Delphi Complete Works of Jerome K. Jerome (Illustrated) (Series Four) (76 page)

I think he understood, though I could explain nothing, but that I had had a fear something had happened to him, for from that time forward he dropped all reserve with me, and talked openly of our approaching parting.

“It might have come to us earlier, my dear boy,” he would say with his arm round me, “or it might have been a little later. A year or so one way or the other, what does it matter? And it is only for a little while, Paul. We shall meet again.”

But I could not answer him, for clutch them to me as I would, all my beliefs — the beliefs in which I had been bred, the beliefs that until then I had never doubted, in that hour of their first trial, were falling from me. I could not even pray. If I could have prayed for anything, it would have been for my father’s life. But if prayer were all powerful, as they said, would our loved ones ever die? Man has not faith enough, they would explain; if he had there would be no parting. So the Lord jests with His creatures, offering with the one hand to snatch back with the other. I flung the mockery from me. There was no firm foothold anywhere. What were all the religions of the word but narcotics with which Humanity seeks to dull its pain, drugs in which it drowns its terrors, faith but a bubble that death pricks.

I do not mean my thoughts took this form. I was little more than a lad, and to the young all thought is dumb, speaking only with a cry. But they were there, vague, inarticulate. Thoughts do not come to us as we grow older. They are with us all our lives. We learn their language, that is all.

One fair still evening it burst from me. We had lingered in the Park longer than usual, slowly pacing the broad avenue leading from the Observatory to the Heath. I poured forth all my doubts and fears — that he was leaving me for ever, that I should never see him again, I could not believe. What could I do to believe?

“I am glad you have spoken, Paul,” he said, “it would have been sad had we parted not understanding each other. It has been my fault. I did not know you had these doubts. They come to all of us sooner or later. But we hide them from one another. It is foolish.”

“But tell me,” I cried, “what can I do? How can I make myself believe?”

“My dear lad,” answered my father, “how can it matter what we believe or disbelieve? It will not alter God’s facts. Would you liken Him to some irritable schoolmaster, angry because you cannot understand him?”

“What do you believe,” I asked, “father, really I mean.”

The night had fallen. My father put his arm round me and drew me to him.

“That we are God’s children, little brother,” he answered, “that what He wills for us is best. It may be life, it may be sleep; it will be best. I cannot think that He will let us die: that were to think of Him as without purpose. But His uses may not be our desires. We must trust Him. ‘Though He slay me yet will I trust in Him.’”

We walked awhile in silence before my father spoke again.

“‘Now abideth these three, Faith, Hope and Charity’ — you remember the verse — Faith in God’s goodness to us, Hope that our dreams may be fulfiled. But these concern but ourselves — the greatest of all is Charity.”

Out of the night-shrouded human hive beneath our feet shone here and there a point of light.

“Be kind, that is all it means,” continued my father. “Often we do what we think right, and evil comes of it, and out of evil comes good. We cannot understand — maybe the old laws we have misread. But the new Law, that we love one another — all creatures He has made; that is so clear. And if it be that we are here together only for a little while, Paul, the future dark, how much the greater need have we of one another.”

I looked up into my father’s face, and the peace that shone from it slid into my soul and gave me strength.

CHAPTER IX.

OF THE FASHIONING OF PAUL.

Loves of my youth, whither are ye vanished? Tubby of the golden locks; Langley of the dented nose; Shamus stout of heart but faint of limb, easy enough to “down,” but utterly impossible to make to cry: “I give you best;” Neal the thin; and Dicky, “dicky Dick” the fat; Ballett of the weeping eye; Beau Bunnie lord of many ties, who always fought in black kid gloves; all ye others, ye whose names I cannot recollect, though I well remember ye were very dear to me, whither are ye vanished, where haunt your creeping ghosts? Had one told me then there would come a day I should never see again your merry faces, never hear your wild, shrill whoop of greeting, never feel again the warm clasp of your inky fingers, never fight again nor quarrel with you, never hate you, never love you, could I then have borne the thought, I wonder?

Once, methinks, not long ago, I saw you, Tubby, you with whom so often I discovered the North Pole, probed the problem of the sources of the Nile, (Have you forgotten, Tubby, our secret camping ground beside the lonely waters of the Regent’s Park canal, where discussing our frugal meal of toasted elephant’s tongue — by the uninitiated mistakable for jumbles — there would break upon our trained hunters’ ear the hungry lion or tiger’s distant roar, mingled with the melancholy, long-drawn growling of the Polar Bear, growing ever in volume and impatience until half-past four precisely; and we would snatch our rifles, and with stealthy tread and every sense alert make our way through the jungle — until stopped by the spiked fencing round the Zoological Gardens?) I feel sure it was you, in spite of your side whiskers and the greyness and the thinness of your once clustering golden locks. You were hurrying down Throgmorton Street chained to a small black bag. I should have stopped you, but that I had no time to spare, having to catch a train at Liverpool Street and to get shaved on the way. I wonder if you recognised me: you looked at me a little hard, I thought. Gallant, kindly hearted Shamus, you who fought once for half an hour to save a frog from being skinned; they tell me you are now an Income Tax assessor; a man, it is reported, with power of disbelief unusual among even Inland Revenue circles; of little faith, lacking in the charity that thinketh no evil. May Providence direct you to other districts than to mine.

So Time, Nature’s handy-man, bustles to and fro about the many rooms, making all things tidy, covers with sweet earth the burnt volcanoes, turns to use the debris of the ages, smoothes again the ground above the dead, heals again the beech bark marred by lovers.

In the beginning I was far from being a favourite with my schoolmates, and this was the first time trouble came to dwell with me. Later, we men and women generally succeed in convincing ourselves that whatever else we may have missed in life, popularity in a greater or less degree we have at all events secured, for without it altogether few of us, I think, would care to face existence. But where the child suffers keener than the man is in finding himself exposed to the cold truth without the protecting clothes of self-deception. My ostracism was painfully plain to me, and, as was my nature, I brooded upon it in silence.

“Can you run?” asked of me one day a most important personage whose name I have forgotten. He was head of the Lower Fourth, a tall youth with a nose like a beak, and the manner of one born to authority. He was the son of a draper in the Edgware Road, and his father failing, he had to be content for a niche in life with a lower clerkship in the Civil Service. But to us youngsters he always appeared a Duke of Wellington in embryo, and under other circumstances might, perhaps, have become one.

“Yes,” I answered. As a matter of fact it was my one accomplishment, and rumour of it maybe had reached him.

“Run round the playground twice at your fastest,” he commanded; “let me see you.”

I clinched my fists and charged off. How grateful I was to him for having spoken to me, the outcast of the class, thus publicly, I could only show by my exertions to please him. When I drew up before him I was panting hard, but I could see that he was satisfied.

“Why don’t the fellows like you?” he asked bluntly.

If only I could have stepped out of my shyness, spoken my real thoughts! “O Lord of the Lower Fourth! You upon whom success — the only success in life worth having — has fallen as from the laps of the gods! You to whom all Lower Fourth hearts turn! tell me the secret of this popularity. How may I acquire it? No price can be too great for me to pay for it. Vain little egoist that I am, it is the sum of my desires, and will be till the long years have taught me wisdom. The want of it embitters all my days. Why does silence fall upon their chattering groups when I draw near? Why do they drive me from their games? What is it shuts me out from them, repels them from me? I creep into the corners and shed scalding tears of shame. I watch with envious eyes and ears all you to whom the wondrous gift is given. What is your secret? Is it Tommy’s swagger? Then I will swagger, too, with anxious heart, with mingled fear and hope. But why — why, seeing that in Tommy they admire it, do they wait for me with imitations of cock-a-doodle-do, strut beside me mimicking a pouter pigeon? Is it Dicky’s playfulness? — Dicky, who runs away with their balls, snatches their caps from off their heads, springs upon their backs when they are least expecting it?

“Why should Dicky’s reward be laughter, and mine a bloody nose and a widened, deepened circle of dislike? I am no heavier than Dicky; if anything a pound or two lighter. Is it Billy’s friendliness? I too would fling my arms about their necks; but from me they angrily wrench themselves free. Is indifference the best plan? I walk apart with step I try so hard to render careless; but none follows, no little friendly arm is slipped through mine. Should one seek to win one’s way by kind offices? Ah, if one could! How I would fag for them. I could do their sums for them — I am good at sums — write their impositions for them, gladly take upon myself their punishments, would they but return my service with a little love and — more important still — a little admiration.”

But all I could find to say was, sulkily: “They do like me, some of them.” I dared not, aloud, acknowledge the truth.

“Don’t tell lies,” he answered; “you know they don’t — none of them.” And I hung my head.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do,” he continued in his lordly way; “I’ll give you a chance. We’re starting hare and hounds next Saturday; you can be a hare. You needn’t tell anybody. Just turn up on Saturday and I’ll see to it. Mind, you’ll have to run like the devil.”

He walked away without waiting for my answer, leaving me to meet Joy running towards me with outstretched hands. The great moment comes to all of us; to the politician, when the Party whip slips from confabulation with the Front Bench to congratulate him, smiling, on his really admirable little speech; to the youthful dramatist, reading in his bed-sitting-room the managerial note asking him to call that morning at eleven; to the subaltern, beckoned to the stirrup of his chief — the moment when the sun breaks through the morning mists, and the world lies stretched before us, our way clear.

Obeying orders, I gave no hint in school of the great fortune that had come to me; but hurrying home, I exploded in the passage before the front door could be closed behind me.

“I am to be a hare because I run so fast. Anybody can be a hound, but there’s only two hares, and they all want me. And can I have a jersey? We begin next Saturday. He saw me run. I ran twice round the playground. He said I was splendid! Of course, it’s a great honour to be a hare. We start from Hampstead Heath. And may I have a pair of shoes?”

The jersey and the shoes my mother and I purchased that very day, for the fear was upon me that unless we hastened, the last blue and white striped jersey in London might be sold, and the market be empty of running shoes. That evening, before getting into bed, I dressed myself in full costume to admire myself before the glass; and from then till the end of the week, to the terror of my mother, I practised leaping over chairs, and my method of descending stairs was perilous and roundabout. But, as I explained to them, the credit of the Lower Fourth was at stake, and banisters and legs equally of small account as compared with fame and honour; and my father, nodding his head, supported me with manly argument; but my mother added to her prayers another line.

Saturday came. The members of the hunt were mostly boys who lived in the neighbourhood; so the arrangement was that at half-past two we should meet at the turnpike gate outside the Spaniards. I brought my lunch with me and ate it in Regent’s Park, and then took the ‘bus to the Heath. One by one the others came up. Beyond mere glances, none of them took any notice of me. I was wearing my ordinary clothes over my jersey. I knew they thought I had come merely to see them start, and I hugged to myself the dream of the surprise that was in store for them, and of which I should be the hero. He came, one of the last, our leader and chief, and I sidled up behind him and waited, while he busied himself organising and constructing.

“But we’ve only got one hare,” cried one of them. “We ought to have two, you know, in case one gets blown.”

“We’ve got two,” answered the Duke. “Think I don’t know what I’m about? Young Kelver’s going to be the other one.”

Silence fell upon the meet.

“Oh, I say, we don’t want him,” at last broke in a voice. “He’s a muff.”

“He can run,” explained the Duke.

“Let him run home,” came another voice, which was greeted with laughter.

“You’ll run home in a minute yourself,” threatened the Duke, “if I have any of your cheek. Who’s captain here — you or me? Now, young ‘un, are you ready?”

I had commenced unbuttoning my jacket, but my hands fell to my side. “I don’t want to come,” I answered, “if they don’t want me.”

“He’ll get his feet wet,” suggested the boy who had spoken first. “Don’t spoil him, he’s his mother’s pet.”

“Are you coming or are you not?” shouted the Duke, seeing me still motionless. But the tears were coming into my eyes and would not go back. I turned my face away without speaking.

“All right, stop then,” cried the Duke, who, like all authoritative people, was impatient above all things of hesitation. “Here, Keefe, you take the bag and be off. It’ll be dark before we start.”