Quincunx

  After some argument my mother, seeing that he was immovable, at last agreed.

  “Please give my mother the direction of the school so that she may write to me,” I asked.

  He wrote it on a piece of paper and my mother carefully put it away.

  Then Mr Steplight pulled out his repeater. “We must leave here in ten minutes to be sure of the coach,” he said.

  Considerately, he withdrew to wait in the hackney-cab.

  I took up the bundle in which my few possessions were secured and it only remained for us to kiss and part.

  “I will come up to see you as soon as I can,” my mother said.

  “No, Mamma, don’t be silly. When you’ve paid off this bill you won’t have any money left at all.”

  “No, dearest,” she said, stroking my cheek.

  “Are you paying attention, Mamma? I shall be taken care of now, but what shall you do?”

  “I don’t know.” She seemed stunned by the sudden changes in our fortunes and simply gazed at me with her eyes shining with an unnatural glitter. “All that matters is that you will be safe now.”

  “No, you must listen to me,” I insisted. “Find cheap lodgings, or live with Mrs Fortisquince if she offers to have you. I believe we must have misjudged her before. And yet, I’m not entirely sure. Be very careful, won’t you? Are you listening, Mamma?”

  “Yes, darling,” she said.

  “Try to find work while you live on what will be left of Sir Perceval’s money. There should be a little.”

  I gave her the map which she carefully placed in her pocket-book.

  “Look after it,” I told her. “For I shall want it back.”

  I felt that it would help her in that great city and be a kind of talisman.

  We embraced, I picked up my bundle and we went into the hall to tell the bailiff we were ready for my departure. He allowed my mother to stand at the street-door to wave me off, though he insisted on keeping his hand on her arm. When I had climbed into the coach and seated myself beside Mr Steplight, he handed the balance owing to my mother through the window. As the vehicle moved off I looked out of window and saw such an expression of longing on her face that I turned away but then I looked back and could see how hurt she was that I had averted my head. What would become of her, I wondered. And when would I see her again?

  CHAPTER 44

  As the vehicle drew away Mr Steplight’s smile faded and he fell silent, staring out of window. When we reached the Golden-Cross-inn he seized me by the arm and held onto me until we boarded the coach for the North. I was surprised to see that the inside was full up, but I assumed that someone had only just that minute secured the place he had presumably booked but which my mother was, in the event, not occupying, and so I made no comment on it.

  As the coach clattered through the streets I sank back in my seat, taking no interest in the sights as I brooded on what this latest delay to my mother’s release could mean. Could it have some significance that I had not grasped? Mr Steplight and I made a fine pair of travelling-companions, for he addressed no word to me nor even looked in my direction during all the first stage so that I might have been a parcel he had shoved onto the seat beside him.

  North of London we ran into a cold clammy mist which lay in the hollows like a fine veil of gauze through which the sun appeared as pallid as a huge moon, bringing a chill against which — for all that it was July — my coat gave no protection. We travelled through the afternoon and the evening, and then halted briefly to take a late supper before going on in the night-coach.

  We travelled through the next day and then late that evening I saw in the darkness occasional flashes of fire and heard strange noises. When I asked my companion what this meant he merely shrugged his shoulders, and so for three or four hours I stared out in bewilderment at the ghastly lights that flickered around us on both sides. I became aware of a foul stench of a kind that was familiar to me from the gas-works in Westminster but much more pungent, and when we stopped to change horses in the dirty, cavernous hold of an inn-yard I leaned out of window and called to one of the ostlers: “Please, what is that smell?”

  He seemed puzzled by my question but at last responded, in an outlandish accent, with something that sounded like: “That’ll be t’ mains, yoong mester.”

  This left me none the wiser but as we journeyed on and I dozed and awoke and dozed again, the dawn slowly crept upon us from our right hand and the oppressive smell and the fires were left behind and a landscape of rolling hills and villages was revealed by the pale cloud-obscured sun.

  At the next large town we breakfasted at about five in the morning and then took the branch-coach. And now, as we continued yet further northward, the countryside grew bleaker as we entered a land of high moors broken only by steep ridges and stony outcrops. More and more dismayed by Mr Steplight’s manner towards me, and puzzled that a school should be located in such a desolate landscape, I tried to make him tell me something about the academy to which he was taking me. Now it was that he smiled for the first and last time on that journey when he turned to me briefly and said: “Crastinus enim dies solicitus erit sibi ipsi. Sufficit diei malitia sua. That is to say, ‘Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof’.” The words jogged my memory but it was long before I remembered where I had last heard them.

  At a gaunt inn that stood at an empty cross-roads in the middle of a vast landscape, we parted from the coach and Mr Steplight hired a chaise. The road we took ran to the west straight across the undulating moorland and here there were very few farmhouses and they all turned windowless walls to the east; and when I looked back I saw their small low windows on the other side like eyes that were narrowed to follow us.

  Though I had revolved the business of the codicil again and again in my mind with the feeling that there was something strange that I had not been able to put my finger upon, I had got nowhere. But now, when I tried to see the whole affair from the point of view of the self-interest of each of the other parties involved, the anomaly came to me suddenly: “Mr Steplight,” I said, “if Sir Perceval intended to destroy the codicil when he sent you to buy it, then how was it also necessary to his interests to keep me alive?”

  He turned and looked at me very strangely — almost with a kind of pleasure — compressing his thin lips. Then he looked away again as if reading his fortune in the barren landscape.

  At last the driver turned off the high-road and trundled carefully down a rough track. To my surprise we appeared to be approaching a farm. We passed some fields, marked by stone walls but otherwise barely distinguishable from the uncultivated terrain all around, and in one of them I saw three thin, poorly-dressed boys at work. We drove into the farm-yard where two large mastiffs chained up by the gate barked angrily at us. Ahead of us was a long low stone farmhouse in the midst of a dirty yard in which lay heaps of mouldering straw and refuse. Enclosing the yard were two tumbledown ricks, a midden, several delapidated outbuildings, and a drying-ground, in which some more boys were threshing corn with flails. Like those I had already noticed, they had pinched faces and deep-sunken eyes underscored by dark smudges, and were wearing ragged trowsers and shirts. A well-dressed burly youth stood by, holding a whip and apparently over-looking them.

  The chaise stopped at the door of the farm-house and we got down. Mr Steplight knocked and a little maid-servant peered anxiously round the edge of the door as it opened.

  “I am Mr Steplight,” my companion said. “I believe Mr Quigg is expecting me.”

  “Oh yes, sir, come in,” she said, curtseying and pulling back the door.

  We entered and found that the door opened straight into the “house-place”, a large stone-flagged kitchen-cum-hall.

  “Mr Quigg is in the library. Will you come this way, please, sir.”

  She knocked on the door and showed us into a small room which, in view of its designation, was chiefly remarkable for the complete absence of books. A fat red-faced man, with what I would now call a brandy-painte
d nose, half-rose from the table at which he was sitting as we entered, pushing something into a drawer and wiping his sleeve across his mouth. He was about fifty and, wearing a high neck-cloth, a bottle-green coat, and mud-spattered boots and gaiters, looked exactly like the farmers I knew from my Melthorpe years. The two gentlemen saluted each other as if they had never met and yet knew each other.

  “My letter has preceded me, then, Mr Quigg?” said my companion.

  “I ken nowt aboot yon,” he replied in the broad speech of the country. “But it cwome yester forenoon. ’Troost yow had a good journey. Pray be seated, and tak’ a glass of wine, my good sir.”

  When this ceremony had been carried out and the two gentlemen had toasted each other, Mr Quigg looked at me: “Yon’s t’ lad, I tak’ it?”

  “It is.”

  He turned and pulled me roughly towards him:

  “Give me tha pook.”

  I stared at him in bewilderment and he laughed unpleasantly and cuffed me on the side of the head. “Why, art deaf? Tha hast cloth ears? Then Cloth-Ear is rightly tha name. I want tha boondle.”

  He seized my “poke” from me, untied it and then shook its contents onto the floor: a few shirts, and some articles carefully packed by my mother.

  “Turn out tha pockets, Cloth-Ear.”

  I handed over the few coins I had and he put them in his pocket without counting them. “Put on yon,” he said, handing me a bundle of what looked like rags. While I was exchanging my trowsers and shirt for these, Mr Quigg said pleasantly to his visiter: “Would yow care to see t’other lad?”

  “I would indeed.”

  Mr Quigg went to the door, put his head round it and bellowed: “Send Mealy-Plant in here.” He came back rubbing his hands ingratiatingly: “I reckon yow’ll be reet glad to see what we’ve made on him, Mr Steplight, and will report t’ same to t’ party consarned.”

  Mr Steplight glanced warningly towards me and said: “I’m sure I can rely upon you.”

  “Very good,” replied Mr Quigg, looking at me as I stood in my newly-acquired rags. “And now to business, Mr Steplight,” he said briskly, and he gripped me painfully by the arm and propelled me towards the door and out of the room, slamming it behind me with the words: “Stop there.”

  I waited in the house-place, grateful for the few moments of respite to try to understand what was happening. This was like no school I had ever heard of!

  After a few minutes a pale ragged boy a year or two younger than I came in.

  He glanced at me timidly and said in the soft accents of the South: “Should I knock or wait, do you think?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll be beaten whichever I do,” he said and knocked softly. The door opened suddenly, Mr Quigg seized him roughly by the arm, hitting him about the head to encourage speed, and dragged him into the room slamming the door behind him.

  I reflected that no-one could be pleased with what had been made of that boy. A few minutes later he was thrust out of the room as the door was slammed behind him.

  “Are you to come here?” he said to me shyly.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I am very sorry for you.”

  The door opened and Mr Quigg stood glaring at us: “What dost tha think th’art doing?” he shouted. “Get back to work.”

  As the boy moved away Mr Quigg struck out at his head and shoulders, slewing him sideways with the force of the blow as he ran.

  “Mischievous young devils, Mr Steplight,” he said, as that gentleman followed him out. “They need a firm hand.”

  He seized my shoulder, gripping so hard that I nearly cried out, and pushed me before him out to the chaise. Mr Steplight climbed in and shook hands with the headmaster.

  I said: “Goodbye, Mr Steplight.”

  He glanced at me briefly without acknowledging me, and then the chaise pulled away.

  Mr Quigg tightened his grip and shook me to emphasize what he was saying: “Now th’art to start afternoon school.”

  “Please sir,” I protested, “I’ve not eaten since early this morning and I’m very hungry.”

  Mr Quigg removed his hand in order to hit me across the face: “Tha dostna speak until th’art bidden.”

  Again gripping my shoulder, he led me — to my surprise — not back into the house but across the yard towards the outbuildings I had seen from the chaise where a group of boys were threshing corn.

  “Here’s a new ’un, Hal,” he said to the youth with the whip who had a nose like a parrot’s bill. “Cloth-Ear.”

  “All right, Cloth-Ear, get to work,” said the burly youth.

  I picked up the flail but since I had no idea how to use it, I had to be shewn — which involved much cuffing and swearing.

  Mr Quigg watched benignly for a few minutes this commencement of my studies, and then strolled back towards the house.

  Now, hungry and thirsty as I was, I was forced to work for the next three hours at the exhausting task of threshing, with only a single break of a few minutes. The hand-staff of blackthorn blistered my hand as I swung the swupple. Then once we had threshed the corn from the ear, we had to winnow it to separate the corn from the husks and chaff, and the dust that was raised by the winnowing-fan made us gasp and choke.

  We laboured under the sharp gaze of Hal who seated himself on a bale of hay and smoked a pipe. But if any boy slacked Hal cried out in the manner of a coachman and “touched him up” with his whip. At last our over-looker allowed us to stop and then led us to a delapidated barn outside which there was another group of boys of various ages who were being supervised by yet another youth with a whip — this one thin and cadaverous, and his face badly pitted like a frost-bitten leaf in autumn.

  These two counted us: “Eleven with the new ’un makes twelve,” Hal called out. “It’s one of tha’s that’s wanting, Roger.”

  “Mealy-Plant,” the thin youth replied. “He’s on his way.”

  And a few minutes later the boy I had spoken to outside Mr Quigg’s library came into the yard from one of the fields, staggering with exhaustion.

  “Get in!” shouted Roger and cracked the whip above our heads alarmingly.

  All the boys hurried into the barn and I followed them. It was empty except for bales of decaying straw and there was more straw underfoot above a layer of mud. There was a strong musty smell of rot which grew intenser when the door was secured behind us. The only light came through the gaps between the boards, and in the near-darkness no-one spoke. We laid ourselves down on the straw, too tired for speech. After several minutes we heard the wooden cross-bars being raised and the door was opened by Mr Quigg who entered followed by the two young men each carrying a bucket. The boys rose wearily and stood back while Roger and Hal poured the contents of the buckets into a large wooden trough and I saw that they were nothing but potatoes. None of the boys moved and all kept their eyes on Mr Quigg. When the youths had finished he stepped forward holding up his hand as if to quell an uproar:

  “Now young genel’men, I ken how hoongry yow mun be after yowr labours in t’ fields of laming. How do I ken? Why, on account of I ken what boys are. How do I ken what boys are? On account of I wor one myself. But don’t go thinking I had the advantages of a superior eddication like what yow’re getting. Oh no, indeed. I wor turned out by my fond pappy to yarn my living at no more nor seven year old, so yow boys are lucky and yow should be grateful.”

  He made this speech regularly. Later I was told that he had been a porter at a school in Wakefield and that this was his closest experience of education.

  He looked around at us with a cruel smile, waiting as if enjoying the suspense. At last he shouted: “Now get it!”

  All the boys ran forward to reach into the trough and to my horror began fighting amongst themselves. Three of them were bigger and heavier than the others and these — two of whom were almost plump by comparison with their fellows — pushed the smaller ones aside and seized as many of the potatoes as they could, tucked them into their
shirts which they held out before them, and carried them away to a corner of the barn. Mr Quigg and his sons (for that is who I learned the two youths were) urged the other boys on with shouts and occasional blows of the whips. When the bigger boys had eaten their potatoes they came back for more. Hungry as I was I could not bring myself to join in the fight.

  “Good lads,” Mr Quigg cried out giving the three bigger boys a hunk of barley-bread each. Then he addressed me, jeeringly: “Art tha not hungry now, Cloth-Ear?”

  I shook my head and he struck me with the whip. I crept away and watched from the shadows. A boy who had a humped back and short, misshapen legs was fighting off some of the smaller fellows to seize a few of the potatoes that were left. I noticed that the boy I had spoken to, the one addressed by Mr Quigg as Mealy-Plant, was, like me, making no attempt to obtain any of the potatoes although he was one of the comparatively larger boys.

  When the trough was empty Mr Quigg and his sons went out and I heard the cross-bar slam into place. A minute or two later the monotonous howl of the yard-dogs turned into a series of frenzied barks as the sound of their chains being unlocked became audible. I heard them approach and then saw their muzzles shoved through the wide gap under the door of the barn as they scratched at the wood, whining savagely. No notice was taken by my new companions, and then the thinnest of the three bigger boys began working at a flint and tinder until at last he lit a tallow-dip and somewhat dispelled the darkness.

  Now I saw the young cripple hold out a potato to a large but vacant-faced boy who took it without looking at him and put it straight into his mouth. Then the crippled boy went over to the one I had spoken to outside Mr Quigg’s library who was lying as if exhausted on the straw, and held out a potato to him.

  “Here you are, Stephen,” he said.

  “Thank you, Richard.” He took it and looked across at me: “But he had nothing either.”

  Stephen broke the potato in two and held out one half.

  “It’s yours,” I said, shaking my head, though I was in pain from hunger.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said.