Paul Kelver | Page 7

new departure.
The good dame evidently perceived her error, and made haste to correct it.
"Oh, you! You are lucky enough," she replied; "I was thinking of your poor mother."
"Isn't mamma lucky?"
"Well, she hasn't been too lucky since you came."
"Wasn't it lucky, her having me?"
"I can't say it was, at that particular time."
"Didn't she want me?"
Mrs. Fursey was one of those well-meaning persons who are of opinion that the only reasonable attitude of childhood should be that of perpetual apology for its existence.
"Well, I daresay she could have done without you," was the answer.
I can see the picture plainly still. I am sitting on a low chair before the nursery fire, one knee supported in my locked hands, meanwhile Mrs. Fursey's needle grated with monotonous regularity against her thimble. At that moment knocked at my small soul for the first time the problem of life.
Suddenly, without moving, I said:
"Then why did she take me in?"
The rasping click of the needle on the thimble ceased abruptly.
"Took you in! What's the child talking about? Who's took you in?"
"Why, mamma. If she didn't want me, why did she take me in?"
But even while, with heart full of dignified resentment, I propounded this, as I proudly felt, logically unanswerable question, I was glad that she had. The vision of my being refused at the bedroom window presented itself to my imagination. I saw the stork, perplexed and annoyed, looking as I had sometimes seen Tom Pinfold look when the fish he had been holding out by the tail had been sniffed at by Anna, and the kitchen door shut in his face. Would the stork also have gone away thoughtfully scratching his head with one of those long, compass-like legs of his, and muttering to himself. And here, incidentally, I fell a-wondering how the stork had carried me. In the garden I had often watched a blackbird carrying a worm, and the worm, though no doubt really safe enough, had always appeared to me nervous and uncomfortable. Had I wriggled and squirmed in like fashion? And where would the stork have taken me to then? Possibly to Mrs. Fursey's: their cottage was the nearest. But I felt sure Mrs. Fursey would not have taken me in; and next to them, at the first house in the village, lived Mr. Chumdley, the cobbler, who was lame, and who sat all day hammering boots with very dirty hands, in a little cave half under the ground, his whole appearance suggesting a poor-spirited ogre. I should have hated being his little boy. Possibly nobody would have taken me in. I grew pensive, thinking of myself as the rejected of all the village. What would the stork have done with me, left on his hands, so to speak. The reflection prompted a fresh question.
"Nurse, where did I come from?"
"Why, I've told you often. The stork brought you."
"Yes, I know. But where did the stork get me from?" Mrs. Fursey paused for quite a long while before replying. Possibly she was reflecting whether such answer might not make me unduly conceited. Eventually she must have decided to run that risk; other opportunities could be relied upon for neutralising the effect.
"Oh, from Heaven."
"But I thought Heaven was a place where you went to," I answered; "not where you comed from." I know I said "comed," for I remember that at this period my irregular verbs were a bewildering anxiety to my poor mother. "Comed" and "goned," which I had worked out for myself, were particular favourites of mine.
Mrs. Fursey passed over my grammar in dignified silence. She had been pointedly requested not to trouble herself with that part of my education, my mother holding that diverging opinions upon the same subject only confused a child.
"You came from Heaven," repeated Mrs. Fursey, "and you'll go to Heaven--if you're good."
"Do all little boys and girls come from Heaven?"
"So they say." Mrs. Fursey's tone implied that she was stating what might possibly be but a popular fallacy, for which she individually took no responsibility.
"And did you come from Heaven, Mrs. Fursey?" Mrs. Fursey's reply to this was decidedly more emphatic.
"Of course I did. Where do you think I came from?"
At once, I am ashamed to say, Heaven lost its exalted position in my eyes. Even before this, it had puzzled me that everybody I knew should be going there--for so I was always assured; now, connected as it appeared to be with the origin of Mrs. Fursey, much of its charm disappeared.
But this was not all. Mrs. Fursey's information had suggested to me a fresh grief. I stopped not to console myself with the reflection that my fate had been but the fate of all little boys and girls. With a child's egoism I seized only upon my own particular case.
"Didn't they want me in