That Glimpse of Truth

by David Miller

  But what has all this to do with my married happiness? How can all this affect my wife and me? Why – to tell what happened last autumn – do I run all this way back into the Past? The Past – what is the Past? I might say the star-shaped flake of soot on a leaf of the poor-looking plant, and the bird lying on the quilted lining of my cap, and my father’s pestle and my mother’s cushion, belong to it. But that is not to say they are any less mine than they were when I looked upon them with my very eyes, and touched them with these fingers. No, they are more; they are a living part of me. Who am I, in fact, as I sit here at this table, but my own past? If I deny that, I am nothing. And if I were to try and divide my life into childhood, youth, early manhood and so on, it would be a kind of affectation; I should know I was doing it just because of the pleasantly important sensation it gives one to rule lines, and to use green ink for childhood, red for the next stage, and purple for the period of adolescence. For, one thing I have learnt, one thing I do believe is, Nothing Happens Suddenly. Yes, that is my religion, I suppose …

  My mother’s death, for instance. Is it more distant from me to-day than it was then? It is just as close, as strange, as puzzling, and in spite of all the countless times I have recalled the circumstances, I know no more now than I did then whether I dreamed them or whether they really occurred. It happened when I was thirteen and I slept in a little strip of a room on what was called the Half Landing. One night I woke up with a start to see my mother, in her nightgown, without even the hated flannel dressing-gown, sitting on my bed. But the strange thing which frightened me was, she wasn’t looking at me. Her head was bent; the short thin tail of hair lay between her shoulders; her hands were pressed between her knees, and my bed shook; she was shivering. It was the first time I had ever seen her out of her own room. I said, or I think I said, “Is that you, mother?” And as she turned round I saw in the moonlight how queer she looked. Her face looked small – quite different. She looked like one of the boys at the school baths, who sits on a step, shivering just like that, and wants to go in and yet is frightened.

  “Are you awake?” she said. Her eyes opened; I think she smiled. She leaned towards me. “I’ve been poisoned,” she whispered. “Your father’s poisoned me.” And she nodded. Then, before I could say a word, she was gone, and I thought I heard the door shut. I sat quite still; I couldn’t move. I think I expected something else to happen. For a long time I listened for something; there wasn’t a sound. The candle was by my bed, but I was too frightened to stretch out my hand for the matches. But even while I wondered what I ought to do, even while my heart thumped – everything became confused. I lay down and pulled the blankets round me. I fell asleep, and the next morning my mother was found dead of failure of the heart.

  Did that visit happen? Was it a dream? Why did she come to tell me? Or why, if she came, did she go away so quickly? And her expression – so joyous under the frightened look – was that real? I believed it fully the afternoon of the funeral, when I saw my father dressed up for his part, hat and all. That tall hat so gleaming black and round was like a cork covered with black sealing-wax, and the rest of my father was awfully like a bottle, with his face for the label – Deadly Poison. It flashed into my mind as I stood opposite him in the hall. And Deadly Poison, or old D.P., was my private name for him from that day.

  Late, it grows late. I love the night. I love to feel the tide of darkness rising slowly and slowly washing, turning over and over, lifting, floating, all that lies strewn upon the dark beach, all that lies hid in rocky hollows. I love, I love this strange feeling of drifting – whither? After my mother’s death I hated to go to bed. I used to sit on the window-sill, folded up, and watch the sky. It seemed to me the moon moved much faster than the sun. And one big, bright green star I chose for my own. My star! But I never thought of it beckoning to me or twinkling merrily for my sake. Cruel, indifferent, splendid – it burned in the airy night. No matter – it was mine! But growing close up against the window there was a creeper with small, bunched up pink and purple flowers. These did know me. These, when I touched them at night, welcomed my fingers; the little tendrils, so weak, so delicate, knew I would not hurt them. When the wind moved the leaves I felt I understood their shaking. When I came to the window, it seemed to me the flowers said among themselves, “The boy is here.”

  As the months passed, there was often a light in my father’s room below. And I heard voices and laughter. “He’s got some woman with him,” I thought. But it meant nothing to me. Then the gay voice, the sound of the laughter, gave me the idea it was one of the girls who used to come to the shop in the evenings – and gradually I began to imagine which girl it was. It was the dark one in the red coat and skirt, who once had given me a penny. A merry face stooped over me – warm breath tickled my neck – there were little beads of black on her long lashes, and when she opened her arms to kiss me, there came a marvellous wave of scent! Yes, that was the one. Time passed, and I forgot the moon and my green star and my shy creeper – I came to the window to wait for the light in my father’s window, to listen for the laughing voice, until one night I dozed and I dreamed she came again – again she drew me to her, something soft, scented, warm and merry hung over me like a cloud. But when I tried to see, her eyes only mocked me, her red lips opened and she hissed, “Little sneak! little sneak!” But not as if she were angry, as if she understood, and her smile somehow was like a rat … hateful!

  The night after, I lighted the candle and sat down at the table instead. By and by, as the flame steadied, there was a small lake of liquid wax, surrounded by a white, smooth wall. I took a pin and made little holes in this wall and then sealed them up faster than the wax could escape. After a time I fancied the candle flame joined in the game; it leapt up, quivered, wagged; it even seemed to laugh. But while I played with the candle and smiled and broke off the tiny white peaks of wax that rose above the wall and floated them on my lake, a feeling of awful dreariness fastened on me – yes, that is the word. It crept up from my knees to my thighs, into my arms; I ached all over with misery. And I felt so strangely that I couldn’t move. Something bound me there by the table – I couldn’t even let the pin drop that I held between my finger and thumb. For a moment I came to a stop, as it were.

  Then the shrivelled case of the bud split and fell, the plant in the cupboard came into flower. “Who am I?” I thought. “What is all this?” And I looked at my room, at the broken bust of the man called Hahnemann on top of the cupboard, at my little bed with the pillow like an envelope. I saw it all, but not as I had seen before … Everything lived, but everything. But that was not all. I was equally alive and – it’s the only way I can express it – the barriers were down between us – I had come into my own world!

  The barriers were down. I had been all my life a little outcast; but until that moment no one had “accepted” me; I had lain in the cupboard – or the cave forlorn. But now – I was taken, I was accepted, claimed. I did not consciously turn away from the world of human beings; I had never known it; but I from that night did beyond words consciously turn towards my silent brothers …

  THE FALL OF THE IDOL

  Richmal Crompton

  Richmal Crompton (1890–1969) is known worldwide for her Just William stories. Born in Lancashire, she moved to London, trained as a school mistress, but had to stop teaching when she lost the use of her right leg through polio. She died in Bromley in 1969 having written plays and nearly fifty novels. In most of them, William is aged eleven.

  William was bored. He sat at his desk in the sunny schoolroom and gazed dispassionately at a row of figures on the blackboard.

  “It isn’t sense,” he murmured scornfully.

  Miss Drew was also bored, but, unlike William, she tried to hide the fact.

  “If the interest on a hundred pounds for one year is five pounds,” she said wearily, then, “William Brown, do sit up and don’t look so stupid!”

  William changed his position from that of lolling over
one side of his desk to that of lolling over the other, and began to justify himself.

  “Well, I can’t unnerstand any of it. It’s enough to make anyone look stupid when he can’t unnerstand any of it. I can’t think why people go on givin’ people bits of money for givin’ ’em lots of money and go on an’ on doin’ it. It dun’t seem sense. Anyone’s a mug for givin’ anyone a hundred pounds just ’cause he says he’ll go on givin’ him five pounds and go on stickin’ to his hundred pounds. How’s he to know he will? Well,” he warmed to his subject, “what’s to stop him not givin’ any five pounds once he’s got hold of the hundred pounds an’ goin’ on stickin’ to the hundred pounds –”

  Miss Drew checked him by a slim, upraised hand.

  “William,” she said patiently, “just listen to me. Now suppose,” her eyes roved round the room and settled on a small red-haired boy, “suppose that Eric wanted a hundred pounds for something and you lent it to him –”

  “I wun’t lend Eric a hundred pounds,” he said firmly, “’cause I ha’n’t got it. I’ve only got 3½d, an’ I wun’t lend that to Eric, ’cause I’m not such a mug, ’cause I lent him my mouth organ once an’ he bit a bit off an’ –”

  Miss Drew interrupted sharply. Teaching on a hot afternoon is rather trying.

  “You’d better stay in after school, William, and I’ll explain.”

  William scowled, emitted his monosyllable of scornful disdain “Huh!” and relapsed into gloom.

  He brightened, however, on remembering a lizard he had caught on the way to school, and drew it from its hiding place in his pocket. But the lizard had abandoned the unequal struggle for existence among the stones, top, penknife, bits of putty, and other small objects that inhabited William’s pocket. The housing problem had been too much for it.

  William in disgust shrouded the remains in blotting paper, and disposed of it in his neighbour’s inkpot. The neighbour protested and an enlivening scrimmage ensued.

  Finally the lizard was dropped down the neck of an inveterate enemy of William’s in the next row, and was extracted only with the help of obliging friends. Threats of vengeance followed, couched in blood-curdling terms, and written on blotting paper.

  Meanwhile Miss Drew explained Simple Practice to a small but earnest coterie of admirers in the front row. And William, in the back row, whiled away the hours for which his father paid the education authorities a substantial sum.

  But his turn was to come.

  At the end of afternoon school one by one the class departed, leaving William only nonchalantly chewing an India rubber and glaring at Miss Drew.

  “Now, William.”

  Miss Drew was severely patient.

  William went up to the platform and stood by her desk.

  “You see, if someone borrows a hundred pounds from someone else –”

  She wrote down the figures on a piece of paper, bending low over her desk. The sun poured in through the window, showing the little golden curls in the nape of her neck. She lifted to William eyes that were stern and frowning, but blue as blue above flushed cheeks.

  “Don’t you see, William?” she said.

  There was a faint perfume about her, and William the devil-may-care pirate and robber-chief, the stern despiser of all things effeminate, felt the first dart of the malicious blind god. He blushed and simpered.

  “Yes, I see all about it now,” he assured her. “You’ve explained it all plain now. I cudn’t unnerstand it before. It’s a bit soft – in’t it – anyway, to go lending hundred pounds about just ’cause someone says they’ll give you five pounds next year. Some folks is mugs. But I do unnerstand now. I cudn’t unnerstand it before.”

  “You’d have found it simpler if you hadn’t played with dead lizards all the time,” she said wearily, closing her books.

  William gasped.

  He went home her devoted slave. Certain members of the class always deposited dainty bouquets on her desk in the morning. William was determined to outshine the rest. He went into the garden with a large basket and a pair of scissors the next morning before he set out for school.

  It happened that no one was about. He went first to the hothouse. It was a riot of colour. He worked there with a thoroughness and concentration worthy of a nobler cause. He came out staggering beneath a piled-up basket of hothouse blooms. The hothouse itself was bare and desolate.

  Hearing a sound in the back garden he hastily decided to delay no longer, but to set out to school at once. He set out as unostentatiously as possible.

  Miss Drew, entering her classroom, was aghast to see instead of the usual small array of buttonholes on her desk, a mass of already withering hothouse flowers completely covering her desk and chair.

  William was a boy who never did things by halves.

  “Good Heavens!” she cried in consternation.

  William blushed with pleasure.

  He changed his seat to one in the front row. All that morning he sat, his eyes fixed on her earnestly, dreaming of moments in which he rescued her from robbers and pirates (here he was somewhat inconsistent with his own favourite role of robber-chief and pirate), and bore her fainting in his strong arms to safety. Then she clung to him in love and gratitude, and they were married at once by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.

  William would have no half measures. They were to be married by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, or else the Pope. He wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t rather have the Pope. He would wear his black pirate suit with the skull and crossbones. No, that would not do –

  “What have I just been saying, William?” said Miss Drew.

  William coughed and gazed at her soulfully.

  “’Bout lendin’ money?” he said, hopefully.

  “William!” she snapped. “This isn’t an arithmetic lesson. I’m trying to teach you about the Armada.”

  “Oh, that!” said William brightly and ingratiatingly. “Oh, yes.”

  “Tell me something about it.”

  “I don’t know anything – not jus’ yet –”

  “I’ve been telling you about it. I do wish you’d listen,” she said despairingly.

  William relapsed into silence, nonplussed, but by no means cowed.

  When he reached home that evening he found that the garden was the scene of excitement and hubbub. One policeman was measuring the panes of glass in the conservatory door, and another was on his knees examining the beds near. His grown-up sister, Ethel, was standing at the front door.

  “Every single flower has been stolen from the conservatory some time this morning,” she said excitedly. “We’ve only just been able to get the police. William, did you see anyone about when you went to school this morning?”

  William pondered deeply. His most guileless and innocent expression came to his face.

  “No,” he said at last. “No, Ethel, I didn’t see nobody.”

  William coughed and discreetly withdrew.

  That evening he settled down at the library table, spreading out his books around him, a determined frown upon his small face.

  His father was sitting in an armchair by the window reading the evening paper.

  “Father,” said William suddenly, “s’pose I came to you an’ said you was to give me a hundred pounds an’ I’d give you five pounds next year an’ so on, would you give it me?”

  “I should not, my son,” said his father firmly.

  William sighed.

  “I knew there was something wrong with it,” he said.

  Mr Brown returned to the leading article, but not for long.

  “Father, what was the date of the Armada?”

  “Good Heavens! How should I know? I wasn’t there.”

  William sighed.

  “Well, I’m tryin’ to write about it and why it failed an’ – why did it fail?”

  Mr Brown groaned, gathered up his paper, and retired to the dining-room.

  He had almost finished the leading article when William appeared, his arms full of b
ooks, and sat down quietly at the table.

  “Father, what’s the French for “my aunt is walking in the garden”?”

  “What on earth are you doing?” said Mr Brown irritably.

  “I’m doing my home lessons,” said William virtuously.

  “I never even knew you had the things to do.”

  “No,” William admitted gently, “I don’t generally take much bother over them, but I’m goin’ to now – ’cause Miss Drew” – he blushed slightly and paused – “’cause Miss Drew” – he blushed more deeply and began to stammer, “’c – ’cause Miss Drew” – he was almost apoplectic.