Chapter I

Jim was not sure when it first dawned on him that there was such a thing as security. When he did realise it he supposed it to be like one of those things, procurable for others, but unprocurable for him, which were marked at a shilling in the shop windows.

He had never known bodily safety except for the first few weeks of his life, when his mother by a species of enlightened tact threatened to come to pieces altogether and was retained by a reluctant matron in the hospital beyond her allotted time. When they returned home they promptly resumed the cup-and-ball existence produced by Tom Barton’s intemperance.

Tom Barton was quite good-tempered when he was sober, and he was rarely drunk except during the week-ends, but from Friday to Monday the house rose and fell in the tempest of his intoxication. He was a good workman, and their income see-sawed between affluence and penury.

Nothing was more normal to Jim than the appearance and disappearance of the furniture. Wash-stands floated in and out of rooms, sofas precariously furnished shelters for games, and then, like Rachel’s children, were not. Mantelpieces held clocks, china dogs and thrilling blue-beaded mats, and at a turn of the wrist—nothing but the bread-knife.

Hazily, like a far-off dream, a mute piano broke over his baby consciousness, and as swiftly and irrevocably vanished.

‘’E’s drunk it,’ was the explanation presented to Jim by a sympathetic neighbour.

As regular, and more noticeable than the migratory flight of tables and chairs, were the kicks and bruises which descended upon the human portions of the family.

Only Mrs. Barton was at all permanently bruised. Tom never hit the children unless they came in his way. When he was mad with drink he frequently expressed a wish to kill them, but beating his wife always did instead.

There was no convenient substitute for Mrs. Barton. Every now and then she screamed till the police came, which was very exciting for the children, but ordinarily she was very quiet, and then the interest of these occasions palled.

Mrs. Barton had had a great deal of spirit as a girl, and it lasted her nicely till she became a mother; then she alternated between melancholy and exasperation.

She meant to be kind to her children, and she always loved them, but the methods of her affection became as frayed as her nerves.

She kept them tolerably clean, and fed them as well as she could. She called them in at night and hit them perfunctorily and without spitefulness when they cried.

She was not an ideal mother but she had the maternal instinct.

Family life as far as Jim was concerned vacillated between tears and curses, and as soon as he was capable of choice he threw his weight upon the side of curses.

He cried when he had to, but he became conscious in himself of formidable gusts of ferocity which were as exciting as a game; they intimidated his equals and even at times his physical superiors.

He had all the habits of a badly teased stable kitten; whenever he was approached he prepared to strike, for almost as soon as he had learned anything he had learned that the only successful attitude of defence is attack.

His sister Eliza was easily quelled by him, though she was five years his elder. Her long hair put her out of court. Jim had only to wind his little hand in it and pull. Bert, his younger brother, cringed at the sight of him. Even his mother did not hit Jim after he was five years old and had gone for her with a knife.

Awful tussles took place between Jim and his father, and though they naturally ended in the complete victory of Mr. Barton they left his parent as a rule rather breathless and severely bitten.

Tom, unless he was drunk—when he feared nothing—had a secret dread of his baby Jim’s blue eyes; they had a way of looking blazing mad like a tortured animal’s and the child did not seem to know that when you are beaten, you really are beaten.

Jim’s idea was that when you could retaliate no more you waited till exhausted nature re-equipped you—and then you burst out afresh.

He had no respect for a parent’s ‘that’s enough,’ and seemed incapable of recognising any finality but his own.

Something within him, very violent and unbreakable, never felt itself quelled. Jim did not know it was his spirit, because neither the word nor the thing was recognised in his circle.

Nothing was ever explained to him about anything.

He took blows, food, and curses from the same source; only he learned to dodge the blows and if possible steal the food; the curses were neither here nor there, except that they were sometimes useful as premonitory symptoms. He could often guess from the tone in which they were screamed whether there was a blow or bread and jam behind their easy utterance.

Jim’s mother loved him, but Jim did not know she loved him; he knew only that he could reckon upon her, as far as he could reckon on anything, to supply certain of his wants.

He hated his father, but he did not know that that hot, menaced feeling, which sprang into his heart when he saw his father appear, was hate. He only knew that he did not ever wish to see his father.

Toward the rest of the world Jim felt, and exhibited a wary indifference.

Some children in the neighborhood seemed to be cleaner than the little Bartons, and had more food, but Jim did not like them any better for that. Occasionally children of another class altogether appeared in the street—strange visions of smiling faces and smart apparel, safeguarded by nurses, loomed sickeningly upon Jim’s sight. They could not be stoned nor rolled in the gutter. Something mysterious but formidable, called ‘law,’ was behind them.

Jim cast surly and incredulous glances at them. Later on he attached to their infrequent appearances phrases caught up from the steps of public houses, expressive of derision and tinctured with envy.

But Jim himself was not envious of the rich. He preferred the tested violence of his dirty fists and well-developed muscles.

They might, these denizens of the upper air, have force behind them—but it was easy to see that they had no force in them. They were more vulnerable than Eliza. Jim knew that he could quickly reduce them below fighting level if he were given the chance.

He himself, even with both eyes blacked and the wind completely knocked out of him by a forcible descent of a flight of stairs, had never reached the abyss at which the fighting instinct stopped.

If his father couldn’t down him nobody could. Deep in his hard and stubborn heart he nursed the feeling that the rich were soft.

Swanhill was a small town, or a big slum, whichever way you chose to look at it, set between two larger towns in a factory district. Four miles behind it lay the green, unvisited country, and in front of it were the river and the factories. Eighty chimneys soared, with a sodden incapacity for grace, into a smudge of sky. They seemed to be fumbling in their own smoke for a way out into the open air, but they never found it.

The town had six long, grimy streets filled with newspaper, orange-peel, smoke, small and overcrowded cottages, and the flashing windows of gigantic public houses. A handsome stone church perched ineffectually upon the hillside.

The population of Swanhill was seven thousand. Three hundred of it went to church. Fourteen belonged to the Salvation Army; there were fifty Catholics, and perhaps another fifty intermittently visited two nondescript chapels. This was the little leaven, and it did nothing whatever to interfere with the whole lump.

Jim had no preference for any particular scenery; but he liked the river, where he could get wet always, and in the summer very nearly drowned. He did not know what anything looked like, nor that anything else could look any different.

Eliza taught him something about school. She had to be clean for it, and in time, sooner or later you had to give in to the teachers, though you could with impunity take it out of the other children at stated intervals in a yard.

She did not tell Jim what she had learned in school because she made a habit of relaxing her attention the instant the cane receded. Nothing remained in Eliza’s mind after lesson hours but a little empty clamour and a few meaningless phrases.

She was not an easy child to teach because all the powers of her nature—and Eliza was by no means deficient in power—were concentrated upon inattention. She carried blankness of mind to a fine art.

Eliza’s treasures were in the street, and that was where her heart was. She cared only for accidents, funerals and the arrival of babies, and upon none of these stimulating realities did her teachers touch.

Lessons seemed to Eliza’s active and mature mind to be twaddle from an underworld.

She sat in school because she had to, and she was never one to waste her kicks upon the inevitable. When she thought that she could evade compulsion, Eliza was swift to evade it, but if she saw that compulsion had a longer reach, she gave in to it immediately.

Nor did Eliza mind giving in to compulsion as Jim did because she had a practical nature and she saw that it was no use minding. She was not an idealist. When she fought it was for a tangible object like an apple. An apple was worth a certain amount of physical inconvenience to Eliza; a principle was not. And as to fighting for the vanity of the thing in order to discover which was the stronger, Eliza gave to these inconclusive reckonings the derision which all good women keep for masculine triumphs.

When Jim had once beaten her, Eliza never fought him again, but she frequently circumvented him. Jim did not like Eliza, but he preferred her to any one else.

They often combined quite successfully against the dangers of the open road or the exigencies of family life, which were rather more dangerous than the road.

Jim did not start school until he was five years old, and for the first year or two he agreed perfectly with the standpoint of Eliza.

School was one more thing that happened, like drunkenness or bedtime. It fell upon the just and the unjust with the same continuous ineptitude.

School was duller than the street and sweeter than home. Sometimes you got something extra out of it, say another child’s marbles; or a hymn-tune fell with an unexpected pleasantness upon the ear.

Once or twice a week a queer man dressed in black, with a habit of strange words and a voice incomprehensibly and dreamily low, with no zip in it, came in, and gave them all a lesson about a Person or People called God. The headmaster remained in the room with his cane inconspicuous but handy, so that you could not even yawn; but you did not have to listen, nor did God interfere with you in any other way. The creature in black seemed to think He would, but He didn’t. A word called crucifixion slid off Jim’s attention like water off a duck’s back.

More interesting things leaped at him daily out of a Reader.

When Jim was nearly seven he suddenly found that cats, dogs and other odd combinations of letters could be mastered. He actually saw them for himself as they were in books, and he began to like these odd gymnastics of the intellect.

School ceased to be an unbroken restless blank punctuated by the blows of an exasperated grownup.

He felt the dawn of a creative spirit; he could make words come right by himself. Figures spun themselves alive for him, and he began to grasp incredulously that geography was about the real earth.

History never seemed very sensible to him, though he liked to hear, of course, about the fighting. The causes seemed inadequate, for who cared about kings? But it was nice to think that almost everybody fought about something from the beginning of the world, and would probably go on fighting about it until the end.

Jim lost the sense of outwitting his teachers by complete absence of mind. All kinds of strange, responsive things rose up in him, questions hammered at his hard little head all day long.

He began to doubt if everybody had to be hit so much; he read about extraordinary outbreaks of kindness. He even experienced one of them. Another boy gave him a humming top which he thought—mistakenly, as it happened—had ceased to hum. When the other boy found that Jim’s superior manipulation had brought back its powers, he naturally tried to repossess himself of the top, but he was easily fought into acquiescence.

The other boy’s name was Erb Badger, and the humming top cemented the first real affection of Jim’s life.

It stirred all the generosity of his youth. Jim became suddenly aware that you could at a pinch really like people, and a strange feeling began to dawn in him for his mother. She smiled at one of his copy-books with obvious pride, and it hurt him when his father took the smile off her face by a casual blow.

One summer evening behind a persevering lilac-bush choked in smuts, Jim astounded Eliza by asking her if she had ever liked anybody.

Jim was nine years old at the time, and Eliza was a well-grown girl of fourteen.

She looked at him with wary, unflinching eyes—that had rather the effect of highly polished black buttons—then she said—

‘Garn, y’ere soft!’

But Jim wasn’t really soft. He hit Eliza severely and without compunction till she was forced to say, ‘Give over!’

Then he gave over, but he still wondered if it wasn’t possible to like somebody without being soft.