Perhaps it was in sheer desperation that Cleaver's boy (whose name, by the way, was James Annan, though the fact was hardly ever mentioned except in the police court) at last resolved to make a desperate cast.
"They canna baith hae me," he said, "an' Guid kens I want neither o' them. But gin I had yin o' them, she wad maybe keep the ither off."
So Cleaver's boy scratched his head to find out a way of settling the difficulty. He could, he thought, be indifferently happy with either. It was only having both of them "tearing at his coat-tails" that made him miserable.
At last he dashed his hand against his thigh with a [140]cry of joy, and fell to dancing a hobnailed fandango in the gutter.
"Dod, man, the verra thing," he said; "I'll toss for them!"
So with that Cleaver's boy took out his lucky penny, and, selecting a smooth space of the unpaved roadway of a new street, where the coin would neither stick edgeways nor yet bounce unfairly on the stones, he spun the coin deftly upwards from his level thumb-nail.
"Heads Sall—tails Susy!" he said, very solemnly, for his life was in the twirl of the penny.
"Heads she is—Sal has got me!" exclaimed the ardent lover.
They were engaged that night. The next day they were photographed together—Sal with a very large hat, a great deal of hair, and a still larger amount of feather; Cleaver's boy with a very small hat, an immense check suit, and a pipe stuck at a knowing angle with the bowl turned down. That same night Sal had still a lover, indeed, but the glory of her betrothal attire was no more. Her hat was a mere trampled ruin. Her fringe was patchy. She had a black eye; and all that remained of Susy Murphy was in the lock-up for assault and battery. Without doubt it was a stirring time for James Annan, and it is to be feared that Mr. Cleaver and his customers did not get quite their fair share of his attention while it lasted.
Susy Murphy got off under the First Offenders Act. But immediately upon re-encountering her successful rival she incontinently became a second offender, and was as summarily fined thirty shillings or seven days. And it added to the bitterness of Cleaver's boy, that he had to come good for both the hat ruined in the first battle and the dress torn to shreds in the second.
[141]
Then it also became his duty to take out Miss Mackay every evening, and so frequent were the demands upon his purse, that Cleaver's boy perceived that nothing but marriage stood between him and financial ruin.
"If I was only marriet," he soliloquised, "I could stop the lemonades and ice-creams. They're juist terrible expensive. I declare Sal thinks naething o' a dozen bottles. And gin ye stickit a preen until her ony gate, I declare she wad fizz."
It occurred to him, however, that as a temporary alternative it might be possible to increase his earnings. And Cleaver's boy was not above asking for what he wanted.
"Guid jobs wants finding nooadays!" was a favourite expression of his.
Now there was a certain Bailie Holden among the customers of Mr. Cleaver. This dignitary had succeeded to the responsible position of Convener of the Cleaning and Lighting department—a division of the city's municipal business which has always been associated with excellent eating and drinking, and a good deal of both.
Bailie Holden had the finest taste in the light wines of his country of any man on the council. In his happier moments of inspiration he could tell the age of Long John to within a year. Now Bailie Holden had, among other excellent domestic properties, a kitchen-maid who was not above casting soft eyes at spruce James Annan of Cleaver's, so débonnaire, with his blue apron and his basket over his arm. And James had cultivated the acquaintance according to his opportunity, without, of course, thinking it necessary to say anything to Sal Mackay—or, for the matter of that, to Sue Murphy either. So that, in the course of conversation at the area door, it fell out that Cleaver's boy mentioned his desire to be no [142]more Cleaver's boy, but a servant of the city corporation in the department of Cleaning and Lighting. And the kitchen-maid answered, keeping her eyes on James and adjusting her tumbled cap at the same time—
"I'll speak to the maister when he comes through the back kitchen, to smoke his pipe in the yaird after dinner-time."
For it was the use and wont of Bailie Holden, when he was without company, or could shunt the entertainment of it upon his wife, to put on a seedy garden coat and slip off quietly round by the greenhouses. Here he took from the edge of a heating tube a short clay pipe of excessive blackness; then from a canister he extracted a snaky twist of Bogie roll. Bailie Holden was renowned for keeping the best cigars in the city, and he also smoked them regularly indoors. His wife, indeed, did not allow anything else. But he came outside for his real smoke, in his shirt-sleeves in the warm evenings, and in his garden coat when it was colder. For though to all men he was now Havanna of the most exclusive brand, and all his appointments like unto that dignity, yet at the heart of him he was still kindly Bogie roll.
The Bailie thought on many things out there in the dark as he nuzzled down the glowing ash in the pipe-bowl close under his nose. He thought, for instance, of the year Elizabeth and he were married, when they started at the foot of Morrison Street in one room at the back of the gasfitter's shop. They did not keep a servant then, and Elizabeth had not yet learned to object to the smoking of Bogie roll. Indeed, her father and her three brothers (all honest masons) incessantly smoked nothing else. But when there was need to find a place in the little back-room for another person with no experience in Bogie roll where he came from, then the Bailie had gone [143]out every night to the backyard, sat down on a roll of lead piping and smoked a black pipe, with a babe's little complainings tugging at his heart all the while. And the memory of the Bogie roll outside the window, across which the black shadows went and came, had somehow kept his heart warm all through the years.
And, strange it is to say it, but though he was in many ways a difficult man to serve, yet many a servant had remained another term, simply because the master slipped out to take his smoke away from every one in the evening. This is the whole idyll of the life of Bailie Holden, Convener of the Committee on Cleaning and Lighting and proximate Lord Provost of the city. It is curious that it should be an idyll of Bogie roll.