JUST such a day as Johnny's London memories always brought, cold and dry
and brisk, found him perched on the cart that was to take him to London
again. Besides himself, the cart held his mother and his sister, and the
household furniture from the cottage; while Banks, the carrier, sat on
the shaft. Bessy was made comfortable in the armchair; her mother sat on
a bundle of bedding, whence it was convenient to descend when steep hills
were encountered; and Johnny sat on the tail-board, and jumped off and on
as the humour took him.
All through long Loughton village there was something of a triumphal
progress, for people knew them, and turned to look. Bessy alone remained
in the cart for the long pull up Buckhurst Hill, while Johnny, tramping
beside and making many excursions into the thicket, flung up into her lap
sprigs of holly with berries. Already they had plenty, packed close in a
box, but it is better to have too much than too little, so any promising
head was added to the store. For it was December, and Christmas would
come in three weeks or so. And ere that Nan May was to open shop in
London. It was to be a chandler's shop, with aspirations toward grocery
and butter: chandlery, grocery, and butter being things of the buying and
selling whereof Nan May knew as little as anybody in the world, beyond
the usual retail prices at the forest villages. But something must be
done, and everything has a beginning somewhere. So Nan May resolutely
set face to the work, to play the world with all the rigour of the game;
and her figure, as she tramped sturdily up the hill beside the cart, was
visible symbol of her courage. Always a healthy, clear-skinned, almost a
handsome woman, active and shapely, she walked the hill with something of
steadfast fierceness, as one joying in trampling an obstacle: her eyes
fixed before her, and taking no heed of the view that opened to Bessy's
gaze as she looked back from under the tilt of the cart; but busy with
thought of the fight she was beginning, a little fearful, but by so much
the gamer. Meanwhile, it was a good piece of business to decorate a shop
with holly at Christmas, and here Johnny found holly ready for the work;
it would cost money in London.
The cart crowned the hill-top, and still Nan May regarded not the show
that lay behind, whereof Bessy took her fill for the moments still left.
There Loughton tumbled about its green hills, beset with dusky trees,
like a spilt boxful of toys, with the sad-coloured forest making the
horizon line behind it. Away to the left, seen between the boughs of the
near pines, High Beach steeple lifted from the velvety edge, and as far
to the right, on its own hill, rose the square church tower that stood by
gran'dad's grave. And where the bold curve of Staples Hill lost itself
among the woods, some tall brown trees uprose above the rest and gave
good-bye. For invisible beyond them lay the empty cottage in its patch
of garden, grown dank and waste. Then roadside trees shut all out, and
the cart stopped on the level to take up Nan May.
And now the old mare jogged faster along to Woodford Wells and through
the Green, fringed with a wonder of big houses, and many broad miles of
country seen between them; then, farther, down the easy slope of Rising
Sun Road, with thick woods at the way's edge on each side, their winter
austerity softened by the sunlight among the brown twigs. And so on and
on, till they emerged in bushy Leyton Flats, and turned off for
Leytonstone.
And now they were nearing London indeed. Once past the Green Man, they
were on a tram-lined road, and there were shops and houses with scarce a
break. Where there was one bricklayers on scaffoldings were building
shopfronts. The new shops had a raw, disagreeable look, and some of
these a little older were just old enough to be dirty without being a
whit less disagreeable and raw. Some were prosperous, brilliant with
gilt and plate-glass; others, which had started even with them, stood
confessed failures, poor and mean, with a pathetic air--almost an
expression--of disappointment in every window. Older buildings--some
very old--stood about Harrow Green, but already the wreckers had begun to
pull a cottage down to make room for something else. And then the new
shops began again, and lined the road without a check, till they were new
no longer, but of the uncertain age of commonplace London brick and
mortar; and Maryland Point Railway Station was passed; and it was town
indeed, with clatter and smoke and mud.
Stratford Broadway lay wide and busy, wth the church and the town-hall
imposing and large. But soon the road narrowed and grew fouler, and the
mouths of unclean alleys dribbled slush and dirty children across the
pavement. Then there were factories, and the road passed over narrow
canals of curiously iridescent sludge, too thick, to the casual eye, for
the passage of any craft, but interesting to the casual nose. And there
was a great, low, misty waste of the dullest possible rubbish, where
grass would not grow; a more hopelessly desolate and dispiriting
wilderness than Johnny had ever dreamed of or Bessy ever read; with a
chemical manure-works in a far corner, having a smell of great volume and
range.
They topped Bow Bridge, and turned sharply to the left. Now it was
London itself, London by Act of Parliament. There was a narrow way with
a few wharf gates, and then an open space, with houses centuries old,
fallen on leaner years, but still grubbily picturesque. Hence the old
mare trotted through a long and winding street that led by dirty entries,
by shops, by big distilleries, by clean, dull houses where managers
lived, by wooden inns swinging ancient signs, over canal bridges: to a
place of many streets lying regularly at right angles, all of small
houses, all clean, every one a counterpart of every other. And then--the
docks and the ships. At least, the great dock-gates, with the giant
pepper-box and the clock above them, and the high walls, with here and
there a mast. And at intervals, as the houses permitted, the high walls
and the masts were visible again and again in the short way yet to go,
pass Blackwall Cross, till at last the cart stopped before a little
shut-up shop, badly in want of paint; in a street where one gained the
house-doors down areas maybe, or up steps, or on the level, from a
pavement a little more than two feet wide; while the doors themselves,
and the wooden rails that guarded all the steps, were painted in divers
unaccustomed and original colours, and had nothing in common but a subtle
flavour of ship's stores. Over the way was the wall of a ship-yard. And
wheresoever there might be a view of houses from the back, there were
small flagstaffs rigged as masts, with gaffs complete.
The door of the little shop opened, after a short struggle with the rusty
lock, and Nan May and her children were at home in London.