BEATING THE TOWN.
They turned their faces again toward the centre of the town, and
resumed their walk, taking in more of what they saw than while they
had not yet had the second instalment of their daily bread. What a
thing is food! It is the divineness of the invention--the need for the
food, and the food for the need--that makes those who count their
dinner the most important thing in the day, such low creatures:
nothing but what is good in itself can be turned into vileness. It is
a delight to see a boy with a good honest appetite; a boy that _loves_
his dinner is a loathsome creature. Eat heartily, my boy, but be ready
to share, even when you are hungry, and have only what you could eat
up yourself, else you are no man. Remember that you created neither
your hunger nor your food; that both came from one who cares for you
and your neighbours as well.
In the strength of the half-loaf he had eaten, the place looked to
Clare far more wonderful, and his hopes of earning his bread grew yet
more radiant. But he passed one shop after another, and always
something prevented him from going in. One after another did not look
just the right sort, did not seem to invite him: the next might be
better! I dare say but for that half-loaf, he would have made a trial
sooner, but I doubt if he would have succeeded sooner. He did not
think of going to parson, doctor, or policeman for advice; he went
walking and staring, followed by Tommy with his hands in his
pocketless pocket-holes. Clare was not yet practical in device, though
perfect in willingness, and thorough in design. Up one street and down
another they wandered, seeing plenty of food through windows, and in
carts and baskets, but never any coming their way, except in the form
of tempting odours that issued from almost every house, and grew in
keenness and strength toward one o’clock. Oh those odours!--agonizing
angels of invisible yet most material good! Of what joys has not the
Father made us capable, when the poorest necessity is linked with such
pain! What a tormenting thing--and what a good must be meant to come
out of it!--to be hungry, downright, cravingly hungry with the whole
microcosm, and not a halfpenny to buy a mouthful of assuagement!--to
be assailed with wafts of deliriously undefined promise, not one of
which seems likely to be fulfilled!--promise true to men hurrying home
to dinner or luncheon, but only rousing greater desire in such as
Clare and Tommy. Not one opportunity of appropriation presented
itself, else it would have gone ill with Tommy, now that the eyes and
ears of his guardian were on the alert. For Clare thought of him now
as a little thievish pup, for whose conduct, manners, and education he
was responsible.
The agony began at length to abate--ready to revive with augmented
strength when the next hour for supplying the human furnace should
begin to approach. Few even of those who know what hunger is,
understand to what it may grow--how desire becomes longing, longing
becomes craving, and craving a wild passion of demand. It must be
terrible to be hungry, and not know God!
As the evening came down upon them, worn out, faint with want,
shivering with cold, and as miserable in prospect as at the moment,
yet another need presented itself with equally imperative
requisition--that of shelter that they might rest. It was even more
imperative: they could not eat; they _must_ lie down!
Whether it be a rudiment retained from their remote ancestry, I cannot
tell, but any kind of suffering will wake in some a masterful impulse
to burrow; and as the boys walked about in their misery, white with
cold and hunger, Clare’s eyes kept turning to every shallowest
archway, every breach in wall or hedge that seemed to offer the least
chance of covert, while, every now and then, Tommy would bolt from his
side to peer into some opening whose depth was not immediately patent
to his ferret-gaze. Once, in a lane on the outskirts of the town, he
darted into a narrow doorway in the face of a wall, but instantly
rushed back in horror: within was a well, where water lay still and
dark. Then first Clare had a hint of the peculiar dread Tommy had of
water, especially of water dark and unexpected. Possibly he had once
been thrown into such water to be got rid of. But Clare at the moment
was too weary to take much notice of his dismay.
It was an old town in which they were wandering, and change in the
channels of traffic had so turned its natural nourishment aside, that
it was in parts withering and crumbling away. Not a few of the houses
were, some from poverty, some from utter disuse, yielding fast to
decay. But there were other causes for the condition of one, which,
almost directly they came out of the lane I have just mentioned, into
the end of a wide silent street, drew the roving, questing eyes of
Clare and Tommy. The moon was near the full and shining clear, so that
they could perfectly see the state it was in. Most of its windows were
broken; its roof was like the back of a very old horse; its
chimney-pots were jagged and stumped with fracture; from one of them,
by its entangled string, the skeleton of a kite hung half-way down the
front. But, notwithstanding such signs of neglect, the red-brick wall
and the wrought-iron gate, both seven feet high, that shut the place
off from the street, stood in perfect aged strength. The moment they
saw it, the house seemed to say to them, “There’s nobody here: come
in!” but the gate and the wall said, “Begone!”