Jenks

“ Then, suddenly, words Mrs Jenks had said to her yesterday came into her head.
“When you want food, or anything else very bad, and you don’t know how to get it, then is the time to ask God for it. All you have to do is to say up your want, whatever it be, in as few, and small, and simple words as you like, and though you speaks down in your dark cellar, God will hear you up in Heaven, and if ’tis any way possible He’ll give you what you want.”
Flo remembered these words of Mrs Jenks’ now with great and sudden gladness. ”

“ The prison chapel is not constructed to enable the prisoners to gaze about them, and as the only individual Jenks could see was the chaplain, he fixed his eyes on him.
He did this with a little return of his old sullenness, for though he was a good man, and even Jenks admitted this, he was so tired of him. He had seen him so very, very often, in his cell and at chapel. After spending his life amid the myriad faces of London, Jenks had found the months, during which he had never gazed on any human countenance but that of his warder, the governor, chaplain, and doctor, interminably long. ”

“ They would have prayed, the men of the Hera, and perhaps Captain Jenks with them if he had time for it. When they came safe ashore, not a man lost—but first the long blind groping, in one boat and one damned little dory, never knowing what might answer the next weary thrust of the oars—why, safe ashore they would have praised God for hearing them—the same God who strangely failed to hear a myriad others praying in extremity—and with some leftover gratitude to Peter Jenks as God's instrument. "Ben, hear me. I say God is far away, no whit concerned with man...." ”

“ She jilted me for Jenks, and no sooner did she say the word to him than she talked him into enlisting too.... That's why I'm no good. Every time I remember I'm a soldier I think of her laughing at me, and I feel a fool.'
"'Well,' said I, 'she must be proud of you both, for you're the weariest, wonkiest pair of wash-outs I ever swore at.'
"I didn't send for Jenks; I could guess his excuse. He had obviously about as much spirit for fighting as Ruggles, and he was just hanging on and trying not to get hurt before the War stopped. ”

“ Jenks, partly through Miss Mary’s aid, and partly through his mother’s savings, is apprenticed to a carpenter, and his strict honesty, his earnestness of purpose, joined to his bright and funny ways, have already made him a favourite with his master. Humanly speaking, few are likely to do better in their calling and station than he, and his dream is some day wholly to support his beloved little mother. ”

“ Jenks hated effeminate men, so he looked with admiration at this one, and presently, the instincts of his trade being ever uppermost, began to calculate how best he could pick his pockets, and what a dreadful grip the stranger could give his—Jenks’—throat with those great muscular hands. ”

“ After all, Jenks wasn't so bad. Honest and human. In fantasy Ben saw a gleam of rugged friendliness (respect?) in the little blue eyes....
Better have a third line. If Uncle John had left and Jenks could not be reached, lost in liquor or otherwise unavailable, then he could—oh, hell, ask around at the wharf anyway, find out when Artemis was expected to sail, since it seemed that Uncle John was unwilling to tell him. Tom Ball ought to know. Maybe he would run into Daniel Shawn again, and could, at the very least, learn whether Shawn was to sail as mate. ”

“ He had gone back then to the quarterdeck, where the Captain had waked in a remission of the fever, and told him of it. "She's taken better men," said Captain Jenks, and shrugged and groaned. "All the same I never thought he had it in him." That was all Captain Jenks ever said of Matthew Ledyard. Ben in the undemanding hours of the days that followed could yet inquire: Where is the way where light dwelleth? And where does the self end and the universe begin? ”

“ Jenks turned round with merry eyes.
“I’m yer ’umble servant, my Lady, the Hearl’s wife,” he said, with a mock bow to Flo; but then noticing her white little anxious face, he changed his tone to one of compassion. “Why, wot hever ails you, young ’un? You is all of a tremble. Come along and ’ave a drop of ’ot coffee at the stalls.”
“No, Jenks, I doesn’t want to. Jenks, I come fur to say as you, and me, and Dick mustn’t be pardeners no more. You mustn’t come no more to this yere cellar, Jenks.” ”

“ Clean, wondrous blue—Jenks told me once 'tis good as well water above the tides. He took a sloop of mine up to Albany once, years ago. Well, poor Jenks! He'll be into the second or third tankard by now, scarce giving that slave wench time to lift off his boots. Yes, the troubled men—seekers and dreamers and friends of the moon, a little mad, and minds grown wise before their time like your sweet brother's—I don't pretend to understand 'em, Ben, the way I think you and I understand each other. I suppose they engender a great share of the sorrow in the world. ”

“ Jenks 156 put in. “Come along and I’ll throw together a mess for you.”
“Nobody goes hungry from the Adams wagon, stranger,” Captain Adams observed. He slightly raised his voice, peremptory. “Rachael! Fetch our guest some breakfast.”
“But as Mr. Jenks has invited me, Captain, and I am in his employ——” I protested. He cut me short.
“I have said that nobody, man, woman or child, or dog, goes hungry from the Adams wagon. The flesh must be fed as well as the soul.” ”

“ Jenks never visits about ashore?"
"Mph!... Ben, when you're a man grown, should you find yourself a little too fond of drink, I suggest you resist it, even sometimes at cost of being named a poor thing, canting killjoy or whatever. 'Tis a matter of being your own man. Should you find—by your own judgment, boy—that drinking interferes with that, don't drink. Did you like Mr. Shawn?"
"Yes, sir, I did like him, very much. Are you telling me indirectly, Uncle John, that Captain Jenks——?"
"I am." Mr. Kenny halted his gray gelding on a rise of ground. ”

“ Hiram Jenks is his baptismal name. I call him Hi, for short: see the pun? ha, ha, ha! Hi Jenks, when I'm in a highly humorous vein,—that's another; and when he's in a teasing humor, I call him Hi, son. There's another! Ha, ha, ha! Can't help it: I'm always doing it. I must be funny; in my office, at my table— Rowell. You seem to be a very busy man, Mr. Jenks. Hosea. I am. I'm a auctioneer, funeral undertaker, coroner, lawyer, expressman, carpenter, shoemaker, any thing by which I can gain an honest penny. There's only one office that seems necessary to my happiness. I would be a postmaster ”

“ He told so clear a story as to chill the enthusiasm of the room. He pointed to the man with the mustache, black curly, and yellow. "I saw them shooting from the right of the road," he said. Jenks tried but little to shake him, and left him unshaken. He was followed by the other wounded soldier, whose story was nearly the same, except that he identified different prisoners.
"Who did you say shot you?" inquired Jenks. "Which of these two?"
"I didn't say. I don't know."
"Don't know a man when he shoots you in broad daylight?" ”

“ I likes you, Jenks, and now I’m goin’ to tell you why.”
“Oh! my heyes,” said Jenks, “that’s an honour. Oh! my stars! can I abear so big an honour? ’Old me, Flo, I feels kind of top ’eavy. Now then, break it heasy, Flo.”
“I never know’d as yer trade was that of a thief, Jenks,” quietly continued the little girl. “I thought as it wor a real nice trade as me and Dick might larn, and we mustn’t larn that, not ef we was to starve. Dick and me must never be thiefs. But, Jenks, I’m not a blamin’ you—it ain’t wrong fur you, Jenks—you ’adn’t never a mother, as telled you to keep an honest boy.” ”

“ Ruggles got up first, and while he waited for Jenks he turned on his Little Tich smile. It worked; Jenks smiled too, and the rivals went off together like brothers.
"I said nothing, and forgot them again—clean forgot them, until, a week later, Jenks came to me in Number Seven with a yarn about a crater and a sniper, and might he go and perforate him.
"I had noticed the sniper myself, so I sent Jenks to chase a broom and picked my own men for this job that mattered. I'd no sooner done it than [pg 352] Ruggles marched up and asked to be made one of the party. ”

“ And I've never felt quite easy about our guards since Polycarp Jenks said—Do you know where it is—the fire?”
“It's between here and the railroad. Give me that sack, and you go on back to the house. You can't do any good.” And when she handed the sack up to him and then kept on up the hill, he became autocratic in his tone. “Go on back to the house, I tell you!”
“I shall not do anything of the kind,” she retorted indignantly, and Kent gave a snort of disapproval, kicked his horse into a lunging gallop, and left her. ”

“ Sproud, although many in the room were laughing, and she herself, I think, felt she had done little but sacrifice her own character without repairing the injury she had done black curly. Jenks made her repeat that she was frightened; not calm enough to be sure of voices, especially many speaking together; that she had seen no one throughout. He even attempted to show that the talk about the hay-stack might have been purely about hay, and that the half-sack of gold might have been put there at another time—might belong to some honest man this very moment. ”

“ Cory."
"But—truly she didn't. Anyway, that picture—"
"Art," said Madam Jenks sadly. "When I think how Mr. Jenks and I have striven to teach her womanly ways, and all to no purpose, and then such dreadful passion if she be crossed in the lightest particular, even in these trivial childish notions of art, the which she could not have got it from Mr. Jenks or myself, good heavens!"
Charity said from the doorway: "I heard that." Sultan had given up trying to sleep; he leaned against her leg and whined.
"Oh, Charity, Charity—I suppose you never even went near the kitchen to help Clarissa." ”

“ Jenks was about to ask why, but he changed his mind and resumed his mocking tone.
“My Lady, you is alwis werry perlite—you is not one of them fine dames as welwet, and silk, and feathers maks too ’igh and mighty to speak to a chap. ”

“ Jenks' virtue, for by raising that voice to strong conversational pitch he could lift you the father and mother of a typhoon out of a flat calm.
A clop of hoofs, a grind of halting wheels—Ben heard that above the mutter of small waves fumbling the piles of the wharf, and turned to see the coach drawing up near Mr. Kenny's warehouse. A dark woman stepped out, doll-size with distance, helping two others alight. The breeze snatched at full skirts; an arm flew up restraining a blue bonnet ”

“ Such are, whether at the worst or at the best, some of the aspects of that season as Mr. Jenks's image presides; in the light of which I may perhaps again rather wonder at my imputation to the general picture of so much amenity. Clearly the good man was a civiliser—whacks and all; and by some art not now to be detected. He was a complacent classic—which was what my brother's claim for him, I dare say, mostly represented ”

“ But Scamp, alas for you, poor fellow! you are inexperienced, and you do not know how the trained bull-dog can fight.
Jenks had secured him with a piece of rope to the broken table, but when Jenks and Dick were out Flo would unfasten him, and he would lie at her feet and never attempt to run away. ”

“ Some day, however successful he might be in this life, he must die, and his naked soul appear before God; and God would ask him so many things, such a piled-up account of sins he would have to lay to his charge. And his father and mother would look on and reproach him, and God would pass sentence on him—he could not escape. He had crucified the Son of God afresh, and put Him to an open shame!
Jenks was not ignorant, like Flo and Dick, he knew of these things. ”

“ Griggs, Pemble, and Jenks. Henry knew that he, at least, was no burden on his employer's finances; but he was not yet aware that Mr. Pemble was there on a similar footing, while Jenks's labours were rewarded weekly with half-a-crown.
But this morning a bright and new star swung into his ambit, when a young man of about twenty years of age sauntered jauntily into the shop, his hat stuck on one side of his head and a cigarette drooping from his lips, where grew a moustache which must have struck envy into the soul of Mr. Pemble. The new-comer winked cheerily to Jenks, nodded a "How d'you do?" ”

“ Don't say you're going to lecture as well?"
"The good God preserve us!" exclaimed Jenks blasphemously. "But I am off in your train to Boulogne. Been transferred to our show there, and between ourselves, I'm not sorry to go. It's a decent hole in some ways, Boulogne, and it's time I got out of Rouen. You're a lucky man, padre, not to be led into temptation by every damned girl you meet. I don't know what they see in me," he continued mournfully, "and, at this hour of the afternoon, I don't know what I see in them."
"Nor do I," said Langton. "Have a drink, Graham? ”

“ Edgar exclaimed, looking admiringly at the old bowman, "and I say, give him the prize on condition he shall show me how to deliver true arrows on each other's heels! What is the secret, Hugh?" he asked, smiling.
"The secret," the old man replied as he carefully straightened his bow and replaced it in its case, "is to face another archer who draws his bow with the hope of planting his arrow in your breast before yours comes. I know nothing else that gives one so quick a hand and eye. You need only practice, my young lord. Your draw is sure and steady. Your eye and hand are true. ”