"Why did you give up like a weak coward?" I burst out angrily. "You had talent. You would have won with ordinary perseverance.""Maybe," he replied, in the same even tone of indifference. "Isuppose I hadn't the grit. I think if somebody had believed in me it might have helped me. But nobody did, and at last I lost belief in myself. And when a man loses that, he's like a balloon with the gas let out."I listened to his words in indignation and astonishment. "Nobody believed in you!" I repeated. "Why, I always believed in you, you know that I--"Then I paused, remembering our "candid criticism" of one another.
"Did you?" he replied quietly, "I never heard you say so. Good-night."
In the course of our Strandward walking we had come to the neighbourhood of the Savoy, and, as he spoke, he disappeared down one of the dark turnings thereabouts.
I hastened after him, calling him by name, but though I heard his quick steps before me for a little way, they were soon swallowed up in the sound of other steps, and, when I reached the square in which the chapel stands, I had lost all trace of him.
A policeman was standing by the churchyard railings, and of him Imade inquiries.
"What sort of a gent was he, sir?" questioned the man.
"A tall thin gentleman, very shabbily dressed--might be mistaken for a tramp.""Ah, there's a good many of that sort living in this town," replied the man. "I'm afraid you'll have some difficulty in finding him."Thus for a second time had I heard his footsteps die away, knowing Ishould never listen for their drawing near again.
I wondered as I walked on--I have wondered before and since--whether Art, even with a capital A, is quite worth all the suffering that is inflicted in her behalf--whether she and we are better for all the scorning and the sneering, all the envying and the hating, that is done in her name.
Jephson arrived about nine o'clock in the ferry-boat. We were made acquainted with this fact by having our heads bumped against the sides of the saloon.
Somebody or other always had their head bumped whenever the ferry-boat arrived. It was a heavy and cumbersome machine, and the ferry-boy was not a good punter. He admitted this frankly, which was creditable of him. But he made no attempt to improve himself; that is, where he was wrong. His method was to arrange the punt before starting in a line with the point towards which he wished to proceed, and then to push hard, without ever looking behind him, until something suddenly stopped him. This was sometimes the bank, sometimes another boat, occasionally a steamer, from six to a dozen times a day our riparian dwelling. That he never succeeded in staving the houseboat in speaks highly for the man who built her.
One day he came down upon us with a tremendous crash. Amenda was walking along the passage at the moment, and the result to her was that she received a violent blow first on the left side of her head and then on the right.
She was accustomed to accept one bump as a matter of course, and to regard it as an intimation from the boy that he had come; but this double knock annoyed her: so much "style" was out of place in a mere ferry-boy. Accordingly she went out to him in a state of high indignation.
"What do you think you are?" she cried, balancing accounts by boxing his ears first on one side and then on the other, "a torpedo! What are you doing here at all? What do you want?""I don't want nothin'," explained the boy, rubbing his head; "I've brought a gent down.""A gent?" said Amenda, looking round, but seeing no one. "What gent?""A stout gent in a straw 'at," answered the boy, staring round him bewilderedly.
"Well, where is he?" asked Amenda.
"I dunno," replied the boy, in an awed voice; "'e was a-standin'
there, at the other end of the punt, a-smokin' a cigar."Just then a head appeared above the water, and a spent but infuriated swimmer struggled up between the houseboat and the bank.
"Oh, there 'e is!" cried the boy delightedly, evidently much relieved at this satisfactory solution of the mystery; "'e must ha'
tumbled off the punt."
"You're quite right, my lad, that's just what he did do, and there's your fee for assisting him to do it." Saying which, my dripping friend, who had now scrambled upon deck, leant over, and following Amenda's excellent example, expressed his feelings upon the boy's head.
There was one comforting reflection about the transaction as a whole, and that was that the ferry-boy had at last received a fit and proper reward for his services. I had often felt inclined to give him something myself. I think he was, without exception, the most clumsy and stupid boy I have ever come across; and that is saying a good deal.
His mother undertook that for three-and-sixpence a week he should "make himself generally useful" to us for a couple of hours every morning.
Those were the old lady's very words, and I repeated them to Amenda when I introduced the boy to her.
"This is James, Amenda," I said; "he will come down here every morning at seven, and bring us our milk and the letters, and from then till nine he will make himself generally useful."Amenda took stock of him.
"It will be a change of occupation for him, sir, I should say, by the look of him," she remarked.
After that, whenever some more than usually stirring crash or blood-curdling bump would cause us to leap from our seats and cry: "What on earth has happened?" Amenda would reply: "Oh, it's only James, mum, making himself generally useful."Whatever he lifted he let fall; whatever he touched he upset;whatever he came near--that was not a fixture--he knocked over; if it was a fixture, it knocked HIM over. This was not carelessness:
