The last train to Oldcastle happened to pass above the bridge at that moment, and a head leant far out through a carriage window.
‘Ay!’ a clear voice sounded, with a touch of derision on the night air—‘Ay! that’s right, haud him tight, for he wants it badlies.’
YANKEE BILL AND QUAKER JOHN
Quaker John was one of the best known figures in the small seaport town of Old Quay. Short of stature, heavy of tread, always quietly attired in a black suit, which varied not in cut from year to year; indeed, the same suit had once been known to do duty for three years together, till his wife one day, so ’twas said, handed them over to the chimney-sweep in mistaken identity. You might have told that he was of Puritan descent some yards away, but the ‘letter of the law’ in him had been softened down by the kindly genius of the old-fashioned Quaker. A genial twinkle lay in hiding at the back of his steadfast eye, and a smile was always ‘at heel’ beside his big and honest mouth.
A broad and spectacled nose completed the portrait of one in whom the harmlessness as of a dove did not of necessity efface the wisdom of the serpent. At least, so said Yankee Bill, who read character ‘at sight’; but then, Bill was a disciple of that cynical logic which proclaims not only all priests to be humbugs, but all men immersed in business who make pretensions to piety to be hypocrites or fools.
He had happened to pass along the street one ‘fourth-day’ morning as John came out of the meeting-house, and overheard him address a remark about business to a Quaker friend at his side, and thereafter was merciless in ridicule. ‘John’s patent incubator,’ he styled the meeting-house, ‘for plot-hatching,’ and pretended to be afraid of doing business with him on Wednesday afternoons for fear of being ‘skinned.’
Bill was a waif from the seas who had somehow been thrown up at Old Quay a few years back, and having ‘prospected around’ and ‘pegged out a claim’ for himself in the indiscriminate region of commission business, life insurance, advertising agencies, secretaryships, and other nebulous formative processes, was now almost as well-known a figure in the town as Quaker John himself.
The chief foundation in any abiding friendship is a certain diversity of temperament which those who wondered at the mutual liking that had sprung up between the retiring stockbroker’s clerk and the worldly Yankee had evidently overlooked. To John the American’s audacity was a perpetual delight, tempered by occasional Puritan scruples as to whether he was justified in associating with so hardened an unbeliever. To Bill Coody the Quaker’s reposefulness and quiet self-sufficiency were both a sleeping-draught and irritant.
Nothing delighted him more than to get a rise out of John; but John was hard to catch, and even when craftily inveigled into a theological argument, was extremely chary of entering into definite statements. Even when his position was most hotly assailed by the other, who made unsparing use of the argumentum ad hominem, reinforced by a store of malicious anecdotes of religious ‘professors’ all the world over, John never lost his temper, but mildly suggested that his antagonist was an Anarchist in disguise.