Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City 5

Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City 5

Yet there is no doubt whatever, that Cleg and not his father had been

guilty of both burglary and theft that night; and that Duddingstone

Loch was indictable for the reset of the stolen property.

 

Then Cleg Kelly, burglar, winked an eye at his father's back, and

settled himself to sleep the genuine sleep of the just.

 

 

 

 

ADVENTURE VII.

 

THE ADVENTURE OF THE COCKROACHES.

 

 

One day Cleg Kelly became paper-boy at the shop of Mistress Roy, at the

top corner of Meggat's Close. And he wanted you to know this. He was

no longer as the paper-boys who lag about the Waverley, waiting for

stray luggage left on the platforms, nor even as this match-boy. He was

in a situation.

 

His hours were from half-past six in the morning to half-past six in

the morning, when he began again. His wages were three shillings a

week—and his chance. But he was quite contented, for he could contrive

his own amenities by the way. His father had been in a bad temper ever

since he lost his tools, and so Cleg did not go home often.

 

This was the way in which he got his situation and became a member

of the established order of things, indeed, the next thing to a

voter. There had been a cheap prepaid advertisement in the "Evening

Scrapbook," which ran as follows:—

 

"WANTED, _an active and intelligent message-boy, able to read and

write. Must be well recommended as a Christian boy of good and willing

disposition. Wages not large, but will be treated as one of the

family.—Apply No. 2,301, _'Scrapbook'_ Office._"

 

Now Miss Cecilia Tennant thought this a most interesting and

encouraging advertisement. She had been for a long time on the look-out

for a situation to suit Cleg. The Junior Partner indeed could have

been induced to find a place for Cleg in "The Works," but it was

judged better that the transition from the freedom of the streets to

the lettered ease of an office desk should be made gradually. So Celie

Tennant went after this situation for Cleg in person.

 

The arrangement with Mistress Roy in the Pleasance was a little

difficult to make, but Celie made it. She went down one clammy evening,

when the streets were covered with a greasy slime, and the pavements

reflected the gloomy sky. In the grey lamp-sprinkled twilight she

reached the paper-shop. There were sheafs of papers and journals hung

up on the cheeks of the door. Coarsely coloured valentines hung in

the window, chiefly rude portraitures of enormously fat women with

frying-pans, and of red-nosed policemen with batons to correspond.

 

Celie Tennant entered. There was a heavy smell of moist tobacco all

about. The floor of the little shop was strewn with newspapers,

apparently of ancient date, certainly of ancient dirt. These rustled

and moved of themselves in a curious way, as though they had untimely

come alive. As indeed they had done, for the stir was caused by the

cockroaches arranging their domestic affairs underneath. Celie lifted

her nose a little and her skirts a good deal. It took more courage

to stand still and hear that faint rustling than to face the worst

bully of Brannigan's gang in the Sooth Back. She rapped briskly on the

counter.

 

A man came shuffling out of the room in the rear. He was clad in rusty

black, and had a short clay pipe in his mouth. His eyes were narrow and

foxy, and he looked unwholesomely scaly—as if he had been soaked in

strong brine for half a year, but had forgotten either to finish the

process, or to remove the traces of the incomplete pickling.

 

"Servant, m'am!" said he, putting his pipe behind him as he came into

the shop.

 

"I was referred here—to this address—from the office of the 'Evening

Scrapbook,'" said Celie, with great dignity, standing on her tiptoes

among the papers. "I called about the situation of message-boy you

advertised for."

 

"Ye wasna thinkin' o' applyin' yersel'!" said the man, with a weak

jocularity. "For my ain part I hae nae objections to a snod bit lass,

but the mistress michtna like it."

 

Miss Cecilia Tennant looked at him in a way that would have frozen a

younger man, but the frowsy object from the back shop only smirked and

laughed. With care, the jest would serve him a week. He made up his

mind to whom he would tell it when the lady was gone.

 

"I wish to recommend one of the boys from my class for the position.

His name is Charles Kelly. He is a smart boy of thirteen, and he is

anxious to get good and steady work. What are the wages you offer?"

 

The man looked cunningly all about the shop. He craned his neck over

the counter and looked up the street. He had a long-jointed body, and

a neck that shut up and pulled out like a three-draw telescope. Celie

Tennant shrank instinctively when the man protruded his head past her

in this curious manner, as she might have shrunk from some loathly

animal.

 

Then, having resumed his normal slouch behind the counter, he looked at

his visitant and said, "The wage is half a croon a week, and his chance

o' the drawer—the same as mysel'."

 

"His chance of the drawer!" said Celie, not understanding.

 

"When _she's_ oot," the man continued, laying his finger against

the side of his nose and winking with meaning and __EXPRESSION__ at his

visitor. The __EXPRESSION__ of disgust at the corner of Miss Tennant's

nose threatened to result in a permanent tilt, which might have been

unbecoming, and which certainly must have frightened the Junior Partner.

 

"When she's oot," repeated the frowsy one, confidentially, "your friend

is welcome to his chance o' the drawer—if," he added, with infinite

caution, "she was to leave it unlocked, which she seldom does. It's

lock'd the noo! See!" And he shook a greasy knob under the counter till

the drawer rattled against the bolt of the lock. "Oh, it's just like

her! She aye does that when she gangs oot. She's an awsome near woman!

She has nae confidence, nae open-hearted leeberality, sic' as a wife

ought to hae wi' the husband of her bosom."

 

"Do you want a message-boy, or do you not?" said Celie, who felt that

in the interests of Cleg she would face a battery of artillery, but who

really could not stand the rustling among the papers on the floor very

much longer.

 

"Certain she do that!" said the man, "an active boy, an intelligent

boy, a Christian boy—half a croon a week—and his chance o' the drawer."

 

Once more he protruded his head in that monstrously serpentine manner

round the corner of the low shop-door. But this time he retracted it

quick as lightning, and shuffled back into the room behind. Celie heard

him throw himself on a chair, which groaned under him.

 

"I'm sleepin' noo," he said, "sleepin' soond. Dinna say that I ever

spoke till ye, for I'll deny it if ye do!" he said.

 

Cecilia Tennant stood her ground bravely, though the newspapers on the

floor rustled continuously. She wondered why the path of duty was such

a cockroachy one. A moment afterward a grim-looking, hard-faced woman

entered. She was a tall woman, with a hooked nose and broad masculine

face. The eyes were at once fierce and suspicious. She marched straight

round the counter, lifting the little flap at the back and letting it

fall with a bang. The cat was sitting on the end of the counter nearest

the door of the inner room. The woman took her hand and swept it from

the counter, as though she had merely knocked off a little dust. The

cat went into the inner room like a projectile.

 

Then, having entrenched herself at the back of the counter, the

fierce-eyed woman turned sharp round and faced Celie Tennant.

 

"Well?" she said, with a certain defiance in her tone such as women

only use to one another, which was at once depreciatory and pitiful.

The Junior Partner would have turned and fled, but Celie Tennant was

afraid of no woman that walked.

 

"I came," she said, clearly and coldly, "to ask about the situation of

message-boy for one of my Mission lads. I was sent here from the office

of the newspaper. Has the situation been filled?"

 

"What is the boy's name?" asked the woman, twitching the level single

line of her black brows at her visitor.

 

"His name is Charles Kelly."

 

"Son o' Tim Kelly that leeves in the Brickfield?" asked the woman

quickly.

 

"I believe that is his father's name," said Celie, giving glance for

glance.

 

"Then we dinna want the likes o' him here!" said the woman, half

turning on her heel with a certain dark contempt.

 

"But my name is Cecilia Tennant of Glenleven Road, and I am quite

willing to give security for the boy—to a reasonable amount, that is——"

continued Celie, who had a practical mind and much miniature dignity.

 

"Will ye leave the money?" asked the woman, as if a thought struck her.

 

"Certainly not," replied Celie, "but I will write you a line stating

that I hold myself responsible for anything he is proved guilty of

stealing, to the extent of ten pounds."

 

It was thus that Cleg Kelly became newsboy and general assistant to

Mistress Roy and her husband at Roy's corner.

 

As Celie went out, she heard Mr. Roy stretching himself and yawning, as

though awakening out of a deep sleep.

 

"Wha's that ye hae had in?" he inquired pleasantly.

 

"What business is that o' yours, ye muckle slabber?" returned his wife

with instant aggression.

 

And the cockroaches continue to rustle all the time beneath the carpet

of old newspapers.

 

 

 

 

ADVENTURE VIII.

 

THE FLIGHT OF SHEEMUS.

 

 

Next morning Cleg Kelly entered upon his duties. He carried orders to

the various publishing offices for about two hundred papers in all. He

had often been there before upon his own account, so that the crowd and

the rough jocularity were not new to him. But now he practised a kind

of austere, aristocratic hauteur. He was not any longer a prowler on

the streets, with only a stance for which he might have to fight. He

was a newsvendor's assistant. He would not even accept wager of battle

upon provocation offered. He could, however, still kick; and as he had

an admirable pair of boots with tackety soles an inch thick to do it

with, he soon made himself the most respected boy in the crowd.

 

On returning to the Pleasance, he was admitted through the chink of the

door by Mistress Roy, who was comprehensively dressed in a vast yellow

flannel bed-gown, which grew murkier and murkier towards her feet. Her

hair was tumbling about her eyes. That, too, was of a yellow grey, as

though part of the bed-gown had been ravelled out and attached loosely

to her head. Feathers and woolly dust were stuck impartially over hair

and bed-gown.

 

"Write the names on the papers as I cry them," she said to Cleg, "and

look slippy."

 

Cleg was quick to obey. He had, in fact, his pencil ready.

 

"Cready, number seventeen—three stairs back. Dinna write a' that. Write

the name, an' mind the rest," said Mistress Roy.

 

"MacVane, twenty-wan, shop," and so on went the list interminably.

 

Mistress Roy kept no books, but in her memory she had the various

counts and reckonings of all grades of her customers. She retained

there, for instance, the exact amounts of the intricate scores of

the boys who took in the "Boys of the City." She knew who had not

paid for the last chapter of "Ned Kelly; or, the Iron-clad Australian

Bushranger." She had a mental gauge on the great roll of black twist

tobacco which lay on the counter among old "Evening Scraps." She knew

exactly how much there was in the casks of strong waters under the

stairs, from which, every Sunday, her numerous friends and callers were

largely entertained.

 

When Cleg went out to deliver his papers he had nearly a hundred calls

to make. But such was his sense of locality and his knowledge of the

district that, with the help of a butcher's boy of his acquaintance (to

whom he promised a reading of the "Desperadoes of New Orleans; or, the

Good Ku Klux"), he managed to deliver all—except a single "Scotsman"

to one Mackimmon, who lived in a big land at the corner of Rankeillor

Street. Him he was utterly unable to discover.

 

Upon his return Mistress Roy was waiting for him.

 

"Did ye deliver them a'?" she asked, bending forward her head in a

threatening manner as if expecting a negative reply.

 

"A' but yin!" said Cleg, who was in good spirits, and pleased with

himself.

 

His mistress took up a brush. Cleg's hand dropped lightly upon a pound

weight. He did not mean to play the abused little message-boy if he

knew it.

 

"And what yin might that be?" said Mistress Roy.

 

"Mackimmon," said the boy briefly, "he's no in Rankeillor Street ava'."

 

The hand that held the brush went back in act to throw. Now this was,

from the point of view of psychological dynamics, a mistake in tactics.

A woman should never attempt to throw anything in controversy, least of

all a brush. Her stronghold is to advance to the charge with all her

natural weapons and vigour. But to throw a brush is to abdicate her

providential advantages. And so Mistress Roy found.

 

A straight line is the shortest distance between two points, and that

was the course described by the pound weight on which Cleg Kelly

dropped his hand. It sped fair and level from his hand, flung low as he

had many a time skimmed stones on Saint Margaret's Loch in the hollow

under the Crags.

 

"_Ouch!_" suddenly said Mistress Roy, taken, as she herself said, "in

the short of the wind." The hearth-brush with which she had been wont

to correct her former message boys fell helplessly to the ground.

 

"Fetch me a toothfu' frae the back o' the door. Oh, ye villain, Cleg

Kelly! I'm a' overcome like!" she said.

 

Cleg went to the back of the door where there was a keg with a spigot.

He brought his mistress a drink in a little tinnikin.

 

She seemed to have forgotten to be angry, and bent her brows upon him

more pleasantly than she had yet done.

 

"I thocht that ye were a religious boy," she said.

 

Cleg stood back a little with Mackimmon's paper still in his hand.

 

"Pund wecht for besom shank is good religion," said the imperfect

Christian but excellent message-boy.

 

"Gang and deliver that paper!" Mistress Roy commanded, again looking up.

 

"I want my breakfast," said Cleg, with an air of sullen determination.

 

His mistress looked at him a moment, still sitting with the tinnikin of

undutied whisky in her hand, and occasionally taking a sip. Cleg eyed

her level-fronted.

 

She gave in all at once.

 

"Tak' the knife and help yoursel'," she said, pointing to a loaf and a

piece of yellow cheese.

 

She went into a back room.

 

"Get up, Jock," she said, giving the clothes a jerk over the foot of

the bed, and seizing a water can. Her husband rose to his feet on

the floor without a word. Thus was business begun in Mistress Roy's

paper-shop on the Pleasance.

 

And so that day went on, the first of many. When Celie Tennant asked

Cleg how he was getting on, he said, as the manner of his kind is,

"Fine!" And no word more could she get out of him. For Cleg was not a

boy to complain. His father, Timothy Kelly, was safely in gaol, and

that was enough to give Cleg an interest in life. Moreover, he could

save some of his three shillings a week to give to Vara Kavannah to

help her with the children.

 

He had not as yet taken advantage of the "chance of the drawer"

offered by Mr. Roy. But, on the other hand, he had stuck out for three

shillings and his keep.

 

Also, as the advertisements which he read every day in the papers said,

he meant to see that he got it.

 

Vara Kavannah was a friend of Cleg's. She lived with her mother in

a poor room in the Tinklers' Lands, and tried to do her duty by her

little baby brother Gavin and her younger brother Hugh. Her mother was

a friend of Mr. Timothy Kelly's, and there is no more to be said. The

only happy time for all of them was when both Mr. Kelly, senior, and

Sal Kavannah were provided for in the gaol on the Calton. But this did

not happen often at one time. When it did, Cleg went up the long stairs

and told Vara. Then they started and took the baby and Hugh for a long

walk in the Queen's Park. Cleg carried the baby. The boys of his own

age did not mock him to his face for doing this. The Drabble had done

it once, and severely regretted it for several days, during which time

his face conveyed a moral lesson to all beholders.

 

It was also a happy time for Vara Kavannah when her mother was safely

locked up on a long sentence, or when for some weeks she disappeared

from the city. Her father, a kindly, weak man, stood the dog's life his

wife led him as long as possible.

 

Sheemus Kavannah was a poet. The heart was in him which tells men that

the world is wide and fair. He had endured his wife in the bitterness

of his heart, till late one evening he rose, and with his wife lying on

the floor, a log, he awaked his little lass. There were tears streaming

down his cheeks. His daughter started from her bed with her hair all

about her. She was used to sudden and painful wakenings.

 

"Vara," he said, speaking in Irish, "daughter of Sheemus, Vara

Kavannah, hark to me. Mavourneen, my heart is broke with your mother.

It's no good at all to stay. I am going to Liverpool for work, and when

I get it I shall come back and take you away—you, Vara, and Hugh and

little Gavin. Lonely shall my road be and far. But I shall return, I

shall return!"

 

Now Vara, being bred where they spoke not the tongue of the old

country, understood nothing but the last words, "I shall return, I

shall return!"

 

So it was in this way that Cleg Kelly became father and mother to the

little company of three in the Tinklers' Lands.

 

As he went on the way of his duty, he found out some things about

the business capacity of Mistress Roy that would have astonished the

police. He had, in the impetuous ardour of youth, cleared away the

accumulated papers on the floor, and raided the swarming cockroaches.

 

"Hullo, mother, what's the matter here?" cried one of the customers of

the place, coming to Mistress Roy, who sat in the little den at the

back.

 

"Naething," said that lady. "It's only that daft laddie. He disna think

I gie him aneuch to do, so he's ta'en to finding wark for himsel'."

 

The customer, a burly, clean-shaven man, took a long look at Cleg.

 

"Tim Kelly's kid," said the woman, by way of explanation.

 

The man whistled—a long, mellow whistle—with an odd turn at the end.

 

"No," said Mistress Roy, shaking her head, "the lad's square. And

what's mair, I'm no gaun to hae him meddled. He's the first boy that

ever took oot the papers without cheatin'." A good character is a valuable asset, even in a shebeen.