John Halifax, Gentleman Read online

  “We mean,” John said gaily, “to be two living Essays on the Advantages of Poverty. We are not going to be afraid of it or ashamed of it. We don’t care who knows it. We consider that our respectability lies solely in our two selves.”

  xvThe novel does lapse from time to time, especially when the author’s voice creeps in, usually to make judgments. John and Phineas’s one trip to the theater is a good example:

  Shabby and small as the place was, it was filled with all the beau monde of Coltham, which then, patronized by royalty, rivaled even Bath in its fashion and folly. Such a dazzle of diamonds and spangled turbans and Prince-of-Wales’ plumes. Such an odd mingling of costume, which was then in a transition state, the old ladies clinging tenaciously to the stately silken petticoats and long bodices, surmounted by the prim and decent bouffantes, while the younger belles had begun to flaunt in the French fashions of flimsy muslins, shortwaisted—narrow-skirted. These we had already heard Jael furiously inveighing against: for Jael, Quakeress as she was, could not quite smother her original propensity towards the decoration of the “the flesh,” and betrayed a suppressed but profound interest in the same.

  John and I quite agreed with her, that it was painful to see gentle English girls clad, or rather un-clad, after the fashion of our enemies across the Channel; now, unhappy nation! Sunk to zero in politics, religion, and morals—where high-bred ladies went about dressed as heathen goddesses, with the bare arms and bare sandalled feet, gaining none of the pure simplicity of the ancient world, and losing all the decorous dignity of our modern times.

  However, the Victorian stoicism and acceptance of one’s position, in some places is quite touching. Here’s Phineas accepting the limits of his small life:

  I [Phineas Fletcher] was, nevertheless, twenty years old; and although Jael and Sally were the only specimens of xvithe other sex which had risen on my horizon, yet once or twice, since I had read Shakespeare, I had had a boy’s lovely dreams of the divinity of womanhood. They began, and ended—mere dreams. Soon dawned the bare, hard truth, that my character was too feeble and womanish to be likely to win any woman’s reverence or love. Or, even had this been possible, one sickly as I was, stricken with hereditary disease, ought never to seek to perpetuate it by marriage. I therefore put from me, at once and for ever, every feeling of that kind; and during my whole life—I thank God!—have never faltered in my resolution. Friendship was given me for love—duty for happiness. So best, and I was satisfied.

  It seems from reading the text and learning of John’s plight as an orphan early on in the novel, that there was little help for the poor in the late 1700s. Ironically, more than two hundred years later, many Britons feel the opposite is true, and the social welfare system is too generous, and discourages people from working.

  One must remember that the decades of people’s lives two hundred years ago were as varied to them as the decades of our lives are to us, with new fashions, moral viewpoints, technologies, figures of speech, and even foods. The difference between our time and their own time would have been the same number of years between their time and the Elizabethan era.

  One of my favorite passages, references a battlefield from the Wars of the Roses in the late 1400s:

  We came out in those quiet hay-fields, which, tradition says, had once grown wine for the rosy monks close by, and history avers, were afterwards watered by a darker stream than the blood of grapes. The Vineyards had been a battle-field; and under the long wavy grass, and the roots of xviithe wild apple trees, slept many a Yorkist and Lancastrian. Sometimes an unusually deep furrow turned out a white bone—but more often the relics were undisturbed, and the meadows used as pastures or hay-fields.

  The book cleverly incorporates many other historical events that readers in the 1860s would have lived through and were perhaps beginning to look back upon.

  It was the year 1800, long known in the English households as “the dear year.” The present generation can have no conception of what a terrible year that was—War, Famine, and Tumult stalking hand-in-hand, and no one to stay them. For between the upper and lower classes there was a great gulf fixed; the rich ground the faces of the poor, the poor hated, yet meanly succumbed to, the rich. Neither had Christianity enough boldly to cross the line of demarcation, and prove, the humbler, that they were men,—the higher and wiser, that they were gentlemen.

  Here’s another:

  Many yet alive remember this year—1825—the panic year. War having ceased, commerce, in its worst form, started into sudden and unhealthy overgrowth. Speculations of all kinds sprung up like fungi, out of dead wood, flourished a little, and dropped away. Then came ruin, not of hundreds, but thousands, of all ranks, and classes. This year, and this month in this year, the breaking of many established firms, especially bankers, told that the universal crash had just begun.

  When it was first published in the mid-nineteenth century, John Halifax, Gentleman was a massive commercial success with xviiimore than two hundred thousand copies in print. It was a book that came at the right time, and celebrated the right things such as the Reform Bill and the abolition of slavery. More than two hundred years later, the main character’s honesty, hard word, self-reliance, kindness, stoicism, manners, and respect for others is still fresh and inspiring. As I was finishing this introduction, I took my daughter to a seventeenth-century church a short walk from my parents’ house here in Cambridgeshire. We spent an hour reading the headstones, trying to figure out why in 1898 three young children died within a few days of each other, just a week shy of Christmas. Then we had a picnic at the edge of a field of blowing wheat, and I realized how noisy the modern world is with aircraft and cars, factories, and machines. I explained to my daughter that hundreds of years ago, there was no such noise, and that we may be approaching a new time when another industrial revolution occurs, only this one won’t be about dependence, but independence.xixxx

  1CHAPTER I

  “Get out o’ Mr. Fletcher’s road, ye idle, lounging, little—”

  “Vagabond,” I think the woman (Sally Watkins, once my nurse), was going to say, but she changed her mind.

  My father and I both glanced round, surprised at her unusual reticence of epithets: but when the lad addressed turned, fixed his eyes on each of us for a moment, and made way for us, we ceased to wonder. Ragged, muddy, and miserable as he was, the poor boy looked anything but a “vagabond.”

  “Thee need not go into the wet, my lad. Keep close to the wall, and there will be shelter enough both for us and thee,” said my father, as he pulled my little hand-carriage into the alley, under cover, from the pelting rain. The lad, with a grateful look, put out a hand likewise, and pushed me further in. A strong hand it was—roughened and browned with labour—though he was scarcely as old as I. What would I not have given to have been so stalwart and so tall!

  Sally called from her house-door, “Wouldn’t Master Phineas come in and sit by the fire a bit?”—But it was always a trouble to me to move or walk; and I liked staying at the mouth of the alley, watching the autumnal shower come sweeping down the street: besides, I wanted to look again at the stranger-lad.

  2He had scarcely stirred, but remained leaning against the wall—either through weariness, or in order to be out of our way. He took little or no notice of us, but kept his eyes fixed on the pavement—for we actually boasted pavement in the High Street of our town of Norton Bury—watching the eddying rain-drops, which, each as it fell, threw up a little mist of spray. It was a serious, haggard face for a boy of only fourteen or so. Let me call it up before me—I can, easily, even after more than fifty years.

  Brown eyes, deep-sunken, with strongly-marked brows, a nose like most other Saxon noses, nothing particular; lips well-shaped, lying one upon the other, firm and close; a square, sharply outlined, resolute chin, of that type which gives character and determination to the whole physiognomy, and without which in the fairest features, as in the best dispositions, one is always conscious of a certain want.
>
  As I have stated, in person the lad was tall and strongly-built; and I, poor puny wretch! so reverenced physical strength. Everything in him seemed to indicate that which I had not: his muscular limbs, his square, broad shoulders, his healthy cheek, though it was sharp and thin—even to his crisp curls of bright thick hair.

  Thus he stood, principal figure in a picture which is even yet as clear to me as yesterday—the narrow, dirty alley leading out of the High Street, yet showing a glimmer of green field at the further end; the open house-doors on either side, through which came the drowsy burr of many a stocking-loom, the prattle of children paddling in the gutter, and sailing thereon a fleet of potato parings. In front the High Street, with the mayor’s house opposite, porticoed and grand: and beyond, just where the rain-clouds were breaking, rose up out of a nest of trees, the square tower of our ancient abbey—Norton Bury’s boast and pride. On it, from a break in the clouds, came a sudden stream of light. The stranger-lad lifted up his head to look at it.

  3“The rain will be over soon,” I said, but doubted if he heard me. What could he be thinking of so intently?—a poor working lad, whom few would have given credit for thinking at all.

  I do not suppose my father cast a second glance or thought on the boy, whom, from a sense of common justice, he had made take shelter beside us. In truth, worthy man, he had no lack of matter to occupy his mind, being sole architect of a long up-hill but now thriving trade. I saw, by the hardening of his features, and the restless way in which he poked his stick into the little water-pools, that he was longing to be in his tan-yard close by.

  He pulled out his great silver watch—the dread of our house, for it was a watch which seemed to imbibe something of its master’s character; remorseless as justice or fate, it never erred a moment.

  “Twenty-three minutes lost by this shower. Phineas, my son, how am I to get thee safe home? unless thee wilt go with me to the tan-yard—”

  I shook my head. It was very hard for Abel Fletcher to have for his only child such a sickly creature as I, now, at sixteen, as helpless and useless to him as a baby.

  “Well, well, I must find some one to go home with thee.” For though my father had got me a sort of carriage in which, with a little external aid, I could propel myself, so as to be his companion occasionally in his walks between our house, the tan-yard, and the Friends’ meeting-house—still he never trusted me anywhere alone. “Here, Sally—Sally Watkins! do any o’ thy lads want to earn an honest penny?”

  Sally was out of earshot; but I noticed that as the lad near us heard my father’s words, the colour rushed over his face, and he started forward involuntarily. I had not before perceived how wasted and hungry-looking he was.

  “Father!” I whispered. But here the boy had mustered up his courage and voice.

  4“Sir, I want work; may I earn a penny?”

  He spoke in tolerably good English—different from our coarse, broad, G—shire drawl; and taking off his tattered old cap, looked right up into my father’s face. The old man scanned him closely.

  “What is thy name, lad?”

  “John Halifax.”

  “Where dost thee come from?”

  “Cornwall.”

  “Hast thee any parents living?”

  “No.”

  I wished my father would not question thus; but possibly he had his own motives, which were rarely harsh, though his actions often appeared so.

  “How old might thee be, John Halifax?”

  “Fourteen, sir.”

  “Thee art used to work?”

  “Yes.”

  “What sort of work?”

  “Anything that I can get to do.”

  I listened nervously to this catechism, which went on behind my back.

  “Well,” said my father, after a pause, “thee shall take my son home, and I’ll give thee a groat. Let me see; art thee a lad to be trusted?” And holding him at arm’s length, regarding him meanwhile with eyes that were the terror of all the rogues in Norton Bury, Abel Fletcher jingled temptingly the silver money in the pockets of his long-flapped brown waistcoat. “I say, art thee a lad to be trusted?”

  John Halifax neither answered nor declined his eyes. He seemed to feel that this was a critical moment, and to have gathered all his mental forces into a serried square, to meet the attack. He met it, and conquered in silence.

  “Lad, shall I give thee the groat now?”

  5“Not till I’ve earned it, sir.”

  So, drawing his hand back, my father slipped the money into mine, and left us.

  I followed him with my eyes, as he went sturdily plashing down the street; his broad, comfortable back, which owned a coat of true Quaker cut, but spotless, warm, and fine; his ribbed hose and leathern gaiters, and the wide-brimmed hat set over a fringe of grey hairs, that crowned the whole with respectable dignity. He looked precisely what he was—an honest, honourable, prosperous tradesman. I watched him down the street—my good father, whom I respected perhaps even more than I loved him. The Cornish lad watched him likewise.

  It still rained slightly, so we remained under cover. John Halifax leaned in his old place, and did not attempt to talk. Once only, when the draught through the alley made me shiver, he pulled my cloak round me carefully.

  “You are not very strong, I’m afraid?”

  “No.”

  Then he stood idly looking up at the opposite—the mayor’s—house, with its steps and portico, and its fourteen windows, one of which was open, and a cluster of little heads visible there.

  The mayor’s children—I knew them all by sight, though nothing more; for their father was a lawyer, and mine a tanner; they belonged to Abbey folk and orthodoxy, I to the Society of Friends—the mayor’s rosy children seemed greatly amused by watching us shivering shelterers from the rain. Doubtless our position made their own appear all the pleasanter. For myself it mattered little; but for this poor, desolate, homeless, wayfaring lad to stand in sight of their merry nursery window, and hear the clatter of voices, and of not unwelcome dinner-sounds—I wondered how he felt it.

  Just at this minute another head came to the window, a somewhat older child; I had met her with the rest; she was only 6a visitor. She looked at us, then disappeared. Soon after, we saw the front door half opened, and an evident struggle taking place behind it; we even heard loud words across the narrow street.

  “I will—I say I will.”

  “You shan’t, Miss Ursula.”

  “But I will!”

  And there stood the little girl, with a loaf in one hand and a carving-knife in the other. She succeeded in cutting off a large slice, and holding it out.

  “Take it, poor boy!—you look so hungry. Do take it.” But the servant forced her in, and the door was shut upon a sharp cry.

  It made John Halifax start, and look up at the nursery window, which was likewise closed. We heard nothing more. After a minute he crossed the street, and picked up the slice of bread. Now in those days bread was precious, exceedingly. The poor folk rarely got it; they lived on rye or meal. John Halifax had probably not tasted wheaten bread like this for months: it appeared not, he eyed it so ravenously;—then, glancing towards the shut door, his mind seemed to change. He was a long time before he ate a morsel; when he did so, it was quietly and slowly; looking very thoughtful all the while.

  As soon as the rain ceased, we took our way home, down the High Street, towards the Abbey church—he guiding my carriage along in silence. I wished he would talk, and let me hear again his pleasant Cornish accent.

  “How strong you are!” said I, sighing, when, with a sudden pull, he had saved me from being overturned by a horseman riding past—young Mr. Brithwood of the Mythe House, who never cared where he galloped or whom he hurt—“So tall and so strong.”

  “Am I? Well, I shall want my strength.”

  “How?”

  7“To earn my living.”

  He drew up his broad shoulders, and planted on the pavement a firmer foot, as if he knew he
had the world before him—would meet it single-handed, and without fear.

  “What have you worked at lately?”

  “Anything I could get, for I have never learned a trade.”

  “Would you like to learn one?”

  He hesitated a minute, as if weighing his speech. “Once I thought I should like to be what my father was.”

  “What was he?”

  “A scholar and a gentleman.”

  This was news, though it did not much surprise me. My father, tanner as he was, and pertinaciously jealous of the dignity of trade, yet held strongly the common-sense doctrine of the advantages of good descent; at least, in degree. For since it is a law of nature, admitting only rare exceptions, that the qualities of the ancestors should be transmitted to the race—the fact seems patent enough, that even allowing equal advantages, a gentleman’s son has more chances of growing up a gentleman than the son of a working man. And though he himself, and his father before him, had both been working men, still, I think, Abel Fletcher never forgot that we originally came of a good stock, and that it pleased him to call me, his only son, after one of our forefathers, not unknown—Phineas Fletcher, who wrote the “Purple Island.”

  Thus it seemed to me, and I doubted not it would to my father, much more reasonable and natural that a boy like John Halifax—in whom from every word he said I detected a mind and breeding above his outward condition—should come of gentle than of boorish blood.

  “Then, perhaps,” I said, resuming the conversation, “you would not like to follow a trade?”

  “Yes, I should. What would it matter to me? My father was a gentleman.”

  8“And your mother?”

  And he turned suddenly round; his cheeks hot, his lips quivering: “She is dead. I do not like to hear strangers speak about my mother.”

  I asked his pardon. It was plain he had loved and mourned her; and that circumstances had smothered down his quick boyish feelings into a man’s tenacity of betraying where he had loved and mourned. I, only a few minutes after, said something about wishing we were not “strangers.”