No Good Deed 42

A few moments later, a hunched figure lurched in. The improbable dentition looked familiar. He looked no older than he had in his guise of itinerant puppet-master near St Paul's, or indeed the frock-coated figure in the Coble Inn in far-off Northumbria, though both guises had been left some years behind. He was dressed in a garish frock-coat of the brightest blue. His waistcoat was a darker blue with white stars. His pantaloons were striped in red and white. There could be no doubt that I knew the fellow, for had his voice - with its grace-note accents of the gypsy or Jew - not convinced me, his words could not but do so,

'Still ahead of the Nimmers, Sir?'

The barman looked on, yawning.

'I fear you are mistaken in me, Sir. Northrup. Northrup's the name.'

'Of course, it is, Sir, of course it is.'

He smiled and the gleaming teeth slid a little forward, but not at the alarming rate I recalled from our last encounter, in as much as they remained confined by the limits of his mouth.

'And your name, Sir, what might that be?' I asked, truly the abrupt manners of the Americans were affecting my own.

'Why, it might be anything you like!' This time he laughed and the teeth strained once more to escape.

It took quite some self-restraint not to grasp the man by the throat and dash his forehead against the deal surface until his teeth finally did come out. Perhaps a little of my ire showed in my face, for he gave a less confident laugh and went on,

'But I go by Cletus Camborne,' he gestured with a sweep of the arm at his own attire. 'A nom de Theatre, of course.'

The man, who by my calculation must have seen many more than seventy summers in whichever lands he had spent them, could hardly have looked less like an actor to my eye, even did one not consider his clothing.

'Shakespeare, is it?' I enquired.

His mouth made as much of a pout as his unfortunate dental arrangement would allow,

'Sir Garrick Cattermole gives a little of his Lear, depending on the audience. And my own moment centre stage is a reading from the Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.'

'You must be hard put to make more than a quarter of an hour's entertainment out of that.' I told him, thinking to myself that should the fifth part of such a quarter-hour's entertainment consist of anything from the pen of Mr Dickens, it might well make the whole seem ten times as long.

'Ah... the majority of the entertainment consists in a very fine minstrel show.'

Which accounted for his bizarre raiment, if not his presence on that side of the Atlantic Ocean, on the very steamboat on which I had taken passage. It struck me as a ludicrous coincidence worthy of the sentimentalist hack himself.