Читать книгу John Cornelius: His Life and Adventures - Hugh Walpole - Страница 13

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Shortly after his ninth birthday his grandfather died. The old man’s end was very peaceful. During the last week of his reign he was dispensing offices to his friends in the Asylum, making one Lord High Chancellor, another General of his Eastern Forces. He made some excellent laws too in those last days, as, for instance, the caging of birds was an offence deserving of two years in gaol, everyone with more than one hundred pounds a year must have a rose-garden, and anyone chaining a dog for more than six hours at a time was himself to be chained for a like duration. He very solemnly nominated Johnny as heir to the throne. He died with a smile on his lips, in all probability the happiest man in England.

John’s grandmother did not long survive him. It had been so great a part of her life that she should care for her husband that she naturally followed him with the hope that he would still be needing her care. She was also greatly distressed by the unhappiness of her son, John’s father. After her husband’s death she spent most of the day in the Cornelius’ cottage, looking at her son with the loving anxiety of a mother, which, when there is no way of appeasing it, can be very irritating. Little Mr. Cornelius sat at his table, pretending to work, while his mother in a voice of tremulous brightness asked him, once every half-hour, whether there wasn’t anything she could do for him.

Poor Daisy Cornelius went on with her washing and felt no loving-kindness towards her mother-in-law. And then one day the little woman gave a cry and fell back on to John’s patchwork quilt. Her son, whose arms were round her, suddenly realized that one of the last supports left to him in life was dying. She looked into his eyes and, with the realization that he loved her, contentedly died.

One of the things that had happened to John by this time was that his voice had developed into one of the finest ever heard in Glebeshire. I have not only his word for it; Anne, Charlie and other later acquaintances testified quite sufficiently. He might, I don’t doubt, had he known the right people, have won a singing scholarship in one of the Cathedrals—and what would have been his fate then?

However, there was no one in Port Merlin to advise him, and his audiences consisted principally of washerwomen, fishermen, boys and girls who laughed at him, Mr. Bartholomew, Mr. Darlington, Mrs. Winchester, Jimmy Lipscombe—and, for a brief while, the congregation at St. Peter’s Church.

This last episode was characteristic of much that happened to him through life. It seems that the Rector of St. Peter’s, Mr. Dunlop was his name, heard of John’s voice and invited him to sing to him, which he very readily did. He was then asked to sing in St. Peter’s choir. John enquired—what benefits were there? Well, there was a Choir Treat in the summer and a jolly Party at Christmas-time. John said that he would see how he liked it.

Mr. Dunlop was, I understand, the ‘motherly’ kind of clergyman. All his choir-boys were his children and, of course, like many mothers, he had his favourite child. John used to imitate him very well—his cherubic smile, his chuckle, his kindly pressure on the lucky boy’s shoulder. ‘But I was never one of the lucky boys. I was far too ugly and my clothes were too shabby. Besides, I was always upsetting the other boys, telling them stories in church, generally misbehaving. As a matter of fact I could not bear Mr. Dunlop touching me. I’ve been always like that. I hate to be touched by the wrong person. So I shrank away when his fat fingers caught my arm.’

The unhappy climax came when on a gala day, Easter Sunday perhaps it was, Mr. Dunlop’s favourite child was to sing as solo in the anthem ‘O for the Wings of a Dove.’

The little singer was the favourite child of the Dunlop family just then and he had, John always asserted, a voice like a pencil on a slate.

In any case, he had but just started on his song when John could endure it no longer and started also. He knew the music perfectly, his voice was strong, pure, resonant, and very soon he was the only singer. Nothing very romantic occurred. Charlie Christian was in the congregation, but John’s beautiful eyes, as his voice soared higher and higher, did not meet, over the heads of the people, Charlie’s beautiful eyes. John simply occupied himself with his business, which was not, alas, his business at all. The congregation was unaware of anything save that its soul was being given the most delectable bread and treacle.

Afterwards in the vestry Mr. Dunlop had a great deal to say. He was, most rightly, indignant. John simply remarked that his voice could lick any other boy’s voice in England and he could read music at sight, which was more than Mr. Dunlop could. He ceased, from that moment, to be a member of St. Peter’s choir, and Charlie ceased to be a member of its congregation, which he had joined only as John’s supporter.

The friendship between the two boys was now something of real importance. The deeper I look into it, the more surely I discover its essential character, the more I recall to mind the Lama and Kim, two noble gentlemen not, at this time of which I am writing, yet created. Charlie was physically like the Lama as little as may be, neither in brains nor in character had he any resemblance to him. He was looking neither for an Arrow nor a River and the only Wheel of which he was conscious was the wheel of mechanics.

Moreover it was he who protected John and it was Kim who protected the Lama. Nevertheless the resemblance is there. Charlie had, I fancy, the kind of influence over John that the Lama had over Kim. Charlie was quiet, still, reflective. John had the Lama’s naïveté and the Lama’s wisdom, but he had the mischievousness and the charming arrogance of Kim. I am thinking, perhaps, when all is said, of the Lama’s quiet and beautiful fidelity, his unswerving insistence on the final values; Charlie had that more than any man I have ever known.

Charlie’s mind was entirely of a mechanical character and it was through machines that he came to a perception of human beings. His ambition was to be an engineer and it often worried him that John should tell lies and believe so many things that were clearly untrue. He liked then and always to argue and he was one of the most obstinate of God’s creatures. Argument with Charlie meant repeating the same thing over and over again.

‘There bain’t no mermaids.’

‘How do you know there aren’t?’

‘Everyone knows there’s not.’

‘How do you know what’s under the sea?’

‘There bain’t no mermaids, I tell you. It’s silly to talk so soft.’

‘I’ll tell you what’s under the sea. There are trees of coral, pink coral, and the sun shines down through the green water and touches the tips of the coral trees, while a little swarm of fish, fish all mouths with scales of gold——’

‘There bain’t no mermaids. ’Tis silly——’

‘How do you know? Have you ever been to the bottom of the sea?’

‘Of course not. But there bain’t——’

Charlie would sit, his fingers active, whittling a stick, sharpening a pencil, mending a box. He could do anything with his hands.

At the age of six he swam like a fish, whereas John was never a good swimmer. But he liked to be in the water, and Charlie would swim out ahead of him tempting him further and further, and then, as John sank, he would feel Charlie’s muscular arm around him. He was afraid of nothing if Charlie were near.

Anne Swinnerton was altogether a different problem. The critical moment of Anne’s life arrived when, at the age of eleven and a little over, she was informed by a girl to whom she had been impertinent (or as she herself would call it, independent) exactly and precisely how her mother earned a living. Anne, being no fool, had from a very early age realized that a considerable number of gentlemen called upon her mother and appeared to like her very much. Mrs. Swinnerton was pretty, gay and lively. She also had, as Anne knew, a heady temper and moods of extreme misery and despair. Anne often described to me that queer life in that queer house on the cliff. Where Mr. Swinnerton was she never knew.

Not only did she never see her father in the flesh, she never even saw a photograph of him. She never knew whether she were legitimate or no; she suspected she was not.

When she was six she was given a bedroom in the little house on the ground floor looking over the cliff to the sea. The only other person in the house beside a weekly char was a grim young woman called Miss Merkle who came straight out of the pages of Dickens, where her name was Rosa Dartle. This lady was fierce-tempered and gave little Anne many a slap and a shaking. She had a sort of unkind, vexed angry love for Anne’s mother. She cooked very well and looked after the house. She never spoke to any of Mrs. Swinnerton’s gentlemen friends. If she encountered one she passed him as though he were not.

Mrs. Swinnerton’s friends came sometimes from a distance, sometimes from near at hand. Often they stayed all night. Some of them little Anne came to know quite well. There was Uncle George, who was large, burly, red-faced, with side-whiskers. Often she saw Uncle George in his nightshirt—once she saw him in the sitting-room and her mother was sitting on his knee. There was Mr. Saunders, who was a little shy man, regarding her with eyes of terror, why she couldn’t imagine. Then there was a young, gay, very pleasant gentleman with the odd name of Uncle Percy Garden. Perhaps because of his name, perhaps because of the strong scent that he used, she always connected him with flowers.

It sometimes seemed to her unusual that it should be always gentlemen who visited their house and never ladies. Between her mother and herself an undoubted affection existed, but it was of a kind that checked in Anne any sort of demonstrativeness—for when her mother showed affection she was so very demonstrative that Anne felt a little sick, and when her mother didn’t need affection she disliked even to be touched. This early training was greatly responsible for Anne’s own dislike of demonstrations in later life.

It was an untidy little house with the smell of cigarette-smoke, bon-bons, Miss Merkle’s cooking, and the salt sea air all over it. But Anne was quite happy in that life until the girl at school informed her plainly that Anne’s mother slept with all these different gentlemen and that they paid her mother money for the pleasure of doing so. Even then Anne understood very little of it; she could see no reason why the gentlemen should pay her mother money for so very slight a pleasure. She herself disliked extremely to sleep with her mother.

What she did understand was that, in some mysterious fashion, it was disgraceful that this should occur, and that she and her mother were ‘bad’ because of it. Shortly after this she was taken away from the school and sent to a boarding-school at Truro in Cornwall. This interrupted her friendship with John for five whole years. The result of this crisis was to make her outwardly proud, reserved, defiant, unfriendly. Her warmth of heart, her loyalty of spirit, were hidden.

She did not, in these years in Truro, forget John. She has told me how strange it was that she should remember him and think of him more than of any other human being. He also remembered her. He wrote to her funny letters and little pieces of very bad poetry. All these she kept.

One was:

Dear Anne—I’m thinking of going fishing with Charlie not that I ever catch anything but it’s a half-holiday. I cheeked Mrs. Hoskin last night and stood behind a door when she didn’t know and made her jump like anything. I’m beginning to write a play about Robin Hood. It’s in twelve acts and the first act is in the greenwood and the second act is King Richard landing from Palestine. I’ve written a poem. Here it is:

When I was at the glassy sea

Two crabs said to me

There’s the wind blowing

Over the rocks

And the mermaids

Will hide

Under the Tide

Tearfully.

I’m very clever I think, not like others, and I am going to write some of the finest books there have ever been. I am seeing after father because he is not very well.

Your loving friend,

John Cornelius.

At a very early age his writing was excellently clear and his spelling remarkably good. This letter, on a kind of pink rough paper in which you pack meat or vegetables, is before me on my table now.

Those words about his father were true enough. He had now become his father’s guard, guide, friend and general cheerer-up. His mind at the mature age of nine was entirely divided between his father and his career!

Myself: ‘Your career?’

John: ‘Well—what would you call it? Writing plays, telling people stories, singing songs to anyone who would listen.’

Myself: ‘You must have had many rebuffs.’

John: ‘I did. I didn’t care in the least. It wasn’t until the Bicycle Factory ...’

In any case poor Mrs. Cornelius was quite incapable of looking after her husband. That fear of him, the sense of inferiority that she had always had, was now very much stronger, for he had withdrawn himself from her into the world of his own griefs. Then he earned no more with his toys and his boxes, for the capacity for work seemed entirely to have deserted him, and he would sit, hour by hour, staring out at the sea and doing nothing. So she must earn more, and the stronger this necessity was upon her the more desperate was her disorder and flurry and unpunctuality.

She was, I understand, a really good laundress, a laundress by nature—but that nature was also entirely without discipline or technique and she would go about wringing her hands and crying: ‘Oh, Lordy! Lordy! Whatever are we going to do now?’

John at this moment, although he loved her so dearly, had little time to spend on her; his care was all for his father.

It was the son who took the father out for walks now, rather than the father the son. John would hurry home from school, would find his father seated at the table, toys and boxes unfinished before him, his hands folded.

‘Come on now,’ John would cry, and Cornelius would get up, as though moving out of a dream, and nod his head. They very seldom went into the town now; more and more they chose the same course, the rough sea-path that ran between the wiry spear-shaped grass and the nodding sea-pinks at the edge of the dunes above the shore in the direction of St. Gertrude Head. There St. Gertrude sat like a fat old market-woman, her skirts drawn up to her knees, paddling in the level metallic sea.

While the gulls cried and the wind tugged at the grass and the sea tramped, murmured, and tramped again below them, the two of them would walk quietly forward, as though they had a serious destination. John would talk, thinking of everything that might cheer his father. But his father would not be cheered. He would be silent for a long while, simply pounding along, looking sometimes out to sea, his lips moving once and again as though he were going to speak. Then, quite precipitately, he would exclaim:

‘It’s unbelievable, John, how cruel life is. Yes, whichever way you look at it. Nobody’s happy. They may have been once but they aren’t any more. Human beings have lost the way of running the world and, mark me, the more they learn the more bewildered they’ll get. Bewildered! That’s the word. Why, what a comment on the present world when you can say that my poor old father, who was a lunatic in the paupers’ Asylum, was happier than anyone else in this town. Isn’t that a shameful thing, John? But it’s true.’

And John told me that he would stand up for life as though he had been appointed life’s especial defender. He would cry, pouring out floods of words to the gulls, and the rose-coloured evening sky, and the long white lines that threaded the purple sea, that it wasn’t true. That there were many happy people—Miss Gracie and Mrs. Winchester and Mr. Bartholomew and Mr. Dunlop (although he didn’t like him) and Charlie Christian ... they were all happy.

Well, then—and John’s father’s voice would fall low and tremble with emotion—wasn’t it unfair that for no fault of their own some people should be chosen to be unhappy and failures—such failures that they were unable even to earn enough to keep wife and child and the wife must kill herself with working to keep the family?

‘If there’s a God, John, He’s cruel. He is there only to torture us; it amuses Him. There’s nothing new about that. You know that, don’t you? Men have been finding that to be true for thousands of years but they can’t bear to admit it. They cheat themselves deliberately.’ And then his father would burst out: ‘But there isn’t a God. We are like these weeds, the gulls there. We are born like them, millions of us, and are lost and forgotten as quickly. We suffer, they suffer. We torture ourselves and one another and the sea advances and retreats not caring. Nothing cares.’

And then he’d remember that John was a boy, only nine years old, and he’d say he was ashamed to talk with such despair. Perhaps he was wrong—maybe he was wrong.

John would do everything he could to comfort him. He would put his arm through his father’s (he was already almost as tall) and tell him that of course he was wrong and that any time now someone would come along and make him famous, and that he wasn’t to be unhappy because that horrible old woman ...

‘I would say that it didn’t seem to me to matter very much whether people admired what you did or not if what you made was beautiful. A bit priggish, do you think? If it was, I was punished later on for saying such a thing: I was to be taught just that lesson. And then I would talk about God and say that I didn’t believe there could be so much beauty in the world if it was only accident. If it was all accident, I would say, why, then the world would be ugly—tin cans and garbage-heaps—fish and birds would be colourless and flowers have no scent... A bit priggish? I don’t think so. I had tried to think these things out. I was so much with older people and of course I talked too much. In any case I was doing everything I could to comfort my father. Now when he was unhappy he seemed to me younger than myself and more helpless.’

But nothing would rouse him. The two old women, Mrs. Hoskin and Mrs. Garriman, would come in and see him sitting there and mutter that it was a shame for poor Mrs. Cornelius, her having so much to do, working her poor fingers to the bone, and they’d drive him crazy....

So one afternoon John comes back from school and finds his mother crying her heart out and his father gone. While Mrs. Cornelius was away, seeing about some laundry, he had seized his chance and gone, leaving a note behind him. The note said that he was off to try and get some work. Perhaps in Drymouth. That he couldn’t endure any longer to sit there idle while Daisy worked her hands to the bone to keep him. As soon as he had found work he would let them know. In any case she would have now only two mouths to feed rather than three.

The emptiness caused by his departure was terrible. They both loved him so much. Mrs. Cornelius could not believe that he was really gone. She would start up every five minutes or so with a cry: ‘There he is! He’s come back! I knew he would!’ She could not sleep but tossed from side to side all night long. And of course her work suffered. She began to be sadly behindhand with it—neither eating nor sleeping, looking out of window to see whether he were returning ...

Mrs. Hoskin and Mrs. Garriman were for ever poking their heads round the door. They must have been women who really rejoiced in the misfortunes of others, who revelled in unkindness, who were as conceited as they were unkind. They brooded like two untidy slightly-inebriated crows over the scene. Their arrogance was their trouble. They could not endure the success or happiness of others because the failure of their own lives, neither too successful nor too happy, was thus emphasized. They knew that they would never achieve anything in the world but would be always peevish, destructive commentators on the achievements of others.

‘They were so ugly,’ John said, ‘that they hurt you to look at them. Mrs. Hoskin was small and dirty, and if she had been a man would have been bald. Her complexion was pallid, muddy; her nose hooked. Mrs. Garriman was tall and thin and, it seemed, suffered from dyspepsia. She had a green slanting eye. She was the more conceited of the two, the less harmful, for Mrs. Hoskin suffered from an inferiority complex, which made her savage with anyone who had any luck.

‘She saw everyone as the American sometimes sees the Englishman—pompous, self-satisfied, complacent, affected, self-centred. That was the outside world to Mrs. Hoskin, who was a widow and had a little shop with sweets, tobacco, some indecent postcards in a drawer. She was pimp, procuress, moneylender to the sailors, fishermen and others who got into her clutches. She had a high-pitched eager voice:

‘ “Oh, ’e’ll come back, never you be afraid. You cheer up, Daisy—as many fish in the sea as ... What about a drop? Cheer you up. Come on. Never bother what the kid says.” She hated me,’ John would go on, ‘and I hated her. She’s been a symbol to me all my life of the self-satisfied destroyer, the evil that there is in the world, the eternal mischief-maker.’

That is the kind of exaggerated romanticism John indulged in. As I have said already, Mrs. Hoskin was nothing ... and no doubt, poor dear, she had her own troubles....

In any case matters were now serious. John must begin to earn something. Little Mr. Bartholomew got him into a bicycle factory.

This, I fancy, was so small an affair that it was absurd perhaps to dignify it with the name of factory. In 1893 bicycles were beginning to be all the rage in England and little branches of hopeful new enterprises were to be found everywhere.

In Port Merlin there was for a decade or so Bennett’s Bicycle Manufactory. Mr. Bartholomew, who was by this time greatly attached to John, knew a Mr. Roper who was manager of the place. John was, of course, too young to be allowed to leave school and earn his living in any serious way, but it was arranged that from five to seven he should fetch and carry for Mr. Roper and should receive so many shillings a week from Mr. Roper’s own personal pocket. The incident that ended this affair was to have an effect on John for many years to come. By this time he was very tall for his age, and his ugliness of feature was not less marked. At the same time, because of the brightness of his watching eye, because his hair was inclined to be long, because of a certain softness of cheek and gentleness of voice, because, too, of his singing abilities, his story-telling, the awkwardness with which he ran, because finally of his general unlikeness to all other boys whatever, there was something feminine about him. He had in his nature, like all true artists, a mingling of the masculine and feminine....

When he had been obliging fat, fussy, breathless little Mr. Roper for a week or so some of the rougher hands about the place waylaid him. Laughing, not, in any real intention, brutal, they dragged him to a deserted corner and there informed him that they were certain that he was a sweet little girl in disguise, that they had bets on the matter and must make sure.

‘At that moment for the first time for many a day all the nightmares of my earlier childhood returned on me. A horror, a disgust, a despair far greater than the situation deserved, leapt on me. The man with the jagged teeth, the man with the taloned hands ... As they caught hold of me I uttered a cry of passionate despair. They had pulled my trousers down ... with much laughter their hands were about my body. I began to cry so desperately, so forlornly, that their rough sense of fun was itself surprised. They hadn’t intended anything so tragic. They slunk away, pretending to mock my defencelessness; I, weeping bitterly, dragged up my trousers and went home. That was the end of Bennett’s Bicycles....’

It was then that he began his serious resolve to go to London. He did not know how it could be done and at present at least he could not leave his mother, but, in one way or another, he must be in London. Once there he was as confident of his abilities, as vain of his talents as though someone had whispered in his ear....

It was at this time of great distress and apprehension that he said he first met the Bird-Man.

Myself: ‘No one has ever seen the Bird-Man but yourself.’

John: ‘What of that? No one has ever met you but myself—the you that I meet, I mean. Do you suppose that anyone else sees you as I see you, any one else alive or dead? We all of us meet one another uniquely and that meeting is only a shadow of the only real meeting we have—our meeting with ourselves. If you’d met the Bird-Man he would have seemed to you in all probability a tramp walking from Exeter to Truro. You would probably never have noticed the birds at all.’

Myself: ‘This is all very tiresome. People in these days hate this kind of vague fantasy....’

John (paying no attention): ‘He looked like a tramp, or perhaps like a tree turned into a tramp by some evil magician. He had that kind of regretful remembering look. When I first saw him he was sitting with his back to a hummock on Gunbarrow Moor. It was a grand day and the moor glittered with sun, the sea expanse beyond it in a trembling white haze. He was in rags—you could see his bare brown thigh. He wore an old black bishop’s hat on his head, the tags still on it. He had a long fleshy fat nose and a ragged beard. On his finger was a fine bishop’s ring, a fat, fussy robin——’

Myself: ‘I don’t believe it.’

John: ‘That doesn’t matter in the least. Do you suppose your believing or not believing anything makes any difference to the facts? That’s what’s the matter with critics, religious sects, bankers and politicians. He was there all right and very nice too. I sat down beside him and he said I was the first boy who hadn’t driven the birds away. I asked him why they stayed with him so quietly and he said because they trusted him, because they knew he wouldn’t break his word to them. Also he had a very special bird-seed, which he showed me. He carried a coloured bag made of leather. It was full of grey seed. He scattered a little of this on the ground, but the birds wouldn’t touch it. He said they knew it wasn’t their meal-time. I asked him where he lived and he said he could be faithful to any place. He used the word “faithful” a great many times.’

Myself: ‘The trouble with being faithful is that your mind doesn’t grow.’

John: ‘Well, considering the little that anyone’s mind grows anyway, perhaps fidelity is more important.’

Myself: ‘You will irritate many serious-minded people with all this pretty-pretty nonsense about bird-men——’

John: ‘That doesn’t matter in the least. It isn’t my business to consider whether I irritate people——’

All the same, after John left Mr. Roper’s service, things became very serious. He had suddenly to wrestle with a number of problems for which he was much too young.

Those two old devils, Mrs. Hoskin and Mrs. Garriman, were now for ever persuading his poor mother to take a ‘drop.’ One of the hardest things for John was the way in which his mother appeared now humble and self-accusing in front of him. She would always appear to be working her hardest on his return from school and she would look at him rather like a dog who expects to be scolded. She would chatter to him with a heightened eagerness and would want to hear about all that had happened to him. Then, when he began to tell her, her interest would droop, her eyes wander. She would listen as though for footsteps. She would begin to work with a feverish energy, ironing and scrubbing, sighing as she worked. He would wake in the night and hear her crying. Once or twice he saw her standing, in her nightdress, by the table, handling the toy soldiers, the two or three little unfinished boxes.

They were very definitely hungry most of the time or would have been had not Charlie Christian shared his lunch with John at school. John was too proud to allow anyone else to know. He brought things home for his mother, however. He stole food on several easy occasions.

Then one night, when it was raining in a frenzy and John was reading Lavengro to his mother, who didn’t understand a word of it, the door was pushed open and Mr. Cornelius stood there. He looked at them, opened his mouth to speak, then stumbled to the ground.

They took off his wet clothes and put him to bed. They could see that he was very ill and they sent for a doctor. Yes, he was very ill. He had not had enough to eat; had caught a bad chill, had a very serious fever. He needed many things—medicine, special food. But there was no money in the house. Well, then, he must go to the hospital.

But Mr. Cornelius refused to go to the hospital. Physically weak though he was he resisted with surprising energy. In a feeble trembling whisper, his fingers shaking against the sheet, he told them that he had come home to die and in his own home his death should be.

John, as soon as he saw the desire in his father’s eyes, pleaded with them also. He would look after his father, he would see that he had everything. Where was the money? Oh, he’d get the money somehow.

‘I was quite prepared to steal it. I didn’t care where from. It seemed to me monstrous that father should be dying for want of a pound or two and that other people should have more than they could use. Not an original idea! ... But if you had seen my mother apologizing to that little sharp ferrety-eyed doctor, rubbing her red hands one against another and murmuring: “It isn’t my fault, doctor, really it is not.... I work as well as I am able ... indeed I do.” And my father, so white and thin and small now that he looked like a child lying there, with his mouth set obstinately, summoning all his strength to resist anyone who tried to remove him. Over and over again, moistening his lips with his tongue, he murmured: “I’ve come back ... to die.” ’

They were saved by a most unexpected person. Anne Swinnerton’s mother. She appeared on the morning after Cornelius’ return. The doctor was saying: ‘There’s nothing for it but the hospital.’

Mrs. Swinnerton—wearing, John remembered, a large girlish floppy summer hat with masses of paper roses—stepped forward and said:

‘Oh, why need he go to the hospital?’

It seems that Mrs. Swinnerton had helped him the night before to reach his house. She had been shy of entering with him but, through the night, had been disturbed by her conscience. Poor man! He had looked so dreadfully ill.... Frightened out of her life at her interference, she had come to enquire....

She was a chattering, giggling, face-painted little woman but exceedingly capable. If Mrs. Cornelius knew of her immoral reputation it did not worry her in the least: nor did either herself or John hesitate to take anything that Mrs. Swinnerton might have to offer. The situation had become too real for fantasies about morals or property.

Mrs. Swinnerton established herself in the Cornelius’ cottage and became quite a domineering person. Even Mrs. Garriman and Mrs. Hoskin did not venture to obtrude their heads.

But John was concentrated on his father. That passionate love always in his heart poured out now as never before. He thought that if he cared intensely enough, if he put everything that he had into saving his father, he would save him.

The little man was really dying of exhaustion, of starvation. He had succeeded in reaching Polchester and with good fortune he found a job with a haberdasher. His gentlemanly appearance and voice suggested to his employer that he would be a good salesman. And so for a while he was, but his strength could not sustain the long unbroken hours on his feet. He found, too, that he had a hunger for his wife and child. His loneliness was appalling. He would listen to the Cathedral bells chiming the hours at night and would cry—too weak, too weary to check his tears. Then he fell ill, lost his job, started back for Port Merlin. A friendly waggoner helped him part of the way. A lady driving a trap took him ten miles. He walked the rest. He knew that he was dying and for the last part of his journey he was accompanied, he thought, by a fellow-traveller, who assured him again and again that death was nothing to be disturbed about....

If he had not been so sure that he was going to die he might have lived. He had everything that he needed. Little Mrs. Swinnerton’s kindness was astonishing. ‘Now, now, don’t thank me. Your boy and my girl are friends.’ ... ‘Now you lie down and get a sleep, Mrs. Cornelius—do now.’ She sat, with her skirt turned up to her knees, a lot of bad jewellery about her neck, powdering her nose. But there was no duty too menial for her to perform. ‘Bless your soul, I don’t mind.... There’s nothing about men I don’t know.’ ‘Poor dears, poor dears! ... Poor dears, that’s what men are!

During the last two days Mr. Cornelius lay there, saying nothing, thinking only of his wife and his son. He held John’s hand, stared into his face as though he were searching for something.

He died without saying a word—only looking, looking for an assurance, a comfort, a purpose that all his life he had not found.