I Wish I Had Sent John Brown A Pound Or Two When I Was In
Good Health; But One Is Selfish Then, And Puts Off Things Till It Is Too
Late - A Lame Excuse Verily.
I can scarcely believe now that he is really
dead, gone as you might casually pluck a hawthorn leaf from the hedge.
The next cottage was a very marked one, for houses grow to their owners.
The low thatched roof had rounded itself and stooped down to fit itself
to Job's shoulders; the walls had got short and thick to suit him, and
they had a yellowish colour, like his complexion, as if chewing tobacco
had stained his cheeks right through. Tobacco juice had likewise
penetrated and tinted the wall. It was cut off as it seemed by a
party-wall into one room, instead of which there were more rooms beyond
which no one would have suspected. Job had a way of shaking hands with
you with his right hand, while his left hand was casually doing something
else in a detached sort of way. 'Yes, sir,' and 'No, sir,' and nodding to
everything you said all so complaisant, but at the end of the bargain you
generally found yourself a few shillings in some roundabout manner on the
wrong side. Job had a lot of shut-up rooms in his house and in his
character, which never seemed to be opened to daylight. The eaves hung
over and beetled like his brows, and he had a forelock, a regular antique
forelock, which he used to touch with the greatest humility. There was a
long bough of an elm hanging over one gable just like the forelock. His
face was a blank, like the broad end wall of the cottage, which had no
window - at least you might think so until you looked up and discovered
one little arrow slit, one narrow pane, and woke with a start to the idea
that Job was always up there watching and listening. That was how he
looked out of his one eye so intensely cunning, the other being a wall
eye - that is, the world supposed so, as he kept it half shut, always
between the lights; but whether it was really blind or not I cannot say.
Job caught rats and rabbits and moles, and bought fagots or potatoes, or
fruit or rabbit-skins, or rusty iron: wonderful how he seemed to have
command of money. It was done probably by buying and selling almost
simultaneously, so that the cash passed really from one customer to
another, and was never his at all. Also he worked as a labourer, chiefly
piecework; also Mrs. Job had a shop window about two feet square: snuff
and tobacco, bread and cheese, immense big round jumbles and sugar, kept
on the floor above, and reached down by hand, when wanted, through the
opening for the ladder stairs. The front door - Job's right hand - was
always open in summer, and the flagstones of the floor chalked round
their edges; a clean table, clean chairs, decent crockery, an old clock
about an hour slow, a large hearth with a minute fire to boil the kettle
without heating the room. Tea was usually at half-past three, and it is a
fact that many well-to-do persons, as they came along the road hot and
dusty, used to drop in and rest and take a cup - very little milk and much
gossip. Two paths met just there, and people used to step in out of a
storm of rain, a sort of thatched house club. Job was somehow on fair
terms with nearly everybody, and that is a wonderful thing in a village,
where everybody knows everybody's business, and petty interests
continually cross. The strangest fellow and the strangest way of life,
and yet I do not believe a black mark was ever put against him; the
shiftiness was all for nothing. It arose, no doubt, out of the constant
and eager straining to gain a little advantage and make an extra penny.
Had Job been a Jew he would have been rich. He was the exact counterpart
of the London Jew dealer, set down in the midst of the country. Job
should have been rich. Such immense dark brown jumbles, such
cheek-distenders - never any French sweetmeats or chocolate or bonbons to
equal these. I really think I could eat one now. The pennies and
fourpenny bits - there were fourpenny bits in those days - that went behind
that two-foot window, goodness! there was no end. Job used to chink them
in a pint pot sometimes before the company, to give them an idea of his
great hoards. He always tried to impress people with his wealth, and
would talk of a fifty-pound contract as if it was nothing to him. Jumbles
are eternal, if nothing else is. I thought then there was not such
another shop as Job's in the universe. I have found since that there is a
Job shop in every village, and in every street in every town - that is to
say, a window for jumbles and rubbish; and if you don't know it, you may
be quite sure your children do, and spend many a sly penny there. Be as
rich as you may, and give them gilded sweetmeats at home, still they will
slip round to the Job shop.
It was a pretty cottage, well backed with trees and bushes, with a
south-east mixture of sunlight and shade, and little touches that cannot
be suggested by writing. Job had not got the Semitic instinct of keeping.
The art of acquisition he possessed to some extent, that was his right
hand; but somehow the half-crowns slipped away through his unstable left
hand, and fortune was a greasy pole to him. His left hand was too cunning
for him, it wanted to manage things too cleverly. If it had only had the
Semitic grip, digging the nails into the flesh to hold tight each
separate coin, he would have been village rich.
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