Despair's Last Journey

CHAPTER I

The first hint of memory showed a hearth, a fire, and a woman sitting in a chair with an outstretched finger. An invisible hand bunched his petticoats behind, and at his feet was a rug made of looped fragments of cloth of various colours. He lurched across the rug and caught the finger with a sense of adventure and triumph. Somebody clapped hands and laughed. Memory gave no more.

Then there was a long, narrow, brick-paved yard, a kind of oblong well, with one of the narrower sides broken down. The bricks of the pavement were of many colours--browns, purples, reds. They were full of breakages and hollows, and in rainy weather small pools gathered in the petty valleys. The loftiest boundary wall had once been whitewashed, but was now streaked green and yellow with old rains. A pump with a worn trough of stone stood half-way up the yard, and near it was a boy--a very little boy, in petticoats, and a yellow straw hat with ribbons. The frock he wore was of some tartan pattern, with red and green in it He had white thread socks, and shoes with straps across the instep. The straps were fastened with round glass buttons, and the child, with his feet planted close together, was looking down at the buttons with a flush of pride. He was conscious of being prettily attired, and this was his first remembered touch of personal vanity.

He was walking and crying in an old-fashioned village street, crying because his fat small thighs were chafing one another. It was Sunday, or a holiday, for his father was in a tall silk hat and black broadcloth and high collar, and a satin stock which fastened with a shiny buckle high up in the neck behind. His father stooped and lifted him, and carried him all the way to an old house with three front-doors, and porches over the doors, and a cage with two doves in it hanging on the lichened wall. There was a hedged garden opposite the house, with four poplars in the hedgerow. Their tops went right into the blue. Inside the old house was an old gentleman who was called Uncle. Round the room he sat in were hung a number of fiddles in green-baize bags. How he had learned what the bags held the child could not tell, but he knew. The old gentleman took him on his knee, and allowed him to touch his whiskers, which were crisp and soft, and snipped pieces of white paper into the shapes of trees and animals and houses, with a little pair of scissors. He had blue veins on the back of his white hands, and little cords the like of which were not on the child’s, as examination proved. This was his first memory of any house which was not home.

There he first saw a piano. It was open, and he beat the keys, sounding now one note at a time and now two or three together. This was a fascinating exercise, but he was bidden to desist from it, and was given a picture-book to look at It was full of wiry-looking steel plates of men in cauldrons, and on crucifixes, and on racks, and bound to stakes in fires. He remembered it as Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs,’ but by a later knowledge.

There was a well in a yard, with a rope and a windlass, and an old wooden bucket all over trailing green mosses. Off the yard there was a blacksmith’s shop, with a disused anvil and disused tools in it, and a cold hearth covered with scattered slack and iron filings. A dog, whose chain allowed him to come within a yard of the door of this workshop, woke up at the clank of the tools and barked. The child cried until his mother came and took him away with some show of angry impatience, not with his father’s gentleness. He knew her for his mother, of course, but this was his first remembrance of her.

It was baking-day, and so it could not have been a Sunday. In a big ‘jowl’ of earthenware--that was the local word for it--a batch of dough was set before a fire to rise. It had a clean cloth spread over it, and the dough had been slashed across and across with a knife. Somebody said the sign of the cross was made to keep the devil out of the bread. There was a vague wonder at that, but it soon died. A portion of the dough was used to make what were called ‘rough-and-ready cakes.’ Dripping was rolled into the dough, and it was sprinkled with sugar and currants. Then it was pulled into all manner of rough shapes, so as to bake with crisp edges, and was put on a greased dripping-pan into an oven. The cakes were served hot with new milk, and made a regal feast.

It grew dark, which for summer-time was a new experience. The child, tired, but wakeful, stood at the door in fear of the dog. Suddenly he roused the household with screams of joy.

‘Mother! mother! Look what I’ve found!’

There was a rush and a swirl of petticoats. The infant had seen the stars for the first time, and had some trouble in explaining the nature of his find. When it was known that he had discovered the solar system and its neighbouring fragment of the universe, there was a laugh, and he was left alone, humiliated.

‘I have made many equally valuable and original discoveries since then,’ said Paul Armstrong, and so went on staring down the canon, seeing nothing of what lay before him, but beholding his child-self so clearly that he seemed to be living over again the life of forty years ago.

The child was shy, dreamy, sensitive, inventive, and a liar. He and his brother Dick were together walking in the shabby High Street, and talking about cricket.

‘I’ll bet you haven’t seen what I’ve seen,’ said Paul. He was seven years old by now, breeched in corduroys, which had had time to grow rusty. The middle-aged man, sitting at his tent-door, smelt the odour of the new cords, and heard their disgusting whistle as he moved his limbs in them for the first time. Only the poorest boys went clothed in corduroy, and Paul and brother Dick were bitterly lowered in their own esteem when they were forced by motherly economy into that badge of social servitude. ‘I’ll bet you haven’t seen what I’ve seen.’

‘What have you seen? asked Dick.

He was rather a fatuous boy, with round, innocent eyes, easily opening at tales of marvel, and a temptation to a liar.

‘Why, when I was in Scotland three years ago with father,’ Paul began, ‘I saw the Highlanders play cricket.’ He had never in his life been a mile away from his native parish, and Dick knew that as well as he did, but it made no difference. ‘They wore kilts, and father wore a kilt, and had a feather in his bonnet, and top-boots like Robin Hood, all loose about the tops, and a bow and arrow. And he smoked a cigar, and gave me a whole lot of vesuvians to strike by myself behind a tent. You could smell vesuvians and cigars and sunshiny trod-on grass everywhere.’

‘Tell us about the Highlanders,’ said Dick.

‘They was all ten foot high,’ said Paul. ‘They wouldn’t have ‘em in the eleven without they was ten foot high.’

Dick said that stood to reason.

‘And they played in their kilts, and they didn’t wear pads, and they had their bats all made of iron, and the ball was iron, too. It was a cannon-ball, and they fired it out of a cannon, and the wickets was a mile and a half apart--no, a mile and a quarter--and one man hit the ball, and the other men shouted, “Run it out!” and he ran sixty-four runs. Then he dropped down stone-dead, and Mr. Murchison read the funeral service.’

Then the talk drifted. Next Sunday the Rev. Roderic Murchison, M.A., read out from the pulpit a text which gave over all liars to fire and brimstone. Paul went quaking all day. Dick and he slept together in a gaunt attic chamber. Mary, their sister, twenty years Paul’s elder, saw them to bed, put them through a rough form of prayer, and took away the candle. Dick, with nothing on his conscience, went to sleep. Paul lay and sweated, dreading fire, and wondering with open-eyed horror, ‘Why brimstone?’ and imagining extraordinary terrors from its addition. At last conscience would have no Nay, and brimful of fear and contrition--for the one was as real as the other--he woke up Dick in the black hollow of the night This was hard work, but he was bent on self-purgation, and would not confess until Dick was really wide awake.

‘Dick!’ he said, gripping his brother in the dark and straining him in his childish arms. ‘Dick! Oh, Dick, I’ve been a liar, and I daresn’t go to sleep. Do you remember what I said about the Highlanders last Thursday?’

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