A few years ago I turned into a tobacconist’s to have a badly stopped pipe cleaned out.
“Well! Well! And how did the canary do?” said the man behind the counter. We shook hands, and “What’s your name?” we both asked together.
His name was Lewis Holroyd Burges, of “Burges and Son,” as I might have seen above the door—but Son had been killed in Egypt. His hair was whiter than it had been, and the eyes were sunk a little.
“Well! Well! To think,” said he, “of one man in all these millions turning up in this curious way, when there’s so many who don’t turn up at all—eh?” (It was then that he told me of Son Lewis’s death and why the boy had been christened Lewis.) “Yes. There’s not much left for middle-aged people just at present. Even one’s hobbies——We used to fish together. And the same with canaries! We used to breed ’em for colour—deep orange was our speciality. That’s why I spoke to you, if you remember; but I’ve sold all my birds. Well! Well! And now we must locate your trouble.”
He bent over my erring pipe and dealt with it skilfully as a surgeon. A soldier came in, spoke in an undertone, received a reply, and went out.
“Many of my clients are soldiers nowadays, and a number of ’em belong to the Craft,” said Mr. Burges. “It breaks my heart to give them the tobaccos they ask for. On the other hand, not one man in five thousand has a tobacco-palate. Preference, yes. Palate, no. Here’s your pipe, again. It deserves better treatment than it’s had. There’s a procedure, a ritual, in all things. Any time you’re passing by again, I assure you, you will be welcome. I’ve one or two odds and ends that may interest you.”
I left the shop with the rarest of all feelings on me—the sensation which is only youth’s right—that I might have made a friend. A little distance from the door I was accosted by a wounded man who asked for “Burges’s.” The place seemed to be known in the neighbourhood.
I found my way to it again, and often after that, but it was not till my third visit that I discovered Mr. Burges held a half interest in Ackerman and Pernit’s, the great cigar-importers, which had come to him through an uncle whose children now lived almost in the Cromwell Road, and said that the uncle had been on the Stock Exchange.
“I’m a shopkeeper by instinct,” said Mr. Burges. “I like the ritual of handling things. The shop has done me well. I like to do well by the shop.”
It had been established by his grandfather in 1827, but the fittings and appointments must have been at least half a century older. The brown and red tobacco- and snuff-jars, with Crowns, Garters, and names of forgotten mixtures in gold leaf; the polished “Oronoque” tobacco-barrels on which favoured customers sat; the cherry-black mahogany counter, the delicately moulded shelves, the reeded cigar-cabinets, the German-silver-mounted scales, and the Dutch brass roll and cake-cutter, were things to covet.