Polly remained awake for a little while looking out over the kingdom. Winter and summer alike she slept with her bed across the dormer window, that she might see it in the evening and the morning and when she woke up at night. Angel Lane sloped steeply below number twelve so that Polly’s window at the back of the house commanded one of the finest views in the city. When she had entered into possession of her attic at number twelve she had for the first time in her life owned privacy and a view. Just at first she had scarcely known what to do with either of them. The silence and loneliness had frightened her, and it had made her feel dizzy to see the roofs of the city tumbling away below her westward down to the river, and then the vast plain beyond stretching to where the sun rose at the end of the world. Then slowly deep needs of whose existence she had scarcely been aware began to be satisfied and there woke in her the question. Who am I?—a question that she had not asked in the crowded orphanage days. The solitude of her room made her aware of herself and the illimitable beauty it looked upon made her aware of something beyond herself, so far away that its unattainable perfection broke her heart. And yet it was near. It was far as the brown brink of the horizon before dawn, and near as the yellow rose that climbed from the walled garden below and in June propped itself upon her window sill and scented her room. The scent of a flower is a very close and intimate thing, she thought. It can seem to be a part of your body and blood.
Polly’s name for her view, the kingdom, she had picked up from attending Saint Matthew’s at the South Gate on Sundays with all the other orphanage children. The prayers had for the most part gone off her like water off a duck’s back but that one perpetually repeated sentence, “The kingdom the power and the glory,” had stuck in her mind like a phrase of music and now it sang itself there whenever she looked at her view. Tonight it was moonlit and sparkling. Frost glistened on the tumbled roofs and great stars burned in the sky. She could just see the church towers crowning the little hills in the fen, far away and small like toy towers, and here and there the gleam of water, but the power and glory in the vast singing sky had crushed the earth to nothingness tonight. It was not her own idea that stars sang. Isaac sometimes taught her to say bits of poetry when they were together in the scullery, and he had taught her the bit about the singing stars. All the rags and tags of verse that Isaac knew, taught him in his childhood by his mother, were gradually passing from his memory to hers. There they were in safekeeping, for Polly had a remarkable memory. The orphanage had not been very successful in teaching her to read or write—she had been there for too short a time; but anything she had heard with attention she remembered. On Saturdays, when she went marketing and Emma handed her a shopping list, she was too ashamed to say she could not read it, but luckily Emma always read it aloud before handing it to her and she never forgot anything.
Suddenly she remembered that it was market day tomorrow. She had been feeling chilly in spite of Sooty’s warmth, for the blankets on her bed were poor and thin and the frost thrust its fingers through the ill-fitting little window, but now she began to glow. Tomorrow in the market she would see Job. The warmth of her joy tingled upwards from her toes to her cheeks and they were a faint rose color in the moonlight. The stars came closer and she swung up to meet them, yet when she was among them they changed from singing spirits to flowers and she saw them as lilies growing in a field beside a stream. In her dream she and Job were together in a small dancing boat, and the quick water was carrying them out into a mystery. It was a dream full of expectancy and it often came to her.
4. Job
1.
THE sudden appearance of Isaac Peabody in the shop had sent Job running down through the streets of the city as lightly and silently as a phantom. Though he possessed a pair of broken boots he went barefoot when he could because it made escape easier. He was not by temperament an escapist, for he had extraordinary toughness and courage, but he retained his sanity by living as much as possible within his own private world. When he had to come out of it he did what had to be done as well as he could, and endured stoically what had to be endured, and escaped back to it again. He had not been afraid of the clockmaker, he had fled only from force of habit. He had caught glimpses of Isaac many times before tonight and the old man and all his clocks lived with him in his world, together with Polly and a few others. Very few were admitted. It was a signal honor to be admitted by Job to the place within himself.
As he descended the hill toward the river and the North Gate he imagined he was climbing down the escarpments of a mountain. It was always as a mountain that he thought of the Cathedral. Shut at night within the safety of his world he would sometimes try to imagine what it was like inside, and he would try to choose between one and another of the amazing landscapes that drifted cloudlike through his heaven and try to fit it inside the mountain. But none of them was great enough. When they touched the stone of the mountain they dissolved into nothingness. The mountain kept its secret and it never even occurred to him that he should climb up to it and see if it possessed a crack in the rock that would let him in. He was not, like Isaac, afraid of it, but people did not go inside it whose clothes were dirty and who stank. He had absorbed that fact with the air he breathed when he first came to the city. He did not resent it. He was kept from resentment by a piece of knowledge which to him was as factual as his boots; that if he could keep himself from going under there would be a way through his present bad luck to good luck. But he must not go under. If he did the easy thing that he often longed to do, if he stopped washing under the pump and cracking the fleas and let himself sink back into the slime and obscenity of Swithin’s Lane, he would lose the way. Upon this fact he had grounded himself.
He reached the flight of stone steps that led down from the respectable part of the city to the slums below and paused and looked back. He could see the Cathedral above him towering against the stars, and as he gazed Michael struck the half-hour. Then with his head up he turned and ran down the dirty steps.
He might be lucky tonight, he thought, as he padded past St. Nicholas at the North Gate into the darkness of Swithin’s Lane, and get to bed without a belting. He was late but if his master was still at the pub old Keziah would not tell on him. He was apprenticed to Albert Lee the fishmonger, whom he hated and who hated him, but old Keziah, Lee’s mother, was kind to him after her fashion. Job was used to being hated and did not much mind because he knew the reason for it; he was different, and he exulted in his difference. The hidden exultation gave him a slight air of arrogance, though actually he had no more pride than was necessary for the preservation of decency, and increased his illusiveness. There were times when Lee thought he would burst a blood vessel if he could not get a good grip on the boy and beat the superiority right out of him. Yet at the end of a belting he had somehow done neither.
The moonlight that flooded the heights of the city scarcely penetrated to Swithin’s Lane. The upper stories of the old houses jutted over the lower, turning the lane into a dark, filthy tunnel. Garbage squelched under Job’s bare feet and he heard the rats scuttling. There was a faint glimmer of candlelight behind some of the small dirty windows, and now and then through an open door came the usual din of children screaming and exhausted, and maddened women shouting at them. A few drunken men lurched along the gutter but most were still at the pubs. The stench of the place was nauseating but Job was as used to that as he was used to the smell of fish that penetrated his appalling clothes, and already there was a part of him that was running on ahead to sanctuary. He could almost see it, a wraith that had his shape but was made of white flame, himself as he would be when he had passed through. He did not know whether he had imagined this wraith or whether it was real. It ran swiftly, leaping over the heaps of refuse and the scummy pools, and he ran after it, losing it sometimes and then glimpsing it again. He did not catch up with it until they had reached the side door of the shop, which stood ajar on its broken hinges, and then again it was gone and he was alone.
H
e edged in cautiously, for the half-open door meant that one or other of them was still in the kitchen behind the shop. If he could once leap up the narrow stairs at the end of the passage to the dark landing above, and then scramble up the ladder that led to his attic under the tiles, he was safe. Lee, a heavy man, could not negotiate the rotting ladder even when sober; when drunk he couldn’t even find it. Job reached the end of the passage and leaped for the stairs, but even as he did so he was aware of the heavy body lurching through the kitchen door, and a vast hand grabbed his bare ankle. At the same moment he was equally aware that the other boy was back again, leaping into his body to share the torture with him. He did not struggle, knowing it was useless, and also he knew intuitively that his contemptuous acceptance of the inevitable maddened Lee. They were a queer couple of enemies, for the boy too had his weapons. He enjoyed the many ways in which he could use his quick slim body and agile mind in a wordless taunting of Lee’s sodden, stupid clumsiness. And Lee was slightly in his power, for the skill of the apprentice was the mainstay of the business. Job knew that whenever he ran up to the city after dark Lee was in a fright that he would not come back.
But he had not yet attempted to run away. He knew the consequences. He had been apprenticed to Lee for three years and only one year had passed. If the cops caught him he’d be prosecuted and imprisoned under the Master and Servant Act, and he would not be allowed to plead for himself. He had a morbid dread of prison and of all dark and shut-in places. But the beatings were bad. Some night there might be one which would be too much for him.
Lee dragged him into the kitchen and set about it by the light of a candle stump and the moonlight that flowed through the window. The light was dim and he was drunk, and some of his blows went wide, but those that cut true had the force of the man’s strength and hatred full behind them. Job never sobbed or cried out because he knew Lee wanted him to, and beat him largely for that purpose. His gasps he could not control but the man’s own labored breathing covered them up. It did not last long, for Lee was in too poor shape to keep it up, but while it lasted it was indeed very bad and almost the worst was the ending of it, when he was sick and faint with pain and exhaustion and yet must get himself up and out of the room without letting Lee know that he had broken him. It was easier tonight, for that boy had not left him and was a strength in his body. He moved through the moonlight to the door with his head up and vanished silently up the stairs. Lee flung his belt into the corner of the dirty kitchen and cursed, and then the sobs that he had been unable to tear out of Job clawed at his own chest. He sat hunched on the wooden chair, his great red hands dangling between his knees, and maudlin tears made streaks upon his face that were as hot and stiff as the streaks on Job’s back. Of the two of them he was the more wretched. He was possibly the most miserable man in the city that night.
Job gained his attic, did what he could to help himself and lay face downward on his wretched bed. The attic was no more than a roof space with boards laid across the beams below to hold his bed and a broken chair. It had one small dormer window but the roof sloped so steeply that there was only one place in the little room where he could stand upright. All the same, he loved this eyrie because it was his own and no one but himself could get to it. And because here he could sleep and dream and gain his world.
He lay still for a long while upon the threshold, but he could not go in yet because the pain was too bad. He knew how to keep still, not only physically but inside himself, so that when the pain ebbed in his body the tumult in his mind quieted too. The window faced not upon the squalor of Swithin’s Lane but toward the river and the fen, where the frost was crisping the grasses and the tall pointed reeds. The night flowed in through the window, filling the room with the coldness of well water. He could hear the faint sound of the river flowing past, and gazing down as though he lay on the riverbank itself he could see in imagination the silver of the moonlight lying on the water, trembling where it splintered silently about the stones at the water’s edge and the spears of the reeds. All his life he was to find the sight and sound of flowing water one of the greatest solacements of grief.
2.
He had been lying on the riverbank like this, face downward and looking at the water, on that day when as a small boy he had run away from his governess to fish for minnows and the gypsies had got him. He could still in nightmare feel the hand grasping at his clothes, lifting him up, and smell the huge dirty palm clamped over his mouth that he might not scream. He had lived for two months with the gypsies and they had given him his name, Job Mooring, but he did not remember much about it now except the perpetual swaying of the van, the barking of the dogs, the blows and curses. But he did remember how the rolling country of the midlands had flattened out into the fen, and that he had liked the fen, and that one day in a green grove he was sold for eight guineas to Dan Gurney, a chimney sweep of the city, to be his climbing boy. That the kidnaping of small boys to be chimney sweeps was a frequent occurrence during the shameful years of the exploitation of the children he did not know. Working for Dan he seemed alone in his wretchedness and knew nothing of the army of other children who toiled and died in the mines and factories and chimneys of England. That he too did not die was because of his extraordinary toughness and because when it got to the point where he could not bear it any more he was delivered.
The man who had saved him was the first whom he had admitted to live in his world, and was in fact the creator of it, for his great stature and compassion could not be held within the hard tight walls of a small boy’s suffering. Job had to make space about him and in his mind he made it, and then as time passed the space grew and became a world of illimitable fancy where this man walked as a giant. Job only vaguely remembered his governess, and a big house with many servants where a man painted pictures and a woman played the piano and had no time for him. He believed now that they had been relatives but not his parents, for he had no memories of love. He had encountered love for the first time, and then only briefly, in his short encounter with the giant.
In the quietness, with the pain growing easier, he looked down and saw the encounter as though he were looking through the wrong end of a telescope, with the moving figures small and far away. Yet it was happening within him too, it was always happening, because it was the point of his salvation. The water, then, had welled up through the broken ground to give a living freshness to his whole life. The timelessness of salvation was something he did not understand yet but he was aware of the freshness whenever he remembered that day.
He wished he could remember just how he and Dan Gurney had got there. It had still been dark when Dan had dragged him out of bed and cuffed him and told him to get on with it. In one way Dan had been a better master than Lee, for he had been too lazy to beat him, but in all other ways a worse one. Lee’s cruelty was largely the emanation of his wretchedness but Dan had enjoyed his.
Carrying their sacks they climbed up through the steep streets of the city, and they seemed to climb interminably. The light grew as they climbed but there was a thick mist so that Job had no idea where they were. Nor in his wretchedness did he care. They went under an archway and the tread of their boots rang hollowly upon the paving stones beneath it. Then they passed under tall trees, invisible but dripping with mist. The cold drops fell on Job’s face and made tracks through the grime. He was a stunted little creature in those days, thin but very agile, and invaluable as a climbing boy. He could get through very narrow flues and so far had had the wit to get himself out again. It was bad for a sweep’s reputation when a boy got stuck and died.
They came through the mist to the back door of a great house and when he saw its size Job was frightened, because these big old houses of the gentry were the worst. Most of them had their old wide chimneys contracted, so that they should not smoke too much, to a space only just large enough to allow a boy to get up and down, and the flues were winding passages with sharp angles. They were hot and dark and stifling and it was easy to
lose yourself. It was then that the fear got bad and it was difficult to keep steady enough to use your wits to save yourself. It was, for Job, getting increasingly difficult. During his first year with Dan his natural pluck, a healthy body and great curiosity had given him resilience, but as the months dragged on and he grew weak with semistarvation and the foul air of the chimneys the fear grew. Today, as the butler let them into the darkened house, it seemed to stop his breath altogether and there was a clawing sort of pain in his guts. As he followed Dan and the butler up a long passage he thought he was going to be sick. He would have been if there had been anything in his stomach.
They came to a big room shrouded in dust sheets, and now there was a housemaid in a mobcap and apron as well as the majestic butler. It was light now but the gray mist was still muffled against the windows. The great chimney gaped. To one side of it stood a basket of kindling, waiting for the relighting of the fire when the chimney should be swept.
“Up with you, boy,” said Dan.
But Job stood where he was, trembling violently. It was the first time he had refused a chimney.
“Go on, you young bleeder!” said Dan low and savagely, but still Job did not move. Dan cursed and struck him, and the butler and maid coaxed gently, promising him a slice of cake when it was over, but he would not go. Except to protect his head with his arms when Dan struck him he did not move.
“The boy’s shy-like,” said Dan to the butler. “Ain’t never been in a house as fine as this before. You leave ’im to me, sir. You too, ma’am. ’E won’t be afeared alone with me.”
“Don’t strike the child,” said the maid. “If we go, mind you treat him gentle.”
Dan swore that he always treated Job gentle and the boy was as fond of him as his own father, and rather reluctantly the butler and maid left the room. Dan did not waste time. He seized Job and thrust him bodily up the chimney. His arm came after him a little way, forcing him up with blows, and mechanically Job began to climb. He went on for a little way and then stopped. He couldn’t do it. His mind went blank and he clung where he was, completely still. He heard a rustling below but he did not wonder what it was until the flames leaped up. To light a fire beneath him was a very old trick for making a boy climb but it was new to Job. He gave a choking cry, clung for a moment with his head hanging back, caught between the darkness and the flames, and then the blackness and the fire seemed to rush together and he let go and fell.
The Dean's Watch Page 6