It was mid-July, and even at an altitude of four thousand feet the sun
could scorch at noonday. The lonely man sat at his outlook, gazing down
the valley. There was a faint haze abroad, a thickening of the air so
apparently slight, and in itself so imperceptible, that he would not
have noticed it but for the fact that it blotted out many familiar
distant peaks, and narrowed his horizon to some four or five miles. He
waited for the sun to pierce this impalpable fog, but waited in vain.
The sun itself was red and angry in colour, and shrunk to half its
common size. Even at noontide the eye could look on it for a second or
two without being unbearably dazzled.
The shade in which he sat moved slowly eastward, and had almost deserted
him, when his hand felt a sudden fierce pang of pain as if an insect had
stung him. He moved hastily and examined the mark of what he took for
a sting. It was round, small, and red, as if the end of a hot
knitting-needle had been pressed upon the skin. Whilst he sat sucking
at the place to draw the pain away, and looking round in search of the
insect foe, the same quick burning pang struck him on the cheek. He
moved hastily again, and stared and listened keenly. There was not a
buzz of wings anywhere near at hand, and not an insect in sight. But as
he looked and harkened he was enlightened. A great tear of resinous gum
had caught and hardened in a fork of the branches, and the sun’s rays
falling on and through this were concentrated as if by a burning-glass.
The fiery point had stung him.
He broke away the cause of mischief, and then looked about him with
a new understanding. The forest fires had begun, and it was the smoke
which so closed in the view. He could detect now a faintly aromatic
smell of burning, and wondered that he had not noticed it before.
There was not a breath of air stirring, and not a hint of flame in all
the haze which on every side blotted out the far-off hills, and changed
to a dull tint of smoke those which still loomed upon him. At night the
moon hung in the starless sky like a globe of blood, and day by day the
dimness of the air increased. The cloud took no form of cloud, and not
a sound came through it except for the voice of the water, and the
occasional roll and clangour of the trains. The distances in view grew
briefer and more brief, and within a week of the date of his discovery
the nearest peaks were obliterated, and the air had grown pungent with
its charge of invisible burned atoms.
He sat in the midst of this narrowed and darkened world, this world of
silence and solitude, as he sat in the middle of his own despairs. His
life had fallen away to this--an aching heart in a world where no man
came. Had it not been for pride, he could have wept for pity of himself.
Had it not been for a sense of rebellion against fate and the world,
he could have died of his own disdain. He had played the fool, but the
world had taken an unjust advantage of his folly. He loathed himself and
it.
Thus trebly banished--from friends, from the world, from Nature--he
dreamed his dreams. The past came back again.
Paul was keeping shop. The door, rarely passed by the foot of a
customer, stood open to invite the world at large. Armstrong came in
with his spectacles resting on his shaggy brows. Paul, who had been
wool-gathering, went back to nominative, dative, and ablative. He hated
the Eton Latin grammar as he had not learned to hate anything else in
life.
‘Any custom?’ asked the father.
‘Nobody,’ said Paul.
‘Paul, lad,’ said Armstrong, after a lengthy pause. He cleared his
throat, and laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Yell reach your twalth
birthday next week. It’s time ye were doing something in the warld.’
He pulled down his glasses and looked at the lad gravely. ‘I’ve tauld
Mester Reddy ye’ll not be going back to school after the holidays.
There’s over-many mouths to keep, and over-many backs to clothe, lad.
Ye’ll have to buckle to, like the rest of us.’
‘Yes, father,’ said Paul. The prospect looked welcome, as almost any
change does to a boy.
‘What would ye like to be?’ his father asked
‘I dunno,’ said Paul, rubbing his nose hard with the back of one
freckled hand.
‘Well, I’ll thenk it over. Ye can get away to your plays now, but the
serious purpose o’ life’s beginnin’ for ye.’
Paul needed no further leave. He snatched his cap and was away up the
High Street before anybody could find time to tell him that his neck
was unwashed, his boots unblacked or unlaced, or his collar disarranged.
These reminders were an unfailing grievance to him when they came, and
they seemed to hail upon him all day long. With the thought that he was
entering the world and beginning his career in earnest, he thrust his
hands into his corduroy pockets, swaggering in his walk, and so absorbed
that he forgot to touch the street lamp-posts for two or three hundred
yards. He stood overcome by this discovery, retraced his steps almost to
the shop-door, in spite of his fear of being recalled, and then raced
on his original way, laying a hand on each lamp-post as he passed it
In this fashion he arrived at the gate of an unpretentious little house
which had many reasons for looking glorious and palatial in his eyes.
For one thing, it was a private house. No business of any sort was done
there, and its inhabitants lived on their own money. Then it stood back
from the road, behind iron railings, and had a gravel pathway leading
to the front door, and a little bit of orderly garden with one drooping
laburnum in it, which in its season hung clear gold blossoms over the
roadway. There was a small coach-house beside the main building. It held
no vehicle of any sort, but it was a coach-house all the same. Inside
the house everything was neat and clean, and to Paul’s mind luxurious.
There were carpets in all the living-rooms and bedrooms. There was a
piano, there were marble mantelpieces with gold-framed mirrors over
them, one to each front-room, and the chambers which held these
splendours were familiarly used, and not merely kept for show. Paul had
the run of this house, for the orphan children of his mother’s second
cousin lived there, and the relationship was recognised.
He rang the bell, and a fresh-coloured, prettyish girl in a smart cap
came to the door.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s you, is it! Come to see the young ladies, are
you?’ Paul nodded with his hands in his pockets.
‘You’re in pretty fettle!’ said the girl. ‘Look at your boots! Look at
your hair! Look at the smut on your nose!’
Paul looked at his boots, tried to look at his hair, squinted downwards
in search of the smut, and said: ‘Bother!’
‘All right,’ the girl responded. ‘You’ll find ‘em in the garden. They’ll
be rare and proud to see you.’
Paul, somewhat shamefaced, took the familiar way into the garden, and
stood rooted. A small striped tent of pink and white had been set up on
the unshaven grass-plot, and five or six girls, all in white dresses,
were seated near it round a tea-table. One, who had black hair and dark
eyes, wore a crimson sash, and the rest had blue sashes with prodigious
bows. Paul knew them all with one exception, but after the first glance
he had eyes for the exception only. She was a lackadaisical young person
of eighteen, with pale sandy ringlets and a cold-boiled-veal complexion;
but he thought her a creature of another sphere, and his heart shivered
with a strange, delicious sense of worship. He stood and stared, and his
inward thoughts were poorly translated by his aspect, as happens with
most people How long the dream held him he did not know, but the Vision
turned, and he met the young person’s eye.
‘Who is that dirty boy? asked the Vision. ‘I suppose he wants to speak
to you, Zillah.’
Zillah, who was the elder of the two orphan girls, turned, and blushed
till she looked the colour of her sash. But she rose from her seat and
came to Paul and whispered to him:
‘You mustn’t come here to-day, Paul We’ve got company. And goodness
gracious, child, how untidy you are to be sure!’
Then shame fell like an avalanche, and Paul went altogether dizzy and
silly under the shock of it How he got home he never knew, but an
hour later he was in the back-kitchen, standing on a mat in his
stocking-feet, with his shirt-sleeves turned up to his elbows, and was
polishing his boots until the leather grew hot beneath the brush. He
washed himself in a frenzy of remorse and resolve, and scoured his hands
with yellow soap, silver sand, and a stubbly scrubbing-brush until they
tingled. Then he fell upon the family stock of hair-oil, which was kept
in a medicine-bottle in the kitchen cupboard, and, except on Sundays,
was held sacred to the girls. Then he put on a clean collar (which was
a daring and outrageous defiance of authority, which allowed but two a
week), and prepared to face consequences. The family brush and comb
were kept in a small bag which hung on a nail beside the scratched and
defaced old family looking-glass, and Paul was artistically at work upon
his hair when his mother entered the kitchen. The excellent woman sat
down to laugh, and Armstrong came in with his customary vague air of
patient thinking.
‘William,’ said Mrs. Armstrong, ‘look at our Paul. Niver tell me the
hage of merricles is past Why, I believe he’s fell in love!’
It was the perpetual astonishment of Paul’s life that his mother
always knew and understood the things he would not have her know and
understand. Even now, at his tent-door, seeing all these dead hours so
clearly that he forgot his present existence altogether, he thought of
her half-malicious, wholly-humorous intuition with wonder. Why had she
never understood the things he would have given so much to have her
understand?
Armstrong smiled with a melancholy, tired sweetness.
‘Larn to be tidy, lad,’ he said. ‘I like a self-respecting fellow that
honours his own person.’
‘M’m,’ said Mrs. Armstrong. ‘You’ve got a five days’ beard on, William.’
He looked at her, stroking his own bristly chin.
‘Ay,’ he said. ‘This’ll be Thursday. Paul, just be getting me my razor
and the brush and soap-box, there’s a good lad.’
Paul obeyed, and then betook himself to the timber-grove, where he sat
rapt into meditations on the Vision. He had read whatever came within
his reach, good, bad, or indifferent, and his conscious thoughts were
always a patchwork of phrases. When he was put to mind the shop he read
the penny weeklies. He was fresh from one of the works of J. F. Smith,
the un-remembered prose laureate of the _London Journal_, who would have
been reckoned a giant of invention if he had lived in these days, and a
sentence from his latest chapter got into Paul’s head and went round
and round: ‘There lay the fair, gifted, almost idolized girl.’ In Mr.
Smith’s moving page the fair, gifted, almost idolized girl was dying,
and Paul did not as yet know enough of the story-teller’s craft of that
day to be sure that she would recover in the next chapter. She mixed
herself with the lady of the sandy ringlets who had described him as a
dirty boy, and the pathos of the situation lent an added anguish to his
thoughts. How beautiful was the lady of the ringlets, how ethereal in
aspect, how far removed, how worshipful, how adorable! How refined was
her voice, how elegant her accent! She had spoken of him as a b’y, but
that was a local fashion, and Paul knew no better. She was far and far
away--a being of the skies, at once an aristocrat and an angel. He began
to make verses about her, of course--ghastly, fustian stuff, at the
recollection of which the Solitary shuddered, and then laughed. But from
that day forward Paul had spasmodic rages of personal cleanliness and
adornment.
There was a jar of goose-oil always kept on the top of the baking-oven
in the back-kitchen, and, learning that goose-oil was an unfailing
specific for the growth of whiskers and moustache, he began to rub his
lip and cheeks with this unguent Many a time when he was left alone he
lit a candle, and getting his face between it and the mirror, tried to
trace on the outline a fringe of hair. He found an occasional momentary
satisfaction in burned cork, but the joy was futile, and impermanent.
He met the Vision in the street one day when he was carrying a parcel,
and the shame of his menial employment, and the sense of the coarseness
of his clothes made him long for the earth to open. The fact that the
young person did not know him, or look at him, or think about him, made
no difference. The young head was filled with absurd dreams. Sometimes
he was a prince in disguise. He was being bred up to know nothing of his
princedom, so that he might be splendidly and properly astonished when
the revelation came. At other times he recognised his lowly origin, and
went away into the boy’s Somewhere--a noble country full of beneficent
chances--and came back great and glorious, in gloves and patent-leather
boots, and a hat and moustache, and conquered the Vision and married
her. At other times he died, with his great heart unspoken, and was
buried in the parish churchyard.
But whilst he was full of all manner of ambitions and yearnings, and
dreams which nobody else in the wide world dreamed about, a family
conclave was held to decide what Paul should be. One Simmons, a dapper,
perky draper in the High Street, wanted a shop-boy, and Mrs. Armstrong
was for asking the place for Paul There was not a grain of ambition in
the household, and the melancholy fact was that there was no money to
bind Paul apprentice anywhere. But Paul would have none of the draper.
He was cuffed in corners by the maternal hand, but he held his own.
He would run away, he declared, he would drown himself, he would do
anything rather than submit to that. So finally he was turned into the
ramshackle old printing-office, where all his elder brothers had been
before him, and learned to sort pie, and to roll at press, and to
sweep the floors, and to blow old dusty type-cases clean. He wore
a brown-paper apron tied about his waist with string, and lived so
obscured in printer’s ink, for which he seemed to have a natural
affinity, that he hardly looked like a white boy at all.
He was still a liar, but he told his lies on paper now, and hid them. He
told them in prose and verse--prose which was measled with ‘Oh’s,’ and
‘Alas’s,’ and full of great windblown phrases of bombast, like inflated
bladders, each with one little parched pea of meaning to rattle inside
it The verse was mainly such as might have been written by a moderately
illiterate absurd old man who had found life a vanity, and had deserved
his discovery.
There was one idle and worthless journeyman in the ramshackle office,
and one only. He kept the place like a pigsty, and the floor was
littered with boards on which unlocked formes of type fell about into
confusion. Paul could pick his way through these blindfold, and many and
many a night in the dark he raged out his verses, marching to and fro
with the four big dim windows staring dully at him, wall-eyed with
countless paper patches, seen as darker blots on the darkness.
One night he was there in hiding. He had played truant from
Sunday-school and chapel, and had been all day in the fields, hungry,
but happy beyond all dreaming. And, oh! the Sundays! the dreary, bestial
days, with Sunday-school at half-past nine and chapel at eleven, and
Sunday-school at half-past two and chapel at half-past six and family
prayers at nine, and bed at half-past nine, and books forbidden, and
speech a crime, and whistling a felony. Paul had broken loose, and knew
not what to look for, and cared little for the hour. For his head was
full of verses, and his heart was full of the summer day, and for
the first time in his life he had gone to Nature, and forgotten his
thrice-thirty-times copied emotions, and had dared to speak in his own
voice. The lines he had made that day were unutterably sacred and sweet
to him. The dreaming Solitary, staring down the gorge, heard the
boy’s awestruck whisper, and, forgetting all the rest of the verses,
remembered this one only:
‘Why, all is happy! Not a worm that crawls,
Or grasshopper that chirps about the grass,
Or beetle basking on the sunny walls,
Or mail-clad fly that skims the face of glass
The river wears in summer;--not a bird
That sings the tranquil glory of the fields,
Or single sight is seen or sound is heard,
But some new pleasure to my full soul yields!’
Paul, standing there in the darkness, whispered this many times as if
struck with awe by it, and indeed the boy wondered, and thought it an
inspiration.
‘That is poetry,’ said Paul ‘I am a poet--a poet--a poet!’
He fell on his knees, with his face on his hands in the open quoin
drawer, feeling as if he had uttered a blasphemy. How long he was there
he never knew, but he was disturbed by the grating of a door below, and
his father’s voice called up the stairs:
‘Paul! Where are ye?’
‘Here, father,’ Paul answered
A sob met his voice half-way, and Armstrong came stumbling up the
stairs.
‘What’s the matter, lad?’ he asked, in a tone between concern and
impatience.
‘Nothing,’ said Paul.
‘Why is’t ye’re here alaun?’ his father demanded ‘And whaur have ye been
the livelong day? And what are ye cryin’ for?
‘Nothing,’ said Paul again.
‘Ye’re not such a fule,’ said Armstrong, ‘as to be cryin’ an’ hidin’ for
naething, an’ I’m not such a fule as to believe it.’
He paused, but Paul made no reply. The old man struck a lucifer match
and lit the gas. The boy stood blinking in the light, his face stained
with tears, his eyelids red and a little swollen. To the father’s eye he
looked sullen and defiant Of course he was neither, but he was entirely
hopeless of being understood, and therefore helpless to explain.
‘Noo, Paul,’ said Armstrong, with a severity which he felt to be
justified, ‘I’m goin’ to the bottom o’ this business. Ye’ve absented
yourself the haul day from the House o’ God. Ye’ve not been seen since
morning’s light, and it’s nigh-hand on midnight Whaur _have_ ye been?
Answer me that at once, sir.’
‘In the Hoarstone Fields,’ said Paul.
‘And wha’s been with ye, helping ye to desecrate God’s day?’
‘Nobody, father. I’ve been by myself all the while.’
‘And what’s been your work, my lad?’ There was silence, and the silence
began to have a threat in it ‘I’m goin’ to the bottom o’ this affeer,
Paul,’ said the father. He meant that honestly, but he was not taking
the right way. ‘I’m not to be put off by ony lies or inventions. Ye’ve
been alaun in the Hoarstone Fields all day? What took ye there? And hoo
have ye passed the time? I’ll know!’ he added, after another long pause.
Perhaps there was nobody in the world who stood less chance of knowing,
but how should Armstrong have guessed that? He was a just man, and as
kind-hearted a father as might have been found within a hundred miles.
If he could have known the truth, he would not only have been disarmed,
but proud and glad. But Paul at this time had a holy terror of him. It
grew to a close and reverent affection later on, and there was such a
confidence between this pair as is not often found. But now? Paul would
have suffered anything rather than tell the truth. It was not that he
would not. He could not His tongue was fettered.
‘Noo, Paul,’ said Armstrong. ‘Let’s have a luik at this. Ye’re not
supposin’ in your inmost mind that I’m in the least small degree likely
to believe the yarn ye’ve tauld me. Ye’ve been in the lonely fields all
day, doing naething and speaking to naebody. And for that ye’ve stayed
away from your meals, an’ noo ye’re in hiding like a creminal? It hasn’t
an air o’ pro-babeelity, Paul; it has _no_ air o’ pro-babeelity. You see
that?
Paul saw it--quite as clearly as his father. But how was it to be
explained? Could Paul say, ‘My good sir, I am a boy of genius. I have
been filled with the Divine afflatus, and have been driven into solitude
by my own thoughts. I have been so held by dreams of beauty that I have
forgotten everything’? Could Paul offer that intolerable cheeky boast?
And yet to offer to explain was to do that, and nothing less than that.
‘Vary well,’ said Armstrong. ‘Ye’ll go to your bed, and I’d advise ye
to thenk the matter over. I’ll gev ye till morning. But I’ll have the
truth, or I’ll know the reason why.’
The gas went out under Armstrong’s thumb and finger on the tap, and in
the sudden darkness the gray, patient, reproachful face still burned in
the boy’s eyes.
‘Father!’ said Paul, and stretching out both hands, he caught hold of
him by the sleeve.
‘Well!’ answered Armstrong sternly.
He thought it his duty to be stern, but the tone killed the rising
impulse of courage in Paul’s heart He could have stammered a hint of the
truth then, and the darkness would have been friendly to him. A caress,
a hand on head or shoulder, would have done the business, but caresses
were not in fashion in the Armstrong household. There was another
silence, and Armstrong said:
‘I gev ye till morning, and then Paul, my lad, ye’ll have yourself to
thank for what may happen. I’ll be at the bottom o’ this matter, or I’ll
know the reason why. I’m no friend to the rod, but I’ll not stand by
open-eyed an’ see you walkin’ straight to the deevil without an effort
to turn ye. An’ I’ll have naething less than a full confession. Ye may
luik for a flogging if I don’t get it, and a daily flogging till I do.
For, my lad, if I flay your back, and break my heart to do it, I’ll win
at the truth.’
They went down the long dark garden together, and at the kitchen-door
Armstrong paused.
‘It’s a sore thing,’ he said, ‘for a man to have to misuse his ain flesh
an’ blood. But ye’re not of an age to understand that. Remember, Paul,
this is not my seeking; but I’ll have the truth by foul means or fair.
And it’s just you to choose.’
Paul entered the kitchen, and his mother was for instant justice, as she
saw it, but Armstrong intervened.
‘This matter is in my hands,’ he said.
He was a very quiet and yielding man in many things, but when he chose
to speak in that way he made his word law.
Then came the lonely night. The wretched poet, a weedy lad who had
overgrown his strength, lay in bed and cried in anguish. He topped his
father by a head already, though he was but three months beyond his
fifteenth birthday, and if he had chosen to fight he might perhaps have
held his own. But a thought so impious never entered his mind. He was
helpless, and he lay blubbering, undignified, with a breaking heart. He
did not think much or often of the coming pain, but he brooded on the
indignity and injustice until he writhed with yelps of wrath and hatred
and agony of heart, and awoke Dick, who wanted to know what was the
matter, and was roughly sympathetic for a time, until, finding he could
make out nothing, he turned and went to sleep again.
There were black looks in the morning everywhere, for Paul was known
to be in deep disgrace again. He swallowed a cup of the thin, washy
coffee--its flavour of chicory and coarse brown sugar was nauseous on
the palate of the man at the tent door--and then his father, pale as
himself, rose amidst the affrighted boys and girls, and motioned him
silently to the sitting-room. This was a sort of family vault, with its
scanty furniture in grave-clothes, and a smell of damp disuse about it
always, even in summer-time.
‘Are ye ready with the truth?’ asked Armstrong. Paul looked at him like
a dumb thing in a trap, but said never a word. ‘Very well,’ The gray
man’s hands shook and his voice, and his face was of the colour of gray
paper. ‘Go to the back-kitchen and strip.’
Paul, dry-eyed, gloomy, and desperate, walked before, and his father
followed. The girls clung to each other. There had been no such scene as
this in the house for years. The tawse had hung idle even for Paul for
many and many a day. Armstrong took the instrument of justice from its
hook, and laid it on the table He took off his coat, and rolled up his
left shirt-sleeve. He was left-handed. The arm he bared was corded and
puny. It shook as if he had the palsy. His wife had a sudden pity for
him, and ran at him with a gush of tears.
‘William,’ she said, ‘don’t break your heart for the young vil’in; he
isn’t worth it Oh, God! I wish he was no child o’ mine.’
She dropped into a chair and cried. Armstrong passed out of the kitchen.
The girls listened, and Dick, chalky white, with his mouth open, as Paul
had seen him on his way through. They heard the swish, swish, swish of
the tawse, and not another sound but hard breathing for a full minute;
then Paul began to groan, and then to shriek.
‘Now,’ panted Armstrong, ‘shall I have the truth?’
There was no answer, and he fell to again; but Paul turned and caught
his arm, and after an ineffectual struggle, the old man dropped the
tawse and walked into the kitchen. Paul dressed and sat on the table,
quivering all over. He sat there for hours, and nobody approached him
until at last the servant, with frightened eyes, came to make ready for
dinner; then he got up and went to his old refuge in the lumber-room.
One of his sisters brought him food after the family dinner-hour, but he
refused it passionately.
‘Oh, Paul,’ she said, clinging to him till he shook her from his
writhing shoulders, ‘why don’t you confess?’
‘Confess what? snarled Paul. ‘Confess I was born into a family of fools
and nincompoops? That’s all I’ve got to confess.’
He was left to himself all day, and at night he went un-chidden to the
larder, and helped himself to bread and cheese. He took a jug to the
pump, and coming back, ate his meal, standing amongst his people like an
outlaw.
‘Well, Paul,’ said his father, ‘are ye in the mind to make a clean
breast of it?’
‘No,’ said Paul, ‘I’m not.’
The defiance fell like a thunderbolt, and eyes changed with eyes all
round the room in horror and amazement.
‘We’ll see in the morning,’ Armstrong said.
‘All right,’ answered Paul; and so finished his meal, and took his cap
from its hook behind the door.
‘Where are you going?’ cried his mother.
‘That’s my business,’ said Paul, breaking into sudden passionate
defiance. ‘What am _I_ flogged like a dog for? _You_ don’t know. There
isn’t one of you, from father down to George, who knows what I’ve been
doing. I can’t remember an hour’s fair play from the day that I was
born. Look here, father: you may take another turn at me to-morrow and
next day, you can come on every morning till I’m as old as you are, but
you’ll never get a word out of me. I’ve done no harm, and anybody with
an ounce of justice in him would prove something before he served his
own flesh and blood as you’ve served me.’
He was in a rage of tears again, and every word he spoke was tuned to
the vulgar accent of his childhood. ‘Father’ was ‘feyther’ and ‘born’
was ‘boorn.’ He did not speak like a poet, or look like one to whose
full soul all things yielded pleasure. These thoughts hit Paul, and he
laughed loud and bitterly, and went his way into the street.
The upshot of it was that Paul was flogged no more. Armstrong sickened
of the enterprise, and gave it up.
The lonely man was thinking of it all, seeing it all. Suddenly a voice
seemed to speak to him, and the impression was so astonishingly vivid
that before he knew he had answered it aloud. He started awake at the
sound of his own voice, and his skin crisped from head to heel.
‘There’s no rancour, Paul, lad?’ the voice had said, or seemed to say.
‘Rancour?’ he had answered, with a queer tender laugh. ‘You dear old
dad!’
For the first time the sense of an actual visitation rested with him,
and continued real. He felt, he knew, or seemed to know, that his
father’s soul was near.