Читать книгу The Sailor - Snaith John Collis - Страница 24

The Sailor paid six-and-six for the belt of Russia leather, and in Ginger's opinion that was as good as getting it for nothing. Also he agreed to share bed and board with Ginger for the sum of twelve shillings a week. It was top price, Ginger allowed, but then the accommodation was extra. Out of the window of the bedroom you could pitch a stone into the wharf of Antcliff and Jackson, Limited.

This arrangement, in Ginger's opinion, was providential for both parties. Such lodgings would have been beyond Ginger's means had he been unable to find a decent chap to share them with him. Then the Sailor was young, in Ginger's opinion, in spite of the fact that he had been six years at sea. It would be a great thing in Ginger's opinion for so young a sailor to be taken in hand by a landsman of experience until he got a bit more used to terrier firmer.

So much was the Sailor impressed by Ginger's disinterestedness that at six o'clock that evening, when his first day's work was done, he brought his gear from the wharf to No. 1, Paradise Alley. Ginger superintended its removal in the manner of an uncle deeply concerned for the welfare of a favorite nephew. Indeed this was Ginger's permanent attitude to the Sailor from this time on; all the same, he received twelve shillings in advance for a week's board and lodging. Uncle and nephew then sat down to a high tea of hot sausages, with unlimited toast and dripping, before a good fire, in a front parlor so clean and comfortable that the mind of the Sailor was carried back a long six years to Mother and the Foreman Shunter.

When Henry Harper sat down to this meal with Ginger opposite, and that philanthropist removed the cover from three comely sausages, measured them carefully and helped the Sailor to the larger one-and-a-half, his first thought was that he was now as near heaven as he was ever likely to get. What a change from the food, the company, and the squalor of the Margaret Carey! Klondyke himself could not have handed him the larger sausage-and-a-half with an air more genuinely polite. There was a self-possession about Ginger that was almost as wine and music to the torn soul of Henry Harper.

As the Sailor sat eating his sausage-and-a-half and after the manner of a sybarite dipping in abundant gravy the perfectly delicious toast and dripping, he felt he would never be able to repay the debt he already owed to Ginger. That floating hell which had been his home for six long years, that other hell the native haunt of Auntie where all his early childhood had been passed, even that more contiguous hell in the next street but two, the abode of Grandma, were this evening a thousand miles away. Just as the mere presence of Klondyke had once given him courage and self-respect which in his darkest hours since he had never altogether lost, so now, after such a meal, the mere sight of Ginger sitting at the other side of the fire, smoking Log Cabin, put him in new heart, touched him, if not with a sense of joy, with a sense of hope.

As became a man of parts Ginger was not content to sit for the rest of the evening smoking Log Cabin and gazing into the fire. At a quarter past seven, by the cuckoo clock on the chimneypiece, there came a knock at the outer door of the room which opened on the street. This was to herald the arrival of Ginger's own private newspaper, the Evening Mercury, which had been brought by a tattered urchin of nine, of whom the Sailor caught a passing glimpse, and as in a glass darkly beheld his former self.

In the eyes of the Sailor hardly anything could have ministered so much to Ginger's social position as that every evening of his life, Sundays excepted, his own newspaper should be delivered at No. 1, Paradise Alley. It was impossible for the Sailor to forget his early days in spite of the fact that fortune had come to him now in a miraculous way. His world was still divided into those who sold papers and those who bought them. Ginger clearly belonged to the latter exclusive and princely caste. He was of the class of Klondyke – of Klondyke who in his shore-goings in the uttermost parts of the earth behaved in an indescribably regal and plutocratic manner. Sometimes it had appeared to the Sailor, such were the amazing uses to which Klondyke had put his money, that the earth was his and all the lands and the waters thereof.

Ginger's ideas were not as princely as those of Klondyke; that was, in regard to money itself. He did not throw money about in the way that Klondyke did, nor had he Klondyke's air of genial magnificence which vanquished all sorts and conditions of men and women. But in their own way Ginger's ideas were quite as imperial.

As soon as Ginger opened his evening paper he remarked, with a short whistle, "I see Wednesday has beat the Villa."

"No," said the incredulous Sailor.

It was an act of politeness on the part of the Sailor to be incredulous. He might have accepted the fact without any display of emotion. But he felt it was due to his feelings that he should make some kind of comment, for they had been stirred considerably by the victory of Wednesday over the Villa.

"Win by much?" asked the Sailor, his heart suddenly beginning to beat under his seaman's jersey.

"Three two," said Ginger.

"At Brum?"

"No, at Sheffle, in foggy weather, on a holdin' turf."

The Sailor's eyes glowed. And then with his chin in his hands he gazed deep into the fire.

"I once seen the Villa," he said in a dreaming voice. It was the proudest memory of his life.

Ginger withdrew his mind from a consideration of the Police Report and the latest performances of the Government.

"At the Palace?" Ginger's tone was deep as becomes one entering upon an epic subject.