He resolved, first, to try the Institute.  Nora’s name and address must be on the class registers; but what business had he with the girl’s class registers?  As diplomatist his failure was lamentable.  He could invent no reasonable excuses, and ignoble defeat was his fate at the hands of the rigid lady who managed the girls department of the Institute.  Then he took to prowling about all the streets that lay beyond that second corner that had marked the end of their evening walks, watching for her; searching also, desperately, for some impossible sign about a house that might suggest that she lived in it.  Thus he spent the daylight of two evenings watching a little muslin-hung window, because the muslin was tied with a ribbon of a sort he remembered her to have worn, and because he chose to fancy a neatness and a daintiness about the tying that might well be hers.  But on the second evening as dusk fell the window opened, and a hairy, red-bearded man in blue shirt sleeves put out his head and leaned on the sill to smoke his pipe and watch the red sky.  Johnny swung away savagely, and called himself a fool for his pains; p. 235and indeed, he could ill afford to waste time, for Maidment and Hurst claimed him till five each day, and a few hours in the evening were all that remained; more, Nora would change her lodgings—perhaps had done so already.

After this he screwed his courage so high as to go to the police-station where the charge against Nora’s mother must have been taken, and to ask for her address.  But the cast-iron-faced inspector in charge took his name and address instead, as a beginning, and then would tell him nothing.  And at last, maddened and reckless, he went to the publican, and demanded the information of him.  Now if Johnny had had a little more worldly experience, a little more cunning, and a great deal more coolness, he would have done this at first, and, beginning by ordering a drink, he would have opened a casual conversation, led it to the matter of the window, and in the end would have gained his point quietly and easily.  But as it was, he did none of these things.  He ordered no drink, and he made a blunt request, taking little thought of its manner, none of the publican’s point of view, and perhaps forgetting that the man was in no way responsible for the rebuffs already endured.  The publican, for his part, was already in a bad temper, because of the clumsy tapping of a barrel and ensuing “cheek” of the potman.  So he answered Johnny’s demand by asking if he had come to pay for the window; p. 236and receiving the negative reply he had expected, he urgently recommended the intruder’s departure “outside”: in such terms as gave no choice but compliance.

So that now, in extremity, Johnny resolved on a last expedient: one that had been vaguely in his mind for a day or two, though he had yet scarce had courage to consider it seriously.  This was, to tell his mother the whole thing; and to induce her, if he might, to ask the address at the Institute—perhaps on some pretext of dressmaking business.  He was not hopeful, for he well knew that any hint of traffic with the family of one such as Nora’s mother would be a horror to her.  But he could see nothing else, and to sit still were intolerable.  Moreover he guessed that his mother must suspect something from his preoccupation, and his neglect of his drawing.  Though indeed poor Nan was most at pains, just then, to conceal troubles of her own.

Mr. Butson, in fact, began to chafe under the restraints of narrow circumstances.  Not that he was poorer than had been his habit—indeed he was much better off—but that his needs had expanded with his prosperity and with his successes in society.  And it was just now that his wife began to attempt retrenchment.  Probably she was encouraged by the outrageous revolt of her son, a revolt which had made advisable a certain degree of caution on the part of himself, the head of the household.  She spoke of a rumour that the ship-yard p. 237opposite might close, as so many other Thames ship-yards had closed of late years.  That, she said, would mean ruin for the shop, and she must try to save what little she might, meantime.  An absurdity, of course, in Mr. Butson’s view.  He felt no interest in the rumours of old women about ship-yards, and petty measurement of the sordid chances of trade irritated him.  If his wife found one source of profit running dry, she must look out and tap another, that was all.  So long as he got what he wanted he troubled little about the manner of its getting.  But now he ran near having less than he wanted, and his wife was growing even less accommodating.  She went so far as to hint of withholding the paltry sum the lad earned; he should have it himself, she thought, to buy his clothes, and to save toward the end of his apprenticeship.  More than this, Mr. Butson much suspected that Johnny had actually had his own money for some while past, and that Mrs. Butson had descended to the mean subterfuge of representing as his earnings a sum which in reality she extracted each week from the till; an act of pure embezzlement.  And then there was the cottage in Epping Forest.  She wouldn’t sell it now, though she wanted to sell when she first left it.  What good was there in keeping it?  True there was three-and-sixpence a week of rent, but that was nothing; it would go in a round of drinks, or in half a round, in any distinguished bar; and there were deductions even p. 238from the three-and-sixpence.  Sold, the cottage might produce a respectable sum—perhaps a hundred pounds—at anyrate eighty.  The figures stirred his blood.  What a magnificent dash a man might cut with eighty pounds!  And a fortune might be made out of it, too, if it were used wisely, and not buried away in a wretched three-and-sixpenny cottage.  Properly invested on judicious flat-race Certainties, it would double itself about twice a week.  So he made it very plain to Nan that the sale of the cottage for what it would fetch and the handing over of the proceeds was a plan he insisted on.  But the stupid woman wouldn’t see it.  It was plain that she was beginning to over-estimate her importance in the establishment, by reason that of late she had not been sufficiently sworn at, shoved, thumped, and twisted and pinched on the arms.  That was the worst of kindness to a woman—she took advantage.

So that he was obliged to begin to thump again.  There was no need to do it so that Johnny might know, and so cause a low disturbance.  In fact, Johnny took little notice of things at home just now, no longer made inquiries, nor lifted the poker with so impudent a stare; and he was scarce indoors at all.  Wherefore Mr. Butson punched and ruffianed—being careful to leave no disreputable marks in visible spots, such as black eyes—and sometimes he kicked; and he demanded more money and more, but all the while insisted on the sale of the p. 239cottage.  The monstrous laws of conveyance made it impossible for him to lay hands on ............