A Little World

by George Manville Fenn

An Alarm.

Mrs Winks was bound under contract to spend the next day at Duplex Street; but she made known just now her presence in the Dials, being busy enough in the lower regions of D. Wragg’s; for the smoke and steam of her copper altar, erected to the goddess of cleanliness, rose through the house, to be condensed in a dewy clamminess upon handrail and paint. It was the incense that rose thickly to the nostrils when she stuck in a wooden probe to fish up boiling garments for purification’s sake.

The inhabitants of D. Wragg’s dwelling took but little notice of Mrs Winks’ washing-days, inasmuch as they were inured to them by their frequency. D. Wragg, though, must be excepted; for when some bird would sneeze and evince a dislike to the odorous moist vapour, he called to mind the deaths of three valuable cochins by croup—a catarrh-like distemper which, with or without truth, he laid to the charge of Mrs Winks’ washing.

So that good lady busied herself over what she called her own and Monsieur Canau’s “toots,”—meaning thereby divers calico undergarments—till her playbill curl-papers grew soft in the steam. Mrs Winks was interrupted but once, when, aroused by the plunging in of the copper-stick and an extra cloud from the sacrifice, D. Wragg stamped with his heavy boot upon the shop-floor, and shouted an inquiry as to how long Mrs Winks would be before she was done, and whether she knew that there was company in the house?

To this query the stout lady returned the very vague response of “Hours!”

For D. Wragg was now shop-minding, and, as he called it, busy—that is to say, he was going over his stock, stirring up sluggish birds with a loose perch, administering pills composed of rue and butter to sickly bantams, which sat in a heap with feathers erect, and refusing to be smoothed down.

Here and there he would pin a newspaper before the cage of a newly-captured finch, fighting hard to escape by breaking its prison bars, beating its soft round bosom bare of feathers against the cruel wires, but with a fair prospect before it of finding relief for its restless spirit, if not for its body, and flight—where?

Then there were the “tarriers” to look after, some of which justified their name by not finding customers.

Here D. Wragg seemed quite at home, looking, as he stooped and tightened a chain or shortened a string, much like one of the breed Darwinised, and in a state of transition.

D. Wragg’s ministrations were needed, for since the shop had been left by Janet to his care, there had been sundry vicious commotions amongst the dogs. One slight skirmish had ended in a spaniel having an ear made more fringe-like in character. Then the restless little animals had executed a gavotte upon their hind-legs, maybe a waltz, ending in a general tangle, and an Old Bailey performance, caused by the twisting together of string and chain into a Gordian knot, which puzzled D. Wragg into using a knife for sword in its solution—the dogs the while lying panting, with protruding eyes, and a general aspect of being at the last gasp.