"Why don't you go to bed and sleep, Tony?"
"How can I sleep wi' me head full o' what the boy's thinking o'it all!"
More walking and he calmed down a little.
"Come and have some hot grog for a sleeping draught, Tony, and then go home to bed."
"Come along, man; then if you go straight to bed you'll sleep."
"I on'y wish I cude. The boy must be turned in by this time. 'Tis like as if I got a picture of him in my mind, where he is, an' he ain't happy--_I_ knows."
When Tony went down the narrow roadway, homewards, he had had just the amount of grog to make him sleep: no more, no less. That father's grief--the boy gone to sea, the father left stranded ashore--it was bad to listen to. While going up town, I wondered with how much sorrow the Navy is recruited. We look on our sailors rather less fondly than on the expensive pieces of machinery we send them to sea in. I don't think I shall ever again be able to regard the Navy newspaper-fashion. It seems as if someone of mine belongs to it....
This morning, when I saw Tony on the Front, he was more than a little awkward; looked shyly at me, from under his peaked cap, as if to read in my face what I thought of him. He had slept after all, and spoke of the hot grog as a powerful, strange invention, new to him as a sleeping draught. When, in talking, I said that I have only a back bedroom and a fripperied sitting room, and that my old lodgings do not please me as they used to, he clapped me on the shoulder with a jollity intended, I think, to put last night out of my mind. "What a pity yu hadn't let we know yu cuden't find lodgings to your liking. Us got a little room in house where they sends people sometimes from the Alexandra Hotel when they'm full up. My missis 'ould du anything to make 'ee comfor'able. Yu an't never see'd her, have 'ee? Nice little wife, I got. Yu let us know when yu be coming thees way again; that is, if yu don' mind coming wi' the likes o' us. We won't disturb 'ee."
Good fellow! It was his thanks. However I shall be going home to-morrow. Tony Widger lives, I believe, somewhere down the Gut, in Under Town, a place they call the Seacombe slum. You can see a horde of children pouring in and out of the Gut all day long, and in the evening the wives stand at the seaward end of it, to gossip and await their husbands. Noisy place....