Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison

by Arthur Morrison

  Doubts and perplexities assailed Johnny also, though for a time they grew to nothing sharper. He would have gone home straightway, proud and joyful, if a little sheepish, to tell his mother the tale of that evening. But Nora had implored him to say nothing yet. She wanted time to think things over, she said. And she left him at the familiar corner, two streets beyond the Institute, begging him to come no farther, for this time, at anyrate. Next evening was the evening of the dressmaking class. He saw her for a few minutes, on her way through those two familiar streets, and he thought she looked unwell.

  A few nights later he saw her again. Plainly she had been crying. When they came to a deserted street of shut-up wharves he asked her why.

  “Only — only I’ve been thinking!” she said.

  “What about?”

  “About you, Johnny — about you and me. We — I think — we’re very young, aren’t we?”

  That had not struck him as a difficulty. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know about that. I s’pose we are, like others. But I shall be out o’ my time in two years and a half, or not much more, and then—”

  “Yes, then,” she said, catching at the word, “p’raps then it will be different — and — I mean we shall be older and know better, Johnny. And — now — we can often see one another and talk like friends — and—” She looked up to read his eyes, trembling.

  Something cold took Johnny by the throat, and checked his voice. “But — what — you don’t mean — that?”

  “Yes,” she said, though it was bitter hard. “It’ll be best — I’m sure, Johnny!”

  Johnny gulped, and his voice hardened. “Oh!” he said, “if you want to throw me over you might say so, in straight English!”

  “Oh — don’t talk like that, Johnny!” she pleaded, and laid her hand on his arm. “It’s unkind! You know it’s unkind!”

  “No — it’s only plain an’ honest. I don’t understand this half-and-half business — seeing each other ‘like friends’ an’ all that.”

  One more effort she made to hold her position — but her strength was near gone. “It’ll be better, Johnny — truly it will! You — you might meet someone you’d like better, and—”

  “That’s my look-out; time to talk about that when it comes. The other night you let me kiss you, and you kissed me back — told me you loved me. Now you don’t. Maybe you’ve met someone you like better.”

  She held out no more. Her head fell on his shoulder, and she broke into an agony of tears. “O Johnny, Johnny, that is cruel! You don’t know how cruel it is! I shall never like anybody better than you — never half so much. Don’t be unkind! I’ve not one friend in the world but you, and I do love you more than anything.”

  With that Johnny was ready to kick himself for a ruffian. He looked about, but nobody else was in the shadowy street. He kissed Nora, he called himself hard names, and he quieted her, though she still sobbed. And there was no more talk of mere friendship. She had tried her compromise, and had broken down. But presently Johnny ventured to ask if she foresaw any difficulty with her parents.

  “Father’s dead,” she said simply. “He’s been dead for years.” This was the first word of her family matters that Johnny had heard. Should he come to see her mother? The question struck her like a blow.

  “No — no, Johnny,” she said. “Not yet — no, you mustn’t. I can’t tell you why — I can’t really; at any-rate not now.” Then after a pause, “O Johnny, I’m in such trouble! Such trouble, Johnny!” And she wept again.

  But tell her trouble she would not. At anyrate not then. And in the end she left Johnny much mystified, and near as miserable as herself, because of his blind helplessness in this unrevealed affliction.

  Inexpert in mysteries, he was all incomprehension. What was this trouble that he must not be told of? He did not even know where Nora lived. Why shouldn’t she tell him? Why did she never let him see her as far as home? This much he knew: that she had a mother, but had lost her father by death. And this he had but just learned from her under stress of tears. He was not to see her mother — at least not yet. And Nora was in sore trouble, but refused to say what the trouble was. That night he moped and brooded. And at Maidment and Hurst’s next morning — it was Saturday — Mr. Cottam the gaffer swore, and made remarks about the expedience of being thoroughly awake before dinnertime. More, at one o’clock Johnny passed the pay-box without taking his money, and turned back for it, when reminded, amid the chaff of his shopmates, many offers of portership, and some suggestions to scramble the slighted cash.

  Not far from the yard-gate he saw a small crowd of people about a public-house; and as he neared he perceived Mother Born-drunk in the midst of it. The publican had refused to serve her — indeed, had turned her out — and now she swayed about his door and proclaimed him at large.

  “‘Shultin’ a lady!” she screamed hoarsely. “Can’t go in plashe ‘thout bein’ ‘shulted. ‘Shulted by low common public-’oush. I won’t ‘ave it!”

  “Don’t you stand it, ducky!” sang out a boy. “You give ‘em what for!”

  For a moment she seemed inclined to turn her wrath on her natural enemy, the boy, but her eye fell on a black bottle with a broken neck, lying in the gutter. “Gi’ ‘em what for?” she hiccupped, stooping for the bottle, “Yesh, I’ll gi’ ‘em what for!” and with that flung the bottle at the largest window in sight.

  There was a crash, a black hole in the midst of the plate glass, and a vast “spider” of cracks to its farthest corners. Mother Born-drunk stood and stared, perhaps a little sobered. Then a barman ran out, tucking in his apron, and took her by the arm. There were yells and screams and struggles, and cheers from blackguard boys; and Mother Born-drunk was hauled off, screaming and sliding and stumbling, between a policeman and the publican.

  Johnny told his mother, when he reached home, that her old acquaintance Emma Pacey was like to endure a spell of gaol. But what occupied his mind was Nora’s trouble, and he forgot Mother Born-drunk for three or four days.

  Then came the next evening of the dressmaking class at the Institute, and he went, never doubting to meet Nora as she came away. At the door the housekeeper, who was also hall-porter, beckoned, and gave him a letter, left earlier in the day. It was addressed to him by name, in a weak and straggling female hand, and for a moment he stared at it, not a little surprised. When he tore open the envelope he found a blotchy, tear-stained rag of a letter, and read this: —

  “My Dearest Johnny, — It is all over now and I do hope you will forgive me for not telling you before. This is to say good-bye and God bless you and pray forget all about me. It was wrong of me to let it go so far but I did love you so Johnny, and I could not help it and then I didn’t know what to do. I can never come to the classes again with all this disgrace and everything printed in the newspapers and I must get work somewhere where they don’t know me. I would rather die, but I must look after her as well as I can, Johnny, because she is my mother. Burn this at once and forget all about me and some day you will meet some nice girl belonging to a respectable family and nothing to be ashamed of. Don’t try to find me — that will only make us both miserable. Good-bye and please forgive me.

  “Yours affectionately,

  “Nora Sansom.”

  What was this? What did it all mean? He stood in the gymnasium dressing-room to read it, and when he looked up, the gaslight danced and the lockers spun about him. The one clear thing was that Nora said good-bye, and was gone.

  Presently his faculties assorted themselves, and he read the letter again; and then once more. It was “all over” and she asked him to forgive her for not telling him before. Telling him what? She told him nothing now. She would never come to the Institute again, and he didn’t know her address, and he mustn’t try to find her. But then there was “everything printed in the newspapers.” Of course, he must look at the newspapers; why so long realising that? He went to the reading-room and applied himself to the pile of papers and magazines that litter
ed the table. One paper after another he searched and searched again, but saw nothing that he could connect with Nora, by any stretch of imagination. Till he found a stray sheet of the day before, with rings of coffee-stain on it. The “police intelligence” lay uppermost, and in the midst of the column the name Emma Sansom, in italic letters, caught his eye. She was forty-one, and was charged with drunkenness and wilful damage. A sentence more, and everything stood displayed, as by a flash of lightning; for he had witnessed the offence himself, on Saturday. Emma Sansom was the married name of Emma Pacey, whom the boys called Mother Born-drunk; and the woman was Nora’s mother!

  Now it was plain — all, from the very beginning, when the child wandered in the night seeking her strayed and drunken mother, and inquired for her with the shamed excuse that she was ill. This was why he was not to call to see Nora’s mother; and it was for this that Nora hindered him from seeing her home.

  There was the shameful report, all at length. The publican’s tale was simple and plain enough. He had declined to serve the prisoner because she was drunk, and as she refused to leave, he had her turned out, though, he said, she made no particular resistance. Shortly afterward he heard a crash, and found a broken bottle and a great deal of broken glass in the bar. He had gone outside, and saw the prisoner being held by his barman. His plate-glass window was smashed, and it was worth ten pounds. There was little more evidence. The police told his worship that the prisoner had been fined small sums for drunkenness before, but she was usually inoffensive, except for collecting crowds of boys. This was the first charge against her involving damage.

  She was the widow of a ship’s officer lost at sea, and she had a small annuity, but was chiefly supported of late by her daughter — a dressmaker — a very respectable young woman. The daughter was present (the reporter called her “a prepossessing young female in great distress”), and she wished to be allowed to pay the damage in small instalments. But in the end her mother was sent to prison for a month in default of payment of fine and damage. For indeed the daughter was a minor, and her undertaking was worthless.

  One thing Johnny looked for eagerly, but did not find — the prisoner’s address. Whether consideration for the daughter had prompted the reporter to that suppression, or whether it was due to accident, Johnny could not guess. In other reports in the same column some addresses were given and some not. But straightway Johnny went to beg the housekeeper that he might rummage the store of old papers for those of the day before. For to desert Nora now, in her trouble, was a thing wholly inconceivable; and so far from burning the letter, he put it, envelope and all, in his safest pocket, and felt there, more than once, to be assured of its safety.

  But the address was in none of the papers. In fact the report was in no more than three, and in one of those it was but five lines long. What should he do? He could not even write her one line of comfort. And he had been going on with his work placidly all Monday while Nora had been standing up in a police-court, weeping and imploring mercy for her wretched mother! If he had known he could scarce have done anything to aid her. But helplessness was no consolation — rather the cruellest of aggravations.

  Well, there stood the matter, and raving would not help it, nor would beating the table — nor even the head — with the fist. He must somehow devise a way to reach Nora.

  CHAPTER XXVIII.

  HE resolved, first, to try the Institute. Nora’s name and address must be on the class registers; but what business had he with the girl’s class registers? As diplomatist his failure was lamentable. He could invent no reasonable excuses, and ignoble defeat was his fate at the hands of the rigid lady who managed the girls department of the Institute. Then he took to prowling about all the streets that lay beyond that second corner that had marked the end of their evening walks, watching for her; searching also, desperately, for some impossible sign about a house that might suggest that she lived in it. Thus he spent the daylight of two evenings watching a little muslin-hung window, because the muslin was tied with a ribbon of a sort he remembered her to have worn, and because he chose to fancy a neatness and a daintiness about the tying that might well be hers. But on the second evening as dusk fell the window opened, and a hairy, red-bearded matt in blue shirt sleeves put out his head and leaned on the sill to smoke his pipe and watch the red sky. Johnny swung away savagely, and called himself a fool for his pains; and indeed, he could ill afford to waste time, for Maid-ment and Hurst claimed him till five each day, and a few hours in the evening were all that remained; more, Nora would change her lodgings — perhaps had done so already.

  After this he screwed his courage so high as to go to the police-station where the charge against Nora’s mother must have been taken, and to ask for her address. But the cast-iron-faced inspector in charge took his name and address instead, as a beginning, and then would tell him nothing. And at last, maddened and reckless, he went to the publican, and demanded the information of him. Now if Johnny had had a little more worldly experience, a little more cunning, and a great deal more coolness, he would have done this at first, and, beginning by ordering a drink, he would have opened a casual conversation, led it to the matter of the window, and in the end would have gained his point quietly and easily. But as it was, he did none of these things. He ordered no drink, and he made a blunt request, taking little thought of its manner, none of the publican’s point of view, and perhaps forgetting that the man was in no way responsible for the rebuffs already endured. The publican, for his part, was already in a bad temper, because of the clumsy tapping of a barrel and ensuing “cheek” of the potman. So he answered Johnny’s demand by asking if he had come to pay for the window; and receiving the negative reply he had expected, he urgently recommended the intruder’s departure “outside”: in such terms as gave no choice but compliance.

  So that now, in extremity, Johnny resolved on a last expedient: one that had been vaguely in his mind for a day or two, though he had yet scarce had courage to consider it seriously. This was, to tell his mother the whole thing; and to induce her, if he might, to ask the address at the Institute — perhaps on some pretext of dressmaking business. He was not hopeful, for he well knew that any hint of traffic with the family of one such as Nora’s mother would be a horror to her. But he could see nothing else, and to sit still were intolerable. Moreover he guessed that his mother must suspect something from his preoccupation, and his neglect of his drawing. Though indeed poor Nan was most at pains, just then, to conceal troubles of her own.

  Mr. Butson, in fact, began to chafe under the restraints of narrow circumstances. Not that he was poorer than had been his habit — indeed he was much better off — but that his needs had expanded with his prosperity and with his successes in society. And it was just now that his wife began to attempt retrenchment. Probably she was encouraged by the outrageous revolt of her son, a revolt which had made advisable a certain degree of caution on the part of himself, the head of the household. She spoke of a rumour that the ship-yard opposite might close, as so many other Thames ship-yards had closed of late years. That, she said, would mean ruin for the shop, and she must try to save what little she might, meantime. An absurdity, of course, in Mr. Butson’s view. He felt no interest in the rumours of old women about ship-yards, and petty measurement of the sordid chances of trade irritated him. If his wife found one source of profit running dry, she must look out and tap another, that was all. So long as he got what he wanted he troubled little about the manner of its getting. But now he ran near having less than he wanted, and his wife was growing even less accommodating. She went so far as to hint of withholding the paltry sum the lad earned; he should have it himself, she thought, to buy his clothes, and to save toward the end of his apprenticeship. More than this, Mr. Butson much suspected that Johnny had actually had his own money for some while past, and that Mrs. Butson had descended to the mean subterfuge of representing as his earnings a sum which in reality she extracted each week from the till; an act of pure embezzlement. And then th
ere was the cottage in Epping Forest. She wouldn’t sell it now, though she wanted to sell when she first left it. What good was there in keeping it? True there was threeand-sixpence a week of rent, but that was nothing; it would go in a round of drinks, or in half a round, in any distinguished bar; and there were deductions even from the three-and-sixpence. Sold, the cottage might produce a respectable sum — perhaps a hundred pounds — at anyrate eighty. The figures stirred his blood. What a magnificent dash a man might cut with eighty pounds! And a fortune might be made out of it, too, if it were used wisely, and not buried away in a wretched three-and-sixpenny cottage. Properly invested on judicious flat-race Certainties, it would double itself about twice a week. So he made it very plain to Nan that the sale of the cottage for what it would fetch and the handing over of the proceeds was a plan he insisted on. But the stupid woman wouldn’t see it. It was plain that she was beginning to over-estimate her importance in the establishment, by reason that of late she had not been sufficiently sworn at, shoved, thumped, and twisted and pinched on the arms. That was the worst of kindness to a woman — she took advantage.

  So that he was obliged to begin to thump again. There was no need to do it so that Johnny might know, and so cause a low disturbance. In fact, Johnny took little notice of things at home just now, no longer made inquiries, nor lifted the poker with so impudent a stare; and he was scarce indoors at all. Wherefore Mr. Butson punched and ruffianed — being careful to leave no disreputable marks in visible spots, such as black eyes — and sometimes he kicked; and he demanded more money and more, but all the while insisted on the sale of the cottage. The monstrous laws of conveyance made it impossible for him to lay hands on the deeds and sell the place himself, or he would have done it, of course. And he made it advisable, too, for Bessy to avoid him — and that had a better effect than any direct attack on Nan. Till at last the woman was so far reduced that she was near a very dangerous rebellion indeed — nearer than Mr. Butson suspected. For she began to think of attempting a separation by magistrate’s order, shameful as it would be in the neighbourhood. Though she feared greatly.