“They went slogging up to the churchyard gate all right, but when they got to staggering along ’tween the gravestones Mark thought he could see a something white sitting in the poorch, but the sailor couldn’t see anything at all with that lump on his shoulders.
“‘What’s that there?’ Mark whispers in Pat’s ear. And Pat Crowe whispers back, just for joking: ‘Old Nick in his nightshirt.’
“‘Steady now,’ Mark whispers, ‘go steady Pat, it’s getting up and coming.’ Pat only gives a bit of a chuckle and says: ‘Ah, that’s him, that’s just like him.’
“Then Levi calls out from the poorch soft like: ‘You got him then! Is he a fat ’un?’
“‘Holy God,’ cried the sailor, ‘it is the devil!’ and he chucks poor Mark over his back at Levi’s feet and runs for his mortal life. He was the most frittened of the lot ’cos he hadn’t believed in anything at all—but there it was. And just as he gets to the gate he sees someone else coming along in the dark carrying a something on its shoulder—it was Impey wi’ the sheep. ‘Powers above,’ cried Pat Crowe, ‘it’s the Day of Judgment come for sartin!’ And he went roaring the news up street like a madman, and Impey went off somewheres too—but I dunno where Impey went.
“Well, poor old Mark laid on the ground, he were a game old cock, but he could hardly speak, he was strook dazzled. And Levi was frittened out of his life in the darkness and couldn’t make anythink out of nothink. He just creeps along to Mark and whispers: ‘Who be that? Who be that?’ And old Mark looks up very timid, for he thought his last hour was on him, and he says: ‘Be that you, Satan?’ Drackly Levi heard that all in a onexpected voice he jumped quicker en my neighbour’s flea. He gave a yell bigger nor Pat Crowe and he bolted too. But as he went he dropped the little tin canister and old Mark picked it up. And he shook the canister, and he heerd money in it, and then something began to dawn on him, for he knowed how his brother’s fortune had been buried.
“‘I rede it, I rede it,’ he says, ‘that was Levi Carter, the dirty thief! I rede it, I rede it,’ he says. And he putt the tin can in his pocket and hopped off home as if he never knowed what rheumatucks was at all. And when he opened that canister there was the sixty golden sovereigns in that canister. Sixty golden sovereigns! ‘Bad things ’ull be worse afore they’re better,’ says Mark, ‘but they never won’t be any better than this.’ And so he stuck to the money in the canister, and that’s how he bought his cottage arter all. ’Twarn’t much of a house, just wattle and daub, wi’ a thetch o’ straa', but ’twas what he fancied, and there he ended his days like an old Christian man. (Good health!)”
Huxley Rustem
Huxley Rustem settled himself patiently upon the hairdresser’s waiting bench to probe the speculation that jumped grasshopper-like into the field of his inquisitorial mind: ’Why does a man become a barber? Well, what is it that persuades a man, not by the mere compulsion of destiny, but by the sweet reasonableness of inclination, to dedicate his activities to the excision of other people’s pimples and the discomfiture of their hairy growths? He had glanced through the two papers, Punch and John Bull, handed him by the boy in buttons, and now, awaiting his turn, posed himself with this inquiry. There was a girl at it, too, at the end of the saloon. She seemed to have picked him out from the crowd of men there; he caught her staring, an attractive girl. It seemed insoluble; misfortunate people may, indeed must, by the pressure of circumstances, become sewermen, butchers, scavengers, and even clergymen, but the impulse to barbery was, he felt, quite indelicately ironic. How that girl stared at him—if she was not very careful she would be clipping the fellow’s ear—did she think she knew him? He rather hoped she would have to attend to him; would he be lucky enough? Huxley tried to estimate the chances by observing the half-dozen toilets in progress, but his calculations did not encourage the hope at all. It was very charming for an agreeable woman, a stranger, too, to do that kind of service for you. He remembered that, after his marriage five years ago, he had tried to persuade his wife to lather and shave him, “just for a lark, you know,” but she was adamant, didn’t see the joke at all! Well, well, he decided that the word barber derived in some ironic way from the words barbarism or barbarity, expressing, unconsciously perhaps, contempt on the part of the barber for a world that could only offer him this imposture for a man’s sacred will to order and activity. Yet it didn’t seem so bad for women—that splendid young creature there at the end of the saloon! The boy in buttons approached, and Huxley Rustem was ushered to that vacant chair at the end; the splendid young thing had placed a wrapper about him—she had almost “cuddled” it round his neck—and stood demurely preparing to do execution upon his poll, turning her eyes mischievously upon his bright-hued socks, which, by a notable coincidence, were the same colour as her own handsome hose. Huxley had a feeling that she had cunningly arranged the succession of turns in order to secure him to her chair—which shows that he was still young and very impressionable. Such a feeling is one of the customary assumptions of vanity, the natural and prized, but much-denied, possession of all agreeable people. Huxley, as the girl had already noted, and now saw more vividly in the mirror fronting them, was agreeable, was attractive. (My dear reader, both you and Huxley Rustem are right, the dainty barbaress had laid her nets for this particular victim.)