Bailie Holden had the finest taste in the light wines of his country
of any man on the council. In his happier moments of inspiration he
could tell the age of Long John to within a year. Now Bailie Holden
had, among other excellent domestic properties, a kitchen-maid who
was not above casting soft eyes at spruce James Annan of Cleaver's,
so _débonnaire_, with his blue apron and his basket over his arm. And
James had cultivated the acquaintance according to his opportunity,
without, of course, thinking it necessary to say anything to Sal
Mackay—or, for the matter of that, to Sue Murphy either. So that, in
the course of conversation at the area door, it fell out that Cleaver's
boy mentioned his desire to be no more Cleaver's boy, but a servant of
the city corporation in the department of Cleaning and Lighting. And
the kitchen-maid answered, keeping her eyes on James and adjusting her
tumbled cap at the same time—
"I'll speak to the maister when he comes through the back kitchen, to
smoke his pipe in the yaird after dinner-time."
For it was the use and wont of Bailie Holden, when he was without
company, or could shunt the entertainment of it upon his wife, to put
on a seedy garden coat and slip off quietly round by the greenhouses.
Here he took from the edge of a heating tube a short clay pipe of
excessive blackness; then from a canister he extracted a snaky twist of
Bogie roll. Bailie Holden was renowned for keeping the best cigars in
the city, and he also smoked them regularly indoors. His wife, indeed,
did not allow anything else. But he came outside for his real smoke,
in his shirt-sleeves in the warm evenings, and in his garden coat when
it was colder. For though to all men he was now Havanna of the most
exclusive brand, and all his appointments like unto that dignity, yet
at the heart of him he was still kindly Bogie roll.
The Bailie thought on many things out there in the dark as he nuzzled
down the glowing ash in the pipe-bowl close under his nose. He thought,
for instance, of the year Elizabeth and he were married, when they
started at the foot of Morrison Street in one room at the back of the
gasfitter's shop. They did not keep a servant then, and Elizabeth had
not yet learned to object to the smoking of Bogie roll. Indeed, her
father and her three brothers (all honest masons) incessantly smoked
nothing else. But when there was need to find a place in the little
back-room for another person with no experience in Bogie roll where he
came from, then the Bailie had gone out every night to the backyard,
sat down on a roll of lead piping and smoked a black pipe, with a
babe's little complainings tugging at his heart all the while. And the
memory of the Bogie roll outside the window, across which the black
shadows went and came, had somehow kept his heart warm all through the
years.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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