FOR some while a problem had confronted the inmates of the cottage, and
now it was ever with them: the choice of a trade for Johnny. The
situation of the cottage itself made the main difficulty. There was a
walk of two miles to the nearest railway station, and then London was
twelve miles off. It was in London that trades were learnt; but to get
there? Here the family must stay, for here was the cottage, which cost
no rent, for the old man had bought it with his little savings.
Moreover, here also were the butterflies and the moths, which meant
butter to the dry bread of the little pension; and here was the garden.
To part with Johnny altogether was more than his mother could face, and,
indeed, what was to pay for his lodging and keep?
The moths and butterflies could be no living for Johnny. To begin with,
though he was always ready to help in the hatching, killing, setting, and
what not, he was no born insect-hunter, like his grandfather; and then
the old man had long realised that the forest was growing a poorer and
poorer hunting-ground each year, and must some day (after he was dead, he
hoped) be no longer worth working. People were hard on the hawks, so
that insect-eating birds multiplied apace, and butterflies were fewer.
And there was something else, or so it seemed--some subtle influence from
the great smoky province that lay to the south-west. For London grew and
grew, and washed nearer and still nearer its scummy edge of barren
brickbats and clinkers. It had passed Stratford long since, and had
nearly reached Leyton. And though Leyton was eight miles off, still the
advancing town sent something before it--an odour, a subtle
principle--that drove off the butterflies. The old man had once taken
the Emperor Moth at Stratford, in a place long covered with a row of
grimy little houses; now the Emperor was none too easy to find in the
thickest of the woodland. And, indeed, when the wind came from the
south-west the air seemed less clear, in the old man's eyes, than was its
wont a dozen years back. True, many amateurs came with nets--boys from
boarding-schools thereabout, chiefly--and did not complain. But he, who
by trade had noted day by day for many years the forest's produce in egg,
larva, pupa, and imago, saw and knew the change. So that butterflies
being beyond possibility as Johnny's trade, his grandfather naturally
bethought him of the one other he himself was familiar with, and spoke of
the post-office. He knew the postmaster at Loughton, and the postmasters
at other of the villages about the forest. By making a little interest
Johnny might take the next vacancy as messenger. But the prospect did
not tempt the boy. He protested, and it was almost his sole contribution
to the daily discussion, that he wanted to make something; and there was
little doubt, if one might judge from the unpleasing ships and figures in
coloured chalks wherewith he defaced whatever offered a fair surface,
that he would most like to make pictures. He never urged the choice in
plain terms, for that were hopeless: but both his mother and his
grandfather condemned it in all respects as though he did.
"There's a deal more caterpillar than butterfly in this life for the
likes of us, my boy," the old man would say, as he laboured at his
setting. "Makin' pictures an' such is all very well, but we can't always
choose our own line. I've bin a lucky man in my time, thank God. The
insects was my hobby long 'fore I made any money of 'em. Your poor
gran'mother that you never saw, 'A lot o' good them moths an' grubs'll be
to you,' she used to say. 'Why not bees, as you can make somethin' out
of?' An' Haskins, that took the next round to mine, he kep' bees. But I
began sellin' a few specimens to gentlemen here an' there, an' then more,
an' after that I took 'em to London reg'lar, same as now. It ain't as
good as it was, an' it's goin' to be worse, but I'm in hopes it'll last
my time out. It was because I was carryin' letters here that I had the
chance o' doin' it at all. If you was to carry 'em yourself, you'd be
able to do something else too--bees p'raps. A good few mends boots, but
we're a bit off the villages here. Here's the house--yours an' your
mother's when I'm gone, an' I'm sixty-nine; an' it's healthier an'
cleaner than London. You could put up a little bit o' glass in the
garden an' grow tomatoes an' cucumbers. Them--an' fowls--you could keep
fowls--would sell very well to the gentlefolk, an' they all know the
postman. Wages ain't high, but you live cheap here, with no rent, and
there's a pension, p'raps. That's your line, depend on it, Johnny."
"But I should like a trade where I could _make_ something," the boy would
answer wistfully. "I really should, gran'dad."
"Ah"--with a shake of the head--"make what? I doubt but you're meanin'
pictures. You must get that notion out of your head, Johnny. Some of
them as make 'em may do well, but most's awful. I see 'em in London
often, drorin' on the pavement; reg'lar clever ones, too, doin' mackerel
an' bits o' salmon splendid, and likenesses o' the Queen, an' sunsets,
with the sky shaded beautiful. Beggin'! Reg'lar beggin', with a cap out
for coppers, an' 'Help gifted poverty' wrote in chalk. _That_ won't do,
ye know, Johnny."
The boy's mother felt for him an indefinite ambition not to be realised
by a life of letter-carrying, though picture-making she favoured as
little as did the old man. But there was the situation of the cottage--a
hindrance they could see no way to overcome. This being so, they left it
for the time, and betook themselves to smaller difficulties. Putting the
letter-carrying aside for the moment, and forgetting distance as an
obstacle, what trades were there to choose from? Truly a good many: and
that none should be missed, Johnny's grandfather took paper and a pencil
and walked to Woodford, where he begged use of a London Directory and
read through all the trades, from Absorbent Cotton Wool Manufacturers to
Zincographic Printers, making a laborious list as he went, omitting (with
some reluctance) such items as Bankers, Brokers--Stock and
Share--Merchants, Patentees, and Physicians, and hesitating a little over
such as Aeronauts and Shive Turners. The task filled a large part of
three days of uncommonly hard work, and old David May finished his list
in mental bedevilment. What was a Shive Turner? Indeed, for that
matter, what was an Ammeter?
The list did but multiply confusion and divide counsel. Nan May sang
less at her house-work now, thinking of what she could remember of the
trades that began with Absorbent Cotton Wool Manufacture and ended with
Zincographic Printing. Little Bess neglected the bookshelf, and pored
over the crabbed catalogue with earnest incomprehension. It afflicted
Johnny himself with a feeling akin to terror, for which he found it hard
to account. The arena of the struggle for bread was so vast, and he so
small a combatant to choose a way into the scrimmage! More, it seemed
all so unattractive. There could be little to envy in the daily life of
a Seed Crusher or a Court Plaster Maker. But the old man would pin a
sheet of the list to the wall and study it while he worked within doors:
full of patience and simple courage.
"Bakin' Powder Maker," he would call aloud to whomsoever it might reach.
"How's that? That's makin' something. . . . "
Sometimes Bob Smallpiece, the forest keeper, would look in on his way by
the cottage and be consulted. Bob was an immense being in much leather
and velveteen, with a face like a long-kept pippin. When he first came
to the forest, years back, his amiable peeps into the house may have been
prompted by professional considerations, for it was his habit to keep an
eye on solitary cottages in his walk: cottages wherein it had once or
twice been his luck to spy by surprise some furry little heap that a poke
of his ash stick had separated into dead rabbits. Indeed, had old May's
tastes lain that way, nothing would have been easier for him than to set
a snare or two at night as he hunted his moths. But soon the keeper
found that this one, at least, of the cottagers thereabouts was no
poacher, and then his greetings were as friendly as they seemed. As to
Johnny's trade, he had few ideas beyond one that butchers did very well
in London: his sister having married one. And what a Shive Turner or an
Ammeter might be he knew no more than his stick. But he knew well enough
what a poacher was (as also, perhaps, did the stick, if contact could
teach it); and he counselled that the boy be kept away from certain
"lots"--as the "Blandy lot," the "Honeywell lot," and the "Hayes
lot"--who would do him no good. The old butterfly-hunter knew these
"lots" very well on his own account; and his perpetual gropings about
banks and undergrowth made him no friends among them. They would scarce
believe, even after long experience, that grubs alone accounted for his
activity; and truly, a man with a government pension, who affected
scientific tastes, who lived a clean life, who was called "Mr. May" by
keepers, and who, moreover, had such uncommon opportunities of witnessing
what passed in the woods, might well be an object of suspicion. In
simple truth, the village loafers had small conception of the old man's
knowledge of their behaviour among the rabbit burrows. He knew the woods
as they knew the inwards of a quart pot, and his eyes, aged as they might
be, were trained by years of search for things well-nigh invisible amid
grass, leaves, and undergrowths. He could have found their wires
blindfold, and he knew Joe Blandy's wires from Amos Honeywell's better
than Joe and Amos themselves. But of all this he said nothing, holding
himself a strict neutral, and judging it best never to seem too knowing.
Still it was the fact that when the "lots" were periodically weeded of
members caught with disjoinable guns, wire nooses, or dead things furred
or feathered, those left behind were apt to link circumstances together,
and to regard the old man with doubt and ill-favour. Once, indeed, he
hung in doubt for days, much tempted to carry a hint to Bob Smallpiece of
a peculiarly foul and barbarous manner of deer-stealing, wherein figured
a tied fawn, an anxious doe, a heavy stone, a broken leg, and a cut
throat. But it chanced that the keeper was otherwise aware, and old
May's doubt was determined by news that the thief, waled and gory (for he
had made a fight for it), had been brought to the police-cells, with a
dripping doe on a truck behind him. Even now as Bob Smallpiece grinned
in at the cottage door one saw the gap where two teeth had gone in that
"up-and-downer."
"No," said the keeper, "it won't do the boy no good to let him knock
about with nothing to do. 'Bout here, specially. Boys that knocks about
this part mostly gets in wi' them lots as we bin speakin' of, or
something about as bad. Ain't there no gentleman hereabout 'ud give him
a job?"
"I'd like him to learn a trade," the old man said anxiously, "but I don't
see how. It's always somethin' to stand by, is a trade, an' it's what he
wants. Wants to make somethin'--that's the way he puts it. Else I'd say
post-office, same as me."
"His father was in the engineerin'," remarked Mrs. May, who had arrived
at the door with certain sticks of rhubarb from the garden. "I'd like
him to go to that, I think; but he can't, from here."
Bob Smallpiece knew nothing of engineering, and little more of any other
of the several trades read out from the list pinned to the window-frame
near which the old man worked at a setting-stick. And presently he
departed on his walk. Bessy at the casement above saw him swing away
toward the glen, lifting his stick in recognition of Johnny, who bore a
bundle of dead sticks homeward.
Johnny's mother peeled and cut the rhubarb, revolving impossible
expedients for bridging the space between them and London: the space that
looked so small on the map, but was so great an obstacle to their
purposes, and so wide a division between the two modes of life she knew.
Johnny's grandfather pinned and strapped deftly, deep in thought.
Presently, looking up, "It beats me," he said, fearful of ignoring some
good thing in trades, "to guess what a Shive Turner is!"