Tales of the Old London Slum – Complete Series. Morrison Arthur
him, and Dicky saw a wide grin on his face as he came to his corner. The leathery toughness of the man, and the advantage it gave him, now grew apparent. He had endured to the full as much and as hard punching as had his foe—even more, and harder; once he had fallen on the broken cobble-stones with all Leary’s weight on him; and once he had been knocked down on them. But, except for the sweat that ran over his face and down his back, and for a missing front tooth and the lip it had cut, he showed little sign of the struggle; while Leary’s left eye was a mere slit in a black wen, his nose was a beaten mass, which had ensanguined him (and indeed Josh) from crown to waist, and his chest and flanks were a mottle of bruises.
‘Father’s awright, mother—I see ‘im laughin’! And ‘e’s smashed Leary’s nose all over ‘is face!’
Up again they sprang for the next round, Perrott active and daring, Leary cautious and a trifle stiff. Josh rushed in and struck at the tender ribs once more, took two blows callously on his head, and sent his left at the nose, with a smack as of a flail on water. With that Leary rushed like a bull, and Josh was driven and battered back, for the moment without response. But he ducked, and slipped away, and came again, fresh and vicious. And now it was seen that Perrott’s toughness of hand was lasting. Leary’s knuckles were raw, cut, and flayed, and took little good by the shock when they met the other’s stubborn muzzle; while Josh still flung in his corneous fists, hard and lasting as a bag of bullets.
But suddenly, stooping to reach the mark once more, Josh’s foot turned on a projecting stone, and he floundered forward into Billy’s arms. Like a flash his neck was clipped in the big man’s left arm: Josh Perrott was in chancery. Quick and hard Leary pounded the imprisoned head, while Jerry Gullen and Kiddo Cook danced distracted and dismayed, and the crowd whooped and yelled.
Dicky hung delirious over the sill, and shrieked he knew not what. He saw his father fighting hard at the back and ribs with both hands, and Leary hammering his face in a way to make pulp of an ordinary mazzard. Then suddenly Josh Perrott’s right hand shot up from behind, over Leary’s shoulder, and gripped him at the chin. Slowly, with tightened muscles, he forced his man back over his bent knee, Leary clinging and swaying, but impotent to struggle. Then, with an extra wrench from Josh, up came Leary’s feet from the ground, higher, higher, till suddenly Josh flung him heavily over, heels up, and dropped on him with all his weight.
The Ranns roared again. Josh was up in a moment, sitting on Kiddo Cook’s knee, and taking a drink from a bottle. Billy Leary lay like a man fallen from a house-top. His seconds turned him on his back, and dragged him to his corner. There he lay limp and senseless, and there was a cut at the back of his head.
The High Mobsman who held the watch waited for half a minute and then called ‘Time!’ Josh Perrott stood up, but Billy Leary was knocked out of knowledge, and heard not. He was beaten.
Josh Perrott was involved in a howling, dancing crowd, and was pushed, grinning, this way and that, slapped on the back, and offered drinks. In the outskirts the tossers, inveterate, pulled out their pence and resumed their game.
Dicky spun about, laughing, flushed, and elated, and as soon as the door was distinct to his dazzled sight, he ran off downstairs. His mother, relieved and even pleased, speculated as to what money the thing might bring. She put the baby on the bed, and looked from the window.
Josh, in the crowd, shouted and beckoned her, pointing and tapping his bare shoulder. He wanted his clothes. She gathered together the shirt, the coat, and the waistcoat, and hurried downstairs. Looey could come to no harm lying on the bed for a few minutes. And, indeed, Hannah Perrott felt that she would be a person of distinction in the crowd, and was not sorry to have an excuse for going out.
‘Three cheers for the missis!’ sang out Kiddo Cook as she came through the press. ‘I said ‘e’d ‘ave a bob or two for you, didn’t I?’ Josh Perrott, indeed, was rich—a capitalist of five pounds. For a sovereign a side had been put up, and his backer had put on a sovereign for him at three to one. So that now it became him to stand beer to many sympathisers. Also, he felt that the missis should have some part in the celebration, for was it not her injury that he had avenged on Sally Green’s brother? So Hannah Perrott, pleased though timorous, was hauled away with the rest to Mother Gapp’s.
Here she sat by Josh’s side for an hour. Once or twice she thought of Looey, but with native inertness she let the thought slip. Perhaps Dicky would be back, and at any rate it was hard if she must not take half an hour’s relaxation once in a way. At last came Dicky, urgent perplexity in his face, looking in at the door. Josh, minded to be generous all round, felt for a penny.
‘Mother,’ said Dicky, plucking at her arm, ‘Pigeony Poll’s at ‘ome, nussin’ Looey; she told me to tell you to come at once.’
Pigeony Poll? What right had she in the room? The ghost of Hannah Perrott’s respectability rose in resentment. She supposed she must go. She arose, mystified, and went, with Dicky at her skirts.
Pigeony Poll sat by the window with the baby in her arms, and pale misgiving in her dull face. ‘I—I come in, Mrs Perrott, mum,’ she said, with a hush in her thick voice, ‘I come in ‘cos I see you goin’ out, an’ I thought the baby’d be alone. She—she’s ‘ad a sort o’ fit—all stiff an’ blue in the face and grindin’ ‘er little mouth. She’s left auf now—but I—I dunno what to make of ‘er. She’s so—so—’
Hannah Perrott stared blankly, and lifted the child, whose arm dropped and hung. The wizen age had gone from Looey’s face, and the lids were down on the strained eyes; her pale lips lay eased of the old pinching—even parted in a smile. For she looked in the face of the Angel that plays with the dead children.
Hannah Perrott’s chin fell. ‘Lor’,’ she said bemusedly, and sat on the bed.
An odd croaking noise broke in jerks from Pigeony Poll as she crept from the room, with her face bowed in the bend of her arm, like a weeping schoolboy. Dicky stared, confounded…. Josh came and gazed stupidly, with his mouth open, walking tip-toe. But at a word from Kiddo Cook, who came in his tracks, he snatched the little body and clattered off to the dispensary, to knock up the young student.
The rumour went in the Jago that Josh Perrott was in double luck. For here was insurance money without a doubt. But in truth that was a thing the Perrotts had neglected.
Hannah Perrott felt a listless relief; Josh felt nothing in particular, except that there was no other thing to be done, and that Mother Gapp’s would be a cheerful place to finish the day in, and keep up the missis’s pecker.
So that eight o’clock that evening at Perrotts’ witnessed a darkening room wherein an inconsiderable little corpse lay on a bed; while a small ragamuffin spread upon it with outstretched arms, exhausted with sobbing, a soak of muddy tears:—‘O Looey, Looey! Can’t you ‘ear? Won’t you never come to me no more?’
And the Reverend Henry Sturt, walking from church through Luck Row toward his lodgings in Kingsland Road, heard shouts and riot behind the grimy panes of Mother Gapp’s, and in the midst the roar of many voices joined in the Jago chant:—
Six bloomin’ long months in a prison, Six more bloomin’ months I must stay, For meetin’ a bloke in our alley, An’ takin’ ‘is uxter away!
Toora-li—toora-li—looral, Toora-li—toora-li—lay, A-coshin’ a bloke in our alley, An’ takin’ ‘is uxter away!
CHAPTER XIV
ON an autumn day four years after his first coming to the Jago, the Reverend Henry Sturt left a solicitor’s office in Cheapside, and walked eastward, with something more of hope and triumph in him than he had felt since the Jago fell to his charge. For the ground was bought whereon should be built a church and buildings accessory, and he felt, not that he was like to see any great result from his struggle, but that perhaps he might pursue it better armed and with less of grim