Two Bottles of Relish: The Little Tales of Smethers and Other Stories. Lord Dunsany

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      ‘I should put on the mask now,’ said Ulton.

      And they helped me to fasten it while we were still out of sight of the house. Ulton gave me a whistle to blow in case I wanted help. ‘We’ll be as close as we can get without being seen,’ he said. Even then, it seemed to me, they’d be a bit late, if I wanted help enough to whistle for it. Perhaps I looked a bit lonely, for Ulton said: ‘It’s no use our coming near enough to be seen, or he’d let nobody in. Very likely he won’t let you in in any case. But do what you can.’

      ‘I’ll get in all right,’ I said. And off I started.

      The night seemed very dark, which was really all to the good, only somehow it didn’t seem so. It seemed lonely too, and all the small gusts of wind that came blowing past me seemed lost in it. I heard a step coming my way, and a man passed me, who I knew must be the village constable going to report to Ulton. That made three people that would come if I whistled, but it didn’t make anything less lonely then. And then I came to the house; a wicket gate and a path through a little garden, and I was at the front door. I rang till a window opened on the first floor, the window of a dark room, and no face showed.

      ‘What do you want?’ said the voice.

      ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘if you don’t want anything.’

      ‘What do you mean by that?’ said the voice in the dark room.

      ‘Only,’ I said, ‘that there’s one thing that nearly everyone wants.’

      ‘Well? What?’ he said.

      ‘Health,’ I answered. ‘And how are you to have that without food; and good food, with a relish to it?’

      ‘I don’t want to buy anything,’ he said, and was just going to shut down the window.

      ‘Wait a minute,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to sell anything. I’ve a wonderful relish for meats and savouries here; but I don’t sell it, I give it.’

      It’s a good catch that. You see, they give away one bottle free to whoever buys a dozen. So I catch them by telling them that the bottle is free, and getting them to sign an order for a dozen afterwards; and of course they pay on the nail. That’s the difficult part of it, the order and getting the cash; all that comes later, but that free bottle gets me into the house. And it got me in here.

      ‘Then what do you make out of it?’ he asked me.

      Interested enough to ask questions, you see.

      ‘Well, the truth is,’ I said, ‘you’ll like it so much that you’ll order more. That’s where I come in.’

      The more you think it over, the more you’ll see how that catches them. It looks like business only starting when they are so satisfied that they can’t do without the stuff. Human beings are very gullible. You see, I know. And murderers are only human.

      ‘Oh, well; let’s have it,’ he said grudgingly.

      And in I went with my Numnumo. He opened the door, and seemed all alone in the house. A decent meal, or even the hope of one, probably meant a lot to a man like that.

      He brought me into a small room, off the hall, and switched on the light and sat down. ‘Let’s have a look at it,’ he said.

      He was a nasty-looking fellow, sitting there. Not a man to play tricks with. I don’t say he could read your thoughts; but he had a quick look in his eyes, as though if you tried to think of anything clever, he’d get there before you. He had an orange-coloured moustache, chopped short; and he sat there looking at me. Ulton and Linley felt a long way away. I didn’t mind playing the Numnumo trick on him, or on any man; because that was second nature to me, and hardly felt like a trick. But I didn’t like playing the trick I was going to play.

      ‘This is your bottle,’ I said, pulling the Numnumo out of my pocket. And I managed to pull out three of the gas-bombs, too. ‘Samples,’ I said, as they came out.

      But he wasn’t looking at what I had in my hands; he was staring at my glasses with the rubber fittings round them. I saw that, and explained in a hurry.

      ‘The fumes from Numnumo,’ I said, ‘don’t only make your mouth water; they make your eyes water too.’

      Not much chance of selling it after that, of course; people don’t want to be weeping into their plates; but selling Num-numo wasn’t what I was after on that day.

      He wouldn’t take his eyes off me. And then he put down a hand and slowly covered me with a revolver.

      ‘Oh! Don’t do that,’ I said.

      And I dropped the three bombs full of tear-gas, and the bottle of relish on top. I apologized and stooped down to tidy up all the mess, and then the fumes reached him. So he got up and came groping towards me, meaning to shoot. But it was too late then; he couldn’t see. And I began dodging him quietly. He stopped to listen, following with his revolver any sounds that he heard or thought he heard; till all of a sudden he seemed to change his mind, and shot himself through the head.

       THE SECOND FRONT

      IT’S some time now since I wrote about Mr Linley, and I don’t suppose anyone remembers the name of Smethers. That’s my name. But the whole world knows Numnumo, the relish for meats and savouries; and I push it. That is to say I travel and I take orders for it, or I used to, before this war upset everything. And some may remember the tale I wrote about that, about Numnumo I mean, because Mr Linley came into it, and he’s a man you don’t forget so easily; and, if you do, perhaps you don’t forget Steeger and what happened at Unge. Horrid it was. I told about that in my story: The Two Bottles of Relish I called it. And then Steeger turned up again; that was when he shot Constable Slugger, and they couldn’t catch him for either case. Funny, too; because the police knew perfectly well that he had done both murders, and Linley came along and told them how. Still, they couldn’t catch him. Well, they could catch him whenever they wanted to, but what I mean is there’d have been a verdict of Not Guilty, and the police were more afraid of that than a criminal is afraid of the other verdict. So Steeger was still at large. And then there came a case of a man that did three murders, and Linley helped the police over that. They got that man. And then the war came, and murder looked a very small thing, and no more had been heard of Steeger for a long time. Mr Linley got a commission, and, when they found out about his brains, he went to the War Office, to what they call M.I., and I went to be, what I never thought I’d be, a private soldier, and Numnumo was heard of no more, except for a few little wails from the advertisers, saying what a good thing it used to be. Yes, I got called up in the summer of 1940, and was put in barracks near London. I used often to lay awake at night under my brown blankets, thinking of the battles the British army had been in, things I’d heard of at school, and more that the sergeants taught us about, and trying to picture what they were like and what they sounded like; and all the while a battle raging over the barracks. I got the idea that some of those old battles might have been fairly quiet compared to those nights. But I don’t know.

      Well, that battle was over in a year. We won it; I mean our airmen did. But we hadn’t much to spare. It was a nasty time. I don’t think the Germans would behave quite like that now. They’ve spoken very nicely of late about not destroying culture and СКАЧАТЬ