The Idol of the Blind: A Novel

by Tom Gallon

When David Willis came back from church, the child had got his questions ready, and knew exactly what answers he required, as a child always unerringly does. He asked why all the shops along the other side of the street were closed, and why the bells rang on that day, and why the people sang in the big church which loomed above them. And then he heard for the first time of that other world into which we try so hard to peer; of that dread Presence—dread to a child—beyond the skies that shuts in our vision. He was puzzled to understand how his mother could be right above him, watching to see if he were a good boy or a bad; and why, in that case, those flowers were put upon that grass-covered bed of hers out in the churchyard. He pondered the matter deeply, and was much disconcerted to think that the God of whom every one seemed so much afraid was all round him and could see everything he did.

He went one day into the church with his father—an experience indeed! It was quite empty, save for themselves, and the first thought that occurred to him was to wonder where the roof was; and why his voice rumbled and rattled and sprang at him from far above when he incautiously spoke in his usual shrill treble. The phrase which his father used—“the house of God”—awed him; he understood why the roof was so much higher than that of their own house. A lovely pattern of many colours on the stone pavement at his feet arrested his attention. He followed the shafts of light upward to the great rose window high up in the wall over the porch. His heart went a little quicker, and he gripped his father’s hand with his baby fingers. That surely must be the eye of God looking down at him.

He went home tremblingly to think the matter over; saw in the childish wonder of discovery something that no one had found before; screwed his courage to make further inquiries of his father concerning this dread Being. It was a terror to him to learn that the Being was everywhere, not alone in the great place where people went in their best clothes to worship him. He crept up to his tiny bedroom under the roof that night, and hurriedly closed the door and drew the curtains, and lay in bed quakingly triumphant at the thought that he had shut It out, only to wake up with a start in a little while at the remembrance that It must have been in the room before his precautions were taken. He climbed out of bed, and pattered across to the window; pulled back the curtains, and pushed open the casement. All the benign influence of a summer starlight night was about him; the lights were twinkling sleepily and safely down in the town; and he could hear calm, slow country voices in the street beyond the garden. Life—great and wonderful to his childish mind, although bounded by so narrow a horizon—seemed beautiful and good and secure; he smiled, and dropped his sleepy head on his arms on the window ledge, and slept there calmly till the morning came.

The world is always a place of giants to us when we are very little; therein lies the tragedy and the terror of it. We are always told that childhood is such a happy time; we cry always how gladly we would return to it. But we know well that we would not return to it with the ignorance with which we left it; that we should go back to its delights and its irresponsibilities with the magician’s wand of Experience in our hands to make it a fairyland. To a lonely child the world in which he lives is a place of terrors, with no one who understands his needs to explain to him all he craves so desperately to know.

Comethup was left pretty much to his own devices in those early days. David Willis liked to have the boy near him, liked to see him moving about the house. But, in his dreamy fashion, he took but scant notice of the child as a child; he painted to himself glowing pictures of what the boy would be when he had grown older and was ripe for companionship; for the present, he waited a little impatiently for that time to come. So it happened that Comethup explored his world alone.

The seasons seemed always to come suddenly. He would wake up, bright and alert, on a glorious morning of sunshine, with an endless prospect of sunny days before him; fires were things of the past, and the garden was no more a sealed place, wherein he must not run for fear of splashing his little white legs with mud. In just the same way there seemed no intermediate time between the summer, with its glorious abundance of roses and its long, hot afternoons, and the time when the roses were gone, and he was curled up like a little comfortable animal on the hearthrug before the parlour fire. That was the time, too, for going to bed in the dark, when the dreadful hour crept inexorably on; when he must leave the warmth and brightness of the lower room and climb with reluctant feet into a colder atmosphere, where grim shadows lurked on the landing, and the pale moon grinned in at him through an uncurtained window, like a queer face all on one side.

The church grew, quite naturally, from its mystic qualities, to be his chief delight. Everything about it was wonderful, from the long flight of stone steps which led up to the organ-loft where his father played, to the great brown wooden bird, with its beak open, and with outstretched wings, which stood on a carved pillar before the altar. Its seats were a never-failing source of delight to the shy child—places in which one could hide, secure from every one, and look up at the great roof, and at the sunlight slanting in through the windows. But perhaps it was best of all to sit up in the organ-loft, as he sometimes did with his father; to draw a huge hassock close up against the old-fashioned wooden partition, and sit there and look down, unseen and unsuspected, at the people below. Comethup always stood up at the proper places on those occasions, and sat down when the people rustled into their seats; he tried, too, to murmur something which sounded a little like the responses which rumbled up from below.

His world widened out a little as the placid years flowed on. The garden of the roses no longer bounded his horizon; the gate ceased to be a barrier which must not be passed. The spirit of adventure was strong in Comethup one summer afternoon, when his father was sleeping peacefully on the hard horsehair sofa in the parlour, and the little maid who waited upon them was busied in the kitchen. The garden had been all explored; on such a day as this, when the air was heavy and still, the very scent of the roses hung heavily. Poor Comethup was a little tired of roses—a little tired even of that wonderful garden, every corner of which, every stick and stone, he knew by heart. And then, just as he clung to the iron railings of the gate, and looked out disconsolately into the quiet street, there came a playmate.

It was a dog; a mere boisterous, happy-go-lucky, tumbling, joyous puppy of a few months; a thing of comical crinkled mouth and serious eyes, a delightful romping rascal that loved the world and hailed every creature friend. It stopped opposite the gate where Comethup stood, and backed itself upon its ridiculous little haunches and inch of tail, and barked deliriously; then dashed off a foot or two in excited chase of something which didn’t exist; and then, suddenly remembering Comethup, returned madly to the assault, thrusting its little black nose under the gate in a frantic endeavour to bite Comethup’s little white socks.

It was irresistible. Comethup cautiously pulled open the gate, trembling at his daring as he did so, and went down on the gravel on his knees, clapping his hands, and doing all in his power to induce the puppy to come to him.