A Great Man Read online

  ‘Baby. In that bag,’ Tom stammered.

  ‘Out of the way, my bold buccaneer,’ said the doctor, striding across the mat into the corridor.

  At two o’clock the next morning, Tom being asleep, and all going well with wife and child, Mr. Henry Knight returned at length to his sitting-room, and resumed the composition of the letter to the editor of the Standard. The work existed as an artistic whole in his head, and he could not persuade himself to seek rest until he had got it down in black-and-white; for, though he wrote letters instead of sonnets, he was nevertheless a sort of a poet by temperament. You behold him calm now, master once more of his emotions, and not that agitated, pompous, and slightly ridiculous person who lately stamped over Oxford Street and stormed the Alhambra Theatre. And in order to help the excellent father of my hero back into your esteem, let me point out that the imminence and the actuality of fatherhood constitute a somewhat disturbing experience, which does not occur to a man every day.

  Mr. Knight dipped pen in ink, and continued:

  ‘ ... who I hold to be not only the greatest poet, but also the greatest moral teacher that England has ever produced, ‘“To thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.” ‘In conclusion, sir, I ask, without fear of contradiction, are we or are we not, in this matter of the National Debt, to be true to our national selves? ‘Yours obediently, ‘A

  CONSCIENTIOUS

  TAXPAYER

  .’

  The signature troubled him. His pen hovered threateningly over it, and finally he struck it out and wrote instead: ‘Paterfamilias.’ He felt that this pseudonym was perhaps a little inapposite, but some impulse stronger than himself forced him to employ it.

  CHAPTER III

  HIS CHRISTENING

  ‘But haven’t I told you that I was just writing the very name when Annie came in to warn me?’

  Mr. Knight addressed the question, kindly and mildly, yet with a hint of annoyance, to his young wife, who was nursing their son with all the experience of three months’ practice. It was Sunday morning, and they had finished breakfast in the sitting-room. Within an hour or two the heir was to be taken to the Great Queen Street Wesleyan Methodist Chapel for the solemn rite of baptism.

  ‘Yes, lovey,’ said Mrs. Knight. ‘You’ve told me, time and again. But, oh Henry! Your name’s just Henry Knight, and I want his to be just Henry Knight, too! I want him to be called after you.’

  And the mother, buxom, simple, and adoring, glanced appealingly with bright eyes at the man who for her epitomized the majesty and perfections of his sex.

  ‘He will be Henry Knight,’ the father persisted, rather coldly.

  But Mrs. Knight shook her head.

  Then Aunt Annie came into the room, pushing Tom before her. Tom was magnificently uncomfortable in his best clothes.

  ‘What’s the matter, Sue?’ Aunt Annie demanded, as soon as she had noticed her sister’s face.

  And in a moment, in the fraction of a second, and solely by reason of Aunt Annie’s question, the situation became serious. It jumped up, as domestic situations sometimes do, suddenly to the temperature at which thunderstorms are probable. It grew close, heavy, and perilous.

  Mrs. Knight shook her head again. ‘Nothing,’ she managed to reply.

  ‘Susan wants----‘ Mr. Knight began suavely to explain.

  ‘He keeps on saying he would like him to be called----‘ Mrs. Knight burst out.

  ‘No I don’t—no I don’t!’ Mr. Knight interrupted. ‘Not if you don’t wish it!’

  A silence followed. Mr. Knight drummed lightly and nervously on the table-cloth. Mrs. Knight sniffed, threw back her head so that the tears should not fall out of her eyes, and gently patted the baby’s back with her right hand. Aunt Annie hesitated whether to speak or not to speak.

  Tom remarked in a loud voice:

  ‘If I were you, I should call him Tom, like me. Then, as soon as he can talk, I could say, “How do, Cousin Tom?” and he could say back, “How do, Cousin Tom?”’

  ‘But we should always be getting mixed up between you, you silly boy!’ said Aunt Annie, smiling, and trying to be bright and sunny.

  ‘No, you wouldn’t,’ Tom replied. ‘Because I should be Big Tom, and of course he’d only be Little Tom. And I don’t think I’m a silly boy, either.’

  ‘Will you be silent, sir!’ Mr. Knight ordered in a voice of wrath. And, by way of indicating that the cord of tension had at last snapped, he boxed Tom’s left ear, which happened to be the nearest.

  Mrs. Knight lost control of her tears, and they escaped. She offered the baby to Aunt Annie.

  ‘Take him. He’s asleep. Put him in the cradle,’ she sobbed.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Aunt Annie intimately, in a tone to show how well she knew that poor women must always cling together in seasons of stress and times of oppression.

  Mrs. Knight hurried out of the room. Mr. Knight cherished an injury. He felt aggrieved because Susan could not see that, though six months ago she had been entitled to her whims and fancies, she was so no longer. He felt, in fact, that Susan was taking an unfair advantage of him. The logic of the thing was spread out plainly and irrefutably in his mind. And then, quite swiftly, the logic of the thing vanished, and Mr. Knight rose and hastened after his wife.

  ‘You deserved it, you know,’ said Aunt Annie to Tom.

  ‘Did I?’ The child seemed to speculate.

  They both stared at the baby, who lay peacefully in his cradle, for several minutes.

  ‘Annie, come here a moment.’ Mr. Knight was calling from another room.

  ‘Yes, Henry. Now, Tom, don’t touch the cradle. And if baby begins to cry, run and tell me.’

  ‘Yes, auntie.’

  And Aunt Annie went. She neglected to close the door behind her; Tom closed it, noiselessly.

  Never before had he been left alone with the baby. He examined with minute care such parts of the living organism as were visible, and then, after courageously fighting temptation, and suffering defeat, he touched the baby’s broad, flat nose. He scarcely touched it, yet the baby stirred and mewed faintly. Tom began to rock the cradle, at first gently, then with nervous violence. The faint mew became a regular and sustained cry.

  He glanced at the door, and decided that he would make a further effort to lull the ridiculous agitation of this strange and mysterious being. Bending down, he seized the baby in both hands, and tried to nurse it as his two aunts nursed it. The infant’s weight was considerable; it exceeded Tom’s estimate, with the result that, in the desperate process of extracting the baby from the cradle, the cradle had been overset, and now lay on its beam-ends.

  ‘Hsh—hsh!’ Tom entreated, shooing and balancing as best he could.

  Then, without warning, Tom’s spirit leapt into anger.

  ‘Will you be silent, sir!’ he demanded fiercely from the baby, imitating Uncle Henry’s tone. ‘Will you be silent, sir!’ He shook the infant, who was astounded into a momentary silence.

  The next thing was the sound of footsteps approaching rapidly along the passage. Tom had no leisure to right the cradle; he merely dropped the baby on the floor by the side of it, and sprang to the window.

  ‘You naughty, naughty boy!’ Aunt Annie shrieked. ‘You’ve taken baby out of his cradle! Oh, my pet! my poor darling! my mumsy! Did they, then?’

  ‘I didn’t! I didn’t!’ Tom asserted passionately. ‘I’ve never stirred from here all the time you were out. It fell out itself!’

  ‘Oh!’ screamed Aunt Annie. ‘There’s a black place on his poor little forehead!’

  In an instant the baby’s parents were to the rescue, and Tom was declaring his innocence to the united family.

  ‘It fell out itself!’ he repeated; and soon he began to think of interesting details. ‘I saw it. It put its hand on the edge of the cradle and pulled up, and then it leaned to one side, and then the cradle toppled over.’

  Of course the preposterous lie
was credited by nobody.

  ‘There’s one thing!’ said Mrs. Knight, weeping for the second time that morning. ‘I won’t have him christened with a black forehead, that I won’t!’

  At this point, Aunt Annie, who had scurried to the kitchen for some butter, flew back and anointed the bruise.

  ‘It fell out itself!’ Tom said again.

  ‘Whatever would the minister think?’ Mrs. Knight wondered.

  ‘It fell out itself!’ said Tom.

  Mr. Knight whipped Tom, and his Aunt Annie put him to bed for the rest of the day. In the settled opinion of Mrs. Knight, Tom was punished for attempting to murder her baby. But Mr. Knight insisted that the punishment was for lying. As for the baptism, it had necessarily to be postponed for four weeks, since the ceremony was performed at the Great Queen Street Chapel only on the first Sunday in the month.

  ‘I never touched it!’ Tom asseverated solemnly the next day. ‘It fell out itself!’

  And he clung to the statement, day after day, with such obstinacy that at length the three adults, despite the protests of reason, began to think that conceivably, just conceivably, the impossible was possible—in regard to one particular baby. Mrs. Knight had often commented on the perfectly marvellous muscular power of her baby’s hand when it clutched hers, and signs were not wanting to convince the parents and the aunt that the infant was no ordinary infant, but indeed extraordinary and wonderful to the last degree.

  On the fourth day, when Tom had asserted for about the hundredth time, ‘It fell out itself,’ his Aunt Susan kissed him and gave him a sweetmeat. Tom threw it away, but in the end, after much coaxing, he consented to enjoy it. Aunt Susan detected the finger of Providence in recent events, and one night she whispered to her husband: ‘Lovey, I want you to call him what you said.’

  And so it occurred, at the christening, that when the minister leaned over the Communion-rail to take the wonder-child from its mother’s arms, its father whispered into the minister’s ear a double name.

  ‘Henry Shakspere----‘ began the minister with lifted hand.

  And the baby smiled confidently upwards.

  CHAPTER IV

  AGED TWELVE

  ‘Quick! He’s coming!’

  It was Aunt Annie who uttered the dramatic whisper, and as she did so she popped a penknife on to an empty plate in front of an empty chair at the breakfast-table. Mr. Knight placed a silver watch and also, separately, a silver chain by the side of the weapon; and, lastly, Mrs. Knight had the happy inspiration of covering these articles with the empty slop-basin.

  The plotters sat back in their chairs and tried to keep their guilty eyes off the overturned basin. ‘Two slices, Annie?’ said Mr. Knight in a loud tone, elaborately casual. ‘Yes, please,’ said Aunt Annie. Mrs. Knight began to pour out coffee. They all three looked at each other, joyous, naughty, strategic; and the thing of which they were least conscious, in that moment of expectancy, was precisely the thing that the lustrous trifles hidden beneath the basin were meant to signalize: namely, the passage of years and the approach of age. Mr. Knight’s hair was grey; Mrs. Knight, once a slim bride of twenty-seven, was now a stout matron of thirty-nine, with a tendency to pant after the most modest feats of stair-climbing; and Aunt Annie, only the other day a pretty girl with a head full of what is wrongly called nonsense, was a spinster—a spinster. Fortunately, they were blind to these obvious facts. Even Mr. Knight, accustomed as he was to survey fundamental truths with the detachment of a philosopher, would have been shocked to learn that his hair was grey. Before the glass, of a morning, he sometimes remarked, in the tone of a man whose passion for candour permits him to conceal nothing: ‘It’s getting grey.’

  Then young Henry burst into the room.

  It was exactly twelve years since he had been born, a tiny, shapeless, senseless, helpless, toothless, speechless, useless, feeble, deaf, myopic creature; and now he was a school-boy, strong, healthy, big, and clever, who could define a dodecahedron and rattle off the rivers of Europe like a house on fire. The change amounted to a miracle, and it was esteemed as such by those who had spent twelve years chiefly in watching it. One evening, in the very earliest stages, while his mother was nursing him, his father had come into the darkened chamber, and, after bending over the infant, had struck a match to ignite a cigar; and the eyes of the infant had blinked in the sudden light. ‘See how he takes notice! the mother had cried in ecstatic wonderment. And from that moment she, and the other two, had never ceased to marvel, and to fear. It seemed impossible that this extraordinary fragment of humanity, which at first could not be safely ignored for a single instant night or day, should survive the multitudinous perils that surrounded it. But it did survive, and it became an intelligence. At eighteen months the intelligence could walk, sit up, and say ‘Mum.’ These performances were astounding. And the fact that fifty thousand other babies of eighteen months in London were similarly walking, sitting up, and saying ‘Mum,’ did not render these performances any the less astounding. And when, half a year later, the child could point to a letter and identify it plainly and unmistakably—’O’—the parents’ cup was full. The mother admitted frankly that she had not expected this final proof of understanding. Aunt Annie and father pretended not to be surprised, but it was a pretence merely. Why, it seemed scarcely a month since the miraculous child had not even sense enough to take milk out of a spoon! And here he was identifying ‘O’ every time he tried, with the absolute assurance of a philologist! True, he had once or twice shrieked ‘O’ while putting a finger on ‘Q,’ but that was the fault of the printers, who had printed the tail too small.

  After that the miracles had followed one another so rapidly, each more amazing than the last, that the watchers had unaffectedly abandoned themselves to an attitude of permanent delighted astonishment. They lived in a world of magic. And their entire existence was based on the tacit assumption—tacit because the truth of it was so manifest—that their boy was the most prodigious boy that ever was. He went into knickerbockers. He learnt hymns. He went to school—and came back alive at the end of the first day and said he had enjoyed it! Certainly, other boys went to school. Yes, but there was something special, something indefinable, something incredible, about Henry’s going to school that separated his case from all the other cases, and made it precious in its wonder. And he began to study arithmetic, geometry, geography, history, chemistry, drawing, Latin, French, mensuration, composition, physics, Scripture, and fencing. His singular brain could grapple simultaneously with these multifarious subjects. And all the time he was growing, growing, growing. More than anything else it was his growth that stupefied and confounded and enchanted his mother. His limbs were enormous to her, and the breadth of his shoulders and the altitude of his head. It puzzled her to imagine where the flesh came from. Already he was as tail as she, and up to Aunt Annie’s lips, and up to his father’s shoulder. She simply adored his colossal bigness. But somehow the fact that a giant was attending the Bloomsbury Middle School never leaked out.

  ‘What’s this?’ Henry demanded, mystified, as he sat down to breakfast. There was a silence.

  ‘What’s what?’ said his father gruffly. ‘Get your breakfast.’

  ‘Oh my!’ Henry had lifted the basin.

  ‘Had you forgotten it was your birthday?’ Mrs. Knight asked, beaming.

  ‘Well, I’m blest!’ He had in truth forgotten that it was his birthday.

  ‘You’ve been so wrapped up in this Speech Day business, haven’t you?’ said Aunt Annie, as if wishful to excuse him to himself for the extraordinary lapse.

  They all luxuriated in his surprise, his exclamations, his blushes of delight, as he fingered the presents. For several days, as Henry had made no reference to his approaching anniversary, they had guessed that he had overlooked it in the exciting preparations for Speech Day, and they had been anticipating this moment with the dreadful joy of conspirators. And now they were content. No hitch, no anticlimax had occurred.

  ‘I k
now,’ said Henry. ‘The watch is from father, and you’ve given me the chain, mother, and the knife is from Aunt Annie. Is there a thing in it for pulling stones out of horses’ hoofs, auntie?’ (Happily, there was.)

  ‘You must make a good breakfast, dear; you’ve got a big day before you,’ enjoined his mother, when he had thanked them politely, and assumed the watch and chain, and opened all the blades and other pleasant devices of the penknife.

  ‘Yes, mother,’ he answered obediently.

  He always obeyed injunctions to eat well. But it would be unfair to Henry not to add that he was really a most obedient boy—in short, a good boy, a nice boy. The strangest thing of all in Henry’s case was that, despite their united and unceasing efforts, his three relatives had quite failed to spoil him. He was too self-possessed for his years, too prone to add the fanciful charm of his ideas to no matter what conversation might be proceeding in his presence; but spoiled he was not.

  The Speech Day which had just dawned marked a memorable point in his career. According to his mother’s private notion, it would be a demonstration, and a triumphant demonstration, that, though the mills of God grind slowly, they grind exceeding small. For until that term, of which the Speech Day was the glittering conclusion, the surpassing merits and talents of her son had escaped recognition at the Bloomsbury Middle School. He had never reached the top of a form; he had never received a prize; he had never earned pedagogic praise more generous than ‘Conduct fair—progress fair.’ But now, out of the whole school, he had won the prize for Good Conduct. And, as if this was not sufficiently dazzling, he had also taken to himself, for an essay on ‘Streets,’ the prize for English Composition. And, thirdly, he had been chosen to recite a Shaksperean piece at the ceremony of prize-giving. It was the success in Composition which tickled his father’s pride, for was not this a proof of heredity? Aunt Annie flattered herself on the Good Conduct prize. Mrs. Knight exulted in everything, but principally in the prospective sight of her son at large on the platform delivering Shakspere to a hushed, attentive audience of other boys’ parents. It was to be the apotheosis of Henry, was that night!