XXIII
Meanwhile Sarah Horrotian, a small, determined, flat-bosomed woman of curiously heavy footsteps and rigorously determined aspect, attired in a narrow gown of rasping wincey and a blue-checked apron with a wedge-shaped bib, made plaint, groaning over the hideous wickedness of this world as she pounded with the roller at the dough upon the pastry-board. It helps the picture to add that the widow’s pastry was of a consistence so tough and lasting that no human being, save one, partaking thereof, had ever been known to venture on a second helping, the exception being Digweed, the pigman.
When Sarah’s only child, Joshua, then a white-skinned, red-curled, burly youngster of eighteen, already standing nearly six feet high in his deceased father’s solid mahogany-topped boots and old-fashioned cords, and the baggy velveteen coat with the huge horn buttons, even when the hard, shiny, low-crowned hat hung on its peg against the passage wall—when Josh took the Queen’s Shilling, it may have been an undigested slice of the widow’s Spartan pie-crust, innocent of mollifying medium or shortening of any kind, that spurred him to the act, combined with Sarah’s railing.
For the Lili and the Lilith, that ceaselessly chide, with shrill, weird, human-seeming voices, amongst the ruins of dead and long-forgotten cities on Babylonian plains, were as piping bullfinches compared with Sarah Horrotian.
If she had ever met with any members of the sect, she would have shone as a Muggletonian. To denounce rather than to exhort was her religion. To proclaim sinners lost eternally, and luxuriate in the prospect of their frying, to call down judgments from Heaven upon those who had offended her, was the widow’s way.
News came to her from Jason Digweed, her unsavory Mercury and general intelligencer, that one Whichello, clerk and beadle to the Parish Church of Market Drowsing, whose incumbent claimed tithes from the widow, had suffered the loss of an eye, which had dropped out upon the Prayer-Book in the middle of the Litany, being a blinder all along—though Whichello had never had theghost of a notion of it—and nearly scared Parson into fits.
“Then the Lord has not forgotten me!” said the grim little woman, folding her great bony hands upon her meager bosom. “He remembered that clutch of thirty addled Black Spanish eggs I bought of that whited sepulcher and set under our old Broody, and He has smitten, sparing to slay.”
“Now, mother!...” began Josh, wriggling on the low-backed settle; “you don’t really go for to say you believe a thing of the Lord like that there!”
“Silence!” said the widow, turning her long, sallow, high-nosed face, with the scanty loops of black hair upon the temples, upon her son, and freezing even his accustomed blood with the glare of her fierce black eyes. “If so be as the Almighty wills to avenge His chosen, who are you to say Him nay?”
She went out of the kitchen, shaking the crockery on the shelves with her ponderous gait, and visited her stores and sent from thence half-a-bag of potatoes and a leg of new-killed pork to the clerk’s wife. “For the Lord never meant the innocent to suffer with the guilty,” she knew. Later, when she subscribed half-a-crown towards the purchase of a glass eye for the bereaved Whichello, she forgot to quote her authority for the act.
Poor folk in want approached Sarah, expectant of verbal brimstone, not unhopeful of receiving more substantial aid. For the widow Horrotian, after severely-exhaustive inquiries, failing to run Deception to its earth, exuded silver in shilling drops, girding as she gave, when the well-to-do buttoned up their pockets and bestowed nothing but sympathetic words. Yet these were praised as kindly folk, when there were no blessings for Sarah. For even as her hand relieved, her tongue dropped vitriol on human hearts, and raised resentful blisters there.
One of these blisters, breaking upon a Sunday night at tea-time, led to the outlawing of Josh and his subsequent enlistment. A teapot was involved in the quarrel, which yet sprang from a milky source. For to the moral scourges with which Mrs. Horrotian lashed the quivering flesh of her only child, she never, never failed to add, as a crowning, overwhelming instance of the filial ingratitudeof her son Josh, the reproach that she had nourished him at her maternal bosom—preferably choosing meal-times, and those rare occasions when guests gathered at her board, for these intimate reminiscences of the young man’s helpless infancy.
To look at the woman raised doubts as to the possibility of her ever having nourished anything except a grudge or a resentment. No deal board could be flatter than the surface she would passionately strike with her bony hand in testimony to the fact alleged, causing Josh to choke with embarrassment in his mug of home-brewed ale, and eliciting from the guest—always a partisan and crony of her own—grunts, if a male: or pensive, feminine sighs, or neutral clicks of the tongue against the palate.
“As if I could help it!” Josh suddenly burst out on the epoch-making occasion referred to.
The turning of the worm was so unexpected that the widow leaned back in her chair, and there ensued a silence only broken when the minister of the local Bethesda groaned. For the ReverendMr.Pooker, with his wife and daughter, were frequently guests at Sarah’s board, the widow, nominally a member of the Established Church, having seceded to Dissent, liking her religion as she liked her tea, hot and strong, and without sugar.
“I think you spoke, young man?” said the ReverendMr.Pooker, setting down the pot of rhubarb jam into which he had been diving, and staring solemnly at Josh. Mrs. Pooker faithfully reproduced the stare, and little Miss Pooker tried to do so, but only managed to look at the presumptuous youth with her little canary-colored head tilted on one side in an admiring manner. Not being sufficiently regenerate and elect to be insensible to the dreadful fascination of wickedness.
“I did speak!” asserted young Josh, boldly meeting the black eyes that flamed upon him out of the deep hollows under his mother’s high narrow brow. “I said, ‘As if I could help it!’ and I say so again.... Were there no teapots handy? A teapot wouldn’t ha’ pitched itself in a child’s face years after he’s earned the right, Lord knows! to call himself a man.”
“Scoffer!” thundered the great bass voice of the little flat-chested woman. “Mocker! As though I, Sarah Horrotian,would disobey the command that bids a woman suckle her children!”
“Well and nobly said, ma’am!” commented the Reverend Pooker, reaching for the seed-cake. “And let us hope that the respect and gratitood owed by a child so nerrished to a parent——”
“And such a parent!” interpolated Mrs. Pooker tenderly.
“Will not be forgotten,” said the ReverendMr.Pooker through the intervening medium of seed-cake, “by this misgeided and onrewly Young Man!”
“Very well, then!” said Josh, driven beyond patience. “All right! But why be I to thank her for doing what the Lord commanded her to do? That’s what I want to know!”
Sarah Horrotian rose up at the tea-board end of the Pembroke table in the best parlor.
“Another speech like that, Joshua, and if you was ten times the son of my womb, you should go forth motherless from these doors. What! Shall the Name of the Lord be taken in vain at my table, and I not drive forth the blasphemer from my roof!”
“Dear sister in grace ...” began placid Mrs. Pooker, possibly foreseeing regrettable contingencies. But Sarah was fairly launched.
“And naked shall you go, Joshua, save for the clothes upon your back, and not a penny of my money shall be lavished upon the accursed of God and of his mother, for whom Hell gapes, and eternal punishment is most surely waiting.”
“Hem!—hem!” coughed the Reverend Pooker, getting alarmed. But Mrs. Horrotian was wound up, and, as Josh knew, would go till she ran down.
“There shall you gnash your teeth in torment,” boomed the awful voice of the widow. “There shall the Worm that dieth not gnaw your vitals——”
“Oh!—dang the dod-gassed Worm!” broke in the lost one, and at this hideous blasphemy the ReverendMr.Pooker set down his refilled teacup with a bump that spilled half its contents over the saucer’s edge, and the minister’s wife and daughter fairly cowered in their chairs.
“I be sick to death of hearing about worms and gnashingsand torment. And as for going forth o’ your doors, I’ll go now. So good-by, mother, for good and my parting respects to you,Mr.Pooker and Mrs. Pooker! Don’t ’e cry, Miss Jenny! I shan’t go to Hell a day sooner for all my mother’s cursing. A pretty mother!” said Josh in boiling indignation, “to be calling down damnation on her only son across her Sunday tea-tray. Why, one o’ they Cannibal Islanders she throws away good money on converting ’ud make a better shift at being civil to her own flesh and blood!”
Sarah did not recover her power of sonorous speech for some minutes after the best parlor door had slammed behind her departing prodigal, and his swift heavy steps had traversed the stone-flagged passage, and his manly voice, still vibrating with anger, had been heard telling the old mastiff Roger to go back to his kennel in the yard. Then she offeredMr.Pooker a fresh cup of tea, and when the pastor declined, suggesting application at the Mercy Seat for a better frame of mind for somebody unparticularized by name, the stark little woman gave no more sign of consciousness of the intimate and personal nature of the supplication, than if she had been asked to join in prayer for an obdurate Fiji Islander, determined on not parting with a favorite fetish of carved cocoanut-wood adorned with red sinnet and filed sharks’ teeth.
But when the farmhouse was silent, and its few inmates, all save the mistress, wrapped in slumber, Sarah Horrotian sat upon a hard, uncompromising, uncomfortable chair by the dying embers of the farm-kitchen fire; and wept, as might have wept a wooden manikin, on some stage of puppets; wrenched with grotesque spasms and wiry throes of grief, holding her blue-checked apron squarely before her reddened eyes.
Ah! pity these isolated ones, stern of nature, obdurate of heart, who yearn to yield but are not fashioned for yielding. All they crave is the opportunity to relent and be tender, but it never, never comes! If someone had the courage to cling about those iron necks of theirs and pray them with tears and kisses, to be kind, they believe in their secret hearts that they could; but the waters of tenderness are dried up in them, or lost, as are forgottenand buried fountains in the great Desert, doomed never to spring to the light in crystal radiance and cool a thirsty traveler’s lip. What tragic agonies are theirs, who can even see their dear ones die, unreconciled and unforgiven.... Ah! pity them, the obdurate of heart!
As for the Prodigal, who had tramped it into Market Drowsing, and bribed the under-ostler at the Saracen’s Head Inn with sixpence to let him sleep in the hayloft appertaining to that hostelry after a supper of bread-and-cheese and ale, he had had a clinching interview with the tall Sergeant of Lancers at the Recruiting Office, before that stately functionary’s palate had lost the flavor of his post-breakfast quart of beer.
Josh chose the Hundredth Lancers for the reason that he liked horses; and because the Sergeant, whom he hugely admired, belonged to that dashing Light Cavalry regiment. Also because there were knights in plate-armor tilting with lances in the half-obliterated fourteenth-century frescoes that rainy weather brought out in ghostly blotches through the conscientious Protestant whitewash of Market Drowsing Parish Church; and he had, from early boyhood, achieved patience throughout the Vicar’s hydra-headed sermons, by imagining how he, Josh Horrotian, would wield such a weapon, bestriding just such another steed as Sir Simon Flanderby’s war-horse with the steel spiked nose-piece and breast-piece, the wide embroidered rein, and the emblazoned, parti-colored housing sweeping the ground like a lady’s train....
The Railway had not yet reached Dullingstoke. But the Sergeant, with his plentifully-be-ribboned captives, six other youths of Josh’s own age, had marched into the town—with frequent washings-out of thirsty throats with pots of beer upon the way—and had whisked them off by the “Wonder” coach for Spurham before to Sarah Horrotian of The Upper Clays Farm came the news that her only son had joined in his lot with the shedders of blood.
Erelong, to that hopeful recruit, learning the goose-step at Spurham Baracks with the other raw-material under process of licking into shape, arrived a goodly chest containing comfortable provender of home-cured bacon, home-madecheese and butter, a stone bottle of The Upper Clays home-brewed ale, and a meat-pie with a crust of almost shell-proof consistency. In conjunction with a sulphurous tract, a bottle of horehound balsam for coughs, and a Bible containing a five-pound note pinned within a half-sheet of dingy notepaper, inscribed in the widow’s stiff laborious handwriting: “For my son. From his affectionate Mother. S. Horrotian.”
Do you know stern Sarah a little better now? Do you comprehend the craving need of strong excitement, the powerfully-dramatic bent that found a relieving outlet in the provocation of those passionate scenes that left the simpler and less complex nature of her offspring suffering and unstrung?
He was the gainer, she the loser, by that breach of theirs. Her terrible voice, her freezing glare would never overawe his soul and paralyze his tongue again. He would always have an answer for her thenceforth; her quelling days were over....
For to Josh, who had been bred in the belief that the word of Sarah was as little to be disputed as the Word between the black stamped-leather covers of the great Family Bible on the best parlor side-table, had come the revelation that his mother was merely a woman after all. She had always promised him that he would be blasted by a lightning-stroke from Heaven did he presume to defy her awful mandates and dispute her sovereign will. He had done both these things, and what is more, had done them on a Sunday, and the effect upon the weather had been absolutelynil. One of the balmiest, rosiest, and brightest of summer evenings he could recall had smiled upon the exile’s tramp into Market Drowsing. He had thrown his curly red head back, and squared his strong shoulders as he went, looking up at the pale shining splendor of the evening star....
Full revelation of her loss of power to sway the imagination of her son did not come to Sarah Horrotian until two years later, when Josh, a full-blown trooper in Her Majesty’s Hundredth Regiment of Lancers, came home, upon her written invitation, to spend a furlough at The Upper Clays.
He had acquired a power of smart repartee, a militarysangfroid which Sarah found disconcerting.... His way of smiling as he pulled at a recently-acquired red whisker betokened self-consciousness and vanity, that damning sin.... It was in vain she urged him to confess himself a worm, and no man....
“That’s your opinion o’ your son, maybe!...” Josh played with the hirsute ornament, which his mother secretly admired, in the dandified way she abhorred, adding; “But I should call my father’s son a decent sort o’ beggar, taking him all round!”
“Pride goeth before a fall,” said Sarah, in her deep chest-notes of warning, “and the pit is digged deep for the feet of the vainglorious.”
“Ay, ay!” assented the soldier. “Perhaps I be vainglorious, a bit. But you have so poor an opinion o’ me, mother, that I’m driven to have a better o’ myself than I should in ordinary. Try praising me, if you want me to run myself down!”
Sarah was silenced. She shut up her mouth like a trap, and went about her work in rigid dumbness, while the voice of her soul cried out in bitterness, wrestling with Heaven for the soul of her son.
Whom to praise, whom to take pride in, whom to favor and indulge were to damn to all eternity, according to the Book from which some souls draw milk and honey, and others corroding verjuice and bitterest gall.