“Strictly speaking,” remarked the youth, with good humour, “my name is not cloth-head. My name is Myddleton West.”
“Can you sleep a-nights?” asked the boy, “with a name like that?”
“Myddleton West, journalist, of 39, Fetter Lane, Holborn. Now tell me yours.”
The boy complied reluctantly. With decreasing hesitation he gave further particulars.
“I’ll do a sketch about you,” said Myddleton West, looking down at the boy. “‘The Infant of Hoxton’ I think I’ll call it.”
“Going to put some’ing about me in the paper?” asked the boy, with undisguised interest, and discarding entirely his attitude of defiance.
“If they’ll take it. There is at times a certain coyness on the part of editors—”
The boy suddenly started. He touched the brass rod, and flew downstairs with so much swiftness that he reached the court before Myddleton West had discovered his absence. West looked up and saw the constable descending to call him back to the room; the reason for Bobbie Lancaster’s flight became obvious.
The boy slipped eel-like through the crowd of women at the doorway, and presently reached moonlight and Hoxton Street, where he drifted intuitively to the outside of the theatre. It gratified him exceedingly as he felt the shilling in his knotted handkerchief, to think that he might, if he were so minded—the hour being now half-past eight—go in at half price, and seating himself in the stage box, witness the last three acts of “Foiled by a Woman.” He laughed outright as, standing near the lamps, he looked in at the swing doors of the principal entrance and imagined the astonishment of those in the three-penny gallery, high up on the top of the mountain of faces within, were they to see him enter importantly the box at the right of the stage and survey with lordly air the crowded, heated, interested house. How they would roar at him if he were to stick a penny in his eye and, carefully stroking an imaginary moustache, say, “Bai Jove! What people!” It would not be the first time that he had amused a crowd; once at a fire in Shoreditch he had put on a paper helmet, pretending to be chief of the fire brigade, and a matron in the crowd, watching him, had been so exceptionally amused at his antics that she had had to be unlaced and dragged home by solicitous lady friends. The boy resisted the temptations of the enticing placards, for he had already decided on the manner in which the shilling was to be expended; the recollection of this made him think of home. There would be some argument, he knew, with his mother concerning his long absence, but, once the first storm was over, sunshine would come, and a small flask and sausages would make her content.
He stepped in at the dark open doorway of his home, and went upstairs. At the end of the passage on the ground floor a smelly oil lamp diffused scent, but not light; it served only to accentuate the blackness. The boy knew the stairs well, and dodging the hole on the fifth stair and stepping over the eighth—the eighth was a practical joke stair, and if you stepped on its edge it instantly stood up and knocked your leg—he piloted himself adroitly on the landing. There were voices in the back room.