A year later, Marco recalled this evening as a thrilling memory, and as one which would never pass away from him throughout his life. He would always be able to call it all back. The small and dingy back room, the dimness of the one poor gas-burner, which was all they could afford to light, the iron box pushed into the corner with its maps and plans locked safely in it, the erect bearing and actual beauty of the tall form, which the shabbiness of worn and mended clothes could not hide or dim. Not even rags and tatters could have made Loristan seem insignificant or undistinguished. He was always the same. His eyes seemed darker and more wonderful than ever in their remote thoughtfulness and interest as he spoke.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘It is a splendid game. And it is curious. He has thought it out well. The lad is a born soldier.’
‘It is not a game to him,’ Marco said. ‘And it is not a game to me. The Squad is only playing, but with him it’s quite different. He knows he’ll never really get what he wants, but he feels as if this was something near it. He said I might show you the map he made. Father, look at it.’
He gave Loristan the clean copy of The Rat’s map of Samavia. The city of Melzarr was marked with certain signs. They were to show at what points The Rat – if he had been a Samavian general – would have attacked the capital. As Marco pointed them out, he explained The Rat’s reasons for his planning.
Loristan held the paper for some minutes. He fixed his eyes on it curiously, and his black brows drew themselves together.
‘This is very wonderful!’ he said at last. ‘He is quite right. They might have got in there, and for the very reasons he hit on. How did he learn all this?’
‘He thinks of nothing else now,’ answered Marco. ‘He has always thought of wars and made plans for battles. He’s not like the rest of the Squad. His father is nearly always drunk, but he is very well educated, and, when he is only half drunk, he likes to talk.’
‘The Rat asks him questions then, and leads him on until he finds out a great deal. Then he begs old newspapers, and he hides himself in corners and listens to what people are saying. He says he lies awake at night thinking it out, and he thinks about it all the day. That was why he got up the Squad.’
Loristan had continued examining the paper.
‘Tell him,’ he said, when he refolded and handed it back, ‘that I studied his map, and he may be proud of it. You may also tell him –’ and he smiled quietly as he spoke – ‘that in my opinion he is right. The Iarovitch would have held Melzarr today if he had led them.’
Marco was full of exultation.
‘I thought you would say he was right. I felt sure you would. That is what makes me want to tell you the rest,’ he hurried on. ‘If you think he is right about the rest too –’ He stopped awkwardly because of a sudden wild thought which rushed upon him. ‘I don’t know what you will think,’ he stammered. ‘Perhaps it will seem to you as if the game – as if that part of it could – could only be a game.’
He was so fervent in spite of his hesitation that Loristan began to watch him with sympathetic respect, as he always did when the boy was trying to express something he was not sure of. One of the great bonds between them was that Loristan was always interested in his boyish mental processes – in the way in which his thoughts led him to any conclusion.
‘Go on,’ he said again. ‘I am like The Rat and I am like you. It has not seemed quite like a game to me, so far.’
He sat down at the writing table and Marco, in his eagerness, drew nearer and leaned against it, resting on his arms and lowering his voice, though it was always their habit to speak at such a pitch that no one outside the room they were in could distinguish what they said.
‘It is The Rat’s plan for giving the signal for a Rising,’ he said.
Loristan made a slight movement.
‘Does he think there will be a Rising?’ he asked.
‘He says that must be what the Secret Party has been preparing for all these years. And it must come soon. The other nations see that the fighting must be put an end to even if they have to stop it themselves. And if the real King is found – but when The Rat bought the newspaper there was nothing in it about where he was. It was only a sort of rumour. Nobody seemed to know anything.’ He stopped a few seconds, but he did not utter the words which were in his mind. He did not say: ‘But you know.’
‘And The Rat has a plan for giving the signal?’ Loristan said.
Marco forgot his first feeling of hesitation. He began to see the plan again as he had seen it when The Rat talked. He began to speak as The Rat had spoken, forgetting that it was a game. He made even a clearer picture than The Rat had made of the two vagabond boys – one of them a cripple – making their way from one place to another, quite free to carry messages or warnings where they chose, because they were so insignificant and poor-looking that no one could think of them as anything but waifs and strays, belonging to nobody and blown about by the wind of poverty and chance. He felt as if he wanted to convince his father that the plan was a possible one. He did not quite know why he felt so anxious to win his approval of the scheme – as if it were real – as if it could actually be done. But this feeling was what inspired him to enter into new details and suggest possibilities.
‘A boy who was a cripple and one who was only a street singer and a sort of beggar could get almost anywhere,’ he said. ‘Soldiers would listen to a singer if he sang good songs – and they might not be afraid to talk before him. A strolling singer and a cripple would perhaps hear a great many things it might be useful for the Secret Party to know. They might even hear important things. Don’t you think so?’
Before he had gone far with his story, the faraway look had fallen upon Loristan’s face – the look Marco had known so well all his life. He sat turned a little sidewise from the boy, his elbow resting on the table and his forehead on his hand. He looked down at the worn carpet at his feet, and so he looked as he listened to the end. It was as if some new thought were slowly growing in his mind as Marco went on talking and enlarging on The Rat’s plan. He did not even look up or change his position as he answered, ‘Yes. I think so.’
But, because of the deep and growing thought in his face, Marco’s courage increased. His first fear that this part of the planning might seem so bold and reckless that it would only appear to belong to a boyish game, gradually faded away for some strange reason. His father had said that the first part of The Rat’s imaginings had not seemed quite like a game to him, and now – even now – he was not listening as if he were listening to the details of mere exaggerated fancies. It was as if the thing he was hearing was not wildly impossible. Marco’s knowledge of Continental countries and of methods of journeying helped him to enter into much detail and give realism to his plans.
‘Sometimes we could pretend we knew nothing but English,’ he said. ‘Then, though The Rat could not understand, I could. I should always understand in each country. I know the cities and the places we should want to go to. I know how boys like us live, and so we should not do anything which would make the police angry or make people notice us. If anyone asked questions, I would let them believe that I had met The Rat by chance, and we had made up our minds to travel together because people gave more money to a boy who sang if he was with a cripple. There was a boy who used to play the guitar in the streets of Rome, and he always had a lame girl with him, and everyone knew it was for that reason. When he played, people looked at the girl and were sorry for her and gave her soldi. You remember.’
‘Yes, I remember. And what you say is true,’ Loristan answered.
Marco leaned forward across the table so that he came closer to him. The tone in which the words were said made his courage leap like a flame. To be allowed to go on with this boldness was to feel that he was being treated almost as if he were a man. If his father had wished to stop him, he could have done it with one quiet glance, without uttering a word. For some wonderful reason he did not wish him to cease talking. He was willing to hear wha
t he had to say – he was even interested.
‘You are growing older,’ he had said the night he had revealed the marvellous secret. ‘Silence is still the order, but you are man enough to be told more.’
Was he man enough to be thought worthy to help Samavia in any small way – even with boyish fancies which might contain a germ of some thought which older and wiser minds might make useful? Was he being listened to because the plan, made as part of a game, was not an impossible one – if two boys who could be trusted could be found? He caught a deep breath as he went on, drawing still nearer and speaking so low that his tone was almost a whisper.
‘If the men of the Secret Party have been working and thinking for so many years – they have prepared everything. They know by this time exactly what must be done by the messengers who are to give the signal. They can tell them where to go and how to know the secret friends who must be warned. If the orders could be written and given to – to someone who has – who has learned to remember things!’ He had begun to breathe so quickly that he stopped for a moment.
Loristan looked up. He looked directly into his eyes.
‘Someone who has been trained to remember things?’ he said.
‘Someone who has been trained,’ Marco went on, catching his breath again. ‘Someone who does not forget – who would never forget – never! That one, even if he were only twelve – even if he were only ten – could go and do as he was told.’
Loristan put his hand on his shoulder.
‘Comrade,’ he said, ‘you are speaking as if you were ready to go yourself.’
Marco’s eyes looked bravely straight into his, but he said not one word.
‘Do you know what it would mean, Comrade?’ his father went on. ‘You are right. It is not a game. And you are not thinking of it as one. But have you thought how it would be if something betrayed you – and you were set up against a wall to be shot?’
Marco stood up quite straight. He tried to believe he felt the wall against his back.
‘If I were shot, I should be shot for Samavia,’ he said. ‘And for you, Father.’
Even as he was speaking, the front doorbell rang and Lazarus evidently opened it. He spoke to someone, and then they heard his footsteps approaching the back sitting room.
‘Open the door,’ said Loristan, and Marco opened it.
‘There is a boy who is a cripple here, sir,’ the old soldier said. ‘He asked to see Master Marco.’
‘If it is The Rat,’ said Loristan, ‘bring him in here. I wish to see him.’
Marco went down the passage to the front door. The Rat was there, but he was not upon his platform. He was leaning upon an old pair of crutches, and Marco thought he looked wild and strange. He was white, and somehow the lines of his face seemed twisted in a new way. Marco wondered if something had frightened him, or if he felt ill.
‘Rat,’ he began, ‘my father –’
‘I’ve come to tell you about my father,’ The Rat broke in without waiting to hear the rest, and his voice was as strange as his pale face. ‘I don’t know why I’ve come, but I – I just wanted to. He’s dead!’
‘Your father?’ Marco stammered. ‘He’s – ’
‘He’s dead,’ The Rat answered shakily. ‘I told you he’d kill himself. He had another fit and he died in it. I knew he would, one of these days. I told him so. He knew he would himself. I stayed with him till he was dead – and then I got a bursting headache and I felt sick – and I thought about you.’
Marco made a jump at him because he saw he was suddenly shaking as if he were going to fall. He was just in time, and Lazarus, who had been looking on from the back of the passage, came forward. Together they held him up.
‘I’m not going to faint,’ he said weakly, ‘but I felt as if I was. It was a bad fit, and I had to try and hold him. I was all by myself. The people in the other attic thought he was only drunk, and they wouldn’t come in. He’s lying on the floor there, dead.’
‘Come and see my father,’ Marco said. ‘He’ll tell us what to do. Lazarus, help him.’
‘I can get on by myself,’ said The Rat. ‘Do you see my crutches? I did something for a pawnbroker last night, and he gave them to me for pay.’
But though he tried to speak carelessly, he had plainly been horribly shaken and overwrought. His queer face was yellowish white still, and he was trembling a little.
Marco led the way into the back sitting room. In the midst of its shabby gloom and under the dim light Loristan was standing in one of his still, attentive attitudes. He was waiting for them.
‘Father, this is The Rat,’ the boy began. The Rat stopped short and rested on his crutches, staring at the tall, reposeful figure with widened eyes.
‘Is that your father?’ he said to Marco. And then added, with a jerky half-laugh, ‘He’s not much like mine, is he?’
chapter ten
the rat – and samavia
What The Rat thought when Loristan began to speak to him, Marco wondered. Suddenly he stood in an unknown world, and it was Loristan who made it so because its poverty and shabbiness had no power to touch him. He looked at the boy with calm and clear eyes, he asked him practical questions gently, and it was plain that he understood many things without asking questions at all. Marco thought that perhaps he had, at some time, seen drunken men die, in his life in strange places. He seemed to know the terribleness of the night through which The Rat had passed. He made him sit down, and he ordered Lazarus to bring him some hot coffee and simple food.
‘Haven’t had a bite since yesterday,’ The Rat said, still staring at him. ‘How did you know I hadn’t?’
‘You have not had time,’ Loristan answered.
Afterward he made him lie down on the sofa.
‘Look at my clothes,’ said The Rat.
‘Lie down and sleep,’ Loristan replied, putting his hand on his shoulder and gently forcing him toward the sofa. ‘You will sleep a long time. You must tell me how to find the place where your father died, and I will see that the proper authorities are notified.’
‘What are you doing it for?’ The Rat asked, and then he added, ‘Sir.’
‘Because I am a man and you are a boy. And this is a terrible thing,’ Loristan answered him.
He went away without saying more, and The Rat lay on the sofa staring at the wall and thinking about it until he fell asleep. But, before this happened, Marco had quietly left him alone. So, as Loristan had told him he would, he slept deeply and long; in fact, he slept through all the night.
When he awakened it was morning, and Lazarus was standing by the side of the sofa looking down at him.
‘You will want to make yourself clean,’ he said. ‘It must be done.’
‘Clean!’ said The Rat, with his squeaky laugh. ‘I couldn’t keep clean when I had a room to live in, and now where am I to wash myself?’ He sat up and looked about him.
‘Give me my crutches,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to go. They’ve let me sleep here all night. They didn’t turn me into the street. I don’t know why they didn’t. Marco’s father – he’s the right sort. He looks like a swell.’
‘The Master,’ said Lazarus, with a rigid manner, ‘the Master is a great gentleman. He would turn no tired creature into the street. He and his son are poor, but they are of those who give. He desires to see and talk to you again. You are to have bread and coffee with him and the young Master. But it is I who tell you that you cannot sit at table with them until you are clean. Come with me,’ and he handed him his crutches. His manner was authoritative, but it was the manner of a soldier; his somewhat stiff and erect movements were those of a soldier, also, and The Rat liked them because they made him feel as if he were in barracks. He did not know what was going to happen, but he got up and followed him on his crutches.
Lazarus took him to a closet under the stairs where a battered tin bath was already full of hot water, which the old soldier himself had brought in pails. There were soap and coarse, clean towels on a wooden cha
ir, and also there was a much worn but clean suit of clothes.
‘Put these on when you have bathed,’ Lazarus ordered, pointing to them. ‘They belong to the young Master and will be large for you, but they will be better than your own.’ And then he went out of the closet and shut the door.
It was a new experience for The Rat. So long as he remembered, he had washed his face and hands – when he had washed them at all – at an iron tap set in the wall of a back street or court in some slum. His father and himself had long ago sunk into the world where to wash one’s self is not a part of everyday life. They had lived amid dirt and foulness, and when his father had been in a maudlin state, he had sometimes cried and talked of the long-past days when he had shaved every morning and put on a clean shirt.
To stand even in the most battered of tin baths full of clean hot water and to splash and scrub with a big piece of flannel and plenty of soap was a marvellous thing. The Rat’s tired body responded to the novelty with a curious feeling of freshness and comfort.
‘I dare say swells do this every day,’ he muttered. ‘I’d do it myself if I was a swell. Soldiers have to keep themselves so clean they shine.’
When, after making the most of his soap and water, he came out of the closet under the stairs, he was as fresh as Marco himself; and, though his clothes had been built for a more stalwart body, his recognition of their cleanliness filled him with pleasure. He wondered if by any effort he could keep himself clean when he went out into the world again and had to sleep in any hole the police did not order him out of.
He wanted to see Marco again, but he wanted more to see the tall man with the soft dark eyes and that queer look of being a swell in spite of his shabby clothes and the dingy place he lived in. There was something about him which made you keep on looking at him, and wanting to know what he was thinking of, and why you felt as if you’d take orders from him as you’d take orders from your general, if you were a soldier. He looked, somehow, like a soldier, but as if he were something more – as if people had taken orders from him all his life, and always would take orders from him. And yet he had that quiet voice and those fine, easy movements, and he was not a soldier at all, but only a poor man who wrote things for papers which did not pay him well enough to give him and his son a comfortable living. Through all the time of his seclusion with the battered bath and the soap and water, The Rat thought of him, and longed to have another look at him and hear him speak again. He did not see any reason why he should have let him sleep on his sofa or why he should give him a breakfast before he turned him out to face the world. It was first-rate of him to do it. The Rat felt that when he was turned out, after he had had the coffee, he should want to hang about the neighbourhood just on the chance of seeing him pass by sometimes. He did not know what he was going to do. The parish officials would by this time have taken his dead father, and he would not see him again. He did not want to see him again. He had never seemed like a father. They had never cared anything for each other. He had only been a wretched outcast whose best hours had been when he had drunk too much to be violent and brutal. Perhaps, The Rat thought, he would be driven to going about on his platform on the pavements and begging, as his father had tried to force him to do. Could he sell newspapers? What could a crippled lad do unless he begged or sold papers?