THE INNOCENT EYE
By JAMES HANLEY
filHE teacher looked at his class. It was just turned I nine o'clock. He was an earnest young man. If only they were as earnest. And then he thought," If only Misery did not raise its face every day." When he sighed the class sat up to attention. Of late this had been his signal. "Rhys Price. What are you doing there ? " Though a rebuke, there was kindness in its tone. And again he called, "Rhys Price. Sit up there." But he found it necessary to cross to the boy's desk and shake him. He was fast asleep.
The other boys looked at him indifferently. After all it was no concern of theirs. Today it was Rhys Price. Tomorrow it would be somebody else. Perhaps Bert Jones or even Abraham Daniels. "Sit up, Price. You can't go falling asleep like this every day." He must be patient, very patient, the innocent eye looked up at him, the innocent eye of ten-year-old Rhys Price, out-of-work miner's son, and it was so easy to blur, to destroy. He patted the boy on the head. "Did you have your breakfast this morning ? " he asked, and made to return to the desk, when the boy replied, "Yes, sir. I— —," and then he had thrown sleep from him, he was sitting very erect, all attention with the other boys.
So the lessons began. He read aloud his history, and when the music lesson began responded with that peculiar soft yell in his young Welsh voice, but always his thoughts were far from the school. They left the room, travelled the road towards the desolate valley from which he had come that morning, and he thought, not of history or singing, nor indeed of that weak and watery winter sun, that sun that shone so curiously, almost begrudgingly, upon those towering slag-heaps, but he thought of the night to come. Light was nothing to him, he thought only of the approaching darkness when he might fall asleep, and he dreamed of a soft bed giving to his weight.
He had tried so hard this morning but it just could not be helped, he had fallen asleep. It wasn't that room, of course, perhaps it was that long climb up the slag-heap, that continuously bent back, fingers scratching in the slag for some pieces of coal. Well, he had helped his father, and that was more than Gwynne had done, even David, but then they were younger than he was, eight and six years old. David was much too small for that work. He felt sorry for his father. Once there had been a nice cottage nestling at the foot of the hill, with its little patch of garden, and he remembered how his mother would sit there looking at their father digging the fresh potatoes for dinner. And suddenly thought came to an abrupt end at the same moment as the teacher's patience reached its limit. "Rhys Price. You must pay attention to your lessons" . . . "Yes," he was saying, "He must. There is the quarterly inspection." Again that innocent eye, yes, all those innocent eyes, looked up at him, and feeling suddenly ashamed he turned his back on them as he said, "Now we will take the great continent of America."
How uninterested they looked, yes, even bored, but then, were they children ? He hoped so, though he had seen much, understood much. He was sorry for them in the depths of his heart. Miner's children, but especially Rhys Price. Then he bent his head over the book on his desk, began to read aloud. The hands of Rhys Price occasionally went to his eyes, he rubbed them and again as the class settled down to silence his thoughts wandered back down the valleys. But it would soon be over, he would go home; darkness would fall, covering the slag-heaps, the everlasting twilight that seemed to hang over the valleys. Again his head dropped, until finally it was flat upon the desk, mouth touching the opened pages of his book, and the teacher saw, said "Dear me" under his breath, and looked at his book again. If Rhys Price had fallen asleep again he would not disturb him. They all looked so tired anyhow. Children, "not quite," he thought, " just little stunted men, miniatures of their parents, stunted little children already shaped by necessity for the pit."
Rhys Price snored most delicately. He was lost to them. Later he woke, noiselessly, without movement, and the printed page was wet and he was afraid, and would not move his head. It remained pressed flat upon the book. He was at home, in the room where his father and mother and two brothers lived, and it was dark. The gas was turned low, for bedtime had come. He saw his mother in the one bed ; she had been in it for two years now, and he had heard his father say it was through nothing but sheer worry. And his father lay there, too, for at night his mother was dreadfully afraid, and clung to her husband, and looked so frightened, as though—but it was always like that now. Gwynne and David slept in that large wooden crate, and he slept on the wooden chair. And the gas went out and he had fallen asleep on the chair, waking by fits and starts, feeling cramped, cold, how hard the wood was.
How queer his father would look at them of an evening, how silent his mother was, how noisy his brothers. But last night was worst of all. He remembered that quite clearly, for he had waked to hear his father shouting, and at first he had laughed in the darkness when his father shouted, "But what have we done ? We haven't done anything. We haven't," and he thought his father had committed some crime or other, but when his father screeched he had fallen from the chair. The two brothers were so fast asleep in the big wooden box that they did not hear a sound, but he had heard, and wondering, terribly afraid, he had run to his mother, and heard her say, "Bring quickly Mrs. Roberts," and he had run from the one room that was their new home.
Mrs. Roberts had come, and later when light came another came, and then a van. And his father was gone. So tonight he would sleep at the bottom of the soft bed with his mother, and he cried and smiled smotheringly into the pages of his book, and then something happened very quickly, for the teacher had closed his book with a loud snap and he had the look of a man who has suddenly remem- bered something, and he was thinking, "Of course ; they took his father to the asylum this morning, I should have known," and then he put his hand on the boy's shoulder. " Rhys Price. You may go home—now. Here," and he put some money in the boy's hand. "And when you get home give it to your mother and tell her that I'm coming to see her, and tell her that I said that she must let you sleep and sleep and sleep . . ."
"Yes sir, yes sir," and hiding his tear-stained and blushing face the boy. hurried out of the room, and his only thought was of the black valley towards which his feet were drawing him.
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