THE shop in Harbour Lane had been a greengrocer's, a barber's, a
fried-fishmonger's, and a tripe-seller's. But chiefly it had been shut
up, as it was now. Nobody had ever come into it with much money, it is
true, but all had gone out of it with less than they brought. It was
said, indeed, that the greengrocer had gone out with nothing but the
clothes he wore; but as he went no farther than the end of the street,
where he drowned himself from a swing bridge, he needed no more, nor even
so much. Mr. Dunkin, the landlord, had bought the place at a low price,
as was his way in buying things; but he got very little out of his
investment, which was not his way at all. It was a novelty that
surprised and irritated Mr. Dunkin. He was a substantial tradesman, who
had long relinquished counter work, for there were a dozen assistants in
the two departments of his chief shop, eight for grocery and butter, and
four for oil and saucepans, paint and mousetraps; and there were half a
dozen branches, some in the one trade and some in the other, scattered
about in as many neighbouring parishes. He was a large man, of vast
sympathy. The tone of his voice, the grasp of his wide, pulpy hand, told
of infinite tenderness toward the sorrows and sins of the world. Even in
the early days when he had but one shop (a little one) and no shopman, he
would weigh out a pound of treacle with so melting a benignity that the
treacle seemed balm of Gilead, and a bounteous gift at the price. He
would drive a bargain in a voice of yearning beneficence that left the
other party ashamed of his own self-seeking, as well as something the
poorer by the deal. It was a voice wherein a purr had a large part--a
purr that was hoarse yet soothing, and eloquent of compassion; so that no
man was so happy but a talk with Mr. Dunkin would persuade him that the
lot was hard indeed, that entitled him to such a wealth of sympathy. It
was a wealth that Mr. Dunkin squandered with no restraint but this, that
it carried no other sort of wealth with it.
On the whole, Nan May had counted herself fortunate in falling in with
Mr. Dunkin. For when, in his fatherly solicitude, he discovered that she
had a little money in hand, he undertook to supply her with stock, and to
give her certain hints in the mystery of chandlery. He, also, felt no
cause for complaint: for he had hoped for a tenant merely, and here was
tenant and customer in one. More, she was a widow, knowing nothing of
trade, so that it might be possible to sell her what others would not
buy, at a little extra profit. As to rent, moreover, he was doing well.
For on the day the deposit was paid, Mrs. May had found little choice
among vacant shops, and this was in a situation to suit her plans as to
Johnny and his trade; and as she was tired and nervous, full of plain
anxiety, sympathetic Mr. Dunkin saw his chance of trying for an extra
shilling a week, and got it. And Nan May was left to pay for what
painting and cleaning the place might need. It needed a good deal, as
Mr. Dunkin had ruefully observed two days before, in expectation of a
decorator's bill if ever a tenant came.
* * * * *
And now Nan May addressed herself to the work. First, the house must be
cleaned; the paint could be considered after. She had swept one room
into a habitable state on her last day in town, and here her little store
of furniture was stacked. Then, her sleeves and her skirt turned back,
and a duster over her head, she assailed walls and ceilings with a broom,
and after these the floors. So far Johnny helped, but when scrubbing
began he hindered. So it was that for a day or so, until it was time for
him to help with the windows, he had leisure wherein to make himself
acquainted with the neighbourhood.
It was a neighbourhood with a flavour distinct from that of the districts
about it. There the flat rows of six-roomed cottages, characterless all,
stretched everywhere, rank behind rank, in masses unbroken except by the
busier thoroughfares of shops. Here each little house asserted its
individuality by diversity of paint as much as by diversity of shape. It
was, indeed, the last stronghold of the shipwrights and mast-makers,
fallen from their high estate since the invasion of iron ships and
northern competition. In fact, Shipwrights' Row was the name of a short
rank of cottages close by, with gardens in front, each with its mast and
flag complete. In other places, where the back-yards were very small,
the flagstaff and stays were apt to take to their use the whole space:
the pole rising from the exact centre, and a stay taking its purchase
from each extreme corner, so that anybody essaying a circuit must perform
it with many sudden obeisances. The little streets had an air of
cleanliness all their own, largely due to the fresh paint that
embellished whatsoever there was an excuse for painting. Many
front-doors were reached by two stone steps, always well whitened; and
whether there were steps or not, the flagstones before each threshold
were distinguished by a whited semicircle five feet in diameter. Noting
this curious fact as he tramped along one such street, Johnny was
startled by an angry voice close at his elbow, a voice so very sudden and
irate that he jumped aside ere he looked for the source. A red-faced
woman knelt within a door.
"Idle young faggit!" she said. "Stompin' yer muddy boots all over my
clean step!" And she made so vigorous a grasp at a broom that Johnny
went five yards at a gallop.
Now truly there was no step of any sort to the house. And Johnny had but
crossed the semicircle because he conceived the footpath to be public
property, and because it was narrow. But he learnt, afterwards, that the
semicircle was a sacred institution of the place, in as high regard among
the women as its fellow-fetish, the flagstaff, was among the men; also
that none but grown people--and those of low habits or in drink--dared
trespass on it; and that it was always called "the step." He learnt
much, too, in the matter of paint. Every male inhabitant of Harbour
Lane, Shipwrights' Row, and the neighbouring streets, carried, in his
leisure moments, a pipe, a pot of paint, and a brush. He puffed
comfortably at the pipe, and stumped about his back (or front) garden
with the paint-pot in one hand and the brush in the other, "touching-up"
whatever paint would stick to. Rails, posts, water-butts, dustbins,
clothes-posts, all were treated, not because they needed it (for they
were scarce dry from the last coat), but because there was the paint, and
there was the brush, and there was the leisure; and this was the only way
to use all three. So that most things about the gardens took an
interesting variety of tints in the run of the year, since it was rarely
the case that the same colour was used twice in succession. When all
wooden surfaces were covered, it was customary to take a turn at
window-sills, rain-water pipes, and the stones or oyster-shells that
bordered the little flower-beds; and when nothing else was left, then the
paint-pot and the brush and the pipe were conveyed to the front, and the
front-door, which had been green, became royal blue, or flaming salmon;
as did the railings, if there were any, and the window-frames. Two
things alone were not subject to such changes of complexion: the
flagstaff and the brick pavings. For it was a law immutable that the
flagstaffs should be speckless white, and the bricks a cheerful
vermilion; this last a colour frequently renewed, because of nailed
boots, but done in good oil paint, because of wet weather. Everything
else took the range of the rainbow, and something beyond; so that it was
possible, in those houses where two families lived, to tell at a glance
whether the upstairs family were on terms of intimacy or merely of
distant civility with the downstairs, by the colours, uniform or diverse,
of the sills and the model fences that guarded the flower-pots on them.
For the token and sign of friendship in Harbour Lane was the loan or the
exchange of paint. It was the proper method of breaking the ice between
new acquaintances, and was recognised as such by general sanction. The
greeting, "Bit o' blue paint any use to ye?" and the offer of the pot
across the back fence, were the Harbour Lane equivalents of a call and
cards; and the newcomer made early haste with an offer of yellow or green
paint in return. Indeed, it was in this way that the paint arrived which
afterwards made Nan May's little shop a bedazzlement to the wayfarer, and
furnished Johnny with the first painting job he ever grew tired of. But
newcomers were rare in the neighbourhood, for it was a colony apart, with
independent manners and habits of thought. True, it had its own
divisions and differences: as, for instance, on the question whether or
not the association of the paint-pot and brush with the Sunday paper were
sinful; but these divisions were purely internal, and nothing was heard
of them beyond the boundaries.
But paint was something more than a recreation and an instrument of
social amenity. It furnished the colony with an equivalent of high
finance, wherein all the operations proper to Money and Credit (as spelt
with capital initials) were reflected in Paint. For it was a permanent
condition of life in Harbour Lane and thereabouts, that everybody owed
everybody else some amount of Paint, and was owed Paint, in his turn, by
others. So that a complicated system of exchange prevailed, in which
verbal bills and cheques were drawn. As thus, to make a simple case:
"'Ullo, Bill, what about that pot o' paint?"
"Well, I was goin' to bring it round to-night."
"All right. But don't bring it to me--take it to George. Ye see, I owe
Jim a bit o' paint, an' 'e owes Joe a bit, an' Joe owes George a bit. So
that'll make it right all round. Don't forget!"
With many such arrangements synchronising, crossing and mixing with each
other, and made intricate by differing degrees and manners of debit and
credit between Bill and George and Jim and Joe, the unlikely subject of
Paint became involved in a mathematical web of exceeding interest, a
small image of the Money Market, a sort of chaos by double entry wherein
few operators were able to strike a balance at a moment, and most were
vaguely uncertain whether their accounts inclined toward an affluence of
Paint or toward sheer bankruptcy. An exciting result attained without
the aid of capital, and with no serious hurt to anybody.
But these were things that Johnny learned in the succeeding weeks. In
his walks while his mother scrubbed floors at home, he observed one or
two matters. As to costume, he perceived that the men wore blue dungaree
jackets with large bone buttons, and outside these, now that it was
winter, short pilot coats of dark blue stuff, thick and stiff, like a
board. The trousers were moleskins, perhaps once white, all stained with
very shiny black patches, and all of one cut, which placed the seat (very
baggy) a few inches above the bend of the knee; and there was a peaked
cap, of the same shiny black all over that distinguished parts of the
trousers. He also saw that whereas yesterday the backyards were brisk
with fluttering linen, to-day they held scarce any. For yesterday was
Monday, and it was matter of pride among the energetic housewives of the
place to get washing done at the beginning of the week. For a woman fell
in her neighbours' respect the later in the week her washing day came.
So Johnny explored the streets with wide eyes and a full heart. For here
was London, where they made great things--ships and engines. There were
places he fancied he recognised--great blank walls with masts behind
them. But now the masts seemed fewer and shorter than in the old days:
as in truth they were, for now more of the ships were steamships, filling
greater space for half the show of mast. Then in other places he came on
basins filled with none but sailing-ships, and here the masts were as
tall and fine as ever, stayed with much cordage, and had their yards
slung at a gallant slope, like the sword on Sir Walter Raleigh's hip.
And at Blackwall Stairs, looking across the river, stood an old, old
house that Johnny stared at for minutes together: a month or two later he
heard the tradition that Sir Walter Raleigh himself had lived there. It
was first of a row of old waterside buildings, the newest of which had
looked across, and almost fallen into, the river, when King George's
ships had anchored off Blackwall--and King Charles's for that matter.
There, too, stood the Artichoke Tavern, clean and white and wooden, a
heap of gables and windows all out of perpendicular: a house widest and
biggest everywhere at the top, and smallest at the ground floor; a house
that seemed ready to topple into the river at a push, so far did its
walls and galleries overhang the water, and so slender were the piles
that supported them. Here, in the square space on the quay, brown men in
blue jerseys sold bloaters by the score, stringing them through the gills
with tarry yarn; and half the brown men wore earrings. Below, on the
foreshore, lay many boats, and children ran among them, or raked for
river-mussels among the stones.
In another place he came on just such market-streets as he remembered to
have trotted along, at his mother's side, in the old London life; though
now, indeed, they seemed something dirtier and meaner, and the people
seemed less cheerful. But this was a place away from Harbour Lane--a
neighbourhood of dull and dingy rows of little houses, range on range.
And still farther he found another street of shops, or rather half a
street, for one side was a blank wall. But no great skeleton ship lifted
its ribs above the bricks, and no hammers clanged behind them; for it was
a ship-yard abandoned, and a painted board, thick with grime, offered the
place for sale or hire. Some of the shops opposite were abandoned too,
and the others were poor and dull. Johnny walked a few steps backward,
looking at the shops, and when he turned about at a corner, he almost
scorched himself at a coke fire where chestnuts were roasting; and there
behind the fire stood the pockmarked man himself, not a whit altered!
There he stood, with his hands deep in his pockets, and tapped the kerb
with his clogged boots, just as he had stood when the great ship was
making, and the lights flared round it, and the shops were all open and
busy: perhaps the pitted face was a trifle paler, but that was all.
But Harbour Lane and thereabout were the most interesting parts, and the
pleasantest for Johnny. Just beyond the Stairs, and the old houses, and
the Artichoke Tavern, was a dock-inlet, with an extraordinary bridge that
halved in the middle, and swung back to each of two quays, to let ships
through. Men worked it quite easily, with a winch, and Johnny could have
watched for an hour. But just here he caught sight of an acquaintance.
For down on the quay below the bridge-end, sitting on a mooring-post, was
Mr. Butson. A trifle seedy and fallen in condition, Johnny fancied, and
grumly ill-used as ever. As Johnny looked, Mr. Butson took a pipe from
his pocket, and a screw of paper. The paper yielded nothing. Mr. Butson
raked through both jacket-pockets, and scowled at his empty hands. In
the end, after a gloomy inspection of the pipe, he put it away and
returned to savage meditation. And Johnny went home.