Dear journal, I was so excited I could hardly sleep. I had the profound joy of a man who had stumbled—who had failed, for a time, to fulfill those duties of modern adulthood upon which the fortunes of his family and his self-worth depend—but who had now regained his stride and found himself redeemed entirely. I felt so blessed! The expression of Mary’s sleeping face might seem neutral to the untrained observer, but to me I was sure I could read a kind of triumph in the silence between her snores. She was proud of me! And I was glad of it. I knew that despite all the servants’ mutterings about how suddenly I had changed and how surely Mary seemed to be changing too, everything would be all right.
Oh, I forgot to mention that, journal. All the servants seemed convinced that Mary’s personality had transformed.
In a particularly dark and worrisome way.
Especially Chives.
He had mentioned something about it to me some months ago.
Right before he disappeared.
Sure enough, I rose the next morning to find a telegram waiting for me with the address of 126B Corporation Street. As a special dose of luck, the train to Birmingham was one of those pretty red ones, which made me happy.
Pausing only long enough to hire myself a room at a hotel on New Street, I made my way to Corporation Street, eager to see the office. Imagine my surprise when the building at 126 contained no signage for Franco-Midland Hardware Company Limited. For a moment, I had this terrible sense that I might have been made a fool of and that the whole situation was just rotten. Luckily, at that very instant came a tap at my shoulder. Turning, I beheld the smiling face of Harry Pinner.
Let me say, the family resemblance to Arthur Pinner was striking! Harry was the same height, the same weight, and had the same voice. The same age, even! But his clothes were different. And where Arthur had had dark hair, a dark beard, and dark eyebrows, Harry Pinner had none of these features at all. He must have quite recently, though, for the skin was still pale where his hair, beard, and eyebrows should have been—as if it had not felt the touch of the sun in some time.
He greeted me and asked if I was the remarkably gifted man his brother had told him about. I blushed, and admitted that I was. We shook hands in a firm but friendly manner. Oh, and I even thought to extend him my personal assurance that I was, in no way, a zebra.
He told me not to worry about the lack of a plaque to proclaim the business; he had only just rented the premises and had not yet labeled them. I was very excited as I followed him up the stairs, but instead of a bustling office, he ushered me into a disused storage room. There were plenty of desks and chairs, I had to admit, but they were stacked along the walls. He laughed at my dismay and explained that he was only in the most early stages of assembling the English branch. Yet, what was that? He had a promising new business manager; the rest would follow. Now, didn’t I want to know what my duties would be?
And I said, “Yes! Very much!”
He set me up with a desk and chair in the middle of the room and deposited a heavy, three-volume set of tomes in front of me. This, he explained, was the extended Paris directory. Here I would find the name, address and occupation of everybody who lived in and around Paris. The problem, he said, was that there was no reliable list of the hardware sellers. To serve the deficiency, he would very much appreciate it if I could go through all three volumes, finding every person associated with hardware in the greater Paris metropolitan area, and write their names and addresses down for him.
I told him that of course I would and—since there didn’t seem to be any employees for me to manage yet—this was a fine use of my time. He stared at me long and hard, as if trying to determine if I were in earnest or not. I looked back at him and—as I could not guess which expression he wanted me to show—kept my face as neutral as I could. After a time, he gave a shrug and went off to fetch me a pen and paper. He then took his leave, saying that he must go do “business stuff ” but that he would return later and check my progress.
He returned several times over the next few days. He often smelled of drink and sometimes even seemed a bit unsteady on his feet. I asked if he was quite all right, and he assured me he was. “Business often requires a lunch meeting, where drinks are served,” he told me. “And at some meetings, it isn’t lunchtime, so drinks are all we’ve got.” He seemed always glad to find me at my desk but took little note of my progress on the list. This, I ascribed to his great trust in me and I resolved not to disappoint him.
Thus, I would report to the office every morning, open the tome, then write my little heart out, as fast as I could. Sometimes my eyes would hurt from the lack of light. Or my fingers from clutching the pen. Oh, and I’d get nosebleeds from concentrating so hard for so many hours. But what else had I to do? I could go sit in the hotel room, but that was no fun and not nearly as industrious a way to spend my time. And hadn’t Arthur Pinner told me the hours would be long? So, there I sat, and applied myself with every ounce of resolve I could muster.
It was Sunday when I began it—a strange
