“I ain’t ashamed of it,” Johnny replied gloomily. “An’ I’ve got other things to think about now, besides drawing.”
Hicks stared, stuttered a little, and rubbed his cap over his head. He wondered whether or not he ought to ask questions.
They went a little way in silence, and then Johnny said: “It’s him; Butson.”
“No!” exclaimed Hicks, checking in his stride, and staring at Johnny again. “What! Bin fightin’ Butson?”
Johnny poured out the whole story; and as he told Hicks’s eyes widened, his face flushed and paled, his hands opened and closed convulsively, and again and again he blew and stuttered incomprehensibly.
“Job is, to drive the brute away,” Johnny concluded wearily. “He’ll stop as long as he’s fed. An’ mother thinks it’s a disgrace to get a separation—goin’ before a magistrate an’ all. I’m only tellin’ you because I know you won’t jaw about it among the neighbours.”
That day Long Hicks got leave of absence for the rest of the week, mightily astonishing Mr. Cottam by the application, for Hicks had never been known to take a holiday before.
“’Awright,” the gaffer growled, “seein’ as we’re slack. There’s one or two standin’ auf for a bit a’ready. But what’s up with you wantin’ time auf? Gittin’ frisky? Runnin’ arter the gals?”
And indeed Long Hicks spent his holiday much like a man who is running after something, or somebody. He took a walking tour of intricate plan, winding and turning among the small streets, up street and down, but tending northward; through Bromley, Bow and Old Ford, and so toward Homerton and the marshes.
Meantime Johnny walked to and from his work alone, and brooded. He could not altogether understand his mother’s attitude toward Butson. She had been willing, even anxious, to get rid of him by any process that would involve no disgrace among the neighbours, and no peril to the trade of the shop; he had made her life miserable; yet now she tended the brute’s cuts and bumps as though he didn’t deserve them, and she cried more than ever. As for Johnny himself, he spared Butson nothing. Rather he drew a hideous solace from any torture wherewith he might afflict him.