The youngest son, named Jeremy, married the rich widow of a saddler. She was the owner of a fine gabled house in the High Street of the flourishing town of Cheriton – some eight miles from Bishops Hitchingworth. He had all the few good looks of the family, but he was sly and crafty and hard. The first thing he did after he came home from his honeymoon was to paint in a long red nose to the portrait of the saddler. The next thing he did was to drown his wife’s cat in the water-butt, because he said the starveling had stolen the cheese. The third thing he did was to burn her best Sunday bonnet, then her wig – to keep it company. How she could bear to go on living with him is a mystery. Nevertheless she did.
This Jeremy had three sons: Job, John and (another) Jeremy. But he did not flourish. Far from it. The family went ‘down the ladder’, rung by rung, until at long last it reached the bottom. Then it began to climb up again. But Jeremy’s children did best. His youngest daughter married a well-to-do knacker, and their only son (yet another Jeremy), though he ran away from home because he hated water-gruel and suet pudding, went into business as assistant to the chief sweep in Cheriton. And, at last, having by his craft and cunning and early rising and hard-working inherited his master’s business, he bought his great-grandfather’s fine gabled house, and became Master Chimney-Sweep and ‘Sweep by Appointment’, to the Mayor and Corporation and the Lords of three neighbouring Manors. And he never married at all. In spite of his hard childhood, in spite of the kindness shown him by his master, in spite of his good fortune with the three Lords of the Manor, he was a skinflint and a pick-halfpenny. He had an enormous brush over his door, a fine brass knocker, and – though considering all things, he had mighty few friends – he was the best, as well as the richest master-sweep in those parts.
But a good deal of his money and in later years most of his praise was due to his three small orphan ’prentices – Tom, Dick and Harry. In those days, hearths and fireplaces were as large as little rooms or chambers, or at any rate as large as large cupboards or closets. They had wide warm comfortable ingle-nooks, and the chimneys were like deep wells running up to the roof, sometimes narrowing or angling off towards the top. And these chimneys were swept by hand.
Jeremy’s ’prentices, then, had to climb up and up, from sooty brick to brick with a brush, and sweep till they were as black as blackest blackamoors, inside and out. Soot, soot, soot! Eyes, mouth, ears and nose. And now and then the bricks were scorching hot, and their hands got blistered. And now and then they were all but suffocated in the narrow juts. And once in a while were nearly wedged there, to dry like mummies in the dark. And sometimes, in the midst of the smother, a leg would slip, and down they would come tumbling like apples out of a tree or hailstones out of a cloud in April.
And Jeremy Nollykins, after tying up all the money they brought him in fat canvas and leather bags, served them out water-gruel for supper, and water-gruel for breakfast. For dinner on Tuesdays and Thursdays he gave them slabs of suet-pudding with lumps of suet in it like pale amber beads; what he called soup on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays; and a bit of catsmeat (bought cheap from his second cousin) on Sundays. But then you can’t climb chimneys on no meat. On Saturdays they had piping-hot pease-pudding and pottage: because on Saturdays the Mayor’s man might look in. You would hardly believe it: but in spite of such poor mean living, in spite of their burns and their bruises, and the soot in their eyes and lungs and in their close lint-coloured hair, these three small boys, Tom, Dick and Harry, managed to keep their spirits up. They even rubbed their cheeks rosy after the week’s soot had been washed off under the pump on a Saturday night.
They were like Tom Dacre in the poem:
… There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
That curled like a lamb’s back was shav’d: so I said
‘Hush, Tom! never mind it for when your head’s bare
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.’
And so he was quiet, and that very night
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!
That thousands of sleepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack
Were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black …
Still, they always said ‘Mum’ to the great ladies and ‘Mistress’ to the maids, and they kept their manners even when some crabbed old woman said they were owdacious, or imperent, or mischeevious. And sometimes a goodwife would give them a slice of bread pudding, or a mug of milk, or a baked potato, or perhaps a pocket-full of cookies or a slice of white bread (which did not remain white for very long). And now and then, even a sip of elderberry wine. After all, even half-starved sparrows sometimes find tit-bits, and it’s not the hungry who enjoy their victuals least.
When they could scuttle away too, they would bolt off between their jobs to go paddling in the river, or bird-nesting in the woods, or climbing in an old stone quarry not very far from the town. It was lovely wooded country thereabouts – near ancient Cheriton.
Whether they played truant or not, Jeremy Nollykins the Third – Old Noll, as his neighbours called him – used to beat them morning, noon and night. He believed in the rod. He spared nobody, neither man nor beast. Tom, Dick and Harry pretty well hated old Noll: and that’s a bad thing enough. But, on the other hand, they were far too much alive and hearty and happy when they were not being beaten, and they were much too hungry even over their water-gruel to think or to brood over how much they hated him: which would have been very much worse.
In sober fact – with their bright glittering eyes and round cheeks and sharp white teeth, and in spite of their skinny ribs and blistered hands, they were a merry trio. As soon as ever their teeth stopped chattering with the cold, and their bodies stopped smarting from Old Noll’s sauce, and their eyes from the soot, they were laughing and talking and whistling and champing, like grasshoppers in June or starlings in September. And though they sometimes quarrelled and fought together, bit and scratched too, never having been taught to fight fair, they were very good friends. Now and again too they shinned up a farmer’s fruit-trees to have a taste of his green apples. Now and again they played tricks on old women. But what lively little chimney-sweeps wouldn’t?
They were three young ragamuffins, as wild as colts, as nimble as kids, though a good deal blacker. And, however hard he tried, Old Noll never managed to break them in. Never. And at night they slept as calm and deep as cradled babies – all three of them laid in a row up in an attic under the roof on an immense wide palliasse or mattress of straw, with a straw bolster and a couple of pieces of old sacking for blankets each.
Now Old Noll, simply perhaps because he was – both by nature as well as by long practice – a mean old curmudgeonly miser, hated to see anybody merry, or happy, or even fat. There were moments when he would have liked to skin his three ’prentices alive. But then he wanted to get out of them all the work he could. So he was compelled to give them that much to eat. He had to keep them alive – or the Mayor’s man would ask why. Still, it enraged him that he could not keep their natural spirits down; that however much he beat them they ‘came up smiling’. It enraged him to know in his heart (or whatever took its place) that though – when they had nothing better to do, or were smarting from his rod in pickle – they detested him, they yet had never done him an ill-turn.
Every day he would gloat on them as they came clattering down to their water-gruel just as Giant Despair gloated on Faithful and Christian in the dungeon. And sometimes at night he would creep up to their bare draughty attic, and the stars or the moon would show him the three of them lying there fast asleep on their straw mattress, the sacking kicked off, and on their faces a faint far-away smile as if their dreams were as peaceful as the swans in the Islands of the Blest. It enraged him. What could the little urchins be dreaming about? What made ugly little blackamoors grin even in their sleep? You can thwack a wake boy, but you can’t thwack a dreamer; not at least while he is dreaming. So here Old Noll was helpless. He could only grind his teeth at the sight o
f them. Poor Old Noll.
He ground his teeth more than ever when he first heard the music in the night. And he might never have heard it at all if hunger hadn’t made him a mighty bad sleeper himself. A few restless hours was the most he got, even in winter. And if Tom, Dick and Harry had ever peeped in on him as he lay in his four-post bed, they would have seen no smile on his old sunken face, with its long nose and long chin and straggling hair – but only a sort of horrifying darkness. They might even have pitied him, stretched out there, with nightmare twisting and contorting his sharp features, and his bony fingers continually on the twitch.
Because, then, Old Noll could not sleep of nights, he would sometimes let himself out of his silent house to walk the streets. And while so walking, he would look up at his neighbours’ windows, glossily dark beneath the night-sky, and he would curse them for being more comfortable than he. It was as if instead of marrow he had malice in his bones, and there is no fattening on that.
Now one night, for the first time in his life, except when he broke his leg at eighteen, Old Noll had been unable to sleep at all. It was a clear mild night with no wind, and a fine mild scrap of a moon was in the west, and the stars shone bright. There was always a sweet balmy air in Cheriton, borne in from the meadows that then stretched in within a few furlongs of the town; and so silent was the hour you could almost hear the rippling of the river among its osiers that far away.
And as Old Nollykins was sitting like a gaunt shadow all by himself on the first milestone that comes into the town – and he was too niggardly even to smoke a pipe of tobacco – a faint easy wind came drifting along the street. And then on the wind a fainter music – a music which at first scarcely seemed to be a music at all. Nonetheless it continued on and on, and at last so rilled and trembled in the air that even Old Nollykins, who was now pretty hard of hearing, caught the strains and recognized the melody. It came steadily nearer, that music – a twangling and tootling and a horning, a breathing as of shawms, waxing merrier and merrier in the quick mild night October air:
Girls and boys, come out to play!
The moon doth shine as bright as day;
Leave your supper, and leave your sleep,
And come with your playfellows into the street! …
Girls and boys come out to play: on and on and on, now faint now shrill, now in a sudden rallying burst of sound as if it came from out of the skies. Not that the moon just then was shining as bright as day. It was but barely in its first quarter. It resembled a bent bit of intensely shining copper down low among the stars: or a gold basin, of which little more than the edge showed, resting a-tilt. But little moon or none, the shapes that were now hastening along the street, running and hopping and skipping and skirring and dancing, had heard the summons, had obeyed the call. From by-lane and alley, court, porch and house-door the children of Cheriton had come pouring out like water-streams in spring-time. Running, skipping, hopping, dancing, they kept time to the tune. Old Noll fairly gasped with astonishment as he watched them. What a dreadful tale to tell – and all the comfortable and respectable folks of Cheriton fast asleep in their beds! To think such innocents could be such wicked deceivers! To think that gluttonous and grubby errand and shop and boot-and-shoe and pot boys could look so clean and nimble and happy and free. He shivered; partly because of his age and the night air, and partly with rage.
But real enough though these young skip-by-nights appeared to be, there were three queer things about them. First, there was not the faintest sound of doors opening or shutting, or casement windows being thrust open with a squeal of the iron rod. Next, there was not the faintest rumour of footsteps even, though at least half the children of Cheriton were now bounding along the street, like autumn leaves in the wind, and all with their faces towards the East and the water-meadows. And last, though Noll could see the very eyes in their faces in the faint luminousness of starshine and a little moon, not a single one of that mad young company turned head to look at him, or showed the least sign of knowing that he was there. Clockwork images of wood or wax could not have ignored him more completely.
Old Noll, after feeling at first startled, flabbergasted, a little frightened even, was now in a fury. His few old teeth began to grind together as lustily as had the millstones of Jeremy the First when he was rich and prosperous. Nor was his rage diminished when, lo and behold, even as he turned his head, out of his own narrow porch with its three rounded steps and fluted shell of wood above it, came leaping along who but his own three half-starved ’prentices, Tom, Dick and Harry – now seemingly nine-year-olds as plump and comely to see as if they had been fed on the fat of the land, as if they had never never in the whole of their lives so much as tasted rod-sauce. Their mouths were opening and shutting, too, as if they were whooping calls one to the other and to their other street-mates, though no sound came from them. They snapped their fingers in the air. They came cavorting and skirling along in their naked feet to the strains of the music as if bruised elbows, scorched shins, cramped muscles and iron-bound clogs had never once pestered their young souls. Yet not a sound, not a whisper, not a footfall could the deaf old man hear – nothing but that sweet, shrill and infuriating music.
In a few minutes the streets were empty, a thin fleece of cloud had drawn across the moon, and only one small straggler was still in sight, a grandson of the Mayor. He was last merely because he was least, and had nobody to take care of him. And Old Noll, having watched this last night-truant out of sight, staring at him with eyes like marbles beneath his bony brows, hobbled back across the street to his own house, and after pausing awhile at the nearest doorpost to gnaw his beard and think what next was to be done, climbed his three flights of shallow oak stairs until he came to the uppermost landing under the roof. There at last with infinite caution he lifted the pin of the door of the attic and peered in on what he supposed would be an empty bed. Empty! Not a bit of it! Lying there asleep, in the dim starlight of the dusty dormer window, he could see as plain as can be the motionless shapes of his three ’prentices, breathing on so calmly in midnight’s deep-most slumber that he even ventured to fetch in a tallow candle in a pewter stick in order that he might examine them more closely.
In its smoky beams he searched the three young slumbering faces. They showed no sign that the old skinflint was stooping as close over them as a bird-snarer over his nets. There were smears of soot even on their eyelids and the fine dust of it lay thick on the flaxen lamb’s-wool of their close-shorn heads. They were smiling away, gently and distantly as if they were sitting in their dreams in some wonderful orchard, supping up strawberries and cream; as though the spirits within them were untellably happy though their bodies were as fast asleep as humming-tops or honey-bees in winter.
Stair by stair Old Nollykins crept down again, blew out his candle, and sat down on his bed to think. He was a cunning old miser, which is as far away from being generous and wise as the full moon is from a farthing dip. His fingers had itched to wake his three sleeping chimney-boys with a smart taste of his rod, just to ‘larn them a lesson’. He hated to think of the quiet happy smile resting upon their faces while the shadow-shapes or ghosts of them were out and away, pranking and gallivanting in the green water-meadows beyond the town. How was he to know that his dimming eyes had not deluded him? Supposing he went off to the Mayor himself in the morning and told his midnight tale, who would believe it? High and low, everybody hated him, and as like as not they would shut him up in the town jail for a madman, or burn his house about his ears supposing him to be a wizard. ‘No, no, no!’ he muttered to himself. ‘We must watch and wait, friend Jeremy, and see what we shall see.’
Next morning his three ’prentices, Tom, Dick and Harry, were up and about as sprightly as ever, a full hour before daybreak. You might have supposed from their shining eyes and apple cheeks that they had just come back from a long holiday on the blissful plains of paradise. Away they tumbled – merry as frogs – to work, with their brushes and bags, still munching
away at their gritty oatcakes – three parts bran to one of meal.
So intent had Old Noll been on watching from his chimney-corner what he could see in their faces at breakfast, and on trying to overhear what they were whispering to each other, that he forgot to give them their usual morning dose of stick. But not a word had been uttered about the music or the dancing or the merry-making at the water-meadows. They just chattered their usual scatter-brained gibberish to one another – except when they saw that the old creature was watching them; and he was speedily convinced that whatever adventures their dream-shapes may have had in the night-hours, these had left no impression on their waking minds.
Poor Old Noll. An echo of that music and the sight he had seen kept him awake for many a night after, and his body was already shrunken by age and by his miserly habits to nothing much more substantial than a bag of animated bones. And yet all his watching was in vain. So weary and hungry for sleep did he become, that when at last the hunter’s moon shone at its brightest and roundest over the roofs of Cheriton, he nodded off in his chair. He was roused a few hours afterwards by a faint glow in his room that was certainly not moonlight, for it came from out of the black dingy staircase passage. Instantly he was wide awake – but too late. For, even as he peeped through the door-crack, there flitted past his three small ’prentices – just the ghosts or the spirits or the dream-shapes of them – faring happily away. They passed him softer than a breeze through a willow tree and were out of sight down the staircase before he could stir.
Short Stories for Children Page 18