A Rough Shaking
Home - George MacDonald - A Rough ShakingChapter XVIII.
Beating the town.
They turned their faces again toward the centre of the town, and
resumed their walk, taking in more of what they saw than while they
had not yet had the second instalment of their daily bread. What a
thing is food! It is the divineness of the invention--the need for the
food, and the food for the need--that makes those who count their
dinner the most important thing in the day, such low creatures:
nothing but what is good in itself can be turned into vileness. It is
a delight to see a boy with a good honest appetite; a boy that loves
his dinner is a loathsome creature. Eat heartily, my boy, but be ready
to share, even when you are hungry, and have only what you could eat
up yourself, else you are no man. Remember that you created neither
your hunger nor your food; that both came from one who cares for you
and your neighbours as well.
In the strength of the half-loaf he had eaten, the place looked to Clare far more wonderful, and his hopes of earning his bread grew yet more radiant. But he passed one shop after another, and always something prevented him from going in. One after another did not look just the right sort, did not seem to invite him: the next might be better! I dare say but for that half-loaf, he would have made a trial sooner, but I doubt if he would have succeeded sooner. He did not think of going to parson, doctor, or policeman for advice; he went walking and staring, followed by Tommy with his hands in his pocketless pocket-holes. Clare was not yet practical in device, though perfect in willingness, and thorough in design. Up one street and down another they wandered, seeing plenty of food through windows, and in carts and baskets, but never any coming their way, except in the form of tempting odours that issued from almost every house, and grew in keenness and strength toward one o'clock. Oh those odours!--agonizing angels of invisible yet most material good! Of what joys has not the Father made us capable, when the poorest necessity is linked with such pain! What a tormenting thing--and what a good must be meant to come out of it!--to be hungry, downright, cravingly hungry with the whole microcosm, and not a halfpenny to buy a mouthful of assuagement!--to be assailed with wafts of deliriously undefined promise, not one of which seems likely to be fulfilled!--promise true to men hurrying home to dinner or luncheon, but only rousing greater desire in such as Clare and Tommy. Not one opportunity of appropriation presented itself, else it would have gone ill with Tommy, now that the eyes and ears of his guardian were on the alert. For Clare thought of him now as a little thievish pup, for whose conduct, manners, and education he was responsible.
The agony began at length to abate--ready to revive with augmented strength when the next hour for supplying the human furnace should begin to approach. Few even of those who know what hunger is, understand to what it may grow--how desire becomes longing, longing becomes craving, and craving a wild passion of demand. It must be terrible to be hungry, and not know God!
As the evening came down upon them, worn out, faint with want, shivering with cold, and as miserable in prospect as at the moment, yet another need presented itself with equally imperative requisition--that of shelter that they might rest. It was even more imperative: they could not eat; they must lie down!
Whether it be a rudiment retained from their remote ancestry, I cannot tell, but any kind of suffering will wake in some a masterful impulse to burrow; and as the boys walked about in their misery, white with cold and hunger, Clare's eyes kept turning to every shallowest archway, every breach in wall or hedge that seemed to offer the least chance of covert, while, every now and then, Tommy would bolt from his side to peer into some opening whose depth was not immediately patent to his ferret-gaze. Once, in a lane on the outskirts of the town, he darted into a narrow doorway in the face of a wall, but instantly rushed back in horror: within was a well, where water lay still and dark. Then first Clare had a hint of the peculiar dread Tommy had of water, especially of water dark and unexpected. Possibly he had once been thrown into such water to be got rid of. But Clare at the moment was too weary to take much notice of his dismay.
It was an old town in which they were wandering, and change in the channels of traffic had so turned its natural nourishment aside, that it was in parts withering and crumbling away. Not a few of the houses were, some from poverty, some from utter disuse, yielding fast to decay. But there were other causes for the condition of one, which, almost directly they came out of the lane I have just mentioned, into the end of a wide silent street, drew the roving, questing eyes of Clare and Tommy. The moon was near the full and shining clear, so that they could perfectly see the state it was in. Most of its windows were broken; its roof was like the back of a very old horse; its chimney-pots were jagged and stumped with fracture; from one of them, by its entangled string, the skeleton of a kite hung half-way down the front. But, notwithstanding such signs of neglect, the red-brick wall and the wrought-iron gate, both seven feet high, that shut the place off from the street, stood in perfect aged strength. The moment they saw it, the house seemed to say to them, "There's nobody here: come in!" but the gate and the wall said, "Begone!"