Part 16

I hope Harrogate is having the desired effect upon you. I was about to say that you have missed few events of any value or interest during your absence, but I feel I must qualify that statement. You have missed a golden moment. The great Baldwin evening has come and gone and I deplore the fact that you were not there. My sense of gratification, however, is not due to Ephraim himself but to my unpopular protégé and white elephant--Alfred Codling. I tell you it was glorious! Ephraim spoke for an hour and a half, the usual thing, a dull _réchauffée_ of Schopenhauer and Hegel, droning forth platitudes and half-baked sophistries. When it was finished the chairman asked if anyone else wished to speak. To my amazement my ex-lance-corporal rose heavily to his feet. His face was brick red and his eyes glowed with anger. He pointed his big fingers at Ephraim and exclaimed: “Yes, talk, talk, talk--that’s all it is. There’s nothing in it at all!” and he hobbled out of the room (you know he was wounded in the right foot). The position, as you may imagine, was a little trying. I did not feel in the mood to stay and make apologies. I hurried after Codling. I caught him up at the end of the lane. I said, “Codling, why did you do that?” He could not speak for a long time, then he said: “I’m sorry, sir. It came over me like, all of a sudden.” We walked on. At the corner by Harvey’s mill we met a girl. Her face was wet--there was a fine rain pouring at the time. They looked at each other these two, then she suddenly threw out her arms and buried her face on his chest. I realized that this was no place for me and I hurried on. The following morning I received the enclosed letter. Please return it to me.

Yours ever, JAMES.

ALFRED CODLING TO JAMES WEEKES

DEAR SIR,

Please to irrase my name from the littery soc. I feel I have treated you bad about it but there it is. I apologize to you for treatin you bad like this that is all I regret You have always been kind and pleesant to me lendin me the books and that. I shall always be grateful to you for what you have done. It all came over me sudden like last night while that chap was spoutin out about what you call _physology_. I had never heard tell on the word till you put me on to it and now they all talk about it. I looked it up in the diction and it says somethin about the science of mind and that chap went on spoutin about it. I had quarrel with my girl we had nevver quarrel before and I was very down abowt it. She is the best girl a feller could wish and I have always said so. Somehow last night while he was spoutin on it came over me sudden I thowt of the nights I had spent alone in the dessert when it was all quite and missterous and big. I had been throw it all sir. I had seen my pals what was alive one minnit blown to peices the next. I had tramped hundreds of miles and gone without food and watter. I had seen hell itsel sir And when you are always with death like that sir you are always so much alive You are alive and then the next minnit you may be dead and it makes you want to feel in touch like with everythin You cant hate noone when you like that You think of the other feller over there whose thinkin like you are prehaps and he all alone to lookin up the blinkin stars and it comes over you that its only love that holds us all together love and nothin else at all My hart was breakin thinkin of Annie what I had treated so bad and what I had been throw and he went on spoutin and spoutin What does he know about _physology_ You have to had been very near death to find the big things thats what I found out and I couldnt tell these littery blokes that thats why I lost my temper and so please to irrase me from the soc They cant teach me nothen that matters I’ve seen it all and I cant teach them nothen because they havent been throw it What I have larnt is sir that theres somethin big in our lives apart from getting on and comfits and good times and so sir I am much oblidged for all you done for me and except my appology for the way I treat you

Your obedient servant, ALFRED CODLING.

JAMES WEEKES TO EDWIN JOPE

DEAR JOPE,

In reply to your letter, I cannot see my way to apologize or even dissociate myself with the views expressed by Mr. Alfred Codling at our last meeting, consequently I must ask you to accept my resignation.

Yours very truly, JAMES WEEKES.

SAMUEL CHILDERS TO EDWIN JOPE

DEAR JOPE,

Taking into consideration all the circumstances of the case, I must ask you to accept my resignation from the Tibbelsford Literary Society.

Yours faithfully, S. CHILDERS.

ANNIE PHELPS TO ALFRED CODLING

MY DEAR ALF,

Of course its all right. I am all right now dear Alf I will try and be a good wife to you I amnt clever like you with all your big thowts and that but I will and be a good wife to you Aunt Em is goin to give us that horses-hair and mother says therell be tweanty-five pounds comin to me when Uncle Steve pegs out and he has the dropsie all right already What do you say to Aperil if we can git that cottidge of Mrs. Plummers mothers See you Sunday

love from x x x x x x x x x x ANNIE.

EPHRAIM BALDWIN TO EDWIN JOPE

DEAR MR. JOPE,

As no apology has been forthcoming to me _from any quarter_ for the outrageous insult I was subjected to on the occasion of my last paper, I must ask you to accept my resignation.

Yours faithfully, EPHRAIM BALDWIN, O.B.E.

ALFRED CODLING TO ANNIE PHELPS

MY DEAR ANNE,

You will be please to hear they made me foreman this will mean an increas and so on I think April; will be alright Mr. Weekes sent me check for fifty pounds to start farnishin but I took it back I said no I could not accep it havin done nothin to earn it and treatin him so bad over that littery soc but he said yes and he put it in such a way that I accep after all so we shall be alright for farnishin at the present He was very kind and he says we was to go to him at any time and I was to go on readin the books he says I shall find good things in them but not the littery soc he says he has left it hisself I feel I treated him very bad but I could not stand that feller spoutin and him nevver havin been throw it like what I have That dog of Charly’s killed one of Mrs. Reeves chickens Monday so must now close till Sunday with love from

Your soon husband (dont it sound funny?) ALF.

EDWIN JOPE TO WALTER BUNNING

DEAR SIR,

In reply to your letter I beg to say that the Tibbelsford Literary Society is dissolved.

Yours faithfully, E. JOPE.

“FACE”

It will not, of course, surprise you to know that it was at the Cravenford National School that he was first known as “Face.” The people of Essex are well-known for their candour and lucidity of expression. He was an exceptionally--well, plain boy. There was nothing abnormal, or actually mal-formed about him, it was only that his features had that perambulatory character which is the antithesis of classic. It was what the Americans call a “homely” face. The proportions were all just wrong, the ears slightly protruding, the jaw too lantern, the eyes actually too wide apart. Moreover, his figure was clumsy in the extreme. He seemed all hands, and feet, and knees, and chin. It was impossible for him to pass any object without kicking it. Neither was his personality enhanced by his manner, which was taciturn and sullen, _gauche_ in the extreme. The games and amusements of other boys held no attractions for him. He made no friends, exchanged no confidences, distinguished himself at nothing. Yet those of the impatient world who found time to devote a second glance to this uncouth exterior were bound to be impressed by the appeal of those deep brown expectant eyes.

They were not essentially intelligent eyes, but they had a kind of breadth of sympathy, a profound watchfulness, like the eyes of some caged animal to whom the full functions of its being had not so far been revealed.

It was the universality of this nick-name, “Face,” which preserved it, for the boys of Cravenford National School knew that Caleb Fryatt resented it, and individually they feared him. That very clumsiness and imperviousness of his was apt to be overwhelming when adapted to militant purposes. Not that he was easy to rouse, but it was difficult to know when he was roused--he gave no outward manifestation of it--but when he was, it was difficult to get him to stop. He was a grim and merciless fighter, who could take punishment with a kind of morbid relish. It only inspired him to a more terrible onslaught. The boys preferred to attack him in company, and then usually vocally, by peeping over the churchyard wall and calling out:

“Face! Face! Oh, my! There’s a face!”

The tragic setting of his home life explained much. He had had a brother and two elder sisters, all of whom had died in infancy. He lived with his father and mother in a meagre dilapidated cottage a mile beyond the church. His father worked at a stud farm, at such moments as the mood for work was upon him. He was a man of morose and vicious temper, quickened by spasmodic outbreaks of alcoholic indulgence. Of poor physique, he was nevertheless a dangerous engine of destruction in these moods, particularly in respect to the frailer sex. Caleb had been brought up in a code which recognized unquestioningly the right of might, which accepted tears and blows as a natural concomitant to its reckoning. He had stood powerless and affrighted at the vision of his little mother beaten unreasonably almost to insensibility, and he had never heard her complain. His own body was scarred by the thousand attentions of sticks and belts. He, too, had not complained. In some dumb way he suffered more from the blows his mother received than he did from those he received himself.

But he was growing up now--ugly, clumsy old “Face.” When at the age of fourteen he passed through the first standard and out of the school, he was already as tall as his father, and somewhat thicker in girth, more agile, tougher in fibre. The significance of this development did not occur to him at the time. He was sent to work at Sam Hurds’, the blacksmith, a dour, intelligent, religious giant, who instructed him in the intricacies of his craft with relentless thoroughness, but without much sympathy. The boy liked the work, although he showed no great aptitude at it. He had a way of plodding on, appearing to understand, serving long hours, and then in a period of abstraction forgetting all that he had been told. He loved the blazing forge, the clang of metal upon metal, the sheen upon the carter’s horses that came in to be shod, the sunlight making patterns on the road outside....

He was two years with Sam Hurds. At seventeen his muscles were like a man’s. His overgrown, hulking body like a fully developed farm labourer’s. His appearance had not improved. Even the smith adopted the village nick-name and called him “Face.” At first it was “Young Face,” then “Face,” then as their sombre familiarity developed, and the smith realized the boy’s sound qualities and the something far too old for his years, it became “Old Face.” He knew that his assistant had no powers of adaptability, little invention, not a very real grasp of the essentials, but at the same time he knew he could trust him. He would do precisely as he was told. He would stick to it. He could be relied upon like a sheep dog. Nothing could shift him from his post of duty.

The smith was right, but he had not allowed for those outward thrusts of fate which upset the soberest plans.

One night Caleb arrived home and found his mother crying. He had never seen her cry before. He regarded her spell-bound.

“What is it, mother?”

“Nothing, lad, nothing. Come, your tea’s keeping warm upon the hob. There’s a pasty----”

“Nay, you wouldn’t cry for nowt, mother. Lift up your head.”

She lifted up her head and dashed the tears away, but as she moved toward the kitchen he noticed that she was trying to conceal a limp. He caught her up.

“He has been striking you again.”

“It’s nothing, lad.”

“Show me.”

He pulled her down to him and she wept again. Lifting the hem of her skirt, she revealed her leg above the ankle, bound up in linen.

“He kicked me, dear, but it is nothing. It will pass.”

Caleb ate his tea in silence. His table manners were never of the finest, and on this occasion he masticated his food, and swilled his tea, like an animal preoccupied with some disturbance of its normal life. Afterward he sat apart and thought, his mother busy with household matters. Later she popped across the road to a neighbouring cottage to borrow some ointment.

While she was out his father returned. It was getting dark, and a fine rain was beginning to fall. His father came stumbling up the cottage garden singing. Caleb blocked his passage in the little entrance hall, and said deliberately:

“You didn’t ought to have kicked mother.”

His father, emerging from the shock of surprise, scowled at him.

“What’s that?”

“You didn’t ought to have kicked mother.”

For a moment Stephen Fryatt was speechless, then he lurched forward and pushed his son away.

“What the devil’s it to do with you, whippersnapper?”

Caleb thrust his father back against the wall and repeated.

“You didn’t ought to have kicked her.”

Then Stephen saw red. He struck at his son with his clenched hand, and the blow split the boy’s ear. Caleb took his father by the throat and shook him. The latter tried to bring his knee into play. At this foul method of attack, Caleb, too, became angry. Those long powerful fingers gripped tighter. He closed up, and flung his father’s body against the lintel of the door. He did not realize his own newly developed strength. When his mother returned a little later she found her man lying in the passage with the back of his head in a pool of blood, her son hovering ghost-like in the background. She gave a cry:

“What’s this ye’ve done, Caleb?”

A hollow voice came out of the darkness:

“He didn’t ought to have kicked ye, mother.”

She screamed and, kneeling upon the floor, she supported the battered head upon her knee. It appeared an unrecognizable thing, the hair so much blacker in the ivory-hued face, the eyes staring stupidly.

Followed then a shifting phantasmagoria, scenes and emotions incomprehensible to the defender. Neighbours, and doctors and policemen, talking and arguing, whispering together, pointing at him. He was led away. In all that early turmoil, and in the more bewildering proceedings which followed, the one thing which impressed him deeply was the attitude of his mother. She had changed toward him entirely. She accused him, reviled him, even cursed him. He would ponder upon this in his dark cell at night. He had never imagined that his mother could have loved his father--not in that way, not to that extent. His brown ox-like eyes tried to penetrate the darkness for some solution. He had no fear as to what they would do with him, but everything was inexplicable ... unsatisfying. The days and weeks which followed--he lost all sense of time--added to the sense of mystification. He appeared to be passed from one judge to another, beginning with a gentleman in a tweed suit and knickerbockers, and ending with a very old man in a white wig and gold-rimmed glasses, of whom only the head and the thin pale fingers seemed visible. Yes, yes, why did they keep on torturing him like this? He had answered all the questions again and again, always giving the same replies, always ending up with the solemn asseveration:

“He didn’t ought to have kicked her.”

At the same time he had never meant to kill his father. He had under-estimated his strength. He had become very strong in the forge. His father had attacked him first. It was unfortunate that the back of Mr. Fryatt’s head had struck the sharp corner of the lintel post. He was in any case crazy with drink. The boy was only seventeen. He believed he was defending his mother. Of course, these pleas were not his. This version of the case had not occurred to him, but to his surprise a learned-looking gentleman, who had visited him in his cell, had stood up in Court and made them vehemently. And hearing the case put like that Caleb nodded his head. He hadn’t thought of it in that light, but it was quite true. Oh, but the arguments which ensued! The long words and phrases, the delays, and pomp and uncertainty. Never once did the question seem to come up as to whether his father “ought to have done it,” or not. According to his mother his father appeared to have been almost a paragon of a father.

It was all settled at last, and he was sent away to a “Home” for two years.

Home! The ironic travesty of the word penetrated his thick skull immediately he had passed what looked like a prison gate. There were two hundred boys in this home. It seemed strange to live in a home ruled over by a governor in uniform, policed by gaolers and superintendents. Strange to have a home one could not leave at will, where iron discipline turned one out at dawn, drove one like a slave to long hours of hard and uncongenial work. Strange that home should breathe bitterness and distrust, that it should be under a code which seemed to repeat eternally:

“Don’t forget you are a criminal. Young as yet, but the taint is in you!”

It was true there were momentary relaxations, football and other games which he detested, bleak and interminable services in a chapel, organ recitals and concerts. The other boys disgusted him with their endless obscenities and suggestions, their universal conviction that the great thing was to “get through it,” so as to be able to resume those criminal practices inherent in them, practices which the home did nothing to eradicate or relieve.

If “Old Face” had not been of the toughest fibre, dull witted, impervious, and in a sense unawakened, those two years would have broken him. As it was they dulled his sensibilities even more, they embittered him. Those brown eyes had almost lost that straining glance of expectancy, as though the home had taught him that there was nothing for him in any case to expect. He was a criminal, hallmarked for eternity. When he had been there six months they sent for him to go and visit the chaplain. That good man looked very impressive, and announced that the governor had received information that Caleb’s mother was dead, and that it was his solemn duty to break the news to him. He appeared relieved that the boy did not at once burst into tears. He then delivered a little homily on life and death, and pointed out that it was Caleb’s evil and vicious actions which had hastened his mother’s death. He advised him to pour out his heart in penitence to God, who was always our Rock and Saviour in times of tribulation. He quoted passages from Leviticus, and Caleb stared at him dully, thinking the while:

“I’ll never see my mother again, never, never.”

He did not give way to grief. The news only bewildered him the more. He went about his duties in the home stolidly. He was quite an exemplary inmate, hardly up to the average standard of quickness and intelligence, but quiet, obedient, and well behaved. At the end of his term of service he was sent up before the governor and other officials. The clumsy scrawl of his signature was demanded upon innumerable forms. He believed he was once more to be a free man. And so he was in a qualified sense. But he was not to escape without the seal of the institution being indelibly stamped upon him. In round-about phrases the governor explained that he was to leave the home, but he was not to imagine that he was a free agent to go about the world murdering whomever he liked. He was still a criminal, requiring supervision and watching. Out of their Christian charity the governors had found employment for him at a timber merchant’s at Bristol. Thither he would go, but he must remember that he was still under their protection. Every few weeks he must report to the police. Any act of disobedience on his part would be treated--well, by a sterner authority. On the next occasion he would not be sent to a nice comfortable establishment like the home, where they played football and had concerts, but to Wormwood Scrubbs or Dartmoor. Did he understand? Oh, yes, Caleb understood--at least, partly. He was to be free, free in a queer way.

The arrangement did not exactly tally with his sense of freedom, any more than this building tallied with his idea of home, but he was only nineteen and his body was strong and his spirit not completely broken. Any ideas he may have entertained that the new life was going to spell freedom in any sense were quickly shattered. The timber merchant at Bristol was a man named Barnet, a tyrant of the worst description. He knew the kind of material he was handling. Most of his employees were ex-convicts, ticket-of-leave-men, Lascars, or social derelicts. He acted accordingly. Caleb slept in a shed with nine other men, four of whom were coloured. They worked ten hours a day loading timber on barges. They were given greasy cocoa and bread at six o’clock in the morning, a meal of potatoes and little square lumps of hard meat at twelve, then tea and bread at four o’clock in the afternoon. In addition to this he was paid twelve shillings a week. The slightest act of insubordination or slackness was met with the threat:

“Here, you! Any more of that and you go back to where you came from!”

Before he had been there a month he felt that the home was indeed a home in comparison. Strangely enough, it was one of the coloured men who rescued him from his thraldom, a pleasant voiced coon with only one eye. He appeared to take a fancy to Caleb. One night he came to him and whispered:

“Say, boss, would you like to beat it?”

It took some time for the boy from Cravenford to understand the coloured man’s phraseology and plan, but when he did, he fell in with it with alacrity. The following Saturday they visited a little public-house down by the docks and were there introduced to a grizzled mate. Hands were wanted on a merchantman sailing for Buenos Ayres the following week. The coloured man was a free agent and he signed on, and Caleb signed on in the name of J. Bullock. Two nights before sailing he hid in a barge and joined his ship the following morning. All day long he experienced the tremors of dread for the first time in his life. The primitive instinct of escape and the call of the sea was upon him. He could have danced with joy when he heard the rattling of the chains, and the hoarse cries of the deck hands as the big ship got under way at dusk.