Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City: His Progress and Adventures

by S. R. Crockett

Susy Murphy got off under the First Offenders Act. But immediately upon re-encountering her successful rival she incontinently became a second offender, and was as summarily fined thirty shillings or seven days. And it added to the bitterness of Cleaver's boy, that he had to come good for both the hat ruined in the first battle and the dress torn to shreds in the second.

Then it also became his duty to take out Miss Mackay every evening, and so frequent were the demands upon his purse, that Cleaver's boy perceived that nothing but marriage stood between him and financial ruin.

"If I was only marriet," he soliloquised, "I could stop the lemonades and ice-creams. They're juist terrible expensive. I declare Sal thinks naething o' a dozen bottles. And gin ye stickit a preen until her ony gate, I declare she wad fizz."

It occurred to him, however, that as a temporary alternative it might be possible to increase his earnings. And Cleaver's boy was not above asking for what he wanted.

"Guid jobs wants finding nooadays!" was a favourite expression of his.

Now there was a certain Bailie Holden among the customers of Mr. Cleaver. This dignitary had succeeded to the responsible position of Convener of the Cleaning and Lighting department—a division of the city's municipal business which has always been associated with excellent eating and drinking, and a good deal of both.

Bailie Holden had the finest taste in the light wines of his country of any man on the council. In his happier moments of inspiration he could tell the age of Long John to within a year. Now Bailie Holden had, among other excellent domestic properties, a kitchen-maid who was not above casting soft eyes at spruce James Annan of Cleaver's, so débonnaire, with his blue apron and his basket over his arm. And James had cultivated the acquaintance according to his opportunity, without, of course, thinking it necessary to say anything to Sal Mackay—or, for the matter of that, to Sue Murphy either. So that, in the course of conversation at the area door, it fell out that Cleaver's boy mentioned his desire to be no more Cleaver's boy, but a servant of the city corporation in the department of Cleaning and Lighting. And the kitchen-maid answered, keeping her eyes on James and adjusting her tumbled cap at the same time—

"I'll speak to the maister when he comes through the back kitchen, to smoke his pipe in the yaird after dinner-time."

For it was the use and wont of Bailie Holden, when he was without company, or could shunt the entertainment of it upon his wife, to put on a seedy garden coat and slip off quietly round by the greenhouses. Here he took from the edge of a heating tube a short clay pipe of excessive blackness; then from a canister he extracted a snaky twist of Bogie roll. Bailie Holden was renowned for keeping the best cigars in the city, and he also smoked them regularly indoors. His wife, indeed, did not allow anything else. But he came outside for his real smoke, in his shirt-sleeves in the warm evenings, and in his garden coat when it was colder. For though to all men he was now Havanna of the most exclusive brand, and all his appointments like unto that dignity, yet at the heart of him he was still kindly Bogie roll.