FRANCIS BACON

• Francis bacon was born on January 22,1561,london,England
• His father Sir Nicholas Bacon was “Lord Keeper of the great seal”
• 
  So the queen Elizabeth called him, “The young lord keeper”, later Bacon also became like his father, “lord keeper of the great seal”
• Francis Bacon is the first great stylist in English prose
• Bacon was influenced by French Essayist, “Montaigne”
• Bacon was favoured by the new “Renaissance Humanism” and didn’t like “Aristotelinism” and “Scholasticism”
• He thought Aristotle’s philosophy as unprofitable, argumentative and incorrect
• Bacon wrote, “A letter of Advice to Queen Elizabeth” during the winter of 1584-1585
• Bacon was knighted by James I in 1603
• In 1618, Bacon became the lord Chancellor of England
• In 1621, he became Viscount of St.Albans
• Bacon married Allice Barnham, daughter of Drapper
• He was accused of bribe and corruption so he was fined 40000 pounds
• He became a friend of Robert Devereux, who was II Earl of Essex and Favourite of Queen Elizabeth through him, he became the earl’s confident adviser and attended court pleasure parties, so wrote “The Conference of Pleasure”
• Bacon was a legendary English philosopher, scientist, lawyer, statesman, author,jurist and father of scientific methods
• Important personality in natural philosophy, key thinker in scientific methods
• He is also interested in Inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry , this method is known as Baconian method
• He is called as “father of Empiricism”(the theory that all knowledge is based on experience derived from the senses) other writers of empiricism John Locke, David Hume
• He is called as “parent of modern science”
• He is called as “father of English essayist”

• He is called as “Aphoristic essayist”, “Instructive essayist”
• Bacon is central figure of Jacobean period
• 
  Bacon’s essays deals with 1)Man’s relation to supreme being 2)Man’s relation to himself 3)Man’s relation to society and the world
• Hug Walker says, “Bacon is the first English Essayist remains by seer mass and weight of genius”
• Alexander Pope said, “If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined, “The wisest and meanest of mankind”
• Bacon’s predecessors Philip Sidney , John Lyly,Roger Ascham
• Bacon’s style of writing is pithy style, brief vigorously expressive, ignores unnecessary conceits and imaginaries
• Bacon is also influenced by Machiaevelli (Italy writer, author of The Prince)
• Bacon tried to find refrigerator by covering the dead hen under the snow, then suffered of Bronchitis and died on 9th April 1626
• Bacon said, “Essay was a dispersed meditation”
• “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed and some few to be chewed and digested”
• “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man”
• His works, “Novum Organum Scientorium ” (latin word means New Method) about science, this is dedicated to James I
• His work “Advancement of learning”-1605 ,dedicated to James I ,translated into latin as “De Augmentis scientarium” called as “Hallmark of Renaissance”
• Bacon’s first collection of Essays was published in 1597(10)
• Bacon’s second collection of Essays was published in 1612 (38)
• Bacon’s third/final collection of Essays was published in 1625(58)
• The history of Henry VII
• New Atlantis (unfinished work of Bacon)

• Wisdom of Ancients
• The Instuaratio Magna/The great institution of True Philosophy(in 6 parts)
• His tour to Europe helped him to write “Notes on the state of Europe”
• Bacon’s Essay “Of Masque and Triumph” shows art of providing entertainment
• Bacon became reason for the death of Earl of Essex II, so he wrote “An Apology”
• Full name of Bacon’s essay “Essay is religious meditations places of persuasion and dissuasion, seen and allowed”
• Bacon said about himself, “I only sound the genius of investigation clarion, but enter not into the battle”

Additional Points

• Francis Bacon is the first great stylist in English prose
• In Novum Organum Bacon is concerned with the question of valid knowledge
• Bacon’s Nuvum Organum is Philosophical treatise
• The theme of Bacon’s The New Atlantis is the advancement of science
• “Nuptial love maketh mankind; friendly love perfecteth it; but wanton love corrupteth and
• embaseth it”. Where do these words occur? Francis Bacon’s Essay “Of Love”
• The theme of Bacon’s The New Atlantis is discovery of the new world
• With Bacon the essay form is The aphoristic expression of accumulated public wisdom(NET)
• Matheson says, in his final evaluation of Bacon as an essayist: “The Essays have won him a place apart, and are the source of his fame with the world at large.They introduce a new form of composition into English Literature which was destined to have a varied and fruitful development. They are for the most

part detached and impersonal, and there is nothing in them to mark the tragedy of his life. ”

OF REVENGE BY FRANCIS BACON

REVENGE is a kind of wild justice; which the more man’ s nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out. For as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law; but the revenge of that wrong, putteth the law out of office. Certainly, in taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior; for it is a prince’s part to pardon. And Solomon, I am sure, saith, It is the glory of a man, to pass by an offence. That which is past is gone, and irrevocable; and wise men have enough to do, with things present and to come; therefore they do but trifle with themselves, that labor in past matters. There is no man doth a wrong, for the wrong’s sake; but thereby to purchase himself profit, or pleasure, or honor, or the like. Therefore why should I be angry with a man, for loving himself better than me? And if any man should do wrong, merely out of ill- nature, why, yet it is but like the thorn or briar, which prick and scratch, because they can do no other. The most tolerable sort of revenge, is for those wrongs which there is no law to remedy; but then let a man take heed, the revenge be such as there is no law to punish; else a man’s enemy is still before hand, and it is two for one. Some, when they take revenge, are desirous, the party should know, whence it cometh. This is the more generous. For the delight seemeth to be, not so much in doing the hurt, as in making the party repent. But base and crafty cowards, are like the arrow that flieth in the dark. Cosmus, duke of Florence, had a desperate saying against perfidious or neglecting friends, as if those wrongs were unpardonable; You shall read (saith he) that we are commanded to forgive our enemies; but you never read, that we are commanded to forgive our friends. But yet the spirit of Job was in a better tune: Shall we (saith he) take good at God’s hands, and not be content to take evil also? And so of friends in a proportion. This is certain, that a man that studieth revenge, keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise would heal, and do well. Public revenges are for the most part fortunate; as that for the death of Caesar; for the death of Pertinax; for the death of Henry the Third of France; and many more. But in private revenges, it is not so. Nay rather, vindictive persons live the life of witches; who, as they are mischievous, so end they infortunate.

• In the medieval age there was fight everywhere, it was called as Fueds
• Opening line of the essay OF Revenge , “Revenge is the wild justice”
• The more man’s nature runs to , the more ought law to weed it out
• Revenge offends the law
• “ Certainly in taking revenge a man is but even with his enemy but passing it over, he is superior”
• Solomon said “It is glory of a man to pass by an offence”
• “There is no man doth a wrong , for the wrong’s sake but thereby to purchase himself profit or pleasure or honour or the like”. Therefore why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me”

• Man doing wrong is compared with Thorn or Briar (wild rose with long prickly stems) it is their nature to prick and scratch “And if any man is doing wrong merely out of ill nature, why yet It is but like the thorn or briar, which prick and scratch, because they can do no other”
• Some great people led out their real identity while take revenge but base and crafty (cunning) cowards take revenge without telling identity, they are compared with an arrow that flies in the dark
• An injury committed because of self love is forgivable
• Cosimo de medici (Duke of Florence ) in 16th century tells desperately “wrong or injury committed by a perfidious –(wrong friends) is unpardonable
• You shall read, “we are commended to forgive our enemies but you never read that we are commended to forgive our friends” quote said by Cosimo de Medici (Duke of Florence)
• For this Bacon replies that in the Bible , the spirit of Job tells us “shall we take good at God’s hands and not be content to take evil also ?And so of friends in Proportion ” this is applied to Friends also, we accept the good things done by Our friends, like wise if a friend does any wrong , we should accept that too
• “This is certain that a man studieth of Revenge keeps his own wounds green, which otherwise heal and do well”- A Man always thinks of taking Revenge is keeping his wounds green, if he doesn’t think revenge , wound would heal
• Pardon is better form of Revenge
• If there is no remedy by law, that type of revenge is tolerable
• Public revenges are fortunate, those who took, revenge for public revenges are given below
• 1.Mark Antony took revenge for the death of Julius Ceasar

• 2.Spetimus Severus took revenge for the death of Pertinax
• 3. Henry IV took Revenge for the death of Henry III
• Public revenges are fortunate but private revenges are not so fortunate, they will end our lives in a miserable manner
• “Vindictive persons live the life of withces , who as they are mischievous , so end they unfortunate” this is the last line of the essay “Of Revenge”

OF STUDIES BY FRANCIS BACON

STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment, and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best, from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning, by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. Abeunt studia in mores. Nay, there is no stond or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies; like as diseases of the body, may have appropriate exercises. Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast; gentle walking for the stomach; riding for the head; and the like. So if a man’s wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again. If his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the Schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores.

If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study 197 the lawyers’ cases. So every defect of the mind, may have a special receipt.

• Studies is used for delight in private and retirement
• Studies is used as ornament in discourse (Conversation)
• Studies is used as ability in taking Judgment /handling of business
• But if we spent too much of times in study it is called as sloth(laziness)
• If we use studies too much as ornament, it is called as affectation(false display)
• If we use studies too much to judge, it is called as showing the eccentricity of a scholar(humour of a scholar)

• Crafty man (cunning men) condemn studies
• Simple men admire studies
• Wise men use studies
• “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, some few to be chewed and digested” famous quote from “OF Studies”
• “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man”
• “If a man writes little , he needs great memory”
• “If he confers little he needs to have present wit”(Discuss)
• If he reads little , he needs to have much cunning
• The study of history make men wise
• The study of poetry make men witty
• The study of maths makes men Subtle(clever)
• The study of natural philosophy makes men deep/Grave
• The study of moral makes men grave (serious minded)
• The study of logic and rhetoric (art of using language) makes men able to contend (debate and reasoning ability)
• “Abeunt Studia in Mores” studies become habits, studies pass into character
• Every disease of body may get cured by correct exercises
• Bowling is good for stones and reins
• Shooting is good for lungs and breast
• Gentle walking is good for stomach
• Riding is good for head
• Like that if a man’s wit is wandering , he has to study maths to control his wavering mind and develop his concentration power
• If a man is unable to differentiate between things like “Cymini Sectors” he has to study middle age scholar’s philosophy , then he will develop decision making

• “Cymini Sectors” means experts in hair splitting, here it refers one who makes fine differentiation
• If a man is unable to examine a subject carefully from point , he has to study lawyer’s case
• “Read not to contradict and confute nor to believe and to take for granted nor to find talk and discourse but to weigh and discourse”
• “Every defect of mind have a special receipt”(remedy)- the last line of the essay “Of Studies”

Pygmalion By

George Bernard Shaw

PREFACE TO PYGMALION.

A Professor of Phonetics.

As will be seen later on, Pygmalion needs, not a preface, but a sequel, which I have supplied in its due place. The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it sounds like. It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him. German and Spanish are accessible to foreigners: English is not accessible even to Englishmen. The reformer England needs today is an energetic phonetic enthusiast: that is why I have made such a one the hero of a popular play. There have been heroes of that kind crying in the wilderness for many years past. When I became interested in the subject towards the end of the eighteen-seventies, Melville Bell was dead; but Alexander J. Ellis was still a living patriarch, with an impressive head always covered by a velvet skull cap, for which he would apologize to public meetings in a very courtly manner. He and Tito Pagliardini, another phonetic veteran, were men whom it was impossible to dislike. Henry Sweet, then a young man, lacked their sweetness of character: he was about as conciliatory to conventional mortals as Ibsen or Samuel Butler. His great ability as a phonetician (he was, I think, the best of them all at his job) would have entitled him to high official recognition, and perhaps enabled him to popularize his subject, but for his Satanic contempt for all academic dignitaries and persons in general who thought more of Greek than of phonetics. Once, in the days when the Imperial Institute rose in South Kensington, and Joseph Chamberlain was booming the Empire, I induced the editor of a leading monthly review to commission an article from Sweet on the imperial importance of his subject. When it arrived, it contained nothing but a savagely derisive attack on a professor of language and literature whose chair Sweet regarded as proper to a phonetic expert only. The article, being libelous, had to be returned as impossible; and I had to renounce my dream of dragging its author into the limelight. When I met him afterwards, for the first time for many years, I found to my astonishment that he, who had been a quite tolerably presentable young man, had actually managed by sheer scorn to alter his personal appearance until he had become a sort of walking repudiation of Oxford and all its traditions. It must have been largely in his own despite that he was squeezed into something called a Readership of phonetics there. The future of phonetics rests probably with his pupils, who all swore by him; but nothing could bring the man himself into any sort of compliance with the university, to which he nevertheless clung by divine right in an intensely Oxonian way. I daresay his papers, if he has left

any, include some satires that may be published without too destructive results fifty years hence. He was, I believe, not in the least an ill-natured man: very much the opposite, I should say; but he would not suffer fools gladly.

Those who knew him will recognize in my third act the allusion to the patent Shorthand in which he used to write postcards, and which may be acquired from a four and six-penny manual published by the Clarendon Press. The postcards which Mrs. Higgins describes are such as I have received from Sweet. I would decipher a sound which a cockney would represent by zerr, and a Frenchman by seu, and then write demanding with some heat what on earth it meant. Sweet, with boundless contempt for my stupidity, would reply that it not only meant but obviously was the word Result, as no other Word containing that sound, and capable of making sense with the context, existed in any language spoken on earth. That less expert mortals should require fuller indications was beyond Sweet’s patience. Therefore, though the whole point of his “Current Shorthand” is that it can express every sound in the language perfectly, vowels as well as consonants, and that your hand has to make no stroke except the easy and current ones with which you write m, n, and u, l, p, and q, scribbling them at whatever angle comes easiest to you, his unfortunate determination to make this remarkable and quite legible script serve also as a Shorthand reduced it in his own practice to the most inscrutable of cryptograms. His true objective was the provision of a full, accurate, legible script for our noble but ill-dressed language; but he was led past that by his contempt for the popular Pitman system of Shorthand, which he called the Pitfall system. The triumph of Pitman was a triumph of business organization: there was a weekly paper to persuade you to learn Pitman: there were cheap textbooks and exercise books and transcripts of speeches for you to copy, and schools where experienced teachers coached you up to the necessary proficiency. Sweet could not organize his market in that fashion. He might as well have been the Sybil who tore up the leaves of prophecy that nobody would attend to. The four and six-penny manual, mostly in his lithographed handwriting, that was never vulgarly advertized, may perhaps some day be taken up by a syndicate and pushed upon the public as The Times pushed the Encyclopaedia Britannica; but until then it will certainly not prevail against Pitman. I have bought three copies of it during my lifetime; and I am informed by the publishers that its cloistered existence is still a steady and healthy one. I actually learned the system two several times; and yet the shorthand in which I am writing these lines is Pitman’s. And the reason is, that my secretary cannot transcribe Sweet, having been perforce taught in the schools of Pitman. Therefore, Sweet railed at Pitman as vainly as Thersites railed at Ajax: his raillery, however it may have eased his soul, gave no popular vogue to Current Shorthand. Pygmalion Higgins is not a portrait of Sweet, to whom the adventure of Eliza Doolittle would have been impossible; still, as will be seen,

there are touches of Sweet in the play. With Higgins’s physique and temperament Sweet might have set the Thames on fire. As it was, he impressed himself professionally on Europe to an extent that made his comparative personal obscurity, and the failure of Oxford to do justice to his eminence, a puzzle to foreign specialists in his subject. I do not blame Oxford, because I think Oxford is quite right in demanding a certain social amenity from its nurslings (heaven knows it is not exorbitant in its requirements!); for although I well know how hard it is for a man of genius with a seriously underrated subject to maintain serene and kindly relations with the men who underrate it, and who keep all the best places for less important subjects which they profess without originality and sometimes without much capacity for them, still, if he overwhelms them with wrath and disdain, he cannot expect them to heap honors on him.

Of the later generations of phoneticians I know little. Among them towers the Poet Laureate, to whom perhaps Higgins may owe his Miltonic sympathies, though here again I must disclaim all portraiture. But if the play makes the public aware that there are such people as phoneticians, and that they are among the most important people in England at present, it will serve its turn.

I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.

Finally, and for the encouragement of people troubled with accents that cut them off from all high employment, I may add that the change wrought by Professor Higgins in the flower girl is neither impossible nor uncommon. The modern concierge’s daughter who fulfils her ambition by playing the Queen of Spain in Ruy Blas at the Theatre Francais is only one of many thousands of men and women who have sloughed off their native dialects and acquired a new tongue. But the thing has to be done scientifically, or the last state of the aspirant may be worse than the first. An honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club; and I am sorry to say that in spite of the efforts of our Academy of Dramatic Art, there is still too much sham golfing English on our stage, and too little of the noble English of Forbes Robertson.

ACT I

Covent Garden at 11.15 p.m. Torrents of heavy summer rain. Cab whistles blowing frantically in all directions. Pedestrians running for shelter into the market and under the portico of St. Paul’s Church, where there are already several people, among them a lady and her daughter in evening dress. They are all peering out gloomily at the rain, except one man with his back turned to the rest, who seems wholly preoccupied with a notebook in which he is writing busily.

The church clock strikes the first quarter.

THE DAUGHTER [in the space between the central pillars, close to the one on her left] I’m getting chilled to the bone. What can Freddy be doing all this time? He’s been gone twenty minutes.

THE MOTHER [on her daughter’s right] Not so long. But he ought to have got us a cab by this.

A BYSTANDER [on the lady’s right] He won’t get no cab not until half- past eleven, missus, when they come back after dropping their theatre fares.

THE MOTHER. But we must have a cab. We can’t stand here until half- past eleven. It’s too bad.

THE BYSTANDER. Well, it ain’t my fault, missus.

THE DAUGHTER. If Freddy had a bit of gumption, he would have got one at the theatre door.

THE MOTHER. What could he have done, poor boy?

THE DAUGHTER. Other people got cabs. Why couldn’t he?

Freddy rushes in out of the rain from the Southampton Street side, and comes between them closing a dripping umbrella. He is a young man of twenty, in evening dress, very wet around the ankles.

THE DAUGHTER. Well, haven’t you got a cab? FREDDY. There’s not one to be had for love or money.

THE MOTHER. Oh, Freddy, there must be one. You can’t have tried.

THE DAUGHTER. It’s too tiresome. Do you expect us to go and get one ourselves?

FREDDY. I tell you they’re all engaged. The rain was so sudden: nobody was prepared; and everybody had to take a cab. I’ve been to Charing Cross one way and nearly to Ludgate Circus the other; and they were all engaged.

THE MOTHER. Did you try Trafalgar Square?

FREDDY. There wasn’t one at Trafalgar Square. THE DAUGHTER. Did you try?

FREDDY. I tried as far as Charing Cross Station. Did you expect me to walk to Hammersmith?

THE DAUGHTER. You haven’t tried at all.

THE MOTHER. You really are very helpless, Freddy. Go again; and don’t come back until you have found a cab.

FREDDY. I shall simply get soaked for nothing.

THE DAUGHTER. And what about us? Are we to stay here all night in this draught, with next to nothing on. You selfish pig—

FREDDY. Oh, very well: I’ll go, I’ll go. [He opens his umbrella and dashes off Strandwards, but comes into collision with a flower girl, who is hurrying in for shelter, knocking her basket out of her hands. A blinding flash of lightning, followed instantly by a rattling peal of thunder, orchestrates the incident]

THE FLOWER GIRL. Nah then, Freddy: look wh’ y’ gowin, deah. FREDDY. Sorry [he rushes off].

THE FLOWER GIRL [picking up her scattered flowers and replacing them in the basket] There’s menners f’ yer! Te-oo banches o voylets trod into the mad. [She sits down on the plinth of the column, sorting her flowers, on the lady’s right. She is not at all an attractive person. She is perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, hardly older. She wears a little sailor hat of black straw that

has long been exposed to the dust and soot of London and has seldom if ever

been brushed. Her hair needs washing rather badly: its mousy color can hardly

be natural. She wears a shoddy black coat that reaches nearly to her knees and

is shaped to her waist. She has a brown skirt with a coarse apron. Her boots are much the worse for wear. She is no doubt as clean as she can afford to be; but compared to the ladies she is very dirty. Her features are no worse than theirs; but their condition leaves something to be desired; and she needs the services of a dentist].

THE MOTHER. How do you know that my son’s name is Freddy, pray?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y’ de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy atbaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f’them? [Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.]

THE DAUGHTER. Do nothing of the sort, mother. The idea!

THE MOTHER. Please allow me, Clara. Have you any pennies? THE DAUGHTER. No. I’ve nothing smaller than sixpence.

THE FLOWER GIRL [hopefully] I can give you change for a tanner, kind lady.

THE MOTHER [to Clara] Give it to me. [Clara parts reluctantly]. Now [to the girl] This is for your flowers.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Thank you kindly, lady.

THE DAUGHTER. Make her give you the change. These things are only a penny a bunch.

THE MOTHER. Do hold your tongue, Clara. [To the girl]. You can keep the change.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, thank you, lady.

THE MOTHER. Now tell me how you know that young gentleman’s name.

THE FLOWER GIRL. I didn’t.

THE MOTHER. I heard you call him by it. Don’t try to deceive me.

THE FLOWER GIRL [protesting] Who’s trying to deceive you? I called him Freddy or Charlie same as you might yourself if you was talking to a stranger and wished to be pleasant. [She sits down beside her basket].

THE DAUGHTER. Sixpence thrown away! Really, mamma, you might have spared Freddy that. [She retreats in disgust behind the pillar].

An elderly gentleman of the amiable military type rushes into shelter, and closes a dripping umbrella. He is in the same plight as Freddy, very wet about the ankles. He is in evening dress, with a light overcoat. He takes the place left vacant by the daughter’s retirement.

THE GENTLEMAN. Phew!

THE MOTHER [to the gentleman] Oh, sir, is there any sign of its stopping?

THE GENTLEMAN. I’m afraid not. It started worse than ever about two minutes ago. [He goes to the plinth beside the flower girl; puts up his foot on it; and stoops to turn down his trouser ends].

THE MOTHER. Oh, dear! [She retires sadly and joins her daughter].

THE FLOWER GIRL [taking advantage of the military gentleman’s proximity to establish friendly relations with him]. If it’s worse it’s a sign it’s

nearly over. So cheer up, Captain; and buy a flower off a poor girl.

THE GENTLEMAN. I’m sorry, I haven’t any change. THE FLOWER GIRL. I can give you change, Captain, THE GENTLEMEN. For a sovereign? I’ve nothing less.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Garn! Oh do buy a flower off me, Captain. I can change half-a-crown. Take this for tuppence.

THE GENTLEMAN. Now don’t be troublesome: there’s a good girl. [Trying his pockets] I really haven’t any change—Stop: here’s three hapence, if that’s any use to you [he retreats to the other pillar].

THE FLOWER GIRL [disappointed, but thinking three halfpence better than nothing] Thank you, sir.

THE BYSTANDER [to the girl] You be careful: give him a flower for it. There’s a bloke here behind taking down every blessed word you’re saying. [All turn to the man who is taking notes].

THE FLOWER GIRL [springing up terrified] I ain’t done nothing wrong by speaking to the gentleman. I’ve a right to sell flowers if I keep off the kerb. [Hysterically] I’m a respectable girl: so help me, I never spoke to him except to ask him to buy a flower off me. [General hubbub, mostly sympathetic to the flower girl, but deprecating her excessive sensibility. Cries of Don’t start hollerin. Who’s hurting you? Nobody’s going to touch you. What’s the good of fussing? Steady on. Easy, easy, etc., come from the elderly staid spectators, who pat her comfortingly. Less patient ones bid her shut her head, or ask her roughly what is wrong with her. A remoter group, not knowing what the matter is, crowd in and increase the noise with question and answer: What’s the row? What she do? Where is he? A tec taking her down. What! him? Yes: him over there: Took money off the gentleman, etc. The flower girl, distraught and mobbed, breaks through them to the gentleman, crying mildly] Oh, sir, don’t let him charge me. You dunno what it means to me. They’ll take away my character and drive me on the streets for speaking to gentlemen. They—

THE NOTE TAKER [coming forward on her right, the rest crowding after him] There, there, there, there! Who’s hurting you, you silly girl? What do you take me for?

THE BYSTANDER. It’s all right: he’s a gentleman: look at his boots. [Explaining to the note taker] She thought you was a copper’s nark, sir.

THE NOTE TAKER [with quick interest] What’s a copper’s nark?

THE BYSTANDER [inept at definition] It’s a—well, it’s a copper’s nark, as you might say. What else would you call it? A sort of informer.

THE FLOWER GIRL [still hysterical] I take my Bible oath I never said a word—

THE NOTE TAKER [overbearing but good-humored] Oh, shut up, shut up. Do I look like a policeman?

THE FLOWER GIRL [far from reassured] Then what did you take down my words for? How do I know whether you took me down right? You just show me what you’ve wrote about me. [The note taker opens his book and holds it steadily under her nose, though the pressure of the mob trying to read it over his shoulders would upset a weaker man]. What’s that? That ain’t proper writing. I can’t read that.

THE NOTE TAKER. I can. [Reads, reproducing her pronunciation exactly] “Cheer ap, Keptin; n’ haw ya flahr orf a pore gel.”

THE FLOWER GIRL [much distressed] It’s because I called him Captain. I meant no harm. [To the gentleman] Oh, sir, don’t let him lay a charge agen me for a word like that. You—

THE GENTLEMAN. Charge! I make no charge. [To the note taker] Really, sir, if you are a detective, you need not begin protecting me against molestation by young women until I ask you. Anybody could see that the girl meant no harm.

THE BYSTANDERS GENERALLY [demonstrating against police espionage] Course they could. What business is it of yours? You mind your own affairs. He wants promotion, he does. Taking down people’s words! Girl never said a word to him. What harm if she did? Nice thing a girl can’t shelter from the rain without being insulted, etc., etc., etc. [She is conducted by the more sympathetic demonstrators back to her plinth, where she resumes her seat and struggles with her emotion].

THE BYSTANDER. He ain’t a tec. He’s a blooming busybody: that’s what he is. I tell you, look at his boots.

THE NOTE TAKER [turning on him genially] And how are all your people down at Selsey?

THE BYSTANDER [suspiciously] Who told you my people come from Selsey?

THE NOTE TAKER. Never you mind. They did. [To the girl] How do you come to be up so far east? You were born in Lisson Grove.

THE FLOWER GIRL [appalled] Oh, what harm is there in my leaving Lisson Grove? It wasn’t fit for a pig to live in; and I had to pay four-and-six a week. [In tears] Oh, boo—hoo—oo—

THE NOTE TAKER. Live where you like; but stop that noise.

THE GENTLEMAN [to the girl] Come, come! he can’t touch you: you have a right to live where you please.

A SARCASTIC BYSTANDER [thrusting himself between the note taker and the gentleman] Park Lane, for instance. I’d like to go into the Housing Question with you, I would.

THE FLOWER GIRL [subsiding into a brooding melancholy over her basket, and talking very low-spiritedly to herself] I’m a good girl, I am.

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER [not attending to her] Do you know where I come from?

THE NOTE TAKER [promptly] Hoxton.

Titterings. Popular interest in the note taker’s performance increases.

THE SARCASTIC ONE [amazed] Well, who said I didn’t? Bly me! You know everything, you do.

THE FLOWER GIRL [still nursing her sense of injury] Ain’t no call to meddle with me, he ain’t.

THE BYSTANDER [to her] Of course he ain’t. Don’t you stand it from him. [To the note taker] See here: what call have you to know about people what never offered to meddle with you? Where’s your warrant?

SEVERAL BYSTANDERS [encouraged by this seeming point of law] Yes: where’s your warrant?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Let him say what he likes. I don’t want to have no truck with him.

THE BYSTANDER. You take us for dirt under your feet, don’t you? Catch you taking liberties with a gentleman!

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. Yes: tell HIM where he come from if you want to go fortune-telling.

THE NOTE TAKER. Cheltenham, Harrow, Cambridge, and India.

THE GENTLEMAN. Quite right. [Great laughter. Reaction in the note taker’s favor. Exclamations of He knows all about it. Told him proper. Hear him tell the toff where he come from? etc.]. May I ask, sir, do you do this for your living at a music hall?

THE NOTE TAKER. I’ve thought of that. Perhaps I shall some day.

The rain has stopped; and the persons on the outside of the crowd begin to drop off.

THE FLOWER GIRL [resenting the reaction] He’s no gentleman, he ain’t, to interfere with a poor girl.

THE DAUGHTER [out of patience, pushing her way rudely to the front and displacing the gentleman, who politely retires to the other side of the pillar] What on earth is Freddy doing? I shall get pneumonia if I stay in this draught any longer.

THE NOTE TAKER [to himself, hastily making a note of her pronunciation of “monia”] Earlscourt.

THE DAUGHTER [violently] Will you please keep your impertinent remarks to yourself?

THE NOTE TAKER. Did I say that out loud? I didn’t mean to. I beg your pardon. Your mother’s Epsom, unmistakeably.

THE MOTHER [advancing between her daughter and the note taker] How very curious! I was brought up in Largelady Park, near Epsom.

THE NOTE TAKER [uproariously amused] Ha! ha! What a devil of a name! Excuse me. [To the daughter] You want a cab, do you?

THE DAUGHTER. Don’t dare speak to me.

THE MOTHER. Oh, please, please Clara. [Her daughter repudiates her with an angry shrug and retires haughtily.] We should be so grateful to you, sir, if you found us a cab. [The note taker produces a whistle]. Oh, thank you. [She joins her daughter]. The note taker blows a piercing blast.

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. There! I knowed he was a plain-clothes copper.

THE BYSTANDER. That ain’t a police whistle: that’s a sporting whistle.

THE FLOWER GIRL [still preoccupied with her wounded feelings] He’s no right to take away my character. My character is the same to me as any lady’s.

THE NOTE TAKER. I don’t know whether you’ve noticed it; but the rain stopped about two minutes ago.

THE BYSTANDER. So it has. Why didn’t you say so before? and us losing our time listening to your silliness. [He walks off towards the Strand].

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER. I can tell where you come from. You come from Anwell. Go back there.

THE NOTE TAKER [helpfully] Hanwell.

THE SARCASTIC BYSTANDER [affecting great distinction of speech]

Thenk you, teacher. Haw haw! So long [he touches his hat with mock respect and strolls off].

THE FLOWER GIRL. Frightening people like that! How would he like it himself.

THE MOTHER. It’s quite fine now, Clara. We can walk to a motor bus. Come. [She gathers her skirts above her ankles and hurries off towards the Strand].

THE DAUGHTER. But the cab—[her mother is out of hearing]. Oh, how tiresome! [She follows angrily].

All the rest have gone except the note taker, the gentleman, and the flower girl, who sits arranging her basket, and still pitying herself in murmurs.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Poor girl! Hard enough for her to live without being worrited and chivied.

THE GENTLEMAN [returning to his former place on the note taker’s left] How do you do it, if I may ask?

THE NOTE TAKER. Simply phonetics. The science of speech. That’s my profession; also my hobby. Happy is the man who can make a living by his hobby! You can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue. I can place any man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ought to be ashamed of himself, unmanly coward! THE GENTLEMAN. But is there a living in that?

THE NOTE TAKER. Oh yes. Quite a fat one. This is an age of upstarts. Men begin in Kentish Town with 80 pounds a year, and end in Park Lane with a hundred thousand. They want to drop Kentish Town; but they give themselves away every time they open their mouths. Now I can teach them—

THE FLOWER GIRL. Let him mind his own business and leave a poor girl—

THE NOTE TAKER [explosively] Woman: cease this detestable boohooing instantly; or else seek the shelter of some other place of worship.

THE FLOWER GIRL [with feeble defiance] I’ve a right to be here if I like, same as you.

THE NOTE TAKER. A woman who utters such depressing and disgusting sounds has no right to be anywhere—no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech: that your native language is the language of Shakespear and Milton and The Bible; and

don’t sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.

THE FLOWER GIRL [quite overwhelmed, and looking up at him in mingled wonder and deprecation without daring to raise her head] Ah—ah— ah—ow—ow—oo!

THE NOTE TAKER [whipping out his book] Heavens! what a sound! [He writes; then holds out the book and reads, reproducing her vowels exactly] Ah

—ah—ah—ow—ow—ow—oo!

THE FLOWER GIRL [tickled by the performance, and laughing in spite of herself] Garn!

THE NOTE TAKER. You see this creature with her kerbstone English: the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador’s garden party. I could even get her a place as lady’s maid or shop assistant, which requires better English. That’s the sort of thing I do for commercial millionaires. And on the profits of it I do genuine scientific work in phonetics, and a little as a poet on Miltonic lines.

THE GENTLEMAN. I am myself a student of Indian dialects; and—

THE NOTE TAKER [eagerly] Are you? Do you know Colonel Pickering, the author of Spoken Sanscrit?

THE GENTLEMAN. I am Colonel Pickering. Who are you?

THE NOTE TAKER. Henry Higgins, author of Higgins’s Universal Alphabet.

PICKERING [with enthusiasm] I came from India to meet you. HIGGINS. I was going to India to meet you.

PICKERING. Where do you live?

HIGGINS. 27A Wimpole Street. Come and see me tomorrow.

PICKERING. I’m at the Carlton. Come with me now and let’s have a jaw over some supper.

HIGGINS. Right you are.

THE FLOWER GIRL [to Pickering, as he passes her] Buy a flower, kind gentleman. I’m short for my lodging.

PICKERING. I really haven’t any change. I’m sorry [he goes away].

HIGGINS [shocked at girl’s mendacity] Liar. You said you could change half-a-crown.

THE FLOWER GIRL [rising in desperation] You ought to be stuffed with nails, you ought. [Flinging the basket at his feet] Take the whole blooming basket for sixpence.

The church clock strikes the second quarter.

HIGGINS [hearing in it the voice of God, rebuking him for his Pharisaic want of charity to the poor girl] A reminder. [He raises his hat solemnly; then throws a handful of money into the basket and follows Pickering].

THE FLOWER GIRL [picking up a half-crown] Ah—ow—ooh! [Picking up a couple of florins] Aaah—ow—ooh! [Picking up several coins] Aaaaaah

—ow—ooh! [Picking up a half-sovereign] Aasaaaaaaaaah—ow—ooh!!!

FREDDY [springing out of a taxicab] Got one at last. Hallo! [To the girl] Where are the two ladies that were here?

THE FLOWER GIRL. They walked to the bus when the rain stopped. FREDDY. And left me with a cab on my hands. Damnation!

THE FLOWER GIRL [with grandeur] Never you mind, young man. I’m going home in a taxi. [She sails off to the cab. The driver puts his hand behind him and holds the door firmly shut against her. Quite understanding his mistrust, she shows him her handful of money]. Eightpence ain’t no object to me, Charlie. [He grins and opens the door]. Angel Court, Drury Lane, round the corner of Micklejohn’s oil shop. Let’s see how fast you can make her hop it. [She gets in and pulls the door to with a slam as the taxicab starts].

FREDDY. Well, I’m dashed!

ACT II

Next day at 11 a.m. Higgins’s laboratory in Wimpole Street. It is a room on the first floor, looking on the street, and was meant for the drawing-room. The double doors are in the middle of the back hall; and persons entering find in the corner to their right two tall file cabinets at right angles to one another against the walls. In this corner stands a flat writing-table, on which are a phonograph, a laryngoscope, a row of tiny organ pipes with a bellows, a set of lamp chimneys for singing flames with burners attached to a gas plug in the wall by an indiarubber tube, several tuning-forks of different sizes, a life-size image of half a human head, showing in section the vocal organs, and a box containing a supply of wax cylinders for the phonograph.

Further down the room, on the same side, is a fireplace, with a comfortable

leather-covered easy-chair at the side of the hearth nearest the door, and a coal-scuttle. There is a clock on the mantelpiece. Between the fireplace and the phonograph table is a stand for newspapers.

On the other side of the central door, to the left of the visitor, is a cabinet of shallow drawers. On it is a telephone and the telephone directory. The corner beyond, and most of the side wall, is occupied by a grand piano, with the keyboard at the end furthest from the door, and a bench for the player extending the full length of the keyboard. On the piano is a dessert dish heaped with fruit and sweets, mostly chocolates.

The middle of the room is clear. Besides the easy chair, the piano bench, and two chairs at the phonograph table, there is one stray chair. It stands near the fireplace. On the walls, engravings; mostly Piranesis and mezzotint portraits. No paintings.

Pickering is seated at the table, putting down some cards and a tuning-fork which he has been using. Higgins is standing up near him, closing two or three file drawers which are hanging out. He appears in the morning light as a robust, vital, appetizing sort of man of forty or thereabouts, dressed in a professional-looking black frock-coat with a white linen collar and black silk tie. He is of the energetic, scientific type, heartily, even violently interested in everything that can be studied as a scientific subject, and careless about himself and other people, including their feelings. He is, in fact, but for his years and size, rather like a very impetuous baby “taking notice” eagerly and loudly, and requiring almost as much watching to keep him out of unintended mischief. His manner varies from genial bullying when he is in a good humor to stormy petulance when anything goes wrong; but he is so entirely frank and void of malice that he remains likeable even in his least reasonable moments.

HIGGINS [as he shuts the last drawer] Well, I think that’s the whole show. PICKERING. It’s really amazing. I haven’t taken half of it in, you know.

HIGGINS. Would you like to go over any of it again?

PICKERING [rising and coming to the fireplace, where he plants himself with his back to the fire] No, thank you; not now. I’m quite done up for this morning.

HIGGINS [following him, and standing beside him on his left] Tired of listening to sounds?

PICKERING. Yes. It’s a fearful strain. I rather fancied myself because I can pronounce twenty-four distinct vowel sounds; but your hundred and thirty beat me. I can’t hear a bit of difference between most of them.

HIGGINS [chuckling, and going over to the piano to eat sweets] Oh, that

comes with practice. You hear no difference at first; but you keep on listening, and presently you find they’re all as different as A from B. [Mrs. Pearce looks in: she is Higgins’s housekeeper] What’s the matter?

MRS. PEARCE [hesitating, evidently perplexed] A young woman wants to see you, sir.

HIGGINS. A young woman! What does she want?

MRS. PEARCE. Well, sir, she says you’ll be glad to see her when you know what she’s come about. She’s quite a common girl, sir. Very common indeed. I should have sent her away, only I thought perhaps you wanted her to talk into your machines. I hope I’ve not done wrong; but really you see such queer people sometimes—you’ll excuse me, I’m sure, sir—

HIGGINS. Oh, that’s all right, Mrs. Pearce. Has she an interesting accent?

MRS. PEARCE. Oh, something dreadful, sir, really. I don’t know how you can take an interest in it.

HIGGINS [to Pickering] Let’s have her up. Show her up, Mrs. Pearce [he rushes across to his working table and picks out a cylinder to use on the phonograph].

MRS. PEARCE [only half resigned to it] Very well, sir. It’s for you to say. [She goes downstairs].

HIGGINS. This is rather a bit of luck. I’ll show you how I make records. We’ll set her talking; and I’ll take it down first in Bell’s visible Speech; then in broad Romic; and then we’ll get her on the phonograph so that you can turn her on as often as you like with the written transcript before you.

MRS. PEARCE [returning] This is the young woman, sir.

The flower girl enters in state. She has a hat with three ostrich feathers, orange, sky-blue, and red. She has a nearly clean apron, and the shoddy coat has been tidied a little. The pathos of this deplorable figure, with its innocent vanity and consequential air, touches Pickering, who has already straightened himself in the presence of Mrs. Pearce. But as to Higgins, the only distinction he makes between men and women is that when he is neither bullying nor exclaiming to the heavens against some featherweight cross, he coaxes women as a child coaxes its nurse when it wants to get anything out of her.

HIGGINS [brusquely, recognizing her with unconcealed disappointment, and at once, baby-like, making an intolerable grievance of it] Why, this is the girl I jotted down last night. She’s no use: I’ve got all the records I want of the Lisson Grove lingo; and I’m not going to waste another cylinder on it. [To the girl] Be off with you: I don’t want you.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Don’t you be so saucy. You ain’t heard what I come for yet. [To Mrs. Pearce, who is waiting at the door for further instruction] Did you tell him I come in a taxi?

MRS. PEARCE. Nonsense, girl! what do you think a gentleman like Mr.

Higgins cares what you came in?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, we are proud! He ain’t above giving lessons, not him: I heard him say so. Well, I ain’t come here to ask for any compliment; and if my money’s not good enough I can go elsewhere.

HIGGINS. Good enough for what?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Good enough for ye—oo. Now you know, don’t you? I’m come to have lessons, I am. And to pay for em too: make no mistake.

HIGGINS [stupent] WELL!!! [Recovering his breath with a gasp] What do you expect me to say to you?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Well, if you was a gentleman, you might ask me to sit down, I think. Don’t I tell you I’m bringing you business?

HIGGINS. Pickering: shall we ask this baggage to sit down or shall we throw her out of the window?

THE FLOWER GIRL [running away in terror to the piano, where she turns at bay] Ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—ow—oo! [Wounded and whimpering] I won’t be called a baggage when I’ve offered to pay like any lady.

Motionless, the two men stare at her from the other side of the room, amazed.

PICKERING [gently] What is it you want, my girl?

THE FLOWER GIRL. I want to be a lady in a flower shop stead of selling at the corner of Tottenham Court Road. But they won’t take me unless I can talk more genteel. He said he could teach me. Well, here I am ready to pay him

—not asking any favor—and he treats me as if I was dirt.

MRS. PEARCE. How can you be such a foolish ignorant girl as to think you could afford to pay Mr. Higgins?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Why shouldn’t I? I know what lessons cost as well as you do; and I’m ready to pay.

HIGGINS. How much?

THE FLOWER GIRL [coming back to him, triumphant] Now you’re talking! I thought you’d come off it when you saw a chance of getting back a bit of what you chucked at me last night. [Confidentially] You’d had a drop in, hadn’t you?

HIGGINS [peremptorily] Sit down.

THE FLOWER GIRL. Oh, if you’re going to make a compliment of it— HIGGINS [thundering at her] Sit down.

MRS. PEARCE [severely] Sit down, girl. Do as you’re told. [She places the stray chair near the hearthrug between Higgins and Pickering, and stands behind it waiting for the girl to sit down].

THE FLOWER GIRL. Ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—oo! [She stands, half rebellious, half bewildered].

PICKERING [very courteous] Won’t you sit down?

LIZA [coyly] Don’t mind if I do. [She sits down. Pickering returns to the hearthrug].

HIGGINS. What’s your name?

THE FLOWER GIRL. Liza Doolittle.

HIGGINS [declaiming gravely] Eliza, Elizabeth, Betsy and Bess, They went to the woods to get a bird’s nes’:

PICKERING. They found a nest with four eggs in it: HIGGINS. They took one apiece, and left three in it. They laugh heartily at their own wit.

LIZA. Oh, don’t be silly.

MRS. PEARCE. You mustn’t speak to the gentleman like that. LIZA. Well, why won’t he speak sensible to me?

HIGGINS. Come back to business. How much do you propose to pay me for the lessons?

LIZA. Oh, I know what’s right. A lady friend of mine gets French lessons for eighteenpence an hour from a real French gentleman. Well, you wouldn’t have the face to ask me the same for teaching me my own language as you would for French; so I won’t give more than a shilling. Take it or leave it.

HIGGINS [walking up and down the room, rattling his keys and his cash in his pockets] You know, Pickering, if you consider a shilling, not as a simple shilling, but as a percentage of this girl’s income, it works out as fully equivalent to sixty or seventy guineas from a millionaire.

PICKERING. How so?

HIGGINS. Figure it out. A millionaire has about 150 pounds a day. She earns about half-a-crown.

LIZA [haughtily] Who told you I only—

HIGGINS [continuing] She offers me two-fifths of her day’s income for a lesson. Two-fifths of a millionaire’s income for a day would be somewhere about 60 pounds. It’s handsome. By George, it’s enormous! it’s the biggest offer I ever had.

LIZA [rising, terrified] Sixty pounds! What are you talking about? I never offered you sixty pounds. Where would I get—

HIGGINS. Hold your tongue.

LIZA [weeping] But I ain’t got sixty pounds. Oh—

MRS. PEARCE. Don’t cry, you silly girl. Sit down. Nobody is going to touch your money.

HIGGINS. Somebody is going to touch you, with a broomstick, if you don’t stop snivelling. Sit down.

LIZA [obeying slowly] Ah—ah—ah—ow—oo—o! One would think you was my father.

HIGGINS. If I decide to teach you, I’ll be worse than two fathers to you.

Here [he offers her his silk handkerchief]!

LIZA. What’s this for?

HIGGINS. To wipe your eyes. To wipe any part of your face that feels moist. Remember: that’s your handkerchief; and that’s your sleeve. Don’t mistake the one for the other if you wish to become a lady in a shop.

Liza, utterly bewildered, stares helplessly at him.

MRS. PEARCE. It’s no use talking to her like that, Mr. Higgins: she doesn’t understand you. Besides, you’re quite wrong: she doesn’t do it that way at all [she takes the handkerchief].

LIZA [snatching it] Here! You give me that handkerchief. He give it to me, not to you.

PICKERING [laughing] He did. I think it must be regarded as her property, Mrs. Pearce.

MRS. PEARCE [resigning herself] Serve you right, Mr. Higgins.

PICKERING. Higgins: I’m interested. What about the ambassador’s garden party? I’ll say you’re the greatest teacher alive if you make that good. I’ll bet you all the expenses of the experiment you can’t do it. And I’ll pay for the lessons.

LIZA. Oh, you are real good. Thank you, Captain.

HIGGINS [tempted, looking at her] It’s almost irresistible. She’s so deliciously low—so horribly dirty—

LIZA [protesting extremely] Ah—ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—oooo!!! I ain’t dirty: I washed my face and hands afore I come, I did.

PICKERING. You’re certainly not going to turn her head with flattery, Higgins.

MRS. PEARCE [uneasy] Oh, don’t say that, sir: there’s more ways than one of turning a girl’s head; and nobody can do it better than Mr. Higgins, though he may not always mean it. I do hope, sir, you won’t encourage him to do anything foolish.

HIGGINS [becoming excited as the idea grows on him] What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day. I shall make a duchess of this draggletailed guttersnipe.

LIZA [strongly deprecating this view of her] Ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—oo!

HIGGINS [carried away] Yes: in six months—in three if she has a good ear and a quick tongue—I’ll take her anywhere and pass her off as anything. We’ll start today: now! this moment! Take her away and clean her, Mrs. Pearce. Monkey Brand, if it won’t come off any other way. Is there a good fire in the kitchen?

MRS. PEARCE [protesting]. Yes; but—

HIGGINS [storming on] Take all her clothes off and burn them. Ring up Whiteley or somebody for new ones. Wrap her up in brown paper till they come.

LIZA. You’re no gentleman, you’re not, to talk of such things. I’m a good girl, I am; and I know what the like of you are, I do.

HIGGINS. We want none of your Lisson Grove prudery here, young woman. You’ve got to learn to behave like a duchess. Take her away, Mrs. Pearce. If she gives you any trouble wallop her.

LIZA [springing up and running between Pickering and Mrs. Pearce for protection] No! I’ll call the police, I will.

MRS. PEARCE. But I’ve no place to put her. HIGGINS. Put her in the dustbin.

LIZA. Ah—ah—ah—ow—ow—oo! PICKERING. Oh come, Higgins! be reasonable.

MRS. PEARCE [resolutely] You must be reasonable, Mr. Higgins: really you must. You can’t walk over everybody like this.

Higgins, thus scolded, subsides. The hurricane is succeeded by a zephyr of amiable surprise.

HIGGINS [with professional exquisiteness of modulation] I walk over everybody! My dear Mrs. Pearce, my dear Pickering, I never had the slightest intention of walking over anyone. All I propose is that we should be kind to this poor girl. We must help her to prepare and fit herself for her new station in life. If I did not express myself clearly it was because I did not wish to hurt her delicacy, or yours.

Liza, reassured, steals back to her chair.

MRS. PEARCE [to Pickering] Well, did you ever hear anything like that, sir?

PICKERING [laughing heartily] Never, Mrs. Pearce: never. HIGGINS [patiently] What’s the matter?

MRS. PEARCE. Well, the matter is, sir, that you can’t take a girl up like that as if you were picking up a pebble on the beach.

HIGGINS. Why not?

MRS. PEARCE. Why not! But you don’t know anything about her. What about her parents? She may be married.

LIZA. Garn!

HIGGINS. There! As the girl very properly says, Garn! Married indeed! Don’t you know that a woman of that class looks a worn out drudge of fifty a year after she’s married.

LIZA. Who’d marry me?

HIGGINS [suddenly resorting to the most thrillingly beautiful low tones in his best elocutionary style] By George, Eliza, the streets will be strewn with the bodies of men shooting themselves for your sake before I’ve done with you.

MRS. PEARCE. Nonsense, sir. You mustn’t talk like that to her.

LIZA [rising and squaring herself determinedly] I’m going away. He’s off his chump, he is. I don’t want no balmies teaching me.

HIGGINS [wounded in his tenderest point by her insensibility to his elocution] Oh, indeed! I’m mad, am I? Very well, Mrs. Pearce: you needn’t order the new clothes for her. Throw her out.

LIZA [whimpering] Nah—ow. You got no right to touch me.

MRS. PEARCE. You see now what comes of being saucy. [Indicating the door] This way, please.

LIZA [almost in tears] I didn’t want no clothes. I wouldn’t have taken them [she throws away the handkerchief]. I can buy my own clothes.

HIGGINS [deftly retrieving the handkerchief and intercepting her on her reluctant way to the door] You’re an ungrateful wicked girl. This is my return for offering to take you out of the gutter and dress you beautifully and make a lady of you.

MRS. PEARCE. Stop, Mr. Higgins. I won’t allow it. It’s you that are wicked. Go home to your parents, girl; and tell them to take better care of you.

LIZA. I ain’t got no parents. They told me I was big enough to earn my own living and turned me out.

MRS. PEARCE. Where’s your mother?

LIZA. I ain’t got no mother. Her that turned me out was my sixth stepmother. But I done without them. And I’m a good girl, I am.

HIGGINS. Very well, then, what on earth is all this fuss about? The girl doesn’t belong to anybody—is no use to anybody but me. [He goes to Mrs. Pearce and begins coaxing]. You can adopt her, Mrs. Pearce: I’m sure a daughter would be a great amusement to you. Now don’t make any more fuss. Take her downstairs; and—

MRS. PEARCE. But what’s to become of her? Is she to be paid anything?

Do be sensible, sir.

HIGGINS. Oh, pay her whatever is necessary: put it down in the housekeeping book. [Impatiently] What on earth will she want with money? She’ll have her food and her clothes. She’ll only drink if you give her money.

LIZA [turning on him] Oh you are a brute. It’s a lie: nobody ever saw the sign of liquor on me. [She goes back to her chair and plants herself there defiantly].

PICKERING [in good-humored remonstrance] Does it occur to you, Higgins, that the girl has some feelings?

HIGGINS [looking critically at her] Oh no, I don’t think so. Not any feelings that we need bother about. [Cheerily] Have you, Eliza?

LIZA. I got my feelings same as anyone else.

HIGGINS [to Pickering, reflectively] You see the difficulty?

PICKERING. Eh? What difficulty?

HIGGINS. To get her to talk grammar. The mere pronunciation is easy enough.

LIZA. I don’t want to talk grammar. I want to talk like a lady.

MRS. PEARCE. Will you please keep to the point, Mr. Higgins. I want to know on what terms the girl is to be here. Is she to have any wages? And what is to become of her when you’ve finished your teaching? You must look ahead a little.

HIGGINS [impatiently] What’s to become of her if I leave her in the gutter? Tell me that, Mrs. Pearce.

MRS. PEARCE. That’s her own business, not yours, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS. Well, when I’ve done with her, we can throw her back into the gutter; and then it will be her own business again; so that’s all right.

LIZA. Oh, you’ve no feeling heart in you: you don’t care for nothing but yourself [she rises and takes the floor resolutely]. Here! I’ve had enough of this. I’m going [making for the door]. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you ought.

HIGGINS [snatching a chocolate cream from the piano, his eyes suddenly beginning to twinkle with mischief] Have some chocolates, Eliza.

LIZA [halting, tempted] How do I know what might be in them? I’ve heard of girls being drugged by the like of you.

Higgins whips out his penknife; cuts a chocolate in two; puts one half into his mouth and bolts it; and offers her the other half.

HIGGINS. Pledge of good faith, Eliza. I eat one half you eat the other. [Liza opens her mouth to retort: he pops the half chocolate into it]. You

shall have boxes of them, barrels of them, every day. You shall live on them.

Eh?

LIZA [who has disposed of the chocolate after being nearly choked by it] I wouldn’t have ate it, only I’m too ladylike to take it out of my mouth.

HIGGINS. Listen, Eliza. I think you said you came in a taxi.

LIZA. Well, what if I did? I’ve as good a right to take a taxi as anyone else.

HIGGINS. You have, Eliza; and in future you shall have as many taxis as you want. You shall go up and down and round the town in a taxi every day. Think of that, Eliza.

MRS. PEARCE. Mr. Higgins: you’re tempting the girl. It’s not right. She

should think of the future.

HIGGINS. At her age! Nonsense! Time enough to think of the future when you haven’t any future to think of. No, Eliza: do as this lady does: think of other people’s futures; but never think of your own. Think of chocolates, and taxis, and gold, and diamonds.

LIZA. No: I don’t want no gold and no diamonds. I’m a good girl, I am. [She sits down again, with an attempt at dignity].

HIGGINS. You shall remain so, Eliza, under the care of Mrs. Pearce. And you shall marry an officer in the Guards, with a beautiful moustache: the son of a marquis, who will disinherit him for marrying you, but will relent when he sees your beauty and goodness—

PICKERING. Excuse me, Higgins; but I really must interfere. Mrs. Pearce is quite right. If this girl is to put herself in your hands for six months for an experiment in teaching, she must understand thoroughly what she’s doing.

HIGGINS. How can she? She’s incapable of understanding anything. Besides, do any of us understand what we are doing? If we did, would we ever do it?

PICKERING. Very clever, Higgins; but not sound sense. [To Eliza] Miss Doolittle—

LIZA [overwhelmed] Ah—ah—ow—oo!

HIGGINS. There! That’s all you get out of Eliza. Ah—ah—ow—oo! No use explaining. As a military man you ought to know that. Give her her orders: that’s what she wants. Eliza: you are to live here for the next six months, learning how to speak beautifully, like a lady in a florist’s shop. If you’re good and do whatever you’re told, you shall sleep in a proper bedroom, and have lots to eat, and money to buy chocolates and take rides in taxis. If you’re naughty and idle you will sleep in the back kitchen among the black beetles, and be walloped by Mrs. Pearce with a broomstick. At the end of six months you shall go to Buckingham Palace in a carriage, beautifully dressed. If the King finds out you’re not a lady, you will be taken by the police to the Tower of London, where your head will be cut off as a warning to other presumptuous flower girls. If you are not found out, you shall have a present of seven-and-sixpence to start life with as a lady in a shop. If you refuse this offer you will be a most ungrateful and wicked girl; and the angels will weep for you. [To Pickering] Now are you satisfied, Pickering? [To Mrs. Pearce] Can I put it more plainly and fairly, Mrs. Pearce?

MRS. PEARCE [patiently] I think you’d better let me speak to the girl properly in private. I don’t know that I can take charge of her or consent to the

arrangement at all. Of course I know you don’t mean her any harm; but when you get what you call interested in people’s accents, you never think or care what may happen to them or you. Come with me, Eliza.

HIGGINS. That’s all right. Thank you, Mrs. Pearce. Bundle her off to the bath-room.

LIZA [rising reluctantly and suspiciously] You’re a great bully, you are. I won’t stay here if I don’t like. I won’t let nobody wallop me. I never asked to go to Bucknam Palace, I didn’t. I was never in trouble with the police, not me. I’m a good girl—

MRS. PEARCE. Don’t answer back, girl. You don’t understand the gentleman. Come with me. [She leads the way to the door, and holds it open for Eliza].

LIZA [as she goes out] Well, what I say is right. I won’t go near the king, not if I’m going to have my head cut off. If I’d known what I was letting myself in for, I wouldn’t have come here. I always been a good girl; and I never offered to say a word to him; and I don’t owe him nothing; and I don’t care; and I won’t be put upon; and I have my feelings the same as anyone else

—

Mrs. Pearce shuts the door; and Eliza’s plaints are no longer audible. Pickering comes from the hearth to the chair and sits astride it with his arms on the back.

PICKERING. Excuse the straight question, Higgins. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?

HIGGINS [moodily] Have you ever met a man of good character where women are concerned?

PICKERING. Yes: very frequently.

HIGGINS [dogmatically, lifting himself on his hands to the level of the piano, and sitting on it with a bounce] Well, I haven’t. I find that the moment I let a woman make friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. I find that the moment I let myself make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another.

PICKERING. At what, for example?

HIGGINS [coming off the piano restlessly] Oh, Lord knows! I suppose the woman wants to live her own life; and the man wants to live his; and each tries to drag the other on to the wrong track. One wants to go north and the other south; and the result is that both have to go east, though they both hate the east

wind. [He sits down on the bench at the keyboard]. So here I am, a confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain so.

PICKERING [rising and standing over him gravely] Come, Higgins! You know what I mean. If I’m to be in this business I shall feel responsible for that girl. I hope it’s understood that no advantage is to be taken of her position.

HIGGINS. What! That thing! Sacred, I assure you. [Rising to explain] You see, she’ll be a pupil; and teaching would be impossible unless pupils were sacred. I’ve taught scores of American millionairesses how to speak English: the best looking women in the world. I’m seasoned. They might as well be blocks of wood. I might as well be a block of wood. It’s—

Mrs. Pearce opens the door. She has Eliza’s hat in her hand. Pickering retires to the easy-chair at the hearth and sits down.

HIGGINS [eagerly] Well, Mrs. Pearce: is it all right?

MRS. PEARCE [at the door] I just wish to trouble you with a word, if I may, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS. Yes, certainly. Come in. [She comes forward]. Don’t burn that, Mrs. Pearce. I’ll keep it as a curiosity. [He takes the hat].

MRS. PEARCE. Handle it carefully, sir, please. I had to promise her not to burn it; but I had better put it in the oven for a while.

HIGGINS [putting it down hastily on the piano] Oh! thank you. Well, what have you to say to me?

PICKERING. Am I in the way?

MRS. PEARCE. Not at all, sir. Mr. Higgins: will you please be very particular what you say before the girl?

HIGGINS [sternly] Of course. I’m always particular about what I say. Why do you say this to me?

MRS. PEARCE [unmoved] No, sir: you’re not at all particular when you’ve mislaid anything or when you get a little impatient. Now it doesn’t matter before me: I’m used to it. But you really must not swear before the girl.

HIGGINS [indignantly] I swear! [Most emphatically] I never swear. I detest the habit. What the devil do you mean?

MRS. PEARCE [stolidly] That’s what I mean, sir. You swear a great deal too much. I don’t mind your damning and blasting, and what the devil and where the devil and who the devil—

HIGGINS. Really! Mrs. Pearce: this language from your lips!

MRS. PEARCE [not to be put off]—but there is a certain word I must ask you not to use. The girl has just used it herself because the bath was too hot. It begins with the same letter as bath. She knows no better: she learnt it at her mother’s knee. But she must not hear it from your lips.

HIGGINS [loftily] I cannot charge myself with having ever uttered it, Mrs. Pearce. [She looks at him steadfastly. He adds, hiding an uneasy conscience with a judicial air] Except perhaps in a moment of extreme and justifiable excitement.

MRS. PEARCE. Only this morning, sir, you applied it to your boots, to the butter, and to the brown bread.

HIGGINS. Oh, that! Mere alliteration, Mrs. Pearce, natural to a poet.

MRS. PEARCE. Well, sir, whatever you choose to call it, I beg you not to let the girl hear you repeat it.

HIGGINS. Oh, very well, very well. Is that all?

MRS. PEARCE. No, sir. We shall have to be very particular with this girl as to personal cleanliness.

HIGGINS. Certainly. Quite right. Most important.

MRS. PEARCE. I mean not to be slovenly about her dress or untidy in leaving things about.

HIGGINS [going to her solemnly] Just so. I intended to call your attention to that [He passes on to Pickering, who is enjoying the conversation immensely]. It is these little things that matter, Pickering. Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves is as true of personal habits as of money. [He comes to anchor on the hearthrug, with the air of a man in an unassailable position].

MRS. PEARCE. Yes, sir. Then might I ask you not to come down to breakfast in your dressing-gown, or at any rate not to use it as a napkin to the extent you do, sir. And if you would be so good as not to eat everything off the same plate, and to remember not to put the porridge saucepan out of your hand on the clean tablecloth, it would be a better example to the girl. You know you nearly choked yourself with a fishbone in the jam only last week.

HIGGINS [routed from the hearthrug and drifting back to the piano] I may do these things sometimes in absence of mind; but surely I don’t do them habitually. [Angrily] By the way: my dressing-gown smells most damnably of benzine.

MRS. PEARCE. No doubt it does, Mr. Higgins. But if you will wipe your fingers—

HIGGINS [yelling] Oh very well, very well: I’ll wipe them in my hair in future.

MRS. PEARCE. I hope you’re not offended, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS [shocked at finding himself thought capable of an unamiable sentiment] Not at all, not at all. You’re quite right, Mrs. Pearce: I shall be particularly careful before the girl. Is that all?

MRS. PEARCE. No, sir. Might she use some of those Japanese dresses you brought from abroad? I really can’t put her back into her old things.

HIGGINS. Certainly. Anything you like. Is that all?

MRS. PEARCE. Thank you, sir. That’s all. [She goes out].

HIGGINS. You know, Pickering, that woman has the most extraordinary ideas about me. Here I am, a shy, diffident sort of man. I’ve never been able to feel really grown-up and tremendous, like other chaps. And yet she’s firmly persuaded that I’m an arbitrary overbearing bossing kind of person. I can’t account for it.

Mrs. Pearce returns.

MRS. PEARCE. If you please, sir, the trouble’s beginning already. There’s a dustman downstairs, Alfred Doolittle, wants to see you. He says you have his daughter here.

PICKERING [rising] Phew! I say! [He retreats to the hearthrug]. HIGGINS [promptly] Send the blackguard up.

MRS. PEARCE. Oh, very well, sir. [She goes out]. PICKERING. He may not be a blackguard, Higgins. HIGGINS. Nonsense. Of course he’s a blackguard.

PICKERING. Whether he is or not, I’m afraid we shall have some trouble with him.

HIGGINS [confidently] Oh no: I think not. If there’s any trouble he shall have it with me, not I with him. And we are sure to get something interesting out of him.

PICKERING. About the girl? HIGGINS. No. I mean his dialect. PICKERING. Oh!

MRS. PEARCE [at the door] Doolittle, sir. [She admits Doolittle and retires].

Alfred Doolittle is an elderly but vigorous dustman, clad in the costume of his profession, including a hat with a back brim covering his neck and shoulders. He has well marked and rather interesting features, and seems equally free from fear and conscience. He has a remarkably expressive voice, the result of a habit of giving vent to his feelings without reserve. His present pose is that of wounded honor and stern resolution.

DOOLITTLE [at the door, uncertain which of the two gentlemen is his man] Professor Higgins?

HIGGINS. Here. Good morning. Sit down.

DOOLITTLE. Morning, Governor. [He sits down magisterially] I come about a very serious matter, Governor.

HIGGINS [to Pickering] Brought up in Hounslow. Mother Welsh, I should think. [Doolittle opens his mouth, amazed. Higgins continues] What do you want, Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE [menacingly] I want my daughter: that’s what I want. See?

HIGGINS. Of course you do. You’re her father, aren’t you? You don’t suppose anyone else wants her, do you? I’m glad to see you have some spark of family feeling left. She’s upstairs. Take her away at once.

DOOLITTLE [rising, fearfully taken aback] What!

HIGGINS. Take her away. Do you suppose I’m going to keep your daughter for you?

DOOLITTLE [remonstrating] Now, now, look here, Governor. Is this reasonable? Is it fair to take advantage of a man like this? The girl belongs to me. You got her. Where do I come in? [He sits down again].

HIGGINS. Your daughter had the audacity to come to my house and ask me to teach her how to speak properly so that she could get a place in a flower-shop. This gentleman and my housekeeper have been here all the time. [Bullying him] How dare you come here and attempt to blackmail me? You sent her here on purpose.

DOOLITTLE [protesting] No, Governor.

HIGGINS. You must have. How else could you possibly know that she is here?

DOOLITTLE. Don’t take a man up like that, Governor.

HIGGINS. The police shall take you up. This is a plant—a plot to extort money by threats. I shall telephone for the police [he goes resolutely to the telephone and opens the directory].

DOOLITTLE. Have I asked you for a brass farthing? I leave it to the gentleman here: have I said a word about money?

HIGGINS [throwing the book aside and marching down on Doolittle with a poser] What else did you come for?

DOOLITTLE [sweetly] Well, what would a man come for? Be human, governor.

HIGGINS [disarmed] Alfred: did you put her up to it?

DOOLITTLE. So help me, Governor, I never did. I take my Bible oath I ain’t seen the girl these two months past.

HIGGINS. Then how did you know she was here?

DOOLITTLE [“most musical, most melancholy”] I’ll tell you, Governor, if you’ll only let me get a word in. I’m willing to tell you. I’m wanting to tell you. I’m waiting to tell you.

HIGGINS. Pickering: this chap has a certain natural gift of rhetoric. Observe the rhythm of his native woodnotes wild. “I’m willing to tell you: I’m wanting to tell you: I’m waiting to tell you.” Sentimental rhetoric! That’s the Welsh strain in him. It also accounts for his mendacity and dishonesty.

PICKERING. Oh, PLEASE, Higgins: I’m west country myself. [To Doolittle] How did you know the girl was here if you didn’t send her?

DOOLITTLE. It was like this, Governor. The girl took a boy in the taxi to give him a jaunt. Son of her landlady, he is. He hung about on the chance of her giving him another ride home. Well, she sent him back for her luggage when she heard you was willing for her to stop here. I met the boy at the corner of Long Acre and Endell Street.

HIGGINS. Public house. Yes?

DOOLITTLE. The poor man’s club, Governor: why shouldn’t I? PICKERING. Do let him tell his story, Higgins.

DOOLITTLE. He told me what was up. And I ask you, what was my feelings and my duty as a father? I says to the boy, “You bring me the luggage,” I says—

PICKERING. Why didn’t you go for it yourself?

DOOLITTLE. Landlady wouldn’t have trusted me with it, Governor. She’s that kind of woman: you know. I had to give the boy a penny afore he trusted me with it, the little swine. I brought it to her just to oblige you like, and make myself agreeable. That’s all.

HIGGINS. How much luggage?

DOOLITTLE. Musical instrument, Governor. A few pictures, a trifle of jewelry, and a bird-cage. She said she didn’t want no clothes. What was I to think from that, Governor? I ask you as a parent what was I to think?

HIGGINS. So you came to rescue her from worse than death, eh? DOOLITTLE [appreciatively: relieved at being understood] Just so,

Governor. That’s right.

PICKERING. But why did you bring her luggage if you intended to take her away?

DOOLITTLE. Have I said a word about taking her away? Have I now?

HIGGINS [determinedly] You’re going to take her away, double quick. [He crosses to the hearth and rings the bell].

DOOLITTLE [rising] No, Governor. Don’t say that. I’m not the man to stand in my girl’s light. Here’s a career opening for her, as you might say; and

—

Mrs. Pearce opens the door and awaits orders.

HIGGINS. Mrs. Pearce: this is Eliza’s father. He has come to take her away. Give her to him. [He goes back to the piano, with an air of washing his hands of the whole affair].

DOOLITTLE. No. This is a misunderstanding. Listen here—

MRS. PEARCE. He can’t take her away, Mr. Higgins: how can he? You told me to burn her clothes.

DOOLITTLE. That’s right. I can’t carry the girl through the streets like a blooming monkey, can I? I put it to you.

HIGGINS. You have put it to me that you want your daughter. Take your daughter. If she has no clothes go out and buy her some.

DOOLITTLE [desperate] Where’s the clothes she come in? Did I burn them or did your missus here?

MRS. PEARCE. I am the housekeeper, if you please. I have sent for some clothes for your girl. When they come you can take her away. You can wait in the kitchen. This way, please.

Doolittle, much troubled, accompanies her to the door; then hesitates; finally turns confidentially to Higgins.

DOOLITTLE. Listen here, Governor. You and me is men of the world, ain’t we?

HIGGINS. Oh! Men of the world, are we? You’d better go, Mrs. Pearce. MRS. PEARCE. I think so, indeed, sir. [She goes, with dignity].

PICKERING. The floor is yours, Mr. Doolittle.

DOOLITTLE [to Pickering] I thank you, Governor. [To Higgins, who takes refuge on the piano bench, a little overwhelmed by the proximity of his visitor; for Doolittle has a professional flavor of dust about him]. Well, the truth is, I’ve taken a sort of fancy to you, Governor; and if you want the girl, I’m not so set on having her back home again but what I might be open to an arrangement. Regarded in the light of a young woman, she’s a fine handsome girl. As a daughter she’s not worth her keep; and so I tell you straight. All I ask is my rights as a father; and you’re the last man alive to expect me to let her go for nothing; for I can see you’re one of the straight sort, Governor. Well, what’s a five pound note to you? And what’s Eliza to me? [He returns to his chair and sits down judicially].

PICKERING. I think you ought to know, Doolittle, that Mr. Higgins’s intentions are entirely honorable.

DOOLITTLE. Course they are, Governor. If I thought they wasn’t, I’d ask fifty.

HIGGINS [revolted] Do you mean to say, you callous rascal, that you would sell your daughter for 50 pounds?

DOOLITTLE. Not in a general way I wouldn’t; but to oblige a gentleman like you I’d do a good deal, I do assure you.

PICKERING. Have you no morals, man?

DOOLITTLE [unabashed] Can’t afford them, Governor. Neither could you if you was as poor as me. Not that I mean any harm, you know. But if Liza is going to have a bit out of this, why not me too?

HIGGINS [troubled] I don’t know what to do, Pickering. There can be no question that as a matter of morals it’s a positive crime to give this chap a farthing. And yet I feel a sort of rough justice in his claim.

DOOLITTLE. That’s it, Governor. That’s all I say. A father’s heart, as it were.

PICKERING. Well, I know the feeling; but really it seems hardly right— DOOLITTLE. Don’t say that, Governor. Don’t look at it that way. What am

I, Governors both? I ask you, what am I? I’m one of the undeserving poor:

that’s what I am. Think of what that means to a man. It means that he’s up agen middle class morality all the time. If there’s anything going, and I put in for a bit of it, it’s always the same story: “You’re undeserving; so you can’t have it.”

But my needs is as great as the most deserving widow’s that ever got money out of six different charities in one week for the death of the same husband. I don’t need less than a deserving man: I need more. I don’t eat less hearty than him; and I drink a lot more. I want a bit of amusement, cause I’m a thinking man. I want cheerfulness and a song and a band when I feel low. Well, they charge me just the same for everything as they charge the deserving. What is middle class morality? Just an excuse for never giving me anything. Therefore, I ask you, as two gentlemen, not to play that game on me. I’m playing straight with you. I ain’t pretending to be deserving. I’m undeserving; and I mean to go on being undeserving. I like it; and that’s the truth. Will you take advantage of a man’s nature to do him out of the price of his own daughter what he’s brought up and fed and clothed by the sweat of his brow until she’s growed big enough to be interesting to you two gentlemen? Is five pounds unreasonable? I put it to you; and I leave it to you.

HIGGINS [rising, and going over to Pickering] Pickering: if we were to take this man in hand for three months, he could choose between a seat in the Cabinet and a popular pulpit in Wales.

PICKERING. What do you say to that, Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE. Not me, Governor, thank you kindly. I’ve heard all the preachers and all the prime ministers—for I’m a thinking man and game for politics or religion or social reform same as all the other amusements—and I tell you it’s a dog’s life anyway you look at it. Undeserving poverty is my line. Taking one station in society with another, it’s—it’s—well, it’s the only one that has any ginger in it, to my taste.

HIGGINS. I suppose we must give him a fiver. PICKERING. He’ll make a bad use of it, I’m afraid.

DOOLITTLE. Not me, Governor, so help me I won’t. Don’t you be afraid that I’ll save it and spare it and live idle on it. There won’t be a penny of it left by Monday: I’ll have to go to work same as if I’d never had it. It won’t pauperize me, you bet. Just one good spree for myself and the missus, giving pleasure to ourselves and employment to others, and satisfaction to you to think it’s not been throwed away. You couldn’t spend it better.

HIGGINS [taking out his pocket book and coming between Doolittle and the piano] This is irresistible. Let’s give him ten. [He offers two notes to the dustman].

DOOLITTLE. No, Governor. She wouldn’t have the heart to spend ten; and perhaps I shouldn’t neither. Ten pounds is a lot of money: it makes a man feel prudent like; and then goodbye to happiness. You give me what I ask you, Governor: not a penny more, and not a penny less.

PICKERING. Why don’t you marry that missus of yours? I rather draw the line at encouraging that sort of immorality.

DOOLITTLE. Tell her so, Governor: tell her so. I’m willing. It’s me that suffers by it. I’ve no hold on her. I got to be agreeable to her. I got to give her presents. I got to buy her clothes something sinful. I’m a slave to that woman, Governor, just because I’m not her lawful husband. And she knows it too. Catch her marrying me! Take my advice, Governor: marry Eliza while she’s young and don’t know no better. If you don’t you’ll be sorry for it after. If you do, she’ll be sorry for it after; but better you than her, because you’re a man, and she’s only a woman and don’t know how to be happy anyhow.

HIGGINS. Pickering: if we listen to this man another minute, we shall have no convictions left. [To Doolittle] Five pounds I think you said.

DOOLITTLE. Thank you kindly, Governor. HIGGINS. You’re sure you won’t take ten? DOOLITTLE. Not now. Another time, Governor.

HIGGINS [handing him a five-pound note] Here you are. DOOLITTLE. Thank you, Governor. Good morning.

[He hurries to the door, anxious to get away with his booty. When he opens it he is confronted with a dainty and exquisitely clean young Japanese lady in a simple blue cotton kimono printed cunningly with small white jasmine blossoms. Mrs. Pearce is with her. He gets out of her way deferentially and apologizes]. Beg pardon, miss.

THE JAPANESE LADY. Garn! Don’t you know your own daughter? DOOLITTLE {exclaiming Bly me! it’s Eliza!

HIGGINS {simul- What’s that! This! PICKERING {taneously By Jove!

LIZA. Don’t I look silly? HIGGINS. Silly?

MRS. PEARCE [at the door] Now, Mr. Higgins, please don’t say anything to make the girl conceited about herself.

HIGGINS [conscientiously] Oh! Quite right, Mrs. Pearce. [To Eliza] Yes: damned silly.

MRS. PEARCE. Please, sir.

HIGGINS [correcting himself] I mean extremely silly.

LIZA. I should look all right with my hat on. [She takes up her hat; puts it on; and walks across the room to the fireplace with a fashionable air].

HIGGINS. A new fashion, by George! And it ought to look horrible!

DOOLITTLE [with fatherly pride] Well, I never thought she’d clean up as good looking as that, Governor. She’s a credit to me, ain’t she?

LIZA. I tell you, it’s easy to clean up here. Hot and cold water on tap, just as much as you like, there is. Woolly towels, there is; and a towel horse so hot, it burns your fingers. Soft brushes to scrub yourself, and a wooden bowl of soap smelling like primroses. Now I know why ladies is so clean. Washing’s a treat for them. Wish they saw what it is for the like of me!

HIGGINS. I’m glad the bath-room met with your approval.

LIZA. It didn’t: not all of it; and I don’t care who hears me say it. Mrs.

Pearce knows.

HIGGINS. What was wrong, Mrs. Pearce?

MRS. PEARCE [blandly] Oh, nothing, sir. It doesn’t matter.

LIZA. I had a good mind to break it. I didn’t know which way to look. But I hung a towel over it, I did.

HIGGINS. Over what?

MRS. PEARCE. Over the looking-glass, sir.

HIGGINS. Doolittle: you have brought your daughter up too strictly.

DOOLITTLE. Me! I never brought her up at all, except to give her a lick of a strap now and again. Don’t put it on me, Governor. She ain’t accustomed to it, you see: that’s all. But she’ll soon pick up your free-and-easy ways.

LIZA. I’m a good girl, I am; and I won’t pick up no free and easy ways.

HIGGINS. Eliza: if you say again that you’re a good girl, your father shall take you home.

LIZA. Not him. You don’t know my father. All he come here for was to touch you for some money to get drunk on.

DOOLITTLE. Well, what else would I want money for? To put into the plate in church, I suppose. [She puts out her tongue at him. He is so incensed by this that Pickering presently finds it necessary to step between them]. Don’t you give me none of your lip; and don’t let me hear you giving this gentleman any of it neither, or you’ll hear from me about it. See?

HIGGINS. Have you any further advice to give her before you go, Doolittle? Your blessing, for instance.

DOOLITTLE. No, Governor: I ain’t such a mug as to put up my children to all I know myself. Hard enough to hold them in without that. If you want Eliza’s mind improved, Governor, you do it yourself with a strap. So long, gentlemen. [He turns to go].

HIGGINS [impressively] Stop. You’ll come regularly to see your daughter. It’s your duty, you know. My brother is a clergyman; and he could help you in your talks with her.

DOOLITTLE [evasively] Certainly. I’ll come, Governor. Not just this week, because I have a job at a distance. But later on you may depend on me. Afternoon, gentlemen. Afternoon, ma’am. [He takes off his hat to Mrs. Pearce, who disdains the salutation and goes out. He winks at Higgins, thinking him probably a fellow sufferer from Mrs. Pearce’s difficult disposition, and follows her].

LIZA. Don’t you believe the old liar. He’d as soon you set a bull-dog on him as a clergyman. You won’t see him again in a hurry.

HIGGINS. I don’t want to, Eliza. Do you?

LIZA. Not me. I don’t want never to see him again, I don’t. He’s a disgrace to me, he is, collecting dust, instead of working at his trade.

PICKERING. What is his trade, Eliza?

LIZA. Talking money out of other people’s pockets into his own. His proper trade’s a navvy; and he works at it sometimes too—for exercise—and earns good money at it. Ain’t you going to call me Miss Doolittle any more?

PICKERING. I beg your pardon, Miss Doolittle. It was a slip of the tongue.

LIZA. Oh, I don’t mind; only it sounded so genteel. I should just like to take a taxi to the corner of Tottenham Court Road and get out there and tell it to wait for me, just to put the girls in their place a bit. I wouldn’t speak to them, you know.

PICKERING. Better wait til we get you something really fashionable.

HIGGINS. Besides, you shouldn’t cut your old friends now that you have risen in the world. That’s what we call snobbery.

LIZA. You don’t call the like of them my friends now, I should hope. They’ve took it out of me often enough with their ridicule when they had the chance; and now I mean to get a bit of my own back. But if I’m to have fashionable clothes, I’ll wait. I should like to have some. Mrs. Pearce says you’re going to give me some to wear in bed at night different to what I wear in the daytime; but it do seem a waste of money when you could get

something to show. Besides, I never could fancy changing into cold things on a winter night.

MRS. PEARCE [coming back] Now, Eliza. The new things have come for you to try on.

LIZA. Ah—ow—oo—ooh! [She rushes out].

MRS. PEARCE [following her] Oh, don’t rush about like that, girl [She shuts the door behind her].

HIGGINS. Pickering: we have taken on a stiff job. PICKERING [with conviction] Higgins: we have.

ACT III

It is Mrs. Higgins’s at-home day. Nobody has yet arrived. Her drawing- room, in a flat on Chelsea embankment, has three windows looking on the river; and the ceiling is not so lofty as it would be in an older house of the same pretension. The windows are open, giving access to a balcony with flowers in pots. If you stand with your face to the windows, you have the fireplace on your left and the door in the right-hand wall close to the corner nearest the windows.

Mrs. Higgins was brought up on Morris and Burne Jones; and her room, which is very unlike her son’s room in Wimpole Street, is not crowded with furniture and little tables and nicknacks. In the middle of the room there is a big ottoman; and this, with the carpet, the Morris wall-papers, and the Morris chintz window curtains and brocade covers of the ottoman and its cushions, supply all the ornament, and are much too handsome to be hidden by odds and ends of useless things. A few good oil-paintings from the exhibitions in the Grosvenor Gallery thirty years ago (the Burne Jones, not the Whistler side of them) are on the walls. The only landscape is a Cecil Lawson on the scale of a Rubens. There is a portrait of Mrs. Higgins as she was when she defied fashion in her youth in one of the beautiful Rossettian costumes which, when caricatured by people who did not understand, led to the absurdities of popular estheticism in the eighteen-seventies.

In the corner diagonally opposite the door Mrs. Higgins, now over sixty and long past taking the trouble to dress out of the fashion, sits writing at an elegantly simple writing-table with a bell button within reach of her hand. There is a Chippendale chair further back in the room between her and the window nearest her side. At the other side of the room, further forward, is an

Elizabethan chair roughly carved in the taste of Inigo Jones. On the same side a piano in a decorated case. The corner between the fireplace and the window is occupied by a divan cushioned in Morris chintz.

It is between four and five in the afternoon.

The door is opened violently; and Higgins enters with his hat on.

MRS. HIGGINS [dismayed] Henry! [scolding him] What are you doing here to-day? It is my at home day: you promised not to come. [As he bends to kiss her, she takes his hat off, and presents it to him].

HIGGINS. Oh bother! [He throws the hat down on the table]. MRS. HIGGINS. Go home at once.

HIGGINS [kissing her] I know, mother. I came on purpose.

MRS. HIGGINS. But you mustn’t. I’m serious, Henry. You offend all my friends: they stop coming whenever they meet you.

HIGGINS. Nonsense! I know I have no small talk; but people don’t mind. [He sits on the settee].

MRS. HIGGINS. Oh! don’t they? Small talk indeed! What about your large talk? Really, dear, you mustn’t stay.

HIGGINS. I must. I’ve a job for you. A phonetic job.

MRS. HIGGINS. No use, dear. I’m sorry; but I can’t get round your vowels; and though I like to get pretty postcards in your patent shorthand, I always have to read the copies in ordinary writing you so thoughtfully send me.

HIGGINS. Well, this isn’t a phonetic job. MRS. HIGGINS. You said it was.

HIGGINS. Not your part of it. I’ve picked up a girl.

MRS. HIGGINS. Does that mean that some girl has picked you up? HIGGINS. Not at all. I don’t mean a love affair.

MRS. HIGGINS. What a pity! HIGGINS. Why?

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, you never fall in love with anyone under forty-five. When will you discover that there are some rather nice-looking young women about?

HIGGINS. Oh, I can’t be bothered with young women. My idea of a loveable woman is something as like you as possible. I shall never get into the

way of seriously liking young women: some habits lie too deep to be changed. [Rising abruptly and walking about, jingling his money and his keys in his trouser pockets] Besides, they’re all idiots.

MRS. HIGGINS. Do you know what you would do if you really loved me, Henry?

HIGGINS. Oh bother! What? Marry, I suppose?

MRS. HIGGINS. No. Stop fidgeting and take your hands out of your pockets. [With a gesture of despair, he obeys and sits down again]. That’s a good boy. Now tell me about the girl.

HIGGINS. She’s coming to see you.

MRS. HIGGINS. I don’t remember asking her.

HIGGINS. You didn’t. I asked her. If you’d known her you wouldn’t have asked her.

MRS. HIGGINS. Indeed! Why?

HIGGINS. Well, it’s like this. She’s a common flower girl. I picked her off the kerbstone.

MRS. HIGGINS. And invited her to my at-home!

HIGGINS [rising and coming to her to coax her] Oh, that’ll be all right. I’ve taught her to speak properly; and she has strict orders as to her behavior. She’s to keep to two subjects: the weather and everybody’s health—Fine day and How do you do, you know—and not to let herself go on things in general. That will be safe.

MRS. HIGGINS. Safe! To talk about our health! about our insides! perhaps about our outsides! How could you be so silly, Henry?

HIGGINS [impatiently] Well, she must talk about something. [He controls himself and sits down again]. Oh, she’ll be all right: don’t you fuss. Pickering is in it with me. I’ve a sort of bet on that I’ll pass her off as a duchess in six months. I started on her some months ago; and she’s getting on like a house on fire. I shall win my bet. She has a quick ear; and she’s been easier to teach than my middle-class pupils because she’s had to learn a complete new language. She talks English almost as you talk French.

MRS. HIGGINS. That’s satisfactory, at all events. HIGGINS. Well, it is and it isn’t.

MRS. HIGGINS. What does that mean?

HIGGINS. You see, I’ve got her pronunciation all right; but you have to

consider not only how a girl pronounces, but what she pronounces; and that’s where—

They are interrupted by the parlor-maid, announcing guests.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Mrs. and Miss Eynsford Hill. [She withdraws].

HIGGINS. Oh Lord! [He rises; snatches his hat from the table; and makes for the door; but before he reaches it his mother introduces him].

Mrs. and Miss Eynsford Hill are the mother and daughter who sheltered from the rain in Covent Garden. The mother is well bred, quiet, and has the habitual anxiety of straitened means. The daughter has acquired a gay air of being very much at home in society: the bravado of genteel poverty.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Mrs. Higgins] How do you do? [They shake hands].

MISS EYNSFORD HILL. How d’you do? [She shakes]. MRS. HIGGINS [introducing] My son Henry.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Your celebrated son! I have so longed to meet you, Professor Higgins.

HIGGINS [glumly, making no movement in her direction] Delighted. [He backs against the piano and bows brusquely].

Miss EYNSFORD HILL [going to him with confident familiarity] How do you do?

HIGGINS [staring at her] I’ve seen you before somewhere. I haven’t the ghost of a notion where; but I’ve heard your voice. [Drearily] It doesn’t matter. You’d better sit down.

MRS. HIGGINS. I’m sorry to say that my celebrated son has no manners.

You mustn’t mind him.

MISS EYNSFORD HILL [gaily] I don’t. [She sits in the Elizabethan chair].

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [a little bewildered] Not at all. [She sits on the ottoman between her daughter and Mrs. Higgins, who has turned her chair away from the writing-table].

HIGGINS. Oh, have I been rude? I didn’t mean to be. [He goes to the central window, through which, with his back to the company, he contemplates the river and the flowers in Battersea Park on the opposite bank as if they were a frozen dessert.]

The parlor-maid returns, ushering in Pickering.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Colonel Pickering [She withdraws]. PICKERING. How do you do, Mrs. Higgins?

MRS. HIGGINS. So glad you’ve come. Do you know Mrs. Eynsford Hill

—Miss Eynsford Hill? [Exchange of bows. The Colonel brings the Chippendale chair a little forward between Mrs. Hill and Mrs. Higgins, and sits down].

PICKERING. Has Henry told you what we’ve come for? HIGGINS [over his shoulder] We were interrupted: damn it! MRS. HIGGINS. Oh Henry, Henry, really!

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [half rising] Are we in the way?

MRS. HIGGINS [rising and making her sit down again] No, no. You couldn’t have come more fortunately: we want you to meet a friend of ours.

HIGGINS [turning hopefully] Yes, by George! We want two or three people. You’ll do as well as anybody else.

The parlor-maid returns, ushering Freddy. THE PARLOR-MAID. Mr. Eynsford Hill.

HIGGINS [almost audibly, past endurance] God of Heaven! another of them.

FREDDY [shaking hands with Mrs. Higgins] Ahdedo?

MRS. HIGGINS. Very good of you to come. [Introducing] Colonel Pickering.

FREDDY [bowing] Ahdedo?

MRS. HIGGINS. I don’t think you know my son, Professor Higgins. FREDDY [going to Higgins] Ahdedo?

HIGGINS [looking at him much as if he were a pickpocket] I’ll take my oath I’ve met you before somewhere. Where was it?

FREDDY. I don’t think so.

HIGGINS [resignedly] It don’t matter, anyhow. Sit down. He shakes Freddy’s hand, and almost slings him on the ottoman with his face to the windows; then comes round to the other side of it.

HIGGINS. Well, here we are, anyhow! [He sits down on the ottoman next Mrs. Eynsford Hill, on her left.] And now, what the devil are we going to talk about until Eliza comes?

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry: you are the life and soul of the Royal Society’s soirees; but really you’re rather trying on more commonplace occasions.

HIGGINS. Am I? Very sorry. [Beaming suddenly] I suppose I am, you know. [Uproariously] Ha, ha!

MISS EYNSFORD HILL [who considers Higgins quite eligible matrimonially] I sympathize. I haven’t any small talk. If people would only be frank and say what they really think!

HIGGINS [relapsing into gloom] Lord forbid!

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [taking up her daughter’s cue] But why?

HIGGINS. What they think they ought to think is bad enough, Lord knows; but what they really think would break up the whole show. Do you suppose it would be really agreeable if I were to come out now with what I really think?

MISS EYNSFORD HILL [gaily] Is it so very cynical?

HIGGINS. Cynical! Who the dickens said it was cynical? I mean it wouldn’t be decent.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [seriously] Oh! I’m sure you don’t mean that, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS. You see, we’re all savages, more or less. We’re supposed to be civilized and cultured—to know all about poetry and philosophy and art and science, and so on; but how many of us know even the meanings of these names? [To Miss Hill] What do you know of poetry? [To Mrs. Hill] What do you know of science? [Indicating Freddy] What does he know of art or science or anything else? What the devil do you imagine I know of philosophy?

MRS. HIGGINS [warningly] Or of manners, Henry?

THE PARLOR-MAID [opening the door] Miss Doolittle. [She withdraws].

HIGGINS [rising hastily and running to Mrs. Higgins] Here she is, mother. [He stands on tiptoe and makes signs over his mother’s head to Eliza to indicate to her which lady is her hostess].

Eliza, who is exquisitely dressed, produces an impression of such remarkable distinction and beauty as she enters that they all rise, quite flustered. Guided by Higgins’s signals, she comes to Mrs. Higgins with studied grace.

LIZA [speaking with pedantic correctness of pronunciation and great beauty of tone] How do you do, Mrs. Higgins? [She gasps slightly in making sure of the H in Higgins, but is quite successful]. Mr. Higgins told me I might

come.

MRS. HIGGINS [cordially] Quite right: I’m very glad indeed to see you. PICKERING. How do you do, Miss Doolittle?

LIZA [shaking hands with him] Colonel Pickering, is it not?

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. I feel sure we have met before, Miss Doolittle. I remember your eyes.

LIZA. How do you do? [She sits down on the ottoman gracefully in the place just left vacant by Higgins].

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [introducing] My daughter Clara. LIZA. How do you do?

CLARA [impulsively] How do you do? [She sits down on the ottoman beside Eliza, devouring her with her eyes].

FREDDY [coming to their side of the ottoman] I’ve certainly had the pleasure.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [introducing] My son Freddy. LIZA. How do you do?

Freddy bows and sits down in the Elizabethan chair, infatuated.

HIGGINS [suddenly] By George, yes: it all comes back to me! [They stare at him]. Covent Garden! [Lamentably] What a damned thing!

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry, please! [He is about to sit on the edge of the table]. Don’t sit on my writing-table: you’ll break it.

HIGGINS [sulkily] Sorry.

He goes to the divan, stumbling into the fender and over the fire-irons on his way; extricating himself with muttered imprecations; and finishing his disastrous journey by throwing himself so impatiently on the divan that he almost breaks it. Mrs. Higgins looks at him, but controls herself and says nothing.

A long and painful pause ensues.

MRS. HIGGINS [at last, conversationally] Will it rain, do you think?

LIZA. The shallow depression in the west of these islands is likely to move slowly in an easterly direction. There are no indications of any great change in the barometrical situation.

FREDDY. Ha! ha! how awfully funny!

LIZA. What is wrong with that, young man? I bet I got it right. FREDDY. Killing!

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. I’m sure I hope it won’t turn cold. There’s so much influenza about. It runs right through our whole family regularly every spring.

LIZA [darkly] My aunt died of influenza: so they said.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [clicks her tongue sympathetically]!!!

LIZA [in the same tragic tone] But it’s my belief they done the old woman

in.

MRS. HIGGINS [puzzled] Done her in?

LIZA. Y-e-e-e-es, Lord love you! Why should she die of influenza? She

come through diphtheria right enough the year before. I saw her with my own eyes. Fairly blue with it, she was. They all thought she was dead; but my father he kept ladling gin down her throat til she came to so sudden that she bit the bowl off the spoon.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [startled] Dear me!

LIZA [piling up the indictment] What call would a woman with that strength in her have to die of influenza? What become of her new straw hat that should have come to me? Somebody pinched it; and what I say is, them as pinched it done her in.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. What does doing her in mean?

HIGGINS [hastily] Oh, that’s the new small talk. To do a person in means to kill them.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Eliza, horrified] You surely don’t believe that your aunt was killed?

LIZA. Do I not! Them she lived with would have killed her for a hat-pin, let alone a hat.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. But it can’t have been right for your father to pour spirits down her throat like that. It might have killed her.

LIZA. Not her. Gin was mother’s milk to her. Besides, he’d poured so much down his own throat that he knew the good of it.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Do you mean that he drank? LIZA. Drank! My word! Something chronic.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. How dreadful for you!

LIZA. Not a bit. It never did him no harm what I could see. But then he did not keep it up regular. [Cheerfully] On the burst, as you might say, from time to time. And always more agreeable when he had a drop in. When he was out of work, my mother used to give him fourpence and tell him to go out and not come back until he’d drunk himself cheerful and loving-like. There’s lots of women has to make their husbands drunk to make them fit to live with. [Now quite at her ease] You see, it’s like this. If a man has a bit of a conscience, it always takes him when he’s sober; and then it makes him low-spirited. A drop of booze just takes that off and makes him happy. [To Freddy, who is in convulsions of suppressed laughter] Here! what are you sniggering at?

FREDDY. The new small talk. You do it so awfully well.

LIZA. If I was doing it proper, what was you laughing at? [To Higgins] Have I said anything I oughtn’t?

MRS. HIGGINS [interposing] Not at all, Miss Doolittle.

LIZA. Well, that’s a mercy, anyhow. [Expansively] What I always say is— HIGGINS [rising and looking at his watch] Ahem!

LIZA [looking round at him; taking the hint; and rising] Well: I must go. [They all rise. Freddy goes to the door]. So pleased to have met you. Good- bye. [She shakes hands with Mrs. Higgins].

MRS. HIGGINS. Good-bye.

LIZA. Good-bye, Colonel Pickering.

PICKERING. Good-bye, Miss Doolittle. [They shake hands]. LIZA [nodding to the others] Good-bye, all.

FREDDY [opening the door for her] Are you walking across the Park, Miss Doolittle? If so—

LIZA. Walk! Not bloody likely. [Sensation]. I am going in a taxi. [She goes out].

Pickering gasps and sits down. Freddy goes out on the balcony to catch another glimpse of Eliza.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [suffering from shock] Well, I really can’t get used to the new ways.

CLARA [throwing herself discontentedly into the Elizabethan chair]. Oh, it’s all right, mamma, quite right. People will think we never go anywhere or see anybody if you are so old-fashioned.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. I daresay I am very old-fashioned; but I do

hope you won’t begin using that expression, Clara. I have got accustomed to hear you talking about men as rotters, and calling everything filthy and beastly; though I do think it horrible and unladylike. But this last is really too much. Don’t you think so, Colonel Pickering?

PICKERING. Don’t ask me. I’ve been away in India for several years; and manners have changed so much that I sometimes don’t know whether I’m at a respectable dinner-table or in a ship’s forecastle.

CLARA. It’s all a matter of habit. There’s no right or wrong in it. Nobody means anything by it. And it’s so quaint, and gives such a smart emphasis to things that are not in themselves very witty. I find the new small talk delightful and quite innocent.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [rising] Well, after that, I think it’s time for us to

go.

Pickering and Higgins rise.

CLARA [rising] Oh yes: we have three at homes to go to still. Good-bye,

Mrs. Higgins. Good-bye, Colonel Pickering. Good-bye, Professor Higgins.

HIGGINS [coming grimly at her from the divan, and accompanying her to the door] Good-bye. Be sure you try on that small talk at the three at-homes. Don’t be nervous about it. Pitch it in strong.

CLARA [all smiles] I will. Good-bye. Such nonsense, all this early Victorian prudery!

HIGGINS [tempting her] Such damned nonsense! CLARA. Such bloody nonsense!

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [convulsively] Clara!

CLARA. Ha! ha! [She goes out radiant, conscious of being thoroughly up to date, and is heard descending the stairs in a stream of silvery laughter].

FREDDY [to the heavens at large] Well, I ask you [He gives it up, and comes to Mrs. Higgins]. Good-bye.

MRS. HIGGINS [shaking hands] Good-bye. Would you like to meet Miss Doolittle again?

FREDDY [eagerly] Yes, I should, most awfully. MRS. HIGGINS. Well, you know my days.

FREDDY. Yes. Thanks awfully. Good-bye. [He goes out]. MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Good-bye, Mr. Higgins.

HIGGINS. Good-bye. Good-bye.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Pickering] It’s no use. I shall never be able to bring myself to use that word.

PICKERING. Don’t. It’s not compulsory, you know. You’ll get on quite well without it.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Only, Clara is so down on me if I am not positively reeking with the latest slang. Good-bye.

PICKERING. Good-bye [They shake hands].

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Mrs. Higgins] You mustn’t mind Clara. [Pickering, catching from her lowered tone that this is not meant for him to hear, discreetly joins Higgins at the window]. We’re so poor! and she gets so few parties, poor child! She doesn’t quite know. [Mrs. Higgins, seeing that her eyes are moist, takes her hand sympathetically and goes with her to the door]. But the boy is nice. Don’t you think so?

MRS. HIGGINS. Oh, quite nice. I shall always be delighted to see him.

MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Thank you, dear. Good-bye. [She goes out].

HIGGINS [eagerly] Well? Is Eliza presentable [he swoops on his mother and drags her to the ottoman, where she sits down in Eliza’s place with her son on her left]?

Pickering returns to his chair on her right.

MRS. HIGGINS. You silly boy, of course she’s not presentable. She’s a triumph of your art and of her dressmaker’s; but if you suppose for a moment that she doesn’t give herself away in every sentence she utters, you must be perfectly cracked about her.

PICKERING. But don’t you think something might be done? I mean something to eliminate the sanguinary element from her conversation.

MRS. HIGGINS. Not as long as she is in Henry’s hands.

HIGGINS [aggrieved] Do you mean that my language is improper?

MRS. HIGGINS. No, dearest: it would be quite proper—say on a canal barge; but it would not be proper for her at a garden party.

HIGGINS [deeply injured] Well I must say—

PICKERING [interrupting him] Come, Higgins: you must learn to know yourself. I haven’t heard such language as yours since we used to review the volunteers in Hyde Park twenty years ago.

HIGGINS [sulkily] Oh, well, if you say so, I suppose I don’t always talk

like a bishop.

MRS. HIGGINS [quieting Henry with a touch] Colonel Pickering: will you tell me what is the exact state of things in Wimpole Street?

PICKERING [cheerfully: as if this completely changed the subject] Well, I have come to live there with Henry. We work together at my Indian Dialects; and we think it more convenient—

MRS. HIGGINS. Quite so. I know all about that: it’s an excellent arrangement. But where does this girl live?

HIGGINS. With us, of course. Where would she live?

MRS. HIGGINS. But on what terms? Is she a servant? If not, what is she? PICKERING [slowly] I think I know what you mean, Mrs. Higgins.

HIGGINS. Well, dash me if I do! I’ve had to work at the girl every day for months to get her to her present pitch. Besides, she’s useful. She knows where my things are, and remembers my appointments and so forth.

MRS. HIGGINS. How does your housekeeper get on with her?

HIGGINS. Mrs. Pearce? Oh, she’s jolly glad to get so much taken off her hands; for before Eliza came, she had to have to find things and remind me of my appointments. But she’s got some silly bee in her bonnet about Eliza. She keeps saying “You don’t think, sir”: doesn’t she, Pick?

PICKERING. Yes: that’s the formula. “You don’t think, sir.” That’s the end of every conversation about Eliza.

HIGGINS. As if I ever stop thinking about the girl and her confounded vowels and consonants. I’m worn out, thinking about her, and watching her lips and her teeth and her tongue, not to mention her soul, which is the quaintest of the lot.

MRS. HIGGINS. You certainly are a pretty pair of babies, playing with your live doll.

HIGGINS. Playing! The hardest job I ever tackled: make no mistake about that, mother. But you have no idea how frightfully interesting it is to take a human being and change her into a quite different human being by creating a new speech for her. It’s filling up the deepest gulf that separates class from class and soul from soul.

PICKERING [drawing his chair closer to Mrs. Higgins and bending over to her eagerly] Yes: it’s enormously interesting. I assure you, Mrs. Higgins, we take Eliza very seriously. Every week—every day almost—there is some new change. [Closer again] We keep records of every stage—dozens of

gramophone disks and photographs—

HIGGINS [assailing her at the other ear] Yes, by George: it’s the most absorbing experiment I ever tackled. She regularly fills our lives up; doesn’t she, Pick?

PICKERING. We’re always talking Eliza. HIGGINS. Teaching Eliza.

PICKERING. Dressing Eliza. MRS. HIGGINS. What!

HIGGINS. Inventing new Elizas.

Higgins and Pickering, speaking together:

HIGGINS. You know, she has the most extraordinary quickness of ear: PICKERING. I assure you, my dear Mrs. Higgins, that girl

HIGGINS. just like a parrot. I’ve tried her with every PICKERING. is a genius. She can play the piano quite beautifully HIGGINS. possible sort of sound that a human being can make— PICKERING. We have taken her to classical concerts and to music HIGGINS. Continental dialects, African dialects, Hottentot PICKERING. halls; and it’s all the same to her: she plays everything HIGGINS. clicks, things it took me years to get hold of; and PICKERING. she hears right off when she comes home, whether it’s HIGGINS. she picks them up like a shot, right away, as if she had

PICKERING. Beethoven and Brahms or Lehar and Lionel Morickton;

HIGGINS. been at it all her life.

PICKERING. though six months ago, she’d never as much as touched a piano.

MRS. HIGGINS [putting her fingers in her ears, as they are by this time shouting one another down with an intolerable noise] Sh—sh—sh—sh! [They stop].

PICKERING. I beg your pardon. [He draws his chair back apologetically].

HIGGINS. Sorry. When Pickering starts shouting nobody can get a word in edgeways.

MRS. HIGGINS. Be quiet, Henry. Colonel Pickering: don’t you realize that when Eliza walked into Wimpole Street, something walked in with her?

PICKERING. Her father did. But Henry soon got rid of him.

MRS. HIGGINS. It would have been more to the point if her mother had.

But as her mother didn’t something else did.

PICKERING. But what?

MRS. HIGGINS [unconsciously dating herself by the word] A problem. PICKERING. Oh, I see. The problem of how to pass her off as a lady.

HIGGINS. I’ll solve that problem. I’ve half solved it already.

MRS. HIGGINS. No, you two infinitely stupid male creatures: the problem of what is to be done with her afterwards.

HIGGINS. I don’t see anything in that. She can go her own way, with all the advantages I have given her.

MRS. HIGGINS. The advantages of that poor woman who was here just now! The manners and habits that disqualify a fine lady from earning her own living without giving her a fine lady’s income! Is that what you mean?

PICKERING [indulgently, being rather bored] Oh, that will be all right, Mrs. Higgins. [He rises to go].

HIGGINS [rising also] We’ll find her some light employment. PICKERING. She’s happy enough. Don’t you worry about her. Good-bye.

[He shakes hands as if he were consoling a frightened child, and makes for the

door].

HIGGINS. Anyhow, there’s no good bothering now. The thing’s done.

Good-bye, mother. [He kisses her, and follows Pickering].

PICKERING [turning for a final consolation] There are plenty of openings.

We’ll do what’s right. Good-bye.

HIGGINS [to Pickering as they go out together] Let’s take her to the Shakespear exhibition at Earls Court.

PICKERING. Yes: let’s. Her remarks will be delicious. HIGGINS. She’ll mimic all the people for us when we get home.

PICKERING. Ripping. [Both are heard laughing as they go downstairs].

MRS. HIGGINS [rises with an impatient bounce, and returns to her work at the writing-table. She sweeps a litter of disarranged papers out of her way; snatches a sheet of paper from her stationery case; and tries resolutely to write.

At the third line she gives it up; flings down her pen; grips the table angrily and exclaims] Oh, men! men!! men!!!

ACT IV

The Wimpole Street laboratory. Midnight. Nobody in the room. The clock on the mantelpiece strikes twelve. The fire is not alight: it is a summer night.

Presently Higgins and Pickering are heard on the stairs.

HIGGINS [calling down to Pickering] I say, Pick: lock up, will you. I shan’t be going out again.

PICKERING. Right. Can Mrs. Pearce go to bed? We don’t want anything more, do we?

HIGGINS. Lord, no!

Eliza opens the door and is seen on the lighted landing in opera cloak, brilliant evening dress, and diamonds, with fan, flowers, and all accessories. She comes to the hearth, and switches on the electric lights there. She is tired: her pallor contrasts strongly with her dark eyes and hair; and her expression is almost tragic. She takes off her cloak; puts her fan and flowers on the piano; and sits down on the bench, brooding and silent. Higgins, in evening dress, with overcoat and hat, comes in, carrying a smoking jacket which he has picked up downstairs. He takes off the hat and overcoat; throws them carelessly on the newspaper stand; disposes of his coat in the same way; puts on the smoking jacket; and throws himself wearily into the easy-chair at the hearth. Pickering, similarly attired, comes in. He also takes off his hat and overcoat, and is about to throw them on Higgins’s when he hesitates.

PICKERING. I say: Mrs. Pearce will row if we leave these things lying about in the drawing-room.

HIGGINS. Oh, chuck them over the bannisters into the hall. She’ll find them there in the morning and put them away all right. She’ll think we were drunk.

PICKERING. We are, slightly. Are there any letters?

HIGGINS. I didn’t look. [Pickering takes the overcoats and hats and goes down stairs. Higgins begins half singing half yawning an air from La Fanciulla del Golden West. Suddenly he stops and exclaims] I wonder where the devil my slippers are!

Eliza looks at him darkly; then leaves the room.

Higgins yawns again, and resumes his song. Pickering returns, with the contents of the letter-box in his hand.

PICKERING. Only circulars, and this coroneted billet-doux for you. [He throws the circulars into the fender, and posts himself on the hearthrug, with his back to the grate].

HIGGINS [glancing at the billet-doux] Money-lender. [He throws the letter after the circulars].

Eliza returns with a pair of large down-at-heel slippers. She places them on the carpet before Higgins, and sits as before without a word.

HIGGINS [yawning again] Oh Lord! What an evening! What a crew! What a silly tomfoollery! [He raises his shoe to unlace it, and catches sight of the slippers. He stops unlacing and looks at them as if they had appeared there of their own accord]. Oh! they’re there, are they?

PICKERING [stretching himself] Well, I feel a bit tired. It’s been a long day. The garden party, a dinner party, and the opera! Rather too much of a good thing. But you’ve won your bet, Higgins. Eliza did the trick, and something to spare, eh?

HIGGINS [fervently] Thank God it’s over!

Eliza flinches violently; but they take no notice of her; and she recovers herself and sits stonily as before.

PICKERING. Were you nervous at the garden party? I was. Eliza didn’t seem a bit nervous.

HIGGINS. Oh, she wasn’t nervous. I knew she’d be all right. No, it’s the strain of putting the job through all these months that has told on me. It was interesting enough at first, while we were at the phonetics; but after that I got deadly sick of it. If I hadn’t backed myself to do it I should have chucked the whole thing up two months ago. It was a silly notion: the whole thing has been a bore.

PICKERING. Oh come! the garden party was frightfully exciting. My heart began beating like anything.

HIGGINS. Yes, for the first three minutes. But when I saw we were going to win hands down, I felt like a bear in a cage, hanging about doing nothing. The dinner was worse: sitting gorging there for over an hour, with nobody but a damned fool of a fashionable woman to talk to! I tell you, Pickering, never again for me. No more artificial duchesses. The whole thing has been simple purgatory.

PICKERING. You’ve never been broken in properly to the social routine.

[Strolling over to the piano] I rather enjoy dipping into it occasionally myself: it makes me feel young again. Anyhow, it was a great success: an immense success. I was quite frightened once or twice because Eliza was doing it so well. You see, lots of the real people can’t do it at all: they’re such fools that they think style comes by nature to people in their position; and so they never learn. There’s always something professional about doing a thing superlatively well.

HIGGINS. Yes: that’s what drives me mad: the silly people don’t know their own silly business. [Rising] However, it’s over and done with; and now I can go to bed at last without dreading tomorrow.

Eliza’s beauty becomes murderous.

PICKERING. I think I shall turn in too. Still, it’s been a great occasion: a triumph for you. Good-night. [He goes].

HIGGINS [following him] Good-night. [Over his shoulder, at the door] Put out the lights, Eliza; and tell Mrs. Pearce not to make coffee for me in the morning: I’ll take tea. [He goes out].

Eliza tries to control herself and feel indifferent as she rises and walks across to the hearth to switch off the lights. By the time she gets there she is on the point of screaming. She sits down in Higgins’s chair and holds on hard to the arms. Finally she gives way and flings herself furiously on the floor raging.

HIGGINS [in despairing wrath outside] What the devil have I done with my slippers? [He appears at the door].

LIZA [snatching up the slippers, and hurling them at him one after the other with all her force] There are your slippers. And there. Take your slippers; and may you never have a day’s luck with them!

HIGGINS [astounded] What on earth—! [He comes to her]. What’s the matter? Get up. [He pulls her up]. Anything wrong?

LIZA [breathless] Nothing wrong—with YOU. I’ve won your bet for you, haven’t I? That’s enough for you. I don’t matter, I suppose.

HIGGINS. YOU won my bet! You! Presumptuous insect! I won it. What did you throw those slippers at me for?

LIZA. Because I wanted to smash your face. I’d like to kill you, you selfish brute. Why didn’t you leave me where you picked me out of—in the gutter? You thank God it’s all over, and that now you can throw me back again there, do you? [She crisps her fingers, frantically].

HIGGINS [looking at her in cool wonder] The creature IS nervous, after

all.

LIZA [gives a suffocated scream of fury, and instinctively darts her nails at

his face]!!

HIGGINS [catching her wrists] Ah! would you? Claws in, you cat. How dare you show your temper to me? Sit down and be quiet. [He throws her roughly into the easy-chair].

LIZA [crushed by superior strength and weight] What’s to become of me?

What’s to become of me?

HIGGINS. How the devil do I know what’s to become of you? What does it matter what becomes of you?

LIZA. You don’t care. I know you don’t care. You wouldn’t care if I was dead. I’m nothing to you—not so much as them slippers.

HIGGINS [thundering] THOSE slippers.

LIZA [with bitter submission] Those slippers. I didn’t think it made any difference now.

A pause. Eliza hopeless and crushed. Higgins a little uneasy.

HIGGINS [in his loftiest manner] Why have you begun going on like this?

May I ask whether you complain of your treatment here?

LIZA. No.

HIGGINS. Has anybody behaved badly to you? Colonel Pickering? Mrs.

Pearce? Any of the servants?

LIZA. No.

HIGGINS. I presume you don’t pretend that I have treated you badly. LIZA. No.

HIGGINS. I am glad to hear it. [He moderates his tone]. Perhaps you’re tired after the strain of the day. Will you have a glass of champagne? [He moves towards the door].

LIZA. No. [Recollecting her manners] Thank you.

HIGGINS [good-humored again] This has been coming on you for some days. I suppose it was natural for you to be anxious about the garden party. But that’s all over now. [He pats her kindly on the shoulder. She writhes]. There’s nothing more to worry about.

LIZA. No. Nothing more for you to worry about. [She suddenly rises and gets away from him by going to the piano bench, where she sits and hides her

face]. Oh God! I wish I was dead.

HIGGINS [staring after her in sincere surprise] Why? in heaven’s name, why? [Reasonably, going to her] Listen to me, Eliza. All this irritation is purely subjective.

LIZA. I don’t understand. I’m too ignorant.

HIGGINS. It’s only imagination. Low spirits and nothing else. Nobody’s hurting you. Nothing’s wrong. You go to bed like a good girl and sleep it off. Have a little cry and say your prayers: that will make you comfortable.

LIZA. I heard YOUR prayers. “Thank God it’s all over!”

HIGGINS [impatiently] Well, don’t you thank God it’s all over? Now you are free and can do what you like.

LIZA [pulling herself together in desperation] What am I fit for? What have you left me fit for? Where am I to go? What am I to do? What’s to become of me?

HIGGINS [enlightened, but not at all impressed] Oh, that’s what’s worrying you, is it? [He thrusts his hands into his pockets, and walks about in his usual manner, rattling the contents of his pockets, as if condescending to a trivial subject out of pure kindness]. I shouldn’t bother about it if I were you. I should imagine you won’t have much difficulty in settling yourself, somewhere or other, though I hadn’t quite realized that you were going away. [She looks quickly at him: he does not look at her, but examines the dessert stand on the piano and decides that he will eat an apple]. You might marry, you know. [He bites a large piece out of the apple, and munches it noisily]. You see, Eliza, all men are not confirmed old bachelors like me and the Colonel. Most men are the marrying sort (poor devils!); and you’re not bad- looking; it’s quite a pleasure to look at you sometimes—not now, of course, because you’re crying and looking as ugly as the very devil; but when you’re all right and quite yourself, you’re what I should call attractive. That is, to the people in the marrying line, you understand. You go to bed and have a good nice rest; and then get up and look at yourself in the glass; and you won’t feel so cheap.

Eliza again looks at him, speechless, and does not stir.

The look is quite lost on him: he eats his apple with a dreamy expression of happiness, as it is quite a good one.

HIGGINS [a genial afterthought occurring to him] I daresay my mother could find some chap or other who would do very well—

LIZA. We were above that at the corner of Tottenham Court Road.

HIGGINS [waking up] What do you mean?

LIZA. I sold flowers. I didn’t sell myself. Now you’ve made a lady of me I’m not fit to sell anything else. I wish you’d left me where you found me.

HIGGINS [slinging the core of the apple decisively into the grate] Tosh, Eliza. Don’t you insult human relations by dragging all this cant about buying and selling into it. You needn’t marry the fellow if you don’t like him.

LIZA. What else am I to do?

HIGGINS. Oh, lots of things. What about your old idea of a florist’s shop? Pickering could set you up in one: he’s lots of money. [Chuckling] He’ll have to pay for all those togs you have been wearing today; and that, with the hire of the jewellery, will make a big hole in two hundred pounds. Why, six months ago you would have thought it the millennium to have a flower shop of your own. Come! you’ll be all right. I must clear off to bed: I’m devilish sleepy. By the way, I came down for something: I forget what it was.

LIZA. Your slippers.

HIGGINS. Oh yes, of course. You shied them at me. [He picks them up, and is going out when she rises and speaks to him].

LIZA. Before you go, sir—

HIGGINS [dropping the slippers in his surprise at her calling him sir] Eh? LIZA. Do my clothes belong to me or to Colonel Pickering?

HIGGINS [coming back into the room as if her question were the very climax of unreason] What the devil use would they be to Pickering?

LIZA. He might want them for the next girl you pick up to experiment on. HIGGINS [shocked and hurt] Is THAT the way you feel towards us?

LIZA. I don’t want to hear anything more about that. All I want to know is whether anything belongs to me. My own clothes were burnt.

HIGGINS. But what does it matter? Why need you start bothering about that in the middle of the night?

LIZA. I want to know what I may take away with me. I don’t want to be accused of stealing.

HIGGINS [now deeply wounded] Stealing! You shouldn’t have said that, Eliza. That shows a want of feeling.

LIZA. I’m sorry. I’m only a common ignorant girl; and in my station I have to be careful. There can’t be any feelings between the like of you and the like of me. Please will you tell me what belongs to me and what doesn’t?

HIGGINS [very sulky] You may take the whole damned houseful if you like. Except the jewels. They’re hired. Will that satisfy you? [He turns on his heel and is about to go in extreme dudgeon].

LIZA [drinking in his emotion like nectar, and nagging him to provoke a further supply] Stop, please. [She takes off her jewels]. Will you take these to your room and keep them safe? I don’t want to run the risk of their being missing.

HIGGINS [furious] Hand them over. [She puts them into his hands]. If these belonged to me instead of to the jeweler, I’d ram them down your ungrateful throat. [He perfunctorily thrusts them into his pockets, unconsciously decorating himself with the protruding ends of the chains].

LIZA [taking a ring off] This ring isn’t the jeweler’s: it’s the one you bought me in Brighton. I don’t want it now. [Higgins dashes the ring violently into the fireplace, and turns on her so threateningly that she crouches over the piano with her hands over her face, and exclaims] Don’t you hit me.

HIGGINS. Hit you! You infamous creature, how dare you accuse me of such a thing? It is you who have hit me. You have wounded me to the heart.

LIZA [thrilling with hidden joy] I’m glad. I’ve got a little of my own back, anyhow.

HIGGINS [with dignity, in his finest professional style] You have caused me to lose my temper: a thing that has hardly ever happened to me before. I prefer to say nothing more tonight. I am going to bed.

LIZA [pertly] You’d better leave a note for Mrs. Pearce about the coffee; for she won’t be told by me.

HIGGINS [formally] Damn Mrs. Pearce; and damn the coffee; and damn you; and damn my own folly in having lavished MY hard-earned knowledge and the treasure of my regard and intimacy on a heartless guttersnipe. [He goes out with impressive decorum, and spoils it by slamming the door savagely].

Eliza smiles for the first time; expresses her feelings by a wild pantomime in which an imitation of Higgins’s exit is confused with her own triumph; and finally goes down on her knees on the hearthrug to look for the ring.

ACT V

Mrs. Higgins’s drawing-room. She is at her writing-table as before. The

parlor-maid comes in.

THE PARLOR-MAID [at the door] Mr. Henry, mam, is downstairs with Colonel Pickering.

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, show them up.

THE PARLOR-MAID. They’re using the telephone, mam. Telephoning to the police, I think.

MRS. HIGGINS. What!

THE PARLOR-MAID [coming further in and lowering her voice] Mr.

Henry’s in a state, mam. I thought I’d better tell you.

MRS. HIGGINS. If you had told me that Mr. Henry was not in a state it would have been more surprising. Tell them to come up when they’ve finished with the police. I suppose he’s lost something.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, maam [going].

MRS. HIGGINS. Go upstairs and tell Miss Doolittle that Mr. Henry and the Colonel are here. Ask her not to come down till I send for her.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, mam.

Higgins bursts in. He is, as the parlor-maid has said, in a state. HIGGINS. Look here, mother: here’s a confounded thing!

MRS. HIGGINS. Yes, dear. Good-morning. [He checks his impatience and kisses her, whilst the parlor-maid goes out]. What is it?

HIGGINS. Eliza’s bolted.

MRS. HIGGINS [calmly continuing her writing] You must have frightened her.

HIGGINS. Frightened her! nonsense! She was left last night, as usual, to turn out the lights and all that; and instead of going to bed she changed her clothes and went right off: her bed wasn’t slept in. She came in a cab for her things before seven this morning; and that fool Mrs. Pearce let her have them without telling me a word about it. What am I to do?

MRS. HIGGINS. Do without, I’m afraid, Henry. The girl has a perfect right to leave if she chooses.

HIGGINS [wandering distractedly across the room] But I can’t find anything. I don’t know what appointments I’ve got. I’m— [Pickering comes in. Mrs. Higgins puts down her pen and turns away from the writing-table].

PICKERING [shaking hands] Good-morning, Mrs. Higgins. Has Henry

told you? [He sits down on the ottoman].

HIGGINS. What does that ass of an inspector say? Have you offered a reward?

MRS. HIGGINS [rising in indignant amazement] You don’t mean to say you have set the police after Eliza?

HIGGINS. Of course. What are the police for? What else could we do? [He sits in the Elizabethan chair].

PICKERING. The inspector made a lot of difficulties. I really think he suspected us of some improper purpose.

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, of course he did. What right have you to go to the police and give the girl’s name as if she were a thief, or a lost umbrella, or something? Really! [She sits down again, deeply vexed].

HIGGINS. But we want to find her.

PICKERING. We can’t let her go like this, you know, Mrs. Higgins. What were we to do?

MRS. HIGGINS. You have no more sense, either of you, than two children. Why—

The parlor-maid comes in and breaks off the conversation.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Mr. Henry: a gentleman wants to see you very particular. He’s been sent on from Wimpole Street.

HIGGINS. Oh, bother! I can’t see anyone now. Who is it? THE PARLOR-MAID. A Mr. Doolittle, Sir.

PICKERING. Doolittle! Do you mean the dustman?

THE PARLOR-MAID. Dustman! Oh no, sir: a gentleman.

HIGGINS [springing up excitedly] By George, Pick, it’s some relative of hers that she’s gone to. Somebody we know nothing about. [To the parlor- maid] Send him up, quick.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, Sir. [She goes].

HIGGINS [eagerly, going to his mother] Genteel relatives! now we shall hear something. [He sits down in the Chippendale chair].

MRS. HIGGINS. Do you know any of her people? PICKERING. Only her father: the fellow we told you about.

THE PARLOR-MAID [announcing] Mr. Doolittle. [She withdraws].

Doolittle enters. He is brilliantly dressed in a new fashionable frock-coat, with white waistcoat and grey trousers. A flower in his buttonhole, a dazzling silk hat, and patent leather shoes complete the effect. He is too concerned with the business he has come on to notice Mrs. Higgins. He walks straight to Higgins, and accosts him with vehement reproach.

DOOLITTLE [indicating his own person] See here! Do you see this? You done this.

HIGGINS. Done what, man?

DOOLITTLE. This, I tell you. Look at it. Look at this hat. Look at this coat.

PICKERING. Has Eliza been buying you clothes?

DOOLITTLE. Eliza! not she. Not half. Why would she buy me clothes? MRS. HIGGINS. Good-morning, Mr. Doolittle. Won’t you sit down?

DOOLITTLE [taken aback as he becomes conscious that he has forgotten his hostess] Asking your pardon, ma’am. [He approaches her and shakes her proffered hand]. Thank you. [He sits down on the ottoman, on Pickering’s right]. I am that full of what has happened to me that I can’t think of anything else.

HIGGINS. What the dickens has happened to you?

DOOLITTLE. I shouldn’t mind if it had only happened to me: anything might happen to anybody and nobody to blame but Providence, as you might say. But this is something that you done to me: yes, you, Henry Higgins.

HIGGINS. Have you found Eliza? That’s the point. DOOLITTLE. Have you lost her?

HIGGINS. Yes.

DOOLITTLE. You have all the luck, you have. I ain’t found her; but she’ll find me quick enough now after what you done to me.

MRS. HIGGINS. But what has my son done to you, Mr. Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE. Done to me! Ruined me. Destroyed my happiness. Tied me up and delivered me into the hands of middle class morality.

HIGGINS [rising intolerantly and standing over Doolittle] You’re raving. You’re drunk. You’re mad. I gave you five pounds. After that I had two conversations with you, at half-a-crown an hour. I’ve never seen you since.

DOOLITTLE. Oh! Drunk! am I? Mad! am I? Tell me this. Did you or did you not write a letter to an old blighter in America that was giving five

millions to found Moral Reform Societies all over the world, and that wanted you to invent a universal language for him?

HIGGINS. What! Ezra D. Wannafeller! He’s dead. [He sits down again carelessly].

DOOLITTLE. Yes: he’s dead; and I’m done for. Now did you or did you not write a letter to him to say that the most original moralist at present in England, to the best of your knowledge, was Alfred Doolittle, a common dustman.

HIGGINS. Oh, after your last visit I remember making some silly joke of the kind.

DOOLITTLE. Ah! you may well call it a silly joke. It put the lid on me right enough. Just give him the chance he wanted to show that Americans is not like us: that they recognize and respect merit in every class of life, however humble. Them words is in his blooming will, in which, Henry Higgins, thanks to your silly joking, he leaves me a share in his Pre-digested Cheese Trust worth three thousand a year on condition that I lecture for his Wannafeller Moral Reform World League as often as they ask me up to six times a year.

HIGGINS. The devil he does! Whew! [Brightening suddenly] What a lark! PICKERING. A safe thing for you, Doolittle. They won’t ask you twice.

DOOLITTLE. It ain’t the lecturing I mind. I’ll lecture them blue in the face, I will, and not turn a hair. It’s making a gentleman of me that I object to. Who asked him to make a gentleman of me? I was happy. I was free. I touched pretty nigh everybody for money when I wanted it, same as I touched you, Henry Higgins. Now I am worrited; tied neck and heels; and everybody touches me for money. It’s a fine thing for you, says my solicitor. Is it? says I. You mean it’s a good thing for you, I says. When I was a poor man and had a solicitor once when they found a pram in the dust cart, he got me off, and got shut of me and got me shut of him as quick as he could. Same with the doctors: used to shove me out of the hospital before I could hardly stand on my legs, and nothing to pay. Now they finds out that I’m not a healthy man and can’t live unless they looks after me twice a day. In the house I’m not let do a hand’s turn for myself: somebody else must do it and touch me for it. A year ago I hadn’t a relative in the world except two or three that wouldn’t speak to me. Now I’ve fifty, and not a decent week’s wages among the lot of them. I have to live for others and not for myself: that’s middle class morality. You talk of losing Eliza. Don’t you be anxious: I bet she’s on my doorstep by this: she that could support herself easy by selling flowers if I wasn’t respectable. And the next one to touch me will be you, Henry Higgins. I’ll have to learn to

speak middle class language from you, instead of speaking proper English. That’s where you’ll come in; and I daresay that’s what you done it for.

MRS. HIGGINS. But, my dear Mr. Doolittle, you need not suffer all this if you are really in earnest. Nobody can force you to accept this bequest. You can repudiate it. Isn’t that so, Colonel Pickering?

PICKERING. I believe so.

DOOLITTLE [softening his manner in deference to her sex] That’s the tragedy of it, ma’am. It’s easy to say chuck it; but I haven’t the nerve. Which one of us has? We’re all intimidated. Intimidated, ma’am: that’s what we are. What is there for me if I chuck it but the workhouse in my old age? I have to dye my hair already to keep my job as a dustman. If I was one of the deserving poor, and had put by a bit, I could chuck it; but then why should I, acause the deserving poor might as well be millionaires for all the happiness they ever has. They don’t know what happiness is. But I, as one of the undeserving poor, have nothing between me and the pauper’s uniform but this here blasted three thousand a year that shoves me into the middle class. (Excuse the expression, ma’am: you’d use it yourself if you had my provocation). They’ve got you every way you turn: it’s a choice between the Skilly of the workhouse and the Char Bydis of the middle class; and I haven’t the nerve for the workhouse. Intimidated: that’s what I am. Broke. Bought up. Happier men than me will call for my dust, and touch me for their tip; and I’ll look on helpless, and envy them. And that’s what your son has brought me to. [He is overcome by emotion].

MRS. HIGGINS. Well, I’m very glad you’re not going to do anything foolish, Mr. Doolittle. For this solves the problem of Eliza’s future. You can provide for her now.

DOOLITTLE [with melancholy resignation] Yes, ma’am; I’m expected to provide for everyone now, out of three thousand a year.

HIGGINS [jumping up] Nonsense! he can’t provide for her. He shan’t provide for her. She doesn’t belong to him. I paid him five pounds for her. Doolittle: either you’re an honest man or a rogue.

DOOLITTLE [tolerantly] A little of both, Henry, like the rest of us: a little of both.

HIGGINS. Well, you took that money for the girl; and you have no right to take her as well.

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry: don’t be absurd. If you really want to know where Eliza is, she is upstairs.

HIGGINS [amazed] Upstairs!!! Then I shall jolly soon fetch her

downstairs. [He makes resolutely for the door].

MRS. HIGGINS [rising and following him] Be quiet, Henry. Sit down. HIGGINS. I—

MRS. HIGGINS. Sit down, dear; and listen to me.

HIGGINS. Oh very well, very well, very well. [He throws himself ungraciously on the ottoman, with his face towards the windows]. But I think you might have told me this half an hour ago.

MRS. HIGGINS. Eliza came to me this morning. She passed the night partly walking about in a rage, partly trying to throw herself into the river and being afraid to, and partly in the Carlton Hotel. She told me of the brutal way you two treated her.

HIGGINS [bounding up again] What!

PICKERING [rising also] My dear Mrs. Higgins, she’s been telling you stories. We didn’t treat her brutally. We hardly said a word to her; and we parted on particularly good terms. [Turning on Higgins]. Higgins: did you bully her after I went to bed?

HIGGINS. Just the other way about. She threw my slippers in my face. She behaved in the most outrageous way. I never gave her the slightest provocation. The slippers came bang into my face the moment I entered the room—before I had uttered a word. And used perfectly awful language.

PICKERING [astonished] But why? What did we do to her?

MRS. HIGGINS. I think I know pretty well what you did. The girl is naturally rather affectionate, I think. Isn’t she, Mr. Doolittle?

DOOLITTLE. Very tender-hearted, ma’am. Takes after me.

MRS. HIGGINS. Just so. She had become attached to you both. She worked very hard for you, Henry! I don’t think you quite realize what anything in the nature of brain work means to a girl like that. Well, it seems that when the great day of trial came, and she did this wonderful thing for you without making a single mistake, you two sat there and never said a word to her, but talked together of how glad you were that it was all over and how you had been bored with the whole thing. And then you were surprised because she threw your slippers at you! I should have thrown the fire-irons at you.

HIGGINS. We said nothing except that we were tired and wanted to go to bed. Did we, Pick?

PICKERING [shrugging his shoulders] That was all. MRS. HIGGINS [ironically] Quite sure?

PICKERING. Absolutely. Really, that was all.

MRS. HIGGINS. You didn’t thank her, or pet her, or admire her, or tell her how splendid she’d been.

HIGGINS [impatiently] But she knew all about that. We didn’t make speeches to her, if that’s what you mean.

PICKERING [conscience stricken] Perhaps we were a little inconsiderate.

Is she very angry?

MRS. HIGGINS [returning to her place at the writing-table] Well, I’m afraid she won’t go back to Wimpole Street, especially now that Mr. Doolittle is able to keep up the position you have thrust on her; but she says she is quite willing to meet you on friendly terms and to let bygones be bygones.

HIGGINS [furious] Is she, by George? Ho!

MRS. HIGGINS. If you promise to behave yourself, Henry, I’ll ask her to come down. If not, go home; for you have taken up quite enough of my time.

HIGGINS. Oh, all right. Very well. Pick: you behave yourself. Let us put on our best Sunday manners for this creature that we picked out of the mud. [He flings himself sulkily into the Elizabethan chair].

DOOLITTLE [remonstrating] Now, now, Henry Higgins! have some consideration for my feelings as a middle class man.

MRS. HIGGINS. Remember your promise, Henry. [She presses the bell- button on the writing-table]. Mr. Doolittle: will you be so good as to step out on the balcony for a moment. I don’t want Eliza to have the shock of your news until she has made it up with these two gentlemen. Would you mind?

DOOLITTLE. As you wish, lady. Anything to help Henry to keep her off my hands. [He disappears through the window].

The parlor-maid answers the bell. Pickering sits down in Doolittle’s place. MRS. HIGGINS. Ask Miss Doolittle to come down, please.

THE PARLOR-MAID. Yes, mam. [She goes out]. MRS. HIGGINS. Now, Henry: be good.

HIGGINS. I am behaving myself perfectly. PICKERING. He is doing his best, Mrs. Higgins.

A pause. Higgins throws back his head; stretches out his legs; and begins to whistle.

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry, dearest, you don’t look at all nice in that attitude.

HIGGINS [pulling himself together] I was not trying to look nice, mother. MRS. HIGGINS. It doesn’t matter, dear. I only wanted to make you speak. HIGGINS. Why?

MRS. HIGGINS. Because you can’t speak and whistle at the same time. Higgins groans. Another very trying pause.

HIGGINS [springing up, out of patience] Where the devil is that girl? Are we to wait here all day?

Eliza enters, sunny, self-possessed, and giving a staggeringly convincing exhibition of ease of manner. She carries a little work-basket, and is very much at home. Pickering is too much taken aback to rise.

LIZA. How do you do, Professor Higgins? Are you quite well? HIGGINS [choking] Am I— [He can say no more].

LIZA. But of course you are: you are never ill. So glad to see you again, Colonel Pickering. [He rises hastily; and they shake hands]. Quite chilly this morning, isn’t it? [She sits down on his left. He sits beside her].

HIGGINS. Don’t you dare try this game on me. I taught it to you; and it doesn’t take me in. Get up and come home; and don’t be a fool.

Eliza takes a piece of needlework from her basket, and begins to stitch at it, without taking the least notice of this outburst.

MRS. HIGGINS. Very nicely put, indeed, Henry. No woman could resist such an invitation.

HIGGINS. You let her alone, mother. Let her speak for herself. You will jolly soon see whether she has an idea that I haven’t put into her head or a word that I haven’t put into her mouth. I tell you I have created this thing out of the squashed cabbage leaves of Covent Garden; and now she pretends to play the fine lady with me.

MRS. HIGGINS [placidly] Yes, dear; but you’ll sit down, won’t you? Higgins sits down again, savagely.

LIZA [to Pickering, taking no apparent notice of Higgins, and working away deftly] Will you drop me altogether now that the experiment is over, Colonel Pickering?

PICKERING. Oh don’t. You mustn’t think of it as an experiment. It shocks me, somehow.

LIZA. Oh, I’m only a squashed cabbage leaf.

PICKERING [impulsively] No.

LIZA [continuing quietly]—but I owe so much to you that I should be very unhappy if you forgot me.

PICKERING. It’s very kind of you to say so, Miss Doolittle.

LIZA. It’s not because you paid for my dresses. I know you are generous to everybody with money. But it was from you that I learnt really nice manners; and that is what makes one a lady, isn’t it? You see it was so very difficult for me with the example of Professor Higgins always before me. I was brought up to be just like him, unable to control myself, and using bad language on the slightest provocation. And I should never have known that ladies and gentlemen didn’t behave like that if you hadn’t been there.

HIGGINS. Well!!

PICKERING. Oh, that’s only his way, you know. He doesn’t mean it.

LIZA. Oh, I didn’t mean it either, when I was a flower girl. It was only my way. But you see I did it; and that’s what makes the difference after all.

PICKERING. No doubt. Still, he taught you to speak; and I couldn’t have done that, you know.

LIZA [trivially] Of course: that is his profession. HIGGINS. Damnation!

LIZA [continuing] It was just like learning to dance in the fashionable way: there was nothing more than that in it. But do you know what began my real education?

PICKERING. What?

LIZA [stopping her work for a moment] Your calling me Miss Doolittle that day when I first came to Wimpole Street. That was the beginning of self- respect for me. [She resumes her stitching]. And there were a hundred little things you never noticed, because they came naturally to you. Things about standing up and taking off your hat and opening doors—

PICKERING. Oh, that was nothing.

LIZA. Yes: things that showed you thought and felt about me as if I were something better than a scullerymaid; though of course I know you would have been just the same to a scullery-maid if she had been let in the drawing- room. You never took off your boots in the dining room when I was there.

PICKERING. You mustn’t mind that. Higgins takes off his boots all over the place.

LIZA. I know. I am not blaming him. It is his way, isn’t it? But it made such a difference to me that you didn’t do it. You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up (the dressing and the proper way of speaking, and so on), the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl, and always will; but I know I can be a lady to you, because you always treat me as a lady, and always will.

MRS. HIGGINS. Please don’t grind your teeth, Henry. PICKERING. Well, this is really very nice of you, Miss Doolittle. LIZA. I should like you to call me Eliza, now, if you would.

PICKERING. Thank you. Eliza, of course.

LIZA. And I should like Professor Higgins to call me Miss Doolittle. HIGGINS. I’ll see you damned first.

MRS. HIGGINS. Henry! Henry!

PICKERING [laughing] Why don’t you slang back at him? Don’t stand it.

It would do him a lot of good.

LIZA. I can’t. I could have done it once; but now I can’t go back to it. Last night, when I was wandering about, a girl spoke to me; and I tried to get back into the old way with her; but it was no use. You told me, you know, that when a child is brought to a foreign country, it picks up the language in a few weeks, and forgets its own. Well, I am a child in your country. I have forgotten my own language, and can speak nothing but yours. That’s the real break-off with the corner of Tottenham Court Road. Leaving Wimpole Street finishes it.

PICKERING [much alarmed] Oh! but you’re coming back to Wimpole Street, aren’t you? You’ll forgive Higgins?

HIGGINS [rising] Forgive! Will she, by George! Let her go. Let her find out how she can get on without us. She will relapse into the gutter in three weeks without me at her elbow.

Doolittle appears at the centre window. With a look of dignified reproach at Higgins, he comes slowly and silently to his daughter, who, with her back to the window, is unconscious of his approach.

PICKERING. He’s incorrigible, Eliza. You won’t relapse, will you?

LIZA. No: Not now. Never again. I have learnt my lesson. I don’t believe I could utter one of the old sounds if I tried. [Doolittle touches her on her left shoulder. She drops her work, losing her self-possession utterly at the

spectacle of her father’s splendor] A—a—a—a—a—ah—ow—ooh!

HIGGINS [with a crow of triumph] Aha! Just so. A—a—a—a—ahowooh! A—a—a—a—ahowooh ! A—a—a—a—ahowooh! Victory! Victory! [He throws himself on the divan, folding his arms, and spraddling arrogantly].

DOOLITTLE. Can you blame the girl? Don’t look at me like that, Eliza. It ain’t my fault. I’ve come into money.

LIZA. You must have touched a millionaire this time, dad.

DOOLITTLE. I have. But I’m dressed something special today. I’m going to St. George’s, Hanover Square. Your stepmother is going to marry me.

LIZA [angrily] You’re going to let yourself down to marry that low common woman!

PICKERING [quietly] He ought to, Eliza. [To Doolittle] Why has she changed her mind?

DOOLITTLE [sadly] Intimidated, Governor. Intimidated. Middle class morality claims its victim. Won’t you put on your hat, Liza, and come and see me turned off?

LIZA. If the Colonel says I must, I—I’ll [almost sobbing] I’ll demean myself. And get insulted for my pains, like enough.

DOOLITTLE. Don’t be afraid: she never comes to words with anyone now, poor woman! respectability has broke all the spirit out of her.

PICKERING [squeezing Eliza’s elbow gently] Be kind to them, Eliza.

Make the best of it.

LIZA [forcing a little smile for him through her vexation] Oh well, just to show there’s no ill feeling. I’ll be back in a moment. [She goes out].

DOOLITTLE [sitting down beside Pickering] I feel uncommon nervous about the ceremony, Colonel. I wish you’d come and see me through it.

PICKERING. But you’ve been through it before, man. You were married to Eliza’s mother.

DOOLITTLE. Who told you that, Colonel?

PICKERING. Well, nobody told me. But I concluded naturally—

DOOLITTLE. No: that ain’t the natural way, Colonel: it’s only the middle class way. My way was always the undeserving way. But don’t say nothing to Eliza. She don’t know: I always had a delicacy about telling her.

PICKERING. Quite right. We’ll leave it so, if you don’t mind.

DOOLITTLE. And you’ll come to the church, Colonel, and put me through straight?

PICKERING. With pleasure. As far as a bachelor can.

MRS. HIGGINS. May I come, Mr. Doolittle? I should be very sorry to miss your wedding.

DOOLITTLE. I should indeed be honored by your condescension, ma’am; and my poor old woman would take it as a tremenjous compliment. She’s been very low, thinking of the happy days that are no more.

MRS. HIGGINS [rising] I’ll order the carriage and get ready. [The men rise, except Higgins]. I shan’t be more than fifteen minutes. [As she goes to the door Eliza comes in, hatted and buttoning her gloves]. I’m going to the church to see your father married, Eliza. You had better come in the brougham with me. Colonel Pickering can go on with the bridegroom.

Mrs. Higgins goes out. Eliza comes to the middle of the room between the centre window and the ottoman. Pickering joins her.

DOOLITTLE. Bridegroom! What a word! It makes a man realize his position, somehow. [He takes up his hat and goes towards the door].

PICKERING. Before I go, Eliza, do forgive him and come back to us. LIZA. I don’t think papa would allow me. Would you, dad?

DOOLITTLE [sad but magnanimous] They played you off very cunning, Eliza, them two sportsmen. If it had been only one of them, you could have nailed him. But you see, there was two; and one of them chaperoned the other, as you might say. [To Pickering] It was artful of you, Colonel; but I bear no malice: I should have done the same myself. I been the victim of one woman after another all my life; and I don’t grudge you two getting the better of Eliza. I shan’t interfere. It’s time for us to go, Colonel. So long, Henry. See you in St. George’s, Eliza. [He goes out].

PICKERING [coaxing] Do stay with us, Eliza. [He follows Doolittle].

Eliza goes out on the balcony to avoid being alone with Higgins. He rises and joins her there. She immediately comes back into the room and makes for the door; but he goes along the balcony quickly and gets his back to the door before she reaches it.

HIGGINS. Well, Eliza, you’ve had a bit of your own back, as you call it. Have you had enough? and are you going to be reasonable? Or do you want any more?

LIZA. You want me back only to pick up your slippers and put up with your tempers and fetch and carry for you.

HIGGINS. I haven’t said I wanted you back at all. LIZA. Oh, indeed. Then what are we talking about?

HIGGINS. About you, not about me. If you come back I shall treat you just as I have always treated you. I can’t change my nature; and I don’t intend to change my manners. My manners are exactly the same as Colonel Pickering’s.

LIZA. That’s not true. He treats a flower girl as if she was a duchess. HIGGINS. And I treat a duchess as if she was a flower girl.

LIZA. I see. [She turns away composedly, and sits on the ottoman, facing the window]. The same to everybody.

HIGGINS. Just so. LIZA. Like father.

HIGGINS [grinning, a little taken down] Without accepting the comparison at all points, Eliza, it’s quite true that your father is not a snob, and that he will be quite at home in any station of life to which his eccentric destiny may call him. [Seriously] The great secret, Eliza, is not having bad manners or good manners or any other particular sort of manners, but having the same manner for all human souls: in short, behaving as if you were in Heaven, where there are no third-class carriages, and one soul is as good as another.

LIZA. Amen. You are a born preacher.

HIGGINS [irritated] The question is not whether I treat you rudely, but whether you ever heard me treat anyone else better.

LIZA [with sudden sincerity] I don’t care how you treat me. I don’t mind your swearing at me. I don’t mind a black eye: I’ve had one before this. But [standing up and facing him] I won’t be passed over.

HIGGINS. Then get out of my way; for I won’t stop for you. You talk about me as if I were a motor bus.

LIZA. So you are a motor bus: all bounce and go, and no consideration for anyone. But I can do without you: don’t think I can’t.

HIGGINS. I know you can. I told you you could.

LIZA [wounded, getting away from him to the other side of the ottoman with her face to the hearth] I know you did, you brute. You wanted to get rid of me.

HIGGINS. Liar.

LIZA. Thank you. [She sits down with dignity].

HIGGINS. You never asked yourself, I suppose, whether I could do without YOU.

LIZA [earnestly] Don’t you try to get round me. You’ll HAVE to do without me.

HIGGINS [arrogant] I can do without anybody. I have my own soul: my own spark of divine fire. But [with sudden humility] I shall miss you, Eliza. [He sits down near her on the ottoman]. I have learnt something from your idiotic notions: I confess that humbly and gratefully. And I have grown accustomed to your voice and appearance. I like them, rather.

LIZA. Well, you have both of them on your gramophone and in your book of photographs. When you feel lonely without me, you can turn the machine on. It’s got no feelings to hurt.

HIGGINS. I can’t turn your soul on. Leave me those feelings; and you can take away the voice and the face. They are not you.

LIZA. Oh, you ARE a devil. You can twist the heart in a girl as easy as some could twist her arms to hurt her. Mrs. Pearce warned me. Time and again she has wanted to leave you; and you always got round her at the last minute. And you don’t care a bit for her. And you don’t care a bit for me.

HIGGINS. I care for life, for humanity; and you are a part of it that has come my way and been built into my house. What more can you or anyone ask?

LIZA. I won’t care for anybody that doesn’t care for me.

HIGGINS. Commercial principles, Eliza. Like [reproducing her Covent Garden pronunciation with professional exactness] s’yollin voylets [selling violets], isn’t it?

LIZA. Don’t sneer at me. It’s mean to sneer at me.

HIGGINS. I have never sneered in my life. Sneering doesn’t become either the human face or the human soul. I am expressing my righteous contempt for Commercialism. I don’t and won’t trade in affection. You call me a brute because you couldn’t buy a claim on me by fetching my slippers and finding my spectacles. You were a fool: I think a woman fetching a man’s slippers is a disgusting sight: did I ever fetch YOUR slippers? I think a good deal more of you for throwing them in my face. No use slaving for me and then saying you want to be cared for: who cares for a slave? If you come back, come back for the sake of good fellowship; for you’ll get nothing else. You’ve had a thousand times as much out of me as I have out of you; and if you dare to set up your little dog’s tricks of fetching and carrying slippers against my creation of a

Duchess Eliza, I’ll slam the door in your silly face.

LIZA. What did you do it for if you didn’t care for me? HIGGINS [heartily] Why, because it was my job.

LIZA. You never thought of the trouble it would make for me.

HIGGINS. Would the world ever have been made if its maker had been afraid of making trouble? Making life means making trouble. There’s only one way of escaping trouble; and that’s killing things. Cowards, you notice, are always shrieking to have troublesome people killed.

LIZA. I’m no preacher: I don’t notice things like that. I notice that you don’t notice me.

HIGGINS [jumping up and walking about intolerantly] Eliza: you’re an idiot. I waste the treasures of my Miltonic mind by spreading them before you. Once for all, understand that I go my way and do my work without caring twopence what happens to either of us. I am not intimidated, like your father and your stepmother. So you can come back or go to the devil: which you please.

LIZA. What am I to come back for?

HIGGINS [bouncing up on his knees on the ottoman and leaning over it to her] For the fun of it. That’s why I took you on.

LIZA [with averted face] And you may throw me out tomorrow if I don’t do everything you want me to?

HIGGINS. Yes; and you may walk out tomorrow if I don’t do everything YOU want me to.

LIZA. And live with my stepmother? HIGGINS. Yes, or sell flowers.

LIZA. Oh! if I only COULD go back to my flower basket! I should be independent of both you and father and all the world! Why did you take my independence from me? Why did I give it up? I’m a slave now, for all my fine clothes.

HIGGINS. Not a bit. I’ll adopt you as my daughter and settle money on you if you like. Or would you rather marry Pickering?

LIZA [looking fiercely round at him] I wouldn’t marry YOU if you asked me; and you’re nearer my age than what he is.

HIGGINS [gently] Than he is: not “than what he is.”

LIZA [losing her temper and rising] I’ll talk as I like. You’re not my teacher

now.

HIGGINS [reflectively] I don’t suppose Pickering would, though. He’s as confirmed an old bachelor as I am.

LIZA. That’s not what I want; and don’t you think it. I’ve always had chaps enough wanting me that way. Freddy Hill writes to me twice and three times a day, sheets and sheets.

HIGGINS [disagreeably surprised] Damn his impudence! [He recoils and finds himself sitting on his heels].

LIZA. He has a right to if he likes, poor lad. And he does love me. HIGGINS [getting off the ottoman] You have no right to encourage him. LIZA. Every girl has a right to be loved.

HIGGINS. What! By fools like that?

LIZA. Freddy’s not a fool. And if he’s weak and poor and wants me, may be he’d make me happier than my betters that bully me and don’t want me.

HIGGINS. Can he MAKE anything of you? That’s the point.

LIZA. Perhaps I could make something of him. But I never thought of us making anything of one another; and you never think of anything else. I only want to be natural.

HIGGINS. In short, you want me to be as infatuated about you as Freddy?

Is that it?

LIZA. No I don’t. That’s not the sort of feeling I want from you. And don’t you be too sure of yourself or of me. I could have been a bad girl if I’d liked. I’ve seen more of some things than you, for all your learning. Girls like me can drag gentlemen down to make love to them easy enough. And they wish each other dead the next minute.

HIGGINS. Of course they do. Then what in thunder are we quarrelling about?

LIZA [much troubled] I want a little kindness. I know I’m a common ignorant girl, and you a book-learned gentleman; but I’m not dirt under your feet. What I done [correcting herself] what I did was not for the dresses and the taxis: I did it because we were pleasant together and I come—came—to care for you; not to want you to make love to me, and not forgetting the difference between us, but more friendly like.

HIGGINS. Well, of course. That’s just how I feel. And how Pickering feels. Eliza: you’re a fool.

LIZA. That’s not a proper answer to give me [she sinks on the chair at the writing-table in tears].

HIGGINS. It’s all you’ll get until you stop being a common idiot. If you’re going to be a lady, you’ll have to give up feeling neglected if the men you know don’t spend half their time snivelling over you and the other half giving you black eyes. If you can’t stand the coldness of my sort of life, and the strain of it, go back to the gutter. Work til you are more a brute than a human being; and then cuddle and squabble and drink til you fall asleep. Oh, it’s a fine life, the life of the gutter. It’s real: it’s warm: it’s violent: you can feel it through the thickest skin: you can taste it and smell it without any training or any work. Not like Science and Literature and Classical Music and Philosophy and Art. You find me cold, unfeeling, selfish, don’t you? Very well: be off with you to the sort of people you like. Marry some sentimental hog or other with lots of money, and a thick pair of lips to kiss you with and a thick pair of boots to kick you with. If you can’t appreciate what you’ve got, you’d better get what you can appreciate.

LIZA [desperate] Oh, you are a cruel tyrant. I can’t talk to you: you turn everything against me: I’m always in the wrong. But you know very well all the time that you’re nothing but a bully. You know I can’t go back to the gutter, as you call it, and that I have no real friends in the world but you and the Colonel. You know well I couldn’t bear to live with a low common man after you two; and it’s wicked and cruel of you to insult me by pretending I could. You think I must go back to Wimpole Street because I have nowhere else to go but father’s. But don’t you be too sure that you have me under your feet to be trampled on and talked down. I’ll marry Freddy, I will, as soon as he’s able to support me.

HIGGINS [sitting down beside her] Rubbish! you shall marry an ambassador. You shall marry the Governor-General of India or the Lord- Lieutenant of Ireland, or somebody who wants a deputy-queen. I’m not going to have my masterpiece thrown away on Freddy.

LIZA. You think I like you to say that. But I haven’t forgot what you said a minute ago; and I won’t be coaxed round as if I was a baby or a puppy. If I can’t have kindness, I’ll have independence.

HIGGINS. Independence? That’s middle class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

LIZA [rising determinedly] I’ll let you see whether I’m dependent on you.

If you can preach, I can teach. I’ll go and be a teacher.

HIGGINS. What’ll you teach, in heaven’s name? LIZA. What you taught me. I’ll teach phonetics.

HIGGINS. Ha! Ha! Ha!

LIZA. I’ll offer myself as an assistant to Professor Nepean.

HIGGINS [rising in a fury] What! That impostor! that humbug! that toadying ignoramus! Teach him my methods! my discoveries! You take one step in his direction and I’ll wring your neck. [He lays hands on her]. Do you hear?

LIZA [defiantly non-resistant] Wring away. What do I care? I knew you’d strike me some day. [He lets her go, stamping with rage at having forgotten himself, and recoils so hastily that he stumbles back into his seat on the ottoman]. Aha! Now I know how to deal with you. What a fool I was not to think of it before! You can’t take away the knowledge you gave me. You said I had a finer ear than you. And I can be civil and kind to people, which is more than you can. Aha! That’s done you, Henry Higgins, it has. Now I don’t care that [snapping her fingers] for your bullying and your big talk. I’ll advertize it in the papers that your duchess is only a flower girl that you taught, and that she’ll teach anybody to be a duchess just the same in six months for a thousand guineas. Oh, when I think of myself crawling under your feet and being trampled on and called names, when all the time I had only to lift up my finger to be as good as you, I could just kick myself.

HIGGINS [wondering at her] You damned impudent slut, you! But it’s better than snivelling; better than fetching slippers and finding spectacles, isn’t it? [Rising] By George, Eliza, I said I’d make a woman of you; and I have. I like you like this.

LIZA. Yes: you turn round and make up to me now that I’m not afraid of you, and can do without you.

HIGGINS. Of course I do, you little fool. Five minutes ago you were like a millstone round my neck. Now you’re a tower of strength: a consort battleship. You and I and Pickering will be three old bachelors together instead of only two men and a silly girl.

Mrs. Higgins returns, dressed for the wedding. Eliza instantly becomes cool and elegant.

MRS. HIGGINS. The carriage is waiting, Eliza. Are you ready? LIZA. Quite. Is the Professor coming?

MRS. HIGGINS. Certainly not. He can’t behave himself in church. He makes remarks out loud all the time on the clergyman’s pronunciation.

LIZA. Then I shall not see you again, Professor. Good bye. [She goes to the door].

MRS. HIGGINS [coming to Higgins] Good-bye, dear.

HIGGINS. Good-bye, mother. [He is about to kiss her, when he recollects something]. Oh, by the way, Eliza, order a ham and a Stilton cheese, will you? And buy me a pair of reindeer gloves, number eights, and a tie to match that new suit of mine, at Eale & Binman’s. You can choose the color. [His cheerful, careless, vigorous voice shows that he is incorrigible].

LIZA [disdainfully] Buy them yourself. [She sweeps out].

MRS. HIGGINS. I’m afraid you’ve spoiled that girl, Henry. But never mind, dear: I’ll buy you the tie and gloves.

HIGGINS [sunnily] Oh, don’t bother. She’ll buy em all right enough.

Good-bye.

They kiss. Mrs. Higgins runs out. Higgins, left alone, rattles his cash in his pocket; chuckles; and disports himself in a highly self-satisfied manner.

**

The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed, would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of “happy endings” to misfit all stories. Now, the history of Eliza Doolittle, though called a romance because of the transfiguration it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it. This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because the true sequel is patent to anyone with a sense of human nature in general, and of feminine instinct in particular.

Eliza, in telling Higgins she would not marry him if he asked her, was not coquetting: she was announcing a well-considered decision. When a bachelor interests, and dominates, and teaches, and becomes important to a spinster, as Higgins with Eliza, she always, if she has character enough to be capable of it, considers very seriously indeed whether she will play for becoming that bachelor’s wife, especially if he is so little interested in marriage that a determined and devoted woman might capture him if she set herself resolutely to do it. Her decision will depend a good deal on whether she is really free to choose; and that, again, will depend on her age and income. If she is at the end of her youth, and has no security for her livelihood, she will marry him

because she must marry anybody who will provide for her. But at Eliza’s age a good-looking girl does not feel that pressure; she feels free to pick and choose. She is therefore guided by her instinct in the matter. Eliza’s instinct tells her not to marry Higgins. It does not tell her to give him up. It is not in the slightest doubt as to his remaining one of the strongest personal interests in her life. It would be very sorely strained if there was another woman likely to supplant her with him. But as she feels sure of him on that last point, she has no doubt at all as to her course, and would not have any, even if the difference of twenty years in age, which seems so great to youth, did not exist between them.

As our own instincts are not appealed to by her conclusion, let us see whether we cannot discover some reason in it. When Higgins excused his indifference to young women on the ground that they had an irresistible rival in his mother, he gave the clue to his inveterate old-bachelordom. The case is uncommon only to the extent that remarkable mothers are uncommon. If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses. This makes him a standing puzzle to the huge number of uncultivated people who have been brought up in tasteless homes by commonplace or disagreeable parents, and to whom, consequently, literature, painting, sculpture, music, and affectionate personal relations come as modes of sex if they come at all. The word passion means nothing else to them; and that Higgins could have a passion for phonetics and idealize his mother instead of Eliza, would seem to them absurd and unnatural. Nevertheless, when we look round and see that hardly anyone is too ugly or disagreeable to find a wife or a husband if he or she wants one, whilst many old maids and bachelors are above the average in quality and culture, we cannot help suspecting that the disentanglement of sex from the associations with which it is so commonly confused, a disentanglement which persons of genius achieve by sheer intellectual analysis, is sometimes produced or aided by parental fascination.

Now, though Eliza was incapable of thus explaining to herself Higgins’s formidable powers of resistance to the charm that prostrated Freddy at the first glance, she was instinctively aware that she could never obtain a complete grip of him, or come between him and his mother (the first necessity of the married woman). To put it shortly, she knew that for some mysterious reason he had not the makings of a married man in him, according to her conception of a husband as one to whom she would be his nearest and fondest and warmest interest. Even had there been no mother-rival, she would still have refused to

accept an interest in herself that was secondary to philosophic interests. Had Mrs. Higgins died, there would still have been Milton and the Universal Alphabet. Landor’s remark that to those who have the greatest power of loving, love is a secondary affair, would not have recommended Landor to Eliza. Put that along with her resentment of Higgins’s domineering superiority, and her mistrust of his coaxing cleverness in getting round her and evading her wrath when he had gone too far with his impetuous bullying, and you will see that Eliza’s instinct had good grounds for warning her not to marry her Pygmalion.

And now, whom did Eliza marry? For if Higgins was a predestinate old bachelor, she was most certainly not a predestinate old maid. Well, that can be told very shortly to those who have not guessed it from the indications she has herself given them.

Almost immediately after Eliza is stung into proclaiming her considered determination not to marry Higgins, she mentions the fact that young Mr. Frederick Eynsford Hill is pouring out his love for her daily through the post. Now Freddy is young, practically twenty years younger than Higgins: he is a gentleman (or, as Eliza would qualify him, a toff), and speaks like one; he is nicely dressed, is treated by the Colonel as an equal, loves her unaffectedly, and is not her master, nor ever likely to dominate her in spite of his advantage of social standing. Eliza has no use for the foolish romantic tradition that all women love to be mastered, if not actually bullied and beaten. “When you go to women,” says Nietzsche, “take your whip with you.” Sensible despots have never confined that precaution to women: they have taken their whips with them when they have dealt with men, and been slavishly idealized by the men over whom they have flourished the whip much more than by women. No doubt there are slavish women as well as slavish men; and women, like men, admire those that are stronger than themselves. But to admire a strong person and to live under that strong person’s thumb are two different things. The weak may not be admired and hero-worshipped; but they are by no means disliked or shunned; and they never seem to have the least difficulty in marrying people who are too good for them. They may fail in emergencies; but life is not one long emergency: it is mostly a string of situations for which no exceptional strength is needed, and with which even rather weak people can cope if they have a stronger partner to help them out. Accordingly, it is a truth everywhere in evidence that strong people, masculine or feminine, not only do not marry stronger people, but do not show any preference for them in selecting their friends. When a lion meets another with a louder roar “the first lion thinks the last a bore.” The man or woman who feels strong enough for two, seeks for every other quality in a partner than strength.

The converse is also true. Weak people want to marry strong people who

do not frighten them too much; and this often leads them to make the mistake we describe metaphorically as “biting off more than they can chew.” They want too much for too little; and when the bargain is unreasonable beyond all bearing, the union becomes impossible: it ends in the weaker party being either discarded or borne as a cross, which is worse. People who are not only weak, but silly or obtuse as well, are often in these difficulties.

This being the state of human affairs, what is Eliza fairly sure to do when she is placed between Freddy and Higgins? Will she look forward to a lifetime of fetching Higgins’s slippers or to a lifetime of Freddy fetching hers? There can be no doubt about the answer. Unless Freddy is biologically repulsive to her, and Higgins biologically attractive to a degree that overwhelms all her other instincts, she will, if she marries either of them, marry Freddy.

And that is just what Eliza did.

Complications ensued; but they were economic, not romantic. Freddy had no money and no occupation. His mother’s jointure, a last relic of the opulence of Largelady Park, had enabled her to struggle along in Earlscourt with an air of gentility, but not to procure any serious secondary education for her children, much less give the boy a profession. A clerkship at thirty shillings a week was beneath Freddy’s dignity, and extremely distasteful to him besides. His prospects consisted of a hope that if he kept up appearances somebody would do something for him. The something appeared vaguely to his imagination as a private secretaryship or a sinecure of some sort. To his mother it perhaps appeared as a marriage to some lady of means who could not resist her boy’s niceness. Fancy her feelings when he married a flower girl who had become declassee under extraordinary circumstances which were now notorious!

It is true that Eliza’s situation did not seem wholly ineligible. Her father, though formerly a dustman, and now fantastically disclassed, had become extremely popular in the smartest society by a social talent which triumphed over every prejudice and every disadvantage. Rejected by the middle class, which he loathed, he had shot up at once into the highest circles by his wit, his dustmanship (which he carried like a banner), and his Nietzschean transcendence of good and evil. At intimate ducal dinners he sat on the right hand of the Duchess; and in country houses he smoked in the pantry and was made much of by the butler when he was not feeding in the dining-room and being consulted by cabinet ministers. But he found it almost as hard to do all this on four thousand a year as Mrs. Eynsford Hill to live in Earlscourt on an income so pitiably smaller that I have not the heart to disclose its exact figure. He absolutely refused to add the last straw to his burden by contributing to Eliza’s support.

Thus Freddy and Eliza, now Mr. and Mrs. Eynsford Hill, would have spent a penniless honeymoon but for a wedding present of 500 pounds from the Colonel to Eliza. It lasted a long time because Freddy did not know how to spend money, never having had any to spend, and Eliza, socially trained by a pair of old bachelors, wore her clothes as long as they held together and looked pretty, without the least regard to their being many months out of fashion. Still, 500 pounds will not last two young people for ever; and they both knew, and Eliza felt as well, that they must shift for themselves in the end. She could quarter herself on Wimpole Street because it had come to be her home; but she was quite aware that she ought not to quarter Freddy there, and that it would not be good for his character if she did.

Not that the Wimpole Street bachelors objected. When she consulted them, Higgins declined to be bothered about her housing problem when that solution was so simple. Eliza’s desire to have Freddy in the house with her seemed of no more importance than if she had wanted an extra piece of bedroom furniture. Pleas as to Freddy’s character, and the moral obligation on him to earn his own living, were lost on Higgins. He denied that Freddy had any character, and declared that if he tried to do any useful work some competent person would have the trouble of undoing it: a procedure involving a net loss to the community, and great unhappiness to Freddy himself, who was obviously intended by Nature for such light work as amusing Eliza, which, Higgins declared, was a much more useful and honorable occupation than working in the city. When Eliza referred again to her project of teaching phonetics, Higgins abated not a jot of his violent opposition to it. He said she was not within ten years of being qualified to meddle with his pet subject; and as it was evident that the Colonel agreed with him, she felt she could not go against them in this grave matter, and that she had no right, without Higgins’s consent, to exploit the knowledge he had given her; for his knowledge seemed to her as much his private property as his watch: Eliza was no communist. Besides, she was superstitiously devoted to them both, more entirely and frankly after her marriage than before it.

It was the Colonel who finally solved the problem, which had cost him much perplexed cogitation. He one day asked Eliza, rather shyly, whether she had quite given up her notion of keeping a flower shop. She replied that she had thought of it, but had put it out of her head, because the Colonel had said, that day at Mrs. Higgins’s, that it would never do. The Colonel confessed that when he said that, he had not quite recovered from the dazzling impression of the day before. They broke the matter to Higgins that evening. The sole comment vouchsafed by him very nearly led to a serious quarrel with Eliza. It was to the effect that she would have in Freddy an ideal errand boy.

Freddy himself was next sounded on the subject. He said he had been

thinking of a shop himself; though it had presented itself to his pennilessness as a small place in which Eliza should sell tobacco at one counter whilst he sold newspapers at the opposite one. But he agreed that it would be extraordinarily jolly to go early every morning with Eliza to Covent Garden and buy flowers on the scene of their first meeting: a sentiment which earned him many kisses from his wife. He added that he had always been afraid to propose anything of the sort, because Clara would make an awful row about a step that must damage her matrimonial chances, and his mother could not be expected to like it after clinging for so many years to that step of the social ladder on which retail trade is impossible.

This difficulty was removed by an event highly unexpected by Freddy’s mother. Clara, in the course of her incursions into those artistic circles which were the highest within her reach, discovered that her conversational qualifications were expected to include a grounding in the novels of Mr. H.G. Wells. She borrowed them in various directions so energetically that she swallowed them all within two months. The result was a conversion of a kind quite common today. A modern Acts of the Apostles would fill fifty whole Bibles if anyone were capable of writing it.

Poor Clara, who appeared to Higgins and his mother as a disagreeable and ridiculous person, and to her own mother as in some inexplicable way a social failure, had never seen herself in either light; for, though to some extent ridiculed and mimicked in West Kensington like everybody else there, she was accepted as a rational and normal—or shall we say inevitable?—sort of human being. At worst they called her The Pusher; but to them no more than to herself had it ever occurred that she was pushing the air, and pushing it in a wrong direction. Still, she was not happy. She was growing desperate. Her one asset, the fact that her mother was what the Epsom greengrocer called a carriage lady had no exchange value, apparently. It had prevented her from getting educated, because the only education she could have afforded was education with the Earlscourt green grocer’s daughter. It had led her to seek the society of her mother’s class; and that class simply would not have her, because she was much poorer than the greengrocer, and, far from being able to afford a maid, could not afford even a housemaid, and had to scrape along at home with an illiberally treated general servant. Under such circumstances nothing could give her an air of being a genuine product of Largelady Park. And yet its tradition made her regard a marriage with anyone within her reach as an unbearable humiliation. Commercial people and professional people in a small way were odious to her. She ran after painters and novelists; but she did not charm them; and her bold attempts to pick up and practise artistic and literary talk irritated them. She was, in short, an utter failure, an ignorant, incompetent, pretentious, unwelcome, penniless, useless little snob; and though she did not admit these disqualifications (for nobody ever faces

unpleasant truths of this kind until the possibility of a way out dawns on them) she felt their effects too keenly to be satisfied with her position.

Clara had a startling eyeopener when, on being suddenly wakened to enthusiasm by a girl of her own age who dazzled her and produced in her a gushing desire to take her for a model, and gain her friendship, she discovered that this exquisite apparition had graduated from the gutter in a few months’ time. It shook her so violently, that when Mr. H. G. Wells lifted her on the point of his puissant pen, and placed her at the angle of view from which the life she was leading and the society to which she clung appeared in its true relation to real human needs and worthy social structure, he effected a conversion and a conviction of sin comparable to the most sensational feats of General Booth or Gypsy Smith. Clara’s snobbery went bang. Life suddenly began to move with her. Without knowing how or why, she began to make friends and enemies. Some of the acquaintances to whom she had been a tedious or indifferent or ridiculous affliction, dropped her: others became cordial. To her amazement she found that some “quite nice” people were saturated with Wells, and that this accessibility to ideas was the secret of their niceness. People she had thought deeply religious, and had tried to conciliate on that tack with disastrous results, suddenly took an interest in her, and revealed a hostility to conventional religion which she had never conceived possible except among the most desperate characters. They made her read Galsworthy; and Galsworthy exposed the vanity of Largelady Park and finished her. It exasperated her to think that the dungeon in which she had languished for so many unhappy years had been unlocked all the time, and that the impulses she had so carefully struggled with and stifled for the sake of keeping well with society, were precisely those by which alone she could have come into any sort of sincere human contact. In the radiance of these discoveries, and the tumult of their reaction, she made a fool of herself as freely and conspicuously as when she so rashly adopted Eliza’s expletive in Mrs. Higgins’s drawing-room; for the new-born Wellsian had to find her bearings almost as ridiculously as a baby; but nobody hates a baby for its ineptitudes, or thinks the worse of it for trying to eat the matches; and Clara lost no friends by her follies. They laughed at her to her face this time; and she had to defend herself and fight it out as best she could.

When Freddy paid a visit to Earlscourt (which he never did when he could possibly help it) to make the desolating announcement that he and his Eliza were thinking of blackening the Largelady scutcheon by opening a shop, he found the little household already convulsed by a prior announcement from Clara that she also was going to work in an old furniture shop in Dover Street, which had been started by a fellow Wellsian. This appointment Clara owed, after all, to her old social accomplishment of Push. She had made up her mind that, cost what it might, she would see Mr. Wells in the flesh; and she had

achieved her end at a garden party. She had better luck than so rash an enterprise deserved. Mr. Wells came up to her expectations. Age had not withered him, nor could custom stale his infinite variety in half an hour. His pleasant neatness and compactness, his small hands and feet, his teeming ready brain, his unaffected accessibility, and a certain fine apprehensiveness which stamped him as susceptible from his topmost hair to his tipmost toe, proved irresistible. Clara talked of nothing else for weeks and weeks afterwards. And as she happened to talk to the lady of the furniture shop, and that lady also desired above all things to know Mr. Wells and sell pretty things to him, she offered Clara a job on the chance of achieving that end through her.

And so it came about that Eliza’s luck held, and the expected opposition to the flower shop melted away. The shop is in the arcade of a railway station not very far from the Victoria and Albert Museum; and if you live in that neighborhood you may go there any day and buy a buttonhole from Eliza.

Now here is a last opportunity for romance. Would you not like to be assured that the shop was an immense success, thanks to Eliza’s charms and her early business experience in Covent Garden? Alas! the truth is the truth: the shop did not pay for a long time, simply because Eliza and her Freddy did not know how to keep it. True, Eliza had not to begin at the very beginning: she knew the names and prices of the cheaper flowers; and her elation was unbounded when she found that Freddy, like all youths educated at cheap, pretentious, and thoroughly inefficient schools, knew a little Latin. It was very little, but enough to make him appear to her a Porson or Bentley, and to put him at his ease with botanical nomenclature. Unfortunately he knew nothing else; and Eliza, though she could count money up to eighteen shillings or so, and had acquired a certain familiarity with the language of Milton from her struggles to qualify herself for winning Higgins’s bet, could not write out a bill without utterly disgracing the establishment. Freddy’s power of stating in Latin that Balbus built a wall and that Gaul was divided into three parts did not carry with it the slightest knowledge of accounts or business: Colonel Pickering had to explain to him what a cheque book and a bank account meant. And the pair were by no means easily teachable. Freddy backed up Eliza in her obstinate refusal to believe that they could save money by engaging a bookkeeper with some knowledge of the business. How, they argued, could you possibly save money by going to extra expense when you already could not make both ends meet? But the Colonel, after making the ends meet over and over again, at last gently insisted; and Eliza, humbled to the dust by having to beg from him so often, and stung by the uproarious derision of Higgins, to whom the notion of Freddy succeeding at anything was a joke that never palled, grasped the fact that business, like phonetics, has to be learned.

On the piteous spectacle of the pair spending their evenings in shorthand schools and polytechnic classes, learning bookkeeping and typewriting with incipient junior clerks, male and female, from the elementary schools, let me not dwell. There were even classes at the London School of Economics, and a humble personal appeal to the director of that institution to recommend a course bearing on the flower business. He, being a humorist, explained to them the method of the celebrated Dickensian essay on Chinese Metaphysics by the gentleman who read an article on China and an article on Metaphysics and combined the information. He suggested that they should combine the London School with Kew Gardens. Eliza, to whom the procedure of the Dickensian gentleman seemed perfectly correct (as in fact it was) and not in the least funny (which was only her ignorance) took his advice with entire gravity. But the effort that cost her the deepest humiliation was a request to Higgins, whose pet artistic fancy, next to Milton’s verse, was calligraphy, and who himself wrote a most beautiful Italian hand, that he would teach her to write. He declared that she was congenitally incapable of forming a single letter worthy of the least of Milton’s words; but she persisted; and again he suddenly threw himself into the task of teaching her with a combination of stormy intensity, concentrated patience, and occasional bursts of interesting disquisition on the beauty and nobility, the august mission and destiny, of human handwriting. Eliza ended by acquiring an extremely uncommercial script which was a positive extension of her personal beauty, and spending three times as much on stationery as anyone else because certain qualities and shapes of paper became indispensable to her. She could not even address an envelope in the usual way because it made the margins all wrong.

Their commercial school days were a period of disgrace and despair for the young couple. They seemed to be learning nothing about flower shops. At last they gave it up as hopeless, and shook the dust of the shorthand schools, and the polytechnics, and the London School of Economics from their feet for ever. Besides, the business was in some mysterious way beginning to take care of itself. They had somehow forgotten their objections to employing other people. They came to the conclusion that their own way was the best, and that they had really a remarkable talent for business. The Colonel, who had been compelled for some years to keep a sufficient sum on current account at his bankers to make up their deficits, found that the provision was unnecessary: the young people were prospering. It is true that there was not quite fair play between them and their competitors in trade. Their week-ends in the country cost them nothing, and saved them the price of their Sunday dinners; for the motor car was the Colonel’s; and he and Higgins paid the hotel bills. Mr. F. Hill, florist and greengrocer (they soon discovered that there was money in asparagus; and asparagus led to other vegetables), had an air which stamped the business as classy; and in private life he was still Frederick Eynsford Hill,

Esquire. Not that there was any swank about him: nobody but Eliza knew that he had been christened Frederick Challoner. Eliza herself swanked like anything.

That is all. That is how it has turned out. It is astonishing how much Eliza still manages to meddle in the housekeeping at Wimpole Street in spite of the shop and her own family. And it is notable that though she never nags her husband, and frankly loves the Colonel as if she were his favorite daughter, she has never got out of the habit of nagging Higgins that was established on the fatal night when she won his bet for him. She snaps his head off on the faintest provocation, or on none. He no longer dares to tease her by assuming an abysmal inferiority of Freddy’s mind to his own. He storms and bullies and derides; but she stands up to him so ruthlessly that the Colonel has to ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins; and it is the only request of his that brings a mulish expression into her face. Nothing but some emergency or calamity great enough to break down all likes and dislikes, and throw them both back on their common humanity—and may they be spared any such trial!

—will ever alter this. She knows that Higgins does not need her, just as her

father did not need her. The very scrupulousness with which he told her that day that he had become used to having her there, and dependent on her for all sorts of little services, and that he should miss her if she went away (it would never have occurred to Freddy or the Colonel to say anything of the sort) deepens her inner certainty that she is “no more to him than them slippers”, yet she has a sense, too, that his indifference is deeper than the infatuation of commoner souls. She is immensely interested in him. She has even secret mischievous moments in which she wishes she could get him alone, on a desert island, away from all ties and with nobody else in the world to consider, and just drag him off his pedestal and see him making love like any common man. We all have private imaginations of that sort. But when it comes to business, to the life that she really leads as distinguished from the life of dreams and fancies, she likes Freddy and she likes the Colonel; and she does not like Higgins and Mr. Doolittle. Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable.

Swami and Friends

ADITHYA ACADEMY SALEM

R. K. Narayan

CHAPTER I

Monday Morning

It was Monday morning. Swaminathan was reluctant to open his eyes. He considered Monday specially unpleasant in the calendar. After the delicious freedom of Saturday and Sunday, it was difficult to get into the Monday mood of work and discipline. He shuddered at the very thought of school: that dismal yellow building; the fire-eyed Vedanayagam, his class-teacher; and the Head Master with his thin long cane….

By eight he was at his desk in his ‘room’, which was only a corner in his father’s dressing-room. He had a table on which all his things, his coat, cap, slate, ink-bottle, and books, were thrown in a confused heap. He sat on his stool and shut

his eyes to recollect what work he had for the day: first of course there was Arithmetic–those fiveApDuIzTzleHsYinAPrAofCit aAnDd LEoMss;YtheSnAthLeEreMwas English–he had to copy down a page from his Eighth Lesson, and write dictionary meanings of difficult

words; and then there was Geography.

And only two hours before him to do all this heap of work and get ready for the school!

Fire-eyed Vedanayagam was presiding over the class with his back to the long window. Through its bars one saw a bit of the drill ground and a corner of the veranda of the Infant Standards. There were huge windows on the left showing vast open grounds bound at the other extreme by the railway embankment.

To Swaminathan existence in the classroom was possible only because he could watch the toddlers of the Infant Standards falling over one another, and through the windows on the left see the 12.30 mail gliding over the embankment, booming and rattling while passing over the Sarayu Bridge. The first hour passed

of quietly. The second they had Arithmetic. Vedanayagam went out and returned in a few minutes in the role of an Arithmetic teacher. He droned on monotonously. Swaminathan was terribly bored. His teacher’s voice was beginning to get on his nerves. He felt sleepy.

The teacher called for home exercises. Swaminathan left his seat, jumped on the platform, and placed his note-book on the table. While the teacher was scrutinizing the sums, Swaminathan was gazing on his face, which seemed so tame at close quarters. His criticism of the teacher’s face was that his eyes were too near each other, that there was more hair on his chin than one saw from the bench, and that he was very very bad-looking. His reverie was disturbed. He felt a terrible pain in the soft flesh above his left elbow. The teacher was pinching him with one hand, and with the other, crossing out all the sums. He wrote ‘Very Bad’ at the bottom of the page, flung the note-book in Swaminathan’s face, and drove him back to his seat.

Next period AthDeyIThaHd YHiAstoAryC. TAheDbEoyMs YlooSkeAd LfoErwMard to it eagerly. It was taken by D. Pillai, who had earned a name in the school for kindness and good

humour. He was reputed to have never frowned or sworn at the boys at any time. His method of teaching History conformed to no canon of education. He told the boys with a wealth of detail the private histories of Vasco da Gama, Clive, Hastings, and others. When he described the various fights in History, one heard the clash of arms and the groans of the slain. He was the despair of the Head Master whenever the latter stole along the corridor with noiseless steps on his rounds of inspection.

The Scripture period was the last in the morning. It was not such a dull hour after all. There were moments in it that brought stirring pictures before one: the Red Sea cleaving and making way for the Israelites; the physical feats of Samson; Jesus rising from the grave; and so on. The only trouble was that the Scripture master, Mr Ebenezar, was a fanatic.

‘Oh, wretched idiots!’ the teacher said, clenching his fists, Why do you worship dirty, lifeless, wooden idols and stone images? Can they talk? No. Can they see? No. Can they bless you? No. Can they take you to Heaven? No. Why? Because they have no life. What did your Gods do when Mohammed of Gazni smashed them to pieces, trod upon them, and constructed out of them steps for his lavatory? If those idols and images had life, why did they not parry Mohammed’s onslaughts?’

He then turned to Christianity. ‘Now see our Lord Jesus. He could cure the sick, relieve the poor, and take us to Heaven. He was a real God. Trust him and he will take you to Heaven; the kingdom of Heaven is within us.’ Tears rolled down Ebenezar’s cheeks when he pictured Jesus before him. Next moment his face became purple with rage as he thought of Sri Krishna: “Did our Jesus go gadding about with dancing girls like your Krishna? Did our Jesus go about stealing butter like that archscoundrel Krishna’? Did our Jesus practice dark tricks on those

around him?’

ADITHYA ACADEMY SALEM

He paused for breath. The teacher was intolerable to-day. Swaminathan’s

blood boiled. He got up and asked, ‘If he did not, why was he crucified?’ The teacher told him that he might come to him at the end of the period and learn it in private. Emboldened by this mild reply, Swaminathan put to him another question, ‘If he was a God, why did he eat flesh and fish and drink wine?’ As a brahmin boy it was inconceivable to him that a God should be a non-vegetarian. In answer to this, Ebenezar left his seat, advanced slowly towards Swaminathan, and tried to wrench his left ear off.

Next day Swaminathan was at school early. There was still half an hour before the bell. He usually spent such an interval in running round the school or in playing the Digging Game under the huge Tamarind tree. But to-day he sat apart, sunk in thought. He had a thick letter in his pocket. He felt guilty when he touched

its edge with his fingers. He called himself an utter idiot for having told his father about Ebenezar the night before during the meal.

As soon as the bell rang, he walked into the Head Master’s room and handed him a letter. The Head Master’s face became serious when he read:

Sir,

‘I beg to inform you that my son Swaminathan of the First Form, A section, was assaulted by his Scripture Master yesterday in a fanatical rage. I hear that he is always most insulting and provoking in his references to the Hindu religion. It is bound to have a bad effect upon the boys. This is not the place for me to dwell upon the necessity for toleration in these matters.

I am also informed that when my son got up to have a few doubts cleared, he was roughly handled by the same teacher. His ears were still red when he came home last evening.

The one conclusion that I can come to is that you do not want non-

Christian boys in yoAurDscIThoHolY. IAf it AisCsoA, DyoEu MmaYy kSinAdlyLEinfMorm us as we are quite willing to withdraw our boys and send them elsewhere. I may remind you that

Albert Mission School is not the only school that this town, Malgudi, possesses. I hope you will be kind enough to inquire into the matter and favour me with a reply. If not, I regret to inform you, I shall be constrained to draw the attention of higher authorities to these Unchristian practices.

I have the honour to be, Sir,

Your most obedient servant,

W. T. Sreenivasan.’

When Swaminathan came out of the room, the whole school crowded round him and hung on his lips. But he treated inquisitive questions with haughty indifference. He honoured only four persons with his confidence. Those were the four that he liked and admired most in his class. The first was Somu, the Monitor, who carried himself with such an easy air. He set about his business, whatever it was, with absolute confidence and calmness. He was known to be chummy even with the teachers. No teacher ever put to him a question in the class. It could not be said that he shone brilliantly as a student. It was believed that only the Head Master could reprimand him. He was more or less the uncle of the class.

Then there was Mani, the mighty Good-For-Nothing. He towered above all the other boys of the class. He seldom brought any books to the class, and never bothered about home-work. He came to the class, monopolised the last bench, and slept bravely. No teacher ever tried to prod him.

It was said that a new teacher who once tried it very nearly lost his life.

Mani bullied all straAngDerIsTthHaYt cAamAe ChiAs wDaEy,MbeYthSeyAbLigEoMr small. People usually slunk aside when he passed. Wearing his cap at an angle, with a Tamil novel

under his arm, he had been coming to the school ever since the old school peon could remember. In most of the classes he stayed longer than his friends did. Swaminathan was proud of his friendship. While others crouched in awe, he -could address him as ‘Mani’ with gusto and pat him on the back familiarly. Swaminathan admiringly asked whence Mani derived his power. Mani replied that he had a pair of wooden clubs at home with which he would break the backs of those that dared to tamper with him.

Then there was Sankar, the most brilliant boy of the class. He solved any problem that was given to him in five minutes, and always managed to border on 90 %. There was a belief among a section of the boys that if only he started cross- examining the teachers the teachers would be nowhere. Another section asserted that Sankar was a dud and that he learnt all the problems and their solution in

advance by his sycophancy. He was said to receive his 90% as a result of washing clothes for his masters. He could speak to the teachers in English in the open class. He knew all the rivers, mountains, and countries in the world. He could repeat History in his sleep. Grammar was child’s play to him. His face was radiant with intelligence, though his nose was almost always damp, and though he came to the class with his hair braided and with flowers in it. Swaminathan looked on him as a marvel. He was very happy when he made Mani see eye to eye with him and admit Sankar to their company. Mani liked him in his own way and brought down his heavy fist on Sankar’s back whenever he felt inclined to demonstrate his affection. He would scratch his head and ask where the blithering fool of a scraggy youngster got all that brain from and why he should not part with a little of it.

The fourth friend was Samuel known as the ‘Pea’ on account of his size. There was nothing outstanding about him. He was just ordinary, no outstanding virtue of muscle or intellect. He was as bad in Arithmetic as Swaminathan was. He

was as apprehensivAe,DwIeTakH, YanAd nAerCvoAusD, EabMouYt thSinAgsLaEs MSwaminathan was. The bond between them was laughter. They were able to see together the same

absurdities and incongruities in things. The most trivial and unnoticeable thing to others would tickle them to death.

When Swaminathan told them what action his father had taken in the Scripture Master affair, there was a murmur of approval. Somu was the first to express it, by bestowing on his admirer a broad grin. Sankar looked serious and said, ‘Whatever others might say, you did right in setting your father to the job.’ The mighty Mani half closed his eyes and grunted an approval of sorts. He was only sorry that the matter should have been handled by elders. He saw no sense in it. Things of this kind should not be allowed to go beyond the four walls of the classroom. If he were Swaminathan, he would have closed the whole incident at the beginning by hurling an ink bottle, if nothing bigger was available, at the

teacher. Well, there was no harm in what Swaminathan had done; he would have done infinitely worse by keeping quiet.

However, let the Scripture Master look out: Mani had decided to wring his neck and break his back. Samuel the Pea, found himself in an acutely embarrassing position. On the one hand, he felt constrained to utter some remark. On the other, he was a Christian and saw nothing wrong in Ebenezar’s observations, which seemed to be only an amplification of one of the Commandments. He felt that his right place was on Ebenezar’s side. He managed to escape by making scathing comments on Ebenezar’s dress and appearance and leaving it at that.

The class had got wind of the affair. When the Scripture period arrived there was a general expectation of some dramatic denouement. But nothing happened. Ebenezar went on as merrily as ever. He had taken the trouble that day to plod through Baghavad Gita, and this generous piece of writing lends itself to

any interpretation. InAEDbeITneHzaYr’sAhaAnCd iAt sDerEveMd aYs aSwAeLapEoMn against Hinduism.

His tone was as vigorous as ever, but in his denunciation there was more scholarship. He pulled Baghavad Gita to pieces, after raising Hinduism on its base. Step by step he was reaching the sublime heights of rhetoric. The class Bible lay uncared for on the table.

The Head Master glided in. Ebenezar halted, pushing back his chair, and rose, greatly Hurried. He looked questioningly at the Head Master. The Head Master grimly asked him to go on. Ebenezar had meanwhile stealthily inserted a finger into the pages of the closed Bible. On the word of command from the Head Master, he tried to look sweet and relaxed his brow, which was knit in fury. He then opened his book where the finger marked and began to read at random. It happened to be the Nativity of Christ. The great event had occurred. There the divine occupant was in the manger. The Wise Men of the East were faithfully following the Star.

The boys attended in their usual abstracted way. It made little difference to them whether Ebenezar was making a study of Hinduism in the light of Baghavad Gita or was merely describing the Nativity of Christ.

The Head Master listened for a while and, in an undertone, demanded an explanation. They were nearing the terminal examination and Ebenezar had still not gone beyond the Nativity. When would he reach the Crucifixion and Resurrection, and begin to revise? Ebenezar was flabbergasted. He could not think of anything to say. He made a bare escape by hinting that that particular day of the week, he usually devoted to a rambling revision. Oh, no! He was not as far behind as that. He was in the proximity of the Last Supper. At the end of the day Swaminathan was summoned to the Head Master’s room. As soon as he received the note, he had an impulse to run home. And when he expressed it, Mani took him in his hands, propelled him through to the Head Master’s room, and gave him a gentle push in. Swaminathan staggered before the Head Master.

Ebenezar wAasDIsTittHingYAon AaCsAtoDol,EloMokYingSAshLeeEpMish. The Head Master asked: ‘What is the trouble, Swaminathan?’

Oh–nothing, sir,’ Swaminathan replied. ‘If it is nothing, why this letter?’

‘Oh!’ Swaminathan ejaculated uncertainly.

Ebenezar attempted to smile. Swaminathan wished to be well out of the whole affair. He felt he would not mind if a hundred Ebenezars said a thousand times worse things about the Gods.

You know why I am here?’ asked the Head Master.

Swaminathan searched for an answer: the Head Master might be there to receive letters from boys’ parents; he might be there to flay Ebenezars alive; he might be there to deliver six cuts with his cane every Monday at twelve o’clock. And above all why this question?

‘I don’t know, sir,’ Swaminathan replied innocently.

answer.

‘I am here to look after you,’ said the Head Master.

Swaminathan was relieved to find that the question had such a simple

‘And so continued the Head Master, ‘you must come to me if you want any

help, before you go to your father.’

Swaminathan furtively glanced at Ebenezar, who writhed in his chair.

‘I am sorry,’ said the Head Master, ‘that you should have been so foolish as to go to your father about this simple matter. I shall look into it. Take this letter to your father.

Swaminathan took the letter and shot out of the room with great relief.

ADITHYA ACADEMY SALEM

CHAPTER II

Rajam and Mani

RIVER SARAYU was the pride of Malgudi. It was some ten minutes walk from Ellaman Street, the last street of the town, chiefly occupied by oilmongers. Its sand- banks were the evening resort of all the people of the town. The Municipal President took any distinguished visitor to the top of the Town Hall and proudly pointed to him Sarayu in moonlight, glistening like a silver belt across the North.

The usual evening crowd was on the sand. Swaminathan and Mani sat aloof on a river-step, with their legs dangling in water. The peepul branches overhanging the river rustled pleasantly. A light breeze played about the boughs and scattered stray leaves on the gliding stream below. Birds filled the air with their cries. Far away, near Nallappa’s Mango Grove, a little downstream, a herd of cattle

was crossing the river. And then a country cart drawn by bullocks passed, the cart- man humming a lowAtuDneIT. IHt wYaAs soAmCeAfifDteeEnMmYinutSesApLaEst Msunset and there was a soft red in the West.

‘The water runs very deep here, doesn’t it?’ Mani asked. ‘Yes, why?’

‘I am going to bring Rajam here, bundle him up, and throw him into the

river.’

Rajam was a fresh arrival in the First A. He had sauntered into the class on

the reopening day of the Second Term, walked up to the last bench, sat beside Mani, and felt very comfortable indeed till Mani gave him a jab in the ribs, which he returned. He had impressed the whole class on the very first day. He was a new- comer; he dressed very well–he was the only boy in the class who wore socks and shoes, fur cap and tie, and a wonderful coat and knickers.

He came to the school in a car. As well as all this, he proved to be a very good student too. There were vague rumours that he had come from some English boys’ school somewhere in Madras. He spoke very good English, ‘Exactly like a “European”‘; which meant that few in the school could make out what he said. Many of his class-mates could not trust themselves to speak to him, their fund of broken English being small. Only Sankar, the genius of the class, had the courage to face him, though his English sounded halting and weak before that of Rajam.

This Rajam was a rival to Mani. In his manner to Mani he assumed a certain nonchalance to which Mani was not accustomed. If Mani jabbed, Rajam jabbed; if Mani clouted, he clouted; if Mani kicked, he kicked. If Mani was the overlord of the class, Rajam seemed to be nothing less.

And add to all this the fact that Rajam was a regular seventy percenter, second only to Sankar. There were sure indications that Rajam was the new power in the class. Day by day as Mani looked on, it was becoming increasingly clear that

a new menace had aApDpeIaTreHd YinAhisAliCfe.ADEMY SALEM

All this lay behind his decision on the river-step to bundle up Rajam and throw him into the river. Swaminathan expressed a slight fear: “You forget that his father is the police superintendent.’ Mani remained silent for a while and said, What do I care? Some night I am going to crack his shoulders with my clubs.’

‘If I were you, I would keep out of the way of policemen. They are an awful lot,’ said Swaminathan.

‘If you were me! Huh! But thank God I am not you, a milk-toothed coward like you.’

Swaminathan bit his lips and sighed.

‘And that reminds me,’ said the other, ‘you are in need of a little warning. I find you hanging about that Rajam a bit too much. Well, have a care for your limbs. That is all I can say.’

Swaminathan broke into loud protestations. Did Mani think that Swaminathan could respect anyone but him, Mani the dear old friend and guide? What made him think so? As far as Swaminathan could remember, he had never been within three yards of Rajam. Oh, how he hated him!

That vile upstart! When had Mani seen him with Rajam? Oh, yes, it must have been during the Drawing period on Monday. It wa s Rajam who had come and talked to him in spite of the cold face that Swaminathan had turned to him.

That ass had wanted a pencil sharpener, which he did not get, as he was promptly directed to go to a shop and buy it if he needed it so urgently. Oh, there was no comparison between Rajam and Mani.

This pleased Mani greatly. For the first time that evening he laughed, and laughed heartily too. He shook Swaminathan and gave such an affectionate twist to his ear that Swaminathan gave a long howl. And then he suddenly asked, ‘Did you bring the thing that I wanted?’

‘Oh, Mani! I AbeDgIaTHhuYndAredApCarAdoDnEs oMf yYouS. MAyLmEoMther was all the time in the kitchen. I could not get it.’ (‘It’ referred to lime pickles.)

‘You are a nasty little coward–Oh, this riverbank and the fine evening. How splendid it would have been!…’

Swaminathan was to act as a cord of communication between Rajam and Mani. They were sitting in the last bench with their backs against the yellow wall. Swaminathan sat between Rajam and Mani. Their books were before them on the desks; but their minds were busy.

Mani wrote on a piece of paper ‘Are you a man?’ and gave it to Swaminathan, who pushed it across to Rajam, putting on as offensive a look as possible. Rajam read it, crumpled it, and threw it away. At which Mani wrote another note repeating the question, with the addition ‘You are the son of a dog if you don’t answer this,’ and pushed it across. Rajam hissed into Swaminathan’s face, ‘You scoundrel, don’t disturb me,’ and crumpled the letter.

Further progress was stopped.

‘Swaminathan, stand up,’ said the teacher. Swaminathan stood up faithfully.

‘What is Lisbon famous for?’ asked the teacher.

Swaminathan hesitated and ventured, ‘For being the capital of Spain.’

The teacher bit his moustache and fired a second question, ‘What do you know about the Indian climate?’

‘It is hot in summer and cold in winter.’

‘Stand up on the bench!’ roared the teacher. And Swaminathan stood up without a protest. He was glad that he was given this supposedly degrading punishment instead of the cane.

The teacher resumed his lessons: Africa was a land of forests., Nile was the most important river there. Did they understand? What did he say? He selected someone from the first bench to answer this question. (Nile was the most important

river in Africa, the bAoyDaITnsHweYreAd AprComApDtlyE, aMndYthSe AteLacEhMer was satisfied.) What was Nile? (The most important river in Africa, a boy answered with alacrity and was

instantly snubbed for it, for he had to learn not to answer before he was asked to.) Silence. Silence. Why was there such a lot of noise in the class? Let them go on making & noise and they would get a clean, big zero in the examination. He would see to that.

Swaminathan paid no attention to the rest of the lessons. His mind began to wander. Standing on the bench, he stood well over the whole class. He could see so many heads, and he classified them according to the caps: there were four red caps, twenty-five Gandhi caps, ten fur caps, and so on.

When the work for the day was over, Swaminathan, Mani, and Rajam, adjourned to a secluded spot to say what was in their minds. Swaminathan stood between them and acted as the medium of communication. They were so close that they could have heard each other even if they had spoken in whispers. But it

was a matter of form between enemies to communicate through a medium. Mani faced Swaminathan steadily and asked, ‘Are you a man?’

Swaminathan turned to Rajam and repeated, ‘Are you a man?’ Rajam flared up and shouted, ‘Which dog doubts it?’

Swaminathan turned to Mani and said ferociously, ‘Which dirty dog doubts

it?’

‘Have you the courage to prove that you are a man?’ asked Mani. Swaminathan turned to Rajam and repeated it.

‘How?’

‘How?’ repeated Swaminathan to Mani.

‘Meet me at the river, near Nallappa’s Grove, to-morrow evening.’ ‘Near Nallappa’s Grove,’ Swaminathan was pleased to echo. ‘What for?’ asked Rajam.

To see if you can break my head.’

‘Oh, to pieceAs,D’ sIaTidHRYajAamA.

CADEMY SALEM

Swaminathan’s services were dispensed with. They gave him no time to

repeat their words. Rajam shouted in one ear, and Mani in the other.

‘So we may expect you at the river to-morrow,’ said Swaminathan. ‘Yes,’ Rajam assured them.

Mani wanted to know if the ether would come with guards. No, he would not. And Mani voiced another doubt: ‘If anything happens to you, will you promise to keep it out of your father’s knowledge?’ Rajam promised, after repudiating the very suggestion that he might act otherwise.

Nallappa’s Grove stood a few yards before them. It was past six and the traffic for the day between the banks was over. The usual evening crowd was far behind them. Swaminathan and Mani were squatting on the sand. They were silent. Mani was staring at the ground, with a small wooden club under his arm. He was thinking: he was going to break Rajam’s head in a short while and throw his

body into the river. But if it should be recovered? But then how could they know that he had done it? But if Rajam should come and trouble him at night as a spirit? Since his grandfather’s death, he was sleeping alone. What if Rajam should come and pull his hair at night? After all it would be better not to kill him. He would content himself with breaking his limbs and leaving him to his fate. If he should batter his head, who was going to find it out? Unless of course–He cast a sly look at Swaminathan, who was blinking innocently….

Unless of course Swaminathan informed the police.

At the sound of the creaking of boots, they turned and found that Rajam had come. He was dressed in khaki, and carried under his arm an air-gun that was given to him a couple of months ago on his birthday. He stood very stiff and said: ‘Here I am, ready.’

‘You are late.’ ‘Yes.’

^{‘We will star}A^t.’DITHYA ACADEMY SALEM

Rajam shouldered his gun and fired a shot in the air. Mani was startled. He

stood still, his club down.

‘You heard the shot?’ asked Rajam. The next is going to be into your body, if you are keen upon a fight.’

‘But this is unfair. I have no gun while you have It was to be a hand-to-

hand fight.’

Then, why have you brought your club? You never said anything about it yesterday.’

Mani hung down his head.

‘What have I done to offend you?’ asked Rajam. ‘You called me a sneak before someone.’

‘That is a lie.’

There was an awkward pause. ‘If this is all the cause of your anger, forget it. I won’t mind being friends.’

‘Nor I,’ said Mani.

Swaminathan gasped with astonishment. In spite of his posing before Mani, he admired Rajam intensely, and longed to be his friend. Now this was the happiest conclusion to all the unwanted trouble. He danced with joy.

Rajam lowered his gun, and Mani dropped his club. To show his goodwill, Rajam pulled out of his pocket half a dozen biscuits.

The river’s mild rumble, the rustling of the peeyul leaves, the half-light of the late evening, and the three friends eating, and glowing with new friendship– Swaminathan felt at perfect peace with the world.

ADITHYA ACADEMY SALEM

CHAPTER III

Swami’s Grandmother

IN THE ill-ventilated dark passage between the front hall and the dining-room, Swaminathan’s grandmother lived with all her belongings, which consisted of an elaborate bed made of five carpets, three bed sheets, and five pillows, a square box made of jute fibre, and a small wooden box containing copper coins, cardamoms, cloves, and areca-nut.

After the night meal, with his head on his granny’s lap, nestling close to her, Swaminathan felt very snug and safe in the faint atmosphere of cardamom and cloves.

‘Oh, granny!’ he cried ecstatically, ‘you don’t know what a great fellow

Rajam is.’ He told her the story of the first enmity between Rajam and Mani and the subsequent friendshAip.DITHYA ACADEMY SALEM

‘You know, he has a real police dress,’ said Swaminathan. ‘Is it? What does he want a police dress for?’ asked granny.

‘His father is the Police Superintendent. He is the master of every policeman here.’ Granny was impressed. She said that it must be a tremendous office indeed. She then recounted the days when her husband, Swaminathan’s grandfather, was a powerful Sub-Magistrate, in which office he made the police force tremble before him, and the fiercest dacoits of the place flee. Swaminathan waited impatiently for her to finish the story. But she went on, rambled, confused, mixed up various incidents that took place at different times.

That will do, granny,’ he said ungraciously. ‘Let me tell you something about Rajam. Do you know how many marks he gets in Arithmetic?’

‘He gets all the marks, does he, child?’ asked granny.

‘No, silly. He gets ninety marks out of one hundred.’

‘Good. But you must also try and get marks like him. . . You know, Swami, your grandfather used to frighten the examiners with his answers sometimes. When he answered a question, he did it in a tenth of the time that others took to do it. And then, his answers would be so powerful that his teachers would give him two hundred marks sometimes. .. . When he passed his F. A. he got such a big medal!

I wore it as a pendant for years till–When did I remove it? Yes, when your aunt was born…. No, it wasn’t your aunt…. It was when your father was born I

remember on the tenth day of confinement No, no. I was right.

It was when your aunt was born. Where is that medal now?

I gave it away to your aunt–and she melted it and made four bangles out of it. The fool! And such flimsy bangles too! I have always maintained that she is the worst fool in our family. ‘

‘Oh, enoughA, gDraITnnHy!YYAouAgoCoAnDboEthMerYingSaAboLutEoMld unnecessary stories.

Won’t you listen to Rajam?’

‘Yes, dear, yes.’

‘Granny, when Rajam was a small boy, he killed a tiger.’ ‘Indeed! The brave little boy!’

You are saying it just to please me. You don’t believe it.’

Swaminathan started the story enthusiastically: Rajam’s father was camping in a forest. He had his son with him. Two tigers came upon them suddenly, one knocking down the father from behind. The other began chasing Rajam, who took shelter behind a bush and shot. it dead with his gun. ‘Granny, are you asleep?’ Swaminathan asked at the end of the story.

‘No, dear, I am listening.’

‘Let me see. How many tigers came upon how many?’ ‘About two tigers on Rajam,’ said granny.

Swaminathan became indignant at his grandmother’s inaccuracy. ‘Here I am going hoarse telling you important things and you fall asleep and imagine all sorts of nonsense.

I am not going to tell you anything more. I know why you are so indifferent.

You hate Rajam.’

‘No, no, he is a lovely little boy,’ granny said with conviction, though she had never seen Rajam. Swaminathan was pleased. Next moment a new doubt assailed him.

‘Granny, probably you don’t believe the tiger incident.’ ‘Oh, I believe every word of it,’ granny said soothingly.

Swaminathan was pleased, but added as a warning: ‘He would shoot anyone that called him a liar.’

Granny expressed her approval of this attitude and then begged leave to start the story of Harischandra, who, just to be true to his word, lost his throne,

wife, and child, and AgoDt tIhTemHYallAbaAckCinAtDheEeMnd.YShSeAwLasEhMalf-way through it when Swaminathan’s rhythmic snoring punctuated her narration, and she lay down to

sleep.

Saturday afternoon. Since Saturday and Sunday came so rarely, to Swaminathan it seemed absurd to waste at home, gossiping with granny and mother or doing sums. It was his father’s definite orders that Swaminathan should not start loafing in the afternoon and that he should stay at home and do school work. But this order was seldom obeyed.

Swaminathan sat impatiently in his ‘study’, trying to wrest the meaning out of a poem in his English Reader. His father stood before the mirror, winding a turban round his head. He had put on his silk coat. Now only his spectacles remained. Swaminathan watched his progress keenly.

Even the spectacles were on. All that now remained was the watch. Swaminathan felt glad. This was the last item and after that father would leave for

the Court. Mother came in with a tumbler of water in one hand and a plate of betel leaves and nuts in the other. Frank drank the water and held out his hand. She gave him a little areca-nut and half a dozen neatly rolled betel leaves. He put them all into his mouth, chewing them with great contentment. Swaminathan read at the top of his voice the poem about a woolly sheep. His father fussed about a little for his tiny silver snuff-box and the spotted kerchief, which was the most unwashed thing in that house. He hooked his umbrella on his arm. This was really the last signal for starting. Swaminathan had almost closed the book and risen. His father had almost gone out of the room. But–Swaminathan stamped his foot under the table. Mother stopped father and said: ‘By the way, I want some change. The tailor is coming today. He has been pestering me for the last four days.’

‘Ask him to come to-morrow,’ father said. Mother was insistent. Father returned to his bureau, searched for the keys, opened it, took out a purse, and gave her the change.

‘I don’t knowAhDowITI HamYgAoinAg CtoAmDanEagMe YthinSgAs fLorEtMhe rest of the month,’ he said peering into the purse. He locked the bureau, and adjusted his turban before

the mirror. He took a heavy pinch of snuff, and wiping his nose with his kerchief, walked out. Swaminathan heaved a sigh of relief.

‘Bolt the door,’ came father’s voice from the street door.

Swaminathan heard the clicking of the bolts. He sat at the window, watched his father turn the corner, and then left his post.

His mother was in the kitchen giving instructions to the cook about the afternoon coffee. Granny was sitting up in her bed. ‘Come here, boy,’ she cried as soon as she saw him.

‘I can’t. No time now.’

‘Please. I will give you three pies,’ she cried. Swaminathan ignored the offer and dashed away. ‘Where are you going?’ mother asked.

‘I have got to go,’ Swaminathan said with a serious face. ‘Are you going to loaf about in the sun?’

‘Certainly not,’ he replied curtly.

‘Wander about recklessly and catch fever?…’ ‘No, mother, I am not going to wander about.’

‘Has your father not asked you to stay at home on holidays?’

‘Yes, but my Drawing Master has asked me to see him. I suppose even then I should not go.’ He added bitterly: ‘If I fail in the Drawing examination I think you will be pleased.’

Swaminathan ran down Grove Street, turned to his right, threaded his way through Abu Lane, stood before a low roofed, dingy house, and gave a low whistle. He waited for a second and repeated it. The door chain clanked, the door opened a little, and Mani’s head appeared and said: ‘Fool! My aunt is here, don’t come in. Go away and wait for me there.’

SwaminathaAn DmIoTveHd YawAayAaCndAwDaEiteMd YundSerAaLtEreMe. The sun was beating down fiercely. The street was almost deserted. A donkey was standing near a

gutter, patiently watching its sharp shadow. A cow was munching a broad, green, plantain leaf. Presently Mani sneaked out of his house.

Rajam’s father lived in Lawley Extension (named after the mighty engineer Sir Frederick Lawley, who was at one time the Superintending Engineer for Malgudi Circle), which consisted of about fifty neat bungalows, mostly occupied by government officials. The Trunk Road to Trichinopoly passed a few yards in front of these houses.

Swaminathan and Mani were nervously walking up the short drive leading to Rajam’s house. A policeman in uniform cried to them to stop and came running towards them.

Swaminathan felt like turning and fleeing. He appealed to Mani to speak to the policeman. The policeman asked what they were doing there. Mani said in a

tone in which overdone carelessness was a trifle obvious: ‘If Rajam is in the house, we are here to see him. He asked us to come.’ The policeman at once became astonishingly amiable and took them along to Rajam’s room.

To Mani and Swaminathan the room looked large. There were chairs in it, actually chairs, and a good big table with Rajam’s books arranged neatly on it. What impressed them most was a timepiece on the table. Such a young follow to own a timepiece! His father seemed to be an extraordinary man.

Presently Rajam entered. He had known that his friends were waiting for him, but he liked to keep them waiting for a few minutes, because he had seen his father doing it. So he stood for a few minutes in the adjoining room, biting his nails. When he could keep away no longer, he burst in upon his friends.

‘Sit down, boys, sit down,’ he cried when he saw them standing.

In a few minutes they were chatting about odds and ends, discussing their teachers and school-mates, their parents, toys, and games.

Rajam took AtheDmITtoHaYcuApbAoaCrdAaDndEtMhreYw iSt oApLenE. MThey beheld astounding things in it, miniature trains and motors, mechanical marvels, and a magic -lantern

with slides, a good many large picture-books, and a hundred other things.

What interested Mani most was a grim air-gun that stood in a corner. Rajam gave them permission to handle anything they pleased. In a short while Swaminathan was running an engine all over the room. Mani was shooting arrow after arrow from a bow, at the opposite wall. When he tired of it, he took up the gun and devastated the furniture around with lead balls.

‘Are you fellows, any of you, hungry?’ Rajam asked. ‘No,’ they said half-heartedly.

‘Hey,’ Rajam cried. A policeman entered.

‘Go and ask the cook to bring some coffee and tiffin for three.’ The ease and authority with which he addressed the policeman filled his friends with wonder and admiration.

The cook entered with a big plateful of eatables. He set down the plate on the table. Rajam felt that he must display his authority.

‘Remove it from the table, you–‘ he roared at the cook. The cook removed it and placed it on a chair.

‘You dirty ass, take it away, don’t put it there.’ ‘Where am I to put it, Raju?’ asked the cook.

Rajam burst out: ‘You rascal, you scoundrel, you talk back to me?’ The cook made a wry face and muttered something.

‘Put it on the table/ Rajam commanded. The cook obeyed, mumbling: ‘If you are rude, I am going to tell your mother.’

‘Go and tell her, I don’t care,’ Rajam retorted.

He peered into a cup and cursed the cook for bringing it so dirty. The cook looked up for a moment, quietly lifted the plate, and saying, ‘Come and eat in the kitchen if you want food,’ went away with it.

This was aAgDreaITt HdisYapApoAinCtmAenDt EtoMSYwaSmiAnaLthEaMn and Mani, who were waiting with watering mouths. To Rajam it was a terrible moment. To be outdone

by his servant before his friends! He sat still for a few minutes and then said with a forced laugh: ‘The scoundrel, that cook is a buffoon Wait a minute.’ He went out.

After a while he returned, carrying the plate himself. His friends were a bit astonished at this sign of defeat. Obviously he could not subdue the cook. Swaminathan puzzled his head to find out why Rajam did not shoot the cook dead, and Mani wanted to ask if he could be allowed to have his own way with the cook for a few minutes. But Rajam set their minds at rest by explaining to them: ‘I had to bring this myself. I went in and gave the cook such n. kick for his impertinence that he is lying unconscious in the kitchen.’

CHAPTER IV

What is a tail

THE Geography Master was absent, and the boys of the First A had leisure between three and three-forty-five on Wednesday.

Somehow Swaminathan had missed his friends and found himself alone. He wandered along the corridor of the Infant Standards. To Swaminathan, who did not really stand over four feet, the children of the Infant Standards seemed ridiculously tiny. He felt vastly superior and old. He was filled with contempt when he saw them dabbling in wet clay, trying to shape models. It seemed such a meaningless thing to do at school! Why, they could as well do those things resembling elephants, mangoes, and whatnots, in the backyards of their houses. Why did they come all the way to a school to do this sort of thing? Schools were meant for more serious things like Geography, Arithmetic, Bible, and English.

In one room he found all the children engaged in repeating simultaneously

the first two letters of the Tamil alphabet. He covered his ears and wondered how the teacher was ablAe DtoITstaHnYd Ait. HAeCpAasDseEd MonY. InSaAnLotEheMr room he found an ill- clad, noisy crowd of children. The noise that they made, sitting on their benches and swinging their legs, got on his nerves. He wrinkled his brow and twisted his mouth in the hope of making the teacher feel his resentment but unfortunately the teacher was sitting with his back to Swaminathan.

He paused at the foot of the staircase leading to the senior classes the Second and the Third Forms. He wanted to go up and inspect those classes which he eagerly looked for ward to joining. He took two or three steps up, and changed his mind. The Head Master might be up there, he always handled those classes. The teachers too were formidable, not to speak of the boys themselves, who were snobs and bullies. He heard the creak of sandals far off and recognised the footsteps of the Head Master. He did not want to be caught there–that would mean a lot of unsatisfactory explanations.

It was with pleasant surprise that he stumbled into his own set, which he had thought was not at school. Except Rajam and Mani all the rest were there. Under the huge tamarind tree they were playing some game. Swaminathan joined them with a low, ecstatic cry. The response disappointed him. They turned their faces to him with a faint smile, and returned to their game. What surprised Swaminathan most was that even the genial Somu was grim. Something seemed to be wrong somewhere. Swaminathan assumed an easy tone and shouted: ‘Boys, what about a little place for me in the game?’ Nobody answered this. Swaminathan paused and announced that he was waiting for a place in the game.

‘It is a pity, we can’t take more,’ Sankar said curtly.

There are people who can be very efficient as tails,’ said the Pea. The rest laughed at this.

‘You said Tail, didn’t you?’ asked Sankar. ‘What makes ‘ you talk of Tail

now?’

‘It is just my pleasure. What do you care? It doesn’t apply to you anyway,’

said the Pea.

ADITHYA ACADEMY SALEM

‘I am glad to hear it, but does it apply to anyone here?’ asked Sankar.

‘It may.’

‘What is a Tail?’

‘A long thing that attaches itself to an ass or a dog.’

Swaminathan could comprehend very little except that the remark contained some unpleasant references to himself. His cheeks grew hot. He wanted to cry.

The bell rang and they ran to their class. Swaminathan slunk to his seat with a red face.

It was the English period presided over by Vedanayagam. He was reading the story of the old man who planted trees for posterity and was paid ten rupees by a king. Not a word reached Swaminathan’s brain, in which there was only dull pain

and vacuity. If he had been questioned he would have blundered and would have had to spend the rest of the hour standing on the bench. But his luck was good.

The period was over. He was walking home alone, rather slowly, with a troubled heart. Somu was going a few yards in front of him. Swaminathan cried out: ‘Somu, Somu Somu, won’t you stop?’ Somu stopped till the other came up. After

a brief silence Swaminathan quavered: ‘What is the matter with you fellows?’

‘Nothing very particular,’ replied Somu. ‘By the way, may I inform you that you have earned a new name?–The Tail, Rajam’s Tail, to be more precise. We aren’t good enough for you, I believe. But how can everyone be a son of a Police Superintendent?’ With that he was off.

This was probably Swaminathan’s first shock in life. It paralysed all his mental processes. When his mind started working again, he faintly wondered if he had been dreaming. The staid Somu, the genial Somu, the uncle Somu, was it the same Somu that had talked to him a few minutes ago? What was wrong in liking and going about with Rajam? Why did it make them so angry?

He went hoAmDe, ITfluHngYhAis AcoCatAaDndEcMapYaSndAbLoEokMs on the table, gulped down the cold coffee that was waiting for him, and sat on the pyol, vacantly gazing

into the dark intricacies of the gutter that adorned Vinayaka Mudali Street. A dark volume of water was rushing along. Odd pieces of paper, leaves, and sticks, floated by. A small piece of tin was gently skimming along. Swaminathan had an impulse to plunge his hand in and pick it up. But he let it go. His mind was inert. He watched the shining bit float away. It was now at the end of the compound wall; now it had passed under the tree. Swaminathan was slightly irritated when a brick obstructed the progress of the tin. He said that the brick must either move along or stand aside without interfering with the traffic. The piece of tin released itself and dashed along furiously, disappeared round a bend at the end of the street. Swaminathan ran in, got a sheet of paper, and made a boat. He saw a small ant moving about aimlessly. He carefully caught it, placed it in the boat, and lowered the boat into the stream. He watched in rapture its quick motion. He held his breath

when the boat with its cargo neared a danger zone formed by stuck-up bits of straw and other odds and ends. The boat made a beautiful swerve to the right and avoided destruction. It went on and on. It neared a fatal spot where the waters were swirling round and round in eddies. Swaminathan was certain that his boat was nearing its last moment. He had no doubt that it was going to be drawn right to the bottom of the circling eddies.

The boat whirled madly round, shaking and swaying and quivering. But providentially a fresh supply of water from the kitchen in the neighbour’s house pushed it from behind out of danger. But it rushed on at a fearful speed, and Swaminathan felt that it was going to turn turtle. Presently it calmed, and resumed a normal speed. But when it passed under a tree, a thick dry leaf fell down and upset it. Swaminathan ran frantically to the spot to see if he could save at least the ant. He peered long into the water, but there was no sign of the ant. The boat and its cargo were wrecked beyond recovery. He took a pinch of earth, uttered a prayer for the soul of the ant, and dropped it into the gutter. In a few days Swaminathan

got accustomed to hAis DpoIsTitHionYaAs tAheCeAneDmEy oMf SYomSuAaLndEcMompany.

All the same now and then he had an irresistible desire to talk to his old friends. When the Scripture Master pursed his lips and scratched his nose, Swaminathan had a wild impulse to stamp on the Pea’s leg and laugh, for that was a joke that they had never failed to enjoy day after day for many years past. But now Swaminathan smothered the impulse and chuckled at it himself, alone. And again, when the boy with the red cap nodded in his seat and woke up with a start every time his head sank down, Swaminathan wanted to whisper into the Pea’s ear: ‘Look at that fellow, third on the first bench, red cap–Now he is falling off again–‘ and giggle; but he merely bit his lips and kept quiet.

Somu was looking in his direction. Swaminathan thought that there was friendliness in his look. He felt a momentary ecstasy as he realised that Somu was willing to be friendly again. They stared at each other for a while, and just as

Swaminathan was beginning to put on a sweet friendly look, Somu’s expression hardened and he turned away.

Swaminathan was loitering in the compound. He heard familiar voices behind, turned round, and saw Somu, Sankar, and the Pea, following him. Swaminathan wondered whether to stop and join them, or wait till they had passed and then go in the opposite direction. For it was awkward to be conscious of the stare of three pairs of hostile eyes behind one’s ears. He believed that every minute movement of his body was being watched and commented on by the three followers. He felt that his gait was showing unfavourably in their eyes. He felt they were laughing at the way in which he carried his books. There was a slight itching on his nape, his hand almost rose, but he checked it, feeling that the scratching would be studiously watched by the six keen eyes.

He wanted to turn to his right and enter the school hall. But that would be construed as cowardice; they would certainly think that he was doing it to escape from them. He wanted to run away, but that would be no better. He wanted to turn

back and get away AinDthIeTHopYpoAsitAe CdirAecDtioEn,MbYut tShaAt LwEouMld mean meeting them square in the face. So, his only recourse was to keep on walking as best as he

could, not showing that he was conscious of his followers. The same fellows ten days ago, what they were! Now what formidable creatures they had turned out to be! Swaminathan was wonder struck at the change.

It was becoming unendurable. He felt that his legs were taking a circular motion, and were twining round each other when he walked. It was too late to turn and dash into the school hall. He had passed it. Now he had only one way of escape. He must run. It was imperative. He tried a trick.

He paused suddenly, turned this way and that, as if looking for something, and then cried aloud: -Oh, I have left my note-book somewhere,’ raised his hand and was off from the spot like a stag.

CHAPTER V

Father’s Room

IT WAS Saturday and Rajam had promised to come in the afternoon. Swaminathan was greatly excited. Where was he to entertain him? Probably in his own ‘room’; but his father often came in to dress and undress. No, he would be at Court, Swaminathan reminded himself with relief. He cleaned his table and arranged his books so neatly that his father was surprised and had a good word to say about it.

Swaminathan went to his grandmother. ‘Granny,’ he said, ‘I have talked to you about Rajam, haven’t I?

‘Yes. That boy who is very strong but never passes his examination.’ ‘No. No. That is Mani.’

‘Oh, now I remember, it is a boy who is called the Gram or something, that witty little boy.’

Swaminathan made a gesture of despair. ‘Look here granny, you are again

mistaking the Pea foAr hDimIT. IHmYeaAn RAaCjaAm,DwEhoMhYas SkilAleLd EtigMers, whose father is the Police Superintendent, and who is great.’

‘Oh,’ granny cried, ‘that boy, is he coming here? I am so glad.’ ‘H’m But I have got to tell you–‘

‘Will you bring him to me? I want to see him.’

‘Let us see,’ Swaminathan said vaguely, ‘I can’t promise. But I have got to tell you, when he is with me, you must not call me or come to my room.’

‘Why so?’ asked granny.

‘The fact is–you are, well you are too old,’ said Swaminathan with brutal candour. Granny accepted her lot cheerfully.

That he must give his friend something very nice to eat, haunted his mind. He went to his mother, who was squatting before a cutter with a bundle of plantain leaves beside her. He sat before her, nervously crushing a piece of leaf this way and that, and tearing it to minute bits.

‘Don’t throw all those bits on the floor. I simply can’t sweep the floor any more,’ she said.

‘Mother, what are you preparing for the afternoon tiffin?’ ‘Time enough to think of it,’ said mother.

‘You had better prepare something very nice, something fine and sweet. Rajam is coming this afternoon. Don’t make the sort of coffee that you usually give me. It must be very good and hot.’ He remembered how in Rajam’s house everything was brought to the room by the cook. ‘Mother, would you mind if I don’t come here for coffee and tiffin? Can you send it to my room?’ He turned to the cook and said: ‘Look here you can’t come to my room in that dhoti. You will have to wear a clean, white dhoti and shirt.’ After a while he said: ‘Mother, can you ask father to lend me his room for just an hour or two?’ She said that she could not as she was very busy. Why could he himself not go and ask?

‘Oh, he will give more readily if you ask,’ said Swaminathan.

He went to his father and said: ‘Father, I want to ask you something.’ Father looked up from the papers over which he was bent.

‘Father, I waAntDyoITurHroYomA.’ ACADEMY SALEM

‘What for?’

‘I have to receive a friend,’ Swaminathan replied. ‘You have your own room,’ father said.

‘I can’t show it to Rajam.’

‘Who is this Rajam, such a big man?’

‘He is the Police Superintendent’s son. He is–he is not ordinary.’

‘I see. Oh! Yes, you can have my room, but be sure not to mess up the things on the table.’

‘Oh, I will be very careful. You are a nice father, father.’

Father guffawed and said: ‘Now run in, boy, and sit at your books.’

Rajam’s visit went off much more smoothly that Swaminathan had anticipated. Father had left his room open; mother had prepared some marvel with wheat, plum, and sugar. Coffee was really good. Granny had kept her promise and

did not show her senile self to Rajam. Swaminathan was only sorry that the cook did not change his dhoti.

Swaminathan seated Rajam in his father’s revolving chair. It was nearly three hours since he had come. They had talked out all subjects–Mani, Ebenezar, trains, tiger-hunting, police, and ghosts.

Which is your room?’ Rajam asked.

Swaminathan replied with a grave face: This is my room, why?’

Rajam took time to swallow this. ‘Do you read such books?’ he asked, eyeing the big giltedged law books on the table. Swaminathan was embarrassed.

Rajam made matters worse with another question.

‘But where are your books?’ There was just a flicker of a smile on his lips. ‘The fact is,’ said Swaminathan, ‘this table belongs to my father. When I am

out, he meets his clients in this room.’

‘But where do you keep your books?’

Swaminathan made desperate attempts to change the topic: ‘You have seen my grandmother, Rajam?’

‘No. Will youAsDhoIwThHeYr tAo mAeC? IAsDhoEuldMloYveStoAsLeeEhMer’ replied Rajam.

‘Wait a minute then,’ said Swaminathan and ran out.

He had one last hope that his granny might be asleep. It was infinitely safer to show one’s friends a sleeping granny.

He saw her sitting on her bed complacently. He was disappointed. He stood staring at her, lost in thought.

‘What is it, boy?’ granny asked, ‘Do you want anything?’

‘No. Aren’t you asleep? Granny,’ he said a few minutes later, ‘I have brought Rajam to see you.’

‘Have you?’ cried granny, ‘Come nearer, Rajam. I can’t see your face well.

You know I am old and blind.’

Swaminathan was furious and muttered under his breath that his granny had no business to talk all this drivel to Rajam.

Rajam sat on her bed. Granny stroked his hair and said that he had fine soft hair, though it was really short and prickly. Granny asked what his mother’s

name was, and how many children she had. She then asked if she had many jewels. Rajam replied that his mother had a black trunk filled with jewels, and a green one containing gold and silver vessels. Rajam then described to her Madras, its light house, its sea, its trams and buses, and its cinemas. Every item made granny gasp with wonder.

When Swaminathan entered the class, a giggle went round the benches. He walked to his seat hoping that he might not be the cause of the giggling. But it continued. He looked about. His eyes travelled up to the black-board. His face burnt red. On the board was written in huge letters ‘TAIL’. Swaminathan walked to the black-board and rubbed it off with his hands. He turned and saw Sankar’s head bent over his note-book, and the Pea was busy, unpacking his satchel. Without a word Swaminathan approached the Pea and gave him a fierce slap on his cheek. The Pea burst into tears and swore that he did not do it. He cast a sly look at Sankar, who was absorbed in some work. Swaminathan turned to him and slapped his face also.

Soon there was pandemonium, Sankar, Swaminathan, and the Pea, rolling over, tearing, scratcAhiDngI,TaHndYkAickAinCg AonDe EanMotYherS. TAhLeEbMell rang. Rajam, Somu, and Mani entered. The teacher came in and stood aghast. He could do little more

than look on and ejaculate. He was the old Tamil Pundit, the most helpless teacher in the school.

Somu and Mani parted the fighters. The teacher ascended the platform and took his seat. The class settled down. Somu got up and said: ‘Sir, please let us go out. We do not want to disturb the class.’ The teacher demurred; but already Mani had gone out, pushing Swaminathan and the Pea before him. Somu followed him with Sankar.

They came to a lonely spot in the field adjoining the school. There was tense silence for a while, and Mani broke it: “What is wrong with you, you little rogues?’ Three started to speak at once. Swaminathan’s voice was the loud- protest: ‘He–the Pea–wrote TAIL–Big Tail–on the Blackboard–big–‘

‘No–I didn’t, you–‘ screamed the Pea.

The other two wrote it,’ cried Swaminathan pointing at Sankar.

‘Rascal! Did you see me?’ howled Sankar.

Mani covered their mouths with his hands. ‘What is a tail, anyway?’ he asked, not having been told anything about it till then.

‘They call me Rajam’s tail,’ sobbed Swaminathan.

A frozen expression came over Mani’s face, and he asked, ‘And who dares to talk of Rajam here?’

‘Oh, dare!’ repeated Somu.

‘If any of you fellows have done it–‘ growled Mani, looking at the trembling Sankar and the Pea.

‘If they have, what can you do?’ asked Somu with a contemptuous smile. ‘What do you mean, Somu, what do you mean?’

‘Look here, Mani,’ Somu cried, ‘for a long time I have been waiting to tell you this: you think too much of yourself and your powers.’ Mani swung his hand and brought it down on Somu’s nape. Somu pushed it away with a heavy blow. Mani aimed a kick at Somu, which would send him rolling. Somu stepped aside and delivered one himself, which nearly bent the other.

The three yAouDnIgTstHerYs AcouAldChAarDdlEy MbeYlievSe AthLeEir Meyes. Somu and Mani

fighting! They lost their heads. They thought that Somu and Mani were killing each other. They looked accusingly at one another, and then ran towards the school.

They burst in upon the Head Master, who gathered from them with difficulty that in the adjacent field two murders were being committed at that very moment. He was disposed to laugh at first. But the excitement and seriousness on the boy’s faces made him check his laughter and scratch his chin. He called a peon and with him set off to the field.

The fighters, rolling and rolling, were everywhere in the field. The Head Master and the peon easily picked them apart, much to the astonishment of Swaminathan, who had thought till then that the strength that Somu or Mani possessed was not possessed by anyone else in the world.

CHAPTER VI

A Friend in Need

ONE AFTERNOON three weeks later, Swaminathan stood before Mani’s house and gave a low whistle. Mani joined him. They started for Rajam’s house, speculating on the way what the surprise (which Rajam had said he would give them if they saw him that afternoon) might be.

‘I think,’ said Swaminathan, ‘Rajam is merely joking. It is merely a trick to get us to his house.’ He was very nearly pushed into a gutter for this doubt.

‘Probably he has bought a monkey or something,’ Swaminathan ventured again. Mani was gracious enough to admit that it might be so. They thought of all possible subjects that might surprise them, and gave up the attempt in the end.

Their thoughts turned to their enemies. ‘You know what I am going to do?’ Mani asked. ‘I am going to break Somu’s waist. I know where he lives. He lives in Kabir Street, behind the market. I have often seen him coming out at nights to a

shop in the market fAorDbIeTteHl lYeaAvesA. CI sAhaDll EfirMst YflingSaAsLtoEnMe at the municipal lamp

and put it out. You have no idea how dark Kabir Street is…. I shall wait with my club, and as soon as he appears–He will sprawl in the dust with broken bones. ‘

Swaminathan shuddered at the thought. ‘And that is not all,’ said Mani, ‘I am going to get that Pea under by heel and press him to the earth. And Sankar is going to hang by his tuft over Sarayu, from a peepul branch ‘

They stopped talking when they reached Rajam’s house. The gate was bolted, and they got up the wall and jumped in. A servant came running towards them. He asked, ‘Why, did you climb the wall?’ ; ‘Is the wall your property?’ Mani asked and burst into laughter.

‘But if you had broken your ribs–‘ the servant began. ‘What is that to you? Your ribs are safe, are they not?’ Swaminathan asked ungraciously and laughed.

‘And just a word more,’ Mani said, ‘do you happen to be by any chance the Police Superintendent’s son?’

‘No, no,’ replied the servant.

‘Very well then,’ replied Mani, ‘we have come to see and talk to the Police Superintendent’s son.’ The servant beat a hasty retreat.

They banged their fists on Rajam’s door. They heard the clicking of the latch and hid themselves behind the pillar.

Rajam peeped out and shut the door again.

They came out, stood before the door, and wondered what to do. Swaminathan applied his mouth to the keyhole and mewed like a cat. Mani pulled him away and putting his mouth to the hole barked like a dog. The latch clicked again, and the door slightly opened. Mani whispered to Swaminathan, ‘You are a blind kitten, I will be a blind puppy.’

Mani fell down on his knees and hands, shut his eyes tight, pushed the door with his head, and entered Rajam’s room in the role of a blind puppy.

Swaminathan crawleAdDbIeThHindYhAimAwCithAsDhEut MeyYes,SmAeLwEinMg for all he was worth. They moved round and round the room, Rajam adding to the interest of the game

by mewing and barking in answer every few seconds. The blind puppy brushed its side against a leg, and thinking that it belonged to Rajam, softly bit the calf muscle. Imagine its confusion when it opened its eyes and saw that it was biting its enemy, Somu! the blind kitten nestled close to a leg and scratched it with its paw. Opening its eyes it found that it was fondling a leg that belonged to its enemy, Sankar.

Mani remained stunned for a moment, and then scrambled to his feet. He looked around, his face twitching with shame and rage. He saw the Pea sitting in a corner, his eyes twinkling with mischief, and felt impelled to take him by the throat. He turned round and saw Rajam regarding him steadily, his mouth still quivering with a smothered grin.

As for Swaminathan he felt that the best place for himself would be the darkness and obscurity under a table or a chair.

‘What do you mean by this, Rajam?’ Mani asked. ‘Why are you so wild?’

‘It was your fault,’ said Mani vehemently, ‘I didn’t know–‘ He looked around. ‘Well, well. I didn’t ask you to crawl and bark, did I?’

Somu and company laughed. Mani glared round, ‘I am going away, Rajam.

This is not the place for me.’

Rajam replied, ‘You may go away, if you don’t want me to see you or speak to you any more.’

Mani fidgeted uneasily. Rajam took him aside and soothed him. Rajam then turned to Swaminathan, who was lost in bottomless misery. He comforted and flattered him by saying that it was the best imitation of a cat and dog that he had ever witnessed in his life. He admitted that for a few minutes he wondered whether he was watching a real cat and a dog. They would get prizes if they did it in fairs. If Swaminathan and Mani would be good enough to repeat the fun, he would be delighted, and even ask his father to come and watch.

This was soAotDhinITg.HSYwaAmiAnaCthAanDaEndMMYanSi fAelLt pEroMud of themselves. And after the round of eating that followed, they were perfectly happy, except when they

thought of the other three in the room.

They were in this state of mind when Rajam began a lecture on friendship. He said impressive things about friendship, quoting from his book the story of the dying old man and the faggots, which proved that union was strength. A friend in need was a friend indeed. He then started giving hair-raising accounts of what hell had in store for persons who fostered enmity. According to Rajam, it was written in the Vedas that a person who fostered enmity should be locked up in a small room, after his death. He would be made to stand, stark naked, on a pedestal of red-hot iron, there were beehives all around with bees as big as lemons.

If the sinner stepped down from the pedestal, he would have to put his foot on immense scorpions and centipedes that crawled about the room in hundreds– (A shudder went through the company.)

–The sinner would have to stand thus for a month, without food or sleep. At the end of a month he would be transferred to another place, a very narrow bridge over a lake of boiling oil. The bridge was so narrow that he would be able to keep only one foot on it at a time. Even on the narrow bridge there were plenty of wasp nests and cactus, and he would be goaded from behind to move on. He would have to balance on one foot, and then on another, for ages and ages, to keep himself from falling into the steaming lake below, and move on indefinitely….

The company was greatly impressed. Rajam then invited everyone to come forward and say that they would have no more enemies. If Sankar said it, he would get a bound note-book; if Swaminathan said it, he would get a clock-work engine; if Somu said it, he would get a belt; and if Mani said it, he would get a nice pocket-knife; and the Pea would get a marvellous little pen.

He threw open the cupboard and displayed the prizes. There was silence for some time as each sat gnawing his nails. Rajam was sweating with his peace- making efforts. The Pea was the first to rise. He stood before the cup- board and

said, ‘Let me see theAfDouInTtaHin-YpeAn.’ARCajAamDgEavMe Yit hSimA. LEM

The Pea turned it round and round and gave it back without any comment. ‘Why don’t you like it?’ Rajam asked. The Pea kept staring into the cupboard and said, ‘Can I have that box?’ He pointed at a tiny box with a lot of yellow and black designs on it and a miniature Taj Mahal on its lid. Rajam said, ‘I can’t give you that. I want it.’ He paused.

He had two more boxes like that in his trunk. He changed his mind, ‘No. I don’t want it. You can take the box if you like.’

In a short while, Mani was sharpening a knife on his palm; Somu was trying a belt on; Sankar was fingering a thick bound note-book; and Swaminathan was jealously clasping a green engine to his bosom.

CHAPTER VII

A New Arrival

MOTHER had been abed for two days past. Swaminathan missed her very much in the kitchen, and felt uncomfortable without her attentions. He was taken to her room, where he saw her lying dishevelled and pale on her bed. She asked him to come nearer. She asked him why he was looking emaciated and if he was not eating and sleeping well. Swaminathan kept staring at her blankly. Here seemed to be a different mother. He was cold and reserved when he spoke to her. Her appearance depressed him. He wriggled himself from her grasp and ran out.

His granny told him that he was going to have a brother. He received the news without enthusiasm.

That night he was allowed to sleep on granny’s bed. The lights kept

burning all night. Whenever he opened his eyes, he was conscious of busy feet scurrying along the ApaDssIaTgHe. YLaAteAatCnAigDht ESwMaYminSatAhaLnEwMoke up and saw a lady doctor in the hall. She behaved as if the house belonged to her.

She entered mother’s room, and presently out of the room came a mingled noise of whispers and stifled moans. She came out of the room with a serious face and ordered everybody about. She commanded even father to do something. He vanished for a moment and reappeared with a small bottle in his hand. He hovered about uncertainly. The hushed voices, hurry, seriousness, agitation, hot water, and medicine–preparations for ushering a new person into the world–were too bewildering for Swaminathan’s comprehension. Meanwhile granny kept asking something of everybody that passed by, and no one troubled to answer her.

What did it matter? The five carpets in granny’s bed were cosy; her five pillows were snug; and granny’s presence near by was reassuring; and above all, his eyelids were becoming heavy. What more did he want? He fell asleep.

The Tamil Pundit, with his unshaven face and the silver-rimmed spectacles set askew on his nose, was guiding the class through the intricacies of Tamil Grammar. The guide was more enthusiastic than his followers. A continual buzz filled the air. Boys had formed themselves into small groups and carried on private conversations. The Pundit made faint attempts to silence the class by rapping his palms on the table. After a while, he gave up the attempt and went on with his lecture. His voice was scarcely audible. Sankar and a few others sat on the first bench with cocked-up ears and busy pencils.

Swaminathan and the Pea sat on the last bench.

‘I say, Pea,’ said Swaminathan, I got a new brother this morning.’ The Pea was interested. ‘How do you like him?’

‘Oh, like him! He is hardly anything. Such a funny looking creature!’ said Swaminathan and gave what he thought was an imitation of his little brother: he shut his eyes, compressed his lips, folded his hands on his chest, protruded his

tongue, and tilted hisAhDeaITd HfroYmAsidAe CtoAsiDdeE. TMheYPSeaAlaLuEghMed uncontrollably. ‘But,’ Swaminathan said, ‘this thing has a wonderful pair of hands, so small and plump,

you know! But I tell you, his face is awful, red, red like chilly.’

They listened to the teacher’s lecture for a few minutes. ‘I say, Swami,’ said the Pea, ‘these things grow up soon. I have seen a baby that was just what your brother is. But you know, when I saw it again during Michaelmas I could hardly recognise it.’

CHAPTER VIII

Before the Examinations

IN APRIL, just two weeks before the examinations, Swaminathan realised that his father was changing–for the worse. He was becoming fussy and difficult. He seemed all of a sudden to have made up his mind to harass his son. If the latter was seen chatting with his granny, he was told sourly, ‘Remember, boy, there is an examination. Your granny can wait, not your examination.’ If he was seen wandering behind his mother, lie was hunted down and sent to his desk. If his voice was heard anywhere after the Taluk Office gong had struck nine, a command would come from his father’s room, ‘Swami, why haven’t you gone to bed yet? You must get up early and study a bit.’ This was a trying period in Swaminathan’s life. One day he was piqued enough to retort, ‘Why are you so nervous about my examination?’

‘Suppose yoAu DfaiIl?T’ HYA ACADEMY SALEM

‘Suppose all your juniors in the Fifth Standard become your classmates?’ Swaminathan sat at Decimals for half an hour.

At school everybody seemed to be overwhelmed by the thought of the examinations. It was weeks since anybody had seen a smile on Sankar’s face. Somu had become brisk and business-like. The Pea took time to grasp jokes, and seldom gave out any. And as for Rajam, he came to the school at the stroke of the first bell, took down everything the teacher said, and left at the stroke of the last bell, hardly uttering a dozen words to anybody. Mani was beginning to look worried and took every opportunity to take Sankar aside and have his doubts (that arose from time to time as he plodded through his texts) cleared. He dogged the steps of the school clerk. There was a general belief in the school that the clerk was omniscient and knew all the question papers of all the classes.

One day Mani went to the clerk’s house and laid a neat bundle containing fresh brinjals at his feet. The clerk was pleased and took Mani in and seated him on a stool. The clerk looked extremely amiable and Mani felt that he could ask anything at that moment and get it. The clerk was murmuring something about his cat, a lank ill-fed thing, that was nestling close to him. Most of what he was saying did not enter Mani’s head. He was waiting feverishly to open the topic of question papers. The clerk had meanwhile passed from cats to eye-flies; but it made little difference to Mani, who was waiting for the other to pause for breath to launch his attack. ‘You must never let these eye flies buzz near your eyes. All cases of eyesore can be traced to it. When you get eyesore the only thing you can do is to take a slice of raw onion ‘

Mani realised that the other would not stop, and butted in, ‘There is only a week more for the examinations, sir ‘

The clerk was slightly puzzled: ‘Yes, indeed, a week more You must

take care to chooseAoDnIlyTHtheYjAuicAy CvaArieDtyE, tMheYlaSrgAe LjuEicyMvariety, not the small onion ‘

‘Sir,’ Mani interrupted, ignoring the juicy variety, ‘I am much worried about my examination.’ He tried to look pathetic.

‘I am glad. If you read well, you will pass’ said the Oracle.

‘You see, sir, I am so worried, I don’t sleep at nights, thinking of the examination…. If you could possibly tell me something important I have such a

lot to study–don’t want to study unnecessary things that may not be necessary for the examination.’ He meandered thus. The clerk understood what he was driving at, but said, ‘Just read all your portions arid you will pass.’ Mani realised that diplomacy was not his line. He asked bluntly, ‘Please tell me, sir, what questions we are getting for our examination.’

The clerk denied having any knowledge of the question papers. Mani flattered him by asking, if he did not know the questions, who else would. By just a

little more of the same judicious flattery the clerk was moved to give what Mani believed to be ‘valuable hints’. In spite of the fact that he did not know what the First Form texts were, the clerk ventured to advise, ‘You must pay particular attention to geography. Maybe you will have to practise map-drawing a lot. And in arithmetic make it a point to solve at least five ‘I won’t.’

‘Of course you won’t if you study hard and answer well Suppose you fail

and all your class-mates go up, leaving you behind? You can start doing just what you like on the very day your examination closes.’

Swaminathan reflected: Suppose the Pea, Mani, Rajam, and Sankar, deserted him and occupied Second A? His father was right. And then his father drove home the point, problems every day, and you will be able to tackle arithmetic as easily as you swallow plantains.’

‘And what about English?’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that. Have you read all your lessons?’

‘Yes, sir,’ MaAnDi reITpliHedYwAithAouCt cAonDviEctMionY.

SALEM

‘It is all right then. You must read all the important lessons again, and if you

have time, yet again, and that will be ample.’

These answers satisfied Mani greatly. On his way home, he smiled to himself and said that the four annas he had invested on brinjals was not after all a waste.

Mani felt important. He secretly pitied his classmates, who had to do coolly work without valuable hints to lighten their labour. He felt he ought to share his good secret with Swaminathan without divulging the source.

They were going home from the school. They stopped for a while at the junction of Vinayak Mudali and Grove Streets before parting ways. Mani said, ‘Young man, have you any idea what we are getting for the examination?’

‘Nothing outside the covers of the text-books.’

Mani ignored the humour. ‘Now listen to me carefully, last night from seven to ten, do you know what I did?’

‘Munched ground-nuts?’

‘Idiot, don’t joke. I made two maps or India, two of Africa, and one map of Europe.’

‘Say all the maps in the Atlas.’

‘Maybe,’ Mani said, not quite liking the remark, but I do it with some definite purpose…. It may be that I know one or two questions. But don’t let the other fellows know anything about it. I may get into trouble.’ Swaminathan was taken in by the other’s seriousness and inferred a moral.

Reaching home, Swaminathan felt rather dull. His mother was not at home. Granny was not in a talkative mood. He related to her some exciting incidents of the day: ‘Granny, guess what happened in our school to-day. A boy in First C stabbed another in the forearm with a penknife.’

‘What for?’ asked granny mechanically.

‘They were eAnDemITiesH.’YFiAndiAngCthAaDt itEfeMll fYlat,ShAe LbrEouMght out the big event of the day. ‘Granny, granny, here is another thing. The Head Master knocked his toe

against a door-post and oh! there was such a lot of blood! He went limping about the school the whole day. He couldn’t take the Third Form and so they had leave, the lucky fellows!’

‘Is it?’ asked granny.

Swaminathan perceived, to his intense disgust, that his granny was in one of her dull sleepy moods.

He strayed near the swing-cradle of his little brother. Though at first he had been sceptical of his brother’s attractions and possibilities, now day by day he was finding him more interesting. This little one was now six months old and was charming. His attainments were: he made shrill noises whenever he saw anybody; thrust his fists into his mouth and damped his round arms up to the elbow; vigorously kicked the air; and frequently displayed his bare red gums in a smile. Swaminathan loved every inch of him.

He would spend hours balancing himself on the edge of the cradle and trying to make him say ‘Swaminathan’. The little one would gurgle, and Swaminathan would shriek, pretending that it was the other’s futile version of his name.

Now he peered in and was disappointed to find the baby asleep. He cleared his throat aloud and coughed in the hope of waking him. But the baby slept. He waited for a moment, and tiptoed away, reminding himself that is was best to leave die other alone, as he had a knack of throwing the house in turmoil for the first half-hour, whenever he awoke from sleep.

Staying at home in the evenings was extremely irksome. He sighed at the thought of the sand-banks of Sarayu and Mani’s company. But his father had forbidden him to go out till the examinations were over. He often felt he ought to tell his father what he thought of him. But somehow when one came near doing it, one failed. He would have to endure it after all only for a week…. The thought that he would have to put up with his travails only for a week at worst gave him fresh energy.

He sat at his table and took out his Atlas. He opened the political map of

Europe and sat gazAingDaItTitH. IYt pAuzAzleCdAhiDmEhoMwYpeSopAleLmEaMnaged to live in such a crooked country as Europe. He wondered what the shape of the people might be who lived in places where the outline narrowed as in a cape, and how they

managed to escape being strangled by the contour of their land. And then another favourite problem began to tease him: how did those map makers find out what the shape of a country was? How did they find out that Europe was like a camel’s head? Probably they stood on high towers and copied what they saw below. He wondered if he would be able to see India as it looked in the map, if he stood on the top of the Town Hall. He had never been there nor ever did he wish to go there. Though he was incredulous, tailor Ranga persistently informed him that there was a torture chamber in the top story of the Town Hall to which Pathans decoyed young people.

He shook himself from his brown study and copied the map of Europe. He kept the original and his own copy side by side and congratulated himself on his ability to draw, though his outline looked like some strange animal that had part bull’s face and part camel’s.

It was past seven by now and his father came home. He was greatly pleased to see his son at work. ‘That is right, boy,’ he said looking at the map. Swaminathan felt that that moment was worth all his suffering. He turned over the pages and opened out the map of Africa. Two days before his examination he sat down to draw up a list of his needs. On a piece of paper he wrote: Unruled white paper 20 Sheets Nibs 6 Ink 2 Bottles Clips Pins He nibbled his pencil and reread the list. The list was disappointing. He had never known that his wants were so few. When he first sat down to draw the list he had hoped to fill two or three imposing pages. But now the cold lines on the paper numbered only five. He scrutinised the list again: ‘Unruled white paper 20 sheets.’ He asked himself why he was so particular about the paper’s being unruled. It was a well-known fact that, try as he would, his lines had a tendency to curl up towards the right-hand corner of the paper. That would not do for examinations. He had better keep a stock of ruled paper. And then ‘Nibs’. He wondered how many nibs one would need for an examination. One? Two? Five?… And then the Ink column worried him. How much of it did one buy? After that he had trouble with clips and pins. He not only had not the faintest idea of the quantity of each that he would need but was totally ignorant

of the unit of purchaAseDaIlTsoH. CYoAuldAoCneAgDo EtoMa YshoSpAaLndEdMemand six pins and six clips without offending the shop man?

At the end the list was corrected to: Unruled white paper Ruled white paper Black ink Clips Pins The list was not satisfactory even now. After pondering over it, he added ‘Cardboard Pad One’ and ‘One Rupee For Additional Expenses’. His father was busy in his office. Swaminathan stood before him with the list in his hand. Father was absorbed in his work and did not know that Swaminathan was there. Swaminathan suddenly realised that it would be better to approach his father at some other time. He could be sure of a better reception if he opened the question after food. He tiptoed out. When he was just outside the door, his father called out, ‘Who is that?’ There was no friendliness in the tone. ‘Who is that I say?’ roared father again and was at his side with a scowling face before Swaminathan could decide whether to sneak out or stop and answer.

‘Was it you?’ ‘Yes.’

You idiot, why couldn’t you answer instead of driving me hoarse calling out “Who is that? Who is that?”…. A man can’t have peace in this house even for a second. Here I am at work–and every fifth second somebody or other pops in with some fool question or other. How am I to go on? Go and tell your mother that she can’t come to my room for the rest of the day. I don’t care if the whole battalion of oil-mongers and vegetable women come and clamour for money. Let her drive them out. Your mother seems to think–What is that paper in your hand?’

‘Nothing, father,’ Swaminathan answered, thrusting the paper into his

pocket.

‘What is that?’ father shouted, snatching the list. Reading it with a terrific

scowl, he went back to his chair. ‘What is this thing?’

Swaminathan had to cough twice to find his voice. ‘It is–my–examination

list.’

‘What examination list?’

‘My examinations begin the day after to-morrow, you know.’

‘And yet you are wandering about the house like an unleashed donkey!

What preposterous list is this? Do you think rupees, annas and pies drop from the

sky?’ Swaminathan AdiDd nITotHthYinAk sAo,CbAut DsoEmMethYingSnAeLarElyMso. Father pulled out a drawer and peering into it said: ‘You can take from me anything you want. I haven’t got clips. You don’t need them.

And then the pad, why do you want a pad? Are there no desks in your rooms? In our days slates were good enough for us. But now you want pen, paper, ink, and pad to keep under the paper ‘ He took out an awful red pencil and scored

out the ‘Pad’ from the list. It almost gashed the list.

He flung it back at Swaminathan, who looked at it sadly. How deliriously he had been dreaming of going to Ameer Mart, jingling with coins, and buying things!

He was just going out when rather called him back and said: ‘Here, boy, as you go, for goodness’ sake, remove the baby from the hall. I can’t stand his idiotic cry…. What is the matter with him? Is your mother deaf or callous? The child may

cry till he has fits, for aught she cares. ‘

CHAPTER IX

School Breaks Up

WITH dry lips, parched throat, and ink-stained fingers, and exhaustion on one side and exaltation on the other, Swaminathan strode out of the examination hall, on the last day.

Standing in the veranda, he turned back and looked into the hall and felt slightly uneasy. He would have felt more comfortable if all the boys had given their papers as he had done, twenty minutes before time. With his left shoulder resting against the wall, Sankar was lost to the world. Rajam, sitting under the second ventilator, between two Third-Form boys, had become a writing machine. Mani was still gazing at the rafters, scratching his chin with the pen. The Pea was leaning back in his seat, revising his answers.

One supervisor was drowsing in his chair; another was pacing up and down, with an abstrAacDteIdTloHoYk Ain hAisCeAyeDs.ETMheYscSraAtcLhyEnMoise of active nibs, the rustle of papers, and the clearing of the throats, came through the brooding silence

of the hall.

Swaminathan suddenly wished that he had not come out so soon. But how could he have stayed in the hall longer?

The Tamil paper was set to go on till five o’clock. He had found himself writing the last line of the last question at four-thirty. Out of the six questions set, he had answered the first question to his satisfaction, the second was doubtful, the third was satisfactory, the fourth, he knew, was clearly wrong (but then, he did not know the correct answer).

The sixth answer was the best of the lot. It took only a minute to answer it. He had read the question at two minutes to four-thirty, started answering a minute later, and finished it at four-thirty. The question was: ‘What moral do you infer from

the story of the Brahmin and lie Tiger?’ (A brahmin was passing along the edge of a pond. A tiger hailed him from the other bank and offered him a gold bangle. The brahmin at first declined the offer, but when the tiger protested its innocence and sincerity and insisted upon his taking the bangle, he waded through the water. Before he could hold out his hand for the bangle, he was inside the tiger.) Swaminathan had never thought that this story contained a moral. But now he felt that it must have one since the question paper mentioned it. He took a minute to decide whether the moral was; ‘We must never accept a gold bangle when it is offered by a tiger’ or ‘Love of gold bangle cost one one’s life’. He saw more logic in the latter and wrote it down. After writing, he had looked at the big hall clock. Half an hour more! What had he to do for half an hour? But he felt awkward to be the first to go out. Why could not the others be as quick and precise as he?

He had found it hard to kill time. Why wasn’t the paper set for two and a half hours instead of three? He had looked wistfully at the veranda outside. If only

he could pluck up enAoDugIhTcHouYraAgeAtoChAanDd EinMtheYpSapAerLaEndMgo out–he would have no more examinations for a long time to come–he could do what he pleased–roam

about the town in the evenings and afternoons and morning–throw away the books–command granny to tell endless tales.

He had seen a supervisor observing him, and had at once pretended to be busy with the answer paper. He thought that while he was about it, he might as well do a little revision. He read a few lines of the first question and was bored. He turned over the leaves and kept gazing at the last answer. He had to pretend that he was revising. He kept gazing at the moral of the tiger story till it lost all its meaning. He set his pen to work. He went on improving the little dash under the last line indicating the end, till it became an elaborate complicated pattern.

He had looked at the clock again, thinking that it must be nearly five now. It was only ten minutes past four-thirty. He saw two or three boys giving up their papers and going out, and felt happy. He briskly folded the paper and wrote on the

flap the elaborate inscription: Tamil Tamil W. S. Swaminathan I st Form A section Albert Mission School Malgudi South India Asia.

The bell rang. In twos and threes boys came out of the hall. It was a thorough contrast to the preceding three hours. There was the din of excited chatter.

mate.

‘What have you written for the last question?’ Swaminathan asked a class-

‘Which? The moral question?… Don’t you remember what the teacher said

in the class?… “Love of gold cost the brahmin his life.”‘

‘Where was gold there?’ Swaminathan. objected. “There was only a gold bangle. How much have you written for the question?’

‘One page,’ said the class-mate.

Swaminathan did not like this answer. He had written only a line. “What!

You should not have written so much.’

A little later AheDfoITunHd YRaAjamACanAdDSaEnMkaYr. ‘WSeAll,LbEoyMs, how did you find the

paper?’

‘How did you find it?’ Sankar asked. ‘Not bad,’ Swaminathan said.

‘I was afraid only of Tamil,’ said Rajam, ‘now I think I am safe. I think I may

get passing marks.’

‘No. Certainly more. A class,’ Sankar said.

‘Look here,’ Swaminathan said, ‘some fools have written a page for that moral question.’

‘I wrote only three-quarters of a page,’ Rajam said.

‘And I only a little more than half,’ said Sankar, who was an authority on these matters.

‘I too wrote about that length, about half a page,’ lied Swaminathan as a salve to his conscience, and believed it for the moment.

‘Boys, do you remember that we have no school from to-morrow?’ ‘Oh, I forgot all about it,’ Rajam said.

‘Well, what are you going to do with yourselves?’ somebody asked.

‘I am going to use my books as fuel in the kitchen,’ Swaminathan said.

‘My father has bought a lot of books for me to read during the vacation, Sinbad the Sailor, Alibaba, and so on,’ said Sankar.

Mani came throwing up his arms and wailing: ‘Time absolutely insufficient. I could have dashed off the last question,’

The Pea appeared from somewhere with a huge streak of ink on his left cheek. ‘Hallo Sankar, first class?’

‘No. May hardly get thirty-five.’

‘You rascal, you are lying. If you get a first class, may I cut off your tuft?’ Mani asked.

The bell rang again fifteen minutes later. The whole school crowded into

the hall. There was AjoyDiInTeHveYryAfaAceCaAndDgEooMd-YfellSowAshLipEiMn every word. Even the teachers tried to be familiar and pleasant. Ebenezar, when he saw Mani, asked:

‘Hallo, block-head, how are you going to waste your vacation?’

‘I am going to sleep, sir,’ Mani said, winking at his friends.

‘Are you likely to improve your head by the time you return to the school?’ ‘How is it possible, sir, unless you cut off Sankar’s head and present it to

me?’ A great roar of laughter followed this.

There would have been roars of laughter at anything; the mood was such. In sheer joy the Drawing Master was bringing down his cane on a row of feet because, he said, he saw some toes growing to an abnormal length.

The Head Master appeared on the platform, and after waiting for the noise to subside, began a short speech, in which he said that the school would remain closed till the nineteenth of June and open again on the twentieth. He hoped that the boys would not waste their time but read storybooks and keep glancing through

the books prescribed for their next classes, to which, he hoped, most of them were going to be promoted. And now a minute more, there would be a prayer, after which the boys might disperse and go home.

At the end of the prayer the storm burst. With the loudest, lustiest cries, the gathering flooded out of the hall in one body. All through this vigorous confusion and disorder, Swaminathan kept close to Mani. For there was a general belief in the school that enemies stabbed each other on the last day. Swaminathan had no enemy as far as he could remember. But who could say? The school was a bad place.

Mani did some brisk work at the school gate, snatching from all sorts of people ink-bottles and pens, and destroying them. Around him was a crowd seething with excitement and joy. Ecstatic shrieks went up as each article of stationery was destroyed. One or two little boys feebly protested. But Mani wrenched the ink-bottles from their hands, tore their caps, and poured ink over their

clothes. He had a AsmDaIlTl

HbaYndAoAf

CasAsisDtaEntMs, YamSonAgLwEhMom Swaminathan was

prominent, overcome by the mood of the hour, he had spontaneously emptied his ink-bottle over his own head and had drawn frightful dark circles under his eyes with the dripping ink.

A policeman passed in the road. Mani shouted: ‘Oh, policeman, policeman! Arrest these boys!’ A triumphant cry from a hundred throats rent the air. A few more ink-bottles exploded on the ground and a few more pens were broken. In the midst of it Mani cried: ‘Who will bring me Singaram’s turban? I shall dye it for him.’

Singaram, the school peon, was the only person who was not affected by the spirit of liberty that was abroad, and as soon as the offer to dye his turban reached his ears, he rushed into the crowd with a big stick and dispersed the revellers.

CHAPTER X

The Coachman’s Son

SWAMINATHAN had two different attachments: one to Somu, Sankar, and the Pea–a purely scholastic one, which automatically ceased when the school gates closed; his other attachment was more human to Rajam and Mani. Now that they had no school, they were free from the shackles of time, and were almost always together, and arranged for themselves a hectic vacation.

Swaminathan’s one consuming passion in life now was to get a hoop. He dreamt of it day and night. He feasted on visions of an ex-cycle wheel without spokes or tyre. You had only to press a stick into the groove and the thing would fly. Oh, what joy to see it climb small obstacles, and how gently it took curves! When running it made a steady hum, which was music to the ear. Swaminathan thought that anybody in Malgudi would understand that he was coming, even a

mile away, by that AhDumIT. HHeYsAomAeCtimAesDEkeMpt YawSakAeLtEill Mten thirty in the night,

thinking of this hoop. He begged everyone that he came across, from his father’s friends to a municipal sweeper that he knew, to give him a cycle wheel.

Now he could not set his eyes on a decent bicycle without his imagination running riot over its wheels. He dreamt one night that he crossed the Sarayu near Nallappa’s Grove ‘on’ his wheel. It was a vivid dream; the steel wheel crunched on the sandy bed of the river as it struggled and heaved across. It became a sort of horse when it reached the other bank. It went back home in one leap, took him to the kitchen, and then to his bed, and lay down beside him. This was fantastic; but the early part of the dream was real enough. It nearly maddened him to wake to a hoopless morning.

In sheer despair he opened his heart to a coachman–a casual acquaintance of his. The coachman was very sympathetic. He agreed that

existence was difficult without a hoop. He said that he would be able to give Swaminathan one in. a few hours if the latter could give him five rupees. This was an immense sum, which Swaminathan hoped to possess in some distant future when he should become as tall as his father. He said so. At which the coachman gave a convincing talk on how to get it. He wanted only six pies to start with; in a short time he would make it six annas, and after that convert it to six rupees. And Swaminathan could spend the five out of the six rupees on the hoop and the balance of one rupee just as he pleased. Swaminathan declared that nothing would give him greater happiness tlian giving that extra rupee to the coachman. If any doubts arose in Swaminathan’s mind, they were swept away by the other’s rhetoric. The coachman’s process of minting higher currency was this: he had a special metal pot at home in which he kept all base copper coins together with some mysterious herb (whose name he would not reveal even if he were threatened with torture). He kept the whole thing, he said, buried in the ground, he squatted on the

spot at dead of nightAaDndITpeHrfYormAedAsCoAmeDyEogMa,YanSd Alo LwEheMn the time came, all the copper was silver. He could make even gold, but to get the herbs for it, he would

have to walk two hundred and fifty miles across strange places, and he did not consider it worth all that exertion.

Swaminathan asked him when he might see him again as he had to think out and execute a plan to get six pies. The coachman said that if the other did not get the money immediately he would not be available for weeks to come as his master was going away and he would have to go away too. Swaminathan cringed and begged him to grant him six hours and ran home. He first tried granny. She almost shed tears that she had no money, and held her wooden box upside down to prove how hard up she was.

‘I know, granny, you have a lot of coins under your pillows.’ ‘No, boy. You can search if you like.’

Swaminathan ordered granny to leave the bed and made a thorough search under the pillows and the carpets.

‘Why do you want money now?’ granny asked.

‘If you have what I want, have the goodness to oblige me. If not, why ask futile questions?’

Granny cried to mother: ‘If you have money, give this boy six pies.’ But nobody was prepared to oblige Swaminathan. Father dismissed the request in a fraction of a second, which made Swaminathan wonder what he did with all the money that he took from his clients.

He now tried a last desperate chance. He fell on his hands and knees, and resting his cheek on the cold cement floor, peered into the dark space under his father’s heavy wardrobe. He had a wild notion that he might find a few coins scattered there. He thrust his hand under the wardrobe and moved it in all directions. All that he was able to collect was a disused envelope musty with

cobweb and dust, a AcoDckIrToaHchY, AandApCinAchDesEoMf fiYne SduAstL. EM

He sometimes believed that he could perform magic, if only he set about it with sufficient earnestness. He also remembered Ebenezar’s saying in the class that God would readily help those that prayed to him. He secured a small cardboard box, placed in it a couple of pebbles, and covered them with fine sand and leaves. He carried the box to the pooja room and placed it in a corner. It was a small room in which a few framed pictures of Gods hung in the wall, and a few bronze and brass idols kept staring at Swaminathan from a small carved wooden pedestal. A permanent smell of flowers, camphor, and incense, hung in the air.

Swaminathan stood before the Gods and with great piety informed them of the box and its contents, how he expected them to convert the two pebbles into two three-pie coins, and why he needed money so urgently. He promised that if the Gods helped him; he would give up biting his thumb. He closed his eyes and muttered: ‘Oh, Sri Rama! Thou hast slain Ravana though he had ten heads, can’t

you give me six pies?… If I give you the six pies now, when will you give me the hoop? I wish you would tell me what that herb is. Mani, shall I tell you the secret

of getting a hoop?

Oh, Rama! Give me six pies and I will give up biting my thumb for a year ‘

He wandered aimlessly in the backyard persuading himself that in a few minutes he could return to the pooja room and take his money–transmuted pebbles. He fixed a time limit of half an hour.

Ten minutes later he entered the pooja room, prostrated himself before the Gods, rose, and snatching his box, ran to a secluded place in the backyard. With a fluttering heart he opened the box. He emptied it on the ground, ran his fingers through the mass of sand and leaves, and picked up the two pebbles. As he gazed at the cardboard box, the scattered leaves, sand, and the unconverted pebbles, he was filled with rage. The indifference of the Gods infuriated him and brought tears to his eyes. He wanted to abuse the Gods, but was afraid to. Instead, he vented all

his rage on the cardAboDarIdTbHoxY, aAndAkCickAedDiEt frMomYpSlacAeLtoEpMlace and stamped upon the leaves and sand. He paused and doubted if the Gods would approve of even

this. He was afraid that it might offend them. He might get on without money, but it was dangerous to incur the wrath of Gods; they might make him fail in his examinations, or kill father, mother, granny, or the baby. He picked up the box again and put back into it the sand, the leaves, and the pebbles, that were crushed, crumpled, and kicked, a minute ago. He dug a small pit at the root of a banana tree and buried the box reverently.

Ten minutes later he stood in Abu lane, before Mani’s house, and whistled twice or thrice. Mani did not appear. Swaminathan climbed the steps and knocked on the door. As the door-chain clanked inside, he stood in suspense. He was afraid he might not be able to explain his presence if anyone other than Mani should open the door. The door opened, and his heart sank. A big man with bushy eyebrows stood before him. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘Who are you? Where is Mani?’ Swaminathan asked. This was intended to convey that he had come to see Mani but was quite surprised to meet this other person, and would like to know who it was, whom he had the pleasure of seeing before him. But in his confusion, he could not put this sentiment in better form.

‘You ask me who I am in my own house?’ bellowed the Bushy-Eyebrows. Swaminathan turned and jumped down the steps to flee. But the Bushy-Eyebrows ordered: ‘Come here, little man.’ It was impossible to disobey this command. Swaminathan slowly advanced up the steps, his eyes bulging with terror. The Bushy-Eyebrows said: ‘Why do you run away? If you have come to see Mani, why don’t you see him?’ This was logic absolute.

‘Never mind,’ Swaminathan said irrelevantly. ‘Go in and see him, little man.’

Swaminathan meekly entered the house. Mani was standing behind the door, tame and unimpressive in his domestic setting. He and Swaminathan stood

staring at each otheAr, DneIiTthHer YofAtheAmCuAtteDriEngMa YsinSglAe LwoErdM. The Bushy-Eyebrows was standing in the door-way with his back to them, watching the street.

Swaminathan pointed a timid finger and jerked his head questioningly. Mani whispered: ‘Uncle.’

The uncle suddenly turned round and said: Why do you stand staring at each other? -Did you come for that? Wag your tongues, boys.’ After this advice he stepped into the street to drive away two dogs that came and rolled in front of the house, locked in a terrible fight. He was now out of earshot. Swaminathan said: ‘Your uncle? I never knew. I say, Mani, can’t you come out now?… No?… I came on urgent business. Give me–urgent–six pies–got to have it–coachman goes away for weeks–may not get the chance again–don’t know what to do without hoop ‘ He paused.

Mani’s uncle was circling round the dogs, swearing at them and madly searching for stones. Swaminathan continued: ‘My life depends on it. If you don’t give it, I am undone. Quick, get the money.’

‘I have no money, nobody gives me money,’ Mani replied.

Swaminathan felt lost. ‘Where does your uncle keep his money? Look into that box ‘

‘I don’t know.’

‘Mani, come here,’ his uncle cried from the street, ‘drive away these devils.

Get me a stone.’

‘Rajam, can you lend me a policeman?’ Swaminathan asked two weeks

later.

‘Policeman! Why?’

‘There is a rascal in this town who has robbed me.’ He related to Rajam his

dealings with the coachman. ‘And now,’ Swaminathan said continuing his tale of

woe, ‘whenever he sAeeDs ImTeH, YheApreAteCnAdsDnoEt Mto YrecSogAnLiseEmMe. If I got to his house, I am told he is not at home, though I can hear him cursing somebody inside. If I

persist, he sends word that he will unchain his dog and kill me.’ ‘Has he a dog?’ asked Rajam.

‘Not any that I could see.’

‘Then why not rush into his house and kick him?’

‘It is all very well to say that. I tremble whenever I go to see him. There is no knowing what coachmen have in their houses. He may set his horse on me.’

‘Let him, it isn’t going to eat you,’ said Mani.

‘Isn’t it? I am glad to know it. You come with me one day to tailor Ranga and hear what he has to say about horses. They are sometimes more dangerous than even tigers,’ Swaminathan said earnestly.

‘Suppose you wait one day and catch him at the gate?’ Rajam suggested.

‘I have tried it. But whenever he comes out, he is on his coach. And as soon as he sees me, he takes out his long whip. I get out of his reach and shout. But what is the use? That horse simply flies! And to think that he has duped me of two annas!’

‘It was six pies, wasn’t it?’

‘But he took from me twice again, six pies each time ‘

‘Then it is only an anna and a half,’ Rajam said. ‘No, Rajam, It is two annas.’

‘My dear boy, twelve pies make an anna, and you have paid thrice, six pies each time; that is eighteen pies in all, one anna and a half.’

‘It is a useless discussion. Who cares how many pies make an anna?’ Swaminathan said.

‘But in money matters, you must be precise–very well go on, Swami.’

‘The coachman first took from me six pies, promising me the silver coins in

two days. He dodgedAmDeITfoHr fYouAr dAayCs AanDd dEeMmaYndSedAsLixEmMore pies, saying that he had collected herbs for twelve pies. He put me off again and took from me another

six pies, saying that without it the whole process would fail. And after that, every time I went to him he put me off with some excuse or other; he often complained that owing to the weather the process was going on rather slowly. And two days ago he told me that he did not know me or anything about my money. And now you know how he behaves–I don’t mind the money, but I hate his boy–that dark rascal. He makes faces at me whenever he sees me, and he has threatened to empty a bucketful of drain-water on my head. One day he held up an open penknife. I want to thrash him; that will make his father give me back my two annas.’

Next day Swaminathan and Mani started for the coachman’s house. Swaminathan was beginning to regret that he had ever opened the subject before his friends. The affair was growing beyond his control. And considering the interest

that Rajam and Mani displayed in the affair, one could not foresee where it was going to take them all.

Rajam had formed a little plan to decoy and kidnap the coachman’s son. Mani was his executive. He was to befriend the coachman’s son. Swaminathan had very little part to play in the preliminary stages. His duty would cease with pointing out the coachman’s house to Mani.

The coachman lived a mile from Swaminathan’s house, westward, in Keelacheri, which consisted of about a dozen thatched huts and dingy hovels, smoke-tinted and evil- smelling, clustering together irregularly.

They were now within a few yards of the place. Swaminathan tried a last desperate chance to stop the wheel of vengeance.

‘Mani, I think the coachman’s son has returned the money.’ What!’

‘I think…’

‘You think soA, DdoITyoHu?YCAanAyCouAsDhoEw Mit tYo mSeA?’ LEM

Swaminathan pleaded: ‘Leave him alone, Mani. You don’t know what troubles we shall get into by tampering with that boy. ‘

‘Shut up or I will wring your neck.’

‘Oh, Mani–the police–or the boy himself–he is frightful, capable of anything.’ He had in his heart a great dread of the boy. And sometimes in the night would float before him a face dark, dirty and cruel, and make him shiver. It was the face of the coachman’s son.

‘He lives in the third house,’ Swaminathan pointed out. At the last moment Mani changed his plan and insisted upon Swaminathan’s following him to the coachman’s house. Swaminathan sat down in the road as a protest. But Mani was stubborn. He dragged Swaminathan along till they came before the coachman’s house, and then started shouting at him.

‘Mani, Mani, what is the matter?’

‘You son of a donkey,’ Mani roared at Swaminathan and swung his hand to strike him.

Swaminathan began to cry. Mani attempted to strangle him. A motley crowd gathered round them, urchins with prodigious bellies, women of dark aspect, and their men. Scurvy chickens cackled and ran hither and thither. The sun was unsparing. Two or three mongrels lay in the shade of a tree and snored. A general malodour of hencoop and unwashed clothes pervaded the place.

And now from the hovel that Swaminathan had pointed out as the coachman’s, emerged a little man of three feet or so, ill-clad and unwashed. He pushed his way through the crowd and, securing a fine place, sucked his thumb and watched the fight in rapture. Mani addressed the crowd indignantly, pointing at Swaminathan: ‘This urchin, I don’t know who he is, all of a sudden demands two annas from me. I have never seen him before. He says I owe him that money.’ Mani continued in this strain for fifteen minutes. At the end of it, the coachman’s

son took the thumb AouDt oIfThHisYmAoutAh CanAd DreEmaMrkYed:S’HAeLmEuMst be sent to the jail.’ At this Mani bestowed an approving smile upon him and asked: ‘Will you help me to

carry him to the police station?’

‘No,’ said the coachman’s son, being afraid of police stations himself.

Mani asked: ‘How do you know that he must be taken to the police station?’ ‘I know it.’

‘Does he ever trouble you similarly?’ asked Mani. ‘No,’ said the boy.

‘Where is the two annas that your father took from me?’ asked Swaminathan, turning to the boy his tear-drenched face. The crowd had meanwhile melted, after making half-hearted attempts to bring peace. Mani asked the boy suddenly: ‘Do you want this top?’ He held a shining red top.

The boy put out his hand for the top.

Mani said: ‘I can’t give you this. if you come with me, I will give you a bigger one. Let us become friends.’

The boy had no objection. ‘Won’t you let me see it?’ he asked. Mani gave it to him. The boy turned it in his hand twice or thrice and in the twinkling of an eye disappeared from the place. Mani took time to grasp the situation. When he did grasp it, he saw the boy entering a hovel far off. He started after him.

When Mani reached the hovel the door was closed. Mani knocked a dozen times, before a surly man appeared and said that the boy was not there. The door was shut again. Mani started knocking again. Two or three menacing neighbors came round and threatened to bury him alive if he dared to trouble them in their own locality. Swaminathan was desperately appealing to Mani to come away. But it took a great deal more to move him. He went on knocking.

The neighbours took up their position a few yards off, with handfuls of stones, and woke the dogs-sleeping under the tree.

It was onlyAwDhIeTnHt YheAdoAgCs AcaDmEe MboYunSciAngLEtoMwards them that Mani shouted: ‘Run,’ to Swaminathan, and set an example himself.

A couple of stones hit Swaminathan on the back. One or two hit Mani also. A sharp stone skinned Mani’s right heel. They became blind and insensible to everything except the stretch of road before them.

CHAPTER XI

In Fathers Presence

DURING summer Malgudi was one of the most detested towns in South India. Sometimes the heat went above a hundred and ten in the shade, and between twelve and three any day in summer the dusty blanched roads were deserted.

Even donkeys and dogs, the most vagrant of animals, preferred to move to the edge of the street, where cat-walks and minor projections from buildings cast a sparse strip of shade, when the fierce sun tilted towards the west. But there is this peculiarity about heat: it appears to affect only those that think of it. Swaminathan, Mani and Rajam would have been surprised if anybody had taken the trouble to prove to them that the Malgudi sun was unbearable. They found the noon and the afternoon the most fascinating part of the day. The same sun that beat down on the

head of Mr. Hentel, the mill manager, and drove him to Kodaikanal, or on the turban of Mr. KrishnAanD, ItTheHEYxeAcuAtivCe AEnDgEineMerY, aSndAmLaEdeMhim complain that his profession was one of the hardest, compelling him to wander in sun and storm,

beat down on Swaminathan’s curly head, Mani’s tough matted hair, and Rajam’s short wiry crop, and left them unmoved. The same sun that baked the earth so much that even Mr. Retty, the most Indianised of the ‘Europeans’, who owned a rice mill in the deserted bungalow outside the town (he was, by the way, the mystery man of the place: nobody could say who he was or where he had come from; he swore at his boy and at his customers in perfect Tamil and always moved about in shirt, shorts, and sandalled feet) screamed one day when he forgetfully took a step or two barefoot, the same sun made the three friends loathe to remain under a roof.

They were sitting on a short culvert, half a mile outside the municipal limits, on the Trunk Road. A streak of water ran under the culvert on a short stretch of

sand, and mingled with Sarayu farther down. There was no tree where they sat, and the sun struck their heads directly. On the sides of the road there were paddy fields; but now all that remained was scorched stubble, vast stretches of stubble, relieved here and there by clustering groves of mango or coco-nut. The Trunk Road was deserted but for an occasional country cart lumbering along head for ten minutes, if you want me to do it as a punishment. I only pretended to scratch Swami to show the coachman’s boy that I was his enemy.’

A jingling was now heard. A close mat-covered cart drawn by a white bullock was coming down the road. When it had come within a yard of the culvert, they rose, advanced, stood in a row, and shouted: ‘Pull up the animal, will you?’

The cart driver was a little village boy. ‘Stop the cart, you fool,’ cried Rajam.

‘If he does not stop, we shall arrest him and confiscate his cart.’ This was Swaminathan.

The cart drivAerDsIaTidH: ‘BYoAys,AwChyAdDo yEoMu sYtopSmAeL?’EM

‘Don’t talk,’ Mani commanded, and with a serious face went round the cart and examined the wheels. He bent down and scrutinised the bottom of the cart: ‘Hey, cart man, get down.’

‘Boys, I must go,’ pleaded the driver.

Whom do you address as “boys”?’ asked Rajam menacingly. ‘Don’t you know who we are?’

‘We are the Government Police out to catch humbugs like you,’ added Swaminathan.

‘I shall shoot you if you say a word,’ said Rajam to the young driver. Though the driver was incredulous, he felt that there must be something in what they said.

Mani tapped a wheel and said: ‘The culvert is weak, we can’t let you go over it unless you show us the pass.’

The cart driver jabbered: ‘Please, sirs, let me–I have to be there.’ ‘Shut up,’ Rajam commanded.

Swaminathan examined the animal and said: ‘Come here.’

The cart driver was loath to get down. Mani dragged him from his seat and gave him a push towards Swaminathan. Swaminathan scowled at him, and pointing at the sides of the animal, asked: ‘Why have you not washed the animal, you blockhead?’

The villager replied timidly: ‘I have washed the animal, sir.

‘But why is this here?’ Swaminathan asked, pointing at a brown patch. ‘Oh, that! The animal has had it since its birth, sir.’

‘Birth? Are you trying to teach me?’ Swaminathan shouted and raised his leg to kick the cart driver.

They showed signs of relenting.

‘Give the rascal a pass, and be done with him,’ Rajam conceded

graciously. SwaminaAthDanITtoHokYoAut Aa CpeAncDil EstMubYanSd Aa LgrEubMby pocket-book that he always carried about him on principle. It was his habit to note down all sorts of

things: the number of cycles that passed him, the number of people going barefoot, the number going with sandals or shoes on, and so forth.

He held the paper and pencil ready. Mani took hold of the rope of the bullock, pushed it back, and turned it the other way round. The cart driver protested. But Mani said: ‘Don’t worry. It has got to stand here. This is the boundary.’

‘I have to go this way, sir.’ ‘You can turn it round and go.’

What is your name?’ asked Rajam. ‘Karuppan,’ answered the boy.

Swaminathan took it down. ‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘You don’t know? Swami, write a hundred,’ said Rajaro ‘No sir, no sir, I am not a hundred.’

‘Mind your business and hold your tongue. You are a hundred. I will kill you if you say no. What is your bullock’s name?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘Swami write “Karuppan” again.’

‘Sir, that is my name, not the bullock’s.’

They ignored this and Swaminathan wrote ‘Karuppan’ against the name of the bullock.

‘Where are you going?’ ‘Sethur.’

Swaminathan wrote it down. ‘How long will you stay there?’ ‘It is my place, sir.’

‘If that is so,AwDhaItTbHroYugAht yAoCu hAeDre?E’ MY SALEM

‘Our headman sent ten bags of coco-nut to the Railway Shed.’

Swaminathan entered every word in his note-book. Then all the three signed the page, tore it off, gave it to the cart driver, and permitted him to start.

Much to Swaminathan’s displeasure, his father’s courts closed in the second week of May, and father began to spend the afternoons at home. Swaminathan feared that it might interfere with his afternoon rambles with Rajam and Mani. And it did. On the very third day of his vacation, father commanded Swaminathan, just as he was stepping out of the house: ‘Swami, come here.’

Father was standing in the small courtyard, wearing a dhoti and a banian, the dress, which, for its very homeliness, Swaminathan detested to see him in; it indicated that he did not intend going out in the near future.

‘Where are you going?’ ‘Nowhere.’

now.’

Where were you yesterday at this time?’ ‘Here.’

“You are lying. You were not here yesterday. And you are not going out

‘That is right,’ mother added, just appearing from some where, ‘there is no

limit to his loafing in the sun. He will die of sunstroke if he keeps on like this.’

Father would have gone on even without mother’s encouragement. But now her words spurred him to action. Swaminathan was asked to follow him to his ‘room’ in his father’s dressing-room.

‘How many days is it since you have touched your books?’ father asked as he blew off the fine layer of dust on Swaminathan’s books, and cleared the web that an industrious spider was weaving between a corner of the table and the pile of books.

Swaminathan viewed this question as a gross breach of promise.

‘Should I reaAdDevIeTnHwYheAn IAhaCvAe nDoEscMhoYol?S’ ALEM

‘Do you think you have passed the B. A.?’ father asked.

‘I mean, father, when the school is closed, when there is no examination, even then should I read?’

‘What a question! You must read.’

‘But, father, you said before the examinations that I needn’t read after they were over. Even Rajam does not read.’

As he uttered the last sentence, he tried to believe it; he clearly remembered Rajam’s complaining bitterly of a home tutor who came and pestered him for two hours a day thrice a week. Father was apparently deaf to Swaminathan’s remarks. He stood over Swaminathan and set him to dust his books and clean his table. Swaminathan vigorously started blowing off the dust from the book covers. He caught the spider carefully, and took it to the window to

throw it out. He held it outside the window and watched it for a while. It was swinging from a strand that gleamed in a hundred delicate tints.

‘Look sharp! Do you want a whole day to throw out the spider?’ father asked. Swaminathan suddenly realised that he might have the spider as his pet and that it would be a criminal waste to throw it out. He secretly slipped it into his pocket and, after shaking an empty hand outside the window, returned to his duty at the desk.

‘Look at the way you have kept your English Text! Are you not ashamed of yourself?’ Swaminathan picked up the oily red-bound Fourth Reader, opened it, and banged together the covers, in order to shake off the dust, and then robbed violently the oily covers with his palm.

‘Get a piece of cloth, boy. That is not the way to clean things. Get a piece of cloth, Swami,’ father said, half kindly and half impatiently.

Swaminathan looked about and complained, ‘I can’t find any here, father.’

^{‘Run and se}A^e.’DITHYA ACADEMY SALEM

This was a welcome suggestion. Swaminathan hurried out. He first went to

his grandmother.

‘Granny, get me a piece of cloth, quick.’ Where am I to go for a piece of cloth?’

‘Where am I to go?’ he asked peevishly and added quite irrelevantly, ‘if one has go t to read even during holidays, I don’t see why holidays are given at all.’

‘What is the matter?’

This was his opportunity to earn some sympathy. He almost wept as he said: ‘I don’t know what Rajam and Mani will think, waiting for me there, if I keep on fooling here. Granny, if father cannot find any work to do, why shouldn’t he go and sleep?’

Father shouted across the hall: ‘Did you find the cloth?’

Swaminathan answered: ‘Granny hasn’t got it. I shall see if mother has.’ His mother was sitting in the back corridor on a mat, with the baby sleeping on her lap. Swaminathan glared at her. Her advice to her husband a few minutes ago rankled in his heart. ‘You are a fine lady, mother,’ he said in an undertone, ‘why don’t you leave us, poor folk, alone?’

‘What?’ she asked, unconscious of the sarcasm, and having forgotten what she had said to her husband a few minutes ago.

‘You needn’t have gone and carried tales against me. I don’t know what I have done to you.’ He would have enjoyed prolonging this talk, but father was waiting for the duster.

‘Can you give me a piece of cloth?’ he asked, coming to business. ‘What cloth?’

‘What cloth! How should I know? It seems I have got to tidy up those– those books of mine. A fine way of spending the holidays!’

^{‘I can’t get a}A^nyDⁿI^oT^wH^.’ YA ACADEMY SALEM

‘Hmm. You can’t, can’t you?’ He looked about. There was a piece of cloth

under the baby. In a flash, he stooped, rolled the baby over, pulled out the cloth, and was off. He held his mother responsible for all his troubles, and disturbing the baby and snatching its cloth gave him great relief.

With a fierce satisfaction he tilted the table and tipped all the things on it over the floor, and then picked them up one by one, and arranged them on the table. Father watched him: ‘Is this how you arrange things? You have kept all the light things at the bottom and the heavy ones on top. Take out those note-books. Keep the Atlas at the bottom.’ Mother came in with the baby in her arms and complained to father, ‘Look at that boy, he has taken the baby’s cloth. Is there nobody to control him, in this house? I wonder how long his school is going to be kept closed.’ Swaminathan continued his work with concentrated interest. Father

was pleased to ignore mother’s complaint; he merely pinched the sleeping baby’s cheeks, at which mother was annoyed and left the room.

Half an hour later Swaminathan sat in his father’s room in a chair, with a slate in his hand and pencil ready. Father held the arithmetic book open and dictated: ‘ “Rama has ten mangoes with which he wants to earn fifteen annas. Krishna wants only four mangoes. How much will Krishna have to pay?”‘

Swaminathan gazed and gazed at this sum, and every time he read it, it seemed to acquire a new meaning. He had the feeling of having stepped into a fearful maze His mouth began to water at the thought of mangoes. He wondered

what made Rama fix fifteen annas for ten mangoes. What kind of a man was Rama? Probably he was like Sankar. Somehow one couldn’t help feeling that he must have been like Sankar, with his ten mangoes and his iron determination to get fifteen annas. If Rama was like Sankar, Krishna must have been like the Pea. Here Swaminathan felt an unaccountable sympathy for Krishna.

‘Have you dAonDeITthHe YsuAm?A’ fCatAheDr EasMkeYd, lSooAkiLngEMover the newspaper he was reading.

‘Father, will you tell me if the mangoes were ripe?’

Father regarded him for a while and smothering a smile remarked: ‘Do the sum first. I will tell you whether the fruits were ripe or not, afterwards.’

Swaminathan felt utterly helpless. If only father would tell him whether Rama was trying to sell ripe fruits or unripe ones! Of what avail would it be to tell him afterwards? He felt strongly that the answer to this question contained the key to the whole problem. It would be scandalous to expect fifteen annas for ten unripe mangoes. But even if he did; it wouldn’t be unlike Rama, whom Swaminathan was steadily beginning to hate and invest with the darkest qualities.

‘Father, I cannot do the sum,’ Swaminathan said, pushing away the slate. ‘What is th e matter with you? You can’t solve a simple problem in Simple

Proportion?’

‘We are not taught this kind of thing in our school.’

‘Get the slate here. I will make you give the answer now.’

Swaminathan waited with interest for the miracle to happen. Father studied the sum for a second and asked: ‘What is the price of ten mangoes?’

Swaminathan looked over the sum to find out which part of the sum contained an answer to this question. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You seem to be an extraordinary idiot. Now read the sum. Come on. How much does Rama expect for ten mangoes?’

‘Fifteen annas of course,’ Swaminathan thought, but how could that be its price, just price? It was very well for Rama to expect it in his avarice. But was it the right price? And then there was the obscure point whether the mangoes were ripe or not. If they were ripe, fifteen annas might not be an improbable price. If only he could get more light on this point!

‘How much does Rama want for his mangoes?’

‘Fifteen annaAsD,’ rIeTpHliedYSAwaAmCinAatDhaEn MwitYhouSt AcoLnvEicMtion. Very good. How many mangoes does Krishna want?’

‘Four.’

‘What is the price of four?’

Father seemed to delight in torturing him. How could he know? How could he know what that fool Krishna would pay?

‘Look here, boy. I have half a mind to thrash you. What have you in your head? Ten mangoes cost fifteen annas. What is the price of one? Come on. If you don’t say it–‘ His hand took Swaminathan’s ear and gently twisted it. Swaminathan could not open his mouth because he could not decide whether the solution lay in the realm of addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division. The longer he hesitated, the more violent the twist was becoming. In the end when father was waiting with a scowl for an answer, he received only a squeal from his son. ‘I am not going to leave you till you tell me how much a single mango costs at fifteen

annas for ten.’ What was the matter with father? Swaminathan kept blinking. Where was the urgency to know its price? Anyway, if father wanted so badly to know, instead of harassing him, let him go to the market and find it out.

The whole brood of Ramas and Krishnas, with their endless transactions with odd quantities of mangoes and fractions of money, were getting disgusting.

Father admitted defeat by declaring: ‘One mango costs fifteen over ten annas. Simplify it.’

Here he was being led to the most hideous regions of arithmetic, Fractions. ‘Give me the slate, father. I will find it out.’ He worked and found at the end of fifteen minutes: ‘The price of one mango is three over two annas.’ He expected to be contradicted any moment. But father said: ‘Very good, simplify it further.’ It was plain sailing after that. Swaminathan announced at the end of half an hour’s agony: ‘Krishna must pay six annas,’ and burst into tears.

At five o’clock when he was ready to start for the club, Swaminathan’s

father felt sorry for hAavDingITwHorYrieAd hAisCsoAnDalEl tMheYaftSerAnoLonE. M’Would you like to come with me to the club, boy?’ he asked when he saw Swaminathan sulking behind a

pillar with a woebegone face. Swaminathan answered by disappearing for a minute and reappearing dressed in his coat and cap. Father surveyed him from head to foot and remarked: ‘Why can’t you be a little more tidy?’ Swaminathan writhed awkwardly.

‘Lakshmi,’ father called, and said to mother when she came: ‘there must be a clean dress for the boy in the box. Give him something clean.’

‘Please don’t worry about it now. He is all right. Who is to open the box?

The keys are somewhere I have just mixed milk for the baby–‘ said mother.

‘What has happened to all his dresses?’

‘What dresses? You haven’t bought a square inch of cloth since last summer.’

What do you mean? What has happened to all the pieces of twill I bought a few months ago?’ he demanded vaguely, making a mental note at the same time, to take the boy to the tailor on Wednesday evening. Swaminathan was relieved to find his mother reluctant to get him a fresh dress, since he had an obscure dread that his father would leave him behind and go away if he went in to change.

A car hooted in front of the house. Father snatched his tennis racket from a table and rushed out, followed by Swaminathan. A gentleman, wearing a blazer that appealed to Swaminathan, sat at the wheel, and said: ‘Good evening,’ with a grin. Swaminathan was at first afraid that this person might refuse to take him in the car. But his fears were dispelled by the gentleman’s saying amiably: ‘Hallo, Srinivasan, are you bringing your boy to the club? Right 0!’ Swaminathan sat in the back seat while his father and his friend occupied the front.

The car whizzed along. Swaminathan was elated and wished that some of his friends could see him then. The car slid into a gate and came to a stop amidst

half a dozen other caArsD. ITHYA ACADEMY SALEM

He watched his father playing tennis, and came to the conclusion that he was the best player in all the three courts that were laid side by side. Swaminathan found that whenever his father hit the ball, his opponents were unable to receive it and so let it go and strike the screen. He also found that the picker’s life was one of grave risks. | Swaminathan fell into a pleasant state of mind. The very fact that he was allowed to be present there and watch the play gave him a sense of importance. He would have something to say to his friends tomorrow. He slowly moved and stood near the screen behind his father. Before stationing himself there, he wondered for a moment if the little fellow in khaki dress might not object. But the little fellow was busy picking up balls and throwing them at the players. Swaminathan stayed there for about ten minutes. His father’s actions were clearer to watch from behind, and the twang of his racket when hitting the ball was very pleasing to the ear.

For a change Swaminathan stood looking at the boy in khaki dress. As he gazed, his expression changed. He blinked fast as if he disbelieved his eyes. It was the coachman’s son, only slightly transformed by the khaki dress! Now the boy had turned and seen him. He grinned maliciously and hastily took out of his pocket a penknife, and held it up. Swaminathan was seized with cold fear. He moved away fast, unobtrusively, to his former place, which was at a safe distance from his enemy. After the set when his father walked towards the building, Swaminathan took care to walk a little in front of him and not behind, as he feared that he might get a stab any minute in his back.

‘Swami, don’t go in front. You are getting between my legs.’ Swaminathan obeyed with a reluctant heart. He kept shooting glances sideways and behind. He stooped and picked up a stone, a sharp stone, and held it ready for use if any emergency should arise. The distance from the tennis court to the building was about a dozen yards, but to Swaminathan it seemed to be a mile and a half.

He felt safeAwDheInTHheYsAat iAn Ca AchDaiEr bMesYideShAisLfEatMher in the card-room. A thick cloud of smoke floated in the air. Father was shuffling and throwing cards with

great zest. This was the safest place on earth. There was father and any number of his friends, and let the coachman’s son try a hand if he liked. A little later Swaminathan looked out of the window and felt disturbed at the sight of the stars. It would be darker still by the time the card game was finished and father rose to go home.

An hour later father rose from the table. Swaminathan was in a highly nervous state when he got down the last steps of the building. There were unknown dangers lurking m the darkness around. He was no doubt secure between father and his friend. That thought was encouraging. But Swaminathan felt at the same time that it would have been better if all the persons in the card- room had escorted him to the car. He needed all the guarding he could get, and

some more. Probably by this time the boy had gone out and brought a huge gang of assassins and was waiting for him.

He could not walk in front as, in addition to getting between his father’s legs, he had no idea which way they had to go for the car. Following his father was out of the question, as he might not reach the car at all. He walked in a peculiar sidestep which enabled him to see before him and behind him simultaneously. The distance was interminable. He decided to explain the danger to father and seek his protection.

‘Father.’ Well, boy?’

Swaminathan suddenly decided that his father had better not know anything about the coachman’s son, however serious the situation might be.

‘What do you want, boy?’ father asked again. ‘Father, are we going home now?’

‘Yes.’ ‘Walking?’

ADITHYA ACADEMY SALEM

‘No. The car is there, near the gate.’

When they came to the car, Swaminathan got in first and occupied the centre of the back seat. He was still in suspense. Father’s friend was taking time to start the car. Swaminathan was sitting all alone in the back seat, very far behind father and his friend. Even now, the coachman’s son and his gang could easily pull him out and finish him.

The car started. When its engine rumbled, it sounded to Swaminathan’s ears like the voice of a saviour. The car was outside the gate now and picked up speed. Swaminathan lifted a corner of his dhoti and mopped his brow.

CHAPTER XII

Broken Panes

ON THE 15th of August 1930, about two thousand citizens of Malgudi assembled on the right bank of Sarayu to protest against the arrest of Gauri Sankar, a prominent political worker of Bombay. An earnest-looking man clad in khaddar stood on a wooden platform and addressed the gathering. In a high, piercing voice, he sketched the life and achievements of Gauri Sankar; and after that passed on to generalities: ‘We are slaves to-day,’ he shrieked, ‘worse slaves than we have ever been before. Let us remember our heritage. Have we forgotten the glorious periods of Ramayana and Mahabharata? This is the country that has given the world a Kalidasa, a Buddha, a Sankara. Our ships sailed the high seas and we had reached the height of civilisation when the Englishman ate raw flesh and wandered in the jungles, nude.

But now whAaDt aITreHwYe?A’ HAeCpAauDseEdMaYnd SsaAidLEonMthe inspiration of the

moment, without troubling to verify the meaning: ‘We are slaves of slaves.’ To Swaminathan, as to Mani, this part of the speech was incomprehensible. But five minutes later the speaker said something that seemed practicable: ‘Just think for a while. We are three hundred and thirty-six millions, and our land is as big as Europe minus Russia. England is no bigger than our Madras Presidency and is inhabited by a handful of white rogues and is thousands of miles away. Yet we bow in homage before the Englishman!

Why are we become, through no fault of our own, docile and timid? It is the bureaucracy that has made us so, by intimidation and starvation. You need not do more. Let every Indian spit on England, and the quantity of saliva will be enough to drown England ‘

‘Gandhi ki Jai!’ shouted Swaminathan involuntarily, deeply stirred by the speaker’s eloquence at this point. He received a fierce dig from Mani, who whispered: Tool! Why can’t you hold your tongue?’

Swaminathan asked: ‘Is it true?’ Which?’

‘Spitting and drowning the Europeans.’

‘Must be, otherwise, do you think that fellow would suggest it?’ ‘Then why not do it? It is easy.’

‘Europeans will shoot us, they have no heart,’ said Mani.

This seemed a satisfactory answer, and Swaminathan was about to clear up another doubt, when one or two persons sitting around frowned at him.

For the rest of the evening Swaminathan was caught in the lecturer’s eloquence; so was Mani. With the lecturer they wept over the plight of the Indian peasant; resolved to boycott English goods, especially Lancashire and Manchester

cloth, as the ownersAoDf tIhTosHe YmAillsAhaCdAcuDt EoffMthYe tShuAmLbsEoMf the weavers of Dacca muslin, for which India was famous at one time. What muslin it was, a whole piece

of forty yards could be folded and kept in a snuff box! The persons who cut off the thumbs of such weavers deserved the worst punishment possible. And Swaminathan was going to mete it out by wearing only khaddar, the rough homespun. He looked at the dress he was just then wearing, in chagrin. ‘Mani,’ he said in a low voice, ‘have you any idea what I am wearing?’

Mani examined Swaminathan’s coat and declared: ‘It is Lancashire cloth.’ ‘How do you know it?’

Mani glared at him in answer.

‘What are you wearing?’ asked Swaminathan.

‘Of course khaddar. Do you think I will pay a pie to those Lancashire devils? No. They won’t get it out of me.’

Swaminathan had his own doubts over this statement. But he preferred to keep quiet, and wished that he had come out nude rather than in what he believed to be Lancashire cloth.

A great cry burst from the crowd: ‘Bharat Matha ki Jai!’ And then there were cries of ‘Gandhi ki Jai!’ After that came a kind of mournful ‘national’ song. The evening’s programme closed with a bonfire of foreign cloth. It was already dark. Suddenly the darkness was lit up by a red glare. A fire was lighted. A couple of boys wearing Gandhi caps went round begging people to bum their foreign cloth. Coats and caps and upper cloth came whizzing through the air and fell with a thud into the fire, which purred and crackled and rose high, thickening the air with smoke and a burnt smell. People moved about like dim shadows in the red glare. Swaminathan was watching the scene with little shivers of joy going down his spine. Somebody asked him: ‘Young man, do you want our country to remain in eternal slavery?’

‘No, no,’ SwAamDinIaTthHanYrAeplAiedC. ADEMY SALEM

‘But you are wearing a foreign cap.’

Swaminathan quailed with shame. ‘Oh, I didn’t notice he said and removing his cap flung it into the fire with a feeling that he was saving the country.

Early next morning as Swaminathan lay in bed watching a dusty beam of sunlight falling a few yards off his bed, his mind, which was just emerging from sleep, became conscious of a vague worry. Swaminathan asked himself what that worry was. It must be something connected with school. Homework? No. Matters were all right in that direction. It was something connected with dress. Bonfire, bonfire of clothes. Yes. It now dawned upon him with an oppressive clearness that he had thrown his cap into the patriotic bonfire of the previous evening; and of course his father knew nothing about it.

What was he going to wear for school to-day? Telling his father and asking for a new cap was not practicable. He could not go to school bareheaded.

He started for the school in a mood of fatalistic abandon, with only a coat and no cap on. And the fates were certainly kind to him. At least Swaminathan believed that he saw the hand of God in it when he reached the school and found the boys gathered in the road in front of the school in a noisy irregular mob.

Swaminathan passed through the crowd unnoticed till he reached the school gate. A perfect stranger belonging to the Third Form stopped him and asked: ‘Where are you going?’

Swaminathan hesitated for a moment to discover if there was any trap in this question and said: Why–er…. Of course ‘

‘No school to-day,’ declared the stranger with emphasis, and added passionately, ‘one of the greatest sons of the Mother and has been sent to god.’

‘I won’t go to school,’ Swaminathan said, greatly relieved at this unexpected solution to his cap problem.

The Head Master and the teachers were standing in the front veranda of

the school. The HeaAdDMIaTsHterYloAokAedCcAarDewEoMrn.YEbSeAneLzaEr Mwas swinging his cane and pacing up and down. For once, the boys saw D. Pillai, the History Teacher,

serious, and gnawing his close-clipped moustache in great agitation. The crowd in the road had become brisker and noisier, and the school looked forlorn. At five minutes to ten the first bell rang, hardly heard by anyone except those standing near the gate. A conference was going on between the teachers and the Head Master. The Head Master’s hand trembled as he pulled out his watch and gave orders for the second bell. The bell that at other times gave out a clear rich note now sounded weak and inarticulate. The Head Master and the teacher were seen coming toward the gate, and a lull came upon the mob.

The Head Master appealed to the boys to behave and get back to their classes quietly. The boys stood firm. The teachers, including D. Pillai, tried and failed. After uttering a warning that the punishment to follow would be severe, the Head Master withdrew. Thundering shouts of ‘Bharat Matha ki Jai!’

‘Gandhi ki Jai!’ and ‘Gaura Sankar ki Jai!’ followed him.

There were gradual unnoticed additions of all sorts of people to the original student mob. Now zestful adult voices could be detected in the frequent cries of ‘Gandhi ki Jai!’ Half a dozen persons appointed themselves leaders, and ran about crying: ‘Remember, this is a hartal. This is a day of mourning. Observe it in the proper spirit of sorrow and silence.’

Swaminathan was an unobserved atom in the crowd. Another unobserved atom was busily piling up small stones before him, and flinging them with admirable aim at the panes in the front part of the school building. Swaminathan could hardly help following his example. He picked up a handful of stones and searched the building with his eyes. He was disappointed to find at least seventy per cent of the panes already attended to.

He uttered a sharp cry of joy as he discovered a whole ventilator, consisting of small square glasses, in the Head Master’s room, intact! He sent a

stone at it and waiteAd DwiIthTcHoYckAed-AupCeAarDs fEorMthYe sSplAintLerEinMg noise as the stone hit the glass, and the final shivering noise, a fraction of a second later, as the piece

crashed on the floor. It was thrilling.

A puny man came running into the crowd announcing excitedly, ‘Work is going on in the Board High School.’

This horrible piece of news set the crowd in motion. A movement began towards the Board High School, which was situated at the tail-end of Market Road.

When it reached the Board High School, the self-appointed leaders held up their hands and requested the crowd to remain outside and be peaceful, and entered the school. Within fifteen minutes, trickling in by twos and threes, the crowd was in the school hall.

A spokesman of the crowd said to the Head Master, ‘Sir, we are not here to create a disturbance. We only want you to close the school. It is imperative. Our leader is in gaol. Our Motherland is in the throes of war.’

The Head Master, a wizened owl-like man, screamed, “With whose permission did you enter the building? Kindly go out. Or I shall send for the police.’

This was received with howling, jeering, and hooting. And following it, tables and benches were overturned and broken, and window-panes were smashed. Most of the Board School boys merged with the crowd. A few, however, stood apart. They were first invited to come out; but when they showed reluctance, they were dragged out.

Swaminathan’s part in all this was by no means negligible. It was he who shouted ‘We will spit on the police’ (though it was drowned in the din), when the Head Master mentioned the police. The mention of the police had sent his blood boiling. What brazenness, what shamelessness, to talk of police–the nefarious agents of the Lancashire thumb cutters! When the pandemonium started, he was behind no one in destroying the school furniture. With tremendous joy he discovered that there were many glass panes untouched yet. His craving to break

them could not be AfulDly IsTaHtisYfieAd iAn ChisAoDwEn MscYhooSl.AHLeEraMn round collecting ink- bottles and flung them one by one at every pane that caught his eye. When the

Board School boys were dragged out, he felt that he could not do much in that line, most of the boys being as big as himself. On the flash of a bright idea, he wriggled through the crowd and looked for the Infant Standards. There he found little children huddled together and shivering with fright. He charged into this crowd with such ferocity that the children scattered about, stumbling and falling. One unfortunate child who shuffled and moved awkwardly received individual attention. Swaminathan pounced upon him, pulled out his cap, threw it down and stamped on it, swearing at him all the time. He pushed him and dragged him this way and that and then gave him a blow on the head and left him to his fate.

Having successfully paralysed work in the Board School, the crowd moved on in a procession along Market Road. The air vibrated with the songs and slogans uttered in a hundred keys by a hundred voices. Swaminathan found himself

wedged in among a lot of unknown people, in one of the last ranks. The glare from the blanched treeless Market Road was blinding. The white dust stirred up by the procession hung like thin mist in the air and choked him. He could see before him nothing but moving backs and shoulders and occasionally odd parts of some building. His throat was dry with shouting, and he was beginning to feel hungry. He was just pondering whether he could just slip out and go home, when the procession came to a sudden halt. In a minute the rear ranks surged forward to see what the matter was.

The crowd was now in the centre of Market Road, before the fountain in the square. On the other side of the fountain were drawn up about fifty constables armed with lathis. About a dozen of them held up the procession. A big man, with a cane in his hand and a revolver slung from his belt, advanced towards the procession. His leather straps and belts and the highly-polished boots and hose made him imposing in Swaminathan’s eyes. When he turned his head

Swaminathan saw toAhDisIThoHrrYorAthaAt Cit wAaDs ERaMjaYm’sSfaAthLeEr! MSwaminathan could not help feeling sorry that it should be Rajam’s father. Rajam’s father! Rajam’s father to

be at the head of those traitors! The Deputy Superintendent of Police fixed his eyes on his wrist- watch and said, ‘I declare this assembly unlawful. I give it five minutes to disperse.’ At the end of five minutes he looked up and uttered in a hollow voice the word, ‘Charge.’

In the confusion that followed Swaminathan was very nearly trampled upon and killed. The policemen rushed into the crowd, pushing and beating everybody. Swaminathan had joined a small group of panic-stricken runners. The policemen came towards them with upraised lathis. Swaminathan shrieked to them, ‘Don’t kill me. I know nothing.’

He then heard a series of dull noises as the lathis descended on the bodies of his neighbours. Swaminathan saw blood streaming from the forehead of one.

Down came the lathis again. Another runner fell down with a groan. On the back of a third the lathis fell again and again.

Swaminathan felt giddy with fear. He was running as fast as his legs could carry him. But the policemen kept pace with him; one of them held him up by his hair and asked, What business have you here?’

‘I don’t know anything, leave me, sirs,’ Swaminathan pleaded.

‘Doing nothing! Mischievous monkey!’ said the grim, hideous policeman– how hideous policemen were at close quarters!–and delivering him a light tap on the head with the lathi, ordered him to run before he was kicked.

Swaminathan’s original intention had been to avoid that day’s topic before his father. But as soon as father came home, even before taking off his coat, he called mother and gave her a summary of the day’s events. He spoke with a good deal of warmth. The Deputy Superintendent is a butcher,’ he said as he went in to change. Swaminathan was disposed to agree that the Deputy Superintendent was

a butcher, as he reAcoDlleIcTteHdYthAe ApicCtuAreDoEf MRaYjamS’sAfLatEheMr looking at his watch, grimly ticking off seconds before giving orders for massacre. Father came out of

the dressing-room be fore undoing his tie, to declare, ‘Fifty persons have been taken to the hospital with dangerous contusions. One or two are also believed to be killed.’ Turning to Swaminathan he said, ‘I heard, that schoolboys have given a lot of trouble, what did you do?

There was a strike… replied Swaminathan and discovered here an opportunity to get his cap problem solved. He added, ‘Oh, the confusion! You know, somebody pulled off the cap that I was wearing and tore it to bits. I want a

cap before I start for school to-morrow.’ Who was he?’ rather asked.

‘I don’t know, some bully in the crowd.’ ‘Why did he do it?’

‘Because it was foreign ‘

Who said so? I paid two rupees and got it from the Khaddar Stores. It is a black khaddar cap. Why do you presume that you know what is what?’

‘I didn’t do anything. I was very nearly assaulted when I resisted.’

‘You should have knocked him down. I bought the cap and the cloth for your coat on the same day in the Khaddar Stores. If any man says that they are not khaddar, he must be blind.’

‘People say that it was made in Lancashire.’

‘Nonsense. You can ask them to mind their business. And if you allow your clothes to be torn by people who think this and that, you will have to go about naked, that is all. And you may also tell them that I won’t have a pie of mine sent to foreign countries. I know my duty. Whatever it is, why do not you urchins leave politics alone and mind your business?

‘We have enough troubles in our country without you brats messing up things…’

SwaminathaAn DlaIyTHwiYdeAaAwaCkAe DinEbMedYfoSr AaLlEonMg time. As the hours advanced, and one by one as the lights in the house disappeared, his body

compelled him to take stock of the various injuries done to it during the day. His elbows and muscles had their own tales to tell: they brought back to his mind the three or four falls that he had had that day. One was–when–yes, when Rajam got down from his car and came to the school, and Swaminathan had wanted to hide himself, and in the hurry stumbled on a heap of stones, and there the knees were badly skinned. And again when the policemen charged, he ran and fell flat before a shop, and some monster ran over him, pinning him with one foot to the ground.

Now as he turned there was a pang about his hips. And then he felt as if a load had been hung from his thighs. And again as he thought of it, he felt a heavy monotonous pain in the head–the merciless rascals! The policeman’s lathi was none too gentle. And he had been called a monkey! He would–He would see–To

call him a monkey! He was no monkey. Only they–the policemen–looked like monkeys, and they behaved like monkeys too.

The Head Master entered the class with a slightly flushed face and a hard ominous look in his eyes. Swaminathan wished that he had been anywhere but there at that moment. The Head Master surveyed the class for a few minutes and asked, ‘Are you not ashamed to come and sit there after what you did yesterday?’ Just as a special honour to them, he read out the names of a dozen or so that had attended the class. After that he read out the names of those that had kept away, and asked them to stand on their benches. He felt that that punishment was not enough and asked them to stand on their desks. Swaminathan was among them and felt humiliated at that eminence. Then they were lectured. When it was over, they were asked to offer explanations one by one. One said that he had had an attack of headache and there fore could not come to the school. He was asked to bring a medical certificate. The second said that while he had been coming to the

school on the previoAusDdIaTyH, sYomAeoAnCe AhaDd EtolMd hYimSthAaLt tEheMre would be no school, and he had gone back home. The Head Master replied that if he was going to listen

to every loafer who said there would be no school, he deserved to be flogged. Anyway, why did he not come to the school and verify? No answer. The punishment was pronounced: ten days’ attendance cancelled, two rupees fine, and the whole day to be spent on the desk. The third said that he had had an attack of headache. The fourth said that he had had stomach-ache. The fifth said that his grandmother died suddenly just as he was starting for the school. The Head Master asked him if he could bring a letter from his father. No. He had no father. Then, who was his guardian? His grandmother. But the grandmother was dead, was she not? No. It was another grandmother. The Head Master asked how many grandmothers a person could have. No answer. Could he bring a letter from his neighbours?

No, he could not. None of his neighbours could read or write, because he lived in the more illiterate parts of Ellaman Street. Then the Head Master offered to send a teacher to this illiterate locality to ascertain from the boy’s neighbours if the death of the grandmother was a fact. A pause, some perspiration, and then the answer that the neighbours could not possibly know anything about it, since the grandmother died in the village. The Head Master hit him on the knuckles with his cane, called him a street dog, and pronounced the punishment: fifteen days’ suspension.

When Swaminathan’s turn came, he looked around helplessly. Rajam sat on the third bench in front, and resolutely looked away. He was gazing at the black- board intently.

But yet the back of his head and the pink ears were visible to Swaminathan. It was an intolerable sight. Swaminathan was in acute suspense lest that head should turn and fix its eyes on his; he felt that he would drop from the

desk to the floor, ifAthDaIt ThHapYpeAneAd.CTAheDpEinMk eYarSs AthLreEe Mbenches off made him incapable of speech. If only somebody would put a black-board between his eyes

and those pink ears!

He was deaf to the question that the Head Master was putting to him. A rap on his body from the Head Master’s cane brought him to himself.

‘Why did you keep away yesterday?’ asked the Head Master, looking up. Swaminathan’s first impulse was to protest that he had never been absent. But the attendance register was there. ‘No–No–I was stoned. I tried to come, but they took away my cap and burnt it. Many strong men held me down when I tried to come….

When a great man is sent to gaol…. I am surprised to see you a slave of the Englishmen…. Didn’t they cut off–Dacca Muslin–Slaves of slaves….’ These were some of the disjointed explanations which streamed into his head, and, which, even at that moment, he was discreet enough not to express. He had wanted to mention a headache, but he found to his distress that others beside him had had

one. The Head Master shouted, Won’t you open your mouth?’ He brought the cane sharply down on Swaminathan’s right shoulder. Swaminathan kept staring at the Head Master with tearful eyes, massaging with his left hand the spot where the cane was laid. ‘I will kill you if you keep on staring without answering my question,’ cried the Head Master.

I–I–couldn’t come,’ stammered Swaminathan.

“Is that so?’ asked the Head Master, and turning to a boy said, ‘Bring the

peon.’

Swaminathan thought: ‘What, is he going to ask the peon to thrash me? If

he does any such thing, I will bite everybody dead.’ The peon came. The Head Master said to him, ‘Now say what you know about this rascal on the desk.’

The peon eyed Swaminathan with a sinister look, grunted, and demanded, ‘Didn’t I see you break the panes?…’

‘Of the ventilators in my room?’ added the Head Master with zest.

Here there wAaDs InToHchYaAnceAoCf AesDcaEpeM. SYwaSmAinLatEhaMn kept staring foolishly till he received another whack on the back.

The Head Master demanded what the young brigand had to say about it. The brigand had nothing to say. It was a fact that he had broken the panes. They had seen it. There was nothing more to it. He had unconsciously become defiant and did not care to deny the charge. When another whack came on his back, he ejaculated, ‘Don’t beat me, sir. It pains.’ This was an invitation to the Head Master to bring down the cane four times again. He said, ‘Keep standing here, on this desk, staring like an idiot, till I announce your dismissal.’

Every pore in Swaminathan’s body burnt with the touch of the cane. He had a sudden flood of courage, the courage that comes of desperation. He restrained the tears that were threatening to rush out, jumped down, and, grasping his books, rushed out muttering, ‘I don’t care for your dirty school.’

CHAPTER XIII

The ‘M. C. C’

Six WEEKS later Rajam came to Swaminathan’s house to announce that he forgave him all his sins–starting with his political activities, to his new acquisition, the Board High School air, by which was meant a certain slowness and stupidity engendered by mental decay.

After making his exit from Albert Mission School in that theatrical manner (on the day following the strike), Swaminathan became so consistently stubborn that a few days later his father took him to the Board School and admitted him there. At first Swaminathan was rather uncertain of his happiness in the new school. But he excited the curiosity that all newcomers do, and found himself to his great satisfaction the centre of attraction in Second C. All his new class-mates, remarkably new faces, often clustered round him to see him and hear him talk. He

had not yet picked the few that he would have liked to call his chums. He still believed that his AlbAerDt MITissHioYn AsetAwCasAinDtaEctM, thYouSghA, sLinEceMthe reopening in June,

the set was not what it had been before. Sankar disappeared, and people said that his father had been transferred; Somu was not promoted, and that meant he was automatically excluded from the group, the law being inexorable in that respect; the Pea was promoted, but he returned to the class exactly three months late, and he was quite full up with medical certificates, explanations, and exemptions. He was a man of a hundred worries now, and passed his old friends like a stranger. Only Rajam and Mani were still intact as far as Swaminathan was concerned. Mani saw him every day. But Rajam had not spoken to him since the day when his political doings became known.

And now this afternoon Swaminathan was sitting in a dark corner of the house trying to make a camera with a card board box and a spectacle lens. In his effort to fix the lens in the hole that was one round too large, he was on the point of losing his temper, when he heard a familiar voice calling him. He ran to the door.

‘Hallo! Hallo! Rajam,’ he cried, ‘why didn’t you tell me you were coming?’ ‘What is the thing in your hand?’ Rajam asked.

‘Oh,’ Swaminathan said, blushing. ‘Come, come, let us have a look at it.’

‘Oh, it is nothing,’ Swaminathan said, giving him the box.

As Rajam kept gazing at the world through the hole in the cardboard box, Swaminathan said, ‘Akbar Ali of our class has made a marvellous camera.’

‘Has he? What does he do with it?’ ‘He has taken a lot of photos with it.’ ‘Indeed! Photos of what?’

‘He hasn’t yet shown them to me, but they are probably photos of houses, people, and trees.’

Rajam sat down on the door-step and asked, ‘And who is this Akbar Ali?’ ‘He is a nice Mohammedan, belongs to our class.’

‘In the Board High School?’ There was just a suspicion of a sneer in his

tone. SwaminathanApDrefIeTrrHedYtAo iAgnCorAe DthEis MquYesStioAn LaEndMcontinued, ‘He has a bicycle. He is a very fine Mohammedan, calls Mohammed of Gazni and Aurangazeb rascals.’

‘What makes you think that they were that?’

‘Didn’t they destroy our temples and torture the Hindus? Have you forgotten the Somnathpur God?…’

‘We brahmins deserve that and more,’ said Rajam. ‘In our house my father does not care for New-Moon days and there are no Annual Ceremonies for the dead.’ He was in a debating mood, and Swaminathan realised it and remained silent. Rajam said, ‘I tell you what, it is your Board High School that has given you this mentality.’

Swaminathan felt that the safest course would be to agree with him. ‘You are right in a way. I don’t like the Board High School.’

‘Then why did you go and join it?’

‘I could not help it. You saw how beastly our Head Master was. If you had been in my place, you would have kicked him in the face.’

This piece of flattery did not soothe Rajam, ‘If I were you I would have kept clear of all your dirty politics and strikes.’ His father was a Government servant, and hence his family was anti-political.

Swaminathan said, ‘You are right. I should have remained at home on the day of the strike.’ This example of absolute submissiveness touched Rajam. He said promptly that he was prepared to forgive Swaminathan his past sins and would not mind his belonging to the Board School. They were to be friends as of old. What would you say to a cricket team?’ Rajam asked.

Swaminathan had not thought of cricket as something that he himself could play. He was, of course, familiar with Hobbs, Bradman, and Duleep, and vainly tried to carry their scores in his head, as Rajam did. He filched pictures of cricket players, as Rajam did, and pasted them in an album, though he secretly did not very much care for those pictures there was something monotonous about them.

He sometimes thouAghDt ItThaHt YtheAsAamCeApDicEturMe YwaSs ApaLsEtedMin every page of the album.

‘No, Rajam, I don’t think I can play. I don’t know how to play.’

‘That is what everybody thinks’ said Rajam, ‘I don’t know how myself, though I collect pictures and scores.’

This was very pleasing to hear. Probably Hobbs too was shy and skeptical before he took the bat and swung it. We can challenge a lot of teams, including our School Eleven. They think they can’t be beaten,’ said Swaminathan.

‘What! The Board School mugs think that! We shall thrash them. Oh, yes.’ ‘What shall we call it?’

‘Don’t you know? It is the M. C. C.,’ said Rajam.

That is Hobbs’s team, isn’t it? They may drag us before a court if we take their name.’

‘Who says that? If we get into any trouble, I shall declare before the judge that M. C. C. stands for Malgudi Cricket Club.’

Swaminathan was a little disappointed. Though as M. C. C. it sounded imposing, the name was really a bit tame.

‘I think we had better try some other name, Rajam.’ What would you suggest?’

Well-I am for “Friends Eleven”.’ ‘Friends Eleven?’

‘Or say “Jumping Stars”?’ said Swaminathan. ‘Oh, that is not bad, not bad you know.’

‘I do think it would be glorious to call ourselves “Jumping Stars”!’

Rajam instantly had a vision of a newspaper report: ‘The Jumping Stars soundly thrashed the Board High School Eleven.’

‘It is a beauty, I think,’ he cried, moved by the vision.

He pulled out a piece of paper and a pencil, and said, ‘Come on, Swami, repeat the names thAatDcoITmHe Yto AyoAurCheAaDd. EIt MwoYuldSbAe LbeEttMer to have a long list to select from. We shall underline “Jumping Stars” and “M. C. C.” and give them special consideration. Come on.’

Swaminathan remained thoughtful and started,’ “Friends Eleven”….

“Jumping Stars”…. “Friends Union” ‘

‘I have “Friends Union” already here,’ Rajam said, pointing to the list. Swaminathan went on: ‘ “Excelsiors” ‘

‘I have got it.’

‘ “Excelsior Union”…. “Champion Eleven” ‘ A long pause.

‘Are you dried up?’ Rajam asked.

‘No, if Mani were here, he would have suggested a few more names… “Champion Eleven”.’

‘You have just said it.’

‘ “Victory Union Eleven” ‘

That is very good. I think it is very very good. People would be afraid of us.’ He held the list before him and read the names with great satisfaction. He had struggled hard on the previous night to get a few names. But only ‘Friends Union’ and ‘Excelsiors’ kept coming till he felt fatigued. But what a lot of names Swaminathan was able to reel off. ‘Can you meet me to-morrow evening, Swami? I shall get Mani down. Let us select a name.’

After a while Swaminathan asked, ‘Look here, do you think we shall have to pay tax or something to the Government when we start the team?’

The Government seems to tax everything in this world.

My father’s pay is about five hundred. But nearly two hundred and over is demanded by the Government. Anyway, what makes you think that we shall have to pay tax?’

‘I mean–if we don’t pay tax, the Government may not recognise our team or its name and a hundred other teams may take the same name. It might lead to all sorts of complications.’

‘Suppose weAhDavIeTtHwYo nAamAeCs?A’ aDskEedMRYajaSmA. ‘It is not done.’

LEM

‘I know a lot of teams that have two names. When I was in Bishop Waller’s, we had a cricket team that we called I don’t remember the name now. I think we called it “Cricket Eleven” and “Waller’s Cricket Eleven”. You see, one name is for ordinary use and the other is for matches.’

‘It is all very well for a rich team like your Waller’s. But suppose the Government demands two taxes from us?’

Rajam realised at this point that the starting of a cricket team was the most complicated problem on earth. He had simply expected to gather a dozen fellows on the maidan next to his compound and play, and challenge the world. But here were endless troubles, starting with the name that must be unique. Government taxes, and so on. The Government did not seem to know where it ought to interfere

and where not. He had a momentary sympathy for Gandhi; no wonder he was dead against the Government.

Swaminathan seemed to be an expert in thinking out difficulties. He said, ‘Even if we want to pay, whom are we to pay the taxes to?’ Certainly not to His Majesty or the Viceroy. Who was the Government? What if somebody should take the money and defraud them, somebody pretending to be the Government? Probably they would have to send the taxes by Money Order to the Governor! Well, that might be treason. And then what was the amount to be paid?

They sat round Rajam’s table in his room. Mani held before him a catalogue of Messrs Binns, the Shop for Sports Goods. He read,’ “Junior Willard Bats, Seven Eight, made of finest seasoned wood, used by Cambridge Junior Boys’, Eleven”.’

‘Let me have a look at it ‘ said Rajam. He bent over the table and said,

‘Seems to be a fine bat. Have a look at it, Swami.’ Swaminathan craned his neck and agreed that it was a fine bat, but he was indiscreet enough to say, ‘It looks like any other bat in theAcDatIaTloHguYe.A’ MAanCi’sAlDeftEhManYd sShoAt LoEut Mand held his neck and pressed his face close to the picture of the bat: ‘Why do you pretend to be a cricket player if you cannot see the difference between Junior Willard and other bats? You are not fit to be even a sweeper in our team.’

After this admonition the hold was relaxed. Rajam asked, ‘Swami, do you know what the catalogue man calls the Junior Willard? It seems it is the Rolls- Royce among the junior bats. Don’t you know the difference between the Rolls- Royce and other cars?’

Swaminathan replied haughtily, ‘I never said I saw no difference between the Rolls-Royce and other cars.’

‘What is the difference?’ urged Rajam.

Mani laughed and teased, ‘Come on. If you really know the difference, why don’t you say it?’

Swaminathan said, ‘The Rolls cost a lakh of rupees, while other cars cost about ten thousand; a Rolls has engines made of silver, while other cars have iron engines.’

‘Oh, oh!’ peered Rajam.

‘A Rolls never gives trouble, while other cars always give trouble; a Rolls engine never stops; a Rolls-Royce never makes a noise, while other cars always make a noise.’

“Why not deliver a lecture on the Rolls-Royce?’ asked Mani.

‘Swami, I am glad you know so much about the Rolls Royce. I am at the same time ashamed to find you knowing so little about Willard Junior. We had about a dozen Willard Juniors when I was in Bishop Waller’s. Oh! what bats! There are actual springs inside the bat, so that when you touch the ball it flies. There is fine silk cord wound round the handle. You don’t know anything, and yet you talk! Show me another bat which has silk cord and springs like the Willard.’

There was a pause, and after that Rajam said, ‘Note it down, Swami.’

Swaminathan notedAdoDwInToHnYaApaApeCr, AViDlorEd MJuYne-SeaAr LbaEt.M’ And looking up asked, ‘How many?’

‘Say three. Will that do, Mani?’

‘Why waste money on three bats? Two will do ‘

‘But suppose one breaks in the middle of a match?’ Rajam asked.

‘Do you suppose we are going to supply bats to our opponents? They will have to come provided with bats. We must make it clear.’

‘Even then, if our bat breaks we may have to stop playing.’ ‘Two will do, Rajam, unless you want to waste money.’

Rajam’s enthusiasm was great. He left his chair and sat on the arm of Mani’s chair, gloating over the pictures of cricket goods in the catalogue. Swaminathan, though he was considered to be bit of a heretic, caught the enthusiasm and perched on the other arm of the chair. All the three devoured with their eyes the glossy pictures of cricket balls, bats, and nets.

In about an hour they selected from the catalogue their team’s requirements. And then came the most difficult part of the whole affair–a letter to Messrs Binns, ordering goods. Bare courtesy made Rajam offer the authorship of the letter to Mani, who declined it. Swaminathan was forced to accept it in spite of his protests, and he sat for a long time chewing his pencil without producing a word: he had infinite trouble with spelling, and the more he tried to be correct the more muddled he was becoming; in the end he sat so long thinking of spelling that even such words as ‘The’ and ‘And’ became doubtful. Rajam took up the task himself. Half an hour later he placed on the table a letter: ‘From M. C. C. (And Victory Union Eleven), Malgudi.

To

Messrs Binns, Sportsmen, Mount Road, Madras.

‘DEAR SIR,A’PDleIaTsHe YseAndAtoCoAuDr tEeaMmYtwSo AjuLniEorMwillard bats, six balls, wickets and other things quick. It is very urgent. We shall send you money

afterwards. Don’t fear. Please be urgent.

‘Yours obediently, ‘CAPTAIN RAJAM (Captain).’

This letter received Swaminathan’s benedictions. But Mani expressed certain doubts. He wanted to know whether ‘Dear’ could stand at the beginning of a letter to a perfect stranger. ‘How can you call Binns “Dear Sir”? You must say “Sir”.’

Rajam’s explanation was: ‘I won’t say “Sir”. It is said only by clerks. I am not Binns’s clerk. I don’t care to address him as “Sir”.’

So this letter went as it was. After this exacting work they were resting, with a feeling of relief, when the postman came in with a card for Rajam. Rajam read it and cried, ‘Guess who has written this?’

‘Binns.’

‘Silly. It must be our Head Master.’

‘Somebody.’ ‘J. B. Hobbs.’

‘It is from Sankar,’ Rajam announced joyfully.

‘Sankar! We had almost forgotten that old thief.’ Swaminathan and Mani tore the card from Rajam’s hand and read: ‘MY DEAR FRIEND, ‘I am studying here because my father came here. My mother is also here. All of us are here. And we will be only here. I am doing well. I hope you are doing well. It is very hot here. I had fever for three days and drank medicine. I hope I will read well and pass the examination. Is Swami and Mani doing well! It is very hot here. I am playing cricket now. I can’t write more.

‘With regards’, ‘Your dearest friend, ‘SANKAR.’ ‘P. S. Don’t forget me.

‘S.’

They were profoundly moved by this letter, and decided to reply at once.

Three lettersAwDeIrTe HreYadAy inAaCnAhoDuEr. MMaYni ScoApiLedESMankar’s letter verbatim. Swaminathan and Rajam wrote nearly similar letters: they said they were doing well by the grace of God; they hoped that Sankar would pass and also that he was doing well; then they said a lot about their cricket team and hoped that Sankar would become a member; they also said that Sankar’s team might challenge them to a match.

The letters were put into a stamped envelope, and the flap was pasted. It was only then that they felt the need of knowing Sankar’s address. They searched all parts of Sankar’s card. Not a word anywhere, not even the name of the town he was writing from. They tried to get this out of the postmark. But a dark curved smudge on the stamp cannot be very illuminating.

The M.C.C. and its organisers had solid proof that they were persons of count when a letter from Binns came addressed to the Captain, M.C.C., Malgudi. It was a joy, touching that beautiful envelope and turning it over in the hand. Binns

were the first to recognise the M.C.C., and Rajam took a vow that he would buy every bit that his team needed from that great firm. There were three implications in this letter that filled Rajam and his friends with rapture: (1) that His Majesty’s post office recognised their team was proved by the fact that the letter addressed to the captain was promptly delivered to him; (2) that they were really recognised by such a magnificent firm as Binns of Madras was proved by the fact that Binns cared to reply in a full letter and not on a card, and actually typed the letter! (3) Binns sent under another cover carrying four annas postage a huge catalogue. What a tribute!

The letter informed the captain that Messrs Binns thanked him for his letter and would be much obliged to him if he would kindly remit 25% with the order and the balance could be paid against the V.P.P. of the Railway Receipt.

Three heads buzzed over the meaning of this letter. The trouble was that they could not understand whether Binns were going to send the goods or not. Mani promised to unravel the letter if somebody would tell him what ‘Obliged’ meant. When they turned the pages of a dictionary and offered him the meaning,

he was none the wiAseDr. IHTeHfeYlt AthaAt iCt wAaDs Ea MmeYaniSngAleLssEwMord in that place. ‘One thing is clear,’ said Rajam, ‘Binns thanks us for our letter. So I don’t think this letter

could mean a refusal to supply us goods.’ Swaminathan agreed with him, ‘That is right. If he did not wish to supply you with things, would he thank you?

He would have abused you.’ He scrutinised the letter again to make sure that there was no mistake about the thanks.

‘Why has the fool used this word?’ Mani asked, referring to ‘Obliged’ which he could not pronounce. It has no meaning. Is he trying to make fun of us?’

‘He says something about 25%. I wish I knew what it was’, said Rajam.

Swaminathan could hardly contain himself, ‘I say, Rajam, I am surprised that you cannot understand this letter; you got 60% in the last examination.’

‘Have you any sense in you? What has that to do with this. Even a B. A. cannot understand this letter.’

In the end they came to the conclusion that the letter was sent to them by mistake. As far as they could see, the M.C.C. had written nothing in their previous letter to warrant such expressions as ‘Obliged’, ‘Remit’, and ‘25%’. It could not be that the great firm of Binns were trying to make fun of them. Swaminathan pointed out ‘To the Captain, M.C.C.’ at the beginning of the letter. But he was told that it was also a part of the mistake.

This letter was put in a cover with a covering letter and dispatched. The covering letter said: ‘We are very sorry that you sent me somebody’s letter. We are returning this somebody’s letter. Please send our things immediately.’

The M. C. C. were an optimistic lot. Though they were still unhonoured with a reply to their second letter, they expected their goods to arrive with every post. After ten days they thought they would start playing with whatever was available till they got the real bats, etc. The bottom of a dealwood case provided them with three good bats, and Rajam managed to get three used tennis balls from his father’s club. The Pea was there, offerAinDg fIoTuHr rYeaAl stAumCpAs DthaEt MheYbeSlieAveLdEheMhad somewhere in his house. A neat slip of ground adjoining Rajam’s bungalow was to be the pitch. Everything was ready. Even if Binns took a month more to manufacture the goods specially for the M. C. C. (as they faintly thought probable), there need be no delay in starting practice. By the time the real bats and the balls arrived, they would be in form to play matches. Rajam had chosen from his class a few who, he thought, deserved to become members of the M. C. C. At five o’clock on the opening day, the M. C. C. had as sembled, all except the Pea, for whom Rajam was waiting anxiously. He had promised to bring the real stumps. It was half an hour past time and yet he was not to be seen anywhere.

At last his puny figure was discovered in the distance. There was a catch in Rajam’s heart when he saw him. He strained his eyes to find out if the Pea had the things about him. But since the latter was coming from the west, he was seen in the blaze of the evening sun. All the twelve assembled in the field shaded their

eyes and looked. Some said that he was carrying a bundle, while some thought that he was swinging his hands freely.

When he arrived, Rajam asked, ‘Why didn’t you tell us that you hadn’t the stumps?’

‘I have still got them,’ protested the Pea, ‘I shall bring them to-morrow. I am sure my father knows where they are kept.’

‘You kept us waiting till now. Why did you not come earlier and tell us that you could not find them?’

‘I tell you, I have been spending hours looking for them everywhere. How could I come here and tell you and at the same time search?’

A cloud descended upon the gathering. For over twenty hours every one among them had been dreaming of swinging a bat and throwing a ball. And they could have realised the dream but for the Pea’s wickedness. Everybody looked at him sourly. He was isolated. Rajam felt like crying when he saw the dealwood planks and the tennis balls lying useless on the ground. What a glorious evening

they could have hadAif DonIlTy HtheYsAtumApCs AhaDd EbeMenYbroSuAghLt!EM

Amidst all this gloom somebody cast a ray of light by suggesting that they might use the compound wall of Rajam’s bungalow as a temporary wicket.

A portion of the wall was marked off with a piece of charcoal, and the captain arranged the field and opened the batting himself. Swaminathan took up the bowling. He held a tennis ball in his hand, took a few paces, and threw it over. Rajam swung the bat but missed it. The ball hit the wall right under the charcoal mark. Rajam was bowled out with the very first ball! There was a great shout of joy. The players pressed round Swaminathan to shake him and pat him on the back, he was given on the very spot the tide, ‘Tate’.

CHAPTER XIV

Granny Shoves Her Ignorance

WORK was rather heavy in the Board High School. The amount of home-work given at the Albert Mission was nothing compared to the heap given at the Board. Every teacher thought that his was the only subject that the boys had to study. Six sums in arithmetic, four pages of ‘hand-writing copy’, dictionary meanings of scores of tough words, two maps, and five stanzas in Tamil poetry, were the average home-work every day. Swaminathan sometimes wished that he had not left his old school. The teachers here were ruthless beings; not to speak of the drill three evenings a week, there were scout classes, compulsory games, etc., after the regular hours every day; and missing a single class meant half a dozen cane cuts on the following day. The wizened spectacled man was a repulsive creature, with his screeching voice; the Head of the Albert Mission had a majestic air about him in spite of all his defects.

All this rigouAr DanIdTHdisYciAplinAeCreAsuDlteEdMinYa SlifAe LwEithMlittle scope for leisure.

Swaminathan got up pretty early, rushed through all his home-work, and rose just in time to finish the meal and reach the school as the first bell rang. Every day, as he passed the cloth shop at the end of Market Road, the first bell reached his ears. And just as he panted into the class, the second bell would go off. The bell lacked the rich note of the Albert Mission gong; there was something mean and nasal about it. But he soon got accustomed to it.

Except for an hour in the afternoon, he had to be glued to his seat right on till four-thirty in the evening. He had lost the last-bench habit (it might be because he had no longer Mani’s company in the classroom). He sat in the second row, and no dawdling easygoing nonsense was tolerated there; you sat right under the teacher’s nose. When the four-thirty bell rang, Swaminathan slipped his pencil into his pocket and stretched his cramped aching fingers. The four-thirty bell held no special thrill. You could not just dash out of the class with a howl of joy. You had to go to the drill ground and stand in a solemn line, and for three- quarters of an hour

the Drill Master treated you as if you were his dog. He drove you to march left and right, stand attention, and swing the arms, or climb the horizontal or parallel bars, whether you liked it or not, whether you knew the thing or not. For aught the Drill Master cared, you might lose your balance on the horizontal bars and crack your skull.

At the end of this you ran home to drink coffee, throw down the books, and rush off to the cricket field, which was a long way off. You covered the distance half running, half walking, moved by the vision of a dun field sparsely covered with scorched grass, lit into a blaze by the slant rays of the evening sun, enveloped in a flimsy cloud of dust, alive with the shouts of players stamping about. What music there was in the thud of the bat hitting the ball! Just as you took the turn leading to Lawley Extension, you looked at the sun, which stood poised like a red hot coin on the horizon. You hoped it would not sink. But by the time you arrived at the field, the sun went down, leaving only a splash of colour and light in the sky. The shadows already crept out, and one or two municipal lanterns twinkled here and

there. You still hoped you would be in time for a good game. But from about half a furlong away you saAw DtheITteHamYAsquAatCtinAg DcaEreMlesYslySroAuLndEtMhe field. Somebody was

wielding the bat rather languidly, bowled and fielded by a handful who were equally languid–the languor that comes at the end of a strenuous evening in the sun.

In addition to the misery of disappointment, you found Rajam a bit sore. He never understood the difficulties of a man. ‘Oh, Swami, why are you late again?’

‘Wretched drill class.’

‘Oh, damn your drill classes and scout classes! Why don’t you come early?’ ‘What can I do, Rajam? I can’t help it.’

‘Well, well. I don’t care. You are always ready with excuses. Since the new bats, balls and things arrived, you have hardly played four times.’

Others being too tired to play, eventually you persuaded the youngest member of the team (a promising, obedient boy of the Fifth Standard, who was admitted because he cringed and begged Rajam perseveringly) to bowl while you batted. And when you tired of it, you asked him to hold the bat and started bowling,

and since you were the Tate of the team, the youngster was rather nervous. And again you took up batting, and then bowling, and so on. It went on till it became difficult to find the ball in the semi-darkness and the picker ran after small dark objects on the ground, instead of after the ball. At this stage a rumour started that the ball was lost and caused quite a stir. The figures squatting and reposing got busy, and the ball was retrieved. After this the captain passed an order forbidding further play, and the stumps were drawn for the day, and soon all the players melted in the darkness. You stayed behind with Rajam and Mani, perclied upon Rajam’s compound wall, and discussed the day’s game and the players, noting the improvement, stagnation, or degeneration of each player, till it became quite dark and a peon came to inform Rajam that his tutor had come.

One evening, returning home from the cricket field, after parting from Mani at the Grove Street junction, Swaminathan’s conscience began to trouble him. A slight incident had happened during the early evening when he had gone home from the school to throw down the books and start for the cricket field. He had just

thrown down the books and was running towards the kitchen, when granny cried,

‘Swami, Swami. Oh,AboDyI, TcoHmYe AherAe.C’

ADEMY SALEM

‘No,’ he said as usual and was in a moment out of her sight, in the kitchen, violently sucking coffee out of a tumbler. He could still hear her shaky querulous voice calling him. There was something appealing in that weak voice, and he had a fit of pity for her sitting and calling people who paid no heed to her. As soon as he had drunk the coffee, he went to her and asked, ‘What do you want?’

She looked up and asked him to sit down. At that he lost his temper and all the tenderness he had felt for her a moment back. He raced, ‘If you are going to say what you have to say as quickly as possible…. If not, don’t think I am a silly fool ‘

She said, ‘I shall give you six pies. You can take three pies and bring me a lemon for three pies.’ She had wanted to open this question slowly and diplomatically, because she knew what to expect from her grandson. And when she asked him to sit down, she did it as the first diplomatic move.

Without condescending to say yes or no, Swaminathan held out his hand for the coins and took them. Granny said, ‘You must come before I count ten.’ This imposition of a time-limit irritated him. He threw down the coins and said, ‘If you want it so urgently, you had better go and get it yourself.’ It was nearing five-thirty and he wanted to be in the field before sunset. He stood frowning at her as if giving her the choice of his getting the lemon late when he returned from the field, or not at all. She said, ‘I have a terrible pain in the stomach. Please run out and come back, boy.’

He did not stay there to hear more.

But now all the excitement and exhilaration of the play being over, and having bidden the last ‘good night’, he stood in the Grove and Vinayak Mudali Street junction, as it were face to face with his soul. He thought of his grandmother and felt guilty. Probably she was writhing with pain at that very moment. It stung his heart as he remembered her pathetic upturned face and watery eyes. He called himself a sneak, a thief, an ingrate, and a hardhearted villain.

In this mood of self-reproach he reached home. He softly sat beside granny and kept looAkiDngITatHhYerA. ItAwCasAcDonEtrMaryYtoShAisLcEusMtom. Every evening as

soon as he reached home he would dash straight into the kitchen and worry the cook.”

But now he felt that his hunger did not matter.

Granny’s passage had no light. It had only a shaft falling from the lamp in the hall. In the half-darkness, he could not see her face clearly. She lay still. Swaminathan was seized with a horrible passing doubt whether she might not be dead–of stomach-ache. He controlled his voice and asked, ‘Granny, how is your pain?’ Granny stirred, opened her eyes, and said, ‘Swami, you have come! Have you had your food?’

‘Not yet. How is your stomach-ache, granny?’ ‘Oh, it is all right. It is all right.’

It cost him all his mental powers to ask without flinching, ‘Did you get the lemon?’ He wanted to know it. He had been feeling genuinely anxious about it.

Granny answered this question at once, but to Swaminathan it seemed an age–a terrible stretch of time during which anything might happen, she might say anything, scold him, disown him, swear that she would have nothing more to do with him, or say reproachfully that if only he had cared to go and purchase the lemon in time, he might have saved her and that she was going to die in a few minutes. But she simply said, ‘You did right in not going. Your mother had kept a dozen in the kitchen.’

Swaminathan was overjoyed to hear this good news. And he expressed this mood of joy in: ‘You know what my new name is? I am Tate.’

‘What?’

‘Tate.’

‘What is Tate?’ she asked innocently. Swaminathan’s disappointment was twofold: she had not known anything of his new title, and failed to understand its rich significance even when told. At other times he would have shouted at her. But now he was a fresh penitent, and so asked her kindly, ‘Do you mean to say that you don’t know Tate?’

‘I don’t knowAwDhaITt yHouYmAeaAn.C’

ADEMY SALEM

‘Tate, the great cricket player, the greatest bowler on earth.’ ‘I hope you know what cricket is.’

‘What is that?’ granny asked. Swaminathan was aghast at this piece of illiteracy. ‘Do you mean to say, granny, that you don’t know what cricket is, or are you fooling me?’

‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Don’t keep on saying “I don’t know what you mean”. I wonder what the boys and men of your days did in the evenings! I think they spent all the twenty- four hours in doing holy things.’

He considered for a second. Here was his granny stagnating in appalling ignorance; and he felt it his duty to save her. He delivered a short speech setting forth the principles, ideals, and the philosophy, of the game of cricket, mentioning the radiant gods of that world. He asked her every few seconds if she understood,

and she nodded her head, though she caught only three per cent of what he said. He concluded the speech with a sketch of the history and the prospects of the M.

C. C. ‘But for Rajam, granny,’ he said, ‘I don’t know where we should have been. He has spent hundreds of rupees on this team. Buying bats and balls is no joke. He has plenty of money in his box. Our team is known even to the Government. If you like, you may write a letter to the M. C. C. and it will be delivered to us promptly. You will see us winning all the cups in Malgudi, and in course of time we shall show even the Madras fellows what cricket is.’ He added a very important note: ‘Don’t imagine all sorts of fellows can become players in our team.’

His father stood behind him, with the baby in his arms. He asked, “What are you lecturing about, young man?’ Swaminathan had not noticed his father’s presence, and now writhed awkwardly as he answered, ‘Nothing…. Oh, nothing, father.’

‘Come on. Let me know it too.’

‘It is nothing–Granny wanted to know something about cricket and I was explaining it to her.’

‘Indeed! I neAveDr IkTnHewYmAotAheCr wAaDs Ea MspYortsSwAomLaEnM. Mother, I hope Swami has filled you with cricket-wisdom.’

Granny said, ‘Don’t tease the boy. The child is so fond of me. Poor thing! He has been trying to tell me all sorts of things. You are not in the habit of explaining things to me. You are all big men ‘

Father replied, pointing at the baby, ‘Just wait a few days and this little fellow will teach you all the philosophy and the politics in the world.’ He gently clouted the baby’s fat cheeks, and the baby gurgled and chirped joyfully. ‘He has already started lecturing. Listen attentively, mother.’ Granny held up her arms for the baby. But father clung to him tight and said, ‘No. No. I came home early only for this fellow’s sake. I can’t. Come on, Swami, I think we had better sit down for food. Where is your mother?’

The captain sternly disapproved of Swaminathan’s ways. ‘Swami, I must warn you. You are neglecting the game. You are not having any practice at all.’

‘It is this wretched Board School work.’

‘Who asked you to go and join it. They never came and invited you. Never mind. But let me tell you. Even Bradman, Tate, and everybody spends four to five hours on the pitch every day, practising, practising. Do you think you are greater than they?’

‘Captain, listen to me. I do my best to arrive at the field before five. But this wretched Board High School time-table is peculiar.’

A way out had to be found. The captain suggested, ‘You must see your Head Master and ask him to exempt you from extra work till the match is over.’ It was more easily said than done, and Swaminathan said so, conjuring up before his mind a picture of the wizened face and the small dingy spectacles of his Head Master.

‘I am afraid to ask that monster,’ Swaminathan said. ‘He may detain me in Second Form for ages.’

‘Indeed! Are you telling me that you are in such terror of your Head

Master? Suppose I see him?’

‘Oh, please AdoDn’It,TcHapYtaAin. AI CbeAg DyoEu.MYoYu dSoAn’tLkEnoMw what a vicious being he is. He may not treat you well. Even if he behaves well before you, he is sure to lull me when you are gone.’

‘What is the matter with you, Swami? Your head is full of nonsense. How are we to go on? It is two months since we started the team, and you have not played even for ten days. ‘

Mani, who had stretched himself on the compound wall, now broke in: ‘Let us see what your Head Master can do. Let him say yes or no. If he kills you I will pulp him. My clubs have had no work for a long time.’

There was no stopping Rajam. The next day he insisted that he would see the Head Master at the school. He would not mind losing a couple of periods of his own class. Mani offered to go with him but was advised to mind his business.

Next morning at nine-thirty Swaminathan spent five minutes rubbing his eyes red, and then complained of headache. His father felt his temples and said that he would be all right if he dashed a little cold water on his forehead.

‘Yes, father,’ Swaminathan said and went out. He stood outside father’s room and decided that if cold water was a cure for headache he would avoid it, since he was praying for that malady just then. Rajam was coming to see the Head Master, and it would be unwise to go to the school that morning. He went in and asked, ‘Father, did you say cold water?’

‘Yes.’

‘But don’t you think it will give me pneumonia or something? I am also feeling feverish.’

Father felt his pulse and said, ‘Now run to school and you will be all right.’ It was easier to squeeze milk out of a stone than to get permission from father to keep away from school.

He whispered into his granny’s ear, ‘Granny, even if I die, I am sure father

will insist on sending my corpse to the school.’ Granny protested vehemently against this sentimeAnt.DITHYA ACADEMY SALEM

‘Granny, a terrible fever is raging within me and my head is splitting with headache. But yet, I mustn’t keep away from school.’

Granny said, ‘Don’t go to school.’ She then called mother and said, ‘This child has fever. Why should he go to school?’

‘Has he?’ mother asked anxiously, and fussed over him. She felt his body and said that he certainly had a temperature. Swaminathan said pathetically, ‘Give me milk or something, mother. It is getting late for school.’ Mother vetoed this virtuous proposal. Swaminathan faintly said, ‘But father may not like it.’ She asked him to lie down on a bed and hurried along to father’s room. She stepped into the room with the declaration, ‘Swami has fever, and he can’t go to school.’

‘Did you take his temperature?’

‘Not yet. It doesn’t matter if he misses the school for a day.’

‘Anyway, take his temperature,’ he said. He feared that his wife might detect the sarcasm in his suggestion, and added as a palliative, ‘that we may know whether a doctor is necessary.’

A thermometer stuck out of Swaminathan’s mouth for half a minute and indicated normal. Mother looked at it and thrust it back into his mouth. It again showed normal. She took it to father, and he said, ‘Well, it is normal,’ itching to add, ‘I knew it.’ Mother insisted, ‘Something has gone wrong with the thermometer. The boy has fever. There is no better thermometer than my hand. I can swear that he has 100.2 now.’

‘Quite likely’, father said.

And Swaminathan, when he ought to have been at school, was lying peacefully, with closed eyes, on his bed. He heard a footstep near his bed and opened his eyes. Father stood over him and said in an undertone, ‘You are a lucky fellow. What a lot of champions you have in this house when you don’t want to go to school!’ Swaminathan felt that this was a sudden and unprovoked attack from behind. He shut his eyes and turned towards the wall with a feeble groan.

By the afterAnoDoInThHe YwAasAaClreAadDy EbeMdsYoreS. AHLe EdMreaded the prospect of staying in bed through the evening. Moreover, Rajam would have already come to the school in the morning and gone.

He went to his mother and informed her that he was starting for the school. There was a violent protest at once. She felt him all over and said that he was certainly better but in no condition to go to school. Swaminathan said, ‘I am feeling quite fit, mother. Don’t get fussy.’

On the way to the school he met Rajam and Mani. Mani had his club under his arm. Swaminathan feared that these two had done something serious.

Rajam said, ‘You are a fine fellow! Where were you this morning?’ ‘Did you see the Head Master, Rajam?’

‘Not yet. I found that you had not come, and did not see him. I want you to be with me when I see him. After all it is your business.’

When Swaminathan emerged from the emotional chaos which followed Rajam’s words, he asked, ‘What is Mani doing here?’

‘I don’t know,’ Rajam said, ‘I found him outside your school with his club, when he ought to have been in his class.’

‘Mani, what about your class?’

‘It is all right,’ Mani replied, ‘I didn’t attend it today.’ ‘And why your club?’ Swaminathan asked.

‘Oh! I simply brought it along.’

Rajam asked, ‘Weren’t you told yesterday to attend your class and mind your business?’

‘I don’t remember. You asked me to mind my business only when I offered to accompany you. I am not accompanying you. I just came this way, and you have also come this way. This is a public road.’ Mani’s jest was lost on them. Their minds were too busy with plans for the impending interview.

‘Don’t worry, young men,’ Mani said, ‘I shall see you through your troubles.

I will talk to the Head Master, if you like.’

‘If you step iAntoDhIiTs HrooYmA, hAe CwiAll cDalEl thMe YpolSiceA,’LSEwMaminathan said.

When they reached the school, Mani was asked to go away, or at worst wait in the road. Rajam went in, and Swaminathan was compelled to accompany him to the Head Master’s room.

The Head Master was sleeping with his head between his hands and his elbows resting on the table. It was a small stuffy room with only one window opening on the weather beaten side-wall of a shop; it was cluttered with dust-laden rolls of maps, globes, and geometrical squares. The Head Master’s white cane lay on the table across two ink-bottles and some pads. The sun came in a hot dusty beam and fell on the Head Master’s nose and the table. He was gently snoring. This was a possibility that Rajam had not thought of.

‘What shall we do?’ Swaminathan asked in a rasping whisper. ‘Wait,’ Rajam ordered.

They waited for ten minutes and then began to make gentle noises with their feet. The Head Master opened his eyes and without taking his head from his hands, kept staring at them vacantly, without showing any sign of recognition. He rubbed his eyes, raised his eyebrows three times, yawned, and asked in a voice thick with sleep, ‘Have you fellows no class?’ He fumbled for his spectacles and put them on. Now the picture was complete–wizened face and dingy spectacles calculated to strike terror into the hearts of Swaminathan. He asked again, ‘To what class do you fellows belong? Have you no class?’

‘I don’t belong to your school,’ Rajam said defiantly. ‘Ah, then which heaven do you drop from?’

Rajam said, ‘I am the captain of the M. C. C. and have come to see you on business.’

‘What is that?’

‘This is my friend W. S. Swaminathan of Second C studying in your school ‘

‘I am honoured to meet you,’ said the Head Master turning to Swaminathan. RajamADfeIltTaHt tYhaAt mAoCmeAnDt tEhaMt hYe hSaAd LfoEunMd out where the Board

High School got its reputation from.

“I am the captain of the M. C. C.’ ‘Equally honoured ‘

‘He is in my team. He is a good bowler ‘

‘Are you?’ said the Head Master, turning to Swaminathan. ‘May I come to the point?’ Rajam asked.

‘Do, do,’ said the Head Master, ‘for heaven’s sake, do.’

‘It is this,’ Rajam said, ‘he is a good bowler and he needs some practice. He can’t come to the field early enough because he is kept in the school every day after four-thirty. What do you want me to do?’

‘Sir, can’t you permit him to go home after four-thirty?’

The Head Master sank back in his chair and remained silent. Rajam asked again, What do you say, sir, won’t you do it?’

‘Are you the Head Master of this school or am I?’

‘Of course you are the Head Master, sir. In Albert Mission they don’t keep us a minute longer than four-thirty. And we are exempted from drill if we play games.’

‘Here I am not prepared to listen to your rhapsodies on that pariah school.

Get out.’

Mani, who had been waiting outside, finding his friends gone too long, and having his own fears, now came into the Head Master’s room.

‘Who is this?’ asked the Head Master, looking at Mani sourly. ‘What do you want?’ ‘Nothing,’ Mani replied and quietly stood in a corner.

‘I can’t understand why every fellow who finds nothing to do comes and stands in my room.’

‘I am the Police Superintendent’s son,’ Rajam said abruptly.

‘Is that so? Find out from your father what he was doing on the day a gang of little rascals came in and smashed these windows. What is the thing that fellow

has in his hand?’

‘My woodenAclDubI,T’ MHaYniAansAwCerAedD. EMY SALEM

Rajam added, ‘He breaks skulls with it. Come out, Mani, come on, Swami.

There is nothing doing with this–this mad- cap.’

CHAPTER XV

Before the Match

THE M. C. C. ‘s challenge to a ‘friendly’ match was accepted by the Young Men’s Union, who kept themselves in form by indefatigable practice on the vacant site behind the Reading Room, or when the owner of this site objected, right in the middle of Kulam Street. The match was friendly in nought but name. The challenge sent by the M. C. C. was couched in terms of defiance and threat.

There were some terrifying conditions attached to the challenge. The first condition was that the players should be in the field promptly at eleven noon. The second was that they should carry their own bats, while the stumps would be graciously supplied by the M. C. C. The third was not so much a plain condition as a firm hint that they would do well to bring and keep in stock” a couple of their own

balls. The reason for this was given in the pithy statement ‘that your batsmen might hit your own balls aAndDnIoTt HbrYeaAk oAuCrs’A. TDheEnMexYt wSaAs LthEe Minhospitable suggestion that they had better look out for themselves in regard to lunch, if they cared to have

any at all. The last condition was perhaps the most complicated of the lot over which some argument and negotiation ensued: ‘You shall pay for breaking bats, balls, wickets and other damages.’

The Y.M.U. captain was rather puzzled by this. He felt that it was irrelevant in view of the fact that there were conditions 2 and 3, and if they broke any bats and balls at all, it would be their own property, and the M.C.C.’s anxiety to have the damage made good was unwarranted. He was told that the stumps belonged to the

M.C.C. anyway, and there was also the Y.M.U.’s overlooking clauses 2 and 3. At which the Y.M.U. captain became extremely indignant and asked why if the M.C.C. was so impoverished, it should not come and play in their (Y.M.U.’s) own pitch and save them the trouble of carrying their team about. The stinging rejoinder occurred

to the indignant Rajam exactly twenty minutes after the other captain had left, that it could not be done as the M. C. C. did not think much of a match played in the middle of Kulam Street, if the owner of the vacant site behind the Reading Room should take it into his head to object to the match. Before he left, the Y. M. U. captain demanded to be told what ‘Other damages’ in the last clause meant. Rajam paused, looked about, and pointed to the windows and tiles of a house adjoining the M. C. C. field.

The match was to be played on Sunday two weeks later. Rajam lost all peace of mind. He felt confident that his team could thrash the Y. M. U. He himself could be depended upon not to let down the team. Mani was steady if unimpressive. He could be depended upon to stop with his head, if necessary, any ball. His batting was not bad. He had a peculiar style. With his bat he stopped all reasonable approaches to the wicket and brought the best bowlers to a fainting condition. Rajam did not consider it worth while to, think of the other players of the

team. There was onAlyDoInTeHpYlayAerAwChoAcDauEseMd YhimSAthLe EdeMepest anxiety day and night.

He was a dark horse. On him rested a great task, a mighty responsibility. He was the Tate of the team, and he must bowl out all the eleven of the other team. But he looked uncertain. Even with the match only a fortnight off, he did not seem to care for practice. He stuck to his old habit of arriving at the field when darkness had fallen on the earth. ‘Swami,’ Rajam pleaded, ‘please do try to have at least an hour’s practice in the evenings.’

‘Certainly Rajam, if you can suggest a way. ‘

Why not you tell your Head Master that ‘

‘Oh, no, no,’ Swaminathan cried, ‘I am grateful to you for your suggestion.

But let us not think of that man. He has not forgotten your last visit yet.’

‘I don’t care. What I want is that you should have good practice. If you keep any batsman standing for more than five minutes, I will never see your face again. You needn’t concern yourself with the score. You can leave it to us. ‘

Just seven days before the match, Swaminathan realised that his evenings were more precious than ever. As soon as the evening bell rang, he lined up with the rest in the drill ground. But contrary to the custom, he had not taken off his coat and cap. All the others were in their shirts, with their dhotis tucked up. The Drill Master, a square man with protruding chest, a big moustache sharpened at the ends, and a silk turban wound in military style, stood as if he posed before a camera, and surveyed his pupils with a disdainful side-glance. The monitor called out the names from the greasy register placed on the vaulting horse. The attendance after an interminable time was over and the Drill Master gave up his pose, came near the file, and walked from one end to the other, surveying each boy sternly. Swaminathan being short came towards the end of the file. The Drill

Master stopped befAorDe IhTimH, YlooAkeAd ChimADupEaMndYdoSwAn,LaEnMd passed on muttering: ‘You won’t get leave. Coat and cap off.’ Swaminathan became desperate and

pursued him: ‘Sir, I am in a terrible state of health. I can’t attend Drill to-day. I shall die if I do. Sir, I think I shall–‘ He was prancing behind the Drill Master.

The Drill Master had come to the last boy and yet Swaminathan was dogging him. He turned round on Swaminathan with a fierce oath: ‘What is the matter with you?’

‘Sir, you don’t understand my troubles. You don’t even care to ask me what I am suffering from.’

‘Yes, yes, what exactly is ailing you now?’

Swaminathan had at first thought of complaining of headache, but now he saw that the Drill Master was in a mood to slight even the most serious of headaches. He had an inspiration and said: ‘Sir, the whole of last night I was delirious.’ The Drill Master was stunned by this piece of news.

‘YOU were delirious! Are you mad?’

‘No, sir. I didn’t sleep a wink last night. I was delirious. Our doctor said so. He has asked me not to attend Drill for a week to come. He said that I should die if I attended Drill.’

‘Get away, young swine, before I am tempted to throttle you. I don’t believe a word. But you are a persevering swine. Get out.’

The intervening period, about half an hour, between leaving the drill ground and reaching the cricket field, was a blur of hurry and breathlessness. Everybody at the field was happy to see him so early. Rajam jumped with joy.

On the whole everything was satisfactory. The only unpleasant element in all this was an obsession that the Drill Master might spy him out. So that, when they dispersed for the evening, Swaminathan stayed in Rajam’s house till it was completely dark, and then skulked home, carefully avoiding the lights falling in the street from shop-fronts.

The next moArnDinIgThHe YforAmeAdCa AplaDnEtoMbeYfrSeeAaLll EthMe evenings of the week. He was at his desk with the Manual of Grammar open before him. It was seven-

thirty in the morning, and he had still two and a half hours before him for the school.

He did a little cautious reconnoitering: mother was in the baby’s room, for the rhythmic creaking of the cradle came to his ears. Father’s voice was coming from the front room; he was busy with his clients. Swaminathan quietly slipped out of the house.

He stood before a shop in front of which hung the board; ‘Doctor T. Kesavan, L. M. & S. Sri Krishna Dispensary.’ The doctor was sitting at a long table facing the street. Swaminathan found that the doctor was alone and free, and entered the shop.

‘Hallo, Swaminathan, what is the matter?’ ‘Nothing, sir. I have come on a little business.’

‘All well at home?’

‘Quite. Doctor, I have got to have a doctor’s certificate immediately.’ ‘What is the matter with you?’

‘I will tell you the truth, doctor. I have to play a match next week against the Young Men’s Union. And I must have some practice. And yet every evening there is Drill Class, Scouting, some dirty period or other. If you could give me a certificate asking them to let me off at four-thirty, it would help the M. C. C. to win the match.’

‘Well, I could do it. But is there anything wrong with you?’

Swaminathan took half a second to find an answer: ‘Certainly, I am beginning to feel of late that I have delirium.’

‘What did you say?’ asked the doctor anxiously.

Swaminathan was pleased to find the doctor so much impressed, and repeated that he was having the most violent type of delirium.

‘Boy, did you say delirium? What exactly do you mean by delirium?’

SwaminathaAn DdidITnHot YcoAnsAideCr Ait tDheEcMorrYectStiAmeLEforMcross examination. But he had to have the doctor’s favour. He answered: ‘I have got it. I can’t say exactly.

But isn’t it some, some kind of stomach ache?’

The doctor laughed till a great fit of coughing threatened to choke him. After that he looked Swaminathan under the eye, examined his tongue, tapped his chest, and declared him to be in the pink of health, and told him he would do well to stick to his drill if he wanted to get rid of delirium.

Swaminathan again explained to him how important it was for him to have his evenings free. But the doctor said: ‘It is all very well. But I should be prosecuted if I gave you any such certificate.’

‘Who is going to find it out, doctor? Do you want our M. C. C. to lose the

match?’

‘I wish you all success. Don’t worry. I can’t give you a certificate. But I shall

talk to your Head Master about you and request him to let you off after four-thirty.’

‘That will do. You are very kind to me, doctor.’

At four-thirty that evening, without so much as thinking of the Scouting Class in the quadrangle of the school, Swaminathan went home and then to the cricket field. Next day lie had Drill Class, and he did not give it a thought. He was having plenty of practice. Rajam said: “Swami, you are wonderful! All that you needed was a little practice. What have you done about your evening classes?’

‘It is a slight brain-work, my boy. Our doctor has told the Head Master that I should die if I stayed in the school after four-thirty. I got him to do it. What do you think of it?”

Mani dug him in the ribs and cried: ‘You are the brainiest fellow I have ever seen.’ Rajam agreed with him, and then was suddenly seized with worry: ‘Oh, I don’t know if we shall win that match. I will die if we lose.’

Mani said: ‘Here, Rajam, I am sick of your talks of defeat. Do you think those monkey-faced fools can stand up to us?’

‘I shall writeAtoDthIeTpHapYeArs iAf wCeAwDin,E’ sMaidYRaSjaAmL. EM

‘Will they print our photos?’ Tate asked. Without doubt.’

It was during the Geography hour on Friday that the Head Master came to the class, cane in hand. The Geography Master, Mr. Rama Rao, a mild elderly person, rose respectfully. The Head Master gave the full benefit of his wizened face to the class. His owl-like eyes were fixed upon Swaminathan, and he said: ‘Get up.’

Swaminathan got up. ‘Come here.’

Swaminathan ‘came’ there promptly. ‘Show your shameless face to the class fully.’ Swaminathan now tried to hide his face. The Head Master threw out his arm and twisted Swaminathan’s neck to make him face the class, and said: ‘This great man is too busy to bother about such trivial matters as Drill and Scouting, and

has not honoured these classes with his presence since last Monday.’ His lips twisted in a wry smile. The class considered it safer to take the cue, and gently giggled. Even on the Geography Master’s face there appeared a polite smile.

‘Sir, have you any explanation to give?’ the Head Master asked.

With difficulty Swaminathan found his voice and answered: ‘It was the doctor–didn’t the doctor talk to you about me, sir?’

‘What doctor talk about what?’

‘He said he would,’ faintly answered Swaminathan.

‘If you talk in enigmas I shall strip you before the class and thrash you.’ ‘Dr. Kesavan said–‘

‘What about Dr. Kesavan?’

‘He said he would talk to you about me and get me exemption from Drill and other extra periods. He said that I should die if I attended Drill for some days to come.’

‘And pray whAaDt isITyoHurYtrAouAbleC?A’

DEMY SALEM

‘He thinks it is some–some kind–of–delirium, you know.’ He had

determined to avoid this word since he met the doctor last, but at this critical moment be blundered into it by sheer habit.

The Head Master turned to the teacher and raised his brow. He waited for some time and said: ‘I am waiting to hear what other words of truth and wisdom are going to drop from your mouth.’

‘Sir, I thought he had talked to you. He said he would ‘

‘I don’t care to have every street mongrel come and tell me what to do in my school with my boys. It is a good thing that this Surgeon-General did not come. If he had, I would have asked the peon to bash his head on the table.’

Swaminathan realised that the doctor had deceived him. He remembered the genial smile with which the doctor had said that he would see the Head Master. Swaminathan shuddered as he realised what a deep-dyed villain Dr. Kesavan was

behind that genial smile. He would teach that villain a lesson; put a snake into his table-drawer; he would not allow that villain to feel his pulse even if he (Swaminathan) should be dying of fever. Further plans of revenge were stopped by a flick of the cane on his knuckles. The Head Master held the cane ready and cried: ‘Hold out your hand. Six on each hand for each day of absence, and the whole of the next lesson on the bench. Monitor, you had better see to it. And remember W. S. Swaminathan, if you miss a single class again, I shall strip you in the school hall and ask the peon to cane you. You can’t frighten me with your superintendent? of police, their sons, grandsons, or grandfathers. I don’t care even if you complain to His Majesty.’ He released Swaminathan’s neck and raised the cane.

Another moment and that vicious snake-like cane, quivering as if with life, would have descended on Swaminathan’s palm. A flood of emotion swept him off his feet, a mixture of fear, resentment, and rage. He hardly knew what he was

doing. His arm shot AouDt, IpTluHckYedAthAeCcaAneDfEroMm YtheSHAeaLdEMMaster’s hand, and flung it out of the window. Then he dashed to his desk, snatched his books, and ran out

of the room. He crossed the hall and the veranda in a run, climbed the school gate because the bolt was too heavy for him, and jumped into the end of Market Road.

He sat under a tree on the roadside to collect his thoughts. He had left the school to which he would never go back as long as that tyrant was there. If his father should hear of it, he would do heaven knew what. He would force him to go back, which would be impossible He had got out of two schools in this fashion.

There were no more schools in Malgudi. His father would have to send him to Trichinopoly or Madras. But probably the Board High School Head Master would write to all the schools, telling them who Swaminathan was. He would not be admitted to any school. So he would have to work and earn He might get some

rupees–and he could go to hotels and buy coffee and tiffin as often as he pleased. What divine sweets the Bombay Anand Bhavan made! There was some green slab

on the top left of the stall, with almonds stuck on it. He had always wanted to eat it, but lacked the courage to ask the hotel man, as he believed it to be very costly….

His father would not allow him to remain in the house if he did not go to school. He might beat him. He would not go home that day nor on any other day. He could not face his father. He wondered at the same time where he could go. Anywhere. If he kept walking along Market Road where would it lead him? Probably to Madras. Could he reach Bombay and England if he went further? He could work in any of those places, earn money and do what he pleased. If he should go by train But

what to do for money? There might not be much trouble about that. The station master was an amiable man, and Swaminathan knew him.

The school bell rang, and Swaminathan rose to hurry away. The boys might come out, stand around, and watch him as if he were something funny.

He hurried along Market Road, turned to his right, along Smith Street, and taking a short-cut through some intricate lanes, stood before his old school, the

Albert Mission. The sAigDhtITofHthYe AdeeApCyeAlloDwEbMuildYingSwAitLh EitsMtop-story filled him with a nostalgia for old times. He wished he had not left it. How majestic everything

there now seemed! The Head Master, so dignified in his lace-turban, so unlike the grubby wretch of the Board. Vedanayagam, Ebenezar, even Ebenezar. D. P. Pillai, how cosy and homely his history classes were! Swaminathan almost wept at the memory of Somu and the Pea…. All his friends were there, Rajam, Somu, Mani, and the Pea, happy, dignified, and honoured within the walls of the august Albert Mission School. He alone was out of it, isolated, as if he were a leper. He was an outcast, an outcast. He was filled with a sudden self-disgust. Oh, what would he not give to be back in the old school! Only, they would not take him in. It was no use. He had no more schools to go to in Malgudi. He must run away to Madras and work. But he had better see Rajam and Mani before going away.

He lingered outside the school gate. He had not the courage to enter it. He was the enemy of the school. The peon Singaram might assault him and drive him

out if he saw him. He discreetly edged close to the massive concrete gate-post which screened him from a direct view of the school. He had to meet Rajam and Mani. But how? He stood still for a few minutes and formed a plan.

He went round behind the school. It was a part of the building that nobody frequented. It was a portion of the fallow field adjoining the school and terminating in the distant railway embankment. Swaminathan had not seen this place even once in all the six or seven years that he had spent at the school. Here the school compound wall was covered half with moss, and the rear view of the school was rather interesting. From here Swaminathan could see only the top half of the building, but even that presented a curious appearance. For instance, he could not at once point out where his old Second A was situated. He rolled up a stone to the foot of the wall, and stood on it. He could just see the school compound now. It was about twelve, the busiest hour in the school, and there was not a single person in the compound. He waited. It was tedious waiting. After a short time, a very small

person came out of AthDe IFTirsHt YStAandAarCd,AtoDbEloMw Yhis SnoAseL.ETMhe three sections of the First Standard were in a block not a dozen yards from Swaminathan.

Swaminathan whistled softly, and the very small person did not hear. Swaminathan repeated the whistling, and the very small person turned and started as if he saw an apparition. Swaminathan beckoned to him. The small person took just a second to decide whether to obey the call of that apparition or to run back to the class. Swaminathan called him again. And the very small man drew towards him as if in a hypnotic state, staring wildly.

Swaminathan said: ‘Would you like to have an almond peppermint?’

The very small man could hardly believe his ears. Here was a man actually offering almond peppermints! It could not be true. There was probably some fraud in it. Swaminathan repeated the offer and the small man replied rather cautiously that he would like to have the peppermint.

‘Well, then,’ Swaminathan said, ‘you can’t have it just now. You will have to earn it. Just go to Second Form A and tell M. Rajam that somebody from his house wants him urgently and bring him over here, and then hold out your hand for the peppermint. Maybe you will be given two.’

The small man stood silent, assimilating every detail of the question, and then with a puckered brow asked: ‘Where is Second Form A?’

‘Upstairs.’

‘Oh!’ the boy ejaculated with a note of despair, and stood ruminating.

‘What do you say?’ Swaminathan asked, and added: ‘Answer me before I count ten. Otherwise the offer is off. One, two, three–‘

You say it is upstairs’?’ the boy asked. ‘Of course, I do.’

‘But I have never gone there.’ ‘You will have to now.’

‘I don’t knowAthDeIwTaHy.Y’ ‘Just climb the stairs.’

A ACADEMY SALEM

‘They may–they may beat me if I am seen there.’

‘If you care for the almond peppermint you will have to risk it. Say at once whether you will go or not.’

‘All right. Wait for me.’ The very small man was off.

Ten minutes later he returned, followed by Rajam. Rajam was astonished to see Swaminathan’s head over the wall. What are you doing here?’

‘Jump over the wall. I want you very urgently, Rajam.’ ‘I have got a class. I can’t come out now.’

‘Don’t be absurd. Come on. I have something very urgent to say.’ Rajam jumped over the wall and was by his side.

Swaminathan’s head disappeared from view. A pathetic small voice asked over the wall: ‘Where is my peppermint?’

‘Oh, I forgot you, little one,’ Swaminathan said reappearing, ‘come on, catch this.’ He tossed a three-pie coin at the other.

‘YOU said almond peppermint,’ the boy reminded.

‘I may say a thousand things,’ Swaminathan answered brusquely, ‘but isn’t a three-pie coin sufficient? You can buy an almond peppermint if you want.’

‘But you said two almond peppermints.’

‘Now be off, young man. Don’t haggle with me like a brinjal seller. Leam contentment,’ said Swaminathan and jumped down from the stone.

‘Rajam, do you know what has happened in the school to-day? I have fought with the Head Master. I am dismissed. I have no more schools or classes.’

‘You fought with the Head Master?’

‘Yes, he came to assault me about the Drill attendance, and I wrenched his hand, and snatched the cane I don’t believe I shall ever go back to the school. I

expect there will be a lot of trouble if I do.’

‘What a boyAyDouITarHe!Y’ eAxclAaimCeAd DRaEjaMmY. ‘YSOAU LarEe Malways in some trouble or other wherever you go. Always, always–‘

‘It was hardly my fault, Rajam,’ Swaminathan said, and tried to vindicate himself by explaining to him Dr. Kesavan’s villainy.

‘You have no sense, Swami. You are a peculiar fellow.’

‘What else could I do to get the evenings off for practice. The Y. M. U. are no joke.’

‘You are right, Swami. I watched the fellows at practice this morning. They have morning practice too. They are not bad players. There is one Mohideen, a dark fellow, oh, you know–you will have to keep an eye on him. He bats like Bradman. You will have to watch him. There is another fellow, Shanmugam. He is a dangerous bowler. But there is one weakness in Mohideen. He is not so steady on the leg side Swami, don’t worry about anything for some time to come. You

must come in the morning too tomorrow. We have got to beat those fellows.’

Swaminathan had really called Rajam to bid him good- bye, but now he changed his mind. Rajam would stop him if he came to know of his adventurous plans. He wasn’t going to tell Rajam, nor anybody about it, not even Mani. If he was stopped, he would have no place to stay in. The match was still two days off. He would go away without telling anyone, somehow practice on the way, come back for a few hours on the day of the match, disappear once again, and never come back to Malgudi–a place which contained his father, a stem stubborn father, and that tyrant of a Head Master And no amount of argument on his part could ever

make his father see eye to eye with him. If he went home, father might beat him, thrash him, or kill him, to make him return to the Board High School. Father was a tough man…. He would have to come back on the day of the match, without anybody’s knowledge. Perhaps it would not be necessary. He asked suddenly: ‘Rajam, do you think I am so necessary for the match?’

Rajam regarded him suspiciously and said: ‘Don’t ask such questions.’ He

added presently: ‘WAe DcaInT’t HdoYwAithAouCt yAoDu, ESwMaYmi.SNAo.LWEeMdepend upon you. You are the best bowler we have. We have got to give those fellows a beating. I shall

commit suicide if we lose. Oh, Swami, what a mess you have made of things! What are you going to do without a school?’

‘I shall have to join a workshop or some such thing.’ ‘What will your father say when he hears of it?’

‘Oh, nothing. He will say it is all right. He won’t trouble me,’ Swaminathan

said.

‘Swami, I must get back to the class. It is late.’ Rajam rose and sprinted

towards the school, crying: ‘Come to the field early. Come very soon, now that you are free ‘

CHAPTER XVI

Swami Disappears

SWAMINATHAN’S father felt ashamed of himself as he approached Ellaman Street, the last street of the town, which turned into a rough track for about a hundred yards, and disappeared into the sands of the Sarayu River. He hesitated for a second at the end of Market Road, which was bright with the lights of a couple of late shops and a street gas lamp, before he turned to plunge into the darkness and silence of Ellaman Street. A shaft of greenish light from the gas-lamp fell athwart Ellaman Street, illuminating only a few yards of the street and leaving the rest in deep gloom. A couple of municipal lanterns smouldered in their wicks, emphasising the darkness around.

Swaminathan’s father felt ashamed of himself. He was going to cross the street, plod through the sand, and gaze into the Sarayu–for the body of his son! His son, Swami, to be looked for in the Sarayu! It seemed to him a ridiculous thing

to do. But what couldAhDeIdToH? YHeAdaAreCd AnoDt rEetMurnYhoSmAeLwEithMout some definite news

of his son, good or bad. The house had worn a funereal appearance since nine o’clock. His wife and his old mother were more or less dazed and demented. She– his wife–had remained cheerful till the Taluk Office gong struck ten, when her face turning white, she had asked him to go and find out from Swaminathan’s friends and teachers what had happened to him.

He did not know where Swaminathan’s Head Master lived. He had gone to the Board School and asked the watchman, who misdirected him and made him wander over half the town without purpose. He could not find Mani’s house.

He had gone to Rajam’s house, but the house was dark, everybody had gone to bed, and he felt that it would be absurd to wake up the household of a stranger to ask if they had seen his son. From what he could get out of the servant sleeping in the veranda, he understood that Swaminathan had not been seen in Rajam’s house that evening. He had then vaguely wandered in the streets. He was doing it to please his wife and mother. He had not shared in the least his wife’s

nervousness. He had felt all along that the boy must have gone out somewhere and would return, and then he would treat him with some firmness and nip this tendency in the bud. He had spent nearly an hour thus and gone home. Even his mother had left her bed and was hobbling agitatedly about the house, praying to the God of the Thirupathi Hills and promising him rich offerings if he should restore Swaminathan to her safe and sound. His wife stood like a stone image, looking down the street. The only tranquil being in the house was the youngest member ‘of the family, whose soft breathings came from the cradle, defying the gloom and heaviness in the house.

When Swaminathan’s father gave his wife the news–or no news–that he had gathered from his wanderings, he had assumed a heavy aggressive cheerfulness. It had lasted for a while, and gradually the anxiety and the nervousness of the two women infected him. He had begun to feel that something must have happened to his son–a kidnapping or an accident. He was trying to reason out these fears when his wife asked in a trembling voice: ‘Did you search in

the hospital?’ and broke into a hysterical cry. He received this question with apparent disdain whAileDhIisTmHinYdAwaAs CcoAnjDurEingMuYp aSvAisiLonEoMf his son lying in a pulp

in the hospital. He was struggling to erase this picture from his mind when his mother made matters worse with the question: ‘Tell me–tell me–where could the boy have gone? Were you severe with him for anything this morning?’ He was indignant at this question. Everybody seemed to be holding him responsible for Swaminathan’s disappearance. Since nine o’clock he had been enduring the sly references and the suspicious glances. But this upset him, and he sharply asked his mother to return to her bed and not to let her brain concoct silly questions. He had after that reviewed his behaviour with his son since the morning, and discovered with surprise and relief that he had not seen him the whole day. The boy had risen from bed, studied, and gone to school, while he had shut himself up in his room with his clients. He then wondered if he had done anything in the past two or three days. He was not certain of his memory, but he felt that his conduct was blameless. As far as he could remember there had not been any word or act of

his that could have embittered the boy and make him do–do–wild things. It was nearing twelve and he found his wife still sobbing. He tried to console her and rose to go out saying, again with a certain loud cheerfulness: ‘I am going out to look for him. If he comes before I return, for Heaven’s sake don’t let him know what I am out for. I don’t care to appear a fool in his eyes.’

He had walked rather briskly up Hospital Road, but had turned back after staring at the tall iron gates of the hospital. He told himself that it was unnecessary to enter the hospital, but in fact knew that he lacked the courage. That very window in which a soft dim light appeared might have behind it the cot containing Swaminathan all pulped and bandaged. He briskly moved out of Hospital Road and wandered about rather aimlessly through a few dark lanes around the place. With each hour, his heart became heavier. He had slunk past Market Road, and now entered Ellaman Street.

He swiftly passed through Ellaman Street and crossed the rough toot-path leading to the river. His pace slackened as he approached the river. He tried to

convince himself that he was about to do a piece of work which was a farce.

But if the boAdDy oITf hHisYsAon,AsCodAdeDnEaMndYbloSatAedL, EshMould be seen stuck up

among the reeds, and rocking gently on the ripples. He shut his eyes and prayed:

‘Oh, God, help me.’ He looked far up and down the river which was gliding along with gentle music. The massive -peepul trees overhanging the river sighed to the night. He started violently at the sight of the flimsy shadow of some branch on the water; and again as some float kept tilting against the moss-covered parapet with muffled thuds.

And then, still calling himself a fool, he went to the Malgudi Railway Station and walked a mile or so along the railway line, keenly examining the iron rails and the sleepers. The ceaseless hum and the shrill whistle of night insects, the whirring of bats, and the croaking of frogs, came through the awful loneliness of the night. He once stooped with a shudder to put his finger on some wet patch on the rails. As he held up the finger and examined it in the starlight and found that it was only water and not blood, he heaved a sigh of relief and thanked God.

CHAPTER XVII

The Day of the Match

A NARROW road branching to the left of the Trunk Road attracted Swaminathan because it was shaded by trees bearing fruits. The white balllike wood-apple, green figs, and the deep purple eugenia, peeped out of thick green foliage. He walked a mile and did not like the road. It was utterly deserted and silent. He wished to be back in the Trunk Road in which there was some life and traffic, though few and far between: some country cart lumbering along; or an occasional motor-car with trunks and bedding strapped behind, whizzing past and disappearing in a cloud of dust; or groups of peasants moving on the edge of the road. But this branch road oppressed him with its stillness. Moreover, he had been wandering for many hours away from home, and now longed to be back there. He became desperate at the thought of home. What fine things the cook prepared! And how mother always

insisted upon serving ghee and curds herself! Oh! how he would sit before his leaf and watch mother oApeDnITthHe YcuApboAaCrdAaDndEbMrinYg oSutAtLheEaMluminum curd-pot, and

how soft and white it was as it noiselessly fell on the heap of rice on the leaf and enveloped it! A fierce hunger now raged within him. His thighs were heavy and there was pain around his hips. He did not notice it, but the sun’s rays were coming obliquely from the west, and the birds were on their homeward flight.

When hunger became unbearable, he plucked and ate fruits. There was a clean pond near by.

He rested for some time and then started to go back home. The only important thing now was home, and all the rest seemed trivial beside it. The Board School affair appeared inconsequent. He marvelled at himself for having taken it seriously and rushed into all this trouble. What a fool he had been! He wished with all his heart that he had held out his hand when the Head Master raised his cane. Even if he had not done it, he wished he had gone home and told his father everything. Father would have scolded him a little (in case he went too far, granny

and mother could always be depended upon to come to his rescue). All this scolding and frowning would have been worth while, because father could be depended upon to get him out of any trouble. People were afraid of him. And what foolishness to forgo practice with the match only two days ahead! If the match was lost, there was no knowing what Rajam would do.

Meanwhile, Swaminathan was going back towards the Trunk Road. He thought he would be presently back in it, and then he had only to go straight, an d it would take him right into Market Road, and from there he could reach home blindfold. His parents might get angry with him if he went home so late. But he could tell them that he had lost his way. Or would that be too mild? Suppose he said that he had been kidnapped by Pathans and had to escape from them with great difficulty….

He felt he had been walking long enough. He ought to have reached the Trunk Road long ago, but as he stopped and looked about, he found that he was still going along the thick avenue of figs and wood-apple. The ground was strewn

with discoloured, disAfigDurIeTdHfrYuitAs, AanCd AleaDvEesM. TYheSroAadLEseMemed to be longer now that he was going back. The fact was that he had unconsciously followed a gentle

imperceptible curve, as the road cunningly branched and joined the Mempi Forest Road. Some seventy miles further it split into a number of rough irregular tracks disappearing into the thick belt of Mempi Forests. If he had just avoided this deceptive curve, he would have reached the Trunk Road long ago.

Night fell suddenly, and his heart beat fast. His throat went dry as he realised that he had not reached the Trunk Road. The trees were still thick and the road was still narrow. The Trunk Road was broader, and there the sky was not screened by branches. But here one could hardly see the sky; the stars gleamed through occasional gaps overhead. He quickened his pace though he was tired. He ran a little distance, his feet falling on the leaf-covered ground with a sharp rustling noise. The birds in the branches overhead started at this noise and fluttered their wings. In that deep darkness and stillness, the noise of fluttering wings had an

uncanny ghostly quality. Swaminathan was frightened and stood still. He must reach the Trunk Road and thence find his way home. He would not mind even if it were twelve o’clock when he reached the Trunk Road. There was something reassuring in its spaciousness and in the sparseness of vegetation. But here the closeness of the tree-trunks and their branches intertwining at the top gave the road the appearance of a black bleak cavern with an evil spirit brooding over it.

The noise of the disturbed birds subsided. He started on again. He trod warily so as not to make a noise and disturb the birds again, though he felt an urge to run, run with all his might and reach the Trunk Road and home. The conflict between the impulse to run and the caution that counselled him not to run was fierce. As he walked noiselessly, slowly, suppressing the impulse to run on madly, his nerves quivered with the strain. It was as if he had been rope-walking in a gale.

His ears became abnormally sensitive. They caught every noise his feet made, with the slightest variations. His feet came down on the ground with a light tick or a subdued crackle or a gentle swish, according to the object on the ground:

small dry twigs, halAf-gDreIeTnHleYavAes,AoCr Aa DthiEckMlaYyerSoAf LdrEy Mwithered leaves. There were occasional patches of bare uncovered ground, and there the noise was a light

thud, or pit pat; pit pat pit pat in monotonous repetition. Every noise entered Swaminathan’s ears. For some time he was conscious of nothing else. His feet said pish–pish–pish–pat–pit–pat–swish and crackled. These noises streamed into his head, monotonously, endlessly. They were like sinister whispers, calling him to a dreadful sacrifice. He clearly heard his name whispered. There was no doubt about it. ‘Swami…. Swami…. Swami…. Swami…. Swami ‘ the voice said, and then

the dreadful suggestion of a sacrifice. It was some devil, coming behind him noiselessly, and saying the same thing over and over again, deep into his ears. He stopped and looked about. There the immense monster crouched, with its immense black legs wide apart, and its shadowy arms joined over its head. It now swayed a little. He dared not take his eyes off it for fear that it might pounce upon him. He stood frozen to the ground and stared at this monster. Why did it cease its

horrid whispers the moment he turned back? He stood staring. He might have spent about five minutes thus. And when the first thrill of fear subsided, he saw a little more clearly and found that the monster consisted of massive tree-trunks and their top branches.

He continued his journey. He was perhaps within a yard of the Trunk Road, and afterwards he would sing as he sauntered home. He asked himself whether he would rest awhile on the Trunk Road or go, without stopping, home. His legs felt as if they had been made of stone. He decided that he would sit down for some time when he reached the Trunk Road. It did not matter. The Trunk Road was safe and secure even at twelve o’clock. If he took a rest, he would probably be able to run home….

He came to a clearing. The stars were visible above. The road wound faintly in front of him. No brooding darkness, no clustering crowded avenue here. He felt a momentary ecstasy as he realised that he had come to the Trunk Road. It bore all the characteristics of the Trunk Road. The sight of the stars above, clear

and uninterrupted, rAevDivIeTd HhiYm.AAAs CheApDauEseMd YanSd AwaLtEchMed the million twinkling bodies, he felt like bursting into music, out of sheer relief. He had left behind the

horrid, narrow, branch-roofed road. At this realization his strength came back to him. He decided not to waste time in resting. He felt fit to go forward. But presently he felt uneasy. He remembered clearly that the branch road began at right angles to the Trunk Road. But here it continued straight. He stood bewildered for a moment and then told himself that it was probably a continuation of the branch road, a continuation that he had not noticed before. Whatever it was, the Trunk Road must surely cut this at right angles, and if he turned to his right and went forward he would reach home. He looked to his right and left, but there was not the faintest trace of a road anywhere. He soon explained to himself that he was probably not able to see the Trunk Road because of the night. The road must be there all right. He turned to his right, took a step or two, and went knee-deep in quagmire. He waded through it and went forward. Long spiked grass tickled his

face and in some places he was lost in undergrowth. He turned back and reached the road.

Presently he realised his position. He was on an unknown distant road at a ghostly hour. Till now the hope that he was moving towards the familiar Trunk Road sustained him. But now even the false hope being gone, he became faint with fear. When he understood that the Trunk Road was an unreal distant dream, his legs refused to support him. All the same he kept tottering onwards, knowing well that it was a meaningless, aimless, march. He walked like one half stunned. The strangeness of the hour, so silent indeed that even the drop of a leaf resounded through the place, oppressed him with a sense of inhumanity. Its remoteness gave him a feeling that he was walking into a world of horrors, subhuman and supernatural.

He collapsed like an empty bag, and wept bitterly. He called to his father, mother, granny, Rajam, and Mani. His shrill loud cry went through the night past those half-distinct black shapes looming far ahead, which might be trees or devils

or gate-posts of InfeArnDo.ITNoHwYhAe pAraCyeAdDtoEaMll tYheSgoAdLs EthMat he knew to take him out of that place. He promised them offerings: two coco-nuts every Saturday to the

elephant-faced Ganapathi; a vow to roll bare-bodied in dust, beg, and take the alms to the Lord of Thirupathi. He paused as if to give the gods time to consider his offer and descend from their heights to rescue him.

Now his head was full of wild imaginings. He heard heavy footfalls behind, turned and saw a huge lump of darkness coming towards him. It was too late, it had seen him. Its immense tusks showed faintly white. It came roaring, on the way putting its long trunk around a tree and plucking it over by the roots and dashing it on the ground. He could see its’ small eyes, red with anger, its tusks lowered, and the trunk lifted and poised ready. He just rolled to one side and narrowly escaped. He lay panting for a while, his clothes wet with sweat. He heard stealthy footsteps and a fierce growl and before he could turn to see what it was, heavy jaws snapped behind his ears, puffing out foul hot breath on his nape. He had the presence of

mind to lower his head and lie flat, and the huge yellow-and-black tiger missed him. Now a leopard, now a lion, even a whale, now a huge crowd, mixed crowd of wild elephants, tigers, lions, and demons, surrounded him. The demons lifted him by his ears, plucked every hair on his head, and peeled off his skin from head to foot. Now what was this, coiling round his legs, cold an slimy? He shrank in horror from a scorpion that was advancing with its sting in the air. No, this was no place for human being. The cobra and the scorpion were within a inch of him. He shrieked, scrambled to his feet, and ran He kept looking back, the scorpion was moving as fast as he, there was no escaping it: he held his breath and with the last ounce of strength doubled his pace– He had touched the other wicket and returned. Two runs. He stood with the bat. The captain of the Y. M. U. bowler and he hit a sixer. The cheers were deafening. Rajam ran round the field in joy, jumped up the wall and down thrice. The next ball was bowled. Instead of hitting it, Swaminathan flung the bat aside and received it on his head. The ball rebounded and speeded back towards the bowler–the Board High School Head Master; but Swaminathan ran after the ball, overtoAokDit IhTaHlt-wYaAy, cAaCugAhtDit,EaMnd YraisSinAgLhEis Marm, let it go with terrific force towards the Captain’s head, which was presently hit and shattered. The M. C.

C. had won, and their victory was marked by chasing the Y. M. U. out of the field, with bricks and wickets, hats and balls; and Swaminathan laughed and laughed till he collapsed with exhaustion.

Ranga, the cart-man, was returning to his village, five miles on this side of Mempi Forests, early on Saturday morning. He had left Malgudi at two in the morning so as to be in his village by noon. He had turned the long stretch of the Mempi Forest Road, tied the bullock-rope to the cart, and lain down. The soft tinkling of the bells and the gentle steady pace of the bullock sent him to sleep at once.

Suddenly the bullock stopped with a jerk. Ranga woke up and uttered the series of oaths and driving cries that usually gave the bullock speed, and violently tugged the rope. The bullock merely tossed its head with a tremendous jingle of its

bells, but did not move. Ranga, exasperated by its conduct, got down to let the animal know and feel what he thought of it. In the dim morning light, he saw a human form across the way. He shouted, ‘Hi! Get up lazy lubber. A nice place you have found to sleep in! Be up and doing. Do you follow me’?’ When the sleeper was not awakened by this advice, Ranga went forward to throw him out of the way. ‘Ah, a little fellow! Why is he sleeping here’?’ he said, and bending closer

still, exclaimed, ‘Oh, Siva, he is dead!’ The legs and arms, the exposed portions of the body, were damp with the slight early dew. He tore the boy’s shirt and plunged his hand in and was greatly relieved to find the warmth life still there. His simple mind tortured itself with the mystery of the whole situation. Here was a little boy from the town, his dress and appearance proclaimed, alone in this distant highway, lying nearly dead across the road. Who was he? Where did he come from? Why was he there? Ranga’s brain throbbed with these questions. Devils were known to carry away human beings and leave them in distant places. It might be, or might not be. He gave up the attempt to solve the problem himself, feeling that he had

better leave such thiAngDs ItTo HleaYrnAedApCeoAplDe lEikeMthYe sSirAcaLr EofMficer who was staying in the Travellers’ Bungalow three stones on this side the forests. His (Ranga’s)

business would be nothing more than taking the boy to the officer. He gently lifted the boy and carried him to the cart.

He sat in his seat, took the ropes in his hand, raised a foot and kicked the bullock in the stomach, and loosened the rope with the advice to his anim al that if it did not for once give up its usual dawdling ways, he would poke a red-hot pike into its side. Intelligently appreciating the spirit of this advice, the bullock shook itself and set off at a trot that it served for important occasions.

Swaminathan stared blankly before him. He could not comprehend his situation. At first he had believed he was where he had been day after day for so many years–at home. Then gradually, as his mind cleared, he remembered several remote incidents in a confused jumble. He blinked fast. He put out his arm and fumbled about. He studied the objects before him more keenly. It was an

immense struggle to keep the mind alert. He fixed his eyes on a picture on the wall- or was it a calendar?–to find out if it was the same thing that hung before his bed at home. He was understanding its details little by little when all of a sudden his mind collapsed with exhaustion, and confusion began. Was there an object there at all on the wall? He was exasperated by the prank of the mind…. He vaguely perceived a human figure in a chair near by. The figure drew the chair nearer and said, That is right, boy. Are you all right now?’… These words fell on ears that had not yet awakened to life. Swaminathan was puzzled to see his father there. He wanted to know why he was doing such an extraordinary thing as sitting by his side.

‘Father,’ he cried, looking at the figure.

‘You will see your father presently. Don’t worry,’ said the figure and put to him a few questions which would occur to any man with normal curiosity. Swaminathan took such a long time to answer each question and then it was all so incoherent and irrelevant that the stranger was first amused, then irritated, and in the end gave up asAkinDgITquHesYtioAnsA. SCwAamDiEnaMthaYn SwaAsLcEonMsiderably weakened by the number of problems that beset him: Who was this man? Was he father? If he was not, why was he there? Even if he was, why was he there? Who was he? What was he saying? Why could he not utter his words louder and clearer?

This father-and-not-father person then left the room. He was Mr. M. P. S. Nair, the District Forest Officer, just then camping near Mempi Forests. He had been out in the forest the whole day and returned to the Travellers’ Bungalow only at seven in the evening. He had hardly rolled off his puttees and taken off his heavy boots when he was told about the boy. After hours of effort with food and medicine, the boy was revived. But what was the use? He was not in a fit condition to give an account of himself. If the boy’s words were to be believed, he seemed to belong to some strange unpronounceable place unknown to geographers.

Early next morning Mr. Nair found the boy already up and very active. In the compound, the boy stood a few yards from a tree with a heap of stones at his

feet. He stooped, picked up a stone, backed a few yards, took a few quick steps, stopped abruptly, and let the stone go at a particular point on the tree-trunk. He repeated this like clock-work with stone after stone.

‘Good morning, young man,’ Mr. Nair said. ‘How are you now?’ ‘I am grateful to you, sir, you have saved me from great trouble.’ ‘Oh, yes. You are very busy?’

‘I am taking practice, sir. We are playing a match against the Y. M. U. and Rajam is depending upon me for bowling. They call me Tate. I have not had practice at all–for–for a long time. I did a foolish thing in starting out and missing practice with the match coming off on–What day is this, sir?’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Please tell me, sir. I want to know how many days more we have for the

match.’

‘This is Sunday.’

‘What? What?’ Swaminathan stood petrified. Sunday! Sunday! He gazed

dully at the heap of sAtoDneIsTaHt YhisAfeAetC. WAhDatEisMthYe mSatAteLr?E’ M

‘The match is on Sunday,’ Swaminathan stammered.

‘What if it is? You have still a day before you. This is only Saturday.’ ‘You said it was Sunday, sir.’

‘No. No. This is Saturday. See the calendar if you like.’ ‘But you said it was Sunday.’

‘Probably a slip of the tongue.’

‘Sir, will you see that I am somehow at the field before Sunday?’

‘Certainly, this very evening. But you must tell me which your place is and whose son you are.’

CHAPTER XVIII

The Return

IT was three-thirty on Sunday afternoon. The match between the M. C. C. and the

Y. M. U. was still in progress. The Y. M. U. had won the toss, and were all out for eighty-six at two o’clock. The captain’s was the top score, thirty-two. The M. C. C. had none to bowl him out, and he stood there like an automaton, hitting right and left, tiring out all the bowlers.

He kept on for hours, and the next batsman was as formidable, though not a scorer. He exhausted the M. C. C. of the little strength that was left, and Rajam felt keenly the lack of a clever bowler.

After the interval the game started again at two-thirty, and for the hour that the M. C. C. batted the score stood at the unimpressive figure of eight with three out in quick succession. Rajam and Mani had not batted. Rajam watched the game with the blackest heart and cursed heartily everybody concerned. The match would

positively close at fiAveD-thITirtHy; YjusAt tAwoChAoDursEmMoYre,SaAndLwEoMuld the remaining eight

make up at least seventy-eight and draw the match? It was a remote possibility. In his despair he felt that at least six more would follow suit without raising the score even to twenty.

And then he and Mani would be left. And he had a wild momentary hope that each might be able to get forty with a few judicious sixers and boundaries.

He was squatting along with his players on the ground in the shade of the compound wall.

‘Raju, a minute, come here,’, came a voice from above. Rajam looked up and saw his father’s head over the wall. ‘Father, is it very urgent?’

‘It is. I won’t detain you for more than a minute.’

When he hopped over the wall and was at his father’s side, he was given a letter. He glanced through it, gave it back to his father, and said casually, ‘So he is

safe and sound. I wonder what he is doing there.’ He ruminated for a second and turned to go.

‘I am sending this letter to Swaminathan’s father. He is sure to get a car and rush to the place. I shall have to go with him. Would you like to come?’

Rajam remained silent for a minute and said emphatically, ‘No.’ ‘Don’t you want to see your friend and bring him back?’

‘I don’t care,’ Rajam said briefly, and joined his friends. He went back to his seat in the shade of the wall. The fourth player was promising. Rajam whispered to Mani, ‘I say that boy is not bad. Six runs already! Good, good.’

‘If these fellows make at least fifty we can manage the rest.’

Rajam nodded an assent, but an unnoticed corner of his mind began to be busy with something other than the match. His father’s news had stirred in him a mixture of feelings. He felt an urgent desire to tell Mani what he had just heard. ‘Mani, you know Swami–‘ he said and stopped short because he remembered that he was not interested in Swaminathan. Mani sprang up and asked, ‘What about Swami? What about him? Tell me, Rajam. Has he been found?’

_{‘I don’t know}A_.’ DITHYA ACADEMY SALEM

‘Oh, Rajam, Rajam, you were about to say something about him.’ ‘Nothing. I don’t care.’

Swaminathan had a sense of supreme well-being and security. He was flattered by the number of visitors that were coming to see him. His granny and mother were hovering round him ceaselessly, and it was with a sneaking satisfaction that he saw his little brother crowing unheeded in the cradle, for once overlooked and abandoned by everybody.

Many of father’s friends came to see him and behaved more or less alike. They stared at him with amusement and said how relieved they were to have him back and asked some stereo typed questions and went away after uttering one or two funny remarks. Father went out with one of his friends. Before going, he said, ‘Swami, I hope I shall not have to look for you when I come back.’ Swaminathan was hurt by this remark. He felt it to be cruel and inconsiderate.

After his father left, he felt more free, free to lord over a mixed gathering consisting of mother’s and granny’s friends and some old men who were known to the family long before Swaminathan’s father was bom.

Everybody gazed at Swaminathan and uttered loud remarks to his face. Through all this crowd Swaminathan espied the cook and bestowed a smile on him. Over the babble the cook uttered some irrelevant, happy remark, which concluded with the hope that now father, mother and granny might resume the practice of taking food. Swaminathan was about to shout something in reply when his attention was diverted by the statement of a widow, who, rolling her eyes and pointing heavenward, said that He alone had saved the boy, and who could have foreseen that the Forest Officer would be there to save the boy from die jaws of wild beasts?

Granny said that she would have to set about fulfilling the great promises of offerings made to the Lord of the Seven Hills to whom alone she owed the safe return of the child. Mother had meanwhile disappeared into the kitchen and now

came out with a tumbler of hot coffee with plenty of sugar in it, and some steaming tiffin in a plate. SwaAmDinIaTthHanY, AquiAckClyAaDndEwMithYgrSeaAt LreElisMh, disposed of both. A

mixed fragrance, delicate and suggestive, came from the kitchen.

Swaminathan cast his mind back and felt ashamed of himself for his conduct with the Forest Officer, when that harassed gentleman was waiting for a reply from the Deputy Superintendent of Police, which took the form of a taxi drawing up before the Travellers’ Bungalow, disgorging father, mother, Rajam’s father, and an inspector of police. What a scene his mother created when she saw him! He had at first feared that Rajam’s father and the inspector were going to handcuff him. What a fine man Rajam’s father was! And how extraordinarily kind his own father was! So much so that, five minutes after meeting him, Swaminathan blurted out the whole story, from his evasion of Drill Classes to his disappearance, without concealing a single detail. What was there so funny in his narration? Everybody laughed uproariously, and mother covered her face with the end of her sari and wiped her eyes at the end of every fit of laughter….

This retrospect was spoiled by one memory. He had forgotten to take leave of the Forest Officer, though that gentleman opened the door of the car and stood near it. Swaminathan’s conscience scorched him at the recollection of it.

A gulp came to his throat at the thought of the kindly District Forest Officer, looking after the car speeding away from him, thoroughly brokenhearted by the fact that a person whose life he had saved should be so wicked as to go away without saying ‘Good-bye.’

His further reflections on the subject and the quiet discussion among the visitors about the possible dangers that might have befallen Swaminathan, were all disturbed–destroyed, would be more accurate–by a tornado-like personality sweeping into their midst with the tremendous shout, ‘What! Oh! Swami!’ The visitors were only conscious of some mingled shoutings and brisk movements and after that both Swaminathan and Mani disappeared from the hall. As they came to a secluded spot in the backyard, Mani said, ‘I thought you were dead or some such thing.’

‘I was, nearly.’

‘What a foolAyDouITweHreYtAo gAetCfrAighDteEneMd Yof tShaAt LHEeaMd Master and run away like that!’ Rajam told me everything.

I wanted to break your shoulders for not calling me when you had come to our school and called Rajam ‘

‘I had no time, Mani. ‘

‘Oh, Swami. I am so glad to see you alive. I was–I was very much troubled about you. Where were you all along?’

‘I–I–I really can’t say. I don’t know where I was. Some- where–‘ He recounted in this style his night of terrors and the subsequent events.

‘Have I not always said that you were the worst coward I have ever known? You would have got safely back home if you had kept your head cool and followed the straight road.

‘You imagined all sorts of things.’

Swaminathan took this submissively and said, ‘But I can’t believe that I was picked up by that cart-man. I don’t remember it at all.’

Mani advised, ‘If he happens to come to your place during Deepavali or Pongal festival, don’t behave like a niggard. He deserves a bag of gold. If he had not cared to pick you up, you might have been eaten by a tiger.’

‘And I have done another nasty thing,’ Swaminathan said, ‘I didn’t thank and say “Good-bye” to the Forest Officer before I came away. He was standing near the car all the time.’

‘If he was so near why did you seal your mouth’?’ ‘I didn’t think of it till the car had come half-way.’

‘You are a–a very careless fellow. You ought to have thanked him.’ ‘Now what shall I do? Shall I write to him?’

‘Do. But do you know his address?’ ‘My father probably does.’

‘What will you write?’

‘Just tell him–I don’t know. I shall have to ask father about it. Some nice letter, you know. I owAeDhIimTHsoYmAucAh fCorAbDrinEginMg YmeSbAacLkEinMtime for the match.’

‘What are you saying?’ Mani asked.

‘Are you deaf? I was saying that I must ask father to write a nice letter, that

is all.’

‘Not that. I heard something about the match. What is it?’ ‘Yes?’

‘Are you mad to think that you are in time for the match?’ asked Mani. He

then related to Swaminathan the day’s encounter with the Y. M. U. and the depressing results, liberally explaining what Swaminathan’s share was in the collapse of the M. C. C.

‘Why did you have it to-day?’ Swaminathan asked weakly. ‘Why not?’

‘But this is only Saturday.’ ‘Who said that?’

‘The Forest Officer said that this was only Saturday.’

‘You may go and tell him that he is a blockhead,’ Mani retorted.

Swaminathan persisted that it could not be Sunday, till Mani threatened to throw him down, sit on his body, and press his entrails out. Swaminathan remained in silence, and then said, ‘I won’t write him that letter. He has deceived me.’

‘Who?’

‘The Forest Officer And what does Rajam say about me?’

‘Rajam says a lot, which I don’t wish to repeat. But I will tell you one thing. Never appear before him. He will never speak to you. He may even shoot you on sight.’

‘What have I done?’ asked Swaminathan.

‘You have ruined the M. C. C. You need not have promised us, if you had wanted to funk. At least you could have told us you were going away. Why did you hide it from Rajam when you saw him at our school? That is what Rajam wants to know.’

Swaminathan quietly wept, and begged Mani to pacify Rajam and convey to him SwaminathanA’sDloIvTeHanYdAexAplCanAatDionEs.MMYanSi reAfuLsEedMto interfere, ‘You don’t

know Rajam. He is a gem. But it is difficult to get on with him.’ With a forced optimism in his tone Swaminathan said, ‘He will be all right when he sees me. I shall see him tomorrow morning.’

Mani wanted to change the topic, and asked: ‘Are you going back to

school?’

‘Yes, next week. My father has already seen the Head Master, and it

seems things will be all right in the school. He seems to have known everything about the Board School business.’

‘Yes, I and Rajam told him everything.’

‘After all, I shall have to go back to the Board High School. Father says I can’t change my school now.’

CHAPTER XIX

Parting Present

ON Tuesday morning, ten days later, Swaminathan rose from bed with a great effort of will at five o’clock. There was still an hour for the train to arrive at the Malgudi Station and leave it four minutes later, carrying away Rajam, for ever.

Swaminathan had not known that this was to happen till Mani came and told him, on the previous night at about ten, that Rajam’s father was transferred -to Trichinopoly and the whole family would be leaving Malgudi on the following morning. Mani said that he had known it for about a week, but Rajam had strictly forbidden him to say anything about it to Swaminathan. But at the last moment Mani could not contain himself and had violated Rajam’s ban.

A great sense of desolation seized Swaminathan at once. The world

seemed to have become blank all of a sudden. The thought of Lawley Extension without Rajam appaAlleDd IhTimHwYitAh itAs CemApDtinEesMs.YHeSsAwLorEe Mthat he would never go there again. He raved at Mani. And Mani bore it patiently. Swaminathan could not

think of a world without Rajam. What was he to do in the evenings? How was he to spend the holiday afternoons? Whom was he to think of as his friend?

At the same time he was filled with a sense of guilt: he had not gone and seen Rajam even once after his return. Fear, shame, a feeling of uncertainty, had made him postpone his visit to Rajam day after day. Twice he had gone up to the gate of Rajam’s house, but had turned back, his courage and determination giving way at the last moment. He was in this state, hoping to see Rajam every to- morrow, when Mani came to him with the shattering news. Swaminathan wanted to rush up to Rajam’s house that very second and claim him once again. But–but–he felt awkward and shirked. Tomorrow morning at the station. The train was leaving at six. He would go to the station at five.

‘Mani, will you call me at five to-morrow morning?’

‘No. I am going to sleep in Rajam’s house, and go with him to the station.’

For a moment Swaminathan was filled with the darkest jealousy. Mani to sleep in Rajam’s house, keep him company till the last moment, talk and laugh till midnight, and he to be excluded! He wanted to cling to Mani desperately and stop his going.

When Mani left, Swaminathan went in, opened his dealwood box, and stood gazing into it. He wanted to pick out something that could be presented to Rajam on the following morning. The contents of the box were a confused heap of odds and ends of all metals and materials. Here a cardboard box that had once touched Swaminathan’s fancy, and there a toy watch, a catalogue, some picture books, nuts and bolts, disused insignificant parts of defunct machinery, and so on to the brim. He rummaged in it for half an hour, but there seemed to be nothing in it worth taking to Rajam. The only decent object in it was a green engine given to him

over a year ago by ARaDjaImT.HTYheAsigAhCt oAf iDt, EnoMw YdenSteAdLaEndMchipped in a couple of places and lying between an empty thread-reel and a broken porcelain vase,

stirred in him vivid memories. He became maudlin…. He wondered if he would have to return that engine to Rajam now that they were no longer friends. He picked it up to take it with him to the station and return it to Rajam. On second thoughts, he put it back, partly because he loved the engine very much, partly because he told himself that it might be an insult to reject a present after such a long time…. Rajam was a good reader, and Swaminathan decided to give him a book. He could not obviously give him any of th e text-books. He took out the only book that he respected (as the fact of his separating it from the text-books on his desk and giving it a place in the dealwood box showed). It was a neat tiny volume of Andersen’s Fairy Tales that his father had bought in Madras years ago for him. He could never get through the book to his satisfaction. There were too many

unknown unpronounceable English words in it. He would give this book to Rajam. He went to his desk and wrote on the fly-leaf ‘To my dearest friend Rajam’.

Malgudi Station was half dark when Swaminathan reached it with the tiny volume of Andersen’s Fairy Tales in his hand. The Station Master was just out of bed and was working at the table with a kerosene light, not minding in the least the telegraph keys that were tapping away endless messages to the dawn.

A car drew up outside. Swaminathan saw Rajam, his father, mother, someone he did not know, and Mani, getting down. Swaminathan shrank at the sight of Rajam. All his determination oozed out as he saw the captain approach the platform, dressed like a ‘European boy’. His very dress and tidiness made Swaminathan feel inferior and small. He shrank back and tried to make himself inconspicuous.

Almost immediately, the platform officers and policemen. Rajam was unapproachable. He was standing with his father in the middle of a cluster of

people in uniform. AAlDl tIhTatHSYwAamAinCatAhaDn EcoMuldY sSeeALofERMajam was his left leg, through a gap between two policemen. Even that was obstructed when the

policemen drew closer. Swaminathan went round, in search of further gaps.

The train was sighted. There was at once a great bustle.

The train hissed and boomed into the platform. The hustle and activity increased. Rajam and his party moved to the edge of the platform. Things were dragged and pushed into a Second Class compartment with desperate haste by a dozen policemen. Rajam’s mother got in. Rajam and his father were standing outside the compartment. The police officers now barricaded them completely, bidding them farewell and garlanding them. There was a momentary glimpse of Rajam with a huge rose garland round his neck.

Swaminathan looked for, and found Mani. ‘Mani, Rajam is going away.’ ‘Yes, Swami, he is going away.’

‘Mani, will Rajam speak to me?’

‘Oh, yes. Why not?’ asked Mani.

Now Rajam and his father had got into the compartment. The door was closed and the door-handle turned.

‘Mani, this book must be given to Rajam.’ Swaminathan said. Mani saw that there was no time to lose. The bell rang. They desperately pushed their way through the crowd and stood under a window. Swaminathan could hardly see anything above. His head hardly came up to the door-handle.

The crowd pressed from behind. Mani shouted into the compartment: ‘Here is Swami to bid you good-bye.’ Swaminathan stood on his toes. A head leaned over the window and said: ‘Good-bye, my Mani. Don’t forget me. Write to me.

‘Good-bye friend…. Here is Swami,’ Mani said. Rajam craned his neck. Swaminathan’s upturned eyes met his. At the sight of the familiar face Swaminathan lost control of himself and cried: ‘Oh, Rajam, Rajam, you are going away, away. When will you come back?’ Rajam kept looking at him without a word

and then (as it seeAmDedITtoHSYwAamAinCatAhaDn)EoMpeYnedSAhisLEmoMuth to say something, when everything was disturbed by the guard’s blast and the hoarse whistle of the

engine. There was a slight rattling of chains, a tremendous hissing, and the train began to move. Rajam’s face, with the words still unuttered on his lips, receded. Swaminathan became desperate and blurted: ‘Oh, Mani! This book must be given to him,’ and pressed the book into Mani’s hand. Mani ran along the platform with the train and shouted over the noise of the train: ‘Good-bye, Rajam. Swami gives you this book.’ Rajam held out his hand for the book, and took it, and waved a farewell. Swaminathan waved back frantically.

Swaminathan and Mani stood as if glued, where they were, and watched the train. The small red lamp of the last van could be seen for a long time, it diminished in size every minute, and disappeared around a bend. All the jarring, raiding, clanking, spurting, and hissing of the moving train softened in the distance into something that was half a sob and half a sigh. Swaminathan said: ‘Mani, I am

glad he has taken the book. Mani, he waved to me. He was about to say something when the train started. Mani, he did wave to me and to me alone. Don’t deny it.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Mani agreed.

Swaminathan broke down and sobbed. Mani said: ‘Don’t be foolish, Swami.’

‘Does he ever think of me now?’ Swaminathan asked hysterically. ‘Oh, yes,’ said Mani. He paused and added: ‘Don’t worry.

If he has not talked to you, he will write to you.’ What do you mean?’ ‘He told me so,’ Mani said.

‘But he does not know my address.’

‘He asked me, and I have given it,’ said Mani.

‘No. No. It is a lie. Come on, tell me, what is my address?’ ‘It is–it is–never mind what I have given it to Rajam.’

Swaminathan looked up and gazed on Mani’s face to find out whether Mani was joking or was inAeaDrnITesHt. YBuAt foAr ConAceDMEaMni’sYfaSceAhLadEbMecome inscrutable.

The End

THE SCARLET

LETTER

Nathaniel Hawthorne

InfoBooks.org

SYNOPSIS OI THE SC6PLET LETTEP

Thg Scarlgľ Lgľľgr is ľhg mosľ gmblgmaľic novgl by 6mgrican wriľgr Naľhanigl Hawľhorng, publishgd in 1850. In iľ, ľhg auľhor ľglls ľhg sľory of Hgsľgr Prynng, who concgivgd a daughľgr wiľh a man who was noľ hgr husband. 6ccusgd of adulľgry shg was ľakgn ľo ľhg Pillory ľo bg g…posgd ľo public humiliaľion and forcgd ľo wgar ľhg lgľľgr “6” in scarlgľ on hgr drgss as a rgmindgr of hgr crimg.

Thg novgl is sgľ in Ngw England during ľhg 17ľh cgnľury. Hgsľgr had ľo facg a socigľy ľhaľ complgľgly isolaľgd hgr, ľurngd iľs back on hgr, and judggd hgr sgvgrgly, ľo ľhg poinľ of disrupľing hgr gnľirg lifg.

Dgaľh, sin, shamg, and guilľ arg g…plorgd in ľhis work from a criľical pgrspgcľivg ľoward social condgmnaľion, which can bring ľhg worsľ consgqugncgs ľo ľhg lifg of any pgrson.

If you wanľ ľo rgad morg abouľ ľhis book you can visiľ ľhg following link

Thg Scarlgľ Lgľľgr by Naľhanigl Hawľhorng aľ InfoBooks.org

If you wish ľo rsad ľhis work in oľhsr languagss, jusľ click on ľhs corrssponding links:

• Spanish InfoLibros.org: La Leľra Escarlaľa auľor Naľhaniel Hawľhorne
• Porľuguese InfoLivros.org: A Leľra Escarlaľe auľor Naľhaniel Hawľhorne
• French InfoLivres.org: La leľľre Écarlaľe auľeur Naľhaniel Hawľhorne

If you wanľ ľo accsss our digiľal library wiľh mors ľhan 3,500 books ľo rsad and download for frss, ws inviľs you ľo visiľ ľhis pags:

• • +3,500 free books in PDF formaľ aľ InfoBooks.org

C H A P T E R I

THE PRISON DOOR

A throng of bearded men, in sad-coloured garments and grey steeple- crowned hats, inter-mixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognised it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere in the Vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old churchyard of King’s Chapel. Certain it is that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications

of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New World.

Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel- track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-pern, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilised society, a prison. But on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it, or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson as she entered the prison-door, we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolise some sweet moral blossom that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human

frailty and sorrow.

C H A P T E R II

THE MARKET-PLACE

The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston, all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door.

Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle or vagrant Indian, whom the white man’s firewater had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter- tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows.

In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the part of the spectators, as befitted a people among whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor might look for, from such bystanders, at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.

It was a circumstance to be noted on the summer morning when our story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of

ancestry, every successive mother had transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not character of less force and solidity than her own. The women who were now standing about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen: and the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England.

There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone.

“Goodwives,” said a hard-featured dame of fifty, “I’ll tell ye a piece of my mind. It would be greatly for the public behoof if we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should have the handling of such malefactresses as this Hester Prynne. What think ye, gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, that are now here in a knot together, would she come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates have awarded? Marry, I trow not.”

“People say,” said another, “that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come upon his congregation.”

“The magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but merciful overmuch—that is a truth,” added a third autumnal matron. “At the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead. Madame Hester would have winced at that, I warrant me. But she—the naughty baggage—little will she care what they put upon the bodice of her gown! Why, look you, she may cover it with a brooch, or such like heathenish adornment, and so walk the streets as brave as ever!”

“Ah, but,” interposed, more softly, a young wife, holding a child by the hand, “let her cover the mark as she will, the pang of it will be always in her heart.”

“What do we talk of marks and brands, whether on the bodice of her gown or the flesh of her forehead?” cried another female, the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges. “This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die; is there not law for it? Truly there is, both in the Scripture and the statute-book. Then let the magistrates, who have made it of no effect, thank themselves if their own wives and daughters go astray.”

“Mercy on us, goodwife!” exclaimed a man in the crowd, “is there no virtue in woman, save what springs from a wholesome

fear of the gallows? That is the hardest word yet! Hush now, gossips for the lock is turning in the prison-door, and here comes Mistress Prynne herself.”

The door of the jail being flung open from within there appeared, in the first place, like a black shadow emerging into sunshine, the grim and grisly presence of the town-beadle, with a sword by his side, and his staff of office in his hand. This personage prefigured and represented in his aspect the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law, which it was his business to administer in its final and closest application to the offender. Stretching forth the official staff in his left hand, he laid his right upon the shoulder of a young woman, whom he thus drew forward, until, on the threshold of the prison- door, she repelled him, by an action marked with natural dignity and force of character, and stepped into the open air as if by her own free will. She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day; because its existence, heretofore, had brought it acquaintance only with the grey twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison.

When the young woman—the mother of this child—stood fully revealed before the crowd, it seemed to be her first impulse to clasp the infant closely to her bosom; not so much by an impulse of motherly affection, as that she might thereby conceal a certain token, which was wrought or fastened into her dress. In a moment, however, wisely judging that one token of

her shame would but poorly serve to hide another, she took the baby on her arm, and with a burning blush, and yet a haughty smile, and a glance that would not be abashed, looked around at her townspeople and neighbours. On the breast of her gown, in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A. It was so artistically done, and with so much fertility and gorgeous luxuriance of fancy, that it had all the effect of a last and fitting decoration to the apparel which she wore, and which was of a splendour in accordance with the taste of the age, but greatly beyond what was allowed by the sumptuary regulations of the colony.

The young woman was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam; and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. She was ladylike, too, after the manner of the feminine gentility of those days; characterised by a certain state and dignity, rather than by the delicate, evanescent, and indescribable grace which is now recognised as its indication. And never had Hester Prynne appeared more ladylike, in the antique interpretation of the term, than as she issued from

the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even startled, to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped. It may be true that, to a sensitive observer, there was some thing exquisitely painful in it. Her attire, which indeed, she had wrought for the occasion in prison, and had modelled much after her own fancy, seemed to express the attitude of her spirit, the desperate recklessness of her mood, by its wild and picturesque peculiarity. But the point which drew all eyes, and, as it were, transfigured the wearer—so that both men and women who had been familiarly acquainted with Hester Prynne were now impressed as if they beheld her for the first time—was that SCARLET LETTER, so fantastically embroidered and illuminated upon her bosom. It had the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity, and enclosing her in a sphere by herself.

“She hath good skill at her needle, that’s certain,” remarked one of her female spectators; “but did ever a woman, before this brazen hussy, contrive such a way of showing it? Why, gossips, what is it but to laugh in the faces of our godly magistrates, and make a pride out of what they, worthy gentlemen, meant for a punishment?”

“It were well,” muttered the most iron-visaged of the old dames, “if we stripped Madame Hester’s rich gown off her dainty shoulders; and as for the red letter which she hath stitched so

curiously, I’ll bestow a rag of mine own rheumatic flannel to make a fitter one!”

“Oh, peace, neighbours—peace!” whispered their youngest companion; “do not let her hear you! Not a stitch in that embroidered letter but she has felt it in her heart.”

The grim beadle now made a gesture with his staff. “Make way, good people—make way, in the King’s name!” cried he. “Open a passage; and I promise ye, Mistress Prynne shall be set where man, woman, and child may have a fair sight of her brave apparel from this time till an hour past meridian. A blessing on the righteous colony of the Massachusetts, where iniquity is dragged out into the sunshine! Come along, Madame Hester, and show your scarlet letter in the market-place!”

A lane was forthwith opened through the crowd of spectators. Preceded by the beadle, and attended by an irregular procession of stern-browed men and unkindly visaged women, Hester Prynne set forth towards the place appointed for her punishment. A crowd of eager and curious schoolboys, understanding little of the matter in hand, except that it gave them a half-holiday, ran before her progress, turning their heads continually to stare into her face and at the winking baby in her arms, and at the ignominious letter on her breast. It was

no great distance, in those days, from the prison door to the market-place. Measured by the prisoner’s experience, however,

it might be reckoned a journey of some length; for haughty as her demeanour was, she perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon. In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvellous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. With almost a serene deportment, therefore, Hester Prynne passed through this portion of her ordeal, and came to a sort of scaffold, at the western extremity of the market- place. It stood nearly beneath the eaves of Boston’s earliest church, and appeared to be a fixture there.

In fact, this scaffold constituted a portion of a penal machine, which now, for two or three generations past, has been merely historical and traditionary among us, but was held, in the old time, to be as effectual an agent, in the promotion of good citizenship, as ever was the guillotine among the terrorists of France. It was, in short, the platform of the pillory; and above it rose the framework of that instrument of discipline, so fashioned as to confine the human head in its tight grasp, and thus hold it up to the public gaze. The very ideal of ignominy was embodied and made manifest in this contrivance of wood and iron. There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature

—whatever be the delinquencies of the individual—no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do. In Hester Prynne’s instance, however, as not unfrequently in other cases, her sentence bore that she should stand a certain time upon the platform, but without undergoing that gripe about the neck and confinement of the head, the proneness to which was the most devilish characteristic of this ugly engine. Knowing well her part, she ascended a flight of wooden steps, and was thus displayed to the surrounding multitude, at about the height of a man’s shoulders above the street.

Had there been a Papist among the crowd of Puritans, he might have seen in this beautiful woman, so picturesque in her attire and mien, and with the infant at her bosom, an object to remind him of the image of Divine Maternity, which so many illustrious painters have vied with one another to represent; something which should remind him, indeed, but only by contrast, of that sacred image of sinless motherhood, whose infant was to redeem the world. Here, there was the taint of deepest sin in the most sacred quality of human life, working such effect, that the world was only the darker for this woman’s beauty, and the more lost for the infant that she had borne.

The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow- creature, before society shall have

grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering at it. The witnesses of Hester Prynne’s disgrace had not yet passed beyond their simplicity. They were stern enough to look upon her death, had that been the sentence, without a murmur at its severity, but had none of the heartlessness of another social state, which would find only a theme for jest in an exhibition like the present. Even had there been a disposition to turn the matter into ridicule, it must have been repressed and overpowered by the solemn presence of men no less dignified than the governor, and several of his counsellors, a judge, a general, and the ministers of the town, all of whom sat or stood in a balcony of the meeting-house, looking down upon the platform. When such personages could constitute a part of the spectacle, without risking the majesty, or reverence of rank and office, it was safely to be inferred that the infliction of a legal sentence would have an earnest and effectual meaning.

Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and grave. The unhappy culprit sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her, and concentrated at her bosom. It was almost intolerable to be borne. Of an impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety of insult; but there was a quality so much more terrible in the solemn mood of the popular mind, that she longed rather to behold all those rigid countenances contorted with scornful merriment, and herself the object. Had a roar of laughter burst from the

multitude—each man, each woman, each little shrill-voiced child, contributing their individual parts—Hester Prynne might have repaid them all with a bitter and disdainful smile. But, under the leaden infliction which it was her doom to endure, she felt, at moments, as if she must needs shriek out with the full power of her lungs, and cast herself from the scaffold down upon the ground, or else go mad at once.

Yet there were intervals when the whole scene, in which she was the most conspicuous object, seemed to vanish from her eyes, or, at least, glimmered indistinctly before them, like a mass of imperfectly shaped and spectral images. Her mind, and especially her memory, was preternaturally active, and kept bringing up other scenes than this roughly hewn street of a little town, on the edge of the western wilderness: other faces than were lowering upon her from beneath the brims of those steeple-crowned hats. Reminiscences, the most trifling and immaterial, passages of infancy and school-days, sports, childish quarrels, and the little domestic traits of her maiden years, came swarming back upon her, intermingled with recollections of whatever was gravest in her subsequent life; one picture precisely as vivid as another; as if all were of similar importance, or all alike a play. Possibly, it was an instinctive device of her spirit to relieve itself by the exhibition of these phantasmagoric forms, from the cruel weight and hardness of the reality.

Be that as it might, the scaffold of the pillory was a point of view that

revealed to Hester Prynne the entire track along which she had been treading, since her happy infancy. Standing on that miserable eminence, she saw again her native village, in Old England, and her paternal home: a decayed house of grey stone, with a poverty-stricken aspect, but retaining a half obliterated shield of arms over the portal, in token of antique gentility. She saw her father’s face, with its bold brow, and reverend white beard that flowed over the old-fashioned Elizabethan ruff; her mother’s, too, with the look of heedful and anxious love which it always wore in her remembrance, and which, even since her death, had so often laid the impediment of a gentle remonstrance in her daughter’s pathway. She saw her own face, glowing with girlish beauty, and illuminating all the interior of the dusky mirror in which she had been wont to gaze at it. There she beheld another countenance, of a man well stricken in years, a pale, thin, scholar-like visage, with eyes dim and bleared by the lamp- light that had served them to pore over many ponderous books. Yet those same bleared optics had a strange, penetrating power, when it was their owner’s purpose to read the human soul. This figure of the study and the cloister, as Hester Prynne’s womanly fancy failed not to recall, was slightly deformed, with the left shoulder a trifle higher than the right. Next rose before her in memory’s picture-gallery, the

intricate and narrow thoroughfares, the tall, grey houses, the huge cathedrals, and the public edifices, ancient in date and quaint in architecture, of a continental city; where new life had awaited her, still in connexion with the misshapen scholar: a new life, but feeding itself on time- worn materials, like a tuft of green moss on a crumbling wall. Lastly, in lieu of these shifting scenes, came back the rude market-place of the Puritan settlement, with all the townspeople assembled, and levelling their stern regards at Hester Prynne—yes, at herself—who stood on the scaffold of the pillory, an infant on her arm, and the letter A, in scarlet, fantastically embroidered with gold thread, upon her bosom.

Could it be true? She clutched the child so fiercely to her breast that it sent forth a cry; she turned her eyes downward at the scarlet letter, and even touched it with her finger, to assure herself that the infant and the shame were real. Yes these were her realities—all else had vanished!

C H A P T E R III

THE RECOGNITION

From this intense consciousness of being the object of severe and universal observation, the wearer of the scarlet letter was at length relieved, by discerning, on the outskirts of the crowd, a figure which irresistibly took possession of her thoughts. An Indian in his native garb was standing there; but the red men were not so infrequent visitors of the English settlements that

one of them would have attracted any notice from Hester Prynne at such a time; much less would he have excluded all other objects and ideas from her mind. By the Indian’s side, and evidently sustaining a companionship with him, stood a white man, clad in a strange disarray of civilized and savage costume.

He was small in stature, with a furrowed visage, which as yet could hardly be termed aged. There was a remarkable intelligence in his features, as of a person who had so cultivated his mental part that it could not fail to mould the physical to itself and become manifest by unmistakable tokens. Although, by a seemingly careless arrangement of his heterogeneous garb, he had endeavoured to conceal or abate the peculiarity, it was sufficiently evident to Hester Prynne that one of this man’s

shoulders rose higher than the other. Again, at the first instant of perceiving that thin visage, and the slight deformity of the figure, she pressed her infant to her bosom with so convulsive a force that the poor babe uttered another cry of pain. But the mother did not seem to hear it.

At his arrival in the market-place, and some time before she saw him, the stranger had bent his eyes on Hester Prynne. It was carelessly at first, like a man chiefly accustomed to look inward, and to whom external matters are of little value and import, unless they bear relation to something within his mind. Very soon, however, his look became keen and penetrative. A writhing horror twisted itself across his features, like a snake gliding swiftly over them, and making one little pause, with all its wreathed intervolutions in open sight. His face darkened with some powerful emotion, which, nevertheless, he so instantaneously controlled by an effort of his will, that, save at a single moment, its expression might have passed for calmness. After a brief space, the convulsion grew almost imperceptible, and finally subsided into the depths of his nature. When he found the eyes of Hester Prynne fastened on his own, and saw that she appeared to recognize him, he slowly and calmly raised his finger, made a gesture with it in the air, and laid it on his lips.

Then touching the shoulder of a townsman who stood near to him, he addressed him in a formal and courteous manner:

“I pray you, good Sir,” said he, “who is this woman?—and wherefore is she here set up to public shame?”

“You must needs be a stranger in this region, friend,” answered the townsman, looking curiously at the questioner and his savage companion, “else you would surely have heard of Mistress Hester Prynne and her evil doings. She hath raised a great scandal, I promise you, in godly Master Dimmesdale’s church.”

“You say truly,” replied the other; “I am a stranger, and have been a

wanderer, sorely against my will. I have met with grievous mishaps by sea and land, and have been long held in bonds among the heathen-folk to the southward; and am now brought hither by this Indian to be redeemed out of my captivity. Will it please you, therefore, to tell me of Hester Prynne’s—have I her name rightly?—of this woman’s offences, and what has brought her to yonder scaffold?”

“Truly, friend; and methinks it must gladden your heart, after your troubles and sojourn in the wilderness,” said the townsman, “to find yourself at length in a land where iniquity is searched out and punished in the sight of rulers and people, as here in our godly New England. Yonder woman, Sir, you must know, was the wife of a certain learned man, English by birth, but who had long ago dwelt in Amsterdam, whence some good time agone he was minded to cross over and cast in his lot with us of the Massachusetts. To this purpose he sent his wife before him,

remaining himself to look after some necessary affairs. Marry, good Sir, in some two years, or less, that the woman has been a dweller here in Boston, no tidings have come of this learned gentleman, Master Prynne; and his young wife, look you, being left to her own misguidance—”

“Ah!—aha!—I conceive you,” said the stranger with a bitter smile. “So learned a man as you speak of should have learned this too in his books. And who, by your favour, Sir, may be the father of yonder babe—it is some three or four months old, I should judge—which Mistress Prynne is holding in her arms?”

“Of a truth, friend, that matter remaineth a riddle; and the Daniel who shall expound it is yet a-wanting,” answered the townsman. “Madame Hester absolutely refuseth to speak, and the magistrates have laid their heads together in vain.

Peradventure the guilty one stands looking on at this sad spectacle, unknown of man, and forgetting that God sees him.”

“The learned man,” observed the stranger with another smile, “should come himself to look into the mystery.”

“It behoves him well if he be still in life,” responded the townsman. “Now, good Sir, our Massachusetts magistracy, bethinking themselves that this woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall, and that, moreover, as is most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the sea, they have not been bold to put in force the extremity of our righteous law against her. The penalty thereof is death. But in

their great mercy and tenderness of heart they have doomed Mistress Prynne to stand only a space of three hours on the platform of the pillory, and then and thereafter, for the remainder of her natural life to wear a mark of shame upon her bosom.”

“A wise sentence,” remarked the stranger, gravely, bowing his head. “Thus

she will be a living sermon against sin, until the ignominious letter be engraved upon her tombstone. It irks me, nevertheless, that the partner of her iniquity should not at least, stand on the scaffold by her side. But he will be known—he will be known!—he will be known!”

He bowed courteously to the communicative townsman, and whispering a few words to his Indian attendant, they both made their way through the crowd.

While this passed, Hester Prynne had been standing on her pedestal, still with a fixed gaze towards the stranger—so fixed a gaze that, at moments of intense absorption, all other objects in the visible world seemed to vanish, leaving only him and her.

Such an interview, perhaps, would have been more terrible than even to meet him as she now did, with the hot mid-day sun burning down upon her face, and lighting up its shame; with the scarlet token of infamy on her breast; with the sin-born infant in her arms; with a whole people, drawn forth as to a festival,

staring at the features that should have been seen only in the quiet gleam of the fireside, in the happy shadow of a home, or beneath a matronly veil at church. Dreadful as it was, she was conscious of a shelter in the presence of these thousand witnesses. It was better to stand thus, with so many betwixt him and her, than to greet him face to face—they two alone. She fled for refuge, as it were, to the public exposure, and dreaded the moment when its protection should be withdrawn from her. Involved in these thoughts, she scarcely heard a voice behind her until it had repeated her name more than once, in a loud and solemn tone, audible to the whole multitude.

“Hearken unto me, Hester Prynne!” said the voice.

It has already been noticed that directly over the platform on which Hester Prynne stood was a kind of balcony, or open gallery, appended to the meeting- house. It was the place whence proclamations were wont to be made, amidst an assemblage of the magistracy, with all the ceremonial that attended such public observances in those days. Here, to witness the scene which we are describing, sat Governor Bellingham himself with four sergeants about his chair, bearing halberds, as a guard of honour. He wore a dark feather in his hat, a border of embroidery on his cloak, and a black velvet tunic beneath—a gentleman advanced in years, with a hard experience written in his wrinkles. He was not ill-fitted to be the head and representative of a community which owed its origin and progress, and its present state of development, not to the

impulses of youth, but to the stern and tempered energies of manhood and the sombre sagacity of age; accomplishing so much, precisely because it imagined and hoped so little. The other eminent characters by whom the chief ruler was surrounded were distinguished by a dignity of mien, belonging to a period when the forms of authority were felt to possess the sacredness of Divine

institutions. They were, doubtless, good men, just and sage. But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman’s heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face. She seemed conscious, indeed, that whatever sympathy she might expect lay in the larger and warmer heart of the multitude; for, as she lifted her eyes towards the balcony, the unhappy woman grew pale, and trembled.

The voice which had called her attention was that of the reverend and famous John Wilson, the eldest clergyman of Boston, a great scholar, like most of his contemporaries in the profession, and withal a man of kind and genial spirit. This last attribute, however, had been less carefully developed than his intellectual gifts, and was, in truth, rather a matter of shame than self- congratulation with him. There he stood, with a border

of grizzled locks beneath his skull-cap, while his grey eyes, accustomed to the shaded light of his study, were winking, like those of Hester’s infant, in the unadulterated sunshine. He looked like the darkly engraved portraits which we see prefixed to old volumes of sermons, and had no more right than one of those portraits would have to step forth, as he now did, and meddle with a question of human guilt, passion, and anguish.

“Hester Prynne,” said the clergyman, “I have striven with my young brother here, under whose preaching of the Word you have been privileged to sit”—here Mr. Wilson laid his hand on the shoulder of a pale young man beside him—”I have sought, I say, to persuade this godly youth, that he should deal with you, here in the face of Heaven, and before these wise and upright rulers, and in hearing of all the people, as touching the vileness and blackness of your sin. Knowing your natural temper better than I, he could the better judge what arguments to use, whether of tenderness or terror, such as might prevail over your hardness and obstinacy, insomuch that you should no longer hide the name of him who tempted you to this grievous fall. But he opposes to me—with a young man’s over-softness, albeit wise beyond his years—that it were wronging the very nature of woman to force her to lay open her heart’s secrets in such broad daylight, and in presence of so great a multitude. Truly, as I sought to convince him, the shame lay in the commission of the sin, and not in the showing of it forth. What say you to it,

once again, brother Dimmesdale? Must it be thou, or I, that shall deal with this poor sinner’s soul?”

There was a murmur among the dignified and reverend occupants of the balcony; and Governor Bellingham gave expression to its purport, speaking in an authoritative voice, although tempered with respect towards the youthful clergyman whom he addressed:

“Good Master Dimmesdale,” said he, “the responsibility of this woman’s soul lies greatly with you. It behoves you; therefore, to exhort her to repentance and to confession, as a proof and consequence thereof.”

The directness of this appeal drew the eyes of the whole crowd upon the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale—young clergyman, who had come from one of the great English universities, bringing all the learning of the age into our wild forest land. His eloquence and religious fervour had already given the earnest of high eminence in his profession. He was a person of very striking aspect, with a white, lofty, and impending brow; large, brown, melancholy eyes, and a mouth which, unless when he forcibly compressed it, was apt to be tremulous, expressing both nervous sensibility and a vast power of self restraint.

Notwithstanding his high native gifts and scholar-like attainments, there was an air about this young minister—an apprehensive, a startled, a half-frightened look—as of a being

who felt himself quite astray, and at a loss in the pathway of human existence, and could only be at ease in some seclusion of his own. Therefore, so far as his duties would permit, he trod in the shadowy by-paths, and thus kept himself simple and childlike, coming forth, when occasion was, with a freshness, and fragrance, and dewy purity of thought, which, as many people said, affected them like the speech of an angel.

Such was the young man whom the Reverend Mr. Wilson and the Governor had introduced so openly to the public notice, bidding him speak, in the hearing of all men, to that mystery of a woman’s soul, so sacred even in its pollution. The trying nature of his position drove the blood from his cheek, and made his lips tremulous.

“Speak to the woman, my brother,” said Mr. Wilson. “It is of moment to her soul, and, therefore, as the worshipful Governor says, momentous to thine own, in whose charge hers is. Exhort her to confess the truth!”

The Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale bent his head, in silent prayer, as it seemed, and then came forward.

“Hester Prynne,” said he, leaning over the balcony and looking down steadfastly into her eyes, “thou hearest what this good man says, and seest the accountability under which I labour. If thou feelest it to be for thy soul’s peace, and that thy earthly punishment will thereby be made more effectual to salvation, I charge thee to speak out the name of thy fellow-sinner and

fellow- sufferer! Be not silent from any mistaken pity and tenderness for him; for, believe me, Hester, though he were to step down from a high place, and stand there beside thee, on thy pedestal of shame, yet better were it so than to hide a guilty heart through life. What can thy silence do for him, except it tempt him

—yea, compel him, as it were—to add hypocrisy to sin? Heaven hath granted thee an open ignominy, that thereby thou mayest work out an open triumph

over the evil within thee and the sorrow without. Take heed how thou deniest to him—who, perchance, hath not the courage to grasp it for himself—the bitter, but wholesome, cup that is now presented to thy lips!”

The young pastor’s voice was tremulously sweet, rich, deep, and broken. The feeling that it so evidently manifested, rather than the direct purport of the words, caused it to vibrate within all hearts, and brought the listeners into one accord of sympathy. Even the poor baby at Hester’s bosom was affected by the same influence, for it directed its hitherto vacant gaze towards Mr. Dimmesdale, and held up its little arms with a half-pleased, half-plaintive murmur. So powerful seemed the minister’s appeal that the people could not believe but that Hester Prynne would speak out the guilty name, or else that the guilty one himself in whatever high or lowly place he stood, would be

drawn forth by an inward and inevitable necessity, and compelled to ascend the scaffold.

Hester shook her head.

“Woman, transgress not beyond the limits of Heaven’s mercy!” cried the Reverend Mr. Wilson, more harshly than before. “That little babe hath been gifted with a voice, to second and confirm the counsel which thou hast heard. Speak out the name! That, and thy repentance, may avail to take the scarlet letter off thy breast.”

“Never,” replied Hester Prynne, looking, not at Mr. Wilson, but into the deep and troubled eyes of the younger clergyman. “It is too deeply branded. Ye cannot take it off. And would that I might endure his agony as well as mine!”

“Speak, woman!” said another voice, coldly and sternly, proceeding from the crowd about the scaffold, “Speak; and give your child a father!”

“I will not speak!” answered Hester, turning pale as death, but responding to this voice, which she too surely recognised. “And my child must seek a heavenly father; she shall never know an earthly one!”

“She will not speak!” murmured Mr. Dimmesdale, who, leaning over the balcony, with his hand upon his heart, had awaited the result of his appeal. He now drew back with a long respiration. “Wondrous strength and generosity of a woman’s heart! She will not speak!”

Discerning the impracticable state of the poor culprit’s mind, the elder clergyman, who had carefully prepared himself for the occasion, addressed to the multitude a discourse on sin, in all its branches, but with continual reference to the ignominious letter. So forcibly did he dwell upon this symbol, for the hour or more during which his periods were rolling over the people’s heads, that it assumed new terrors in their imagination, and seemed to derive

its scarlet hue from the flames of the infernal pit. Hester Prynne, meanwhile, kept her place upon the pedestal of shame, with glazed eyes, and an air of weary indifference. She had borne that morning all that nature could endure; and as her temperament was not of the order that escapes from too intense suffering by a swoon, her spirit could only shelter itself beneath a stony crust of insensibility, while the faculties of animal life remained entire. In this state, the voice of the preacher thundered remorselessly, but unavailingly, upon her ears. The infant, during the latter portion of her ordeal, pierced the air with its wailings and screams; she strove to hush it mechanically, but seemed scarcely to sympathise with its trouble. With the same hard demeanour, she was led back to prison, and vanished from the public gaze within its iron- clamped portal. It was whispered by those who peered after her that the scarlet letter threw a lurid gleam along the dark passage-way of the interior.

C H A P T E R IV

THE INTERVIEW

After her return to the prison, Hester Prynne was found to be in a state of nervous excitement, that demanded constant watchfulness, lest she should perpetrate violence on herself, or do some half-frenzied mischief to the poor babe. As night approached, it proving impossible to quell her insubordination by rebuke or threats of punishment, Master Brackett, the jailer, thought fit to introduce a physician. He described him as a man of skill in all Christian modes of physical science, and likewise familiar with whatever the savage people could teach in respect to medicinal herbs and roots that grew in the forest. To say the truth, there was much need of professional assistance, not merely for Hester herself, but still more urgently for the child— who, drawing its sustenance from the maternal bosom, seemed to have drank in with it all the turmoil, the anguish and despair, which pervaded the mother’s system. It now writhed in convulsions of pain, and was a forcible type, in its little frame, of the moral agony which Hester Prynne had borne throughout the day.

Closely following the jailer into the dismal apartment, appeared that individual, of singular aspect whose presence in the crowd had been of such deep interest to the wearer of the scarlet

letter. He was lodged in the prison, not as suspected of any offence, but as the most convenient and suitable mode of disposing of him, until the magistrates should have conferred with the Indian sagamores respecting his ransom. His name was announced as Roger Chillingworth. The jailer, after ushering him into the room, remained a moment, marvelling at the comparative quiet that followed his entrance; for Hester Prynne had immediately become as still as death, although the child continued to moan.

“Prithee, friend, leave me alone with my patient,” said the practitioner. “Trust me, good jailer, you shall briefly have peace in your house; and, I promise you, Mistress Prynne shall hereafter be more amenable to just authority than you may have found her heretofore.”

“Nay, if your worship can accomplish that,” answered Master Brackett, “I shall own you for a man of skill, indeed! Verily, the woman hath been like a possessed one; and there lacks little that I should take in hand, to drive Satan out of her with stripes.”

The stranger had entered the room with the characteristic quietude of the profession to which he announced himself as belonging. Nor did his demeanour change when the withdrawal of the prison keeper left him face to face with the woman, whose absorbed notice of him, in the crowd, had intimated so

close a relation between himself and her. His first care was given to the child, whose cries, indeed, as she lay writhing on the trundle-bed, made it of peremptory necessity to postpone all other business to the task of soothing her. He examined the infant carefully, and then proceeded to unclasp a leathern case, which he took from beneath his dress. It appeared to contain medical preparations, one of which he mingled with a cup of water.

“My old studies in alchemy,” observed he, “and my sojourn, for above a year past, among a people well versed in the kindly properties of simples, have made a better physician of me than many that claim the medical degree. Here, woman! The child is yours—she is none of mine—neither will she recognise my voice or aspect as a father’s. Administer this draught, therefore, with thine own hand.”

Hester repelled the offered medicine, at the same time gazing with strongly marked apprehension into his face. “Wouldst thou avenge thyself on the innocent babe?” whispered she.

“Foolish woman!” responded the physician, half coldly, half soothingly. “What should ail me to harm this misbegotten and miserable babe? The medicine is potent for good, and were it my child—yea, mine own, as well as thine! I could do no better for it.”

As she still hesitated, being, in fact, in no reasonable state of mind, he took the infant in his arms, and himself administered

the draught. It soon proved its efficacy, and redeemed the leech’s pledge. The moans of the little patient subsided; its convulsive tossings gradually ceased; and in a few moments, as is the custom of young children after relief from pain, it sank into a profound and dewy slumber. The physician, as he had a fair right to be termed, next bestowed his attention on the mother. With calm and intent scrutiny, he felt her pulse, looked into her eyes—a gaze that made her heart shrink and shudder, because so familiar, and yet so strange and cold—and, finally, satisfied with

his investigation, proceeded to mingle another draught.

“I know not Lethe nor Nepenthe,” remarked he; “but I have learned many new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them—a recipe that an Indian taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that were as old as Paracelsus. Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless conscience. That I cannot give thee. But it will calm the swell and heaving of thy passion, like oil thrown on the waves of a tempestuous sea.”

He presented the cup to Hester, who received it with a slow, earnest look into his face; not precisely a look of fear, yet full of doubt and questioning as to what his purposes might be. She looked also at her slumbering child.

“I have thought of death,” said she—”have wished for it—would even have prayed for it, were it fit that such as I should pray for

anything. Yet, if death be in this cup, I bid thee think again, ere thou beholdest me quaff it. See! it is even now at my lips.”

“Drink, then,” replied he, still with the same cold composure. “Dost thou know me so little, Hester Prynne? Are my purposes wont to be so shallow? Even if I imagine a scheme of vengeance, what could I do better for my object than to let thee live—than to give thee medicines against all harm and peril of life—so that this burning shame may still blaze upon thy bosom?” As he spoke, he laid his long fore-finger on the scarlet letter, which forthwith seemed to scorch into Hester’s breast, as if it had been red hot. He noticed her involuntary gesture, and smiled. “Live, therefore, and bear about thy doom with thee, in the eyes of men and women—in the eyes of him whom thou didst call thy husband—in the eyes of yonder child! And, that thou mayest live, take off this draught.”

Without further expostulation or delay, Hester Prynne drained the cup, and, at the motion of the man of skill, seated herself on the bed, where the child was sleeping; while he drew the only chair which the room afforded, and took his own seat beside her. She could not but tremble at these preparations; for she felt that—having now done all that humanity, or principle, or, if so it were, a refined cruelty, impelled him to do for the relief of physical suffering—he was next to treat with her as the man whom she had most deeply and irreparably injured.

“Hester,” said he, “I ask not wherefore, nor how thou hast fallen into the pit, or say, rather, thou hast ascended to the pedestal

of infamy on which I found thee. The reason is not far to seek. It was my folly, and thy weakness. I

—a man of thought—the book-worm of great libraries—a man already in decay, having given my best years to feed the hungry dream of knowledge— what had I to do with youth and beauty like thine own? Misshapen from my birth-hour, how could I delude myself with the idea that intellectual gifts

might veil physical deformity in a young girl’s fantasy? Men call me wise. If sages were ever wise in their own behoof, I might have foreseen all this. I might have known that, as I came out of the vast and dismal forest, and entered this settlement of Christian men, the very first object to meet my eyes would be thyself, Hester Prynne, standing up, a statue of ignominy, before the people. Nay, from the moment when we came down the old church-steps together, a married pair, I might have beheld the bale-fire of that scarlet letter blazing at the end of our path!”

“Thou knowest,” said Hester—for, depressed as she was, she could not endure this last quiet stab at the token of her shame— “thou knowest that I was frank with thee. I felt no love, nor feigned any.”

“True,” replied he. “It was my folly! I have said it. But, up to that epoch of my life, I had lived in vain. The world had been so cheerless! My heart was a habitation large enough for many

guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream—old as I was, and sombre as I was, and misshapen as I was—that the simple bliss, which is scattered far and wide, for all mankind to gather up, might yet be mine. And so, Hester, I drew thee into my heart, into its innermost chamber, and sought to warm thee by the warmth which thy presence made there!”

“I have greatly wronged thee,” murmured Hester.

“We have wronged each other,” answered he. “Mine was the first wrong, when I betrayed thy budding youth into a false and unnatural relation with my decay. Therefore, as a man who has not thought and philosophised in vain, I seek no vengeance, plot no evil against thee. Between thee and me, the scale hangs fairly balanced. But, Hester, the man lives who has wronged us both! Who is he?”

“Ask me not!” replied Hester Prynne, looking firmly into his face. “That thou shalt never know!”

“Never, sayest thou?” rejoined he, with a smile of dark and self- relying intelligence. “Never know him! Believe me, Hester, there are few things whether in the outward world, or, to a certain depth, in the invisible sphere of thought—few things hidden from the man who devotes himself earnestly and unreservedly to the solution of a mystery. Thou mayest cover up thy secret from the prying multitude. Thou mayest conceal it, too, from the ministers and magistrates, even as thou didst this day, when

they sought to wrench the name out of thy heart, and give thee a partner on thy pedestal. But, as for me, I come to the inquest with other senses than they possess. I shall seek this man, as I have sought truth in books: as I have sought gold in alchemy.

There is a sympathy that will make me conscious of him. I shall see him tremble. I shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and unawares. Sooner or later, he must needs be

mine.”

The eyes of the wrinkled scholar glowed so intensely upon her, that Hester Prynne clasped her hand over her heart, dreading lest he should read the secret there at once.

“Thou wilt not reveal his name? Not the less he is mine,” resumed he, with a look of confidence, as if destiny were at one with him. “He bears no letter of infamy wrought into his garment, as thou dost, but I shall read it on his heart. Yet fear not for him! Think not that I shall interfere with Heaven’s own method of retribution, or, to my own loss, betray him to the gripe of human law. Neither do thou imagine that I shall contrive aught against his life; no, nor against his fame, if as I judge, he be a man of fair repute. Let him live! Let him hide himself in outward honour, if he may! Not the less he shall be mine!”

“Thy acts are like mercy,” said Hester, bewildered and appalled; “but thy words interpret thee as a terror!”

“One thing, thou that wast my wife, I would enjoin upon thee,” continued the scholar. “Thou hast kept the secret of thy paramour. Keep, likewise, mine! There are none in this land that know me. Breathe not to any human soul that thou didst ever call me husband! Here, on this wild outskirt of the earth, I shall pitch my tent; for, elsewhere a wanderer, and isolated from human interests, I find here a woman, a man, a child, amongst whom and myself there exist the closest ligaments. No matter whether of love or hate: no matter whether of right or wrong!

Thou and thine, Hester Prynne, belong to me. My home is where thou art and where he is. But betray me not!”

“Wherefore dost thou desire it?” inquired Hester, shrinking, she hardly knew why, from this secret bond. “Why not announce thyself openly, and cast me off at once?”

“It may be,” he replied, “because I will not encounter the dishonour that besmirches the husband of a faithless woman. It may be for other reasons. Enough, it is my purpose to live and die unknown. Let, therefore, thy husband be to the world as one already dead, and of whom no tidings shall ever come.

Recognise me not, by word, by sign, by look! Breathe not the secret, above all, to the man thou wottest of. Shouldst thou fail me in this, beware! His fame, his position, his life will be in my hands. Beware!”

“I will keep thy secret, as I have his,” said Hester. “Swear it!” rejoined he.

And she took the oath.

“And now, Mistress Prynne,” said old Roger Chillingworth, as he was hereafter to be named, “I leave thee alone: alone with thy infant and the scarlet

letter! How is it, Hester? Doth thy sentence bind thee to wear the token in thy sleep? Art thou not afraid of nightmares and hideous dreams?”

“Why dost thou smile so at me?” inquired Hester, troubled at the expression of his eyes. “Art thou like the Black Man that haunts the forest round about us? Hast thou enticed me into a bond that will prove the ruin of my soul?”

“Not thy soul,” he answered, with another smile. “No, not thine!”

C H A P T E R V

HESTER AT HER NEEDLE

Hester Prynne’s term of confinement was now at an end. Her prison-door was thrown open, and she came forth into the sunshine, which, falling on all alike, seemed, to her sick and morbid heart, as if meant for no other purpose than to reveal the scarlet letter on her breast. Perhaps there was a more real torture in her first unattended footsteps from the threshold of the prison than even in the procession and spectacle that have been described, where she was made the common infamy, at which all mankind was summoned to point its finger. Then, she was supported by an unnatural tension of the nerves, and by all the combative energy of her character, which enabled her to convert the scene into a kind of lurid triumph. It was, moreover, a separate and insulated event, to occur but once in her lifetime, and to meet which, therefore, reckless of economy, she might call up the vital strength that would have sufficed for many quiet years. The very law that condemned her—a giant of stern features but with vigour to support, as well as to annihilate, in his iron arm—had held her up through the terrible ordeal of her ignominy. But now, with this unattended walk from her prison door, began the daily custom; and she must either sustain and carry it forward by the ordinary resources of her

nature, or sink beneath it. She could no longer borrow from the future to help her through the present grief. Tomorrow would bring its own trial with it; so would the next day, and so would the next: each its own trial, and yet the very same that was now so unutterably grievous to be borne. The days of the far-off future would toil onward, still with the same burden for her to take up, and bear along with her, but never to fling down; for the accumulating days and added years would pile up their misery upon the heap of shame. Throughout them all, giving up her individuality, she would become the general symbol at which the preacher and moralist might point, and in which they might vivify and embody their images of woman’s frailty and sinful passion. Thus the young and pure would be taught to look at her, with the scarlet letter flaming on her breast—at her, the child of honourable parents—at her, the mother of a

babe that would hereafter be a woman—at her, who had once been innocent— as the figure, the body, the reality of sin. And over her grave, the infamy that she must carry thither would be her only monument.

It may seem marvellous that, with the world before her—kept by no restrictive clause of her condemnation within the limits of the Puritan settlement, so remote and so obscure—free to return to her birth-place, or to any other European land, and there hide her character and identity under a new exterior, as completely as if emerging into another state of being—and having also the

passes of the dark, inscrutable forest open to her, where the wildness of her nature might assimilate itself with a people whose customs and life were alien from the law that had condemned her—it may seem marvellous that this woman should still call that place her home, where, and where only, she must needs be the type of shame. But there is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghost-like, the spot where some great and marked event has given the colour to their lifetime; and, still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Her sin, her ignominy, were the roots which she had struck into the soil. It was as if a new birth, with stronger assimilations than the first, had converted the forest-land, still so uncongenial to every other pilgrim and wanderer, into Hester Prynne’s wild and dreary, but life-long home. All other scenes of earth—even that village of rural England, where happy infancy and stainless maidenhood seemed yet to be in her mother’s keeping, like garments put off long ago—were foreign to her, in comparison. The chain that bound her here was of iron links, and galling to her inmost soul, but could never be broken.

It might be, too—doubtless it was so, although she hid the secret from herself, and grew pale whenever it struggled out of her heart, like a serpent from its hole—it might be that another feeling kept her within the scene and pathway that had been so fatal. There dwelt, there trode, the feet of one with whom she

deemed herself connected in a union that, unrecognised on earth, would bring them together before the bar of final judgment, and make that their marriage-altar, for a joint futurity of endless retribution. Over and over again, the tempter of souls had thrust this idea upon Hester’s contemplation, and laughed at the passionate and desperate joy with which she seized, and then strove to cast it from her. She barely looked the idea in the face, and hastened to bar it in its dungeon. What she compelled herself to believe— what, finally, she reasoned upon as her motive for continuing a resident of New England—was half a truth, and half a self-delusion. Here, she said to herself had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost: more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.

Hester Prynne, therefore, did not flee. On the outskirts of the town, within the verge of the peninsula, but not in close vicinity to any other habitation, there was a small thatched cottage. It had been built by an earlier settler, and abandoned, because the soil about it was too sterile for cultivation, while its comparative remoteness put it out of the sphere of that social activity which already marked the habits of the emigrants. It stood on the shore, looking across a basin of the sea at the forest-covered hills, towards the west. A clump of scrubby trees,

such as alone grew on the peninsula, did not so much conceal the cottage from view, as seem to denote that here was some object which would fain have been, or at least ought to be, concealed. In this little lonesome dwelling, with some slender means that she possessed, and by the licence of the magistrates, who still kept an inquisitorial watch over her, Hester established herself, with her infant child. A mystic shadow of suspicion immediately attached itself to the spot.

Children, too young to comprehend wherefore this woman should be shut out from the sphere of human charities, would creep nigh enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage- window, or standing in the doorway, or labouring in her little garden, or coming forth along the pathway that led townward, and, discerning the scarlet letter on her breast, would scamper off with a strange contagious fear.

Lonely as was Hester’s situation, and without a friend on earth who dared to show himself, she, however, incurred no risk of want. She possessed an art that sufficed, even in a land that afforded comparatively little scope for its exercise, to supply food for her thriving infant and herself. It was the art, then, as now, almost the only one within a woman’s grasp—of needle- work. She bore on her breast, in the curiously embroidered letter, a specimen of her delicate and imaginative skill, of which the dames of a court might gladly have availed themselves, to add the richer and more spiritual adornment of human ingenuity to their fabrics of silk and gold. Here, indeed, in the

sable simplicity that generally characterised the Puritanic modes of dress, there might be an infrequent call for the finer productions of her handiwork. Yet the taste of the age, demanding whatever was elaborate in compositions of this kind, did not fail to extend its influence over our stern progenitors, who had cast behind them so many fashions which it might seem harder to dispense with.

Public ceremonies, such as ordinations, the installation of magistrates, and all that could give majesty to the forms in which a new government manifested itself to the people, were, as a matter of policy, marked by a stately and well-conducted ceremonial, and a sombre, but yet a studied magnificence.

Deep ruffs, painfully wrought bands, and gorgeously embroidered gloves, were all deemed necessary to the official state of men assuming the reins of power, and were readily allowed to individuals dignified by rank or wealth, even while sumptuary laws forbade these and similar extravagances to the plebeian order. In the array of funerals, too—whether for the apparel of the

dead body, or to typify, by manifold emblematic devices of sable cloth and snowy lawn, the sorrow of the survivors—there was a frequent and characteristic demand for such labour as Hester Prynne could supply. Baby- linen—for babies then wore robes of state—afforded still another possibility of toil and emolument.

By degrees, not very slowly, her handiwork became what would now be termed the fashion. Whether from commiseration for a woman of so miserable a destiny; or from the morbid curiosity that gives a fictitious value even to common or worthless things; or by whatever other intangible circumstance was then, as now, sufficient to bestow, on some persons, what others might seek in vain; or because Hester really filled a gap which must otherwise have remained vacant; it is certain that she had ready and fairly requited employment for as many hours as she saw fit to occupy with her needle. Vanity, it may be, chose to mortify itself, by putting on, for ceremonials of pomp and state, the garments that had been wrought by her sinful hands. Her needle-work was seen on the ruff of the Governor; military men wore it on their scarfs, and the minister on his band; it decked the baby’s little cap; it was shut up, to be mildewed and moulder away, in the coffins of the dead. But it is not recorded that, in a single instance, her skill was called in to embroider the white veil which was to cover the pure blushes of a bride. The exception indicated the ever relentless vigour with which society frowned upon her sin.

Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple abundance for her child. Her own dress was of the coarsest materials and the most sombre hue, with only that one ornament—the scarlet letter—which it was her doom to wear.

The child’s attire, on the other hand, was distinguished by a

fanciful, or, we may rather say, a fantastic ingenuity, which served, indeed, to heighten the airy charm that early began to develop itself in the little girl, but which appeared to have also a deeper meaning. We may speak further of it hereafter. Except for that small expenditure in the decoration of her infant, Hester bestowed all her superfluous means in charity, on wretches less miserable than herself, and who not unfrequently insulted the hand that fed them. Much of the time, which she might readily have applied to the better efforts of her art, she employed in making coarse garments for the poor. It is probable that there was an idea of penance in this mode of occupation, and that she offered up a real sacrifice of enjoyment in devoting so many hours to such rude handiwork. She had in her nature a rich, voluptuous, Oriental characteristic—a taste for the gorgeously beautiful, which, save in the exquisite productions of her needle, found nothing else, in all the possibilities of her life, to exercise itself upon. Women derive a pleasure, incomprehensible to the other sex, from the delicate toil of the needle. To Hester Prynne it might have been a mode of expressing, and therefore soothing, the passion of her life. Like all other joys, she rejected it as

sin. This morbid meddling of conscience with an immaterial matter betokened, it is to be feared, no genuine and steadfast penitence, but something doubtful, something that might be deeply wrong beneath.

In this manner, Hester Prynne came to have a part to perform in the world. With her native energy of character and rare capacity, it could not entirely cast her off, although it had set a mark upon her, more intolerable to a woman’s heart than that which branded the brow of Cain. In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it. Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished, and as much alone as if she inhabited another sphere, or communicated with the common nature by other organs and senses than the rest of human kind. She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible repugnance. These emotions, in fact, and its bitterest scorn besides, seemed to be the sole portion that she retained in the universal heart. It was not an age of delicacy; and her position, although she understood it well, and was in little danger of forgetting it, was often brought before her vivid self- perception, like a new anguish, by the rudest touch upon the tenderest spot. The poor, as we have already said, whom she sought out to be the objects of her bounty, often reviled the hand that was stretched forth to succour them. Dames of elevated rank, likewise, whose doors she entered in the way of her occupation, were accustomed to distil drops of bitterness

into her heart; sometimes through that alchemy of quiet malice, by which women can concoct a subtle poison from ordinary trifles; and sometimes, also, by a coarser expression, that fell upon the sufferer’s defenceless breast like a rough blow upon an ulcerated wound. Hester had schooled herself long and well; and she never responded to these attacks, save by a flush of crimson that rose irrepressibly over her pale cheek, and again subsided into the depths of her bosom. She was patient—a martyr, indeed—but she forebore to pray for enemies, lest, in spite of her forgiving aspirations, the words of the blessing should stubbornly twist themselves into a curse.

Continually, and in a thousand other ways, did she feel the innumerable throbs of anguish that had been so cunningly contrived for her by the undying, the ever-active sentence of the Puritan tribunal. Clergymen paused in the streets, to address words of exhortation, that brought a crowd, with its mingled grin and frown, around the poor, sinful woman. If she entered a church, trusting to share the Sabbath smile of the Universal Father, it was often her mishap to find herself the text of the discourse. She grew to have a dread of children; for they had imbibed from their parents a vague idea of something

horrible in this dreary woman gliding silently through the town, with never any companion but one only child. Therefore, first allowing her to pass, they pursued her at a distance with shrill cries, and the utterances of a word that had no distinct purport

to their own minds, but was none the less terrible to her, as proceeding from lips that babbled it unconsciously. It seemed to argue so wide a diffusion of her shame, that all nature knew of it; it could have caused her no deeper pang had the leaves of the trees whispered the dark story among themselves—had the summer breeze murmured about it—had the wintry blast shrieked it aloud! Another peculiar torture was felt in the gaze of a new eye. When strangers looked curiously at the scarlet letter—and none ever failed to do so—they branded it afresh in Hester’s soul; so that, oftentimes, she could scarcely refrain, yet always did refrain, from covering the symbol with her hand. But then, again, an accustomed eye had likewise its own anguish to inflict. Its cool stare of familiarity was intolerable. From first to last, in short, Hester Prynne had always this dreadful agony in feeling a human eye upon the token; the spot never grew callous; it seemed, on the contrary, to grow more sensitive with daily torture.

But sometimes, once in many days, or perchance in many months, she felt an eye—a human eye—upon the ignominious brand, that seemed to give a momentary relief, as if half of her agony were shared. The next instant, back it all rushed again, with still a deeper throb of pain; for, in that brief interval, she had sinned anew. (Had Hester sinned alone?)

Her imagination was somewhat affected, and, had she been of a softer moral and intellectual fibre would have been still more so, by the strange and solitary anguish of her life. Walking to

and fro, with those lonely footsteps, in the little world with which she was outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to Hester—if altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted—she felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She was terror- stricken by the revelations that were thus made. What were they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne’s? Or, must she receive those intimations—so obscure, yet so distinct

—as truth? In all her miserable experience, there was nothing else so awful

and so loathsome as this sense. It perplexed, as well as shocked her, by the irreverent inopportuneness of the occasions that brought it into vivid action. Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in

fellowship with angels. “What evil thing is at hand?” would Hester say to herself. Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be nothing human within the scope of view, save the form of this earthly saint! Again a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously assert itself, as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who, according to the rumour of all tongues, had kept cold snow within her bosom throughout life. That unsunned snow in the matron’s bosom, and the burning shame on Hester Prynne’s— what had the two in common? Or, once more, the electric thrill would give her warning—”Behold Hester, here is a companion!” and, looking up, she would detect the eyes of a young maiden glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly averted, with a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks as if her purity were somewhat sullied by that momentary glance. O Fiend, whose talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere?— such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man’s hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like herself.

The vulgar, who, in those dreary old times, were always contributing a grotesque horror to what interested their imaginations, had a story about the scarlet letter which we might readily work up into a terrific legend. They averred that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-

pot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the night-time. And we must needs say it seared Hester’s bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumour than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.

C H A P T E R VI

PEARL

We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant; that little creature, whose innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty passion. How strange it seemed to the sad woman, as she watched the growth, and the beauty that became every day more brilliant, and the intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over the tiny features of this child! Her Pearl—for so had Hester called her; not as a name expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm, white, unimpassioned lustre that would be indicated by the comparison. But she named the infant “Pearl,” as being of great price—purchased with all she had—her mother’s only treasure!

How strange, indeed! Man had marked this woman’s sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it were sinful like

herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on that same dishonoured bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in heaven! Yet these thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with

hope than apprehension. She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no faith, therefore, that its result would be good. Day after day she looked fearfully into the child’s expanding nature, ever dreading to detect some dark and wild peculiarity that should correspond with the guiltiness to which she owed her being.

Certainly there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its vigour, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs, the infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden: worthy to have been left there to be the plaything of the angels after the world’s first parents were driven out. The child had a native grace which does not invariably co-exist with faultless beauty; its attire, however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were the very garb that precisely became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in rustic weeds. Her mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better understood hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be procured, and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in the arrangement and decoration of the dresses which the child wore before the public eye. So magnificent was the small figure when thus arrayed, and such was the splendour of Pearl’s own proper beauty, shining through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her on the darksome cottage floor.

And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with the child’s rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect. Pearl’s aspect was imbued

with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child there were many children, comprehending the full scope between the wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little, of an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there was a trait of passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never lost; and if in any of her changes, she had grown fainter or paler, she would have ceased to be herself—it would have been no longer Pearl!

This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but—or else Hester’s fears deceived her—it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into which she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving her existence a great law had been broken; and the result was a being whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in disorder, or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be discovered. Hester could only account for the child’s character— and even then most vaguely and imperfectly—by recalling what

she herself had been during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her soul from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its material of earth. The mother’s impassioned state had been the medium through which were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life; and, however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains of crimson

and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the untempered light of the intervening substance. Above all, the warfare of Hester’s spirit at that epoch was perpetuated in Pearl. She could recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her temper, and even some of the very cloud- shapes of gloom and despondency that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated by the morning radiance of a young child’s disposition, but, later in the day of earthly existence, might be prolific of the storm and whirlwind.

The discipline of the family in those days was of a far more rigid kind than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application of the rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in the way of punishment for actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen for the growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester Prynne, nevertheless, the loving mother of this one child, ran little risk of erring on the side of undue severity. Mindful, however, of her own errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender but strict control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge. But the task was beyond her skill. After testing both smiles and frowns, and proving that neither mode of treatment possessed any calculable influence, Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses. Physical compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while it lasted. As to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her mind or heart, little Pearl

might or might not be within its reach, in accordance with the caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother, while Pearl was yet an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look, that warned her when it would be labour thrown away to insist, persuade or plead.

It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse, sometimes so malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that Hester could not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl was a human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild, bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness and intangibility: it was as if she were hovering in the air, and might vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not whence and goes we know not whither. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush towards the child—to pursue the little elf in the flight which she invariably began—to snatch her to her bosom with a close pressure and earnest kisses—not so much from overflowing love as to assure herself that Pearl was flesh and blood, and not utterly delusive. But Pearl’s laugh, when

she was caught, though full of merriment and music, made her mother more doubtful than before.

Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought so dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into passionate tears. Then, perhaps

—for there was no foreseeing how it might affect her—Pearl would frown, and clench her little fist, and harden her small features into a stern, unsympathising look of discontent. Not seldom she would laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or—but this more rarely happened—she would be convulsed with rage of grief and sob out her love for her mother in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly safe in confiding herself to that gusty tenderness: it passed as suddenly as it came. Brooding over all these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but, by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible intelligence. Her only real comfort was when the child lay in the placidity of sleep. Then she was sure of her, and tasted hours of quiet, sad, delicious happiness; until— perhaps with that perverse expression glimmering from beneath her opening lids—little Pearl awoke!

How soon—with what strange rapidity, indeed—did Pearl arrive at an age that was capable of social intercourse beyond the mother’s ever-ready smile and nonsense-words! And then what a happiness would it have been could Hester Prynne have heard

her clear, bird-like voice mingling with the uproar of other childish voices, and have distinguished and unravelled her own darling’s tones, amid all the entangled outcry of a group of sportive children. But this could never be. Pearl was a born outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of sin, she had no right among christened infants.

Nothing was more remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child comprehended her loneliness: the destiny that had drawn an inviolable circle round about her: the whole peculiarity, in short, of her position in respect to other children. Never since her release from prison had Hester met the public gaze without her. In all her walks about the town, Pearl, too, was there: first as the babe in arms, and afterwards as the little girl, small companion of her mother, holding a forefinger with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate of three or four footsteps to one of Hester’s. She saw the children of the settlement on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashions as the Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church, perchance, or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in a sham fight with the Indians, or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft. Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but

never sought to make acquaintance. If spoken to, she would not

speak again. If the children gathered about her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her puny

wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill, incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because they had so much the sound of a witch’s anathemas in some unknown tongue.

The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish, unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and child, and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not unfrequently reviled them with their tongues. Pearl felt the sentiment, and requited it with the bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value, and even comfort for the mother; because there was at least an intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful caprice that so often thwarted her in the child’s manifestations. It appalled her, nevertheless, to discern here, again, a shadowy reflection of the evil that had existed in herself. All this enmity and passion had Pearl inherited, by inalienable right, out of Hester’s heart. Mother and daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated those unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne before Pearl’s birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the softening influences of maternity.

At home, within and around her mother’s cottage, Pearl wanted not a wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life

went forth from her ever- creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The unlikeliest materials—a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower—were the puppets of Pearl’s witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage of her inner world. Her one baby-voice served a multitude of imaginary personages, old and young, to talk withal. The pine- trees, aged, black, and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the ugliest weeds of the garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down and uprooted most unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed, but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural activity—soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a tide of life—and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be a little more than was observable in other children of bright faculties; except as Pearl, in the dearth of human playmates, was thrown more upon the visionary throng which she created. The singularity lay in the hostile feelings

with which the child regarded all these offsprings of her own heart and mind. She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing broadcast the dragon’s teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies, against whom she rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly sad—then what depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own heart the cause—to observe, in one so young, this constant recognition of an adverse world, and so fierce a training of the energies that were to make good her cause in the contest that must ensue.

Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees, and cried out with an agony which she would fain have hidden, but which made utterance for itself betwixt speech and a groan—”O Father in Heaven— if Thou art still my Father—what is this being which I have brought into the world?” And Pearl, overhearing the ejaculation, or aware through some more subtile channel, of those throbs of anguish, would turn her vivid and beautiful little face upon her mother, smile with sprite-like intelligence, and resume her play.

One peculiarity of the child’s deportment remains yet to be told. The very first thing which she had noticed in her life, was— what?—not the mother’s smile, responding to it, as other babies do, by that faint, embryo smile of the little mouth, remembered so doubtfully afterwards, and with such fond discussion whether it were indeed a smile. By no means! But that first object of which Pearl seemed to become aware was—shall we say it?— the scarlet letter on Hester’s bosom! One day, as her mother

stooped over the cradle, the infant’s eyes had been caught by the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the letter; and putting up her little hand she grasped at it, smiling, not doubtfully, but with a decided gleam, that gave her face the look of a much older child. Then, gasping for breath, did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token, instinctively endeavouring to tear it away, so infinite was the torture inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl’s baby-hand. Again, as if her mother’s agonised gesture were meant only to make sport for her, did little Pearl look into her eyes, and smile. From that epoch, except when the child was asleep, Hester had never felt a moment’s safety: not a moment’s calm enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is true, would sometimes elapse, during which Pearl’s gaze might never once be fixed upon the scarlet letter; but then, again, it would come at unawares, like the stroke of sudden death, and always with that peculiar smile and odd expression of the eyes.

Once this freakish, elvish cast came into the child’s eyes while Hester was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and suddenly

—for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered with unaccountable delusions—she fancied that she beheld, not her own miniature portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of Pearl’s eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet bearing the semblance of features that

she had known full well, though seldom with a smile, and never with malice in them. It was as if an evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though less vividly, by the same illusion.

In the afternoon of a certain summer’s day, after Pearl grew big enough to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of wild flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother’s bosom; dancing up and down like a little elf whenever she hit the scarlet letter. Hester’s first motion had been to cover her bosom with her clasped hands. But whether from pride or resignation, or a feeling that her penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain, she resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly into little Pearl’s wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers, almost invariably hitting the mark, and covering the mother’s breast with hurts for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to seek it in another. At last, her shot being all expended, the child stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little laughing image of a fiend peeping out—or, whether it peeped or no, her mother so imagined it—from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.

“Child, what art thou?” cried the mother.

“Oh, I am your little Pearl!” answered the child.

But while she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and down with the humoursome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak might be to fly up the chimney.

“Art thou my child, in very truth?” asked Hester.

Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment, with a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was Pearl’s wonderful intelligence, that her mother half doubted whether she were not acquainted with the secret spell of her existence, and might not now reveal herself.

“Yes; I am little Pearl!” repeated the child, continuing her antics.

“Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!” said the mother half playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive impulse came over her in the midst of her deepest suffering. “Tell me, then, what thou art, and who sent thee hither?”

“Tell me, mother!” said the child, seriously, coming up to Hester, and pressing herself close to her knees. “Do thou tell me!”

“Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!” answered Hester Prynne.

But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness of the child. Whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or because an evil

spirit prompted her, she put up her small forefinger and touched the scarlet letter.

“He did not send me!” cried she, positively. “I have no Heavenly Father!” “Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!” answered the mother,

suppressing a groan. “He sent us all into the world. He sent even me, thy

mother. Then, much more thee! Or, if not, thou strange and elfish child, whence didst thou come?”

“Tell me! Tell me!” repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laughing and capering about the floor. “It is thou that must tell me!”

But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a dismal labyrinth of doubt. She remembered—betwixt a smile and a shudder—the talk of the neighbouring townspeople, who, seeking vainly elsewhere for the child’s paternity, and observing some of her odd attributes, had given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring: such as, ever since old Catholic times, had occasionally been seen on earth, through the agency of their mother’s sin, and to promote some foul and wicked purpose. Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish enemies, was a brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child to whom this inauspicious origin was assigned among the New England Puritans.

C H A P T E R VII

THE GOVERNOR’S HALL

Hester Prynne went one day to the mansion of Governor Bellingham, with a pair of gloves which she had fringed and embroidered to his order, and which were to be worn on some great occasion of state; for, though the chances of a popular election had caused this former ruler to descend a step or two from the highest rank, he still held an honourable and influential place among the colonial magistracy.

Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a pair of embroidered gloves, impelled Hester, at this time, to seek an interview with a personage of so much power and activity in the affairs of the settlement. It had reached her ears that there was a design on the part of some of the leading inhabitants, cherishing the more rigid order of principles in religion and government, to deprive her of her child. On the supposition that Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon origin, these good people not unreasonably argued that a Christian interest in the mother’s soul required them to remove such a stumbling-block from her path. If the child, on the other hand, were really capable of moral and religious growth, and possessed the elements of

ultimate salvation, then, surely, it would enjoy all the fairer prospect of these advantages by being transferred to wiser and better guardianship than Hester Prynne’s. Among those who promoted the design, Governor Bellingham was said to be one of the most busy. It may appear singular, and, indeed, not a little ludicrous, that an affair of this kind, which in later days would have been referred to no higher jurisdiction than that of the select men of the town, should then have been a question publicly discussed, and on which statesmen of eminence took sides. At that epoch of pristine simplicity, however, matters of even slighter public interest, and of far less intrinsic weight than the welfare of Hester and her child, were strangely mixed up with the deliberations of legislators and acts of state. The period was hardly, if at all, earlier than that of our story, when a dispute concerning the right of property in a pig not only caused a fierce and bitter contest in the legislative body of the colony, but resulted in an important modification of the framework itself of the legislature.

Full of concern, therefore—but so conscious of her own right that it seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public on the one side, and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of nature, on the other—Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary cottage. Little Pearl, of course, was her companion. She was now of an age to run lightly along by her mother’s side, and, constantly in motion from morn till sunset, could have accomplished a much longer journey than that before her.

Often, nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she demanded to be taken up in arms; but was soon as imperious to be let down again, and frisked onward before Hester on the grassy pathway, with many a harmless trip and tumble. We have spoken of Pearl’s rich and luxuriant beauty—a beauty that shone with deep and vivid tints, a bright complexion, eyes possessing intensity both of depth and glow, and hair already of a deep, glossy brown, and which, in after years, would be nearly akin to black. There was fire in her and throughout her: she seemed the unpremeditated offshoot of a passionate moment. Her mother, in contriving the child’s garb, had allowed the gorgeous tendencies of her imagination their full play, arraying her in a crimson velvet tunic of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered in fantasies and flourishes of gold thread. So much strength of colouring, which must have given a wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl’s beauty, and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth.

But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and indeed, of the child’s whole appearance, that it irresistibly and inevitably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet letter in another form: the scarlet letter endowed with life! The mother herself—as if the red ignominy were so deeply scorched into her brain that all her conceptions assumed its form—had carefully

wrought out the similitude, lavishing many hours of morbid ingenuity to create an analogy

between the object of her affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture. But, in truth, Pearl was the one as well as the other; and only in consequence of that identity had Hester contrived so perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.

As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the children of the Puritans looked up from their play,—or what passed for play with those sombre little urchins—and spoke gravely one to another.

“Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter: and of a truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet letter running along by her side! Come, therefore, and let us fling mud at them!”

But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping her foot, and shaking her little hand with a variety of threatening gestures, suddenly made a rush at the knot of her enemies, and put them all to flight. She resembled, in her fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence—the scarlet fever, or some such half-fledged angel of judgment—whose mission was to punish the sins of the rising generation. She screamed and shouted, too, with a terrific volume of sound, which, doubtless, caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake within them. The

victory accomplished, Pearl returned quietly to her mother, and looked up, smiling, into her face.

Without further adventure, they reached the dwelling of Governor Bellingham. This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of which there are specimens still extant in the streets of our older towns now moss-grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy at heart with the many sorrowful or joyful occurrences, remembered or forgotten, that have happened and passed away within their dusky chambers. Then, however, there was the freshness of the passing year on its exterior, and the cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a human habitation, into which death had never entered. It had, indeed, a very cheery aspect, the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that, when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful. The brilliancy might have be fitted Aladdin’s palace rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the quaint taste of the age which had been drawn in the stucco, when newly laid on, and had now grown hard and durable, for the admiration of after times.

Pearl, looking at this bright wonder of a house began to caper and dance, and imperatively required that the whole breadth of

sunshine should be stripped off its front, and given her to play with.

“No, my little Pearl!” said her mother; “thou must gather thine own

sunshine. I have none to give thee!”

They approached the door, which was of an arched form, and flanked on each side by a narrow tower or projection of the edifice, in both of which were lattice-windows, the wooden shutters to close over them at need. Lifting the iron hammer that hung at the portal, Hester Prynne gave a summons, which was answered by one of the Governor’s bond servant—a free- born Englishman, but now a seven years’ slave. During that term he was to be the property of his master, and as much a commodity of bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool. The serf wore the customary garb of serving-men at that period, and long before, in the old hereditary halls of England.

“Is the worshipful Governor Bellingham within?” inquired Hester.

“Yea, forsooth,” replied the bond-servant, staring with wide- open eyes at the scarlet letter, which, being a new-comer in the country, he had never before seen. “Yea, his honourable worship is within. But he hath a godly minister or two with him, and likewise a leech. Ye may not see his worship now.”

“Nevertheless, I will enter,” answered Hester Prynne; and the bond- servant, perhaps judging from the decision of her air, and the glittering symbol in her bosom, that she was a great lady in the land, offered no opposition.

So the mother and little Pearl were admitted into the hall of entrance. With many variations, suggested by the nature of his building materials, diversity of climate, and a different mode of social life, Governor Bellingham had planned his new habitation after the residences of gentlemen of fair estate in his native land. Here, then, was a wide and reasonably lofty hall, extending through the whole depth of the house, and forming a medium of general communication, more or less directly, with all the other apartments. At one extremity, this spacious room was lighted by the windows of the two towers, which formed a small recess on either side of the portal. At the other end, though partly muffled by a curtain, it was more powerfully illuminated by one of those embowed hall windows which we read of in old books, and which was provided with a deep and cushioned seat. Here, on the cushion, lay a folio tome, probably of the Chronicles of England, or other such substantial literature; even as, in our own days, we scatter gilded volumes on the centre table, to be turned over by the casual guest. The furniture of the hall consisted of some ponderous chairs, the backs of which were elaborately carved with wreaths of oaken flowers; and likewise a table in the same taste, the whole being of the Elizabethan age, or perhaps earlier, and heirlooms, transferred hither from

the Governor’s paternal home. On the table—in token that the sentiment of old English hospitality had not been left behind— stood a large pewter tankard, at the bottom of which, had Hester or Pearl peeped into it, they might have seen the frothy remnant of a recent draught of ale.

On the wall hung a row of portraits, representing the forefathers of the Bellingham lineage, some with armour on their breasts, and others with stately ruffs and robes of peace. All were characterised by the sternness and severity which old portraits so invariably put on, as if they were the ghosts, rather than the pictures, of departed worthies, and were gazing with harsh and intolerant criticism at the pursuits and enjoyments of living men.

At about the centre of the oaken panels that lined the hall was suspended a suit of mail, not, like the pictures, an ancestral relic, but of the most modern date; for it had been manufactured by a skilful armourer in London, the same year in which Governor Bellingham came over to New England. There was a steel head-piece, a cuirass, a gorget and greaves, with a pair of gauntlets and a sword hanging beneath; all, and especially the helmet and breastplate, so highly burnished as to glow with white radiance, and scatter an illumination everywhere about upon the floor. This bright panoply was not meant for mere idle show, but had been worn by the Governor on many a solemn muster and training field, and had glittered, moreover, at the head of a regiment in the Pequod war. For,

though bred a lawyer, and accustomed to speak of Bacon, Coke, Noye, and Finch, as his professional associates, the exigencies of this new country had transformed Governor Bellingham into a soldier, as well as a statesman and ruler.

Little Pearl, who was as greatly pleased with the gleaming armour as she had been with the glittering frontispiece of the house, spent some time looking into the polished mirror of the breastplate.

“Mother,” cried she, “I see you here. Look! Look!”

Hester looked by way of humouring the child; and she saw that, owing to the peculiar effect of this convex mirror, the scarlet letter was represented in exaggerated and gigantic proportions, so as to be greatly the most prominent feature of her appearance. In truth, she seemed absolutely hidden behind it.

Pearl pointed upwards also, at a similar picture in the head- piece; smiling at her mother, with the elfish intelligence that was so familiar an expression on her small physiognomy. That look of naughty merriment was likewise reflected in the mirror, with so much breadth and intensity of effect, that it made Hester Prynne feel as if it could not be the image of her own child, but of an imp who was seeking to mould itself into Pearl’s shape.

“Come along, Pearl,” said she, drawing her away, “Come and look into this fair garden. It may be we shall see flowers there; more beautiful ones than we find in the woods.”

Pearl accordingly ran to the bow-window, at the further end of the hall, and looked along the vista of a garden walk, carpeted with closely-shaven grass, and bordered with some rude and immature attempt at shrubbery. But the

proprietor appeared already to have relinquished as hopeless, the effort to perpetuate on this side of the Atlantic, in a hard soil, and amid the close struggle for subsistence, the native English taste for ornamental gardening. Cabbages grew in plain sight; and a pumpkin-vine, rooted at some distance, had run across the intervening space, and deposited one of its gigantic products directly beneath the hall window, as if to warn the Governor that this great lump of vegetable gold was as rich an ornament as New England earth would offer him. There were a few rose-bushes, however, and a number of apple-trees, probably the descendants of those planted by the Reverend Mr. Blackstone, the first settler of the peninsula; that half mythological personage who rides through our early annals, seated on the back of a bull.

Pearl, seeing the rose-bushes, began to cry for a red rose, and would not be pacified.

“Hush, child—hush!” said her mother, earnestly. “Do not cry, dear little Pearl! I hear voices in the garden. The Governor is coming, and gentlemen along with him.”

In fact, adown the vista of the garden avenue, a number of persons were seen approaching towards the house. Pearl, in utter scorn of her mother’s attempt to quiet her, gave an eldritch scream, and then became silent, not from any notion of obedience, but because the quick and mobile curiosity of her disposition was excited by the appearance of those new personages.

C H A P T E R VIII

THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER

Governor Bellingham, in a loose gown and easy cap—such as elderly gentlemen loved to endue themselves with, in their domestic privacy—walked foremost, and appeared to be showing off his estate, and expatiating on his projected improvements. The wide circumference of an elaborate ruff, beneath his grey beard, in the antiquated fashion of King James’s reign, caused his head to look not a little like that of John the Baptist in a charger. The impression made by his aspect, so rigid and severe, and frost-bitten with more than autumnal age, was hardly in keeping with the appliances of worldly enjoyment wherewith he had evidently done his utmost to surround himself. But it is an error to suppose that our great forefathers—though accustomed to speak and think of human existence as a state merely of trial and warfare, and though unfeignedly prepared to sacrifice goods and life at the behest of duty— made it a matter of conscience to reject such means of comfort, or even luxury, as lay fairly within their grasp. This creed was never taught, for instance, by the venerable pastor, John Wilson, whose beard, white as a snow-drift, was

seen over Governor Bellingham’s shoulders, while its wearer suggested that pears and peaches might yet be naturalised in the New England climate, and that purple grapes might possibly be compelled to flourish against the sunny garden-wall. The old clergyman, nurtured at the rich bosom of the English Church, had a long established and legitimate taste for all good and comfortable things, and however stern he might show himself in the pulpit, or in his public reproof of such transgressions as that of Hester Prynne, still, the genial benevolence of his private life had won him warmer affection than was accorded to any of his professional contemporaries.

Behind the Governor and Mr. Wilson came two other guests— one, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, whom the reader may remember as having taken a brief and reluctant part in the scene of Hester Prynne’s disgrace; and, in close companionship with him, old Roger Chillingworth, a person of great skill in physic, who for two or three years past had been settled in the town. It was understood that this learned man was the physician as well as friend of the young minister, whose health had severely suffered of late by his too unreserved self-sacrifice to the labours and duties of the pastoral relation.

The Governor, in advance of his visitors, ascended one or two steps, and, throwing open the leaves of the great hall window, found himself close to little Pearl. The shadow of the curtain fell on Hester Prynne, and partially concealed her.

“What have we here?” said Governor Bellingham, looking with surprise at the scarlet little figure before him. “I profess, I have never seen the like since my days of vanity, in old King James’s time, when I was wont to esteem it a high favour to be admitted to a court mask! There used to be a swarm of these small apparitions in holiday time, and we called them children of the Lord of Misrule. But how gat such a guest into my hall?”

“Ay, indeed!” cried good old Mr. Wilson. “What little bird of scarlet plumage may this be? Methinks I have seen just such figures when the sun has been shining through a richly painted window, and tracing out the golden and crimson images across the floor. But that was in the old land. Prithee, young one, who art thou, and what has ailed thy mother to bedizen thee in this strange fashion? Art thou a Christian child—ha? Dost know thy catechism? Or art thou one of those naughty elfs or fairies whom we thought to have left behind us, with other relics of Papistry, in merry old England?”

“I am mother’s child,” answered the scarlet vision, “and my name is Pearl!”

“Pearl?—Ruby, rather—or Coral!—or Red Rose, at the very least, judging from thy hue!” responded the old minister, putting forth his hand in a vain attempt to pat little Pearl on the cheek. “But where is this mother of thine? Ah! I see,” he added; and, turning to Governor Bellingham, whispered, “This is the

selfsame child of whom we have held speech together; and behold here the unhappy woman, Hester Prynne, her mother!”

“Sayest thou so?” cried the Governor. “Nay, we might have judged that such a child’s mother must needs be a scarlet woman, and a worthy type of her of Babylon! But she comes at a good time, and we will look into this matter forthwith.”

Governor Bellingham stepped through the window into the hall, followed by his three guests.

“Hester Prynne,” said he, fixing his naturally stern regard on the wearer of the scarlet letter, “there hath been much question concerning thee of late. The point hath been weightily discussed, whether we, that are of authority and influence, do well discharge our consciences by trusting an immortal soul, such as there is in yonder child, to the guidance of one who hath stumbled and fallen amid the pitfalls of this world. Speak thou, the child’s own mother! Were it not, thinkest thou, for thy little one’s temporal and eternal welfare that she be taken out of thy charge, and clad soberly, and disciplined strictly, and instructed in the truths of heaven and earth? What canst thou do for the child in this kind?”

“I can teach my little Pearl what I have learned from this!” answered Hester Prynne, laying her finger on the red token.

“Woman, it is thy badge of shame!” replied the stern magistrate. “It is because of the stain which that letter indicates that we would transfer thy child to other hands.”

“Nevertheless,” said the mother, calmly, though growing more pale, “this badge hath taught me—it daily teaches me—it is teaching me at this moment

—lessons whereof my child may be the wiser and better, albeit they can profit nothing to myself.”

“We will judge warily,” said Bellingham, “and look well what we are about to do. Good Master Wilson, I pray you, examine this Pearl—since that is her name—and see whether she hath had such Christian nurture as befits a child of her age.”

The old minister seated himself in an arm-chair and made an effort to draw Pearl betwixt his knees. But the child, unaccustomed to the touch or familiarity of any but her mother, escaped through the open window, and stood on the upper step, looking like a wild tropical bird of rich plumage, ready to take flight into the upper air. Mr. Wilson, not a little astonished at this outbreak

—for he was a grandfatherly sort of personage, and usually a vast favourite with children—essayed, however, to proceed with the examination.

“Pearl,” said he, with great solemnity, “thou must take heed to instruction, that so, in due season, thou mayest wear in thy bosom the pearl of great price. Canst thou tell me, my child, who made thee?”

Now Pearl knew well enough who made her, for Hester Prynne, the daughter of a pious home, very soon after her talk with the child about her Heavenly Father, had begun to inform her of those truths which the human spirit, at whatever stage of immaturity, imbibes with such eager interest. Pearl, therefore— so large were the attainments of her three years’ lifetime—could have borne a fair examination in the New England Primer, or the first column of the Westminster Catechisms, although unacquainted with the outward form of either of those celebrated works. But that perversity, which all children have more or less of, and of which little Pearl had a tenfold portion, now, at the most inopportune moment, took thorough possession of her, and closed her lips, or impelled her to speak words amiss. After putting her finger in her mouth, with many ungracious refusals to answer good Mr. Wilson’s question, the child finally announced that she had not been made at all, but had been plucked by her mother off the bush of wild roses that grew by the prison-door.

This phantasy was probably suggested by the near proximity of the Governor’s red roses, as Pearl stood outside of the window, together with her recollection of the prison rose-bush, which she had passed in coming hither.

Old Roger Chillingworth, with a smile on his face, whispered something in the young clergyman’s ear. Hester Prynne looked at the man of skill, and even then, with her fate hanging in the balance, was startled to perceive what a change had come over

his features—how much uglier they were, how his dark complexion seemed to have grown duskier, and his figure more misshapen— since the days when she had familiarly known him. She met his eyes for an instant, but was immediately constrained to give all her attention to the scene now going forward.

“This is awful!” cried the Governor, slowly recovering from the astonishment into which Pearl’s response had thrown him. “Here is a child of three years old, and she cannot tell who made her!

Without question, she is equally in the dark as to her soul, its present depravity, and future destiny! Methinks, gentlemen, we need inquire no further.”

Hester caught hold of Pearl, and drew her forcibly into her arms, confronting the old Puritan magistrate with almost a fierce expression. Alone in the world, cast off by it, and with this sole treasure to keep her heart alive, she felt that she possessed indefeasible rights against the world, and was ready to defend them to the death.

“God gave me the child!” cried she. “He gave her in requital of all things else which ye had taken from me. She is my happiness—she is my torture,

none the less! Pearl keeps me here in life! Pearl punishes me, too! See ye not, she is the scarlet letter, only capable of being

loved, and so endowed with a millionfold the power of retribution for my sin? Ye shall not take her! I will die first!”

“My poor woman,” said the not unkind old minister, “the child shall be well cared for—far better than thou canst do for it.”

“God gave her into my keeping!” repeated Hester Prynne, raising her voice almost to a shriek. “I will not give her up!” And here by a sudden impulse, she turned to the young clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale, at whom, up to this moment, she had seemed hardly so much as once to direct her eyes. “Speak thou for me!” cried she. “Thou wast my pastor, and hadst charge of my soul, and knowest me better than these men can. I will not lose the child! Speak for me! Thou knowest—for thou hast sympathies which these men lack—thou knowest what is in my heart, and what are a mother’s rights, and how much the stronger they are when that mother has but her child and the scarlet letter! Look thou to it! I will not lose the child! Look to it!”

At this wild and singular appeal, which indicated that Hester Prynne’s situation had provoked her to little less than madness, the young minister at once came forward, pale, and holding his hand over his heart, as was his custom whenever his peculiarly nervous temperament was thrown into agitation. He looked now more careworn and emaciated than as we described him at the scene of Hester’s public ignominy; and whether it were his failing health, or whatever the cause might be, his large dark eyes had a world of pain in their troubled and melancholy depth.

“There is truth in what she says,” began the minister, with a voice sweet, tremulous, but powerful, insomuch that the hall re- echoed and the hollow armour rang with it—”truth in what Hester says, and in the feeling which inspires her! God gave her the child, and gave her, too, an instinctive knowledge of its nature and requirements—both seemingly so peculiar— which no other mortal being can possess. And, moreover, is there not a quality of awful sacredness in the relation between this mother and this child?”

“Ay—how is that, good Master Dimmesdale?” interrupted the Governor. “Make that plain, I pray you!”

“It must be even so,” resumed the minister. “For, if we deem it otherwise, do we not thereby say that the Heavenly Father, the creator of all flesh, hath lightly recognised a deed of sin, and made of no account the distinction between unhallowed lust and holy love? This child of its father’s guilt and its mother’s shame has come from the hand of God, to work in many ways upon her heart, who pleads so earnestly and with such bitterness of spirit the right to

keep her. It was meant for a blessing—for the one blessing of her life! It was meant, doubtless, the mother herself hath told us, for a retribution, too; a torture to be felt at many an unthought- of moment; a pang, a sting, an ever- recurring agony, in the midst of a troubled joy! Hath she not expressed this thought in

the garb of the poor child, so forcibly reminding us of that red symbol which sears her bosom?”

“Well said again!” cried good Mr. Wilson. “I feared the woman had no better thought than to make a mountebank of her child!”

“Oh, not so!—not so!” continued Mr. Dimmesdale. “She recognises, believe me, the solemn miracle which God hath wrought in the existence of that child. And may she feel, too— what, methinks, is the very truth—that this boon was meant, above all things else, to keep the mother’s soul alive, and to preserve her from blacker depths of sin into which Satan might else have sought to plunge her! Therefore it is good for this poor, sinful woman, that she hath an infant immortality, a being capable of eternal joy or sorrow, confided to her care—to be trained up by her to righteousness, to remind her, at every moment, of her fall, but yet to teach her, as if it were by the Creator’s sacred pledge, that, if she bring the child to heaven, the child also will bring its parents thither! Herein is the sinful mother happier than the sinful father. For Hester Prynne’s sake, then, and no less for the poor child’s sake, let us leave them as Providence hath seen fit to place them!”

“You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness,” said old Roger Chillingworth, smiling at him.

“And there is a weighty import in what my young brother hath spoken,” added the Rev. Mr. Wilson.

“What say you, worshipful Master Bellingham? Hath he not pleaded well for the poor woman?”

“Indeed hath he,” answered the magistrate; “and hath adduced such arguments, that we will even leave the matter as it now stands; so long, at least, as there shall be no further scandal in the woman. Care must be had nevertheless, to put the child to due and stated examination in the catechism, at thy hands or Master Dimmesdale’s. Moreover, at a proper season, the tithing- men must take heed that she go both to school and to meeting.”

The young minister, on ceasing to speak had withdrawn a few steps from the group, and stood with his face partially concealed in the heavy folds of the window-curtain; while the shadow of his figure, which the sunlight cast upon the floor, was tremulous with the vehemence of his appeal. Pearl, that wild and flighty little elf stole softly towards him, and taking his hand in the grasp of both her own, laid her cheek against it; a caress so tender, and withal so

unobtrusive, that her mother, who was looking on, asked herself—”Is that my Pearl?” Yet she knew that there was love in the child’s heart, although it mostly revealed itself in passion, and hardly twice in her lifetime had been softened by such gentleness as now. The minister—for, save the long-sought regards of woman, nothing is sweeter than these marks of

childish preference, accorded spontaneously by a spiritual instinct, and therefore seeming to imply in us something truly worthy to be loved—the minister looked round, laid his hand on the child’s head, hesitated an instant, and then kissed her brow. Little Pearl’s unwonted mood of sentiment lasted no longer; she laughed, and went capering down the hall so airily, that old Mr. Wilson raised a question whether even her tiptoes touched the floor.

“The little baggage hath witchcraft in her, I profess,” said he to Mr.

Dimmesdale. “She needs no old woman’s broomstick to fly withal!”

“A strange child!” remarked old Roger Chillingworth. “It is easy to see the mother’s part in her. Would it be beyond a philosopher’s research, think ye, gentlemen, to analyse that child’s nature, and, from it make a mould, to give a shrewd guess at the father?”

“Nay; it would be sinful, in such a question, to follow the clue of profane philosophy,” said Mr. Wilson. “Better to fast and pray upon it; and still better, it may be, to leave the mystery as we find it, unless Providence reveal it of its own accord. Thereby, every good Christian man hath a title to show a father’s kindness towards the poor, deserted babe.”

The affair being so satisfactorily concluded, Hester Prynne, with Pearl, departed from the house. As they descended the steps, it

is averred that the lattice of a chamber-window was thrown open, and forth into the sunny day was thrust the face of Mistress Hibbins, Governor Bellingham’s bitter- tempered sister, and the same who, a few years later, was executed as a witch.

“Hist, hist!” said she, while her ill-omened physiognomy seemed to cast a shadow over the cheerful newness of the house. “Wilt thou go with us to- night? There will be a merry company in the forest; and I well-nigh promised the Black Man that comely Hester Prynne should make one.”

“Make my excuse to him, so please you!” answered Hester, with a triumphant smile. “I must tarry at home, and keep watch over my little Pearl. Had they taken her from me, I would willingly have gone with thee into the forest, and signed my name in the Black Man’s book too, and that with mine own blood!”

“We shall have thee there anon!” said the witch-lady, frowning, as she drew back her head.

But here—if we suppose this interview betwixt Mistress Hibbins and

Hester Prynne to be authentic, and not a parable—was already an illustration of the young minister’s argument against sundering the relation of a fallen mother to the offspring of her frailty. Even thus early had the child saved her from Satan’s snare.

C H A P T E R IX

THE LEECH

Under the appellation of Roger Chillingworth, the reader will remember, was hidden another name, which its former wearer had resolved should never more be spoken. It has been related, how, in the crowd that witnessed Hester Prynne’s ignominious exposure, stood a man, elderly, travel-worn, who, just emerging from the perilous wilderness, beheld the woman, in whom he hoped to find embodied the warmth and cheerfulness of home, set up as a type of sin before the people. Her matronly fame was trodden under all men’s feet. Infamy was babbling around her in the public market-place. For her kindred, should the tidings ever reach them, and for the companions of her unspotted life, there remained nothing but the contagion of her dishonour; which would not fail to be distributed in strict accordance and proportion with the intimacy and sacredness of their previous relationship. Then why—since the choice was with himself—should the individual, whose connexion with the fallen woman had been the most intimate and sacred of them all, come forward to vindicate his claim to an inheritance so little desirable? He resolved not to be pilloried beside her on her pedestal of shame. Unknown to all but Hester Prynne, and possessing the lock and key of her silence, he chose to withdraw

his name from the roll of mankind, and, as regarded his former ties and interest, to vanish out of life as completely as if he indeed lay at the bottom of the ocean, whither rumour had long ago consigned him. This purpose once effected, new interests would immediately spring up, and likewise a new purpose; dark, it is true, if not guilty, but of force enough to engage the full strength of his faculties.

In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the Puritan town as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the learning and intelligence of which he possessed more than a common measure. As his studies, at a previous period of his life, had made him extensively acquainted with the medical science of the day, it was as a physician that he presented himself and as such was cordially received. Skilful men, of the medical and chirurgical profession, were of rare occurrence in the colony. They seldom, it would appear, partook of the religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic. In their researches into the human frame, it may be that the higher and more subtle faculties of such men were materialised, and that they lost the

spiritual view of existence amid the intricacies of that wondrous mechanism, which seemed to involve art enough to comprise all of life within itself. At all events, the health of the good town of Boston, so far as medicine had aught to do with it, had hitherto lain in the guardianship of an aged deacon and apothecary,

whose piety and godly deportment were stronger testimonials in his favour than any that he could have produced in the shape of a diploma. The only surgeon was one who combined the occasional exercise of that noble art with the daily and habitual flourish of a razor. To such a professional body Roger Chillingworth was a brilliant acquisition. He soon manifested his familiarity with the ponderous and imposing machinery of antique physic; in which every remedy contained a multitude of far-fetched and heterogeneous ingredients, as elaborately compounded as if the proposed result had been the Elixir of Life. In his Indian captivity, moreover, he had gained much knowledge of the properties of native herbs and roots; nor did he conceal from his patients that these simple medicines, Nature’s boon to the untutored savage, had quite as large a share of his own confidence as the European Pharmacopoeia, which so many learned doctors had spent centuries in elaborating.

This learned stranger was exemplary as regarded at least the outward forms of a religious life; and early after his arrival, had chosen for his spiritual guide the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The young divine, whose scholar-like renown still lived in Oxford, was considered by his more fervent admirers as little less than a heavenly ordained apostle, destined, should he live and labour for the ordinary term of life, to do as great deeds, for the now feeble New England Church, as the early Fathers had achieved for the infancy of the Christian faith. About this period, however,

the health of Mr. Dimmesdale had evidently begun to fail. By those best acquainted with his habits, the paleness of the young minister’s cheek was accounted for by his too earnest devotion to study, his scrupulous fulfilment of parochial duty, and more than all, to the fasts and vigils of which he made a frequent practice, in order to keep the grossness of this earthly state from clogging and obscuring his spiritual lamp. Some declared, that if Mr. Dimmesdale were really going to die, it was cause enough that the world was not worthy to be any longer trodden by his feet. He himself, on the other hand, with characteristic humility, avowed his belief that if Providence should see fit to remove him, it would be because of his own unworthiness to perform its humblest mission here on earth. With all this difference of opinion as to the cause of his decline, there could be no question of the fact. His form grew emaciated; his voice, though still rich and sweet, had a certain melancholy prophecy of decay in it; he was often observed, on any slight alarm or other sudden accident, to put his hand over his heart with first a flush and then a paleness, indicative of pain.

Such was the young clergyman’s condition, and so imminent the prospect

that his dawning light would be extinguished, all untimely, when Roger Chillingworth made his advent to the town. His first entry on the scene, few people could tell whence, dropping down as it were out of the sky or starting from the nether earth, had an

aspect of mystery, which was easily heightened to the miraculous. He was now known to be a man of skill; it was observed that he gathered herbs and the blossoms of wild- flowers, and dug up roots and plucked off twigs from the forest- trees like one acquainted with hidden virtues in what was valueless to common eyes. He was heard to speak of Sir Kenelm Digby and other famous men—whose scientific attainments were esteemed hardly less than supernatural—as having been his correspondents or associates. Why, with such rank in the learned world, had he come hither? What, could he, whose sphere was in great cities, be seeking in the wilderness? In answer to this query, a rumour gained ground—and however absurd, was entertained by some very sensible people—that Heaven had wrought an absolute miracle, by transporting an eminent Doctor of Physic from a German university bodily through the air and setting him down at the door of Mr.

Dimmesdale’s study! Individuals of wiser faith, indeed, who knew that Heaven promotes its purposes without aiming at the stage-effect of what is called miraculous interposition, were inclined to see a providential hand in Roger Chillingworth’s so opportune arrival.

This idea was countenanced by the strong interest which the physician ever manifested in the young clergyman; he attached himself to him as a parishioner, and sought to win a friendly regard and confidence from his naturally reserved sensibility.

He expressed great alarm at his pastor’s state of health, but

was anxious to attempt the cure, and, if early undertaken, seemed not despondent of a favourable result. The elders, the deacons, the motherly dames, and the young and fair maidens of Mr. Dimmesdale’s flock, were alike importunate that he should make trial of the physician’s frankly offered skill. Mr.

Dimmesdale gently repelled their entreaties. “I need no medicine,” said he.

But how could the young minister say so, when, with every successive Sabbath, his cheek was paler and thinner, and his voice more tremulous than before—when it had now become a constant habit, rather than a casual gesture, to press his hand over his heart? Was he weary of his labours? Did he wish to die? These questions were solemnly propounded to Mr. Dimmesdale by the elder ministers of Boston, and the deacons of his church, who, to use their own phrase, “dealt with him,” on the sin of rejecting the aid which Providence so manifestly held out. He listened in silence, and finally promised to confer with the physician.

“Were it God’s will,” said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, when, in fulfilment of this pledge, he requested old Roger Chillingworth’s professional

advice, “I could be well content that my labours, and my sorrows, and my sins, and my pains, should shortly end with me, and what is earthly of them be buried in my grave, and the

spiritual go with me to my eternal state, rather than that you should put your skill to the proof in my behalf.”

“Ah,” replied Roger Chillingworth, with that quietness, which, whether imposed or natural, marked all his deportment, “it is thus that a young clergyman is apt to speak. Youthful men, not having taken a deep root, give up their hold of life so easily! And saintly men, who walk with God on earth, would fain be away, to walk with him on the golden pavements of the New Jerusalem.”

“Nay,” rejoined the young minister, putting his hand to his heart, with a flush of pain flitting over his brow, “were I worthier to walk there, I could be better content to toil here.”

“Good men ever interpret themselves too meanly,” said the physician.

In this manner, the mysterious old Roger Chillingworth became the medical adviser of the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. As not only the disease interested the physician, but he was strongly moved to look into the character and qualities of the patient, these two men, so different in age, came gradually to spend much time together. For the sake of the minister’s health, and to enable the leech to gather plants with healing balm in them, they took long walks on the sea-shore, or in the forest; mingling various walks with the splash and murmur of the waves, and the solemn wind-anthem among the tree-tops. Often, likewise, one was the guest of the other in his place of study and retirement. There was a fascination for the minister in the company of the

man of science, in whom he recognised an intellectual cultivation of no moderate depth or scope; together with a range and freedom of ideas, that he would have vainly looked for among the members of his own profession. In truth, he was startled, if not shocked, to find this attribute in the physician.

Mr. Dimmesdale was a true priest, a true religionist, with the reverential sentiment largely developed, and an order of mind that impelled itself powerfully along the track of a creed, and wore its passage continually deeper with the lapse of time. In no state of society would he have been what is called a man of liberal views; it would always be essential to his peace to feel the pressure of a faith about him, supporting, while it confined him within its iron framework. Not the less, however, though with a tremulous enjoyment, did he feel the occasional relief of looking at the universe through the medium of another kind of intellect than those with which he habitually held converse. It was as if a window were thrown open, admitting a freer atmosphere into the close and stifled study, where his life was wasting itself away, amid lamp-light, or obstructed day- beams, and the musty fragrance, be it sensual or moral, that exhales from books. But the air was too fresh and chill to be long breathed with comfort. So

the minister, and the physician with him, withdrew again within the limits of what their Church defined as orthodox.

Thus Roger Chillingworth scrutinised his patient carefully, both as he saw him in his ordinary life, keeping an accustomed pathway in the range of thoughts familiar to him, and as he appeared when thrown amidst other moral scenery, the novelty of which might call out something new to the surface of his character. He deemed it essential, it would seem, to know the man, before attempting to do him good. Wherever there is a heart and an intellect, the diseases of the physical frame are tinged with the peculiarities of these. In Arthur Dimmesdale, thought and imagination were so active, and sensibility so intense, that the bodily infirmity would be likely to have its groundwork there. So Roger Chillingworth—the man of skill, the kind and friendly physician—strove to go deep into his patient’s bosom, delving among his principles, prying into his recollections, and probing everything with a cautious touch, like a treasure-seeker in a dark cavern. Few secrets can escape an investigator, who has opportunity and licence to undertake such a quest, and skill to follow it up. A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy of his physician. If the latter possess native sagacity, and a nameless something more,—let us call it intuition; if he show no intrusive egotism, nor disagreeable prominent characteristics of his own; if he have the power, which must be born with him, to bring his mind into such affinity with his patient’s, that this last shall unawares have spoken what he imagines himself only to have thought; if such revelations be received without tumult, and acknowledged not so often by an uttered sympathy as by silence, an inarticulate

breath, and here and there a word to indicate that all is understood; if to these qualifications of a confidant be joined the advantages afforded by his recognised character as a physician;—then, at some inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved, and flow forth in a dark but transparent stream, bringing all its mysteries into the daylight.

Roger Chillingworth possessed all, or most, of the attributes above enumerated. Nevertheless, time went on; a kind of intimacy, as we have said, grew up between these two cultivated minds, which had as wide a field as the whole sphere of human thought and study to meet upon; they discussed every topic of ethics and religion, of public affairs, and private character; they talked much, on both sides, of matters that seemed personal to themselves; and yet no secret, such as the physician fancied must exist there, ever stole out of the minister’s consciousness into his companion’s ear. The latter had his suspicions, indeed, that even the nature of Mr. Dimmesdale’s bodily disease had never fairly been revealed to him. It was a strange reserve!

After a time, at a hint from Roger Chillingworth, the friends of Mr. Dimmesdale effected an arrangement by which the two were lodged in the

same house; so that every ebb and flow of the minister’s life- tide might pass under the eye of his anxious and attached

physician. There was much joy throughout the town when this greatly desirable object was attained. It was held to be the best possible measure for the young clergyman’s welfare; unless, indeed, as often urged by such as felt authorised to do so, he had selected some one of the many blooming damsels, spiritually devoted to him, to become his devoted wife. This latter step, however, there was no present prospect that Arthur Dimmesdale would be prevailed upon to take; he rejected all suggestions of the kind, as if priestly celibacy were one of his articles of Church discipline. Doomed by his own choice, therefore, as Mr. Dimmesdale so evidently was, to eat his unsavoury morsel always at another’s board, and endure the life-long chill which must be his lot who seeks to warm himself only at another’s fireside, it truly seemed that this sagacious, experienced, benevolent old physician, with his concord of paternal and reverential love for the young pastor, was the very man, of all mankind, to be constantly within reach of his voice.

The new abode of the two friends was with a pious widow, of good social rank, who dwelt in a house covering pretty nearly the site on which the venerable structure of King’s Chapel has since been built. It had the graveyard, originally Isaac Johnson’s home-field, on one side, and so was well adapted to call up serious reflections, suited to their respective employments, in both minister and man of physic. The motherly care of the good widow assigned to Mr. Dimmesdale a front apartment, with a sunny exposure, and heavy window-curtains,

to create a noontide shadow when desirable. The walls were hung round with tapestry, said to be from the Gobelin looms, and, at all events, representing the Scriptural story of David and Bathsheba, and Nathan the Prophet, in colours still unfaded, but which made the fair woman of the scene almost as grimly picturesque as the woe-denouncing seer. Here the pale clergyman piled up his library, rich with parchment-bound folios of the Fathers, and the lore of Rabbis, and monkish erudition, of which the Protestant divines, even while they vilified and decried that class of writers, were yet constrained often to avail themselves. On the other side of the house, old Roger Chillingworth arranged his study and laboratory: not such as a modern man of science would reckon even tolerably complete, but provided with a distilling apparatus and the means of compounding drugs and chemicals, which the practised alchemist knew well how to turn to purpose. With such commodiousness of situation, these two learned persons sat themselves down, each in his own domain, yet familiarly passing from one apartment to the other, and bestowing a mutual and not incurious inspection into one another’s business.

And the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale’s best discerning friends, as we have intimated, very reasonably imagined that the hand of Providence had

done all this for the purpose—besought in so many public and domestic and secret prayers—of restoring the young minister to

health. But, it must now be said, another portion of the community had latterly begun to take its own view of the relation betwixt Mr. Dimmesdale and the mysterious old physician. When an uninstructed multitude attempts to see with its eyes, it is exceedingly apt to be deceived. When, however, it forms its judgment, as it usually does, on the intuitions of its great and warm heart, the conclusions thus attained are often so profound and so unerring as to possess the character of truth supernaturally revealed. The people, in the case of which we speak, could justify its prejudice against Roger Chillingworth by no fact or argument worthy of serious refutation. There was an aged handicraftsman, it is true, who had been a citizen of London at the period of Sir Thomas Overbury’s murder, now some thirty years agone; he testified to having seen the physician, under some other name, which the narrator of the story had now forgotten, in company with Dr. Forman, the famous old conjurer, who was implicated in the affair of Overbury. Two or three individuals hinted that the man of skill, during his Indian captivity, had enlarged his medical attainments by joining in the incantations of the savage priests, who were universally acknowledged to be powerful enchanters, often performing seemingly miraculous cures by their skill in the black art. A large number—and many of these were persons of such sober sense and practical observation that their opinions would have been valuable in other matters—affirmed that Roger Chillingworth’s aspect had undergone a remarkable change while he had dwelt in town, and especially since his

abode with Mr. Dimmesdale. At first, his expression had been calm, meditative, scholar-like. Now there was something ugly and evil in his face, which they had not previously noticed, and which grew still the more obvious to sight the oftener they looked upon him. According to the vulgar idea, the fire in his laboratory had been brought from the lower regions, and was fed with infernal fuel; and so, as might be expected, his visage was getting sooty with the smoke.

To sum up the matter, it grew to be a widely diffused opinion that the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, like many other personages of special sanctity, in all ages of the Christian world, was haunted either by Satan himself or Satan’s emissary, in the guise of old Roger Chillingworth. This diabolical agent had the Divine permission, for a season, to burrow into the clergyman’s intimacy, and plot against his soul. No sensible man, it was confessed, could doubt on which side the victory would turn. The people looked, with an unshaken hope, to see the minister come forth out of the conflict transfigured with the glory which he would unquestionably win. Meanwhile, nevertheless, it was sad to think of the perchance mortal agony through which he must struggle towards his triumph.

Alas! to judge from the gloom and terror in the depth of the poor minister’s

eyes, the battle was a sore one, and the victory anything but secure.

C H A P T E R X

THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT

Old Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in temperament, kindly, though not of warm affections, but ever, and in all his relations with the world, a pure and upright man. He had begun an investigation, as he imagined, with the severe and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as if the question involved no more than the air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem, instead of human passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself. But, as he proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still calm, necessity, seized the old man within its gripe, and never set him free again until he had done all its bidding. He now dug into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man’s bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption. Alas, for his own soul, if these were what he sought!

Sometimes a light glimmered out of the physician’s eyes, burning blue and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like one of those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan’s awful doorway in the hillside, and quivered on the

pilgrim’s face. The soil where this dark miner was working had perchance shown indications that encouraged him.

“This man,” said he, at one such moment, to himself, “pure as they deem him—all spiritual as he seems—hath inherited a strong animal nature from his father or his mother. Let us dig a little further in the direction of this vein!”

Then after long search into the minister’s dim interior, and turning over many precious materials, in the shape of high aspirations for the welfare of his race, warm love of souls, pure sentiments, natural piety, strengthened by thought and study, and illuminated by revelation—all of which invaluable gold was perhaps no better than rubbish to the seeker—he would turn back, discouraged, and begin his quest towards another point. He groped along as stealthily, with as cautious a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a chamber where a man lies only half asleep—or, it may be, broad awake—with purpose to steal the very treasure which this man guards as the apple of his eye. In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the floor would now and then creak; his garments would rustle; the shadow of his presence, in a forbidden proximity, would be thrown across his victim. In other words, Mr. Dimmesdale, whose sensibility of nerve often produced the effect of spiritual intuition, would become vaguely aware that something inimical to his peace

had thrust itself into relation with him. But Old Roger Chillingworth, too, had perceptions that were almost intuitive; and when the minister threw his startled eyes towards him, there the physician sat; his kind, watchful, sympathising, but never intrusive friend.

Yet Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen this individual’s character more perfectly, if a certain morbidness, to which sick hearts are liable, had not rendered him suspicious of all mankind. Trusting no man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter actually appeared. He therefore still kept up a familiar intercourse with him, daily receiving the old physician in his study, or visiting the laboratory, and, for recreation’s sake, watching the processes by which weeds were converted into drugs of potency.

One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the sill of the open window, that looked towards the grave-yard, he talked with Roger Chillingworth, while the old man was examining a bundle of unsightly plants.

“Where,” asked he, with a look askance at them—for it was the clergyman’s peculiarity that he seldom, now-a-days, looked straight forth at any object, whether human or inanimate, “where, my kind doctor, did you gather those herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?”

“Even in the graveyard here at hand,” answered the physician, continuing his employment. “They are new to me. I found them

growing on a grave, which bore no tombstone, no other memorial of the dead man, save these ugly weeds, that have taken upon themselves to keep him in remembrance. They grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done better to confess during his lifetime.”

“Perchance,” said Mr. Dimmesdale, “he earnestly desired it, but could not.” “And wherefore?” rejoined the physician.

“Wherefore not; since all the powers of nature call so earnestly for the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart, to make manifest, an outspoken crime?”

“That, good sir, is but a phantasy of yours,” replied the minister. “There can be, if I forbode aright, no power, short of the Divine mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem, the secrets that may be buried in the human heart. The heart, making itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them, until the day when all hidden things shall be revealed. Nor have I so read or interpreted Holy Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of human thoughts and deeds, then to be made, is intended as a part of the retribution. That, surely, were a shallow view of it. No; these revelations, unless I greatly err, are meant merely to promote the intellectual satisfaction of all intelligent beings, who will stand waiting, on that day, to see the dark

problem of this life made plain. A knowledge of men’s hearts will be needful to the completest solution of that problem. And, I conceive moreover, that the hearts holding such miserable secrets as you speak of, will yield them up, at that last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable.”

“Then why not reveal it here?” asked Roger Chillingworth, glancing quietly aside at the minister. “Why should not the guilty ones sooner avail themselves of this unutterable solace?”

“They mostly do,” said the clergyman, griping hard at his breast, as if afflicted with an importunate throb of pain. “Many, many a poor soul hath given its confidence to me, not only on the

death-bed, but while strong in life, and fair in reputation. And ever, after such an outpouring, oh, what a relief have I witnessed in those sinful brethren! even as in one who at last draws free air, after a long stifling with his own polluted breath. How can it be otherwise? Why should a wretched man—guilty, we will say, of murder—prefer to keep the dead corpse buried in his own heart, rather than fling it forth at once, and let the universe take care of it!”

“Yet some men bury their secrets thus,” observed the calm physician. “True; there are such men,” answered Mr.

Dimmesdale. “But not to suggest

more obvious reasons, it may be that they are kept silent by the very

constitution of their nature. Or—can we not suppose it?—guilty as they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a zeal for God’s glory and man’s welfare, they shrink from displaying themselves black and filthy in the view of men; because, thenceforward, no good can be achieved by them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better service. So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow, while their hearts are all speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid themselves.”

“These men deceive themselves,” said Roger Chillingworth, with somewhat more emphasis than usual, and making a slight gesture with his forefinger. “They fear to take up the shame that rightfully belongs to them. Their love for man, their zeal for God’s service—these holy impulses may or may not coexist in their hearts with the evil inmates to which their guilt has unbarred the door, and which must needs propagate a hellish breed within them. But, if they seek to glorify God, let them not lift heavenward their unclean hands! If they would serve their fellowmen, let them do it by making manifest the power and reality of conscience, in constraining them to penitential self- abasement! Would thou have me to believe, O wise and pious friend, that a false show can be better—can be more for God’s glory, or man’ welfare—than God’s own truth? Trust me, such men deceive themselves!”

“It may be so,” said the young clergyman, indifferently, as waiving a

discussion that he considered irrelevant or unseasonable. He had a ready faculty, indeed, of escaping from any topic that agitated his too sensitive and nervous temperament.—”But, now, I would ask of my well-skilled physician, whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have profited by his kindly care of this weak frame of mine?”

Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard the clear, wild laughter of a young child’s voice, proceeding from the adjacent burial-ground. Looking instinctively from the open window—for it was summer-time—the minister beheld Hester Prynne and little Pearl passing along the footpath that traversed the enclosure. Pearl looked as beautiful as the day, but was in one of those moods of perverse merriment which, whenever they occurred, seemed to remove her entirely out of the sphere of sympathy or human contact. She now skipped irreverently from one grave to another; until coming to the broad, flat, armorial tombstone of a departed worthy—perhaps of Isaac Johnson himself

—she began to dance upon it. In reply to her mother’s command and entreaty that she would behave more decorously, little Pearl paused to gather the prickly burrs from a tall burdock which grew beside the tomb. Taking a handful of these, she arranged them along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated the maternal bosom, to which the burrs, as their nature was, tenaciously adhered. Hester did not pluck them off.

Roger Chillingworth had by this time approached the window and smiled grimly down.

“There is no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for human ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed up with that child’s composition,” remarked he, as much to himself as to his companion. “I saw her, the other day, bespatter the Governor himself with water at the cattle- trough in Spring Lane. What, in heaven’s name, is she? Is the imp altogether evil? Hath she affections? Hath she any discoverable principle of being?”

“None, save the freedom of a broken law,” answered Mr. Dimmesdale, in a quiet way, as if he had been discussing the point within himself, “Whether capable of good, I know not.”

The child probably overheard their voices, for, looking up to the window with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence, she threw one of the prickly burrs at the Rev. Mr.

Dimmesdale. The sensitive clergyman shrank, with nervous dread, from the light missile. Detecting his emotion, Pearl clapped her little hands in the most extravagant ecstacy. Hester Prynne, likewise, had involuntarily looked up, and all these four persons, old and young, regarded one another in silence, till the child laughed aloud, and shouted—”Come away, mother! Come away, or yonder old black man will catch you! He hath got hold of the minister already. Come away, mother or he

will catch you! But he cannot catch little Pearl!”

So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing, and frisking fantastically among the hillocks of the dead people, like a creature that had nothing in common with a bygone and buried generation, nor owned herself akin to it. It was as if she had been made afresh out of new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life, and be a law unto herself without her eccentricities being reckoned to her for a crime.

“There goes a woman,” resumed Roger Chillingworth, after a pause, “who, be her demerits what they may, hath none of that mystery of hidden sinfulness which you deem so grievous to be borne. Is Hester Prynne the less miserable, think you, for that scarlet letter on her breast?”

“I do verily believe it,” answered the clergyman. “Nevertheless, I cannot answer for her. There was a look of pain in her face which I would gladly have been spared the sight of. But still, methinks, it must needs be better for the sufferer to be free to show his pain, as this poor woman Hester is, than to cover it up in his heart.”

There was another pause, and the physician began anew to examine and arrange the plants which he had gathered.

“You inquired of me, a little time agone,” said he, at length, “my judgment as touching your health.”

“I did,” answered the clergyman, “and would gladly learn it. Speak frankly, I pray you, be it for life or death.”

“Freely then, and plainly,” said the physician, still busy with his plants, but keeping a wary eye on Mr. Dimmesdale, “the disorder is a strange one; not so much in itself nor as outwardly manifested,—in so far, at least as the symptoms have been laid open to my observation. Looking daily at you, my good sir, and watching the tokens of your aspect now for months gone by, I should deem you a man sore sick, it may be, yet not so sick but that an instructed and watchful physician might well hope to cure you. But I know not what to say, the disease is what I seem to know, yet know it not.”

“You speak in riddles, learned sir,” said the pale minister, glancing aside out of the window.

“Then, to speak more plainly,” continued the physician, “and I crave pardon, sir, should it seem to require pardon, for this needful plainness of my speech. Let me ask as your friend, as one having charge, under Providence, of your life and physical well being, hath all the operations of this disorder been fairly laid open and recounted to me?”

“How can you question it?” asked the minister. “Surely it were child’s play

to call in a physician and then hide the sore!”

“You would tell me, then, that I know all?” said Roger Chillingworth, deliberately, and fixing an eye, bright with intense and concentrated intelligence, on the minister’s face. “Be it so!

But again! He to whom only the outward and physical evil is laid open, knoweth, oftentimes, but half the evil which he is called upon to cure. A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part. Your pardon once again, good sir, if my speech give the shadow of offence. You, sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body is the closest conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak, with the spirit whereof it is the instrument.”

“Then I need ask no further,” said the clergyman, somewhat hastily rising from his chair. “You deal not, I take it, in medicine for the soul!”

“Thus, a sickness,” continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in an unaltered tone, without heeding the interruption, but standing up and confronting the emaciated and white-cheeked minister, with his low, dark, and misshapen figure,—”a sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit hath immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily frame. Would you, therefore, that your physician heal the bodily evil? How may this be unless you first lay open to him the wound or trouble in your soul?”

“No, not to thee! not to an earthly physician!” cried Mr. Dimmesdale, passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright, and with a kind of fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth. “Not to thee! But, if it be the soul’s disease, then do I commit myself to the one Physician of the soul! He, if it stand with His good

pleasure, can cure, or he can kill. Let Him do with me as, in His justice and wisdom, He shall see good. But who art thou, that meddlest in this matter? that dares thrust himself between the sufferer and his God?”

With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the room.

“It is as well to have made this step,” said Roger Chillingworth to himself, looking after the minister, with a grave smile. “There is nothing lost. We shall be friends again anon. But see, now, how passion takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out of himself! As with one passion so with another. He hath done a wild thing ere now, this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart.”

It proved not difficult to re-establish the intimacy of the two companions, on the same footing and in the same degree as heretofore. The young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy, was sensible that the disorder of his nerves had hurried him into an unseemly outbreak of temper, which there had been nothing in the physician’s words to excuse or palliate. He marvelled,

indeed, at the violence with which he had thrust back the kind old man, when merely proffering the advice which it was his duty to bestow, and which the minister himself had expressly sought. With these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in making the amplest apologies, and besought his friend still to continue the care which, if not successful in restoring him to

health, had, in all probability, been the means of prolonging his feeble existence to that hour. Roger Chillingworth readily assented, and went on with his medical supervision of the minister; doing his best for him, in all good faith, but always quitting the patient’s apartment, at the close of the professional interview, with a mysterious and puzzled smile upon his lips. This expression was invisible in Mr. Dimmesdale’s presence, but grew strongly evident as the physician crossed the threshold.

“A rare case,” he muttered. “I must needs look deeper into it. A strange sympathy betwixt soul and body! Were it only for the art’s sake, I must search this matter to the bottom.”

It came to pass, not long after the scene above recorded, that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, noon-day, and entirely unawares, fell into a deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter volume open before him on the table. It must have been a work of vast ability in the somniferous school of literature. The profound depth of the minister’s repose was the more remarkable, inasmuch as he was one of those persons whose sleep ordinarily is as light as fitful, and as easily scared away, as a small bird hopping on a twig. To such an unwonted remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into itself that he stirred not in his chair when old Roger Chillingworth, without any extraordinary precaution, came into the room. The physician advanced directly in front of his patient, laid his hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the vestment, that hitherto had always covered it even from the professional eye.

Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and slightly stirred. After a brief pause, the physician turned away.

But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Had a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask how Satan comports himself when a precious human soul is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom.

But what distinguished the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the trait of wonder in it!

C H A P T E R XI

THE INTERIOR OF A HEART

After the incident last described, the intercourse between the clergyman and the physician, though externally the same, was really of another character than it had previously been. The intellect of Roger Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plain path before it. It was not, indeed, precisely that which he had laid out for himself to tread. Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy. To make himself the one trusted friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse, the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of sinful thoughts, expelled in vain! All that guilty sorrow, hidden from the world, whose great heart would have pitied and forgiven, to be revealed to him, the Pitiless—to him, the Unforgiving! All that dark treasure to be lavished on the very man, to whom nothing else could so adequately pay the debt of vengeance!

The clergyman’s shy and sensitive reserve had balked this scheme. Roger Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly, if at all, less satisfied with the aspect of affairs, which Providence—using the avenger and his victim for its own

purposes, and, perchance, pardoning, where it seemed most to punish

—had substituted for his black devices. A revelation, he could almost say, had been granted to him. It mattered little for his object, whether celestial or from what other region. By its aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt him and Mr. Dimmesdale, not merely the external presence, but the very inmost soul of the latter, seemed to be brought out before his eyes, so that he could see and comprehend its every movement. He became, thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor in the poor minister’s interior world. He could play upon him as he chose.

Would he arouse him with a throb of agony? The victim was for ever on the rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled the engine: and the physician knew it well. Would he startle him with sudden fear? As at the waving of a magician’s wand, up rose a grisly phantom—up rose a thousand phantoms—in many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking round about the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at his breast!

All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the minister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil influence watching over him, could never gain a knowledge of its actual nature. True, he looked doubtfully, fearfully—even, at times, with horror and the bitterness of hatred

—at the deformed figure of the old physician. His gestures, his gait, his

grizzled beard, his slightest and most indifferent acts, the very fashion of his garments, were odious in the clergyman’s sight; a token implicitly to be relied on of a deeper antipathy in the breast of the latter than he was willing to acknowledge to himself. For, as it was impossible to assign a reason for such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious that the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart’s entire substance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause.

He took himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference to Roger Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that he should have drawn from them, and did his best to root them out. Unable to accomplish this, he nevertheless, as a matter of principle, continued his habits of social familiarity with the old man, and thus gave him constant opportunities for perfecting the purpose to which—poor forlorn creature that he was, and more wretched than his victim—the avenger had devoted himself.

While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinations of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr.

Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacred office. He won it indeed, in great part, by his sorrows. His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily life. His fame, though still on its upward slope, already

overshadowed the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent as several of them were. There are scholars among them, who had spent more years in acquiring abstruse lore, connected with the divine profession, than Mr. Dimmesdale had lived; and who might well, therefore, be more profoundly versed in such solid and valuable attainments than their youthful brother. There were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his, and endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard iron, or granite understanding; which, duly mingled with a fair proportion of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly respectable, efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical species. There were others again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated by weary toil among their books, and by patient thought, and etherealised, moreover, by spiritual communications with the better world, into which their purity of life had almost introduced these holy personages, with their garments of mortality still clinging to them. All that they lacked was, the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolising, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart’s native language. These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven’s last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of Flame. They would have vainly sought—had they ever dreamed of seeking

—to express the highest truths through the humblest medium of familiar

words and images. Their voices came down, afar and indistinctly, from the

upper heights where they habitually dwelt.

Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr. Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character, naturally belonged. To the high mountain peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed, had not the tendency been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath which it was his doom to totter. It kept him down on a level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the angels might else have listened to and answered! But this very burden it was that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but sometimes terrible! The people knew not the power that moved them thus.

They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness. They fancied him the mouth-piece of Heaven’s messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very ground on which he trod was sanctified. The virgins of his church grew pale around him, victims of a passion so imbued with religious sentiment,

that they imagined it to be all religion, and brought it openly, in their white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice before the altar. The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr.

Dimmesdale’s frame so feeble, while they were themselves so rugged in their infirmity, believed that he would go heavenward before them, and enjoined it upon their children that their old bones should be buried close to their young pastor’s holy grave. And all this time, perchance, when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was thinking of his grave, he questioned with himself whether the grass would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing must there be buried!

It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration tortured him. It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value, that had not its divine essence as the life within their life. Then what was he?—a substance?—or the dimmest of all shadows? He longed to speak out from his own pulpit at the full height of his voice, and tell the people what he was. “I, whom you behold in these black garments of the priesthood—I, who ascend the sacred desk, and turn my pale face heavenward, taking upon myself to hold communion in your behalf with the Most High Omniscience—I, in whose daily life you discern the sanctity of Enoch—I, whose footsteps, as you suppose, leave a gleam along my earthly track, whereby the Pilgrims that shall come after me may be guided to the regions of the blest—I, who have laid the hand of baptism upon your children—I, who

have breathed the parting prayer over your dying friends, to whom the Amen sounded faintly from a world which they had quitted—I, your pastor, whom you so reverence and trust, am utterly a pollution and a lie!”

More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a purpose never to come down its steps until he should have spoken words like the above. More than once he had cleared his throat, and drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when sent forth again, would come burdened with the black secret of his soul. More than once—nay, more than a hundred times—he had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity, and that the only wonder was that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled up before their eyes by the burning wrath of the Almighty! Could there be plainer speech than this? Would not the people start up in their seats, by a simultaneous impulse, and tear him down out of the pulpit which he defiled? Not so, indeed! They heard it all, and did but reverence him the more. They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in those self-condemning words. “The godly youth!” said they among themselves. “The saint on earth! Alas! if he discern such sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid spectacle would he behold in thine or mine!” The minister well knew—subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was!—the light in

which his vague confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only one other sin, and a self- acknowledged shame, without the momentary relief of being self-deceived. He had spoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did. Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his miserable self!

His inward trouble drove him to practices more in accordance with the old, corrupted faith of Rome than with the better light of the church in which he had been born and bred. In Mr.

Dimmesdale’s secret closet, under lock and key, there was a bloody scourge. Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divine had plied it on his own shoulders, laughing bitterly at himself the while, and smiting so much the more pitilessly because of that bitter laugh. It was his custom, too, as it has been that of many other pious Puritans, to fast—not however, like them, in order to purify the body, and render it the fitter medium of celestial illumination—but rigorously, and until his knees trembled beneath him, as an act of penance. He kept vigils, likewise, night after night, sometimes in utter darkness, sometimes with a glimmering lamp, and sometimes, viewing his own face in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light which he could throw upon it. He thus typified the constant introspection wherewith he tortured, but could not purify himself. In these lengthened

vigils, his brain often reeled, and visions seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a faint light of their own, in the remote dimness of the chamber, or more vividly and close beside him, within the looking-glass. Now it was a herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at the pale minister,

and beckoned him away with them; now a group of shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, but grew more ethereal as they rose. Now came the dead friends of his youth, and his white-bearded father, with a saint- like frown, and his mother turning her face away as she passed by. Ghost of a mother—thinnest fantasy of a mother—methinks she might yet have thrown a pitying glance towards her son! And now, through the chamber which these spectral thoughts had made so ghastly, glided Hester Prynne leading along little Pearl, in her scarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first at the scarlet letter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman’s own breast.

None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment, by an effort of his will, he could discern substances through their misty lack of substance, and convince himself that they were not solid in their nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or that big, square, leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity. But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the truest and most substantial things which the poor minister now dealt with. It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realities there are

around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be the spirit’s joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole universe is false—it is impalpable—it shrinks to nothing within his grasp. And he himself in so far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. The only truth that continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth was the anguish in his inmost soul, and the undissembled expression of it in his aspect. Had he once found power to smile, and wear a face of gaiety, there would have been no such man!

On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at, but forborne to picture forth, the minister started from his chair. A new thought had struck him. There might be a moment’s peace in it. Attiring himself with as much care as if it had been for public worship, and precisely in the same manner, he stole softly down the staircase, undid the door, and issued forth.

C H A P T E R XII

THE MINISTER’S VIGIL

Walking in the shadow of a dream, as it were, and perhaps actually under the influence of a species of somnambulism, Mr. Dimmesdale reached the spot where, now so long since, Hester Prynne had lived through her first hours of public ignominy. The same platform or scaffold, black and weather-stained with the storm or sunshine of seven long years, and foot-worn, too, with the tread of many culprits who had since ascended it, remained standing beneath the balcony of the meeting-house. The minister went up the steps.

It was an obscure night in early May. An unvaried pall of cloud muffled the whole expanse of sky from zenith to horizon. If the same multitude which had stood as eye-witnesses while Hester Prynne sustained her punishment could now have been summoned forth, they would have discerned no face above the platform nor hardly the outline of a human shape, in the dark grey of the midnight. But the town was all asleep. There was no peril of discovery. The minister might stand there, if it so pleased him, until morning should redden in the east, without other risk than that the dank and chill night air would creep into his frame, and stiffen his joints with rheumatism, and clog his

throat with catarrh and cough; thereby defrauding the expectant audience of to-morrow’s prayer and sermon. No eye could see him, save that ever- wakeful one which had seen him in his closet, wielding the bloody scourge. Why, then, had he come hither? Was it but the mockery of penitence? A mockery, indeed, but in which his soul trifled with itself! A mockery at which angels blushed and wept, while fiends rejoiced with jeering laughter! He had been driven hither by the impulse of that Remorse which dogged him everywhere, and whose own sister and closely linked companion was that Cowardice which invariably drew him back, with her tremulous gripe, just when the other impulse had hurried him to the verge of a disclosure. Poor, miserable man! what right had infirmity like his to burden itself with crime? Crime is for the iron-nerved, who have their choice either to endure it, or, if it press too hard, to exert their fierce and savage strength for a good purpose, and fling it off at once! This feeble and most sensitive of spirits could do neither, yet continually did one thing or another, which intertwined, in the same inextricable knot, the agony of heaven- defying guilt and vain repentance.

And thus, while standing on the scaffold, in this vain show of expiation, Mr. Dimmesdale was overcome with a great horror of mind, as if the universe were gazing at a scarlet token on his naked breast, right over his heart. On that spot, in very truth, there was, and there had long been, the gnawing and poisonous tooth of bodily pain. Without any effort of his will, or power to

restrain himself, he shrieked aloud: an outcry that went pealing through the night, and was beaten back from one house to another, and reverberated from the hills in the background; as if a company of devils, detecting so much misery and terror in it, had made a plaything of the sound, and were bandying it to and fro.

“It is done!” muttered the minister, covering his face with his hands. “The whole town will awake and hurry forth, and find me here!”

But it was not so. The shriek had perhaps sounded with a far greater power, to his own startled ears, than it actually possessed. The town did not awake; or, if it did, the drowsy slumberers mistook the cry either for something frightful in a dream, or for the noise of witches, whose voices, at that period, were often

heard to pass over the settlements or lonely cottages, as they rode with Satan through the air. The clergyman, therefore, hearing no symptoms of disturbance, uncovered his eyes and looked about him. At one of the chamber- windows of Governor Bellingham’s mansion, which stood at some distance, on the line of another street, he beheld the appearance of the old magistrate himself with a lamp in his hand a white night-cap on his head, and a long white gown enveloping his figure. He looked like a ghost evoked unseasonably from the grave. The

cry had evidently startled him. At another window of the same house, moreover appeared old Mistress Hibbins, the Governor’s sister, also with a lamp, which even thus far off revealed the expression of her sour and discontented face. She thrust forth her head from the lattice, and looked anxiously upward. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, this venerable witch-lady had heard Mr. Dimmesdale’s outcry, and interpreted it, with its multitudinous echoes and reverberations, as the clamour of the fiends and night-hags, with whom she was well known to make excursions in the forest.

Detecting the gleam of Governor Bellingham’s lamp, the old lady quickly extinguished her own, and vanished. Possibly, she went up among the clouds. The minister saw nothing further of her motions. The magistrate, after a wary observation of the darkness—into which, nevertheless, he could see but little further than he might into a mill-stone—retired from the window.

The minister grew comparatively calm. His eyes, however, were soon greeted by a little glimmering light, which, at first a long way off was approaching up the street. It threw a gleam of recognition, on here a post, and there a garden fence, and here a latticed window-pane, and there a pump, with its full trough of water, and here again an arched door of oak, with an iron knocker, and a rough log for the door-step. The Reverend Mr.

Dimmesdale noted all these minute particulars, even while firmly convinced that the doom of his existence was stealing onward, in the footsteps which he now heard; and that the

gleam of the lantern would fall upon him in a few moments more, and reveal his long-hidden secret. As the light drew nearer, he beheld, within its illuminated circle, his brother clergyman—or, to speak more accurately, his professional father, as well as highly valued friend—the Reverend Mr. Wilson, who, as Mr. Dimmesdale now conjectured, had been praying at the bedside of some dying man. And so he had. The good old minister came freshly from the death-chamber of Governor Winthrop, who had passed from earth to heaven within that very hour. And now surrounded, like the saint-like personage of olden times, with a radiant halo, that glorified him amid this gloomy night of sin—as if the departed Governor had left him an inheritance of his glory, or as if he had caught upon himself the distant shine of the celestial city, while looking thitherward to see the triumphant pilgrim pass within its gates—now, in short, good Father Wilson was moving homeward, aiding his footsteps with

a lighted lantern! The glimmer of this luminary suggested the above conceits to Mr. Dimmesdale, who smiled—nay, almost laughed at them—and then wondered if he was going mad.

As the Reverend Mr. Wilson passed beside the scaffold, closely muffling his Geneva cloak about him with one arm, and holding the lantern before his breast with the other, the minister could hardly restrain himself from speaking

—

“A good evening to you, venerable Father Wilson. Come up hither, I pray you, and pass a pleasant hour with me!”

Good Heavens! Had Mr. Dimmesdale actually spoken? For one instant he believed that these words had passed his lips. But they were uttered only within his imagination. The venerable Father Wilson continued to step slowly onward, looking carefully at the muddy pathway before his feet, and never once turning his head towards the guilty platform. When the light of the glimmering lantern had faded quite away, the minister discovered, by the faintness which came over him, that the last few moments had been a crisis of terrible anxiety, although his mind had made an involuntary effort to relieve itself by a kind of lurid playfulness.

Shortly afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again stole in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He felt his limbs growing stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness of the night, and doubted whether he should be able to descend the steps of the scaffold. Morning would break and find him there. The neighbourhood would begin to rouse itself. The earliest riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a vaguely- defined figure aloft on the place of shame; and half-crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knocking from door to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost—as he needs must think it—of some defunct transgressor. A dusky tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. Then—

the morning light still waxing stronger—old patriarchs would rise up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames, without pausing to put off their night- gear. The whole tribe of decorous personages, who had never heretofore been seen with a single hair of their heads awry, would start into public view with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects.

Old Governor Bellingham would come grimly forth, with his King James’ ruff fastened askew, and Mistress Hibbins, with some twigs of the forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good Father Wilson too, after spending half the night at a death-bed, and liking ill to be disturbed, thus early, out of his dreams about the glorified saints. Hither, likewise, would come the elders and deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale’s church, and the young virgins who so idolized their minister, and had made a shrine for him in their white bosoms, which now, by-the-bye, in their hurry

and confusion, they would scantly have given themselves time to cover with their kerchiefs. All people, in a word, would come stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their amazed and horror-stricken visages around the scaffold. Whom would they discern there, with the red eastern light upon his brow?

Whom, but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half-frozen to death, overwhelmed with shame, and standing where Hester Prynne had stood!

Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the minister, unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great peal of laughter. It was immediately responded to by a light, airy, childish laugh, in which, with a thrill of the heart—but he knew not whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute—he recognised the tones of little Pearl.

“Pearl! Little Pearl!” cried he, after a moment’s pause; then, suppressing his voice—”Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you there?”

“Yes; it is Hester Prynne!” she replied, in a tone of surprise; and the minister heard her footsteps approaching from the side- walk, along which she had been passing. “It is I, and my little Pearl.”

“Whence come you, Hester?” asked the minister. “What sent you hither?” “I have been watching at a death-bed,” answered Hester Prynne “at

Governor Winthrop’s death-bed, and have taken his measure for a robe, and

am now going homeward to my dwelling.”

“Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl,” said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. “Ye have both been here before, but I was not with you. Come up hither once again, and we will stand all three together.”

She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform, holding little Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child’s

other hand, and took it. The moment that he did so, there came what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his own pouring like a torrent into his heart, and hurrying through all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating their vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three formed an electric chain.

“Minister!” whispered little Pearl.

“What wouldst thou say, child?” asked Mr. Dimmesdale.

“Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noontide?” inquired Pearl.

“Nay; not so, my little Pearl,” answered the minister; for, with the new energy of the moment, all the dread of public exposure, that had so long been the anguish of his life, had returned upon him; and he was already trembling at the conjunction in which— with a strange joy, nevertheless—he now found himself—”not so, my child. I shall, indeed, stand with thy mother and thee one

other day, but not to-morrow.”

Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the minister held it fast.

“A moment longer, my child!” said he.

“But wilt thou promise,” asked Pearl, “to take my hand, and mother’s hand, to-morrow noontide?”

“Not then, Pearl,” said the minister; “but another time.” “And what other time?” persisted the child.

“At the great judgment day,” whispered the minister; and, strangely enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of the truth impelled him to answer the child so. “Then, and there, before the judgment-seat, thy mother, and thou, and I must stand together. But the daylight of this world shall not see our meeting!”

Pearl laughed again.

But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those meteors, which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to waste, in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its radiance, that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses, with their jutting storeys and quaint gable- peaks; the doorsteps and thresholds with the early grass springing up about them; the garden-plots, black with freshly- turned earth; the wheel-track, little worn, and even in the market-place margined with green on either side—all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of this world than

they had ever borne before. And there stood the minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link between those two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splendour, as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another.

There was witchcraft in little Pearl’s eyes; and her face, as she glanced upward at the minister, wore that naughty smile which made its expression frequently so elvish. She withdrew her hand from Mr. Dimmesdale’s, and pointed across the street. But he clasped both his hands over his breast, and cast his eyes towards the zenith.

Nothing was more common, in those days, than to interpret all meteoric appearances, and other natural phenomena that occurred with less regularity than the rise and set of sun and moon, as so many revelations from a supernatural source. Thus, a blazing spear, a sword of flame, a bow, or a sheaf of arrows seen in the midnight sky, prefigured Indian warfare. Pestilence was known to have been foreboded by a shower of crimson light. We doubt whether any marked event, for good or evil, ever befell New England, from its settlement down to revolutionary times, of which the inhabitants had not been previously warned by some spectacle of its nature. Not seldom, it had been seen by multitudes. Oftener, however, its credibility

rested on the faith of some lonely eye-witness, who beheld the wonder through the coloured, magnifying, and distorted medium of his imagination, and shaped it more distinctly in his after-thought. It was, indeed, a majestic idea that the destiny of nations should be revealed, in these awful hieroglyphics, on the cope of heaven. A scroll so wide might not be deemed too expensive for Providence to write a people’s doom upon. The belief was a favourite one with our forefathers, as betokening that their infant commonwealth was under a celestial guardianship of peculiar intimacy and strictness. But what shall we say, when an individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on the same vast sheet of record. In such a case, it could only be the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man, rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature, until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting page for his soul’s history and fate.

We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and heart that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter—the letter A— marked out in lines of dull red light. Not but the meteor may have shown itself at that point, burning duskily through a veil of cloud, but with no such shape as his guilty imagination gave it, or, at least, with so little definiteness, that another’s guilt might have seen another symbol in it.

There was a singular circumstance that characterised Mr. Dimmesdale’s psychological state at this moment. All the time that he gazed upward to the zenith, he was, nevertheless, perfectly aware that little Pearl was pointing her finger towards old Roger Chillingworth, who stood at no great distance from the scaffold. The minister appeared to see him, with the same glance that discerned the miraculous letter. To his feature as to all other objects, the meteoric light imparted a new expression; or it might well be that the physician was not careful then, as at all other times, to hide the malevolence with which he looked upon his victim. Certainly, if the meteor kindled up the sky, and disclosed the earth, with an awfulness that admonished Hester Prynne and the clergyman of the day of judgment, then might Roger Chillingworth

have passed with them for the arch-fiend, standing there with a smile and scowl, to claim his own. So vivid was the expression, or so intense the minister’s perception of it, that it seemed still to remain painted on the darkness after the meteor had vanished, with an effect as if the street and all things else were at once annihilated.

“Who is that man, Hester?” gasped Mr. Dimmesdale, overcome with terror. “I shiver at him! Dost thou know the man? I hate him, Hester!”

She remembered her oath, and was silent.

“I tell thee, my soul shivers at him!” muttered the minister again. “Who is he? Who is he? Canst thou do nothing for me? I have a nameless horror of the man!”

“Minister,” said little Pearl, “I can tell thee who he is!”

“Quickly, then, child!” said the minister, bending his ear close to her lips. “Quickly, and as low as thou canst whisper.”

Pearl mumbled something into his ear that sounded, indeed, like human language, but was only such gibberish as children may be heard amusing themselves with by the hour together. At all events, if it involved any secret information in regard to old Roger Chillingworth, it was in a tongue unknown to the erudite clergyman, and did but increase the bewilderment of his mind.

The elvish child then laughed aloud.

“Dost thou mock me now?” said the minister.

“Thou wast not bold!—thou wast not true!” answered the child. “Thou wouldst not promise to take my hand, and mother’s hand, to-morrow noon- tide!”

“Worthy sir,” answered the physician, who had now advanced to the foot of the platform—”pious Master Dimmesdale! can this be you? Well, well, indeed! We men of study, whose heads are in our books, have need to be straitly looked after! We dream in our waking moments, and walk in our sleep. Come, good sir, and my dear friend, I pray you let me lead you home!”

“How knewest thou that I was here?” asked the minister, fearfully.

“Verily, and in good faith,” answered Roger Chillingworth, “I knew nothing of the matter. I had spent the better part of the night at the bedside of the worshipful Governor Winthrop, doing what my poor skill might to give him ease. He, going home to a better world, I, likewise, was on my way homeward, when this light shone out. Come with me, I beseech you, Reverend sir, else you will be poorly able to do Sabbath duty to-morrow. Aha! see now how they trouble the brain—these books!—these books! You should study less, good sir, and take a little pastime, or these night whimsies will grow upon

you.”

“I will go home with you,” said Mr. Dimmesdale.

With a chill despondency, like one awakening, all nerveless, from an ugly dream, he yielded himself to the physician, and was led away.

The next day, however, being the Sabbath, he preached a discourse which was held to be the richest and most powerful, and the most replete with heavenly influences, that had ever proceeded from his lips. Souls, it is said, more souls than one, were brought to the truth by the efficacy of that sermon, and vowed within themselves to cherish a holy gratitude towards Mr. Dimmesdale throughout the long hereafter. But as he came

down the pulpit steps, the grey-bearded sexton met him, holding up a black glove, which the minister recognised as his own.

“It was found,” said the Sexton, “this morning on the scaffold where evil- doers are set up to public shame. Satan dropped it there, I take it, intending a scurrilous jest against your reverence. But, indeed, he was blind and foolish, as he ever and always is. A pure hand needs no glove to cover it!”

“Thank you, my good friend,” said the minister, gravely, but startled at heart; for so confused was his remembrance, that he had almost brought himself to look at the events of the past night as visionary.

“Yes, it seems to be my glove, indeed!”

“And, since Satan saw fit to steal it, your reverence must needs handle him without gloves henceforward,” remarked the old sexton, grimly smiling. “But did your reverence hear of the portent that was seen last night? a great red letter in the sky— the letter A, which we interpret to stand for Angel. For, as our good Governor Winthrop was made an angel this past night, it was doubtless held fit that there should be some notice thereof!”

“No,” answered the minister; “I had not heard of it.”

C H A P T E R XIII

ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER

In her late singular interview with Mr. Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne was shocked at the condition to which she found the clergyman reduced. His nerve seemed absolutely destroyed. His moral force was abased into more than childish weakness. It grovelled helpless on the ground, even while his intellectual faculties retained their pristine strength, or had perhaps acquired a morbid energy, which disease only could have given them. With her knowledge of a train of circumstances hidden from all others, she could

readily infer that, besides the legitimate action of his own conscience, a terrible machinery had been brought to bear, and was still operating, on Mr. Dimmesdale’s well-being and repose. Knowing what this poor fallen man had once been, her whole soul was moved by the shuddering terror with which he had appealed to her—the outcast woman—for support against his instinctively discovered enemy. She decided, moreover, that he had a right to her utmost aid. Little accustomed, in her long seclusion from society, to measure her ideas of right and wrong by any standard external to herself, Hester saw—or seemed to see—that there lay a responsibility upon her in reference to the

clergyman, which she owned to no other, nor to the whole world besides. The links that united her to the rest of humankind—links of flowers, or silk, or gold, or whatever the material—had all been broken. Here was the iron link of mutual crime, which neither he nor she could break. Like all other ties, it brought along with it its obligations.

Hester Prynne did not now occupy precisely the same position in which we beheld her during the earlier periods of her ignominy. Years had come and gone. Pearl was now seven years old. Her mother, with the scarlet letter on her breast, glittering in its fantastic embroidery, had long been a familiar object to the townspeople. As is apt to be the case when a person stands out in any prominence before the community, and, at the same time, interferes neither with public nor individual interests and convenience, a species of general regard had ultimately grown up in reference to Hester Prynne. It is to the credit of human nature that, except where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by a gradual and quiet process, will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility. In this matter of Hester Prynne there was neither irritation nor irksomeness. She never battled with the public, but submitted uncomplainingly to its worst usage; she made no claim upon it in requital for what she suffered; she did not weigh upon its sympathies. Then, also, the blameless purity of her life during all

these years in which she had been set apart to infamy was reckoned largely in her favour. With nothing now to lose, in the sight of mankind, and with no hope, and seemingly no wish, of gaining anything, it could only be a genuine regard for virtue that had brought back the poor wanderer to its paths.

It was perceived, too, that while Hester never put forward even the humblest title to share in the world’s privileges—further than to breathe the common air and earn daily bread for little Pearl and herself by the faithful labour of her hands—she was quick to acknowledge her sisterhood with the race of man whenever benefits were to be conferred. None so ready as she to give of her little substance to every demand of poverty, even though the bitter- hearted pauper threw back a gibe in requital of the food brought regularly to his door, or the garments wrought for him by the fingers that could have

embroidered a monarch’s robe. None so self-devoted as Hester when pestilence stalked through the town. In all seasons of calamity, indeed, whether general or of individuals, the outcast of society at once found her place. She came, not as a guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the household that was darkened by trouble, as if its gloomy twilight were a medium in which she was entitled to hold intercourse with her fellow-creature. There glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of the sick chamber. It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer’s hard

extremity, across the verge of time. It had shown him where to set his foot, while the light of earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light of futurity could reach him. In such emergencies Hester’s nature showed itself warm and rich—a well-spring of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, and inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one. She was self- ordained a Sister of Mercy, or, we may rather say, the world’s heavy hand had so ordained her, when neither the world nor she looked forward to this result. The letter was the symbol of her calling. Such helpfulness was found in her— so much power to do, and power to sympathise—that many people refused to interpret the scarlet A by its original signification.

They said that it meant Able, so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.

It was only the darkened house that could contain her. When sunshine came again, she was not there. Her shadow had faded across the threshold. The helpful inmate had departed, without one backward glance to gather up the meed of gratitude, if any were in the hearts of those whom she had served so zealously.

Meeting them in the street, she never raised her head to receive their greeting. If they were resolute to accost her, she laid her finger on the scarlet letter, and passed on. This might be pride, but was so like humility, that it produced all the softening influence of the latter quality on the public mind. The public is despotic in its temper; it is capable of denying common justice

when too strenuously demanded as a right; but quite as frequently it awards more than justice, when the appeal is made, as despots love to have it made, entirely to its generosity. Interpreting Hester Prynne’s deportment as an appeal of this nature, society was inclined to show its former victim a more benign countenance than she cared to be favoured with, or, perchance, than she deserved.

The rulers, and the wise and learned men of the community, were longer in acknowledging the influence of Hester’s good qualities than the people. The prejudices which they shared in common with the latter were fortified in themselves by an iron frame-work of reasoning, that made it a far tougher labour to expel them. Day by day, nevertheless, their sour and rigid wrinkles were relaxing into something which, in the due course of years, might grow to be an expression of almost benevolence. Thus it was with the men of rank, on

whom their eminent position imposed the guardianship of the public morals. Individuals in private life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty; nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not of that one sin for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since. “Do you see that woman with the embroidered badge?” they would say to strangers. “It is our Hester—the town’s own Hester—who is so kind to the poor, so helpful to the sick, so comfortable to the afflicted!”

Then, it is true, the propensity of human nature to tell the very worst of itself, when embodied in the person of another, would constrain them to whisper the black scandal of bygone years. It was none the less a fact, however, that in the eyes of the very men who spoke thus, the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun’s bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness, which enabled her to walk securely amid all peril.

Had she fallen among thieves, it would have kept her safe. It was reported, and believed by many, that an Indian had drawn his arrow against the badge, and that the missile struck it, and fell harmless to the ground.

The effect of the symbol—or rather, of the position in respect to society that was indicated by it—on the mind of Hester Prynne herself was powerful and peculiar. All the light and graceful foliage of her character had been withered up by this red-hot brand, and had long ago fallen away, leaving a bare and harsh outline, which might have been repulsive had she possessed friends or companions to be repelled by it. Even the attractiveness of her person had undergone a similar change. It might be partly owing to the studied austerity of her dress, and partly to the lack of demonstration in her manners. It was a sad transformation, too, that her rich and luxuriant hair had either been cut off, or was so completely hidden by a cap, that not a shining lock of it ever once gushed into the sunshine. It was due in part to all these causes, but still more to something else, that there seemed to be no longer anything in Hester’s face for Love

to dwell upon; nothing in Hester’s form, though majestic and statue like, that Passion would ever dream of clasping in its embrace; nothing in Hester’s bosom to make it ever again the pillow of Affection. Some attribute had departed from her, the permanence of which had been essential to keep her a woman. Such is frequently the fate, and such the stern development, of the feminine character and person, when the woman has encountered, and lived through, an experience of peculiar severity. If she be all tenderness, she will die. If she survive, the tenderness will either be crushed out of her, or—and the outward semblance is the same—crushed so deeply into her heart that it can never show itself more. The latter is perhaps the truest theory. She who has once been a woman, and ceased to be so, might at any moment become a woman again, if there were only the magic touch to effect the transformation. We shall see whether Hester Prynne were ever afterwards so touched and so transfigured.

Much of the marble coldness of Hester’s impression was to be attributed to the circumstance that her life had turned, in a great measure, from passion and feeling to thought. Standing alone in the world—alone, as to any dependence on society, and with little Pearl to be guided and protected—alone, and hopeless of retrieving her position, even had she not scorned to consider it desirable—she cast away the fragment of a broken chain. The world’s law was no law for her mind. It was an age in

which the human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and rearranged—not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was their most real abode— the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit. She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it, would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatised by the scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the seashore, thoughts visited her such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England; shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door.

It is remarkable that persons who speculate the most boldly often conform with the most perfect quietude to the external regulations of society. The thought suffices them, without investing itself in the flesh and blood of action. So it seemed to be with Hester. Yet, had little Pearl never come to her from the spiritual world, it might have been far otherwise. Then she might have come down to us in history, hand in hand with Ann Hutchinson, as the foundress of a religious sect. She might, in one of her phases, have been a prophetess. She might, and not improbably would, have suffered death from the stern tribunals of the period, for attempting to undermine the foundations of

the Puritan establishment. But, in the education of her child, the mother’s enthusiasm of thought had something to wreak itself upon. Providence, in the person of this little girl, had assigned to Hester’s charge, the germ and blossom of womanhood, to be cherished and developed amid a host of difficulties. Everything was against her. The world was hostile. The child’s own nature had something wrong in it which continually betokened that she had been born amiss—the effluence of her mother’s lawless passion—and often impelled Hester to ask, in bitterness of heart, whether it were for ill or good that the poor little creature had been born at all.

Indeed, the same dark question often rose into her mind with reference to the whole race of womanhood. Was existence worth accepting even to the happiest among them? As concerned her own individual existence, she had long ago decided in the negative, and dismissed the point as settled. A tendency to speculation, though it may keep women quiet, as it does man, yet

makes her sad. She discerns, it may be, such a hopeless task before her. As a first step, the whole system of society is to be torn down and built up anew. Then the very nature of the opposite sex, or its long hereditary habit, which has become like nature, is to be essentially modified before woman can be allowed to assume what seems a fair and suitable position.

Finally, all other difficulties being obviated, woman cannot take

advantage of these preliminary reforms until she herself shall have undergone a still mightier change, in which, perhaps, the ethereal essence, wherein she has her truest life, will be found to have evaporated. A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish.

Thus Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere. At times a fearful doubt strove to possess her soul, whether it were not better to send Pearl at once to Heaven, and go herself to such futurity as Eternal Justice should provide.

The scarlet letter had not done its office. Now, however, her interview with the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the night of his vigil, had given her a new theme of reflection, and held up to her an object that appeared worthy of any exertion and sacrifice for its attainment. She had witnessed the intense misery beneath which the minister struggled, or, to speak more accurately, had ceased to struggle. She saw that he stood on the verge of lunacy, if he had not already stepped across it. It was impossible to doubt that, whatever painful efficacy there might be in the secret sting of remorse, a deadlier venom had been infused into it by the hand that proffered relief. A secret enemy had been continually by his side, under the semblance of

a friend and helper, and had availed himself of the opportunities thus afforded for tampering with the delicate springs of Mr. Dimmesdale’s nature. Hester could not but ask herself whether there had not originally been a defect of truth, courage, and loyalty on her own part, in allowing the minister to be thrown into a position where so much evil was to be foreboded and nothing auspicious to be hoped. Her only justification lay in the fact that she had been able to discern no method of rescuing him from a blacker ruin than had overwhelmed herself except by acquiescing in Roger Chillingworth’s scheme of disguise. Under that impulse she had made her choice, and had chosen, as it now appeared, the more wretched alternative of the two. She determined to redeem her error so far as it might yet be possible. Strengthened by years of hard and solemn trial, she felt herself no longer so inadequate to cope with Roger Chillingworth as on that night, abased by sin and half-maddened by the ignominy that was still new, when they had talked together in the prison-chamber. She had climbed her way since then to a higher point. The old man, on the other hand, had brought

himself nearer to her level, or, perhaps, below it, by the revenge which he had stooped for.

In fine, Hester Prynne resolved to meet her former husband, and do what might be in her power for the rescue of the victim on whom he had so evidently set his gripe. The occasion was

not long to seek. One afternoon, walking with Pearl in a retired part of the peninsula, she beheld the old physician with a basket on one arm and a staff in the other hand, stooping along the ground in quest of roots and herbs to concoct his medicine withal.

C H A P T E R XIV

HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN

Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and play with the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should have talked awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. So the child flew away like a bird, and, making bare her small white feet went pattering along the moist margin of the sea. Here and there she came to a full stop, and peeped curiously into a pool, left by the retiring tide as a mirror for Pearl to see her face in.

Forth peeped at her, out of the pool, with dark, glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her eyes, the image of a little maid whom Pearl, having no other playmate, invited to take her hand and run a race with her. But the visionary little maid on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to say—”This is a better place; come thou into the pool.” And Pearl, stepping in mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom; while, out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water.

Meanwhile her mother had accosted the physician. “I would speak a word with you,” said she—”a word that concerns us much.”

“Aha! and is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger Chillingworth?” answered he, raising himself from his stooping

posture. “With all my heart! Why, mistress, I hear good tidings of you on all hands! No longer ago than yester-eve, a magistrate, a wise and godly man, was discoursing of your affairs, Mistress Hester, and whispered me that there had been question concerning you in the council. It was debated whether or no, with safety to the commonweal, yonder scarlet letter might be taken off your bosom. On my life, Hester, I made my intreaty to the worshipful magistrate that it might be done forthwith.”

“It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off the badge,” calmly replied Hester. “Were I worthy to be quit of it, it would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into something that should speak a different

purport.”

“Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better,” rejoined he, “A woman must needs follow her own fancy touching the adornment of her person. The letter is gaily embroidered, and shows right bravely on your bosom!”

All this while Hester had been looking steadily at the old man, and was shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a change had been wrought upon him within the past seven years. It was not so much that he had grown older; for though the traces of advancing life were visible he bore his age well, and seemed to retain a wiry vigour and alertness. But the

former aspect of an intellectual and studious man, calm and quiet, which was what she best remembered in him, had altogether vanished, and been succeeded by an eager, searching, almost fierce, yet carefully guarded look. It seemed to be his wish and purpose to mask this expression with a smile, but the latter played him false, and flickered over his visage so derisively that the spectator could see his blackness all the better for it. Ever and anon, too, there came a glare of red light out of his eyes, as if the old man’s soul were on fire and kept on smouldering duskily within his breast, until by some casual puff of passion it was blown into a momentary flame. This he repressed as speedily as possible, and strove to look as if nothing of the kind had happened.

In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office. This unhappy person had effected such a transformation by devoting himself for seven years to the constant analysis of a heart full of torture, and deriving his enjoyment thence, and adding fuel to those fiery tortures which he analysed and gloated over.

The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne’s bosom. Here was another ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to her.

“What see you in my face,” asked the physician, “that you look at it so earnestly?”

“Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears bitter enough for it,” answered she. “But let it pass! It is of yonder miserable man that I would speak.”

“And what of him?” cried Roger Chillingworth, eagerly, as if he loved the topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it with the only person of whom he could make a confidant. “Not to hide the truth, Mistress Hester, my thoughts happen just now to be busy with the gentleman. So speak freely and I will make answer.”

“When we last spake together,” said Hester, “now seven years ago, it was your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy as touching the former relation

betwixt yourself and me. As the life and good fame of yonder man were in your hands there seemed no choice to me, save to be silent in accordance with your behest. Yet it was not without heavy misgivings that I thus bound myself, for, having cast off all duty towards other human beings, there remained a duty towards him, and something whispered me that I was betraying it in pledging myself to keep your counsel. Since that day no man is so near to him as you. You tread behind his every footstep. You are beside him, sleeping and waking. You search his thoughts. You burrow and rankle in his heart! Your clutch is on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living death, and still he knows you not. In permitting this I have surely acted a false

part by the only man to whom the power was left me to be true!”

“What choice had you?” asked Roger Chillingworth. “My finger, pointed at this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into a dungeon, thence, peradventure, to the gallows!”

“It had been better so!” said Hester Prynne.

“What evil have I done the man?” asked Roger Chillingworth again. “I tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician earned from monarch could not have bought such care as I have wasted on this miserable priest! But for my aid his life would have burned away in torments within the first two years after the perpetration of his crime and thine. For, Hester, his spirit lacked the strength that could have borne up, as thine has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet letter. Oh, I could reveal a goodly secret! But enough. What art can do, I have exhausted on him. That he now breathes and creeps about on earth is owing all to me!”

“Better he had died at once!” said Hester Prynne.

“Yea, woman, thou sayest truly!” cried old Roger Chillingworth, letting the lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes. “Better had he died at once! Never did mortal suffer what this man has suffered. And all, all, in the sight of his worst enemy! He has been conscious of me. He has felt an influence dwelling always upon him like a curse. He knew, by some spiritual sense—for the Creator never made another being so sensitive

as this—he knew that no friendly hand was pulling at his heartstrings, and that an eye was looking curiously into him, which sought only evil, and found it. But he knew not that the eye and hand were mine! With the superstition common to his brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be tortured with frightful dreams and desperate thoughts, the sting of remorse and despair of pardon, as a foretaste of what awaits him beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my presence, the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged, and who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed, he did not err, there was a fiend at

his elbow! A mortal man, with once a human heart, has become a fiend for his especial torment.”

The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted his hands with a look of horror, as if he had beheld some frightful shape, which he could not recognise, usurping the place of his own image in a glass. It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at the interval of years—when a man’s moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind’s eye. Not improbably he had never before viewed himself as he did now.

“Hast thou not tortured him enough?” said Hester, noticing the old man’s look. “Has he not paid thee all?”

“No, no! He has but increased the debt!” answered the physician, and as he proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer characteristics, and subsided into gloom. “Dost thou remember me, Hester, as I was nine years agone? Even then I was in the autumn of my days, nor was it the early autumn. But all my life had been made up of earnest, studious, thoughtful, quiet years, bestowed faithfully for the increase of mine own knowledge, and faithfully, too, though this latter object was but casual to the other—faithfully for the advancement of human welfare. No life had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so rich with benefits conferred. Dost thou remember me? Was I not, though you might deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for others, craving little for himself—kind, true, just and of constant, if not warm affections? Was I not all this?”

“All this, and more,” said Hester.

“And what am I now?” demanded he, looking into her face, and permitting the whole evil within him to be written on his features. “I have already told thee what I am—a fiend! Who made me so?”

“It was myself,” cried Hester, shuddering. “It was I, not less than he. Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?”

“I have left thee to the scarlet letter,” replied Roger Chillingworth. “If that has not avenged me, I can do no more!” He laid his finger on it with a smile.

“It has avenged thee,” answered Hester Prynne.

“I judged no less,” said the physician. “And now what wouldst thou with me touching this man?”

“I must reveal the secret,” answered Hester, firmly. “He must discern thee in thy true character. What may be the result I know not. But this long debt of confidence, due from me to him, whose bane and ruin I have been, shall at

length be paid. So far as concerns the overthrow or preservation of his fair fame and his earthly state, and perchance his life, he is in my hands. Nor do I

—whom the scarlet letter has disciplined to truth, though it be the truth of red- hot iron entering into the soul—nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any longer a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy mercy. Do with him as thou wilt! There is no good for him, no good for me, no good for thee. There is no good for little Pearl. There is no path to guide us out of this dismal maze.”

“Woman, I could well-nigh pity thee,” said Roger Chillingworth, unable to restrain a thrill of admiration too, for there was a quality almost majestic in the despair which she expressed. “Thou hadst great elements. Peradventure, hadst thou met earlier with a better love than mine, this evil had not been. I pity thee, for the good that has been wasted in thy nature.”

“And I thee,” answered Hester Prynne, “for the hatred that has transformed a wise and just man to a fiend! Wilt thou yet purge

it out of thee, and be once more human? If not for his sake, then doubly for thine own! Forgive, and leave his further retribution to the Power that claims it! I said, but now, that there could be no good event for him, or thee, or me, who are here wandering together in this gloomy maze of evil, and stumbling at every step over the guilt wherewith we have strewn our path. It is not so! There might be good for thee, and thee alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged and hast it at thy will to pardon. Wilt thou give up that only privilege? Wilt thou reject that priceless benefit?”

“Peace, Hester—peace!” replied the old man, with gloomy sternness—”it is not granted me to pardon. I have no such power as thou tellest me of. My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains all that we do, and all we suffer. By thy first step awry, thou didst plant the germ of evil; but since that moment it has all been a dark necessity. Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend’s office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may! Now, go thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man.”

He waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of gathering herbs.

C H A P T E R V

HESTER AND PEARL

So Roger Chillingworth—a deformed old figure with a face that haunted men’s memories longer than they liked—took leave of Hester Prynne, and

went stooping away along the earth. He gathered here and there a herb, or grubbed up a root and put it into the basket on his arm. His gray beard almost touched the ground as he crept onward. Hester gazed after him a little while, looking with a half fantastic curiosity to see whether the tender grass of early spring would not be blighted beneath him and show the wavering track of his footsteps, sere and brown, across its cheerful verdure. She wondered what sort of herbs they were which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs of species hitherto unknown, that would start up under his fingers? Or might it suffice him that every wholesome growth should be converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch? Did the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere else, really fall upon him? Or was there, as it rather seemed, a circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity whichever way he turned

himself? And whither was he now going? Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time, would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, henbane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness the climate could produce, all flourishing with hideous luxuriance?

Or would he spread bat’s wings and flee away, looking so much the uglier the higher he rose towards heaven?

“Be it sin or no,” said Hester Prynne, bitterly, as still she gazed after him, “I hate the man!”

She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or lessen it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those long-past days in a distant land, when he used to emerge at eventide from the seclusion of his study and sit down in the firelight of their home, and in the light of her nuptial smile. He needed to bask himself in that smile, he said, in order that the chill of so many lonely hours among his books might be taken off the scholar’s heart. Such scenes had once appeared not otherwise than happy, but now, as viewed through the dismal medium of her subsequent life, they classed themselves among her ugliest remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes could have been! She marvelled how she could ever have been wrought upon to marry him! She deemed it her crime most to be repented of, that she had ever endured and reciprocated the lukewarm grasp of his hand, and had suffered the smile of her lips and eyes to mingle and melt into his own. And it seemed a fouler offence committed by Roger Chillingworth than any

which had since been done him, that, in the time when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side.

“Yes, I hate him!” repeated Hester more bitterly than before. “He betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!”

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth’s, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. But Hester ought long ago to have done with this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery and wrought out no repentance?

The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after the crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on Hester’s state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise have acknowledged to herself.

He being gone, she summoned back her child. “Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?”

Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no loss for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully with her

own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom forth, and—as it declined to venture—seeking a passage for herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made little boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snailshells, and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the shore. She seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and made prize of several five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun. Then she took up the white foam that streaked the line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze, scampering after it with winged footsteps to catch the great snowflakes ere they fell. Perceiving a flock of beach-birds that fed and fluttered along the shore, the naughty child picked up her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from rock to rock after these small sea- fowl, displayed remarkable dexterity in pelting them. One little gray bird, with a white breast, Pearl was almost sure had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away with a broken wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her sport, because it grieved her to have done harm to a little being that was as wild as the sea- breeze, or as wild as Pearl herself.

Her final employment was to gather seaweed of various kinds, and make herself a scarf or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus assume the aspect of a little mermaid. She inherited her mother’s gift for devising drapery and costume. As the last

touch to her mermaid’s garb, Pearl took some eel-grass and imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom the decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother’s. A letter—the letter A—but freshly green

instead of scarlet. The child bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with strange interest, even as if the one only thing for which she had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.

“I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?” thought Pearl.

Just then she heard her mother’s voice, and, flitting along as lightly as one of the little sea-birds, appeared before Hester Prynne dancing, laughing, and pointing her finger to the ornament upon her bosom.

“My little Pearl,” said Hester, after a moment’s silence, “the green letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport. But dost thou know, my child, what this letter means which thy mother is doomed to wear?”

“Yes, mother,” said the child. “It is the great letter A. Thou hast taught me in the horn-book.”

Hester looked steadily into her little face; but though there was that singular expression which she had so often remarked in her black eyes, she could not satisfy herself whether Pearl really

attached any meaning to the symbol. She felt a morbid desire to ascertain the point.

“Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?”

“Truly do I!” answered Pearl, looking brightly into her mother’s face. “It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his heart!”

“And what reason is that?” asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd incongruity of the child’s observation; but on second thoughts turning pale.

“What has the letter to do with any heart save mine?”

“Nay, mother, I have told all I know,” said Pearl, more seriously than she was wont to speak. “Ask yonder old man whom thou hast been talking with,— it may be he can tell. But in good earnest now, mother dear, what does this scarlet letter mean?— and why dost thou wear it on thy bosom?—and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”

She took her mother’s hand in both her own, and gazed into her eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious character. The thought occurred to Hester, that the child might really be seeking to approach her with childlike confidence, and doing what she could, and as intelligently as she knew how, to establish a meeting-point of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an unwonted aspect. Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little other return than the

waywardness of an April breeze, which spends its time in airy sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanours it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose,

kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then be gone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart. And this, moreover, was a mother’s estimate of the child’s disposition. Any other observer might have seen few but unamiable traits, and have given them a far darker colouring. But now the idea came strongly into Hester’s mind, that Pearl, with her remarkable precocity and acuteness, might already have approached the age when she could have been made a friend, and intrusted with as much of her mother’s sorrows as could be imparted, without irreverence either to the parent or the child. In the little chaos of Pearl’s character there might be seen emerging and could have been from the very first—the steadfast principles of an unflinching courage—an uncontrollable will—sturdy pride, which might be disciplined into self-respect—and a bitter scorn of many things which, when examined, might be found to have the taint of falsehood in them. She possessed affections, too, though hitherto acrid and disagreeable, as are the richest flavours of unripe fruit. With all these sterling attributes, thought Hester, the evil which she

inherited from her mother must be great indeed, if a noble woman do not grow out of this elfish child.

Pearl’s inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of her being. From the earliest epoch of her conscious life, she had entered upon this as her appointed mission. Hester had often fancied that Providence had a design of justice and retribution, in endowing the child with this marked propensity; but never, until now, had she bethought herself to ask, whether, linked with that design, there might not likewise be a purpose of mercy and beneficence. If little Pearl were entertained with faith and trust, as a spirit messenger no less than an earthly child, might it not be her errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her mother’s heart, and converted it into a tomb?—and to help her to overcome the passion, once so wild, and even yet neither dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the same tomb-like heart?

Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester’s mind, with as much vivacity of impression as if they had actually been whispered into her ear. And there was little Pearl, all this while, holding her mother’s hand in both her own, and turning her face upward, while she put these searching questions, once and again, and still a third time.

“What does the letter mean, mother? and why dost thou wear it? and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”

“What shall I say?” thought Hester to herself. “No! if this be the price of the child’s sympathy, I cannot pay it.”

Then she spoke aloud—

“Silly Pearl,” said she, “what questions are these? There are many things in

this world that a child must not ask about. What know I of the minister’s heart? And as for the scarlet letter, I wear it for the sake of its gold thread.”

In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before been false to the symbol on her bosom. It may be that it was the talisman of a stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who now forsook her; as recognising that, in spite of his strict watch over her heart, some new evil had crept into it, or some old one had never been expelled. As for little Pearl, the earnestness soon passed out of her face.

But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop. Two or three times, as her mother and she went homeward, and as often at supper-time, and while Hester was putting her to bed, and once after she seemed to be fairly asleep, Pearl looked up, with mischief gleaming in her black eyes.

“Mother,” said she, “what does the scarlet letter mean?”

And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of being awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and

making that other enquiry, which she had so unaccountably connected with her investigations about the scarlet letter—

“Mother!—Mother!—Why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”

“Hold thy tongue, naughty child!” answered her mother, with an asperity that she had never permitted to herself before. “Do not tease me; else I shall put thee into the dark closet!”

C H A P T E R XVI

A FOREST WALK

Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve to make known to Mr. Dimmesdale, at whatever risk of present pain or ulterior consequences, the true character of the man who had crept into his intimacy. For several days, however, she vainly sought an opportunity of addressing him in some of the meditative walks which she knew him to be in the habit of taking along the shores of the Peninsula, or on the wooded hills of the neighbouring country. There would have been no scandal, indeed, nor peril to the holy whiteness of the clergyman’s good fame, had she visited him in his own study, where many a penitent, ere now, had confessed sins of perhaps as deep a dye as the one betokened by the scarlet letter. But, partly that she dreaded the secret or undisguised interference of old Roger Chillingworth, and partly that her conscious heart imparted suspicion where none could have been felt, and partly that both the minister and she would need the whole wide world to

breathe in, while they talked together—for all these reasons Hester never thought of meeting him in any narrower privacy than beneath the open sky.

At last, while attending a sick chamber, whither the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale had been summoned to make a prayer, she learnt that he had gone, the day before, to visit the Apostle Eliot, among his Indian converts. He would probably return by a certain hour in the afternoon of the morrow. Betimes, therefore, the next day, Hester took little Pearl—who was necessarily the companion of all her mother’s expeditions, however inconvenient her presence

—and set forth.

The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed from the Peninsula to the mainland, was no other than a foot-path. It straggled onward into the mystery of the primeval forest. This hemmed it in so narrowly, and stood so black and dense on either side, and disclosed such imperfect glimpses of the sky above, that, to Hester’s mind, it imaged not amiss the moral wilderness in which she had so long been wandering. The day was chill and sombre. Overhead was a gray expanse of cloud, slightly stirred, however, by a breeze; so that a gleam of flickering sunshine might now and then be seen at its solitary play along the path. This flitting cheerfulness was always at the further extremity of some long vista through the forest. The sportive sunlight—feebly sportive, at best, in the predominant pensiveness of the day and scene—withdrew itself as they came nigh, and left the spots where it had danced the drearier, because they had hoped to find them bright.

“Mother,” said little Pearl, “the sunshine does not love you.

It runs away and hides itself, because it is afraid of something on your bosom. Now, see! There it is, playing a good way off.

Stand you here, and let me run and catch it. I am but a child.

It will not flee from me—for I wear nothing on my bosom yet!” “Nor ever will, my child, I hope,” said Hester.

“And why not, mother?” asked Pearl, stopping short, just at the beginning of her race. “Will not it come of its own accord when I am a woman grown?”

“Run away, child,” answered her mother, “and catch the sunshine. It will soon be gone.”

Pearl set forth at a great pace, and as Hester smiled to perceive, did actually catch the sunshine, and stood laughing in the midst of it, all brightened by its splendour, and scintillating with the vivacity excited by rapid motion. The light lingered about the lonely child, as if glad of such a playmate, until her mother had drawn almost nigh enough to step into the

magic circle too.

“It will go now,” said Pearl, shaking her head.

“See!” answered Hester, smiling; “now I can stretch out my hand and grasp some of it.”

As she attempted to do so, the sunshine vanished; or, to judge from the bright expression that was dancing on Pearl’s features, her mother could have fancied that the child had absorbed it

into herself, and would give it forth again, with a gleam about her path, as they should plunge into some gloomier shade.

There was no other attribute that so much impressed her with a sense of new and untransmitted vigour in Pearl’s nature, as this never failing vivacity of spirits: she had not the disease of sadness, which almost all children, in these latter days, inherit, with the scrofula, from the troubles of their ancestors. Perhaps this, too, was a disease, and but the reflex of the wild energy with which Hester had fought against her sorrows before Pearl’s birth. It was certainly a doubtful charm, imparting a hard, metallic lustre to the child’s character. She wanted—what some people want throughout life—a grief that should deeply touch her, and thus humanise and make her capable of sympathy. But there was time enough yet for little Pearl.

“Come, my child!” said Hester, looking about her from the spot where Pearl had stood still in the sunshine—”we will sit down a little way within the wood, and rest ourselves.”

“I am not aweary, mother,” replied the little girl. “But you may sit down, if you will tell me a story meanwhile.”

“A story, child!” said Hester. “And about what?”

“Oh, a story about the Black Man,” answered Pearl, taking hold of her mother’s gown, and looking up, half earnestly, half mischievously, into her face.

“How he haunts this forest, and carries a book with him a big, heavy book, with iron clasps; and how this ugly Black Man

offers his book and an iron pen to everybody that meets him here among the trees; and they are to write their names with their own blood; and then he sets his mark on their bosoms. Didst thou ever meet the Black Man, mother?”

“And who told you this story, Pearl,” asked her mother, recognising a common superstition of the period.

“It was the old dame in the chimney corner, at the house where you watched last night,” said the child. “But she fancied me asleep while she was talking of it. She said that a thousand and a thousand people had met him here, and had written in his book, and have his mark on them. And that ugly

tempered lady, old Mistress Hibbins, was one. And, mother, the old dame said that this scarlet letter was the Black Man’s mark on thee, and that it glows like a red flame when thou meetest him at midnight, here in the dark wood. Is it true, mother? And dost thou go to meet him in the nighttime?”

“Didst thou ever awake and find thy mother gone?” asked Hester. “Not that I remember,” said the child. “If thou fearest to leave me in our cottage, thou mightest take me along with thee. I would very gladly go! But, mother, tell me now! Is there such a Black Man? And didst thou ever meet him? And is this his mark?”

“Wilt thou let me be at peace, if I once tell thee?” asked her mother. “Yes, if thou tellest me all,” answered Pearl.

“Once in my life I met the Black Man!” said her mother. “This scarlet letter is his mark!”

Thus conversing, they entered sufficiently deep into the wood to secure themselves from the observation of any casual passenger along the forest track. Here they sat down on a luxuriant heap of moss; which at some epoch of the preceding century, had been a gigantic pine, with its roots and trunk in the darksome shade, and its head aloft in the upper atmosphere. It was a little dell where they had seated themselves, with a leaf- strewn bank rising gently on either side, and a brook flowing through the midst, over a bed of fallen and drowned leaves. The trees impending over it had flung down great branches from time to time, which choked up the current, and compelled it to form eddies and black depths at some points; while, in its swifter and livelier passages there appeared a channel-way of pebbles, and brown, sparkling sand. Letting the eyes follow along the course of the stream, they could catch the reflected light from its water, at some short distance within the forest, but soon lost all traces of it amid the bewilderment of tree-trunks and underbrush, and here and there a huge rock covered over with gray lichens. All these giant trees and boulders of granite seemed intent on making a mystery of the course of this small brook; fearing, perhaps, that, with its never-ceasing loquacity, it should whisper tales out of the heart of the old forest whence it flowed, or mirror its revelations on the smooth surface of a pool. Continually, indeed, as it stole onward, the streamlet kept up a

babble, kind, quiet, soothing, but melancholy, like the voice of a young child that was spending its infancy without playfulness, and knew not how to be merry among sad acquaintance and events of sombre hue.

“Oh, brook! Oh, foolish and tiresome little brook!” cried Pearl, after listening awhile to its talk, “Why art thou so sad? Pluck up a spirit, and do not be all the time sighing and

murmuring!”

But the brook, in the course of its little lifetime among the forest trees, had gone through so solemn an experience that it could not help talking about it, and seemed to have nothing else to say. Pearl resembled the brook, inasmuch as the current of her life gushed from a well-spring as mysterious, and had flowed through scenes shadowed as heavily with gloom. But, unlike the little stream, she danced and sparkled, and prattled airily along her course.

“What does this sad little brook say, mother?” inquired she.

“If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook might tell thee of it,” answered her mother, “even as it is telling me of mine. But now, Pearl, I hear a footstep along the path, and the noise of one putting aside the branches. I would have thee betake thyself to play, and leave me to speak with him that comes yonder.”

“Is it the Black Man?” asked Pearl.

“Wilt thou go and play, child?” repeated her mother, “But do not stray far into the wood. And take heed that thou come at my first call.”

“Yes, mother,” answered Pearl, “But if it be the Black Man, wilt thou not let me stay a moment, and look at him, with his big book under his arm?”

“Go, silly child!” said her mother impatiently. “It is no Black Man! Thou canst see him now, through the trees. It is the minister!”

“And so it is!” said the child. “And, mother, he has his hand over his heart! Is it because, when the minister wrote his name in the book, the Black Man set his mark in that place? But why does he not wear it outside his bosom, as thou dost, mother?”

“Go now, child, and thou shalt tease me as thou wilt another time,” cried Hester Prynne. “But do not stray far. Keep where thou canst hear the babble of the brook.”

The child went singing away, following up the current of the brook, and striving to mingle a more lightsome cadence with its melancholy voice. But the little stream would not be comforted, and still kept telling its unintelligible secret of some very mournful mystery that had happened—or making a prophetic lamentation about something that was yet to happen—within the verge of the dismal forest. So Pearl, who had enough of shadow in her own little life, chose to break off all acquaintance with this repining brook. She set herself, therefore, to gathering

violets and wood-anemones, and some scarlet columbines that she found growing in the crevice of a high rock.

When her elf-child had departed, Hester Prynne made a step or two towards the track that led through the forest, but still remained under the deep

shadow of the trees. She beheld the minister advancing along the path entirely alone, and leaning on a staff which he had cut by the wayside. He looked haggard and feeble, and betrayed a nerveless despondency in his air, which had never so remarkably characterised him in his walks about the settlement, nor in any other situation where he deemed himself liable to notice. Here it was wofully visible, in this intense seclusion of the forest, which of itself would have been a heavy trial to the spirits. There was a listlessness in his gait, as if he saw no reason for taking one step further, nor felt any desire to do so, but would have been glad, could he be glad of anything, to fling himself down at the root of the nearest tree, and lie there passive for evermore. The leaves might bestrew him, and the soil gradually accumulate and form a little hillock over his frame, no matter whether there were life in it or no. Death was too definite an object to be wished for or avoided.

To Hester’s eye, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale exhibited no symptom of positive and vivacious suffering, except that, as little Pearl had remarked, he kept his hand over his heart.

C H A P T E R XVII

THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER

Slowly as the minister walked, he had almost gone by before Hester Prynne could gather voice enough to attract his observation. At length she succeeded.

“Arthur Dimmesdale!” she said, faintly at first, then louder, but hoarsely

—”Arthur Dimmesdale!”

“Who speaks?” answered the minister. Gathering himself quickly up, he stood more erect, like a man taken by surprise in a mood to which he was reluctant to have witnesses. Throwing his eyes anxiously in the direction of the voice, he indistinctly beheld a form under the trees, clad in garments so sombre, and so little relieved from the gray twilight into which the clouded sky and the heavy foliage had darkened the noontide, that he knew not whether it were a woman or a shadow. It may be that his pathway through life was haunted thus by a spectre that had stolen out from among his thoughts.

He made a step nigher, and discovered the scarlet letter. “Hester! Hester Prynne!”, said he; “is it thou? Art thou in life?”

“Even so.” she answered. “In such life as has been mine these seven years past! And thou, Arthur Dimmesdale, dost thou yet live?”

It was no wonder that they thus questioned one another’s actual and bodily

existence, and even doubted of their own. So strangely did they meet in the dim wood that it was like the first encounter in the world beyond the grave of two spirits who had been intimately connected in their former life, but now stood coldly shuddering in mutual dread, as not yet familiar with their state, nor wonted to the companionship of disembodied beings. Each a ghost, and awe-stricken at the other ghost. They were awe-stricken likewise at themselves, because the crisis flung back to them their consciousness, and revealed to each heart its history and experience, as life never does, except at such breathless epochs. The soul beheld its features in the mirror of the passing moment. It was with fear, and tremulously, and, as it were, by a slow, reluctant necessity, that Arthur Dimmesdale put forth his hand, chill as death, and touched the chill hand of Hester Prynne. The grasp, cold as it was, took away what was dreariest in the interview. They now felt themselves, at least, inhabitants of the same sphere.

Without a word more spoken—neither he nor she assuming the guidance, but with an unexpressed consent—they glided back

into the shadow of the woods whence Hester had emerged, and sat down on the heap of moss where she and Pearl had before been sitting. When they found voice to speak, it was at first only to utter remarks and inquiries such as any two acquaintances might have made, about the gloomy sky, the threatening storm, and, next, the health of each. Thus they went onward, not boldly, but step by step, into the themes that were brooding deepest in their hearts. So long estranged by fate and circumstances, they needed something slight and casual to run before and throw open the doors of intercourse, so that their real thoughts might be led across the threshold.

After awhile, the minister fixed his eyes on Hester Prynne’s. “Hester,” said he, “hast thou found peace?”

She smiled drearily, looking down upon her bosom. “Hast thou?” she asked.

“None—nothing but despair!” he answered. “What else could I look for, being what I am, and leading such a life as mine? Were I an atheist—a man devoid of conscience—a wretch with coarse and brutal instincts—I might have found peace long ere now.

Nay, I never should have lost it. But, as matters stand with my soul, whatever of good capacity there originally was in me, all of God’s gifts that were the choicest have become the ministers of spiritual torment. Hester, I am most miserable!”

“The people reverence thee,” said Hester. “And surely thou workest good among them! Doth this bring thee no comfort?”

“More misery, Hester!—Only the more misery!” answered the clergyman

with a bitter smile. “As concerns the good which I may appear to do, I have no faith in it. It must needs be a delusion. What can a ruined soul like mine effect towards the redemption of other souls?—or a polluted soul towards their purification? And as for the people’s reverence, would that it were turned to scorn and hatred! Canst thou deem it, Hester, a consolation that I must stand up in my pulpit, and meet so many eyes turned upward to my face, as if the light of heaven were beaming from it!—must see my flock hungry for the truth, and listening to my words as if a tongue of Pentecost were speaking!— and then look inward, and discern the black reality of what they idolise? I have laughed, in bitterness and agony of heart, at the contrast between what I seem and what I am! And Satan laughs at it!”

“You wrong yourself in this,” said Hester gently. “You have deeply and sorely repented. Your sin is left behind you in the days long past. Your present life is not less holy, in very truth, than it seems in people’s eyes. Is there no reality in the penitence thus sealed and witnessed by good works? And wherefore should it not bring you peace?”

“No, Hester—no!” replied the clergyman. “There is no substance in it! It is cold and dead, and can do nothing for me! Of penance, I have had enough! Of penitence, there has been

none! Else, I should long ago have thrown off these garments of mock holiness, and have shown myself to mankind as they will see me at the judgment-seat. Happy are you, Hester, that wear the scarlet letter openly upon your bosom! Mine burns in secret! Thou little knowest what a relief it is, after the torment of a seven years’ cheat, to look into an eye that recognises me for what I am! Had I one friend—or were it my worst enemy!— to whom, when sickened with the praises of all other men, I could daily betake myself, and be known as the vilest of all sinners, methinks my soul might keep itself alive thereby. Even thus much of truth would save me! But now, it is all falsehood!—all emptiness!—all death!”

Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak. Yet, uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he did, his words here offered her the very point of circumstances in which to interpose what she came to say. She conquered her fears, and spoke:

“Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for,” said she, “with whom to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of it!” Again she hesitated, but brought out the words with an effort.—”Thou hast long had such an enemy, and dwellest with him, under the same roof!”

The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and clutching at his heart, as if he would have torn it out of his bosom.

“Ha! What sayest thou?” cried he. “An enemy! And under mine own roof!

What mean you?”

Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for which she was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him to lie for so many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at the mercy of one whose purposes could not be other than malevolent. The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale. There had been a period when Hester was less alive to this consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to herself as a more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night of his vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both softened and invigorated. She now read his heart more accurately. She doubted not that the continual presence of Roger Chillingworth—the secret poison of his malignity, infecting all the air about him—and his authorised interference, as a physician, with the minister’s physical and spiritual infirmities—that these bad opportunities had been turned to a cruel purpose. By means of them, the sufferer’s conscience had been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his spiritual being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be

insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good and True, of which madness is perhaps the earthly type.

Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once— nay, why should we not speak it?—still so passionately loved! Hester felt that the sacrifice of the clergyman’s good name, and death itself, as she had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have been infinitely preferable to the alternative which she had taken upon herself to choose. And now, rather than have had this grievous wrong to confess, she would gladly have laid down on the forest leaves, and died there, at Arthur Dimmesdale’s feet.

“Oh, Arthur!” cried she, “forgive me! In all things else, I have striven to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might have held fast, and did hold fast, through all extremity; save when thy good—thy life—thy fame—were put in question! Then I consented to a deception. But a lie is never good, even though death threaten on the other side! Dost thou not see what I would say? That old man!—the physician!—he whom they call Roger Chillingworth!—he was my husband!”

The minister looked at her for an instant, with all that violence of passion, which—intermixed in more shapes than one with his higher, purer, softer qualities—was, in fact, the portion of him which the devil claimed, and through which he sought to win the rest. Never was there a blacker or a fiercer frown than Hester now encountered. For the brief space that it lasted, it was a dark transfiguration. But his character had been so much

enfeebled by suffering, that even its lower energies were incapable of more than a temporary struggle. He sank down on the ground, and buried his face in his

hands.

“I might have known it,” murmured he—”I did know it! Was not the secret told me, in the natural recoil of my heart at the first sight of him, and as often as I have seen him since? Why did I not understand? Oh, Hester Prynne, thou little, little knowest all the horror of this thing! And the shame!—the indelicacy!—the horrible ugliness of this exposure of a sick and guilty heart to the very eye that would gloat over it! Woman, woman, thou art accountable for this!—I cannot forgive thee!”

“Thou shalt forgive me!” cried Hester, flinging herself on the fallen leaves beside him. “Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!”

With sudden and desperate tenderness she threw her arms around him, and pressed his head against her bosom, little caring though his cheek rested on the scarlet letter. He would have released himself, but strove in vain to do so. Hester would not set him free, lest he should look her sternly in the face. All the world had frowned on her—for seven long years had it frowned upon this lonely woman—and still she bore it all, nor ever once turned away her firm, sad eyes. Heaven, likewise, had frowned upon her, and she had not died. But the frown of this

pale, weak, sinful, and sorrow-stricken man was what Hester could not bear, and live!

“Wilt thou yet forgive me?” she repeated, over and over again. “Wilt thou not frown? Wilt thou forgive?”

“I do forgive you, Hester,” replied the minister at length, with a deep utterance, out of an abyss of sadness, but no anger. “I freely forgive you now. May God forgive us both. We are not, Hester, the worst sinners in the world. There is one worse than even the polluted priest! That old man’s revenge has been blacker than my sin. He has violated, in cold blood, the sanctity of a human heart. Thou and I, Hester, never did so!”

“Never, never!” whispered she. “What we did had a consecration of its own. We felt it so! We said so to each other. Hast thou forgotten it?”

“Hush, Hester!” said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. “No; I have not forgotten!”

They sat down again, side by side, and hand clasped in hand, on the mossy trunk of the fallen tree. Life had never brought them a gloomier hour; it was the point whither their pathway had so long been tending, and darkening ever, as it stole along—and yet it unclosed a charm that made them linger upon it, and claim another, and another, and, after all, another moment. The forest was obscure around them, and creaked with a blast that was passing through it. The boughs were tossing heavily above their heads; while one solemn old tree

groaned dolefully to another, as if telling the sad story of the pair that sat beneath, or constrained to forbode evil to come.

And yet they lingered. How dreary looked the forest-track that led backward to the settlement, where Hester Prynne must take up again the burden of her ignominy and the minister the hollow mockery of his good name! So they lingered an instant longer.

No golden light had ever been so precious as the gloom of this dark forest. Here seen only by his eyes, the scarlet letter need not burn into the bosom of the fallen woman! Here seen only by her eyes, Arthur Dimmesdale, false to God and man, might be, for one moment true!

He started at a thought that suddenly occurred to him.

“Hester!” cried he, “here is a new horror! Roger Chillingworth knows your purpose to reveal his true character. Will he continue, then, to keep our secret? What will now be the course of his revenge?”

“There is a strange secrecy in his nature,” replied Hester, thoughtfully; “and it has grown upon him by the hidden practices of his revenge. I deem it not likely that he will betray the secret. He will doubtless seek other means of satiating his dark passion.”

“And I!—how am I to live longer, breathing the same air with this deadly enemy?” exclaimed Arthur Dimmesdale, shrinking within himself, and pressing his hand nervously against his

heart—a gesture that had grown involuntary with him. “Think for me, Hester! Thou art strong. Resolve for me!”

“Thou must dwell no longer with this man,” said Hester, slowly and firmly. “Thy heart must be no longer under his evil eye!”

“It were far worse than death!” replied the minister. “But how to avoid it? What choice remains to me? Shall I lie down again on these withered leaves, where I cast myself when thou didst tell me what he was? Must I sink down there, and die at once?”

“Alas! what a ruin has befallen thee!” said Hester, with the tears gushing into her eyes. “Wilt thou die for very weakness? There is no other cause!”

“The judgment of God is on me,” answered the conscience- stricken priest. “It is too mighty for me to struggle with!”

“Heaven would show mercy,” rejoined Hester, “hadst thou but the strength to take advantage of it.”

“Be thou strong for me!” answered he. “Advise me what to do.”

“Is the world, then, so narrow?” exclaimed Hester Prynne, fixing her deep

eyes on the minister’s, and instinctively exercising a magnetic power over a spirit so shattered and subdued that it could hardly hold itself erect. “Doth the universe lie within the compass of yonder town, which only a little time ago was but a leaf-strewn desert, as lonely as this around us? Whither leads

yonder forest-track? Backward to the settlement, thou sayest! Yes; but, onward, too! Deeper it goes, and deeper into the wilderness, less plainly to be seen at every step; until some few miles hence the yellow leaves will show no vestige of the white man’s tread. There thou art free! So brief a journey would bring thee from a world where thou hast been most wretched, to one where thou mayest still be happy! Is there not shade enough in all this boundless forest to hide thy heart from the gaze of Roger Chillingworth?”

“Yes, Hester; but only under the fallen leaves!” replied the minister, with a sad smile.

“Then there is the broad pathway of the sea!” continued Hester. “It brought thee hither. If thou so choose, it will bear thee back again. In our native land, whether in some remote rural village, or in vast London—or, surely, in Germany, in France, in pleasant Italy—thou wouldst be beyond his power and knowledge! And what hast thou to do with all these iron men, and their opinions? They have kept thy better part in bondage too long already!”

“It cannot be!” answered the minister, listening as if he were called upon to realise a dream. “I am powerless to go. Wretched and sinful as I am, I have had no other thought than to drag on my earthly existence in the sphere where Providence hath placed me. Lost as my own soul is, I would still do what I may for other human souls! I dare not quit my post, though an unfaithful sentinel, whose sure reward is death and dishonour, when his dreary watch shall come to an end!”

“Thou art crushed under this seven years’ weight of misery,” replied Hester, fervently resolved to buoy him up with her own energy. “But thou shalt leave it all behind thee! It shall not cumber thy steps, as thou treadest along the forest-path: neither shalt thou freight the ship with it, if thou prefer to cross the sea. Leave this wreck and ruin here where it hath happened. Meddle no more with it! Begin all anew! Hast thou exhausted possibility in the failure of this one trial? Not so! The future is yet full of trial and success. There is happiness to be enjoyed! There is good to be done! Exchange this false life of thine for a true one. Be, if thy spirit summon thee to such a mission, the teacher and apostle of the red men. Or, as is more thy nature, be a scholar and a sage among the wisest and the most renowned of the cultivated world. Preach! Write! Act! Do anything, save to lie down and die! Give up this name of Arthur Dimmesdale, and make thyself another, and a high one, such as thou canst wear without fear or shame. Why shouldst thou tarry so much as one other day in the torments that have so gnawed into thy life? that have made

thee feeble to will and to do? that will leave thee powerless even to repent? Up, and away!”

“Oh, Hester!” cried Arthur Dimmesdale, in whose eyes a fitful light, kindled by her enthusiasm, flashed up and died away, “thou tellest of running a race to a man whose knees are tottering beneath him! I must die here! There is not the strength

or courage left me to venture into the wide, strange, difficult world alone!”

It was the last expression of the despondency of a broken spirit. He lacked energy to grasp the better fortune that seemed within his reach.

He repeated the word—”Alone, Hester!”

“Thou shall not go alone!” answered she, in a deep whisper. Then, all was spoken!

C H A P T E R XVIII

A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE

Arthur Dimmesdale gazed into Hester’s face with a look in which hope and joy shone out, indeed, but with fear betwixt them, and a kind of horror at her boldness, who had spoken what he vaguely hinted at, but dared not speak.

But Hester Prynne, with a mind of native courage and activity, and for so long a period not merely estranged, but outlawed from society, had habituated herself to such latitude of speculation as was altogether foreign to the clergyman. She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness, as vast, as intricate, and shadowy as the untamed forest, amid the gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide their fate. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in his woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established; criticising all with hardly more reverence than the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church. The tendency of her fate and fortunes had been to set her free. The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These

had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws; although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of the most sacred of

them. But this had been a sin of passion, not of principle, nor even purpose. Since that wretched epoch, he had watched with morbid zeal and minuteness, not his acts—for those it was easy to arrange—but each breath of emotion, and his every thought. At the head of the social system, as the clergymen of that day stood, he was only the more trammelled by its regulations, its principles, and even its prejudices. As a priest, the framework of his order inevitably hemmed him in. As a man who had once sinned, but who kept his conscience all alive and painfully sensitive by the fretting of an unhealed wound, he might have been supposed safer within the line of virtue than if he had never sinned at all.

Thus we seem to see that, as regarded Hester Prynne, the whole seven years of outlaw and ignominy had been little other than a preparation for this very hour. But Arthur Dimmesdale! Were such a man once more to fall, what plea could be urged in extenuation of his crime? None; unless it avail him somewhat that he was broken down by long and exquisite suffering; that

his mind was darkened and confused by the very remorse which harrowed it; that, between fleeing as an avowed criminal, and remaining as a hypocrite, conscience might find it hard to strike the balance; that it was human to avoid the peril of death and infamy, and the inscrutable machinations of an enemy; that, finally, to this poor pilgrim, on his dreary and desert path, faint, sick, miserable, there appeared a glimpse of human affection and sympathy, a new life, and a true one, in exchange for the heavy doom which he was now expiating. And be the stern and sad truth spoken, that the breach which guilt has once made into the human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired. It may be watched and guarded, so that the enemy shall not force his way again into the citadel, and might even in his subsequent assaults, select some other avenue, in preference to that where he had formerly succeeded. But there is still the ruined wall, and near it the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over again his unforgotten triumph.

The struggle, if there were one, need not be described. Let it suffice that the clergyman resolved to flee, and not alone.

“If in all these past seven years,” thought he, “I could recall one instant of peace or hope, I would yet endure, for the sake of that earnest of Heaven’s mercy. But now—since I am irrevocably doomed—wherefore should I not snatch the solace allowed to the condemned culprit before his execution? Or, if this be the path to a better life, as Hester would persuade me, I surely give up no fairer prospect by pursuing it! Neither can I

any longer live without her companionship; so powerful is she to sustain—so tender to soothe! O Thou to whom I dare not lift mine eyes, wilt Thou yet pardon me?”

“Thou wilt go!” said Hester calmly, as he met her glance.

The decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the exhilarating effect—upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon of his own heart—of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an unredeemed, unchristianised, lawless region. His spirit rose, as it were, with a bound, and attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than throughout all the misery which had kept him grovelling on the earth. Of a deeply religious temperament, there was inevitably a tinge of the devotional in his mood.

“Do I feel joy again?” cried he, wondering at himself. “Methought the germ of it was dead in me! Oh, Hester, thou art my better angel! I seem to have flung myself—sick, sin-stained, and sorrow-blackened—down upon these forest leaves, and to have risen up all made anew, and with new powers to glorify Him that hath been merciful! This is already the better life! Why did we not find it sooner?”

“Let us not look back,” answered Hester Prynne. “The past is gone! Wherefore should we linger upon it now? See! With this symbol I undo it all, and make it as if it had never been!”

So speaking, she undid the clasp that fastened the scarlet letter, and, taking it from her bosom, threw it to a distance among the withered leaves. The mystic token alighted on the hither verge of the stream. With a hand’s-breadth further flight, it would have fallen into the water, and have given the little brook another woe to carry onward, besides the unintelligible tale which it still kept murmuring about. But there lay the embroidered letter, glittering like a lost jewel, which some ill- fated wanderer might pick up, and thenceforth be haunted by strange phantoms of guilt, sinkings of the heart, and unaccountable misfortune.

The stigma gone, Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden of shame and anguish departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief! She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom! By another impulse, she took off the formal cap that confined her hair, and down it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her features. There played around her mouth, and beamed out of her eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves with her maiden hope, and a happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been

but the effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the

yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that had made a shadow hitherto, embodied the brightness now. The course of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood’s heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.

Such was the sympathy of Nature—that wild, heathen Nature of the forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher truth—with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly-born, or aroused from a death-like slumber, must always create a sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world. Had the forest still kept its gloom, it would have been bright in Hester’s eyes, and bright in Arthur Dimmesdale’s!

Hester looked at him with a thrill of another joy.

“Thou must know Pearl!” said she. “Our little Pearl! Thou hast seen her— yes, I know it!—but thou wilt see her now with other eyes. She is a strange child! I hardly comprehend her! But thou wilt love her dearly, as I do, and wilt advise me how to deal with her!”

“Dost thou think the child will be glad to know me?” asked the minister, somewhat uneasily. “I have long shrunk from children, because they often show a distrust—a backwardness to be familiar with me. I have even been afraid of little Pearl!”

“Ah, that was sad!” answered the mother. “But she will love thee dearly, and thou her. She is not far off. I will call her. Pearl!

Pearl!”

“I see the child,” observed the minister. “Yonder she is, standing in a streak of sunshine, a good way off, on the other side of the brook. So thou thinkest the child will love me?”

Hester smiled, and again called to Pearl, who was visible at some distance, as the minister had described her, like a bright- apparelled vision in a sunbeam, which fell down upon her through an arch of boughs. The ray quivered to and fro, making her figure dim or distinct—now like a real child, now like a child’s spirit—as the splendour went and came again. She heard her mother’s voice, and approached slowly through the forest.

Pearl had not found the hour pass wearisomely while her mother sat talking with the clergyman. The great black forest— stern as it showed itself to those who brought the guilt and troubles of the world into its bosom—became the playmate of the lonely infant, as well as it knew how. Sombre as it was, it put on the kindest of its moods to welcome her. It offered her the partridge- berries, the growth of the preceding autumn, but ripening only in the spring, and now red as drops of blood upon

the withered leaves. These Pearl gathered, and was pleased with their wild flavour. The small denizens of the wilderness hardly took pains to move out of her path. A partridge, indeed, with a brood of

ten behind her, ran forward threateningly, but soon repented of her fierceness, and clucked to her young ones not to be afraid. A pigeon, alone on a low branch, allowed Pearl to come beneath, and uttered a sound as much of greeting as alarm. A squirrel, from the lofty depths of his domestic tree, chattered either in anger or merriment—for the squirrel is such a choleric and humorous little personage, that it is hard to distinguish between his moods—so he chattered at the child, and flung down a nut upon her head. It was a last year’s nut, and already gnawed by his sharp tooth. A fox, startled from his sleep by her light footstep on the leaves, looked inquisitively at Pearl, as doubting whether it were better to steal off, or renew his nap on the same spot. A wolf, it is said—but here the tale has surely lapsed into the improbable— came up and smelt of Pearl’s robe, and offered his savage head to be patted by her hand. The truth seems to be, however, that the mother-forest, and these wild things which it nourished, all recognised a kindred wilderness in the human child.

And she was gentler here than in the grassy-margined streets of the settlement, or in her mother’s cottage. The Bowers appeared to know it, and one and another whispered as she passed,

“Adorn thyself with me, thou beautiful child, adorn thyself with me!”—and, to please them, Pearl gathered the violets, and anemones, and columbines, and some twigs of the freshest green, which the old trees held down before her eyes. With these she decorated her hair and her young waist, and became a nymph child, or an infant dryad, or whatever else was in closest sympathy with the antique wood. In such guise had Pearl adorned herself, when she heard her mother’s voice, and came slowly back.

Slowly—for she saw the clergyman!

C H A P T E R XIX

THE CHILD AT THE BROOKSIDE

“Thou wilt love her dearly,” repeated Hester Prynne, as she and the minister sat watching little Pearl. “Dost thou not think her beautiful? And see with what natural skill she has made those simple flowers adorn her! Had she gathered pearls, and diamonds, and rubies in the wood, they could not have become her better! She is a splendid child! But I know whose brow she has!”

“Dost thou know, Hester,” said Arthur Dimmesdale, with an unquiet smile, “that this dear child, tripping about always at thy side, hath caused me many an alarm? Methought—oh, Hester, what a thought is that, and how terrible to dread it!—that my own features were partly repeated in her face, and so strikingly that the world might see them! But she is mostly thine!”

“No, no! Not mostly!” answered the mother, with a tender smile. “A little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to trace whose child she is. But how strangely beautiful she looks with those wild flowers in her hair! It is as if one of the fairies, whom we left in dear old England, had decked her out to meet us.”

It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before experienced, that they sat and watched Pearl’s slow advance. In her was visible the tie that united them. She had been offered to the world, these seven past years, as the living hieroglyphic, in which was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide—all written in this symbol—all plainly manifest—had there been a prophet or magician skilled to read the character of flame! And Pearl was the oneness of their being. Be the foregone evil what it might, how could they doubt that their earthly lives and future destinies were conjoined when they beheld at once the material union, and the spiritual idea, in whom they met, and were to dwell immortally together; thoughts like these—and perhaps other thoughts, which they did not acknowledge or define— threw an awe about the child as she came onward.

“Let her see nothing strange—no passion or eagerness—in thy way of accosting her,” whispered Hester. “Our Pearl is a fitful and fantastic little elf sometimes. Especially she is generally intolerant of emotion, when she does not fully comprehend the why and wherefore. But the child hath strong affections! She loves me, and will love thee!”

“Thou canst not think,” said the minister, glancing aside at Hester Prynne, “how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns for it! But, in truth, as I already told thee, children are not readily won to be familiar with me. They will not climb my knee, nor prattle in my ear, nor answer to my smile, but stand apart, and eye me strangely. Even little babes, when I take them in my

arms, weep bitterly. Yet Pearl, twice in her little lifetime, hath been kind to me! The first time—thou knowest it well! The last was when thou ledst her with thee to the house of yonder stern old Governor.”

“And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine!” answered the mother. “I remember it; and so shall little Pearl. Fear nothing. She may be strange and shy at first, but will soon learn to love thee!”

By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and stood on the further side, gazing silently at Hester and the clergyman, who still sat together on the mossy tree-trunk waiting to receive her. Just where she had paused, the brook chanced to form a pool so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect image of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage, but more refined and spiritualized than the reality. This image, so nearly identical with the living

Pearl, seemed to communicate somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child herself. It was strange, the way in which Pearl stood, looking so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest gloom, herself, meanwhile, all glorified with a ray of sunshine, that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy. In the brook beneath stood another child

—another and the same—with likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself, in some indistinct and tantalizing manner, estranged from Pearl, as if the child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to return to it.

There were both truth and error in the impression; the child and mother were estranged, but through Hester’s fault, not Pearl’s. Since the latter rambled from her side, another inmate had been admitted within the circle of the mother’s feelings, and so modified the aspect of them all, that Pearl, the returning wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew where she was.

“I have a strange fancy,” observed the sensitive minister, “that this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the legends of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to cross a running stream? Pray hasten her, for this delay has already imparted a tremor to my nerves.”

“Come, dearest child!” said Hester encouragingly, and stretching out both her arms. “How slow thou art! When hast thou been so sluggish before now? Here is a friend of mine, who must be thy friend also. Thou wilt have twice as much love henceforward as thy mother alone could give thee! Leap across the brook and come to us. Thou canst leap like a young deer!”

Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet expressions, remained on the other side of the brook. Now she fixed her bright wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister, and now included them both in the same glance, as if to detect and explain to herself the relation which they bore to one another. For some unaccountable reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale felt the child’s eyes upon himself, his hand—with that gesture so habitual as to have become involuntary—stole over his heart. At length, assuming a singular air of authority, Pearl stretched out her hand, with the small forefinger extended, and pointing evidently towards her mother’s breast. And beneath, in the mirror of the brook, there was the flower- girdled and sunny image of little Pearl, pointing her small forefinger too.

“Thou strange child! why dost thou not come to me?” exclaimed Hester.

Pearl still pointed with her forefinger, and a frown gathered on her brow— the more impressive from the childish, the almost baby-like aspect of the features that conveyed it. As her mother still kept beckoning to her, and arraying her face in a holiday suit of unaccustomed smiles, the child stamped her foot with a yet more imperious look and gesture. In the brook, again, was the fantastic beauty of the image, with its reflected frown, its pointed finger, and imperious gesture, giving emphasis to the aspect of little Pearl.

“Hasten, Pearl, or I shall be angry with thee!” cried Hester Prynne, who, however, inured to such behaviour on the elf- child’s part at other seasons, was naturally anxious for a more seemly deportment now. “Leap across the brook, naughty child, and run hither! Else I must come to thee!”

But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother’s threats any more than mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a fit of passion, gesticulating violently, and throwing her small figure into the most extravagant contortions. She accompanied this wild outbreak with piercing shrieks, which the woods reverberated on all sides, so that, alone as she was in her childish and unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden multitude were lending her their sympathy and encouragement. Seen in the brook once more was the shadowy wrath of Pearl’s image, crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot, wildly gesticulating, and, in the midst of all, still pointing its small forefinger at Hester’s bosom.

“I see what ails the child,” whispered Hester to the clergyman, and turning pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her trouble and annoyance, “Children will not abide any, the slightest, change in the accustomed aspect of things that are daily before their eyes. Pearl misses something that she has always seen me wear!”

“I pray you,” answered the minister, “if thou hast any means of pacifying the child, do it forthwith! Save it were the cankered wrath of an old witch like Mistress Hibbins,” added he,

attempting to smile, “I know nothing that I would not sooner encounter than this passion in a child. In Pearl’s young beauty, as in the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect. Pacify her if thou lovest me!”

Hester turned again towards Pearl with a crimson blush upon her cheek, a conscious glance aside clergyman, and then a heavy sigh, while, even before she had time to speak, the blush yielded to a deadly pallor.

“Pearl,” said she sadly, “look down at thy feet! There!—before thee!—on the hither side of the brook!”

The child turned her eyes to the point indicated, and there lay the scarlet letter so close upon the margin of the stream that the gold embroidery was

reflected in it.

“Bring it hither!” said Hester.

“Come thou and take it up!” answered Pearl.

“Was ever such a child!” observed Hester aside to the minister. “Oh, I have much to tell thee about her! But, in very truth, she is right as regards this hateful token. I must bear its torture yet a little longer—only a few days longer

—until we shall have left this region, and look back hither as to a land which we have dreamed of. The forest cannot hide it! The

mid-ocean shall take it from my hand, and swallow it up for ever!”

With these words she advanced to the margin of the brook, took up the scarlet letter, and fastened it again into her bosom. Hopefully, but a moment ago, as Hester had spoken of drowning it in the deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon her as she thus received back this deadly symbol from the hand of fate. She had flung it into infinite space! she had drawn an hour’s free breath! and here again was the scarlet misery glittering on the old spot! So it ever is, whether thus typified or no, that an evil deed invests itself with the character of doom. Hester next gathered up the heavy tresses of her hair and confined them beneath her cap. As if there were a withering spell in the sad letter, her beauty, the warmth and richness of her womanhood, departed like fading sunshine, and a gray shadow seemed to fall across her.

When the dreary change was wrought, she extended her hand to Pearl.

“Dost thou know thy mother now, child?”, asked she, reproachfully, but with a subdued tone. “Wilt thou come across the brook, and own thy mother, now that she has her shame upon her—now that she is sad?”

“Yes; now I will!” answered the child, bounding across the brook, and clasping Hester in her arms “Now thou art my mother indeed! and I am thy little Pearl!”

In a mood of tenderness that was not usual with her, she drew down her mother’s head, and kissed her brow and both her cheeks. But then—by a kind of necessity that always impelled this child to alloy whatever comfort she might chance to give with a throb of anguish—Pearl put up her mouth and kissed the scarlet letter, too.

“That was not kind!” said Hester. “When thou hast shown me a little love, thou mockest me!”

“Why doth the minister sit yonder?” asked Pearl.

“He waits to welcome thee,” replied her mother. “Come thou, and entreat

his blessing! He loves thee, my little Pearl, and loves thy mother, too. Wilt thou not love him? Come he longs to greet thee!”

“Doth he love us?” said Pearl, looking up with acute intelligence into her mother’s face. “Will he go back with us, hand in hand, we three together, into the town?”

“Not now, my child,” answered Hester. “But in days to come he will walk hand in hand with us. We will have a home and fireside of our own; and thou shalt sit upon his knee; and he will teach thee many things, and love thee dearly. Thou wilt love him—wilt thou not?”

“And will he always keep his hand over his heart?” inquired Pearl.

“Foolish child, what a question is that!” exclaimed her mother. “Come, and ask his blessing!”

But, whether influenced by the jealousy that seems instinctive with every petted child towards a dangerous rival, or from whatever caprice of her freakish nature, Pearl would show no favour to the clergyman. It was only by an exertion of force that her mother brought her up to him, hanging back, and manifesting her reluctance by odd grimaces; of which, ever since her babyhood, she had possessed a singular variety, and could transform her mobile physiognomy into a series of different aspects, with a new mischief in them, each and all. The minister—painfully embarrassed, but hoping that a kiss might prove a talisman to admit him into the child’s kindlier regards— bent forward, and impressed one on her brow. Hereupon, Pearl broke away from her mother, and, running to the brook, stooped over it, and bathed her forehead, until the unwelcome kiss was quite washed off and diffused through a long lapse of the gliding water. She then remained apart, silently watching Hester and the clergyman; while they talked together and made such arrangements as were suggested by their new position and the purposes soon to be fulfilled.

And now this fateful interview had come to a close. The dell was to be left in solitude among its dark, old trees, which, with their multitudinous tongues, would whisper long of what had passed there, and no mortal be the wiser. And the melancholy brook would add this other tale to the mystery with which its little

heart was already overburdened, and whereof it still kept up a murmuring babble, with not a whit more cheerfulness of tone than for ages heretofore.

C H A P T E R XX

THE MINISTER IN A MAZE

As the minister departed, in advance of Hester Prynne and little Pearl, he threw a backward glance, half expecting that he should discover only some faintly traced features or outline of the mother and the child, slowly fading into the twilight of the woods. So great a vicissitude in his life could not at once be received as real. But there was Hester, clad in her gray robe, still standing beside the tree-trunk, which some blast had overthrown a long antiquity ago, and which time had ever since been covering with moss, so that these two fated ones, with earth’s heaviest burden on them, might there sit down together, and find a single hour’s rest and solace. And there was Pearl, too, lightly dancing from the margin of the brook—now that the intrusive third person was gone—and taking her old place by her mother’s side. So the minister had not fallen asleep and dreamed!

In order to free his mind from this indistinctness and duplicity of impression, which vexed it with a strange disquietude, he recalled and more thoroughly defined the plans which Hester and himself had sketched for their departure. It had been determined between them that the Old World, with its crowds and cities, offered them a more eligible shelter and

concealment than the wilds of New England or all America, with its alternatives of an Indian wigwam, or the few settlements of Europeans scattered thinly along the sea- board. Not to speak of the clergyman’s health, so inadequate to sustain the hardships of a forest life, his native gifts, his culture, and his entire development would secure him a home only in the midst of civilization and refinement; the higher the state the more delicately adapted to it the man. In furtherance of this choice, it so happened that a ship lay in the harbour; one of those unquestionable cruisers, frequent at that day, which, without being absolutely outlaws of the deep, yet roamed over its surface with a remarkable irresponsibility of character. This vessel had recently arrived from the Spanish Main, and within three days’ time would sail for Bristol. Hester Prynne— whose vocation, as a self-enlisted Sister of Charity, had brought her acquainted with the captain and crew—could take upon herself to secure the passage of two individuals and a child with all the secrecy which circumstances rendered more than desirable.

The minister had inquired of Hester, with no little interest, the precise time at which the vessel might be expected to depart. It would probably be on the fourth day from the present. “This is most fortunate!” he had then said to himself. Now, why the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale considered it so very fortunate we hesitate to reveal. Nevertheless—to hold nothing back from the reader—it was because, on the third day from the present, he was to preach the Election Sermon; and, as such an occasion

formed an honourable epoch in the life of a New England Clergyman, he could not have chanced upon a more

suitable mode and time of terminating his professional career. “At least, they shall say of me,” thought this exemplary man, “that I leave no public duty unperformed or ill-performed!” Sad, indeed, that an introspection so profound and acute as this poor minister’s should be so miserably deceived! We have had, and may still have, worse things to tell of him; but none, we apprehend, so pitiably weak; no evidence, at once so slight and irrefragable, of a subtle disease that had long since begun to eat into the real substance of his character. No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

The excitement of Mr. Dimmesdale’s feelings as he returned from his interview with Hester, lent him unaccustomed physical energy, and hurried him townward at a rapid pace. The pathway among the woods seemed wilder, more uncouth with its rude natural obstacles, and less trodden by the foot of man, than he remembered it on his outward journey. But he leaped across the plashy places, thrust himself through the clinging underbrush, climbed the ascent, plunged into the hollow, and overcame, in short, all the difficulties of the track, with an unweariable activity that astonished him. He could not but recall how feebly, and with what frequent pauses for breath he

had toiled over the same ground, only two days before. As he drew near the town, he took an impression of change from the series of familiar objects that presented themselves. It seemed not yesterday, not one, not two, but many days, or even years ago, since he had quitted them. There, indeed, was each former trace of the street, as he remembered it, and all the peculiarities of the houses, with the due multitude of gable-peaks, and a weather-cock at every point where his memory suggested one. Not the less, however, came this importunately obtrusive sense of change. The same was true as regarded the acquaintances whom he met, and all the well-known shapes of human life, about the little town. They looked neither older nor younger now; the beards of the aged were no whiter, nor could the creeping babe of yesterday walk on his feet to-day; it was impossible to describe in what respect they differed from the individuals on whom he had so recently bestowed a parting glance; and yet the minister’s deepest sense seemed to inform him of their mutability. A similar impression struck him most remarkably as he passed under the walls of his own church. The edifice had so very strange, and yet so familiar an aspect, that Mr. Dimmesdale’s mind vibrated between two ideas; either that he had seen it only in a dream hitherto, or that he was merely dreaming about it now.

This phenomenon, in the various shapes which it assumed, indicated no external change, but so sudden and important a change in the spectator of the familiar scene, that the

intervening space of a single day had operated on his consciousness like the lapse of years. The minister’s own will, and Hester’s will, and the fate that grew between them, had wrought this transformation. It

was the same town as heretofore, but the same minister returned not from the forest. He might have said to the friends who greeted him—”I am not the man for whom you take me! I left him yonder in the forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a mossy tree trunk, and near a melancholy brook! Go, seek your minister, and see if his emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain- wrinkled brow, be not flung down there, like a cast-off garment!” His friends, no doubt, would still have insisted with him—”Thou art thyself the man!” but the error would have been their own, not his.

Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home, his inner man gave him other evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code, in that interior kingdom, was adequate to account for the impulses now communicated to the unfortunate and startled minister. At every step he was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be at once involuntary and intentional, in spite of himself, yet growing out of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse. For instance, he met one of his own deacons. The good old man addressed him with the paternal affection and

patriarchal privilege which his venerable age, his upright and holy character, and his station in the church, entitled him to use and, conjoined with this, the deep, almost worshipping respect, which the minister’s professional and private claims alike demanded. Never was there a more beautiful example of how the majesty of age and wisdom may comport with the obeisance and respect enjoined upon it, as from a lower social rank, and inferior order of endowment, towards a higher. Now, during a conversation of some two or three moments between the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale and this excellent and hoary- bearded deacon, it was only by the most careful self- control that the former could refrain from uttering certain blasphemous suggestions that rose into his mind, respecting the communion- supper. He absolutely trembled and turned pale as ashes, lest his tongue should wag itself in utterance of these horrible matters, and plead his own consent for so doing, without his having fairly given it. And, even with this terror in his heart, he could hardly avoid laughing, to imagine how the sanctified old patriarchal deacon would have been petrified by his minister’s impiety.

Again, another incident of the same nature. Hurrying along the street, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale encountered the eldest female member of his church, a most pious and exemplary old dame, poor, widowed, lonely, and with a heart as full of reminiscences about her dead husband and children, and her dead friends of long ago, as a burial-ground is full of storied

gravestones. Yet all this, which would else have been such heavy sorrow, was made almost a solemn joy to her devout old soul, by religious consolations and the truths of Scripture, wherewith she had fed herself continually for more than thirty years. And since Mr. Dimmesdale had taken her in charge, the good grandam’s

chief earthly comfort—which, unless it had been likewise a heavenly comfort, could have been none at all—was to meet her pastor, whether casually, or of set purpose, and be refreshed with a word of warm, fragrant, heaven-breathing Gospel truth, from his beloved lips, into her dulled, but rapturously attentive ear. But, on this occasion, up to the moment of putting his lips to the old woman’s ear, Mr. Dimmesdale, as the great enemy of souls would have it, could recall no text of Scripture, nor aught else, except a brief, pithy, and, as it then appeared to him, unanswerable argument against the immortality of the human soul. The instilment thereof into her mind would probably have caused this aged sister to drop down dead, at once, as by the effect of an intensely poisonous infusion. What he really did whisper, the minister could never afterwards recollect. There was, perhaps, a fortunate disorder in his utterance, which failed to impart any distinct idea to the good widows comprehension, or which Providence interpreted after a method of its own.

Assuredly, as the minister looked back, he beheld an expression

of divine gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like the shine of the celestial city on her face, so wrinkled and ashy pale.

Again, a third instance. After parting from the old church member, he met the youngest sister of them all. It was a maiden newly-won—and won by the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale’s own sermon, on the Sabbath after his vigil—to barter the transitory pleasures of the world for the heavenly hope that was to assume brighter substance as life grew dark around her, and which would gild the utter gloom with final glory. She was fair and pure as a lily that had bloomed in Paradise. The minister knew well that he was himself enshrined within the stainless sanctity of her heart, which hung its snowy curtains about his image, imparting to religion the warmth of love, and to love a religious purity. Satan, that afternoon, had surely led the poor young girl away from her mother’s side, and thrown her into the pathway of this sorely tempted, or— shall we not rather say?— this lost and desperate man. As she drew nigh, the arch-fiend whispered him to condense into small compass, and drop into her tender bosom a germ of evil that would be sure to blossom darkly soon, and bear black fruit betimes. Such was his sense of power over this virgin soul, trusting him as she did, that the minister felt potent to blight all the field of innocence with but one wicked look, and develop all its opposite with but a word.

So—with a mightier struggle than he had yet sustained—he held his Geneva cloak before his face, and hurried onward, making no sign of recognition, and leaving the young sister to digest his

rudeness as she might. She ransacked her conscience—which was full of harmless little matters, like her pocket or her work- bag—and took herself to task, poor thing! for a thousand imaginary faults, and went about her household duties with swollen eyelids the next morning.

Before the minister had time to celebrate his victory over this last

temptation, he was conscious of another impulse, more ludicrous, and almost as horrible. It was—we blush to tell it—it was to stop short in the road, and teach some very wicked words to a knot of little Puritan children who were playing there, and had but just begun to talk. Denying himself this freak, as unworthy of his cloth, he met a drunken seaman, one of the ship’s crew from the Spanish Main. And here, since he had so valiantly forborne all other wickedness, poor Mr. Dimmesdale longed at least to shake hands with the tarry black-guard, and recreate himself with a few improper jests, such as dissolute sailors so abound with, and a volley of good, round, solid, satisfactory, and heaven-defying oaths! It was not so much a better principle, as partly his natural good taste, and still more his buckramed habit of clerical decorum, that carried him safely through the latter crisis.

“What is it that haunts and tempts me thus?” cried the minister to himself, at length, pausing in the street, and striking his hand against his forehead.

“Am I mad? or am I given over utterly to the fiend? Did I make a contract with him in the forest, and sign it with my blood? And does he now summon me to its fulfilment, by suggesting the performance of every wickedness which his most foul imagination can conceive?”

At the moment when the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale thus communed with himself, and struck his forehead with his hand, old Mistress Hibbins, the reputed witch-lady, is said to have been passing by. She made a very grand appearance, having on a high head-dress, a rich gown of velvet, and a ruff done up with the famous yellow starch, of which Anne Turner, her especial friend, had taught her the secret, before this last good lady had been hanged for Sir Thomas Overbury’s murder.

Whether the witch had read the minister’s thoughts or no, she came to a full stop, looked shrewdly into his face, smiled craftily, and—though little given to converse with clergymen— began a conversation.

“So, reverend sir, you have made a visit into the forest,” observed the witch-lady, nodding her high head-dress at him. “The next time I pray you to allow me only a fair warning, and I shall be proud to bear you company. Without taking overmuch upon myself my good word will go far towards gaining any

strange gentleman a fair reception from yonder potentate you wot of.”

“I profess, madam,” answered the clergyman, with a grave obeisance, such as the lady’s rank demanded, and his own good breeding made imperative—”I profess, on my conscience and character, that I am utterly bewildered as touching the purport of your words! I went not into the forest to seek a potentate, neither do I, at any future time, design a visit thither, with a view to gaining the favour of such personage. My one sufficient object was to greet

that pious friend of mine, the Apostle Eliot, and rejoice with him over the many precious souls he hath won from heathendom!”

“Ha, ha, ha!” cackled the old witch-lady, still nodding her high head-dress at the minister. “Well, well! we must needs talk thus in the daytime! You carry it off like an old hand! But at midnight, and in the forest, we shall have other talk together!”

She passed on with her aged stateliness, but often turning back her head and smiling at him, like one willing to recognise a secret intimacy of connexion.

“Have I then sold myself,” thought the minister, “to the fiend whom, if men say true, this yellow-starched and velveted old hag has chosen for her prince and master?”

The wretched minister! He had made a bargain very like it! Tempted by a dream of happiness, he had yielded himself with deliberate choice, as he had never done before, to what he knew was deadly sin. And the infectious poison of that sin had been thus rapidly diffused throughout his moral system. It had stupefied all blessed impulses, and awakened into vivid life the whole brotherhood of bad ones. Scorn, bitterness, unprovoked malignity, gratuitous desire of ill, ridicule of whatever was good and holy, all awoke to tempt, even while they frightened him.

And his encounter with old Mistress Hibbins, if it were a real incident, did but show its sympathy and fellowship with wicked mortals, and the world of perverted spirits.

He had by this time reached his dwelling on the edge of the burial ground, and, hastening up the stairs, took refuge in his study. The minister was glad to have reached this shelter, without first betraying himself to the world by any of those strange and wicked eccentricities to which he had been continually impelled while passing through the streets. He entered the accustomed room, and looked around him on its books, its windows, its fireplace, and the tapestried comfort of the walls, with the same perception of strangeness that had haunted him throughout his walk from the forest dell into the town and thitherward. Here he had studied and written; here gone through fast and vigil, and come forth half alive; here striven to pray; here borne a hundred thousand agonies! There

was the Bible, in its rich old Hebrew, with Moses and the Prophets speaking to him, and God’s voice through all.

There on the table, with the inky pen beside it, was an unfinished sermon, with a sentence broken in the midst, where his thoughts had ceased to gush out upon the page two days before. He knew that it was himself, the thin and white-cheeked minister, who had done and suffered these things, and written thus far into the Election Sermon! But he seemed to stand apart, and eye this former self with scornful pitying, but half-envious curiosity. That self was

gone. Another man had returned out of the forest—a wiser one—with a knowledge of hidden mysteries which the simplicity of the former never could have reached. A bitter kind of knowledge that!

While occupied with these reflections, a knock came at the door of the study, and the minister said, “Come in!”—not wholly devoid of an idea that he might behold an evil spirit. And so he did! It was old Roger Chillingworth that entered. The minister stood white and speechless, with one hand on the Hebrew Scriptures, and the other spread upon his breast.

“Welcome home, reverend sir,” said the physician “And how found you that godly man, the Apostle Eliot? But methinks, dear sir, you look pale, as if the travel through the wilderness had

been too sore for you. Will not my aid be requisite to put you in heart and strength to preach your Election Sermon?”

“Nay, I think not so,” rejoined the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. “My journey, and the sight of the holy Apostle yonder, and the free air which I have breathed have done me good, after so long confinement in my study. I think to need no more of your drugs, my kind physician, good though they be, and administered by a friendly hand.”

All this time Roger Chillingworth was looking at the minister with the grave and intent regard of a physician towards his patient. But, in spite of this outward show, the latter was almost convinced of the old man’s knowledge, or, at least, his confident suspicion, with respect to his own interview with Hester Prynne. The physician knew then that in the minister’s regard he was no longer a trusted friend, but his bitterest enemy. So much being known, it would appear natural that a part of it should be expressed. It is singular, however, how long a time often passes before words embody things; and with what security two persons, who choose to avoid a certain subject, may approach its very verge, and retire without disturbing it. Thus the minister felt no apprehension that Roger Chillingworth would touch, in express words, upon the real position which they sustained towards one another. Yet did the physician, in his dark way, creep frightfully near the secret.

“Were it not better,” said he, “that you use my poor skill tonight? Verily, dear sir, we must take pains to make you strong and

vigorous for this occasion of the Election discourse. The people look for great things from you, apprehending that another year may come about and find their pastor gone.”

“Yes, to another world,” replied the minister with pious resignation. “Heaven grant it be a better one; for, in good sooth, I hardly think to tarry with my flock through the flitting seasons of another year! But touching your medicine, kind sir, in my present frame of body I need it not.”

“I joy to hear it,” answered the physician. “It may be that my remedies, so

long administered in vain, begin now to take due effect. Happy man were I, and well deserving of New England’s gratitude, could I achieve this cure!”

“I thank you from my heart, most watchful friend,” said the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale with a solemn smile. “I thank you, and can but requite your good deeds with my prayers.”

“A good man’s prayers are golden recompense!” rejoined old Roger Chillingworth, as he took his leave. “Yea, they are the current gold coin of the New Jerusalem, with the King’s own mint mark on them!”

Left alone, the minister summoned a servant of the house, and requested food, which, being set before him, he ate with ravenous appetite. Then flinging the already written pages of

the Election Sermon into the fire, he forthwith began another, which he wrote with such an impulsive flow of thought and emotion, that he fancied himself inspired; and only wondered that Heaven should see fit to transmit the grand and solemn music of its oracles through so foul an organ pipe as he.

However, leaving that mystery to solve itself, or go unsolved for ever, he drove his task onward with earnest haste and ecstasy.

Thus the night fled away, as if it were a winged steed, and he careering on it; morning came, and peeped, blushing, through the curtains; and at last sunrise threw a golden beam into the study, and laid it right across the minister’s bedazzled eyes.

There he was, with the pen still between his fingers, and a vast, immeasurable tract of written space behind him!

C H A P T E R XXI

THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY

Betimes in the morning of the day on which the new Governor was to receive his office at the hands of the people, Hester Prynne and little Pearl came into the market-place. It was already thronged with the craftsmen and other plebeian inhabitants of the town, in considerable numbers, among whom, likewise, were many rough figures, whose attire of deer-skins marked them as belonging to some of the forest settlements, which surrounded the little metropolis of the colony.

On this public holiday, as on all other occasions for seven years past, Hester was clad in a garment of coarse gray cloth. Not more by its hue than by some indescribable peculiarity in its fashion, it had the effect of making her fade personally out of sight and outline; while again the scarlet letter brought her back from this twilight indistinctness, and revealed her under the moral aspect of its own illumination. Her face, so long familiar to the townspeople, showed the marble quietude which they were accustomed to behold there. It

was like a mask; or, rather like the frozen calmness of a dead woman’s features; owing this dreary resemblance to the fact

that Hester was actually dead, in respect to any claim of sympathy, and had departed out of the world with which she still seemed to mingle.

It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression unseen before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now; unless some preternaturally gifted observer should have first read the heart, and have afterwards sought a corresponding development in the countenance and mien. Such a spiritual seer might have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the multitude through several miserable years as a necessity, a penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure, she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony into a kind of triumph. “Look your last on the scarlet letter and its wearer!”—the people’s victim and lifelong bond-slave, as they fancied her, might say to them. “Yet a little while, and she will be beyond your reach! A few hours longer and the deep, mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which ye have caused to burn on her bosom!” Nor were it an inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to human nature, should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester’s mind, at the moment when she was about to win her freedom from the pain which had been thus deeply incorporated with her being. Might there not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last, long, breathless draught of the cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all her years of womanhood had been perpetually

flavoured. The wine of life, henceforth to be presented to her lips, must be indeed rich, delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and golden beaker, or else leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the lees of bitterness wherewith she had been drugged, as with a cordial of intensest potency.

Pearl was decked out with airy gaiety. It would have been impossible to guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed its existence to the shape of gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at once so gorgeous and so delicate as must have been requisite to contrive the child’s apparel, was the same that had achieved a task perhaps more difficult, in imparting so distinct a peculiarity to Hester’s simple robe. The dress, so proper was it to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or inevitable development and outward manifestation of her character, no more to be separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a butterfly’s wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright flower. As with these, so with the child; her garb was all of one idea with her nature. On this eventful day, moreover, there was a certain singular inquietude and excitement in her mood, resembling nothing so much as the shimmer of a diamond, that sparkles and flashes with the varied throbbings of the breast on which it is displayed. Children have always a sympathy in the agitations of those connected with them: always, especially, a sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of

whatever kind, in domestic circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who was the gem on her mother’s unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of her spirits, the emotions which none could detect in the marble passiveness of Hester’s brow.

This effervescence made her flit with a bird-like movement, rather than walk by her mother’s side.

She broke continually into shouts of a wild, inarticulate, and sometimes piercing music. When they reached the market- place, she became still more restless, on perceiving the stir and bustle that enlivened the spot; for it was usually more like the broad and lonesome green before a village meeting- house, than the centre of a town’s business.

“Why, what is this, mother?” cried she. “Wherefore have all the people left their work to-day? Is it a play-day for the whole world? See, there is the blacksmith! He has washed his sooty face, and put on his Sabbath-day clothes, and looks as if he would gladly be merry, if any kind body would only teach him how! And there is Master Brackett, the old jailer, nodding and smiling at me. Why does he do so, mother?”

“He remembers thee a little babe, my child,” answered Hester.

“He should not nod and smile at me, for all that—the black, grim, ugly- eyed old man!” said Pearl. “He may nod at thee, if he will; for thou art clad in gray, and wearest the scarlet letter. But see, mother, how many faces of strange people, and Indians

among them, and sailors! What have they all come to do, here in the market-place?”

“They wait to see the procession pass,” said Hester. “For the Governor and the magistrates are to go by, and the ministers, and all the great people and good people, with the music and the soldiers marching before them.”

“And will the minister be there?” asked Pearl. “And will he hold out both his hands to me, as when thou ledst me to him from the brook-side?”

“He will be there, child,” answered her mother, “but he will not greet thee to-day, nor must thou greet him.”

“What a strange, sad man is he!” said the child, as if speaking partly to herself. “In the dark nighttime he calls us to him, and holds thy hand and mine, as when we stood with him on the scaffold yonder! And in the deep forest, where only the old trees can hear, and the strip of sky see it, he talks with thee, sitting on a heap of moss! And he kisses my forehead, too, so that the little brook would hardly wash it off! But, here, in the sunny day, and among all the people, he knows us not; nor must we know him! A strange, sad man is he, with his hand always over his heart!”

“Be quiet, Pearl—thou understandest not these things,” said her mother. “Think not now of the minister, but look about thee, and see how cheery is everybody’s face to-day. The children have

come from their schools, and the grown people from their workshops and their fields, on purpose to be happy, for, to-day, a new man is beginning to rule over them; and so—as has been the custom of mankind ever since a nation was first gathered— they make merry and rejoice: as if a good and golden year were at length to pass over the poor old world!”

It was as Hester said, in regard to the unwonted jollity that brightened the faces of the people. Into this festal season of the year—as it already was, and continued to be during the greater part of two centuries—the Puritans compressed whatever mirth and public joy they deemed allowable to human infirmity; thereby so far dispelling the customary cloud, that, for the space of a single holiday, they appeared scarcely more grave than most other communities at a period of general affliction.

But we perhaps exaggerate the gray or sable tinge, which undoubtedly characterized the mood and manners of the age. The persons now in the market-place of Boston had not been born to an inheritance of Puritanic gloom. They were native Englishmen, whose fathers had lived in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan epoch; a time when the life of England, viewed as one great mass, would appear to have been as stately, magnificent, and joyous, as the world has ever witnessed. Had they followed their hereditary taste, the New England settlers would have illustrated all events of public importance by bonfires, banquets, pageantries, and processions. Nor would it have been impracticable, in the observance of majestic

ceremonies, to combine mirthful recreation with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque and brilliant embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation, at such festivals, puts on.

There was some shadow of an attempt of this kind in the mode of celebrating the day on which the political year of the colony commenced. The dim reflection of a remembered splendour, a colourless and manifold diluted repetition of what they had beheld in proud old London—we will not say at a royal coronation, but at a Lord Mayor’s show—might be traced in the customs which our forefathers instituted, with reference to the annual installation of magistrates. The fathers and founders of the commonwealth—the statesman, the priest, and the soldier— seemed it a duty then to assume the outward state and majesty, which, in accordance with antique style, was looked upon as the proper garb of public and social eminence. All came forth to move in procession before the people’s eye, and thus impart a needed dignity to the simple framework of a government so newly constructed.

Then, too, the people were countenanced, if not encouraged, in relaxing the severe and close application to their various modes of rugged industry, which

at all other times, seemed of the same piece and material with their religion. Here, it is true, were none of the appliances which popular merriment would so readily have found in the England of Elizabeth’s time, or that of James—no rude shows of a

theatrical kind; no minstrel, with his harp and legendary ballad, nor gleeman with an ape dancing to his music; no juggler, with his tricks of mimic witchcraft; no Merry Andrew, to stir up the multitude with jests, perhaps a hundred years old, but still effective, by their appeals to the very broadest sources of mirthful sympathy. All such professors of the several branches of jocularity would have been sternly repressed, not only by the rigid discipline of law, but by the general sentiment which give law its vitality. Not the less, however, the great, honest face of the people smiled—grimly, perhaps, but widely too. Nor were sports wanting, such as the colonists had witnessed, and shared in, long ago, at the country fairs and on the village- greens of England; and which it was thought well to keep alive on this new soil, for the sake of the courage and manliness that were essential in them. Wrestling matches, in the different fashions of Cornwall and Devonshire, were seen here and there about the market-place; in one corner, there was a friendly bout at quarterstaff; and—what attracted most interest of all—on the platform of the pillory, already so noted in our pages, two masters of defence were commencing an exhibition with the buckler and broadsword. But, much to the disappointment of the crowd, this latter business was broken off by the interposition of the town beadle, who had no idea of permitting the majesty of the law to be violated by such an abuse of one of its consecrated places.

It may not be too much to affirm, on the whole, (the people being then in the first stages of joyless deportment, and the offspring of sires who had known how to be merry, in their day), that they would compare favourably, in point of holiday keeping, with their descendants, even at so long an interval as ourselves. Their immediate posterity, the generation next to the early emigrants, wore the blackest shade of Puritanism, and so darkened the national visage with it, that all the subsequent years have not sufficed to clear it up. We have yet to learn again the forgotten art of gaiety.

The picture of human life in the market-place, though its general tint was the sad gray, brown, or black of the English emigrants, was yet enlivened by some diversity of hue. A party of Indians— in their savage finery of curiously embroidered deerskin robes, wampum-belts, red and yellow ochre, and feathers, and armed with the bow and arrow and stone-headed spear—stood apart with countenances of inflexible gravity, beyond what even the Puritan aspect could attain. Nor, wild as were these painted barbarians, were they the wildest feature of the scene. This distinction could more justly be claimed by some mariners—a part of the crew of the vessel from the Spanish Main—who had come ashore to see the humours of Election Day. They were rough- looking desperadoes, with sun-blackened faces, and an immensity of beard;

their wide short trousers were confined about the waist by belts, often clasped with a rough plate of gold, and sustaining always a long knife, and in some instances, a sword. From beneath their broad-brimmed hats of palm-leaf, gleamed eyes which, even in good-nature and merriment, had a kind of animal ferocity. They transgressed without fear or scruple, the rules of behaviour that were binding on all others: smoking tobacco under the beadle’s very nose, although each whiff would have cost a townsman a shilling; and quaffing at their pleasure, draughts of wine or aqua-vitae from pocket flasks, which they freely tendered to the gaping crowd around them. It remarkably characterised the incomplete morality of the age, rigid as we call it, that a licence was allowed the seafaring class, not merely for their freaks on shore, but for far more desperate deeds on their proper element. The sailor of that day would go near to be arraigned as a pirate in our own. There could be little doubt, for instance, that this very ship’s crew, though no unfavourable specimens of the nautical brotherhood, had been guilty, as we should phrase it, of depredations on the Spanish commerce, such as would have perilled all their necks in a modern court of justice.

But the sea in those old times heaved, swelled, and foamed very much at its own will, or subject only to the tempestuous wind, with hardly any attempts at regulation by human law. The buccaneer on the wave might relinquish his calling and become at once if he chose, a man of probity and piety on land; nor,

even in the full career of his reckless life, was he regarded as a personage with whom it was disreputable to traffic or casually associate. Thus the Puritan elders in their black cloaks, starched bands, and steeple-crowned hats, smiled not unbenignantly at the clamour and rude deportment of these jolly seafaring men; and it excited neither surprise nor animadversion when so reputable a citizen as old Roger Chillingworth, the physician, was seen to enter the market-place in close and familiar talk with the commander of the questionable vessel.

The latter was by far the most showy and gallant figure, so far as apparel went, anywhere to be seen among the multitude. He wore a profusion of ribbons on his garment, and gold lace on his hat, which was also encircled by a gold chain, and surmounted with a feather. There was a sword at his side and a sword-cut on his forehead, which, by the arrangement of his hair, he seemed anxious rather to display than hide. A landsman could hardly have worn this garb and shown this face, and worn and shown them both with such a galliard air, without undergoing stern question before a magistrate, and probably incurring a fine or imprisonment, or perhaps an exhibition in the stocks. As regarded the shipmaster, however, all was looked upon as pertaining to the character, as to a fish his glistening scales.

After parting from the physician, the commander of the Bristol ship

strolled idly through the market-place; until happening to approach the spot where Hester Prynne was standing, he appeared to recognise, and did not hesitate to address her. As was usually the case wherever Hester stood, a small vacant area—a sort of magic circle—had formed itself about her, into which, though the people were elbowing one another at a little distance, none ventured or felt disposed to intrude. It was a forcible type of the moral solitude in which the scarlet letter enveloped its fated wearer; partly by her own reserve, and partly by the instinctive, though no longer so unkindly, withdrawal of her fellow-creatures. Now, if never before, it answered a good purpose by enabling Hester and the seaman to speak together without risk of being overheard; and so changed was Hester Prynne’s repute before the public, that the matron in town, most eminent for rigid morality, could not have held such intercourse with less result of scandal than herself.

“So, mistress,” said the mariner, “I must bid the steward make ready one more berth than you bargained for! No fear of scurvy or ship fever this voyage. What with the ship’s surgeon and this other doctor, our only danger will be from drug or pill; more by token, as there is a lot of apothecary’s stuff aboard, which I traded for with a Spanish vessel.”

“What mean you?” inquired Hester, startled more than she permitted to appear. “Have you another passenger?”

“Why, know you not,” cried the shipmaster, “that this physician here— Chillingworth he calls himself—is minded to try my cabin-

fare with you? Ay, ay, you must have known it; for he tells me he is of your party, and a close friend to the gentleman you spoke of—he that is in peril from these sour old Puritan rulers.”

“They know each other well, indeed,” replied Hester, with a mien of calmness, though in the utmost consternation. “They have long dwelt together.”

Nothing further passed between the mariner and Hester Prynne. But at that instant she beheld old Roger Chillingworth himself, standing in the remotest corner of the market-place and smiling on her; a smile which—across the wide and bustling square, and through all the talk and laughter, and various thoughts, moods, and interests of the crowd—conveyed secret and fearful meaning.

C H A P T E R XXII

THE PROCESSION

Before Hester Prynne could call together her thoughts, and consider what

was practicable to be done in this new and startling aspect of affairs, the sound of military music was heard approaching along a contiguous street. It denoted the advance of the procession of magistrates and citizens on its way towards the meeting-house: where, in compliance with a custom thus early established, and ever since observed, the Reverend Mr.

Dimmesdale was to deliver an Election Sermon.

Soon the head of the procession showed itself, with a slow and stately march, turning a corner, and making its way across the market-place. First came the music. It comprised a variety of instruments, perhaps imperfectly adapted to one another, and played with no great skill; but yet attaining the great object for which the harmony of drum and clarion addresses itself to the multitude—that of imparting a higher and more heroic air to the scene of life that passes before the eye. Little Pearl at first clapped her hands, but then lost for an instant the restless agitation that had kept her in a continual effervescence

throughout the morning; she gazed silently, and seemed to be borne upward like a floating sea-bird on the long heaves and swells of sound. But she was brought back to her former mood by the shimmer of the sunshine on the weapons and bright armour of the military company, which followed after the music, and formed the honorary escort of the procession. This body of soldiery—which still sustains a corporate existence, and marches down from past ages with an ancient and honourable fame—was composed of no mercenary materials. Its ranks were filled with gentlemen who felt the stirrings of martial impulse, and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms, where, as in an association of Knights Templars, they might learn the science, and, so far as peaceful exercise would teach them, the practices of war. The high estimation then placed upon the military character might be seen in the lofty port of each individual member of the company. Some of them, indeed, by their services in the Low Countries and on other fields of European warfare, had fairly won their title to assume the name and pomp of soldiership. The entire array, moreover, clad in burnished steel, and with plumage nodding over their bright morions, had a brilliancy of effect which no modern display can aspire to equal.

And yet the men of civil eminence, who came immediately behind the military escort, were better worth a thoughtful observer’s eye. Even in outward demeanour they showed a stamp of majesty that made the warrior’s haughty stride look

vulgar, if not absurd. It was an age when what we call talent had far less consideration than now, but the massive materials which produce stability and dignity of character a great deal more. The people possessed by hereditary right the quality of reverence, which, in their descendants, if it survive at all, exists in smaller proportion, and with a vastly diminished force in the selection and estimate of public men. The change may be for good or ill, and is partly, perhaps, for both. In that old day the English settler on these rude shores—

having left king, nobles, and all degrees of awful rank behind, while still the faculty and necessity of reverence was strong in him—bestowed it on the white hair and venerable brow of age— on long-tried integrity—on solid wisdom and sad-coloured experience—on endowments of that grave and weighty order which gave the idea of permanence, and comes under the general definition of respectability. These primitive statesmen, therefore— Bradstreet, Endicott, Dudley, Bellingham, and their compeers—who were elevated to power by the early choice of the people, seem to have been not often brilliant, but distinguished by a ponderous sobriety, rather than activity of intellect. They had fortitude and self-reliance, and in time of difficulty or peril stood up for the welfare of the state like a line of cliffs against a tempestuous tide. The traits of character here indicated were well represented in the square cast of countenance and large physical development of the new

colonial magistrates. So far as a demeanour of natural authority was concerned, the mother country need not have been ashamed to see these foremost men of an actual democracy adopted into the House of Peers, or make the Privy Council of the Sovereign.

Next in order to the magistrates came the young and eminently distinguished divine, from whose lips the religious discourse of the anniversary was expected. His was the profession at that era in which intellectual ability displayed itself far more than in political life; for—leaving a higher motive out of the question it offered inducements powerful enough in the almost worshipping respect of the community, to win the most aspiring ambition into its service. Even political power—as in the case of Increase Mather—was within the grasp of a successful priest.

It was the observation of those who beheld him now, that never, since Mr. Dimmesdale first set his foot on the New England shore, had he exhibited such energy as was seen in the gait and air with which he kept his pace in the procession. There was no feebleness of step as at other times; his frame was not bent, nor did his hand rest ominously upon his heart. Yet, if the clergyman were rightly viewed, his strength seemed not of the body. It might be spiritual and imparted to him by angelical ministrations. It might be the exhilaration of that potent cordial which is distilled only in the furnace-glow of earnest and long- continued thought. Or perchance his sensitive temperament was invigorated by the loud and piercing music that swelled

heaven-ward, and uplifted him on its ascending wave. Nevertheless, so abstracted was his look, it might be questioned whether Mr. Dimmesdale even heard the music. There was his body, moving onward, and with an unaccustomed force. But where was his mind? Far and deep in its own region, busying itself, with preternatural activity, to marshal a procession of stately thoughts that were soon to issue thence; and so he saw nothing, heard nothing, knew nothing of what was around him; but the spiritual element took up the feeble frame and

carried it along, unconscious of the burden, and converting it to spirit like itself. Men of uncommon intellect, who have grown morbid, possess this occasional power of mighty effort, into which they throw the life of many days and then are lifeless for as many more.

Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not, unless that he seemed so remote from her own sphere, and utterly beyond her reach. One glance of recognition she had imagined must needs pass between them. She thought of the dim forest, with its little dell of solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where, sitting hand-in-hand, they had mingled their sad and passionate talk with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had they known each other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now! He, moving proudly past, enveloped as it were, in the rich

music, with the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista of his unsympathizing thoughts, through which she now beheld him! Her spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that, vividly as she had dreamed it, there could be no real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself. And thus much of woman was there in Hester, that she could scarcely forgive him—least of all now, when the heavy footstep of their approaching Fate might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer!—for being able so completely to withdraw himself from their mutual world—while she groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found him not.

Pearl either saw and responded to her mother’s feelings, or herself felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen around the minister. While the procession passed, the child was uneasy, fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of taking flight. When the whole had gone by, she looked up into Hester’s face—

“Mother,” said she, “was that the same minister that kissed me by the brook?”

“Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!” whispered her mother. “We must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in the forest.”

“I could not be sure that it was he—so strange he looked,” continued the child. “Else I would have run to him, and bid him

kiss me now, before all the people, even as he did yonder among the dark old trees. What would the minister have said, mother? Would he have clapped his hand over his heart, and scowled on me, and bid me begone?”

“What should he say, Pearl,” answered Hester, “save that it was no time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the market-place? Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not speak to him!”

Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr. Dimmesdale, was expressed by a person whose eccentricities— insanity, as we should term it— led her to do what few of the townspeople would have ventured on—to begin a conversation with the wearer of the scarlet letter in public. It was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great magnificence, with a triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of rich velvet, and a gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the procession. As this ancient lady had the renown (which subsequently cost her no less a price than her life) of being a principal actor in all the works of necromancy that were continually going forward, the crowd gave way before her, and seemed to fear the touch of her garment, as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous folds.

Seen in conjunction with Hester Prynne— kindly as so many now felt towards the latter—the dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins had doubled, and caused a general movement from that part of the market-place in which the two women stood.

“Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it?” whispered the old lady confidentially to Hester. “Yonder divine man! That saint on earth, as the people uphold him to be, and as—I must needs say—he really looks! Who, now, that saw him pass in the procession, would think how little while it is since he went forth out of his study—chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in his mouth, I warrant—to take an airing in the forest! Aha! we know what that means, Hester Prynne! But truly, forsooth, I find it hard to believe him the same man. Many a church member saw I, walking behind the music, that has danced in the same measure with me, when Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian powwow or a Lapland wizard changing hands with us! That is but a trifle, when a woman knows the world. But this minister. Couldst thou surely tell, Hester, whether he was the same man that encountered thee on the forest path?”

“Madam, I know not of what you speak,” answered Hester Prynne, feeling Mistress Hibbins to be of infirm mind; yet strangely startled and awe-stricken by the confidence with which she affirmed a personal connexion between so many persons (herself among them) and the Evil One. “It is not for me to talk lightly of a learned and pious minister of the Word, like the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale.”

“Fie, woman—fie!” cried the old lady, shaking her finger at Hester. “Dost thou think I have been to the forest so many times, and have yet no skill to judge who else has been there? Yea, though no leaf of the wild garlands which they wore while

they danced be left in their hair! I know thee, Hester, for I behold the token. We may all see it in the sunshine! and it glows like a red flame in the dark. Thou wearest it openly, so there need be no question about that. But this minister! Let me tell thee in thine ear! When the Black Man sees one of his own servants, signed and sealed, so shy of owning to the bond as is

the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, he hath a way of ordering matters so that the mark shall be disclosed, in open daylight, to the eyes of all the world! What is that the minister seeks to hide, with his hand always over his heart? Ha, Hester Prynne?”

“What is it, good Mistress Hibbins?” eagerly asked little Pearl. “Hast thou seen it?”

“No matter, darling!” responded Mistress Hibbins, making Pearl a profound reverence. “Thou thyself wilt see it, one time or another. They say, child, thou art of the lineage of the Prince of Air! Wilt thou ride with me some fine night to see thy father?

Then thou shalt know wherefore the minister keeps his hand over his heart!”

Laughing so shrilly that all the market-place could hear her, the weird old gentlewoman took her departure.

By this time the preliminary prayer had been offered in the meeting-house, and the accents of the Reverend Mr.

Dimmesdale were heard commencing his discourse. An irresistible feeling kept Hester near the spot. As the sacred

edifice was too much thronged to admit another auditor, she took up her position close beside the scaffold of the pillory. It was in sufficient proximity to bring the whole sermon to her ears, in the shape of an indistinct but varied murmur and flow of the minister’s very peculiar voice.

This vocal organ was in itself a rich endowment, insomuch that a listener, comprehending nothing of the language in which the preacher spoke, might still have been swayed to and fro by the mere tone and cadence. Like all other music, it breathed passion and pathos, and emotions high or tender, in a tongue native to the human heart, wherever educated. Muffled as the sound was by its passage through the church walls, Hester Prynne listened with such intenseness, and sympathized so intimately, that the sermon had throughout a meaning for her, entirely apart from its indistinguishable words. These, perhaps, if more distinctly heard, might have been only a grosser medium, and have clogged the spiritual sense. Now she caught the low undertone, as of the wind sinking down to repose itself; then ascended with it, as it rose through progressive gradations of sweetness and power, until its volume seemed to envelop her with an atmosphere of awe and solemn grandeur. And yet, majestic as the voice sometimes became, there was for ever in it an essential character of plaintiveness. A loud or low expression of anguish—the whisper, or the shriek, as it might be conceived, of suffering humanity, that touched a sensibility in every bosom! At times this deep strain of pathos was all that

could be heard, and scarcely heard sighing amid a desolate silence. But even when the minister’s voice grew high and commanding—when it gushed irrepressibly upward—when it assumed its utmost breadth and power, so

overfilling the church as to burst its way through the solid walls, and diffuse itself in the open air—still, if the auditor listened intently, and for the purpose, he could detect the same cry of pain. What was it? The complaint of a human heart, sorrow- laden, perchance guilty, telling its secret, whether of guilt or sorrow, to the great heart of mankind; beseeching its sympathy or forgiveness,

—at every moment,—in each accent,—and never in vain! It was this profound and continual undertone that gave the clergyman his most appropriate power.

During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of the scaffold. If the minister’s voice had not kept her there, there would, nevertheless, have been an inevitable magnetism in that spot, whence she dated the first hour of her life of ignominy.

There was a sense within her—too ill-defined to be made a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind—that her whole orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this spot, as with the one point that gave it unity.

Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother’s side, and was playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the

sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid the twilight of the clustering leaves. She had an undulating, but oftentimes a sharp and irregular movement. It indicated the restless vivacity of her spirit, which to-day was doubly indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because it was played upon and vibrated with her mother’s disquietude. Whenever Pearl saw anything to excite her ever active and wandering curiosity, she flew thitherward, and, as we might say, seized upon that man or thing as her own property, so far as she desired it, but without yielding the minutest degree of control over her motions in requital. The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled, were none the less inclined to pronounce the child a demon offspring, from the indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity that shone through her little figure, and sparkled with its activity. She ran and looked the wild Indian in the face, and he grew conscious of a nature wilder than his own. Thence, with native audacity, but still with a reserve as characteristic, she flew into the midst of a group of mariners, the swarthy-cheeked wild men of the ocean, as the Indians were of the land; and they gazed wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a flake of the sea- foam had taken the shape of a little maid, and were gifted with a soul of the sea-fire, that flashes beneath the prow in the

night-time.

One of these seafaring men the shipmaster, indeed, who had spoken to Hester Prynne was so smitten with Pearl’s aspect, that he attempted to lay hands upon her, with purpose to snatch a kiss. Finding it as impossible to touch her as to catch a humming-bird in the air, he took from his hat the gold chain that was twisted about it, and threw it to the child. Pearl immediately

twined it around her neck and waist with such happy skill, that, once seen there, it became a part of her, and it was difficult to imagine her without it.

“Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter,” said the seaman, “Wilt thou carry her a message from me?”

“If the message pleases me, I will,” answered Pearl.

“Then tell her,” rejoined he, “that I spake again with the black-a- visaged, hump shouldered old doctor, and he engages to bring his friend, the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him. So let thy mother take no thought, save for herself and thee. Wilt thou tell her this, thou witch-baby?”

“Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air!” cried Pearl, with a naughty smile. “If thou callest me that ill-name, I shall tell him of thee, and he will chase thy ship with a tempest!”

Pursuing a zigzag course across the marketplace, the child returned to her mother, and communicated what the mariner

had said. Hester’s strong, calm steadfastly-enduring spirit almost sank, at last, on beholding this dark and grim countenance of an inevitable doom, which at the moment when a passage seemed to open for the minister and herself out of their labyrinth of misery— showed itself with an unrelenting smile, right in the midst of their path.

With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the shipmaster’s intelligence involved her, she was also subjected to another trial. There were many people present from the country round about, who had often heard of the scarlet letter, and to whom it had been made terrific by a hundred false or exaggerated rumours, but who had never beheld it with their own bodily eyes. These, after exhausting other modes of amusement, now thronged about Hester Prynne with rude and boorish intrusiveness. Unscrupulous as it was, however, it could not bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards. At that distance they accordingly stood, fixed there by the centrifugal force of the repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired. The whole gang of sailors, likewise, observing the press of spectators, and learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came and thrust their sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the ring. Even the Indians were affected by a sort of cold shadow of the white man’s curiosity and, gliding through the crowd, fastened their snake-like black eyes on Hester’s bosom, conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this brilliantly embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high dignity

among her people. Lastly, the inhabitants of the town (their own interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by sympathy with what they saw others feel) lounged idly to the same quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all the rest, with their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar shame. Hester saw and recognized the selfsame faces of that group of matrons, who had awaited her forthcoming from the prison-door seven years ago; all save

one, the youngest and only compassionate among them, whose burial-robe she had since made. At the final hour, when she was so soon to fling aside the burning letter, it had strangely become the centre of more remark and excitement, and was thus made to sear her breast more painfully, than at any time since the first day she put it on.

While Hester stood in that magic circle of ignominy, where the cunning cruelty of her sentence seemed to have fixed her for ever, the admirable preacher was looking down from the sacred pulpit upon an audience whose very inmost spirits had yielded to his control. The sainted minister in the church! The woman of the scarlet letter in the marketplace! What imagination would have been irreverent enough to surmise that the same scorching stigma was on them both!

C H A P T E R XXIII

THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER

The eloquent voice, on which the souls of the listening audience had been borne aloft as on the swelling waves of the sea, at length came to a pause. There was a momentary silence, profound as what should follow the utterance of oracles. Then ensued a murmur and half-hushed tumult, as if the auditors, released from the high spell that had transported them into the region of another’s mind, were returning into themselves, with all their awe and wonder still heavy on them. In a moment more the crowd began to gush forth from the doors of the church.

Now that there was an end, they needed more breath, more fit to support the gross and earthly life into which they relapsed, than that atmosphere which the preacher had converted into words of flame, and had burdened with the rich fragrance of his thought.

In the open air their rapture broke into speech. The street and the market- place absolutely babbled, from side to side, with applauses of the minister. His hearers could not rest until they had told one another of what each knew better than he could tell or hear.

According to their united testimony, never had man spoken in so wise, so high, and so holy a spirit, as he that spake this day;

nor had inspiration ever breathed through mortal lips more evidently than it did through his. Its influence could be seen, as it were, descending upon him, and possessing him, and continually lifting him out of the written discourse that lay before him, and filling him with ideas that must have been as marvellous to himself as to his audience. His subject, it appeared, had been the relation between the Deity and the communities of mankind, with a special reference to the New England which they were here planting in the wilderness. And, as he drew towards the

close, a spirit as of prophecy had come upon him, constraining him to its purpose as mightily as the old prophets of Israel were constrained, only with this difference, that, whereas the Jewish seers had denounced judgments and ruin on their country, it was his mission to foretell a high and glorious destiny for the newly gathered people of the Lord. But, throughout it all, and through the whole discourse, there had been a certain deep, sad undertone of pathos, which could not be interpreted otherwise than as the natural regret of one soon to pass away. Yes; their minister whom they so loved—and who so loved them all, that he could not depart heavenward without a sigh—had the foreboding of untimely death upon him, and would soon leave them in their tears. This idea of his transitory stay on earth gave the last emphasis to the effect which the preacher had produced; it was as if an angel, in his passage to the skies, had

shaken his bright wings over the people for an instant—at once a shadow and a splendour—and had shed down a shower of golden truths upon them.

Thus, there had come to the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale—as to most men, in their various spheres, though seldom recognised until they see it far behind them—an epoch of life more brilliant and full of triumph than any previous one, or than any which could hereafter be. He stood, at this moment, on the very proudest eminence of superiority, to which the gifts or intellect, rich lore, prevailing eloquence, and a reputation of whitest sanctity, could exalt a clergyman in New England’s earliest days, when the professional character was of itself a lofty pedestal. Such was the position which the minister occupied, as he bowed his head forward on the cushions of the pulpit at the close of his Election Sermon. Meanwhile Hester Prynne was standing beside the scaffold of the pillory, with the scarlet letter still burning on her breast!

Now was heard again the clamour of the music, and the measured tramp of the military escort issuing from the church door. The procession was to be marshalled thence to the town hall, where a solemn banquet would complete the ceremonies of the day.

Once more, therefore, the train of venerable and majestic fathers were seen moving through a broad pathway of the people, who drew back reverently, on either side, as the Governor and magistrates, the old and wise men, the holy

ministers, and all that were eminent and renowned, advanced into the midst of them. When they were fairly in the marketplace, their presence was greeted by a shout. This— though doubtless it might acquire additional force and volume from the child-like loyalty which the age awarded to its rulers— was felt to be an irrepressible outburst of enthusiasm kindled in the auditors by that high strain of eloquence which was yet reverberating in their ears. Each felt the impulse in himself, and in the same breath, caught it from his neighbour. Within the church, it had hardly been kept down; beneath the sky it pealed upward to the zenith. There were human beings enough, and enough of highly

wrought and symphonious feeling to produce that more impressive sound than the organ tones of the blast, or the thunder, or the roar of the sea; even that mighty swell of many voices, blended into one great voice by the universal impulse which makes likewise one vast heart out of the many. Never, from the soil of New England had gone up such a shout! Never, on New England soil had stood the man so honoured by his mortal brethren as the preacher!

How fared it with him, then? Were there not the brilliant particles of a halo in the air about his head? So etherealised by spirit as he was, and so apotheosised by worshipping admirers, did his footsteps, in the procession, really tread upon the dust of earth?

As the ranks of military men and civil fathers moved onward, all eyes were turned towards the point where the minister was seen to approach among them. The shout died into a murmur, as one portion of the crowd after another obtained a glimpse of him.

How feeble and pale he looked, amid all his triumph! The energy—or say, rather, the inspiration which had held him up, until he should have delivered the sacred message that had brought its own strength along with it from heaven—was withdrawn, now that it had so faithfully performed its office. The glow, which they had just before beheld burning on his cheek, was extinguished, like a flame that sinks down hopelessly among the late decaying embers. It seemed hardly the face of a man alive, with such a death-like hue: it was hardly a man with life in him, that tottered on his path so nervously, yet tottered, and did not fall!

One of his clerical brethren—it was the venerable John Wilson— observing the state in which Mr. Dimmesdale was left by the retiring wave of intellect and sensibility, stepped forward hastily to offer his support. The minister tremulously, but decidedly, repelled the old man’s arm. He still walked onward, if that movement could be so described, which rather resembled the wavering effort of an infant, with its mother’s arms in view, outstretched to tempt him forward. And now, almost imperceptible as were the latter steps of his progress, he had come opposite the well-remembered and weather- darkened scaffold, where, long since, with all that dreary lapse of time

between, Hester Prynne had encountered the world’s ignominious stare. There stood Hester, holding little Pearl by the hand! And there was the scarlet letter on her breast! The minister here made a pause; although the music still played the stately and rejoicing march to which the procession moved. It summoned him onward—inward to the festival!—but here he made a pause.

Bellingham, for the last few moments, had kept an anxious eye upon him. He now left his own place in the procession, and advanced to give assistance judging, from Mr. Dimmesdale’s aspect that he must otherwise inevitably fall. But there was something in the latter’s expression that warned back the magistrate, although a man not readily obeying the vague intimations that pass

from one spirit to another. The crowd, meanwhile, looked on with awe and wonder. This earthly faintness, was, in their view, only another phase of the minister’s celestial strength; nor would it have seemed a miracle too high to be wrought for one so holy, had he ascended before their eyes, waxing dimmer and brighter, and fading at last into the light of heaven!

He turned towards the scaffold, and stretched forth his arms. “Hester,” said he, “come hither! Come, my little Pearl!”

It was a ghastly look with which he regarded them; but there was something at once tender and strangely triumphant in it.

The child, with the bird-like motion, which was one of her characteristics, flew to him, and clasped her arms about his knees. Hester Prynne—slowly, as if impelled by inevitable fate, and against her strongest will—likewise drew near, but paused before she reached him. At this instant old Roger Chillingworth thrust himself through the crowd—or, perhaps, so dark, disturbed, and evil was his look, he rose up out of some nether region—to snatch back his victim from what he sought to do! Be that as it might, the old man rushed forward, and caught the minister by the arm.

“Madman, hold! what is your purpose?” whispered he. “Wave back that woman! Cast off this child! All shall be well! Do not blacken your fame, and perish in dishonour! I can yet save you! Would you bring infamy on your sacred profession?”

“Ha, tempter! Methinks thou art too late!” answered the minister, encountering his eye, fearfully, but firmly. “Thy power is not what it was! With God’s help, I shall escape thee now!”

He again extended his hand to the woman of the scarlet letter.

“Hester Prynne,” cried he, with a piercing earnestness, “in the name of Him, so terrible and so merciful, who gives me grace, at this last moment, to do what—for my own heavy sin and miserable agony—I withheld myself from doing seven years ago, come hither now, and twine thy strength about me! Thy strength, Hester; but let it be guided by the will which God hath granted me! This wretched and wronged old man is opposing it

with all his might!—with all his own might, and the fiend’s! Come, Hester—come! Support me up yonder scaffold.”

The crowd was in a tumult. The men of rank and dignity, who stood more immediately around the clergyman, were so taken by surprise, and so perplexed as to the purport of what they saw—unable to receive the explanation which most readily presented itself, or to imagine any other—that they remained silent and inactive spectators of the judgement which Providence seemed about to work. They beheld the minister, leaning on

Hester’s shoulder, and supported by her arm around him, approach the scaffold, and ascend its steps; while still the little hand of the sin-born child was clasped in his. Old Roger Chillingworth followed, as one intimately connected with the drama of guilt and sorrow in which they had all been actors, and well entitled, therefore to be present at its closing scene.

“Hadst thou sought the whole earth over,” said he looking darkly at the clergyman, “there was no one place so secret—no high place nor lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me—save on this very scaffold!”

“Thanks be to Him who hath led me hither!” answered the minister.

Yet he trembled, and turned to Hester, with an expression of doubt and anxiety in his eyes, not the less evidently betrayed, that there was a feeble smile upon his lips.

“Is not this better,” murmured he, “than what we dreamed of in the forest?” “I know not! I know not!” she hurriedly replied. “Better? Yea; so we may

both die, and little Pearl die with us!”

“For thee and Pearl, be it as God shall order,” said the minister; “and God is merciful! Let me now do the will which He hath made plain before my sight. For, Hester, I am a dying man. So let me make haste to take my shame upon me!”

Partly supported by Hester Prynne, and holding one hand of little Pearl’s, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale turned to the dignified and venerable rulers; to the holy ministers, who were his brethren; to the people, whose great heart was thoroughly appalled yet overflowing with tearful sympathy, as knowing that some deep life-matter—which, if full of sin, was full of anguish and repentance likewise—was now to be laid open to them. The sun, but little past its meridian, shone down upon the clergyman, and gave a distinctness to his figure, as he stood out from all the earth, to put in his plea of guilty at the bar of Eternal Justice.

“People of New England!” cried he, with a voice that rose over them, high, solemn, and majestic—yet had always a tremor through it, and sometimes a shriek, struggling up out of a

fathomless depth of remorse and woe—”ye, that have loved me!—ye, that have deemed me holy!—behold me here, the one sinner of the world! At last—at last!—I stand upon the spot where, seven years since, I should have stood, here, with this woman, whose arm, more than the little strength wherewith I have crept hitherward, sustains me at this dreadful moment, from grovelling down upon my face! Lo, the scarlet letter which Hester wears! Ye have all shuddered at it! Wherever her walk hath been

—wherever, so miserably burdened, she may have hoped to find repose—it hath cast a lurid gleam of awe and horrible repugnance round about her. But

there stood one in the midst of you, at whose brand of sin and infamy ye have not shuddered!”

It seemed, at this point, as if the minister must leave the remainder of his secret undisclosed. But he fought back the bodily weakness—and, still more, the faintness of heart—that was striving for the mastery with him. He threw off all assistance, and stepped passionately forward a pace before the woman and the children.

“It was on him!” he continued, with a kind of fierceness; so determined was he to speak out the whole. “God’s eye beheld it! The angels were for ever pointing at it! (The Devil knew it well, and fretted it continually with the touch of his burning finger!)

But he hid it cunningly from men, and walked among you with the mien of a spirit, mournful, because so pure in a sinful world!— and sad, because he missed his heavenly kindred! Now, at the death-hour, he stands up before you! He bids you look again at Hester’s scarlet letter! He tells you, that, with all its mysterious horror, it is but the shadow of what he bears on his own breast, and that even this, his own red stigma, is no more than the type of what has seared his inmost heart! Stand any here that question God’s judgment on a sinner! Behold! Behold, a dreadful witness of it!”

With a convulsive motion, he tore away the ministerial band from before his breast. It was revealed! But it were irreverent to describe that revelation. For an instant, the gaze of the horror- stricken multitude was concentrated on the ghastly miracle; while the minister stood, with a flush of triumph in his face, as one who, in the crisis of acutest pain, had won a victory. Then, down he sank upon the scaffold! Hester partly raised him, and supported his head against her bosom. Old Roger Chillingworth knelt down beside him, with a blank, dull countenance, out of which the life seemed to have departed.

“Thou hast escaped me!” he repeated more than once. “Thou hast escaped me!”

“May God forgive thee!” said the minister. “Thou, too, hast deeply sinned!”

He withdrew his dying eyes from the old man, and fixed them on the woman and the child.

“My little Pearl,” said he, feebly and there was a sweet and gentle smile over his face, as of a spirit sinking into deep repose; nay, now that the burden was removed, it seemed almost as if he would be sportive with the child

—”dear little Pearl, wilt thou kiss me now? Thou wouldst not, yonder, in the forest! But now thou wilt?”

Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part had developed all her sympathies; and as her tears

fell upon her father’s cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor forever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it. Towards her mother, too, Pearl’s errand as a messenger of anguish was fulfilled.

“Hester,” said the clergyman, “farewell!”

“Shall we not meet again?” whispered she, bending her face down close to his. “Shall we not spend our immortal life together?

Surely, surely, we have ransomed one another, with all this woe! Thou lookest far into eternity, with those bright dying eyes!

Then tell me what thou seest!”

“Hush, Hester—hush!” said he, with tremulous solemnity. “The law we broke!—the sin here awfully revealed!—let these alone be in thy thoughts! I fear! I fear! It may be, that, when we forgot our God—when we violated our reverence each for the other’s soul—it was thenceforth vain to hope that we could meet hereafter, in an everlasting and pure reunion. God knows; and He is merciful! He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my breast! By sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to keep the torture always at red-heat! By bringing me hither, to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people! Had either of these agonies been wanting, I had been lost for ever! Praised be His name! His will be done! Farewell!”

That final word came forth with the minister’s expiring breath. The multitude, silent till then, broke out in a strange, deep voice of awe and wonder, which could not as yet find utterance, save in this murmur that rolled so heavily after the departed spirit.

C H A P T E R XXIV

CONCLUSION

After many days, when time sufficed for the people to arrange their thoughts in reference to the foregoing scene, there was more than one account of what had been witnessed on the scaffold.

Most of the spectators testified to having seen, on the breast of the unhappy minister, a SCARLET LETTER—the very semblance of that worn by Hester Prynne—imprinted in the flesh. As regarded its origin there were various explanations, all of which must necessarily have been conjectural. Some affirmed that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when

Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge, had begun a course of penance—which he afterwards, in so many futile methods, followed out—by inflicting a hideous torture on himself. Others contended that the stigma had not been produced until a long time subsequent, when old Roger Chillingworth, being a potent necromancer, had caused it to appear, through the agency of magic and poisonous drugs.

Others, again and those best able to appreciate the minister’s peculiar sensibility, and the wonderful operation of his spirit

upon the body—whispered their belief, that the awful symbol was the effect of the ever-active tooth of remorse, gnawing from the inmost heart outwardly, and at last manifesting Heaven’s dreadful judgment by the visible presence of the letter. The reader may choose among these theories. We have thrown all the light we could acquire upon the portent, and would gladly, now that it has done its office, erase its deep print out of our own brain, where long meditation has fixed it in very undesirable distinctness.

It is singular, nevertheless, that certain persons, who were spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have removed their eyes from the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that there was any mark whatever on his breast, more than on a new-born infant’s. Neither, by their report, had his dying words acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any—the slightest— connexion on his part, with the guilt for which Hester Prynne had so long worn the scarlet letter. According to these highly-respectable witnesses, the minister, conscious that he was dying—conscious, also, that the reverence of the multitude placed him already among saints and angels—had desired, by yielding up his breath in the arms of that fallen woman, to express to the world how utterly nugatory is the choicest of man’s own righteousness. After exhausting life in his efforts for mankind’s spiritual good, he had made the manner of his death a parable, in order to impress on his admirers the mighty and mournful lesson, that, in the view of Infinite Purity, we are

sinners all alike. It was to teach them, that the holiest amongst us has but attained so far above his fellows as to discern more clearly the Mercy which looks down, and repudiate more utterly the phantom of human merit, which would look aspiringly upward. Without disputing a truth so momentous, we must be allowed to consider this version of Mr. Dimmesdale’s story as only an instance of that stubborn fidelity with which a man’s friends—and especially a clergyman’s—will sometimes uphold his character, when proofs, clear as the mid-day sunshine on the scarlet letter, establish him a false and sin-stained creature of the dust.

The authority which we have chiefly followed—a manuscript of old date, drawn up from the verbal testimony of individuals, some of whom had known Hester Prynne, while others had heard the tale from contemporary witnesses fully confirms the view taken in the foregoing pages. Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister’s miserable experience, we put

only this into a sentence:—”Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred!”

Nothing was more remarkable than the change which took place, almost immediately after Mr. Dimmesdale’s death, in the appearance and demeanour of the old man known as Roger

Chillingworth. All his strength and energy— all his vital and intellectual force—seemed at once to desert him, insomuch that he positively withered up, shrivelled away and almost vanished from mortal sight, like an uprooted weed that lies wilting in the sun. This unhappy man had made the very principle of his life to consist in the pursuit and systematic exercise of revenge; and when, by its completest triumph consummation that evil principle was left with no further material to support it

—when, in short, there was no more Devil’s work on earth for him to do, it only remained for the unhumanised mortal to betake himself whither his master would find him tasks enough, and pay him his wages duly. But, to all these shadowy beings, so long our near acquaintances—as well Roger Chillingworth as his companions we would fain be merciful. It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual fife upon another: each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his subject. Philosophically considered, therefore, the two passions seem essentially the same, except that one happens to be seen in a celestial radiance, and the other in a dusky and lurid glow. In the spiritual world, the old physician and the minister—mutual victims as they have been

—may, unawares, have found their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy

transmuted into golden love.

Leaving this discussion apart, we have a matter of business to communicate to the reader. At old Roger Chillingworth’s decease, (which took place within the year), and by his last will and testament, of which Governor Bellingham and the Reverend Mr. Wilson were executors, he bequeathed a very considerable amount of property, both here and in England to little Pearl, the daughter of Hester Prynne.

So Pearl—the elf child—the demon offspring, as some people up to that epoch persisted in considering her—became the richest heiress of her day in the New World. Not improbably this circumstance wrought a very material change in the public estimation; and had the mother and child remained here, little Pearl at a marriageable period of life might have mingled her wild blood with the lineage of the devoutest Puritan among them all. But, in no long time after the physician’s death, the wearer of the scarlet letter disappeared, and Pearl along with her. For many years, though a vague report would now and

then find its way across the sea—like a shapeless piece of driftwood tossed ashore with the initials of a name upon it—yet no tidings of them unquestionably authentic were received. The story of the scarlet letter grew into a legend. Its spell, however,

was still potent, and kept the scaffold awful where the poor minister had died, and likewise the cottage by the sea-shore where Hester Prynne had dwelt. Near this latter spot, one afternoon some children were at play, when they beheld a tall woman in a gray robe approach the cottage-door. In all those years it had never once been opened; but either she unlocked it or the decaying wood and iron yielded to her hand, or she glided shadow-like through these impediments—and, at all events, went in.

On the threshold she paused—turned partly round—for perchance the idea of entering alone and all so changed, the home of so intense a former life, was more dreary and desolate than even she could bear. But her hesitation was only for an instant, though long enough to display a scarlet letter on her breast.

And Hester Prynne had returned, and taken up her long- forsaken shame! But where was little Pearl? If still alive she must now have been in the flush and bloom of early womanhood. None knew—nor ever learned with the fulness of perfect certainty—whether the elf-child had gone thus untimely to a maiden grave; or whether her wild, rich nature had been softened and subdued and made capable of a woman’s gentle happiness. But through the remainder of Hester’s life there were indications that the recluse of the scarlet letter was the object of love and interest with some inhabitant of another land.

Letters came, with armorial seals upon them, though of

bearings unknown to English heraldry. In the cottage there were articles of comfort and luxury such as Hester never cared to use, but which only wealth could have purchased and affection have imagined for her. There were trifles too, little ornaments, beautiful tokens of a continual remembrance, that must have been wrought by delicate fingers at the impulse of a fond heart. And once Hester was seen embroidering a baby-garment with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult had any infant thus apparelled, been shown to our sober-hued community.

In fine, the gossips of that day believed—and Mr. Surveyor Pue, who made investigations a century later, believed—and one of his recent successors in office, moreover, faithfully believes— that Pearl was not only alive, but married, and happy, and mindful of her mother; and that she would most joyfully have entertained that sad and lonely mother at her fireside.

But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New England, than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned, therefore, and resumed— of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it—resumed the symbol of which we

have related so dark a tale. Never afterwards did it quit her bosom. But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-

devoted years that made up Hester’s life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too. And, as Hester Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more especially

—in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion—or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognised the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful, and wise; moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of

joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end.

So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the scarlet letter. And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King’s Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tomb- stone served for both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate—as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport—there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which may serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:—

“ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES”

oxford world’s classics

THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD

Oliver Goldsmith was born in 1730(?), the second son of Charles Goldsmith, curate of the parish of Kilkenny West in West Meath in Ireland. In 1745 he was admitted to Trinity College Dublin. He quickly dissipated his savings by gambling, which was to become an abiding interest. After periods at the Universities of Edinburgh and Leyden he spent 1755–6 travelling in Europe, where he is reputed to have eked out a living by playing the flute and disputing doctrinal points at monasteries and universities. Before embarking on a writing career he worked in London as an apothecary’s assistant, a doctor, and a school usher. A combination of overwork, worry, and poor self-treatment hastened his death in 1774.

Goldsmith’s ability and range as a professional writer were considerable. Best known perhaps for The Vicar of Wakefield, he was also the author of biographies, anthologies, translations, poems (The Traveller, 1764, and The Deserted Village, 1770), plays (She Stoops to Conquer, 1773), as well as numerous reviews and essays.

Arthur Friedman is the late distinguished Professor of English at the University of Chicago and editor of Goldsmith’s Collected Works.

Robert L. Mack is a lecturer in the School of English at the University of Exeter. He has previously taught at Princeton University and Vanderbilt University, and is the editor of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and Oriental Tales for Oxford World’s Classics. His biog- raphy of the poet Thomas Gray was published by Yale University Press in 2000.

oxford world’s classics

For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics have brought readers closer to the world’s great literature. Now with over 700 titles—from the 4,000-year-old myths of Mesopotamia to the twentieth century’s greatest novels—the series makes available lesser-known as well as celebrated writing.

The pocket-sized hardbacks of the early years contained introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, and other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading.

Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and

reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers.

OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

OLIVER GOLDSMITH

The Vicar of Wakefield

Edited by

ARTHUR FRIEDMAN

With an Introduction and Notes by

ROBERT L. MACK

1

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in

Oxford New York

Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto

With offices in

Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in the United States

by Oxford University Press Inc., New York Editorial matter © Robert L. Mack 2006

The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published as a World’s Classics paperback 1981 Reissued as an Oxford World’s Classics paperback 1999 New edition 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press,

or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available

Typeset in Ehrhardt

by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk Printed in Great Britain by

Clays Ltd, St. Ives plc.

ISBN 0–19–280512–6 978–0–19–280512–6

1

CONTENTS

Introduction vii

Note on the Text xxxix

Select Bibliography xl

A Chronology of Oliver Goldsmith xlv

THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD 1

Explanatory Notes 171

This page intentionally left blank

INTRODUCTION

Composition, Publication, and Reception

The Vicar of Wakefield—Oliver Goldsmith’s only novel—was first published on 27 March 1766. A second edition, in which Goldsmith made a great many stylistic revisions to the text, appeared on 31 May of that same year. Three further editions of the novel were to be published in the author’s own lifetime, the last of which was dated 2 April 1774—just two days before Goldsmith’s death.

The manner in which the manuscript of Goldsmith’s novel first found its way into the hands of booksellers has become the stuff of literary legend. The most famous account first appeared in James Boswell’s monumental Life of Johnson in 1791. Boswell reports Johnson as having recollected,

I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was drest, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he pro- duced to me. I looked into it, and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return, and having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.¹

Boswell was not alone in considering the anecdote worth preserv- ing. Both Hester Lynch (Thrale) Piozzi and Sir John Hawkins

¹ James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 294.

viii Introduction

had included similar accounts in their own memoirs relating to Johnson (which appeared in 1786 and 1787, respectively), and still further details regarding the origin and history of Gold- smith’s novel were to be forthcoming.² The inevitable contradic- tions between these several versions would extend to comprehend a wide range of disagreements regarding the actual date on which the transaction took place, the identity of the bookseller(s) involved, the precise amount of money that changed hands, and speculation as to where and when the work had been written or, indeed, if the novel had even been completed at the time of the sale. In whatever form one first encounters the story, however, its most striking feature remains the simple revelation that The Vicar of Wakefield is clearly among those works that finally reached the public only as a result of immediate financial need. Like John- son’s own Rasselas (1759)—said to have been written ‘in the even- ings of one week’, and under the awful pressure of his mother’s grave illness—The Vicar of Wakefield, for all its polite reputation as a genial and light-hearted work, was in actual fact the product of financial exigency.³ In a manner similar to so many noteworthy novels of the period (among them not only the works of profes- sional authors such as Eliza Haywood and Clara Reeve, but also the fictions of Frances Sheridan, Elizabeth Inchbald, and the later novels of Fanny Burney), Goldsmith’s volume was written under conditions of considerable economic, emotional, and even physical stress. As an actual text, The Vicar of Wakefield was made available to a wider audience only as an impromptu means of last resort.

Goldsmith had already, even at this relatively early stage of his career in London, gained some reputation as one of the most prolific of the so-called ‘Grub Street hacks’—that growing breed of writers-for-hire whose work was to fill the pages of an

² The accounts of Hawkins and Piozzi are included in E. H. Mikhail (ed.), Goldsmith: Interviews and Recollections (London: St Martin’s Press, 1993), 30–4, 53–5; other versions of events can be found in several of the passages brought together in G. S. Rousseau (ed.), Goldsmith: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).

³ Boswell, Life of Johnson, 240.

Introduction ix

ever-increasing number of newspapers, journals, and magazines throughout the period. Since 1757 he had been turning out enormous amounts of material—translations, book reviews, short tales, and essays—writing at first for Ralph Griffiths’s Monthly Review, and later for (among others) the Critical Review, the British Magazine, and the Public Ledger. He also found the time to see his own short-lived periodical—The Bee (1759)—through the press, and to publish his extended Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759).

Given the rather chaotic circumstances under which the manuscript of Goldsmith’s novel was sold in the autumn of 1762 and the difficult conditions under which it was written, it is all the more intriguing that his tale betrays in its telling what can only be described as a narrative pace of hasty leisure. In terms of its fictional stride, The Vicar of Wakefield falls somewhere between the ordered wanderings of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and the more casual pilgrimage of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752). The Vicar of Wakefield remains a pecu- liarly odd generic hybrid that participates in modes as diverse as the picaresque novel, the French philosophical conte, the period- ical essay, domestic conduct books, and the traditions of classical fabulists such as Aesop, while at the same time invoking the for- mal structures and arguments of everything from sermons and political pamphlets to the lyrics of the pleasure gardens and the popular ballads of the city streets. Assimilating such a wide var- iety of narrative voices, the novel moves at an expository speed that is at once both recognizable and unique; it is a notably short work possessed, if not of epic tropes and epic rhetoric, then at least of a certain degree of epic depth and resonance. An intim- ate, family story of fewer than two hundred pages that confines itself to what one chapter heading describes as ‘The happiness of a country fire-side’ (p. 27), Goldsmith’s work has, nevertheless, routinely if paradoxically been regarded as little less than an iconic depiction of national identity. As the Victorian reader George Lillie Craik observed in 1845, The Vicar of Wakefield stands for many English readers as the ‘first genuine novel of domestic life’, and would continue for some considerable time to

x Introduction

be looked upon as an achievement which—unlike the work of, say, Fielding or Sterne—furnished a balanced and historically specific ‘representation of the common national mind and man- ners’ and ‘the broad general course of our English thinking and living’.⁴ The character of an entire cultural point of view, in other words, was thought for generations to have been distilled in its pages to a perfect quintessence. Within the structural framework of what many would argue remains, essentially, little more than an extended fairy tale, The Vicar of Wakefield reaches towards—and at its most successful moments comes very near to articulating— the defining qualities normally to be found only in the most ven- erated of secular scriptures. Goldsmith’s otherwise modest novel was a little book that had managed somehow to capture some very big ideas indeed.

At the time of the novel’s first publication, Goldsmith himself, of course, had been far more anxious that his work prove an immediate financial success. If the text of the novel had in fact, as scholars now generally agree, been set down on paper sometime towards the middle of 1762, then Goldsmith would also have been looking to take full advantage of the vogue established by the recent popularity of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. The earliest volumes of Sterne’s masterpiece had begun appearing to great acclaim in December 1759. Although he raged against Sterne both as a churchman and as a writer, Goldsmith would remain deeply envious of the tremendous financial success enjoyed by Tristram Shandy. His primary reason for writing an extended narrative fiction of his own in a vaguely similar manner was, in the straightforward words of one modern biographer, ‘in the first place monetary’; Hester Piozzi shrewdly observed that Goldsmith ‘fretted over the novel’ because ‘when done, [it was] to be his whole fortune’.⁵ And although he clearly wrote the novel as a marketable property with the anxious dispatch of a working journalist, he had obviously been revolving certain elements of its

⁴ George Lillie Craik, Sketches of the History of Literature and Learning in England

(London: 1845), v. 160; repr. in Rousseau (ed.), Goldsmith: Critical Heritage, 303.

⁵ See John Ginger, The Singular Man: The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith

(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977), 180–1.

Introduction xi

plot and characterization over in his mind for many years. As matters so turned out, Goldsmith’s publishers—John Newbery and his nephew, Francis—held on to the manuscript for a further three and a half years before seeing it into print. The reasons behind this delay remain unclear. Johnson himself suspected that the booksellers simply left the manuscript unpublished until Goldsmith had established a more financially viable reputation as a poet. Newbery, he noted practically, ‘did not publish it till after the Traveller had appeared’. ‘Then to be sure,’ he added of the manuscript, ‘it was actually worth some money’.⁶

Or so one would have thought. Despite Goldsmith’s growing fame (in addition to the success of The Traveller (1764), referred to by Johnson above, the author had scored a series of hits with his ‘Chinese Letters’ of 1760–1 and a Life of Richard Nash in 1762, and had begun to make his mark as a writer of popular histories), The Vicar of Wakefield was surprisingly slow to find its audience. They may politely have admitted the broad and ‘homely’ appeal of his narrative, certainly, but none of Gold- smith’s contemporaries could have foreseen that the work would in time assume its enviable position as one of the most genuinely beloved of our so-called English ‘classics’. Though the novel had by 1774 passed through five authorized London editions, its sales were good yet by no means sensational; ‘it seems doubtful’, one biographer has speculated, ‘if more than two thousand copies were sold in Goldsmith’s lifetime’.⁷ Only in the decades following its author’s death, when it was championed by the likes of Sir Walter Scott, Byron, Schlegel, and Goethe, was The Vicar of Wakefield to demonstrate its peculiarly catholic appeal. William Hazlitt’s 1821 judgement that ‘if Goldsmith had never written anything but the two or three first chapters of The Vicar of Wakefield . . .

they would have stamped him a genius’ speaks for an entire gen- eration of readers steeped in the conventions and expectations of European Romanticism, and singles out precisely those sorts of Rousseau-esque moments in the narrative they admired most.

⁶ Boswell, Life of Johnson, 294.

⁷ A. Lytton Sells, Oliver Goldsmith: His Life and Works (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1974), 112.

xii Introduction

The editor William Spalding was to comment later in the century that Goldsmith’s novel had ‘been read, and liked, oftener than any other novel in any other European language’.⁸ Influential readers throughout the Regency and early Victorian period— George Craik, Leigh Hunt, George Eliot, William Thackeray, and Thomas De Quincey among them—would repeatedly (if unvaryingly) echo such praise. Goldsmith’s twentieth-century editor Arthur Friedman calculated that in the roughly twenty- five years after its author’s death, twenty-three more London editions of the novel were published, and a further twenty-one editions in English were published elsewhere.⁹ Throughout the nineteenth century—the early and middle decades of which saw the novel at the height of its popularity—Goldsmith’s volume averaged two new editions each year in English alone. Figures for French and German translations were comparable. The Vicar of Wakefield is to this day one of only a small handful of English novels that can honestly lay a claim never to have passed out of print. It has even, to some extent, become a part of our everyday lives. Goldsmith’s language is used to illustrate the meanings of hundreds of words in the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (1992); The Vicar of Wakefield is specifically cited in that work over seventy-five times. Readers are referred to the novel for illustrations of the usage of possibly unfamiliar expres- sions (e.g. ‘blarney’, ‘monogamist’, ‘mouthed’, ‘muck’, ‘nightfall’, ‘overcivility’), as well as for those more specifically redolent of the eighteenth century (‘elegist’, ‘entre nous’, ‘masquerade’, ‘neck- lace’, ‘palpitate’), and even for some of the most common words in the language (‘may’, ‘mind’, ‘nicely’).

The Plot of The Vicar of Wakefield and the Book of Job

The story that Goldsmith decided to tell in his novel strikes one even in its barest outlines deliberately to have been singled out

⁸ William Spalding, in The Complete Works of Oliver Goldsmith (London: James Spalding, 1872), 7.

⁹ See Arthur Friedman (ed.), Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 5 vols. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1966), iv. 11.

Introduction xiii

for its potential mythic resonance. Even readers unaware of the circumstances under which the novel was actually written, as we have seen, might well be forgiven for supposing that the author had made a shrewd and calculated decision to write in a particular vein—and with an eye towards a very precise audience—purely in the interest of driving up sales. Narrated throughout by its central character, the Revd Dr Charles Primrose, the novel opens on a note of prelapsarian harmony. The Vicar of the novel’s title, Dr Primrose, lives with his family in a state of modest comfort in the Edenic village of Wakefield. Benefiting from the income provided by the investment of a ‘sufficient’ private fortune, the Vicar is free to devote the profits of his living to the orphans and widows of the neighbourhood clergy. He keeps no curate, prefer- ring to attend to all the necessary duties of the parish himself. He claims to have made it his business to become well acquainted with every man within his care. He exhorts the married members of his flock to temperance, and urges those who are yet bachelors to marry and establish households of their own. He confesses to derive a secret pleasure from having earned Wakefield its reputation as a town most noteworthy for three things: ‘a parson wanting pride, young men wanting wives, and ale-houses wanting customers’. The even tenor of the Primrose household is troubled only occasionally by the Vicar’s own obsession with a particularly obscure matter of church doctrine. One of his ‘favourite topics’, he tells us, is matrimony, further explaining that he values himself on being a ‘strict monogamist’ (p. 12); he has published several tracts arguing that it is illegal for any ordained minister of the Church of England to remarry after the death of his wife. The Vicar himself has for many years been happily married to the faithful if still independently minded Deborah Primrose. The couple’s eldest son, George—the first of their six children—has just completed his studies at Oxford, and is about to be married to Miss Arabella Wilmot, the daughter of a neighbouring clergyman. Within the space of only a few pages, however, the pastoral placidity of the Vicar’s world is shattered. A series of mis- fortunes—precipitated by his own financial misjudgement in having placed the entire source of his private income in the hands

xiv Introduction

of a local merchant, and further fuelled by his tactless adherence to his cherished doctrinal ‘principles’ in the face of a violent disagreement with the neighbour who was to be his son’s father- in-law—soon compels the family to leave Wakefield altogether. The Vicar accepts a poorly paid curacy some seventy miles away. His prospects for marriage ruined, young George Primrose sets out alone to establish himself in a professional career, and hope- fully to redeem the family’s fortunes. As the rest of the family travels to the Vicar’s new living, a fortuitous accident finds them introduced and indebted to Mr Burchell, a well-spoken and still youthful gentleman who, despite his handsome manners and appearance, seems currently to be possessed of little if any for- tune himself. Happily familiar with the neighbourhood to which the Vicar is journeying, Burchell warns Primrose against the notorious reputation of the local Squire, a young man who, he confides, has been allowed to assume his current position though still dependent on his reclusive uncle, Sir William Thornhill. Young Squire Thornhill’s libertine behaviour is all the more surprising because his uncle, who has withdrawn from the public eye, is known even to Primrose by reputation as an individual once widely praised throughout the kingdom for his highly developed sense of sympathy and benevolence.

No sooner has the family begun to establish itself with some degree of comfort in their newly reduced circumstances, but they receive a visit from the Squire himself. They find Thornhill to be quite unlike the haughty and disreputable figure Burchell’s description had led them to expect, and decide that the latter was speaking merely and for some private motive out of envy or dis- like. They look upon the Squire as a charming and quite dashing young man, and are flattered that he thinks nothing of con- descending to pass much time with his new tenants. Primrose’s two marriageable daughters—Olivia and Sophia—are overawed by the fact that the Squire should even think of spending his evenings in their humble company, and are soon caught up in their mother’s ambitious vision of the possibilities of unlikely matches and wildly prosperous futures for either or both her girls. The Squire’s further introduction of two apparently sophisticated

Introduction xv

London ladies to the company, and their proposal that the Primrose girls accompany them back to town to experience the smartening effect of a proper social season, is greeted ecstatically in the Primrose household, although the Vicar professes still to have some reservations regarding such a scheme. Primrose is content to offer a generally rosy picture of their new way of life, however, and narrates with a wry amusement the several, harm- less follies of his various family members. He wryly notes their attempts to ape the behaviour of their social betters, while at the same time looking down their noses on—and taking every pos- sible opportunity themselves to impress—those near neighbours whose more suitable company the presence of the Squire and his retinue has instantly rendered beneath them.

Although throughout the first half of the novel the family thus appears to be adjusting to their situation with a minimum amount of dissatisfaction, the catastrophic second part of Goldsmith’s tale reveals every one of the decisions taken up to that point to have been a disastrous mistake. The Vicar in particular, it turns out, has thoroughly misjudged the characters of the family’s supposed friends and neighbours, to say nothing of their insidious and truly dangerous enemies. As a result, he has jeopardized their happiness, and remains generally ineffectual as they are each successively brought to the brink of tragedy. In a passage that was sub- sequently to become one of the best-known episodes in the novel, his young and pedantically affected son Moses is sent to the local market to sell one of the family’s horses, only to be duped into swapping the animal for a gross of worthless green spectacles; the Vicar’s attempts to remedy the situation by heading off to the market himself to sell their remaining horse find him similarly hoodwinked by the same man. Deborah, Olivia, and Sophia are so blinded by status and so hungry for social recognition that they ignore the warnings of Mr Burchell regarding the Squire’s motives; indeed, they suspect Burchell himself of spreading false reports and slandering their reputation throughout the neigh- bourhood. When Olivia is glimpsed being driven away in a carriage in the company of two men, Primrose immediately sus- pects Burchell to be behind the abduction, and sets off in pursuit.

xvi Introduction

The narrative of his wanderings initiates a further catalogue of disasters. Primrose has no sooner begun to make progress in tracing his daughter’s path, than he falls ill with a fever, and finds himself confined to his bed in a roadside alehouse for nearly three weeks. His return journey is interrupted by an encounter with a group of strolling players, in whose company he is fooled into being entertained at the home of a neighbourhood man, whom he takes to be—by his manners and bearing—nothing less than the local Member of Parliament. Their evening debate on the subject of politics and the best form of social order is interrupted by the unexpected return of the gentleman who turns out to be the true master of the house, and who reveals to those assembled around his table that their supposed ‘host’ was no better than his own butler, who ‘in his master’s absence, had a mind to cut a figure, and be for a while the gentleman himself’ (p. 89). Primrose is further nonplussed to discover that this very same gentleman is the uncle to that same Miss Arabella Wilmot who was to have been married to his son George. He is even more shocked to find George himself—whom he thought to be making a respectable name for himself elsewhere in the world—revealed to be a member of the company of players.

The Vicar’s own narrative is at this point interrupted by his

son’s account of his chequered fortunes as a ‘philosophical vaga- bond’ in and around the metropolis. Both father and son are sur- prised to learn that Arabella Wilmot has since their own departure from Wakefield become engaged to marry Squire Thornhill; Primrose is yet again taken aback when he stumbles upon Olivia herself on his way home, and discovers that it was the Squire and not Burchell who had run off with her and seduced her under the pretence of a false marriage. Realizing that she was to be treated as a common mistress, however, Olivia escaped and was also making her way home as best she could when accidentally discovered by her father. Only now does the Vicar realize that the Squire’s recent and seemingly generous purchase of an army commission for his son George has merely served as an efficient means of getting him out of the country—and out of the way of his bride-to-be Arabella Wilmot—and so removing him from the picture altogether.

Introduction xvii

The tremendous events that greet the hopeful return of Primrose and Olivia to the family home initiate the final series of catastrophes in the novel, the mounting severity of which draw Primrose and his family further and further into a slough of misery and—for most readers—a vision of human behaviour that grotesquely resembles a universe not operating on any prin- ciples of benevolence, generosity, or fellow feeling, but motivated rather by a degree of selfish hypocrisy and a rank fetishism of power that would in all likelihood have driven even the likes of Thomas Hobbes to despair. The final ten chapters of The Vicar of Wakefield constitute the dark wonderland of Goldsmith’s novel. We move increasingly in these pages within a night world of pain, penury, chains, and prisons—a world apparently abandoned by justice, and lit only sporadically by the fires of destruction.

The obvious narrative precedent for the headlong spectacle in these chapters of a righteous man confronted against his own will with the problem of evil and injustice in the world—a precedent for the presentation of the hero as ‘victim’, even—is the ancient legend that achieved its finest expression in the biblical Book of Job. It concerns a pious man of great virtue and integrity who is suddenly and without warning deprived of all the rewards of his labour and forced to undergo unspeakable trials. Despite the fact that he is subjected to great suffering and further loss, Job refuses, against the pressing advice of his friends and family, to renounce his God, but remains steadfast in his allegiance, and blesses his Lord even as before. His wife is among the first who fails to comprehend the depth of his enduring loyalty. ‘Dost thou still retain thine integrity?’, she asks scornfully, before advising him succinctly: ‘curse God, and die’ (Job 2: 9). Thanks in large part to the New Testament reminder in James 5: 11, to possess ‘the patience of Job’ has passed into our language as a proverbial expression applied to one who can with equanimity endure that which for any other individual would prove unendurable. The Job of the Old Testament, however, is far from passively ‘patient’ in the book that bears his name. He is angry, often furious, and decidedly impatient with a cosmos in which the wicked seem

xviii Introduction

not only to go free but to flourish, and with a deity that remains unresponsive to his human demand for justice.

Goldsmith’s Vicar recalls his biblical prototype in several important respects, but perhaps the strongest characteristic that links Dr Primrose to Job is the corresponding degree to which both tend to regard their own ‘goodness’—their own practice of virtue and due deference—as ‘money in the bank’, as Stephen Mitchell puts it.¹⁰ Fewer things, certainly, are likely to strike the reader upon repeated encounters with the eighteenth-century novel as forcefully as the underlying if deeply repressed anxiety of Dr Primrose himself with regard to the radical instability of this world. The rapid acceleration of catastrophes and events as the novel moves towards its conclusion in some respects repre- sents nothing so accurately as the Vicar’s escalating panic; his earlier attempts to present to his family—and to his readers—a face of serene acceptance when confronted with changes and dis- ruptions are weakened to the point of absolute collapse with each devastating blow of fate. And the novel is to some extent a mere catalogue of instability—a recitation of catastrophes, many of them if not of biblical proportions, then at least of a biblical nature: marriages, promises, and trusts are broken, loyalties are betrayed, identities are disguised or thoroughly misapprehended, currency itself and ‘values’ of all kinds are in a constant state of flux, and the physical world of the novel is one that is visited without warning by outbreaks of fire and flood. The city may be the most obvious haunt of criminals and con men, but the natural world is hospitable only when tamed by the hand of man; even then it is subject always to whims of a seemingly amoral deity. Even the Vicar’s obsession with the doctrines of William Whiston regarding the marriage of clergymen in certain circumstances can be read as a manifestation of his own fear that—should he ever find himself in such a position—he would be incapable of handling the disruption of any such change in circumstance. Primrose’s repeated advocacy of his pet theories is an attempt to

¹⁰ The Book of Job, trans. and introd. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Harper Collins,

1979), p. ix.

Introduction xix

fortify himself against his own sense of weakness and inadequacy in the face of possible chaos.

Yet to whatever extent Goldsmith desired in his novel to recall to the minds of his readers the tribulations that beset even God’s favourite, he is careful to avoid the most sombre aspects of his Old Testament model. Although The Vicar of Wakefield does arguably tackle a subject no less impressive than the ability and the moral strength of mankind to transcend human suffering, the author does not push his hero in any unconvincing way towards an achievement of bold and enlightened spiritual insight. Toward the end of his trials, Job regrets all that has been taken from him, and wishes only that he could exchange his present state for his past:

Oh that I were as in months past, as in the days when God pre- served me;

When his candle shined upon my head, and when by his light I walked through darkness;

As I was in the days of my youth, when the secret of God was upon my tabernacle;

When the Almighty was yet with me, when my children were about me; . . .

When the ear heard me, then it blessed me; and when the eye saw me, it gave witness to me (Job 29: 2–5, 11)

Job’s outburst markedly anticipates the words of Goldsmith’s Vicar in his extremity. Yet whereas the lament of Job builds towards the end of his narrative to a bewildered cry of outrage against the comprehensive fact of human misery, the Vicar’s more hysterical apostrophes are invariably thumped violently back to ground by the interruption of someone close to him who tells him essentially that he, of all people, ought to know better. As Dr Primrose approaches his lowest point, in prison and believing his daughter Olivia already to be dead, he is informed by his wife—who is herself nearly incoherent with grief and on the edge of collapse—that his younger daughter, Sophia, has also just been forcibly abducted by a ‘well drest man’ in a passing post-chaise. ‘Now’, the Vicar cries aloud to the prison cell,

xx Introduction

‘the sum of my misery is made up, nor is it in the power of any thing on earth to give me another pang. What! not one left! not to leave me one! the monster! the child that was next my heart! she had the beauty of an angel, and almost the wisdom of an angel. But support that woman [i.e., his wife, Deborah], nor let her fall. Not to leave me one!’ (p. 139)

Deborah Primrose, however, unlike the wife of Job, is the one who more successfully resists the pressures of the moment, and serves herself as a model for her husband:

‘Alas! my husband,’ said my wife, ‘you seem to want comfort even more than I. Our distresses are great; but I could bear this and more, if I saw you but easy. They may take away my children and all the world, if they leave me but you.’ (pp. 139–40)

The Vicar manages to pull himself together and to regain some degree of composure, but the arrival of his son, George, bloody, wounded, and in fetters just two pages later proves to be too much for him. He is once again transformed into the accusing picture of angry despair. ‘I tried to restrain my passions for a few minutes in silence,’ he writes,

but I thought I should have died with the effort—‘O my boy, my heart weeps to behold thee thus, and I cannot, cannot help it. In the moment that I thought thee blest, and prayed for thy safety, to behold thee thus again! Chained, wounded. And yet the death of the youthful is happy. But I am old, a very old man, and have lived to see this day. To see my children all untimely falling about me, while I continue a wretched survivor in the midst of ruin! May all the curses that ever sunk a soul fall heavy upon the murderer of my children. May he live, like me, to see—’ (p. 142)

The Vicar is at this moment of mounting denunciation inter- rupted by no one other than his wounded, bloody son himself, who cries:

‘Hold, Sir, . . . or I shall blush for thee. How, Sir, forgetful of your age, your holy calling, thus to arrogate the justice of heaven, and fling those curses upward that must soon descend to crush thy own grey head with destruction! No, Sir, let it be your care now to fit me for that vile death I must shortly suffer, to arm me with hope and resolution, to

Introduction xxi

give me courage to drink of that bitterness which must shortly be my portion.’ (p. 142)

The first-person account of Dr Primrose—a narrative voice that is throughout the novel skilfully interrupted and varied by what might be described as his own rhetorical ‘encounters’ with other forms of storytelling, versification, narration, sermonizing, representation, and debate—manages always to serve the same function that dramatic techniques such as discrepant awareness (whereby the audience can be reassured early in the action of a comedy that everything will, indeed, end happily) facilitate in the theatre. The narrative of Dr Primrose and his family is every- where lightened by Goldsmith’s own instinct for the sort of deft repetition that will come in time to characterize the comedy of the absurd.

Dr Primrose and his faith, by the end of the novel, may have been sorely tried, but at no point does the Vicar, like his Old Testament predecessor, achieve the sublime insight that leads to a gesture of wholehearted surrender or submission. Whereas the tone of Job’s final words in the face of the Unnameable—the Voice that speaks to him from the Whirlwind—voices the serene transformation of bitterness to awe, that of the Vicar is merely, if appropriately, content. ‘I know that thou canst do every thing, and that no thought can be withholden from thee’, Job acknowledges before his God; ‘Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes’ (Job 42: 2, 6). Dr Primrose finds final comfort not so much in any genuine repentance or comprehen- sion of his own mortality, but in the renewal of familiar and comforting ‘ceremonies’. The shadows that are increasingly vis- ible throughout the thematic landscapes of Goldsmith’s novel are shades cast only by momentary obstructions against a relatively constant background of light, however variable its intensity. If the first half of the novel had been bathed in the pastoral optimism and the possible attainment of a frugal, rural contentment, the second is a nightmare of cumulative disasters that is redeemed by an ending reminiscent of nothing so much as a late Shakespearian romance. The Vicar’s pronouncement at the end of the novel

xxii Introduction

seems in fact almost explicitly to recall the words not of the awe-stricken Job, but of Shakespeare’s own Prospero, in the final moments of The Tempest. ‘I had nothing now on this side of the grave to wish for,’ runs the Vicar’s concluding sentence in the novel, ‘all my cares were over, my pleasure was unspeakable. It now only remained that my gratitude in good fortune should exceed my former submission in adversity’ (p. 170).

Charm, Autobiography, and Sentiment

For many years the simple phenomenon of The Vicar of Wake- field’s sustained popularity appeared to be the main talking point for most criticism. The story itself—and Goldsmith’s handling of it—seemed somehow beyond commentary. It is a testament not so much to any inherent excellence, but simply to the long- standing enigma of Goldsmith’s novel, that Thomas Babington Macaulay’s entry on the author, originally included in the 1856 (8th) edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was to remain in print until as late as 1961. Some few critics paused to comment on what they thought to be the peculiarly arbitrary sequence of the novel’s narrative ‘incidents’, but most were compelled merely to accept the work for the humorous and vaguely ‘delightful’ quality that formed the basis of its continued wide appeal.

Henry James best articulated the odd combination of approval and frustration the novel provoked within any individual deter- mined to say something consequential or objective about its aes- thetic achievement. He was driven to the point of distraction by Goldsmith’s novel, memorably christening it ‘the spoiled child of our literature’, able to ‘[convert] everything it contains into a happy case of exemption and fascination. . . . One admits the particulars [of The Vicar of Wakefield] with the sense that, as regards the place the thing has taken, it remains, by a strange little law of its own, quite undamaged—simply stands there smil- ing with impunity.’¹¹

¹¹ Henry James, ‘Introduction’ to Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (New York, 1900); repr. in Rousseau (ed.), Goldsmith: Critical Heritage, 65–9, from which all quotations are taken.

Introduction xxiii

In his final assessment of Goldsmith’s work, James went as far as to suggest that—although singular—the novel so stretched the ‘indulgence’ of its readers, that it must on some level be judged a failure. ‘Read as one of the masterpieces by a person not acquainted with our Literature,’ he wrote, ‘it might easily give the impression that this literature is not immense.’ While tentatively suggesting that, in terms of Goldsmith’s style, ‘the frankness of his sweetness and the beautiful ease of his speech’ is the quality that first appeals to Goldsmith’s readers, confronted with its larger achievement, James concedes defeat: ‘I am afraid I cannot go further than this in the way of speculation as to how a classic is grown,’ he decides, wearily; ‘In the open air is perhaps the most we can say. Goldsmith’s style is the flower of what I have called its amenity, and [Goldsmith’s own] amenity the making of that independence of almost everything by which The Vicar has triumphed.’

He concludes of the novel: ‘the thing has succeeded by terms of its incomparable amenity’, which reduces us to a point of critical helplessness, so that ‘under its charm we resist the irritation of having to define [its] character’.

‘Charm’ and ‘amenity’ are not exactly the kinds of words that

one is likely to find in any contemporary dictionary of critical terms. Yet until the most recent critics of Goldsmith’s novel felt themselves free to pursue those apparently fragmented elements of the text that might be used as keys to unlock its relevance to specific issues of class, power, and politics, any more traditional interpretive approaches to the work seemed doomed to certain failure. Attempts to analyse Goldsmith’s ‘plot’ invariably reached the same conclusions: the Vicar’s narrative was poorly con- structed, at once both dense and highly complicated, yet also stuttering in pace and lacking in proportion. Those few episodes in the first half of the novel that might with a more patient exposition have been developed into successful set pieces remained too confused and hurried; there was simply no excuse for the frenzied pace and unlikely reversals of the latter part of the work. Similarly, the ‘calamities’ that might otherwise have carried some emotional weight were so clumsily clustered together, and each

xxiv Introduction

followed so hard upon the next, that any impact they might otherwise have possessed was altogether dissipated. As for the ‘realism’ or sense of verisimilitude that one might with reason expect even from the simplest fairy story, the reader could only search in vain. Any comments on Goldsmith’s plot, in other words, were invariably little more than echoes of Macaulay’s observations of 1856, in which he dismissed the novel’s ‘fable’ as not merely faulty, but ‘one of the worst that ever was con- structed’. ‘It wants’, Macaulay had sniffed, ‘not merely the prob- ability that ought to be found in a tale of common English life, but that consistency which ought to be found even in the wildest fiction about witches, giants, and fairies.’¹²

Hopeful suggestions that the novel was intended to be a spon-

taneous and self-consciously innovative attempt to break free from the increasing strictures imposed on novelistic fictions were no less quickly dispatched by the assertion that those very same aspects that struck new readers as unusual or at least well accom- plished had simply been freely borrowed from existing works. Almost every narrative episode in the Vicar’s account took its cue from or otherwise found its model not in lived human experience or behaviour, but had been drawn straight from the work of a contemporary or immediate predecessor. The narratives of seduction drew in almost every detail from novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740–1) and Clarissa (1747–8); the prison scenes had already been ‘done’—and to far better effect—by Henry Fielding in his Amelia (1751), and the picaresque adven- tures of Dr Primrose and his son owed more than a little of their colour to those of that same author’s Joseph Andrews (1742); in tone, Goldsmith had failed in his obvious attempts to imitate the successful ‘sensibility’ of which Sterne continued to demon- strate himself a master, to capture the epigrammatic brilliance that Johnson had displayed to such fine effect in his Rasselas, or even to reproduce some of the anecdotal appeal of which he had demonstrated himself capable in his own ‘Chinese Letters’.

¹² From Thomas Babington Macaulay’s life of Goldsmith in Encyclopaedia Britannica,

8th edn. (1856), x. 705–9; repr. in Rousseau (ed.), Goldsmith: Critical Heritage, 349.

Introduction xxv

His ‘characters’, such as they were, amounted to little more than static, two-dimensional cut-outs of little if any emotional depth, and admitted no development.

The only quality for which The Vicar of Wakefield was likely to garner any positive critical attention at all, in fact, was its success- fully modest description—limited almost entirely to its earliest chapters—of an ideal of pastoral retirement and domestic harmony that was thought to be worthy of imitation. It was only when he limited himself to depictions of this nature, critics also suggested, that Goldsmith’s style came close to suiting his subject. The opening lines of Chapter V provide an ideal example of such scenes. The Vicar is here describing the situation of his new living, and the manner in which the members of his family accommodated themselves to their fortunes:

At a small distance from the house my predecessors had made a seat, overshadowed by an hedge of hawthorn and honeysuckle. Here, when the weather was fine, and our labour soon finished, we usually sate together, to enjoy an extensive landschape [sic], in the calm of the evening. Here too we drank tea, which now was become an occasional banquet; and as we had it but seldom, it diffused a new joy, the prepar- ations for it being made with no small share of bustle and ceremony. On these occasions, our two little ones always read for us, and they were regularly served after we had done. Sometimes, to give a variety to our amusements, the girls sung to the guitar; and while they thus formed a little concert, my wife and I would stroll down the sloping field, that was embellished with blue bells and centaury, talk of our children with rapture, and enjoy the breeze that wafted both health and harmony (pp. 24–5)

Goldsmith was among those writers who, until recently, was often referred to as being in some way ‘pre-Romantic’. The win- ning strengths of passages such as this, however, are those more accurately associated with the ethos of Augustan poetics; the Vicar’s new home and pastimes are similar to those praised by poets earlier in the century (one thinks specifically of the ethos of John Pomfret’s ‘The Choice’ (1700), for example, or the restrained environments and behaviour described in Alexander Pope’s moral epistles). The language here is as cool and calm as

xxvi Introduction

the activities are temperate; this is a landscape characterized by the ideals of the beautiful and picturesque, not the vertiginous ecstasy of the sublime, or the fantastic primitivism of any Rousseau-esque ‘natural world’.

The Vicar of Wakefield also owed much of its continued popu- larity—though it earned the respect of few critics—to its per- ceived value as a work of religious consolation. To whatever extent readers as sympathetic as Johnson may have disparaged the technical achievement of Goldsmith’s novel when he dis- missed it as ‘a mere fanciful performance’ that contained ‘nothing of real life . . . and very little of nature’, for a great many mem- bers of Goldsmith’s audience The Vicar of Wakefield seemed absolutely to insist on being read for its morality and for its reassuring spiritual message.¹³ An early, unsigned notice that appeared in Hugh Kelly’s Babler shortly after the novel’s publi- cation simply took for granted that Goldsmith’s primary reason for presenting his readers with such a variety of calamitous cir- cumstances was to provide ‘a masterly vindication of that exterior disparity in the dispensations of providence, at which our mod- ern infidels seem to triumph with so unceasing a satisfaction’. ‘And’, the reviewer continued, ‘it must undoubtedly yield a sub- lime consolation to the bosom of wretchedness to think, that if the opulent are blessed with a continual round of temporal felicity, they shall at least experience some moments of so superior a rapture in the immediate presence of their God, as will fully compensate for the seeming severity of their former situ- ations.’¹⁴ The spectacular series of denouements that closes the novel, in other words, was thought to amount to a vindication of the terminal justice and equity of the divine plan. Another early reviewer, whose notice on the novel appeared in the Monthly Review in May 1766, effaced any reservations he may have had regarding the book’s stylistic oddities to conclude:

¹³ The judgement of Samuel Johnson noted here is recorded by Frances Burney in The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, ed. Charlotte Barrett (Philadelphia, 1842), 38–9; repr. in Rousseau (ed.), Goldsmith: Critical Heritage, 189–90.

¹⁴ Unsigned Review in Hugh Kelly’s Babler, 77 (10 July 1776), 55–9; repr. in Rousseau (ed.), Goldsmith: Critical Heritage, 54.

Introduction xxvii

In brief, with all its faults, there is much rational entertainment to be met with in this very singular tale; but it deserves our warmer appro- bation for its moral tendency; particularly for the exemplary manner in which it recommends and enforces, the great obligations of universal benevolence; the most amiable quality that can possibly distinguish and adorn the worthy man and the good christian!¹⁵

Well over a generation later, Goldsmith’s biographer John Forster felt no need to apologize for similarly reading The Vicar of Wake- field as an attempt to justify the ways of God to man. Forster thought the novel had sprung from the ‘sweet emotion’ of Gold- smith’s own ‘chequered life’, and concluded that the author’s own experiences had merely been re-presented to the public so as ‘to show us that patience in suffering, that persevering reliance on the providence of God . . . are the easy and certain means of pleasure in this world, and of turning pain to noble uses’.¹⁶

Despite the dramatic shift in critical perspective within the last fifty years or more that has looked generally to separate the ‘life’ from the ‘work’, and which in its most extreme forms attempted to dispense with the role of the author in the task of textual interpretation altogether, biographically based readings of The Vicar of Wakefield have remained stubbornly popular well into the twenty-first century. Washington Irving’s observation that Goldsmith’s novel had simply offered readers its scenes and characters ‘as seen through the medium of his own indulgent eye, and set forth with the colourings of his good head and heart’

is in all likelihood liable to be no less acceptable a sentiment to the vast majority of today’s readers than it would have been to those who first encountered it in 1825.¹⁷ ‘Any biographer who refused to read the family life of the Goldsmiths into the account of the Primrose family’, as John Ginger confessed, ‘would have to

¹⁵ Unsigned notice, in Monthly Review, 34 (May 1766), 407; repr. in Rousseau (ed.),

Goldsmith: Critical Heritage, 44.

¹⁶ From John Forster’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (1848); portions of Forster’s Life are included in George Lewes’s review of that work, British Quarterly, 8 (1 Aug. 1848), 1–25; repr. in Rousseau (ed.), Goldsmith: Critical Heritage, 329.

¹⁷ Washington Irving, British Classics (New York, 1825); repr. in Rousseau (ed.),

Goldsmith: Critical Heritage, 265.

xxviii Introduction

be made of stern stuff.’¹⁸ George Rousseau was rather less under- standing when he countered: ‘At the heart of the problem—and it is a problem—lies Goldsmith’s life.’ ‘Goldsmith-the-man’, Rousseau with reason lamented, ‘has interested critics more than Goldsmith-the-writer.’¹⁹

Both Ginger and Rousseau, it must be conceded, make legit- imate points; the briefest outline of Goldsmith’s life does seem to read like something straight out of his novel. Born into a modest clerical family in rural Ireland, Goldsmith would often in his work reimagine the fields and streams around his childhood home of Lissoy to have constituted a veritable paradise; in the face of all the economic and social realities of the time, for Goldsmith the parsonage in which he had been raised, and the activities he was always to associate with his young and relatively carefree exist- ence there, were effortlessly resituated in his adult writing and viewed through a haze that transformed them into a lost golden age. Even his time at Trinity College Dublin, to which Goldsmith was admitted in June 1745, emerges in most biographical accounts as a challenging but by no means overstressful period in his life. The only things most readers tend to remember about Goldsmith’s career as an undergraduate is that he was publicly admonished and temporarily sent down for taking part in a stu- dent riot in 1747 (in which others were actually killed), became addicted to gambling and other vices associated with ‘low com- pany’, and began to display those traits what were eventually to develop into lifelong habits of personal irresponsibility; Goldsmith held the dubious distinction of actually having been punched in his face by his own tutor. His wild misadventures upon returning briefly to his mother’s home (he attempted unsuccessfully to be ordained into the Anglican Church, served as a private tutor to a family in County Roscommon, and claimed accidentally to have missed the boat that was to have carried him as an emigrant to America), though matter enough for most men,

¹⁸ John Ginger, The Notable Man: The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977), 168.

¹⁹ Ed.’s introd. in Rousseau (ed.), Goldsmith: Critical Heritage, 3.

Introduction xxix

served only as a kind of comic prelude to the more wide-ranging adventures he claimed to have experienced as a wandering traveller throughout Germany, Switzerland, France, and northern Italy some few years later, in 1755. His sporadic attempts to find a suitable occupation invariably led nowhere, although his time spent at Edinburgh University and then at Leyden from 1752 to 1754 would leave him with just enough knowledge later in life so as to pass himself off as a medical doctor. Prior to his first real success as a writer in his early thirties, Goldsmith lived a hand- to-mouth existence that resembled nothing so much as a series of Hogarth prints brought to life. He tried his hand at being an apothecary, an ad hoc physician, a proofreader, and an usher at a boys’ school in Peckham; in 1758 he even applied (unsuccess- fully) for a civilian position within the East India Company. He produced hundreds of pages of reviews and essays before the success of his verse-epistle The Traveller in December 1764 finally brought him some acclaim as an author of genuine merit. For a brief period, he enjoyed the intimate company of some of the period’s finest writers, artists, and political thinkers. The further successes of The Vicar of Wakefield and of his 1770 poem The Deserted Village—along with his two comedies for the stage, The Good-Natured Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1773)— were no sooner to set him on a path to some degree of financial and personal stability than he died—of kidney disease—in April 1774, at the relatively young age of 43.

It is little wonder that readers have felt there to be important

links between the story of Goldsmith’s life and that of his novel. Almost all the elements that were to characterize his peculiar narrative romance are already present in his own personal his- tory; many features needed hardly even to be transformed in any serious way. The pastoral settings within which the Revd Primrose and his family find themselves throughout much of the first half of the novel seem for many readers unequivocally to have been based on his own earliest experiences in Ireland (the area around Lissoy is today marketed to tourists as ‘Goldsmith Country’, despite the fact that the author was, after the age of 21, never again even to set foot in Ireland); the character of Primrose

xxx Introduction

himself is routinely thought to embody the virtues of Goldsmith’s own clergyman father; perhaps most significantly, entire extended sections in the second half of the novel relating to the adventures both of Primrose and of his son George were so inextricably linked to the author’s own personal anecdotes and Continental adventures by Goldsmith’s earliest biographers that it remains even today impossible to disentangle what is ‘true’ from what is purely fictitious.

Yet for a modern reader convincingly to maintain that in order to understand Goldsmith’s novel, we must first gain a full appreciation of Goldsmith the man, is not merely unsustainable, but deeply misleading. Many critics, by contrast, treat The Vicar of Wakefield as an uncomplicated example of that peculiarly eighteenth-century literary kind, the ‘sentimental novel’. Such novels were a narrative manifestation of the period’s ‘cult of feel- ing’. They gave expression to the new emphasis being placed on the significance of subjective experience. Readers—many of them women—were throughout the century increasingly drawn to works of fiction that exhibited the moving spectacle of ‘virtue in distress’; one’s own ability to empathize with the misfortunes of fictional others was looked upon as a measure of the strength of one’s own ‘heart’ and of the vigour of those moral principles that in turn dictate the behaviour of our lives. Novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa simply paved the way for later works containing even more provocative displays of (usually female) suffering, all designed to draw forth from readers as highly sensitized and as actively sympathetic a response as possible. The period’s obsession with such concepts as ‘senti- ment’, ‘sensibility’, and ‘melancholia’ was thought to be wit- nessed everywhere in the literature of the era.

In order to read Goldsmith’s novel in such a manner, readers must place no small degree of faith in the author’s manipulation of the vicar himself as an effective narrator—one who is at once both dispassionate in the control he maintains over potentially disturbing emotions, yet also demurely impu- dent—and who manages successfully to record the events of the novel, as John Butt put it, ‘briefly, even briskly, without being

Introduction xxxi

fundamentally unsettled by any of them’.²⁰ In presenting his tale through such an amiable and coherent figure, it might be argued, Goldsmith avoided those tendencies that would have rendered the work less successful in the hands of other contemporary prac- titioners in the form of the sentimental novel. Frances Sheridan, whose Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph appeared in 1761, would have savoured the destitution of the characters. Similarly Henry Brooke, whose immensely popular The Fool of Quality (1766–72) first appeared in the same year as The Vicar of Wakefield, tended to display a feverish intensity and an ‘uncontrolled vehemence’ in his attempts to reconcile a world controlled by divine providence to the plight of helpless characters in positions of extreme dis- tress in a hostile world. What some critics would argue to be the ‘controlled spontaneity’ of Goldsmith’s narrator in The Vicar of Wakefield was complemented by the corresponding guidance he maintained over the structure of his narrative—a structure that modern readers are less likely to notice. Commentators have pointed out that the Vicar’s story is perfectly divided into two halves—the first half being essentially a comedy, its episodes (apart from the initial expulsion from Wakefield) relatively minor and even comfortably domestic in nature. The second half of the novel, by contrast, is a quasi-tragedy rich in the pathos of multiple misfortunes and catastrophes. Goldsmith thrusts his characters into the world in a dramatic and distressing way—we move within the space of a few pages from financial discomfiture and minor mishaps to abductions, penury, destruction by fire, imprisonment, and a tone of near apocalyptic catastrophe. Whereas Goldsmith’s narrative technique in the first part of the novel had been relatively limited, the second prominently includes a diversity of novelistic modes and voices, including traveller’s tales, politics, discussions on philosophy and aesthet- ics, digressions on subjects including penal reform and the state of urban depravity, and even sermons. The symmetry of the entire novel is precise, and neatly reverses the sentiment of the

²⁰ See John Butt, The Mid-Eighteenth Century, ed. and completed by Geoffrey Carnell, Oxford History of English Literature, vol. viii. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 473.

xxxii Introduction

novel’s epigraph: the happy family of the first part of the novel should take heed in their felicity, much in the manner that they should be sustained throughout the calamities of the second half by the promise of Christian hope. The thirty-two chapters are divided neatly into two halves of sixteen chapters each; fur- ther divisions can then be drawn that discern subsets of a pair of eight chapters apiece. The three poems included in the novel in each case punctuate crucial turning points of the narrative action, contributing to subliminally perceived design that further underscores the symmetrical effect of the novel as a whole.²¹

Sentiment versus Satire

If a great many readers of Goldsmith’s work are still inclined to look upon The Vicar of Wakefield primarily as a relatively straightforward domestic fiction or sentimental romance of this sort, professional critics have tended increasingly to agree that the novel’s seeming artlessness is in fact nothing more than a self- conscious pose that has been assumed by the author—part of a disingenuous attempt deliberately to trick his readers and to raise false generic and narrative expectations. According to such a view, Goldsmith superficially invokes various literary genres and modes in the course of his tale only to subvert them. His appar- ently earnest narrative of sentiment is in fact an extended exer- cise in irony. Such fundamental disagreements in approach have ensured that certain passages in the novel thought by some to be deeply felt and sincere are no less likely to be read by others as rich with elements of parody and satire, and have raised a series of critical questions that have yet to be fully answered. Just how far, exactly, are we meant to trust the Revd Primrose’s own narration

²¹ See ibid. 475. The novel’s structure is also addressed in Robert H. Hopkins’s influential reading of the novel as a satire in The True Genius of Oliver Goldsmith (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1974), 199–207; Sven Bäckman, This Singular Tale: A Study of the Vicar of Wakefield and Its Literary Background, Lund Studies in English, 40 (Lund, Sweden: G. W. K. Gleerup, 1971); Arthur F. Kinney, Oliver Goldsmith Revisited (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 76–7; Ricardo Quintana, Oliver Goldsmith: A Georgian Study (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), 109–12.

Introduction xxxiii

of his ‘tale’ when, even from the opening pages of the volume, he reveals himself to be wildly inconsistent, illogical, and, at worst, completely hypocritical? To what extent could readers ever accept Goldsmith’s fiction as somehow true to life or at least relevant to their lived experience, much less autobiographical, when it is so clearly a work that on every page—and increasingly throughout the text—bears the traces of its deliberate confusion of almost every literary ‘type’ that flourished in the period? Did Goldsmith in fact set out actually to write a satire on the vogue for sentimental fiction or ‘sensibility’ in general (as he was more obviously to do in his theatrical comedies), yet allow his narrative in this instance to spin so wildly out of control as to lose all authority over his own plot and characters? As the critic Ricardo Quintana sometime ago observed, for all its apparent simplicity and innocence, The Vicar of Wakefield has given rise to ‘more questions and presents greater difficulties of interpretation than any of Goldsmith’s other compositions’.²²

Those novels that participate most successfully in the tradi- tions of satire in English tend usually to alert their audiences from the very outset that they will need always to be vigilant; they insist that their readers be aware of the fragile seam of irony that divides the perceived appearance of things from the fictional ‘reality’ of the novelistic world. The Vicar of Wakefield may not fail completely to alert readers to its possible parodic or satiric agendas. Yet Goldsmith’s particular blend of irony and sincerity in the novel has posed no end of questions for generations of readers. Upon closer examination, we soon discover that nothing about The Vicar of Wakefield is ever as simple as it first appears to be. The text of the novel—indeed, even the language with which the work introduces itself to its audience and announces its sup- posed intentions—initiates a complicated and occasionally coy strategy of linguistic play. The novel also contains an astounding number of characters who disguise themselves or participate in some sort of ‘masquerade’. Many tend effortlessly to assume

²² See Quintana, Oliver Goldsmith: A Georgian Study, Masters of World Literature series (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), 99–100.

xxxiv Introduction

different identities and to ‘play’ the roles of others in a romantic or dramatic manner.

The Vicar of Wakefield even begins, like some vexed and impish Hamlet, not by answering questions, but by asking them. The original title page pointedly characterizes the narrative as ‘a Tale, supposed to have been written by himself’.²³ Modern readers are unfortunately unlikely to pay much if any attention to the specific designation of the fiction they hold in their hands as a ‘Tale’. The extended subtitles of most eighteenth-century novels, however, alerted readers to important claims of authenticity and proven- ance—they called attention to the balance of tradition and innovation, of authority and licence. Narratives designated to be tales tended to feature an intrusive and slightly wayward narrative persona, and were often marked by a tendency towards digres- sion and generic inclusivity. Goldsmith’s further qualification that his is a tale ‘supposed to have been written by [the Vicar of Wakefield]’ is perhaps even more peculiar—particularly in his use of that troubling ‘supposed ’. Is Goldsmith (or an otherwise unnamed and unidentified ‘editor’) asking us here to believe that the Vicar’s narrative is true? Is the subtitle working to highlight the nature of the Vicar’s story as fiction? Or is it merely an assumption on the part of an ‘editor’? At the very least, the uncertainty reflected in this seemingly straightforward phrase anticipates Goldsmith’s manipulation of what will remain an enigmatic and at times even wildly inconsistent narrative voice throughout the novel itself.

It is further typical of The Vicar of Wakefield that even the central title of the novel is deliberately misleading. How many of Goldsmith’s readers over the years must have wondered why it is that the Vicar is so prominently described as being ‘of Wakefield’, when he in fact leaves Wakefield for ever in the opening pages of his story (Dr Primrose inhabits the village of the novel’s title for less than ten pages of a narrative that remains in any modern edition close to 190 pages long)? Why, for that matter, does

²³ For some further consideration of the ambiguities of Goldsmith’s title, see Hopkins, True Genius of Oliver Goldsmith, 173.

Introduction xxxv

Goldsmith allow the location of the curacy in the gift of Sir William Thornhill that the Vicar subsequently takes on—the set- ting for most the novel’s action—itself to remain nameless? Some readers may not even notice that the man who is ‘supposed’ to be relating the autobiographical ‘tale’ of the designated ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ is, oddly, for the better part of the narrative technically not the Vicar of Wakefield at all. The levels of narrative awareness that are supposed to filter the story first from the original teller of the tale to any assumed listeners, and only thence from an editor to the printer or bookseller, further obscure the veracity of the final product.

In any event, the unnamed community depicted in the novel to which the Vicar and his family remove is emphatically not the idyllic, pastoral ‘Wakefield’ that has established itself in the popu- lar imagination, but rather, as the Vicar himself describes it, an isolated living in a ‘little neighbourhood’ of farmers attached to a nearby town that is a straggling place consisting of ‘a few mean houses, having lost all its former opulence, and retaining no marks of its ancient superiority but the gaol’. This same ‘ancient superiority’ yet attaches itself to the town in a lingering manner primarily because of its fortress-like prison—a building, we are informed, that had ‘formerly been built for the purposes of war’ (p. 124). The Vicar imagined by so many readers as inhabiting a bucolic world of easy contentment that is disrupted by the unexpected intrusion of the kinds of external forces more typic- ally confined to the city and the urban environment, in actual fact lives near the run-down and economically depressed remnant of a military community—a town the only distinction of which remains the fortress that serves simultaneously as a monument to its foundation as a bulwark against the bellicose instability of its former inhabitants and near-neighbours, and a living testimony, as a prison, to the ineradicable poverty and depravity of human nature.

Not merely ‘Wakefield’ but all the names in the novel would appear carefully to have been designed just to provoke confusion. Goldsmith’s specific designation of the town of Wakefield has prompted many readers to wonder how it came about that he

xxxvi Introduction

should ever have desired to associate his novel with the actual town of Wakefield, in Yorkshire (to which Goldsmith’s fictional community bears little if any resemblance) or perhaps to another, smaller village of that same name closer to London. The fact that the author pointedly draws attention to the connotations of names and naming throughout the work would seem to encour- age readers to pursue such matters; proper names do carry sig- nificant connotations in the work. The Vicar’s speculation early in the novel, for example, that the naming of his daughters was influenced by his wife’s weakness for romantic fiction may itself be the stuff of old wives’ tales, yet the names finally chosen for the two girls do indeed carry appropriately ‘romantic’ and clas- sical connotations. Olivia, deriving from Latin and related to the masculine Oliver, literally means ‘of the olive tree’, and so, meta- phorically, ‘peace’; it entered English after it was prominently used by Shakespeare in his Twelfth Night (1601), where it was associated with misguided romantic infatuation. Sophia is from the Greek, and means ‘wisdom’ (often traditionally connoting ‘holy wisdom’). In the Christian tradition, the name is associated with the mythical saint who is said to have died of grief after witnessing the martyrdom of her three daughters. Both names are consequently of ancient origin, and both would be appropriate designations for the heroines of popular—and, in the eyes of the Vicar, unfortunately ‘feminine’—romantic fictions; both are likewise obscurely related to the perceived feminine activities of loss and suffering. In stark contrast, the female name most favoured by the Vicar, ‘Grissel’, is suitably mundane and empha- tically Anglo-Saxon, being derived from the Germanic gris or ‘grey’, and hild, meaning ‘battle’. In contrast to the names chosen by Deborah Primrose, Griselda, for example, is the name given to a patient wife in one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1400).

Goldsmith’s novel of course includes names that are ‘realistic’

(e.g. ‘Wilmot’, ‘Cripse’); yet it does so alongside names that are in some way descriptive or potentially symbolic (‘Primrose’, ‘Grogram’, ‘Pinwire’), or that are resonant of other literary char- acters (‘Burchell’, ‘Arnold’), as well as those that quite specific- ally call to mind recent and contemporary political figures

Introduction xxxvii

(‘Wilkinson’, ‘Thornhill’). The Vicar of Wakefield, in other words, appears to combine a number of converging trends in this area, much in the manner that it brings together related, developing trends in genre and literary modes. Returning to the village named in the novel’s title, it is more than possible that an eighteenth-century audience would still have been aware of the origins of such a place name to designate, quite literally, the field in which the rural parish community held its annual ‘wake’ or festival—a celebration that originally fell on a Sunday or the feast day of a saint, and was an occasional holiday that featured dancing, village sports, and other amusements. In a very real sense, Dr Primrose is following in the footsteps of his island forebears no less clearly than he is being subjected to the trials of the biblical Job—ranging from Piers Plowman and Colin Cloute to John Bunyan’s Christian in his Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). As Oswald Doughty observed some time ago, ‘the Vicar of Wakefield is Christian in the mid-eighteenth century’.²⁴

If Goldsmith’s novel is to be read as a satire rather than a

sincere work of ‘sentimental fiction’, one needs to remain very much alive to the subtle inconsistencies and illogicalities of the Vicar’s narration. Critics such as Robert Hopkins have con- vincingly demonstrated the intricate manner in which Goldsmith manipulates Primrose’s voice throughout the text to reveal his own shortcomings, and his manifestations of often petty vindic- tiveness and pride. The several instances of bathos in the novel— moments when an attempt at the sublime is suddenly undercut by the revelation of the questionable perceptions and judgements of a deeply flawed humanity—simply must be taken into account in any coherent reading of the novel. Whether or not one would wish to go so far as Hopkins himself in arguing that the novel is not merely a playful parody, but an intense and calculated satire, is another question altogether. Henry James may himself, finally, have been not so far from articulating a certain kind of truth

²⁴ Oswald Doughty, ‘Introduction’ to Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield

(London: Scholartis Press, 1928), p. xli.

xxxviii Introduction

when he confronted what he characterized as the novel’s unfail- ing ‘charm’ and ‘amenity’. John Trusler, writing on the meaning of specific words and terminology shortly after The Vicar of Wakefield was published,²⁵ emphasized the notion that charm— much like any related spell or enchantment—is a quality only naturally averse to reason; ‘charm’ is an attribute or feature, as dictionary definitions tend to stress even to this day, that exerts some kind of fascinating or attractive influence that excites admir- ation or love despite its being contrary to all the more sensible arguments against it. For all the sophistication of the analyses that have subsequently been brought to bear on the novel, James’s suggestion that the enduring qualities of The Vicar of Wakefield are rooted firmly in its ability continually to charm its readers suggests no small achievement on Goldsmith’s part after all.

²⁵ John Trusler’s The Difference, Between Words, Esteemed Synonymous, . . . 2 vols. (Dublin, 1776), i. 36.

NOTE ON THE TEXT

Most writers on Goldsmith would today agree that The Vicar of Wakefield was probably written at Goldsmith’s lodgings in Wine Office Court in late 1761 or in 1762. Internal evidence supports the supposition that the manuscript was sold sometime near the end of 1762. For reasons that have not been satisfactorily explained the novel was not published until some three and a half years later, on 27 March 1766, when it appeared in two volumes

with the imprint: ‘salisbury: Printed by b. collins, For

F. Newbery in Pater-Noster-Row, London’. Two other author- ized editions appeared in 1766, the second edition (with many stylistic revisions) on 31 May, and the third on 27 August. The fourth authorized edition, dated 1770, was published on 9 December 1769 and the fifth, dated 1773, on 2 April 1774, two days before Goldsmith’s death. By 1820, at least 111 editions had appeared.

The text of the present edition is substantially that established for Arthur Friedman’s Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith (Oxford, 1966), volume iv. It is the text of the first edition modified by the new readings of the second edition for which Goldsmith appears to have been responsible. Friedman accepted as authoritative no new readings from editions after the second; verbal variants from the third, fourth, and fifth editions can be found in Collected Works, iv. 185.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Editions

The Collected Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Katherine C. Balderston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928); includes the recollections of Goldsmith’s sister, Mrs Catherine Hudson, as appendix III.

Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966); Friedman’s carefully edited text of the novel is printed in vol. iv, with a brief but excellent introduction detailing its composition, sale, and publication.

Goldsmith: Selected Works, ed. Richard Garnett, the Reynard Library (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967).

The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. James Prior (London,

1801).

The Plays of Oliver Goldsmith together with The Vicar of Wakefield, ed.

C.E. Doble and G. Ostler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909).

The Poems of Gray, Collins, and Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale, Annotated English Poets (London: Longman, 1969).

The Vicar of Wakefield, ed. Oswald Doughty (London: Scholartis Press, 1928).

The Vicar of Wakefield and Other Writings, ed. Frederick W. Hilles (New York: The Modern Library, 1955).

The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Peter Cunningham, 4 vols. (London, 1854).

Biography, Biographical Sources, and Bibliographies

Black, William, Goldsmith, English Men of Letters (London, 1878).

Dobson, Austin, Life and Writings of Oliver Goldsmith, Great Writers (London, n.d. [1889]).

Dussinger, John A., ‘Goldsmith, Oliver (1728?–1774)’, in Colin Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Forster, John, The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, 2 vols. (1848;

6th edn., London: Bickerson and Son, 1877).

Friedman, Arthur, ‘Oliver Goldsmith’, in George Watson (ed.),

Select Bibliography xli

The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 5 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), ii. 1191–1210.

Ginger, John, The Notable Man: The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1977).

Irving, Washington, Oliver Goldsmith (1844; 2nd edn., New York:

1849) (revised from 1st edn. of Forster, Life and Times, above).

Jefferes, A. Norman, Oliver Goldsmith, Writers and Their Work (London, 1959).

Lytton Sells, A., Oliver Goldsmith: His Life and Works (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1974).

Mikhail, E. H., Goldsmith: Interviews and Recollections (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993).

Percy, Thomas, ‘The Life of Dr Oliver Goldsmith’, in The Miscel- laneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith, vol. i (London, 1801), i. 1–118. Prior, James, The Life of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B., 4 vols. (London,

1837).

Quintana, Ricardo, Oliver Goldsmith: A Georgian Study, Masters of World Literature series (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969).

Sherwin, Oscar, Goldy: The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith

(New York: Twayne, 1961).

Wardle, Ralph M., Oliver Goldsmith (London: Constable & Co., 1957). Woods, Samuel H., Oliver Goldsmith: A Reference Guide (Boston:

G. K. Hall, 1982).

Critical Studies of Sensibility and Sentimentalism

Bredvold, Louis I., The Natural History of Sensibility (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962).

Braudy, Leo, ‘The Form of the Sentimental Novel’, Novel, 7 (Fall

1973), 5–13.

Brissenden, R. F., Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (London: Hutchinson, 1974).

Conger, Sydney McMillan (ed.), Sensibility in Transformation: Cre- ative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics; Essays in Honour of Jean H. Hagstrum (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990).

Crane, R. S., ‘Suggestions toward a Genealogy of the “Man of Feeling” ’, ELH 1 (1934), 205–30.

Ellis, Markman, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

xlii Select Bibliography

Friedman, Arthur, ‘Aspects of Sentimentalism in Eighteenth-Century Literature’, in H. K. Miller, Eric Rothstein, and G. S. Rousseau (eds.) The Augustan Milieu: Essays Presented to Louis A. Landa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).

Knox, Ronald, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950).

Mason, John, Gentlefolk in the Making, 1531–1774 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1935).

Mullan, John, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

Rawson, Claude, Satire and Sentiment, 1660–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933).

Starr, G. A., ‘Sentimental Novels of the Later Eighteenth Century’ in John Richetti, John Bender, Deidre David, and Michael Seidel, (eds.), The Columbia History of the British Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 181–98.

Todd, Janet, Sensibility: An Introduction (London: Methuen, 1987). Van Sant, Ann Jessie, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel:

The Senses in Social Context, Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth- Century English Literature and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Critical Studies of Goldsmith and The Vicar of Wakefield

Bäckman, Sven, This Singular Tale: A Study of ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’ and Its Literary Background, Lund Studies in English, 40 (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1971).

Bataille, Robert A., ‘City and Country in The Vicar of Wakefield’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 3 (1977), 112–14.

Battestin, Martin, ‘Goldsmith: The Comedy of Job’, in The Providence of Wit: Aspects of Form in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 193–214.

Bender, John, ‘Prison Reform and the Sentence of Narration in The Vicar of Wakefield’, in Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Browns (eds.), The New Eighteenth Century (New York: Methuen, 1987), 168–88.

Carson, James P., ‘ “The Little Republic” of the Family: Goldsmith’s Politics of Nostalgia’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 16/2 (Jan. 2004), 174–96.

Dixon, Peter, Oliver Goldsmith Revisited (Boston: Twayne Publishers,

1991).

Select Bibliography xliii

Durant, David, ‘The Vicar of Wakefield and the Sentimental Novel’,

Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 17 (1977), 477–91. Dussinger, John A., ‘The Vicar of Wakefield: “Sickly Sensibility”

and the Rewards of Fortune’, in The Discourse of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century Fiction (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1974), 148–72.

Dykstal, Timothy, ‘The Story of O: Politics and Pleasure in The Vicar of Wakefield’, ELH 62 (1995), 329–46.

Ferguson, Oliver W. ‘Goldsmith as Ironist’, Studies in Philology, 81/2

(1984), 212–28.

—— ‘Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, and the Periodicals’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 76 (1977), 525–36.

Golden, Morris, ‘The Time of Writing of The Vicar of Wakefield’ Bulletin of the New York Public Library (Sept. 1961), 442–50.

Harkin, Maureen, ‘Goldsmith on Authorship in The Vicar of Wakefield’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 14/3–4 (2002), 325–44.

Hilliard, Raymond F. ‘The Redemption of Fatherhood in The Vicar of Wakefield’, Studies in English Literature, 23 (1983), 465–80.

Hopkins, Robert H., The True Genius of Oliver Goldsmith (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1969).

—— ‘Matrimony in The Vicar of Wakefield and the Marriage Act of

1753’, Studies in Philology, 74 (1977), 322–39.

Jaarsma, Richard J., ‘Satiric Intent in The Vicar of Wakefield’, Studies in Short Fiction, 5 (1967–68), 331–41.

Jaffares, Norman A., ‘The Vicar of Wakefield’ in Seàn Lucy (ed.), Goldsmith: The Gentle Master (Cork: Cork University Press, 1984).

Mullan, John, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

Murray, David, ‘From Patrimony to Paternity in The Vicar of Wakefield’, in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 9/3 (Apr. 1997), 327–36. Pierce, Robert B., ‘Moral Education in the Novel of the 1750s’,

Philological Quarterly, 44 (1965), 73–83.

Quintana, Ricardo, ‘The Vicar of Wakefield: The Problem of Critical Approach’, Modern Philology, 71 (1973), 59–65.

Rogers, Henry N., ‘God’s Implausible Plot: The Providential Design of The Vicar of Wakefield’, Philological Review, 28/1 (2002), 5–17. Rothstein, Eric, and Weinbrot, Howard, ‘The Vicar of Wakefield,

Mr Wilmot, and the “Whitsonean Controversy” ’, Philological Quarterly, 55 (1976), 225–40.

xliv Select Bibliography

Rousseau, G. S. (ed.), Goldsmith: The Critical Heritage, Critical Heritage series (gen. ed. Brian C. Southam) (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).

Swarbrick, Andrew (ed.), The Art of Oliver Goldsmith (London: Vision Press, 1984).

Taylor, Richard C., ‘Goldsmith’s First Vicar’, Review of English Studies, 41/162 (1990), 191–9.

Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics

Austen, Jane, Catharine and Other Writings, ed. Margaret Anne Doody and Douglas Murray.

—— Sense and Sensibility, ed. James Kinsley, Margaret Anne Doody and Claire Lamont.

Boswell, James, Life of Johnson, ed. Pat Rogers and R. W. Chapman.

Burke, Edmund, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Adam Phillips.

Burney, Fanny, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Vivien Jones. Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, ed. J. Donald Crowley.

Fielding, Henry, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, ed. Thomas Keymer.

—— Tom Jones, ed. John Bender and Simon Stern.

Hume, David, Selected Essays, ed. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar.

Johnson, Samuel, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. J. P. Hardy.

Mackenzie, Henry, The Man of Feeling, ed. Brian Vickers, Stephen Bending, and Stephen Bygrave.

Sterne, Laurence, A Sentimental Journey and Other Writings, ed. Ian Jack and Tim Parnell.

—— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Ian Campbell Ross.

A CHRONOLOGY OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH

1730? (10 November) born, either at Pallas, County Longford, or at Ardnagowan—his grandmother’s house—near Elphin, the second son and fifth child of the Revd Charles Gold- smith and his wife Ann (née James). The family soon moves to Lissoy, where Goldsmith spends his childhood. James Thomson completes The Seasons.

1735–45 Attends school at Lissoy, the Diocesan School at Elphin, and schools in Athlone and Edgeworthstown, County Longford.

1745 (11 June) admitted as a sizar to Trinity College Dublin.

Death of Jonathan Swift.

1747 (21 May) death of father; Goldsmith takes part in a student riot for which he received a ‘public admonishment’. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (to 1748).

1749 Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones.

1750 Receives AB degree. Samuel Johnson begins The Rambler.

1750–2 Attempts unsuccessfully to be ordained into the Anglican Church. Returns to his mother’s home near Athlone, and entertains the possibility of emigrating to America (from Cork) and studying law in London. He is engaged for a short time as a private tutor to a family in County Roscommon.

1751 Tobias Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle; Henry Fielding’s Amelia.

1752 Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote.

1752–4 Studies medicine at Edinburgh.

1753 Elected to the Medical Society at Edinburgh University.

1754 Leaves Edinburgh and attends medical lectures at Leyden.

Death of Henry Fielding.

1755–6 Travels across the Continent, often on foot, visiting Germany, Switzerland, France, and northern Italy.

1755 Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language.

1756 (1 February) returns to England; settles in London.

1756–7 Engaged in various odd jobs in and around London, includ- ing positions as an apothecary, physician, proofreader, and

xlvi

Chronology

an usher in a boys’ school in Peckham. May have applied for and received his medical degree from Trinity College Dublin.

1757 Begins reviewing for the Monthly Review, while lodging with its editor, Ralph Griffiths.

1759 Begins contributing to Tobias Smollett’s Critical Review; (2 April) publishes An Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe; also contributes essays and reviews to The Busy Body, The British Magazine, and The Lady’s Magazine; (6 October–25 November) writes the periodical paper The Bee.

1760–1 Publishes his ‘Chinese Letters’ in the Public Ledger and continues to write for other magazines.

1761 (31 May) first visited by Dr Samuel Johnson.

1762 The ‘Chinese Letters’ collected and republished as The Citizen of the World; publishes The Life of Richard Nash; effects his release from arrest for debt by selling a third share in The Vicar of Wakefield on 28 October.

1764 An History of England, in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son and (19 December) The Traveller, or A Prospect of Society.

1765 Essays by Mr. Goldsmith; private edition of Edwin and Angelina.

1766 (27 March) The Vicar of Wakefield; (31 May) second edition; (27 August) third edition.

1767 (April) two-volume anthology, The Beauties of English Poesy.

1768 (29 January) The Good Natur’d Man acted at Covent Garden and published; death of his brother Henry, to whom he had dedicated The Traveller. Death of Laurence Sterne and pub- lication of A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy.

1769 (18 May) publishes The Roman History; (December) appointed professor of Ancient History in the Royal Academy. (9 December) fourth authorized edition of The Vicar of Wakefield; David Garrick’s Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford-Upon-Avon; John Wilkes expelled from the House of Commons.

1770 (26 May) publishes The Deserted Village.

1771 Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling.

Chronology xlvii

1772 Performance of his Threnodia Augustalis; falls ill in the late summer with a serious bladder infection.

1773 She Stoops to Conquer produced at Covent Garden and published; contributes essays to the Westminster Magazine.

1774 (2 April) fifth authorized edition of The Vicar of Wakefield; Retaliation and An History of the Earth, and Animated Nature; (4 April) dies in his chambers in the Middle Temple.

1776 Monument to Goldsmith erected in Westminster Abbey. The Haunch of Venison published posthumously. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (vol. i); Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations; American Declaration of Independence.

This page intentionally left blank

THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD*

A Tale

Supposed to be written by himself

Sperate miseri, cavete fælices*

This page intentionally left blank

ADVERTISEMENT*

There are an hundred faults in this Thing, and an hundred things might be said to prove them beauties. But it is needless. A book may be amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity. The hero of this piece unites in himself the three greatest characters upon earth; he is a priest, an husbandman, and the father of a family. He is drawn as ready to teach, and ready to obey, as simple in affluence, and majestic in adversity. In this age of opulence and refinement whom can such a character please? Such as are fond of high life, will turn with disdain from the simplicity of his country fire-side. Such as mis- take ribaldry for humour, will find no wit in his harmless conver- sation; and such as have been taught to deride religion, will laugh at one whose chief stores of comfort are drawn from futurity.

Oliver Goldsmith

This page intentionally left blank

CONTENTS

1. The description of the family of Wakefield; in which a kindred likeness prevails as well of minds as of persons 9
2. Family misfortunes. The loss of fortune only serves to encrease the pride of the worthy 12
3. A migration. The fortunate circumstances of our lives

are generally found at last to be of our own procuring 15

1. A proof that even the humblest fortune may grant happiness, which depends not on circumstance, but constitution 21
2. A new and great acquaintance introduced. What we

place most hopes upon generally proves most fatal 24

1. The happiness of a country fire-side 27
2. A town wit described. The dullest fellows may learn

to be comical for a night or two 30

1. An amour, which promises little good fortune, yet may

be productive of much 34

1. Two ladies of great distinction introduced. Superior

finery ever seems to confer superior breeding 41

1. The family endeavours to cope with their betters. The miseries of the poor when they attempt to appear

above their circumstances 44

1. The family still resolve to hold up their heads 48
2. Fortune seems resolved to humble the family of Wakefield. Mortifications are often more painful than

real calamities 52

1. Mr. Burchell is found to be an enemy; for he has the confidence to give disagreeable advice 56
2. Fresh mortifications, or a demonstration that seeming calamities may be real blessings 59

6 Contents

1. All Mr. Burchell’s villainy at once detected. The folly

of being over-wise 65

1. The Family use art, which is opposed with still greater 69
2. Scarce any virtue found to resist the power of long and

pleasing temptation 74

1. The pursuit of a father to reclaim a lost child to virtue 81
2. The description of a Person discontented with the present government, and apprehensive of the loss of

our liberties 84

1. The history of a philosophic vagabond, pursuing novelty, but losing content 92
2. The short continuance of friendship among the vicious, which is coeval only with mutual satisfaction 104
3. Offences are easily pardoned where there is love at bottom 111
4. None but the guilty can be long and completely miserable 115
5. Fresh calamities
6. No situation, however wretched it seems, but has some

119

sort of comfort attending it 123

1. A reformation in the gaol. To make laws complete,

they should reward as well as punish 127

1. The same subject continued
2. Happiness and misery rather the result of prudence than of virtue in this life. Temporal evils or felicities being regarded by heaven as things merely in themselves trifling and unworthy its care in the

131

distribution 135

1. The equal dealings of providence demonstrated with regard to the happy and the miserable here below. That from the nature of pleasure and pain, the wretched must be repaid the balance of their sufferings

in the life hereafter 144

Contents 7

1. Happier prospects begin to appear. Let us be in-

flexible, and fortune will at last change in our favour 148

1. Former benevolence now repaid with unexpected interest 155
2. The Conclusion

167

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER I

The description of the family of Wakefield; in which a kindred likeness prevails as well of minds as of persons

I was ever of opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who con- tinued single, and only talked of population. For this motive, I had scarce taken orders a year before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife as she did her wedding gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well. To do her justice, she was a good-natured notable woman; and as for breeding, there were few country ladies who could shew more. She could read any English book without much spelling, but for pickling, preserving, and cookery, none could excel her. She prided herself also upon being an excellent contriver in house- keeping; tho’ I could never find that we grew richer with all her contrivances.

However, we loved each other tenderly, and our fondness encreased as we grew old. There was in fact nothing that could make us angry with the world or each other. We had an elegant house, situated in a fine country, and a good neighbourhood. The year was spent in moral or rural amusements; in visiting our rich neighbours, and relieving such as were poor. We had no revolu- tions to fear, nor fatigues to undergo; all our adventures were by the fire-side, and all our migrations from the blue bed to the brown.*

As we lived near the road, we often had the traveller or stran-

ger visit us to taste our gooseberry wine, for which we had great reputation; and I profess with the veracity of an historian, that I never knew one of them find fault with it. Our cousins too, even to the fortieth remove, all remembered their affinity, without any help from the Herald’s office,* and came very frequently to see us. Some of them did us no great honour by these claims of kindred; as we had the blind, the maimed, and the halt amongst the number. However, my wife always insisted that as they were

10 The Vicar of Wakefield

the same flesh and blood, they should sit with us at the same table. So that if we had not very rich, we generally had very happy friends about us; for this remark will hold good thro’ life, that the poorer the guest, the better pleased he ever is with being treated: and as some men gaze with admiration at the colours of a tulip, or the wing of a butterfly, so I was by nature an admirer of happy human faces. However, when any one of our relations was found to be a person of very bad character, a troublesome guest, or one we desired to get rid of, upon his leaving my house, I ever took care to lend him a riding coat, or a pair of boots, or sometimes an horse of small value, and I always had the satisfac- tion of finding he never came back to return them. By this the house was cleared of such as we did not like; but never was the family of Wakefield known to turn the traveller or the poor dependant out of doors.

Thus we lived several years in a state of much happiness, not but that we sometimes had those little rubs which Providence sends to enhance the value of its favours. My orchard was often robbed by school-boys, and my wife’s custards plundered by the cats or the children. The ’Squire would sometimes fall asleep in the most pathetic* parts of my sermon, or his lady return my wife’s civilities at church with a mutilated curtesy. But we soon got over the uneasiness caused by such accidents, and usually in three or four days began to wonder how they vext us.

My children, the offspring of temperance, as they were edu- cated without softness, so they were at once well formed and healthy; my sons hardy and active, my daughters beautiful and blooming. When I stood in the midst of the little circle, which promised to be the supports of my declining age, I could not avoid repeating the famous story of Count Abensberg,* who, in Henry II’s progress through Germany, while other courtiers came with their treasures, brought his thirty-two children, and presented them to his sovereign as the most valuable offering he had to bestow. In this manner, though I had but six, I considered them as a very valuable present made to my country, and con- sequently looked upon it as my debtor. Our eldest son was named George, after his uncle, who left us ten thousand pounds. Our

The Vicar of Wakefield 11

second child, a girl, I intended to call after her aunt Grissel; but my wife, who during her pregnancy had been reading romances, insisted upon her being called Olivia. In less than another year we had another daughter, and now I was determined that Grissel should be her name; but a rich relation taking a fancy to stand godmother, the girl was, by her directions, called Sophia; so that we had two romantic names in the family;* but I solemnly protest I had no hand in it. Moses was our next, and after an interval of twelve years, we had two sons more.

It would be fruitless to deny my exultation when I saw my little ones about me; but the vanity and the satisfaction of my wife were even greater than mine. When our visitors would say, ‘Well, upon my word, Mrs. Primrose, you have the finest children in the whole country.’—‘Ay, neighbour,’ she would answer, ‘they are as heaven made them, handsome enough, if they be good enough; for handsome is that handsome does.’* And then she would bid the girls hold up their heads; who, to conceal nothing, were certainly very handsome. Mere outside is so very trifling a circumstance with me, that I should scarce have remembered to mention it, had it not been a general topic of conversation in the country. Olivia, now about eighteen, had that luxuriancy of beauty with which painters generally draw Hebe;* open, sprightly, and commanding. Sophia’s features were not so striking at first; but often did more certain execution; for they were soft, modest, and alluring. The one vanquished by a single blow, the other by efforts successfully repeated.

The temper of a woman is generally formed from the turn of her features, at least it was so with my daughters. Olivia wished for many lovers, Sophia to secure one. Olivia was often affected from too great a desire to please. Sophia even represt excellence from her fears to offend. The one entertained me with her viv- acity when I was gay, the other with her sense when I was serious. But these qualities were never carried to excess in either, and I have often seen them exchange characters for a whole day together. A suit of mourning has transformed my coquet into a prude, and a new set of ribbands* has given her younger sister more than natural vivacity. My eldest son George was bred at

12 The Vicar of Wakefield

Oxford, as I intended him for one of the learned professions.* My second boy Moses, whom I designed for business, received a sort of a miscellaneous education at home. But it is needless to attempt describing the particular characters of young people that had seen but very little of the world. In short, a family likeness prevailed through all, and properly speaking, they had but one character, that of being all equally generous, credulous,* simple, and inoffensive.

CHAPTER II

Family misfortunes. The loss of fortune only serves to encrease the pride of the worthy

The temporal concerns of our family were chiefly committed to my wife’s management, as to the spiritual I took them entirely under my own direction. The profits of my living, which amounted to but thirty-five pounds a year,* I made over to the orphans and widows of the clergy of our diocese;* for having a sufficient fortune of my own, I was careless of temporalities, and felt a secret pleasure in doing my duty without reward. I also set a resolution of keeping no curate,* and of being acquainted with every man in the parish, exhorting the married men to temper- ance and the bachelors to matrimony; so that in a few years it was a common saying, that there were three strange wants at Wakefield, a parson wanting pride, young men wanting wives, and ale-houses wanting customers.

Matrimony was always one of my favourite topics, and I wrote several sermons to prove its happiness: but there was a peculiar tenet which I made a point of supporting; for I maintained with Whiston,* that it was unlawful for a priest of the church of England, after the death of his first wife, to take a second, or to express it in one word, I valued myself upon being a strict monogamist.

I was early innitiated into this important dispute, on which so many laborious volumes have been written. I published some

The Vicar of Wakefield 13

tracts upon the subject myself, which, as they never sold, I have the consolation of thinking are read only by the happy Few. Some of my friends called this my weak side; but alas! they had not like me made it the subject of long contemplation. The more I reflected upon it, the more important it appeared. I even went a step beyond Whiston in displaying my principles: as he had engraven upon his wife’s tomb that she was the only wife of William Whiston; so I wrote a similar epitaph for my wife, though still living, in which I extolled her prudence, œconomy, and obedience till death; and having got it copied fair, with an elegant frame, it was placed over the chimney-piece, where it answered several very useful purposes. It admonished my wife of her duty to me, and my fidelity to her; it inspired her with a passion for fame, and constantly put her in mind of her end.

It was thus, perhaps, from hearing marriage so often recom- mended, that my eldest son, just upon leaving college, fixed his affections upon the daughter of a neighbouring clergyman, who was a dignitary in the church, and in circumstances to give her a large fortune: but fortune was her smallest accomplishment. Miss Arabella Wilmot was allowed by all, except my two daughters, to be completely pretty. Her youth, health, and innocence, were still heightened by a complexion so transparent,* and such an happy sensibility of look, as even age could not gaze on with indiffer- ence. As Mr. Wilmot knew that I could make a very handsome settlement on my son, he was not averse to the match; so both families lived together in all that harmony which generally pre- cedes an expected alliance. Being convinced by experience that the days of courtship are the most happy of our lives, I was willing enough to lengthen the period; and the various amuse- ments which the young couple every day shared in each other’s company, seemed to encrease their passion. We were generally awaked in the morning by music, and on fine days rode a hunting. The hours between breakfast and dinner the ladies devoted to dress and study: they usually read a page, and then gazed at themselves in the glass, which even philosophers might own often presented the page of greatest beauty. At dinner my wife took the lead; for as she always insisted upon carving every thing herself, it

14 The Vicar of Wakefield

being her mother’s way, she gave us upon these occasions the history of every dish. When we had dined, to prevent the ladies leaving us,* I generally ordered the table to be removed; and some- times, with the music master’s assistance, the girls would give us a very agreeable concert. Walking out, drinking tea, country dances, and forfeits,* shortened the rest of the day, without the assistance of cards, as I hated all manner of gaming, except back- gammon, at which my old friend and I sometimes took a two- penny hit.* Nor can I here pass over an ominous circumstance that happened the last time we played together: I only wanted to fling a quatre, and yet I threw deuce ace* five times running.

Some months were elapsed in this manner, till at last it was

thought convenient to fix a day for the nuptials of the young couple, who seemed earnestly to desire it. During the prepar- ations for the wedding, I need not describe the busy importance of my wife, nor the sly looks of my daughters: in fact, my atten- tion was fixed on another object, the completing a tract which I intended shortly to publish in defence of my favourite principle. As I looked upon this as a master-piece both for argument and style, I could not in the pride of my heart avoid shewing it to my old friend Mr. Wilmot, as I made no doubt of receiving his approbation; but not till too late I discovered that he was most violently attached to the contrary opinion, and with good reason; for he was at that time actually courting a fourth wife.* This, as may be expected, produced a dispute attended with some acri- mony, which threatened to interrupt our intended alliance: but on the day before that appointed for the ceremony, we agreed to discuss the subject at large.

It was managed with proper spirit on both sides: he asserted that I was heterodox, I retorted the charge: he replied, and I rejoined. In the mean time, while the controversy was hottest, I was called out by one of my relations, who, with a face of concern, advised me to give up the dispute, at least till my son’s wedding was over. ‘How,’ cried I, ‘relinquish the cause of truth, and let him be an husband, already driven to the very verge of absurdity. You might as well advise me to give up my fortune as my argu- ment.’ ‘Your fortune,’ returned my friend, ‘I am now sorry to

The Vicar of Wakefield 15

inform you, is almost nothing. The merchant in town, in whose hands your money was lodged, has gone off, to avoid a statute of bankruptcy,* and is thought not to have left a shilling in the pound. I was unwilling to shock you or the family with the account till after the wedding: but now it may serve to moderate your warmth in the argument; for, I suppose, your own prudence will enforce the necessity of dissembling at least till your son has the young lady’s fortune secure.’*—‘Well,’ returned I, ‘if what you tell me be true, and if I am to be a beggar, it shall never make me a rascal, or induce me to disavow my principles. I’ll go this moment and inform the company of my circumstances; and as for the argument, I even here retract my former concessions in the old gentleman’s favour, nor will I allow him now to be an husband in any sense of the expression.’

It would be endless to describe the different sensations of both families when I divulged the news of our misfortune; but what others felt was slight to what the lovers appeared to endure. Mr. Wilmot, who seemed before sufficiently inclined to break off the match, was by this blow soon determined: one virtue he had in perfection, which was prudence,* too often the only one that is left us at seventy-two.

CHAPTER III

A migration. The fortunate circumstances of our lives are generally found at last to be of our own procuring

The only hope of our family now was, that the report of our misfortunes might be malicious or premature: but a letter from my agent in town soon came with a confirmation of every par- ticular. The loss of fortune to myself alone would have been trifling; the only uneasiness I felt was for my family, who were to be humble without an education to render them callous to contempt.

Near a fortnight had passed before I attempted to restrain their affliction; for premature consolation is but the remembrancer of

16 The Vicar of Wakefield

sorrow. During this interval, my thoughts were employed on some future means of supporting them; and at last a small Cure* of fifteen pounds a year was offered me in a distant neighbour- hood, where I could still enjoy my principles without molest- ation.* With this proposal I joyfully closed, having determined to encrease my salary by managing a little farm.

Having taken this resolution, my next care was to get together the wrecks of my fortune; and all debts collected and paid, out of fourteen thousand pounds we had but four hundred remaining. My chief attention therefore was now to bring down the pride of my family to their circumstances; for I well knew that aspiring beggary is wretchedness itself. ‘You can’t be ignorant, my chil- dren,’ cried I, ‘that no prudence of ours could have prevented our late misfortune; but prudence may do much in disappointing its effects. We are now poor, my fondlings, and wisdom bids us conform to our humble situation. Let us then, without repining, give up those splendours with which numbers are wretched, and seek in humbler circumstances that peace with which all may be happy. The poor live pleasantly without our help, why then should not we learn to live without theirs. No, my children, let us from this moment give up all pretensions to gentility; we have still enough left for happiness if we are wise, and let us draw upon content for the deficiencies of fortune.’

As my eldest son was bred a scholar, I determined to send him to town, where his abilities might contribute to our support and his own. The separation of friends and families is, perhaps, one of the most distressful circumstances attendant on penury. The day soon arrived on which we were to disperse for the first time. My son, after taking leave of his mother and the rest, who mingled their tears with their kisses, came to ask a blessing from me. This I gave him from my heart, and which, added to five guineas, was all the patrimony I had now to bestow. ‘You are going, my boy,’ cried I, ‘to London on foot, in the manner Hooker, your great ancestor, travelled there before you. Take from me the same horse that was given him by the good bishop Jewel, this staff,* and take this book too, it will be your comfort on the way: these two lines in it are worth a million, I have been young, and now am old; yet

The Vicar of Wakefield 17

never saw I the righteous man forsaken, or his seed begging their bread.* Let this be your consolation as you travel on. Go, my boy, whatever be thy fortune let me see thee once a year; still keep a good heart, and farewell.’ As he was possest of integrity and honour, I was under no apprehensions from throwing him naked into the amphitheatre of life,* for I knew he would act a good part whether vanquished or victorious.

His departure only prepared the way for our own, which arrived a few days afterwards. The leaving a neighbourhood in which we had enjoyed so many hours of tranquility, was not without a tear, which scarce fortitude itself could suppress. Besides, a journey of seventy miles to a family that had hitherto never been above ten from home, filled us with apprehension, and the cries of the poor, who followed us for some miles, contributed to encrease it. The first day’s journey brought us in safety within thirty miles of our future retreat, and we put up for the night at an obscure inn in a village by the way. When we were shewn a room, I desired the landlord, in my usual way, to let us have his company, with which he complied, as what he drank would encrease the bill next morning. He knew, however, the whole neighbourhood to which I was removing, particularly ’Squire Thornhill, who was to be my landlord, and who lived within a few miles of the place. This gentleman he described as one who desired to know little more of the world than its pleasures, being particularly remarkable for his attachment to the fair sex. He observed that no virtue was able to resist his arts and assiduity, and that scarce a farmer’s daughter within ten miles round but what had found him successful and faithless. Though this account gave me some pain, it had a very different effect upon my daughters, whose features seemed to brighten with the expect- ation of an approaching triumph, nor was my wife less pleased and confident of their allurements and virtue. While our thoughts were thus employed, the hostess entered the room to inform her husband, that the strange gentleman, who had been two days in the house, wanted money, and could not satisfy them for his reckoning. ‘Want money!’ replied the host, ‘that must be impos- sible; for it was no later than yesterday he paid three guineas to

18 The Vicar of Wakefield

our beadle to spare an old broken soldier that was to be whipped through the town for dog-stealing.* The hostess, however, still persisting in her first assertion, he was preparing to leave the room, swearing that he would be satisfied one way or another, when I begged the landlord would introduce me to a stranger of so much charity as he described. With this he complied, shewing in a gentleman who seemed to be about thirty, drest in cloaths that once were laced.* His person was well formed, and his face marked with the lines of thinking. He had something short and dry in his address, and seemed not to understand ceremony, or to despise it. Upon the landlord’s leaving the room, I could not avoid expressing my concern to the stranger at seeing a gentle- man in such circumstances, and offered him my purse to satisfy the present demand. ‘I take it with all my heart, Sir,’ replied he, ‘and am glad that a late oversight in giving what money I had about me, has shewn me that there are still some men like you. I must, however, previously entreat being informed of the name and residence of my benefactor, in order to repay him as soon as possible.’ In this I satisfied him fully, not only mentioning my name and late misfortunes, but the place to which I was going to remove. ‘This,’ cried he, ‘happens still more luckily than I hoped for, as I am going the same way myself, having been detained here two days by the floods, which, I hope, by to-morrow will be found passable.’ I testified the pleasure I should have in his company, and my wife and daughters joining in entreaty, he was prevailed upon to stay supper. The stranger’s conversation, which was at once pleasing and instructive, induced me to wish for a continu- ance of it; but it was now high time to retire and take refreshment against the fatigues of the following day.

The next morning we all set forward together: my family on horseback, while Mr. Burchell, our new companion,* walked along the foot-path by the road-side, observing, with a smile, that as we were ill mounted, he would be too generous to attempt leaving us behind. As the floods were not yet subsided, we were obliged to hire a guide, who trotted on before, Mr. Burchell and I bringing up the rear. We lightened the fatigues of the road with philosophical disputes, which he seemed to understand

The Vicar of Wakefield 19

perfectly. But what surprised me most was, that though he was a money-borrower, he defended his opinions with as much obstinacy as if he had been my patron. He now and then also informed me to whom the different seats belonged that lay in our view as we travelled the road. ‘That,’ cried he, pointing to a very magnificent house which stood at some distance, ‘belongs to Mr. Thornhill, a young gentleman who enjoys a large fortune, though entirely dependant on the will of his uncle, Sir William Thornhill, a gentleman, who content with a little himself, per- mits his nephew to enjoy the rest, and chiefly resides in town.’ ‘What!’ cried I, ‘is my young landlord then the nephew of a man whose virtues, generosity, and singularities are so universally known? I have heard Sir William Thornhill represented as one of the most generous, yet whimsical, men in the kingdom; a man of consummate benevolence’—‘Something, perhaps, too much so,’ replied Mr. Burchell, ‘at least he carried benevolence to an excess* when young; for his passions were then strong, and as they all were upon the side of virtue, they led it up to a romantic extreme. He early began to aim at the qualifications of the soldier and scholar; was soon distinguished in the army, and had some reputation among men of learning. Adulation ever follows the ambitious; for such alone receive most pleasure from flattery. He was surrounded with crowds, who shewed him only one side of their character; so that he began to lose a regard for private inter- est in universal sympathy. He loved all mankind; for fortune pre- vented him from knowing that there were rascals. Physicians tell us of a disorder in which the whole body is so exquisitely sensible, that the slightest touch gives pain: what some have thus suffered in their persons, this gentleman felt in his mind.* The slightest distress, whether real or fictitious, touched him to the quick, and his soul laboured under a sickly sensibility of the miseries of others. Thus disposed to relieve, it will be easily conjectured, he found numbers disposed to solicit: his profusions began to impair his fortune, but not his good-nature; that, indeed, was seen to encrease as the other seemed to decay: he grew improvident as he grew poor; and though he talked like a man of sense, his actions were those of a fool. Still, however, being surrounded

20 The Vicar of Wakefield

with importunity, and no longer able to satisfy every request that was made him, instead of money he gave promises. They were all he had to bestow, and he had not resolution enough to give any man pain by a denial. By this he drew round him crowds of dependants, whom he was sure to disappoint; yet wished to relieve. These hung upon him for a time, and left him with mer- ited reproaches and contempt. But in proportion as he became contemptible to others, he became despicable to himself. His mind had leaned upon their adulation, and that support taken away, he could find no pleasure in the applause of his heart, which he had never learnt to reverence. The world now began to wear a different aspect; the flattery of his friends began to dwindle into simple approbation. Approbation soon took the more friendly form of advice, and advice when rejected produced their re- proaches. He now therefore found that such friends as benefits had gathered round him, were little estimable: he now found that a man’s own heart must be ever given to gain that of another. I now found, that—that—I forget what I was going to observe:* in short, sir, he resolved to respect himself, and laid down a plan of restoring his falling fortune. For this purpose, in his own whimsi- cal manner he travelled through Europe on foot, and now, though he has scarce attained the age of thirty, his circumstances are more affluent than ever. At present, his bounties are more rational and moderate than before; but still he preserves the character of an humourist, and finds most pleasure in eccentric virtues.’

My attention was so much taken up by Mr. Burchell’s account, that I scarce looked forward as we went along, till we were alarmed by the cries of my family, when turning, I perceived my youngest daughter in the midst of a rapid stream, thrown from her horse, and struggling with the torrent. She had sunk twice, nor was it in my power to disengage myself in time to bring her relief. My sensations were even too violent to permit my attempt- ing her rescue: she must have certainly perished had not my companion, perceiving her danger, instantly plunged in to her relief, and, with some difficulty, brought her in safety to the opposite shore. By taking the current a little farther up, the rest of the family got safely over; where we had an opportunity of joining

The Vicar of Wakefield 21

our acknowledgments to her’s. Her gratitude may be more readily imagined than described: she thanked her deliverer more with looks than words, and continued to lean upon his arm, as if still willing to receive assistance. My wife also hoped one day to have the pleasure of returning his kindness at her own house. Thus, after we were refreshed at the next inn, and had dined together, as Mr. Burchell was going to a different part of the country, he took leave; and we pursued our journey. My wife observing as we went, that she liked him extremely, and protesting, that if he had birth and fortune to entitle him to match into such a family as our’s, she knew no man she would sooner fix upon. I could not but smile to hear her talk in this lofty strain: but I was never much displeased with those harmless delusions that tend to make us more happy.

CHAPTER IV

A proof that even the humblest fortune may grant happiness, which depends not on circumstance, but

constitution

The place of our retreat was in a little neighbourhood, consisting of farmers, who tilled their own grounds, and were equal strangers to opulence and poverty. As they had almost all the conveniencies of life within themselves, they seldom visited towns or cities in search of superfluity. Remote from the polite,* they still retained the primæval simplicity of manners, and frugal by habit, they scarce knew that temperance was a virtue. They wrought with chearfulness on days of labour; but observed festi- vals as intervals of idleness and pleasure. They kept up the Christmas carol, sent true love-knots on Valentine morning, eat pancakes on Shrove-tide, shewed their wit on the first of April, and religiously cracked nuts on Michaelmas eve.* Being apprized of our approach, the whole neighbourhood came out to meet their minister, drest in their finest cloaths, and preceded by a pipe and tabor: A feast also was provided for our reception, at which we sat

22 The Vicar of Wakefield

chearfully down; and what the conversation wanted in wit, was made up in laughter.

Our little habitation was situated at the foot of a sloping hill, sheltered with a beautiful underwood behind, and a pratling river before; on one side a meadow, on the other a green. My farm consisted of about twenty acres of excellent land, having given an hundred pound for my predecessor’s good-will. Nothing could exceed the neatness of my little enclosures:* the elms and hedge rows appearing with inexpressible beauty. My house consisted of but one story, and was covered with thatch, which gave it an air of great snugness; the walls on the inside were nicely white-washed, and my daughters undertook to adorn them with pictures of their own designing. Though the same room served us for parlour and kitchen, that only made it the warmer. Besides, as it was kept with the utmost neatness, the dishes, plates, and coppers, being well scoured, and all disposed in bright rows on the shelves, the eye was agreeably relieved, and did not want richer furniture. There were three other apartments, one for my wife and me, another for our two daughters, within our own, and the third, with two beds, for the rest of the children.

The little republic to which I gave laws,* was regulated in the following manner: by sun-rise we all assembled in our common appartment; the fire being previously kindled by the servant. After we had saluted each other with proper ceremony, for I always thought fit to keep up some mechanical forms of good breeding, without which freedom ever destroys friendship, we all bent in gratitude to that Being who gave us another day. This duty being performed, my son and I went to pursue our usual industry abroad, while my wife and daughters employed them- selves in providing breakfast, which was always ready at a certain time. I allowed half an hour for this meal, and an hour for dinner; which time was taken up in innocent mirth between my wife and daughters, and in philosophical arguments between my son and me.

As we rose with the sun, so we never pursued our labours after it was gone down, but returned home to the expecting family; where smiling looks, a neat hearth, and pleasant fire,

The Vicar of Wakefield 23

were prepared for our reception. Nor were we without guests: sometimes farmer Flamborough, our talkative neighbour, and often the blind piper,* would pay us a visit, and taste our goose- berry wine; for the making of which we had lost neither the receipt nor the reputation. These harmless people had several ways of being good company, while one played, the other would sing some soothing ballad, Johnny Armstrong’s last good night, or the cruelty of Barbara Allen.* The night was concluded in the manner we began the morning, my youngest boys being appointed to read the lessons of the day, and he that read loudest, distinctest, and best, was to have an half-penny on Sunday to put in the poor’s box.

When Sunday came, it was indeed a day of finery, which all my sumptuary edicts* could not restrain. How well so ever I fancied my lectures against pride had conquered the vanity of my daugh- ters; yet I still found them secretly attached to all their former finery: they still loved laces, ribbands, bugles and catgut,* my wife herself retained a passion for her crimson paduasoy,* because I formerly happened to say it became her.

The first Sunday in particular their behaviour served to mor- tify me: I had desired my girls the preceding night to be drest early the next day; for I always loved to be at church a good while before the rest of the congregation. They punctually obeyed my directions; but when we were to assemble in the morning at breakfast, down came my wife and daughters, drest out in all their former splendour; their hair plaistered up with pomatum, their faces patched* to taste, their trains bundled up into an heap behind, and rustling at every motion. I could not help smiling at their vanity, particularly that of my wife, from whom I expected more discretion. In this exigence, therefore, my only resource was to order my son, with an important air, to call our coach. The girls were amazed at the command; but I repeated it with more solemnity than before.—‘Surely, my dear, you jest,’ cried my wife, ‘we can walk it perfectly well: we want no coach to carry us now.’ ‘You mistake, child,’ returned I, ‘we do want a coach; for if we walk to church in this trim, the very children in the parish will hoot after us.’—‘Indeed,’ replied my wife, ‘I always imagined that

24 The Vicar of Wakefield

my Charles was fond of seeing his children neat and handsome about him.’—‘You may be as neat as you please,’ interrupted I, ‘and I shall love you the better for it; but all this is not neatness, but frippery. These rufflings, and pinkings,* and patchings, will only make us hated by all the wives of all our neighbours. No, my children,’ continued I, more gravely, ‘those gowns may be altered into something of a plainer cut; for finery is very unbecoming in us, who want the means of decency. I don’t know whether such flouncing and shredding* is becoming even in the rich, if we consider, upon a moderate calculation, that the naked- ness of the indigent world may be cloathed from the trimmings of the vain.’*

This remonstrance had the proper effect; they went with great composure, that very instant, to change their dress; and the next

day I had the satisfaction of finding my daughters, at their own request employed in cutting up their trains into Sunday waist- coats for Dick and Bill, the two little ones, and what was still more satisfactory, the gowns seemed improved by this curtailing.

CHAPTER V

A new and great acquaintance introduced. What we place most hopes upon, generally proves most fatal

At a small distance from the house my predecessor had made a seat, overshaded by an hedge of hawthorn and honeysuckle. Here, when the weather was fine, and our labour soon finished, we usually sate together, to enjoy an extensive landschape, in the calm of the evening. Here too we drank tea, which now was become an occasional banquet; and as we had it but seldom, it diffused a new joy, the preparations for it being made with no small share of bustle and ceremony. On these occasions, our two little ones always read for us, and they were regularly served after we had done. Sometimes, to give a variety to our amusements, the girls sung to the guitar; and while they thus formed a little con- cert, my wife and I would stroll down the sloping field, that was

The Vicar of Wakefield 25

embellished with blue bells and centaury,* talk of our children with rapture, and enjoy the breeze that wafted both health and harmony.

In this manner we began to find that every situation in life might bring its own peculiar pleasures: every morning waked us to a repetition of toil; but the evening repaid it with vacant* hilarity.

It was about the beginning of autumn, on a holiday, for I kept

such as intervals of relaxation from labour, that I had drawn out my family to our usual place of amusement, and our young musi- cians began their usual concert. As we were thus engaged, we saw a stag bound nimbly by, within about twenty paces of where we were sitting, and by its panting, it seemed prest by the hunters. We had not much time to reflect upon the poor animal’s distress, when we perceived the dogs and horsemen come sweeping along at some distance behind, and making the very path it had taken. I was instantly for returning in with my family; but either curiosity or surprize, or some more hidden motive, held my wife and daughters to their seats. The huntsman, who rode foremost, past us with great swiftness, followed by four or five persons more, who seemed in equal haste. At last, a young gentleman of a more genteel appearance than the rest, came forward, and for a while regarding us, instead of pursuing the chace, stopt short, and giv- ing his horse to a servant who attended, approached us with a careless superior air. He seemed to want no introduction, but was going to salute my daughters* as one certain of a kind reception; but they had early learnt the lesson of looking presumption out of countenance. Upon which he let us know that his name was Thornhill, and that he was owner of the estate that lay for some extent round us. He again, therefore, offered to salute the female part of the family, and such was the power of fortune and fine cloaths, that he found no second repulse. As his address, though confident, was easy, we soon became more familiar; and perceiv- ing musical instruments lying near, he begged to be favoured with a song. As I did not approve of such disproportioned acquaint- ances,* I winked upon my daughters in order to prevent their compliance; but my hint was counteracted by one from their mother; so that with a chearful air they gave us a favourite song

26 The Vicar of Wakefield

of Dryden’s.* Mr. Thornhill seemed highly delighted with their performance and choice, and then took up the guitar himself. He played but very indifferently; however, my eldest daughter repaid his former applause with interest, and assured him that his tones were louder than even those of her master. At this compliment he bowed, which she returned with a curtesy. He praised her taste, and she commended his understanding: an age could not have made them better acquainted. While the fond mother too, equally happy, insisted upon her landlord’s stepping in, and tasting a glass of her gooseberry. The whole family seemed earnest to please him: my girls attempted to entertain him with topics they thought most modern, while Moses, on the contrary, gave him a question or two from the ancients, for which he had the satisfac- tion of being laughed at:* my little ones were no less busy, and fondly stuck close to the stranger. All my endeavours could scarce keep their dirty fingers from handling and tarnishing the lace on his cloaths, and lifting up the flaps of his pocket holes, to see what was there. At the approach of evening he took leave; but not till he had requested permission to renew his visit, which, as he was our landlord, we most readily agreed to.

As soon as he was gone, my wife called a council on the con- duct of the day. She was of opinion, that it was a most fortunate hit; for that she had known even stranger things at last brought to bear. She hoped again to see the day in which we might hold up our heads with the best of them; and concluded, she protested she could see no reason why the two Miss Wrinklers should marry great fortunes, and her children get none. As this last argument was directed to me, I protested I could see no reason for it neither, nor why Mr. Simpkins got the ten thousand pound prize in the lottery, and we sate down with a blank:* ‘I protest, Charles,’ cried my wife, ‘this is the way you always damp my girls and me when we are in Spirits. Tell me, Sophy, my dear, what do you think of our new visitor? Don’t you think he seemed to be good-natured?’—‘Immensely so, indeed, Mamma,’ replied she. ‘I think he has a great deal to say upon every thing, and is never at a loss; and the more trifling the subject, the more he has to say.’—‘Yes,’ cried Olivia, ‘he is well enough for a man; but for

The Vicar of Wakefield 27

my part, I don’t much like him, he is so extremely impudent and familiar; but on the guitar he is shocking.’ These two last speeches I interpreted by contraries. I found by this, that Sophia internally despised, as much as Olivia secretly admired him.— ‘Whatever may be your opinions of him, my children,’ cried I, ‘to confess a truth, he has not prepossest me in his favour. Disproportioned friendships ever terminate in disgust; and I thought, notwithstanding all his ease, that he seemed perfectly sensible of the distance between us. Let us keep to companions of our own rank. There is no character more contemptible than a man that is a fortune-hunter, and I can see no reason why fortune-hunting women should not be contemptible too. Thus, at best, we shall be contemptible if his views be honourable; but if they be otherwise! I should shudder but to think of that! It is true I have no apprehensions from the conduct of my children, but I think there are some from his character.’—I would have pro- ceeded, but for the interruption of a servant from the ’Squire, who, with his compliments, sent us a side of venison, and a promise to dine with us some days after. This well-timed present pleaded more powerfully in his favour, than any thing I had to say could obviate. I therefore continued silent, satisfied with just having pointed out danger, and leaving it to their own discretion to avoid it. That virtue which requires to be ever guarded, is scarce worth the centinel.

CHAPTER VI

The happiness of a country fire-side

As we carried on the former dispute with some degree of warmth, in order to accommodate matters, it was universally agreed, that we should have a part of the venison for supper, and the girls undertook the task with alacrity. ‘I am sorry,’ cried I, ‘that we have no neighbour or stranger to take a part in this good cheer: feasts of this kind acquire a double relish from hospital- ity.’—‘Bless me,’ cried my wife, ‘here comes our good friend

28 The Vicar of Wakefield

Mr. Burchell, that saved our Sophia, and that run you down fairly in the argument.’—‘Confute me in argument, child!’ cried I. ‘You mistake there, my dear. I believe there are but few that can do that: I never dispute your abilities at making a goose-pye, and I beg you’ll leave argument to me.’—As I spoke, poor Mr. Burchell entered the house, and was welcomed by the family, who shook him heartily by the hand, while little Dick officiously reached him a chair.

I was pleased with the poor man’s friendship for two reasons; because I knew that he wanted mine, and I knew him to be friendly as far as he was able. He was known in our neighbour- hood by the character of the poor Gentleman that would do no good when he was young, though he was not yet thirty. He would at intervals talk with great good sense; but in general he was fondest of the company of children, whom he used to call harm- less little men. He was famous, I found, for singing them ballads, and telling them stories; and seldom went out without something in his pockets for them, a piece of ginger-bread, or an halfpenny whistle.* He generally came for a few days into our neighbourhood once a year, and lived upon the neighbours hospitality. He sate down to supper among us, and my wife was not sparing of her gooseberry wine. The tale went round; he sung us old songs, and gave the children the story of the Buck of Beverland, with the history of Patient Grissel, the adventures of Catskin, and then Fair Rosamond’s bower.* Our cock, which always crew at eleven, now told us it was time for repose; but an unforeseen difficulty started about lodging the stranger: all our beds were already taken up, and it was too late to send him to the next alehouse. In this dilemma, little Dick offered him his part of the bed, if his brother Moses would let him lie with him; ‘And I,’ cried Bill, ‘will give Mr. Burchell my part, if my sisters will take me to theirs.’—‘Well done, my good children,’ cried I, ‘hospitality is one of the first christian duties. The beast retires to its shelter, and the bird flies to its nest; but helpless man can only find refuge from his fellow creature. The greatest stranger in this world, was he that came to save it.* He never had an house, as if willing to see what hospitality was left remaining amongst us. Deborah, my dear,’ cried I, to my

The Vicar of Wakefield 29

wife, ‘give those boys a lump of sugar each, and let Dick’s be the largest, because he spoke first.’

In the morning early I called out my whole family to help at saving an after-growth of hay,* and our guest offering his assist- ance, he was accepted among the number. Our labours went on lightly, we turned the swath to the wind, I went foremost, and the rest followed in due succession. I could not avoid, however, observing the assiduity of Mr. Burchell in assisting my daughter Sophia in her part of the task. When he had finished his own, he would join in her’s, and enter into a close conversation: but I had too good an opinion of Sophia’s understanding, and was too well convinced of her ambition, to be under any uneasiness from a man of broken fortune. When we were finished for the day, Mr. Burchell was invited as on the night before; but he refused, as he was to lie that night at a neighbour’s, to whose child he was carrying a whistle. When gone, our conversation at supper turned upon our late unfortunate guest. ‘What a strong instance,’ said I, ‘is that poor man of the miseries attending a youth of levity and extravagance. He by no means wants sense, which only serves to aggravate his former folly. Poor forlorn creature, where are now the revellers, the flatterers, that he could once inspire and com- mand! Gone, perhaps, to attend the bagnio pander,* grown rich by his extravagance. They once praised him, and now they applaud the pander: their former raptures at his wit, are now converted into sarcasms at his folly: he is poor, and perhaps deserves pov- erty; for he has neither the ambition to be independent, nor the skill to be useful.’ Prompted, perhaps, by some secret reasons, I delivered this observation with too much acrimony, which my Sophia gently reproved. ‘Whatsoever his former conduct may be, pappa, his circumstances should exempt him from censure now. His present indigence is a sufficient punishment for former folly; and I have heard my pappa himself say, that we should never strike our unnecessary blow at a victim over whom providence holds the scourge of its resentment.’—‘You are right, Sophy,’ cried my son Moses, ‘and one of the ancients finely represents so malicious a conduct, by the attempts of a rustic to flay Marsyas, whose skin, the fable tells us, had been wholly stript off by

30 The Vicar of Wakefield

another.* Besides, I don’t know if this poor man’s situation be so bad as my father would represent it. We are not to judge of the feelings of others by what we might feel if in their place. However dark the habitation of the mole to our eyes, yet the animal itself finds the apartment sufficiently lightsome.* And to confess a truth, this man’s mind seems fitted to his station; for I never heard any one more sprightly than he was to-day, when he conversed with you.’—This was said without the least design, however it excited a blush, which she strove to cover by an affected laugh, assuring him, that she scarce took any notice of what he said to her; but that she believed he might once have been a very fine gentleman. The readiness with which she undertook to vindicate herself, and her blushing, were symptoms I did not internally approve; but I represt my suspicions.

As we expected our landlord the next day, my wife went to make the venison pasty; Moses sate reading, while I taught the little ones: my daughters seemed equally busy with the rest; and I observed them for a good while cooking something over the fire. I at first supposed they were assisting their mother; but little Dick informed me in a whisper, that they were making a wash* for the face. Washes of all kinds I had a natural antipathy to; for I knew that instead of mending the complexion they spoiled it. I there- fore approached my chair by sly degrees to the fire, and grasping the poker, as if it wanted mending, seemingly by accident, over- turned the whole composition, and it was too late to begin another.

CHAPTER VII

A town wit described. The dullest fellows may learn to be comical for a night or two

When the morning arrived on which we were to entertain our young landlord, it may be easily supposed what provisions were exhausted to make an appearance. It may also be conjectured that my wife and daughters expanded their gayest plumage upon this occasion. Mr. Thornhill came with a couple of friends, his

The Vicar of Wakefield 31

chaplain and feeder.* The servants, who were numerous, he politely ordered to the next ale-house: but my wife, in the tri- umph of her heart, insisted on entertaining them all; for which, by the bye, our family was pinched for three weeks after. As Mr. Burchell had hinted to us the day before, that he was making some proposals of marriage to Miss Wilmot, my son George’s former mistress, this a good deal damped the heartiness of his reception: but accident, in some measure, relieved our embarras- ment; for one of the company happening to mention her name, Mr. Thornhill observed with an oath, that he never knew any thing more absurd than calling such a fright a beauty: ‘For strike me ugly,’ continued he, ‘if I should not find as much pleasure in choosing my mistress by the information of a lamp under the clock at St. Dunstan’s.* At this he laughed, and so did we:—the jests of the rich are ever successful. Olivia too could not avoid whispering, loud enough to be heard, that he had an infinite fund of humour.

After dinner, I began with my usual toast, the Church; for this I was thanked by the chaplain, as he said the church was the only mistress of his affections.—‘Come tell us honestly, Frank,’ said the ’Squire, with his usual archness, ‘suppose the church, your present mistress, drest in lawn sleeves,* on one hand, and Miss Sophia, with no lawn about her, on the other, which would you be for?’ ‘For both, to be sure,’ cried the chaplain.—‘Right Frank,’ cried the ’Squire; ‘for may this glass suffocate me but a fine girl is worth all the priestcraft in the creation. For what are tythes and tricks but an imposition,* all a confounded imposture, and I can prove it.’—‘I wish you would,’ cried my son Moses, ‘and I think,’ continued he, ‘that I should be able to answer you.’—‘Very well, Sir,’ cried the ’Squire, who immediately smoaked him,* and wink- ing on the rest of the company, to prepare us for the sport, ‘if you are for a cool argument upon that subject, I am ready to accept the challenge. And first, whether are you for managing it analogically, or dialogically?’ ‘I am for managing it rationally,’ cried Moses, quite happy at being permitted to dispute. ‘Good again,’ cried the ’Squire, ‘and firstly, of the first. I hope you’ll not deny that what- ever is is. If you don’t grant me that, I can go no further.’ —

32 The Vicar of Wakefield

‘Why,’ returned Moses, ‘I think I may grant that, and make the best of it.’—‘I hope too,’ returned the other, ‘you’ll grant that a part is less than the whole.’ ‘I grant that too,’ cried Moses, ‘it is but just and reasonable.’—‘I hope,’ cried the ’Squire, ‘you will not deny, that the two angles of a triangle are equal to two right ones.’—‘Nothing can be plainer,’ returned t’other, and looked round with his usual importance.—‘Very well,’ cried the ’Squire, speaking very quick, ‘the premises being thus settled, I proceed to observe, that the concatanation of self existences, proceeding in a reciprocal duplicate ratio, naturally produce a problematical dialogism, which in some measure proves that the essence of spirituality may be referred to the second predicable’—‘Hold, hold,’ cried the other, ‘I deny that: Do you think I can thus tamely submit to such heterodox doctrines?’—‘What,’ replied the ’Squire, as if in a passion, ‘not submit! Answer me one plain question: Do you think Aristotle right when he says, that relatives are related?’ ‘Undoubtedly,’ replied the other.—‘If so then,’ cried the ’Squire, ‘answer me directly to what I propose: Whether do you judge the analytical investigation of the first part of my enthymem deficient secundum quoad, or quoad minus, and give me your reasons: give me your reasons, I say, directly.’—‘I pro- test,’ cried Moses, ‘I don’t rightly comprehend the force of your reasoning; but if it be reduced to one simple proposition, I fancy it may then have an answer.’—‘O, sir,’ cried the ’Squire, ‘I am your most humble servant, I find you want me to furnish you with argument and intellects too. No, sir, there I protest you are too hard for me.’ This effectually raised the laugh against poor Moses, who sate the only dismal figure in a groupe of merry faces: nor did he offer a single syllable more during the whole entertainment.

But though all this gave me no pleasure, it had a very different

effect upon Olivia, who mistook it for humour, though but a mere act of the memory. She thought him therefore a very fine gentle- man; and such as consider what powerful ingredients a good figure, fine cloaths, and fortune, are in that character, will easily forgive her. Mr. Thornhill, notwithstanding his real ignorance, talked with ease, and could expatiate upon the common topics of

The Vicar of Wakefield 33

conversation with fluency. It is not surprising then that such talents should win the affections of a girl, who by education was taught to value an appearance in herself, and consequently to set a value upon it in another.

Upon his departure, we again entered into a debate upon the merits of our young landlord. As he directed his looks and con- versation to Olivia, it was no longer doubted but that she was the object that induced him to be our visitor. Nor did she seem to be much displeased at the innocent raillery of her brother and sister upon this occasion. Even Deborah herself seemed to share the glory of the day, and exulted in her daughter’s victory as if it were her own. ‘And now, my dear,’ cried she to me, ‘I’ll fairly own, that it was I that instructed my girls to encourage our landlord’s addresses. I had always some ambition, and you now see that I was right; for who knows how this may end?’ ‘Ay, who knows that indeed,’ answered I, with a groan: ‘for my part I don’t much like it; and I could have been better pleased with one that was poor and honest, than this fine gentleman with his fortune and infidel- ity; for depend on’t, if he be what I suspect him, no free-thinker shall ever have a child of mine.’

‘Sure, father,’ cried Moses, ‘you are too severe in this; for heaven will never arraign him for what he thinks, but for what he does. Every man has a thousand vicious thoughts, which arise without his power to suppress. Thinking freely of religion, may be involuntary with this gentleman: so that allowing his senti- ments to be wrong, yet as he is purely passive in his assent, he is no more to be blamed for his errors than the governor of a city without walls for the shelter he is obliged to afford an invading enemy.’

‘True, my son,’ cried I; ‘but if the governor invites the enemy, there he is justly culpable. And such is always the case with those who embrace error. The vice does not lie in assenting to the proofs they see; but in being blind to many of the proofs that offer. So that, though our erroneous opinions be involuntary when formed, yet as we have been wilfully corrupt, or very neg- ligent in forming them, we deserve punishment for our vice, or contempt for our folly.’

34 The Vicar of Wakefield

My wife now kept up the conversation, though not the

argument: she observed, that several very prudent men of our acquaintance were free-thinkers,* and made very good husbands; and she knew some sensible girls that had skill enough to make converts of their spouses: ‘And who knows, my dear,’ continued she, ‘what Olivia may be able to do. The girl has a great deal to say upon every subject, and to my knowledge is very well skilled in controversy.’

‘Why, my dear, what controversy can she have read?’ cried I. ‘It does not occur to me that I ever put such books into her hands: you certainly over-rate her merit.’ ‘Indeed, pappa,’ replied Olivia, ‘she does not: I have read a great deal of controversy. I have read the disputes between Thwackum and Square;* the controversy between Robinson Crusoe and Friday the savage,* and I am now employed in reading the controversy in Religious courtship.’*— ‘Very well,’ cried I, ‘that’s a good girl, I find you are perfectly qualified for making converts, and so go help your mother to make the gooseberry-pye.’

CHAPTER VIII

An amour, which promises little good fortune, yet may be

productive of much

The next morning we were again visited by Mr. Burchell, though I began, for certain reasons, to be displeased with the frequency of his return; but I could not refuse him my company and fire- side. It is true his labour more than requited his entertainment; for he wrought among us with vigour, and either in the meadow or at the hay-rick put himself foremost. Besides, he had always something amusing to say that lessened our toil, and was at once so out of the way, and yet so sensible, that I loved, laughed at, and pitied him. My only dislike arose from an attachment he dis- covered to my daughter: he would, in a jesting manner, call her his little mistress, and when he bought each of the girls a set of ribbands, hers was the finest. I knew not how, but he every day

The Vicar of Wakefield 35

seemed to become more amiable, his wit to improve, and his simplicity to assume the superior airs of wisdom.

Our family dined in the field, and we sate, or rather reclined, round a temperate repast, our cloth spread upon the hay, while Mr. Burchell gave chearfulness to the feast. To heighten our satisfaction two blackbirds answered each other from opposite hedges, the familiar redbreast came and pecked the crumbs from our hands, and every sound seemed but the echo of tranquillity. ‘I never sit thus,’ says Sophia, ‘but I think of the two lovers, so sweetly described by Mr. Gay,* who were struck dead in each other’s arms. There is something so pathetic in the description, that I have read it an hundred times with new rapture.’—‘In my opinion,’ cried my son, ‘the finest strokes in that description are much below those in the Acis and Galatea of Ovid.* The Roman poet understands the use of contrast better, and upon that figure artfully managed all strength in the pathetic depends.’—‘It is remarkable,’ cried Mr. Burchell, ‘that both the poets you mention have equally contributed to introduce a false taste into their respective countries, by loading all their lines with epithet. Men of little genius found them most easily imitated in their defects, and English poetry, like that in the latter empire of Rome, is nothing at present but a combination of luxuriant images, with- out plot or connexion; a string of epithets that improve the sound, without carrying on the sense.* But perhaps, madam, while I thus reprehend others, you’ll think it just that I should give them an opportunity to retaliate, and indeed I have made this remark only to have an opportunity of introducing to the com- pany a ballad, which, whatever be its other defects, is I think at least free from those I have mentioned.’

A BALLAD*

‘Turn, gentle hermit of the dale, And guide my lonely way,

To where yon taper cheers the vale, With hospitable ray.

36 The Vicar of Wakefield

‘For here forlorn and lost I tread, With fainting steps and slow;

Where wilds immeasurably spread, Seem lengthening as I go.’

‘Forbear, my son,’ the hermit cries, ‘To tempt the dangerous gloom;

For yonder faithless phantom flies To lure thee to thy doom.

‘Here to the houseless child of want, My door is open still;

And tho’ my portion is but scant, I give it with good will.

‘Then turn to-night, and freely share Whate’er my cell bestows;

My rushy couch, and frugal fare, My blessing and repose.

‘No flocks that range the valley free, To slaughter I condemn:

Taught by that power that pities me, I learn to pity them.

‘But from the mountain’s grassy side, A guiltless feast I bring;

A scrip with herbs and fruits supply’d, And water from the spring.

‘Then, pilgrim, turn, thy cares forego; All earth-born cares are wrong:

Man wants but little here below, Nor wants that little long.’

Soft as the dew from heav’n descends, His gentle accents fell:

The modest stranger lowly bends, And follows to the cell.

Far in a wilderness obscure The lonely mansion lay;

The Vicar of Wakefield 37

A refuge to the neighbouring poor, And strangers led astray

No stores beneath its humble thatch Requir’d a master’s care;

The wicket opening with a latch, Receiv’d the harmless pair.

And now when busy crowds retire To take their evening rest,

The hermit trimm’d his little fire, And cheer’d his pensive guest:

And spread his vegetable store, And gayly prest, and smil’d;

And skill’d in legendary lore, The lingering hours beguil’d.

Around in sympathetic mirth Its tricks the kitten tries,

The cricket chirrups in the hearth; The crackling faggot flies.

But nothing could a charm impart To sooth the stranger’s woe;

For grief was heavy at his heart, And tears began to flow.

His rising cares the hermit spy’d, With answering care opprest:

‘And whence, unhappy youth,’ he cry’d, ‘The sorrows of thy breast?

‘From better habitations spurn’d, Reluctant dost thou rove;

Or grieve for friendship unreturn’d, Or unregarded love?

‘Alas! the joys that fortune brings, Are trifling and decay;

And those who prize the paltry things, More trifling still than they.

38 The Vicar of Wakefield

‘And what is friendship but a name, A charm that lulls to sleep;

A shade that follows wealth or fame, But leaves the wretch to weep?

‘And love is still an emptier sound, The modern fair one’s jest:

On earth unseen, or only found To warm the turtle’s nest.

‘For shame fond youth thy sorrows hush, And spurn the sex,’ he said:

But while he spoke a rising blush His love-lorn guest betray’d.

Surpriz’d he sees new beauties rise, Swift mantling to the view;

Like colours o’er the morning skies, As bright, as transient too.

The bashful look, the rising breast, Alternate spread alarms:

The lovely stranger stands confest A maid in all her charms.

‘And, ah, forgive a stranger rude, A wretch forlorn,’ she cry’d;

‘Whose feet unhallowed thus intrude Where heaven and you reside.

‘But let a maid thy pity share, Whom love has taught to stray;

Who seeks for rest, but finds despair Companion of her way.

‘My father liv’d beside the Tyne, A wealthy Lord was he;

And all his wealth was mark’d as mine, He had but only me.

‘To win me from his tender arms, Unnumber’d suitors came;

The Vicar of Wakefield 39

Who prais’d me for imputed charms, And felt or feign’d a flame.

‘Each hour a mercenary crowd, With richest proffers strove:

Among the rest young Edwin bow’d, But never talk’d of love.

‘In humble simplest habit clad, No wealth nor power had he;

Wisdom and worth were all he had, But these were all to me.

‘The blossom opening to the day, The dews of heaven refin’d,

Could nought of purity display, To emulate his mind.

‘The dew, the blossom on the tree, With charms inconstant shine;

Their charms were his, but woe to me, Their constancy was mine.

‘For still I try’d each fickle art, Importunate and vain;

And while his passion touch’d my heart, I triumph’d in his pain.

‘Till quite dejected with my scorn, He left me to my pride;

And sought a solitude forlorn, In secret where he died.

‘But mine the sorrow, mine the fault, And well my life shall pay;

I’ll seek the solitude he sought, And stretch me where he lay.

‘And there forlorn despairing hid, I’ll lay me down and die:

’Twas so for me that Edwin did, And so for him will I.’

40 The Vicar of Wakefield

‘Forbid it heaven!’ the hermit cry’d, And clasp’d her to his breast:

The wondering fair one turn’d to chide, ’Twas Edwin’s self that prest.

‘Turn, Angelina, ever dear, My charmer, turn to see,

Thy own, thy long-lost Edwin here, Restor’d to love and thee.

‘Thus let me hold thee to my heart, And ev’ry care resign:

And shall we never, never part, My life,—my all that’s mine.

‘No, never, from this hour to part, We’ll live and love so true;

The sigh that rends thy constant heart, Shall break thy Edwin’s too.’

While this ballad was reading, Sophia seemed to mix an air of

tenderness with her approbation. But our tranquillity was soon disturbed by the report of a gun just by us, and immediately after a man was seen bursting through the hedge, to take up the game he had killed. This sportsman was the ’Squire’s chaplain, who had shot one of the blackbirds that so agreeably entertained us. So loud a report, and so near, startled my daughters; and I could perceive that Sophia in the fright had thrown herself into Mr. Burchell’s arms for protection. The gentleman came up, and asked pardon for having disturbed us, affirming that he was ignorant of our being so near. He therefore sate down by my youngest daughter, and, sportsman like, offered her what he had killed that morning. She was going to refuse, but a private look from her mother soon induced her to correct the mistake, and accept his present, though with some reluctance. My wife, as usual, discovered her pride in a whisper, observing, that Sophy had made a conquest of the chaplain, as well as her sister had of the ’Squire. I suspected, however, with more probability, that her affections were placed upon a different object. The chaplain’s

The Vicar of Wakefield 41

errand was to inform us, that Mr. Thornhill had provided music and refreshments, and intended that night giving the young ladies a ball by moon-light, on the grass-plot before our door. ‘Nor can I deny,’ continued he, ‘but I have an interest in being first to deliver this message, as I expect for my reward to be honoured with miss Sophy’s hand as a partner.’ To this my girl replied, that she should have no objection, if she could do it with honour: ‘But here,’ continued she, ‘is a gentleman,’ looking at Mr. Burchell, ‘who has been my companion in the task for the day, and it is fit he should share in its amusements.’ Mr. Burchell returned her a compliment for her intentions; but resigned her up to the chap- lain, adding that he was to go that night five miles, being invited to an harvest supper. His refusal appeared to me a little extra- ordinary, nor could I conceive how so sensible a girl as my young- est, could thus prefer a man of broken fortune to one whose expectations were much greater. But as men are most capable of distinguishing merit in women, so the ladies often form the truest judgments of us. The two sexes seem placed as spies upon each other, and are furnished with different abilities, adapted for mutual inspection.

CHAPTER IX

Two ladies of great distinction introduced. Superior finery ever seems to confer superior breeding

Mr. Burchell had scarce taken leave, and Sophia consented to dance with the chaplain, when my little ones came running out to tell us that the ’Squire was come, with a crowd of company. Upon our return, we found our landlord, with a couple of under gentlemen and two young ladies richly drest, whom he intro- duced as women of very great distinction and fashion from town.* We happened not to have chairs enough for the whole company; but Mr. Thornhill immediately proposed that every gentleman should sit in a lady’s lap. This I positively objected to, notwithstanding a look of disapprobation from my wife. Moses

42 The Vicar of Wakefield

was therefore dispatched to borrow a couple of chairs; and as we were in want of ladies to make up a set at country dances, the two gentlemen went with him in quest of a couple of partners. Chairs and partners were soon provided. The gentlemen returned with my neighbour Flamborough’s rosy daughters, flaunting with red top-knots,* but an unlucky circumstance was not adverted to; though the Miss Flamboroughs were reckoned the very best dancers in the parish, and understood the jig and the round- about to perfection; yet they were totally unacquainted with country dances.* This at first discomposed us: however, after a little shoving and dragging, they at last went merrily on. Our music consisted of two fiddles, with a pipe and tabor. The moon shone bright, Mr. Thornhill and my eldest daughter led up the ball, to the great delight of the spectators; for the neighbours hearing what was going forward, came flocking about us. My girl moved with so much grace and vivacity, that my wife could not avoid discovering the pride of her heart, by assuring me, that though the little chit* did it so cleverly, all the steps were stolen from herself. The ladies of the town strove hard to be equally easy, but without success. They swam, sprawled, languished, and frisked; but all would not do: the gazers indeed owned that it was fine; but neighbour Flamborough observed, that Miss Livy’s feet seemed as pat to the music as its echo. After the dance had continued about an hour, the two ladies, who were apprehensive of catching cold, moved to break up the ball. One of them, I thought, expressed her sentiments upon this occasion in a very coarse manner, when she observed, that by the living jingo, she was all of a muck of sweat.* Upon our return to the house, we found a very elegant cold supper, which Mr. Thornhill had ordered to be brought with him. The conversation at this time was more reserved than before. The two ladies threw my girls quite into the shade; for they would talk of nothing but high life, and high lived company; with other fashionable topics, such as pictures, taste, Shakespear, and the musical glasses.* ’Tis true they once or twice mortified us sensibly by slipping out an oath; but that appeared to me as the surest symptom of their distinc- tion, (tho’ I am since informed that swearing is perfectly

The Vicar of Wakefield 43

unfashionable.) Their finery, however, threw a veil over any grossness in their conversation. My daughters seemed to regard their superior accomplishments with envy; and what appeared amiss was ascribed to tip-top quality breeding. But the con- descension of the ladies was still superior to their other accomplishments. One of them observed, that had miss Olivia seen a little more of the world, it would greatly improve her. To which the other added, that a single winter in town* would make her little Sophia quite another thing. My wife warmly assented to both; adding, that there was nothing she more ardently wished than to give her girls a single winter’s polishing. To this I could not help replying, that their breeding was already superior to their fortune; and that greater refinement would only serve to make their poverty ridiculous, and give them a taste for pleasures they had no right to possess.—‘And what pleasures,’ cried Mr. Thornhill, ‘do they not deserve to possess, who have so much in their power to bestow? As for my part,’ continued he, ‘my fortune is pretty large, love, liberty, and pleasure, are my maxims; but curse me if a settlement of half my estate could give my charming Olivia pleasure, it should be hers; and the only favour I would ask in return would be to add myself to the benefit.’ I was not such a stranger to the world as to be ignorant that this was the fashionable cant to disguise the insolence of the basest proposal; but I made an effort to suppress my resentment. ‘Sir,’ cried I, ‘the family which you now condescend to favour with your company, has been bred with as nice a sense of honour as you. Any attempts to injure that, may be attended with very dangerous consequences. Honour, Sir, is our only possession at present, and of that last treasure we must be particularly careful.’—I was soon sorry for the warmth with which I had spoken this, when the young gentleman, grasping my hand, swore he commended my spirit, though he disapproved my suspicions. ‘As to your present hint,’ continued he, ‘I protest nothing was farther from my heart than such a thought. No, by all that’s tempting, the virtue that will stand a regular siege was never to my taste; for all my amours are carried by a coup de main.’*

44 The Vicar of Wakefield

The two ladies, who affected to be ignorant of the rest,

seemed highly displeased with this last stroke of freedom, and began a very discreet and serious dialogue upon virtue: in this my wife, the chaplain, and I, soon joined; and the ’Squire himself was at last brought to confess a sense of sorrow for his former excesses. We talked of the pleasures of temperance, and of the sun-shine in the mind unpolluted with guilt. I was so well pleased, that my little ones were kept up beyond the usual time to be edified by so much good conversation. Mr. Thornhill even went beyond me, and demanded if I had any objection to giving prayers. I joyfully embraced the proposal, and in this manner the night was passed in a most comfortable way, till at last the company began to think of returning. The ladies seemed very unwilling to part with my daughters; for whom they had conceived a particular affection, and joined in a request to have the pleasure of their company home. The ’Squire seconded the proposal, and my wife added her entreaties: the girls too looked upon me as if they wished to go. In this perplexity I made two or three excuses, which my daughters as readily removed; so that at last I was obliged to give a peremptory refusal; for which we had nothing but sullen looks and short answers the whole day ensuing.

CHAPTER X

The family endeavours to cope with their betters. The miseries of the poor when they attempt to appear above their

circumstances

I now began to find that all my long and painful lectures upon temperance, simplicity, and contentment, were entirely disregarded. The distinctions lately paid us by our betters awaked that pride which I had laid asleep, but not removed. Our windows again, as formerly, were filled with washes for the neck and face. The sun was dreaded as an enemy to the skin without doors, and the fire as a spoiler of the complexion within. My

The Vicar of Wakefield 45

wife observed, that rising too early would hurt her daughters eyes, that working after dinner would redden their noses, and she convinced me that the hands never looked so white as when they did nothing. Instead therefore of finishing George’s shirts, we now had them new modelling their old gauzes, or flourishing upon catgut.* The poor Miss Flamboroughs, their former gay companions, were cast off as mean acquaintance, and the whole conversation ran upon high life and high lived company, with pictures, taste, Shakespear, and the musical glasses.

But we could have borne all this, had not a fortune-telling gypsey come to raise us into perfect sublimity. The tawny sybil no sooner appeared, than my girls came running to me for a shilling a piece to cross her hand with silver. To say the truth, I was tired of being always wise, and could not help gratifying their request, because I loved to see them happy. I gave each of them a shilling; though, for the honour of the family, it must be observed, that they never went without money themselves, as my wife always generously let them have a guinea each, to keep in their pockets; but with strict injunctions never to change it. After they had been closetted up with the fortune-teller for some time, I knew by their looks, upon their returning, that they had been promised some- thing great.—‘Well, my girls, how have you sped? Tell me, Livy, has the fortune-teller given thee a pennyworth?’—‘I protest, pappa,’ says the girl, ‘I believe she deals with some body that’s not right; for she positively declared, that I am to be married to a ’Squire in less than a twelvemonth?’—‘Well now, Sophy, my child,’ said I, ‘and what sort of a husband are you to have?’ ‘Sir,’ replied she, ‘I am to have a Lord soon after my sister has married the ’Squire.’—‘How,’ cried I, ‘is that all you are to have for your two shillings! Only a Lord and a ’Squire for two shillings! You fools, I could have promised you a Prince and a Nabob* for half the money.’

This curiosity of theirs, however, was attended with very ser- ious effects: we now began to think ourselves designed by the stars for something exalted, and already anticipated our future grandeur.

46 The Vicar of Wakefield

It has been a thousand times observed, and I must observe it

once more, that the hours we pass with happy prospects in view, are more pleasing than those crowned with fruition. In the first case we cook the dish to our own appetite; in the latter nature cooks it for us. It is impossible to repeat the train of agreeable reveries we called up for our entertainment. We looked upon our fortunes as once more rising; and as the whole parish asserted that the ’Squire was in love with my daughter, she was actually so with him; for they persuaded her into the passion. In this agree- able interval, my wife had the most lucky dreams in the world, which she took care to tell us every morning, with great solemnity and exactness. It was one night a coffin and cross bones, the sign of an approaching wedding: at another time she imagined her daughters pockets filled with farthings, a certain sign of their being shortly stuffed with gold. The girls themselves had their omens. They felt strange kisses on their lips; they saw rings in the candle, purses bounced from the fire,* and true love-knots lurked in the bottom of every tea-cup.

Towards the end of the week we received a card from the town ladies; in which, with their compliments, they hoped to see all our family at church the Sunday following. All Saturday morning I could perceive, in consequence of this, my wife and daughters in close conference together, and now and then glancing at me with looks that betrayed a latent plot. To be sincere, I had strong suspicions that some absurd proposal was preparing for appear- ing with splendor the next day. In the evening they began their operations in a very regular manner, and my wife undertook to conduct the siege. After tea, when I seemed in spirits, she began thus.—‘I fancy, Charles, my dear, we shall have a great deal of good company at our church to-morrow.’—‘Perhaps we may, my dear,’ returned I; ‘though you need be under no uneasiness about that, you shall have a sermon whether there be or not.’—‘That is what I expect,’ returned she; ‘but I think, my dear, we ought to appear there as decently as possible, for who knows what may happen?’ ‘Your precautions,’ replied I, ‘are highly commendable. A decent behaviour and appearance in church is what charms me. We should be devout and humble, chearful and serene.’—‘Yes,’

The Vicar of Wakefield 47

cried she, ‘I know that; but I mean we should go there in as proper a manner as possible; not altogether like the scrubs* about us.’ ‘You are quite right, my dear,’ returned I, ‘and I was going to make the very same proposal. The proper manner of going is, to go there as early as possible, to have time for meditation before the service begins.’—‘Phoo, Charles,’ interrupted she, ‘all that is very true; but not what I would be at. I mean, we should go there genteelly. You know the church is two miles off, and I protest I don’t like to see my daughters trudging up to their pew all blowzed and red with walking, and looking for all the world as if they had been winners at a smock race.* Now, my dear, my pro- posal is this: there are our two plow horses, the Colt that has been in our family these nine years, and his companion Blackberry, that have scarce done an earthly thing for this month past. They are both grown fat and lazy. Why should not they do something as well as we? And let me tell you, when Moses has trimmed them a little, they will cut a very tolerable figure.’

To this proposal I objected, that walking would be twenty times more genteel than such a paltry conveyance, as Blackberry was wall-eyed, and the Colt wanted a tail: that they had never been broke to the rein; but had an hundred vicious tricks; and that we had but one saddle and pillion in the whole house. All these objections, however, were over-ruled; so that I was obliged to comply. The next morning I perceived them not a little busy in collecting such materials as might be necessary for the exped- ition; but as I found it would be a business of time, I walked on to the church before, and they promised speedily to follow. I waited near an hour in the reading desk for their arrival; but not finding them come as expected, I was obliged to begin, and went through the service, not without some uneasiness at finding them absent. This was encreased when all was finished, and no appearance of the family. I therefore walked back by the horse-way, which was five miles round, tho’ the foot-way was but two, and when got about half way home, perceived the procession marching slowly forward towards the church; my son, my wife, and the two little ones exalted upon one horse, and my two daughters upon the other. I demanded the cause of their delay; but I soon found by

48 The Vicar of Wakefield

their looks they had met with a thousand misfortunes on the road. The horses had at first refused to move from the door, till Mr. Burchell was kind enough to beat them forward for about two hundred yards with his cudgel. Next the straps of my wife’s pillion* broke down, and they were obliged to stop to repair them before they could proceed. After that, one of the horses took it into his head to stand still, and neither blows nor entreaties could prevail with him to proceed. It was just recovering from this dismal situation that I found them; but perceiving every thing safe, I own their present mortification did not much displease me, as it would give me many opportunities of future triumph, and teach my daughters more humility.

CHAPTER XI

The family still resolve to hold up their heads

Michaelmas eve happening on the next day,* we were invited to burn nuts and play tricks at neighbour Flamborough’s. Our late mortifications had humbled us a little, or it is probable we might have rejected such an invitation with contempt: however, we suf- fered ourselves to be happy. Our honest neighbour’s goose and dumplings were fine, and the lamb’s-wool,* even in the opinion of my wife, who was a connoiseur, was excellent. It is true, his manner of telling stories was not quite so well. They were very long, and very dull, and all about himself, and we had laughed at them ten times before: however, we were kind enough to laugh at them once more.

Mr. Burchell, who was of the party, was always fond of seeing some innocent amusement going forward, and set the boys and girls to blind man’s buff. My wife too was persuaded to join in the diversion, and it gave me pleasure to think she was not yet too old. In the mean time, my neighbour and I looked on, laughed at every feat, and praised our own dexterity when we were young. Hot cockles* succeeded next, questions and commands followed that, and last of all, they sate down to hunt the slipper. As every

The Vicar of Wakefield 49

person may not be acquainted with this primæval pastime, it may be necessary to observe, that the company at this play plant them- selves in a ring upon the ground, all, except one who stands in the middle, whose business it is to catch a shoe, which the company shove about under their hams from one to another, something like a weaver’s shuttle. As it is impossible, in this case, for the lady who is up to face all the company at once, the great beauty of the play lies in hitting her a thump with the heel of the shoe on that side least capable of making a defence. It was in this manner that my eldest daughter was hemmed in, and thumped about, all blowzed, in spirits, and bawling for fair play, fair play, with a voice that might deafen a ballad singer, when confusion on confusion, who should enter the room but our two great acquaintances from town, Lady Blarney and Miss Carolina Wilelmina Amelia Skeggs! Description would but beggar, therefore it is unnecessary to describe this new mortification. Death! To be seen by ladies of such high breeding in such vulgar attitudes! Nothing better could ensue from such a vulgar play of Mr. Flamborough’s proposing. We seemed stuck to the ground for some time, as if actually petrified with amazement.

The two ladies had been at our house to see us, and finding us from home, came after us hither, as they were uneasy to know what accident could have kept us from church the day before. Olivia undertook to be our prolocutor,* and delivered the whole in a summary way, only saying, ‘We were thrown from our horses.’ At which account the ladies were greatly concerned; but being told the family received no hurt, they were extremely glad: but being informed that we were almost killed by the fright, they were vastly sorry; but hearing that we had a very good night, they were extremely glad again. Nothing could exceed their com- plaisance to my daughters; their professions the last evening were warm, but now they were ardent. They protested a desire of having a more lasting acquaintance. Lady Blarney was particu- larly attached to Olivia; Miss Carolina Wilelmina Amelia Skeggs (I love to give the whole name) took a greater fancy to her sister. They supported the conversation between themselves, while my daughters sate silent, admiring their exalted breeding. But as every

50 The Vicar of Wakefield

reader, however beggarly himself, is fond of high-lived dialogues, with anecdotes of Lords, Ladies, and Knights of the Garter, I must beg leave to give him the concluding part of the present conversation.

‘All that I know of the matter,’ cried Miss Skeggs, ‘is this, that it may be true, or it may not be true: but this I can assure your Ladyship, that the whole rout was in amaze; his Lordship turned all manner of colours, my Lady fell into a sound;* but Sir Tomkyn, drawing his sword, swore he was her’s to the last drop of his blood.’ ‘Well,’ replied our Peeress, ‘this I can say, that the Dutchess never told me a syllable of the matter, and I believe her Grace would keep nothing a secret from me. This you may depend upon as fact, that the next morning my Lord Duke cried out three times to his valet de chambre, Jernigan, Jernigan, Jernigan, bring

me my garters.’

But previously I should have mentioned the very impolite behaviour of Mr. Burchell, who, during this discourse, sate with his face turned to the fire, and at the conclusion of every sentence would cry out fudge, an expression which displeased us all, and in some measure damped the rising spirit of the conversation.*

‘Besides, my dear Skeggs,’ continued our Peeress, ‘there is

nothing of this in the copy of verses that Dr. Burdock made upon the occasion.’ Fudge!

‘I am surprised at that,’ cried Miss Skeggs; ‘for he seldom leaves any thing out, as he writes only for his own amusement. But can your Ladyship favour me with a sight of them?’ Fudge!

‘My dear creature,’ replied our Peeress, ‘do you think I carry such things about me? Though they are very fine to be sure, and I think myself something of a judge; at least I know what pleases myself. Indeed I was ever an admirer of all Doctor Burdock’s little pieces; for except what he does, and our dear Countess at Hanover-Square, there’s nothing comes out but the most lowest stuff in nature; not a bit of high life among them.’ Fudge!

‘Your Ladyship should except,’ says t’other, ‘your own things in the Lady’s Magazine.* I hope you’ll say there’s nothing low lived there? But I suppose we are to have no more from that quarter?’ Fudge!

The Vicar of Wakefield 51

‘Why, my dear,’ says the Lady, ‘you know my reader and com- panion has left me, to be married to Captain Roach, and as my poor eyes won’t suffer me to write myself, I have been for some time looking out for another. A proper person is no easy matter to find, and to be sure thirty pounds a year is a small stipend for a well-bred girl of character, that can read, write, and behave in company; as for the chits about town, there is no bearing them about one.’ Fudge!

‘That I know,’ cried Miss Skeggs, ‘by experience. For of the three companions I had this last half year, one of them refused to do plain-work* an hour in the day, another thought twenty-five guineas a year too small a salary, and I was obliged to send away the third, because I suspected an intrigue with the chaplain. Virtue, my dear Lady Blarney, virtue is worth any price; but where is that to be found?’ Fudge!

My wife had been for a long time all attention to this discourse; but was particularly struck with the latter part of it. Thirty pounds and twenty-five guineas a year made fifty-six pounds five shillings English money, all which was in a manner going a- begging, and might easily be secured in the family. She for a moment studied my looks for approbation; and, to own a truth, I was of opinion, that two such places would fit our two daughters exactly. Besides, if the ’Squire had any real affection for my eldest daughter, this would be the way to make her every way qualified for her fortune. My wife therefore was resolved that we should not be deprived of such advantages for want of assurance, and under- took to harangue for the family. ‘I hope,’ cried she, ‘your Lady- ships will pardon my present presumption. It is true, we have no right to pretend to such favours; but yet it is natural for me to wish putting my children forward in the world. And I will be bold to say my two girls have had a pretty good education, and capacity, at least the country can’t shew better. They can read, write, and cast accompts; they understand their needle, breadstitch, cross and change, and all manner of plain-work; they can pink, point, and frill; and know something of music; they can do up small cloaths, work upon catgut; my eldest can cut paper,* and my youngest has a very pretty manner of telling fortunes upon the cards.’ Fudge!

52 The Vicar of Wakefield

When she had delivered this pretty piece of eloquence, the two

ladies looked at each other a few minutes in silence, with an air of doubt and importance. At last, Miss Carolina Wilelmina Amelia Skeggs condescended to observe, that the young ladies, from the opinion she could form of them from so slight an acquaintance, seemed very fit for such employments: ‘But a thing of this kind, Madam,’ cried she, addressing my spouse, ‘requires a thorough examination into characters, and a more perfect knowledge of each other. Not, Madam,’ continued she, ‘that I in the least sus- pect the young ladies virtue, prudence and discretion; but there is a form in these things, Madam, there is a form.’

My wife approved her suspicions very much, observing, that she was very apt to be suspicious herself; but referred her to all the neighbours for a character: but this our Peeress declined as unnecessary, alledging that her cousin Thornhill’s recommenda- tion would be sufficient, and upon this we rested our petition.

CHAPTER XII

Fortune seems resolved to humble the family of Wakefield. Mortifications are often more painful than real calamities

When we were returned home, the night was dedicated to schemes of future conquest. Deborah exerted much sagacity in conjecturing which of the two girls was likely to have the best place, and most opportunities of seeing good company. The only obstacle to our preferment was in obtaining the ’Squire’s recom- mendation; but he had already shewn us too many instances of his friendship to doubt of it now. Even in bed my wife kept up the usual theme: ‘Well, faith, my dear Charles, between ourselves, I think we have made an excellent day’s work of it.’—‘Pretty well,’ cried I, not knowing what to say.—‘What only pretty well!’ returned she. ‘I think it is very well. Suppose the girls should come to make acquaintances of taste in town! This I am assured of, that London is the only place in the world for all manner of husbands. Besides, my dear, stranger things happen every day:

The Vicar of Wakefield 53

and as ladies of quality are so taken with my daughters, what will not men of quality be! Entre nous, I protest I like my Lady Blarney vastly, so very obliging. However, Miss Carolina Wilelmina Amelia Skeggs has my warm heart. But yet, when they came to talk of places in town, you saw at once how I nailed them. Tell me, my dear, don’t you think I did for my children there?’— ‘Ay,’ returned I, not knowing well what to think of the matter, ‘heaven grant they may be both the better for it this day three months!’ This was one of those observations I usually made to impress my wife with an opinion of my sagacity; for if the girls succeeded, then it was a pious wish fulfilled; but if any thing unfortunate ensued, then it might be looked upon as a prophecy. All this conversation, however, was only preparatory to another scheme, and indeed I dreaded as much. This was nothing less than, that as we were now to hold up our heads a little higher in the world, it would be proper to sell the Colt, which was grown old, at a neighbouring fair, and buy us an horse that would carry single or double upon an occasion, and make a pretty appearance at church or upon a visit. This at first I opposed stoutly; but it was as stoutly defended. However, as I weakened, my antagonist gained strength, till at last it was resolved to part with him.

As the fair happened on the following day, I had intentions of going myself; but my wife persuaded me that I had got a cold, and nothing could prevail upon her to permit me from home. ‘No, my dear,’ said she, ‘our son Moses is a discreet boy, and can buy and sell to very good advantage; you know all our great bargains are of his purchasing. He always stands out and higgles,* and actually tires them till he gets a bargain.’

As I had some opinion of my son’s prudence, I was willing enough to entrust him with this commission; and the next morn- ing I perceived his sisters mighty busy in fitting out Moses for the fair; trimming his hair, brushing his buckles, and cocking his hat with pins.* The business of the toilet being over, we had at last the satisfaction of seeing him mounted upon the Colt, with a deal box before him to bring home groceries in. He had on a coat made of that cloth they call thunder and lightning,* which, though grown too short, was much too good to be thrown away. His waistcoat

54 The Vicar of Wakefield

was of gosling green,* and his sisters had tied his hair with a broad black ribband. We all followed him several paces from the door, bawling after him good luck, good luck, till we could see him no longer.

He was scarce gone, when Mr. Thornhill’s butler came to con- gratulate us upon our good fortune, saying, that he overheard his young master mention our names with great commendation.

Good fortune seemed resolved not to come alone. Another footman from the same family followed, with a card for my daughters, importing, that the two ladies had received such pleas- ing accounts from Mr. Thornhill of us all, that, after a few previ- ous enquiries, they hoped to be perfectly satisfied. ‘Ay,’ cried my wife, ‘I now see it is no easy matter to get into the families of the great; but when one once gets in, then, as Moses says, one may go sleep.’ To this piece of humour, for she intended it for wit, my daughters assented with a loud laugh of pleasure. In short, such was her satisfaction at this message, that she actually put her hand in her pocket, and gave the messenger seven-pence halfpenny.

This was to be our visiting-day. The next that came was Mr. Burchell, who had been at the fair. He brought my little ones a pennyworth of gingerbread each, which my wife undertook to keep for them, and give them by letters at a time.* He brought my daughters also a couple of boxes, in which they might keep wafers, snuff, patches, or even money,* when they got it. My wife was usually fond of a weesel skin purse,* as being the most lucky; but this by the bye. We had still a regard for Mr. Burchell, though his late rude behaviour was in some measure displeasing; nor could we now avoid communicating our happiness to him, and asking his advice: although we seldom followed advice, we were all ready enough to ask it. When he read the note from the two ladies, he shook his head, and observed, that an affair of this sort demanded the utmost circumspection.—This air of diffidence highly displeased my wife. ‘I never doubted, Sir,’ cried she, ‘your readiness to be against my daughters and me. You have more circumspection than is wanted. However, I fancy when we come to ask advice, we will apply to persons who seem to have made use

The Vicar of Wakefield 55

of it themselves.’—‘Whatever my own conduct may have been, madam,’ replied he, ‘is not the present question; tho’ as I have made no use of advice myself, I should in conscience give it to those that will.’—As I was apprehensive this answer might draw on a repartee, making up by abuse what it wanted in wit, I changed the subject, by seeming to wonder what could keep our son so long at the fair, as it was now almost night-fall.—‘Never mind our son,’ cried my wife, ‘depend upon it he knows what he is about. I’ll warrant we’ll never see him sell his hen of a rainy day.* I have seen him buy such bargains as would amaze one. I’ll tell you a good story about that, that will make you split your sides with laughing—But as I live, yonder comes Moses, without an horse, and the box at his back.’

As she spoke, Moses came slowly on foot, and sweating under the deal box, which he had strapt round his shoulders like a ped- lar.—‘Welcome, welcome, Moses; well, my boy, what have you brought us from the fair?’—‘I have brought you myself,’ cried Moses, with a sly look, and resting the box on the dresser.—‘Ay, Moses,’ cried my wife, ‘that we know, but where is the horse?’ ‘I have sold him,’ cried Moses, ‘for three pounds five shillings and two-pence.’—‘Well done, my good boy,’ returned she, ‘I knew you would touch them off. Between ourselves, three pounds five shillings and two-pence is no bad day’s work. Come, let us have it then.’—‘I have brought back no money,’ cried Moses again. ‘I have laid it all out in a bargain, and here it is,’ pulling out a bundle from his breast: ‘here they are; a groce of green spectacles, with silver rims and shagreen* cases.’—‘A groce of green spectacles!’ repeated my wife in a faint voice. ‘And you have parted with the Colt, and brought us back nothing but a groce of green paltry spectacles!’—‘Dear mother,’ cried the boy, ‘why won’t you listen to reason? I had them a dead bargain, or I should not have bought them. The silver rims alone will sell for double the money.’—‘A fig for the silver rims,’ cried my wife, in a passion: ‘I dare swear they won’t sell for above half the money at the rate of broken silver, five shillings an ounce.’—‘You need be under no uneasiness,’ cried I, ‘about selling the rims; for they are not worth six-pence, for I perceive they are only copper varnished over.’—‘What,’

56 The Vicar of Wakefield

cried my wife, ‘not silver, the rims not silver!’ ‘No,’ cried I, ‘no more silver than your sauce-pan.’—‘And so,’ returned she, ‘we have parted with the Colt, and have only got a groce of green spectacles, with copper rims and shagreen cases! A murrain take such trumpery.* The blockhead has been imposed upon, and should have known his company better.’—‘There, my dear,’ cried I, ‘you are wrong, he should not have known them at all.’— ‘Marry, hang the ideot,’ returned she, ‘to bring me such stuff, if I had them, I would throw them in the fire.’ ‘There again you are wrong, my dear,’ cried I; ‘for though they be copper, we will keep them by us, as copper spectacles, you know, are better than nothing.’

By this time the unfortunate Moses was undeceived. He now saw that he had indeed been imposed upon by a prowling sharper,* who, observing his figure, had marked him for an easy prey. I therefore asked the circumstances of his deception. He sold the horse, it seems, and walked the fair in search of another. A rever- end looking man brought him to a tent, under pretence of having one to sell. ‘Here,’ continued Moses, ‘we met another man, very well drest, who desired to borrow twenty pounds upon these, saying, that he wanted money, and would dispose of them for a third of the value. The first gentleman, who pretended to be my friend, whispered me to buy them, and cautioned me not to let so good an offer pass. I sent for Mr. Flamborough, and they talked him up as finely as they did me, and so at last we were persuaded to buy the two groce between us.’

CHAPTER XIII

Mr. Burchell is found to be an enemy; for he has the confidence to give disagreeable advice

Our family had now made several attempts to be fine; but some unforeseen disaster demolished each as soon as projected. I endeavoured to take the advantage of every disappointment, to improve their good sense in proportion as they were frustrated in

The Vicar of Wakefield 57

ambition. ‘You see, my children,’ cried I, ‘how little is to be got by attempts to impose upon the world, in coping with our betters. Such as are poor and will associate with none but the rich, are hated by those they avoid, and despised by these they follow. Unequal combinations are always disadvantageous to the weaker side: the rich having the pleasure, and the poor the inconvenien- cies that result from them. But come, Dick, my boy, and repeat the fable that you were reading to-day, for the good of the company.’ ‘Once upon a time,’ cried the child, ‘a Giant and a Dwarf were friends, and kept together. They made a bargain that they would never forsake each other, but go seek adventures. The first battle they fought was with two Saracens, and the Dwarf, who was very courageous, dealt one of the champions a most angry blow. It did the Saracen but very little injury, who lifting up his sword, fairly struck off the poor Dwarf’s arm. He was now in a woeful plight; but the Giant coming to his assistance, in a short time left the two Saracens dead on the plain, and the Dwarf cut off the dead man’s head out of spite. They then travelled on to another adventure. This was against three bloody-minded Satyrs, who were carrying away a damsel in distress. The Dwarf was not quite so fierce now as before; but for all that, struck the first blow, which was returned by another, that knocked out his eye: but the Giant was soon up with them, and had they not fled, would certainly have killed them every one. They were all very joyful for this victory, and the damsel who was relieved fell in love with the Giant, and married him. They now travelled far, and farther than I can tell, till they met with a company of robbers. The Giant, for the first time, was foremost now; but the Dwarf was not far behind. The battle was stout and long. Wherever the Giant came all fell before him; but the Dwarf had like to have been killed more than once. At last the victory declared for the two adventurers; but the Dwarf lost his leg. The Dwarf was now without an arm, a leg, and an eye, while the Giant was without a single wound. Upon which he cried out to his little companion, My little heroe, this is glori- ous sport; let us get one victory more, and then we shall have honour for ever. No, cries the Dwarf, who was by this time grown wiser, no, I declare off; I’ll fight no more: for I find in every battle

58 The Vicar of Wakefield

that you get all the honour and rewards, but all the blows fall upon me.’

I was going to moralize this fable, when our attention was called off to a warm dispute between my wife and Mr. Burchell, upon my daughters intended expedition to town. My wife very strenuously insisted upon the advantages that would result from it. Mr. Burchell, on the contrary, dissuaded her with great ardor, and I stood neuter.* His present dissuasions seemed but the sec- ond part of those which were received with so ill a grace in the morning. The dispute grew high, while poor Deborah, instead of reasoning stronger, talked louder, and at last was obliged to take shelter from a defeat in clamour. The conclusion of her harangue, however, was highly displeasing to us all: she knew, she said, of some who had their own secret reasons for what they advised; but, for her part, she wished such to stay away from her house for the future.—‘Madam,’ cried Burchell, with looks of great com- posure, which tended to enflame her the more, ‘as for secret reasons, you are right: I have secret reasons, which I forbear to mention, because you are not able to answer those of which I make no secret: but I find my visits here are become troublesome; I’ll take my leave therefore now, and perhaps come once more to take a final farewell when I am quitting the country.’ Thus saying, he took up his hat, nor could the attempts of Sophia, whose looks seemed to upbraid his precipitancy, prevent his going.

When gone, we all regarded each other for some minutes with confusion. My wife, who knew herself to be the cause, strove to hide her concern with a forced smile, and an air of assurance, which I was willing to reprove: ‘How, woman,’ cried I to her, ‘is it thus we treat strangers? Is it thus we return their kindness? Be assured, my dear, that these were the harshest words, and to me the most unpleasing that ever escaped your lips!’—‘Why would he provoke me then,’ replied she; ‘but I know the motives of his advice perfectly well. He would prevent my girls from going to town, that he may have the pleasure of my youngest daughter’s company here at home. But whatever happens, she shall chuse better company than such low-lived fellows as he.’—‘Low-lived, my dear, do you call him,’ cried I, ‘it is very possible we may

The Vicar of Wakefield 59

mistake this man’s character: for he seems upon some occasions the most finished gentleman I ever knew.—Tell me, Sophia, my girl, has he ever given you any secret instances of his attach- ment?’—‘His conversation with me, sir,’ replied my daughter, ‘has ever been sensible, modest, and pleasing. As to aught else, no, never. Once, indeed, I remember to have heard him say he never knew a woman who could find merit in a man that seemed poor.’ ‘Such, my dear,’ cried I, ‘is the common cant of all the unfortunate or idle. But I hope you have been taught to judge properly of such men, and that it would be even madness to expect happiness from one who has been so very bad an œcono- mist of his own. Your mother and I have now better prospects for you. The next winter, which you will probably spend in town, will give you opportunities of making a more prudent choice.’

What Sophia’s reflections were upon this occasion, I can’t pre- tend to determine; but I was not displeased at the bottom that we were rid of a guest from whom I had much to fear. Our breach of hospitality went to my conscience a little: but I quickly silenced that monitor by two or three specious reasons, which served to satisfy and reconcile me to myself. The pain which conscience gives the man who has already done wrong, is soon got over. Conscience is a coward, and those faults it has not strength enough to prevent, it seldom has justice enough to accuse.

CHAPTER XIV

Fresh mortifications, or a demonstration that seeming calamities may be real blessings

The journey of my daughters to town was now resolved upon, Mr. Thornhill having kindly promised to inspect their conduct himself, and inform us by letter of their behaviour. But it was thought indispensably necessary that their appearance should equal the greatness of their expectations, which could not be done without expence. We debated therefore in full council what were the easiest methods of raising money, or, more properly

60 The Vicar of Wakefield

speaking, what we could most conveniently sell. The deliberation was soon finished, it was found that our remaining horse was utterly useless for the plow, without his companion, and equally unfit for the road, as wanting an eye, it was therefore determined that we should dispose of him for the purposes above-mentioned, at the neighbouring fair, and, to prevent imposition, that I should go with him myself. Though this was one of the first mercantile transactions of my life, yet I had no doubt about acquitting myself with reputation. The opinion a man forms of his own prudence is measured by that of the company he keeps, and as mine was mostly in the family way, I had conceived no unfavourable senti- ments of my worldly wisdom. My wife, however, next morning, at parting, after I had got some paces from the door, called me back, to advise me, in a whisper, to have all my eyes about me.

I had, in the usual forms, when I came to the fair, put my horse through all his paces; but for some time had no bidders. At last a chapman approached, and, after he had for a good while exam- ined the horse round, finding him blind of one eye, he would have nothing to say to him: a second came up; but observing he had a spavin, declared he would not take him for the driving home: a third perceived he had a wind-gall, and would bid no money: a fourth knew by his eye that he had the botts: a fifth, wondered what a plague I could do at the fair with a blind, spavined, galled hack,* that was only fit to be cut up for a dog kennel. By this time I began to have a most hearty contempt for the poor animal myself, and was almost ashamed at the approach of every customer; for though I did not entirely believe all the fellows told me; yet I reflected that the number of witnesses was a strong presumption they were right, and St. Gregory, upon good works, professes himself to be of the same opinion.*

I was in this mortifying situation, when a brother clergyman,

an old acquaintance, who had also business to the fair, came up, and shaking me by the hand, proposed adjourning to a public- house and taking a glass of whatever we could get. I readily closed with the offer, and entering an ale-house, we were shewn into a little back room, where there was only a venerable old man, who sat wholly intent over a large book, which he was reading. I never

The Vicar of Wakefield 61

in my life saw a figure that pre-possessed me more favourably. His locks of silver grey venerably shaded his temples, and his green old age seemed to be the result of health and benevolence. How- ever, his presence did not interrupt our conversation; my friend and I discoursed on the various turns of fortune we had met: the Whistonean controversy, my last pamphlet, the archdeacon’s reply, and the hard measure that was dealt me.* But our attention was in a short time taken off by the appearance of a youth, who, entering the room, respectfully said something softly to the old stranger. ‘Make no apologies, my child,’ said the old man, ‘to do good is a duty we owe to all our fellow creatures: take this, I wish it were more; but five pounds will relieve your distress, and you are welcome.’ The modest youth shed tears of gratitude, and yet his gratitude was scarce equal to mine. I could have hugged the good old man in my arms, his benevolence pleased me so. He continued to read, and we resumed our conversation, until my companion, after some time, recollecting that he had business to transact in the fair, promised to be soon back; adding, that he always desired to have as much of Dr. Primrose’s company as possible. The old gentleman, hearing my name mentioned, seemed to look at me with attention, for some time, and when my friend was gone, most respectfully demanded if I was any way related to the great Primrose, that couragious monogamist, who had been the bulwark of the church. Never did my heart feel sincerer rapture than at that moment. ‘Sir,’ cried I, ‘the applause of so good a man, as I am sure you are, adds to that happiness in my breast which your benevolence has already excited. You behold before you, Sir, that Doctor Primrose, the monogamist, whom you have been pleased to call great. You here see that unfortunate Divine, who has so long, and it would ill become me to say, successfully, fought against the deuterogamy of the age.’ ‘Sir,’ cried the stranger, struck with awe, ‘I fear I have been too familiar; but you’ll forgive my curiosity, Sir: I beg pardon.’ ‘Sir,’ cried I, grasping his hand, ‘you are so far from displeasing me by your familiarity, that I must beg you’ll accept my friendship, as you already have my esteem.’—‘Then with gratitude I accept the offer,’ cried he, squeezing me by the hand, ‘thou glorious pillar of

62 The Vicar of Wakefield

unshaken orthodoxy; and do I behold—’ I here interrupted what he was going to say; for tho’, as an author, I could digest no small share of flattery, yet now my modesty would permit no more. However, no lovers in romance ever cemented a more instant- aneous friendship. We talked upon several subjects: at first I thought he seemed rather devout than learned, and began to think he despised all human doctrines* as dross. Yet this no way lessened him in my esteem; for I had for some time begun pri- vately to harbour such an opinion myself. I therefore took occa- sion to observe, that the world in general began to be blameably indifferent as to doctrinal matters, and followed human specula- tions too much—‘Ay, Sir,’ replied he, as if he had reserved all his learning to that moment, ‘Ay, Sir, the world is in its dotage, and yet the cosmogony or creation of the world has puzzled philoso- phers of all ages. What a medly of opinions have they not broached upon the creation of the world? Sanconiathon, Manetho, Berosus,* and Ocellus Lucanus, have all attempted it in vain. The latter has these words, Anarchon ara kai atelutaion to pan,* which imply that all things have neither beginning nor end. Manetho also, who lived about the time of Nebuchadon-Asser, Asser being a Syriac word usually applied as a sirname to the kings of that country, as Teglat Phael-Asser, Nabon-Asser, he, I say, formed a conjecture equally absurd; for as we usually say ek to biblion kubernetes,* which implies that books will never teach the world; so he attempted to investigate—But, Sir, I ask pardon, I am straying from the ques- tion.’—That he actually was; nor could I for my life see how the creation of the world had any thing to do with the business I was talking of; but it was sufficient to shew me that he was a man of letters, and I now reverenced him the more. I was resolved there- fore to bring him to the touch-stone; but he was too mild and too gentle to contend for victory. Whenever I made any observation that looked like a challenge to controversy, he would smile, shake his head, and say nothing; by which I understood he could say much, if he thought proper. The subject therefore insensibly changed from the business of antiquity to that which brought us both to the fair; mine I told him was to sell an horse, and very luckily, indeed, his was to buy one for one of his tenants. My horse

The Vicar of Wakefield 63

was soon produced, and in fine we struck a bargain. Nothing now remained but to pay me, and he accordingly pulled out a thirty pound note,* and bid me change it. Not being in a capacity of complying with his demand, he ordered his footman to be called up, who made his appearance in a very genteel livery. ‘Here, Abraham,’ cried he, ‘go and get gold for this; you’ll do it at neighbour Jackson’s, or any where.’ While the fellow was gone, he entertained me with a pathetic harangue on the great scarcity of silver,* which I undertook to improve, by deploring also the great scarcity of gold; so that by the time Abraham returned, we had both agreed that money was never so hard to be come at as now. Abraham returned to inform us, that he had been over the whole fair and could not get change, tho’ he had offered half a crown for doing it. This was a very great disappointment to us all; but the old gentleman having paused a little, asked me if I knew one Solomon Flamborough in my part of the country: upon replying that he was my next door neighbour, ‘If that be the case then,’ returned he, ‘I believe we shall deal. You shall have a draught upon him, payable at sight;* and let me tell you he is as warm a man as any within five miles round him. Honest Solomon and I have been acquainted for many years together. I remember I always beat him at three jumps; but he could hop upon one leg farther than I.’ A draught upon my neighbour was to me the same as money; for I was sufficiently convinced of his ability: the draught was signed and put into my hands, and Mr. Jenkinson, the old gentleman, his man Abraham, and my horse, old Blackberry, trotted off very well pleased with each other.

After a short interval being left to reflection, I began to recol-

lect that I had done wrong in taking a draught from a stranger, and so prudently resolved upon following the purchaser, and hav- ing back my horse. But this was now too late: I therefore made directly homewards, resolving to get the draught changed into money at my friend’s as fast as possible. I found my honest neighbour smoking his pipe at his own door, and informing him that I had a small bill upon him, he read it twice over. ‘You can read the name, I suppose,’ cried I, ‘Ephraim Jenkinson.’ ‘Yes,’

64 The Vicar of Wakefield

returned he, ‘the name is written plain enough, and I know the gentleman too, the greatest rascal under the canopy of heaven. This is the very same rogue who sold us the spectacles. Was he not, a venerable looking man, with grey hair, and no flaps to his pocket-holes? And did he not talk a long string of learning about Greek and cosmogony, and the world?’ To this I replied with a groan. ‘Aye,’ continued he, ‘he has but that one piece of learning in the world, and he always talks it away whenever he finds a scholar in company; but I know the rogue, and will catch him yet.’

Though I was already sufficiently mortified, my greatest struggle was to come, in facing my wife and daughters. No truant was ever more afraid of returning to school, there to behold the master’s visage, than I was of going home. I was determined, however, to anticipate their fury, by first falling into a passion myself.

But, alas! upon entering, I found the family no way disposed for battle. My wife and girls were all in tears, Mr. Thornhill having been there that day to inform them, that their journey to town was entirely over. The two ladies having heard reports of us from some malicious person about us, were that day set out for London. He could neither discover the tendency, nor the author of these, but whatever they might be, or whoever might have broached them, he continued to assure our family of his friendship and protection. I found, therefore, that they bore my disappointment with great resignation, as it was eclipsed in the greatness of their own. But what perplexed us most was to think who could be so base as to asperse the character of a family so harmless as ours, too humble to excite envy, and too inoffensive to create disgust.

The Vicar of Wakefield 65

CHAPTER XV

All Mr. Burchell’s villainy at once detected. The folly of

being over-wise

That evening and a part of the following day was employed in fruitless attempts to discover our enemies: scarce a family in the neighbourhood but incurred our suspicions, and each of us had reasons for our opinion best known to ourselves. As we were in this perplexity, one of our little boys, who had been playing abroad, brought in a letter-case,* which he found on the green. It was quickly known to belong to Mr. Burchell, with whom it had been seen, and, upon examination, contained some hints upon different subjects; but what particularly engaged our attention was a sealed note, superscribed, the copy of a letter to be sent to the two ladies at Thornhill-castle. It instantly occurred that he was the base informer, and we deliberated whether the note should not be broke open. I was against it; but Sophia, who said she was sure that of all men he would be the last to be guilty of so much baseness, insisted upon its being read. In this she was seconded by the rest of the family, and, at their joint solicitation, I read as follows:

‘Ladies,

‘The bearer will sufficiently satisfy you as to the person from whom this comes: one at least the friend of innocence, and ready to prevent its being seduced. I am informed for a truth, that you have some intention of bringing two young ladies to town, whom I have some knowledge of, under the character of companions. As I would neither have simplicity imposed upon, nor virtue con- taminated, I must offer it as my opinion, that the impropriety of such a step will be attended with dangerous consequences. It has never been my way to treat the infamous or the lewd with severity; nor should I now have taken this method of explaining myself, or reproving folly, did it not aim at guilt. Take therefore the admonition of a friend, and seriously reflect on the consequences

66 The Vicar of Wakefield

of introducing infamy and vice into retreats where peace and innocence have hitherto resided.’

Our doubts were now at an end. There seemed indeed some- thing applicable to both sides in this letter, and its censures might as well be referred to those to whom it was written, as to us; but the malicious meaning was obvious, and we went no farther. My wife had scarce patience to hear me to the end, but railed at the writer with unrestrained resentment. Olivia was equally severe, and Sophia seemed perfectly amazed at his baseness. As for my part, it appeared to me one of the vilest instances of unprovoked ingratitude I had met with. Nor could I account for it in any other manner than by imputing it to his desire of detaining my young- est daughter in the country, to have the more frequent opportun- ities of an interview. In this manner we all state ruminating upon schemes of vengeance, when our other little boy came running in to tell us that Mr. Burchell was approaching at the other end of the field. It is easier to conceive than describe the complicated sensations which are felt from the pain of a recent injury, and the pleasure of approaching vengeance. Tho’ our intentions were only to upbraid him with his ingratitude; yet it was resolved to do it in a manner that would be perfectly cutting. For this purpose we agreed to meet him with our usual smiles, to chat in the beginning with more than ordinary kindness, to amuse him a little; and then in the midst of the flattering calm to burst upon him like an earthquake, and overwhelm him with the sense of his own baseness. This being resolved upon, my wife undertook to manage the business herself, as she really had some talents for such an undertaking. We saw him approach, he entered, drew a chair, and sate down.—‘A fine day, Mr. Burchell.’—‘A very fine day, Doctor; though I fancy we shall have some rain by the shoot- ing of my corns.’*—‘The shooting of your horns,’ cried my wife, in a loud fit of laughter, and then asked pardon for being fond of a joke.—‘Dear madam,’ replied he, ‘I pardon you with all my heart; for I protest I should not have thought it a joke had you not told me.’—‘Perhaps not, Sir,’ cried my wife, winking at us, ‘and yet I dare say you can tell us how many jokes go to an ounce.’—‘I

The Vicar of Wakefield 67

fancy, madam,’ returned Burchell, ‘you have been reading a jest book* this morning, that ounce of jokes is so very good a conceit; and yet, madam, I had rather see half an ounce of understand- ing.’—‘I believe you might,’ cried my wife, still smiling at us, though the laugh was against her; ‘and yet I have seen some men pretend to understanding that have very little.’—‘And no doubt,’ replied her antagonist, ‘you have known ladies set up for wit that had none.’—I quickly began to find that my wife was likely to gain but little at this business; so I resolved to treat him in a stile of more severity myself. ‘Both wit and understanding,’ cried I, ‘are trifles, without integrity: it is that which gives value to every character. The ignorant peasant, without fault, is greater than the philosopher with many; for what is genius or courage without an heart? An honest man is the noblest work of God.’*

‘I always held that hackney’d maxim of Pope,’ returned

Mr. Burchell, ‘as very unworthy a man of genius, and a base desertion of his own superiority. As the reputation of books is raised not by their freedom from defect, but the greatness of their beauties; so should that of men be prized not for their exemption from fault, but the size of those virtues they are possessed of. The scholar may want prudence, the statesman may have pride, and the champion ferocity; but shall we prefer to these the low mech- anic, who laboriously plods on through life, without censure or applause? We might as well prefer the tame correct paintings of the Flemish school to the erroneous, but sublime animations of the Roman pencil.’*

‘Sir,’ replied I, ‘your present observation is just, when there are

shining virtues and minute defects; but when it appears that great vices are opposed in the same mind to as extraordinary virtues, such a character deserves contempt.’

‘Perhaps,’ cried he, ‘there may be some such monsters as you describe, of great vices joined to great virtues; yet in my progress through life, I never yet found one instance of their existence: on the contrary, I have ever perceived, that where the mind was capacious, the affections were good. And indeed Providence seems kindly our friend in this particular, thus to debilitate the understanding where the heart is corrupt, and diminish the

68 The Vicar of Wakefield

power where there is the will to do mischief. This rule seems to extend even to other animals: the little vermin race are ever treacherous, cruel, and cowardly, whilst those endowed with strength and power are generous, brave, and gentle.’

‘These observations sound well,’ returned I, ‘and yet it would be easy this moment to point out a man,’ and I fixed my eye stedfastly upon him, ‘whose head and heart form a most detest- able contrast. Ay, Sir,’ continued I, raising my voice, ‘and I am glad to have this opportunity of detecting him in the midst of his fancied security. Do you know this, Sir, this pocket-book?’—‘Yes, Sir,’ returned he, with a face of impenetrable assurance, ‘that pocket-book is mine, and I am glad you have found it.’—‘And do you know,’ cried I, ‘this letter? Nay, never falter man; but look me full in the face: I say, do you know this letter?’—‘That letter,’ returned he, ‘yes, it was I that wrote that letter.’—‘And how could you,’ said I, ‘so basely, so ungratefully presume to write this letter?’—‘And how came you,’ replied he, with looks of unparal- lelled effrontery, ‘so basely to presume to break open this letter? Don’t you know, now, I could hang you all for this? All that I have to do, is to swear at the next justice’s, that you have been guilty of breaking open the lock of my pocket-book, and so hang you all up at his door.* This piece of unexpected insolence raised me to such a pitch, that I could scarce govern my passion. ‘Ungrateful wretch, begone, and no longer pollute my dwelling with thy base- ness. Begone, and never let me see thee again: go from my doors, and the only punishment I wish thee is an allarmed conscience, which will be a sufficient tormentor!’ So saying, I threw him his pocket-book, which he took up with a smile, and shutting the clasps with the utmost composure, left us, quite astonished at the serenity of his assurance. My wife was particularly enraged that nothing could make him angry, or make him seem ashamed of his villainies. ‘My dear,’ cried I, willing to calm those passions that had been raised too high among us, ‘we are not to be surprised that bad men want shame; they only blush at being detected in doing good, but glory in their vices.

‘Guilt and shame, says the allegory, were at first companions, and in the beginning of their journey inseparably kept together.

The Vicar of Wakefield 69

But their union was soon found to be disagreeable and inconveni- ent to both; guilt gave shame frequent uneasiness, and shame often betrayed the secret conspiracies of guilt. After long dis- agreement, therefore, they at length consented to part for ever. Guilt boldly walked forward alone, to overtake fate, that went before in the shape of an executioner: but shame being naturally timorous, returned back to keep company with virtue, which, in the beginning of their journey, they had left behind. Thus, my children, after men have travelled through a few stages in vice, shame forsakes them, and returns back to wait upon the few virtues they have still remaining.’

CHAPTER XVI

The family use art, which is opposed with still greater

Whatever might have been Sophia’s sensations, the rest of the family was easily consoled for Mr. Burchell’s absence by the company of our landlord, whose visits now became more frequent and longer. Though he had been disappointed in procuring my daughters the amusements of the town, as he designed, he took every opportunity of supplying them with those little recreations which our retirement would admit of. He usually came in the morning, and while my son and I followed our occupations abroad, he sat with the family at home, and amused them by describing the town, with every part of which he was particularly acquainted. He could repeat all the observations that were retailed in the atmosphere of the playhouses, and had all the good things of the high wits by rote long before they made way into the jest-books. The intervals between conversation were employed in teaching my daughters piquet.* or sometimes in setting my two little ones to box to make them sharp,* as he called it: but the hopes of having him for a son-in-law, in some measure blinded us to all his imperfections. It must be owned that my wife laid a thousand schemes to entrap him, or, to speak it more tenderly, used every art to magnify the merit of her daughter. If the cakes at tea eat

70 The Vicar of Wakefield

short and crisp, they were made by Olivia: if the gooseberry wine was well knit,* the gooseberries were of her gathering: it was her fingers which gave the pickles their peculiar green; and in the composition of a pudding, it was her judgment that mix’d the ingredients. Then the poor woman would sometimes tell the ’Squire, that she thought him and Olivia extremely of a size, and would bid both stand up to see which was tallest. These instances of cunning, which she thought impenetrable, yet which every body saw through, were very pleasing to our benefactor, who gave every day some new proofs of his passion, which though they had not arisen to proposals of marriage, yet we thought fell but little short of it; and his slowness was attributed sometimes to native bashfulness, and sometimes to his fear of offending his uncle. An occurrence, however, which happened soon after, put it beyond a doubt that he designed to become one of our family, my wife even regarded it as an absolute promise.

My wife and daughters happening to return a visit to neigh- bour Flamborough’s, found that family had lately got their pic- tures drawn by a limner,* who travelled the country, and took likenesses for fifteen shillings a head. As this family and ours had long a sort of rivalry in point of taste, our spirit took the alarm at this stolen march upon us, and notwithstanding all I could say, and I said much, it was resolved that we should have our pictures done too. Having, therefore, engaged the limner, for what could I do? our next deliberation was to shew the superiority of our taste in the attitudes. As for our neighbour’s family, there were seven of them, and they were drawn with seven oranges,* a thing quite out of taste, no variety in life, no composition in the world. We desired to have something in a brighter style, and, after many debates, at length came to an unanimous resolution of being drawn together, in one large historical family piece.* This would be cheaper, since one frame would serve for all, and it would be infinitely more genteel; for all families of any taste were now drawn in the same manner. As we did not immediately recollect an historical subject to hit us, we were contented each with being drawn as independent historical figures. My wife desired to be represented as Venus, and the painter was desired not to be too

The Vicar of Wakefield 71

frugal of his diamonds in her stomacher* and hair. Her two little ones were to be as Cupids by her side, while I, in my gown and band, was to present her with my books on the Whistonian con- troversy. Olivia would be drawn as an Amazon,* sitting upon a bank of flowers, drest in a green joseph, richly laced with gold,* and a whip in her hand. Sophia was to be a shepherdess, with as many sheep as the painter could put in for nothing; and Moses was to be drest out with an hat and white feather. Our taste so much pleased the ’Squire, that he insisted on being put in as one of the family in the character of Alexander the great, at Olivia’s feet. This was considered by us all as an indication of his desire to be introduced into the family, nor could we refuse his request. The painter was therefore set to work, and as he wrought with assiduity and expedition, in less than four days the whole was compleated. The piece was large, and it must be owned he did not spare his colours; for which my wife gave him great encomiums.* We were all perfectly satisfied with his performance; but an unfortunate circumstance had not occurred till the picture was finished, which now struck us with dismay. It was so very large that we had no place in the house to fix it. How we all came to disregard so material a point is inconceivable; but certain it is, we had been all greatly remiss. The picture, therefore, instead of gratifying our vanity, as we hoped, leaned, in a most mortifying manner, against the kitchen wall, where the canvas was stretched and painted, much too large to be got through any of the doors, and the jest of all our neighbours. One compared it to Robinson Crusoe’s long-boat, too large to be removed;* another thought it more resembled a reel in a bottle;* some wondered how it could be got out, but still more were amazed how it ever got in.

But though it excited the ridicule of some, it effectually raised more malicious suggestions in many. The ’Squire’s portrait being found united with ours, was an honour too great to escape envy. Scandalous whispers began to circulate at our expence, and our tranquility was continually disturbed by persons who came as friends to tell us what was said of us by enemies. These reports we always resented with becoming spirit; but scandal ever improves by opposition.

72 The Vicar of Wakefield

We once again therefore entered into a consultation upon

obviating the malice of our enemies, and at last came to a reso- lution which had too much cunning to give me entire satisfaction. It was this: as our principal object was to discover the honour of Mr. Thornhill’s addresses, my wife undertook to sound him, by pretending to ask his advice in the choice of an husband for her eldest daughter. If this was not found sufficient to induce him to a declaration, it was then resolved to terrify him with a rival. To this last step, however, I would by no means give my consent, till Olivia gave me the most solemn assurances that she would marry the person provided to rival him upon this occasion, if he did not prevent it, by taking her himself. Such was the scheme laid, which though I did not strenuously oppose, I did not entirely approve.

The next time, therefore, that Mr. Thornhill came to see us, my girls took care to be out of the way, in order to give their mamma an opportunity of putting her scheme in execution; but they only retired to the next room, from whence they could over- hear the whole conversation: My wife artfully introduced it, by observing, that one of the Miss Flamboroughs was like to have a very good match of it in Mr. Spanker. To this the ’Squire assent- ing, she proceeded to remark, that they who had warm* fortunes were always sure of getting good husbands: ‘But heaven help,’ continued she, ‘the girls that have none. What signifies beauty, Mr. Thornhill? or what signifies all the virtue, and all the qualifi- cations in the world, in this age of self-interest? It is not, what is she? but what has she? is all the cry.’

‘Madam,’ returned he, ‘I highly approve the justice, as well as the novelty, of your remarks, and if I were a king, it should be otherwise. It should then, indeed, be fine times with the girls without fortunes: our two young ladies should be the first for whom I would provide.’

‘Ah, Sir!’ returned my wife, ‘you are pleased to be facetious: but I wish I were a queen, and then I know where my eldest daughter should look for an husband. But now, that you have put it into my head, seriously Mr. Thornhill, can’t you recommend me a proper husband for her? She is now nineteen years old, well

The Vicar of Wakefield 73

grown and well educated, and, in my humble opinion, does not want for parts.’

‘Madam,’ replied he, ‘if I were to chuse, I would find out a person possessed of every accomplishment that can make an angel happy. One with prudence, fortune, taste, and sincerity, such, madam, would be, in my opinion, the proper husband.’ ‘Ay, Sir,’ said she, ‘but do you know of any such person?’—‘No, madam,’ returned he, ‘it is impossible to know any person that deserves to be her husband: she’s too great a treasure for one man’s possession: she’s a goddess. Upon my soul, I speak what I think, she’s an angel.’—‘Ah, Mr. Thornhill, you only flatter my poor girl: but we have been thinking of marrying her to one of your tenants, whose mother is lately dead, and who wants a man- ager: you know whom I mean, farmer Williams; a warm man, Mr. Thornhill, able to give her good bread; and who has several times made her proposals: (which was actually the case) but, Sir,’ concluded she, ‘I should be glad to have your approbation of our choice.’—‘How, madam,’ replied he, ‘my approbation! My approbation of such a choice! Never. What! Sacrifice so much beauty, and sense, and goodness, to a creature insensible of the blessing! Excuse me, I can never approve of such a piece of injustice! And I have my reasons!’—‘Indeed, Sir,’ cried Deborah, ‘if you have your reasons, that’s another affair; but I should be glad to know those reasons.’—‘Excuse me, madam,’ returned he, ‘they lie too deep for discovery: (laying his hand upon his bosom) they remain buried, rivetted here.’

After he was gone, upon general consultation, we could not tell what to make of these fine sentiments. Olivia considered them as instances of the most exalted passion; but I was not quite so sanguine: it seemed to me pretty plain, that they had more of love than matrimony in them: yet, whatever they might portend, it was resolved to prosecute the scheme of farmer Williams, who, from my daughter’s first appearance in the country, had paid her his addresses.

74 The Vicar of Wakefield

CHAPTER XVII

Scarce any virtue found to resist the power of long and pleasing temptation

As I only studied my child’s real happiness, the assiduity of Mr. Williams pleased me, as he was in easy circumstances, pru- dent, and sincere. It required but very little encouragement to revive his former passion; so that in an evening or two he and Mr. Thornhill met at our house, and surveyed each other for some time with looks of anger: but Williams owed his landlord no rent, and little regarded his indignation. Olivia, on her side, acted the coquet to perfection, if that might be called acting which was her real character, pretending to lavish all her tenderness on her new lover. Mr. Thornhill appeared quite dejected at this prefer- ence, and with a pensive air took leave, though I own it puzzled me to find him so much in pain as he appeared to be, when he had it in his power so easily to remove the cause, by declaring an honourable passion. But whatever uneasiness he seemed to endure, it could easily be perceived that Olivia’s anguish was still greater. After any of these interviews between her lovers, of which there were several, she usually retired to solitude, and there indulged her grief. It was in such a situation I found her one evening, after she had been for some time supporting a fictitious gayety.—‘You now see, my child,’ said I, ‘that your confidence in Mr. Thornhill’s passion was all a dream: he permits the rivalry of another, every way his inferior, though he knows it lies in his power to secure you to himself by a candid declaration.’—‘Yes, pappa,’ returned she, ‘but he has his reasons for this delay: I know he has. The sincerity of his looks and words convince me of his real esteem. A short time, I hope, will discover the generosity of his sentiments, and convince you that my opinion of him has been more just than yours.’—‘Olivia, my darling,’ returned I, ‘every scheme that has been hitherto pursued to compel him to a declaration, has been proposed and planned by yourself, nor can you in the least say that I have constrained you. But you must not

The Vicar of Wakefield 75

suppose, my dear, that I will ever be instrumental in suffering his honest rival to be the dupe of your ill-placed passion. Whatever time you require to bring your fancied admirer to an explanation shall be granted; but at the expiration of that term, if he is still regardless, I must absolutely insist that honest Mr. Williams shall be rewarded for his fidelity. The character which I have hitherto supported in life demands this from me, and my tenderness, as a parent, shall never influence my integrity as a man. Name then your day, let it be as distant as you think proper, and in the mean time take care to let Mr. Thornhill know the exact time on which I design delivering you up to another. If he really loves you, his own good sense will readily suggest that there is but one method alone to prevent his losing you for ever.’—This proposal, which she could not avoid considering as perfectly just, was readily agreed to. She again renewed her most positive promise of marry- ing Mr. Williams, in case of the other’s insensibility; and at the next opportunity, in Mr. Thornhill’s presence, that day month was fixed upon for her nuptials with his rival.

Such vigorous proceedings seemed to redouble Mr. Thornhill’s

anxiety: but what Olivia really felt gave me some uneasiness. In this struggle between prudence and passion, her vivacity quite forsook her, and every opportunity of solitude was sought, and spent in tears. One week passed away; but Mr. Thornhill made no efforts to restrain her nuptials. The succeeding week he was still assiduous; but not more open. On the third he discontinued his visits entirely, and instead of my daughter testifying any impatience, as I expected, she seemed to retain a pensive tranquil- lity, which I looked upon as resignation. For my own part, I was now sincerely pleased with thinking that my child was going to be secured in a continuance of competence and peace, and fre- quently applauded her resolution, in prefering happiness to ostentation. It was within about four days of her intended nup- tials, that my little family at night were gathered round a charm- ing fire, telling stories of the past, and laying schemes for the future. Busied in forming a thousand projects, and laughing at whatever folly came uppermost, ‘Well, Moses,’ cried I, ‘we shall soon, my boy, have a wedding in the family, what is your opinion

76 The Vicar of Wakefield

of matters and things in general?’—‘My opinion, father, is, that all things go on very well; and I was just now thinking, that when sister Livy is married to farmer Williams, we shall then have the loan of his cyder-press and brewing tubs for nothing.’—‘That we shall, Moses,’ cried I, ‘and he will sing us Death and the Lady,* to raise our spirits into the bargain.’—‘He has taught that song to our Dick,’ cried Moses; ‘and I think he goes thro’ it very pret- tily.’—‘Does he so,’ cried I, ‘then let us have it: where’s little Dick? let him up with it boldly.’—‘My brother Dick,’ cried Bill my youngest, ‘is just gone out with sister Livy; but Mr. Williams has taught me two songs, and I’ll sing them for you, pappa. Which song do you chuse, the Dying Swan,* or the Elegy on the death of a mad dog?’ ‘The elegy, child, by all means,’ said I, ‘I never heard that yet; and Deborah, my life, grief you know is dry, let us have a bottle of the best gooseberry wine, to keep up our spirits. I have wept so much at all sorts of elegies of late, that without an enlivening glass I am sure this will overcome me; and Sophy, love, take your guitar, and thrum in with the boy a little.’

An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog*

Good people all, of every sort, Give ear unto my song;

And if you find it wond’rous short, It cannot hold you long.

In Isling town there was a man, Of whom the world might say,

That still a godly race he ran, Whene’er he went to pray.

A kind and gentle heart he had, To comfort friends and foes;

The naked every day he clad, When he put on his cloaths.

And in that town a dog was found, As many dogs there be,

The Vicar of Wakefield 77

Both mungrel, puppy, whelp, and hound, And curs of low degree.

This dog and man at first were friends; But when a pique began,

The dog, to gain some private ends, Went mad and bit the man.

Around from all the neighbouring streets, The wondering neighbours ran,

And swore the dog had lost his wits, To bite so good a man.

The wound it seem’d both sore and sad, To every christian eye;

And while they swore the dog was mad, They swore the man would die.

But soon a wonder came to light, That shew’d the rogues they lied,

The man recovered of the bite, The dog it was that dy’d.

‘A very good boy, Bill, upon my word, and an elegy that may truly be called tragical. Come, my children, here’s Bill’s health, and may he one day be a bishop.’

‘With all my heart,’ cried my wife; ‘and if he but preaches as well as he sings, I make no doubt of him. The most of his family, by the mother’s side, could sing a good song: it was a common saying in our country, that the family of the Blenkinsops could never look strait before them, nor the Huginsons blow out a candle; that there were none of the Grograms* but could sing a song, or of the Marjorams but could tell a story.’—‘However that be,’ cried I, ‘the most vulgar ballad of them all generally pleases me better than the fine modern odes, and things that petrify us in a single stanza; productions that we at once detest and praise. Put the glass to your brother, Moses.* The great fault of these elegi- asts is, that they are in despair for griefs that give the sensible part of mankind very little pain. A lady loses her muff, her fan,

78 The Vicar of Wakefield

or her lap-dog, and so the silly poet runs home to versify the disaster.’

‘That may be the mode,’ cried Moses, ‘in sublimer composi- tions; but the Ranelagh* songs that come down to us are perfectly familiar, and all cast in the same mold: Colin meets Dolly, and they hold a dialogue together; he gives her a fairing to put in her hair, and she presents him with a nosegay; and then they go together to church, where they give good advice to young nymphs and swains to get married as fast as they can.’*

‘And very good advice too,’ cried I, ‘and I am told there is not a

place in the world where advice can be given with so much pro- priety as there; for, as it persuades us to marry, it also furnishes us with a wife; and surely that must be an excellent market, my boy, where we are told what we want, and supplied with it when wanting.’

‘Yes, Sir,’ returned Moses, ‘and I know but of two such mar- kets for wives in Europe, Ranelagh in England, and Fontarabia* in Spain. The Spanish market is open once a year, but our English wives are saleable every night.’

‘You are right, my boy,’ cried his mother, ‘Old England is the only place in the world for husbands to get wives.’—‘And for wives to manage their husbands,’ interrupted I. ‘It is a proverb abroad, that if a bridge were built across the sea, all the ladies of the Continent would come over* to take pattern from ours; for there are no such wives in Europe as our own.

‘But let us have one bottle more, Deborah, my life, and Moses give us a good song. What thanks do we not owe to heaven for thus bestowing tranquillity, health, and competence. I think myself happier now than the greatest monarch upon earth. He has no such fire-side, nor such pleasant faces about it. Yes, Deborah, we are now growing old; but the evening of our life is likely to be happy. We are descended from ancestors that knew no stain, and we shall leave a good and virtuous race of children behind us. While we live they will be our support and our pleasure here, and when we die they will transmit our honour untainted to posterity. Come, my son, we wait for a song: let us have a chorus. But where is my darling Olivia? That little cherub’s voice is always sweetest

The Vicar of Wakefield 79

in the concert.’—Just as I spoke Dick came running in. ‘O pappa, pappa, she is gone from us, she is gone from us, my sister Livy is gone from us for ever’—‘Gone, child’—‘Yes, she is gone off with two gentlemen in a post chaise,* and one of them kissed her, and said he would die for her; and she cried very much, and was for coming back; but he persuaded her again, and she went into the chaise, and said, O what will my poor pappa do when he knows I am undone!’ —‘Now then,’ cried I, ‘my children, go and be miserable; for we shall never enjoy one hour more. And O may heaven’s everlasting fury light upon him and his! Thus to rob me of my child! And sure it will, for taking back my sweet innocent that I was leading up to heaven. Such sincerity as my child was possest of. But all our earthly happiness is now over! Go, my children, go, and be miserable and infamous; for my heart is broken within me!’—‘Father,’ cried my son, ‘is this your forti- tude?’—‘Fortitude, child! Yes, he shall see I have fortitude! Bring me my pistols. I’ll pursue the traitor. While he is on earth I’ll pursue him. Old as I am, he shall find I can sting him yet. The villain! The perfidious villain!’—I had by this time reached down my pistols, when my poor wife, whose passions were not so strong as mine, caught me in her arms. ‘My dearest, dearest husband,’ cried she, ‘the bible is the only weapon that is fit for your old hands now. Open that, my love, and read our anguish into patience, for she has vilely deceived us.’—‘Indeed, Sir,’ resumed my son, after a pause, ‘your rage is too violent and unbecoming. You should be my mother’s comforter, and you encrease her pain. It ill suited you and your reverend character thus to curse your greatest enemy: you should not have curst him, villain as he is.’— ‘I did not curse him, child, did I?’—‘Indeed, Sir, you did; you curst him twice.’—‘Then may heaven forgive me and him if I did. And now, my son, I see it was more than human benevolence that first taught us to bless our enemies! Blest be his holy name for all the good he hath given, and for all that he hath taken away. But it is not, it is not, a small distress that can wring tears from these old eyes, that have not wept for so many years. My Child!— To undo my darling! May confusion seize! Heaven forgive me, what am I about to say! You may remember, my love, how good

80 The Vicar of Wakefield

she was, and how charming; till this vile moment all her care was to make us happy. Had she but died! But she is gone, the honour of our family contaminated, and I must look out for happiness in other worlds than here. But my child, you saw them go off: per- haps he forced her away? If he forced her, she may yet be inno- cent.’—‘Ah no, Sir!’ cried the child; ‘he only kissed her, and called her his angel, and she wept very much, and leaned upon his arm, and they drove off very fast.’—‘She’s an ungrateful crea- ture,’ cried my wife, who could scarce speak for weeping, ‘to use us thus. She never had the least constraint put upon her affec- tions. The vile strumpet has basely deserted her parents without any provocation, thus to bring your grey hairs to the grave, and I must shortly follow.’

In this manner that night, the first of our real misfortunes, was spent in the bitterness of complaint, and ill supported sallies of enthusiasm. I determined, however, to find out our betrayer, wherever he was, and reproach his baseness. The next morning we missed our wretched child at breakfast, where she used to give life and chearfulness to us all. My wife, as before, attempted to ease her heart by reproaches. ‘Never,’ cried she, ‘shall that vilest stain of our family again darken those harmless doors. I will never call her daughter more. No, let the strumpet live with her vile seducer: she may bring us to shame, but she shall never more deceive us.’

‘Wife,’ said I, ‘do not talk thus hardly: my detestation of her guilt is as great as yours; but ever shall this house and this heart be open to a poor returning repentant sinner. The sooner she returns from her transgression, the more welcome shall she be to me. For the first time the very best may err; art may persuade, and novelty spread out its charm. The first fault is the child of simplicity; but every other the offspring of guilt. Yes, the wretched creature shall be welcome to this heart and this house, tho’ stained with ten thousand vices. I will again hearken to the music of her voice, again will I hang fondly on her bosom, if I find but repentance there. My son, bring hither my bible and my staff; I will pursue her, wherever she is, and tho’ I cannot save her from shame, I may prevent the continuance of iniquity.’

The Vicar of Wakefield 81

CHAPTER XVIII

The pursuit of a father to reclaim a lost child to virtue

Tho’ the child could not describe the gentleman’s person who handed his sister into the post-chaise, yet my suspicions fell entirely upon our young landlord, whose character for such intrigues was but too well known. I therefore directed my steps towards Thornhill-castle, resolving to upbraid him, and, if pos- sible, to bring back my daughter: but before I had reached his seat, I was met by one of my parishioners, who said he saw a young lady resembling my daughter in a post-chaise with a gentleman, whom, by the description, I could only guess to be Mr. Burchell, and that they drove very fast. This information, however, did by no means satisfy me. I therefore went to the young ’Squire’s, and though it was yet early, insisted upon seeing him immediately: he soon appeared with the most open familiar air, and seemed per- fectly amazed at my daughter’s elopement, protesting upon his honour that he was quite a stranger to it. I now therefore con- demned my former suspicions, and could turn them only on Mr. Burchell, who I recollected had of late several private confer- ences with her: but the appearance of another witness left me no room to doubt of his villainy, who averred, that he and my daugh- ter were actually gone towards the wells, about thirty miles off, where there was a great deal of company. Being driven to that state of mind in which we are more ready to act precipitately than to reason right, I never debated with myself, whether these accounts might not have been given by persons purposely placed in my way, to mislead me, but resolved to pursue my daughter and her fancied deluder thither. I walked along with earnestness, and enquired of several by the way; but received no accounts, till entering the town, I was met by a person on horseback, whom I remembered to have seen at the ’Squire’s, and he assured me that if I followed them to the races,* which were but thirty miles farther, I might depend upon overtaking them; for he had seen them dance there the night before, and the whole assembly

82 The Vicar of Wakefield

seemed charmed with my daughter’s performance. Early the next day I walked forward to the races, and about four in the afternoon I came upon the course. The company made a very brilliant appearance, all earnestly employed in one pursuit, that of pleas- ure; how different from mine, that of reclaiming a lost child to virtue! I thought I perceived Mr. Burchell at some distance from me; but, as if he dreaded an interview, upon my approaching him, he mixed among a crowd, and I saw him no more. I now reflected that it would be to no purpose to continue my pursuit farther, and resolved to return home to an innocent family, who wanted my assistance. But the agitations of my mind, and the fatigues I had undergone, threw me into a fever, the symptoms of which I per- ceived before I came off the course. This was another unexpected stroke, as I was more than seventy miles distant from home: how- ever, I retired to a little ale-house by the road-side, and in this place, the usual retreat of indigence and frugality, I laid me down patiently to wait the issue of my disorder. I languished here for near three weeks; but at last my constitution prevailed, though I was unprovided with money to defray the expences of my enter- tainment. It is possible the anxiety from this last circumstance alone might have brought on a relapse, had I not been supplied by a traveller, who stopt to take a cursory refreshment. This person was no other than the philanthropic bookseller in St. Paul’s church-yard,* who has written so many little books for children: he called himself their friend; but he was the friend of all man- kind. He was no sooner alighted, but he was in haste to be gone; for he was ever on business of the utmost importance, and was at that time actually compiling materials for the history of one Mr. Thomas Trip.* I immediately recollected this good-natured man’s red pimpled face; for he had published for me against the Deuterogamists* of the age, and from him I borrowed a few pieces, to be paid at my return. Leaving the inn, therefore, as I was yet but weak, I resolved to return home by easy journies of ten miles a day. My health and usual tranquillity were almost restored, and I now condemned that pride which had made me refractory to the hand of correction. Man little knows what calamities are beyond his patience to bear till he tries them; as in

The Vicar of Wakefield 83

ascending the heights of ambition, which look bright from below, every step we rise shews us some new and gloomy prospect of hidden disappointment; so in our descent from the summits of pleasure, though the vale of misery below may appear at first dark and gloomy, yet the busy mind, still attentive to its own amuse- ment, finds as we descend something to flatter and to please. Still as we approach, the darkest objects appear to brighten, and the mental eye becomes adapted to its gloomy situation.

I now proceeded forward, and had walked about two hours, when I perceived what appeared at a distance like a waggon, which I was resolved to overtake; but when I came up with it, found it to be a strolling company’s cart, that was carrying their scenes and other theatrical furniture to the next village, where they were to exhibit. The cart was attended only by the person who drove it, and one of the company, as the rest of the players were to follow the ensuring day. Good company upon the road, says the proverb, is the shortest cut, I therefore entered into conversation with the poor player; and as I once had some theat- rical powers myself, I disserted on such topics with my usual freedom: but as I was pretty much unacquainted with the present state of the stage, I demanded who were the present theatrical writers in vogue, who the Drydens and Otways of the day.*—‘I fancy, Sir,’ cried the player, ‘few of our modern dramatists would think themselves much honoured by being compared to the writers you mention. Dryden and Row’s manner, Sir, are quite out of fashion; our taste has gone back a whole century, Fletcher, Ben Johnson,* and all the plays of Shakespear, are the only things that go down.’—‘How,’ cried I, ‘is it possible the present age can be pleased with that antiquated dialect, that obsolete humour, those over-charged characters, which abound in the works you mention?’—‘Sir,’ returned my companion, ‘the public think nothing about dialect, or humour, or character; for that is none of their business, they only go to be amused, and find themselves happy when they can enjoy a pantomime, under the sanction of Johnson’s or Shakespear’s name.’—‘So then, I suppose,’ cried I, ‘that our modern dramatists are rather imitators of Shakespear than of nature.’—‘To say the truth,’ returned my companion, ‘I

84 The Vicar of Wakefield

don’t know that they imitate any thing at all; nor indeed does the public require it of them: it is not the composition of the piece, but the number of starts and attitudes that may be introduced into it that elicits applause. I have known a piece, with not one jest in the whole, shrugged into popularity, and another saved by the poet’s throwing in a fit of the gripes. No, Sir, the works of Con- greve and Farquhar have too much wit in them for the present taste; our modern dialect is much more natural.’*

By this time the equipage of the strolling company was arrived

at the village, which, it seems, had been apprised of our approach, and was come out to gaze at us; for my companion observed, that strollers always have more spectators without doors than within. I did not consider the impropriety of my being in such company till I saw a mob gather about me. I therefore took shelter, as fast as possible, in the first ale-house that offered, and being shewn into the common room, was accosted by a very well-drest gentleman, who demanded whether I was the real chaplain of the company, or whether it was only to be my masquerade character in the play. Upon informing him of the truth, and that I did not belong in any sort to the company, he was condescending enough to desire me and the player to partake in a bowl of punch, over which he discussed modern politics with great earnestness and interest. I set him down in my mind for nothing less than a parliament-man at least; but was almost confirmed in my conjectures, when upon my asking what there was in the house for supper, he insisted that the player and I should sup with him at his house, with which request, after some entreaties, we were prevailed on to comply.

CHAPTER XIX

The description of a person discontented with the present government, and apprehensive of the loss of our liberties

The house where we were to be entertained, lying at a small distance from the village, our inviter observed, that as the coach was not ready, he would conduct us on foot, and we soon arrived

The Vicar of Wakefield 85

at one of the most magnificent mansions I had seen in that part of the country. The apartment into which we were shewn was perfectly elegant and modern; he went to give orders for supper, while the player, with a wink, observed that we were perfectly in luck. Our entertainer soon returned, an elegant supper was brought in, two or three ladies, in an easy deshabille,* were intro- duced, and the conversation began with some sprightliness. Polit- ics, however, was the subject on which our entertainer chiefly expatiated; for he asserted that liberty was at once his boast and his terror. After the cloth was removed, he asked me if I had seen the last Monitor, to which replying in the negative, ‘What, nor the Auditor,* I suppose?’ cried he. ‘Neither, Sir,’ returned I. ‘That’s strange, very strange,’ replied my entertainer. ‘Now, I read all the politics that come out. The Daily, the Public, the Ledger, the Chronicle, the London Evening, the White-hall Evening,* the seventeen magazines, and the two reviews,* and though they hate each other, I love them all. Liberty, Sir, liberty is the Briton’s boast, and by all my coal mines in Cornwall,* I rever- ence its guardians.’ ‘Then it is to be hoped,’ cried I, ‘you rever- ence the king.’ ‘Yes,’ returned my entertainer, ‘when he does what we would have him; but if he goes on as he has done of late, I’ll never trouble myself more with his matters. I say nothing. I think only. I could have directed some things better. I don’t think there has been a sufficient number of advisers: he should advise with every person willing to give him advice, and then we should have things done in anotherguess manner.’*

‘I wish,’ cried I, ‘that such intruding advisers were fixed in the pillory. It should be the duty of honest men to assist the weaker side of our constitution, that sacred power that has for some years been every day declining, and losing its due share of influence in the state. But these ignorants still continue the cry of liberty, and if they have any weight basely throw it into the subsiding scale.’

‘How,’ cried one of the ladies, ‘do I live to see one so base, so sordid, as to be an enemy to liberty, and a defender of tyrants? Liberty, that sacred gift of heaven, that glorious privilege of Britons!’

86 The Vicar of Wakefield

‘Can it be possible,’ cried our entertainer, ‘that there should be

any found at present advocates for slavery? Any who are for meanly giving up the privileges of Britons? Can any, Sir, be so abject?’

‘No, Sir,’ replied I, ‘I am for liberty, that attribute of Gods! Glorious liberty! that theme of modern declamation. I would have all men kings. I would be a king myself. We have all naturally an equal right to the throne: we are all originally equal. This is my opinion, and was once the opinion of a set of honest men who were called Levellers.* They tried to erect themselves into a com- munity, where all should be equally free. But, alas! it would never answer; for there were some among them stronger, and some more cunning than others, and these became masters of the rest; for as sure as your groom rides your horses, because he is a cunninger animal than they, so surely will the animal that is cun- ninger or stronger than he, sit upon his shoulders in turn. Since then it is entailed upon humanity to submit, and some are born to command, and others to obey, the question is, as there must be tyrants, whether it is better to have them in the same house with us, or in the same village, or still farther off, in the metropolis. Now, Sir, for my own part, as I naturally hate the face of a tyrant, the farther off he is removed from me, the better pleased am I. The generality of mankind also are of my way of thinking, and have unanimously created one king, whose election at once diminishes the number of tyrants, and puts tyranny at the great- est distance from the greatest number of people. Now the great who were tyrants themselves before the election of one tyrant, are naturally averse to a power raised over them, and whose weight must ever lean heaviest on the subordinate orders. It is the inter- est of the great, therefore, to diminish kingly power as much as possible; because whatever they take from that is naturally restored to themselves; and all they have to do in the state, is to undermine the single tyrant, by which they resume their prim- æval authority. Now, the state may be so circumstanced, or its laws may be so disposed, or its men of opulence so minded, as all to conspire in carrying on this business of undermining mon- archy. For, in the first place, if the circumstances of our state

The Vicar of Wakefield 87

be such, as to favour the accumulation of wealth, and make the opulent still more rich, this will encrease their ambition. An accumulation of wealth, however, must necessarily be the con- sequence, when as at present more riches flow in from external commerce, than arise from internal industry: for external com- merce can only be managed to advantage by the rich, and they have also at the same time all the emoluments arising from internal industry: so that the rich, with us, have two sources of wealth, whereas the poor have but one. For this reason, wealth in all commercial states is found to accumulate, and all such have hitherto in time become aristocratical. Again, the very laws also of this country may contribute to the accumulation of wealth; as when by their means the natural ties that bind the rich and poor together are broken, and it is ordained that the rich shall only marry with the rich; or when the learned are held unqualified to serve their country as counsellors merely from a defect of opu- lence, and wealth is thus made the object of a wise man’s ambi- tion; by these means I say, and such means as these, riches will accumulate. Now the possessor of accumulated wealth, when furnished with the necessaries and pleasures of life, has no other method to employ the superfluity of his fortune but in purchas- ing power. That is, differently speaking, in making dependants, by purchasing the liberty of the needy or the venal, of men who are willing to bear the mortification of contiguous tyranny for bread. Thus each very opulent man generally gathers round him a circle of the poorest of the people; and the polity abounding in accumulated wealth, may be compared to a Cartesian system, each orb with a vortex of its own.* Those, however, who are will- ing to move in a great man’s vortex, are only such as must be slaves, the rabble of mankind, whose souls and whose education are adapted to servitude, and who know nothing of liberty except the name. But there must still be a large number of the people without the sphere of the opulent man’s influence, namely, that order of men which subsists between the very rich and the very rabble; those men who are possest of too large fortunes to submit to the neighbouring man in power, and yet are too poor to set up for tyranny themselves. In this middle order of mankind

88 The Vicar of Wakefield

are generally to be found all the arts, wisdom, and virtues of society. This order alone is known to be the true preserver of freedom, and may be called the People. Now it may happen that this middle order of mankind may lose all its influence in a state; and its voice be in a manner drowned in that of the rabble: for if the fortune sufficient for qualifying a person at present to give his voice in state affairs, be ten times less than was judged sufficient upon forming the constitution, it is evident that greater numbers of the rabble will thus be introduced into the political system, and they ever moving in the vortex of the great, will follow where greatness shall direct. In such a state, therefore, all that the mid- dle order has left, is to preserve the prerogative and privileges of the one principal governor with the most sacred circumspection. For he divides the power of the rich, and calls off the great from falling with tenfold weight on the middle order placed beneath them. The middle order may be compared to a town of which the opulent are forming the siege, and which the governor from without is hastening the relief. While the besiegers are in dread of an enemy over them, it is but natural to offer the townsmen the most specious terms; to flatter them with sounds, and amuse them with privileges: but if they once defeat the governor from behind, the walls of the town will be but a small defence to its inhabitants. What they may then expect, may be seen by turning our eyes to Holland, Genoa, or Venice, where the laws govern the poor, and the rich govern the law. I am then for, and would die for, monarchy, sacred monarchy; for if there be any thing sacred amongst men, it must be the anointed sovereign of his people, and every diminution of his power in war, or in peace, is an infringement upon the real liberties of the subject. The sounds of liberty, patriotism, and Britons, have already done much, it is to be hoped that the true sons of freedom will prevent their ever doing more. I have known many of those pretended champions for lib- erty in my time, yet do I not remember one that was not in his heart and in his family a tyrant.*

My warmth I found had lengthened this harangue beyond the

rules of good breeding: but the impatience of my entertainer, who often strove to interrupt it, could be restrained no longer. ‘What,’

The Vicar of Wakefield 89

cried he, ‘then I have been all this while entertaining a Jesuit in parson’s cloaths; but by all the coal mines of Cornwall, out he shall pack, if my name be Wilkinson.* I now found I had gone too far, and asked pardon for the warmth with which I had spoken. ‘Pardon,’ returned he in a fury: ‘I think such principles demand ten thousand pardons. What, give up liberty, property, and, as the Gazetteer says, lie down to be saddled with wooden shoes!* Sir, I insist upon your marching out of this house immediately, to pre- vent worse consequences, Sir, I insist upon it.’ I was going to repeat my remonstrances; but just then we heard a footman’s rap at the door, and the two ladies cried out, ‘As sure as death there is our master and mistress come home.’ It seems my entertainer was all this while only the butler, who, in his master’s absence, had a mind to cut a figure, and be for a while the gentleman himself; and, to say the truth, he talked politics as well as most country gentlemen do. But nothing could now exceed my confusion upon seeing the gentleman, and his lady, enter, nor was their surprize, at finding such company and good cheer, less than ours. ‘Gentle- men,’ cried the real master of the house, to me and my com- panion, ‘my wife and I are your most humble servants; but I protest this is so unexpected a favour, that we almost sink under the obligation.’ However unexpected our company might be to them, theirs, I am sure, was still more so to us, and I was struck dumb with the apprehensions of my own absurdity, when whom should I next see enter the room but my dear miss Arabella Wilmot, who was formerly designed to be married to my son George; but whose match was broken off, as already related. As soon as she saw me, she flew to my arms with the utmost joy. ‘My dear sir,’ cried she, ‘to what happy accident is it that we owe so unexpected a visit? I am sure my uncle and aunt will be in rap- tures when they find they have the good Dr. Primrose for their guest.’ Upon hearing my name, the old gentleman and lady very politely stept up, and welcomed me with most cordial hospitality. Nor could they forbear smiling upon being informed of the nature of my present visit: but the unfortunate butler, whom they at first seemed disposed to turn away, was, at my intercession, forgiven.

90 The Vicar of Wakefield

Mr. Arnold and his lady, to whom the house belonged, now

insisted upon having the pleasure of my stay for some days, and as their niece, my charming pupil, whose mind, in some measure, had been formed under my own instructions, joined in their entreaties, I complied. That night I was shewn to a magnificent chamber, and the next morning early Miss Wilmot desired to walk with me in the garden, which was decorated in the modern manner.* After some time spent in pointing out the beauties of the place, she enquired with seeming unconcern, when last I had heard from my son George. ‘Alas! Madam,’ cried I, ‘he has now been near three years absent,* without ever writing to his friends or me. Where he is I know not; perhaps I shall never see him or happiness more. No, my dear Madam, we shall never more see such pleasing hours as were once spent by our fire-side at Wakefield. My little family are now dispersing very fast, and poverty has brought not only want, but infamy upon us.’ The good-natured girl let fall a tear at this account; but as I saw her possessed of too much sensibility, I forbore a more minute detail of our sufferings. It was, however, some consolation to me to find that time had made no alteration in her affections, and that she had rejected several matches that had been made her since our leaving her part of the country. She led me round all the extensive improvements of the place, pointing to the several walks and arbours, and at the same time catching from every object a hint for some new question relative to my son. In this manner we spent the forenoon, till the bell summoned us in to dinner, where we found the manager of the strolling company that I mentioned before, who was come to dispose of tickets for the Fair Penitent, which was to be acted that evening, the part of Horatio* by a young gentleman who had never appeared on any stage. He seemed to be very warm in the praises of the new performer, and averred, that he never saw any who bid so fair for excellence. Acting, he observed, was not learned in a day; ‘But this gentle- man,’ continued he, ‘seems born to tread the stage. His voice, his figure, and attitudes, are all admirable. We caught him up acci- dentally in our journey down.’ This account, in some measure, excited our curiosity, and, at the entreaty of the ladies, I was

The Vicar of Wakefield 91

prevailed upon to accompany them to the play-house, which was no other than a barn. As the company with which I went was incontestably the chief of the place, we were received with the greatest respect, and placed in the front seat of the theatre; where we sate for some time with no small impatience to see Horatio make his appearance. The new performer advanced at last, and let parents think of my sensations by their own, when I found it was my unfortunate son. He was going to begin, when, turning his eyes upon the audience, he perceived Miss Wilmot and me, and stood at once speechless and immoveable. The actors behind the scene, who ascribed this pause to his natural timidity, attempted to encourage him; but instead of going on, he burst into a flood of tears, and retired off the stage. I don’t know what were my feelings on this occasion; for they succeeded with too much rapidity for description: but I was soon awaked from this disagreeable reverie by Miss Wilmot, who, pale and with a trembling voice, desired me to conduct her back to her uncle’s. When got home, Mr. Arnold, who was as yet a stranger to our extraordinary behaviour, being informed that the new performer was my son, sent his coach, and an invitation, for him; and as he persisted in his refusal to appear again upon the stage, the players put another in his place, and we soon had him with us. Mr. Arnold gave him the kindest reception, and I received him with my usual transport; for I could never counterfeit false resentment. Miss Wilmot’s reception was mixed with seeming neglect, and yet I could perceive she acted a studied part. The tumult in her mind seemed not yet abated; she said twenty giddy things that looked like joy, and then laughed loud at her own want of meaning. At intervals she would take a sly peep at the glass, as if happy in the consciousness of unresisting beauty, and often would ask questions, without giving any manner of attention to the answers.

92 The Vicar of Wakefield

CHAPTER XX

The history of a philosophic vagabond, pursuing novelty,

but losing content

After we had supped, Mrs. Arnold politely offered to send a couple of her footmen for my son’s baggage, which he at first seemed to decline; but upon her pressing the request, he was obliged to inform her, that a stick and a wallet were all the move- able things upon this earth that he could boast of. ‘Why, aye my son,’ cried I, ‘you left me but poor, and poor I find you are come back; and yet I make no doubt you have seen a great deal of the world.’—‘Yes, Sir,’ replied my son, ‘but travelling after fortune, is not the way to secure her; and, indeed, of late, I have desisted from the pursuit.’—‘I fancy, Sir,’ cried Mrs. Arnold, ‘that the account of your adventures would be amusing: the first part of them I have often heard from my niece; but could the company prevail for the rest, it would be an additional obligation.’— ‘Madam,’ replied my son, ‘I promise you the pleasure you have in hearing, will not be half so great as my vanity in repeating them; and yet in the whole narrative I can scarce promise you one adventure, as my account is rather of what I saw than what I did. The first misfortune of my life, which you all know, was great; but tho’ it distrest, it could not sink me. No person ever had a better knack at hoping than I. The less kind I found fortune at one time, the more I expected from her another, and being now at the bottom of her wheel, every new revolution might lift, but could not depress me. I proceeded, therefore, towards London in a fine morning, no way uneasy about to-morrow, but chearful as the birds that caroll’d by the road, and comforted myself with reflecting, that London was the mart where abilities of every kind were sure of meeting distinction and reward.

‘Upon my arrival in town, Sir, my first care was to deliver your letter of recommendation to our cousin, who was himself in little better circumstances than I. My first scheme, you know, Sir, was to be usher at an academy,* and I asked his advice on the affair.

The Vicar of Wakefield 93

Our cousin received the proposal with a true Sardonic grin. Aye, cried he, this is indeed a very pretty career, that has been chalked out for you. I have been an usher at a boarding school myself; and may I die by an anodyne necklace,* but I had rather be an under turnkey in Newgate. I was up early and late: I was brow-beat by the master, hated for my ugly face by the mistress, worried by the boys within, and never permitted to stir out to meet civility abroad. But are you sure you are fit for a school? Let me examine you a little. Have you been bred apprentice to the business? No. Then you won’t do for a school. Can you dress the boys hair? No. Then you won’t do for a school. Have you had the small-pox? No. Then you won’t do for a school. Can you lie three in a bed? No. Then you will never do for a school. Have you got a good stomach? Yes. Then you will by no means do for a school. No, Sir, if you are for a genteel easy profession, bind yourself seven years as an apprentice to turn a cutler’s wheel; but avoid a school by any means. Yet come, continued he, I see you are a lad of spirit and some learning, what do you think of commencing author, like me? You have read in books, no doubt, of men of genius starving at the trade: At present I’ll shew you forty very dull fellows about town that live by it in opulence. All honest jogg trot men,* who go on smoothly and dully, and write history and politics, and are praised; men, Sir, who, had they been bred coblers, would all their lives have only mended shoes, but never made them.

‘Finding that there was no great degree of gentility affixed to

the character of an usher, I resolved to accept his proposal; and having the highest respect for literature, hailed the antiqua mater of Grub-street with reverence. I thought it my glory to pursue a track which Dryden and Otway trod before me. I considered the goddess of this region as the parent of excellence; and however an intercourse with the world might give us good sense, the poverty she granted I supposed to be the nurse of genius! Big with these reflections, I sate down, and finding that the best things remained to be said on the wrong side, I resolved to write a book that should be wholly new. I therefore drest up three paradoxes with some ingenuity. They were false, indeed, but they were new.

94 The Vicar of Wakefield

The jewels of truth have been so often imported by others, that nothing was left for me to import but some splendid things that at a distance looked every bit as well. Witness you powers what fancied importance sate perched upon my quill while I was writ- ing. The whole learned world, I made no doubt, would rise to oppose my systems; but then I was prepared to oppose the whole learned world. Like the porcupine I sate self collected, with a quill pointed against every opposer.’

‘Well said, my boy,’ cried I, ‘and what subject did you treat upon? I hope you did not pass over the importance of Monogamy. But I interrupt, go on; you published your paradoxes; well, and what did the learned world say to your paradoxes?’

‘Sir,’ replied my son, ‘the learned world said nothing to my paradoxes; nothing at all, Sir. Every man of them was employed in praising his friends and himself, or condemning his enemies; and unfortunately, as I had neither, I suffered the cruellest morti- fication, neglect.

‘As I was meditating one day in a coffee-house on the fate of my paradoxes, a little man happening to enter the room, placed

himself in the box before me, and after some preliminary dis- course, finding me to be a scholar, drew out a bundle of proposals, begging me to subscribe to a new edition he was going to give the world of Propertius,* with notes. This demand necessarily produced a reply that I had no money; and that concession led him to enquire into the nature of my expectations. Finding that my expectations were just as great as my purse, I see, cried he, you are unacquainted with the town, I’ll teach you a part of it. Look at these proposals, upon these very proposals I have sub- sisted very comfortably for twelve years. The moment a noble- man returns from his travels, a Creolian arrives from Jamaica,* or a dowager from her country seat, I strike for a subscription. I first besiege their hearts with flattery, and then pour in my proposals at the breach. If they subscribe readily the first time, I renew my request to beg a dedication fee.* If they let me have that, I smite them once more for engraving their coat of arms at the top. Thus, continued he, I live by vanity, and laugh at it. But between our- selves, I am now too well known, I should be glad to borrow your

The Vicar of Wakefield 95

face a bit: a nobleman of distinction has just returned from Italy; my face is familiar to his porter; but if you bring this copy of verses, my life for it you succeed, and we divide the spoil.’

‘Bless us, George,’ cried I, ‘and is this the employment of poets now! Do men of their exalted talents thus stoop to beggary! Can they so far disgrace their calling, as to make a vile traffic of praise for bread?’

‘O no, Sir,’ returned he, ‘a true poet can never be so base; for wherever there is genius there is pride. The creatures I now describe are only beggars in rhyme. The real poet, as he braves every hardship for fame, so he is equally a coward to contempt, and none but those who are unworthy protection condescend to solicit it.

‘Having a mind too proud to stoop to such indignities, and yet a fortune too humble to hazard a second attempt for fame, I was now obliged to take a middle course, and write for bread. But I was unqualified for a profession where mere industry alone was to ensure success. I could not suppress my lurking passion for applause; but usually consumed that time in efforts after excel- lence which takes up but little room, when it should have been more advantageously employed in the diffusive productions of fruitful mediocrity. My little piece would therefore come forth in the mist of periodical publication, unnoticed and unknown. The public were more importantly employed, than to observe the easy simplicity of my style, or the harmony of my periods. Sheet after sheet was thrown off to oblivion. My essays were buried among the essays upon liberty, eastern tales, and cures for the bite of a mad dog; while Philautos, Philalethes, Philelutheros, and Philan- thropos,* all wrote better, because they wrote faster, than I.

‘Now, therefore, I began to associate with none but disap- pointed authors, like myself, who praised, deplored, and despised each other. The satisfaction we found in every celebrated writer’s attempts, was inversely as their merits. I found that no genius in another could please me. My unfortunate paradoxes had entirely dried up that source of comfort. I could neither read nor write with satisfaction; for excellence in another was my aversion, and writing was my trade.

96 The Vicar of Wakefield

‘In the midst of these gloomy reflections, as I was one day

sitting on a bench in St. James’s park, a young gentleman of distinction, who had been my intimate acquaintance at the uni- versity, approached me. We saluted each other with some hesita- tion, he almost ashamed of being known to one who made so shabby an appearance, and I afraid of a repulse. But my suspi- cions soon vanished; for Ned Thornhill was at the bottom a very good-natured fellow.’

‘What did you say, George?’ interrupted I. ‘Thornhill, was not that his name? It can certainly be no other than my landlord.’— ‘Bless me,’ cried Mrs. Arnold, ‘is Mr. Thornhill so near a neigh- bour of yours? He has long been a friend in our family, and we expect a visit from him shortly.’

‘My friend’s first care,’ continued my son, ‘was to alter my appearance by a very fine suit of his own cloaths, and then I was admitted to his table upon the footing of half-friend, half- underling. My business was to attend him at auctions, to put him in spirits when he sate for his picture, to take the left hand in his chariot when not filled by another, and to assist at tattering a kip,* as the phrase was, when we had a mind for a frolic. Beside this, I had twenty other little employments in the family. I was to do many small things without bidding; to carry the cork screw; to stand godfather to all the butler’s children; to sing when I was bid; to be never out of humour; always to be humble, and, if I could, to be very happy.

‘In this honourable post, however, I was not without a rival. A captain of marines, who was formed for the place by nature, opposed me in my patron’s affections. His mother had been laun- dress to a man of quality, and thus he early acquired a taste for pimping and pedigree. As this gentleman made it the study of his life to be acquainted with lords, though he was dismissed from several for his stupidity; yet he found many of them who were as dull as himself, that permitted his assiduities. As flattery was his trade, he practised it with the easiest address imaginable; but it came aukward and stiff from me; and as every day my patron’s desire of flattery encreased, so every hour being better acquainted with his defects, I became more unwilling to give it. Thus I was

The Vicar of Wakefield 97

once more fairly going to give up the field to the captain, when my friend found occasion for my assistance. This was nothing less than to fight a duel for him, with a gentleman whose sister it was pretended he had used ill. I readily complied with his request, and tho’ I see you are displeased at my conduct, yet as it was a debt indispensably due to friendship, I could not refuse. I under- took the affair, disarmed my antagonist, and soon after had the pleasure of finding that the lady was only a woman of the town, and the fellow her bully and a sharper.* This piece of service was repaid with the warmest professions of gratitude; but as my friend was to leave town in a few days, he knew no other method of serving me, but by recommending me to his uncle Sir William Thornhill, and another nobleman of great distinction, who enjoyed a post under the government. When he was gone, my first care was to carry his recommendatory letter to his uncle, a man whose character for every virtue was universal, yet just. I was received by his servants with the most hospitable smiles; for the looks of the domestics ever transmit their master’s benevo- lence. Being shewn into a grand apartment, where Sir William soon came to me, I delivered my message and letter, which he read, and after pausing some minutes, Pray, Sir, cried he, inform me what you have done for my kinsman, to deserve this warm recommendation? But I suppose, Sir, I guess your merits, you have fought for him; and so you would expect a reward from me, for being the instrument of his vices. I wish, sincerely wish, that my present refusal may be some punishment for your guilt; but still more, that it may be some inducement to your repentance.— The severity of this rebuke I bore patiently, because I knew it was just. My whole expectations now, therefore, lay in my letter to the great man. As the doors of the nobility are almost ever beset with beggars, all ready to thrust in some sly petition, I found it no easy matter to gain admittance. However, after bribing the servants with half my worldly fortune, I was at last shewn into a spacious apartment, my letter being previously sent up for his lordship’s inspection. During this anxious interval I had full time to look round me. Every thing was grand, and of happy contrivance: the paintings, the furniture, the gildings, petrified me with awe, and

98 The Vicar of Wakefield

raised my idea of the owner. Ah, thought I to myself, how very great must the possessor of all these things be, who carries in his head the business of the state, and whose house displays half the wealth of a kingdom: sure his genius must be unfathomable! During these awful reflections I heard a step come heavily for- ward. Ah, this is the great man himself! No, it was only a cham- bermaid. Another foot was heard soon after. This must be He! No, it was only the great man’s valet de chambre. At last his lordship actually made his appearance. Are you, cried he, the bearer of this here letter? I answered with a bow. I learn by this, continued he, as how that—But just at that instant a servant delivered him a card, and without taking farther notice, he went out of the room, and left me to digest my own happiness at leisure. I saw no more of him, till told by a footman that his lordship was going to his coach at the door. Down I immediately followed, and joined my voice to that of three or four more, who came, like me, to petition for favours. His lordship, however, went too fast for us, and was gaining his Chariot door with large strides, when I hallowed out to know if I was to have any reply. He was by this time got in, and muttered an answer, half of which only I heard, the other half was lost in the rattling of his chariot wheels. I stood for some time with my neck stretched out, in the posture of one that was listening to catch the glorious sounds, till looking round me, I found myself alone at his lordship’s gate.*

‘My patience, continued my son, ‘was now quite exhausted: stung with the thousand indignities I had met with, I was willing to cast myself away, and only wanted the gulph to receive me. I regarded myself as one of those vile things that nature designed should be thrown by into her lumber room,* there to perish in obscurity. I had still, however, half a guinea left, and of that I thought fortune herself should not deprive me: but in order to be sure of this, I was resolved to go instantly and spend it while I had it, and then trust to occurrences for the rest. As I was going along with this resolution, it happened that Mr. Cripse’s office* seemed invitingly open to give me a welcome reception. In this office Mr. Cripse kindly offers all his majesty’s subjects a generous promise of 30 l. a year, for which promise all they give in return is

The Vicar of Wakefield 99

their liberty for life, and permission to let him transport them to America as slaves. I was happy at finding a place where I could lose my fears in desperation, and entered this cell, for it had the appearance of one, with the devotion of a monastic. Here I found a number of poor creatures, all in circumstances like myself, expecting the arrival of Mr. Cripse, presenting a true epitome of English impatience. Each untractable soul at variance with for- tune, wreaked her injuries on their own hearts: but Mr. Cripse at last came down, and all our murmurs were hushed. He deigned to regard me with an air of peculiar approbation, and indeed he was the first man who for a month past talked to me with smiles. After a few questions, he found I was fit for every thing in the world. He paused a while upon the properest means of providing for me, and slapping his forehead, as if he had found it, assured me, that there was at that time an embassy talked of from the synod of Pensylvania to the Chickasaw Indians, and that he would use his interest to get me made secretary. I knew in my own heart that the fellow lied, and yet his promise gave me pleasure, there was some- thing so magnificent in the sound. I fairly, therefore, divided my half guinea, one half of which went to be added to his thirty thousand pound, and with the other half I resolved to go to the next tavern, to be there more happy than he.

‘As I was going out with that resolution, I was met at the door by the captain of a ship, with whom I had formerly some little acquaintance, and he agreed to be my companion over a bowl of punch. As I never chose to make a secret of my circumstances, he assured me that I was upon the very point of ruin, in listening to the office-keeper’s promises; for that he only designed to sell me to the plantations. But, continued he, I fancy you might, by a much shorter voyage, be very easily put into a genteel way of bread. Take my advice. My ship sails to-morrow for Amsterdam; What if you go in her as a passenger? The moment you land all you have to do is to teach the Dutchmen English, and I’ll warrant you’ll get pupils and money enough. I suppose you understand English, added he, by this time, or the deuce is in it. I confidently assured him of that; but expressed a doubt whether the Dutch would be willing to learn English. He affirmed with an oath that

100 The Vicar of Wakefield

they were fond of it to distraction; and upon that affirmation I agreed with his proposal, and embarked the next day to teach the Dutch English in Holland. The wind was fair, our voyage short, and after having paid my passage with half my moveables, I found myself, fallen as from the skies, a stranger in one of the principal streets of Amsterdam. In this situation I was unwilling to let any time pass unemployed in teaching. I addressed myself therefore to two or three of those I met, whose appearance seemed most promising; but it was impossible to make ourselves mutually understood. It was not till this very moment I recollected, that in order to teach Dutchmen English, it was necessary that they should first teach me Dutch. How I came to overlook so obvious an objection, is to me amazing; but certain it is I overlooked it.

‘This scheme thus blown up, I had some thoughts of fairly shipping back to England again; but happening into company with an Irish student, who was returning from Louvain,* our conversation turning upon topics of literature, (for by the way it may be observed, that I always forgot the meanness of my cir- cumstances when I could converse upon such subjects) from him I learned that there were not two men in his whole university who understood Greek. This amazed me. I instantly resolved to travel to Louvain, and there live by teaching Greek; and in this design I was heartened by my brother student, who threw out some hints that a fortune might be got by it.

‘I set boldly forward the next morning. Every day lessened the burthen of my moveables, like Æsop and his basket of bread;* for I paid them for my lodgings to the Dutch as I travelled on. When I came to Louvain, I was resolved not to go sneaking to the lower professors, but openly tendered my talents to the principal him- self. I went, had admittance, and offered him my service as a master of the Greek language, which I had been told was a desid- eratum in his university. The principal seemed at first to doubt of my abilities; but of these I offered to convince him, by turning a part of any Greek author he should fix upon into Latin. Finding me perfectly earnest in my proposal, he addressed me thus: You see me, young man, continued he, I never learned Greek, and I don’t find that I have ever missed it. I have had a doctor’s cap and

The Vicar of Wakefield 101

gown without Greek: I have ten thousand florins a year without Greek; I eat heartily without Greek, and in short, continued he, as I don’t know Greek, I do not believe there is any good in it.

‘I was now too far from home to think of returning; so I resolved to go forward.* I had some knowledge of music, with a tolerable voice, and now turned what was once my amusement into a present means of subsistence. I passed among the harmless peasants of Flanders, and among such of the French as were poor enough to be very merry; for I ever found them sprightly in proportion to their wants. Whenever I approached a peasant’s house towards night-fall, I played one of my most merry tunes, and that procured me not only a lodging, but subsistence for the next day. I once or twice attempted to play for people of fashion; but they always thought my performance odious, and never rewarded me even with a trifle. This was to me the more extra- ordinary, as whenever I used in better days to play for company, when playing was my amusement, my music never failed to throw them into raptures, and the ladies especially; but as it was now my only means, it was received with contempt: a proof how ready the world is to under rate those talents by which a man is supported. ‘In this manner I proceeded to Paris, with no design but just to look about me, and then to go forward. The people of Paris are much fonder of strangers that have money, than of those that have wit. As I could not boast much of either, I was no great favourite. After walking about the town four or five days, and seeing the outsides of the best houses, I was preparing to leave this retreat of venal hospitality, when passing through one of the principal streets, whom should I meet but our cousin, to whom you first recommended me. This meeting was very agreeable to me, and I believe not displeasing to him. He enquired into the nature of my journey to Paris, and informed me of his own busi- ness there, which was to collect pictures, medals, intaglios,* and antiques of all kinds, for a gentleman in London, who had just stept into taste and a large fortune. I was the more surprised at seeing our cousin pitched upon for this office, as he himself had often assured me he knew nothing of the matter. Upon my asking how he had been taught the art of a connoscento* so very suddenly,

102 The Vicar of Wakefield

he assured me that nothing was more easy. The whole secret consisted in a strict adherence to two rules: the one always to observe, that the picture might have been better if the painter had taken more pains; and the other, to praise the works of Pietro Perugino.* But, says he, as I once taught you how to be an author in London, I’ll now undertake to instruct you in the art of picture buying at Paris.

‘With this proposal I very readily closed, as it was a living, and now all my ambition was to live. I went therefore to his lodgings, improved my dress by his assistance, and after some time, accom- panied him to auctions of pictures, where the English gentry were expected to be purchasers. I was not a little surprised at his intim- acy with people of the best fashion, who referred themselves to his judgment upon every picture or medal, as to an unerring standard of taste. He made very good use of my assistance upon these occasions; for when asked his opinion, he would gravely take me aside, and ask mine, shrug, look wise, return, and assure the company, that he could give no opinion upon an affair of so much importance. Yet there was sometimes an occasion for a more supported assurance. I remember to have seen him, after giving his opinion that the colouring of a picture was not mellow enough, very deliberately take a brush with brown varnish, that was accidentally lying by, and rub it over the piece with great composure before all the company, and then ask if he had not improved the tints.

‘When he had finished his commission in Paris, he left me strongly recommended to several men of distinction, as a person very proper for a travelling tutor; and after some time I was employed in that capacity by a gentleman who brought his ward to Paris, in order to set him forward on his tour through Europe. I was to be the young gentleman’s governor, but with a proviso that he should always be permitted to govern himself. My pupil in fact understood the art of guiding in money concerns much bet- ter than I. He was heir to a fortune of about two hundred thou- sand pounds, left him by an uncle in the West Indies; and his guardians, to qualify him for the management of it, had bound him apprentice to an attorney. Thus avarice was his prevailing

The Vicar of Wakefield 103

passion: all his questions on the road were how money might be saved, which was the least expensive course of travel; whether any thing could be bought that would turn to account when disposed of again in London. Such curiosities on the way as could be seen for nothing he was ready enough to look at; but if the sight of them was to be paid for, he usually asserted that he had been told they were not worth seeing. He never paid a bill, that he would not observe, how amazingly expensive travelling was, and all this though he was not yet twenty-one. When arrived at Leghorn, as we took a walk to look at the port and shipping, he enquired the expence of the passage by sea home to England. This he was informed was but a trifle, compared to his returning by land, he was therefore unable to withstand the temptation; so paying me the small part of my salary that was due, he took leave, and embarked with only one attendant for London.

‘I now therefore was left once more upon the world at large, but then it was a thing I was used to. However my skill in music could avail me nothing in a country where every peasant was a better musician than I; but by this time I had acquired another talent, which answered my purpose as well, and this was a skill in disputation. In all the foreign universities and convents, there are upon certain days philosophical theses maintained against every adventitious disputant; for which, if the champion opposes with any dexterity, he can claim a gratuity in money, a dinner, and a bed for one night. In this manner therefore I fought my way towards England, walked along from city to city, examined man- kind more nearly, and, if I may so express it, saw both sides of the picture. My remarks, however, are but few: I found that mon- archy was the best government for the poor to live in, and com- monwealths for the rich. I found that riches in general were in every country another name for freedom; and that no man is so fond of liberty himself as not to be desirous of subjecting the will of some individuals in society to his own.

‘Upon my arrival in England, I resolved to pay my respects

first to you, and then to enlist as a volunteer in the first expedition that was going forward; but on my journey down my resolutions were changed, by meeting an old acquaintance, who I found

104 The Vicar of Wakefield

belonged to a company of comedians, that were going to make a summer campaign in the country. The company seemed not much to disapprove of me for an associate. They all, however, apprized me of the importance of the task at which I aimed; that the public was a many headed monster, and that only such as had very good heads could please it: that acting was not to be learnt in a day; and that without some traditional shrugs, which had been on the stage, and only on the stage, these hundred years, I could never pretend to please. The next difficulty was in fitting me with parts, as almost every character was in keeping. I was driven for some time from one character to another, till at last Horatio was fixed upon, which the presence of the present company has happily hindered me from acting.’

CHAPTER XXI

The short continuance of friendship amongst the vicious, which is coeval only with mutual satisfaction

My son’s account was too long to be delivered at once, the first part of it was begun that night, and he was concluding the rest after dinner the next day, when the appearance of Mr. Thornhill’s equipage at the door seemed to make a pause in the general satisfaction. The butler, who was now become my friend in the family, informed me with a whisper, that the ’Squire had already made some overtures to Miss Wilmot, and that her aunt and uncle seemed highly to approve the match. Upon Mr. Thornhill’s entering, he seemed, at seeing my son and me, to start back; but I readily imputed that to surprize, and not displeasure. However, upon our advancing to salute him, he returned our greeting with the most apparent candour; and after a short time, his presence served only to encrease the general good humour.

After tea he called me aside, to enquire after my daughter; but upon my informing him that my enquiry was unsuccessful, he seemed greatly surprised; adding, that he had been since frequently at my house, in order to comfort the rest of my

The Vicar of Wakefield 105

family, whom he left perfectly well. He then asked if I had communicated her misfortune to Miss Wilmot, or my son; and upon my replying that I had not told them as yet, he greatly approved my prudence and precaution, desiring me by all means to keep it a secret: ‘For at best,’ cried he, ‘it is but divulging one’s own infamy; and perhaps Miss Livy may not be so guilty as we all imagine.’ We were here interrupted by a servant, who came to ask the ’Squire in, to stand up at country dances; so that he left me quite pleased with the interest he seemed to take in my concerns. His addresses, however, to Miss Wilmot, were too obvious to be mistaken; and yet she seemed not perfectly pleased, but bore them rather in compliance to the will of her aunt, than from real inclin- ation. I had even the satisfaction to see her lavish some kind looks upon my unfortunate son, which the other could neither extort by his fortune nor assiduity. Mr. Thornhill’s seeming composure, however, not a little surprised me: we had now continued here a week, at the pressing instances of Mr. Arnold; but each day the more tenderness Miss Wilmot shewed my son, Mr. Thornhill’s friendship seemed proportionably to encrease for him.

He had formerly made us the most kind assurances of using

his interest to serve the family; but now his generosity was not confined to promises alone: the morning I designed for my departure, Mr. Thornhill came to me with looks of real pleasure to inform me of a piece of service he had done for his friend George. This was nothing less than his having procured him an ensign’s commission in one of the regiments that was going to the West Indies,* for which he had promised but one hundred pounds, his interest having been sufficient to get an abatement of the other two. ‘As for this trifling piece of service,’ continued the young gentleman, ‘I desire no other reward but the pleasure of having served my friend; and as for the hundred pound to be paid, if you are unable to raise it yourselves, I will advance it, and you shall repay me at your leisure.’ This was a favour we wanted words to express our sense of: I readily therefore gave my bond for the money, and testified as much gratitude as if I never intended to pay. George was to depart for town the next day to secure his commission, in pursuance of his generous patron’s directions,

106 The Vicar of Wakefield

who judged it highly expedient to use dispatch, lest in the mean time another should step in with more advantageous proposals. The next morning, therefore, our young soldier was early pre- pared for his departure, and seemed the only person among us that was not affected by it. Neither the fatigues and dangers he was going to encounter, nor the friends and mistress, for Miss Wilmot actually loved him, he was leaving behind, any way damped his spirits. After he had taken leave of the rest of the company, I gave him all I had, my blessing. ‘And now, my boy,’ cried I, ‘thou art going to fight for thy country, remember how thy brave grandfather fought for his sacred king, when loyalty among Britons was a virtue. Go, my boy, and immitate him in all but his misfortunes, if it was a misfortune to die with Lord Falkland.* Go, my boy, and if you fall, tho’ distant, exposed and unwept by those that love you, the most precious tears are those with which heaven bedews the unburied head of a soldier.’

The next morning I took leave of the good family, that had been kind enough to entertain me so long, not without several expressions of gratitude to Mr. Thornhill for his late bounty. I left them in the enjoyment of all that happiness which affluence and good breeding procure, and returned towards home, despair- ing of ever finding my daughter more, but sending a sigh to heaven to spare and to forgive her. I was now come within about twenty miles of home, having hired an horse to carry me, as I was yet but weak, and comforted myself with the hopes of soon seeing all I held dearest upon earth. But the night coming on, I put up at a little public-house by the road-side, and asked for the landlord’s company over a pint of wine. We sate beside his kitchen fire, which was the best room in the house, and chatted on politics and the news of the country. We happened, among other topics, to talk of young ’Squire Thornhill, who the host assured me was hated as much as his uncle Sir William, who sometimes came down to the country, was loved. He went on to observe, that he made it his whole study to betray the daughters of such as received him to their houses, and after a fortnight or three weeks possession, turned them out unrewarded and abandoned to the world. As we continued our discourse in this manner, his wife,

The Vicar of Wakefield 107

who had been out to get change, returned, and perceiving that her husband was enjoying a pleasure in which she was not a sharer, she asked him, in an angry tone, what he did there, to which he only replied in an ironical way, by drinking her health. ‘Mr. Symmonds,’ cried she, ‘you use me very ill, and I’ll bear it no longer. Here three parts of the business is left for me to do, and the fourth left unfinished; while you do nothing but soak with the guests all day long, whereas if a spoonful of liquor were to cure me of a fever, I never touch a drop.’ I now found what she would be at, and immediately poured her out a glass, which she received with a curtesy, and drinking towards my good health, ‘Sir,’ resumed she, ‘it is not so much for the value of the liquor I am angry, but one cannot help it, when the house is going out of the windows.* If the customers or guests are to be dunned, all the burthen lies upon my back, he’d as lief eat that glass as budge after them himself. There now above stairs, we have a young woman who has come to take up her lodgings here, and I don’t believe she has got any money by her over-civility. I am certain she is very slow of payment, and I wish she were put in mind of it.’—‘What signifies minding her,’ cried the host, ‘if she be slow, she is sure.’—‘I don’t know that,’ replied the wife; ‘but I know that I am sure she has been here a fortnight, and we have not yet seen the cross of her money.’—‘I suppose, my dear,’ cried he, ‘we shall have it all in a lump.’—‘In a lump!’ cried the other, ‘I hope we may get it any way; and that I am resolved we will this very night, or out she tramps, bag and baggage.’—‘Consider, my dear,’ cried the husband, ‘she is a gentlewoman, and deserves more respect.’ —‘As for the matter of that,’ returned the hostess, ‘gen- tle or simple, out she shall pack with a sassarara.* Gentry may be good things where they take; but for my part I never saw much good of them at the sign of the Harrow.’—Thus saying, she ran up a narrow flight of stairs, that went from the kitchen to a room over-head, and I soon perceived by the loudness of her voice, and the bitterness of her reproaches, that no money was to be had from her lodger. I could hear her remonstrances very distinctly: ‘Out I say, pack out this moment, tramp thou infamous strumpet, or I’ll give thee a mark thou won’t be the better for this three

108 The Vicar of Wakefield

months. What! you trumpery, to come and take up an honest house, without cross or coin to bless yourself with; come along I say.’—‘O dear madam,’ cried the stranger, ‘pity me, pity a poor abandoned creature for one night, and death will soon do the rest.’—I instantly knew the voice of my poor ruined child Olivia. I flew to her rescue, while the woman was dragging her along by the hair, and I caught the dear forlorn wretch in my arms.— ‘Welcome, any way welcome, my dearest lost one, my treasure, to your poor old father’s bosom. Tho’ the vicious forsake thee, there is yet one in the world that will never forsake thee; tho’ thou hadst ten thousand crimes to answer for, he will forget them all.’—‘O my own dear’—for minutes she could no more—‘my own dearest good papa! Could angels be kinder! How do I deserve so much! The villain, I hate him and myself, to be a reproach to such goodness. You can’t forgive me. I know you cannot.’—‘Yes, my child, from my heart I do forgive thee! Only repent, and we both shall yet be happy. We shall see many pleasant days yet, my Olivia!’—‘Ah! never, sir, never. The rest of my wretched life must be infamy abroad and shame at home. But, alas! papa, you look much paler than you used to do. Could such a thing as I am give you so much uneasiness? Sure you have too much wisdom to take the miseries of my guilt upon yourself.’—‘Our wisdom, young woman,’ replied I.—‘Ah, why so cold a name, papa?’ cried she. ‘This is the first time you ever called me by so cold a name.’—‘I ask pardon, my darling,’ returned I; ‘but I was going to observe, that wisdom makes but a slow defence against trouble, though at last a sure one.’

The landlady now returned to know if we did not chuse a more genteel apartment, to which assenting, we were shewn a room, where we could converse more freely. After we had talked ourselves into some degree of tranquility, I could not avoid desiring some account of the gradations that led to her present wretched situation. ‘That villain, sir,’ said she, ‘from the first day of our meeting made me honourable, though private, proposals.’

‘Villain indeed,’ cried I; ‘and yet it in some measure surprizes me, how a person of Mr. Burchell’s good sense and seeming

The Vicar of Wakefield 109

honour could be guilty of such deliberate baseness, and thus step into a family to undo it.’

‘My dear papa,’ returned my daughter, ‘you labour under a strange mistake, Mr. Burchell never attempted to deceive me. Instead of that he took every opportunity of privately admonish- ing me against the artifices of Mr. Thornhill, who I now find was even worse than he represented him.’—‘Mr. Thornhill,’ inter- rupted I, ‘can it be?’—‘Yes, Sir,’ returned she, ‘it was Mr. Thornhill who seduced me, who employed the two ladies, as he called them, but who, in fact, were abandoned women of the town, without breeding or pity, to decoy us up to London. Their artifices, you may remember would have certainly succeeded, but for Mr. Burchell’s letter, who directed those reproaches at them, which we all applied to ourselves. How he came to have so much influence as to defeat their intentions, still remains a secret to me; but I am convinced he was ever our warmest sincerest friend.’

‘You amaze me, my dear,’ cried I; ‘but now I find my first suspicions of Mr. Thornhill’s baseness were too well grounded: but he can triumph in security; for he is rich and we are poor. But tell me, my child, sure it was no small temptation that could thus obliterate all the impressions of such an education, and so virtuous a disposition as thine.’

‘Indeed, Sir,’ replied she, ‘he owes all his triumph to the desire I had of making him, and not myself, happy. I knew that the ceremony of our marriage, which was privately performed by a popish priest, was no way binding, and that I had nothing to trust to but his honour.’ ‘What,’ interrupted I, ‘and were you indeed married by a priest, and in orders?’—‘Indeed, Sir, we were,’ replied she, ‘though we were both sworn to conceal his name.’— ‘Why then, my child, come to my arms again, and now you are a thousand times more welcome than before; for you are now his wife to all intents and purposes; nor can all the laws of man, tho’ written upon tables of adamant, lessen the force of that sacred connexion.’

‘Alas, Papa,’ replied she, ‘you are but little acquainted with his villainies: he has been married already, by the same priest, to six or eight wives more, whom, like me, he has deceived and abandoned.’

110 The Vicar of Wakefield

‘Has he so?’ cried I, ‘then we must hang the priest, and you shall inform against him to-morrow.’* ‘But Sir,’ returned she, ‘will that be right, when I am sworn to secrecy?’—‘My dear,’ I replied, ‘if you have made such a promise, I cannot, nor will I tempt you to break it. Even tho’ it may benefit the public, you must not inform against him. In all human institutions a smaller evil is allowed to procure a greater good; as in politics, a province may be given away to secure a kingdom; in medicine, a limb may be lopt off, to preserve the body. But in religion the law is written, and inflexible, never to do evil. And this law, my child, is right: for otherwise, if we commit a smaller evil, to pro- cure a greater good, certain guilt would be thus incurred, in expectation of contingent advantage. And though the advantage should certainly follow, yet the interval between commission and advantage, which is allowed to be guilty, may be that in which we are called away to answer for the things we have done, and the volume of human actions is closed for ever. But I interrupt you, my dear, go on.’

‘The very next morning,’ continued she, ‘I found what little expectations I was to have from his sincerity. That very morning he introduced me to two unhappy women more, whom, like me, he had deceived, but who lived in contented prostitution. I loved him too tenderly to bear such rivals in his affections, and strove to forget my infamy in a tumult of pleasures. With this view, I danced, dressed, and talked; but still was unhappy. The gentle- men who visited there told me every moment of the power of my charms, and this only contributed to encrease my melancholy, as I had thrown all their power quite away. Thus each day I grew more pensive, and he more insolent, till at last the monster had the assurance to offer me to a young Baronet of his acquaintance. Need I describe, Sir, how his ingratitude stung me. My answer to this proposal was almost madness. I desired to part. As I was going he offered me a purse; but I flung it at him with indigna- tion, and burst from him in a rage, that for a while kept me insensible of the miseries of my situation. But I soon looked round me, and saw myself a vile, abject, guilty thing, without one friend in the world to apply to.

The Vicar of Wakefield 111

‘Just in that interval, a stage-coach happening to pass by, I took a place, it being my only aim to be driven at a distance from a wretch I despised and detested. I was set down here, where, since my arrival, my own anxiety, and this woman’s unkindness, have been my only companions. The hours of pleasure that I have passed with my mamma and sister, now grow painful to me. Their sorrows are much; but mine is greater than theirs; for mine are mixed with guilt and infamy.’

‘Have patience, my child,’ cried I, ‘and I hope things will yet be better. Take some repose to-night, and to-morrow I’ll carry you home to your mother and the rest of the family, from whom you will receive a kind reception. Poor woman, this has gone to her heart: but she loves you still, Olivia, and will forget it.’

CHAPTER XXII

Offences are easily pardoned where there is love at bottom

The next morning I took my daughter behind me, and set out on my return home. As we travelled along, I strove, by every persua- sion, to calm her sorrows and fears, and to arm her with reso- lution to bear the presence of her offended mother. I took every opportunity, from the prospect of a fine country, through which we passed, to observe how much kinder heaven was to us, than we to each other, and that the misfortunes of nature’s making were very few. I assured her, that she should never perceive any change in my affections, and that during my life, which yet might be long, she might depend upon a guardian and an instructor. I armed her against the censures of the world, shewed her that books were sweet unreproaching companions to the miserable, and that if they could not bring us to enjoy life, they would at least teach us to endure it.

The hired horse that we rode was to be put up that night at an inn by the way, within about five miles from my house, and as I was willing to prepare my family for my daughter’s reception, I determined to leave her that night at the inn, and to return

112 The Vicar of Wakefield

for her, accompanied by my daughter Sophia, early the next morning. It was night before we reached our appointed stage: however, after seeing her provided with a decent apartment, and having ordered the hostess to prepare proper refreshments, I kissed her, and proceeded towards home. And now my heart caught new sensations of pleasure the nearer I approached that peaceful mansion. As a bird that had been frighted from its nest, my affections out-went my haste, and hovered round my little fire-side, with all the rapture of expectation. I called up the many fond things I had to say, and anticipated the welcome I was to receive. I already felt my wife’s tender embrace, and smiled at the joy of my little ones. As I walked but slowly, the night wained apace. The labourers of the day were all retired to rest; the lights were out in every cottage; no sounds were heard but of the shrilling cock, and the deep-mouthed watch-dog, at hollow dis- tance. I approached my little abode of pleasure, and before I was within a furlong of the place, our honest mastiff came running to welcome me.

It was now near mid-night that I came to knock at my door: all was still and silent: my heart dilated with unutterable happiness, when, to my amazement, I saw the house bursting out in a blaze of fire, and every apperture red with conflagration! I gave a loud convulsive outcry, and fell upon the pavement insensible. This alarmed my son, who had till this been asleep, and he perceiving the flames, instantly waked my wife and daughter, and all running out, naked, and wild with apprehension, recalled me to life with their anguish. But it was only to objects of new terror; for the flames had, by this time, caught the roof of our dwelling, part after part continuing to fall in, while the family stood, with silent agony, looking on, as if they enjoyed the blaze. I gazed upon them and upon it by turns, and then looked round me for my two little ones; but they were not to be seen. O misery! ‘Where,’ cried I, ‘where are my little ones?’—‘They are burnt to death in the flames,’ says my wife calmly, ‘and I will die with them.’—That moment I heard the cry of the babes within, who were just awaked by the fire, and nothing could have stopped me. ‘Where, where, are my children?’ cried I, rushing through the flames, and

The Vicar of Wakefield 113

bursting the door of the chamber in which they were confined, ‘Where are my little ones?’—‘Here, dear papa, here we are,’ cried they together, while the flames were just catching the bed where they lay. I caught them both in my arms, and snatched them through the fire as fast as possible, while just as I was got out, the roof sunk in. ‘Now,’ cried I, holding up my children, ‘now let the flames burn on, and all my possessions perish. Here they are, I have saved my treasure. Here, my dearest, here are our treasures, and we shall yet be happy.’ We kissed our little darlings a thousand times, they clasped us round the neck, and seemed to share our transports, while their mother laughed and wept by turns.

I now stood a calm spectator of the flames, and after some time, began to perceive that my arm to the shoulder was scorched in a terrible manner. It was therefore out of my power to give my son any assistance, either in attempting to save our goods, or preventing the flames spreading to our corn. By this time, the neighbours were alarmed, and came running to our assistance; but all they could do was to stand, like us, spectators of the calamity. My goods, among which were the notes I had reserved for my daughters fortunes, were entirely consumed, except a box, with some papers, that stood in the kitchen, and two or three things more of little consequence, which my son brought away in the beginning. The neighbours contributed, however, what they could to lighten our distress. They brought us cloaths, and fur- nished one of our out-houses with kitchen utensils; so that by daylight we had another, tho’ a wretched, dwelling to retire to. My honest next neighbour, and his children, were not the least assiduous in providing us with every thing necessary, and offering what ever consolation untutored benevolence could suggest.

When the fears of my family had subsided, curiosity to know the cause of my long stay began to take place; having therefore informed them of every particular, I proceeded to prepare them for the reception of our lost one, and tho’ we had nothing but wretchedness now to impart, I was willing to procure her a welcome to what we had. This task would have been more dif- ficult but for our recent calamity, which had humbled my wife’s pride, and blunted it by more poignant afflictions. Being unable to

114 The Vicar of Wakefield

go for my poor child myself, as my arm grew very painful, I sent my son and daughter, who soon returned, supporting the wretched delinquent, who had not the courage to look up at her mother, whom no instructions of mine could persuade to a per- fect reconciliation; for women have a much stronger sense of female error than men. ‘Ah, madam,’ cried her mother, ‘this is but a poor place you are come to after so much finery. My daugh- ter Sophy and I can afford but little entertainment to persons who have kept company only with people of distinction. Yes, Miss Livy, your poor father and I have suffered very much of late; but I hope heaven will forgive you.’—During this reception, the unhappy victim stood pale and trembling, unable to weep or to reply; but I could not continue a silent spectator of her distress, wherefore assuming a degree of severity in my voice and manner, which was ever followed with instant submission, ‘I entreat, woman, that my words may be now marked once for all: I have here brought you back a poor deluded wanderer; her return to duty demands the revival of our tenderness. The real hardships of life are now coming fast upon us, let us not therefore encrease them by dissention among each other. If we live harmoniously together, we may yet be contented, as there are enough of us to shut out the censuring world, and keep each other in counten- ance. The kindness of heaven is promised to the penitent, and let ours be directed by the example. Heaven, we are assured, is much more pleased to view a repentant sinner, than ninety nine persons who have supported a course of undeviating rectitude.* And this is right; for that single effort by which we stop short in the down- hill path to perdition, is itself a greater exertion of virtue, than an hundred acts of justice.’

The Vicar of Wakefield 115

CHAPTER XXIII

None but the guilty can be long and completely miserable

Some assiduity was now required to make our present abode as convenient as possible, and we were soon again qualified to enjoy our former serenity. Being disabled myself from assisting my son in our usual occupations, I read to my family from the few books that were saved, and particularly from such, as, by amusing the imagination, contributed to ease the heart. Our good neighbours too came every day with the kindest condolence, and fixed a time in which they were all to assist at repairing my former dwelling. Honest farmer Williams was not last among these visitors; but heartily offered his friendship. He would even have renewed his addresses to my daughter; but she rejected them in such a manner as totally represt his future solicitations. Her grief seemed formed for continuing, and she was the only person of our little society that a week did not restore to chearfulness. She now lost that unblushing innocence which once taught her to respect her- self, and to seek pleasure by pleasing. Anxiety now had taken strong possession of her mind, her beauty began to be impaired with her constitution, and neglect still more contributed to diminish it. Every tender epithet bestowed on her sister brought a pang to her heart and a tear to her eye; and as one vice, tho’ cured, ever plants others where it has been, so her former guilt, tho’ driven out by repentance, left jealousy and envy behind. I strove a thousand ways to lessen her care, and even forgot my own pain in a concern for her’s, collecting such amusing passages of history, as a strong memory and some reading could suggest. ‘Our happi- ness, my dear,’ I would say, ‘is in the power of one who can bring it about a thousand unforeseen ways, that mock our foresight. If example be necessary to prove this, I’ll give you a story, my child, told us by a grave, tho’ sometimes a romancing, historian.

‘Matilda was married very young to a Neapolitan nobleman of the first quality, and found herself a widow and a mother at the age of fifteen. As she stood one day caressing her infant son in

116 The Vicar of Wakefield

the open window of an apartment, which hung over the river Volturna, the child, with a sudden spring, leaped from her arms into the flood below, and disappeared in a moment. The mother, struck with instant surprize, and making an effort to save him, plunged in after; but, far from being able to assist the infant, she herself with great difficulty escaped to the opposite shore, just when some French soldiers were plundering the country on that side, who immediately made her their prisoner.

‘As the war was then carried on between the French and Italians with the utmost inhumanity, they were going at once to perpetrate those two extremes, suggested by appetite and cruelty. This base resolution, however, was opposed by a young officer, who, tho’ their retreat required the utmost expedition, placed her behind him, and brought her in safety to his native city. Her beauty at first caught his eye, her merit soon after his heart. They were married; he rose to the highest posts; they lived long together, and were happy. But the felicity of a soldier can never be called permanent: after an interval of several years, the troops which he commanded having met with a repulse, he was obliged to take shelter in the city where he had lived with his wife. Here they suffered a siege, and the city at length was taken. Few histor- ies can produce more various instances of cruelty, than those which the French and Italians at that time exercised upon each other. It was resolved by the victors, upon this occasion, to put all the French prisoners to death; but particularly the husband of the unfortunate Matilda, as he was principally instrumental in pro- tracting the siege. Their determinations were, in general, exe- cuted almost as soon as resolved upon. The captive soldier was led forth, and the executioner, with his sword, stood ready, while the spectators in gloomy silence awaited the fatal blow, which was only suspended till the general, who presided as judge, should give the signal. It was in this interval of anguish and expectation, that Matilda came to take her last farewell of her husband and deliverer, deploring her wretched situation, and the cruelty of fate, that had saved her from perishing by a premature death in the river Volturna, to be the spectator of still greater calamities. The general, who was a young man, was struck with surprize

The Vicar of Wakefield 117

at her beauty, and pity at her distress; but with still stronger emotions when he heard her mention her former dangers. He was her son, the infant for whom she had encounter’d so much dan- ger. He acknowledged her at once as his mother, and fell at her feet. The rest may be easily supposed: the captive was set free, and all the happiness that love, friendship, and duty could confer on each, were united.’

In this manner I would attempt to amuse my daughter; but she listened with divided attention; for her own misfortunes engrossed all the pity she once had for those of another, and nothing gave her ease. In company she dreaded contempt; and in solitude she only found anxiety. Such was the colour of her wretchedness, when we received certain information, that Mr. Thornhill was going to be married to Miss Wilmot, for whom I always suspected he had a real passion, tho’ he took every opportunity before me to express his contempt both of her person and fortune. This news only served to encrease poor Olivia’s affliction; such a flagrant breach of fidelity, was more than her courage could support. I was resolved, however, to get more certain information, and to defeat, if possible, the completion of his designs, by sending my son to old Mr. Wilmot’s, with instructions to know the truth of the report, and to deliver Miss Wilmot a letter, intimating Mr. Thornhill’s conduct in my family. My son went, in pursuance of my direc- tions, and in three days returned, assuring us of the truth of the account; but that he had found it impossible to deliver the letter, which he was therefore obliged to leave, as Mr. Thornhill and Miss Wilmot were visiting round the country. They were to be married, he said, in a few days, having appeared together at church the Sunday before he was there, in great splendour, the bride attended by six young ladies, and he by as many gentlemen. Their approaching nuptials filled the whole country with rejoicing, and they usually rode out together in the grandest equipage that had been seen in the country for many years. All the friends of both families, he said, were there, particularly the ’Squire’s uncle, Sir William Thornhill, who bore so good a character. He added, that nothing but mirth and feasting were going forward; that all the country praised the young bride’s beauty, and the

118 The Vicar of Wakefield

bridegroom’s fine person, and that they were immensely fond of each other; concluding, that he could not help thinking Mr. Thornhill one of the most happy men in the world.

‘Why let him if he can,’ returned I: ‘but, my son, observe this bed of straw, and unsheltering roof; those mouldering walls, and humid floor; my wretched body thus disabled by fire, and my children weeping round me for bread; you have come home, my child, to all this, yet here, even here, you see a man that would not for a thousand worlds exchange situations. O, my children, if you could but learn to commune with your own hearts, and know what noble company you can make them, you would little regard the elegance and splendours of the worthless. Almost all men have been taught to call life a passage, and themselves the travel- lers. The similitude still may be improved when we observe that the good are joyful and serene, like travellers that are going towards home; the wicked but by intervals happy, like travellers that are going into exile.’

My compassion for my poor daughter, overpowered by this new disaster, interrupted what I had farther to observe. I bade her mother support her, and after a short time she recovered. She appeared from that time more calm, and I imagined had gained a new degree of resolution: but appearances deceived me; for her tranquility was the langour of over-wrought resentment. A supply of provisions, charitably sent us by my kind parishioners, seemed to diffuse new chearfulness amongst the rest of the fam- ily, nor was I displeased at seeing them once more sprightly and at ease. It would have been unjust to damp their satisfactions, merely to condole with resolute melancholy, or to burthen them with a sadness they did not feel. Thus, once more, the tale went round and the song was demanded, and chearfulness condescended to hover round our little habitation.

The Vicar of Wakefield 119

CHAPTER XXIV

Fresh calamities

The next morning the sun rose with peculiar warmth for the season; so that we agreed to breakfast together on the honey- suckle bank: where, while we sate, my youngest daughter, at my request, joined her voice to the concert on the trees about us. It was in this place my poor Olivia first met her seducer, and every object served to recall her sadness. But that melancholy, which is excited by objects of pleasure, or inspired by sounds of harmony, sooths the heart instead of corroding it. Her mother too, upon this occasion, felt a pleasing distress, and wept, and loved her daughter as before. ‘Do, my pretty Olivia,’ cried she, ‘let us have that little melancholy air your pappa was so fond of, your sister Sophy has already obliged us. Do child, it will please your old father.’ She complied in a manner so exquisitely pathetic as moved me.

When lovely woman stoops to folly,* And finds too late that men betray,

What charm can sooth her melancholy, What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover,

To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover,

And wring his bosom—is to die.

As she was concluding the last stanza, to which an interruption in her voice from sorrow gave peculiar softness, the appearance of Mr. Thornhill’s equipage at a distance alarmed us all, but particularly encreased the uneasiness of my eldest daughter, who, desirous of shunning her betrayer, returned to the house with her sister. In a few minutes he was alighted from his chariot, and making up to the place where I was still sitting, enquired after my health with his usual air of familiarity. ‘Sir,’ replied I, ‘your

120 The Vicar of Wakefield

present assurance only serves to aggravate the baseness of your character; and there was a time when I would have chastised your insolence, for presuming thus to appear before me. But now you are safe; for age has cooled my passions, and my calling restrains them.’

‘I vow, my dear sir,’ returned he, ‘I am amazed at all this; nor can I understand what it means! I hope you don’t think your daughter’s late excursion with me had any thing criminal in it.’

‘Go,’ cried I, ‘thou art a wretch, a poor pitiful wretch, and every way a lyar; but your meanness secures you from my anger! Yet sir, I am descended from a family that would not have borne this! And so, thou vile thing, to gratify a momentary passion, thou hast made one poor creature wretched for life, and polluted a family that had nothing but honour for their portion.’

‘If she or you,’ returned he, ‘are resolved to be miserable, I cannot help it. But you may still be happy; and whatever opinion you may have formed of me, you shall ever find me ready to contribute to it. We can marry her to another in a short time, and what is more, she may keep her lover beside; for I protest I shall ever continue to have a true regard for her.’

I found all my passions alarmed at this new degrading pro- posal; for though the mind may often be calm under great injur- ies, little villainy can at any time get within the soul, and sting it into rage.—‘Avoid my sight, thou reptile,’ cried I, ‘nor continue to insult me with thy presence. Were my brave son at home, he would not suffer this; but I am old, and disabled, and every way undone.’

‘I find,’ cried he, ‘you are bent upon obliging me to talk in an harsher manner than I intended. But as I have shewn you what may be hoped from my friendship, it may not be improper to represent what may be the consequences of my resentment. My attorney, to whom your late bond has been transferred, threatens hard, nor do I know how to prevent the course of justice, except by paying the money myself, which, as I have been at some expences lately, previous to my intended marriage, is not so easy to be done. And then my steward talks of driving for the rent:* it is certain he knows his duty; for I never trouble myself with affairs

The Vicar of Wakefield 121

of that nature. Yet still I could wish to serve you, and even to have you and your daughter present at my marriage, which is shortly to be solemnized with Miss Wilmot; it is even the request of my charming Arabella herself, whom I hope you will not refuse.’

‘Mr. Thornhill,’ replied I, ‘hear me once for all: as to your marriage with any but my daughter, that I never will consent to; and though your friendship could raise me to a throne, or your resentment sink me to the grave, yet would I despise both. Thou hast once wofully, irreparably, deceived me. I reposed my heart upon thine honour, and have found its baseness. Never more, therefore, expect friendship from me. Go, and possess what for- tune has given thee, beauty, riches, health, and pleasure. Go, and leave me to want, infamy, disease, and sorrow. Yet humbled as I am, shall my heart still vindicate its dignity, and though thou hast my forgiveness, thou shalt ever have my contempt.’

‘If so,’ returned he, ‘depend upon it you shall feel the effects of this insolence, and we shall shortly see which is the fittest object of scorn, you or me.’—Upon which he departed abruptly.

My wife and son, who were present at this interview, seemed terrified with the apprehension. My daughters also, finding that he was gone, came out to be informed of the result of our confer- ence, which, when known, alarmed them not less than the rest. But as to myself, I disregarded the utmost stretch of his malevo- lence: he had already struck the blow, and now I stood prepared to repel every new effort. Like one of those instruments used in the art of war, which, however thrown, still presents a point to receive the enemy.*

We soon, however, found that he had not threatened in vain;

for the very next morning his steward came to demand my annual rent, which, by the train of accidents already related, I was unable to pay. The consequence of my incapacity was his driving my cattle that evening, and their being appraised and sold the next day for less than half their value. My wife and children now therefore entreated me to comply upon any terms, rather than incur certain destruction. They even begged me to admit his visits once more, and used all their little eloquence to paint the calamities I was going to endure. The terrors of a prison, in so

122 The Vicar of Wakefield

rigorous a season as the present, with the danger that threatened my health from the late accident that happened by the fire. But I continued inflexible.

‘Why, my treasures,’ cried I, ‘why will you thus attempt to persuade me to the thing that is not right! My duty has taught me to forgive him; but my conscience will not permit me to approve. Would you have me applaud to the world what my heart must internally condemn? Would you have me tamely sit down and flatter our infamous betrayer; and to avoid a prison continually suffer the more galling bonds of mental confinement! No, never. If we are to be taken from this abode, only let us hold to the right, and wherever we are thrown, we can still retire to a charming apart- ment, when we can look round our own hearts with intrepidity and with pleasure!’

In this manner we spent that evening. Early the next morning, as the snow had fallen in great abundance in the night, my son was employed in clearing it away, and opening a passage before the door. He had not been thus engaged long, when he came running in, with looks all pale, to tell us that two strangers, whom he knew to be officers of justice, were making towards the house. Just as he spoke they came in, and approaching the bed where I lay, after previously informing me of their employment and busi- ness, made me their prisoner, bidding me prepare to go with them

to the county gaol, which was eleven miles off.

‘My friends,’ said I, ‘this is severe weather on which you have come to take me to a prison; and it is particularly unfortunate at this time, as one of my arms has lately been burnt in a terrible manner, and it has thrown me into a slight fever, and I want cloaths to cover me, and I am now too weak and old to walk far in such deep snow: but if it must be so—’

I then turned to my wife and children, and directed them to get together what few things were left us, and to prepare immedi- ately for leaving this place. I entreated them to be expeditious, and desired my son to assist his elder sister, who, from a con- sciousness that she was the cause of all our calamities, was fallen, and had lost anguish in insensibility. I encouraged my wife, who, pale and trembling, clasped our affrighted little ones in her arms,

The Vicar of Wakefield 123

that clung to her bosom in silence, dreading to look round at the strangers. In the mean time my youngest daughter prepared for our departure, and as she received several hints to use dispatch, in about an hour we were ready to depart.

CHAPTER XXV

No situation, however wretched it seems, but has some sort of comfort attending it

We set forward from this peaceful neighbourhood, and walked on slowly. My eldest daughter being enfeebled by a slow fever, which had begun for some days to undermine her constitution, one of the officers, who had an horse, kindly took her behind him; for even these men cannot entirely divest themselves of humanity. My son led one of the little ones by the hand, and my wife the other, while I leaned upon my youngest girl, whose tears fell not for her own but my distresses.

We were now got from my late dwelling about two miles, when we saw a crowd running and shouting behind us, consisting of about fifty of my poorest parishioners. These, with dreadful imprecations, soon seized upon the two officers of justice, and swearing they would never see their minister go to gaol while they had a drop of blood to shed in his defence, were going to use them with great severity. The consequence might have been fatal, had I not immediately interposed, and with some difficulty rescued the officers from the hands of the enraged multitude. My children, who looked upon my delivery now as certain, appeared trans- ported with joy, and were incapable of containing their raptures. But they were soon undeceived, upon hearing me address the poor deluded people, who came, as they imagined, to do me service.

‘What! my friends,’ cried I, ‘and is this the way you love me! Is this the manner you obey the instructions I have given you from the pulpit! Thus to fly in the face of justice, and bring down ruin on yourselves and me! Which is your ring-leader? Shew me the

124 The Vicar of Wakefield

man that has thus seduced you. As sure as he lives he shall feel my resentment. Alas! my dear deluded flock, return back to the duty you owe to God, to your country, and to me. I shall yet perhaps one day see you in greater felicity here, and contribute to make your lives more happy. But let it at least be my comfort when I pen my fold for immortality, that not one here shall be wanting.’

They now seemed all repentance, and melting into tears, came one after the other to bid me farewell. I shook each tenderly by the hand, and leaving them my blessing, proceeded forward without meeting any farther interruption. Some hours before night we reached the town, or rather village; for it consisted but of a few mean houses, having lost all its former opulence, and retaining no marks of its ancient superiority but the gaol.

Upon entering, we put up at an inn, where we had such refreshments as could most readily be procured, and I supped with my family with my usual chearfulness. After seeing them properly accommodated for that night, I next attended the sher- iff’s officers to the prison, which had formerly been built for the purposes of war, and consisted of one large apartment, strongly grated, and paved with stone, common to both felons and debtors at certain hours in the four and twenty. Besides this, every prisoner had a separate cell, where he was locked in for the night. I expected upon my entrance to find nothing but lamentations, and various sounds of misery; but it was very different. The prisoners seemed all employed in one common design, that of forgetting thought in merriment or clamour. I was apprized of the usual perquisite required upon these occasions, and immedi- ately complied with the demand, though the little money I had was very near being all exhausted. This was immediately sent away for liquor, and the whole prison soon was filled with riot,

laughter, and prophaneness.

‘How,’ cried I to myself, ‘shall men so very wicked be chearful, and shall I be melancholy! I feel only the same confinement with them, and I think I have more reason to be happy.’

With such reflections I laboured to become chearful; but chear- fulness was never yet produced by effort, which is itself painful. As I was sitting therefore in a corner of the gaol, in a pensive

The Vicar of Wakefield 125

posture, one of my fellow prisoners came up, and sitting by me, entered into conversation. It was my constant rule in life never to avoid the conversation of any man who seemed to desire it: for if good, I might profit by his instruction; if bad, he might be assisted by mine. I found this to be a knowing man, of strong unlettered sense; but a thorough knowledge of the world, as it is called, or, more properly speaking, of human nature on the wrong side. He asked me if I had taken care to provide myself with a bed, which was a circumstance I had never once attended to.*

‘That’s unfortunate,’ cried he, ‘as you are allowed here nothing

but straw, and your apartment is very large and cold. However you seem to be something of a gentleman, and as I have been one myself in my time, part of my bed-cloaths are heartily at your service.’

I thanked him, professing my surprize at finding such human- ity in a gaol in misfortunes; adding, to let him see that I was a scholar, ‘That the sage ancient seemed to understand the value of company in affliction, when he said, Ton kosman aire, ei dos ton etairon,* and in fact,’ continued I, ‘what is the World if it affords only solitude?’

‘You talk of the world, Sir,’ returned my fellow prisoner; ‘the world is in its dotage, and yet the cosmogony or creation of the world has puzzled the philosophers of every age. What a medly of opinions have they not broached upon the creation of the world. Sanconiathon, Manetho, Berosus, and Ocellus Lucanus have all attempted it in vain. The latter has these words, Anarchon ara kai atelutaion to pan, which implies’—‘I ask pardon, Sir,’ cried I, ‘for interrupting so much learning; but I think I have heard all this before. Have I not had the pleasure of once seeing you at Welbridge* fair, and is not your name Ephraim Jenkinson?’ At this demand he only sighed. ‘I suppose you must recollect,’ resumed I, ‘one Doctor Primrose, from whom you bought a horse.’

He now at once recollected me; for the gloominess of the place and the approaching night had prevented his distinguishing my features before.—‘Yes, Sir,’ returned Mr. Jenkinson, ‘I remember you perfectly well; I bought an horse, but forgot to pay for him. Your neighbour Flamborough is the only prosecutor I am any

126 The Vicar of Wakefield

way afraid of at the next assizes: for he intends to swear positively against me as a coiner.* I am heartily sorry, Sir, I ever deceived you, or indeed any man; for you see,’ continued he, shewing his shackles, ‘what my tricks have brought me to.’

‘Well, sir,’ replied I, ‘your kindness in offering me assistance, when you could expect no return, shall be repaid with my endeavours to soften or totally suppress Mr. Flamborough’s evi- dence, and I will send my son to him for that purpose the first opportunity; nor do I in the least doubt but he will comply with my request, and as to my evidence, you need be under no uneasi- ness about that.’

‘Well, sir,’ cried he, ‘all the return I can make shall be yours. You shall have more than half my bed-cloaths to night, and I’ll take care to stand your friend in the prison, where I think I have some influence.’

I thanked him, and could not avoid being surprised at the

present youthful change in his aspect; for at the time I had seen him before he appeared at least sixty.—‘Sir,’ answered he, ‘you are little acquainted with the world; I had at that time false hair, and have learnt the art of counterfeiting every age from seventeen to seventy. Ah sir, had I but bestowed half the pains in learning a trade, that I have in learning to be a scoundrel, I might have been a rich man at this day. But rogue as I am, still I may be your friend, and that perhaps when you least expect it.’

We were now prevented from further conversation, by the arrival of the gaoler’s servants, who came to call over the prisoners names, and lock up for the night. A fellow also, with a bundle of straw for my bed attended, who led me along a dark narrow passage into a room paved like the common prison, and in one corner of this I spread my bed, and the cloaths given me by my fellow prisoner; which done, my conductor, who was civil enough, bade me a good-night. After my usual meditations, and having praised my heavenly corrector, I laid myself down and slept with the utmost tranquility till morning.

The Vicar of Wakefield 127

CHAPTER XXVI

A reformation in the gaol. To make laws complete, they should reward as well as punish

The next morning early I was awakened by my family, whom I found in tears at my bed-side. The gloomy strength of every thing about us, it seems, had daunted them. I gently rebuked their sorrow, assuring them I had never slept with greater tran- quility, and next enquired after my eldest daughter, who was not among them. They informed me that yesterday’s uneasiness and fatigue had encreased her fever, and it was judged proper to leave her behind. My next care was to send my son to procure a room or two to lodge the family in, as near the prison as conveniently could be found. He obeyed; but could only find one apartment, which was hired at a small expence, for his mother and sisters, the gaoler with humanity consenting to let him and his two little brothers lie in the prison with me. A bed was therefore prepared for them in a corner of the room, which I thought answered very conveniently. I was willing however previously to know whether my little children chose to lie in a place which seemed to fright them upon entrance.

‘Well,’ cried I, ‘my good boys, how do you like your bed? I hope you are not afraid to lie in this room, dark as it appears.’

‘No, papa,’ says Dick, ‘I am not afraid to lie any where where you are.’

‘And I,’ says Bill, who was yet but four years old, ‘love every place best that my papa is in.’

After this, I allotted to each of the family what they were to do. My daughter was particularly directed to watch her declining sister’s health; my wife was to attend me; my little boys were to read to me: ‘And as for you, my son,’ continued I, ‘it is by the labour of your hands we must all hope to be supported. Your wages, as a day-labourer, will be full sufficient, with proper fru- gality, to maintain us all, and comfortably too. Thou art now sixteen years old, and hast strength, and it was given thee, my

128 The Vicar of Wakefield

son, for very useful purposes; for it must save from famine your helpless parents and family. Prepare then this evening to look out for work against to-morrow, and bring home every night what money you earn, for our support.’

Having thus instructed him, and settled the rest, I walked down to the common prison, where I could enjoy more air and room. But I was not long there when the execrations, lewdness, and brutality that invaded me on every side, drove me back to my apartment again. Here I sate for some time, pondering upon the strange infatuation of wretches, who finding all mankind in open arms against them, were labouring to make themselves a future and a tremendous enemy.

Their insensibility excited my highest compassion, and blotted my own uneasiness from my mind. It even appeared a duty incumbent upon me to attempt to reclaim them. I resolved there- fore once more to return, and in spite of their contempt to give them my advice, and conquer them by perseverance. Going there- fore among them again, I informed Mr. Jenkinson of my design, at which he laughed heartily, but communicated it to the rest. The proposal was received with the greatest good-humour, as it promised to afford a new fund of entertainment to persons who had now no other resource for mirth, but what could be derived from ridicule or debauchery.

I therefore read them a portion of the service with a loud unaffected voice, and found my audience perfectly merry upon the occasion. Lewd whispers, groans of contrition burlesqued, winking and coughing, alternately excited laughter. However, I continued with my natural solemnity to read on, sensible that what I did might amend some, but could itself receive no contamination from any.

After reading, I entered upon my exhortation, which was rather calculated at first to amuse them than to reprove. I previ- ously observed, that no other motive but their welfare could induce me to this; that I was their fellow prisoner, and now got nothing by preaching. I was sorry, I said, to hear them so very prophane; because they got nothing by it, but might lose a great deal: ‘For be assured, my friends,’ cried I, ‘for you are my

The Vicar of Wakefield 129

friends, however the world may disclaim your friendship, though you swore twelve thousand oaths in a day, it would not put one penny in your purse. Then what signifies calling every moment upon the devil, and courting his friendship, since you find how scurvily he uses you. He has given you nothing here, you find, but a mouthful of oaths and an empty belly; and by the best accounts I have of him, he will give you nothing that’s good hereafter.

‘If used ill in our dealings with one man, we naturally go elsewhere. Were it not worth your while then, just to try how you may like the usage of another master, who gives you fair promises at least to come to him. Surely, my Friends, of all stupidity in the world, his must be greatest, who, after robbing an house, runs to the thieftakers for protection. And yet how are you more wise? You are all seeking comfort from one that has already betrayed you, applying to a more malicious being than any thieftaker of them all; for they only decoy, and then hang you; but he decoys and hangs, and what is worst of all, will not let you loose after the hangman has done.’

When I had concluded, I received the compliments of my audience, some of whom came and shook me by the hand, swear- ing that I was a very honest fellow, and that they desired my further acquaintance. I therefore promised to repeat my lecture next day, and actually conceived some hopes of making a reforma- tion here; for it had ever been my opinion, that no man was past the hour of amendment, every heart lying open to the shafts of reproof, if the archer could but take a proper aim. When I had thus satisfied my mind, I went back to my apartment, where my wife had prepared a frugal meal, while Mr. Jenkinson begged leave to add his dinner to ours, and partake of the pleasure, as he was kind enough to express it, of my conversation. He had not yet seen my family, for as they came to my apartment by a door in the narrow passage, already described, by this means they avoided the common prison. Jenkinson at the first interview therefore seemed not a little struck with the beauty of my youngest daughter, which her pensive air contributed to heighten, and my little ones did not pass unnoticed.

130 The Vicar of Wakefield

‘Alas, Doctor,’ cried he, ‘these children are too handsome and too good for such a place as this!’

‘Why, Mr. Jenkinson,’ replied I, ‘thank heaven my children are pretty tolerable in morals, and if they be good, it matters little for the rest.’

‘I fancy, sir,’ returned my fellow prisoner, ‘that it must give you great comfort to have this little family about you.’

‘A comfort, Mr. Jenkinson,’ replied I, ‘yes it is indeed a comfort, and I would not be without them for all the world; for they can make a dungeon seem a palace. There is but one way in this life of wounding my happiness, and that is by injuring them.’ ‘I am afraid then, sir,’ cried he, ‘that I am in some measure culpable; for I think I see here (looking at my son Moses) one that

I have injured, and by whom I wish to be forgiven.’

My son immediately recollected his voice and features, though he had before seen him in disguise, and taking him by the hand, with a smile forgave him. ‘Yet,’ continued he, ‘I can’t help won- dering at what you could see in my face, to think me a proper mark for deception.’

‘My dear sir,’ returned the other, ‘it was not your face, but your white stockings and the black ribband in your hair, that allured me. But no disparagement to your parts, I have deceived wiser men than you in my time; and yet, with all my tricks, the blockheads have been too many for me at last.’

‘I suppose,’ cried my son, ‘that the narrative of such a life as yours must be extremely instructive and amusing.’

‘Not much of either,’ returned Mr. Jenkinson. ‘Those relations which describe the tricks and vices only of mankind, by increas- ing our suspicion in life, retard our success. The traveller that distrusts every person he meets, and turns back upon the appear- ance of every man that looks like a robber, seldom arrives in time at his journey’s end.

‘Indeed I think from my own experience, that the knowing one is the silliest fellow under the sun. I was thought cunning from my very childhood; when but seven years old the ladies would say that I was a perfect little man; at fourteen I knew the world, cocked my hat, and loved the ladies; at twenty, though I was

The Vicar of Wakefield 131

perfectly honest, yet every one thought me so cunning, that not one would trust me. Thus I was at last obliged to turn sharper in my own defence,* and have lived ever since, my head throbbing with schemes to deceive, and my heart palpitating with fear of detection.

‘I used often to laugh at your honest simple neighbour Flamborough, and one way or another generally cheated him once a year. Yet still the honest man went forward without sus- picion, and grew rich, while I still continued tricksy and cunning, and was poor, without the consolation of being honest.

‘However,’ continued he, ‘let me know your case, and what has brought you here; perhaps though I have not skill to avoid a goal myself, I may extricate my friends.’

In compliance with his curiosity, I informed him of the whole train of accidents and follies that had plunged me into my present troubles, and my utter inability to get free.

After hearing my story, and pausing some minutes, he slapt his forehead, as if he had hit upon something material, and took his leave, saying he would try what could be done.

CHAPTER XXVII

The same subject continued

The next morning I communicated to my wife and children the scheme I had planned of reforming the prisoners, which they received with universal disapprobation, alledging the impossibil- ity and impropriety of it; adding, that my endeavours would no way contribute to their amendment, but might probably disgrace my calling.

‘Excuse me,’ returned I, ‘these people, however fallen, are still men, and that is a very good title to my affections. Good council rejected returns to enrich the giver’s bosom; and though the instruction I communicate may not mend them, yet it will assuredly mend myself. If these wretches, my children, were princes, there would be thousands ready to offer their ministry;

132 The Vicar of Wakefield

but, in my opinion, the heart that is buried in a dungeon is as precious as that seated upon a throne. Yes, my treasures, if I can mend them I will; perhaps they will not all despise me. Perhaps I may catch up even one from the gulph, and that will be great gain; for is there upon earth a gem so precious as the human soul?’

Thus saying, I left them, and descended to the common prison, where I found the prisoners very merry, expecting my arrival; and each prepared with some gaol trick to play upon the doctor. Thus, as I was going to begin, one turned my wig awry, as if by accident, and then asked my pardon. A second, who stood at some distance, had a knack of spitting through his teeth, which fell in showers upon my book. A third would cry amen in such an affected tone as gave the rest great delight. A fourth had slily picked my pocket of my spectacles. But there was one whose trick gave more universal pleasure than all the rest; for observing the manner in which I had disposed my books on the table before me, he very dextrously displaced one of them, and put an obscene jest-book of his own in the place. However I took no notice of all that this mischievous groupe of little beings could do; but went on, perfectly sensible that what was ridiculous in my attempt, would excite mirth only the first or second time, while what was serious would be permanent. My design succeeded, and in less than six days some were penitent, and all attentive.

It was now that I applauded my perseverance and address, at thus giving sensibility to wretches divested of every moral feeling, and now began to think of doing them temporal services also, by rendering their situation somewhat more comfortable. Their time had hitherto been divided between famine and excess, tumultous riot and bitter repining. Their only employment was quarrelling among each other, playing at cribbage, and cutting tobacco stop- pers.* From this last mode of idle industry I took the hint of setting such as chose to work at cutting pegs for tobacconists and shoemakers,* the proper wood being bought by a general subscrip- tion, and when manufactured, sold by my appointment; so that each earned something every day: a trifle indeed, but sufficient to maintain him.

The Vicar of Wakefield 133

I did not stop here, but instituted fines for the punishment of immorality, and rewards for peculiar industry. Thus in less than a fortnight I had formed them into something social and humane, and had the pleasure of regarding myself as a legislator, who had brought men from their native ferocity into friendship and obedience.

And it were highly to be wished, that legislative power would thus direct the law rather to reformation than severity. That it would seem convinced that the work of eradicating crimes is not by making punishments familiar, but formidable. Then instead of our present prisons, which find or make men guilty, which enclose wretches for the commission of one crime, and return them, if returned alive, fitted for the perpetration of thousands; we should see, as in other parts of Europe, places of penitence and solitude, where the accused might be attended by such as could give them repentance if guilty, or new motives to virtue if innocent. And this, but not the increasing punishments, is the way to mend a state: nor can I avoid even questioning the validity of that right which social combinations have assumed of capitally punishing offences of a slight nature. In cases of murder their right is obvious, as it is the duty of us all, from the law of self- defence, to cut off that man who has shewn a disregard for the life of another. Against such, all nature arises in arms; but it is not so against him who steals my property. Natural law gives me no right to take away his life, as by that the horse he steals is as much his property as mine. If then I have any right, it must be from a compact made between us, that he who deprives the other of his horse shall die. But this is a false compact; because no man has a right to barter his life, no more than to take it away, as it is not his own. And beside, the compact is inadequate, and would be set aside even in a court of modern equity, as there is a great penalty for a very trifling convenience, since it is far better that two men should live, than that one man should ride. But a compact that is false between two men, is equally so between an hundred, or an hundred thousand; for as ten millions of circles can never make a square, so the united voice of myriads cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood. It is thus that reason speaks, and

134 The Vicar of Wakefield

untutored nature says the same thing. Savages that are directed by natural law alone are very tender of the lives of each other; they seldom shed blood but to retaliate former cruelty.

Our Saxon ancestors, fierce as they were in war, had but few executions in times of peace; and in all commencing governments that have the print of nature still strong upon them, scarce any crime is held capital.

It is among the citizens of a refined community that penal laws, which are in the hands of the rich, are laid upon the poor. Government, while it grows older, seems to acquire the morose- ness of age; and as if our property were become dearer in propor- tion as it increased, as if the more enormous our wealth, the more extensive our fears, all our possessions are paled up with new edicts every day, and hung round with gibbets to scare every invader.

I cannot tell whether it is from the number of our penal laws, or the licentiousness of our people, that this country should shew more convicts in a year, than half the dominions of Europe united. Perhaps it is owing to both; for they mutually produce each other. When by indiscriminate penal laws a nation beholds the same punishment affixed to dissimilar degrees of guilt, from perceiving no distinction in the penalty, the people are led to lose all sense of distinction in the crime, and this distinction is the bulwark of all morality: thus the multitude of laws produce new vices, and new vices call for fresh restraints.

It were to be wished then that power, instead of contriving new laws to punish vice, instead of drawing hard the cords of society till a convulsion come to burst them, instead of cutting away wretches as useless, before we have tried their utility, instead of converting correction into vengeance, it were to be wished that we tried the restrictive arts of government, and made law the protector, but not the tyrant of the people. We should then find that creatures, whose souls are held as dross, only wanted the hand of a refiner; we should then find that wretches, now stuck up for long tortures, lest luxury should feel a momentary pang, might, if properly treated, serve to sinew the state in times of danger; that, as their faces are like ours, their hearts are so too;

The Vicar of Wakefield 135

that few minds are so base as that perseverance cannot amend; that a man may see his last crime without dying for it; and that very little blood will serve to cement our security.

CHAPTER XXVIII

Happiness and misery rather the result of prudence than of virtue in this life. Temporal evils or felicities being regarded by heaven as things merely in themselves trifling

and unworthy its care in the distribution

I had now been confined more than a fortnight, but had not since my arrival been visited by my dear Olivia, and I greatly longed to see her. Having communicated my wishes to my wife, the next morning the poor girl entered my apartment, leaning on her sister’s arm. The change which I saw in her countenance struck me. The numberless graces that once resided there were now fled, and the hand of death seemed to have molded every feature to alarm me. Her temples were sunk, her forehead was tense, and a fatal paleness sate upon her cheek.

‘I am glad to see thee, my dear,’ cried I; ‘but why this dejection Livy? I hope, my love, you have too great a regard for me, to permit disappointment thus to undermine a life which I prize as my own. Be chearful child, and we yet may see happier days.’

‘You have ever, sir,’ replied she, ‘been kind to me, and it adds to my pain that I shall never have an opportunity of sharing that happiness you promise. Happiness, I fear, is no longer reserved for me here; and I long to be rid of a place where I have only found distress. Indeed, sir, I wish you would make a proper sub- mission to Mr. Thornhill; it may, in some measure, induce him to pity you, and it will give me relief in dying.’

‘Never, child,’ replied I, ‘never will I be brought to acknow- ledge my daughter a prostitute; for tho’ the world may look upon your offence with scorn, let it be mine to regard it as a mark of credulity, not of guilt. My dear, I am no way miserable in this place, however dismal it may seem, and be assured that while you

136 The Vicar of Wakefield

continue to bless me by living, he shall never have my consent to make you more wretched by marrying another.’

After the departure of my daughter, my fellow prisoner, who was by at this interview, sensibly enough expostulated upon my obstinacy, in refusing a submission, which promised to give me freedom. He observed, that the rest of my family was not to be sacrificed to the peace of one child alone, and she the only one who had offended me. ‘Beside,’ added he, ‘I don’t know if it be just thus to obstruct the union of man and wife, which you do at present, by refusing to consent to a match which you cannot hinder, but may render unhappy.’

‘Sir,’ replied I, ‘you are unacquainted with the man that oppresses us. I am very sensible that no submission I can make could procure me liberty even for an hour. I am told that even in this very room a debtor of his, no later than last year, died for want. But though my submission and approbation could transfer me from hence, to the most beautiful apartment he is possessed of; yet I would grant neither, as something whispers me that it would be giving a sanction to adultery. While my daughter lives, no other marriage of his shall ever be legal in my eye. Were she removed, indeed, I should be the basest of men, from any resentment of my own, to attempt putting asunder those who wish for an union. No, villain as he is, I should then wish him married, to prevent the consequences of his future debaucheries. But now should I not be the most cruel of all fathers, to sign an Instrument which must send my child to the grave, merely to avoid a prison myself; and thus to escape one pang, break my child’s heart with a thousand?’

He acquiesced in the justice of this answer, but could not avoid

observing, that he feared my daughter’s life was already too much wasted to keep me long a prisoner. ‘However’, continued he, ‘though you refuse to submit to the nephew, I hope you have no objections to laying your case before the uncle, who has the first character in the kingdom for every thing that is just and good. I would advise you to send him a letter by the post, intimating all his nephew’s ill usage, and my life for it that in three days you shall have an answer.’ I thank’d him for the hint, and instantly set

The Vicar of Wakefield 137

about complying; but I wanted paper, and unluckily all our money had been laid out that morning in provisions, however he supplied me.

For the three ensuing days I was in a state of anxiety, to know what reception my letter might meet with; but in the mean time was frequently solicited by my wife to submit to any conditions rather than remain here, and every hour received repeated accounts of the decline of my daughter’s health. The third day and the fourth arrived, but I received no answer to my letter: the complaints of a stranger against a favourite nephew, were no way likely to succeed; so that these hopes soon vanished like all my former. My mind, however, still supported itself though con- finement and bad air began to make a visible alteration in my health, and my arm that had suffered in the fire, grew worse. My children however sate by me, and while I was stretched on my straw, read to me by turns, or listened and wept at my instruc- tions. But my daughter’s health declined faster than mine; every message from her contributed to encrease my apprehensions and pain. The fifth morning after I had written the letter which was sent to sir William Thornhill, I was alarmed with an account that she was speechless. Now it was, that confinement was truly pain- ful to me; my soul was bursting from its prison to be near the pillow of my child, to comfort, to strengthen her, to receive her last wishes, and teach her soul the way to heaven! Another account came. She was expiring, and yet I was debarred the small comfort of weeping by her. My fellow prisoner, some time after, came with the last account. He bade me be patient. She was dead!—The next morning he returned, and found me with my two little ones, now my only companions, who were using all their innocent efforts to comfort me. They entreated to read to me, and bade me not to cry, for I was now too old to weep. ‘And is not my sister an angel, now, pappa,’ cried the eldest, ‘and why then are you sorry for her? I wish I were an angel out of this frightful place, if my pappa were with me.’ ‘Yes,’ added my youngest dar- ling, ‘Heaven, where my sister is, is a finer place than this, and there are none but good people there, and the people here are very bad.’

138 The Vicar of Wakefield

Mr. Jenkinson interupted their harmless prattle, by observing that now my daughter was no more, I should seriously think of the rest of my family, and attempt to save my own life, which was every day declining, for want of necessaries and wholesome air. He added, that it was now incumbent on me to sacrifice any pride or resentment of my own, to the welfare of those who depended on me for support; and that I was now, both by reason and justice, obliged to try to reconcile my landlord.

‘Heaven be praised,’ replied I, ‘there is no pride left me now, I should detest my own heart if I saw either pride or resentment lurking there. On the contrary, as my oppressor has been once my parishoner, I hope one day to present him up an unpolluted soul at the eternal tribunal. No, sir, I have no resentment now, and though he has taken from me what I held dearer than all his treasures, though he has wrung my heart, for I am sick almost to fainting, very sick, my fellow prisoner, yet that shall never inspire me with vengeance. I am now willing to approve his marriage, and if this submission can do him any pleasure, let him know, that if I have done him any injury, I am sorry for it.’ Mr. Jenkinson took pen and ink, and wrote down my submission nearly as I have exprest it, to which I signed my name. My son was employed to carry the letter to Mr. Thornhill, who was then at his seat in the country. He went, and in about six hours returned with a verbal answer. He had some difficulty, he said, to get a sight of his landlord, as the servants were insolent and suspicious; but he accidentally saw him as he was going out upon business, preparing for his marriage, which was to be in three days. He continued to inform us, that he stept up in the humblest manner, and delivered the letter, which, when Mr. Thornhill had read, he said that all submission was now too late and unnecessary; that he had heard of our application to his uncle, which met with the contempt it deserved; and as for the rest, that all future applications should be directed to his attorney, not to him. He observed, however, that as he had a very good opinion of the discretion of the two young ladies, they might have been the most agreeable intercessors.

‘Well, sir,’ said I to my fellow prisoner, ‘you now discover the temper of the man that oppresses me. He can at once be facetious

The Vicar of Wakefield 139

and cruel; but let him use me as he will, I shall soon be free, in spite of all his bolts to restrain me. I am now drawing towards an abode that looks brighter as I approach it: this expectation cheers my afflictions, and though I leave an helpless family of orphans behind me, yet they will not be utterly forsaken; some friend, perhaps, will be found to assist them for the sake of their poor father, and some may charitably relieve them for the sake of their heavenly father.’

Just as I spoke, my wife, whom I had not seen that day before, appeared with looks of terror, and making efforts, but unable to speak. ‘Why, my love,’ cried I, ‘why will you thus encrease my afflictions by your own, what though no submissions can turn our severe master, tho’ he has doomed me to die in this place of wretchedness, and though we have lost a darling child, yet still you will find comfort in your other children when I shall be no more.’ ‘We have indeed lost,’ returned she, ‘a darling child. My Sophia, my dearest, is gone, snatched from us, carried off by ruffians!’

‘How, madam,’ cried my fellow prisoner, ‘miss Sophia carried off by villains, sure it cannot be?’

She could only answer with a fixed look and a flood of tears. But one of the prisoners wives, who was present, and came in with her, gave us a more distinct account: she informed us that as my wife, my daughter, and herself, were taking a walk together on the great road a little way out of the village, a post-chaise and pair drove up to them and instantly stopt. Upon which, a well drest man, but not Mr. Thornhill, stepping out, clasped my daughter round the waist, and forcing her in, bid the postilion drive on, so that they were out of sight in a moment.

‘Now,’ cried I, ‘the sum of my misery is made up, nor is it in the power of any thing on earth to give me another pang. What! not one left! not to leave me one! the monster! the child that was next my heart! she had the beauty of an angel, and almost the wisdom of an angel. But support that woman, nor let her fall. Not to leave me one!’—‘Alas! my husband,’ said my wife, ‘you seem to want comfort even more than I. Our distresses are great; but I could bear this and more, if I saw you but easy. They

140 The Vicar of Wakefield

may take away my children and all the world, if they leave me but you.’

My Son, who was present, endeavoured to moderate our grief; he bade us take comfort, for he hoped that we might still have reason to be thankful.—‘My child,’ cried I, ‘look round the world, and see if there be any happiness left me now. Is not every ray of comfort shut out; while all our bright prospects only lie beyond the grave!’—‘My dear father,’ returned he, ‘I hope there is still something that will give you an interval of satisfaction; for I have a letter from my brother George’—‘What of him, child,’ interrupted I, ‘does he know of our misery. I hope my boy is exempt from any part of what his wretched family suffers?’— ‘Yes, sir,’ returned he, ‘he is perfectly gay, chearful, and happy. His letter brings nothing but good news; he is the favourite of his colonel, who promises to procure him the very next lieutenancy that becomes vacant!’

‘And are you sure of all this,’ cried my wife, ‘are you sure that nothing ill has befallen my boy?’—‘Nothing indeed, madam,’ returned my son, ‘you shall see the letter, which will give you the highest pleasure; and if any thing can procure you comfort, I am sure that will.’ ‘But are you sure,’ still repeated she, ‘that the letter is from himself, and that he is really so happy?’—‘Yes, Madam,’ replied he, ‘it is certainly his, and he will one day be the credit and the support of our family!’—‘Then I thank providence,’ cried she, ‘that my last letter to him has miscarried.’ ‘Yes, my dear,’ con- tinued she, turning to me, ‘I will now confess that though the hand of heaven is sore upon us in other instances, it has been favourable here. By the last letter I wrote my son, which was in the bitterness of anger, I desired him, upon his mother’s blessing, and if he had the heart of a man, to see justice done his father and sister, and avenge our cause. But thanks be to him that directs all things, it has miscarried, and I am at rest.’ ‘Woman,’ cried I, ‘thou hast done very ill, and at another time my reproaches might have been more severe. Oh! what a tremendous gulph hast thou escaped, that would have buried both thee and him in endless ruin. Providence, indeed, has here been kinder to us than we to ourselves. It has reserved that son to be the father and protector of

The Vicar of Wakefield 141

my children when I shall be away. How unjustly did I complain of being stript of every comfort, when still I hear that he is happy and insensible of our afflictions; still kept in reserve to support his widowed mother, and to protect his brothers and sisters. But what sisters has he left, he has no sisters now, they are all gone, robbed from me, and I am undone.’—‘Father,’ interrupted my son, ‘I beg you will give me leave to read this letter, I know it will please you.’ Upon which, with my permission, he read as follows:

Honoured Sir,

I have called off my imagination a few moments from the pleasures that surround me, to fix it upon objects that are still more pleasing, the dear little fire-side at home. My fancy draws that harmless groupe as listening to every line of this with great composure. I view those faces with delight which never felt the deforming hand of ambition or distress! But whatever your hap- piness may be at home, I am sure it will be some addition to it, to hear that I am perfectly pleased with my situation, and every way happy here.

Our regiment is countermanded and is not to leave the king- dom; the colonel, who professes himself my friend, takes me with him to all companies where he is acquainted, and after my first visit I generally find myself received with encreased respect upon repeating it. I danced last night with Lady G——, and could I forget you know whom, I might be perhaps successful. But it is my fate still to remember others, while I am myself forgotten by most of my absent friends, and in this number, I fear, Sir, that I must consider you; for I have long expected the pleasure of a letter from home to no purpose. Olivia and Sophia too, promised to write, but seem to have forgotten me. Tell them they are two arrant little baggages, and that I am this moment in a most violent passion with them: yet still, I know not how, tho’ I want to bluster a little, my heart is respondent only to softer emotions. Then tell them, sir, that after all, I love them affectionately, and be assured of my ever remaining

Your dutiful son.

142 The Vicar of Wakefield

‘In all our miseries,’ cried I, ‘what thanks have we not to return, that one at least of our family is exempted from what we suffer. Heaven be his guard, and keep my boy thus happy to be the supporter of his widowed mother, and the father of these two babes, which is all the patrimony I can now bequeath him. May he keep their innocence from the temptations of want, and be their conductor in the paths of honour.’ I had scarce said these words, when a noise, like that of a tumult, seemed to proceed from the prison below; it died away soon after, and a clanking of fetters was heard along the passage that led to my apartment. The keeper of the prison entered, holding a man all bloody, wounded and fettered with the heaviest irons. I looked with compassion on the wretch as he approached me, but with horror when I found it was my own son.—‘My George! My George! and do I behold thee thus. Wounded! Fettered! Is this thy happiness! Is this the manner you return to me! O that this sight could break my heart at once and let me die!’

‘Where, Sir, is your fortitude,’ returned my son with an intrepid voice. ‘I must suffer, my life is forfeited, and let them take it.’

I tried to restrain my passions for a few minutes in silence, but I thought I should have died with the effort—‘O my boy, my heart weeps to behold thee thus, and I cannot, cannot help it. In the moment that I thought thee blest, and prayed for thy safety, to behold thee thus again! Chained, wounded. And yet the death of the youthful is happy. But I am old, a very old man, and have lived to see this day. To see my children all untimely falling about me, while I continue a wretched survivor in the midst of ruin! May all the curses that ever sunk a soul fall heavy upon the murderer of my children. May he live, like me, to see—’

‘Hold, Sir,’ replied my son, ‘or I shall blush for thee. How, Sir, forgetful of your age, your holy calling, thus to arrogate the just- ice of heaven, and fling those curses upward that must soon des- cend to crush thy own grey head with destruction! No, Sir, let it be your care now to fit me for that vile death I must shortly suffer, to arm me with hope and resolution, to give me courage to drink of that bitterness which must shortly be my portion.’

‘My child, you must not die: I am sure no offence of thine can

The Vicar of Wakefield 143

deserve so vile a punishment. My George could never be guilty of any crime to make his ancestors ashamed of him.’

‘Mine, Sir,’ returned my son, ‘is, I fear, an unpardonable one. When I received my mother’s letter from home, I immediately came down, determined to punish the betrayer of our honour, and sent him an order to meet me, which he answered, not in person, but by his dispatching four of his domestics to seize me. I wounded one who first assaulted me, and I fear desperately, but the rest made me their prisoner. The coward is determined to put the law in execution against me, the proofs are undeniable, I have sent a challenge, and as I am the first transgressor upon the statute,* I see no hopes of pardon. But you have often charmed me with your lessons of fortitude, let me now, Sir, find them in your example.’

‘And, my son, you shall find them. I am now raised above this world, and all the pleasures it can produce. From this moment I break from my heart all the ties that held it down to earth, and will prepare to fit us both for eternity. Yes, my son, I will point out the way, and my soul shall guide yours in the ascent, for we will take our flight together. I now see and am convinced you can expect no pardon here, and I can only exhort you to seek it at that greatest tribunal where we both shall shortly answer. But let us not be niggardly in our exhortation, but let all our fellow prisoners have a share: good gaoler let them be permitted to stand here, while I attempt to improve them.’ Thus saying, I made an effort to rise from my straw, but wanted strength, and was able only to recline against the wall. The prisoners assembled accord- ing to my directions, for they loved to hear my council, my son and his mother supported me on either side, I looked and saw that none were wanting, and then addressed them with the following exhortation.

144 The Vicar of Wakefield

CHAPTER XXIX

The equal dealings of providence demonstrated with regard to the happy and the miserable here below. That from the nature of pleasure and pain, the wretched must be repaid

the balance of their sufferings in the life hereafter

My friends, my children, and fellow sufferers, when I reflect on the distribution of good and evil here below, I find that much has been given man to enjoy, yet still more to suffer.* Though we should examine the whole world, we shall not find one man so happy as to have nothing left to wish for; but we daily see thou- sands who by suicide shew us they have nothing left to hope. In this life then it appears that we cannot be entirely blest; but yet we may be completely miserable!

Why man should thus feel pain, why our wretchedness should be requisite in the formation of universal felicity, why, when all other systems are made perfect by the perfection of their sub- ordinate parts, the great system should require for its perfection, parts that are not only subordinate to others, but imperfect in themselves? These are questions that never can be explained, and might be useless if known. On this subject providence has thought fit to elude our curiosity, satisfied with granting us motives to consolation.

In this situation, man has called in the friendly assistance of philosophy, and heaven seeing the incapacity of that to console him, has given him the aid of religion. The consolations of phil- osophy are very amusing, but often fallacious. It tells us that life is filled with comforts, if we will but enjoy them; and on the other hand, that though we unavoidably have miseries here, life is short, and they will soon be over. Thus do these consolations destroy each other; for if life is a place of comfort, its shortness must be misery, and if it be long, our griefs are protracted. Thus phil- osophy is weak; but religion comforts in an higher strain. Man is here, it tells us, fitting up his mind, and preparing it for another abode. When the good man leaves the body and is all a glorious

The Vicar of Wakefield 145

mind, he will find he has been making himself a heaven of happiness here, while the wretch that has been maimed and con- taminated by his vices, shrinks from his body with terror, and finds that he has anticipated the vengeance of heaven. To religion then we must hold in every circumstance of life for our truest comfort; for if already we are happy, it is a pleasure to think that we can make that happiness unending, and if we are miserable, it is very consoling to think that there is a place of rest. Thus to the fortunate religion holds out a continuance of bliss, to the wretched a change from pain.

But though religion is very kind to all men, it has promised peculiar rewards to the unhappy; the sick, the naked, the house- less, the heavy-laden, and the prisoner, have ever most frequent promises in our sacred law. The author of our religion every where professes himself the wretch’s friend, and unlike the false ones of this world, bestows all his caresses upon the forlorn. The unthinking have censured this as partiality, as a preference with- out merit to deserve it. But they never reflect that it is not in the power even of heaven itself to make the offer of unceasing felicity as great a gift to the happy as to the miserable. To the first eternity is but a single blessing, since at most it but encreases what they already possess. To the latter it is a double advantage; for it diminishes their pain here, and rewards them with heavenly bliss hereafter.

But providence is in another respect kinder to the poor than the rich; for as it thus makes the life after death more desirable, so it smooths the passage there. The wretched have had a long familiarity with every face of terror. The man of sorrow lays himself quietly down, without possessions to regret, and but few ties to stop his departure: he feels only nature’s pang in the final separation, and this is no way greater than he has often fainted under before; for after a certain degree of pain, every new breach that death opens in the constitution, nature kindly covers with insensibility.

Thus providence has given the wretched two advantages over the happy in this life, greater felicity in dying, and in heaven all that superiority of pleasure which arises from contrasted enjoyment.

146 The Vicar of Wakefield

And this superiority, my friends, is no small advantage, and seems to be one of the pleasures of the poor man in the parable,* for though he was already in heaven, and felt all the raptures it could give, yet it was mentioned as an addition to his happiness, that he had once been wretched and now was comforted, that he had known what it was to be miserable, and now felt what it was to be happy.

Thus, my friends, you see religion does what philosophy could never do: it shews the equal dealings of heaven to the happy and the unhappy, and levels all human enjoyments to nearly the same standard. It gives to both rich and poor the same happiness here- after, and equal hopes to aspire after it; but if the rich have the advantage of enjoying pleasure here, the poor have the endless satisfaction of knowing what it was once to be miserable, when crowned with endless felicity hereafter; and even though this should be called a small advantage, yet being an eternal one, it must make up by duration what the temporal happiness of the great may have exceeded by intenseness.

These are therefore the consolations which the wretched have peculiar to themselves, and in which they are above the rest of mankind; in other respects they are below them. They who would know the miseries of the poor must see life and endure it. To declaim on the temporal advantages they enjoy, is only repeating what none either believe or practise. The men who have the necessaries of living are not poor, and they who want them must be miserable. Yes, my friends, we must be miserable. No vain efforts of a refined imagination can sooth the wants of nature, can give elastic sweetness to the dank vapour of a dungeon, or ease to the throbbings of a broken heart. Let the philosopher from his couch of softness tell us that we can resist all these. Alas! the effort by which we resist them is still the greatest pain! Death is slight, and any man may sustain it; but torments are dreadful, and these no man can endure.

To us then, my friends, the promises of happiness in heaven should be peculiarly dear; for if our reward be in this life alone, we are then indeed of all men the most miserable. When I look round these gloomy walls, made to terrify, as well as to confine us;

The Vicar of Wakefield 147

this light that only serves to shew the horrors of the place, those shackles that tyranny has imposed, or crime made necessary; when I survey these emaciated looks, and hear those groans, O my friends, what a glorious exchange would heaven be for these. To fly through regions unconfined as air, to bask in the sunshine of eternal bliss, to carrol over endless hymns of praise, to have no master to threaten or insult us, but the form of goodness himself for ever in our eyes, when I think of these things, death becomes the messenger of very glad tidings; when I think of these things, his sharpest arrow becomes the staff of my support; when I think of these things, what is there in life worth having; when I think of these things, what is there that should not be spurned away: kings in their palaces should groan for such advantages; but we, hum- bled as we are, should yearn for them.

And shall these things be ours? Ours they will certainly be if we but try for them; and what is a comfort, we are shut out from many temptations that would retard our pursuit. Only let us try for them, and they will certainly be ours, and what is still a comfort, shortly too; for if we look back on past life, it appears but a very short span, and whatever we may think of the rest of life, it will yet be found of less duration; as we grow older, the days seem to grow shorter, and our intimacy with time, ever lessens the perception of his stay. Then let us take comfort now, for we shall soon be at our journey’s end; we shall soon lay down the heavy burthen laid by heaven upon us, and though death, the only friend of the wretched, for a little while mocks the weary traveller with the view, and like his horizon, still flies before him; yet the time will certainly and shortly come, when we shall cease from our toil; when the luxurious great ones of the world shall no more tread us to the earth; when we shall think with pleasure on our sufferings below; when we shall be surrounded with all our friends, or such as deserved our friendship; when our bliss shall be unutterable, and still, to crown all, unending.

148 The Vicar of Wakefield

CHAPTER XXX

Happier prospects begin to appear. Let us be inflexible, and fortune will at last change in our favour

When I had thus finished and my audience was retired, the gaoler, who was one of the most humane of his profession, hoped I would not be displeased, as what he did was but his duty, observing that he must be obliged to remove my son into a stronger cell, but that he should be permitted to revisit me every morning. I thanked him for his clemency, and grasping my boy’s hand, bade him farewell, and be mindful of the great duty that was before him.

I again, therefore laid me down, and one of my little ones sate by my beside reading, when Mr. Jenkinson entering, informed me that there was news of my daughter; for that she was seen by a person about two hours before in a strange gentleman’s company, and that they had stopt at a neighbouring village for refreshment, and seemed as if returning to town. He had scarce delivered this news, when the gaoler came with looks of haste and pleasure, to inform me, that my daughter was found. Moses came running in a moment after, crying out that his sister Sophy was below and coming up with our old friend Mr. Burchell.

Just as he delivered this news my dearest girl entered, and with looks almost wild with pleasure, ran to kiss me in a transport of affection. Her mother’s tears and silence also shewed her pleas- ure.—‘Here, pappa,’ cried the charming girl, ‘here is the brave man to whom I owe my delivery; to this gentleman’s intrepidity I am indebted for my happiness and safety—’ A kiss from Mr. Burchell, whose pleasure seemed even greater than hers, inter- rupted what she was going to add.

‘Ah, Mr. Burchell,’ cried I, ‘this is but a wretched habitation you now find us in; and we are now very different from what you last saw us. You were ever our friend: we have long discovered our errors with regard to you, and repented of our ingratitude. After the vile usage you then received at my hands, I am almost

The Vicar of Wakefield 149

ashamed to behold your face; yet I hope you’ll forgive me, as I was deceived by a base ungenerous wretch, who, under the mask of friendship, has undone me.’

‘It is impossible,’ replied Mr. Burchell, ‘that I should forgive you, as you never deserved my resentment. I partly saw your delusion then, and as it was out of my power to restrain, I could only pity it!’

‘It was ever my conjecture,’ cried I, ‘that your mind was noble; but now I find it so. But tell me, my dear child, how hast thou been relieved, or who the ruffians were who carried thee away?’

‘Indeed, Sir,’ replied she, ‘as to the villain who brought me off, I am yet ignorant. For as my mamma and I were walking out, he came behind us, and almost before I could call for help, forced me into the post-chaise, and in an instant the horses drove away. I met several on the road, to whom I cried out for assistance; but they disregarded my entreaties. In the mean time the ruffian himself used every art to hinder me from crying out: he flattered and threatened by turns, and swore that if I continued but silent, he intended no harm. In the mean time I had broken the canvas that he had drawn up, and whom should I perceive at some dis- tance but your old friend Mr. Burchell, walking along with his usual swiftness, with the great stick for which we used so much to ridicule him. As soon as we came within hearing, I called out to him by name, and entreated his help. I repeated my exclamations several times, upon which, with a very loud voice, he bid the postillion stop; but the boy took no notice, but drove on with still greater speed. I now thought he could never overtake us, when in less than a minute I saw Mr. Burchell come running up by the side of the horses, and with one blow knock the postillion to the ground. The horses when he was fallen soon stopt of themselves, and the ruffians stepping out, with oaths and menaces drew his sword, and ordered him at his peril to retire; but Mr. Burchell running up, shivered his sword to pieces, and then pursued him for near a quarter of a mile; but he made his escape. I was at this time come out myself, willing to assist my deliverer; but he soon returned to me in triumph. The postillion, who was recovered, was going to make his escape too; but Mr. Burchell ordered him

150 The Vicar of Wakefield

at his peril to mount again, and drive back to town. Finding it impossible to resist, he reluctantly complied, though the wound he had received seemed, to me at least, to be dangerous. He continued to complain of the pain as we drove along, so that he at last excited Mr. Burchell’s compassion, who, at my request, exchanged him for another at an inn where we called on our return.’

‘Welcome then,’ cried I, ‘my child, and thou her gallant deliverer, a thousand welcomes. Though our chear is but wretched, yet our hearts are ready to receive you. And now, Mr. Burchell, as you have delivered my girl, if you think her a recompence she is yours, if you can stoop to an alliance with a family so poor as mine, take her, obtain her consent, as I know you have her heart, and you have mine. And let me tell you, Sir, that I give you no small treasure, she has been celebrated for beauty it is true, but that is not my meaning, I give you up a treasure in her mind.’

‘But I suppose, Sir,’ cried Mr. Burchell, ‘that you are apprized of my circumstances, and of my incapacity to support her as she deserves?’

‘If your present objection,’ replied I, ‘be meant as an evasion of my offer, I desist: but I know no man so worthy to deserve her as you; and if I could give her thousands, and thousands sought her from me, yet my honest brave Burchell should be my dearest choice.’

To all this his silence alone seemed to give a mortifying refusal, and without the least reply to my offer, he demanded if we could not be furnished with refreshments from the next inn, to which being answered in the affirmative, he ordered them to send in the best dinner that could be provided upon such short notice. He bespoke also a dozen of their best wine; and some cordials for me. Adding, with a smile, that he would stretch a little for once, and tho’ in a prison, asserted he was never better disposed to be merry. The waiter soon made his appearance with preparations for din- ner, a table was lent us by the gaoler, who seemed remarkably assiduous, the wine was disposed in order, and two very well-drest dishes were brought in.

My daughter had not yet heard of her poor brother’s melancholy

The Vicar of Wakefield 151

situation, and we all seemed unwilling to damp her chearfulness by the relation. But it was in vain that I attempted to appear chearful, the circumstances of my unfortunate son broke through all efforts to dissemble; so that I was at last obliged to damp our mirth by relating his misfortunes, and wishing that he might be permitted to share with us in this little interval of satisfaction. After my guests were recovered from the consternation my account had produced, I requested also that Mr. Jenkinson, a fellow prisoner, might be admitted, and the gaoler granted my request with an air of unusual submission. The clanking of my son’s irons was no sooner heard along the passage, than his sister ran impatiently to meet him; while Mr. Burchell, in the mean time, asked me if my son’s name were George, to which replying in the affirmative, he still continued silent. As soon as my boy entered the room, I could perceive he regarded Mr. Burchell with a look of astonishment and reverence. ‘Come on,’ cried I, ‘my son, though we are fallen very low, yet providence has been pleased to grant us some small relaxation from pain. Thy sister is restored to us, and there is her deliverer: to that brave man it is that I am indebted for yet having a daughter, give him, my boy, the hand of friendship, he deserves our warmest gratitude.’

My son seemed all this while regardless of what I said, and still continued fixed at respectful distance.—‘My dear brother,’ cried his sister, ‘why don’t you thank my good deliverer; the brave should ever love each other.’

He still continued his silence and astonishment, till our guest at last perceived himself to be known, and assuming all his native dignity, desired my son to come forward. Never before had I seen any thing so truly majestic as the air he assumed upon this occa- sion. The greatest object in the universe, says a certain phil- osopher,* is a good man struggling with adversity; yet there is still a greater, which is the good man that comes to relieve it. After he had regarded my son for some time with a superior air, ‘I again find,’ said he, ‘unthinking boy, that the same crime—’ But here he was interrupted by one of the gaoler’s servants, who came to inform us that a person of distinction, who had driven into town with a chariot and several attendants, sent his respects to the

152 The Vicar of Wakefield

gentlemen that was with us, and begged to know when he should think proper to be waited upon.—‘Bid the fellow wait,’ cried our guest, ‘till I shall have leisure to receive him;’ and then turning to my son, ‘I again find, Sir,’ proceeded he, ‘that you are guilty of the same offence for which you once had my reproof, and for which the law is now preparing its justest punishments. You imagine, perhaps, that a contempt for your own life, gives you a right to take that of another: but where, Sir, is the difference between a duelist who hazards a life of no value, and the murderer who acts with greater security? Is it any diminution of the game- ster’s fraud when he alledges that he has staked a counter?’*

‘Alas, Sir,’ cried I, ‘whoever you are, pity the poor misguided

creature; for what he has done was in obedience to a deluded mother, who in the bitterness of her resentment required him upon her blessing to avenge her quarrel. Here, Sir, is the letter, which will serve to convince you of her imprudence and diminish his guilt.’

He took the letter, and hastily read it over. ‘This,’ says he, ‘though not a perfect excuse, is such a palliation of his fault, as induces me to forgive him. And now, Sir,’ continued he, kindly taking my son by the hand, ‘I see you are surprised at finding me here; but I have often visited prisons upon occasions less interest- ing. I am now come to see justice done a worthy man, for whom I have the most sincere esteem. I have long been a disguised specta- tor of thy father’s benevolence. I have at his little dwelling enjoyed respect uncontaminated by flattery, and have received that happiness that courts could not give, from the amusing sim- plicity around his fire-side. My nephew has been apprized of my intentions of coming here, and I find is arrived; it would be wronging him and you to condemn him without examination: if there be injury, there shall be redress; and this I may say without boasting, that none have ever taxed the injustice of Sir William Thornhill.’*

We now found the personage whom we had so long entertained as an harmless amusing companion was no other than the cele- brated Sir William Thornhill, to whose virtues and singularities scarce any were strangers. The poor Mr. Burchell was in reality a

The Vicar of Wakefield 153

man of large fortune and great interest, to whom senates listened with applause, and whom party heard with conviction; who was the friend of his country, but loyal to his king. My poor wife recollecting her former familiarity, seemed to shrink with appre- hension; but Sophia, who a few moments before thought him her own, now perceiving the immense distance to which he was removed by fortune, was unable to conceal her tears.

‘Ah, Sir,’ cried my wife, with a piteous aspect, ‘how is it pos- sible that I can ever have your forgiveness; the slights you received from me the last time I had the honour of seeing you at our house, and the jokes which I audaciously threw out, these jokes, Sir, I fear can never be forgiven.’

‘My dear good lady,’ returned he with a smile, ‘if you had your joke, I had my answer: I’ll leave it to all the company if mine were not as good as yours. To say the truth, I know no body whom I am disposed to be angry with at present but the fellow who so frighted my little girl here. I had not even time to examine the rascal’s person so as to describe him in an advertisement. Can you tell me, Sophia, my dear, whether you should know him again?’

‘Indeed, Sir,’ replied she, ‘I can’t be positive; yet now I recol- lect he had a large mark over one of his eye-brows.’ ‘I ask pardon, madam,’ interrupted Jenkinson, who was by, ‘but be so good as to inform me if the fellow wore his own red hair?’—‘Yes, I think so,’ cried Sophia.—‘And did your honour,’ continued he, turning to Sir William, ‘observe the length of his legs?’—‘I can’t be sure of their length,’ cried the Baronet, ‘but I am convinced of their swiftness; for he outran me, which is what I thought few men in the kingdom could have done.’—‘Please your honour,’ cried Jenkinson, ‘I know the man: it is certainly the same; the best runner in England; he has beaten Pinwire of Newcastle,* Timothy Baxter is his name, I know him perfectly, and the very place of his retreat this moment. If your honour will bid Mr. Gaoler let two of his men go with me, I’ll engage to produce him to you in an hour at farthest.’ Upon this the gaoler was called, who instantly appearing, Sir William demanded if he knew him. ‘Yes, please your honour,’ reply’d the gaoler, ‘I know Sir William Thornhill well, and every body that knows any thing of him, will desire to

154 The Vicar of Wakefield

know more of him.’—‘Well then,’ said the Baronet, ‘my request is, that you will permit this man and two of your servants to go upon a message by my authority, and as I am in the commission of the peace, I undertake to secure you.’—‘Your promise is suf- ficient,’ replied the other, ‘and you may at a minute’s warning send them over England whenever your honour thinks fit.’

In pursuance of the gaoler’s compliance, Jenkinson was dis- patched in search of Timothy Baxter, while we were amused with the assiduity of our youngest boy Bill, who had just come in and climbed up to Sir William’s neck in order to kiss him. His mother was immediately going to chastise his familiarity, but the worthy man prevented her; and taking the child, all ragged as he was, upon his knee, ‘What, Bill, you chubby rogue,’ cried he, ‘do you remember your old friend Burchell; and Dick too, my honest veteran, are you here, you shall find I have not forgot you.’ So saying, he gave each a large piece of gingerbread, which the poor fellows eat very heartily, as they had got that morning but a very scanty breakfast.

We now sate down to dinner, which was almost cold; but previ- ously, my arm still continuing painful, Sir William wrote a pre- scription, for he had made the study of physic his amusement, and was more than moderately skilled in the profession: this being sent to an apothecary who lived in the place, my arm was dressed, and I found almost instantaneous relief. We were waited upon at dinner by the gaoler himself, who was willing to do our guest all the honour in his power. But before we had well dined, another message was brought from his nephew, desiring permission to appear, in order to vindicate his innocence and honour, with which request the Baronet complied, and desired Mr. Thornhill to be introduced.

The Vicar of Wakefield 155

CHAPTER XXXI

Former benevolence now repaid with unexpected interest

Mr. Thornhill made his entrance with a smile, which he seldom wanted, and was going to embrace his uncle, which the other repulsed with an air of disdain. ‘No fawning, Sir, at present,’ cried the Baronet, with a look of severity, ‘the only way to my heart is by the road of honour; but here I only see complicated instances of falsehood, cowardice, and oppression. How is it, Sir, that this poor man, for whom I know you professed a friendship, is used thus hardly? His daughter vilely seduced, as a recompence for his hospitality, and he himself thrown into a prison perhaps but for resenting the insult? His son too, whom you feared to face as a man—’

‘Is it possible, Sir,’ interrupted his nephew, ‘that my uncle could object that as a crime which his repeated instructions alone have persuaded me to avoid.’

‘Your rebuke,’ cried Sir William, ‘is just; you have acted in this instance prudently and well, though not quite as your father would have done: my brother indeed was the soul of honour; but thou—yes you have acted in this instance perfectly right, and it has my warmest approbation.’

‘And I hope,’ said his nephew, ‘that the rest of my conduct will not be found to deserve censure. I appeared, Sir, with this gentleman’s daughter at some places of public amusement; thus what was levity, scandal called by a harsher name, and it was reported that I had debauched her. I waited on her father in person, willing to clear the thing to his satisfaction, and he received me only with insult and abuse. As for the rest, with regard to his being here, my attorney and steward can best inform you, as I commit the management of business entirely to them. If he has contracted debts and is unwilling or even unable to pay them, it is their business to proceed in this manner, and I see no hardship or injustice in pursuing the most legal means of redress.’

‘If this,’ cried Sir William, ‘be as you have stated it, there is

156 The Vicar of Wakefield

nothing unpardonable in your offence, and though your conduct might have been more generous in not suffering this gentleman to be oppressed by subordinate tyranny, yet it has been at least equitable.’*

‘He cannot contradict a single particular,’ replied the ’Squire,

‘I defy him to do so, and several of my servants are ready to attest what I say. Thus, Sir,’ continued he, finding that I was silent, for in fact I could not contradict him, ‘thus, Sir, my own innocence is vindicated; but though at your entreaty I am ready to forgive this gentleman every other offence, yet his attempts to lessen me in your esteem, excite a resentment that I cannot govern. And this too at a time when his son was actually preparing to take away my life; this, I say, was such guilt, that I am determined to let the law take its course. I have here the challenge that was sent me and two witnesses to prove it; one of my servants has been wounded dan- gerously, and even though my uncle himself should dissuade me, which I know he will not, yet I will see public justice done, and he shall suffer for it.’

‘Thou monster,’ cried my wife, ‘hast thou not had vengeance enough already, but must my poor boy feel thy cruelty. I hope that good Sir William will protect us, for my son is as innocent as a child; I am sure he is, and never did harm to man.’

‘Madam,’ replied the good man, ‘your wishes for his safety are not greater than mine; but I am sorry to find his guilt too plain; and if my nephew persists—’ But the appearance of Jenkinson and the gaoler’s two servants now called off our attention, who entered, haling in a tall man, very genteelly drest, and answering the description already given of the ruffian who had carried off my daughter—‘Here,’ cried Jenkinson, pulling him in, ‘here we have him, and if ever there was a candidate for Tyburn,* this is one.’

The moment Mr. Thornhill perceived the prisoner, and

Jenkinson, who had him in custody, he seemed to shrink back with terror. His face became pale with conscious guilt, and he would have withdrawn; but Jenkinson, who perceived his design, stopt him—‘What, ’Squire,’ cried he, ‘are you ashamed of your two old acquaintances, Jenkinson and Baxter: but this is the way that all great men forget their friends, though I am resolved we

The Vicar of Wakefield 157

will not forget you. Our prisoner, please your honour,’ continued he, turning to Sir William, ‘has already confessed all. This is the gentleman reported to be so dangerously wounded: He declares that it was Mr. Thornhill who first put him upon this affair, that he gave him the cloaths he now wears to appear like a gentleman, and furnished him with the post-chaise. The plan was laid between them that he should carry off the young lady to a place of safety, and that there he should threaten and terrify her; but Mr. Thornhill was to come in in the mean time, as if by accident, to her rescue, and that they should fight awhile and then he was to run off, by which Mr. Thornhill would have the better opportunity of gaining her affections himself under the character of her defender.’

Sir William remembered the coat to have been frequently worn by his nephew, and all the rest the prisoner himself confirmed by a more circumstantial account; concluding, that Mr. Thornhill had often declared to him that he was in love with both sisters at the same time.

‘Heavens,’ cried Sir William, ‘what a viper have I been foster- ing in my bosom! And so fond of public justice too as he seemed to be. But he shall have it; secure him, Mr. Gaoler—yet hold, I fear there is not legal evidence to detain him.’

Upon this, Mr. Thornhill, with the utmost humility, entreated that two such abandoned wretches might not be admitted as evi- dences against him, but that his servants should be examined.— ‘Your servants,’ replied Sir William, ‘wretch, call them yours no longer: but come let us hear what those fellows have to say, let his butler be called.’

When the butler was introduced, he soon perceived by his former master’s looks that all his power was now over. ‘Tell me,’ cried Sir William sternly, ‘have you ever seen your master and that fellow drest up in his cloaths in company together?’ ‘Yes, please your honour,’ cried the butler, ‘a thousand times: he was the man that always brought him his ladies.’—‘How,’ interrupted young Mr. Thornhill, ‘this to my face!’—‘Yes,’ replied the butler, ‘or to any man’s face. To tell you a truth, Master Thornhill, I never either loved you or liked you, and I don’t care if I tell you

158 The Vicar of Wakefield

now a piece of my mind.’—‘Now then,’ cried Jenkinson, ‘tell his honour whether you know any thing of me.’—‘I can’t say,’ replied the butler, ‘that I know much good of you. The night that gentleman’s daughter was deluded to our house, you were one of them.’—‘So then,’ cried Sir William, ‘I find you have brought a very fine witness to prove your innocence: thou stain to human- ity! to associate with such wretches!’ (But continuing his examin- ation) ‘You tell me, Mr. Butler, that this was the person who brought him this old gentleman’s daughter.’—‘No, please your honour,’ replied the butler, ‘he did not bring her, for the ’Squire himself undertook that business; but he brought the priest that pretended to marry them.’—‘It is but too true,’ cried Jenkinson, ‘I cannot deny it, that was the employment assigned me, and I confess it to my confusion.’

‘Good heavens!’ exclaimed the Baronet, ‘how every new dis- covery of his villainy alarms me. All his guilt is now too plain, and I find his present prosecution was dictated by tyranny, cowardice and revenge; at my request, Mr. Gaoler, set this young officer, now your prisoner, free, and trust to me for the consequences. I’ll make it my business to set the affair in a proper light to my friend the magistrate who has committed him. But where is the unfortunate young lady herself: let her appear to confront this wretch, I long to know by what arts he has seduced her honour. Entreat her to come in. Where is she?’

‘Ah, Sir,’ said I, ‘that question stings me to the heart: I was once indeed happy in a daughter, but her miseries—’ Another interruption here prevented me; for who should make her appearance but Miss Arabella Wilmot, who was next day to have been married to Mr. Thornhill. Nothing could equal her surprize at seeing Sir William and his nephew here before her; for her arrival was quite accidental. It happened that she and the old gentleman her father were passing through the town, on their way to her aunt’s, who had insisted that her nuptials with Mr. Thornhill should be consummated at her house; but stop- ping for refreshment, they put up at an inn at the other end of the town. It was there from the window that the young lady hap- pened to observe one of my little boys playing in the street, and

The Vicar of Wakefield 159

instantly sending a footman to bring the child to her, she learnt from him some account of our misfortunes; but was still kept ignorant of young Mr. Thornhill’s being the cause. Though her father made several remonstrances on the impropriety of going to a prison to visit us, yet they were ineffectual; she desired the child to conduct her, which he did, and it was thus she surprised us at a juncture so unexpected.

Nor can I go on, without a reflection on those accidental meet- ings, which, though they happen every day, seldom excite our surprize but upon some extraordinary occasion. To what a for- tuitous concurrence do we not owe every pleasure and conveni- ence of our lives. How many seeming accidents must unite before we can be cloathed or fed. The peasant must be disposed to labour, the shower must fall, the wind fill the merchant’s sail, or numbers must want the usual supply.

We all continued silent for some moments, while my charming pupil, which was the name I generally gave this young lady, united in her looks compassion and astonishment, which gave new finishings to her beauty. ‘Indeed, my dear Mr. Thornhill,’ cried she to the ’Squire, who she supposed was come here to succour and not to oppress us, ‘I take it a little unkindly that you should come here without me, or never inform me of the situ- ation of a family so dear to us both: you know I should take as much pleasure in contributing to the relief of my reverend old master here, whom I shall ever esteem, as you can. But I find that, like your uncle, you take a pleasure in doing good in secret.’

‘He find pleasure in doing good!’ cried Sir William, interrupt- ing her. ‘No, my dear, his pleasures are as base as he is. You see in him, madam, as complete a villain as ever disgraced humanity. A wretch, who after having deluded this poor man’s daughter, after plotting against the innocence of her sister, has thrown the father into prison, and the eldest son into fetters, because he had courage to face his betrayer. And give me leave, madam, now to congratulate you upon an escape from the embraces of such a monster.’

‘O goodness,’ cried the lovely girl, ‘how have I been deceived! Mr. Thornhill informed me for certain that this gentleman’s

160 The Vicar of Wakefield

eldest son, Captain Primrose, was gone off to America with his new-married lady.’

‘My sweetest miss,’ cried my wife, ‘he has told you nothing but falsehoods. My son George never left the kingdom, nor never was married. Tho’ you have forsaken him, he has always loved you too well to think of any body else; and I have heard him say he would die a batchellor for your sake.’ She then proceeded to expatiate upon the sincerity of her son’s passion, she set his duel with Mr. Thornhill in a proper light, from thence she made a rapid digression to the ’Squire’s debaucheries, his pretended mar- riages, and ended with a most insulting picture of his cowardice.

‘Good heavens!’ cried Miss Wilmot, ‘how very near have I been to the brink of ruin! But how great is my pleasure to have escaped it! Ten thousand falsehoods has this gentleman told me! He had at last art enough to persuade me that my promise to the only man I esteemed was no longer binding, since he had been unfaith- ful. By his falsehoods I was taught to detest one equally brave and generous!’

But by this time my son was freed from the incumbrances of justice, as the person supposed to be wounded was detected to be an impostor. Mr. Jenkinson also, who had acted as his valet de chambre, had dressed up his hair, and furnished him with what- ever was necessary to make a genteel appearance. He now there- fore entered, handsomely drest in his regimentals, and, without vanity, (for I am above it) he appeared as handsome a fellow as ever wore a military dress. As he entered, he made Miss Wilmot a modest and distant bow, for he was not as yet acquainted with the change which the eloquence of his mother had wrought in his favour. But no decorums could restrain the impatience of his blushing mistress to be forgiven. Her tears, her looks, all contrib- uted to discover the real sensations of her heart for having forgot- ten her former promise and having suffered herself to be deluded by an impostor. My son appeared amazed at her condescension, and could scarce believe it real.—‘Sure, madam,’ cried he, ‘this is but delusion! I can never have merited this! To be blest thus is to be too happy.’—‘No, Sir,’ replied she, ‘I have been deceived, basely deceived, else nothing could have ever made me unjust to my

The Vicar of Wakefield 161

promise. You know my friendship, you have long known it; but forget what I have done, and as you once had my warmest vows of constancy, you shall now have them repeated; and be assured that if your Arabella cannot be yours, she shall never be another’s.’— ‘And no other’s you shall be,’ cried Sir William, ‘if I have any influence with your father.’

This hint was sufficient for my son Moses, who immediately flew to the inn where the old gentleman was, to inform him of every circumstance that had happened. But in the mean time the

’Squire perceiving that he was on every side undone, now finding that no hopes were left from flattery or dissimulation, concluded that his wisest way would be to turn and face his pursuers. Thus laying aside all shame, he appeared the open hardy villain. ‘I find then,’ cried he, ‘that I am to expect no justice here; but I am resolved it shall be done me. You shall know, Sir,’ turning to Sir William, ‘I am no longer a poor dependant upon your favours. I scorn them. Nothing can keep Miss Wilmot’s fortune from me, which, I thank her father’s assiduity, is pretty large. The articles, and a bond for her fortune, are signed, and safe in my possession.* It was her fortune, not her person, that induced me to wish for this match, and possessed of the one, let who will take the other.’ This was an alarming blow, Sir William was sensible of the justice of his claims, for he had been instrumental in drawing up the marriage articles himself. Miss Wilmot therefore perceiving that her fortune was irretrievably lost, turning to my son, she asked if the loss of fortune could lessen her value to him. ‘Though fortune,’ said she, ‘is out of my power, at least I have my

hand to give.’

‘And that, madam,’ cried her real lover, ‘was indeed all that you ever had to give; at least all that I ever thought worth the accept- ance. And now I protest, my Arabella, by all that’s happy, your want of fortune this moment encreases my pleasure, as it serves to convince my sweet girl of my sincerity.’

Mr. Wilmot now entering, he seemed not a little pleased at the danger his daughter had just escaped, and readily consented to a dissolution of the match. But finding that her fortune, which was secured to Mr. Thornhill by bond, would not be given up,

162 The Vicar of Wakefield

nothing could exceed his disappointment. He now saw that his money must all go to enrich one who had no fortune of his own. He could bear his being a rascal; but to want an equivalent to his daughter’s fortune was wormwood. He sate therefore for some minutes employed in the most mortifying speculations, till Sir William attempted to lessen his anxiety.—‘I must confess, Sir,’ cried he, ‘that your present disappointment does not entirely dis- please me. Your immoderate passion for wealth is now justly punished. But tho’ the young lady cannot be rich, she has still a competence sufficient to give content. Here you see an honest young soldier, who is willing to take her without fortune; they have long loved each other, and for the friendship I bear his father, my interest shall not be wanting in his promotion. Leave then that ambition which disappoints you, and for once admit that happiness which courts your acceptance.’

‘Sir William,’ replied the old gentleman, ‘be assured I never yet forced her inclinations, nor will I now. If she still continues to love this young gentleman, let her have him with all my heart. There is still, thank heaven, some fortune left, and your promise will make it something more. Only let my old friend here (mean- ing me) give me a promise of settling six thousand pounds upon my girl, if ever he should come to his fortune, and I am ready this night to be the first to join them together.’

As it now remained with me to make the young couple happy, I

readily gave a promise of making the settlement he required, which, to one who had such little expectations as I, was no great favour. We had now therefore the satisfaction of seeing them fly into each other’s arms in a transport. ‘After all my misfortunes,’ cried my son George, ‘to be thus rewarded! Sure this is more than I could ever have presumed to hope for. To be possessed of all that’s good, and after such an interval of pain! My warmest wishes could never rise so high!’—‘Yes, my George,’ returned his lovely bride, ‘now let the wretch take my fortune; since you are happy without it so am I. O what an exchange have I made from the basest of men to the dearest best!—Let him enjoy our for- tune, I now can be happy even in indigence.’—‘And I promise you,’ cried the ’Squire, with a malicious grin, ‘that I shall be very

The Vicar of Wakefield 163

happy with what you despise.’—‘Hold, hold, Sir,’ cried Jenkinson, ‘there are two words to that bargain. As for that lady’s fortune, Sir, you shall never touch a single stiver* of it. Pray your honour,’ continued he to Sir William, ‘can the ’Squire have this lady’s fortune if he be married to another?’ —‘How can you make such a simple demand,’ replied the Baronet, ‘undoubtedly he can- not.’—‘I am sorry for that,’ cried Jenkinson; ‘for as this gentle- man and I have been old fellow sporters, I have a friendship for him. But I must declare, well as I love him, that his contract is not worth a tobacco stopper,* for he is married already.’—‘You lie, like a rascal,’ returned the ’Squire, who seemed rouzed by this insult, ‘I never was legally married to any woman.’—‘Indeed, begging your honour’s pardon,’ replied the other, ‘you were; and I hope you will shew a proper return of friendship to your own honest Jenkinson, who brings you a wife, and if the company restrains their curiosity a few minutes, they shall see her.’—So saying he went off with his usual celerity, and left us all unable to form any probable conjecture as to his design.—‘Ay let him go,’ cried the ’Squire, ‘whatever else I may have done I defy him there. I am too old now to be frightened with squibs.’*

‘I am surprised,’ said the Baronet, ‘what the fellow can intend by this. Some low piece of humour I suppose!’—‘Perhaps, Sir,’ replied I, ‘he may have a more serious meaning. For when we reflect on the various schemes this gentleman has laid to seduce innocence, perhaps some one more artful than the rest has been found able to deceive him. When we consider what numbers he has ruined, how many parents now feel with anguish the infamy and the contamination which he has brought into their families, it would not surprise me if some one of them—Amazement! Do I see my lost daughter! Do I hold her! It is, it is my life, my happiness. I thought thee lost, my Olivia, yet still I hold thee— and still thou shalt live to bless me.’—The warmest transports of the fondest lover were not greater than mine when I saw him introduce my child, and held my daughter in my arms, whose silence only spoke her raptures. ‘And art thou returned to me, my darling,’ cried I, ‘to be my comfort in age!’—‘That she is,’ cried Jenkinson, ‘and make much of her, for she is your own

164 The Vicar of Wakefield

honourable child, and as honest a woman as any in the whole room, let the other be who she will. And as for you ’Squire, as sure as you stand there this young lady is your lawful wedded wife. And to convince you that I speak nothing but truth, here is the licence by which you were married together.’—So saying, he put the licence into the Baronet’s hands, who read it, and found it perfect in every respect. ‘And now, gentlemen,’ continued he, ‘I find you are surprised at all this; but a few words will explain the difficulty. That there ’Squire of renown, for whom I have a great friendship, but that’s between ourselves, has often employed me in doing odd little things for him. Among the rest, he commis- sioned me to procure him a false licence and a false priest, in order to deceive this young lady. But as I was very much his friend, what did I do but went and got a true licence and a true priest, and married them both as fast as the cloth could make them. Perhaps you’ll think it was generosity that made me do all this. But no. To my shame I confess it, my only design was to keep the licence and let the ’Squire know that I could prove it upon him whenever I thought proper, and so make him come down when- ever I wanted money.’ A burst of pleasure now seemed to fill the whole apartment; our joy reached even to the common room, where the prisoners themselves sympathized,

And shook their chains

In transport and rude harmony.*

Happiness was expanded upon every face, and even Olivia’s cheek seemed flushed with pleasure. To be thus restored to repu- tation, to friends and fortune at once, was a rapture sufficient to stop the progress of decay and restore former health and vivacity. But perhaps among all there was not one who felt sincerer pleas- ure than I. Still holding the dear-loved child in my arms, I asked my heart if these transports were not delusion. ‘How could you,’ cried I, turning to Mr. Jenkinson, ‘how could you add to my miseries by the story of her death! But it matters not, my pleasure at finding her again, is more than a recompence for the pain.’

‘As to your question,’ replied Jenkinson, ‘that is easily

answered. I thought the only probable means of freeing you

The Vicar of Wakefield 165

from prison, was by submitting to the ’Squire, and consenting to his marriage with the other young lady. But these you had vowed never to grant while your daughter was living, there was therefore no other method to bring things to bear but by persuading you that she was dead. I prevailed on your wife to join in the deceit, and we have not had a fit opportunity of undeceiving you till now.’

In the whole assembly now there only appeared two faces that did not glow with transport. Mr. Thornhill’s assurance had entirely forsaken him: he now saw the gulph of infamy and want before him, and trembled to take the plunge. He therefore fell on his knees before his uncle, and in a voice of piercing misery implored compassion. Sir William was going to spurn him away, but at my request he raised him, and after pausing a few moments, ‘Thy vices, crimes, and ingratitude,’ cried he, ‘deserve no tenderness; yet thou shalt not be entirely forsaken, a bare competence shall be supplied, to support the wants of life, but not its follies. This young lady, thy wife, shall be put in possession of a third part of that fortune which once was thine, and from her tenderness alone thou art to expect any extraordinary supplies for the future.’ He was going to express his gratitude for such kind- ness in a set speech; but the Baronet prevented him by bidding him not aggravate his meanness, which was already but too apparent. He ordered him at the same time to be gone, and from all his former domestics to chuse one such as he should think proper, which was all that should be granted to attend him.

As soon as he left us, Sir William very politely stept up to his

new niece with a smile, and wished her joy. His example was followed by Miss Wilmot and her father; my wife too kissed her daughter with much affection, as, to use her own expression, she was now made an honest woman of.* Sophia and Moses followed in turn, and even our benefactor Jenkinson desired to be admit- ted to that honour. Our satisfaction seemed scarce capable of increase. Sir William, whose greatest pleasure was in doing good, now looked round with a countenance open as the sun, and saw nothing but joy in the looks of all except that of my daughter Sophia, who, for some reasons we could not comprehend, did not

166 The Vicar of Wakefield

seem perfectly satisfied. ‘I think now,’ cried he, with a smile, ‘that all the company, except one or two, seem perfectly happy. There only remains an act of justice for me to do. You are sensible, Sir,’ continued he, turning to me, ‘of the obligations we both owe Mr. Jenkinson. And it is but just we should both reward him for it. Miss Sophia will, I am sure, make him very happy, and he shall have from me five hundred pounds as her fortune, and upon this I am sure they can live very comfortably together. Come, Miss Sophia, what say you to this match of my making? Will you have him?’—My poor girl seemed almost sinking into her mother’s arms at the hideous proposal.—‘Have him, Sir!’ cried she faintly. ‘No, Sir, never.’—‘What,’ cried he again, ‘not have Mr. Jenkinson, your benefactor, an handsome young fellow, with five hundred pounds and good expectations!’—‘I beg, Sir,’ returned she, scarce able to speak, ‘that you’ll desist, and not make me so very wretched.’—‘Was ever such obstinacy known,’ cried he again, ‘to refuse a man whom the family has such infinite obligations to, who has preserved your sister, and who has five hundred pounds! What not have him!’—‘No, Sir, never,’ replied she, angrily, ‘I’d sooner die first.’—‘If that be the case then,’ cried he, ‘if you will not have him—I think I must have you myself.’ And so saying, he caught her to his breast with ardour. ‘My loveliest, my most sensible of girls,’ cried he, ‘how could you ever think your own Burchell could deceive you, or that Sir William Thornhill could ever cease to admire a mistress that loved him for himself alone? I have for some years sought for a woman, who a stranger to my fortune could think that I had merit as a man. After having tried in vain, even amongst the pert and the ugly, how great at last must be my rapture to have made a conquest over such sense and such heavenly beauty.’ Then turning to Jenkinson, ‘As I cannot, Sir, part with this young lady myself, for she has taken a fancy to the cut of my face, all the recompence I can make is to give you her fortune, and you may call upon my steward to-morrow for five hundred pounds.’ Thus we had all our compliments to repeat, and Lady Thornhill underwent the same round of ceremony that her sister had done before. In the mean time Sir William’s gentle- man appeared to tell us that the equipages were ready to carry us

The Vicar of Wakefield 167

to the inn, where every thing was prepared for our reception. My wife and I led the van, and left those gloomy mansions of sorrow. The generous Baronet ordered forty pounds to be distributed among the prisoners, and Mr. Wilmot, induced by his example, gave half that sum. We were received below by the shouts of the villagers, and I saw and shook by the hand two or three of my honest parishioners, who were among the number. They attended us to our inn, where a sumptuous entertainment was provided, and coarser provisions distributed in great quantities among the populace.

After supper, as my spirits were exhausted by the alternation of pleasure and pain which they had sustained during the day, I asked permission to withdraw, and leaving the company in the midst of their mirth, as soon as I found myself alone, I poured out my heart in gratitude to the giver of joy as well as of sorrow, and then slept undisturbed till morning.

CHAPTER XXXII

The Conclusion

The next morning as soon as I awaked I found my eldest son sitting by my bedside, who came to encrease my joy with another turn of fortune in my favour. First having released me from the settlement that I had made the day before in his favour, he let me know that my merchant who had failed in town was arrested at Antwerp, and there had given up effects to a much greater amount than what was due to his creditors. My boy’s generosity pleased me almost as much as this unlooked for good fortune. But I had some doubts whether I ought in justice to accept his offer. While I was pondering upon this, Sir William entered the room, to whom I communicated my doubts. His opinion was, that as my son was already possessed of a very affluent fortune by his mar- riage, I might accept his offer without any hesitation. His busi- ness, however, was to inform me that as he had the night before sent for the licences, and expected them every hour, he hoped

168 The Vicar of Wakefield

that I would not refuse my assistance in making all the company happy that morning. A footman entered while we were speaking, to tell us that the messenger was returned, and as I was by this time ready, I went down, where I found the whole company as merry as affluence and innocence could make them. However, as they were now preparing for a very solemn ceremony, their laugh- ter entirely displeased me. I told them of the grave, becoming and sublime deportment they should assume upon this mystical occa- sion, and read them two homilies and a thesis of my own compos- ing, in order to prepare them. Yet they still seemed perfectly refractory and ungovernable. Even as we were going along to church, to which I led the way, all gravity had quite forsaken them, and I was often tempted to turn back in indignation. In church a new dilemma arose, which promised no easy solution. This was, which couple should be married first; my son’s bride warmly insisted, that Lady Thornhill, (that was to be) should take the lead; but this the other refused with equal ardour, pro- testing she would not be guilty of such rudeness for the world. The argument was supported for some time between both with equal obstinacy and good breeding. But as I stood all this time with my book ready, I was at last quite tired of the contest, and shutting it, ‘I perceive,’ cried I, ‘that none of you have a mind to be married, and I think we had as good go back again; for I suppose there will be no business done here to-day.’—This at once reduced them to reason. The Baronet and his Lady were first married, and then my son and his lovely partner.

I had previously that morning given orders that a coach should be sent for my honest neighbour Flamborough and his family, by which means, upon our return to the inn, we had the pleasure of finding the two Miss Flamboroughs alighted before us. Mr. Jenkinson gave his hand to the eldest, and my son Moses led up the other; (and I have since found that he has taken a real liking to the girl, and my consent and bounty he shall have when- ever he thinks proper to demand them.) We were no sooner returned to the inn, but numbers of my parishioners, hearing of my success, came to congratulate me, but among the rest were those who rose to rescue me, and whom I formerly rebuked with

The Vicar of Wakefield 169

such sharpness. I told the story to Sir William, my son-in-law, who went out and reproved them with great severity; but finding them quite disheartened by his harsh reproof, he gave them half a guinea a piece to drink his health and raise their dejected spirits.

Soon after this we were called to a very genteel entertainment, which was drest by Mr. Thornhill’s cook. And it may not be improper to observe with respect to that gentleman, that he now resides in quality of companion at a relation’s house, being very well liked and seldom sitting at the side-table, except when there is no room at the other; for they make no stranger of him. His time is pretty much taken up in keeping his relation, who is a little melancholy, in spirits, and in learning to blow the French-horn. My eldest daughter, however, still remembers him with regret; and she has even told me, though I make a great secret of it, that when he reforms she may be brought to relent. But to return, for I am not apt to digress thus, when we were to sit down to dinner our ceremonies were going to be renewed. The question was whether my eldest daughter, as being a matron, should not sit above the two young brides, but the debate was cut short by my son George, who proposed, that the company should sit indis- criminately, every gentleman by his lady. This was received with great approbation by all, excepting my wife, who I could perceive was not perfectly satisfied, as she expected to have had the pleas- ure of sitting at the head of the table and carving all the meat for all the company. But notwithstanding this, it is impossible to describe our good humour. I can’t say whether we had more wit amongst us now than usual; but I am certain we had more laugh- ing, which answered the end as well. One jest I particularly remember, old Mr. Wilmot drinking to Moses, whose head was turned another way, my son replied, ‘Madam, I thank you.’ Upon which the old gentleman, winking upon the rest of the company, observed that he was thinking of his mistress. At which jest I thought the two miss Flamboroughs would have died with laugh- ing. As soon as dinner was over, according to my old custom, I requested that the table might be taken away, to have the pleasure of seeing all my family assembled once more by a chearful fire-side. My two little ones sat upon each knee, the rest of the

170 The Vicar of Wakefield

company by their partners. I had nothing now on this side of the grave to wish for, all my cares were over, my pleasure was unspeakable. It now only remained that my gratitude in good fortune should exceed my former submission in adversity.

EXPLANATORY NOTES

Abbreviations

Collected Letters The Collected Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Katherine C. Balderston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928)

Collected Works Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, 5

vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966)

Doughty The Vicar of Wakefield, ed. with introd. and notes by Oswald Doughty (London: Scholartis Press, 1928)

Johnson Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edn. revised by the author (London: W. Strahan, J. and

F. Rivington, 1773)

Lonsdale The Poems of Gray, Collins and Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lons- dale (London: Longman, 1969) (the poetry of Goldsmith appears on pp. 567–769)

OED Oxford English Dictionary (2nd edn., Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1989)

Oxford DNB Colin Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford Diction- ary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)

Percy Memoir Thomas Percy, ‘The Life of Dr. Oliver Goldsmith’, in The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B. (London, 1801), vol. i

Some of the Explanatory Notes are drawn from Friedman’s 1981 World’s Classics edition without further attribution.

title page: Wakefield: in the Collected Works, iv. 13, Friedman had observed that the title of the novel may have been suggested by a poem in the Annual Register (1759), 452–4, entitled ‘On the Vicar of W——d’. The poem itself bears no relation—except by way of contrast—to the contents of the novel; it is satirical of the miserliness of the vicar, whose character is clearly indicated in the first two couplets:

The vicar’s rich, his income clear, Exceeds eight hundred pounds a year. Yet weeping want goes by the door, Or knocks unheard—the vicar’s poor.

title page: Sperate miseri, cavete fælices: ‘Hope, ye miserable ones; ye happy ones, fear’. Goldsmith’s epigraph is taken from the penultimate sentence of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).

172 Explanatory Notes

3 advertisement : the remarks offered here regarding the standards expected in ‘this age of opulence and refinement’ are echoed in the actual text of the novel by those of Mr Burchell on ‘the reputation of books’ and the ‘greatness of their beauties’, p. 67.

1. migrations from the blue bed to the brown: the language used by the Vicar to describe the couple’s domestic ‘migrations’ is drawn from Goldsmith’s own life. Goldsmith had playfully complained in a letter to his friend and brother-in-law Daniel Hodson, in December 1757, that the arrival of his much younger brother Charles in London late in 1757 had brought him no real news of his Irish relations: ‘Some friends, he tells me, are still lean but very rich, other very fat but still very poor[.] Nay all the news I hear from you, is that you and Mrs. Hodson [Goldsmith’s older sister, Catherine] sally out to visits among the neighbours, and sometimes make a migration from the blue bed to the brown’ (Collected Letters, 30).

Our cousins . . . without any help from the Herald’s oflce: the Herald’s Office was the office of the royal corporation, the Herald’s College or College of Arms, which had been founded in 1483. In addition to exercis- ing jurisdiction in matters armorial, and granting Armorial bearings, the Office proved pedigrees. A ‘remove’ was ‘a degree in descent or consanguinity’ (this example cited in OED).

1. pathetic: used here specifically in the sense of ‘producing an effect upon the emotions; moving, stirring, affecting’ (OED).

the famous story of Count Abensberg: Friedman, in the Collected Works, iv. 20, successfully traced the source for this story in Louise Moreri’s Le Grand Dictionnaire historique (Amsterdam, 1740), ii. 163. Moreri had included in his history the tale of Bébon, Baron of Abensburg, in Bavaria, who arrived at the court of the Emperor Henri II accompanied by all thirty of his sons. Astounded by the appearance of so many people, the Emperor asked the Baron why he was surrounded by such a numerous assembly. Bébon responded that he had only brought his male children and their servants so that he might have the opportunity to make a ‘present’ of them to the Emperor. The Emperor was so charmed by the handsome appearance of the entire company, Moreri wrote, that ‘he embraced each of them in turn, and promised to look upon them as his own, and always to keep them close to his heart’.

1. two romantic names in the family: Friedman, in the Collected Works (iii. 177), notes another instance of possible self-referentiality in Gold- smith’s writings here, observing that in his essay on the coronation of George III included in the Public Ledger for 24 September 1761, Gold- smith had given the wife of the common-councilman the name Grizzle. On the Vicar’s suggestion that the naming of his two daughters was influenced by the fact that his wife had been reading too much romantic fiction, see Introduction p. xxxvi.

handsome is that handsome does: a proverbial expression dating at least as far back as 1659 (in his note in the original Oxford World’s Classics

Explanatory Notes 173

edition of the novel, p. 199, Friedman traces it to ‘at least 1670’); earlier variations of the same sentiment—e.g. ‘goodly is he that goodly doth’— can be found in texts dating from the late sixteenth century.

Hebe: in Greek mythology, the daughter of Zeus and Hera, and cup- bearer of the Gods. Her name—which means, almost literally, ‘beautiful youth’—remained, despite its classical origins, fashionable among the writers of popular songs and ballads.

ribbands: throughout Goldsmith’s work ‘ribband’ is used for ‘ribbon’, which here refers specifically to those kinds of silk and satin ribbons used by women in the period as items of ornamentation.

1. one of the learned professions: traditionally, George’s study at Oxford would have prepared him, if not for the Church, then for later employ- ment in the fields of medicine, law, and science or academic scholarship.

credulous: used here not in the negative sense of ‘over-ready to believe’ or ‘apt to believe on weak or insufficient grounds’, but rather to mean simply ‘disposed to believe’ or free from guile (OED).

my living thirty-five pounds a year: cf. Goldsmith’s description of the

local vicar of a rural parish in his popular poem The Deserted Village

(1770), ii. 41–4, in which the vicar is described as being ‘. to all the country dear, | and passing rich with forty pounds a year; | Remote from towns he ran his godly race, | Nor e’er had changed, nor wished to change, his place ’ (Collected Works, iv. 293). Lonsdale (p. 682) notes

that the village preacher of Goldsmith’s poem has ‘inevitably’ been iden- tified with Goldsmith’s father, the Revd Charles Goldsmith, and with his brother, the Revd Henry Goldsmith, ‘both of whom held the living of Kilkenny West near Lissoy’.

I made over to the orphans and widows of the clergy of our diocese: in the first (March 1766) edition of Goldsmith’s novel, this passage reads ‘I gave to the orphans and widows of our diocese’. This change from ‘gave’ to ‘made over’ in the second edition suggests that Goldsmith wanted deliberately to emphasize that the income from his living had not so much been freely offered to the poor of the parish, but had rather actually been made over or transferred by the Vicar into the hands of trustees, from whom he could no longer claim it back.

I also set a resolution of keeping no curate: a curate was ‘a clergyman engaged for a stipend or salary to perform ministerial duties in the

parish as a deputy or assistant of the incumbent’ (OED). The Vicar wishes to emphasize that he had made a point of dispatching with any assistance in fulfilling his duties in the parish.

I maintained with Whiston: William Whiston (1667–1752) was a mathe- matician, a natural philosopher, a clergyman, a proponent of primitive Christianity, and a student and sometime friend of Sir Isaac Newton. He published over 120 separate books on a wide range of subjects includ- ing geology, mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy, and played an

174 Explanatory Notes

important role in the earliest attempts to determine longitude at sea. The Oxford DNB notes that Whiston was ‘a vigorous opponent of both deism and unbelief on the one hand, and high-church orthodoxy on the other’ who sought to maintain a middle ground ‘between what to him were two extremes’. Goldsmith focuses on the extent to which Dr Primrose has adopted Whiston’s principles of monogamy. Whiston had argued in his 1749 autobiography: ‘Paul and the Apostolic Constitutions agree, and above four Centuries concur with them, that neither a Bishop, a Presbyter, nor a Deacon, ought to be more than the Husband of one Wife; or to be more than once married, altho’ neither the modern Churches, nor Baptists, have always observed this Rule of Primitive Christianity’ (Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mr. William Whiston (London, 1749), 467). Whiston himself remained happily married for over fifty years. See Stephen

D. Snobelen, ‘William Whiston’, in the Oxford DNB, lviii. 502–6.

1. a complexion so transparent: a disposition or temperament so ‘candid’ or ‘open’.
2. to prevent the ladies leaving us: it was traditional in the period even in provincial towns for women to withdraw to the drawing room or the parlour following midday dinner. After an hour or occasionally a little less the women usually ordered their tea to be served, at which time they also called for the men to finish their drinking and to come and join them.

forfeits: ‘in certain games, an article (usually something carried on the person) which a player gives up by way of penalty for making some mistake, and which he afterwards redeems by performing some ludicrous task’ (OED).

a two-penny hit: a stake or bet amounting to twopence; in other words, the Vicar even when wagering with his old friend at backgammon plays for only the most modest of amounts.

fling a quatre . . . threw deuce ace: he wanted to throw a total of four with the two dice, but threw a two and a one (or perhaps two aces).

courting a fourth wife: of a clergyman’s taking a fourth wife Whiston says: ‘This is a Piece of Licentiousness, and a Contradiction to the Laws of the New Testament plainly intolerable’ (Memoirs, 468).

1. a statute of bankruptcy: the Bankruptcy Laws, first instituted in England in the fifteenth century, were originally directed against fraudulent traders, who, much like the ‘merchant’ in town (i.e., his agent) into whose hands the Vicar has placed his money, could potentially ‘run off’ with the property of their creditors.

young lady’s fortune secure: the ‘fortune’ that Arabella Wilmot brought to the marriage would immediately, upon the couple’s exchange of vows, become the property of her husband. See also p. 161 and note.

one virtue . . . which was prudence: one of the four so-called pagan virtues: Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, and Justice. Combined with the

Explanatory Notes 175

Christian virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love, they together formed the traditional seven virtues.

1. a small Cure: a curacy or living: ‘a parish or other sphere of spiritual ministration; a “charge” ’ (OED).

enjoy my principles without molestation: see sixth note to p. 12. Friedman maintained that it had not been made adequately clear why the Vicar should resign his living of £35 a year at Wakefield to take a cure of £15 a year. The Vicar’s remark here about enjoying his ‘principles without molestation’ and his reference in Chapter XIV to ‘the Whistonian con- troversy, the last pamphlet, the archdeacon’s reply, and the hard measure that was dealt me’, Friedman argued, suggest that in an earlier version of Chapter II the Vicar left Wakefield to escape persecution for his principles.

the same horse that was given him by the good bishop Jewel, this staff: Richard Hooker (1554–1600) was a theologian, philosopher, and preacher. The story referred to here is found in the account of Hooker’s departure from Bishop Jewel in Isaak Walton’s The Life of Mr. Richard Hooker (first pub. 1665): ‘at the Bishop’s parting with him, the Bishop gave him good counsel, and his benediction, but forgot to give him money; which when the Bishop had considered, he sent a servant in all haste to call Richard back to him; and at Richard’s return, the Bishop said to him, “Richard, I sent for you back to lend you a horse, which hath carried me many a mile, and, I thank God, with much ease:” and presently delivered into his hand a walking-staff, with which he had travelled through many parts of Germany’ (Lives (Oxford, 1805), i. 244).

1. his seed begging their bread: this passage is quoted verbatim from Psalm 37: 25.

throwing him naked into the amphitheatre of life: a similar phrase is used in the history of the Man in Black in Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World, letter 27: ‘I resembled, upon my first entrance into the busy and insidious world, one of those gladiators who were exposed without armour in the amphitheatre at Rome’ (Collected Works, ii. 114).

1. paid three guineas to our beadle whipped though the town for dog-stealing:

in a small village community such as the one in which the Vicar has paused on his way to his new living, the beadle would have been the officer who acted in the capacity of a constable; he would likewise have been responsible within the local parish for the administration of justice. The infamous Black Act of 1723 had made many offences related to poaching capital crimes—i.e., crimes punishable by death. Beadles were obliged by the statute law of England to arrest even vagrants. Male beg- gars and vagrants would have been subject to public whipping and removal and—more likely than not—imprisonment at hard labour for as long as seven days; petty thievery was to remain punishable by public whipping until 1820.

176 Explanatory Notes

1. cloaths that once were laced: the clothes of gentlemen—particularly their coats—were frequently ornamented with high quality gold or silver lace; linen fabrics of cotton, silk, and wool, could also be embroidered and trimmed with inwrought patterns of different colours.

Mr. Burchell, our new companion: Goldsmith may have taken such names in the novel as ‘Burchell’ and ‘Arnold’ from Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761). In that novel, the marriage of the title character to Orlando Faulkland is forestalled by the revelation of his previous attachment to the former Miss Burchell. Sidney Bidulph accepts instead the proposals of a Mr Arnold.

1. he carried benevolence to an excess: the danger of excessive benevolence is a constant theme in Goldsmith’s writings. See Collected Works, v. 3.

Physicians tell us of a disorder . . . this gentleman felt in his mind: Sir William Thornhill is represented here as possessing a degree of non-verbal sens- ibility more usually reserved for the female heroines of popular novels of sentiment. The description not only underscores the intimate alliance that was thought to connect the moral sense with the physical body and its ‘exquisite’ sensations in a healthy individual, but draws attention to the possibility that an otherwise commendable inclination towards benevolence could lead in some cases to the development of a ‘sickly sensibility of the miseries of others’.

1. I forgot what I was going to observe: Mr Burchell’s momentary confusion here, as he falls into the first-person singular, is the first of many indica- tions that he is himself Sir William Thornhill.
2. the polite: used here to refer to ‘the refined’ or ‘the sophisticated’ and urbane.

religiously cracked nuts on Michaelmas eve: one of the customs associated with the feast of St Michael the Archangel or Michaelmas Day (29 September) was that of picking hazelnuts; in some rural parishes the evening prior to Michalemas Day, i.e. Michaelmas Eve, took on the name of Nut Crack Night, on which occasion harvested nuts were carried into the church to be broken open. Also associated with Michaelmas were the festivities surrounding the many hiring and livestock fairs that took place at this time of the year. The rituals Goldsmith here connects to the other feast days and holidays mentioned are more obviously maintained in some form in contemporary society.

In his essay ‘The Revolution in Low Life’, first printed in June 1762, Goldsmith had written of the inhabitants of a village some fifty miles from London: ‘They were merry at Christmas and mournful in Lent, got drunk on St. George’s-day, and religiously cracked nuts on Michaelmas-eve’ (Collected Works, iii. 195).

1. my little enclosures: the consequences of the enclosure of open land in the Hanoverian period—by which procedure open or ‘common’ fields were ‘enclosed’ or marked off with a boundary as private property—are of

Explanatory Notes 177

some significance elsewhere in Goldsmith’s work, particularly with regard to his 1770 poem The Deserted Village (on which, see Lonsdale, 67–74).

The little republic to which I gave laws: in the dedication to A Discourse on Inequality (1754), Jean-Jacques Rousseau defined a republic as ‘a state where every individual being acquainted with each other, neither the dark manoeuvres of vice nor the modesty of virtue [is] concealed from public gaze or judgement’ (Rousseau, A Discourse on Inequality, trans. Maurice Cranston (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 57). It has been argued con- vincingly that Primrose’s description of his family as ‘a little republic’ is entirely in keeping with Goldsmith’s own political views as they are expressed elsewhere in the novel (esp. Chapter XIX) and in his history writing more generally. See James P. Carson, ‘ “The Little Republic” of the Family: Goldsmith’s Politics of Nostalgia’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 16/2 (2004), 173–96.

1. the blind piper: a generic reference to an itinerant musician, although Iain Dall Mackay (1656?–1754) was hereditary piper to Sir Kenneth MacKenzie of Gairloch, and a composer famously known under the names ‘Iain Dall’ (Blind John) and ‘Am Piopare Dall’ (or the Blind Piper).

Johnny Armstrong’s last good night, or the cruelty of Barbara Allen: both traditional English ballads. ‘Barbara Allan’ and ‘Johnny Armstrong’s Last Good Night’, like the equally familiar ‘Sir Patrick Spens’, are variations on the ‘good night’ or popular funeral lament.

my sumptuary edicts: a sumptuary edict could refer to ‘any law regulating expenditure’, but was used most frequently with reference to any such law that looked to prevent the spending of money ‘with a view to restrain- ing excess in food, dress, equipage, etc.’ (OED).

bugles and catgut: a bugle is ‘a tube-shaped glass bead, usually black, used to ornament wearing apparel’ (OED). Shining beads of black glass of this kind were popular in the period, although considered by some to be slightly common or vulgar. Catgut is ‘a kind of coarse thick-ribbed cotton stuff’ (OED); it had often formerly been used as stiffening, although the ‘cord’ or ‘corduroy’ of the sort referred to in this instance, from the French corde du roy, could refer to ribbed fabrics of any material, includ- ing such ‘fancy’ stuff as velveteen, crêpe, and even silks.

her crimson paduasoy: a strong, rich, silk fabric, usually slightly corded or embossed, popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; Deborah Primrose’s ‘passion’ for her crimson paduasoy betrays a degree of vulgarity.

pomatum patched: pomatum was a scented ointment, frequently of the

sort used for application to the skin or, as in this instance, the dressing of the hair. Patched: it was fashionable among women in the period to apply small pieces of black silk or court-plasters to the face, so as to hide any

178 Explanatory Notes

blemishes, or, more usually, to show off the delicacy of their complexions by contrast.

1. pinkings: elaborately decorated cloth or leather.

flouncing and shredding: a flounce was ‘an ornamental appendage to the skirt of a lady’s dress, consisting of a strip gathered and sewed on by its upper edge around the skirt, and left hanging and waving’; to ‘shred’ one’s clothing was to trim it ‘with shreds of gold lace’ (OED).

the nakedness of the indigent world may be cloathed from the trimmings of the vain: cf. [William Penn,] Some Fruits of Solitude, 7th edn. (London: Assigns of J. Sowle, 1718), 32: ‘Excess in Apparel is another costly Folly: The very Trimming of the vain World would cloath all the naked one.’

1. centaury: also known in England as common or lesser centaury, and so- called because its medicinal properties were said first to have been dis- covered by the centaur Chiron, of Hellenic mythology; the plant was sometimes compared by herbalists to oregano, marjoram, and St John’s Wort.

vacant: meaning in this instance not ‘vacuous’ but ‘free from preoccupa- tion’ (OED).

was going to salute my daughters: i.e., made as if to embrace and then to kiss them.

disproportioned acquaintances: friendships between individuals so widely separated by social class.

1. Dryden: John Dryden (1631–1700), pre-eminent poet and dramatist of the Restoration period.

the satisfaction of being laughed at: in the first edition of the novel, this passage continued: ‘for he always ascribed to his wit that laughter which was lavished at his simplicity’. It has been suggested that this was omitted in subsequent editions ‘because . . . Goldsmith found it was used against himself’ (see e.g. Doughty, ‘Introduction’, p. xxvii).

we sate down with a blank: i.e. gambled unsuccessfully; participated in the lottery but did not win the prize.

28 an halfpenny whistle: a small musical toy, pierced with six holes and usu- ally made of tin, to be had for the price of a penny or less, usually from passing peddlers.

the history of Patient Grissel, the adventures of Catskin, and then Fair Rosamond’s bower: in A Collection of Old Ballads, i (3rd edn., 1727), are to be found ‘An Excellent Ballad of a Noble Marquis and Patient Grissel’ (pp. 252–60) and ‘a Lamentable Ballad of Fair Rosamond, King Henry the Second’s Concubine’ (pp. 11–17). Both are likewise mentioned in John Gay’s The Shepherd’s Week (1714). The ‘adventures of Catskin’ is probably the ballad entitled The Wandering Young Gentlewoman; or, Cat- skin or The Catskin’s Garland. Austin Dobson noted the latter to have been reprinted in Bell’s Ballads of the Peasantry (1857), 115. (Dobson, The Life and Writings of Oliver Goldsmith (London, n.d. [1888?]), 115).

Explanatory Notes 179

the beast retires to his shelter he that came to save it: the Vicar’s language

here recalls passages from the New Testament, including Matthew 8: 20

and Luke 4: 58.

1. an after-growth of hay: the second growth, harvested toward the latter end of the year.

the bagnio pander: a pimp in a brothel; Johnson’s definition observes that a pander could more generally refer to ‘an agent for the lust or ill designs of another’.

1. the attempts of a rustic to flay Marsyas stript off by another: in classical

mythology, the satyr Marsyas, having picked up the flutes first invented and then discarded by Athena, grew so proficient in his ability that he challenged Apollo to a contest. Apollo agreed to the challenge. His divine skill having assured his success in the match, Apollo subsequently had Marsyas flayed alive. The tale is a variation of that which more often pits Apollo against Pan in a contest judged by King Midas.

lightsome: ‘permeated with light; well-lighted, bright, illumined’ (OED).

making a wash: ‘a liquid cosmetic for the complexion’. This example is cited in OED.

1. feeder: Goldsmith’s critics have disagreed as to exactly what the word means in this context. It is clear, since the ‘chaplain and feeder’ here are synonymous with the ‘couple of friends’ who arrive with Thornhill, that ‘feeder’ is not being used simply as another term for the parson. Thornhill’s ‘feeder’—according to contemporary usage—is likely to have been the huntsman in charge of feeding his hounds; others have noted, however, that Johnson rather confusingly defines the word not only as ‘one that gives food’, but also as ‘one that eats’. In the Collected Works, Friedman further entertains the possibility, however, that the designation is used here to identify the individual in question as Thornhill’s tutor; to call someone a ‘feeder’ could be a humorous way of referring to the manner in which they ‘crammed’ their charges with learning.

under the clock at St. Dunstan’s: the famous clock outside the old church of St Dunstan’s in the West, in London, had since the late seventeenth century been a place of popular resort, and one of the more famous sights of the capital.

lawn sleeves: sleeves made of ‘lawn’, a fabric of fine linen, resembling cambric, that was used for the sleeves of bishops, and was consequently a mark of the dignity or office of a bishop.

an imposition: in this sense, a levy or a tax, but also perhaps a pun by the Squire on use of the word in its more proper ecclesiastical sense of the laying on of hands in blessing or confirmation.

smoaked him: to ‘smoak’ or ‘smoke’ was, according to Johnson, ‘to smell out’; ‘to find out’. The Squire, in other words, has instantly understood Moses’ purpose, and has decided to pretend to entertain the boy’s desire to engage him in a learned disputation.

180 Explanatory Notes

1. free-thinkers: generally speaking, individuals who refused ‘to submit [their] reason to the control of authority in matters of religious belief’ (OED).

the disputes between Thwackum and Square: cf. Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones (1749), particularly bk. III, chs. iii, viii, ix; bk. IV, ch. iv; and bk. V, ch. viii. As John Bender and Simon Stern note: ‘the contrast between Square’s and Thwackum’s precepts is the contrast between rational religion, or deism, based in the law of nature, versus revealed religion based in the authority of Scripture’. See Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, ed. Bender and Stern (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), 879.

the controversy between Robinson Crusoe and Friday the savage: after having rescued Friday from his enemies, Crusoe sets up to instruct him in the Christian religion, with decidedly mixed results. Crusoe, confessing his own confusion on doctrinal matters, decides finally to settle with such ‘plain Instruction’ as ‘sufficiently serv’d to the enlightening [of] this Savage Creature’. See Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. J. Donald Crowley (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998), 221.

Religious courtship: Olivia had clearly not paid attention to the subtitle of this work by Daniel Defoe (1722): Being Historical Discourses on the Necessity of Marrying Religious Husbands and Wives only.

1. the two lovers, so sweetly described by Mr. Gay: the story is told in a letter from John Gay to Mr F.——, dated 9 August 1718, in The Correspond- ence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), i. 482–3. The reference here appears to be particularly to the verse epitaph in the letter, which Gay says was furnished by himself and Pope:

When Eastern lovers feed the funeral fire; On the same pile the faithful fair expire;

Here pitying Heaven that virtue mutual found, And blasted both, that it might neither wound. Hearts so sincere, th’Almighty saw well pleas’d, Sent his own lightening, and the Victims seiz’d.

the Acis and Galatea of Ovid: a reference to the myth recounted by the Roman poet in Metamorphoses, 13. 738 ff. Acis was a Sicilian shepherd beloved of the sea nymph Galatea, who was crushed to death by his rival, the cyclops Polyphemus. Acis was transformed by the gods into a stream that rises from a fountain on Mount Etna.

without carrying on the sense: Mr Burchell’s protestations regarding con- temporary English poetry were maintained by Goldsmith himself. See Collected Works, iv. 46 n. 3.

a ballad : in 1765 a few copies of this poem were printed with the title Edwin and Angelina. A Ballad. By Mr. Goldsmith. Printed for the Amusement of the Countess of Northumberland. Lonsdale speculates that the poem was

Explanatory Notes 181

written perhaps as early as 1761, and ‘may well have been included in the MS. of Vicar which [Goldsmith] sold in the autumn of 1762’. For a full critical text and the circumstances of the poem’s composition see Collected Works, iv. 191 ff. and Lonsdale, 596–8.

1. women of very great distinction and fashion from town: the two women reveal themselves in the coarse vulgarity of their conversation, and later demonstrate by the duplicity of their conduct, to be ‘abandoned women of the town’ (p. 109). Goldsmith must be given some credit for advancing the currency of the word Blarney—in the sense of ‘smoothly flattering or cajoling talk’—in colloquial English; his is the first example cited of the use of the term in that sense in OED.

The second of the two names used by Goldsmith here—Miss Carolina Wilelmina Amelia Skeggs, the full length of which, the Vicar later con- fesses, so delights him as he writes it (p. 49)—finds its origins in letter 55 of Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (first published in the Public Ledger for Friday, 1 August 1760). In that letter, Lien Chi Altangi mentions a ‘sweet pretty creature’ by the name of Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Tibbs, a name which itself derives from the names of Queen Wilhelmina Caroline, wife of George II, and of Princess Amelia, his second daughter. See Collected Works, ii. 230.

1. top-knots: bows or ribbons tied and used as ornaments in the hair.

the jig . . . round-about . . . country dances: the reference to ‘country dances’ here is understandably somewhat confusing for modern readers. The daughters of the Vicar’s neighbour Flamborough would be familiar with such native dances as they had grown up with in their rural com- munity—dances that would often be practised in the open air, and would have included the familiar steps of a jig or a simple round dance, like the ‘round-about’ mentioned in the passage. What the Vicar in this instance characterizes as ‘country dances’ were in fact those that followed the more complex minuet and other similar forms from France, and which remained popular among the fashionable classes throughout the eight- eenth century. The assistance of both pocket book guides as well as the instruction of formal dancing masters were available to those young people who had not had the opportunity to learn the latest steps at venues such as Vauxhall or Ranelagh.

chit: used here by the Vicar in an uncharacteristic sense to refer affection- ately to his own daughter.

by the living jingo, she was all of a muck of sweat: for the level of usage suggested here, cf. the Spectator, 217 (8 November 1711), where a cor- respondent complains of a lack of ‘Delicacy’ in ‘a young Creature’; ‘After our Return from a Walk the other Day, she threw her self in an Elbow Chair, and professed before a large Company, that she was all over in a Sweat.’ Goldsmith’s use of the vulgar and intensified ‘by the living jingo’ as a vigorous form of asseveration in this passage is cited in OED as one of the first appearances of that phrase in English.

182 Explanatory Notes

the musical glasses: concerts on musical glasses had been given in London earlier in the eighteenth century, although 1761 seems to have been the year of their greatest popularity (the various notes were produced by rubbing the rims of glasses filled with different amounts of water). See Alec Hyatt King’s article ‘Musical Glasses’ in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music (2nd edn., London Macmillan, 2001),

xvii. 471–3.

43 a single winter in town: the winter would have constituted for the Vicar’s daughters the necessary exposure of a social ‘season’—‘the period of the year during which [London] was most frequented for business, fashion, or amusement; . . . the time (now May to July) when the fashionable world . . . assembled in town’ (OED).

coup de main: a martial metaphor, meaning literally, ‘stroke of hand’: ‘a sudden and vigorous attack, for the purpose of instantaneously capturing a position’ (OED).

1. gauzes . . . catgut: gauze here means any relatively transparent garment of silk, linen, or cotton; on catgut see note to p. 23.

a Nabob: a nawab; in extended use, ‘a wealthy, influential, or powerful landowner or other person, esp. one with an extravagantly luxurious lifestyle; . . . any wealthy or high-ranking foreigner’ (OED).

1. they saw rings in the candle, purses bounced from the fire: the Vicar’s daugh- ters and his wife misinterpret their dreams and everyday occurrences according to the rituals of rural superstition. The Connoisseur for 13 March 1755, in an article on ‘Country Superstitions’, notes a ‘purse’ to be ‘a round cinder, as opposed to a hollow oblong one, which betokens a coffin’. The detection of ‘rings’ circling the flame of a candle was likewise taken to be a harbinger of some vague and undesignated future event. Cf. the Universal Spectator (3rd edn., 1756), ii. 175: ‘She never has any Thing befals her, without some fore-notice or other; she . . . is forewarn’d of Deaths by the bursting of Coffins out of the Fire; Purses too from the same Element promise Money; and her Candle brings her Letters constantly before the Post.’
2. scrubs: ‘mean insignificant fellow[s], person[s] of little account or poor appearance’ (OED). For this usage, see also Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, bk. VIII, ch. iv: ‘He is an arrant scrub, I assure you.’

blowzed and red with walking . . . winners at a smock race: to look ‘blowzy’ or ‘blowzed’ was to be high coloured or reddened by sunburn and exposure; a ‘smock race’ was a race run by women or girls in which a smock was the prize, although it may also have connoted a race or contest of some sort that was undertaken by women in their smocks.

1. pillion: a light saddle used by women—in this instance, the Vicar’s wife, Deborah—when riding a horse.

Michaelmas eve happening on the next day: although it is doubtful that Goldsmith would have paid attention to such a detail, Michaelmas eve

Explanatory Notes 183

(28 September) fell on Monday (’the next day’) in 1761, when he was probably engaged in writing the novel.

lamb’s-wool: ‘a drink consisting of hot ale mixed with the pulp of roasted apples, and sugared and spiced’ (OED).

Hot cockles: ‘a rustic game in which one player lay face downwards, or knelt down with his eyes covered, and being struck on the back by the others in turn, guessed who struck him’ (OED).

1. prolocutor: this formal or legal term signifies ‘one who speaks for another or others’ (OED); a spokesperson. The Vicar appears to adopt such formal language in misplaced deference to the sudden appearance of the family’s ‘two great acquaintances from town’.
2. a sound: a swoon (the reading of the first edition).

would cry out fudge damped the rising spirit of the conversation: ‘fudge’,

according to Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, rev. Eric Beale (London, 1984), signified ‘a lie, nonsense’; the exclamation alerts any listener to Mr Burchell’s considered opinion that the conversation between Miss Skeggs and the Peeress is a calculated deception.

the Lady’s Magazine: Goldsmith contributed to this magazine in 1760 and 1761; indeed, he was—disguised as the ‘Honourable Mrs. Caroline Stanhope’—for a time its editor.

1. plain-work: ‘plain needlework or sewing, as distinct from fancy work or embroidery’ (OED).

breadstitch . . . pink, point cut paper: ‘breadstitch’, properly ‘brede-

stitch’, in which ‘brede’ means ‘braid’, was sewing work that involved some kind of interweaving, braiding, or embroidery; to ‘pink’ waas to ‘Ornament (cloth, leather, or the like), by cutting or punching eyelet-holes, figures, letters, &c.’; to ‘point’ was to ‘Fasten or lace with tagged points or laces’ (OED); and to ‘cut paper’ was to fashion paper into elaborate designs or patterns.

1. higgles: strives ‘for petty advantage in bargaining’ (OED), i.e., haggles. brushing his buckles, and cocking his hat with pins: the buckles referred to here are likely to be shoe-buckles or knee-buckles; to cock one’s hat,

according to Johnson, meant ‘to set up the hat with an air of petulance and pertness’; Moses’ sisters have been pinning his hat so that it sits at a jaunty angle on one side of his head.

thunder and lightening: ‘a cloth, apparently of glaring colours’, also ‘applied to articles of apparel of a “loud” or “flashy” style, or combining two strongly contrasted colours’ (OED; the Vicar’s observation that the coat is still being worn by his son, ‘though grown too short’ suggests that its slightly gaudy colouring might have been more appropriate to a child than to a young man 16 years of age.

1. gosling green: ‘a pale, yellowish green’ (OED).

184 Explanatory Notes

1. a pennyworth of gingerbread each . . . give them by letters at a time: small portions of gingerbread would typically be formed in the shapes of men, animals, and letters of the alphabet.

boxes, in which they might keep wafers, snuff, patches, or even money: the word ‘box’ was only gradually extended since about 1700 to include, as it does here, ‘cases of larger size, made to hold merchandise and personal property . . . understood to be four-sided and of wood’ (OED).

a weesel skin purse: a purse probably made from the brown summer coat of the European ermine or stoat-weasel.

1. I’ll warrant we’ll never see him sell his hen of a rainy day: a proverbial expression going back at least to 1639. Stephen Coote notes its inclusion in James Kelly’s 1721 collection of Scottish Proverbs as ‘You will part with nothing to your disadvantage, for a hen looks ill on a rainy day’. See The Vicar of Wakefield, ed. Stephen Coote (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 206.

shagreen: this word, denoting a kind of untanned leather with a rough, granular surface, was common in the period, although it appears, perhaps because of its suggestions of artful delicacy or fastidious and appealingly colourful protection, almost to have a totemic value in the sentimental novels of the eighteenth century.

1. A murrain take such trumpery: i.e. ‘a pox upon such rubbish’; a ‘murrain’ was, even in the eighteenth century, a rather archaic word for ‘plague’ or ‘disease’.

a prowling sharper: a wandering rogue; used here and elsewhere in the text to connote various types of swindlers and con-artists.

58 I stood neuter: to ‘stand neuter’ was ‘to remain neutral’ or to ‘declare neutrality’.

1. a spavin . . . a windgall . . . the botts . . . a blind, spavined, galled hack: all afflictions, obviously, that would render the Vicar’s ‘poor animal’ an unpromising sale. A ‘spavin’ is ‘a hard bony tumour or excrescence formed at the union of the splint-bone and the shank in a horse’s leg, and produced by inflammation of the cartilage uniting those bones’; a wind- gall is ‘A soft tumour on either side of a horse’s leg just above the fetlock’; ‘botts’ or ‘bots’ is ‘a parasitical worm or maggot . . . inhabiting the digest- ive organs of the horse’ (OED).

St. Gregory, upon good works, professes himself to be of the same opinion: possibly a reference to a passage in the fifth Theological Oration of St Gregory Nazianzen, in which the ‘number of witnesses’ required for testification is discussed with reference to John 1: 8. Included in the Greek Anthology—excerpts from which helped to form the basis for most schoolchildren’s knowledge of Greek—St Gregory Nazianzen would have been an author with whom Goldsmith was familiar.

1. my last pamphlet, the archdeacon’s reply, and the hard measure that was dealt

Explanatory Notes 185

me: these allusions make no sense in the present state of the novel. See note to p. 16, above.

1. all human doctrines: all doctrines relating to secular—as opposed to divine—matters.

Sanconiathon, Manetho, Berosus: the first a Phoenician, the second an Egyptian, the third a Chaldean, whose writings on the history and culture of their respective countries are largely lost.

Anarchon ara kai arelutaion to pan: Friedman suggests this phrase is a reference to Ocellus Lucanus, De universi natura, 1. 2. Jenkinson’s under- standing of the Greek here—to suggest that ‘things have neither begin- ning nor end’—is roughly correct.

ek to biblion kubernetes: Friedman comments that the words appear twice in Galen: De libris propriis, 5 and De compositione medicamentorum per genera, 3. 2. Judging from the slightly mangled Greek, however, the quotations here appear to have come from a popular book of adages, and not directly from the ancients. If Jenkinson is indeed referring to Galen (ad 129–216) in his subsequent assertion that ‘books will never teach the world’, he would then appear to be alluding to Galen’s methodology, as expressed in his writing on ancient medicine. Galen stressed the need for experiment and practical observation, and chastised those who based their practice on a priori arguments and established hypotheses.

1. a thirty pound note: banknotes had been issued in the mid-century to the value of £100 and even £1,000, although it would yet have been unusual to encounter notes of even £10 or £15 in such an environment. Jenkinson’s associate Abraham has (supposedly) offered as much as a silver half-crown—itself worth two and a half shillings—to anyone who could change the £30 note for him, but has still met with no success.

the great scarcity of silver: at the time of the novel’s action, there would have been several denominations of silver coin (e.g., crown, half-crown, shilling, sixpence) in circulation, and the shortage of such currency was a common and even chronic hindrance. A letter in Lloyd’s Evening Post for 22–5 January 1762 offers a remedy for the ‘scarcity of silver coin’; the Gazetteer for 28 August 1762 says, ‘The distress of mankind, from the great scarcity of silver, grows every day more insupportable’; the Gentle- man’s Magazine had observed three years earlier, in March 1759, that ‘people who have numbers of workmen to pay frequently give 10s in £100 to supply themselves with silver coin’.

a draught upon him, payable at sight: instead of paying the Vicar in cash, Jenkinson has given him a formal, written order for payment of the money that is due to him that has been addressed to Solomon Flambor- ough; according to such a ‘draught’ or ‘draft’, Primrose should now be able to ‘draw on’ Flamborough as an individual who holds funds that have been set aside or are available for this purpose. He rightly admits within a

186 Explanatory Notes

very short period of time that it was foolish of him to have taken such a draft ‘from a stranger’.

1. a letter-case: such private letter-cases or letter books, in which an indi- vidual could keep, for their own reference, copies of any correspondence sent as well as materials for writing any new letters, or items such as visiting cards or covers, were relatively common in the period.
2. we shall have some rain by the shooting of my corns: see a letter on country superstitions in the Connoisseur, 59 (13 March 1755): ‘my aunt assured us it would be wet, she knew very well by the shooting of her corns’.
3. a jest book: collections in which amusing jokes or diverting stories were gathered and made available to the reader as his or her own bons mots were common; the material in some such collections could be bawdy.

An honest man is the noblest work of God: from Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man (1733–4), iv. 248: ‘An honest man’s the noblest work of God.’ Burchell is somewhat unusual in so vigorously criticizing Pope’s line as ‘hackney’d’; he is admittedly suggesting that the maxim was only a slip on Pope’s part, one that was, as he puts it, ‘very unworthy’ of a man of such genius.

tame correct paintings of the Flemish school . . . sublime animations of the Roman pencil: Mr Burchell evinces the common preference of the era. As Jeremy Black has observed: ‘Renaissance and later Italian paintings were valued greatly in Britain, where they were regarded as the best example of their art. The Italian school of painting was considered

superior to the Dutch school.’ See Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (London: Sutton Publishing, 1992), 261.

1. Don’t you know . . . hang you all up at his door: a great many new laws in the 1700s—collectively dubbed the ‘Bloody Code’ by some historians—would have looked upon the Primrose family’s treatment of Mr Burchell’s letter-case as a property crime potentially meriting the death penalty. The local ‘justice’ whose authority Mr Burchell invokes in this passage would have been the justice of the peace, whose office was charged with preserving the peace and apprehending and charging crim- inals. Ironically, the reader learns later in Goldsmith’s novel that this same office is held by no one other than Sir William Thornhill—alias ‘Mr Burchell’—himself (see p. 154).
2. piquet: (or picquet), ‘a card game played by two persons with a pack of 32 cards (the low cards from the two to the six being excluded), in which points are scored on various groups or combinations of cards, and on tricks’ (OED). The Vicar clearly considers piquet an appropriate game to be taught to his daughters.

sharp: used here to mean both rugged and quick-witted.

1. well knit: a term sometimes used by viticulturists and wine enthusiasts to describe the nature of a wine’s palate or taste; a wine can be described as

Explanatory Notes 187

‘well knit’ or ‘well integrated’ with reference to its structure or coherence, as opposed to ‘disjointed’, ‘unstructured’, or even ‘flabby’.

a limner: a picture-maker or, as here, more specifically, an itinerant painter of portraits.

drawn with seven oranges: the orange was occasionally used in such depic- tions as a symbol of fertility.

one large historical family piece: the Vicar’s desire that he and his family be depicted as ‘independent historical figures’ in ‘one large historical piece’ in fact results in a picture that is close to catastrophic in its wildly ana- chronistic depiction of discord and thematic incompatibility. As it stands completed, the oversized family portrait not only includes the inexplic- able depiction of the Vicar’s wife, as Venus, being presented by her husband with his (in this instance, in particular) radically inappropriate books on monogamy and the Whistonian controversy, but the equally arbitrary inclusion of the disconnected figures of Olivia, represented as an Amazon (see note, below), Sophia, as a shepherdess, and a nondescript Moses. The intrusion of the Squire as Alexander the Great (a historical figure whose rapacious desire for conquest can at least be connected with his own character in the novel) only suggests how foolish the family will prove to have been in permitting him to stand in a position of such intimacy in their household.

1. a stomacher: ‘an ornamental covering for the chest (often covered with jewels) worn by women under the lacing of the bodice’ (OED).

Amazon: in classical mythology, Amazons were a band of female warriors that lived on the edges of the known world.

a green joseph, richly laced with gold: a ‘joseph’—so called in allusion to the coat worn by the patriarch Joseph in Genesis 41: 48–57—was ‘a long cloak, worn chiefly by women in the eighteenth century when riding, and on other occasions; it was buttoned all the way down the front and had a small cape’ (OED).

encomiums: panegyrics or praises.

Crusoe’s long-boat, too large to be removed: the Vicar recalls a famous incident in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Having been stranded on his island for three years, Crusoe decides to craft a boat for himself. He embarks upon his undertaking ‘the most like a Fool, that ever Man did, who had any of his Sense awake’. Only after he has spent close to half a year on the project does Crusoe pause to calculate that it would take him a further ten to twelve years to dig the canal necessary to bring the boat (uphill) to the water. From this episode, Crusoe observes that he has learned a lesson with regard to ‘the Folly of beginning a Work before we count the Cost; and before we judge rightly of our own Strength to go through with it’. See Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Crowley, 126–7.

a reel in a bottle: like the more familiar ship in a bottle; an object ‘too large to be removed’ from the container in which it has been placed.

188 Explanatory Notes

72 warm: used here and in the discussion regarding farmer Williams that follows in the sense of ‘comfortably off, well to do; rich, affluent’ (OED).

1. Death and the Lady: an old ballad. Note the portrait of Goldsmith by Joshua Reynolds, in which he links the title with that of the two other ballads referred to in the novel (see p. 23 and note): ‘His favourite songs were Johnny Armstrong, Barbara Allen, and Death and the Lady. In sing- ing the last he endeavoured to humour the dialogue by looking very fierce and speaking in rough voice for Death, which he suddenly changed when he came to the lady’s part, putting on what he fancied to be a lady-like sweetness of countenance with a thin, shrill voice’ (Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. F. W. Hilles (London: Heinemann, 1952), 50).

the Dying Swan: the song is given in The Musical Miscellany; being a Collection of Choice Songs (1729–31), i. 110–12.

An elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog: Lonsdale speculates that this poem was originally written ‘between the summer of 1760 and the autumn of 1762’ during the early part of which period London ‘was seized with something of a panic about mad-dog bites’ which Goldsmith derided in his ‘Chinese Letters’ and reprinted as letters 29, 68, 69, and 75 of his Citizen of the World (1762). Noting that the context of the novel makes it clear that the Elegy was ‘once again satirizing contemporary elegies’, Londsale likewise notes that Goldsmith was particularly imitating for three stanzas (as he done throughout the earlier ‘An Elegy on that Glory of her Sex, Mrs Mary Blaze’) lines included in the French poet La Monnoye’s Menagiana (3rd edn. 1715) and Poésies (1716), the hero of which is ‘le fameux la Galisse, homme imaginaire’, and in which the last line of each verse stanza deflates the banality of the lines that have preceded it. See Lonsdale, 593–5.

1. Grograms: by placing this family name alongside those of ‘Blenkinsop’ and ‘Huginson’, Goldsmith appears pointedly to wish to draw attention to the fact that Deborah Primrose’s maiden name also designates ‘a coarse fabric of silk, of mohair and wool, or of these mixed with silk; often stiffened with gum’ (OED). The fourth name here—Marjoram—of course recollects the aromatic herb, the leaves of which are used in cooking.

Put the glass to your brother, Moses: i.e., raise your glass in a toast.

1. Ranelagh: one of the two most fashionable pleasure gardens in London in the Hanoverian era, the other being Vauxhall. Ranelagh was opened in Chelsea in 1742, and continued until its closure in 1803 to attract a distinctly more ‘aristocratic’ crowd than its counterpart on the south side of the Thames. Both pleasure gardens remained, for many, venues notori- ous for sexual assignations; even ‘respectable’ women were to some degree aware of the extent to which they were putting themselves on display when they paced around Ranelagh’s rotunda. It is a testament either to the Vicar’s complete innocence or to his complete folly that he

Explanatory Notes 189

declares that ‘there is not a place in the world where advice [regarding courtship and marriage] can be given with so much propriety as there’. In no circumstances would it be at all appropriate for him to praise Ranelagh, as he does here, as ‘an excellent market’ for potential wives.

Colin meets Dolly to get married as fast as they can: an anonymous

popular ‘Ranelagh song’ of this sort entitled ‘Colin and Dolly’ was included in the first volume of Clio and Euterpe, or British Harmony, published in London by Henry Roberts in 1758. The ballad narrative recounted by Moses here, however, more precisely recalls lines such as John Cunningham’s ‘Holiday Gown’, a version of which would be published in Newcastle in 1771.

Fontarabia: perhaps the allusion here is to the manner of securing hus- bands at Fontarabia employed by the girls operating the boats on ‘the river of Andaye’, described by the Comtesse d’Aulnoy in The Ingenious and Diverting Letters of the Lady——Travels into Spain (2nd edn. 1692; repr. London, 1899), 22: ‘When they are willing to marry, they go to Mass at Fontarabia, which is the nearest Town to ’em; and there the young Men come to chuse ’em Wives to their Humour.’

all the ladies of the Continent would come over: Peter Heylyn wrote of England: ‘it is acknowledged the Paradise of Women. And it is a common by-word among the Italians, that if there were a Bridge built over the Narrow Sea, all the Women of Europe would run into england’ (Cosmography, in Four Books: Containing the Chorography and History of the Whole World (London, 1670), 296–7). See also Edward Chamberlayne, Angliae Notitia; or, The Present State of England (London, 1671), i. 316.

1. a post chaise: a travelling carriage, further noted in the OED usually to have ‘a closed body’, and capable of seating as many as four individuals. The driver or postilion usually rode on one of the horses.
2. followed them to the races: race meetings were held all across the country in the eighteenth century, but the most celebrated racing took place at Newmarket in Cambridgeshire, where, by the middle of the century, the Jockey Club framed the rules for racing that were eventually adopted throughout England.
3. the philanthropic bookseller in St. Paul’s church-yard: Goldsmith’s friend and publisher, John Newbery (1713–67). See J. Rose, ‘John Newbery’, in

J. F. Bracken and J. Silver (eds.), The British literary Book Trade, 1700– 1820, Dictionary of Literary Biography series, 154 (1995), 216–28; Charles Welsh, A bookseller of the last century, being some account of the life of John Newbery (London, 1885).

the history of one Mr. Thomas Trip: ‘Thomas Tripp’s History of Birds and Beasts, 6d.’ appears in a list of children’s books advertised by Newberry in the Public Ledger for 28 December 1761.

Deuterogamists: ‘one who marries a second time, or who upholds second marriages’. This is the only example cited in OED.

190 Explanatory Notes

1. the Drydens and Otways of the day: the dramatists admired by the Vicar— John Dryden (1631–1700) and Thomas Otway (1625–85)—are dismissed by the player as old-fashioned. Dryden had dominated the theatrical world of the Restoration and late seventeenth century with tragedies such as Tyrannic Love (1669), Aurung Zebe (1675), and All For Love (1677). Otway’s two masterpieces, The Orphan (1680) and Venice Preserved (1682) were to remain stock pieces (in spite of what the player says here of his work being ‘quite out of fashion’) well into the nineteenth century.

Row . . . Fletcher . . . Johnson: Nicholas Rowe (1674–1718) enjoyed tremendous success in the early years of the century with his tragedies The Fair Penitent (1703) and Jane Shore (1715); John Fletcher (along with his frequent writing partner, Francis Beaumont) and Ben Jonson were both among those popular dramatists whose work rivalled Shakespeare on the early sixteenth-century stage.

1. Congreve and Farquhar . . . our modern dialect is much more natural: William Congreve (1670–1729) and George Farquhar (1677–1707), whose often elaborately ‘witty’ comedies had been the popular products of the late seventeenth-century stage.
2. in an easy deshabille: i.e., ‘dishabille’, from the French en déshabillé, mean- ing ‘the state of being partly undressed, or dressed in a negligent or careless style; undress’ (OED).

Monitor . . . Auditor: weekly periodical essays concerned with politics. The Monitor was founded by Alderman Beckford in 1755, and was opposed to the government of Lord Bute; the Auditor, founded seven years later by Arthur Murphy, was also in opposition to Bute. Friedman observes that the fact that the Auditor was published regularly only from 10 June 1762 until 16 May 1763 would suggest time limits for the composition or revision of this passage.

The Daily . . . the White-hall Evening: the newspapers mentioned are the Daily Advertiser, the Public Advertiser, the Public Ledger (to which Goldsmith contributed in 1760 and 1761), the London Chronicle, the London Evening Post, and the Whitehall Evening-Post.

the two reviews: the Monthly Review, to which Goldsmith contributed in 1757 and 1758, and the Critical Review, to which he contributed in 1759 and 1760.

by all my coal mines in Cornwall: the fact that his host twice swears by this oath should have alerted even the Vicar to his duplicity. Cornwall was well known for the mining not of coal, but of tin.

anotherguess manner: in another way, or a different manner of behaving.

1. Levellers: originally, a party among Cromwell’s soldiers who wished to level to an equality all distinctions of rank and property. By 1755, Johnson could confidently extend the term to refer to any individual ‘who destroys superiority’ or who ‘endeavours to bring all to the same state of equality’.

Explanatory Notes 191

1. a Cartesian system, each orb with a vortex of its own: according to the ‘Cartesian System’ or the theory of vortices advanced by the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) to account for the formation of and movement within the universe, space was filled with particles of subtle matter in various states, all of which matter was endowed with a rotary motion postulated as spinning around the sun.
2. in his family a tyrant: parallels for most of the political ideas in the Vicar’s long speech can be found in Goldsmith’s writings of 1760–2.
3. Wilkinson: the name is probably intended to suggest John Wilkes, to whose political principles Wilkinson’s bear a resemblance.

lie down to be saddled with wooden shoes: wooden shoes were in the eight- eenth century ‘popularly taken as typical of the miserable condition of the French peasantry’ (OED).

1. garden decorated in the modern manner: i.e., in the less formal and even

‘expressive’ and ‘natural’ manner of such landscape architects as Charles Bridgeman, William Kent, and—in the period in which Goldsmith was writing—Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown.

near three years absent: the Vicar’s assertion that his son George has been absent from the family for nearly three years is at odds with the chron- ology implied by the rest of the novel, according to which the narrative has by this point moved, roughly, only from spring to early winter.

the Fair Penitent the part of Horatio: Horatio is the friend of one of

the central male characters, Altamont, in Nicholas Rowe’s notorious ‘she-tragedy’, first acted at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1703. The Fair Penitent was one of the most popular plays of the century, and Goldsmith might with confidence have expected his readers to draw some possible connec- tions with Rowe’s heroine, Calista, who is seduced by the man she loves (Lothario) before being abandoned and forced to marry another (Altamont).

1. usher at an academy: taken by many to be a reminiscence of Goldsmith’s own experience as a tutor in Dr Milner’s school for nonconformists in Peckham in 1756, and again in 1758.
2. an anodyne necklace: the Anodyne Necklace, for the relief of teething infants, was sold—curiously enough—‘In long-acre, At Mr. Burchell’s, at the anodyne necklace’ (see, for example, the Public Advertiser for 6 July 1761). Friedman, apparently working on the notion that an ‘ano- dyne’ was a drug or medicine that soothed or assuaged pain, suggested that perhaps here ‘an anodyne necklace’ is used as slang for a hangman’s halter, which would at least bring misfortune to an end. The oath used by George’s cousin here may similarly indicate a willingness sooner to suc- cumb to the dubious nostrums and remedies of a ‘quack’ doctor than ever resume teaching in a school.

honest jogg trot men: straightforward men who go about their work in a humdrum or perfunctory manner.

192 Explanatory Notes

1. Propertius: Sextus Propertius (50–16 bce), with Ovid, one of the best known of the classical amatory and elegiac poets.

a Creolian . . . from Jamaica: an obsolete form of ‘Creole’, the name by which the British referred to ‘a person born and naturalized in the West Indies, but of European or of African descent’ (OED). The name did not carry any reference to skin tone or colour, but was used rather to dis- tinguish those who were born in Europe or Africa from the aboriginal peoples.

a dedication fee: the fee paid to or asked by a writer for having a work dedicated to a particular subscriber.

1. Philautos, Philalethes, Philelutheros, and Philanthropos: pseudonyms sup- posedly used by writers, meaning—respectively—Lover of Self, of Truth, of Other, and of Mankind. Cf. the preface to Essays by Mr. Goldsmith (1765): ‘If there be a pride in multiplied editions, I have seen some of my labours sixteen times reprinted, and claimed by different parents as their own. I have seen them . . . signed at the end with the names of Philautos, Philalethes, Philelutheros, and Philanthropos’ (Collected Works, iii. 1).
2. My business was to attend him at auctions . . . assist him at tattering a kip: it was fashionable for otherwise idle loungers of the upper class to pass the morning attending auctions. To ‘tatter’ meant to tear down or reduce to tatters, and a ‘kip’ was slang for a brothel, hence George has assisted Thornhill in ‘tearing down a brothel’ and generally helping to make mischief when he ‘had a mind for a frolic’.
3. her bully and a sharper: ‘bully’ was another term for ‘the “gallant” or protector of a prostitute; one who lives by protecting prostitutes’.
4. I found myself alone at his lordship’s gate: Friedman, in Collected Works (iv. 114), notes that A. Lytton Sells identified the source of the conclu- sion to this episode in the first paper of Marivaux’s Le Spectateur français.

nature . . . thrown by into her lumber room: ‘lumber’ was sometimes used as slang in the period for ‘a house or room . . . where stolen property is hidden; a house used by criminals’ (OED).

Mr. Cripse’s oflce: Friedman noted that a Mr Crisp actually conducted an employment office in London: ‘Wanted for North-America, a great Number of Tradesmen, such as House-Carpenters, Joyners, Masons, . . . and a great Number of young Women with their Friends Consent. . . .

Enquire at Crisp’s Office behind St. Lawrence’s Church, near Guildhall’. (Public Advertiser, 28 September 1761). Perhaps Goldsmith was willing to make free with Crisp’s character because in the first part of 1762, at about the time when Goldsmith was probably writing the novel, Crisp was in trouble with the law: ‘A few Days since Elizabeth Webb, a Girl of about Fifteen Years of Age, applying to an Office kept by one Crisp for a Service, was by him seduced, kidnapt, and put on board the Elizabeth lying at Gravesend, in Order for her Transportation to America; and

Explanatory Notes 193

Yesterday he being taken before the Right Hon. The Lord Mayor, was by his Lordship committed to the Poultry Compter [the prison at Poultry Street, in the City].—It was said by some Girls present, that he, not content with depriving them of their Liberty, used his utmost Efforts, by Promise of Money, &c. to seduce their Virtue’ (Public Advertiser, 29 April 1762).

1. Louvain: the university at Louvain, in what was then the Duchy of Brabant, was established in 1425 by John IV of the House of Burgundy and Pope Martin V. George’s experiences and disappointment at Louvain are in line with a decline in the reputation of the university in this period, when its programme of study and scholarship was perceived to be out-of-date.

like Æsop and his basket of bread: Herodotus informs us in his Histories (2. 134) that the historical Aesop was a slave who lived in the middle of the sixth century bce. One of the many fables attributed to him tells the story of an occasion on which his master, a merchant, intended to under- take a journey. Having requested that he might carry the lightest burden, Aesop took up the basket of bread. The other servants, at first scornfully pointing out that the basket he had chosen was the heaviest of them all, were later compelled to acknowledge the fabulist’s ingenuity when— having distributed the bread equally among the servants for dinner and then their later supper—they realized that Aesop’s burden had all but disappeared, while their own seemed to grow heavier with each step.

1. I resolved to go forward: George’s wanderings bear some close resem- blances to Goldsmith’s own tour of the Continent on foot in 1755. The nature and extent of the resemblances is confused, however, by the fact that some of Goldsmith’s earliest biographers put some of George’s exact words into Goldsmith’s mouth as things he said about himself.

intaglios: ‘figure[s] or design[s] incised or engraved; cutting[s] or engraving[s] in stone or other hard material’ (OED).

connoscento: i.e. cognoscente, ‘one who knows a subject thoroughly; a connoisseur: chiefly in reference to the fine arts’ (OED).

1. Pietro Perugino: Italian painter (1446–1524) whose work was particularly admired by a ‘cultivated’ eighteenth-century audience.
2. an ensign’s commission in one of the regiments that was going to the West Indies: Mr Thornhill has purchased for George Primrose a commission in the armed forces on the basis of a payment of £100; the Vicar has prom- ised to advance the remaining £200. The practice of selling commissions in the service in this manner continued until as late as 1871 (see W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army (London: Macmillan and Co., 1899), i. 316 ff.).
3. thy brave grandfather to die with Lord Falkland: Lucius Carey, second

Viscount Falkland (b. 1609/10) was killed in action in 1643, when fighting for the royalist cause at the battle of Newbury. If George’s grandfather

194 Explanatory Notes

died with him, and if the time of the action of the novel is supposed to be about 1761 or 1762 (the time the work was probably written), then the Vicar would have to be considerably over 100 years old.

107 the house is going out of the windows: proverbial phrase, meaning that everything is falling into confusion.

with a sassarara: alternatively, ‘with a siseray’, meaning ‘with a vengeance’; promptly, suddenly. This example is cited in OED.

110 you shall inform against him to-morrow: to ‘inform’ on someone in this sense meant to accuse them of a crime or wrongdoing; i.e., to act as an informant to the law.

114 ninety nine persons who have supported a course of undeviating rectitude: Goldsmith’s biblical references are to Matthew 18: 12–14 and Luke 15: 4–7, both of which relate versions of the parable of the lost sheep.

1. when lovely woman stoops to folly: reprinted in Lonsdale as ‘Song from The Vicar of Wakefield’, where the editor notes that the lines were ‘pre- sumably written before the autumn of 1762 when the MS of Vicar was sold to Newberry’. Lonsdale also comments that Austin Dobson, in his Complete Poetical Works (Oxford, 1906), had ‘objected to “the impropri- ety, and even inhumanity” of making the wretched girl sing such a song but [Goldsmith] and his audience, like the Primrose family, enjoyed the mood of soothing melancholy which it induced’. See Lonsdale, 595–6.
2. my steward talks of driving for the rent: i.e., the officer who manages Thornhill’s lands and household has been obliged to put pressure on the Vicar for prompt payment of the rent owed to the Squire.
3. Like one of those instruments . . . presents a point to receive the enemy: the Vicar compares his defiant attitude to that of a projectile missile used in war as a kind of weapon—such as a heavy metal ball or chuck—that is designed so as to be ‘pointed’ or dangerously studded in such a manner as to harm the enemy, regardless of the attitude in which it strikes.
4. He asked me if I had taken care to provide myself with a bed . . . never once attended to: prisoners in the Vicar’s position would actually have been compelled to pay extra for any amenities when imprisoned. Such pay- ment extended not only to a bed or to any food and drink beyond the simplest penny-loaf of bread and water, but to such items as sheets, candles, coals, and also to the privilege of entertaining any visitors.

Ton kosman aire, ei dos ton etairon; roughly, ‘Take the world, and with it you are given a companion’.

Welbridge: apparently a place of Goldsmith’s own invention.

1. a coiner: a counterfeiter.
2. turn sharper in my own defence: Jenkinson claims that he was compelled to become a ‘sharper’—a rogue and a swindler—only because people, judging him from his appearance, insisted that he must have been one in the first place.

Explanatory Notes 195

1. cribbage tobacco stoppers: cribbage is ‘a game at cards, played by two,

three, or four persons, with a complete pack of 52 cards, five (or six) of which are dealt to each player, and a board with sixty-one holes on which the points are scored by means of pegs; a characteristic feature being the “crib”, consisting of cards thrown out from each player’s hand, and belonging to the dealer’ (OED). Ironically, of course, given the context here, ‘cribbage’ also referred to anything that had been ‘cribbed’ or stolen. Tobacco stoppers are instruments used for tamping down loose tobacco in the bowl of a pipe, to be smoked.

cutting pegs for tobacconists and shoemakers: the Vicar sets his fellow prisoners to work fashioning the small pins of wood used by tobacconists and their customers to tamp tobacco into pipes or, later, cigarettes with series of light taps. Shoemakers used a slightly different sort of peg to fasten the ‘uppers’ of a shoe to the sole, or to fasten the ‘lifts’—the layers of leather used to form the heel—to each other.

1. the first transgressor upon the statute: such a statute is apparently a com- plete invention on the part of Goldsmith. A challenge to fight was found to be a misdemeanour, punishable with fine and imprisonment, only in 1851. See Earl Jowitt and Clifford Walsh (eds.), The Dictionary of English Law (London, 1959), i. 399.
2. much has been given man to enjoy, yet still more to suffer: Friedman draws attention in Collected Works (iv. 160) to the similarity between the Vicar’s sentiments here and those expressed in chapter XI of Johnson’s Rasselas: ‘The Europeans, answered Imlac, are less unhappy than we, but they are not happy. Human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.’

146 the poor man in the parable: the parable of Lazarus, as it is told in Luke 16: 20–5.

1. says a certain philosopher: Seneca, in his short ethical treatise De Providen- tia (On Providence), 2.6. One of ten such treatises, the work maintains that it is impossible for a good man truly to suffer in the hands of evil. Goldsmith’s library—at the time of his death—contained a complete set of the works of Seneca.
2. staked a counter: a counter was ‘an imitation coin of brass or inferior metal; a token used to represent real coin’ (OED). Hence ‘to stake a counter’ meant to make a wager with a counterfeit coin, to undertake a gamble with nothing ‘at stake’.

Sir William Thornhill: Oswald Doughty calls attention to the possible identification of Sir William Thornhill as Sir George Savile, MP for the county of York—an identification first made by Edward Ford in his art- icle ‘Names and Characters in The Vicar of Wakefield’, National Review (May 1883). Sir George Savile (1726–84), the eighth baronet Savile, was a politician. His main estate was at Rufford, Nottinghamshire, but, like his father, he pursued his parliamentary career in Yorkshire, where his seat

196 Explanatory Notes

was at Thornhill, near Dewsbury. He was best known for speaking out in favour of respecting the wishes of the voters in the matter of John Wilkes and the contested Middlesex election in 1769, and for his fierce oppos- ition to the punitive measures directed against the American colonies beginning in 1774. See John Cannon, ‘Savile, Sir George, eighth baronet (1726–1784)’, in the Oxford DNB, xlix. 107–9.

153 Pinwire of Newcastle: an athletically superior individual apparently of Goldsmith’s own invention, although his name—further suggestive of the ‘lengthy’ legs commented on by Sophia and the extremely lean phys- ique suitable for pre-eminence in activities such as sprinting and run- ning—recalls the descriptive nicknames often bestowed on those who dominated other sports in the period, such as those of the prizefighters Benjamin (‘Big Ben’) Bryan or Brain, Bill (‘the Tinman’) Hooper, or the otherwise unidentified ‘Fighting Grenadier’ who was defeated by Brain in Bloomsbury in 1786.

156 equitable: fair or technically in accordance with equity, if not exactly just or—as Sir William puts it—‘generous’.

a candidate for Tyburn: someone likely to be hanged.

161 The articles, and a bond for her fortune, are signed, and safe in my possession: i.e., the articles of marriage. The development in the mid-eighteenth cen- tury—signalled most notably by Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act in 1753—of parliamentary civil laws that transferred the authority govern- ing the regulations of marriage to the central government, although pri- marily concerned with the outlawing of clandestine marriages as well as marriages entered into without parental consent by persons under the age of 21, in fact helped to give husbands even greater control of their wives’ properties. Squire Thornhill, as his uncle immediately acknowledges, would consequently, under those stricter laws governing marriage settle- ments in the period, legally already have secured for himself the entirety of Miss Wilmot’s ‘large fortune’.

1. stiver: used generally to refer to any small coin of little value; a small quantity of anything, a ‘bit’; ‘not a stiver’ means ‘not one single bit’.

a tobacco stopper: see note to p. 132.

squibs: the term squib was occasionally used in the mid-eighteenth century to signify ‘a mean, insignificant, or paltry fellow’ (OED), although it more commonly referred to any firework or small explosive device that terminated in a slight or annoying rather than dangerous explosion. In either case, Thornhill means to signify that he is beyond such petty tricks.

1. And shook their chains | In transport and rude harmony: from William Congreve’s tragedy, The Mourning Bride (1697), Act I, scene ii.
2. made an honest woman of: Judith Siefring (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), s.v. ‘honest’, notes that the phrase make an honest woman of was already, by this time, ‘dated and

Explanatory Notes 197

humorous’, and meant to marry a woman, ‘especially to avoid scandal if she is pregnant’. For the level of usage of this phrase see Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, bk. XV, ch. viii: ‘Miss Nancy was, in vulgar language, made an honest woman’; Richardson, The History of Sir Charles Grandison (5th edn., 1766), iv. 251: ‘The Lord grant that he

may be obliged to make a ruined girl an honest woman, as they phrase

it in lancashire.’

The 3 Mistakes of My Life

A Story about Business, Cricket and Religion

Chetan Bhagat

Rupa & Co

Acknowledgements

My readers, you that is, to whom I owe all my success and motivation. My life belongs to you now, and serving you is the most meaningful thing I can do with my life. I want to share something with you. I am very ambitious in my writing goals. However, I don’t want to be India’s most admired writer. I just want to be India’s most loved writer. Admiration passes, love endures.

To Shinie Antony, a friend who has been with me all these years and who critically reviews my work and ensures that it is fit for my reader’s consumption. My family, which continues to support me in all my ventures. Specially, my brother Ketan Bhagat for his critical feedback from Sydney and cricket freak brother-in-law Anand Suryanaryan who told me more about cricket than anyone else would have.

The people of Gujarat, in particular Ahmedabad, where I spent some of the most wonderful and formative years of my life.

My publishers Rupa and Co, who have fulfilled all my dreams and continue to pursue the goal of making India read.

My friends in the film industry, who have given me a new platform to tell my stories from, and who teach me new things everyday, in particular Atul Agnihotri, Raju Hirani, Alvira Khan, Sharman Joshi, Vipul Shah, Imtiaz Ali, Shirish Kunder, Farah Khan and Salman Khan.

The Madras Players and Evam Theatre Group, who turned my stories into wonderful plays.

My friends in the media, especially those who have understood my intentions for my country and are with me.

My colleagues at Deutsche Bank, my friends in Mumbai and Hong Kong. God, who continues to look after me despite my flaws.

Prologue

It is not everyday you sit in front of your computer on a Saturday morning and get an email like this:

From: Ahd_businessman@gmail.com Sent: 12/28/2005 11.40 p.m. To: info@chetanbhagat.com

Subject: A final note

Dear Chetan

This email is a combined suicide note and a confession letter. I have let people down and have no reason to live. You don’t know me. I’m an ordinary boy in Ahmedabad who read your books. And somehow I felt I could write to you after that. I can’t really tell anyone what I am doing to myself – which is taking a sleeping pill everytime I end a sentence – so I thought I would tell you.

I kept my coffee cup down and counted. Five full stops already

I made three mistakes; I don’ t want to go into details.

My suicide is not a sentimental decision. As many around me know, I am a good businessman because I have little emotion. This is no knee-jerk reaction. I waited over three years, watched Ish’s silent face everyday. But after he refused my offer yesterday, I had no choice left.

I have no regrets either. Maybe I’d have wanted to talk to Vidya once more – but that doesn’t seem like such a good idea right now.

Sorry to bother you with this. But I felt like I had to tell someone. You have ways to improve as an author but you do write decent books. Have a nice weekend.

Regards Businessman

17, 18, 19. Somewhere, in Ahmedabad a young ‘ordinary’ boy had popped nineteen sleeping pills while typing out a mail to me. Yet, he expected me to have a nice weekend. The coffee refused to go down my throat. I broke into a cold sweat.

‘One, you wake up late. Two, you plant yourself in front of the computer first thing in the morning. Are you even aware that you have a family?’ Anusha said. In case it isn’t obvious enough from the authoritative tone, Anusha is my wife.

I had promised to go furniture shopping with her – a promise that was made ten weekends ago.

She took my coffee mug away and jiggled the back of my chair. ‘We need dining chairs. Hey, you look worried?’ she said.

I pointed to the monitor.

`Businessman?’ she said as she finished reading the mail. She looked pretty shaken up too.

And it is from Ahmedabad,’ I said, ‘that is all we know.’ `You sure this is real?’ she said, a quiver in her voice. `This is not spam,’ I said. `It is addressed to me.’

My wife pulled a stool to sit down. I guess we really did need write extra chairs.

`Think,’ she said. `We’ve got to let someone know. His parents maybe.’

`How? I don’t know where the hell it came from,’ I said. And who do we know in Ahmedabad?’

`We met in Ahmedabad, remember?’ Anusha said. A pointless statement, I thought. Yes, we’d been classmates at IIM-A years ago. ‘So?’

`Call the institute. Prof Basant or someone,’ she sniffed and left the room. ‘Oh no, the daal is burning.’

There are advantages in having a wife smarter than you. I could never be a detective.

I searched the institute numbers on the Internet and called. An operator connected me to Prof Basant’s residence. I checked the time, 10.00 a.m. in Singapore,

7.30 a.m. in India. It is a bad idea to mess with a prof early in the morning.

`Hello?’ a sleepy voice answered. Had to be the prof.

`Prof Basant, Hi. This is Chetan Bhagat calling. Your old student, remember?’

`Who?’ he said with a clear lack of curiosity in his voice. Bad start.

I told him about the course he took for us, and how we had voted him the friendliest professor in the campus. Flattery didn’t help much either.

‘Oh that Chetan Bhagat,’ he said, like he knew a million of them. You are a writer now, no?’

‘Yes sir,’ I said, ‘that one.’

‘So why are you writing books?’ ‘Tough question, sir,’ I stalled.

‘Ok, a simple one. Why are you calling me so early on a Saturday?’ I told him why and forwarded the email to him.

‘No name, eh?’ he said as he read the mail.

‘He could be in a hospital somewhere in Ahmedabad. He would have just checked in. Maybe he is dead. Or maybe he is at home and this was a hoax,’ I said.

I was blabbering. I wanted help – for the boy and me. The prof had asked a good question. Why the hell did I write books – to get into this?

‘We can check hospitals,’ Prof said. ‘I can ask a few students. But a name surely helps. Hey wait, this boy has a Gmail account, maybe he is on Orkut as well.’

‘Or-what?’ Life is tough when you are always talking to people smarter than

you.

‘You are so out of touch, Chetan. Orkut is a networking site. Gmail users sign up there. If he is a member and we are lucky, we can check his profile.’

I heard him clicking keys and sat before my own PC. I had just reached the Orkut site when Prof Basant exclaimed, ‘Aha, Ahmedabad Businessman. There is a brief profile here. The name only says G. Patel. Interests are cricket, business, mathematics and friends. Doesn’t seem like he uses Orkut much though.’

‘What are you talking about Prof Basant? I woke up to a suicide note, written exclusively to me. Now you are telling me about his hobbies. Can you help me or…’

A pause, then, ‘I will get some students. We will search for a new young patient called G. Patel, suspected of sleeping pill overdose. We will call you if we find anything, ok?

‘Yes, sir,’ I said, breathing properly after a long time.

‘And how is Anusha? You guys bunked my classes for dates and flow forget

me.’

‘She is fine, sir.’

‘Good, I always felt she was smarter than you. Anyway, let’s find your boy,’

the prof said and hung up.

Besides furniture shopping, I had to finish an office presentation. My boss, Michel’s boss was due from New York. Hoping to impress him Michel asked me to make a presentation of the group, with fifty charts. For three consecutive nights last week I had worked until 1:00 a.m., but had gotten only halfway.

‘This is a suggestion. Don’t take it the wrong way. But do consider taking a bath,’ my wife said.

I looked at her.

‘Just an option,’ she said.

I think she is overcautious sometimes. I don’t bite back. ‘Yes, yes. I will,’ I said and stared at the computer again.

Thoughts darted through my head. Should I call some hospitals myself? What if Prof Basant dozed off again? What if he could not collect the students? What if G. Patel was dead? And why am I becoming so involved here?

I took a reluctant shower. I opened the office presentation, but found myself unable to type a single word.

I refused breakfast, though regretted it moments later – as hunger and anxiety did not go well together.

My phone rang at 1.33 p.m.

`Hello,’ Prof Basant’s voice was unmistakable. ‘We have a match at Civil Hospital. His name is Govind Patel, twenty-five years of age. A second-year student of mine found him.’

‘And?’

‘And he is alive. But won’t talk. Even to his family. Must be in shock.’ ‘What are the doctors saying?’ I said.

‘Nothing. It is a government hospital. What do you expect? Anyway, they will flush his stomach and send him home. I won’t worry too much now. Will ask a student to check again in the evening.’

‘But what is his story? What happened?’

All that I don’t know. Listen, don’t get too involved. India is a big country. These things happen all the time. The more you probe, the more the chances of the police harassing you.’

Next, I called the Civil Hospital. However, the operator did not know about the case and there was no facility to transfer the line to the ward either.

Anusha, too, was relieved that the boy was safe. She then announced the plan for the day – the dining chair hunt. It would begin at Ikea on Alexandra Road.

We reached Ikea at around three o’clock and browsed through the space-saving dining sets. One dining table could fold four times over and become a coffee table – pretty neat.

‘I want to know what happened to the twenty-five-year-old businessman,’ I muttered.

‘You will find out eventually. Let him recover. Must be one of those crazy reasons of youth – rejection in love, low marks or drugs.’ I stayed silent.

‘C’mon, he just emailed you. Your ID is on your book cover. You really don’t need to get involved. Should we take six or eight?’ She moved towards an oak-wood set.

I protested that we rarely had so many guests at home. Six chairs would be enough.

‘The marginal capacity utilisation of the two chairs would be less than ten per cent,’ I said.

‘You men are least helpful,’ she tossed back and then selected six chairs. My mind strayed back to the businessman.

Yes, everyone was right. I shouldn’t get involved. But yet, of all the people in the world, this boy had sent me his last words. I couldn’t help but get involved.

We ate lunch in the food court next to Ikea.

‘I have to go,’ I told my wife as I played with my lemon rice. ‘Where? To the office. Ok, you are a free man now. I did my shopping,’ my wife said.

‘No. I want to go to Ahmedabad. I want to meet Govind Patel.’ I did not meet her eye. Maybe I was sounding crazy.

‘Are you nuts?’

I think it is only in my generation that Indian women started slamming their husbands.

‘My mind keeps going back,’ I said.

‘What about your presentation? Michel will kill you.’

‘I know. He won’t get promoted unless he impresses his boss.’ My wife looked at me. My face was argument enough. She knew I would not talk sense until I had met the boy.

‘Well, there is only one direct flight at 6 p.m. today. You can check the tickets.’ She dialled the Singapore Airlines number and handed me the phone.

I entered the room the nurses had led me to. The eerie silence and the darkness made my footsteps sound loud. Ten different instruments beeped and LED lights flickered at regular intervals. Cables from the instruments disappeared into the man I had travelled thousands of miles to see – Govind Patel.

I noticed the curly hair first. He had a wheatish complexion and bushy eyebrows. His thin lips had turned dry because of the medicines.

`Hi, Chetan Bhagat … the writer you wrote to,’ I said, unsure if he could place me.

`O … How did … you find me?’ he said, finding it difficult to speak.

`Destined to, I guess,’ I said.

I shook hands and sat down. His mother came into the room. She looked so sleep-deprived, she could use a sleeping pill herself. I greeted her as she went out to get tea.

I looked at the boy again. I had two instant urges – one, to ask him what happened and two, to slap him.

`Don’t look at me like that,’ he said, shifting in his bed, ‘you must be angry.

Sorry, I should not have written that mail.’

‘Forget the mail. You should not have done what you did.’

He sighed. He took a hard look at me and then turned his gaze sideways.

`I have no regrets,’ he said.

`Shut up. There is nothing heroic in this. Cowards pop pills.’ `You would have done the same, if you were in my place.’ `Why? What happened to you?’

`It doesn’t matter!

We fell silent as his mother returned with tea. A nurse came in and told his mother to go home, but she refused to budge. Finally, the doctor had to intervene.

She left at 11.30 p.m. I stayed in the room, promising the doctor I would leave soon.

`So, tell me your story,’ I said, once we were alone.

`Why? What can you do about it? You can’t change what happened,’ he said tiredly.

`You don’t just listen to stories to change the past. Sometimes, it is important to know what happened.’

`I am a businessman. To me, people only do things out of self-interest.

What’s in it for you? And why should I waste my time telling you anything?’

I stared at the soft-skinned face that hid such hardness inside. `Because I will want to tell others,’ I said. There, that was my incentive.

And why would anyone care? My story is not trendy or sexy like the IITs and call centres.’

He removed the quilt covering his chest. The heater and our conversation kept the room warm.

`I think they will care,’ I said, ‘a young person tried to kill himself. That does not seem right.’

`No one gives a fuck about me.’

I tried, but found it difficult to be patient. I considered slapping him again.

`Listen,’ I said, pitching my voice to the maximum allowed in a hospital. ‘You chose to send your last mail to me. That means at a certain level you trusted me. I located you and flew out within hours of your mail. You still question if I care? And now this cocky attitude, this arrogance is part of your business? Can’t you talk to me like a friend? Do you even know what a friend is?’

A nurse came peeking into the room on hearing my loud voice. We became quiet. The clock showed midnight.

He sat there stunned. Everyone had behaved nicely with him today. I stood up and turned away from him.

‘I know what a friend is,’ he said at last. I sat down next to him.

‘I do know what a friend is. Because I had two, the best ones in the world.’

One

India vs South Africa 4th ODI, Vadodra

17 March 2000

Over 45

`Why the fuck did you have to move?’ Ishaan’s scream drowned out the stadium din on the TV. I had shifted up to a sofa from the floor.

`Huh?’ I said. We were in Ishaan’s house — Ishaan, Omi and I. Ishaan’s mom had brought in tea and khakra for us. ‘It is more comfortable to snack on the sofa. That is why I moved.’

`Tendulkar’s gone. Fuck, now at this stage. Omi, don’t you dare move now.

Nobody moves for the next five overs.’

I looked at the TV. We were chasing 283 to win. India’s score a ball ago was 256-2 after forty-five overs. Twenty-seven runs in five overs, with eight wickets to spare and Tendulkar on the crease. A cakewalk. The odds were still in India’s favour, but Tendulkar was out. And that explained the frowns on Ishaan’s forehead.

‘The khakra’s crispy,’ Omi said. Ishaan glared at Omi, chiding him for his shallow sensory pleasure in a moment of national grief. Omi and I kept our tea cups aside and looked suitably mournful.

The crowd clapped as Tendulkar made his exit. Jadeja came to the crease and added six more runs. End of forty-six overs, India 262/3. Twenty-one more runs to win in four overs, with seven wickets in hand.

Over 46

‘He made 122. The guy did his job. Just a few final closing shots left. Why are you getting so worked up?’ I asked during a commercial break. I reached for my tea cup, but Ishaan signalled me to leave it alone. We were not going to indulge until the fate of the match was decided. Ishaan was pissed with us anyway. The match was in Vadodra, just two hours away from Ahmedabad. But we could not go – one, because we didn’t have money, and two, because I had my correspondence exams in two days. Of course, I had wasted the whole day watching the match on TV instead, so reason number two did not really hold much weight.

‘It is 5.25 runs required per over,’ I said, not able to resist doing a mathematical calculation. That is one reason I like cricket, there is so much maths in it.

‘You don’t know this team. Tendulkar goes, they panic. It isn’t about the average. It is like the queen bee is dead, and the hive loses order,’ Ishaan said.

Omi nodded, as he normally does to whatever Ishaan has to say about cricket. ‘Anyway, I hope you realise, we didn’t meet today to see this match. We have to

decide what Mr Ishaan is doing about his future, right?’ I said.

Ishaan had always avoided this topic ever since he ran away from NDA a year ago. His dad had already sarcastically commented, ‘Cut a cake today to celebrate one year of your uselessness.’

However, today I had a plan. I needed to sit them down to talk about our lives.

Of course, against cricket, life is second priority.

‘Later,’ Ishaan said, staring avidly at a pimple cream commercial.

‘Later when Ishaan? I have an idea that works for all of us. We don’t have a lot of choice, do we?’

‘All of us? Me, too?’ Omi quizzed, already excited. Idiots like him love to be part of something, anything. However, this time we needed Omi.

‘Yes, you play a critical role Omi. But later when Ish? When?’

‘Oh, stop it! Look, the match is starting. Ok, over dinner. Let’s go to Gopi,’ Ish said.

‘Gopi? Who’s paying?’ I was interrupted as the match began.

Beep, beep, beep. The horn of a car broke our conversation. A car zoomed outside the pol.

‘What the hell! I am going to teach this bastard a lesson,’ Ish said, looking out the window.

‘What’s up?’

‘Bloody son of a rich dad. Comes and circles around our house everyday’ ‘Why?’ I said.

‘For Vidya. He used to be in coaching classes with her. She complained about him there too,’ Ish said.

Beep, beep, beep, the car came near the house again.

‘Damn, I don’t want to miss this match,’ Ish said as he saw India hit a four. Ish picked up his bat. We ran out the house. The silver Esteem circled the pol and came back for another round of serenading. Ish stood in front of the car and asked the boy to stop. The Esteem halted in front of Ish. Ish went to the driver, an adolescent.

‘Excuse me, your headlight is hanging out.’

‘Really?’ the boy said and shut off the ignition. He stepped outside and came to the front.

Ish grabbed the boy’s head from behind and smashed his face into the bonnet. He proceeded to strike the headlight with his bat. The glass broke and the bulb hung out.

‘What’s your problem,’ the boy said, blood spurting out of his nose. ‘You tell me what’s up? You like pressing horns?’ Ish said.

Ish grabbed his collar and gave six non-stop slaps across his face. Omi picked up the bat and smashed the windscreen. The glass broke into a million pieces. People on the street gathered around as there is nothing quite as entertaining as a street fight.

The boy shivered in pain and fear. What would he tell his daddy about his broken car and face?

Ish’s dad heard the commotion and came out of the house. Ish held the boy in an elbow lock. The boy was struggling to breathe.

‘Leave him,’ Ish’s dad said. Ish gripped him tighter.

‘I said leave him,’ Ish’s dad shouted, ‘what’s going on here?’

‘He has been troubling Vidya since last week,’ Ish said. He kicked the boy’s face with his knee and released him. The boy kneeled on the floor and sucked in air. The last kick from Ish had smeared the blood from his nose across his face.

‘And what do you think you are doing?’ Ish’s dad asked him.

‘Teaching him a lesson,’ Ish said and unhooked his bat stuck in the windscreen.

‘Really, when will you learn your lessons?’ Ish’s dad said to him. Ish turned away.

‘You go now,’ Ish’s dad said to the beeping driver, who folded his hands. Seeing that no one cared about his apology, he trudged back to his car.

Ish’s dad turned to his neighbours. ‘For one whole year he’s been sitting at home. Ran away from the army of his own country and then wants to teach lessons to others! He and his loafer friends hanging around the house all day long.’

One sidelong glance at his dad and Ish walked back home. ‘Where the hell are you going now?’ Ish’s dad said.

‘Match. Why? You want to curse me some more?’ Ish said.

‘When you’ve wasted your entire life, what’s another day?’ Ish’s father said and the neighbours half-nodded their heads in sympathy.

We missed the final five overs of the match. Luckily, India won and Ish didn’t get that upset.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ Ishaan jumped. ‘Gopi on me tonight.’ I love idiots.

Actually, Ishaan is not an idiot. At least not as much as Omi. It is just that both of them suck at studies, especially maths, and I am good at it. Hence, I have this chip on my shoulder. It does sound a bit conceited, but it is the only chip on my shoulder. For instance, I am easily the poorest of the three (though I will be the richest one day), even though Ishaan and Omi aren’t particularly wealthy. Ishaan’s dad works in the telephone exchange, and while they have lots of phones in the house, the salary is modest. Omi’s dad is the priest of the Swamibhakti temple, which actually belongs to Omi’s mom’s family for generations. And that does not pay well either. But still, they are a lot better off than me and my mom. My mom runs a small Gujarati snacks business, and the little bit of money I make from tuitions helps us get by, but that’s about it.

‘We won, we won the series 3-1,’ Omi repeated what he read on the TV screen. Of course, it would have been too much for him to express such original insight. Some say Omi was born stupid, while some say he became stupid after a cork ball hit him on the head in Class VI. I didn’t know the reason, but I did know that maybe the best idea for him would be to become a priest. He wouldn’t have much of a career otherwise, given that he barely scraped through Class XII, after repeating the maths compartment exam twice. But he didn’t want to be a priest, so my plan was the best one.

I ate the khakra. My mother made it better than Ishaan’s mom. We were professionals after all.

‘I’ll go home to change and then we will go to Gopi, ok?’ I said as Ishaan and Omi were still dancing. Dancing after an Indian victory was a ritual we had started when we were eleven, one that should have stopped by thirteen. However, here we were at twenty-one, jigging like juveniles. Ok, so we won, someone had to. In mathematical terms, there was a pretty good probability – did it really need jumping around?



I walked back home.

The narrow lanes of the old city were bustling with the evening crowd. My house and Ishaan’s were only half a kilometre apart. Everything in my world fell between this distance. I passed by the Nana Park, extra packed with kids playing

cricket as India had won the match. I played here almost every day of my school life.

We still come here sometimes, but now we prefer the abandoned bank branch compound near my home.

A tennis ball landed at my feet. A sweaty twelve-year-old boy came running to me. I picked up the ball for him. Nana Park is where I had first met Ishaan and Omi, over fifteen years ago. There was no dramatic moment that marked the start of our friendship. Maybe we sized each other up as the only six-year-olds in the ground and started playing together.

Like most neighbourhood kids, we went to the Belrampur Municipal School, hundred metres down Nana Park. Of course, only I studied while Ish and Omi ran to the park at every opportunity.

Three bicycles tried to overtake each other in the narrow by lane. I had to step inside Qazi restaurant to let them pass. A scent of fried coriander and garlic filled the narrow room. The cook prepared dinner, a bigger feast than usual as India had won the match. Ishaan and I came here sometimes (without telling Omi, of course) for the cheap food and extraordinary mutton. The owner assured us ‘small mutton’, implying goat and not beef. I believed him, as he would not have survived in the neighbourhood if he served beef. I wanted to eat here instead of Gopi. But we had promised Gopi to Omi, and the food was fantastic there as well. Food is a passion here, especially as Gujarat is a dry state. People here get drunk on food.

Yes, Ahmedabad is my city. It is strange, but if you have had happy times in a city for a long time, you consider it the best city in the world. I feel the same about Ahmedabad. I know it is not one of those hip cities like Delhi, Bombay or Bangalore. I know people in these cities think of Ahmedabad as a small town, though that is not really the case. Ahmedabad is the sixth largest city in India, with a population of over five million. But I guess if you have to emphasise the importance of something, then it probably isn’t as important in the first place. I could tell you that Ahmedabad has better multiplexes than Delhi or nicer roads than Bombay or better restaurants than Bangalore – but you will not believe me. Or even if you do, you won’t give a damn. I know Belrampur is not Bandra, but why should I defend being called a small-town-person as if it is a bad thing? A funny thing about small towns is that people say it is the real India. I guess they do acknowledge that at one level the India of the big cities is fake. Yes, I am from the old city of Amdavad and proud of it. We don’t have as many fashion shows and we still like our women to wear clothes. I don’t see anything wrong with that.

I stepped out of Qazi and continued my way home, turning in the pol towards Omi’s temple. Of course, we called it Omi’s temple because he lived there, but the official name was the Swamibhakti temple. As I entered the by lane, two people fought over garbage disposal around the crammed pol.

There are things about my small town neighbourhood that I want to change. In some ways, it is way behind the rest of Ahmedabad. For one, the whole old city could be a lot cleaner. The new city across the other side of the Sabarmati river has gleaming glass and steel buildings, while the old city finds it difficult to get rubbish cleared on time.

I want to change another thing. I want to stop the gossip theories people come up with about other people. Like the theory about Omi becoming stupid because a cricket ball hit him. There is no basis for it, but every pol in Belrampur talks

about it. Or the theory that Ish was thrown out of NDA and did not run away. I know for a fact that it is not true. Ish cannot handle unquestioned authority, and even though he was really excited about the army (which was his only option), he could not stand some Major ordering him around for the next two decades of his life. So he paid the penalty, cited personal reasons like ailing parents or something and ran right back to Belrampur.

And of course, what I want to stop the most – the weirdest theory that I became emotionless the day dad left us. Dad left mom and me over ten years ago, for we found out he had a second wife across town. As far as I can remember, I was never good with emotional stuff. I love maths, I love logic and those subjects have no place for emotion. I think human beings waste too much time on emotions. The prime example is my mother. Dad’s departure was followed by months of crying with every lady in every pol coming down to sympathise with her. She spent another year consulting astrologers as to which planet caused dad to move out, and when would that position change. Thereafter, a string of grandaunts came to live with her as she could not bring herself to stay alone. It wasn’t until I turned fifteen and understood how the world worked that I could coax her into opening the snacks business. Of course, my coaxing was part of it, the rest of it was that all her jewellery was officially sold by then.

Her snacks were great, but she was no businessman. Emotional people make terrible businessmen. She would sell on credit and buy on cash – the first mistake a small business can make. Next, she would keep no accounts. The home spending money was often mixed with the business money, and we frequently had months where the choice was to buy either rice for our consumption or black pepper for the papads.

Meanwhile, I studied as much as I could. Our school was not Oxford, and emphasis on studies was low with more teachers bunking classes than students. Still, I topped maths every single year. People thought I was gifted when I hit a hundred in maths in class X. For me, it was no big deal. For once, the gossip vine helped. The news of my score spread across pols, and we had a new source of income – tuitions. I was the only maths tutor in Belrampur, and bad maths scores had reached epidemic proportions. Along with khaman and khakra, trigonometry and algebra became sources of income in the Patel household. Of course, it was a poor neighbourhood, so people could not pay much. Still, another thousand bucks a month was a lifestyle changing event for us. From fan, we graduated to cooler. From chairs, we went to a secondhand sofa. Life became good.

I reached Omi’s temple. The loud rhythmic chime of the bell interrupted my thoughts. I checked my watch, it was 6 p.m., the daily aarti time. I saw Omi’s dad from a distance, his eyes closed as he chanted the mantras. Even though I was an agnostic, there was something amazing about his face – it had genuine feeling for the God he prayed to. No wonder he was among the most liked people in the community. Omi’s mother was beside him, her maroon saree draped along her head and hands folded. Next to her was Bittoo Mama, Omi’s maternal uncle. He was dressed in a white dhoti and saffron scarf. His huge biceps seemed even larger with his folded hands. His eyes, too, were transfixed in genuine admiration for the idols of Krishna and Radha.

Omi would get into trouble for reaching the aarti late. It would not be the first time though, as matches in Nana Park were at a crucial stage around 6 p.m.



‘How was the match?’ mom said as I reached home. She stood outside the house.

She had just finished loading a hired auto with fresh dhokla for a marriage party. Finally, my mother could delegate routine tasks like delivery and focus on her core competence – cooking. She took out a dhokla piece from the auto for me. Bad business – snucking out something from a customer order.

‘Great match. Nail-biting finish, we won,’ I said, walking in.

I switched on the tubelight inside. The homes in our pol required light even during daytime.

‘If I have a good Diwali season, I will get you a colour TV,’ mom vowed.

‘No need,’ I said. I removed my shoes to get ready for a shower, ‘you need a bigger grinder urgently, the small one is all wobbly’

‘I will buy the TV if only the business makes extra money,’ she said.

‘No. If you make extra money, put it back in the business. Don’t buy useless things. I can always see the match in colour in Ishaan’s house.’

She left the room. My mother knew it was futile arguing with me. Without dad around, it was amazing how much say I had in the house. And I only hoped Ish and Omi would listen to my proposition as well.

My love for business began when I first started tuitions. It was amazing to see money build up. With money came not only things like coolers and sofas but also the most important stuff – respect. Shopkeepers no longer avoided us, relatives re- invited us to weddings and our landlord’s visit did not throw us into turmoil. And then there was the thrill – I was making money, not earning it under some boss or getting a handout. I could decide my fate, how many students to teach, how many hours per class – it was my decision.

There is something about Gujaratis, we love business. And Ambadadis love it more than anything else. Gujarat is the only state in India where people tend to respect you more if you have a business than if you are in service. The rest of the country dreams about a cushy job that gives a steady salary and provides stability. In Ahmedabad, service is for the weak. That was why I dreamt my biggest dream – to be a big businessman one day. The only hitch was my lack of capital. But I would build it slowly and make my dream come true. Sure, Ish could not make his dream of being in the Indian cricket team real, but that was a stupid dream to begin with. To be in the top eleven of a country of a billion people was in many ways an impossible dream, and even though Ish was top class in Belrampur, he was no Tendulkar. My dream was more realistic, I would start slow and then grow my business. From a turnover of thousands, to lakhs, to crores and then to hundreds of crores.

I came out of the shower and dressed again.

“Want to eat anything?’ my mother voiced her most quoted line from the kitchen.

‘No, I am going out with Ish and Omi to Gopi.’

‘Gopi? Why? I make the same things. What do you get at Gopi that I can’t give you at home?’

Peace and quiet, I wanted to say.

‘It’s Ish’s treat. And I want to talk to them about my new business.’

‘So you are not repeating the engineering entrance,’ my mother came out of the kitchen. She raised dough-covered hands, ‘You can take a year to prepare. Stop taking tuitions for a while, we have money now.’

My mother felt guilty about a million things. One of them was me not making it to a good engineering college. Tuitions and supporting my mom’s business meant I could study less for the entrance exams. I didn’t make it to IIT or any of the top institutes.

I did make it to a far-flung college in Kutch, but it wasn’t worth

it to leave my tuition income, friends, cricket at Nana Park and mom for that. Not that I felt any emotion, it just did not seem like the right trade. I could do maths honours right here in Amdavad University, continue tuitions and think about business. The Kutch college did not even guarantee a job.

‘I don’t want to be an engineer, mom. My heart is in business. Plus, I have already done two years of college. One more and I will be a graduate.’

‘Yes, but who gives a job to a maths graduate?’

It was true. Maths honours was a stupid course to take from an economic point of view.

‘It is ok. I needed a degree and I can get it without studying much,’ I said. ‘I am a businessman, mom. I can’t change that.’

My mother pulled my cheeks. Chunks of dough stuck to my face.

‘Be whatever. You are always my son first.’ She hugged me. I hated it. I hate a display of emotion more than emotion itself. ‘I better go.’



That is your tenth chapatti,’ Ish told Omi.

‘Ninth. Who cares? It is a buffet. Can you pass the ghee please?’ ‘All that food. It has to be bad for you,’ Ish said.

‘Two hundred push-ups.’ Omi said. ‘Ten rounds of Nana Park. One hour at Bittoo Mama’s home gym. You do this everyday like me and you can hog without worry.’

People like Omi are no-profit customers. There is no way Gopi could make money off him.

‘Aamras, and ras malai. Thanks,’ Omi said to the waiter. Ish and I nodded for the same.

‘So, what’s up? I’m listening,’ Ish said as he scooped up the last spoon of aamras.

‘Eat your food first. We’ll talk over tea,’ I said. People argued less on a full stomach.

‘I am not paying for tea. My treat is limited to a thali,’ Ishaan protested. ‘I’ll pay for the tea,’ I said.

‘Relax, man. I was only joking. Mr Accounts can’t even take a joke. Right, Omi?’ Omi laughed.

‘Whatever. Guys, you really need to listen today. And stop calling me Mr Accounts.’

I ordered tea while the waiter cleared our plates.

I am serious, Ish. What do you plan to do with your life? We are not kids anymore,’ I said.

‘Unfortunately,’ Ish said and sighed. ‘Ok, then. I will apply for jobs, maybe do an NIIT computer course first. Or should I take an insurance job? What do you think?’

I saw Ish’s face. He tried to smile, but I saw the pain. The champion batsman of Belrampur would become an insurance salesman. Belrampur kids had grown up applauding his boundaries at Nana Park. But now, when he had no life ahead, he wanted to insure other people’s lives.

Omi looked at me, hoping I’d come up with a great option from Santa’s goodie bag. I was sick of parenting them.

‘I want to start a business,’ I began.

‘Not again,’ Ish said. ‘I can’t do that man. What was it the last time? A fruit dealership? Ugh! I can’t be weighing watermelons all day. And the crazy one after that, Omi?’

‘Car accessories. He said there is big money in that,’ Omi said as he slurped his dessert.

‘What? Put seat covers all day. No thanks. And the other one – stock broker.

What is that anyway?’ Ish shrugged.

‘So what the fuck do you want to do? Beg people to buy insurance? Or sell credit cards at street corners? You, Ish, are a military school dropout,’ I said and paused for breath. ‘And you got a compartment in Class XII, twice. You can be a priest, Omi, but what about us?’

I don’t want to be a priest,’ Omi said listlessly.

‘Then, why do you oppose me even before I start? This time I have something that will interest you.’

‘What?’ Ish said. ‘Cricket,’ I said.

‘What?’ both of them said in unison.

‘There you go, nice to get your attention. Now can I talk?’ ‘Sure,’ Ish waved a hand.

‘We are going to open a cricket shop,’ I said. I deliberately left for the rest room.

‘But how?’ Omi interrogated when I returned. ‘What is a cricket shop?’

‘A sports store really. But since cricket is the most popular game in Belrampur, we will focus on that.’

Ish’s silence meant he was listening to me.

‘It will be a small retail store. Money for a shop deposit is a problem, so I need Omi’s help.’

‘Mine?’ Omi said.

‘Yes, we will open the shop right inside the Swami temple complex. Next to the flower and puja shops. 1 noticed an empty shop there. And it is part of the temple land.’

‘A cricket shop in a temple complex?’ Ish questioned.

‘Wait. Omi, do you think you can arrange that? Without that our plan is«a non- starter.’

‘You mean the Kuber sweet shop that just closed? The temple trust will rent it out soon. And normally they let it out to something related to temple activities,’ Omi said.

‘I know. But you have to convince your dad. After all he runs the temple trust.’ ‘He does, but Mama looks after the shops. Will we pay rent?’

‘Yes,’ I sighed. ‘But not immediately. We need a two-month waiver. And we cannot pay the deposit.’

‘I’ll have to go through mom,’ Omi said. Good, his mind was working.

‘Sorry to ask again, but a cricket shop in a temple complex? Who will buy? Seventy-year-old aunties who come for kirtan will want willow bats?’ Ish scoffed.

The waiter had cleared our tea and presented the bill. By Gopi protocol, we had to be out of the restaurant in two minutes.

‘Good question. A cricket shop by a temple does sound strange. But think – is there any sports shop in Belrampur?’

‘Not really. You don’t even get leather balls. Ellis Bridge is the nearest,’ Ish said.

‘See, that’s number one. Number two, the temple is a family place. Kids are among the most bored people in temples. Where are they going to hang out?’

‘It is true,’ Omi said. ‘That is why so many balloon wallahs hover outside.’

‘And that is where Ish comes in. People know you were a good player. And you can give playing tips to every kid who comes to buy from us. Slowly, our reputation will build.’

‘But what about Christian or Muslim kids? They won’t come, right?’ Ish said. ‘Not at first but the shop is outside the temple. As word spreads, they will

come. What choice do they have anyway?’ ‘Where will we get what we sell?’ Ish said.

‘There’s a sports equipment supplier in Vastrapur who will give us a month’s credit. If we have the space, we are good to go without cash.’

‘But what if it doesn’t run?’ Ish asked with scepticism.

‘Worst case, we sell the stock at a loss and I’ll cover the rest through my tuition savings. But it will work, man. If you put your heart into it, it will.’

Both of them remained silent.

‘Guys, please. I need you for this. I really want to run a business. I can’t do it without partners. It’s cricket,’ I appealed to Ish.

‘I’m in,’ Omi smiled. ‘I don’t have to be a priest and I get to work from home.

I’m so in.’

‘I won’t handle money. I’ll focus on the cricket,’ Ish said. I smiled. Yes, he was coming around.

‘Of course. You think I will let you handle cash? So, are we partners?’ I stretched out my liand.

Omi hi-fived me and Ish joined in.

‘What are we going to call it?’ Omi said in the auto.

‘Ask Ish,’ I said. If Ish named it, he would feel more connected to the project. ‘How about Team India Cricket Shop?’ Ish suggested. ‘Great name,’ I said and

watched Ish smile for the first time that evening.

‘Two rupees fifty paise each, guys,’ I said as the auto stopped near my pol in Belrampur.

‘Here you go Mr Accounts,’ Ish said and passed his share.

Two

The Team India Cricket Shop opened with the smashing of a coconut on the morning of 29 April 2000. All our immediate families had come. My mother and Omi’s family were visibly happy while Ish’s parents were silent. They still visualised Ish as an army officer, not a shopkeeper in Belrampur.

‘May Laxmi shower all blessings on you hardworking boys,’ Omi’s mother said before she left.

Soon, it was just us in our twenty-feet-by-ten-feet shop. ‘Move the counter in, the shutter won’t close,’ Ish screamed at Omi. Omi’s forehead broke into sweat as he lifted the bulky counter-top yet again to move it back an inch.

I stepped out of the shop and crossed the road for the tenth time to look at the board. It was six feet wide and two feet tall. We had painted it blue – the colour of the Indian team. In the centre, we had the letters ‘Team India Cricket Shop’ in the colours of the Indian flag. The excited painter from Shahpur had thrown in the faces of Tendulkar and Ganguly for free. Ganguly had a squint and Tendulkar’s lips looked bee-stung, but it all added to the charm.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Omi said as he joined me in looking at the board.

Our first customer came at 12 noon. An under-ten boy strolled to the front of our store as his mother bought puja flowers. The three of us sprung into action.

‘Should I ask him what he wants?’ Omi whispered to me. I shook my head. Pushy meant desperate.

The boy looked at tennis balls and bounced a few of them. While no one played tennis in Belrampur, kids played cricket with them.

‘How much for the balls?’ The boy moved to local balls. Clearly this was a price- sensitive customer. He bounced five different ones on the ground.

‘Eight bucks. You want one?’ I said. He nodded.

‘You have money?’ ‘Mummy has,’ he said. ‘Where is mummy?’

‘There,’ he pointed in the general direction of the other temple shops. I picked up the balls he had bounced and placed them in the basket.

His mother came running into our shop.

‘There you are Sonu, stupid boy,’ she pulled his elbow and took him out. ‘Mummy, ball’ was all he could say about his potential purchase.

‘Don’t worry, we will sell,’ I told my business partners.

We made our first sale soon after. Two young brothers wearing branded clothes came to the shop.

‘How much for tennis balls?’ one boy said.

‘Eight bucks for Arrow, six bucks for the local basket there,’ Ish said.

The boys moved to the local basket. They, started the ball-bouncing routine again as my heart wept.

‘So where do you play cricket?’ Ish asked them. ‘Satellite,’ the elder boy said.

Satellite was an upmarket neighbourhood on the other side of the Sabarmati river.

‘What are you doing in the old city?’ Ish said.

‘We came to the temple. It is Harsh bhaiya’s birthday,’ the younger boy said.

I realised we had struck real-estate gold. The temple was ancient and drew in people from the new city, too. And it was a birthday, every chance of pockets being loaded.

‘You want to see bats?’ I asked from the cash counter. The boys shook their heads.

Ish turned to me and signalled silence.

‘Happy birthday, Harsh. You bowler or batsman?’ Ish said.

Harsh looked up at Ishaan. A grown-up man asking an eleven-year-old if he was a bowler or batsman was a huge honour. It meant he was now old enough to be specialised, even though he may not have thought about it.

‘Er, I am more of a batsman,’ Harsh said.

‘Defensive or attack?’ Ish asked as if he was interviewing Tendulkar on ESPN. ‘Huh?’ Harsh said.

‘You like shots?’ Ish asked. Which kid didn’t? Harsh nodded.

‘Show me your stance,’ Ish said. He turned to nie and asked for a bat, I went to the stack of willow bats. I had bought them directly from a Kashmiri supplier in Law Garden. I picked the right size for the boy. Size six and two hundred bucks. Not top of the line, of course, but the best we could hope to sell here.

Harsh took a stance on the empty space in front of the shop. Like every kid, he leaned his entire weight on the bat while standing. Ish moved over and gently straightened Harsh’s back. He moved his wrist upwards, and told him to balance the weight evenly on the legs.

‘And now, whenever you attack, use the front leg to move forward but do not forget the back leg. That is your support, your anchor. Notice Tendulkar, he keeps one leg fixed.’

An awestruck Harsh air-struck a few strokes. ‘Give me some tips, too,’ the younger one whined. ‘First me, Chinu,’ Harsh said.

Ish turned to Chinu. ‘What are you, Chinu?’ ‘All-rounder,’ Chinu said promptly.

‘Great. Show me your bowling grip.’

Their parents finally found our shop. It was time to go to the temple.

‘Mummy, I want the ball,’ Chinu said. ‘How much?’ his mother said. ‘Six rupees,’ Ish said.

She took out a twenty-rupee note and asked me to give two. ‘I want the bat, mummy,’ Harsh said. ‘You already have a bat.’

‘This one is better for my stance, mummy. Please.’ Harsh took a stance again.

He had improved with the lesson but his mother ignored him. ‘How much is this?’ she said.

‘Two hundred rupees,’ I said.

‘Too expensive. No Harsh, we are not getting a bat.’ ‘My birthday present, mummy, please.’ Harsh cajoled.

‘Yes but beta, why buy something from this temple shop. Old city doesn’t have good quality. We will go to the Navrangpura market.’

‘It is excellent quality, aunty. We source from Kashmiri suppliers. Take my word,’ Ish said.

‘Aunty’ eyed us with suspicion.

‘I was the team captain for all municipal schools in the area, aunty. I have personally chosen the bats,’ Ish said with as much heart as Omi’s dad said his prayers.

‘Please, mummy,’ Harsh said and tugged at her saree. The tug connected to aunty’s purse, which opened and brought out two hundred-rupee notes.

Done. We had closed the deal of the day. The bat cost us a hundred and sixty, so forty bucks profit, I exclaimed mentally.

‘Goodbye, champ.’ Ish waved to Harsh.

‘I’ll come to your shop on my happy birthday,’ Chinu said. ‘Yes! You are amazing, Ish,’ I said and hi-fived everyone.

‘The kid is a quick learner. If he practices, he will be good. Of course, his mother will stuff him with studies the moment he reaches Class X. The only stance he will take is to sit on a desk with his books,’ Ish said.

‘Don’t be depressing, man,’ I said. ‘We made forty bucks on the bat and four on the two balls. We are forty-four bucks in profit, sir.’

We sold some candy and two more balls in the next two hours. Our total profit for the day was fifty bucks. We moved the bats and the ball baskets inside and closed shop at 7.00 p.m., after the puja. To celebrate our opening we chose the chana-bhatura stall. At four bucks a plate, I could expense it to the business.

‘Do I get to take some money home? I really want to give mom my first salary,’ Omi said as he tucked in half a chili with his hot bhatura.

“Wait, this isn’t real profit. This is contribution. We earn th< rent first and then we will see.’ I placed my empty plate back a the stall. ‘Congrats guys, we are in business.’

Three Months Later

‘Eight thousand three, four and five hundred,’ I said as I emptied the cashier’s box. ‘This is our profit for the first three months after paying rent. Not bad, not bad at all.’

I was super-pleased. Our shop had opened at an opportune< time. The summer vacations had started and India had won the one-day series with South Africa. Kids with lots of time and patriotism flocked to Team India Cricket Shop the day they received their pocket money.

Some came even without money, if only to meet Ish and ge tips on cricket. I didn’t mind as it helped us pass the time. The dull aspect of opening a shop is boredom. We opened from nine to seven, and even with twenty customers a day it meant only around two customers an hour.

‘So we get our share now?’ Omi said excitedly.

I divided the money into four stacks. The first three stacks were fifteen hundred rupees each – the money each of us could take home. The remaining four thousand was to be retained in the business.

‘What do you mean retained? What do we need to retain it for?’ Ish questioned even as Omi happily counted his notes.

‘Ish, we need to keep a war chest in case we want to renovate the store. Don’t you want a better glass countertop? Or nice lighting?’

Ish shook his head.

‘Sure we do. And … I have expansion plans,’ I said. ‘What?’

‘There is a new shopping mall under construction at Navrangpura char rasta. If you book early, you can get a discount on renting a shop.’

‘Renting? But we already have a shop,’ Ish said, puzzled and irritated at the same time.

I knew why Ish grumbled. He wanted to buy a TV for the shop, listening to matches on radio during shop hours was no fun.

‘No Ish, a proper shop. Young people like to shop in swanky malls. That is the future. Our shop has been doing good business, hut we can’t grow unless we move to a new city location.’

‘I like it here,’ Omi said. ‘This is our neighbourhood. What we sell is being used by kids in Nana Park.’

‘I don’t want this short-sighted mentality. I will open a store in a mall, and by next year have one more store. If you don’t grow in business, you stagnate.’

‘Another shop? What? We will not be working together?’ Omi said.

‘It is Govind’s bullshit. We have only started and he already aspires to be Ambani. Can’t we just buy a TV?’ Ish said, ‘Shah Electronics will give us on instalment if we pay a down-payment of four thousand.’

‘No way. We keep the four thousand for business.’ ‘Well, the TV belongs to the business, no?’ Ish said.

‘Yes, but it is a dead asset. It doesn’t earn. We have a long way to go. Three thousand a month is nothing. And Ish doesn’t let me keep notebooks and pencils…’

‘I said this is a sports store. I don’t want kids to think about studies when they come here.’

Ish and I had argued about this before. I saw an easy opportunity, but Ish protested every time.

‘Ok, here is a deal,’ Ish said, ‘I agree to the notebooks, not textbooks mind you, only notebooks. But we buy a TV. I have to watch matches. I don’t care, here take my fifteen hundred.’

He threw his share of cash at me.

Omi tossed in his money as well. As usual, I had to surrender to fools.

‘Ok, but we need to increase the revenue. Target for next quarter is twenty thousand bucks.’

They ignored me as they discussed TV brands. I shook my head and outlined my strategy for increasing revenues.

‘Will you do coaching classes?’ I asked Ish. ‘What?’

‘Kids love your cricket tips. Why not do cricket coaching for a fee?’

‘Me? I am not that good man. And where? In the temple?’ ‘No, we will do it in the abandoned SBI compound.’ ‘Why? Aren’t we making enough?’ Omi said. ‘We can never make enough. I want to get to fifty thousand a quarter. Omi, you can give fitness training to the students.’ ‘So more work for us. What about you?’ Ish said. ‘I am going to start offering maths tuitions again.’ ‘Here?’

‘Yes, a couple here, or in the SBI compound itself while you guys give cricket coaching.’

Omi and Ish looked at me like I was the hungriest shark in the world. ‘C’mon guys. I am making sure we have a solid healthy business.’

‘It is ok. Just the shop is so boring, Ish,’ Omi said. He was excited about making kids do push-ups.

‘Yeah, at least I will get to hit the pitch,’ Ish said.

I tossed in my fifteen hundred, too, and we bought a TV the same day. We set it permanently at the sports channel. Omi brought mats and cushions and spread them in front of the TV. On match days, we would all sit there until a customer arrived. I had to admit, it made the day go by much quicker.

I changed the board on the shop. Under the ‘Team India Cricket Shop’, it also said ‘Stationery, Cricket Coaching and Maths Tuitions available’. I may not have diversified geographically, but I had diversified my product offering.

Three

Apart from cricket, badminton was the other popular game in Belrampur. In fact, the girls only played badminton. It was an excellent turnover business. Shuttle cocks needed to be replaced, rackets needed rewiring and badminton rackets didn’t last as long as cricket bats.

School stationery became the other hit item in the following weeks. Only some kids played sports, but every kid needed notebooks, pens and pencils, and parents never said no to that. Many times, someone buying a ball would buy a notebook, or the other way round. We offered a total solution. Soon, suppliers came to us themselves. They kept stuff on credit and returnable basis – chart paper, gum bottles, maps of India, water bottles and tiffin boxes. It is only after you open a shop that you realise the length and breadth of the Indian student industry.

We kept the cricket coaching and tuitions at the same price -250 rupees a month. Customers for maths tuitions were easier to get, given the higher demand and my track record. I taught at the SBI compound building in the mornings. Ish used the compound grounds for the two students who signed up for cricket tuitions.

They were the best players in the Belrampur Municipal School and had fought with their parents to let them try coaching for three months.

Of course, we still spent most of our time in the shop.

‘Should we do greeting cards?’ I wondered as I opened a sample packet left by a supplier. At five-rupee retail price and two-rupee cost price, cards had solid margins. However, people in Belrampur did not give each other greeting cards.

‘This is in-swinger, and this is off-swinger. By the way, this is the third ball in two weeks. What’s up Tapan?’ Ish asked a regular customer. Thirteen-year-old Tapan was one of the best bowlers of his age in the Belrampur Municipal School. Ish gripped the cricket ball and showed him the wrist movement.

‘It is that nightmare Ali. Ball keeps getting lost with his shots. Why did he move to our school?’ Tapan grumbled as he rubbed the ball on his shorts.

‘Ali? New student? Haven’t seen him here,’ Ish said. All good players visited our store and Ish knew them personally.

‘Yes, batsman. Just joined our school. You should come see him. He wouldn’t come here, right?’ Tapan said.

Ish nodded. We had few Muslim customers. Most of them used other Hindu boys to make their purchases.

‘You want to sign up for cricket tuitions. Ish will teach you, he played at the district level,’ I could not help pitching our other service.

‘Mummy will not allow. She said I can only take tuitions for studies. No sports coaching,’ Tapan said.

‘It is ok, have a good game,’ Ish said, ruffling the boy’s hair.

‘You see this. That is why India doesn’t win every match,’ Ish said after Tapan left.

Yes, Ish has this ridiculous theory that India should win every match. ‘Well, we don’t have to. It won’t be much of a game otherwise,’ I said and closed the cash box.

‘Our country has a billion people. We should always win,’ Ish insisted.

‘Statistically impossible.’

‘Why? Australia has twenty million people. Yet they win almost every match. We have fifty times the people, so fifty times the talent. Plus, cricket is India’s only game while Australia has rugby and football and whatever. So there is no way we should be defeated by them. Statistically, my friend, Australia should be a rounding error.’

‘Then why?’ I said.

‘Well, you saw that kid. Parents will spend thousands teaching kids useless trigonometry and calculus they will never use in real life. But if it is sports coaching, it is considered a waste of money.’

‘Don’t worry, we have them covered. Our shop now offers both.’

‘It is not about the business Govind. Really, is this just about money for you?’ ‘Money is nice…’

‘These kids, Govind. Look at them, thirteen-year-olds holding their bats with pride. Or the way they want to learn to bowl better. They have a fire in their eyes before every little match at Nana Park. When India wins, they dance. They are they only people Ij see with passion. I like being with them.’

‘Whatever,’ I shrugged.

‘Of course, in two years time they will reach Class X. Their bats will be replaced with physics books. And then the spark will begin to die. Soon, they will turn into depressed adults.’

‘That is not true, Ish. Everyone needs a passion. I have mine.’

‘Then why are most grown-ups so grumpy? Why can’t they smile more often and be excited like those kids at Nana Park?’ ‘Can you stop being grumpy now and help me clean the

shop?’



‘Ok, ok, we will do a booze party,’ I laughed. Omi and Ish had gripped me tight from both sides until I relented.

‘Where is my son Omi?’ Bittoo Mama entered our shop at (losing time and proceeded to hug his nephew. He held a box of sweets in a red velvet cloth.

‘Where were you, Mama?’ Omi said. Since the shop opened, he had never visited us.

‘I toured all over Gujarat, with Parekh-ji. What an experience! Here, have some besan ladoos. Fresh from Baroda,’ Bittoo Mama said. I ordered a Frooti. Ish pulled out stools and we sat outside. I picked a ladoo.

‘What is this, Omi? Wearing shoes?’ Bittoo Mama’s eyes were lined with kohl.

He had a red tikka in the middle of his forehead.

‘Mama?’ Omi squeaked. I looked at my feet. I wore fake Reebok slippers. Ish wore his old sneakers.

‘Your shop is in a temple, and you are wearing shoes? A Brahmin priest’s boy?’ ‘Mama, c’mon this is outside the temple. None of the other shopkeepers wear…’ ‘Other shopkeepers are useless baniyas so you will also become like them? Do

you do puja every morning before you open?’ ‘Yes, Mama,’ Omi lied point-blank.

‘You also,’ Mama said, referring to Ish and me. ‘You are Hindu hoys. You have your shop in such a pure place. At least remove your shoes, light a lamp.’

‘We come here to work, not to perform rituals,’ I said. I now paid full rent every month to be in this shop. Nobody told me how to run my business.

Mama looked surprised. ‘What is your name?’ ‘Govind.’

‘Govind what?’ ‘Govind Patel.’ ‘Hindu, no?’

‘1 am agnostic,’ I said, irritated as I wanted to shut the shop and go home. ‘Agno…?’

‘He is not sure if there is God or not,’ Ish explained.

‘Doesn’t believe in God? What kind of friends do you have Omi?’ Mama was aghast.

‘No, that is an atheist,’ I clarified. ‘Agnostic means maybe God exists, maybe he doesn’t. I don’t know.’

‘You young kids,’ Bittoo said, ‘such a shame. I had come to invite you and look at you.’

Omi looked at me. I turned my gaze away.

‘Don’t worry about Govind, Mama. He is confused.’ I hate it when people take my religious status for confusion. Why did I have to or not have to believe in something?

Ish offered the Frooti to Bittoo Mama. It softened him a little. ‘What about you?’ Mama asked Ish.

‘Hindu, Mama. I pray and everything.’ Ish said. Yeah right only when six balls were left in a match.

Mama took a large sip and shifted his gaze to Omi and Ish As far as he was concerned I did not exist.

What did you want to invite us for Mama?’ Omi said.

He lifted the red velvet cloth and unwrapped a three-foot-long brass trishul. Its sharp blades glinted under the shop’s tubelight.

‘It’s beautiful. Where did you get it from?’ Omi queried.

‘It is a gift from Parekh-ji. He said in me he sees the party’s future. I worked day and night. We visited every district in Gujarat. He said, “if we have more people like Bittoo, people will be proud to be Hindu again.” He made me the recruitment in-charge for young people in Ahmedabad.’

Ish and I looked at Omi for footnotes.

‘Parekh-ji is a senior Hindu party leader. And he heads the biggest temple trust in Baroda,’ Omi said. ‘What, he knows the CM or something, Mama?’

‘Parekh-ji not only knows the CM, but also talks to him twice a day,’ Bittoo Mama said. ‘And I told Parekh-ji about you, Omi. I see in you the potential to teach Hindu pride to young people.’

‘But Mama, I’m working full time…’

‘I am not telling you to leave everything. But get in touch with the greater responsibilities we have. We are not just priests who speak memorised lines at ceremonies. We have to make sure India’s future generation understands Hindutva properly. I want to invite you to a grand feast to Parekh-ji’s house. You should come too, Ish. Next Monday in Gandhinagar.’

Of course, blasphemous me got no invitation.

‘Thanks, Mama. It sounds great, but I don’t know if we can,’ Ish said. How come some people are so good at being polite.

‘Why? Don’t worry, it is not just priests. Many young, working people will also come.’

‘I don’t like politics,’ Ish said.

‘Huh? This isn’t politics, son. This is a way of life.’ ‘I will come,’ Omi said.

‘But you should come too, Ish. We need young blood.’ Ish stayed hesitant.

‘Oh, you think Parekh-ji is some old, traditional man who will force you to read scriptures. Do you know where Parekh-ji went to college? Cambridge, and then Harvard. He had a big hotel business in America, which he sold and came back. He talks your language. Oh, and he used to play cricket too, for the Cambridge college team.’

‘I will come if Govind comes,’ said Ish the idiot.

Mama looked at me. In his eyes, I was the reason why Hindu culture had deteriorated lately.

‘Well, I came to invite the three of you in the first place. He only said he doesn’t believe in God.’

‘I didn’t say that,’ I said. Oh, forget it, I thought.

‘Then come.’ Mama stood up. ‘All three of you. I’ll give Omi the address. It is the grandest house in Gandhinagar.’



People called me Mr Accounts; greedy, miser, anything. But the fact is, I did organise an all-expense-paid booze party to motivate my partners at the shop. It is bloody hard to get alcohol in Ahmedabad, let alone bulky bottles of beer. One of my contacts – Romy Bhai – agreed to supply a crate of extra strong beer for a thousand bucks.

At 7 p.m. on the day of the party, Romi Bhai left the beer -wrapped in rags – at the SBI compound entrance. I came to the gate and gave Romi Bhai the day’s newspaper. On the third page of the newspaper, I had stapled ten hundred-rupee notes. He nodded and left.

I dragged the cloth package inside and placed the bottles in the three ice-filled buckets I had kept in the kitchen. I took out the bottle opener from the kitchen shelf, where we kept everything from Maggi noodles to boxes of crackers to burst when India won a match.

Another person may see the abandoned SBI branch as an eerie party venue. This used to be an old man’s haveli. The owner could not repay and the bank foreclosed the property. Thereafter, the bank opened a branch in the haveli. The owner’s family filed a lawsuit after he died. The dispute still unresolved, the family obtained a court injunction that the bank could not use the property for profit. Meanwhile, SBI realised that a tiny by lane in Belrampur was a terrible branch location. They vacated the premises and gave the keys to the court. The court official kept a key with Omi’s dad, a trustworthy man in the area. This was done in case officials needed to view it and the court was closed. Of course, no one ever came and Omi had access to the keys.

The property was a six-hundred square yard plot, huge by Belrampur standards. The front entrance directly opened into the living room, now an abandoned bank customer service area. The three bedrooms on the first floor were the branch manager’s office, the data room and the locker room. The branch

manager’s office had a giant six-feet vault. We kept our cricket kit in the otherwise empty safe.

We hung out most in the haveli’s backyard. In its prime, it was the lawn of a rich family. As part of the bank branch, it was an under-utilised parking lot and now, our practice pitch.

I rotated the beer bottles in the ice bucket to make them equally cold. Ish walked into the bank.

‘So late,’ I said. ‘It is 8.30.’

‘Sorry, watching cricket highlights. Wow, strong beer,’ Ish said as he picked up a bottle. We had parked ourselves on the sofas in the old customer waiting area downstairs. I reclined on the sofa. Ish went to the kitchen to get some bhujia.

‘Omi here?’ Ish said as he opened the packet.

‘No, I am the only fool. I take delivery, clean up the place and wait for my lords to arrive.’

‘Partners, man, partners,’ Ish corrected. ‘Should we open a bottle?’ ‘No, wait.’

Omi arrived in ten minutes. He made apologies about his dad holding him back to clean the temple. Omi then prayed for forgiveness before drinking alcohol.

‘Cheers!’ all of us said as we took a big sip. It was bitter, and tasted only slightly better than phenyl.

“What is this? Is this genuine stuff?’ Ish asked.

We paused for a moment. Spurious alcohol is a real issue in Ahmedabad. ‘Nah, nobody makes fake beer. It is just strong,’ I said.

If you filled your mouth with bhujia, the beer did not taste half as bad. In fact, the taste improved considerably after half a bottle. As did everyone’s mood.

‘I want to see this Ali kid. Three customers have mentioned him,’ Ish said. ‘The Muslim boy?’ Omi said.

‘Stop talking like your Mama?’ Ish scolded. ‘Is that relevant? They say he has excellent timing.’

‘Where does he play?’ I enquired through a mouthful of bhujia.

‘In our school. Kids say his most common shot is a six.’ ‘Let’s go check him out. Looks like the school has your worthy successor,’ 1 said.

Ish turned silent. It was a sensitive topic and if it was not for the beer, I would not have said it.

‘Succeeding Ish is hard,’ Omi said. ‘Remember the hundred against Mahip Municipal School, in sixty-three balls? No one forgets that innings.’ Omi stood up and patted Ish’s back again, as if the ten-year-old match had ended minutes ago.

‘No one forgets the two ducks in the state selection trials either,’ Ish said and paused again.

‘Screw that, you were out of form, man,’ Omi said.

‘But those are the matches that fucking mattered, right? Now can we flip the topic?’

Omi backed off and I gladly changed the subject. ‘I think we should thank our sponsors for tonight – The Team India Cricket Shop. In seven months of operation, our profit is 42,600 rupees. Of which, we have distributed 18,000 to the partners and 22,000 is for the Navrangpura shop deposit. And the remaining 2,600 is for entertainment like tonight. So, thank you, dear shareholders and partners, and let’s say cheers to the second bottle.’

I took out the second bottle for each of us from the ice bucket.

‘Stud-boy,’ Ish slurred, standing up, ‘This business and its profit is all owed to Stud-boy, Mr Govind Patel. Thank you, buddy. Because of you this dropout military cadet has a future. And so does this fool who’d be otherwise jingling bells in the temple all his life. Give me a hug, Stud-boy.’

He came forward to give me a hug. It was drunk affection, but genuine enough. ‘Will you do me one more favour buddy?’ Ish said.

‘What?’

‘There is someone who wants maths tuitions,’ Ish said.

‘No, I am full, Ish. Seven students already…,’ I said as Ish interrupted me. ‘It is Vidya.’ ‘Your sister?’

‘She finished Class XII. She is dropping a year now to prepare for the medical entrance.’

‘You don’t need maths to become a doctor.’

‘No, but the entrance exams do. And she is awful at it. You are the best man, who else can I trust?’

‘If it is your sister, then I mean…,’ I took a breath. ‘Wow, Vidya to join medical college? Is she that old now?’

‘Almost eighteen, dude.’

‘I teach younger kids though, class five to eight. Her course is more advanced. I am not in touch.’

‘But you got a fucking century in that subject, dude. Just try she needs any help she can get.’

I said nothing for a while, trying to remember what I knew of Vidya, which was little.

‘What are you thinking. Oh, I know, Mr Accounts. Don’t worry we will pay you,’ Ish said and took a big sip.

‘Shut up, man. It is for your sister. Ok, I’ll do it. When do we start?’

‘Can you start Monday … no Monday is Parekh-ji’s feast. Damn, Omi what the fuck are we going to do there?’

‘The things we do to keep your Mama happy.’ I couldn’t wait to move to Navrangpura.

‘Parekh ji is supposed to be a great man,’ Omi said. ‘And I always listen to you guys. Come for me this time.’

‘Anyway, Tuesday then,’ I said to Ish. ‘So is she going to come to the bank?’ ‘Dad will never send her out alone. You come home.’

‘What?’ I said. Maybe I should have accepted a fee. ‘Ok, I’ll move some classes.

Say seven in the evening?’

‘Sure, now can you answer one maths question, Mr Accounts,’ Ish said. ‘What?’

‘You ordered a crate with ten bottles. We drank three each. Where is the tenth one?’ Ish stood up swaying.

I stood as well. ‘The question is not where the tenth one is, but who does it belong to.’ I lunged for the ice bucket. Ish dived in as well. Cold water splashed on the floor as we tugged at the bottle. After a ten-second tiff, he released it.

‘Take it, dude. What would I do without you?’

Four

We reached Parekh-ji’s residence at around eight in the evening. Two armed guards manning the front gate let us in after checking our names. The entrance of the house had an elaborate rangoli, dozens of lamps and fresh flowers.

‘See, what a gathering,’ Bittoo Mama met us at the door. ‘Have dinner before the talk begins.’ From an aarti plate, he put big red tikkas on our foreheads. He told us Parekh-ji would make a speech after dinner.

We moved to the massive food counter. A Gujarati feast consisted of every vegetarian snack known to man. There was no alcohol, but there was juice of every fruit imaginable. At parties like this, you regret you have only one stomach. I took a jain pizza and looked around the massive living room. There were fifty guests dressed in either white or saffron. Parekh-ji wore a saffron dhoti and white shirt, sort of a perfect crowd blend. Ish looked oddly out of place with his skull and crossbones, black Metallica T-shirt. Apart from us, everyone had either grey hair or no hair It looked like a marriage party where only the priests were invited Most of them carried some form of accessory like a trishul or a rudraksha or a holy book.

Ish and 1 exchanged a what-are-we-doing-here glance.

Omi went to meet a group of two bald-whites, one grey-saffron and one bald- saffron. He touched their feet and everyone blessed him. Considering Omi met these kind of people often, he had one Of the highest per-capita-blessings ratio in India.

‘The food is excellent, no?’ Omi returned. Food in Gujarat was always good. But still people keep saying it. Ish passed his Jain-dimsum to Omi.

‘Who are these people?’ I asked idly.

‘It is quite simple,’ Omi said. ‘The people in saffron are priests or other holy men from around the city. The people in white are the political party people. Why aren’t you eating any dimsums?’

‘I don’t like Chinese,’ Ish said. ‘And who is Parekh-ji?’

‘Well, he is a guide,’ Omi said. ‘Or that is what he says to be humble. But actually, he is the chairperson of the main temple 1 rust. He knows the politicians really well, too.’

‘So he is a hybrid, a poli-priest,’ I deduced.

‘Can you be more respectful? And what is this T-shirt, Ish?’

Everyone shushed as Parekh-ji came to the centre of the living room. He carried a red velvet cushion with him, which looked quite comfortable. He signalled everyone to sit down on the carpet. Like a shoal of fishes, the saffrons separated from the whites and sat down in two neat sections.

‘Where the hell do we sit?’ Ish said as he turned to me. I had worn a blue T- shirt and couldn’t find my colour zone. Bittoo Mama tugged at Omi’s elbow and asked us to join the saffron set. We sat there, looking like the protagonists of those ugly duckling stories in our mismatched clothes. Bittoo Mama came with three saffron scarves and handed them to us.

‘What? I am not…,’ I protested to Omi.

‘Shh … just wear it,’ Omi said and showed us how to wrap it around our neck.

Parekh-ji sat on his wonderful magic cushion. There was pin-drop silence. Ish cracked his knuckle once. Omi gave him a dirty look. Everyone closed their eyes, apart from me. I looked around while everyone chanted in Sanskrit. They ended their chants after a minute and Parekh-ji began his speech.

‘Welcome devotees, welcome to my humble home. I want to especially welcome the team on the right from the Sindhipur temple. They have returned from kar seva in Ayodhya for over a month. Let us bow to them and seek blessings.’

Everyone bowed to a group of six saffrons holding trishuls.

Parekh-ji continued, ‘We also have some young people today. We need them badly. Thanks to Bittoo Mama, who brought them. Bittoo is working hard for the party. He will support our candidate Hasmukh-ji for the election next year.’

Everyone looked at us and gave smiling nods. We nodded back.

‘Devotees, the Hindu religion teaches us to bear a lot. And we do bear a lot. So, today’s discussion is “How much bearing is enough? Until when does a Hindu keep bearing pain?'”

Everyone nodded. My knees were stiff with pain from sitting cross-legged. I wondered if I should stop bearing pain right then and stretch my legs.

‘Our scriptures tell us not to harm others,’ Parekh-ji said. ‘They teach us acceptance of all faiths, even if those faiths do not accept us. They teach us patience. Thousands of years ago, our wise men thought of such wonderful values, valid even today. And today you great men pass on these values to society,’ Parekh-ji said, gesturing at the priests. The priests nodded.

‘At the same time, the scriptures also tell us not to bear injustice. The Gita tells Arjun to fight a virtuous war. So at some point we are meant to fight back. When is that point is something to think about.’

Vigorous nods shook the crowd. Even though I found the whole gathering and the magic red cushion a bit over the top, Parekh-ji’s logic was flawless.

‘And right now, I see that injustice again. Hindus being asked to compromise, to accept, to bear. Hindus asked for the resurrection of one temple. Not any temple, a temple where one of our most revered gods was born. But they won’t give it to us. We said we will move the mosque respectfully, round the corner. But no, that was considered unreasonable. We tried to submit proof; but that was suppressed. Is this justice? Should we keep bearing it? I am just an old man, I don’t have the answers.’

Ish whispered in my ear, ‘It is politics, man. Just pure simple politics.’

Parekh-ji continued: ‘I don’t even want to go into who this country belongs to. Because the poor Hindu is accustomed to being ruled by someone else – 700 years by Muslims, 250 years by the British. We are independent now, but the Hindu does not assert himself. But what makes me sad is that we are not even treated as equals. They call themselves secular, but they give preference to the Muslims? We fight for equal treatment and are called communal? The most brutal terrorists are Muslim, but they say we are hardliners. More Hindu kids sleep hungry every night than Muslim, but they say Muslims are downtrodden.’

Parekh-ji stopped to have a glass of water. ‘They say to me, Parekh-ji, why do you know so many politicians? I say, I am a servant of God. I didn’t want to join politics. But if I as a Hindu want justice, I need to get involved in how the country is rum. And what other way is there to get involved than join politics? So, here I am half saffron, half white – at your service.’

The audience gave a mini applause, including Omi. Ish and I were too overfed to react.

‘But there is hope. You know where this hope comes from – Gujarat. We are a state of businessmen. And you might say a hundred bad things about a businessman, but you cannot deny that a businessman sees reality. He knows how the parts add up, how the world works. We won’t stand for hypocrisy or unfairness. That is why, we don’t elect the pseudo-secular parties. We are not communal, we are honest. And if we react, it is because we have been bearing pain for a long time.’

The audience broke into full applause. I used the break to step out into the front garden of Parekh-ji’s house and sit on an intricately carved swing. Parekh-ji spoke inside for ten more minutes, inaudible to me. I looked at the stars above and thought of the man on the velvet cushion. It was strange, I was both attracted to and repelled by him. He had charisma and lunacy at the same time.

After his speech there were a few more closing mantras, followed by two bhajans by a couple of priests from Bhuj. Ish came out. ‘You here?’

‘Can we go home?’ I said.



I reached Ishaan’s house at 7 p.m. on Tuesday. She sat at her study table. Her room had the typical girlie look – extra clean, extra cute and extra pink. Stuffed toys and posters with cheesy messages like ‘I am the boss’ adorned the walls of the room. I sat on the chair. Her brown eyes looked at me with full attention. I couldn’t help but notice that her childlike face was in the process of turning into a beautiful woman’s.

‘So which areas of maths are you strong in?’ ‘None really,’ she said.

‘Algebra?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Trigonometry?’ ‘Whatever.’ ‘Calculus?’

She raised her eyebrows as if I had mentioned a horror movie. ‘Really?’ I said, disturbed at such indifference to my favourite subject. ‘Actually, I don’t like maths much.’

‘Hmmm,’ I said and tried to be like a thoughtful professor. ‘You don’t like it much or you don’t understand a few things and so you don’t like it yet? Maths can be fun you know.’

‘Fun?’ she said with a disgusted expression. ‘Yes.’

She sat up straight and shook her head. ‘Let me make myself clear. I positively hate maths. For me it occupies a place right up there with cockroaches and lizards. I get disgusted, nauseated, and depressed by it. Between an electric shock or a maths test, I will choose the former. I heard some people have to walk two miles to get water in Rajasthan. I would trade my maths problems for that walk, everyday. Maths is the worst thing ever invented by man. What were they thinking? Language is too easy, so let’s make up some creepy symbols and manipulate them to haunt every generation of kids. Who cares if sin theta is different from cos theta? Who wants to know the expansion of the sum of cubes?’

‘Wow, that’s some reaction,’ 1 said, my mouth still open.

‘And fun? If maths is fun, then getting a tooth extraction is fun. A viral infection is fun. Rabies shots are fun.’

‘I think you are approaching it the wrong way.’

‘Oh ho ho, don’t go there. I am not just approaching it. I have lived, compromised, struggled with it. It is a troubled relationship we have shared for years. From classes one to twelve, this subject does not go away. People have nightmares about monsters. I have nightmares about surprise maths tests. I know you scored a hundred and you are in love with it. But remember, in most parts of the world maths means only one thing to students.’

She stopped to breathe. I had the urge to get up and run away. How can I tame a wild beast?

‘What?’

‘Goosebumps. See I already have them,’ she said, pulling her kameez sleeve up to her elbow. I thought the little pink dots on her skin were more from her emotional outburst than maths.

I also noticed her thin arm. It was so fair you could see three veins running across. Her hand had deep lines, with an exceptionally long lifeline. Her fingers seemed long as they were so thin. She had applied a glittery silver-white nailpolish only on the outer edge of the nails. How do women come up with these ideas?

‘What?’ she said as I checked out her arm for a moment too long.

I immediately opened a textbook. ‘Nothing. My job is to teach you maths, not to make you like it. You want to be a doctor I heard.’

‘I want to go to a college in Mumbai.’ ‘Excuse me?’

‘I want to get out of Ahmedabad. But mom and dad won’t let me. Unless, of course, it is for a prestigious course like medicine or engineering. Engineering has maths, maths means vomit so that is ruled out. Medicine is the other choice and my exit pass. But they have this medical entrance exam and…’

I realised that Vidya did not have an internal pause button. And since I had only an hour and the tutorial equivalent of climbing Everest barefoot, I wanted to come to the point.

‘So, which topic would you like to start with?’ ‘Anything without equations.’

‘I saw your medical entrance exam course. Looks like there are a few scoring areas that are relatively easier.’

I opened the medical exam entrance guide and turned it towards her.

‘See this, probability,’ I said. ‘This and permutations will be twenty-five per cent of the maths exam. Statistics is another ten per cent. No equations here, so can we start with this?’

‘Sure,’ she said and took out a brand new exercise book. She kept two pens parallel to the notebook. She opened the first page of the probability chapter like she was the most diligent student in India. Most clueless, probably.

‘Probability,’ I said, ‘is easily the most fun. I say this because you can actually use the concepts in probability to solve everyday problems.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like what what?’

‘What everyday problems can you solve?’ she quizzed, brushing aside a strand of hair.

‘Well, you are going ahead, but let’s see.’ I looked around for a11 easy example. I noticed her impeccably done-up room, tucked in pink bedsheets. On the opposite wall were posters of Westlife, Backstreet Boys, Hrithik Roshan. Next to them was a wall of greeting cards. ‘See those cards?’

‘They are birthday cards from my school friends. I had my birthday two months ago.’

I ignored the information overload. ‘Say there are twenty of them. Most are white, though. Some are coloured. How many?’

‘Five coloured ones,’ she said, scanning the cards, her eyes asking ‘so?’

‘Cool, five. Now let’s say I take all the cards and put them in a sack. Then I pull out one card, what is the probability the card is coloured?’

‘Why would you put them in a sack?’ she said. ‘Hypothetical. What is the chance?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Ok, so let’s use this example to start the basic premise of probability.

Probability can be defined as,’ I said as I wrote the lines:

Probability = No of times something you want happens / No of times something can happen

‘How come there are no symbols?’ she said.

‘See, I told you probability is interesting. Let’s look at the denominator. How many different cards can come out if I put out one card from the stack of twenty?’

‘Er … twenty?’

‘Yes, of course. Good.’ ‘Duh!’ she said.

I controlled my irritation. I dumbed down the problem for her and she duh-ed me. Some attitude, there.

‘And now the numerator. I want a coloured card. How ma different coloured cards can come out if I pull one?’

‘Five?’

‘Yep. And so let’s apply our wordy formula,’ I said and wrote down.

Probability = No of times something you want happens (5) / No of times something can happen (20) So, probability = 5/20 = 0.25

‘There you go. The probability is 0.25, or twenty-five per cent.’ I said and placed the pen back on the table. She reread what I wrote for a few moments.

‘That is simple. But the exam problems are harder,’ she said at last.

‘We will get there. But the basic concept needs to be understood first. And you didn’t vomit.’

I was interrupted by two beeps on her cellphone. She rushed to her bedside table to pick up the phone. She sat on the bed and read her message. ‘My school friend. She’s stupid,’ she smiled fondly at the phone.

I kept silent and waited for her to come back. ‘Ok, let’s do another one,’ I said. ‘Let us say we have a jar with four red and six blue marbles.’

I finished three more problems in the next half an hour. ‘See, it’s not that hard when you focus. Good job!’ I praised her as she solved a problem.

‘You want tea?’ she said, ignoring my compliment. ‘No thanks, I don’t like to have too much tea.’

‘Oh me neither. I like coffee. You like coffee?’

‘I like probability and you should too. Can we do the next problem?’

Her cellphone beeped again. She dropped her pen and leaped to her phone.

‘Leave it. No SMS-ing in my class,’ I said.

‘It’s just…,’ she said as she stopped her hand midway.

‘I will go if you don’t concentrate. I have turned down many students for this class.’

She was zapped at my firmness. But I am no Mr Nice, and I hate people who are not focused. Especially those who hate maths.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘We only have an hour. Do your fun activities later.’ ‘I said sorry’ She picked up her pen again and opened the cap in disgust.

Five

You. Must. Come. Now.’ The kid sucked in air after every word. ‘Ali. Is…’ ‘Relax Paras,’ lsh told the panting boy. He had come running from the Belrampur Municipal School and was insisting we go with him.

‘Now? It is only four, how can I close business?’ I said.

‘He doesn’t play cricket that often. He always plays marbles. I’lease come today, lsh bhaiya.’

‘Let’s go. It is a slow day anyway,’ lsh said as he slipped on his chappals.

Omi had already stepped out. I locked the cashbox and told the owner of the flower shop next to ours to keep watch.

We reached our school’s familiar grounds. Twenty boys circled Ali. ‘I don’t want to play now,’ a voice said from the centre of the crowd.

A thin, almost malnourished boy sat on the ground, his face covered with his hands.

The crowd backed off. Some kids volunteered to be fielders. Omi became the wicket keeper. I stood near the bowler’s end, at the umpire’s slot. Ali took the crease. He strained hard to look at the bowler. The crowd clapped as Ish took a short run-up. I couldn’t understand the fuss in seeing this delicate, doe-eyed boy play. The bat reached almost two-thirds his height.

Ish’s run-up was fake, as he stopped near me. A grown man bowling pace to a twelve-year-old is silly. Ish looked at the boy and bowled a simple lollipop delivery.

The slow ball pitched midway and took its time to reach the crease. Thwack, Ali moved his bat in a smooth movement and connected. The ball surged high as Ish and I looked at it for its three seconds of flight – six!

Ish looked at Ali and nodded in appreciation. Ali took a stance again and scrunched his face, partially due to the sun but also in irritation for not receiving a real delivery.

For the next ball, Ish took an eight step run-up. The boy could play, girlie features be damned! The medium pace ball rose high on the bounce and smash! Another six.

Ish gave a half smile. Ali’s bat had not hit the ball, but his pride. The crowd clapped.

Ish took an eleven-step run-up for the next ball. He grunted when the ball left his hand. The ball bounced to Ali’s shoulder. Ali spun on one leg as if in a dance and connected – six!

Three balls, three sixes – Ish looked molested. Omi’s mouth was open but he focused on wicket-keeping. I think he was trying to control his reaction for Ish’s sake.

‘He is a freak. Ali the freak, Ali the freak,’ a kid fielding at mid-on shouted and distracted Ali.

‘Just play,’ Ish said to Ali and gave the fielder a glare.

Ish rubbed the ball on his pants thrice. He changed his grip and did some upper body twists. He took his longest run-up yet and ran forward with full force. The ball went fast, but was a full toss. Ish’s frustration showed in this delivery. It deserved punishment. Ali took two steps forward and smash! The ball went high and reached past the ground, almost hitting a classroom window.

I laughed. I knew I shouldn’t have, but I did. To see the school cricket champion of my batch raped so in public by a mere boy of twelve was too funny. At least to me. Actually, only to me.

‘What?’ Ish demanded in disgust. ‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘Where is the fucking ball?’

‘They are trying to find it. You want to buy one from my shop, coach?’ I jeered lightly.

‘Shut up,’ Ish hissed as the ball came rolling back to him.

Ish was about to take a run-up when Ali sat down at his crease.

‘What happened?’ Omi was the first to reach him. ‘I told you. I get a headache.

Can I go back now?’ Ali said, his childish voice almost in tears.

Omi looked at Ish and me. I shrugged. ‘I told you, no? Freak!’ Paras ran up to us. Ali stood. ‘Can I go?’

We nodded. From his pocket, Ali took out some marbles that resembled his eyes. Rolling them in his hand, he left the ground.

‘I cannot believe it,’ Ish declared as he finished his fifty morning pushups. He came and sat next to me on the bank’s backyard floor. Omi continued to complete his hundred.

‘Tea,’ I announced and handed Ish his cup. My best friend had laced serious mental trauma yesterday. I couldn’t do much apart from making my best cup of ginger tea in the bank kitchen.

‘It can’t be just luck, right? No way,’ Ish answered his own qestions.

I nodded my head towards a plate of biscuits, which he ignored. I wondered if the Ali episode would cause permanent damage to Ish’s appetite. Ish continued to talk to himself as I tuned myself out. Omi moved on to sit-ups. He also belted out Hanuman-ji’s forty verses along with the exercise. I loved this little morning break

– between the students’ leaving and the shop’s opening. It gave me time to think. And these days I only thought about the new shop. ‘Twenty-five thousand rupees saved already, and fifteen thousand more by December,’ 1 mumbled, ‘If the builder accepts forty as deposit, I can secure the Navrangpura lease by year end.’

I poured myself another cup of tea. ‘Here are your shop’s keys, Mama. We are moving to our shop in Navrangpura, in the air-conditioned mall,’ I repeated my dream dialogue inside my head for the hundredth time. Three more months, I assured myself.

‘You guys ate all the biscuits?’ Omi came to us as he finished his exercise. ‘Sorry, tea?’ I offered.

Omi shook his head. He opened a polypack of milk and put it to his mouth. Like me, he didn’t have much tea. Caffeine ran in Ish’s family veins though. I remembered Vidya offering me tea. Stupid girl, duh-ing me.

‘Still thinking of Ali?’ Omi said to Ish, wiping his milk moustache.

‘He is amazing, man. I didn’t bowl my best, but not so bad either. But he just, just…,’ Words failed Ish.

‘Four sixes. Incredible!’ Omi said, ‘No wonder they call him a freak.’ ‘Don’t know if he is a freak. But he is good,’ Ish said.

‘These Muslim kids man. You never know what…,’ Omi said and gulped the remainder of his milk.

‘Shut up. He is just fucking good. I have never seen anyone play like that. I want to coach him.’

‘Sure, as long as he pays. He can’t play beyond four balls. You could help him,’ I told Ish.

‘What? You will teach that mullah kid?’ Omi’s face turned worrisome.

‘I will teach the best player in Belrampur. That kid has serious potential. You know like…’ ‘Team India?’ I suggested.

‘Shh, don’t tempt fate, but yes. I want to teach him. They’ll ruin him in that school. They can barely teach the course there, forget sports.’

‘We are not teaching a Muslim kid,’ Omi vetoed. ‘Bittoo Mama will kill me.’ ‘Don’t overreact. He won’t know. We just teach him at the bank,’ Ish said. For

the rest of the argument, Ish and Omi just exchanged stares. Ultimately, like always, Omi gave in to Ish.

‘Your choice. Make sure he never comes near the temple. If! Bittoo Mama finds out, he will kick us out of the shop.’

‘Omi is right. We need the shop for a few more months,’ I said. ‘We also need to go to the doctor,’ Ish said. ‘Doctor?’ I said.

‘His head was hurting after four balls. I want a doctor to see him before we begin practicing.’

‘You’ll have to talk to his parents if you want him to pay,’ I said.

‘I’ll teach him for free,’ Ish said. ‘But still, for Indian parents cricket equals time waste.’ ‘Then we’ll go to his house,’ Ish said. ‘I am not going to any Muslim house,’ Omi said almost hysterically. ‘I am not going.’

‘Let’s go open the shop first. It’s business time,’ I said.

★

No cricket, I like marbles,’ Ali protested for the fifth time. Ish took four chocolates (at the shop’s expense, idiot) for him, a reward for every sixer. Ali accepted the chocolates but said no to cricket coaching, and a foot-stomping no to meeting the doctor.

‘Our shop has marbles,’ I cajoled. ‘Special blue ones from Jaipur. One dozen for you if you come to the doctor. He is just across the street.’

Ali looked at me with his two green marbles.

‘Two dozen if you come for one cricket coaching class in the morning,’ I said. ‘Doctor is fine. For coaching class, ask abba.’

‘Give me abba’s name and address,’ I said.

‘Naseer Alam, seventh pol, third house on the ground floor.’ ‘What name did you say?’ Omi said.

‘Naseer Alam,’ Ali repeated.

‘I have heard the name somewhere. But I can’t recall…’ Omi murmured, but Ish ignored him.

‘Dr Verma’s clinic is in the next pol. Let’s go,’ Ish said.



‘Welcome, nice to have someone young in my clinic for a change.’ Dr Verma removed his spectacles. He rubbed his fifty-year-old eyes.

His wrinkles had multiplied since I last met him three years ago. His once black hair had turned white. Old age sucks.

‘And who is this little tiger? Open your mouth, baba,’ Dr Verma said and switched on his torch out of habit. ‘What happened?’

‘Nothing’s wrong. We have some questions,’ Ish said. The doctor put his torch down. ‘Questions?’

‘This boy is gifted in cricket. I want to know how he does it,’ Ish said.

‘Does what?’ Dr Verma said. ‘Some people are just talented.’ ‘I bowled four balls to him. He slammed sixes on all of them,’ lsh said.

‘What?’ Dr Verma said. He knew lsh was one of the best players in the neighbourhood.

‘Unbelievable but true,’ I chimed in. ‘Also, he sat down after four balls. He said his head hurt’

Dr Verma turned to Ali. ‘You like cricket, baba?’ ‘No,’ Ali said.

‘This is more complicated than the usual viral fever. What happened after the four balls, baba?’

‘Whenever I play with concentration, my head starts hurting, Ali said. He slid his hands into his pocket. I heard the rustle of marbles.

‘Let us check your eyes,’ Dr Verma said and stood up to go” to the testing room.

‘Eyesight is fantastic,’ Dr Verma said, returning. ‘I recommend you meet my friend Dr Multani from the city hospital. He is an eye specialist and used to be a team doctor for a baseball team in USA. In fact, I haven’t met him for a year. I can take you tomorrow if you want.’

We nodded. I reached for my wallet. Dr Verma gave me a stern glance to stop. ‘Fascinating,’ Dr Multani said only one word as he held up Mi’s MRI scan. He

had spent two hours with Ali. He did every test imaginable – a fitness check, a blood test, retinal scans, a computerised hand-eye coordination exam. The Matrix style MRI, where Ali had to lie down head first inside a chamber, proved most useful.

‘I miss my sports-doctor days, Verma. This love for Amdavad made me give up a lot,’ Dr Multani said. He ordered tea and khakra for all of us.

Are we done?’ Ali said and yawned.

‘Almost. Play marbles in the garden outside if you want,’ I )r Multani said. He kept quiet until Ali left.

‘That was some work, Multani, for a little headache,’ Dr Verma s.iid.

‘It is not just a headache,’ Dr Multani said and munched a kliakra. ‘Ish is right, the boy is exceptionally gifted.’

‘How?’ I blurted. What was in those tests that said Ali could smash any bowler to bits.

‘The boy has hyper-reflex. It is an aberration in medical terms, but proving to be a gift for cricket.’

‘Hyper what?’ Omi echoed.

‘Hyper reflex,’ Dr Multani lifted a round glass paper weight from I lis table and pretended to hurl it at Omi. Omi ducked. ‘When I ihrow this at you, what do you do? You reflexively try to prevent 1 he attack. I didn’t give you an advance warning and everything happened in a split second. Thus, you didn’t do a conscious think to duck away, it just happened.’

Dr Multani paused for a sip of water and continued, ‘It matters little in everyday life, except if we touch something too hot or too cold. However, in sports it is crucial.’ Dr Multani paused to open .1 few reports and picked up another khakra.

I looked at Ali outside from the window. He was using a catapult to shoot one marble to hit another one.

‘So Ali has good reflexes. That’s it?’ Ish said.

‘His reflexes are at least ten times better than ours. But there is more. Apart from reflex action, the human brain makes decisions in two other ways. One is the long, analysed mode – the problem goes through a rigorous analysis in our brain and we decide the course of action. And then there is a separate, second way that’s faster but less accurate. Normally, the long way is used and we are aware of it. But sometimes, in urgent situations, the brain chooses the shortcut way. Call it a quick-think mode.’

We nodded as Dr Multani continued:

‘In reflex action, the brain short-circuits the thinking process and acts. He can just about duck, forget try to catch it. However, the response time is superfast. Sports has moments that requires you to think in every possible way – analysed, quick-think or reflex.’

And Ali?’ Ish said.

Dr Multani picked up the MRI scan again. ‘Ali’s brain is fascinating. His first, second and even the third reflex way of thinking is fused. His response time is as fast as that of a reflex action, yet his decision making is as accurate as the analysed mode. You may think he hit that superfast delivery of yours by luck, but his brain saw its path easily. Like it was a soft throw.’

‘But I bowled fast.’

‘Yes, but his brain can register it and act accordingly. If it is hard to visualise … imagine that Ali sees the ball in slow motion A normal player will use the second or third way of thinking to hit a fast ball. Ali uses the first. A normal player needs years of practice to ensure his second way gets as accurate to play well. Ali doesn’t need to. That is his gift.’

It look us a minute to digest Dr Multani’s words. We definitely had to use the first way of thinking to understand it.

‘To him a pace delivery is slow motion?’ Ish tried again.

‘Only to his brain, as it analyses fast. Of course, if you hit him with a fast ball he will get hurt.’

‘But how can he hit so far?’ Ish said.

‘He doesn’t hit much. He changes direction of the already fast ball. The energy in that ball is mostly yours.’

‘Have you seen other gifted players like him?’ I wanted to know.

‘Not to this degree, this boy’s brain is wired differently. Some may call it a defect, so I suggest you don’t make a big noise about it’

‘He is Indian team material,’ Ish said. ‘Dr Multani, you know he is.’

Dr Multani sighed. ‘Well, not at the moment. His headaches are a problem, for instance. While his brain can analyse fast, it .ilso tires quickly. He needs to stay in the game. He has to survive Until his brain gets refreshed to use the gift again.’

‘Can that happen?’ Ish said.

‘Yes, under a training regimen. And he has to learn the other aspects of cricket. I don’t think he ever runs between the wickets. The boy has no stamina. He is weak, almost malnourished,’ the iloctor said.

I am going to coach him,’ Ish vowed. And Omi will help. Omi will make him eat and make him fit.’

‘No, I can’t,’ Omi refused as all looked at him. ‘Dr Verma, tell I hem why I can’t.’

‘Because he’s a Muslim. Multani, remember Naseer from the Muslim University? Ali is his son.’

‘Oh, that Naseer? Yes, he used to campaign in the university elections. Used to be a firebrand once, but I have heard that he has toned down.’

‘Yes, he is in politics full time now. Moved from a pure Muslim to a secular party,’ Dr Verma said.

Ish looked at Dr Verma, surprised.

‘I found out after you guys left yesterday. Sometimes I feel I run a gossip centre, not a clinic’ Dr Verma chuckled. ‘Anyway, that’s the issue then. A priest’s son teaching a Muslim boy.’

‘I don’t want to teach him,’ Omi said quickly.

‘Shut up, Omi. You see what we have here?’ Ish spoke.

Omi stood up, gave Ish a disapproving glance and left the room.

‘How about the state academy?’ Dr Verma said. ‘They’ll ruin him,’ Ish said.

‘I agree.’ Dr Multani paused. ‘He is too young, Muslim and poor. And he is untrained. I’d suggest you keep this boy and his talent under wraps for now. When the time comes, we will see.’

We left the clinic. I took out four marbles from my pocket and called Ali. ‘Ali, time to go. Here, catch.’

I threw the four marbles high in the air towards him. I had thrown them purposely apart.

Ali looked away from his game and saw the marbles midair. He remained in his squat position and raised his left hand high. One, two, three, four – like a magic wand his left hand moved. He caught every single one of them.

Six

He won’t agree, I spoke to him already,’ Ali huffed. We reached the end of Belrampur to get to his house. He lived in a particularly squalid pol. Ali pressed the bell. I noticed his father’s nameplate had a motif of the secular political party. Ali, so late again,’ his dad said as he opened the door. He wore an impeccable black achkan, which contrasted with his white beard and a tight skullcap of lace

material. He looked around sixty, which meant Ali came late in his life.

And who are you gentlemen?’ he said.

‘I am Ishaan,’ Ish said. And this is Govind and Omi. We are Ali’s friends.’ ‘Friends?’ Ali’s dad said, underlining the absurd age difference.

‘Yes abba, they came to play cricket at the school. They have a sports shop. I told you, remember?’ ‘Come in,’ Ali’s dad said.

We sat in the living room. Ali’s mother, wearing a brown-Coloured salwar suit, brought in glasses of roohafza. Even though a dupatta covered most of her face, I could make out that she must’ve been at least twenty years younger than her husband. She scolded Ali for not studying for his test the next day. I think Indian mothers have two tasks – to tell children to eat more or study more.

‘We wanted to talk about coaching Ali,’ Ish began after Ali left the room with his mom.

‘Cricket coaching? No, thanks. We are not interested,’ Ali’s dad said in a tone that was more conclusive than discussion oriented.

‘But uncle…,’ Ish protested.

‘Look above,’ Ali’s dad said and pointed to the roof, ‘look, there are cracks on the ceiling. There is this room and one other tiny room that I have taken on rent. Does it look like the house of a person who can afford cricket coaching?’

‘We won’t be charging Ali,’ Ish said.

I glared at Ish. I hate it when he gives discounts at the shop, but a hundred per cent off is insane.

‘What will he do with cricket coaching? Already school is difficult for him after the madrasa. This is the first time Ali is studying maths. And I can’t even afford a maths tutor…’

‘Govind teaches maths,’ Ish said. ‘What?’ Ali’s dad and I said together.

‘Really, he is the best in Belrampur. He got hundred per cent marks in the Class XII board exam.’

I double glared at Ish. I was fully booked in tuitions and I already taught his clown of a sister for free. ‘But Ish, I can’t,’ I said.

‘Maybe we can do a combined deal. If you allow him cricket coaching with us, we will teach him maths for free,’ Ish said ignoring my words.

‘How can I teach for free? I have paying students waiting,’ I said.

Ish glanced at me with disdain as if I had shot down his mission to Mars. ‘For free?’ I mouthed to him.

‘I will pay whatever I can,’ Ali’s dad said in a muffled voice.

‘I am sorry, but this is how I earn my living. I can’t…’ I said, in a desperate attempt to salvage my asshole image.

‘Just take it from my salary, ok? Can you let me talk?’ Ish said with great politeness.

I wanted to get up and leave.

I get a small retirement pension. How much do you charge?’

‘Four hun…,’ I started to say but Ish interrupted with ‘Why don’t we start and see how it goes?’

Everyone nodded, even Omi because he did whatever everyone else was doing anyway.

‘Right, Govind?’ he said to me last.

I gave the briefest nod possible, a five-degree tilt.

‘Stay for dinner, please,’ Ali’s dad implored as we stood up to leave. ‘No, no,’ Omi said, horrified at the idea of eating in a Muslim home.

‘Please, I insist. For us, hospitality is important. You are our mehmaan.’

I would have disagreed, but I wanted to get something for the free maths-and- cricket coaching programme.

We sat on the living room floor. Ali’s mom brought us two extra large plates, one for the three of us and another for Ali’s dad. The plates had simple food – chapattis, daal and a potato-cauliflower vegetable.

Omi sat down. He did not touch the food.

‘Sorry I can’t offer you meat. This is all we have today.’ ‘I don’t eat meat. I am a priest’s son,’ Omi said.

An awkward pause followed. Ish jumped in, ‘The food looks great. Dig in guys.’

To share a single plate is strangely intimate, lsh and I broke off the same chapatti. His long fingers reminded me of his sister’s. Damn, I had to teach her again the next day.

‘They don’t teach maths in madrasas?’ I asked for the sake of conversation and mathematics.

‘Not in this one,’ Ali’s dad said as he spooned in daal. ‘Maths and science are forbidden.’

‘That’s strange. In this day and age,’ I said. I thought of a business opportunity, a massive maths tuition chain outside every madrasa.

‘Not really,’ Ali’s dad said. ‘Madrasas were not even supposed to be schools. Their role is confined to teaching Islamic culture. Here, have some more chapattis.’

‘And that’s why you had him switch schools?’ lsh said.

‘Yes. I would have done it earlier, but my father was adamant Ali goes to a madrasa. He died six months ago.’

‘Oh, I am sorry,’ Ish said.

‘He was unwell for a long time. I miss him, but not the years of medical expenses that wiped me out,’ Ali’s father said. He drank a glass of water. ‘When I retired from university, I had to leave the campus quarters. The party wanted me to move here. The Belrampur Municipal School was close, so I put him there. Is it good?’

‘Yes, we studied there for twelve years,’ I said.

‘Omi, you didn’t eat anything. At least have some fruit,’ Ali’s dad said, offering him some bananas. Omi took one, examined it, and gobbled it in three bites.

‘Why are you so keen to teach Ali cricket?’ Ali’s dad said.

The question was enough to light up Ish’s face. He spoke animatedly. ‘Ali has a gift. You see how he blossoms with my training.’

‘You play cricket?’ Ali’s father said.

‘In school and now I have a sports store. I’ve seen players, but none like Ali,’ Ish said passionately.

‘But it’s just a game. One guy hits a ball with a stick, the rest run around to stop it.’

‘It’s more than that,’ lsh said, offended. ‘But if you have never played it, you will never understand.’

Ali’s dad said, ‘You know I am a member of the secular party?’ ‘We saw the sign,’ I said.

‘Would you like to come and visit our party sometime?’

Omi suddenly stood up. ‘Do you know who you are talking to? I am Pandit Shastri’s son. You have seen the Swami temple in Belrampur or not?’ His voice was loud.

Ish pulled Omi’s elbow to make him sit down. ‘How does that matter, son?’ Ali’s dad said.

‘You are telling me to come visit your party? I am a Hindu.’

‘We won’t hold that against you,’ Ali’s father grinned. ‘Ours is a secular party.’ ‘It is not secular. It is suck-ular party. Suck-up politics, that is all you know.

No wonder Muslims like you flock there. Now Ish, we are leaving or not?’ ‘Omi, behave yourself, we came for Ali.’

I don’t care. Let him play marbles and fail maths. If Bittoo Mama finds out I am here…’

‘Bittoo is your Mama?’ Ali’s dad said.

‘He is your opposition. And a suck-up party will never win in Belrampur.’ ‘Calm down, son. Sit down,’ Ali’s dad said.

Omi sat down and Ish massaged his shoulder. Omi rarely flared up, but when he did, it took several pacifying tactics to get him back to normal.

‘Here, have a banana. I know you are hungry,’ Ish soothed. Omi resisted, but took the banana.

‘I am also new to secular politics, son. I was in a hardline party,’ Ali’s dad said and paused to reflect, ‘yes, I made a few mistakes too.’

‘Whatever. Don’t even try to convert people from our party to yours,’ Omi said fiercely.

I won’t. But why are you so against us? The party has ruled the country for forty years, we must be doing something right.’

‘You won’t rule Gujarat anymore. Because we can see through your hypocrisy,’ Omi said.

‘Omi, stop,’ Ish said.

‘It’s ok, Ish. I rarely get young people to talk to. Let him speak his mind,’ Ali’s dad said.

I don’t have anything to say. Let’s go,’ Omi said.

‘The communal parties aren’t perfect either,’ Ali’s dad said. I guess even Ali’s dad loved to argue.

‘There you go. Here is the bias, you call us communal. Your party gives preference to Muslims, but it is secular. Why?’ Omi said. ‘What preference have we given?’ Ali’s dad said. ‘Why can’t you let us make a temple in Ayodhya?’ Omi said. ‘Because there is a mosque there already’

‘But there was a temple there before.’ ‘That is not proven.’ ‘It has. The government keeps hiding those reports.’ ‘Incorrect.’

‘Whatever. It is not an ordinary place. We believe it is the birthplace of our lord. We said, “Give us that site, and we will move the mosque respectfully next door.” But you can’t even do that. And we, the majority, can’t have that one little request fulfilled. Parekh-ji is right, what hope does a Hindu have in this country?’

‘Oh, so it is Parekh-ji. He taught you all this?’ Ali’s dad almost smirked.

‘He didn’t teach us. Our cause is labelled communal, it is not Cool to talk about it. But because Hindus don’t talk, you think they don’t feel anything? Why do you think people listen to Parekh-ji? because somewhere deep down, he strikes a chord. A common chord of resentment is brewing Mr Naseer, even if it is not talked about’

A lot of Hindus vote for us, you should know,’ Ali’s father said. ‘But slowly they will see the truth.’

‘Son, India is a free country. You have a right to your views. My only advice is Hinduism is a great religion, but don’t get extreme.’

‘Hah, don’t tell me about being extreme. We know which religion is extreme.’

I wasn’t sure if Omi really believed in what he said, or if he was revising lessons given by Parekh-ji. He never spoke about this to Ish and me, but, somewhere deep down, did he also feel like Bittoo Mama? If Ish’s passion was cricket and my passion was business, was Omi’s passion religion? Or maybe, like most people, he was confused and trying to find his passion. And unlike us who never took him seriously, perhaps Parekh-ji gave him a sense of purpose and importance.

‘Can we please make a pact to not discuss politics?’ Ish pleaded as he signalled a timeout.

‘You still fine with sending your son?’ I asked Ali’s dad, wondering if he had changed his mind after Omi’s outbursts.

‘Don’t be silly. We are communicating our differences. That is what is missing in this country. It’s ok, I trust you with my son.’ |

We stood up to leave and reached the door, lsh confirmed the practice time – 7 a.m.

‘Come, I will walk you boys to the main road. I like to take a walk after dinner,’ Ali’s dad said.

We walked out of Ali’s house. Omi held his head down, probably feeling ashamed at having raised his voice. Ali’s dad spoke again. ‘I am not particularly fond of my own party’

‘Really?’ I said when no one said anything.

‘Yes, because at one level, they too, like all political parties, spend more time playing politics than working for the country. Creating differences, taking sides, causing divides – they know this too well.’

All of us nodded to say goodnight. But Ali’s dad was not finished. ‘It is like two customers go to a restaurant and the manager gives them only one plate of food. And if you want to eat, you must fight the other guy. The two guys get busy fighting, and some people tell them to make amends and eat half plate each. In all this, they forget the real issue – why didn’t the manager provide-two plates of food?’

I noticed Ali’s dad’s face. Behind the beard and the moustache, there was a wise man somewhere.

‘Good point, the fight is created. That is why I am never big on religion or politics,’ I said.

‘Once a fight is created, it leads to another and so on. Youl can’t really check it,’ lsh said.

‘You know I used to teach zoology in college,’ Ali’s dad said. ‘And I once read about chimpanzee fights that may be relevant here.’

‘Chimpanzee fights?’

‘Yes, male chimpanzees of the same pack fight violently with each other – for food, females, whatever. However, after the fight, they go through a strange ritual. They kiss each other, on the lips.’

Even Omi had to laugh.

‘So Hindus and Muslims should kiss?’ I said.

‘No, the point is this ritual was created by nature. To make sure the fight gets resolved and the pack stays together. In fact, any long-term relationship requires this.’

‘Any?’ Ish said.

‘Yes, take any husband and wife. They will fight, and hurt each other emotionally. However, later they will make up, with hugs, presents or kind understanding words. These reconciliatory mechanisms are essential. The problem in Indian Hindu-Muslim rivalry is not that that one is right and the other is wrong. It is…

‘That there are no reconciliatory mechanisms,’ Ish said.

‘Yes, so that means if politicians fuel a fire, there is no fire brigade to check it. It sounds harsh, but Omi is right. People feel inside. Just by not talking about it, the differences do not go away. The resentment brews and brews, and doesn’t come out until it is too late.’

We had reached the main road and stopped next to a paan shop. I figured out why Ali’s dad had come with us. He wanted I lis after-dinner paan.

‘Tell Ali to be on time,’ Ish said as we waved goodbye.

The image of kissing chimpanzees stayed with me all night.

Ali came on time in a white kurta pajama. He held his maths books in one hand and his cricket bat in the other.

‘Cricket first. Keep the books away,’ Ish said.

The boy looked startled by the sudden instruction. I took him upstairs and opened the vault. Ali chose an empty locker and put down his books. Paresh and Naveen, two other kids had also come for cricket practice. They were both Ali’s age but looked stronger.

‘Boys, run around the backyard twenty times,’ Ish ordered in his drill sergeant voice. His decision on how many rounds the kids must run was arbitrary. I think he enjoyed this first dose of power everyday.

I went upstairs to the vault to look at Ali’s books. The notebooks were blank.

The maths textbook was for Class VII, but looked untouched.

I came out to the first floor balcony. The students were on their morning jog. ‘What?’ Ish said as Ali stopped after five rounds.

‘I … can’t … run,’ Ali heaved.

Omi smirked. ‘Buddy, people here do hundred rounds. How are you going to run between the wickets? How are you going to field?’

‘That is why … I don’t … like cricket,’ Ali said, still trying to catch his breath. ‘Can’t we just play?’ Ali said. ‘You have to warm up, buddy,’ Ish said. Ali had more than warmed up. His face was hot and red.

After exercises, Ish did catch and field practice. Ish stood in the middle with the bat as everyone bowled to him. He lobbed the ball high and expected everyone to catch. Ali never moved from his position. He could catch only when the ball came close to him.

‘All right, let’s play,’ Ish clapped his hands.’Paresh, you are with me. We’ll bowl first. Naveen you be in Ali’s team and bat first.’

Naveen took the crease and Ali became the runner. Naveen struck on Paresh’s fourth ball. Ish ran to get the ball. It was an easy two runs, but Ali’s laziness meant they could score only one. I’aresh took a three-step run-up and bowled. Ali struck, the ball rose and hurled towards the first floor. I ducked in the first floor balcony. The ball went past me and hit the branch manager’s office window.

Paresh had the same shocked expression as Ish, when Ali had hit a six off his first ball.

‘Hey, what? You hero or something?’ Ish ran to Ali. Ali looked puzzled at the reprimand.

‘This is not a cricket ground. We are playing in a bank. If the ball goes out and hits someone, who will be responsible? What if things break? Who will pay?’ Ish shouted.

Ali still looked surprised.

‘That was a good shot,’ Paresh said.

‘Shut up. Hey Ali, I know you can do that. Learn the other aspects of the game.’ Ali froze, very near tears.

‘Ok, listen. I am sorry. I did not mean to…,’ Ish said. ‘That is all I know. I can’t do anything else,’ Ali’s voice cracked.

‘We will teach you. Now why don’t you bowl?’

Ali didn’t bat anymore that day. Ish kept the practice simple for the next half an hour and tried not to scream. The latter was tough, especially because he was an animal when it came to cricket.

‘Get your books from upstairs. We will study in the backyard,’ I told a sweaty ‘Ali.

He brought his books down and opened the first chapter of his maths book. It was on fractions and decimals.

Omi brought two polypacks of milk. ‘Here,’ he gave one to Ish.

‘Thanks,’ Ish said, and tore it open with his mouth. ‘And here, one more,’ Omi said.

‘For what?’ Ish said, after taking a big sip.

‘Give it to your stick insect,’ Omi said. ‘Have you seen his arms? They are thinner than the wicket. You want to make him a player or not?’

‘You give him yourself,’ Ish smiled.

Omi shoved the milk packet near Ali and left. ‘You have done some fractions before?’ I said. He nodded.

I told him to simplify 24/64 and he started dividing the numerator and denominator by two again and again. Of course, he lacked the intuition he had in hitting sixes in mathematics. However, his father had tried his best.

‘See you at the shop,’ Ish told me and turned to Ali, ‘Any questions on cricket, champ?’

‘Why do people run between the wickets to score runs?’ Ali said, nibbling the end of his pen.

‘That’s how you score. It’s the rule,’ Ish said.

‘No, not that way. I mean why run across and risk getting out for one or two runs when you can hit six with one shot?’

Ish scratched his head. ‘Keep your questions to maths,’ he said and left.



‘I have figured it out. The young generation from the Sixties to the Eighties is the worst India ever had. These thirty years are an embarrassment for India,’ Ish said as we lay down in the shop.

We had spread a mat on the shop’s floor. A nap was a great way to kill time during slow afternoons. It was exam time and business was modest. Omi snoozed while Ish and 1 had our usual philosophical discussion.

‘Not all that bad,’ I said. ‘We won the World Cup in 1983.’

‘Yeah, we played good cricket, but that’s about it. We remained poor, kept fighting wars, electing the same control freaks who did nothing for the country. People’s dream job was a government job, yuck. Nobody took risks or stuck their neck out. Just one corrupt banana republic marketed by the leaders as this new socialist, intellectual nation. Tanks and thinktanks, nothing else,’ Ish said.

‘And guess who was at the top? Which party? Secular nonsense again,’ Omi joined in, opening one eye.

‘Well, your right-wing types didn’t exactly get their act together cither,’ Ish said. ‘We will, man. We are so ready. You wait and see, elections next year and

Gujarat is ours,’ Omi said.

‘Anyway, screw politics. My point is, that the clueless Sixties to Eighties generation is now old, and running the country. But the Nineties and the, what do they say…’

‘Zeroes.’

‘Yeah, whatever. The Zeroes think different. But we are being run by old fogeys who never did anything worthwhile in their primetime. The Doordarshan generation is running the Star TV generation,’ Ish said.

I clapped. ‘Wow, wisdom is free at the Team India Cricket Shop.’

‘Fuck off. Can’t have a discussion around here. You think only you are the intellectual type. I am just a cricket coach,’ Ish grumbled.

‘No, you are the intellectual, bro. I am the sleepy type. Now can we rest until the next pesky kid comes,’ I said, closing my eyes. Our nap was soon interrupted. ‘Lying down, well done. When rent is cheap, shopkeepers Will sleep,’ Bittoo

Mama’s voice made us all sit up. Now what the hell was he doing here?

‘It is slow this time of the day, Mama,’ Omi said as he pulled out a stool. He signalled me to get tea. I opened the cash box and took some coins.

‘Get something to eat as well,’ Mama said. I nodded. Now who the fuck pays for Mama’s snacks? The rent is not that cheap, I thought as I left the shop with a fake smile. I returned with tea for everyone.

Mama was telling Omi, ‘You come help me if it is slow in the afternoons. Your friends can come too. Winning a seat is not that easy. These secular guys are good.’

‘What do you want me to do, Mama?’ Omi said as he took the tea glasses off the crate and passed them around.

‘We have to mobilise young people. Tell them our philosophy, warn them against the hypocrites. During campaign time, we need people to help us in publicity, organising rallies. There is work to be done.’

‘I’ll come next time, Mama,’ Omi said.

‘Tell others, too. If you see young people at the temple, tell them about our party. Tell them about me.’

I stood up, disgusted. Yes, I could see the point in targeting temple visitors, given the philosophy of the party. But when someone comes to pray, should they be pitched to join politics? I opened the accounts register to distract myself.

‘You will come?’ Mama turned to Ish.

‘Someone has to man the shop. At least one person, even if it is slow,’ Ish said.

Smartass, that was supposed to be my excuse. ‘And you, Govind?’ Mama said.

‘I am not into that sort of stuff. I am agnostic, remember?’ I said, still reading the register.

‘But this isn’t about religion. It is about justice. And considering we gave you this shop at such a low rent, you owe US something.’

‘It is not your shop. Omi’s mother gave it to us. And given the location, the rent we pay is fair,’ I said.

I alone am enough, Mama. Dhiraj will come as well, right?’ Omi said, to break the ever escalating tension between Mama and me. Dhiraj was Mama’s fourteen- year-old son and Omi’s cousin.

‘Look at his pride! This two-bit shop and a giant ego,’ Mama said. ‘If Omi wasn’t there, I’d get you kicked out.’

‘There will be no need. We are leaving soon anyway,’ I said without thinking. I couldn’t help it. I wanted to tell him only at l lie last minute, just before we moved to the Navrangpura mall. Hut I was sick of his patronising tone.

‘Oh, really? Where, you will pull a hand-cart with these bats and balls?’ Mama said.

‘We are moving to Navrangpura mall. You can take your shop back then.’ ‘What?’ Mama exclaimed.

‘We will make the deposit next month. Possession when it opens in three months. This two-bit shop is about to move to a prime location sports store,’ I said.

Mama’s mouth remained open. I had dreamt of this expression lor months. ‘Really?’ Mama turned to Omi.

Omi nodded.

‘How much is the deposit?’ Mama said. ‘Forty thousand. We saved it,’ I said.

‘You pay one thousand a month for this shop. If you were paying the market rent of two, you wouldn’t be able to save this much,’ Mama said.

I kept quiet.

‘What? Now you are quiet, eh?’ Mama stood up.

What was I supposed to do? Jump and grab his feet? I was also giving his nephew employment and an equal share in my business. Sure, Omi was a friend, but given his qualifications, nobody would give him that stature. A cheaper rent was the least he could do.

‘Let me know when you want me, Mama,’ Omi said. ‘Good, I’ll see you,’ he said, ‘continue your rest.’

Ish raised his middle finger as Mama left. Then we lay down and went back to sleep.

Seven

‘Have you done the sums I gave you?’

Vidya nodded. I couldn’t see her face as we sat side by side, but I knew she’d just cried when she lifted a hand to wipe an eye.

I opened her tuition notebook. I am a tutor, not a consoler. ‘You did them all?’ She shook her head. ‘How many did you do?’

She showed me seven fingers. Ok, seven out of ten weren’t bad. But why wasn’t she saying anything.

‘What’s up?’ I said, more to improve communication than the sight of her smudged eyes.

‘Nothing,’ she said in a broken voice.

A girl’s ‘nothing’ usually means ‘a lot’. Actually, it meant ‘a lot and don’t get me started’. I thought of a suitable response to a fake ‘nothing’.

‘You want to go wash your face?’ I said. ‘I am fine. Let’s get started.’

I looked at her eyes. Her eyelashes were wet. She had the same eyes as her brother. However, the brown was more prominent on her fair face.

‘Your second problem is correct too,’ I said, and ticked her notebook. I almost wrote ‘good’ out of habit. I normally taught young kids, and they loved it if I made comments like ‘good’, ‘well done’ or made a ‘star’ against their answers. But Vidya was no kid.

‘You did quite well,’ I said as I finished reviewing her work.

‘Excuse me,’ she said and ran to the bathroom. She probably had an outburst of tears. She came back, this time her eyeliner gone and the whole face wet.

‘Listen, we can’t have a productive class if you are disturbed. We have to do more complex problems today and. ’

‘But I am not disturbed. It’s Garima and her, well, forget it.’ ‘Garima?’

‘Yes, my cousin and best friend in Bombay. I told you last time.’ ‘I don’t remember,’ I said.

‘She told me last night she would SMS me in the morning. It is afternoon already, and she hasn’t. She always does that.’ ‘Why don’t you SMS her instead?’

‘I am not doing that. She said she would. And so she should, right?’ I looked at her blankly, unable to respond.

‘She is in this hi-fi PR job, so she is too busy to type a line?’ I wished that woman would SMS her so we could start class.

‘Next time I will tell her I have something really important to I talk about and not call her for two days,’ she said.

Some, I repeat only some girls, measure the strength of their friendship by the power of the emotionally manipulative games they could play with each other.

‘Should we start?’

‘Yeah, I am feeling better. Thanks for listening.’

‘No problem. So what happened in problem eight?’ I said.

We immersed ourselves into probability for the next half an hour. When she applied her mind, she wasn’t dumb at maths as she came across on first impression. But she rarely applied it for more than five minutes. Once, she had to

change her pen. Then she had to reopen and fasten her hairclip. In fifteen minutes, she needed a cushion behind her back. After that her mother sent in tea and biscuits and she had to sip it every thirty seconds. Still, we plowed along. Forty minutes into the class, she pulled her chair back.

‘My head is throbbing now. I have never done so much maths continuously in my life. Can we take a break?’

‘Vidya, we only have twenty minutes more,’ I said.

She stood up straight and blinked her eyes. ‘Can we agree to a five-minute break during class? One shouldn’t study maths that long. It has to be bad for you.’

She kept her pen aside and opened her hair. A strand fell on my arm. I pulled my hand away.

‘How is your preparation for other subjects? You don’t hate science, do you?’ I said. I wanted to keep the break productive.

I like science. But the way they teach it, it sucks,’ Vidya said. ‘Like what?’

‘Like the medical entrance guides, they have thousands of multiple choice questions. You figure them out and then you are good enough to be a doctor. That’s not how I look at science.’

‘Well, we have no choice. There are very few good colleges and competition is tough.’

I know. But the people who set these exam papers, I wonder if they ever are curious about chemistry anymore. Do they just cram up reactions? Or do they ever get fascinated by it? Do they ever see a marble statue and wonder, it all appears static, but inside this statue there are protons buzzing and electrons madly spinning.’

I looked into her bright eyes. I wished they would be as lit up when I taught her probability.

‘That’s quite amazing, isn’t it?’ I said.

‘Or let’s talk of biology. Think about this,’ she said and touched my arm. ‘What is this?’

‘What?’ I said, taken aback by her contact.

‘This is your skin. Do you know there are communities of bacteria living here? There are millions of individual life forms -eating, reproducing and dying right on us. Yet, we never wonder. Why? We only care about cramming up an epidermal layer diagram, because that comes in the exam every single year.’

I didn’t know what to say to this girl. Maybe I should have stuck to teaching seven-year-olds.

‘There are some good reference books outside your textbooks for science,’ I told her.

‘Are there?’

‘Yes, you get them in the Law Garden book market. They go into concepts. I can get them for you if you want. Ask your parents if they will pay for them.’

*Of course, they will pay. If it is for studies, they spend like crazy. But can I come along with you?’

‘No, you don’t have to. I’ll get the bill.’ ‘What?’

‘In case you are thinking how much I will spend.’ ‘You silly or what? It will be a nice break. We’ll go together.’ ‘Fine. Let’s do the rest of the sums. We have taken a fifteen-minute break.’

I finished a set of exercises and gave her ten problems as homework. Her phone beeped as I stood up to leave. She rushed to grab it. ‘Garima,’ she said and I shut the door behind me.

I was walking out when Ish came home.

‘Hey, good class? She is a duffer, must be tough,’ said Ish, his body covered in sweat after practice.

‘Not bad, she is a quick learner,’ I said. I didn’t know why, but looking at Ish right then made my heart beat fast. I wondered if I should tell him about my plan to go to Law Garden with Vidya to buy books. But that would be stupid, I thought. I didn’t have to explain everything to him.

‘I figured out a way to rein in Ali,’ Ish said. ‘How?’

‘I let him hit his four sixes first. Then he is like any of us.’ I nodded.

‘The other boys get pissed though. They think I have a special place for this student.’ Ish added.

‘They are kids. Don’t worry,’ I said and wondered how much longer I had to be with him and why the hell did I feel so

guilty?

‘Yeah. Some students are special, right?’ Ish chuckled. For a nanosecond I felt he was making a dig at me. No, this was about Ali. I didn’t have a special student.

‘You bet. Listen, have to go. Mom needs help with a big wedding order.’

With that, I took rapid strides and was out of his sight. My head buzzed like those electrons inside the marble statue in Omi’s temple.

★

She was dressed in a white chikan salwar kameez on the day of our Law

Garden trip. Her bandhini orange and red dupatta had tiny brass bells at the end. They made a sound everytime she moved her hand. There was a hint of extra make-up. Her lips shone and I couldn’t help staring at them.

‘It’s lip gloss. Is it too much?’ she said self-consciously, rubbing her lips with her fingers. Her upper lip had a near invisible mole on the right. I pulled my gaze away and looked for autos on the street. Never, ever look at her face, I scolded myself.

‘That’s the bookshop,’ I said as we reached the store.

The University Bookstore in Navrangpura was a temple for all muggers in the city. Nearly all customers were sleep deprived, overzealous students who’d never have enough of quantum physics or calculus. They don’t provide statistics, but I am sure anyone who clears the engineering and medical entrance exams in the city has visited the bookstore.

The middle-aged shopkeeper looked at Vidya through his glasses. She was probably the best looking customer to visit that month. Students who prepared for medical entrance don’t exactly wear coloured lip gloss.

‘Ahem, excuse me,’ I said as the shopkeeper scanned Vidya up and down. ‘Govind beta, so nice to see you,’ he said. One good way old people get away

with leching is by branding you their son or daughter. He knew my name ever since I scored a hundred in the board exam. In the newspaper interview I had

recommended his shop. He displayed the cutting for two years after that. I still get a twenty-five per cent discount on every purchase.

‘You have organic chemistry by L.G.Wade?’ I said. I would have done more small talk, but I wanted to avoid talking about Vidya. In fact, I didn’t even want him to look at Vidya.

‘Well, yes,’ the shopkeeper said, taken aback by my abruptness.

‘Chemistry book, red and white balls on the cover,’ he screamed .it one of his five assistants.

‘This is a good book,’ I said as I tapped the cover and gave it to Vidya. ‘Other organic chemistry books have too much to memorise. This one explains the principles.’

Vidya took the book in her hand. Her red nail polish was the same colour as the atoms on the cover.

‘Flip through it, see if you like it,’ I said.

She turned a few pages. The shopkeeper raised an eyebrow. He was asking me about the girl. See this is the reason why people think Ahmedabad is a small town despite the multiplexes. It is the mentality of the people.

‘Student, I take tuitions,’ I whispered to satisfy his curiosity lest he gave up sleeping for the rest of his life. He nodded his head in approval. Why do these old people poke their nose in our affairs so much? Like, would we care if he hung out with three grandmas?

‘If you say it is good, I am fine,’ she said, finishing her scan. ‘Good, and in physics, have you ever read Resnick and Halliday?’

‘Oh, I saw that book at my friend’s place once. Just the table of contents depressed me. It’s too hi-fi for me.’

‘What is this “hi-fi”? It is in your course, you have to study it,’ I said, my voice stern.

‘Don’t they have some guides or something?’ she said, totally ignoring my comment.

‘Guides are a short cut. They solve a certain number of problems. You need to understand the concepts.’

The shopkeeper brought out the orange and black cover Resnick and Halliday. Yes, the cover was scary and dull at the same time, something possible only in physics books.

‘I won’t understand it. But if you want to, let’s buy it,’ Vidya agreed.

‘Of course, you will understand it. And uncle, for maths do you have M.L. Khanna?’

I could see his displeasure in me calling him uncle, but someone needed to remind him.

‘Maths Khanna,’ the shopkeeper shouted. His assistants pulled out the yellow and black tome. Now if Resnick and Halliday is scary, M.L. Khanna is the Exorcist. I haven’t seen a thicker book and every page is filled with the hardest maths problems in the world. It was amusing that a person with a friendly name like M.L Khanna could do this to the students of our country.

‘What is this?’ Vidya said and tried to lift the book with her left hand. She couldn’t. She used both hands and finally took it six inches off the ground. ‘No, seriously, what is this? An assault weapon?’

‘It covers every topic,’ I said and measured the thickness with the fingers of my right hand, the four fingers fell short.

She held her hand sideways over mine to assist. ‘Six, it is six fingers thick,’ she said softly.

I pulled my hand out, lest uncle raise his eyebrows again, or worst case join his hand to ours to check the thickness.

‘Don’t worry, for the medical entrance you only have to study a few topics,’ I reassured her.

We paid for the books and came out of the shop.

We walked on the Navrangpura main road. My new shop was two hundred metres away. I had the urge to go see it.

‘Now what?’ she said.

‘Nothing, let’s go home,’ I said and looked for an auto. ‘You are a big bore, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘Excuse me?’ I said.

‘Dairy Den is round the corner. I’m hungry,’ she said.

‘I am starving. Seriously, I am famished.’ She kept a hand on her stomach. She wore three rings, each with different designs and tiny, multi-coloured stones.

I took the least visible seat in Dairy Den. Sure, no one from our gossip-loving pol came to this hip teen joint, but one could never be too careful. If a supplier saw me at Dairy Den, I would be like any other trendy young boy in Ahmedabad. I would never get a good price for cricket balls.

I felt hungry too. But I couldn’t match the drama-queen in histrionics. She ordered a Den’s special pizza, which had every topping available in Dairy Den’s kitchen. All dishes were vegetarian, as preferred by Ambavadis.

‘These books look really advanced,’ she said, pointing to the plastic bag. ‘They are MSc books,’ I said.

She raised her eyebrows. ‘Can someone explain to me why seventeen-year-olds are made to read MSc books in this country?’

I shrugged. I had no answers for lazy students.

The pizza arrived. We kept quiet and started eating it. I looked at her. She tied her hair, so that it would not fall on the pizza and touch the cheese. She kept her dupatta away from the table and on the chair. The great thing about girls is that even during pauses in the conversation you can look at them and not get bored.

She looked sideways as she became conscious of two boys on a faraway table staring at her. It wasn’t surprising, considering she was the best looking girl in Dairy Den by a huge margin. Why are there so few pretty girls? Why hadn’t evolution figured it out that men liked pretty women and turned them all out that way?

She checked her phone for any new SMSs. She didn’t need to as her phone beeped louder than a fire alarm everytime there was one. She pulled back her sleeve and lifted a slice of pizza. She used her fingers to lift the strands of cheese that had fallen out and placed them back on the slice. Finally she took a bite.

‘So, what’s up?’ she broke the silence. ‘Are we allowed to talk about anything apart from science subjects?’

‘Of course,’ I said. I glared at the boys at the other table. They didn’t notice me. ‘We are not that far apart in age. We could be friends, you know,’ she said. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘tough, isn’t it?’

‘Tough? Give me one reason why?’

‘I will give you four – (1) I am your teacher (2) you are my best friend’s sister (3) you are younger than me, and (4) you are a girl.’

I felt stupid stating my reasons in bullet points. There is a reason why nerds can’t impress girls. They don’t know how to talk.

She laughed at me rather than with me.

‘Sorry for the list. Can’t get numbers out of my system,’ I said.

She laughed. ‘It tells me something. You have thought it out. That means, you have considered a potential friendship.’

I remained silent.

‘I am kidding,’ she said and tapped my hand. She had this habit of soothing people by touching them. With normal people it would’ve been ok, but with sick people like me, female touches excite more than soothe. I felt the urge to look at her face again. I turned determinedly to the pizza instead.

‘But seriously, you should have a backup friend,’ she said. ‘Backup what?’

‘You, Ish and Omi are really close. Like you have known each other since you were sperm.’

My mouth fell open at her last word. Vidya was supposed to be Ish’s little sister who played with dolls. Where did she learn to talk like that?

‘Sorry, I meant Ish and Omi are your best friends. But if you have to bitch … oops, rant about them, who do you do it with?’ ‘I don’t need to rant about my friends,’ I said. ‘C’mon, are they perfect?’ ‘No one is perfect.’

‘Like Garima and I are really close. We talk twice a day. But sometimes she ignores me, or talks to me like I am some naive small town girl. I hate it, but she is still my best friend.’

‘And?’ I said. Girls talk in circles. Like an algebra problem, it takes a few steps to get them to the point.

‘And, talking about it to you, venting, like this, makes me feel better. And I can forgive her. So, even though she is a much closer friend of mine, you became a backup friend.’

If she applied as much brain in maths, no one could stop her from becoming a surgeon. But Vidya who could micro-analyse relationships for hours, would not open M.L. Khanna to save her life.

‘So, c’mon, what’s the one rant you have about your best friends?’

‘My friends are my business partners, too. So it’s complicated,’ I paused. ‘Sometimes I don’t think they understand business. Or may be they do, but they don’t understand the passion I bring to it.’

She nodded. I loved that nod. For once, someone had nodded at something I felt so deeply about.

‘How?’ she egged me on.

Over the last few scraps of pizza, I told her everything. I told her about our shop, and how I managed everything. How I had expanded the business to offer tuitions and coaching. I told her about Ish’s irritating habit of giving discounts to kids and Omi’s dumbness in anything remotely connected to numbers. And finally, I told her about my dream – to get out of the old city and have a new shop in an air-conditioned mall, i

‘Navrangpura,’ she said, ‘near here?’

‘Yes,’ I said, as my chest expanded four inches.

She saw the glitter in my eyes, as I could see it reflected in hers.

‘Good you never did engineering. Though 1 am sure you would have got in,’ she said.

‘I can’t see myself in an office. And leaving mom and her business alone was not an option.’

I had opened up more than I ever had to anyone in my life. This wasn’t right, I chided myself. I mentally repeated the four reasons and poked the pile of books.

‘More than me, you need to be friends with these books,’ I said and asked for the bill.



‘Coming,’ a girl responded as Ishaan rang the bell of our supplier’s home. We had come to purchase new bats and get old ones repaired.

Saira, supplier Pandit-ji’s eighteen-year-old daughter, opened the door.

‘Papa is getting dressed, you can wait in the garage,’ she said, handing us the key to Pandit-ji’s warehouse store. We went to the garage and sat on wooden stools. Ish dumped the bats for repair on the floor.

The Pandit Sports Goods Suppliers was located in Ellis Bridge. The owner, Giriraj Pandit, had his one-room house right next to it. Until five years ago, he owned a large bat factory in Kashmir. That was before he was kicked out of his hometown by militants who gave him the choice of saving his neck or his factory. Today be felt blessed being a small supplier in Ahmedabad with his family still alive.

‘Kashmiris are so fair complexioned,’ I said to make innocuous conversation. ‘You like her,’ Ish grinned.

Are you nuts?’

‘Fair-complexioned, eh?’ Ish began to laugh.

‘Govind bhai, my best customer,’ Pandit-ji said as he came into the warehouse, fresh after a bath. He offered us green almonds. It is nice to be a buyer in business. Everybody welcomes you.

‘We need six bats, and these need repairs,’ I said.

‘Take a dozen Govind bhai,’ he said and opened a wooden trunk, the India- Australia series is coming, demand will be good.’

‘Not in the old city,’ I said.

He opened the wooden trunk and took out a bat wrapped in plastic. He opened the bat. It smelled of fresh willow. Sometimes hat makers used artificial fragrance to make new bats smell good, hut Pandit-ji was the real deal.

Ish examined the bat. He went to the box and checked the other bats for cracks and chips.

‘The best of the lot for you Govind bhai,’ Pandit-ji smiled heartily. ‘How much,’ I said.

‘Three hundred.’ ‘Joking?’

‘Never,’ he swore.

‘Two hundred fifty,’ I said, ‘last and final.’

‘Govind bhai, it is a bit tough right now. My cousin’s family has arrived from Kashmir, they’ve lost everything. I have five more mouths to feed until he finds a job and place.’

‘They are all living in that room?’ Ish was curious.

‘What to do? He had a bungalow in Srinagar and a fifty-year. old almond business. Now, see what times have come to, kicked out of our own homes,’ Pandit-ji sighed and took out the bats for repair from the gunny bag.

I hated sympathy in business deals. We settled for two hundred and seventy after some more haggling. ‘Done,’ I said and took out the money. I dealt in thousands now, but imagined that transacting in lakhs and crores wouldn’t be that different.

Pandit-ji took the money, brushed it against the mini-temple in his godown and put it in his pocket. His God had made him pay a big price in life, but he still felt grateful to him. I could never understand this absolute faith that believers possess. Maybe I missed something by being agnostic.

Eight

Ali reached practice twenty minutes late. Every delayed minute made Ish more pissed.

‘You are wearing kurta pajama, where is your kit?’ Ish screamed as Ali walked in at 7.20 a.m.

‘Sorry, woke up late. I didn’t get time and…’

‘Do your rounds,’ Ish said and stood in the centre of the bank’s courtyard. When Ali finished his rounds, Ish unwrapped a new bat for him.

‘For you, brand new from Kashmir. Like it?’

Ali nodded without interest. ‘Can I leave early today?’ ‘Why?’ Ish snapped.

‘There is a marble competition in my pol.’ ‘And what about cricket?’ Ali shrugged.

‘First you come late, then you want to go early. What is the point of marbles?’ Ish said as he signalled him to take the crease. One of the three other boys became the bowler.

‘We will start with catching practice. Ali, no shots, give them catches.’

Ali’s self-control had become better after training for a few months. Ish had taught him to play defensive and avoid getting out. With better diet and exercise, Ali’s stamina had improved. He gained the strength to hit the ball rather than rely on momentum. Once Ali faced five balls in a restrained manner, he could sharpen his focus to use his gift. The trick was to use his ability at a lever that scored yet sustained him at the crease. One ball an over worked well. Ish now wanted him to get to two balls an over.

‘Switch. Paras to bat, Ali to field,’ Ish shouted after three overs. Ali didn’t hit any big shots. Disappointed, he threw the bat on| the crease.

‘Hey, watch it. It is a new bat,’ Ish said.

Paras batted a catch towards Ali, whose hands were busy tightening the cords of his pajama. The ball thunked down on the ground.

‘You sleeping or what?’ Ish said but Ali ignored him. Three balls later, Paras set up a catch for Ali again. ‘Hey, Ali, catch,’ Ish screamed from his position at the umpire.

Ali had one hand in his pocket. He noticed Ish staring at him and lifted up his hand in a cursory manner. Two steps and he could have caught the ball. He didn’t, and the ball landed on the ground.

‘Hey,’ Ish shook Ali’s shoulder hard. ‘You dreaming?’ ‘I want to leave early,’ Ali said, rubbing his shoulder. ‘Finish practice first.’

‘Here Ali, bat,’ Paras said as he came close to Ali. ‘No he has to field,’ Ish said. ‘It is ok, Ish bhaiya. I know he wants to bat,’ Paras said and gave Ali the bat.

And I want to practice more catches. I need to get good before my school match.’

Ali took the bat, walked to the crease without looking up. Disconcerted by this insolence, Ish rued spoiling the boy with gifts – sometimes kits, sometimes bats.

Ish allowed Ali to bat again upon Paras’ insistence. ‘Lift it for I’aras, gentle to the left.’

The ball arrived, Ali whacked it hard. Like his spirit, the ball Hew out of the bank. ‘I want to go.’ Ali stared at Ish with his green eyes.

‘I don’t care about your stupid marble tournament. No marble player ever became great,’ Ish shouted.

‘Well, you also never became great,’ Ali said. Ouch, kids and their bitter truth.

Ish froze. His arm trembled. With perfect timing like Ali’s bat, Ish’s right hand swung and slapped Ali’s face hard. The impact and shock made Ali fall on the ground.

Everyone stood erect as they heard the slap.

Ali sat up on the ground and sucked his breath to fight tears.

‘Go play your fucking marbles,’ Ish said and deposited a slap again. I ran behind to pull Ish’s elbow. Ali broke into tears. I bent down to pick up Ali. I tried to hug him, as his less-strict maths tutor. He pushed me away.

‘Go away,’ Ali said, crying as he kicked me with his tiny legs, I don’t want you.’ ‘Ali, quiet buddy. Come, let’s go up, we will do some fun sums,’ I said. Oops,

wrong thing to say to a kid who had just been whacked. ‘I don’t want to do sums,’ Ali glared back at me.

‘Yeah, don’t want to field. Don’t want to do sums. Lazy freak show wants to play marbles all day,’ Ish spat out.

I felt it was stupid of Ish to argue with a twelve-year-old. ‘Everyone go home, we practice tomorrow,’ I said.

‘No, we have to…,’ Ish to said. ‘Ish, go inside the bank,’ I said.

‘I don’t like him,’ Ali said, still in tears.

‘Ali behave. This is no way to speak to your coach. Now go home,’ I said.

I exhaled a deep breath as everyone left. Maybe God sent me here to be everyone’s parent.

★

‘What the fuck is wrong with you? He is a kid,’ I said to Ish after everyone left. I

made lemonade in the kitchen to calm Ish down Ish stood next to me. ‘Brat, thinks he has a gift,’ Ish said.

‘He does,’ I said and passed him his drink, ‘hey, can you order another LPG cylinder. This one is almost over,’ I said. We did have a kerosene stove, but it was a pain to cook on that.

We came to the cashier’s waiting area to sit on the sofas.

Ish kept quiet. He held back something. I wasn’t sure if it was tears, as I had never seen Ish cry.

‘I shouldn’t have hit him,’ he said after drinking half a glass. I nodded.

‘But did you see his attitude? “You never became great.” Can you imagine if I had said it to my coach?’

‘He is just a twelve-year-old. Don’t take him seriously,’

‘He doesn’t care man. He has it in him to make to the national team. But all he wants to do is play his fucking marbles.’

‘He enjoys marbles. He doesn’t enjoy cricket, yet.’

Ish finished his drink and tossed the plastic glass in the kitchen sink. We locked the bank’s main door and the gate and walked towards our shop.

‘It is so fucking unfair,’ Ish said, ‘I slaved for years. I gave up my future for this game. Nothing came of it. And you have this kid who is born with this talent he doesn’t even care about.’

‘What do you mean nothing came of it? You were the best player in school for years.’

‘Yeah, in Belrampur Municipal School, that’s like saying Vidya is the Preity Zinta of our pol. Who cares?’

‘What?’ I said and couldn’t control a smile.

‘Nothing, our aunt once called her that, and I keep teasing her on it,’ Ish said. His mood lightened up a little. We came close to our shop. The temple dome became visible.

‘Why does God do this Govind?’ Ish said. ‘Do what?’

‘Give so much talent to some people. And people like me have none.’ ‘You are talented.’

‘Not enough. Not as much as Ali. I love this game, but have no gifts. I pushed myself – woke up at 4 a.m. everyday, training for hours, practice and more practice. I gave up studies, and now that I think of it, even my future. And then comes this marble player who has this freakish gift. I could never see the ball and whack it like Ali. Why Govind?’

Continuing my job as the parent of my friends, I had to try and answer every silly question of his. ‘I don’t know. God gives talent so that the ordinary person can become extraordinary. Talent is the only way the poor can become rich. Otherwise, in this world the rich would remain rich and the poor would remain poor. This unfair talent actually creates a balance, helps to make the world fair,’ I said. I reflected on my own statement a little.

‘So why doesn’t he care? Marbles? Can you believe the boy is more interested in marbles?’

‘He hasn’t seen what he can get out of cricket. Right now he is the marble champ in his pol and loves that position. Once he experiences the same success in cricket, he will value his gift Until now, he was a four ball freak show. You will turn him into a player Ish,’ I said.

We reached the shop. Omi had reached before us and swept the floor. He missed coming to coaching, but he had promised his Mama to attend the morning rallies at least twice a week. Today was one of those days.

‘Good practice?’ Omi asked idly as he ordered tea.

Ish went inside. I put a finger on my lips to signal Omi to be quiet. A ten-year-old came with thirty coins to buy a cricket ball.

‘A leather ball is twenty-five bucks. You only have twenty-one,’ I said as I finished the painful task of counting the coins.

‘I broke the piggy bank. I don’t have anymore,’ the boy said very seriously. ‘Then come later,’ I said as Ish interrupted me.

‘Take it,’ Ish said and gave the boy the ball. The boy grabbed it and ran away.

‘Fuck you Ish,’ I said.

‘Fuck you businessman,’ Ish said and continued to sulk about Ali in the corner.



It took Ish one box of chocolates, two dozen marbles and a new sports cap to woo Ali back. Ali missed us, too. His mother told us he cried for two hours that day and never attended the marble tournament. He hadn’t come for practice the next two days either. Ish’s guilt pangs had turned into an obsession. Ali had an

apology ready – probably stage-managed by his mother. He touched Ish’s feet and said sorry for insulting his guru. Ish hugged him and Have the gifts. Ish said he’d cut off his hand rather than hit him again. All too melodramatic if you ask me. The point was Ali came back, this time more serious, and Ish mellowed somewhat. Ali’s cricket improved, and other students suggested we take him to the district trials.

Ish vetoed the idea. ‘No way, the selection people will destroy him. If they reject him, he is going to be disappointed forever. If they accept him, they will make him play useless matches for several years. He will go for selections, but only the big one – the national team.’

‘Really? You confident he will make it,’ Omi said, passing us lassi in steel glasses after practice.

‘He will be a player like India never had,’ Ish announced. It sounded a bit mad, but we had seen Ali demolish the best of bowlers, even if for a few balls. Two more years and Ish could well be right.

‘Don’t talk about Ali’s gift at all. I don’t trust anyone.’ Ish wiped his lassi moustache.



‘Excuses don’t clear exams, Vidya. If you study this, it will help. Nothing else will.’ I opened the chemistry book again.

‘I tried,’ she said and pushed back her open hair. She had not bathed. She had a track pant on that I think she had been wearing since she was thirteen and a pink T-shirt that said ‘fairy queen’ or something. How can a grown-up woman wear something that says ‘fairy queen’? How can anyone wear something that says ‘fairy queen’?

‘I pray everyday. That should help,’ she said.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or flip my fuse again at her nonchalance. Maybe if she didn’t look like a cute ragdoll in those clothes, I would have lost my temper again.

‘Don’t leave it to God, nothing like reading organic chemistry yourself,’ I said. She nodded and moved her chair, as a bottle fell over on the ground.

‘Oops,’ she said and bent down.

‘What?’ I stood up in reflex. It was a bottle of coconut oil, fortunately closed. ‘Nothing, I thought I’ll oil my hair,’ she said and lifted the blue bottle.

I looked at her face. My gaze lasted a quarter second more than necessary. There is an optimal time for looking at women before it gets counted as a stare. I had crossed that threshold. Self-consciously she tugged at the T-shirt’s neckline as she sat back up. The tug was totally due to me. I didn’t look there at all, but she thought I did. I felt sick.

‘Coconut oil,’ I said, probably the dumbest thing to say but it changed the topic.

‘Yes, a bit of organic chemistry for my head. Maybe this will help.’ I flipped the book’s pages to see how benzene became oxidised.

‘When is your birthday?’ she said. ’14 March,’ I replied. ‘Pi Day.’ ‘What day?’

‘Pi Day. You see, Pi approximates to 3.14 so 14 March is the same date. It is Einstein’s birthday, too. Cool, isn’t it?’

‘A day for Pi? How can you have a day for something so horrible?’

‘Excuse me? It is an important day for maths lovers. We never make it public though. You can say you love literature, you can say you love music but you can’t say you feel the same way for maths.’

‘Why not?’

‘People label you a geek.’ ‘That you are,’ she giggled.

She pulled the oil bottle cap close.

‘Can you help me oil my hair? I can’t reach the back.’

My tongue slipped like it was coated in that oil as I tried to speak. ‘Vidya, we should study now.’

‘Yeah, yeah, almost done. Just above the back of my neck, please.’

She twisted on her chair so her back faced me. She held up the cap of the oil bottle.

What the hell, I thought. I dipped my index finger in the oil and brought it to her neck.

‘Not here,’ she giggled again. ‘It tickles. Higher, yes at the roots.’

She told me to dip three fingers instead of one and press harder. I followed her instructions in a daze. The best maths tutor in town had become a champi man.

‘How’s the new shop coming?’ she said.

‘Great, I paid the deposit and three months advance rent,’ I said. ‘Fifty thousand bucks, cash. We will have the best location in the mall’

‘I can’t wait,’ she said.

‘Two more months,’ I said. ‘Ok, that’s enough. You do it yourself now, I will hold the cap for you.’

She turned to look at me, dipped her fingers in the oil and applied it to her head.

‘I wish I were a boy,’ she said, rubbing oil vigorously.

‘Why? Easier to oil hair?’ I said, holding up the cap in my hand even though my wrist ached.

‘So much easier for you to achieve your passions. I won’t be allowed to open such a shop,’ she said.

I kept quiet.

‘There, hopefully my brain would have woken up now,’ she said, tying back her hair and placing the chemistry book at the centre of the table.

‘1 don’t want to study this,’ she said. “Vidya, as your teacher my role is…’

‘Yeah, what is your role as my teacher? Teach me how to reach my dreams or how to be a drone?’

I kept quiet. She placed her left foot on her lap. I noticed the tiny teddy bears all over her pajamas.

‘Well, I am not your teacher. I am your tutor, your maths tutor. And as far as I know, there are no dream tutors.’

‘Are you not my friend?’ ‘Well, sort of.’

‘Ok, sort-of-friend, what do you think I should do? Crush my passion and surround myself with hydrocarbon molecules forever?’

I kept quiet.

‘Say something. I should lump these lessons even if I have no interest in them whatsoever as that is what all good Indian students do?’

I kept quiet.

‘What?’ she prodded me again.

‘The problem is you think I am this geek who solves probability problems for thrills. Well, maybe I do, but that is not all of me. I am a tutor, it is a job. But never fucking accuse me of crushing your passion.’ Too late I realised I had used the F-word. ‘Sorry for the language.’

‘Cursing is an act of passion.’

I smiled and turned away from her.

‘So there you go,’ she said, ‘my tutor-friend, I want to make an admission to you. I want to go to Mumbai, but not to cut cadavers. I want to study PR.’

I banged my fist on the table. ‘Then do it. Don’t give me this wish-I-was-a-boy and I’m-trapped-in-a-cage nonsense. Ok, so you are in a cage, but you have a nice, big, oiled brain that is not pea-sized like a bird’s. So use it to find the key out.’

‘Medical college is one key, but not for me,’ she said. ‘In that case, break the cage,’ I said.

‘How?’

‘What makes the cage? Your parents, right? Do you have to listen to them all the time?’

‘Of course not. I’ve been lying to them since I was five.’

‘Really? Wow,’ I said and collected myself. ‘Passion versus parents is a tough call. But if you have to choose, passion should win. Humanity wouldn’t have progressed if people listened to their parents all the time.’

‘Exactly. Our parents are not innocent either. Weren’t we all conceived in a moment of passion?’ I looked at her innocent -looking face, shocked. This girl is out of control. Maybe it isn’t such a good idea to get her out of her cage.

Nine

26 January is a happy day for all Indians. Whether or not you feel patriotic, it is a guaranteed holiday in the first month of the year. I remember thinking it would be the last holiday at our temple shop since we were scheduled to move to the new mall on Valentine’s Day. Apart from the deposit, we had spent another sixty thousand to fit out the interiors. I borrowed ten thousand from my mother, purely as a loan. Ish’s dad refused to give any money. Omi, even though I had said no, took the rest in loan from Bittoo Mama.

The night before Republic Day, I lay in bed with my thoughts. I had invested a hundred and ten thousand rupees. My business had already reached lakhs. Should we do a turf carpet throughout? Now that would be cool for a sports shop. I dreamed of my chain of stores the whole night.

‘Stop shaking me mom, I want to sleep,’ I screamed. Can’t the world let a businessman sleep on a rare holiday.

But mom didn’t shake me. I moved on my own. I opened my eyes. My bed went back and forth too. I looked at the wall clock. It had fallen on the floor. The room furniture, fan and windows vibrated violently.

I rubbed my eyes, what was this? Nightmares?

I stood up and went to the window. People on the street ran haphazardly in random directions.

‘Govind,’ my mother screamed from the other room, ‘hide under the table. It is an earthquake.’

‘What?’ I said and ducked under the side table kept by the window in reflex. I could see the havoc outside. Three TV antennas horn the opposite building fell down. A telephone pole broke and collapsed on the ground.

The tremors lasted for forty-five seconds, the most destructive and longest forty-five seconds of my life. Of course, I did not know n then. A strange silence followed the earthquake.

‘Mom,’ I screamed.

‘Govind, don’t move,’ she screamed back.

‘It is gone,’ I said after ten more minutes had passed, ‘you ok?’

I came out to the living room. Everything on the wall -I alendars, paintings and lampshades, lay on the floor.

‘Govind,’ my mother came and hugged me. Yes, I was fine. My mother was fine too.

‘Let’s get out,’ she said. ‘Why?’

‘The building might collapse.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said as my mother dragged me out in my pajamas. The street was full of people.

‘Is it a bomb?’ a man spoke to the other in whispers.

‘Earthquake. It’s coming on TV. It started in Bhuj,’ a man on the street said. ‘Bad?’ the other man said.

‘We felt the tremors hundreds of kilometres away, imagine the situation in Bhuj,’ another old man said.

We stood out for an hour. No, the foundation of our building, or for that matter any in our pol had not come loose. Meanwhile, rumours and gossip spread fast. Some said more earthquakes could come. Some said India had tested a nuclear bomb. A few parts of Ahmedabad reported property damage. Stories rippled through the street.

I re-entered my house after two hours and switched on the TV. Every channel covered the earthquake. It epicentred in Bhuj, though it affected many parts of Gujarat.

‘Reports suggest that while most of Ahmedabad is safe, many new and upcoming buildings have suffered severe damage…,’ the reporter said as tingles went down my spine.

‘No, no, no…,’ I mumbled to myself.

‘What?’ my mother said as she brought me tea and toast. ‘I have to go out.’

‘Where?’

‘Navrangpura … now,’ I said and wore my slippers. Are you mad?’ she said. ‘My shop mom, my shop,’ is all 1 said as I ran out of the house.

The whole city was shut. I couldn’t find any autos or buses. I decided to run the seven-kilometre stretch. I had to see if my new store was ok. Yes, I just wanted that to be ok.

It took me an hour to get there. I saw the devastation en-route. The new city areas like Satellite suffered heavy damage. Almost every building had their windows broken. Those buildings that were under construction had crumbled to rubble. I entered Navrangpura. Signs of plush shops lay on the road. I reasoned that my new, ultra-modern building would have earthquake safety features. I gasped for breath as I ran the last hundred metres. Sweat covered my entire body.

Did I miss the building? I said as I reached my lane. The mayhem on the street and the broken signs made it hard to identify addresses.

I retreated, catching my breath.

‘Where is the building?’ I said to myself as I kept circling my lane.

I found it, finally. Only that the six storeys that were intact a day ago had now turned into a concrete heap. I could not concentrate. I felt intense thirst. I looked for water, but I only saw rubble, rubble and more rubble. My stomach hurt. I grabbed it with my left hand and sat on a broken bench to keep my consciousness.

The police pulled out a labourer, with bruises all over. Cement hags had fallen on him and crushed his legs. The sight of blood made me vomit. No one in the crowd noticed me. One lakh and ten thousand, the number spun in my head.

Unrelated images of the day my dad left us flashed in my head. Those images had not come for years. The look on his face as he shut the living room door on the way out. My mother’s silent tears for the next few hours, which continued for the next few years. I don’t know why that past scene came to me. I think the brain has a special box where it keeps crappy memories. It stays shut, but everytime a new entry has to be added, it opens and you can look at what is inside. I felt anger at my dad, totally misplaced as I should have felt anger at the

earthquake. Or at myself, for betting so much money. Anger for making the first big mistake of my life.

My body trembled with violent intensity.

‘Don’t worry, God will protect us,’ someone tapped my shoulder.

‘Oh really, then who the hell sent it in the first place?’ I said and pushed the stranger away. I didn’t need sympathy, I wanted my shop.

Two years of scrimping and saving, twenty years of dreams – all wiped away in twenty seconds. The ‘Navrangpura Mall’s’ neon sign, once placed at the top of the six floor building, now licked the ground. Maybe this was God’s way of saying something – that we shouldn’t have these malls. We were destined to remain a small town and we shouldn’t even try to be like the big cities. I don’t know why I thought of God, I was agnostic. But who else do you blame earthquakes on?

Of course, I could blame the builder of the Navrangpura mall. For the hundred- year-old buildings in the old city pols remained standing. Omi’s two-hundred- year-old temple stood intact. Then why did my fucking mall collapse? What did he make it with? Sand?

I needed someone to blame. I needed to hit someone, something. I lifted a brick, and threw it at an already smashed window. The remaining glass broke into little bits.

‘What are you doing? Haven’t we seen enough destruction?’ said someone next to me.

I couldn’t make out his face, or anyone’s face. My heart beat at double the normal rate. Surely, we could sue the builder, my heart said. The builder would have run away, my head said. And no one would get their money back.

‘Govind, Govind,’ Ish said. He screamed in my ear when I finally noticed him. ‘What the hell are you doing here man? It is dangerous to be out, let’s go home’

Ish said.

I kept looking at the rubble like I had for the last four hours.

‘Govind,’ Ish said, ‘we can’t do anything. Let’s go.’ ‘We are finished Ish,’ I said, feeling moist in my eyes for the first time in a decade.

‘It’s ok buddy. We have to go,’ Ish said. ‘We lost everything. Look, our business collapsed even before IT opened…’

I broke down. I never cried the day my father left us. I never cried when my hand had got burnt one Diwali and Dr Verma had TO give me sedatives to go to sleep. I never cried when India lost a match. I never cried when I couldn’t join engineering college. I never cried when we barely made any money for the first three months of business. But that day, when God slapped my city for no reason, I cried and cried. Ish held me and let me use his shirt to absorb my tears.

‘Govi, let’s go home,’ Ish said. He never shortened my name before. He’d never seen me like that too. Their CEO and parent had broken down.

‘We are cursed man. I saved, and I saved and I fucking saved. And we took loans. But then, this? Ish, I don’t want to see that smug look on Bittoo Mama’s face. I will work on the roadside,’ I said as Ish dragged me away to an auto.

People must have thought I had lost a child. But when a businessman loses his business, it is similar. It is one thing when you take a business risk and suffer a loss, but this was unfair. Someone out there needed to realise this was fucking unfair.

Ish bought a Frooti to calm me. It helped, especially since I didn’t eat anything else for the next two days. I think the rest of the Ambavadis didn’t either.

I found out later that over thirty thousand people lost their lives. That is a stadium full of people. In Bhuj, ninety per cent of homes were destroyed. Schools and hospitals flattened to the ground. Overall in Gujarat, the quake damaged a million structures. One of those million structures included my future shop. In the large scheme of things, my loss was statistically irrelevant. In the narrow, selfish scheme of things, I suffered the most. The old city fared better than the new city. Somehow our grandfathers believed in cement more than the new mall owners.

Compared to Gujarat, Ahmedabad had better luck, the Ty channels said. The new city lost only fifty multi-storey buildings, They said only a few hundred people died in Ahmedabad compared to tens of thousands elsewhere. It is funny when hundreds of people dying is tagged with ‘only’. Each of those people would have had families, and hopes and aspirations all shattered in forty* five seconds. But that is how maths works – compared to thirty thousand, hundreds is a rounding error.

★

I had not left home for a week. For the first three days I had burning fever, and

for the next four my body felt stone cold.

‘Your fever is gone.’ Dr Verma checked my pulse. I lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

‘You haven’t gone to the shop?’

I shook my head, still horizontal on bed.

‘I didn’t expect this from you. You have heard of Navaldharis Dr Verma said. I kept quiet.

‘You can talk. I haven’t put a thermometer in your mouth.’ ‘No, who are they?’ ‘Navaldharis is a hardcore entrepreneur community in Gujarat Everyone there

does business. And they say, a true Navaldhari businessman is one who can rise after being razed to the ground nine times.’

‘I am in debt, Doctor. I lost more money in one stroke than my business ever earned.’

There is no businessman in this world who has never lost money. There is no one who has learnt to ride a bicycle without falling off. There is no one who has loved without getting hurt. It’s all part of the game.’ Dr Verma shrugged.

‘I’m scared,’ I said, turning my face to the wall. ‘Stop talking like middle-class parents. So scared of losing money, they want their kids to serve others all their lives to get a safe salary.’

‘I have lost a lot.’

‘Yes, but age is on your side. You are young, you will earn It all back. You have no kids to feed, you have no household to maintain. And the other thing is, you have seen less money. You * an live without it.’

I don’t feel like doing anything. This earthquake, why did this liappen? Do you know our school is now a refugee camp?’

‘Yes, and what are the refugees doing? Lying in bed or trying to recover?’

I tuned out the doctor. Everyone around me was giving me advice, good advice actually. But I was in no mood to listen. I was in no mood for anything. The shop? It would remain closed for a week more. Who would buy sports stuff after an earthquake?

‘Hope to see you out of bed tomorrow,’ Dr Verma said and left. The clock showed three in the afternoon. I kept staring at it until four.

‘May I come in, Govind sir,’ Vidya’s cheeky voice in my home sounded so strange that I sprang up on bed. And what was with

I he sir?

She had the thick MX. Khanna book and a notebook in her hand.

‘What are you doing here?’ I pulled up my quilt to hide my pajamas and vest attire.

She, of course, looked impeccable in her maroon and orange salwar kameez with matching mirror-work dupatta.

‘I got stuck with some sums. Thought I’d come here and ask since you were not well,’ she said, sitting down on a chair next to my bed.

My mother came in the room with two cups of tea. I mimed to her for a shirt. ‘You want a shirt?’ she said, making my entire signalling exercise futile. ‘What sums?’ I asked curtly after mom left.

‘Maths is what I told my mom. Actually, I wanted to give you this.’ She extended the voluminous M.L. Khanna tome to me.

What was that for? To solve problems while bedridden?

My mother returned with a shirt and left. I held my shirt ill one hand and the

M.L. Khanna in another. Modesty vs Curiosity, I shoved the shirt aside and opened the book. A handmade, pink greeting card fell out.

The card had a hand-drawn cartoon of a boy lying in bed. She had labelled it Govind, in case it wasn’t clear to me. Insidf it said: ‘Get Well Soon’ in the cheesiest kiddy font imaginable. A poem underneath said:

To my maths tutor/ passion guide/ sort-of-friend, 1 cannot fully understand ycrur loss, but 1 can try. Sometimes life throws curve balls and you question why. There may be no answers, but I assure time will heal the wound.

Here is wishing you a heartfelt ‘get well soon’. Your poorest performing student, Vidya

It’s not very good,’ she murmured.

‘I like it. I am sorry about the sort-of friend. I am just…,’ I said.

‘It’s ok. I like the tag. Makes it clear that studies are first, right?’

I nodded.

‘How are you doing?’

I overcame my urge to turn to the wall. ‘Life goes on. It has to. Maybe an air- conditioned mall is not for me.’

‘Of course, it is. It isn’t your fault. I am sure you will get 1 here one day. Think about this, aren’t you lucky you weren’t in the shop already when it happened? Imagine the lives lost if the mall was open?’

She had a point. I had to get over this. I had to re-accept liittoo Mama’s smug face.

I returned her M.L. Khanna and kept the card under my pillow. ‘Ish said you haven’t come to the shop.’

‘The shop is open?’ I said. Ish and Omi met me every evening but never mentioned it.

‘Yeah, you should see bhaiya struggle with the accounts at home. Take tuitions for him, too,’ she giggled. ‘I’ll leave now. About my classes, no rush really.’

‘I’ll be there next Wednesday,’ I called out.

‘Nice girl,’ my mother said carefully. ‘You like her?’ ‘No. Horrible student.’

Ish and Omi came at night when I had finished my unappetising dinner of boiled vegetables.

‘How are you running the shop?’ my energetic voice surprised them. ‘You sound better,’ Ish said.

‘Who is doing the accounts?’ I said and sat up. Omi pointed at Ish.

‘And? What is it? A two for one sale?’

‘We haven’t given any discounts all week,’ Ish said and sat next to me on the bed.

Ish pulled at my pillow to be more comfortable. ‘Wait,’ I said, jamming the pillow with my elbow.

‘What’s that?’ Ish said and smiled as he saw an inch of pink paper under my pillow.

‘Nothing. None of your business,’ I said. Of course it was his business, it was his sister.

‘Card?’ Omi said.

‘Yes, from my cousin,’ I said.

‘Are you sure?’ Ish came to tickle me, to release my death grip on the pillow. ‘.Stop it’, I said, trying to appear light hearted. My heart beat fast as I pinned

the pillow down hard.

‘Pandit’s daughter, isn’t it?’ Omi chuckled.

‘Whatever,’ I said, sitting on the pillow as a desperate measure.

‘Mixing business with pleasure?’ Ish said and laughed. I joined in the laughter to encourage the deception. ‘Come back,’ Ish said.

‘The loans … It’s all my fault,’ I told the wall. ‘Mama said we can continue to use the shop,’ Omi said. ‘No conditions?’ I said, surprised. ‘Not really,’ Omi said. ‘And that means?’ ‘It is understood we need to help him in his campaign,’ Ish said. ‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to do anything. Omi and I will help.’

‘We have to pay his loan back fast. We have to,’ I said.

‘We’ll get over this,’ Ish looked me in the eye. Brave words, but for the first time believable.

‘I am sorry I invested…,’ I felt I had to apologise, but Omi interrupted me. ‘We did it together as business partners. And you are the smartest of us.’

I was not sure if his last line was correct anymore. I was a disaster as a businessman. ‘See you tomorrow,’ I said.

After they left, I pulled out the card again and smoothed the ceases. I read the card eight times before falling asleep.

My break from work brought out hidden skills in my friends. Save a few calculation errors, they managed the accounts just fine. They tabulated daily sales, had their prices right and had offered no discounts. The shop was clean and things were easy to find. Maybe one day I could create businesses and be hands-off. I checked myself from dreaming again. India is not a place for dreams. Especially when you have failed once. I finally saw the sense inherent in the Hindu philosophy of being satisfied with what one had, rather than yearn for more. It wasn’t some cool philosophy that ancient sages invented, but a survival mantra in a country where desires are routinely crushed. This shop in the temple

was my destiny, and earning that meagre income from it my karma. More was not meant to be. I breathed out, felt better and opened the cash drawer.

‘Pretty low for two weeks. But first the earthquake, and now the India-Australia series,’ Ish said from his corner.

‘People really don’t have a reason to play anymore,’ Omi said.

‘No, no. It’s fine. What’s happening in the series?’ I said. I had lost track of the cricket schedule.

‘India lost the first test. Two more to go. The next one is in Calcutta,’ Ish said. ‘Damn. One-days?’

‘Five of them, yet to start,’ Omi said. ‘I wouldn’t get my hopes high. These Australians are made of something else.’

‘I’d love to know how the Australians do it,’ Ish said.

Mama’s arrival broke up our chat. ‘Samosas, hot, careful,’ he said, placing a brown bag on the counter.

In my earlier avatar, this was my cue to frown, to comment about the grease spoiling the counter. However, the new post-quake Govind no longer saw Mama as hostile. We sat in the sunny courtyard having tea and samosas. They tasted delicious, I think samosas are the best snack known to man.

‘Try to forget what happened,’ Mama sighed. ‘I have never seen such devastation.’

‘How was your trip?’ Omi said. Mama had just returned from Bhuj. ‘Misery everywhere. We need camps all over Gujarat. But how much can Parekh-ji do?’

Mama had stayed up nights to set up the makeshift relief camp at the Belrampur school. Parekh-ji had sent truckloads of grain, pulses and other supplies. People had finally begun to move out and regain their lives.

‘We’ll close the camp in three weeks,’ Mama said to Omi, ‘and I can go back to my main cause, Ayodhya.’

The camp had won Mama many fans in the neighbourhood, Technically, anyone could seek refuge. However, a Muslim family would rarely go there for help. Even if they did, camp managers handed out rations but emphasised that everyone in the camp was a Hindu. Despite this soft discrimination, the new-me found it a noble exercise.

‘Mama, about your loan,’ I turned to him, but he did not hear me.

‘My son is coming with me to Ayodhya. You guys should join,’ he said. He saw our reluctant faces and added, ‘I mean after you restore the business.’

‘We can help here, Mama,’ Omi said. ‘Is there any project after 1 he camp?’ ‘Oh yes, the spoonful of mud campaign,’ Mama said. We looked puzzled.

‘We are going to Ayodhya for a reason. We will get gunnybags full of soil from there. We will go to every Hindu house in Belrampur and ask them if they want a spoon of mud from Rama’s birthplace in their house. They can put it in their backyard, mix it with plants or whatever. A great idea from Parekh-ji.’

I saw Parekh-ji’s twisted but impeccable logic. No one would say no to a spoonful of soil from Ayodhya. But with that, they were inadvertently buying into the cause. Sympathy for people fighting for Ayodhya would be automatic. And sympathy converted well into votes.

Mama noted the cynicism in my expression.

‘Only a marketing strategy for a small campaign. The other party does it at a far bigger scale.’

I picked up another samosa.

‘It’s ok, Mama. Politics confuses me,’ I said. ‘I can’t comment. We will help you.

You have saved our livelihood, we are forever indebted.’

‘You are my kids. How can you be indebted to your father?’ ‘Business is down, but on the revised loan instalments…,’ but Mama cut me again.

‘Forget it, sons. You faced a calamity. Pay when you can. And now you are members of our party, right?’

Mama stood up to hug us. I half-heartedly hugged him back, I felt sick owing people money. ‘Mama, I am sorry. 1 was arrogant, rude and disrespectful. I realise my destiny is this shop. Maybe God intended it this way and I accept it,’ 1 said.

‘We are all like that when young. But you have started believing in God?’ Mama said and beamed.

‘I’m just less agnostic now.’

‘Son, this is the best news I’ve heard today,’ Mama said. ‘Something good has come out of all this loss.’

A man dragged a heavy wooden trunk into our shop. ‘Who’s that? Oh, Pandit- ji?’ I said.

Pandit-ji panted, his white face a rosy red. He arranged the trunk on the floor. ‘A sports shop closed down. The guy could not pay. He paid me with trunks full of goods. I need cash, so I thought I will bring this to you.’

‘I have no cash either,’ I said as I offered him a samosa. ‘Pandit-ji, business is terrible.’

‘Who’s asking you for cash now? Just keep it in your shop. I’ll send one more trunk. Whatever sells, you keep half and give me half. Just this one trunk is worth ten thousand. I have six more at home. What say?’

I took in the trunks as I had no risk. We needed a miracle to move that many goods. Of course, I wasn’t aware that the second test match of the India Australia series would be one.

Mama introduced himself to Pandit-ji. They started talking like grown-ups do, exchanging hometowns, castes and sub-castes.

‘We are late,’ Ish whispered, but loud enough for Mama and Pandit-ji to hear. ‘You have to go somewhere?’ Mama said.

‘Yes, to a cricket match. One of the students we coach is playing,’ Ish said, avoiding Ali’s name.

Omi downed the shutters of the shop. Omi signalled and all of us bent to touch Mama’s feet.

‘My sons,’ Mama said as he held a palm over our heads and blessed us.

Don’t worry about that idiot from that stupid team. You creamed them,’ Ish said to Ali.

We returned from a neighbourhood match. Ali’s side had won with him scoring the highest. Ali lasted eight overs. Ish looked pleased that the training was finally showing results. However, our celebratory mood dampened as the opposing team’s captain kicked Ali in the knee before running away.

‘Will they hurt me again?’ Ali said.

‘No, because I will hurt them before anyone touches you,’ Ish said, kissing Ali’s forehead, Ish would make a good father. Not like his own father who never said one pleasant sentence.

Omi picked up a limping Ali. ‘I’ll take him to the shop,’ Omi said. ‘And ask ma to make him some turmeric milk. You guys get dinner, whatever he wants.’

‘I want kebabs,’ Ali said promptly. ‘Kebabs? In the shop?’ I hesitated. ‘Fine, just don’t tell anyone,’ Omi said.

‘He’s ready,’ Ish said. His face glowed behind the smoke of roasting kebabs at Qazi dhaba. ‘Did you see him play? He can wait, run and support others. He plays along until time comes for the big hits. Fielding sucks, but other than that, he is perfect. He is ready, man.’ The smell of chicken tikka filled my nostrils. Omi was really missing a lot in life. ‘For what?’ I asked.

‘Australia is touring India at present, right?’ Ish said as the waiter packed our order of rumali rotis, lamb skewers and chicken tikka with onions and green chutney. ‘So?’ I said.

‘He is ready to meet the Australians.’

Ten

India vs Australia Test Match Kolkata, 11-15 March 2001

Day 1

Most of the time crap happens in life. However, sometimes miracles do too. To us, the second test match of the India-Australia series was the magic cure for the quake. I remember every day of that match. Ish continued with his weird and highly improbable ideas of making Ali meet the Australian team.

‘Meet the Australians?’ Omi said as he dusted the counter. Ish and I sat on the floor in front of the TV.

‘They are in India,’ Ish said. He pointed to the Australian team batting on the screen. ‘When are we ever going to get a chance like this?’

‘Is he mad?’ Omi asked me.

‘Of course, he is. What will you do by meeting them? Really?’ I joined in.

‘I want to get their opinion on Ali.’ ‘How?’ Omi said as he sat down with us. ‘We will go see a match. Maybe a one-day,’ Ish said.

‘There is no money for trips,’ I said.

‘The one-day series will continue for the next two months. If business picks up, then we could,’ Ish said.

‘They are raping us again. Fuck, business is never going to pick up,’ I said as I saw the score. On the first day at tea, Australia’s score was 193/1.

‘If it does. I said if, Ish said, upset at the score more than me.

‘So we go see a match. Then what? Knock on Hayden’s door and say, “Hey, check this kid out.” How do you intend to meet them?’ I mocked.

‘I don’t know,’ Ish turned to the screen, scowling. ‘Bowl better, guys.’

‘Excuse me, are you watching the India-Australia match?’ a lady’s voice interrupted us.

An elderly woman stood at the counter with a puja thali in her hand. ‘Yes?’

‘Can my grandson watch it with you for a while?’ she said.

I stood up from the floor. A small boy accompanied the lady. I was never keen on random people coming into our shop to spend their time. She sensed my hesitation. ‘We’ll buy something. I want to attend the bhajans inside and Babloo wants to see the match.’

‘Of course, he can come in.’ Ish opened the door wider. The boy came in and sat before the TV. Ish and I exchanged a round of dirty looks.

‘Don’t watch from so close Babloo. Hello, I am Mrs Ganguly by the way. I also need advice on buying cricket equipment for my school, if you can visit me sometime.’

‘School?’ I said.

‘Yes, I am the principal of the Kendriya Vidyalaya on Ellisbridge. We never had good suppliers for sports. Everybody thinks we are government so they try and rip us off. You supply to schools, no?’

The answer was no. We did not supply to schools.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘In fact, we have our inhouse advisor Ishaan. He is an ex-district level player.’

‘Great. I will see you then,’ Mrs Ganguly said and left us to ponder over her business proposition.

‘You want candy, Babloo?’ Omi said as we tried our best to impress anyone related to Mrs Ganguly.

‘But we are not suppliers,’ Ish said later.

‘So what? You have to swing this for me, Ish. This is a regular income business.’

‘If I get you this, will you come to Goa?’ ‘Goa?’ I raised my eyebrows.

‘It’s the last one-day. I am stretching it out as far as I can. If we save enough, let’s go with Ali.’ ‘But…’ ‘Say yes.’

‘Yes,’ I said. After the mall fiasco, I wanted to make Ish happy. I stood up to check the day’s accounts.

‘Cool. Hey, see the match?’ Ish said. Tt has totally turned.’

I looked at the TV. Perhaps God listened to Mrs Ganguly’s prayers inside. A little known Surd called Harbhajan Singh had howled after tea. Wickets crumbled and from 193/1, Australia ended the day at 291/8.

‘Bhajji, you are great,’ Ish bent forward to kiss the TV. ‘Don’t watch the TV from so close,’ Babloo said.

‘Don’t listen to grown-ups all the time. Nobody went blind watching TV from close. Don’t people work on computers?’ Ish was jumping up and down in excitement.

Mrs Ganguly came in two hours later to pick up Babloo. She bought him two tennis balls. I was tempted to throw them in for free, but she might take it the wrong way.

‘Here,’ she said, giving me her card. ‘We have a board meeting every Monday.

Why don’t you come and tell us how you can help?’

We had four days to prepare. The board would be in a better mood if India won this match.

‘Sure, we will see you then,’ I said and slipped a candy to Babloo.

Day 2

The only way to describe the second day of the match was ‘depressing’. From 291/8, Australia dragged on their first innings to end at a healthy 445 all out. The Indians came out to bat and opener Ramesh got out for no score.

‘Who the fuck is this Ramesh? Connection quota,’ Ish said.

But it wasn’t only Ramesh who sucked. Tendulkar scored ten, others even less. Dravid scored the highest at twenty-five. The second day ended with India at 128/8.

Ish tore his chapattis with anger over dinner. ‘These Australians must be thinking – why even bother to come and play with India.’

‘Pray for a draw. With a draw there is hope of sales. Else we should change our business. Sports is the wrong choice in our country.’ I passed the daal to Omi.

‘They have twenty million people. We have one billion, growing at two per cent a year. Heck, we create an Australia every year. Still, they cream us. Something is wrong about this.’

‘Should we open another flower shop? There will always be a demand for that in a temple,’ I said.

Ish ignored me. He mumbled something about avoiding a follow-on, which looked pretty difficult.

Day 3

The next morning I don’t know why we even bothered to switch on the TV. India struggled to stretch their first innings, but packed up before lunch at 171 all out. ‘And the Australians have asked India to follow on,’ the commentator said and I slapped my forehead. A defeat in a test match was one thing, but an innings defeat meant empty parks for weeks. Kids would rather read textbooks than play cricket and be reminded of India’s humiliation. Why on earth had I started this business? What an idiot I am? Why couldn’t I open a sweet shop instead? Indians would always eat sweets. Why sports? Why cricket?

‘That’s fucking-follow-on-fantastic,’ Ish said, inventing his own phrases for the moment. He clenched his fist and came dangerously 1 lose to the TV. ‘We had them by their balls at 291/8, and now l hey ask us to follow on?’

‘Should we turn off the TV?’ I said. Should we close the shop for good? I thought.

‘Wait, I want to see this. I want to see how our team makes eye contact when they lose so badly,’ Ish said.

‘They are not making eye contact. You are just watching them on TV,’ Omi said.

‘If this match is a draw, I will treat you all to dinner. Ok, two dinners,’ Ish said.

For its second innings, India made one change. It replaced the opener Ramesh with another new guy called Laxman.

‘The team is full of people with contacts. Everyone is getting their turn today,’ Ish said as the Indian openers took the crease for the second follow-on innings.

But Laxman connected with the ball and bat. He slammed four after four. At the end of the third day, India stood at a respectable 254/4. Adding that to the first innings score of 171, India needed only 20 runs to match Australia’s first innings of 445. An innings defeat looked unlikely, and, yes, we could even draw now.

‘See, that’s what the Indian team does. Right when you give up hope, they get you involved again,’ Ish said at dinner.

‘You were going to see all days anyway. Please think about our Monday meeting,’ I said.

‘Laxman’s job is not done. He needs to be around if we wan a draw,’ Ish said. I sighed. I would have to prepare for the school meeting by myself.

Day 4

If there was a day that India dominated world cricket, it was on the fourth day of the match. Yes, India won the World Cup on 25 June 1983 and so that counted, too. But the day I’m talking about was when two Indian batsmen made eleven Australian cricketers dance to their tune. They did it in public and they did it the whole day. That’s right. On the fourth day of the Test, Ish didn’t leave the TV even to pee.

Here is what happened. Laxman and Dravid continued to play and added 357 runs for the fifth wicket. Day 4 started at 274/4 and ended at 589/4. Nine of the eleven members of the Australian team took turns bowling, but none of them succeeded in getting a wicket. The crowd at Eden Gardens became possessed. They chanted Laxman’s name enough times to make Steve Waugh visibly grumpy. The team that had given us a follow-on could not bowl one batsman out.

Laxman ended the day at 275 not out, scoring more than what the entire Indian team did in their first innings. Dravid made 155 not out. We had lots of wickets left, had 337 runs more than Australia and only one day left in the match.

‘I can finally sleep in peace. I’ll buy the draw dinners,’ Ish said as we downed the shutters of the shop.

‘Hope we have some kids back in the park again,’ I said. Day 5

Human expectations have no limit. While we were praying only for a draw two days ago, the start of the fifth day raised new hopes. Laxman left at 281 and everyone in the stadium stood up to applaud for his eleven-hour innings.

The Indian captain Ganguly made a surprise decision. After an hour’s play for the day, he declared the Indian innings at 657/7. It meant Australia would have to come back and bat. And that they had to make 384 runs in the rest of the day to win the match.

‘Is Ganguly mad? It’s too risky. We should have continued to play. Get the draw done and over with,’ I said.

‘Maybe he has something else in mind,’ Ish said. ‘What?’ Omi scratched his head.

I wasn’t sure of Ganguly’s intentions either. Ok, so we lucked out and made a big total to take the game to a draw. But why did the captain declare when he could have played on until there was no time left? Unless, of course, he wanted a decision. That was, an Indian victory.

‘He can’t be serious. We had a follow-on. We could have had an innings defeat. Now, Ganguly really thinks he has a chance to bowl these Australians out?’ I said.

Ish nodded as the Australian batsman reverted to the crease. Ganguly had kept the winning score of 384 required by the Australians at a tantalising level – difficult yet possible. Australians could have played safe and taken the game to a draw, but that is not how Australians play.

‘Hey Mr Mathematician, has it happened? Has it ever happened that the side facing a follow-on actually won the match?’ Ish said. He signalled Omi to start urgent, special prayers.

I pulled out the cricket data book from the top shelf. We hardly sold any of these, but the publisher insisted we keep a few copies ‘Ok, so it has happened earlier,’ I said after a ten-minute search.

‘How many times?’ Ish said, eyes glued to screen.

‘Twice,’ I said and noticed Omi close his eyes and chant silently. ‘See, it happens. Twice in how long?’ Ish said.

‘Twice in the last hundred and ten years.’ Ish turned to me. ‘Only twice?’

‘Once in 1894 and then in 1981,’ I read out loud from the page. ‘Both times, England won against, guess who, Australia. Sorry buddy, but statistically speaking, this match is so over.’

Ish nodded.

‘Like the probability is so low that I’d say if India wins, I will sponsor the Goa trip,’ I joked.

‘Or like if India wins, you will start believing in God?’ Omi played along. ‘Yep,’ I said.

I told Omi to stop praying too much. A draw would be fine. Ganguly probably did not know the odds. The worst would be if Australia did score the runs.

‘161/3,’ Omi read Australia’s score at tea, which coincided with our own break. ‘Let’s clean up the shop, guys. The match gets over in a few hours. We may have some customers,’ I said. ‘A draw is fine. We will take the Australians another

time.’ Ish reluctantly picked up the mop.

Day 5 – Post-tea

The Indian team must have mixed something special in their tea. Australia came back and continued to cruise at 166/3. Then came five deadly overs that included a hattrick from Harbhajan Singh. Next stop, Australia 174/8. In eight runs, half of the Australian team was gone.

‘Ish, don’t fucking stand in front of the TV,’ I said. But Ish wasn’t standing, only jumping.

‘Fuck your statistics man, fuck the probability,’ Ish shouted in jubilation. I don’t like it when people insult mathematics, but I gave Ish the benefit of doubt. You are allowed a few celebratory curses when you witness history.

Pretty soon, the last two batsmen were scalped as well. Harbhajan, the Surd that Ish kissed on screen (and left saliva marks all over), took six wickets, and India won the match in the most spectacular way ever.

In Eden Gardens, every placard, every poster and anything combustible besides people was on fire. It was impossible to hear the TV commentary, as the crowds roared everytime an Indian team member’s name was announced.

Ish stood tall, his hands on his hips and looked at the screen. I could see genuine love in his eyes. Every now and then, I had seen Ish watch the men in blue as if he wished he was one of them. But today, he didn’t have any of his own regrets. I think more than wanting to be them, he wanted them to win. He saw Harbhajan jump and jumped along. He clapped when Ganguly came to accept the trophy.

‘Two balls quickly please, we have a match,’ a boy plonked a fifty-rupee note on the counter. The first customer of the great Indian Cricket Season had arrived.

I folded my hands and looked at the sky. Thank you God, for the miracles you bestow on us.

‘We have come to offer solutions, not just sell some balls,’ I started.

I had delivered my first line perfect. The preparations until two last night better be worth it, I told myself. We were in the principal’s office in the Kendriya Vidyalaya. The office wasin a poor state, with rickety furniture and dusty trophies. Like most government offices and buildings old files piled up high on several cupboards. The lady principal and six teachers sat around a semicircular wooden table. It must be miserable to work here, I thought. It must be miserable to work for anyone else, I thought again.

‘Go on,’ the principal said, as my pause for effect became too long.

‘So we have a district-level champion player who can design a package based on your needs and budgets,’ I pointed at Ish and every teacher looked at him.

I passed out sheets that estimated the school’s monthly needs based on eight hundred students. I had them laser printed at a computer shop for three rupees a page. A peon brought samosas and tea for everyone.

‘How much will this cost?’ the administrative head said.

‘We did some calculations. Your average cost will be ten thousand a month,’ I said.

‘That’s too much. This is a Kendriya Vidyalaya. Not a private school,’ the administrative head said. He shut the notebook and pushed it towards me.

I took a deep breath. I had thought of an answer for this scenario. ‘Sir, we can scale down.’

Ish interupped me, ‘It is twelve rupees per child a month. Don’t you think sport deserves as much as the cost of a fountain pen?’

The teachers looked up from their notebooks and exchanged glances.

‘Frankly, no. We get judged on our results. The pass percentage and the first divisions. We have limited resources,’ the head said.

‘If everyone thinks that way, where will India’s sportsmen come from?’ Ish said. ‘From rich families.’ The head took out his glasses and wiped ihem calmly.

‘But talent is not distributed only among the rich. We have to expand the pool.’ ‘Do you know half our classrooms leak in the rain,’ the head said. ‘Should we

get shiny balls or fix the leaks?’ He stood up to leave.

I mentally said the F-word a few times. C’mon Govind, save this. You need business, any business,

‘Sir, we can do a plan for five thousand a month,’ I said. Ish raised a hand to keep me quiet. I could have killed him.

Ish stood up, to match the admin head’s height. ‘What are you here to do?’ ‘To give children an education,’ the head said with a straight face.

‘And all the education is in these books they read under the plastered roofs?

What about the education that comes from sports?’ ‘What?’ the admin head said.

‘Sit down Jitin sir,’ the principal said. ‘Let us hear what they have to say.’ Jitin-sir, I mentally noted his name as he sat down again.

‘Are you teaching your kids a subject called teamwork? Are you teaching them how to chase a goal with passion? Are you teaching them discipline? Are you teaching them focus?’ Ish asked. I stamped his foot, signalling him to sit down. But he ignored me.

‘What are you talking about?’ This from one of the teachers,

‘Sports teaches them all this. And tell me, who will be more successful in life? The kid who knows all the chemical formulae or the one who knows teamwork, passion, discipline and focus?’

‘Sit down, son,’ the principal said. Ish took his seat but did not keep quiet.

‘I’m not setding for a scaled-down version. Eight hundred kids and they want to keep them locked in classes all day. We will chase useless first divisions but not spend two samosa plates worth of money on sports.’

He pointed to the samosas on the plate. All the teachers stopped eating midway. The pause continued until the principal spoke again. ‘Fine, ten thousand is ok for a trial. Let’s see how it goes. You are on for six months.’

We stood up to shake hands. Six educated, fifty-somethings stood up to shake hands with me. Yes, I had become a real businessman.

‘If this works, why don’t you come to a meeting at our Belapur school?’ the oldest gentleman in the group said.

‘Oh, yes. This is Mr Bhansali, headmaster of the Belapur school. He came for a visit, so I asked him to sit in this meeting,’ the principal introduced.

I took his card. I mentally made a note to order business cards and wondered if I could do the fist pumping now or save it for later.

Eleven

Goa, wow! Someone has a good life,’ Vidya said with a pin in her mouth. She stood on a stool in her room, fixing a poster of Aamir Khan in Dil Chahta Hai on the wall. I, her tutor, held the pin tray. So much for my position of authority.

‘Goa is your brother’s idea. I really don’t need this break from work,’ I said.

‘Of course, you do,’ she said as she stepped down. ‘It will help you get over the earthquake.’

‘What will help me get over the earthquake is work, and the money I make to pay back those loans. This trip is costing us three thousand bucks.’ I came back to her desk.

She took her seat, opened her book and slapped each page as she turned it over.

‘Can you act more interested?’

‘I am not a good actor,’ she said.

“Very funny. So did you do the calculus chapter in your so-called self-study mode.’

‘I did self-study as you did not have time for me,’ she said.

‘Anyway, I don’t understand it. As usual, I suck. What is all this “dx dt”, and why are they so many scary symbols?’

‘Vidya, you are appearing for medical entrance. Don’t talk like…,’ I stopped mid-sentence. I opened the calculus chapter. Some spoilt brats have to be spoonfed even the basics.

‘Don’t talk like what?’

‘Like a duffer. Now pay attention.’

‘I am not a duffer. Just go to Goa, manage your business, make money, insult people who don’t salivate for maths and don’t make any time for friends. I can manage fine.’

The last word ‘fine’ had the loudest volume.

‘Excuse me. Is there a problem?’ I said after a pause. ‘Yes, calculus problems. Can we please start?’

I explained calculus to her for an hour. ‘Try the exercises in the end. And read the next chapter by the time I come back,’ I said as I finished class.

She kept quiet.

‘Vidya, why is it that sometimes making you talk is like extracting teeth.’

I am like this only, you have a problem? Only you have the right to ignore people?’ she threw back. Her eyes turned moist and her long fingers trembled. Before moisture turned to rain, I had to exit.

‘I’ll be back in four days,’ I said as I headed to the door. ‘Who cares?’ she said from behind me.



‘Eat on time and don’t stay up late,’ said Ali’s dad as the train signal went off.

Ali was too excited to care for his dad’s instructions. He reserved the top berth for himself and climbed up. Omi said his pre-journey prayers.

‘Ali’s ammi doesn’t care. He is a piece of my heart,’ Ali’s dad said and his eyes became moist. ‘Sometimes I wish I had not married again.’

I wrapped the cash and tickets in plastic and placed it inside my socks. Travelling with a twelve-year-old, and two other grownup kids, this responsibility had to fall on me.

‘It is ok, chacha. See now you can go to your election rally in Baroda,’ I said. ‘That’s right. I cannot leave Ali with his ammi for four days.’ ‘Are you getting a

ticket this year,’ I said as I chained our suitcase to the lower berth. The train began to move.

‘No, no. I am not that senior in the party. But I will be helping l he Belrampur candidate. Ali beta,’ don’t jump between berths, Ali…,’ his voice trailed off as the train picked speed.

Ish pulled Ali’s arm and drew him into his lap. ‘Say bye properly,’ Ish said. ‘Khuda Hafiz, abba,’ Ali called out as the train left for sunnier climes.



‘Organisers. We have to meet the organisers. Let us go in,’ I said. A hairy arm stopped me. The arm belonged to a security guard outside the VIP stand.

‘Thirty thousand people here want to go in there. Who are you? Autograph hunters?’

‘Say it,’ Ish said to me in a hushed voice. ‘Get your senior. I want to talk to him.’ ‘Why?’ the hairy guard said.

I flashed out a card. It said ‘Zuben Singh, Chairman, Wilson Sport,’ Pandit-ji had once met the chairman of the biggest sports company in India. I had borrowed the card from his trunk.

I own Wilson Sports. We want to talk about some endorsement deals. Now will you cooperate or…’

The security guard broke into a sweat and called his manager, I repeated the story to him. He called the senior-most security person who came in a suit. I made a fake phone call pretending to talk about ten-crore-rupees business orders. He remained sceptical, I ended another call in Gujarati and his face softened.

‘Gujarati?’ he said.

I stared at him, trying to decipher the better answer. In India you don’t know whether someone will like you or hate you because you are from a certain place.

‘Yes,’ I said guardedly.

‘Oh, how are you?’ he said in Gujarati. Thank God for India’s various regional clubs.

I just landed from Ahmedabad,’ I said.

‘Why have you come without an appointment?’ he said.

‘I came to see the match. I saw the Australians play and thought maybe we could find a brand ambassador.’

‘Why Australian? Why don’t you take an Indian?’

A totally irrelevant question, but it hinted at his growing belief is us. ‘Can’t afford the Indian team. The good players are too expensive. The bad ones, well, tell me, will you buy a bat endorsed by Ajit Agarkar?’

The guard nodded. He spoke into a microphone hanging from his ear and turned to us.

‘One of you stay with us,’ the security head said. ‘He will,’ I said and pointed to Omi.

‘One guard will accompany you. What about the kid? He has to go?’

‘Oh yes, he is in the campaign. You see, we are doing a coach and student theme.’

The gates creaked open. The guards frisked us to the point of molestation.

Finally, we made it to the enclosure. We walked through

the posh, red fibre-glass seats and sat down in an empty row. We had the best view in the stadium. We came after the Indian innings had ended. Australia would bat now. Apart from the batsmen on

crease, their team would be in the stands soon. ‘Omi will be ok?’ Ish whispered. I nodded.

‘We will wait for the Australian team to come, ok?’ I said to the security guard lest he became suspicious again. He nodded.

‘Are you from Gujarat?’ Ish asked him.

‘No,’ the guard said. He looked upset, as if a Gujarati girl broke his heart. ‘Hey, look slowly five rows behind,’ Ish said.

I turned. There was a young Sikh boy in a burgundy turban wearing the Indian team dress.

‘Sharandeep Singh, the twelfth man. He may be in the team noon. Should I go shake his hand?’

‘Don’t be nuts. One suspicion you are star-struck and they will kick our asses out of here,’ I said.

‘Can I take that?’ Ali said as waiters in white uniforms walked a round with soft drinks.

‘Pretend you own a two-hundred-crore company. Go for it Ali,’ I said. Soon we were all drinking Fanta in tall glasses. Thank God lor sponsors.

Murmurs rippled in our stand. Everyone turned back to see men in yellow dresses emerge from the dressing room. Ish clutched my hand tight as he saw the Australian team members. They came and sat two rows ahead of us.

‘That is Steve Waugh, the Australian captain,’ Ish whispered in my ear. I could hear his heart beat through his mouth.

I nodded and a deep breath. Yes, everyone was there – Bevan, Lehman, Symonds and even McGrath. But we didn’t come here to check out the Australian team like awestruck fans. We were he for a purpose.

‘Ish bhaiya, there is Ponting, in the pads. He is one down,’ Ali’s scream ruined my effort to act placid.

A few people noticed, but looked away as Ali was a kid. True VIPs never screamed at stars even though they liked to hang around them.

A young white man, whom I did not recognise came and sat one row ahead of us. He wore the Australian team shirt, but had a pair of casual khaki shorts on. With curly hair and deep blue eyes, he could not be more than twenty.

The VIPs clapped as Adam Gilchrist hit a six. In the general stalls, there was a silence of misery. Ish wanted to curse the bowler, but sense prevailed and he kept silent.

The Australian team hi-fived at the six. The curly haired boy-man in f&nt pumped his fists.

Ali finished his third Fanta.

‘Go talk. I have done my job,’ I prompted Ish. ‘After a few overs, let the match settle,’ Ish said.

Australia lost their first wicket of Hayden at a score of seventy and there was a dignified applause in the VIP enclosure. Ponting was cheered by teammates as he went out to take the crease. Srinath dismissed Ponting three balls later.

Ish could not contain himself any longer. ‘Yes, go Srinath go,’ Ish cheered as I stopped him from standing up on his chair. A few people smirked at the quality of lowlife making it to the VIP stands these days. Bevan, already padded up, left for his innings. The curly haired boy-man turned around to look at Ish.

‘Go, India go. We can do this. Series win, c’mon we are 2-2,’ Ish said to himself. The boy-man stared at us. Ish became conscious.

‘It’s ok. Good on ya, mate!’ he said. ‘Sorry, we…,’ I said.

‘I’d do the same thing if it were my team,’ he said. Here was a chance to talk.

Maybe he was a team member’s brother or something.

I nudged Ish with my elbow.

‘Hi,’ Ish said. ‘I’m Ishaan, we have come from Ahmedabad in Gujarat. And he is Zubin, he owns Wilson sports. And this here

is Ali.’

‘Good to see you Hi, I am Fred. Fred Li.’ ‘You play in the team?’ I asked Fred. ‘Not right now, back problem. But yes, started playing for Australia a year ago.’

‘Batsman?’

‘Bowler, pace,’ Fred answered.

‘Fred, we need to talk. About this boy. We really need to talk,’ Ish said, his breath short with excitement.

‘Sure mate, I’ll come on over,’ Fred said and lunged over to sit next to Ish.

The security guard relaxed as he saw us with someone white. We must be important enough after all.

Ish finished his story in an hour.

‘You want me to test him? Mate, you should show him to your selectors or something.’

‘Trust me, if Indian selectors were up to the job, we wouldn’t lose so many matches to a country with one-fiftieth the people. No offence.’

‘We are a tough team to beat. There are several reasons for that,’ Fred said slowly.

‘Well, that is why I want you to test him. I have groomed him for almost a year now, and will continue to do so. We travelled twenty-four hours to meet someone in your team because I trust you.’

‘And what would that do? What if I told he was good?’

‘If you say the boy has world-class potential, I will give up my life to get him out there, I swear. Please, just bowl a few balls to him.’

‘Mate, if I started doing that to everyone that came along…’

‘I beg you, Fred. Sportsman to sportsman. Or rather, small sportsman to big sportsman.’

Fred stared at Ish with unblinking blue eyes.

‘I played for my district, too. Never had the guidance to go further,’ Ish continued. ‘I wasted my studies, fought with my parents, threw away my career for this game. This means everything to me. Not everyone coming to you will be like that.’

Fred smiled at that. ‘Mate, you Indians are good at this emotional stuff. Trust me, I gave up a lot for this game, too.’

‘So you agree?’

‘Four balls, no more. After the match. Stay nearby,’ Fred said and loped back to his seat. ‘And you better hope Australia wins so I remain in a good mood to keep my promise.’

Ish’s smile froze. I can’t do that. I can’t wish against India.’

‘Kidding mate. You guys are better at emotions. But we take the-piss better,’ Fred winked.

Half the Aussie lingo was beyond me, but we smiled anyway. ‘Call our friend, we need him,’ I said firmly to the guard.

Two minutes later, Omi joined us. He came in so thirsty he grabbed Ali’s drink. ‘What the hell were you guys doing? 1 waited two hours?’

‘Making friends,’ I said, smiling back at Fred as Australia hit a four.

Australia won the match, but Ish didn’t have time for remorse. He had to pad up Ali.

We came to the ground half an hour after the final match ceremonies. ‘He is a pace bowler.’ Ish turned to Ali, ‘Do you want a helmet?’

Ali shook his head.

‘Wear it.’ Ish strapped the helmet on to Ali’s head. ‘Ready, mate?’ Fred called from the bowler’s end.

Ali nodded. Ish took the wicketkeeper’s place. Fred took a ten-step run-up with a ferocious expression. The ball zoomed past Ali. Ish stepped back to catch it.

‘Gifted?’ Fred said to me as he prepared another run-up. ‘Hey, what’s up Ali?’ Ish said.

‘I cannot see. The ball is white. And the foreigner makes scary faces.’

‘Ignore the face. Look at the ball,’ Ish said as he pulled out the helmet. Omi ran to adjust the black screen on the boundary.

Fred bowled a perfect second delivery. Ali struck this time. The bat deflected the ball forty-five degrees. The ball stayed low but did not bounce until it crossed the boundary. Six.

‘Bloody hell! Where did that come from?’ Fred said.

‘Two more balls,’ I said. I was aware of what was happening inside Fred’s head. The feeling of being trampled, mutiliated and vanquished by a mere boy had only begun.

Fred’s third ball went for a four and the last one for a six. His face looked more humiliated than scary. And no matter how many times he said ‘mate’, his tone had turned from calm to anxious. He looked like someone who had been shaken of all his convictions about cricket.

‘How did he do that?’ Fred muttered, tugging at his curly hair. We looked at Ali. He sat down on the floor and held his head.

‘You ok?’ Ish said. The pressure had gotten to Ali. ‘What’s up?’ Fred said. ‘Being extra focused takes a lot out of him. He needs to recoup after a few big

hits. I taught him to play a full innings in the neighbourhood but today…’

‘Stress, mate, all that travel and you shove a scary white guy in his face,’ Fred said.

‘He has to face this,’ Ish said. He bent down to remove Ali’s pads. ‘Yep, needs stamina and training, but will go places,’ Fred said. ‘You think so?’ ‘That’s Fred’s verdict.’

‘Hey guys can you hang on, I need to make a call.’ Fred said and stepped away to dial a number on his cellphone. I couldn’t hear Fred but he had a ten-minute animated conversation before he returned to us.

‘Thanks, Fred,’ Ish said. I could see the pride in Ish’s face.

Goodonya. Why don’t you guys bring him down to Australia for a while? Hang out and practice in my academy,’ Fred invited like going to Australia was as simple as taking an auto to Navrangpura. ‘Really?’ Ish said.

Yeah right, I thought. We had scraped to get second-class tickets for Goa. We were leaving the same night to save money. Yet, Ish wanted to go to Australia.

‘We can’t, Fred,’ I intervened. ‘Why?’ Fred asked.

‘Can’t afford it. I don’t own a cricket business.’ ‘What?’

‘I run a small cricket shop. We lied to get into your enclosure for this.’ The air became tense.

‘Holy Moly,’ Fred smiled, ‘You guys! Some gumption. Anyway, I am no rich guy either like your Indian team players. So that’s cool by me. But you could have got into trouble there if caught.’

‘I had to make sure Ali gets tested by the best,’ Ish said.

‘Then get him to Australia. I leave India tomorrow. How big is your business?’ ‘It is kind of small,’ Ish said. ‘And tickets are expensive.’

‘Well, one of my ex-girlfriends works with Qantas. Let me see what I can do,’ Fred said as we walked back. ‘It is just Ish and Ali right?’

‘That’s fine,’ I said quickly.

‘No, we are partners Fred. Either we all come together or not. We need four tickets,’ Ish said.

‘Hang on,’ Fred said as he stepped away to make another call.

‘All right,’ Fred said as he returned, ‘I can do four tickets.’ ‘Wow,’ Ish exclaimed, ‘look Ali, this is because of you.’

Ali smiled.

‘But July is better,’ Fred said, ‘it is winter in Australia and tickets are cheaper.’ ‘July works,’ I said. ‘We can’t come in the summer vacation, that’s peak sales

season.’

I figured apart from the tickets, there would be expense on passports, visas and living expenses during the trip. I needed some time to save for that. I didn’t have to do it, but it’s not every day you get to go international.

Twelve

There is some junk around here. But it will be a great store for your shop,’ Mama said, opening the door of a dilapidated godown.

Sunlight hit the room for the first time in years. Two rats scurried across on unsteady legs. We navigated our way through empty gunnybags, stacks of bricks and abandoned masonry.

‘It will take weeks to organise this. Omi, we will need six lights on the ceiling,’ I said.

‘It’s fifteen feet by fifteen feet. A good size,’ Mama said. ‘Mama, what rent do you want for this?’ I said.

I had decided to go into wholesale business. I was quite certain that the recent cricket series would increase demand bigtime. As long as I could secure goods on credit, I could make money.

‘Nonsense. A father does not take rent from his son,’ Mama said.

I hated such form of benevolence. I had estimated the godown’s rent as half of the shop. It had no frontage to make it suitable for retail.

‘And speaking of sons, I want you to meet my son today,’ Mama said and shouted.’Dhiraj! Dhiraj!’ Dhiraj, Mama’s fourteen-year-old son, came running from the temple compound. His Spiderman T-shirt and jeans contrasted with the plate of vermillion and saffron paste that he was carrying in his hand.

‘Baba, here you are. Let me put the tilak,’ Dhiraj said.

Dhiraj put a tilak on Mama’s forehead. ‘Meet your brothers, Mama said. ‘Govind, Ishaan and, of course, Omi.’

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘The cricket shop owners. I love cricket,’ the boy said in a voice that had just broken into adolescence.

‘So young, yet he helps me with my campaign after school,’ Mama said with pride in his voice. ‘Two trips to Ayodhya already. Put tilak on your brothers, son.’

Dhiraj put tilak on our foreheads too. ‘I have to finish puja. Ish bhaiya, you have to give me cricket tips someday’

‘Sure, run along,’ Mama said.

We came out of the godown. Mama bolted the door. ‘How is it going, Mama? You need me?’ Omi said.

‘Flections are only six months away. In a few months, the rallies will start. I have to show Parekh-ji what a brilliant job I can do.’

I took out ten one-hundred-rupee notes and placed them in Mama’s hand. ‘Rent for the godown, Mama,’ I said.

‘Leave it no,’ he said.

‘Don’t say no, Mama. 1 am already obligated to you. Business is looking up. We will repay your loan soon, too,’ 1 said.



‘Hello, Pandit-ji? Can you hear me?’ 1 said. 1 received a call from Pandit-ji a month alter 1 had opened the godown. The temple bells made it hard to talk and I had to strain my ears to hear his voice on the horrible line.

‘I have had enough, Govind. I want to marry my daughters off and go back to my Kashmir.’

‘I know Pandit-ji,’ I said. He had told me this story a dozen nines.

‘Yes, but last week a nice family came to our house. They have two sons, both based in London. They will take both my daughters. Want to do it as early as possible.’

in one ceremony?’

‘Yes, imagine the saving. But if it is one ceremony, they want it in style. I have sold the godown, but I need a buyer for the

goods.’

‘How much is the stock worth?’

‘Two lakhs of sale value. Of which retailers like you took twenty per cent margin, and 1 kept another ten per cent. The true cost is a round one lakh forty thousand.’

‘I’ll take it for one lakh,’ I said on impulse. Ish and Omi looked it me in surprise. What crazy scheme was I up to now?

‘One lakh forty is the cost, and now you want to buy it off me at a loss?’ i am buying everything.’

‘Give me the money by next month, you can take it for one ten,’ Pandit-ji said. I said one lakh. No more.’ I said in a firm voice.

‘When can you take the stock? The godown buyer needs possession fast,’ Pandit-ji said.

‘Today,’ I said.

When I told Ish and Omi about the deal later, worry lines crisscrossed their foreheads. I saw a gold-mine trade. India had performed great in the recent series. The summer vacations would start in a few weeks. If I sold it all, I could double my money.

‘You know what you are doing, right?’ Ish was doubtful.

I looked at him. My risks had let him down before. Yet, you can’t do business without taking bets.

‘Yes, I do. Do you trust me?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But his daughter is gone.’ ‘What?’ I said, puzzled.

‘You had a thing for her,’ Ish reminded me.

‘Oh,’ I said and looked away. You have no idea who has a thing for whom buddy, I thought.

★

Business exploded in the next three months. Every Indian kid played cricket in

May and June. Experts had called the India-Australia series historic. The actual matches had taken place during the exams. The pent-up cricket fix came out properly only in the vacations.

‘Is this how Harbhajan grips the ball?’ a seven-year-old tried to fit the cricket ball into his tiny fist.

‘Laxman and my batting styles are identical,’ said another boy in the park.

Customers at the temple shop tripled. Our wholesale business fared even better. Retailers never stopped calling.

‘What? Pandit-ji is going back to Kashmir? Anyway, two boxes of balls in City Mall sports shop?’ said one.

‘I’ve taken over Pandit-ji’s business. Call us, we deliver in two hours,’ I told another large shop in Satellite.

‘No, cash down only. Ahmedabad has no quality stock. You want now, pay now,’ 1 said to a credit seeker.

I kept track of cash, Omi did deliveries, while Ish manned the shop. When schools reopened, he also looked after the monthly supply business. We now supplied to four schools. It took a national holiday on 15 August for us to have a quiet day at the shop.

‘We should have kept kites. Look at the sky, that’s easy money,’ 1 said as I counted cash.

‘Hurry up with the accounts,’ Omi said. ‘Mama wants us there by four.’

Mama had planned his rally on Independence Day, the same day as Ali’s dad had planned a speech for his party’s candidate. What’s more, both the rallies took place at the same venue, at the opposite ends of Nana Park.

‘We will get there by four. But guess what’s our profit for the last four months,’ I faced the two.

Both shrugged.

‘Seventy thousand,’ I said. ‘Seventy what?’ Ish said.

‘That’s right. Out of which forty thousand will be used to repay our loans. The remaining thirty is ours,’ I said and passed on a bundle of notes to each of them.

‘Who decides how to cut this money?’ Ish said.

‘I do, any problem?’ I said and realised I had come across too firm. ‘Nope. So, how many loans do we have left?’

‘Only twenty thousand more, if you count the interest. We will repay all by the end of the year,’ I said and locked the safe. I kept the key in my shirt pocket. I stood up to do a stock inventory in the godown.

‘Hey, Govind,’ Ish said as he pulled my arm down. ‘What?’ ‘Australia,’ he said.

‘C’mon, we have discussed it. Yes, it was nice to meet Fred and Ali is good. Just the visas cost three thousand each.’

‘Fred is giving the tickets,’ Ish said.

‘But we will still spend a lot. I’d imagine at least ten thousand a head, or forty thousand for the four of us,’ I said. I wanted to go as well, but I couldn’t afford to spend so much on a junket.

‘Here is my ten,’ Ish said and tossed the bundle back to me, ‘My contribution to the Australia fund.’

I looked at Ish and Omi. These guys are nuts. Super nuts.

‘Take this money home and toss the bundle at your dad. You need to.’ ‘Dad is only going to find another reason to curse me,’ Ish said. ‘Here’s mine.’ Omi tossed in his bundle, too. ‘C’mon Omi,’ I said.

‘I don’t work for money. I’m with you guys and don’t have to be a priest. That’s good enough for me.’

‘Well then let’s save it for the business and…,’ I was interrupted immediately. ‘No, this money is for Australia only’

‘Just when the business was looking up! Oh well,’ I said and tossed my bundle too.

‘There you go,’ Ish said, ‘we’ve got thirty grand done. Now if only you don’t pay the loan this time.’

‘No way Ish. The loan has to be repaid.’ ‘We will repay it – later,’ Ish said.

ish, you don’t listen. What if the other expenses end up higher?’

‘We will spend as little as possible. We’ll take enough theplas and khakras to eat for the stay. Fred will arrange the stay. Think about it man, the Australian cricket team,’ Ish said.

I sat down and sighed. My financially clueless partners looked at me like kids waiting for candy.

‘All right. Who is the bloody travel agent, let me bargain with him,‘ I said.

‘Yes, here we go,’ Ish said as he dialled the agent’s number. ‘One week, I can’t leave the business anymore and everyday will be expensive there,’ I said as I took the phone. Omi disconnected the phone. ‘Later, let’s go to Nana Park now,’ Omi said.

★

Twice. They dug up the Ayodhya site twice.’ Mama raised two lingers.

His voice echoed, more due to the poor quality of loudspeakers than the impact of his words. Ish and I sat at one end of the first row. Omi stood on stage. He felt important wearing a party badge, though he only had an errand-boy status. His responsibilities included placing mineral water bottles for everyone sitting on the stage.

Mama had done a good job of publicity. Two hundred people had shown up, not bad for a neighbourhood gathering. The candidate, Hasmukh-ji, a veteran of state politics and a longtime associate of Parekh-ji, sat centrestage. Mama was enjoying his five minutes of mike fame before Hasmukh-ji’s speech.

‘As far back as 1978, ASI, the government’s own entity, found temple evidence. But the secular government hid it. Then in 1992, our dear kar sevaks were pushed into breaking the structure. And they found something.’

Ish started cracking knuckles, punctuating Mama’s words.

‘They found a Hari-Vishnu inscription that established without doubt that there was a temple in the past. But the secular party buries that news, too. The focus shifts to the kar sevaks as vandals. But what about that evidence? Can a Hindu in India demand justice or not? Where should we go? To America?’

Everyone applauded as Mama left the stage. Mama had candidate potential, I thought.

Hasmukh-ji came to the mike. He requested everyone to close their eyes to say the Gayatri Mantra, thrice. It always worked. The crowd became involved. They liked Hasmukh-ji before he had spoken a word.

Omi stepped off the stage and came to me. ‘Govind, Mama wants you to spy on Ali’s dad’s rally. And Ish, can you come backstage, the snacks need to be distributed.’

‘But why?’ I was bewildered.

‘You promised to help Mama, remember?’ Omi said, his silk badge fluttering in the breeze.

I walked over to the other end of the park, to the other rally, The decorations here were less saffron and more white.

‘Gujarat is a place of intelligent people,’ Ali’s dad was speaking, ‘who know politics and religion are separate.’

I took a seat in the last row and eyeballed the crowd. Unlike Mama’s hundred per cent Hindu, this was more of a mixed bunch, If the secular party was so pro- Muslim as Mama suggested, why were so many Hindus sitting here?

‘The gods we pray to, stayed away from politics in their time. If we truly want to follow our gods, we must keep our religion separate from politics. Religion is private, politics public,’ Ali’s dad said.

‘You a party member?’ someone asked me. I shook my head. I guessed he was Hindu.

‘How about you?’ I said.

‘Yes, tor generations,’ he said.

Ali’s father invited the main candidate, Ghulam Zian, on stage.

As the septuagenarian began to talk, the microphones turned silent and the pedestal fans conked off. Murmurs ran along the crowd. Was it a power failure? No, as the event had its own generators.

it’s sabotage. The Hindu party did it,’ said one person in the crowd. Tension filled the air. People talked about raiding the Hindu rally.

‘Let’s teach those guys a lesson,’ a muscular man led the pack and lifted his chair. I wondered if I should run back and warn Mama.

‘It’s back. Ladies and gentlemen, please sit down. The power is back,’ Ali’s father came to the stage with folded hands. The fans whirred again.

1 remembered the kissing chimpanzees and reconciliation mechanisms. But right now, there were no kisses. Only chairs that could be thrown everytime the power went off.

I stepped outside. I called a travel agent. ‘We want to apply for four passports and visas to Australia. And don’t give me a crazy price.’

I returned to Ghulam Zian’s speech. Ali’s dad spotted me and came over, inaayat, Govind bhai. What brings you here? Welcome, welcome.’

‘You speak well. You know Ish’s plans to take Ali to Australia?’ I said.

‘He told me, Inshallah, you will go. Ali mentions Ishaan bhai’s name at least ten times everyday. Sometimes I feel Ishaan bhai is more his father than me. Goa, Australia, I never say no to him. Why isn’t he here?’

‘Well he and Omi are…’

‘At the other rally, isn’t it? Don’t worry, I understand. Your choice.’

i am a businessman. I have no interest in politics,’ I said, in fact, I’ll go now.’

He fell into step with me. ‘I’ll come and say hello to Ishaan bhai.’

I wanted to tell him it was a terrible idea for him to come to Mama’s rally. Politics may be his pastime, but for Mama it was lift and death. I kept quiet as we walked back to Mama’s rally. Hasmukh-bhai was still on, with lots of hand gestures. ‘Put your hand on your heart. Don’t you feel wronged as Hindus? And if we had the best culture and administration thousands of years ago, why not now?’

Mama saw us from the stage and pointed a finger. A few people in the crowd looked at me and Ali’s father.

‘Hey, who is that?’ a party worker said.

The crowd booed at us. Ali’s dad’s beard looked extremely out of place.

‘Get lost, you traitor,’ said a person from the crowd. ‘Let’s teach him a lesson,’ said another. Hasmukh-ji stopped talking. Luckily, he kept quiet. Ali’s abba raised his hand to wave to Mama and Hasmukh-ji.

‘Go away, Ali’s abba,’ I murmured without looking at him.

Omi came running to me and grabbed my hand. ‘What the hell are you doing? I sent you to spy and you bring back another spy?’

Ali’s dad heard Omi and looked at me. I shook my head. He gave me an all- knowing smile and turned to walk back.

I don’t give a fuck about this,’ I shouted back. I doubt he heard me.

Thirteen

First Goa, now Australia. What business do you do?’ said Vidya, her eyes the size of the new one-rupee coins.

‘Fred kept his promise when Ish wrote to him again. We received tickets in the mail,’ I said. We had finished class and I wanted to tell her about my impending absence.

‘So who are the two people going?’ she said.

‘Not two, four. Ali and the three of us are going,’ I said. ‘Lucky bums,’ she laughed.

‘So, I will be away for ten days. But your books won’t be. Vidya, all my students do well. Don’t let me down.’ ‘You also don’t let me down,’ she said. ‘How?’

‘Forget it. So where are you going in Australia?’

‘Sydney. Fred is from there. Ali will practice in his academy for a week. When your brother sets his mind on something, he goes real far.’

‘Unlike me. I can’t focus. I’m sure I will flunk my medical entrance. I will be stuck in this hellhole home even in college. And then I will get married into another hell-hole in some backward part of Gujarat.’

‘Gujarat is not backward,’ I retorted. ‘Maybe I am too forward.’

We locked eyes again. In an entrance exam for insolence, Vidya would top easy.

I opened her guide books.

‘Why are studies so boring? Why do you have to do something so uninteresting to become something in life?’

‘Vidya, philosophical questions, no. Mathematical questions, yes,’ I said and stood up to leave.

‘Will you get me something from Australia?’

‘Ask your brother, he will get you whatever you want.’ I restacked the books.

No way would I spend more cash than I needed to.

‘Anyway, we are on a tight budget,’ I clarified. She nodded as if she understood. ‘So, will you miss me?’ I continued to look down.

‘You have a budget for how much you can miss people, too?’ she asked. ‘Do your sums, Vidya. Focus,’ I said and left.

★

‘You guys tired or wanna hit practice?’ were Fred’s first words of welcome at

the airport.

‘Where is my bed?’ I wanted to ask.

We had taken an overnight train from Ahmedabad to Mumbai, waited six more hours to board a fourteen-hour flight to Sydney via Singapore. Thirty hours of travel in cramped environments and I wanted to kill myself with sleep.

‘Oh, so we made it in time for practice?’ Ish looked out at the streets of Sydney. At 7 a.m. in the morning, joggers clogged the pavements. Picture-postcard coffee shops advertised delicious muffins.

I patted the khakras in my bag. We couldn’t afford any cakes In this town.

‘I go to the academy ground in the morning,’ Fred said as he stepped on the gas. ‘I’ve put you up in a hostel. Take a nap first I’d say. Philip will pick you up for the evening practice.’



Guys, this is Ali. He is a batsman,’ Fred said to the other players who came for practice. Apart from Philip, there was a beefy guy called Peter and a spectacled spinner called Steve. I forgot the other names instantly.

Fred screamed, ‘Five rounds everyone. Close to the boundary line, no short- cuts.’

The first two hours of our Australian practice was the practice of death. Five rounds of the academy grounds equaled twenty rounds of Nana Park and fifty rounds of the bank’s courtyard. After the run, we did innumerable sit-ups, push- ups and crunches. Three personal trainers supervised five students each. The first lime I groaned, one came running to me. The next time he said, ‘Cut the drama, mate.’

We came to the pitch after endurance training. I told them I was no player, but I had to field anyway.

‘Here, bowl,’ Fred tossed the ball to Ali. ‘He doesn’t really bowl,’ Ish said.

‘I know, give it a burl,’ Fred clapped his hands.

Philip took his fielding place at the boundary near me. ‘What’s burl?’ I asked him.

‘Aussie slang, mate,’ Philip laughed, it means give it a try.’

Ish offered to be the wicket keeper, but Fred told him to stay at the slip instead. Ali’s bowling was no match for these state level players. Roger slammed the ball towards the boundary several times. Once the ball came between Philip and me, and we had a tough time catching it.

‘Rattle your dags, mate,’ another fielder shouted at me. No one had to translate ‘hurry up’ to me.

I threw the ball back. What was I doing in the middle of this Australian ground?

As the day progressed, so did my Aussie vocabulary. ‘Onya’ was short for ‘good on you’, which meant well done. An easy ball was a ‘piece of piss’, while a good one ‘packed a wallop’. The mosquitoes were ‘mozzies’, and soft drinks ‘coldies’. When I took a loo break, Philip broke into some more slang. ‘You got to siphon the python, is it?’

It started to get dark.

‘Pack-up time,’ announced Fred though Ali hadn’t batted yet. Fred raised his eyebrows at a glum Ish in the locker room.

I am fine,’ said Ish. Omi and Ali were taking a walk outside the dub. ‘Fair dinkum?’

Ish looked up from his wooden stool.

‘He is asking if you are telling the truth,’ I showed off my newfound linguistic skills.

‘When is practice tomorrow, Fred, in English if you can,’ Ish said.

‘You a whinger?’ Fred said. ‘Whinge means…,’ I said as Ish interrupted me.

I know what whinge means, can someone please explain the point of calling a batsman from thousands of miles away and not making him bat?’

Fred smiled, ‘Oh, you wanted your little discovery to bat. What for? So he can hit a few sixes. You want the kid to be a show-off from day one?’

That’s not what I…’

‘Mate, I see a lot of talent. Every AIS scholarship kid has tickets on himself. If I don’t break their pride, they will stay hoons for the rest of their life. Sportsmen aren’t movie stars, mate. Even though your country treats them like that.’

‘But Fred…’

‘You Indians have good talent, but the training – trust me on that mate.’

‘We are only here for a week,’ Ish sounded helpless. ‘I’ll make the week productive. But today’s lesson was important. If he isn’t humble, he won’t last long,’ Fred said, then looked at his watch. ‘Promised the missus some time. I’m off like a bride’s nightie.’



‘Cheers!’ everyone cried. We clanged our dark brown bottles of XXXX beer, also known as ‘fourex’ stubbies. ‘Hi!’ our server Hazel, too hot to be a waitress, hugged Fred. ‘Oooh…,’ Fred’s students egged him on after she left. ‘No way, mate. The missus won’t tolerate me making eyes at anyone else,’ Fred said. ‘But you guys are single. You must have pretty girls all over you in India.’ Everyone looked at us. ‘We don’t have girlfriends,’ Omi said.

‘Why not? Indian women are hot,’ said Michael, rolling his ‘Too busy with work,’ I said.

‘Busy? Never heard a bloke too busy to root, mate,’ Roger said.

Everyone laughed. Root meant, well, whatever. ‘Check those honeys out,’

Michael said as four girls walked in.

“The one in brown, she’s ain’t bad,’ Michael said. ‘NCR 5.’ ‘NCR 10,’ Roger said.

‘And the blue one?’ Philip said.

‘She’s NCR 0. Bring it on, man,’ Roger said. Everyone laughed. ‘What’s NCR?’ I asked as there was a whiff of maths in the

air.

‘NCR is Number of Cans Required. The amount of beer yoi need to drink to want to have sex with a girl,’ Fred said.

‘Michael dated an ugly bitch once. He admits it, NCR 40 Roger said. Everyone roared with laughter.

‘Here you go, hungry boys,’ Hazel said in a flirtatious tone she passed the plates.

The Australians mainly ate meat dishes. We had stuck to a pizza as it was the only recognisable choice.

‘You got to do more protein,’ Michael said, his biceps flexing, as he ate. Omi said, I drink two litres of milk everyday.’

Ish sat next to Fred. I could not hear their conversation However, I saw Ish’s frequent nods. I left the Aussie rooting stories and moved to Ish.

‘If you’re the bowler and you’ve got the ball in your hand, you’re controlling the game. You’ve got to make sure the batsman know who’s the boss,’ Fred was saying. ‘Same for Ali. He doesn’t just need to hit shots, he needs to show the other team who is the boss.’ ‘Right,’ Ish said.

My players will eventually figure out new ways to bowl to Ali. A determined mind can counter a gift. A champion has both.’ Ish nodded.

Hi Govind!’ Fred had spotted me. ‘Don’t want rooting tips? We are just doing boring coach talk.’

Ish’s chest swelled with pride as Fred had called him equal in role.

I remembered something. ‘You mentioned a scholarship yesterday. What’s that? In fact, how does the whole sports thing work in Australia.’

‘You want to know why Australia always wins?’ it doesn’t always win,’ Ish said.

‘Not always, thank goodness. We love to dominate opponents, hut also love a fight. When there’s a challenge, it brings out the

best.‘

‘Yeah, even if not every time, Australia does win a lot. Every Olympics, there is pile of medals for Australia. In cricket, the domination continues. How come, Fred?’ 1 said.

‘Plenty of reasons, mate. But it wasn’t always like this.’ Fred sipped his sparkling water, in fact, in the 1976 Olympic games in Montreal, Australia didn’t win a single medal.’ ‘But you guys did well last year,’ Ish said. ‘Yes, in Sydney 2000. Australia won 56 medals, only after USA, Russia and China. All these countries have ten times as many people.’ He paused. ‘Aussies saw the Montreal fiasco as a national shame. So the government set up the Australian Institute of Sports or the AIS and initiated the world’s best scholarship programme.’ Fred finished his glass of water and continued:

‘And today the AIS has hundreds of staff – coaches, doctors and physios. They get two hundred million dollars of funding| and have excellent facilities. And at the heart of it all, they offer seven hundred scholarships a year.’ Fred pushed the spaghetti plate towards me.

I listened as I struggled with the ribbon-like pasta. I calculated how seven hundred scholarships for twenty million people would equate to for India. That was the equivalent of thirty-five thousad sports scholarships a year for India to match the ratio.

‘What’s the scholarship? Money?’ Ish wanted to know.

‘Not just money, mate. It is full on. Expert coaching accommodation, travel to tournaments, sports science, medicine -you name it. And the best part is to be part of that communit where everyone has a singular commitment to their sport. I can’t describe that feeling,’ Fred said, as his eyes lit up.

‘I know the feeling,’ Ish said. Even though Ish’s eyes aren’t blue. they shone as bright.

The waiters cleared our plates as we finished our food. ‘Any famous players from this scholarship programme?’

‘Heaps. Michael Bevan, Adam Gilchrist, Justin Langer, Damien Martyn, Glenn McGrath, Ricky Ponting, Andrew Symonds, Shane Warne…’

‘What are you talking about? These are all cricketing legends Ish said. ‘Legends – that’s a good word,’ Fred laughed. ‘Hope I get there someday.’ ‘You have a scholarship, too?’ I said. Fred nodded.

‘You are already a legend, Fred,’ Ish said. ‘Nah, I’m starting out. And let me tell you boys, the whole legend bit is far-fetched. You take a bit of talent and mould it properly, and good stuff happens. In that sense, Australia can create legends.’

‘And we can’t,’ Ish asked.

‘Well you could, though right now you rely on talent more than training. You have a big population, a tiny number of them are born excellent. Like Tendulkar, or maybe like Ali.’

‘Yeah, but,’ Ish boxed his left palm with his right, ‘imagine what would happen if we could have this kind of training in India.’

‘Cricket would be finished. India would dominate and teams like us would be nowhere. At least for now we can call ourselves “legend”.’ Fred hooked his fingers around the last word.

Ali did bat the following days. Every bowler went through the shock of being slammed for sixes. However, Ali kept the showbiz low and played a steady game. He crossed fifty runs in a couple of innings. On Friday morning Ali hit the ball for a defensive shot. The ball didn’t go far. Ali decided to stay at the crease.

‘Run, it is a single,’ Ish urged from the boundary line.

‘Run Ali,’ Ish said again. Ali looked surprised at the instruction hut ran. ‘Faster,’ Ish screamed, ‘don’t sleep.’

Ali ran faster as the fielder returned the ball to the bowler.

‘Jump,’ Ish said. Ali dived. He made the crease but fell with his full body weight coming down on his left ankle. As everyone rushed towards him, he lay on the ground clenching his teeth and holding back tears.

‘Oh, get up. No time for drama,’ Ish said.

‘Easy, mate,’ Fred said to Ish and signalled for a physio. Within minutes, a paramedic arrived and placed an ice pack on Ali’s swollen ankle.

‘Lucky it is not a fracture or dislocation. Looks like a ligament got some wear, mate,’ the physio said, applying painkillers and wrapping a crepe bandage. Ali leaned on the physio as he tried to hobble. ‘Give the game a rest for two days. You’ll be fine.’

‘Don’t worry, he’ll play in a few hours,’ Ish said with a sheepish expression.

Guilt bubbled up his eyes.

‘Everyone,’ Fred clapped his hands, ‘let’s sit down.’ We sat down on the pitch around Fred in a circle.

‘You are big boys and tough players. You want to give it your all. But I can’t emphasise it enough – respect your body’s limits

‘I do,’ Ish said, feeling compelled to speak, ‘but there was a single there. And that is what we Indians miss. We don’t want to dive. We don’t want to take risks.’

‘The game is not about being macho. You can’t get caught up in the moment so much that you forget.’

‘Forget what?’ I said.

‘Forget that you got one fragile body. Lose it, and you are gone, You must safeguard it. And Ish, you must protect your student.’

Ish hung his head low.

‘I had just started my career when my nasty back almost finished it,’ Fred said. ‘I’d have been selling suits at a store for the rest of my life, as that is the only job I could get.’

He added, ‘1 made the same mistakes, wanting to kill myself for the game I played that day. But if you want a career, think long term. Yes, passion is important. But the head has to be clear during the match.’

Ish apologised to Fred later in the locker room. ‘I’d never let Ali get hurt.’

‘The kid is good. I have a little surprise for him. You leave Sunday evening, right?’

‘Yes, in two days,’ Ish said.’Can’t believe the week went by so fast.’ ‘Sunday breakfast is on me. I want you guys to meet someone important.’

★

Bondi beach is so beautiful that it needs a coffee table book of its own. First, the sky. The Australian sky is a different colour from India. It actually looks the same as the sky blue colour in paint shops and is so crisp that your eyes hurt. There is no pollution. The sea is visible for miles. At the shore, the Pacific Ocean meets the powdery sand to create perfect waves. They are strong enough to surf on, yet soft enough to make you relax.

But that summer, the nicest part about the beach was its people – those who were not men. That is, those who were women. Gorgeous and topless. And if you’ve never seen a topless woman in your life before, places like this did things to you.

‘There must be a hundred women here,” Ish whistled. And each one a knockout!’

It was true. It was like all the beautiful women in the world emailed each other and decided to meet at Bondi.

‘You want an umbrella?’ I said as we parked ourselves at a scenic spot. Six topless women played Frisbee there.

‘Wow, you can actually see their ni … wow,’ Omi pointed out helpfully.

‘There are a hundred women here. So we have two hundred breasts to look at,’ I said and was teased for bringing maths everywhere.

Having grown up in a place where sleeveless blouses cause scandals, tops-off is what an MBA type would call a ‘paradigm

shift’.

‘I could not play with them. I’d never look at the Frisbee Ish said.

‘Check that blonde one, wow, she is massive,’ I said. Oh well when in Disneyland, play.

‘This is what heaven must look like. My eyes are tired from not blinking,’ Omi said.

It is funny but the bare-breasts became routine in a few minutes. I guess you get used to good things fast. I’d much prefer to see one topless woman every day for hundred days, rather than a hundred at once. I sat down on the sand. Ish and Omi soon went for a swim in the sea and to see if wet and topless women looked even hotter wet. Yes, we are a sick bunch.

I noticed a brunette in an umbrella next to me. She wore a shirt on top of her bikini and had her back to me. Her long black hair fell over her thin back. She applied something in her half, probably oil or lotion or any such thing that girls feel is essential to their existence.

Something hurt inside me. I felt like someone pounded my chest. The brunette rubbed her hair exactly like Vidya. I saw Omi and Ish splashing in the water at a distance. They laughed as the pushed each other down.

Random thoughts circulated in my head, like oiled fingers in hair. Wouldn’t it be nice if Vidya was here? Isn’t this what she longed for most? Freedom above all else? Didn’t she have the Bondi spirit, even though I’d have killed her if she walked around in a bikini. Wait a minute, I’d kill her or her brother Ish would kill her? Why should I care? But I did say I would kill her? And why am I thinking of her when there are so many beautiful topless women to distract me right now? And why do I think of her every night before I go to bed? And why does my mind not stop asking stupid questions?

If you began to miss a girl thousands of miles away even with naked breasts around you, something is seriously wrong. I opened my notebook that I carried

everywhere. I wanted to make a budget for the next three months. I found a long strand of hair. It didn’t belong to Ish or Omi or me. Only one person that I knew had long hair. The notebook I had opened to forget her made me miss her even more.

Omi came running to me. Water dripped from him and fell on my legs. I closed my book.

‘The water is amazing. C’mon inside,’ he said, catching his breath. ‘No, I have work. I have to make a call,’ I said. ‘Call who?’

‘Suppliers,’ I said without making eye contact. ‘From here? Isn’t it expensive?’ ‘Short call, need some coins,’ I said as I collected the change.

‘You are working on Bondi? Whatever, I am diving in again,’ Omi said and ran back to the sea.

I collected my belongings and walked back to the beach shopping area. I found a public phone.

I dialed her number.

Fourteen

The phone rang twice. I disconnected it. I thought about leaving the booth. I re- inserted the coins and dialled again. ‘Hello? Ishaan bhaiya?’ Vidya said as she picked up the phone.

The phone gobbled two dollars worth of coins. I cut the phone again. Fuck, what the hell was I doing? I called again with fresh coins. She picked up instantly. ‘Bhaiya, can you hear me?’

I did the cheesiest thing possible. I just breathed. I must have come across as a pervert, but I could not find anything better to say.

‘Govind?’ she said, her voice careful. Had she guessed my breath? What is with this kid? ‘Hi,’ I said. I could not contain myself any longer. ‘Govind, wow. I saw the international number. So, tell me?’ Of all the phrases ever said on the phone, I hate ‘tell me’ the most. Do I have to tell something just because I have called? ‘Well, I…’

‘How is Australia? Having fun? Tell me?’

I could kill her if she said tell me again. But maybe I should just tell her something, I thought.

‘Yes, it is nice. You will like this place,’ I said. ‘Which place? Tell more no? Where are you now?’

‘Bondi beach. It is beautiful. Such a perfect place,’ I said. Of course, I gave stupid descriptions. But you try to call a girl you are not supposed to call for the first time.

To add to the nervousness, the phone consumed coins at a ferocious pace. I kept adding more change as the damn phone ate a dollar every thirty seconds.

‘Wow. I have never seen a real beach in my life. How is it? Does the water never end? Can you keep looking until forever?’

‘Yeah, and the sky is endless too.’ Duh! Say something more than borrowing from her phrases.

‘Where are Ish and Omi?’

‘They are in the water. I am in a booth,’ I said.

She asked the one question I did not want her to ask. ‘So, how come you called?’

‘Oh nothing. How is the preparation going? Integration is quite important you know.’

‘You called about integration?’ ‘Well, and other…’

‘Do you miss me?’ ‘Vidya.’

‘What?’

‘Don’t ask silly questions.’

‘I miss you. A lot actually,’ she said. Her voice became heavy. ‘Ok, that’s well, that’s … wow,’ I said, champion of nonsensical, monosyllabic responses.

‘Yeah, and not as a tutor. As a friend. As a very good friend.’

A ‘very good friend’ is a dangerous category with Indian girls. From here you can either make fast progress. Or, if you play it wrong, you go down to the lowest category invented by Indian women ever – rakhi brother. Rakhi brother really means ‘you can talk to me, but don’t even freaking think about anything else you

bore’. A little voice in my mind shouted at me, ‘tell her you miss her stupid, or you’ll be getting rakhis for the rest of your life.’

‘I do. If you were here, Sydney would be more fun.’ ‘Wow, that’s the nicest thing you ever said to me.’

I kept quiet. When you have said something nice, don’t be in a hurry to speak again and ruin the good line.

‘Can I get you anything from here?’ I said. ‘Tight budget, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Yeah, but a little something won’t hurt…,’ I said.

‘I have an idea. Get me some sand from the beach you are on right now. That way I will have a piece of Sydney with me.’

Sand? Now that was a weird request. At least it was cheap. Free, rather. ‘Really?’ I said.

‘Yeah, bring me a matchbox full of sand. And put some feelings in it if there is space,’ she said.

The phone display blinked. It threatened me to feed it with more money or my first romantic conversation would be murdered. I had no coins left.

‘Listen, I have to go now. No more change,’ I said. ‘Sure, come back soon. Someone’s missing you.’

‘Back in three days. I miss you too,’ I said and cleared my throat. Wow, I could actually say what I felt after all.

‘And I want to tell you something…,’ she said. ‘What?’

Beep. Beep. Beep. A stupid Australian company called Telstra ruined my first romantic moment.

I walked back. I thought about the girl who only wanted sand. I also thought how much money telecom companies must make given a tiny call cost me as much as a meal.

I passed a trendy outdoor restaurant called Blue Orange Cafe. Australians give the word laid-back new meaning. People sit with a glass of beer for hours. Beautiful waitresses scampered around getting people burgers and toasted sandwiches.

I took a match box from the bar and emptied the sticks in a dustbin. I walked back to the shore until the surfy water touched my toes. I looked around and bent over. I stuffed some sand in the matchbox and put it in my pocket.

‘Hey, what are you doing?’ Omi said as he emerged from the waves like the world’s ugliest mermaid.

‘Nothing, what are you doing this side? The waves are better at the other end,’ I said.

‘I came to meet you. Can I borrow a few coins for a Coke. I feel thirsty.’

‘Coins are finished. Have some cash left for today, but let’s use it to eat lunch.’ ‘Finished?’ Omi said.

‘Yeah,’ I said, irritated. I don’t like it when people less sensible than me question me.

‘Who did you call?’ Omi said. ‘Supplier.’

‘Which one?’

‘Fuck off Omi, let’s go get lunch. Will you get dry first.’ ‘Vidya?’

I looked at him dumbstruck. What a random guess. And what the hell is his business anyway. ‘What?’ I said, surprised. ‘Don’t lie to me.’

‘C’mon Omi why would I call Vidya?’ ‘I’m not that stupid.’ ‘You are,’ I said. We walked towards the restaurant with me three steps ahead of him.

‘I’ve seen the way you guys look at each other,’ he said as he tried to catch up with me.

‘Get lost,’ I said and walked faster. We came to Campbell Parade, a strip of bars and cafes near the beach.

‘And I’ve noticed. You never talk about her since you started teaching her,’ he said.

I went inside ‘Hog’s Breath Cafe’. After five days in this country the name didn’t seem weird anymore.

We sat facing each other. I lifted the menu to cover my face and avoid conversation.

‘You can hide if you want. But I know.’ I slid the menu down.

‘It’s nothing, ok maybe something. But nothing to worry about,’ I said. I hid behind the menu again.

‘There is an unspoken rule among Indian men, and you broke it.’

‘What rule?’ I said and slammed the menu on the table.

‘You don’t hit upon your best friend’s sister. You just don’t. It is against the protocol.’

‘Protocol? What is this, the army? And I didn’t hit on her. She hit upon me,’ I said.

‘But you let her hit upon you. You let her.’ ‘Well, it wasn’t exactly like being hit. it didn’t hurt. It felt good,’ I said.

I played with the toothpicks on the table to avoid eye Contact.

‘Fuck man, how far are you guys?’

‘What? Hey Omi, go call Ish for lunch. We are here and he has no idea.’ ‘Yes, he really has no idea,’ Omi said and left.

A noisy gang played on the pool table near us. I had five minutes until Ish came back. Thoughts came to me. Will Omi say something stupid to him? No, Omi was not that stupid.

Omi and Ish walked in laughing. Ok, all is good.

‘Hog’s Breath? Can you think of a worse name for a restaurant?’ Ish said and laughed.

‘I can,’ Omi said.

‘Don’t say it. Anyway, where’s the toilet? I have to go siphon the…,’ Ish said. ‘Over there,’ I interrupted him and pointed to the corner. I had enough of

Aussies for a lifetime.

‘Are you intimate with her?’ Omi continued. ‘Did you say anything to him?’ I said. ‘You think I’m stupid?’ ‘Yeah.’

‘I didn’t. Now tell me, what stage are you in the relationship?’ Omi said. ‘Stage?’ I said.

‘Yes, there is a “we-just-look” stage, the most common stage in the old city.

Then a “we-just-talk” stage. Then a “hold-hand” stage. Then a…’ ‘It’s not like that. It’s different between us.’

‘Fuck, that’s an advanced stage. When you think your relationship is different from any other in this world. Don’t do anything stupid ok?’

‘Stupid?’

Omi leaned forward to whisper.

‘You know stupid. Ish will kill you, or her dad will. Or any man who is related to her will. Remember that guy in the car? Trust me, you don’t want to be that boy, or that car.’

‘Well, it’s nothing really. Just good friends,’ I said and looked towards the toilet. ‘Just good friends should be a banned phrase. There is nothing more

misleading. You are her teacher damn it. And how old is she? Seventeen?’ ‘Turns eighteen in a few months.’

‘Oh great,’ Omi said.

Ish came out of the toilet. He cracked a joke with the Aussie guys playing pool.

I turned to Omi.

‘I don’t want to talk about it. Don’t worry, I won’t do anything stupid. She sucks at maths. I don’t know why I agreed to teach her in the first place.’

‘Then stop teaching her no?’ Omi said.

‘Can we get lunch, I really want to get lunch,’ I said and flipped the menu. ‘I am just saying…’

‘Ish,’ I screamed across the bar, ‘What do you want? Garlic bread is the cheapest item on the menu.’

‘Whatever, I trust you,’ he screamed back as he continued to play pool with the Aussie guys.

His last phrase bobbed up and down in my head like the surfboards on Bondi beach.



These houses are huge,’ I said as we drove past a rich neighbourhood called Double Bay.

Fred had picked us up for breakfast on Sunday, our last day. Ish, Omi and Ali sat at the back in Fred’s Saab convertible while I rode in the front. Cool air blew through our hair as we drove past Sydney’s early morning streets.

‘But most people have modest places,’ Fred said. ‘In Australia, we don’t brag about how much money we make or what car you drive. Heck, people don’t even ask what job you do. Do you know what people ask the most?’

‘What?’ Ish said.

‘What do you play, that’s what they ask,’ Fred said.

‘I love Australia. I wish India approached sports with the same spirit.’ Ish leaned forward.

‘Here sports is a national obsession,’ Fred said. ‘What’s the obsession in your country then?’

‘There’s a lot of people. And there’s a lot of obsessions. That’s the problem,’ Ish said.

‘But religion and politics are pretty big. And them together, even bigger,’ I added.

I stay out of that stuff. Aussie politics are a joke anyway,’ Fred said, killing the engine.

We parked in an area called Paramatta Park. Fred had brought us to Lachan’s Restaurant in the Old Colonial House. We went inside the restaurant to find two men waiting for us.

‘Good morning Mr Greener and Mr Cutler.’ Fred introduced us to the two older men.

‘And this is the talented boy?’ Mr Greener patted All’s back.

‘Yep, as talented as the man above sends them,’ Fred said as we settled at the table.

‘These are the gentlemen who helped me get your tickets. Not| my ex- girlfriend,’ Fred said and winked at us.

‘What?’ Ish said as we understood the purpose of Fred inviting us. It wasn’t to just play for a week.

‘Remember my phone calls from Goa? To these gentlemen,’ Fred said.

‘Mr Greener is the chairman of the Australian Sports Academy and Mr Cutler is head of the AIS scholarship programme.’ Fred buttered some toast ‘I told them about AIL How he is good, really good, and how with proper training he has the potential to go really far.’

I saw Ish s face tighten in anticipation. Were they going to sponsor Ali?

‘If he is as good as Fred and his boys who played with you say you are,’ Mr Greener said, ‘we should do whatever we can to help’

“Thank you, thank you,’ Ish said as Fred shushed him. Over-excitement was a constant problem with Ish. His sister as well, Maybe it was hereditary.

‘You see,’ Mr Cutler cleared his throat, ‘the AIS selects from the nominations of the various state academies. I can get Ali selected, However, Ali doesn’t live in any Australian state.’

‘So?’ Ish said.

‘Under AIS rules, the scholarship holder must be an Australian resident, or at least a person in the process of becoming a resident’

‘Can’t we make an exception?’ I said. Omi was too busy eating to talk. Omi and Ali had hardly spoken during the entire trip. The Aussie accent stumped them.

‘Well, the only way we can do it is this,’ Mr Cutler said and took out a file. He opened it and laid out some forms on the table.

‘Or Cutler had to pull serious strings at the immigration department for this,’ Mr Greener laughed in a friendly manner.

‘Well, this is the Australian citizenship forms. As you may know, a lot of people in the world want it. But here, given the great talent, we are offering Ali an Australian citizenship.’

Ali and Omi stopped eating as they saw the forms on the table.

‘He’ll become Australian?’ Omi said. ‘He’ll become a champion,’ Fred said.

‘His parents will have residency rights, too. And Ish, you can … your friends here, too, can apply. We will assist you in every way. Chances are good,’ Mr Cutler said.

‘You love Australia.’ Fred winked at Ish.

‘Think about the child’s future. From what I hear, his means are rather, er, limited,” Mr Cutler said.

They meant poor. I nodded. Ali’s life would transform. ‘They have a point,’ I told Ish, who still looked shell-shocked.

‘Why don’t you ask Ali first? It is his life and his decision,’ Mr Greener said.

‘Yes, no pressure,’ Fred said, turning over both his palms. We explained the offer in simple terms to Ali while a waiter cleared our plates.

‘So, Ah … what do you want?’ Ish said.

‘If I make it to the team, who will I play for?’ Ah said. Australia,’ Mr Cutler said.

‘But I’m an Indian,’ Ali said.

‘But you can become an Australian as well. We are a multicultural society,’ Mr Greener said. ‘No,’ Ali said.

‘What?’

‘I am an Indian. I want to play for India. Not for anyone else.’

‘But son, we will give you the same respect as your own country, And some good coaching,’ Mr Greener said.

‘I have a good coach,’ Ali said and looked at Ish. Ish beamed at his proudest moment ever.

‘It will be tough to make it in your country. Your coach knows that,’ Mr Cutler said.

Ali spoke slowly after a pause.

‘It’s ok if I don’t become a player, but it’s not ok if I am not an Indian,’ Ali said. Maybe he never meant it to be profound, but that was his deepest statement yet.

‘But,’ Mr Cutler said. He leaned forward and put his hand on Ali’s shoulder. Ali slid next to Ish and hid against him.

The officials tried for another half an hour. They asked if we could speak to Ali’s parents, but realised this wasn’t going to work after all. I maintained the polite conversation.

‘We are sorry. We do realise that this is a big, big honour,’ I said, ‘sorry Fred.

What you have done for us is huge.’

‘No worries mate. Your kid is good and he knows it. If you can make a billion people proud, why bother with us down under?’ Fred said and laughed. He didn’t show if he was upset. Sportsman spirit, I guess.

We saw the officials off to their car.

‘Never mind mate. Maybe next time, next life in this case. You could be Australian, who knows?’ Mr Greener said as he slid into the driving seat of his silver Honda Accord.

‘I don’t want to,’ Ali said, his face emerging from hiding behind Ish. ‘What?’

‘I don’t want to be Australian in my next life. Even if I have a hundred next lives, I want to be Indian in all of them,’ Ali said.

A plane flew above us. I looked up in the sky. I was glad I was going home tonight.

Fifteen

Vidya. Vidya. Vidya – her name rang like an alarm in my head. I ran through tomato sellers and marble playing kids to reach her house on time.

I had tons of work. There were waiting suppliers, stuck stocks and unattended orders. However, Vidya’s thoughts dominated them all. A part of me, the logical part, told me this was not a good idea. Businessmen should not waste time on stupid things like women. But the other irrational part of me loved it. And this part controlled me at the moment. Where is Vidya? I looked up at her window as 1 pressed the bell downstairs.

‘Govind,’ Vidya’s dad opened the door. I froze. Why does every male in the family of the girl you care about instil a fear in your soul?

‘Uncle, Vidya … tuitions,’ I said.

‘She is upstairs, on the terrace,’ he said as he let me in. He picked up a newspaper from the coffee table. Why do old people like newspapers so much? They love reading the news, but what do they do about it? I went to the internal staircase to go up to the terrace.

He spoke again as I climbed the steps. ‘How is she? Will she make it to the medical entrance?’

‘She is a bright student,’ I said in a small voice. ‘Not like her useless brother,’ uncle said. He buried himself into the newspaper, dismissing me.

I climbed up to the terrace. Vidya stood there with an air-hostess smile. ‘Welcome to my al fresco tuition place.’

She went and sat on a white plastic chair with a table and an extra chair in front ‘I had so many doubts,’ she said, flipping through her notebook.

Smoke came out from under the table. ‘Hey, what’s this?’ I said. ‘Mosquito coil,’ she said.

I bent under the table to see the green, smouldering spiral coil. I also saw her bare feet. She had her trademark pearl-white nail polish only on the toenail tips. ‘The coil is not working,’ I said as I came up, ‘I see a mozzie party on top of your head.’

‘Mozzie?’

‘It is what they call mosquitoes in Australia,’ I said. ‘Oh, foreign returned now. How was Australia?’

‘Great,’ I looked at her. I tried to be normal. I couldn’t, not after that call. I had opened my cards already. No matter how close I held them to my chest now, she. had seen them.

I noticed her dress. She wore a new purple and white bandhini salwar kameez today. Her necklace had a purple teardrop pendant and matching earrings. She had freshly bathed. Her hair smelt of a little bit of Dettol soap and well, her. Every girl has a wonderful smell right after a bath. I think they should bottle it and sell it.

‘You brought my gift,’ she said to break the pause, or rather to fill up the silence as I checked her out.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

I stood up to take out the match box from my jeans pocket.

‘Blue Orange Cafe, cool,’ she said. She took the box and slid it open with her thin fingers.

‘Wow, an Australian beach in my hands,’ she said. She held it up with pride as if I had presented the queen’s stolen diamonds.

‘I feel silly. I should have brought something substantial,’ I said.

‘No, this is perfect. Look there is a tiny shell inside,’ she signalled me to lean forward. Our heads met in a dull thud as we looked into the matchbox’s contents.

Her toes touched mine as we inched closer. ‘Ouch,’ she said as she pulled her feet away. ‘What?’ I said.

‘Nothing, the mosquito coil,’ she said, ‘I touched the hot tip.’

I sat back upright. Water droplets had passed from her hair to mine. Half the mosquitoes hovering over her head had shifted over to mine as well.

‘Why am I so cheap?’ I said.

‘It’s fine. The call would have cost something.’

‘Yeah, five dollars and sixty cents,’ I said and regretted talking like an accountant the next second.

‘There you go. Anyway, life’s best gifts are free,’ she said and pulled her hair back to tie them with a rubber band.

I nodded. Ok, enough is enough, my inner Mr Logical told me. Time to study.

I opened the books. She asked the dreaded question. ‘So how come you called?’ ‘I told you,’ I mumbled.

‘Did you really miss me?’ she said and put her palm on my hand. I pulled it back in reflex. She looked surprised.

‘I am sorry, Vidya. I shouldn’t. I have my business to focus on and this is really not my thing, but…,’ I said and turned away. I couldn’t talk when I looked at her. Or rather, I couldn’t talk when she looked at me.

‘It’s ok, you don’t have to be sorry,’ she said.

‘It’s not ok. I don’t have time for emotions,’ I said in a firm voice, ‘and this is not the place anyway. My best friend’s sister? What the fuck … oops, sorry.’

She giggled.

‘Be serious, Vidya. This is not right. I am your teacher, your brother trusts me as a friend, I have responsibilities – loans, business and a mother. You are not even eighteen.’

‘Two months,’ she wiggled two fingers. ‘Two months and I will turn eighteen.

Time to bring me another nice gift. Anyway, please continue.’

‘Well, whatever. The point is, significant reasons exist for me not to indulge in illogical emotions. And I want…’

She stood up and came to my side. She sat on the flimsy armrest of my plastic chair.

She put her finger on my mouth. She cupped my face in her palms.

‘You don’t shave that often eh? Ew,’ she said. She threw a tiny spit ball in the air.

‘What?’ I said and looked at her.

‘I think a mosquito kissed me,’ she said and spit again, ‘is it still there in my mouth?’

She opened her mouth and brought it close. Her lips were eight millimetres apart from mine.

Soon the gap reduced to zero. I don’t know if I came towards her or she came towards me. The tiny distance made it difficult to ascertain who took the

initiative. I felt something warm on my lips and realised that we have come too dose, or maybe too far.

We kissed again. The mosquitoes on our respective heads re-joined.

I’d love to say I saw stars and heard sweet, music during my first kiss. But the dominating background sounds were (a) Vidya’s mom’s pressure cooker whistle from downstairs in the kitchen, (b) the campaign sounds from the autos of various parties for the upcoming elections and (c) the constant buzz of the mozzies. But when you are in the middle of a kiss, sound and sight get muted I checked once to see if the other terraces were empty. Then I closed my eyes.

‘Vidya, what are we doing,’ I said, not letting her go. I couldn’t stop. Probability, algebra, trigonometry and calculus – the passion held back in all those classes came blazing out.

‘It’s fine, it’s fine,’ she kept reassuring me and kissing me.

We broke away from each other because even passionate people need oxygen.

She looked at me with a big grin.

I packed my pens and books. No maths tonight.

‘Why aren’t you making eye contact?’ She remarked, mischief in her voice. I kept silent.

‘You are older than me and a hundred times better than me in maths. But, in some ways, I am way more mature than you.’ ‘Oh, yeah?’ I challenged weakly, collecting the textbooks. She pulled my chin up.

‘I am turning eighteen. I can do whatever I want,’ she said. The loudspeaker of a campaign auto continued in the background. ‘I can vote in that election,’ she continued, ‘I can have a bank account, I can marry, I can…’

‘Study. You can also try to get into a good college,’ I interrupted her.

She laughed. We stood up and walked over to the watertank on the terrace. We leaned against the tank and saw the sunset. We talked about everything other than maths. I told her about the academy, the dinner with Fred, the blue Australian sky and the loamy water on Bondi beach.

She listened in excitement. She said she wished she could have a home on the beach and how she would colour the walls inside pink and yellow. It is amazing how specific girls can get about hypothetical scenarios. ‘Want coffee?’ she said.

‘You’ll have to go down?’ I said as I held her hand on instinct. A voice in me still protested, but now that voice had no volume.

‘No, I have a secret stash under the water tank. Come,’ she said and pulled at my hand.

The five feet cubical cement water tank was raised from the ground on reinforced concrete pillars. Between the tank and the ground, there was a gap of four feet We could sit on the ground under the tank.

‘This is my favourite place since I was a kid,’ she said. I bent on my knees and’ slid inside, following her. She pulled out a picnic basket. It had a thermos flask, red plastic cups and Marie biscuits.

‘Welcome to Vidya’s rooftop cafe” sir,’ she said and passed me a cup.

I looked at her. She is too beautiful to study maths. Maths is for losers like me.

I took a sip. My lips still felt the sensation of her lips. I rested on my elbow but the concrete surface hurt.

‘I’ll get cushions next time,’ she said. ‘It’s fine,’ I said.

We finished our coffee and came out. We switched on the terrace bulb. I flipped through the textbook to forget the kisses and coffee. The symbols of integration looked dull for the first time in my life. At one level, maths does suck.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘For what?’ she said.

‘For the coffee and the … you know.’

She leaned forward and kissed my cheek. ‘Thanks for the gift, the gift of true close friendship.’

True-close-friendship, another hyphenated tag. It meant progress.

I came down the steps passed through the living room on the way out.

‘What a good, responsible boy. Ish hasn’t learnt anything from him,’ Vidya’s father was saying to his wife as I shut the door behind.

★

I could have done my accounts much faster if I didn’t have the parallel SMS

conversation. My phone beeped a fifth time.

‘Who the hell are you SMSing?’ Omi asked from the counter.

It was six in the evening, almost time to shut the shop. Ish had gone to one of the KVs and Omi had to leave soon for the evening aarti. Two dozen invoices, notebooks, pens and a calculator surrounded me.

‘Nothing, I am bargaining with a supplier,’ I said. I turned the phone to silent mode.

‘Call him,’ Omi said.

‘I’ll look desperate. I’d rather he calls first.’

‘Do the accounts first, Govind. So many unpaid orders, it is a complete mess,’ Omi said, popping a candy from the jar into his mouth. I let it pass. Anything to get his mind off the SMSs.

My phone flashed again.

itz my bday.

i celebr8 my way.

u’ll get cake or not??

I had saved Vidya’s number as ‘Supplier Vidyanath’ in my phone, in case anyone picked it up. Also, I deleted her messages as soon as I read them.

‘I hope you are staying away from Ish’s sister?’ Omi said. My hands froze as I manipulated the messages. I told myself, It is a coincidence. Omi doesn’t know who I am messaging to. Be cool.

I replied to the SMS.

Ok, u win. will get a small 1

now let me work, you study 2 

I kept the phone aside. Smiley faces had entered my life.

‘I teach her, Omi. Just a few months for her entrance exams,’ I said. I dug myself deep into the paperwork.

‘Does she…,’ Omi began.

‘Can I do the accounts or should we gossip about my students?’ I glared at Omi.

Mama came running to our shop. ‘Switch on the TV fast.’

‘Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center Twin Towers located in New York,’ the BBC news channel reader said. The live visual was incredible even by sci-fi movie standards. The hundred-storey tall twin towers had deep incisions in the middle, like someone had cut through loaves of bread.

‘Two planes in a row suggest a planned .terrorist attack,’ a military intelligence expert said on the TV. ‘The world will never be the same again,’ the Israeli prime minister said.

We half-closed the shutters. Everyone in the temple gathered around TV sets where the towers crumbled down again and again in replay. Smoke, soot and concrete dust filled the streets of New York. Reports said thousands may be dead.

‘What the…,’ Ish said as he returned to the shop.

‘Muslim terrorists, I guarantee you,’ Mama said as his phone rang. He saw the number and stood in attention.

‘Parekh-ji?’ Mama said, his voice subservient. I couldn’t hear Parekh-ji’s words.

‘I am watching it,’ Mama said,’They are turning into a menace Yes, yes sir we are ready for the elections Parekh-ji, yes,’ Mama said, wiping sweat off his chest, ‘Belrampur is not a problem … yes, other neighbourhoods need work but you know Hasmukh-ji. He doesn’t spend as much time…’

Bittoo Mama stepped away from us. Parekh-ji gave him tips on the elections next week.

Later at night, pictures of the first suspects were released. Four Muslim boys had joined a flying school a few months back. They had hijacked the plane using office box cutter knives and caused one of the most spectacular man-made disasters of the world. A stick-thin old man called Bin Laden released an amateur video, claiming it was all his big idea.

‘What’s up?’ Omi asked Mama as he ended his call.

‘Hasmukh-ji takes everything for granted. He doesn’t pound the streets of his constituency.’

‘Parekh-ji is not happy?’ Omi said.

‘He is fine with me. He isn’t too worried. The bye-election is only for two seats in Gujarat The real elections are next year.’

‘Mama, so next year,’ Omi said and patted Mama’s back, ‘we will have an MLA in the family.’

The temple bells rang to signify time for the final aarti. Omi and Mama stood up to leave.

‘I have to show Parekh-ji I deserve it. Winning this seat will help,’ Mama said. ‘You need any more help?’ Omi asked. ‘You already did so much,’ Mama said

and kissed Omi, ‘but we must put extra effort next week. Parekh-ji said these attacks could work in our favour, Let’s tell everyone at the puja.’ They left the shop and went inside the temple.

‘Your phone flashed. Is it on silent?’ Ish said. He collected all the invoices scattered on the ground. We were closing the shop for the night.

‘Oh, must be by mistake,’ I said and picked it up, ‘a supplier is sending me messages’.

I opened supplier Vidyanath’s message.

when I study, I think kisses u and only u, v misses

I put the phone in my pocket

‘What? Trying to sell you something?’ Ish said.

‘Yes, wooing me, hard,’ I said as I locked the cashbox.



I knew it, that old man wouldn’t listen,’ Mama said.

His mood alternated between anger and tears. It was hard for a tough, grown- up man like him to cry. However, it was even harder to work for months and lose an election. We stood outside the counting booths. Electoral officers were still tallying the last few votes, though the secular party had already started rolling drumbeats outside.

‘Look at the Belrampur votes,’ Mama pointed to the ballot boxes. ‘Clean sweep for the Hindu party. That’s my area. The two other neighbourhoods given to me, we won majority votes there, too.’

His group of a dozen twenty-something supporters held their heads down.

‘And look what happened in the other neighbourhoods. That Muslim professor has nothing to do all day. He even met the old ladies. But Hasmukh-ji? Huh, chip on shoulder about being upper caste. Cannot walk the lanes and feels he can win elections by waving from the car. And look, he ran away two hours into the counting.’

Mama wiped his face with his hands and continued. ‘Am I not from a priest’s family? Did 1 not go to the sewer-infested lanes of the Muslim pols? Aren’t there Hindu voters there? Why didn’t he go?’

The secular party workers jeered at Mama’s team. Tempers rose as a few of Mama’s team members heckled the drum player.

‘It’s going to get ugly,’ I told Omi in his ear, ‘let’s get out of here.’ ‘I can’t go. Mama needs me,’ Omi said.

A white Mercedes drove up in-front of the vote-counting station. A jeep of bodyguards came alongside. The guards surrounded the area as the Mercedes’ door opened. Parekh-ji stepped outside.

Mama ran to Parekh-ji. He lay down on the ground and ‘I am your guilty man.

Punish me,’ Mama said, his voice heavy.

Parekh-ji placed both his hands on Mama’s head. ‘Get up, Bittoo.’

‘No, no. I want to die here. I let the greatest man down,’ Mama continued to bawl.

Parekh-ji gave the youngsters a firm glance. Everyone backed off. Parekh-ji lifted Mama up by the shoulders, ‘Come, let’s go for dinner to Vishala. We need to talk.’

Mama walked towards Parekh-ji’s ear, his head still down.

‘Come son,’ Parekh-ji said to Omi. Ish and I looked at each other. Maybe it was time for Ish and me to vanish.

‘Can Ish and Govind come along? They came to Gandhinagar,’ Omi said. I guess he wanted us to have a treat at Vishala, normally unaffordable for us.

Parekh-ji looked at us and tried to place us. I don’t know if he could. ‘Hop into the jeep,’ he said.

The Vishala Village Restaurant and Utensils Museum is located at the outskirts of Ahmedabad, in the village of Sarkhej. Along with a craft museum and village courtyards, there is an ethnic restaurant that serves authentic Gujarati cuisine.

We took a semi-private room with seating on the clay floor. Parekh-ji’s security staff sat outside, near the puppet show for kids. Their guns made the guest’s importance known to the waiters and insured us good service. Within minutes, we had two dozen dishes in front of us.

‘Eat, and don’t get so sentimental about politics. Emotional speeches are fine, but in your mind always think straight,’ Parekh-ji lectured Mama.

We gorged on the dhokla, khandvi, ghugra, gota, dalwada and several other Gujarati snacks. I felt full even before the main course arrived.

‘Now, listen, Parekh-ji said as he finished his glass of mint chaas, ‘things are not as they seem. Hasmukh-ji’s defeat has a back story. We expected it.’

‘What?’ Mama said while Omi, Ish and I made valiant inroads into the food. ‘Hasmukh-ji’s seniority in the party earned him a ticket. But he is part of the

old school. The same school as the current chief minister. Our high command in Delhi is not happy with them.’

‘They are not?’ Mama echoed stupidly.

‘No. We might be a Hindu party, but it doesn’t mean we preach religion all day and do no work. Gujarat is a place of business, it is not a lazy place. The high command did not like the way the administration handled the earthquake. People lost a lot in that, I know you boys did too,’ he turned to us.

We nodded. The mention of the earthquake still hurt.

‘The by-elections for these seats came as a boon. The old school put their candidate. We knew they were weak. Of count, hardworking people like Bittoo tried their best But, a dud candidate is a dud candidate. So we lost both the seats. With the main election in twelve months, the entire party machinery is shaken up. And the high command finally gets a chance to make a change.’

‘What change?’ Mama said.

“They are replacing the chief minister.’

‘What? For losing two seats?’ Mama said, ‘the total number of seats is…’

‘A hundred and eighty plus,’ Parekh-ji said as he broke his bajra rati, ‘but like I said, it gave a reason to change. And Gujarat is vital to our party. We can’t afford to lose it.’

We gorged on the dhokla, khandvi, ghugra, gota, dalwada and several other Gujarati snacks. I felt full even before the main course arrived.

‘Now, listen,1 Parekh-ji said as he finished his glass of mint chaas, ‘things are not as they seem. Hasmukh-ji’s defeat has a back story. We expected it.’

‘What?’ Mama said while Omi, Ish and I made valiant inroads into the food. ‘Hasmukh-ji’s seniority in the party earned him a ticket. But he is part of the

old school. The same school as the current chief minister. Our high command in Delhi is not happy with them.’

‘They are not?’ Mama echoed stupidly.

‘No. We might be a Hindu party, but it doesn’t mean we preach religion all day and do no work. Gujarat is a place of business, it is not a lazy place. The high command did not like the way the administration handled the earthquake. People lost a lot in that, I know you boys did too,’ he turned to us.

We nodded. The mention of the earthquake still hurt.

‘The by-elections for these seats came as a boon. The old school put their candidate. We knew they were weak. Of count, hardworking people like Bittoo tried their best But, a dud candidate is a dud candidate. So we lost both the

seats. With the main election in twelve months, the entire party machinery is shaken up. And the high command finally gets a chance to make a change.’

‘What change?’ Mama said.

“They are replacing the chief minister.’

‘What? For losing two seats?’ Mama said, ‘the total number of seats is…’

‘A hundred and eighty plus,’ Parekh-ji said as he broke his bajra rati, ‘but like I said, it gave a reason to change. And Gujarat is vital to our party. We can’t afford to lose it.’

‘No dessert here or what?’ Parekh-ji said as there was a delay after the main courses were cleared.

‘Who will get the aamras for the sahib?’ Mama screamed at the waiters.

Sixteen

Where’s your smallest chocolate cake?’ I was at Navrangpura’s Ten, the best cake shop in Ahmedabad. Vidya turned eighteen on 19 November 2001. She could now officially make her own decisions. Unofficially, she had done that since birth.

‘No bag please,’ I said as I kept the cake box in my rucksack of books. I kept the rucksack upright in my lap until I made it to Vidya’s place.

Entering Vidya’s house while hiding a cake was hard enough. Ish being in the house made it worse. India was playing England It Kolkata Eden Gardens in a day-night match. Ish had plonked himself in front of the sofa with sandwiches, milk, chips and biscuits – everything that he needed to survive for the next eight hours. Ish’s dad sat on the dining table, continuing his PhD on the newspapers of India. As was often the case when Ish was around, uncle had a disgusted expression on his face.

I snuck the rucksack between my arm and side body to keep it horizontal. ‘India’s batting – Ganguly and Tendulkar. Seventy no loss after ten overs,’ Ish

said and screamed, ‘Mom, sauce!’

Uncle picked up the ketchup bottle from the dining table and banged it as hard as possible on the coffee table in front of his son.

‘Thanks dad,’ Ish said. ‘Can you move. Can’t see the TV.’ Ish’s dad gave his son a dirty look and moved.

‘Sit no,’ Ish said to me.

‘Tuitions,’ I said, pointing to Vidya’s room.

‘Oh, you’ve come for that. She’s studying on her birthday, dedication dude.’ ‘Some people are serious about their lives…,’ Ish’s dad ranted while still

reading his paper.

Ish pressed the volume button on the TV remote as loud as possible in protest. ‘His mother has made him into a monster,’ Ish’s dad said and left for his

bedroom. Tendulkar struck a four and the monster clapped.

‘Don’t worry, dad’s fine,’ Ish said as he saw my nervous expression. ‘Hey, wish her and all. She’ll like it. I forgot this morning.’

Ish grabbed a sandwich and topped it with lots of chips and ketchup. He took a big bite. My friend had found bliss. I had to find mine.

I climbed the stairs, my heart beating fast. ‘Happy birthday, Miss Eighteen,’ I greeted as I shut the terrace door.

She wore a shiny red kurti and white pants. The choice of clothes was a bit over the top but it was ok on a birthday I guess.

‘Did you know eighteen is the only number that is twice the sum of its digits?’ she said.

I took out the cake and placed it on the white plastic table. ‘A cake from Ten! Someone is going high-class,’ she teased.

‘You like chocolate. They have the best.’ I opened the box. She stood up from her chair and came next to me to see the cake.

‘You’ve changed since we have had this thing.’ ‘What thing?’ I peeped into her big eyes.

‘This thing,’ she said and came forward to kiss me. We kissed during almost every class since the last month, so it wasn’t a big deal. Sometimes we kissed

everytime she solved a problem. At other times, we took a kissing break every fifteen minutes. Once, we didn’t kiss at all as she did a mock test. However, we made up for it in the next class where we spent the first ten minutes kissing and the rest discussing her mistakes. When we felt desire, we kissed. When we felt guilty, we studied. Somehow, we balanced mathematics and romance within the hour quite well.

We went to the edge of the terrace. The last bit of sunlight disappeared as the sky turned dark orange. The evening breeze held a chill. At a distance, we saw the dome of Omi’s temple.

She entwined her hands with mine and looked at me. ‘You tell me,’ she said as she removed a strand of hair from her face, ‘should I become a doctor?’

I shook my head.

‘Then how do I get out?’

‘Apply to whichever college and just go,’ I said.

‘How?’ she said as she tugged my hand. ‘How will I even get the application fee to apply? How will I support myself in Mumbai?’

‘Your parents will eventually come around. They will pay for your studies. Until then…’

A loud roar went through the pol and startled us. India had hit a six. ‘Until then what?’ she said after the noise subsided.

‘Until then I will support you,’ I said. We looked into each other’s eyes. She smiled. We took a walk around the perimeter of the terrace.

‘So my tutor doesn’t believe I need to figure out maths problems?’ ‘Figuring out the maths of life is more important,’ I said. ‘What’s that?’

‘Who you are, what do you want versus what people expect of you. And how to keep what you want without pissing off people too much. Life is an optimisation problem, with tons of variables and constraints.’

‘Is it possible to run away and not piss off my parents?’

‘You can minimise the pissed-off state, but can’t make it zero. We can only optimise life, never solve it,’ I said as we came to a corner.

‘Can I tell you something weird?’ ‘What?’

‘When you talk hardcore maths, like these terms that totally go over my head,’ she said, her hand in take-off motion above her head.

‘Yes.’

‘It turns me on.’

‘Vidya, your boldness…,’ I said, shocked. ‘Makes you blush, right?’ she said and laughed. ‘So we are cutting this cake or what?’ I said to change the topic.

‘Of course, follow me to Café Vidya,’ she said.

We slid under the water tank and sat on the floor. She had brought six pink cushions and a rug. ‘I brought them from my room, so we can have a little party here,’ she said and passed a couple to me. Under the cushions, she had a stereo.

‘Music?’ she said, her face pretty as a song. I nodded.

‘I’ll put on Boyzone, my favourite,’ she said. I took out the packet of eighteen candles that came with the cake.

‘Let’s light all of them,’ she said.

I wanted to go switch on the terrace light as it had become dark.

‘Let it be,’ she said and pulled my hand as she lit the eighteenth candle. ‘What if someone comes?’

‘Both my parents have bad knees. They never climb up to the terrace. And Ish, well there is a match on.’

We heard two consecutive roars in the pol. The Indian innings had reached the slog overs.

She released my hand as I sat down again. She looked beautiful as the candlelight flickered on her face. A song called ‘No matter what’ started to play. Like with all romantic songs, the lyrics seemed tailor-made for us.

No matter what they tell us No matter what they do

No matter what they teach us

What we believe is true

The candle flames appeared to move to the rhythm of the music. She cut the cake with the plastic knife that came in the box. I wished her again and put a piece of cake in her mouth. She held it in her mouth and leaned towards me. She pushed me back on the cushions and brought her mouth close to mine for my share of the cake.

She kissed me like she never had before. It wasn’t like she did anything different, but there seemed to be more feeling behind it. Her hands came to my shoulders and under my shirt.

The music continued.

I can’t deny what I believe I can’t be what I’m not

I know this love’s forever That’s all that matters now

I don’t know if it was the candlelight or the birthday mood or the cushions or what. But it was then that I made the second mistake of my life.

I opened the top button of her kurti and slid my fingers inside. A voice inside stopped me, I took my hand out. But she continued to kiss me as she unbuttoned the rest of her top. She pulled my fingers towards her again.

‘Vidya…’ By this time my hand was in places impossible to withdraw from for any guy. So, I went with the flow, feelings, desire, nature or whatever else people called the stuff that evaporated human rationality.

She took off her kurti. ‘Remove your hand, they won’t run away.’ ‘Huh?’ I said.

‘How else do I remove this?’ she said, pointing to her bra. I moved my hands to her stomach as she took the bra off and lay on top of me.

‘Take it off,’ she said, tugging at my shirt. At this point, I could have jumped off the terrace if she asked me to. I followed her instruction instantly.

The music didn’t stop, and neither did we. We went further and further as the tiny cake candles burned out one by one. Sweat beads glistened on our bodies. Vidya didn’t say anything throughout, apart from one time in the middle.

‘Are you going to go down on me?’ she said, after she had done the same to me.

I went down, and came back up. We looked into each other’s eyes as we became one. The screams from the pols continued as England lost wickets.

Only four candles remained burning by the time we finished. We combined the six cushions to make one mattress and lay on it. Only after we were done did we realise how cold and chilly it really was. We covered ourselves in my jacket and dug our cold feet inside the lower cushions.

‘Wow, I am an adult and am no longer a virgin, so cool. Thank God,’ she said and giggled. She cuddled next to me. A sense of reality struck as the passion subsided. What have you done Mr Govind Patel?

‘See, I still have goosebumps,’ she said and lifted her arm. Little pink bumps dotted her flawless, fair skin.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, Govind, what are you doing right now? Touching her goosebumps? The voice in me grew stronger.

I am so glad this happened. Aren’t you?’ she said. I kept quiet.

‘Say something.’

‘I should get going.’ ‘Don’t you like it here?’

‘Here? You realise we are on top of your dad and mom and brother?’ ‘Stop freaking out,’ she said.

‘I am sorry. I am nervous,’ I said.

‘Don’t be,’ she said and hugged me. She felt my body shake. ‘You ok?’

I didn’t know why, but I had tears in my eyes. Maybe I felt scared. Maybe because no one had held me like that ever and asked if I was ok. Maybe because I never knew it would be possible for me to feel like this. Maybe because I had betrayed my best friend. I normally never cried, but with so many reasons at the same time, it was impossible not to.

‘Hey, I’m the girl. Let me do this part,’ she said. I looked into her moist eyes.

I sat up and dressed. We came outside as the moon lit up the terrace. I checked my watch. I had overshot the class time by thirty minutes.

‘I love you,’ she said from behind as I opened the terrace door. ‘Happy birthday,’ I said and left.

‘Hey, you missed the best part. We will win this. Stay on,’ Ish said as I reached downstairs.

‘No, I’m quite tired. I’ll watch it at home,’ I said as I reached the main door.

‘Eat dinner, son,’ Ish’s mother said as she set the table. ‘I’ve made special dishes for Vidya’s birthday.

‘No aunty, my mummy has cooked at home as well,’ I said. I had already celebrated her daughter’s birthday.

‘Such a good boy,’ she said fondly as I left the house.

Seventeen

Hold it tight, it is shaking,’ Omi said. He stood on his toes on a stool to reach the ceiling. We wanted to drop the tricolour ribbons from the ceiling fan. I held the legs of the stool, Ish stood next to us with glue and cellotape.

‘I’ll fall,’ Omi warned, dangling his right foot off the stool. ‘It’s not my fault. The stool has creaky legs,’ I said.

I never wanted to celebrate Republic Day, which came in a week. However, we did want to celebrate our resurrection after the earthquake a year ago. Though thoughts about that day still made me tremble, I was relieved to have fully paid off our loans. Our business had tripled from a year ago and it all happened from this shop.

‘January 26 preparations? Keep it up,’ Mama’s entry distracted us all. Omi toppled from the stool and landed on the floor. The ribbons fell on his head.

‘You let go!’ he accused me as everyone laughed.

Mama placed a brown bag of samosas and some yellow pamphlets on the table.

We grabbed a samosa each.

‘What exactly are you counting?’ I asked idly. ‘The number of times we have made love,’ she replied. ‘Wow, our score is eight already.’ ‘You keep track?’ I said. ‘I keep track of a lot of things.’ ‘Like what?’

‘Like today is 21 Feb, only five days to my period. Hence, it is a safe day.’

‘It’s safe anyway. I used a condom,’ I said as I shifted my cushion for comfort. ‘Oh? So now you trust physics over mathematics?’ she said and giggled. She

flipped over to rest on her elbows and poked her toes into my shins. ‘Are you still embarrassed to buy condoms?’

‘I get them from an unknown chemist in Satellite. And I have enough now for a while.’

‘Oh really,’ she climbed over me. ‘So no problem in using a couple more then?’ With that, our score reached nine.

‘Goodnight aunty,’ I said to Vidya’s mom. I always hated that part, the point when aunty offered me something to eat or asked me why I worked so hard.

I walked back home with my thoughts. Nine times in two months. We made love on an average of once a week. Nine times meant I had lost all benefit of doubt. I couldn’t say that I had made love to her by accident, in an impulsive moment. You don’t do things by accident nine times. Though sometimes, another kind

of accident can happen. And I found out exactly five days later.

★

‘There is something you should know,’ she said.

We had come to the Ahmedabad Textile Industries Research Association’s (ATIRA) campus lawns. She had SMSed me that we needed to go for an ‘urgent walk’, whatever that meant. We had said at home that we had to go and buy a really good maths guide. No one questioned us after that. The ATIRA lawns in Vastrapur swell with strollers in the evening. Several couples held hands. I wanted to but did not. We fixed our gaze on the ground and did a slow walk. Fat aunties wearing sarees and sneakers and with a firm resolve to lose weight overtook us.

‘What’s up?’ I said and bought a packet of groundnuts. ‘Something is late,’ she said.

I tried to think of what she was referring to. I couldn’t. ‘What?’ I said.

‘My period,’ she said.

Men cannot respond when the P-word is being talked about. For the most part, it freaks them out.

‘Really? How?’ I said, struggling for words.

‘What do you mean how? It should have happened yesterday, the 25th, but hasn’t.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Excuse me? I wouldn’t know if it has happened?’ she said and stopped to look at me.

‘No, I meant are you sure it was due on 25th Feb?’ ‘I am not that bad at maths.’

‘Ok but…,’ I said. I had created the problem. I had nothing of value to offer in the discussion. I offered her groundnuts. She declined.

‘But what?’ she said.

‘But we used protection. And how does it work with girls? Are they always on time?’ I asked. Nothing in the world was always exactly on time.

‘Mine are. Normally I don’t care. But now that I am with you, even a slight delay scares me. And the anxiety creates more delay’

‘Do you want to see a doctor?’ I was desperate to suggest a solution. ‘And say what? Please check if I am pregnant?’

Another P-word to freak men out. No, she did not say that ‘You can’t be pregnant?’ I said.

Sweat erupted on my forehead like I had jogged thrice around the ATIRA lawns.

I rubbed my hands and took deep breaths.

‘Why not?’ she retorted, her face tense. ‘And can you be supportive and not hyperventilate.’

‘Let’s sit down,’ I said and pointed to a bench. I threw the packet of groundnuts in the dustbin. She sat next to me. I debated whether I should put my arm around her. My being close to he had caused this anyway. She kept quiet. Two tears came rolling out of her eyes. God, I had to figure out something. My mind processed the alternatives at lightning speed, (a) Make her laugh – bad idea,{b) Step away and let her be – no, (c) Suggest potential solutions like the A word – hell no, (d) Hold her – maybe, ok hold her, hold her and tell her you will be there for her. Do it, moron.

I slid closer to her on the bench and embraced her. She hid her face on my shoulder and cried. Her hands clutched my shirt

‘Don’t worry, I will be there for you,’ I said.

‘Why, why is it so unfair? Why do only I have to deal with this?’ she cried, ‘why can’t you get pregnant at the same time?’

Because I am biologically male, I wanted to say. But I think she knew that. ‘Listen Vidya, we used the rhythm method, we used protection I know it is not

hundred per cent but the probability is so low…’

Vidya just shook her head and cried. Maths is always horrible at reassuring people. Nobody believed in probability in emotional moments.

A family walked by. The man carried a fat boy on his shoulders. I found it symbolic of the potential burden in my life. The thought train started again. I am twenty-two years old. I have big dreams for my business. I have my mother to

support. Come to think of it, I have to take care of my friends’ careers too. And Vidya? She is only eighteen. She has to study more, be a PR person or whatever she wants to be. She couldn’t move from one prison to the next. Ok, worst case I have to mention the A-word.

She slid away from me. The crying had made her eyes wet and face pink. She looked even more beautiful. Why can’t men stop noticing beauty, ever? We stood up to walk back after a few minutes.

‘Let’s wait for a day or two more. We’ll see what we have to do then,’ I said as we reached the auto stand.

‘It’s probably a false alarm. I’m overreacting. I should have waited for a day or two longer before telling you,’ she said. She clasped my fingers in the auto. Her face vacillated from calm to worried.

We kept quiet in the auto for five minutes. Then I had to say it. ‘Vidya, in case, just in case it is not a false alarm. What are we going to do? Or should we talk about it later?’

‘You tell me, what do you want to do?’

When women ask you for your choice, they already have a choice in mind. And if you want to maintain sanity, you’d better choose the same.

I looked into her eyes to find out the answer she expected from me. I couldn’t find it.

‘I don’t know. This is too big a news for me. I can’t say what we will do.

Pregnancy, abortion, I don’t know how all this works.’ ‘You want me to get an abortion?’

‘No, no. I said I don’t know. What’s the other option, marriage?’ ‘Excuse me, I am eighteen. I just passed out of school,’ she said. ‘Then what?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t want to think. Please don’t talk about it,’ she said. We kept quiet for the rest of the auto journey.

‘Here, take this maths guide to show at home,’ I said and passed her a book when she reached home.

Vidya and I exchanged ten ‘are you asleep’ and ‘not yet’ messages that night.



‘What’s up?’ Ish said as I laid my head on the cashbox early morning. ‘Nothing. Couldn’t sleep well,’ I said.

‘Why? Thinking of Pandit-ji’s daughter,’ Ish laughed. I ignored him. Every few hours I had the urge to send Vidya a ‘did anything happen’ message. But she would tell me if something happened. I opened a calendar and tracked all the past dates of our intimacy. Apart from the first time several months ago, I had used protection every time. Could they be late for any other reason? I didn’t know and I could not ask anyone. Ish and Omi probably didn’t even know the P-word. And there was no other woman I knew apart from Vidya. And I couldn’t ask mom anyway. I picked up my phone again. ‘How is it going?’, I sent a neutral message. ‘Nothing yet’, she replied back.

The next night I did get some sleep. I sprang out of bed early morning to SMS her again. I had an SMS from her already, ‘a bit of pain, nothing else’.

I threw the phone away. I wanted to reach the shop early to take out supplies from the godown. Somehow, I hated being late anymore.

Eighteen

Are trains ever on time?’ Mama’s loud voice interrupted us while we were at work. Ish dragged out a heavy box of wickets from the godown.

‘Mama, you here so early?’ Omi said.

Mama kept two pink paper boxes on the wicket box. He had a tikka from the morning prayers on his forehead.

‘I had bought hot kachoris for my son and other sevaks. Their train was supposed to reach at 5 a.m. But it is five hours late. Now what to do? Thought I will have them with you,’ Mama said and took out a kachori.

‘So leftover breakfast for us?’ Omi said and laughed.

‘They are absolutely fresh. I’ll get more when they come. Eat them while they are still hot, come Ish, Govind,’ Mama said.

‘Didn’t know you boys come here so early,’ Mama said. The shop’s clock said eight o’ clock.

‘Had some work in the godown,’ I said and took a bite of a kachori. It tasted delicious.

We ordered tea and sat on the stools outside the shop.

Mama talked to Omi about their relatives. Ish and I discussed the delivery plan for the day. The shop didn’t open until nine. We could eat in peace.

‘Third round of tea? Ok? Yeah good,’ Mama said and called for the tea-boy again. I had two kachoris and felt full.

Mama stood up to leave at 9.30 a.m. I wrapped the boxes back for him. ‘Keep them,’ Mama said, ‘I’ll get more anyway.’

‘No Mama, we have had enough…’

Mama’s phone ring interrupted me. Mama picked up the phone. His face became serious. His mouth opened and his eyes darted around.

‘I don’t know the coach number, why are you asking me?’ Mama said. ‘What’s up Mama?’ Omi said.

Mama put his hand on the phone and turned to Omi.

‘It is a junior party official in Ayodhya. He put our sevak team in the train the day before. Now he wants the coach number. And he isn’t telling me why,’ Mama said.

‘Wait,’ Omi said and went inside the shop. He came out with a notebook.

‘Here, I had noted the PNR number and other details while making the booking,’ Omi said.

Mama took the notebook and spoke on the phone again.

‘Ok listen, they were in S6 … yeah, it says S6, hundred per cent S6, hello listen

… why are you praying while talking to me? Hey, hello…’

The person on the other end hung up the phone. Mama tried to call the number back but no one picked up. ‘What’s going on?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. I have to … I’ll go to the station,’ Mama said.

‘I’ll come with you?’ Omi said. ‘No, it’s fine. I had to go anyway. I’ll find out,’ Mama said and left.

Two hours later the whole country had found out.

‘Stop flipping channels,” I screamed at Omi, ‘they are all showing the same thing.’

We stopped at NDTV. The newsreader repeated the news for the tenth time.

‘At least fifty people died and more than a dozen injured when miscreants set fire to a bogie of the Sabarmati Express near the Godhra station in Gujarat on Wednesday morning.’ The channel dialled in a railway official from Godhra on the phone.

‘Can you tell us what exactly is going on sir?’ the newsreader said.

‘We are still getting reports. But at around 8.30 in the morning Sabarmati Express arrived at Godhra station,’ the official said as his voice waned.

‘Hello, can you hear us?’ the newsreader said several times. ‘Yes, I can now,’ the official said and continued his story.

From what the channels knew at that point, a mob stoned a bogie of the Sabarmati Express. The bogie contained kar sevaks returning from Ayodhya. The passengers shut the metal windows to protect themselves from the stones. The mob threw petrol on the bogie and set it on fire.

‘What mob is this? Does it look premeditated?’ the newsreader asked.

The railway official avoided controversy. ‘The police has arrived and are investigating the matter. Only they can comment on this.’

Ish, Omi and I watched TV non-stop. We cancelled all deliveries for the day. ‘Mama’s not picking up, I’ve tried ten times,’ Omi said and threw his phone

aside.

TV channels had reached Godhra station. We saw the burnt bogie. The rest of the train had already left for Ahmedabad. A tea vendor revealed more than the railway official.

‘The mob had Muslims. They had an argument with the Hindu kar sevaks and burnt everyone – women, children,’ the tea vendor said.

‘We have fifty-eight people dead and over twenty injured, as per reports from the Godhra hospital,’ the newsreader said, ‘and we have just received confirmation that the burnt bogie was S6.’

‘Did she say S6?’ Omi said, turning to me.

I kept quiet. I didn’t want to confirm the bad news.

‘Did she? My brother is in that bogie.’ Omi said and ran out.

We came out of the shop. Every shopkeeper had a tense expression.

‘They burn little kids, see what kind of a community is this,’ a florist said to his neighbouring mithai shop owner.

‘Early morning in a railway station. Look at their guts,’ another shopkeeper said.

‘They struck America in broad daylight too. Now the fuckers have reached Gujarat. And Delhi will suck their dicks,’ the florist said. One rarely heard curse words in the temple, but today was different. Of all the days in my life, today was different.

Omi came out of the temple with his father, mother and Mama’s wife. All shopkeepers, Ish and I gathered around them.

‘Get my Dhiraj. I say get my Dhiraj,’ Mama’s wife’s wails echoed against the temple walls.

‘I’ll go to the station and find out,’ Omi said. He tried Mama’s phone again, but it did not connect.

‘Don’t go, the city is not safe,’ the florist said. Omi’s mother clutched Omi’s hand.

‘There could be a curfew soon. Let’s shut shops and go home,’ a florist said.

The shopkeepers dispersed. Dhiraj’s mother’s tears didn’t stop.

‘Don’t worry, Mama will call back. The news is sketchy. We don’t know what happened,’ I said.

‘Come home son,’ Omi’s father said to Omi. ‘I’ll help them shut the shop,’ Omi said.

We went back to the shop. We had to customers that morning, and didn’t expect any more.

‘Do you have gloves Ish bhaiya? Mine are worn out,’ Ali’s voice startled us. We had packed the shop by one o’clock.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Ish said.

Ali was taken aback. He wore a yellow T-shirt and an old pair of jeans. Luckily, he wasn’t wearing his skull cap.

‘I am getting ready for practice. We have one at 4.30 today no?’

‘You haven’t seen the news?’ I said. ‘We don’t have TV,’ he said. ‘And your abba?’

‘He took ammi to her parents in Surat. He will come at six.’ ‘And you didn’t go?’ Ish said.

‘How could I? We had practice. Don’t want to do hundred push-ups for missing practice,’ Ali said and laughed, ‘hey why are you shutting down the shop? My gloves…’

‘Nothing, you come with us. Don’t be alone at home,’ Ish said as he downed the shutters.

‘Us?’ Omi said in a firm voice.

‘You go Omi, your parents and aunt need you,’ Ish said. ‘And you?’ Omi said. ‘Am taking Ali home. I’ll drop him off when his parents come back.’

Omi looked at me to say something. I shrugged my shoulders.

‘You want to come to my place?’ Ish said to me. We walked out of the temple compound.

I wanted to see Vidya. But it wasn’t the best time, and Vidya would not be in the best mood anyway. I wondered if I should SMS her again.

‘No, my mother would be worried too,’ I said. She’d probably he in the kitchen, preparing dough for the evening dhokla.

I reached home. Over lunch, I told my mother what had happened at Godhra. My mother made me swear that I’d never fall in love with a Muslim girl. I felt tired after the two sleepless nights and the events on the TV, and took an afternoon nap. Omi’s phone call woke me up.

‘Hey what’s up Omi? Got in touch with Mama?’ I said and rubbed my eyes. The phone’s clock showed it was 5.30 p.m.

‘I lost my brother Govind. He died on the spot,’ Omi said and his voice broke.

He started crying. I lifted myself off the bed and stood up. ‘Mama called. He is devastated,’ Omi said.

‘Is he at home?’ I said.

‘No, he went to the party office. All the workers are with him to support him. He told me not to tell his wife or anyone else. Like they haven’t guessed.’

‘It’s horrible. Omi, it’s horrible,’ I said. I shuddered to think we almost took that trip.

‘I can’t keep silent at home and not show it. I have to get out,’ Omi said. ‘Then come home,’ I said. ‘Where is Ish?’ Omi said.

‘I don’t know, can you stay on the line?’ I said. I put Omi’s line on hold and called Ish. He picked up after ten rings. ‘Ish, where are you? Why do you take so long to pick up?’ ‘I am at the bank. I came with Ali to practice.’ ‘Is this the time to practice?’

‘What? I became sick of staying at home all day. And dad gave me dirty looks because Ali was with me. So I said, screw it, let’s hit some balls.’

‘Ish, horrible news. Dhiraj is…,’ I said and stopped mid-sentence. ‘Oh no,’ he said, ‘really?’

‘Yeah, Omi told me. Mama told him to keep quiet at home. He wants to get out.’ ‘Come over here then,’ Ish said.

‘Ok,’ I said. I hung up on Ish and switched to the other line. ‘Come to the bank.

Leave now before it gets dark,’ I said to Omi.

‘Mom, don’t cook for me. We’ll make something at the bank,’ I said as I left the house.



‘Trouble has started in the city. I heard a mob burnt two buses down in Jamalpur,’ Omi said.

We came to the tuition area of the backyard to have our dinner. Omi had cooked potato curry and rice.

‘Rumour or true?’ I said.

‘True, a local TV channel showed it as I left,’ Omi said, It’s strange at home.

Mami is still praying for Dhiraj’s safety.’

Omi’s body shook. He broke into tears. I held his hand as he hugged me.

Ali looked at us. I smiled back at him. I went to the room where we kept books and brought back three Phantom comics. I gave them to Ali as he happily read them with his meal.

We sat away from Ali so he could not hear us.

‘The mob that burnt the Jamalpur bus, Hindu or Muslim?’ 1 said. ‘I don’t know, I’m really scared,’ Omi said.

We finished dinner and cleaned the kitchen by eight. We were planning to leave when Ish’s phone rang. It was his dad. Ish hesitated to pick it up and did so only after half a minute.

I had dinner. I’ll be back in half an hour…,’ Ish said, ‘what?’

We turned to look at Ish. I could only hear his side of the conversation.

‘Ok … Ok … listen, I am at the bank. We are safe here. Yes, I promise we won’t walk out on the streets … yes we have bedding here. Don’t panic.’

I gave Ish a puzzled look.

‘A building in our pol caught fire,’ Ish said. ‘Wow, which one?’ I said.

‘The Muslim one at the corner,’ Ish said. ‘It caught fire? By itself?’ I said.

‘That is what dad is hoping. But it could be a Hindu mob. Dad said stay wherever you are.’

‘Our moms will worry. Govind’s would too,’ Omi said.

‘Call them,’ Ish said, I can’t take Ali to his home too. His parents don’t even have a phone,’ Ish said.

I called my mother and told her I would be safe at the bank. We had slept over at the bank several times in the past. Many booze parties had ended with us passing out on the mattresses in the branch manager’s room on the first floor.

We sat on couches in the cashier waiting area and played cards after dinner. Ali slept soon. Ish brought a quilt from the manager’s office and tucked him in on a separate sofa.

Omi dropped three cards. ‘Three aces,’ Omi said with an extra-straight face. He sucks at bluff.

I tapped the cards. I wondered whether to turn them. Loud chants disrupted my thought.

‘What’s that?’ I said. I saw the time – 10 p.m. ‘Those are Hindu chants,’ Omi said. ‘Angry-Hindu chants,’ Ish said. Calls to Shiva and Rama combined with drumbeats. We climbed the stairs two floors to reach the bank’s roof. The city glowed orange in the thick winter night. One, two, three -I saw three balls of flame across the pols. The nearest flame came from a building fifty yards away. A crowd of people stood outside. They threw stones on the burning building. I couldn’t see well, but could hear the screams of the people inside the pol. The screams mixed with celebratory chants. You may have heard about riots several times or even seen them on TV. But to witness them in front of your eyes stuns your senses. My neighbourhood resembled a calamity movie film set. A burning man ran across the road. The Hindu mob chased him. He stumbled on a stone and fell, around twenty yards away from us. The mob crowded over him. Two minutes later, the crowd moved away while the man lay still. I had witnessed someone’s death for the first time in my life. My hands, face, neck, legs – everything turned cold. My heart beat in the same irregular way as it did on the day of the earthquake. Nature caused that disaster, man made this one. I don’t know which is more dangerous.

‘Come inside,’ Ish tugged hard at my sleeve. We went downstairs. My body shivered.

‘It‘s fine. Let’s go to sleep. The police will come soon. By morning it will be ok,’ Ish said as he put his arm around me.

‘Can we sleep together?’ I said. Yes, I admit it, I felt super scared.

Ish nodded. He picked up Ali from the couch. We went to the branch manager’s room on the first floor and shut the door. I checked my phone before going to bed. Vidya had given me a missed call. I was in no state of mind to call or SMS back. Ish lay next to me anyway. I kept the phone in my pocket.

I took three quilts and slept in the middle next to Ali. Omi and Ish surrounded us. We switched off the lights at 10.30 p.m.

At 11.30 p.m. I woke up again. We heard a shattering noise. Someone shook the main gate of the bank.

‘Who is it,’ I said. Ish stood up and wore his shirt.

‘Let’s find out,’ Ish said and shook Omi’s leg, ‘come Omi.’

We went downstairs. I switched on the main lobby lights. Ish looked through the keyhole.

‘It’s the mob,’ Ish said, one eye still on the keyhole, ‘Mama is leading the pack.’ We looked at each other. Ish turned the door knob and opened the door.

Nineteen

‘My sons,’ Mama screamed.

We unlocked the bank’s main gate and opened it slightly. Mama opened his arms. He held a fire-torch in one hand and a trishul in the other. I expected him to cry when he saw Omi, but he didn’t. He came close to us for a hug. He took the three of us in his arms. ‘My son, the bastards killed my son,’ Mama said as he wouldn’t let go of us.

I looked into his cold eyes. He didn’t look like a father who had just lost his son. Alcohol and marijuana smells reeked from his mouth. Mama appeared more stoned than grieved.

‘My brother, Mama,’ Omi said and held back his tears.

‘Don’t cry. Nobody will cry today,’ Mama screamed and released us. He turned to address the mob, ‘we Hindus have only cried. While these mother fuckers come and keep killing us over the centuries. In a Hindu country, in a Hindu state, the fuckers can come and burn our kids in broad daylight. And we don’t do anything. We just cry. Come rape us, loot us and burn us. They think they can terrorise the whole fucking world but we will have no guts to do anything.’ ‘Kill them,’ the mob replied. The shaky body movements of the mob showed their intoxication. By blood or alcohol, I could not tell.

‘But the bastards made a big mistake. They tried to rape Gujarat today. Mother fuckers thought these vegetarian people, what will they do? Come let’s show them what we can do?’

Mama paused to take a sip from his hip flask. We stepped back towards the bank.

‘I hope they won’t expect us to join. I won’t,’ I whispered in Ish’s ear.

‘Nor am I, and let’s take Omi inside too,’ Ish said. We told Omi to hide behind us. In a delicate movement, Ish shut the bank gate again and locked it.

‘What are you whispering?’ Mama said and almost lost his balance. His fire torch fell on the floor. The mob cleared around it. He lifted the torch back.

‘Where is my other son? Open this gate,’ Mama said as he couldn’t see Omi. ‘What do you want Mama? Can we talk tomorrow?’ I said.

‘No tomorrow, I want something today.’

‘Mama, you know Omi needs to get home…,’ I said. Mama brushed me away.

I don’t want Omi. I don’t want any of you. I have many people to help me kill the bastards.’

Ish came next to me. He held my hand tight. ‘So leave us Mama,’ Ish said.

‘I want the boy. I want that Muslim boy,’ Mama said. ‘What?’ Ish said.

‘Eye for an eye. I’ll slaughter him right here. Then I will cry for my son. Get the fucking boy,’ Mama said and thumped Ish’s chest. Ish struggled to stand straight.

The blow torches lit up the dried grass on the entrance of the bank. A thick lock kept the gate shut and the mob outside.

‘Mama, you are drunk. There is nobody here,’ Omi said.

‘You lose a son first. Then I will tell you about being drunk,’ Mama said, ‘and I know he is here because he is not at his home.’

‘Mama, your dispute is with his father,’ I said.

‘I’ve taken care of his father,’ Mama said, ‘and his whore stepmother. I killed them with this.’ Mama lifted his trishul to show us. The tips had blood on them.

I looked at Ish and Omi. We made an instant decision. We ran inside the bank.

I shut the main entrance door and bolted it.

I sucked in long, deep breaths.

‘Relax, relax … we have to think,’ Ish said.

‘I will join them and take them away,’ Omi said. ‘No, it won’t work,’ Ish said.

‘They killed his parents?’ I said and continued to breathe fast.

The mob banged against the gate. They didn’t like our vanishing manoeuvre. I wondered how long the lock would hold.

I sat down on the couch. I had to think despite the deafening gate noise. ‘What are our options,’ I said.

‘We can try to negotiate with them,’ I said. Nobody responded.

‘They have madness in their eyes, they won’t talk,’ Omi said. ‘We could try and escape. Or fight them,’ Ish said.

‘You want to fight forty people who are under a spell to murder?’ I said. ‘Then what?’ Ish said.

I looked at Ish. For the first time in my life, I had seen him scared. I kept looking at him hoping he would consider all options. Even the worst one.

‘Don’t even think about giving up Ali,’ Ish said to me as his pointed finger poked my chest.

‘What else can we offer them?’ I said.

‘Money?’ Ish said as his body shivered, ‘you say people always talk if there is money involved.’

‘We don’t have that much money,’ I said.

‘But we will make it and give it to them,’ Ish said. ‘For Mama it is not about the money,’ Omi said.

‘That is true,’ Ish said, ‘but if we buy the rest of them, Mama won’t be able to do it alone. We need to scatter the crowd.’

I paced around the room. We didn’t have money. Yes, the rioters would be poor people in the neighbourhood with nothing to lose. But still, how and who would do the talking?

‘You are the best at money talk,’ Ish said.

‘It could backfire. How do I separate Mama from them?’ I said. ‘I’ll do that,’ Omi said.

We opened the main door again. The crowd stopped banging their trishuls at the front gate lock.

‘C’mon son, open the gate. You boys can leave, we will do the rest,’ Mama said. ‘Mama, I want to talk to you. Just you,’ Omi said in a sympathetic voice. ‘Sure, open the gate son,’ Mama said.

I went forward and opened the gate. I raised my hand to calm the crowd. I had to appear confident.

‘Move back. Mama wants to talk to his other son,’ I said.

Omi took Mama to the side and hugged him. Mama consoled him. I looked through the crowd to see any influential person. A man with a turban had six men behind him. He wore a gold chain.

‘Can I talk to you?’ I said.

The man came to me. He held a fire torch in his hand. My cheek felt the heat. ‘Sir, I want to offer you a proposal.’ ‘What?’

‘How many of these men are yours?’ ‘Ten,’ he said, after some hesitation. ‘If I promise you ten thousand, can you slowly step back and walk away?’ I said. ‘Why?’ he said.

‘Please, don’t ask. Consider it an offering. And keep it quiet as I don’t have enough for all.’

‘Why do you want to save the boy?’ he asked.

‘Fifteen thousand last. My shop is at the temple. You can ruin it if I don’t pay.’

The man in the gold chain went back to his group. He spoke to them as they stepped backwards. He turned to me and nodded. Twenty-five per cent of my problem was over.

Mama left Omi and came to me.

‘What’s going on here?’ Mama said. He did not notice forty people turning to thirty in his drunk state.

‘Mama think again. You have a future in the party. Parekh-ji will not approve of this,’ I said.

Mama laughed. He took out his mobile phone and dialled a number.

‘Parekh-ji won’t approve?’ Mama said and waited for the phone to be picked up. ‘Yes, Parekh-ji, I am well. Don’t worry, I will grieve later. Right now it is war time. Oh and someone thinks you are not happy with me … here talk … yes

talk…’

Mama passed his phone. The crowd waited behind us. ‘Hello? Who is this,’ Parekh-ji’s voice came at the other end.

‘Govind, Parekh-ji. One of Omi’s friends. We came to Vishala with you…,’ I said. ‘Oh yes. Son, trying day for us Hindus. So are you supporting us?’

“This is wrong, sir,’ I said, not sure why I called him sir, ‘this is wrong.’

‘What? The train burning, isn’t it?’ ‘Not that Parekh-ji, they want to kill a boy’ ‘So what can I do?’ he said. ‘Stop them.’

‘Our job is to listen to people and do what they tell us. Not the other way round.’

‘People don’t want this,’ I said.

‘They do. Trust me. Today, the cooker needs a whistle to release the pressure.” ‘But kids? Women?’ I said.

‘Doesn’t matter. Whatever it takes to quench the hurt feelings. People in pain want to feel better. Unfortunately, today I can’t think of a better way.’

‘This is a horrible way,’ I said.

‘This will last a day or two, but if we stifle it, it could explode into a huge civil war.’

‘Your party will be blamed for it,’ I said, trying to appeal to their self-interest. ‘By who? A few pseudos? Not the people of Gujarat. We are making people feel

better. They will elect us again and again. You wait and see.’

‘Sir, this boy. He could be in the national team someday.’ Mama snatched the phone from me.

‘Don’t worry Parekh-ji, I’ll take care of all this. You will be proud of me tomorrow,’ Mama said and hung up.

I looked around for another mini-leader in the pack. I walked up to him and took him aside.

‘Fifteen thousand, you take your people and walk away,’ I said. This time my lure did not entice.

‘Mama, he is trying to buy me,’ the mini-leader screamed at the top of his voice. ‘No, no you heard me wrong, what are you mad or something?’ I said and

moved back towards the bank.

‘What’s going on Omi? Get the boy here,’ Mama screamed.

Omi nodded to Mama. He went to the main door. The crowd remained at the gate and only the porch separated us. However, the gate did not have a lock anymore.

Omi knocked on the main entrance. Ish opened it after confirming the person.

Both of them disappeared inside.

I stood alone with the rioters. They suspected me of offering bribes. I wanted to run inside too. However, someone had to keep the crowd out.

‘Are they getting him?’ Mama asked me. ‘I think so,’ I said.

I offered to check inside as Mama asked twice. I went to the door and knocked.

Ish opened it for a nanosecond and I slipped inside.

I let out the loudest sigh ever. Ish bolted the door and blocked it with the sofa from the waiting lounge.

‘They are waiting. If one of us doesn’t show up in two minutes, they will attack,’ I said.

‘Ali woke up,’ Omi said. ‘Where is he?’ I said.

‘I locked him in the manager’s room. How many people?’ Ish said. ‘Thirty,’ I said. ‘Let’s fight,’ Ish said.

Twenty

Ish, I want to talk to you,’ I said. ‘We don’t have time,’ Ish said. ‘Omi!’ Mama’s scream came through the main door. ‘Coming Mama. Give us five minutes,’ Omi screamed back. ‘Get him fast,’ Mama said.

I made Ish sit on the sofa that blocked the main door. ‘Ish, can I offer a bit of logic in the current chaos,’ I said. ‘What? We have no time,’ Ish said.

‘I know. But I also know what will happen if we fight thirty people. We will all die. They will get Ali and kill him too,’ I said.

‘So what are you trying to say,’ Ish said and stood up.

‘Giving up three lives to possibly save one. Can you show me the maths in this?’

‘Fuck your maths. This isn’t about business.’

‘Then what is it about? Why should we all die? Only because you love the kid?’ ‘No,’ he said and turned his back to me.

‘Then what?’

‘Because he is a national treasure,’ Ish said.

‘Oh, and we are national filth? So maybe one day the kid will hit a few sixes and Indians will waste the day watching TV and get thrills out of it. So fucking what? What about my mother? What about Omi’s parents? What about…,’ I said and turned quiet. I almost said Vidya.

‘I’m not giving him up. You want to run away. Open the door and run. Omi, you are welcome to go too,’ Ish said.

‘I am not going. But how do we fight them Ish?’ Omi said.

Ish told us to follow him. He led us to the kitchen. He told us to lift a kerosene canister each. He also picked up three buckets that we used to chill beer. We fell in step behind him as we took the steps to the roof.

‘It’s heavy,’ I said.

‘Twenty litres each. That’s heavy for sure,’ Ish said as we reached the roof. Fires dotted the neighbourhood skyline. The weather didn’t feel as cold as a

February night should be.

‘We are coming!’ Mama said as his group pushed the rusted metal gate of the bank open. They came to the porch and banged on the main entrance door.

‘Stop shouting Mama,’ Ish said. Mama looked up to the roof.

‘Where are you hiding sister-fuckers,’ Mama said. The crowd hurled fire torches at us. We stood two stories high. Nothing reached us. One fire torch fell on a rioter and he yelped in pain. A mob maybe passionate, but it can also be quite stupid. They stopped throwing torches after that.

Ish kept Mama engaged.

‘Mama, I was born without fear. See,’ Ish said and climbed on the roof ledge. The crowd became distracted. If they weren’t, they’d attack the main door.

Despite three bolts and a sofa in front, they would break it in ten minutes flat. After that, they’d have to break the first floor entrance door and then the flimsy one at the roof. In fifteen minutes, we would be roasted in blowtorches. Ish’s plan better be good.

‘Say Jai Sri Ram,’ Ish shouted. It worked perfectly, the crowd had to participate. Most of the crowd did not know whether we supported them or not. At least not yet.

Meanwhile, Omi and I poured the kerosene out of the canisters into the buckets. The canisters had a narrow neck and the kerosene wouldn’t flow out fast. We needed a big strike.

Ish struck Siva’s poses on the ledge. A few drunk members of the mob even bowed to him. Perhaps Siva had come down tonight to bless the rioters.

‘One, two, three and go,’ I whispered as Omi and I upturned the buckets. We threw the oil forward to keep it away from the bank building.

The blowtorches in the rioters’ hands acted as the ignition. A river of fire fell on the bank’s porch. Panic spread in the mob. They took a few moments to realise we had attacked them. Ish stepped off the ledge. We hid ourselves under the parapet. I raised my head high enough to watch the happenings below. A few mobsters ran out of the bank gate as their clothes caught fire. I suppose it is much more fun to burn people, than get burnt yourself.

‘How many ran away?’ Ish said.

‘Quite a few. There’s panic downstairs.’ The remaining people started jabbing trishuls on the main door. I popped my body up to count the people. I estimated more than ten, but less than twenty.

‘We have to go down,’ Ish said. ‘Are you mad?’ I said.

‘No. Let’s reduce the people further,’ Ish said.

‘Ish, we are hurting people. Some of them may die. We threw a lot of kerosene,’ I said.

‘I don’t care,’ Ish said, ‘we have to hurt some more.’

We came down to the first floor. Ish unlocked the branch manager’s office door with the bunch of keys in his pocket. Ali awaited him inside and ran to hug him.

‘I am scared,’ Ali said and broke into tears. ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to be fine,’ Ish said. ‘I want to go home to abba.’

I ran my fingers through Ali’s hair. Home was no longer an option.

‘Ali, you will be fine if you listen to me. Will you listen to me?’ Ish said. Ali nodded.

‘Some horrible people want to get you. I need to lock you up in the vault. They will never get you there,’ Ish said. He pointed to the claustrophobic six by six room.

‘There? It’s so dark?’ Ali said.

‘Here, take my phone. Keep the light on. I will be back soon,’ Ish said and gave him his cell-phone.

Ish put Ali in the safe. He gave him a few pillows. Ali switched on the phone light. Ish shut the door and locked it. He kept the keys inside his sock.

‘You ok?’ Ish screamed. ‘It’s dark,’ Ali said. ‘Hold on ok?’ Ish said.

‘Ok, we have to cook one more dish in the kitchen. Come fast,’ Ish said.

We left Ali in the vault and ran to the kitchen. The jabs at the main door continued. I estimated we had five more minutes before the door gave away.

Ish unplugged the LPG cylinder. ‘Carry this to the main door,’ Ish said.

Omi and I carried the LPG cylinder. We kept it under the sofa blocking the main door.

‘Omi where do we keep the fireworks?” Ish said. ‘Top shelf,’ Omi said.

Ish came back with boxes of leftover Diwali crackers. We usually burst them when India won a match. Ish emptied a box of bombs on the cylinder.

He took two bombs and opened the fuse to make it last longer. The crowd banged at the door. One main door bolt became loose.

‘I open, you light and all run up. Clear?’ Ish said to Omi.

Omi nodded. Ish climbed on the sofa and tried to get hold of the bolt. It vibrated under the impact of the mob’s jabs.

Omi lit a matchstick and took it to the fuse. As the fuse tip turned orange, Ish opened the bolt. The sofa would keep the door in place for a few more seconds, the time we had to save our lives.

‘Run,’ Ish said as he jumped off the sofa.

We ran up the stairs. I was four steps away from the top when the door came loose.

‘Mother fuckers we won’t leave you. Killing your own people,’ the mini-leader I had tried to bribe opened the door. Him and three more men entered the room.

‘Hey stop,’ they shouted at me as I continued to climb. I looked behind, eight men had entered the bank.

I was one step from the top when my ears hurt. The explosion rocked the cupboards on the ground floor as the main door blew away. I think the mini- leader took the worst hit from the cylinder. The other eight men couldn’t have been much better off.

I didn’t know what we were doing. Preventing someone from taking revenge by attacking them ourselves. I had never seen body parts fly in the air. I didn’t know if any of the rioters remained. I used the two way switch at the top to switch on the ground floor tube light. Smoke and bits of paper from the old files filled the room. Ish and Omi came behind me.

‘All gone?’ Ish said.

The smoke cleared in thirty seconds. A few men lay around the room. I could not tell if they were injured or dead. The erstwhile main door was now an empty gap. Mama entered the room with five other people. Maybe he was lucky, or maybe he had the foresight to send others to open the door first. The five people ran to the injured in the room. Mama looked up. His eyes met us.

Twenty One

Traitors, you bastards,’ Mama screamed. I noticed his left hand. It bled and the kerosene had burnt part of his kurta’s left sleeve.

‘Catch them,’ Mama shouted. He and five other men ran up the stairs. Ish, Omi and I ran into the branch manager’s office and shut the door.

‘Hold these,’ Ish said. His hands trembled as he shuffled through the cricket equipment we kept in the manager’s office. Ish picked up a bat. Mama and his group had reached the branch manager’s office door.

‘Open or we will break it,’ Mama said, even though they didn’t bang the door. They continued to threaten us but didn’t act. Perhaps they were afraid of what we would blow up this time.

My heartbeat sounded almost as loud as their screams.

‘I don’t have my phone. Give me yours, I’ll call the police,’ Ish said to me. ‘We will not leave,’ Mama’s voice reverberated through the door.

I passed my phone to Ish. He dialled the police number.

‘Fuck, no one is picking up,’ Ish said and tried again. Nobody answered.

Ish hung up the phone and shook it in frustration. Beep Beep, my phone said as a message arrived. ‘It’s an SMS,’ Ish said as he opened it.

Hey, stay safe tonight.

By the way, just got my period!! Yippee!! Relieved no?

C U soon my hot teacher. Love – me.

The message came from supplier Vidyanath. Ish gave me a puzzled look. I shrugged my shoulders and reached to take my phone. Ish moved the phone away from me. He looked at me in shock. He turned to the message and went into details. He saw the number. He dialled it.

I came close to a cardiac arrest.

‘Hey, cool no? I never thought I’d be celebrating a period,’ Vidya rattled off on the other side as she saw my number. I could hear her cheerful voice even though Ish held the phone. ‘Vidya?’ Ish said as his brows became tense. ‘Ish bhaiya?’ she said.

Ish looked at me. He cut the line and kept the phone in his pocket.

For a moment we forgot that we had murderers at our door. Ish stepped forward towards me as I backtracked until I reached the wall.

‘Ish I can explain…,’ I said even though I couldn’t. Ish dropped the bat on the ground. He lifted his hand and then – slap! slap! He deposited two of them on my face. Then he made his hand into a fist and punched me hard in the stomach.

I fell on the ground. I felt intense pain, but I felt I had lost the right to say anything, including screaming in agony. I clenched my teeth and closed my eyes. I deserved this. I had to pay for the second mistake of my life.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ Omi said even though he understood the situation well.

‘Nothing, selfish bastard. He is a snake. He’ll sell us if he could, Fucking businessman,’ Ish said and kicked me in the shins.

‘Hey Ish, you want to get killed?’ Omi said.

‘Fuck you Mama, come in if you have the guts,’ Ish shouted and walked up to the door.

Omi lent me a hand. I stood up and leaned on him. I wondered if my intestines had burst.

‘I told you. Protocol,’ Omi said.

‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ I said. I don’t know why I said that. I had unprotected sex with a barely legal student and my best friend’s sister. It must be up there in the top ten morally wrong things one could possibly do.

Mama’s patience ran out after five minutes. He ordered his minions to break the door. They pressed their trishuls against the door, but kept their distance.

‘Right now, aim is to survive, not to settle scores,’ Omi said.

Omi handed Ish the bat again. I held my wicket tight. We monitored the door. A few more jabs and it would open.

‘I’ll let them in anyway,’ Omi said and released the bolt.

‘You want to kill me? Mama, go on, kill me. Why wait,’ Omi said and opened the door.

‘Move aside Omi. Just tell me, where is the boy,’ Mama said. ‘You won’t get any boy here,’ Ish growled.

Mama’s five men held up their trishuls. We lifted our cricket weapons. One man attacked Ish. Ish blocked him with his bat. Ish struck the bat on the man’s arm, leg, thigh and groin. The man fell on the floor.

My hands shivered as I tackled another fat man. My wicket got stuck in his trishul’s blades. Our conjoined weapons hurled in the air as we tried to extract them apart. He kicked me in my right knee and I lost my balance. He came forward and pinned me to the wall.

The third man hit Ish on the neck with the blunt end of the trishul. Ish fell forward. The man took Ish captive and pushed him against the wall.

Omi had crushed the toes of the fourth man with the bat. The man winced as he fell on the floor. Omi kicked his stomach but the fifth man punched hard on Omi’s back. The man grabbed Omi from behind.

‘Buffalo, you can’t get free now,’ the man said.

‘Tch, tch. Stupid bastards. Like playing with fire eh?’ Mama said as he sat on the branch manager’s table. The three of us were pinned to the wall. The three remaining able men had blocked our bodies with their trishuls.

Mama sat on the branch manager’s table and looked at us.

‘I want blood. Give me the boy, or it will be yours,’ Mama said. He took out his hip flask and had a big sip of whisky.

‘There is no boy here,’ Ish said, ‘as you can see.’

‘You are not to be trusted, as I have seen,’ Mama said. He threw the empty flask at Ish. It hit him in the chest.

Two injured men lay on the floor. Mama kicked them. ‘Go search,’ Mama said.

The men hobbled and left the room.

‘Nobody here,’ they screamed as they traversed the various rooms of the bank.

Their voice had pain. Something told me they’d had enough.

Mama went close to Ish. He pulled Ish’s hair hard. ‘Tell me you bastard,’ Mama said. ‘He is not here,’ Ish said.

‘I will…,’ Mama said as a phone ring interrupted him.

The phone didn’t belong to me or Omi. The ring didn’t come from Mama and his men either.

Mama followed the sound. The sound came from the manager’s table. Mama went to the wall behind the manager’s table. It had the vault. The sound came from within the vault.

‘Open this,’ Mama said as he pointed to the wheel shaped lock of the vault.

We kept quiet. Ish’s phone rang again. I guessed Vidya had called to explain things to her brother.

‘I said open this,’ Mama said.

‘This is the bank’s vault. We don’t have the keys,’ I said. I wanted to do my part to help Ish. I wanted to do anything to make me less of a creep.

‘Oh yes. The smart boy has spoken. No keys,’ Mama said. My head turned to Ish. Ish looked away from me.

Mama grabbed my chin and turned my face to him.

‘So we are idiots isn’t it? You don’t have the keys, but how did the fucking phone end up inside? Search them.’

Mama’s minions began the most violent search possible. The man searching me ripped open my shirt pocket. He slapped me once and asked me to turn around. His nails poked me as he frisked me from top to bottom. I told him I didn’t have the keys more than ten times, but he wouldn’t listen. He searched my pant pockets and grabbed my groin twice to check. Whenever I tried to squirm, he jabbed me with his fist.

The other men did the same to Omi and Ish. The man searching him ripped off Ish’s shirt. He took a trishul and poked him in his rib cage.

‘This bastard doesn’t have it,’ my man said and gave up his grip. He pinned me to the wall again.

‘This one neither,’ the man with Omi said.

‘This one needs to be tamed,’ the man with Ish said as he tried to take off Ish’s pants. Ish kicked hard in the man’s shins. I noticed the blood on Ish’s chest.

‘Should I help,’ Mama said from the branch manager’s desk. ‘Don’t worry I’ll tackle him,’ the man said even as Ish bit his arm.

Mama came to Ish. He jabbed the blunt end of the trishul again at his chest wound.

Ish screamed in pain and fell. The man searching Ish slapped him a few times. Ish clenched his teeth and continued to kick. Mama reached into Ish’s pockets. He felt something. Ish had worn practice shorts underneath his pants. Mama took his hands out of the pants and slid it again into Ish’s shorts. He pulled out a bangle sized keyring. It had two six inch long keys.

Ish lay on the floor taking heavy breaths from his mouth. His eyes looked defiant even as his body refused to cooperate.

Mama twirled the key ring in his hand.

‘Never looted a bank before,’ Mama said, ‘and what a prize today. Father and son, I’ll root out the clan.’

Mama took a minute to figure out the vault keys. ‘Don’t Mama, he is a child. For my sake,’ Omi said. Mama paused and turned to look at us.

‘My Dhiraj was also a child,’ Mama said and went to the vault.

Ish sat on the floor. The man guarding him suffocated Ish with the trishul rod around his neck.

‘Don’t touch him. He is national treasure,’ Ish growled. The man suffocated him further.

‘I’ll pay you, whatever you want,’ I said.

‘Businessman, go sell your mother,’ Mama said to me as he turned the wheel of the vault.

‘There is the bastard,’ Mama said.

Mama yanked out Ali from the vault. His thin body in the white kurta pajama shivered intensely. His smudged face told me he had been crying inside. Mama grabbed Ali by the neck and raised him high in the air.

‘Ish bhaiya,’ Ali said as his legs dangled.

‘The more innocent you look now, the bigger devil you will be in ten years,’ Mama said and brought Ali down. He released his grip on Ali’s neck.

‘Stop it Mama,’ Omi said as Mama lifted his trishul.

‘You won’t understand,’ Mama said and folded his hands to pray. ‘Run Ali, run,’ Ish screamed.

Ali tried to run out of the room. Mama opened his eyes. He ran after Ali and jabbed the trishul into Ali’s ankle.

Ali screamed in pain and fell down.

Mama kneeled down on the floor next to Ali.

‘Don’t you try and escape son of a bitch. I can kill you in one clean shot. If you try to be clever I will cut each finger of yours one at a time. Understand?’ Mama roared. His eyes were red, the white barely visible.

Mama closed his eyes again and mumbled silent chants. He took his folded hands to his forehead and heart and tapped it thrice. He opened his eyes and lifted the trishul. Ali stood up and tried to limp away.

Mama lifted the trishul high to strike.

‘Mama no,’ Omi screamed in his loudest voice. Omi pushed the man blocking him. He ran between Mama and Ali. Mama screamed a chant and struck.

‘Stop Mama,’ Omi said.

Even if Mama wanted to stop, he couldn’t. The strike already had momentum.

The trishul entered Omi’s stomach with a dull thud.

‘Oh … oh,’ Omi said as he absorbed what happened first and felt the pain later. Within seconds, a pool of blood covered the floor. Mama and his men looked at each other, trying to make sense of what had occurred.

‘Mama, don’t do it,’ Omi said, still unaware that the trishul blades had penetrated five inches inside him.

‘Omi, my son,’ Mama said.

Omi writhed in pain as Mama yanked the trishul out.

I had never seen so much blood. I wanted to puke. My mind went numb. The man who pinned Omi earlier now held Ali tight and came close to Mama. Mama had Omi in his lap.

‘Look you animal, what did you do,’ Ish screamed. Ish had seen the scene from behind. He never saw the trishul inside him. Only I had seen, and for years later that image would continue to haunt me.

‘Call an ambulance you dogs,’ Ish screamed. Ish’s captor held him super-tight.

Ali put his free hand on Omi’s chest. It moved up and down in an asymmetrical manner.

Omi held Ali’s hand and looked at me. His eyes looked weak. Tears ran across my cheeks. I had no energy to fight the man holding me. I had no energy left to do anything.

‘Leave us you bastards,’ I cried like a baby.

‘You’ll be fine my son, I didn’t mean to,’ Mama said as he brushed Omi’s hair. ‘He is a good boy Mama, he didn’t kill your son. All Muslims are not bad,’ Omi

said, his voice breaking as he gulped for breath.

‘Love you friend,’ Omi said as he looked at me, a line that could be termed cheesy if it wasn’t his last. His eyes closed.

‘Omi, my son, my son,’ Mama tried to shake him back to life.

‘What? What happened?’ Ish said. He had only witnessed the drama from behind.

Mama put his head on Omi’s chest. Ish started kicking and shoving the man holding him. The man jabbed Ish with his elbow. Ish gripped his trishul rod and pushed back hard until he could slip out. He gave the man a kick in his groin. The man fell down as Ish kicked him again thrice in the same place. Ish pounded his head with his foot until the man became unconscious. Ish ran to Omi.

Mama left Omi’s body on the ground and stood up. Ish went over and touched Omi’s face. He had never touched a dead body before, let alone his friend’s. I saw Ish cry for the first time. He sniffed back hard but the tears wouldn’t stop.

‘See what you made me do you bastard,’ Mama said, ‘made me kill another son. But I am not weak. I haven’t cried yet, look.’

Ish ignored Mama. He went through the same numbness I did a few moments ago. He touched Omi’s body again and again.

‘Hindus are not weak, am I weak?’ Mama said as he turned to his men. The men looked nervous, as things had not gone as planned. The man who held Ali’s arm looked at Mama, looking for guidance for the next step.

‘Hold him back, next to this mother pimping businessman,’ Mama said. The man brought Ali next to me and held him back with a trishul.

Ish’s captor had recovered from the groin attack. He woke up and ran to Ish from behind. He struck the blunt end of the trishul on Ish’s head.

‘Ah!’ Ish said in pain as he fell down, semi-conscious. The man dragged Ish back to the wall. Ish faced Ali and me.

‘No more chances,’ Mama said as he came in front of Ali. Mama asked Ali’s captor to release him. I looked at Ish, around fifteen feet away. His captor looked extra-alert. Ish looked at me. His eyes tried to tell me something.

What? I asked myself, What is he trying to say?

I squinted my eyes to look at Ish. He moved his eyeballs from centre to left in quick succession. He wanted me to run out and block Mama. Just the way Omi had, unsuccessfully.

I examined my captor. He blocked me but his eyes watched Mama and Ali. It is hard to take your eyes of a live murder. I could slip out. However, what was the point of getting killed?

‘Get ready you pig,’ Mama said as he lifted his trishul and took five steps back.

Maybe I could extract myself and try to pull Ali towards me. That way Mama’s strike could hit the wall. Ish could push his captor away, come from behind and protect us all. Is that what Ish had tried to say? I had limited data beyond the eye

movement. I had limited time. I couldn’t analyse, I had to do first and think later. The exact opposite of when I slept with Vidya. There, I should have thought first and done later.

Mama ran towards Ali. I knew I had to get out of the captor’s grip, grab Ali and pull him to my side. I got ready to move. However, I looked at Mama. The sight of his huge frame and a sharp weapon sent a fear inside me. And I wasted precious time thinking when I should have acted. Ish and I exchanged another glance and he saw my fear mixed with self-interest. What if the trishul ends in my stomach? The what-ifs made me hesitant, but I snapped myself out of it and made a dive to my left. I grabbed Ali and pulled him towards me. Mama struck, but missed Ali’s torso. One blade of the trishul jabbed Ali’s wrist. Ali would have been completely unhurt only if I had dived a second earlier. And here it was, something I didn’t realise then, the one second delay being the third big mistake of my life.

Of course, I didn’t know I had made a mistake then.

Ish did exactly as I thought, and banged his head against the captor’s to set himself free. It would have hurt Ish, but I think Ish was beyond pain right now. Ish took his captor’s trishul and struck it into the man’s heart. The man screamed once and turned silent.

Ish ran to us.

‘He’s ok, he is ok,’ I said turning to Ish. I held Ali tight within me in an embryo position.

★

There were two captors left and Mama. We did not want to kill anyone.

‘We just want to go away,’ Ish said as he held his trishul, facing Mama. Mama had a trishul too. Their eyes met. Mama’s men watched the impending duel. I ran with Ali to the other end of the room. The men came running after us.

‘Stop you bastards,’ the men said as we reached the end of the room. One of the men went and bolted the door.

Ali lifted a bat from the floor. I picked one too, though not sure if I could really fight right now,

Ali winced as his right wrist hurt when he lifted the bat. ‘Heh? Want to fight?’ the two captors said.

Mama and Ish were still in their face off. Each had a stern gaze. Mama rotated his trishul in his hand.

One of the men turned to go back to Mama.

‘I’ll take care of him, you finish the boy Mama,’ he said.

‘Sure,’ Mama said as he moved away. As he left, Mama struck his trishul at Ish’s toes. Ish didn’t expect it. He lost his balance and fell down next to the manager’s desk.

‘You are fucking weak, you know that,’ Ish said.

‘I can finish you now. Thank your stars you were born in a Hindu house,’ Mama said as he spat on Ish’s face. Mama came to Ali.

‘Oh, you want to play eh? You want to play bat ball with me,’ Mama said and laughed as Ali held up his bat.

‘Move away,’ Mama said to his men, ‘the boy wants to play. Yeah, you son of a whore, play with me,’ Mama said as he danced around Ali, just out of the striking distance of Ali’s bat.

Ali pranced around as he stumbled on two cricket balls kept on the floor.

Mama picked one up.

‘You want me to bowl? Eh? Play bat ball?’ Mama said and laughed, ‘one last ball before you die?’

Mama tossed the ball in his hands. ‘Yeah, bowl to me,’ Ali said.

‘Oh really?’ Mama said and laughed.

Another ball lay next to Ali’s foot. Ali brushed the ball with his feet towards Ish. The ball rolled to Ish. Ish sat on the floor leaning against the manager’s table. His toes whooshed out blood and he couldn’t get up.

‘Don’t come near me,’ Ali said to Mama.

‘Oh, I am so scared of the bat ball,’ Mama said and pretended to shiver in jest.

He tossed the ball in one hand and held the trishul in the other.

Ish picked up the ball slowly. Ali’s eyes met with Ish. Ali gave the briefest nod possible.

Ish lifted the ball in his hand. The captor noticed but didn’t react. Ish threw the ball towards Ali with all his strength.

Slam! Ali struck the ball with the bat. He had one shot, and he didn’t miss it. The ball hit Mama’s temple hard. Mama released the ball in his hand to hold his head. The ball fell on the floor and Ali kicked it to Ish. Ish threw it again, Ali connected and slam! The ball hit the centre of Mama’s forehead.

Ali’s shots were powerful enough to get balls out of stadiums. At five feet range, they hit Mama like exploding bricks. Mama fell down. His trishul fell on the floor. Ish used it as a stick to get up. The captors ran towards Mama. Ish came from behind and stabbed one in his neck. The other captor saw the blood gush out, the killer look in Ish’s eyes. He opened the bolt and was out of sight in ten seconds.

Ali kneeled down on the floor. He held his right wrist with his left hand. ‘Oh my God,’ Ali said, more in pain than surprise at what he had done.

Mama lay on the ground. His temple had burst. Internal bleeding had made his forehead dark and swollen. He barely moved. Nobody wanted to go close to check his breath. His eyes shut after five minutes and I checked his pulse.

‘It’s stopped. I think he’s dead,’ I said. I had become an expert in dead bodies. Ish’s arms wrapped around Ali.

‘It’s hurting a lot Ish bhaiya. Take me home,’ Ali said. His body still trembled in fear.

‘C’mon move that wrist. Ali, you need that wrist, keep it alive,’ Ish said. He hobbled towards the door to leave. He used a trishul as his walking stick.

‘We saved him, Ish we saved him,’ I said as I shook Ish’s shoulders from behind.

Ish stopped. He turned to me. He didn’t give me a dirty look, but something worse than that. He gave me the look of indifference. Sure, I had let him down for lots of reasons. But why was he behaving like Who was I? Like he had nothing whatsoever to do with me. Ish turned and started to walk.

‘Hey Ish, wait for me. I’ll help you open the door’ I said. I reached the door. Ish hand gestured me to get out of the way.

‘Ish, c’mon Ish, he is alive. We, we did it,’ I said.

Ish didn’t say anything. He left me like I was one of the dead bodies and walked out.

Epilogue

The heart rate monitor beeped fast. Govind’s pulse had crossed 130 beats a minute. The nurse came running inside. ‘What did you do?’ she said.

‘I am fine. Just chatting,’ Govind said. He sat up a little on the bed.

‘Don’t make him exert himself.’ The nurse wagged her finger at me. I nodded and she left the room.

‘And from that day, exactly three years, two months and one week ago, Ish has not spoken to me again. Everytime I try speaking to him he snubs me.’ Govind ended his story.

I gave him a glass of water as his voice faltered.

‘So what happened in the three years – to the shop, to Vidya, to Ali?’ I asked.

He turned his gaze down and played with the heart rate monitor wire attached on his chest. He swallowed a couple of times to keep his composure.

I did not prod further. If he wanted to tell me, he would. I checked the time, it was five in the morning. I stepped outside the room. The early morning sunlight filled the hospital corridors. I asked someone where to get tea from. He pointed me to the canteen.

I came back with two cups. Govind refused as he wasn’t allowed one after a stomach wash. He didn’t make eye contact.

‘I need to find the Singapore Airlines phone number. I have to confirm my return trip,’ I said, to change his mood.

‘Omi’s parents,’ Govind said, his gaze and voice both low. ‘I can’t tell you how … destroyed they were. For weeks, the temple had visitors from the neighbourhood and the only prayers were for Omi, Dhiraj and Mama. At the funerals, Omi’s father cried as five thousand people descended from all over Ahmedabad. Omi’s mother became ill after not eating for a week. She had to be in the hospital for a month!

I debated whether to place my hand on Govind’s hand lying pale on the covers.

‘I didn’t go to the shop for two months. I tried to contact Ish, but … If I went to meet him, he’d shut the door on my face.’

‘Did you speak to Vidya?’

Govind shook his head. ‘Speaking to Vidya was out of question. They put her under house arrest. Her dad slammed her mobile phone to pieces. The TV channels moved on after the Godhra news and the riots. But my life collapsed. I lived through all that. I didn’t pop pills then. Don’t think I am not strong … just because I am here today’ He paused. ‘Three months after the incident, Omi’s mother came home. She told me to reopen the shop. Omi had told her it was his favourite place in the world. Mama was gone, so the shop belonged to Omi’s mother now. And she wanted to give it to us to keep the memory of her son alive.’

‘So did you agree?’

‘Initially, I couldn’t meet her eye. The guilt … of letting Omi die, of my part in Mama’s death, of celebrating Mama’s death. But she knew nothing of my nightmares and I had to make a living anyway. The business was losing money. We had defaulted many supply contracts. So I came back to the shop. Ish told Omi’s mother he Would come, too, but didn’t want anything to do with me. Omi’s mother wanted us both, so there was only one solution.’ ‘What?’

‘We split the shop into two. We put a plywood wall right in the middle. Ish took the right side and continued the sports shop. I took the left and turned my portion into a student stationery and textbook store. His customers often came to my store and vice versa. We offered studies and sports at the same place but we never, not once, spoke. Not even when India reached the finals in the 2003 World Cup. Ish watches matches alone now, and never jumps at a six.’

‘Did you ever contact Vidya again? And what happened to Ali?’ I realised I was asking more questions than offering support. But I had to know.

‘They sent Vidya to Bombay, to do a PR course. That was the one positive thing for her. They wanted her away from me, medical college or not. So Vidya did get to fly out of her cage. She had instructions to never speak to me again. However, she loves breaking rules and did try to contact me a couple of times from there. But this time I never replied. I couldn’t do it… I saw her brother everyday. All I wanted to do was make as much money as possible and save it for Ali.’

‘To bring him up?’ I said and took a sip from my cup. Why does hospital tea taste like Dettol?

‘Ali stays in Ish’s house now, so he will be brought up well anyway. But we need the money for his wrist operation. A lot of money,’ Govind said.

The nurse came to the room for the morning checkup. Govind requested he wanted to use the toilet. The nurse agreed and took off the drips and monitor cords attached to him. I waited anxiously for ten minutes, my mind riven with doubts about his stability, when he returned. ‘What kind of operation?’ I asked.

‘Ali’s wrist is damaged. That means his ability to turn the bat at the right time is gone. I saved his life, but my one second of delay cost him his gift. I told you, that delay was the third mistake of my life.’

‘You did your best. It was a moment’s delay,’ I reassured.

‘But a conscious moment. I was selfish. Like I was with my ambition when I wanted to make the mall, or when I was with Vidya. They are right, you know. I am not a businessman, I am a selfish bastard,’ he said and paused before speaking again.

‘He needs reconstructive surgery. The trishul gouged out some of the muscle from the wrist. So doctors have to cut up a piece of muscle from the thigh and attach it to the wrist. Then, they have to hope that it works. It isn’t a synthetic skin graft, but a muscle transfer. It only happens abroad. And it costs a bomb.’

‘How much?’

‘Don’t even talk about the full price. Ish wrote to every big hospital in the UK and USA for subsidies. The best deal he has is from a hospital in UK, which has promised us an operation for five lakhs. Of course, Ish never told me all this. That is all I could hear from the thin plywood wall’

‘You have the money?’

‘Ish saved two lakhs in the past three years. I saved another three. Last week I went to him with the money. I said let’s pool our resources and get Ali operated. I said we must act now as it takes nine months to get an appointment at that hospital anyway. And then he…,’ Govind’s voice choked again.

‘You ok?’ I said.

Govind nodded. ‘You know what he did? He refused to touch my money and wore cricket gloves while handing the envelope back to me. In fact, he offered me his cashbox and said he could give me money if I needed it to satisfy my greed. He said he didn’t want to get Ali operated with a dishonest man’s money.’

Govind voice began to break. ‘I am not dishonest. I’m selfish and have made mistakes, but I’m not dishonest. And I don’t only care about money. I care about Ali, too.’

I sat on his bed put my hand on his arm. He pulled it away.

‘After three years of saving every rupee I could, Ish calls my labour dishonest. I can’t take it anymore. Dr Verma had given me pills as I had trouble sleeping at night. That day I felt why not sleep once and for all. Maybe I had calculated life all wrong. It was time to quit the equation.’ He smiled feebly.

The doctor came to Govind’s ward at 7 a.m. The chemicals from the pills had been flushed out of Govind’s system.

‘I’d like the patient to sleep for six hours,’ the doctor told me as he drew the curtains. I left the room and went out. Govind’s mother sat on a bench in the corridor. She looked up, worried.

‘He is fine, just needs some rest.’ I sat next to her on the bench. ‘Such a brave boy I had. What happened to him?’ she sighed. ‘He thought he was being brave,’ I said. ‘Does Ish know?’

She looked at me sideways. ‘They don’t talk.’

‘Can you tell him what happened. Don’t force him to come to the hospital,’ I said. Govind’s mother nodded. We left the hospital together. She had sat in an auto when I spoke again. ‘By the way, do you know which college Vidya goes to in Bombay?’

‘So many visitors? This is a hospital, not a club,’ the nurse grumbled as she changed Govind’s bedsheets in the evening.

Govind’s hospital room was bustling with people. Apart from the nurse, there were Ish, Vidya, Govind’s mother and I. We waited for Mr Sleepyhead to wake up from his second nap of the day. A lot of people had lost sleep because of his sleeping pills.

Govind’s eyelashes flickered and everyone moved closer to the bed. ‘Ish? Vidya!’ Govind blinked.

‘There are better ways to attract attention,’ Vidya said. ‘When did you come?’ Govind asked, quite forgetting the others.

‘I left my marketing class halfway,’ Vidya said. ‘But that doesn’t mean I forgive you for not replying to me. Or for popping these pills. I never popped anything even when I was most scared, you know when.’

‘Your parents told you not to speak to me again. Ish wanted the same.’

‘So?’ Vidya removed her college bag from her shoulder and placed it on the bed. ‘What did your heart want?’

Ish stood silent, looking at Govind. Govind’s mother looked shocked, probably dreading a firecracker of a daughter-in-law like Vidya someday.

‘I am sorry, Ish. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I l… loved her,’ Govind said.

Ish began to walk out of the room. Govind’s mother went after him and pulled his arm. She placed Ish’s hand on Govind’s.

‘You don’t have to listen to parents, but I do think you should be friends again,’ Govind’s mother said.

Ish remained silent. Govind clasped Ish’s hand. Govind’s mother continued: ‘Life will have many setbacks. People close to you will hurt you.

But you don’t break it off. You don’t hurt them more. You try to heal it. It is a lesson not only you, but our country needs to learn.’

‘Remember the kissing chimpanzees?’ Govind called after him. Ish stopped and looked back at Govind.

‘Take the money for Ali. For me, it’s no longer just for the money. But what the money is for. Get Ali all right, it is important to me, too.’

Ish sniffed hard as he tried to resist tears.

‘Can you forgive me, three times over?’ Govind said. Both Govind’s and Ish’s eyes turned moist.

‘Aunty, isn’t it strange that all the men in the ward are crying while the women are like, so, together?’ Vidya said.

Govind’s mother looked horrified. Confident women make terrible daughters-in- law.

I met Govind the next morning, right before I left for the airport. Govind was due for discharge that evening.

“Thanks,’ he said emotionally. ‘For what?’

‘For dropping by. I don’t know how I will ever repay you…’ ‘Actually, there is a way’ Govind waited.

‘Your story, it needs to be shared.’ ‘Like a book?’

‘Yes, exactly a book. My third book. Will you help me?’

I don’t know. I only like stories with happy endings,’ he said. ‘You have a pretty happy ending.’

I don’t know yet about Ali. We are going for the operation, but the success probability is not hundred per cent. Fifty-fifty is what they told us.’

‘You should have faith. Probability is best left to books,’ I said. He nodded.

‘So I’ll go back and we’ll be in touch over email,’ I said. ‘Sure, we can work on it. But do not release the story until we know about Ali. Ok? It may mean your effort goes to waste,’ he said. ‘I agree,’ I said and we shook hands.

I met Vidya at the hospital entrance as I left. She was wearing a green lehanga, probably her most cheerful dress, to lift Govind’s spirits. She carried a bouquet.

‘Nice roses,’ I said.

‘Law Garden has the best ones. I miss Ahmedabad, can’t wait for my course to be over in six months,’ she said.

‘I thought you were a Bombay girl, trapped in the small city or whatever.’

‘He told you everything? Like everything?’ she, looked shocked. ‘Pretty much.’ ‘Oh well, Bombay is nice, but my own is my own. Pao bhaji tastes much better in

Ahmedabad.’

I wanted to chat with her more, but had to leave. They had let me into their world, but I couldn’t overstay.

Epilogue II

I sat at my home computer in Singapore. My wife came to my desk at midnight.

‘Can you leave this story for now? You have done what you could. He’ll tell you if anything happens,’ she said.

‘Yes, but they are in London right now. The operation is over, Ali’s doing physio exercises everyday. He could be ready for a batting test anytime.’

‘You have been saying the same thing over and over since last month. Now can you please turn off the light?’

I lay down and thought about them. It was day time in London. Would the doctors agree to let him go to the cricket field for a test today? What would happen if he faces a ball after such a long gap? Will the new wrist be too delicate to play sports? Thoughts continued to swirl as I drifted off to sleep.

The next morning I woke up early. I had an SMS from Govind.

doc approves ali 2 play, fingers X. pls pray,

v hit pitch 2mrow

I went to office the next day. London is eight hours behind Singapore, and 1 checked my phone during my evening coffee at 4 p.m. I had no message. I left office at 8 p.m. I was in the taxi when my phone beeped.

ish bowls 2 ali.

ali moves fwd & turns. straight 6…!