<h2><SPAN name="page75"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>IX.</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">The</span> shop in Harbour Lane had been a
greengrocer’s, a barber’s, a
fried-fishmonger’s, and a tripe-seller’s. But
chiefly it had been shut up, as it was now. Nobody had ever
come into it with much money, it is true, but all had gone out of
it with less than they brought. It was said, indeed, that
the greengrocer had gone out with nothing but the clothes he
wore; but as he went no farther than the end of the street, where
he drowned himself from a swing bridge, he needed no more, nor
even so much. Mr. Dunkin, the landlord, had bought the
place at a low price, as was his way in buying things; but he got
very little out of his investment, which was not his way at
all. It was a novelty that surprised and irritated Mr.
Dunkin. He was a substantial tradesman, who had long
relinquished counter work, for there were a dozen assistants in
the two departments of his chief shop, eight for grocery and
butter, and four for oil and saucepans, paint and mousetraps; and
there were half a dozen branches, some in the one trade and some
in the other, scattered about in as many neighbouring
parishes. He was a large man, of vast <SPAN name="page76"></SPAN><span class="pagenum">p.
76</span>sympathy. The tone of his voice, the grasp of his
wide, pulpy hand, told of infinite tenderness toward the sorrows
and sins of the world. Even in the early days when he had
but one shop (a little one) and no shopman, he would weigh out a
pound of treacle with so melting a benignity that the treacle
seemed balm of Gilead, and a bounteous gift at the price.
He would drive a bargain in a voice of yearning beneficence that
left the other party ashamed of his own self-seeking, as well as
something the poorer by the deal. It was a voice wherein a
purr had a large part—a purr that was hoarse yet soothing,
and eloquent of compassion; so that no man was so happy but a
talk with Mr. Dunkin would persuade him that the lot was hard
indeed, that entitled him to such a wealth of sympathy. It
was a wealth that Mr. Dunkin squandered with no restraint but
this, that it carried no other sort of wealth with it.</p>
<p>On the whole, Nan May had counted herself fortunate in falling
in with Mr. Dunkin. For when, in his fatherly solicitude,
he discovered that she had a little money in hand, he undertook
to supply her with stock, and to give her certain hints in the
mystery of chandlery. He, also, felt no cause for
complaint: for he had hoped for a tenant merely, and here was
tenant and customer in one. More, she was a widow, knowing
nothing of trade, so that it might be possible to sell her what
others would not buy, at a little extra profit. As to <SPAN name="page77"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>rent,
moreover, he was doing well. For on the day the deposit was
paid, Mrs. May had found little choice among vacant shops, and
this was in a situation to suit her plans as to Johnny and his
trade; and as she was tired and nervous, full of plain anxiety,
sympathetic Mr. Dunkin saw his chance of trying for an extra
shilling a week, and got it. And Nan May was left to pay
for what painting and cleaning the place might need. It
needed a good deal, as Mr. Dunkin had ruefully observed two days
before, in expectation of a decorator’s bill if ever a
tenant came.</p>
<div class="gapspace"> </div>
<p>And now Nan May addressed herself to the work. First,
the house must be cleaned; the paint could be considered
after. She had swept one room into a habitable state on her
last day in town, and here her little store of furniture was
stacked. Then, her sleeves and her skirt turned back, and a
duster over her head, she assailed walls and ceilings with a
broom, and after these the floors. So far Johnny helped,
but when scrubbing began he hindered. So it was that for a
day or so, until it was time for him to help with the windows, he
had leisure wherein to make himself acquainted with the
neighbourhood.</p>
<p>It was a neighbourhood with a flavour distinct from that of
the districts about it. There the flat rows of six-roomed
cottages, characterless all, stretched <SPAN name="page78"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>everywhere, rank behind rank, in
masses unbroken except by the busier thoroughfares of
shops. Here each little house asserted its individuality by
diversity of paint as much as by diversity of shape. It
was, indeed, the last stronghold of the shipwrights and
mast-makers, fallen from their high estate since the invasion of
iron ships and northern competition. In fact,
Shipwrights’ Row was the name of a short rank of cottages
close by, with gardens in front, each with its mast and flag
complete. In other places, where the back-yards were very
small, the flagstaff and stays were apt to take to their use the
whole space: the pole rising from the exact centre, and a stay
taking its purchase from each extreme corner, so that anybody
essaying a circuit must perform it with many sudden
obeisances. The little streets had an air of cleanliness
all their own, largely due to the fresh paint that embellished
whatsoever there was an excuse for painting. Many
front-doors were reached by two stone steps, always well
whitened; and whether there were steps or not, the flagstones
before each threshold were distinguished by a whited semicircle
five feet in diameter. Noting this curious fact as he
tramped along one such street, Johnny was startled by an angry
voice close at his elbow, a voice so very sudden and irate that
he jumped aside ere he looked for the source. A red-faced
woman knelt within a door.</p>
<p>“Idle young faggit!” she said.
“Stompin’ yer muddy <SPAN name="page79"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>boots all over my clean
step!” And she made so vigorous a grasp at a broom
that Johnny went five yards at a gallop.</p>
<p>Now truly there was no step of any sort to the house.
And Johnny had but crossed the semicircle because he conceived
the footpath to be public property, and because it was
narrow. But he learnt, afterwards, that the semicircle was
a sacred institution of the place, in as high regard among the
women as its fellow-fetish, the flagstaff, was among the men;
also that none but grown people—and those of low habits or
in drink—dared trespass on it; and that it was always
called “the step.” He learnt much, too, in the
matter of paint. Every male inhabitant of Harbour Lane,
Shipwrights’ Row, and the neighbouring streets, carried, in
his leisure moments, a pipe, a pot of paint, and a brush.
He puffed comfortably at the pipe, and stumped about his back (or
front) garden with the paint-pot in one hand and the brush in the
other, “touching-up” whatever paint would stick
to. Rails, posts, water-butts, dustbins, clothes-posts, all
were treated, not because they needed it (for they were scarce
dry from the last coat), but because there was the paint, and
there was the brush, and there was the leisure; and this was the
only way to use all three. So that most things about the
gardens took an interesting variety of tints in the run of the
year, since it was rarely the case that the same <SPAN name="page80"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>colour was
used twice in succession. When all wooden surfaces were
covered, it was customary to take a turn at window-sills,
rain-water pipes, and the stones or oyster-shells that bordered
the little flower-beds; and when nothing else was left, then the
paint-pot and the brush and the pipe were conveyed to the front,
and the front-door, which had been green, became royal blue, or
flaming salmon; as did the railings, if there were any, and the
window-frames. Two things alone were not subject to such
changes of complexion: the flagstaff and the brick pavings.
For it was a law immutable that the flagstaffs should be
speckless white, and the bricks a cheerful vermilion; this last a
colour frequently renewed, because of nailed boots, but done in
good oil paint, because of wet weather. Everything else
took the range of the rainbow, and something beyond; so that it
was possible, in those houses where two families lived, to tell
at a glance whether the upstairs family were on terms of intimacy
or merely of distant civility with the downstairs, by the
colours, uniform or diverse, of the sills and the model fences
that guarded the flower-pots on them. For the token and
sign of friendship in Harbour Lane was the loan or the exchange
of paint. It was the proper method of breaking the ice
between new acquaintances, and was recognised as such by general
sanction. The greeting, “Bit o’ blue paint any
use to ye?” and the offer of the pot across the <SPAN name="page81"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>back fence,
were the Harbour Lane equivalents of a call and cards; and the
newcomer made early haste with an offer of yellow or green paint
in return. Indeed, it was in this way that the paint
arrived which afterwards made Nan May’s little shop a
bedazzlement to the wayfarer, and furnished Johnny with the first
painting job he ever grew tired of. But newcomers were rare
in the neighbourhood, for it was a colony apart, with independent
manners and habits of thought. True, it had its own
divisions and differences: as, for instance, on the question
whether or not the association of the paint-pot and brush with
the Sunday paper were sinful; but these divisions were purely
internal, and nothing was heard of them beyond the
boundaries.</p>
<p>But paint was something more than a recreation and an
instrument of social amenity. It furnished the colony with
an equivalent of high finance, wherein all the operations proper
to Money and Credit (as spelt with capital initials) were
reflected in Paint. For it was a permanent condition of
life in Harbour Lane and thereabouts, that everybody owed
everybody else some amount of Paint, and was owed Paint, in his
turn, by others. So that a complicated system of exchange
prevailed, in which verbal bills and cheques were drawn. As
thus, to make a simple case:</p>
<p>“’Ullo, Bill, what about that pot o’
paint?”</p>
<p><SPAN name="page82"></SPAN><span class="pagenum">p.
82</span>“Well, I was goin’ to bring it round
to-night.”</p>
<p>“All right. But don’t bring it to
me—take it to George. Ye see, I owe Jim a bit
o’ paint, an’ ’e owes Joe a bit, an’ Joe
owes George a bit. So that’ll make it right all
round. Don’t forget!”</p>
<p>With many such arrangements synchronising, crossing and mixing
with each other, and made intricate by differing degrees and
manners of debit and credit between Bill and George and Jim and
Joe, the unlikely subject of Paint became involved in a
mathematical web of exceeding interest, a small image of the
Money Market, a sort of chaos by double entry wherein few
operators were able to strike a balance at a moment, and most
were vaguely uncertain whether their accounts inclined toward an
affluence of Paint or toward sheer bankruptcy. An exciting
result attained without the aid of capital, and with no serious
hurt to anybody.</p>
<p>But these were things that Johnny learned in the succeeding
weeks. In his walks while his mother scrubbed floors at
home, he observed one or two matters. As to costume, he
perceived that the men wore blue dungaree jackets with large bone
buttons, and outside these, now that it was winter, short pilot
coats of dark blue stuff, thick and stiff, like a board.
The trousers were moleskins, perhaps once white, all stained with
very shiny black patches, and all of one cut, which placed the
seat (very baggy) a few inches above the <SPAN name="page83"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>bend of the
knee; and there was a peaked cap, of the same shiny black all
over that distinguished parts of the trousers. He also saw
that whereas yesterday the backyards were brisk with fluttering
linen, to-day they held scarce any. For yesterday was
Monday, and it was matter of pride among the energetic housewives
of the place to get washing done at the beginning of the
week. For a woman fell in her neighbours’ respect the
later in the week her washing day came.</p>
<p>So Johnny explored the streets with wide eyes and a full
heart. For here was London, where they made great
things—ships and engines. There were places he
fancied he recognised—great blank walls with masts behind
them. But now the masts seemed fewer and shorter than in
the old days: as in truth they were, for now more of the ships
were steamships, filling greater space for half the show of
mast. Then in other places he came on basins filled with
none but sailing-ships, and here the masts were as tall and fine
as ever, stayed with much cordage, and had their yards slung at a
gallant slope, like the sword on Sir Walter Raleigh’s
hip. And at Blackwall Stairs, looking across the river,
stood an old, old house that Johnny stared at for minutes
together: a month or two later he heard the tradition that Sir
Walter Raleigh himself had lived there. It was first of a
row of old waterside buildings, the newest of which had looked
across, and almost fallen into, the <SPAN name="page84"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>river, when King George’s ships
had anchored off Blackwall—and King Charles’s for
that matter. There, too, stood the Artichoke Tavern, clean
and white and wooden, a heap of gables and windows all out of
perpendicular: a house widest and biggest everywhere at the top,
and smallest at the ground floor; a house that seemed ready to
topple into the river at a push, so far did its walls and
galleries overhang the water, and so slender were the piles that
supported them. Here, in the square space on the quay,
brown men in blue jerseys sold bloaters by the score, stringing
them through the gills with tarry yarn; and half the brown men
wore earrings. Below, on the foreshore, lay many boats, and
children ran among them, or raked for river-mussels among the
stones.</p>
<p>In another place he came on just such market-streets as he
remembered to have trotted along, at his mother’s side, in
the old London life; though now, indeed, they seemed something
dirtier and meaner, and the people seemed less cheerful.
But this was a place away from Harbour Lane—a neighbourhood
of dull and dingy rows of little houses, range on range.
And still farther he found another street of shops, or rather
half a street, for one side was a blank wall. But no great
skeleton ship lifted its ribs above the bricks, and no hammers
clanged behind them; for it was a ship-yard abandoned, and a
painted board, thick with grime, offered the place <SPAN name="page85"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>for sale or
hire. Some of the shops opposite were abandoned too, and
the others were poor and dull. Johnny walked a few steps
backward, looking at the shops, and when he turned about at a
corner, he almost scorched himself at a coke fire where chestnuts
were roasting; and there behind the fire stood the pockmarked man
himself, not a whit altered! There he stood, with his hands
deep in his pockets, and tapped the kerb with his clogged boots,
just as he had stood when the great ship was making, and the
lights flared round it, and the shops were all open and busy:
perhaps the pitted face was a trifle paler, but that was all.</p>
<p>But Harbour Lane and thereabout were the most interesting
parts, and the pleasantest for Johnny. Just beyond the
Stairs, and the old houses, and the Artichoke Tavern, was a
dock-inlet, with an extraordinary bridge that halved in the
middle, and swung back to each of two quays, to let ships
through. Men worked it quite easily, with a winch, and
Johnny could have watched for an hour. But just here he
caught sight of an acquaintance. For down on the quay below
the bridge-end, sitting on a mooring-post, was Mr. Butson.
A trifle seedy and fallen in condition, Johnny fancied, and
grumly ill-used as ever. As Johnny looked, Mr. Butson took
a pipe from his pocket, and a screw of paper. The paper
yielded nothing. Mr. Butson raked through <SPAN name="page86"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>both
jacket-pockets, and scowled at his empty hands. In the end,
after a gloomy inspection of the pipe, he put it away and
returned to savage meditation. And Johnny went home.</p>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />