“Then I wish you’d do a favour for me, old fellow.”
“Of course,” I answered promptly. “What is it?”
“Call at the Lowrys and tell Lily to meet me at Loughborough Junction at eight to-night, at the usual place. I want to take her to the Crystal Palace to see the fireworks. I was going to wire, but you’ll pass her father’s place. Will you give her the message?”
“Certainly,” I answered. “But is she at home?”
“Yes. She’s got her holidays. Tell her I’m very busy, or I’d have come down myself. Sorry to trouble you.”
I promised him to deliver the message, and after eating a chop at the Cock, I walked along to the Gaiety and there took a blue motor-bus, which deposited me outside a small, very dingy shop, a few doors up the Walworth Road from the Elephant and Castle, which bore over the little, old-fashioned window the sign, “Morris Lowry, Herbalist.” Displayed to the gaze of the passer-by were various assortments of lozenges and bunches of dried herbs, boxes of pills guaranteed to cure every ill, and a row of dirty glass bottles filled with yellow liquids, containing filthy-looking specimens of various repulsive objects. The glaring cards in the window advertised such desirable commodities as “Lowry’s Wind Pills,” “Lowry’s Cough Tablets,” and “Lowry’s Herbal Ointment,” while the window itself and the whole shop-front was dirt-encrusted, one pane being cracked across.
As I entered the dark little shop, a mere box of a place smelling strongly of camomile, sarsaparilla and such-like herbs, which hung in dried and dusty confusion all over the ceiling, there arose from a chair the queerest, oddest creature that one might ever meet, even in the diverse crowds of lower London. Morris Lowry, the herbalist, was a strange specimen of distorted humanity, hunch-backed, with an abnormally large, semi-bald head, a scrubby grey beard, and wearing large, old-fashioned, steel-rimmed spectacles, which imparted to him an appearance of learning and distinction. His legs were short and stumpy, his body rather stout, and his arms of inordinate length, while the whole appearance of his sickly, yellow, wizened face was such as might increase one’s belief in the Darwinian theory. Indeed, it was impossible to look upon him without one’s mind reverting to monkeys, for his high cheek bones and square jaws bore a striking resemblance to the facial expression of the ancestral gorilla.
Dressed in black cloak and conical hat he would have made an ideal stage wizard; but attired as he was in greasy black frock coat, and trousers that had long ago passed the glossy stage, he was certainly as curious-looking an individual as one could have found on the Surrey side of the Thames. He was no stranger to me, for on several occasions I had called there with Dick, and had chatted with him. Trade in herbs had dwindled almost to nothing. Nowadays, with all sorts and varieties of well-advertised medicines, the people of Newington, Walworth, and the New Kent Road did not patronise the old-fashioned herbal remedies, which, if truth be told, are perhaps more potent and wholesome than any of the quack nostrums flaunted in the daily papers and on the hoardings. Ten years ago the herbalists did a brisk trade in London, especially among lower class housewives who, having come up from the country, were glad enough to obtain the old-world decoctions; but nowadays the herbalists’ only source of profit seems to be in the sale of skin soaps and worm tablets.
Old Morris, with his ugly, deformed figure and shining bald head, welcomed me warmly as I entered, and at once invited me into the little shop-parlour beyond, a mere dark cupboard which still retained the odour of the midday meal—Irish stew it must have been—and seemed infested with a myriad of flies. Possibly the fragrance of the herbs attracted them, or else they revelled among the succulent tablets exposed in the open boxes upon the narrow counter. These lozenges, together with his various bottled brews, tinctures of this and of that, the old man manufactured in a kind of dilapidated shed at the rear, which, be it said, often offended the olfactory nerves of the whole neighbourhood when certain herbs were in the process of stewing.
“Lily is out,” croaked the weird old fellow, in response to my inquiry, “but I’ll, of course, give her the message. She don’t get much chance nowadays, poor child! When her mother was alive we used to manage to run down to Margit for a week or fortnight in the hot weather. But now—” and he shrugged his shoulders with quite a foreign air. “Well, there’s only me to look after the shop,” he added. “And things are not so brisk as they were a few years ago.” He spoke with a slight accent, due, Cleugh had told me, to the fact that his mother was French, and he had lived in France a number of years. Few people, however, noticed it, for by many he was believed to be a Jew.