CHAPTER XIV

BILLY OF MAYFAIR

There was one, and only one, section of society in London that found unalloyed pleasure in the abnormal features of the period. The youth of the lower orders revelled in the absence of the restraint that hitherto had qualified the natural joy of life. The Boy in the Street in all his varied experiences had never had so good a time before. He made the most of it. He came, not as a single spy, but in battalions. His shrill voice rent the air day and night; his cockney smartness found new and glorious opportunities for exercise; the badinage of the pavement was heard on every side. The march of the Leaguers, or the whirling rush of a band of Dancers, never failed to stir him to loud delight or tumultuous excitement.

There was one small youth, here entering the pages of this chronicle, who participated with the keenest relish in the unfolding drama of the day. This boy was Billy of Mayfair. Not always had he found his headquarters in that highly rented and exclusive district. Like the Wise Men, and like many clever boys, he came from the East. But his travels westward began at an extremely early age, and in regard to the migrations of that period Billy’s mind was quite a blank. His grandmother, a woman of no importance, and given, when means permitted, to inebriety, sometimes mentioned Poplar as the place of his nativity, and on other occasions asserted that in the Isle of Dogs Billy’s pink eyes first opened on the murky world down East. There was not much difference, and nothing to choose between those grimy regions, and Billy himself never troubled his white-thatched head about the past. He was in the West Central district when first he realised that he was anywhere, and he accepted his surroundings just as he accepted his physical peculiarities. Billy was quite accustomed to the special, if unflattering, notice which his appearance attracted, and showed no surprise or resentment when addressed contemptuously as a “blooming Halbino.”

If a skin specialist had explained to him that his abnormal skin and hair resulted from an absence of the minute particles of colouring matter usually found in the lowest layer of the epidermis, he would have listened respectfully and then departed with the skimming step and whooping yell familiar to his young companions of the gutter. But nobody explained him to himself, and it was an accepted, and not perhaps unwelcome, fact that he was not like other boys.

When Billy reached the age of ten he was still residing in a “third floor back” in an unsavoury court of which the narrow entrance is in Chapel Street, a short thoroughfare running from Lamb’s Conduit Street to Milman Street. But Billy was not much at home; nor was Billy’s grandmother aforesaid,--a prematurely aged and doddering person who earned precarious pence by perfunctorily sweeping crossings in an adjacent square. At night the two shared the shelter of the third floor back, and breathed till morning light, or darkness, the poisonous air of the miserable apartment. In warm fine weather Billy kept late hours. Sometimes, like the people who were “seeing life”--Heaven save the mark!--the boy did not go home till morning. Billy, like many another gutter child in London, knew much of its night side--the side known to the policemen, to hansom-cabmen, and to hospital nurses on night duty, who look out of window when cabs rattle up to certain neighbouring houses. Editors and journalists know also of that night side, but all things are not for publication. Half the world is ignorant of the deadly canker eating into the vitals of the nation; and the other half keeps silence.

It was through being out late at night that Billy lost his leg. It fell out thus: Billy, dead tired, was sleeping in a doorway at the top of Bedford Row, when the vigilant eye of P.C. Dormer espied his small and huddled form. The law, through the eyes of the constabulary, looks with sternness on such lapses from well-ordered life and habits. The open-air treatment must not be adopted on your own responsibility. If you have no home--well, you ought to have. You may walk the king’s highway, but if that grows fatiguing and you slumber on a doorstep, it is the plain duty of P.C. Dormer to rouse and move you on. In effect, to be homeless is to be criminal, and to wander abroad without any visible means of subsistence, brings man or boy within the purview of the law. Lucky for you if P.C. Dormer does not see reason to conclude that incidentally you are loitering with intent to commit a felony.

So Billy was shaken, and slumbered again; he did not rise, but the policeman’s temper did. So the grip of a mighty hand came upon Billy’s bony little shoulder, making him call out sharply and then whimper.

“Get out o’ this,” growled the constable. So Billy got out, into Theobald’s Road. There, at what he believed to be a safe distance, he found another lurking-place, and having had a fatiguing day in the streets, he fell asleep again. But the law was on his trail. P.C. Dormer’s bull’s-eye, searching nooks and doorways, discovered once again the insignificant rebel against social order. Dormer was greatly ruffled. At the corner of Gray’s Inn Road, half an hour earlier, he had encountered a band of hooligans, who, strong in numbers, had jeered at his authority. In such circumstances it was but police nature that he should take it out of somebody. And here was Billy, defying or ignoring the majesty of the law! With a howl of pain and terror the boy came out of his dreams to find himself once more in the grip of a superior force. He wriggled to the pavement and lay there sobbing. Then P.C. Dormer gave him a vicious kick and Billy screamed with agony. It was no good now to tell him to be off. To “move on” was a physical impossibility. He lay and writhed.

The next day he was in hospital in Great Ormond Street. He was supposed to have been knocked down by a fire engine in a hurry. Billy knew better, but he held his peace. His bibulous grandmother told the matron that “there’d always been summat wrong with his ’ip.” There was something very wrong now; and presently they transferred the injured child to the Alexandra Hospital in Queen Square, where hip disease was a speciality. Surgeons came and went, and now and then there were operation days at intervals. There came a day when the operating knife was brought to bear on Billy, and when it had done its necessary work, Billy’s right leg was his no more, and for a time he had that weird experience of feeling pain in a member that was non-existent.

Sister, staff-nurse, day nurses and night nurses--they were all kind and tender to the little one-legged patient. They assured him he would be all right now, and that he was going to have a beautiful little crutch to get along with presently. His grandmother came to see him on visitors’ days, blear-eyed and pendulous of lip. On those days, indeed, many impossible parents and guardians went up the stone stairs of the Alexandra, bringing cheap and noisy toys, and refreshments of a wholly inappropriate character. With the general throng came on one occasion a stalwart man who walked like a policeman. He was a policeman. It was P.C. Dormer. He was a good fellow in the main, and he had children of his own. At first Billy did not recognise him out of uniform. Then remembrance dawned, and to his amazement his quick pink eyes noted tears in the eyes of P.C. Dormer. Clumsily, ashamedly, the constable put a painted toy upon the bed, and Billy smiled. Then the big man, with hasty glance around, bent his great red face over him.

“You ’aven’t spilt, ’ave you?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.

“Not me,” said Billy, speaking very low, but very scornfully.

“My Gawd! but you’re a good plucked ’un!” said P.C. Dormer. “I’m damned sorry, that I am.” His great fist closed upon the small boy’s tiny hand. It was the proudest, happiest moment Billy had ever known.

Sometimes, though the Alexandra was devoted to the hip-diseases of children, other diseases found an entry; and one day, Billy, who had shown disquieting symptoms, found himself, as the nurses said “in isolation.” In other words, he was placed in a detached ward, approached by a short bridge, under the care of a nurse specially told off to watch and tend him, and perchance to catch the same disease herself. The word went round that it was “dip.” And “dip” it was. When the doctor was sure of that, Billy was treated with anti-toxin for diphtheria, and the telephone was quickly set to work. An ambulance came round--a beautiful carriage, the nurse in charge explained; and Billy--nurses nodding and smiling at a distance, with eyes that had a tearful, frightened look--was borne down the staircase and so away to Hampstead. There, in the “dip” ward of the Fever Hospital, he fought the fight with death--the students in their quaint garb looking on; and, to the surprise of all, came out victorious.

Seven weeks later he was discharged, and back again in the three-pair back. There was the old grandmother, doddering still, the same, yet not the same. One grey morning, when Billy awoke, something in her appearance startled him. The poor old thing was dead; and so unsightly and alarming in his eyes that straightway he arose and fled, hopping and tapping with his crutch along the grey, deserted streets--anywhere, anywhere away from that awesome sight.

How the boy lived, or starved, throughout the next few days he never realised. When at length he mustered courage to return, all that remained of “this our sister” was there no longer. The parish authorities were accustomed to these cases. The room was swept and garnished after a fashion. Already other tenants were in possession, and Billy was admonished to go about his business. Having no business, he hopped vaguely into the streets again. He had a horror now of walls and rooms. Over there in the Alexandra he had had his experiences, and outside the National, on the opposite side of the square, in the night, he had sometimes heard blood-curdling screams from epileptic patients. He shuddered--shook, as it were, the dust from his remaining foot, and hopped off towards the unexplored regions of the west.

Along Great Russell Street he made his way, gazing at the grim mass of the great museum, and wondering if it were another hospital or a prison. There were pigeons and policemen inside the formidable railings. The former attracted; but the latter repelled. So he turned his back on the mighty store-house of antiquities, caring and knowing nothing about the forty-three miles of the bookshelves, and all the cheerless wonders of its different sections. Onward he hopped, across Tottenham Court Road into Oxford Street. The district pleased him. Presently the waving of big boughs attracted notice, and exploration led him into Grosvenor Square. Further investigation resulted in the discovery of Berkeley Square, and finally, very weary and hungry, he sat down to rest on the doorstep of Sir John Westwood’s house in Hill Street.

From that day forth the boy became and remained Billy of Mayfair; destined to play his little part in national events.