THE TOWN-SPARROW.
“This, too, will pass,” is a Persian word: I should like it better if
it were “This, too, shall pass.”
Gibbie’s agony passed, for God is not the God of the dead but of the
living. Through the immortal essence in him, life became again life,
and he ran about the streets as before. Some may think that wee Sir
Gibbie--as many now called him, some knowing the truth, and others in
kindly mockery--would get on all the better for the loss of such a
father; but it was not so. In his father he had lost his Paradise, and
was now a creature expelled. He was not so much to be pitied as many
a child dismissed by sudden decree from a home to a school; but the
streets and the people and the shops, the horses and the dogs, even
the penny-loaves though he was hungry, had lost half their precious
delight, when his father was no longer in the accessible background,
the heart of the blissful city. As to food and clothing, he did neither
much better nor any worse than before: people were kind as usual, and
kindness was to Gibbie the very milk of mother Nature. Whose the hand
that proffered it, or what the form it took, he cared no more than a
stray kitten cares whether the milk set down to it be in a blue saucer
or a white. But he always made the right return. The first thing a
kindness deserves is acceptance, the next is transmission: Gibbie gave
both, without thinking much about either. For he never had taken, and
indeed never learned to take, a thought about what he should eat or
what he should drink, or wherewithal he should be clothed--a fault
rendering him, in the eyes of the economist of this world, utterly
unworthy of a place in it. There is a world, however, and one pretty
closely mixed up with this, though it never shows itself to one who
has no place in it, the birds of whose air have neither storehouse
nor barn, but are just such thoughtless cherubs--thoughtless for
themselves, that is--as wee Sir Gibbie. It would be useless to attempt
convincing the mere economist that this great city was a little better,
a little happier, a little merrier, for the presence in it of the
child, because he would not, even if convinced of the fact, recognize
the gain; but I venture the assertion to him, that the conduct of
not one of its inhabitants was the worse for the example of Gibbie’s
apparent idleness; and that not one of the poor women who now and then
presented the small baronet with a penny, or a bit of bread, or a scrap
of meat, or a pair of old trousers--shoes nobody gave him, and he
neither desired nor needed any--ever felt the poorer for the gift, or
complained that she should be so taxed.
Positively or negatively, then, everybody was good to him, and Gibbie
felt it; but what could make up for the loss of his Paradise, the bosom
of a father? Drunken father as he was, I know of nothing that can or
ought to make up for such a loss, except that which can restore it--the
bosom of the Father of fathers.
He roamed the streets, as all his life before, the whole of the day,
and part of the night; he took what was given him, and picked up what
he found. There were some who would gladly have brought him within the
bounds of an ordered life; he soon drove them to despair, however, for
the streets had been his nursery, and nothing could keep him out of
them. But the sparrow and the rook are just as respectable in reality,
though not in the eyes of the hen-wife, as the egg-laying fowl, or the
dirt-gobbling duck; and, however Gibbie’s habits might shock the ladies
of Mr. Sclater’s congregation who sought to civilize him, the boy was
no more about mischief in the streets at midnight, than they were in
their beds. They collected enough for his behoof to board him for a
year with an old woman who kept a school, and they did get him to sleep
one night in her house. But in the morning, when she would not let him
run out, brought him into the school-room, her kitchen, and began to
teach him to write, Gibbie failed to see the good of it. He must have
space, change, adventure, air, or life was not worth the name to him.
Above all he must see friendly faces, and that of the old dame was not
such. But he desired to be friendly with her, and once, as she leaned
over him, put up his hand--not a very clean one, I am bound to give
her the advantage of my confessing--to stroke her cheek: she pushed
him roughly away, rose in indignation upon her crutch, and lifted her
cane to chastise him for the insult. A class of urchins, to Gibbie’s
eyes at least looking unhappy, were at the moment blundering through
the twenty-third psalm. Ever after, even when now Sir Gilbert more than
understood the great song, the words, “thy rod and thy staff,” like
the spell of a necromancer would still call up the figure of the dame
irate, in her horn spectacles and her black-ribboned cap, leaning with
one arm on her crutch, and with the other uplifting what was with her
no mere symbol of authority. Like a shell from a mortar, he departed
from the house. She hobbled to the door after him, but his diminutive
figure many yards away, his little bare legs misty with swiftness as he
ran, was the last she ever saw of him, and her pupils had a bad time of
it the rest of the day. He never even entered the street again in which
she lived. Thus, after one night’s brief interval of respectability, he
was again a rover of the city, a flitting insect that lighted here and
there, and spread wings of departure the moment a fresh desire awoke.
It would be difficult to say where he slept. In summer anywhere; in
winter where he could find warmth. Like animals better clad than he,
yet like him able to endure cold, he revelled in mere heat when he
could come by it. Sometimes he stood at the back of a baker’s oven,
for he knew all the haunts of heat about the city; sometimes he buried
himself in the sids (_husks of oats_) lying ready to feed the kiln of a
meal-mill; sometimes he lay by the furnace of the steam-engine of the
water-works. One man employed there, when his time was at night, always
made a bed for Gibbie: he had lost his own only child, and this one of
nobody’s was a comfort to him.
Even those who looked upon wandering as wicked, only scolded into
the sweet upturned face, pouring gall into a cup of wine too full
to receive a drop of it--and did not hand him over to the police.
Useless verily that would have been, for the police would as soon have
thought of taking up a town sparrow as Gibbie, and would only have
laughed at the idea. They knew Gibbie’s merits better than any of those
good people imagined his faults. It requires either wisdom or large
experience to know that a child is not necessarily wicked even if born
and brought up in a far viler _entourage_ than was Gibbie.
The merits the police recognized in him were mainly two--neither of
small consequence in their eyes; the first, the negative, yet more
important one, that of utter harmlessness; the second, and positive
one--a passion and power for rendering help, taking notable shape
chiefly in two ways, upon both of which I have already more than
touched. The first was the peculiar faculty now pretty generally
known--his great gift, some, his great luck, others called it--for
finding things lost. It was no wonder the town crier had sought his
acquaintance, and when secured, had cultivated it--neither a difficult
task; for the boy, ever since he could remember, had been in the
habit, as often as he saw the crier, or heard his tuck of drum in the
distance, of joining him and following, until he had acquainted himself
with all particulars concerning everything proclaimed as missing. The
moment he had mastered the facts announced, he would dart away to
search, and not unfrequently to return with the thing sought. But it
was not by any means only things sought that he found. He continued
to come upon things of which he had no simulacrum in his phantasy.
These, having no longer a father to carry them to, he now, their owners
unknown, took to the crier, who always pretended to receive them with a
suspicion which Gibbie understood as little as the other really felt,
and at once advertised them by drum and cry. What became of them after
that, Gibbie never knew. If they did not find their owners, neither did
they find their way back to Gibbie; if their owners were found, the
crier never communicated with him on the subject. Plainly he regarded
Gibbie as the favoured jackal, whose privilege it was to hunt for the
crier, the royal lion of the city forest. But he spoke kindly to him,
as well he might, and now and then gave him a penny.
The second of the positive merits by which Gibbie found acceptance in
the eyes of the police, was a yet more peculiar one, growing out of his
love for his father, and his experience in the exercise of that love.
It was, however, unintelligible to them, and so remained, except on the
theory commonly adopted with regard to Gibbie, namely, that _he wasna
a’ there_. Not the less was it to them a satisfactory whim of his,
seeing it mitigated their trouble as guardians of the nightly peace and
safety. It was indeed the main cause of his being, like themselves, so
much in the street at night: seldom did Gibbie seek his lair--I cannot
call it couch--before the lengthening hours of the morning. If the
finding of things was a gift, this other peculiarity was a passion--and
a right human passion--absolutely possessing the child: it was, to play
the guardian angel to drunk folk. If such a distressed human craft hove
in sight, he would instantly bear down upon and hover about him, until
resolved as to his real condition. If he was in such distress as to
require assistance, he never left him till he saw him safe within his
own door. The police asserted that wee Sir Gibbie not only knew every
drunkard in the city, and where he lived, but where he generally got
drunk as well. That one was in no danger of taking the wrong turning,
upon whom Gibbie was in attendance, to determine, by a shove on this
side or that, the direction in which the hesitating, uncertain mass
of stultified humanity was to go. He seemed a visible embodiment of
that special providence which is said to watch over drunk people and
children, only here a child was the guardian of the drunkard, and
in this branch of his mission, was well known to all who, without
qualifying themselves for coming under his cherubic cognizance, were in
the habit of now and then returning home late. He was least known to
those to whom he rendered most assistance. Rarely had he thanks for it,
never halfpence, but not unfrequently blows and abuse. For the first
he cared nothing; the last, owing to his great agility, seldom visited
him with any directness. A certain reporter of humorous scandal, after
his third tumbler, would occasionally give a graphic description of
what, coming from a supper-party, he once saw about two o’clock in
the morning. In the great street of the city, he overhauled a huge
galleon, which proved, he declared, to be the provost himself, not
exactly _water_-logged, and yet not very buoyant, but carrying a good
deal of sail. He might possibly have escaped very particular notice,
he said, but for the assiduous attendance upon him of an absurd little
cock-boat, in the person of wee Gibbie--the two reminding him right
ludicrously of the story of the Spanish Armada. Round and round the
bulky provost gyrated the tiny baronet, like a little hero of the ring,
pitching into him, only with open-handed pushes, not with blows, now
on this side and now on that--not after such fashion of sustentation
as might have sufficed with a man of ordinary size, but throwing all
his force now against the provost’s bulging bows, now against his
over-leaning quarter, encountering him now as he lurched, now as he
heeled, until at length he landed him high, though certainly not dry,
on the top of his own steps. The moment the butler opened the door, and
the heavy hulk rolled into dock, Gibbie darted off as if he had been
the wicked one tormenting the righteous, and in danger of being caught
by a pair of holy tongs. Whether the tale was true or not, I do not
know: with after-dinner humourists there is reason for caution. Gibbie
was not offered the post of henchman to the provost, and rarely could
have had the chance of claiming salvage for so distinguished a vessel,
seeing he generally cruised in waters where such craft seldom sailed.
Though almost nothing could now have induced him to go down Jink Lane,
yet about the time the company at Mistress Croale’s would be breaking
up, he would on most nights be lying in wait a short distance down the
Widdiehill, ready to minister to that one of his father’s old comrades
who might prove most in need of his assistance; and if he showed him no
gratitude, Gibbie had not been trained in a school where he was taught
to expect or even to wish for any.
I could now give a whole chapter to the setting forth of the pleasures
the summer brought him, city summer as it was, but I must content
myself with saying that first of these, and not least, was the mere
absence of the cold of the other seasons, bringing with it many
privileges. He could lie down anywhere and sleep when he would; or
spend, if he pleased, whole nights awake, in a churchyard, or on the
deck of some vessel discharging her cargo at the quay, or running about
the still, sleeping streets. Thus he got to know the shapes of some of
the constellations, and not a few of the aspects of the heavens. But
even then he never felt alone, for he gazed at the vista from the midst
of a cityful of his fellows. Then there were the scents of the laylocks
and the roses and the carnations and the sweet-peas, that came floating
out from the gardens, contending sometimes with those of the grocers’
and chemists’ shops. Now and then too he came in for a small feed of
strawberries, which were very plentiful in their season. Sitting then
on a hospitable doorstep, with the feet and faces of friends passing
him in both directions, and love embodied in the warmth of summer all
about him, he would eat his strawberries, and inherit the earth.