Corporal Sam and Other Stories Part 17

'It's about my Mike, sir,' began Mrs Halloran, in a lachrymose voice, and paused to dab her eyes with a corner of her ap.r.o.n. 'Which I'm sure, sir, we ought to be very grateful to you for all your kindness and the trouble you're takin', and so says the boy's father.

For he's growin' up more of a handful every day, and how to manage him pa.s.ses our wits.'

'Are you telling me, Mrs Halloran, that this boy of yours is the thief who stole my pigeons?'

Mr Pinsent, looking at the boy with a magisterial frown, began to wish he had not been quite so hasty in sending round the town sergeant.

'You did, didn't you, Mike?' appealed Mrs Halloran. And Mike, looking straight before him, grunted something which might pa.s.s for an admission. 'You must try to overlook the boy's manner, sir.

He's case-hardened, I fear, and it goes sore to a mother's heart that ever I should rear up a child to be a thief. But as Halloran said to me, "Take the young limb to his Worship," Halloran says, "and maybe a trifle of correction by a gentleman in his Worship's position will have some effect," he says. But I hope, sir, you won't visit all the punishment on Mike, for he didn't do it alone; and though I'm not sayin' he don't deserve all he gets, 'tisn't fair to make him the only scapegoat--now is it, sir?'

'My good woman, I--I have no such intention,' stammered the mayor, glancing at the lad again, and liking his appearance worse than ever.

'I thank your Worship.' Mrs Halloran dropped a quick curtsey.

'And so I made free to tell Halloran, who was in doubt of it.

"Mr Pinsent," I said, "is a just-minded man, an' you may be sure," I said, "he'll mete out the same to all, last as well as first."'

'Yes, yes!' The mayor took her up impatiently and paused for a moment, still eyeing the boy. 'Er--by the way, what age is your son?'

'Rising fifteen, sir; christened fifteen years ago last St Michael's Day, which is the twenty-ninth of September, though little good it done him. He takes after his father, sir. All the Hallorans shoot up tall, like runner beans; and thick in the bone. Or so his father says. For my part, I've never been to Ireland; but by the looks of en you'd say not a day less than seventeen. It seems like blood-money, my takin' five shillin' and handin' the child over--at his tender age--and me his own mother that nursed en!'

Here Mrs Halloran, whose emotions had been mastering her for some moments, broke down in a violent fit of sobbing; and this so affected her offspring that he emitted a noise like the hoot of a dog.

As he started it without warning, so abruptly he ended it, and looked around with an impa.s.sive face.

It was uncanny. It shook the mayor's nerve. 'My dear Mrs Halloran, if you will let me have a word or two with your son--'

'Oh, I know!' she wailed. 'That's how you put it. But you give me over the money, sir, and let me go quick, before I weaken on it.

You never had a child of your own, Mr Pinsent--and more's the pity for the child--but with one of your own you'd know what it feels like!'

Mr Pinsent felt in his trouser-pocket, drew forth two half-crowns, and pressed them into Mrs Halloran's dirty palm. With a sob and a blessing she escaped. He heard her run sobbing down the pa.s.sage to the front door. Then he turned upon Mike.

The boy had sidled round with his back against the wall, and stood there with his left elbow up and his fists half clenched. For the s.p.a.ce of half a minute the mayor eyed him, and he eyed the mayor.

'Sit down, Mike,' said the mayor gently.

'Goo! What d'ye take me for?' said Mike, lifting his hands a little.

'Sit down, I tell you.'

'Huh--yes, an' let you cop me over the head? You just try it--that's all; you just come an' try it?'

'I--er--have no intention of trying it,' said Mr Pinsent.

'It certainly would not become me to administer--to inflict--corporal punishment on a youth of your--er--inches. What grieves me--what pains me more than I can say, is to find a boy of your--er-size and er--development--by which I mean mental development, sense of responsibility--er--mixed up in this disgraceful affair.

I had supposed it to be a prank, merely--a piece of childish mischief--and that the perpetrators were quite small boys.'

(Here--not a doubt of it--Mr Pinsent was telling the truth.)

'Why,' he went on, with the air of one making a pleasant little discovery, 'I shouldn't be surprised to find you almost as tall as myself! Yes. I declare I believe you are quite as tall! No'-he put up a hand as Mike, apparently suspecting a ruse, backed in a posture of defence--'we will not take our measures to-day. I have something more serious to think about. For you will have noticed that while I suspected this robbery to be the work of small thoughtless boys, I treated it lightly; but now that I find a great strapping fellow like you mixed up in the affair, it becomes my business to talk to you very seriously indeed.'

And he did. He sat down facing Mike Halloran across the table, and read him a lecture that should have made any boy of Mike's size thoroughly ashamed of himself; and might have gone on admonishing for an hour had not Mrs Salt knocked again at the door.

'If you please,' announced Mrs Salt, 'here's the Widow Barnicutt from the Quay to see you, along with her red-headed 'Dolphus.'

'Which,' said the Widow Barnicutt, panting in at her heels and bobbing a curtsey, 'it's sorry I am to be disturbin' your Worship, and I wouldn't do it if his poor father was alive and could give 'em the strap for his good. But the child bein' that out of hand that all my threats do seem but to harden him, and five shillin' a week's wage to an unprovided woman; and I hope your Worship will excuse the noise I make with my breathin', which is the a.s.sma, and brought on by fightin' my way through the other women.'

Mr Pinsent gasped, and put up a hand to his brow.

'The other women?' he echoed. 'What other women?'

'The pa.s.sage is full of 'em,' said Mrs Salt, much as though she were reporting that the house was on fire.

'Ay,' said the widow, 'but my 'Dolphus is the guilty one--I got his word for it.'

'There's Maria Bunny,' persisted Mrs Salt, beginning to tick off the list on her fingers, 'Maria Bunny with her Wesley John, and Mary Polly Polwarne with her Nine Days' Wonder, and Amelia Trownce with the twins, and Deb Hicks with the child she christened Nonesuch, thinkin' 'twas out of the Bible; and William Spargo's second wife Maria with her step-child, and Catherine Nance with her splay-footed boy that I can never remember the name of--'

'Oh! send 'em away!' bawled Mr Pinsent. 'Send 'em away before their husbands come home from work and raise a riot!' Then he recollected himself. 'No, fetch 'em all in here, from the street,' said he, dropping into a chair and taking his head in both hands. 'Fetch 'em all in, and let me deal with 'em!'

The town, when it laughed over the story next day, found the cream of the joke in this--Bester Pinsent, in promising Mrs Halloran that her boy should but share punishment with the rest, had forgotten in his agitation of mind to stipulate that the reward should also be divided. As it was, he had paid her the full five shillings, and the rest of the women (there were twenty-four) would be content with nothing less.

But it was really little Mr Lupus, the schoolmaster, that--all unconsciously--had the last word. Trotting past Butcher Trengrove's shop next morning, on his way to open school, Mr Lupus caught sight of his Worship standing within the doorway, halted, and came across the street with a nervous flush on his face.

'Mr Mayor, sir, if I may have a word with you? Begging your pardon, sir, but it lies on my conscience--all night, sir, it has been troubling me--that I boasted to you yesterday of my boys' good attendance. Indeed, sir, it has been good in the past. But yesterday afternoon! Oh, sir, I fear that you were right, after all, and something serious is amiss with the boys of this town!'

I regret that I cannot report here the precise words of Mr Pinsent's reply.

NEWS FROM TROY!

Troy--not for the first time in its history--is consumed with laughter; laughter which I deprecate, while setting down as an impartial chronicler the occasion and the cause of it.

You must know that our venerable and excellent squire, Sir Felix Felix-Williams, has for some years felt our little town getting, as he puts it, 'beyond him.' He remembers, in his father's time, the gra.s.s growing in our streets. The few vessels that then visited the port brought American timber-props for the mines out of which the Felix-Williams estate drew its royalties, and shipped in exchange small cargoes of emigrants whom, for one reason or another, that estate was unable to support. It was a simple system, and Sir Felix has often in talk with me lamented its gradual strangulation, in his time, by the complexities of modern commerce.--You should hear, by the way, Sir Felix p.r.o.nounce that favourite phrase of his 'in my time'; he does it with a dignified humility, as who should say, 'Observe, I am of the past indeed, but I have lent my name to an epoch.'

As a fact the access of a railway to our little port, the building of jetties for the china-clay trade, the development of our harbour which now receives over 300,000 tons of shipping annually--all these have, in ways direct and indirect, more than doubled the old gentleman's income. But to do him justice, he regards this scarcely at all. He sets it down--and rightly--to what he has taken to call on public occasions 'the expansion of our Imperial Greatness'; but in his heart of hearts he regrets his loosening hold on a population that was used to sit under his fig-tree and drink of his cistern.

With their growth the working cla.s.ses have come to prefer self-help to his honest regulation of their weal. There has been no quarrel: we all love Sir Felix and respect him, though now and then we laugh at him a good deal.

There has been no quarrel, I repeat. But insensibly we have lost the first place in his affections, which of late years have concentrated themselves more and more upon the small village of Kirris-vean, around a corner of the coast. By its mere beauty, indeed, any one might be excused for falling in love with Kirris-vean. It lies, almost within the actual shadow of Sir Felix's great house, at the foot of a steep wooded coombe, and fronts with diminutive beach and pier the blue waters of our neighbouring bay. The cottages are whitewashed and garlanded with jasmine, solanum, the monthly rose.

Fuchsias bloom in their front gardens; cabbages and runner beans climb the hillside in orderly rows at their backs. The women curtsey to a stranger; the men touch their hats; and the inhabitants are mostly advanced in years, for the young men and maidens leave the village to go into 'good service' with testimonials Sir Felix takes a delight to grant, because he has seen that they are well earned.

If you were to stand at the cross-roads in the middle of Eaton Square and say 'Kirris-vean!' in a loud voice, it is odds (though I will not promise) that a score of faces would arise from underground and gaze out wistfully through area-railings. For no one born in Kirris-vean can ever forget it. But Kirris-vean itself is inhabited by grandparents and grandchildren (these last are known in Eaton Square as 'Enc.u.mbrances'). It has a lifeboat in which Sir Felix takes a peculiar pride (but you must not launch it unless in fine weather, or the crew will fall out). It has also a model public-house, The Three Wheatsheaves, so named from the Felix-Williams' coat of arms.

The people of Troy believe--or at any rate a.s.sert--that every one in Kirris-vean is born with a complete suit of gilt b.u.t.tons bearing that device.

Few dissipations ripple the gentle flow--which it were more descriptive perhaps to call stagnation--of life in that model village. From week-end to week-end scarcely a boat puts forth from the shelter of its weed-coated pier; for though Kirris-vean wears the aspect of a place of fishery, it is in fact nothing of the kind.

Its inhabitants--blue-jerseyed males and sun-bonneted females--sit comfortably on their pensions and tempt no perils of the deep.

Why should they risk shortening such lives as theirs? A few crab-pots--'accessories,' as a painter would say--rest on the beach above high-water mark, the summer through; a few tanned nets hang, and have hung for years, a-drying against the wall of the school-house. But the prevalent odour is of honeysuckle. The aged c.o.xswain of the lifeboat reported to me last year that an American visitor had asked him how, dwelling remote from the railway, the population dealt with its fish. 'My dear man,' said I, 'you should have told him that you get it by Parcels' Post from Billingsgate.'

I never know--never, in this life shall I discover--how rumour operates in Troy, how it arrives or is spread. Early in August a rumour, incredible on the face of it, reached me that Kirris-vean intended a Regatta! . . . For a week I disbelieved it; for almost another week I forgot it; and then lo! Sir Felix himself called on me and confirmed it.

A trio of young footmen (it appeared) had arrived in Kirris-vean to spend a holiday on board-wages--their several employers having gone northward for the grouse, to incommodious shooting-boxes where a few servants sufficed. Finding themselves at a loose end (to use their own phrase for it) these three young men had hit on the wild--the happy--the almost delirious idea of a Regatta; and taking their courage in their hands had sought an interview with Sir Felix, to entreat his patronage for the scheme. They had found him in his most amiable mood, and within an hour--the old gentleman is discursive--he had consented to become Patron and President and to honour the gathering with his presence. But observe; the idea cannot have originated before August the 12th, on which day the trio arrived from London; yet a whisper of it had reached me on the 2nd or 3rd.

I repeat that I shall never understand the operation of rumour in Troy.