Chapter III

Mrs. Barton, whose admiration for her eldest son had become the one light in a drab existence, was herself the innocent cause of its total eclipse.

She was getting tea ready when the accident happened. They were all there except Mr. Barton. The baby, scarlet in the face with nettle-rash and bad temper, had been soothed into temporary calm by the illegitimate use of a dummy.

Bert was contentedly sucking the paint off a toy horse under the table. Most of it was already worn off by the friction of his constant tongue, but there was still a streak of vermilion on its tail. Eliza was making eyes and faces of no uncertain meaning at the grocer’s boy over the way. It was that black day of the week known as a half-holiday.

The March wind ran dryly to and fro in the Grove, carrying a harvest of scraps of newspaper, rags, and orange-peel.

Mr. Barton had started home in an irritated mood. He was not a sentimental parent, but what feeling he had was centred upon his children—he never drank more than half his earnings out of consideration for their welfare; and he always regarded them with that resentful affection common to people who have made great sacrifices for an unworthy cause.

If he had a favourite, it was Eliza. There was something about the metallic glean of Eliza’s roving eyes which appealed to her father. It was the eye of one who sooner or later ‘got there.’ She did not ask doubtful questions nor expect impossible virtues as her brother Jim did.

Mr. Barton had never done Eliza any harm—for she was an expert at dodging blows—and yet he had never had to go out of his way to do her any good. It was a soothing relationship. So it was most unfortunate—on a Saturday afternoon—that one of his mates should have chosen to give him some very drastic hints upon the character of his daughter.

Mr. Barton made up his mind to beat his favourite child, and drank a good deal of rather bad beer to get his spirit up.

No one should say he was a parent complacent of his daughter’s shame. Not that Eliza had any shame, but if half what his mate suggested was true she would be a good candidate for it. He would beat Eliza first to show her what was what—and then he would beat his wife, because after all, being the child’s mother, she was directly responsible for her morals.

The moment he pushed the door open his whole family knew that there would be what was popularly known in the Grove as ‘trouble.’

There were kippers for tea, but no one could taste a kipper until the trouble was over.

Bert began to cry and flattened himself against the wall. The children looked like a covey of flustered partridges, prepared to shoot out into space at a moment’s notice.

Mrs. Barton put her hand up to her head and then let it fall again, realising that it was not likely to be of more use to her there than anywhere else.

Mr. Barton’s legs were fairly steady, but his thoughts were uncertain. He pronounced one word in the direction of Eliza. It was an explanatory word, and Eliza poised under it with an eye on the scullery door.

But Mr. Barton’s attention focused more readily upon his wife. He approached her to ratify his sentence upon Eliza with a blow. He knew that Mrs. Barton would not spring to avoid it as Eliza would. She had no spring left in her.

Jim had been watching his father steadily in order to effect his own escape if necessary, when something suddenly went queer before his eyes—it was as if a thin, protecting screen were withdrawn between him and his own emotions. He saw his mother’s face in a mist—very white and sick with anticipation, he heard her say, ‘Ah, don’t Tom——’ and all desire for personal escape went out of him. He sprang suddenly forward and struck at his father’s head with Bert’s toy horse.

Mr. Barton swayed back with astonishment, but before he had recovered from it Jim struck again. This time he had a better weapon, for Eliza, with a woman’s readiness of wit and hand, had thrust the poker toward him. Jim dropped the toy horse and struck savagely with the poker.

The blow caught Mr. Barton so that he spun once like a very heavy, silent top, and then sank in a heap on the floor. Jim struck at him again and again; he was in a panic now—a panic of accumulated rage; and all the terror of the household was behind his lifted arm. If his father got up again not one of them would escape.

But Mr. Barton made no attempt to get up again. He lay there quietly in a pool of his own blood. Then he shuddered once or twice as if something had to be shaken off—shook it off and lay quite still.

Jim was not sure what had happened, but the heap on the floor did not look like his father any more. It looked like a bundle of old clothes which ought to be cleared away.

There was nothing terrible or powerful in it, and yet there was something very terrible and powerful in the room, which seemed to take up all the air.

Mrs. Barton sat there, looking at the heap with her mouth open and her eyes curiously fixed.

Eliza screamed readily and dramatically till the neighbours rushed in. Some one sent for the police, and when they came Eliza pointed an accusatory finger at her brother, for she realised that the situation was exceptional and that in exceptional situations some one had better be accused.

The police lifted Mr. Barton up, and Mrs. Barton screamed—a curious, flat scream, not at all like the full-dress successes of Eliza. She was still screaming, with no meaning at all behind her voice when the police took Jim away. He was a very small criminal, and they were not at all unkind to him. When he told them he was fourteen years old one of them said in a reassuring manner,—

‘Well, sonny, you won’t swing for it this time!’

The magistrate was more severe, and the court was a still, dreadful place where all the dust was tidy and as if kept there very carefully to make the benches look sad.

The magistrate finished by saying that the penitentiary would be just the place for Jim.

They put him in for three years with criminals of every sort and kind, and feeble-minded, whose crimes were only blunders. Jim’s questions faded for a time under his new destiny.

It was no use asking questions about such unreasonable things. Only he remembered his books, and there were pictures in his mind which blotted out the eternal whitewash of the walls.

He missed the life of the streets most. Life was still there under the massive dullness of the institution, but it ran subterraneously and without freedom, and some of it was very, very nasty.

Jim could not keep his hopes alive in it, but he kept his stubborn pictures. He could see the Miss Masters playing tennis in white drill skirts on a green lawn crying ‘Forty love’ to the curate, and the contents of his book, tropical lands under curious skies with birds flying, knights in armour who were brave and kind; and there was always at the back of his mind that unfinished picture of his father lying in a dishevelled heap on the floor and not getting up again.

Jim had meant to be a schoolmaster, and he went on with his education in the penitentiary. Mr. Atkinson had spoken for him to the magistrate and so had the headmaster. They had called him promising.

Common or bad language, Jim knew already, but now he learned the vivid phraseology of thieves.

What carefully brought-up people call vice and get excited over, Jim knew as unreflectively as he knew rancid butter. He got used to both these things, but he never took any interest in them.

He was beaten sometimes very hard and quite justly by the authorities.

He fought his way from the first into perfect security from the other boys. Nobody could do him any more harm than he could them, and he had the splendid reputation of a murderer to back him. He was not underfed, and he had a healthier and more open-air physical life than he had ever known.

His only starvation was of the spirit, and all his growing senses starved in company with his soul. He was approaching the age of beauty, and no one ever spoke or thought of beauty, nor was the penitentiary furnished with any single object framed for that purpose.

After two years his mother died. Eliza disappeared, and Bert and the baby were swallowed up by excellent orphanages.

These facts were communicated to Jim quite kindly by the master of the penitentiary himself, in a parlour which smelled musty, and was used only for visitors or the breaking of calamities. He was given a black crepe band and the addresses of the orphanages.

Jim was sixteen when his family disappeared. He had killed his father, which never gave him any particular regret; but the complete wiping out of his domestic circle was a more unsatisfactory business. They had not been a particularly nice family, but they were all he had.

Jim felt as if certain starved roots which bound him to the earth had suddenly been cut. All his memories rushed up on him and haunted him with loneliness.

He did not cry, but he kept tucked away in the corner of his retentive brain the addresses of the orphanages.

Eliza had probably landed on her feet; but he often wondered where this attitude had placed her. He would have looked her up if she had been in his place and he in hers, but he did not expect this weakness from Eliza.

Jim had received quite a lot of religious instruction by now, so that when he said—and he was obliged to say it at least twice a day—‘Our Father Which art in Heaven,’ he knew he was referring to a possible old gentleman who in some unknown and rather large place might or might not keep an eye on him. This was God. He did not seem very get-at-able, and most of the boys in the penitentiary took the view that He was invented. You could not have bad language without a Deity, but you could have everything else.

Jim, however, was not a positive atheist. For one thing, he had read more than any one, even the penitentiary schoolmaster, so that he knew the whole idea was not in the nature of a scholastic invention on purpose to cause friction—which was the accepted view of his new companions. There was more to it than that. Some one, when you came to think of it, was probably behind something—but you couldn’t quite tell what.

The sky, the clouds, the stars, the common grasses of the distant fields, the blue spread vision of the sea, and the swift, interminable flow of water between river banks—could these things happen by accident?

They were like creatures—were they not created? And if they were created, was there not a Creator? What would happen if you fell into the sky? (Jim received a bad mark for this irrelevant question.)

What did happen to people when you hit them too hard with a poker? They were there just before—what became of them afterward?

Their bodies were dead, of course; but they weren’t dead, were they? They’d gone as if they passed through their bodies, as people at a railway station slip in and out of trains.

Where did they go? The chaplain was quite nice; he did not punish Jim for asking this question. He said, ‘Heaven or hell’ without a moment’s hesitation. But he preferred talking about cricket.

Apparently Heaven and hell hadn’t much meaning except when you used them with the direct intention of being bad. What was it that meant inside people to be good or bad? Something meant inside Jim—something as fierce as his fighting instinct and as plain as a pair of compasses. It was always going about its business, meaning something, and it very seldom meant to be bad.

This something in Jim did not shrink from badness as weak boys did, with tears; it looked steadily at it and resented it. It pushed him toward friendly relations with all his world—often quite uselessly, because all he had learned and read made his companions hostile to him. It pushed him forward through his work, and never rested in him till he had done his best.

He heard the master say once of him, to a member of a committee, ‘That boy over there has got character——’ but he did not know what character meant. He knew only that somebody had put something inside him which belonged to him and was never satisfied.

He was not consciously unhappy; he associated unhappiness only with physical mischance. Yet there was one spot in his mind vulnerable to pain, and over which he always hurried.

It was not his crime; he acknowledged that simply as a blunder—and on the whole it was a successful blunder. But it hurt him to think of his mother. She had been to see him twice since he had been in the penitentiary, and each time she had brought him things to eat and had cried over him, and before she went she had said between her tears,—

‘Gord—they needn’t have took you away from me.’

Now she was dead and couldn’t come any more, so there was, of course, no use bothering about it.

But the sore place in Jim’s mind remained. It was the nearest point he reached toward that broken image of the mind of God—human love.