Читать книгу Gathered In - Catherine Helen Spence - Страница 17

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That James Oswald's ignorance was well-nigh absolute, was no surprise to his cousin. What could he possibly have learned? He never opened a book or even read the current news in the newspapers, and had no society which would improve him. How he could make out the racing news and the odds which his mother said interested him so much, was a puzzle to Kenneth, for he could not read aloud a sentence of English, without serious blunders, and of the ordinary rules of arithmetic he appeared to know nothing. His writing was as inelegant as his spelling was incorrect, and of ordinary matters, which are familiar to the schoolboy of ten, this lad of seventeen was perfectly ignorant. Was there any way of awakening curiosity, of arousing ambition, of breathing some soul into this clod? Had he any affection for either of his parents, or for any one?

Kenneth tried to get his cousin to talk, but for that Jim had no inclination. He was not going to speak to a spy and a tell-tale! Kenneth next tried to talk to him, but the pleasantness which had made him so popular in Edinburgh and on board the 'Kent' seemed altogether at fault here. No topic could interest him at all. His Scottish grandparents and their interest in Tingalpa and its inmates; what did he care for old fogies whom he had never seen and never wished to see? Edinburgh and its sights--perfectly stolid. The voyage--equally uninterested. The theatricals, with which he had amused Jim's mother, were pooh-poohed as mere amateurs' performance that no one used to Castlehurst or Melbourne professionals would care sixpence to see. The landing at Melbourne--one little spark of interest was elicited here.

"And what did you think of Melbourne," said Jim.

"A wonderful city for its age. Handsome, busy, and with beautiful suburbs. To me, however, it looked painfully new."

A coarse laugh was the first sign given that Jim cared for what his cousin had been saying.

"That is the best of Melbourne," said he. "None of your old mouldy buildings with no end of lying stories about them, but all spick and span new. If a house gets shabby it is pulled down and another put up in its place. In time it will lick all the cities of England into a cocked hat. There's some life in Melbourne. If I'd only lost my bet as I wanted to we'd have had a run down to meet you, but the governor reckoned on his spree first, and was out in his calculation for once. Rum notion of enjoyment the governor has. I take my pleasure different to him. And now he'll not move to Melbourne, for months he says. He's chalked out some sickening work for me, and you and him will be sick enough of it before you're done with it. I wish you and the 'Kent' had gone to the bottom. The fishes might have had the benefit of your cram and welcome."

"There go two words to that bargain, my good fellow. I prefer dryer quarters, even Cowarrel in a bad season," said Kenneth.

"With Bob Horne's dryest speeches for amusement. But I tell you once for all, that I'm not going to slave and work like a nigger, because the governor thinks it will make a gentleman of me. It's the rhino that makes the gentleman nowadays, and there's plenty of that. Now just hear reason; let us settle how little I am to do, just for appearance sake. And as for your poking your nose into my business, I tell you plainly I'll have none of it. It's all very very well for the old cock, who takes his grog wholesale, and makes a beast of himself two or three times a year, to say I'm to keep clear of the brandy bottle; and for him that has had the game of making a fortune to tell you to watch that I don't handle the dice-box, it was on his tongue's end to say the billiard table too, but he thought that was rather too strong, but a man must have some way of risking money to win or lose, or life would be as flat as ditchwater. I tell you I've been used to have my own way and I'm going to have it. You look like a milksop, and I hear you are a teetotaller, and I've no doubt you are a hypocrite. What's your figure?"

"Nothing that you could offer," said Kenneth, "would make me disregard your father's wishes."

"And you will find I'll make the place pretty hot for you."

"I don't care in the least for what you threaten."

"And you mean to follow me about?"

"I shall try to carry out your father's wishes."

"And report to him?"

"Whatever he asks I shall answer to the best of my knowledge."

"I wish you joy of your post. You'll wish you were back in 'Auld Reekie', as my father calls it, ten times in the half-hour."

"That's likely enough. I wish it now, but that makes not the slightest difference to my duty."

"Duty!" said Jim, in a tone of the deepest disgust. "Well, I suppose you are not twenty, and you speak about duty as if I believed you cared a hang about it. Well, I'll learn as little as I can. It will save you trouble to know it at the first."

"You will find it the wiser course, and certainly the more profitable course, to try to please your father. You will find learning more interesting if you would give it a fair trial."

"That's all according to taste. I believe you spoke a true word about water running up hill, though I had a mind to thrash you for your damned conceit all the same."

Poor Jim with his slight figure, his puny limbs, and his general want of vigour, caused by precocious drinking, smoking, and late hours, was much more able to talk of such thrashing than likely to attempt it.

"Pray, what the better are you now for all the years you've been at this sickening work?" resumed he with a glance of disgust at the schoolbooks which, though they had not been used, had been abused with splashes of ink and gashes of knives so that they looked to have seen some service.

"I hope I am a great deal the better, and I am sure I am very much the happier for what I know."

"Well, and you bring all this rot out here when I've seen the best scholars--men with a degree--(which you could not get, for all you tried, as the governor let out one day) knockabout hands on stations, or loafing at Castlehurst, glad to get their grub and a glass of brandy from men that did not know their A.B.C. No;" said James with the profound conceit of ignorance, "I could buy a score of them with a keg of brandy and a pound of tobacco. And the governor knows that as well as I do, for all he preaches to me before you, and be hanged to you."

Kenneth had certainly uphill work enough to discourage a more experienced instructor and an older man. A stupid unwilling boy in a school learns unconsciously something from his companions and the teacher has the bright boys to push on and encourage his labours; but the hammering at a single, dull, refractory spoiled lad, is the very lowest depth to which a conscientious man could be condemned.

But with incredible pains and trouble, and George Oswald's own firm keeping to his word about money, he effected something. Jim did learn to read better, to write legibly, to spell imperfectly, and to cast accounts somewhat better than the other branches, for he really wanted to understand the odds, and to bet with more precise information than he had done heretofore.

Kenneth did not keep him long at work, the poor head could not stand any continued attention even to elementary learning, but the main thing that he wished to effect, was to give him some taste for innocent amusement, and some interest in books or pictures or gardening or the working of the station. All Jim's ideas of recreation or fun were connected with public houses, theatres, and general spending of money among low company, and when his cousin tried to interest him in books of the lightest description, Jim only experienced varieties of weariness.

He tried him with a sporting novel, but, except for the tit-bits about races and matches, the rest was all "rot." The love passages and the description were "not business." He tried him with a schoolboy book, but it was babyish; with a cleverly illustrated child's book, it was twaddle; with ballad poetry, which is the earliest of literature, but it was stuff; with the drama, but that was no use read; the theatre, with the dresses and the scenery and the stars and the bar and smoking-room, was more like the thing. Yes, he liked the Melbourne theatre and the Castlehurst theatre, when there was anything good on. He laughed very heartily at a modern comic song with a good chorus sung in a Music Hall or in the Shades, especially if it was sung in character with a good get up, but as for seeing any fun in the finest jokes printed in a book, that was beyond him.

Would not he like to act, to take a part in some private theatricals? Too much trouble, far better to pay other people to act for him; but yet this suggestion received more attention than any other that Kenneth had made, and Mrs. Oswald took up the idea and interested herself in the costumes, and proposed to invite their neighbours the Deanes and the Roberts's. It was of no use thinking of inviting the Grays of Wilta. Miss Deane and her brother were glad to take parts, Mick and Biddy were easily drilled for the two Irish servants in the little farce which was selected, Kenneth took a heavy part and doubled another, and Jim, in the handsomest clothes of the party, did the walking gentleman. With much coaching from his cousin and several rehearsals, Jim got his part and his cues fairly, and the piece went off pleasantly enough. It was not much towards the matriculation, but it might be something towards education to get him to do such things, but after the performance, Jim rested on his laurels. He could do theatricals as well as any one--indeed his mother thought he far surpassed his cousin, whose two parts were taken in shabby clothes; but it was too much to go through to effect so little. He liked to "blow" about his acting, and how many speeches he had to learn, and how pat he had them, but there was no further result.

The enforced companionship of the two cousins was to both a painful restraint, but there is no doubt that it kept Jim for the times out of much mischief. If he had his living to earn, there might have been some hope for the lad, but as the only son of George Oswald, he saw not the slightest cause for exertion or the least motive for ambition. His father was devoured with the wish to rise in the social scale, and to mix with his betters in birth and breeding, but Jim liked the society of his inferiors, where he was the king of the company, and where he could feel that he or his father (which was the same thing) could buy them all up. As, in spite of his pride of purse, he never was conscious that his cousin looked up to him one whit, he felt the constant association with him a galling chain, and lost no opportunity of saying so to him.

In one respect Kenneth's visit was not disappointing to his uncle and aunt; they were visited by some of the neighbours who had held aloof before, but with none of them could Kenneth himself find the companionship he longed for. Neither the Deanes nor the Roberts's had any intelligent tastes. He was suffering so keenly from intellectual isolation, as well as from a phase of religious difficulty, that his inner life was almost unendurable. Fifty times in a week was he tempted to go to his uncle and request to be allowed to go as an usher in a school or as a clerk in a Bank or a warehouse, or as a shepherd on a station, anything rather than continue in this miserable position of bear-warder without the effective command of the bear. But his uncle thought he was really doing Jim good, and hated the idea of parting with him. Kenneth, too, got attached to Mr. Oswald, and gradually found out methods of serving him which, though far less important, were more satisfactorily carried out. And he knew that as his uncle grew older, there would be more for a young active willing helper to do in various ways. Although Mrs. Oswald's jealousy was sometimes aroused at the praises bestowed by her husband on his nephew, and at the invitations he received and the preference shown to him over Jim by the neighbours, she found him very obliging and helpful in many ways, and made no active effort to oust him.

Slowly and drearily the days, months, and years passed by, varied by occasional visits to Melbourne, where the desire for liberty became almost maddening, and several hard drinking bouts on the part of Mr. Oswald, which even Kenneth thought a much less evil than the constant glasses of beer, wine, and spirits, from which all his efforts failed to keep the son.

It was Kenneth's birthday, he was of age, and he was more than usually gloomy. No one knew or cared about it, he had no inheritance to look for, no mother now to take pride in her handsome boy. And his father--their fates were apart, apart for ever. If the Australian life had been as happy as his father had hoped it would be, he would have written; but it was so much harder than he could have feared, that he thought it better to let Mr. McDiarmid think all was well, and that he accepted the severance as the best and wisest course. But in this loveless house, how his heart yearned for the love he could not claim. Hard thoughts came into his heart, such a wish that he had never been born, such an impatience of the interminable hours that led to nothing--of the efforts renewed every day without any good results--such a weariness of his thankless task, such an eager desire to shuffle off this mortal coil altogether, if he could do it without sin. Who would miss him? The grandparents were just as well and comfortable without him. His uncle would cease to expect impossibilities and to entertain hopes from his influence over Jim which could never be realized, his aunt and cousin would be better pleased if he went out of their sphere altogether, into the grave or anywhere else.

Here was Nelly's letter just received, cheerful about the old folks, chatty about the kind neighbours, and effusive about a recent visit from Mr. Stalker, who had gone with her to the Linleath woods in memory of the old times, who had lent her some books and had executed Kenneth's commission about her birthday present so beautifully. It was so good of him to mind her. She had been at the old home lately, and thought much of the old days when Kenneth had taken her to school, and of the still older times when the three of them had those lovely walks on the Saturday afternoons.

"Nelly would miss my letters, and Harry too," thought Kenneth, "but except for the monthly communication, I am completely taken out of their lives. They could not miss me much. And there's Harry trying to delay the evil day, and complaining of his hard fate. He had shrunk from the appointment as assistant and successor to his great uncle, and gone on teaching and writing in Edinburgh, but the old man's health was failing and he must make up his mind soon. And he is not satisfied with the prospect of an assured livelihood in a rural parish, where everyone will look up to him, where he can preach thoughtful and eloquent sermons, and do a little work for the Press; not at all satisfied. He is too speculative to be satisfied with set creeds and crystallized opinions; too honest with himself to think himself a guide for young and old; and filled with a wild desire to have his fling out before he settles down, and that fling forbidden by the restraints of his profession. The provision made by his many friends for his future comfort appears to be as cruel kindness as in my case, but he is not starved intellectually and morally as I am. He has many friends with whom to change ideas; he reads, he writes, he thinks; I seem to forget that I ever had any intellectual power or ambition at all."

On that birthday he sat down and wrote a long letter to his father, in which he gave vent to all his feelings, and described the colourless life, the difficult duties, the religious despondency, the intellectual stagnation. He poured out all the affection which he had felt for his dead mother to this father, whom he could have loved so warmly and obeyed so loyally if it had been allowed, but from whom he was severed so completely, and in the act of writing he felt he was gaining some sympathy, and would go on henceforward with more courage. After he had finished the letter, he set fire to it and reduced it to ashes. As he watched the last red sparks wander and expire, the futility of all such make-believes, either to his father on earth or in heaven, fell heavy on him, and leaning his face in his hands in his solitary room, he groaned in the bitterness of his soul.

"If he knew it, what could he do for me? He cannot step out of his own sphere to lend a friendly hand to pluck me out of this slough of despond. No, let him serenely move in his own orbit, and, if he casts a glance towards me, let him continue to think that I have been caught up in an inferior system more suited to me--perhaps really better for me--than his own. Why should I undeceive him? And it is the same with prayer. I may relieve my own feelings for a moment, but I can call down no efficient help. 'On the hills like gods together, careless of mankind,' that is all we can hope for from the Higher powers. I must make out the two years, however, that were thought to fit Jim for matriculation. After that I must have liberty. There is no need for me to attempt to make bricks without straw any longer than that."