HOW DAVE FAILED TO PROFIT BY HIS EXPERIENCE. OF PAOLO TOSCANELLI
AND CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS. OF A NEW SHORE DAVE AND DOLLY REACHED BY
EXPLORATION, ROUND THE CORNER; AND OF OTHER NAVIGATORS WHO HAD, IN
THIS CASE, MADE IT FOR THEMSELVES. OF THE PUBLIC SPIRIT OF DAVE AND
DOLLY, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF A _BARRAGE_. HOW MRS. TAPPING AND
MRS. RILEY HEARD THE ENGINES. OF A SHORTAGE OF MUD, AND A GREAT
RESOLVE OF DAVE'S. WHY NOT SOME NEW MUD FROM THE NEW SHORE?
The interest of Dave's accident told in the last chapter is merely
collateral. It shows how narrow an escape the story that follows had not
only of never being finished, but even of never being written. For if
its events had never happened, it goes near to certainty that they would
never have been narrated. Near, but not quite. For even if Dave had
profited by these warnings, cautions, and moral lessons to the extent of
averting what now appears to have been Destiny, some imaginative author
might have woven a history showing exactly what might have happened to
him if he had not been a good boy. And that history, in the hands of a
master--one who had the organ of the conditional praeterpluperfect tense
very large--might have worked out the same as this.
The story may be thankful that no such task has fallen to its author's
lot. It is so much easier to tell something that actually did happen
than to make up as you go.
Dave was soon as bad as ever--no doubt of it. Only he kept clear of that
post. The burnt child dreads the fire, and the chances are that
admonitions not to climb up on posts had less to do with his abstention
from this one than the lesson the post itself had hammered into the back
of his head. Exploration of the outer world--of the regions imperfectly
known beyond that post--had so far produced no fatal consequences; so
that Aunt M'riar's and Uncle Mo's warnings to the children to keep
within bounds had not the same convincing character.
But a time was at hand for the passion of exploration to seize upon
these two very young people, and to become an excitement as absorbing to
them as the discovery of America to Paolo Toscanelli and Christopher
Columbus. At first it was satisfied by the _cul-de-sac_ recess on which
Sapps Court opened. But this palled, and no wonder! How could it compete
with the public highway out of which it branched, especially when there
was a new shore--that is to say, sewer--in course of construction?
To stand on the edge of a chasm which certainly reached to the bowels of
the earth, and to see them shovelled up from platform to platform by
agencies that spat upon their hands for some professional reason
whenever there came a lull in the supply from below, was to find life
worth living indeed. These agencies conversed continually about an
injury that had been inflicted on them by the Will of God, the selfish
caprice of their employers, or the cupidity of the rich. They appeared
to be capable of shovelling in any space, however narrow, almost to the
extent of surrendering one dimension and occupying only a plane surface.
But it hadn't come to that yet. The battens that kept the trench-sides
vertical were wider apart than what you'd have thought, when you come to
try 'em with a two-fut rule. And the short lengths of quartering that
kep' 'em apart were not really intersecting the diggers' anatomies as
the weaver's shuttle passes through the warp. That was only the
impression of the unconcerned spectator as he walked above them over the
plank bridge that acknowledged his right of way across the road. His
sympathies remained unentangled. If people navigated, it was their own
look out. You see, these people were navvies, or navigators, although it
strains one's sense of language to describe them so.
The best of it was to come. For in time the lowest navvy was threatened
with death by misadventure, unless he come up time enough to avoid the
water. The small pump the job had been making shift with was obliged to
acknowledge itself beaten, and to make way for one with two handles,
each with room for two pumpers; and this in turn was discarded in favour
of a noisy affair with a donkey-engine, which brought up the yellow
stream as fast as ever a gutter of nine-inch plank, nailed up to a =V=,
would carry it away. And it really was a most extraordinary thing that
of all those navigators there was not one that had not predicted in
detail exactly the course of events that had come about. Mr. Bloxam, the
foreman, had told the governor that there would be no harm in having the
pump handy, seeing they would go below the clay. And each of the others
had--so they themselves said--spoken in the same sense, in some cases
using a most inappropriate adjective to qualify the expected flood.
Why, even Sleepy Joe had seen that! Sleepy Joe was this same foreman,
and he lived in a wooden hutch on the job, called The Office.
But the watershed of any engine--whatever may be its donkey-power, and
whatever that name implies--slops back where a closed spout changes
suddenly to an open gutter, and sets up independent lakes and rivers.
This one sent its overflow towards Sapps Court, the incline favouring
its distribution along the gutter of the _cul-de-sac_, which lay a
little lower than the main street it opened out of. Its rich, ochrous
rivulets--containing no visible trace of haemorrhage, in spite of that
abuse of an adjective--were creeping slowly along the interstices of
cobblestone paving that still outlived the incoming of Macadam, when
Dave and Dolly Wardle ventured out of their archway to renew a survey,
begun the previous day, of the fascinating excavation in the main
street.
Here was an opportunity for active and useful service not to be lost.
Dave immediately cast about to scrape up and collect such mud as came
ready to hand, and with it began to build up an intercepting embankment
to stop the foremost current, that was winding slowly, like Vesuvian
lava, on the line of least resistance. Dolly followed his example,
filling a garment she called her pinafore with whatever mould or
_debris_ was attainable, and bringing it with much gravity and some
pride to help on the structure of the dyke. A fiction, rather felt than
spoken, got in the air that Sapps Court and its inhabitants would be
overwhelmed as by Noah's flood, except for the exertions of Dave and his
sister. It appealed to some friends of the same age, also inhabitants of
the Court, and with their assistance and sympathy it really seemed--in
this fiction--that a catastrophe might be averted. You may imagine what
a drove of little grubs those children looked in the course of half an
hour. Not that any of them were particularly spruce to begin with.
However, there was the embankment holding back the dirty yellow water;
and now the pump was running on steady-like, there didn't so much come
slopping over to add to the deluge that threatened Sapps Court. The
policeman--the only one supposed to exist, although in form he varied
slightly--made an inquiry as to what was going on, to be beforehand with
Anarchy. He said:--"What are you young customers about, taking the
Company's water?" That seemed to embody an indictment without committing
the accuser to particulars. But he took no active steps, and a very old
man with a fur cap, and no teeth, and big bones in his cheeks,
said:--"It don't make no odds to we, I take it." He was a prehistoric
navvy, who had become a watchman, and was responsible for red lanterns
hooked to posts on the edge of chasms to warn carts off. He was going to
sleep in half a tent, soothed or otherwise by the unflagging piston of
that donkey-engine, which had made up its mind to go till further
notice.
The men were knocking off work, and it was getting on for time for those
children to have their suppers and be put to bed. But as Aunt M'riar had
some trimming to finish, and it was a very fine evening, there was no
harm in leaving them alone a few minutes longer. As for any attractive
influences of supper, those children never come in of theirselves, and
always had to be fetched.
An early lamplighter--for this was in September, 1853--passed along the
street with a ladder, dropping stars as he went. There are no
lamplighters now, no real ones that run up ladders. Their ladders
vanished first, leaving them with a magic wand that lighted the gas as
soon as you got the tap turned; only that was ever so long, as often as
not. Perhaps things are better now that lamps light themselves
instinctively at the official hour of sunset. At any rate, one has the
satisfaction of occasionally seeing one that won't go out, but burns on
into the daylight to spite the Authorities.
They were cold stars, almost green, that this lamplighter dropped; but
this was because the sun had left a flood of orange-gold behind it,
enough to make the tune from "Rigoletto" an organ was playing think it
was being composed in Italy again. The world was a peaceful world,
because Opulence, inflated and moderate, had gone out of town: the
former to its country-house, or a foreign hotel; the latter to lodgings
at the seaside to bathe out of machines and prey on shrimps. The lull
that reigned in and about Sapps Court was no doubt a sort of recoil or
backwater from other neighbourhoods, with high salaries or real and
personal estate, whose dwellings were closed and not being properly
ventilated by their caretakers. It reacted on business there, every bit
as much as in Oxford Street; and that was how Tapping's the
tallow-chandler's--where you got tallow candles and dips, as well as
composites; for in those days they still chandled tallow--didn't have a
single customer in for ten whole minutes by the clock. In that interval
Mrs. Tapping seized the opportunity to come out in the street and
breathe the air. So did Mrs. Riley next door, and they stood conversing
on the topics of the day, looking at the sunset over the roofs of the
_cul-de-sac_ this story has reference to. For Mrs. Tapping's shop was in
the main road, opposite to where the embankment operations were in hand.
"Ye never will be tellin' me now, Mrs. Tapping, that ye've not hur-r-rd
thim calling 'Fire!' in the sthrate behind? Fy-urr, fy-urr, fy-urr!"
This is hard to write as Mrs. Riley spoke it, so great was her command
of the letter _r_.
"Now you name it, Mrs. Riley, deny it I can't. But to the point of
taking notice to bear in mind--why no! It was on my ears, but only to be
let slip that minute. Small amounts and accommodations frequent, owing
to reductions on quantity took, distrack attention. I was a-sayin' to my
stepdaughter only the other day that hearin' is one thing and listenin'
is another. And she says to me, she says, I was talking like a book, she
says. Her very expression and far from respectful! So I says to her, not
to be put upon, 'Lethear,' I says, 'books ain't similar all through but
to seleck from, and I go accordin'....'" Mrs. Tapping, whose system was
always to turn the conversation to some incident in which she had been
prominent, might have developed this one further, but Mrs. Riley
interrupted her with Celtic _naivete_.
"D'ye mane to say, me dyurr, that ye can't hearr 'em now? Kape your
tongue silent and listen!" A good, full brogue permits speech that would
offend in colourless Saxon; and Mrs. Tapping made no protest, but
listened. Sure enough the rousing, maddening "Fire, fire, fire, fire,
fire!" was on its way at speed somewhere close at hand. It grew and
lessened and died. And Mrs. Riley was triumphant. "That's a larrudge
fire, shure!" said she, transposing her impression of the enthusiasm of
the engine to the area of the conflagration. Cold logic perceives that
an engine may be just as keen to pump on a cottage as on a palace,
before it knows which. Mrs. Riley had come from Tipperary, and had
brought a sympathetic imagination with her, leaving any logic she
possessed behind.
A few minutes before the lamplighter passed--saying to the old
watchman:--"Goin' to bed, Sam?" and on receiving the reply, "Time enough
yet!" rejoining sarcastically:--"Time enough for a quart!"--the
labourers at the dyke had recognised the fact that unless new material
could be obtained, the pent-up waters would burst the curb and bound,
rejoicing to be free, and rush headlong to the nearest drain. All the
work would be lost unless a fresh supply could be obtained; the ruling
fiction of a new Noachian deluge might prove a deadly reality instead
of, as now, a theoretical contingency under conditions which engineering
skill might avert. The Sappers and Miners who were roused from their
beds to make good a dynamited embankment and block the relentless Thames
did not work with a more untiring zeal to baffle a real enemy than did
Dave and Dolly to keep out a fictitious one, and hypothetically save
Uncle Moses and Aunt M'riar from drowning. But all efforts would be
useless if there was to be a shortage of mud.
The faces of our little friends, and their little friends, were
earnestness itself as they concentrated on the great work in the glow of
the sunset. They had no eyes for its glories. The lamplighter even,
dropping jewels as he went, passed them by unheeded. The organ
interpreted Donizetti in vain. Despair seemed imminent when Dolly, who,
though small, was as keen as the keenest of the diggers, came back after
a special effort with no more than the merest handful of
gutter-scrapings, saying with a most pathetic wail:--"I tan't det no
more!"
Then it was that a great resolve took shape in the heart of Dave. It
found utterance in the words:--"Oy wants some of the New Mud the Men
spoyded up with their spoyds," and pointed to an ambitious scheme for
securing some of the fine rich clay that lay in a tempting heap beyond
the wooden bridge across the sewer-trench. The bridge that Dave had
never even stood upon, much less crossed!
The daring, reckless courage of the enterprise! Dolly gasped with awe
and terror. She was too small to find at a moment's notice any terms in
which she could dissuade Dave from so venturesome a project. Besides,
her faith in her brother amounted to superstition. Dave _must_ know what
was practicable and righteous. Was he not nearly six years old? She
stood speechless and motionless, her heart in her mouth as she watched
him go furtively across that awful bridge of planks and get nearer and
nearer to his prize.
There were lions in his path, as there used to be in the path of
knights-errant when they came near the castles of necromancers who held
beautiful princesses captive--to say nothing of full-blown dragons and
alluring syrens. These lions took in one case, the form of a
butcher-boy, who said untruthfully:--"Now, young hobstacle, clear out o'
this! Boys ain't allowed on bridges;" and in another that of Michael
Ragstroar, who said, "Don't you let the Company see you carryin' off
their property. They'll rip you open as soon as look at you. You'll be
took afore the Beak." Dave was not yet old enough to see what a very
perverted view of legal process these words contained, but his blue eyes
looked mistrustfully at the speaker as he watched him pass up the street
towards the Wheatsheaf, swinging a yellow jug with ridges round its neck
and a full corporation. Michael had been sent to fetch the beer.
If the blue eyes had not remained fixed on that yellow jug and its
bearer till both vanished through the swing-door of the Wheatsheaf--if
their owner's mistrust of his informant had been strong enough to cancel
the misgivings that crossed his baby mind, only a few seconds sooner,
would things have gone otherwise with Dave? Would he have used that
beautiful lump of clay, as big as a man of his age could carry, on the
works that were to avert Noah's flood from Sapps Court? Would he and
Dolly not probably have been caught at their escapade by an indignant
Aunt M'riar, corrected, duly washed and fed, and sent to bed sadder and
wiser babies? So few seconds might have made the whole difference.
Or, if that heap of clay had been thrown on the other side of the
trench, on the pavement instead of towards the traffic--why then the
children might have taken all they could carry, and Old Sam would have
countenanced them, in reason, as like as not. But how little one gains
by thinking what might have been! The tale is to tell, and tells that
these things were not otherwise, but thus.
* * * * *
Uncle Moses was in the room on the right of the door, called the
parlour, smoking a pipe with the old friend whose advice had probably
kept him from coming on the parish.
"Aunt M'riar!" said he, tapping his pipe out on the hob, and taking care
the ashes didn't get in the inflammable stove-ornament, "I don't hear
them young customers outside. What's got 'em?"
"Don't you begin to fret and werrit till I tell you to it, Moses. The
children's safe and not in any mischief--no more than usual. Mr. Alibone
seen 'em." For although the world called this friend Affability Bob and
Uncle Moses gave him his christened name, Aunt M'riar always spoke of
him, quite civil-like, thus.
"You see the young nippers, Jerry?" said the old prizefighter; who
always got narvous, as you might say, though scarcely alarmed, when they
got out of sight and hearing; even if it was for no more time than what
an egg takes.
"Jist a step beyond the archway, Mosey," said Mr. Alibone. "Paddlin'
and sloppin' about with the water off o' the shore-pump. It's all clean
water, Mrs. Catchpole, only for a little clay." Aunt M'riar, whose
surname was an intrinsic improbability in the eyes of Public Opinion,
and who was scarcely ever called by it, except by Mr. Jerry, expressed
doubts. So he continued:--"You see, they're sinking for a new shore
clear of the old one. So nothing's been opened into."
"Well," said Aunt M'riar, "I certainly did think the flaviour was being
kep' under wonderful. But now you put it so, I understand. What I say
is--if dirt, then clean dirt; and above all no chemicals!... What's that
you're saying, Uncle Mo?"
"Why, I was a-thinking," said Uncle Moses, who seemed restless, "I _was_
a-thinking, Bob, that you and me might have our pipes outside, being dry
underfoot." For Uncle Moses, being gouty, was ill-shod for wet weather.
He was slippered, though not lean. And though Mrs. Burr, coming in just
then, added her testimony that the children were quite safe and happy,
only making a great mess, Uncle Moses would not be content to remain
indoors, but must needs be going out. "These here young juveniles," said
he, outside in the Court, "where was it you took stock of 'em, did you
say?"
"Close to hand," said Affability Bob. "One step out of the archway.
There you'll find 'em, old man. Don't you fret your kidneys. _They're_
all right. Hear the engines?"
"Whereabouts is the fire?"
"Somewhere down by Walworth. I saw the smoke, crossing Hungerford
Bridge. This engine's coming down our road outside."
"I reckon she may be, by the sound. She'll be half-way to Blackfriars
before we're out of this here Court. If she gets by where the road's up!
Maybe she'll have to go back."
"There she stops! What's the popilation shoutin' at?" For the tramp of
the engine's horses, heard plain enough on the main road, came to an end
abruptly, and sounds ensued--men's shouts, women's cries--not
reconcilable with the mere stoppage of a fire-engine by unexpected
narrows or an irregular coal-cart.
"Couldn't say, I'm sure. They're a nizy lot in these parts." So said
Uncle Moses, and walked slowly up the Court, stopping for breath
half-way.