The Undefeated
9781465650436
118 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
It was so hot that a certain Mr. William Hollis sitting on an old bacon box in the lee of a summerhouse in his lock-up garden had removed coat and waistcoat tie and collar, rolled up the sleeves of his shirt and loosened his braces. The presence of a neighbor’s elbows on the party hedge forbade a complete return to nature, but the freedom of Old Man Adam from the restraints imposed by society was envied just now by one at least of his heirs. By the side of Bill Hollis was a stone jar of Blackhampton ale, a famous brew, but even this could not save him from gasping like a carp. It was a scorcher and no mistake—thick, slab and hazy, the sort of heat you can almost cut with a knife. Leaning gracefully across from the next plot was a large, rotund gentleman with the face of a well-nourished ferret. Draped in an artful festoon beneath an old straw hat, a wreath of burdock leaves defended him from the weather. “Mr. Hollis”—he addressed the man on the bacon box with conversational charm—“if you want my opinion they’re putting in a bit of overtime in Hell.”“Mr. Goldman, you’ve got it.” His neighbor, a man of somber imagination, was struck by the force of the image. First he glanced up to a sky of burnished copper and then he glanced down over the edge of sheer hillside upon which he and his friend were poised like a couple of black ants on the face of a hayrick. Below he saw a cauldron in which seethed more than a quarter of a million souls. Floating above the cauldron and its many thousands of chimneys was a haze of soot thick enough to conceal what in point of mere size was the fourteenth city of Great Britain. But speaking geographically, and Blackhampton’s inhabitants were prone to do that, it was the exact center of England, of the United Kingdom, of the British Empire, and therefore—Somewhere in the mind of William Hollis lurked a poet, a philosopher and an artist. He pointed over the dip of the hill into the middle of the cauldron. “Reminds me,” he said, half to himself, for he was not consciously an artist, “of the Inferno of Dant, with Lustrations by Door.” Mr. Goldman frowned at the simile. What else could he do? He was a solid citizen, of a solid city, of a solid empire: he was not merely a Philistine, he was proud of being a Philistine. He suddenly remembered that his neighbor was a failure as a man of business. And in a flash Mr. Goldman knew why. “Yes, Hollis—hot.” The ferret-faced gentleman spoke with more caution and less charm. Commercially and socially he was secure, but the same could hardly be said for the man on the bacon box who spoke of the Inferno of Dant with Lustrations by Door—whatever the Inferno of Dant with Lustrations by Door might be. “Hot enough, Mr. Goldman, to melt those three brass balls of yours.” It was a graceful allusion to a trade symbol, yet a prosperous pawnbroker felt that in making it a semi-bankrupt greengrocer was verging upon the familiar. He had just reached that conclusion when a boy selling papers came along the narrow lane that ran past the end of the garden, and thrust a tousled head over the fence.
