Chapter IV

The Rev. Arthur Atkinson never got on in the Church of England. He took his profession too seriously, and often acted without forethought, by the Gospels.

When Miss Masters said to him,—

‘Isn’t it too awful about Jim Barton? After all we’ve done for him, to murder his own father? It almost makes you lose your faith in human nature, doesn’t it?’

She caught for a moment in her vicar’s eye that dangerous look, so rarely seen, of the consistent Christian.

Miss Masters was a practical woman and she gave up from that hour the thought of Arthur Atkinson as a husband.

He said a little crisply, ‘Something will have to be done for Jim, certainly,’ and she saw that it was going to be far too much.

Arthur Atkinson went to see Jim twice in the penitentiary, but he found the crust of suspicion and contrast between them too heavy to break through.

Jim only looked at his boots, swallowed nervously and lied. Arthur might have got at the boy by breaking down his defences, but he was not the type of man who could take liberties even with a child’s defences. He looked wistfully at the wall of Jim’s frightened pride and left him alone.

‘I can’t,’ he said to himself, ‘do anything with him while he is in this place. If I make him human he will only suffer more. Better let him take the precaution of the deep-sea fishes who lose their eyes in the dark.’

Jim was quite unaware that he possessed a friend. He thought of his vicar as only ‘another of Them’; and by Them he meant mysterious people who asked embarrassing questions, and out of whom nobody that he knew had ever got anything better than a prayer-book.

As Jim’s term neared its end he grew nervous. He was only seventeen and had done so well at the penitentiary school that the committee had decided to offer him two years more and a pupil teachership.

The master of the penitentiary told him that his future was secure. He might, if he worked long and hard enough, and stayed where he was, even become a schoolmaster. Very few penitentiary boys had ever won such a position.

It was so wonderful that it was almost incredible. How could Jim possibly refuse, and would he even be allowed to refuse? Dared he tell one of Them, that in his reprehensible heart he wanted to go on a barge?

He winced at the thought of their incredulity. What! A shiftless, useless life which only appealed to his ignorance, as the stage appeals to silly girls in their teens?

He shrank from expressing this dream, which, with bated breath, he allowed himself at times to dwell on.

A barge—water under him, the open sky—no rules!

What did it matter if it included occasional kicks and curses? The bottom of kicks and curses were easy to plumb—you got out of the way or you retaliated. You didn’t stay under them; they were but irrelevant matter in the wrong place; they formed no atmosphere; they did not paralyse the heart and will.

If he was too poor to serve an apprenticeship and must therefore be content with never being anything better than a barge-boy at a pound a week, what did that matter when you had had nothing a week and a pound spelled independence and a way of life? You could float forever on a barge with no walls hemming you in.

Jim lay awake all night wondering how he could best escape a noble career and sink into insignificance.

He could actually, if he liked, run away. Long ago he had worked out the whole problem. He had the nerve for it and he knew precisely how it could be done.

But once you had escaped there was the shadow of the police behind you. You would find that without money you would have to reappear, and reappearances are usually fatal.

You had to have friends or money to stay disappeared.

Jim had been told of a burglar who would help him—a very good burglar who had made him a sporting offer through a young pal in the same dormitory. His pal would, of course, return to the burglar directly he got out, and he strongly advised Jim to enter the same profession.

Burglary is an intelligent, adventurous career. Still, there again you aren’t really free. Something hangs over you which may, sooner or later, drop.

It would be better, even if it was less amusing, to take up some career which put the law off noticing you at all. Not to be noticed! That was what Jim longed for. Not to be tied to a whistle or a bell, but to go where you liked with no one to see or care where you were at the end of it! It was a fierce longing, and it held the whole of Jim’s heart.

It would be quite impossible to explain it to the master. The master was considered a first-rate master, but he made a point of listening to no explanations but his own. He had a gift for epigram, and he often thought he had got to the bottom of a subject by expressing one of his own ideas.

The master was a good disciplinarian; he knew what was in the boys’ pockets, but he never knew anything that was in their minds—the rules were what mattered, and he had force behind him. He did not care how his horses came to the water, for he knew that he could make them drink.

‘Now if you give trouble,’ he used to say in a sharp, jocular voice to the sullen newcomer, ‘you’ll have to take trouble—that’s what it comes to here!’

He received Arthur Atkinson with that assumed respect which honest members of the clergy most shrink from.

Arthur Atkinson saw at a glance that Mr. Wickham accepted religion as a whipper-in.

‘Ah, yes, sir,’ the master said benignly, ‘come to see the boy—Jim Barton? You were quite right about that boy, sir; I recollect your saying that he was an exceptionally intelligent lad—so he is, most unusual! My schoolmaster says he never has to tell him a thing twice. In fact his intelligence is so exceptional that we are prepared to keep him on permanently—on the staff, as it were.

‘If that boy sticks to it and does his part of the business—why, by the time he’s five-and-twenty he’ll be an educated man earning perhaps two hundred a year! It’s a wonderful outlook for the boy, sir—princely! That’s what I said to him last night.

‘“Barton,” I said, “you can move if you wish to, out of your class.”

‘I did indeed, sir; those were my very words.

‘“This is a democratic country, Barton,” I said. “In a sense—in a certain sense—as far as the penitentiary goes—you have the world before you. Of course there is the stigma”—I made a point of mentioning that to the boy; you must never let them get above themselves—“but here it would be at any rate _partially_ overlooked.”

‘There have been no outbreaks on the part of the lad since we had him; none at all. I said to him the night he arrived. “Now, Barton, if you _give_ trouble, you know you’ll have to _take_ trouble,” and that was final.’

Arthur Atkinson nodded patiently. He was never much interested in anecdotal finalities.

‘Do you know what the boy wants to do himself?’ he asked.

The master stared at this irrelevant question. If it wasn’t the clergy all over to go asking aimless questions of a busy man after everything had been quite clearly explained to them!

If he didn’t guide this particular specimen with great care he might go and put ideas into the boy’s head—then where would they be?

Mr. Wickham explained painstakingly and with great tact that a boy’s best interests and what he wanted were totally different things. In order to fulfil the former you had to ignore the latter.

It didn’t do to ask the boys what they wanted. The Rev. Arthur Atkinson, however, though he seemed quiet, was one of the obstinate kind. He waited for Mr. Wickham to finish speaking, and then he repeated,—

‘Still, I should like to see the boy first and find out what he wants. His sentence is over, you see.’

The master shrugged his shoulders.

‘Oh, quite so, sir, in a sense,’ he said, ‘but if you’ll excuse my giving you a hint, I shouldn’t harp upon that point. His plans are settled, and I assure you that short of what we offer him he’ll have no chance at all. Not what you or I could call a chance.

‘It’s, if I may say so—to use a vulgar expression—neck or nothing with the boy, sir, and he’s remarkably lucky to have such a piece of neck offered him. He is, indeed, sir.’

Arthur Atkinson did not dispute the point. He was feeling extremely uncomfortable. There is nothing in the world so dangerous as to be a real liberal, and unfortunately, it is not dangerous to yourself alone.

If he was prepared to offer Jim any other chance he must be prepared to see him take any other risk; and it is not a reassuring state of things to propose risks to boys of seventeen who have been in a penitentiary for three years.

Nor did Jim look like a suitable subject for freedom. He stood at the door of the visitors’ parlour in answer to his summons, reluctantly shuffling from one foot to the other and fingering his cap.

It was four o’clock on a June afternoon. The windows of the parlour were tight shut to keep the dust off a bright-blue tablecloth, and a fly buzzed unhappily across the dirty pane of glass, tantalisingly between it and the summer air. Jim was more silent than the fly, but he looked quite as desperately shut in.

‘There’s your kind friend, Mr. Atkinson,’ said the master in a cheery voice, with rather a sharp glance at Jim’s lowered eyelids.

He disliked a cowed look at moments when he had no intention of cowing.

‘He’s come to have a little chat with you about the future, and I’ve just been telling him your prospects. Rose-coloured, that’s what I call them—rose-coloured. You can put your cap down.’

Jim put his cap down. The master shook hands cordially with Mr. Atkinson and said,—

‘Well, sir, I’ll see you again later.’

Then he withdrew after another still sharper glance at Jim.

Neither Mr. Atkinson nor Jim moved till the door shut.

Then Jim’s furtive eyes raised themselves cautiously to the face before him. Usually people like Mr. Atkinson set all his wits flying by trying to put him at his ease.

But the man before him, stooping a little, thin, with dreamy eyes and clear-cut sensitive mouth, was not thinking about anybody’s ease. He held out his hand gravely.

At first Jim did not know what to do with it. He had not shaken anybody’s hand for several years—but in the end he clutched nervously at it, dropped it, and as he was told to sit down, took the extreme edge of a chair, and returned defensively to the investigation of his square-toed boots. He was very unhappy and as nervous as a wild animal under human observation for the first time.

Mr. Atkinson was unhappy, too, but he knew better what to do with it.

‘It’s quite true,’ he said slowly, ‘I have been talking to the master about you, Jim. He’s been telling me what he wants you to do, but what I want to know is—what do you want to do yourself?’

Jim’s furtive eyes wandered all round the room and then fixed themselves suddenly with a glance of startling honesty upon his visitor’s face.

‘Do?’ he asked breathlessly. ‘Gord! I want ter get aht!’

He had put his case in a nutshell, and having said all he had to say he dropped his wild, speaking eyes and started trembling. Perhaps he had made a dreadful mistake. This man was only one of Them after all, and wouldn’t want to help him. Perhaps the vicar was only asking questions, and had chanced to light upon the key question of Jim’s heart by accident.

‘You know what they offer you?’ Mr. Atkinson continued quietly. ‘You realise that it’s a good job, better than you could get outside? It may be worth—before you are thirty—two hundred a year, and it’s an educated profession.’

Jim’s faint hope sank still more. But something in the unassuming, quiet voice tempted him to one more effort.

The man before him did not speak as if he was perfectly certain he was right and every other notion was absurd and wrong. He might be accessible to another point of view, however unreasonable it sounded. Jim flung the whole of his spirit into his last appeal.

‘I ’ate it!’ he muttered between shaking lips. ‘I want ter get aht.’

The words fell startlingly into the dirty, conscious, respectable little room. They struck at a system, and they struck in vain.

But the man in front of Jim was not an advocate of systems. He said very quietly—

‘Very well, then—I’ll help you to get out.’

It was almost as if he himself had been caught in a trap and knew the frantic compulsion of its teeth upon the quivering spirit.

Jim raised his eyes to Arthur Atkinson’s, and held them there for a long moment. He gave him in that one glance the scared-off, accumulated confidence of all his fighting years.

Youth launched him out upon a sea of faith, it gave him the generosity to trust, in spite of all experience, in a man of a different class. Jim had never trusted Miss Masters; he had profited by her. But he did not even ask himself what profit lay in the new feeling for the man before him. He gave him, without barriers, the freedom of his soul.

Arthur Atkinson returned his glance, but he was still more afraid. He looked deep into the confident, blue eyes fixed upon him and wondered if what he saw there was really the Call of the Wild.

It is a favourite phrase with those who have all their lives answered unconsciously the easier and more persistent Call of the Tame.

Was he confronted once more by a fugitive aspiration of youth—or was Jim an exception? Did he really want to get out?

Would he, if he was chained up a little longer, grow sleek and contented and be the first to shrink back in horror from the attacks of the open world?

‘You’re safe here, you know,’ Arthur said gently. ‘You won’t be safe outside.’

‘I’ll be safe enough,’ said Jim fiercely. ‘It ain’t no use being safer than you want to be.’

A gleam of answering fierceness came into the eyes of the man who had never got out.

‘Have you thought at all,’ he asked, ‘what you want to do for a living? I suppose they’ve taught you some kind of trade haven’t they?’

Jim’s eyes became vigilantly expressionless again. It seemed to him probably the moment to lie. Jim’s nature was essentially truthful, but he could tell a lie at a pinch, and a pinch came when you saw the truth wouldn’t be understood.

How could you explain a barge to a clergyman? You could not, when you came to think of it, explain a clergyman to a barge.

Arthur Atkinson saw the dangerous veil of class obstruction descending between him and the boy; he cleared it away with a quick gesture of appeal.

‘I shan’t mind,’ he said hurriedly, ‘what you want to do. Tell me anything you like. You see, if you don’t tell me the truth I shall go and make a mistake, and if we’re to be friends you can’t afford my mistakes.’

Jim did not understand the last part of the sentence, but he saw that the pinch had been miraculously removed; as far as this man went there would be no more pinches.

He gave immediately the whole of his mind.

‘I _could_ be a burglar,’ he explained, ‘but I’d rather get on a barge—I don’t want the law after me. I ’ave done a bit of carpentering, but they’ve kept me mostly at books. I don’t want ter do—what they’ve kept me at.’

Arthur Atkinson let the burglar drop, but he had to let the books drop too, and he had counted on the books.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘that’s settled then—we’ll try for a barge. I want you to come straight to me when you get out to-morrow. Will you?’

Jim nodded. He fumbled with the address given him by the vicar, read it, and put it carefully into his pocket.

‘Do you think as ’ow,’ he asked nervously, ‘you _reelly_ can get me orff?’

‘You tell them you are coming to see me to-morrow,’ explained Arthur Atkinson, ‘and go on saying it—then I can manage. Don’t sign anything, and here’s your car fares.’

They exchanged a more successful grip of the hands, and parted.

It was not very easy for either of them to manage the getting out.

The master plainly told Arthur Atkinson that he was ruining the boy’s splendid prospects for a mare’s nest.

He added that he wouldn’t be responsible for the boy’s soul, clergyman or no clergyman. Then he lost his temper and referred Mr. Atkinson to the committee.

The committee were pained, they were astonished, they were very explanatory, and when they saw they weren’t going to be successful they became offended.

They were all that a committee should be. Even the magistrate was referred to, but the boy’s sentence was over. He was a good boy, no one could prevent his going out if he had a clergyman to go to. This was the worst of the legal bond between Church and State. They ought to back each other’s horses, but they were not obliged to.

Mr. Atkinson was assured of the disapproval of all the penitentiary authorities, but he got his own way.

They flung at him as parting shots, ‘Of course if anything goes wrong you will be held directly responsible,’ and that even more dire threat, ‘I suppose you will be prepared to pay for the boy out of your own pocket?’

But Mr. Atkinson unexpectedly asserted that that sacred commodity, his own pocket, was a mere detail. Nobody could say anything after that, but when he had gone they all decided that Mr. Atkinson couldn’t be at all rich.

Then the authorities tackled the boy. They told him first that, of course, he was a free agent; then they explained how unpractical the clergy—excellent in the pulpit or for the next world—were in everyday life.

They painted everyday life for Jim. They reminded him of his unfortunate stigma. A boy who had killed his father was not likely to get on anywhere. Such stories crop up. They took away his freedom as an agent.

Then the chaplain, a wily man, who was used to human nature and knew what a weapon you can make of dreams, wrung the barge out of Jim and mocked him with it.

Jim, sullen and wild-eyed, outfaced this raillery. Then they stopped laughing and told him abruptly that he was insubordinate, ungrateful, and appallingly ignorant of life.

Nothing answered. They did all round the very best they could for Jim and they met with the usual reward of the benevolent—the complete failure of their victim to appreciate their noble purposes.

Apparently Jim did not even know that they were being kind to him. He wanted to get out.

It didn’t quite come to his making this astonishing confession. He cloaked it under the blessed form of words left him by Mr. Atkinson. He repeated with the awful persistency of a ticking clock—

‘Please, I want ter go ter Mr. Atkinson termorrer.’

Nothing more and nothing less.

They told him plainly he could never come back if he did, and he did not blink an eyelid. Then they suggested his signing a paper to say he would come back after all. But he only repeated his formula without signing the paper, and in the end it got him off.

Bewildered, disgraced, without a handshake, Jim left the safeguards of his only home.

It was an excellent institution in many ways. It did wonders for some of its inmates, and it had done something for Jim. It had taught him to love liberty and to ignore danger, and this is not a poor equipment.

The door shut behind him with a solemn clang. He had four shillings and Mr. Atkinson’s address in his pocket.

It was raining a little, but the earth looked very green and young. There was nothing unfriendly in the air, and nothing watchful. It was the first time he had been alone for three years.

Jim flung up his head and started down the road whistling.