Part 9

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 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 fool, 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!"

"Oh, 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 to-night. 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 recognise 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 fionx--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.' Oh, 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 tenour 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 anyone 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 judiciously 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 impregnable, 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 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 stupefied him; he felt ashamed, deeply shamed; but after a while that same recognisable 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.

"Oh, 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.

"Oh, 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."

Printed at The Golden Cockerel Press

End of Project Gutenberg's Clorinda Walks in Heaven, by Alfred Edgar Coppard