§ 5
But it is high time that Joan and Peter came back into this narrative. For this is their story, it bears their names on its covers and on its back and on its title-page and at the head of each left-hand page. It has been necessary to show the state of mind, the mental condition, the outlook, of their sole guardian when their affairs came into his hands. This done they now return by telephone. Oswald had not been back in the comfortable sitting-room at the Climax Club for ten minutes before he was rung up by Mr. Sycamore and reminded of his duty to his young charges. A club page called Mr. Sydenham to the receiver in his bedroom.
In those days the telephone was still far from perfection. It had not been in general use for a decade.... Mr. Sycamore was audible as a still small voice.
“Mr. Sydenham? Sycamore speaking.”
“No need to be,” said Oswald. “You haven’t been speaking to me.”
“Who am I speaking to? I want Mr. Sydenham. Sycamore speaking.”
“I’m Mr. Sydenham. Who are you? No need to be sick of your speaking so far as I’m concerned. I’ve only just been called to the telephone——”
“Your solicitor, Sycamore. S.Y.C.A.M.O.R.E.”
“Oh! Right O. How are you, Mr. Sycamore? I’m Sydenham. How are those children?”
“Hope you’re well, Mr. Sydenham?”
“Gaudy—in a way. How are you?”
“I’ve been with Lady Charlotte today. I don’t know if you’ve heard anything of——”
Whop! Whop. Bunnik. Silence.
After a little difficulty communication with Mr. Sycamore was partially restored. I say partially because his voice had now become very small and remote indeed. “I was saying, I don’t know if you understand anything of the present state of affairs.”
“Nothing,” said Oswald. “Fire ahead.”
“Can you hear me distinctly? I find you almost inaudible.”
Remonstrances with the exchange led after a time to slightly improved communications.
“You were saying something about a fire?” said Mr. Sycamore.
“I said nothing about a fire. You were saying something about the children?”
“Well, well. Things are in a very confused state, Mr. Sydenham. I hope you mean to take hold of their education. These children are not being educated, they are being fought over.”
“Who’s thinking over them?”
“No one. But the Misses Stubland and Lady Charlotte are fighting over them.... F.I.G.H.T.I.N.G. I want you to think over them.... You—yes.... Think, yes. Both clever children. Great waste if they are not properly educated.... Matters are really urgent. I have been with Lady Charlotte today. You know she kidnapped them?”
“Kidnapped?”
A bright girlish voice, an essentially happy voice, cut into the conversation at this point. “Three minutes up,” it said.
Empire-building language fell from Oswald. In some obscure way this feminine intervention was swept aside, and talk was resumed with Mr. Sycamore.
It continued to be a fragmentary talk, and for a time the burthen of some unknown lady complaining to an unknown friend about the behaviour of a third unknown named George, stated to lack “gumption,” interwove with the main theme. But Mr. Sycamore did succeed in conveying to Oswald a sense of urgency about the welfare of his two charges. Immediate attention was demanded. They were being neglected. The girl was ill. “I would like to talk it over with you as soon as possible,” said Mr. Sycamore.
“Can you come and breakfast here at eight?” said the man from the tropics.
“Half past nine,” said the Londoner, and the talk closed.
The talk ended, but for a time the bell of Oswald’s telephone remained in an agitated state, giving little nervous rings at intervals. When he answered these the exchange said “Number please,” and when he said, “You rang me,” the exchange said, “Oh, no! we didn’t....”
“An empire,” whispered Oswald, sitting on the edge of his bed, “which cannot even run a telephone service efficiently....”
“Education....”
He tried to recall his last speech at the club. Had he ranted? What had they thought of it? What precisely had he said? While they sat and talked muck—his memory was unpleasantly insistent upon that “muck”—the sands ran out of the hour-glass, a new generation grew up.
Had he said that? That was the point of it all—about the new generation. A new generation was growing up and we were doing nothing to make it wiser, more efficient, to give it a broader outlook than the generation that had blundered into and blundered through the Boer war. Had he said that? That was what he ought to have said.
§ 6
For a long time he sat on his bed, blank-minded and too tired to finish undressing. He got to bed at last. But not to sleep. He found that the talk in the club had disturbed his mind almost unendurably. It had pointed and endorsed everything that he had been trying not to think about the old country. Now, too weary and too excited to sleep, he turned over and over again, unprofitably and unprogressively, the tangled impressions of his return to England.
How many millions of such hours of restless questioning must have been spent by wakeful Englishmen in the dozen years between the Boer war and the Great war; how many nocturnally scheming brains must have explored the complicated maze of national dangers, national ambitions, and national ineptitude! If “Wake up, England,” sowed no great harvest of change in the daylight, it did at any rate produce large phantom crops at night. He argued with Walsall over and over again, sometimes wide awake and close to the point, sometimes drowsily with the discussion becoming vague and strangely misshapen and incoherent. Was Walsall right? Was it impossible to change the nature and quality of a people? Must we English always be laggards in peace and blunderers in war? Were our achievements accidents, and our failures essential? Was slackness in our blood? Surely a great effort might accomplish much, a great effort to reorganize political life, to improve national education, to make the press a better instrument of public thought and criticism. To which Walsall answered again with, “How can a democratic community take an intelligent interest in its destinies unless it is educated, and how can it educate itself unless it takes an intelligent interest in its destinies?”
Oswald groaned and turned over in bed.
Thought passed by insensible degrees into dreaming and dreaming shallowed again to wakefulness. Always he seemed to be arguing with Walsall and the bishop for education and effort; nevertheless, now vaguely apprehended as an atmospheric background, now real and close, the black forest of his African nightmare was about him. Always he was struggling on and always he was hoping to see down some vista the warm gleam of daylight, the promise of the open. And Walsall, a vast forest owl with enormous spectacles, kept getting in the way, flapping hands that were really great wings at him and assuring him that there was no way out. None. “This forest is life. This forest will always be life. There is no other life. After all it isn’t such a very bad forest.” Other figures, too, came and went; a gigantic bishop sitting back in an easy chair blocked one hopeful vista, declaring that book-learning only made the lower classes discontented and mischievous, and then a stupidly contented fat man smoking a fat cigar drove in a gig athwart the line of march. He said nothing; he just drove his gig. Then somehow an automobile came in, a most hopeful means of escape, except that it had broken down; and Oswald was trying to repair it in spite of the jeering of an elderly gentleman in a white waistcoat. Suddenly the whole forest swarmed with children. There were countless children; there were just two children. Instead of a multitudinous expedition Oswald found himself alone in the black jungle with just two children, two white and stunted children who were dying for the air and light. No one had cared for them. One was ill, seriously ill. Unless the way out was found they could not live. They were Dolly’s children, his wards. But what was he to do for them?...
Then far ahead he saw that light of the great conflagration, that light that promised to be daylight and became a fire....
“Black coffee,” said Oswald during one of the wide-awake intervals. “Cigars. Talk. Over-excited.... I ought to be more careful.... I forget how flimsy I am still....
“I must get my mind off these things. I’ll talk to old Sycamore tomorrow and see about this little master Peter Stubland and his foster-sister. I’ll go into the matter thoroughly. I haven’t thought of them before.
“I wonder if the boy still takes after Dolly....
“After all,” he said, rolling over, “it’s true. Education is the big neglected duty of the time. It’s fundamental. And what am I doing? It’s just England—England all over—to let that boy be dragged up. I ought to see about him—now. I’ll go down there....
“I’ll go and stay with Aunt Charlotte for a day or so. I’ll send her a wire tomorrow.”
§ 7
The quiet but observant life of old Cashel at Chastlands was greatly enlivened by the advent of Oswald.
Signs of a grave and increasing agitation in the mind of Cashel’s mistress became evident immediately after the departure of Mr. Sycamore. Manifestly whatever that gentleman had said or done—old Cashel had been able to catch very little—had been of a highly stimulating nature. So soon as he was out of the house, Lady Charlotte abandoned her sofa and table, upsetting her tonic as she did so, and still wearing her dressing-gown and cap, proceeded to direct a hasty packing for Italy. Unwin became much agitated, and a housemaid being addressed as a “perfect fool” became a sniffing fount of tears. There was a running to and fro with trunks and tea-baskets, a ringing of bells, and minor orders were issued and countermanded; the carriage was summoned twice for an afternoon drive and twice dismissed. When at last the lace peignoir was changed for a more suitable costume in which to take tea, Lady Charlotte came so near to actual physical violence that Unwin abruptly abandoned her quest of a perfect pose for wig and cap, and her ladyship surprised and delighted Cashel with a blond curl cocked waggishly over one eye. She did not have tea until half-past five.
She talked to herself with her hard blue eyes fixed on vacancy. “I will not stay here to be insulted,” she said.
“Rampageous,” whispered Cashel on the landing. “Rumbustious. What’s it all about?”
“Cashel!” she said sharply as he was taking away the tea-things.
“M’lady.”
“Telephone to Mr. Grimes and ask him to take tickets as usual for myself and Unwin to Pallanza—for tomorrow.”
It was terrible but pleasing to have to tell her that Mr. Grimes would now certainly have gone home from his office.
“See that it is done tomorrow. Tomorrow I must catch the eleven forty-seven for Charing Cross. I shall take lunch with me in the train. A wing of chicken. A drop of claret. Perhaps a sandwich. Gentleman’s Relish or shrimp paste. And a grape or so. A mere mouthful. I shall expect you to be in attendance to help with the luggage as far as Charing Cross....”
So she was going after all.
“Like a flight,” mused Cashel. “What’s after the Old Girl?”...
He grasped the situation a little more firmly next day.
The preparations for assembling Lady Charlotte in the hall before departure were well forward at eleven o’clock, although there was no need to start for the station until the half hour. A brief telegram from Oswald received about half-past ten had greatly stimulated these activities....
Unwin, very white in the face—she always had a bilious headache when travelling was forward—and dressed in the peculiar speckled black dress and black hat that she considered most deterrent to foreign depravity, was already sitting stiffly in the hall with Lady Charlotte’s purple-coloured dressing-bag beside her, and Cashel having seen to the roll of rugs was now just glancing through the tea-basket to make sure that it was in order, when suddenly there was the flapping, rustling sound of a large woman in rapid movement upon the landing above, and Lady Charlotte appeared at the head of the stairs, all hatted, veiled and wrapped for travelling. Her face was bright white with excitement. “Unwin, I want you,” she cried. “Cashel, say I’m in bed. Say I’m ill and must not be disturbed. Say I’ve been taken ill.”
She vanished with the agility of a girl of twenty—except that the landing was of a different opinion.
The two servants heard her scuttle into her room and slam the door. There was a great moment of silence.
“Oh, Lor’!” Unwin rose with the sigh of a martyr, and taking the dressing-bag with her—the fittings alone were worth forty pounds—and pressing her handkerchief to her aching brow, marched upstairs.
Cashel, agape, was roused by the ringing of the front door bell. He opened to discover Mr. Oswald Sydenham with one arm in a sling and a rug upon the other.
“Hullo, Cashel,” he said. “I suppose my room isn’t occupied? My telegram here? How’s Lady Charlotte?”
“Very poorly, sir,” said Cashel. “She’s had to take in her bed, sir.”
“Pity. Anything serious?”
“A sudden attact, sir.”
“H’m. Well, tell her I’m going to inflict myself upon her for a day or so. Just take my traps in and I’ll go on with this fly to Limpsfield. Say I’ll be back to dinner.”
“Certainly, sir.”
The old man bustled out to get in the valise and Gladstone bag that constituted Oswald’s luggage. When he came into the hall again he found the visitor scrutinizing the tea-basket and the roll of rugs with his one penetrating eye in a manner that made him dread a question. But Oswald never questioned servants; on this occasion only he winked at one.
“Nothing wrong with the arm, sir?” asked old Cashel.
“Nothing,” said Oswald, still looking markedly at the symptoms of imminent travel. “H’m.”
He went out to the fly, stood ready to enter it, and then swivelled round very quickly and looked up at his aunt’s bedroom window in time to catch an instant impression of a large, anxious face regarding him.
“Ah!” said Oswald, and returned smiling grimly into the hall.
“Cashel,” he called.
“Sir?”
“Her ladyship is up. Tell her I have a few words to say to her before she goes.”
“Beg pardon, sir——”
“Look here, Cashel, you do what I tell you.”
“I’ll tell Miss Unwin, sir.”
He went upstairs, leaving Oswald still thinking over the rugs. Yes, she was off! She had got everything; pointed Alpine sticks, tea-basket, travelling campstool. It must be Switzerland or Italy for the winter at least. A great yearning to see his aunt with his own eye came upon Oswald. He followed Cashel upstairs quietly but swiftly, and found him in a hasty whispered consultation with Unwin on the second landing. “Oh my ’ed’ll burst bang,” Unwin was saying.
“’Er ladyship, sir,” she began at the sight of Oswald.
“Ssh!” he said to her, and held her and Cashel silent with an uplifted forefinger while he listened to the sounds of a large powerful woman going to bed swiftly and violently in her clothes.
“I must go in to her, sir,” said Unwin breaking the silence. “Poor dear! It’s a very sudden attact.”
The door opened and closed upon Unwin.
“Lock the door on him, you—you Idiot!” they heard Lady Charlotte shout—too late.
The hated and dreaded visage of Oswald appeared looking round the corner of the door into the great lady’s bedroom. Her hat had been flung aside, she was tying on an unconvincing night cap over her great blond travelling wig; her hastily assumed nightgown betrayed the agate brooch at her neck.
“How dare you, sir!” she cried at the sight of him.
“You’re not ill. You’re going to cut off to Italy this afternoon. What have you done to my Wards?”
“A lady’s sick room! Sacred, Sir! Have you no sense of decency?”
“Is it measles, Auntie?”
“Go away!”
“I daren’t. If I leave you alone in this country for a year or two you’re bound to get into trouble. What am I to do with you?”
“Unbecoming intrusion!”
“You ought to be stopped by the Foreign Office. You’ll lead to a war with Italy.”
“Go for a doctor, Cashel,” she cried aloud in her great voice. “Go for the doctor.”
“M’lady,” very faintly from the landing.
“And countermand the station cab, Cashel,” said Oswald.
“If you do anything of the sort, Cashel!” she cried, and sitting up in bed clutched the sheets with such violence that a large spring-sided boot became visible at the foot of the bed. The great lady had gone to bed in her boots. Aunt and nephew both glared at this revelation in an astonished silence.
“How can you, Auntie,” said Oswald.
“If I choose,” said Lady Charlotte. “If I choose——Oh! Go away!”
“Back to dinner,” said Oswald sweetly, and withdrew.
He was still pensive upon the landing when Unwin appeared to make sure that the station cab was not countermanded....
Under the circumstances he was not surprised to find on his return from The Ingle-Nook that he was now the only occupant of Chastlands. Aunt Charlotte had fled, leaving behind a note that had evidently been written before his arrival.
My dear Nephew,—I am sorry that my arrangements for going abroad this winter, already made, prevent my welcoming you home for this uninvited and totally unexpected visit. I am sure Cashel and the other servants will take good care of you. You seem to know the way to their good graces. There are many things I should have liked to talk over with you if you had given me due and proper notice of your return as you ought to have done, instead of leaving it to a solicitor to break the glad tidings to me, followed by a sixpenny telegram. As it is, I shall just miss you. I have to go, and I cannot wait. All my arrangements are made. I suppose it is idle to expect civility from you ever or the slightest attention to the convenances. The Sydenhams have never shone in manners. Well, I hope you will take those two poor children quite out of the hands of those smoking, blaspheming, nightgown-wearing Limpsfield women. They are utterly unfit for such a responsibility. Utterly. I would not trust a pauper brat in their hands. The children require firm treatment, the girl especially, or they will be utterly spoilt. She is deceitful and dishonest, as one might expect; she gave Mrs. Pybus a very trying time indeed, catching measles deliberately and so converting the poor woman’s house into a regular hospital. I fear for her later. I have done my best for them both. No doubt you will find it all spun into a fine tale, but I trust your penetration to see through a tissue of lies, however plausible it may seem at the first blush. I am glad to think you are now to relieve me of a serious responsibility, though how a single man not related to her in the slightest degree can possibly bring up a young girl, even though illegitimate, without grave scandal, passes my poor comprehension. No doubt I am an old fashioned old fool nowadays! Thank God! I beg to be excused!
Towards the end of this note her ladyship’s highly angular handwriting betrayed by an enhanced size and considerable irregularity, a deflection from her customary calm.
§ 8
Oswald knocked for some time at the open green door of The Ingle-Nook before attracting any one’s attention. Then a small but apparently only servant appeared, a little round-faced creature who looked up hard into Oswald’s living eye—as though she didn’t quite like the other. She explained that “Miss Phyllis” was not at home, and that “Miss Phœbe mustn’t be disturved.” Miss Phœbe was working. Miss Phyllis had gone away with Mary——
“Who’s Mary?” said Oswald.
“Well, Sir, it’s Mary who always ’as been ’ere, Sir,”—to Windsor to be with Miss Joan. “And it’s orders no one’s allowed to upset Miss Phœbe when she’s writing. Not even Lady Charlotte Sydenham, Sir. I dursn’t give your name, Sir, even. I dursn’t.”
“Except,” she added reverentially, “it’s Death or a Fire.”
“You aren’t the Piano, per’aps?” she asked.
Oswald had to confess he wasn’t.
The little servant looked sorry for him.
And that was in truth the inexorable law now of The Ingle-Nook. Aunt Phœbe was taking herself very seriously—as became a Thinker whose Stitchwoman papers, deep, high, and occasionally broad in thought, were running into a sale of tens of thousands. So she sat hard and close at her writing-table from half-past nine to twelve every morning, secluded and defended from all the world, correcting, musing deeply over, and occasionally reading aloud the proofs of the third series of Stitchwoman papers. (Old Groombridge, the occasional gardener, used to listen outside in awe and admiration. “My word, but she do give it ’em!” old Groombridge used to say.) Oswald perceived that there was nothing to do but wait. “I’ll wait,” he said, “downstairs.”
“I suppose I ought to let you in,” said the little servant, evidently seeking advice.
“Oh, decidedly,” said Oswald, and entered the room in which he had parted from Dolly six years ago.
The door closed behind the little servant, and Oswald found himself in a house far more heavily charged with memories than he could have expected. The furniture had been but little altered; it was the morning time again, the shadow masses fell in the same places, it had just the same atmosphere of quiet expectation it had had on that memorable day before the door beyond had opened and Dolly had appeared, subdued and ashamed, to tell him of the act that severed them for ever. How living she seemed here by virtue of those inanimate things! Had that door opened now he would have expected to see her standing there again. And he was alive still, strong and active, altered just a little by a touch of fever and six short years of experience, but the same thing of impulse and desire and anger, and she had gone beyond time and space, beyond hunger or desire. He had walked between this window and this fireplace on these same bricks on which he was pacing now, spitting abuse at her, a man mad with shame and thwarted desire. Never had he forgiven her, or stayed his mind to think what life had been for her, until she was dead. That outbreak, with gesticulating hands and an angry, grimacing face, had been her last memory of him. What a broken image he had made of himself in her mind! And now he could never set things right with her, never tell her of his belated understanding and pity. “I was a weak thing, confused and torn between my motives. Why did you—you who were my lover—why did you not help me after I had stumbled?” So the still phantom in that room reproached him, a phantom of his own creation, for Dolly had never reproached him; to the end she had had no reproaches in her heart for any one but herself because of their disaster.
“Hold tight to love, little people,” he whispered. “Hold tight to love.... But we don’t, we don’t....”
Never before had Oswald so felt the tremendous pitifulness of life. He felt that if he stayed longer in this room he must cry out. He walked to the garden door and stood looking at the empty flagstone path between the dahlias and sunflowers.
It was all as if he had but left it yesterday, except for the heartache that now mingled with the sunshine.
“Pat—whack—pat—whack”; he scarcely heeded that rhythmic noise.
Peter had gone out of his head altogether. He walked slowly along the pathway towards the little arbour that overhung the Weald. Then, turning, he discovered Peter with a bat in his hand, regarding him....
Directly Oswald saw Peter he marvelled that he had not been eager to see him before. The boy was absurdly like Dolly; he had exactly the same smile; and directly he saw the gaunt figure of his one-eyed guardian he cried out, “It’s Nobby!” with a voice that might have been hers. There was a squeak of genuine delight in his voice. He wasn’t at all the sturdy little thing in a pinafore that Oswald remembered. He seemed indeed at the first glance just a thin, flat-chested little Dolly in grey flannel trousers.
He had obviously been bored before this happy arrival of Oswald. He had been banging a rubber ball against the scullery with a cricket-bat and counting hits and misses. It is a poor entertainment. Oswald did not realize how green his memory had been kept by the Bungo-Peter saga, and Peter’s prompt recognition after six years flattered him.
The two approached one another slowly, taking each other in.
“You remember me?” said Oswald superfluously.
“Don’t I just! You promised me a lion’s skin.”
“So I did.”
He could not bear to begin this new relationship as a defaulter. “It’s on its way to you,” he equivocated, making secret plans.
Peter, tucking his bat under his arm and burying his hands in his trouser pockets, drew still nearer. At a distance of four feet or thereabouts he stopped short and Oswald stopped short. Peter regarded this still incredible home-comer with his head a little on one side.
“It was you, used to tell me stories.”
“You don’t remember my telling you stories?”
“I do. About the Ba-ganda who live in U-ganda. Don’t you remember how you used to put out my Zulus and my elephants and lions on the floor and say it was Africa. You taught us roaring like lions—Joan and me. Don’t you remember?”
Oswald remembered. He remembered himself on all fours with the children on the floor of the sunny playroom upstairs, and some one sometimes standing, sometimes sitting above the game, some one who listened as keenly as the children, some one at whom he talked about that world of lakes as large as seas, and of trackless, sunless forests and of park-like glades and wildernesses of flowers, and about strings of loaded porters and of encounters with marvelling people who had never before set eyes on a European....
§ 9
The idea that the guardianship of Peter was just a little duty to be seen to, vanished at the sight of him in favour of the realization of a living relationship. There are moments when small boys of ten in perfect health and condition can look the smallest, flimsiest, and most pathetic of created things—and at the same time preternaturally valiant and intelligent. They take on a likeness to sacred flames that may at any moment flicker out. More particularly does this unconscious camouflage of delicacy occur in the presence of parents and guardians already in a state of self-reproach and emotional disorder. Mr. Grimes with an eye to growth had procured a grey flannel suit a little too large for Peter, but it never occurred to Oswald that the misfit could be due to anything but a swift and ominous shrinkage of the boy. He wanted to carry him off forthwith to beer and cream and sea-bathing.
But these were feelings he knew he must not betray.
“I must tell you some more stories,” he said. “I’ve come back to England to live.”
“Here?”—brightly.
“Well, near here. But I shall see a lot of you now, Peter.”
“I’ll like that,” said Peter. “I’ve often thought of you....”
A pause.
“You broken your arm?” said Peter.
“Not so bad as that. I’ve got to have some bits of shell taken out.”
“That Egyptian shell? When you got the V.C.?”
“I never told you of the Egyptian shell?” asked Oswald.
“Mummy did. Once. Long ago.”
Another pause.
“This garden’s not so greatly altered, Peter,” said Oswald.
“There’s a Friendship’s Garden up that end,” said Peter, indicating the end by a movement of his head. “But it isn’t much. Aunt Phœbe started it and forgot it. Every one who came was to plant something. And me and Joan have gardens, but they’ve got all weedy now.”
“Let’s have a look at it all,” said Oswald, and guardian and ward strolled towards the steep.
“The Dahlias are splendid this year,” Oswald remarked, “and these Japanese roses are covered with berries. Splendid, aren’t they? One can make a jelly of them. Quite a good jelly. And let me see, wasn’t there a little summerhouse at the end of this path where one looked over the Weald? Ah! here it is. Hardly changed at all.”
He sat down. Here he had talked with Dolly and taken her hand....
He bestirred himself to talk.
“And exactly how old are you now, Peter?”
“Ten years and two months,” said Peter.
“We’ll have to find a school for you.”
“Have you been in Africa since I saw you?” Peter asked, avoiding the topic.
“Since you saw me going off,” said Oswald, and the man glanced at the boy and the boy glanced at the man, and each was wondering what the other remembered. “I’ve been in Uganda all the time. There’s been fighting and working. Some day you must go to Uganda and see all that has been done. We’ve made a good railway and good roads and telegraphs. We’ve put down robbers and cruelty.”
“And shot a lot of lions?”
“Plenty. The lions were pretty awful for a bit. About Nairobi and along the line.”
“Shot ’em when they were coming at you?”
“One was coming straight at me.”
“That’s my skin,” said Peter.
Oswald made no answer.
“I’d like to go to Africa,” said Peter.
“You shall.”
He decided to begin at once upon his neglected task of making an Imperial citizen according to the ideas that prevailed before the advent of the New Imperialism. “That sort of thing,” he said, “is what we Englishmen are for, you know, Peter. What our sort of Englishman is for anyhow. We have to go about the world and make roads and keep the peace and see fair play. We’ve got to kill big beasts and climb hard mountains. That’s the job of the Englishman. He’s a sort of policeman. A sort of working guardian. Not a nosy slave-driver trying to get rich. He chases off slave-drivers. All the world’s his beat. India, Africa, China, and the East, all the seas of the world. This little fat green country, all trim and tidy and set with houses and gardens, isn’t much of a land for a man, you know—unless he’s an invalid. It’s a good land to grow up in and come back to die in. Or rest in. But in between, no!”
“No,” said Peter.
“No.”
“But you haven’t come back to die, Uncle Nobby?”
“No fear. But I’ve had to come back. I’m resting. This old arm, you know, and all that sort of thing. Just for a time.... And besides I want to see a lot of you.”
“Yes.”
“You have to grow up here and learn all you can, science and all sorts of things, so that you can be a useful man—wherever you have to go.”
“Africa,” said Peter.
“Africa, perhaps. And that’s why one has to go to school and college—and learn all about it.”
“They haven’t taught me much about it yet,” said Peter.
“Well, you haven’t been to much in the way of schools,” said Oswald.
“Are there better schools?”
“No end. We’re going to find one,” said Oswald.
“I wish school was over,” said Peter.
“Why? You’ve got no end to learn yet.”
“I want to begin,” said Peter, looking out across the tumbled gentleness of the Weald.
“Begin school?”
“No, begin—Africa, India—doing things.”
“School first,” said Oswald.
“Are there schools where you learn about guns and animals and mountains and foreign people?” said Peter.
“There must be,” said Oswald. “We’ll find something.”
“Where you don’t do Latin and parsing and ’straction of the square root.”
“Oh! those things have their place.”
“Did you have to do them, Uncle Nobby?”
“Rather.”
“Were they useful to you?”
“At times—in a way. Of course those things are good as training, you know—awfully good. Harden up the mental muscles, Peter.”
Peter made no reply to that.
Presently Peter said, “Shall I learn about machines?”
“When you’ve done some mathematics, Peter.”
“I’d like to fly,” said Peter.
“That’s far away yet.”
“There was a boy at that school, his father was an engineer; and he said that flying machines were coming quite soon.”
This was beyond Oswald’s range.
“The French have got a balloon that steers about,” he said. “That’s as near as we are likely to come to flying for a long time yet.”
“This boy said that he meant a real flying machine, not a balloon. It was to be heavier than air. It would fly like a kite or a bird.”
“I doubt if we’ll see that in my lifetime,” said Oswald; “or yours,” blind to the fate that had marked Peter for its own.
“H’m,” said Peter, with a shadow falling upon one of his brightest dreams. (Nobby ought to know these things. His word ought surely to be final. Still, after all, this chap’s father was an engineer.) “I’d love to fly,” said Peter.
§ 10
Something with the decorative effect of a broad processional banner in a very High Church indeed, appeared upon the flagstone path. It was Aunt Phœbe.
She had come out into the garden half an hour before her usual time. But indeed from the moment when she had heard Oswald and Peter talking in the garden below she had been unable to write more. After some futile attempts to pick up the lost thread of her discourse, she had gone to her bedroom and revised her toilet, which was often careless in the morning, so as to be more expressive of her personality. She was wearing a long djibbah-like garment with a richly embroidered yoke, she had sandals over her brown stockings, and rather by way of symbol of authorship than for any immediate use she bore a big leather portfolio. There was moreover now a gold-mounted fountain pen amidst the other ingredients of the cheerful chatelaine that had once delighted Peter’s babyhood.
She seemed a fuller, more confident person than Oswald remembered. She came eloquent with apologies. “I have to make an inexorable rule,” she said, “against disturbances. As if I were a man writer instead of a mere woman. Between nine and one I am a woman enclosed—cloistered—refused. Sacred hours of self-completeness. Unspeakably precious to me. Visitors are not even announced. It is a law—inflexible.”
“We must all respect our work,” said Oswald.
“It’s over now,” said Aunt Phœbe, smiling like the sun after clouds. “It’s over now for the day. I am just human—until tomorrow again.”
“You are writing a book?” Oswald asked rather ineptly.
“The Stitchwoman; Series Three. Much is expected; much must be given. I am the slave now of a Following.”
Aunt Phœbe went to the wall and stood with her fine profile raised up over the view. She was a little breathless and twitching slightly, but very magnificent. Most of her hair was tidy. “Our old Weald, does it look the same?” she asked.
“Quite the same,” said Oswald, standing up beside her.
“But not to me,” she said. “Indeed not to me. To me every day it is different. Always wide, always wonderful, but different, always different. I know it so well.”
Oswald felt she had worked a “catch” on him. He was faintly nettled.
“Still,” he said, “fundamentally one must recognize that it’s the same Weald.”
“I wonder,” said Aunt Phœbe suddenly, looking at him very intently, and then, as if she tasted the word, “Fundamentally?”
“I don’t know,” she added.
Oswald was too much annoyed to reply.
“And what do you think of your new charge?” she asked. “I don’t know whether Peter quite understands that yet. The young squire goes to the men. He casts aside childish things, and rides out in his little Caparison to join the ranks. Do you know that, Peter? Mr. Sydenham is now your sole guardian.”
Peter looked at Oswald and smiled shyly, and his cheeks flushed.
“I think we shall get on together,” said Oswald.
“Would that it ended there! You take the girl too?”
“It is not my doing,” said Oswald.
Aunt Phœbe addressed the Weald.
“Poor Dolly! So it is that the mother soul cheats itself. Through the ages—always self-abnegation for the woman.” She turned to Oswald. “If she had had time to think I am certain she would not have excluded women from this trust. Certain. What have men to do with education? With the education of a woman more particularly. The Greater from the Less. But the thing is done. It has been a great experiment, a wonderful experiment; teaching, I learnt—but I doubt if you will understand that.”
There was a slight pause. “What exactly was the nature of the experiment?” asked Oswald modestly.
“Feminine influence. Dominant.”
Oswald considered. “I don’t know if you include Lady Charlotte,” he threw out.
“Oh!” said Aunt Phœbe.
“But she has played her part, I gather.”
“Feminine! No! She is completely a Man-made Woman. Quintessentially the Pampered Squaw. Holding her position by her former charms. A Sex Residuum. Relict. This last outrage. An incident—merely. Her course of action was dictated for her. A Man. A mere solicitor. One Grimes. The flimsiest creature! An aspen leaf—but Male. Male.”
Stern thoughts kept Aunt Phœbe silent for a time. Then she remarked very quietly, “I shook him. I shook him well.”
“I hope still to have the benefit of your advice,” said Oswald gravely.
“Nay,” she said. But she was pleased. “A shy comment, perhaps. But the difference will be essential. Don’t expect me to guide you as you would wish to be guided. That phase is over between men and women. We hand the children over—since the law will have it so. Take them!”
And then addressing the Weald, Aunt Phœbe, in vibrating accents, uttered a word that was to be the keynote of a decade of feminine activities.
“The Vote,” said Aunt Phœbe, getting a wonderful emotional buzz into her voice. “The Vo-o-o-o-o-te.”
§ 11
So it was that Oswald found himself fully invested with his responsibilities.
There was a terrifying suggestion in Aunt Phœbe’s manner that he would presently have to clap Peter’s hat on, make up a small bundle of Peter’s possessions, and fare forth with him into the wide world, picking up the convalescent at Windsor on the way, but that was a misapprehension of Aunt Phœbe’s intentions. And, after all, it was Peter’s house and garden if it came to that. For a time at least things could go on as they were. But the task of direction was now fully his. Whether these two young people were properly educated or not, whether they too became slackers and inadequate or worthy citizens of this great empire, rested now entirely in his hands.
“They must have the best,” he said....
The best was not immediately apparent.
From Chastlands and his two rooms at the Climax Club Oswald conducted his opening researches for the educational best, and whenever he was at Chastlands he came over nearly every day to The Ingle-Nook on his bicycle. It was a well-remembered road. Scarcely was there a turn in it that did not recall some thought of the former time when he had ridden over daily for a sight of Dolly; he would leave his bicycle in a clump of gorse by the high road that was surely an outgrown fragment of the old bush in which he had been wont to leave it six years before; he would walk down the same rusty path, and his heart would quicken as it used to quicken at the thought of seeing Dolly. But presently Peter began to oust Dolly from his thoughts. Sometimes Peter would be standing waiting for him by the high road. Sometimes Peter, mounted on a little outgrown bicycle, would meet him on the purple common half way.
A man and a boy of ten are perhaps better company than a man and a boy of fifteen. There’s so much less egotism between them. At any rate Peter and Oswald talked of education and travel and politics and philosophy with unembarrassed freedom. Oswald, like most childless people, had had no suspicion of what the grey matter of a bright little boy’s brain can hold. He was amazed at Peter’s views and curiosities. It was Oswald’s instinct never to talk “down” to man, woman or child. He had never thought about it, but if you had questioned him he would have told you that that was the sort of thing one didn’t do. And this instinct gave him a wide range of available companionship. Peter had never conceived such good company as Oswald. You could listen to Oswald for hours. They discoursed upon every topic out of dreamland. And sometimes they came very close even to that dreamland where Bungo Peter adventured immortally. Oswald would feel a transfiguring presence, a touch of fantasy and half suspect their glorious companion.
Much of their talk was a kind of story-telling.
“How should we go to the Congo Forest?” Peter would ask. “Would one go by Nairobi?”
“No, that’s the other way. We’d have to go——”
And forthwith Nobby and Peter were getting their stuff together and counting how many porters they would need....
“One day perhaps we’d come upon a place ’fested with crocodiles,” Peter would say.
“We would. You would be pushing rather ahead of the party with your guns, looking for anything there might be—pushing through tall reeds far above your head,” Oswald would oblige.
“You’d be with me,” insisted Peter....
It was really story-telling....
It was Peter’s habit in those days when he was alone to meditate on paper. He would cover sheet after sheet with rapidly drawn scenes of adventure. One day Oswald found himself figuring in one of these dream pictures. He and Peter were leading an army in battle. “Capture of Ten War Elephants” was the legend thereon. But he realized how clearly the small boy saw him. Nothing was spared of the darkened, browless side of his face with its asymmetrical glass eye, the figure of him was very long and lean and bent, with its arm still in its old sling; and it was drawn manifestly with the utmost confidence and admiration and love....
Peter’s hostility to schools was removed very slowly. The lessons at High Cross had scarred him badly, and about Miss Mills clung associations of the utmost dreariness. Still it was Oswald’s instinct to consult the young man on his destiny.
“There’s a lot you don’t know yet,” said Oswald.
“Can’t I read it out of books?” asked Peter.
“You can’t read everything out of books,” said Oswald. “There’s things you ought to see and handle. And things you can only learn by doing.”
Oswald wanted Peter to plan his own school.
Peter considered. “I’d like lessons about the insides of animals, and about the people in foreign countries—and how engines work—and all that sort of thing.”
“Then we must find a school for you where they teach all that sort of thing,” said Oswald, as though it was merely a question of ordering goods from the Civil Service Stores....
He had much to learn yet about education.
§ 12
But Oswald was still only face to face with the half of his responsibility.
One morning he found Peter at the schoolroom table very busy cutting big letters out of white paper. Beside him was a long strip of Turkey twill from the dressing-up box that The Ingle-Nook had plagiarized from the Sheldricks. “I’m getting ready for Joan,” said Peter. “I’m going to put ’Welcome’ on this for over the garden gate. And there’s to be a triumphal arch.”
Hitherto Peter had scarcely betrayed any interest in Joan at all, now he seemed able to think of no one else, and Oswald found himself reduced abruptly from the position of centre of Peter’s universe to a mere helper in the decorations. But he was beginning to understand the small boy by this time, and he took the withdrawal of the limelight philosophically.
When Aunt Phyllis and Joan arrived they found the flagged path from the “Welcome” gate festooned with chains of coloured paper (bought with Peter’s own pocket-money and made by him and Oswald, with some slight assistance and much moral support from Aunt Phœbe in the evening) to the door. The triumphal arch had been achieved rather in the Gothic style by putting the movable Badminton net posts into a sort of trousering of assorted oriental cloths from the dressing-up chest, and crossing two heads of giant Heracleum between them. Peter stood at the door in the white satin suit his innocent vanity loved—among other rôles it had served for Bassanio, Prince Hal, and Antony (over the body of Cæsar)—with a face of extraordinary solemnity. Behind him stood Uncle Nobby.
Joan wasn’t quite the Joan that Peter expected. She was still wan from her illness and she had grown several inches. She was as tall as he. And she was white-faced, so that her hair seemed blacker than ever, and her eyes were big and lustrous. She came walking slowly down the path with her eyes wide open. There was a difference, he felt, in her movement as she came forward, though he could not have said what it was; there was more grace in Joan now and less vigour. But it was the same Joan’s voice that cried, “Oh, Petah! It’s lovely!” She stood before him for a moment and then threw her arms about him. She hugged him and kissed him, and Uncle Nobby knew that it was the smear of High Cross School that made him wriggle out of her embrace and not return her kisses.
But immediately he took her by the hand.
“It’s better in the playroom, Joan,” he said.
“All right, Joan, go on with him,” said Oswald, and came forward to meet Aunt Phyllis. Aunt Phœbe was on the staircase a little aloof from these things, as became a woman of intellect, and behind Aunt Phyllis came Mary, and behind Mary came the Limpsfield cabman with Aunt Phyllis’s trunk upon his shoulder, and demolished the triumphal arch. But Peter did not learn of that disaster until later, and then he did not mind; it had served its purpose.
The playroom (it was the old nursery rechristened) was indeed better. It was all glorious with paper chains of green and white festooned from corner to corner. On the floor to the right under the window was every toy soldier that Peter possessed drawn up in review array—a gorgeous new Scots Grey band in the front that Oswald had given him. But that was nothing. The big armchair had been drawn out into the middle of the room, and on it was Peter’s own lion-skin. And a piece of red stair-carpet had been put for Joan to go up to the throne upon. And beside the throne was a little table, and on the table was a tinsel robe from Clarkson’s and a wonderful gilt crown and a sceptre. Oswald had brought them along that morning.
“The crown is for you, Joan!” said Peter. “The sceptre was bought for you.”
Little white-faced Joan stood stockishly with the crown in one hand and the sceptre in the other. “Put the crown on, Joan,” said Peter. “It’s yours. It’s a rest’ration ceremony.”
But she didn’t put it on.
“It’s lovely—and it’s lovely,” whispered Joan in a sort of rapture, and stared about her incredulously with her big dark eyes. It was home again—home, and Mrs. Pybus had passed like an evil dream in the night. She had never really believed it possible before that Mrs. Pybus could pass away. Even while Aunt Phyllis and Mary had been nursing her, Mrs. Pybus had hovered in the background like something more enduring, waiting for them to pass away as inexplicably as they had come. Joan had heard the whining voice upon the stairs every day and always while she was ill, and once Mrs. Pybus had come and stood by her bedside and remarked like one who maintains an argument, “She’ll be ’appy enough ’ere when she’s better again.”
No more Mrs. Pybus! No more whining scoldings. No more unexpected slaps and having to go to bed supperless. No more measles and uneasy misery in a bed with grey sheets. No more dark dreadful sayings that lurked in the mind like jungle beasts. She was home, home with Peter, out of that darkness....
And yet—outside was the darkness still....
“Joan,” said Peter, trying to rouse her. “There’s a cake like a birthday for tea....”
When Oswald came in she was still holding the gilt crown in her hand.
She let Peter take it from her and put it on her head, still staring incredulously about her. She took the sceptre limply. Peter was almost gentle with this strange, staring Joan.
§ 13
For some days Oswald regarded Joan as a grave and thoughtful child. She seemed to be what country people call “old-fashioned.” She might have been a changeling. He did not hear her laugh once. And she followed Peter about as if she was his shadow.
Then one day as he cycled over from Chastlands he heard a strange tumult proceeding from a little field on Master’s farm, a marvellous mixture of familiar and unfamiliar sounds, an uproar, wonderful as though a tinker’s van had met a school treat and the twain had got drunk together. The source of this row was hidden from him by a little coppice, and he dismounted and went through the wood to investigate. Joan and Peter had discovered a disused cowshed with a sloping roof of corrugated iron, and they had also happened upon an abandoned kettle and two or three tin cans. They were now engaged in hurling these latter objects on to the resonant roof, down which they rolled thunderously only to be immediately returned. Joan was no longer a slip of pensive dignity, Peter was no longer a marvel of intellectual curiosities. They were both shrieking their maximum. Oswald had never before suspected Joan of an exceptionally full voice, nor Peter of so vast a wealth of gurgling laughter. “Keep the Pot-A-boilin’” yelled Joan. “Keep the Pot-A-boilin’.”
“Hoo!” cried Peter. “Hoo! Go it, Joan. Wow!”
And then, to crown the glory, the kettle burst. It came into two pieces. That was too perfect! The two children staggered back. Each seized a half of the kettle and kicked it deliberately. Then they rolled away and fell on their stomachs amidst the grass, kicking their legs in the air.
But the spirit of rowdyism grows with what it feeds upon.
“Oh, let’s do something reely awful!” cried Joan. “Let’s do something reely awful, Petah!”
Peter’s legs became still and stiff with interrogation.
“Oh, Petah!” said Joan. “If I could only smash a window. Frow a brick frough a real window, a Big Glass Window. Just one Glass Window.”
“Where’s a window?” said Peter, evidently in a highly receptive condition.
From which pitch of depravity Oswald roused him by a prod in the back....
§ 14
But after that Joan changed rapidly. Colour crept back into her skin, and a faintly rollicking quality into her bearing. She became shorter again and visibly sturdier, and her hair frizzed more and stuck out more. Her laugh and her comments upon the world became an increasingly frequent embroidery upon the quiet of The Ingle-Nook. She seemed to have a delusion that Peter was just within earshot, but only just.
Oswald wondered how far her recent experiences had vanished from her mind. He thought they might have done so altogether until one day Joan took him into her confidence quite startlingly. He was smoking in the little arbour, and she came and stood beside him so noiselessly that he did not know she was there until she spoke. She was holding her hands behind her, and she was regarding the South Downs with a pensive frown. She was paying him the most beautiful compliment. She had come to consult him.
“Mrs. Pybus said,” she remarked, “that every one who doesn’t believe there’s a God goes straight to Hell....
“I don’t believe there’s a God,” said Joan, “and Peter knows there isn’t.”
For a moment Oswald was a little taken aback by this simple theology. Then he said, “D’you think Peter’s looked everywhere, Joan?”
Then he saw the real point at issue. “One thing you may be sure about, Joan,” he said, “and that is that there isn’t a Hell. Which is rather a pity in its way, because it would be nice to think of this Mrs. Pybus of yours going there. But there’s no Hell at all. There’s nothing more dreadful than the dreadful things in life. There’s no need to worry about Hell.”
That he thought was fairly conclusive. But Joan remained pensive, with her eyes still on the distant hills. Then she asked one of those unanswerable children’s questions that are all implication, imputation, assumption, misunderstanding, and elision.
“But if there isn’t a Hell,” said Joan, “what does God do?”
§ 15
It was after Joan had drifted away again from these theological investigations that Oswald, after sitting some time in silence, said aloud and with intense conviction, “I love these children.”
He was no longer a stranger in England; he had a living anchorage. He looked out over the autumnal glories of the Weald, dreaming intentions. These children must be educated. They must be educated splendidly. Oswald wanted to see Peter serving the empire. The boy would have pluck—he had already the loveliest brain—and a sense of fun. And Joan? Oswald was, perhaps, not quite so keen in those days upon educating Joan. That was to come later....
After all, the empire, indeed the whole world of mankind, is made up of Joans and Peters. What the empire is, what mankind becomes, is nothing but the sum of what we have made of the Joans and Peters.