Johnny Flynn was then seventeen years old. At that age you could not call him boy without vexing him, or man without causing him to blush—his teasing, ruddy and uproarious mother delighted to produce either or both of these manifestations for her off-spring was a pale mild creature—but he had given a deal of thought to many manly questions. Marriage, for instance, was one of these. That was an institution he admired but whose joys, whatever they were, he was not anxious to experience; its difficulties and disasters as ironically outlined by the widow Flynn were the subject of his grossest scepticism, scepticism in general being not the least prominent characteristic of Johnny Flynn. Certainly his sister Pomona was not married; she was only sixteen, an age too early for such bliss, but all the same she was going to have a baby; he had quarrelled with his mother about that. He quarrelled with his mother about most things, she delighted in quarrels, they amused her very much; but on this occasion she was really very angry, or she pretended to be so—which was worse, much worse than the real thing.
[296]
The Flynns were poor people, quite poor, living in two top-floor rooms at the house of a shoemaker, also moderately poor, whose pelting and hammering of soles at evening were a durable grievance to Johnny. He was fond of the shoemaker, a kind bulky tall man of fifty, though he did not like the shoemaker’s wife, as bulky as her husband and as tall but not kind to him or to anything except Johnny himself; nor did he like any of the other lodgers, of whom there were several, all without exception beyond the reach of affluence. The Flynn apartments afforded a bedroom in front for Mrs. Flynn and Pomona, a room where Johnny seldom intruded, never without a strained sense of sanctity similar to the feeling he experienced when entering an empty church as he sometimes did. He slept in the other room, the living room, an arrangement that also annoyed him. He was easily annoyed, but he could never go to bed until mother and sister had retired, and for the same reason he had always to rise before they got up, an exasperating abuse of domestic privilege.
One night he had just slipped happily into his bed and begun to read a book called “Rasselas,” which the odd-eyed man at the public library had commended to him, when his mother returned to the room, first tapping at the door, for Johnny was a prude as she knew not only from instinct and observation but from protests which had occasionally been addressed to her by the indignant boy. She came in now only half clad, in petticoat and stockinged feet, her arms quite bare.[297] They were powerful arms as they had need to be, for she was an ironer of linen at a laundry, but they were nice to look at and sometimes Johnny liked looking at them, though he did not care for her to run about like that very often. Mrs. Flynn sat down at the foot of his couch and stared at her son.
“Johnny,” she began steadily, but paused to rub her forehead with her thick white shiny fingers. “I don’t know how to tell you, I’m sure, or what you’ll say....” Johnny shook “Rasselas” rather impatiently and heaved a protesting sigh. “I can’t think,” continued his mother, “no, I can’t think that it’s our Pomony, but there she is and it’s got to be done, I must tell you; besides you’re the only man in our family now, so it’s only right for you, you see, and she’s going to have a baby. Our Pomony!”
The boy turned his face to the wall, although his mother was not looking at him—she was staring at that hole in the carpet near the fender. At last he said, “Humph ... well?” And as his mother did not say anything, he added, “What about it, I don’t mind?” Mrs. Flynn was horrified at his unconcern, or she pretended to be so; Johnny was never sure about the genuineness of her moods. It was most unfilial, but he was like that—so was Mrs. Flynn. Now she cried out, “You’ll have to mind, there, you must. I can’t take everything on my own shoulders. You’re the only man left in our family now, you must, Johnny. What are we to do?”
He glared at the wallpaper a foot from his eyes.[298] It had an unbearable pattern of blue but otherwise indescribable flowers; he had it in his mind to have some other pattern there—some day.
“Eh?” asked his mother sharply, striking the foot of the bed with her fist.
“Why ... there’s nothing to be done ... now ... I suppose.” He was blushing furiously. “How did it happen, when will it be?”
“It’s a man she knows, he got hold of her, his name is Stringer. Another two months about. Stringer. Hadn’t you noticed anything? Everybody else has. You are a funny boy, I can’t make you out at all, Johnny, I can’t make you out. Stringer his name is, but I’ll make him pay dearly for it, and that’s what I want you—to talk to you about. Of course he denies of everything, they always do.”
Mrs. Flynn sighed at this disgusting perfidy, brightening however when her son began to discuss the problem. But she talked so long and he got so sleepy at last that he was very glad when she went to bed again. Secretly she was both delighted and disappointed at his easy acceptance of her dreadful revelation; fearing a terrible outburst of anger she had kept the knowledge from him for a long time. She was glad to escape that, it is true, but she rather hungered for some flashing reprobation of this unknown beast, this Stringer. She swore she would bring him to book, but she felt old and lonely, and Johnny was a strange son, not very virile. The mother had told Pomona terrifying prophetic tales of what Johnny would do, what he would be certain to do; he would,[299] for instance, murder that Stringer and drive Pomony into the street; of course he would. Yet here he was, quite calm about it, as if he almost liked it. Well, she had told him, she could do no more, she would leave it to him.
In the morning Johnny greeted his sister with tender affection and at evening, having sent her to bed, he and his mother resumed their discussion.
“Do you know, mother,” he said, “she is quite handsome, I never noticed it before.”
Mrs. Flynn regarded him with desperation and then informed him that his sister was an ugly disgusting little trollop who ought to be birched.
“No, no, you are wrong, mother, it’s bad, but it’s all right.”
“You think you know more about such things than your own mother, I suppose.” Mrs. Flynn sniffed and glared.
He said it to her gently: “Yes.”
She produced a packet of notepaper and envelopes “The Monster Packet for a Penny,” all complete with a wisp of pink blotting paper and a penholder without a nib, which she had bought at the Chandler’s on her way home that evening, along with some sago and some hair oil for Johnny whose stiff unruly hair provoked such spasms of rage in her bosom that she declared that she was “sick to death of it.” On the supper table lay also a platter, a loaf, a basin of mustard pickle, and a plate with round lengths of cheese shaped like small candles.
“Devil blast him!” muttered Mrs. Flynn as she[300] fetched from a cupboard shelf a sour-looking bottle labelled Writing Fluid, a dissolute pen, and requested Johnny to compose a letter to Stringer—devil blast him!—telling him of the plight of her daughter Pomona Flynn, about whom she desired him to know that she had already consulted her lawyers and the chief of police and intimating that unless she heard from him satisfactory by the day after tomorrow the matter would pass out of her hands.
“That’s no good, it’s not the way,” declared her son thoughtfully; Mrs. Flynn therefore sat humbly confronting him and awaited the result of his cogitations. Johnny was not a very robust youth, but he was growing fast now, since he had taken up with running; he was very fleet, so Mrs. Flynn understood, and had already won a silver-plated hot water jug, which they used for the milk. But still he was thin and not tall, his dark hair was scattered; his white face was a nice face, thought Mrs. Flynn, very nice, only there was always something strange about his clothes. She couldn’t help that now, but he had such queer fancies, there was no other boy in the street whose trousers were so baggy or of such a colour. His starched collars were all right of course, beautifully white and shiny, she got them up herself, and they set his neck off nicely.
“All we need do,” her son broke in, “is just tell him.”
“Tell him?”
“Yes, just tell him about it—it’s very unfortunate—and ask him to come and see you. I hope, though,”[301] he paused, “I hope they won’t want to go and get married.”
“He ought to be made to, devil blast him,” cried Mrs. Flynn, “only she’s frightened, she is; afraid of her mortal life of him! We don’t want him here, neither, she says he’s a nasty horrible man.”
Johnny sat dumb for some moments. Pomona was a day girl in service at a restaurant. Stringer was a clerk to an auctioneer. The figure of his pale little sister shrinking before a ruffian (whom he figured as a fat man with a red beard) startled and stung him.
“Besides,” continued Mrs. Flynn, “he’s just going to be married to some woman, some pretty judy, God help her ... in fact, as like as not he’s married to her already by now. No, I gave up that idea long ago, I did, before I told you, long ago.”
“We can only tell him about Pomony then, and ask him what he would like to do.”
“What he would like to do, well, certainly!” protested the widow.
“And if he’s a decent chap,” continued Johnny serenely, “it will be all right, there won’t be any difficulty. If he ain’t, then we can do something else.”
His mother was reluctant to concur but the boy had his way. He sat with his elbows on the table, his head pressed in his hands, but he could not think out the things he wanted to say to this man. He would look up and stare around the room as if he were in a strange place, though it was not strange to him at all for he had lived in it many years. There was not[302] much furniture in the apartment, yet there was but little space in it. The big table was covered with American cloth, mottled and shiny. Two or three chairs full of age and discomfort stood upon a carpet that was full of holes and stains. There were some shelves in a recess, an engraving framed in maple of the player scene from “Hamlet,” and near by on the wall hung a gridiron whose prongs were woven round with coloured wools and decorated with satin bows. Mrs. Flynn had a passion for vases, and two of these florid objects bought at a fair companioned a clock whose once snowy face had long since turned sallow because of the oil Mrs. Flynn had administered “to make it go properly.”
But he could by no means think out this letter; his mother sat so patiently watching him that he asked her to go and sit in the other room. Then he sat on, sniffing, as if thinking with his nose, while the room began to smell of the smoking lamp. He was remembering how years ago, when they were little children, he had seen Pomony in her nightgown and, angered with her for some petty reason, he had punched her on the side. Pomony had turned white, she could not speak, she could not breathe. He had been momentarily proud of that blow, it was a good blow, he had never hit another boy like that. But Pomony had fallen into a chair, her face tortured with pain, her eyes filled with tears that somehow would not fall. Then a fear seized him, horrible, piercing, frantic: she was dying, she would die, and there was nothing he could do to stop her! In passionate remorse and pity he had[303] flung himself before her, kissing her feet—they were small and beautiful though not very clean,—until at last he had felt Pomony’s arms droop caressingly around him and heard Pomony’s voice speaking lovingly and forgivingly to him.
After a decent interval his mother returned to him.
“What are we going to do about her?” she asked, “she’ll have to go away.”
“Away! Do you mean go to a home? No, but why go away? I’m not ashamed; what is there to be ashamed of?”
“Who the deuce is going to look after her? You talk like a tom-fool—yes, you are,” insisted Mrs. Flynn passionately. “I’m out all day from one week’s end to the other. She can’t be left alone, and the people downstairs are none too civil about it as it is. She’ll have to go to the workhouse, that’s all.”
Johnny was aghast, indignant, and really angry. He would never never consent to such a thing! Pomony! Into a workhouse! She should not, she should stop at home, here, like always, and have a nurse.
“Fool!” muttered his mother, with castigating scorn. “Where’s the money for nurses and doctors to come from? I’ve got no money for such things!”
“I’ll get some!” declared Johnny hotly.
“Where?”
“I’ll sell something.”
“What?”
“I’ll save up.”
“How?”
[304]
“And I’ll borrow some.”
“You’d better shut up now or I’ll knock your head off,” cried his mother. “Fidding and fadding about—you’re daft!”
“She shan’t go to any workhouse!”
“Fool!” repeated his mother, revealing her disgust at his hopeless imbecility.
“I tell you she shall not go there,” shouted the boy, stung into angry resentment by her contempt.
“She shall, she must.”
“I say she shan’t!”
“O don’t be such a blasted fool,” cried the distracted woman, rising from her chair.
Johnny sprang to his feet almost screaming, “You are the blasted fool, you, you!”
Mrs. Flynn seized a table knife and struck at her son’s face with it. He leaped away in terror, his startled appearance, glaring eyes and strained figure so affecting Mrs. Flynn that she dropped the knife, and, sinking into her chair, burst into peals of hysterical laughter. Recovering himself the boy hastened to the laughing woman. The maddening peals continued and increased, shocking him, unnerving him again; she was dying, she would die. His mother’s laughter had always been harsh but delicious to him, it was so infectious, but this was demoniacal, it was horror.
“O, don’t, don’t, mother, don’t,” he cried, fondling her and pressing her yelling face to his breast. But she pushed him fiercely away and the terrifying laughter continued to sear his very soul until he could bear it no[305] longer. He struck at her shoulders with clenched fist and shook her frenziedly, frantically, crying:
“Stop it, stop, O stop it, she’ll go mad, stop it, stop.”
He was almost exhausted, when suddenly Pomona rushed into the room in her nightgown. Her long black hair tumbled in lovely locks about her pale face and her shoulder; her feet were bare.
“O Johnny, what are you doing?” gasped his little pale sister Pomony, who seemed so suddenly, so unbelievably, turned into a woman. “Let her alone.”
She pulled the boy away, fondling and soothing their distracted mother until Mrs. Flynn partially recovered.
“Come to bed now,” commanded Pomona, and Mrs. Flynn thereupon, still giggling, followed her child. When he was alone trembling Johnny turned down the lamp flame which had filled the room with smoky fumes. His glance rested upon the table knife; the room was silent and oppressive now. He glared at the picture of Hamlet, at the clock with the oily face, at the notepaper lying white upon the table. They had all turned into quivering semblances of the things they were; he was crying.
II
 
A letter, indited in the way he desired, was posted by Johnny on his way to work next morning. He was clerk in the warehouse of a wholesale provision merchant and he kept tally, in some underground cellars carpeted with sawdust, of hundreds of sacks of sugar[306] and cereals, tubs of butter, of lard, of treacle, chests of tea, a regular promontory of cheeses, cases of candles, jam, starch, and knife po............