Читать книгу Old Pybus - Warwick Deeping - Страница 10

Table of Contents

Old John Pybus’s father—Peter Paul Pybus—whom someone had nicknamed the “Cato of Bookseller’s Row”—had—as a counterblast against his own parents’ partiality for apostolic names—christened his own son John Julian Apostasius. For Peter Paul had gone beyond mere nonconformity. He had been a Bradlaugh man in the days when such hardihood might seriously damage a man’s pocket; and in associating his son with the Emperor Julian—called the Apostate—he had defied both his wife and society. Peter Paul had relented so far as to allow the “John,” for as Mrs. Mary had asserted “How could a boy go to a Christian school labelled Julian—Apostasius!” Peter Paul had agreed that it would not be fair to the child, and that a good, stout simple name should be added as a sort of handle.

In those days, before the coming of Kingsway, and the “Waldorf” and Bush House, Peter Paul Pybus had had a shop in Bookseller’s Row. Boys from the city schools had come to Mr. Pybus for second-hand copies of Ovid and Thucydides, but they had been obliged to go elsewhere for their cribs, for Mr. Pybus had held strong views upon education and had refused to pander to the lazy. A little, brown, snuffy shop in the very narrow part of the street, it had had a certain reputation with collectors of first editions. The reputation of the shop had been the reputation of Peter Paul Pybus. Packed full of literary gossip, obtained from heaven knows where, he had taken an interest in all the literary scandals and sensations of two generations. He could have told you just how and why Buchanan attacked Rossetti, and how Tennyson liked to administer rhythmical smacks to a pretty and feminine shoulder when declaiming his own verse. Mr. Peter Paul would never allow Tennyson his poetry. “Suburban stuff, sir. Give me Browning.”

One of John Julian’s early recollections was of a certain shop that was opened in the Row directly opposite the book-shop of Peter Paul. John was fifteen at the time, and the shop had puzzled him. It offered you French novels of a sort, and queer little boxes of artificial sweets. It was a surreptitious shop, and people peered into it surreptitiously. It attracted the school-boys who came to buy school-books. John Julian would sometimes catch two or three of them sniggering outside it, and waiting for some other boy who had sneaked in to buy photographs.

John remembered asking his father about that shop, and his father’s frozen face, and the rasp of his voice.

“There isn’t any such shop, sir——”

“But—there is. Haven’t you been across——?”

Peter Paul had gripped his son by both shoulders.

“Dog’s vomit—my lad. Step over it. I say there is no such shop.”

And for Mr. Peter Paul Pybus there was not. He had a habit of mind that was Cromwellian, and he passed on a part of it to his son.

The elder Pybus and his wife died somewhere in the ’eighties, and John Julian inherited the business, and took to himself a wife. And he, too, was something of an oddity. He stood five feet three, and he married a woman of five feet eleven. It was said in jest by their intimates that John Pybus had to fetch a step-ladder out of the shop when he wanted to kiss his wife. But her height was her only distinction, and it is more than probable that John Julian was disappointed in his marriage. Poor Edith Pybus was both weak and argumentative, and she argued at the wrong moments. She set out to spoil the two boys whom John Julian had given her, and over the upbringing of these two boys there were many clashings. Not for nothing had John the head of a Roman emperor. And he was a Victorian. He had a sort of moral earnestness, an extraordinary sense of honour and of public duty, and like his father he was absolutely fearless. The mother, sentimental and flabby, had set herself with the boys against the father. She gave them sweets after their canings. She tried to smuggle their offences out of sight.

“Boys will be boys, John.”

Whereas John Julian believed that most boys—his own included—were little savages and howling egoists, and that no man is made without good and appropriate lickings. Nor should this be set down to hardness of heart. He tried to be more wisely kind to his two boys than was their foolish, conspiring, jealous mother.

He sent the two youngsters to a goodish school, but he was never on such terms with them as he had been with his own father. They were big youths; they appeared to take after their mother; at the ages of sixteen and fourteen they were able to look down upon their little Roman-headed father. During those earlier years, when he had felt more the mate of his wife, John Julian had allowed her to choose the babies’ names. Hence Probyn and Conrad.

John Pybus had trouble with them from the time of their going to school, and as they grew taller and more full of the arrogance of the awkward age, the trouble increased. They had inherited the concentrated, lower-middle-class snobbery of their mother; they had a loudness; they quarrelled; they purloined each others’ ties and collars. Conrad was a bully. Both of them were perfectly familiar with the secrets of the shop across the way. In fact, at the age of seventeen Probyn was the possessor of a collection of indecent photographs which had to be hidden away under a loose board in his bedroom.

So that when the wife died, and the two young bounders were put out into the world, Probyn with a wholesale woollen firm, Conrad as a clerk in a shipping office, John Julian felt a little weary of them, and of the narrowness of the Row. In fact, it is probable that it was the pulling down of the Row that sent him into the country. He sold the London business, and took over a shop in the Dorsetshire town of Winterbourne. For many years he sold books to the Dorset folk, but the market was limited, and if he managed to keep himself and his housekeeper, he did little more. He wrote regularly to his sons, and saw them occasionally. More than once they borrowed money from him—or rather—he gave it, and would not hear of its return. Probyn married the daughter of a speculative builder who was scattering villas about the Surrey suburbs. They had one son, Lancelot, prophetically shortened by his mother to “Lance.” Conrad was unmarried. He liked his adventures, but he liked them cheap. A fellow could be a very devil among the shop-girls on Yarmouth beach, and if you were careful—Conrad was careful.