by A. J. Cronin
Papa immediately got up, pale but important, and made a sigh to Adam, who also rose. They both went into the lobby, closing the kitchen door behind them as though, by drawing a veil upon the scene, they wished to spare us. Only the mutter of their lowered voices came to us as we sat absolutely mute, as though we ourselves were stricken by the messenger of death.
After a long time Papa came back into the room. A pause. Then Kate, the bravest of us, mustered enough strength to ask: “Have they found him?”
“Yes.” Papa spoke in a low voice; he was paler than before. “They have him.”
“In the mortuary?” Murdoch gasped.
“No,” said Papa, “in Ardfillan jail.”
He surveyed us with a glassy eye; felt his way to his chair; sat down weakly. “He’s been out on the spree with the tinkers from the Skeoch wood … lost his coat and hat in a fight at the boathouse … up to God knows what these last two days … landed in jail at Ardfillan … charged with drunk and disorderly and contempt of the law. Adam has gone to bail him out.”
The shades of night were falling as Adam and Grandpa came up the road. Hatless, wearing an old police tunic open and unbuttoned, in place of his lost jacket, Grandpa looked proud but subdued; there was a gleam in his eye—a chink in his armour which betrayed an inward apprehension. As I crouched at the parlour window in anxious solitude, a glimpse was enough to send me scudding upstairs to the refuge of the old man’s room.
There, listening tensely, I heard the sound of the front door, followed by a dreadful chaos, filled with loud recriminations from Adam, Mama’s tears and lamentations, Papa’s whining abuse, but not a word, not a whisper from Grandpa.
At last he came upstairs, moving slowly, and entered his room. He was sadly tarnished; his beard needed trimming; he exhaled strange and uncomfortable odours.
He threw me a quick glance, began to potter about the room, trying unsuccessfully to hum, pretending not to care. Then he picked up his battered and still sodden hat, which, earlier that day, Mama had placed reverently upon the bed. He considered it for a moment, turned artlessly to me.
“It’ll stand reblocking. It was always a grand hat.”
Book Two
Chapter One
The chestnut trees, spreading more widely, were again in flourish, the setting sun was sending up a faint incense behind the Ben as, full of excitement and pride, I hurried home from the Academy one April afternoon in the year 1910. At least I must assume that it was I, though there were times when I seemed a stranger, an uncouth stranger to myself. The other morning, coming out of Baxter’s after my early “ round,” I had caught a sudden glimpse of a strange apparition in the mirror of the baker’s shop—a pale and lanky boy of fifteen who has outgrown his strength, stooping, with thin wrists and unmanageable feet, an unfamiliar profile, absorbed and melancholy, a man’s nose on a boyish face—I could not repress a start of surprise, of pained unbelief.
But now I was conscious only of my splendid worth, full of my interview with Mr. Reid, held not five minutes ago, on the eve of the short Easter recess. “Jason” Reid had kept me behind the others, then crooked his forefinger for me to come to his desk. My form master was a young man, thirty-two, his stocky figure brimming over with suppressed vitality, the scar on his upper lip a diagonal white weal with tiny white beads, where the stitches had been, symmetrically alongside. This scar—which I suspected to be the result of a hare-lip operation—seemed to pull his nose down, making it flat and boneless, widening the nostrils, even making his blue eyes more prominent, almost bulging, under his fine soft blond hair. He was fair-complexioned, with a dampish skin, for he perspired easily, and was clean-shaven, disdaining to hide that slightly disfigured upper lip by a moustache, as though he welcomed and despised the cruelty of vulgar curiosity. In any case, his speech would have betrayed him, that imperfect articulation which can be reproduced exactly by placing the tongue flat against the roof of the mouth, which softens all the hard ss sounds to th’s, which in fact had given Mr. Reid his nickname on that day when we began the account of the Argonauts in the third ode of Pindar, and he spoke, with emotion, of “Jathon.”
“Shannon.” He drummed with his fingers, while I gazed at him adoringly. “ You are not quite a plate of sour porridge”—his usual designation of the members of his form. “There’s something I want to put up to you.…”
I was still giddy from his momentous words when I reached Lomond View.
I wanted to be alone, to hug my secret, but upstairs Grandpa was waiting at the open window with the draught board set out before him.
“What has kept you?” he asked impatiently.
“Nothing.” I had become intensely secretive. Besides, Grandpa wasn’t the Homeric figure he once had been to me and my announcement was much too valuable to “ waste” on him.
Actually, Grandpa had altered much less than I, his movements were still charged with vigour, though I discerned less ruddy metal in his beard, a few more careless stains upon his waistcoat. He had not reached that stage in his career, to which I must later refer with pain, when his eccentricities became my bane. Lately his life-long friend, Peter Dickie, had been overtaken by the spectre of unwanted old men and retired to the county poorhouse at Glenwoodie. This had sobered Grandpa, who always shied away from evidence of senility, and who resented, as a personal insult, the very mention of the word “ death.” Still, he looked quite spry, because he was enjoying his blessed annual respite: Grandma had departed on her visit to Kilmarnock. The period to be reviewed is, actually, Grandpa’s Indian summer. Yet just then he was in a bad mood, for he imagined I was trying to “ do him out” of his beloved game.
“What’s the matter with you? Standing there like a cat on hot bricks?”
I resigned myself and sat down opposite him while he bent over the board with frowning concentration, pondering his move with a terrible deliberation, preparing a pitfall which I could easily see coming, moving his man with a pretence of innocence, enhancing this transparent cunning by tapping out his dottle, examining the stem of his pipe, and beginning to hum.
Naturally my mind was not on the game, but whizzing with that magnificent proposal of Jason’s which had given me new hope for the future. Like most boys on the verge of leaving school I had worried a good deal about a career. I was ambitious, I knew what I wanted “to be,” yet the circumstances of my life, although they enhanced this longing, did not offer much encouragement for its achievement.
At the Academy I had grown accustomed to finding myself at the top of my form and had passed through the hands of various masters who had prophesied in an impersonal sort of way that I should do well. There was Mr. Irwin, tall, thin, and affected, who suffered dreadfully from colds in his head and fostered in me the belief that I was good at English composition by reading approvingly to the class, in his nasal voice, my high-flown, flowery essays on such subjects as “A Battle at Sea” and “A Day in Spring.” Then came Mr. Caldwell, known to the boys as “Pin” because of the short wooden peg which supported his withered leg. Meek and elderly, with gentle gestures and a small grey imperial, dressed always in clerical grey, he lived in the classics, and took me aside to tell me that, with application, I might be a Latinist. Others, equally well-meaning, had confused me with their conflicting advice.
Not until I fell into Jason’s hands had I felt the warm touch of personal interest. He was the first to regard my interest in natural history as something more than a joke. How well I remember the beginning, that summer day when a pair of butterflies, common blues, flew through the open window into his classroom and we all stopped work to watch them.
“Why two?” Jason Reid asked the question idly of himself as well as the form.
A silence, then my modest voice was heard.
“Because they’re mating, sir.”
Jason’s bulging, satiric gaze found me.
“Plate of porridge, are you suggesting that butterflies have a love life?”
“Oh, yes, sir. The
y can find their mate a mile away by a particular fragrance. It comes from their skin glands. It’s like verbena.”
“The plot thickens.” Jason spoke slowly, not yet quite sure of me. “And how do they smell this delicious perfume, pray?”
“They have special knobs on the end of their antennæ.” I smiled, carried away by my interest. “Oh, that’s nothing, sir. The Red Admiral actually tastes with its feet.”
Loud shout of derision from the class. But Jason stilled them. “Quiet, clods. This dish of porridge knows something—which is more than can be said of others. Go on, Shannon. Don’t our two blue friends here see each other—without the necessity for verbena?”
“Well, sir,” I was blushing now, “the butterfly’s eye is rather curious. It consists of about three thousand separate elements, each with a complete cornea, lens and retina. But although they have good discrimination of colours they’re extremely short-sighted, a range of only about four feet …”
I broke off, and Reid did not press me, but at the end of the hour, as we filed out, he gave me a faint searching smile, the first time he ever smiled at me, murmuring under his breath:
“And strange as it may seem … not a prig.”
From then, while encouraging my biology, he began to take me far ahead of the form in physics; and a few months later set me off in the laboratory upon a line of original research on the permeability of colloids. No wonder I was devoted to him, listening open-mouthed to every word he said in class, with the doglike devotion of a lonely boy, and even, with a thoughtful frown, copying his lisp and slight stutter during my conversations with Gavin.
A year previously Gavin’s father had moved him from the Academy to Larchfield College. It was a sad blow to me. Situated in the neighbouring town of Ardfillan, Larchfield was an exclusive and expensive boarding school, so select as to be almost unattainable to ordinary boys—its headmaster had been to Balliol and had actually captained a famous cricketing club at Lords! In spite of the popularity which he came quickly to enjoy in his new environment, Gavin remained loyal to me. On summer afternoons, when I borrowed Mr. Reid’s bicycle and rode fifteen miles to watch him knock up a half-century for the school, he would detach himself from his flattering circle at the pavilion and come openly to the far side of the lovely playing fields where I, the lowly alien, lay hidden; fling himself in his blazer and white flannels beside me, chewing an end of grass, remarking through compressed lips: “What’s been happening at home?” Nevertheless, although our friendship burned more brightly, although, when Gavin returned, we did everything together, there were long spells of separation when, rather than content myself with a second-rate companion, I fell back upon my own resources and indulged my morbid talent for solitude.
Alone, I roamed the countryside for miles around. I knew every nest, every crag, every sheeptrack on the Winton Hills. I fished the burns in spate, took dabs and pollack from the mudflats of the estuary. I made maps of the uncharted moorland which stretched, a wilderness of peat and heather, beyond the Windy Peak. All the keepers came to know me and to afford me that rare privilege, an unchallenged right of way. My collections grew. Some of my specimens were extremely rare. I had, for instance, splendid preparations of the proliferating hydra—the queer part-plant which liberates an egg—several unclassified forms of freshwater desmids, and that glorious dragonfly the Pantala flavescens, which, so far as I could ascertain, had never before been found in North Britain. Because of these wanderings I never missed the “holidays at the coast” which other boys looked forward to in summer—my imagination took me far beyond these tame resorts, turning the upper moorland into a wild stretch of pampas, or to the plains of Tartary over which I advanced cautiously, scanning the horizon for distant lamas … and sometimes, alas, for endangered missionaries.
Yes, one must admit the painful fact: I was, at this time, ardently devout. Perhaps my solitary hours had fostered this fervour. More probably it was because, like a horse pulling a load uphill, my peculiar nature strained harder in the face of difficulties. Every other day, at great inconvenience to myself, I served Canon Roche’s Mass. On the friendliest terms with the Sisters, I swung the censer in the processions which wound, behind fluttering tapers, in the convent grounds. During Lent I performed prodigies of self-denial. I thanked the Almighty burningly, for having included me in the one true fold, and felt the deepest pity for all those unfortunate boys who had been born into false religions and who would, almost certainly, be lost. I shuddered to think that, but for the goodness of God, I might have come into the world as a Presbyterian or a Mohammedan, with only the thinnest chance of earning my eternal reward!
Although I shall not dwell upon them, my religious tribulations had not ceased and there were days in my calendar which I dreaded—less from physical fear than from the violence they inflicted on my spirit. Let us be honest. Levenford, like most Scottish towns, was a small Vesuvius of intolerance. The Protestants didn’t like the Catholics, the Catholics were not fond of the Protestants, and both had little love for the Jews (who were mostly Poles, a small and inoffensive community congregated in the Vennel). On Saint Patrick’s Day when shamrocks were sported defiantly and the Ancient Order of Hibernians paraded their banners down the High Street behind the green-sashed pipe band, the rivalry between blue and green erupted in unmentionable execrations and innumerable fights. Still more hectic was the Twelfth of July, and the massed procession of the Orange Lodges, Loyal Orders of the Great and Good King William, also with band and banners, led by a man with a tall hat and a gilt-fringed orange apron, riding a white horse and proclaiming: “Saved from popery, slavery, knavery!” while the crowd sang:
“Oh, dogs and dogs and a-holy dogs,
And a-dogs and a-ho-oly wa-ter.
King a-William slew the papish crew,
At the Battle of-a Boyne-a Wa-ter.”
The simple act of lifting my cap as I passed the Holy Angels Church usually brought upon me ridicule or contempt, but on these days of strife, the Twelfth especially, I was lucky if it did not involve me in a running fight.
But do not imagine that I mooned away my days between defending the Faith and chasing butterflies and saints in a beatific state. Papa saw to it that much of my spare time out of school was profitably occupied. Ever since I had attained employable proportions, he had hired me out in various useful directions, my present duty being to rise at six every morning to pedal Baxter’s tricycle van round the empty streets, delivering fresh rolls to the half-awakened town. My small wages were received by him with the remark that they would ease the cost of my board and keep, and he would go on to tell Mama, with pale earnestness, that it was necessary to cut down further on expenses, although these had been pared to the vanishing point. Recently, indeed, Papa had taken the monthly bills into his own hands and he exasperated the tradesmen by exacting reductions or, when he set out to purchase articles for the household, by trying to knock a little off the price. When something “useful” was in question he was always anxious to buy, especially if it seemed a bargain; yet more often than not, in the end some instinct made him draw away from the purchase, bringing him back empty-handed, but, as he triumphantly declared, with the money still in his pocket.…
At this point an exclamation of triumph from my adversary brought back my errant thoughts. While I was dreaming Grandpa had whipped my last two men from the board.
“I knew I had you,” he crowed. “ You that’s supposed to be the cleverest boy in the town!”
I rose quickly, so that he might not see, and so misunderstand, the look of joy springing to my eyes.
Chapter Two
Still restless and excited, I ran downstairs. I was free until eight o’clock in the evening, when I had a special and unbreakable engagement. I thought of calming myself by going to the bioscope matinee, but I had not a farthing in my pocket, or rather in Murdoch’s pocket, for I had reached the size when I could wear his old suits, cast off long ago and faithfully preserved amidst camphor in the att
ic “kist.”
I went into the scullery where Mama was damping clothes at the boiler and laying them on the ironing board, her hair and eyes more faded now, face thinner and more tiredly lined, yet still gentle, and enduring. I stood gazing at her with tremendous meaning, almost with a catch in my breath.
“You wait, Mama,” I said softly. “Yes, just wait.”
She gave me her queer, frowning smile.
“Wait for what?” she asked, after she had tested the hot iron near her cheek.
“Well,” I said, lamely, yet with intensity. “One of these days I’ll be able to do something for you … something big.”
“Will you do something for me now? Something small. Take a note over to Kate’s?”
“Oh, of course, Mama.”
I often carried missives for Mama, and so saved the postage stamp, across the town to Kate, at Barloan Toll, or to Murdoch, who was now solidly established with Mr. Dalrymple at the Nursery, doing extremely well and, to his evident satisfaction, emancipated from Lomond View. These letters were a part of Mama, communications of the spirit, containing news, messages, exhortations, even requests—sent out, in patient persistence, in her unflagging effort to hold the family together.
I waited till her iron was cold. Then she entered the kitchen and brought back a sealed envelope.
“Here you are then. I wish I could send a batch of pancakes with you. But …” She removed the lid from the earthenware crock and peered into it in a troubled fashion. “I seem to be out of flour. Give them my love, though.”
I went out and along Drumbuck Road, crossed the Common and turned left, skirting the great black shape of the Boilerworks—partly stilled by the impending holiday, yet still glowing in its depths, still alive and menacing.
Kate’s house was one of the small new cottages built on a round green knoll near the old Toll-gate, on the western outskirts of the town. And as I came up the hill I suddenly discerned Kate as she came along a level side-street, pushing the perambulator before her. It was a fine navy-blue perambulator and Kate loved to push it. She walked miles with it every week, I am sure, through the town, the shops, round the Knoxhill Park, pausing, proudly to stoop and straighten the navy-blue cover with the white N embroidered on the corner.