As surely as my name is Wilbert Vocks (he said), I intend that this business shall be conducted in accord with all principles of integrity and without demurrage to trickery. I have been allowed by fortune to make a frugal and circumstantial inspection of the general laws and accidents of life, and it is my conviction that by exploring the estuaries of remorse no bill of lading was ever brought to consummation. My rudder is uncompromisingly turned to the favoring gales of expedience, and we will sail a vigorous course into the latitudes of magnetism.
In this admirable resolution Mr. Vocks was strengthened by his partner (Mr. Henry Shingle), who is described as “a thrifty man the colour of a glass of light beer, bleached brown by an open-air youth in Monongahela County, but surmounted spiritually by the bright bubbles of aspiration and elasticity. His clothes were neat and his habits orderly; of his meditative components it is not necessary to surmise. He had not made a habit of thinking profoundly, for he knew that any thought he might have could easily be rebutted by more carefully trained men; therefore he spared himself the embarrassment of argument. His management of the Sales Department, however, was not to be criticized.”
We wish we had taken the trouble to copy out more of The Spanish Sultry while we were about it. The Sultry herself was the lady to whom Mr. Vocks finally succumbed: she caused the fracture of the window-glass business. As the author put it: “Hers was not the clear transparence of Mr. Vocks’s glassy nature; she was stained with violent and ominous colours, and through the panes of her vehement character there burst downpours of scarlet and lavender trouble.”
WHAT KIND OF A DOG?
“What kind of a dog is he?” said the Sea Cliff veterinary over the phone.
We must confess we were stumped. All we could say was that he is—Oh, well just a kind of a dog. We didn’t like to say that he is a Synthetic Hound, and that his full name is Haphazard Gissing I. We didn’t like to admit, at any rate over the telephone, that one of his grandmothers may have been a dachshund and that certainly one of his brothers-in-law is an Airedale. But at any rate it was fixed that we should take our excellent Gissing over to the kennels to be boarded while we were in the city.
Gissing’s behaviour was odd. He seemed, in some inscrutable way, to suspect that something was going to happen. The night before his departure he disappeared, and was away all night—saying good-by to his cronies, we suppose. When we came home early in the afternoon to convoy him to Sea Cliff he was nowhere to be found. But about suppertime he turned up, looking more haggard and disreputable than ever. There was a fresh scar on his face, and he was very hungry. He ate his supper hurriedly, with no dignity at all. As soon as he heard the rattle of his chain his spirits went very low.
But the admirable creature was docile. Dogs are profoundly religious at heart: they put their trust in their deities. Unlike cats, who are determined atheists and fight to the last against fate, dogs accept calmly what they see is ordered by the gods. Gissing hopped into Dame Quickly without protest and sat in silence during the ride. His nose was unusually cold, but then that may have been only the winter evening. He had somewhat the bearing of one who is going to the dentist.