Sentimental Tommy Page 6

  CHAPTER VI

  THE ENCHANTED STREET

  In Thrums Street, as it ought to have been called, herded at leastone-half of the Thrums folk in London, and they formed a colony, ofwhich the grocer at the corner sometimes said wrathfully that not amember would give sixpence for anything except Bibles or whiskey. In thestreets one could only tell they were not Londoners by their walk, theflagstones having no grip for their feet, or, if they had come southlate in life, by their backs, which they carried at the angle on whichwebs are most easily supported. When mixing with the world they talkedthe English tongue, which came out of them as broad as if it had beensqueezed through a mangle, but when the day's work was done, it was onlya few of the giddier striplings that remained Londoners. For themajority there was no raking the streets after diversion, they spent thehour or two before bed-time in reproducing the life of Thrums. Few ofthem knew much of London except the nearest way between this street andtheir work, and their most interesting visitor was a Presbyterianminister, most of whose congregation lived in much more fashionableparts, but they were almost exclusively servant girls, and whendescending area-steps to visit them he had been challenged often andjocularly by policemen, which perhaps was what gave him a subdued andfurtive appearance.

  The rooms were furnished mainly with articles bought in London, butthese became as like Thrums dressers and seats as their owners couldmake them, old Petey, for instance, cutting the back off a chair becausehe felt most at home on stools. Drawers were used as baking-boards,pails turned into salt-buckets, floors were sanded and hearthstonesca'med, and the popular supper consisted of porter, hot water, andsoaked bread, after every spoonful of which, they groaned pleasantly,and stretched their legs. Sometimes they played at the dambrod, but moreoften they pulled down the blinds on London and talked of Thrums intheir mother tongue. Nevertheless few of them wanted to return to it,and their favorite joke was the case of James Gloag's father, who beinghome-sick flung up his situation and took train for Thrums, but he wasback in London in three weeks.

  Tommy soon had the entry to these homes, and his first news of theinmates was unexpected. It was that they were always sleeping. In broaddaylight he had seen Thrums men asleep on beds, and he was somewhatashamed of them until he heard the excuse. A number of the men fromThrums were bakers, the first emigrant of this trade having drawn othersafter him, and they slept great part of the day to be able to work allnight in a cellar, making nice rolls for rich people. Baker Lumsden, whobecame a friend of Tommy, had got his place in the cellar when hisbrother died, and the brother had succeeded Matthew Croall when he died.

  They die very soon, Tommy learned from Lumsden, generally when they areeight and thirty. Lumsden was thirty-six, and when he died his nephewwas to get the place. The wages are good.

  Then there were several masons, one of whom, like the first baker, hadfound work for all the others, and there were men who had drifted intotrades strange to their birthplace, and there was usually one at leastwho had come to London to "better himself" and had not done it as yet.The family Tommy liked best was the Whamonds, and especially he likedold Petey and young Petey Whamond. They were a large family of women andmen, all of whom earned their living in other streets, except the oldman, who kept house and was a famous knitter of stockings, as probablyhis father had been before him. He was a great one, too, at telling whatthey would be doing at that moment in Thrums, every corner of which wasas familiar to him as the ins and outs of the family hose. Young Peteygot fourteen shillings a week from a hatter, and one of his duties wasto carry as many as twenty band-boxes at a time through fashionablestreets; it is a matter for elation that dukes and statesmen had oftento take the curb-stone, because young Petey was coming. Neverthelessyoung Petey was not satisfied, and never would be (such is the Thrumsnature) until he became a salesman in the shop to which he acted atpresent as fetch and carry, and he used to tell Tommy that this positionwould be his as soon as he could sneer sufficiently at the old hats.When gentlemen come into the shop and buy a new hat, he explained, theyput it on, meaning to tell you to send the old one to their address, andthe art of being a fashionable hatter lies in this: you must be able tocurl your lips so contemptuously at the old hat that they tell youguiltily to keep it, as they have no further use for it. Then theyretire ashamed of their want of moral courage and you have made an extrahalf-guinea.

  "But I aye snort," young Petey admitted, "and it should be done withouta sound." When he graduated, he was to marry Martha Spens, who waswaiting for him at Tillyloss. There was a London seamstress whom hepreferred, and she was willing, but it is safest to stick to Thrums.

  When Tommy was among his new friends a Scotch word or phrase oftenescaped his lips, but old Petey and the others thought he had picked itup from them, and would have been content to accept him as a London waifwho lived somewhere round the corner. To trick people so simply,however, is not agreeable to an artist, and he told them his name wasTommy Shovel, and that his old girl walloped him, and his father founddogs, all which inventions Thrums Street accepted as true. What is muchmore noteworthy is that, as he gave them birth, Tommy half believed themalso, being already the best kind of actor.

  Not all the talking was done by Tommy when he came home with news, forhe seldom mentioned a Thrums name, of which his mother could not tellhim something more. But sometimes she did not choose to tell, as when heannounced that a certain Elspeth Lindsay, of the Marywellbrae, was dead.After this she ceased to listen, for old Elspeth had been hergrandmother, and she had now no kin in Thrums.

  "Tell me about the Painted Lady," Tommy said to her. "Is it true she's awitch?" But Mrs. Sandys had never heard of any woman so called: thePainted Lady must have gone to Thrums after her time.

  "There ain't no witches now," said Elspeth tremulously; Shovel's motherhad told her so.

  "Not in London," replied Tommy, with contempt; and this is all that wassaid of the Painted Lady then. It is the first mention of her in thesepages.

  The people Mrs. Sandys wanted to hear of chiefly were Aaron Latta andJean Myles, and soon Tommy brought news of them, but at the same time hehad heard of the Den, and he said first:

  "Oh, mother, I thought as you had told me about all the beauty placesin Thrums, and you ain't never told me about the Den."

  His mother heaved a quick breath. "It's the only place I hinna telledyou o'," she said.

  "Had you forget, it mother?"

  Forget the Den! Ah, no, Tommy, your mother had not forgotten the Den.

  "And, listen, Elspeth, in the Den there's a bonny spring of water calledthe Cuttle Well. Had you forgot the Cuttle Well, mother?"

  No, no; when Jean Myles forgot the names of her children she would stillremember the Cuttle Well. Regardless now of the whispering between Tommyand Elspeth, she sat long over the fire, and it is not difficult tofathom her thoughts. They were of the Den and the Cuttle Well.

  Into the life of every man, and no woman, there comes a moment when helearns suddenly that he is held eligible for marriage. A girl gives himthe jag, and it brings out the perspiration. Of the issue elsewhere ofthis stab with a bodkin let others speak; in Thrums its commonest effectis to make the callant's body take a right angle to his legs, for he hasbeen touched in the fifth button, and he backs away broken-winded. Byand by, however, he is at his work--among the turnip-shoots,say--guffawing and clapping his corduroys, with pauses for uneasymeditation, and there he ripens with the swedes, so that by theback-end of the year he has discovered, and exults to know, that thereward of manhood is neither more nor less than this sensation at theribs. Soon thereafter, or at worst, sooner or later (for by holding outhe only puts the women's dander up), he is led captive to the CuttleWell. This well has the reputation of being the place where it is mosteasily said.

  The wooded ravine called the Den is in Thrums rather than on its westernedge, but is so craftily hidden away that when within a stone's throwyou may give up the search for it; it is also so deep that larks risefrom the bottom and carol overhead, thinkin
g themselves high in theheavens before they are on a level with Nether Drumley's farmland. Inshape it is almost a semicircle, but its size depends on you and themaid. If she be with you, the Den is so large that you must rest hereand there; if you are after her boldly, you can dash to the Cuttle Well,which was the trysting-place, in the time a stout man takes to lace hisboots; if you are of those self-conscious ones who look behind to seewhether jeering blades are following, you may crouch and wriggle yourway onward and not be with her in half an hour.

  Old Petey had told Tommy that, on the whole, the greatest pleasure inlife on a Saturday evening is to put your back against a stile thatleads into the Den and rally the sweethearts as they go by. The lads,when they see you, want to go round by the other stile, but the lasseslike it, and often the sport ends spiritedly with their giving you aclout on the head.

  Through the Den runs a tiny burn, and by its side is a pink path, dyedthis pretty color, perhaps, by the blushes the ladies leave behind them.The burn as it passes the Cuttle Well, which stands higher and just outof sight, leaps in vain to see who is making that cooing noise, and thewell, taking the spray for kisses, laughs all day at Romeo, who cannotget up. Well is a name it must have given itself, for it is only aspring in the bottom of a basinful of water, where it makes about asmuch stir in the world as a minnow jumping at a fly. They say that if aboy, by making a bowl of his hands, should suddenly carry off all thewater, a quick girl could thread her needle at the spring. But it is aspring that will not wait a moment.

  Men who have been lads in Thrums sometimes go back to it from London orfrom across the seas, to look again at some battered little house andfeel the blasts of their bairnhood playing through the old wynds, andthey may take with them a foreign wife. They show her everything, exceptthe Cuttle Well; they often go there alone. The well is sacred to thememory of first love. You may walk from the well to the round cemeteryin ten minutes. It is a common walk for those who go back.

  First love is but a boy and girl playing at the Cuttle Well with abird's egg. They blow it on one summer evening in the long grass, and onthe next it is borne away on a coarse laugh, or it breaks beneath theburden of a tear. And yet--I once saw an aged woman, a widow of manyyears, cry softly at mention of the Cuttle Well. "John was a good man toyou," I said, for John had been her husband. "He was a leal man to me,"she answered with wistful eyes, "ay, he was a leal man to me--but itwasna John I was thinking o'. You dinna ken what makes me greet sosair," she added, presently, and though I thought I knew now I waswrong. "It's because I canna mind his name," she said.

  So the Cuttle Well has its sad memories and its bright ones, and many ofthe bright memories have become sad with age, as so often happens tobeautiful things, but the most mournful of all is the story of AaronLatta and Jean Myles. Beside the well there stood for long a great pinkstone, called the Shoaging, Stone, because it could be rocked like acradle, and on it lovers used to cut their names. Often Aaron Latta andJean Myles sat together on the Shoaging Stone, and then there came atime when it bore these words cut by Aaron Latta:

  HERE LIES THE MANHOOD OF AARON LATTA, A FOND SON, A FAITHFUL FRIENDAND A TRUE LOVER, WHO VIOLATED THE FEELINGS OF SEX ON THIS SPOT, AND ISNOW THE SCUNNER OF GOD AND MAN

  Tommy's mother now heard these words for the first time, Aaron havingcut them on the stone after she left Thrums, and her head sank at eachline, as if someone had struck four blows at her.

  The stone was no longer at the Cuttle Well. As the easiest way ofobliterating the words, the minister had ordered it to be broken, and ofthe pieces another mason had made stands for watches, one of which wasnow in Thrums Street.

  "Aaron Latta ain't a mason now," Tommy rattled on: "he is a warper,because he can warp in his own house without looking on mankind orspeaking to mankind. Auld Petey said he minded the day when Aaron Lattawas a merry loon, and then Andrew McVittie said, 'God behears, to thinkthat Aaron Latta was ever a merry man!' and Baker Lumsden said, 'Curseher!'"

  His mother shrank in her chair, but said nothing, and Tommy explained:"It was Jean Myles he was cursing; did you ken her, mother? she ruinedAaron Latta's life."

  "Ay, and wha ruined Jean Myles's life?" his mother cried passionately.

  Tommy did not know, but he thought that young Petey might know, foryoung Petey had said: "If I had been Jean Myles I would have spat inAaron's face rather than marry him."

  Mrs. Sandys seemed pleased to hear this.

  "They wouldna tell me what it were she did," Tommy went on; "they saidit was ower ugly a story, but she were a bad one, for they stoned herout of Thrums. I dinna know where she is now, but she were stoned out ofThrums!"

  "No alane?"

  "There was a man with her, and his name was--it was--"

  His mother clasped her hands nervously while Tommy tried to remember thename. "His name was Magerful Tam," he said at length.

  "Ay," said his mother, knitting her teeth, "that was his name."

  "I dinna mind any more," Tommy concluded. "Yes, I mind they aye calledAaron Latta 'Poor Aaron Latta.'"

  "Did they? I warrant, though, there wasna one as said 'Poor JeanMyles'?"

  She began the question in a hard voice, but as she said "Poor JeanMyles" something caught in her throat, and she sobbed, painful dry sobs.

  "How could they pity her when she were such a bad one?" Tommy answeredbriskly.

  "Is there none to pity bad ones?" said his sorrowful mother.

  Elspeth plucked her by the skirt. "There's God, ain't there?" she said,inquiringly, and getting no answer she flopped upon her knees, to say ababyish prayer that would sound comic to anybody except to Him to whomit was addressed.

  "You ain't praying for a woman as was a disgrace to Thrums!" Tommycried, jealously, and he was about to raise her by force, when hismother stayed his hand.

  "Let her alane," she said, with a twitching mouth and filmy eyes. "Lether alane. Let my bairn pray for Jean Myles."