“If yer wants ter be a millionhair yer’ll ’ave ter stick ter yer ’rittimetick, now then?”
“Yer can’t,” said Jack, “make no mistakes about money. Not if yer love it.”
“Yer got ter count it.”
“Bah, yer bin countin’ all yer life, an’ where’s it got yer?
“Wot yer got ter do is to ’ave money. The money will count itself. Never yer fear.”
“Now do yer know wot yer talks like? Like a yid.”
“Yer see ’ere, paw, I’m all fed up with this ’ere lack o’ patriotism, everybody takin’ it fer granted nobody can’t ’ave any interlect, ’ceptin’ ther bloody Jews.
“I’ll show them!”
“Jacky, Jacky, ’ave a care, with orl yer persumpshun,” warned mother Sider.
“It’s right down dangerous to talk wot yer bin talkin’ to yer pore par.
“D’yer know that there’s other things wot’s a’most as orful as Jews theirselves, an’ them is crim’nals.
“ ’Ave a care that all this blither abart money don’t lead yer ter crime, one day or ’nother.
“Fer it’s money wot’s ther temptation of ther devil.
“Think on yer pore ma, me dear, think er yer pore pa, and leave all that there evil to the gentry wot the Lord ’as born to it.”
Jack, who at the mention of crime, had begun to hum, more than unconcernedly, sauntered out of the shop.
Jack Sider’s values were not his mother’s nor his father’s.
In the back parlour of a not far distant pub, he stood conversing with his friends. A circle that had been much depleted by the removal of Hyde Park’s parents; a circle that was on the watch for new talent.
“ ’E’s quick, ’e is, and slim. It’s a great thing, slimness in young ’uns, yer can use ’em in a variety o’ ways.”
“Oos tooterin’ ’im?”
“Long Sloan, ’ere.”
“Wot ’im! ’E’s some tooter, I don’t think! Look ’ow ’is young ’Ide Park turned out, that’s a pretty bit o’ tooterin’ to my mind.”
“Wot, Long? ’E’s tootered some o’ the best wot’s never bin cotched. Yer ferget, that child o’ Handrew’s, ’e was always habnormal. There weren’t nothing to be done with ’im. ’Is Par ’isself got reglar wore out with ’im, if it ’adn’t been fer the strain, I betcher he wouldn’t be in now.”
“Well, young un do yer feel up to joinin’ us on our privit ’scursion down ter ’Enly?”
“Gummy I do,” said Jacky.
“An’ looke ’ere. Yer only a beginner an’ yer can’t expec’ tir divide up, not yet. That’ll come. Say we give yer tew shillins fer yer evenin’?”
“O that’ll come, will it? Yer don’t say! Well it ’as come, mind yer, or I ’asn’t—
“This ain’t no perfeshun where youth ain’t no disadvantage, it ain’t. Why I’m quicker than the lot o’ yer. An’ besides,” he jibed, “I’m still a pure one; I ain’t got to ’ave no fear o’ the perlice. They’d give me — — O much more nir ten shillins, jus’ fer yer address.”
“Quick is ’e, quick is ’e? I told yer ’e’d be boss o’ the ’ole gang before he was bearded. That boy,” roared Long Sloan delightedly, “ ’e’s a compensation, that’s what ’e is ter me, a compensation for all the disappointments that ever ’appened to me. Especially ’Ide Park.”
+
It was not difficult for the Siders’s son to be out at night. If the parental horizon was limited, he had the external liberty of children whose parents’ lives are self-contained.
Having bred him and fed him the Siders assumed, except on such occasions as his nimble ambitions alarmed them, that as things went very well with them, they were going well with him.
The private excursion arrived at Henley; to be exact, right under the shrubbery of Mrs. Switheringham Bates’s riverside bungalow, which had become known to them through her prodigal connection with the mission house. They had been able to ascertain the periods of her absences in town, and tonight they expected an easy job, avoiding the servants’ quarters.
It was a still night. And as the stillness deepened, the slim one, hoisted on the shoulders of a senior, grasped a window sill.
In those days, to their hygienic experience an open window at night meant negligence and disoccupation. This gaping asunder of the cottage façade had met with them like a providence, determining their choice of entry.
Jacky had hauled himself onto the sill, enforced by the nether man’s vertical arm, and peered into a yawning blackness—
It was at this moment intruded upon by a lighted candle that illumined the pane of glass like a moon.
His burglarous caryatid dropped from beneath him and his own unmistakeable silhouette remained where it was.
“What do you want?” asked Mrs. Bates, as one who addresses a servant, holding the silver candlestick still steadily.
“What are you doing on my window-sill — at this hour of the night? Who are you?”
Jacky’s brain broke on the crisis. Into the rift there wedged itself, an associated idea.
Charity treats to the wholesomer plays have a highly educational value.
—“Somewhere where? In the dark. A boy looking in at a window — ” He had known all this before.
“When? Where? — —”
Then he remembered.
“Who are you?” asked the woman with the candle yet again.
“I’m,” said Jacky Sider
“Peter Pan.”
“But what—” she asked, so taken aback that this statement had no time to sound unnatural, “—ever do you want?”
“Jus’ to ’ave one look into one o’ them ’appy nurseries.”
It was only lately that she had had a chance to be a mother — Hyde Bates was really here tucked downily into his bed — and the factitious maternity stirred that deep something within her, that stirs in real mothers — whenever it does.
It was an entirely new and satisfying sensation, and she was not averse to staging its effect.
“Why you poor motherless creature,” she cooed, raising the windows, and holding the candle to Jacky’s face.
No his eyes were not upwardly angelic like “her” dear Hyde’s — but shining now in his relief, to their usual warmth of liveliness, he looked, “just a loveable young rascal, all mischief, with not an iota of harm in him, the dear fellow.”
Jacky with her robust aid stepped into the room, and Long Sloan was never to know this particular compensation again.
+
He felt as soldiers back from the trenches felt, in their beds, as though he were falling through softness.
This pastel room offered itself to him like a cheek.
Mrs. Bates led him to the other boy’s bed. There where the prodigious lashes lay shrined, in something like lace. She could remember the Madonna as she bent above the bed, her hair which was loosened fell from her temples, veil-like. It was sparse hair and Jacky saw how it shone, not from itself like the women in the streets, but with a moderate shining that seemed to be applied to it.
“And now,” she proclaimed, having brushed those lashes devoutly enough with her lips, “You see the happy nursery.”
“Gawd,” said Jacky Sider, as the sleeper in subconscious disturbance, turned and revealed the back of his head.
“It’s a boy!”
Blue painted birds were everywhere about; he felt as though there must be a rush of them over his head, out of the room with him as he followed the mistress of the house downstairs, between the terraced frames of reticent gilt.
“Now,” said Mrs. Bates, switching on the lights which fell first upon huge silver bowls filled with rose-coloured roses; the very silver which had lured him here with his friends, “How about a little supper?”