"Will you be good enough to give me what I ask for, at once, please?"
The whole of Frank blazed in this small sentence: but Miss Mills was equal to it.
"You ought to know better," she said, "than to come asking for such things here! Taking up a lot of time like that."
"You don"t keep them?"
Miss Mills uttered a small sound. Miss Jamieson t.i.ttered.
"Shops are the proper places for writing-paper. This is a post-office."
Words cannot picture the superb high breeding shown in this utterance.
Frank should have understood that he had been guilty of gross impertinence in asking such things of Miss Mills; it was treating her almost as a shop-girl. But he was extremely angry by now.
"Then why couldn"t you have the civility to tell me so at once?"
Miss Jamieson laid aside a little sewing she was engaged on.
"Look here, young man, you don"t come bullying and threatening here.
I"ll have to call the policeman if you do.... I was at the railway station last Friday week, you know."
Frank stood still for one furious instant. Then his heart sank and he went out without a word.
The letters got written at last, late that evening, in the back room of a small lodging-house where he had secured a bed. I have the one he wrote to Jack before me as I write, and I copy it as it stands. It was without address or date.
"DEAR JACK,
"I want you to do, something for me. I want you to go to Merefield and see, first, Jenny, and then my father; and tell them quite plainly and simply that I"ve been in prison for a fortnight. I want Jenny to know first, so that she can think of what to say to my father. The thing I was sent to prison for was that I pleaded guilty to stealing a tin of salmon from a child called Mary Cooper. You can see the account of the case in the County Gazette for last Sat.u.r.day week, the twenty-seventh. The thing I really did was to take the tin from somebody else I was traveling with. He asked me to.
"Next, I want you to send on any letters that may have come for me to the address I enclose on a separate piece of paper.
Please destroy the address at once; but you can show this letter to Jenny and give her my love. You are not to come and see me. If you don"t, I"ll come and see you soon.
"Things are pretty bad just now, but I"m going to go through with it.
"Yours,
"F.
"P.S.--By the way, please address me as Mr. F. Gregory when you write."
He was perfectly obstinate, you understand, still.
Frank"s troubles as regards prison were by no means exhausted by his distressing conversation with the young ladies in the post office, and the next one fell on him as he was leaving the little town early on the Sat.u.r.day morning.
He had just turned out of the main street and was going up a quiet side lane that looked as if it would lead to the York Road, when he noticed a disagreeable little scene proceeding up a narrow _cul-de-sac_ across whose mouth he was pa.s.sing.
A tall, loose-limbed young man, in his working-clothes, obviously slightly excited with drink, had hold of a miserable old man by the scruff of the neck with one hand, and was cuffing him with the other.
Now I do not wish to represent Frank as a sort of knight-errant, but the fact is that if anyone with respectable and humane ideas goes on the tramp (I have this from the mouth of experienced persons) he has to make up his mind fairly soon either to be a redresser of wrongs or to be conveniently short-sighted. Frank was not yet sufficiently experienced to have learned the wisdom of the second alternative.
He went straight up the _cul-de-sac_ and without any words at all hit the young man as hard as possible under the ear nearest to him.
There seems to have been a moment of amazed silence; the young man dropped the old one, who fled out into the lane, and struck back at Frank, who parried. Simultaneously a woman screamed somewhere; and faces began to appear at windows and doors.
It is curious how the customs of the Middle Ages, as well as some of their oaths, seem to have descended to the ranks of the British working-man. In the old days--as also in prize-fights to-day--it was quite usual to a.s.sail your adversary with insults as well as with blows.
This was done now. The young man, with a torrent of imprecations, demanded who Frank thought he was, asked where he was coming to, required of society in general an explanation of a stranger"s interfering between a son and a qualified father. There was a murmur of applause and dissent, and Frank answered, with a few harmless expletives such as he had now learned to employ as a sort of verbal disguise, that he did not care how many sons or fathers were in question, that he did not propose to see a certain kind of bully abuse an old man, and that he would be happy to take the old man"s place....
Then the battle was set.
Frank had learned to box in a certain small saloon in Market Street, Cambridge, and knew perfectly well how to take care of himself. He received about half the force of one extremely hard blow just on his left cheek-bone before he got warmed to his work; but after that he did the giving and the loose-limbed young man the receiving, Frank was even scientific; he boxed in the American manner, crouching, with both arms half extended (and this seems to have entirely bewildered his adversary) and he made no effort to reach the face. He just thumped away steadily below the spot where the ribs part, and where--a doctor informs me--a nerve-center, known as the _solar plexus_, is situated. He revolved, too, with considerable agility, round his opponent, and gradually drew the battle nearer and nearer to the side lane outside. He knew enough of slum-chivalry by now to be aware that if a sympathizer, or sycophant, of the young man happened to be present, he himself would quite possibly (if the friend happened to possess sufficient courage) suddenly collapse from a disabling blow on the back of the neck. Also, he was not sure whether there was any wife in the question; and in this case it would be a poker, or a broken bottle, held dagger-wise, that he would have to meet. And he wished therefore to have more room round him than the _cul-de-sac_ afforded.
But there was no need for precaution.
The young man had begun to look rather sickly under the eyes and to hiccup three or four times in distressed manner; when suddenly the clamor round the fight ceased. Frank was aware of a shrill old voice calling out something behind him; and the next instant, simultaneously with the dropping of his adversary"s hands, he himself was seized from behind by the arms, and, writhing, discerned is blue sleeve and a gloved hand holding him.
"Now, what"s all this?" said a voice in his ear.
There was a chorus of explanation, declaring that ""Alb" had been set upon without provocation. There was a particularly voluble woman with red arms and an exceedingly persuasive manner, who advanced from a doorway and described the incident from her own point of view. She had been hanging out the children"s things, she began, and so forth; and Frank was declared the aggressor and ""Alb" the innocent victim.
Then the chorus broke out again, and ""Alb," after another fit of hiccupping, corroborated the witnesses in a broken and pathetically indignant voice.
Frank tore himself from one embracing arm and faced round, still held by the other.
"All right; I shan"t run away.... Look here; that"s a black lie. He was. .h.i.tting that old man. Where is he? Come on, uncle, and tell us all about it."
The old man advanced, his toothless face contorted with inexplicable emotion, and corroborated the red-armed woman, and the chorus generally, with astonishing volubility and emphasis.
"You old fool!" said Frank curtly. "What are you afraid of? Let"s have the truth, now. Wasn"t he hitting you?"
"He, he, he!" giggled the old man, torn by the desire of self-preservation on one side and, let us hope, by a wish for justice on the other. "He warn"t hittin" of me. He"s my son, he is.... "Alb is....
We were just having--"
"There! get out of this," said the policeman, releasing Frank with a shove. "We don"t want your sort here. Coming and making trouble.... Yes; my lad. You needn"t look at me like that. I know you."
"Who the deuce are you talking to?" snapped Frank.
"I know who I"m talking to, well enough," p.r.o.nounced the policeman judicially. "F. Gregory, ain"t it? Now you be off out of this, or you"ll be in trouble again."
There was something vaguely kindly about the man"s manner, and Frank understood that he knew very tolerably where the truth lay, but wished to prevent further disturbance. He gulped down his fury. It was no good saying anything; but the dense of the injustice of the universe was very bitter. He turned away--
A murmur of indignation broke out from the crowd, bidding the policeman do his duty.
And as Frank went up the lane, he heard that zealous officer addressing the court with considerable vigor. But it was very little comfort to him. He walked out of the town with his anger and resentment still hot in his heart at the indignity of the whole affair.