The Journey's End

by J. Storer Clouston

 

THE JOURNEY'S END

I.

ON all the coasts of all the oceans there is now and then cast up some long-drifting, storm-tossed waif. Sometimes he has come from half the world away; and once the land is reached, little wonder he is often content, poor soul, to call his drifting done and rest like a broken spar on the beach where he is stranded.

There is a certain one of these who sits day by day on an island links, his back against a rough stone wall, his dark eyes looking absently over the sandy shore and the empty North Atlantic. Round and round the links his herd of cattle munch their deliberate way, now and then a barking dog worries back a straggler, at their regular hours blue flights of rock pigeons throw swift shadows on the turf, the song of the ocean never ceases, and here in this high latitude Paul has come to dream.

If you travel by train on a certain East London line and look out of the window between the frequent stations, you will see the country he used to live in. It is a land of dingy brick ranged into short, straight streets, some narrow, others little more than slits between the houses. The life of this country has often been told: the work and the meals, and the loves and the hates; but poor Paul had no share even in this. He was an alien in thought and in tongue—a poor foreigner by the first glance at him. His features were the features of the ancient people of the East, his native speech a dialect of the Danube. A Hungarian Jew, a cripple, and a dreamer, he simply existed. Far back, he could remember something of a different land, but it was always a land of causeways and chimneys. He had been brought, to London a little crippled boy; he was now a cripple of twenty. He once had parents; he had now for long been alone in the world. Sometimes he was starving and sometimes he was only hungry. That was his biography.

For all his wild black eyes and unkempt hair, he was a gentle, harmless creature. When he could find work and earned a few shillings a week, he lived under a roof, in a little evil-smelling den; when work failed him he drifted out into the streets, and sometimes slept in night shelters and sometimes on doorsteps, and sometimes, when he was hungrier than usual, he never slept at all, but watched the day break and the man come round to put out the lamps and the occasional policemen pass. The few people he spoke to never heard him complain. He had the fatalism of the East: his life was ordained so, and God was all-powerful. Besides, his mind was filled with a strange chaos of dreamings and vague wonderings. Very little things would give him a quiet, indescribable pleasure, that lasted for hours and sometimes came back and back and whispered to him pleasantly. Sitting on a doorstep in the sunshine resting his maimed legs with his crooked stick beside him, the warm glow all down his back and the bright pavement with its sharp shadows and even the hot, stifling smell of the streets, cheered him like friendly words.

“They are warm, they are bright; they touch me kindly. Yes—yes,” he used to say.

He wandered little, but now and then he would come to a patch of green enclosure with a genial tree looking over the railings, and there he would seek a step and sit down to dream. The tree would nod and shake its leaves and rustle an air, and away went Paul's fancy dancing quietly to the tune of it.

“They are green, they are green,” ran the thoughts. “They are gentle, and only make a little soft sound. The horses and the people tread heavily, but the leaves, they dance upon air.”

Occasionally he saw through an alley end the masts and spars of ships and a glimpse of shining river, with a great brown sail or a smoking funnel passing swiftly by. They would make him dream vaguely of other things, but pleasant things too.

“They pass quickly and smoothly out of the houses, away from the people—somewhere. Yes—yes, somewhere is better than this!”

He shrank from going near the water's edge, because there were wharves there and bustling men, who eyed the ragged cripple sharply and asked him his business. But fortunately for Paul a very little taste served to make a great dream banquet.

These were the satisfactions he got from musing: the penalties were heavy as the rumbling drays that shook the little dens he lived in. In his childhood they were bitter but vague; amorphous sensations of chagrin and inward pain. Sometimes it was hunger and sometimes cold and sometimes hard words and sometimes physical pains that he lamented. Gradually, as the years passed, he saw a common cause for all—a devil directing his enemies. He was poor, and that one word summed up the evils of the world.

He stood without even that bond that ties the poor together. He was so silent and so alien in everything that goes to make up a human being, that he never, in all the years he lived in London, put one foot across the line that divided him sharply from the people in the same house, the folk of the same street. “It is ordered so,” he thought; “something is between—I cannot pass. They do not think the same, they do not understand. It must be thus, yes—yes. But it is very hard!”

When he had no money he simply suffered in silence, and not one soul seemed to heed his trouble. Ignorant, unskilled, and unpractical, the work he could do was such as overflowed the market. The short-lived jobs only brought him in a week what the strong labourer next door would have deemed scant payment for a day.

“There is nothing for the poor,” he said to himself, and looked out of his wide eyes into a muddled world of visions.

“Here in this high latitude Paul has come to dream.”

He was simple as a child, but this land of brick was not the place for children. Only once or twice by a rare happiness he had a glimpse beyond it. Out of the attic window of one room where he lived for a year, he was looking on a Sunday evening. The shroud of smoke that overhangs London through the working week had lifted for the day of rest, and through a cleft between the tiles and chimneys there arose far away to the south the tops of low wooded hills crowned with two high towers and a gleaming roof. It was only the Crystal Palace and the villaed Surrey uplands, but to Paul it seemed like a vision of a better star. He often looked for it again, and now and then at long intervals the smoke would drift aside and towers and sparkling roof and rough hill-crest come out to delight him, and then disappear so utterly that he began to think there was something miraculous in the vision. When work again failed him and he had to leave his attic haven and wander the endless streets, he lost it for ever, and it seemed like the death of a friend.

“It is gone,” said the thoughts. “It was too beautiful for poor Paul.”

Then there came a very bad season for him, when he had to try and sleep where he could find an unmolested corner, and muse with not a morsel of food inside him. His dreams grew feverish and bitter: it seemed to him that this London was like a gigantic millstone, whirring round at an immense velocity and hurling him dizzy on the pavement when he so much as touched its hard and spinning edge. It put a fine point on tempered steel, but only hurt poor Paul.

He lay crumpled up on a doorstep one bright Sunday morning, so empty and wearied that even his quiet, inherited fatalism was tried, when his inspiration came to him. Two relaxed labourers were lounging close beside him, and one read aloud from a paper anecdotes and scraps of various information. Suddenly Paul caught the words: “In the Windy Islands they are kind to poor people.”

The man went on to read of other things, but those words ran like a song in Paul's whirling head:

“In the Windy Islands they are kind to poor people.”

He famished, and said them continually to himself. Night and day the chorus followed him through the hard streets and careless people, till it became a wish; and at last the wish became a determination. Yes—yes, he would go to these islands where they were kind to poor people. It sounds as wild a thought as the resolution of a caged canary to fly home again.

A little work came his way again, and laboriously he laid by a few shillings, half starving himself to do it—for, alas, a poor man could not hope to win his way to this El Dorado. Money was necessary even to reach these kind folk. In time, if this job lasted, he might save perhaps ten shillings; that was gold and would take him anywhere.

But the work as usual left him, and burning with anxiety to start while he still had something by him, he hobbled down to the docks and sat among the shipping. He had no idea where these islands were, how far or in what country, but if they were islands, he must take a ship to reach them. Besides, his rickety legs could scarcely carry him from one street to another, much less over the leagues of land that he was sure must lie between London and a people so different. He remembered dimly coming to this city in a ship, and in a ship he must go away. He inquired of a few men who passed him; some stared and laughed, others answered with a jest, and others paid no attention to the question. He was too poor even to find his way there, he told himself, and the old dull feeling of resignation settled down upon him. Three or four days went by. He saw ships pass down the river, sometimes by day cutting the London sky with their taper masts, sometimes in the dark flaring with red and green lights. In the docks they were lading and unlading. Every ship was going somewhere, and, for all he knew, the one he wanted might be away already.

At last, upon one warm night, he sat on the pavement with his back against a wall, close by the door of a public-house. There was brightness and the noise of sailors' voices inside and, high overhead, stillness and the little lights of the sky. The door opened, and, with a gust of sound, a man came out and started with a rolling gait down the street. Whether it was that he found the darkness a little strange, or the fresh air a little confusing, he hugged the wall so closely that before he had gone ten yards he stumbled over the huddled figure on the pavement.

He swore a hearty oath and cried: “What the —— are you lying there for? If you're so drunk you can't stand, you might at least lie longways under the wall, 'stead of 'midships like that!”

“I am lame,” replied Paul simply.

The man was evidently a little taken aback. He had an open, ruddy face and a seaman's pilot jacket, and after his first outburst of wrath his expression was genial and frank. “Oh, that's it, is it?” he said. “Sorry I spoke so rough, mate, but you see you was kinderways in my road, and a man doesn't always stop to pick his language—see?” He was evidently mellowed by his potations, and smiled affably.

“Are you sailor?” asked Paul.

“Captain Briggs of the schooner Betsy, at your service,” said the man.

“Do you go to the Windy Islands?”

Captain Briggs stared in some surprise and replied: “I've been there, but I ain't a-going there to-night. We're sailing much in that direction, though. Want me to take a message—to a gal, for instance?” He beamed so jovially at poor Paul that he felt emboldened to cry:

“Take me!”

The captain stared at him again and then burst into a hearty guffaw. “As a fust-class saloon passenger, eh?” said he.

“I have some money,” cried Paul eagerly.

“Where d'ye want to go to?”

“To the Windy Islands.”

“Do you know where they are?”

“No,” said Paul. “But you will take me?”

“Well, they're about three days north o' here in a steamer, and we ain't going that rate, I assure you.”

“But I wish to go.”

“And what for, if I may make free for to ask?” demanded the captain, who was evidently much amused.

“They are kind to poor people,” answered Paul.

This time Captain Briggs stared for a full minute without making any reply. Then his face became clouded with suspicion.

“That the truth?” said he. “You're not a-pulling of my leg, my man?”

“I am poor,” replied Paul, with a little surprise, “and I hear tell they are kind. Why should I stay here where men are not kind to poor men?”

The captain slapped his leg and burst out laughing, and then at the sight of Paul's pinched face, stopped suddenly, and fell to staring at him again.

Paul climbed clumsily to his feet, and seized the captain's sleeve. “Take me!” he cried eagerly. “I will pay what I have.”

“Can you cook?” asked the captain.

“I can sew,” said Paul; “I have worked for sailors.”

“Well,” replied the captain with a grin, “we don't generally take our court suits, but we might find you a job o' sorts, and after my trip's finished I might find you a boat to take you on. Poor devil! It's God-forsakenness to be hard up in this d——d town! Come along, mate!” And so Captain Briggs, chuckling to himself every now and then, rolled towards the docks with Paul clinging to his arm.

II.

About nine o'clock on a midsummer night, Paul sat in the bows of a coasting steamer and watched his haven grow clearer. On either side he saw these longed-for islands lying low and bare in a tranquil sea, and now that they were so near dreadful doubts began to torture him. In all his rough and seasick journey he had heard laughter and scoffing at his quest, but never a word of encouragement. “Did he really think,” one man put it bluntly, “that they wanted paupers there any more than in other places? Why didn't he go back to Jerusalem or Jericho, or wherever he came from?”

Even Captain Briggs, when the geniality of liquor had evaporated in the morning, seemed chiefly anxious to be quit of his midnight folly. And so Paul's eyes looked very plaintively over this Northern Sea.

And yet as the steamer turned into the bay there was something so calm and peaceful and open about the shining water that rippled briskly under the bows, in the great clear tent of sky with the sun only just setting at this late hour, in the soft outline of the land ahead, that he felt in his heart convinced kindness was somewhere close at hand.

At the end of the bay he saw the houses of a little village straggling along the shore and looking very northern and out-of-the-world in their setting of treeless country. Behind them on the one side an ancient ruined castle stood up black and sombre against the evening sky; on the other there arose farther off the dark peak of a heather hill. Inland, he spied small farms and cottages, nestling not among acres of brick, but open fields gay with the pale yellow mustard flower.

Were they really kind to poor people?”

As the steamer came nearer shore he heard across the water the harsh “kraak—kraak—kraak,” of innumerable corn-crakes and the plaintive crying of gulls, and he wondered whether they were calling a welcome or a warning.

Half-way down the bay a stone pier ran out into the still green water; there was a mast or two beside it, and the country people were idly strolling down to see a ship come in. In a dream Paul hobbled on shore, and made his way slowly up the cobbles of the pier. The islanders stared at him in a loutish, bovine way, quite different to the stare of city people, but none the less it damped him. “They stare because I am so poor and lame,” he thought, and he remembered what the man had said about paupers.

When he was out of the crowd and away from the pier, he turned along a road that led him round the bay towards the village. The road was white and hard, but the ditches and banks on either side were overgrown with all kinds of long soft grass and bright with little wild flowers. It twisted so in its course, making a curve wherever the shore-line bent, that to Paul, with his poor legs, it began to seem interminable. He hurried as best he could, for the sun had set before he landed, and he feared to be alone in the dark with the kind people yet to find. The silence around him was profound after the turmoil of London and the noises of a ship at sea. The number of little sounds, the “kraak” of the corn-crakes, the infrequent cries of the gulls, the lowing of distant cattle, occasional far-off voices, seemed rather to accentuate than break the stillness. To Paul it was half-restful, half-frightening; this land would be so lonely when darkness descended.

And then all of a sudden his heart began to lighten and he knew that he had come to a kind country; for night was held back. The Northern sky was still glowing like a far-away fire; the air was transparently clear; the stars must have been left behind in the south. He told himself he had come to a land where there was no night, so that poor people could find their way.

“Paul hobbled on shore, and made his way slowly up the cobbles of the pier.”

At last he came to a straggling village and hesitated at the first house; it was dark and low and mean-looking, and he passed on. He would wait for an invitation to come in; and so he went by one cottage after another, by an ugly sober church in a kirkyard of nettles and stones, till he came to a group of young men lounging under a wall. They stared as hard as the others, and again the wanderer's heart sank. He had not the courage to ask these people for kindness. He stopped at the corner of a cross-road leading inland from the shore and came to a sudden resolution. A little way up from the village he saw a farm standing against the clear sky and in the windows there were lights, After the transparent dusk of the land and the blackness of the village houses, a gleam of light looked hospitable and cheerful. He toiled up the hill, and from the top had a glimpse of open sea on the far side of the island, a shining horizon ending in the red North afterglow. But all Paul's wearied mind was centred on the farm. He went through a steading with a savoury smell of cattle and manure, and knocked at the door of the house. The first result was so ominous that he nearly turned tail at once, for hardly had he struck the panel when there arose a most dissatisfied barking and growling within. Then he heard a chiding voice and at last a heavy step. His heart stood still. The door was opened by a broad-faced, red-headed man, and at the first sight of him Paul was sure the birds had cried a welcome.

“Weel?” said the man, looking down on the miserable figure outside.

“I am poor,” said Paul.

The man looked much surprised at this naïve declaration, and laughed.

“That's no very uncommon complaint, onyways,” he replied.

“In the Windy Islands I hear they are kind to poor people,” said Paul.

The farmer looked at him a little suspiciously, but Paul's simplicity was evident enough.

“Where do you come frae?” he asked.

“From London.”

“Frae London!” cried the farmer. “And what brought ye here?”

“I hear they are kind to poor people.”

“And was that a' the reason?”

“No man in London help me,” replied Paul. “They do not care for poor people.”

“And so you cam' here to seek kind folk, like?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I'm——” began the farmer, but he seemed to find no expression sufficient to express his feelings.

“Are you kind to the poor?” asked Paul diffidently.

The farmer looked a little perplexed.

“There's no many poor hereabout, whatever,” said he, “and that's mebbe why they say we're kind to them. But if you're cam' a' this way, it'll no do to send ye aff wanting. Are ye hungry?”

“Yes—very.”

“Come in! come in, boy!” cried the farmer, opening the door wide, and as Paul followed him in he muttered to himself, “Weel, if this doesna beat a'!”

He led the way into the most cheerful room Paul had ever seen. It seemed full of clean and burnished things, and shining, ruddy faces. A kettle hummed on a glowing fire, there was an odour of supper mixed with the reek of peat smoke, and though all the faces stared, none of them laughed. Even the colley under the table only growled mildly.

“Here's a lad that's cam' here to find them that's kind to puir folk,” said the farmer, ushering Paul into the kitchen.

“Maircy on us!” exclaimed a portly woman with a smiling countenance. “Whatna kind o' buddy's this?”

“He's cam' frae London to get better lookit efter,” grinned the farmer.

“And he's muckle need o' it,” said his good wife fervently. “Sit thee doon, boy. I'll warrant thee thou'll be wanting a bite o' supper?”

As Paul was faint with hunger, and quite bewildered with the scene of plenty, and the accent of his hostess sounded strangely in his ears, he simply stared timidly first at her and then round the room from one young face to another.

“A gleam of light looked hospitable and cheerful.”

“The lad doesna look weel,” said the farmer. “He'll mebbe feel better o' his supper, though.”

As they watched Paul ravenously devour his supper, they whispered amongst themselves, their country voices rising now and then so that he could catch mysterious words.

“If thae Lon'on folks think sae weel o' us——” said the mistress of the house, and her voice dropped again.

“——deed, and what can I dae wi' the boy?” returned the farmer.

“Whist!—he can lairn to herd the kye, surely.”

The farmer scratched his tawny head, and the wife seemed to be pressing an argument; at last he turned to Paul and said: “And what will ye mak' o' yersel' here, boy?”

Paul looked at him in perplexity.

“Ye—es, ye—es,” he replied,

“What think ye to dae wi' yersel'?” explained the wife.

Paul shook his head vaguely.

“I do not know. Yes, yes,” he said dreamily.

“It'll never dae to send him aff like this, wi' naething in his pocket and nae trade!” said the wife.

“Think ye ye can herd kye?” asked the farmer.

“Fine that,” interposed his spouse, seeing that Paul looked blank. “Thou needna pay him aught, he'll be thankfu' for his keep, puir lad, 'deed will he!”

Paul smiled. “Yes—yes,” he answered eagerly, “I want not money if I can live, and you are kind. Yes—yes.”

That night he slept more softly and more soundly than he ever remembered sleeping before.

Though it was still early, the sun was high and bright when he hobbled out behind the cows.

“Jimmie here will show ye how to herd the kye,” said the farmer. “It's no hard, ye'll find, but like a' things else it needs learning at first like.”

So Jimmie, a sturdy urchin, and the same suspicious colley and Paul and cows and all set off together. The dog sniffled uneasily round the stranger's legs.

“Poor dog! good dog!” said Paul. “I am poor, yes; will you then bite me?”

But, shabby though this new herd was, the dog actually began wagging his tail, and at that sign of welcome the last burden seemed to lift from the wanderer's simple heart. He should always now have one friend by him.

And so he first came to the island links. The dew still lay upon them, the quiet ocean sparkled beyond; the air was fresh as on a mountain top and fragrant with clover. They sat on the soft turf, and the cattle stolidly began to graze, the dog pretended to close his wary eyes, and Paul's fancy started musing.

“It is very good, it is all very kind; sunshine and grass, and no people to speak hardly: and that blue sea. I do not ever have to sail upon it again. Yes—yes, here they are kind to poor people. But will it last? It is too good; something sad will suddenly happen. But I shall be accustomed. And it is fated so.”

A few little white clouds drifted leisurely overhead, the shadows slowly swung round, shortening and lengthening again, the hum of the shining sea waned when the tide ebbed and rose clearer as the flood came back; but those were all the events that happened. By the evening, when the air was cool and the cattle had gone home and even the north-country sun at last hung low, faith in a kinder destiny had come to Paul.

And there in the Windy Islands he has stayed ever since: through the gales of autumn; through the winters with their brief days, when there are only left a few bleak, cloudy hours of light and then a night that begins in the middle of the afternoon and lies over land and sea sombrely and interminably; through the chilly, airy springs; through the freshness and glamour of the summers when it is never dark.

It was on a summer day that I saw the links smiling in the sunshine, rabbits scuttling to shelter in the sand rifts, gulls lazily wheeling overhead, in the fields the corn-crakes crying as they had cried to welcome Paul; and there in the midst of it all that waif from the Danube looking dreamily out to the Polar Sea.

J. Storer Clouston