by Philip Child
“So are we all.… Do you go to church? Did you go this morning, Joanna?”
“Yes,” said Joanna, pleased.
“Tell me about the sermon.”
“All of it?”
“Why, yes, whatever you can remember.”
“The text, too? Everything he said?”
Surprised at the girl’s eagerness, Aunt Joanna nodded with a smile. Joanna settled herself comfortably on the hassock and a faraway look came into her eyes.
“The third chapter of the Book of Job, and the third verse,” she announced in a low, intense voice; then with a slight alteration of tone: “The third chapter of the Book of Job, and the third verse. Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, There is a man child conceived.”
Aunt Joanna moved uneasily and put down her trumpet for a moment. The note of human despair on a child’s lips sounded eerie and dreadful.… But how perfectly and how unconsciously the child mimicked with her thin voice the intonations of a theatrical preacher. The old lady began to think: “I ought not to have —”
“My dear friends,” said Joanna, raising both her palms with the gesture of a preacher compelling the attention of his congregation. “These terrible words of the man of Uz, spoken from the tomb of the past, bring us face to face with the age old problem of evil. Sickness? Suffering? Why must they be? Who among us, seeing his dear ones, his parents and children bearing the mysterious cross of suffering, has not asked that question.…”
Great-Aunt Joanna Thatcher gazed at the rapt face of her goddaughter. Did the child know what she was saying? One by one the Thatchers and the Burnets in the room stopped talking and listened in tense silence to a child’s voice uttering the thoughts of a rather unctuous man.
“Oh-h , my dear friends” — the thin little voice swelled with the studied emotion of a preacher whose voice reaches out and gathers his audience into an embrace — “The suffering of those we love, is it not a challenge to us who are whole? How ap-applicable to us of the twentieth century is this Bible of ours! Sickness! Social injustice! Bereavement! War, bringing suffering to the innocent with the guilty! All the ills of human life! Have we not all had our pride humbled into the dust through seeing those whom we deemed part of ourselves — our own children, perhaps — suffering, and we powerless to help them…?”
Word for word Joanna repeated what she had heard that morning, with the same gestures, the same florid fluctuations of emotion. Unmindful of herself and of her audience of grown-ups , and unconscious that she, a child of six about to be baptized, was a figure of irony, she pierced the heart of more than one person in the room: of Pen, who thought how a man spends his youth trying to make a secure inner life for himself, only to see it vanish like a puff of smoke when he finds himself living his own bitter troubles over again in his children’s lives; of Maud, who always managed her moods and was cheerful except when unexpected chance brought her face to face with a hidden fear; of the old lady sitting on the sofa, in whom age had long since dulled the pain of life so terribly uttered by a young voice.
She put her hand on her godchild’s shoulder and her voice shook a little. “Thank you, Joanna. You are a dear little girl. But now I think you should stop before you become too excited.”
Murdo in surplice and stole came into the room and the service began. Joanna was excited, and all at once she felt that the pain which she knew so well was not far away. That would be dreadful! … The words of the service moved her to the depth of her soul.… And being steadfast in faith, may so pass the waves of this troublesome world. … The waves rolled in like surf beating on the shore. She trembled.… Great-Aunt Joanna lifted her trumpet and gave response in a firm voice: All this I steadfastly believe . Presently, everyone knelt and there was a rustle of silk like a breeze passing through leaves. The scene and the spoken words became dulled to Joanna, for pain had surrounded her like a mist. She whispered: “Father, please take me upstairs. I feel ill.”
Pen gathered her in his arms and took her upstairs, and Maud followed.
Burnets and Thatchers, drawn for a moment into one family by the too-bigness of life, watched them go in silence.
Dan stood by himself, awkward and self-conscious , though no one was looking at him. Murdo noticed him and said in a voice which he meant to be kind, but which sounded stern to Dan: “Well, my boy. You must take care of your sister. Someday it may be your responsibility. We don’t choose our responsibilities, you know; they choose us.”
Dan did not answer. He looked at the ground with the confused, troubled expression of a child who has been scolded; he was not quite sure why.
II
Most of the relations had left Ardentinny after the christening. Dan mooned about watching his mother and Aunt Fanny. His mother was ironing a flannel nightgown for Joanna. Tamp-tamp-tamp with the iron in short jabs on the collar and sleeves; then she lifted the garment carefully to fold it. Looking up, she smiled at him with her calm smile; it made him feel better.
Aunt Fanny was talking in an undertone, but he heard a little. “The doctor … Maud, it’s a terrible thing.…”
Mother put down the iron carefully on the mat and her look went inside as if she were thinking to herself. “It’s devilish,” she said softly.
He went up to his room and undressed by candlelight, dawdling in order to put off being put in bed with the light out. Alastair was asleep, and Joanna now slept in another room. He heard his mother’s murmur from Joanna’s room telling Joanna about the Princess Perdita and the fairy toadstools. “Ten good fairies sat on a circle of toadstools, and on another magic circle sat ten bad fairies; the good fairies liked people and wanted to help them, but the bad fairies wanted to harm them. One day Perdita went for a walk and all the fairies, both the good fairies and the bad fairies, beckoned to her.…” The wax melted and ran down the candle, making a glistening pool at the bottom. Idly, Dan picked up the lump of hot wax and pressed it into a pellet. “If I flip this so that it hits the doorknob, Joanna will get well,” he thought. But he was afraid to throw it. He blew out the candle, and presently, he went to sleep.
He awoke with a voice ringing in his ears and knew instantly whose it was. It was still nighttime, but moonlight lightened the room with cold brightness. The boy listened with taut muscles for the cry that had awakened him, and almost at once it came again. “Mother! Where are you? Come quickly!” Then the sound of his parents, hurrying up the stairs, their footfalls as they moved about the room, their voices talking low so that he and Alastair should not hear. Alastair was still asleep — of course.
Dan got out of bed, and barefoot, tiptoed down the hall until he stood outside the room. He listened, his heart thumping in his breast like a clock in an empty room.
He heard his father’s voice. “We must never let him feel it was his fault, Maud. It would do him harm to grow up with a thought like that.”
“We must not think it ourselves, Pen. You can’t blame a child for an accident.… Do you think he remembers?”
“No! No, of course not, thank heaven. A child doesn’t look backward or forward.”
The little boy standing outside the door did not know that he was shivering from cold. He was not conscious of himself standing there with the moonlight cleaving the dark, still hall to his feet like a spear. He did not even think, with the detachment of grown people, that he felt miserable, but a terrible dart pierced him, as when in a dream you fall suddenly before you can brace yourself. He felt a sickening dread, but he felt it as a child feels it, with no remembered pattern of dismay and panic to teach him that even despair heals, leaving a scar to be sure, but smoothed out to a recollection.
The picture that flashed in his memory was of Joanna crumpled on the floor of the barn with her head gashed … the other children stricken suddenly into silence … his father carrying Joanna in his arms and giving Dan, as he passed him, a
n unforgettable look of horror. “Come into the house, all of you,” he had said. Hours later, it seemed, his father had come out to them and asked sternly: “How did this happen?”
They had all answered at once, except Dan, who could not have spoken. “We were playing theatre — Dan was going to juggle with croquet balls and —”
“Alastair, you tell me,” said Pen.
“Dan had on a dress suit, Father, and when he started to juggle, he fell and lost his temper and —”
“Mr. Thatcher,” exclaimed Beatrice Elton indignantly (she always took Dan’s side), “it wasn’t like that at all. Alastair tripped Dan on purpose and Dan fell and was hit by a ball and ripped his dress suit. Then Dan lost his temper and he threw a ball at Alastair and Alastair ducked and it hit Joanna and it knocked her off the stage and she hit a shovel and Alastair is a sneak and Dan didn’t do it on purpose, truly he didn’t.”
His father had said: “My boy, you have done a terrible thing.”
Joanna’s voice, calling in panic out of the night’s vacancy, froze his heart. He was too young to bear the knowledge of man’s insecurity in life, and yet the urgency of the cry sank down to that dark fear born with the child, only later to be understood completely by the man.… Beyond the door he could still hear his parents’ voices whispering so that he should not hear. He could not bear it.
There was only one thing for a child to do, and he did it instinctively. He had to run away. He was fleeing from himself, not from persons or places.
He crept back to his room and sat down on the bed, dangling his legs in the path of the moonbeam. Silence now in the house except for the footsteps pacing up and down, up and down in Joanna’s room.… You wished to march out into the wide world — there it lay, outside the window, you had only to step into it.
He put on old clothes, quietly, so as not to wake Alastair. Then he took his twenty-two rifle out of the bureau drawer; for a gipsy often had to shoot rabbits for the pot. Gipsies lived by their good right arm; here today and gone tomorrow, they roamed over the wide world with never a care as long as they had horses and tents and their guns to get food with. He dropped the rifle from the window, climbed out, walked along a ledge to the upper veranda, and swarmed down a post onto the lawn. The grass was wet with dew and shone like silver.
At the gate he turned and looked back at Ardentinny. It stood rambling, ivy-clad , its incongruities mellowed as age mellows the visible marks of conflict in a man; dark, though, and a little grim, like the visage of a puritan. But to the boy it was simply his home. He said goodbye to it.
He turned his face down Galinée Street and began to walk fast. The gipsies! Kekkeno mush’s poov. There was not a single footfall but his own in the deserted streets. Presently, he had passed the limits of the city and was walking down a dusty country road toward Cholera Point. He began to feel tired, but he was still elated. Beside the road there was a neglected garden; he climbed the fence and lay down in the long grass under a snowball bush in blossom, and stared up through the leaves into the moon-white sky. Behind the bush a Lombardy poplar pointed its spear to the sky, standing guard over the blossoming shrub like a pikeman over dreaming beauty. But Dan did not think of that; no words came to him to express the poetry of the night. Uncorrupted by the need of maturity to voice the beauty that eluded us, he could drink it in, not with coldly analyzing reason, but with his whole soul. This is to be free! No moment before or after — only this!
He got up and walked on and on.
A dog barked and Dan, rounding a turn in the road, spied the gaudy gipsy wagons with their empty shafts nuzzling the grass and the horses tethered to their carved sides. A man was sitting beside the embers of a fire in front of the wagons, mending a harness. He was the colour of an Indian, Dan thought, only with sharper features. He went on working at the harness without looking up. Dan was very tired, and all at once he felt frightened. His boy’s dream of himself living a glorious life among gipsies changed to reality. These were strangers; what would they say?
He marched forward over his fear, and the gipsy looked up and surveyed with sharp eyes the small apparition shouldering a twenty-two rifle. He showed no surprise, and Dan suddenly realized that he had been observed for some time.
He planted himself in front of the man and said, “Good morning,” in a faltering voice.
“Is it?” said the gipsy impassively.… “Now who may you be?”
“I’m Daniel Thatcher.”
“Thatcher? And where do you live?”
“I live in Ardentinny. That’s the big house under the hill, near the asylum.… Only I don’t anymore.”
“Oho! So you don’t anymore?”
“No.… I’d like to be a gipsy.”
The man did not seem in the least surprised. He turned his head a little, without taking his eyes from Dan, and called: “Lil, auvacoi !” A woman glided out from the caravan door and stood beside him. The man spoke to her quietly and so low that Dan could not hear what they said. Gipsy talk? he wondered. Then the man raised his voice. “He wants to be a Romany chal , Lil.”
The woman stared at Dan, then she and the man looked at each other. Dan thought they smiled.
“He looks like a —” began the woman, but the man said imperiously, “Jal a bit!” Then to Dan, “So you want to be a gipsy, boy?”
“Yes,” said Dan.
“What does your father do?”
“He is a maner — manufacturer of steel.”
“Of steel, eh? Why did you run away?”
“Because — because I wanted to.”
“To see the world, eh?”
“Yes.”
“And what will your father and mother say?”
Dan hung his head.
“Don’t they want you at home?”
“Oh, yes!” exclaimed Dan, “but — but you see my sister —” But he could not tell strangers about Joanna. “What can you do, boy? Could you go without food for three days? Could you lie all night under a hedgerow when it’s raining? Could you walk all day and watch the horses at night? Could you?”
“Yes,” said Dan stoutly.
“Do you know how to steal chickens?” asked the man with a twinkle. “Do you know how to lie? Can you bakkarder a horse — tell fortunes — read a patteran ? What can you do?”
“I can shoot rabbits,” asserted Dan.
“He can shoot rabbits!” repeated the gipsy drolly to Lil, and they both burst into laughter that was so contagious and so friendly that he began to like them.
“Now look you, boy. You have to be born free to be a gipsy.… Now you lie down here and put this blanket over you.”
“But I don’t want to sleep,” said Dan suspiciously.
“Then look at the stars. Which is the Pole Star?”
“I don’t know,” said Dan sheepishly.
“And you want to be a gipsy!”
Dan settled into the blanket which the gipsy woman tucked around his shoulders. From the caravan came a procession of dark sprites younger than Dan, without so much as a rag of clothing over their little pot bellies; they formed a ring around Dan and stared at him solemnly. They began to whisper to their mother.
“Hush!” said the woman sternly. “Don’t you know enough not to rakker Romany before a gorgio ?”
“But he’s dark like us.”
“He’s not a Romany chal , he’s a gorgio .”
Dan watched the gipsy unhitch a horse, mount him bareback and set off into the night toward Wellington.
He slept and dreamed that he and the little gipsies were playing together. He was one of them; they talked gipsy and he could understand them. Joanna was there, too, but she was not one of them. They all began to tease her because she could not understand what they said. He was teasing her, too. She burst out weeping and began to cry for her mother,
but no one came.… In his sleep Dan tossed off his blanket and called shrilly for his mother. Then he awoke. Dazed with sleep, he saw his mother and father bending over him. He clung to his mother as if he would never let her go.
Behind his parents stood Uncle Murdo and Uncle Charles. Murdo looked grim as if he had been prepared for the worst all along. Uncle Charles winked at him and grinned. A bill changed hands between Pen and the gipsy.
“It’s worth more than a ten spot, ain’t it boss, me being honest and riding miles into the city?”
“And mind you,” said Pen, but with a humorous twinkle to take the edge off his words, “the house has police protection and burglar alarms.”
“Right you are, sir,” said the gipsy with a gracious wave of the hand. “Nothing in it for me in them old houses. Give me the noovoo rich every time.”
“Goodbye, my little chal ,” called the woman, “you come back to me when you’re a grown man!” and the gipsy woman and the gipsy man and Uncle Charles and even the gipsy dogs laughed; Dan could not see why. But his father and Uncle Murdo looked angry.
They were in the carriage going back to Ardentinny. Dan sat hunched up between his father and Uncle Murdo; his mother and Uncle Charles were on the seat facing him. “Well, Daniel?” said Pen. “Do you think it was kind to your mother to run away without a word?” Dan hung his head.
“One would suppose,” put in Murdo, talking across Dan, “that his mother and father had troubles enough without his adding to them.” He gave the boy a penetrating look. “You hadn’t thought of that, had you?”
Dan began to weep.
“What you seem to need is stiffening. Stop snivelling, my boy! You’ve got to learn to be a man. You mustn’t shirk your responsibilities.”
Charles exclaimed indignantly: “Fiddlesticks, Murdo! He’s only a boy. And I’m glad he had the — the guts to run away! Much better than getting sullen and curdled inside. It’s a promising sign — action, no brooding.” Dan sobbed uncontrollably.