England -- Fiction; Patent medicines -- Marketing -- Fiction; Pharmaceutical industry -- Fiction; Satire; Science fiction
I do not remember much of my journey to Wimblehurst with my mother
except the image of her as sitting bolt upright, as rather disdaining
the third-class carriage in which we traveled, and how she looked away
from me out of the window when she spoke of my uncle. “I have not seen
your uncle,” she said, “since he was a boy....” She added grudgingly,
“Then he was supposed to be clever.”
She took little interest in such qualities as cleverness.
“He married about three years ago, and set up for himself in
Wimblehurst.... So I suppose she had some money.”
She mused on scenes she had long dismissed from her mind. “Teddy,” she
said at last in the tone of one who has been feeling in the dark and
finds. “He was called Teddy... about your age.... Now he must be
twenty-six or seven.”
I thought of my uncle as Teddy directly I saw him; there was something
in his personal appearance that in the light of that memory phrased
itself at once as Teddiness—a certain Teddidity. To describe it in and
other terms is more difficult. It is nimbleness without grace, and
alertness without intelligence. He whisked out of his shop upon the
pavement, a short figure in grey and wearing grey carpet slippers; one
had a sense of a young fattish face behind gilt glasses, wiry hair that
stuck up and forward over the forehead, an irregular nose that had its
aquiline moments, and that the body betrayed an equatorial laxity, an
incipient “bow window” as the image goes. He jerked out of the shop,
came to a stand on the pavement outside, regarded something in the
window with infinite appreciation, stroked his chin, and, as abruptly,
shot sideways into the door again, charging through it as it were
behind an extended hand.
“That must be him,” said my mother, catching at her breath.
We came past the window whose contents I was presently to know by
heart, a very ordinary chemist’s window except that there was a
frictional electrical machine, an air pump and two or three tripods and
retorts replacing the customary blue, yellow, and red bottles above.
There was a plaster of Paris horse to indicate veterinary medicines
among these breakables, and below were scent packets and diffusers and
sponges and soda-water syphons and such-like things. Only in the middle
there was a rubricated card, very neatly painted by hand, with these
words—
Buy Ponderevo’s Cough Linctus _now_.
NOW!
WHY?
Twopence Cheaper than in Winter.
You Store Apples! why not the Medicine
You are Bound to Need?
in which appeal I was to recognise presently my uncle’s distinctive
note.
My uncle’s face appeared above a card of infant’s comforters in the
glass pane of the door. I perceived his eyes were brown, and that his
glasses creased his nose. It was manifest he did not know us from Adam.
A stare of scrutiny allowed an expression of commercial deference to
appear in front of it, and my uncle flung open the door.
“You don’t know me?” panted my mother.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account