Captain Broughton sat stiffly erect in the opposite corner of the carriage, with its musty aroma of essence-of-funerals—that indescribable blend of new black clothes and moth-balls and damp horsehair and smelling salts and faded flowers. His square hands, cramped into unaccustomed black kid gloves which already showed a white split across the knuckles, lay awkwardly, palms uppermost, on his knees. “Damn the things,” he said to himself for the fiftieth time, contemplating their empty finger-tips, sticking out flat as the ends of half-filled pea-pods, “why don’t they make ’em so that a man can get his hands into ’em?”
A square-set man, a shade under medium height, with a neat beard, once fair, now faded to a sandy grey, and eyes of the clear ice-blue which suggested a Scandinavian ancestry, he carried his sixty-odd years well. A typical shipmaster, one would say at a first glance: a steady man, a safe man, from whom nothing unexpected need be looked for, one way or the other. And then, perhaps, those ice-blue eyes would give you pause, and the thought would cross your mind that there might be certain circumstances in which the owner of those eyes might conceivably become no longer a safe and steady quantity, but an unknown and even an uncomfortable one.
“Don’t mind admitting I’m glad it’s over,” rattled on the little lawyer; “depressing affairs, these funerals, to my thinking. Horrible. Good for business, though—our business and doctors’ business, what! More people get their death through attendin’ other people’s funerals than one likes to think of. It’s the standing, you know. That’s what does it. Standing on damp ground. Nothing worse—nothing! And then no hats. That’s where our friends the Jews have the pull of us Gentiles—eh, Mr. Jenkinson? If a Jew wants to show respect, he keeps his hat on. Curious, ain’t it? Ever hear the story about the feller—Spurgeon, was it—or Dr. Parker—Spurgeon, I think—one or t’other of ’em, anyway, don’t much matter, really—and the two fellers that kept their hats on while he was preachin’? ‘If I were to go to a synagogue,’ says Spurgeon—yes, I’m pretty sure it was Spurgeon—‘if I went to a synagogue,’ says he, ‘I should keep my hat on; and therefore I should be glad if those two young Jews in the back of the church would take theirs off in my synagogue’—ha ha ha—good, wasn’t it?...
“And talking about getting cold at funerals, I’ll let you into a little secret. I always wear an extra singlet, myself, for funerals. Yes; and a body belt. Got ’em on now. Fact. My wife laughs at me. But I say, ‘Oh, you may laugh, my dear, but you’d laugh the other side of your face if I came home with lumbago and you had to sit up half the night ironing my back.’ Ever try that for lumbago? A common flat iron—you know. Hot as you can bear it. Best thing going—ab-so-lutely....”
He paused while he rubbed a clear place in the windows which their breath had misted and peered out like a child going to a party.
“Nearly there, I think,” he went on. “Between ourselves, I think the old gentleman’s going to cut up remarkably well. Six figures, I shouldn’t wonder. Not a bit, I shouldn’t.... A shrewd man, Captain Broughton, don’t you agree?”
Captain Broughton in his dark corner made a vague noise which might be taken to indicate that he did agree. Not that it mattered, really, whether he agreed or not. The little lawyer was one of those people who was so fond of hearing his own voice that he never even noticed if anyone was listening to him; which was all to the good when you were feverishly busy with your own thoughts.
“Ah, yes,” he resumed, “a very shrewd, capable man of business! Saw the way things were going in the shipping world and got out in time. ‘The sailing ship is done’ (those were his very words to me). ‘If I’d been thirty years younger I’d have started a fleet of steam kettles with the best of ’em. But not now—not at my time of life. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.’ Those were his very words....
“Ah, ha, here we are at last! Between ourselves, a glass o’ the old gentleman’s port won’t come amiss. Fine cellar he kept—fine cellar! ‘I don’t go in for a lot of show, Hobbs,’ I remember him saying once, ‘but I like what I have good....’”