The Arthur Morrison Mystery

by Arthur Morrison

  “He’d better not let me get hold of him,” said Mrs. Jepps a moment later, nodding fiercely at Tommy. “Aggravatin’ little wretch! He’ll drive me mad one o’ these days, that’s what he’ll do!”

  With that the family was borne full drive against the barrier, and struggled and tumbled through the gate, mingled with stray members of other parties; all to an accompaniment of sad official confusion in the matter of what ticket belonged to which. But there was no easy rallying in the subway. The crowd pressed on, and presently Mrs. Lunn got into a novel complication by reason of her umbrella, which she grasped desperately in the middle, somehow drifting away horizontally into the crowd at her full arm’s length; so that in a moment she was carried helplessly up the first few steps of the wrong staircase, clinging to her property with might and main, trailing her lunch-bag behind her, and expostulating with much clamour. Jepps, with the baby, watched her impotently; but Tommy, ducking and dodging among the legs of the crowd, got ahead of her, twisted the umbrella into a vertical position, and so releasing it, ducked and dodged back again. Mrs. Lunn was very angry, and the crowd either disregarded her scolding altogether, or laughed at it, so that Tommy, scrambling back triumphantly through the crush, came very handy to divert it.

  “If I was yer mother I’d give you a good sound hidin’, that’s what I’d do!” said Cousin Jane’s sister’s young man’s aunt.

  Any philosopher might be pardoned some resentment at this. And when his mother, having with difficulty been convinced that the staircase she insisted on was another wrong one, and that the one advised by Tommy was right, forthwith promised him one for himself when she got him home, he grew wholly embittered, while his sister Polly openly triumphed over him. And so, with a few more struggles and family separations (Mrs. Lunn being lost and recovered twice), the party at length found itself opposite an open third-class carriage door, and climbed in with all the speed it might.

  “Ah, well!” said Aunt Susan, “here we are at last, an’ no more bother till we get to Southend any’ow.”

  “There’ll be a lot if you try to get there in this train, mum,” observed a cynical coster, on whose toes Aunt Susan’s weight had left an abiding impression.

  “What?” exclaimed Cousin Jane; “this is the Southend train, ain’t it?”

  “No, mum,” replied the coster calmly, “it ain’t.”

  Mrs. Jepps caught at the door, but it was too late. The train was gathering speed, and in a few seconds it was out of the station. “There,” said Mrs. Jepps, desperately, “I knew it was the wrong platform!”

  “Then you was wrong again, mum,” pursued the sardonic coster; “cos it was the right ’un. But this ’ere’s the wrong train all right.”

  “Mother!” squeaked Polly, viciously, “Tommy says—go away, I will tell—Tommy says he knew it was the wrong train when we got in!”

  “What! You young—you didn’t! How did you know?”

  “Read it on the board,” said Tommy, sulkily. “Board in front of the engine. C, O, L, Col, C, H, E, S, T, chest, E—”

  “Take him away, somebody!” yelped Mrs. Jepps.

  “Take the little imp out o’ my sight or I’ll kill him—I know I shall! Knew it was the wrong train, an’ let us get in! I—Oh!”

  “Why,” pleaded Tommy, in doleful bewilderment, “when I told you about the tickets you said I was drivin’ you mad, an’ when I told you about the platform you said you’d whop me when you got me home, an’ now ’cos I didn’t tell you about the train—”

  “He’s a saucy young varmint, that’s what he is,” interrupted Mrs. Lunn, whose misfortunes were telling on her temper and reddening her face. “Lucky for him he ain’t a child o’ mine, that’s all! I’d show him!”

  “So would I!” added Cousin Jane.

  “He’s a perfect noosance to bring out,” said Aunt Susan; “that’s what he is!”

  “You’re a naughty, wicked boy, Tommy!” said his superior little sister.

  Tommy’s spirits sank to the lowest depths of dejection. There was no understanding these grown-up people, and no pleasing them. They were all at him, except his father, and even he seemed sadly grieved, in his mild fashion.

  The cynical coster had been chuckling in a quiet, asthmatic way, rather as though some small animal was struggling in his chest. Now he spoke again. “It’s all right, mum,” he said. “Don’t be rough on the kid. You can change at Shenfield, jest as good as if you come in the right train all the way.”

  This was better, and the spirits of the party rose accordingly; though their relief was qualified by a feeling of undignified stultification.

  “Givin’ us all a fright for nothing,” said Aunt Susan, with an acid glare at the unhappy Tommy; “it’s a pity some children ain’t taught to keep their mouths shut!”

  “Why, so I did, an’ mother said she’d—”

  “Be quiet now!” interrupted Mrs. Jepps. “Be quiet! You’ve done quite enough mischief with your latter! Catch me bringing you out again on a holiday, that’s all!”

  “Ah! he should go to Southend, he should, if he was my child!” sighed Mrs. Lunn, bitterly. “Not much he shouldn’t,” she added on consideration, lest the sarcasm were misunderstood.

  Ordinarily, Jepps would have received at least half of Tommy’s afflictions; but it is low to wig your husband in public. On the other hand children must be corrected on the spot, if only to show how carefully you are bringing them up; and so for the rest of the journey Tommy remained in the nethermost deeps of despondency; never exhibiting the smallest sign of rising to the surface without being instantly shoved under again by a reproof from somebody.

  The cynical coster got out at Romford, with another asthmatic chuckle and an undisguised wink at Tommy.

  The train jogged along through Harold Wood and Brentwood to Shenfield Junction, and there the party found the Southend train at last. With the people already there they more than filled the compartment they selected, and Tommy had to stand, a distinction which cost him some discomfort; for when he stood by the door he was blamed for interfering with Polly’s and Bobby’s enjoyment of the landscape, and when he moved up the carriage his efforts to maintain his equilibrium led to complications with Aunt Susan’s corns.

  “Is the door properly fastened?” asked a lady with a red bonnet and a brilliant squint, of Mrs. Jepps. “I shouldn’t like to see the pore little dears tumble out an’ smash theirselves to bits.”

  Tommy shook with apprehension, for he had no doubt that, if anything were found wrong with the door, the blame, and plenty of it, would fall on him. But fortunately the fastening was secure; so the lady with the squint went on; “I ’ope you’ll excuse my mentioning it, but there, I am that frightened with the things you hear, you can’t think. There was one little boy, only the other day, now!”

  “Did he fall out of a train, mum?” asked Mrs. Jepps.

  “No, not exactly, mum, but very much the same. He was stole—stole by a dark short man with black whiskers an’ a scar on his leg,—or else it was the little boy which had the scar on his leg, though I’m sure it was the man that had the black whiskers, though bein’ that took aback at the noos I couldn’t swear for certain, though it’s a terrible thing for his mother an’ father, whether they was black or ginger.”

  “Ah, indeed, that it must be! Tommy! What do I always tell you about lookin’ after Bobby in the street? ’Spose he was to be took away? It ought to be a lesson to you to mind what you’re told, an’ not be such a wicked, disobedient boy!”

  “Oh, that ain’t the only one, either,” the cross-eyed woman went on, volubly. “There was quite an intimate friend of a sister o’ mine—leastways my sister knew a young woman that had a aunt lodging only a few streets off of her—that lost her little boy too, some munse ago, just the same way, an’ ain’t ever seen him again.”

  “Dear, dear, now! An’ took away, just the same?”


  “Took away by a dark tall man with a black patch over his eye an’ springside boots. Not to mention a little gal in the very next street to my own next-door neighbour’s sister-in-law, as was stole not a fortni’t after.”

  “Stole by another dark man?” asked the horrified Jepps, his eyes protruding with fatherly emotion.

  “Stole by a dark woman with a black shawl an’ hat, an’ an umbrella with a bone monkey on the ’andle.”

  Everybody was deeply impressed, and the singular uniformity in complexion of childstealers as a class, as well as their sable preference in personal adornment, was accepted as a clause in the scheme of nature. Tommy alone seemed puzzled, as much by these matters as by the wonder how such minute particulars of the vanished malefactors had been obtained. In a less depressed frame of mind he might have put difficult questions. As it was, he prudently held his tongue, and regarded the speaker with sullen astonishment.

  But the lady with the squint went on, tireless. She had become acquainted, through devious channels, with so many unparalleled kidnappings, and such a company of swarthy miscreants passed in guilty array through her conversation, that Southend was reached with the procession in full flourish. Through all this experience Tommy was rigidly restrained from recovering his spirits. By some moral legerdemain each anecdote was made the text for a fresh lecture on his own enormities, before the gathering pile of which he stood confounded: a villain, he grew miserably convinced, as black as any swart kidnapper of them all.

  The day was bright, and Southend was crowded everywhere with holiday-makers. Mrs. Jepps rallied her party and adjured Tommy. “Now you, Tommy, see if you can’t begin to be’ave yourself, an’ take care o’ your little brother an’ sister. S’pose a dark man was to come an’ take them away! Then I s’pose you’d wish you’d been a better boy, when it was too late!”

  “I’d make him wish it a quicker way than that!” said Mrs. Lunn spitefully; for her misfortunes rankled still.

  As the words left her mouth a horrible squeak rent her ears, and a long pink “trunk”—one of those paper tubes which, when blown, extend suddenly to a yard long and as suddenly retreat into a little curl—shot over her shoulder into her eye, and was gone again. With a gasp and a bounce she let go umbrella and lunch-bag together; and, while a grinning boy went dancing and trumpeting away in the crowd, a trickle of fragrant liquor issued from the lunch-bag and wandered across the pavement. Tommy Jepps, startled in the depth of his gloom, hastily stuffed his fist against his mouth, and spluttered irrepressibly over the knuckles. For indeed, in his present state of exasperation, Tommy had little sympathy for the misfortunes of so very distant a relation as Cousin Jane’s sister’s young man’s aunt.

  Tommy’s father was mildly horrified, and murmured deprecatingly from among the baby’s frills. “Tommy!” he said, in an awe-struck whisper. “Tommy! Nothing to laugh at!”

  “Get out o’ my sight!” cried Mrs. Jepps, making a miss at Tommy’s head with her own bag. “Get out o’ my sight before I—”

  Tommy got out of it with all possible celerity, and took his place in the extreme rear of the procession which formed as soon as the lunch-bag had been recovered and cleared of broken glass. And so the procession, with a score of others like it, went straggling along the High Street toward the beach, where the crowd was thicker than ever.

  There were large open spaces, with shows, and swings, and roundabouts, and stalls, and cocoa-nut shies, and among these the Jepps column wound its way, closing up and stopping here, and tailing out lengthily there. It stopped for a moment before a shooting-gallery, and then lengthened in the direction of a band of niggers; opposite the niggers it closed up once more, and Mrs. Jepps looked about to survey her forces. There was Jepps, perspiring freely under the burden of the baby, for the day was growing hot; there were Aunt Susan, Cousin Jane, and Mrs. Lunn, red and ruffled; there were Polly and Bobby; but—Mrs. Jepps gave a second glance round before she would believe it—there was not Tommy!

  Mrs. Jepps’s chin dropped suddenly, and she began darting and dodging, looking this way and that among the crowd. “Tommy!” she cried, “you Tommy!” with a voice still a little angry, but mainly anxious. “Mercy on us, where’s the child gone?”

  Jepps turned back, with blank alarm on so much of his face as was visible above the baby and its clothes, and the rest of the party started dodging in the manner of Mrs. Jepps. But they dodged to no purpose. Their calls were drowned in the general hubbub, and their questings to and fro were fruitless: Tommy was lost.

  “O my child!” cried Mrs. Jepps, “my lovely, darling boy! What shall I do? He’s lost! He’s been stole! The best child as ever was!”

  “Such a little dear!” said Cousin Jane.

  “Such a jool of a duck!” said Aunt Susan, affected almost to tears.

  “Oh, oh!” gasped Mrs. Jepps, with signs of flopping and fainting; “an’—an’—you called him a noosance!”

  “An’ you called him an imp!” retorted Aunt Susan. “You should ha’ treated him better when you had him!”

  “If he was a child o’ mine,” said Mrs. Lunn sententiously, “I’d ha’ been a little more patient with him!”

  “Patient?” cried Mrs. Jepps, stung past all peril of fainting. “Why, mum, you had the face to call him a saucy young varmint, before my very eyes, mum! Before you smashed your gin-bottle, mum!”

  But with that Jepps intervened for peace. “Don’t let’s have no words, ’Tilda,” he said, meekly agitated. “You all pitched into him, more or less, o’ course, but the question now is—”

  “Pitched into him!” ejaculated Mrs. Jepps, turning on her husband. “Well, an’ if we did it was your fault, I s’pose! First you put me out about the tickets, an’ then you took us into a train that the dear child hisself could see was wrong, an’ now—an’ now of course you try to put it all on me! It’s you as ought to ha’ been pitched into, not him, the love! It’s ’ateful to hear you talk, Thomas Jepps!”

  “Shameful!” said Cousin Jane.

  “Shockin’!” said Aunt Susan.

  “Unmanly an’ disgraceful!” said Cousin Jane’s sister’s young man’s aunt.

  Jepps blinked and quailed. “But—but”—he spluttered feebly—“I—I—I on’y—don’t let’s have no words! Try an’ find him; an’—”

  “Oh yes!” sobbed Mrs. Jepps, now verging on tears. “That’s the off-hand way he treats me! After aggravatin’ me to death all the morning, an’ then going an’ losing my own darling child—letting him get stole—he tells me to go an’ find him! Oh dear! Just like a man!”

  “So it is!” assented Cousin Jane. “Always contrairy!”

  “’Orrid!” said Aunt Susan.

  But poor Jepps was off to the nearest stall to ask the stall-keeper if he had seen a boy. It seemed that the stall-keeper had seen a good many boys that morning. But had he seen Jepps’s own boy? This conundrum the stall-keeper gave up without hesitation. But Jepps persevered. Had the stall-keeper seen any dark party with a boy—the sort of dark party as might have stole him? To which the stall-keeper made luminous reply that the darkest parties he had seen that morning were the nigger minstrels a little way off; and that was all he knew about it.

  Jepps’s example did something, and presently the whole party scattered for the hunt. Jepps was left with the baby in his arms, and the other two children about his knees, and he had strict orders not to lose any of them, nor to wander from a certain indicated point, near which the rest of the party might find him on occasion. He was not allowed to join in the search, because somebody must take care of the children, and Mrs. Jepps felt that she would die of suspense if she were condemned to wait inactive.

  Mrs. Jepps was anything but inactive, and the other ladies were as busy as Mrs. Jepps. Before they separated they seized on a wandering apple-woman, who was confused and badgered into a cloudy admission that she had seen a boy wi
th a dark man somewhere, a little while ago, or perhaps rather before that; and, her replies being considered evasive, she was instantly suspected of complicity. Indeed, a very short discussion of her information enabled the ladies to convince each other that it amounted to an unmistakable confession, and made it plain that the plan to be followed was to hunt dark men, with small boys or without them.

  The plan was put in action with too much vigour to last. The ladies made out in divers directions among the fifty or sixty thousand people about them, and discovered several dark men. In the upshot the scheme of the hunt was modified on the urgent suggestion of the inspector in charge at the police-station, in the presence of a sunburnt and plaintful donkey-man, an elderly mulatto, three clamorous organ-grinders, and the most astonished young Japanese student who ever went forth from his lodgings to study the holiday customs of Europe.

  So, with other passages of adventure, it came to pass that Aunt Susan, having rejoined Mrs. Jepps, the two, fatigued and a trifle hysterical, returned to where they had left Jepps. As they turned the last corner, a redheaded man, with his hat in his hand, came running past them, and vanished in the crowd; while they almost immediately perceived Jepps in the near distance, striving his utmost to raise a gallop, while Polly and Bobby hung to his coat-tails, and the baby tumbled and struggled in his arms.

  “Stop him!” cried Jepps, choking with the breathlessness of his trot and the flapping of the baby’s cape over his mouth. “Stop him! It’s him! He’s stole my—”

  “The villain!” cried Mrs. Jepps, turning and charging the crowd. “Stop him! He’s stole my child!”

  “Stop him!” gasped Jepps again. “He snatched my—”

  But Mrs. Jepps and Aunt Susan were deep in the crowd, chasing and grabbing, this time, at red-headed men. Red-headed men, however, were scarce in that particular corner just at the moment, and the scarcest of all was the red-headed man they wanted.

  Jepps, gasping still, came up with his wife and Aunt Susan in the midst of a knot of people, answering the inquiries of curious sympathisers as he came along.