“Oh, from Heaven.”
“But I thought Heaven was a place where you went to,” I answered; “not where you comed from.” I know I said “comed,” for I remember that at this period my irregular verbs were a bewildering anxiety to my poor mother. “Comed” and “goned,” which I had worked out for myself, were particular favourites of mine.
Mrs. Fursey passed over my grammar in dignified silence. She had been pointedly requested not to trouble herself with that part of my education, my mother holding that diverging opinions upon the same subject only confused a child.
“You came from Heaven,” repeated Mrs. Fursey, “and you'll go to Heaven—if you're good.”
“Do all little boys and girls come from Heaven?”
“So they say.” Mrs. Fursey's tone implied that she was stating what might possibly be but a popular fallacy, for which she individually took no responsibility.
“And did you come from Heaven, Mrs. Fursey?” Mrs. Fursey's reply to this was decidedly more emphatic.
“Of course I did. Where do you think I came from?”
At once, I am ashamed to say, Heaven lost its exalted position in my eyes. Even before this, it had puzzled me that everybody I knew should be going there—for so I was always assured; now, connected as it appeared to be with the origin of Mrs. Fursey, much of its charm disappeared.
But this was not all. Mrs. Fursey's information had suggested to me a fresh grief. I stopped not to console myself with the reflection that my fate had been but the fate of all little boys and girls. With a child's egoism I seized only upon my own particular case.
“Didn't they want me in Heaven then, either?” I asked. “Weren't they fond of me up there?”
The misery in my voice must have penetrated even Mrs. Fursey's bosom, for she answered more sympathetically than usual.
“Oh, they liked you well enough, I daresay. I like you, but I like to get rid of you sometimes.” There could be no doubt as to this last. Even at the time, I often doubted whether that six o'clock bedtime was not occasionally half-past five.
The answer comforted me not. It remained clear that I was not wanted either in Heaven nor upon the earth. God did not want me. He was glad to get rid of me. My mother did not want me. She could have done without me. Nobody wanted me. Why was I here?
And then, as the sudden opening and shutting of the door of a dark room, came into my childish brain the feeling that Something, somewhere, must have need of me, or I could not be, Something I felt I belonged to and that belonged to me, Something that was as much a part of me as I of It. The feeling came back to me more than once during my childhood, though I could never put it into words. Years later the son of the Portuguese Jew explained to me my thought. But all that I myself could have told was that in that moment I knew for the first time that I lived, that I was I.
The next instant all was dark again, and I once more a puzzled little boy, sitting by a nursery fire, asking of a village dame questions concerning life.
Suddenly a new thought came to me, or rather the recollection of an old.
“Nurse, why haven't we got a husband?”
Mrs. Fursey left off her sewing, and stared at me.
“What maggot has the child got into its head now?” was her observation; “who hasn't got a husband?”
“Why, mamma.”
“Don't talk nonsense, Master Paul; you know your mamma has got a husband.”
“No, she ain't.”
“And don't contradict. Your mamma's husband is your papa, who lives in London.”
“What's the good of him!”
Mrs. Fursey's reply appeared to me to be unnecessarily vehement.
“You wicked child, you; where's your commandments? Your father is in London working hard to earn money to keep you in idleness, and you sit there and say 'What's the good of him!' I'd be ashamed to be such an ungrateful little brat.”
I had not meant to be ungrateful. My words were but the repetition of a conversation I had overheard the day before between my mother and my aunt.
Had said my aunt: “There she goes, moping again. Drat me if ever I saw such a thing to mope as a woman.”
My aunt was entitled to preach on the subject. She herself grumbled all day about all things, but she did it cheerfully.
My mother was standing with her hands clasped behind her—a favourite attitude of hers—gazing through the high French window into the garden beyond. It must have been spring time, for I remember the white and yellow crocuses decking the grass.
“I want a husband,” had answered my mother, in a tone so ludicrously childish that at sound of it I had looked up from the fairy story I was reading, half expectant to find her changed into a little girl; “I hate not having a husband.”
“Help us and save us,” my aunt had retorted; “how many more does a girl want? She's got one.”
“What's the good of him all that way off,” had pouted my mother; “I want him here where I can get at him.”
I had often heard of this father of mine, who lived far away in London, and to whom we owed all the blessings of life; but my childish endeavours to square information with reflection had resulted in my assigning to him an entirely spiritual existence. I agreed with my mother that such an one, however to be revered, was no substitute for the flesh and blood father possessed by luckier folk—the big, strong, masculine thing that would carry a fellow pig-a-back round the garden, or take a chap to sail in boats.
“You don't understand me, nurse,” I explained; “what I mean is a husband you can get at.”
“Well, and you'll 'get at him,' poor gentleman, one of these days,” answered Mrs. Fursey. “When he's ready for you he'll send for you, and then you'll go to him in London.”
I felt that still Mrs. Fursey didn't understand. But I foresaw that further explanation would only shock her, so contented myself with a simple, matter-of-fact question.
“How do you get to London; do you have to die first?”
“I do think,” said Mrs. Fursey, in the voice of resigned despair rather than of surprise, “that, without exception, you are the silliest little boy I ever came across. I've no patience with you.”
“I am very sorry, nurse,” I answered; “I thought—”
“Then,” interrupted Mrs. Fursey, in the voice of many generations, “you shouldn't think. London,” continued the good dame, her experience no doubt suggesting that the shortest road to peace would be through my understanding of this matter, “is a big town, and you go there in a train. Some time—soon now—your father will write to your mother that everything is ready. Then you and your mother and your aunt will leave this place and go to London, and I shall be rid of you.”
“And shan't we come back here ever any more?”
“Never again.”
“And I'll never play in the garden again, never go down to the pebble-ridge to tea, or to Jacob's tower?”
“Never again.” I think Mrs. Fursey took a pleasure in the phrase. It sounded, as she said it, like something out of the prayer-book.
“And I'll never see Anna, or Tom Pinfold, or old Yeo, or Pincher, or you, ever any more?” In this moment of the crumbling from under me of all my footholds I would have clung even to that dry tuft, Mrs. Fursey herself.