police-sergeant's. He asked for a "piece," and the sergeant's wife told
him to be off. She was busy and he might come back when the weans came
in for their dinners. She had not time to be always giving the likes of
him "pieces" in the middle of the day.
Cleg did not care. He was not particularly hungry. But he hung about
all afternoon in the neighbourhood of the police-station, and so
pestered the good-natured policemen off duty, that one of them
threatened him with "a rare belting" if he did not quit.
Whereupon Cleg buttoned up his jacket, made to himself a paper helmet,
and with a truncheon in his hand stalked about in front of the station,
taking up stray dogs in the name of the law. One of these he had
previously taught to walk upon its hind legs. This animal he arrested,
handcuffed with a twist of wire, and paraded over against the station
in a manner killingly comic—much to the amusement of the passers-by,
as well as detrimental to the sobriety and discipline of the younger
officers themselves. But Cleg was seldom meddled with by the police.
He was under the protection of the sergeant's wife, who so often gave
him a "piece." She also gave "pieces" sometimes to the officers at the
station-house. For according as a policeman is fed, so is he. And it
was the sergeant's wife who stirred the porridge pot. Therefore Cleg
was left alone.
In this manner Cleg amused himself till dark, when he stole home. His
father was already coming down the stairs. Cleg rapidly withdrew.
His father passed out and took the narrowest lanes southward till he
entered the Queen's Park under the immanent gloom of the Salisbury
Crags. Cleg followed like his shadow. Tim Kelly often looked behind.
He boasted that he could hear the tramp of the regulation police boot
at least half a mile, and tell it from the tread of a circus elephant,
and even from the one o'clock gun at the Castle. But he saw no silent
boy tracking him noiselessly after the fashion of the Indian scout, so
vividly described in the "Bully Boys' Journal."
Tim Kelly bored his way into the eye of a rousing south wind that
"reesled" among the bare bones of Samson's Ribs, and hurled itself
upon Edinburgh as if to drive the city off its long, irregular ridge
into the North Sea. Bending sharply to the right, the burglar came
among buildings again. He crossed the marshy end of Duddingstone Loch.
It was tinder-dry with the drought. At the end of a long avenue was
to be seen the loom of houses, and the gleam of lights, as burgess's
wife and burgess moved in this order to their bedrooms and disarrayed
themselves for the night.
Tim Kelly hid behind a wall. Cleg crouched behind his father, but
sufficiently far behind not to attract his attention. Cleg was
taking his first lessons in the great craft of speculation—which is
the obtaining of your neighbour's goods without providing him with
an equivalent in exchange. The trifling matter of your neighbour's
connivance, requisite in betting and stock transactions, escaped the
notice of the Kellys. But perhaps after all that did not matter.
Aurelia Villa, the home of Miss Cecilia Tennant (incidentally also of
her father, Mr. Robert Grey Tennant), darkened down early; for Mr.
Robert Tennant was an early riser, and early rising means early bedding
(and a very good thing too).
Tim Kelly knew all that, for his local knowledge was as astonishing
as his methods of obtaining it were mysterious. It was not twelve of
the clock when Tim drew himself over the wall out of the avenue, and
dropped lightly as a cat upon the pocket-handkerchief lawn, which all
the summer had been worn at the corners by the egg-spoon tennis of
Cecilia and the Junior Partner.
Tim Kelly was at the back door in a minute. It was down three steps. He
laid a bag of tools, which clinked a little as he took them out of his
pocket, on the stone ledge of the step. It might be safer, he thought,
to take a look round the house and listen for the hippopotamus tread
of the regulation bull-hide. In a moment after Tim was round at the
gable end flat among the strawberries. There it came! Clear and
solemnising fell the tread of the law in all its majesty—a bull's-eye
lantern swinging midships a sturdy girth, which could hardly, even by
courtesy, be called a waist. Flash! Like a search-light ran the ray of
the lantern over the front of the property of Mr. Robert Grey Tennant.
But the regulation boots were upon the feet of a man of probity. The
wearer opened the front gate, tramped up the steps, conscientiously
tried the front door and dining-room window of the end house in the
row. They were fast. All was well. Duty done. The owners might sleep
sound. They paid heavy police rates to a beneficent local authority.
Why should they not sleep well? But, alas! the regulation boots did not
take any cognisance of Tim Kelly with his nose among the strawberries,
or of a small boy who was speeding over the waste fields and back yards
into the Park. The small boy carried a parcel. He was a thief. This
small boy was Cleg Kelly, the hero of this tale.
Timothy Kelly rose from among the strawberries with laughter and scorn
in his heart. If the bobby had only gone to the back door instead of
the front, there was a parcel there, which it would have made him a
proud policeman to take to the head office. Tim Kelly stooped at the
steps to take up his precious satchel of tools. His hand met the bare
stone. His bag was gone! His heart dinned suddenly in his ears. This
was not less than witchcraft. He had never been ten yards from them
all the time. Yet the tools were gone without sound or sight of human
being. Then there was an interval.
* * * * *
During this interval Tim Kelly expressed his opinions upon things in
general. The details are quite unfit for publication.
But at that very moment, over at the end of Duddingstone Loch, a small
boy was whirling a small but heavy bag round his head.
"Once! Twice! Thrice—and away!" he cried with glee. Something hurtled
through the air, and fell with a splash far in the black deeps of the
loch. Years after this the antiquary of the thirtieth century may find
this bundle, and on the strength of it he will take away the honest
character of our ancestors of the Iron Age, proving that burglary was
commonly and scientifically practised among them. But the memory of
Cleg Kelly will be clear.
Indeed, he was sound asleep when his father came in, breathing out
threatenings and slaughter. Tim listened intently with his ear at his
son's mouth, for it is well to be suspicious of every one. But Cleg's
breathing was as natural and regular as that of an infant.
Yet there is no doubt whatever, that Cleg and not his father had been
guilty of both burglary and theft that night; and that Duddingstone
Loch was indictable for the reset of the stolen property.
Then Cleg Kelly, burglar, winked an eye at his father's back, and
settled himself to sleep the genuine sleep of the just.
ADVENTURE VII.
THE ADVENTURE OF THE COCKROACHES.
One day Cleg Kelly became paper-boy at the shop of Mistress Roy, at the
top corner of Meggat's Close. And he wanted you to know this. He was
no longer as the paper-boys who lag about the Waverley, waiting for
stray luggage left on the platforms, nor even as this match-boy. He was
in a situation.
His hours were from half-past six in the morning to half-past six in
the morning, when he began again. His wages were three shillings a
week—and his chance. But he was quite contented, for he could contrive
his own amenities by the way. His father had been in a bad temper ever
since he lost his tools, and so Cleg did not go home often.
This was the way in which he got his situation and became a member
of the established order of things, indeed, the next thing to a
voter. There had been a cheap prepaid advertisement in the "Evening
Scrapbook," which ran as follows:—
"WANTED, _an active and intelligent message-boy, able to read and
write. Must be well recommended as a Christian boy of good and willing
disposition. Wages not large, but will be treated as one of the
family.—Apply No. 2,301, _'Scrapbook'_ Office._"
Now Miss Cecilia Tennant thought this a most interesting and
encouraging advertisement. She had been for a long time on the look-out
for a situation to suit Cleg. The Junior Partner indeed could have
been induced to find a place for Cleg in "The Works," but it was
judged better that the transition from the freedom of the streets to
the lettered ease of an office desk should be made gradually. So Celie
Tennant went after this situation for Cleg in person.
The arrangement with Mistress Roy in the Pleasance was a little
difficult to make, but Celie made it. She went down one clammy evening,
when the streets were covered with a greasy slime, and the pavements
reflected the gloomy sky. In the grey lamp-sprinkled twilight she
reached the paper-shop. There were sheafs of papers and journals hung
up on the cheeks of the door. Coarsely coloured valentines hung in
the window, chiefly rude portraitures of enormously fat women with
frying-pans, and of red-nosed policemen with batons to correspond.
Celie Tennant entered. There was a heavy smell of moist tobacco all
about. The floor of the little shop was strewn with newspapers,
apparently of ancient date, certainly of ancient dirt. These rustled
and moved of themselves in a curious way, as though they had untimely
come alive. As indeed they had done, for the stir was caused by the
cockroaches arranging their domestic affairs underneath. Celie lifted
her nose a little and her skirts a good deal. It took more courage
to stand still and hear that faint rustling than to face the worst
bully of Brannigan's gang in the Sooth Back. She rapped briskly on the
counter.
A man came shuffling out of the room in the rear. He was clad in rusty
black, and had a short clay pipe in his mouth. His eyes were narrow and
foxy, and he looked unwholesomely scaly—as if he had been soaked in
strong brine for half a year, but had forgotten either to finish the
process, or to remove the traces of the incomplete pickling.
"Servant, m'am!" said he, putting his pipe behind him as he came into
the shop.
"I was referred here—to this address—from the office of the 'Evening
Scrapbook,'" said Celie, with great dignity, standing on her tiptoes
among the papers. "I called about the situation of message-boy you
advertised for."
"Ye wasna thinkin' o' applyin' yersel'!" said the man, with a weak
jocularity. "For my ain part I hae nae objections to a snod bit lass,
but the mistress michtna like it."
Miss Cecilia Tennant looked at him in a way that would have frozen a
younger man, but the frowsy object from the back shop only smirked and
laughed. With care, the jest would serve him a week. He made up his
mind to whom he would tell it when the lady was gone.
"I wish to recommend one of the boys from my class for the position.
His name is Charles Kelly. He is a smart boy of thirteen, and he is
anxious to get good and steady work. What are the wages you offer?"
The man looked cunningly all about the shop. He craned his neck over
the counter and looked up the street. He had a long-jointed body, and
a neck that shut up and pulled out like a three-draw telescope. Celie
Tennant shrank instinctively when the man protruded his head past her
in this curious manner, as she might have shrunk from some loathly
animal.
Then, having resumed his normal slouch behind the counter, he looked at
his visitant and said, "The wage is half a croon a week, and his chance
o' the drawer—the same as mysel'."
"His chance of the drawer!" said Celie, not understanding.
"When _she's_ oot," the man continued, laying his finger against
the side of his nose and winking with meaning and expression at his
visitor. The expression of disgust at the corner of Miss Tennant's
nose threatened to result in a permanent tilt, which might have been
unbecoming, and which certainly must have frightened the Junior Partner.
"When she's oot," repeated the frowsy one, confidentially, "your friend
is welcome to his chance o' the drawer—if," he added, with infinite
caution, "she was to leave it unlocked, which she seldom does. It's
lock'd the noo! See!" And he shook a greasy knob under the counter till
the drawer rattled against the bolt of the lock. "Oh, it's just like
her! She aye does that when she gangs oot. She's an awsome near woman!
She has nae confidence, nae open-hearted leeberality, sic' as a wife
ought to hae wi' the husband of her bosom."
"Do you want a message-boy, or do you not?" said Celie, who felt that
in the interests of Cleg she would face a battery of artillery, but who
really could not stand the rustling among the papers on the floor very
much longer.
"Certain she do that!" said the man, "an active boy, an intelligent
boy, a Christian boy—half a croon a week—and his chance o' the drawer."
Once more he protruded his head in that monstrously serpentine manner
round the corner of the low shop-door. But this time he retracted it
quick as lightning, and shuffled back into the room behind. Celie heard
him throw himself on a chair, which groaned under him.
"I'm sleepin' noo," he said, "sleepin' soond. Dinna say that I ever
spoke till ye, for I'll deny it if ye do!" he said.
Cecilia Tennant stood her ground bravely, though the newspapers on the
floor rustled continuously. She wondered why the path of duty was such
a cockroachy one. A moment afterward a grim-looking, hard-faced woman
entered. She was a tall woman, with a hooked nose and broad masculine
face. The eyes were at once fierce and suspicious. She marched straight
round the counter, lifting the little flap at the back and letting it
fall with a bang. The cat was sitting on the end of the counter nearest
the door of the inner room. The woman took her hand and swept it from
the counter, as though she had merely knocked off a little dust. The
cat went into the inner room like a projectile.
Then, having entrenched herself at the back of the counter, the
fierce-eyed woman turned sharp round and faced Celie Tennant.
"Well?" she said, with a certain defiance in her tone such as women
only use to one another, which was at once depreciatory and pitiful.
The Junior Partner would have turned and fled, but Celie Tennant was
afraid of no woman that walked.
"I came," she said, clearly and coldly, "to ask about the situation of
message-boy for one of my Mission lads. I was sent here from the office
of the newspaper. Has the situation been filled?"
"What is the boy's name?" asked the woman, twitching the level single
line of her black brows at her visitor.
"His name is Charles Kelly."
"Son o' Tim Kelly that leeves in the Brickfield?" asked the woman
quickly.
"I believe that is his father's name," said Celie, giving glance for
glance.
"Then we dinna want the likes o' him here!" said the woman, half
turning on her heel with a certain dark contempt.
"But my name is Cecilia Tennant of Glenleven Road, and I am quite
willing to give security for the boy—to a reasonable amount, that is——"
continued Celie, who had a practical mind and much miniature dignity.
"Will ye leave the money?" asked the woman, as if a thought struck her.
"Certainly not," replied Celie, "but I will write you a line stating
that I hold myself responsible for anything he is proved guilty of
stealing, to the extent of ten pounds."
It was thus that Cleg Kelly became newsboy and general assistant to
Mistress Roy and her husband at Roy's corner.
As Celie went out, she heard Mr. Roy stretching himself and yawning, as
though awakening out of a deep sleep.
"Wha's that ye hae had in?" he inquired pleasantly.
"What business is that o' yours, ye muckle slabber?" returned his wife
with instant aggression.
And the cockroaches continue to rustle all the time beneath the carpet
of old newspapers.
ADVENTURE VIII.
THE FLIGHT OF SHEEMUS.
Next morning Cleg Kelly entered upon his duties. He carried orders to
the various publishing offices for about two hundred papers in all. He
had often been there before upon his own account, so that the crowd and
the rough jocularity were not new to him. But now he practised a kind
of austere, aristocratic hauteur. He was not any longer a prowler on
the streets, with only a stance for which he might have to fight. He
was a newsvendor's assistant. He would not even accept wager of battle
upon provocation offered. He could, however, still kick; and as he had
an admirable pair of boots with tackety soles an inch thick to do it
with, he soon made himself the most respected boy in the crowd.
On returning to the Pleasance, he was admitted through the chink of the
door by Mistress Roy, who was comprehensively dressed in a vast yellow
flannel bed-gown, which grew murkier and murkier towards her feet. Her
hair was tumbling about her eyes. That, too, was of a yellow grey, as
though part of the bed-gown had been ravelled out and attached loosely
to her head. Feathers and woolly dust were stuck impartially over hair
and bed-gown.
"Write the names on the papers as I cry them," she said to Cleg, "and
look slippy."
Cleg was quick to obey. He had, in fact, his pencil ready.
"Cready, number seventeen—three stairs back. Dinna write a' that. Write
the name, an' mind the rest," said Mistress Roy.
"MacVane, twenty-wan, shop," and so on went the list interminably.
Mistress Roy kept no books, but in her memory she had the various
counts and reckonings of all grades of her customers. She retained
there, for instance, the exact amounts of the intricate scores of
the boys who took in the "Boys of the City." She knew who had not
paid for the last chapter of "Ned Kelly; or, the Iron-clad Australian
Bushranger." She had a mental gauge on the great roll of black twist
tobacco which lay on the counter among old "Evening Scraps." She knew
exactly how much there was in the casks of strong waters under the
stairs, from which, every Sunday, her numerous friends and callers were
largely entertained.
When Cleg went out to deliver his papers he had nearly a hundred calls
to make. But such was his sense of locality and his knowledge of the
district that, with the help of a butcher's boy of his acquaintance (to
whom he promised a reading of the "Desperadoes of New Orleans; or, the
Good Ku Klux"), he managed to deliver all—except a single "Scotsman"
to one Mackimmon, who lived in a big land at the corner of Rankeillor
Street. Him he was utterly unable to discover.
Upon his return Mistress Roy was waiting for him.
"Did ye deliver them a'?" she asked, bending forward her head in a
threatening manner as if expecting a negative reply.
"A' but yin!" said Cleg, who was in good spirits, and pleased with
himself.
His mistress took up a brush. Cleg's hand dropped lightly upon a pound
weight. He did not mean to play the abused little message-boy if he
knew it.
"And what yin might that be?" said Mistress Roy.
"Mackimmon," said the boy briefly, "he's no in Rankeillor Street ava'."
The hand that held the brush went back in act to throw. Now this was,
from the point of view of psychological dynamics, a mistake in tactics.
A woman should never attempt to throw anything in controversy, least of
all a brush. Her stronghold is to advance to the charge with all her
natural weapons and vigour. But to throw a brush is to abdicate her
providential advantages. And so Mistress Roy found.
A straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and that
was the course described by the pound weight on which Cleg Kelly
dropped his hand. It sped fair and level from his hand, flung low as he
had many a time skimmed stones on Saint Margaret's Loch in the hollow
under the Crags.
"_Ouch!_" suddenly said Mistress Roy, taken, as she herself said, "in
the short of the wind." The hearth-brush with which she had been wont
to correct her former message boys fell helplessly to the ground.
"Fetch me a toothfu' frae the back o' the door. Oh, ye villain, Cleg
Kelly! I'm a' overcome like!" she said.
Cleg went to the back of the door where there was a keg with a spigot.
He brought his mistress a drink in a little tinnikin.
She seemed to have forgotten to be angry, and bent her brows upon him
more pleasantly than she had yet done.
"I thocht that ye were a religious boy," she said.
Cleg stood back a little with Mackimmon's paper still in his hand.
"Pund wecht for besom shank is good religion," said the imperfect
Christian but excellent message-boy.
"Gang and deliver that paper!" Mistress Roy commanded, again looking up.
"I want my breakfast," said Cleg, with an air of sullen determination.
His mistress looked at him a moment, still sitting with the tinnikin of
undutied whisky in her hand, and occasionally taking a sip. Cleg eyed
her level-fronted.
She gave in all at once.
"Tak' the knife and help yoursel'," she said, pointing to a loaf and a
piece of yellow cheese.
She went into a back room.
"Get up, Jock," she said, giving the clothes a jerk over the foot of
the bed, and seizing a water can. Her husband rose to his feet on
the floor without a word. Thus was business begun in Mistress Roy's
paper-shop on the Pleasance.
And so that day went on, the first of many. When Celie Tennant asked
Cleg how he was getting on, he said, as the manner of his kind is,
"Fine!" And no word more could she get out of him. For Cleg was not a
boy to complain. His father, Timothy Kelly, was safely in gaol, and
that was enough to give Cleg an interest in life. Moreover, he could
save some of his three shillings a week to give to Vara Kavannah to
help her with the children.
He had not as yet taken advantage of the "chance of the drawer"
offered by Mr. Roy. But, on the other hand, he had stuck out for three
shillings and his keep.
Also, as the advertisements which he read every day in the papers said,
he meant to see that he got it.
Vara Kavannah was a friend of Cleg's. She lived with her mother in
a poor room in the Tinklers' Lands, and tried to do her duty by her
little baby brother Gavin and her younger brother Hugh. Her mother was
a friend of Mr. Timothy Kelly's, and there is no more to be said. The
only happy time for all of them was when both Mr. Kelly, senior, and
Sal Kavannah were provided for in the gaol on the Calton. But this did
not happen often at one time. When it did, Cleg went up the long stairs
and told Vara. Then they started and took the baby and Hugh for a long
walk in the Queen's Park. Cleg carried the baby. The boys of his own
age did not mock him to his face for doing this. The Drabble had done
it once, and severely regretted it for several days, during which time
his face conveyed a moral lesson to all beholders.
It was also a happy time for Vara Kavannah when her mother was safely
locked up on a long sentence, or when for some weeks she disappeared
from the city. Her father, a kindly, weak man, stood the dog's life his
wife led him as long as possible.
Sheemus Kavannah was a poet. The heart was in him which tells men that
the world is wide and fair. He had endured his wife in the bitterness
of his heart, till late one evening he rose, and with his wife lying on
the floor, a log, he awaked his little lass. There were tears streaming
down his cheeks. His daughter started from her bed with her hair all
about her. She was used to sudden and painful wakenings.
"Vara," he said, speaking in Irish, "daughter of Sheemus, Vara
Kavannah, hark to me. Mavourneen, my heart is broke with your mother.
It's no good at all to stay. I am going to Liverpool for work, and when
I get it I shall come back and take you away—you, Vara, and Hugh and
little Gavin. Lonely shall my road be and far. But I shall return, I
shall return!"
Now Vara, being bred where they spoke not the tongue of the old
country, understood nothing but the last words, "I shall return, I
shall return!"
So it was in this way that Cleg Kelly became father and mother to the
little company of three in the Tinklers' Lands.
As he went on the way of his duty, he found out some things about
the business capacity of Mistress Roy that would have astonished the
police. He had, in the impetuous ardour of youth, cleared away the
accumulated papers on the floor, and raided the swarming cockroaches.
"Hullo, mother, what's the matter here?" cried one of the customers of
the place, coming to Mistress Roy, who sat in the little den at the
back.
"Naething," said that lady. "It's only that daft laddie. He disna think
I gie him aneuch to do, so he's ta'en to finding wark for himsel'."
The customer, a burly, clean-shaven man, took a long look at Cleg.
"Tim Kelly's kid," said the woman, by way of explanation.
The man whistled—a long, mellow whistle—with an odd turn at the end.