Chapter XVIII. Beating the town
They turned their faces again toward the centre of the town, and resumed their walk, taking in more of what they saw than while they had not yet had the second instalment of their daily bread. What a thing is food! It is the divineness of the invention—the need for the food, and the food for the need—that makes those who count their dinner the most important thing in the day, such low creatures: nothing but what is good in itself can be turned into vileness. It is a delight to see a boy with a good honest appetite; a boy that loves his dinner is a loathsome creature. Eat heartily, my boy, but be ready to share, even when you are hungry, and have only what you could eat up yourself, else you are no man. Remember that you created neither your hunger nor your food; that both came from one who cares for you and your neighbours as well.
In the strength of the half-loaf he had eaten, the place looked to Clare far more wonderful, and his hopes of earning his bread grew yet more radiant. But he passed one shop after another, and always something prevented him from going in. One after another did not look just the right sort, did not seem to invite him: the next might be better! I dare say but for that half-loaf, he would have made a trial sooner, but I doubt if he would have succeeded sooner. He did not think of going to parson, doctor, or policeman for advice; he went walking and staring, followed by Tommy with his hands in his pocketless pocket-holes. Clare was not yet practical in device, though perfect in willingness, and thorough in design. Up one street and down another they wandered, seeing plenty of food through windows, and in carts and baskets, but never any coming their way, except in the form of tempting odours that issued from almost every house, and grew in keenness and strength toward one o’clock. Oh those odours!—agonizing angels of invisible yet most material good! Of what joys has not the Father made us capable, when the poorest necessity is linked with such pain! What a tormenting thing—and what a good must be meant to come out of it!—to be hungry, downright, cravingly hungry with the whole microcosm, and not a halfpenny to buy a mouthful of assuagement!—to be assailed with wafts of deliriously undefined promise, not one of which seems likely to be fulfilled!—promise true to men hurrying home to dinner or luncheon, but only rousing greater desire in such as Clare and Tommy. Not one opportunity of appropriation presented itself, else it would have gone ill with Tommy, now that the eyes and ears of his guardian were on the alert. For Clare thought of him now as a little thievish pup, for whose conduct, manners, and education he was responsible.
The agony began at length to abate—ready to revive with augmented strength when the next hour for supplying the human furnace should begin to approach. Few even of those who know what hunger is, understand to what it may grow—how desire becomes longing, longing becomes craving, and craving a wild passion of demand. It must be terrible to be hungry, and not know God!
As the evening came down upon them, worn out, faint with want, shivering with cold, and as miserable in prospect as at the moment, yet another need presented itself with equally imperative requisition—that of shelter that they might rest. It was even more imperative: they could not eat; they must lie down!
Whether it be a rudiment retained from their remote ancestry, I cannot tell, but any kind of suffering will wake in some a masterful impulse to burrow; and as the boys walked about in their misery, white with cold and hunger, Clare’s eyes kept turning to every shallowest archway, every breach in wall or hedge that seemed to offer the least chance of covert, while, every now and then, Tommy would bolt from his side to peer into some opening whose depth was not immediately patent to his ferret-gaze. Once, in a lane on the outskirts of the town, he darted into a narrow doorway in the face of a wall, but instantly rushed back in horror: within was a well, where water lay still and dark. Then first Clare had a hint of the peculiar dread Tommy had of water, especially of water dark and unexpected. Possibly he had once been thrown into such water to be got rid of. But Clare at the moment was too weary to take much notice of his dismay.
It was an old town in which they were wandering, and change in the channels of traffic had so turned its natural nourishment aside, that it was in parts withering and crumbling away. Not a few of the houses were, some from poverty, some from utter disuse, yielding fast to decay. But there were other causes for the condition of one, which, almost directly they came out of the lane I have just mentioned, into the end of a wide silent street, drew the roving, questing eyes of Clare and Tommy. The moon was near the full and shining clear, so that they could perfectly see the state it was in. Most of its windows were broken; its roof was like the back of a very old horse; its chimney-pots were jagged and stumped with fracture; from one of them, by its entangled string, the skeleton of a kite hung half-way down the front. But, notwithstanding such signs of neglect, the red-brick wall and the wrought-iron gate, both seven feet high, that shut the place off from the street, stood in perfect aged strength. The moment they saw it, the house seemed to say to them, “There’s nobody here: come in!” but the gate and the wall said, “Begone!”
Chapter XIX. The blacksmith and his forge
At the end of the wall was a rough boarded fence, in contact with it, and reaching, some fifty yards or so, to a hovel in which a blacksmith, of unknown antecedents, had taken possession of a forsaken forge, and did what odd jobs came in his way. The boys went along the fence till they came to the forge, where, looking in, they saw the blacksmith working his bellows. To one with the instincts of Clare’s birth and breeding, he did not look a desirable acquaintance. Tommy was less fastidious, but he felt that the scowl on the man’s brows boded little friendliness. Clare, however, who hardly knew what fear was, did not hesitate to go in, for he was drawn as with a cart-rope by the glow of the fire, and the sparks which, as they gazed, began, like embodied joys, to fly merrily from the iron. Tommy followed, keeping Clare well between him and the black-browed man, who rained his blows on the rosy iron in his pincers, as if he hated it.
“What do you want, gutter-toads?” he cried, glancing up and seeing them approach. “This ain’t a hotel.”
“But it’s a splendid fire,” rejoined Clare, looking into his face with a wan smile, “and we’re so cold!”
“What’s that to me!” returned the man, who, savage about something, was ready to quarrel with anything. “I didn’t make my fire to warm little devils that better had never been born!”
“No, sir,” answered Clare; “but I don’t think we’d better not have been born. We’re both cold, and nobody but Tommy knows how hungry I am; but your fire is so beautiful that, if you would let us stand beside it a minute or two, we wouldn’t at all mind.”
“Mind, indeed! Mind what, you preaching little humbug?”
“Mind being born, sir.”
“Why do you say sir to me? Don’t you see I’m a working man?”
“Yes, and that’s why. I think we ought to say sir and ma’am to every one that can do something we can’t. Tommy and I can’t make iron do what we please, and you can, sir! It would be a grand thing for us if we could!”
“Oh, yes, a grand thing, no doubt!—Why?”
“Because then we could get something to eat, and somewhere to lie down.”
“Could you? Look at me, now! I can do the work of two men, and can’t get work for half a man!”
“That’s a sad pity!” said Clare. “I wish I had work! Then I would bring you something to eat.”
The man did not tell them why he had not work enough—that his drunkenness, and the bad ways to which it had brought him, with the fact that he so often dawdled over the work that was given him, caused people to avoid him.
“Who said I hadn’t enough to eat? I ain’t come to that yet, young ‘un! What made you say that?”
“Because when I had work, I had plenty to eat; and now that I have nothing to do, I have nothing to eat. It’s well I haven’t work now, though,” added Clare with a sigh, “for I’m too tired to do any. Please may I sit on this heap of ashes?”
“Sit where you like, so long ‘s you keep out o’ my way. I ‘ain’t got nothing to give you but a bar of iron. I’ll toast one for you if you would like a bite.”
“No, thank you, sir,” answered Clare, with a smile. “I’m afraid it wouldn’t be digestible. They say toasted cheese ain’t. I wish I had a try though!”
“You’re a comical shaver, you are!” said the blacksmith. “You’ll come to the gallows yet, if you’re a good boy! Them Sunday-schools is doin’ a heap for the gallows!—That ain’t your brother?”
By this time Tommy had begun to feel at home with the blacksmith, from whose face the cloud had lifted a little, so that he looked less dangerous. He had edged nearer to the fire, and now stood in the light of it.
“No,” answered Clare, with an odd doubtfulness in his tone. “I ought to say yes, perhaps, for all men are my brothers; but I mean I haven’t any particular one of my very own.”
“That ain’t no pity; he’d ha’ been no better than you. I’ve a brother I would choke any minute I got a chance.”
While they talked, the blacksmith had put his iron in the fire, and again stood blowing the bellows, when his attention was caught by the gestures of the little red-eyed imp, Tommy, who was making rapid signs to him, touching his forehead with one finger, nodding mysteriously, and pointing at Clare with the thumb of his other hand, held close to his side. He sought to indicate thus that his companion was an innocent, whom nobody must mind. In the blacksmith Tommy saw one of his own sort, and the blacksmith saw neither in Tommy nor in Clare any reason to doubt the hint given him. Not the less was he inclined to draw out the idiot.
“Why do you let him follow you about, if he ain’t your brother?” he said. “He ain’t nice to look at!”
“I want to make him nice,” answered Clare, “and then he’ll be nice to look at. You mustn’t mind him, please, sir. He’s a very little boy, and ‘ain’t been well brought up. His granny ain’t a good woman—at least not very, you know, Tommy!” he added apologetically.
“She’s a damned old sinner!” said Tommy stoutly.
The man laughed.
“Ha, ha, my chicken! you know a thing or two!” he said, as he took his iron from the fire, and laid it again on the anvil.
But besides the brother he would so gladly strangle, there was an idiot one whom he had loved a little and teazed so much, that, when he died, his conscience was moved. He felt therefore a little tender toward the idiot before him. He bethought himself also that his job would soon be at a stage where the fewer the witnesses the better, for he was executing a commission for certain burglars of his acquaintance. He would do no more that night! He had money in his pocket, and he wanted a drink!
“Look here, cubs!” he said; “if you ‘ain’t got nowhere to go to, I don’t mind if you sleep here. There ain’t no bed but the bed of the forge, nor no blankets but this leather apron: you may have them, for you can’t do them no sort of harm. I don’t mind neither if you put a shovelful of slack and a little water now and then on the fire; and if you give it a blow or two with the bellows now and then, you won’t be stone-dead afore the mornin’!—Don’t be too free with the coals, now, and don’t set the shed on fire, and take the bread out of my poor innocent mouth. Mind what I tell you, and be good boys.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Clare. “I thought you would be kind to us! I’ve one friend, a bull, that’s very good to me. So is Jonathan. He’s a horse. The bull’s name is Nimrod. He wants to gore always, but he’s never cross with me.”
The blacksmith burst into a roar of laughter at the idiotic speech. Then he covered the fire with coal, threw his apron over Clare’s head, and departed, locking the door of the smithy behind him.
The boys looked at each other. Neither spoke. Tommy turned to the bellows, and began to blow.
“Ain’t you warm yet?” said Clare, who had seen his mother careful over the coals.
“No, I ain’t. I want a blaze.”
“Leave the fire alone. The coal is the smith’s, and he told us not to waste it.”
“He ain’t no count!” said Tommy, as heartless as any grown man or woman set on pleasure.
“He has given us a place to be warm and sleep in! It would be a shame to do anything he didn’t like. Have you no conscience, Tommy?”
“No,” said Tommy, who did not know conscience from copper. The germ of it no doubt lay in the God-part of him, but it lay deep. Tommy—no worse than many a boy born of better parents—was like a hill full of precious stones, that grows nothing but a few little dry shrubs, and shoots out cold sharp rocks every here and there.
“If you have no conscience,” answered Clare, “one must serve for both—as far as it will reach! Leave go of that bellows, or I’ll make you.”
Tommy let the lever go, turned his back, and wandered, in such dudgeon as he was capable of, to the other side of the shed.
“Hello!” he cried, “here’s a door!—and it ain’t locked, it’s only bolted! Let’s go and see!”
“You may if you like,” answered Clare, “but if you touch anything of the blacksmith’s, I’ll be down on you.”
“All right!” said Tommy, and went out to see if there was anything to be picked up.
Clare got on the stone hearth of the forge, and lay down in the hot ashes, too far gone with hunger to care for the clothes that were almost beyond caring for. He was soon fast asleep; and warmth and sleep would do nearly as much for him as food.
Chapter XX. Tommy reconnoitres
Tommy, out in the moonlight, found himself in a waste yard, scattered over with bits of iron, mostly old and rusty. It was not an interesting place, for it was not likely to afford him anything to eat. Yet, with the instinct of the human animal, he went shifting and prying and nosing about everywhere. Presently he heard a curious sound, which he recognized as made by a hen. More stealthily yet he went creeping hither and thither, feeling here and feeling there, in the hope of laying his hand on the fowl asleep. Urged by his natural impulse to forage, he had forgotten Clare’s warning. His hand did find her, and had it been his grandmother instead of Clare in the smithy, he would at once have broken the bird’s neck before she could cry out; but with the touch of her feathers came the thought of Clare, and by this time he understood that what Clare said, Clare would do.
He had some knowledge of fowls; he had heard too much talk about them at his grandmother’s not to know something of their habits; and finding she sat so still, he concluded that under her might be eggs. To his delight it was so. The hen belonged to a house at some distance, and had wandered from it, in obedience to the secretive instinct of animal maternity, strong in some hens, to seek a hidden shelter for her offspring. This she had found in the smith’s yard, beneath the mould-board of a plough that had lain there for years. Slipping his hand under her, Tommy found five eggs. In greedy haste he took them, every one.
I must do him the justice to say that his first impulse was to dart with them to Clare. But before he had taken a step toward him, again he remembered his threat. With the eggs inside him, he could run the risk; he would not mind a few blows—not much; but if he took them to Clare, the unbearable thing was, that he would assuredly give every one of them back to the hen. He was an idiot, and Tommy was there to look after him; but, in looking after Clare, was Tommy to neglect himself? If Clare would not eat the eggs Tommy carried him, as most certainly he would not, the best thing was for Tommy to eat them himself! What a good thing that it was no use to steal for Clare! The steal would be all for himself! Not a step from the spot did Tommy move till he had sucked every one of the five eggs. But he made one mistake: he threw away the shells.
When he had sucked them, he found himself much lighter-hearted, but, alas, nearly as hungry as before! The spirit of research began again to move him: where were eggs, what might there not be beside?
The moon was nearly at the full; the smith’s yard was radiantly illuminated. But even the moon could lend little enchantment to a scene where nothing was visible but rusty, broken, deserted, despairful pieces of old iron. Tommy lifted his eyes and looked further.
The enclosure was of small extent, bounded on one side by the garden wall of the house they had just passed, and at the bottom by a broken fence, dividing it from a piece of waste land that probably belonged to the house. As he roamed about, Tommy spied a great heap of old iron piled up against the wall, and made for it, in the hope of enlarging his horizon. He scrambled to the top, and looked over. His gaze fell right into a big but, full of dark water. Twice that evening he met the same horror! There was a legendary report, though he had not heard it, I fancy, that his mother drowned herself instead of him: she fell in, and he was fished out. Whether this was the origin of his fear or not, so far from getting down by means of the water-but, Tommy dared not cross at that point. With much trembling he got on the top of the wall, turned his back on the butt, and ran along like a cat, in search of a place where he could descend into the garden. He went right to the end, round the corner, and half-way along the bottom before he found one. There he came to a doorway that had been solidly walled up on the outside, while the door was left in position on the inside—ready for use when the court of chancery should have decided to whom the house belonged. Its frame was flush with the wall, so that its bolts and lock afforded Tommy foothold enough to descend, and confidence of being able to get up again.
He landed in a moonlit wilderness—such a wilderness as a deserted garden speedily becomes, the wealth in the soil converting it the sooner to a savage chaos. Full of the impulse of discovery, and the hope of presenting himself with importance to Clare as the bringer of good tidings, Tommy forced his way through or crept under the overgrown bushes, until he reached a mossy rather than gravelly walk, where it was more easy to advance. It led him to the house.
Had he been a boy of any imagination, he would have shuddered at the thought of attempting an entrance. All the windows had outside shutters. Those of the ground floor were closed—except one that swung to and fro, and must have swung in many a wind since the house was abandoned. The moon shone with a dull whitish gleam on the dusty windows of the first and second stories, and on the great dormers that shot out from the slope of the roof, and cast strange shadows upon it. The door to the garden had had a porch of trellis-work, over which jasmine and other creeping plants were trained; but whether anything of the porch was left, no one could have told in that thicket of creepers, interlaced and matted by antagonist forces of wind and growth so that not a hint of door was visible. Clearly there was nobody within.
Tommy sought the window with the open shutter. Through the dirty glass, and the reflection of the moon, he could see nothing. He tried the sash, but could not stir it. He went round the corner to one end of the house, and saw another door. But an enemy stepped between: the moon shone suddenly up from the ground. In a hollow of the pavement had gathered a pool from the drip of the neglected gutters, and out of its hidden depth the staring round looked at him. It was the third time Tommy’s nerves had been shaken that night, and he could stand no more. At the awful vision he turned and fled, fell, and rose and fled again. It was not imagination in Tommy; it was an undefined, inexplicable horror, that must have had a cause, but could have no reason. Young as he was he had already more than once looked on the face of death, and had felt no awe; he had listened to the gruesomest of tales, told not altogether without art, and had never moved a hair Only one material and two spiritual things had power with him; the one material thing was hunger, the two spiritual things were a feeble love for Clare, and a strong horror of water of any seeming depth. Now a new element was added to this terror by the meddling of the moon in the fiendish mystery—the secret of which must, I think, have been the bottomless depth she gave the water.
He rushed down the garden. With frightful hindrance from the overgrowth, he found the prisoned door by strange perversion become a ladder, gained by it the top of the wall, and sped along as if pursued by an incarnate dread. Horror of horrors! all at once the moon again looked up at him from below: he was within a yard or two of the big water-butt! Right up to it he must go, for, close to it, on the other side of the wall, was the heap of iron by which alone he could get down. He tightened every nerve for the effort. He assured himself that the thing would be over in a moment; that the water was quiet, and could not follow him; that presently he would find himself in the smithy by the warm forge-fire. The scaring necessity was, that he must stoop and kneel right over the water-but, in order to send his legs in advance down the wall to the top of the mound. It was a moment of agony. That very moment, with an appalling unearthly cry, something dark, something hideous, something of inconceivable ghastliness, as it seemed to Tommy, sprang right out of the water into the air. He tumbled from the wall among the iron, and there lay.
The stolen eggs were avenged. The hen, feverish and unhappy from the loss of her hope of progeny, had gone to the butt to sip a little water. Tommy, appearing on the wall above her, startled her. She, flying up with a screech, startled Tommy, and became her own unwitting avenger.