“How does that come about?”
The man had taken a small tin from his pocket, opened it, revealing a collection of cigarette-ends. He broke open a few small ones, rolled and rubbed the tobacco in his palm, breathed on it, then whisked a thin piece of paper from a blue packet, and rolled it into a cigarette.
“It’s shrunk and shrivelled in you,” he answered Ginger.
“But you’re free, aren’t you?”
“Free as the bird in the air! But how free that is no one will ever know, for the bird can’t tell us. And, truth to tell, I oftimes wonder over such things along my day’s tramping. The birds now; I’d see them of an evening, flying in droves, or maybe the two, or it might be the solitary one, and spent and fagged they’d be looking to me; and I’d think to myself: ‘Well, Patrick, as far as you may have to trudge this blessed day, the poor birds have farther.’ An endless travel ‘twould seem to be if one was to watch them fly on, on and on, away out of sight. And to see them flutter about the trees, the ones that be at home, or fiddling around the roof tops, they are as busy as can be, and don’t have a minute to themselves the long day. And everything you see do nearly be the same, from the nimble ant to the waggling worm, all going about their business without a minute of freedom.”
“You ain’t an ant, mister,” said Ginger. “You’re man—you’ve got to remember: I’m master of all I survey!”
“Man’s unconquerable soul!” uttered Corky.
“Even if you haven’t a penny to your name, you’re independent, you’re free!”
“Are you two aware,” began Patrick, “are you aware that there’s many a town in this country where a man can be arrested for not having a penny to his name?”
“Not unless he tries to buy something!”
“He doesn’t have to buy anything. He doesn’t have to do anything. A policeman stops him, asks him who he is, what he does for a living, and how much has he got. And if he’s broke the copper can take him in—in jail. He’s a vagrant, wandering without visible means of support.”
“What, no braces?”
“Braces!” snorted Patrick. “There’s more things need support than a man’s trousers. ‘His unconquerable soul’ is one of them. But who wants to conquer it—the devil? Poor devil, he must have a job to find it, for Man is so occupied with other things, that he doesn’t know he has a soul. I suppose it just rots away——”
“Not entirely,” said Corky.
“Now it might look that for the moment we’re letting the souls of us have a talk,” continued Patrick, “but I’ll warrant if a man in a car held up his hand to give ye a lift, the pair of yeez would be off like a shot——”
“Or you before us,” piped Ginger, “if he offered a plate of stew, or a slab of bread and cheese——”
“Stew! Bread and cheese!” repeated Patrick. “If he offered me them two I’d soon know what to do with them.”
“So would we!”
“I’d fling them in the face of him!”
“You’d what?”
“Fling them at him!” Patrick’s face darkened. “I hope I never see stew, or bread and cheese, this side of the grave. Or the other, come to that.”
His face brightened as he spoke again.
“A nice piece of soda cake, that’s what I’d like, thick in butter. Or a nice fresh currant cake. Or even a potato cake——”
“But them’s not necessities——”
“Arra, who’s talking about necessities?” Patrick said. “You can always do without them! If I had two shillings now, d’you know what I’d buy? A half-ounce of tobacco, a cup of sweet, strong tea, and a nice cake!”
“You would?”
“I would an’ all. Unless I was thirsty, an’ then I might spend the lot on beer!”
“Oh, he’s a proper case!” said Ginger to Corky, eyeing Patrick in mock disapproval.
“Well, do you know now,” said Patrick, putting aside a bit of a laugh, “’tis the truth I’m telling. If kind people would only realize the blessings us tramps would wish on them if they’d give us some change from thick bread, cheese, soup, or the likes of that, then they might try a change. What pleasure they could give a man!”
Patrick was silent for a minute, and Corky remarked:
“It seems like people want to do things for your good, but never for your pleasure. They always think they know what’s best for you——”
“No man ever spoke a truer word!” said Patrick. “Listen in the distance, did you hear that now?—the hooter, or buzzer, or siren, or what the devil they call it. That’s to tell the people at the factory they can this second put their coats on and go home. And it will go off again in the morning, and then it’s to tell them they must come to work at once. Och, isn’t that an awful thing altogether! I see them hurrying and scurrying in the early mornings and it do frighten me, the way they’re all at the beck and call of time, the way five minutes do make such difference to them—and five days don’t make any to me, or five months!
“And work is another thing that do frighten me. When I see the men lifting, carrying, digging, climbing, swinging hammers and filling spades, I nearly faint with the pain in my inside. I mean it makes a strange uneasiness in me. An’ yet I know it’s doing them good, and that some of them even enjoy it. I know because I used to have a hard job, a scaffolder I was. I used to throw all the wooden platforms up for the brickies to stand on, for the men to move on, for the job to grow. Sling them up in the sky, I used. And when they were built I’d take them all down again. At the time I took great love and interest in it; but today, today I wonder what kind of man I could have been—to be satisfied with work of that kind. Oh, boys, I’m ashamed of myself how lazy I’ve grown, that used to be the best scaffolder in the country!”
“Don’t worry, Patrick, it’ll come back to you.”
“Never, never as long as I’m on the roads!” declared Patrick. “That’s what I want you two to understand: in the long run you can only live one life, fit in one place, do one job. Oh, ‘tis a terrible thing indeed, all the rules of life that are inside each an’ every one of us, an’ which we can never escape from. You’d think now to talk that a man could do anything he set his mind to, but ’tisn’t that way at all. There’s something going on in one part of you that another part couldn’t do a thing about; some kind of a quare feeling that decides things—and never mind what the brain says.”
“Like when you’ve seen a murder film, or a spooky one,” said Corky, “an’ coming home along the dark streets you’re scared stiff, an’ you keep telling yourself, ‘It’s just the same as any night, what are you so windy about?’”
“That’s true enough,” remarked Patrick.
“Worry’s the same kind of caper,” said Ginger. “You’ve got a little something on your mind an’ you tell yourself: ‘Worrying ain’t going to do any good, I’ll cut it out,’ an’ you might begin reading of something, an’ you get to the bottom of the page, an’ then you casts the old mind back, an’ you see you ain’t swallowed a word of what’s been going before your eyes—you’ve been worrying all the time.”
“I’ve had that happen me many the time,” said Patrick. “The thing do come in spite of you. I’ll give you a fine example. Now see me, imagine me going down a quiet respectable street, with myself the way I am now. Now who comes up the other side of the road but a policeman—the big blue arm of the law. The minute I clap eyes on him, I’ll tell you what occurs: every single misdeed in me long life, away back to robbing an apple tree when I was eleven, all comes up in a black cloud before me! And yet, much as I know he can’t know a breath of all that, I can’t for the life of me put it out of my mind. He looks. He sees the way I am, an’ wonders what I can be up to. I glimpse his eye, it shouts: ‘Rogue, you’re bent on wrong-doing!’ And though me heart’s as innocent as a babe’s I can’t say No to that bobby’s eye.
“I feel all this. He feels it. He swells in righteousness. I grovel in guilt. His hands go firmly behind his back, my
fingers flip around my face. His feet step soundly, my feet slink.
“If he speaks my heart will jump to a stop. My face will leer and fawn, or will turn brazen and brassy. I don’t know what it will do. I don’t know what words will come from my lips. They will just jerk off my tongue with the scatter of thoughts his deep lawful voice makes in me, for my little frightened brain is paralysed.
“And if he lets me pass unspoken to, the shirt grips in sweat to my trembling body. I want to lie down, alone, to die, somewhere on an ould mountain where no eye can see me, or curl up in the dark of a cave.”
The boys couldn’t say anything. Corky was looking at Patrick’s feet; Ginger at his face.
“Like to come and have a bit of tea with us?” said Corky at last.
“Do,” said Ginger. “We ain’t short of a bob or two.”
Slowly, sadly, Patrick shook his old head.
“God bless ye, and reward ye, thanks, but——” His head shook a No.
“Aw, come on,” said Ginger.
“Yes, Patrick, why not?” said Corky.
Suddenly Patrick sprang to his feet.
“Ten million curses on the life of the roads!” he cried. “A curse on the poorhouses, an’ the doss houses—on the filth, dirt an’ disease. All the pains of a lone heart trudging the world, that is never to know its own bed at night, its own fireside, or the love of ones that are near. . . . Wandering, wandering, wandering, without a stick or stone to know would be your own, or a place to sit, stand, or walk around in that hadn’t others besides yourself. You wouldn’t know the awful emptiness of feelings that can drain the heart out of yuz—ye’d never, never know it.” He hurried away down the road, sobbing backwards in loud appeal: “Go home, go home, go home.”
The boys looked upset.
“Poor old blighter,” said Ginger.
“He was a nice old chap,” said Corky. “I liked him.”
“Me, too,” Ginger looked after the figure of Patrick. “Corky, he told us the truth, eh?”
Corky nodded.
“Corky, it puts things in a different light, don’t it?”
“Well, we’re not on the tramp, are we? We’re out for work.”
“Yay, but suppose we don’t fall into jobs? What then? We’ll have to tramp, won’t we?”
Corky didn’t speak.
“Matter of fact,” said Ginger, “I’m feeling a bit ribby. I’m feeling weary, Corky. And all this caper of searching for a bed, sleeping under the sky, or in a haystack, it sounded good this morning, but it don’t seem to make sense tonight. I mean, not with beds waiting for us at home.”
Corky put a hand out, and forced a wry sort of smile to his face.
“Sorry, Ginger,” he began, “but you don’t have to beat round the old bush. You want to go home an’ you’ve every right to go home. I don’t want to talk about it. But—” he paused, “I’m going on.”
“What! you’d go alone?” gulped Ginger.
“I wouldn’t turn back,” said Corky. “Not here anyway. I’d want to see it for myself, an’ that’s what I’m going to do.”
Ginger knocked Corky’s outstretched hand down.
“Phew, you’re an odd customer, you are!” he said. “Quiet as a little mouse, betimes, an’ here you want to go tackling the whole country on your own!”
“When I make my mind up about some things, I make it up.”
“Okay, then, but you’d better have your Uncle Ginger looking after you. Blow me, Corky, you’re a proper caution, you are.”
“I don’t want to drag you ‘gainst your will, Ginger.”
“Now don’t come the old malarkey, Corky. I said I was coming, and I am. But I ain’t in no condition for arguing. You take the lead, MacTavish. I won’t falter, I won’t grumble. But just this word, off the record, I’m famished. An’ I can scarce lift the plates of meat one after the other.”
“Don’t you worry,” said Corky with confidence. “I’ll get you a lift. Just you see if I don’t. I’ll get us a lift—or my name ain’t George Washington!”
Ginger just looked. He didn’t say anything. Corky set his gaze along the road.
22 A Lift
He grabbed Gingers two wrists. “Spring!” he yelled.
CORKY stood, a resolute figure by the roadside, one foot off the footpath, hand outstretched in signpost fashion, and face set in deep seriousness as the lorry roared towards him, nearer and bigger. He took a deep breath of determination, stiffened his hand to a final kind of ‘Halt!’—though, at the same time he allowed his expression to relax, and a hint of matey appeal to come to his eyes. On came the lorry. Nearer, nearer. It swelled to the full roar of its engine at the spot where Corky held himself. A great rush of air, a harsh swish of dust and fumes—it thundered by.
The driver hadn’t even looked. Well, his eyes had passed on and through Corky; but they had seen nothing. “No more than I was a stump beside the road ...” were Corky’s words.
“You did look a bit of a one,” said Ginger, almost to himself, and when Corky said, “What?” he replied:
“‘Breathes there a man with soul so dead.’”
Corky let it pass.
The ‘stop-when-I-tell-you’ stance had suffered a hard snub. Corky decided to put it aside. He’d try something different.
First it was to stick by the roadside, gaze in admiration at every car and lorry, and hold on his face a smile of deepest envy: “Oh, I would like a ride in your motor, mister!”
Charming as the appeal of such a sight must have been—and Corky felt it surely was—it failed in its impact. It was, of course, essentially a call to the heart. And a heart whizzing by at sixty miles an hour isn’t easily got at. Especially a driver’s.
Next came the ‘thumbing’. Corky had to move backwards for this, at the same time facing the oncoming traffic and giving longing beckonings of the thumb over his shoulder, in a brotherly ‘Going-my-way?’ style.
Ginger, chewing long juicy grasses from the roadside, watched Corky’s antics in detached curiosity. “What do you want to keep moving for?” he called out, reluctant to stir from the spot of ground he had made warm.
“It’s a thing I’d like to see myself, I mean if I were a driver,” explained Corky, “that I was giving a lift to a tryer, a ‘God helps him that helps himself’ sort of kid.”
“Can’t you move backwards and forwards on one beat?” asked Ginger, “then I won’t have to keep stirring.”
“Let me catch this fellow’s eye——” said Corky.
Erect he stood, his arm with upstuck thumb moving gracefully like an inverted grandfather clock pendulum. As the truck came along, without signs of slowing up, Corky leant dangerously towards the middle of the road, his arm going in frantic jerks.
“No luck,” he groaned, as it shot past.
“Pity you ain’t got longer arms,” remarked Ginger. “You could almost get your thumb in the cab and poke the driver in the eye. That ‘ud make them take notice.”
“I will get us a lift,” vowed Corky, “if it’s the last thing I ever do!”
“You’ll get a lift all right!” said Ginger grimly. “An’ it’s likely to be the last thing you ever do if you move any further off the footpath. Look down the road, Corky, see this mad Ike driver coming along. Tell you what you could do—hold me in your arms, like I was dead or had a broken leg, that’ud stop him. Or we could play, ‘What is Mary weeping for?’ in the middle of the road!”
Corky gazed pitifully at the huge Scammell lorry that was sailing up the straight road with thunderous beat. ‘Of all the things there are to wish for in this universe,’ he thought, ‘my only one is a seat for me and Ginger up beside that driver!’ He weakly raised a hand, when a ridiculous self-consciousness struck him, and he made a pretence of scratching his nose. ‘Standing by the roadside picking my nose, what will people think of me?’ began his thoughts again. ‘It’s all been a mistake, a messed-up mistake. I’ve let my heart run away with me, that’s what I’ve done. Old Patrick was
right, it all comes down to corn plasters in the long run. I could stand it better if Ginger wasn’t here. Oh what an ass, what a fool am I! I want my brains testing, an’ then throwing away. Why do I have to keep setting myself these crazy ambitions? Where did I pick up all this stuff about adventure—getting on trawlers—from cabin boy to liner captain? It’s all a lot of bunk. I’d better go an’ see old Crater for my job back tomorrow. I’d better stay at home, go to the pictures once a week, and save up for a carpenter’s tool box, so that when I get married I can spend the week-ends making plant-pot stands for aspidistras!’
All this flashed through Corky’s imagination, and would most likely have gone on flashing through, if there hadn’t been a high screech of brakes from the Scammell. The driver had been taking the road bend at a speed that caused him to keep to his off-side, and here he had nearly collided with a red van coming in the opposite direction. He had braked and turned sharply into the kerb, so as to swing his long trailer to safety.
Corky looked. He saw the rear part of the trailer, empty it was, and stationary, and could be got on. His mind zipped to the opportunity.
“Ginger! Ginger! quick, quick,” he cried. “Can you make it? Quick——” He was off himself. Ginger was almost as quick, but not quite so spirited. Corky gave one flying leap, his hands gripped the wooden runner, and he jerked himself on as the lorry shot off. Ginger was holding on behind. He made a jump at the moment of changing gears, but just failed to make it.
“Gimme your hands!” cried Corky. “I’ll pull you on.”
How can I give you my hands,” blurted Ginger, breathlessly, “it’s all I can do to stick on.”
“Don’t let go!”
“I daren’t.”
“Let me help you.”
“Don’t touch me! You’ll have us both off!”
The lorry was moving fast. Ginger’s feet were hopping along.
His hands clutching the runner. Corky was watching him in helpless agony. Suddenly an impulse took him, he grabbed Ginger’s two wrists. “Spring!” he yelled. Ginger couldn’t refuse. He had to make a leap. Corky pulled back with all his might. For a moment it was uncertain. The pair were balanced desperately on the speeding vehicle. Then with a loud “Yeeow! ...” Ginger landed on his knees at the back. He scrambled to safety, then fixed a look on Corky.
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