Piffingcap had the cup from an old friend, a queer-minded man. He had given it to him just before he had gone out of this continent, not for the first but for the last time—a cup of lead with an inscription upon it in decent letters but strange words.
“Here, Elmer,” said his old friend to the barber of Bagwood, “have this—there’s the doom of half a million beards in it!”
Piffingcap laughed, but without any joy, for his heart was heavy to lose his friend.
“There is in it too,” continued Grafton, offering the pot and tapping it with his forefinger, “a true test of virtue—a rare thing, as you know, in these parts. Secondly, there is in it a choice of fortunes; and thirdly, it may be, a triple calamity and—and—and very serious, you know, but there you are.” He gave it into the barber’s hand with a slight sigh. While his friend duly admired the dull gift the traveller picked up his walking stick and winked at himself in the mirror.
And Elmer Piffingcap, the barber of Bagwood, took his friend’s cup, set it in a conspicuous place upon the shelf of his shop, and bade that friend good-bye, a little knot rolling into his lungs as they shook their two hands together.
“It is true then,” said he, staring at the shining baldness of his friend who stood with hat and stick in hand—for as Piffingcap dared not look into his friend’s eyes, the gleam of the skull took his gaze, as a bright thing will seize the mind of a gnat—“it is true, then, I shall see you no more?”
“No more again,” said the wanderer affably, replacing his hat—disliking that pliant will-less stare of the barber’s mournful eyes. This wandering man had a heart full of bravery though he could not walk with pride, for the corns and bunkles he suffered would have crippled a creature of four feet, leave alone two. But—would you believe it—he was going now to walk himself for all his days round and round the world. O, he was such a man as could put a deceit upon the slyest, with his tall hat and his jokes, living as easy as a bird in the softness and sweetness of the year.
“And if it rains, it rains,” he declared to Polly, “and I squat like a hare in the hedge and keep the blessed bones of me dry and my feet warm—it’s not three weeks since it happened to me; my neck as damp as the inside of an onion, and my curly locks caught in blackberry bushes—stint your laughing, Polly!—the end of my nose as cold as a piece of dead pork, and the place very inconvenient with its sharp thorns and nettles—and no dockleaf left in the whole parish. But there was young barley wagging in the field, and clover to be smelling, and rooks to be watching, and doves, and the rain heaving its long sigh in the greyness—I declare to my God it was a fine handsome day I had that day, Polly!”
In the winter he would be sleeping in decent nooks, eating his food in quiet inns, drying his coat at the forge; and so he goes now into the corners of the world—the little husky fat man, with large spectacles and fox-coloured beard and tough boots that had slits and gouts in them—gone seeking the feathers out of Priam’s peacock. And let him go; we take no more concern of him or his shining skull or his tra-la-la in the highways.
The barber, who had a romantic drift of mind, went into his saloon, and taking up the two cracked china lather mugs he flung them from the open window into his back garden, putting the fear of some evil into the mind of his drowsy cat, and a great anticipation in the brains of his two dusty hens, who were lurking there for anything that could be devoured. Mr. Piffingcap placed the pot made of lead upon his convenient shelf, laid therein his brush, lit the small gas stove under the copper urn, and when Polly, the child from the dairy, arrived with her small can for the barber’s large jug she found him engaged in shaving the chin of Timmy James the butcher, what time Mr. James was engaged in a somewhat stilted conversation with Gregory Barnes about the carnal women of Bagwood.