Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison

by Arthur Morrison

  “Stop in to breakfast?” the man asked, as he stooped again.

  “Yes.”

  “Some o’ the boys ‘11 try a game with ye, p’raps. Don’t mind a little game, do ye?”

  “No.”

  “Ah, I couldn’t stand it when I was a lad. Made me mis’rable. When ye go in the smiths’ shop to git yer breakfast, look about ye, if they’re special kind find-in’ y’ a seat. Up above, f’r instance.”

  Johnny left the long man, and presently observed that the foreman was not in the shop. There was an instant slackness perceivable among the younger and less steady men, for the leading hand had no such authority as Cottam. One man at a lathe, throwing out his gear examined his work, and, turning to Johnny, said, “Look ‘ere, me lad; I want to true this ‘ere bit. Jes’ you go an’ ask Sam Wilkins — that man up at the end there, in the serge jacket — jes’ you go an’ ask ‘im for the round square.”

  Johnny knew the tool called a square, used for testing the truth of finished work, though he had never seen a round one. Howbeit he went off with alacrity: but it seemed that Sam Wilkins hadn’t the round square. It was Joe Mills, over in the far corner. So he tried Joe Mills; but he, it seemed, had just lent it to Bob White, at the biggest shaping-machine near the other end. Bob White understood perfectly, but thought he had last seen the round square in the possession of George Walker. Whereas George Walker was perfectly certain that it had gone downstairs to Bill Cook in the big shop. Doubting nothing from the uncommonly solemn faces of Sam and Joe and Bob and George, Johnny set off down the stone stairs, where he met the ascending gaffer, on his way back from the pattern-maker’s shop.

  “‘Ullo boy,” he said, “where you goin’?”

  “Downstairs, sir, for the round square.”

  Mr. Cottam’s eyes grew more prominent, and there were certain sounds, as of an imprisoned bull-frog, from somewhere deep in his throat. But his expression relaxed not a shade. Presently he said, “Know what a round is?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Know what a square is?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “S’pose somebody wanted a round square drored on paper, what ‘ud ye do?”

  There was another internal croak, and somehow Johnny felt emboldened. “I think,” he said, with some sly hesitation, “I think I’d tell ‘em to do it themselves.”

  Mr. Cottam croaked again, louder, and this time with a heave of the chest. “Awright,” he said, “that’s good enough. Better say somethink like that to them as sent ye. That’s a very old ‘ave, that is.”

  He resumed his heavy progress up the stairs, turning Johnny round by the shoulder, and sending him in front. There were furtive grins in the shop, and one lad asked “Got it?” in a voice cautiously subdued. But just then the bell rang for breakfast.

  Most of the men and several of the boys made their best pace for the gate. These either lived near, or got their breakfasts at coffee-shops, and their half-hour began and ended in haste. The few others, more leisurely, stayed to gather their cans and handkerchiefs — some to wipe their hands on cotton waste, that curious tangled stuff by which alone Johnny remembered his father. As for him, he waited to do what the rest did, for he saw that his friend, the long man, had gone out with the patrons of coffee-shops. The boys took their cans and clattered down to the smiths’ shop, Johnny well in the rear, for he was desirous of judging from a safe distance, what form the “little game” might take, that the long man had warned him of, in case it came soon. But a wayward fate preserved him from booby-traps that morning.

  In the first place, he had come in a cap, and so for-fended one ordeal. For it was the etiquette of the shop among apprentices that any bowler hat brought in on the head of a new lad must be pinned to the wall with the tangs of many files; since a bowler hat, ere a lad had four years at least of service, was a pretension, a vainglory, and an outrage. Next, his lagging saved his new ducks. The first lads down had prepared the customary trap, which consisted of a seat of honour in the best place near the fire; a seat doctored with a pool of oil, and situated exactly beneath a rafter on which stood a can of water taken from a lathe; a string depending from the can, with its lower end fastened behind the seat. So that the victim accepting the accommodation would receive a large oily embellishment on his new white ducks, and, by the impact of his back against the string, induce a copious christening of himself and his entire outfit. But it chanced that an elderly journeyman from the big shop — old Ben Cutts — appeared on the scene early, wiping his spectacles on his jacket lining as he came. He knew nothing of a fresh ‘prentice, saw nothing but a convenient and warm seat, and hastened to seize it.

  The lads were taken by surprise. “No — not there!” shouted one a few yards away.

  “Fust come fust served, me lad,” chuckled old Ben Cutts, as he dropped on the fatal spot. “‘Ere I am, an’ ‘ere I—”

  With that the can fell, and Johnny at the door was astonished to observe a grey-headed workman, with a pair of spectacles in his hand and a vast oily patch on his white overalls, dripping and dancing and swearing, and smacking wildly at the heads of the boys about him, without hitting any.

  There were no more tricks that breakfast-time. For when at length old Ben subsided to his meal, he put a little pile of wedges by his side, to fling at the first boy of whose behaviour he might disapprove. And as his spectacles were now on his nose, and his aim, thus aided, was known to be no bad one, and as the wedges, furthermore, were both hard and heavy, breakfasts were eaten with all the decorum possible in a smiths’ shop.

  Johnny’s new can was satisfactorily blackened, and his breakfast was well disposed of. Such youths as tried him with verbal chaff he answered as well as he might, though he had as yet little of the Cockney boy’s readiness. And at last the bell rang again, and the break-fasters went back to work.

  Mr. Cottam, casting his glance about the shop in search of the simplest possible job for Johnny to begin on, with a steady man at hand to watch him, stopped as his gaze reached Long Hicks, and sent Johnny to help him with his bolts. And so Johnny found the tall man’s surmise verified, and the tall man himself received him with another grin a little less shy. He set him to running down bolts and nuts, showing him how to fix the bolt in a vice and work the nut on it with a spanner. Johnny fell to the task enthusiastically, and so the morning went.

  CHAPTER XIII.

  WHEN Nan May opened shop, she saw that men were pulling down as much of the ship-yard wall opposite as stood between two chalk lines. She thought no more of the thing at the time, not guessing how nearly it concerned her. For this was to be a new workmen’s gate to the ship-yard and passing workmen might change the fortunes of a shop. For that day, however, there was no sign but the demand of a bricklayer’s labourer for a penn’orth of cheese.

  It was as bad a day as Saturday, in the matter of trade — indeed there was no drunken man to buy lard — and the woman’s heart grew heavier as the empty hours went. Bessy stood at the back-parlour door, pale and anxious, but striving to lift a brave face. Before one o’clock there was dinner to be prepared; not that either Bessy or her mother could eat, but for Johnny. And at a quarter past one both met him at the door as cheerfully as they could; and indeed they were eager to hear of his fortunes. They wondered to see him coming with the long man who lived next door; and the long man, for his part, was awkward and nervous when he saw them. At first he hung back, as though to let Johnny go on alone; but he changed his mind, and came striding ahead hastily, looking neither to right nor to left, and plunged in at his door.

  Johnny was hungry and in high spirits. He and Long Hicks, it seemed, had been bedding down a junk ring for a piston, Johnny easing the bolts and nuts, and Long Hicks doing the other work. He said nothing of the round square, but talked greatly of slide-valves and cranks, till Bessy judged him a full engineer already. Between his mouthfuls he illustrated the proper handling of hammer and file, and reprehended the sinful waste of spoiling the surface of a new file on the
outer skin of a fresh iron casting. It cheered Nan May to see the boy taking so heartily to his work, through all her secret dread that she might lack the means to keep him at it. Johnny glanced anxiously at the clock from time to time, and at last declared that he must knock for Long Hicks, who was plainly forgetting how late it was. And in the end he rushed away to disturb the tall man ten minutes too soon, and hurried off to Maidment and Hurst’s, there to take his own new metal ticket from the great board, and drop it duly into the box.

  The afternoon went busily at the factory, and busy days followed. Johnny acquired his first tool, a steel foot-rule, and carried it in public places with a full quarter of its length visible at the top of its appointed pocket. It was the way of all young apprentices to do this; the rule, they would say, thus being carried convenient for the hand. But it was an exact science among the observant to judge a lad’s experience inversely by scale of the inches exposed, going at the rate of half an inch a year. A lad through two years of his “time” would show no more of his rule than two inches; by the end of four years one of these inches would have vanished; as his twenty-first birthday approached, the last inch shrank to a mere hint of bright metal; and nobody ever saw the foot-rule of a full journeyman, except he were using it.

  Johnny’s christening, postponed by the accident of old Ben Cutts, came when he was first put to a small lathe to try his hand at turning bolts. For when, returning from breakfast, he belted his lathe, he did not perceive that the water-can had been tied to the belt; realising it, however, the next instant, when it flew over the shafting and discharged the water on his head. Then he was free of the shop; suffering no more than the rest from the workshop pranks habitual among the younger lads, and joining in them: gammoning newer lads than himself with demands for the round square, and oppressing them with urgent messages to testy gaffers — that a cockroach had got in the foo-foo valve, that the donkey-man wanted an order for a new nosebag, and the like.

  Grew able, moreover, in workshop policy, making good interest with the storekeeper, who might sometimes oblige with the loan of a hammer. For a lost hammer meant a fine of three-and-sixpence, and when yours was stolen — everybody stole everybody else’s hammer — a borrowed one would tide you over till you could steal another. Making friends, too, with the tool-smith, at a slight expense in drinks; though able to punish him also if necessary, by the secret bedevilment of his fire with iron borings. Learned to manufacture an apparent water-crack by way of excuse for a broken file — a water-crack made with a touch of grease well squeezed between the broken ends. In short, became an initiated ‘prentice engineer. In the trade itself, moreover, he was not slow, and Mr. Cottam had once mentioned him (though Johnny did not know it) as “none so bad a boy; one as can work ‘is own ‘ead.” Until his first enthusiasm had worn off, he never ceased from questioning Long Hicks, in his hours of leisure, on matters concerning steam-engines; so that the retiring Hicks grew almost out of touch with the accordion that had been the solace of his solitude. The tall man had never met quite so inquisitive an apprentice; engineering was in the blood, he supposed. He had guessed the boy’s mother an engineer’s wife when first Johnny came to his bench, because of the extra button Nan May had been careful to sew on his jacket cuff; a button used to tighten the sleeve, that it might not catch the driver on a lathe.

  It was early in Johnny’s experience — indeed he had been scarce a fortnight at the engine-shop — when a man coming in from an outdoor job just before dinner told Cottam the foreman, that an old friend was awaiting him at the gate, looking for a job.

  “An’ ‘oo’s the of friend?” asked Cottam, severely distrustful.

  “Mr. ‘Enery Butson, Esquire,” the man answered, with a grin.

  “What? Butson?” the gaffer ejaculated, and his eyes grew rounder. “Butson? Agen? I’d — damme, I’d as soon ‘ave a brass monkey!” And Mr. Cottam stumped indignantly up the shop.

  “Sing’lar, that,” observed a labourer who was helping an erector with a little yacht engine near Johnny’s bench. “Sing’lar like what I ‘eard the gaffer say at Lumley’s when Butson wanted a job there. ‘What?’ sez ‘e. ‘Butson? Why, I’d rayther ‘ave a chaney dawg auf my gran’mother’s mantelpiece,’ ‘e sez. ‘‘E wouldn’t spile castin’s,’ ‘e sez.”

  There were grins between the men who heard, for it would seem that Mr. Butson was not unknown among them. But when Johnny told his mother at dinner, she thought the men rude and ignorant; and she was especially surprised at Mr. Cottam.

  For some little while Johnny wondered at the girl who was hunting for a sick lady in the street on that dark Monday morning. He looked out for her on his way to and from his work, resolved, if he met her, to ask how the search had fared, and how the lady was. But he saw nothing of her, and the thing began to drop from his mind. Till a Saturday afternoon, when he went to see a new “ram” launched; for half-way to the ship-yard he saw a pretty girl — and surely it was the same. In no tears nor trouble now, indeed, but most disconcertingly composed and dignified — yet surely the same. Johnny hesitated, and stopped: and then most precipitately resumed his walk. For truly this was a very awful young person, icily unconscious of him, her casual glance flung serenely through his head and over it...Perhaps it wasn’t the same, after all; and if not — well it was lucky he had said nothing...Nevertheless his inner feeling was that he had made no mistake; more, that the girl remembered him, but was proud and would not own it. It didn’t matter, he said to himself. But the afternoon went a little flat; the launch was less interesting than one might have expected. There was a great ‘iron hull, tricked out with flags; and when men knocked away the dog-shores with sledge-hammers, the ship slid away, cradle and all, into the water. There wasn’t much in that. Of course, if you knocked away the dog-shores, the ship was bound to slide: plainly enough. That wasn’t very interesting. Johnny felt vaguely resentful of the proceedings...But still he wondered afresh at the lost lady who was ill out of doors so early in the morning.

  CHAPTER XIV.

  BUT this launch was when Johnny’s ‘prentice teeth were cut: when the running down of bolts and pins was beneath his notice, and he could be trusted with work at a small nibbling machine; when he had turned stop-valve spindles more than once, and felt secretly confident of his ability to cut a screw.

  Meantime history was making at the shop: very slowly at first, it is true. The holly had been made the most of, but it seemed to attract not at all. Penn’ orths and ha’porths were most of the sales, and even they were few. Nan May grew haggard and desperate. Uncle Isaac had called once soon after the opening Saturday, but since had been a stranger. He had said that he was about to change his lodgings (he was a widower), but Nan knew nothing of his new address. In truth, such was Uncle Isaac’s tenderness of heart, that he disliked the sight or complaint of distress; and, in the manner of many other people of similar tenderness, he betook himself as far as possible from the scene thereof, and kept there.

  It was within a few days of Christmas when things seemed hopeless. Johnny, indeed, had never ceased to hope till now. He had talked of the certainty of struggling on somehow till his wages were enough for all; indeed, even the six shillings a week seemed something considerable now, though he knew that the rent alone came to ten. But even Johnny’s cheerfulness ‘fell in face of the intenser dejection, the more open tears, of his mother and sister, as the days wore on. Long Hicks found him a quieter, less inquisitive boy, and a duller help than at first; and dinner at home was a sad make-believe. Each knew that the other two were contrasting the coming Christmas with the last. Then, gran’dad was with them, hale and merry; to look out of window was to look through a world of frosty twigs to woody deeps where the deer waited, timid and shadowy, for the crusts flung out afar for them from the garden. Now...but there!

  But it was just at this desperate time that a change came, as by magic. The men who pulled down the wall at the opposite side of the street gave place to others who built a mighty brick pier a
t each side of the opening: a pier designed to carry its half of the new gate. But ere the work was near complete, men and boys from the yard found it a convenient place to slip out and in at, on breakfast-time or dinner-time errands.

  Now it chanced at the time that one of these men was in a domestic difficulty; a difficulty that a large part of the eight or nine hundred men of the ship-yard encountered in turn at more or less regular intervals. His wife inhabited the bedroom in company with a monthly nurse; while he roosted sleeplessly at night on a slippery horsehair couch in the parlour, or wallowed in a jumble of spare blankets and old coats on the floor; spending his home hours by day in desolate muddling in the kitchen, lost and incapable, and abject before the tyranny of the nurse. On dark mornings he made forlorn attempts at raking together a breakfast to carry with him to work; but as he had taken no thought to put anything into the cupboard over night, he found it no easy matter to extract a breakfast from it in the morning. So it came to pass that on the second day of his affliction this bedevilled husband, his hunger merely aggravated by the stale lumps of bread he had thought to make shift on, issued forth at the new gate in quest of breakfast. There was little time, and most of the shops were a distance off; but just opposite was a flaming little chandler’s shop, newly opened. It was thinly stocked enough, but it would be hard luck indeed if it did not hold something eatable. And so Nan May’s first customer that day was the starved husband.

  “Got anythink t’ eat?” he asked, his ravening gaze piercing the bare corners of the shop. “Got any bacon?”

  “Yes, sir,” Nan May answered, reaching for the insignificant bit of “streaky” that was all she had.

  “No — cooked, I mean. Aincher got any cold boiled ‘ock?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Y’ ought t’ ave some cooked ‘ock. Lots ‘ud ‘ave it in the yard. I can’t eat that — the smiths’ shop’s the other end o’ the yard, an’ I got nothing to toast it with. Aincher got nothing else?”