There are in this small history some gaps that can never be filled
up; but as much as I know I will tell you.
The cottage where Kit lived until he was five years old stands at the
head of a little beach of white shingle, just inside the harbour's
mouth, so that all day long Kit could see the merchant-ships trailing
in from sea, and passing up to the little town, or dropping down to
the music of the capstan-song, and the calls and the creaking, as
their crews hauled up the sails. Some came and went under bare poles
in the wake of panting tugs; but those that carried canvas pleased
Kit more. For a narrow coombe wound up behind the cottage, and down
this coombe came not only the brook that splashed by the garden gate,
but a small breeze, always blowing, so that you might count on seeing
the white sails take it, and curve out majestically as soon as ever
they came opposite the cottage, and hold it until under the lee of
the Battery Point.
Besides these delights, the cottage had a plantation of ash and hazel
above it, that climbed straight to the smooth turf and the four guns
of the Battery; and a garden with a tamarisk hedge, and a bed of
white violets, the earliest for miles around, and a fuchsia tree
three times as tall as Kit, and a pink climbing rose that looked in
at Kit's window and blossomed till late in November. Here the child
lived alone with his mother. For there was a vagueness of popular
opinion respecting Kit's father; while about his mother, unhappily,
there was no vagueness at all. She was a handsome, low-browed woman,
with a loud laugh, a defiant manner, and a dress of violent hues.
Decent wives clutched their skirts in passing her: but, as a set-off,
she was on excellent terms with every sea-captain and mate that put
into the port.
All these captains and mates knew Kit and made a pet of him: and
indeed there was a curious charm in the great serious eyes and
reddish curls of this child whom other children shunned. No one can
tell if he felt his isolation; but of course it drove him to return
the men's friendship, and to wear a man's solemnity and habit of
speech. The woman dressed him carefully, in glaring colours, out of
her means: and as for his manners, they would no doubt have become
false and absurd, as time went and knowledge came; but at the age of
four they were those of a prince.
"My father was a ship's captain, too," he would tell a new
acquaintance, "but he was drowned at sea--oh, a long while ago; years
and years before I was born."
The beginning of this speech he had learned from his mother; and the
misty antiquity of the loss his own childish imagination suggested.
The captains, hearing it, would wink at each other, swallow down
their grins, and gravely inform him of the sights he would see and
the lands he would visit when the time came for him, too, to be a
ship's captain. Often and often I have seen him perched, with his
small legs dangling, on one of the green posts on the quay, and
drinking in their talk of green icebergs, and flaming parrots, and
pig-tailed Chinamen; of coral reefs of all marvellous colours, and
suns that burnt men black, and monkeys that hung by their tails to
the branches and pelted the passers-by with coco-nuts; and the rest
of it. And the child would go back to the cottage in a waking dream,
treading bright clouds of fancy, with perhaps a little carved box or
knick-knack in his hand, the gift of some bearded, tender-hearted
ruffian. It was pitiful.
Of course he picked up their talk, and very soon could swear with
equal and appalling freedom in English, French, Swedish, German, and
Italian. But the words were words to him and no more, as he had no
morals. Nice distinctions between good and evil never entered the
little room where he slept to the sound only of the waves that curved
round Battery Point and tumbled on the beach below. And I know that,
one summer evening, when the scandalised townsmen and their wedded
wives assembled, and marched down to the cottage with intent to lead
the woman in a "Ramriding," the sight of Kit playing in the garden,
and his look of innocent delight as he ran in to call his mother out,
took the courage out of them and sent them home, up the hill, like
sheep.
Of course the truth must have come to him soon. But it never did:
for when he was just five, the woman took a chill and died in a week.
She had left a little money; and the Vicar, rather than let Kit go to
the workhouse, spent it to buy the child admission to an Orphanage in
the Midlands, a hundred miles away.
So Kit hung the rose-tree with little scraps of crape, and was put,
dazed and white, into a train and whisked a hundred miles off. And
everybody forgot him.
Kit spent two years at the Orphanage in an antique, preposterous
suit--snuff-coloured coat with lappels, canary waistcoat, and
corduroy small-clothes. And they gave him his meals regularly.
There were ninety-nine other boys who all throve on the food: but Kit
pined. And the ninety-nine, being full of food, made a racket at
times; but Kit found it quiet--deathly quiet; and his eyes wore a
listening look.
For the truth was, he missed the noise of the beach, and was
listening for it. And deep down in his small heart the sea was
piping and calling to him. And the world had grown dumb; and he
yearned always: until they had to get him a new canary waistcoat, for
the old one had grown too big.
At night, from his dormitory window, he could see a rosy light in the
sky. At first he thought this must be a pillar of fire put there to
guide him home; but it was only the glare of furnaces in a
manufacturing town, not far away. When he found this out his heart
came near to break; and afterwards he pined still faster.
One evening a lecture was given in the dining-room of the Orphanage.
The subject was "The Holy Land," and the lecturer illustrated it with
views from the magic-lantern.
Kit, who sat in one of the back rows, was moderately excited at
first. But the views of barren hills, and sands, and ruins, and
palm-trees, and cedars, wearied him after a while. He had closed his
eyes, and the lecturer's voice became a sing-song in which his heart
searched, as it always searched, for the music of the beach; when, by
way of variety--for it had little to do with the subject--the
lecturer slipped in a slide that was supposed to depict an incident
on the homeward voyage--a squall in the Mediterranean.
It was a stirring picture, with an inky sky, and the squall bursting
from it, and driving a small ship heeling over white crested waves.
Of course the boys drew their breath.
And then something like a strangling sob broke out on the stillness,
frightening the lecturer; and a shrill cry--
"Don't go--oh, _damn it all!_ don't go! Take me--take me home!"
And there at the back of the room a small boy stood up on his form,
and stretched out both hands to the painted ship, and shrieked and
panted.
There was a blank silence, and then the matron hurried up, took him
firmly in her arms, and carried him out.
"Don't go--oh, for the Lord A'mighty's sake, don't go!"
And as he was borne down the passages his cry sounded among the
audience like the wail of a little lost soul.
The matron carried Kit to the sick-room and put him to bed.
After quieting the child a bit she left him, taking away the candle.
Now the sick-room was on the ground floor, and Kit lay still a very
short while. Then he got out of bed, groped for his clothes, managed
to dress himself, and, opening the window, escaped on to the quiet
lawn. Then he turned his face south-west, towards home and the sea--
and ran.
How could he tell where they lay? God knows. Ask the swallow how
she can tell, when in autumn the warm south is a fire in her brain.
I believe that the sea's breath was in the face of this child of
seven, and its scent in his nostrils, and its voice in his ears,
calling, summoning all the way. I only know that he ran straight
towards his home, a hundred miles off, and that next morning they
found his canary waistcoat and snuff-coloured coat in a ditch, two
miles from the Orphanage, due south-west.
Of his adventures on the road the story is equally silent, as I
warned you. But the small figure comes into view again, a week
later, on the hillside of the coombe above his home. And when he saw
the sea and the white beach glittering beneath him, he did not stop,
even for a moment, but reeled down the hill. The child was just a
living skeleton; he had neither hat, coat, nor waistcoat; one foot
only was shod, the other had worn through the stocking, and ugly red
blisters showed on the sole as he ran. His face was far whiter than
his shirt, save for a blue welt or two and some ugly red scratches;
and his gaunt eyes were full of hunger and yearning, and his lips
happily babbling the curses that the ships' captains had taught him.
He reeled down the hill to the cottage. The tenant was a newcomer to
the town, and had lately been appointed musketry-instructor to the
battery above. He was in the garden pruning the rose-tree, but did
not particularly notice the boy. And the boy passed without turning
his head.
The tide on the beach was far out and just beginning to flow.
There was the same dull plash on the pebbles, the same twinkle as the
sun struck across the ripples. The sun was sinking; in ten minutes
it would be behind the hill.
No one knows what the waves said to Kit. But he flung himself among
them with a choking cry, and drank the brine and tossed it over his
head, and shoulders and chest, and lay down and let the small waves
play over him, and cried and laughed aloud till the sun went down.
Then he clambered on to a rock, some way above them, and lay down to
watch the water rise; and watching it, fell asleep; and sleeping, had
his wish, and went out to the wide seas.