I did not open my shop the first day I entered it; I was sleepy; I slept all day and, to speak plainly, spent the evening whoring. You may depend upon it, there is no woman in the world to compare with a street-bred, fourteen-year-old London girl — and I speak as one who has sailed the Seven Seas and whored in most of their ports. Only the Japanese can compare. The one I selected was clean, well-finished at all points of her charming little body and, she told me, “new to the game”. She explained that she had taken up this profession because the food at home was meagre and she had an insatiable lust for little meat pies. The thought of them, it seemed, maddened her like wine. I bought her an abundance of these pies, hot; but only a little gin, for I had already long known that a girl full of food is flushed and beset with carnal thoughts, while a girl flushed with wine is often little more than a nuisance.
Certainly, when we got to bed she went about her work with unfeigned enthusiasm; I had never known such an indefatigable gymnast, she was gifted, gifted. Never have I laid out a few little meat pies so profitably.
At dawn, as the free-roaming roosters who live in the thick dung of the Strand commenced to crow hideously, I opened one eye and was sorry to see the child investigating the pockets of my breeches. I had taken the breeches off, you understand. I had of course hidden my money, too. She explained, quite unabashed, that she had been merely seeking the price of a little hot meat pie to stay her on the journey home to Tooley Street, where her father, who would beat her, was a tailor’s cutter, and that she would have taken no more. I think she was telling the truth although I was not a credulous man, even in those days.
I gave her the price of six twopenny pies and promised to give her the same — and her supper — whenever she was hungry. She visited me often after that, often. Sometimes she brought her little sister, who would sit in the corner, fascinated, and from time to time would make us a pot of Mr J.’s delicious tea, or run to the shop on the corner for a little, hot meat pie for her sister. Sometimes we let her come into the bed; she was charmingly inquisitive.
I wish I could remember their names but I am old now and can only recall the deeds. She — the older one — used to call me her “dear little Suffolk Punch” although I am not little and often told her that my home was in Holland, not Suffolk, which is a flat, rainy Province in the East of England.
After that first night with the girl whose name I cannot recall I was so tired that I lay in bed all day again, with the shutters of the shop still up. In the late afternoon the boy “You” came upstairs and rapped on my door, saying excitedly that “a right, prime, bang-up, slap-dash, out-and-out swell cove” was hammering on the shop-door with a “cane with a ’orse’s ’ead ’andle”. I considered this carefully, wondering how the child could have learned such language in a Charity School.
“Tell him,” I said at last, “that your master will be happy to wait upon him should he care to call again tomorrow.”
When I arose in the late evening, dressed to go out for supper and any other entertainment the night might afford, the boy “You” told me that the swell cove had cursed most dreadfully and said that he would by no means again venture into so vile a part of the town. I accepted this philosophically.
It was quite two afternoons before he — the swell cove — came back. The shop was now open and the shutters down. He was, indeed, a very swell cove: his hat shone like a looking-glass, his coachman-like surtout bore countless frogs, lappets and capes (the topmost of which was trimmed with the curly black fur from Afghanistan) and a glance out of the window told me that the phaeton he had arrived in was of the very finest, with a coat of arms on the panel of the door and a monogram embroidered on the hammer-cloth.
“Good afternoon, milord,” I said civilly, rubbing my hands in a tradesmanly way, as I supposed he would expect. “You are interested in old blue-and-white wares?”
He stared at me. I stared back, for I was not an Englishman and did not understand the niceties of class.
“I might be and then again I might not,” he said at last and, turning his back, began to examine such of the stock as I had chosen to lay out.
“How much,” he asked languidly, “is that?” pointing with the littlest finger of his gloved hand to a rather good small pot with an impeccable glaze.
“That?” I asked, raising an amused eyebrow. “That toy is a shilling. If you really want it you may pay me next time you are passing.”
He glowered at me. I picked up the piece and sneered at it, as though it were a mere pottery cow-creamer. “The piece to the right of it is thirty guineas, the piece to the left is fifty. This piece, since you are my first customer, and since it is of no value, you may have as a gift.”
His face darkened horridly.
“You are an insolent rascal,” he said quietly and dangerously.
I opened my fingers and let the little pot fall to the floor, where it was dashed to a thousand fragments. I snapped my fingers; the boy “You” crept out with a broom and swept the fragments away. The lord continued to glare at me. I looked back at him, not uncivilly. At last he turned on his heel and strode out of the shop. My shop, that is to say.
The boy, as I turned towards the stairs, gazed at me with saucer-eyes.
“Beg pardon, Sir,” he said, “but had you ought to have done that, Sir? ’Im being a lord, I mean?”
“Time will tell,” I said enigmatically, “and the end justifies the means.”
“Yes Sir, I’m sure Sir,” he said. I mounted the first two stairs, then a thought struck me. “Are you warm enough at night, ‘You’?” I asked.
“Oh, Sir, yes Sir, warm as toast.”
“Because there is a great deal of sacking and soft rags in the chest from which the Delft came.”
“Yes Sir, thankyou, Sir, beg pardon Sir, I have already used it for bedding, but it is as good as new, Sir, I swears.”
“Good boy. Now, all I ask is that, each week, when the weather is sunny, you shall spread it all out in the backyard to air it and to prevent smells. On the same day you shall go to the public fountain in the Convent Gardens vegetable-market and wash yourself all over with yellow soap. Here is twopence for the soap. You shall have the same each week unless I can smell you. The first smelliness and I shall beat you cruelly. You should make quite a halfpenny a weekout of the soap-money if you are careful. But mind: no smells!”
“Yes Sir, thankyou Sir, I swear you shall not have the least annoyance.” He was a well-spoken child for a charity-bastard although thin, thin.
I trudged up to my brass bedstead feeling all the noble emotions of an English gentleman, while he, no doubt, scuttled in to his cosy rat’s-nest under the counter. A moment later I was at the head of the stairs.
“You!” I roared. He was there in a twinkling.
“Why have I fresh long candles in my chamber-sticks? What has been done with last night’s snuff-ends?” The child quaked, with terror but not, I think, with guilt.
“Sir,” he said, “there was but a quarter-inch of tallow left in each stick, so I recharged them. I scraped out the ends and have melted the into the lid of a tin box, thinking to use them with a rag wick so as to read my Pilgrim’s Progress each night, as the Charity-school master bade me. I truly thought, Sir, that they were my perquisites: I am no thief, I swear.”
“Hrrumph,” I said, as I had heard Englishmen say. “Well, be that as it may, put some clothes on and run to the shop on the corner and fetch me three little fourpenny mutton pies, hot, for my supper. Aye, and a pennyworth of fried peas. Here is a shilling and a penny. And look sharp!”