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THE TOWN-SPARROW.
"This, too, will pass," is a Persian word: I should like it better
if it were "This, too, shall pass."
Gibbie's agony passed, for God is not the God of the dead but of the
living. Through the immortal essence in him, life became again
life, and he ran about the streets as before. Some may think that
wee Sir Gibbie -- as many now called him, some knowing the truth, and
others in kindly mockery -- would get on all the better for the loss
of such a father; but it was not so. In his father he had lost his
Paradise, and was now a creature expelled. He was not so much to be
pitied as many a child dismissed by sudden decree from a home to a
school; but the streets and the people and the shops, the horses and
the dogs, even the penny-loaves though he was hungry, had lost half
their precious delight, when his father was no longer in the
accessible background, the heart of the blissful city. As to food
and clothing, he did neither much better nor any worse than before:
people were kind as usual, and kindness was to Gibbie the very milk
of mother Nature. Whose the hand that proffered it, or what the
form it took, he cared no more than a stray kitten cares whether the
milk set down to it be in a blue saucer or a white. But he always
made the right return. The first thing a kindness deserves is
acceptance, the next is transmission: Gibbie gave both, without
thinking much about either. For he never had taken, and indeed
never learned to take, a thought about what he should eat or what he
should drink, or wherewithal he should be clothed -- a fault rendering
him, in the eyes of the economist of this world, utterly unworthy of
a place in it. There is a world, however, and one pretty closely
mixed up with this, though it never shows itself to one who has no
place in it, the birds of whose air have neither storehouse nor
barn, but are just such thoughtless cherubs -- thoughtless for
themselves, that is -- as wee Sir Gibbie. It would be useless to
attempt convincing the mere economist that this great city was a
little better, a little happier, a little merrier, for the presence
in it of the child, because he would not, even if convinced of the
fact, recognize the gain; but I venture the assertion to him, that
the conduct of not one of its inhabitants was the worse for the
example of Gibbie's apparent idleness; and that not one of the poor
women who now and then presented the small baronet with a penny, or
a bit of bread, or a scrap of meat, or a pair of old trousers -- shoes
nobody gave him, and he neither desired nor needed any -- ever felt
the poorer for the gift, or complained that she should be so taxed.
Positively or negatively, then, everybody was good to him, and
Gibbie felt it; but what could make up for the loss of his Paradise,
the bosom of a father? Drunken father as he was, I know of nothing
that can or ought to make up for such a loss, except that which can
restore it -- the bosom of the Father of fathers.
He roamed the streets, as all his life before, the whole of the day,
and part of the night; he took what was given him, and picked up
what he found. There were some who would gladly have brought him
within the bounds of an ordered life; he soon drove them to despair,
however, for the streets had been his nursery, and nothing could
keep him out of them. But the sparrow and the rook are just as
respectable in reality, though not in the eyes of the hen-wife, as
the egg-laying fowl, or the dirt-gobbling duck; and, however
Gibbie's habits might shock the ladies of Mr. Sclater's congregation
who sought to civilize him, the boy was no more about mischief in
the streets at midnight, than they were in their beds. They
collected enough for his behoof to board him for a year with an old
woman who kept a school, and they did get him to sleep one night in
her house. But in the morning, when she would not let him run out,
brought him into the school-room, her kitchen, and began to teach
him to write, Gibbie failed to see the good of it. He must have
space, change, adventure, air, or life was not worth the name to
him. Above all he must see friendly faces, and that of the old dame
was not such. But he desired to be friendly with her, and once, as
she leaned over him, put up his hand -- not a very clean one, I am
bound to give her the advantage of my confessing -- to stroke her
cheek: she pushed him roughly away, rose in indignation upon her
crutch, and lifted her cane to chastise him for the insult. A class
of urchins, to Gibbie's eyes at least looking unhappy, were at the
moment blundering through the twenty-third psalm. Ever after, even
when now Sir Gilbert more than understood the great song, the words,
"thy rod and thy staff," like the spell of a necromancer would still
call up the figure of the dame irate, in her horn spectacles and her
black-ribboned cap, leaning with one arm on her crutch, and with the
other uplifting what was with her no mere symbol of authority. Like
a shell from a mortar, he departed from the house. She hobbled to
the door after him, but his diminutive figure many yards away, his
little bare legs misty with swiftness as he ran, was the last she
ever saw of him, and her pupils had a bad time of it the rest of the
day. He never even entered the street again in which she lived.
Thus, after one night's brief interval of respectability, he was
again a rover of the city, a flitting insect that lighted here and
there, and spread wings of departure the moment a fresh desire
awoke.
It would be difficult to say where he slept. In summer anywhere; in
winter where he could find warmth. Like animals better clad than
he, yet like him able to endure cold, he revelled in mere heat when
he could come by it. Sometimes he stood at the back of a baker's
oven, for he knew all the haunts of heat about the city; sometimes
he buried himself in the sids (husks of oats) lying ready to feed
the kiln of a meal-mill; sometimes he lay by the furnace of the
steam-engine of the water-works. One man employed there, when his
time was at night, always made a bed for Gibbie: he had lost his own
only child, and this one of nobody's was a comfort to him.
Even those who looked upon wandering as wicked, only scolded into
the sweet upturned face, pouring gall into a cup of wine too full to
receive a drop of it -- and did not hand him over to the police.
Useless verily that would have been, for the police would as soon
have thought of taking up a town sparrow as Gibbie, and would only
have laughed at the idea. They knew Gibbie's merits better than any
of those good people imagined his faults. It requires either wisdom
or large experience to know that a child is not necessarily wicked
even if born and brought up in a far viler entourage than was
Gibbie.
The merits the police recognized in him were mainly two -- neither of
small consequence in their eyes; the first, the negative, yet more
important one, that of utter harmlessness; the second, and positive
one -- a passion and power for rendering help, taking notable shape
chiefly in two ways, upon both of which I have already more than
touched. The first was the peculiar faculty now pretty generally
known -- his great gift, some, his great luck, others called it -- for
finding things lost. It was no wonder the town crier had sought his
acquaintance, and when secured, had cultivated it -- neither a
difficult task; for the boy, ever since he could remember, had been
in the habit, as often as he saw the crier, or heard his tuck of
drum in the distance, of joining him and following, until he had
acquainted himself with all particulars concerning everything
proclaimed as missing. The moment he had mastered the facts
announced, he would dart away to search, and not unfrequently to
return with the thing sought. But it was not by any means only
things sought that he found. He continued to come upon things of
which he had no simulacrum in his phantasy. These, having no longer
a father to carry them to, he now, their owners unknown, took to the
crier, who always pretended to receive them with a suspicion which
Gibbie understood as little as the other really felt, and at once
advertised them by drum and cry. What became of them after that,
Gibbie never knew. If they did not find their owners, neither did
they find their way back to Gibbie; if their owners were found, the
crier never communicated with him on the subject. Plainly he
regarded Gibbie as the favoured jackal, whose privilege it was to
hunt for the crier, the royal lion of the city forest. But he spoke
kindly to him, as well he might, and now and then gave him a penny.
The second of the positive merits by which Gibbie found acceptance
in the eyes of the police, was a yet more peculiar one, growing out
of his love for his father, and his experience in the exercise of
that love. It was, however, unintelligible to them, and so
remained, except on the theory commonly adopted with regard to
Gibbie, namely, that he wasna a' there. Not the less was it to them
a satisfactory whim of his, seeing it mitigated their trouble as
guardians of the nightly peace and safety. It was indeed the main
cause of his being, like themselves, so much in the street at night:
seldom did Gibbie seek his lair -- I cannot call it couch -- before the
lengthening hours of the morning. If the finding of things was a
gift, this other peculiarity was a passion -- and a right human
passion -- absolutely possessing the child: it was, to play the
guardian angel to drunk folk. If such a distressed human craft hove
in sight, he would instantly bear down upon and hover about him,
until resolved as to his real condition. If he was in such distress
as to require assistance, he never left him till he saw him safe
within his own door. The police asserted that wee Sir Gibbie not
only knew every drunkard in the city, and where he lived, but where
he generally got drunk as well. That one was in no danger of taking
the wrong turning, upon whom Gibbie was in attendance, to determine,
by a shove on this side or that, the direction in which the
hesitating, uncertain mass of stultified humanity was to go. He
seemed a visible embodiment of that special providence which is said
to watch over drunk people and children, only here a child was the
guardian of the drunkard, and in this branch of his mission, was
well known to all who, without qualifying themselves for coming
under his cherubic cognizance, were in the habit of now and then
returning home late. He was least known to those to whom he
rendered most assistance. Rarely had he thanks for it, never
halfpence, but not unfrequently blows and abuse. For the last he
cared nothing; the former, owing to his great agility, seldom
visited him with any directness. A certain reporter of humorous
scandal, after his third tumbler, would occasionally give a graphic
description of what, coming from a supper-party, he once saw about
two o'clock in the morning. In the great street of the city, he
overhauled a huge galleon, which proved, he declared, to be the
provost himself, not exactly water-logged, and yet not very buoyant,
but carrying a good deal of sail. He might possibly have escaped
very particular notice, he said, but for the assiduous attendance
upon him of an absurd little cock-boat, in the person of wee
Gibbie -- the two reminding him right ludicrously of the story of the
Spanish Armada. Round and round the bulky provost gyrated the tiny
baronet, like a little hero of the ring, pitching into him, only
with open-handed pushes, not with blows, now on this side and now on
that -- not after such fashion of sustentation as might have sufficed
with a man of ordinary size, but throwing all his force now against
the provost's bulging bows, now against his over-leaning quarter,
encountering him now as he lurched, now as he heeled, until at
length he landed him high, though certainly not dry, on the top of
his own steps. The moment the butler opened the door, and the heavy
hulk rolled into dock, Gibbie darted off as if he had been the
wicked one tormenting the righteous, and in danger of being caught
by a pair of holy tongs. Whether the tale was true or not, I do not
know: with after-dinner humourists there is reason for caution.
Gibbie was not offered the post of henchman to the provost, and
rarely could have had the chance of claiming salvage for so
distinguished a vessel, seeing he generally cruised in waters where
such craft seldom sailed. Though almost nothing could now have
induced him to go down Jink Lane, yet about the time the company at
Mistress Croale's would be breaking up, he would on most nights be
lying in wait a short distance down the Widdiehill, ready to
minister to that one of his father's old comrades who might prove
most in need of his assistance; and if he showed him no gratitude,
Gibbie had not been trained in a school where he was taught to
expect or even to wish for any.
I could now give a whole chapter to the setting forth of the
pleasures the summer brought him, city summer as it was, but I must
content myself with saying that first of these, and not least, was
the mere absence of the cold of the other seasons, bringing with it
many privileges. He could lie down anywhere and sleep when he
would; or spend, if he pleased, whole nights awake, in a churchyard,
or on the deck of some vessel discharging her cargo at the quay, or
running about the still, sleeping streets. Thus he got to know the
shapes of some of the constellations, and not a few of the aspects
of the heavens. But even then he never felt alone, for he gazed at
the vista from the midst of a cityful of his fellows. Then there
were the scents of the laylocks and the roses and the carnations and
the sweet-peas, that came floating out from the gardens, contending
sometimes with those of the grocers' and chemists' shops. Now and
then too he came in for a small feed of strawberries, which were
very plentiful in their season. Sitting then on a hospitable
doorstep, with the feet and faces of friends passing him in both
directions, and love embodied in the warmth of summer all about him,
he would eat his strawberries, and inherit the earth.
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