"There's no good in him," said his stepmother, "not a mossul!" With
these words she thrust little Joe forward by applying her knee to the
small of his back, and thereby jerking him into the middle of the school
before the master. "There's no making nothing out of him, whack him as
you will."
Little Joe Lambole was a child of ten, dressed in second-hand, nay,
third-hand garments that did not fit. His coat had been a soldier's
scarlet uniform, that had gone when discarded to a dealer, who had dealt
it to a carter, and when the carter had worn it out it was reduced and
adapted to the wear of the child. The nether garments had, in like
manner, served a full-grown man till worn out; then they had been cut
down at the knees. Though shortened in leg, they maintained their former
copiousness of seat, and served as an inexhaustible receptacle for dust.
Often as little Joe was "licked" there issued from the dense mass of
drapery clouds of dust. It was like beating a puff-ball.
"Only a seven-month child," said Mrs. Lambole contemptuously, "born
without his nails on fingers and toes; they growed later. His wits have
never come right, and a deal, a deal of larruping it will take to make
'em grow. Use the rod; we won't grumble at you for doing so."
Little Joe Lambole when he came into the world had not been expected to
live. He was a poor, small, miserable baby, that could not roar, but
whimpered. He had been privately baptised directly he was born, because,
at the first, Mrs. Lambole said, "The child is mine, though it be such
a creetur, and I wouldn't like it, according, to be buried like a dog."
He was called Joseph. The scriptural Joseph had been sold as a bondman
into Egypt; this little Joseph seemed to have been brought into the
world to be a slave. In all propriety he ought to have died as a baby,
and that happy consummation was almost desired, but he disappointed
expectations and lived. His mother died soon after, and his father
married again, and his father and stepmother loved him, doubtless; but
love is manifested in many ways, and the Lamboles showed theirs in a
rough way, by slaps and blows and kicks. The father was ashamed of him
because he was a weakling, and the stepmother because he was ugly, and
was not her own child. He was a meagre little fellow, with a long neck
and a white face and sunken cheeks, a pigeon breast, and a big stomach.
He walked with his head forward and his great pale blue eyes staring
before him into the far distance, as if he were always looking out of
the world. His walk was a waddle, and he tumbled over every obstacle,
because he never looked where he was going, always looked to something
beyond the horizon.
Because of his walk and his long neck, and staring eyes and big stomach,
the village children called him "Gander Joe" or "Joe Gander"; and his
parents were not sorry, for they were ashamed that such a creature
should be known as a Lambole.
The Lamboles were a sturdy, hearty people, with cheeks like quarrender
apples, and bones set firm and knit with iron sinews. They were a
hard-working, practical people who fattened pigs and kept poultry at
home. Lambole was a roadmaker. In breaking stones one day a bit of one
had struck his eye and blinded it. After that he wore a black patch upon
it. He saw well enough out of the other; he never missed seeing his own
interests. Lambole could have made a few pence with his son had his son
been worth anything. He could have sent him to scrape the road, and
bring the manure off it in a shovel to his garden. But Joe never took
heartily to scraping the dung up. In a word, the boy was good for
nothing.
He had hair like tow, and a little straw hat on his head with the top
torn, so that the hair forced its way out, and as he walked the top
bobbed about like the lid of a boiling saucepan.
When the whortleberries were ripe in June, Mrs. Lambole sent Joe out
with other children to collect the berries in a tin can; she sold them
for fourpence a quart, and any child could earn eightpence a day in
whortleberry time; one that was active might earn a shilling.
But Joe would not remain with the other children. They teased him,
imitated ganders and geese, and poked out their necks and uttered sounds
in imitation of the voices of these birds. Moreover, they stole the
berries he had picked, and put them into their own cans.
When Joe Gander left them and found himself alone in the woods, then he
lay down among the brown heather and green fern, and looked up through
the oak leaves at the sky, and listened to the singing of the birds. Oh,
wondrous music of the woods! the hum of the summer air among the leaves,
the drone of the bees about the flowers, the twittering and fluting and
piping of the finches and blackbirds and thrushes, and the cool soft
cooing of the wood pigeons, like the lowing of aerial oxen; then the
tapping of the green woodpecker and a glimpse of its crimson head, like
a carbuncle running up the tree trunk, and the powdering down of old
husks of fir cones or of the tender rind of the topmost shoot of a
Scottish pine; for aloft a red squirrel was barking a beautiful tree out
of wantonness and frolic. A rabbit would come forth from the bracken and
sit up in the sun, and clean its face with the fore paws and stroke its
long ears; then, seeing the soiled red coat, would skip up--little Joe
lying very still--and screw its nose and turn its eyes from side to
side, and skip nearer again, till it was quite close to Joe Gander; and
then the boy laughed, and the rabbit was gone with a flash of white
tail.
Happy days! days of listening to mysterious music, of looking into
mysteries of sun and foliage, of spiritual intercourse with the great
mother-soul of nature.
In the evenings, when Gander Joe came without his can, or with his can
empty, he would say to his stepmother: "Oh, steppy! it was so nice;
everything was singing."
"I'll make you sing in the chorus too!" cried Mrs. Lambole, and laid a
stick across his shoulders. Experience had taught her the futility of
dusting at a lower level.
Then Gander Joe cried and writhed, and promised to be more diligent in
picking whortleberries in future. But when he went again into the wood
it was again the same. The spell of the wood spirits was on him; he
forgot about the berries at fourpence a quart, and lay on his back and
listened. And the whole wood whispered and sang to him and consoled him
for his beating, and the wind played lullabies among the fir spines and
whistled in the grass, and the aspen clashed its myriad tiny cymbals
together, producing an orchestra of sound that filled the soul of the
dreaming boy with love and delight and unutterable yearning.
It fared no better in autumn, when the blackberry season set in. Joe
went with his can to an old quarry where the brambles sent their runners
over the masses of rubble thrown out from the pits, and warmed and
ripened their fruit on the hot stones. It was a marvel to see how the
blackberries grew in this deserted quarry; how large the fruit swelled,
how thick they were--like mulberries. On the road side of the quarry was
a belt of pines, and the sun drew out of their bark scents of
unsurpassed sweetness. About the blackberries hovered spotted white and
yellow and black moths, beautiful as butterflies. Butterflies did not
fail either. The red admiral was there, resting on the bark of the
trees, asleep in the sun with wings expanded, or drifting about the
clumps of yellow ragwort, doubtful whether to perch or not.
Here, hidden behind the trees, among the leaves of overgrown rubble, was
a one-story cottage of wood and clay, covered with thatch, in which
lived Roger Gale, the postman.
Roger Gale had ten miles to walk every morning, delivering letters, and
the same number of miles every evening, for which twenty miles he
received the liberal pay of six shillings a week. He had to be at the
post office at half-past six in the morning to receive the letters, and
at seven in the evening to deliver them. His work took him about six
hours. The middle of the day he had to himself. Roger Gale was an old
soldier, and enjoyed a pension. He occupied himself, when at home, as a
shoemaker; but the walks took so much out of him, being an old man, that
he had not the strength and energy to do much cobbling when at home.
Therefore he idled a good deal, and he amused his idle hours with a
violin. Now, when Joe Gander came to the quarry before the return of the
postman from his rounds, he picked blackberries; but no sooner had Roger
Gale unlocked his door, taken down his fiddle, and drawn the bow across
the strings, than Joe set down the can and listened. And when old Roger
began to play an air from the _Daughter of the Regiment_, then Joe crept
towards his cottage in little stages of wonderment and hunger to hear
more and hear better, much in the same way as now and again in the wood
the inquisitive rabbits had approached his red jacket. Presently Joe was
seated on the doorstep, with his ear against the wooden door, and the
blackberries and the can, and stepmother's orders and father's stick,
and his hard bed and his meagre meals, even the whole world had passed
away as a scroll that is rolled up and laid aside, and he lived only in
the world of music.
Though his great eyes were wide he saw nothing through them; though the
rain began to fall, and the north-east wind to blow, he felt nothing: he
had but one faculty that was awake, and that was hearing.
One day Roger came to his door and opened it suddenly, so that the
child, leaning against it, fell across his threshold.
"Whom have we here? What is this? What do you want?" asked the postman.
Then Gander Joe stood up, craning his long neck and staring out of his
goggle eyes, with his rough flaxen hair standing up in a ruffle above
his head and his great stomach protruded, and said nothing. So Roger
burst out laughing. But he did not kick him off the step; he gave him a
bit of bread and a drop of cider, and presently drew from the boy the
confession that he had been listening to the fiddle. This was flattering
to the postman, and it was the initiation of a friendship between them.
But when Joe came home with an empty can and said: "Oh, steppy, Master
Roger Gale did fiddle so beautiful!" the woman said: "Fiddle! I'll
fiddle your back pretty smartly, you idle vagabond"; and she was a
truthful woman who never fell short of her word.
To break him of his bad habits--that is, of his dreaminess and
uselessness--Mrs. Lambole took Joe to school.
At school he had a bad time of it. He could not learn the letters. He
was mentally incapable of doing a subtraction sum. He sat on a bench
staring at the teacher, and was unable to answer an ordinary question
what the lesson was about. The school-children tormented him, the
monitor scolded, and the master beat. Then little Joe Gander took to
absenting himself from school. He was sent off every morning by his
stepmother, but instead of going to the school he went to the cottage in
the quarry, and listened to the fiddle of Roger Gale.
Little Joe got hold of an old box, and with a knife he cut holes in it;
and he fashioned a bridge, and then a handle, and he strung horsehair
over the latter, and made a bow, and drew very faint sounds from this
improvised violin, that made the postman laugh, but which gave great
pleasure to Joe. The sound that issued from his instrument was like the
humming of flies, but he got distinct notes out of his strings, though
the notes were faint.
After he had played truant for some time his father heard what he had
done, and he beat the boy till he was like a battered apple that had
been flung from the tree by a storm upon a road.
For a while Joe did not venture to the quarry except on Saturdays and
Sundays. He was forbidden by his father to go to church, because the
organ and the singing there drove him half crazed. When a beautiful,
touching melody was played his eyes became clouded and the tears ran
down his cheeks; and when the organ played the "Hallelujah Chorus," or
some grand and stirring march, his eyes flashed, and his little body
quivered, and he made such faces that the congregation were disturbed
and the parson remonstrated with his mother. The child was clearly
imbecile, and unfit to attend divine worship.
Mr. Lambole got an idea into his head, he would bring up Joe to be a
butcher, and he informed Joe that he was going to place him with a
gentleman of that profession in town. Joe cried. He turned sick at the
sight of blood, and the smell of raw meat was abhorrent to him. But
Joe's likings were of no account with his father, and he took him to the
town and placed him with a butcher there. He was invested in a blue
smock, and was informed that his duties would consist in taking meat
about to the customers. Joe was left. It was the first time he had been
from home, and he cried himself to sleep the first night, and he cried
all the next day when sent around with meat on his shoulder.
Now on his journey through the streets he had to pass the window of a
toy-shop. In the window were dolls and horses and little carts. For
these Joe did not care, but there were also some little violins, some
high priced, and some very low, and over these Joe lingered with loving,
covetous eyes. There was one little fiddle to which his heart went out,
that cost only three shillings and sixpence. Each day, as he passed the
shop, he was drawn to it, and stood looking in, and longed daily more
ardently than on the previous day for this three-and-sixpenny violin.
One day he was so lost in admiration and on the schemes he framed as to
how he might eventually become possessed of the instrument, that he was
unconscious of some boys stealing the meat out of the sort of trough on
his shoulder in which he carried it about.
This was the climax of his misdeeds--he had been reprimanded for his
blunders, delivering the wrong meat at the customers' doors; for his
dilatory ways in going on his errands. The butcher could endure him no
more, and sent him home to his father, who thrashed him, as his welcome.
But he carried home with him the haunting recollections of that
beautiful little red fiddle, with its fine black keys. The bow, he
remembered, was strung with white horsehair. Joe had now a fixed
ambition--something to live for. He would be perfectly happy if he could
have that three-shillings-and-sixpenny fiddle. But how were three
shillings and sixpence to be earned?
He confided his difficulty to postman Roger Gale, and Roger Gale said he
would consider the matter.