FullReads

“He wasn’t more than thirteen; bound for the docks, you could tell at a glance; and by the way he looked about you could tell as easily that in stepping outside Charing Cross station he’d set foot on London stones for the first time. God knows how it struck him–the slush and drizzle, the ugly shop-fronts, the horses slipping in the brown mud, the crowd on the pavement pushing him this side and that. The poor little chap was standing in the middle of it with dazed eyes, like a hare’s, when the ‘bus pulled up. His eyelids were pink and swollen; but he wasn’t crying, though he wanted to. Instead, he gave a gulp as he came on board with stick and bundle, and tried to look brave as a lion.

“I’d have given worlds to speak to him, but I couldn’t. On my word, sir, I should have cried. It wasn’t so much the little chap’s look. But to the knot of his bundle there was tied a bunch of cottage flowers,–sweet-williams, boy’s-love, and a rose or two,–and the sight and smell of them in that stuffy omnibus were like tears on thirsty eyelids. It’s the young that I pity, sir. For Gabriel, in his bed up at Shepherd’s Bush, there’s no more to be said, as far as I can see; and as for me, I’m the oldest clerk in Tweedy’s, which is very satisfactory. It’s the young faces, set toward the road along which we have travelled, that trouble me. Sometimes, sir, I lie awake in my lodgings and listen, and the whole of this London seems filled with the sound of children’s feet running, and I can sob aloud. You may say that it is only selfishness, and what I really pity is my own boyhood. I dare say you’re right. It’s certain that, as I kept glancing at the boy and his sea kit and his bunch of flowers, my mind went back to the January morning, sixty-five years back, when the coach took me off for the first time from the village where I was born to a London charity-school. I was worse off than the boy in the omnibus, for I had just lost father and mother. Yet it was the sticks and stones and flower-beds that I mostly thought of. I went round and said good-bye to the lilacs, and told them to be in flower by the time I came back. I said to the rose-bush, ‘You must be as high as my window next May; you know you only missed it by three inches last summer.’ Then I went to the cow-house, and kissed the cows, one by one. They were to be sold by auction the very next week, but I guessed nothing of it, and ordered them not to forget me. And last I looked at the swallows’ nests under the thatch,–the last year’s nests,–and told myself that they would be filled again when I returned. I remembered this, and how I stretched out my hands to the place from the coach-top; and how at Reading, where we stopped, I spent the two shillings that I possessed in a cocoanut and a bright clasp-knife; and how, when I opened it, the nut was sour; and how I cried myself to sleep, and woke in London.

“The young men in Tweedy’s, though they respect my long standing there, make fun of me at times because I never take a holiday in the country. Why, sir, I dare not. I should wander back to my old village, and–Well, I know how it would be then. I should find it smaller and meaner; I should search about for the flowers and nests, and listen for the music that I knew sixty-five years ago, and remember; and they would not be discoverable. Also every face would stare at me, for all the faces I know are dead. Then I should think I had missed my way and come to the wrong place; or (worse) that no such spot ever existed, and I have been cheating myself all these years; that, in fact, I was mad all the while, and have no stable reason for existing–I, the oldest clerk in Tweedy’s! To be sure, there would be my parents’ headstones in the churchyard. But what are they, if the churchyard itself is changed?

“As it is, with three hundred pounds per annum, and enough laid by to keep him, if I fail, an old bachelor has no reason to grumble. But the sight of that little chap’s nosegay, and the thought of the mother who tied it there, made my heart swell as I fancy the earth must swell when rain is coming. His eyes filled once, and he brushed them under the pretence of pulling his cap forward, and stole a glance round to see if any one had noticed him. The other passengers were busy with their own thoughts, and I pretended to stare out of the window opposite; but there was the drop, sure enough, on his hand as he laid it on his lap again.

“He was bound for the docks, and thence for the open sea, and I, that was bound for Tweedy’s only, had to get out at the top of Cheapside. I know the ‘bus conductor,–a very honest man,–and, in getting out, I slipped half a crown into his hand to give to the boy, with my blessing, at his journey’s end. When I picture his face, sir, I wish I had made it five shillings, and gone without a new tie and dinner altogether.”