“It will deaden the sound a bit, any’ow,” agreed Mrs. Postwhistle.
“Success to temperance,” drank Mr. Clodd, and rose to go.
“I take it you’ve fixed things up all right for yourself,” said Mrs. Postwhistle; “and nobody can blame you if you ’ave. ’Eaven bless you, is what I say.”
“We shall get on together,” prophesied Mr. Clodd. “I’m fond of animals.”
Early the next morning a four-wheeled cab drew up at the entrance to Rolls Court, and in it and upon it went away Clodd and Clodd’s Lunatic (as afterwards he came to be known), together with all the belongings of Clodd’s Lunatic, the curtain-pole included; and there appeared again behind the fanlight of the little grocer’s shop the intimation: “Lodgings for a Single Man,” which caught the eye a few days later of a weird-looking, lanky, rawboned laddie, whose language Mrs. Postwhistle found difficulty for a time in comprehending; and that is why one sometimes meets to-day worshippers of Kail Yard literature wandering disconsolately about St. Dunstan-in-the-West, seeking Rolls Court, discomforted because it is no more. But that is the history of the “Wee Laddie,” and this of the beginnings of William Clodd, now Sir William Clodd, Bart., M.P., proprietor of a quarter of a hundred newspapers, magazines, and journals: “Truthful Billy” we called him then.
No one can say of Clodd that he did not deserve whatever profit his unlicensed lunatic asylum may have brought him. A kindly man was William Clodd when indulgence in sentiment did not interfere with business.
“There’s no harm in him,” asserted Mr. Clodd, talking the matter over with one Mr. Peter Hope, journalist, of Gough Square. “He’s just a bit dotty, same as you or I might get with nothing to do and all day long to do it in. Kid’s play, that’s all it is. The best plan, I find, is to treat it as a game and take a hand in it. Last week he wanted to be a lion. I could see that was going to be awkward, he roaring for raw meat and thinking to prowl about the house at night. Well, I didn’t nag him—that’s no good. I just got a gun and shot him. He’s a duck now, and I’m trying to keep him one: sits for an hour beside his bath on three china eggs I’ve bought him. Wish some of the sane ones were as little trouble.”
The summer came again. Clodd and his Lunatic, a mild-looking little old gentleman of somewhat clerical cut, one often met with arm-in-arm, bustling about the streets and courts that were the scene of Clodd’s rent-collecting labours. Their evident attachment to one another was curiously displayed; Clodd, the young and red-haired, treating his white-haired, withered companion with fatherly indulgence; the other glancing up from time to time into Clodd’s face with a winning expression of infantile affection.
“We are getting much better,” explained Clodd, the pair meeting Peter Hope one day at the corner of Newcastle Street. “The more we are out in the open air, and the more we have to do and think about, the better for us—eh?”
The mild-looking little old gentleman hanging on Clodd’s arm smiled and nodded.