Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison

by Arthur Morrison

  CHAPTER X.

  IT was at Maidment and Hurst’s, engineers, that Johnny’s father had met his death; and it was to Maid-ment 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, Maid-ment 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 fancied recognition, 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 by an 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 each answer. 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 the evenings, 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 partit 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 John May. 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 once passed 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 now trundling 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 Pacers 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.

  “Mornin’, mum,” said the next-door neighbour, a very red-faced man in a dungaree jacket. “Weather’s cleared up a bit. I’ve bin ‘avin’ ‘alf a day auf, touchin’ up things.” He sank with a bob behind the wall, and rose again with a paint-pot in his lifted hand. “Bit o’ red paint any use to ye?”

  CHAPTER XI.

  THE red paint-pot, and a blue one from the same quarter, together with a yellow one from the neighbours on the other side, a white one from an old lighterman in the house behind, and a suitable collection of brushes subscribed by all three, were Johnny’s constant companions till the end of that weary week. The shop-shutters grew to be red, with a blue border. The window-frames were yellow, the wall beneath was white, so was the cornice above; and the door and the door-posts were red altogether, because the red paint went farthest, and the red pot had been fullest to begin with. Not only did the length of the job work off Johnny’s first enthusiasm, but its publicity embarrassed him. Perched conspicuously on a step-ladder, painting a shop in such stirring colours as these, he was the cynosure of all wayfaring folk, the target of whatever jibes their wits might compass. Three out of four warned him that the paint was laid on wrong side out. Some, in unkindly allusion to certain chance splashes, reminded him that he hadn’t half painted the window-panes; and facetious boys, in piteous pantomime, affected to be reduced to instant blindness by sudden knowledge of Johnny’s brilliant performance. But he was most discomforted by those who merely stood and stared, invisible behind him. If only he could have seen them it would not have been so bad; the oppressive consciousness that some contemptuous grown man behind and below — possibly a painter by trade — was narrowly observing every stroke of the brush, shook his nerve and enfeebled his execution. Most of these earnest spectators seemed to have no pressing business of their own, and their inspections were prolonged. One critic found speech to remark, as he turned to go his way: “Well, you are makin’ a bloomin’ mess up there!” But most, as if at a loss for words by mere amazement, sheered off with: “Well, blimy!” It was discouraging to find that all these people could have done it so much better, and, long before the job was finished, Johnny was sore depressed and very humble, as well as tired. Only one of all his witnesses offered help, and he was a surprising person: very tall, very thin, and very sooty from work; with splay feet, sloping shoulders, a long face of exceeding diffidence, and long arms, which seemed to swing and flap irresponsibly with the skirts of his long overcoat, and to be a subject of mute apology. He saw Johnny tip-toeing at the very top of the steps, making a bad shift to reach the cornice. He stopped, looked about him, and then went on a step or two; stopped again, and came back, with a timorous glance at the shop window; and when Johnny turned and looked, he said, in a voice scarce
above a whisper: “Can’tcher reach it?”

  “Not very well.”

  “Let’s come.” And when Johnny descended, the long man, with one more glance about the street, went up three steps at a time and laid the paint on rapidly, many feet at a sweep. He came down and shifted the steps very easily with one hand — and they were heavy steps — went up again, and in three minutes carried the paint to the very end of the cornice. Then he came down, with a sheepish smile at Johnny’s thanks, and shambled as far as next door, where he let himself in with a latch-key. And on Friday, at dinner-time, perceiving Johnny’s progress from his window on the upper floor — he was a lodger, it seemed — he came stealthily down and gave the cornice another coat.

  On Saturday morning the shop was opened in form, though Johnny’s painting was not finished till dusk. Very little happened. A few children stopped on their way, and stared in at the door. The first customer was a boy from among these, who came in to beg a piece of string; and infested Harbour Lane for the rest of the day, swinging a dead rat on the end of it. Hours passed, and Nan May’s spirits fell steadily. A few pounds, a very few — they could scarce be made to last three weeks — was all her reserve, and most of her scanty stock was perishable. If it spoiled it could never be replaced, and unless people bought it, spoil it must. What more could she do? Industry, determination, and all the rest were well enough, but when all was said and done, nothing could make people come and buy.

  Near noon the second customer came — a little girl this time. She wanted a bottle of ink for a halfpenny. There were half-a dozen little bottles of ink in a row in the window; but the price was a penny, so the little girl went away. It was a dull dinner that day. Bessy invented ingenious conjectures to account for the lack of trade, and prophesied a change in the afternoon, or the evening, or perhaps next week, or at latest the week after. Her mother could not understand. Customers came to other shops; why not to this one?