The child was to have a birthday tomorrow and was therefore not uneasy about being late home from school this afternoon. He had lost his pencil case; a hollow long round thing it was, like a rolling-pin, only it had green and yellow rings painted upon it. He kept his marbles in it and so he was often in a trouble about his pencils. He had not tried very much to find the pencil case because the boys “deludered” him—that’s what his father always said. He had asked Heber Gleed if he had seen it—he had strange suspicions of that boy—but Heber Gleed had sworn so earnestly that the greengrocer opposite the school had picked it up, he had even “saw him do it,” that Felix Tincler went into Mr. Gobbit’s shop, and when the greengrocer lady appeared in answer to the ring of the door bell he enquired politely for his pencil case. She was tall and terrible with a squint and, what was worse, a large velvety mole with hairs sprouting from it. She immediately and with inexplicable fury desired him to flee from her greengrocer shop, with a threat of alternative castigation in which a flatiron and a red-hot pick-axe were to figure with unusual and unpleasant prominence. Well he had[176] run out of Mr. Gobbit’s shop, and there was Heber Gleed standing in the road giggling derisively at him. Felix walked on alone, looking in the gutters and areas for his pencil case, until he encountered another friendly boy who took him to dig in a garden where they grew castor-oil plants. When he went home it was late; as he ran along under the high wall of the orphanage that occupied one end of his street its harsh peevish bell clanged out six notes. He scampered past the great gateway under the dismal arch that always filled him with uneasiness, he never passed it without feeling the sad trouble that a prison might give. He stepped into his own pleasant home, a little mute, and a little dirty in appearance; but at six years of age in a home so comfortable and kind the eve of the day that is to turn you into seven is an occasion great enough to yield an amnesty for peccadilloes. His father was already in from work, he could hear him singing. He gave his mother the sprigs he had picked from the castor-oil plant and told her about the pencil case. The meal was laid upon the table, and while mother was gone into the kitchen to boil the water for tea he sat down and tried to smooth out the stiff creases in the white table cloth. His father was singing gaily in the scullery as he washed and shaved: High cockalorum,
Charlie ate the spinach....
He ceased for a moment to give the razor a vigorous stropping and then continued:
[177]
High cockalorum,
High cockalee....
Felix knew that was not the conclusion of the song. He listened, but for some moments all that followed was the loud crepitation of a razor searching a stubborn beard and the sigh of the kettle. Then a new vigour seized the singer:
But mother brought the pandy down
And bate the gree....
Again that rasping of chin briefly intervened, but the conclusion of the cropping was soon denoted by the strong rallentando of the singer:
...dy image,
High cock-alorum,
High cock-a-lee.
Mrs. Tincler brought in the teapot and her husband followed her with his chin tightly shaven but blue, crying with mock horror:
“Faylix, my son! that is seven years old tomorrow! look at him, Mary, the face of him and the hands of him! I didn’t know there was a bog in this parish; is it creeping in a bog you have been?”
The boy did not blench at his father’s spurious austerity, he knew he was the soul of kindness and fun.
“Go wash yourself at the sink,” interposed his mother. Kevin Tincler, taking his son by the hand, continued with mocking admonishment: “All the fine[178] copybooks of the world that you’ve filled up with that blather about cleanliness and holiness, the up strokes very thin and the down strokes very thick! What was it, Mary, he has let it all out of his mind?”
“Go and wash, Felix, and come quickly and have your tea,” laughed Mary Tincler.
“Ah, but what was it—in that grand book of yours?”
The boy stood, in his short buff tunic, regarding his father with shy amusement. The small round clear-skinned face was lovely with its blushes of faint rose; his eyes were big and blue, and his head was covered with thick curling locks of rich brown hair.
“Cleanliness comes next to godliness,” he replied.
“Does it so, indeed?” exclaimed his father. “Then you’re putting your godliness in a pretty low category!”
“What nonsense,” said Mary Tincler as the boy left them.
The Irishman and his dark-eyed Saxon wife sat down at the table waiting for their son.
“There’s a bit of a randy in the Town Gardens tonight, Mary—dancing on the green, fireworks! When the boy is put to bed we’ll walk that way.”
Mary expressed her pleasure but then declared she could not leave the boy alone in his bed.
“He’ll not hurt, Mary, he has no fear in him. Give him the birthday gift before we go. Whisht, he’s coming!”
The child, now clean and handsome, came to his chair and looked up at his father sitting opposite to him.
“Holy Mother!” exclaimed the admiring parent, “it’s[179] the neck of a swan he has. Faylix Tincler, may ye live to be the father of a bishop!”
After tea his father took him up on the down for an hour. As they left their doorway a group of the tidy but wretched orphans was marching back into their seminary, little girls moving in double columns behind a stiff-faced woman. They were all dressed alike in garments of charity exact as pilchards. Grey capes, worsted stockings, straw hats with blue bands round them, and hard boots. The boys were coming in from a different direction, but all of them, even the minutest, were clad in corduroy trousers and short jackets high throated like a gaoler’s. This identity of garment was contrary to the will of God for he had certainly made their pinched bodies diverse enough. Some were short, some tall, dark, fair, some ugly, others handsome. The sight of them made Felix unhappy, he shrank into himself, until he and his father had slipped through a gap in a hedge and were going up the hill that stretched smoothly and easily almost from their very door. The top of the down here was quiet and lovely, but a great flank of it two miles away was scattered over with tiny white figures playing very deliberately at cricket. Pleasant it was up there in the calm evening, and still bright, but the intervening valley was full of grey ungracious houses, allotments, railway arches, churches, graveyards, and schools. Worst of all was the dull forbidding aspect of the Orphanage down beyond the roof of their own house.
They played with a ball and had some wrestling matches until the declining day began to grow dim even[180] on the hill and the fat jumbo clouds over the town were turning pink. If those elephants fell on him—what would they do? Why, they’d mix him up like ice-cream! So said his father.
“Do things ever fall out of the sky?”
“Rain,” said Mr. Tincler.
“Yes, I know.”
“Stars—maybe.”
“Where do they go?”
“O they drop on the hills but ye can never find ’em.”
“Don’t Heaven ever?”
“What, drop down! no,” said Mr. Tincler, “it don’t. I have not heard of it doing that, but maybe it all just stoops down sometimes, Faylix, until it’s no higher than the crown of your hat. Let us be going home now and ye’ll see something this night.”
“What is it?”
“Wait, Faylix, wait!”
As they crossed from the hill Mary drawing down the blinds signalled to them from the window.
“Come along, Felix,” she cried, and the child ran into the darkened room. Upon the table was set a little church of purest whiteness. Kevin had bought it from an Italian hawker. It had a wonderful tall steeple and a cord that came through a hole and pulled a bell inside. And that was not all; the church was filled with light that was shining through a number of tiny arched windows, blue, purple, green, violet, the wonderful windows were everywhere. Felix was silent with wonder; how could you get a light in a[181] church that hadn’t got a door! then Mary lifted the hollow building from the table; it had no floor, and there was a night-light glowing in one of her patty-pans filled with water. The church was taken up to bed with him in the small chamber next his parents’ room and set upon a bureau. Kevin and Mary then went off to the “bit of devilment” in the town gardens. Felix kept skipping from his bed, first to gaze at the church, and then to lean out of the window in his nightshirt, looking for the lamplighter who would come to the street lamp outside. The house was the very last, and the lamp was the very last lamp, on one of the roads that led from the town and thence went poking out into the steady furze-covered downs. And as the lamp was the very last to be lit darkness was always half-fallen by the time the old man arrived at his journey’s end. He carried a pole with a brass tube at one end. There were holes in the brass tube showing gleams of light. The pole rested upon his shoulders as he trudged along humming huskily.
“Here he is,” cried Felix, leaning from the window and waving a white arm. The dull road, empty of traffic and dim as his mother’s pantry by day, curved slightly, and away at the other end of the curve a jet of light had sprung suddenly into the gloom like a bright flower bursting its sheath; a black figure moved along towards him under the Orphanage wall. Other lamps blossomed with light and the lamplighter, approaching the Tinclers’ lamp, thrust the end of his pole into the lantern, his head meanwhile craning back[182] like the head of a horse that has been pulled violently backwards. H............