2015년 2월 26일 목요일

Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City 4

Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City 4



Whenever Cleg saw his father refrain from Hare's public and the evening
sessions of Mistress Flannigan's interesting circle, he knew that Tim
had a project on hand. Generally he took no particular heed to these.
For it was his custom, as soon as he saw his father off on any of his
raids, to go and report himself casually at the nearest police-station,
where the sergeant's wife knew him. She often gave him a "piece" with
sugar on it, having known his mother before ever she left the parish of
Ormiland.
 
The sergeant's wife remembered her own happy escape from being Mrs.
Timothy Kelly, and though her heart had been sore against Isbel at the
time, she had long forgotten the feeling in thankfulness that her lines
had fallen on the right side of the law. But she had never confided to
the sergeant that she had once known Tim Kelly somewhat intimately.
 
Cleg did not mean to be mixed up in any of his father's ill-doings if
he could help it, so upon these occasions he frequented the precincts
of the police-station as much as the sergeant's wife would let him.
 
It was his custom to take his "piece"an excellent thick slice of bread
with brown sugar on itand seat himself on a luxurious paling opposite
to eat it. The fact that a great many message boys passed that way may
have had something to do with Cleg's choice of locality. Cleg liked to
be envied. And, seeing the "piece," more than one boy was sure to give
chase. This introduced a healthy variety into Cleg's life. He liked to
fool with these young men of the message basket. Exercise sharpens the
appetite, and when this morning the butcher's boy chivvied him over the
parched-up grass field that lay between the station and the brickyard,
Cleg fairly whooped in his joy.
 
At first he ran slowly, and apparently with great alarm, so that the
butcher's boy had not the least doubt that he easily could catch him.
Cleg held the sergeant's wife's "piece" in his hand as he ran, so that
the butcher's boy could see the thick sugar on the top of the yellow
butter. This stirred up the pursuer's desires, and he made a spurt to
seize Cleg. Had the assailant been the grocer's boy, to whom sugar and
butter were vain things, Cleg would have had to try another plan. Now,
when the butcher's boy spurted, Cleg almost let himself be caught. He
heard close behind him the labouring of the avenger. With a sudden rush
he sped thirty yards in front; then he turned and ran backwards, eating
the sergeant's wife's "piece" as he ran. This aggravated the butcher's
boy to such an extent that he had to stop with his hand on his panting
side, and curse Cleg's parentagewhich, sad to relate, pleased Cleg
more than anything. He said it was prime. By which he meant, not the
sergeant's wife's "piece," but the whole situation, and especially the
disgust of the butcher's boy.
 
Then Cleg, being contented, offered honourable terms, for he and the
butcher's boy were in reality very good friends. He gave his late
pursuer a fair half of the bread and sugar, but reserved the crust for
himself. So, munching amicably, Cleg and the butcher's boy returned
together to the paling on which Cleg had been sitting.
 
But, alas! during his temporary absence from his care, Tam Luke, the
baker's boy, had come along. And in pursuit of the eternal feud between
butcher's boys and baker's boys, he had overturned the basket and
rolled the meat on the road. Luke was now sitting on the rail a little
way along, smoking a pipe loaded with brown paper, with a kind of
ostentatious calmness.
 
When half across the field the butcher's boy observed the insult to his
basket. Yet he said nothing till he came quite near. Then, in the most
friendly manner possible, he seized the defiled leg of mutton, destined
for the dinner of an eminent Doctor in Divinity, and hit Tam Luke a
swinging blow over the head with it, which not only broke that youth's
pipe, but for a season spoiled the shape of his mouth, and tumbled him
incontinently over the fence.
 
The baker's boy rose, shedding freely bits of clay pipe and exceedingly
evil words. A battle royal seemed imminent to one who did not know the
commonplaces of friendly intercourse among these worthies. But the
baker's boy contented himself with stating over and over in varied and
ornamental language, highly metaphorical in parts, what he would do
to the butcher's boy if he hit him again. However, the butcher's boy
had too great an advantage in handling Professor Hinderlands' leg of
mutton, and the tempest gradually blew itself out.
 
Whereupon all parties betook themselves to a street pump to wash the
various articles which had been strewed in the mire, and to dry them
on the butcher's boy's blue-striped apron, which he wore girt about
him like a rope. It was a highly instructive sight. And had the cooks
of various respectable families seen the process, they would have had
a sufficient answer to their frequent indignant question that morning,
"What can be keeping Cleaver's young vaigabond?"
 
Also, had they happened to pass, a number of the good ladies who sat
down so comfortably to enjoy their dinners (which they called "lunch"
if anybody happened to call) would certainly have gone without the
principal course.
 
But the butcher's boy and the baker's boy were not in the least
distressed. Such things happened every day. It was all in the way of
business. And as for our hero, he, as we have indicated before, merely
remarked, in his vulgar way, that it was prime.
 
So far he had had a good, interesting day, and was exceedingly pleased
with himself.
 
Presently all three went and calmly smoked on the side of the road,
roosting contentedly on the paling, while Tam Luke, who had got a prize
for good reading at the school, drew out of his pocket "The Bully
Boys' Budget"an international journal of immense circulation, which
described the adventures of associated bands of desperate ruffians
(aged, on an average, nine) in New York, a city which Cleaver's loon
looked upon as a boys' Paradise. Boys were discouraged in Edinburgh.
They got no chance of distinguishing themselves.
 
"It's a most michty queer thing," said Cleg, "that the story says, if
Tam Luke reads it richt——"
 
"I'll smash yer tawtie heid!" remarked that gentleman, mightily
offended at the insinuation.
 
"If Tam Luke reads it richt," continued Cleg, "that in New York the
bobbies rin frae the boys; but here the boys rin frae the bobbies like
fun."
 
"_Me?_" said Cleaver's boy. "I wadna rin for ony bobby in the hale
toon."
 
"An' _me_," cried Tam Luke, with mighty contempt, "I lickit a big bobby
the nicht afore yestreen. I could fecht a bobby wi' yae hand tied ahint
my back."
 
"Bobbies are nane sic bad folks. The sergeant's wife over there gied me
a 'piece,'" said Cleg gratefully.
 
"Ye are a reid-heided Irish traitor!" said the butcher's boy with
emphasis.
 
"It's my faither that's reid-heided," said Cleg promptly; "but tak'
that ony way for speaking ill o' the family!"
 
And with the back of his hand he knocked the libeller of his forbears
over into the field.
 
"I'm gaun to be captain o' a band o' robberswill ye baith join?" said
Tam Luke.
 
Cleaver's boy was about to wreak his vengeance on Cleg from the other
side of the fence, but he paused with his arm suspended to think over
the proposal.
 
"I'm gaun to be captain o' a band mysel'! Will ye join?" said the
butcher's boy to Cleg, instead of assaulting him as he had first
intended.
 
"What to do?" asked practical Cleg.
 
"To fecht the poliss, of course!" cried the butcher's boy and the
baker's boy together. Their unanimity was wonderful.
 
"_There's the sergeant the noo!_" said Cleg quietly, pointing across
the road.
 
And it was indeed the sergeant, who, having been on night duty, had
just risen and strolled out to see what kind of weather it was.
 
The valiant captains of the decimating bands which were to terrorise
the police of the city, descended from their several roosts as with
one mind, seized their baskets, and sped round opposite corners with
amazing speed.
 
Cleg Kelly was left alone, sitting on the paling. He pulled out what
remained of his crust, and as he ate it with relish, he laughed aloud
and kicked his heels with glee, so that the sergeant, stretching
himself after his day-sleep, called across to the boy——
 
"What's up wi' ye, Cleg? Ye seem to be enjoyin' yoursel'!"
 
But all the answer he could get out of Cleg was just, "O man, sergeant,
it's prime!"
 
But as to whether he meant the crust or only things in general, the
sergeant was none the wiser.
 
 
 
 
ADVENTURE VI.
 
CLEG TURNS BURGLAR.
 
 
Cleg had watched his father furtively all day. Little conversation
passed between these two. Cleg devoted much of his time to a
consideration of the best means of legitimate gain in his new
profession of capitalist. He possessed the large sum of one shilling
and a penny. It was banked upon sound old principles in the hollow
end of a brick, which was buried under a flag in the backyard of a
brewery. Cleg had hidden it with mystic incantations, and now carried
a red worsted thread twisted round his finger to remind him of its
whereabouts.
 
But there was another reason besides his large capital, why Cleg was
unusually watchful of his father that day. First of all, Tim Kelly
had come home sober from Hare's public the night before. That was a
suspicious circumstance in itself. It showed not only that his ready
cash had all been liquefied, but that Mistress Hare had drawn a line
under the big chalk score behind her door. This line was the intimation
that the single file of figures must be wiped off before another dram
was served.
 
"Ye've had Larry on your back long enough, sure, Tim!" said Mistress
Hare, who regulated these matters in person. "Idleness is a most deadly
sin, Father Malony sez!" continued the landlady devoutly.
 
"Shure, an' it's not the divil's sin, thin, Mistress Hare," said Tim
acutely, "for he's busy enough!"
 
Tim was the only burglar with a brogue in the city, and as such was
dear to the heart of Mistress Hare. For the Scot, when he takes to the
investigation of other people's houses, does so grimly and without
romance. But Tim had always a hint of Celtic imagination and even of
poetry in his creations.
 
For instance, all that day on which Cleg kept his eye on his father,
Tim was meditating a raid on the house of Mr. Robert Grey Tennant, a
comfortable burgess of the burgh, who for the ease of his later life
had built himselfnot a lordly pleasure house indeed, but a comfortable
mansion of Craigleith stone, exactly like three hundred and sixty-five
other mansions on the south side of the city.
 
There was at the back of Aurelia Villa a little bordering of flowers
and strawberries. These, however, never came to much, for the cats
broke the flowers and extraneous boys stole the strawberries. There was
also a little green plot, big enough for parlour croquet, but not big
enough for lawn tennis. Yet this did not prevent the serious-minded
and inventive young woman of the house, Miss Cecilia Tennant, from
frequently playing what she called "pocket-handkerchief tennis" on this
scraplet of lawn. And it was indeed a lively game, when two or three
of her admirers arrived with racquets and rubber shoes to engage in
silk-striped summer strife.
 
When a couple of champions of the Blackhouse Club met on the same side
of the net, they winked at each other, and amusement struggled with
politeness within them. But when each one of their services came near
to annihilating an opponent's nose, and as they sent their returns
out of court and over boundary walls with monotonous regularity, they
changed their minds. Especially was this so when Miss Cecilia Tennant
and a certain Junior Partner in a mercantile concern in the town, put
in with equal certainty neat services and returns, dropping the balls
unexpectedly into odd corners as if playing with egg spoons. They asked
the Junior Partner how he did it. The Junior Partner said it was native
genius. But perhaps the undisclosed fact that Cecilia Tennant and he
played together three nights out of six on that lawn had rather more to
do with it. Pocket-handkerchief tennis is certainly convenient for some
things. It keeps the players very close to one another, except when
they fall outan advantage which it shares with ballooning.
 
But Tim Kelly was not interested in this house because of the desirable
young men who played tennis there, nor yet because of any love of the
young woman for whose sweet sake they bought new scarves and frequented
the neighbourhood on the chance of a casual meeting. On the contrary,
Timothy was after the spoons. Hall-marked silver was his favourite
form of sport. And for this he had all the connoisseur's eagerness and
appreciation.
 
His son was, on the contrary, exceedingly interested in the house
itself. He was the most fervent of Miss Cecilia Tennant's admirers,
though he had never told her so. This peculiarity he shared with a
great many other young gentlemen, including every male teacher except
two (already attached) in Hunker Court school.
 
Yet in spite of all this affection, before midnight of that autumn
night, Cleg Kelly, future Christian, became a burglarand that upon the
premises of his benefactress, Miss Cecilia Tennant. It happened in this
wise.
 
Tim sat all day on the floor of his house at home. He did so from
necessity, not from choice. For his apartment was airily furnished in
the Japanese fashion, with little except a couple of old mattresses
and as many rugs. There were no chairs. They had been removed during
Tim's last absence in the "Calton" by the landlord in lieu of rent. So
Tim sat on the floor and worked with a file among a bundle of keys and
curiously constructed tools. There was, for instance, a great lever
with a fine thin edge set sideways to slip beneath windows on stormy
nights, when the wrench of the hasp from its fastening would not be
heard.
 
There were delicate little keys with spidery legs which Tim looked
at with great admiration, and loved more than he had ever loved his
wife and all his relations. There were also complicated wrenching
implements, with horror latent about them, as though they had come from
some big arm-chaired, red-glassed dental surgery. Tim Kelly was putting
his tools to rights, and Cleg watched him intently, for he also was a
conspirator.
 
At midday the boy vanished and reported himself at the
police-sergeant's. He asked for a "piece," and the sergeant's wife told
him to be off. She was busy and he might come back when the weans came
in for their dinners. She had not time to be always giving the likes of
him "pieces" in the middle of the day.
 
Cleg did not care. He was not particularly hungry. But he hung about
all afternoon in the neighbourhood of the police-station, and so
pestered the good-natured policemen off duty, that one of them
threatened him with "a rare belting" if he did not quit.
 
Whereupon Cleg buttoned up his jacket, made to himself a paper helmet,
and with a truncheon in his hand stalked about in front of the station,
taking up stray dogs in the name of the law. One of these he had
previously taught to walk upon its hind legs. This animal he arrested,
handcuffed with a twist of wire, and paraded over against the station
in a manner killingly comicmuch to the amusement of the passers-by,
as well as detrimental to the sobriety and discipline of the younger
officers themselves. But Cleg was seldom meddled with by the police.
He was under the protection of the sergeant's wife, who so often gave
him a "piece." She also gave "pieces" sometimes to the officers at the
station-house. For according as a policeman is fed, so is he. And it
was the sergeant's wife who stirred the porridge pot. Therefore Cleg
was left alone.
 
In this manner Cleg amused himself till dark, when he stole home. His
father was already coming down the stairs. Cleg rapidly withdrew.
His father passed out and took the narrowest lanes southward till he
entered the Queen's Park under the immanent gloom of the Salisbury
Crags. Cleg followed like his shadow. Tim Kelly often looked behind.
He boasted that he could hear the tramp of the regulation police boot
at least half a mile, and tell it from the tread of a circus elephant,
and even from the one o'clock gun at the Castle. But he saw no silent
boy tracking him noiselessly after the fashion of the Indian scout, so
vividly described in the "Bully Boys' Journal."
 
Tim Kelly bored his way into the eye of a rousing south wind that
"reesled" among the bare bones of Samson's Ribs, and hurled itself
upon Edinburgh as if to drive the city off its long, irregular ridge
into the North Sea. Bending sharply to the right, the burglar came
among buildings again. He crossed the marshy end of Duddingstone Loch.
It was tinder-dry with the drought. At the end of a long avenue was
to be seen the loom of houses, and the gleam of lights, as burgess's
wife and burgess moved in this order to their bedrooms and disarrayed
themselves for the night.
 
Tim Kelly hid behind a wall. Cleg crouched behind his father, but
sufficiently far behind not to attract his attention. Cleg was
taking his first lessons in the great craft of speculationwhich is
the obtaining of your neighbour's goods without providing him with
an equivalent in exchange. The trifling matter of your neighbour's
connivance, requisite in betting and stock transactions, escaped the
notice of the Kellys. But perhaps after all that did not matter.
 
Aurelia Villa, the home of Miss Cecilia Tennant (incidentally also of
her father, Mr. Robert Grey Tennant), darkened down early; for Mr.
Robert Tennant was an early riser, and early rising means early bedding
(and a very good thing too).
 
Tim Kelly knew all that, for his local knowledge was as astonishing
as his methods of obtaining it were mysterious. It was not twelve of
the clock when Tim drew himself over the wall out of the avenue, and
dropped lightly as a cat upon the pocket-handkerchief lawn, which all
the summer had been worn at the corners by the egg-spoon tennis of
Cecilia and the Junior Partner.
 
Tim Kelly was at the back door in a minute. It was down three steps. He
laid a bag of tools, which clinked a little as he took them out of his
pocket, on the stone ledge of the step. It might be safer, he thought,
to take a look round the house and listen for the hippopotamus tread
of the regulation bull-hide. In a moment after Tim was round at the
gable end flat among the strawberries. There it came! Clear and
solemnising fell the tread of the law in all its majestya bull's-eye
lantern swinging midships a sturdy girth, which could hardly, even by
courtesy, be called a waist. Flash! Like a search-light ran the ray of
the lantern over the front of the property of Mr. Robert Grey Tennant.
 
But the regulation boots were upon the feet of a man of probity. The
wearer opened the front gate, tramped up the steps, conscientiously
tried the front door and dining-room window of the end house in the
row. They were fast. All was well. Duty done. The owners might sleep
sound. They paid heavy police rates to a beneficent local authority.
Why should they not sleep well? But, alas! the regulation boots did not
take any cognisance of Tim Kelly with his nose among the strawberries,
or of a small boy who was speeding over the waste fields and back yards
into the Park. The small boy carried a parcel. He was a thief. This
small boy was Cleg Kelly, the hero of this tale.
 
Timothy Kelly rose from among the strawberries with laughter and scorn
in his heart. If the bobby had only gone to the back door instead of
the front, there was a parcel there, which it would have made him a
proud policeman to take to the head office. Tim Kelly stooped at the
steps to take up his precious satchel of tools. His hand met the bare
stone. His bag was gone! His heart dinned suddenly in his ears. This
was not less than witchcraft. He had never been ten yards from them
all the time. Yet the tools were gone without sound or sight of human
being. Then there was an interval.
 
* * * * *
 
During this interval Tim Kelly expressed his opinions upon things in
general. The details are quite unfit for publication.
 
But at that very moment, over at the end of Duddingstone Loch, a small
boy was whirling a small but heavy bag round his head.
 
"Once! Twice! Thriceand away!" he cried with glee. Something hurtled
through the air, and fell with a splash far in the black deeps of the
loch. Years after this the antiquary of the thirtieth century may find
this bundle, and on the strength of it he will take away the honest
character of our ancestors of the Iron Age, proving that burglary was
commonly and scientifically practised among them. But the memory of
Cleg Kelly will be clear.
 
Indeed, he was sound asleep when his father came in, breathing out
threatenings and slaughter. Tim listened intently with his ear at his
son's mouth, for it is well to be suspicious of every one. But Cleg's breathing was as natural and regular as that of an infant.

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