Chapter 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!”

He took Pomona into his arms, crushing the infant against her breast and his own. But she did not mind. She did not rebuke him, she even let him dandle her precious babe.

“Look, what is his name to be, Pomony? Let’s call him Rasselas.”

Pomona looked at him very doubtfully.

“Or would you like William Wallace then, or Robert Bruce?”

“I shall call him Johnny,” said Pomona.

“O, that’s silly!” protested her brother. But Pomona was quite positive about this. He fancied there were tears in her eyes, she was always tender-hearted.

“I shall call him Johnny, Johnny Flynn.”

* * * * *

THE HURLY-BURLY

* * * * *

THE HURLY-BURLY

The Weetmans, mother, son, and daughter, lived on a thriving farm. It was small enough, God knows, but it had always been a turbulent place of abode. For the servant it was: “Phemy, do this,” or “Phemy, have you done that?” from dawn to dark, and even from dark to dawn there was a hovering of unrest. The widow Weetman, a partial invalid, was the only figure that manifested any semblance of tranquillity, and it was a misleading one for she sat day after day on her large hams knitting and nodding and lifting her grey face only to grumble, her spectacled eyes transfixing the culprit with a basilisk glare. And her daughter Alice, the housekeeper, who had a large face, a dominating face, in some respects she was all face, was like a blast in a corridor with her “Maize for the hens, Phemy!--More firewood, Phemy!--Who has set the trap in the harness room?--Come along!--Have you scoured the skimming pans?--Why not!--Where are you idling?--Come along, Phemy, I have no time to waste this morning, you really must help me.” It was not only in the house that this cataract of industry flowed; outside there was activity enough for a regiment. A master-farmer’s work consists largely of a series of conversations with other master-farmers, a long-winded way of doing long-headed things, but Glastonbury Weetman, the son, was not like that at all; he was the incarnation of energy, always doing and doing, chock-full of orders, adjurations, objurgatives, blame, and blasphemy, That was the kind of place Phemy Madigan worked at. No one could rest on laurels there. The farm and the home possessed everybody, lock, stock, and barrel; work was like a tiger, it ate you up implacably. The Weetmans did not mind--they liked being eaten by such a tiger.

After six or seven years of this Alice went back to marry an old sweetheart in Canada, where the Weetmans had originally come from, but Phemy’s burden was in no way lessened thereby. There were as many things to wash and sew and darn; there was always a cart of churns about to dash for a train it could not possibly catch, or a horse to shoe that could not possibly be spared. Weetman hated to see his people merely walking: “Run over to the barn for that hay-fork,” or “Slip across to the ricks, quick now,” he would cry, and if ever an unwary hen hampered his own path it did so only once--and no more. His labourers were mere things of flesh and blood, but they occasionally resented his ceaseless flagellations. Glas Weetman did not like to be impeded or controverted; one day in a rage he had smashed that lumbering loon of a carter called Gathercole. For this he was sent to jail for a month.

The day after he had been sentenced Phemy Madigan, alone in the house with Mrs. Weetman, had waked at the usual early hour. It was a foggy September morning; Sampson and his boy Daniel were clattering pails in the dairy shed. The girl felt sick and gloomy as she dressed; it was a wretched house to work in, crickets in the kitchen, cockroaches in the garret, spiders and mice everywhere. It was an old long low house; she knew that when she descended the stairs the walls would be stained with autumnal dampness, the banisters and rails oozing with moisture. She wished she was a lady and married and living in a palace fifteen stories high.

It was fortunate that she was big and strong, though she had been only a charity girl taken from the workhouse by the Weetmans when she was fourteen years old. That was seven years ago. It was fortunate that she was fed well at the farm, very well indeed; it was the one virtue of the place. But her meals did not counterbalance things; that farm ate up the body and blood of people. And at times the pressure was charged with a special excitation, as if a taut elastic thong had been plucked and released with a reverberating ping.

It was so on this morning. Mrs. Weetman was dead in her bed.

At that crisis a new sense descended upon the girl, a sense of responsibility. She was not in fear, she felt no grief or surprise. It concerned her in some way, but she herself was unconcerned, and she slid without effort into the position of mistress of the farm. She opened a window and looked out of doors. A little way off a boy with a red scarf stood by an open gate.

“Oi ... oi, kup, kup, kup!” he cried to the cows in that field. Some of the cows having got up stared amiably at him, others sat on ignoring his hail, while one or two plodded deliberately towards him. “Oi ... oi, kup, kup, kup!”

“Lazy rascal, that boy,” remarked Phemy, “we shall have to get rid of him. Dan’l! Come here, Dan’l!” she screamed, waving her arm wildly. “Quick!”

She sent him away for police and doctor. At the inquest there were no relatives in England who could be called upon, no witnesses other than Phemy. After the funeral she wrote a letter to Glastonbury Weetman in jail informing him of his bereavement, but to this he made no reply. Meanwhile the work of the farm was pressed forward under her control, for though she was revelling in her personal release from the torment she would not permit others to share her intermission. She had got Mrs. Weetman’s keys and her box of money. She paid the two men and the boy their wages week by week. The last of the barley was reaped, the oats stacked, the roots hoed, the churns sent daily under her supervision. And always she was bustling the men.

“O dear me, these lazy rogues!” she would complain to the empty rooms, “they waste time, so it’s robbery, it _is_ robbery. You may wear yourself to the bone and what does it signify to such as them? All the responsibility, too!--They would take your skin if they could get it off you--and they can’t!”

She kept such a sharp eye on the corn and meal and eggs that Sampson got surly. She placated him by handing him Mr. Weetman’s gun and a few cartridges, saying: “Just shoot me a couple of rabbits over in the warren when you got time.” At the end of the day Mr. Sampson had not succeeded in killing a rabbit so he kept the gun and the cartridges many more days. Phemy was really happy. The gloom of the farm had disappeared. The farmhouse and everything about it looked beautiful, beautiful indeed with its yard full of ricks, the pond full of ducks, the fields full of sheep and cattle, and the trees still full of leaves and birds. She flung maize about the yard; the hens scampered towards it and the young pigs galloped, quarrelling over the grains which they groped and snuffed for, grinding each one separately in their iron jaws, while the white pullets stalked delicately among them, picked up the maize seeds, One, Two, Three, and swallowed them like ladies. Sometimes on cold mornings she would go outside and give an apple to the fat bay pony when he galloped back from the station. He would stand puffing with a kind of rapture, the wind from his nostrils discharging in the frosty air vague shapes like smoky trumpets. Presently upon his hide a little ball of liquid mysteriously suspired, grew, slid, dropped from his flanks into the road. And then drops would begin to come from all parts of him until the road beneath was dabbled by a shower from his dew-distilling outline. Phemy would say:

“The wretches! They were so late they drove him near distracted, poor thing. Lazy rogues, but wait till master comes back, they’d better be careful!”

And if any friendly person in the village asked her: “How are you getting on up there, Phemy?” she would reply, “Oh, as well as you can expect with so much to be done--and such men.” The interlocutor might hint that there was no occasion in the circumstances to distress oneself, but then Phemy would be vexed. To her, honesty was as holy as the sabbath to a little child. Behind her back they jested about her foolishness; but, after all, wisdom isn’t a process, it’s a result, it’s the fruit of the tree. One can’t be wise, one can only be fortunate.

On the last day of her Elysium the workhouse master and the chaplain had stalked over the farm shooting partridges. In the afternoon she met them and asked for a couple of birds for Weetman’s return on the morrow. The workhouse was not far away, it was on a hill facing west, and at sunset time its windows would often catch the glare so powerfully that the whole building seemed to burn like a box of contained and smokeless fire. Very beautiful it looked to Phemy.