Thomas Henry Titt
Adelaide Phillpotts
In the South West of London stands a cathedral, which, from outside, looks like a child’s castle of bricks. But when you go inside you see nothing at first but a large emptiness—a ceiling somewhere up in the clouds supported by huge marble columns. There is always a smell of incense in the air, and there is a little painted figure before which, night and day, burn three rows of candles. Sometimes, on Saints’ Days, other rows of candles are lighted before other painted figures—St. Andrew, St. Patrick, St. George—making centres of bright light in the dimness of the great interior.
Near this cathedral are blocks of tenement buildings where families dwell, one on top of the other, like books in a bookcase. These buildings are full of children: boys and girls and babies.
On the top floor of one of these blocks lived Thomas Henry Titt, aged twelve. Thomas Henry’s father kept a shop round the corner where you saw sausages and onions frying in the window. His mother was dead. He had an elder sister who mended his clothes and helped their father in the shop. Thomas was knownas Tom-Tit; and he looked rather like a bird, for he had thin arms and legs, sharp little eyes, a crest of bright hair, and a pointed nose.
Like every imaginative child, Tom-Tit had a secret: a passion for the sea, which he had never seen. His ocean was in his mind’s eye, and he hoped as no one ever hoped before that one day he might behold the reality of his dream. In the darkness of night Tom-Tit, alone in his attic, lying awake on his mattress, gazed out upon a heaving cornflower-blue coloured ocean—as blue as the flowers which the woman sold at the end of his street. And this ocean was full of shining fishes. There was no land in sight—ever.
Thomas Henry Titt loved the candles that burned before the painted figure in the cathedral. In the winter, when he was small, he had often held his little frozen hands to the warmth of them, when nobody was looking. But as he grew older the candles began to have for him a deeper significance. During evening service he would creep into a corner by one of the pillars, listening to the organ and watching the kneeling people in the distance near the shining altar. Then, when the music stopped and the people were gone, he would steal out and patter along to the rows of candles. There his heart would light up, even as they, and he would thrill with a strange, unaccountable happiness.
Gradually Tom-Tit began to connect these candles with his desire for the sea. The two facts became one in his mind. It was as if, by the light of the former, he could see the blue waves of the other.
Underneath the rows of burning candles was a rack full of new ones. Tom often saw people drop a coin into a box, take one, fix it upon a spike among the rest, and light it. And a longing overcame him to possess for his own one of these new candles. Perhaps, at the bottom of his mind, was the idea that if he tookit home and lighted it, it would bring him nearer to his ultimate ambition—to see the sea. He determined to realise his desire.
Then came a winter day when Tom-Tit’s head ached, shivers ran up and down his spine, and he felt very ill. Therefore his sister bade him stay in bed, and he did so until she had left the house with her father. But then, despite his fever, the craving to possess that candle overcame obedience. So, gripping a penny, he rose, staggered downstairs, and out into the road. The cold air cooled his body and numbed his pains. He slipped unnoticed into the cathedral and leaned for a moment against the wall, for his head was swimming and he could not see. Then he recovered, and his eyes sparkled as he beheld the candles flickering like golden flowers before the wooden figure at the end of the aisle. The surrounding air was a golden haze. The smell of incense was sweet.
He tottered to the box of new candles, dropped in his penny, and took one. Then he dragged himself home, feeling worse and worse at every step, but gloriously glad within, because of the candle in his pocket.
All day he lay on his bed, too ill to sit up, nursing his treasure. “I shall be well to-night,” he thought, “and when it’s dark I’ll light it.”
In the evening his father and sister returned, found him in a state of high fever, and sent for the doctor. He, when he saw Tom-Tit, said that he would come back in the morning and remove him to the hospital if he were not better.
He gave Tom a sleeping draught before he left.
When his father and sister had gone to bed, Thomas Henry, feeling drowsy and less hurt with pain, pulled out his candle half melted already by the heat of his hands, lit it, and set it on a chair by his side. Then he lay gazing at it, until the whole world was but a golden flame with a blue root.
Then a wonderful thing happened. He did not see the candle any more. His first idea was that the wind must have blown it out, for a great wind was blowing. Where could he be? He opened his eyes, which must have been closed, and lo! he was in a little wooden boat on a cornflower-blue sea! The boat was rocking from side to side like the baby’s cradle on the floor below—a mechanical rock, rock, rock, rock, from side to side. He scooped up a handful of the sea, and, just as he had expected, it was bright blue. He could see blue shining fishes swimming round the boat, so he caught them in his fingers where they wriggled about and made blue reflections until he threw them back again into the blue water.
And all the time, though he could not see it, the candle was burning at his side—burning lower, and lower, and lower.
From horizon to horizon the cobalt ocean stretched around him—not a speck of land anywhere. He was perfectly happy there staring down through the blue fathoms and feeling the wind blow. He had never been so happy in his life before.
Then the candle went out.
In the morning they found a little pool of grease on the chair—and Tom-Tit was dead.
But this is not really a sad story, because Thomas Henry did what many thousands of people never do, even though they live to be a hundred and three—he realised his ambition. He saw the sea. And he was not disillusioned; for the sea that he saw was just as beautiful as the sea which he imagined: the reality matched the dream.