Laughing, he laid his hand upon my shoulder. "One person always be suspicious of, Kelver--yourself. n.o.body can do you so much harm as yourself."
Of Washburn we saw more and more. "Hal" we both called him now, for removing with his gentle, masterful hands my mother"s shyness from about her, he had established himself almost as one of the family, my mother regarding him as she might some absurdly bearded boy entrusted to her care without his knowing it, I looking up to him as to some wonderful elder brother.
"You rest me, Mrs. Kelver," he would say, lighting his pipe and sinking down into the deep leathern chair that always waited for him in our parlour. "Your even voice, your soft eyes, your quiet hands, they soothe me."
"It is good for a man," he would say, looking from one to the other of us through the hanging smoke, "to test his wisdom by two things: the face of a good woman, and the ear of a child--I beg your pardon, Paul--of a young man. A good woman"s face is the white sunlight. Under the gas-lamps who shall tell diamond from paste? Bring it into the sunlight: does it stand that test? Then it is good. And the children!
they are the waiting earth on which we fling our store. Is it chaff and dust or living seed? Wait and watch. I shower my thoughts over our Paul, Mrs. Kelver. They seem to me brilliant, deep, original. The young beggar swallows them, forgets them. They were rubbish. Then I say something that dwells with him, that grows. Ah, that was alive, that was a seed.
The waiting earth, it can make use only of what is true."
"You should marry, Hal," my mother would say. It was her panacea for all mankind.
"I would, Mrs. Kelver," he answered her on one occasion, "I would to-morrow if I could marry half a dozen women. I should make an ideal husband for half a dozen wives. One I should neglect for five days, and be a burden to upon the sixth."
From any other than Hal my mother would have taken such a remark, made even in jest, as an insult to her s.e.x. But Hal"s smile was a coating that could sugar any pill.
"I am not one man, Mrs. Kelver, I am half a dozen. If I were to marry one wife she would be married to six husbands. It is too many for any woman to manage."
"Have you never fallen in love?" asked my mother.
"Three of me have, but on each occasion the other five of me out-voted him."
"You"re sure six would be sufficient?" queried my mother, smiling.
"Just the right number, Mrs. Kelver. There is one of me must worship, adore a woman madly, abjectly; grovel before her like the Troubadour before his Queen of Song, eat her slipper, drink the water she has washed in, scourge himself before her window, die for a kiss of her glove flung down with a laugh. She must be scornful, contemptuous, cruel. There is another I would cherish, a tender, yielding creature, one whose face would light at my coming, cloud at my going; one to whom I should be a G.o.d. There is a third I, a child of Pan--an ugly little beast, Mrs. Kelver; horns on head and hoofs on feet, leering through the wood, seeking its fit mate. And a fourth would wed a wholesome, homely wench, deep of bosom, broad of hip; fit mother of a st.u.r.dy brood. A fifth could only be content with a true friend, a comrade wise and witty, a sharer and understander of all joys and thoughts and feelings.
And a last, Mrs. Kelver, yearns for a woman pure and sweet, clothed in love and crowned with holiness. Shouldn"t we be a handful, Mrs. Kelver, for any one woman in an eight-roomed house?"
But my mother was not to be discouraged. "You will find the woman one day, Hal, who will be all of them to you--all of them that are worth having, that is. And your eight-roomed house will be a kingdom!"
"A man is many, and a woman but one," answered Hal.
"That is what men say who are too blind to see more than one side of a woman," retorted my mother, a little sharply; for the honour and credit of her own s.e.x in all things was very dear to my mother. And indeed this I have learned, that the flag of Womanhood you shall ever find upheld by all true women, flouted only by the false. For a judge in petticoats is ever but a witness in a wig.
Hal laid aside his pipe and leant forward in his chair. "Now tell us, Mrs. Kelver, for our guidance, we two young bachelors, what must the lover of a young girl be?"
Always very serious on this subject of love, my mother answered gravely: "She asks for the whole of a man, Hal, not merely for a sixth, nor any other part of him. She is a child asking for a lover to whom she can look up, who will teach her, guide her, protect her. She is a queen demanding homage, and yet he is her king whom it is her joy to serve.
She asks to be his partner, his fellow-worker, his playmate, and at the same time she loves to think of him as her child, her big baby she must take care of. Whatever he has to give she has also to respond with. You need not marry six wives, Hal; you will find your six in one.
""As the water to the vessel, woman shapes herself to man;" an old heathen said that three thousand years ago, and others have repeated him; that is what you mean."
"I don"t like that way of putting it," answered my mother. "I mean that as you say of man, so in every true woman is contained all women. But to know her completely you must love her with all love."
Sometimes the talk would be of religion, for my mother"s faith was no dead thing that must be kept ever sheltered from the air, lest it crumble.
One evening "Who are we that we should live?" cried Hal. "The spider is less cruel; the very pig less greedy, gluttonous and foul; the tiger less tigerish; our cousin ape less monkeyish. What are we but savages, clothed and ashamed, nine-tenths of us?"
"But Sodom and Gomorrah," reminded him my mother, "would have been spared for the sake of ten just men."
"Much more sensible to have hurried the ten men out, leaving the remainder to be buried with all their abominations under their own ashes," growled Hal.
"And we shall be purified," continued my mother, "the evil in us washed away."
"Why have made us ill merely to mend us? If the Almighty were so anxious for our company, why not have made us decent in the beginning?" He had just come away from a meeting of Poor Law Guardians, and was in a state of dissatisfaction with human nature generally.
"It is His way," answered my mother. "The precious stone lies hid in clay. He has His purpose."
"Is the stone so very precious?"
"Would He have taken so much pains to fashion it if it were not? You see it all around you, Hal, in your daily practice--heroism, self-sacrifice, love stronger than death. Can you think He will waste it, He who uses again even the dead leaf?"
"Shall the new leaf remember the new flower?"
"Yes, if it ever knew it. Shall memory be the only thing to die?"
Often of an evening I would accompany Hal upon his rounds. By the savage tribe he both served and ruled he had come to be regarded as medicine man and priest combined. He was both their tyrant and their slave, working for them early and late, yet bullying them unmercifully, enforcing his commands sometimes with vehement tongue, and where that would not suffice with quick fists; the counsellor, helper, ruler, literally of thousands. Of income he could have made barely enough to live upon; but few men could have enjoyed more sense of power; and that I think it was that held him to the neighbourhood.
"Nature laid me by and forgot me for a couple of thousand years," was his own explanation of himself. "Born in my proper period, I should have climbed to chieftainship upon uplifted shields. I might have been an Attila, an Alaric. Among the civilised one can only climb by crawling, and I am too impatient to crawl. Here I am king at once by force of brain and muscle." So in Poplar he remained, poor in fees but rich in honour.
The love of justice was a pa.s.sion with him. The oppressors of the poor knew and feared him well. Injustice once proved before him, vengeance followed sure. If the law would not help, he never hesitated to employ lawlessness, of which he could always command a satisfactory supply.
b.u.mble might have the Board of Guardians at his back, Shylock legal support for his pound of flesh; but sooner or later the dark night brought punishment, a ducking in dock basin or ca.n.a.l, "Brutal a.s.sault Upon a Respected Resident" (according to the local papers), the "miscreants" always making and keeping good their escape, for he was an admirable organiser.
One night it seemed to him necessary that a child should go at once into the Infirmary.
"It ain"t no use my taking her now," explained the mother, "I"ll only get bullyragged for disturbing "em. My old man was carried there three months ago when he broke his leg, but they wouldn"t take him in till the morning."
"Oho! oho! oho!" sang Hal, taking the child up in his arms and putting on his hat. "You follow me; we"ll have some sport. Tally ho! tally ho!" And away we went, Hal heading our procession through the streets, shouting a rollicking song, the baby staring at him openmouthed.
"Now ring," cried Hal to the mother on our reaching the Workhouse gate.
"Ring modestly, as becomes the poor ringing at the gate of Charity." And the bell tinkled faintly.
"Ring again!" cried Hal, drawing back into the shadow; and at last the wicket opened.
"Oh, if you please, sir, my baby--"
"Blast your baby!" answered a husky voice, "what d"ye mean by coming here this time of night?"
"Please, sir, I"m afraid it"s dying, and the Doctor--"
The man was no sentimentalist, and to do him justice made no hypocritical pretence of being one. He consigned the baby and its mother and the doctor to h.e.l.l, and the wicket would have closed but for the point of Hal"s stick.
"Open the gate!" roared Hal. It was idle pretending not to hear Hal anywhere within half a mile of him when he filled his lungs for a cry.
"Open it quick, you blackguard! You gross vat-load of potato spirit, you--"
That the Governor should speak a language familiar to the governed was held by the Romans, born rulers of men, essential to authority. This theory Hal also maintained. His command of idiom understanded by his people was one of his rods of power. In less time than it took the trembling porter to loosen the bolts, Hal had presented him with a word picture of himself, as seen by others, that must have lessened his self-esteem.
"I didn"t know as it was you, Doctor," explained the man.
"No, you thought you had only to deal with some helpless creature you could bully. Stir your fat carca.s.s, you ugly cur! I"m in a hurry."
The House Surgeon was away, but an attendant or two were lounging about, unfortunately for themselves, for Hal, being there, took it upon himself to go round the ward setting crooked things straight; and a busy and alarming time they had of it. Not till a couple of hours later did he fling himself forth again, having enjoyed himself greatly.