David Blaize and the Blue Door

‘So it’s only the same sovereigns all over again,’ thought David, ‘but there must be a lot of them. No wonder they’re cheap.’

He walked up to where they were standing.

‘Please, can you let me have four penny-worth of sovereigns,’ he said.

The Mint-man blew his nose before he answered, and some thirty or forty sovereigns rattled out of his handkerchief. ‘Do you want them new-laid or only for cooking?’ he asked.

David had no intention of cooking them, so he said:

‘New-laid, please.’

The Mint-man picked off one that was coming out of his right elbow, another from his tie, another from his bottom waistcoat button, and the fourth from his knee, and gave them to David.

‘It’ll never do if other people get to know about it,’ he said. ‘We shall be having all the happy families in, though I don’t suppose they’ve got much money. Have another notice put up at once.’

The manager took an enormous quill pen from behind the counter. It reached right up to the ceiling of the room, and he had to hold it in both hands. Up the side of it was printed, ‘Rod, pole or perch.’

‘What shall I say?’ he asked.

‘You may say whatever you like,’ said the Mint-man, ‘but you must write whatever I like. Now begin’ —

‘Sovereigns are five pounds two ounces each to-day, but they’ll be dearer to-morrow.’

‘Then will you please give me five pounds for each of my sovereigns?’ asked the greedy David. ‘Never mind about the ounces.’

The Mint-man and manager whispered together for a little while, and David could hear fragments of their talk like ‘financial stringency,’ ‘tight tendency,’ ‘collapse of credit,’ which meant nothing to him. All the time the porter was shovelling sovereigns down the back of the Mint-man’s neck.

‘The only thing to be done,’ he said, ‘is to write another notice. Write “The Bank has suspended payment altogether. The deposits are therefore forfeited by square root, rule of three, and compound interest.” What do you make of that?’ he asked David triumphantly.

David knew that compound interest and square root came a long way on in the arithmetic book, and that he couldn’t be properly expected to make anything of it. Evidently they were not going to pay him five sovereigns for each of his, but he had done pretty well already, with his four sovereigns instead of four pence.

‘I don’t make anything of it yet,’ he said, ‘because I haven’t got as far.’

‘When I was your age,’ said the manager severely, ‘I’d got so far past it that it was quite out of sight.’

The Mint-man nudged him, and said behind his hand:

‘Never irritate the young. Keep them pleased and simmering.’

He turned to David with a smile, and patted him on the head. Two cold sovereigns went down the front of David’s jersey.

‘We have read your references,’ he said, ‘and find them quite satisfactory. You are therefore appointed honorary errand-boy, and your duties begin immediately. So go straight across to the shop where they repair uncles and aunts, and see if there’s a golden uncle being repaired. If there is, tell him that his nephew – that’s you – wants him to come out to tea – that’s here – and that the motor will be round immediately – and that’s where.’

David felt that he didn’t want to be errand-boy to the bank at all, but somehow he seemed to remember having sent in references. What was even more convincing was that he found his sailor clothes had disappeared, and that he was dressed in a jacket that came close up to his neck, and was covered with brass buttons. He had black trousers, rather tight, and a peaked cap, round the rim of which was written: ‘David Blaize, Esquire. To be returned to the bank immediately. This side up.’

But after he had received his appointment as honorary errand-boy, nobody attended to David any more, for they were all most busily engaged. The manager wheeled in a tea-table, and began arranging tea-things and muffin-dishes on it, then when he had done that, brought in easy chairs, and a piano and all the things that you usually find in drawing-rooms, while the Mint-man made up a huge fire in the fire-place, and put a large saucepan as big as a bath upon it, into which he dropped the sovereigns that oozed out of him. Meantime, the porter had gone out carrying a ladder and a pot of paint, and when David went out too on his errand, he had already painted over the signboard outside the house, which said it was the bank, and had written on it:

‘This is the house of David Blaize, the nephew of Uncle Popacatapetl.’

‘So that’s the uncle who’s coming to tea with me,’ thought David. ‘I wonder if he knows who he is yet.’

The snow had already melted, so that he did not again consider whether he should go tobogganing. It had gone very quickly, but everything seemed to happen quickly here. It could hardly have been five minutes since he had gone into the bank with fourpence in his pocket, and here he was with four sovereigns instead, a complete suit of new clothes, an uncle, and a position as honorary errand-boy. He crossed the street, and entered the shop where boots and shoes used to be repaired, but where now they repaired uncles and aunts.

On the counter there lay a very odd-looking old gentleman, dressed in rags and tatters in about equal proportions. His hands and face were quite yellow, and wherever there was a tatter, or there wasn’t a rag, and he showed through, he was yellow there too. His boots were in very bad repair, and a great golden toe stuck out of one, and a golden heel out of the other: in fact, there could be no doubt at all that he was made of pure gold, and as he was being repaired, he was also either an aunt or an uncle. But though one of David’s aunts had a slight moustache, he had never yet seen an aunt with a long beard and whiskers, and so without doubt there was Uncle Popacatapetl.

The bootmaker and his wife were repairing him, which they did by driving nails into him, so as to tack down the rags over the tatters. If there was a very big tatter, which they could not cover with the rag, they nailed on anything else that was handy. In some places they had filled up the gaps with pieces of newspaper, match-boxes, and bits of leather and sealing-wax, and balls of wool, and apples and photographs. While this was going on, Uncle Popacatapetl kept up a stream of conversation, interspersed with laughing.

‘Anyhow it can’t hurt him much,’ said David to himself.

‘Delicious, delicious!’ said Uncle Popacatapetl. ‘Nail the toe of my boot a little more firmly on to the toe of me. Put a paper-knife there if you can’t cover up the hole. Now my gloves.’

He put on a pair of thick white woollen gloves that came up to his elbow.

‘Would you like them nailed on too, sir?’ asked the shoemaker.

‘By all means. Put a nail in each finger, and three on the wrist, and ninety-eight round my elbows. Did you gum the gloves inside, before I put them on?’

‘I glued them well,’ said the shoemaker’s wife.

‘That’ll glue then,’ said Uncle Popacatapetl. ‘I think when I’ve put my mask on the disguise will be complete. What fun it all is! To think of the Mint-man having traced me all the way here, only to find I’m not in the least like me any more. Or is it ever more?’

‘Never more, ever more, any more,’ said the shoemaker, with his mouth full of nails.

‘It’s every-more, I think,’ said Uncle Popacatapetl, ‘though it doesn’t matter. When I’m finished, and when you’re finished, they won’t think I am anything, still less an uncle. I don’t suppose they ever saw anything the least like me, so why,’ he added argumentatively, ’should they pitch upon uncle?’

They had none of them appeared to notice David at all as yet, and, as he was an errand-boy, he thought he had better proceed with his errand.

‘If you please,’ he said, ‘I think you’re my uncle, and I should like to have you come to tea with me. It’s quite a short way, in fact it’s only across the road, but the motor will be here in a minute, so that you can get in at one door and out at the other.’

Uncle Popacatapetl sat up so suddenly that David knew he must have a hinge in his back. He looked at David, but he couldn’t speak, because the last nail the shoemaker had driven into him had fixed his beard to his chest, which naturally prevented him moving his mouth. But he wrenched off the pair of scissors which had been nailed into his knee, and cut a piece of his beard off, so that he could talk again. He had turned quite pale in the face, which was the only part of him visible, just as if he had been made of silver.

‘Say it again,’ he said.

David said it again, upon which Uncle Popacatapetl jumped up and looked out of the window.

‘It’s a plot,’ he said. ‘That used to be the bank. Now it’s David Blaize. Has it been disguising itself too? Because if so, we’re as we were, and I’ve had all the trouble and hammering for nothing.’

He began to cry in a helpless golden sort of manner. The shoemaker had followed him to the window to repair an enormous tatter with very little rag on his shoulder, and was nailing bananas on to it to cover it up. But he was so much affected by Uncle Popacatapetl’s misery that he hit his fingers instead of the nail and began to cry too, sucking his injured finger and dropping nails out of his mouth. As for his wife, she gave one loud sob, and tore out of the room, leaving the door open. They heard her falling downstairs, bumpity, bumpity, bumpity, till she came BUMP against the cellar door.

‘Bumpity, crumpity, rumpity, numpity, squmpity, zumpity,’ said the shoemaker, with a sob between each word. ‘There she goes. I don’t rightly know if it’s her crying that makes her fall down, or her falling down that makes her cry, but it don’t make home happy, and it’s a great expense in sticking-plaster. The sticking-plaster that’s come into this house would be enough to paper it.’

David was determined not to cry whatever happened, for it never did any good to cry, and besides something must be done at once, only he had not the least idea what that something was. It was perfectly clear that the Mint-man wanted to get Uncle Popacatapetl into the bank, and no wonder, since he was worth his weight in gold, with all the bananas and match-boxes thrown in. And he thought with a shudder of the meat-axe and the saucepan heating over the fire. Without the least doubt Uncle Popacatapetl was going to be chopped up and melted down into sovereigns.

‘It’s all too sad,’ sobbed Uncle Popacatapetl, ‘and too true and too tiresome. I knew they had tracked me down here – wow – wow – but when I saw that there was this nice respectable shop, where uncles and aunts – wow – wow – wow – could be recovered and repaired, I thought I could have myself recovered and repaired out of all knowledge – wow – wow – wow – wow – and diddle the whole lot of them. Instead of which, they send in my beastly nephew to ask me to tea, and then they’ll chop me up, and make sovereigns of me. I’ve seen their signs and notices. They tried to put me off the scent by saying that sovereigns were cheap, and make me think they didn’t want me. And then that was changed, and they said sovereigns were dearer. And then that was changed, and they suspended payment to make me think that they weren’t collecting gold any more, never more at all. Oh, I know their cussedness. And just when everything was going so well, and I was going to walk across the street as cool as carrots or cucumbers, and I should have left by the next telegram that was sent from the office. Look at them all flying in! And there’s one going out with its mackintosh on, and I could have caught it as easy as a subtraction sum if it hadn’t been for this upset. Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.’

David felt dreadfully sorry for him, but what he said about telegrams was quite as dreadfully interesting, and he looked out.

It was quite true: there was a whole string of telegrams rushing down the wires towards the post-office, each in a neat mackintosh. It had begun to snow again, and was getting dark.