Mrs. Barton, whose admiration for her eldest son had become the one
light in a drab existence, was herself the innocent cause of its total
eclipse.
She was getting tea ready when the accident happened. They were all
there except Mr. Barton. The baby, scarlet in the face with nettle-rash
and bad temper, had been soothed into temporary calm by the illegitimate
use of a dummy.
Bert was contentedly sucking the paint off a toy horse under the table.
Most of it was already worn off by the friction of his constant tongue,
but there was still a streak of vermilion on its tail. Eliza was making
eyes and faces of no uncertain meaning at the grocer’s boy over the way.
It was that black day of the week known as a half-holiday.
The March wind ran dryly to and fro in the Grove, carrying a harvest of
scraps of newspaper, rags, and orange-peel.
Mr. Barton had started home in an irritated mood. He was not a
sentimental parent, but what feeling he had was centred upon his
children—he never drank more than half his earnings out of
consideration for their welfare; and he always regarded them with that
resentful affection common to people who have made great sacrifices for
an unworthy cause.
If he had a favourite, it was Eliza. There was something about the
metallic glean of Eliza’s roving eyes which appealed to her father. It
was the eye of one who sooner or later ‘got there.’ She did not ask
doubtful questions nor expect impossible virtues as her brother Jim did.
Mr. Barton had never done Eliza any harm—for she was an expert at
dodging blows—and yet he had never had to go out of his way to do her
any good. It was a soothing relationship. So it was most unfortunate—on
a Saturday afternoon—that one of his mates should have chosen to give
him some very drastic hints upon the character of his daughter.
Mr. Barton made up his mind to beat his favourite child, and drank a
good deal of rather bad beer to get his spirit up.
No one should say he was a parent complacent of his daughter’s shame.
Not that Eliza had any shame, but if half what his mate suggested was
true she would be a good candidate for it. He would beat Eliza first to
show her what was what—and then he would beat his wife, because after
all, being the child’s mother, she was directly responsible for her
morals.
The moment he pushed the door open his whole family knew that there
would be what was popularly known in the Grove as ‘trouble.’
There were kippers for tea, but no one could taste a kipper until the
trouble was over.
Bert began to cry and flattened himself against the wall. The children
looked like a covey of flustered partridges, prepared to shoot out into
space at a moment’s notice.
Mrs. Barton put her hand up to her head and then let it fall again,
realising that it was not likely to be of more use to her there than
anywhere else.
Mr. Barton’s legs were fairly steady, but his thoughts were uncertain.
He pronounced one word in the direction of Eliza. It was an explanatory
word, and Eliza poised under it with an eye on the scullery door.
But Mr. Barton’s attention focused more readily upon his wife. He
approached her to ratify his sentence upon Eliza with a blow. He knew
that Mrs. Barton would not spring to avoid it as Eliza would. She had no
spring left in her.
Jim had been watching his father steadily in order to effect his own
escape if necessary, when something suddenly went queer before his
eyes—it was as if a thin, protecting screen were withdrawn between him
and his own emotions. He saw his mother’s face in a mist—very white and
sick with anticipation, he heard her say, ‘Ah, don’t Tom——’ and all
desire for personal escape went out of him. He sprang suddenly forward
and struck at his father’s head with Bert’s toy horse.
Mr. Barton swayed back with astonishment, but before he had recovered
from it Jim struck again. This time he had a better weapon, for Eliza,
with a woman’s readiness of wit and hand, had thrust the poker toward
him. Jim dropped the toy horse and struck savagely with the poker.
The blow caught Mr. Barton so that he spun once like a very heavy,
silent top, and then sank in a heap on the floor. Jim struck at him
again and again; he was in a panic now—a panic of accumulated rage; and
all the terror of the household was behind his lifted arm. If his father
got up again not one of them would escape.
But Mr. Barton made no attempt to get up again. He lay there quietly in
a pool of his own blood. Then he shuddered once or twice as if something
had to be shaken off—shook it off and lay quite still.
Jim was not sure what had happened, but the heap on the floor did not
look like his father any more. It looked like a bundle of old clothes
which ought to be cleared away.
There was nothing terrible or powerful in it, and yet there was
something very terrible and powerful in the room, which seemed to take
up all the air.
Mrs. Barton sat there, looking at the heap with her mouth open and her
eyes curiously fixed.
Eliza screamed readily and dramatically till the neighbours rushed in.
Some one sent for the police, and when they came Eliza pointed an
accusatory finger at her brother, for she realised that the situation
was exceptional and that in exceptional situations some one had better
be accused.
The police lifted Mr. Barton up, and Mrs. Barton screamed—a curious,
flat scream, not at all like the full-dress successes of Eliza. She was
still screaming, with no meaning at all behind her voice when the police
took Jim away. He was a very small criminal, and they were not at all
unkind to him. When he told them he was fourteen years old one of them
said in a reassuring manner,—
‘Well, sonny, you won’t swing for it this time!’
The magistrate was more severe, and the court was a still, dreadful
place where all the dust was tidy and as if kept there very carefully to
make the benches look sad.
The magistrate finished by saying that the penitentiary would be just
the place for Jim.
They put him in for three years with criminals of every sort and kind,
and feeble-minded, whose crimes were only blunders. Jim’s questions
faded for a time under his new destiny.
It was no use asking questions about such unreasonable things. Only he
remembered his books, and there were pictures in his mind which blotted
out the eternal whitewash of the walls.
He missed the life of the streets most. Life was still there under the
massive dullness of the institution, but it ran subterraneously and
without freedom, and some of it was very, very nasty.
Jim could not keep his hopes alive in it, but he kept his stubborn
pictures. He could see the Miss Masters playing tennis in white drill
skirts on a green lawn crying ‘Forty love’ to the curate, and the
contents of his book, tropical lands under curious skies with birds
flying, knights in armour who were brave and kind; and there was always
at the back of his mind that unfinished picture of his father lying in a
dishevelled heap on the floor and not getting up again.
Jim had meant to be a schoolmaster, and he went on with his education in
the penitentiary. Mr. Atkinson had spoken for him to the magistrate and
so had the headmaster. They had called him promising.
Common or bad language, Jim knew already, but now he learned the vivid
phraseology of thieves.
What carefully brought-up people call vice and get excited over, Jim
knew as unreflectively as he knew rancid butter. He got used to both
these things, but he never took any interest in them.
He was beaten sometimes very hard and quite justly by the authorities.
He fought his way from the first into perfect security from the other
boys. Nobody could do him any more harm than he could them, and he had
the splendid reputation of a murderer to back him. He was not underfed,
and he had a healthier and more open-air physical life than he had ever
known.
His only starvation was of the spirit, and all his growing senses
starved in company with his soul. He was approaching the age of beauty,
and no one ever spoke or thought of beauty, nor was the penitentiary
furnished with any single object framed for that purpose.
After two years his mother died. Eliza disappeared, and Bert and the
baby were swallowed up by excellent orphanages.
These facts were communicated to Jim quite kindly by the master of the
penitentiary himself, in a parlour which smelled musty, and was used
only for visitors or the breaking of calamities. He was given a black
crepe band and the addresses of the orphanages.
Jim was sixteen when his family disappeared. He had killed his father,
which never gave him any particular regret; but the complete wiping out
of his domestic circle was a more unsatisfactory business. They had not
been a particularly nice family, but they were all he had.
Jim felt as if certain starved roots which bound him to the earth had
suddenly been cut. All his memories rushed up on him and haunted him
with loneliness.
He did not cry, but he kept tucked away in the corner of his retentive
brain the addresses of the orphanages.
Eliza had probably landed on her feet; but he often wondered where this
attitude had placed her. He would have looked her up if she had been in
his place and he in hers, but he did not expect this weakness from
Eliza.
Jim had received quite a lot of religious instruction by now, so that
when he said—and he was obliged to say it at least twice a day—‘Our
Father Which art in Heaven,’ he knew he was referring to a possible old
gentleman who in some unknown and rather large place might or might not
keep an eye on him. This was God. He did not seem very get-at-able, and
most of the boys in the penitentiary took the view that He was invented.
You could not have bad language without a Deity, but you could have
everything else.
Jim, however, was not a positive atheist. For one thing, he had read
more than any one, even the penitentiary schoolmaster, so that he knew
the whole idea was not in the nature of a scholastic invention on
purpose to cause friction—which was the accepted view of his new
companions. There was more to it than that. Some one, when you came to
think of it, was probably behind something—but you couldn’t quite tell
what.
The sky, the clouds, the stars, the common grasses of the distant
fields, the blue spread vision of the sea, and the swift, interminable
flow of water between river banks—could these things happen by
accident?
They were like creatures—were they not created? And if they were
created, was there not a Creator? What would happen if you fell into the
sky? (Jim received a bad mark for this irrelevant question.)
What did happen to people when you hit them too hard with a poker? They
were there just before—what became of them afterward?
Their bodies were dead, of course; but they weren’t dead, were they?
They’d gone as if they passed through their bodies, as people at a
railway station slip in and out of trains.
Where did they go? The chaplain was quite nice; he did not punish Jim
for asking this question. He said, ‘Heaven or hell’ without a moment’s
hesitation. But he preferred talking about cricket.
Apparently Heaven and hell hadn’t much meaning except when you used them
with the direct intention of being bad. What was it that meant inside
people to be good or bad? Something meant inside Jim—something as
fierce as his fighting instinct and as plain as a pair of compasses. It
was always going about its business, meaning something, and it very
seldom meant to be bad.
This something in Jim did not shrink from badness as weak boys did, with
tears; it looked steadily at it and resented it. It pushed him toward
friendly relations with all his world—often quite uselessly, because
all he had learned and read made his companions hostile to him. It
pushed him forward through his work, and never rested in him till he had
done his best.
He heard the master say once of him, to a member of a committee, ‘That
boy over there has got character——’ but he did not know what character
meant. He knew only that somebody had put something inside him which
belonged to him and was never satisfied.
He was not consciously unhappy; he associated unhappiness only with
physical mischance. Yet there was one spot in his mind vulnerable to
pain, and over which he always hurried.
It was not his crime; he acknowledged that simply as a blunder—and on
the whole it was a successful blunder. But it hurt him to think of his
mother. She had been to see him twice since he had been in the
penitentiary, and each time she had brought him things to eat and had
cried over him, and before she went she had said between her tears,—
‘Gord—they needn’t have took you away from me.’
Now she was dead and couldn’t come any more, so there was, of course, no
use bothering about it.
But the sore place in Jim’s mind remained. It was the nearest point he
reached toward that broken image of the mind of God—human love.