Part 7

There were no more tricks that breakfast-time. For when at length old Ben subsided to his meal, he put a little pile of wedges by his side, to fling at the first boy of whose behaviour he might disapprove. And as his spectacles were now on his nose, and his aim, thus aided, was known to be no bad one, and as the wedges, furthermore, were both hard and heavy, breakfasts were eaten with all the decorum possible in a smiths' shop.

Johnny's new can was satisfactorily blackened, and his breakfast was well disposed of. Such youths as tried him with verbal chaff he answered as well as he might, though he had as yet little of the Cockney boy's readiness. And at last the bell rang again, and the breakfasters went back to work.

Mr. Cottam, casting his glance about the shop in search of the simplest possible job for Johnny to begin on, with a steady man at hand to watch him, stopped as his gaze reached Long Hicks, and sent Johnny to help him with his bolts. And so Johnny found the tall man's surmise verified, and the tall man himself received him with another grin a little less shy. He set him to running down bolts and nuts, showing him how to fix the bolt in a vice and work the nut on it with a spanner. Johnny fell to the task enthusiastically, and so the morning went.

XIII.

WHEN Nan May opened shop, she saw that men were pulling down as much of the ship-yard wall opposite as stood between two chalk lines. She thought no more of the thing at the time, not guessing how nearly it concerned her. For this was to be a new workmen's gate to the ship-yard and passing workmen might change the fortunes of a shop. For that day, however, there was no sign but the demand of a bricklayer's labourer for a penn'orth of cheese.

It was as bad a day as Saturday, in the matter of trade--indeed there was no drunken man to buy lard--and the woman's heart grew heavier as the empty hours went. Bessy stood at the back-parlour door, pale and anxious, but striving to lift a brave face. Before one o'clock there was dinner to be prepared; not that either Bessy or her mother could eat, but for Johnny. And at a quarter past one both met him at the door as cheerfully as they could; and indeed they were eager to hear of his fortunes. They wondered to see him coming with the long man who lived next door; and the long man, for his part, was awkward and nervous when he saw them. At first he hung back, as though to let Johnny go on alone; but he changed his mind, and came striding ahead hastily, looking neither to right nor to left, and plunged in at his door.

Johnny was hungry and in high spirits. He and Long Hicks, it seemed, had been bedding down a junk ring for a piston, Johnny easing the bolts and nuts, and Long Hicks doing the other work. He said nothing of the round square, but talked greatly of slide-valves and cranks, till Bessy judged him a full engineer already. Between his mouthfuls he illustrated the proper handling of hammer and file, and reprehended the sinful waste of spoiling the surface of a new file on the outer skin of a fresh iron casting. It cheered Nan May to see the boy taking so heartily to his work, through all her secret dread that she might lack the means to keep him at it. Johnny glanced anxiously at the clock from time to time, and at last declared that he must knock for Long Hicks, who was plainly forgetting how late it was. And in the end he rushed away to disturb the tall man ten minutes too soon, and hurried off to Maidment and Hurst's, there to take his own new metal ticket from the great board, and drop it duly into the box.

The afternoon went busily at the factory, and busy days followed. Johnny acquired his first tool, a steel foot-rule, and carried it in public places with a full quarter of its length visible at the top of its appointed pocket. It was the way of all young apprentices to do this; the rule, they would say, thus being carried convenient for the hand. But it was an exact science among the observant to judge a lad's experience inversely by scale of the inches exposed, going at the rate of half an inch a year. A lad through two years of his "time" would show no more of his rule than two inches; by the end of four years one of these inches would have vanished; as his twenty-first birthday approached, the last inch shrank to a mere hint of bright metal; and nobody ever saw the foot-rule of a full journeyman, except he were using it.

Johnny's christening, postponed by the accident of old Ben Cutts, came when he was first put to a small lathe to try his hand at turning bolts. For when, returning from breakfast, he belted his lathe, he did not perceive that the water-can had been tied to the belt; realising it, however, the next instant, when it flew over the shafting and discharged the water on his head. Then he was free of the shop; suffering no more than the rest from the workshop pranks habitual among the younger lads, and joining in them: gammoning newer lads than himself with demands for the round square, and oppressing them with urgent messages to testy gaffers--that a cockroach had got in the foo-foo valve, that the donkey-man wanted an order for a new nosebag, and the like. Grew able, moreover, in workshop policy, making good interest with the storekeeper, who might sometimes oblige with the loan of a hammer. For a lost hammer meant a fine of three-and-sixpence, and when yours was stolen--everybody stole everybody else's hammer--a borrowed one would tide you over till you could steal another. Making friends, too, with the tool-smith, at a slight expense in drinks; though able to punish him also if necessary, by the secret bedevilment of his fire with iron borings. Learned to manufacture an apparent water-crack by way of excuse for a broken file--a water-crack made with a touch of grease well squeezed between the broken ends. In short, became an initiated 'prentice engineer. In the trade itself, moreover, he was not slow, and Mr. Cottam had once mentioned him (though Johnny did not know it) as "none so bad a boy; one as can work 'is own 'ead." Until his first enthusiasm had worn off, he never ceased from questioning Long Hicks, in his hours of leisure, on matters concerning steam-engines; so that the retiring Hicks grew almost out of touch with the accordion that had been the solace of his solitude. The tall man had never met quite so inquisitive an apprentice; engineering was in the blood, he supposed. He had guessed the boy's mother an engineer's wife when first Johnny came to his bench, because of the extra button Nan May had been careful to sew on his jacket cuff; a button used to tighten the sleeve, that it might not catch the driver on a lathe.

It was early in Johnny's experience--indeed he had been scarce a fortnight at the engine-shop--when a man coming in from an outdoor job just before dinner told Cottam the foreman, that an old friend was awaiting him at the gate, looking for a job.

"An' 'oo's the ol' friend?" asked Cottam, severely distrustful.

"Mr. 'Enery Butson, Esquire," the man answered, with a grin.

"What? Butson?" the gaffer ejaculated, and his eyes grew rounder. "Butson? Agen? I'd--damme, I'd as soon 'ave a brass monkey!" And Mr. Cottam stumped indignantly up the shop.

"Sing'lar, that," observed a labourer who was helping an erector with a little yacht engine near Johnny's bench. "Sing'lar like what I 'eard the gaffer say at Lumley's when Butson wanted a job there. 'What?' sez 'e. 'Butson? Why, I'd rayther 'ave a chaney dawg auf my gran'mother's mantelpiece,' 'e sez. ''E wouldn't spile castin's,' 'e sez."

There were grins between the men who heard, for it would seem that Mr. Butson was not unknown among them. But when Johnny told his mother at dinner, she thought the men rude and ignorant; and she was especially surprised at Mr. Cottam.

For some little while Johnny wondered at the girl who was hunting for a sick lady in the street on that dark Monday morning. He looked out for her on his way to and from his work, resolved, if he met her, to ask how the search had fared, and how the lady was. But he saw nothing of her, and the thing began to drop from his mind. Till a Saturday afternoon, when he went to see a new "ram" launched; for half-way to the ship-yard he saw a pretty girl--and surely it was the same. In no tears nor trouble now, indeed, but most disconcertingly composed and dignified--yet surely the same. Johnny hesitated, and stopped: and then most precipitately resumed his walk. For truly this was a very awful young person, icily unconscious of him, her casual glance flung serenely through his head and over it. . . . Perhaps it wasn't the same, after all; and if not--well it was lucky he had said nothing. . . . Nevertheless his inner feeling was that he had made no mistake; more, that the girl remembered him, but was proud and would not own it. It didn't matter, he said to himself. But the afternoon went a little flat; the launch was less interesting than one might have expected. There was a great iron hull, tricked out with flags; and when men knocked away the dog-shores with sledge-hammers, the ship slid away, cradle and all, into the water. There wasn't much in that. Of course, if you knocked away the dog-shores, the ship was bound to slide: plainly enough. _That_ wasn't very interesting. Johnny felt vaguely resentful of the proceedings. . . . But still he wondered afresh at the lost lady who was ill out of doors so early in the morning.

XIV.

BUT this launch was when Johnny's 'prentice teeth were cut: when the running down of bolts and pins was beneath his notice, and he could be trusted with work at a small nibbling machine; when he had turned stop-valve spindles more than once, and felt secretly confident of his ability to cut a screw.

Meantime history was making at the shop: very slowly at first, it is true. The holly had been made the most of; but it seemed to attract not at all. Penn'orths and ha'porths were most of the sales, and even they were few. Nan May grew haggard and desperate. Uncle Isaac had called once soon after the opening Saturday, but since had been a stranger. He had said that he was about to change his lodgings (he was a widower), but Nan knew nothing of his new address. In truth, such was Uncle Isaac's tenderness of heart, that he disliked the sight or complaint of distress; and, in the manner of many other people of similar tenderness, he betook himself as far as possible from the scene thereof, and kept there.

It was within a few days of Christmas when things seemed hopeless. Johnny, indeed, had never ceased to hope till now. He had talked of the certainty of struggling on somehow till his wages were enough for all; indeed, even the six shillings a week seemed something considerable now, though he knew that the rent alone came to ten. But even Johnny's cheerfulness fell in face of the intenser dejection, the more open tears, of his mother and sister, as the days wore on. Long Hicks found him a quieter, less inquisitive boy, and a duller help than at first; and dinner at home was a sad make-believe. Each knew that the other two were contrasting the coming Christmas with the last. Then, gran'dad was with them, hale and merry; to look out of window was to look through a world of frosty twigs to woody deeps where the deer waited, timid and shadowy, for the crusts flung out afar for them from the garden. Now . . . but there!

But it was just at this desperate time that a change came, as by magic. The men who pulled down the wall at the opposite side of the street gave place to others who built a mighty brick pier at each side of the opening: a pier designed to carry its half of the new gate. But ere the work was near complete, men and boys from the yard found it a convenient place to slip out and in at, on breakfast-time or dinner-time errands.

Now it chanced at the time that one of these men was in a domestic difficulty; a difficulty that a large part of the eight or nine hundred men of the ship-yard encountered in turn at more or less regular intervals. His wife inhabited the bedroom in company with a monthly nurse; while he roosted sleeplessly at night on a slippery horsehair couch in the parlour, or wallowed in a jumble of spare blankets and old coats on the floor; spending his home hours by day in desolate muddling in the kitchen, lost and incapable, and abject before the tyranny of the nurse. On dark mornings he made forlorn attempts at raking together a breakfast to carry with him to work; but as he had taken no thought to put anything into the cupboard over night, he found it no easy matter to extract a breakfast from it in the morning. So it came to pass that on the second day of his affliction this bedevilled husband, his hunger merely aggravated by the stale lumps of bread he had thought to make shift on, issued forth at the new gate in quest of breakfast. There was little time, and most of the shops were a distance off; but just opposite was a flaming little chandler's shop, newly opened. It was thinly stocked enough, but it would be hard luck indeed if it did not hold something eatable. And so Nan May's first customer that day was the starved husband.

"Got anythink t' eat?" he asked, his ravening gaze piercing the bare corners of the shop. "Got any bacon?"

"Yes, sir," Nan May answered, reaching for the insignificant bit of "streaky" that was all she had.

"No--cooked, I mean. Aincher got any cold boiled 'ock?"

"No, sir."

"Y' ought t' ave some cooked 'ock. Lots 'ud 'ave it in the yard. I can't eat _that_--the smiths' shop 's the other end o' the yard, an' I got nothing to toast it with. Aincher got nothing else?"

Nan May grasped the situation, and conceived an instant notion, for indeed she had inborn talent as a shopkeeper, though till now it had had no chance to show itself. "Will you wait five minutes?" she asked.

Yes, he would wait five minutes, but no more: and he sat on the empty case, from which Uncle Isaac had delivered his recommendation of Enterprise. Nan May cut two rashers and retired to the shop parlour. In three minutes the hungry customer was hammering on the counter, declaring that he could wait no longer. Pacified by assurances from within, he resigned himself to a minute and a half more of patience: when Mrs. May returned with a massive sandwich, wherein the two rashers, fresh frizzled, lay between two thick slices of bread. Lifting the top slice for a moment, as guarantee of good faith, Nan May exchanged the whole ration for threepence.

"If you'd like any cold boiled bacon, sir," she said, "I shall have some at one o'clock."

He heard, but he was off at a trot with his sandwich. In five minutes Nan May's bonnet was on, and in five more Bessy was minding shop alone, while her mother hastened to Mr. Dunkin's for a hock of bacon. Here was a possible change of fortune, and Nan May was not a woman to waste a chance.

Boiled and cooled--or cooled enough for the taste of hungry riveters--the hock stood in a dish on the counter at one o'clock, flanked by carving-knife and fork. A card, bearing the best 10 that Bessy could draw, advertised the price, and the first quarter-pound of slices was duly cut for the desolate husband, who came back, a little later, for two ounces more; for he had been ill-fed for two or three days, and the new baby made an event wherewith some extra expense was natural. Boys came for two other quarter-pounds, so that it was plain that the first customer had told others; and a loaf was cut up to go with the bacon.

Mrs. May announced the new branch of trade to Johnny when he came to dinner; and though as yet the returns were small enough, there was a new chance, and his mother was hopeful of it; so he went back to the lathe with a lighter heart.

That night the riveters worked overtime, and the bacon was in better demand still. More, at night two or three men took home a snack in paper, for supper; and from that day things grew better daily. The hock was finished by the afternoon of the next day, and the establishment was out of pickles; for men and boys who brought their own cold meat with them came now for pickles. Trade was better as the days went on, and Christmas, though it found them poor enough, was none so sad a festival after all. And in a month, when the gate had been formally opened for some time, and the men streamed by in hundreds, three large hocks would rarely last two days; and there was an average profit of three shillings a hock. More, the bread came in daily in batches, at trade price, and cheese and pickles went merrily. But what went best, and what increased in sale even beyond this point, was the bacon. Some customers called it ham, which pleased Nan May; for indeed her cooking hit the popular taste, and she began to feel a pride in it. Men who went home to dinner would buy bacon to take home for tea; and as many of these lived in Harbour Lane and thereabout, custom soon came from their wives, in soap and candles, treacle and pepper and blacking. Nan May's trade instinct grew with exercise. She found the particular sort of bacon that best suited her purpose and her customers' tastes; she had regular boilings throughout the week; she quickly found the trick of judging the quality of whatever she bought; and she bought to the best use of her money.

But here it must be said that Nan May, in her new prosperity, behaved toward one benefactor with an undutiful forgetfulness that was near ingratitude. For she bought almost nothing of Mr. Dunkin. He was reasonably grieved. True, she had begun by getting her first stock of him, but even then her critical examination of what was sent showed an unworthily suspicious attitude of mind. She even sent back many things and demanded better, wilfully blind to the fact that Mr. Dunkin could turn her out of the shop at a week's notice if he pleased; though indeed in his own mind he was not vindictive, for another new tenant would be hard to find. He even submitted to outrage ending in actual loss and humiliation. For a large tin of mustard was Mrs. May's first supply, and it was a tin from among those kept for sale to small shopkeepers, and not on any account to be sold from retail, across Mr. Dunkin's own counter. But something in the feel and taste of this mustard did not please Nan May (though indeed _she_ was not asked to eat it), and it went back. Now it chanced that Mr. Dunkin had taken on a new shopman that week, and this bungling incapable straightway began selling mustard from the returned tin. He had served three customers before his blunder was perceived, and then the matter came to light purely because the third customer chanced to be a food and drug inspector. This functionary gravely announced himself as soon as he had good hold of the parcel, and handsomely offered the return of a third part of the mustard, in a sealed packet. And the upshot was a fine of five pounds and costs for Mr. Dunkin, on the opinionative evidence of an analyst, who talked of starch and turmeric and ginger--all very excellent substances, as anybody knows. Truly it was a vexatious blow for Mr. Dunkin, and an unjust; for certainly the fault was not his, and to sell such an article, retail, was wholly against his principles. But he never complained, such was his forbearance: never spoke of his hardship to a soul, in fact, except when he "sacked" the new assistant. It was even said that he had offered a reporter money to keep it out of the papers; and though it _did_ get into the papers (and at good length too) yet the effort was kindly meant. For truly it could but give Mrs. May pain to learn that she had been the cause of Mr. Dunkin's misfortune, if she were a woman of any feeling at all.

But as time went, he began to doubt if she were, for her custom dropped away to nothing. The rate at which bacon was handed in from the cart of a firm somewhere in the Borough, was scandalous to behold. Before his very eyes, too, when he called for the rent. He employed a collector, but presently took to coming for the rent himself, that by his presence and his manner he might shame so thankless a tenant into some sense of decency, some order for bacon or mustard. He coughed gently and stared very hard at the incoming goods, but Nan May was in no wise abashed, and gave the carman his directions with shameless composure. With his sympathetic stop full out, Mr. Dunkin asked how trade was, and Nan May answered in proper shopkeeper terms, that "she mustn't grumble." With hums and purrs, he led back through casual questions and answers to the stock he had at first supplied, and asked her how she had done with this, and how that had "gone off." But her answers were so artlessly direct, so inconsiderately truthful, that good Mr. Dunkin was clean baffled, and reduced at last to a desperate hint that if anything were wanted he could take the order back with him. But he got no order, so he purred and hummed his way into Harbour Lane, and so away; and after a time the collector came in his stead.

Mr. Dunkin resolved to wait. He had some doubts of the permanence of this new prosperity in the shop. The place had never brought anybody a living yet, and he should not feel convinced till he had seen steady trade there for some time. Nan May's activities could always be kept from flagging by judicious increases of rent, and _if_ the thing grew well established by her exertions, and was certain to continue a paying concern, why, here would be a new branch of Mr. Dunkin's business ready made. It needed but a week's notice, given unexpectedly, at a properly chosen time, when no neighbouring shop was to let, and a good stroke of business was happily completed. Mrs. May would vanish, a man would go in to manage at a pound or twenty-five shillings a week and his quarters, there would be no interruption to trade (for the outgoing tenant would naturally keep at work till the last minute, to get what little she could), and Mr. Dunkin would have a new branch, paying very excellently, with no trouble to himself. Mr. Dunkin had established other branches in the same way, and found it a very simple and cheap arrangement. There was no risk of his own capital, no trouble in "working-up" the trade, no cost of goodwill, and rent was coming regularly while the tenant laboured with the zeal of a man who imagines he is working for his own benefit and his children's. The important thing was to give nothing but a weekly tenancy; else the tenant might find time to get going somewhere near at hand, and so perhaps deprive Mr. Dunkin of the just reward of his sagacity, foresight, and patience. But there was little difficulty in that matter. Beginners were timid and glad of a weekly tenancy, fearing the responsibility of anything longer, at first; and afterwards--well, things were in a groove, and Mr. Dunkin was so very kind and sympathetic that it wasn't worth while to bother about a change. And by this method Mr. Dunkin, judiciously selecting his purchases in shop property, had acquired two or three of his half-dozen branches, and flourished exceedingly; which all kindly souls rejoiced to see.