by Ruskin Bond
'I won't tell you his name. I'll call him Oswald. He was not one of our people, but a Roman Catholic, the seventeen-year-old son of a baker and confectioner. It was a good photograph. He had cut his sweetheart's throat with a pocket-knife while she was eating an apple at a street-corner, a little girl of twelve. The whole proceedings only took an hour and a half, and he was committed for trial at the Old Bailey. I judged him then to have been insane. There was apparently no motive. The deed had taken place in broad daylight in the neighbourhood of the homes of both parties, and Oswald, if his mother's evidence was to be believed, had run back home immediately afterwards, with a bright smiling face, and the bloodstained knife, closed in one hand, and shouted, "Come and see! Really was a bluetit!" The injured child had staggered to her home, and died an hour after being removed to hospital 'Boy loved me,' was all she could, or would, say.
'I had reached the court before the case was called, and sat behind the dock. I had a perfect view of the young man as he entered and as he left it. How shall I describe him? There was the same look of childlike attention on the face as in Lady Stanley's famous picture His First Offence, though, of course, he was some years older than its subject; but nobody could have said it was a bad face; on the contrary it was stamped with candour and simplicity. I was glad I had come, and not disobeyed the summons of that Press photograph. But the moment the mother, a reddish-haired virago, came out with her only boy's ("our roundsman's") remark, I realised, in a sort of vision, that, whatever was meant by it, Oswald was the very image of a bluetit, a bird I particularly used to notice as a child in the winter, when we stayed with my grandfather at Alresford. His fidgeting, where he sat, put me in mind of one that regularly disported itself on a maple just outside the drawing-room window, and that quaint puckish, or perhaps I should say Mongolian, setting of the black lustreless eyes, I cannot tell you why, seemed birdlike and titlike beyond the rest. Once I grasped this, everything else seemed to fit into the picture; his shabby olive-green suit was the bird's back; he wore a yellow pull-over, crown-blue tie and socks; and a very white shirt showed, I liked to think, where the secondaries should. Although the case was of the most tragic type, and, quite clearly, there was neither money forthcoming to brief counsel with a flair for obtaining lunacy verdicts in capital issues, nor the element of sensational disclosure that spurs the Press to support a defence, I felt curiously elated and bright, certainly not as a result of morbid curiosity—you must take my word for that—though desperately aware that if my family knew where I was they would regard my malady as almost beyond cure. The moment the prisoner stepped down, a police officer standing ready in case he should faint, his eyes caught mine, and I felt—oh, how shall I put it!—as if a reviving draught were being poured down my parched throat. No! I know what you are thinking. Love? It wasn't that at all. I had been in love. This was something quite different; but even then, with the emotion fresh and obscure, and the future unseen, I knew instinctively that I was on the path of health.
'I drifted out of the court with the crowd, and made my way home in a dream. My absence had not been noted. I had bought a newspaper going along, and now I cut out Oswald's photograph. Questions might have been asked had the house copy been found mutilated. The next step was obvious, as soon as I drank in the now known features. I must call on his family; I knew the address; it had been stated in court, a mean street in Kentish Town. I could combine the visit with one to the Zoo, and look at the bluetits there. I slept well that night—my nights had lately been restless—and the suggestion of the Zoo at breakfast gave pleasure. Lucia was beginning to take an interest in something, you see. Nor were objections raised to my going alone, since my lethargy or stupor had worn out the patience of every companion. When I got up to my room I clapped my hands and danced for joy in my secret.
'Of course, I might be mistaken for a journalist or worse and turned away from the door; yet I believed that saturation in that photograph and the birds at the Zoo would make me not unwelcome. At first I thought I would say I came to help, and wondered if I should put so much money by to ease the legal expenses, which must be heavy, even if the boy were hanged. But I decided against this while at the Zoo; I would say I came for their help, that I could not rest for thinking about their son, and leave it at that. Here was the shop! The family lived over it, and the tragedy had taken place at the next street corner. A woman was standing inside behind a twin pile of eclairs and cream buns, the woman who had given evidence yesterday. The braveness to carry on! I found it not hard to speak:
' "I am not a reporter, but I was in court yesterday. I felt it would help me to come and say how sorry I am. I have known trouble."
' "You are one of them probation women, I'm thinking. Very glad, I'm sure. What did you say I could do for you?"
'My brain suddenly went blank. I had fired my shot. I had not quite expected to encounter this self-sufficient pride. What I should have said next, I don't know, but the father came in, a squat white-faced man with tortured grey eyes. The woman turned to him with: "This lady's a stranger; not from the newspapers."
' "What is it, lady?" he said gently.
' "I cannot help thinking about your son. I want to help him, or rather I want you to help me. I don't think there is anything I can do, unless I gave something towards the defence."
' "Don't you trouble," he said; "I see you are genuine. Come in! You mind the shop," he added, to his wife.
'That was the beginning. He saw I was genuine. I suppose nobody had seen that before, or, at any rate, made me feel it; and when I tell you that these people would not accept one penny of mine, and were quite content that I should have tea with them now and again, you will readily understand that a new beauty came into my life, and I felt that sleep was not the best that life could give. That afternoon they told me that their boy (he was their only child) had always been childish with regard to birds, which from his earliest years, would come to him, and feed out of his hand, not only sparrows and robins, but shy wayward creatures like the wren, and even, so they averred, a kingfisher. Until his fourteenth year they had lived at Horsham, and it was his uncle's business that they took over in Kentish Town, on his death, and now they rued the day they came to London. I asked if Oswald had ever had a pet bluetit; they said not, but they did not know of a country bird on which he was not on good terms. He had no violent habits, and would not watch a fowl being killed. His deed was inexplicable. I should go and see the mother of the poor little girl. They were still friendly with her. I asked if he had many girl friends, and was surprised to receive the answer "Only this one."
' "None in the country?"
' "No, none at all, till now. He didn't take to girls, or they didn't to him," the father said; "any amount of boy pals!"
' "You see," said the mother, who interrupted at this point, "he was always a good boy. Plenty of spirit, but we never had to correct him."
' "How do you explain what he said about the bluetit?"
' "I can't," she said, tearful for the first time, "can't no how. You understand, miss, he's not mad."
'I had to understand that; both parents were firm there. With the curious illogicality of their class they would prefer what was dearest to them to be executed rather than confined as a lunatic. "So you see," the father ended; "we don't want no expense for a great lawyer to make judge and jury say he weren't in his senses, nor does the boy want that. We don't want to lose him, but if he's to live he must be right-minded like us. If his father and mother were rich, steps would be taken to prove him mad, no doubt. We may be poor, but we've set our faces agin that."
'I left that house exalted; there is no other word.
'Tea I had had there, and found my parents and elder sister sitting over the remains of theirs. They had had visitors, the Gollers. Vanessa Goller and her father, Sir Luke, the fashionable surgeon, had been over two prisons. They were full of the self-devoting energies of an art master and his wife who taught the juvenile-adult 'star' class to make leather and si
lver objects. "There, Lucia," said my father, "there's an occupation for you! I dare say I could write to Major Greathead—where did they make him Governor, Wandsworth or Pentonville?—and see about your going in one day a week. You haven't done any leather-work for a long while now, but I don't expect your fingers have lost their cunning." This was meant considerately, and my mother chimed in, "Yes, dear; think about that, do! Vanessa said some of the young men looked quite refined. At the remand prison they showed them a young murderer, waiting his trial, only a boy. That is what you want, contact with all different kinds of humanity. I think it so brave of Vanessa; she offered to go with her father."
' "She hasn't thought of going to the murderer's home," I said.
' "No, of course not! Nothing morbid like that. Just her large interest in the world—see everything, that's what I always say; see everything, but don't touch everything."
' "How could you think that of Vanessa?" my only sister added, and my father clinched the matter with, "I will say that about the Gollers, they watch life sympathetically at close quarters, but they never pry too deep, never."
'Thus I realised that I must on no account speak of my experience at home; it simply would not be understood. Neither did my family refer again to the prison matter, though they dined with the Gollers next week. Nor did I attend Oswald's trial. It didn't last five minutes. He pleaded guilty, and his parents were grateful for escaping the attentions of the Press by this simple step. The judge, after passing sentence of death, said the facts of the case would be before the Home Secretary, and a reprieve was granted actually before the petition, got up in the neighbourhood of the crime, was sent in. It was considered possible, I learnt, that the parents would regain their only child in ten years. I visited them regularly, and they showed me his letters, queer inexpressive formalities. I never wrote to him, but one Saturday afternoon in his second year in prison, when, by the way, I had almost entirely lost my listlessness, and behaved outwardly like any other young woman, I went with them to visit him.
'It was a cold, bright day, and the hills round Maidstone were covered with snow. After entering by a postern gate in a side street we waited in a room adjacent to it, which contained a number of newly baked loaves. Then we were led across the yard to a classroom, where the young man was brought in by an officer, and allowed to embrace his people. He had been apprised of my coming, and shook hands frankly. As I took his hand, the whole scene before me was blotted out, and I seemed to look on a bluetit twisting itself round a twig, like the little acrobat it is. I ought to say that I had not worked myself up into this state; on the contrary, I was eagerly taking note of the immediate surroundings. The vision was somehow forced upon me. When I came back to myself we were all seated, we on one side of a table, he and the warder on the other. I took little part in the home talk, though occasionally a glance was made in my direction, as to a friend of the family. After half an hour the officer rose, and we followed suit to say good-bye, and I wondered if I should have the same experience when we shook hands, as we did after the parental kisses. I saw nothing, except the red healthy cheeks and the dark lustreless eyes, but (could I have imagined it?) he didn't say "Good-bye," but "Really was a bluetit!"
'As soon as we were outside the prison I put my doubt to the test by asking his mother why he said that. "Oh," she said, without hesitation, "that was his way of telling you what he was in for," "As it were the number on his arm," her husband added. This might be the reason, yet I was not wholly satisfied. In Oswald's next letter home there was a message of thanks to me for coming to see him, but no desire expressed that I should come again; neither did I do so. Three years later, just a month before I first met my husband, he was released on licence.
'I had now completely gained poise, and went everywhere. I am, in any case, tenacious of old associations, and I had continued to visit the parents, who were greatly respected in their neighbourhood for staying where they were and living down their notoriety. One incident, and only one, happened in that long interval with any bearing on my own secret little fund of pleasure. Sir Luke Goller, who always liked my handwriting and hated typescript, asked me to catalogue the books in his country-house at Studland, while Vanessa, who had had a breakdown, was abroad. Among them was Baptista Porta's Physiognomonia, with its curious engravings showing the resemblance between human and beast-and-bird faces. I was sitting with this on my lap, by the open library window, in front of which extended the branch of a copper-beech, when I heard a scuffling noise, and, looking up, observed two bluetits fighting, or rather one attacking the other on the end of this branch, the ferocity of the one uppermost being astonishing; he seemed bent on digging his beak into the throat of the other, which, with wing outspread, was clinging by one foot to the oscillating twig. I jumped up and clapped my hands. Both flew away, and were out of sight in a second. Then I looked down and saw the old book open at the picture of the ape and the ape-faced man. I cannot explain; it seemed a warning somehow, and both Sir Luke and Lady Goller remarked on my silence at lunch (it was early autumn) al fresco under that tree.
'That November Oswald came out of prison and resumed his employment as baker's roundsman. I purposely did not put in an appearance at his home for some months, though I sent my usual Christmas gift to the parents, and something for him, which he acknowledged in a manly note written in a minute hand; but in February his father wrote that he was in bed with a dislocated thigh, owing to a collision with another baker's boy, and would like to see me. He was sitting up in bed eating an apple off a plate with a knife on it, and started talking about the bearded woman at Barnum's whom his mother had seen as a little girl; "We're not old enough to remember her, are we, miss?" Then he went on to say that Dead Man's Rock, which he had just finished, looked to him as if it had been written after Treasure Island, which he had read "in there," but there were "points about it." At this moment his mother, who had been standing behind my chair, went out to make me some tea, and he took occasion to thank me again for thinking of him, adding, rather illogically, that the mother of Eva (the little girl he had killed) had sent him this apple, and was coming in that afternoon. Opposite the bed, placed longways to the wall, was a window looking out on the yard at the back of the house, and over it a birdcage containing two canaries. I looked up at them, as a ready way of turning the subject, and had got as far as "The birds are still your friends, Oswald," when his nose was on my cheek, and I saw a glint somewhere near my throat. I don't know to this day what I did; I don't think I either screamed or fainted. The horror was too intense. I heard a voice say, "Bless me, I've forgotten the matches. Oswald!" There was a clatter of steel on china, and the face fell back on the pillow. The kind pressure of a woman's arm was round my shoulders; oh yes, the mother was hurrying me out of the room. I am sure I said "I think I'll go away. Let me go!" "He didn't mean you any harm, dear. I was close by." "Oh, let me go, please! I shan't speak of this." "We know that; we trust you. But he didn't mean you any harm. Here's Eva's mother; she'll tell you so." Then I saw that we were on the stairs, and another woman, with a younger, thinnish, freckled face, confronted us. "Has anything happened?" she asked. "No, I only forgot there was a knife with that apple." "Oh!" she said. "Never you mind, lady! There's no vice in him, as I hope for heaven there isn't, and my little Eva was taken. We don't all kiss the same."
'There was no answer to this. I told the mother I understood; I would write; really I did not want any tea, nor to speak to Oswald's father, who was in the shop. She insisted that I should let the other woman see me to my bus. I had to do this. I noticed my escort had a bag. I entreated her to let her friends know that I bore none of them any ill will; if they understood that, I need not write, and they need not write to me. "I'll make it right," she said; "They asked me to-day on purpose to meet you. They wanted you to see this." She opened the bag, and took out a small photograph: "This is Eva," she said. I started back as I looked at it; it might have been my face at twelve. "Ah" she went on, as if reading my thoughts, "
but you're like that now." "This wasn't in the newspapers at the time," I managed to say. "No," came the reply, "they put in one that wasn't a bit like Eva." I couldn't speak; it was as if the knife were at my throat again. I saw that kind lean face, that had somehow won through its anguish, peering into mine, and a voice from—oh!—ever so far away: "Don't bother, dear, but let them or me know when you get married. Only that! Here's the bus. Remember, I said I'd make things right. I've lost my only little girl through him, and I'm a woman of my word." She helped me in, and stood smiling on the pavement. I can see her now.
'In the bus I remembered in the early days Oswald's people had told me I should go and see this woman. Who knows? If I had, this dreadful experience might not have come my way; but again, if I had, I might never have entirely recovered from my apathy or decline. There's a price to be paid for everything in life.
'That's about all. I received no letters from any of the parties, and I wrote none then. As I told you, I had already met Hippolito, and it may well be that day's event precipitated our engagement. On my wedding-day we both sent Oswald's family a telegram, announcing the fact. It was answered by unsigned telegram thus: "Happy days to both from us four." '
'Her suggestion, not yours, to send that wire?' commented the young composer, and the Italian naval man took mock aim at his gleaming flannels with a tomato, and then suddenly dropped it.
