And Bessy, still crying, took hold of her brother’s arm and said, “Don’t say any more, Johnny, please. I—I—p’raps I oughtn’t to ha’ done what I did!”
“What you did!” Johnny answered, not so cheaply appeased. “You do what you like, Bess—I’ll see he don’t interfere. He says he don’t want any words—he shan’t have ’em. He’ll have something harder if he touches you! Let go my arm a minute. Go on, you can get up now!” This to Butson, with the black nose. “You’d better go an’ wash yourself. But none o’ your tricks! If you try to lay hold o’ me from behind, or anything like that, you’ll get it, with anything I can catch hold of! So now you know!”
And Mr. Henry Butson, growling indistinctly, went out to wash his face, closely watched by Johnny, poker in hand.
Next door, on one side, heads were thrust out at the back-door to listen to the unwonted noise of quarrelling at the chandler’s; and on the other side other heads were thrust out at the front door. Because the law of irregularity in the building of Harbour Lane decreed a back-garden to the one house and a front-garden to the other.
XXIV.
His home in Harbour Lane grew less sufferable than ever to Mr. Butson’s tastes. His contempt remained for the sordid surroundings, the vulgar trade, the simple wife—for everything about the place in fact, with the reasonable exceptions of the money he extracted from it and the food he ate there; and now there was the new affliction of an unsubmissive stepson. A stepson, moreover, who watched, and who kept alert ears for any expedient assertion of authority whereat he might raise mutiny; a most objectionable stepson in every way, far too big, and growing bigger every day; who would not forget bygones, and who had a nasty, suggestive way of handling the poker—a large poker, an unnecessarily heavy poker for a sitting-room. And he seemed to suspect things too, and talked unpleasantly of the police; a thing that turned one hot and cold together. So Mr. Butson went more up West, and sought longer solace in the society of the bars.
As for Johnny, finding Butson ceasing, so far as he could see, from active offence, he gave thought to other things; though watching still. His drawing was among the other matters that claimed his care; but chief of them all was a different thing altogether.
For at the Institute he had found the girl he first saw on the dark morning when he set out to be an engineer. He had seen her since—once as he was on his way to a ship-launch, and twice a little later; then not at all for eighteen months at least, till he began to forget. But now that he saw her again and found her a woman—or grown as much a woman as he was grown a man—he wondered that he could ever have forgotten for a moment; more, when he had seen her twice or thrice, and knew the turn of her head and the nearing of her step, he was desperately persuaded that nothing in the world, nor time nor tide, could make him forget again. So that he resolved to learn to dance.
But the little society that danced at the Institute saw nothing of her, this radiant unforgettable. She came twice a week to the dressmaking class; wherein she acted as monitor or assistant to the teacher, being, as Johnny later discovered—by vast exertions—a dressmaker herself, in her daily work. She made no friendships, walked sedately apart, and was in some sort a mystery; being for these reasons regarded as “stuck-up” by the girls of the class, and so made a target for many small needle-thrusts of spite. Johnny had a secret notion that she remembered him; because she would pass him with so extreme an unconsciousness in her manner, so very blank an unacquaintance in her eyes. Neat and grey in her dress, she had ever a placid gravity of air, almost odd by contrast with the unceasing smirk and giggle of the rest of the girls of the Institute. And her name—another happy discovery, attained at great expense of artless diplomacy—was Nora Sansom.
And now for awhile the practice of orthographic projection suffered from neglect and abstraction of mind. Long Hicks, all ignorant of the cause, was mightily concerned, and expostulated, with a face of perplexed surprise, much poking of fingers through the hair, and jerking at the locks thus separated. But it was a great matter that tugged so secretly at Johnny’s mind, and daily harder at his heart-strings, till he blushed in solitude to find himself so weak a creature. Nora Sansom did not come to the dancing. She knew nobody that he knew. She was unapproachable as—as a Chinese Empress. How to approach Nora Sansom? And at the thought he gulped and tingled, and was more than a little terrified. He was not brought to a stand by contemplation of any distinct interposing labyrinth of conventional observance, such as he who can see can pick his way through in strict form; but by a difficulty palpable to instinct rather than figured in mind: an intangible barrier that vexed Johnny to madness, so that he hammered the Institute punching-ball with blind fury. And again, because the world was now grown so many heavens wider, he would sit and dream of things beyond its farthest margin yet. And between plan and section, crank-shaft and piston, he would wake to find himself designing monograms of the letters N. S. and J. M. Altogether becoming a sad young fool, such as none of us ever was in the like circumstances.