A BOY ABOUT TOWN
The young Westminsters had not come in when Pocket finally cast up in
St. John’s Wood Park. But their mother was at home, and she gave the
boy a cup of tepid tea out of a silver tea-pot in the drawing-room.
Mrs. Knaggs was a large lady who spoke her mind with much freedom, at
all events to the young. She remarked how much Upton (so she addressed
him) had altered; but her tone left Pocket in doubt as to whether any
improvement was implied. She for one did not approve of his luncheon in
Oxford Street, much less of the way he had spent a summer’s afternoon;
indeed, she rather wondered at his being allowed alone in London at
all. Pocket, who could sometimes shine in conversation with his elders,
at once reminded Mrs. Knaggs that her own Westminster boys were allowed
alone in London every day of their lives. But Mrs. Knaggs said that was
a very different thing, and that she thought Pocket’s public school
must be very different from Westminster. Pocket bridled, but behaved
himself; he knew where he wanted to stay the night, and got as far
towards inviting himself as to enlarge upon Mr. Coverley’s misfortune
and his own disappointment. Mrs. Knaggs in her turn did ask him where
he meant to and even the conscientious Pocket caught himself declaring
he had no idea. Then the boys were heard returning, and Mrs. Knaggs
said of course he would stop to schoolroom supper, and Pocket thanked
her as properly as though it were the invitation he made sure must
follow. After all, Vivian Knaggs had stayed at Pocket’s three weeks one
Christmas, and Guy a fortnight at Easter; the boys themselves would
think of that; it was not a matter to broach to them, or one to worry
about, prematurely.
Vivian and Guy were respectively rather older and rather younger than
Pocket, and they came in looking very spruce, the one in his Eton
jacket, the other in tails, but both in shiny toppers that excited an
unworthy prejudice in the wearer of the green tie with red spots. They
seemed very glad to see him, however, and the stiffness was wearing off
even before Pocket produced his revolver in the basement room where the
two Westminsters prepared their lessons and had their evening meal.
The revolver melted the last particle of ice, though Vivian Knaggs
pronounced it an old pin-firer, and Guy said he would not fire it for a
thousand pounds. This only made Pocket the more eager to show what he
and his revolver were made of, then and there in the garden, and the
more confident that it never would be heard in the house.
“It would,” answered Vivian, “and seen as well. No, if you want to have
a shot let’s stick up a target outside this window, and fire from just
inside.”
The window was a French one leading into the back garden; but,
unhappily, Mrs. Knaggs’s bedroom was only two floors higher, and it
also looked out on the back; and Mrs. Knaggs herself was in her room
and near her window when the report startled her, and not less because
she little dreamt what it was until she looked out in time to see a
cloud of smoke escaping from the schoolroom window, and Pocket
examining the target, weapon in hand.
There was a great scene about it. Mrs. Knaggs shrieked a prohibition
from aloft, and having pacified an incoherent cook upon the stairs,
descended to extract a solemn promise which might well have ended the
matter. Pocket was very contrite, indeed, drew his weapon’s teeth with
a promptitude that might have been his death, and offered it and them
to be placed under lock and key until he left. But Mrs. Knaggs
contented herself with promoting a solemn promise into a Sacred Word of
Honour—which rather hurt poor Pocket—and with sending him a very
straight message by Vivian after supper.
“The mater’s awfully sorry,” said Vivian, returning from a mission
which Pocket had been obliged to instigate after all. “There’s not a
spare bed in the house.”
Guy incontinently declared there was. A fraternal frown alone prevented
him from going into particulars.
“A sofa would do me all right,” suggested Pocket, who had long ago lost
his last train, and would have preferred a bare plank where there were
boys to fussy old Miss Harbottle’s best bed. But Vivian Knaggs shook
his head.
“The mater says she couldn’t sleep with firearms in the house.”
“I’ll bury them in the garden if she likes.”
“Then you smoke in the night, and at Coverley’s you once walked in your
sleep,” pursued Vivian, who certainly seemed to have been urging the
interloper’s cause. “And the mater’s afraid you might walk out of a
window or set the house on fire.”
“I shouldn’t do either to-night,” protested Pocket, with a grin. “I’ve
not got anything to smoke, and I have got something to keep me quiet.”
And with further information on both points the son of the house went
upstairs again, only to return in quicker time with a more embarrassed
gravity.
“She’s awfully sorry,” he said unconvincingly, “but she can’t undertake
the responsibility of putting you up with your asthma.”
Oddly enough, for he was only too sensitive on some points, Pocket was
not really hurt by his treatment at the hands of these people; he felt
he had made rather a mistake, but not that he had been most inhumanly
cast adrift at sixteen among the shoals and quicksands of London. Nor
was this quite the case as yet; there was still old Miss Harbottle in
Wellington Road. But to her he was not going until decency compelled
him; he was going to have another game of bagatelle with Guy Knaggs
first. It will be seen that with all his sensibilities the youngest
Upton was a most casual and sanguine youth. He took a great deal for
granted, prepared only for the best, and although inclined to worry
over the irrevocable, took no thought for the morrow until he was
obliged. He was sorry he had been so positive with Spearman on the
subject of his friend’s hospitality. He was sorry he had asked and been
refused, rather sorry he had not caught that last train back from St.
Pancras. Yet he left poor Miss Harbottle the best part of another hour
to go to bed in; and that was neither the first nor the last of his
erratic proceedings.
“What about your luggage?” asked the elder Knaggs, as he put on his hat
to walk round with Pocket.
“Good Lord!” cried that worthy, standing still in the hall.
“Haven’t you got any?”
“I left it at Madame Tussaud’s!”
“Left your luggage there?”
“It was only a handbag. How long are they open?”
Young Knaggs looked in _Whitaker_ and said they closed at ten. There
was still time to recover the bag with a taxicab, but in that case it
was not much use his going too. So they said goodbye at the Swiss
Cottage, and the adventures of Pocket Upton began in earnest.
Old Miss Harbottle, his mother’s great friend, would have none of him
either! He stopped on the way to Baker Street to make sure. The garden
gate was one that only opened by a catch and a cable manipulated
indoors. The downstairs lights were out. The gate opened at last, a
light shone through the front door, and the door opened a few inches on
the chain. Pocket confronted a crevice of quilted dressing-gown and
grey curls; but his mother’s friend’s mastiff was making night so
hideous within, and trying so hard to get at his mother’s son, that it
was some time before he could exchange an intelligible word with the
brute’s mistress. It was not a satisfactory interchange then, for Miss
Harbottle at first flatly refused to believe that this was Tony Upton,
whom she had not seen since his preparatory schooldays, and she seemed
inclined to doubt it to the end. Upton or no Upton, she could not take
him in. She had no sheets aired, no fire to air them at, and the cook
had just left. Miss Harbottle’s cook had always just left, except when
she was just leaving. The rejected visitor got an instant’s fun out of
the reflection as he returned to his palpitating taxicab.
His position was now quite serious. He had not many shillings in his
purse. The only thing to do was to put up at Shaw’s Hotel, Trafalgar
Square; that was where his people always stayed, where every servant
was supposed to know them all. He pushed on at once through the cool
June night, and paid away three of his last shillings for the drive.
Alas! not a bed to be had at Shaw’s; it was the worst time of the year,
they told him, and he supposed they meant the best. He also supposed
there had been changes in the staff, for nobody seemed to know his name
as well as he had been led to expect at home.
They were quite nice about it. They pointed out the big hotels
opposite, and recommended more than one of the little ones in Craven
Street. But the big hotels were all full to overflowing; and at the
only little one he tried the boy lost his temper like a man on being
requested to deposit six shillings before proceeding to his room.
Pocket had not got it to deposit, and the galling reflection caused him
to construe the demand as a deliberate reflection upon his outward
respectability—as if he could not have borrowed the money from Dr.
Bompas in the morning!
“I’ll see you blowed,” was his muttered reply, and he caught up his bag
in a passion.
“All right, little man! I shouldn’t be rude about it,” said the dapper
cashier. “If I couldn’t pay my shot I should sleep in the Park, on a
nice fine night like this.”
“I shall!” shouted Pocket through his teeth, as though that would
prevent the brute of a cashier from sleeping soundly in his bed. And it
was his own idle and childish threat that set him presently wondering
what else he was to do. He had the spirit of adventure, as we have
seen.
He had the timorous, or let us say, the imaginative temperament, which
lends to adventure its very salt. He wished to have done dangerous or
heroic things, if not to have to do them. He had so little to boast
about; his brothers, and so many other fellows of his own age, had so
much. It would make a great yarn some day, how he had come up from
school to see a doctor—and slept in the Park!
Meanwhile he had only a vague idea of his way there; he knew hardly
anything of London except St. John’s Wood and his present landmark of
the Nelson column and the Landseer lions. He knew them from having
stayed some time (under another doctor) as a child at Shaw’s Hotel.
But, I say! What would Bompas say to his sleeping out, and what sort of
night could he expect in the open air?
He had an overcoat. It had been in his way all day; it would come in
more than handy for the night. And it suddenly struck Pocket, with all
the force of a forgotten novelty, that he had a revolver and cartridges
as well.
That decided him. Not that he seriously thought himself the kind of
person to use a revolver with resolution or effect; but it made him
feel doughty and even truculent to find the means of heroic defence all
ready to his hand. He began to plume himself on his providential
purchase. He would sell his young life dearly if he fell among London
thieves; in his death he would not be unhonoured at school or at home.
Obituary phrases of a laudatory type sprang like tears to a mind still
healthy enough to dash them away again, as though they had been real
tears; but it was with all the nervous exaltation of the unsuspected
desperado that he inquired his way of a colossal constable at the
corner of Pall Mall and the Haymarket.
The man wanted to know if he meant Hyde Park Corner. “Yes,” said
Pocket, hastily, because his heart was in his mouth and the policeman
looked as though he had seen it there. And he overshot the mark in the
motor omnibus through being ashamed to ask again, only alighting at
Albert Gate; but here there was quite a little stream of decent people
to follow without further tremors into the indubitable Park.
He followed them across the drive and across Rotten Row, gaining
confidence as he went. In a minute it was all delightful; his eyes were
turned outward by all there was to see; and now his chief fear was lest
some one or other of the several passers should stand in his path and
ask what he was doing there. He was still afraid of speaking or being
spoken to, but no longer unreasonably so. Detection as an escaped
schoolboy was his one great dread; he felt he was doing something for
which he might be expelled.
But nobody took any notice of him; this gradually encouraged him to
take more notice of other people, when he found, not altogether to his
surprise, that the majority of those passing through the Park at that
late hour were hardly of his own class. So much the more infinitesimal
were the chances of his being recognised or even suspected for what he
was. There were young men in straw hats, there were red-coated
soldiers, and there were girls. They all filled the schoolboy with
their fascinating possibilities. They were Life. The boy’s heart beat
at what he heard and saw. The couples were hilarious and unrefined. One
wench, almost under his nose, gave her soldier a slap with such a
remark as Pocket had never heard from a woman’s lips before. He turned
away, tingling, and leant upon the parapet of a bridge he had been in
the act of crossing, and thought of school and home and Mr. Coverley.
It was not really a bridge at all. It was only the eastern extremity of
the Serpentine; but as the boy leant over the stone balustrade, and
gazed upon the artificial flood, broadening out indefinitely in the
darkness, it might have been the noblest river in the world. Its banks
were muffled in a feather boa of trees, bedizened by a chain of many
lights; the lights of a real bridge made a diadem in the distance; and
between these sped the lamps of invisible vehicles, like fretful
fireflies. And the still water gave back every glimmer with its own
brilliance, unchallenged and undimmed by moon or star, for not a trace
of either was in the sky; and yet it was the most wonderful sky the boy
had ever seen—a black sky tinged with sullen rose, or a red sky seen
through smoked glasses, he hardly knew which he would have called it.
But he did know that warm and angry glow for the reflection of London’s
light and life; he could not forget he was in London for a moment. Her
mighty machinery with its million wheels throbbed perpetually in his
ears; and yet between the beats would come the quack of a wild duck
near at hand, the splash of a leaping fish, the plaintive whistle of
water-fowl: altogether such a chorus of incongruities as was not lost
upon our very impressionable young vagabond. The booming strokes of
eleven recalled him to a sense of time and his immediate needs. His
great adventure was still before him; he pushed on, bag in hand, to
select its scene. Another road he crossed, alive with the lamps of
cyclists, and came presently upon a wide space intersected with broad
footpaths from which he shrank; it was altogether too public here; he
was approaching an exposed corner in an angle of lighted streets, with
the Marble Arch at its apex, as a signboard made quite clear. He had
come right across the Park; back over the grass, keeping rather more to
the right, in the direction of those trees, was the best thing now.
It was here that he found the grass distinctly damp; this really was
enough to deter an asthmatic, already beginning to feel asthmatical.
Pocket Upton, however, belonged to the large class of people, weak and
strong alike, who are more than loth to abandon a course of action once
taken. It would have required a very severe attack to baulk him of his
night out and its subsequent description to electrified ears. But when
bad steering had brought him up at the bandstand, the deserted chairs
seemed an ordained compromise between prudence and audacity, and he had
climbed into the fenced enclosure when another enormous policeman rose
up horribly in its midst.
“What are you doing here?” inquired this policeman, striding upon
Pocket with inexorable tread.
“No harm, I hope,” replied our hero humbly, but with unusual readiness.
“Nor no good either, I’ll be bound!” said the policeman, standing over
him.
“I was only going to sit down,” protested Pocket, having satisfied his
conscience that in the first place that was all he really had been
going to do.
“There are plenty of places to sit down,” rejoined the policeman.
“You’re not allowed in here. And unless you look sharp about it you
won’t have time to sit down at all.”
“Why not?”
“The Park closes at twelve.”
“Closes?”
“At twelve o’clock, and it’s half-past eleven now.” The boy’s heart
sank into his wet boots. Here was an end of all his dashing plans. He
was certain he had heard or read of people sleeping in the Park; he had
looked upon it as a vast dormitory of the houseless; that was the only
reason he was there. The offensive clerk in the hotel had evidently
entertained the same belief. This idiot of a policeman must be wrong.
But he seemed quite clear about it.
“Did you think we were open all night?” he inquired with a grin.
“I did,” said Pocket; and he was inspired to add, “I even thought a lot
of loafers used to sleep here all night!”
The policeman chuckled aloud.
“They may if they get up the trees; that’s about their only chance,”
said he.
“You search the whole place so thoroughly?”
“We keeps our eyes open,” said the policeman significantly, and Pocket
asked no more questions; he scaled the forbidden fence and made off
with the alacrity of one who meant to go out before he was put out.
Such was his then sincere and sound intention. But where next to turn,
to what seat on the Embankment, or what arch in the slums, in his
ignorance of London he had no idea.
Meanwhile, to increase the irony of his dilemma, now that he was bent
on quitting the Park he found himself striking deeper and deeper into
its heart. He skirted a building, left it behind and out of sight, and
drifted before the wind of destiny between an upright iron fence on one
hand and a restricted open space upon the other. He could no longer see
a single light; but the ground rose abruptly across the fence, and was
thick with shrubs. Men might have been lying behind those shrubs, and
Pocket could not possibly have seen them from the path. Did the
policeman mean to tell him that he or his comrades were going to climb
every fence and look behind every bush in Hyde Park?
Pocket came to anchor with a new flutter at his heart. This upright
fence was not meant for scaling; it was like a lot of area palings, as
obvious and intentional an obstacle. And the whole place closed at
twelve, did it? The flutter became a serious agitation as Pocket saw
himself breaking the laws of the land as well as those of school, saw
himself not only expelled but put in prison! Well, so much the better
for his story so long as those penalties were not incurred; even if
they were, so much the greater hero he!
No wonder his best friends called him disparaging names; he was living
up to the hardest of them now, and he with asthma on him as it was! But
the will was on him too, the obstinate and reckless will, and the way
lay handy in the shape of a row of Park chairs which Pocket had just
passed against the iron palings. He went back to them, mounted on the
first chair, wedged his bag between two of the spikes, set foot on the
back of the chair, and somehow found himself on the other side without
rent or scratch. Then he listened; but not a step could he hear. So
then the cunning dog put his handkerchief through the palings and wiped
the grit from the chair on which he had stood. And they called him a
conscientious ass at school!
But then none of these desperate deeds were against his conscience, and
they had all been thrust on Pocket Upton by circumstances over which he
had lost control when the last train went without him from St. Pancras.
They did not prevent him from kneeling down behind the biggest bush
that I he could find, before curling up underneath it; neither did his
prayers prevent him from thinking—even on his knees—of his revolver,
nor yet—by the force of untimely association—of the other revolvers in
the Chamber of Horrors. He saw those waxen wretches huddled together
in ghastly groups, but the thought of them haunted him less than it
might have done in a feather bed; he had his own perils and adventures
to consider now. One thing, however, did come of the remembrance; he
detached the leather strap he wore as a watch-guard. And used it to
strap a pin-fire revolver, loaded in every chamber, to his wrist
instead.
That was the last but one of the silly boy’s proceedings under the
bush; the last of all was to drain the number-one draught prescribed by
Bompas in the morning, and to fling away the phial. The stuff was sweet
and sticky in the mouth, and Pocket felt a singular and most grateful
warmth at his extremities as he curled up in his overcoat. It was
precisely then that he heard a measured tread approaching, and held his
breath until it had passed without a pause. Yet the danger was still
audible when the boy dropped off, thinking no more about it, but of Mr.
Coverley and Charles Peace and his own people down in Leicestershire.