“‘That’s right,’ he said, ‘keep a steady draw on her. She’s pullin’ now, ain’t she?’
“‘Aye, that she is,’ says Bedlow, hangin’ on for all he was worth. ‘I shouldn’t ha’ thought there could be sich a wind a night like this.’
“‘Oh, any sort of a little breeze is terrific, once it gets under a hairyplane,’ says Mr. Walker. ‘All right, steady; don’t jerk. Just a steady, even pull’s what’s wanted. This hairyplane o’ mine’s worth thousands, and I wouldn’t have it damaged on any account. Hang on tight; the insurance company pays big salvage for a job like this.’
“‘H-how much?’ says Bedlow, gaspin’ an’ pullin’.
“‘Seven an’ three-quarters per cent.,’ says Mr. Walker. ‘You can work it all out while you’re pullin’. There’s eight of you. Divide seven an’ three quarters by eight, an’ that’ll give you each man’s percentage. Steady on! Keep pullin’, an’ don’t slide into the ditch. You’re doin’ splendid. I don’t wonder you won the tug-o’-war today. I’d like to have a team o’ chaps like you pullin’ for me always.’
“It was past one in the mornin’ when they came out, an’ Mr. Walker kep’ on encouragin’ em’ an’ workin’ out percentages till it was very near two and they was half dead. Then he said: —
“‘Keep steady, and I’ll go and see how she’s gettin’ on. P’r’aps me an’ my man can hang the sky-hooks on the safety-valve an’ give you a bit of a rest. But don’t stop pullin’ till I tell you.’
“He called out to Jones an’ went off to meet him. Bedlow and the other chaps hung on somehow an’ waited, but they heard no more of him. After a bit Bedlow sings out: —
“‘Mr. Walker! Mr. Walker!’
“Not a word of answer did they get, but presently the voice of Sam Gill from the other side o’ the field callin’ out most pathetic: —
“‘Mr. Walker! We can’t stick this here much longer!’
“And Bedlow cries out again: —
“‘Mr. Walker! Flesh an’ blood can’t stand this no more. Is them sky-hooks hung on the safety-valve? Can’t we take a rest?’
“Then they heard Sam Gill again complainin’ most molloncholy in the distance, an’ presently says Bill Wood behind Bedlow: —
“‘This here hairyplane’s easin’ up. It don’t pull half as hard as it did. P’r’aps the sky-hooks is hung on the safety-valve.’
“And once more they heard Sam Gill across the field: —
“‘D’ye hear, Mr. Walker? We’re a-goin’ to let go!’
“With that the rope went all slack, an’ they stood up and shouted across the hedge to Sam Gill. It was just beginning to get a little grey in the sky, and things wasn’t so pitch dark.
“‘I can’t see no hairyplane,’ says Bill Wood.
“‘I can’t see nothin’ at all,’ says Bedlow.
“An’ they couldn’t. ‘Cause why? There was nothin’ there. There was no hairyplane an’ no Mr. Walker, an’ no Jones. Nothing but a precious long rope with half o’ the Padfield tug-o’-war team at each end of it!
“They got over the hedge an’ met in the middle o’ the field, and then they all got a presentiment at once.
“‘Them Codham chaps!’ says four of ‘em, and ‘That side o’ bacon!’ says all eight. And with that they runned headlong. But it were too late. There was the gas still aburnin’ an’ the winder an’ the door open, but the side o’ bacon were gone, an’ nobody in Padfield ever see it again. And it was only when he went to draw some water in the mornin’ that Bedlow found out that that there precious long rope they’d all a-been pullin’ on was the rope out of his own well.
“There’s been more’n one fight since then when Codham chaps ha’ called out: ‘Mr. Walker! Can’t we have a rest?’ on market-days or what-not. An’ there was one in the bar o’ this very house when Jim Bartrip, the big chap as slipped in the Codham team, came in an’ told Huxon that if he didn’t know how to divide a side o’ bacon into eight fair parts he could teach him, havin’ seen it done quite lately.
“‘How?’ asks Huxon, very disputatious.
“‘Cut it all up in rashers an’ count ‘em out, you silly chump,’ says Jim Bartrip.
“And arter all the aggeravation what I’ve been tellin’ you, I should think you’d see why a Padfield man don’t want no Codham chap to ask him about hairyplanes.”
LIES UNREGISTERED
I.
IKEY COHEN’S spieler was reached through the mosat innocent door in the world — a door that in the evening, when it was chiefly used, you would swear must be either that of the sponge-merchant’s on one side or the slop-tailor’s on the other. As a matter of fact, each of these establishments had its door at the end farthest from this, the portal that separated the two, and admitted the frequenters of Ikey Cohen’s spieler to the room, mysteriously placed somewhere behind, where they lost their money at faro and chemin de fer.
From the main Whitechapel High Street you turned into a street of new warehouses and shops, which had been a notorious slum a few years ago, and in the first turning to the right you found the door of Ikey Cohen’s spieler. It was the most expressionless and respectable-looking door in the street, with the button of an electric bell let so unobtrusively into the shadowy part of the frame that in the dusk you would overlook it if you were not in the habit of using it. And, indeed, if you were not in the habit, you wasted your time at this door, unless you went with a recognizable customer of the place. For every presser of that button was carefully “piped” from the skylight, and his admission or exclusion depended on the observation so made.
This was in the evening; for Ikey Cohen’s spieler was kept for the accommodation of gamblers of small amounts, who worked during the day to earn them; and although gamblers came who never worked during the day or at any other time, they were not sufficiently profitable to cause the table to open in daylight.
Just such a customer it was who swaggered up the street at nine of a fine night when the sponge-merchant’s had been long shut and the slop-tailor’s already had half the shutters in their places. Naty Green wore his bowler hat very close over his right eye; his Newmarket coat flung wide in the breeze, and his tie, albeit a trifle dirty, flamed with all the colore that could be got for a shilling in Whitechapel High Street.
Naty Green stopped at the respectable door and pressed the button. The door opened quietly and quickly closed behind him. A thick-set, close-cropped man in rubber-soled canvas shoes was dimly visible.
“Moey Marks here?” asked Naty Green.
“Yes.”
Naty Green swore a long and ready sentence. “I want to pop a bit down,” he grumbled. “You’ll have to put it on for me.”
“You get somebody else,” replied the thick-set man. “You know the guv’nor don’t like me playin’.”
“Somebody else? Where’s somebody else as won’t stick to the lot if he plays the stakes, just as much as Moey Marks hisself? An’ what could I say, with him there? Be a pal. You’re the only straight bloke in the shop, s’elp me.”
“An’ if I have to nip off to the door while the stakes is down an’ some one snorks ‘em, ‘ow’s that?”
“I’ll take my chance. Here y’ are— ‘alf a james, a bob a time. Put ‘em where you like — I shan’t grumble.”
The thick-set man hesitated, with a frown on his none too pleasing face. “You know the guv’nor don’t like me cuttin’ in, ‘avin’ to see to things an’ all,” he grumbled, reluctantly extending his hand; “an’ you’ll lose it, like the rest, if you keep on long enough.”
“That’s my lookout. Wait a bit. I’ll go in first.”
The meaning of this conversation would have been clear enough to any eavesdropper from the faro-den beyond the passage. It was simply that Naty Green had “sold himself” to Moey Marks, and for that reason dared not gamble in his presence. It was a common enough procedure when a punter was totally cleared out. A night or two back, Naty Green, having put his last sixpence on the wr
ong card, had withdrawn from the table, with a long, complicated, and dazzling succession of curses, concluding with an offer to sell himself for a sovereign. Moey Marks, flush at the moment, and a man of enterprise, confident in Naty Green’s inability to keep any money he might possess off a gaming-table, took the offer on the spot and paid the money; and now, by the terms implied in the bargain, whenever Moey Marks might observe Naty Green gambling, it was his privilege to seize his winnings as often as they might turn up.
It was an interesting invention, and the only righteous force that operated in Ikey Cohen’s spieler. It led to dodgings and lurkings and watchings and scoutings, but it did keep a gambler’s money in his pocket sometimes when no other earthly invention would have done so.
So Naty Green walked into Ikey Cohen’s spieler, and presently Bill Hooker, door-keeper and retired pugilist, followed through the long passage and past the two doors which it was his duty to bar in case of a raid.
Now, Bill Hooker was no beauty. Thick of neck and shoulder, bullet-headed and beetle-browed naturally, his earlier trade had marked him with no improvements. Seen in profile, his nose descended perpendicularly from his forehead as far as an unimportant tip, and seen from the front it spread away indefinitely into his cheek-bones. His ears, thickened and thickened again by many grievous punches, had long years ago grown tired of recovering their natural proportions, and now remained thick for the rest of Bill Hooker’s life; and an odd scar or two seamed the leathery hide of his face. On the whole, he looked a sad ruffian; and yet in the crowd of faces that night to be seen in Ikey Cohen’s spieler, Bill Hooker’s offered something like a pleasant relief. Among the rest were no broken noses, thick ears, or bullet heads, but the sleekest head in the crowded room had about it something of repulsion of which Bill Hooker’s was innocent.
The table stood a yard from the wall, with his back against which sat the banker, imperturbable, dexterous, Semitic, curled like an Assyrian bull. Packed in a bent and climbing heap about the three other sides of the table, the players swarmed like bees on a bush, reaching on tiptoe to play their stakes, clamorous in Yiddish, blasphemous in English of strange accent. Behind them stood a fringe of less active gamblers, peeping and craning and disputing among themselves; and beyond them wandered others, strays from the swarm, stumped to the last brad, or sold to some watchful speculator. No silent losers were there; English was the prevailing tongue, but English of a quality difficult to match. Any person who has been privileged to indulge the sense of hearing in the silver ring at Alexandra Park races may suppose that the resources of unprintable language have been fully disclosed to him; but five minutes of Ikey Cohen’s spieler would have taught him his error. The simplest sentence grew into a laborious rigmarole, so qualified, punctuated, and embellished as to burst the bonds of syntax and leave its purport buried and bemuddled; so that for a stranger it was needful to skip over the miry flood and pick up a word here and there to piece out the meaning.
To one side of the room stood the bar, just now little patronized. It consisted of two trestles and a board top, standing before a tenth-hand hanging book-shelf, stocked with bottles and glasses. Between the trestles and the liquor stood “the guv’nor” — not Ikey Cohen, however. That speculator reaped the profits from afar, and “the guv’nor” was his nominee, whose business it was to manage the place and bear the brunt of a possible police-raid in the character of proprietor. This man, like Bill Hooker, was a Christian; from which circumstance, and the other that no flies were reputed to abide on Ikey Cohen, the philosopher may draw whatever conclusions he pleases.
For some little while Bill Hooker travelled to and fro from the street door, admitting another gambler and a few more, and rarely letting one out. Meantime the game went steadily on, and the banker wasted not a second of time; for he was a man of business, and he sat in his place on a contract to play Ikey Cohen a fixed sum per hour.
One man, seated close in by the table, clamored above all the din at each turn, losing heavily, turn after turn. He cursed in succession the cards, the game, and himself, and, least reasonably but most angrily, the man who last had cut the cards. He was the worst sort of gambler, and paid the banker well, though his noise was a nuisance. A dozen times he swore to stop after the next turn, and as often he went on, plunging and cursing, and coming near to foaming at the mouth. At last, choking with curses, he turned on his neighbor, who had last cut the cards, and insensately struck at him.
“Now, then, there! Now, then!” roared the manager, with a quick glance at Bill Hooker.
Instantly Bill was in the thick of the crowd and took the fellow by the shoulder. The dealer, who had never looked up, went steadily on, made the pack and shuffled it and put it out to cut.
“All right, all right,” gasped the offender, cringing and abashed. “I beg pardon — I vashn’t myself — I—”
“All right, let ‘im stop,” said the dealer, who wanted the rest of the man’s money. And Bill, who well enough understood his job, contented himself with a growl or two, standing handy at the man’s back.
Here he was well placed to gamble for Naty Green, and presently he began. Five times in succession he put a shilling on the wrong square; but the sixth shilling came back and brought another with it. Then he tried again, and lost. Then he won two shillings in succession; and so, in the course of twenty minutes of varying chance, he ended at the climax of a most unusual run of luck with a net gain of six shillings.
He slipped the money into his pocket, and, with a parting admonition to the bad loser over whom he had been keeping guard, he elbowed out of the crowd, to the speechless disgust of Naty Green, who — like the gambler he was — wanted to see the luck followed up till it vanished.
Bill ignored him, however, and as Moey Marks was still in the room Naty dared not murmur. He glared covertly at the door-keeper, anxious to signal him to resume; but Bill had unwrapped from a parcel in a corner a glass jar of cheap jelly, and was absorbed in the task of scraping away every scrap of the paper label.
Presently a gamester from the inner ring got up and straggled out of the crowd, and Moey Marks took his place, vanishing from outer view. At about the same time Bill Hooker, having scraped the jelly-jar to his satisfaction, made application behind the bar and thence extracted a penny bottle of ink and a pen. Also, from an inner pocket, he brought, with much care, two sheets of notepaper carefully wrapped up.
“Here y’ are,” said Bill Hooker quietly to Naty Green. “One good turn deserves another. You can do different handwritin’s, can’t you?”
“Why?” asked Naty Green, with something of a start. For, in fact, a certain exploit in his previous career made the question a tactless one.
“Come on,” proceeded Bill, pulling the cork from the ink-bottle. “Write on this ‘ere paper: With Lady Walker’s compliments. Write it in a woman’s hand.”
“What’s the ramp?” queried Naty, still doubtful. “Do I stand in?”
“‘Tain’t a ramp,” replied Bill. “It’s — it’s just for my old woman what’s ill; just a jolly — bit of a lark. Come on.”
Naty Green took the pen and wrote as requested, angularly, with many long tails and flourishes.
“Fair knockout,” commented Bill admiringly, taking up the paper by a corner. “Now write on the other one. Write: With Lord Walker’s compliments. Write it like a toff.”
“This to guy your old woman, too?” asked Naty. “‘Ow many more?”
“No more. That’s it — toppin’!” He took the second paper gingerly, and put it beside the first to dry. “‘Ere — ketch ‘old o’ your money,” he proceeded. “Moey Marks is deep in the push — sixteen bob.”
“No,” dissented Naty, stepping back and dropping his voice. “Go an’ get me a bit more.”
“What you’d like me to do is go an’ lose the lot,” replied Bill. “I know your sort. ‘Ere — you ketch old, an’ ketch ‘old quick ‘fore they see you. It ain’t often anybody takes anythin’ away from ‘ere, except the b
anker — you ought to know that.”
“Go on — be a pal. You stopped just when you was winnin’.”
“That’s the difference ‘tween me an’ you. You don’t stop till you ain’t got no more to lose. You done me a little turn, an’ I got a bit for you. I ain’t goin’ to ‘elp you lose it. For the last time, ketch ‘old — else I’ll drop it on the floor.”
Naty, grumbling, and glancing swiftly over his shoulder, took the money with a covert grab and resumed his prowlings in the fringe of the crowd round the table.
And so in time the game flagged, as it did indeed at some time or other every night, even in Ikey Cohen’s spieler. The dealer stopped as soon as the number of punters fell below the paying point, and chemin de fer began in the common routine, with sixpence a coup for Ikey Cohen. Chemin de fer “gets the money quicker,” as some gamblers will say, and loses it quicker, as others experience. And it always finished the evening’s sport at Ikey Cohen’s spieler.
II.
THE door between the sponge-dealer’s and the slop-tailor’s closed behind him, and Bill Hooker, with his parcel under his arm, set off for home. It was not a long walk. He emerged into the street of new shops and warehouses which had lately been a slum, and turned away from the direction of Whitechapel High Street. A hundred yards farther, and he turned to traverse a short street of older and grimier shops, now fast closed; and off this was the street in which the emoluments of Ikey Cohen’s spieler permitted him the tenancy of two second-floor back rooms.
The house was high and black among others a little smaller and of the same blackness. The door opened to his latch-key and revealed a gulf of a greater blackness still. Through this he groped with no hesitation, and up the creaking staircase to the second landing. Here no key was needed; but be turned the door-handle with care, for the sake of the sleeper within.
The room was poor and untidy, but clean; and it was lighted by a candle near the fireplace. He shut the door, again with care, lifted the candle, and went tiptoe toward a small bed in the farther corner.
Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison Page 266