Читать книгу Hands Up! - Frederick John Niven - Страница 4

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There has been a good deal of talk, one way or another, about the Apache Kid. The Yellow Press made capital out of him just as they have made capital out of many another figure on the frontier—Texas Jack, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane.

Now, I knew the Apache Kid. I was mixed up in the last wild days of his life, and, while not seeking to white-wash him, I should like to tell—to all whom it may concern—my view of that extraordinary man.

It is common knowledge that he was liked. Not only cowboys and miners who knew him, but your moneyed person, your capitalist even, can find a sigh for Apache Kid, the hold-up man. I have known two men, prominent, respected, one "interested in mines," the other a great ranch-owner and dabbler in booms, both of whom had met Apache in their travels about the West. Both spoke of him with regret, with much more of a shake of the head over his misguided, or rudderless life, and his wild end, than with the "jolly good riddance" air that might be expected. There was reason for it.

I had better, to begin with, explain how I came to the sage-brush country of the Apache Kid, because, in a new country, the men one meets there have had some concussion (good or bad) in their lives to boast them so far. And the reason for their being in the new country is a kind of striking of the pitch-fork to get their key.

That beginning of things I must tell quite frankly, bolstering myself up to the explanation by the thought that most young men—boys, let me say—for I was but a boy (and though I say "most young men" I am talking of myself!) have a kind of what the Scots call "daftness" in them, and are generally exceedingly sorry for themselves, magnificent in their woes and grandiloquent in their hopes.

I had wanted, in the old country, to be a sheep-farmer. My mother had, however, coaxed me to go in for a scholarship at my school. We spent our summer holidays, I remember, that year, after I had sat for the examination, in the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde, an island that appeals to the youngster because of its moors, its cliffs and corries, its high rocks and adders in the heather.

All through that vacation I was out and about on the hills with the shepherd and working in the dips. My father would come and watch me clutch adroitly a sheep by the horns, swing my leg over it and straddle it to the tank, plunge it in, walk alongside, yank it up at the end, and send it down to the pen among the other baptised ones. I say this not sacrilegiously now, but recalling an unfortunate expression used at the time.

My mother (bless her) was of the old school, and had had hopes that I might become a minister of the gospel, which several boyish escapades had dashed. My father and she had little in common; and one day, as he watched us working in the dips, my mother came along, under her sunshade, from the farm and stood looking on, half-sad, half-proud. My father was wholly proud of me at the moment, because I had pinioned a particular recalcitrant ram between my knees, and, wriggle his head as he would, I was his master. The farm-boys stopped to laugh and egg me on—just as I have seen, since then, cowboys roar with laughter when some branded two-year-old (who slipped through unbranded at one-year) has arisen and made a disturbance in a corral.

My father turned about, and, seeing my mother, gave his sniff that prefaced a jocular remark and said he:

"I think you'd better be glad that the boy can baptise sheep instead of mortals."

My mother stiffened under the sunshade, held it up rigidly over her head instead of letting it make a pretty circle behind her head and shoulders. She walked sadly back to the farm and wrote a letter straightway to her minister, asking him his views on sheep-farming for a young man. The parson wrote back that sheep-farming was a lazy life.

My father was a queer old fellow. He was a determined enough man, but very "jack easy" as the word is. He would dismiss things with a "Pshaw—don't worry me," just when the looker-on expected him to fight to the end for his own view, would give his shoulders a dismissing shrug and retire to the library to read his "Don Quixote" in Spanish, with his feet on the mantelpiece.

When this letter arrived my mother handed it to him and he read it with eyes widening and widening, held it in a trembling hand and bellowed out:

"What has he got to do with it? Perfect nonsense! What a woman! What a woman! He's a shepherd of souls that—that—that—parson! What does he know about mutton?"

And then my dad seemed to listen to the echo of his voice and, alas, saw the humour of his remark. He sat back and laughed at himself, then got up, flicked the letter, said: "Far better give the boy a chance. I wish my father had let me follow my instincts—" and retired to smoke many cigars and read "Don Quixote" in the Spanish.

But evidently he could not settle. I think, looking back on him, that he tried too much to dismiss things instead of to mend them. He had, nevertheless, quite an ordeal of it dismissing that letter. It came on a Friday and all Saturday he was glum and on Sunday so glum that he spent the forenoon yarning with the stable-boy and the ploughman. To my great delight, from where I sat (glum as he, before the farmhouse) I saw him dancing and snapping his fingers, explaining some Spanish dance to the farm hands. They looked upon this townsman, spending his summer vacation with them, as a "great card." He had spent his younger days partly in Chili, in the nitrate business, partly in the Argentine, and lived a deal in the past. He was now giving them an exhibition of some Spanish dance; and presently he began to sing, in response to some request from the stable-boy, a Spanish song.

My mother came out and looked at him sadly. I was old enough to see both sides—to see that, in one way, my dad was making a motley of himself for these boys. But, at the same time, he was having what, out West, we would call "a good time." He was enjoying his summer vacation.

The trouble was that it was Sunday; and my mother thought he had been better employed singing a psalm to the boys—and he knew that she thought that, when, looking across the stableyard, he caught her eyes. Result: he sniffed twice, blew his nose loudly and retired quite inside the stable where the boys followed—and sang, a little more quietly, another Spanish song a little more extravagant. Also my mother wept just two tears, and no more, and retired to the garden seat with the New Testament.

That Sunday was to me a long, long day, for on the Monday I expected to have news of the scholarship and I hoped, most ardently, that I had not won. But Monday was a long day too—because news did not come.

I know nothing in life worse than waiting. To act is good; to rest is good; to loaf is good. But to wait, to wait is horrible, undermining, breaking-down.

The post box, for the old country, was, in the Isle of Arran, very primitive. We might have been in the last ranch of the West so far as the post box went—for it was merely an old mustard box covered with zinc on which the Highland rain played tip-tap between blinks of sun, an old mustard box on top of a stake driven into a bank at the roadside, just where the cart track to the farm debouched from the fine road that runs round the island.

My father walked down with me on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, walked down eager and impatient. He had his own mail to expect, of course, but I know he was eager about that letter for me.

Even on Wednesday it did not come. He had, however, a large mail of his own and among it some newspapers. He slipped his letters into his inside pocket to read afterwards and, with his walking-stick under his left arm, opened a newspaper, held it wide, scanned the pages, frowned under his hanging brows, puffed his moustache, pouted, and bent his head. I thought some speculation had gone agee; but no—he handed me the paper and pointed.

The newspapers had received the list of prize-winners before the letter announcing my place had come to me. Yes—I had won a scholarship. My name looked out on me, in hard print, from among the twenty under the heading, "Result of the —— —— School Bursary Examination."

My father said not a word—just tapped my shoulder twice lightly with his walking-stick, then put it back under his arm, folded his hands behind his back, and walked up hill looking at the pieces of Macadamised rock glittering in the road.

"You see," said he at length, after a long pause, "your mother had hoped that Jack would go in for some profession at home."

Jack was my elder brother, and he had gone to the Panama Canal first of all, then left the canal to embark in the rubber business in Guatemala, then left that and gone to Venezuela where he was now, according to his letters, managing a horse ranch. Spanish was a language my mother looked upon with regret; for Spanish had carried my brother to all these places.

"Well," said I to my father, "I would rather be in Jack's place than in a university."

Up we trudged a few yards more and my father merely sniffed.

"Yes," he said at last, "yes, I quite understand. Well—well—you may learn engineering eventually. And engineering needs education. And engineering can take a man to the ends of the earth if he wants to go."

Of course I jumped at that idea—anywhere, anywhere out of the world of crowds!

Up we came to the farm and my father handed over the mail that had come for my mother.

"Has Will had no letter?" asked my mother, as she took the bundle.

My father smiled and shook his head. Then he prepared to give her a surprise with the newspaper, sniff-sniffing and glancing at it to get his finger on the place to spring it on her. She liked what she called "pleasant surprises," and he liked to surprise her pleasantly.

She opened a certain letter first, curious, womanlike, because she did not know the handwriting.

"I don't know this writing," she said, turning it over and over.

"Well, bless my heart, my dear, why not open it?" said my father. "Eh? What?" and sniffed, and got his finger to the list of Bursary winners.

My mother opened the letter, and one in her handwriting dropped out. She let it fall, looking puzzled, and there it lay—for her strained face held our gaze. She read the letter, let it fall, sat down on the seat before the door and stared into vacancy. My father cried out:

"What? What? What? Not that! Not that! Not that!"

He had an intuitive sense, or quickness of perception, of the kind called Celtic. He lifted the letter and read it. But he had little need to do so. He had known, looking on my mother, that it was to tell of the death of my elder brother; and his jaw went tight. Slowly, stiffly, his head rose and he looked up at the sky and, in a voice I shall never forget, he said:

"Oh, God! And he was a man! He was a man! I shall never forgive you—God!"

"Oh, John! John! Come to me!" cried my mother. "John!" (my father's name) "take care John!"

But my father was walking to and fro in the yard at a quick step as if on a quarter-deck. He walked to the gate that led to the road down hill; he walked to the gate that led to the moors; to and fro, to and fro.

The people who owned the farm-steading came to peep and look. In a near field the farmer stood, rake upheld, transfixed, watching that march. From the door of the farm the old mother peeped. At the stable door there were faces. It was terrible. My father walked to and fro with his jaws locked and grim and his hands clenched. My mother ran after him clutching his shoulder and saying:

"John! John! Let your wife console you."

He turned once or twice in his walk and looked at her, but with no expression save a kind of puzzled one, as if he thought: "Who is this? Why does she hang on my steps?"

Once I thought he was going to strike her and leapt forward to intercept; but it was only a gesture of dismissing her that he had made; and as I leapt forward he looked at me, and his eyes were so blank—looking at me as if I were a stock or stone—that I gave a choking blub in my chest.

Suddenly my father cried out:

"And he was a man, Oh, God! He was a man!" and raised his fist to the heaven—and fell down in the yard.

It is too painful for me to tell the rest; but the end of my father was that he was led away from that farm where we had come on summer vacation, taken away like a little child, led by the hand of a man who had come from Renshaw Asylum for him.

Having gone in for the scholarship, and won it, I now continued my studies, still in Glasgow. Home was very subdued and sad. A great gloom hung over it in which my poor mother moved like a withered leaf. I noticed, when I accompanied her to church—which I always did now, never inventing excuses for staying at home as had been my wont of old—that a new petition had come into the parson's prayer: ". . . and for those whose minds have been blinded we pray for light."

I think if I had looked into my heart during these months I should have been by way of flattering myself that I was an ideal son. Indeed, I think at times I did so look and see myself upon the stage of life as something of a heroic figure. Youth is histrionic.

Sheep-farming was over; in another month I would be sitting for a fresh examination; If I came out near the top a Bursary would be mine again, carrying me on from the grammar school to our university; if I came out a little lower I would have at least a scholarship. I was already looked upon by my class-mates as distinctly in the running; and yet a university career was the last thing that my heart desired.

When I passed Westward by Kelvinside and saw the towers of the university against the sunset they interested me well enough to carry the vision of them home in my mind so that I might make an impression of them in red chalk. From the exterior there was something airy, romantic, about these towers. After seeing them one evening, as I walked home, many raucous voices of a Salvation Army Choir fell harshly on my ears, the discords of cornet and tambourine, with the words, "Far, far away, like bells at sunset pealing," and I wanted to take the choristers up to the end of Charing Cross and ask them to look on these towers as they dissolved in the mists of night—so that they might understand something of the beauty of the words they sang.

When I passed down University Gardens late one night from visiting a friend there, sudden, over me, there was a boom; the half-hour had sounded. And I stood stock still in that broad, deserted thoroughfare, and listened to the waves of sound trembling into distance. That experience made me think of a meteoric stone fallen in the velvet purple of some lake and sending a circle of waves to the surrounding shores. As the words of the singers conjured up the misted towers, fading out so beautifully as to make me annoyed at their insulting discords, so the boom of the bell conjured up a picture. The art of words is not my forte; but I consider, thinking thus, how all the arts are one. To all this I have been led by speaking of the exterior of the University of Glasgow.

As for the interior it had for me no attraction, and yet I was about to sit in an examination in a grand endeavour to achieve that for which I had no desire. So I saw myself, if not a "greenery yallery, oh such a good young man" as—in the phrase of old women—a "good son." Yes—there is no doubt that youth is histrionic.

You will readily understand that a young man of such calibre as this had his calf-love; and if the lady smiled, at times, a little on the sardonic side, I do not know that the young man was any the worse. He is the last, at the time, to perceive the sardonic dimples at the edges of his idol's mouth. He will see to it that she remains for him the Holy Grail, the Light that never was on land or sea. She has her amusement, he his ideal; and I think these things are well.

I think women like things to be a little secretive; an apple, if it be but a crab apple, is preferable to the luscious pear. Really, I do not think, looking back on that idyll from the sanity of middle age, that the secrecy of our meetings was essential; but I do know, whatever the cause, My Lady, with very solemn eyes, suggested to me the advisability of not calling too frequently at her home. I remember that, at the time, I used to marvel much how Fate cast us together, how frequently we, as it were bumped into one another, and I used to take it as a sign that Fate smiled upon us.

But, looking back now, I remember that when I bumped into her—let me say at Queen Street Station—at two of a Saturday afternoon, she really had dropped, in conversation the preceding Monday, that she expected to be in town on Saturday afternoon. When I had made up my mind to visit the Institute of Fine Arts upon a Thursday evening, changed my mind and decided to go upon Friday, I think it quite probable that I really remembered the fact—before the changing of my mind and not after—the fact that she had said that she intended to go to see the pictures at the Fine Arts Institute on Friday evening because the band played on that night.

On so much of my calf-love, then, do I look back with smiling tolerance; no—I think I should say with approval, for he who worships a Goddess in spirit and in truth is not likely to slide too often from his chair beneath the table, at a smoking concert, and, though no puritan, I have observed that a Spartan menu is conducive to a healthy body, and a healthy body is the fit home for a healthy mind.

A celebrated Scot has said that the Scotsman without religion is apt to drop into the public-house; an irreligious young man, I would add, with no blasphemy, but a knowledge of mankind and romantic views, can make out of a West End young lady with bowed lips and russet locks, a Divinity as effectual as a stone Virgin between wax candles. Still, your Divinity must have her whims, and not all her whims can shatter her in the eyes of her worshipper. I really don't think that the secrecy was good, but that is a detail. As luck would have it (I remember how, in the agony of the time, I thought some hideous Fate stepped in upon our family ever) as luck would have it, out of my romance came tragedy.

Thrice I had conveyed My Lady to her door and, by her request, parted from her behind some trees that overlooked her father's house. I suspect there was nothing more in it than the chaffing of her brothers; certainly they used to cock an eye in a roguish way upon me at times, and I fancy indeed that we were looked upon as something of a joke. My Lady would have it, at any rate, that I remain in the shadow of the rhododendrons until she had rung and till the flood of light upon the gravel had announced the opening of the door, its extinguishment the closing. I was to count ten—or something of that kind—and then depart.

This kind of parody of Romeo I can quite understand is titillating to a young lady who owns a ticket of the Circulating Library, but there are many types of minds in the world and while some deck the sinister with the romantic, others see in the romantic the sinister. One such had spied upon me; and on the third, or perhaps fourth occasion of this secretive departure, just as I was turning away, he laid hold of me—a perfect type of dirty-scarved, greasy-capped lurcher.

"Half a minute young man," said he. "I've been watching you."

"Well?" said I.

"What's it worth?" said he.

"What do you mean?" said I.

"Why," said he, "your little game. I'll keep my mouth shut for a quid."

My dander was by no means up; there was a trifle of almost amusement in my mind.

"If you don't give me a quid," he said, "I'll step right over and tell the gentleman that you've been trying to get round about his daughter."

Of course, as the saying is, I saw red at that and hit out; and there we fell to, he, with his hooligan methods to aid in the victory, I with the intense madness at the sullying of my idol. I write with a certain air of levity of these incidents. I do so because there is no other way. When I think of the sequel of it all it seems a very silly play.

At last I landed him a blow that not only laid him flat upon the ground, but kept him there.

I was blown, my heart going like a piston, the sweat was cold on me suddenly in the autumn night. I looked at my antagonist again. The horrible, pallid light of an arc lamp at the corner sifted through the hanging boughs of a lime-tree and glistened on his teeth. My heart, that had been going like a piston, seemed to clutch, and clutch, and clutch; an immense panic fell on me. I bent down and felt his heart and could find no beating.

I remember the torture of the moment, how I was maddened with annoyance at myself because all I could feel was the throb, throbbing of the blood in my own hand. I almost wept. I put my ear to his breast and what I heard was like the echo of my own heart-throbs in my ear. I could hear nothing outside of my terror.

I stood up and said to myself over and over again, "Be calm! Be calm—be calm!" I pressed my lips together; I went over the alphabet, all in a mad endeavour to collect myself. So I gained some measure of calm, at least enough to hold his wrist again, not with my thumb—remembering that there is a pulse in the thumb; but there was no pulse of life in his wrist.

You can conceive my panic. No time now for histrionics. As quick as a knife-thrust I saw the gallows, my mother's agony—her death with a broken heart—already nigh enough broken by the tragedy of my father's madness. I walked home. I wanted to run home but I controlled myself. I walked home.

My mother had gone to bed. I sat all night in my room. It is a wonder I did not go grey as I have heard men may in a night. Time after time I was possessed of a desire to go out and run, run, run. Where? I would ask myself. And there I sat all night reasoning myself into a course of wise action. Wise action! It was the biggest blunder I ever made in my life.

I appeared at breakfast. My mother remarked upon my haggard looks. I made some excuse—I know not what—of neuralgia, of neuralgic pain, of a chill. I have had some moments of suspense in my life. I have had some times of anguish. But they concern myself only, or those who are not my blood kin. I wanted to tell her all; and anon I dared not. I wanted to bid her farewell—and could not. I made my morning's farewell over-cold instead of over-tender—I left the house, I made haste to my bank and drew my little all, and thence to a shipping office.

I saw a clerk who cannot, I suspect, have been a youth of much penetration; for, though I schooled myself, I can hardly think that my face was free of signs of anxiety. I told him some airy tale of wishing to get the first possible boat for America. There was one in a fortnight. When I said, in as nonchalant a voice as I could muster: "Oh—that is some time, and my business demands haste," with a "Just a moment" he withdrew to the side of an elderly man at a rearward desk, an elderly man who had that air as of being ready to jump into the breach at a moment's notice, which I, observing, took for a sign that his suspicion was aroused.

Nothing of the sort of course; he was only eager to book a passage. He came over to me at once and echoing the "Just a moment" of the younger assistant, departed into a partitioned off room at the end of the office. Through the dulled glass I saw him take a receiver from the rests of a telephone. I made a turn on my heel to run from the door, sure that he was ringing up Duke Street, and then I gripped myself. I was going to see it through.

He returned (after about a hundred years) to tell me that that evening I could sail from Liverpool; there was just one berth, second class, if that would suit.

There is no pummelling worse than that of a guilty conscience. I leave it to the reader to imagine, upon these lines, the pummelling of the ensuing days and these last, and horrific, pummellings on the coming alongside of the Doctor's launch, on the coming alongside of the pilot boat, on the coming aboard of the Customs men; on the descent of the gangway.

That, then, is how I left home.