The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories: Modern English
cathedral, should now appear as a _deus ex machina_ to reëndow the choir,
or to found a musical professoriate in connection with the choir,
appointing me the first occupant of the professorial chair?
These thoughts flashed across my mind in the momentary pause of his fluent
tongue.
"As for yourself, sir," he began again, "I have something to propose which
I trust may not prove unwelcome. But the public street is hardly a
suitable place to discuss my proposal. May I call upon you this evening at
your house in the close? I know which it is, for I happened to see you go
into it yesterday after the morning service."
"I shall be very pleased to see you," I replied. "We are going out to
dinner this evening, but I shall be at home and disengaged till about
seven."
"Thank you very much. Then I shall do myself the pleasure of calling upon
you about six o'clock. Till then, farewell!" A graceful wave of the hand,
and my unknown friend had disappeared round the corner of the street.
Now at last, I thought, something is going to happen in my uneventful
life--something to break the monotony of existence. Of course, he must
have inquired my name--he could get that from any of the cathedral
vergers--and, as he said, he had observed whereabouts in the close I
lived. What is he coming to see me for? I wondered. I spent the rest of
the afternoon in making the wildest surmises. I was castle-building in
Spain at a furious rate. At one time I imagined that this faithful son of
the church--as he appeared to me--was going to build and endow a grand
cathedral in Australia on condition that I should be appointed dean at a
yearly stipend of, say, ten thousand pounds. Or perhaps, I said to myself,
he will beg me to accept a sum of money--I never thought of it as less
than a thousand pounds--as a slight recognition of and tribute to my
remarkable vocal ability.
I took a long, lonely walk into the country to correct these ridiculous
fancies and to steady my mind, and when I reached home and had refreshed
myself with a quiet cup of afternoon tea, I felt I was morally and
physically prepared for my interview with the opulent stranger.
Punctually as the cathedral clock struck six there was a ring at the
visitor's bell. In a moment or two my unknown friend was shown into the
drawing-room, which he entered with the easy air of a man of the world. I
noticed he was carrying a small black bag.
"How do you do again, Mr. Dale?" he said as though we were old
acquaintances; "you see I have come sharp to my time."
"Yes," I answered, "and I am pleased to see you; do sit down." He sank
into my best armchair, and placed his bag on the floor beside him.
"Since we met in the afternoon," he said, "I have written a letter to
your dean, expressing the great pleasure I felt in listening to your
choir, and at the same time I inclosed a five-pound note, which I begged
him to divide among the choir boys and men, from Alexander Poulter, Esq.,
of Poulter's Pills. You have of course heard of the world-renowned
Poulter's Pills. I am Poulter!"
Poulter of Poulter's Pills! My heart sank within me! A five-pound note! My
airy castles were tottering!
"I also sent him a couple of hundred of my pamphlets, which I said I
trusted he would be so kind as to distribute in the close."
I was aghast!
"And now, with regard to the special object of my call, Mr. Dale. If you
will allow me to say so, you are not making the most of that grand voice
of yours; you are hidden under an ecclesiastical bushel here--lost to the
world. You are wasting your vocal strength and sweetness on the desert
air, so to speak. Why, if I may hazard a guess, I don't suppose you make
five hundred a year here, at the outside?"
I could say nothing.
"Well, now, I can put you into the way of making at least three or four
times as much as that. Listen! I am Alexander Poulter, of Poulter's Pills.
I have a proposal to make to you. The scheme is bound to succeed, but I
want your help. Accept my proposal and your fortune's made. Did you ever
hear Moody and Sankey?" he asked abruptly.
The man is an idiot, thought I; he is now fairly carried away with his
particular mania. Will it last long? Shall I ring?
"Novelty, my dear sir," he went on, "is the rule of the day; and there
must be novelty in advertising, as in everything else, to catch the public
interest. So I intend to go on a tour, lecturing on the merits of
Poulter's Pills in all the principal halls of all the principal towns all
over the world. But I have been delayed in carrying out my idea till I
could associate myself with a gentleman such as yourself. Will you join
me? I should be the Moody of the tour; you would be its Sankey. I would
speak my patter, and you would intersperse my orations with melodious
ballads bearing upon the virtues of Poulter's Pills. The ballads are all
ready!"
So saying, he opened that bag and drew forth from its recesses nothing
more alarming than a thick roll of manuscript music.
"The verses are my own," he said, with a little touch of pride; "and as
for the music, I thought it better to make use of popular melodies, so as
to enable an audience to join in the chorus. See, here is one of the
ballads: 'Darling, I am better now.' It describes the woes of a fond
lover, or rather his physical ailments, until he went through a course of
Poulter. Here's another: 'I'm ninety-five! I'm ninety-five!' You catch the
drift of that, of course--a healthy old age, secured by taking Poulter's
Pills. Ah! what's this? 'Little sister's last request.' I fancy the idea
of that is to beg the family never to be without Poulter's Pills. Here
again: 'Then you'll remember me!' I'm afraid that title is not original;
never mind, the song is. And here is--but there are many more, and I won't
detain you with them now." He saw, perhaps, I was getting impatient. Thank
Heaven, however, he was no escaped lunatic. I was safe!
"Mr. Poulter," said I, "I took you this afternoon for a disinterested and
philanthropic millionaire; you take me for--for--something different from
what I am. We have both made mistakes. In a word, it is impossible for me
to accept your offer!"
"Is that final?" asked Poulter.
"Certainly," said I.
Poulter gathered his manuscripts together and replaced them in the bag,
and got up to leave the room.
"Good evening, Mr. Dale," he said mournfully, as I opened the door of the
room. "Good evening"--he kept on talking till he was fairly out of the
house--"mark my words, you'll be sorry--very sorry--one day that you did
not fall in with my scheme. Offers like mine don't come every day, and you
will one day regret having refused it."
With these words he left the house.
I had little appetite for my dinner that evening.
_The Pipe_
"RANDOLPH CRESCENT, N.W.
"MY DEAR PUGH--I hope you will like the pipe which I send with
this. It is rather a curious example of a certain school of
Indian carving. And is a present from
"Yours truly, Joseph Tress."
It was really very handsome of Tress--very handsome! The more especially
as I was aware that to give presents was not exactly in Tress's line. The
truth is that when I saw what manner of pipe it was I was amazed. It was
contained in a sandalwood box, which was itself illustrated with some
remarkable specimens of carving. I use the word "remarkable" advisedly,
because, although the workmanship was undoubtedly, in its way, artistic,
the result could not be described as beautiful. The carver had thought
proper to ornament the box with some of the ugliest figures I remember to
have seen. They appeared to me to be devils. Or perhaps they were intended
to represent deities appertaining to some mythological system with which,
thank goodness, I am unacquainted. The pipe itself was worthy of the case
in which it was contained. It was of meerschaum, with an amber mouthpiece.
It was rather too large for ordinary smoking. But then, of course, one
doesn't smoke a pipe like that. There are pipes in my collection which I
should as soon think of smoking as I should of eating. Ask a china maniac
to let you have afternoon tea out of his Old Chelsea, and you will learn
some home truths as to the durability of human friendships. The glory of
the pipe, as Tress had suggested, lay in its carving. Not that I claim
that it was beautiful, any more than I make such a claim for the carving
on the box, but, as Tress said in his note, it was curious.
The stem and the bowl were quite plain, but on the edge of the bowl was
perched some kind of lizard. I told myself it was an octopus when I first
saw it, but I have since had reason to believe that it was some almost
unique member of the lizard tribe. The creature was represented as
climbing over the edge of the bowl down toward the stem, and its legs, or
feelers, or tentacula, or whatever the things are called, were, if I may
use a vulgarism, sprawling about "all over the place." For instance, two
or three of them were twined about the bowl, two or three of them were
twisted round the stem, and one, a particularly horrible one, was uplifted
in the air, so that if you put the pipe in your mouth the thing was
pointing straight at your nose.
Not the least agreeable feature about the creature was that it was
hideously lifelike. It appeared to have been carved in amber, but some
coloring matter must have been introduced, for inside the amber the
creature was of a peculiarly ghastly green. The more I examined the pipe
the more amazed I was at Tress's generosity. He and I are rival
collectors. I am not going to say, in so many words, that his collection
of pipes contains nothing but rubbish, because, as a matter of fact, he
has two or three rather decent specimens. But to compare his collection to
mine would be absurd. Tress is conscious of this, and he resents it. He
resents it to such an extent that he has been known, at least on one
occasion, to declare that one single pipe of his--I believe he alluded to
the Brummagem relic preposterously attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh--was
worth the whole of my collection put together. Although I have forgiven
this, as I hope I always shall forgive remarks made when envious passions
get the better of our nobler nature, even of a Joseph Tress, it is not to
be supposed that I have forgotten it. He was, therefore, not at all the
sort of person from whom I expected to receive a present. And such a
present! I do not believe that he himself had a finer pipe in his
collection. And to have given it to me! I had misjudged the man. I
wondered where he had got it from. I had seen his pipes; I knew them off
by heart--and some nice trumpery he has among them, too! but I had never
seen _that_ pipe before. The more I looked at it, the more my amazement
grew. The beast perched upon the edge of the bowl was so lifelike. Its two
bead-like eyes seemed to gleam at me with positively human intelligence.
The pipe fascinated me to such an extent that I actually resolved
to--smoke it!
I filled it with Perique. Ordinarily I use Birdseye, but on those very
rare occasions on which I use a specimen I smoke Perique. I lit up with
quite a small sensation of excitement. As I did so I kept my eyes perforce
fixed upon the beast. The beast pointed its upraised tentacle directly at
me. As I inhaled the pungent tobacco that tentacle impressed me with a
feeling of actual uncanniness. It was broad daylight, and I was smoking in
front of the window, yet to such an extent was I affected that it seemed
to me that the tentacle was not only vibrating, which, owing to the
peculiarity of its position, was quite within the range of probability,
but actually moving, elongating--stretching forward, that is, farther
toward me, and toward the tip of my nose. So impressed was I by this idea