[Cover Illustration]
THE KINGFISHER
BY
PHYLLIS BOTTOME
AUTHOR OF “THE DARK TOWER,” “THE
CRYSTAL HEART,” “A SERVANT OF
REALITY,” “THE SECOND FIDDLER,” ETC.
NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1921, 1922,
BY THE DESIGNER PUBLISHING COMPANY, INCORPORATED
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
The Kingfisher
CHAPTER I
Jim was not sure when it first dawned on him that there was such a thing
as security. When he did realise it he supposed it to be like one of
those things, procurable for others, but unprocurable for him, which
were marked at a shilling in the shop windows.
He had never known bodily safety except for the first few weeks of his
life, when his mother by a species of enlightened tact threatened to
come to pieces altogether and was retained by a reluctant matron in the
hospital beyond her allotted time. When they returned home they promptly
resumed the cup-and-ball existence produced by Tom Barton’s
intemperance.
Tom Barton was quite good-tempered when he was sober, and he was rarely
drunk except during the week-ends, but from Friday to Monday the house
rose and fell in the tempest of his intoxication. He was a good workman,
and their income see-sawed between affluence and penury.
Nothing was more normal to Jim than the appearance and disappearance of
the furniture. Wash-stands floated in and out of rooms, sofas
precariously furnished shelters for games, and then, like Rachel’s
children, were not. Mantelpieces held clocks, china dogs and thrilling
blue-beaded mats, and at a turn of the wrist—nothing but the
bread-knife.
Hazily, like a far-off dream, a mute piano broke over his baby
consciousness, and as swiftly and irrevocably vanished.
‘’E’s drunk it,’ was the explanation presented to Jim by a sympathetic
neighbour.
As regular, and more noticeable than the migratory flight of tables and
chairs, were the kicks and bruises which descended upon the human
portions of the family.
Only Mrs. Barton was at all permanently bruised. Tom never hit the
children unless they came in his way. When he was mad with drink he
frequently expressed a wish to kill them, but beating his wife always
did instead.
There was no convenient substitute for Mrs. Barton. Every now and then
she screamed till the police came, which was very exciting for the
children, but ordinarily she was very quiet, and then the interest of
these occasions palled.
Mrs. Barton had had a great deal of spirit as a girl, and it lasted her
nicely till she became a mother; then she alternated between melancholy
and exasperation.
She meant to be kind to her children, and she always loved them, but the
methods of her affection became as frayed as her nerves.
She kept them tolerably clean, and fed them as well as she could. She
called them in at night and hit them perfunctorily and without
spitefulness when they cried.
She was not an ideal mother but she had the maternal instinct.
Family life as far as Jim was concerned vacillated between tears and
curses, and as soon as he was capable of choice he threw his weight upon
the side of curses.
He cried when he had to, but he became conscious in himself of
formidable gusts of ferocity which were as exciting as a game; they
intimidated his equals and even at times his physical superiors.
He had all the habits of a badly teased stable kitten; whenever he was
approached he prepared to strike, for almost as soon as he had learned
anything he had learned that the only successful attitude of defence is
attack.
His sister Eliza was easily quelled by him, though she was five years
his elder. Her long hair put her out of court. Jim had only to wind his
little hand in it and pull. Bert, his younger brother, cringed at the
sight of him. Even his mother did not hit Jim after he was five years
old and had gone for her with a knife.
Awful tussles took place between Jim and his father, and though they
naturally ended in the complete victory of Mr. Barton they left his
parent as a rule rather breathless and severely bitten.
Tom, unless he was drunk—when he feared nothing—had a secret dread of
his baby Jim’s blue eyes; they had a way of looking blazing mad like a
tortured animal’s and the child did not seem to know that when you are
beaten, you really are beaten.
Jim’s idea was that when you could retaliate no more you waited till
exhausted nature re-equipped you—and then you burst out afresh.
He had no respect for a parent’s ‘that’s enough,’ and seemed incapable
of recognising any finality but his own.
Something within him, very violent and unbreakable, never felt itself
quelled. Jim did not know it was his spirit, because neither the word
nor the thing was recognised in his circle.
Nothing was ever explained to him about anything.
He took blows, food, and curses from the same source; only he learned to
dodge the blows and if possible steal the food; the curses were neither
here nor there, except that they were sometimes useful as premonitory
symptoms. He could often guess from the tone in which they were screamed
whether there was a blow or bread and jam behind their easy utterance.
Jim’s mother loved him, but Jim did not know she loved him; he knew only
that he could reckon upon her, as far as he could reckon on anything, to
supply certain of his wants.
He hated his father, but he did not know that that hot, menaced feeling,
which sprang into his heart when he saw his father appear, was hate. He
only knew that he did not ever wish to see his father.
Toward the rest of the world Jim felt, and exhibited a wary
indifference.
Some children in the neighborhood seemed to be cleaner than the little
Bartons, and had more food, but Jim did not like them any better for
that. Occasionally children of another class altogether appeared in the
street—strange visions of smiling faces and smart apparel, safeguarded
by nurses, loomed sickeningly upon Jim’s sight. They could not be stoned
nor rolled in the gutter. Something mysterious but formidable, called
‘law,’ was behind them.
Jim cast surly and incredulous glances at them. Later on he attached to
their infrequent appearances phrases caught up from the steps of public
houses, expressive of derision and tinctured with envy.
But Jim himself was not envious of the rich. He preferred the tested
violence of his dirty fists and well-developed muscles.
They might, these denizens of the upper air, have force behind them—but
it was easy to see that they had no force in them. They were more
vulnerable than Eliza. Jim knew that he could quickly reduce them below
fighting level if he were given the chance.
He himself, even with both eyes blacked and the wind completely knocked
out of him by a forcible descent of a flight of stairs, had never
reached the abyss at which the fighting instinct stopped.
If his father couldn’t down him nobody could. Deep in his hard and
stubborn heart he nursed the feeling that the rich were soft.
Swanhill was a small town, or a big slum, whichever way you chose to
look at it, set between two larger towns in a factory district. Four
miles behind it lay the green, unvisited country, and in front of it
were the river and the factories. Eighty chimneys soared, with a sodden
incapacity for grace, into a smudge of sky. They seemed to be fumbling
in their own smoke for a way out into the open air, but they never found
it.
The town had six long, grimy streets filled with newspaper, orange-peel,
smoke, small and overcrowded cottages, and the flashing windows of
gigantic public houses. A handsome stone church perched ineffectually
upon the hillside.
The population of Swanhill was seven thousand. Three hundred of it went
to church. Fourteen belonged to the Salvation Army; there were fifty
Catholics, and perhaps another fifty intermittently visited two
nondescript chapels. This was the little leaven, and it did nothing
whatever to interfere with the whole lump.
Jim had no preference for any particular scenery; but he liked the
river, where he could get wet always, and in the summer very nearly
drowned. He did not know what anything looked like, nor that anything
else could look any different.
Eliza taught him something about school. She had to be clean for it, and
in time, sooner or later you had to give in to the teachers, though you
could with impunity take it out of the other children at stated
intervals in a yard.
She did not tell Jim what she had learned in school because she made a
habit of relaxing her attention the instant the cane receded. Nothing
remained in Eliza’s mind after lesson hours but a little empty clamour
and a few meaningless phrases.
She was not an easy child to teach because all the powers of her
nature—and Eliza was by no means deficient in power—were concentrated
upon inattention. She carried blankness of mind to a fine art.
Eliza’s treasures were in the street, and that was where her heart was.
She cared only for accidents, funerals and the arrival of babies, and
upon none of these stimulating realities did her teachers touch.
Lessons seemed to Eliza’s active and mature mind to be twaddle from an
underworld.
She sat in school because she had to, and she was never one to waste her
kicks upon the inevitable. When she thought that she could evade
compulsion, Eliza was swift to evade it, but if she saw that compulsion
had a longer reach, she gave in to it immediately.
Nor did Eliza mind giving in to compulsion as Jim did because she had a
practical nature and she saw that it was no use minding. She was not an
idealist. When she fought it was for a tangible object like an apple. An
apple was worth a certain amount of physical inconvenience to Eliza; a
principle was not. And as to fighting for the vanity of the thing in
order to discover which was the stronger, Eliza gave to these
inconclusive reckonings the derision which all good women keep for
masculine triumphs.
When Jim had once beaten her, Eliza never fought him again, but she
frequently circumvented him. Jim did not like Eliza, but he preferred
her to any one else.
They often combined quite successfully against the dangers of the open
road or the exigencies of family life, which were rather more dangerous
than the road.
Jim did not start school until he was five years old, and for the first
year or two he agreed perfectly with the standpoint of Eliza.
School was one more thing that happened, like drunkenness or bedtime. It
fell upon the just and the unjust with the same continuous ineptitude.
School was duller than the street and sweeter than home. Sometimes you
got something extra out of it, say another child’s marbles; or a
hymn-tune fell with an unexpected pleasantness upon the ear.
Once or twice a week a queer man dressed in black, with a habit of
strange words and a voice incomprehensibly and dreamily low, with no zip
in it, came in, and gave them all a lesson about a Person or People
called God. The headmaster remained in the room with his cane
inconspicuous but handy, so that you could not even yawn; but you did
not have to listen, nor did God interfere with you in any other way. The
creature in black seemed to think He would, but He didn’t. A word called
crucifixion slid off Jim’s attention like water off a duck’s back.
More interesting things leaped at him daily out of a Reader.
When Jim was nearly seven he suddenly found that cats, dogs and other
odd combinations of letters could be mastered. He actually saw them for
himself as they were in books, and he began to like these odd gymnastics
of the intellect.
School ceased to be an unbroken restless blank punctuated by the blows
of an exasperated grownup.
He felt the dawn of a creative spirit; he could make words come right by
himself. Figures spun themselves alive for him, and he began to grasp
incredulously that geography was about the real earth.
History never seemed very sensible to him, though he liked to hear, of
course, about the fighting. The causes seemed inadequate, for who cared
about kings? But it was nice to think that almost everybody fought about
something from the beginning of the world, and would probably go on
fighting about it until the end.
Jim lost the sense of outwitting his teachers by complete absence of
mind. All kinds of strange, responsive things rose up in him, questions
hammered at his hard little head all day long.
He began to doubt if everybody had to be hit so much; he read about
extraordinary outbreaks of kindness. He even experienced one of them.
Another boy gave him a humming top which he thought—mistakenly, as it
happened—had ceased to hum. When the other boy found that Jim’s
superior manipulation had brought back its powers, he naturally tried to
repossess himself of the top, but he was easily fought into
acquiescence.
The other boy’s name was Erb Badger, and the humming top cemented the
first real affection of Jim’s life.
It stirred all the generosity of his youth. Jim became suddenly aware
that you could at a pinch really like people, and a strange feeling
began to dawn in him for his mother. She smiled at one of his copy-books
with obvious pride, and it hurt him when his father took the smile off
her face by a casual blow.
One summer evening behind a persevering lilac-bush choked in smuts, Jim
astounded Eliza by asking her if she had ever liked anybody.
Jim was nine years old at the time, and Eliza was a well-grown girl of
fourteen.
She looked at him with wary, unflinching eyes—that had rather the
effect of highly polished black buttons—then she said—
‘Garn, y’ere soft!’
But Jim wasn’t really soft. He hit Eliza severely and without
compunction till she was forced to say, ‘Give over!’
Then he gave over, but he still wondered if it wasn’t possible to like
somebody without being soft.