Читать книгу The Coming of Amos - William J. Locke - Страница 5

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I OUGHT to have known that he was coming. I was warned by my sister Muriel—the one who married my good friend, the present Bishop of Bradbury. On receipt of the news of Dorcas’s death—the sisters had been in vague correspondential touch, a letter every five years or so—Muriel had written to me. But, alas, in my pursuit of the Perfect Egoism, I have never been able to nerve myself to the self-sacrificing effort of transliterating Muriel’s letters. I have told you how Muriel, the intellectual, first found common ground with her husband in the Treatise on Vestments. She was also an authority on Missals. In her early days she seemed to be a posthumous child of the Gothic Revival. She out-Pugined Pugin, who was in his grave long before she was born, in her enthusiasm for the recreating of dead and gone Gothic things. All this was very harmless. Her excellent husband knocked, so to speak, the crockets and the gargoyles off her, and she became a model wife and mother. But one thing he could never cure—the handwriting which she invented or herself in those Gothic days. Her manuscript was beautiful; it was clerkly; it resembled the twelfth-century parchments, deeds of land, Acts of Parliament and what-not, which you can consult in the Record Office. If you learned the cursive characters, all well and good; if you didn’t, her communications remained an enigma. Now, even though I had acquired this esoteric knowledge, I seldom tried to decipher her epistles. The fact of her writing in a strong, bold hand assured me of her health. When I needed any special information, I wrote to Tom, the bishop, who gave it to me by return of post in a dictated typed reply as clear as his own mind.

Muriel did announce the coming of Amos. I turned up her letter later, and there, lying in wait for me all the time, was the undeciphered news she had received from Australia. I tried to explain this to Amos; but all I could get out of him was:

“Fancy folks getting letters and not bothering to read them!”

“My boy,” said I, while he was smoking his awful pipe and drinking his French peasant’s breakfast bowl of black coffee, “I’ve met many hundreds of Australians in my life, but I’ve never come across one quite like you. For goodness’ sake tell me something about yourself.”

I was justified in my adjuration. The Australian of good family—and the Fontenays are of as good blood as any in England—has breeding and education. He talks the King’s English. Even the roystering privates whom I had come across during the war shewed signs of superior sophistication. My nephew Amos was a puzzle.

“Hadn’t you better read Mother’s letter first?” said he.

It appeared to be the only human, polite and common-sense thing to do. I took the letter from my pocket. Childish memories were revived by the clear, spiky, uncompromising handwriting. It was all the clearer, as she had evidently taken the pains of the person who has grown unfamiliar with the handling of a pen.

“Do you know what’s in it?” I asked.

“No. Mother was never much of a talker.”

I spread it out and read:

“Dear Brother David——”

The invocation gave me a curious sense of remoteness. “Dear David”; yes. Even “My dear Brother,” but “Brother David”! I did not know myself.

It went on:

“I have not written to you before, because you were a child when I left home, and your heart was unawakened to the Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. What you are like now I don’t know, but I hope and pray earnestly that you have found Salvation as I have done and the certainty of eternal communion with God. My dear husband found Peace many years ago, and as he has no relatives living, and as I am going to join him very soon, you are the only man of the family alive to whom I can write concerning my only son, Amos. The doctor who came to see me yesterday, after a long and weary journey up country, told me I was suffering from pernicious anæmia and prescribed treatment and remedies that I cannot get in this wild and lonesome place. So my days are numbered. I am ready, after a long and toil-worn life, to look into the face of my Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ.

“I cannot but think that our dear father’s son, whatever errors of dogma he may have been trained in, is a good Christian man, and it is in this belief that I commend to him my only son whom I have done my best to keep unspotted from the world.

“I find it difficult to express myself, having lived apart for so many years from what, in our worldly days, we used to call civilization. The words come slowly, and I am very weak and tired and longing for the Eternal Rest in the arms of our blessed Lord. What I want to say is this:

“Last night, after I guessed my sentence from the doctor’s lips, I lay awake all night thinking of my boy Amos and probing my conscience to learn whether I had done my duty by him or not. A Voice came to me saying that I had not. That in keeping him by me in the wilderness, under the pretence of sheltering him from the temptation and sin of the world, I had been acting from selfish motives. I had trained him, since his beloved father’s death, in the Fear of the Lord; but, owing to the incessant toil which has been our daily lot since we came into possession of our first piece of land, he has received no other education. And so my conscience tells me that I have sinned by failing in my duty towards my son, and my repentance now assures me of God’s divine forgiveness.

“Amos is twenty-five years old. He has never left Warraranga; he has never seen a town, not even the poor little township of Jacksonville to which one of our hands went to fetch the doctor. The Voice tells me that it is not right that he should remain here all his life without subjecting himself to the discipline of the world. For possibly, when I have passed away, and my influence fades, he may be tempted by the rough men who work for us to seek the excitement and the pleasure of the towns. I would far sooner send him, after my death, into the great world of Europe, under sure guidance, and yours, dear brother David, is the only guidance that I know.

“If he was poor in the world’s goods, my pride would not allow me to ask such a favour, but, thanks to the Everlasting Mercy, we have prospered exceedingly. I own many square miles of arable land and pasture, and heads of cattle and sheep in quantifies unknown to you in England. I have drudged my life out for my dear son and put away money almost unthinkingly into the bank. At this time of writing he has no notion that he is a wealthy man. Bit by bit I have saved. Besides the land and stock and crops managed now, under Amos and myself, by Joseph Judge, a close friend of my husband and a devout Christian, there is something like fifty thousand pounds lying at compound interest in the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.”

At this point I gasped and glanced at the uncouth inheritor of wealth, who, elbows on table, regarded me with the blue eyes of bland innocence, smoking his filthy pipe.

I read on:

“As I have made my will, being a woman of business, leaving him residuary legatee, after a provision (a quarter share in the estate) for Joseph Judge, and a few bequests, Amos will be a rich man, how rich he will not know until after my death. It is my earnest desire that he should learn to spend these riches in the true service of God, and unless he receives the education and the knowledge of the world, its snares and its dangers, which I have culpably neglected to give him, I do not see how he can be expected to do so ...”

Here a first portion of the letter ended. Under a date a couple of days later, she resumed:

“I have spoken to Amos and laid upon him my commands, which he faithfully promises to execute.”

This sentence was written in the old spiky hand, with innumerable quivers, betokening the vehement will of the dying woman. But what followed dwindled gradually into illegibility. She scribbled until her powers failed and the end was a meaningless scrawl. But what she wrote sufficed. He had promised to come to Europe for five years, to seek me out, and place himself under my tutelage. After that there was nothing but the half-decipherable incoherence of the Calvinistic Faith in which she had lived and died.

I put the letter back in my pocket.

“Your mother must have been a great woman,” I said.

“I got her photograph. Like to see it?”

He produced his greasy letter-case and fished out a card.

“A feller come last year taking likenesses. Said he had a swell business in Jacksonville. I guess it’s good.”

Good! No doubt it was. But it shocked me through and through. What was I—fourteen?—when Dorcas ran away. I had my boyish memories of her—a tall, eager girl, fresh complexioned, an ordinary young lady, attired in the conventional taste of the period. I held in my hand the picture of a gaunt, worn, hollow-cheeked elderly drudge, in an amorphous print cotton gown. Her thinning hair was tied in a skinny knot behind. The hands, showing plainly against the skirt, were gnarled with toil.... Before my mind flashed the vision of my other sister, Muriel, when I had last seen her in the autumn—fresh and unlined, with plump arms and shoulders emerging (just within the limits of decorum set for wives of modern bishops) from a pink chiffon bodice; and round her neck were great fat pearls. But Dorcas! So have I seen faded and broken portraits of miners’ mothers which wounded soldiers shewed me during the war. How could sister of mine and Muriel have reached this stage of social—what other word can there be?—of social deterioration? I looked again at the grim face. It was that of Dorcas right enough; with her long determined chin and her steady eyes that could glow and harden at once.

“Yes,” I said gently, handing the photograph back to Amos. “She was a remarkable woman!”

“She could do anything from holding prayer meetings to shearing a sheep or building a shack. None of the men could touch her.”

“And your father?” I asked.

Father, it appeared, had been all for religion. He had gone out with the intention of taking the Gospel to the Bushmen of the interior. But when he reached the Never Never Land he found that all the blacks with whom he came in contact were already converted, while those few remaining unconverted were inaccessible. My sister Dorcas must have loved the scrubby, fiery little man with a great passion, to have acquiesced in this ignorant absurdity. Labouring in the vineyard of the Lord, he called it; which meant working with their hands for sustenance, for they took little with them, while they preached their fervent doctrine to all who would give them a hearing. As far back as Amos could remember, it had been Mother who had held command. It was she who had schemed, planned and directed. Although he spoke of Father with filial awe, as of a great and holy man, I suspect the late Mr. Burden of lamentable incompetence in worldly affairs. It was Mother who gradually bought the sheep and the cattle and the land, who paid the hired hands, who designed the new rude buildings, who sold the wool and the corn, at the same time as she cooked the dinner and scrubbed the floor and made and mended for husband and son. Not that this man Burden was idle. He must have slaved hard. But he had no thought of piling up riches in this world; to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow was the Divine ordinance; having earned his crust, both his conscience and his worldly desires were satisfied.

“But he was a one-er to preach,” said Amos enthusiastically—the slang word seemed an echo of long past decades and lands infinitely remote. “If he couldn’t get nobody else to preach to he would preach to Mother and me. I wish you could have heard him, uncle.”

I replied gravely that I should have been much edified.

“You would,” said he.

Reading between the lines of Amos’s artless narrative, I surmised the tragedy of the vehement, ineffectual little man: a born preacher, driven by the spirit to one of the waste places of the earth where there was no one to preach to. He had died ten years ago—“of the fever,” according to Amos, possibly worn out by the thwarting of his passion.

It was Mother who had taught the boy to read and write and cypher. How did she find time for it? Amos guessed she could find time for most things. Beyond that he had had no schooling. From his early childhood he had taken his part in the daily drudgery. He had no other conception of life.

I got all this out of him gradually by discreet questioning, for he was far from loquacious. Description was beyond his powers. To this day I have the vaguest picture in my mind of the wealth-producing wilderness which he had left. I had nothing to go upon but the portrait of Dorcas, his hands, his speech, his manners. Dorcas’s letter was explanatory but not descriptive....

The red winter sun was sinking behind the Esterel in a pomp of royal purple when I raised the sitting and conducted him to his room. He looked round the pleasant red-tiled chamber, its asperities softened by a Persian rug or two and, with a grin, admitted that I had snug quarters.

“I daresay you’d like to rest or go out for a stroll,” said I. “Anyhow, dinner’s at half-past seven.” And I added unreflectingly: “You can dress or not, just as you like. I generally do.”

He regarded me in a puzzled way.

“Dress?”

“Yes,” said I, “evening dress.”

“You mean change my clothes?”

“Of course,” said I.

I shewed him the bathroom and fled.

He turned up for dinner in riding-kit, old and worn. I had told him to change, and he had changed into the only other costume he possessed. I am perfectly aware that clothes are but externals; but after all they connote a more subtle philosophical significance of life than was dreamed of even by Carlyle. Entering the drawing-room punctually at half-past seven, Amos stared me up and down in my dinner-suit.

“Well, I’m blessed!”

“Why?”

“Are you going to give a party?”

“No,” said I.

He wrinkled an uncomprehending brow.

“Do you stick on those things every night?”

It was far from my heart to hurt his feelings. He had floundered into the room like a confident, ungainly dog. So I said, with what I believe was a kindly smile:

“You must have seen practically everybody like this on your voyage home.”

He shook his head. “Not a one,” said he.

“What line did you come by?”

He mentioned the line, gave me the name of a famous ship. I was more puzzled than ever.

“Do you mean to tell me that no one on board dressed for dinner?”

Obviously he didn’t know what I was talking about. An idea struck me.

“You came first class, of course.”

“First class?—Na-ow!” His features grimaced a humorous scorn of the suggestion.

“Second, then?”

“Na-ow. Why waste money in foolishness?”

He had come steerage! He, with fifty thousand pounds, not invested, but in drawable, tangible paper equivalents of fifty thousand golden sovereigns, lying to his credit at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Just think of it! Fifty thousand liquid pounds!

I had learned from François, in the meanwhile, that the ancient Gladstone bag constituted his sole luggage and that he had trudged with it from the station, up the hill. I learned too that he had found his way to the Villa by shewing all and sundry a dirty piece of paper and following the direction of pointing fingers, for of French he knew no word.

At dinner, which he called supper, being convinced at he had dined at two o’clock, he ate with heartiness of appetite, but with suspicion of new-fangled food. As I have said, he thoroughly enjoyed the decoction—it was more than an infusion—of black Ceylon tea. His table manners were of the most primitive. He used his fingers largely in place of a fork, and wiped them on his clothes instead of the napkin, as to the use of which he seemed to be at a loss. Every minute, in order to understand this nephew of mine, I had to recall the photograph of my grim elder sister in her print cotton dress, who had cut herself adrift from the gentle life whereof napkins were a symbol. Finger-bowls beat him altogether. At the sight of them he muttered queer religious euphemisms of oaths. As an object lesson I hastily dipped my fingers in; he was evidently struck by the futility of the performance. I swear I caught in his eye the unspoken thought:

“If you want to have a wash, go into the washhouse and wash—but finnicking about with tips of fingers is too blamed silly for words.”

During the meal conversation languished. My questions elicited monosyllabic replies and my observations no response whatever. As at lunch, he was silent. It struck me that among primitive races dining was not a social art, but the intense satisfaction of an appetite. It had been his lifelong custom to come into the rude homestead at meal-times, with the hunger born of open-air toil, and to fling himself into his seat and attack the coarse food set before him, as the dog rushes to his platter, therein to be soul-absorbed. He sounded, however, a disturbing note, at the beginning of dinner, when the soup was set before him.

“Ain’t you going to ask a Blessing, uncle?”

I had a second’s bewilderment. I had travelled far from the childhood days when, in my parson father’s household, we put our hands together and asked to be grateful for what we were about to receive. In my worldling’s world the suggestion was pathetically, accusingly grotesque.

“It’s the custom, on this side,” said I, “for everyone to ask it silently.” And with an air of profound meditation I peppered my soup as though casting the incense of prayer.

“Let us get at things,” I said, when he had recovered from the concentration on food, “what are your plans?”

“I ain’t got any,” said he, “Mother said you were to make ’em for me. She died rather sudden, as you know, so I didn’t have much time for talk. But I promised to come to live with you for five years, Uncle David and, as Mother said, get my education.”

There was no getting away from his transparent honesty. I’m afraid my lips curled in a humorous smile.

“That’s your idea, is it—to come and live with me for five years?”

He wagged his big head.

“I promised Mother,” he replied.

During my gasping, my cigar went out. Absent-mindedly I relit it from the little silver lamp. I made a wry face and crushed it down on the ash-tray. His shrewd eyes watched me. He said:

“Cigars ain’t much good. They’re a toss up. Why, I once paid fourpence for two cigars, and the second one I had to put down just like that. A pipe’s much safer.”

Perspiration beaded on my forehead. What point of contact had I with the fellow? How could I tell him that, in my pursuit of the Perfect Egoism, I smoke only Corona Coronas imported direct from Havana, at fantastic cost? I could only acquiesce gravely with his proposition and light another. I must say, in vindication of my hospitality, that I had offered him my cigar case, but that he had preferred his pipe.

“Thank Heaven,” I thought, opening the window to let rankness curl over the unoffending Mediterranean, “as he can’t have had the wit to smuggle, his supply, wherever he got it, will soon be exhausted.”

I had to return, however, to the main theme of conversation.

“You reckon to be with me for five years?”

He nodded sagely. “It’s a long time.”

“A damned long time,” said I.

I saw him wince. I asked ironically:

“Do you object to my saying ‘damned’?”

“Mother wouldn’t allow anyone in the house to say ‘damn’ or ‘blast’ or ‘bloody.’ ”

“Why?”

“She said it was blasphemy.”

“And how many were you in the house?” I asked, in pursuit of information.

“About fifty!”

“Fifty!”

My brain reeled for a moment in the process of assimilation of a new idea—I must leave this little narrow painting life of Europe and get some kind of conception of the primitive wilderness. I repeated:

“Fifty? In the house?”

He grinned wide.

“Why, of course. How do you think they would get food if Mother didn’t cook for ’em?”

I didn’t know. I vaguely suggested wives. Apparently wives at Warraranga were at a premium. The vast majority of shearers and cattle-riders had left their peculiar and individual specimens of the Eternal Feminine behind in some township where such things were to be had as beds and hairpins and frying-pans and other conditions of female existence. As far as I could gather, the vast sheep—or cattle—run of Warraranga was exploited by temporarily celibate labour, my late sister having no use for female encumbrances. The men came in droves from the township to work for a particular season. Dorcas fed them in a bare tin-roofed hut, furnished with rude trestle tables and benches. Sometimes there were more than fifty, according to Amos. It all depended on the season. They seemed to sleep under other tin-roofed shelters. There, of course, they could do and talk as they listed. But in the eating-shed—that is my own conception of the dreadful place—Dorcas ruled absolute. Did her quick ear, as she threaded her way through the maze of eating men, catch a foul or blasphemous word, she pounced on the offender and cast him out into the wilderness that intervened between Warraranga and the spot where he had his more or less permanent being.

His delicate-eared upbringing is no doubt very good for his soul, but I’m afraid, if he does not get used to a little light blasphemy, his path through the social world will be painful.

The question of the five years still lurked at the back of our talk. But he did not revert to it. Knocking out the ashes of his pipe against the heel of his boot, he declared himself to be sleepy and ready for bed. I asked him at what hour he would care to breakfast.

“When do you generally have it? Half-past five—six?”

I pictured myself facing him before dawn across a breakfast-table laden with eggs and bacon and beef-steaks, and shuddered.

“It’s the custom in this country for people to breakfast in their own rooms,” I explained. “Also rather later than you do in Australia. Don’t you think eight would be a good hour?”

“Crikey!” said he. “What do you do before then?”

“Sleep,” said I.

He remarked that it was a funny country, and gripping my hand in his painful clasp bade me good night and sought repose.

Please bear with me if I give an entirely erroneous picture of Warraranga. Through my lack of enterprise the wilds of Australia are unknown to me. For aught I know they may be as sophisticated as Peckham Rye. This is a story, not about Australia, but about myself. My imagination can only record the impressions made on it by Amos’s peculiarly unpicturesque narrative.

Amos, however, I know.

He winced at my casual “damn.”

I wandered up to the studio, which is cosy at night, with a great log fire burning on the hearth. For a long time I sat there staring into the flames, the most embarrassed Egoist on earth. What in Heaven’s name was I to do? If he had been a normal young Australian of decent upbringing, the problem would have been comparatively easy. But he wasn’t. He had the habits and manner and speech of a coal-heaver. He was devoid of anything approaching education. Even the practical education in knowledge of strange cities and strange peoples provided by the war had been denied him; for his mother, holding war to be infinitely wicked, had retained him by her side. In the social—you may call it snobbish—sense of the word, he was impossible. And here was I holding my niche in the fashionable little world of Cannes. It was a grotesque and exasperating situation.

Of course I could repudiate all responsibility and send him about his business with good advice. The Perfect Egoist would have done so, to a certainty. But somehow I could not disregard the message of the dead woman in the print gown that was my sister. I read her letter over again, two or three times.... Also, if Amos were an uppish, contradictory, disagreeable beast I might salve my conscience with the argument that the task imposed on me was beyond human accomplishment. But good nature, simplicity, trustfulness, all the best doggy virtues just oozed out of him. I couldn’t turn him out of doors into a friendless Europe. And yet, the problem remained: What the devil was I to do with him? Who could advise me? Impelled by the instinct of the helpless male, I ran over a list of level-headed women of my acquaintance in Cannes. And then the brilliant idea occurred to me. I would tum him over to Dorothea. She must leave her embroidered-bag shop and come out immediately and take charge.

I wrote to her there and then a letter that would have melted the heart of a far sterner vendor of embroidered bags than Dorothea—sealed it, stamped it and took it downstairs to the slab in the hall to be posted the first thing in the morning. After which, with the exhilarating feeling of a coward’s duty done, I went smilingly to bed.