“Most unusual, ma’am,” replied Mr. Verryspice. But at last they persuaded a bathchair man to give them a lift to their destination, where they arrived a little indecorously perhaps, for the top-hatted butcher was sitting as unconcernedly and as upright as a wax figure upon Mrs. Squance’s knees. The office they sought lay somewhere in a vast cavernous building full of stairs and corridors, long, exhausting, hollow corridors like the Underground railway, and on every floor and turning were signposts of the turnpike variety with directions:
“To the Bedel of St. Thomas’s Basket, 3 miles.”
“Registrar of Numismatics and Obligations, 2-1/4.”
Along one of these passages they plunged, and after some aggravating hindrances, including a demand from a humpty-backed clerk for a packet of No. 19 egg-eyed sharps, and five pennyworth of cachous which she found in her bosom, the permission was secured, and the butcher thereupon handed the weapon to Mrs. Squance.
“What did you say you wanted it for?” he asked.
Mrs. Squance’s gratitude was great, but her indignation was deep and disdained reply. She seized the pistol and began to run home. Rather a stout lady, too, and the exercise embarrassed her. Her hair fetched loose, her stockings slipped down, and her strange, hurrying figure, brandishing a pistol, soon attracted the notice of policemen and a certain young greengrocer with a tray of onions, who trotted in her wake until she threatened them all with the firearm.
Breathlessly at last she mounted the tremendous staircase. Happily in the interval the damage had been repaired, the tree chopped down, piano delivered, and ducks recaptured. She reached her rooms only in time to hear a great crash of glass from within. Old Ben was strutting about with a triumphant air.
“I done ’im—I done ’im,” he called. “You can come in now; I’ve just chucked ’im through the window!” And sure enough he had. The sash looked as if it had been blown out by a cannon-ball. Mrs. Squance peered out, and there, far down at the front door, curled up as if asleep, lay the lion. At that moment the milkman arrived, with that dissonant clatter peculiar to milkmen. He dashed down his cans close by the nose of the lion, which apparently he had not seen. The scared animal leaped up in its terror, and darting down an alley was seen no more.
So far this narrative, devoid as it is of moral grandeur and literary grace, has subjected the reader’s comprehension to no scientific rigours; but he who reads on will discern its cunning import—a psychological outcome with the profoundest implications. Listen. Mrs. Squance awoke that morning in her own hard-looking little house of one floor, with the hard-looking shop, startled to find the window of their room actually smashed, and inexplicable pains in her right hand. She related these circumstances in after years with so many symptoms of truth and propriety that she herself at last vividly believed in the figure of old Ben as a lion-slayer. “Saved my life when I was ’tacked by a lion!” she would say to her awed grandchildren, and she would proceed to regale them with a narration which, I regret to say, had only the remotest likeness to the foregoing story.