“Do you feel better?” Severn asked of the sick man. Thomas looked at the questioner with tragic brown eyes, in which was no anger, only mute self-pity. He did not answer, but looked like a wounded animal, very pitiable. Mrs. Thomas quickly repressed an impulse of impatient scorn, replacing it with a numb, abstract sense of duty, lofty and cold.
“Come,” said Severn, full of pity, and gentle as a woman. “Let me help you to bed.”
Thomas, leaning heavily on the young man, whose white garments were dabbed with blood and water, stumbled forlornly into his room. There Severn unlaced his boots and got off the remnant of his collar. At this point Mrs. Thomas came in. She had taken her part; she was weeping also.
“Thank you, Mr. Severn,” she said coldly. Severn, dismissed, slunk out of the room. She went up to her husband, took his pathetic head upon her bosom, and pressed it there. As Severn went downstairs, he heard the few sobs of the husband, among the quick sniffing of the wife’s tears. And he saw Kate, who had stood on the stairs to see all went well, climb up to her room with cold, calm face.
He locked up the house, put everything in order. Then he heated some water to bathe his face, which was swelling painfully. Having finished his fomentations, he sat thinking bitterly, with a good deal of shame.
As he sat, Mrs. Thomas came down for something. Her bearing was cold and hostile. She glanced round to see all was safe. Then:
“You will put out the light when you go to bed, Mr. Severn,” she said, more formally than a landlady at the seaside would speak. He was insulted: any ordinary being would turn off the light on retiring. Moreover, almost every night it was he who locked up the house, and came last to bed.
“I will, Mrs. Thomas,” he answered. He bowed, his eyes flickering with irony, because he knew his face was swollen.
She returned again after having reached the landing.
“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind helping me down with the box,” she said, quietly and coldly. He did not reply, as he would have done an hour before, that he certainly should not help her, because it was a man’s job, and she must not do it. Now, he rose, bowed, and went upstairs with her. Taking the greater part of the weight, he came quickly downstairs with the load.
“Thank you; it’s very good of you. Good-night,” said Mrs. Thomas, and she retired.
In the morning Severn rose late. His face was considerably swollen. He went in his dressing-gown across to Thomas’s room. The other man lay in bed, looking much the same as ever, but mournful in aspect, though pleased within himself at being coddled.
“How are you this morning?” Severn asked.
Thomas smiled, looked almost with tenderness up at his friend.
“Oh, I’m all right, thanks,” he replied.
He looked at the other’s swollen and bruised cheek, then again, affectionately, into Severn’s eyes.
“I’m sorry” — with a glance of indication — ”for that,” he said simply. Severn smiled with his eyes, in his own winsome manner.
“I didn’t know we were such essential brutes,” he said. “I thought I was so civilised . . .”
Again he smiled, with a wry, stiff mouth. Thomas gave a deprecating little grunt of a laugh.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “It shows a man’s got some fight in him.”
He looked up in the other’s face appealingly. Severn smiled, with a touch of bitterness. The two men grasped hands.
To the end of their acquaintance, Severn and Thomas were close friends, with a gentleness in their bearing, one towards the other. On the other hand, Mrs. Thomas was only polite and formal with Severn, treating him as if he were a stranger.
Kate, her fate disposed of by her “betters”, passed out of their three lives.
LESSFORD’S RABBITS
ON Tuesday mornings I have to be at school at half past eight to administer the free breakfasts. Dinners are given in the canteen in one of the mean streets, where the children feed in a Church Mission room appropriately adorned by Sunday School cartoons showing the blessing of the little ones, and the feeding of the five thousand. We serve breakfasts, however, in school, in the wood-work room high up under the roof.
Tuesday morning sees me rushing up the six short flights of stone stairs, at twenty-five minutes to nine. It is my disposition to be late. I generally find a little crowd of children waiting in the ‘art’ room — so called because it is surrounded with a strip of blackboard too high for the tallest boy to reach — which is a sort of ante-room to the workshop where breakfast is being prepared. I hasten through the little throng to see if things are ready. There are two big girls putting out the basins, and another one looking in the pan to see if the milk is boiling. The room is warm, and seems more comfortable because the windows are high up under the beams of the slanting roof and the walls are all panelled with ruddy gold, varnished wood. The work bench is in the form of three sides of a square — or of an oblong — as the dining tables of the ancients used to be, I believe. At one of the extremities are the three vises, and at the other the great tin pan, like a fish kettle, standing on a gas ring. When the boys’ basins are placed along the outer edge of the bench, the girls’ on the inner, and the infants’ on the lockers against the wall, we are ready. I look at the two rows of assorted basins, and think of the three bears. Then I admit the thirty, who bundle to their places and stand in position, girls on the inside facing boys on the outside, and quaint little infants with their toes kicking the lockers along the walls.
Last week the infant mistress did not come up, so I was alone. She is an impressive woman, who always commands the field. I stand in considerable awe of her. I feel like a reckless pleasure boat with one extravagant sail misbehaving myself in the track of a heavy earnest coaster when she bears down on me. I was considerably excited to find myself in sole charge. As I ushered in the children, the caretaker, a little fierce-eyed man with hollow cheeks and walrus moustache, entered with the large basket full of chunks of bread. He glared around without bidding me good morning.
‘Miss Culloch not come?’ he asked.
‘As you see,’ I replied.
He grunted, and put down the basket. Then he drew himself up like a fiery prophet, and stretching forth his hairy arm towards the opposite door, shouted loudly to the children:
‘None of you’s got to touch that other door there! You hear — you’re to leave it alone!’
The children stared at him without answering.
‘A brake as I’m making for these doors,’ he said confidentially to me, thrusting forward his extraordinarily hairy lean arms, and putting two fingers of one hand into the palm of the other, as if to explain his invention. I bowed.
‘Nasty things them swing doors’ — he looked up at me with his fierce eyes, and suddenly swished aside his right arm:
‘They come to like that!’ he exclaimed, ‘and a child’s fingers is cut off — clean!’ — he looked at me for ratification. I bowed.
‘It’ll be a good thing, I think,’ he concluded, considerably damped. I bowed again. Then he left me. The chief, almost the only duty of a caretaker, is to review the works of the head and of the staff, as a reviewer does books: at length and according to his superior light.
I told one of the girls to give three chunks of bread to each child, and, having fished a mysterious earwig out of the scalding milk, I filled the large enamelled jug — such as figures and has figured in the drawing lessons of every school in England, I suppose — and doled out the portions — about three-quarters of a pint per senior, and half a pint per infant. Everything was ready. I had to say grace. I dared not launch into the Infant mistress’ formula, thanking the Lord for his goodness — ‘and may we eat and drink to thine everlasting glory — Amen.’ I looked at the boys, dressed in mouldering garments of remote men, at the girls with their rat-tailed hair, and at the infants, quaint little mites on whom I wished, but could not bring myself to expend my handkerchief, and I wondered what I should say. The only other grace I knew was ‘For th
ese and for all good things may the Lord make us truly thankful.’ But I wondered whom we should thank for the bad things. I was becoming desperate. I plunged:
‘Ready now — hands together, close eyes. “Let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”’ I felt myself flushing with confusion — what did I mean? But there was a universal clink of iron spoons on the basins, and a snuffling, slobbering sound of children feeding. They had not noticed, so it was all right. The infants were kneeling and squalling by the lockers, the boys were stretching wide their eyes and their mouths at the same time, to admit the spoon. They spilled the milk on their jackets and wiped it off with their sleeves, continuing to eat all the time.
‘Don’t slobber, lads, be decent,’ I said, rebuking them from my superior sphere. They ate more carefully, glancing up at me when the spoon was at their mouths.
I began to count the number — nine boys, seven girls, and eleven infants. Not many. We could never get many boys to give in their names for free meals. I used to ask the Kelletts, who were pinched and pared thin with poverty:
‘Are you sure you don’t want either dinners or breakfasts, Kellet?’
He would look at me curiously, and say, with a peculiar small movement of his thin lips.
‘No Sir.’
‘But have you plenty — quite plenty?’
‘Yes Sir’ — he was very quiet, flushing at my questions. None — or very few — of the boys could endure to accept the meals. Not many parents would submit to the indignity of the officer’s inquirer and the boys, the most foolishly sensitive animals in the world, would, many of them, prefer to go short rather than to partake of charity meals of which all their school-mates were aware.
‘Halket — where is Halket?’ I asked.
‘Please Sir, his mother’s got work,’ replied Lessford, one of my own boys, a ruddy, bonny lad — many of those at breakfast were pictures of health. Lessford was brown-skinned and had fine dark eyes. He was a reticent, irresponsible creature, with a radical incapacity to spell and to read and to draw, but who sometimes scored at arithmetic. I should think he came of a long line of unrelievedly poor people. He was skilled in street lore, and cute at arithmetic, but blunt and blind to everything that needed a little delicacy of perception. He had an irritating habit of looking at me furtively, with his handsome dark eyes, glancing covertly again and again. Yet he was not a sneak; he gave himself the appearance of one. He was a well-built lad, and he looked well in the blue jersey he wore — there were great holes at the elbows, showing the whitish shirt and a brown bit of Lessford. At breakfasts he was a great eater. He would have five solid pieces of bread, and then ask for more.
We gave them bread and milk one morning, cocoa and currant bread the next. I happened to go one cocoa morning to take charge. Lessford, I noticed, did not eat by any means so much as on bread mornings. I was surprised. I asked him if he did not care for currant loaf, but he said he did. Feeling curious, I asked the other teachers what they thought of him. Mr Hayward, who took a currant bread morning, said he was sure the boy had a breakfast before he came to school; — Mr Jephson, who took a milk morning, said the lad was voracious, that it amused him to try to feed him up. I watched — turning suddenly to ask if anyone wanted a little more milk, and glancing over the top of the milk pan as I was emptying it.
I caught him: I saw him push a piece of bread under his jersey, glancing furtively with a little quiver of apprehension up at me. I did not appear to notice, but when he was going downstairs I followed him and asked him to go into the class-room with me. I closed the door and sat down at my table: he stood hanging his head and marking with his foot on the floor. He came to me, very slowly, when I bade him. I put my hand on his jersey, and felt something underneath. He did not resist me, and I drew it out. It was his cap. He smiled, he could not help it, at my discomfiture. Then he pulled his lips straight and looked sulky. I tried again — and this time I found three pieces of bread in a kind of rough pocket inside the waist of his trousers. He looked at them blackly as I arranged them on the table before him, flushing under his brown skin.
‘What does this mean?’ I asked. He hung his head, and would not answer.
‘You may as well tell me — what do you want this for?’
‘Eat,’ he muttered, keeping his face bent. I put my hand under his chin and lifted up his face. He shut his eyes, and tried to move his face aside, as if from a very strong light which hurt him.
‘That is not true,’ I said. ‘I know perfectly well it is not true. You have a breakfast before you come. You do not come to eat. You come to take the food away.’
‘I never!’ he exclaimed sulkily.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You did not take any yesterday. But the day before you did.’
‘I never, I never!!’ he declared, more emphatically, in the tone of one who scores again. I considered.
‘Oh no — the day before was Sunday. Let me see. You took some on Thursday — yes, that was the last time — You took four or five pieces of bread — I hung fire; he did not contradict; ‘five, I believe,’ I added. He scraped his toe on the ground. I had guessed aright. He could not deny the definite knowledge of a number.
But I could not get another word from him. He stood and heard all I had to say, but he would not look up, or answer anything. I felt angry.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘if you come to breakfasts any more, you will be reported.’
Next day, when asked why he was absent from breakfast, he said his father had got a job.
He was a great nuisance for coming with dirty boots. Evidently he went roaming over fields and everywhere. I concluded he must have a strain of gipsy in him, a mongrel form common in the south of London. Halket was his great friend. They never played together at school, and they had no apparent common interests. Halket was a debonair, clever lad who gave great promise of turning out a neer-do-well. He was very lively, soon moved from tears to laughter; Lessford was an inveterate sulker. Yet they always hung together.
One day my bread-stealer arrived at half past two, when the register was closed. He was sweating, dishevelled, and his breast was heaving. He gave no word of explanation, but stood near the great blackboard, his head dropped, one leg loosely apart, panting.
‘Well!’ I exclaimed, ‘this is a nice thing! What have you to say?’ I rose from my chair.
Evidently he had nothing to say.
‘Come on,’ I said finally. ‘No foolery! Let me hear it.’ He knew he would have to speak. He looked up at me, his dark eyes blazing:
‘My rabbits has all gone!’ he cried, as a man would announce his wife and children slain. I heard Halket exclaim. I looked at him. He was half-out of the desk, his mercurial face blank with dismay.
‘Who’s ’ad ‘em?’ he said, breathing the words almost in a whisper.
‘Did you leave th’ door open?’ Lessford bent forward like a serpent about to strike as he asked this. Halket shook his head solemnly:
‘No! I’ve not been near ’em today.’
There was a pause. It was time for me to reassume my position of authority. I told them both to sit down, and we continued the lesson. Halket crept near his comrade and began to whisper to him, but he received no response. Lessford sulked fixedly, not moving his head for more than an hour.
At playtime I began to question Halket: ‘Please Sir — we had some rabbits in a place on the allotments. We used to gather manure for a man, and he let us have half of his tool-house in the garden —.’
‘How many had you — rabbits?’
‘Please Sir — they varied. When we had young ones we used to have sixteen sometimes. We had two brown does and a black buck.’
I was somewhat taken back by this.
‘How long have you had them?’
‘A long time now Sir. We’ve had six lots of young ones.’
‘And what did you do with them?’
‘Fatten them, Sir’ — he spoke with a little triumph, but he was reluctant to say much more.
‘And what did you fatten them on?’
The boy glanced swiftly at me. He reddened, and for the first time became confused.
‘Green stuff, what we had given us out of the gardens, and what we got out of the fields.’
‘And bread,’ I answered quietly.
He looked at me. He saw I was not angry, only ironical. For a few moments he hesitated, whether to lie or not. Then he admitted, very subdued:
‘Yes Sir.’
‘And what did you do with the rabbits?’ — he did not answer — ‘Come, tell me. I can find out whether or not.’
‘Sold them,’ — he hung his head guiltily.
‘Who did the selling?’
‘I, Sir — to a greengrocer.’
‘For how much?’
‘Eightpence each.’
‘And did your mothers know?’
‘No Sir.’ He was very subdued and guilty.
‘And what did you do with the money?’
‘Go to the Empire — generally.’
I asked him a day or two later if they had found the rabbits. They had not. I asked Halket what he supposed had become of them.
‘Please Sir — I suppose somebody must ’a stole them. The door was not broken. You could open our padlock with a hair-pin. I suppose somebody must have come after us last night when we’d fed them. I think I know who it is, too, Sir.’ He shook his head widely — ‘There’s a place where you can get into the allotments off the field —’
A LESSON ON A TORTOISE
IT was the last lesson on Friday afternoon, and this, with Standard VI, was Nature Study from half-past three till half-past four. The last lesson of the week is a weariness to teachers and scholars. It is the end; there is no need to keep up the tension of discipline and effort any longer, and, yielding to weariness, a teacher is spent.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 574
