Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/38

 He began to know the names and the faces and the callings of the men who drifted into it. There was Romer—the managing clerk of Spens and Waterlove, a polite person with restless brown eyes and an unpleasant tongue. He had an amazing collection of stories. Biles, who owned the big butcher's shop in High Street, would slip in with his red, greasy and furtive face, and would spill silly compliments from his coarse lips. Sadler the "vet" went away each night stiffly drunk, moving like a figure on wires, his eyes fierce in his thin and debauched face. But there were dozens of them, farmers, tradesmen, commercial travellers, young bloods, all slinking in like dogs, drinking, and lounging and lusting.

"The fools!"

Sorrell called them fools, and his scorn of them was part of his own pain. He had to mark for some of them in the billiard room, to listen to their dirty stories, to fetch them drinks. It was their amusement, and his torture, for often he was drooping with fatigue and boredom, and yearning for the fools to go to bed. And he would hear the laughter in the "Cubby Hole," and the splurgings of these tradesmen who made love like bullocks.

"Floe—on thou shining river."

That was Medlum's jest, Medlum who kept the bookshop and sold prayer-books and Bibles and pretty-pretty art tourist guides, and who had a wife and seven children. He was a sandy man who looked as though he had been dipped in a bleaching vat, all save his mouth which was thin and red and lascivious.

They spent much money.

They would send poor old Palfrey up to bed, bemused, shuffling in his slippers, grabbing at the handrail. Often Sorrell would have to help John Palfrey up the stairs, listening to his pantings and to his fuddled confidences.

"She don't care—not a damn. I've got water in me. I'm like a grape, Steve. What did the doctor call it? Ass-i-tis. Wish I were dead."

He would pause at the top of the stairs, panting, and staring solemnly at Sorrell.

"You mark my words. A coffin—in six months, I'm asking you. Who cares?"

He would weep.