Chapter IV The Installation
I
Mrs. Biddlecombe welcomed the homing couple when they returned to the Dream Cottage, but she positively refused to forsake the semi-detached in Laburnum Row, although Quinney, for his part, was willing to entertain a mother-in-law indefinitely, if Susan wished it. Susan, rather to his surprise, did not wish it. And the obvious fact that her husband considered the matter of small importance slightly distressed her, as indicating an abnormal indifference to persons which contrasted oddly with his absorption in things of wood and stone, graven images, let us call them, which the almighty Tomlin had set up in the freshly decorated and enlarged premises in Mel Street. Tomlin, indeed, had sent down a lot of stuff, and some of it was very good. Joe could hardly tear himself from the porcelain, and gloated over the blue and white, so Susan affirmed, as if he wished to kiss it.
The London dealer followed his crates.
He expressed unqualified approval of what Joe had bought in Brittany, taking, however, most of the credit to himself, inasmuch as he had dispatched Quinney to Treguier. The younger man grinned, wondering what Tomlin would say when he beheld the Dream Cottage and its furniture. He arranged that Mrs. Biddlecombe should be present upon that memorable occasion, for he was well aware that the good soul did not share his enthusiasm for mahogany, and that she resented his criticism of her burked schemes of decoration.
Need it be recorded that Quinney triumphed? Tomlin was so impressed that he said gaspingly, “I’ll take the lot off your hands, Joe, at a twenty-five per cent. advance.”
“No, you won’t!” replied Joe. “Our furniture is not for sale, old man. Not yet, by Gum!”
“You are a wonder!” said Tomlin generously.
“Isn’t he?” exclaimed Susan.
It was a great moment.
Late dinner followed, a partie carrée. Joe provided champagne, and port in a cut-glass decanter. Warmed by this splendid hospitality, Tomlin became anecdotal. Perhaps he wanted to astonish the ladies. Unquestionably he succeeded in doing so. One story will suffice to illustrate Tomlin’s methods, and it was told, be it remembered, with exuberant chucklings within two hundred yards of the Cathedral Close.
“It’s becoming harder every day, ma’am,” he addressed Mrs. Biddlecombe, “to get hold of the right stuff—cheap. I have agents everywhere. Old Mr. Quinney was one. And now and again they hear of a real bargain. Often as not the people who ’ave it won’t part. They would part, ma’am, if they was offered the right price, but that wouldn’t be business. No. Well, only the other day, I got hold of the sweetest table, genuine Adam, and hand-painted! Paid a fiver for it!”
“Really, did you now?” murmured Mrs. Biddlecombe For all she knew a “fiver” might be a large or a small price. Tomlin continued:
“Yes, ma’am, a fi’ pun note. It was this way. The table belonged to a decayed gentlewoman, who’d seen better days, and needed money.”
Mrs. Biddlecombe sighed; the anecdote had become almost personal, and therefore the more interesting.
“That may happen to any of us,” she murmured.
“She had inherited this table from her grandma,” continued Tomlin, “and my agent heard of it, and saw it. He offered the old lady four pun ten, and she wouldn’t deal. Obstinate as a mule she was!”
“Sensible old dear, I call her,” said Quinney.
“My agent was fairly boiled, and then inspiration struck him. He never went near the old gal for a couple of months. Then he called with a friend, a stout, red-faced man, bit of an amateur actor. My agent introduced him as a collector of choice bits. Asked if he might show him the little table. Old lady was willing enough, and of course the low comedy feller crabbed it.”
“Stale dodge that,” remarked Quinney.
“Wait a bit. After crabbin’ it, he pretended to be interested in other things; and then he began to act queer. He’d slipped a bit o’ soap into his mouth, so as to froth proper.”
“Gracious me! Why!” asked Mrs. Biddlecombe.
“Then he went into a regular fit, fell down, and as he fell grabbed the little table, and broke off one of its pretty spindle legs. When he come out of his fit, my agent said that the least thing a gentleman could do was to buy the table he’d spoiled. The old lady took a fiver as compensation, and jolly glad she was to get it. I sold that table to an American millionaire for one hundred and twenty-five—guineas!”
Mrs. Biddlecombe rose majestically. She saw that her son-in-law was laughing.
“Come, Susan, let us leave these gentlemen to their wine.”
Susan followed her out of the room. When the door was shut behind them, Quinney said:
“Old man, that yarn was a bit too thick for ’em. See?”
Tomlin laughed boisterously.
“One more glass of port,” he replied, “and I’ll tell you another.”
He told several; and when the men returned to the small drawing-room, Susan said timidly that her mother had gone back to Laburnum Row. Later, when she was alone with her husband, she asked a sharp question:
“Joe, dear, you wouldn’t have done what Mr. Tomlin did, would you?”
“About what, Sue?”
“About that table. Mother and I thought it was horrid of him to take advantage of a poor old lady.”
Joe evaded the question cleverly:
“Look ye here, my girl, Tomlin is—well, Tomlin. Don’t you mix him up with me.”
“But, Joe, you are mixed up with him—in business.”
“Temporary arrangement, my pretty, nothing more.”
He kissed her, murmuring, “Blessed little saint you are!”
II
Melchester was profoundly interested in the new premises, and the other dealers in genuine antiques went about, so Quinney affirmed, chattering with rage, and predicting ruin.
“They’ll be ruined,” said Quinney, chuckling and rubbing his hands. “Nobody will buy their muck, and they know it.”
He had very nice hands, with long slender fingers, manifestly fashioned to pick up egg-shell china. Also in spite of his accent, which time might reasonably be expected to improve, his voice held persuasive inflections, and the resonant timbre of the enthusiast, likely to ring in the memories of too timid customers, the collectors who stare at bargains twice a day till they are snapped up by somebody else. Quinney despised these Laodiceans in his heart, but he told Susan that they did well enough to practise upon.
“You want to get the patter,” he told his wife, “and the best and quickest way is to turn loose on the think it overs. See?”
It had long been arranged between them that Susan was to help in the shop and acquire at first hand intimate knowledge of a complex business. Quinney summed up the art of selling stuff in a few pregnant words.
“Find out what they want, and don’t be too keen to sell to ’em. Most men, my pretty, and nearly all the women go dotty over the things hardest to get. Our best stuff will sell itself, if we go slow. Old silver is getting scarcer every day.”
Susan smiled at her Joe’s words of wisdom. He continued fluently: “We’ve a lot to learn; something new every hour. And we shall make bloomin’ errors, again and again. All dealers do. Tomlin was had to rights only last week over two Chippendale chairs; and he thinks he knows all about ’em. I’ve been done proper over that coffee-pot.”
He showed her a massive silver coffee-pot with finely defined marks upon it.
“A genuine George II bit, Susie, and worth its weight in gold if it hadn’t been tampered with by some fool later on. All that repoussé work is George IV, and I never knew it. The worst fake is the half-genuine ones.”
“Gracious!” exclaimed his pupil.
“There are lots o’ things I don’t know, and don’t understand, my girl; all the more reason to hold tight on to what I do know. And what I know I’ll try to share with you, and what you know you’ll try to share with me.”
“I’m stupid about things,” said Susan.
Quinney strolled across the room, and selected two jars more or less alike in shape and paste and colour.
“Can you tell t’other from which?” he asked. “Look at ’em, feel ’em inside and out.”
Susan obeyed, but after a minute she shook her head.
“Ain’t they just alike, Joe?”
“Lord, no! One’s the real old blue and white, hand-painted, and worth fifty pound. T’other is a reproduction, printed stuff, with a different glaze. Look again, my pretty!”
“This is the old one, Joe.”
“No, it ain’t. Slip your hand inside. Which is the smoother and better finished inside?”
“Yes, I feel the difference, but I don’t see it. I wish I could see it.”
“You will. I’m going to put a little chipped bit of the best on your toilet table. You just squint at it twenty times a day for one year, and you’ll know something. That’s what I’m doing with the earlier stuff, which is more difficult to be sure of, because it doesn’t look so good. I wouldn’t trust my judgment to buy it. That’s Tomlin’s job.”
Susan frowned.
“I don’t like Mr. Tomlin, Joe.”
“Never asked you to like him, but we can learn a lot from Tomlin. See? He’s an expert upon Chinese and Japanese porcelain and lac. We’ve got to suck his brains.”
“Ugh!” said Susan.
During these first few weeks she displayed great aptitude as a saleswoman. Her face, so ingenuous in its expression, her soft voice, her pretty figure attracted customers. The price of every article in the shop was marked in letters which she could turn into figures. But this price was a “fancy one,” what Quinney termed a “top-notcher.” Susan was instructed to take a third less. Quinney trained her to answer awkward questions, to make a pretty picture of ignorance, to pose effectively as the inexperienced wife keeping the shop during the absence of her husband. He had said upon the morning of the grand opening of Quinneys’, “I don’t want you to tell lies, Sue.”
“I wouldn’t for the world,” she replied.
He pinched her chin, chuckling derisively. “I know you wouldn’t; but I don’t want you to tell all the truth neither.”
“What do you mean?”
“This oak now. Me and you know it’s new, but if a customer tells you it’s old, don’t contradict him. ‘Twouldn’t be polite. All you know about it is this—your clever hubby picked it up in France, in Brittany. See?”
She asked anxiously, “It won’t be acting a lie, dear?”
“Not a bit of it! By Gum, Sue, I’m as proud of that conscience of yours as I am of that jar. Not a flaw in either.”
After this she played her part so artlessly that Joe chuckled half a dozen times a day. She tackled the Bishop—alone. Quinney saw the great man approaching and told Susan. She wished to bolt, but Quinney disappeared instead, listening to the duologue that followed. The Bishop stared at the fine wares from Tomlin’s, whipped out his spectacles, and entered, smiling at Susan’s blushing face.
“Good-morning, my lord!”
“Good-morning, Mrs. Quinney. May I look at some of these tempting things?”
He looked at what was best amongst the porcelain sent down by Tomlin, displaying knowledge of the different periods. Then he said courteously, “As this is my first visit, I must buy something for luck. What is the price of that small jar with the prunus decoration? If it is within my means——”
He paused, gravely expectant, but Susan divined somehow what was flitting through his mind; the outrageous prices exacted by old Quinney. She perceived that this was a test purchase. The price of the jar was marked five pounds. Susan said demurely, “We can sell this to you, my lord, for three pounds ten.”
“I’ll take it, Mrs. Quinney.”
He went away with his purchase in his hand. Quinney came back, not too well pleased.
“He’d have given a fiver for it. Why didn’t you ask more than we was prepared to take?”
Susan, knowing her own strength, answered decisively:
“His lordship confirmed me, Joe.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“He knows about china. He passed by the inferior stuff. I wanted him to tell his friends that our prices were very reasonable; and I wanted him to come again. He promised that he would. And I think the clergy, our own clergy, ought to be treated—generously.”
“By Gum, you’re right!” said Quinney. “They’ll tell the old women that our prices touch bottom, reg’lar bargains.”
She was equally successful with Mrs. Nish, a widow of ample means and an ardent collector. Mrs. Nish may have seen the Bishop’s jar and have learned from him that it had been bought at a modest figure. She came in next day, richly rustling in black silk, a large, imposing woman, with a deportment that indicated opulence and a complexion heightened by good living. Mr. Nish had accumulated a fortune in Australia, sheep-farming, and had died—as so many such men do—when he retired from active business. His widow bought a large house standing in a small garden, just outside Melchester. The Close called upon her (not the County), because she subscribed generously to local charities. Her taste, however, was flamboyantly rococo; and on that account Quinney despised her, although he admitted to Susan that she might be educated. When he beheld her pair of prancing bays, he whispered to Susan, “Have a go at the old girl!” Then he retreated discreetly to his inner room. Mrs. Nish greeted Susan with much affability, and immediately mentioned the Bishop, “my lording” him with unction. The jar with prunus decoration was spoken of as a little prune pot.
“I want one just like it.”
“I’m afraid,” said Susan, “that you will not find another just like it.”
“As near as may be,” said Mrs. Nish.
“The only other jar with similar decoration, and of the same period, is this.”
She displayed the finest jar in their possession, adding, “The price is fifty pounds.”
Mrs. Nish was tremendously impressed.
“It can’t be worth all that,” she protested.
“I think his lordship would tell you that it was. We don’t expect to sell it. In fact it belongs to somebody else. We get a small commission if it is sold.”
Susan carefully replaced the jar, and picked up its counterfeit.
“This is modern, madam, a very clever production, made by the same factory in China. We ask five pounds for this.”
“I don’t buy fakes.”
“Of course not, madam. My husband says Lord Mel has not a finer piece of blue and white than that.”
Mrs. Nish turned aside to examine the oak, but her eyes wandered now and again to the big jar. Susan knew that she was thinking how pleasant it would be to say carelessly, “Oh, yes; I paid fifty pounds for that.”
Quinney carried the jar to her house late that afternoon, and he told Susan that she was a clever dear.
“You like the work?” he asked.
She hesitated.
“I like being with you, Joe.”
“Good! You can consider yourself permanently engaged, Mrs. Quinney.”
“Permanently?”
His quick ear detected an odd inflection. He glanced at her sharply, and saw a faint blush. In silence they stared at each other. Then Quinney kissed her, pinched her cheek, pulled her small ear, as he said boisterously:
“Ho! Another job in view?”
She whispered:
“I—I think so.”