Читать книгу Happy Stories, Just to Laugh at - Стивен Ликок - Страница 8

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(“Behold, a cheerful heart can deny adversity and cast out fear.”—St. Paul, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Field Marshal Goebbels.)

... So when the cheque was made out, the other boys at the club said it was up to me to take it round to Jones. “Other boys” sounds funny, doesn’t it? But you can’t exactly write “other old men.” You see, I’d known Jones about the longest, indeed ever since he and I were at school at the old Upper Canada on King St. Some of them had only known him about twenty years. So they said I’d have to take the cheque and give it either to Jones or to Bess.

I went round right away that same evening. It wasn’t yet late.

Jones lives in an enchanted castle, but you wouldn’t know it was enchanted if you didn’t know Jones and the strange light that burns in him. You’d think the house just one of those old left-behind houses that stand in the old, left-behind streets of Toronto, with ragged palings and half-withered trees.

When I reached it in the half-darkness, there were Jones and Bess at the paling’s gate, evidently just coming home. “Come on in,” said Jones, cheerily; who wouldn’t be proud to say come on in to a house like that ...

Inside, it was the biggest, darkest, gloomiest house you ever saw—with no lights in it, till Jones took us up to the big “study” on the first floor and lit a lamp. He’s burning coal oil this winter; it’s a softer light, it appears, less trying to the eyes. And now that there are no maids in the house you need so few lights that Jones has cut the electricity clean out—he has, or someone has, anyway.

The “study” is just one of the rooms with enchanted names like that; beside it is “father’s library” with more dust and fewer books than any I ever saw. And upstairs there is “mother’s bedroom” and “Aunt Annie’s room,” though they’re both dead these thirty years. Similarly on the ground floor there is still the “butler’s pantry,” with fifty niches for fifty bottles that are not there, nor any butler since the time when “father” gave a dinner to the prime minister, while Jones and I were still at Upper Canada. Jones said the prime minister shook hands with him and said some Latin. So!—a house like that—eh, what? With beautiful palings and lovely trees and a butler and a prime minister, and a library full of law books, who wouldn’t be proud of it? No wonder it was enchanted. So it is for Bess, too—or at least, because of Jones and the others.

As a matter of fact the old room looked pretty cheery and comfortable when Jones got a good fire going in the grate. It seems he’s burning some of the old law books from the cupboard under the library shelves. They’re better than soft coal, it seems, less dust and steadier heat. No coal has come to the house, in fact, since it stopped coming. The books are not the ones father valued. He’s just burning the Appendix to the Journals of the Legislative Assembly of Canada. Father always meant to burn those anyway and Jones only kept them because he was sure they must be darned good reading if a feller ever got down to them. It seems that he never got down to them—or round to them—I forget which way you get at Journals. Anyway they burn well. Jones is still only at the year 1857 and they go clear to Confederation. How’s that, eh? That’ll last clean to April. And anyway “grandfather” got them all for nothing. Did Jones ever tell you (oh, yes, he must have) how his grandfather moved the second reading of the Pickerel Fisheries Bill and what Sir John A. said?

... Anyway it was pretty comfortable in front of the fire and when Jones said, “I’m sorry I haven’t a drop of—,” why, there! I had a whole flask of it that one of the boys had shoved into my pocket at the club for Jones. As to soda ... it transpired at once that in “father’s” time no one drank it; they said it spoiled good liquor ... Well, here’s luck, eh?

So, to begin talk, I asked Jones where they had been.

“Over at the University at a lecture,” said Jones. “Wonderful stuff! Why weren’t you there?”

“I didn’t know there was one. Many people there?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, “quite a good crowd. It’s queer, you know, people don’t seem to know about all these lectures over at the college ... wonderful stuff, too ... and free, mind you, nothing to pay to hear lectures that are mighty well worth it, and more. What was that one about that we were at last week, Bess?”

“Palaeontology,” Bess said, looking up from her knitting in the lamplight—like that, just “palaeontology.” Bess never wastes words. She lets Jones talk.

“Oh, yes, palaeontology; it means the science of fish; he showed one in a rock. And, do you know, there were only eleven people there, counting Bess; she wasn’t exactly there, but she came right to the door and then, while I was in, she went over to Mrs. McGinnis’s—the professor’s wife. It’s like that over there; it’s funny; often quite a good crowd almost up to the door, and then a lot break away.”

“And what about tonight?” I asked. “Oh, tonight was fine, let me see—counting Bess—she was at the Peterson’s—there were twenty-six. Of course it was a subject that would draw, it was on Taxation, the Shifting of Taxation. It was wonderful stuff, a marvellous lecturer.”

“A good delivery?” I asked.

“Fine,” Jones said, “except his voice—but what I mean is, it was clear over my head, great stuff—in fact I couldn’t follow it at all, except some stuff he put on the blackboard. He took a tax and turned it into a line, a curve—and you could watch it get closer and closer to a line and yet never touch it.”

“Is that what shifted the tax?”

“I didn’t quite catch on to the shifting,” Jones said. “It seems, or at least the professor said, that all taxes keep shifting on to the consumer—they heap right up on him till he gets a marginal—now, what did he call it?—oh, yes, a marginal satisfaction, and stops consuming altogether. Wait till I get some more water.”

Jones took the jug and started off down stairs with it, stumbling and half stubbing his toe on the worn carpet as he moved off. Everything is worn and everything is wearing out in the Jones’s enchanted castle. You see, as Jones says, why bother to put things in shape in the house till the two boys come home. While they’re over there, things can stay as they are. Especially as Jones has got the time of their return worked out with great certainty. Eddie, being in the Air, one month after war ends—they’ll come first—and John, who is in the artillery, say, a month later. That will give at least a month to have the whole place done over.

So while Jones was down stairs I asked, “Are the taxes paid, Bessie?”

She shook her head.

“Any coal?”

“Another week, anyway.”

“There!” said Jones, “fill it up, and let me stir that fire and get another appendix. Here we are, 1859, Vol. I.”

I thought that the subject of taxes might give me a start towards the cheque.

“Talking of taxes,” I said with an attempt at jocularity, “I suppose you’re like the rest of us, right up against it?”

“Oh, no,” Jones said, “I’m fine! Right up to date. You see on this house I’ve always paid, if you understand, just once a year, that is last year for the year before and pay it the next year; this year, I’ve slipped back a year, but that’s only three. I had a notice about it, but all very nice, you know, just something formal about selling the house, etc. But all very nice.”

“And the income tax?”

“Ah, that’s different. I was getting short there, quite a bit, in fact, well, several years, but this new Ruml plan will clean all that up. Did I tell you?” Jones continued. “I’ve sent in a plan myself to Ottawa suggesting methods of throwing back taxes forward ... in fact, that is what I wanted this shifting stuff for ...”

“What have they done about it?” I inquired.

“Fine,” Jones said. “Answered straight back, no delay ... Referred to File XXOO46 in case I wanted to write further ... think of the trouble they take, assigning me a personal number like that. And more than that—it seems that the department are going to give my plan every consideration; they said so; they shouldn’t really do so much as that. However, if it goes through, it shifts my income tax clear away even without the new Ruml plan; so between the two, I’m in easy street.”

“How about your own personal finance?” I said, still feeling for an opening.

“Don’t owe a cent ...”

“I thought you had a mortgage?” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he answered, “there’s the mortgage. You see, a house like this, as they all told me, carries a fine mortgage—they say, nearly as much as the place is worth. But I never count the mortgage as it is a fixed item. I meant that we have no debts.”

“We owe the bills ...” Bess said, still knitting.

“Ah, the bills,” Jones answered. “I don’t mean bills. I was talking of debts. The bills—”

“The grocer—” said Bess—“two years.”

“You’d hardly count the grocer’s account as a bill,” said Jones. “Of course, I am not counting things like the grocer and the coal and that; and I must say they’ve all been awfully decent about it. Why, the coal man the other day, the head man, came right up himself to ask if there was anything I could suggest, and when I said I couldn’t he said he couldn’t ... Then of course some of these bills are not new ones at all—they’re old bills.”

“The doctor’s account,” said Bess, “goes back to when the boys were at school.”

“Exactly,” said Jones. “You’d hardly count that, especially with the doctor an old friend. Just now, of course, things are a little muddled, I’m really just waiting till, well, till the boys are back. Everything will all come right then; won’t it, Bess?”

“Everything,” Bess said, and went on knitting.

“As a matter of fact,” Jones continued, “I got, or rather Bess did, a most comfortable little windfall a month ago—money paid out of the remains of her mother’s estate—you’d forgotten all about it, eh, Bess? But perhaps, you heard of it?”

“No,” I answered. Nor had I, or not since I gave the cheque to Bess at the back door a month ago.

On a pretext of Jones’s foot, I let Bess show me out. Down below at the door, I gave her the cheque.

“This,” I said, “is from the estate.”

She may even have believed me; after all, enchantment is enchantment.