Adventure stories; Boys -- Fiction; East End (London, England) -- Fiction; Grandfathers -- Fiction; London (England) -- Fiction
"Out you go!" pursued Grandfather Nat, "every swab o' ye! Can't leave
the place not even to go to--not for nothin', without a row like this,
givin' the house a bad name! Go on, Jim Crute! Unless I'm to chuck ye!"
The men had begun filing out awkwardly, with nothing but here and there:
"Awright, guv'nor"--"Awright, cap'en." "Goin', ain't I?" and the like.
But one big ruffian lagged behind, scowling and murmuring rebelliously.
In a flash Grandfather Nat was through the counter-wicket. With a dart
of his long left arm he had gripped the fellow's ear and spun him round
with a wrench that I thought had torn the ear from the head; and in the
same moment had caught him by the opposite wrist, so as to stretch the
man's extended arm, elbow backward, across his own great chest; a
posture in which the backward pull against the elbow joint brought a
yell of agony from the victim. Only a man with extraordinarily long arms
could have done the thing exactly like that. The movement was so
savagely sudden that my grandfather had kicked open the door and flung
Jim Crute headlong into the street ere I quite understood it; when there
came a check in my throat and tears in my eyes to see the man so cruelly
handled.
Grandfather Nat stood a moment at the door, but it seemed that his
customer was quelled effectually, for presently he turned inward again,
with such a grim scowl as I had never seen before. And at that a queer
head appeared just above the counter--I had supposed the bar to be
wholly cleared--and a very weak and rather womanish voice said, in tones
of over-inflected indignation: "Serve 'em right, Cap'en Kemp, I'm sure.
Lot o' impudent vagabones! Ought to be ashamed o' theirselves, that they
ought. Pity every 'ouse ain't kep' as strict as this one is, that's what
I say!"
And the queer head looked round the vacant bar with an air of virtuous
defiance, as though anxious to meet the eye of any so bold as to
contradict.
It was anything but a clean face on the head, and it was overshadowed by
a very greasy wideawake hat. Grubbiness and unhealthy redness contended
for mastery in the features, of which the nose was the most surprising,
wide and bulbous and knobbed all over; so that ever afterward, in any
attempt to look Mr. Cripps in the face, I found myself wholly
disregarding his eyes, and fixing a fascinated gaze on his nose; and I
could never recall his face to memory as I recalled another, but always
as a Nose, garnished with a fringe of inferior features. The face had
been shaved--apparently about a week before; and by the sides hung long
hair, dirtier to look at than the rest of the apparition.
My grandfather gave no more than a glance in the direction of this
little man, passed the counter and re-joined me, pulling off his coat as
he came. Something of my tingling eyes and screwed mouth was visible, I
suppose, for he stooped as he rolled up his shirt-sleeves and said:
"Why, Stevy boy, what's amiss?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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