<h2><SPAN name="page38"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>III.</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">So</span> life went at the cottage.
For a little while they looked for another visit from Uncle
Isaac; since, as he sent no postal order, it was felt that he
must defer the return of the half-crown merely because he
contemplated an early payment in person. But weeks passed
and nothing was heard of him, nor seen. Meantime the
problem of Johnny’s trade met no solution. He had
left school nearly three months now, and, the thing seeming
desperate, he had well-nigh resolved to give in to the
post-office. At the thought London seemed a far and
wondrous place whereto he could never attain; and awe of the
terrible list his grandfather had compiled from the London
Directory, became longing for the least inviting trade in the
collection. He had his memories of London, too, and they
were more numerous and more pleasant than Bessy’s.
There he could see, from his bedroom window, the masts of many
ships, quite close. In the strong winds (and in his
remembered London the weather was ever cold, brisk, dry, and
windy) the masts bent and rocked gravely, the ropes bellied, and
the blocks whistled aloud. At nights he lay and heard the
yards <SPAN name="page39"></SPAN><span class="pagenum">p.
39</span>groan and the cordage creak and rattle. Just by
the corner, ships sometimes thrust prying jib-booms clean over
the dock wall, as if to see what a town was like; and often he
had stood in the street to watch men climbing the rigging and
hanging bent over spars, like earwigs. He had gone
shopping, too, gripping tight at his mother’s skirts, in
flaring market-streets, where everybody shouted at once, and
there were mountains of bulls’-eyes and peppermint on
barrows. There was a street with shops on one side and a
blank wall on the other; and over and behind this wall, lifted
high in the air, was the monstrous skeleton of a great
ship. Men swarmed like ants about the skeleton, and all day
hammers went with a mighty clangour, and great lights flared at
night. There were big blank walls at all the places where
they made ships, and he could remember a little door in one such
wall, a door beyond which he greatly desired to see. But it
was rarely opened, and then but a little way, by an ill-natured
old man, who squeezed through and closed it very quickly.
So that Johnny believed he must issue thus to prevent the escape
of some small and active animal, imprisoned within. All
that Johnny remembered of his father was that he wiped his oily
hands on cotton waste: a curious stuff—like a great deal of
soft sewing-thread in a hopeless tangle—that he had never
seen since. That and the funeral: when he rode in a
carriage with a crape bow <SPAN name="page40"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>pinned to his new jacket, and his
mother held his hand very tight at the grave-side. Most of
his memories were of the streets, and some revived after long
oblivion: as when the smell of roasted chestnuts brought a vision
of a glowing coke fire by the corner of the ship-yard wall, with
a pock-marked man behind it whom he would know anywhere
now. And he was not to return to this place of wistful
memory after all, nor to learn to make a ship nor an
engine—let alone a picture.</p>
<p>The weeks went, and berries hung where flowers had been.
Johnny and Bessy made their yearly harvest of blackberries, some
for puddings and jam at home, some to sell at such kitchen doors
as might receive them. Until an afternoon in early October:
when, with an order from a lady at Theydon, they betook
themselves in search of sloes.</p>
<p>Warm colours touched the woods to a new harmony, and seen from
high ground, they lay like flower-beds in green and red, yellow
and brown. The honeysuckle bloomed its second time, and
toadstools stood in crimson companies in the shade of the
trees. Sloes were rare this year near home, so the children
searched their way through the Wake Valley to Honey Lane
Quarters, and there they found their sloes, though few.</p>
<p>It was a long and scratchy task; and, when it was finished,
they were well up in St. Thomas’s Quarters, and the sun was
setting. They made the best of their <SPAN name="page41"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>way back as
far as the road near the Dun Cow, and there parted. For
Bessy was tired and hungry, and though Johnny was little better,
he resolved to carry his sloes fresh to Theydon and get the
money, since he was already a little on the way. So Bessy
turned up the lane that led to the cottage, and Johnny took to
the woods again for Theydon, by way to right of Wormleyton
Pits.</p>
<p>Dusk was growing to dark, but the boy stepped fearlessly, well
knowing his path. The last throstle sang his last evensong
for the year, and was still. The shadowy trees, so living
and so silent about him: the wrestling trunks of beeches, the
reaching arms of oak and hornbeam, all struck at gaze as though
pausing in their everlasting struggle to watch and whisper as he
passed: and the black depths between them might well have
oppressed the imagination of such a boy from other parts; but
Johnny tramped along among them little heeding, thinking of the
great ship-haunted London he longed for, and forecasting nothing
of the blow that should fall but in that hour and send him the
journey sorrowing.</p>
<p>Presently he was aware of a light ahead. It moved a foot
or two from the ground, and Johnny knew its swing. Then it
stopped, resting by a tree root. “You,
gran’dad?” called Johnny, and “Hullo!”
came the old man’s voice in answer.</p>
<p><SPAN name="page42"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>The old
man had cut a leaf, with a caterpillar on it, from a shrub, and
was packing it in a pill-box. “Out for a few
night-feeders,” he explained, as the boy stopped beside
him. “But you ain’t been home to tea,” he
added. “Takin’ home the sloes? Might
ha’ left ’em till the morning, John, easy,—now
you’ve got ’em.”</p>
<p>“Oh, I come up from over there”—Johnny made
a vague toss of the arm—“an’ I thought I might
as well cut across to Theydon first. Bess went up the
lane. I’ll be home ’fore ye now,
gran’dad, ’nless you ’re goin’ back
straight.”</p>
<p>“I won’t be long behind ye; I’m just
goin’ to the Pits. I can’t make nothin’
o’ them I took last night, under the brambles an’
heather,—never saw the like before quite; so I’m
goin’ to see if there’s more, an’ get all I
can.”</p>
<p>They walked together a few yards, till the trees
thinned. “You’ll go ’cross the
Slade,” said the old man. “Step it, or
you’ll be beat!”</p>
<p>“I’ll step it,” the boy answered.
“I want my tea.”</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p>He was trotting home by the lane from Theydon, with his empty
basket on his arm, and his hands (and the sixpence) in his
trousers pockets, when he checked at a sound, as of a cry from
the wood. But he heard no more, and trotted on.
Probably the deer were fighting somewhere; rare fighters were the
bucks in October.</p>
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