The Other Nineteenth Century

by Avram Davidson

  The door opened and the Master Craftsman came out. His ruddy face looked much less than cheerful. “Didn’t even say thank you,” murmured Mr. Washburne.

  Brother Johnson grunted. “What did they want—hamburgers? People live on that nowadays. Why, what is the matter with good old-fashioned meat-and-oatmeal-loaf? Good old-fashioned scrapple? With hash? Anything the matter with our old-fashioned-style hash and mashed turnips?”

  “Not a thing,” Mr. Washburne said staunchly. “Say, I guess I’m going to take a little rest-up before lunchtime. My soup bowls won’t be ready for a while yet, I guess.” He had a hopeful, questioning note in his voice.

  “Be ready soon as they cool,” the Master Craftsman said firmly. “Well, I got to go to town, do some bank business, so I’ll give you a lift to the Guest House.”

  “’Preciate that.”

  In the car Mr. Washburne said nothing. Brother Johnson clutched the wheel, breathing heavily. “Sister Ferguson,” he said. “Known that woman forty years. For-ty years. Taught her the ancient art of stained glass. The ancient arts of spinning and weaving. Taught her typing and double-entry bookkeeping. Taught her how to look on beauty, clear. Now she wants to sell out. To—sell—out! ‘Either get one of those Federal grants like everybody else is doing,’ is what she said. ‘Never while I draw breath.’ I told her, ‘will I ask the Federal Government to do one thing for me which I can do for myself,’ is what I said. Asked her, ‘What? You going soft in your maturity?’”

  Mr. Washburne’s mild indeterminate sound might have been sympathy. Or sleepiness. The trees and shrubs and scattered buildings of the place looked rather bare under the gray sky. Brother Johnson made a surprised noise. “What? Gone past the Guest House?” he asked. He looked briefly aside at the other man. “Well, I’ll back up, then. No problem.—Solve our own problems,” he admonished.

  He leaned over and opened the door. “Got a good three-quarter hour before the bell rings for lunch. Notice its mellow sound, by the way. Cast that bell myself,” he said proudly.

  Alone in the car he continued his conversation. “‘Sister, you are not going to sell out, are you?’ is what I asked her. For-ty years, oh, I saw it coming. I knew. I could tell. ‘Either to Washington or to you or to Tom, Dick, or Harry,’ she had the brass to say. Said, ‘If no Federal grant, then buy my shares out,’ says she. ‘The grant will pay for an apprenticeship program, a lot of young people are interested in learning old arts nowadays, and we can install a new heating system; otherwise I am going to Florida and I am not going to spend one more winter shivering before my hand-crafted fireplace!’

  “Apprenticeship program! Young people! Hippies! Sister Ferguson!” he concluded.

  “What’s that, hey, Johnson?” asked the man at the gas station.

  “Huh? Oh. Oh, just talking to myself. Fill’er up. Regular.”

  The man at the gas station said, “Must have money in the bank, talking to yourself that way.”

  The Master Craftsman grunted and said, “I’m going to put some money in the bank, soon as you put some gas in my tank.”

  “Well, good. Guess I’ll be able to deposit that post-dated check you gave me for last month’s bill.” He moved on back to take the cap off the tank. After a while he put it back on, made out the new bill with a small pencil stub, handed it in for the Master of Dawnside to sign. “My brother Bob,” said the man at the gas station, “he draws disability, he draws Social Security, he draws Food Stamps, he don’t have to worry about the oil company trying to force the independent distributors out of business, he don’t have to get out of bed at half past five in the morning.”

  The Master of Dawnside handed back pad and pencil. “The day I ask the Federal Government to do one single thing which I can do myself,” he said grimly, “is the day I hope to die.”

  In town he parked carefully in front of where Snyder’s Grocery used to be—Snyder’s had often bought Dawnside products—and ignored the wide parking lot of the supermarket-which had never bought from Dawnside. He waited in the bank till Mr. Hopkins, the senior cashier, had finished with another customer, then stepped up to his window. Mr. Hopkins’s small face smiled, cheeks as shiny as those on a crisp apple. Very softly he said, peering through his thick glasses, “Oh, good, you can catch up on your taxes, then.” He picked up the deposit slip.

  “Yes,” said the Master Craftsman, “I can give the Federal Government some more of my money. So it can give it all away again to somebody else.”

  Mr. Hopkins sighed and nodded. “How true … One thousand, and one, two, three, four, five. Makes fifteen hundred. That’s it?”

  “That’s it for now.”

  “All in crisp new bills. Business must be picking up. Or”—and a roguish twinkle came into his faded blue eyes—“maybe you print them yourself, do you? Say, they look just about as good as what the government makes!”

  “Just about,” said the Master Craftsman of Dawnside.

  The two older gentlemen had a quiet little laugh together, at that one.

  AFTERWORD TO “BUSINESS MUST BE PICKING UP”

  Note the strict accuracy of the artisan’s words: “ … some more of my money.” This story offers wry criticism of both modern commercialism, and the self-indulgent “self-reliance” of the American Arts and Crafts movement at the close of the nineteenth century.

  Elbert Hubbard, a prosperous American soap salesman, founded the Roycrofters community in East Aurora, New York, after a visit to England. There, Hubbard had been impressed by the ideals of William Morris. Morris was indisputably a genius in addition to being a Pre-Raphaelite artist, wealthy socialist, pioneering designer, translator, poet, etc. Hubbard was at his best as a promoter—selling the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement and the simple life to a vast, fee-paying bourgeois audience. At least one American genius did get his start in East Aurora: Dard Hunter, master papermaker and fine printer, whose influence remains strong today.

  In the still unpublished AdVentures in AutoBiography, Davidson recalls the not-so-genteel poverty of the writing life of the 1950s; after the death of a fellow writer from those days, Davidson was told that his acquaintance had “had a damned fine plate” for printing twenties—his own money, in other words.

  —Henry Wessells

  DR. BHUMBO SINGH

  Trevelyan Street used to be four blocks long, but now it is only three, and its aft end is blocked by the abutment of an overpass. (Do you find the words Dead End to have an ominous ring?) The large building in the 300 block used to be consecrated to worship by the Mesopotamian Methodist Episcopal Church (South) but has since been deconsecrated and is presently a glue warehouse. The small building contains the only Bhuthanese grocery and deli outside of Asia; its trade is small. And the little (and wooden) building lodges an extremely dark and extremely dirty little studio which sells spells, smells, and shrunken heads. Its trades are even smaller.

  The spells are expensive, the smells are exorbitant, and the prices of its shrunken heads—first chop though they be—are simply inordinate.

  The studio, however, has a low rent (it has a low ceiling, too), pays no license fee—it is open (when it is open) only between the hours of seven P.M. and seven A.M., during which hours the municipal license department does not function—and lacks not for business enough to keep the proprietor, a native of the Andaman Islands, in the few, the very few things, without which he would find life insupportable: namely curried squid, which he eats—and eats and eats—baroque pink pearls, which he collects, and (alone, and during the left phase of the moon) wears; also live tree-shrews. Some say that they are distantly cognate to the primates and, hence, it is supposed, to Man. Be that as it may. In their tiny ears he whispers directions of the most unspeakable sort, and then turns them loose, with great grim confidence. And an evil laugh.

  The facts whereof I speak, I speak with certainty, for they were related to me by my friend Mr. Underhand; and Mr. Underhand has never been known to lie.

  At any rate, at le
ast, not to me.

  “A good moonless evening to you, Underhand Misterjee,” says the proprietor, at the termination of one lowering, glowering afternoon in Midnovember, “and a bad evening indeed to those who have had the fortune to incur your exceedingly just displeasure.” He scratches a filthy ear-lobe with a filthy finger.

  —Midnovember, by the way, is the month which was banished from the Julian Calendar by Julian the Apostate; it has never appeared in the Gregorian Calendar: a good thing, too—

  “And a good evening to you, Dr. Bhumbo Singh,” says Mr. Underhand. “As for them-Ha Ha!” He folds his thin and lilac-gloved hands over the handle of his stalking-crutch. Even several so-called experts have declared the handle (observed by light far less dim than that in the shop of Bhumbo Singh) to be ivory: they are wrong: it is bone, purely bone … . Or perhaps one would better say, impurely bone … .

  “Ha Ha!” echoes (Dr.) Bhumbo Singh. He has in fact no right at all to this distinguished family name, which he has assumed in dishonor of a certain benevolent Sikh horse-coper who in a rash and malignly constellated hour took the notion to adopt him.

  Now to business; “A spell, Underhand Sahib?” he next asks, rubbing his chin. His chin bears a dull-blue tattoo which would strike terror to the hearts and loosen the strings of the bowels of the vilest ruffians in Rangoon, Lahore, Peshawar, Pernambuco, and Wei-hattahatta yet unhanged, save, of course, that it is almost always by virtue of dust, the inky goo of curried squid, and a hatred of water akin to hydrophobia, totally invisible. “A spell, a spell? A nice spell? A severed head?”

  “Fie upon your trumpery spells,” Mr. Eevelyn (two es) Underhand says easily. “They are fit only for witches, warlocks, and Boy Scouts or Girl. As for your severed heads, shrunken or otherwise: Ho Ho.”

  He puts the tip of his right index finger alongside of the right naris of his nose. He winks.

  Dr. Bhumbo Singh attempts a leer, but his heart is not in it. “They cost uncommon high nowadays, even wholesale,” he whines. And then he drops commercial mummery and simply waits.

  “I have come for a smell, Doctor,” Underhand says, flicking away with the tip of his stalking-crutch a cricket scaped from the supply kept to feed the tree-shrews. Dr. Bh. Singh’s red little eyes gleam like those of a rogue ferret in the rutting season.

  Underhand gives his head a brisk, crisp nod, and smacks his pursed lips. “A smell, subtle, slow, pervasive. A vile smell. A puzzling smell. A smell of seemingly ubiquitous provenaunce, and yet a smell which has no spoor. An evil smell. One which will, eventually, and to infinite relief, diminish … diminish … all but vanish … and then, rising like a phoenix from its bed of fragrant ashes, stalk abroad like a pest—worse, far worse than before …

  “A smell disgusting beyond disgust …”

  A slight shiver passes through Dr. (he has neither right nor title to this title, but who would dare deny it him? The AMA? The last platform which they could have occupied together even in combat was also occupied by Albertus Magnus.) passes through Dr. Bhumbo S.’s filthy, meagre frame. His tongue protrudes. (It is true that he can, when moved to do so, touch with it the tip of his rather retrousse nose; if it is also true that he can—and does—catch flies with it like a toad or chameleon, Mr. Underhand has not found the matter meet communicating to me.) His tongue withdraws. “In short, most valued customer, what is now requisite is a smell which will drive men mad.”

  “‘Men,’ Dr. Bhumbo Singh? ‘Men?’ I said nothing of men. The word never issued from my mouth. The concept, in fact, never formed in my mind.” Bhumbo shakes with what may be a malarial spasm, but is probably silent laughter.

  “I have just the thing,” he says. “I have the very thing. The price is purely pro forma, the price is minimal, the price is 1500 golden gold pieces, of the coinage of Great Golconda. Per ounce.”

  Underhand’s brows raise, descend, meet. “‘Of the imprint of Great Golconda’? Why, even the very schoolboys know that Golconda-gold was so exceedingly pure that it might be eaten like jam, which is why so few of its coins now remain. Damme, damme, Dr. Bhumbo Singh, if this is how you treat and charge your most valued customers, it is no wonder that you have so few.” A mass of filth, matted together with cobwebs, slowly floats from the invisible ceiling to the unspeakable floor; is ignored.

  The merchant shrugs. “Not even for my own brother, sir, am I willing to prepare the smell for less.” Considering that Bhumbo’s own (and only) brother, Bhimbo, has spent the last seven and one half years laden with chains in the sixth sub-basement of the gaol privily kept by that ugly, obese, and evil old woman, Fatima, Dowager Begum of Oont, without Bhumbo offering so much as two rupees two pice in ransom, this is quite probably the truth. “However, out of my great regard and respect for you personally and my desire to maintain the connexion, I shall not require you to purchase the full ounce. I shall sell it you by the drachm or scruple.”

  “Done, Bhumbojee, done!” cries Mr. Underhand. He thumps the stalking-crutch upon the filthy, filthy floor. The tree-shrew utter shrill little yipples of annoyance, and Bhumbo gives them crickets: they subside, aside from making nonverbal, crunching noises.

  Nearby on the overpass a truck or lorry rumbles past; in its wake the frail building trembles, causing at least one of the shrunken heads to roll from side to side and grind its teeth. No one pays it mind. “Be pleased to return hither, then, Underhand Effendi, on (or, it may be, a trifle after) the Gules of December,” Bhumbo Singh says. Then grows just a trifle uncertain. “‘December,’ the giaours call the next half-past-a-month ‘December,’ do they not?”

  Eevelyn Underhand (two es) rises to go. “They do indeed. They have a high festival therein.”

  “They do, they do?” cries Bhumbo Singh. “I had not known. —What a thing it is to be wise!” He accompanies his customer to the dirty, dirty door with many bows, obeisances, and genuflections. Customer, having perfunctorily placed his foot once on Bhumbo’s nasty neck, is long gone by the time the last of these is finished.

  Gone, long gone, and the distant echo of the penny-whistle (on which he is wont to play the grace-notes to the Lament For Nana Sahib as he walks his spidery way through such dank ways and dark) long gone as well … .

  In the next sundry weeks, either Bhumbo Singh or his very simulacrum is seen in a multitude of exceedingly diverse places. Abattoirs know him for brief moments; wool-pulleries and tanneries as well. He is seen to cast handsful of the Semi-silent Sands of the Hazramawut (or Courts of Death) at the window-panes of Abdulahi al-Ambergrisi (who sells asafoetida as well): and the Abdulahi (an Yezid of the Yezidi-folk) to open, blench, withdraw, thrust out by means of a very long-handled net an ampula of what-it-may-be. The Bhumbo—and if it be not he, who be it?—is observed out of the corners of eyes to scramble under the wharf at the Old Fish Market (condemned, since, by the Board of Health). He visits, also, the hovels of one or two and never more than three foreign folk who formerly fared at sea in tropic clime and who live now in tumbled sheds on the farther sides of disused dumps and show their ravaged faces only to the faces of the ravaged moons.

  And on the nights when the moon is dark, he scrambles through ointment factories, in search of flies.

  Now and then he whispers, and, did one dare come close and nigh, one would hear him calculate in somewise as this: “Such-andsuch a number of golden gold-pieces! with some I shall buy me more baroque pink pearls and with some I shall buy me more curried squid and some I shall lay away to gloat upon and others—nay! one lone other!—shall I give to Iggulden the Goldbeater to beat me gold-leaf so soft and wide and thin: half of this I shall lay for a strangle-mask upon the face of a certain real-estate ‘developer’ and tother moiety shall She-Who-Makes-Sweetmeats roll round hot comfits and pasties and pastries for me and when this has melted like yellow butter I shall eat of them nor shall I invite even one other to join me and afterwards I shall lick my twelve fingers till they be somewhat clean … .”

  Then he chuckles … a sound like the bu
bbling of thick hot grease in the foetid try-pots of a cannibal feast.

  Meanwhile, and what of Mr. Underhand?

  Mr. Underhand meanwhile makes visits, too: but of a more sociable nature: Mr. Underhand pays calls.

  “Oh. Undy. It’s you,” says a woman through the chink in the well-chained door. “Whadda you want?”

  “Gertrude, I have brought you, this being the first of the month, the sum mulcted of me by the terms of our bill of divorcement,” says he. As always.

  He passes money through the crack or slit between doorjamb and door. Rapidly she riffles through it; asks, “Is this all I’m gonna get?” As always.

  “No,” sighs he, “I fear me not. It is, however, all that you are going to get in this or any other one month of the year; it being the extortionate amount wrested from me by compound, I do not say ‘collusion,’ between your attorneys and the judge upon the bench. Gertrude: good night.”

  He turns and departs. She makes a sound between her palate and her sinuses which experience has instructed she intends for scorn: then: cluntch-cluntch … thuckle-thuckle … the night-bolts. Cloonk. The door.

  Mr. Underhand, an hour later, bathed and bay-rum’d and clothed in his best-of-best. Spats upon his glittering shoes. Hat and gloves and cane in one hand. Flowers in the other.

  “Eevelyn,” she says, hand to her gleaming, glittering throat. “What a lovely surprise. What quite lovely flowers. Oh, how nice.”

  “May I come in. My dear.”

  “Why of course. Need you ask. Now I shan’t be lonely. For a while. Eevelyn.” They kiss.