‘Oh, am I?’ exclaimed the stall-keeper, and reached the conclusion, after a close scrutiny of his impecunious customer, that perhaps he would. We’ve all got to try and get into heaven somehow, and the ticket would be cheap for a cup of tea. ‘Well, you can share my bit o’ luck, if you like. Last customer left in too much hurry to take his change.’
He held up the coin he had been examining. It was a two-shilling piece. A new one. Then he turned his head and glanced along the road, where the last customer was vanishing into the murk.
‘One o’ them—well, jerky chaps,’ the stall-keeper went on, as he slopped tea into a thick cup. ‘Up they come like a jack-in-the-box. “Sandwich!” And they’ve hardly got their fingers on it before they’re off. I reckon when they say their prayers they jest say, “Hallo God, good-bye!”’ He chuckled at his little joke while he shoved the cup across. He always served spoons with his saucers, to prove that he knew Ritz manners, but the spoons were always drowned. ‘Couldn’t have gone quicker, not if a bobby’d been after him.’
Ben did not offer any comment at once. The tea claimed first attention. But when he had drunk half of it and the warmth began to percolate through the chills in his soul, he observed, meditatively:
‘P’r’aps one was!’
‘Well, you never know, do you?’ replied the stall-keeper, now becoming meditative himself. ‘New money and old clothes always makes me suspicious if it ain’t Christmas-time. And, then, there’s another thing. There was a nasty mark on his face. That’s right. A nasty mark. And not one he’d got in the war.’ He paused, to visualise the nasty mark. It had been on his left cheek. ‘Read about the bloke they’ve done in at Hammersmith?’
Ben frowned. Wasn’t there any way of keeping this old man from continually popping up?
‘It’s in the paper,’ said the stall-keeper.
‘Well, I ain’t read it,’ answered Ben. ‘I belongs to one o’ them inscripshun libraries.’
The stall-keeper’s head disappeared behind the expanded pages of an afternoon journal. Invisible, it announced:
‘Ah, here we are. “Old Man With His Throat Cut. Hunt in Hammersmith. Rich Recloosey.” Don’t seem no end to ’em. But they’ve got the knife, I see, and it ses here that the police are on the track of an important clue.’
‘Well, the dead bloke’s a clue, ain’t ’e?’ queried Ben, making an effort.
‘And we’re to look out for a feller six foot one, in a dark suit.’
‘And wot do we do when we finds ’im?’ inquired Ben. ‘Go hup ter ’im and hask, “Beg pardon, guv’nor, but do you ’appen to ’ave done a murder terday?” They tike us fer blinkin’ mugs, don’t they?’
But the stall-keeper wasn’t listening to Ben. He was thinking. ‘Six foot one. Six foot one. And a dark suit. Well, that’s queer—or am I barmy?’
A couple of sailors came along. They were noisy and half-drunk. Not feeling social (and you need to feel social if you are going to get any change out of half-drunks), Ben finished his tea, thanked the good-natured stall-keeper, and slipped away. In two minutes, the pleasant coffee-stall was merely a memory, and the dark, moist streets were closing in upon him again.
From beyond the dimness on his left came the depressing sound of a tram. The sound was some way off, and painted no sylvan picture. Ahead, moist vistas. On his right, a wall. A high wall. An interminable wall. Every now and then the wall was punctuated by an opening guarded by a gate or a door. The doors, being solid, revealed no glimpse of what lay beyond the wall, but through the occasional gates one got little peeps of a queer, derelict land, of unpopulated spaces, of rails that seemed to have no purpose, of large, barren buildings and of other walls. One could not see water, but one knew it was there. It hung in the greyness, and breathed up above its level. It was both depressing and invigorating—it whispered of lapping ooze and of vivid colours, of blue seas and blackened bodies. It gave you the taste of salt and the tang of wet rope. It filled your subconscious soul with a prayer for liberty and a knowledge of captivity, even the subconscious soul of a scarecrow like Ben, who had no knowledge of his soul or of what it was passing through.
‘Gawd, wot a smell!’ he thought once. ‘Tork abart dead fish!’
Yes, even his nose was shocked. Yet there was something about the smell … Ben, in almost-forgotten days, had been to sea …
Hallo! One of the doors was ajar! Hardly conscious that he did so, he slipped through. Perhaps he thought that, on the inner side of this wall, there would be fewer inquiries when he found his pitch for the night. Perhaps the water’s breath, or that queer, dead-fish smell, had led him to follow an unreasonable impulse. Or perhaps the invisible fingers from which he was endeavouring to escape had stretched out through the open door, had closed round his frail frame, and had drawn him in. A moment of sudden terror, born of he knew not what, supported the latter theory as he stood on this threshold of dockland.
‘Garn, yer idgit!’ he rounded on himself the next instant; and he comforted himself by his time-worn philosophy, ‘One plice is as good as another, ain’t it, when there ain’t nowhere helse?’
So, quelling his fear and imagining himself a hero once more, he advanced over the derelict spaces of the dock to find a corner where he could lie down and dream of kings and queens.
And the invisible fingers closed the door in the wall behind him.
‘Oi! Git orf me!’
Ben sat up abruptly, with a clammy sensation that a nightmare had pattered over him. Then fear of death was succeeded by indignation against life. Why had life, as momentarily represented by a black and shadowy dockyard, nothing better to offer a weary man than the horrible spot on which he lay?
Ben did not often sleep between clean sheets, but he had his standards. A bit of a carpet, with a footstool under your head—the corner of an empty attic, particularly if the attic were triangular to improve the wedge-like snugness of the angle, and if the peeling wall-paper kept off your nose—a couple of chairs with a minimum of seven legs—even a table, either on it or under it, according to which least reminded you of granite—these were supportable and permitted you to retain the one per cent of self-respect unfeeling life had left you. But cold and slippery stone, an equally cold and slippery post that vanished from behind you every time you moved your head half an inch to scratch it, leaving you outstretched, and rats!—these were conditions that even a worm might turn at, destroying its faith in the god that looks so inadequately after the Lesser Things!
Yes, the rats in particular. Ben hated rats. Nasty, slimy creatures, with evil eyes and bodies four sizes too large. Mice, now—they were different. You could chum up with a mouse when you knew how, and give them little bits of cheese. But rats took the cheese without waiting to ask. They just watched you from a dark corner or a crack, then darted forward with a swift swish, clambered heavily over you like giant slugs fitted with feet, used your face as a floor, and left their foot-marks on your soul.
‘Next rat I see,’ thought Ben, ‘I’ll wring its neck!’
A large dock rodent accepted the challenge, leapt at his cheek, and bounced away again into the blackness. Ben’s eyebrows only escaped contact through being raised out of the rat’s route in terror. A month previously an Asiatic’s eyebrows had been less fortunate in Smyrna.
‘Blimy, wot a life!’ muttered Ben, wiping his forehead with a red handkerchief. The handkerchief was already four weeks late for its annual laundering, but, even so, handkerchief