Carol-Lynn Waugh - The Twelve Crimes of Christmas

“He could scarcely effect an entrance more noisily,” said Pons, reflectively. “Perhaps he is only observing the Christmas season and wishes to favor you with its compliments.”

“Humbug!” said Snawley in a loud voice, and with such a grimace that it seemed to me he could not have made it more effectively had he practiced it in front of a mirror.

“Is he young?”

“If any young fellow had a voice so cracked, I’d send him to a doctor.” He shook his head vigorously. “He can’t be less than middle-aged. No, sir. Not with a voice like that. He could sour the apples in a barrel with such a voice.”

“How often does he come?”

“Why, sir, it is just about every night. I am plagued by his voice, by his very presence, and now he has taken to adding Christmas songs to his small repertoire, it is all the more trying. But chiefly I am plagued-I will confess it-by my curiosity about the reason for this attention he bestows upon me. I sent Pip-Pip is my clerk, retired, now, like myself, with his wife dead and his children all out in the world, even the youngest, who finally recovered his health-I sent Pip, I say, out to tell him to be off, and he but laughed at him, and gave him a walnut or two for himself, and sent one along for me! The impudence of the fellow!” His chin whiskers literally trembled with his indignation.

Pons had folded his arms across his chest, clasping his elbows with his lean fingers, holding in his mirth, which danced around his mouth and in his eyes. “But,” he said, visibly controlling himself, “if you are a poor man, you can scarcely be in possession of valuables someone else might covet.”

Plainly now our client was torn between the desire to maintain the face he had put upon himself, and to lift a little of it for us to see him a trifle more clearly; for he sat in dour silence.

“Unless,” pursued Pons, “you have valuables of a more intangible nature. I suspect you are a collector.”

Our visitor started violently. “Why do you say so?”

“I submit that coat you are wearing cannot be newer than 1890, the waistcoat likewise. Your cane is gold-headed; I have not seen such a cane about since 1910. Heavy, too. I suspect it is loaded. And what you have left outside is a period piece-obviously your own, since you drove it yourself. No one who had worn your clothing steadily since it was made could present it still in such good condition.”

“You are as sharp as they say you are,” said our client grudgingly. “It’s true I’m a collector.”

“Of books,” said Pons.

“Books and such,” assented Snawley. “Though how you can tell it I don’t pretend to know.”

“The smell of ink and paper make a special kind of mustiness, Mr. Snawley. You carry it. And, I take it, you are particularly fond of Dickens.”

Snawley’s jaw dropped; his mouth hung momentarily agape. “You amaze me,” he said.

“Dr. Parker charges me with amazing him for the past year and a half, since he took up residence here,” said Pons. “It will do you no harm. It has done him none.”

“How, Mr. Pons, do you make out Dickens?”

“Those street songs you know so well are those of Dickens’s day. Since you made a point of saying you should know them, it is certainly not far wide of the mark to suggest that you are a Dickensian.”

A wintry smile briefly touched our client’s lips, but he suppressed it quickly. “I see I have made no mistake in coming to you. It is really the obligation of the police, but they are forever about getting out of their obligations. It is the way of the new world, I fear. But I had heard of you, and I turned it over in mind several days, and I concluded that it would be less dear to call on you than to ask you to call on me. So I came forthwith.”

“Nevertheless,” said Pons, his eyes twinkling, “I fancy we shall have to have a look at that fellow who, you say, is making such a nuisance of himself.”

Our client made a rapid calculation, as was evident by the concentration in his face. “Then you had better come back with me now,” he said, “for if you come at any other time, the price of the conveyance will surely be added to the bill.”

“That is surely agreeable with me,” said Pons. “If it will do for Parker.”

Snawley bridled with apprehension. “Does he come, too?”

“Indeed, he does.”

“Will he be added to the fee?”

“No, Mr. Snawley.”

“Well, then, I will just go below and wait for you to come down,” said our client, coming to his feet and seizing his hat from the mantel, where I had put it next to Pons’s unanswered letters, unfolded and affixed to the mantel by a dagger, a souvenir of one of his adventures.

Our client had hardly taken himself off before Pons’s laughter burst forth.

When he relieved himself, he turned to me. “What do you make of that fellow, Parker?”

“I have never seen the like,” I replied. “Parsimonious, suspicious, and, I suspect, not nearly as poor as he would have us believe.”

“Capital! Capital! It is all too human for the rich to affect poverty and the poor to affect wealth. We may take it that Mr. Snawley is not poor. If he has a corner house and room enough for someone to walk from one end of the property, around the corner, to the other, we may assume that Mr. Snawley’s ‘bit of land,’ as he puts it, is appreciably more than what the average individual would take for a ‘bit.’ ”

He was getting into his greatcoat as he spoke, and I got into mine. As I reached for my bowler, he clapped his deerstalker to his head, and we were off down the stairs to where our equipage waited at the curb.

Snawley ushered me into the cab.

Behind me, Pons paused briefly to ask, “How long does this fellow stay on his beat?”

“Two, three hours a night. Rain, fog, or shine. And now, with Christmas almost upon us, he has brought along some bells to ring. It is maddening, sir, maddening,” said our client explosively.

Pons got in, Snawley closed the door and mounted to the box, and we were off toward Edgware Road, and from there to Lambeth and Brixton and Dulwich, seeing always before us, from every clear vantage point, the dome of the Crystal Palace, and at every hand the color and gayety of the season. Yellow light streamed from the shops into the falling snow, tinsel and glass globes, aglow with red and green and other colors shone bright, decorations framed the shop windows, holly and mistletoe hung in sprays and bunches here and there. Coster’s barrows offered fruit and vegetables, Christmas trees, fish and meat, books, cheap china, carpets. Street sellers stood here and there with trays hung from their necks, shouting their wares-Christmas novelties, balloons, tricks, bonbons, comic-papers, and praising the virtues of Old Moore’s Almanack. At the poultry shops turkeys, geese, and game hung to entice the late shoppers, for it was the day before Christmas Eve, only a trifle more than two years after the ending of the great conflict, and all London celebrated its freedom from the austerities of wartime. The dancing snowflakes reflected the colors of the shops-sometimes red, sometimes yellow or pink or blue or even pale green-and made great halos around the streetlamps.

Snawley avoided crowded thoroughfares as much as possible, and drove with considerable skill; but wherever we went, people turned on the street to look at the hansom cab as it went by-whether they were children or strollers, policemen on their rounds or shoppers with fowl or puddings in their baskets-startled at sight of this apparition from the past.

Our destination proved to be Upper Norwood.

Ebenezer Snawley’s home was an asymmetric Jacobean pile, dominated by a small tower, and with Elizabethan bay windows that faced the street. It rose in the midst of a small park that occupied the corner of a block and spread over a considerable portion of that block. A dim glow shone through the sidelights at the door; there was no other light inside. The entire neighborhood had an air of decayed gentility, but the falling snow and the gathering darkness sufficiently diminished the glow of the street-lamp so that it was not until we had descended from the cab, which had driven in along one side of the property, bound for a small coach house at the rear corner-directly opposite the street corner-and walked to the door of the house that it became evident how much the house, too, had decayed for want of adequate care, though it was of mid-Victorian origin, and not, therefore, an ancient building-little more than half a century old.