The Adventures of Harry Revel Part 2

Trapp?"

"Jesting, ma'am?"

"You do not really employ that barbarous method of acceleration?"

"Meaning furze-bushes? Why, no, ma'am; not often. Look ye here, young sir," he continued, dismissing (as of no account) this subject, so interesting to me; "you was wide awake, anyway, when you came down, and that you can't deny."

"Harry," persisted Miss Plinlimmon, "has not been used to harsh treatment. You will like his manners: he is a very gentlemanly boy."

Mr. Trapp stared at her, then at me, then slowly around the room.

"Gentlemanly?" he echoed at length, in a wondering way, under his breath.

"I have used my best endeavours. Yes, though I say it to his face, you will really--if careful to appeal to his better instincts--find him one of Nature's gentlemen."

Mr. Trapp broke into a grin of relief; almost you could say that he heaved a sigh.

"Oh, that's all?" said he. "Why, Lord love ye, ma'am, I've been called that myself before now!"

So to Mr. Trapp I was bound, early next week, before the magistrates sitting in petty sessional division, to serve him and to receive from him proper sustenance and clothing until the age of twenty-one.

And I (as nearly as could be guessed, for I had no birthday) had barely turned ten. Mr. Scougall arrived in time to pilot me through these formalities and hand me over to Mr. Trapp: but at a parting interview, throughout which we both wept copiously, Miss Plinlimmon gave me for souvenir a small Testament with this inscription on the fly-leaf:

H. REVEL, _from his affectionate friend, A. Plinlimmon_.

_O happy, happy days, when childhood's cares Were soon forgotten!

But now, when dear ones all around are still the same, Where shall we be in ten years' time?_

"They were my own composition," she explained. Mr. George bade me a gloomier farewell. "You might come to some good," he said contemplatively; "and then again you mightn't. I ain't what they call a _pessimist_, but I thinks poorly of most things. It's safer."

Mr. Trapp was exceedingly jocose as he conveyed me home to his house beside the Barbican, Plymouth; stopping on the way before every building of exceptional height and asking me quizzically how I would propose to set about climbing it. At the time, in the soreness of my heart, I resented this heavy pleasantry, and to be sure, after the tenth repet.i.tion or so, the diversity of the buildings to which he applied it but poorly concealed its sameness. But, in fact, he was doing his best to be kind, and succeeded in a sort; for it roused a childish scorn in me and so fetched back my heart, which at starting had been somewhere in my boots.

I took it for granted that a sweep must inhabit a dingy hovel, and certainly the crowded filth of the Barbican promised nothing better as we threaded our way among fishermen, fish-jowters, blowzy women, and children playing hop-scotch with the heads of decaying fish.

At the seaward end of it, and close beside the bow-fronted Custom House, we turned aside into an alley which led uphill between high blank walls to the base of the Citadel: and here, stuck as if it were a marten's nest under the shadow of the ramparts, a freshly whitewashed cottage overhung the slope, with a sweep's brush dangling over its doorway and the sign "S. Trapp, Chimney Sweep in Season."

While I wondered what might be the season for chimney-sweeps, a small bead-eyed woman emerged from the doorway and shook a duster vigorously: in the which act catching sight of us, she paused.

"I've a-got en, my dear," said Mr. Trapp much as a man might announce the capture of a fish: and though he did not actually lift me for inspection his hand seemed to waver over my collar.

But it was Mrs. Trapp, who, after a fleeting glance at me, caught her husband by the collar.

"And you actilly went in that state, you nasty keerless hulks!

O, you heart-breaker!"

Mr. Trapp in custody managed to send me a sidelong, humorous grin.

"My dear, I thought 'twould be a surprise for you--business taking me that way, and the magistrates being used to worse."

"You heart-breaker!" repeated Mrs. Trapp. "And me slaving morn and night to catch up with your messy ways! What did I tell you the first time you came back from the Hospital looking like a malkin, and with a clean shift of clothes laid out for you and the water on the boil, that I couldn't have taken more trouble, no, not for a funeral?

Didn't I tell you 'twas positively lowering?"

"I ha'n't a doubt you did, my dear."

"That's what you are. You're a lowering man. And there by your own account you met a lady, with your neck streaked like a ham-rasher, and me not by--thank goodness!--to see what her feelings were; and now 'tis magistrates. But nothing warns you. I suppose you thought that as 'twas only fondlings without any father or mother it didn't matter how you dressed!"

Mrs. Trapp, though she might seem to talk at random, had a wifely knack of dropping a shaft home. Her husband protested.

"Come, come, Maria--you know I'm not that sort of man!"

"How do I know what sort of man you are, under all that dirt?

For my part, if I'd been a magistrate, you shouldn't have walked off with the boy till you'd washed yourself, not if you'd gone down on your hands and knees for it; and him with his face shining all over like a little Moses on the Mount, which does the lady credit if she's the one you saw; though how they can dress children up like pickle-herrings it beats me. Your bed's at the top of the house, child, and there you'll find a suit o' clothes that I've washed and aired after the last boy. I only hope you won't catch any of his nasty tricks in 'em. Straight up the stairs and the little door to the left at the top."

"Unless"--Mr. Trapp picked up courage for one more pleasantry--"you'd like to make a start at once and go up by way of the chimbley."

He was rash. As a pugilist might eye a recovering opponent supposed to be stunned, so Mrs. Trapp eyed Mr. Trapp.

"I thought I told you plain enough," she said, "that you're a lowering man. What's worse, you're an unconverted one. Oh, you nasty, fat, plain-featured fellow! Go indoors and wash yourself, this instant!"

I spent close upon four years with this couple: and good parents they were to me, as well as devoted to each other. Mrs. Trapp may have been "cracked," as she certainly suffered from a determination of words to the mouth: but, as a child will, I took her and the rest of the world as I found them. She began to mother me at once; and on the very next morning took my clothes in hand, snipped the ridiculous tails off the jacket, and sent it, with the breeches, to the dyer's.

The yellow waistcoat she cut into pin-cushions, two for upstairs and two for the parlour.

Having no children to save for, Mr. Trapp could afford to feed and clothe an apprentice and take life easily to boot. Mrs. Trapp would never allow him to climb a ladder; had even chained him to _terra firma_ by a vow--since, as she explained to me once, "he's an unconverted man. There's no harm in 'en; but I couldn't bear to have him cut off in his sins. Besides, with such a figure, he'd scatter."

I recollect it as a foretaste of his kindness that on the first early morning, as he led me forth to my first experiment, we paused between the blank walls of the alley that I might practise the sweep's call in comparative privacy. The sound of my own voice, reverberated there, covered me with shame, though it could scarcely have been louder than the cheeping of the birds on the Citadel ramparts above.

"Hark to that fellow, now!" said my master, as the notes of a bugle sang out clear and brave in the dawn. "He's no bigger than you, I warrant, and has no more call to be proud of his business." In time I grew bold enough and used to begin my "Sweep, Swee--eep!" at the mouth of the alley to warn Mrs. Trapp of our return.

My first chimney daunted me, though it was a wide one, belonging to a cottage, well fitted with climbing brackets, and so straight that from the flat hearth-stone you could see a patch of blue sky with the gulls sailing across it. Mr. Trapp instructed me well and I listened, setting my small jaws to choke down the terror: but, once started, with his voice guiding me from below and growing hollower as I ascended, I found that all came easily enough. "Bravo!" he shouted up from the far side of the street, whither he had run out to see me wave my brush from the summit. In a day or two he began to boast of me, and I had to do my young best to live up to a reputation; for the fame of my feat on Emmanuel Church spire had spread all over the Barbican. Being reckoned a bold fellow, I had to justify myself in fighting with the urchins of my age there; in which, and in wrestling, I contrived to hold my own. My shame was that I had never learnt to swim. All my rivals could swim, and even in the winter weather seemed to pa.s.s half their time in the filthy water of Sutton Pool, or in running races, stark naked, along the quay's edge.

Our trade, steady and leisurable until the last week of March, then went up with a rush and continued at high pressure through April and May, so that, dog-tired in every limb, I had much ado to drag myself to bed up the garret stairs after Mrs. Trapp had rubbed my ankles with goose-fat where the climbing-irons galled them. While this was doing, Mr. Trapp would smoke his pipe and watch and a.s.sure me that mine were the "growing-pains" natural to sweeps, and Mrs. Trapp (without meaning it in the least) lamented the fate which had tied her for life to one. "It being well known that my birthday is the 15th of the month and its rightful motto in Proverbs thirty-one, 'She riseth also while it is yet night and giveth meat to her household and a portion to her maidens'; and me never able to hire a gel at eight pounds a year even!"

"If you did," retorted Mr. Trapp, "I don't see you turning out at midnight to feed her."

Early in June this high-tide of business slackened, and by the close of the second week we were moderately idle. On Midsummer morning I descended to find, to my vast astonishment, Mr. Trapp seated at table before a bowl of bread and milk and wearing a thick blue guernsey tucked inside his trousers, the waist of which reached so high as to reduce his braces to mere shoulder-straps. I could not imagine why he, a man given to perspiration, should add to his garments at this season.

Breakfast over, he beckoned me to the door and jerked his thumb towards the lintel. The usual, sign had been replaced by a shorter one: "S. Trapp. Gone Driving."

"If folks," said he, "ha'n't the foresight to get swept afore Midsummer, I don't humour 'em."

"Are--are you really going for a drive, sir?" I stammered.

"To be sure I am. I drive every day in the summer. What do you suppose?"

"It won't be a chaise and pair, sir?" I hazarded, though even this would not have surprised me.

"Not to-day. Lord knows what we may come to, but to-day 'tis mackerel and whiting; later on, pilchards."

He took me down to the quay; and there, sure enough, we stepped on board a boat lying ready, with two men in her, who fended off and began to hoist sails at once. Mr. Trapp took the helm. It turned out that he owned a share in the vessel and worked her from Midsummer to Michaelmas with a crew of two men and a boy. The men were called Isaac and Morgan (I cannot remember their other names), the one extremely old and surly, the other cheerful, curly-haired and active, and both sparing of words. I was to be the boy.

We baited our hooks and whiffed for mackerel as we tacked out of the Sound. And by and by we came to what Isaac called the "grounds"

(though I could see nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the sea) and cast anchor and weighted our lines differently and caught a few whiting while we ate our dinner. The wind had fallen to a flat calm. After dinner Mr. Trapp looked up and said to Isaac: