<h2><SPAN name="page69"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>VIII.</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Just</span> such a day as Johnny’s
London memories always brought, cold and dry and brisk, found him
perched on the cart that was to take him to London again.
Besides himself, the cart held his mother and his sister, and the
household furniture from the cottage; while Banks, the carrier,
sat on the shaft. Bessy was made comfortable in the
armchair; her mother sat on a bundle of bedding, whence it was
convenient to descend when steep hills were encountered; and
Johnny sat on the tail-board, and jumped off and on as the humour
took him.</p>
<p>All through long Loughton village there was something of a
triumphal progress, for people knew them, and turned to
look. Bessy alone remained in the cart for the long pull up
Buckhurst Hill, while Johnny, tramping beside and making many
excursions into the thicket, flung up into her lap sprigs of
holly with berries. Already they had plenty, packed close
in a box, but it is better to have too much than too little, so
any promising head was added to the store. For it was
December, and Christmas would come in three weeks or so.
And ere <SPAN name="page70"></SPAN><span class="pagenum">p.
70</span>that Nan May was to open shop in London. It was to
be a chandler’s shop, with aspirations toward grocery and
butter: chandlery, grocery, and butter being things of the buying
and selling whereof Nan May knew as little as anybody in the
world, beyond the usual retail prices at the forest
villages. But something must be done, and everything has a
beginning somewhere. So Nan May resolutely set face to the
work, to play the world with all the rigour of the game; and her
figure, as she tramped sturdily up the hill beside the cart, was
visible symbol of her courage. Always a healthy,
clear-skinned, almost a handsome woman, active and shapely, she
walked the hill with something of steadfast fierceness, as one
joying in trampling an obstacle: her eyes fixed before her, and
taking no heed of the view that opened to Bessy’s gaze as
she looked back from under the tilt of the cart; but busy with
thought of the fight she was beginning, a little fearful, but by
so much the gamer. Meanwhile, it was a good piece of
business to decorate a shop with holly at Christmas, and here
Johnny found holly ready for the work; it would cost money in
London.</p>
<p>The cart crowned the hill-top, and still Nan May regarded not
the show that lay behind, whereof Bessy took her fill for the
moments still left. There Loughton tumbled about its green
hills, beset with dusky trees, like a spilt boxful of toys, with
the sad-coloured forest making the horizon line behind it.
Away to the left, seen <SPAN name="page71"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>between the boughs of the near pines,
High Beach steeple lifted from the velvety edge, and as far to
the right, on its own hill, rose the square church tower that
stood by gran’dad’s grave. And where the bold
curve of Staples Hill lost itself among the woods, some tall
brown trees uprose above the rest and gave good-bye. For
invisible beyond them lay the empty cottage in its patch of
garden, grown dank and waste. Then roadside trees shut all
out, and the cart stopped on the level to take up Nan May.</p>
<p>And now the old mare jogged faster along to Woodford Wells and
through the Green, fringed with a wonder of big houses, and many
broad miles of country seen between them; then, farther, down the
easy slope of Rising Sun Road, with thick woods at the
way’s edge on each side, their winter austerity softened by
the sunlight among the brown twigs. And so on and on, till
they emerged in bushy Leyton Flats, and turned off for
Leytonstone.</p>
<p>And now they were nearing London indeed. Once past the
Green Man, they were on a tram-lined road, and there were shops
and houses with scarce a break. Where there was one
bricklayers on scaffoldings were building shopfronts. The
new shops had a raw, disagreeable look, and some of these a
little older were just old enough to be dirty without being a
whit less disagreeable and raw. <SPAN name="page72"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>Some were prosperous, brilliant with
gilt and plate-glass; others, which had started even with them,
stood confessed failures, poor and mean, with a pathetic
air—almost an expression—of disappointment in every
window. Older buildings—some very old—stood
about Harrow Green, but already the wreckers had begun to pull a
cottage down to make room for something else. And then the
new shops began again, and lined the road without a check, till
they were new no longer, but of the uncertain age of commonplace
London brick and mortar; and Maryland Point Railway Station was
passed; and it was town indeed, with clatter and smoke and
mud.</p>
<p>Stratford Broadway lay wide and busy, wth the church and the
town-hall imposing and large. But soon the road narrowed
and grew fouler, and the mouths of unclean alleys dribbled slush
and dirty children across the pavement. Then there were
factories, and the road passed over narrow canals of curiously
iridescent sludge, too thick, to the casual eye, for the passage
of any craft, but interesting to the casual nose. And there
was a great, low, misty waste of the dullest possible rubbish,
where grass would not grow; a more hopelessly desolate and
dispiriting wilderness than Johnny had ever dreamed of or Bessy
ever read; with a chemical manure-works in a far corner, having a
smell of great volume and range.</p>
<p><SPAN name="page73"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>They
topped Bow Bridge, and turned sharply to the left. Now it
was London itself, London by Act of Parliament. There was a
narrow way with a few wharf gates, and then an open space, with
houses centuries old, fallen on leaner years, but still grubbily
picturesque. Hence the old mare trotted through a long and
winding street that led by dirty entries, by shops, by big
distilleries, by clean, dull houses where managers lived, by
wooden inns swinging ancient signs, over canal bridges: to a
place of many streets lying regularly at right angles, all of
small houses, all clean, every one a counterpart of every
other. And then—the docks and the ships. At
least, the great dock-gates, with the giant pepper-box and the
clock above them, and the high walls, with here and there a
mast. And at intervals, as the houses permitted, the high
walls and the masts were visible again and again in the short way
yet to go, pass Blackwall Cross, till at last the cart stopped
before a little shut-up shop, badly in want of paint; in a street
where one gained the house-doors down areas maybe, or up steps,
or on the level, from a pavement a little more than two feet
wide; while the doors themselves, and the wooden rails that
guarded all the steps, were painted in divers unaccustomed and
original colours, and had nothing in common but a subtle flavour
of ship’s stores. Over the way was the wall of a
ship-yard. And wheresoever there might be a <SPAN name="page74"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>view of
houses from the back, there were small flagstaffs rigged as
masts, with gaffs complete.</p>
<p>The door of the little shop opened, after a short struggle
with the rusty lock, and Nan May and her children were at home in
London.</p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />