The Book of Ebenezer le Page Read online

  Jim and me had a drink in the Crown before we went home. While we was drinking, he said in a dreamy sort of way, ‘O dare to be a Daniel!’ I said, ‘What you drooling about now?’ He said, ‘I was only thinking about Daniel in the lion’s den.’ Anyhow, she wasn’t late that Thursday for a wonder. I hadn’t been waiting at the Weighbridge more than two minutes when she turned up. She was like a girl let out of school. I remember she was wearing a little sailor hat and a pink dress with puffed sleeves. She caught hold of me by the arm and said, ‘Oh, it’s nice to be going out! Where are we going?’ I said I thought we’d go to the Terres. ‘What’s on there?’ she said. ‘Singing and dancing on the stage,’ I said, ‘and Living Pictures.’ It was a big oblong tent in the gardens past Havelet, before you get to the tunnel. The Living Pictures was what I wanted to see. I hadn’t seen any yet.

  On the way she wanted to know everything about me: where I worked and what I did and if I had brothers and sisters and if my father and mother was alive. I told her straight out everything, and we was quite friendly. I think she liked me all right when she didn’t forget she was a Guernsey girl, and try and be half English like the gentry. Mind you, I didn’t look so bad that night. I was all spruced up in my best blue serge suit, and had a rose in my buttonhole. They was just going to begin at the Terres when we got there. The seats was sixpence and a shilling and one-and-six and a few rows in front at two shillings. Jim and me would have sat in the shilling, but I bought two one-and-six. The Living Picture was after the interval. A white sheet was let down from a roller in front of the stage, and the magic lantern was in the gangway. The lights was put out and all the girls giggled.

  I wondered after, if perhaps Liza thought I was going to hold her hand in the dark; but I was too interested in the picture. It was an exciting picture. A fellow on a bike was being chased by a steam-roller. It went after him hell for leather along roads and down lanes and round corners, until the poor fellow fell off his bike from going so fast and the steam-roller ran right over him and flattened him out. You could see the shape of his body flat on the road. The driver of the steam-roller stopped and got down and had a look. He was quite worried. He scratched his head and didn’t know what to do; and then he spotted the fellow’s pump had fallen off his bike. He picked it up and fitted it in the fellow’s ear and pumped him up. The fellow swelled out and jumped on his bike and rode off again as fast as before with the steamroller going full pelt after him. I laughed and laughed. ‘I think that’s silly!’ said Liza. ‘It isn’t silly,’ I said, ‘it’s funny. It’s you that’s silly!’ After that everything I liked, she didn’t; and everything she liked, I didn’t. There was a fellow made me think of Terence de Freis. When the lights went up again, he sat by a table looking at a photo of a beautiful woman and sang to it:

  If those lips could only speak,

  And those eyes could only see,

  And those beautiful golden tresses

  Were there in realitee,

  Could I only take your hand

  As I did when you took my name,

  But it’s only a beautiful picture

  In a beautiful golden frame!

  Liza thought it was lovely. I said, ‘He’s a turd!’

  I saw her back to Castle Carey, but we quarrelled all the way. I don’t know what about. I tried to put my arm around her waist, but she wouldn’t let me; and when I tried to kiss her, she said I wasn’t the nice boy she had thought I was. She had to go in by a side door; but when we got there she stood in the porch, if you please, waiting to be kissed. I made out I didn’t understand. ‘Am I going to see you again?’ she said. ‘I don’t know!’ I said and walked home in a fury.

  I went along to the Weighbridge the next Thursday at half-past seven in case she turned up; and, sure enough, after I had been waiting for a quarter of an hour, along she came. She said she just happened to be passing. I deserved that, so I took no notice. That night we strolled along the Castle Walk to the end of the breakwater. We got on better than the week before, but I nearly had a fight with her by the lighthouse. There was fellows sitting on the end of the pier fishing, and she wanted me to stop them because she said it was cruel. I’d have looked a fool! When I wouldn’t, she was going to do it herself, and I had to stop her by force. I managed to turn her round and walk her back; and when she didn’t see the fellows fishing, she forgot. I took her home up St Julien’s Avenue and along Candie and across Cambridge Park. She let me put my arm around her waist and kiss her good-night. I asked her if she’d come to the Circus with me the next Thursday. She said she’d be delighted to: I was so refreshing after the people she had to put up with at Castle Carey. I didn’t know what she meant by that, quite.

  I had been to the Circus several times with Jim. Sloan’s Circus came to Guernsey every year for two months in the summer and pitched in a field by the Tram-shed. It was a green tent with a pole in the middle and slanting poles all round; and inside it was lit by rings of gas-jets. When you went in, it was like being in a jelly-bowl turned upside-down under the sea. It was sixpence to sit on the wooden steps at the back; and Jim and me always sat in the top row, so as not to have other people’s knees sticking in our backs. It was a shilling to sit in the chairs down by the ring; and there was a special block of chairs with antimacassars for three shillings. I never saw nobody sitting there, except Dr de Jersey and his wife. They wasn’t for people like us. I bought two tickets for the shilling seats down by the ring.

  The first part of the programme Liza enjoyed as much as me. She was quite excited and gripped hold of me when the brass band struck up a Sousa march and the horses came galloping in. I had seen it all before, and it wasn’t very good really. Mr Sloan had been a good horseback rider in his time, but now if he did Dick Turpin’s Ride to York, he didn’t have enough breath left when he got there to cry tears over the death of Black Bess. Mrs Sloan didn’t do much. She sat sideways on Prince, who trotted round the ring and showed her off. She was on the heavy side and poor old Prince’s back was hollow from her weight. I said I was sorry for old Prince and Liza said she was sorry too. Miss Sloan stood on the rump of Darling, her Arab steed, and jumped through a hoop held out by Shadow, the clown. I said she wasn’t much cop. Liza thought the same. Shadow, the clown, had a white face and tried to be funny by being miserable. I didn’t laugh. Liza didn’t laugh either. The Shetland ponies made me laugh. The smallest always wanted to go round the wrong way. He was the one I liked. Liza said he was a pet.

  The second half of the programme was Colonel Cody, instead of Dick Turpin’s Ride to York. He was supposed to be a Red Indian; but I don’t know if he was or not. He was bald on the top of his head, but had long hair hanging down his back. He was a wonderful shot. He could hit a sixpence while he was riding round the ring and turning a buncho on his horse. I don’t think that interested Liza much. The next thing he did was to take out cataracts from the eye with his tongue. It was that upset Liza to start with. When I’d been with Jim the shilling seats was mostly taken up by families; but that night, because Cody was there, the fellows from the quarries who had cataracts on their eyes sat down in front. He went from one to the other, held open the eye-lid, licked the cataract off the naked eye, and showed them the skin on the back of his hand to prove he had done it. It wasn’t a trick because my father used to do it for the fellows at work, only he wasn’t as quick as Cody. Liza said it was filthy. I said a chap who had a cataract on his eye didn’t care if it was filthy or not, if he got rid of the cataract. Besides, my father wasn’t filthy.

  Cody’s great act was to mesmerise a woman he had brought over from Jersey. Some said she had been given stuff beforehand; but I don’t think so. I noticed once she got behind the tent pole out of range of his eyes, and he swore at her to move. People said she lived with him and he knocked her about, so that she was afraid of him, and would do anything he said. Others said he had snakes in his lodgings at the Bouet, and had learnt how to do it from them. Anyhow, she fell down on the sawdust of the ring li
ke a limp rag. Liza already wanted to jump in the ring and stop it, and I had to hang on to her. I don’t think the woman suffered. Cody stuck a pin in her and she didn’t bat an eyelid. He then picked her up in his arms and arranged her with her head on the edge of one chair and her feet on the edge of another. He did something to her muscles and she went stiff. He then put a board on her body, but it wasn’t touching either of the chairs; and he got three cart-horse drivers to stand on the board. She didn’t bend. In the excitement I let go of Liza, who was wriggling like an eel. She made one jump and was in the ring.

  I didn’t know where to put myself: I was so ashamed. She was cheered by half the crowd and boo’d by the other. All the circus people gathered round her and said the woman was perfectly all right and couldn’t feel a thing. Liza wanted for her to be brought round there and then; but it was explained the woman had gone under expecting to be as if she was asleep until the Saturday night, and it would be dangerous and not for the good of the woman to bring her round before. Mr Sloan himself, who was then in a frock coat and had a big white shirt front, offered Liza two free tickets for the three-shilling seats for her to come and bring a friend with her to see it done. Liza snatched the tickets from his hand and tore them to shreds and threw the pieces in his face. ‘Brutes! Brutes!’ she said. ‘Brutes of men! That poor woman! That poor woman!’ and she walked out of the ring and out of the Circus with her head in the air, and everybody cheering and laughing. I let her go. I’m no Daniel, me.

  12

  Jim only laughed when I told him about Liza. He said he always knew when I had been out with Liza because I looked like Victor when he came back from one of his gallivants. Victor was a good and faithful dog and hardly ever left his master’s heels; but every now and then he would go off after a bitch. He’d be gone for a week sometimes, and would be seen mooning along the lanes; but nobody would dare to try and bring him back. Then one morning, lo and behold, he’d be in his basket again. He would look grumpy and miserable, and have his fur torn; and, once, a hole in his ear and, another time, a bad wound on the top of his head. For days after, he would only crawl out and lie in the sun, saying to himself, ‘Never again! Never again!’

  I gave up all thought of Liza. I chased after Florrie Brehaut, who was learning to be a nurse. She liked the boys and was easy; and she knew a thing or two, that girl. I saw Liza in Town a few times, and once when I was out with Florrie. She was nearly always with a different bloke. The only one she went out with at all regular was Don Guille, the son of Jurat Guille; but even when she was with him, she would smile and wave to me, as if nothing had happened. Florrie didn’t like her. I liked Florrie all right, but I was glad when she went to England. ‘It’s no good me writing, is it?’ she said. ‘It isn’t much,’ I said: ‘I’m not one for writing letters.’

  I spent a lot of my spare time on the farm with Jim. Of an evening, when I’d finished work and there wasn’t much had to be done in our garden, I’d go down; and on Saturday afternoons. I liked farming better than working in the greenhouses. Jim said I would have made a good farmer. ‘Better than you, anyway,’ I said. The trouble with Jim was that he was soft about the animals. They wasn’t just so much milk and butter and meat so far as he was concerned, but Rosie and Marie and Evangeline and Boney, the bull. It nearly broke Jim’s heart when the young bullocks had to go off to the slaughterhouse. ‘They haven’t had half a life,’ he’d say. When Timothy, the donkey, got so old he was of no use to anybody and was eating every other creature out of house and home, Jim’s father said he would have to be put down. Jim turned on his father. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘and when you get to be an old man, we’ll have you put down by a humane killer and your carcase carried on a truck to the Tram-shed to be burnt.’ Timothy lived on for many more years and got fatter and fatter, until one day he was found dead in a field from overeating. The creatures knew Jim’s weakness. I could get the cows down the lane in five minutes. It used to take Jim half-an-hour and, even then, two or three would be wandering back to where they’d come from. He’d swear at them in all the colours of the rainbow; but they didn’t take a blind bit of notice. ‘Ah well, cows are cows,’ he’d say.

  Christmas I always spent at home with my mother; but Jim came to us for Boxing Day. Tabitha and Jean came for the New Year. They would arrive New Year’s Eve and take my mother to Town with them, and come back with her to Les Moulins and stay the night. Those days New Year was kept up nearly as much as Christmas; and New Year’s Eve in Town was nearly as good as Christmas Eve. I always went to Town with Jim New Year’s Eve, and stayed the night at his place. After a good supper, we would lie awake in his big bed and wait to hear the New Year come in. When the whistles and the hooters started going down St Sampson’s, and the sirens from the ships, he would wish me a happy New Year and I would wish him one too; and then we’d curl up together and go to sleep.

  New Year’s Day I helped to get ready for the party. The Mahys used to have a quiet Christmas with just the family; but New Year’s Day they gave a big party. I remember one year Christine Mahy was there. She had done her time in College and was teaching in a school at Frimley in Surrey, but she was then home for the holidays. I asked her if she had seen anything of Raymond lately. He hadn’t been round to see me for months, and I was beginning to wonder if something was the matter with him. ‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘I’ve been seeing quite a lot of Raymond.’ His health was all right, it seemed, but he had decided he wanted to be a minister. I couldn’t make that out at all. He was such a sincere boy, I’d have thought a minister was the last thing he would want to be.

  La Hetty came to see my mother soon after to tell her all about it. The two of them was having tea and a chin-wag when I came in from work. La Hetty was half for it, and half against. At first she blamed Horace. She said Raymond only wanted to be a minister so as he could go away from Guernsey, because Horace had gone away from Guernsey. I was sure there was something more to it than that. She went on to say that Raymond had been converted. He had always gone to Chapel; but he had never ‘come forward’, as they say. Hetty was ashamed he had made a show of himself in front of everybody. She did say there hadn’t been much talk. As a matter of fact, it was done quiet at St Sampson’s. They didn’t cry aloud their sins and throw themselves on their knees at the penitent form, as they did at the Salvation Army. They just stood up in an after-meeting where most of those present was already converted.

  Hetty said Raymond now taught in the Sunday School and was out most nights of the week on something to do with Chapel. He helped with the Band of Hope and the Scouts and went to Mr Carrington’s Bible Class. Mr Carrington was manager for John Leale on the Bridge, and Hetty was pleased Raymond was getting mixed up with the Leales and the Birds and the Doreys and the Johns and such people, who was all well-to-do and relations of each other in one way or another. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘the Le Pages are as common as flies.’ She wasn’t as worried as I would have thought at the idea of him going away. She said she didn’t know how she was going to bear it while he was away; but if when after he came out of College, he was sent to preach in a Chapel in England, she could sell up everything and go and live with him. She didn’t say what was going to happen to Harold. I didn’t know if Wallaballoo was her house, or his. I thought it was his. She said, ‘There’s nothing I’d like better than to go and live in a place where I’m not known, and where everybody don’t know all my business.’ I listened, but I didn’t say nothing, except that I hoped Raymond hadn’t forgotten he got a Cousin Ebenezer.

  He came round the next evening. ‘Hullo, stranger!’ I said. He said he was sorry he hadn’t been to see me before, but he’d been busy. It sounded all right; but he was different somehow. He didn’t look at me straight. It was as if there was something he was ashamed of. I said I was just going down to my boat to mend a net, if he’d like to come with me. He said he’d come and he sat on the shingle watching me. La Petite Grève is only a small bay, but it’s nice with the rocks and the noi
se of the sea, and only the sea and the rocks to look at. I was quite happy working with him sitting there saying nothing. I wasn’t going to bring up religion, unless he did. At last he said, ‘I suppose you think I am a hypocrite.’

  I said, ‘I reckon we’re all hypocrites, one way or the other, if the truth was known.’ He said, ‘Jesus saves.’ I didn’t like to hear a boy talking like that. I said, ‘It was brave of you to stand up for what you believe.’ He said, ‘It’s true, you know. I’ve proved it.’ I said, ‘Well, I haven’t. I’m not saved.’ He said, ‘I don’t do it any more.’ I wondered how that could be. Myself, since I was thirteen or fourteen, I hadn’t managed to live without something having to happen sometimes. I said, ‘Yes, but nature is nature. Something got to happen.’ ‘It doesn’t happen to me now,’ he said, ‘except when I’m asleep, and, when I wake up, I repent.’ I began to feel rather sick of Raymond. I liked him better when he was a sinner. I said, ‘How long before you go to your college?’ ‘Years yet,’ he said. ‘I have exams to pass first.’ ‘You’ll do that all right,’ I said. He said, ‘I really came to ask you to do the same.’ ‘How d’you mean?’ I said. ‘Make the Great Decision,’ he said. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We’ll see.’