A Breaker of Laws/Chapter 3
CHAPTER III
The next morning Alfred Bateson did a thing that prophesied to him a month before, would have caused him to laugh incredulously. He took pains to discover the address of Barraclough, called upon that long young man, and made a straightforward appeal to him for work. He did not tell the young Oxford man all the details of the past; indeed, he made careful selection of events, taking special care to say nothing of the burglary at the house of Caroline's mistress. (One result of this successful enterprise had been that fifteen pounds stood to his credit in the savings bank records of the post-office in Deptford Broadway, a fact he accounted for to Caroline by reminding her of the existence of his uncle in South America.)
Young Barraclough, being a good fellow, with keen desires to reconstruct the world outrunning the fair amount of immature shrewdness that he possessed, had trouble to conceal his delight at being thus early confronted with excellent material upon which to commence work, and Alfred Bateson, noting this, improved his story with artistic touches.
'I only ask for a chance,' urged Alfred in a manly way. 'Gimme a chance, sir, and I'll take full advantage of it.'
'You promise that?'
'On any blooming book,' said Alfred, 'you like to put before me.'
'Considering what you have told me about your career,' said the tall young man in his high voice, 'there is a certain risk.'
'Very well,' said Alfred resignedly, and punching out his cap. 'So be it, then; I'll go on as I've been goin'. What is to be will be, and I must put up with it; but it does seem a bit 'ard that when a chap wants to get married and to run on the main line ever after There! I won't take up any more of your time, sir.'
'Stop!' said Barraclough anxiously. 'Don't go like that, my good fellow. I want to do something for you, only that I want to do the right thing. You say you are going to be married?'
'Nothing but a gel,' said Alfred, 'would make a man want to walk straight after he'd been walking crooked.'
Barraclough's indecision vanished. Being himself shyly in love with a determined young woman, he knew the influence that one woman possessed.
'Good-morning, sir,' said Alfred respectfully, 'and pardon me for 'aving troubled you.'
'Wait one moment. I'll give you a letter to the head of our works in Watergate Street.' He took a pen and wrote a note. 'If you have any ability, any determination at all,' he said, 'that will procure work for you.'
'Thanks,' said Alfred.
'Now,' said Barraclough, in his high voice, 'don't forget that you are going to turn over a new leaf.'
'I'll turn over a whole volume, sir.'
'I shall watch your career with considerable interest,' said the young man, with a touch of his oratorical style, and waving a small gold-handled paper-cutter. 'I shall hope to find my present action justified by results. Much, of course, rests with yourself—much, also, with the company you keep.'
'I shall pick and choose in future, sir. Seems to me I've pulled up just in time.'
Young Barraclough put down the paper-cutter and went towards the door.
'Believe me,' he said, in his treble voice, 'there is more happiness to be found in an honest life than in any other. Only a few nights since I visited the cottage of an old ex-convict, who had reformed, and I felt gratified to see how much comfort there was in the place. The man was evidently leading a good, serene, happy life.'
'A brand from the burnin', sir.'
'Exactly. Good-bye, and—er'—here a burst of genuineness came—'good luck to you.'
On his way home from Watergate Street that evening, after his first day of work, Alfred put his hand in the inside pocket of his short coat to find a letter from Caroline. He felt something hard, and took it out. It was a small gold-handled paper-cutter.
'’Pon me word,' he said to himself amusedly, 'if I ain't a caution I I pinched it without knowing.'
He changed his room that evening and went to live in a brand-new street off Lower Road; this enabled him for some time to evade meeting Mr. or Miss Ladd or any of their friends. The banns being published, for three Sundays church-goers were challenged to produce any good reason why Alfred Bateson and Caroline Hooper should not be bound together in the bonds of holy matrimony. On the last occasion, Alfred and Caroline themselves listened to the announcement from the gallery.
'I never turned so red,' said Caroline shyly, 'in all my life before.'
The new departure had its drawbacks. The daily work was a trouble. It interfered with the joy of strolling about; it destroyed the fine feeling of irresponsibility so precious to the London loafer. No light matter, mind you, to have to rise at half-past five in the morning and dress and trudge down to the works; no small thing to have to do hard manual labour after getting a living by sheer mental astuteness. Being, however, a cheerful young man, he became popular with his fellow-workmen, and his smartness and Cockney humour gratified everyone excepting the one or two butts of the place. Memory troubled him not at all; if after a fortnight of work anyone had taxed him with any of certain incidents, he would have resented the raking up of old grievances as showing want of good taste. As for Caroline, there was no young woman in South-east London who carried so much happiness in her eyes. Her mistress and the other servants entered with great spirit into the preparations for the wedding, and her mistress, still eager for the study of human documents, issued an order that Alfred should come to see her, with which order he (to the good Caroline's regret) declined to comply.
'You might, dear,' she urged, 'just to oblige me.'
They were walking, arm-in-arm, after a busy evening at furniture shops, down by the Seamen's Hospital towards Greenwich Pier.
'I'm so awk'ard in company,' declared Alfred modestly.
'Nonsense!' said Caroline. 'I think you've got quite good manners, considering, and she'd be so pleased. My two sisters are at her cousin's house down in Devonshire, and she takes an interest'
'Suppose she took a fancy to me?' asked Alfred.
'Oh, well, dear,' said the girl affectionately, 'if you think there's any risk of that, p'raps I'd better make some excuse for you. As a matter of fact, she'd only talk about her robbery.'
'Ain't she let that old subject drop yet?'
'Her's always harpin' on it,' said Caroline. 'Mr. Dowton, the detective, says he never saw such a lady to worry. He keeps telling her they've got a clue, but even that isn't good enough for her.'
'Some people are never satisfied,' said Alfred. 'Give us a kiss, little sweet.'
'I do think it's kind of you to suggest our going to Devonshire after we're married,' said Caroline. 'Fancy my seeing my sisters for a few hours on the Sunday, and introducin' my—my husband.' She sighed contentedly. 'I shall feel as proud as proud.'
A pause.
'Look 'ere, Kerry,' said Alfred carefully: 'I want to talk to you serious.'
'Don't often catch you like that.'
'I'm dead serious now, at any rate. I want you not to go thinking me an angel of perfection. As a matter of fact, I am very far from being perfect; I've got my faults—few men more so.'
'Now you're beginning your nonsense again,' she said reprovingly.
'I'm speaking the truth for once,' he said: 'I'm a bad lot.'
'Ah, well,' said Caroline, with her pretty head near to his shoulder, 'you're just good enough for me. Is that a London steamer coming down the river?'
The steamer from London Bridge puffed its way presently to the pier below, and gave the pierhead a facetious bump. The cornet and violin on board stopped in the middle of a waltz, a plank was laid down to connect the steamer with the landing-stage, the connection was rendered certain by stout ropes. Men ran about with lanterns, and one held a light to the gangway to show the voyagers where they were expected to trip. Alfred, looking down, his arm around Caroline's slim waist, started.
'Pricked yourself again?' she asked cheerfully.
'No,' he answered shortly.
'What, then?'
'Seen someone I know. Let's keep back here.'
Mr. Ladd and his sister stamped their way up the wooden staircase with the rest of the passengers, Mr. Ladd bearing on his arm a dingy brown overcoat, for which on such an evening the casual observer would have said he could have had little use; Miss Ladd with a kind of fishing net containing three large turnips and a few blameless parcels. Mr. Ladd suddenly forced his way through the crowd, muttering that he had no desire to miss his train.
'Whoa!' shouted a prosperous-looking old gentleman excitedly at the gates. 'Stop everybody! Whistle for the police! Don't let a soul move till I give the word!'
'What have you found now, sir?' asked the uniformed man at the toll-house.
'Found?' screamed the old gentleman. 'Found be hanged! I've lost my breastpin! A twenty-guinea breastpin presented to me by'
A constable, accompanied by a red-haired man in tweeds, came across from the Ship tavern. The crowd made way for them.
'That's Mr. Dowton,' whispered Caroline—'the one with the fresh complexion. He's a detective.'
'Keep back 'ere,' insisted Alfred; 'you don't want to be mixed up in it.'
The crowd debated the circumstances with animation until the old gentleman marched away to the police-station in company with the policeman and Dowton, when it broke up and went on in lumps. Miss Ladd, speaking to half a dozen strangers as she walked up past the hospital towards the tram-lines, declared that it was nothing more or less than a burning shame that you could not go about in respectable places without enduring the annoyance of having your property stolen. For her part, argued Miss Ladd, with much sincerity, and carrying her fishing-net carefully, she could not help feeling that the police were hand-in-glove with these dreadful people, and it was high time the whole system was exposed to public knowledge. Miss Ladd bade the others good-evening, and, announcing her intention of going home across Creek Bridge, walked off calmly through the market towards Bridge Street. Immediately afterwards she returned to the neighbourhood of the pier gates, and watched from a side-street the young couple as they strolled away together.
'A passing fancy,' said Miss Ladd to herself persuasively. 'It'll be all over in a month's time.' She shook her head as she turned to go home. 'All the same,' she sighed, 'I wish I was better-lookin'.'
To foil the efforts of Caroline's fellow-servants, who had organized a mysterious conspiracy of swooping down on the church with bags of rice provided by the cook, and old slippers furnished by the lady's-maid, the date of the wedding was changed, and the event took place with only William Finnis for lay witness. William Finnis signed the register; William Finnis accompanied the young couple to an Italian restaurant in Greenwich, opposite the theatre, for the wedding breakfast; William Finnis proposed the health of the bride and bridegroom in a curt speech—'Well,' he said, lifting his glass, '’ere's fortune'; William Finnis accompanied them by afternoon boat up to London Bridge, and on to Westminster, where they went over the empty Houses of Parliament, and Alfred pretended to be a peer of the realm under the title of Lord Bateson. Then they rested on the Embankment, and the sun shining cheerfully upon them, and a pleasant breeze coming off the river, they watched the slow, overgorged barges going along laboriously, noted the crowded steamboats pulling from pier to pier, and saw the trains strolling off across the railway bridge with passengers for the Continent. Later, William Finnis, in a burst of invention, suggested tea, and insisted upon paying for this, scowling so much at a mild young woman who served them—meaning to look jocular, but failing to get the desired expression—that the mild young woman went away into a corner, after attending to the party, and had a mild fit of hysterics.
Tea finished, William Finnis, still with ideas in his head, suggested the play, and upon Caroline, who had never been to a theatre, demanding, 'What play?' William Finnis said boldly, 'The 'Delphi play.' To the Adelphi therefore they went, and, the occasion being special, they decided to go into the pit, the mere name of which seemed to the good Caroline to confirm her worst doubts. Once the play began, however, she felt amazed and gratified to see that everything wicked and vicious received full condemnation both on the stage and from the pit and gallery, so that when, in the second act, the cruel, unkind man said contemptuously, 'A fig for all your moral and social laws!' not only did the women around her shake their heads and whisper to each other satirically, 'There's a pretty beauty for you! Shows what some men are, don't it?' but quite a small infant on the stage took up the subject in an artless, shrill-voiced way, and in two or three well-chosen sentences confuted the unpleasant man and left him, so to speak, without a foot to stand upon. At five minutes past eleven everything came as right as it is possible for right to be, and the delighted young woman, hurrying off with her husband to Charing Cross to catch the train to Greenwich, declared over her shoulder to William Finnis that she should like to go to a theatre every night of her life. At Deptford Station, Finnis, after ascertaining the hour of departure of the Sunday excursion, said good-bye, remarking that, likely as not, he might feel inclined for a bit of an outing himself on that day.
And, indeed, when Paddington Station woke up rather sulkily at an unusually early hour on the morning of the following Sunday, it received in the crowd of West-Country excursionists, not only Alfred (with a brown-paper parcel) and Caroline, but the stolid, ever-present Finnis. A third person with more of tact than William Finnis possessed would have been a tiresome third person; William Finnis had just enough to enable him to be entirely inoffensive.
'’Ullo!' he said casually, 'you two 'ere? How'd it be for us all to travel all together? We shall be nice company for each other.'
A proud little woman was Caroline Bateson that early morning. Instructing her husband where to look for the Barnstaple carriage, knowing exactly which way the train would go, talking Devonshire to dazed, perplexed excursionists, and feeling evidently that she was responsible for all that part of England west of Paddington. Pleasant to see her admiration for her husband; odd to notice how that young man, usually full of self-assurance and Cockney impudence, became quiet and awkward in her reverential presence.
When at the hour appointed the over-grown, two-engined train started on its long run to the West, Caroline it was who made irascible babies laugh; arranged a truce between quarrelling couples with tempers rasped and abraded by early rising; gave up her corner to a shop girl, who, having finished work but a few hours since, could not now keep her eyes open. Caroline found where everybody was going, discovered an exceptionally cross wife who had once nearly visited the neighbourhood in which Caroline herself was born, which fact gave the cross wife so much astonishment that before the train reached Reading she was calling her husband 'Tom dear,' and he was calling her 'Chicksy.' Caroline was the Cook's guide of the double compartment, the one from whom no information was hidden. She knew the true version of the ten-minutes' compulsory stop at Swindon; she alone was sure which came first, Bath or Bristol.
'Isn't she a regular little treat?' asked Alfred in a whisper.
'Fair,' replied Finnis judicially. 'What's in your parcel?'
'She's simply perfect,' declared Alfred.
'I was never,' mentioned Finnis, as excuse for his moderation, 'much of what you might call a gusher in regard to females.'
'There was never one like this. She's simply a marvel.' Alfred clicked his tongue, and whispered again: '’Pon me word! I wish I didn't feel such a 'ound of a chap.'
'Ah,' said the other consolingly, 'It's no use wishing that. What have you got packed up in'
'I tell you,' declared Alfred, 'when I see her a-bustling about our little shanty, and 'ear her singing, and see her all so good and cheerful-like, why, I've got such a contemp' for meself that for two pins I could out and make a 'ole in the water before she finds what a'
'Now,' said Finnis reprovingly—'now you're givin' us what I call kid's talk.' He raised his voice. 'Lot of cows they do seem to grow in this country. What's the use of them?'
It was a long ride, but it did not seem long to the majority of the excursionists, and certainly not to Alfred Bateson; now and again he felt the contents of the package that stood between his knees, wrinkling his forehead in the effort of thought. When at about eleven o'clock the train pulled up at Barnstaple Station, and the cramped passengers descended, he appeared so sedate in manner that William Finnis asked him with some anxiety whether he felt quite well. The excursion seemed to have lost a number of carriages since it had left Paddington, and had saved but two or three to bring into Barnstaple.
'She ban't come,' wailed a large copy of Caroline, glancing at her without recognition. 'Her's lost the train, for sartain.'
'I knawed she would,' said a still larger edition of Caroline despairingly.
'May I ask who you're lookin' for?' asked Alfred, at a nudge from the delighted Caroline.
'Young party by name of—why, it's yew!' said the delighted woman, rushing at the young wife. 'Why, 'pon my word, if you ban't grawed quite gude-lookin'!'
Proud introduction of Alfred, introduction also of William Finnis. Out of the station, through the excited crowd of excursionists and their friends; across the bridge covering the shallow river and into High Street, where a groaning little 'bus with its own views on Sunday labour took them away from the town.
The three young women were genuinely happy to see each other (the two Devonshire sisters so much interested in taking furtive note of Caroline's dress as to lose now and again the thread of their remarks), and the two men kept silent—an attitude natural to William Finnis, but foreign to the nature of Alfred. Alfred tried to hum, with a view of making it appear that he was quite at his ease, but something in his throat prevented. Indeed, it was not until the complaining little bus had stopped and had allowed them to get down, and they were walking up the long drive to a big square house, that he recovered his usual self-assurance.
'I expect you gentlemen are tired,' said the eldest sister, falling back, 'after all yoor long joorney. Us 'll have some tea and cream for 'e when we get in the kitchen.'
'Tea?' echoed Finnis doubtfully.
'You do know how to look after yourselves,' said Alfred; 'that I can see with 'alf an eye. I never saw gels look so young as you Devonshire ladies in all my life.'
'How old do 'e reckon I be?' asked the elder sister archly.
'Thirty-five?' said William Finnis.
'Twen'y-five?' said Alfred readily.
If Finnis's guess had the effect of barring him from close friendship, it is certain that Alfred's adroit reply gave him instant admission to the goodwill of the two ladies. Calculated later on, it appeared that, if Alfred's figure had been correct, the age of Caroline as youngest sister would have been reduced to about twelve, but this fact did not remove the good impression which the venture created.
The mistress was away, the elder sister explained, as they went to the back of the large house and entered the kitchen; with the exception of Mr. Mowling, they were alone. Mr. Mowling proved to be a mild, girlish, inoffensive footman, who read boys' journals, and had but one ambition, which was to go, not then, but at some unfixed date, to fight in a battle. 'Jest to see what it's like,' giggled Mr. Mowling.
'What else is in your parcel, Alf dear?' demanded Caroline with her pretty air of authority. 'There's something hard, and'
'Some'ing I packed in by mistake,' answered Alfred. 'I'll go out presently and throw it away.'
'What like, Mr. Bateson?' asked the eldest sister inquisitively.
'Not quite what a lady would understand,' said Alfred
'Beg pardon, I'm sure,' said the elder sister, with some confusion.
'Granted,' said Alfred handsomely.
After dinner Alfred went from the house furtively with his parcel, leaving the contented sisters to have what they called a good talk, while William Finnis engaged Mr. Mowling in a game of cribbage. At the edge of a pond circled by long, straight, decorous trees Alfred untied the parcel, taking from it five shining heavy little instruments made of steel. He looked at each with something of affection, and rubbed them on his sleeve carefully. He laid them all down on the shaded green bank of the pond, and, after looking at them for some time, sighed, and, rising, walked briskly around the pond, his eyes attracted ever by the neat shining tools that glistened when the sun peeped through the circle of tall trees.
He walked past them several times until he heard from the house the sound of a girl's laugh; then he took the bright steel articles, and began to throw them desperately out into the centre of the pond.
'What ho!' cried William Finnis. 'What's the game, Elf?'
Alfred started at the voice, and turned with an uplifted jemmy in his hand.
'What are you playin' of?' Alfred did not answer, and Finnis went on: 'That bit of dough they call a footman goes and wins eighteenpence from me, and then says he wants his afternoon's nap.'
'William, ole man'
'Elf!'
'I'm goin' to tell you some'ing—some'ing about the way I've been going on the last year or two.'
'You needn't,' said Finnis shortly.
'You've knowed all along?'
'I've guessed.'
'What was your idea, then, in not'
'I thought,' said William Finnis slowly and carefully, 'that when you got yourself into trouble you'd be glad of me to stick by you.'
'It's all over now,' said Alfred, after a pause; 'I'm never going in for it again.'
'If you did,' said Finnis strenuously, 'you'd deserve to be broke in bits.' They turned and walked across the lawn in the direction of the house. 'Did you throw away that last one?'
'Yes.'
'Liar! It's in the back-pocket of your trousers now.'
'Ah, well,' said Alfred, 'I'll keep it as a momento. Race you to the kitchen door for tuppence.'