第37章

"I assure you for the moment I was staggered,"said Dad,rounding off his story."I am aware that my nose has added to the gaiety of nations,but it was the first time that it had been reckoned as a creature distinct from myself with an individuality of its own."Dad Grimes was a man of fifty,wearing a frock coat that showed a faint green where the light fell on the shoulders,and a tall silk hat that had grown old with the wearer.But for his nose he might have been an undertaker.It was an impossible nose,the shape and size of a potato,and the colour of pickled cabbage--the nose for a clown in the Carnival of Venice.Its marvellous shape was none of Dad's choosing,but the colour was his own,laid on by years of patient drinking as a man colours a favourite pipe.Years ago,when he was a bank manager,his heart had bled at the sight of this ungainly protuberance;but since his downfall,he had led the chorus of laughter that his nose excited,with a degraded pride in his physical defect.

It was Dicky Freeman's turn to shout,and he began another story as Dad sucked the dregs of beer off his moustache.Dad recognized the opening sentence.It was one of the interminable stories out of the Decameron of the bar-room,realistic and obscene,that circulate among drinkers.Dad knew it by heart.He looked at his glass,and remembered that it was his fourth drink.Instantly he thought of the Duchess.With his usual formula "'Scuse me;I'm a married man,y'know,"he hurried out of the bar in search of his little present.

It was nine o'clock,and the Duchess would be waiting for him with his tea since six.And always when he stopped at the "Angel"on his way home,he tried to soften her icy looks with a little present.Sometimes it was a bunch of grapes that he crushed to a pulp by rolling on them;sometimes a dozen apples that he spilt out of the bag,and recovered from the gutter with lurching steps.But tonight he happened to stop in front of the fish shop,and a lobster caught his eye.The beer had quickened the poetry in his soul,and the sight of this fortified inhabitant of the deep pleased him like a gorgeous sunset.He shuffled back to the Angel with the lobster under his arm,wrapped in a piece of paper.

One more drink and he would go home.He put the lobster carefully at his elbow and called for drinks.But Dicky was busy with a new trick with a box of matches,and Dad,who was a recognized expert in the idle devices of bar-room loafers--picking up glasses and bottles with a finger and thumb,opening a footrule with successive jerks from the wrist,drinking beer out of a spoon--forgot the lapse of time with the new toy.

Punctually on the stroke of eleven the swinging doors of the Angel were closed and the huge street lamps were extinguished.Dad's eye was glassy,but he remembered the lobster.

"Whersh my lil'present?"he wailed."Mush 'ave lil'present for the Duchess,y'know.'Ow could I g'ome,d'ye think?"He made so much noise that the landlord came to see what was the matter,and then the barman pointed to where he had left the lobster on the counter.He tucked it under his arm and lurched into the street.Now,Dad could run when he couldn't walk.He swayed a little,then suddenly broke into a run whose speed kept him from falling and preserved his balance like a spinning top.

The Duchess,seen through a haze,seemed unusually stern tonight;but with beery pride he produced his little present,the mail-clad delicacy,the armoured crustacean.But Dicky Freeman,offended by Dad's sudden departure in the middle of the story,had taken a mean revenge with the aid of the barman,and,as Dad unfastened the wrapping,there appeared,not the shellfish in its vermilion armour,but something smooth and black--an empty beer-bottle!Dad stared and blinked.A look at the Duchess revealed a face like the Ten Commandments.The situation was too abject for words;he grinned vacantly and licked his lips.

The Grimes family lived in the third house in the terrace,counting from the lamp-post at the corner of Buckland Street,where,running parallel to Cardigan Street,it tumbles over the hill and is lost to sight on its way to Botany Road.It was a long,ugly row of two-storey houses,the model lodging-houses of the crowded suburbs,so much alike that Dad had forced his way,in a state of intoxication,into every house in the terrace at one time or another,under the impression that he lived there.

Ten years ago the Grimes family had come to live in Waterloo,when the Bank of New Guinea had finally dispensed with Dad's services as manager at Billabong.His wife had picked on this obscure suburb of working men to hide her shame,and Dad who could make himself at home on an ant-hill,had cheerfully acquiesced.He had started in business as a house-agent,and the family of three lived from hand to mouth on the profits that escaped the publican.Not that Dad was idle.He was for ever busy;but it was the busyness of a fly.He would call for the rent,and spend half the morning fixing a tap for Mrs Brown,instead of calling in the plumber;he would make a special journey to the other end of Sydney for Mrs Smith,to prove that he had a nose for bargains.

Mrs Grimes forgot with the greatest ease that her neighbours were made of the same clay as herself,but she never forgot that she had married a bank manager,and she never forgave Dad for lowering her pride to the dust.

True,she was only the governess at Nullah Nullah station when Dad married her,but her cold aristocratic features had given her the pick of the neighbouring stations,and Dad was reckoned a lucky man when he carried her off.It was her fine,aquiline features and a royal condescension in manner that had won her the title of "Duchess"in this suburb of workmen.