“Fansheen you,” he repeated. “Hahu?”
And having kissed me, he sat down on the pavement.
CHAPTER XIV
Person and character of Mr. Archibald Maidstone. Irreverent attitude towards the firm’s publications. Would-be laxity of two constables. Their tardy performance of an obvious duty. Deplorable condition of my Sunday trousers. Their effect on Miss Botterill and Mr. Chrysostom Lorton. The arrival and influence of the Reverend Eugene Cake. Mr. Maidstone is dismissed and I succeed him. Complete discomfiture of his three elder children.
I have said that he sat down, and even had that been all, it would have been a sufficiently unpleasant encounter, although, as I had instantly seen, it ought certainly to issue in my own immediate commercial advancement. But he did more, for so firmly did he grip my arm that I was compelled to sit down beside him, with what reluctance will be the better imagined when I have briefly described his person and character. By name Archibald Maidstone, he was a tall, gaunt man with high cheek-bones and a grey moustache, and in his earlier life he had held some sort of position in the British mercantile marine. An accident at sea, however, had deprived him of one of his eyes as well as of the two middle fingers of his left hand, and for some time he had been the proprietor of a small and unsuccessful marine store. He had then become a commercial traveller for a firm of grocers that had subsequently failed, and had finally, at the age of forty-one, obtained a minor position in the business of Mr. Chrysostom Lorton.
A married man with several children, he had afterwards been appointed show-room manager, and it was as his assistant, as I have already said, that I had entered Mr. Lorton’s employment. From the outset, however, although I had endeavoured to conceal this, I had both disliked and distrusted him, and in spite of what I presumed to be a species of nautical humour, I had found his attitude towards me peculiarly offensive. I had never been accustomed, for example, as I had been obliged to point out to him, to be addressed as ‘young-feller-me-lad,’ or ‘the bosun’s mate,’ and I had even been compelled to report him to Mr. Lorton in order to secure more respectful treatment. I had been deeply concerned, too, to observe the levity with which, in the absence of customers, he would handle and describe the sacred publications of which it was his privilege to be the salesman. ‘Bilge-water for the Bairns,’ for instance, was a frequent expression of his for our well-known series of Talks with the Infants, and I had even heard him refer to a parcel of Claudie’s Temptations as “another half-hundredweight of the Prigs’ Paradise.” Indeed, on one occasion, ignorant of the presence of the author—the celebrated Non-conformist, the Reverend Eugene Cake—he had tossed me a window-copy of Without are Dogs, saying that, if they were ‘wise bow-wows,’ they would stay there; and it was only after a second interview with Mr. Chrysostom Lorton, the tearful intervention of Mrs. Maidstone, and a complete apology to the Reverend Cake, that he was allowed to retain his position.
But for the fact, indeed, that his children were still at school and dependent upon his earnings, and that his wife, who seemed inexplicably attached to him, had been an invalid for some years, he would most certainly have been dismissed, and I had always felt that this should have been done. Nor was I alone in this, for when I ventured to congratulate him on the successful sale of Without are Dogs, the Reverend Cake had entirely agreed with me in deploring Mr. Maidstone’s retention in the business.
Such then was the man by whose side I was now sitting upon the damp pavement, and from whom I only detached myself after a prolonged struggle, just as a member of the police force came in sight. This was a stalwart constable of somewhat coarse appearance to whom I immediately made myself known, and to whose attention I then brought Mr. Maidstone, who was still seated upon the pavement.
“Ha, I see,” he said, “a bit sideways. Do you happen to know where the gentleman lives?”