Youma. The story of a West-Indian slave

Book I Chapter

I NO one having once seen this garden, ever could forget it. The walls round it hemmed it like the border to a handkerchief ; God knows how the sun ever reached to the patch of grass in the centre to illumine it like an emerald set in old, stained silver. A pear tree towered at one corner and shed its petals on the thankless street without. In the flower-beds, modern things declined to grow ; the sweet-williams seemed to have come without ever being planted ; poppies sowed themselves as they chose. The affected William Allan Richardson withered away, or its vitals were gnawed out before it reached its prime ; the saffron and lavender sweet peas, laboriously chosen, buried their subtleties in the earth and grew up as the Lord had created them, with healthy, mottled skins ; or else pure white, and susceptible to the smuts and impurities of the air about them.

To the three children playing there, the garden was nothing but a play-ground. Its limitations loomed above its attractions — it was just a place where you could have done almost anything you wanted' but A where, as you were not allowed to do anything, you just fought, and killed things ; buried them, dug them up again, and muddled generally. The attitudes of the three boys were more or less suggestive of their attitudes in after-life. One, the eldest, was, with a stick, dexterously hacking blossoms off those branches of the pear tree within his convenient reach. A newspaper spread beneath the tree, received, and afterwards, when screwed tightly up and buried in the dust-bin, concealed, the traces. The youngest boy, posted by the gate, stood sentinel ; the approach of danger would be signalled by him.

He was always on that side which for the moment held most power ; needless to say, circumstances frequently compelled him to turn traitor. The boy whose age came in between the two, had climbed to where the wall stooped low over the gate, and was hanging over a standard rose which was growing up to it — to get (as he explained) — the smell of it, the way it grew. His father, who to him expressed authority more than any other sentiment, caught sight of him in crossing the yard and commanded him to get off the wall instantaneously. This the boy did, and losing his footing, he jumped rather heavily on the border beneath and his heel clipped the heads off two fine pansies. These he thrust hastily into his pocket whilst, with his hands, he smoothed the imprints of his boots. Not because he was deceitful but because such accidents were ranked as sins and punished accordingly, and not because he was afraid of punishment in a general sense but because he was too sore this particular day, to receive it with his customary indifference.

The bodily punishment inflicted on him for sins contemplated, or suspected, or actually committed, shamed him to the soul, not for himself, but for the person who inflicted it. The strokes which merely marked his flesh, carved — so it seemed to him — notches in the spirit of the other, which eternity could not efface. He endured a good deal, this boy ; forgave much, and forgot nothing. One of three, he came in between, not only in years, for he seemed to be third person through all life ; always wanting to be wanted, never wanted ; always seeming to render completeness incomplete, always to be search ing for the other half of himself which always evaded him. His brothers were dear to him because they were human beings like himself, not because they were his brothers ; he neither claimed, nor owned to, kinship with any living thing which had the power of speech.

He had a certain affinity with a yellow cat which took the sun from his garden and rolled on his seeds, and round whose neck he had with infinite pains tied a bottle, conveying the whole to the \vater-tank. The eyes of the drowning cat and its hideous clawing at life, paralysed him for a moment ; then he nearly drowned himself in a successful effort to save its life, and after he had been fished out and dried and whipped by a leathern belt with a buckle at the end, the cat and he had no secrets from each other. The father, not deliberately cruel, as a man with a keenly mistaken sense of duty, developed its tendency towards cruelty. It was probably because it gave him personal pain to make his boys suffer that he punished them. Anything which hurt him must be whole some and righteous even though it hurt others more.

Suppression, contradiction and frustration were the essential elements in his scheme of training. In his blind adherence to theory, he overlooked the fact that nothing can eradicate development ; suppression can only check its natural growth, with the result that when artificial control is removed, nature re-asserts itself with the added force of long restraint and immaturity becomes over-development. Their mother represented the sunshine in her boy's lives, intermittent, and veiled by her sense of duty to her husband, and her tears were shame-faced and secret. She sat out in the garden amongst the flowers to which her husband ministered and which he picked grudgingly and with excruciating taste for the adornment of her table. She worked at things in gay colours at variance with the shades in her own heart and listened to learned books which he read aloud to her whilst her thoughts played tip-cat with her boys and longed to be a boy amongst them.

If her mind ever escaped so far from her self-control, she must have dreamed the strangest things about those lives unfolding there with the yearly blossoms of the pear tree and the petals of the clematis and roses on the wall. There is nothing in the world so holy, so mysterious or so pathetic as the possibilities of an unlived life. The atmosphere of this garden should have made for greatness ; the peace of it, the simplicity, the natural monotony. It was where the first ideas were conceived, the first sins committed, the first memories engraved. One of them looked back to it in spare moments, contemptuously ; the second with indolent complacence, the last, with heart-searching recollection and unspeak able desire. So each grew up the way that he was going ; each, the same start, the different finish — life an open book to all, and one skimmed the first few chapters and then plunged in at the centre and went backwards the rest of the way ; one tore the covers from it and criticised the binding and one read it through line for line and between each line from the beginning to the end — laughed with it, wept with it, lived it. The first was Valentine, Stuart was the youngest, and Kenyon was the one who came in between.

Chapter II Governesses

came and went in succession. Their reign was short and the reverse of sweet. They worked hard, though ineffectively, and were paid inadequately. Valentine learnt easily and forgot still more easily ; Stuart learnt and retained his knowledge and took equal pleasure in both. Kenyon's capacities had not been tested, for he had never been urged beyond the point of blankly refusing either to learn or to be taught. More corporeal punishment was resorted to and he seemed to thrive on it, though his heart hardened. He had so intense a love running amok in him that it seemed to him strange that no one upon whom to squander it, had ever come his way. His governess repelled his attention, his brothers dis puted his attention to his mother, and upon his father — he told himself — one could lavish nothing but an enforced respect and, in one's silent heart, extravagant vows of vengeance.

Kenyon used to look up to the top of the high wall round the garden. He knew the squalid scene outside it to perfection, yet he always dreamed a landscape to himself and fancied that he would be better there than where he was. Away from the watching of uncom prehending eyes; away from the far nearness — by himself, as well as to himself — then the pretence of having companions to his liking would not be so out of place. Of the two brothers, Stuart was his greater friend because there was more which appealed to him in Valentine. He always distributed himself in this manner. His worship of his mother he hid darkly, although it came occasionally to the light and shamed him. His own ungovernable fits of passion gave him pleasure ; he revelled in the capacity for vice and crime his father hinted at in him, but from his sensitive affections and from his yearning to give and to receive, he shrank in self-abasement.

Living in a world created by himself and holding only himself in a material form, he forgot of what value it was to him, and only realised his misery. He felt so sorry for his mother when she implored him, with the covert tears in her eyes, not to be so wicked. He had no words in which to express that he did not feel wicked — he merely was so — (he was told) God made him : punish God ; a form of logic which failed in everything save a troubled conviction of his father's insight and his own iniquity. The real bad in him was known only to himself and he feared it whilst waiting with a beating heart for the time when he should be able to test its powers to the full. He had the strength of a goodness unsuspected and all the strength of a badness suspected and misconstrued. He would be either a martyr or a murderer and not a success as either.

The days passed monotonously, automatically. They were divided for the most part into the sins discovered and the sins undiscovered. Occasionally of course there were respites, such as when Stuart knocked a piece clean out of his head and it had to be sewn up with a needle like a sickle and thread like thin string. Even then, not all the morbid longing in the world could prevent its healing in the long-run and Stuart dwindled from a hero into a plain boy with an unbecoming scar upon his forehead. Then Kenyon borrowed a ladder and climbed to the top of the garden wall and tried to stand upright, and in the interval, Valentine and Stuart removed the ladder and Kenyon, knowing that detection was inevitable, determined to do something to merit it, and finding himself in an ideal position, riddled the windows of the bathroom with loose stones off the wall.

Afterwards he slid his length down the wall and dropped the remainder, landing with a dislocated bone. He was removed to bed and kept there upon plain fare until the doctor pronounced him able to use his foot again. That was a black day for Kenyon. His solitary confinement had been just to his liking ; two-thirds of it had been spent out of bed, hopping or crawling in considerable agony either to the landing, whence, by listening to the tones heard from the dining-room, he could accurately gauge the tempers of the authorities, or else to the window of his bedroom, from which he exchanged forbidden greeting with his brothers and acted as umpire in the games they were perpetrating in the garden. Also the maid, Sanford, whose life he had threatened and, in a fit of generosity, spared, brought him apples and did his mysterious bidding without asking questions.

Girls played a small part in the lives of these three boys. It is true that the typical little girl of their own age was now and then invited to tea in the garden. She wore a starched blue cotton frock and her hair, virtuously straight, hung down her back. To Kenyon, a girl meant nothing more than the largest form of creature which could be tortured without paying back. His greeting to this girl, when introduced as a guest at his birthday party, would be in this manner. " What do you want ? " " I've come to play with you." " Oh, have you — well, then, you can just go back where you've come from ; you're not wanted here. Girls aren't any use for anything — you haven't ever seen a cat killed." The girl shamefacedly admits the truth of this, and, obedient to a primary instinct of self-preservation, replies to the next question in the affirmative.

" Would you like to see me hit that cat on the head with a brick? Well, you can't, because I can't find a brick, but I'll show you a cat we killed last week " (taking up a spade) " if there's any of it left — they rot in the heat." Yet his justice towards a sex which he regarded as a wholesale infringement, was always tempered by mercy. Sometimes Kenyon fancied that he saw things ; people and things he never could have seen — places dearly familiar to his mind but which his feet had never trod. Sometimes in a moment of evil impetu osity, he painted these scenes in vivid word pictures to his brothers ; every detail, and sometimes it was so easy to make himself the hero — to draw on his imagination so that he did feats of colossal strength and bravery with an ease and modesty which surprised even himself.

One of these worked so upon his mind in his early days that concealment became well nigh impossible and Valentine and Stuart were made sharers in it. An old farmhouse, overgrown with ivy, standing in a field surrounded by willow trees and itself bordered by them. The neighing of horses, grunting of pigs and the occasional fierce bark of a dog came from a little distance. Kenyon had been there. Precisely when and in what manner, he preferred to keep a secret. His intent had been to reach a certain hedge beyond which was a field of cowslips, and he had crossed the brook, recking nothing of his danger, and had made for the hedge in question. The dark had been peculiarly dense — there was no moon ; the shadows of the trees made the water extra deep — fish splashed there : the plank was barely four inches wide, and rotten, yet he had crossed it in safety.

The gate leading into the farmyard was heavy to push open and it swung back again with a crash after you opened it. He had scarcely set foot in the slosh which the rain had made of the in-trodden hay, when a gigantic dog had rushed at him out of the darkness. It was a St Bernard dog with four white feet ; it had fallen on him savagely — he had had no time, excepting for self defence : he had met the dog squarely, closed his hands about its massive throat, and strangled it. It had been a grim fight and when it was over, he had left it lying there, stiff, cold and horrible, and had come away quickly and silently, for fear of detection. He brought no cowslips back with him, nor any other trophy, but if they did not believe him, he would show them the very spot, just as he had described it (minus the corpse of the dead dog, which would have been removed) . . . some other time.

Such was the story which Valentine, in a fit of virtuous disapproval, told to his father. Kenyon was sent for. His father was seated at his writing-table ; he had fixed his pincenez on his nose to give full vent, outwardly, to the severity which permeated him within. Kenyon closed the door behind him, a characteristic mastery over himself causing him to deliberately make his imprisonment more complete. Gradually approaching the abhorred presence, he only thought how horribly the flesh fell in trenches over the mouth ; how weak that would be, stripped of its tyranny. " Come here, sir." " I am here." " Don't answer me. What do you mean by telling such lies to your brothers ? " Silence from Kenyon. " Do you hear me ? " Still no answer, only a nod from Kenyon. " Do you hear me, sir ? " " Yes, but you told me not to answer you.

His father stretched out his hand for the ruler on his desk and brought it down on the boy's knuckles. " What book did you get that nonsense out of? " Kenyon was watching the colours changing on his hand. " I didn't get it out of any book," he said, " I got it out of my head — it's true." " Do you know where liars go ? " " Hell." " Yes — do you want to go there ? " Don't care twopence." " You want whipping, sir — perhaps that will teach you to tell the truth. Go to your room. Stay there till after supper — I shall come up to you." The boy turned and left the room. Mounting the stairs three at a time (which his legs were scarcely long enough to compass), he reached the door of his room and shoved it to behind him. He was savage with himself for his mismanagement. It never occurred to him actively to resent his brother's treachery— that was natural — a foregone conclusion, if one had only been smart enough to look ahead — but he might have manœuvred more cleverly— he might have left out about the dog.

He could not say if that were possible, since — to admit the truth to himself— that had never really happened, but the rest ! How could he prove any of it since he could not prove it all ? why should he have to prove — the truth — was it not sufficient to itself? In the meantime, the real and unreal were merged in immediate actualities : he might have waited until after supper ! Earlier punishment had also taken the form of fasting, and he was hungry. He heard the plates clanking as the maid carried them into the dining-room. Then the door was closed and the smell of the cooking grew fainter. Half-an-hour later, his father came into the room. " I shall give you another chance," he said " I don't want to whip you." Kenyon bit his lip — he did not want to be whipped. " Admit," said his father, " that you told a lot of lies, and I won't whip you this time."

" I can't," said Kenyon, " it isn't true." " Why are you so obstinate ? — why do you give me such a lot of trouble? — you make me appear cruel whereas I am only trying to help you by making you do what is right. Admit that there is no such place as the place you spoke of to your brothers." " But there is." . " Still ? " " Yes." " How do you get to it ? — take me there." " I can't. I don't know where it is — but you keep straight along till you come to a long hill and it's on the top of the hill, over a stile, on the left-hand side." " The left-hand side of what — what ro?d ? " " I don't know where the road is, but it's not near here." " Then how could you go there, — you have scarcely ever been out of this house alone. It is very dangerous for a boy who isn't clever and can't work a scheme out properly, to invent such stories, because he traps him self.

Shall I tell you how I know that this whole story is a fabrication ? Because it would be impossible for a boy of your size to kill a large dog by strangling it : besides, if there were a word of truth in what you say, the police would have been after you for damaging other people's property." " I never killed any dog" said Kenyon. " I said that to amuse them. But the place is true." " How is it, then, that if you went there once, you can't go again and take me there?" " Because I can't remember when I went, it's a long time ago." " I was waiting to see how long you would keep this up. You know perfectly well that you have never been further than the village, by yourself, in your whole life." " I know. Well, then, I never went to the place, but it's there, all the same." " That is a prevarication — how could you tell that there is such a place, if you have never been there — and I can prove that you've never been there."

" People know that there's such a place as Heaven though they've never been there." " I am tired of your nonsense. Undress. I shall be obliged to flog you." Kenyon undressed. His father thrashed him and then, turning out the gas, left him, as he said, to his conscience. This did not ache half so much as his bruised back. He lay across his bed a few minutes, marvelling at the strange intangibility of God and unsensitiveness of parents. Then he arose, lit the gas, unearthed from the pocket of his coat a piece of paper and a pencil stump and drew a trembling outline of a low-roofed, rambling house, a brook crossed by a plank and lined by trees. A gate, a hedge. Sheds. He did it slowly, drawing the while upon his memory. Then he took out a little key, opened an ungainly wooden box with a rose painted upon it, and stored the print away there.

When he had feasted his eyes upon the treasures already ensconced there — the teeth of un familiar animals, a photograph of his mother before he had ever seen her, a stoneless ring, the history of his own life, written by himself — he locked the box again, hid the key, got into bed, kicked all the bed-clothes off it, deliberately forgot his prayers, and composed him self for slumber. It was almost an hour later that his mother crept into his room with a candlestick in one hand and a plate in the other, with a piece of rice pudding and a raspberry tart upon it. She put the candle down upon the table and laid her cheek, all warm with tears, against his own. " My darling," she sobbed, " what is to be done ? — here, I can't stay — you must eat this. I can't tell you how unhappy 1 am — hush, don't speak — I ought to go."

It was so wonderful, so terrifying to have a mother who loved one and came to tell one so in what seemed like the middle of the night, that Kenyon never made any attempt to respond to her, excepting with his heart. "Mother," he whispered, "honestly, I didn't tell any, except about the dog — honestly." " Hush, don't ! God bless you ! " She slipped her arm round him and pressed him to her; then picked up the candle and slipped quietly out of the room. Kenyon consumed that tart many distinct times, in his mind. Materially he would have none of it. It was true that he had lied about the dog. He had thought it was a dog. But it had all been so vague that he should have kept it to himself. Chastisement, self-administered, was necessary. The tart remained, tantalisingly round, on the chair by his bedside.

At last, when the desire became overwhelming, there was nothing for it but to seize the tart with one hand ; with the other, to dash the window up and to pitch the tart out of it, away over the wall, into the street beyond. This done, Kenyon returned, licked the tips of his fingers, said his prayers and went to sleep.

Chapter III Oh

the ugly little town ; stone-walled, cobbledstoned, narrow of street and narrrower of mind, what could it foster, save dreams? The life, with its examples of misunderstanding, mistrust, severity — what could it inspire save the ambition to be free of it? The daily walk — so far and no further, with a governess whose feet reluctantly followed her charges, but whose mind was far away in her own sad little dreams ; what could they teach, save a smouldering passion to break from the narrow confines and view the world at large ? On Sundays, there was the dreaded church-going. The unintelligible chapter to be learnt beforehand, the catechism afterwards, to see how deeply its lessons had been engraved upon the heart. Words could not have described Kenyon's abhorrence of this ceremony. Its superficial piety conveyed itself to his instinct where his mind could not have argued it — its colourless disinterest !

The house of God ! where He provided such poor entertainment for those who called upon Him ! The sermon was the saving point. Then, at least, he could take the hasp off his mind and let it wander at will. Seated where his father's glance fell directly on his face, he could assume a listening attitude and an expression of absorbed devotion, whilst mentally he bowed himself into the presence of his dreams. Such dreams ! What power ! What fame ! To feel and understand the pulse of the world — to rule it by sympathy. That was the prevailing ambition. To be loved — yet generally, only, not individually — to remain undiscovered, influencing thousands. His exact profession, he had not definitely determined. It alternated with the seasons. As a detective, he must prevent designs on life ; as a burglar, he must risk his own life — as an engine driver, the lives of others ; a hangman takes lives, and a grave-digger disposes of them when taken.

All these were naturally tempting. To take life appeared to him to be one of the greatest claims to it a man could offer. The future of the three was, at this period, utterly indefinite. None of them had as yet developed any marked tendency. Valentine might do anything and would, more probably, do nothing — Stuart had the ponderous caution, the power of inconsistently logical deduction which appears to peculiarly fit a man for the law. A certain avarice added to it, argued that he might be successful. They knew little of the stock from which they sprang. Their father had fanned to flame the only spark of individuality in his character when he had married the woman who afterwards became their mother. Something in her disinterested gaiety — the simplicity of her beliefs and the unquestioning faith of her nature had, like sun, illumined the dust of his and had brought him as near to love as its barrenness would permit.

The boys did not know their near relations. At Christmas they exchanged cards with a crowd of cousins whose Christian names they knew only collectively : their grandparents were dead — their E mother's only brother, dead : their father's two married sisters and a brother, living abroad. Something in their remoteness aroused Kenyon's curiosity. His loneliness caused him to have a lingering suspicion that from near kin, kinship might be discovered. He hankered after knowing them ; that possibility seeming so distant, he questioned his father as to his relatives. His father informed him that the present state of aloofness was deliberate — not accidental. Family disagreements had caused the two branches to separate and spread their roots in totally different directions and diverse manners. An appeal to his mother, elicited the fact that there had been a tragedy, far back in his father's family.

Renewed pressure drew forth an admission that the skeleton in the cupboard was a great-grandfather, long since buried and forgotten. It could be nothing to him (they said) that long ago, his father's father's father had had a life and had misused it. Still, Kenyon wondered. Nothing drew him, like tragedy, or failure. Mystery, he decided, was the breath of life, and he straightway thanked God for having endowed his family with a mystery and him with a researchful curiosity which would not leave it long unsolved. His nature, naturally reverent, had been merely perverted, not stifled, by its training. A profound conviction of the existence of a Deity had taken the form of a suspicion. Already, at the immature age when life, to a boy, should be nothing but a play ground, he chose to regard it as a game in which most of the players were to be losers and the part he meant to play was that of frustrating God's moves.

He fancied that his Creator thought no less of him for his defensive attitude — he thought they understood each other ; they would both play the game squarely, and after that, neither would grudge the other victory. It was at about this period, that things began to happen. The first notes of the Opening Chorus were struck now. The curtain went up slowly on the Drama of his life. Tragedy, comedy, farce — it mattered little — it was his.

Chapter IV Yes

— things were beginning to happen now. It was where, in a book, you would begin to read. You always skipped the description of the home and its surroundings. The old doctor met Kenyon in the street, slapped him on the back and told him he was growing up. Not an impressive observation, but it counted with Kenyon. Ten years later, when the name was mentioned, he would have told you that when he was thirteen years of age, the old doctor had stopped him in the street and told him that he was growing up. The governess was away upon her holiday. The boys' father wrote and told her that she might regard it as a permanency. The boys had learnt nothing from her ; they were getting old enough to begin and take education seriously. No one stopped to think what this sudden lack of employment might mean to the homeless little teacher — no one, save Kenyon, who wrote her a long, consolatory letter to which he never received an answer.