He was trotting home by the lane from Theydon, with his empty basket on his arm, and his hands (and the sixpence) in his trousers pockets, when he checked at a sound, as of a cry from the wood. But he heard no more, and trotted on. Probably the deer were fighting somewhere; rare fighters were the bucks in October.
Johnnyhad finished his tea, and was lying at his ease in the old easy-chair, whistling, rattling his heels on the hearth, and studying a crack in the ceiling that suggested an angry face. Mrs. May had put the sixpence the sloes had brought into the cracked teacup that still awaited the return of Uncle Isaac’s half-crown, had washed the tea-things, and was now mending the worn collar of gran’dad’s great-coat, in readiness for the winter. Bessy had fallen asleep over her book, had been wakened, had fallen asleep again, and in the end had drowsily climbed the stairs to early bed: but still the old man did not return.
“I wonder gran’dad ain’t back yet,” Johnny’s mother said for the third time. “He said he’d be quick, so’s to finish that case to-night.” This was a glass-topped mahogany box, in course of setting with specimens of all the Sphinges: a special private order.
“’Spect he can’t find them caterpillars he went for,” Johnny conjectured; “that’s what it is. He’s forgot all about racin’ me home.”
Mrs. May finished the collar, lifted the coat by theloop, and turned it about in search of rents. Finding none, she put it down and stood at the door, listening.
“Think you’re too tired to go an’ look for him, Johnny?” she asked presently.
Johnny thought he was. “It’s them caterpillars, safe enough,” he said. “He never saw any before, an’ it was just a chance last night. To-night he can’t find ’em, and he’s keepin’ on searchin’ all over the Pits and the Slade; that’s about it.”
There was another pause, till Mrs. May remembered something. “The bit o’ candle he had in the lantern wouldn’t last an hour,” she said. “He’d ha’ had to come back for more. Johnny, I’m gettin’ nervous.”
“Why, what for?” asked Johnny, though the circumstance of the short candle startled his confidence. “He might get a light from somewhere else, ’stead o’ comin’ all the way back.”
“But where?” asked Mrs. May. “There’s only the Dun Cow, an’ he might almost as well come home—besides, he wouldn’t ask ’em.”
Johnny left the chair, and joined his mother at the door. As they listened a more regular sound made itself plain, amid the low hum of the trees; footsteps. “Here he comes,” said Johnny.
But the sound neared and the steps were long and the tread was heavy. In a few moments Bob Smallpiece’s voice came from the gloom, wishing them good-night.
Mrs. May called to him. “Have you seen gran’dad anywhere, Mr. Smallpiece?”
The keeper checked his strides, and came to the garden gate, piebald with the light from the cottage door. “No,” he said, “I ain’t run across him, nor seen his light anywheres. Know which way he went?”
“He was just going to Wormleyton Pits an’ back, that’s all.”
“Well, I’ve just come straight across the Pits, an’ as straight here as ever I could go, past the Dun Cow; an’ ain’t seen ne’er a sign of him. Want him particular?”
“I’m gettin’ nervous about him, Mr. Smallpiece—somehow I’m frightened to-night. He went out about six, an’ now it don’t want much to nine, an’ he only had a bit o’ candle that wouldn’t burn an hour. And he never meant stopping long, I know, ’cause of a case he’s got to set. I thought p’raps you might ha’ seen—”
“No, I see nothin’ of him. But I’ll go back to the Pits now, if you like, an’ welcome.”
“I’d be sorry to bother you, but I would like someone to go. Here, Johnny, go along, there’s a good boy.”
“All right, all right,” the keeper exclaimed cheerfully. “We’ll go together. I expect he’s invented some new speeches o’ moth, an’ he’s forgot all about his light, thinkin’ out the improvements. It ain’t the first time he’s been out o’ night about here, anyhow. Not likely to lose himself, is Mr. May.”
Johnny had his cap and was at the gate; and in a moment the keeper and he were mounting the slope.
“Mother’s worryin’ herself over nothing to-night,” Johnny grumbled. “Gran’dad’s been later ’n this many’s a time, an’ she never said a word. Why, when he gets after caterpillars an’ things he forgets everything.”
They walked on among the trees. Presently, “How long is it since your father died?” Bob Smallpiece asked abruptly.
“Nine years, now, and more.”
“Mother might ha’ married agen, I s’pose?”
“I dunno. Very likely. Never heard her say nothing.”
Bob Smallpiece walked on with no more reply than a grunt. Soon a light from the Dun Cow twinkled through the bordering coppice, and in a few paces they were up at the wood’s edge.
“No light along the road,” the keeper said, glancing to left and right, and making across the hard gravel.
“There’s somebody,” Johnny exclaimed, pointing up the pale road.
“Drunk,” objected the other. And truly the indistinct figure staggered and floundered. “An’ goin’ the wrong way. Chap just out o’ the Dun Cow. Come on.”
But Johnny’s gaze did not shift. “It’s gran’dad!” he cried suddenly, and started running.
Bob Smallpiece sprang after him, and in twenty paces they were running abreast. As they neared the old man they could hear him talking rapidly, in a monotonous, high-pitched voice; he was hatless, and though they called he took no heed, but stumbled on as one seeing and hearing nothing; till, as the keeper reached to seize his arm, he trod in a gulley and fell forward.
The shock interrupted his talk, and he breathed heavily, staring still before him, as he regained his uncertain foothold, and reeled a step farther. Then Bob Smallpiece grasped him above the elbow, and shouted his name.
“What’s the matter, gran’dad?” Johnny demanded. “Ill?”
The old man glared fixedly, and made as though to resume his course.
“Why, what’s this?” said Bob Smallpiece, retaining the arm, and lifting a hand gently to the old man’s hair. It was blood, dotted and trickling. “Lord! he’s had a bad wipe over the head,” said Bob, and with that lifted old May in his arms, as a nurse lifts a child. “Theydon’s nearest; run, Johnny boy—run like blazes an’ fetch the doctor tantivy!”
“Take him into the Dun Cow?”
“No—home’s best, an’ save shiftin’ him twice. Run it!”
“Purple Emperors an’ Small Coppers,” began theold man again in his shrill chatter. “Small Coppers an’ Marsh Ringlets everywhere, and my bag full o’ letters at the beginning of the round, but I finished my round and now they’re all gone; all gone because o’ London comin’, an’ I give in my empty bag—” and so he tailed off into indistinguishable gabble, while Bob Smallpiece carried him into the wood.
To Johnny, scudding madly toward Theydon, it imparted a grotesque horror, as of some absurd nightmare, this baby-babble of his white-haired grandfather, carried baby-fashion. He blinked as he ran, and felt his head for his cap, half believing that he ran in a dream in very truth.
Mrs. Maystill stood at the cottage door, and the keeper, warned by the light, called from a little distance. “Here we are, Mrs. May,” he said, as cheerfully as might be. “He’s all right—just had a little accident, that’s all. So I’m carryin’ him. Don’t be frightened; get a little water—I think he’s got a bit of a cut on the head. But it’s nothing to fluster about.” . . . And so assuring and protesting, Bob brought the old man in.
The woman saw the staring grey face and the blood. “O-o-o—my God!” she quavered, stricken sick and pale. “He’s—he’s—”
“No, no. No, no! Keep steady and help. Shift the table, an’ I’ll put him down on the rug.”
She mastered herself, and said no more. The old man, whose babble had sunk to an indistinct mutter, was no sooner laid on the floor than he made a vague effort to rise, as though to continue on his way. But he was feebler than before, and Bob Smallpiece pressed him gently back upon the new-mended coat, doubled to make a pillow.
Nan May, tense and white, curbed her agitation,ministering and suffering in silence. Years before a man had been carried home to her thus, but then all was over, and after the first numbness grief could take its vent. Once she asked Bob Smallpiece, in a whisper, how it had happened. He told how little he knew, and save for passing the words to Bessy, wakened by unwonted sounds, Mrs. May said nothing. Bessy, in her nightgown, sat on the stairs, hugging her crutch, and sobbing with what quietness she could compel of herself.
There was a little brandy in a quartern bottle, and the keeper thought it well to force the spirit between the old man’s teeth, while Mrs. May bathed the head and washed away the clotted blood. As they did so the wheels of the doctor’s dog-cart were heard in the lane, and soon the doctor came in at the door, pulling off his gloves.
Johnny stood, pale, helpless, and still almost breathless, behind the group, while the doctor knelt at his grandfather’s side. There was a contused wound at the top of the head, the doctor could see, a little back, not serious. But blood still dripped from the ears, and the doctor shook his head. “Fracture of the base,” he said, as to himself.
Reviving a little, because of the brandy and the bathing, the old man once more made a motion as if torise, his eyes grew brighter, though fixed still, and his voice rose distinctly as ever.
“—took the bag in, yes. London’s comin’ fast, London’s comin’ an’ a-frightenin’ out the butterflies. London’s a-drivin’ the butterflies out o’ my round, out o’ my round, an’ butterflies can’t live near it. London’s out o’ my round an’ I’ve done my round an’ now I’ll give in the empty bag. Take the bag: an’ look for the pension. That’s the ’vantage o’ the Pos’-Office, John. Some gets pensions but some don’, but the butterflies’ll last my time I hope: an’ Haskins he kep’ bees, but I’m hopin’ to finish my roun’—” and so on and so on till the voice fell again and the muttering was fainter than before.
Bob Smallpiece stood awkwardly by, unwilling to remain a useless intruder, but just as reluctant to desert friends in trouble. Presently he bethought himself that work was still to do in inquiry how the old man’s hurt had befallen, whether by accident or attack; perhaps, indeed, to inform the police, and that in good time. So he asked, turning his hat about in his hands, if there was anything else he could do.
“Nothing more, Smallpiece, thanks,” the doctor said, with an unmistakable lift of the brows and a glance at the door.
“God bless you for helpin’ us, Mr. Smallpiece,” Mrs. May said as she let him out. “I’ll let you knowhow he is in the mornin’ if you can’t call.” And when the door was shut, “Go to bed, Johnny, my boy, and take a rest.” But Johnny went no farther than the stairs, and sat there with his sister.
The old man’s muttering ceased wholly, and he breathed heavily, stertorously. The doctor rose to his feet and turned to Mrs. May.
“Won’t you tell me, sir,” she said. “Is it—is it—”
“It is very serious,” the doctor said gravely; and added with impressive slowness, “very serious indeed.”
The woman took a grip of the table, and caught three quick breaths.
“You must keep yourself calm, and you must bear up. You must prepare yourself—in case of something very bad indeed.”
Twice she tried to speak, but was mute; and then, “No hope?” she said, more to sight than to hearing.
He put his hand kindly on her shoulder. “It would be wrong of me to encourage it,” he said. “As for what I can do, it is all over. . . . But you must bear up,” he went on firmly, as, guided to a chair, she bent forward and covered her face. “Drink this—” He took a small bottle from his bag, poured something into a cup and added water. “Drink it—drink it up; all of it. . . . I must go. . . . You’ve your children to think of, remember. Come to your mother, my boy. . . . ”
He was gone, and the children stood with their arms about their mother. The old man’s breathing, which had grown heavier and louder still, presently eased again, and his eyes closed drowsily. At this the woman looked up with an impossible hope in her heart. Truly, the breath was soft and natural, and the drawn lines had gone from the face: he must be sleeping. Why had she not thought to ask Bob Smallpiece to carry him up to bed? And why had the doctor not ordered it? Softly she turned the wet cloth that lay over the wound.
The breath grew lighter and still lighter, and more peaceful the face, till one might almost trace a smile. Quieter and quieter, and still more peaceful: till all was peace indeed.
Bob Smallpieceand a police-inspector busied themselves that night at Wormleyton Pits. The pits were none of them deep—six feet at most. At the bottom of the deepest they found old May’s lantern, with the glass broken and the candle overrun and extinguished; and the gravel was spotted with marks which, in the clearer light of the morning, were seen to be marks of blood. It was useless to look for foot-prints. The ground was dry, and, except in the pits themselves, it was covered with heather, whereon no such traces were possible. And this was all the police had to say at the inquest, whereat the jury gave a verdict of Accidental Death. For the old man had died, as was medically certified after post-mortem examination, of brain-laceration produced by fracture of the base of the skull; and the fracture was caused by percussion from a blow on the upper part of the head—a blow probably suffered by falling backward into the pit and striking the head against a large stone embedded at the bottom. Everything suggested such an explanation. Above the steepest wall of the pit, over which the fall must have chanced,a narrow ledge of ground ran between the brink and a close clump of bramble and bush; and this ledge was grown thick with tough heather, as apt, almost, as a tangle of wire, to catch the foot and cause a stumble. It was plain that, stooping to his occupation on this ledge, and perhaps forgetting his situation in the interest of his search, he had fallen backward into the pit with the lantern. He had probably lain there insensible for some while, and then, developing a crazed half-consciousness, he had crawled out by the easy slope at the farther end, and staggered off whithersoever his disjointed faculties might carry him. Nobody had seen him but his grandson and the keeper; so that the verdict was a matter of course, and the dismal inquiry was soon done with. And indeed the jury knew all there was to know, unless it were a trivial matter, of some professional interest to Bob Smallpiece, about which the police preferred to have nothing said; since it could not help the jury, though it might chance, later, to be of some use to themselves. It was simply the fact that several very fresh peg-holes were observed about the pits, hinting a tearing away of rabbit-snares with no care to hide the marks.
The days were bad dreams to Johnny. He found himself continually repeating in his mind that gran’dad was dead, gran’dad was dead; as though he wereforcing himself to learn a lesson that persistently slipped his memory. Well enough he knew it, and it puzzled him that he should find it so hard to believe, and, mostly, so easy a grief. As he woke in the morning the thought struck down his spirits, and then, with an instant revulsion, he doubted it was but the aftertaste of a dream. But there lay the empty half of the bed they were wont to share, and the lesson began again. He went about the house. Here was a sheet of gran’dad’s list of trades, pinned to the wall, there the unfinished case of moths for which the customer was waiting. These, and the shelves, and the breeding-boxes—all were as parts of the old man, impossible to consider apart from his active, white-headed figure. In some odd, hopeless way they seemed to suggest that it was all right, and that gran’dad was simply in the garden, or upstairs, or in the backhouse, and presently would come in as usual and put them all to their daily uses. And it was only by dint of stern concentration of thought that Johnny forced on himself the assurance that the old man would come among his cases no more, nor ever again discuss with him the list of London trades. Then the full conviction struck him sorely, like a blow behind the neck: the heavy stroke of bereavement and the sick fear of the world for his mother and sister, together. But there—he was merely torturing himself. He took refuge in a curious callousness, that he could call back very easilywhen he would. So the days went, but with each new day the intermissions of full realisation grew longer: till plain grief persisted in a leaden ache, rarely broken by a spell of apathy.
His mother and his sister went about household duties silently, not often apart. They were comforted in companionship, it seemed, but solitude brought tears and heartbreak. Nan May’s London upbringing caused her some thought of what her acquaintances there would have called a “proper” funeral. But here the machinery of such funerals must be brought from a distance, thus becoming doubly expensive; and this being the case, cottagers made very little emulation at such times, and a walking funeral—perhaps at best a cab from the rank at Loughton station—satisfied most. Moreover, the old man himself had many a time preached strong disapproval of money wasted on funerals; had, indeed, prophesied that if any costliness were wasted on him, he would rise from his coffin and kick a mute. So now that the time had come, a Theydon carpenter made the coffin, and a cab from Loughton was the whole show. The old man’s relations were not, and of Nan May’s most still alive were forgotten; for in the forest cottage the little family had been secluded from such connections, as by sundering seas. At first they had seemed too near for correspondence, and then they had been found too far for visiting. Uncle Isaac came to the funeral,however; and though in the beginning he seemed prepared for solemn declamation, something in the sober grief at the cottage made him unwontedly quiet.
It was a short coffin, accommodated under the cabman’s seat with no great protrusion at the ends; what there was being covered decently with a black cloth. And the cab held the mourners easily: Johnny and Bessy in their Sunday clothes, their mother in hers (they had always been black since she was first a widow) and Uncle Isaac in a creasy suit of lustrous black, oddly bunched and wrinkled at the seams: the conventional Sunday suit of his generation of artisans, folded carefully and long preserved, and designed to be available alike for church and for such funerals as might come to pass.
A brisk wind stirred the trees, and flung showers of fallen leaves after the shabby old four-wheeler as it climbed the lanes that led up to the little churchyard; where the sexton and his odd man waited with planks and ropes by the new-dug grave. It was a bright afternoon, but a fresh chill in the wind hinted the coming of winter. A belated Red Admiral seemed to chase the cab, fluttering this way or that, now by one window, now by the other, and again away over the hedge-top. Nothing was said. Now and again Johnny took his eyes from the open window to look at his companions. His mother, opposite, sat, pale and worn, with her handsin her lap, and gazed blankly over his head at the front window of the cab. She was commonly a woman of healthy skin and colour, but now the skin seemed coarser, and there was no colour but the pink about her red eyelids. Uncle Isaac, next her, sat forward, and rubbed his chin over and round the knob of his walking stick, a bamboo topped with a “Turk’s head” of tarred cord. As for Bessy, sitting at the far end of his own seat, Johnny saw nothing of her face for her handkerchief and the crutch-handle. But she was very quiet, and he scarcely thought she was crying. For himself, he was sad enough, in a heavy way, but in no danger of tears; and he turned again, and looked out of the window.
At last the cab stopped at the lych gate. Here Bob Smallpiece unexpectedly appeared, to lend a hand with the coffin. So that with the sexton, and the carpenter who was the undertaker, Uncle Isaac, and the keeper, the cabman’s help was not wanted. The cabman lingered a moment, to shift cloths and aprons, and to throw a glance or two after the little company as it followed the clergyman, and then he hastened to climb to his seat and drive after a young couple that he spied walking in the main road; for they were strangers, and looked a likely fare back to the station.
Johnny found church much as it was on Sunday, except that to-day they sat near the front, and that hewas conscious of a faint sense of family importance by reason of the special service, and the coffin so conspicuously displayed. A few neighbours—women mostly—were there, too; and when the coffin was carried out to the grave, they grouped themselves a little way off in the background, with Bob Smallpiece farther back still.
From the grave’s edge one looked down over the country-side, green and hilly, and marked out in meadows by rows of elms, with hedges at foot. The wind came up briskly and set the dead leaves going again and again, chasing them among the tombs and casting them into the new red grave. Bessy was quiet no longer, but sobbed aloud, and Nan May took no more care to dry her eyes. Johnny made an effort that brought him near to choking, and then another; and then he fixed his attention on the cows in a meadow below, counted them with brimming eyes, and named them (for he knew them well) as accurately as the distance would let him. He would scarce trust himself to take a last look, with the others, at the coffin below and its bright tin plate, but fell straightway to watching a man mending thatch on a barn, and wondering that he wore neither coat nor waistcoat in such a fresh wind. And so, except for a stray tear or two, which nobody saw overflow from the brimming eyes, he faced it out, and walked away with the others under the curious gaze of the neighbours, who lined up by the path. And Smallpiece went off inthe opposite direction with the carpenter, who carried back the pall folded over his arm, like a cloak.
The four mourners walked back by the lanes, in silence. Uncle Isaac bore the restraint with difficulty, and glanced uneasily at Nan May’s face from time to time, as though he were watching an opportunity to expound his sentiments at length. But Johnny saw nothing of this, for affliction was upon him. Now that gran’dad was passed away indeed—was buried, and the clods were rising quickly over him—now that even the coffin was gone from the cottage, and would never be seen again—it seemed that he had never understood before, and he awoke to the full bitterness of things. More, his effort at restraint was spent, and in the revulsion he found he could hold in no longer. He peeped into the thickets by the lane-side as he went, questing for an excuse to drop behind. Seeing no other, he stooped and feigned to tie his bootlace; calling, in a voice that quavered absurdly in trying to seem indifferent, “Go on, mother, I’m comin’ presently!”
He dashed among the bushes, flung himself on the grass, and burst into a blind fury of tears, writhing as though under a shower of stinging blows. He had meant to cry quietly, but all was past control, and any might hear that chanced by. He scarce knew whether the fit had endured for seconds, minutes, or hours, when he was aware of his mother, sitting beside him and pressinghis bursting head to her breast. Bessy was there too, and his mother’s arms were round both alike.
With that he grew quieter and quieter still. “We mustn’t break down, Johnny boy—there’s hard struggles before us,” his mother said, smoothing back his hair. “An’ you must be very good to me, Johnny, you’re the man now!”
He kissed her, and brushed the last of his tears away. “Yes, mother, I will,” he said. He rose, calmer, awake to new responsibilities, and felt a man indeed. Nothing remained of his outbreak but a chance-coming shudder in the breath, and, as he helped Bessy to her feet, he saw, five yards off, among the bushes, Uncle Isaac, under his very tall hat, gazing blankly at the group, and gently rubbing the Turk’s head on his stick among the loose grey whiskers that bordered his large face.
Nan Mayrose another woman in the morning; for there was work before her. The children marvelled to see her so calm and so busy, so full of thought for the business in hand, so little occupied with sorrowful remembrance. The old man, prudent ever, had arranged years since for what had now befallen. There was a simple little will on a sheet of notepaper. There was a great and complicated list, on odd scraps of paper, thickly beset with additions, alterations, and crossings-out, of the “specimens” hoarded in the cottage; with pencil notes of values, each revised a dozen times, as the market changed. There was a Post-Office Savings Bank deposit book, with entries amounting to eight pounds ten, and a nomination form whereby Nan May might withdraw the money. There was no life-insurance, for the old man had surrendered it years ago, to secure the few pounds he needed to make up the full price of the cottage.
The will gave Nan May all there might be to take, and left her to execute. Uncle Isaac, on the return to the cottage the day before, had at length broken intospeech, and by devious approaches, cunningly disguised and ostentatiously casual, had reached the will. But he got little by his motion, for though his niece told him the will’s purport, she protested that till to-morrow she should do nothing with it, nor did she even offer to produce it. Of course, he had scarcely expected a legacy himself; but still, he was Uncle Isaac, profound in experience, learned in the law, and an oracle in the family. It seemed, to say the least, a little scandalous that he should not have had the handling of this property, the selling, the control, the doling out, with such consideration the exertion might earn, and the accidents of arithmetic detach.
“It’s an important thing, is a will,” said Uncle Isaac sagely. “A thing as ought to be seen to by a experienced person. You might jist look an’ see ’ow it’s wrote. If any’s wrote in pencil it’s nullavoid.”
“No,” replied Mrs. May, without moving. “It’s all in ink.”
Then, after a long pause: “Lawyers comes very expensive with wills,” Uncle Isaac observed. “They come expensive alwis, an’ mostly they rob the property accordin’ to form o’ lawr. It’s best to get a man of experience, as you can trust, to go straight to Somerset ’ouse in form o’ porpus . . . It’s the cheapest way, an’ safe. ’E takes the will, jist as it might be me, an’ ’e goes to the ’thorities, an’ ’e talks to ’em, knowin’ an’confidential. ’Ere I am, ses ’e, as it might be me, on be’alf o’ the last will an’ ’oly testament as it might be o’ Mr. May. An’ I’ve come in form o’ porpus, ’avin’ objections to lawyers. In form o’ porpus,” Uncle Isaac repeated impressively, tapping a forefinger on the table: as was his way of blazoning an erudite phrase that else might pass unregarded.
“Poor gran’dad told me what to do about goin’ to Somerset House, an’ all that,” answered Nan May, “in case anything happened. But I’d take it very kind if you’d come with me, Uncle Isaac, me not understandin’ such things. But I can’t think about it to-day.” And with so much of his finger in the pie Uncle Isaac was fain to be content. And soon he left, declining to stay for the night—to Johnny’s great relief—because his cheap return-ticket was available for the day and no more.
And now Johnny, having brought sheets of foolscap paper from Loughton, was set to work to make a fair copy of the amazing list of specimens; a work at great length accomplished in an unstable round hand, but on the whole with not so many blots. And Nan May’s series of visits to Somerset House was begun, saddening her with a cost of one and ninepence each visit for fares in train and omnibus. The first, indeed, cost more, for Uncle Isaac’s fare from Millwall was also to be paid.But he came no more, for in truth his failure as a man of business was instant and ignoble.
To begin with, the shadow of the awful building fell on him as he neared it, extinguishing his confidence and stopping his tongue. In the quadrangle the very tall hat distinguished an Uncle Isaac of hushed speech and meek docility, and along the corridors it followed Nan May deferentially, in unresting pursuit of room No. 37. The room was reached at last, and here Uncle Isaac found himself constrained to open the business. For Nan May herself held back now, and the young man in gold-rimmed glasses fixed him with his eye. So, taking off his hat with both hands, Uncle Isaac, in a humble murmur, began:—“We’ve—good mornin’, sir—we’ve come as it might be in form o’ porpus—”
“What?”
“As regards to a will,” Uncle Isaac explained desperately, dropping his technicality like a hot rivet. “As regards to a will an’ dyin’ testament which the late deceased did—did write out.”
“Very well. Are you the executor?”
“Well, sir, not as it might be executor. No. But as uncle to Mr. May’s daughter-in-law by marriage—”
“Areyou?” The gentleman turned abruptly to Nan May, who gave him the will. Whereupon Uncle Isaac, in a hopeful way of recovering nerve and eloquence, was thrust out of the business, and told that Nan May alonewould be dealt with. And he retired once more into shadow, with a little relief to leaven a great deal of injured dignity.
So that for the rest Nan May relied on herself alone, and hardened her face to the world. When the specimens came to be sold, a smart young man came from the London firm of naturalists, to make an offer. He examined the trays and cases as hastily and carelessly as was consistent with a privily sharp eye to all they held, and with the air of contempt proper for a professional buyer. For in such a matter of business the widow and the orphan needing money are the weak party, humble and timid, watching small signs with sinking hearts, and easy to beat: and a man of business worth the name of one, takes advantage of the fact for every penny it will bring. So the smart young man, looking more contemptuous than ever, and dusting his fingers with his pocket-handkerchief, flung Nan May an offer of five pounds for the lot.
“No, thank-you, sir,” the woman answered with simple decision. “I’m sorry you’ve had the trouble. Good-morning.” Which was not the reply the young man had looked for, and indeed, not a reply easy of rejoinder. So he was constrained to some unbending of manner, and a hint that his firm might increase the offer if she would name a sum. And the whole thing ended with a letter carrying a cheque for forty pounds. Which wasvery handsome indeed, for the young man’s firm would scarce have paid more than eighty pounds for the collection In the ordinary way of trade.
And so the old man’s little affairs were gathered up, and the Inland Revenue took its bite out of the estate, and there were no more journeys to Somerset House. But nobody would buy the cottage.
Justsuch a day as Johnny’s London memories always brought, cold and dry and brisk, found him perched on the cart that was to take him to London again. Besides himself, the cart held his mother and his sister, and the household furniture from the cottage; while Banks, the carrier, sat on the shaft. Bessy was made comfortable in the armchair; her mother sat on a bundle of bedding, whence it was convenient to descend when steep hills were encountered; and Johnny sat on the tail-board, and jumped off and on as the humour took him.
All through long Loughton village there was something of a triumphal progress, for people knew them, and turned to look. Bessy alone remained in the cart for the long pull up Buckhurst Hill, while Johnny, tramping beside and making many excursions into the thicket, flung up into her lap sprigs of holly with berries. Already they had plenty, packed close in a box, but it is better to have too much than too little, so any promising head was added to the store. For it was December, and Christmas would come in three weeks or so. And erethat Nan May was to open shop in London. It was to be a chandler’s shop, with aspirations toward grocery and butter: chandlery, grocery, and butter being things of the buying and selling whereof Nan May knew as little as anybody in the world, beyond the usual retail prices at the forest villages. But something must be done, and everything has a beginning somewhere. So Nan May resolutely set face to the work, to play the world with all the rigour of the game; and her figure, as she tramped sturdily up the hill beside the cart, was visible symbol of her courage. Always a healthy, clear-skinned, almost a handsome woman, active and shapely, she walked the hill with something of steadfast fierceness, as one joying in trampling an obstacle: her eyes fixed before her, and taking no heed of the view that opened to Bessy’s gaze as she looked back from under the tilt of the cart; but busy with thought of the fight she was beginning, a little fearful, but by so much the gamer. Meanwhile, it was a good piece of business to decorate a shop with holly at Christmas, and here Johnny found holly ready for the work; it would cost money in London.
The cart crowned the hill-top, and still Nan May regarded not the show that lay behind, whereof Bessy took her fill for the moments still left. There Loughton tumbled about its green hills, beset with dusky trees, like a spilt boxful of toys, with the sad-coloured forest making the horizon line behind it. Away to the left, seenbetween the boughs of the near pines, High Beach steeple lifted from the velvety edge, and as far to the right, on its own hill, rose the square church tower that stood by gran’dad’s grave. And where the bold curve of Staples Hill lost itself among the woods, some tall brown trees uprose above the rest and gave good-bye. For invisible beyond them lay the empty cottage in its patch of garden, grown dank and waste. Then roadside trees shut all out, and the cart stopped on the level to take up Nan May.
And now the old mare jogged faster along to Woodford Wells and through the Green, fringed with a wonder of big houses, and many broad miles of country seen between them; then, farther, down the easy slope of Rising Sun Road, with thick woods at the way’s edge on each side, their winter austerity softened by the sunlight among the brown twigs. And so on and on, till they emerged in bushy Leyton Flats, and turned off for Leytonstone.
And now they were nearing London indeed. Once past the Green Man, they were on a tram-lined road, and there were shops and houses with scarce a break. Where there was one bricklayers on scaffoldings were building shopfronts. The new shops had a raw, disagreeable look, and some of these a little older were just old enough to be dirty without being a whit less disagreeable and raw.Some were prosperous, brilliant with gilt and plate-glass; others, which had started even with them, stood confessed failures, poor and mean, with a pathetic air—almost an expression—of disappointment in every window. Older buildings—some very old—stood about Harrow Green, but already the wreckers had begun to pull a cottage down to make room for something else. And then the new shops began again, and lined the road without a check, till they were new no longer, but of the uncertain age of commonplace London brick and mortar; and Maryland Point Railway Station was passed; and it was town indeed, with clatter and smoke and mud.
Stratford Broadway lay wide and busy, wth the church and the town-hall imposing and large. But soon the road narrowed and grew fouler, and the mouths of unclean alleys dribbled slush and dirty children across the pavement. Then there were factories, and the road passed over narrow canals of curiously iridescent sludge, too thick, to the casual eye, for the passage of any craft, but interesting to the casual nose. And there was a great, low, misty waste of the dullest possible rubbish, where grass would not grow; a more hopelessly desolate and dispiriting wilderness than Johnny had ever dreamed of or Bessy ever read; with a chemical manure-works in a far corner, having a smell of great volume and range.
They topped Bow Bridge, and turned sharply to the left. Now it was London itself, London by Act of Parliament. There was a narrow way with a few wharf gates, and then an open space, with houses centuries old, fallen on leaner years, but still grubbily picturesque. Hence the old mare trotted through a long and winding street that led by dirty entries, by shops, by big distilleries, by clean, dull houses where managers lived, by wooden inns swinging ancient signs, over canal bridges: to a place of many streets lying regularly at right angles, all of small houses, all clean, every one a counterpart of every other. And then—the docks and the ships. At least, the great dock-gates, with the giant pepper-box and the clock above them, and the high walls, with here and there a mast. And at intervals, as the houses permitted, the high walls and the masts were visible again and again in the short way yet to go, pass Blackwall Cross, till at last the cart stopped before a little shut-up shop, badly in want of paint; in a street where one gained the house-doors down areas maybe, or up steps, or on the level, from a pavement a little more than two feet wide; while the doors themselves, and the wooden rails that guarded all the steps, were painted in divers unaccustomed and original colours, and had nothing in common but a subtle flavour of ship’s stores. Over the way was the wall of a ship-yard. And wheresoever there might be aview of houses from the back, there were small flagstaffs rigged as masts, with gaffs complete.
The door of the little shop opened, after a short struggle with the rusty lock, and Nan May and her children were at home in London.
Theshop in Harbour Lane had been a greengrocer’s, a barber’s, a fried-fishmonger’s, and a tripe-seller’s. But chiefly it had been shut up, as it was now. Nobody had ever come into it with much money, it is true, but all had gone out of it with less than they brought. It was said, indeed, that the greengrocer had gone out with nothing but the clothes he wore; but as he went no farther than the end of the street, where he drowned himself from a swing bridge, he needed no more, nor even so much. Mr. Dunkin, the landlord, had bought the place at a low price, as was his way in buying things; but he got very little out of his investment, which was not his way at all. It was a novelty that surprised and irritated Mr. Dunkin. He was a substantial tradesman, who had long relinquished counter work, for there were a dozen assistants in the two departments of his chief shop, eight for grocery and butter, and four for oil and saucepans, paint and mousetraps; and there were half a dozen branches, some in the one trade and some in the other, scattered about in as many neighbouring parishes. He was a large man, of vastsympathy. The tone of his voice, the grasp of his wide, pulpy hand, told of infinite tenderness toward the sorrows and sins of the world. Even in the early days when he had but one shop (a little one) and no shopman, he would weigh out a pound of treacle with so melting a benignity that the treacle seemed balm of Gilead, and a bounteous gift at the price. He would drive a bargain in a voice of yearning beneficence that left the other party ashamed of his own self-seeking, as well as something the poorer by the deal. It was a voice wherein a purr had a large part—a purr that was hoarse yet soothing, and eloquent of compassion; so that no man was so happy but a talk with Mr. Dunkin would persuade him that the lot was hard indeed, that entitled him to such a wealth of sympathy. It was a wealth that Mr. Dunkin squandered with no restraint but this, that it carried no other sort of wealth with it.
On the whole, Nan May had counted herself fortunate in falling in with Mr. Dunkin. For when, in his fatherly solicitude, he discovered that she had a little money in hand, he undertook to supply her with stock, and to give her certain hints in the mystery of chandlery. He, also, felt no cause for complaint: for he had hoped for a tenant merely, and here was tenant and customer in one. More, she was a widow, knowing nothing of trade, so that it might be possible to sell her what others would not buy, at a little extra profit. As torent, moreover, he was doing well. For on the day the deposit was paid, Mrs. May had found little choice among vacant shops, and this was in a situation to suit her plans as to Johnny and his trade; and as she was tired and nervous, full of plain anxiety, sympathetic Mr. Dunkin saw his chance of trying for an extra shilling a week, and got it. And Nan May was left to pay for what painting and cleaning the place might need. It needed a good deal, as Mr. Dunkin had ruefully observed two days before, in expectation of a decorator’s bill if ever a tenant came.
And now Nan May addressed herself to the work. First, the house must be cleaned; the paint could be considered after. She had swept one room into a habitable state on her last day in town, and here her little store of furniture was stacked. Then, her sleeves and her skirt turned back, and a duster over her head, she assailed walls and ceilings with a broom, and after these the floors. So far Johnny helped, but when scrubbing began he hindered. So it was that for a day or so, until it was time for him to help with the windows, he had leisure wherein to make himself acquainted with the neighbourhood.
It was a neighbourhood with a flavour distinct from that of the districts about it. There the flat rows of six-roomed cottages, characterless all, stretchedeverywhere, rank behind rank, in masses unbroken except by the busier thoroughfares of shops. Here each little house asserted its individuality by diversity of paint as much as by diversity of shape. It was, indeed, the last stronghold of the shipwrights and mast-makers, fallen from their high estate since the invasion of iron ships and northern competition. In fact, Shipwrights’ Row was the name of a short rank of cottages close by, with gardens in front, each with its mast and flag complete. In other places, where the back-yards were very small, the flagstaff and stays were apt to take to their use the whole space: the pole rising from the exact centre, and a stay taking its purchase from each extreme corner, so that anybody essaying a circuit must perform it with many sudden obeisances. The little streets had an air of cleanliness all their own, largely due to the fresh paint that embellished whatsoever there was an excuse for painting. Many front-doors were reached by two stone steps, always well whitened; and whether there were steps or not, the flagstones before each threshold were distinguished by a whited semicircle five feet in diameter. Noting this curious fact as he tramped along one such street, Johnny was startled by an angry voice close at his elbow, a voice so very sudden and irate that he jumped aside ere he looked for the source. A red-faced woman knelt within a door.
“Idle young faggit!” she said. “Stompin’ yer muddyboots all over my clean step!” And she made so vigorous a grasp at a broom that Johnny went five yards at a gallop.
Now truly there was no step of any sort to the house. And Johnny had but crossed the semicircle because he conceived the footpath to be public property, and because it was narrow. But he learnt, afterwards, that the semicircle was a sacred institution of the place, in as high regard among the women as its fellow-fetish, the flagstaff, was among the men; also that none but grown people—and those of low habits or in drink—dared trespass on it; and that it was always called “the step.” He learnt much, too, in the matter of paint. Every male inhabitant of Harbour Lane, Shipwrights’ Row, and the neighbouring streets, carried, in his leisure moments, a pipe, a pot of paint, and a brush. He puffed comfortably at the pipe, and stumped about his back (or front) garden with the paint-pot in one hand and the brush in the other, “touching-up” whatever paint would stick to. Rails, posts, water-butts, dustbins, clothes-posts, all were treated, not because they needed it (for they were scarce dry from the last coat), but because there was the paint, and there was the brush, and there was the leisure; and this was the only way to use all three. So that most things about the gardens took an interesting variety of tints in the run of the year, since it was rarely the case that the samecolour was used twice in succession. When all wooden surfaces were covered, it was customary to take a turn at window-sills, rain-water pipes, and the stones or oyster-shells that bordered the little flower-beds; and when nothing else was left, then the paint-pot and the brush and the pipe were conveyed to the front, and the front-door, which had been green, became royal blue, or flaming salmon; as did the railings, if there were any, and the window-frames. Two things alone were not subject to such changes of complexion: the flagstaff and the brick pavings. For it was a law immutable that the flagstaffs should be speckless white, and the bricks a cheerful vermilion; this last a colour frequently renewed, because of nailed boots, but done in good oil paint, because of wet weather. Everything else took the range of the rainbow, and something beyond; so that it was possible, in those houses where two families lived, to tell at a glance whether the upstairs family were on terms of intimacy or merely of distant civility with the downstairs, by the colours, uniform or diverse, of the sills and the model fences that guarded the flower-pots on them. For the token and sign of friendship in Harbour Lane was the loan or the exchange of paint. It was the proper method of breaking the ice between new acquaintances, and was recognised as such by general sanction. The greeting, “Bit o’ blue paint any use to ye?” and the offer of the pot across theback fence, were the Harbour Lane equivalents of a call and cards; and the newcomer made early haste with an offer of yellow or green paint in return. Indeed, it was in this way that the paint arrived which afterwards made Nan May’s little shop a bedazzlement to the wayfarer, and furnished Johnny with the first painting job he ever grew tired of. But newcomers were rare in the neighbourhood, for it was a colony apart, with independent manners and habits of thought. True, it had its own divisions and differences: as, for instance, on the question whether or not the association of the paint-pot and brush with the Sunday paper were sinful; but these divisions were purely internal, and nothing was heard of them beyond the boundaries.
But paint was something more than a recreation and an instrument of social amenity. It furnished the colony with an equivalent of high finance, wherein all the operations proper to Money and Credit (as spelt with capital initials) were reflected in Paint. For it was a permanent condition of life in Harbour Lane and thereabouts, that everybody owed everybody else some amount of Paint, and was owed Paint, in his turn, by others. So that a complicated system of exchange prevailed, in which verbal bills and cheques were drawn. As thus, to make a simple case:
“’Ullo, Bill, what about that pot o’ paint?”
“Well, I was goin’ to bring it round to-night.”
“All right. But don’t bring it to me—take it to George. Ye see, I owe Jim a bit o’ paint, an’ ’e owes Joe a bit, an’ Joe owes George a bit. So that’ll make it right all round. Don’t forget!”
With many such arrangements synchronising, crossing and mixing with each other, and made intricate by differing degrees and manners of debit and credit between Bill and George and Jim and Joe, the unlikely subject of Paint became involved in a mathematical web of exceeding interest, a small image of the Money Market, a sort of chaos by double entry wherein few operators were able to strike a balance at a moment, and most were vaguely uncertain whether their accounts inclined toward an affluence of Paint or toward sheer bankruptcy. An exciting result attained without the aid of capital, and with no serious hurt to anybody.
But these were things that Johnny learned in the succeeding weeks. In his walks while his mother scrubbed floors at home, he observed one or two matters. As to costume, he perceived that the men wore blue dungaree jackets with large bone buttons, and outside these, now that it was winter, short pilot coats of dark blue stuff, thick and stiff, like a board. The trousers were moleskins, perhaps once white, all stained with very shiny black patches, and all of one cut, which placed the seat (very baggy) a few inches above thebend of the knee; and there was a peaked cap, of the same shiny black all over that distinguished parts of the trousers. He also saw that whereas yesterday the backyards were brisk with fluttering linen, to-day they held scarce any. For yesterday was Monday, and it was matter of pride among the energetic housewives of the place to get washing done at the beginning of the week. For a woman fell in her neighbours’ respect the later in the week her washing day came.
So Johnny explored the streets with wide eyes and a full heart. For here was London, where they made great things—ships and engines. There were places he fancied he recognised—great blank walls with masts behind them. But now the masts seemed fewer and shorter than in the old days: as in truth they were, for now more of the ships were steamships, filling greater space for half the show of mast. Then in other places he came on basins filled with none but sailing-ships, and here the masts were as tall and fine as ever, stayed with much cordage, and had their yards slung at a gallant slope, like the sword on Sir Walter Raleigh’s hip. And at Blackwall Stairs, looking across the river, stood an old, old house that Johnny stared at for minutes together: a month or two later he heard the tradition that Sir Walter Raleigh himself had lived there. It was first of a row of old waterside buildings, the newest of which had looked across, and almost fallen into, theriver, when King George’s ships had anchored off Blackwall—and King Charles’s for that matter. There, too, stood the Artichoke Tavern, clean and white and wooden, a heap of gables and windows all out of perpendicular: a house widest and biggest everywhere at the top, and smallest at the ground floor; a house that seemed ready to topple into the river at a push, so far did its walls and galleries overhang the water, and so slender were the piles that supported them. Here, in the square space on the quay, brown men in blue jerseys sold bloaters by the score, stringing them through the gills with tarry yarn; and half the brown men wore earrings. Below, on the foreshore, lay many boats, and children ran among them, or raked for river-mussels among the stones.
In another place he came on just such market-streets as he remembered to have trotted along, at his mother’s side, in the old London life; though now, indeed, they seemed something dirtier and meaner, and the people seemed less cheerful. But this was a place away from Harbour Lane—a neighbourhood of dull and dingy rows of little houses, range on range. And still farther he found another street of shops, or rather half a street, for one side was a blank wall. But no great skeleton ship lifted its ribs above the bricks, and no hammers clanged behind them; for it was a ship-yard abandoned, and a painted board, thick with grime, offered the placefor sale or hire. Some of the shops opposite were abandoned too, and the others were poor and dull. Johnny walked a few steps backward, looking at the shops, and when he turned about at a corner, he almost scorched himself at a coke fire where chestnuts were roasting; and there behind the fire stood the pockmarked man himself, not a whit altered! There he stood, with his hands deep in his pockets, and tapped the kerb with his clogged boots, just as he had stood when the great ship was making, and the lights flared round it, and the shops were all open and busy: perhaps the pitted face was a trifle paler, but that was all.
But Harbour Lane and thereabout were the most interesting parts, and the pleasantest for Johnny. Just beyond the Stairs, and the old houses, and the Artichoke Tavern, was a dock-inlet, with an extraordinary bridge that halved in the middle, and swung back to each of two quays, to let ships through. Men worked it quite easily, with a winch, and Johnny could have watched for an hour. But just here he caught sight of an acquaintance. For down on the quay below the bridge-end, sitting on a mooring-post, was Mr. Butson. A trifle seedy and fallen in condition, Johnny fancied, and grumly ill-used as ever. As Johnny looked, Mr. Butson took a pipe from his pocket, and a screw of paper. The paper yielded nothing. Mr. Butson raked throughboth jacket-pockets, and scowled at his empty hands. In the end, after a gloomy inspection of the pipe, he put it away and returned to savage meditation. And Johnny went home.
Itwas at Maidment and Hurst’s, engineers, that Johnny’s father had met his death; and it was to Maidment and Hurst that Nan had resolved to take the boy, and beg an apprenticeship for him. True, the firm had at the time done more than might have been expected of it, for the accident had been largely a matter of heedlessness on the victim’s part, and the victim was no old hand, but had taken his job only a few months before. It had seen that nothing was lacking for the widow’s immediate needs, nor for a decent funeral; and it had offered to find places in an orphanage for the children. But Nan May could not bring herself to part with them: Bessie, indeed, was barely out of the hospital at the time. And then the lonely old butterfly-hunter had cut matters short by carrying them off all three.
So that now, if Johnny were to learn a trade, Maidment and Hurst’s was his best chance, for it was just possible that the firm would take him apprentice without premium, when it was reminded of his father. In this thing Nan May wasted no time. The house once clean within, and something done toward stocking the shop,Johnny was made ready, in the best of his clothes, for inspection. It was a muddy morning, and Mrs. May had fears for the polish on Johnny’s boots. Gladly would she have carried him across the miry streets, as she had done in the London of years ago, though she knew better than to hint at such an outrage on his dignity. So they walked warily, dodging puddles with mutual warnings, and fleeing the splashes of passing vans. Truly London was changed, even more in Nan May’s eyes than in Johnny’s. The people seemed greyer, more anxious, worse fed, than when she lived among them before, a young wife in a smiling world, with the best part of thirty-eight shillings to spend every week. The shops were worse stocked, and many that she remembered well were shut. True, some flourished signs of prosperity, but to her it seemed prosperity of a different and a paltrier sort—vulgar and trumpery. Once out of the Harbour Lane district, the little houses lacked the snug, geranium-decked, wire-blinded, rep-curtained comfort of aspect she remembered so well—the air that suggested a red fire within, a shining copper kettle, a high fender, and muffins on a trivet. Things were cheap, and cold, and grubby. Above all, the silent ship-yards oppressed her fancies. Truly, this looked an ill place for new trade! In her hunt for the vacant shop she had encountered no old friends, and now, though she walked through familiar streets, she had little but fanciedrecognition, now and again, of some face at a shop door.
Presently they turned a corner and came upon a joyful crowd of boys. They ran, they yelled, they flung, and in their midst cursed and floundered a rusty rag of a woman, drunk and infuriate, harried, battered and bedeviled. Her clothes were of decent black, but dusty and neglected, and one side of her skirt dripped with fresh mud. Her hair was draggled about her shoulders, and her bonnet hung in it, a bunch of mangled crape, while she staggered hither and thither, making futile swipes at the nimble rascals about her. She struck out feebly with a little parcel of bacon-rashers rolled in a paper, and already a rasher had escaped, to be flung at her head, and flung again by the hand that could first snatch it from the gutter.
“Yah! Old Mother Born-drunk!” shouted the young savages, and two swooped again with the stretched skipping-rope that had already tripped their victim twice. But she clasped a post with both arms, and cursed at large, hoarse and impotent.
Nan May started and stood, and then hurried on. For she had recognised a face at last, grimed and bloated though it had grown. “Law!” she said, “it’s Emma Pacey! To think—to think of it!”
Indeed the shock was great, and the change amazing. It was a change that would have baffled recognition byan eye that had less closely noted the Emma Pacey of seventeen years ago. But Emma Pacey was a smart girl then (though fast and forward, Nan May had always said), and had caused some little disturbance in a course of true love which led, nevertheless, to Nan’s wedding after all. In such circumstances a woman views her rival’s face, as she views her clothes, with a searching eye, and remembers well. “And to come to that!” mused Nan May, perplexed at a shade of emotion that seemed ill-turned to the occasion, wherein the simple soul saw nothing of womanish triumph.
But the changes seemed not all for the worse. There were busy factories, and some that had been small were now large. Coffee-stalls, too, were set up in two or three places, where no such accommodation was in the old time: always a sign of increasing trade. But on the whole the walk did nothing to raise Nan’s spirits.
Johnny saw little. The excursion was to decide whether he should learn to make steam-engines or not, though what manner of adventure he was to encounter he figured but vaguely. He was to come into presence of some gentlemen, presumably—gentlemen who would settle his whole destiny off-hand, on a cursory examination of his appearance and manner. He must be alert to show his best behaviour, though what things the gentlemen might do or say, and what unforeseen problems of conduct might present themselves, were past guessing;though he guessed and guessed, oblivious of present circumstance. Only once before had he felt quite that quality of trepidation, and that was three years back, when he trudged along the road to Woodford to get a tooth drawn.
But he came off very well, though the preliminaries were solemn—rather more portentous, he thought, than anything in the dentist’s waiting-room. There was a sort of counter, with bright brass rails, and a ground-glass box with an office-boy inside it. The unprecedented and unbusinesslike apparition of Mrs. May, with a timid request to see Mr. Maidment or Mr. Hurst (one was dead, and the other never came near the place), wholly demoralised the office-boy, who retired upon his supports in the depths of the office. Thence there presently emerged a junior clerk, who, after certain questions, undertook to see if the acting partner were in. Then came a time of stealthy and distrustful inspection on the part of the office-boy, who, having regained his box, and gathered up his wits, began to suspect Johnny of designs on his situation. But at last Johnny and his mother were shown into an inner room, furnished with expensive austerity, where a gentleman of thirty or thirty-five (himself expensively austere of mien) sat at a writing-table. The gentleman asked Mrs. May one or two rather abrupt questions about her dead husband—dates, and so forth—and referred to certain notes on his table after eachanswer. Then Nan offered him one of three papers which she had been fiddling in her hand since first she passed the street door—her marriage “lines.”
“O, ah, yes—yes—of course,” said the gentleman with some change of manner. “Of course. Quite right. Best to make sure—can’t remember everybody. Sit down, Mrs. May. Come here, my boy. So you want to be an engineer, eh?”
“Yes, sir, if you please.” He never thought it would be quite so hard to get it out.
“Ah. Plenty of hard work, you know. Not afraid of that, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen next month, sir.”
“Get on all right at school? What standard?”
“Passed seventh, sir.”
Mrs. May handed over her other two papers: a “character” from the schoolmaster and another from the rector.
When the gentleman had read them, “Yes, yes, very good—very good, indeed,” he said. “But you’ve not finished learning yet, you know, my boy, if you’re to be an engineer. Fond of drawing?”
“Yes, sir.”
And Nan May chimed in: “O, yes, sir, very fond.”
“Well, if you stick well at your drawing in theevenings, and learn the theory, you’ll be a foreman some day—perhaps a manager. It all depends on yourself. You shall have a chance to show us what you’re made of. That’s all we can do—the rest is for yourself, as I’ve said.”
“Yes, sir, thank-you, sir—I’ll try.” And Mrs. May was audibly thankful too, and confident of Johnny.
“Very well, it’s settled.” The gentleman rang a bell, and bade the junior clerk “Just send for Cottam.”
“I have sent for the foreman,” he went on, “whose shop you will be in. He’ll look after you as long as you behave well and keep up to your work. You won’t see me very often, but I shall know all about you, remember.” And he turned to his table, and wrote.
Presently there was a sudden thump at the door, which opened slowly and admitted the foremost part—it was the abdomen—of Cottam the foreman. He was of middle height, though he seemed short by reason of his corpulence; deliberate in all his movements, yet hard, muscular, and active. He turned, as it were on his own axis, at the edge of the door, shut it with one hand, while he dangled a marine peaked cap in the other; and looked, with serene composure, from over his scrub of grey beard, first at Mrs. May, then at Johnny, and last at his employer.
“Oh, Cottam,” the gentleman said, writing one more word, and letting drop his pen, “this lad’s name is JohnMay. I expect you’ll remember his father. Bad accident, I believe, in the heavy turning shop; died, in fact.” This with a slight glance at Nan May.
The foreman turned—turned his whole person, for his head was set on his vast shoulders with no visible neck between—bent a trifle, and inspected Johnny as he would have inspected some wholly novel and revolutionary piece of machinery. “Y-u-u-us,” he said, with a slowly rising inflection, expressive of cautious toleration, as of one reserving a definite opinion. “Y-u-u-us!”
“Well, he’s to come on as apprentice, and I’d like him to come into your shop. There’ll be no difficulty about that, will there?”
“N-o-o-o!” with the same deliberate inflection, similarly expressive.
“Then you’d better take him down, and tell the timekeeper. He may as well begin on Monday, I suppose.”
“Y-u-u-us!” tuned once more in an ascending scale. And with that the acting partner bade Mrs. May good-morning, turned to his writing, and the business was over.
Cottam the foreman put his cap on his head and led the way through the outer office, along a corridor, down the stairs and across the yard, with no indecent haste. It was a good distance to go, and Johnny was vaguely reminded of a circus procession that had oncepassed through Loughton, and that he had followed up for nearly three miles, behind the elephant.
Half-way across the yard the foreman stopped, and made a half turn, so as to face Nan May as she came up. He raised an immense leathery fist, and jerked a commensurate thumb over his shoulder. “That’s the young guv’nor,” he said in a hoarse whisper, with a confidential twitch of one cheek that was almost a wink. “That’s the young guv’nor, that is. Smart young chap. Knowed ’im so ’igh.” He brought down his hand to the level of his lowest waistcoat button, twitched his cheek again, nodded, and walked on.
The timekeeper inhabited a little wooden cabin just within the gates, and looked out of a pigeon-hole at all comers. Mr. Cottam put his head into this hole—a close fit—and when he withdrew it, the timekeeper, a grey man, came out of his side door and stared hard at Johnny. Then he growled “All right,” and went in again.
“Six o’clock o’ Monday mornin’,” Mr. Cottam pronounced conclusively, addressing Mrs. May. “Six o’clock o’ Monday mornin’.’Ere,” with a downward jerk of his thumb to make it plain that somewhere else would not do. Then, without a glance at Johnny, whom he had disregarded since they left the office, he turned and walked off. Johnny and his mother were opening the small door that was cut in the great gate, when Mr.Cottam stopped and turned. “Mornin’!” he roared, and went on.
Mother and boy went their way joyously. Here was one of Nan May’s troubles dissolved in air, and as for Johnny, a world of wonders was before him. Now he would understand how steam made engines go, and all day he would see them going—he would make engines himself, in fact. And for this delightful pursuit he would be paid. Six shillings a week was what apprentices got in their first year—a shilling for every day of work. Next year he would get eight shillings, and then ten, and so on. And at twenty-one he would be a man indeed, an engineer like his father before him. More, he was to draw. The gentleman had told him to draw in his spare time. The clang of hammers was as a merry peal from the works that lined their way, and the hoots of steamships on the river made them a moving music.
Nan May wondered to see such merry faces about the streets on the way home. Truly the place was changed; but, perhaps, after all, it was no such bad place, even now. The street was quiet where they had seen the drunken woman, though two very small boys were still kicking a filthy slice of bacon about the gutter. But three streets beyond they saw her for a moment. For the blackguard boys had contrived to topple Mother Born-drunk into a hand-barrow, which they were nowtrundling along at such a pace that the bedraggled sufferer could do no more than lie and cling to the rails, a gasping, uncleanly heap. Truly Emma Pacey’s punishment was upon her.
Bessy brightened wonderfully at the news of Johnny’s success. For she was thoughtful and “old-fashioned” even among the prematurely sage girl-children of her class, and she had been fretting silently. Now she hopped about with something of her old activity. She reported that the next-door neighbour on the left had been persistently peeping over the wall, and that just before their arrival the peep had been accompanied by a very artificial cough, meant to attract attention. So Mrs. May went into the back-yard.