THE RUNAWAY
He sat alone, in a corner of the playing field, a white-faced child of the slums, in a dumb agony of loneliness and despair.
He was frightened and appalled at the wide stretches of green woodland around and the great dome of the blue sky above. It made him feel smaller and more deserted than ever, and his head was sore with home-sickness for his mother and Mabel, the sister next him, and the baby, his especial charge, for whose warm weight his little arms ached with longing.
He had always been his mother's special help. He had minded the younger ones when she got a job at washing or charing, and helped her to sew sacks with little fingers quickly grown deft with practice. They had been very happy, even though food was often short, and spent many pleasant hours amongst the graves of their churchyard playgrounds, or sitting on the Tower Wharf watching the river and the big ships.
The nightmare of his short life had been a man called Daddy, who came back when they were all asleep, smelling strong and queer, and then there would be furious words and the dull thuds of blows falling on his mother's slender body, and he would throw himself screaming to protect his beloved against the wild beast that was attacking her. Once in the fray his arm had got broken, and he had seen, as in an evil dream, a dreaded "cop" enter the room, and Daddy had been hailed to prison, after which there was long peace and joy in the little home.
Then the man came out, and the quarrels were worse than ever, till a kindly neighbour took Percy to sleep on the rag bed with her other children, out of the way of Daddy, who had conceived a violent hatred against his firstborn.
Then one day Daddy was brought home, straight and stiff, on a stretcher. There had been a drunken row at the "Pig and Whistle," and Daddy had fallen backwards on the pavement, and died of a fractured skull. An inquest was held, and much more interest was shown in Daddy's dead body than any one had evinced in his living one. A coroner and a doctor and twelve jurymen "sat" gravely on the corpse, and decided he had died "an accidental death."
Then there was a funeral and a long drive in a carriage with much crape and black about, and Daddy was left in a deep yellow hole with muddy water at the bottom. And peace came again to the widow and orphans.
Peace, but starvation, for the mother's wage did not suffice to buy bread for them all. The rent got behind, and finally, with many tears and much pressure from various black-coated men, who seemed always worrying at the door, he and Mabel had been taken to a big, terrible place called a workhouse. And, after some preliminary misery at another place, called a "Receiving Home," wretchedness had culminated in this strange vastness of loneliness and greenery. Only two days had passed, but they seemed like years, and he trembled lest his sentence here should be a life-one, and he would never see his mother again. He had not killed nor robbed nor hurt any one, and he wondered with the bewilderment of seven years why men and women could be so cruel to him. Then he determined to run away. It had not taken long in the train. If he started soon, he would be home by bedtime.
"Where's London?" he asked a boy who was hitting a smaller one to pass the time.
"Dunno. You go in a train."
"I know. But which way?"
"Dunno, I tell you."
Near him stood one of the teachers, but as a natural enemy the boy felt he was not to be trusted, and did not ask him.
Then the bell rang for dinner, and they took their seats round the long, bare tables, in front of a steaming plate of stewed meat and vegetables. His pulses were beating with excitement at his secret plot, and the food was like sawdust in his mouth. Afternoon school began, and he sat with the resigned boredom of his kind, chanting in shrill chorus the eternal truths of the multiplication table.
Then some other subject, equally dull, was started, when suddenly his heart leaped to his mouth, and he nearly fell off the bench with the unexpected joy of it, for the teacher had brought up the intimate question of his soul: "Which is the way to London?"
The blood throbbed so loud in his ears that he could scarcely hear the answer. "London lies south of this schoolroom. If you walked out of that window, and followed your nose up the white road yonder, it would take you to London."
Other strange instruction followed—how to find north and south, and all about the sun and moon—but he purposely refrained from attending. By the act of God the position of London had been miraculously revealed to him, and he clung fast to that knowledge, so that his brain was burning with the effort of concentration.
At last the bell rang, and they flocked out again into the playing field. He stood alone with his great knowledge and reconnoitred the situation like an experienced general; a high fence with barbed wire ran round the field (clearly boys had run away before), but on the left of the square school-house he could see the shrubbery and the big locked gates by which he had been brought in with fellow-prisoners two days before.
Clearly, there was no escape but by going back to the house and facing perils unspeakable. So, humming softly to himself, he walked back through the long corridors to the entrance-hall, and out at the front door, which was standing open, for the day was hot. He sneaked along like a cat under the laurel bushes.
The big gates were locked, but farther down, hidden in the ivy of the wall, was a small door which yielded to his push, and then, by the favour of the angels, he stood free, and ran for his life up the white road which led to London. At the top of the hill he paused and panted for breath. The windows of the great school-house glared at him like the eyes of some evil beast, and, small as he was, he was painfully conscious of his conspicuousness on the white highway. A farmer's cart passed him, and the man turned round and gazed after him curiously. A motor-bus thundered past in a cloud of white, and again it seemed as if every head turned to watch him.
Hot and faint and thirsty, he still plodded on. London, with its beloved chimneys and friendly crowds, would soon burst into view, and his mother, with her cheery "What-ho, Percy!" would be welcoming him. The new shoes of the school were pinching badly. He longed to take them off, but funked the knots, which some female person had tied that morning with damnable efficiency. The sun had suddenly tumbled into a dangerous-looking pool of red fire, and the shadows which ran beside him had grown so gigantic he felt alarmed. Such terrifying phenomena were unknown in the blessed streets of London. The queer night noises of the countryside had begun around him: strange chirrups and cries from unseen beasts, which seemed to follow and run beside him; and every now and then a horned monster stuck its head over the gate and roared hungrily for its prey.
At length, wearied and hungry, and terrified by the sinister darkness stealing over the landscape, he threw himself down by the wayside. He heard the sound of footsteps behind, and braced himself to meet the knife of the murderer, when a cheerful voice greeted him: "What-ho, sonnie! You are out late. Time for little boys to be in bed."
"Please, sir," said the child, "I am going home to mother."
"Where does your mother live?"
"In London."
"London, eh! But you've a long way to go."
A sob rose and tore at his throat. Still a long way to go, and darkness was coming on—black, inky darkness, uncut by familiar street-lamps.
"Come home with me, Tommy, and my missis will sleep you for the night."
With a feeling of perfect confidence, the child slipped his small fingers into the horny hand of the farm labourer, and half an hour later, washed and fed, he was sleeping in a big bed amongst a heterogeneous collection of curly heads.
"Look 'ere, Bill," said the labourer's wife as she folded up the neat little garments provided by unwilling ratepayers, "'e's runned away from that there barrack school."
"I knowed that," said Bill, knocking the ashes out from his clay pipe. "It ain't the first time as I've met youngsters on the road, and, mebbe, it won't be the last, as folks in the village have been before the beak for harbouring them, poor little devils!"