He realized later that it must have been a small fire, only a few bits of kindling lit to frighten him, and someone must have quickly flung a sack over it when he cried out, for when he slithered down it was not into the flames. A strong pair of hands took hold of him before he could fall, lifted him out of the chimney and put him gently into a big armchair covered with a dust sheet. To Job in his dazed state the room seemed full of people, and a vast and terrible anger like a thunderstorm. It seemed that everyone was being washed backward and forward by the anger as though they were straws in a flood. Only he seemed immune, lying on some rock above the flood and safe from it. Curiosity killed the cat but it can also be very reviving. Job wriggled up in the chair and looked out over its high back as though he were looking over a garden wall. No one saw him and from this vantage point the scene of battle was spread out most splendidly before his eyes.
The room was not full of people after all, only Dan, the butler, the maid and a huge man in black clothes, old and ugly, with a hooked nose and eyeglasses perched upon the summit of the nose. It was he who was so angry, and he was an alarming sight in his anger, but he did not alarm Job. The butler, however, stood at attention like a criminal in the dock, the maid was crying and Dan was trembling. Job had not known Dan could tremble and the sight astonished him. It also astonished him to find that the old man was not making as much noise as he had thought while he was still so bewildered. He was just saying what he thought, and though his voice grated like a saw it was much quieter than Dan’s when he was in a rage. A few of the things that he said lodged in Job’s mind and he remembered them afterward.
“It was my express command that no climbing boy should ever be employed in this house,” he said. “The apparatus for sweeping chimneys without a boy now exists and should be used.” His terrible beak of a nose turned toward the butler and his eyeglasses flashed. “You have flagrantly disobeyed me.”
The butler flinched, as though at a whiplash, but he did not answer, and it was the maid who sobbed out something about the mistress having said to have a climbing boy, and to promise the boy a piece of cake if he wouldn’t go up. Then it seemed that the old man himself flinched. A sort of spasm twisted his face. Job couldn’t understand it. Then it was Dan’s turn. The nose and the eyeglasses turned in his direction and he flattened himself against the wall as though they pinned him there.
“You are aware of the law, I presume. In eighteen hundred and sixty-four it was made illegal for any boy under sixteen to help a chimney sweep. I shall have you summonsed for the breach of that law.”
Dan began to stammer out that Job was sixteen last month. He was small, that’s what it was, small for his age, but sixteen if a day. And that was the truth, guvnor, so help him Gawd.
“Where’s the boy?” asked the terrible old man, and they all looked vaguely round. It was the old man who spotted him first, looking gravely at them over the top of the armchair. Only his grimy face was to be seen, and two filthy hands clasping the top of the chair. His dark hair was cropped short so that the soot should not get into it and he seemed all bones, but they were fine bones and his large dark eyes were remarkable. He gazed at the old man and the old man gazed at him. “What’s your age, boy?” he barked. Both his bark and his scrutiny were most alarming but Job stood up to them very well.
“Dunno, sir,” he said.
“Come here,” said the old man.
Job scrambled out of the chair and came around to stand in front of him. He ducked his head, as one did to the gentry, and then stood squarely with his hands at his sides and looked up at the old man. Soot fell from his diminutive person onto the dust sheets on the floor.
“Eight or nine,” barked the old man. Then he turned and looked at Dan, who was still pinned against the wall. “You will be summonsed and appear before the magistrate, but later I will see to it that you are provided with the necessary equipment for sweeping a chimney without the assistance of a climbing boy. You may go. The boy remains here.” He turned to the butler. “See that this child is cleaned and fed. I will make the best arrangements I can as to his disposal and inform you of them in due course.”
He turned and walked out of the room, his great head thrust forward and his hands behind his back. He had an extraordinary walk, as though he were forging along against a steady head wind. He had not looked at Job again, and had spoken of him as though he were a stray kitten who would have to be drowned if no suitable accommodation could be found. But Job’s feelings were not hurt.
For the rest of that day he was rather miserable. The servants of the great house meant to be kind but there were so many of them that their talk made his head ache. He was allowed to eat his fill of wonderful food but it was too rich and he was sick. It was a painful business being scrubbed clean and having the sores on his body attended to, and afterward he had to sit on a chair with nothing to wear but a blanket, his filthy rags having been burned. During the afternoon the second housemaid, who had young brothers, went to her home and came back with a most peculiar assortment of male garments, all too large. In these he was draped and they were almost as uncomfortable as the blanket.
The next day, suddenly, a bell pealed and he was summoned to the study. The butler took him there, opened the door and pushed him through, indicating a large desk in the far distance to which he must set his course. With his trousers in coils around his ankles and only the tips of his fingers showing below his sleeves, he journeyed across acres of carpet toward the desk. It took a lot of courage but when he got there he found the old man sitting at the desk, looking at him over the top of his eyeglasses. Job ducked his head and then looked back at him, his arms held rigidly at his sides. He was not afraid of the man but he began to tremble, because he had a feeling that he had now been disposed of. The man loomed up above him like a great mountain.
“Boy,” he said in his hard grating voice, and then he stopped and took off his eyeglasses and put them on again. “Boy,” he said again, and now his voice was harsher than ever, “there are in this city a couple of charitable institutions known as Dobson’s orphanages. Boys and girls without homes are cared for and educated there and afterwards apprenticed to suitable trades. The boys’ orphanage is at the East Gate, the girls’ at the West Gate of the city. I have arranged for you to be received at Dobson’s at the East Gate and you will be taken there today. I trust you will be happy.”
There was a silence and Job felt that something was expected of him. He ducked his head and whispered, “Thank you, sir.” Then he just stood there, and he felt very cold. He did not know why he was sobbing. He did not know what he had expected, or why the word “orphanage” had made him feel afraid. He knew he ought to turn around and face the long journey back to the door, but he couldn’t. The journey to the desk had been to the man, but the journey back to the door would be away from him. He knew his nose was running but he hadn’t got a handkerchief. The silence lengthened and the room was full of desolation. Then a large heavy hand came down upon Job’s shoulder, feeling through the folds of his ridiculous coat until it could get a grip on the meager bones beneath. Looking up at the man Job saw that he had taken his eyeglasses off and was peering down at him, and he was as miserable as Job was. Indeed far more miserable, for everything about this man was vast, his anger and his sorrow and his love. The grip upon his shoulder was Job’s first experience of love. He did not recognize it, but he stopped sobbing and wiped his nose on his sleeve. He began to feel warmer and not so wretched. The grip on his shoulder gave him a sense of his own identity.
“Boy, listen to me,” barked the man suddenly.
Job listened, but for a few moments the man said nothing. It was almost as though he did not know what to say. Then he cleared his throat so loudly that Job jumped, and said, “Boy, all things pass. You are a brave child and a remarkable one. You will not be defeated and for the undefeated there is always a way through.”
Then he lumbered to his great height and with his hand still on Job’s shoulder
walked with him to the door. Outside the butler was waiting. Job was handed over and the door was shut, with him on one side and the old man on the other. When a little later he left in a cab in the custody of the butler, bound for the orphanage, it was raining so hard and he was crying so much that he did not notice where they were going. And so he never knew that the great house in which he had lived for two days and nights was right under the stone mountain at the top of the hill.
Job was not happy at the orphanage, though he slept in a clean bed, was adequately fed and taught to read and write and cipher. He was not happy because he was different. The other boys disliked him because he learned more quickly than they did, and they punished him for it with many subtle cruelties. Mr. Fennimore, the master of Dobson’s, a man whose comfortable rotundity and hearty laugh had deceived the whole city into thinking him the kindest of men, punished him too, whenever he could for whatever he could. The boy was brilliant, curious yet secretive, odd, and a challenge to Mr. Fennimore’s understanding that he could not meet. Even the smallest pinprick in his self-esteem was gall to Mr. Fennimore, and he detested the boy.
In spite of the cruelties Dobson’s did much for Job. He recovered health and strength and he became literate. He thought he had forgotten the lessons with his governess but they came back to him now and helped him to learn. It was the literacy that gave him his great joy at Dobson’s. In the schoolroom there was a shelf containing a few tattered books, given by some kindly citizen, and the boys were allowed to read them on Saturday nights. Few made use of the privilege, for they couldn’t read well enough, but Job read them all. He read among others the Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe and The Cloister and the Hearth, spelling them out as best he could to begin with but soon reading fluently. All the books had pictures in them. The books were like rooms in a great house and the pictures were lamps lit in the rooms to show them to him. As he read, his dreams slowly changed. The nightmares of being stuck in chimneys that suddenly started to get smaller and smaller, squeezing him until he woke up choking and screaming, gradually gave way to dreams of forests full of great trees, where fabulous beasts galloped down the cool green aisles, meadows full of flowers and celestial mountains musical with streams. He dreamed of the sea that he had never seen and of ships upon it, and of caves where the tide washed in and out. And gradually the dreams became his world and he walked through it night by night with his hand in that of the old man. Sometimes by day too he would go away inside himself and he would be there. He never spoke of the old man and of his two days in the big house, and no one bothered to ask him how he had come to Dobson’s. The whole experience of those days was part of his world and his private treasure. He scarcely related it to everyday life as he knew it.
He had another joy at Dobson’s, and that was Polly. The boys and girls of the orphanage, the boys living at the East Gate and the girls at the West Gate, came together only on Sundays in church. Dobson, a wealthy divine who a hundred years ago had been Rector of St. Matthew’s at the South Gate, had laid it down as law that on the Lord’s Day all the children must attend matins at his church, and for a hundred years they had done so. Every Sunday morning saw them walking through the city, two crocodiles converging on St. Matthew’s, still dressed in the garments Dobson had decreed, the girls in long gray gowns and cloaks, and black bonnets tied with black velvet strings, the boys in gray coats and breeches and gray worsted stockings. Both boys and girls wore buckled shoes and the boys carried little three cornered black hats. The people of the city loved to see them marching two by two to church, they looked so demure and old-fashioned, and so well cared for. The great munificence of old Dobson in providing for these children was, they felt somehow, to their credit. They were a generous city. Everyone smiled at the children as they passed by.
St. Matthew’s was a lovely little church that might have been designed by Wren. The children sat in the front pews, boys to the right and girls to the left, and it was on a Sunday in spring that Job first glanced across the narrow aisle and saw Polly. He was feeling desolate that morning, having been caned by Mr. Fennimore the day before and having had one of his nightmares, but the moment he met her eyes he felt a sense of warmth and safety. They could never speak but they looked at each other each Sunday for a month, and then he did not see her again, but she joined the old man in his world.
Job was at Dobson’s for four years and then he was apprenticed to old Nat Cooper the undertaker. Nat was kind but stern. He was a hell-fire dissenter and scarcely let Job out of his sight lest the devil run off with him. On Sundays he took him to a tin tabernacle at the opposite end of the city from St. Matthew’s, so that he never saw Polly, and he always took Job with him when a corpse had to be placed in a coffin, so that the boy should learn to think upon his latter end. Job did think upon it, and his nightmares came back. One thing, however, Nat did for him. He taught him carpentry. He learned to distinguish between the different kinds of wood, to love them and understand their ways. Realizing that the boy had great skill with his hands Nat gave him a few tools for his own and taught him wood carving. Job had these tools still and when he was sent out into the fen to find the flowers for the posies Keziah sold in the market, he would bring back bits of wood and make little gifts for Polly. First the books and then the wood. Each was a milestone for him on the way through.
After two years together Nat died and Job was back again on Mr. Fennimore’s hands, and Mr. Fennimore reapprenticed him to Albert Lee. He could hardly have chosen a trade less suited to Job’s temperament and talents, but he was interested in neither. If there was anyone in the world whom Job hated more than Lee it was Mr. Fennimore. Job was never resentful but he was a good fierce hater. There was a lake of fire in the hollow of the mountains in his world in which he had already deposited Dan Gurney, Mr. Fennimore, Lee and a few others. They had not died in it but lived there in the perpetual torment which the old undertaker had described to Job as the state of the damned. It was an exquisite pleasure to picture them there, but on the nights when he was traveling through his world with the old man he could never find the lake of fire.
3.
He fell asleep at last, waking after a few hours to the dull misery that always gripped him when he first woke up. Another day of the fish and the stink and the blows. Two more years of it. He moved and the pain ripped across his back. He burrowed his face into the dirty old pillow again and tore at it with his teeth. It could not have been more tattered than it was and it eased him to feel that he was doing to something that belonged to Lee what Lee was doing to him. He wished he could have done it to Lee. Then suddenly he remembered something; it was market day and Polly would come to the fish stall. Instantly he was quiet and knew the dawn had come and was slowly filling his room. He could hear bird voices crying out in the fen, for the river and the fen were forever bird-haunted. Presently he edged out of bed and moved cautiously to the window because his back was stiff and sore. The stench of the earth closets behind the houses made it impossible to smell the freshness of the morning, but he could see it. The river, though it was scummy where it flowed past Swithin’s Lane, was yet brimming with light and already arrowed here and there with the swift dart of moor hens. Beyond it the fen was wreathed in low silver mist to the horizon. Willow trees and clumps of reeds rose from it frosted and sparkling. There was a village on a hill a few miles away and the cock on its tall church spire took the glint of the morning. Three swans beat across his line of vision, blindingly white, the sound of their great wings tremendous in the morning silence. They passed and the scene settled again to its repose.
Job’s was a temperament that swung easily from one extreme to the other and now misery was lost in a joy that seemed lifting him off his feet. At this moment personal wretchedness seemed to him a small thing in comparison with the vast shining outer world that was always there, sustaining and holding him even when he did not remember or notice it, small even in comparison with his own world that he held within h
imself. The two, echoing and calling to each other, reflected some mystery that was greater than either.
There were shouts and the banging of doors, the smell of cooking. Swithin’s Lane had awoken to another day. He left the window and crept stiffly down the ladder and went out to the back to wash himself at the pump.
5. The Dean’s Watch
1.
THE sun soon conquered the mist and Isaac, as he passed under the great elms of the Close, looked up and saw pale gold leaves trembling against the blue of the sky. Down below there was no wind but up there a faint breeze fingered them. The frost had weakened their hold and even such a faint touch was too much for them. One after another they came slowly spinning down and one or two touched Isaac’s upturned face in falling. He stood looking up, entranced, and his hat fell off. But there was no one to see and laugh at him. At a quarter past nine in the morning the Close was deserted, except for a few well-fed ecclesiastical cats sunning themselves on the tops of the old walls that enclosed the gardens of the Cathedral dignitaries. In these sheltered gardens flowering time was not quite over and the pungent scent of chrysanthemums drifted from them, to mingle with the scent of the bonfire in the Deanery garden and the smell of the wet fallen leaves. How well Isaac knew these scents of autumn and the butterfly touch of falling leaves upon his face, sad or happy as his mood might be. Winter, spring and summer did not accommodate themselves to one’s moods as autumn did. They lacked its gentleness.
The Dean's Watch Page 7