BIM ROCHESTER
I
This is the story of Bim Rochester's first Odyssey. It is a story that
has Bim himself for the only proof of its veracity, but he has never, by
a shadow of a word, faltered in his account of it, and has remained so
unamazed at some of the strange aspects in it that it seems almost an
impertinence that we ourselves should show any wonder. Benjamin (Bim)
Rochester was probably the happiest little boy in March Square, and he
was happy in spite of quite a number of disadvantages.
A word about the Rochester family is here necessary. They inhabited the
largest house in March Square--the large grey one at the corner by Lent
Street--and yet it could not be said to be large enough for them. Mrs.
Rochester was a black-haired woman with flaming cheeks and a most
untidy appearance. Her mother had been a Spaniard, and her father an
English artist, and she was very much the child of both of them. Her
hair was always coming down, her dress unfastened, her shoes untied, her
boots unbuttoned. She rushed through life with an amazing shattering
vigour, bearing children, flinging them into an already overcrowded
nursery, rushing out to parties, filling the house with crowds of
friends, acquaintances, strangers, laughing, chattering, singing, never
out of temper, never serious, never, for a moment, to be depended on.
Her husband, a grave, ball-faced man, spent most of his days in the City
and at his club, but was fond of his wife, and admired what he called
her "energy." "My wife's splendid," he would say to his friends, "knows
the whole of London, I believe. The _people_ we have in our house!" He
would watch, sometimes, the strange, noisy parties, and then would
retire to bridge at his club with a little sigh of pride.
Meanwhile, upstairs in the nursery there were children of all ages, and
two nurses did their best to grapple with them. The nurses came and
went, and always, after the first day or two, the new nurse would give
in to the conditions, and would lead, at first with amusement and a
rather excited sense of adventure, afterwards with a growing feeling of
dirt and discomfort, a tangled and helter-skelter existence. Some of the
children were now at school, but Lucy, a girl ten years of age, was a
supercilious child who rebelled against the conditions of her life, but
was too idle and superior to attempt any alteration of them. After her
there were Roger, Dorothy, and Robert. Then came Bim, four years of age
a fortnight ago, and, last of all, Timothy, an infant of nine months.
With the exception of Lucy and Bim they were exceedingly noisy children.
Lucy should have passed her days in the schoolroom under the care of
Miss Agg, a melancholy and hope-abandoned spinster, and, during lesson
hours, there indeed she was. But in the schoolroom she had no one to
impress with her amazing wisdom and dignity. "Poor mummy," as she always
thought of her mother, was quite unaware of her habits or movements, and
Miss Agg was unable to restrain either the one or the other, so Lucy
spent most of her time in the nursery, where she sat, calm and
collected, in the midst of confusion that could have "given old Babel
points and won easy." She was reverenced by all the younger children
for her sedate security, but by none of them so surely and so
magnificently as Bim. Bim, because he was quieter than the other
children, claimed for his opinions and movements the stronger interest.
His nurses called him "deep," "although for a deep child I must say he's
'appy."
Both his depth and his happiness were at Lucy's complete disposal. The
people who saw him in the Square called him "a jolly little boy," and,
indeed, his appearance of gravity was undermined by the curl of his
upper lip and a dimple in the middle of his left cheek, so that he
seemed to be always at the crisis of a prolonged chuckle. One very
rarely heard him laugh out loud, and his sturdy, rather fat body was
carried rather gravely, and he walked contemplatively as though he were
thinking something out. He would look at you, too, very earnestly when
you spoke to him, and would wait a little before he answered you, and
then would speak slowly as though he were choosing his words with care.
And yet he was, in spite of these things, really a "jolly little boy."
His "jolliness" was there in point of view, in the astounding interest
he found in anything and everything, in his refusal to be upset by any
sort of thing whatever.
But his really unusual quality was his mixture of stolid English
matter-of-fact with an absolutely unbridled imagination. He would
pursue, day by day, week after week, games, invented games of his own,
that owed nothing, either for their inception or their execution, to any
one else. They had their origin for the most part in stray sentences
that he had overheard from his elders, but they also arose from his own
private and personal experiences--experiences which were as real to him
as going to the dentist or going to the pantomime were to his brothers
and sisters. There was, for instance, a gentleman of whom he always
spoke of as Mr. Jack. This friend no one had ever seen, but Bim quoted
him frequently. He did not, apparently, see him very often now, but at
one time when he had been quite a baby Mr. Jack had been always there.
Bim explained, to any one who cared to listen, that Mr. Jack belonged to
all the Other Time which he was now in very serious danger of
forgetting, and when, at that point, he was asked with condescending
indulgence, "I suppose you mean fairies, dear!" he always shook his head
scornfully and said he meant nothing of the kind, Mr. Jack was as real
as mother, and, indeed, a great deal "realer," because Mrs. Rochester
was, in the course of her energetic career, able to devote only
"whirlwind" visits to her "dear, darling" children.
When the afternoon was spent in the gardens in the middle of the Square,
Bim would detach himself from his family and would be found absorbed in
some business of his own which he generally described as "waiting for
Mr. Jack."
"Not the sort of child," said Miss Agg, who had strong views about
children being educated according to practical and common-sense ideas,
"not the sort of child that one would expect nonsense from." It may be
quite safely asserted that never, in her very earliest years, had Miss
Agg been guilty of any nonsense of the sort.
But it was not Miss Agg's contempt for his experiences that worried Bim.
He always regarded that lady with an amused indifference. "She _bothers_
so," he said once to Lucy. "Do you think she's happy with us, Lucy?"
"P'r'aps. I'm sure it doesn't matter."
"I suppose she'd go away if she wasn't," he concluded, and thought no
more about her.
No, the real grief in his heart was that Lucy, the adored, the wonderful
Lucy, treated his assertions with contempt.
"But, Bim, don't be such a silly baby. You know you can't have seen him.
Nurse was there and a lot of us, and _we_ didn't."
"I did though."
"But, Bim----"
"Can't help it. He used to come lots and lots."
"You _are_ a silly! You're getting too old now----"
"I'm _not_ a silly!"
"Yes, you are."
"I'm not!"
"Oh, well, of course, if you're going to be a naughty baby."
Bim was nearer tears on these occasions than on any other in all his
mortal life. His adoration of Lucy was the foundation-stone of his
existence, and she accepted it with a lofty assumption of indifference;
but very sharply would she have missed it had it been taken from her,
and in long after years she was to look back upon that love of his and
wonder that she could have accepted it so lightly; Bim found in her
gravity and assurance all that he demanded of his elders. Lucy was never
at a loss for an answer to any question, and Bim believed all that she
told him.
"Where's China, Lucy?"
"Oh, don't bother, Bim."
"No, but _where_ is it?"
"What a nuisance you are! It's near Africa."
"Where Uncle Alfred is?"
"Yes, just there."
"But _is_ Uncle Alfred in--China?"
"No, silly, of course not."
"Well, then----"
"I didn't say China was in Africa. I said it was near."
"Oh! I see. Uncle Alfred could just go in the train?"
"Yes, of course."
"Oh! I see. P'r'aps he will."
But, for the most part, Bim, realising that Lucy "didn't want to be
bothered," pursued his life alone. Through all the turmoil and disorder
of that tempestuous nursery he gravely went his way, at one moment
fighting lions and tigers, at another being nurse on her afternoon out
(this was a truly astonishing adventure composed of scraps flung to him
from nurse's conversational table and including many incidents that were
far indeed from any nurse's experience), or again, he would be his
mother giving a party, and, in the course of this, a great deal of food
would be eaten, his favourite dishes, treacle pudding and cottage pie,
being always included.
With the exception of his enthusiasm for Lucy he was no sentimentalist.
He hated being kissed, he did not care very greatly for Roger and
Dorothy and Robert, and regarded them as nothing but nuisances when they
interfered with his games or compelled him to join in theirs.
And now this is the story of his Odyssey.
II
It happened on a wet April afternoon. The morning had been fine, a
golden morning with the scent in the air of the showers that had fallen
during the night. Then, suddenly, after midday, the rain came down,
splashing on to the shining pavements as it fell, beating on to the
windows and then running, in little lines, on to the ledges and falling
from there in slow, heavy drops. The sky was black, the statues in the
garden dejected, the almond tree beaten, all the little paths running
with water, and on the garden seats the rain danced like a live thing.
The children--Lucy, Roger, Dorothy, Robert, Bim, and Timothy--were, of
course, in the nursery. The nurse was toasting her toes on the fender
and enjoying immensely that story by Mrs. Henry Wood, entitled "The
Shadow of Ashlydyat." It is entirely impossible to present any adequate
idea of the confusion and bizarrerie of that nursery. One must think of
the most confused aspect of human life that one has ever known--say, a
Suffrage attack upon the Houses of Parliament, or a Channel steamer on a
Thursday morning, and then of the next most confused aspect. Then one
must place them together and confess defeat. Mrs. Rochester was not, as
I have said, very frequently to be found in her children's nursery, but
she managed, nevertheless, to pervade the house, from cellar to garret,
with her spirit. Toys were everywhere--dolls and trains and soldiers,
bricks and puzzles and animals, cardboard boxes, articles of feminine
attire, a zinc bath, two cats, a cage with white mice, a pile of books
resting in a dazzling pyramid on the very edge of the table, two glass
jars containing minute fish of the new variety, and a bowl with
goldfish. There were many other things, forgotten by me.
Lucy, her pigtails neatly arranged, sat near the window and pretended to
be reading that fascinating story, "The Pillars of the House." I say
pretending, because Lucy did not care about reading at any time, and
especially disliked the works of Charlotte Mary Yonge, but she thought
that it looked well that she and nurse should be engaged upon literature
whilst the rest of the world rioted and gambolled their time away. There
was no one who at the moment could watch and admire her fine spirit, but
you never knew who might come in.
The rioting and gambolling consisted in the attempts of Robert, Dorothy,
and Roger, to give a realistic presentation to an audience of one,
namely, the infant Timothy, of the life of the Red Indians and their
Squaws. Underneath the nursery table, with a tablecloth, some chairs and
a concertina, they were presenting an admirable and entirely engrossing
performance.
Bim, under the window and quite close to Lucy, was giving a party. He
had possessed himself of some of Dorothy's dolls' tea things, he had
begged a sponge cake from nurse, and could be heard breaking from time
to time into such sentences as, "Do have a little more tweacle pudding,
Mrs. Smith. It's the best tweacle," and, "It's a nice day, isn't it!"
but he was sorely interrupted by the noisy festivities of the Indians
who broke, frequently, into realistic cries of "Oh! Roger, you're
pulling my hair," or "I won't play if you don't look out!"
It may be that these interruptions disturbed the actuality of Bim's
festivities, or it may be that the rattling of the rain upon the window
panes diverted his attention. Once he broke into a chuckle. "Isn't they
banging on the window, Lucy?" he said, but she was, it appeared, too
deeply engaged to answer him. He found that, in a moment of abstraction,
he had eaten the whole of the sponge cake, so that it was obvious that
the party was over. "Good-bye, Mrs. Smith. It was really nice of you to
come. Good-bye, dear, Mrs. ---- I think the wain almost isn't coming
now."
He said farewell to them all and climbed upon the window seat. Here,
gazing down into the Square, he saw that the rain was stopping, and, on
the farther side, above the roofs of the houses, a little splash of gold
had crept into the grey. He watched the gold, heard the rain coming more
slowly; at first, "spatter-spatter-spatter," then, "spatter--spatter."
Then one drop very slowly after another drop. Then he saw that the sun
from somewhere far away had found out the wet paths in the garden, and
was now stealing, very secretly, along them. Soon it would strike the
seat, and then the statue of the funny fat man in all his clothes, and
then, perhaps, the fountain. He was unhappy a little, and he did not
know why: he was conscious, perhaps, of the untidy, noisy room behind
him, of his sister Dorothy who, now a Squaw of a quite genuine and
realistic kind, was crying at the top of her voice: "I don't care. I
will have it if I want to. You're _not_ to, Roger," and of Timothy, his
baby brother, who, moved by his sister's cries, howled monotonously,
persistently, hopelessly.
"Oh, give over, do, Miss Dorothy!" said the nurse, raising her eye for a
moment from her book. "Why can't you be quiet?"
Outside the world was beginning to shine and glitter, inside it was all
horrid and noisy. He sighed a little, he wanted to express in some way
his feelings. He looked at Lucy and drew closer to her. She had beside
her a painted china mug which one of her uncles had brought her from
Russia; she had stolen some daffodils from her mother's room downstairs
and now was arranging them. This painted mug was one of her most valued
possessions, and Bim himself thought it, with its strange red and brown
figures running round it, the finest thing in all the world.
"Lucy," he said. "Do you s'pose if you was going to jump all the way
down to the street and wasn't afraid that p'r'aps your legs wouldn't get
broken?"
He was not, in reality, greatly interested in the answer to his
question, but the important thing always with Lucy was first to enchain
her attention. He had learnt, long ago, that to tell her that he loved
her, to invite tenderness from her in return, was to ask for certain
rebuff--he always began his advances then in this roundabout manner.
"_What do_ you think, Lucy?"
"Oh, I don't know. How can I tell? Don't bother."
It was then that Bim felt what was, for him, a very rare sensation. He
was irritated.
"I don't bovver," he said, with a cross look in the direction of his
brother and sister Rochesters. "No, but, Lucy, s'pose some one--nurse,
s'pose--_did_ fall down into the street and broke all her legs and arms,
she wouldn't be dead, would she?"
"You silly little boy, of course not."
He looked at Lucy, saw the frown upon her forehead, and felt suddenly
that all his devotion to her was wasted, that she didn't want him, that
nobody wanted him--now when the sun was making the garden glitter like a
jewel and the fountain to shine like a sword.
He felt in his throat a hard, choking lump. He came closer to his
sister.
"You might pay 'tention, Lucy," he said plaintively.
Lucy broke a daffodil stalk viciously. "Go and talk to the others," she
said. "I haven't time for you."
The tears were hot in his eyes and anger was in his heart--anger bred of
the rain, of the noise, of the confusion.
"You _are_ howwid," he said slowly.
"Well, go away, then, if I'm horrid," she pushed with her hand at his
knee. "I didn't ask you to come here."
Her touch infuriated him; he kicked and caught a very tender part of her
calf.
"Oh! You little beast!" She came to him, leant for a moment across him,
then slapped his cheek.
The pain, the indignity, and, above all, a strange confused love for his
sister that was near to passionate rage, let loose all the devils that
owned Bim for their habitation.
He did three things: He screamed aloud, he bent forward and bit Lucy's
hand hard, he seized Lucy's wonderful Russian mug and dashed it to the
ground. He then stood staring at the shattered fragments.
III
There followed, of course, confusion. Nurse started up. "The Shadow of
Ashlydyat" descended into the ashes, the children rushed eagerly from
beneath the table to the centre of hostilities.
But there were no hostilities. Lucy and Bim were, both of them, utterly
astonished, Lucy, as she looked at the scattered mug, was, indeed,
sobbing, but absent-mindedly--her thoughts were elsewhere. Her
thoughts, in fact, were with Bim. She realised suddenly that never
before had he lost his temper with her; she was aware that his affection
had been all this time of value to her, of much more value, indeed, than
the stupid old mug. She bent down--still absent-mindedly sobbing--and
began to pick up the pieces. She was really astonished--being a dry and
rather hard little girl--at her affection for Bim.
The nurse seized on the unresisting villain of the piece and shook him.
"You _naughty_ little boy! To go and break your sister's beautiful mug.
It's your horrid temper that'll be the ruin of you, mark my words, as
I'm always telling you." (Bim had never been known to lose his temper
before.) "Yes, it will. You see, you naughty boy. And all the other
children as good as gold and quiet as lambs, and you've got to go and do
this. You shall stand in the corner all tea-time, and not a bite shall
you have." Here Bim began, in a breathless, frightened way, to sob.
"Yes, well you may. Never mind, Miss Lucy, I dare say your uncle will
bring you another." Here she became conscious of an attentive and deeply
interested audience. "Now, children, time to get ready for tea. Run
along, Miss Dorothy, now. What a nuisance you all are, to be sure."
They were removed from the scene. Bim was placed in the corner with his
face to the wall. He was aghast; no words can give, at all, any idea of
how dumbly aghast he was. What possessed him? What, in an instant of
time, had leapt down from the clouds, had sprung up from the Square and
seized him? Between his amazed thoughts came little surprised sobs. But
he had not abandoned himself to grief--he was too sternly set upon the
problem of reparation. Something must be done, and that quickly.
The great thought in his mind was that he must replace the mug. He had
not been very often in the streets beyond the Square, but upon certain
occasions he had seen their glories, and he knew that there had been
shops and shops and shops. Quite close to him, upon a shelf, was his
money-box, a squat, ugly affair of red tin, into whose large mouth he
had been compelled to force those gifts that kind relations had
bestowed. There must be now quite a fortune there--enough to buy many
mugs. He could not himself open it, but he did not doubt that the man
in the shop would do that for him.
Not for many more moments would he be left alone. His hat was lying on
the table; he seized that and his money-box, and was out on the landing.
The rest is _his_ story. I cannot, as I have already said, vouch for the
truth of it. At first, fortune was on his side. There seemed to be no
one about the house. He went down the wide staircase without making any
sound; in the hall he stopped for a moment because he heard voices, but
no one came. Then with both hands, and standing on tiptoe, he turned the
lock of the door, and was outside.
The Square was bathed in golden sun, a sun, the stronger for his
concealment, but tempered, too, with the fine gleam that the rain had
left. Never before had Bim been outside that door alone; he was aware
that this was a very tremendous adventure. The sky was a washed and
delicate purple, and behold! on the high railings, a row of sparrows
were chattering. Voices were cold and clear, echoing, as it seemed,
against the straight, grey walls of the houses, and all the trees in the
garden glistened with their wet leaves shining with gold; there seemed
to be, too, a dim veil of smoke that was homely and comfortable.
It is not usual to see a small boy of four alone in a London square, but
Bim met, at first, no one except a messenger boy, who stopped and looked
after him. At the corner of the Square--just out of the Square so that
it might not shame its grandeur--was a fruit and flower shop, and this
shop was the entrance to a street that had much life and bustle about
it. Here Bim paused with his money-box clasped very tightly to him. Then
he made a step or two and was instantly engulfed, it seemed, in a
perfect whirl of men and women, of carts and bicycles, of voices and
cries and screams; there were lights of every colour, and especially one
far above his head that came and disappeared and came again with
terrifying wizardry.
He was, quite suddenly, and as it were, by the agency of some outside
person, desperately frightened. It was a new terror, different from
anything that he had known before. It was as though a huge giant had
suddenly lifted him up by the seat of his breeches, or a witch had
transplanted him on to her broomstick and carried him off. It was as
unusual as that.
His under lip began to quiver, and he knew that presently he would be
crying. Then, as he always did, when something unusual occurred to him,
he thought of "Mr. Jack." At this point, when you ask him what happened,
he always says: "Oh! He came, you know--came walking along--like he
always did."
"Was he just like other people, Bim?"
"Yes, just. With a beard, you know--just like he always was."
"Yes, but what sort of things did he wear?" "Oh, just ord'nary things,
like you." There was no sense of excitement or wonder to be got out of
him. It was true that Mr. Jack hadn't shown himself for quite a long
time, but that, Bim felt, was natural enough. "He'll come less and
seldomer and seldomer as you get big, you know. It was just at first,
when one was very little and didn't know one's way about--just to help
babies not to be frightened. Timothy would tell you only he won't. Then
he comes only a little--just at special times like this was."
Bim told you this with a slightly bored air, as though it were silly of
you not to know, and really his air of certainty made an incredulous
challenge a difficult thing. On the present occasion Mr. Jack was just
there, in the middle of the crowd, smiling and friendly. He took Bim's
hand, and, "Of course," Bim said, "there didn't have to be any
'splaining. _He_ knew what I wanted." True or not, I like to think of
them, in the evening air, serenely safe and comfortable, and in any
case, it was surely strange that if, as one's common sense compels one
to suppose, Bim were all alone in that crowd, no one wondered or stopped
him nor asked him where his home was. At any rate, I have no opinions on
the subject. Bim says that, at once, they found themselves out of the
crowd in a quiet, little "dinky" street, as he called it, a street that,
in his description of it, answered to nothing that I can remember in
this part of the world. His account of it seems to present a dark,
rather narrow place, with overhanging roofs and swinging signs, and
nobody, he says, at all about, but a church with a bell, and outside one
shop a row of bright-coloured clothes hanging. At any rate, here Bim
found the place that he wanted. There was a little shop with steps down
into it and a tinkling bell which made a tremendous noise when you
pushed the old oak door. Inside there was every sort of thing. Bim lost
himself here in the ecstasy of his description, lacking also names for
many of the things that he saw. But there was a whole suit of shining
armour, and there were jewels, and old brass trays, and carpets, and a
crocodile, which Bim called a "crodocile." There was also a friendly old
man with a white beard, and over everything a lovely smell, which Bim
said was like "roast potatoes" and "the stuff mother has in a bottle in
her bedwoom."
Bim could, of course, have stayed there for ever, but Mr. Jack reminded
him of a possibly anxious family. "There, is that what you're after?"
he said, and, sure enough, there on a shelf, smiling and eager to be
bought, was a mug exactly like the one that Bim had broken.
There was then the business of paying for it, the money-box was produced
and opened by the old man with "a shining knife," and Bim was gravely
informed that the money found in the box was exactly the right amount.
Bim had been, for a moment, in an agony of agitation lest he should have
too little, but as he told us, "There was all Uncle Alfred's Christmas
money, and what mother gave me for the tooth, and that silly lady with
the green dress who _would_ kiss me." So, you see, there must have been
an awful amount.
Then they went, Bim clasping his money-box in one hand and the mug in
the other. The mug was wrapped in beautiful blue paper that smelt, as we
were all afterwards to testify, of dates and spices. The crocodile
flapped against the wall, the bell tinkled, and the shop was left behind
them. "Most at once," Bim said they were by the fruit shop again; he
knew that Mr. Jack was going, and he had a sudden most urgent longing to
go with him, to stay with him, to be with him always. He wanted to cry;
he felt dreadfully unhappy, but all of his thanks, his strange desires,
that he could bring out was, in a quavering voice, trying hard, you
understand, not to cry, "Mr. Jack. Oh! Mr.----" and his friend was gone.
IV
He trotted home; with every step his pride increased. What would Lucy
say? And dim, unrealised, but forming, nevertheless, the basis for the
whole of his triumph, was his consciousness that she who had scoffed,
derided, at his "Mr. Jack," should now so absolutely benefit by him.
This was bringing together, at last, the two of them.
His nurse, in a fine frenzy of agitation, met him. Her relief at his
safety swallowed her anger. She could only gasp at him. "Well, Master
Bim, and a nice state---- Oh, dear! to think; wherever----"
On the doorstep he forced his nurse to pause, and, turning, looked at
the gardens now in shadow of spun gold, with the fountain blue as the
sky. He nodded his head with satisfaction. It had been a splendid time.
It would be a very long while, he knew, before he was allowed out again
like that. Yes. He clasped the mug tightly, and the door closed behind
him.
I don't know that there is anything more to say. There were the empty
money-box and the mug. There was Bim's unhesitating and unchangeable
story. There _is_ a shop, just behind the Square, where they have some
Russian crockery. But Bim alone!
_I_ don't know.