The dining-room was in an uproar, and it was to be feared nobody’s home-lessons were well done. Weenie had had a map of Europe to do; she also had recently expended the sum of a shilling on a box of coloured crayons. As a natural result she had devoted a bare five minutes to an unrecognizable outline of the Continent, and spent the rest of the evening in making a Joseph’s coat of it. The boys all insisted in having a voice in the selection of colours. Weenie had considered pink would look well for France, seeing she had coloured the Channel and Bay of Biscay a deep indigo, and Belgium and Holland two shades of green. But Alf, fresh from A Tale of Two Cities, insisted it must be dyed incarnadine.
“But I’ve done Spain red,” objected the artist.
“Rub some blue over the red, then.” Alf said.
[219]
“Purple is the right colour for Spain; the people
there always have purple eyes and hair.”
So Weenie selected the most brilliant among her reds, and made France lurid. Italy, by unanimous consent, was blue, a paler tint than the sea. Germany, Richie contended, must be coloured to resemble German sausage, that being, as he said, the chief export of the place; so great pains were expended with dark crimson and dabs of white.
“Well, at all events, we’ll do Russia pink,” Weenie said, eager to cover all that great expanse with the salmon-coloured stick, which worked more easily than the others.
But Alf would not suffer this either. “No,” he said, “it’s got to be yellow,—think of all the convicts there.” And Weenie had to be content for Norway and Switzerland to be the only countries blushing delicately.
“Why,” said Richie, “there’s a pretty map! She’s forgotten Greece altogether, and she’s got no Black Sea in at all, and all her Germany and Austria are not as big as Belgium!”
Weenie looked vexedly at the place Greece should have occupied.
“I always forget that horrid little place,” she said. “Stick it in for me, Alf; you do it more neatly than I.”
So Alf performed upon the brilliant map. He was rather quick with his fingers, and he introduced the [220] country of story and song so skilfully one could not have guessed it had ever been missing. But then Weenie’s handiwork led his fingers into temptation. She always enjoyed drawing Italy because it was like a leg, just as the resemblance to a leg of mutton made South America pleasant and easy to outline. And even to-night, while all the rest of Europe’s lines were scamped, she had taken pains to give a shapely toe and a high heel to the land of sunshine. What wonder if Alf added a high boot with many green buttons and a green toe-cap? What wonder if his pencil ran north and added eyes, and, where necessary, chins to the mouths and noses Weenie intended to indicate Norway’s blue fiords and jagged promontories? Spain with a long-lashed eye placed just at Coimbra, a nostril added to the nose where Lisbon lies, and a black-pointed beard continued below Cape St. Vincent, personified itself; and the “German Sausage Land,” in the twinkling of a crayon, resolved itself into a particularly fat and solid-looking cat. But Weenie at the sight of the ruin actually burst into tears. There was a prize to be given, it seemed, for the best map, and she had felt so admirable a colour-scheme as hers could not fail to win it. All the time she was putting in the Ural Mountains and the Alps, with Dolly’s finicking little pen, she was imagining a scene in school in which the head-teacher stood up and said, “Prize for best workmanship as displayed in map of Europe, Wilhelmina Conway.” [221] And now that booted Italy, that feline Fatherland!
Alf looked quite dismayed, for Weenie was not in the least given to tears.
“I never thought you’d mind,” he said; “you never care how many blots you have. I’m awfully sorry, old girl. Here, you pay me out—you scribble all over this blessed Euclid I had to do for old Brownlow,” and he held out the problems he had worked. But the method he proposed appealed to Weenie’s humour, and a little laugh bubbled out amidst the tears.
“No,” she said, “that wouldn’t do me any good. Come here and I will scribble on you.”
Alf, relieved at her averted wrath, promptly presented his face, and she gave him green eyebrows, a red tip on his nose, and a moustache of ultramarine. Of course that made a clown of him, and he treated them extempore to various antics and witticisms brought home from a circus. Phyl came in at the door just as he finished walking round the table on his hands.
“Alf,” she said, and there came a choking little sound in her voice as she looked at his happy face, “doctor and mother want you in the drawing-room, dear.”
Alf did not notice her voice, nor Richie’s drooped jaw, nor Weenie’s startled air of sudden remembrance.
“Stand clear of the gangway, then,” he cried, and [222] Phyl moved hastily aside in time to allow him to make his exit turning brilliant Catherine-wheels through the door, across the passage, and, with a skilful twist, right into the drawing-room.
In the dining-room nobody spoke for a long time. Dolly went to the window and stood looking out at the willow-trees and grass; and once she broke the silence by laughing in a queer little way, for Jingo was on the path engaged in tearing an old sock to bits, and once he tossed it up in the air and tried to catch it on his nose in the way Alf taught him to catch lumps of sugar. Richie went to Dolly’s side to look also, and they put their arms round each other for comfort as they stood waiting. Phyl presently picked up the geography-book.
“Be saying your gulfs, Freddie,” she said. But when Freddie, also distraught, made the grave statement that the Gulf of Carpentaria was the chief gulf in Victoria, and Broken Bay was the harbour of Perth, she allowed it to go uncontradicted.
Clif and Ted were in the room too, now.
“Poor little beggar!” Clif said, and puffed vigorously at his pipe.
There came a quick clatter across the passage, and Alf burst into their midst again with eyes blazing wrathfully under their green brows, and the blue moustache twitching with the muscles of his face.
“I won’t,” he said stormily. “Don’t you imagine I’m going, any of you. No dirty Germanies for me, [223] thank you. If you want their dirty money go yourselves, all of you.”
“Wish I had the chance,” Ted said. “You don’t know when you’re well off, Alf. None of us ever had such a chance of education.”
“Education!” Little Alf fairly snorted with wrath. “As if I don’t get enough now with old Brownlow to make me sick of everything. Here I’m about as stuffed up with their beastly Latin and Euclid as I can be, and you want to choke some more on me.”
“Well, think of the pleasure to be derived from rolling in money,” said Clif. “You’ll be the important person of the family, Alf; we shall all take our hats off to you when we meet you.”
“I’d rather roll in mud!” said the fierce, small youth. “Sixpence a week’s all I want—you wouldn’t think the Pater ’ud grudge me that!”
The doctor came behind him and laid a quiet hand on his shoulder. “Alf,” he said.
“W—wouldn’t think you’d g—g—grudge me sixpence a week,” blubbered Alf, struggling away and dashing his fist so rapidly across his ashamed eyes one green eyebrow was smeared half-way down his cheek.
“Alf,” said the doctor again, and Alf, looking up, found tears also in the keen fatherly eyes.
The fierce young muscles relaxed, his head drooped.
“G—g—grudge me s—s—sixpence,” he repeated, [224] the tears gushing out in self-pity. His father put an arm round his shoulder and led him out very quietly.
“S—s—s—sixpence,” they heard the sobbing voice repeating just as the drawing-room door closed again.
It was an hour before he came back. He walked in to them then very slowly. His eyes were swollen, half the poor blue moustache was washed away and the red tip of the nose no longer startled, for all the face was puffy and reddened.
Phyl longed to console, but dare not endanger that brittle fortitude. She did not know that the tears were running down her cheeks as fast as they were down Dolly’s, who was holding up Richie’s French exercise-book to hide them.
“Well, old chap,” said Clif.
“Are you going?” said Weenie, breathlessly.
Alf stuck his hands deeper than ever in his pockets.
“Course I am,” he said jerkily.
“That’s sensible, old fellow,” Clif said; “of course it’s a wrench, but you’d be the first to blame the Pater if he let you lose the chance now.”
“Oh, would I?” said little Alf. The fit of coughing that followed accounted of course for the fresh tears in his eyes.
“I’d give my very head to be in your place,” sighed Ted. It chafed his spirit to think of the German Universities and Libraries, travel, mixing with clever men, being wasted on this unwilling [225] young Goth, while he must go hungry for them all his days.
“I’d give—your head—too,” was little Alf’s answer, made staccato for safety.
“But you really are a lucky young dog, you know,” Clif said; “a fortune to your hand—two fortunes perhaps! I wish I’d had a cherubic smile, Alf, and a love-curl, and eyes of blue when the old gentleman and the little wisp of a lady came along.”
“Look here,” said Alf, and he got up and tumbled his heap of books as usual into the book-cupboard, “I’ve promised the Pater I’ll go, but I’ve got another month to have fun in, and if any one speaks to me about that dirty German sausage place I’ll fight him.”
Then they separated for bed.