THE boy must have had a father, and some day he may be a father himself,
but in the meantime he is absolutely different from anything else on
the face of the earth. He is a race by himself, a special creation
that cannot be traced, for who would venture to liken his ways to the
respectability of his father, or who would ever connect him with the
grave and decorous man which he is to be. By-and-by, say in thirty
years, he will preside at a meeting for the prevention of cruelty to
animals, or make enthusiastic speeches for the conversion of black
people, or get in a white heat about the danger of explosives in the
house, or be exceedingly careful about the rate of driving. Meanwhile he
watches two dogs settle their political differences with keen interest,
and would consider it unsportsmanlike to interfere if they were fairly
matched, and the sight of a black man is to him a subject of unfailing
and practical amusement, if he can blow himself and a brother up with
gunpowder, he feels that time has not been lost, and it is to him a
chief delight--although stolen--to travel round at early morn with the
milkman, and being foolishly allowed to drive, to take every corner
on one wheel. He is skilful in arranging a waterfall which comes into
operation by the opening of a door; he keeps a menagerie of pets,
unsightly in appearance, and extremely offensive in smell in his
bedroom. He has an inexhaustible repertory of tricks for any servant
with whom he has quarrelled, and it is his pleasure to come downstairs
on the bannisters, and if any one is looking to make believe that he is
going to fall off and dash himself to destruction three floors below.
His father is aghast at him, and uses the strongest language regarding
his escapades; he wonders how it came to pass that such a boy should
turn up in his home, and considers him what gardeners would call “a
sport” or unaccountable eccentricity in the family. He is sure that he
never did such things when he was a boy, and would be very indignant if
you insinuated he had simply been a prophecy of his son. According
to his conversation you would imagine that his early life had been
distinguished by unbroken and spotless propriety, and his son himself
would not believe for a moment that the pater had ever been guilty of
his own exploits. The Boy is therefore lonely in his home, cut off from
the past and the future; he is apt to be misunderstood and even (in an
extreme case) censured, and his sufferings as a creature of a foreign
race with all the powers of government against him would be intolerable
had he not such a joy in living, and were he not sustained in everything
he does by a quite unaffected sense of innocence, and the proud
consciousness of honourable martyrdom.
As wild animals are best studied in their native states, and are much
restricted in the captivity of a cage, so the Boy is not seen at his
best in a middle-class home where he is sadly fettered by vain customs
(although it is wonderful how even there he can realize himself). When
you want to understand what manner of creature he is, you must see him
on the street. And the boy _in exedsis_, and _de profundis_ too, is a
message-boy.
Concluding that his son has had enough of the Board School, and learning
from his master that there was not the remotest chance he would ever
reach a higher standard, his father brings him some morning to a
respectable tradesman, and persuades the unsuspecting man to take him as
message-boy. Nothing could exceed the modesty and demure appearance of
the Boy, and the only fear is that he be too timid and too simple for
his duty--that he may be run over by a cab or bullied upon the streets.
Carefully washed by his mother, and with his hair nicely brushed, in a
plain but untorn suit of clothes, and a cap set decently on his head, he
is a beautiful sight, and he listens to his father's instructions to do
what he is told, and his master's commandment that he is not to meddle
with anything in the shop, in respectful and engaging silence. His
father departs with a warning look, and his master gives him an easy
errand, and the Boy goes out to begin life in a hard, unfriendly world,
while one pities his tender youth.
The Boy has started with a considerable capital of knowledge, gathered
at school, and in a few weeks he is free of the streets--a full-grown
citizen in his own kingdom, and, if you please, we will watch him for an
hour. His master has given him some fish, and charged him as he values
his life to deliver them at once at No. 29, Rose Terrace, and the boy
departs with conscientious purpose. Half way to his destination he sees
in the far distance the butcher's boy, who also has been sent in hot
haste to some house where the cook is demanding the raw material
for luncheon. They signal to one another with clear, penetrating,
unintelligible cries like savages across a desert, and the result is
that the two messengers rendezvous at the corner of Rose Terrace. What
they talk about no person can tell, for their speech is their own, but
by-and-by under the influence of, no doubt informing, conversation, they
relax from there austere labours and lay down their baskets. A minute
later they are playing marbles with undivided minds, and might be
playing pitch and toss were they not afraid of a policeman coming round
the corner. It is nothing to them, gay, irresponsible children of
nature, that two cooks are making two kitchens unbearable with their
indignation, for the boy has learned to receive complaints with
imperturbable gravity and ingenious falsehood. Life for him is a
succession of pleasures, slightly chastened by work and foolish
impatience. As they play, a dog who has been watching them from afar
with keen interest, and thoroughly understands their ways, creeps near
with cautious cunning, and seizing the chance of a moment when the
butcher's boy has won a “streaky” from the fishmonger, dashes in and
seizes the leg of mutton. If he had been less ambitious and taken a
chop, he would have succeeded, and then the boy would have explained
that the chop had been lost in a street accident in which he was almost
killed, but a leg of mutton is heavy to lift and a boy is only less
alert than a dog. The spoil is barely over the edge of the basket, and
the dog has not yet tasted its sweetness, before the boy gives a yell so
shrill and fearsome that it raises the very hair on the dog's back, and
the thief bolts in terror without his prey. The boy picks up the
mutton, dusts it on his trousers, puts it back in the basket, gives the
fishmonger a playful punch on the side of the head, to which that worthy
responds with an attempted kick, and the two friends depart in opposite
directions, whistling, with a light heart and an undisturbed conscience.
If any one imagines that the boy will now hurry with his fish, he does
not understand the nature of the race and its freedom from enslaving
rule. A few yards down Rose Terrace he comes upon the grocer's boy and
the two unearth a chemist's boy, and our boy produces a penny dreadful,
much tom and very fishy, but which contains the picture of a battle
swimming in blood, and the three sit down for its enjoyment. When they
have fairly exhausted their literature the boy receives his fee, as
the keeper of a circulating library, by being allowed to dip his finger
carefully wetted before into a bag of moist sugar, and to keep all that
he can take out, and the grocer's boy is able to close up the bag so
skilfully that the cook will never know that it has been opened.
From the chemist he receives a still more enjoyable because much more
perilous reward, for he is allowed to put his mouth to the spout of a
syphon and, if he can endure, to take what comes--and that is the reason
why syphons are never perfectly full. It occurs to the chemist at this
moment that he was told to lose no time in delivering some medicines,
and so he departs reluctantly; the conference breaks up, and it seems as
if nothing remained for the boy but to deliver the fish. Still you
never know what may happen, and as at that moment he catches sight of a
motor-car, it seems a mere duty to hurry back to the top of the terrace
to see whether it will break down. It does of course, for otherwise one
could hardly believe it to be a motor-car, and the boy under what he
would consider a call of providence, hastens to offer assistance. Other
boys arrive from different quarters, interested, sympathetic, obliging,
willing to co-operate with the irritated motor-man in every possible
way. They remain with him twenty-five minutes till he starts again, and
then three of them accompany him on a back seat, not because they were
invited, but because they feel they are needed. And then the boy goes
back to Rose Terrace and delivers the fish, stating with calm dignity,
that he had just been sent from the shop and had run all the way.
Things are said to him at the house by the cook, who is not an absolute
fool, and things may be said to him by his master at the shop, who has
some knowledge of boys, but no injurious reflection of any kind affects
the boy. With a mind at leisure from itself he is able to send his empty
basket spinning along the street after a lady's poodle, and to accompany
this attention with a yell that will keep the pampered pet on the run
for a couple of streets to the fierce indignation of its mistress. And
the chances are that he will foregather with an Italian monkey boy, and
although the one knows no Italian and the other knows no English, they
will have pleasant fellowship together, because both are boys, and in
return for being allowed to have the monkey on his shoulder, and seeing
it run up a waterpipe, he will give the Italian half an apple which
comes out of his pocket with two marbles and a knife attached to it. If
he be overtaken by a drenching shower, he covers his head and shoulders
with his empty basket, sticks his hands in his pockets, and goes on his
way singing in the highest of spirits, but if the day be warm he travels
on the steps of a'bus when the conductor is on the roof, or on a lorry,
if the driver be not surly. If it be winter time, and there be ice on
the streets, he does his best, with the assistance of his friends, to
make a slide, and if the police interfere, with whom he is on terms
of honourable warfare, he contents himself with snowballing some
prudish-looking youth, who is out for a walk with his mother. All the
same he is not without his ambitions in the world, and he carries
sacred ideals in the secret of his heart. He would give all that he
possesses,--five lurid and very tattered books, a penknife with four
blades (two broken), nineteen marbles (three glass), and a pair of white
mice--to be the driver of a butcher's cart. The boy is a savage, and
although you may cover him with a thin veneer of civilization he remains
a savage. There is a high-class school for little boys in my district,
and those at a distance are driven home in cabs that they may not get
wet in winter weather and may not be over-fatigued. A cab is passing at
this moment with four boys, who have invited two friends to join them,
and it is raining heavily. Two boys are on the box seat with the driver,
and have thoughtfully left their topcoats inside in case they might get
spoiled. There is a boy with his head out at either window addressing
opprobrious remarks to those on the box-seat, for which insults one of
them has just lost his cap, the other two are fighting furiously in the
bottom of the cab, and will come out an abject spectacle. For you may
train a dog to walk on its hind legs, and you may tame a tiger, but you
cannot take the boyness out of a boy.