The Rebels

PROLOGUE O utside, against the attic slates of the tall house, the summer rain drummed heavily as though, having decided to break through the sultry air, it did not know how to stop, and so must pour down for evermore. The tall dark-haired young man went to the little window and brushed the sleeve of his jacket across the pane, rubbing away the grime in a narrow streak so that he might look outside. The sky was still full of rain. There would be no strolling along the hedgerows that afternoon at any rate. “Poor Nell,” he said. “You’ll miss your walk today, old lady. Aye, that you will—and there won’t be so many summers left for you to walk in now.” He turned away from the thick green glass of the narrow window. “But you’ve had a good life,” he said, “A good life, in its way. A roof over your head and a fire to lie by and a meal when you wanted it. You can’t grumble, old lass; there’s many folk who don’t have that—that and love. And you’ve always had love, always a friendly hand and a soft word. You’ll take the memory of that with you when you go, at least.” He turned back to a heap of miscellaneous objects that lay in one corner of the damp room, against the blistered panelling. There was an old cabin-trunk, varnished a deep brown, with the words ‘William Fisher, Port Elizabeth’, painted on its lid in white; a pile of dusty pink-covered papers, ‘Chatterbox’; a small heap of old clothing, a slouch-hat, a belt, and a felt-covered water-bottle, which gave off a dry and rusty smell when he uncorked it and held it to his nose. “South Africa!” he said. “What a fearful place it must have been. Dry and friendless and full of horror!” Behind the cabin-trunk stood a number of assorted lengths of thin gas-piping, to the end of one of which was secured a candelabrum of jets, with dusty-white glass shades, some of them still unbroken. They were shaped like flowers, or like the skirts of a dancer as she whirled in the air, poised on her toes. They were so incongruous that the young man smiled to himself to see them, so different from the light-shades he knew; for their time, so daring, and in all truth so innocent. “Those old boys thought they were doing something wonderful,” he said, “with their glass shades and their horse-hair sofas!” He smiled and then felt down behind the cabin-trunk to see what he could find there. He brought back a faded photograph and a large shell. They were both thick with dust and at first he wondered whether to bother with them, but the rain once more swished against the attic-window viciously. The young man shivered and wiped away some of the dust from the picture. It had a red plush frame, and its glass was shattered across one corner. The photograph behind the glass was very faded and yellow, though by holding it up near the little window, he could distinguish the sort of thing it was—a family group with the photographer’s name scrawled rhetorically across the bottom right-hand corner. ‘Francis Poole, The Arcade, Walsall.’ “You’d be an old man now if you were alive,” said the youth, and was about to fling the picture back behind the trunk when the expression on one of its still, pale faces stayed his hand. It was a girl in the front row, who sat with her feet tucked below her long sober-coloured petticoats, leaning her head against the knee of a stern-faced lady in a high-necked black velvet bodice. The girl’s eyes were large and dark, so much could be seen despite the picture’s sad fading. These eyes seemed to stare out from that sober, stiffly dressed group, yearning, even frightened. They were eyes that would gaze out into the uncertain future from the faded sepia background until the last trace of pigment left the cardboard which bore Francis Poole’s proud and professional signature; eyes that would never cease to ask their mute question until the thin light that penetrated the dim attic had wiped them from the photograph and had left the pasteboard blank again. The young man peered at the girl’s thin face with its long melancholy jaw and its heavy black hair. In one hand she held a flower though he could not now discern what it might have been. The other narrow palm was placed across her small breast as though in some stylised pose dictated by the brisk and watchful Francis Poole of Walsall. She did not look as though she had enjoyed having that picture taken. Perhaps she had been forced to sit there, with her trembling hand across her thin chest, for ages while the others were being arranged—although, come to think of it, the whole group had the solid, obedient look that said it had not taken long to get them into position, and keep them there. They stared from the picture like gundogs all atremble with subdued and obedient anxiety. The central figure was a stoutly built man with a white square-trimmed beard and a shiny-peaked yachting cap. To his left was the grave lady in the black velvet bodice, holding a small child on her knee. Beside the bearded man stood a solidly-made young fellow in a high-cut jacket, in the lapel of which he wore a precisely posed flower, a neatly trimmed rose, it seemed. The flower of a young man who favoured the known and the accepted rather than the adventurous, the exotic. His hair was cut short, even over the ears, against the current fashion of the time, and his upper lip already carried what must have grown to be a luxuriant moustache. This was a young person of definite ideas but of little imagination, one might have guessed. By his side stood a small lad in sailor clothes, his curly head surmounted by a broad-brimmed straw hat. He held a telescope in his right hand, gingerly and even uncomfortably, as though it might have been loaned to him for the occasion, to be kept intact on pain of terrible punishment! On the other side of the photograph, beside the mother, stood a tall slim girl wearing a flounced white dress and swinging a flowered hat on one elegantly crooked arm. She might almost have been termed beautiful had not the curl of her upper lip carried in it something of disdain for the whole proceeding . . . Or was it disdain for the young boy who stood at her side, almost on the farthest edge of the picture? He seemed different from the others, even at a distance of thirty years or more, and with a difference which not even the art of Francis Poole could nullify. The young man in the attic held the photograph near to the light of the window and stared . . . This of them all was a familiar face, in a strange ghostly way, a face which he felt he knew. He peered deep into the damp-pocked sepia, then suddenly he laughed—laughed at the ill-fitting Sunday clothes, the slouching hangdog stance, the unkempt raven hair that hung unbrushed over the forehead, like a dead bird’s wing. He laughed at the great beak of a nose—yes, a hawk’s beak rather than a nose! The beak of a creature that would give in to no man; no, not even to father, in his important yachting-cap; not even to the great Francis Poole himself! The young man turned the picture over reflectively and saw that names had been scratched across the back of it in ink, an almost indecipherable ink now, that appeared only here and there. Yet by holding the cardboard cross-wise to the light and by following the incisions of the steel nib, he could just make out the names . . . ‘Father . . . Mother . . . Tom.’ Tom was the one with the short hair and the moustache . . . ‘Enoch’. That would be the little one in the sailor suit . . . ‘Phyllis’; the girl with the flounced dress and the sneering lip. Yes, of course, Aunt Phyllis! And to think that she had been almost beautiful once! It seemed impossible. Then, the one beside her was Elijah! There was no doubting that nose, that defiant, hangdog slouch! That refusal to conform! Dear man! Dear Elijah! So he had always been like that! And the little sad-eyed girl who sat with her feet tucked out of sight, who was she? Her name had almost vanished now. But the youth peered down at it, worrying at the shallow scrawl like a terrier above a rat-hole . . . “Susan,” he read. “Good lord! You were Susan! My dear, you were Susan!” He put the picture down, gently now, and stood for a moment thinking. Then he seemed to notice the shell for the first time. It was a large sea-shell rather like an immense cowrie, of a deep pinkish colour. Under its layer of dust he felt that its outer surface was rough but rough with a regularity that caught his interest. He wiped it on the sleeve of the old jacket that lay on the floor. Then he saw that there were words carved on the shell, carved in that curious form of Gothic which seems the special province of monumental masons. The words were quite clear, almost unblemished by time and decay and he read them easily: “enoch fisher, born March 12th, 1867. Taken to God on September 15th, 1881. Believe in Me and I will stretch out My hand to succour ye, though fire should burn and the floods roar. Suffer little children to come unto Me.” The young man held the shell in his hand, wondering, half-afraid. Then, almost as though in embarrassment, he bent and took up the felt-covered water-bottle. It was badly battered and its cloth jacket was coming away at the edges. Across its side was written a number and two initials in thick indelible pencil: “14782 D.B.” His forehead wrinkled for he suddenly recalled a red stone-flagged passageway and a big walnut clock ticking in a corner, and a big man by an open door that led into a garden, and the big man was holding the water-bottle out to him, offering it to him. But the boy could not remember who the big man was, and his forgetfulness brought with it an unaccountable sadness. Suddenly it seemed to him that everything in that dim attic was calling out to him, “Remember me!” As though each object vied with the other for his attention, his memory, his love. But something was holding back memory, preventing the messages from coming through to him clearly; something else that stood in the way, troubling him. He was young and bewildered and lonely now, and some part of a past that was not wholly his was reaching out to him with frail and dusty hands that he did not cherish, for his life was before him and he could not love these ghosts of the attic . . . These dusty things that had suddenly begun to come perceptibly alive as the rain lashed on the thin roof-slates over his head. Defeated, he put the shell back behind the brown-varnished trunk and stood for a while, irresolute, listening. Now the rainspots began to fall more lightly and a faint gleam of sunlight moved across the dim room from the little green window under the eaves. It was like a symbol of release and the youth made his way to the ladder that led to the floor below; but he was some time in finding the first rung as he groped down blindly with his foot, for his eyes had filled with tears, though he did not know why this should be. At last he made his way through the old conservatory where the untended plants curled riotously about each other and even made their way through the broken panes towards the roof. He pulled the door gently to behind him and turned the key in the lock. Then he walked down the long weed-grown path towards the great green gates that gave on to the street. Outside the gates a tall man sat upright in a pony-trap, his legs wrapped in a grey travelling-rug. He turned sharply when he saw the boy. “Damn it, William,” he said, “I thought you were never coming. Your Aunt Phyllis will think we’ve had a spill.” The boy said, “Sorry Uncle ’Lijah, but I was looking at a photograph. A picture of the family, I think, from the look of it.” The tall man grunted. “Hm!” he said. “I’ll burn it if I ever come here again. Such things only bring back old memories!” SUSAN FISHER born 1865