Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison

by Arthur Morrison

  But here Cunning Murrell interrupted. The whole speech was a trifle disconcerting for him; but the latter sentences, which Roboshobery Dove had wished him to take as an artistic and subtle assurance that his secret was safe, put him in alarm. So now he came forward and took up the speech himself.

  “Axcuse me, Master Dove,” he said, with calm dignity. “’Tis much as Master Dove hev told yow, neighbours, though not said as I might say’t. It hev come to be known to me that of late sarten of my lawful trials n’ experiments an’ inquisitions hev been interfered with an’ set wrong by a strange an’ unusual matter, which I hev now mastered an’ got rid of, an’ so needn’t try to explain to yow, especially as yow’d never unnerstan’ my meanin’ if I did. The last experiment that was so made to fail was this evenin’ at Master Banham’s, as doubtless yow’ll hear of at length in the mornin’. The trouble is now made known to me, an’ got rid of for he future. I wish yow good-night, neighbours.”

  Steve Lingood came up and joined the little crowd just as Murrell’s explanation finished, and the neighbours, bedazed already by the tumultuous events of the night, began to discuss this new marvel. As they did so, and just as the sound of Banham’s cart was heard a little lower in the lane, a shout arose from the meadow behind the stile, over which several fresh coastguardsmen had come, scurrying in from eastward. And at the shout the chief officer left the cart and came running. There was a scuffle behind the hedge, an oath, and a few blows; then a wrangle of cries— “Hoad him!” “Look out!” “Where be?” “Stop him, damme!” “There he go!” “Here! Where be him?” “This way!” “No, he’s gone!”

  The chief officer rushed at the stile with such a mouthful of salt-sea rhetoric as Hadleigh had never heard before. But he was too late, for Golden Adams had got away.

  “But there’s a mort o’ tubs here in the ditch, sir!” a coastguardsman reported. And the chief officer was appeased when he found there was.

  Truly for Hadleigh this was a night of nights, this of the very last run of tubs ever attempted on that coast.

  XXVI. — AND AFTER

  IT was a year — more than a year — ere Hadleigh was again the same quiet Hadleigh that it had been before old Sim Cloyse’s last enterprise in contraband. Next year’s fair-day put a short check on the matter as a subject of conversation, it is true; but it was restored in a week, and thirty years afterward it was still a convenient topic at the Castle Inn on winter evenings. It is possible that even now some remain who use that bewildering night as the epoch in their calendar, before which and after which they date the births, marriages, deaths, and other happenings of Hadleigh and Leigh, even as the Moslem dates from the flight of his prophet. It was near a week ere the quicker-witted had sorted out the night’s adventures in their own minds, and never after did any one of them agree with any other as to how it all came about, or in what order. As for the slower-witted, they went puzzled to their graves.

  But in some way the night’s work put a brace to Mrs Martin’s faculties. She brought the revenue men to Castle Hill, and waited at the foot with Dorrily while they crept stealthily to the top; and as soon as it was plain that a seizure was being made and that nothing more remained for her to do, she submitted to go quietly home and to bed. It was a piece of her old life, a revival of her old activity, and it gave her sound and healthy sleep. And in that sleep she slept away the clouds from her mind, waking to something of her old self. For in the morning she gave a loose to her grief for her lost son, such as she had not given before, even when the news was brought her; much, indeed, as though its true meaning were only now made clear.

  There was an end, too, of the tale of her witchcraft. There were women who shook their heads still, and others who held it a shame that Cunning Murrell had not been more careful; but most were content, with some shamefacedness, to let the thing drop wholly. They had ever a reluctance to make over-close acquaintance with her, but perhaps the shamefacedness had its part in that; and, in truth. Mrs Martin was little perturbed, for she was never a gossip.

  Whether or not the thing in any degree shook the popular confidence in Murrell it would be hard indeed to say. Probably not, for Cunning Murrell was an article of faith too long established to be overset by a trifle; and indeed there was no sign of it, though for some little while Ann Pett was regarded with suspicion, because of the adventure in Banham’s bake-house. This, however, rather increased than diminished the awe in which the cunning man was held; and soon his fame stood higher than ever, because of certain very notable successes.

  One of these was made evident in the case of Dorcas Brooker. For it came to be known that she had looked in Cunning Murrell’s famous pail of blackened water, and therein had seen Sam Gill’s ship flung on a rock, and wrecked. And truly enough Sam Gill was shipwrecked on the Azores, for he came back himself, sent home to his own parish by charity, and told the tale. And anybody who doubted might go and ask for him at Atkins’s, the boat-builder, where he got work, and behaved very well. And if, now that Atkins’s is no more, you still offer to doubt, you may see the record of the wedding of Samuel Gill and Dorcas Brooker in the Leigh register at this day.

  Another triumph was in the case of Em Banham, whom Cunning Murrell cured at last — or at any rate Em Banham was cured. He went to work, this time, with more caution, and he used no more iron bottles. Instead he persevered with experiments in physic, using herbs, some stewed, some dried, some chopped, and many made into very large and ugly pills. He persisted so long and so industriously in this treatment that it were a mere absurdity to suggest that in the end the girl grew out of her trouble; and indeed nobody did suggest it. The cure first began to show itself on the next Midsummer Day, when Em Banham went a-fairing with Joe, Dan Fisk’s son, and was never melancholic again. Her sister Mag went a-fairing too, with young Sim Cloyse, just as she had done the last time; and there was nothing to mar the joy of that day, nor to quench the smell of peppermint.

  And so with a slow and gradual drowsing Hadleigh fell asleep again. The black cottage stood in its place, and in truth neither before he went to gaol nor after he came out did old Sim Cloyse dream of demolishing it; for that was a project born of a moment’s ardent inspiration in the brain of young Sim. The days came and went, and the months; even the back pay and prize-money due to the day of Jack Martin’s fatal shore-going came at last, and the tiny pension; and a year went, and another year; and life at the black cottage saw little change.

  But in time there came a day — though it was long to wait — when Steve Lingood looked from the high meadows down to the black cottage, and saw in the garden Dorrily Thorn, with a red rose in her hair.

  XVII. — FINIS

  SIX years were gone, and it was a bright day, and not so cold as it might have been, in December, 1860. Stephen Lingood came up from Leigh by way of the marshes, taking a zig-zag path with care and forethought, for in the winter months it is an easy thing to get into difficulties in boggy spots thereabout. Once on the slope of Castle Hill, however, he was free of the soft places, and climbed with less heed.

  He gained the top and stood beside the greatest of the broken towers to look back. It was a view that had not changed for two hundred years and more — since Croppenburgh dammed and dyked Canvey Island — save in one particular. There toward the east and the sea lay Leigh with its red roofs, floating, as it seemed, on the water. There stretched the water, bright in the sunlight, with the grey Kent coast beyond; and there lay Canvey Island, wide and flat and low, like a patch of duckweed in a pond. Nearer was the Ray, that cut the island off from main Essex; and nearer still the green marshes, where now a boy was jumping, backing, dodging, and jumping again, a mere speck in the distance, trying to out-manoeuvre a pony that would not be caught; while a man, a rather bigger speck, climbed a white gate to dodge the pony on the other side. And this was where the one change was. For the white gate closed a path that led across the railway; and the railway stretched, a straight thin brown line, through Casey March from end to end,
east and west, and its next station was at Leigh.

  Lingood descended the hill behind, and walked up the lane. The black cottage looked down from he bank, but there was a new tenant there now The smith kept his way up the lane along which old Sim Cloyse’s tubs had been carried in Banham’s cart six years ago, in the time of the war, passed Cunning Murrell’s cottage, and come out in Hadleigh street. The hammer rang gaily in the smithy where his new man was at work, but Lingood stopped at his house adjoining — the white cottage with the green door — at the sound of a song within.

  “What will you give me, captain, if that pirate I destroy?”. “I’ll give you fame, I’ll give you gold, you little cabin boy,. And you shall wed my only child, she is my pride and joy,. If you sink ‘em in the Lowlands low. Lowlands! Lowlands!. If you sink ‘em in the Lowlands low!”

  Steve Lingood had no need to peep to know that Roboshobery Dove, with a small girl on the sound knee and a small boy clinging to the wooden leg, was at his favourite amusement in these days, when there were no captured ships to watch for from the Castle loophole, and gardening was stayed till spring. Lingood’s wife nodded and smiled from the window, and he went on to the forge.

  At Cunning Murrell’s, too, there was a change, though a change of a different sort. There in the keeping-room, with all his books, papers, and herbs about him, Cunning Murrell lay a-bed, wasted smaller than ever, though sharp of eye still. He had had the bed brought downstairs, that he might lie here among his treasures, in the place where he had listened to so many secrets, solved so many difficulties, and settled so many destinies. The door had been curtained off with old shawls to give him some privacy from draughts and visitors, and Ann Pett waited on his wants faithfully still.

  “Ann Pett,” said Murrell, his small voice smaller than ever, but sharp, though now with something almost childish in it; “Ann Pett, I will hev the book o’ conjurations from the drawer — no, no, the long one — and I will read, Doan’t make the gruel — I shan’t want it.”

  Ann Pett gave him the manuscript book with its teeming spiders of signs and sigils, and, propped in his bed, he took his iron-rimmed goggles and settled to read. But first he resolved certain business matters.

  “If Mrs Bennett send round for more ‘intment,” he squeaked, “’tis that in the gallipot on the top shelf, next the window. ’Tis twopence, an’ don’t let her hev’t without. Ben’t as though she couldn’t pay it. An’ if Simmons’s come about the cow send ‘em away. I woan’t be bothered.”

  “An’ what mus’ I say if the noo curate comes agen?”

  “Send him away too. I will not hev the noo curate. He knows nothen, that he should come here teachin’ me. He be a boy as might be my great gran’son, an’ I be the devil’s master, as be well knowed. Clargymen den’t bother me in the oad time, an’ I will not hev this meddlin’. Send him away...What be that noise?”

  The old man paused, with his thin grey lips apart, and his hand to his car.

  “‘Haps it be the Lunnon railway train,” said Ann Pett.

  “Ah! the railway train,” he repeated absently; “the railway train...Yes, yes.” Then he spoke up again. “There be one more thing, Ann, an’ the last I hev to tell ‘ee. I hev been carled. He who hev given me my cunnin’ an’ my larnin’, and hev putt me in dominion over arl evil things, hev sent for me, an’ I shall go — to-morrow, at one o’clock. Ann, yow’ve been a good darter to me, though dull of unnerstandin’. It grieve me I han’t much to leave ‘ee. Yow hev little money in hand, I know; but yow shall hev a good gown for once in your life, to wear at the funeral. Look yow in the box under the stairs an’ take a sovereign. Get the best frock it will buy, an’ if one sovereign ben’t enough, yow’ll find anoather. An’ now leave me, Ann. I shall go, as I tell ‘ee — tomorrow — at one o’clock.”

  And he did, to the minute.

  THE END

  THE HOLE IN THE WALL

  This novel was published in 1902 and as such is one of the last works Morrison wrote before he withdrew from writing in order to concentrate on collecting and dealing in Japanese art. The narration is opened by Stephen Kemp, the main character, and it is set in Wapping, a dockland world of shipbuilding, boisterous street life and public houses that were frequented by sailors and dockers. Wapping is a very different district to the Jago, the scene of Morrison’s other novel about criminal activities; this dockland area has a somewhat more exotic feel, with the population of mariners and dockers, shops selling nautical goods such as model ships in bottles and fancy ware brought back on ships from foreign shores: “There were shops full of slops, sou’westers, pilot-coats, sea-boots, tin pannikins, and canvas kit-bags like giants’ bolsters; and rows of big knives and daggers, often engraved with suggestive maxims”.

  In the story Stephen is a young child, living with Nat Kemp, his grandfather in a public house called The Hole in the Wall. His mother has died in childbirth and his father is at sea. The little boy is fascinated by what is to him the exotic world of the sailor – the tattoos sported by his grandfather, the songs sung by the dockers as they worked and the sight of sailing ships drifting past his home. Even the women who frequent the pub are to a child beautiful and colourful in their bright clothes and gaudy scarves. The pub is a place of contrasts; it is a safe haven for Stephen, and where he is loved and protected by his doting grandfather, but it is also a place where shady deals can be contracted. As a child with no friends his own age, the boy spends his time mixing with, and observing, this population of larger than life adults. It is not all amusement, however; Nat warns his grandson of areas that he must not enter, such as Blue Gate Fields— “People get murdered there, Stevy… sailor-men mostly… Pitch them in the dock sometimes, sometimes in the river, so’s they’re washed away.” Stephen does witness the dark side of the area, with the undercurrent of violence and petty crime, slovenly women, fraudsters and drunks, and even at his young age is repelled by it. He is terrified when whilst out and about with his grandfather, he witnesses the stabbing of the man that helped Nat fence the stolen goods that were regularly brought into the pub. One night, the child also discovers his grandfather taking delivery of contraband tobacco; it would seem that his kindly Grandfather Nat had a secret career beneath the veneer of respectability he carefully maintained as a publican. A further blow comes when Stephen’s father is lost at sea in criminal circumstances, leaving just the boy and his grandfather to face the world together. Stephen loves his grandfather dearly and sees very little wrong with him, but Nat is troubled. He does not want Stephen to grow up in the docklands and spend his life being patronised by his “betters”, so he must find a way to give the boy a better life – but how?

  The Hole in the Wall is a beautifully written story and easier to read than some of Morrison’s other works as the representation of dialect is less intrusive or distracting. We receive insights into what Morrison suggests is almost a “caste” system in the poor working class areas; it would seem that criminals from areas like Whitechapel (or indeed the Jago) would not be welcomed in Wapping and Blackwall, and would be looked down upon. Somehow, the style has a more mature feel to it than even A Child of the Jago, which was Morrison’s best-seller and the use of a child’s perceptions narrated first hand by the adult Stevy is very appealing and nicely done. All the characters are well drawn, the scenes of poverty compelling and the action sequences dramatic. Definitely one of Morrison’s finer pieces, it is a worthy novel for him to end his career as a fiction writer on.

  The first edition

  CONTENTS

  PREFACE

  I. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  II. — IN BLUE GATE

  III. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  IV. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  V. — IN THE HIGHWAY

  VI. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  VII. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  VIII. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  IX. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  X. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  XI. — STEPHEN’S TALE

 
; XII. — IN THE CLUB-ROOM

  XIII. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  XIV. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  XV. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  XVI. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  XVII. — IN BLUE GATE

  XVIII. — ON THE COP

  XIX. — ON THE COP

  XX. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  XXI. — IN THE BAR-PARLOUR

  XXII. — ON THE COP

  XXIII. — ON THE COP

  XXIV. — ON THE COP

  XXV. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  XXVI. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  XXVII. — IN THE BAR-PARLOUR

  XXVIII. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  XXIX. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  XXX. — STEPHEN’S TALE

  Title page of the second edition

  PREFACE

  THE old East End of London was a secret and dangerous place. How much thieving and plotting, fighting and knifing and murdering, went on there nobody ever knew or ever will know. The police, who were treated as a common enemy, went about in threes. But towards its own people it could be protective and sentimental. Above all, it was alive, rich in its human texture. This was the private world which Arthur Morrison — journalist, story-teller and collector of Oriental paintings — made authentically his own.