Volume Two—Chapter Sixteen.
Mr Wimble Rakes for Information.
An enormous increase has taken place during the past five-and-twenty years in local journalism. England seems to have been almost Americanised in respect of news, for every centre worthy of the enterprise has been furnished with its newspaper, in which everything is told that is worthy of chronicling, and very often, from want of news, something unworthy of the paper upon which it appears. Notably that celebrated paragraph about So-and-So’s horse and cart, which, left untended, moves on; the horse is startled by shouts, begins to trot, then gallops, and is finally stopped. “It was fortunate that the accident occurred before noon, for at that hour the children would have been leaving school, and,” etc, etc—suggestion of the horror of what might have been.
But Danmouth was not a centre worthy of the enterprise, and, with the exception of a few copies of the county paper which came in weekly to partly satisfy the thirst for news, the inhabitants had no fount to depend upon save Michael Wimble, and to him they gravitated for information respecting the proceedings all around, from a failure, scandal, or accident on shore up to a shipwreck.
Consequently, Wimble’s business on the morning of Gartram’s death was so great that he began to think that he must hire a boy to lather, and the leather slipper nailed up against the wall to serve as a quaintly original till had to be emptied twice.
As a rule, the “salt” personages who hung about the cliff, staring into the sea, came to be shaved on Saturdays, but the news on the wing prompted every man to have a clean shave that morning, and many a stalwart fisher lady regretted that she had not a hirsute excuse for visiting the shop.
Wimble made the most of such information as he was able to glean, and as the morning advanced, he was able to keep on making additions, till the one little seed he received first thing came up, grew and blossomed into a news plant that would have been worth a good deal in town.
Towards evening, though, the excitement at Wimbles museum had fallen off, and gathered about the Harbour Inn, where the gossips of the place, clean shaven, and looking unusually like being in holiday trim, were able to quench their double thirst.
Michael Wimble sighed as he stood at his door looking towards that inn.
“Ah,” he said to himself, “now, if I had a licence to sell beer by retail to be drunk on the premises,”—he was quoting from a board with whose lettering he was familiar—“they would have stopped; and my place being nearest to the Fort, the coroner would have held the inquest there.”