“The three captains shook their ’eads agin, and I noticed that they seemed to watch each other and do it all together.
“‘I don’t understand,’ ses the skipper.
“‘I was afraid you wouldn’t,’ ses the first captain; ‘she took this off.’
“‘So you said before,’ ses the skipper, rather short.
“And became a boy agin,’ ses the other; the wickedest and most artful young rascal that ever signed on with me.’
“He looked round at the others, and they all broke out into a perfect roar of laughter, and jumped up and down and slapped each other on the back, as if they was all mad. Then they asked which was the one wot had ’is ears boxed, and which was Mr. Fisher and which was Mr. Scott, and told our skipper what a nice fatherly man he was. Quite a crowd got round, an’ wouldn’t go away for all we could do to ’em in the shape o’ buckets o’ water and lumps o’ coal. We was the laughing-stock o’ the place, and the way they carried on when the steamer passed us two days later with the fust captain on the bridge, pretending not to see that imp of a boy standing in the bows blowing us kisses and dropping curtsies, nearly put the skipper out of ’is mind.”
HARD LABOUR
Police-constable C 49 paced slowly up Wapping High Street in the cool of the evening. The warehouses were closed, and the street almost denuded of traffic. He addressed a short and stern warning to a couple of youths struggling on the narrow pavement, and pointed out—with the toe of his boot—the undesirability of the curbstone as a seat to a small maiden of five. With his white gloves in his hand he swung slowly along, monarch of all he surveyed.
His complacency and the air with which he stroked his red moustache and side-whiskers were insufferable. Mr. Charles Pinner, ship’s fireman, whose bosom friend C 49 had pinched—to use Mr. Pinner’s own expressive phrase—a week before for causing a crowd to collect, eyed the exhibition with sneering wrath. The injustice of locking up Mr. Johnson, because a crowd of people whom he didn’t know from Adam persisted in obstructing the pathway, had reduced Mr. Pinner to the verge of madness. For a time he kept behind C 49, and contented himself with insulting but inaudible remarks bearing upon the colour of his whiskers.
The constable turned up a little alley-way between two small pieces of waste ground, concerning the desirability and value of which as building sites a notice-board was lurid with adjectives. Mr. Pinner was still behind; he was a man who believed in taking what life could offer him at the moment, and something whispered to him that if he lived a hundred years he would never have such another chance of bonneting that red-whiskered policeman. There were two or three small houses at the end of the alley, but the only other living person in it was a boy of ten. He looked to be the sort of boy who might be trusted to smile approval on Mr. Pinner’s contemplated performance.