Sir Gibbie Ch 5 Featured Books by Tale Teller Kids Reading Age 15 #greatbooks #classics

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter five of Sir Gibby. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox dot org. Recorded
by Taysha Lynn Tasia writes dot WordPress dot com. Sir

(00:21):
Gibby by George MacDonald, Chapter five, Gibbey's calling. I am
not sure that his father's neglect was not, on the
whole better for Gibby than would have been the kindness
of such a father persistently embodying itself. But the picture

(00:41):
of Sir George, by the help of whiskey, and the
mild hatching oven of Mistress Kroll's parlor, softly breaking from
the shell of the cobbler and floating a mild gentleman
in the air of his lukewarm imagination, and poor wee
Gibby trotting outside in the frosty dark, the autumn night,

(01:01):
through which the moon keeps staring down, vague and disconsolate,
is hardly therefore the less pathetic. Under the window of
the parlor, where the light of rebel shone radiant through
a red curtain, he would stand listening for a moment,

(01:22):
then darting off a few yards, suddenly and swiftly, like
a scared bird, fall at once into his own steady
trot up the lane and down till he reached the
window again, where again he would stand and listen. Whether
he made this departure and return twenty or a hundred

(01:43):
times in a night, he nor any one else could
have told. Sometimes he would, for a change extend his
trot along the whitty hill, sometimes along the parallel venel,
but never far from Jink Lane and its glow window.
Never moth haunted lamp so persistently. Ever, as he ran

(02:08):
up this pavement and down that, on the soft sounding
soles of his bare feet, the smile on the boy's
face grew more and more sleepy. But still he smiled,
and still he trotted, still paused at the window, and
still started afresh. He was not so much to be pitied,

(02:32):
as my reader may think. Never in his life had
he yet pitied himself. The thought of hardship or wrong
had not occurred to him. It would have been difficult, impossible,
I believe, to get the idea into his head that
existence bore to him any other shape than it ought.
Things were with him as they had always been, And

(02:55):
whence was he to take a fresh start and question
what had been from the beginning? Had any authority interfered
with a decree that Gibby should no more scour the
midnight streets, no more pass and repass that far shining

(03:16):
splendor of red, than indeed would bitter, though inarticulate complaint
have burst from his bosom. But there was no evil
power to issue such a command, and Gibbey's peace was
not invaded. It was now late, and those streets were empty.

(03:38):
Neither carriage nor cart, nor a wielbarrow nor truck went
any more bumping and clattering over their stones. They were
well lighted with gas, but most of the bordering houses
were dark now. And then a single footfarer passed with loud,
hollow sounding boots long the pavement. Or two girls would come,

(04:03):
laughing along, their merriments echoing rude in the wide stillness.
A cold wind, a small, forsaken, solitary wind, moist with
a thin fog, seemed as well as we Gibby to
be roaming the night, for it met him at various
corners and from all directions. But it had nothing to do,

(04:25):
and nowhere to go, And there. It was not like Gibby,
the business of whose life was even now upon him,
the mightiest hope of whose conscience being was now awake.
All he expected, or ever desired to discover by listening
at the window was simply whether there were yet signs

(04:49):
of the companies breaking up, And his conclusions on that
point were never mistaken. How he arrived at them would
be hard to say. Seldom had he there heard the
voice of his father still seldomer anything beyond its tone
this night, However, as the time drew near when they

(05:12):
must go lest the sabbath should be broken in Mistress
Kroll's decent house, and Gibbey stood once more on tiptoe,
with his head just on the level of the window sill,
he heard his father uttered two words up Darside came
to him through the window in the voice he loved,

(05:33):
plain and distinct. The words conveyed to him nothing at all.
The mere hearing of them made them memorable. For the time, however,
he forgot them, for by indications best known to himself,
he perceived that the company was on the point of separating,
and from that moment did not take his eyes off

(05:54):
the door until he heard the first sounds of its opening.
As however, it was always hard for Gibbey to stand still,
and especially hard on a midnight so cold that his
feet threatened to grow indistinguishable from the slabs of the pavement.
He was driven, in order not to lose sight of it,
to practice the art already cultivated by him, to a

(06:18):
crab like perfection of running first backwards, then forwards, with
scarcely superior speed. But it was not long ere the
much expected sound of Mistress Kroll's voice heralded the hour
for patience to blossom into possession. The voice was neither
loud nor harsh, but clear and firm. The noise that

(06:41):
followed was both loud and strident. Voices had a part
in it, but the movement of chairs and feet, and
the sudden contact of different portions of the body with
walls and tables had a larger The guests were obeying
the voice of their hostess, all in one, like a
flock of sheep, but it was poor shepherd work to

(07:03):
turn them out of the fold. At midnight, Gibbey bounded
up and stood still as a statue at the very
door creek until he heard Mistress Kroll's hand upon the
lock when he bolted, trembling with his eagerness, into the
entry of a court of a few houses to the
whitty hill. One after one, the pitiable company issued from

(07:28):
its paradise, and each stumbled away, too far gone for
leave taking. Most of them passed Gibbey where he stood,
but he took no heed. His father was always the
last and the least capable. But often as he left
her door never did it close behind him, until with

(07:49):
her own eyes Mistress Kroll had seen Gibby darked like
an imp out of the court to take him in charge,
and all the weary way home hover not very like
a guardian angel, but not the less one in truth,
around the unstable equilibrium of his father's tall and swaying form,

(08:09):
and thereupon commenced a series of marvelous gymnastics on the
part of Wee Gibbee. Imagine a small boy with a
gigantic top which six times his own size. He keeps
erect on its peg, not by whipping it round, but
by running around it himself, unfeelingly, applying at the very spot,

(08:31):
in the very moment, the precise measure of impact necessary
to counterbalance its perpetual tendency to fall in one direction
or another, so that the two have all the air
of a single invention, such an invention as one might
meet with in an ancient clock contrived when men had
time to mingle, play with earnest, And you will have

(08:53):
in your mind's eye a real likeness of Sir George,
attended in a midnight in the week by his son
Gilbert home. The big ones staggered, reeled, gyrated, and tumbled
round and round him went the little one now behind,

(09:15):
now before, now on this side, now on that, his
feet never more than touching the ground, but dancing about
like those of a prize fighter, his little arms up
and his hands well forward, like flying buttresses. And such
indeed they were buttresses which flew and flew all about

(09:36):
a universally leaning tower. They propped it here, they propped
it there with wonderful judgment and skill and graduation of
force they applied themselves, and with perfect success, not once
for the last year and a half, during which time
we Gibbey had been the nightly guide of Sir George's

(09:58):
homeward steps. The self disabled, mass fallen prostrate in the gutter,
there to snore out the night the first special difficulty,
that of turning the corner of Jink Lane and the
Witty Hill. Successfully overcome, the twain went reeling and revolving

(10:19):
along the street, much like a whirlwind that had half
forgotten the laws of gyration, until at length it spun
into the court and up to the foot of the
outside stairs over the Baronet's workshop. Then commenced the real
struggle of the evening for Gibbee and for his father too,

(10:40):
though the latter was aware of it only in the
momentary and evanescent flashes of such enlightenment as made him
just capable of yielding to the pushes and pools of
the former. All up the outside and the two inside stairs,
waking and sleeping were as the alternate tic tac of

(11:04):
a pendulum. But Gibbey stuck to his business like a man,
and his resolution and perseverance were, at length, as always
crowned with victory. The house in which lords and ladies
had often reposed was now filled with very humble folk,

(11:25):
who were all asleep when Gibbey and his father entered.
But the noise they had made an ascending caused no
great disturbance of their rest, For if any of them
were roused for a moment. It was but to recognize
at once the cause of the tunnels, and with the
remark it's only we Gibby lookin hymn Sir George, to

(11:46):
turn on the other side and fall asleep again, arrived
at last at the garret door, which stood wide open.
Gibby had small need of light in the nearly pitch
darkness of the place, for there was positively nothing to
stumble over or against between the door and the ancient

(12:09):
four post bed, which was all of his father's house
that remained to Sir George. With heavy shuffling feet, the
drunkard lumbered laboriously bedward, and the bare posts and crazy
frame groaned and creaked as he fell upon the oat

(12:33):
chaff that lay waiting him in place of the vanished
luxury of feathers. We Gibby flew at his legs, nor
rested until the one after the other he had got
them on the bed. If then they were not very
comfortably deposited, he knew that in his first turn their

(12:56):
owner would get them all right. And now rose the
coalmen of Gibbey's day. Its cycle rounded through regions of banishment,
returned to its notice of bliss. In triumph, he spread
over his sleeping father, his dead mother's old plaid of

(13:18):
Gordon Tartan, all the bedding they had, and, without a
moment's further delay, no shoes even to put off, crept
under it and nestled close upon the bosom of his
unconscious parent. A victory more. Another day ended with success,

(13:39):
his father's safe and all his own, the canopy of
the darkness and the plaid over him, as if they
were the one only two in the universe, his father
unable to leave him his for whole dark hours to come.

(14:00):
It was Gibbey's paradise. Now his heaven was his father's bosom,
to which he clung as no infant yet ever clung
to his mother's. He never thought to pity himself that
the embrace was all on his side, that no answering
pressure came back from the prostrate form. He never said

(14:23):
to himself, my father is a drunkard, but I must
make the best of it. He has all I have.
He clung to his one possession, only clung this was
his father all in all to him. What must be
the bliss of such a heart, of any heart, when

(14:44):
it comes to know that there is a father of
father's yea, a father of fatherhood, a father who never
slumbers nor sleeps, but holds all the sleeping in his
ever waking bosom, a bosom whose wakefulness is the sole

(15:06):
fountain of their slumber. The conscious bliss of the child
was of short duration, for in a few minutes he
was fast asleep. But for the gain of those few
minutes only the day had been well spent. End of

(15:29):
chapter five, recorded by Tayshaw in Tasia, writes Doud WordPress
dot com.