for a Penny_,” all complete with a wisp of pink blotting paper and a
penholder without a nib, which she had bought at the Chandler’s on
her way home that evening, along with some sago and some hair oil for
Johnny whose stiff unruly hair provoked such spasms of rage in her
bosom that she declared that she was “sick to death of it.” On the
supper table lay also a platter, a loaf, a basin of mustard pickle, and
a plate with round lengths of cheese shaped like small candles.
“Devil blast him!” muttered Mrs. Flynn as she fetched from a cupboard
shelf a sour-looking bottle labelled _Writing Fluid_, a dissolute pen,
and requested Johnny to compose a letter to Stringer--devil blast
him!--telling him of the plight of her daughter Pomona Flynn, about
whom she desired him to know that she had already consulted her lawyers
and the chief of police and intimating that unless she heard from him
satisfactory by the day after tomorrow the matter would pass out of her
hands.
“That’s no good, it’s not the way,” declared her son thoughtfully; Mrs.
Flynn therefore sat humbly confronting him and awaited the result of
his cogitations. Johnny was not a very robust youth, but he was growing
fast now, since he had taken up with running; he was very fleet, so
Mrs. Flynn understood, and had already won a silver-plated hot water
jug, which they used for the milk. But still he was thin and not tall,
his dark hair was scattered; his white face was a nice face, thought
Mrs. Flynn, very nice, only there was always something strange about
his clothes. She couldn’t help that now, but he had such queer fancies,
there was no other boy in the street whose trousers were so baggy
or of such a colour. His starched collars were all right of course,
beautifully white and shiny, she got them up herself, and they set his
neck off nicely.
“All we need do,” her son broke in, “is just tell him.”
“Tell him?”
“Yes, just tell him about it--it’s very unfortunate--and ask him to
come and see you. I hope, though,” he paused, “I hope they won’t want
to go and get married.”
“He ought to be made to, devil blast him,” cried Mrs. Flynn, “only
she’s frightened, she is; afraid of her mortal life of him! We don’t
want him here, neither, she says he’s a nasty horrible man.”
Johnny sat dumb for some moments. Pomona was a day girl in service at
a restaurant. Stringer was a clerk to an auctioneer. The figure of his
pale little sister shrinking before a ruffian (whom he figured as a fat
man with a red beard) startled and stung him.
“Besides,” continued Mrs. Flynn, “he’s just going to be married to some
woman, some pretty judy, God help her ... in fact, as like as not he’s
married to her already by now. No, I gave up that idea long ago, I did,
before I told you, long ago.”
“We can only tell him about Pomony then, and ask him what he would like
to do.”
“What he would _like_ to do, well, certainly!” protested the widow.
“And if he’s a decent chap,” continued Johnny serenely, “it will be
all right, there won’t be any difficulty. If he ain’t, then we can do
something else.”
His mother was reluctant to concur but the boy had his way. He sat with
his elbows on the table, his head pressed in his hands, but he could
not think out the things he wanted to say to this man. He would look up
and stare around the room as if he were in a strange place, though it
was not strange to him at all for he had lived in it many years. There
was not much furniture in the apartment, yet there was but little
space in it. The big table was covered with American cloth, mottled
and shiny. Two or three chairs full of age and discomfort stood upon a
carpet that was full of holes and stains. There were some shelves in a
recess, an engraving framed in maple of the player scene from “Hamlet,”
and near by on the wall hung a gridiron whose prongs were woven round
with coloured wools and decorated with satin bows. Mrs. Flynn had a
passion for vases, and two of these florid objects bought at a fair
companioned a clock whose once snowy face had long since turned sallow
because of the oil Mrs. Flynn had administered “to make it go properly.”
But he could by no means think out this letter; his mother sat so
patiently watching him that he asked her to go and sit in the other
room. Then he sat on, sniffing, as if thinking with his nose, while
the room began to smell of the smoking lamp. He was remembering how
years ago, when they were little children, he had seen Pomony in her
nightgown and, angered with her for some petty reason, he had punched
her on the side. Pomony had turned white, she could not speak, she
could not breathe. He had been momentarily proud of that blow, it was
a good blow, he had never hit another boy like that. But Pomony had
fallen into a chair, her face tortured with pain, her eyes filled with
tears that somehow would not fall. Then a fear seized him, horrible,
piercing, frantic: she was dying, she would die, and there was nothing
he could do to stop her! In passionate remorse and pity he had flung
himself before her, kissing her feet--they were small and beautiful
though not very clean,--until at last he had felt Pomony’s arms droop
caressingly around him and heard Pomony’s voice speaking lovingly and
forgivingly to him.
After a decent interval his mother returned to him.
“What are we going to do about _her_?” she asked, “she’ll have to go
away.”
“Away! Do you mean go to a home? No, but why go away? I’m not ashamed;
what is there to be ashamed of?”
“Who the deuce is going to look after her? You talk like a
tom-fool--yes, you are,” insisted Mrs. Flynn passionately. “I’m out all
day from one week’s end to the other. She can’t be left alone, and the
people downstairs are none too civil about it as it is. She’ll have to
go to the workhouse, that’s all.”
Johnny was aghast, indignant, and really angry. He would never never
consent to such a thing! Pomony! Into a workhouse! She should not, she
should stop at home, here, like always, and have a nurse.
“Fool!” muttered his mother, with castigating scorn. “Where’s the money
for nurses and doctors to come from? I’ve got no money for such things!”
“I’ll get some!” declared Johnny hotly.
“Where?”
“I’ll sell something.”
“What?”
“I’ll save up.”
“How?”
“And I’ll borrow some.”
“You’d better shut up now or I’ll knock your head off,” cried his
mother. “Fidding and fadding about--you’re daft!”
“She shan’t go to any workhouse!”
“Fool!” repeated his mother, revealing her disgust at his hopeless
imbecility.
“I tell you she shall not go there,” shouted the boy, stung into angry
resentment by her contempt.
“She shall, she must.”
“I say she shan’t!”
“O don’t be such a blasted fool,” cried the distracted woman, rising
from her chair.
Johnny sprang to his feet almost screaming, “You are the blasted fool,
you, you!”
Mrs. Flynn seized a table knife and struck at her son’s face with it.
He leaped away in terror, his startled appearance, glaring eyes and
strained figure so affecting Mrs. Flynn that she dropped the knife,
and, sinking into her chair, burst into peals of hysterical laughter.
Recovering himself the boy hastened to the laughing woman. The
maddening peals continued and increased, shocking him, unnerving him
again; she was dying, she would die. His mother’s laughter had always
been harsh but delicious to him, it was so infectious, but this was
demoniacal, it was horror.
“O, don’t, don’t, mother, don’t,” he cried, fondling her and pressing
her yelling face to his breast. But she pushed him fiercely away and
the terrifying laughter continued to sear his very soul until he could
bear it no longer. He struck at her shoulders with clenched fist and
shook her frenziedly, frantically, crying:
“Stop it, stop, O stop it, she’ll go mad, stop it, stop.”
He was almost exhausted, when suddenly Pomona rushed into the room in
her nightgown. Her long black hair tumbled in lovely locks about her
pale face and her shoulder; her feet were bare.
“O Johnny, what are you doing?” gasped his little pale sister Pomony,
who seemed so suddenly, so unbelievably, turned into a woman. “Let her
alone.”
She pulled the boy away, fondling and soothing their distracted mother
until Mrs. Flynn partially recovered.
“Come to bed now,” commanded Pomona, and Mrs. Flynn thereupon, still
giggling, followed her child. When he was alone trembling Johnny turned
down the lamp flame which had filled the room with smoky fumes. His
glance rested upon the table knife; the room was silent and oppressive
now. He glared at the picture of Hamlet, at the clock with the oily
face, at the notepaper lying white upon the table. They had all turned
into quivering semblances of the things they were; he was crying.
II
A letter, indited in the way he desired, was posted by Johnny on his
way to work next morning. He was clerk in the warehouse of a wholesale
provision merchant and he kept tally, in some underground cellars
carpeted with sawdust, of hundreds of sacks of sugar and cereals, tubs
of butter, of lard, of treacle, chests of tea, a regular promontory
of cheeses, cases of candles, jam, starch, and knife polish, many of
them stamped with the mysterious words “Factory Bulked.” He did not
like those words, they sounded ugly and their meaning was obscure.
Sometimes he took the cheese-tasting implement from the foreman’s
bench and, when no one was looking, pierced it into a fine Cheddar or
Stilton, withdrawing it with a little cylinder of cheese lying like a
small candle in the curved blade. Then he would bite off the piece of
rind, restore it neatly to the body of the cheese, and drop the other
candle-like piece into his pocket. Sometimes his pocket was so full of
cheese that he was reluctant to approach the foreman fearing he would
smell it. He was very fond of cheese. All of them liked cheese.
The Flynns waited several days for a reply to the letter, but none
came. Stringer did not seem to think it called for any reply. At the
end of a week Johnny wrote again to his sister’s seducer. Pomona had
given up her situation at the restaurant; her brother was conspicuously
and unfailingly tender to her. He saved what money he could, spent
none upon himself, and brought home daily an orange or an egg for
the girl. He wrote a third letter to the odious Stringer, not at all
threateningly, but just invitingly, persuasively. And he waited, but
waited in vain. Then in that underground cheese tunnel where he worked
he began to plot an alternate course of action, and as time passed
bringing no recognition from Stringer his plot began to crystallize
and determine itself. It was nothing else than to murder the man;
he would kill him, he had thought it out, it could be done. He would
wait for him near Stringer’s lodgings one dark night and beat out his
brains with a club. All that was necessary then would be to establish
an alibi. For some days Johnny dwelt so gloatingly upon the details
of this retribution that he forgot about the alibi. By this time he
had accumulated from his mother--for he could never once bring himself
to interrogate Pomona personally about her misfortune--sufficient
description of Stringer to recognize him among a thousand, so he
thought. It appeared that he was not a large man with a red beard,
but a small man with glasses, spats, and a slight limp, who always
attended a certain club of which he was the secretary at a certain hour
on certain nights in each week. To Johnny’s mind, the alibi was not
merely important in itself, it was a romantic necessity. And it was
so easy; it would be quite sufficient for Johnny to present himself
at the public library where he was fairly well known. The library was
quite close to Stringer’s lodgings and they, fortunately, were in a
dark quiet little street. He would borrow a book from the odd-eyed man
in the reference department, retire to one of the inner study rooms,
and at half past seven creep out unseen, creep out, creep out with his
thick stick and wait by the house in that dark quiet little street;
it was very quiet, and it would be very dark; wait there for him all
in the dark, just creep quietly out--and wait. But in order to get
that alibi quite perfect he would have to take a friend with him to
the library room, so that the friend could swear that he had really
been there all the time, because it was just possible the odd-eyed man
wouldn’t be prepared to swear to it; he did not seem able to see very
much, but it was hard to tell with people like that.
Johnny Flynn had not told any of his friends about his sister’s
misfortune; in time, time enough, they were bound to hear of it. Of
all his friends he rejected the close ones, those of whom he was very
fond, and chose a stupid lump of a fellow, massive and nasal, named
Donald. Though awkward and fat he had joined Johnny’s running club;
Johnny had trained him for his first race. But he had subjected Donald
to such exhausting exercise, what with skipping, gymnastics, and tiring
jaunts, that though his bulk disappeared his strength went with it; to
Johnny’s great chagrin he grew weak, and failed ignominiously in the
race. Donald thereafter wisely rejected all offers of assistance and
projected a training system of his own. For weeks he tramped miles into
hilly country, in the heaviest of boots to the soles of which he had
nailed some thick pads of lead. When he donned his light running shoes
for his second race he displayed an agility and suppleness, a god-like
ease, that won not only the race, but the admiration and envy of all
the competitors. It was this dull lumpish Donald that Johnny fixed
upon to assist him. He was a great tool and it would not matter if he
did get himself into trouble. Even if he did Johnny could get him out
again, by confessing to the police; so that was all right. He asked
Donald to go to the library with him on a certain evening to read a
book called “Rasselas”--it was a grand book, very exciting--and Donald
said he would go. He did not propose to tell Donald of his homicidal
intention; he would just sit him down in the library with “Rasselas”
while he himself sat at another table behind Donald, yes, behind him;
even if Donald noticed him creeping out he would say he was only going
to the counter to get another book. It was all quite clear, and safe.
He would be able to creep out, creep out, rush up to the dark little
street--yes, he would ask Donald for a piece of that lead and wrap it
round the head of the stick--he would creep out, and in ten minutes or
twenty he would be back in the library again asking for another book or
sitting down by Donald as if he had not been outside the place, as if
nothing had happened as far as he was concerned, nothing at all!
The few intervening days passed with vexing deliberation. Each night
seemed the best of all possible nights for the deed, each hour that
Stringer survived seemed a bad hour for the world. They were bad slow
hours for Johnny, but at last the day dawned, passed, darkness came,
and the hour rushed upon him.
He took his stick and called for Donald.
“Can’t come,” said Donald, limping to the door in answer to Johnny’s
knock. “I been and hurt my leg.”
For a moment Johnny was full of an inward silent blasphemy that flashed
from a sudden tremendous hatred, but he said calmly:
“But still ... no, you haven’t ... what have you hurt it for?”
Donald was not able to deal with such locution. He ignored it and said:
“My knee-cap, my shin, Oo, come and have a look. We was mending a
flue ... it was the old man’s wheelbarrow.... Didn’t I tell him of it
neither!”
“O, you told him of it?”
Johnny listened to his friend’s narration very abstractedly and at last
went off to the library by himself. As he walked away he was conscious
of a great feeling of relief welling up in him. He could not get an
alibi without Donald, not a sure one, so he would not be able to do
anything tonight. He felt relieved, he whistled as he walked, he was
happy again, but he went on to the library. He was going to rehearse
the alibi by himself, that was the wise thing to do, of course,
rehearse it, practise it; it would be perfect next week when Donald was
better. So he did this. He got out a book from the odd-eyed man, who
strangely enough was preoccupied and did not seem to recognize him. It
was disconcerting, that; he specially wanted the man to notice him. He
went into the study room rather uneasily. Ten minutes later he crept
out unseen, carrying his stick--he had forgotten to ask Donald for the
piece of lead--and was soon lurking in the shadow of the dark quiet
little street.
It was a perfect spot, there could not be a better place, not in the
middle of a town. The house had an area entry through an iron gate; at
the end of a brick pathway, over a coalplate, five or six stone steps
led steeply up to a narrow front door with a brass letter box, a brass
knocker, and a glazed fanlight painted 29. The windows too were narrow
and the whole house had a squeezed appearance. A church clock chimed
eight strokes. Johnny began to wonder what he would do, what would
happen, if Stringer were suddenly to come out of that gateway. Should
he--would he--could he...? And then the door at the top of the steps
did open wide and framed there in the lighted space young Flynn saw the
figure of his own mother.
She came down the steps alone and he followed her short jerky footsteps
secretly until she reached the well-lit part of the town, where he
joined her. It was quite simple, she explained to him with an air of
superior understanding: she had just paid Mr. Stringer a visit, waiting
for letters from that humbug had made her “popped.” Had he thought she
would creep on her stomach and beg for a fourpenny piece when she could
put him in jail if all were known, as she would too, if it hadn’t been
for her children, poor little fatherless things? No, middling boxer,
not that! So she had left off work early, had gone and caught him at
his lodgings and taxed him with it. He denied of it; he was that cocky,
it so mortified her, that she had snatched up the clock and thrown it
at him. Yes, his own clock.
“But it was only a little one, though. He was frightened out of his
life and run upstairs. Then his landlady came rushing in. I told her
all about it, everything, and she was that ‘popped’ with him she give
me the name and address of his feons--their banns is been put up. She
made him come downstairs and face me, and his face was as white as the
driven snow. Johnny, it was. He was obliged to own up. The lady said
to him ‘Whatever have you been at, Mr. Stringer,’ she said to him.
‘I can’t believe it, knowing you for ten years, you must have forgot
yourself.’ O, a proper understanding it was,” declared Mrs. Flynn
finally; “his lawyers are going to write to us and put everything in
order; Duckle & Hoole, they are.”
Again a great feeling of relief welled up in the boy’s breast, as if,
having been dragged into a horrible vortex he had been marvellously
cast free again.
The days that followed were blessedly tranquil, though Johnny was
often smitten with awe at the thought of what he had contemplated.
That fool, Donald, too, one evening insisted on accompanying him to
the library where he spent an hour of baffled understanding over the
pages of “Rasselas.” But the lawyers Duckle & Hoole aroused a tumult
of hatred in Mrs. Flynn. They pared down her fond anticipations to
the minimum; they put so much slight upon her family, and such a
gentlemanly decorum and generous forbearance upon the behaviour of
their client, Mr. Stringer, that she became inarticulate. When informed
that that gentleman desired no intercourse whatsoever with any Flynn
or the offspring thereof she became speechless. Shortly, Messrs.
Duckle & Hoole begged to submit for her approval a draft agreement
embodying their client’s terms, one provision of which was that if the
said Flynns violated the agreement by taking any proceedings against
the said Stringer they should thereupon _ipso facto_ willy nilly or
whatever forfeit and pay unto him the said Stringer not by way of
penalty but as damages the sum of £100. Whereupon Mrs. Flynn recovered
her speech and suffered a little tender irony to emerge.
The shoemaker, whose opinion upon this draft agreement was solicited,
confessed himself as much baffled by its phraseology as he was
indignant at its tenor and terms.
“That man,” he declared solemnly to Johnny, “ought to have his brain
knocked out”; and he conveyed by subtle intimations to the boy that
that was the course he would favour were he himself standing in
Johnny’s shoes. “One dark night,” he had roared with a dreadful glare
in his eyes, “with a neat heavy stick!”
The Flynns also consulted a cabman who lodged in the house. His legal
qualifications appeared to lie in the fact that he had driven the
private coach of a major general whose son, now a fruit farmer in
British Columbia, had once been entered for the bar. The cabman was a
very positive and informative cabman. “List and learn,” he would say,
“list and learn”: and he would regale Johnny, or any one else, with an
oration to which you might listen as hard as you liked but from which
you could not learn. He was husky, with a thick red neck and the cheek
bones of a horse. Having perused the agreement with one eye judicially
cocked, the other being screened by a drooping lid adorned with a
glowing nodule, he carefully refolded the folios and returned them to
the boy:
“Any judge--who was up to snuff--would impound that dockyment.”
“What’s that?”
“They would impound it,” repeated the cabman smiling wryly.
“But what’s impound it? What for?”
“I tell you it would be impounded, that dockyment would,” asseverated
the cabman. Once more he took the papers from Johnny, opened them out,
reflected upon them and returned them again without a word. Catechism
notwithstanding, the oracle remained impregnably mystifying.
The boy continued to save his pocket money. His mother went about
her work with a grim air, having returned the draft agreement to the
lawyers with an ungracious acceptance of the terms.
One April evening Johnny went home to an empty room; Pomona was out. He
prepared his tea and afterwards sat reading “Tales of a Grandfather.”
That was a book if anybody wanted a book! When darkness came he
descended the stairs to enquire of the shoemaker’s wife about Pomony,
he was anxious. The shoemaker’s wife was absent too and it was late
when she returned accompanied by his mother.
Pomona’s hour had come--they had taken her to the workhouse--only just
in time--a little boy--they were both all right--he was an uncle.
His mother’s deceit stupified him, he felt shamed, deeply shamed, but
after a while that same recognizable feeling of relief welled up in
his breast and drenched him with satisfactions. After all what could
it matter where a person was born, or where one died, as long as you
had your chance of growing up at all, and, if lucky, of growing up all
right. But this babe had got to bear the whole burden of its father’s
misdeed, though; it had got to behave itself or it would have to pay
its father a hundred pounds as damages. Perhaps that was what that
queer bit of poetry meant, “The child is father of the man.”
His mother swore that they were very good and clean and kind at the
workhouse, everything of the best and most expensive; there was nothing
she would have liked better than to have gone there herself when Johnny
and Pomony were born.
“And if ever I have any more,” Mrs. Flynn sighed, but with profound
conviction, “I will certainly go there.”
Johnny gave her half the packet of peppermints he had bought for
Pomona. With some of his saved money he bought her a bottle of
stout--she looked tired and sad--she was very fond of stout. The rest
of the money he gave her for to buy Pomony something when she visited
her. He would not go himself to visit her, not there. He spent the long
intervening evenings at the library--the odd-eyed man had shown him a
lovely book about birds. He was studying it. On Sundays, in the spring,
he was going out to catch birds himself, out in the country, with a
catapult. The cuckoo was a marvellous bird. So was a titlark. Donald
Gower found a goatsucker’s nest last year.
Then one day he ran from work all the way home, knowing Pomony would at
last be there. He walked slowly up the street to recover his breath.
He stepped up the stairs, humming quite casually, and tapped at the
door of their room--he did not know why he tapped. He heard Pomony’s
voice calling him. A thinner paler Pomony stood by the hearth, nursing
a white-clothed bundle, the fat pink babe.
“O, my dear!” cried her ecstatic brother, “the beauty he is! what larks
we’ll have with him!”