XVII
"My student-cap and schläger and the silver-mounted beer-horn the English Colony gave me, and my mother's Crucifix" found their places on the walls of the clean and comfortable room, and upon cheap stained-deal shelves the books of which Mr. Knewbit had spoken so respectfully were ranged, waiting to refresh their owner's memory whenever he chose to dip into them.
The sharkish manager of the "Royal Copenhagen Hotel" had been cowed into giving up the detained luggage by Mr. Knewbit's assurance that the story of his knavery was even then taking literary form under the skilled hand of a young and aspiring journalist of his (Knewbit's) own acquaintance, and might shortly appear in a newspaper to the confusion of the said manager, unless the property was surrendered upon payment of a corrected version of the bill.
These terms being hastily accepted, the Rules of Fair Play, according to Mr. Knewbit, demanded that the written record of the manager's iniquity should be consigned to Miss Ling's kitchen-fire.
"Not that it ain't a pity, for it ain't half bad for a beginner, though wanting in what I call snap and sparkle. But honor is honor—and if Mr. Ticking reads this knowing you're not going to use it—you'll find the story cropping up presently in the Camberwell Clarion or the Islington Excelsior.... Couldn't you do something else—just for a taster? Or haven't you something finished and put away and forgot?"
P. C. Breagh finally disinterred from the litter of manuscript notes at the bottom of a book-box, a scrawled description of a duel between two Freshmen at a well-known tavern and concert-room outside the walls of Schwürz-Brettingen. The humors of the battle, waged in a low-ceiled room in the upper story, crowded with chaffing, drinking, smoking students; the marvelous nature of the defensive armor worn by the inexperienced Füchse, the blows that fell flat, the final entanglement of their swords, and abandonment of these unfamiliar weapons in favor of fisticuffs, made Mr. Knewbit chuckle, and won the suffrages of Mr. Ticking; who said the fight and the bit of knock-about at the end was nearly good enough to be put on at the Halls.
Mr. Ticking was a journalist who possessed a knack of rhyme, penned comic ditties for Lion Comiques, when these gentlemen would sing them,—and lived in the hope of getting a Burlesque produced at a West-End Theater one day. He had educated himself because you couldn't get on if you were not educated. He could not have explained to you how the process had been carried out. By dexterously angling matter for short paragraphs from the swirl of happenings about him, he contrived—between the Camberwell Clarion, the Islington Excelsior, and the Afternoon, a late daily published in Fleet Street—to net some three pounds at the end of each week. Thirty shillings of this went to support an aged and invalid mother resident at Brixton; and if you had lauded Mr. Ticking as a heroic exemplar of filial virtues, he would have been excessively surprised. Though if you had told him that he wrote Burlesque better than Byron, he would have believed you implicitly.
Mr. Mounteney, Miss Ling's ladylike gentleman, proved to be a tall, stout, elderly, rather depressed individual, whose gold-rimmed glasses, attached to a broad black ribbon, sat a little crookedly upon a high, pink Roman nose. His light blue eyes were over-tried and rather watery, his hair had come off at the top, leaving his crown bald and shiny; his customary attire was a rather seedy black frock-coat, a drab vest with pearl buttons, and rather baggy brown trousers, and he wore turned-down collars and black ribbon neckties, and displayed onyx studs and links in a carefully preserved shirt. Pieces of paper protected his cuffs, invariably covered with memoranda written in violet-ink-pencil, referring to the most delicate and confidential affairs.
For Mr. Mounteney, under the nom de guerre of "Araminta," edited the "Happiness, Health, and Beauty" column of that fashionable feminine monthly, the Ladies' Mentor, into whose bureau, according to Mr. Mounteney, a vast correspondence,—penned by the wives and daughters of what Mr. Mounteney termed the Flower of Britain's Nobility and Gentry, as by their governesses and maids, and the wives and daughters of their butchers, bakers, and candlestick-makers,—continually flowed. Signing themselves by fancy names, these confiding ones would put questions concerning matters of the toilette and so forth, the Answers to which interrogations, with the pseudonyms prefixed, were inserted month by month.
"Little Fairy.—A lady who weighs fourteen stone need not necessarily give up waltzing.