Meanwhile Sarah Horrotian, a small, determined, flat-bosomed woman of
curiously heavy footsteps and rigorously determined aspect, attired
in a narrow gown of rasping wincey and a blue-checked apron with a
wedge-shaped bib, made plaint, groaning over the hideous wickedness
of this world as she pounded with the roller at the dough upon the
pastry-board. It helps the picture to add that the widow’s pastry was
of a consistence so tough and lasting that no human being, save one,
partaking thereof, had ever been known to venture on a second helping,
the exception being Digweed, the pigman.
When Sarah’s only child, Joshua, then a white-skinned, red-curled,
burly youngster of eighteen, already standing nearly six feet high in
his deceased father’s solid mahogany-topped boots and old-fashioned
cords, and the baggy velveteen coat with the huge horn buttons, even
when the hard, shiny, low-crowned hat hung on its peg against the
passage wall--when Josh took the Queen’s Shilling, it may have been
an undigested slice of the widow’s Spartan pie-crust, innocent of
mollifying medium or shortening of any kind, that spurred him to the
act, combined with Sarah’s railing.
For the Lili and the Lilith, that ceaselessly chide, with shrill,
weird, human-seeming voices, amongst the ruins of dead and
long-forgotten cities on Babylonian plains, were as piping bullfinches
compared with Sarah Horrotian.
If she had ever met with any members of the sect, she would have shone
as a Muggletonian. To denounce rather than to exhort was her religion.
To proclaim sinners lost eternally, and luxuriate in the prospect of
their frying, to call down judgments from Heaven upon those who had
offended her, was the widow’s way.
News came to her from Jason Digweed, her unsavory Mercury and general
intelligencer, that one Whichello, clerk and beadle to the Parish
Church of Market Drowsing, whose incumbent claimed tithes from the
widow, had suffered the loss of an eye, which had dropped out upon
the Prayer-Book in the middle of the Litany, being a blinder all
along--though Whichello had never had the ghost of a notion of it--and
nearly scared Parson into fits.
“Then the Lord has not forgotten me!” said the grim little woman,
folding her great bony hands upon her meager bosom. “He remembered that
clutch of thirty addled Black Spanish eggs I bought of that whited
sepulcher and set under our old Broody, and He has smitten, sparing to
slay.”
“Now, mother!...” began Josh, wriggling on the low-backed settle; “you
don’t really go for to say you believe a thing of the Lord like that
there!”
“Silence!” said the widow, turning her long, sallow, high-nosed face,
with the scanty loops of black hair upon the temples, upon her son, and
freezing even his accustomed blood with the glare of her fierce black
eyes. “If so be as the Almighty wills to avenge His chosen, who are you
to say Him nay?”
She went out of the kitchen, shaking the crockery on the shelves
with her ponderous gait, and visited her stores and sent from thence
half-a-bag of potatoes and a leg of new-killed pork to the clerk’s
wife. “For the Lord never meant the innocent to suffer with the
guilty,” she knew. Later, when she subscribed half-a-crown towards the
purchase of a glass eye for the bereaved Whichello, she forgot to quote
her authority for the act.
Poor folk in want approached Sarah, expectant of verbal brimstone, not
unhopeful of receiving more substantial aid. For the widow Horrotian,
after severely-exhaustive inquiries, failing to run Deception to its
earth, exuded silver in shilling drops, girding as she gave, when
the well-to-do buttoned up their pockets and bestowed nothing but
sympathetic words. Yet these were praised as kindly folk, when there
were no blessings for Sarah. For even as her hand relieved, her tongue
dropped vitriol on human hearts, and raised resentful blisters there.
One of these blisters, breaking upon a Sunday night at tea-time, led
to the outlawing of Josh and his subsequent enlistment. A teapot was
involved in the quarrel, which yet sprang from a milky source. For
to the moral scourges with which Mrs. Horrotian lashed the quivering
flesh of her only child, she never, never failed to add, as a crowning,
overwhelming instance of the filial ingratitude of her son Josh, the
reproach that she had nourished him at her maternal bosom--preferably
choosing meal-times, and those rare occasions when guests gathered at
her board, for these intimate reminiscences of the young man’s helpless
infancy.
To look at the woman raised doubts as to the possibility of her ever
having nourished anything except a grudge or a resentment. No deal
board could be flatter than the surface she would passionately strike
with her bony hand in testimony to the fact alleged, causing Josh to
choke with embarrassment in his mug of home-brewed ale, and eliciting
from the guest--always a partisan and crony of her own--grunts, if
a male: or pensive, feminine sighs, or neutral clicks of the tongue
against the palate.
“As if I could help it!” Josh suddenly burst out on the epoch-making
occasion referred to.
* * * * *
The turning of the worm was so unexpected that the widow leaned back
in her chair, and there ensued a silence only broken when the minister
of the local Bethesda groaned. For the Reverend Mr. Pooker, with
his wife and daughter, were frequently guests at Sarah’s board, the
widow, nominally a member of the Established Church, having seceded to
Dissent, liking her religion as she liked her tea, hot and strong, and
without sugar.
“I think you spoke, young man?” said the Reverend Mr. Pooker, setting
down the pot of rhubarb jam into which he had been diving, and staring
solemnly at Josh. Mrs. Pooker faithfully reproduced the stare, and
little Miss Pooker tried to do so, but only managed to look at the
presumptuous youth with her little canary-colored head tilted on one
side in an admiring manner. Not being sufficiently regenerate and elect
to be insensible to the dreadful fascination of wickedness.
“I did speak!” asserted young Josh, boldly meeting the black eyes
that flamed upon him out of the deep hollows under his mother’s high
narrow brow. “I said, ‘As if I could help it!’ and I say so again....
Were there no teapots handy? A teapot wouldn’t ha’ pitched itself in
a child’s face years after he’s earned the right, Lord knows! to call
himself a man.”
“Scoffer!” thundered the great bass voice of the little flat-chested
woman. “Mocker! As though I, Sarah Horrotian, would disobey the
command that bids a woman suckle her children!”
“Well and nobly said, ma’am!” commented the Reverend Pooker, reaching
for the seed-cake. “And let us hope that the respect and gratitood owed
by a child so nerrished to a parent----”
“And such a parent!” interpolated Mrs. Pooker tenderly.
“Will not be forgotten,” said the Reverend Mr. Pooker through the
intervening medium of seed-cake, “by this misgeided and onrewly Young
Man!”
“Very well, then!” said Josh, driven beyond patience. “All right! But
why be I to thank her for doing what the Lord commanded her to do?
That’s what I want to know!”
Sarah Horrotian rose up at the tea-board end of the Pembroke table in
the best parlor.
“Another speech like that, Joshua, and if you was ten times the son of
my womb, you should go forth motherless from these doors. What! Shall
the Name of the Lord be taken in vain at my table, and I not drive
forth the blasphemer from my roof!”
“Dear sister in grace ...” began placid Mrs. Pooker, possibly
foreseeing regrettable contingencies. But Sarah was fairly launched.
“And naked shall you go, Joshua, save for the clothes upon your back,
and not a penny of my money shall be lavished upon the accursed of God
and of his mother, for whom Hell gapes, and eternal punishment is most
surely waiting.”
“Hem!--hem!” coughed the Reverend Pooker, getting alarmed. But Mrs.
Horrotian was wound up, and, as Josh knew, would go till she ran down.
“There shall you gnash your teeth in torment,” boomed the awful voice
of the widow. “There shall the Worm that dieth not gnaw your vitals----”
“Oh!--dang the dod-gassed Worm!” broke in the lost one, and at this
hideous blasphemy the Reverend Mr. Pooker set down his refilled teacup
with a bump that spilled half its contents over the saucer’s edge, and
the minister’s wife and daughter fairly cowered in their chairs.
“I be sick to death of hearing about worms and gnashings and torment.
And as for going forth o’ your doors, I’ll go now. So good-by, mother,
for good and my parting respects to you, Mr. Pooker and Mrs. Pooker!
Don’t ’e cry, Miss Jenny! I shan’t go to Hell a day sooner for all my
mother’s cursing. A pretty mother!” said Josh in boiling indignation,
“to be calling down damnation on her only son across her Sunday
tea-tray. Why, one o’ they Cannibal Islanders she throws away good
money on converting ’ud make a better shift at being civil to her own
flesh and blood!”
Sarah did not recover her power of sonorous speech for some minutes
after the best parlor door had slammed behind her departing prodigal,
and his swift heavy steps had traversed the stone-flagged passage, and
his manly voice, still vibrating with anger, had been heard telling
the old mastiff Roger to go back to his kennel in the yard. Then she
offered Mr. Pooker a fresh cup of tea, and when the pastor declined,
suggesting application at the Mercy Seat for a better frame of mind
for somebody unparticularized by name, the stark little woman gave
no more sign of consciousness of the intimate and personal nature of
the supplication, than if she had been asked to join in prayer for
an obdurate Fiji Islander, determined on not parting with a favorite
fetish of carved cocoanut-wood adorned with red sinnet and filed
sharks’ teeth.
But when the farmhouse was silent, and its few inmates, all save
the mistress, wrapped in slumber, Sarah Horrotian sat upon a hard,
uncompromising, uncomfortable chair by the dying embers of the
farm-kitchen fire; and wept, as might have wept a wooden manikin, on
some stage of puppets; wrenched with grotesque spasms and wiry throes
of grief, holding her blue-checked apron squarely before her reddened
eyes.
* * * * *
Ah! pity these isolated ones, stern of nature, obdurate of heart, who
yearn to yield but are not fashioned for yielding. All they crave is
the opportunity to relent and be tender, but it never, never comes!
If someone had the courage to cling about those iron necks of theirs
and pray them with tears and kisses, to be kind, they believe in their
secret hearts that they could; but the waters of tenderness are dried
up in them, or lost, as are forgotten and buried fountains in the
great Desert, doomed never to spring to the light in crystal radiance
and cool a thirsty traveler’s lip. What tragic agonies are theirs, who
can even see their dear ones die, unreconciled and unforgiven.... Ah!
pity them, the obdurate of heart!
* * * * *
As for the Prodigal, who had tramped it into Market Drowsing, and
bribed the under-ostler at the Saracen’s Head Inn with sixpence to let
him sleep in the hayloft appertaining to that hostelry after a supper
of bread-and-cheese and ale, he had had a clinching interview with the
tall Sergeant of Lancers at the Recruiting Office, before that stately
functionary’s palate had lost the flavor of his post-breakfast quart of
beer.
Josh chose the Hundredth Lancers for the reason that he liked
horses; and because the Sergeant, whom he hugely admired, belonged
to that dashing Light Cavalry regiment. Also because there were
knights in plate-armor tilting with lances in the half-obliterated
fourteenth-century frescoes that rainy weather brought out in ghostly
blotches through the conscientious Protestant whitewash of Market
Drowsing Parish Church; and he had, from early boyhood, achieved
patience throughout the Vicar’s hydra-headed sermons, by imagining
how he, Josh Horrotian, would wield such a weapon, bestriding just
such another steed as Sir Simon Flanderby’s war-horse with the steel
spiked nose-piece and breast-piece, the wide embroidered rein, and the
emblazoned, parti-colored housing sweeping the ground like a lady’s
train....
* * * * *
The Railway had not yet reached Dullingstoke. But the Sergeant, with
his plentifully-be-ribboned captives, six other youths of Josh’s own
age, had marched into the town--with frequent washings-out of thirsty
throats with pots of beer upon the way--and had whisked them off by the
“Wonder” coach for Spurham before to Sarah Horrotian of The Upper Clays
Farm came the news that her only son had joined in his lot with the
shedders of blood.
Erelong, to that hopeful recruit, learning the goose-step at Spurham
Baracks with the other raw-material under process of licking into
shape, arrived a goodly chest containing comfortable provender of
home-cured bacon, home-made cheese and butter, a stone bottle of The
Upper Clays home-brewed ale, and a meat-pie with a crust of almost
shell-proof consistency. In conjunction with a sulphurous tract,
a bottle of horehound balsam for coughs, and a Bible containing
a five-pound note pinned within a half-sheet of dingy notepaper,
inscribed in the widow’s stiff laborious handwriting: “_For my son.
From his affectionate Mother. S. Horrotian._”
* * * * *
Do you know stern Sarah a little better now? Do you comprehend the
craving need of strong excitement, the powerfully-dramatic bent that
found a relieving outlet in the provocation of those passionate
scenes that left the simpler and less complex nature of her offspring
suffering and unstrung?
He was the gainer, she the loser, by that breach of theirs. Her
terrible voice, her freezing glare would never overawe his soul and
paralyze his tongue again. He would always have an answer for her
thenceforth; her quelling days were over....
For to Josh, who had been bred in the belief that the word of Sarah was
as little to be disputed as the Word between the black stamped-leather
covers of the great Family Bible on the best parlor side-table, had
come the revelation that his mother was merely a woman after all. She
had always promised him that he would be blasted by a lightning-stroke
from Heaven did he presume to defy her awful mandates and dispute
her sovereign will. He had done both these things, and what is more,
had done them on a Sunday, and the effect upon the weather had been
absolutely _nil_. One of the balmiest, rosiest, and brightest of summer
evenings he could recall had smiled upon the exile’s tramp into Market
Drowsing. He had thrown his curly red head back, and squared his strong
shoulders as he went, looking up at the pale shining splendor of the
evening star....
Full revelation of her loss of power to sway the imagination of her son
did not come to Sarah Horrotian until two years later, when Josh, a
full-blown trooper in Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, came
home, upon her written invitation, to spend a furlough at The Upper
Clays.
He had acquired a power of smart repartee, a military sangfroid which
Sarah found disconcerting.... His way of smiling as he pulled at a
recently-acquired red whisker betokened self-consciousness and vanity,
that damning sin.... It was in vain she urged him to confess himself a
worm, and no man....
“That’s your opinion o’ your son, maybe!...” Josh played with the
hirsute ornament, which his mother secretly admired, in the dandified
way she abhorred, adding; “But I should call my father’s son a decent
sort o’ beggar, taking him all round!”
“Pride goeth before a fall,” said Sarah, in her deep chest-notes of
warning, “and the pit is digged deep for the feet of the vainglorious.”
“Ay, ay!” assented the soldier. “Perhaps I be vainglorious, a bit. But
you have so poor an opinion o’ me, mother, that I’m driven to have a
better o’ myself than I should in ordinary. Try praising me, if you
want me to run myself down!”
Sarah was silenced. She shut up her mouth like a trap, and went about
her work in rigid dumbness, while the voice of her soul cried out in
bitterness, wrestling with Heaven for the soul of her son.
Whom to praise, whom to take pride in, whom to favor and indulge were
to damn to all eternity, according to the Book from which some souls
draw milk and honey, and others corroding verjuice and bitterest gall.