If you had asked the boy who was now legally Tom Quidmore why he was
reluctant to give his mother a powder that would do her good he would
have been unable to explain his hesitation. Reason, in the main, was
in favor of his doing it. In the first place, he had promised, and he
had always responded to those exhortations of his teachers which laid
stress on keeping his word. Not to keep his word had come to seem an
offense of the nature of personal defilement.
Then the whole matter had been thought out and decreed by an authority
higher than himself. The child mind, like the childish mind at all
times, is under the weight of authority. The source of the authority
is a matter of little moment so long as it speaks decidedly enough. It
is always a means by which to get rid of the bother of using private
judgment, which as often as not is a bore to the person with the right
to it.
In the case of a boy of twelve, private judgment is hampered by a
knowledge of his insufficiency. The man who provides food, clothing,
shelter, is invested with the right to speak. The child mind is
logical, orderly, respectful, and prenatally disposed to discipline.
Except on severe provocation it does not rebel. Tom Quidmore felt no
impulse to rebellion, even though his sense of right and wrong was,
for the moment, mystified.
He lacked data. Such data as came to his hearing, and less often to
his sight, lay morally outside his range. Like those scientifically
minded men who during the childhood of our race registered the
phenomena of electricity without going further, he had no power of
making deductions from what eyes and ears could record. He knew that
there was in life such an element as sexual love; but that was all
he knew. It entered into the relations of married people, and in
some puzzling way contributed to the birth of children; but of its
wanderings and aberrations he had never heard. That man and wife should
reach a breaking point was no part of his conception of the things that
happened. There was nothing of the kind between the Tollivants, nor
among the parents of the lads with whom he had grown up at Harfrey.
That which at Harfrey had been clear unrelenting daylight was at
Bere a gloaming haunted by strange shapes which perplexed and rather
frightened him.
Not until he was fourteen or fifteen years of age, and the Quidmore
episode behind him, like an island passed at sea, did the significance
of these queer doings and sayings really occur to him. All that for the
present his mind and experience were equal to was listening, observing,
and wondering. He knew already what it was to have things which he
hadn't understood at the time of their happening become clear as he
grew older.
An illustration of this came from the small events of that very
afternoon. On going back from his midday dinner to work in the carrot
patch he fixed on half past two as the hour at which he would make
the attempt to force on his mother the prescribed medicine. That time
having arrived, he rose, brushed the earth from his knees, dusted his
hands against each other, and started slowly for the house. A faraway
memory which had been in the back of his mind ever since his father had
made the odd request now began to assert itself, like the throb of an
old pain.
He was a little boy again. In the dim hall of the Swindon Street Home
he was listening to the friendly policeman talking to Miss Honiton. He
recaptured his own emotions, the dumb distress of the young creature
lost in the dark, and ignorant of everything but its helplessness. His
mother had taken something, or had not taken something, he wasn't sure
which. The beaming young lady handed him his present from the Christmas
Tree, and told him that cyanide of potassium--the words were still
branded on his brain--was a deadly poison. Then he stood once more, as
in memory he had stood so many times, in the half-darkened room where
words were mumbled over the long black box which they spoke of as "the
body."
Now that it was all in far perspective he knew what it had meant. That
is, he knew the type of woman his mother had been; he knew the kind
of soil he had sprung from. The events of five years back to a boy of
twelve are a very long distance away. So his mother seemed to Tom.
So did the sneaking through shops, and the flights from tenement to
tenement. So did the awful Christmas Eve when he had lost her. He could
think of her tenderly now because he understood that her mind had been
unhinged. What hurt him with a pain which never fell into perspective
was that in trying to create in his boyish way some faint tradition of
self-respect, he worked back always to this origin in shame.
While seeing no connection between such far-off things and the task
put upon him by his father, he found them jostling each other in his
mind. You took something--and there was disaster. It was as far as his
thought carried him. After that came the fact that, his respect for
authority being strong, he dared not disobey.
He could only dawdle. A delay of five minutes would be five minutes to
the good. Besides, dawdling on a hot, windless summer afternoon, on
which the butterflies, bees, and humming-birds were the only nonhuman
living things not taking a siesta, eased the muscles cramped with long
crouching in the carrot beds. There being two ways of getting to the
house, he took the longer one.
The longer one led him round the duck pond, whence the heat had driven
ashore all the ducks and geese with the exception of one gander. For
no particular reason the gander's name was Ernest. Between Ernest and
Gimlets, the wire-haired terrier pup, one of those battles such as
might take place between Bolivia and Switzerland was in full swing of
rage. Gimlets fought from the bank; Ernest from the pond. When Ernest
paddled forward, with neck outstretched and nostrils hissing, Gimlets
scampered to the top of the shelving shore, where he could stand and
bark defiantly. When Ernest swung himself round and made for the
open sea, Gimlets galloped bravely down to the water's edge, yelping
out challenges. This bloody fray gave the boy a further excuse for
lingering. Three or four times had Ernest, stung by the taunts to which
he had tried to seem indifferent, wheeled round on his enemy. Three or
four times had Gimlets scrambled up the bank and down again. But he,
too, recognized authority, and a call that he couldn't disobey. A long
whistle, and the battle was at an end! Gimlets trotted off.
The whistle came from the grove of pines climbing the little bluff on
the side of the duck pond remote from the house. It struck the boy as
odd that his father should be there at a time when he was supposed
to be cutting New Zealand spinach for the morrow's market. Not to be
caught idling, the boy slipped down the bank to creep undetected below
the pinewood bluff. Neither seeing nor being seen, he nevertheless
heard voices, catching but a single word. The word was Bertha, and it
was spoken by his father. The only Bertha in the place was a certain
beautiful young widow living in Bere. That his father should be talking
to her in the pinewood was another of those details difficult to
explain.
More difficult to explain he found a little scene he caught on looking
backward. Having now passed the bluff, he was about to round the corner
of the pond where the path led through a plantation of blue spruces
which hid the house. His glancing back was an accident, but it made him
witness of an incident pastoral in its charm.
Bertha, being indeed the beautiful young widow, the boy was astonished
to see his father steal a kiss from her. Bertha responded with such a
slap as nymphs give to shepherds, running playfully away. His father
shambled after her, as shepherds after nymphs, catching her in his arms.
Tom plunged into the blue spruce plantation where he could be out of
sight. Hot as he was already, he grew hotter still. What he had seen
was so silly, so stupid, so undignified! He wished he hadn't seen it.
Having seen it, he wished he could forget it. He couldn't forget it
because, unpleasant as he found it, he was somehow aware that it had
bearings beyond unpleasantness. What they were he had nothing to tell
him. He could only run through the plantation as if he would leave the
thing as quickly as possible behind him; and all at once the house came
into sight.
With the house in sight he remembered again what he had come to do. He
stopped running. His steps again began to lag. Feeling for the powder
in his waistcoat pocket, he reminded himself that it would do his
mother good. The house lay sleeping and silent in the heat. He crept up
to the back door.
And there at the open window stood his mother rolling dough on a table.
She rolled languidly, as she did everything. Her head drooped a little
to one side; her expression was full of that tremulous protest against
life which might with a word break into a rain of tears.
Relieved and delighted, he stole round the house, to enter by another
way. She was now lifting a cover of the stove, so that she didn't hear
his approach. Before she knew that anyone was there he had slipped his
arm around her, and smacked a big kiss on her cheek. She turned slowly,
the lifter in her hand. A new life seemed to dawn in her, brightening
her eyes and flushing her sallowness.
"You bad little boy! What did you come home for?"
He replied as was true, that he had come for a drink of water. He had
meant to take a drink of water after putting her powder in the teapot.
"I thought," he ended, "you'd be lying down asleep."
"I was lying down, but something made me get up."