I burned from head to foot.
No sooner were we past them than they broke into loud jeering speech. ‘Pretty little barstard, ain’t he!’ And—‘Who’s yer farver, boy?’
Calamy’s hand was on my shoulder. ‘No, Claud. Go straight on, my boy. Quietly now!’
The incident baffled us. It lacked credibility. A malice so pointed, and exhibited after so long an interval, was more than we could believe natural. Arrived home we did not hesitate to discuss it; for the day of pretending that nothing unusual had happened was over for us. We decided, in conference, that these fellows had been set on to us by their betters. It was not a comforting conclusion, and it boded no good for the future. Was this the beginning of a new campaign? It looked like it. We were very weary of it all, and I for one was more than a little frightened. For myself there was nothing much to fear, except unpleasantness; but my mother had been vaguely ailing for weeks, and she was in no state to stand up against an open persecution. The strain of these past weeks had told on her; some of her elasticity was gone; and it flashed into my mind, as I covertly watched her on this particular evening, that she was being threatened by something invisible. It was a fantastic idea, and I scouted it angrily. But it did not die: for the moment I was at the mercy of my morbid fancy.
My mother was strangely quiet that night, and it was not until the evening of the next day that I overheard a significant fragment of conversation between her and Calamy. I heard and I listened; and since it was a matter that concerned me so closely I listened without shame.
‘They hate me because you won’t,’ said my mother’s voice. ‘If you were to send me away … ’
‘Send you away!’ echoed Calamy in shocked tones.
‘Yes, Robert. Be sensible. I’ve brought all this on you. On you and Claud. I’m nothing but a trouble to you now. If you were to send me away, they’d think you’d done the right thing at last, and … ’
‘Essie,’ said Calamy. And his voice trembled. ‘Don’t ever talk such nonsense again. You and the boy shall go away for a little holiday. It’s been in my mind for a long time. It’ll do you good, both of you. And while you’re away I’ll see what can be done about getting rid of the business, and making a start elsewhere. But as for sending …’ He broke off, and I guessed him to be as near angry as I had ever known him.
But a happy idea struck me. I plunged into the room.
‘Oo, Mother! Are we going to Uncle Claybrook’s?’ said I.
Chapter IX
My progress in this chronicle is like that of the frog in the well: with every three hops up, I slip down the equivalent of two. For now nothing will content me but to unravel some of the memories bound up in that word Lutterthorpe: an enterprise that will take me back to small childhood once again. You must picture me, then, as a child four or five years old; dressed, if the day were Sunday or had the sartorial status of Sunday, in a sailor suit and a wide-brimmed straw hat with H.M.S. VICTORY emblazoned on its ribbon. I can feel now the tug of the elastic under my chin. I can remember the peculiar pleasure it gave me to have that little flannel singlet tied over my chest. I can remember the smell, texture, and pattern of the starched sailor collar; the joy of the lanyard, and the rapture of the whistle that depended from it. But if the day were not Sunday, or in any way special, I would as likely as not be wearing a kind of blouse, a fauntleroy silk collar, velvet corduroy knickers, and white socks. There was a conspiracy in those days to make all children, whatever their sex, look as much like little girls as possible. Nevertheless I had my manly pursuits: my bow and arrow and (later) my catapults; and, when I was not being exhibited to my Aunt Claybrook’s female visitors as a sweet little thing, I was made free of a large garden, which was divided into two parts by a tall brick wall. One of these parts, moreover, was subdivided by the intervention of shrubberies and the variety of ground-levels. You had to descend no fewer than four stone steps to reach the croquet-lawn: this alone, for me, was an occasion of much bliss. In another part of the garden, in the shadow of tall pines and with pine needles strewing the dark ground underfoot, there was a hammock to which I could resort; and in yet another part, remote from the house, was the strangest corner—dank, dark green, overgrown, and pungent with the reek of the ivy that covered the angle of the old wall. This corner, with its dimness and rank growth, had a quality that both repelled and attracted me: it became a primary symbol, part of my mental make-up, and appeared often in dreams. On the other side, not of this wall but of its opposite fellow, lay the kitchen garden, where raspberries were sometimes to be had; and fallen apples, called ‘summerings’; and peas, fresh from the smooth green creakable pod that would lie so sleek and cool in a small fist.
So far, in this sketch of Lutterthorpe, I have been piecing my memories together with deliberation; but now a particular moment—or maybe a composite of particular moments—becomes vivid and translucent. I enter it and am enclosed: the past is present to me. I am standing in the cobbled farmyard at my Uncle Claybrook’s. Its rich blend of smells gives me the greatest possible satisfaction. Here, I tell myself, it is pouring with sun; and here, within reach and almost within sight, is everything I can want to make perfect my lazy afternoon. Yes, it is afternoon: there is that quality in the aspect of things that we call afternoon. Comfortably ranged round the yard are stables, the granary, the cowshed, the pigsty, and a big ruin of a barn. The horses and the cows are out at grass just now, but I think of them with pleasure for a dreaming moment, reflecting that when they are at home they must count themselves very lucky indeed. The stables have one kind of smell, and the cowshed has another: each in its way very pleasing to my nostrils because nothing quite like it is to be encountered at home. Where shall I go? What shall I do? The pigsty hardly needs a visit; for I have already had my fill of staring at the great black sow, and the grunts and squeaks of the little pigs are the only noises that even this afternoon drowsiness cannot quite subdue. Well, the granary then. Ah yes! For the granary is perhaps the most exciting place of all. You go up stone steps to it; and the dimness of that upstairs room, and the height of it, give you the authentic feeling of adventure, of remoteness, of being in an old story. In this high dim place—almost dusky it seems after the brightness of outside—there are bulging bags leaning against the wall, and the air smells of sacking and cider-apples. Glancing back at the doorway that I have just entered by, I can see, at first, nothing but a dazzling oblong space. But presently, when my eyes get accustomed once more to the bright sunshine, I find it good to stand and look down into the yard, across which, as I stare, seven absurdly dignified geese come waddling in single file, all their heads and beaks held at the same slant. Suddenly I am seized with the impulse to make them scatter. I shout and wave my arms. ‘Boo, geese! Boo!’ For I have been told that this is the way to talk to geese. But the geese take no notice of me, so presently, tired of being in the granary, I come to earth again and go and peep in the barn, where, to my inexpressible delight and alarm, I find five small black-and-white puppies nuzzling against their mother, who lies, serenely disregarding them, in the bed she has made for herself in the straw. I would like to snatch one of the puppies into my arms, but the bitch snarls and bares her fangs at me, so I think better of it, and run off into the nearest field, where, in a sun-spattered copse, I lie on my back, staring up at the shining green of the leaves that pattern the sky for me, and at the little shapes of blue and white that show here and there between them. I am close to the hedge, with its cow-parsley and sweetbriar; and close to the dry ditch where, among the roots and undergrowth, I choose to pretend that all manner of small creatures, birds and mice and moles and voles and weasels, sit listening with cocked heads. I can feel the warm breath of clover blowing into my face.
This is so real to me now, as I write, that it must certainly have happened in fact as well as in dream, though I can recall no circumstantial details by which to pin it down to some definite historical occasion. Equally clear, equally and exquisitely lifted out of time and
space, is my sense of walking with my elders, in the late dusk of a summer’s evening, along a rain-washed country road: the freshness of the air in my nostrils; the clear pattering pattern of our many boots on the ground, a sound mysteriously enhanced by the waning of daylight; and, above all, sharpening a lovely moment to a point of memorable meaning, the fun and rapture of finding the wet road jumping alive with hundreds of tiny frogs—frogs so many and so small that, having squealed my delight and gazed my fill (or, that being impossible, having exhausted my companions’ patience) I have to sneak past on tiptoe, taking elaborate precautions to avoid treading on them. It was an incident, this, as vital and unexpected as a fairy tale, and it became my permanent possession: for, though in time I forgot it, here I come upon it again, find it lying as it were at the bottom of the ocean, glazed to a new brightness by the intervening time, rounded and magnified as by a vast water. Near it there is another evening, an evening when, with a conjecture more deep than usual, I watched the shadows gathering in the sky, and saw the cawing rooks questing with sharp beaks, beating the air with black wings, curving in and out of their huge nests in the elm-trees: this from the window of the bedroom I shared with my mother, and it is Sunday night, for church bells from a lonely distance bring me a message of unutterable melancholy. I creep back into bed and lie listening in desolation. The world is empty: my mother is not in the house. Yet not empty, for the room, this strange room at Aunt Claybrook’s, is filling with shadows and presences. Unseen faces are looking and smiling at me; the room is unfriendly, knowing as well as I do that my mother is far away. A cunning room. When Mother is with me it shelters us two benignly, being warm with love. But when she is downstairs the room becomes reserved, indifferent, a thing to be on one’s guard against. And with Mother out of the house—ah, then there is cruelty here, and the darkness is like a stifling blanket, and the sound of bells chiming under a darkened sky makes me think of the Last Judgement, and the Witch of Endor calling spirits from the deep, and Elijah riding to heaven, and the gargoyles grinning down upon the churchyard, and the putty-coloured people lying glassy-eyed in their graves. That one day these same people would rise from their graves, and troop up for judgement, was the last touch of nightmare; for I feared it might happen at any minute and the night become populous with the shrouded persons of the dead. Religion, and especially the ‘consolations’ of religion, provided the chief of all my terrors in childhood.
I think it must have been on this same visit that I saw the dancing bear, only a few hundred yards from the Claybrook farmhouse. I was startled but fascinated; and not so much afraid of the great lumbering beast—which, curiously enough, I felt vaguely sorry for—as of its master, a small man with bushy eyebrows and an enormous nose. The pole he carried was nearly twice as tall as himself; there was something gnome-like about him; and a gap in his row of large yellow teeth gave him a sinister air which his amiable manner did not altogether neutralize. He had an expansive smile and a foreign singsong way of speech. ‘He good bear. He not hurta the little gentleman. Come stroka him.’ These, or something like them, were his words, as he shuffled about in the middle of the road on his loose limbs. They did not encourage me to go nearer. I did not run, for one does not see a bear every day; but I gathered my smallness into a narrower compass, and standing close to the hedge, out of harm’s way, made, I suppose, large eyes at the astonishing spectacle. How I came to be in the street alone is more than I can now say. Nor do I remember the issue of that encounter; but I remember that later in the morning my bear-master presented himself at the house and begged to be allowed to sleep that night in a barn with his bear. From the safety of our friendly domestic interior I watched and listened to him, and suddenly found him lovable. It was an agony of suspense for me to wait for my Uncle Claybrook’s answer; to see him consider the matter, scratching his bristly cheek and frowning in thought. And when at last he said ‘Very well. You can keep the animal under proper control, I suppose?’ I felt a warm gush of pride and pleasure and gratitude, as though I had suddenly been given a shilling. ‘Oo, isn’t it lovely, uncle!’ I said, slipping my hand unexpectedly into his. I did not say, nor did I know, precisely what I felt to be so lovely.
And so, by a devious route, we come to my Uncle Claybrook. But he is worth, I protest, an even longer journey. In my childish eyes Uncle Claybrook was a man twice as large as life, very loud and friendly and funny: godlike, for he held incomparable gifts in his hand; yet a kind of celestial clown, for in his endeavour to entertain a little boy he made nothing of his dignity. Above all (and so much above all as to be beyond my conscious perception) he was the embodiment of all the joys that the word farm held for me. The pigs and geese, the horses and the cattle, the rides in the dogcart, the garden and the fields and flowering hedges, the chalky lanes and the white fences of the railway station, the haystacks, the rabbits, the field-mice, the chance-seen loping fox, the pleasure of watching Aunt Claybrook and her maids at the churning, the sight of cows lumbering home to be milked, the roaming of the garden and the swinging in the hammock and the stick of celery at supper-time: all these were by with and from my Uncle Claybrook, and each contributed a constituent element to the magical sum of him. He was a tall, sturdy, ruddy-faced man, with dark-brown hair but with a glint of red in his whiskers, which were cut in the mutton-chop style. When he smiled, the flesh about his eyes wrinkled numerously; and much smiling had left a fine network of lines to bear witness to a cheerful temperament. But he was by no means always smiling: indeed his face in repose, or wearing an expression of intentness, or pursed in thought, held a hint of fierceness, a hint which his barking voice and curt articulation did nothing to contradict. But these things were superficial, and his geniality, I am confident, was the flower of a deep-rooted kindness. He must, I suppose, have possessed more sober and Sunday-going clothes; yet (but for one unique occasion that remains to be told) I cannot remember seeing him except in his brown tweed jacket, riding-breeches with a check pattern as boisterous as himself, and highly-polished brown-leather gaiters. It would not, in those days, have greatly surprised me to learn that he slept in that garb, so completely did I identify it with his personality. His wife, my mother’s eldest sister, was a wraith beside him: rather gentle, rather timid, rather inclined to labour any point she wished to make: everything ‘rather’. It is a puzzle to know why he married so colourless a person, unless it was the attraction of opposites that united them, and his sense of that physical beauty in her of which, at times, a faded version, a kind of faint pencil-sketch, was still to be found in her prim and somewhat anxious features. The blue of her eyes gave her, sometimes, a wistful look; and when she could be persuaded to laugh, and even to blush, one could believe what seemed at other times incredible—that she was indeed my mother’s sister. It was probably a disappointment to them both, perhaps a grief, that they were childless, the only child of their marriage having been stillborn; and no doubt I came in for a good deal of petting to which the child lost and the children unborn had a better claim. For the rest, it was a prosperous household, well appointed and well staffed. In the matter of food and drink my uncle treated himself handsomely, and his guests no less; he had the hearty man’s suspicion of small or even moderate appetites, regarding such eccentricities—‘Nonsense! Of course you will, my poor Essie! Haven’t come here to starve yourself, have you?’—either as a symptom of approaching illness or as a polite affectation. If illness, then that illness must be warded off by making a hearty meal; if affectation, you must be bullied out of it. My mother, I fancy, found these tactics of his a little trying; and on this last visit, which I must now come to, her very apathy defeated him. Some sickness in my mother there certainly was, on this occasion; and not all his barking could persuade her that eating was the remedy.
And now that I have caught up with my story again, you see us, I hope, my mother and me, alighting from the train at Lutterthorpe Station, being welcomed by a radiant Uncle Claybrook, and driven to the farm in time to sit down to
an enormously high tea. You will hear, too, in imagination, as I in memory, the usual family exchanges. My aunt greets us both with a kindly peck. I am told that I am a big boy for my age, which is something between fourteen and fifteen. My uncle roars a joke at me, and slaps his knee in self-appreciation. And so, in tolerably high spirits, we suffer ourselves to be led to the table, where await us ham, boiled eggs, plates piled high with bread and butter, an enormous fruit-cake, honey, various jams, a bowl or two of scald cream, and my aunt’s large silver teapot that was her mother’s before her.
‘And how,’ said my aunt, as we all sat down to this feast, ‘how is poor Robert managing?’
My mother lifted an eyebrow.
‘All by himself,’ said my aunt in amplification. ‘What a pity you couldn’t have brought him, too, dear! We should have been so pleased to see him. Shouldn’t we, Franky?’ She glanced at her husband with an air of anxious appeal which the circumstances certainly did not warrant; for no one in his senses could have questioned my Uncle Claybrook’s eagerness to entertain his brother-in-law.
‘Bless the woman!’ roared my uncle, in humorous exasperation. ‘Essie knows that without being told, don’t she!’
‘I do hope he’ll manage,’ murmured my aunt, in the tone of one who fears the worst but is resolved to be brave about it.
‘I didn’t like leaving him, you may be sure,’ said my mother, weary of having to explain. ‘But he was set on my coming away. And when he makes up his mind to a thing, he can be as stubborn as the rest.’
The Quick and the Dead Page 6
