SO life went at the cottage. For a little while they looked for another
visit from Uncle Isaac; since, as he sent no postal order, it was felt
that he must defer the return of the half-crown merely because he
contemplated an early payment in person. But weeks passed and nothing
was heard of him, nor seen. Meantime the problem of Johnny's trade met
no solution. He had left school nearly three months now, and, the thing
seeming desperate, he had well-nigh resolved to give in to the
post-office. At the thought London seemed a far and wondrous place
whereto he could never attain; and awe of the terrible list his
grandfather had compiled from the London Directory, became longing for
the least inviting trade in the collection. He had his memories of
London, too, and they were more numerous and more pleasant than Bessy's.
There he could see, from his bedroom window, the masts of many ships,
quite close. In the strong winds (and in his remembered London the
weather was ever cold, brisk, dry, and windy) the masts bent and rocked
gravely, the ropes bellied, and the blocks whistled aloud. At nights he
lay and heard the yards groan and the cordage creak and rattle. Just by
the corner, ships sometimes thrust prying jib-booms clean over the dock
wall, as if to see what a town was like; and often he had stood in the
street to watch men climbing the rigging and hanging bent over spars,
like earwigs. He had gone shopping, too, gripping tight at his mother's
skirts, in flaring market-streets, where everybody shouted at once, and
there were mountains of bulls'-eyes and peppermint on barrows. There was
a street with shops on one side and a blank wall on the other; and over
and behind this wall, lifted high in the air, was the monstrous skeleton
of a great ship. Men swarmed like ants about the skeleton, and all day
hammers went with a mighty clangour, and great lights flared at night.
There were big blank walls at all the places where they made ships, and
he could remember a little door in one such wall, a door beyond which he
greatly desired to see. But it was rarely opened, and then but a little
way, by an ill-natured old man, who squeezed through and closed it very
quickly. So that Johnny believed he must issue thus to prevent the
escape of some small and active animal, imprisoned within. All that
Johnny remembered of his father was that he wiped his oily hands on
cotton waste: a curious stuff--like a great deal of soft sewing-thread in
a hopeless tangle--that he had never seen since. That and the funeral:
when he rode in a carriage with a crape bow pinned to his new jacket, and
his mother held his hand very tight at the grave-side. Most of his
memories were of the streets, and some revived after long oblivion: as
when the smell of roasted chestnuts brought a vision of a glowing coke
fire by the corner of the ship-yard wall, with a pock-marked man behind
it whom he would know anywhere now. And he was not to return to this
place of wistful memory after all, nor to learn to make a ship nor an
engine--let alone a picture.
The weeks went, and berries hung where flowers had been. Johnny and
Bessy made their yearly harvest of blackberries, some for puddings and
jam at home, some to sell at such kitchen doors as might receive them.
Until an afternoon in early October: when, with an order from a lady at
Theydon, they betook themselves in search of sloes.
Warm colours touched the woods to a new harmony, and seen from high
ground, they lay like flower-beds in green and red, yellow and brown.
The honeysuckle bloomed its second time, and toadstools stood in crimson
companies in the shade of the trees. Sloes were rare this year near
home, so the children searched their way through the Wake Valley to Honey
Lane Quarters, and there they found their sloes, though few.
It was a long and scratchy task; and, when it was finished, they were
well up in St. Thomas's Quarters, and the sun was setting. They made the
best of their way back as far as the road near the Dun Cow, and there
parted. For Bessy was tired and hungry, and though Johnny was little
better, he resolved to carry his sloes fresh to Theydon and get the
money, since he was already a little on the way. So Bessy turned up the
lane that led to the cottage, and Johnny took to the woods again for
Theydon, by way to right of Wormleyton Pits.
Dusk was growing to dark, but the boy stepped fearlessly, well knowing
his path. The last throstle sang his last evensong for the year, and was
still. The shadowy trees, so living and so silent about him: the
wrestling trunks of beeches, the reaching arms of oak and hornbeam, all
struck at gaze as though pausing in their everlasting struggle to watch
and whisper as he passed: and the black depths between them might well
have oppressed the imagination of such a boy from other parts; but Johnny
tramped along among them little heeding, thinking of the great
ship-haunted London he longed for, and forecasting nothing of the blow
that should fall but in that hour and send him the journey sorrowing.
Presently he was aware of a light ahead. It moved a foot or two from the
ground, and Johnny knew its swing. Then it stopped, resting by a tree
root. "You, gran'dad?" called Johnny, and "Hullo!" came the old man's
voice in answer.
The old man had cut a leaf, with a caterpillar on it, from a shrub, and
was packing it in a pill-box. "Out for a few night-feeders," he
explained, as the boy stopped beside him. "But you ain't been home to
tea," he added. "Takin' home the sloes? Might ha' left 'em till the
morning, John, easy,--now you've got 'em."
"Oh, I come up from over there"--Johnny made a vague toss of the
arm--"an' I thought I might as well cut across to Theydon first. Bess
went up the lane. I'll be home 'fore ye now, gran'dad, 'nless you 're
goin' back straight."
"I won't be long behind ye; I'm just goin' to the Pits. I can't make
nothin' o' them I took last night, under the brambles an' heather,--never
saw the like before quite; so I'm goin' to see if there's more, an' get
all I can."
They walked together a few yards, till the trees thinned. "You'll go
'cross the Slade," said the old man. "Step it, or you'll be beat!"
"I'll step it," the boy answered. "I want my tea."
* * * * *
He was trotting home by the lane from Theydon, with his empty basket on
his arm, and his hands (and the sixpence) in his trousers pockets, when
he checked at a sound, as of a cry from the wood. But he heard no more,
and trotted on. Probably the deer were fighting somewhere; rare fighters
were the bucks in October.