A Likely Story

by William De Morgan

"Well, now—just you do as I tell you. Got a clean number twelve sable? ... No?—well, number eleven, then ... That'll do!—dip it in Benzine Collas and give it a rinse out. See? Then you give it a rub in your Transparent Oxide, and wipe it clean with a rag. What's left will go all over Diana, and a little to spare..."

"Won't she look green?" Mr. Aiken seemed reluctant.

"Rather! But you do as I say, young feller, and ask no questions.... 'What are you to do next?'—why, take an absoli-yootly white bit of old rag and wipe her quite clean from head to foot." His audience suggesting here that no change would be visible, he added, "That's the idear. Don't you change the colour on any account. But you'll see! Diana—she'll have gone back!"

"There's somethin' in what old Tick says," said Mr. Dobbles, trying to come out of the cold. He nodded mysteriously. Mr. Aiken said he'd think about it.

Mr. Tick said, "I ain't advisin'. I never advise. But if I was to—there's the advice I should give!" Then he and Mr. Dobbles went their ways, leaving Mr. Aiken searching for his tube of Transparent Oxide of Chromium.

Now, Mr. Reginald Aiken always knew where everything was in his Studio, and could lay his hand on it at once. Provided always that you hadn't meddled and shifted the things about! And he knew this tube of colour was in his old japanned tin box, with the folding palette with the hinge broke. It might be difficult to get out by now, because he knew a bottle of Siccatif had broken all over it. But he was keen to make Diana go back, and if he went out to get another tube he would lose all the daylight.

So he sat down to think where the dooce that box had got put. He lit a cigarette to think with. One has to do things methodically, or one soon gets into confusion.

He passed before his mind the epoch-making bouleversements of the past few years; notably the regular good clean-up when he married Euphemia four years since, and took the second floor as well as the Studio floor he had occupied as a bachelor.

He finished that cigarette gloomily. Presently he decided that what had happened on that occasion had probably occurred again. History repeats itself. That box had got shoved back into the recess behind the cassettone. He would have up Mrs. Gapp, who came in by the day, in the place of Mrs. Parples, who had outstayed her welcome, to help him to shift that great beastly useless piece of lumber. Mrs. Gapp was, however, easier to call over the stairs to than to have up. The number of times you called for Mrs. Gapp was according; it varied with your own tenacity of purpose and your readiness to believe that she wasn't there. Mr. Aiken seemed easily convinced that she was at the William the Fourth, up the street. That was the substance of his reason for not shouting himself hoarse; that is to say, it worked out thus as soliloquy. He went back and tried for the japanned tin colour-box, single-handed.

He had much better have gone out to buy a new tube of this useful colour, as in five minutes he was one mass of filth. Only getting the things off the top of that box was enough!—why, you never see anything to come near the state they was in. And if he had only rang again, sharp, Mrs. Gapp would have heard the wire; only, of course, no one could say the bell wasn't broke, and maintain a reputation for truthfulness. We are incorporating in our text some verbal testimony of Mrs. Gapp's, given later.