CHAPTER IIITHE MAKING OF A CRIMINAL
The philosophy of Lynton Hora had for once given way under the stress of a deep emotion. There could be no doubt about that, and no doubt either that the emotion which had strained the philosophy to breaking point was the emotion of hate.
Never before had Guy seen him so wrought upon. Often he had regretted that the man he called father should have been of so calm a temperament—regretted even while he admired. Himself of an impulsive, even ardent nature, he had longed to express his feelings to the one being who had been his sole companion from infancy, who had treated him with unfailing and unvarying kindness, but who chilled, with what appeared to be temperamental coldness, any expression of affection.
Guy was thrilled with the discovery that a deep sea of passion underlay Hora's cold exterior. If Hora hated, of necessity he must love.
He must love him, Guy Hora, his son. Did not every action in his life show it?
The thought awakened Guy's memory actively. His earliest memories were of the Commandatore. He had no knowledge of a mother, or but shadowy recollections, and those might merely be the offspring of his own imagination. Lynton Hora had been father and mother both. Guy could recall Hora's face bending over hisbed in the days of his babyhood. He had one vivid recollection of being parted from his father when he himself was about seven years old. He had been left in the charge of some dark-haired, swarthy-faced people, and they had neglected him—had beaten him. How he had cried for his father, and when his father had returned, he remembered running to him and sobbing out his tale of misery. He remembered how Hora had told him that men never cried when they were hurt, and that he, stricken with shame, had answered that it was not the beating but the loneliness which had brought the tears to his eyes.
Hora had smiled and had left him alone for a few minutes. He had smiled still more when he had returned. Guy remembered seeing the man who had beaten him later that same day with a bruised face and an arm hanging helpless in a sling from his neck.
But that was not his most vivid memory of Hora's return. Chiefly it was a conversation that took place when Hora had taken the boy's hand and led him up into the mountains. Often the boy had recalled the words which had been spoken to him. He could never see a pine tree without their being fresh spoken to his ear, for they had been uttered beneath the pine woods, on the edge of a translucent mountain lake, which mirrored the snowy peaks above it so perfectly that it seemed strange that the pebbles at the bottom could not be counted.
Hora had taken the boy's tears as his text.
"Women weep when they are hurt," he said. "Men strike back. Remember that, Guy; remember too that if you cannot strike with the arm, there are other ways of driving the blow home."
Though Guy had understood the meaning of Hora's words but dimly then, he had remembered them, and later he understood. Hora had often given him practical illustration of his precepts. He never forgot an injury or a slight, and Guy was often allowed to see how Hora avenged either. Memory has no chronological exactitude, and as Guy allowed his thoughts to drift, an instance occurred to him which had happened some years later. They had been travelling in France together and had been hurrying on to Italy. The one other traveller in the same compartment had been a blusterous Englishman of the most unpleasantly self-assertive type. Hora had attempted to engage him in conversation and had met with a surly repulse. When the frontier was reached, the assertive person was asleep. Hora had dexterously possessed himself of the man's watch and when the custom's official made his appearance had transferred, with equal dexterity, the watch to his pocket, leaving a portion of the chain visible. When awakened, the Englishman discovered his loss almost immediately. The official was before him asking him in a language he did not comprehend, whether he had any dutiable articles to declare. The visible piece of chain caught the eye of the excited passenger. He made a grab at the presumed thief. The official, thinking he was being attacked by a madman, made a wild dive for the door and reached the platform. The Englishman followed in pursuit and captured his man. There was a wild melée, from which the victim did not emerge victorious. When the train moved on, Hora was gratified by seeing their late companion ineffectually struggling in the grasp of half-a-dozen stalwart carabinieri.
Guy was fifteen years old when this event had happened, and long before then he had imbibed from his father ideas of morality which were directly at variance with those generally accepted. Guy could never remember a time when Hora had bade him restrain any desire. How well he recalled a day, he could not have been more than six, when they had passed a shop wherein a basket of golden oranges were displayed. "Buy me one," he had cried. Hora had stopped. There was no one in the shop. "I'll teach you a new game," he said. "Go and fetch a couple, Guy. Mind you choose the best," he said.
Guy had obeyed and Hora had praised him. As Guy ate the oranges he thought the game the best he had ever heard of. Next day they had passed the shop and Guy was about to repeat the foray, but Hora had restrained him.
"Look, Guy," he said. "There is somebody there now; when you want oranges or anything else without paying you must be quite sure there is no one about, or you will lose the game."
Guy remembered the precept and acted upon it. It was a delightful new game for anyone to play, if you were only clever enough to play it properly. He used to beg Hora to take him out for a day's stealing, and sometimes, as a reward for perseverance in his studies, Hora would accede to the boy's request. He had no notion that he was doing anything wrong, though he had been taught that there were things he must not do. He knew that he must not tell his father a lie; he knew too that he was to be silent when bidden.
Of course a time had eventually arrived when he hadbecome conscious that there was some lack of harmony between the life he and his father led and the lives of those upon whom they preyed. Hora had taken the boy to see a big penal establishment and his curiosity had been stirred as to the reason of this gathering of men in mud-coloured garb, marked all over with broad arrows. "Why are they all dressed alike? Why do their masters carry guns?" he asked.
Hora had silenced him with a sign at the time, but later, when they were alone, he had explained.
"They are all men who have been trying to play the game of stealing and have lost," he said. "If you were to get caught, you would be taken away and shut up at night in a cell all alone, and dressed in ugly clothes, and when you went out men with guns would be set to watch you so that they should shoot you if you tried to run away."
"Have you ever been caught, father?" Guy asked.
Hora had never replied to that question. His face had grown so dark that Guy had forborne to press for an answer, and the memory of the singular expression which had passed over his countenance had been sufficient to prevent Guy ever repeating the enquiry.
After the visit to the convict establishment, Guy had been timorous at playing his new game, but Hora had chaffed him, advised him, stood beside him, protected him, until he became exceedingly dexterous in a variety of forms of petty larceny. He was never allowed at this time to mix with other boys. Hora had him always under his own eye, educating him according to a system which was a fair sample of the average boy's education as regards matter, but differing vastly from the average boy'seducation as regards the application of the knowledge imparted to him.
Cæsar was never to him a mere handbook by which the intricacies of a dead language were revealed, but a wonderful history of a man who played the game of stealing in a great way. Hora made quite clear to the boy's mind that there was only a difference in degree between the stealing of oranges and the stealing of kingdoms, but that if one wanted to steal kingdoms it was just as well to begin early and learn the principles of the art by stealing oranges. He explained, too, that the world looked with very different eyes upon the theft of a crown and the theft of an orange or an apple. The man who annexed an empire was an emperor whom men acclaimed and set on a throne in a garb of purple, while the man who stole a loaf of bread to assuage his hunger was a petty thief at whom the world hurled opprobrium and thrust into a prison, garbed in mud-coloured clothes and covered over with broad arrows.
Guy began to comprehend what Hora intended him to comprehend, that there was something mean about petty theft, and he no longer found pleasure in his game, but turned instead to the weaving of romances of magnificent depredations.
Even the fiction which was supplied by Hora for the boy's amusement was insidiously utilised for the inculcation of the same perverted morality. With Robinson Crusoe, for instance, it was easy for a man of Hora's equipment to make fun of Crusoe's naïve dependence upon Providence and his exhibition of piety in moments of stress. Hora pointed out that Crusoe's prayers were mere expression of the terror ofan uneducated mind when confronted with personal danger—of a mind which had been trained in youth to rely upon supernatural agencies for relief and comfort. He pointed out that Crusoe really secured his own safety through the exercise of his own constructive and observatory powers, and through no other agency.
As Guy grew older, Hora sedulously built upon the foundation of disbelief which he laid down as the basis of the boy's education. Guy was taught that religion was merely the means by which a priestarchy levied toll upon the body corporate by playing upon inherited superstitions—while history supplied him with plenty of illustrations. History supplied him, too, with plenty of examples to point the arguments with which he supported what was in effect a complete criminal philosophy. Guy was not taught only that atheism was the hope of humanity. Hora had read much of Nietzsche, and he skilfully adopted the Nietzschean philosophy to his purpose. A particular appeal to Guy's mind was to be found in Hora's definition of virtue, as a thirst for danger and courage for the forbidden. As translated by Hora, both in precept and in practice, the highest virtue was to be found in the breaking of laws. He imbibed the doctrines with avidity, for Hora had a persuasive tongue. He learned at the same time to keep them to himself, for, as Hora explained, if sheep knew as much as men, men would have no mutton.
Until eighteen, Guy's education progressed under his father's tuition, and then, feeling sure of him, Hora thought it time to launch him on the world. Guy went to Oxbridge to make acquaintance with his fellows, to survey the flock of sheep which were to supply him withmutton in the future. The time then passed pleasantly enough, and plenty of active exercise supplied him with a vent for his energies. He did not shear any of the sheep, for Hora had bidden him stay his hand. A blameless university career would, he knew, be of great value in the future.
When Guy came down from the University it was with the reputation of being one of its wildest spirits. Great things were predicted of him. Others might excel him in individual efforts in the field and the schools, but none could excel him in fearlessness of demeanour. Besides, Hora's education had supplied him with a serene belief in himself, which had been communicated to those with whom he came in contact. He had been the leader of a set, the model for the freshman, the autocrat of his time. Like most autocrats, he cherished a profound contempt for those who bowed down before him. He was to them as his father was to him, something so much greater than they that their tribute became merely a thing of no account. He understood why his father had no affection for him. How could anyone love the thing beneath; the moth could love the star, but the star could not love the moth—and——
Guy awoke from the reverie into which he had been betrayed by his father's emotion on hearing the name of Captain Marven mentioned. He was quite alone. Myra had left the room after vainly trying to engage his attention. His hand unconsciously sought his pocket, and, when he drew it out, he held in his palm the snuff-box he had reserved for himself from the booty he had brought home on the previous night. He gazed earnestly at the miniature set in the lid.
"So Captain Marven is father's enemy," he muttered, "and this—this must be a portrait of Captain Marven's daughter."
His face grew troubled. His brow puckered. He thrust the box back into his pocket and rose impatiently from his seat.
"Bah!" he said, "what says the Commandatore? Man is trained for war, and woman for the relaxation of the warrior; all else is folly."