The Sailor Part 4

"I'm thinking I'll have a bite meself," said Job, with a glance at the sofa. "And then I suppose I had better take him along to the police station."

Mother made no reply, but gave her husband a breakfast worthy of a foreman shunter. She then examined carefully the boy's hands and feet.

"I never did see such a hobject," said she. And then with an imperious air, "I'll give him a wash, that's what I'll do."

In order to carry out this resolve, she went into the scullery, filled the copper, and lit the fire.

Presently the members of the family, three small boys and a smaller girl, came down to breakfast _en route_ to school. They looked wonderingly at the creature on the sofa, with great curiosity in their half frightened eyes. Their father told them sternly to keep away from it, to get on with their breakfasts, not to make a noise, and to clear off to school.

"Is it a boy or a girl?" Alfie asked Johnnie, in a thrilling whisper as soon as father had retired to help Mother in the scullery.

"A girl, o' course."

There was some excuse for Johnnie: there was something that looked exactly like a girl in the sleeping face. The rest was hidden by the coat.

The family was soon packed off to school, Johnnie "with a flea in his ear" for having cleaned his boots imperfectly the night before. Mother then cleared away the remains of breakfast, and the Foreman Shunter fetched a fair-sized zinc bath out of the washhouse, pushed back the table, and set it down before the fire. He filled it with warm water from the copper, and then gave the sleeper a shake and said,

"Now, then, boy."

The boy roused himself with a little whimper of protest. He had not been very fast asleep; the police in varying forms of their activity were still hovering round the outskirts of his mind. He began to cry miserably at the sight of the zinc bath, which supplied a forgotten link in an awful chain of memories. Yes, this was the police station after all. He remembered now quite well how they gave him a bath before they ...

"What are you crying for?" asked Mother. "I'm not going to hurt you, my boy. Nice warm bath. Bind up your feet. Then you can go to sleep again."

Perhaps it wasn't the police station, after all. Certainly that inst.i.tution as he knew it had no Mother and no warm tea and no fried bacon, and no sofa and no old coat.

Mother removed the filthy shirt and the tattered knickerbockers with uncompromising but not indelicate hands.

"Them had better be burnt, Job," she said sharply, as she gave them to the Foreman Shunter to throw into the back yard.

"Better ha' done this job in the scullery, Mother," said he.

"Too cold...." She took the temperature of the bath with an expert's finger.... "I never did see anything like this poor child. There's nothing to him. Look at his ribs. You can count 'em. Ugh!" The eye of Mother had been arrested by a broad red mark across both thighs.

"That's been done with a whip," said the Foreman Shunter, grimly.

"Just look at those feet ... they are beginning to bleed again. And these pore hands. I'll get some rags and some Friar's Balsam. And his hair! Goodness gracious me! I'll have to go to the chemist's for that, I'm thinking."

It was perfectly true that Mother had to pay a visit to the chemist for the boy's hair. Nothing less than the chemist could meet the case.

In the meantime, the Foreman Shunter soaped and washed the boy thoroughly, dried him with a coa.r.s.e towel, rubbed the Friar's Balsam on the mutilated hands and feet, which made them smart horribly, and bound them in clean rags. Mother then returned to perform wonders with the chemist's lotion. Afterwards she fetched a nightgown of Alfie's, put it on the boy, wrapped him up in a couple of blankets, and made him comfortable on the sofa, and the Foreman Shunter drew it a bit nearer the fire. Then the boy was told he could sleep as long as he liked.

Presently he began to doze, his mind still running on the police; but certainly this was not a bit like the station.

VII

"What'll you do with him, Mother?"

It was tea time, the kitchen blind was down, the gas was lit; and mother was toasting a m.u.f.fin for the Foreman Shunter, who was about to go on duty.

"He can't stay here, you know. We've as many as we can manage already."

"I know that," snapped Mother.

Like most mothers who are worth their salt, she had rather a habit of snapping at the Foreman Shunter.

The boy was feeling wonderfully comfortable. In fact, he had never felt so comfortable in his life. And he was just sufficiently awake to know that his fate was being decided upon.

"What'll you do with him, anyhow?"

"I don't know," snapped Mother.

"I don't neither. Seems to me there's nothing for it but to hand him over to the police."

The boy was fully awake now. His heart stood still. It seemed an age before mother spoke in answer to this terrible suggestion.

"Yes, of course, there's always that," she said, at last.

The boy's heart died within him.

"He can't stay here, that's a moral," said the Foreman Shunter.

"I never said he could," snapped Mother. "But I don't hold with the police myself. It means the Work'us, and you'd better not be born at all, Job Lorimer, than go to the Work'us."

"You are right there," said the Foreman Shunter.

"He wants a honest occ.i.p.ation," said Mother, b.u.t.tering the m.u.f.fin.

"He wants eddicatin' first," said the Foreman Shunter, beginning to eat the m.u.f.fin. "What can you do with a kid like that? Don't know A from a bull's foot. Not fit for any decent society."

"You are right there," said Mother. "But I'm all against the Work'us, and it's no use purtending I ain't."

"Same here," said the Foreman Shunter. "But he can't stay at No. 12, Gladstone Villas, and you can lay to that."

"Did I say he could?" snapped Mother yet again.

"Very well, then."

And the Foreman Shunter went on duty.

It took five days for the _famille_ Lorimer to decide the fate of Henry Harper. Five wonderful days in which he lay most of the time wrapped in warm blankets on a most comfortable sofa in a warm room. Everybody was remarkably good to him. He had the nicest things to eat and drink that had ever come his way; he was spoken to in the only kind tones that had ever been used to him in all his thirteen years of life. He was given a clean shirt of Alfie's without a single hole in it; he was given a pair of Johnnie's socks; a pair of the Foreman Shunter's trousers were cut down for him; he was given boots (Alfie's), a waistcoat (Alfie's), a jacket (Alfie's), a necktie (Johnnie's), a clean linen collar (Alfie's), a red-spotted handkerchief (Percy's--by Percy's own request). In fact, in those five days he was by way of being taken to the bosom of the family.

He was really a very decent sort of boy--at least, Father said so to Mother in Johnnie's hearing. That is, he had the makings of a decent boy. And Johnnie knew that if Father said so it must be so, because Johnnie also knew that Father was an extremely acute and searching critic of boys in general. They were all very sorry for him, and Alfie and Percy were also inclined to be sorry for Johnnie, who had made a regular mug of himself by declaring that this poor street arab was a girl. It would take Johnnie at least a year to live it down, but in the meantime they were full of pity for this miserable waif out of the gutter who could neither write nor read, who tore at his food, who called Mother "lady" and Father "mister," and said "dunno" and used strange terms of the streets in a way they could hardly understand.

This poor gutter-snipe, who had been so badly knocked about, who had never had a father or a mother, or a brother or a sister, was whole worlds away from the fine a.s.surance, the complete freedom and security of Selborne Street Higher Grade Schools. He was more like a dumb animal than a boy; and sometimes as they watched his white, hunted face and heard his strange mumblings--the nearest he got, as a rule, to human speech--it would have taken very little to convince them that such was the case, could they only have forgotten that his like was to be found at every street corner selling matches and evening papers and begging for coppers when the police were not about.

During those five days the boy's future was a sore problem for the Foreman Shunter and his wife. And it was only solved at last by a G.o.d out of a machine. Mr. Elijah Hendren was the deity in question.