The Stark Munro Letters - Arthur Conan Doyle (free ebook reader for pc TXT) 📗

standing on a packing case. Cullingworth took a hammer from the mantelpiece, and began to knock in nails behind the door.

“These will do to hang your clothes on,” said he; “you don’t mind roughing it a little until we get things in order?”

“Not in the least.”

“You see,” he explained, “there’s no good my putting a forty pound suite into a bedroom, and then having to chuck it all out of the window in order to make room for a hundred-pound one. No sense in that, Munro! Eh, what! I’m going to furnish this house as no house has ever been furnished. By Crums! I’ll bring the folk from a hundred miles round just to have leave to look at it. But I must do it room by room. Come down with me and look at the dining-room. You must be hungry after your journey.”

It really was furnished in a marvellous way—nothing flash, and everything magnificent. The carpet was so rich that my feet seemed to sink into it as into deep moss. The soup was on the table, and Mrs. Cullingworth sitting down, but he kept hauling me round to look at something else.

“Go on, Hetty,” he cried over his shoulder. “I just want to show Munro this. Now, these plain dining-room chairs, what d’you think they cost each? Eh, what?”

“Five pounds,” said I at a venture.

“Exactly!” he cried, in great delight; “thirty pounds for the six. You hear, Hetty! Munro guessed the price first shot. Now, my boy, what for the pair of curtains?”

They were a magnificent pair of stamped crimson velvet, with a two-foot gilt cornice above them. I thought that I had better not imperil my newly gained reputation by guessing.

“Eighty pounds!” he roared, slapping them with the back of his hand. “Eighty pounds, Munro! What d’ye think of that? Everything that I have in this house is going to be of the best. Why, look at this waiting-maid!

Did you ever see a neater one?”

He swung the girl, towards me by the arm.

Don’t be silly, Jimmy,” said Mrs. Cullingworth mildly, while he roared with laughter, with all his fangs flashing under his bristling moustache. The girl edged closer to her mistress, looking half-frightened and half-angry.

“All right, Mary, no harm!” he cried. “Sit down, Munro, old chap. Get a bottle of champagne, Mary, and we’ll drink to more luck.”

Well, we had a very pleasant little dinner. It is never slow if Cullingworth is about. He is one of those men who make a kind of magnetic atmosphere, so that you feel exhilarated and stimulated in their presence. His mind is so nimble and his thoughts so extravagant, that your own break away from their usual grooves, and surprise you by their activity. You feel pleased at your own inventiveness and originality, when you are really like the wren when it took a lift on the eagle’s shoulder. Old Peterson, you remember, used to have a similar effect upon you in the Linlithgow days.

In the middle of dinner he plunged off, and came back with a round bag about the size of a pomegranate in his hand.

“What d’ye think this is, Munro? Eh?”

“I have no idea.”

“Our day’s take. Eh, Hetty?” He undid a string, and in an instant a pile of gold and silver rattled down upon the cloth, the coins whirling and clinking among the dishes. One rolled off the table and was retrieved by the maid from some distant corner.

“What is it, Mary? A half sovereign? Put it in your pocket. What did the lot come to, Hetty?”

“Thirty-one pound eight.”

“You see, Munro! One day’s work.” He plunged his hand into his trouser pocket and brought out a pile of sovereigns, which he balanced in his palm. “Look at that, laddie. Rather different from my Avonmouth form, eh? What?”

“It will be good news for them,” I suggested.

He was scowling at me in an instant with all his old ferocity. You cannot imagine a more savage-looking creature than Cullingworth is when his temper goes wrong.

He gets a perfectly fiendish expression in his light blue eyes, and all his hair bristles up like a striking cobra.

He isn’t a beauty at his best, but at his worst he’s really phenomenal. At the first danger signal his wife had ordered the maid from the room.

“What rot you do talk, Munro!” he cried. “Do you suppose I am going to cripple myself for years by letting those debts hang on to me?”

“I understood that you had promised,” said I.

“Still, of course, it is no business of mine.”

“I should hope not,” he cried. “A tradesman stands to win or to lose. He allows a margin for bad debts. I would have paid it if I could. I couldn’t, and so I wiped the slate clean. No one in his senses would dream of spending all the money that I make in Bradfield upon the tradesmen of Avonmouth.”

“Suppose they come down upon you?”

“Well, we’ll see about that when they do. Meanwhile I am paying ready money for every mortal thing that comes up the door steps. They think so well of me here that I could have had the whole place furnished like a palace from the drain pipes to the flagstaff, only I determined to take each room in turn when I was ready for it.

There’s nearly four hundred pounds under this one ceiling.”

There came a tap at the door, and in walked a boy in buttons.

“If you please, sir, Mr. Duncan wishes to see you.”

“Give my compliments to Mr. Duncan, and tell him he may go to the devil!”

“My dear Jimmy!” cried Mrs. Cullingworth.

“Tell him I am at dinner; and if all the kings in Europe were waiting in the hall with their crowns in their hands I wouldn’t cross that door mat to see them.”

The boy vanished, but was back in an instant.

“Please, sir, he won’t go.”

“Won’t go! What d’you mean?” Cullingworth sat with his mouth open and his knife and fork sticking up. “What d’you mean, you brat? What are you boggling about?”

“It’s his bill, sir,” said the frightened boy.

Cullingworth’s face grew dusky, and the veins began to swell on his forehead.

“His bill, eh! Look here!” He took his watch out and laid it on the table. “It’s two minutes to eight.

At eight I’m coming out, and if I find him there I’ll strew the street with him. Tell him I’ll shred him over the parish. He has two minutes to save his life in, and one of them is nearly gone.”

The boy bolted from the room, and in an instant afterwards we heard the bang of the front door, with a clatter of steps down the stairs. Cullingworth lay back in his chair and roared until the tears shone on his eyelashes, while his wife quivered all over with sympathetic merriment.

“I’ll drive him mad,” Cullingworth sobbed at last.

“He’s a nervous, chicken-livered kind of man; and when I look at him he turns the colour of putty. If I pass his shop I usually just drop in and stand and look at him. I never speak, but just look. It paralyses him.

Sometimes the shop is full of people; but it is just the same.”

“Who is he, then?” I asked.

“He’s my corn merchant. I was saying that I paid my tradesmen as I go, but he is the only exception. He has done me once or twice, you see; and so I try to take it out of him. By the way, you might send him down twenty pounds tomorrow, Hetty. It’s time for an instalment.”

What a gossip you will think me, Bertie? But when I begin, my memory brings everything back so clearly, and I write on and on almost unconsciously. Besides, this fellow is such a mixture of qualities, that I could never give you any idea of him by myself; and so I just try to repeat to you what he says, and what he does, so that you may build up your own picture of the man. I know that he has always interested you, and that he does so more now than ever since our fates have drawn us together again.

After dinner, we went into the back room, which was the most extraordinary contrast to the front one, having only a plain deal table, and half-a-dozen kitchen chairs scattered about on a linoleum floor. At one end was an electric battery and a big magnet. At the other, a packing case with several pistols and a litter of cartridges upon it. A rook rifle was leaning tip against it, and looking round I saw that the walls were all pocked with bullet marks.

“What’s this, then?” I asked, rolling my eyes round.

“Hetty, what’s this?” he asked, with his pipe in his hand and his head cocked sideways.

“Naval supremacy and the command of the seas,” said she, like a child repeating a lesson.

“That’s it he shouted, stabbing at me with the amber.

“Naval supremacy and command of the seas. It’s all here right under your nose. I tell you, Munro, I could go to Switzerland tomorrow, and I could say to them—`Look here, you haven’t got a seaboard and you haven’t got a port; but just find me a ship, and hoist your flag on it, and I’ll give you every ocean under heaven.’ I’d sweep the seas until there wasn’t a match-box floating on them. Or I could make them over to a limited company, and join the board after allotment. I hold the salt water in the cup of this hand, every drop of it.”

His wife put her hands on his shoulder with admiration in her eyes. I turned to knock out my pipe, and grinned over the grate.

“Oh, you may grin,” said he. (He was wonderfully quick at spotting what you were doing.) “You’ll grin a little wider when you see the dividends coming in.

What’s the value of that magnet?”

“A pound?”

“A million pounds. Not a penny under. And dirt cheap to the nation that buys it. I shall let it go at that, though I could make ten times as much if I held on.

I shall take it up to the Secretary of the Navy in a week or two; and if he seems to be a civil deserving sort of person I shall do business with him. It’s not every day, Munro, that a man comes into his office with the Atlantic under one arm and the Pacific under the other. Eh, what?”

I knew it would make him savage, but I lay back in my chair and laughed until I was tired. His wife looked at me reproachfully; but he, after a moment of blackness, burst out laughing also, stamping up and down the room and waving his arms.

“Of course it seems absurd to you,” he cried. “Well, I daresay it would to me if any other fellow had worked it out. But you may take my word for it that it’s all right. Hetty here will answer for it. Won’t you, Hetty?”

“It’s splendid, my dear.”

“Now I’ll show you, Munro; what an unbelieving Jew you are, trying to look interested, and giggling at the back of your throat! In the first place, I have discovered a method—which I won’t tell you—of increasing the attractive power of a magnet a hundred-fold. Have you grasped that?”

“Yes.”

“Very good. You are also aware, I presume, that modern projectiles are either made of or tipped with steel. It may possibly have come to your ears that magnets attract steel. Permit me now to show you a small experiment.” He bent over his apparatus, and I suddenly heard the snapping of electricity. “This,”