CHAPTER III
The snow cleared as swiftly as it had begun, and David saw that he was standing in the High Street of the village near which he lived. It was all quite ordinary, and he was afraid that he had somehow been popped back through the blue door during the snowstorm, and was again in the stupid dull world. Just opposite him was the post and telegraph office, and next to that the bank, and beyond that the girls’ school. There were the same old shops too, Mr. Winfall the tailor’s, and the confectioner’s and the bootmaker’s, and at the bottom of the street was the bridge over the river.
‘Well, if I am back in the world again,’ said David, ‘it would be a pity to let all this good snow go to waste without its being tobogganed on. I’ll go home, I think, and get my toboggan. I wonder how they did it.’
He started to go down the street to the bridge across which was the lane which presently passed by the bottom of the field beyond the lake, on the other side of which was the garden, where was the summer-house in which he had left his toboggan yesterday. But he happened to look a little more closely at the bootmaker’s shop, and instead of the card in the window which said, ‘Boots and shoes neatly repaired,’ there was another one on which was written ‘Uncles and Aunts recovered and repaired.’
‘I suppose they recover them when they’re lost, and repair them when they’re found,’ thought David. ‘But it’s not a bit usual.’
He found it no more usual when he looked at the girls’ school, for instead of the brass plate on which was written ‘Miss Milligan’s school for Young Ladies,’ he saw written there ‘Happy Families’ Institute,’ and in the window of the bank a notice ‘Sovereigns are cheap to-day.’
‘I’ll go in there at once,’ thought David, ‘and buy some. I wonder how much money I’ve got.’
He found four pennies in his pocket, and went in with them to the bank. The manager was there talking in a low voice to a very stout gentleman with a meat-chopper in his hand, whom David knew to be the Mint-man from London, just as certainly as if he had had it written all over him. What made it absolutely sure was the fact that sovereigns kept oozing out of his clothes and dropping on the floor. There was quite a pile of them round his feet, which the porter who opened the door to David kept sweeping up, and putting down his neck again.
‘So it’s only the same sovereigns all over again,’ thought David, ‘but there must be a lot of them. No wonder they’re cheap.’
He walked up to where they were standing.
‘Please, can you let me have four penny-worth of sovereigns,’ he said.
The Mint-man blew his nose before he answered, and some thirty or forty sovereigns rattled out of his handkerchief. ‘Do you want them new-laid or only for cooking?’ he asked.
David finds the Mint-man in the bank
David had no intention of cooking them, so he said:
‘New-laid, please.’
The Mint-man picked off one that was coming out of his right elbow, another from his tie, another from his bottom waistcoat button, and the fourth from his knee, and gave them to David.
‘It’ll never do if other people get to know about it,’ he said. ‘We shall be having all the happy families in, though I don’t suppose they’ve got much money. Have another notice put up at once.’
The manager took an enormous quill pen from behind the counter. It reached right up to the ceiling of the room, and he had to hold it in both hands. Up the side of it was printed, ‘Rod, pole or perch.’
‘What shall I say?’ he asked.
‘You may say whatever you like,’ said the Mint-man, ‘but you must write whatever I like. Now begin’—
‘Sovereigns are five pounds two ounces each to-day, but they’ll be dearer to-morrow.’
‘Then will you please give me five pounds for each of my sovereigns?’ asked the greedy David. ‘Never mind about the ounces.’
The Mint-man and manager whispered together for a little while, and David could hear fragments of their talk like ‘financial stringency,’ ‘tight tendency,’ ‘collapse of credit,’ which meant nothing to him. All the time the porter was shovelling sovereigns down the back of the Mint-man’s neck.
‘The only thing to be done,’ he said, ‘is to write another notice. Write “The Bank has suspended payment altogether. The deposits are therefore forfeited by square root, rule of three, and compound interest.” What do you make of that?’ he asked David triumphantly.
David knew that compound interest and square root came a long way on in the arithmetic book, and that he couldn’t be properly expected to make anything of it. Evidently they were not going to pay him five sovereigns for each of his, but he had done pretty well already, with his four sovereigns instead of four pence.
‘I don’t make anything of it yet,’ he said, ‘because I haven’t got as far.’
‘When I was your age,’ said the manager severely, ‘I’d got so far past it that it was quite out of sight.’
The Mint-man nudged him, and said behind his hand:
‘Never irritate the young. Keep them pleased and simmering.’
He turned to David with a smile, and patted him on the head. Two cold sovereigns went down the front of David’s jersey.
‘We have read your references,’ he said, ‘and find them quite satisfactory. You are therefore appointed honorary errand-boy, and your duties begin immediately. So go straight across to the shop where they repair uncles and aunts, and see if there’s a golden uncle being repaired. If there is, tell him that his nephew—that’s you—wants him to come out to tea—that’s here—and that the motor will be round immediately—and that’s where.’
David felt that he didn’t want to be errand-boy to the bank at all, but somehow he seemed to remember having sent in references. What was even more convincing was that he found his sailor clothes had disappeared, and that he was dressed in a jacket that came close up to his neck, and was covered with brass buttons. He had black trousers, rather tight, and a peaked cap, round the rim of which was written: ‘David Blaize, Esquire. To be returned to the bank immediately. This side up.’
But after he had received his appointment as honorary errand-boy, nobody attended to David any more, for they were all most busily engaged. The manager wheeled in a tea-table, and began arranging tea-things and muffin-dishes on it, then when he had done that, brought in easy chairs, and a piano and all the things that you usually find in drawing-rooms, while the Mint-man made up a huge fire in the fire-place, and put a large saucepan as big as a bath upon it, into which he dropped the sovereigns that oozed out of him. Meantime, the porter had gone out carrying a ladder and a pot of paint, and when David went out too on his errand, he had already painted over the signboard outside the house, which said it was the bank, and had written on it:
‘This is the house of David Blaize, the nephew of Uncle Popacatapetl.’
‘So that’s the uncle who’s coming to tea with me,’ thought David. ‘I wonder if he knows who he is yet.’
The snow had already melted, so that he did not again consider whether he should go tobogganing. It had gone very quickly, but everything seemed to happen quickly here. It could hardly have been five minutes since he had gone into the bank with fourpence in his pocket, and here he was with four sovereigns instead, a complete suit of new clothes, an uncle, and a position as honorary errand-boy. He crossed the street, and entered the shop where boots and shoes used to be repaired, but where now they repaired uncles and aunts.
The recovering of Uncle Popacatapetl
On the counter there lay a very odd-looking old gentleman, dressed in rags and tatters in about equal proportions. His hands and face were quite yellow, and wherever there was a tatter, or there wasn’t a rag, and he showed through, he was yellow there too. His boots were in very bad repair, and a great golden toe stuck out of one, and a golden heel out of the other: in fact, there could be no doubt at all that he was made of pure gold, and as he was being repaired, he was also either an aunt or an uncle. But though one of David’s aunts had a slight moustache, he had never yet seen an aunt with a long beard and whiskers, and so without doubt there was Uncle Popacatapetl.
The bootmaker and his wife were repairing him, which they did by driving nails into him, so as to tack down the rags over the tatters. If there was a very big tatter, which they could not cover with the rag, they nailed on anything else that was handy. In some places they had filled up the gaps with pieces of newspaper, match-boxes, and bits of leather and sealing-wax, and balls of wool, and apples and photographs. While this was going on, Uncle Popacatapetl kept up a stream of conversation, interspersed with laughing.
‘Anyhow it can’t hurt him much,’ said David to himself.
‘Delicious, delicious!’ said Uncle Popacatapetl. ‘Nail the toe of my boot a little more firmly on to the toe of me. Put a paper-knife there if you can’t cover up the hole. Now my gloves.’
He put on a pair of thick white woollen gloves that came up to his elbow.
‘Would you like them nailed on too, sir?’ asked the shoemaker.
‘By all means. Put a nail in each finger, and three on the wrist, and ninety-eight round my elbows. Did you gum the gloves inside, before I put them on?’
‘I glued them well,’ said the shoemaker’s wife.
‘That’ll glue then,’ said Uncle Popacatapetl. ‘I think when I’ve put my mask on the disguise will be complete. What fun it all is! To think of the Mint-man having traced me all the way here, only to find I’m not in the least like me any more. Or is it ever more?’
‘Never more, ever more, any more,’ said the shoemaker, with his mouth full of nails.
‘It’s every-more, I think,’ said Uncle Popacatapetl, ‘though it doesn’t matter. When I’m finished, and when you’re finished, they won’t think I am anything, still less an uncle. I don’t suppose they ever saw anything the least like me, so why,’ he added argumentatively, ’should they pitch upon uncle?’
They had none of them appeared to notice David at all as yet, and, as he was an errand-boy, he thought he had better proceed with his errand.
‘If you please,’ he said, ‘I think you’re my uncle, and I should like to have you come to tea with me. It’s quite a short way, in fact it’s only across the road, but the motor will be here in a minute, so that you can get in at one door and out at the other.’
Uncle Popacatapetl sat up so suddenly that David knew he must have a hinge in his back. He looked at David, but he couldn’t speak, because the last nail the shoemaker had driven into him had fixed his beard to his chest, which naturally prevented him moving his mouth. But he wrenched off the pair of scissors which had been nailed into his knee, and cut a piece of his beard off, so that he could talk again. He had turned quite pale in the face, which was the only part of him visible, just as if he had been made of silver.
‘Say it again,’ he said.
David said it again, upon which Uncle Popacatapetl jumped up and looked out of the window.
‘It’s a plot,’ he said. ‘That used to be the bank. Now it’s David Blaize. Has it been disguising itself too? Because if so, we’re as we were, and I’ve had all the trouble and hammering for nothing.’
He began to cry in a helpless golden sort of manner. The shoemaker had followed him to the window to repair an enormous tatter with very little rag on his shoulder, and was nailing bananas on to it to cover it up. But he was so much affected by Uncle Popacatapetl’s misery that he hit his fingers instead of the nail and began to cry too, sucking his injured finger and dropping nails out of his mouth. As for his wife, she gave one loud sob, and tore out of the room, leaving the door open. They heard her falling downstairs, bumpity, bumpity, bumpity, till she came BUMP against the cellar door.
‘Bumpity, crumpity, rumpity, numpity, squmpity, zumpity,’ said the shoemaker, with a sob between each word. ‘There she goes. I don’t rightly know if it’s her crying that makes her fall down, or her falling down that makes her cry, but it don’t make home happy, and it’s a great expense in sticking-plaster. The sticking-plaster that’s come into this house would be enough to paper it.’
David was determined not to cry whatever happened, for it never did any good to cry, and besides something must be done at once, only he had not the least idea what that something was. It was perfectly clear that the Mint-man wanted to get Uncle Popacatapetl into the bank, and no wonder, since he was worth his weight in gold, with all the bananas and match-boxes thrown in. And he thought with a shudder of the meat-axe and the saucepan heating over the fire. Without the least doubt Uncle Popacatapetl was going to be chopped up and melted down into sovereigns.
‘It’s all too sad,’ sobbed Uncle Popacatapetl, ‘and too true and too tiresome. I knew they had tracked me down here—wow—wow—but when I saw that there was this nice respectable shop, where uncles and aunts—wow—wow—wow—could be recovered and repaired, I thought I could have myself recovered and repaired out of all knowledge—wow—wow—wow—wow—and diddle the whole lot of them. Instead of which, they send in my beastly nephew to ask me to tea, and then they’ll chop me up, and make sovereigns of me. I’ve seen their signs and notices. They tried to put me off the scent by saying that sovereigns were cheap, and make me think they didn’t want me. And then that was changed, and they said sovereigns were dearer. And then that was changed, and they suspended payment to make me think that they weren’t collecting gold any more, never more at all. Oh, I know their cussedness. And just when everything was going so well, and I was going to walk across the street as cool as carrots or cucumbers, and I should have left by the next telegram that was sent from the office. Look at them all flying in! And there’s one going out with its mackintosh on, and I could have caught it as easy as a subtraction sum if it hadn’t been for this upset. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.’
David felt dreadfully sorry for him, but what he said about telegrams was quite as dreadfully interesting, and he looked out.
It was quite true: there was a whole string of telegrams rushing down the wires towards the post-office, each in a neat mackintosh. It had begun to snow again, and was getting dark.
‘But why have they got mackintoshes on?’ he asked.
‘Well, of all the silly nephews that ever I had,’ said Uncle Popacatapetl, who had stopped crying as suddenly as if a tap had been turned off, ‘this one takes the cake. Why do you wear a mackintosh?’
‘To keep me dry,’ said David.
‘Well, and mayn’t telegrams do the same?’ asked his uncle. ‘They come from America and Australia and Jerusalem, and did you ever see a wet telegram, though it had gone for hundreds and billions and millions and thousands of miles under the sea?’
‘No, they all seem dry,’ said David.
‘And there you are, sitting there,’ said the golden uncle, ‘and wanting to deprive them of their mackintoshes. Crool, I call it. They puts them on when they starts, and they takes them off when they arrives and cools themselves.’
Uncle Popacatapetl had begun to talk so like David’s father’s gardener, that again he was afraid he had got back into the stupid world.
‘I sees them coming, and I sees them going,’ said his uncle, ‘and who so free I arsk, as a little ninepenny telegram? They’re cheap at the price, they are, going where they please like that——’
He gave a wild shriek, like Miss Muffet when the spider came, and snatched the mask that the shoemaker was holding.
‘There’s the motor come for me,’ he sobbed, ‘and what is a poor old man to do? Nail my mask on quickly. Don’t mind my eyes or my ears or anythink.’
He lay down in the window-seat, and David and the shoemaker drove nails in all over his face. Sometimes the mask, which was that of a young lady with pink cheeks, tore, and then they tacked on buttons from David’s jacket, or bits of the window-curtain.
‘Don’t mine me,’ Uncle Popacatapetl kept whimpering. ‘There goes one eye, and there goes the other, but make it safe whatever you do. Cut off my head, if that would make me look more like a young lady—but I won’t, I won’t, I won’t look like anybody’s uncle. They may take me for an aunt if they like, or a nephew, or a niece, but I won’t be a golden uncle.’
The mask was nailed on at last, and Uncle Popacatapetl sat up.
‘Now go outside, David,’ he said, ‘and find out exactly what sort of motor-car it is.’
David very obediently went out into the street. It looked quite different now, for there were flags flying from every house with the inscription, ‘David Blaize, the fireman’s son,’ which was very gratifying, and showed a pleasant interest in him on the part of the happy families. He felt that he had seen a card of himself as the fireman’s son, but he could not remember his mother as Mrs. Blaize, the fireman’s wife, or his father as Mr. Blaize, the fireman.
But that was not the immediate business in hand. As the whole street was decked out in honour of himself, he naturally bowed right and left, but since nobody was there, it did not matter much whether he bowed or not. Still it was better to be polite. Then he looked in front of him. There stood an immense motor-car, that buzzed in a most sumptuous manner. It was pointing down the street towards the bridge over the river, but it did not much matter which way it pointed, because the bank was immediately opposite. There were two cords attached to the roof of it, and attached to the cords were a couple of aeroplanes, which were pointing in the opposite direction. On the pavement were standing the chauffeur and two pilots of the flying-corps. They all saluted smartly as David came out.
‘Three cheers for David Blaize,’ said one of them. ‘Hip, hip, hip—I’m blowed if I know how it goes on.’
‘You must all say “Hurrah,” ’ said David.
They all said ‘Hurrah,’ in a very depressed sort of voice, and one of the airmen said, ‘Lor’, these civilians.’
‘Lor’, yourself,’ said David, rather rudely. ‘I want to hear about the motor-car.’
The chauffeur stroked the side of the bonnet which contained the engines.
‘She’s a good thing,’ he said. ‘She’s a good going concern. But throttle her up never so, she won’t go less than a hundred miles an hour. So I made so free, your honour, since that was above speed-limit, to harness these two silly aeroplanes which between ’em go ninety miles an hour in the other direction. That brings she down to ten miles an hour, and no one can say a word against her.’
And then the two airmen threw their caps in the air, and shouted ‘Hurrah.’
This was all very clever on the part of the chauffeur, but as the bank was just opposite, and all that the motor-car had got to do was to stand quite still while Uncle Popacatapetl stepped in at one side and got out at the other, it seemed a little superfluous. But David appreciated kind intentions, and next minute he found himself hand-in-hand with the chauffeur and the airmen, and they were all dancing in a circle, singing
‘Ninety miles one ways, and a hundred miles the others,
And some of us are nephews, and all of us are brothers.’
‘Then are you ready to start, your honour?’ said the chauffeur, when they had finished dancing.
David pulled himself together.
‘Yes, but I am taking an invalid with me,’ he said. ‘It’s my uncle, who is far from well, like the spider!’
‘The one that sat down next that old woman?’ asked the chauffeur, pointing over his shoulder with his thumb. ‘He’s all right again, he is.’
‘It’s that sort of illness,’ said David. ‘He’s coming to tea with me, but he had better have a little drive first, to give him an appetite. We’ll go along some road with plenty of telegraph wires. They make him feel better.’
The window of the shoemaker’s house was thrown open, and David’s uncle looked out in his mask.
‘Much better,’ he said. ‘Better much, much better,’ and he closed it again so violently that all the glass broke.
‘Crash!’ said the second of the airmen. He had a very long elastic sort of nose, which David had not noticed before. Then both of them and the chauffeur opened their mouths very wide, as if they were going to sing again.
‘There must be no more singing,’ said David sternly, and they all shut their mouths again with a snap.
There was evidently no time to lose, for David could hear the roaring of the fire in the bank opposite, over which poor Uncle Popacatapetl was to be melted after he had been cut up, and against the red glow of it he could see the heads of the Mint-man and the manager pressed so tightly against the glass that the tips of their noses were quite white, as they looked out and wondered why the motor-car didn’t return.
‘Come on, uncle,’ he shouted, ‘the tea will be spoiled,’ and he gave him a great wink to show that he had got an idea in his head.
So the chauffeur got into his place, and Uncle Popacatapetl came out covered with apples and match-boxes and things like a Christmas-tree, and at the very last moment David undid the buttons of the cords to the aeroplanes, and away they flew, leaving the airmen gazing up at them. Then he shut the door, and he and Uncle Popacatapetl drove off at a hundred miles an hour down the street to the bridge.
‘Turn to the left when you get over the bridge,’ shouted David, ‘and drive over the fields till you come to our lake. You’ll have to jump that, but after that there’s only the garden.’
‘She ain’t been jumping much lately,’ said the chauffeur.
‘It can’t be helped,’ shouted David. ‘Then go to the garden door. I’ll hide you in the game-cupboard,’ he explained to his uncle. ‘There’s lots of room there now all the games have gone.’
Suddenly there came an awful crash. They had run into the railing of the bridge, and the whole motor-car flew into several million small pieces, and there were David and his uncle standing in the middle of the road.
Uncle Popacatapetl began whimpering again.
‘I’m a poor old man,’ he said, ‘and I don’t know whether I’m standing on my head or my heels.’
David looked at him attentively.
‘I think you’re standing on your heels,’ he said, ‘but it’s so dark I can’t tell you for certain. Wait till I light a match.’
There came a noise of running behind them, and, before David could be sure whether his uncle was on his head or his heels, he saw the porter and the Mint-man and the bank manager rushing down the street towards them.
At that very moment the telegraph wires began to sing, as they always do when a telegram is coming along them, and looking up he saw a very long one with its mackintosh on sliding down the wires. It was so long that it came within six or seven feet of the ground.
‘Quick, jump and catch hold of it,’ said David, ‘and then you’ll be safe.’
Twice Uncle Popacatapetl tried to jump, but he couldn’t jump far because he was so heavy, and the Mint-man with the meat-chopper in his hand was close upon them. But the kind good telegram, which was reply-paid, reached down a hand, and pulled him up at the very moment the Mint-man and the manager were grabbing at him. They just missed him, and the Mint-man being unable to stop himself flew over the railing of the bridge, followed by the manager and the porter, and they all fell into the river with three splashes, each louder than all the rest put together.
The telegram rescues Uncle P. from the Mint-man
By this time the telegram and Uncle Popacatapetl were far away out of sight, and as the chauffeur had vanished too, there was little use in David’s remaining on the bridge all alone. He tried, as long as his match burned, to put together some pieces of the motor-car, but when that went out, it was like doing the most awful jig-saw puzzle in the dark.
So he walked back up the street, for there was a bright light coming out of the door of the bank, which looked cheerful, and besides he remembered that he had been sent to ask his Uncle Popacatapetl to tea, so that probably there would be tea ready.
‘It must be time for tea,’ he thought, ‘because it has been dark quite a long time, and I haven’t had it yet. Tea always comes soon after dark even on the shortest days.’
By the bank door were standing the two airmen, whose machines he had unbuttoned. They had got their caps on the side of their heads all right, but they didn’t look quite like ordinary airmen. The nose of one had grown enormously since David saw him last, and he waved it about, turning up the end of it in a manner that reminded David not of an airman at all, but of some quite different sort of creature. The other had a large kind face, and kept moving his mouth round and round, and out of his hair there distinctly stuck two horns, both broken.
As soon as they saw David they ran inside the bank, and shut the door in his face, leaving him out in the dark and the cold.