by David Miller
“She burns no more.”
Before his face the sun showed its edge above the tree-tops, rising steadily. The breeze freshened; a great brilliance burst upon the lagoon, sparkled on the rippling water. The forests came out of the clear shadows of the morning, became distinct, as if they had rushed nearer – to stop short in a great stir of leaves, of nodding boughs, of swaying branches. In the merciless sunshine the whisper of unconscious life grew louder, speaking in an incomprehensible voice round the dumb darkness of that human sorrow. Arsat’s eyes wandered slowly, then stared at the rising sun.
“I can see nothing,” he said half aloud to himself.
“There is nothing,” said the white man, moving to the edge of the platform and waving his hand to his boat. A shout came faintly over the lagoon and the sampan began to glide towards the abode of the friend of ghosts.
“If you want to come with me, I will wait all the morning,” said the white man, looking away upon the water.
“No, Tuan,” said Arsat softly. “I shall not eat or sleep in this house, but I must first see my road. Now I can see nothing – see nothing! There is no light and no peace in the world; but there is death – death for many. We were sons of the same mother – and I left him in the midst of enemies; but I am going back now.”
He drew a long breath and went on in a dreamy tone.
“In a little while I shall see clear enough to strike – to strike. But she has died, and … now … darkness.”
He flung his arms wide open, let them fall along his body, then stood still with unmoved face and stony eyes, staring at the sun. The white man got down into his canoe. The polers ran smartly along the sides of the boat, looking over their shoulders at the beginning of a weary journey. High in the stern, his head muffled up in white rags, the juragan sat moody, letting his paddle trail in the water. The white man, leaning with both arms over the grass roof of the little cabin, looked back at the shining ripple of the boat’s wake. Before the sampan passed out of the lagoon into the creek he lifted his eyes. Arsat had not moved. In the searching clearness of crude sunshine he was still standing before the house, he was still looking through the great light of a cloudless day into the hopeless darkness of the world.
FLEET-FOOTED HESTER
George Gissing
George Gissing (1857–1903) was the subject of a fine Private Eye Clerihew in the late 1980s, which read, if memory serves:
If you haven’t read Gissing
You don’t know what you’re missing:
Endless novels
About whores in hovels.
He wrote over twenty novels, the best known being New Grub Street. He died from emphysema aged forty-six, three days after Christmas; rather uncharacteristically, H.G. Wells nursed him on his deathbed.
She was born and bred in Hackney – the third child of a burly, thick-witted soldier, who had married without leave. Her mother, a thin but wiry woman, took in washing, and supported the family. At sixteen, Hester had a splendid physique: strangers imagined her a fine girl of nineteen or twenty. It was then she ceased running races with the lads in London Fields, for she was engaged to John Rayner, a foreman at the gasworks.
In spite of her petticoats – she would not wear a frock that fell much below the ankle – Hester could beat all but the champion runner of that locality; the average youth had no chance against her. Running was her delight and glory. At the short distance she made capital records, and for “stay” she could have held her own in a public school paper-chase.
Of course John Rayner put an end to all that. It was her running, witnessed by chance when they were strangers to each other, that excited him to an uneasy interest. He made inquiries, sought out her parents, wooed, won a provisional assent; there was an understanding, however, that she should run no more, at all events, in places of public resort. Rayner’s salary came to about two hundred a year; when he married he would take a house of his own; his wife must conform to the rules of civilisation. Hester willingly agreed, for, though she manifested no strong attachment, large prospects decidedly appealed to her, and she rejoiced in the envious admiration of girls who could not hope for a lover with more than thirty shillings a week.
Moreover, he was a man to be proud of. It would have been a calamity had Hester plighted her troth to some whippersnapper of a clerk or artisan, some mortal of poor blood and stinted stature. John Rayner was her male complement: a stalwart fellow, six feet or close upon it, of warm complexion, keen eye, independent bearing. Intellectually, altogether her superior, but a man of the open air, companionable, full of animal passions, little disposed to use his brains in the way of improving a very haphazard education. As a lad he had run away from home – somewhere in the North – and he throve well simply because he did not become a reprobate; for John there was no medium. For him, to fall in love meant something beyond the conception of common men. His fiery worship puzzled Hester, who as yet was by no means ripe for respondent passion.
She looked what she was, a noble savage. Her speech was the speech of Hackney, but on her lips it lost its excessive meanness, and became a fit expression of an elementary, not a degraded, mind. At school she had learnt little or nothing, yet idleness, in her case, seemed compatible with purity; an unconscious reserve kept her apart from the loose-tongued girls of the neighbourhood. She respected her body, was remarkable for cleanliness, aimed in attire at ease and decency, never at display. It was but rarely that she laughed; the sense of humour seemed quite lacking in her. But no one lived from day to day with more vigour of enjoyment. She had the appetite of a ploughboy. Notwithstanding her neglect of cheap triumphs, a vigorous ambition ruled her life. She boasted of John Rayner’s four pounds a week because it seemed to her a very large income indeed; she liked the man because he seemed to her much stronger, and better-looking, and more authoritative than other men with whom she came in contact.
For half a year all went fairly well. Hester had worked at a pickle-factory, but Rayner, disapproving of this, secretly paid her mother an equivalent of the wages, that she might be kept at home. An elder sister, who had hitherto helped in the laundry, went out to work, and Hester took her place; not a very good arrangement, for the girl would not trouble herself to starch and iron skilfully; but it was only for a short time. At seventeen Hester was to be married.
Then befell a calamity. Challenged to run against a lad who boasted himself to be somewhat in the race-course, Hester could not resist the temptation. Late one evening she stole forth and ran the race – and was defeated. Soon hearing of this breach of their agreement, John Rayner came down in wrath. Had Hester been victorious in her contest, she might have bowed the head and asked pardon; mortification made her stubborn and resentful of chiding. There was a quarrel, of characteristic vigour on both sides, and for a week the two kept apart. The good offices of Hester’s mother brought them together again, but John was not his old self; he had become suspicious, jealous. Presently he began to make inquiries concerning one Albert Batchelor, who seemed to be much at the house. He objected to this young man – a paper-hanger’s assistant, smelling of hair-oil and of insolence. Hester wrathfully defended the acquaintance: she had known Albert Batchelor all her life: his object, if any at all, was to make love to her sister; Mr Rayner must be a little less of an autocrat, notwithstanding his place at the gasworks and his ample pay. Language of this kind brought the blood into John’s face; there was a second conflict, more vigorous than the former. Hester tore the ring from her finger, and flung it to the ground – they were in Victoria Park.
“Tike it, and tike yerself off!” she exclaimed, with magnificent scorn, “I don’t want nothin” to do with a man like you.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” was the furious answer. “It’s very certain you won’t do for me! Just send me back my letters, and – and anything else you’ve no use for.”
“I’ll very soon do that! And never show your bad-tempered face again near our ’ouse.”
John turned his back a
nd marched away. His letters and presents were returned – in a very ill-made parcel – and the rupture seemed final.
“You’re a fool, that’s what you are!” observed Hester’s mother. “Now you may go to the pickles ag’in, and let your sister come back to the work as she didn’t ought never to have left.”
“I’ll go precious quick, and glad of it!” Hester made retort.
But she ran no more races and perceptibly a change had come over her. Old friends gave place to new girls of more pretentious stamp than those Hester had formerly chosen. She dressed with corresponding increase of showiness, began to frequent the Standard Theatre whenever she had money to spare, and “carried on” with various young men. About this time her father died, which, on the whole, was a fortunate event, for he had grown of late too fond of rum, and might soon have been a serious burden upon the household which he had never exerted himself to assist. John Rayner heard the news, and one evening managed to encounter Hester in a street near her home. He spoke kindly, gently, but the girl answered only a few cold words and went her way.
A week later he saw her on Hackney Downs with Albert Batchelor. She was laughing noisily – a thing John had never known her do.
One night Hester stayed out so late that her mother threatened chastisement if the offence were repeated. That threat brought about another crisis in the girl’s life. She left home, took lodgings for herself, and henceforth held little communication with her family.
For a space of two years John Rayner spoke not a word to the girl he loved, and in the meanwhile his circumstances underwent a notable change. First of all, owing to outrageous fits of temper, he was dismissed from his place as foreman; his employers offered him work in the carpenter’s shop, a notable degradation. At first John scornfully refused, and left the works altogether; but in a few days – extraordinary thing in so proud a man – he returned as though humbled; he was willing to accept the inferior employment. Again he got into trouble, this time through drink; he was reduced to the smith’s shop, and bore the disgrace without murmuring. Time went on; one day John fought with a fellow workman, and behaved like a wild beast. He had the choice given him of leaving the works altogether or “going to the heap.” To go to the heap signified to labour as a loader of coke. John accepted his debasement, went to the heap, and toiled among the roughest men, making himself as one of them. He drank, and seemed to glory in the fate that had come upon him. To all appearances he was now a sturdy blackguard, coarse of language, violent in demeanour. He terrorised his companions; with him it was a word and a blow. His comely face had lost its tint of robust health; he wore grimy rags; his home was anywhere and nowhere.
Now of all these things Hester was well aware. An old friend of hers, a girl married at sixteen and widowed at twenty, knew John Rayner, and from time to time talked with him; this Mrs Heffron assiduously reported to Hester each calamitous step in John’s history.
“It’s because of you,” she kept repeating. “If you was a girl with a ’art you’d go an’ make it up with the poor man.”
“Me! A likely thing!”
“He’s awfully fond of you.”
“How d’you know?” asked Hester, indifferently.
“’Cos he always says he don’t care for you not a bit.”
This, to be sure, was evidence. Hester mused, but would not discuss the matter. She talked a good deal just now of Albert Batchelor, whose employment kept him in South London, so that she saw him very seldom.
In the summer of this year Hester was just nineteen; she and Mrs Heffron went one Sunday morning into Victoria Park, taking it in turns to push a perambulator which contained the young widow’s two-year-old child. At one point of their walk they passed a man who lay asleep on the grass; Hester went by without noticing him, but Mrs Heffron, suddenly casting back a glance, exclaimed in surpnse –
“Why, that’s Mr Rayner!”
Her companion stopped and looked. John lay in profound slumber, head on arm. He had dressed himself decently this morning and was clean. For nearly a minute Hester gazed at him, then made a summoning motion and went on.
“A precious good job I didn’t marry ’im!” she said.
“It’s all your fault, Hetty,” replied the other, looking back.
“No, it ain’t. He’d have come low, anyway. He ain’t half a man.”
Albert Batchelor proposed marriage to Hester for the third time, but she would give him no definite reply. That she encouraged him was not to be doubted. This autumn he spent a good deal of time in her company: she allowed him to say what he liked, and constantly smiled, but a characteristic reserve appeared in her replies – when she made any. Frequently Hester spoke scarce twenty words in the course of an hour’s walk. In fact, a strange silence had fallen upon her life, and she shunned ordinary companionship. Her temper was occasionally violent, but the old ardours never appeared in her; she had quite ceased to talk of her feats as a runner. In beauty, however, she had by no means fallen off; her lithe frame seemed to have reached the perfection of development, and her face had more expressiveness, consequently more charm, than when it was wont to be flushed with the fervour of physical contest. No one attacked Hester’s reputation; her talk was still pure, and to all appearances she went fancy-free.
On an evening of September, Batchelor and she walked in a quiet road not far from her lodgings. Few people passed them, but presently they were both aware that an acquaintance approached, no other than John Rayner. He wore the coarse clothes in which he worked “at the heap.” Hester fixed her eyes upon him; he saw her, but would not look, and carelessly he went by.
“Will you let him insult me like that?” said the girl, in a hard voice, the moment after John had passed.
“Insult you? What did he do?”
“Why, he looked at me as insultin’ as he could – you must a’seen it. You’re a nice man to walk with anyone!”
Her face was hot; she stood still, pointing after John’s figure.
“It isn’t the first time, neither,” she added, with breathless rapidity. “If you let him go off like that I’ll never speak to you again!”
Mr Batchelor was not exactly a combative man, though he had serviceable thews, and on occasion could face the enemy. The present affair annoyed him for he suspected that Hester had either imagined or invented the insult from Rayner; perhaps she wished to see John punished for the sake of old times. For an instant he hesitated.
“Coward!” cried the girl, with a face of bitter contempt.
That was more than Batchelor could endure.
“Hoigh!” he shouted, running after Rayner, who had reached a distance of twenty yards. “Hoigh, you! – jist stop, will you?”
The other turned in astonishment.
“Are you speaking to me?”
“Yis, I em. What d’ye mean by insultin’ this young lydy? She says you looked at her insultin’ and it ain’t the first time neither. You jist come along ‘ere an’ apologise.”
John gazed at the speaker in bewilderment, then at Hester, who had moved a few steps this way.
“She says I’ve insulted her?”
“Mind who you’re calling she. Why, you’re at it again, a turnin’ up yer nose –”
“If you say another word to me,” said John fiercely, “I’ll leave you no nose to twist. Fool!”
He turned away, but at the same moment received a smart blow on the side of the face.
“That’s your game, is it?” John remarked, again glancing towards Hester, who was leaning slightly forward, with eager gaze. “Look out for yourself, then!”
His coat was off, and in less than a minute Albert Batchelor measured his length on the pavement. There sounded from the spectator of the fight a short mocking laugh. Up again, not much the worse, her champion made excellent play with his fists: blood was on Rayner’s cheek. Unable to plant another knockdown blow, John had still the best of it. Crash, and crash again, sounded his slogging hits. At length he damaged his opponent’s front t
eeth and brought him to his knees.
“Had enough, you fool?” he asked.
Three or four people had assembled, and others were rushing up. A window in the nearest house flew open; women’s voices were heard. The light of a lamp, shining full on Hester, showed her watching with fierce delight.
“I wouldn’t give in, if I was you,” she cried, tauntingly, to Batchelor.
Nor did he. The gathering crowd made it impossible. Another round was fought; it took perhaps, two minutes, and, in that space of time, Batchelor received so severe a thrashing that he tottered to the house steps, and sank there, helpless.
“Don’t try it on again, young fellow,” was John’s parting advice, as he took up his coat and hustled through the throng.
At the same moment Hester went off in the opposite direction, an exulting smile in her eyes. Albert Batchelor never again sought her society.
On reaching home, Hester lit her lamp – it revealed a scrubby little bedroom with an attic window – took off her hat and jacket, and deliberately lay down on the bed. She lay there for an hour or more, gazing at nothing, smiling, her lips moving as though she talked to herself. At eleven o’clock she rose, put on her hat, and once more left the house. She walked as far as the spot where the fight had taken place. It was very quiet here, and very gloomy. A policeman approached and she spoke to him.
“P’liceman, can you tell me ’ow fur it is from ’ere to the corner of Beck Street?” she pointed.