Читать книгу People - Edgar Wallace - Страница 6

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I LEFT Riddles more violently still. It was in the period of strikes. One day all the boys walked out—all except me. When I came out to dinner I was reproached, but went in again. I don't know what it was all about, but in the afternoon I held a meeting with myself and made a dramatic exit from the building by way of the paper chute. The boys were enthusiastic but I was out of work.

I found another printers. I was there a fortnight. It was a soulless kind of place. They printed railway timetables. There was no colour or life in it. I had to carry large parcels of railway printing to very dull offices. After this I went back to my old love—newspapers. W.H. Smith provided me with a peaked cap, and on the wind-swept railway platform at Ludgate Hill and St. Paul's I promoted the sale of newspapers in a perfectly respectable manner. When this palled I found a new job just off the Old Bailey, where, if you went to work early enough, you could see the black flag go up and hear the bell toll to signify the death of picturesque sinners.

In a job and out of a job: I stayed a while with a bootseller marking the virgin soles of balmorals with their selling prices. It was one of those multiple shops with branches in various poor districts. On Saturday nights you could earn an extra shilling by attaching yourself to one of the branches. In a clean, white apron I sold tins of blacking to the ladies of Peckham and tins of dubbin to the horny-handed male saunterers. I drew attention to delightful slippers for women, and hooked down dangling hobnailed boots for the inspection of hardier citizens. It was not very interesting, and I drifted into a rubber factory in Camberwell.

I had got into the habit of standing back and taking a good look at myself.

"Here you are", said I, "making macintosh cloth."

"Here I am", I agreed thankfully. I had got on. I was a "hand" in a factory—I, who had started life as a furtive seller of newspapers, had found my proper place in the industrial scheme.

At the rubber works was a bitter man who taught me something. He was bitter about everything—his home, his work, the beef sandwiches his wife packed for him, my incompetence (I was his assistant), his grinding employer. I sat down one morning in the breakfast hour and puzzled through, without assistance to the genesis of bitterness. And I reduced it to a first cause. I was so full of my unaided discovery that I fell upon him the moment he came in from the yard.

"You're sorry for yourself", I said, with the air of a savant revealing a great discovery.

He was carrying a roll of damask and hit me over the head with it. Thus I learnt two things: never to be sorry for yourself; never to tell people unpalatable truths unless you are in a position to hit them back.

The art of cheap drunkenness was acquired at this factory. Rubber was dissolved in naphtha. By leaning over the vat in which the process was in operation and breathing the naphtha fumes, it was possible to get pleasantly and even hilariously intoxicated. You could also get dead. I had many a pleasant jag until one day it made me very sick.

I wrote the first scene of a little play in rhymed couplets. It was an insulting play about my self-pitying chief. Some time later he complained that I was not as useful an assistant as I might be. I went out of rubber into leather, manufacturing boot heels by pasting scraps of leather together in a mould.

On Friday nights and Saturday afternoons I had a very delicate, indeed an artistic task. One of the Freeman girls had married a flower seller. He was an honest boilermaker when they married, but from what I could gather, boilers went out of fashion soon after the marriage and he had drifted into flowers. I never see a boiler but it suggests nosegays to me. My task in the summer was to "wire" roses, transfix their bases on two sides so that the leaves would neither droop nor fall. In the winter I dipped ivy leaves and hips and haws in sugar and water. They dried glossily.

Every Saturday morning he came back from Covent Garden with a tale of woe.

"Fi'pence a bunch—for them!" He'd shake the unoffending violets savagely. "I never knew flowers so dear!"

The other day I talked with an old lady who sells flowers in Piccadilly Circus. She drew forth from the depths of her basket a shaggy bunch of lilies-of-the-valley.

"Two hog* a bunch for them! I never knew flowers to be so dear!"

[* hog: an old English copper coin.]

There were odd jobs I took, some of which only lasted a fortnight. I was never out of work for more than two or three days.

One day I came home to Mrs. Freeman and told her that I had a job out of London. She was worried at this, because out of London was synonymous with out of the world. So I told her no more, but accompanied the obliging young seaman (I sat next to him in the Surrey gallery) to Grimsby. I brought with me papers signed by my "parent or guardian"—Mr. Freeman's signature was easy to forge—permitting me to ship as a boy on the biggest steam trawler out of Grimsby. I have forgotten the name of it. There is to-day in the Iceland fisheries a Hull trawler called the Edgar Wallace. Remembering my own unhappy experience, I was reluctant even to have my own inanimate name attached to such a craft.

I don't know how long I was at sea. It seemed rather like twenty-eight years. It may have been a month. It was the depth of winter. A gale blew us out and a gale blew us home, and in between whiles it blew an intermittent blizzard. The yards were frozen stiff. The fish were solid as they shovelled them into the hold. I was cook and captain's boy. I boiled cocoa and soup and tea. I made plum puddings and roasted frozen mutton. And I was ill all the time. I was cuffed by the crew for bringing a paper of pins on board—an unpardonable crime on a fishing boat, for pins bring bad luck—and I was cuffed by the captain and the mate for my deficiencies as a chef.

We came into Grimsby one seventh day of February and though I had bound myself for a year I lit out for home with a shilling I had stolen from the captain's cabin and a pair of sea boots that were two sizes too big. Thus equipped, I walked to London. I did odd work on the way but where I couldn't get work I stole bread from bakers' vans. Literally my diet was bread and water. The journey took me the best part of three weeks, and I reached home wearing the shoes of a trustful but wealthy gentleman of St. Albans. His servant had cleaned them and put them on his window-sill. There I found them when I came prowling round in search of food.

For some reason, which I did not discover until years later, Mrs. Freeman regarded this exploit as being a little discreditable. I afterwards learnt that it was the dread word "desertion" which horrified her. I had deserted a ship and apparently there were heavy penalties, even imprisonment, for such nefarious goings on.

"You had better not tell any of the others", she warned me. Mr. Freeman agreed. Generally speaking, he accepted her code as his own.

"You'd better go into milk", said George Freeman; so, after a family consultation, I joined forces with Harry the Milkman.

Harry the Milkman was a sort of relation. A burly, fresh-faced man from Wiltshire with a tiny waxed moustache. He had been in a little trouble with his employers before saving a bit of money, he started forth on his own. I forget whether it was three or six months he got for his embezzlements: I never discussed so trivial a matter.

There never was a more entrancing canvasser than Harry. The lift of his hat to a cook had changed the course of many a dairy account. His hair was parted in the middle and beautifully brushed. He had a way with housemaids which left them with dreams, and when he was not "on the drunk" he was the most passionate abstainer.

Then would he sally forth to Deptford Broadway in a top hat and a frock-coat befitting the importance of the occasion, and address the crowd from a rostrum on the iniquities and evils of intemperance. Harry the Milkman was known far and wide: even to-day Deptford recalls his name and remembers his doings.

He had had one business of his own in the north of London and had allowed that to go smash. Partly drink, partly gallantry. He was all too popular with housemaids. Incidentally, he was married.

We had at least one vice in common: we loved reading. Preferably stories written round the life of that historic character "Deadwood Dick." Often and often on chilly mornings we sat in front of the fire together, each with our slim volume, devouring every line—enthralled by hairbreadth escape, by haughty defiance, by daredevil rescue of innocent maidenhood.

Sometimes Harry would read aloud, his voice quivering with excitement.

"By heavens!" cried Black Pedro. "You shall rue the day you crossed my path, Deadwood!"

Our hero flung his sombrero into the air with a merry laugh.

"Threatened men live long, Black Pedro", he cried. "Adios!"

And, flinging himself upon Starlight, he put spurs to the mustang and disappeared in a cloud of alkali dust.

And all this while, the milk cart was standing outside the door of the shop, a cold horse pawing the macadam, and the maddened customers of Brockley were howling for the breakfast milk that had not come.

In one of his periods of abstinence, he induced me to sign the pledge. As I did not even know the taste of strong drink, I signed readily. He was a member of a lodge, the Rose of Kent, of the Sons of the Phoenix, and in due course became its chief noble. I also became a Son of the Phoenix and was jobbed into the position of lodge secretary—a post which brought me in 2d. per member per quarter. As an officer of the lodge I wore a large scarlet velvet sash, embellished with a tinsel eye of God which should have appeared over my heart, but, owing to my lack of inches, invariably glared on the world from the region of my stomach.

I was ceremoniously addressed as "Worthy Secretary." I wore this sash in public processions—mainly funerals—walking under a large silk banner depicting, if I remember aright, the road to ruin down which The Drinker slowly totters. The banner was borne by two staggering men who, except at funerals, smoked, to show how little they bothered about the burden.

The members were working men—good fellows doing good work. I have nothing but respect and affection for them. The old lodge still stands—I saw its new banner go past the window of my flat in a hospital parade, and I would have gone on to my balcony and saluted it—only I was in my pyjamas.

For years I have kept a souvenir of those days—a daguerreotype showing me with a basket of eggs on my arm, standing in a graceful attitude by a milk barrow. And when my children have grumbled about returning to their expensive schools at the end of term, I have produced the picture.

"It is easier to go to school than to sell eggs", I said, "especially the kind of eggs that I had to sell."

Harry and I quarrelled frequently over the cleaning of milk cans. He said I was a bad cleaner, and I told him loftily that my hands were never intended for the cleaning of milk cans. We parted.

There was a worthy brother of the lodge who was also a worthy plasterer. Also a worthy foreman to a roadmaking firm. He offered me a job. The Victoria Dock Road was being torn up and relaid with granite pitchers. I was appointed timekeeper and mason's labourer. My duties were various. I kept some sort of accounts, I can't remember what, and I carried huge pails of water from a distant standard to the place where the concrete was mixed. I also held the tape when the job was measured up. I relieved the night watchman whilst he had his tea. I helped trim the red lamps that hung on the scaffold poles.

One day when I was helping to hang the lamps on the poles a man came up to me and asked me how much I was earning. I told him, with conscious pride, that I robbed the firm to the extent of fifteen shillings a week.

"Pah!" he said.

He was a man with a beard and talked with an accent. He wore a deer-stalker cap and he had the manner of authority.

"You're doing a man's work", he said. "Ask for more."

I was astonished. I never dreamt that I was worth as much. Here I was—I who had been glad of five shillings a week, and now I was earning fifteen shillings!

The seed of revolt did not take root, and when I joined the night watchman I asked who the old bloke was.

"That's Keir Hardie—he's standing for this district."

I came on the job one morning to learn that he had been elected to Parliament.

Soon after this I was sent to a Silvertown wharf to check the weights of granite that were loaded from barges to carts. Here I met a French inventor who was experimenting with a new kind of brick. He told me there was no God, which was a great relief to me. He believed in reincarnation and had once been a cat. He was a green-eyed, pimply-faced man, terribly thin and full of admiration for Motley the historian. He brought me a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Dutch Republic, which, though I tried hard, I could not read. It was terribly dry after Deadwood Dick.

The job finished. My worthy brother of the Phoenix asked me to go to Clacton with him. Some miscreant was erecting row upon row of attached villas, and my Phoenix man had tendered for the plastering.

It was in the depth of winter. Timekeeper, I was—but usually when the other work was done. From dawn to sunset I lorried lime with a long-handled hoe and filled hods and carried them up steep ladders. The lime worked into my hands till I could not bear water on them. I testify to the health-giving qualities of Clacton air—I was hungry all the time. One day I decided to quit; I could have asked for my money, but I decided it would be useless. I was working for a working man, and a working man, when he gets on in the world, is something of a tyrant.

Instead, I walked to Colchester; pawned my overcoat for six shillings, and came to London with one fixed determination, the result of a long talk I had had with myself.

"Here you are!" I said.

"Where are you?" said I. "You're earning fifteen shillings a week. You have no education, no prospects. Your handwriting is rotten; you're not strong enough for a navvy and not clever enough for a clerk. You're in a rut—how are you going to get out of it?"

On Boxing Day I spent my last shilling to see Fred Leslie in "Cinderella." On the following day, Mrs. Freeman protesting with tears, I borrowed sixpence to pay my fare, and, going down to Woolwich, enlisted myself a private of the Royal West Kent Regiment.

* * * * *

Here, then, was the break, a definite and sharp turn of the road, the first crag in the climb. I had no more definite objective than the man who finds himself at the bottom of a pit into which he has fallen—my one desire was to get out. Somebody had lent me a copy of Smiles's "Self-Help": I think it was the most depressing book I had ever read. All these poor boys who had achieved greatness in various arts and professions had some natural bent. They were mathematicians or artists; the foundation of their fortunes was laid by their inclinations. There were a few patient souls who had worked their way from office-boys to the control of great companies; but it always seemed to me that they did no more than keep themselves in the middle of a great, slow-moving river, and drift towards their elegant harbours.

I had no definite ambitions: I neither burnt the midnight oil in the study of law, nor hoarded my farthings towards a fortune. I never desired enormous monies. Rather, money was cash, to be spent and enjoyed.

If I had a quake at all in the contemplation of my new career, it was the inward shiver that a boy experiences when he enters the fatal train that carries him to his first boarding school. The journey to Maidstone was rather a desolate one—I occupied the same carriage as two convicts being transferred to Maidstone Prison, and on the whole they were more cheerful than I. They had been there before and canvassed the possibility of returning to their old jobs, discussing the advantage of one "ward" over the other.

"Is old So-and-so still on the gate?"

The warder was friendly and informed them that old So-and-so WAS still "on the gate." But there was a new chief warder. One of the prisoners had "met him" in Exeter Jail. He thought he was rather a decent chap, but the warder gave no enthusiastic confirmation of this view.

They asked after old friends. Bill This was "on the Moor" and Harry That was at Portland. They agreed that Portland was worse than Dartmoor but not so cold.

One of the men spoke of prisons in the manner of a virtuoso. He might have been a member of the leisured classes discussing continental hotels. At the journey's end I parted from them with some regret—indeed, I should not have been sorry to have accompanied such agreeable and experienced adventurers. After all, they had only "got" five years, and I was in the army for seven, with no remission for good conduct.