My father could walk but slowly, for George’s boots had blistered his
feet, and it seemed to him that the river-bed, of which he caught
glimpses now and again, never got any nearer; but all things come to an
end, and by seven o’clock on the night of Tuesday, he was on the spot
which he had left on the preceding Friday morning. Three entire days had
intervened, but he felt that something, he knew not what, had seized him,
and that whereas before these three days life had been one thing, what
little might follow them, would be another--and a very different one.
He soon caught sight of his horse which had strayed a mile lower down the
river-bed, and in spite of his hobbles had crossed one ugly stream that
my father dared not ford on foot. Tired though he was, he went after
him, bridle in hand, and when the friendly creature saw him, it recrossed
the stream, and came to him of its own accord--either tired of his own
company, or tempted by some bread my father held out towards him. My
father took off the hobbles, and rode him bare-backed to the camping
ground, where he rewarded him with more bread and biscuit, and then
hobbled him again for the night.
“It was here,” he said to me on one of the first days after his return,
“that I first knew myself to be a broken man. As for meeting George
again, I felt sure that it would be all I could do to meet his brother;
and though George was always in my thoughts, it was for you and not him
that I was now yearning. When I gave George my watch, how glad I was
that I had left my gold one at home, for that is yours, and I could not
have brought myself to give it him.”
“Never mind that, my dear father,” said I, “but tell me how you got down
the river, and thence home again.”
“My very dear boy,” he said, “I can hardly remember, and I had no energy
to make any more notes. I remember putting a scrap of paper into the box
of sovereigns, merely sending George my love along with the money; I
remember also dropping the box into a hole in a tree, which I blazed, and
towards which I drew a line of wood-ashes. I seem to see a poor unhinged
creature gazing moodily for hours into a fire which he heaps up now and
again with wood. There is not a breath of air; Nature sleeps so calmly
that she dares not even breathe for fear of waking; the very river has
hushed his flow. Without, the starlit calm of a summer’s night in a
great wilderness; within, a hurricane of wild and incoherent thoughts
battling with one another in their fury to fall upon him and rend him--and
on the other side the great wall of mountain, thousands of children
praying at their mother’s knee to this poor dazed thing. I suppose this
half delirious wretch must have been myself. But I must have been more
ill when I left England than I thought I was, or Erewhon would not have
broken me down as it did.”
No doubt he was right. Indeed it was because Mr. Cathie and his doctor
saw that he was out of health and in urgent need of change, that they
left off opposing his wish to travel. There is no use, however, in
talking about this now.
I never got from him how he managed to reach the shepherd’s hut, but I
learned some little from the shepherd, when I stayed with him both on
going towards Erewhon, and on returning.
“He did not seem to have drink in him,” said the shepherd, “when he first
came here; but he must have been pretty full of it, or he must have had
some bottles in his saddle-bags; for he was awful when he came back. He
had got them worse than any man I ever saw, only that he was not awkward.
He said there was a bird flying out of a giant’s mouth and laughing at
him, and he kept muttering about a blue pool, and hanky-panky of all
sorts, and he said he knew it was all hanky-panky, at least I thought he
said so, but it was no use trying to follow him, for it was all nothing
but horrors. He said I was to stop the people from trying to worship
him. Then he said the sky opened and he could see the angels going about
and singing ‘Hallelujah.’”
“How long did he stay with you?” I asked.
“About ten days, but the last three he was himself again, only too weak
to move. He thought he was cured except for weakness.”
“Do you know how he had been spending the last two days or so before he
got down to your hut?”
I said two days, because this was the time I supposed he would take to
descend the river.
“I should say drinking all the time. He said he had fallen off his horse
two or three times, till he took to leading him. If he had had any other
horse than old Doctor he would have been a dead man. Bless you, I have
known that horse ever since he was foaled, and I never saw one like him
for sense. He would pick fords better than that gentleman could, I know,
and if the gentleman fell off him he would just stay stock still. He was
badly bruised, poor man, when he got here. I saw him through the gorge
when he left me, and he gave me a sovereign; he said he had only one
other left to take him down to the port, or he would have made it more.”
“He was my father,” said I, “and he is dead, but before he died he told
me to give you five pounds which I have brought you. I think you are
wrong in saying that he had been drinking.”
“That is what they all say; but I take it very kind of him to have
thought of me.”
My father’s illness for the first three weeks after his return played
with him as a cat plays with a mouse; now and again it would let him have
a day or two’s run, during which he was so cheerful and unclouded that
his doctor was quite hopeful about him. At various times on these
occasions I got from him that when he left the shepherd’s hut, he thought
his illness had run itself out, and that he should now reach the port
from which he was to sail for S. Francisco without misadventure. This he
did, and he was able to do all he had to do at the port, though
frequently attacked with passing fits of giddiness. I need not dwell
upon his voyage to S. Francisco, and thence home; it is enough to say
that he was able to travel by himself in spite of gradually, but
continually, increasing failure.
“When,” he said, “I reached the port, I telegraphed as you know, for
more money. How puzzled you must have been. I sold my horse to the man
from whom I bought it, at a loss of only about £10, and I left with him
my saddle, saddle-bags, small hatchet, my hobbles, and in fact
everything that I had taken with me, except what they had impounded in
Erewhon. Yram’s rug I dropped into the river when I knew that I should
no longer need it--as also her substitutes for my billy and pannikin;
and I burned her basket. The shepherd would have asked me questions.
You will find an order to deliver everything up to bearer. You need
therefore take nothing from England.”
At another time he said, “When you go, for it is plain I cannot, and go
one or other of us must, try and get the horse I had: he will be nine
years old, and he knows all about the rivers: if you leave everything
to him, you may shut your eyes, but do not interfere with him. Give the
shepherd what I said and he will attend to you, but go a day or two too
soon, for the margin of one day was not enough to allow in case of a
fresh in the river; if the water is discoloured you must not cross
it--not even with Doctor. I could not ask George to come up three days
running from Sunch’ston to the statues and back.”
Here he became exhausted. Almost the last coherent string of sentences
I got from him was as follows:-
“About George’s money if I send him £2000 you will still have nearly
£150,000 left, and Mr. Cathie will not let you try to make it more. I
know you would give him four or five thousand, but the Mayor and I
talked it over, and settled that £2000 in gold would make him a rich
man. Consult our good friend Alfred” (meaning, of course, Mr. Cathie)
“about the best way of taking the money. I am afraid there is nothing
for it but gold, and this will be a great weight for you to
carry--about, I believe 36 lbs. Can you do this? I really think that if
you lead your horse you . . . no--there will be the getting him down
again--”
“Don’t worry about it, my dear father,” said I, “I can do it easily if I
stow the load rightly, and I will see to this. I shall have nothing else
to carry, for I shall camp down below both morning and evening. But
would you not like to send some present to the Mayor, Yram, their other
children, and Mrs. Humdrum’s grand-daughter?”
“Do what you can,” said my father. And these were the last instructions
he gave me about those adventures with which alone this work is
concerned.
The day before he died, he had a little flicker of intelligence, but all
of a sudden his face became clouded as with great anxiety; he seemed to
see some horrible chasm in front of him which he had to cross, or which
he feared that I must cross, for he gasped out words, which, as near as I
could catch them, were, “Look out! John! Leap! Leap! Le....” but
he could not say all that he was trying to say and closed his eyes,
having, as I then deemed, seen that he was on the brink of that gulf
which lies between life and death; I took it that in reality he died at
that moment; for there was neither struggle, nor hardly movement of any
kind afterwards--nothing but a pulse which for the next several hours
grew fainter and fainter so gradually, that it was not till some time
after it had ceased to beat that we were certain of its having done so.