Читать книгу The Road - Warwick Deeping - Страница 16

Table of Contents

Mr. Prodgers parked the red van in a corner of Lignor market-place. Opposite him he had the white portico and stolid front of the “George Inn,” on his right flank a hardware stall, and on his left, a stall that sold Lignor Rock, though the sweetstuff was no more sacred to Lignor than it was to London.

Life was not growing any more easy either for Lignor or Mr. Samuel, for though Lignor continued to be a market town and an agricultural centre, it was becoming hybridized, and like much of provincial England living upon an exchange of washing. It was suffering from the usual eruption of bungalows and small villas: “Baroda”—“Two Oaks”—“Heather Croft”—“My Corner,” the names have a universality. At every exit to the town, petrol pumps stood like red sentinels. Mr. Tanrock’s new garage was all reinforced concrete and plate glass, with a central and welcoming notice—“Drive right in.” The old red brick of Lignor had become a core about which much highly-coloured pulp had accumulated. Everybody said that the shacks and hutments on the Downs road were a disgrace, but nobody did anything about it. Nor could anything be done with the torrent of traffic that hooted and roared through Lignor on Sundays. Attempts were being made to short-circuit the nuisance.

In the Abbey church—Canon Woolgarth, who was original and a man of some passion—had opened a sermon with the words:

“The Lord’s Day—Lout’s Day, Litter Day, detonations, hootings, smells!”

If Lignor was suffering the pangs of progress, so was Mr. Prodgers. The police were growing more autocratic and less sweet-tempered. The public, while continuing credulous in its attitude towards the Press and to the proprietary preparations advertised therein, found him and his pills less persuasive and plausible. He had to contend with new drifts, Mothers’ Welfare Centres, cash-chemists, a young generation that knew everything, or thought it did. He had modernized his show and his propaganda. Electro-magnetic! Give “Little Mary” a shock. His van flashed lights and emitted cracklings, but business was not quite what it had been.

Mr. Prodgers was a laughing philosopher, and a student of faces, and when darkness descended and lights were lit, the red van became more truly a temple of magic. Also, the other hucksters had had their day, and were packing up, leaving a wilderness of wastepaper, straw, and broken boxes to be dealt with by the Lignor sanitary squad. The public, having completed its business, was in a mood to loiter, listen and be amused, and Mr. Prodgers knew that it is fatal to bore your public.

“Ladies and gentlemen, electricity is life.”

The side of the van let down, forming a platform upon which Mr. Prodgers strutted up and down nicely “smokered” as to the upper man. He wore his top hat at an angle, but the lower part of him lapsed into grey flannel trousers. In one hand he held a silver megaphone, in the other a white wand.

“My pills, ladies and gentlemen, are subjected to a process which I claim to be one of the epoch making discoveries of the century. Drugs! Dead stuff. Some hotch-potch in a bottle. But electrify your drug, ladies and gentlemen, and the drug is a different article. That’s my discovery. Observe!”

Then, with jocund emphasis and some back-chat, he would demonstrate the process, a complex of wires and lights and long glass tubes in which were wads of coloured wool. He would pour a handful of pills into one of the tubes, turn on the current, and cause cracklings and flashings.

“That’s what you get inside you. No, not quite such a thunderstorm. No forked lightning. My pills are powerful persuaders—but they are gentlemen, sirs, gentlemen.”

Mr. Prodgers studied faces. It was necessary. He had to appraise his public, to distinguish the possible patron from the incipient heckler. In every society there exists the Marxian mind, the fanatical, interfering egoist who cannot let life have it, either its pill or its joke. Mr. Prodgers kept a sharp look out for such political faces. He had a particular method of getting back at such people.

“I’ll present you with a free box of my pills, sir, but if the test is to be positive—I must ask you to take a pill in public, and sit down for half an hour in this chair.”

Yes, he had had one or two prodigious triumphs, in which the subsequent and sudden disappearance of the experimenter had electrified the crowd. An emetic pill kept for phenomenal occasions!

On this Thursday night Mr. Prodgers saw a face. It was a little hairy face with twinkling eyes under an immense bowler hat. The twinkling eyes watched him intently, and Mr. Prodgers was on the alert.

“Rheumatism, dyspepsia, constipation——”

The little man with the hat edged nearer and nearer. He was none other than Mr. John Osgood, Bonthorn’s gnome. He waited. He had an air of confidential slyness.

Mr. Prodgers tackled him.

“I think you are interested, sir.”

Yes, Mr. Osgood was interested. He stood in close to the stage, and putting a curved hand to his mouth, whispered.

“Did you say constipation?”

Mr. Prodgers had said so.

“Most certainly.”

“My old woman, she grouts and grouts. I’d like to give she a shock.”

Mr. Prodgers’s spectacles were solemn.

“You mean——?”

“If she must talk about some’at, I’d like she to have some’at to talk about.”

“I have a special pill. If your good lady takes one a night, I can guarantee——”

“How much?”

“One and threepence the box. Twenty-four pills to a box.”

“I’ll have ’un. One—you said?”

“Yes, not more than one.”

Mr. Osgood went home with his box, but being a gnome with sundry grievances he was not quite candid with his wife. He told her to take three pills. She should have some’at actual to grout about.

But that was not the Professor’s adventure. He had one of his own on that Thursday night. Someone threw a tomato at him from the dark passage leading to the “George’s” side entrance. Whose was the malignant or mischievous hand? Mr. Prodgers never knew, but the shot was a good one, and the fruit splashed upon his shirt-front.

But he had a quick and jocund temper.

“Thank you, sir, thank you. Will anyone throw a bunch of flowers. True blue’s my colour.”

Yet, the incident depressed him. Shirt-fronts were precious, and he was his own laundryman. Definitely he had felt pilloried, insulted. Some boy, possibly? But he suspected the “George,” and even the local chemist, for no chemists loved him. Professional jealousy!

At the end of the evening when he put the red van away in the “Chequers” yard, and went into the private bar to have a drink an old acquaintance hailed him. Mr. Prodgers had put his van up at the “Chequers” for the best part of twenty years, though it could not be said that he put himself up there. He slept and mealed in his van.

“Hallo, Sam, on the old round. Have one with me?”

The professor was thirsty after three hours of oratory.

“Thanks. I could do with a drink.”

“Hallo! Who’s blooded your shirt?”

“Someone threw a tomato.”

“It hit you?”

“It—sure—did.”

There was laughter, and Mr. Prodgers joined in it. If you live on the crowd you should be careful to laugh with it.

“Fact is, Prof, you’ve missed the boat. You ought to be going round in that old van of yours spouting Bolshie stuff. It’s the right colour.”

“So was the tomato, my dear sir. I’m thinking of painting my van blue. Any of you gentlemen got a match?”

And in return for the drink and their sympathy he told them the tale of old Osgood who wanted his dear woman to experience reality so that she might have something evidential to talk about. Sam Prodgers could tell a tale very well, and when the room had had its laugh, he threw in his pinch of philosophy.

“Something accomplished, something done, gentlemen. What the world wants is results. You could go and spend fifty guineas in Harley Street and get nothing but a gilt-edged diagnosis. I wouldn’t mind betting that I’ve had as good results. And why? Because I can put a joke inside a pill. Get ’em laughing, get ’em laughing.”

He drank.

“But—mind you—there must be some stuff behind the laugh. My pills aren’t hocus-pocus. No, sir. I’d back them even against Carter’s and Beecham’s for the Derby—any day.”