Original Penny Readings: A Series of Short Sketches. Fenn George Manville
to get work he’d take the jobs a deal too low, and so I used to tell him. But we always got on together, and I’ll tell you how it was I got along with him.
I always could carpenter a bit, but most of my time’s been spent as a painter – ’prenticed to it, you know, and spent seven years with a drunken master to learn ’most nothing, ’cept what I picked up myself. Well, I couldn’t get a job in town, so I was on the look-out round the outside, when I came to our guv’nor’s place, where he was at work with two men, and him doing about as much as both of ’em. No use to try on for carpentering, I thinks, so I sets up the painting sign and goes in.
“Well,” says the guv’nor, “I can give you a job if you can grain.”
Now that was a rum ’un, for I was only a plain painter, and no grainer; but after three weeks’ hard lines, wife and family at home, and work awful, it did seem tantalising to a willing man to have a week’s wages shown him if he could only do one particular thing. Of course I had dodged it a bit before, but I wasn’t a grainer, and I knowed it well enough; but I thinks to myself, “Well, this is outside London, where people ain’t so very artis-like in their ideas, and perhaps I can manage it – so here goes. I can but try, and if I misses, why, it ain’t a hanging matter.” So I says, “Well; I wouldn’t undertake none of your superfine walnuts, and bird’s-eye maples, and marbles; but if it’s a bit of plain oak I’m your man.”
“Well,” he says, “that’ll do; it’s only plain oak; and, if you like, you can begin priming and going on at once. There’s paints and brushes, but you must find your own graining tools.”
At it I goes like a savage, and then I found as there was a week’s work for me before I need touch the graining; for there was priming, and first and second coats; and so I went on, but thinking precious hard about the bit of graining I should have to do. “Nothing venture, nothing gain,” I says; and that night I was hard at it after work – ah! and right up to four o’clock in the morning – trying to put a bit of oak grain on to a piece of smooth deal. I’d got a brush or two, and some colour, and a couple of them comb-like things we uses; and there I was, with the missus trying to keep her eyes open and pretending to sew, while I painted and streaked, and then smudged it about with a bit of rag; and I’m blest if I didn’t put some grain on that piece of wood as would have made Mother Nature stare – knots, and twists, and coarse grain, and shadings as I could have laughed at if I hadn’t been so anxious. You see, the nuisance of it was, it looked so easy when another man did it: touches over with his colour, streaks it down with his comb, and then with a rag gives a smudge here and there, and all so lightly, and there it is done. But I couldn’t, though I tried till the missus nodded, so I was obliged to send her to bed for fear she’d set her cap afire; and then I goes to the pump and has a reg’lar good sloosh, and touches my face over with the cold water, when after a good rub I goes at it again quite fresh.
I can’t think now how many times I rubbed the paint off with the dirty rag, but a good many I know, and the clock had gone three when I was still at it, with every try seeming to be worse than the last; but still I kept on till I seemed to hear it strike four in a muffled sort of way, and then the next thing I heard was the wife calling me, for it was five o’clock, and I had a long way to walk to get to my work.
As soon as I could get my head off the table, and pull myself together, the first thing I did was to look at my graining; and some how or other it didn’t look so very much amiss; but still it warn’t anything like what it ought to be, as I knowed well enough. All that day I was thinking it over, and best part of that dinner-hour I stopped in the shop trying it on again.
Just as I was going to smudge a piece over, and finish my bit of bread and meat, not feeling at all satisfied, I gives a jump, for some one behind me says, —
“Very neat, indeed. Bit of old oak, I suppose. You’d better do them shutters that style of grain.”
Well, do you know, if I didn’t look at the guv’nor – for him it was – to see whether he warn’t a joking me; but, bless you, no; he was as serious as a judge: so feeling all the while like a great humbug, as I was, I says, “Werry well, sir,” finished my dinner, and then got to work again.
It turned out as I expected, just a whole week before I had to begin graining; and what with about an hour a day, and four more every night, I got on pretty well, especially after giving a chap two pots of ale to put me up to a wrinkle or two; and now I sometimes pass by that very bit of graining, and though of course I could do it a deal better now, I don’t feel so very much ashamed of it.
But along of my guv’nor. What a fight that man did have surely; and how well I used to know when he was running short on Saturdays: he’d look ten years older those times; and over and over again I’ve felt ashamed to take the money; but one couldn’t do without it, you know, on account of the little ones and wife. Last of all, though, we got to understand one another – the guv’nor and me; and this was how it was: he’d been worse nor usual, and was terribly hard-up, for he’d been buying wood and paying for it; for though he could have plenty of credit now as he don’t want it, in those days not a bit of stuff could he get without putting the money down. Well, having next to no capital, this bothered him terribly; and after paying two men on Saturday, I felt pretty sure as he was run close, and stood hanging about in the shop, not knowing whether to go in to the house or be off home; and at last I did go home and told the wife about it, and she said we could hold out two or three weeks very well, if I thought the guv’nor would pay by-and-by. But I soon settled that, for I knew my man, and so I set down quietly to my tea, and was sticking a bit of bread-and-butter in one little open beak and a bit in another, when there comes a knock at the door, and I turned red all over, for I felt it was the guv’nor; and so it was, and he’d brought my wages, when, as he stood in my bit of a kitchen holding out the three-and-thirty shillings, I couldn’t for the life of me help looking at where his watch-chain hung, and it warn’t there.
I meant to do it neatly, and without hurting his feelings, for him and his wife had been very kind to us when we had the sickness in the house; but, you see, it warn’t a bit of graining, and I regularly muffed the job when I told him to let it stand for two or three weeks, as we could do till then. Next moment he had hold of my hand, shaking it heartily, and then next after that he broke down in a humbled, mortified sort of a way; and when the wife hurried the children up the staircase, out of sight, poor chap! he sat down, laid his head on his hand, and groaned.
“Cheer up,” I says, “it’ll be all right soon.”
“Right! yes,” he says, jumping up. “But it ain’t that,” he says; “it’s meeting a friend where I didn’t expect one;” and then he was gone.
I was sitting at breakfast next morning (Sunday) when the garden gate rattles, and there was the guv’nor coming in such a hurry. Never stops to knock, but in he comes and shakes hands hearty; and then, without speaking, stuffs a letter into my hand. “Head it,” he says, “last post, last night,” and I did; but what I took most notice of was a long strip of paper with “197 pounds 10 shillings 6 pence” written on it, just under the name of one of the London bankers.
Yes, we had a pleasant dinner, a comfortable cup of tea, and a cosy supper with the guv’nor that day; and uncommon good friends we’ve been ever since. I do all sorts at the shop, so that there’s always a job, and though people say “Jack of all trades – master of none,” I think a man might follow French suit and know two trades and master them both, so as when work falls one way he has a chance the other. Poor folks often get hunted by the wolf Poverty, and it would not be amiss to take a lesson from the burrowing animals, and have two holes – to get out of one when t’other happened to be stopped.
Chapter Six.
A Cabman’s Story
“Hope I see you well, sir. Thanky, sir, I ain’t had such a cigar since as you give me that day. You’ll often find me on this stand, sir, and happy to drive yer at any time, either on the box or inside. But I say, you know, sir, how about putting a feller in print? Fine game some of our chaps made on it, because they said as they knew it all by heart. You see I don’t like to wherrit people with my old stories; but when I can get any one to listen I du like