Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City 13

Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City 13

ADVENTURE XXI.

 

AN IDYLL OF BOGIE ROLL.

 

 

Perhaps it was in sheer desperation that Cleaver's boy (whose name, by

the way, was James Annan, though the fact was hardly ever mentioned

except in the police court) at last resolved to make a desperate cast.

 

"They canna baith hae me," he said, "an' Guid kens I want neither o'

them. But gin I had yin o' them, she wad maybe keep the ither off."

 

So Cleaver's boy scratched his head to find out a way of settling the

difficulty. He could, he thought, be indifferently happy with either.

It was only having both of them "tearing at his coat-tails" that made

him miserable.

 

At last he dashed his hand against his thigh with a cry of joy, and

fell to dancing a hobnailed fandango in the gutter.

 

"Dod, man, the verra thing," he said; "I'll toss for them!"

 

So with that Cleaver's boy took out his lucky penny, and, selecting a

smooth space of the unpaved roadway of a new street, where the coin

would neither stick edgeways nor yet bounce unfairly on the stones, he

spun the coin deftly upwards from his level thumb-nail.

 

"Heads Sall—tails Susy!" he said, very solemnly, for his life was in

the twirl of the penny.

 

"Heads she is—Sal has got me!" exclaimed the ardent lover.

 

They were engaged that night. The next day they were photographed

together—Sal with a very large hat, a great deal of hair, and a still

larger amount of feather; Cleaver's boy with a very small hat, an

immense check suit, and a pipe stuck at a knowing angle with the bowl

turned down. That same night Sal had still a lover, indeed, but the

glory of her betrothal attire was no more. Her hat was a mere trampled

ruin. Her fringe was patchy. She had a black eye; and all that remained

of Susy Murphy was in the lock-up for assault and battery. Without

doubt it was a stirring time for James Annan, and it is to be feared

that Mr. Cleaver and his customers did not get quite their fair share

of his attention while it lasted.

 

Susy Murphy got off under the First Offenders Act. But immediately upon

re-encountering her successful rival she incontinently became a second

offender, and was as summarily fined thirty shillings or seven days.

And it added to the bitterness of Cleaver's boy, that he had to come

good for both the hat ruined in the first battle and the dress torn to

shreds in the second.

 

Then it also became his duty to take out Miss Mackay every evening,

and so frequent were the demands upon his purse, that Cleaver's boy

perceived that nothing but marriage stood between him and financial

ruin.

 

"If I was only marriet," he soliloquised, "I could stop the lemonades

and ice-creams. They're juist terrible expensive. I declare Sal thinks

naething o' a dozen bottles. And gin ye stickit a preen until her ony

gate, I declare she wad fizz."

 

It occurred to him, however, that as a temporary alternative it might

be possible to increase his earnings. And Cleaver's boy was not above

asking for what he wanted.

 

"Guid jobs wants finding nooadays!" was a favourite __EXPRESSION__ of his.

 

Now there was a certain Bailie Holden among the customers of Mr.

Cleaver. This dignitary had succeeded to the responsible position

of Convener of the Cleaning and Lighting department—a division of

the city's municipal business which has always been associated with

excellent eating and drinking, and a good deal of both.

 

Bailie Holden had the finest taste in the light wines of his country

of any man on the council. In his happier moments of inspiration he

could tell the age of Long John to within a year. Now Bailie Holden

had, among other excellent domestic properties, a kitchen-maid who

was not above casting soft eyes at spruce James Annan of Cleaver's,

so _débonnaire_, with his blue apron and his basket over his arm. And

James had cultivated the acquaintance according to his opportunity,

without, of course, thinking it necessary to say anything to Sal

Mackay—or, for the matter of that, to Sue Murphy either. So that, in

the course of conversation at the area door, it fell out that Cleaver's

boy mentioned his desire to be no more Cleaver's boy, but a servant of

the city corporation in the department of Cleaning and Lighting. And

the kitchen-maid answered, keeping her eyes on James and adjusting her

tumbled cap at the same time—

 

"I'll speak to the maister when he comes through the back kitchen, to

smoke his pipe in the yaird after dinner-time."

 

For it was the use and wont of Bailie Holden, when he was without

company, or could shunt the entertainment of it upon his wife, to put

on a seedy garden coat and slip off quietly round by the greenhouses.

Here he took from the edge of a heating tube a short clay pipe of

excessive blackness; then from a canister he extracted a snaky twist of

Bogie roll. Bailie Holden was renowned for keeping the best cigars in

the city, and he also smoked them regularly indoors. His wife, indeed,

did not allow anything else. But he came outside for his real smoke,

in his shirt-sleeves in the warm evenings, and in his garden coat when

it was colder. For though to all men he was now Havanna of the most

exclusive brand, and all his appointments like unto that dignity, yet

at the heart of him he was still kindly Bogie roll.

 

The Bailie thought on many things out there in the dark as he nuzzled

down the glowing ash in the pipe-bowl close under his nose. He thought,

for instance, of the year Elizabeth and he were married, when they

started at the foot of Morrison Street in one room at the back of the

gasfitter's shop. They did not keep a servant then, and Elizabeth had

not yet learned to object to the smoking of Bogie roll. Indeed, her

father and her three brothers (all honest masons) incessantly smoked

nothing else. But when there was need to find a place in the little

back-room for another person with no experience in Bogie roll where he

came from, then the Bailie had gone out every night to the backyard,

sat down on a roll of lead piping and smoked a black pipe, with a

babe's little complainings tugging at his heart all the while. And the

memory of the Bogie roll outside the window, across which the black

shadows went and came, had somehow kept his heart warm all through the

years.

 

And, strange it is to say it, but though he was in many ways a

difficult man to serve, yet many a servant had remained another term,

simply because the master slipped out to take his smoke away from

every one in the evening. This is the whole idyll of the life of

Bailie Holden, Convener of the Committee on Cleaning and Lighting and

proximate Lord Provost of the city. It is curious that it should be an

idyll of Bogie roll.

 

 

 

 

ADVENTURE XXII.

 

THE SEDUCTION OF A BAILIE.

 

 

So it was at this most favourable of times that Cleaver's boy's

kitchen-maid approached her master with her request. It was just at the

critical moment when the Bailie was laying aside the Convener and host,

and donning the Morrison Street plumber, with the garden coat which

carried so strong an atmosphere of the idyllic Bogie roll.

 

"If ye please, sir, there's a young man——," the voice of the

kitchen-maid broke upon his dreams.

 

"Ah, Janet," said the Convener, getting helped into the garden coat,

for he was not now so slim as once he had been, "there always is a

young man! And that's how the world goes on!"

 

"But," said Janet, the kitchen-maid, "this is a very nice young man.

You may have seen him, sir. He comes here twice every day from Mr.

Cleaver's, the butcher's, sir."

 

"No, Janet," replied the Bailie, amicably, "I do not know that I have

observed him. You see, my duties do not compel me to be cleaning the

kitchen steps when nice young men come from Cleaver's!"

 

"Sir," said Janet, with a little privileged indignation, "James Annan,

sir, is a most respectable young man."

 

"And he asked you to speak to me?"

 

"Oh no, sir! Indeed, no, sir! But I thought, sir, that in your

department you might have need of a steady young man."

 

"I have, indeed, Janet. You are as right as ever you will be in your

life," said the Convener of Cleaning and Lighting, thinking of the

ravages which the traditional hospitality of the department sometimes

made among his steadiest young men.

 

"What are his desires, Janet?" said the Bailie; "does he want a chief

inspectorship, or will he be content to handle a broom?"

 

"Oh, not an inspectorship—at first, sir. And he can handle anything,

indeed, sir," said Janet, breathlessly, for the Convener had endued

himself with his coat and showed signs of moving gardenwards.

 

"Including your chin, my dear," said the Bailie, touching (it is very

regrettable to have to state) one of Janet's plump dimples with the

action which used fifty years ago to go by the name of "chucking." He

had dined, his wife was safely up stairs out of harm's way, and Bogie

roll glowed cloudily before him. Let these be his excuses.

 

"James Annan, nor no one else, has more to do with my chin than I like

to let them, sir," said Janet, who came from Inverness, and had a very

clear idea of business.

 

The Bailie laughed and went out.

 

"I will bear it in mind, Janet," said he, for he felt that he was

wasting time. He did not mean Janet's dimpled chin.

 

"Better put it down in your notebook—I'll fetch it, sir!" And Janet

promptly fetched a black leather case, round-shouldered with importance

and bulgy with business.

 

So the Bailie stood in the half-light which came from the kitchen

window, and wetted the stub of a lead-pencil, which Janet had carried

for years in the pocket of her working-dresses without ever needing it.

He hesitated what to write.

 

"The young man's name, sir, is James Annan, and you can send the letter

in care of me, sir," said Janet, with a subtle suggestiveness. She

tiptoed round till she touched his sleeve, so as to look over at what

he was writing.

 

"Thank you, Janet; anything else?" asked the Bailie.

 

"No, sir," said Janet, hesitating with her finger at her lip, "unless,

sir, you could think to put him on this district."

 

So it happened that in due time Mr. Cleaver lost the services of

Cleaver's boy. These valuable assets were simultaneously gained by the

city corporation in the department of Cleaning and Lighting. This has

been the immemorial method in which subordinate positions have been

filled, according to the best traditions of the municipal service. The

great thing is, of course, to catch your convener, as it were, between

dinner and Bogie roll.

 

James Annan was placed on the southern district, and his duty was to

mark in a notebook, less important but a good deal cleaner than the

Bailie's, the names of the streets which were attended to in their

order, and also the exact moment when each final ash-backet was heaped

upon the cart.

 

What precise benefit trim Janet of Inverness got from the arrangement

is not clear. For, being occupied during the night, Cleaver's boy

could no more come for the orders early in the morning, nor yet trot

whistling down the area steps an hour later with the laden basket upon

his arm. So that Janet, supposing the matter interested her at all,

seemed definitely to be the loser.

 

Yet one never knows. For the ways of girls from Inverness are deep

as the sea is deep in the unplumbed places in the middle, which are

painted the deepest indigo on the atlases. James Annan continued to

be called Cleaver's boy, in spite of the fact that a successor at six

shillings a week had been appointed, who now wore Cleaver's boy's

discarded blue aprons. In other ways he would have been glad to succeed

to the perquisites of Cleaver's boy. But he was a sallow-faced youth

with straight hair, who used his tobacco without the aid of a pipe. So

Janet did not deign to bandy a single word with the new boy. He was

no more than a penny-in-the-slot machine, wound up to deliver so many

pounds of steak every day. The kitchen steps were now always cleaned in

the early dawn, and Janet went about in her old wrapper all the morning

and most of the afternoon.

 

She had taken a saving turn, she said, as if it had been the measles.

It was all very well for the table-maid always to wear a black frock.

 

But though she saw less of Cleaver's boy (the original and only genuine

article), it is possible, and indeed likely, that Janet of Inverness

knew more of the romance of Susy and Sal than Cleaver's boy gave

her credit for. Let those who try to run three or four love affairs

abreast, like horses in a circus ring, take warning. Janet of Inverness

had never heard of either Sal or Susy from the lips of Cleaver's boy.

Nevertheless, there was not much of importance to her schemes which

was not familiar to the wise little head set upon the plumply demure

shoulders of Janet of Inverness.

 

 

 

 

ADVENTURE XXIII.

 

THE AMOROUS ADVENTURES OF A NIGHT-SHIFT MAN.

 

 

An interview which Cleaver's boy had to endure may throw some light

upon this. By some strange law of contrary, the undisputed possession

of James Annan's affections damped Sal's ardour. She became flighty

and difficult in her moods. Cleaver's boy could not take her to

enough places of resort, or at least, not to the right ones. So long

as he slighted her and rubbed her face with snow as a regular method

of courtship, she could not love him enough. But now, when she was

formally engaged to him and the alliance had been acknowledged by

Providence and Miss Cecilia Tennant, Sal suddenly found that she did

not care so much about Cleaver's boy after all. This happened in the

second week of the new situation in the department of Cleaning and

Lighting.

 

Sal came home from the mill at six. James went on duty at eight.

Consequently it was now usually about seven when James called. It

was an unhappy and ill-chosen time, as anybody but a man would have

known. For Sal appeared to be in some undress, and was indeed engaged

in frizzling her front hair with a pair of hot knitting needles,

occasionally burning her fingers and her forehead in the process.

 

"Hoo are ye the nicht, Sal?" said James, standing at the cheek of the

door and crossing his legs comfortably. Someone (he forgot who) had

told him he looked well that way.

 

"Naething the better for seein' you!" retorted Sal over her shoulder.

She never took her eyes off the fragment of mirror which was secured

to the wall by two long nails and the broken end of another knitting

needle.

 

"Wy Sal, what's wrang wi' ye?" began Cleaver's boy, anxiously. For

though in the affairs of men, as between boy and boy, his voice was

most for open war, yet in the things of love he liked peace and

sacrificed much to secure it.

 

Sal humped up the shoulder next him and turned sharply away from him

with a gesture indicative of the greatest disdain—without, however,

taking her eyes from the faint blue smoke which went up from the left

side of her fringe, to which she had at that moment applied a fresh

pair of red-hot knitting needles.

 

"Tell me what's the maitter wi' ye, Sal," said James humbly. For the

spirit seemed to have departed out of him.

 

Sal tossed her head and made a sound which, though inarticulate,

indicated that much might be said upon that subject. She could and she

would.

 

Slowly Cleaver's boy extracted from his pocket a neat parcel done up in

paper.

 

"Hae, Sal!" he said, going forward to her elbow and offering them to

her; "hae, here are some sweeties I fetched ye."

 

They were her favourite brandy-balls, and on a suitable day, with a

light wind and strong sun, their perfume carried a quarter of a mile.

James had never known them fail of their effect before. But now,

with a swift half-turn, Sal snatched them out of his hand and flung

them behind the fire. Cleaver's boy stood aghast. They had cost him

fourpence-halfpenny at Tam Luke's shop, and would have cost twice as

much but for Tam's good offices in the weighing department.

 

"What's wrang wi' the brandy-balls, Sal?" he cried in despair. The like

of this had never happened before in his experience. Thus Time works

out its revenges.

 

"Did ye get them oot o' an ash-backet?"[4] at last cried Sal, breaking

her indignant silence.

 

"No," said innocent James, "I got them at Tam Luke's for

fourpence-halfpenny."

 

"So ye say!" returned Sal, who was determined not to be appeased.

 

The brandy-balls were now flaming up the chimney, and fast dissolving

into their elements with a sickly smell and a fizzling noise.

 

"Tell us what ye hae against us, Sal; oot wi' it!" said Cleaver's boy,

who recognised the great truth that with a woman it is always better to

be at the bottom of what she knows, and that at once.

 

"I'm no gaun to keep company wi' ony man that gangs on the nicht

shift!" cried Sal, turning with the needles in her hand and stamping

her foot. "I'll let ye ken that Sal Mackay thinks mair o' hersel' than

that. I hae some pride!"

 

The murder was out. But poor James, who thought that he had done a

fine thing in attaining promotion, knew not what to reply.

 

"And what differ does that make, Sal?" asked Cleaver's boy in

astonishment.

 

"What differ does it make? Hear to the cuddy! Differ—juist this differ,

that ye'll walk oot wi' some dafter lass than Sal Mackay. I hae mair

respect for mysel' than to bemean mysel' to gang wi' a nicht-shift man!"

 

"But," said James, "I get far better pay. Think o' that, Sal!"

 

"I'm no carin' for that, when I canna be there when ye spend it," said

the mercenary Sal, with, however, commendable straightforwardness.

 

"But I fetched ye the brandy-balls, Sal," persisted the once proud boy

of Cleaver's.

 

"Brandy-balls! _That_ for your brandy-balls!" cried Sal, pointing to

the fireplace, in which a little blue flame was still burning, at the

spot where the Tam Luke's sweetmeats had been so irregularly consumed.

"D'ye think that Sal Mackay is to be dependent every nicht on a chap

that has to gang on duty at half-past seven?——"

 

"Eight o'clock!" said Cleaver's boy, eagerly.

 

"At half-past seven," said Sal, jerking her head pugnaciously at each

syllable, "he pits on claes that are a disgrace to be seen forbye

smelled. And what's to come o' the lemonades noo, I wad like to ken—or

o' the gallery at the theaytre?"

 

"There's Saturday afternoon, Sal," said James placably, with a sudden

access of cheerfulness. He had scored a point.

 

"Aye, there's Saturday afternune," replied Sal, with chilling cynicism,

"and what will ye do with your Saturday afternoon? Ye'll maybe tak' me

ower to Aberdour again in the boat, and be sae dazed and sleepy-like

that ye'll faa asleep on the road, as ye did the last time. And hae

everybody sayin', 'My word, Sal, but ye hae a blythe young chap there.

Ye maun hae been fine heartsome company to him?' D'ye think ony lass

that thinks onything o' hersel' wad stand the like o' that?"

 

Sal stamped her foot and paused for a reply. It was certainly an

awkward question. Sal, like most women (thought James) was a demon at

"casting-up" when she began.

 

Cleaver's boy scratched his curly head and advanced towards Sal. He

felt that in the war of words he was going to have very distinctly the

worst of it. But he thought that he might fare better nearer at hand.

It was one of his favourite axioms that "it is aye best to argue wi'

the weemen at close grips." Which, whether it be true or not, at least

shows that Cleaver's boy was a youth of some experience—but Sal Mackay

chose to misinterpret his action.

 

She turned instantly, and, snatching up an iron goblet of hot water

which stood on the hearth, she advanced to meet him, crying, "I'll gie

ye your fill o' throwin' water on decent folk. An' this water will keep

ye fine and warm on the nicht shift, my lad!"

 

At this Cleaver's boy turned and fled. But as he scudded down the

stairs, bent nearly double, the boiling water from Sal Mackay's pan

fell in stinging drops upon the back of his neck, and, what was worse,

upon his suit of new clothes, bought with his week's wages and donned for the first time.