Читать книгу The Hillyars and the Burtons - Henry Kingsley - Страница 19

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MY dear father's religious convictions were, and are, eminently orthodox. He had been born and bred under the shadow of a great Kentish family, and had in his earlier years,--until the age of manhood, indeed,--contemplated the act of going to church anywhere but at the family church in the park as something little less than treason. So when, moved by ambition, he broke through old routine so far as to come to London and establish himself, he grew fiercer than ever in his orthodoxy; and, having made such a desperate step as that, he felt that he must draw a line somewhere. He must have some holdfast to his old life; so his devotion to the Establishment was intense and jealous. The habit he had of attending church in all weathers on Sunday morning, and carefully spelling through the service, got to be so much a part of himself that, when our necessities compelled us to render ourselves to a place where you could n't go to church if you wished it, the craving after the old habit made my father most uneasy and anxious, as far on in the week as Tuesday afternoon; about which time the regret for the churchless Sunday just gone by would have worn itself out. But then the cloud of the equally churchless Sunday approaching would begin to lower down about Thursday afternoon, and grow darker as the day approached; so that for the first six months of our residence in our new home, our Saturday evenings were by no means what they used to be. And yet I can hardly say that my father was at this time a devout man. I think it was more a matter of custom.

Of political convictions, my father had none of any sort or kind whatever. He sternly refused to qualify himself, or to express any opinion on politics, even among his intimates at the Black Lion on Saturday evening. The reason he gave was, that he had a large family, and that custom was custom. Before you condemn him you must remember that he had never had a chance in his life of informing himself on public affairs, and that he showed a certain sort of dogged wisdom in refusing to be led by the nose by the idle and ignorant chatterboxes against whom he was thrown in the parlor of the public-house.

I wish he had shown half as much wisdom with regard to another matter, and I wish I and Joe had been a few years older before he went so far into it. Joe and I believed in him, and egged him on, as two simple, affectionate boys might be expected to do. The fact is, as I have hinted before, that my father had considerable mechanical genius, and was very fond of inventing; but then he was an utterly ignorant man, could scarcely read and write, and knew nothing of what attempts, and of what failures, had been made before his time.

As ill luck would have it, his first attempt in this line was a great success. He invented a centrifugal screw-plate, for cutting very long and large male screws almost instantaneously. He produced the handles of an ordinary screw-plate (carrying a nut two inches diameter), two feet each way, and weighted them heavily at the ends. This, being put on a lathe, was made to revolve rapidly, and by means of an endless screw, approached the bar of iron to be operated on when it was spinning at its extreme velocity. It caught the bar and ran up it as though it were wood, cutting a splendid screw. A large building firm, who needed these great screws for shores, and centres of arches, and so on, bought the patent from my father for seventy pounds.

This was really a pretty and useful invention. My mother went blazing down the street to church in a blue-silk gown and a red bonnet, and the gold and marqueterie in Lord Dacres's great monument paled before her glory. It was all very well, and would have been better had my father been content to leave well alone.

But he wasn't. I never knew a man worth much who was. The very next week he was hard at work on his new treadleboat. We were saved from that. The evil day was staved off by Erne Hillyar.

Joe, among other benefits he was receiving as head boy at the parochial school, was getting a fair knowledge of mechanical drawing; so he had undertaken to make the drawings for this new invention. I had undertaken to sit next him and watch, keeping Fred quiet; my father sat on the other side; Frank lay on his back before the fire, singing softly; and the rest were grouped round Harry. Emma went silently hither and thither about housework, only coming now and then to look over Joe's shoulder; while my mother sat still beside the fire, with her arms folded, buried in thought. She had been uneasy in her mind all the evening; the green-grocer had told her that potatoes would be dear that autumn, and that "Now is your time, Mrs. Burton, and I can't say no fairer than that." She had argued the matter, in a rambling, desultory way, with any one who would let her, the whole evening, and was now arguing it with herself. But all of a sudden she cried out, "Lord a mercy!" and rose up.

It was not any new phase in the potato-question which caused her exclamation; it was Erne Hillyar. "I knocked, Mrs. Burton," he said, "and you did not hear me. May I come in?"

We all rose up to welcome him, but he said he would go away again if we did not sit exactly as we were; so we resumed our positions, and he came and sat down beside me, and leant over me, apparently to look at Joe's drawing.

"I say, Jim," he whispered, "I have run away again."

I whispered, "Wouldn't his pa be terrible anxious?"

"Not this time he won't. He will get into a wax this time. I don't want him to know where I come. If I go to the Parker's, they will tell him I don't spend all the time with them. I shall leave it a mystery."

I was so glad to see him, that I was determined to make him say something which I liked to hear. I said, "Why do you come here, sir?"

"To see you, gaby," he said; and I laughed. "And to see Emma also: so don't be conceited. What are you doing?"

My father and Joe explained the matter to him, and his countenance grew grave, but he said nothing. Very soon afterwards, Emma and he and I had managed to get into a corner together by the fire, and were talking together confidentially.

Erne told Emma of his having run away, and she was very angry with him. She said that, if he came so again, she would not speak one word to him. Erne pleaded with her, and defended himself. He said I was the only friend he had ever made, and that it was hard if he was never to see me. She said that was true, but that he should not do it in an underhand way. He said he must do it so, or not do it at all. She said that her brother was not one that need be run away to, or sought in holes and corners. He said that she knew nothing of the world and its prejudices, and that he should take his own way. She said it was time for Fred to go to bed, and she must wish him goodnight; so they quarrelled, until Fred's artificial shell--pinafore, frock, and all the rest of it--was unbuttoned and unhooked, and nothing remained but to slip him out of it all, and stand him down, with nothing on but his shoes and stockings, to warm his stomach by the fire. When this was done, Erne came round and hoped she wasn't angry with him. He said he would always try to do as she told him, but that he must and would come and see us. And she smiled at him again, and said she was sure that we three would always love one another, as long as we lived; and then, having put on Fred's night-gown, she carried him up to bed, singing as she went.

When Erne had done looking after her, he turned to me, and said:--

"Jim, she is right. I must not come sneaking here. I must have it out with the governor. I have told old Compton about it, and sworn him to secrecy. Now for some good news. Do you remember what you told me about the Thames?"

"Do you mean how it was getting to stink?"

"No, you great Hammersmith. I mean about sailing up it in a boat, as Joe and you and your cousin did; and all the tuliptrees and churches and tea--gardens." I dimly perceived that Erne wished me to take the aesthetical and picturesque view of the river, rather than the sanitary and practical. By way of showing him I understood him, I threw in:--

"Ah! and the skittle-alleys and flag-staffs."

"Exactly," he said. "It's a remarkable fact, that in my argument with my father I dwelt on that very point,--that identical point, I assure you. There's your skittles again, I said; there's a manly game for you. He didn't see it in that light at first, I allow; because he told me not to be an ass. But I have very little doubt I made an impression on him. At all events, I have gained the main point: you will allow that I triumphed."

I said "Yes"; I am sure I don't know why. I liked to have him there talking to me, and would have said "Yes" to anything. We two might have rambled on for a long while, if Joe, who had come up, and was standing beside me, had not said,--

"How, sir, may I ask?"

"Why, by getting him to take a house at Kew. I am to go to school at Dr. Mayby's, and we are going to keep boats, and punts, and things. And I am going to see whether that pleasant cousin of yours, of whom you have told me, can be induced to come up and be our waterman, and teach me to row. Where is your cousin, by the by?"

He was out to-night, we said. He might be in any moment. Erne said, "No matter. Now, Mr. Burton, I want to speak to you, and to Joe."

My father was all attention. Erne took the drawings of the treadle-boat from my father, and told him that the thing had been tried fifty times, and had failed utterly as compared with the oar; that, with direct action, you could not gain sufficient velocity of revolution; and that, if you resorted to multiplying gear, the loss of power sustained by friction was so enormous as to destroy the whole utility of the invention. He proved his case clearly. Joe acquiesced, and so did my father. The scheme was abandoned there and then; and I was left wondering at the strange mixture of sound common sense, knowledge of the subject, and simplicity of language, which Erne had shown. I soon began to see that he had great talents and very great reading, but that, from his hermit-like life, his knowledge of his fellow-creatures was lower than Harry's.

He had got a bed, it appeared, at the Cadogan Hotel in Sloane Street, and I walked home with him. I was surprised, I remember, to find him, the young gentleman who had just put us so clearly right on what was an important question to us, and of which we were in the deepest ignorance, asking the most simple questions about the things in the shop-windows and the people in the streets,--what the things (such common things as bladders of lard and barrels of size) were used for, and what they cost? The costermongers were a great source of attraction to him, for the King's Road that night was nearly as full of them as the New Cut. "See here, Jim," he said, "here is a man with a barrow full of the common murex; do they eat them?" I replied that we ate them with vinegar, and called them whelks. Periwinkles he knew, and recognized as old friends, but tripe was a sealed book to him. I felt such an ox-like content and complacency in hearing his voice and having him near me, that we might have gone on examining this world, so wonderfully new to him, until it was too late to get into his hotel; but he luckily thought of it in time. I, remembering the remarks of a ribald station-master on a former occasion, did not go within reach of the hotel--lights. We parted affectionately, and so ended his second visit.