Piffingcap had the cup from an old friend, a queer-minded man. He had given it to him just before he had gone out of this continent, not for the first but for the last time—a cup of lead with an inscription upon it in decent letters but strange words. “Here, Elmer,” said his old friend to the barber of Bagwood, “have this—there’s the doom of half a million beards in it!”
Piffingcap laughed, but without any joy, for his heart was heavy to lose his friend.
“There is in it too,” continued Grafton, offering the pot and tapping it with his forefinger, “a true test of virtue—a rare thing, as you know, in these parts. Secondly, there is in it a choice of fortunes; and thirdly, it may be, a triple calamity and—and—and very serious, you know, but there you are.” He gave it into the barber’s hand with a slight sigh. While his friend duly admired the dull gift the traveller picked up his walking stick and winked at himself in the mirror.
And Elmer Piffingcap, the barber of Bagwood, took his friend’s cup, set it in a conspicuous place upon the[54] shelf of his shop, and bade that friend good-bye, a little knot rolling into his lungs as they shook their two hands together.
“It is true then,” said he, staring at the shining baldness of his friend who stood with hat and stick in hand—for as Piffingcap dared not look into his friend’s eyes, the gleam of the skull took his gaze, as a bright thing will seize the mind of a gnat—“it is true, then, I shall see you no more?”
“No more again,” said the wanderer affably, replacing his hat—disliking that pliant will-less stare of the barber’s mournful eyes. This wandering man had a heart full of bravery though he could not walk with pride, for the corns and bunkles he suffered would have crippled a creature of four feet, leave alone two. But—would you believe it—he was going now to walk himself for all his days round and round the world. O, he was such a man as could put a deceit upon the slyest, with his tall hat and his jokes, living as easy as a bird in the softness and sweetness of the year.
“And if it rains, it rains,” he declared to Polly, “and I squat like a hare in the hedge and keep the blessed bones of me dry and my feet warm—it’s not three weeks since it happened to me; my neck as damp as the inside of an onion, and my curly locks caught in blackberry bushes—stint your laughing, Polly!—the end of my nose as cold as a piece of dead pork, and the place very inconvenient with its sharp thorns and nettles—and no dockleaf left in the whole parish. But there was young barley wagging in the field, and clover to be smelling, and rooks to be watching, and[55] doves, and the rain heaving its long sigh in the greyness—I declare to my God it was a fine handsome day I had that day, Polly!”
In the winter he would be sleeping in decent nooks, eating his food in quiet inns, drying his coat at the forge; and so he goes now into the corners of the world—the little husky fat man, with large spectacles and fox-coloured beard and tough boots that had slits and gouts in them—gone seeking the feathers out of Priam’s peacock. And let him go; we take no more concern of him or his shining skull or his tra-la-la in the highways.
The barber, who had a romantic drift of mind, went into his saloon, and taking up the two cracked china lather mugs he flung them from the open window into his back garden, putting the fear of some evil into the mind of his drowsy cat, and a great anticipation in the brains of his two dusty hens, who were lurking there for anything that could be devoured. Mr. Piffingcap placed the pot made of lead upon his convenient shelf, laid therein his brush, lit the small gas stove under the copper urn, and when Polly, the child from the dairy, arrived with her small can for the barber’s large jug she found him engaged in shaving the chin of Timmy James the butcher, what time Mr. James was engaged in a somewhat stilted conversation with Gregory Barnes about the carnal women of Bagwood.
Polly was a little lean girl, eight or nine years old, with a face that was soft and rosy and fresh as the bud of gum on the black branches of the orchard. She[56] wore a pretty dimity frock and had gay flowers in her hat. This was her last house of call, and, sitting down to watch Mr. Piffingcap, the town’s one barber, shaving friends and enemies alike, she would be the butt of their agreeable chaff because of her pleasant country jargon—as rich as nutmeg in a homely cake—or her yellow scattered hair, or her sweet eyes that were soft as remembered twilight.
“Your razor is roaring, Mr. Piffingcap!”—peeping round the chair at him. “Oh, it’s that Mr. James!” she would say in pretended surprise. Mr. James had a gruff beard, and the act of removing it occasioned a noise resembling that of her mother scraping the new potatoes.
“What have you got this pot for?” she chattered; “I don’t like it, it’s ugly.”
“Don’t say that now,” said Mr. Piffingcap, pausing with his hand on the butcher’s throttle, “it was Mr. Grafton’s parting gift to me; I shall never see him again, nor will you neither; he’s gone round the world for ever more this time!”
“Oh!” gurgled the child in a manner that hung between pain and delight, “has he gone to Rinjigoffer land?”
“Gone where?” roared Timothy James, lifting his large red neck from the rest.
“He’s told me all about it,” said the child, ignoring him.
“Well, he’s not gone there,” interrupted the barber.
And the child continued, “It’s where the doves and[57] the partridges are so fat that they break down the branches of the trees where they roost....”
“Garn with yer!” said Mr. James.
“... and the hares are as big as foxes....”
“God a mercy!” said Mr. James.
“... yes, and a fox was big and brown and white like a skewbald donkey—he! he! he! And oo yes,” continued Polly, shrilling with excitement, “there was a king badger as would stop your eyes from winking if you met him walking in the dawn!”
“Lord, what should the man be doing telling you them lies,” ejaculated Timothy, now wiping his chin on the napkin. “Did he give you that cup, Piff?”
“Yes,” replied the barber, “and if what he says is true there’s a power o’ miracle in it.”
The butcher surveyed it cautiously and read the inscription:
NE SAMBRA DIVORNAK
“That’s a bit o’ Roosian, I should say,” he remarked as he and Gregory left the saloon.
Polly picked up her empty can and looked at Mr. P.
“Won’t he come back no more?”
“No, Polly, my pigeon, he won’t come back.”
“Didn’t he like us?” asked the child.
The barber stood dumb before her bright searching eyes.
“He was better than my father,” said the child, “or me uncle, or the schoolmaster.”
“He’s the goodest man alive, Polly,” said Mr. P.
[58]
“Didn’t he like us?” again she asked; and as Mr. P. could only look vaguely about the room she went out and closed the latch of the door very softly behind her.
In the succeeding days the barber lathered and cut or sat smoking meditatively in his saloon; the doom began to work its will, and business, which for a quarter of a century had flourished like a plant, as indeed it was, of constant and assured growth, suddenly declined. On weekdays the barber cleaned up the chins of his fellow townsmen alone, but on Sunday mornings he would seek the aid of a neighbour, a youngster whom he called Charleyboy, when four men would be seated at one time upon his shaving-chairs, towel upon breast and neck bared for the sacrifice, while Charleyboy dabbed and pounded their crops into foam. Mr. Piffingcap would follow him, plying his weapon like the genius he was, while Charleyboy again in turn followed him, drying with linen, cooling with rhum, or soothing with splendid unguent. “Next gent, please!” he would cry out, and the last shorn man would rise and turn away, dabbing his right hand into the depths of his breeches pocket and elevating that with his left before producing the customary tribute.
But the genius of Piffingcap and the neat hand of Charley languished in distress. There was no gradual cessation, the thing completely stopped, and Piffingcap did not realize until too late, until, indeed, the truth of it was current in the little town everywhere but in his own shop, that the beards once shaven by him out of Grafton’s pot grew no more in Bagwood; and there came the space of a week or so when not a soul entered[59] the saloon but two schoolboys for the cutting of hair, and a little housemaid for a fringe net.
Then he knew, and one day, having sat in the place the whole morning like a beleaguered rat, with ruin and damnation a hands-breath only from him, he rushed from his shop across to the hardware merchant’s and bought two white china mugs, delicately lined with gold and embossed with vague lumps, and took them back to the saloon.
At dinner time he put the cup of lead into his coat pocket and walked down the street in an anxious kind of way until he came to the bridge at the end of the town. It was an angular stone bridge, crossing a deep and leisurely flowing river, along whose parapet boys had dared a million times, wearing smooth, with their adventuring feet, its soft yellow stone. He stared at the water and saw the shining flank of a tench as it turned over. All beyond the bridge were meads thick with ripe unmown grass and sweet with scabious bloom. But the barber’s mind was harsh with the rancour of noon heats and the misfortunes of life. He stood with one hand resting upon the hot stone and one upon the heavy evil thing in his pocket. The bridge was deserted at this hour, its little traffic having paused for the meal. He took, at length, the cup from his pocket, and whispering to himself “God forgive you, Grafton,” he let it fall from his fingers into the water; then he walked sharply home to his three daughters and told them what he had done.
“You poor loon!” said Bersa.
“O man! man!” moaned Grue.
[60]
“You’re the ruin of us all!” cried Mavie.
Three fine women were Grue and Mavie and Bersa, in spite of the clamour of the outlandish Piffingcap names, and their father had respect for them and admired their handsomeness. But they had for their father, all three of them, the principal filial emotion of compassion, and they showed that his action had been a foolish action, that there were other towns in the world besides Bagwood, and that thousands and millions of men would pay a good price to be quit of a beard, and be shaved from a pot that would complete the destruction of all the unwanted hairiness of the world. And they were very angry with him.
“Let us go and see to it ... what is to be done now ... bring us to the place, father!”
He took them down to the river, and when they peered over the side of the bridge they could see the pot lying half sunk in some white sand in more than a fathom of water.
“Let us instruct the waterman,” they said, “he will secure it for us.”
In the afternoon Grue met the waterman, who was a sly young fellow, and she instructed him, but at tea-time word was brought to Piffingcap that the young waterman was fallen into the river and drowned. Then there was grief in his mind, for he remembered the calamity which Grafton had foretold, and he was for giving up all notions of re-taking the cup; but his daughter Bersa went in a few days to a man was an angler and instructed him; and he took a crooked pole and leaned over the bridge to probe for the cup. In[61] the afternoon word was brought to Piffingcap that the parapet had given way, and the young angler in falling through had dashed out his brains on the abutment of the bridge. And the young gaffer whom Mavie instructed was took of a sunstroke and died on the bank.
The barber was in great grief at these calamities; he had tremors of guilt in his mind, no money in his coffers, and the chins of the Bagwood men were still as smooth as children’s; but it came to him one day that he need not fear any more calamities, and that a thing which had so much tricks in it should perhaps be cured by trickery.
“I will go,” he said, “to the Widow Buckland and ask her to assist me.”
The Widow Buckland was a wild strange woman who lived on a heath a few miles away from Bagwood; so he went over one very hot day to the Widow and found her cottage in the corner of the heath. There was a caravan beside the cottage—it was a red caravan with yellow wheels. A blackbird hung in a wicker cage at the door, and on the side of the roof board was painted
FEATS & GALIAS ATENDED
AGLAURA BUCKLAND
There was nobody in the caravan so he knocked at the cottage door; the Widow Buckland led him into her dim little parlour.
“It ’ull cost you half a James!” says she when Mr. Piffingcap had given her his requirements.
“Half a what?” cried he.
[62]
“You are not,” said the gipsy, “a man of a mean heart, are you?” She said it very persuasively, and he felt he could not annoy her for she was a very large woman with sharp glances.
“No,” said Piffingcap.
“And you’ll believe what I’m telling you, won’t you?”
“Yes,” said Piffingcap.
“It ’ull maybe some time before my words come true, but come true they will, I can take my oath.”
“Yes,” again said Piffingcap.
“George!” she bawled to someone from the doorway, “wher’d yer put my box?”
There was an indistinct reply but she bawled out again, “Well, fetch it off the rabbit hutch.”
“And a man like you,” she continued, turning again to the barber, “doesn’t think twice about half a sovereign, and me putting you in the way of what you want to know, I’m sure.”
And Piffingcap mumbled dubiously “No,” producing with difficulty some shillings, some coppers, and a postal order for one and threepence which a credulous customer had that morning sent him for a bottle of hairwash.
“Let’s look at your ’and,” she said; taking it she reflected gravely:
“You’re a man that’s ’ad your share o’ trouble, aint you?”
Piffingcap bowed meekly.
“And you’ve ’ad your ’appy days, aint you?”
A nod.
[63]
“Well listen to me; you’ve got more fortune in store for you if you know how to pluck it ... you understand my meaning, don’t you?... than any man in the town this bleedun minute. Right, George,” she exclaimed, turning to a very ugly little hunchbacked fellow—truly he was a mere squint of a man, there was such a little bit of him for so much uncomeliness. The Widow Buckland took the box from the hunchback and, thrusting him out of the room, she shut fast the door and turned the key in the lock. Then she drew up a bit of a table to the window, and taking out of the box a small brass vessel and two bottles she set them before her.
“Sit down there, young feller,” she said, and Piffingcap sat down at the end of the table facing the window. The Widow turned to the window, which was a small square, the only one in the room, and closed over it a shutter. The room was clapped in darkness except for a small ray in the middle of the shutter, coming through a round hole about as large as a guinea. She pulled Mr. Piffingcap’s shoulder until the ray was shining on the middle of his forehead; she took up the brass vessel, and holding it in the light of the ray polished it for some time with her forefinger. All her fingers, even her thumbs, were covered with rich sinister rings, but there were no good looks in those fingers for the nails had been munched almost away, and dirty skin hid up the whites. The polished vessel was then placed on the table directly beneath the ray; drops from the two phials were poured into it, a green liquid and a black liquid; mixing together they melted[64] into a pillar of smoke which rose and was seen only as it flowed through the beam of light, twisting and veering and spinning in strange waves.
The Widow Buckland said not a word for a time, but contemplated the twisting shapes as they poured through the ray, breathing heavily all the while or suffering a slight sigh to pass out of her breast. But shortly the smoke played the barber a trick in his nose and heaving up his chin he rent the room with a great sneeze. When he recovered himself she was speaking certain words:
“Fire and water I see and a white virgin’s skin. The triple gouts of blood I see and the doom given over. Fire and water I see and a white virgin’s skin.”
She threw open the shutter, letting in the light; smoke had ceased to rise but it filled the parlour with a sweet smell.
“Well ...” said Mr. Piffingcap dubiously.
And the Widow Buckland spoke over to him plainly and slowly, patting his shoulder at each syllable,
“Fire and water and a white virgin’s skin.”
Unlatching the door she thrust him out of the house into the sunlight. He tramped away across the heath meditating her words, and coming to the end of it he sat down in the shade of a bush by the side of the road, for he felt sure he was about to capture the full meaning of her words. But just then he heard a strange voice speaking, and speaking very vigorously. He looked up and observed a man on a bicycle, riding along towards him, talking to himself in a great way.
[65]
“He is a political fellow rehearsing a speech,” said Mr. Piffingcap to himself, “or perhaps he is some holy-minded person devising a sermon.”
It was a very bald man and he had a long face hung with glasses; he had no coat and rode in his shirt and knickerbockers, with hot thick stockings and white shoes. The barber watched him after he had passed and noted how his knees turned angularly outwards at each upward movement, and how his saddle bag hung at the bottom of his back like some ironical label.
“Fool!” exclaimed Mr. Piffingcap, rising angrily, for the man’s chatter had driven his mind clean away from the Widow Buckland’s meaning. But it was only for a short while, and when he got home he called one of his daughters into the saloon.
“My child,” said Piffingcap, “you know the great trouble which is come on me?” and he told Bersa his difficulty and requested her aid, that is to say: would she go down in the early morning in her skin only and recover the pot?
“Indeed no, father!” said his daughter Bersa, “it is a very evil thing and I will not do your request.”
“You will not?” says he.
“No!” says she, but it was not in the fear of her getting her death that she refused him.
So he called to another of his daughters.
“My child,” said he, “you know the great trouble that is come on me,” and he told Mavie his desire and asked for her aid.
“Why, my father,” says she, “this is a thing which[66] a black hag has put on us all and I will get my death. I love you as I love my life, father, but I won’t do this!”
“You will not?” says he.
“No!” says she, but it was not for fear of her death she refused him.
And he went to his third daughter Grue and tried her with the same thing. “My child, you know the trouble that’s come on me?”
“Oh, will you let me alone!” she says, “I’ve a greater trouble on me than your mouldy pot.” And it is true what she said of her trouble, for she was a girl of a loose habit. So the barber said no more to them and went to his bed.
Two days later, it being Saturday, he opened in the morning his saloon and sat down there. And while he read his newspaper in the empty place footsteps scampered into his doorway, and the door itself was pushed open just an inch or two.
“Come in,” he said, rising.
The door opened fully.
“Zennybody here?” whispered Polly walking in very mysteriously, out of breath, and dressed in a long mackintosh.
“What is the matter, my little one?” he asked, putting his arm around her shoulders, for he had a fondness for her. “Ach, your hair’s all wet, what’s the matter?”
The little girl put her hand under the macintosh and drew out the leaden pot, handing it to the barber[67] and smiling at him with inarticulate but intense happiness. She said not a word as he stared his surprise and joy.
“Why Polly, my dear, how did you get it?”
“I dived in and got it.”
“You never ... you princess ... you!”
“I just bin and come straight here with it.”
She opened and shut the mackintosh quickly, displaying for a brief glance her little white naked figure with the slightest tremulous crook at the sharp knees.
“Ah, my darling,” exclaimed the enraptured barber, “and you’re shivering with not a rag on you but them shoes ... run away home, Polly, and get some things on, Polly ... and ... Polly, Polly!” as she darted away, “come back quick, won’t you?”
She nodded brightly back at him as she sprang through the doorway. He went to the entrance and watched her taking her twinkling leaps, as bonny as a young foal, along the pavement.
And there came into the barber’s mind the notion that this was all again a piece of fancy tricks; but there was the dark pot, and he examined it. Thoughtfully he took it into his backyard and busied himself there for a while, not telling his daughters of its recovery. When, later, Polly joined him in the garden he had already raised a big fire in an old iron brazier which had lain there.
“Ah, Polly my dear, I’m overjoyed to get it back, but I dasn’t keep it ... it’s a bad thing. Take it in your fingers now, my dear little girl, and just chuck[68] it in that fire. Ah, we must melt the wickedness out of it,” he said, observing her disappointment, “it’s been the death of three men and we dasn’t keep it.”
They watched it among the coals until it had begun to perish drop by drop through the grating of the brazier.
Later in the day Mr. Piffingcap drove Polly in a little trap to a neighbouring town to see a circus, and the pair of them had a roaring dinner at the Green Dragon. Next morning when Polly brought the milk to the saloon there were Timmy James and Gregory Barnes being shaved, for beards had grown again in Bagwood.