“Show that, sir, at the bar of the ‘Three Stars’ at Hanwitch, and if you don’t get every attention, be good enough to write to me, and see if they don’t lose my patronage.”
Holdsworth looked at the card, whereon he might have seen a very commonplace name, printed in capitals, with “Commercial Traveller” squeezed into the corner; but he saw nothing. A name had been pronounced which quickened the dormant memory in him into a vitality that threatened to make it burst through the shell that imprisoned it, and proclaim all that he passionately longed to know.
Powerless must his mind have been not to find in the name of the Hanwitch inn the magic to give him back his memory. Could not his heart recall the sweet day he had spent in Hanwitch with Dolly at his side?—the sweetest, happiest day of all the days he had passed in the brief three months during which they had been together? One might have thought that, saving her own dear face, there was nothing more potent to roll back the deep mantle of darkness, and lay bare the shining panorama of those far-off times, than the name of the inn in whose deep bay window they had sat linked in each other’s arms, watching the soft sunshine shimmering through the summer leaves, and the clear river wandering gently along its emerald-banked channel.
Further conversation was out of the question for a while, by the chairman hammering on the table and calling silence for a song. The disagreeable effects produced by the last song had completely passed away, and the landlord thought that another “ditty,” as he called it, might safely be sung.
A very corpulent man stood up, with a face upon him of which the quantity of flesh had worked the expression into an aspect of fixed amazement. An immense blue-spotted cravat adorned his throat, and long streaks of hair fell slanting down his cheeks. His small clothes and arm-sleeves were distressingly tight, and suggested that any display of pathos or humour, of gesticulation or laughter, would be in the highest degree inconvenient. It was not hard to guess that this fat man sang comic songs, that he dropped every h, and that he was in the eating-line, in a commercial sense.
He was saluted with a round of laughter, which, being hammered down, he began in a soft, oily, tenor voice—
“A dawg’s-meat man he loved a voman,
Sairey her name vos—not uncommon;
He had vun eye, and he hown’d a barrer.