The Romance of a Plain Man. Glasgow Ellen Anderson Gholson
have gone to work
The blue flame of the match flickered an instant along the words; then it went out, and with Samuel at my heels, I crept through the back gate and down the alley to the next street, which led to the ragged brow of the hill. Ahead of me, as I turned off into Main Street, the scattered lights of the city showed like blurred patches upon the darkness. Gradually, while I went rapidly downhill, I saw the patches change into a nebulous cloud, and the cloud resolve itself presently into straight rows of lamps. Few people were in the streets at that hour, and when I reached the dim building of the Old Market, I found it cold and deserted, except for a stray cur or two that snarled at Samuel from a heap of trodden straw under a covered wagon. Despite the fact that I was for all immediate purposes as homeless as the snarling curs, I was not without the quickened pulses which attend any situation that a boy may turn to an adventure. A high heart for desperate circumstances has never failed me, and it bore me company that night when I came back again with aching feet to the Old Market, and lay down, holding Samuel tight, on a pile of straw.
In a little while I awoke because Samuel was barking, and sitting up in the straw I saw a dim shape huddled beside me, which I made out, after a few startled blinks, to be the bent figure of a woman wrapped in a black shawl with fringed ends, which were pulled over her head and knotted under her chin. From the penetrating odour I had learned to associate with my father, I judged that she had been lately drinking, and the tumbled state of my coat convinced me that she had been frustrated by Samuel in a base design to rifle my pockets. Yet she appeared so miserable as she sat there rocking from side to side and crying to herself, that I began all at once to feel very sorry. It seemed to hurt her to cry and yet I saw that the more it hurt her the more she cried.
"If I were you," I suggested politely, "I'd go home right away."
"Home?" repeated the woman, with a hiccough, "what's home?"
"The place you live in."
"Lor, honey, I don't live in no place. I jest walks."
"But what do you do when you get tired?"
"I walks some mo'."
"An' don't you ever leave off?"
"Only when it's dark like this an' thar's no folks about."
"But what do folks say to you when they see you walkin'?"
"Say to me," she threw back her head and broke into a drunken laugh, "why, they say to me: 'Step lively!'"
She crawled closer, peering at me greedily under the pale glimmer of the street lamp.
"Why, you're a darlin' of a boy," she said, "an' such pretty blue eyes!" Then she rose to her feet and stood swaying unsteadily above me, while Samuel broke out into angry barks. "Shall I tell you a secret because of yo' blue eyes?" she asked. "It's this – whatever you do in this world, you step lively about it. I've done a heap of lookin' an' I've seen the ones who get on are the ones who step the liveliest. It ain't no matter where you're goin', it ain't no matter who's befo' you, if you want to get there first, step lively!"
She went out, taking her awful secret with her, and turning over I fell asleep again on my pile of straw. "If ever I have a dollar I'll give it to her so she may stop walkin'," was my last conscious thought.
My next awakening was a very different one, for the light was streaming into the market, and a cheerful red face was shining down, like a rising sun, over a wheelbarrow of vegetables.
"Don't you think it's about time all honest folk were out of bed, sonny?" enquired a voice.
"I ain't been here mo'n an hour," I retorted, resenting the imputation of slothfulness with a spirit that was not unworthy of my mother.
The open length of the market, I saw now, was beginning to present a busy, almost a festive, air. Stalls were already laden with fruit and vegetables, and farmers' wagons covered with canvas, and driven by sunburnt countrymen, had drawn up to the sidewalk. Rising hurriedly to my feet, I began rubbing my eyes, for I had been dreaming of the fragrance of bacon in our little kitchen.
"Now I'd be up an' off to home, if I were you, sonny," observed the marketman, planting his wheelbarrow of vegetables on the brick floor, and beginning to wipe off the stall. "The sooner you take yo' whippin', the sooner you'll set easy again."
"There ain't anybody to whip me," I replied dolefully, staring at the sign over his head, on which was painted in large letters – "John Chitling. Fish, Oysters (in season). Vegetables. Fruits."
Stopping midway in his preparations, he turned on me his great beaming face, so like the rising sun that looked over his shoulder, while I watched his big jean apron swell with the panting breaths that drew from his stomach.
"Here's a boy that says he ain't got nobody to whip him!" he exclaimed to his neighbours in the surrounding stalls, – a poultryman, covered with feathers, a fish vender, bearing a string of mackerel in either hand, and a butcher, with his sleeves rolled up and a blood-stained apron about his waist.
"I al'ays knew you were thick-headed, John Chitling," remarked the fish dealer, with contempt, "but I never believed you were such a plum fool as not to know a tramp when you seed him."
"You ain't got but eleven of yo' own," observed the butcher, with a snicker; "I reckon you'd better take him along to round out the full dozen."
"If I've got eleven there ain't one of 'em that wa'nt welcome," responded John, his slow temper rising, "an' I reckon what the Lord sends he's willing to provide for."
"Oh, I reckon he is," sneered the fish dealer, who appeared to be of an unpleasant disposition, "so long as you ain't over-particular about the quality of the provision."
"Well, he don't provide us with yo' fish, anyway," retorted John; and I was watching excitedly for the coming blows when the butcher, who had been looking over me as reflectively as if I had been a spring lamb brought to slaughter, intervened with a peaceable suggestion that he should take me into his service.
"I'm on the lookout for a bright boy in my business," he observed.
But the sight of blood on his rolled-up shirt sleeves produced in me that strange sickness I had inherited from my mother, who used to pay an old coloured market man to come up and wring the necks of her chickens; and when the question was put to me if I'd like to be trained up for a butcher, I drew back and stood ready for instant flight in case they should attempt' to decide my future by present force.
"I'd rather work for you," I said, looking straight at John Chitling, for it occurred to me that if I were made to murder anything I'd rather it would be oysters.
"Ha! ha! he knows by the look of you, you're needin' one to make up the dozen," exclaimed the butcher.
"Well, I declar he does seem to have taken a regular fancy," acknowledged John, flattered by my decision. "I don't want any real hands now, sonny, but if you'd like to tote the marketing around with Solomon, I reckon I can let you have a square meal or so along with the others."
"What'll yo' old woman say to it, John?" enquired the poultryman, with a loud guffaw, "when you send her a new one of yo' own providin'?"
John Chitling was busily arranging a pile of turnips with what he doubtless thought was an artistic eye for colour, and the facetiousness of the poultryman reacted harmlessly from his thick head.
"You needn't worry about my wife, for she ain't worryin'," he rejoined, and the shine seemed to gather like moisture on his round red face under his shock of curling red hair. "She takes what comes an' leaves the Lord to do the tendin'."
At this a shout went up which I did not understand, until I came to know later that an impression existed in the neighbourhood that the Chitlings had left entirely too much of the bringing up of their eleven children in the hands of Providence, who in turn had left them quite as complacently to the care of the gutter.
"I don't know but what too much trust in the Lord don't work as badly as too little," observed the fish dealer, while John went on placidly arranging his turnips and carrots. "What appears to me to be best religion for a working-man is to hold a kind of middle strip between faith and downright disbelievin'. Let yo' soul trust