"Ah, what's that? He is lighting a match or something. No, my eyes deceive me. There is no light. Everything here seems to deceive me. I'll go home.
And John Timmons walked out of Welbeck Place, and took his way eastward.
Mr. John Timmons was not a hard-working man in the sense of one devoted ardently to physical labour. His domain was thought. He was a merchant, a negotiator, not an artisan. He kept his hands in his pockets mostly, in order that his brain might not be distracted by having to look after them. He had a theory that it is wasteful to burn the candle at both ends. If you employ your brain and your hands it will very soon be all over with you. Still, he held that the appearance of indulgence or luxury was most unbecoming in any place of business, and particularly in a marine store, where transactions were concerned with so stern and stubborn things as junk and old metal. He dealt in junk, but out of regard for the feelings of gentlemen who might have had bitter and long acquaintance with it while adorning another sphere, Timmons kept the junk away from sight in the cellar, to which mere callers were never admitted. Timmons had an opinion that the mere look of junk had a tendency to damp the professional ardour of men who had ever spent the days of their captivity in converting it into oakum.
On the ground floor of Timmons's premises there was no such thing as a chair. He looked on a chair in a marine store as a token of dangerous softening of manners. If a man allowed himself a chair in his place of business why not also a smoking-cap and slippers?
But Timmons had a high office stool, which was a thing differing altogether from a chair. It was of Spartan simplicity and uncomfortableness, and besides, it gave the solvent air of a counting house to the place. It had also another advantage, it enabled you to sit down without placing your eyes lower than the level of a man of your own height standing.
On Saturday morning about nine o'clock Timmons was reposing on the high stool at his doorway, if any part of this establishment may be called a doorway, where one side was all door and there was no other means of exit. He had bought a morning paper on his way to business, and he now sat with the advertising sheet of the paper spread out before him on his knees. Sometimes articles in which he dealt were offered for sale in that sheet, and once in a way he bought a paper to have a look at this sheet, and afterwards, if he had time, scan the news. He made it a point never to look at the reports of the police courts or criminal trials. Every man has his own feelings, and Timmons was not an exception. If an inquiry or trial in which he took interest was going on in London he was certain to know more of it than the newspapers told. He avoided the accounts of trials that did not interest him. They had as damping effect on him as the sight of junk had on some of his customers.