FullReads

“‘I have,’ I says, still keepin’ me head down. ‘It’s in me side pocket. Pull it out, please, me hand’s that dirty’–and out come the writ!

“Ye ought to have seen his face when he read it. He made a jump for the door, but I got there fust and downstairs in a tumble, and fell in a heap at the foot with everything he could lay his hands on comin’ after me–tongs, shovel, and poker.

“I got a raise of five bob when I went back and ten bob besides from the boss.

“I ought to have stayed at the law, sor; I’d be a magistrate by now a-sittin’ on a sheepskin instead of ——

“Where’ll I put this big canvas, sor–up agin the bow or laid flat? The last coat ain’t dry yet,” he muttered to himself, touching my picture with his finger in true paper-hanger style. “Oh, yes, I see–all ready, sor, ye kin step in. Same place we painted yesterday, sor?–up near the mill? All right, sor.” And we pushed out into the stream.

These talks with Fin are like telephone messages from the great city hardly an hour away. They always take place in the open, while I am floating among pond-lilies or drifting under wide-spreading trees, their drooping leaves dabbling in the silent current like children’s fingers, or while I am sitting under skies as blue as any that bend above my Beloved City by the Sea; often, too, when the delicious silence about me is broken only by the lapping of the water around my punt, the sharpening of a bit of charcoal, or the splash of a fish. That his stories are out of key with my surroundings, often reminding me of things I have come miles over the sea to forget, somehow adds to their charm.

There is no warning given. Suddenly, and apparently without anything that leads up to the subject in mind, this irrepressible Irishman breaks out, and before I am aware of the change, the glory of the morning and all that it holds for me of beauty has faded out of the slide of my mental camera and another has taken its place. Again I am following Fin’s cab through the mazes of smoky, seething London, now waiting outside a concert-hall for some young blood, or shopping along Regent Street, or at full tilt to catch a Channel train at Charing Cross–each picture enriched by a running account of personal adventure that makes them doubly interesting.

“You wouldn’t mind, sor,” he begins, “if I tell ye of a party of three I took home from a grand ball–one of the toppy balls of the winter, in one o’ them big halls on the Strand? Two o’ them Was dressed like the Royal family in satins that stuck out like a haystack and covered with diamonds that would hurt your eyes to look at ’em–” And then in his inimitable dialect–impossible to reproduce by any combination of vowels at my command, and punctured every few minutes by ringing laughs that can be heard half a mile away–follows a description of how one of his fares, Ikey by name, the son of the stoutest of the women, by a sudden lurch of his cab–Ikey rode outside–while rounding into a side street, was landed in the mud.

“Oh, that was a great night, sor,” he rattles on. “Ye ought to ‘a’ seen him when I picked him up. he looked as if they’d been a-swobbin’ the cobbles wid him. ‘Oh, me son! me son! it’s kilt ye are!’ she hollered out, clawin’ him wid both hands, and up they hauled him all over them satin dresses! And where do ye think I took ’em, sor? To Hanover Square, or out by St. James Park? No, sor, not a bit of it! Down in an alley in Whitechapel, sor, that ye’d be afraid to walk through after sundown, and into a shop wid three balls over it. What do ye think o’ that, sor?”