incomprehensible to the defender. Neighbours, and doctors and
policemen, talking and arguing, whispering together, pointing at
him. He was led away. In all that early turmoil, and in the more
bewildering proceedings which followed, the one thing which impressed
him deeply was the attitude of his mother. She had changed toward him
entirely. She accused him, reviled him, even cursed him. He would
ponder upon this in his dark cell at night. He had never imagined
that his mother could have loved his father--not in that way, not to
that extent. His brown ox-like eyes tried to penetrate the darkness
for some solution. He had no fear as to what they would do with him,
but everything was inexplicable ... unsatisfying. The days and weeks
which followed--he lost all sense of time--added to the sense of
mystification. He appeared to be passed from one judge to another,
beginning with a gentleman in a tweed suit and knickerbockers, and
ending with a very old man in a white wig and gold-rimmed glasses,
of whom only the head and the thin pale fingers seemed visible. Yes,
yes, why did they keep on torturing him like this? He had answered
all the questions again and again, always giving the same replies,
always ending up with the solemn asseveration:
“He didn’t ought to have kicked her.”
At the same time he had never meant to kill his father. He had
under-estimated his strength. He had become very strong in the forge.
His father had attacked him first. It was unfortunate that the back
of Mr. Fryatt’s head had struck the sharp corner of the lintel post.
He was in any case crazy with drink. The boy was only seventeen. He
believed he was defending his mother. Of course, these pleas were
not his. This version of the case had not occurred to him, but to
his surprise a learned-looking gentleman, who had visited him in his
cell, had stood up in Court and made them vehemently. And hearing
the case put like that Caleb nodded his head. He hadn’t thought
of it in that light, but it was quite true. Oh, but the arguments
which ensued! The long words and phrases, the delays, and pomp and
uncertainty. Never once did the question seem to come up as to
whether his father “ought to have done it,” or not. According to his
mother his father appeared to have been almost a paragon of a father.
It was all settled at last, and he was sent away to a “Home” for two
years.
Home! The ironic travesty of the word penetrated his thick skull
immediately he had passed what looked like a prison gate. There
were two hundred boys in this home. It seemed strange to live in a
home ruled over by a governor in uniform, policed by gaolers and
superintendents. Strange to have a home one could not leave at will,
where iron discipline turned one out at dawn, drove one like a slave
to long hours of hard and uncongenial work. Strange that home should
breathe bitterness and distrust, that it should be under a code which
seemed to repeat eternally:
“Don’t forget you are a criminal. Young as yet, but the taint is in
you!”
It was true there were momentary relaxations, football and other
games which he detested, bleak and interminable services in a chapel,
organ recitals and concerts. The other boys disgusted him with their
endless obscenities and suggestions, their universal conviction that
the great thing was to “get through it,” so as to be able to resume
those criminal practices inherent in them, practices which the home
did nothing to eradicate or relieve.
If “Old Face” had not been of the toughest fibre, dull witted,
impervious, and in a sense unawakened, those two years would have
broken him. As it was they dulled his sensibilities even more, they
embittered him. Those brown eyes had almost lost that straining
glance of expectancy, as though the home had taught him that there
was nothing for him in any case to expect. He was a criminal,
hallmarked for eternity. When he had been there six months they sent
for him to go and visit the chaplain. That good man looked very
impressive, and announced that the governor had received information
that Caleb’s mother was dead, and that it was his solemn duty to
break the news to him. He appeared relieved that the boy did not at
once burst into tears. He then delivered a little homily on life and
death, and pointed out that it was Caleb’s evil and vicious actions
which had hastened his mother’s death. He advised him to pour out his
heart in penitence to God, who was always our Rock and Saviour in
times of tribulation. He quoted passages from Leviticus, and Caleb
stared at him dully, thinking the while:
“I’ll never see my mother again, never, never.”
He did not give way to grief. The news only bewildered him the
more. He went about his duties in the home stolidly. He was quite
an exemplary inmate, hardly up to the average standard of quickness
and intelligence, but quiet, obedient, and well behaved. At the end
of his term of service he was sent up before the governor and other
officials. The clumsy scrawl of his signature was demanded upon
innumerable forms. He believed he was once more to be a free man.
And so he was in a qualified sense. But he was not to escape without
the seal of the institution being indelibly stamped upon him. In
round-about phrases the governor explained that he was to leave the
home, but he was not to imagine that he was a free agent to go about
the world murdering whomever he liked. He was still a criminal,
requiring supervision and watching. Out of their Christian charity
the governors had found employment for him at a timber merchant’s
at Bristol. Thither he would go, but he must remember that he was
still under their protection. Every few weeks he must report to the
police. Any act of disobedience on his part would be treated--well,
by a sterner authority. On the next occasion he would not be sent to
a nice comfortable establishment like the home, where they played
football and had concerts, but to Wormwood Scrubbs or Dartmoor. Did
he understand? Oh, yes, Caleb understood--at least, partly. He was to
be free, free in a queer way.
The arrangement did not exactly tally with his sense of freedom, any
more than this building tallied with his idea of home, but he was
only nineteen and his body was strong and his spirit not completely
broken. Any ideas he may have entertained that the new life was going
to spell freedom in any sense were quickly shattered. The timber
merchant at Bristol was a man named Barnet, a tyrant of the worst
description. He knew the kind of material he was handling. Most of
his employees were ex-convicts, ticket-of-leave-men, Lascars, or
social derelicts. He acted accordingly. Caleb slept in a shed with
nine other men, four of whom were coloured. They worked ten hours a
day loading timber on barges. They were given greasy cocoa and bread
at six o’clock in the morning, a meal of potatoes and little square
lumps of hard meat at twelve, then tea and bread at four o’clock in
the afternoon. In addition to this he was paid twelve shillings a
week. The slightest act of insubordination or slackness was met with
the threat:
“Here, you! Any more of that and you go back to where you came from!”
Before he had been there a month he felt that the home was indeed a
home in comparison. Strangely enough, it was one of the coloured men
who rescued him from his thraldom, a pleasant voiced coon with only
one eye. He appeared to take a fancy to Caleb. One night he came to
him and whispered:
“Say, boss, would you like to beat it?”
It took some time for the boy from Cravenford to understand the
coloured man’s phraseology and plan, but when he did, he fell in
with it with alacrity. The following Saturday they visited a little
public-house down by the docks and were there introduced to a
grizzled mate. Hands were wanted on a merchantman sailing for Buenos
Ayres the following week. The coloured man was a free agent and he
signed on, and Caleb signed on in the name of J. Bullock. Two nights
before sailing he hid in a barge and joined his ship the following
morning. All day long he experienced the tremors of dread for the
first time in his life. The primitive instinct of escape and the call
of the sea was upon him. He could have danced with joy when he heard
the rattling of the chains, and the hoarse cries of the deck hands as
the big ship got under way at dusk.
The voyage to Buenos Ayres was uneventful. The work was hard and the
discipline severe, but he was conscious all the time of sensing the
first draught of freedom that he had experienced since he left his
village. This feeling was accentuated at port when he realized that
after being paid off, he was free to leave the ship. But the rigid
magnificence of Buenos Ayres depressed him. He learnt that after
unloading they were to refit and convey cattle to Durban in South
Africa, so he signed on again for the next voyage. This proved to be
a formidable experience. A week out they ran into very heavy seas. He
was detailed to attend the cattle. The cattle superintendent was a
drunken bully. The stench among the cattle pens, added to the violent
heaving of the ship, brought on sickness, but he was not allowed any
respite. The cattle themselves were seasick, and many of them died
and had to be thrown overboard. The voyage lasted three weeks, and
when he arrived at Durban he determined to try his luck once more as
a landsman. At that time there was plenty of demand for unskilled
labour for men of Caleb’s physique in South Africa, but it was poorly
paid. He drifted about the country doing odd jobs. He visited Cape
Town, Kimberly and Pietermaritzburg. The fever of _wanderlust_ was
upon him. He never remained in one situation for more than a few
months. He was the man who desired to see over the ridge. Perhaps
further, just a little further, would be--he knew not what, some
answer to the inexpressible yearning within him, deep calling unto
deep. At the age of twenty-two he was working on the railroad near
Nyanza. They came and told him about the great war, which had just
started in Europe. A keen-faced little man, one of the gangers,
tapped him on the shoulder and said:
“It’s lucky for you lad you’re out here. Otherwise they’d be telling
you that ‘your king and country need you’.”
The phrase disturbed him. Night after night he lay awake dreaming of
England. Memories of the home and of the timber-merchant at Bristol
vanished. He thought only of Cravenford, the gray ivy-coloured
church, the rambling high street, the pond by Mr. Larry’s farm, the
cross-roads where he and another boy named Stoddard had fought one
April afternoon, his mother’s cottage, now, alas! deserted, but
always sacred, old Sam Hurds banging away in the smithy, the rooks
circling above the great elms in the park--all, all these things were
perhaps in danger whilst he lay sulking in a foreign land. They had
called him “Face.” Well, why not? He knew he was not particularly
pre-possessing. The fellow workmen had always been at great pains to
point this out to him. But still--stolidly and indifferently he went
about his work, and then one day in the old manner he vanished....
We will not attempt to record Caleb’s experiences of the war. He had
no difficulty in joining a volunteer unit in Capetown, which was
drafted to England. There he asked to be transferred to one of his
own county regiments. The request was overlooked in the clamour of
those days. He found himself with a cockney infantry regiment, and he
remained with it through the whole course of the war. His life was
identical to that of his many million comrades. In some respects he
seemed to enjoy lapses of greater freedom than he had experienced for
a long time. He was better fed, better clothed, better looked after.
He had money in his pocket which he knew not what to do with. He
made a good soldier, doing unquestioningly what he was told, sticking
grimly to his post, being completely indifferent to danger.
Save for a few months on the Italian front, he served the whole time
in France. He was slightly wounded three times, and in 1917 was
awarded a military cross for an astounding feat of bravery in bombing
a German dug-out and killing five of the enemy single-handed in the
dark. Those queer spiritual strivings so deep down in his nature
derived no satisfaction from the war. It was all quite meaningless
and incomprehensible. When he left South Africa he had an idea that
the fighting would be in England. He visualized grim battles in the
fields beyond Cravenford, and he and the other boys from the school
defending their village. He had never conceived that a war could be
like this. Sometimes he would lie awake at night and ruminate vaguely
upon the queer perversity of fate which suddenly made murder popular.
He had been turned out of England because he had quite inadvertently
killed his father for kicking his mother across the shins, and now
he was praised for killing five men within a few minutes. He didn’t
know, of course, but perhaps some of those men--particularly that
elderly plump man who coughed absurdly as he ran on to Caleb’s
bayonet--perhaps they were better men than his father, although
foreigners, although enemy. It was very perplexing....
After a gray eternity of time, the thing came to an end. He found
himself back in England. During the war much had been forgotten and
forgiven. No one asked him for his credentials. The police never
interfered with him. With his three wound stripes, his military
cross, and his papers all in order, he was for a time a _persona
grata_.
He had a bonus beyond the pay which he had saved, and he had never
been so wealthy in his life. He stayed in London, and tried to adapt
himself to a life of luxury and freedom, but he was not happy. In
restaurants he was self-conscious, in theatres bored, in the streets
bewildered. And so one day he set out and returned to his native
village. Strangely, little had it altered! There was the church,
the smithy, and the old street all just the same. He called on the
smith, who was startled at the sight of him, but on perceiving his
stripes and ribbons, reasonably polite. He ransacked the village for
old friends. Alas! How many of his school associates had gone, never
to return. He called on Mr. Green, the miller, Mrs. Allport, at the
general shop, Bob Canning, the carrier. Oh, dear me! yes, they all
remembered him, were quite courteous, glad he had done well at the
war, got through safely. Well, well! And soon the story got round.
“Old Face has returned. Old Face! The boy who murdered his father!”
The novelty of his re-appearance and return soon wore off, and he
knew that he was held in distrust in the village. He wandered far
afield, and eventually obtained employment at a brick-works at
Keeble, four miles down the valley toward Blaizing-Killstoke. Here
the rumours concerning him gradually percolated, but they carried
little weight or significance. He was a good workman, and time
subdues all things.
Then the strangest miracle happened to Caleb Fryatt. He was nearly
thirty, hard-bitten, battered, ill-mannered, with a scar from
a bullet on his left cheek, little money, no prospects and no
ambition--an unattractive chunk of a man. But what should we all do
if love itself were not the greatest miracle of all? Anne Tillie was
by no means a beauty herself, but she was not without attraction. She
had a round, bright red ingenuous face, a heavily built figure with
rather high shoulders and long arms. She was a year older than Caleb
and inclined to be deaf, but there was a transparent honesty and
simplicity about her. One could see that she would be honest, loyal,
and true to all her purposes. She was the daughter of the postman
at Blaizing-Killstoke. She and Caleb used to meet in the evenings
and wander the lanes together. They did not appear to converse very
much, but they would occasionally laugh, and give each other a hearty
push. To her father’s disgust, these attentions led to marriage the
following year. They went to live in a tiny cottage on the outskirts
of Keeble, ten minutes’ bicycle ride from the works. Anne made an
excellent wife. She seemed to understand and adapt herself to her
husband’s idiosyncrasies. She kept the cottage spotlessly clean,
tended his clothes, and kept him in clean linen, cooked well, and
studied all his little wants and peculiarities. She found time to
attend to the garden, grow her own vegetables, and even see after a
dozen fowls.
Caleb had never enjoyed such material comfort. In the evening they
would sit either side of the fire, he with his pipe and she with
her sewing. They were an unusually silent couple. Apart from her
deafness, they never seemed prompted to exchange more than cursory
remarks about the weather, their food, or some matter of local
gossip. In the summer they sat in the garden, and watching the blue
smoke from his pipe curl away into the amber light of the setting
sun, Caleb felt that he had reached a haven after a restless storm.
He worked remorsely hard at the brick-works, and in two years’ time
was made a kiln foreman, receiving good wages. Malevolent people
still whispered the story concerning the boy who murdered his father,
and pointed an accusing finger at the back of his bulky form, but no
one dared to remind Anne of that tragic happening. She knew the full
details of it quite well, and woe to any unfortunate individual who
dared to suggest that her man was in the wrong! In course of time he
built a barn, and a toolshed, and they bought an adjoining orchard.
They kept pigs, and then a pony and trap, and on Thursdays Anne would
drive to market, and sell eggs, and chickens and apples. Oh, yes,
they were becoming a prosperous pair. Caleb had surely outlived
the ugly vicissitudes of his fate. Was he happy? Was he completely
satisfied? Who shall say? The promptings from the soul come from some
deep root no one has fathomed. He was conscious of a greater peace
than he had ever known. He sometimes hummed a quite unrecognizable
tune as he went about his work. The mornings enchanted him with
gossamer webs gleaming with dew, swinging between the flowers. But
the eyes still sometimes appeared to be seeking--one knows not what.
They had been married five years and seven months when the child was
born. It came as a great surprise to Caleb. He had hardly dared to
visualize such an eventuality. What a to-do there was in the cottage!
Another room to be prepared, strange garments suddenly appearing upon
the line in the kitchen, a visiting nurse somewhat important and
discursive.
“A boy! Ho!” thought Caleb, as he trundled along on his bicycle
the following morning. A boy who would grow up and perhaps become
like himself. Well, that was very strange, very remarkable. Most
remarkable that such a possibility had never occurred to him. All
day long, and for nights and weeks after he thought about the boy
who was going one day to be a man like himself. The thought at first
worried and perplexed him. Was he--had he been--the kind of man
the world would want perpetuated? He felt the fierce censure and
distrust mankind had always lavished upon himself beginning to focus
upon the boy, and gradually the protective sense developed in him
to a desperate degree. The boy should have better chances than he
ever had, the boy should be protected, cared for, shown the way of
things.... Caleb ruminated. His wife became very dear to him. He was
a man on the threshold of revelation. But before his eyes had fully
opened to the complete realization of all that this meant to him,
a wayward gust of fever shattered the spectrum. The little fellow
died when barely four months old. For a time Caleb was most deeply
concerned for the health of his wife, who was a victim of the same
scourge, but, as she gradually recovered, a feeling of unendurable
melancholy crept over him. He began to observe the gray perspective
of his life, its past and future. When Anne was once more normal,
their intercourse became more taciturn than ever. There fell between
them long, empty silences. There were times when he regarded her
with boredom, almost with aversion. The years would roll on ...
wander-spirit would assail him. He would be tempted to pick up his
cap and go forth and seek some port, where a ship under ballast
might be preparing to essay the vast insecurity of heaving waters.
But something told him that that would be cruel. His wife’s love for
him was the most moving experience of his life, far greater than his
love for her. She was middle-aged now, and her deafness was more
pronounced than ever.
Once she went away to stay with her father for a few days. The
morning after she left, a wall in the brickyard collapsed and crushed
his right foot. He was carried home in excruciating pain. A neighbour
came in and attended him and they fetched the doctor. They wanted to
send for his wife but he told them not to bother her. All night he
was delirious, and for the next two days and nights he went through a
period of torment. As the fever abated a deep feeling of depression
crept over him. He began to yearn for his wife profoundly. The
neighbour, an elderly woman, wife of the local corn-chandler, was
kindness itself. But everything she did was just wrong. How could
she know the way Caleb liked things, and he lying there silent and
uncomplaining?
On the third evening Anne arrived. She had heard the news. She came
bustling into the cottage, dropped her bag, pressed her lips to his.
“Silly Billy, why didn’t you send for me?”
Silly Billy! That was her favourite term of raillery when he had
behaved foolishly.
He choked back a desire to cry with relief.
“It’s nothing, nothing to bother about.”
But a feeling of deep contentment crept over him. His eyes regarded
her thick plump figure moving busily but quietly about the room.
There would be nothing now to disturb or annoy him. Everything
would be done just--just as he liked it. She deftly re-arranged
the positions of tables, and cups, and curtains. As the evening
wore on she hovered above him, watching his every little movement,
like a tigress watching over its cub. She eased the pillow, stroked
his hair, and by some adroit manœuvre relieved the pressure on his
throbbing leg. A deep sense of tranquillity permeated him. For the
first time for three days he felt the desire to sleep, the cottage
seemed so inordinately quiet, secure. Once when she was stooping near
the chair by the bed, he seized her rough, strong forearm and pulled
her to him. He believed he slept at last with her cheeks pressed
against his own....
They treated him very well at the brick-works, and his wages were
paid every week during his absence. It was nearly two months before
he could get about again, and the doctors said he must expect to
have a permanent limp. Summer vanished in the October mists, and a
long winter dragged through its course. Spring again. Its pulse a
little feebler than in the old days? Well, well, what could a man
expect? Some of the old desires raised their heads and tugged at
his heart-strings. He was very happy--off and on a little soiled,
perhaps, by the stress of bitter years, a little more ordinary, a
little more sociable. He sometimes visited “The Green Man” and would
drink beer with Mr. White, the corn-chandler, and old Tom Smethwick.
And after a glass or two he would be quite a social acquisition, and
would be inclined to boast a little of his deeds in the Great War,
and of his adventures in foreign lands. No harm in it. Not such a
bad sort, Old Face, the boy who murdered his father.