Harding's Luck

CHAPTER I

TINKLER AND THE MOONFLOWER

DICKIE lived at New Cross. At least the address was New Cross, but really the house where he lived was one of a row of horrid little houses built on the slope where once green fields ran down the hill to the river, and the old houses of the Deptford merchants stood stately in their pleasant gardens and fruitful orchards. All those good fields and happy gardens are built over now. It is as though some wicked giant had taken a big brush full of yellow ochre paint, and another full of mud-colour, and had painted out the green in streaks of dull yellow and filthy brown; and the brown is the roads and the yellow is the houses. Miles and miles and miles of them, and not a green thing to be seen except the cabbages in the greengrocers’ shops, and here and there some poor trails of creeping-jenny drooping from a dirty window-sill. There is a little yard at the back of each house; this is called the garden, and some of these show green—but they only show it to the houses’ back windows. You cannot see it from the street. These gardens are green, because green is the colour that most pleases and soothes men’s eyes; and however you may shut people up between bars of yellow and mud colour, and however hard you may make them work, and however little wage you may pay them for working, there will always be found among those people some men who are willing to work a little longer, and for no wages at all, so that they may have green things growing near them.

But there were no green things growing in the garden at the back of the house where Dickie lived with his aunt. There were stones and bones, and bits of brick, and dirty old dish-cloths matted together with grease and mud, worn-out broom-heads and broken shovels, a bottomless pail, and the mouldy remains of a hutch where once rabbits had lived. But that was a very long time ago, and Dickie had never seen the rabbits. A boy had brought a brown rabbit to school once, buttoned up inside his jacket, and he had let Dickie hold it in his hands for several minutes before the teacher detected its presence and shut it up in a locker till school should be over. So Dickie knew what rabbits were like. And he was fond of the hutch for the sake of what had once lived there.

And when his aunt sold the poor remains of the hutch to a man with a barrow who was ready to buy anything, and who took also the pails and the shovels, giving threepence for the lot, Dickie was almost as unhappy as though the hutch has really held a furry friend. And he hated the man who took the hutch away, all the more because there were empty rabbit-skins hanging sadly from the back of the barrow.

It is really with the going of that rabbit-hutch that this story begins. Because it was then that Dickie, having called his aunt a Beast, and hit at her with his little dirty fist, was well slapped and put out into the bereaved yard to come to himself, as his aunt said. He threw himself down on the ground and cried and wriggled with misery and pain, and wished—ah, many things.

Wot’s the bloomin’ row now? the Man Next Door suddenly asked; been hittin’ of you?

They’ve took away the ’utch, said Dickie.

Well, there warn’t nothin’ in it.

I diden want it took away, wailed Dickie.

Leaves more room, said the Man Next Door, leaning on his spade. It was Saturday afternoon and the next-door garden was one of the green ones. There were small grubby daffodils in it, and dirty-faced little primroses, and an arbour beside the water-butt, bare at this time of the year, but still a real arbour. And an elder-tree that in the hot weather had flat, white flowers on it big as tea-plates. And a lilac-tree with brown buds on it. Beautiful. Say, matey, just you chuck it! Chuck it, I say! How in thunder can I get on with my digging with you ’owlin’ yer ’ead off? inquired the Man Next Door. You get up and peg along in an’ arst yer aunt if she’d be agreeable for me to do up her garden a bit. I could do it odd times. You’d like that.

Not ’arf! said Dickie, got up, and went in.

Come to yourself, eh? sneered the aunt. You mind, and let it be the last time you come your games with me, my beauty. You and your tantrums!

Dickie said what it was necessary to say, and got back to the garden.

She says she ain’t got no time to waste, an’ if you ’ave she don’t care what you does with it.

There’s a dirty mug you’ve got on you, said the Man Next Door, leaning over to give Dickie’s face a rub with a handkerchief hardly cleaner. Now I’ll come over and make a start. He threw his leg over the fence. You just peg about an’ be busy pickin’ up all them fancy articles, and nex’ time yer aunt goes to Buckingham Palace for the day we’ll have a bonfire.

Fifth o’ November? said Dickie, sitting down and beginning to draw to himself the rubbish that covered the ground.

"Fifth of anything you like, so long as she ain’t about, said he, driving in the spade. ’Ard as any old doorstep it is. Never mind, we’ll turn it over, and we’ll get some little seedses and some little plantses and we shan’t know ourselves."

I got a ’apenny, said Dickie.

Well, I’ll put one to it, and you leg ’long and buy seedses. That’s wot you do.

Dickie went. He went slowly, because he was lame. And he was lame because his aunt had dropped him when he was a baby. She was not a nice woman, and I am glad to say that she goes out of this story almost at once. But she did keep Dickie when his father died, and she might have sent him to the workhouse. For she was not really his aunt, but just the woman of the house where his father had lodged. It was good of her to keep Dickie, even if she wasn’t very kind to him. And as that is all the good I can find to say about her, I will say no more. With his little crutch, made out of a worn-out broom cut down to his little height, he could manage quite well in spite of his lameness.

‘GIMME,’ SAID DICKIE—‘GIMME A PENN’ORTH O’ THAT THERE.’

He found the cornehandler’s—a really charming shop that smelt like stables and had deep dusty bins where he would have liked to play. Above the bins were delightful little square-fronted drawers, labelled Rape, Hemp, Canary, Millet, Mustard, and so on; and above the drawers pictures of the kind of animals that were fed on the kind of things that the shop sold. Fat, oblong cows that had eaten Burley’s Cattle Food, stout pillows of wool that Ovis’s Sheep Spice had fed, and, brightest and best of all, an incredibly smooth-plumaged parrot, rainbow-coloured, cocking a black eye bright with the intoxicating qualities of Perrokett’s Artistic Bird Seed.

Gimme, said Dickie, leaning against the counter and pointing a grimy thumb at the wonder—gimme a pennorth o’ that there!

Got the penny? the shopman asked carefully.

Dickie displayed it, parted with it, and came home nursing a paper bag full of rustling promises.

Why, said the Man Next Door, that ain’t seeds. It’s parrot food, that is.

It said the Ar-something Bird Seed, said Dickie, downcast; I thought it ’ud come into flowers like birds—same colours as wet the poll parrot was, donteherknow?

And so it will like as not, said the Man Next Door comfortably. I’ll set it along this end soon’s I’ve got it turned over. I lay it’ll come up something pretty.

So the seed was sown. And the Man Next Door promised two more pennies later for real seed. Also he transplanted two of the primroses whose faces wanted washing.

It was a grand day for Dickie. He told the whole story of it that night when he went to bed to his only confidant, from whom he hid nothing. The confidant made no reply, but Dickie was sure this was not because the confidant didn’t care about the story. The confidant was a blackened stick about 5 inches long, with little blackened bells to it like the bells on dogs’ collars. Also a rather crooked bit of something whitish and very hard, good to suck, or to stroke with your fingers, or to dig holes in the soap with. Dickie had no idea what it was. His father had given it to him in the hospital where Dickie was taken to say goodbye to him. Goodbye had to be said because of father having fallen off the scaffolding where he was at work and not getting better. You stick to that, father had said, looking dreadfully clean in the strange bed among all those other clean beds; it’s yourn, your very own. My dad give it to me, and it belonged to his dad. Don’t you let any one take it away. Some old lady told the old man it ’ud bring us luck. So long, old chap.

Dickie remembered every word of that speech, and he kept the treasure. There had been another thing with it, tied on with string. But Aunt Maud had found that, and taken it away to take care of, and he had never seen it again. It was brassy, with a white stone and some sort of pattern on it. He had the treasure, and he had not the least idea what it was, with its bells that jangled such pretty music, and its white spike so hard and smooth. He did not know—but I know. It was a rattle—a baby’s old-fashioned rattle—or, if you would rather call it that, a coral and bells.

And we shall ’ave the fairest flowers of hill and dale, said Dickie, whispering comfortably in his dirty sheets, and green sward. Oh! Tinkler dear, ’twill indeed be a fair scene. The gayest colours of the rainbow amid the Ague Able green of fresh leaves. I do love the Man Next Door. He has indeed a ’art of gold.

That was how Dickie talked to his friend Tinkler. You know how he talked to his aunt and the Man Next Door. I wonder whether you know that most children can speak at least two languages, even if they have never had a foreign nurse or been to foreign climes—or whether you think that you are the only child who can do this?

Believe me, you are not. Parents and guardians would be surprised to learn that dear little Charlie has a language quite different from the one he uses to them—a language in which he talks to the cook and the housemaid. And yet another language—spoken with the real accent too—in which he converses with the boot-boy and the grooms.

Dickie, however, had learned his second language from books. The teacher at his school had given him six—Children of the New Forest, Quentin Durward, Hereward the Wake, and three others—all paper-backed. They made a new world for Dickie. And since the people in books talked in this nice, if odd, way, he saw no reason why he should not—to a friend whom he could trust.

I hope you’re not getting bored with all this?

You see, I must tell you a little about the kind of boy Dickie was and the kind of way he lived, or you won’t understand his adventures. And he had adventures—no end of adventures—as you will see presently.

Dickie woke, gay as the spring sun that was trying to look in at him through his grimy windows.

Perhaps he’ll do some more to the garden to-day! he said, and got up very quickly.

He got up in the dirty, comfortless room and dressed himself. But in the evening he was undressed by kind, clean hands, and washed in a big bath half-full of hot, silvery water, with soap that smelt like the timber yard at the end of the street. Because, going along to school, with his silly little head full of Artistic Bird Seeds and flowers rainbow-coloured, he had let his crutch slip on a banana-skin and had tumbled down, and a butcher’s cart had gone over his poor lame foot. So they took the hurt foot to the hospital, and of course he had to go with it, and the hospital was much more like the heaven he read of in his books than anything he had ever come across before.

He noticed that the nurses and the doctors spoke in the kind of words that he had found in his books, and in a voice that he had not found anywhere; so when on the second day a round-faced, smiling lady in a white cap said, Well, Tommy, and how are we to-day? he replied—

My name is far from being Tommy, and I am in Lux Ury and Af Fluence, I thank you, gracious lady.

At which the lady laughed and pinched his cheek.

When she grew to know him better, and found out where he had learned to talk like that, she produced more books. And from them he learned more new words. They were very nice to him at the hospital, but when they sent him home they put his lame foot into a thick boot with a horrid, clumpy sole and iron things that went up his leg.

His aunt and her friends said, How kind! but Dickie hated it. The boys at school made game of it—they had got used to the crutch—and that was worse than being called Old Dot-and-go-one, which was what Dickie had got used to—so used that it seemed almost like a pet name.

And on that first night of his return he found that he had been robbed. They had taken his Tinkler from the safe corner in his bed where the ticking was broken, and there was a soft flock nest for a boy’s best friend.

He knew better than to ask what had become of it. Instead he searched and searched the house in all its five rooms. But he never found Tinkler.

Instead he found next day, when his aunt had gone out shopping, a little square of cardboard at the back of the dresser drawer, among the dirty dusters and clothes pegs and string and corks and novelettes.

It was a pawnticket—Rattle. One shilling.

Dickie knew all about pawntickets. You, of course, don’t. Well, ask some grown-up person to explain; I haven’t time. I want to get on with the story.

Until he had found that ticket he had not been able to think of anything else. He had not even cared to think about his garden and wonder whether the Artistic Bird Seeds had come up parrot-coloured. He had been a very long time in the hospital, and it was August now. And the nurses had assured him that the seeds must be up long ago—he would find everything flowering, you see if he didn’t.

" ‘IT IS A MOONFLOWER, OF COURSE,’ HE SAID."

And now he went out to look. There was a tangle of green growth at the end of the garden, and the next garden, was full of weeds. For the Man Next Door had gone off to look for work down Ashford way, where the hop-gardens are, and the house was to let.

A few poor little pink and yellow flowers showed stunted among the green where he had sowed the Artistic Bird Seed. And, towering high above everything else—oh, three times as high as Dickie himself—there was a flower—a great flower like a sunflower, only white.

Why, said Dickie, it’s as big as a dinner-plate.

It was.

It stood up, beautiful and stately, and turned its cream-white face towards the sun.

The stalk’s like a little tree, said Dickie; and so it was.

It had great drooping leaves, and a dozen smaller white flowers stood out below it on long stalks, thinner than that needed to support the moonflower itself.

"It is a moonflower, of course, he said, if the other kind’s sunflowers. I love it! I love it! I love it!"

He did not allow himself much time for loving it, however; for he had business in hand. He had, somehow or other, to get a shilling. Because without a shilling he could not exchange that square of cardboard with Rattle on it for his one friend, Tinkler. And with the shilling he could. (This is part of the dismal magic of pawntickets which some grown-up will kindly explain to you.)

I can’t get money by the sweat of my brow, said Dickie to himself; nobody would let me run their errands when they could get a boy with both legs to do them. Not likely. I wish I’d got something I could sell.

He looked round the yard—dirtier and nastier than ever now in the parts that the Man Next Door had not had time to dig. There was certainly nothing there that any one would want to buy, especially now the rabbit-hutch was gone. Except . . . why, of course—the moonflowers!

He got the old worn-down knife out of the bowl on the back kitchen sink, where it nestled among potato peelings like a flower among foliage, and carefully cut half a dozen of the smaller flowers. Then he limped up to New Cross Station, and stood outside, leaning on his crutch, and holding out the flowers to the people who came crowding out of the station after the arrival of each train—thick, black crowds of tired people, in too great a hurry to get home to their teas to care much about him or his flowers. Everybody glanced at them, for they were wonderful flowers, as white as water-lilies, only flat—the real sunflower shape—and their centres were of the purest yellow gold colour.

Pretty, ain’t they? one black-coated person would say to another. And the other would reply—

No. Yes. I dunno! Hurry up, can’t you?

It was no good. Dickie was tired, and the flowers were beginning to droop. He turned to go home, when a sudden thought brought the blood to his face. He turned again quickly and went straight to the pawnbroker’s. You may be quite sure he had learned the address on the card by heart.

He went boldly into the shop, which had three handsome gold balls hanging out above its door, and in its window all sorts of pretty things—rings, and chains, and brooches, and watches, and china, and silk handkerchiefs, and concertinas.

Well, young man, said the stout gentleman behind the counter, what can we do for you?

I want to pawn my moonflowers, said Dickie.

The stout gentleman roared with laughter, and slapped a stout leg with a stout hand.

Well, that’s a good ’un! he said, as good a one as ever I heard. Why, you little duffer, they’d be dead long before you came back to redeem them, that’s certain.

You’d have them while they were alive, you know, said Dickie gently.

What are they? Don’t seem up to much. Though I don’t know that I ever saw a flower just like them, come to think of it, said the pawnbroker, who lived in a neat villa at Brockley and went in for gardening in a gentlemanly, you-needn’t-suppose-I-can’t-afford-a-real-gardener-if-I-like sort of way.

They’re moonflowers, said Dickie, and I want to pawn them and then get something else out with the money.

Got the ticket? said the gentleman, cleverly seeing that he meant get out of pawn.

Yes, said Dickie; and it’s my own Tinkler that my daddy gave me before he died, and my aunt Missa Propagated it when I was in hospital.

The man looked carefully at the card.

All right, he said at last; hand over the flowers. They are not so bad, he added, more willing to prize them now that they were his (things do look different when they are your own, don’t they?). "Here, Humphreys, put these in a