<h2><SPAN name="page122"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>XIII.</h2>
<p><span class="smcap">When</span> 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.</p>
<p>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 <SPAN name="page123"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <SPAN name="page124"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>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.</p>
<p>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. <SPAN name="page125"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>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
<SPAN name="page126"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>to
tighten the sleeve, that it might not catch the driver on a
lathe.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“An’ ’oo’s the ol’
friend?” asked Cottam, severely distrustful.</p>
<p>“Mr. ’Enery Butson, Esquire,” the man
answered, with a grin.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><SPAN name="page127"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>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 <SPAN name="page128"></SPAN><span class="pagenum"></span>to slide:
plainly enough. <i>That</i> 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.</p>
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