As for the Perrotts, they could easily find another room, at the high rent always charged for the privilege of residence in the Jago. To have remained in one room four or five years, and to have paid rent with indifferent good regularity was a feat sufficiently rare to be notorious, and to cause way to be made for them wherever a room was falling vacant, or could be emptied. They went no farther than across the way, to a room wherein a widow had died over her sack-making two days before, and had sat on the floor with her head between her knees for hours, while her children, not understanding, cried that they were hungry. These children were now gone to the workhouse: more fortunate than the many they left behind. And the room was a very fair one, ten feet square or so.
The rest of the tenants thought not at all of new quarters, and did nothing to find them, till they found themselves and their belongings roofless in Old Jago Street. Then with one accord they demanded lodgings of the vicar. Most of them had never inhabited any rooms so long as they had these which they must now leave — having been ejected again and again because of unpaid rent. Nevertheless, they clamoured for redress as they might have clamoured had they never changed dwellings in their lives.
Nobody resisted the police; for there were too many of them. Moreover, Father Sturt was there, and few had hardihood for any but their best behaviour in his presence. Still, there were disputes among the Jagos themselves, that sometimes came very near to fights. Ginger Stagg’s missis professed to recognise a long-lost property in a tin kettle brought into the outer air among the belongings of Mrs Walsh. The miscellaneous rags and sticks that were Cocko Harnwell’s household goods got mingled in the roadway with those appertaining to the Fishers; and their assortment without a turn of family combat was a task which tried the vicar’s influence to the utmost. Mrs Rafferty, too, was suspected of undue pride in a cranky deal wash-stand, and thereby of a disposition to sneer at the humbler turn-out of the Regans from the next floor: giving occasion for a shrill and animated row.
The weather was dry, fortunately, and the evicted squatted in the roadway, by their heaps, or on them, squabbling and lamenting. Ginger Stagg, having covered certain crockery with the old family mattress, forgetfully sat on it, and came upon Father Sturt with an indignant demand for compensation.
Father Sturt’s efforts to stimulate a search for new lodgings met with small success at first. It was felt that, no doubt, there were lodgings to be had, but they would be open to the fatal objection of costing something; and the Jago temperament could neither endure nor understand payment for what had once been given for nothing. Father Sturt, the Jagos argued, had given them free quarters for so long. Then why should he stop now? If they cleared out in order to make room for his new church, in common fairness he should find them similar lodging on the same terms. So they sat and waited for him to do it.
At length the vicar set to work with them in good earnest, carried away with him a family or two at a time, and inducted them to rooms of his own finding. And hereat others, learning that in these cases rent in advance was exacted, bestirred themselves: reflecting that if rent must be paid they might as well choose their own rooms as take those that Father Sturt might find. Of course the thing was not done without payments from the vicar’s pocket. Some were wholly destitute; others could not muster enough to pay that advance of rent which alone could open a Jago tenancy. Distinguishing the genuine impecuniosity from the merely professed, with the insight that was now a sixth sense with him, Father Sturt helped sparingly and in secret; for a precedent of almsgiving was an evil thing in the Jago, confirming the shiftlessness which was already a piece of Jago nature, and setting up long affliction for the almsgiver. Enough of such precedents existed; and the inevitable additions thereto were a work of anxious responsibility and jealous care.
So the bivouac in Old Jago Street melted away. For one thing, there were those among the dispossessed who would not waste time in unproductive inactivity just then; for war had arisen with Dove Lane, and spoils were going. Dove Lane was no very reputable place, but it was not like the Jago. In the phrase of the district, the Dove Laners were pretty thick, but the Jagos were thick as glue. There were many market-porters among the Dove Laners, and at this, their prosperous season, they and their friends resorted to a shop in Meakin Street, kept by an ‘ikey’ tailor, there to buy the original out-and-out downy benjamins, or the celebrated bang-up kicksies, cut saucy, with artful buttons and a double fakement down the sides. And hereabout they were apt to be set upon by Jagos; overthrown by superior numbers; bashed; and cleaned out. Or, if the purchases had been made, they were flimped of their kicksies, benjies or daisies, as the case might be. So that a fight with Dove Lane might be an affair of some occasional profit; and it became no loyal Jago to idle in the stronghold.
Father Sturt’s task was nearly over, when, returning to Old Jago Street, he saw Dicky Perrott sitting by a still-remaining heap — a heap small and poor even among those others. The Perrotts had been decorously settled in their new home since early morning; but here was Dicky, guarding a heap with a baby on it, and absorbed in the weaving of rush bags.
‘That’s right, Dicky my boy,’ said Father Sturt in the approving voice that a Jago would do almost anything — except turn honest — to hear. And Dicky, startled, looked up, flushed and happy, over his shoulder.
‘Rush bags, eh?’ the vicar went on, stooping and handing Dicky another rush from the heap. ‘And whose are they?’
The bags, the rushes, the heap, and the baby belonged to Mrs Bates, the widow, who was now in search of a new room. Dicky had often watched the weaving of fishmongers’ frails, and, since it was work in which he had had no opportunity of indulging, it naturally struck him as a fascinating pastime. So that he was delighted by the chance which he had taken, and Mrs Bates, for her part, was not sorry to find somebody to mind her property. Moreover, by hard work and the skill begot of much practice, she was able to earn a sum of some three farthings an hour at the rush bags: a profit which her cupidity made her reluctant to lose, for even half an hour. And thus to have Dicky carry on the business — and in his enthusiasm he did it very well — was a further consideration.
Father Sturt chatted with Dicky till the boy could scarce plait for very pride. Would not Dicky like to work regularly every day, asked Father Sturt, and earn wages? Dicky could see no graceful answer but the affirmative; and in sober earnest he thought he would. Father Sturt took hold of Dicky’s vanity. Was he not capable of something better than other Jago boys? Why should he not earn regular wages, and live comfortably, well fed and clothed, with no fear of the police, and no shame for what he did? He might do it, when others could not. They were not clever enough. They called themselves ‘clever’ and ‘wide;’ ‘but,’ said Father Sturt, ‘is there one of them that can deceive me?’ And Dicky knew there was not one. Most did no work, the vicar’s argument went on, because they had neither the pluck to try nor the intelligence to accomplish. Else why did they live the wretched Jago life instead of take the pleasanter time of the decent labourer?
Dicky, already zealous at work as exampled in rush bag-making, listened with wistful pride. Yes, if he could, he would work and take his place over the envious heads of his Jago friends. But how? Nobody would employ a boy living in the Jago. That was notorious. The address was a topsy-turvy testimonial for miles round.
All the same when Mrs Bates at last took away her belongings, Dicky ran off in delighted amaze to tell his mother and Em that he was going to tea at Father Sturt’s rooms.
And the wreckers tore down the foul old houses, laying bare the secret dens of a century of infamy; lifting out the wide sashes of the old ‘weavers’ windows’ — the one good feature in the structures; letting light and air at last into the subterraneous basements where men and women had swarmed, and bred, and died, like wolves in their lairs; and emerging from clouds of choking dust, each man a colony of vermin. But there were rooms which the wreckers — no jack-a-dandies neither — flatly refused to enter; and not
hing would make them but much coaxing, the promise of extra pay, and the certainty of much immediate beer.
XVIII
Mr Grinder kept a shop in the Bethnal Green Road. It was announced in brilliant lettering as an ‘oil, colour and Italian warehouse,’ and there, in addition to the oil and the colour, and whatever of Italian there might have been, he sold pots, pans, kettles, brooms, shovels, mops, lamps, nails, and treacle. It was a shop ever too tight for its stock, which burst forth at every available opening, and heaped so high on the paving that the window was half buried in a bank of shining tin. Father Sturt was one of the best customers: the oil, candles and utensils needed for church and club all coming from Mr Grinder’s. Mr Grinder was losing his shop-boy, who had found a better situation; and Father Sturt determined that, could but the oil-man be persuaded, Dicky Perrott should be the new boy. Mr Grinder was persuaded. Chiefly perhaps, because the vicar undertook to make good the loss, should the experiment end in theft; partly because it was policy to oblige a good customer; and partly, indeed, because Mr Grinder was willing to give such a boy a chance in life, for he was no bad fellow, as oil-and-colourmen go, and had been an errand boy himself.
So that there came a Monday morning when Dicky, his clothes as well mended as might be (for Hannah Perrott, no more than another Jago, could disobey Father Sturt), and a cut-down apron of his mother’s tied before him, stood by Mr Grinder’s bank of pots and kettles, in an eager agony to sell something, and near blind with the pride of the thing. He had been waiting at the shop-door long ere Mr Grinder was out of bed; and now, set to guard the outside stock — a duty not to be neglected in that neighbourhood — he brushed a tin pot here and there with his sleeve, and longed for some Jago friend to pass and view him in his new greatness. The goods he watched over were an unfailing source of interest; and he learned by much repetition the prices of all the saucepans, painted in blue distemper on the tin, and ranging from eightpence-halfpenny, on the big pots in the bottom row, to three-halfpence on the very little ones at the top. And there were long ranks of little paraffin lamps at a penny — the sort that had set fire to a garret in Half Jago Street a month since, and burnt old Mother Leary to a greasy cinder. With a smaller array of a superior quality at fourpence-halfpenny — just like the one that had burst at Jerry Gullen’s, and burnt the bed. While over his head swung doormats at one-and-eightpence, with penny mousetraps dangling from their corners.
When he grew more accustomed to his circumstances, he bethought him to collect a little dirt, and rub it down the front of his apron, to give himself a well-worked and business-like appearance; and he greatly impeded women who looked at the saucepans and the mousetraps, ere they entered the shop, by his anxiety to cut them off from Mr Grinder and serve them himself. He remembered the boy at the toy-shop in Bishopsgate Street, years ago, who had chased him through Spitalfields; and he wished that some lurching youngster would snatch a mousetrap, that he might make a chase himself.
At Mr Grinder’s every call Dicky was prompt and willing; for every new duty was a fresh delight, and the whole day a prolonged game of real shopkeeping. And at his tea — he was to have tea each day in addition to three and sixpence every Saturday — he took scarce five minutes. There was a trolley — just such a thing as porters used at railway stations, but smaller — which was his own particular implement, his own to pack parcels on for delivery to such few customers as did not carry away their own purchases: and to acquire the dexterous management of this trolley was a pure joy. He bolted his tea to start the sooner on a trolley-journey to a public-house two hundred yards away.
His enthusiasm for work as an amusement cooled in a day or two, but all his pride in it remained. The fight with Dove Lane waxed amain, but Dicky would not be tempted into more than a distant interest in it. In his day-dreams he saw himself a tradesman, with a shop of his own and the name ‘R. Perrott,’ with a gold flourish, over the door. He would employ a boy himself then; and there would be a parlour, with stuff-bottomed chairs and a shade of flowers, and Em grown up and playing on the piano. Truly Father Sturt was right: the hooks were fools, and the straight game was the better.
Bobby Roper, the hunchback, went past the shop once, and saw him. Dicky, minding his new dignity, ignored his enemy, and for the first time for a year and more, allowed him to pass without either taunt or blow. The other, astonished at Dicky’s new occupation, came back and back again, staring, from a safe distance, at Dicky and the shop. Dicky, on his part, took no more notice than to assume an ostentatious vigilance: so that the hunchback, baring his teeth in a snigger of malice, at last turned on his heel and rolled off.
Twice Kiddo Cook passed, but made no sign of recognition beyond a wink; and Dicky felt grateful for Kiddo’s obvious fear of compromising him. Once old Beveridge came by, striding rapidly, his tatters flying, and the legend ‘Hard Up’ chalked on his hat, as was his manner in his town rambles. He stopped abruptly at sight of Dicky, stooped, and said:— ‘Dicky Perrott? Hum — hum — hey?’ Then he hurried on, doubtless conceiving just such a fear as Kiddo Cook’s. As for Tommy Rann, his affections were alienated by Dicky’s outset refusal to secrete treacle in a tin mug for a midnight carouse; and he did not show himself. So matters went for near a week.
But Mr Weech missed Dicky sadly. It was rare for a day to pass without a visit from Dicky, and Dicky had a way of bringing good things. Mr Weech would not have sold Dicky’s custom for ten shillings a week. So that when Mr Weech inquired, and found that Dicky was at work in an oil-shop, he was naturally annoyed. Moreover, if Dicky Perrott got into that way of life, he would have no fear for himself, and might get talking inconveniently among his new friends about the business affairs of Mr Aaron Weech. And at this reflection that philanthropist grew thoughtful.
XIX
Dicky had gone on an errand, and Mr Grinder was at the shop door, when there appeared before him a whiskered and smirking figure, with a quick glance each way along the street, and a long and smiling one at the oil-man’s necktie.
‘Good mornin’, Mr Grinder, good mornin’ sir.’ Mr Weech stroked his left palm with his right fist and nodded pleasantly. ‘I’m in business meself, over in Meakin Street — name of Weech: p’r’aps you know the shop? I — I jist ‘opped over to ask’ — Grinder led the way into the shop— ‘to ask (so’s to make things quite sure y’know, though no doubt it’s all right) to ask if it’s correct you’re awfferin’ brass roastin’-jacks at a shillin’ each.’
‘Brass roastin’-jacks at a shillin’?’ exclaimed Grinder, shocked at the notion. ‘Why, no!’
Mr Weech appeared mildly surprised. ‘Nor yut seven-poun’ jars o’ jam an’ pickles at sixpence?’ he pursued, with his eye on those ranged behind the counter.
‘No!’
‘Nor doormats at fourpence?’
‘Fourpence? Cert’nly not!’
Mr Weech’s face fell into a blank perplexity. He pawed his ear with a doubtful air, murmuring absently:— ‘Well I’m sure ‘e said fourpence: an’ sixpence for pickles, an’ bring ‘em round after the shop was shut. But there’, he added, more briskly, ‘there’s no ‘arm done, an’ no doubt it’s a mistake.’ He turned as though to leave, but Grinder restrained him.
‘But look ‘ere,’ he said, ‘I want to know about this. Wotjer mean? ‘Oo was goin’ to bring round pickles after the shop was shut? ‘Oo said fourpence for doormats?’
‘Oh, I expect it’s jest a little mistake, that’s all,’ answered Weech, making another motion toward the door; ‘an’ I don’t want to git nobody into trouble.’
‘Trouble? Nice trouble I’d be in if I sold brass smoke-jacks for a bob! There’s somethink ‘ere as I ought to know about. Tell me about it straight.’
Weech looked thoughtfully at the oil-man’s top waistcoat button for a few seconds, and then said:— ‘Yus, p’raps I better. I can feel for you, Mr Grinder, ‘avin’ a feelin’ ‘art, an’ bein’ in business meself. Where’s your boy?’
‘Gawn out.’
&n
bsp; ‘Comin’ back soon?’
‘Not yut. Come in the back-parlour.’
There Mr Weech, with ingenuous reluctance, assured Mr Grinder that Dicky Perrott had importuned him to buy the goods in question at the prices he had mentioned, together with others — readily named now that the oil-man swallowed so freely — and that they were to be delivered and paid for at night when Dicky left work. But perhaps, Mr Weech concluded, parading an obstinate belief in human nature, perhaps the boy, being new to the business, had mistaken the prices, and was merely doing his best to push his master’s trade.
‘No fear o’ that,’ said Grinder, shaking his head gloomily. ‘Not the least fear o’ that. ‘E knows the cheapest doormats I got’s one an’ six — I ‘eard him tell customers so outside a dozen times; an’ anyone can see the smoke-jacks is ticketed five an ‘nine’ — as Mr Weech had seen, when he spoke of them. ‘I thought that boy was too eager an’ willin’ to be quite genavin,’ Dicky’s master went on. ‘‘E ain’t ‘ad me yut, that’s one comfort: if anythin’ ‘ud bin gawn I’d ‘a’ missed it. But out ‘e goes as soon as ‘e comes back: you can take yer davy o’ that!’
‘Ah,’ replied Mr Weech, ‘it’s fearful the wickedness there is about, ain’t it? It’s enough to break yer ‘art. Sich a neighb’r’ood, too! Wy, if it was known as I’d give you this ‘ere little friendly information, bein’ in business meself an’ knowin’ wot it is, my life wouldn’t be safe a hower. It wouldn’t, Mr Grinder.’
‘Wouldn’t it?’ said Mr Grinder. ‘You mean them in the Jago, I s’pose.’
‘Yus. They’re a awful lot, Mr Grinder — you’ve no idear. The father o’ this ‘ere boy as I’ve warned you aginst, ‘e’s in with a desprit gang, an’ they’d murder me if they thought I’d come an’ told you honest, w’en you might ‘a’ bin robbed, as is my nature to. They would indeed. So o’ course you won’t say wot I toldjer, nor ‘oo give you this ‘ere honourable friendly warnin’ — not to nobody.’
Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison Page 83