Nobody ever answered Jim’s questions. They rose rank upon serried rank,
behind the barrier of his fists.
He had two worlds to dwell in; the world of the streets, swift, violent
and public, which he thoroughly understood and took his part in without
effort; and the world within his opening mind, intensely private,
confused and tentative.
There were no connecting links and he was precipitated from one to the
other without conscious volition. Jim’s complications were not shared by
Eliza.
Eliza did not care how the earth was made or why we got here.
She knew that she had not received all she wanted, but that some of it
could be acquired by strategy. The only problem that gave her any
serious intellectual misgiving was how to obtain feather boas and
jewellery while remaining within the law. Sometimes, in her more
imaginative moments, she wondered what would happen if she went beyond
it.
Tom Barton knocked his son down for asking him why he wanted to get
drunk.
It was not a filial question, nor was Mr. Barton’s an analytical mind.
He did not know that he got drunk from a variety of reasons. The size
and frequency of public houses; the extreme dryness of his throat from
working in chalk; the lack of horizon beyond Saturday night; and the
fine feeling which intoxication gave him of a temporary mastery over
mind and matter, supplied a certain authority for these aberrations.
Besides, there was nothing to stop him getting drunk.
Jim’s questions were taken more kindly by his mother. She told him
repeatedly to ‘get along,’ but her tone was one of admiration, and he
often found her eyes resting on him with more alertness than her sunken
gaze usually held, as if—like that Mother of old—she was pondering his
questions in her heart.
There was no one outside the family circle to whom Jim could appeal. The
Grove in which the Bartons lived was divided from any intercourse with
Dives by an impassable gulf. The Grove did not know what was on the
other side of the gulf. Nor apparently did Dives.
There was the church, of course, but though the Grove had no antagonism
to the church none of its inhabitants ever went inside it except
automatically shortly after a birth, if the birth was respectable—it
was considered bad form to baptize illegitimate children—and after a
death as reluctantly as the law allowed.
The teachers in the school looked on education as the insertion of a
series of facts; they wished to lift a lid and press all that they could
into an empty receptacle, and they resented in Jim’s mind the presence
of anything they had not put there.
Perhaps Jim might have given up the search for wider knowledge as
useless if he had been the type of character which can give anything up.
But the quality behind his fists which made him unbeatable in physical
combat gave him also a queer, blind power of continuing any losing game,
and those who continue losing games long enough may win them. Accident
or fate, or some sublime intent, plays into their hands. But there is no
convention about such visitants; they seldom appear in an appropriate
guise.
Miss Masters came to call at Number 8, the Grove. There was a new vicar
at the church, and Miss Masters, who lived out of the smoke two miles
away, was a fresh ecclesiastical broom. She had not done much sweeping
for the former vicar, a toothless scholar who took his services and left
people alone; but this younger and most energetic Christian had rallied
round him several good women who realised the presence of opportunity
and had not too much to do at home.
Jim was lying in a corner of the kitchen when he heard a doubtful
knocking at the door. He knew it was not a neighbour, for his neighbours
had no doubts; nor was it a rate-collector, for rate-collectors thunder.
Mrs. Barton opened the door cautiously and explained to a confused and
flushed young lady, anxious to make a good impression, and not catch
anything, that Jim had merely been trod on by a horse.
The young lady came in and sat down on the edge of a chair. She smiled
without ease, and Mrs. Barton, who had been washing and was in the
middle of mangling, stood fingering the kitchen table. Jim had never
seen a lady so near before. He didn’t think the teachers at the school
were really ladies; he could understand their voices, and they hadn’t
very bright patent-leather shoes.
‘I don’t know whether you know,’ said Miss Masters impressively, ‘that
the Rev. Arthur Atkinson has just come to this parish?’
Mrs. Barton saw that something was expected of her, so she said, ‘Really
now?’ and hoped she wasn’t going to be asked to pay a penny for a
magazine which she didn’t want, like some one in the next parish. Their
late vicar had been restfully uninterested in the spread of light
religious literature.
‘Yes,’ said Miss Masters cheerfully, ‘and he’s given me the Grove!’
Mrs. Barton stared hard at this dubious piece of clerical generosity.
She did not wish to look a gift-horse in the mouth, but what had this
poor young woman in front of her, in her very well-tailored blue serge
suit, done, to be saddled with the Grove? In her mind’s eye Mrs. Barton
saw the Grove as it was between eight and nine o’clock of a Saturday
night. She had herself been trailed, screaming, from end to end of it
several times.
She recalled the Grove speaking its mind in its Sunday leisure; and if
she had been capable of as much thought as her son, who was listening
with all his ears, she would have wondered at the curiously different
angles from which two people may see the same object.
‘To visit, you know,’ went on Miss Masters more brightly still. ‘He
thinks we all ought to make friends with each other.’
‘I dessay ’e’s young,’ interrupted Mrs. Barton sympathetically. ‘’E’ll
get over all that.’
Jim drew a deep breath—he wished this visitor would not clip her words
and lower her voice at the end of her sentences. She was saying things
which ought to be carefully followed.
‘He told me to be sure and look you up,’ went on Miss Masters. ‘He has
heard all about you.’
Jim was not surprised to see that his mother was annoyed. ‘To hear all
about a person’ in the Grove meant to hear a great deal to their
disadvantage.
Mrs. Barton stiffened with sudden ferocity.
‘’Oo ever said anything about me,’ she said sharply, ‘lied—and that’s
all there is to it! There ain’t nothink no one _can_ say! I take what
lodgers the law allows, and I ’ave my marriage lines in the tea-caddy.’
‘Oh, nothing against you,’ cried Miss Masters hurriedly. ‘Quite the
contrary! It was the police, you know, told Mr. Atkinson about your
husband—Saturday nights, and all you have to suffer——’
She looked vaguely at Jim, who returned her gaze with a fascinated,
impenetrable stare.
‘I’m afraid you are not very happy, Mrs. Barton?’
Mrs. Barton licked her dry lips and then looked down at her black and
broken finger-nails. She felt resentful. She didn’t see that the clergy
had any call to talk over Mr. Barton with the police; nor did she see
what Saturday nights, and their sometimes too public history, had to do
with this neat coat and skirt in front of her.
Mrs. Barton was hot and choleric with the family wash, and she had been
brought up rather short by the irrelevant word ‘happy’—but she
smothered her feelings politely and spoke tolerantly after a moment’s
pause.
‘Oh, well,’ she said, ‘I suppose we must all take the rough with the
smooth, mustn’t we?’
She did not add that the proportions are sometimes strangely different.
Jim’s mind leaped upon the charm of this new word ‘happy.’ Of course he
had heard it before, but the sense was new; he had never heard it
applied to his mother.
Why should she be happy? She hadn’t been to a circus. Did people like
this lady go normally to such quantities of circuses that they were
always happy? What did his mother mean by taking the rough with the
smooth?
Probably she didn’t mean anything; she had only spoken with the
deep-seated courtesy of the poor, desiring to relieve any discomfort
caused by too sharp a contrast between her life and that of her
visitor’s. Grown-up people often said things like that they didn’t
mean—but Jim never did. What he said he meant, and he always expected
the same radical and abnormal sincerity from others.
‘I really came to speak to you about your difficulties,’ Miss Masters
began again; ‘but oughtn’t we to go into another room?’
She looked significantly at Jim, who scowled horribly at this possible
deprivation of experience; but he was relieved when he remembered that
their only other room was the scullery, which must be more or less under
water from the wash.
‘Oh, ’e don’t matter,’ said his mother easily. ‘Yer can’t keep ’em out
of it, and ’e’s going on for ten, Jim is.’
‘Mr. Atkinson thinks,’ Miss Masters said in a low, embarrassed voice,
‘and so do I, that your life as it is now must be very brutalising. We
quite understand how hard the question is for you, and we deeply
sympathise with you. The very idea of breaking the sacredness of the
marriage tie is awful; but these weekly scenes, before the children,
too, and the actual danger to your own life. Ought you not to think of
leaving your husband, Mrs. Barton?’
Mrs. Barton stared at her. She was bewildered by the innocence of her
visitor’s question; also the word ‘sacred’ and the phrase ‘marriage tie’
were not easily comprehensible to her. Some people might be married like
that, of course, but these were not her difficulties.
‘What would I do,’ she asked doubtfully, ‘with the children? They ’ave
to be fed. There’s Eliza, now, out of work again—I don’t know what’s
ter become of that gel. Seems as if I couldn’t get her in, off the
streets, try as I may—and ’er father’s ’and’s so ’eavy. I don’t seem
ter hardly like to ask ’im to beat ’er.
‘An’ Jim, ’e’s at school still—and Bert—’e’s too young to go yet, and
the baby not weaned nor won’t be while I ’ave anythink for ’im with the
price of milk what it is. Yer can’t leave babies ter work out, and
there’s so few places hereabouts anyhow ter work in—and Tom ’e’d take
up with another woman. That’s what ’e’d do. A man ’as ter ’ave some one,
if it’s only to shy things at. I shouldn’t get a penny out of ’im again,
not once I left ’im.’
Miss Masters looked shocked. She had naturally not regarded the question
quite in this light; she had meant to be strictly practical, and she had
actually gone to the Free Library and looked up the Separation Laws.
But she had expected questions of the heart to predominate—memory,
affection, romance—that was one of the reasons why she had offered to
undertake the interview. She had murmured to Mr. Atkinson that only a
woman could understand another woman’s heart; but she found it a little
difficult to follow Mrs. Barton’s.
‘You could take a room, couldn’t you,’ she suggested, ‘with the
children, and I think after a fortnight the court would bring a
maintenance order against your husband?’
‘’Oo’s ter let me ’ave a room for nothing for a fortnight?’ demanded
Mrs. Barton. ‘And ’ow’s the law going to tackle Tom when ’e won’t have
no money, ’E’ll drink it up, or move on somewheres where ’e can’t be
’ad. Once yer ’ooked, yer ’ooked, as far as I can see; and now, if
you’ll excuse me, miss, I must get back to my mangle.’
Mrs. Barton smoothed her rough hand along the top of her working apron.
She hesitated before she left the room. She could not believe that there
was no help or wisdom in so well-dressed a visitor.
She looked wistfully at the flushed face and confused eyes of Miss
Masters; but nothing came from them. Miss Masters wanted to get away
too, but she hadn’t got a mangle.
She asked instead, if she mightn’t stay for a few minutes with the poor
little boy. She was so fond of children. Mrs. Barton nodded and slipped
into the scullery.
In another fortnight she must go into the hospital. Frequent kickings
had put something wrong inside her. It was very painful and would have
to be taken out.
She would like to have talked to her visitor about it, but after all she
hadn’t liked to bother her. She was unmarried and there were
details—quite familiar to Jim—which would perhaps be out of place
presented to a mind so ignorant of the basic laws of marriage. You could
not be too careful with ladies.
‘Leave my ’usband!’ said Mrs. Barton grimly to herself. ‘A pretty fool I
should look leavin’ a ’usband! Me with four children to keep, and ’alf
of me inside ter be took out!’
Miss Masters, left alone with a fierce-eyed, tow-headed and perfectly
silent urchin in the corner, wondered if after all she was very fond of
children, and longed to take the nearest tram home to a quiet tea. Jim’s
blue eyes held her; it was the crisis of his life. He could not speak,
but his mind seethed with questions.
‘Was it really a horse that kicked you?’ Miss Masters asked
ingratiatingly. ‘Do tell me about it.’
‘Yus—’e trod on me,’ said Jim automatically.
He did not see how he could tell her anything more about it than that.
Out of all his seething questions he drew one hurriedly and flung it at
her.
‘Are you ’appy?’ he asked with fierce intensity.
The suddenness of this question took Miss Masters’ breath away—but she
agreed after a moment’s pause that she was. She had a disagreeable
mother, three sisters prettier than herself, and much too small a dress
allowance. Still, she shuffled out of these disadvantages and claimed
her birthright.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said smiling, ‘perfectly happy. Aren’t you?’
‘I dunno,’ said Jim doubtfully; ‘not if I know what ’appy is. I were
once; I looked at a circus through a ’ole in the tent.’
Miss Masters let this opening into bliss slide past her. She was rather
a perfunctory young woman, and she preferred the surface of things. She
asked Jim’s name and if he was fond of reading. He said with another
flash of conviction—
‘Gord, I sh’ud think I was——’
It occurred to Miss Masters to wind up this interview successfully by an
offer to lend Jim books. One always felt more comfortable after one had
really _done_ something for the poor. The sudden light in his face
clinched the matter.
Miss Masters remembered about the books. Unconsciously she became the
cornerstone of Jim’s life, and though she was at the time thinking much
more seriously about tennis, she kept his soul alive.
In a few months’ time Jim’s stubborn, insistent little figure was given
the run of the Masters’ library—they were well-to-do middle-class
people who had to have some books.
Miss Masters rejoicing in her conquest of a boy famed for being the
worst in the district, lent him a summer house full of earwigs to read
in. Jim dared not take the books home, for his father would have pawned
them—or even his mother, if she hadn’t cash enough for a meal. In the
winter they let him have hay in the summer house and an old blanket.
He tore the heart out of their books, but he never became intimate with
the Masters. They said, ‘Hullo’ when he appeared, and patted him on the
shoulder, and Jim watched speculatively their family manners. He even
mimicked in private their clipped accents. They said—
‘Oo do yer do? Haow gled I _em_ to see you.’
But he never really liked them.
He went once or twice to church as an experiment, but he soon gave it
up. He was bored by the cryptic and unintelligent prayers. He preferred
to listen to hymn-tunes outside the door if it wasn’t too cold, and
though the Rev. Arthur Atkinson was a good man he was no preacher.
He took, however, a special interest in Jim, and often when he gave
those queer lessons about bunches of Divinity, at school, he would
single out Jim for appreciative and casual talk. His interest in Jim
became infectious, the headmaster caught it. Some—a very few—of Jim’s
questions got answered. There was talk of secondary education, and even,
if this succeeded, of the university.
Jim’s mind soared steadily on toward undreamed-of goals. The future
appeared for him so wide that he might have fallen through it quite
comfortably and never been anything but a nice young man if it hadn’t
been for an accident—quite a normal accident except in its
consequences—which took place in a minute and changed everything.