"In doubtful matters Courage may do much:--In desperate
--Patience."--_Old Proverb_.
The young skater duly recovered, and thenceforward Mr. Wood's popularity
in the village was established, and the following summer he started a
swimming-class, to which the young men flocked with more readiness than
they commonly showed for efforts made to improve them.
For my own part I had so realized, to my shame, that one may feel very
adventurous and yet not know how to venture or what to venture in the
time of need, that my whole heart was set upon getting the school-master
to teach me to swim and to dive, with any other lessons in preparedness
of body and mind which I was old enough to profit by. And if the true
tales of his own experiences were more interesting than the Penny
Numbers, it was better still to feel that one was qualifying in one's
own proper person for a life of adventure.
During the winter Mr. Wood built a boat, which was christened the
_Adela_, after his wife. It was an interesting process to us all. I hung
about and did my best to be helpful, and both Jem and I spoiled our
everyday trousers, and rubbed the boat's sides, the day she was painted.
It was from the _Adela_ that Jem and I had our first swimming-lessons,
Mr. Wood lowering us with a rope under our arms, by which he gave us as
much support as was needed, whilst he taught us how to strike out.
We had swimming-races on the canal, and having learned to swim and dive
without our clothes, we learnt to do so in them, and found it much more
difficult for swimming and easier for diving. It was then that the
trousers we had damaged when the _Adela_ was built came in most
usefully, and saved us from having to attempt the at least equally
difficult task of persuading my mother to let us spoil good ones in an
amusement which had the unpardonable quality of being "very odd."
Dear old Charlie had as much fun out of the boat as we had, though he
could not learn to dive. He used to look as if every minute of a pull up
the canal on a sunny evening gave him pleasure; and the brown Irish
spaniel Jem gave him used to swim after the boat and look up in
Charlie's face as if it knew how he enjoyed it. And later on, Mr. Wood
taught Bob Furniss to row and Charlie to steer; so that Charlie could
sometimes go out and feel quite free to stop the boat when and where he
liked. That was after he started so many collections of insects and
water-weeds, and shells, and things you can only see under a microscope.
Bob and he used to take all kinds of pots and pans and nets and dippers
with them, so that Charlie could fish up what he wanted, and keep things
separate. He was obliged to keep the live things he got for his
fresh-water aquarium in different jam-pots, because he could never be
sure which would eat up which till he knew them better, and the
water-scorpions and the dragon-fly larvæ ate everything. Bob Furniss did
not mind pulling in among the reeds and waiting as long as you wanted.
Mr. Wood sometimes wanted to get back to his work, but Bob never wanted
to get back to his. And he was very good-natured about getting into the
water and wading and grubbing for things; indeed, I think he got to like
it.
At first Mr. Wood had been rather afraid of trusting Charlie with him.
He thought Bob might play tricks with the boat, even though he knew how
to manage her, when there was only one helpless boy with him. But Mrs.
Furniss said, "Nay! Our Bob's a bad 'un, but he's not one of that sort,
he'll not plague them that's afflicted." And she was quite right; for
though his father said he could be trusted with nothing else, we found
he could be trusted with Cripple Charlie.
It was two days before the summer holidays came to an end that Charlie
asked me to come down to the farm and help him to put away his fern
collection and a lot of other things into the places that he had
arranged for them in his room; for now that the school-room was wanted
again, he could not leave his papers and boxes about there. Charlie
lived at the farm altogether now. He was better there than on the moors,
so he boarded there and went home for visits. The room Mrs. Wood had
given him was the one where the old miser had slept. In a memorandum
left with his will it appeared that he had expressed a wish that the
furniture of that room should not be altered, which was how they knew it
was his. So Mrs. Wood had kept the curious old oak bed (the back of
which was fastened into the wall), and an old oak press, with a great
number of drawers with brass handles to them, and all the queer
furniture that she found there, just as it was. Even the brass
warming-pan was only rubbed and put back in its place, and the big
bellows were duly hung up by the small fire-place. But everything was so
polished up and cleaned, the walls re-papered with a soft grey-green
paper spangled with dog-daisies, and the room so brightened up with
fresh blinds and bedclothes, and a bit of bright carpet, that it did
not look in the least dismal, and Charlie was very proud and very fond
of it. It had two windows, one where the beehive was, and one very sunny
one, where he had a balm of Gilead that Isaac's wife gave him, and his
old medicine-bottles full of cuttings on the upper ledge. The old women
used to send him "slippings" off their fairy roses and myrtles and
fuchsias, and they rooted very well in that window, there was so much
sun.
Charlie had only just begun a fern collection, and I had saved my
pocket-money (I did not want it for anything else) and had bought him
several quires of cartridge-paper; and Dr. Brown had given him a packet
of medicine-labels to cut up into strips to fasten his specimens in
with, and the collection looked very well and very scientific; and all
that remained was to find a good place to put it away in. The drawers of
the press were of all shapes and sizes, but there were two longish very
shallow ones that just matched each other, and when I pulled one of them
out, and put the fern-papers in, they fitted exactly, and the drawer
just held half the collection. I called Charlie to look, and he hobbled
up on his crutches and was delighted, but he said he should like to put
the others in himself, so I got him into a chair, and shut up the full
drawer and pulled out the empty one, and went down-stairs for the two
moleskins we were curing, and the glue-pot, and the toffy-tin, and some
other things that had to be cleared out of the school-room now the
holidays were over.
When I came back the fern-papers were still outside, and Charlie was
looking flushed and cross.
"I don't know how you managed," he said, "but I can't get them in. This
drawer must be shorter than the other; it doesn't go nearly so far
back."
"Oh yes, it does, Charlie!" I insisted, for I felt as certain as people
always do feel about little details of that kind. "The drawers are
exactly alike; you can't have got the fern-sheets quite flush with each
other," and I began to arrange the trayful of things I had brought
up-stairs in the bottom of the cupboard.
"I _know_ it's the drawer," I heard Charlie say. ("He's as obstinate as
possible," thought I.)
Then I heard him banging at the wood with his fists and his crutch. ("He
_is_ in a temper!" was my mental comment.) After this my attention was
distracted for a second or two by seeing what I thought was a bit of
toffy left in the tin, and biting it and finding it was a piece of
sheet-glue. I had not spit out all the disgust of it, when Charlie
called me in low, awe-struck tones: "Jack! come here. Quick!"
I ran to him. The drawer was open, but it seemed to have another drawer
inside it, a long, narrow, shallow one.
"I hit the back, and this sprang out," said Charlie. "It's a secret
drawer--and look!"
I did look. The secret drawer was closely packed with rolls of thin
leaflets, which we were old enough to recognize as bank-notes, and with
little bags of wash-leather; and when Charlie opened the little bags
they were filled with gold.
There was a paper with the money, written by the old miser, to say that
it was a codicil to his will, and that the money was all for Mrs. Wood.
Why he had not left it to her in the will itself seemed very puzzling,
but his lawyer (whom the Woods consulted about it) said that he always
did things in a very eccentric way, but generally for some sort of
reason, even if it were rather a freaky one, and that perhaps he thought
that the relations would be less spiteful at first if they did not know
about the money, and that Mrs. Wood would soon find it, if she used and
valued his old press.
I don't quite know whether there was any fuss with the relations about
this part of the bequest, but I suppose the lawyer managed it all right,
for the Woods got the money and gave up the school. But they kept the
old house, and bought some more land, and Walnut-tree Academy became
Walnut-tree Farm once more. And Cripple Charlie lived on with them, and
he was so happy, it really seemed as if my dear mother was right when
she said to my father, "I am so pleased, my dear, for that poor boy's
sake, I can hardly help crying. He's got two homes and two fathers and
mothers, where many a young man has none, as if to make good his
affliction to him."
It puzzles me, even now, to think how my father could have sent Jem and
me to Crayshaw's school. (Nobody ever called him Mr. Crayshaw except the
parents of pupils who lived at a distance. In the neighbourhood he and
his whole establishment were lumped under the one word _Crayshaw's_, and
as a farmer hard by once said to me, "Crayshaw's is universally
disrespected.")
I do not think it was merely because "Crayshaw's" was cheap that we were
sent there, though my father had so few reasons to give for his choice
that he quoted that among them. A man with whom he had had business
dealings (which gave him much satisfaction for some years, and more
dissatisfaction afterwards) did really, I think, persuade my father to
send us to this school, one evening when they were dining together.
Few things are harder to guess at than the grounds on which an
Englishman of my father's type "makes up his mind"; and yet the
question is an important one, for an idea once lodged in his head, a
conviction once as much his own as the family acres, and you will as
soon part him from the one as from the other. I have known little
matters of domestic improvements, in which my mother's comfort was
concerned and her experience conclusive, for which he grudged a few
shillings, and was absolutely impenetrable by her persuasions and
representations. And I have known him waste pounds on things of the most
curious variety, foisted on him by advertising agents without knowledge,
trial, or rational ground of confidence. I suppose that persistency, a
glibber tongue than he himself possessed, a mass of printed rubbish
which always looks imposing to the unliterary, that primitive
combination of authoritativeness and hospitality which makes some men as
ready to say Yes to a stranger as they are to say No at home, and
perhaps some lack of moral courage, may account for it. I can clearly
remember how quaintly sheepish my father used to look after committing
some such folly, and how, after the first irrepressible fall of
countenance, my mother would have defended him against anybody else's
opinion, let alone her own. Young as I was I could feel that, and had a
pretty accurate estimate of the value of the moral lecture on faith in
one's fellow-creatures, which was an unfailing outward sign of my
father's inward conviction that he had been taken in by a rogue. I knew
too, well enough, that my mother's hasty and earnest Amen to this
discourse was an equally reliable token of her knowledge that my father
sorely needed defending, and some instinct made me aware also that my
father knew that this was so. That he knew that it was that tender
generosity towards one's beloved, in which so many of her sex so far
exceeds ours, and not an intellectual conviction of his wisdom, which
made her support what he had done, and that feeling this he felt
dissatisfied, and snapped at her accordingly.
The dislike my dear mother took to the notion of our going to Crayshaw's
only set seals to our fate, and the manner of her protests was not more
fortunate than the matter. She was timid and vacillating from wifely
habit, whilst motherly anxiety goaded her to be persistent and almost
irritable on the subject. Habitually regarding her own wishes and views
as worthless, she quoted the Woods at every turn of her arguments, which
was a mistake, for my father was sufficiently like the rest of his
neighbours not to cotton very warmly to people whose tastes,
experiences, and lines of thought were so much out of the common as
those of the ex-convict and his wife. Moreover, he had made up his mind,
and when one has done that, he is proof against seventy men who can
render a reason.
To rumours which accused "Crayshaw's" of undue severity, of discomfort,
of bad teaching and worse manners, my father opposed arguments which he
allowed were "old-fashioned" and which were far-fetched from the days of
our great-grandfather.
A strict school-master was a good school-master, and if more parents
were as wise as Solomon on the subject of the rod, Old England would not
be discredited by such a namby-pamby race as young men of the present
day seemed by all accounts to be. It was high time the boys did rough it
a bit; would my mother have them always tied to her apron-strings? Great
Britain would soon be Little Britain if boys were to be brought up like
young ladies. As to teaching, it was the fashion to make a fuss about
it, and a pretty pass learning brought some folks to, to judge by the
papers and all one heard. His own grandfather lived to ninety-seven, and
died sitting in his chair, in a bottle-green coat and buff breeches. He
wore a pig-tail to the day of his death, and never would be contradicted
by anybody. He had often told my father that at the school _he_ went to,
the master signed the receipts for his money with a cross, but the usher
was a bit of a scholar, and the boys had cream to their porridge on
Sundays. And the old gentleman managed his own affairs to ninety-seven,
and threw the doctor's medicine-bottles out of the window then. He died
without a doubt on his mind or a debt on his books, and my father
(taking a pinch out of Great-Grandfather's snuff-box) hoped Jem and I
might do as well.
In short, we were sent to "Crayshaw's."
It was not a happy period of my life. It was not a good or wholesome
period; and I am not fond of recalling it. The time came when I shrank
from telling Charlie everything, almost as if he had been a girl. His
life was lived in such a different atmosphere, under such different
conditions. I could not trouble him, and I did not believe he could make
allowances for me. But on our first arrival I wrote him a long letter
(Jem never wrote letters), and the other day he showed it to me. It was
a first impression, but a sufficiently vivid and truthful one, so I give
it here.
"CRAYSHAW'S (for that's what they call it here, and a beastly hole it is).
"_Monday_.
"MY DEAR OLD CHARLIE,--We came earlier than was settled, for Father got
impatient and there was nothing to stop us, but I don't think old
Crayshaw liked our coming so soon. You never saw such a place, it's so
dreary. A boy showed us straight into the school-room. There are three
rows of double desks running down the room and disgustingly dirty, I
don't know what Mrs. Wood would say, and old Crayshaw's desk is in front
of the fire, so that he can see all the boys sideways, and it just stops
any heat coming to them. And there he was, and I don't think Father
liked the look of him particularly, you never saw an uglier. Such a
flaming face and red eyes like Bob Furniss's ferret and great big
whiskers; but I'll make you a picture of him, at least I'll make two
pictures, for Lewis Lorraine says he's got no beard on Sundays, and
rather a good one on Saturdays. Lorraine is a very rum fellow, but I
like him. It was he showed us in, and he did catch it afterwards, but he
only makes fun of it. Old Crayshaw's desk had got a lot of canes on one
side of it and a most beastly dirty snuffy red and green handkerchief on
the other, and an ink-pot in the middle. He made up to Father like
anything and told such thumpers. He said there were six boys in one
room, but really there's twelve. Jem and I sleep together. There's
nothing to wash in and no prayers. If you say them you get boots at your
head, and one hit Jem behind the ear, so I pulled his sleeve and said,
'Get up, you can say them in bed,' But you know Jem, and he said, 'Wait
till I've done, _God bless Father and Mother_,' and when he had, he went
in and fought, and I backed him up, and them old Crayshaw found us, and
oh, how he did beat us!
"----_Wednesday_. Old Snuffy is a regular brute, and I don't care if he
finds this and sees what I say. But he won't, for the milkman is taking
it. He always does if you can pay him. But I've put most of my money
into the bank. Three of the top boys have a bank, and we all have to
deposit, only I kept fourpence in one of my boots. They give us
bank-notes for a penny and a halfpenny; they make them themselves. The
sweet-shop takes them. They only give you eleven penny notes for a
shilling in the bank, or else it would burst. At dinner we have a lot of
pudding to begin with, and it's very heavy. You can hardly eat anything
afterwards. The first day Lorraine said quite out loud and very polite,
'Did you say _duff before meat_, young gentlemen?' and I couldn't help
laughing, and old Snuffy beat his head horridly with his dirty fists.
But Lorraine minds nothing; he says he knows old Snuffy will kill him
some day, but he says he doesn't want to live, for his father and mother
are dead; he only wants to catch old Snuffy in three more booby-traps
before he dies. He's caught him in four already. You see, when old
Snuffy is cat-walking he wears goloshes that he may sneak about better,
and the way Lorraine makes booby-traps is by balancing cans of water on
the door when it's ajar, so that he gets doused, and the can falls on
his head, and strings across the bottom of the door, not far from the
ground, so that he catches his goloshes and comes down. The other
fellows say that old Crayshaw had a lot of money given him in trust for
Lorraine, and he's spent it all, and Lorraine has no one to stick up for
him, and that's why Crayshaw hates him.
"----_Saturday_. I could not catch the milkman, and now I've got your
letter, though Snuffy read it first. Jem and I cry dreadful in bed.
That's the comfort of being together. I'll try and be as good as I can,
but you don't know what this place is. It's very different to the farm.
Do you remember the row about that book Horace Simpson got? I wish you
could see the books the boys have here. At least I don't wish it, for I
wish I didn't look at them, the milkman brings them; he always will if
you can pay him. When I saw old Snuffy find one in Smith's desk, I
expected he would half kill him, but he didn't do much to him, he only
took the book away; and Lorraine says he never does beat them much for
that, because he doesn't want them to leave off buying them, because he
wants them himself. Don't tell the Woods this. Don't tell Mother Jem and
I cry, or else she'll be miserable. I don't so much mind the beatings
(Lorraine says you get hard in time), nor the washing at the sink--nor
the duff puddings--but it is such a beastly hole, and he is such an old
brute, and I feel so dreadful I can't tell you. Give my love to Mrs.
Wood and to Mr. Wood, and to Carlo and to Mary Anne, and to your dear
dear self, and to Isaac when you see him.
"And I am your affectionate friend,
"JACK.
"P.S. Jem sends his best love, and he's got two black eyes.
"P.S. No. 2. You would be sorry for Lorraine if you knew him. Sometimes
I'm afraid he'll kill himself, for he says there's really nothing in the
Bible about suicide. So I said--killing yourself is as bad as killing
anybody else. So he said--is stealing from yourself as bad as stealing
from anybody else? And we had a regular _argue_. Some of the boys
argle-bargle on Sundays, he says, but most of them fight. When they
differ, they put tin-tacks with the heads downwards on each other's
places on the forms in school, and if they run into you and you scream,
old Snuffy beats you. The milkman brings them, by the half-ounce, with
very sharp points, if you can pay him. Most of the boys are a horrid
lot, and so dirty. Lorraine is as dirty as the rest, and I asked him
why, and he said it was because he'd thrown up the sponge; but he got
rather red, and he's washed himself cleaner this morning. He says he has
an uncle in India, and some time ago he wrote to him, and told him about
Crayshaw's, and gave the milkman a diamond pin, that had been his
father's, and Snuffy didn't know about, to post it with plenty of
stamps, but he thinks he can't have put plenty on, for no answer ever
came. I've told him I'll post another one for him in the holidays. Don't
say anything about this back in your letters. He reads 'em all.
"----_Monday_. I've caught the milkman at last, he'll take it this
evening. The lessons here are regular rubbish. I'm so glad I've a good
knife, for if you have you can dig holes in your desk to put collections
in. The boy next to me has earwigs, but you have to keep a look-out, or
he puts them in your ears. I turned up a stone near the sink this
morning, and got five wood-lice for mine. It's considered a very good
collection."