Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet Part 31

"Och, thin," shrieked the woman, "here's that thief o' the warld, Micky Kelly, slandhering o' us afore the blessed heaven, and he owing 2. 14s.

1/2d. for his board an' lodging, let alone p.a.w.n-tickets, and goin' to rin away, the black-hearted ongrateful sarpent!" And she began yelling indiscriminately, "Thieves!" "Murder!" "Blasphemy!" and such other e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns, which (the English ones at least) had not the slightest reference to the matter in hand.

"I'll come to him!" said Downes, with an oath, and rushed stumbling up the stairs, while the poor wretch sneaked in again, and slammed the door to. Downes battered at it, but was met with a volley of curses from the men inside; while, profiting by the Babel, I blew out the light, ran down-stairs, and got safe into the street.

In two hours afterwards, Mackaye, Porter, Crossthwaite, and I were at the door, accompanied by a policeman, and a search-warrant. Porter had insisted on accompanying us. He had made up his mind that his son was at Downes's; and all representations of the smallness of his chance were fruitless. He worked himself up into a state of complete frenzy, and flourished a huge stick in a way which shocked the policeman's orderly and legal notions.

"That may do very well down in your country, sir; but you arn't a goin' to use that there weapon here, you know, not by no hact o' Parliament as I knows on."

"Ow, it's joost a way I ha' wi' me." And the stick was quiet for fifty yards or so, and then recommenced smas.h.i.+ng imaginary skulls.

"You'll do somebody a mischief, sir, with that. You'd much better a lend it me."

Porter tucked it under his arm for fifty yards more; and so on, till we reached Downes's house.

The policeman knocked: and the door was opened, cautiously, by an old Jew, of a most un-"Caucasian" cast of features, however "high-nosed," as Mr.

Disraeli has it.

The policeman asked to see Michael Kelly.

"Michaelsh? I do't know such namesh--" But before the parley could go farther, the farmer burst past policeman and Jew, and rushed into the pa.s.sage, roaring, in a voice which made the very windows rattle,

"Billy Poorter! Billy Poorter! whor be yow? whor be yow?"

We all followed him up-stairs, in time to see him charging valiantly, with his stick for a bayonet, the small person of a Jew-boy, who stood at the head of the stairs in a scientific att.i.tude. The young rascal planted a dozen blows in the huge carcase--he might as well have thumped the rhinoceros in the Regent's Park; the old man ran right over him, without stopping, and dashed up the stairs; at the head of which--oh, joy!--appeared a long, shrunken, red-haired figure, the tears on its dirty cheeks glittering in the candle-glare. In an instant father and son were in each other's arms.

"Oh, my barn! my barn! my barn! my barn!" And then the old Hercules held him off at arm's length, and looked at him with a wistful face, and hugged him again with "My barn! my barn!" He had nothing else to say. Was it not enough? And poor Kelly danced frantically around them, hurrahing; his own sorrows forgotten in his friend's deliverance.

The Jew-boy shook himself, turned, and darted down stairs past us; the policeman quietly put out his foot, tripped him headlong, and jumping down after him, extracted from his grasp a heavy pocket-book.

"Ah! my dear mothersh's dying gift! Oh, dear! oh dear! give it back to a poor orphans.h.!.+"

"Didn't I see you take it out o' the old un's pocket, you young villain?"

answered the maintainer of order, as he shoved the book into his bosom, and stood with one foot on his writhing victim, a complete nineteenth-century St. Michael.

"Let me hold him," I said, "while you go up-stairs."

"_You_ hold a Jew-boy!--you hold a mad cat!" answered the policeman, contemptuously--and with justice--for at that moment Downes appeared on the first-floor landing, cursing and blaspheming.

"He's my 'prentice! he's my servant! I've got a bond, with his own hand to it, to serve me for three years. I'll have the law of you--I will!"

Then the meaning of the big stick came out. The old man leapt down the stairs, and seized Downes. "You're the tyrant as has locked my barn up here!" And a thras.h.i.+ng commenced, which it made my bones ache only to look at. Downes had no chance; the old man felled him on his face in a couple of blows, and taking both hands to his stick, hewed away at him as if he had been a log.

"I waint hit a's head! I waint hit a's head!"--whack, whack. "Let me be!"--whack, whack-puff. "It does me gude, it does me gude!"--puff, puff, puff--whack. "I've been a bottling of it up for three years, come Whitsuntide!"--whack, whack, whack--while Mackaye and Crossthwaite stood coolly looking on, and the wife shut herself up in the side-room, and screamed "Murder!"

The unhappy policeman stood at his wits' end, between the prisoner below and the breach of the peace above, bellowing in vain, in the Queen's name, to us, and to the grinning tailors on the landing. At last, as Downes's life seemed in danger, he wavered; the Jew-boy seized the moment, jumped up, upsetting the constable, dashed like an eel between Crossthwaite and Mackaye, gave me a back-handed blow in pa.s.sing, which I felt for a week after, and vanished through the street-door, which he locked after him.

"Very well!" said the functionary, rising solemnly, and pulling out a note-book--"Scar under left eye, nose a little twisted to the right, bad chilblains on the hands. You'll keep till next time, young man. Now, you fat gentleman up there, have you done a qualifying of yourself for Newgate?"

The old man had ran up-stairs again, and was hugging his son; but when the policeman lifted Downes, he rushed back to his victim, and begged, like a great school-boy, for leave to "bet him joost won bit moor."

"Let me bet un! I'll pay un!--I'll pay all as my son owes un! Marcy me!

where's my pooss?" And so on raged the Babel, till we got the two poor fellows safe out of the house. We had to break open the door to do it, thanks to that imp of Israel.

"For G.o.d's sake, take us too!" almost screamed five or six other voices.

"They're all in debt--every onesh; they sha'n't go till they paysh, if there's law in England," whined the old Jew, who had re-appeared.

"I'll pay for 'em--I'll pay every farden, if so be as they treated my boy well. Here, you, Mr. Locke, there's the ten pounds as I promised you. Why, whor is my pooss?"

The policeman solemnly handed it to him. He took it, turned it over, looked at the policeman half frightened, and pointed with his fat thumb at Mackaye.

"Well, he said as you was a conjuror--and sure he was right."

He paid me the money. I had no mind to keep it in such company; so I got the poor fellows' p.a.w.n-tickets, and Crossthwaite and I took the things out for them. When we returned, we found them in a group in the pa.s.sage, holding the door open, in their fear lest we should be locked up, or entrapped in some way. Their spirits seemed utterly broken. Some three or four went off to lodge where they could; the majority went upstairs again to work. That, even that dungeon, was their only home--their only hope--as it is of thousands of "free" Englishmen at this moment.

We returned, and found the old man with his new-found prodigal sitting on his knee, as if he had been a baby. Sandy told me afterwards, that he had scarcely kept him from carrying the young man all the way home; he was convinced that the poor fellow was dying of starvation. I think really he was not far wrong. In the corner sat Kelly, crouched together like a baboon, blubbering, hurrahing, invoking the saints, cursing the sweaters, and blessing the present company. We were afraid, for several days, that his wits were seriously affected.

And, in his old arm-chair, pipe in mouth, sat good Sandy Mackaye, wiping his eyes with the many-coloured sleeve, and moralizing to himself, _sotto voce_:

"The auld Romans made slaves o' their debitors; sae did the Anglo-Saxons, for a' good Major Cartwright has writ to the contrary. But I didna ken the same Christian practice was part o' the Breetish const.i.tution. Aweel, aweel--atween Riot Acts, Government by Commissions, and ither little extravagants and codicils o' Mammon's making, it's no that easy to ken, the day, what is the Breetish const.i.tution, and what isn't. Tak a drappie, Billy Porter, lad?"

"Never again so long as I live. I've learnt a lesson and a half about that, these last few months."

"Aweel, moderation's best, but abstinence better than naething. Nae man shall deprive me o' my leeberty, but I'll tempt nae man to gie up his." And he actually put the whisky-bottle by into the cupboard.

The old man and his son went home next day, promising me, if I would but come to see them, "twa hundert acres o' the best partridge-shooting, and wild dooks as plenty as sparrows; and to live in clover till I bust, if I liked." And so, as Bunyan has it, they went on their way, and I saw them no more.

CHAPTER XXII.

AN EMERSONIAN SERMON.

Certainly, if John Crossthwaite held the victim-of-circ.u.mstance doctrine in theory, he did not allow Mike Kelly to plead it in practice, as an extenuation of his misdeeds. Very different from his Owenite "it's-n.o.body's-fault" harangues in the debating society, or his admiration for the teacher of whom my readers shall have a glimpse shortly, was his lecture that evening to the poor Irishmen on "It's all your own fault."

Unhappy Kelly! he sat there like a beaten cur, looking first at one of us, and then at the other, for mercy, and finding none. As soon as Crossthwaite's tongue was tired, Mackaye's began, on the sins of drunkenness, hastiness, improvidence, over-trustfulness, &c., &c., and, above all, on the cardinal offence of not having signed the protest years before, and spurned the dishonourable trade, as we had done. Even his most potent excuse that "a boy must live somehow," Crossthwaite treated as contemptuously as if he had been a very Leonidas, while Mackaye chimed in with--

"An' ye a Papist! ye talk o' praying to saints an' martyrs, that died in torments because they wad na do what they should na do? What ha' ye to do wi' martyrs?--a meeserable wretch that sells his soul for a mess o'

pottage--four slices per diem o' thin bread-and-b.u.t.ter? Et propter veetam veevendi perdere causas! Dinna tell me o' your hards.h.i.+ps--ye've had your deserts--your rights were just equivalent to your mights, an' so ye got them."

"Faix, thin, Misther Mackaye, darlint, an' whin did I desarve to p.a.w.n me own goose an' board, an' sit looking at the spidhers for the want o' them?"

"p.a.w.n his ain goose! p.a.w.n himsel! p.a.w.n his needle--gin it had been worth the p.a.w.ning, they'd ha' ta'en it. An' yet there's a command in Deuteronomy, Ye shall na tak the millstone in pledge, for it's a man's life; nor yet keep his raiment ower night, but gie it the puir body back, that he may sleep in his ain claes, an' bless ye. O--but p.a.w.nbrokers dinna care for blessings--na marketable value in them, whatsoever."

"And the shopkeeper," said I, "in 'the Arabian Nights,' refuses to take the fisherman's net in pledge, because he gets his living thereby."

"Ech! but, laddie, they were puir legal Jews, under carnal ordinances, an'