Once at a children’s gymkhana that somebody had, Charlie fell down; and when he saw a trickle of blood on his knee he went white and began to whimper. He never could bear blood. Some of the gymkhana children looked mocking and whispered, and Julian came along and told them to shut up, very fiercely. Then he patted Charlie on the back and said: ‘Buck up, old chap,’ and put an arm round him and took him up to the house to be bandaged. Judith watched them going away, pressed close to each other, the backs of their heads and their thin childish shoulders looking lonely and pathetic. She thought suddenly: ‘They’ve no Mother and Father;’ and her throat ached.
Charlie sometimes told you things. Once, after one of the quarrels, chucking pebbles into the river, he said:
‘It’s pretty rotten Julian and me always quarrelling.’
‘But it’s his fault, Charlie.’
‘Oh, I dare say it’s just as much mine.’
Magnanimous Charlie.
‘Oh no, he’s so beastly to you. I think he’s a horrid boy.’
‘Rot! What do you know about it?’ he said indignantly. ‘He’s ripping and he’s jolly clever too. Much cleverer than me. He thinks I’m an awful ass.’
‘Oh, you’re not.’
‘Well he thinks so,’ he said gloomily. ‘I expect I am.’
It was terrible to see him so depressed.
‘I don’t think so Charlie.’ Then fearfully plunging: ‘I wish you were my brother.’
He hurled a pebble, watched it strike the water, got up to go and said charmingly:
‘Well, I wish you were my sister.’
And at once it was clear he did not really mean it. He did not care. He was used to people adoring him, wanting from him what he never gave but always charmingly pretended to give. It was a deep pang in the heart. She cried out inwardly: ‘Ah, you don’t mean it! …’ Yet at the same time there was the melting glow because he had after all said it.
Another time he took a pin out of his coat and said:
‘D’you see what this is?’
‘A pin.’
‘Guess where I found it.’
‘In the seat of your chair.’
The flippancy was misplaced. He ignored it and said impressively:
‘In my pudding at school.’
‘Oh!’
‘I nearly swallowed it.’
‘Oh!’
‘If I had I’d ’a’ died.’
He stared at her.
‘Oh, Charlie! …’
‘You can keep it if you like.’
He was so beautiful, so gracious, so munificent that words failed …
She put the pin in a sealed envelope and wrote on it, The pin that nearly killed CF.’ with the date; and laid it away in the washstand drawer with her will and a bit of uncut turquoise, and some shells, and a piece of bark from the poplar tree that fell down in the garden. After that she was a good deal encouraged to hope he might marry her.
Sometimes Charlie and Mariella looked alike – clear, bloodlessly cool; and they both adored dogs and talked a special language to them. But Charlie was all nerve, vulnerable, easy to trouble; and Mariella seemed quite impervious. They disliked each other. He thought she despised him, and it made him nag and try to score off her. Yet they had this subtle likeness.
Sometimes Charlie played the piano for hours. He and Julian remembered tunes in their heads and could play them correctly even if they had only heard them whistled once. If one could not remember a bar, the other could: they supplemented each other. It was thrilling to hear them. They were wrapped in shining mists of glory. When Charlie sang Christmas carols his voice was heartbreakingly sweet and he looked like the little choir boy, too saintly, too blue-eyed to live, – which made Judith anxious. The grandmother used to wipe her eyes when he sang, and say to Judith, just as if she had been grown up, that he was the image of his dear father.
The grandmother did not love Julian in the same way, though sometimes in the evening she would stroke his rough stormy-looking head as he lay on the floor, and say very pityingly: ‘Poor old boy.’ He used to shut his eyes tight when she said it, and let himself be stroked for a minute, then jerk away. He always did things twice as vehemently as other people. He never shut his eyes without screwing them up. At first you thought he was just beastly, but later you found he was pathetic as well and knew why she said: ‘Poor old boy’ with that particular inflection. Later still you varied hating him with almost loving him.
Judith was the only one he never mocked at. She was quite immune. He did not always take notice of her of course, being at Eton, and she much younger; but when he did, he was always kindly – even interested; so that it seemed unjust to dislike him so much, except for Charlie’s sake.
He was an uncomfortable person. If you had been alone with him it was a relief to get back to the others. His senses were too acute, his mind too angular. He would not let anything alone. He was always prying and poking restlessly, testing and examining, and making you do the same, insistently holding your attention as long as he wanted it, so that his company was quite exhausting. He always hoped to find people more intelligent, more interesting than they were, and he would not let them alone till he had discovered their inadequacy and thrown them away.
But the more he poked at a person’s mind, the more that person withdrew. He had that knack. He spent his time doing himself no good, repelling where he hoped to attract. He was of a didactical turn of mind. He loved instructing; and he knew so much about his subjects and was so anxious to impart all he knew that he would go on and on and on. It was very tiresome. Judith was too polite to show her boredom, so she got a lot of instruction. Sometimes he tried when they were alone together to make her tell him her thoughts, which would have been terribly embarrassing but that he soon lost interest in them and turned to his own. He himself had a great many thoughts which he threw at her pell mell. He had contemptuous ideas about religion. He had just become an unbeliever, and he said ‘God’ in quite an ordinary unashamed conversational voice. Sometimes she understood his thoughts, or pretended to, to save the explanation, and sometimes she let him explain, because it made him so pleased and enthusiastic. He would contort himself all over with agony searching for the right, the perfect words in which to express himself, and if he was satisfied at the end he hummed a little tune. He loved words passionately: he invented very good ones. Also he made the most screamingly funny monstrous faces to amuse them all, if he felt cheerful. Generally, however, he was morose when they were all together, and went away alone, looking as if he despised and distrusted them. Judith discovered he did not really prefer to be alone: he liked one other person, a listener. It made him light up impetuously and talk and talk. The others thought him conceited, and he was; yet all the time he was less conceited than self-abasing and sensitive, less overbearing than diffident. He could not laugh at himself, only at others; and he never forgave a person who laughed at him.
He told untruths to a disconcerting extent. Judith told a great many herself, so she was very quick to detect his, and always extremely shocked. Once the grandmother said:
‘Who broke the punt pole?’
And they all said:
‘I didn’t’
Then she said patiently:
‘Well, who went punting yesterday?’ And Martin, red and anxious with his desire to conceal nothing, cried joyfully. ‘I did’ – adding almost with disappointment: ‘But I didn’t break the pole.’ His truthfulness was quite painfully evident. Nobody had broken the pole.
Julian whistled carelessly for a bit after that, so Judith knew.
Sometimes he invented dreams, pretending he had really dreamt them. Judith always guessed when the dreams were untruths, though often they were very clever and absurd, just like real dreams. She made up dreams too, so he could not deceive her. She knew the recipe for the game; and that, try as you would
, some betraying touch was bound to creep in.
In the same way he could not deceive her about the adventures he had had, the queer people he had met, plausible as they were. Made-up people were real enough, but only in their own worlds, which were each as different from the world your body lived in as the people who made them were different from each other. The others always believed him when they bothered to listen; they had not the imagination to find him out. Judith as a fellow artist was forced to judge his lies intellectually, in spite of moral indignation.
He was rather mean about sweets. Often he bought a bagful of acid drops, and after handing them round once went away and finished them by himself. Sometimes when Judith was with him he sucked away and never once said: ‘Have one.’ But another time he bought her eightpence worth all to herself and took her for a beetle walk. He adored beetles. He knew their names in Latin, and exactly how many thousand eggs a minute they laid and what they ate, and where and how long they lived. Coming back he put his arm round her and she was proud, though she wished he were Charlie.
He read a lot and sometimes he was secretive about it. He stayed in the bath room whole afternoons reading dictionaries or the Arabian Nights.
He was the only one who was said to know for certain how babies were born. When the others aired their theories he laughed in a superior way. Then one day after they had all been persuading him he said, surly and brief: ‘Well, haven’t you noticed animals, idiots?’ And after they had consulted amongst themselves a bit they all thought they understood, except Martin, and Mariella had to explain to him.
Julian played the piano better than Charlie; he played so that it was impossible not to listen. But he was not, as Charlie was, a pure vessel for receiving music and pouring it forth again. Judith thought Charlie undoubtedly lapped up music as a kitten lapped milk.
Julian said privately that he intended to write an opera. It was too thrilling for words. He had already composed a lovely thing called ‘Spring’ with trills, and an imitation of a cuckoo recurring in it. It was wonderful, – exactly like a real cuckoo. Another composition was called ‘The Dance of the Stag-Beetles’. That was very funny. You simply saw the stag-beetles lumping solemnly round. It made everybody laugh – even the grandmother. Then Roddy invented a dance for it which was as funny as the music; and it became a regular thing to be done on rainy days. Julian himself preferred ‘Spring’. He said it was a bigger thing altogether.
Roddy was the queerest little boy. He was the most unreal and thrilling of all because he was there so rarely. His parents were not dead like Julian’s and Charlie’s, or abroad like Martin’s or divorced and disgraced like Mariella’s. (Mariella’s mother had run away with a Russian Pole, whatever that was, when Mariella was a baby; and after that her father … there Nurse had broken off impressively and tilted an imaginary bottle to her lips when she was whispering about it to the housemaid.)
Roddy’s parents lived in London and allowed him to come on a week’s visit once every holiday. Roddy scarcely ever spoke. He had a pale, flat face and yellow-brown eyes with a twinkling light remote at the back of them. He had a ruffled dark shining head and a queer smile that you watched for because it was not like anyone else’s. His lip lifted suddenly off his white teeth and then turned down at the corners in a bitter-sweet way. When you saw it you said ‘Ah!’ to yourself, with a little pang, and stared, – it was so queer. He had a trick of spreading out his hands and looking at them, – brown broad hands with long crooked fingers that were magical when they held a pencil and could draw anything. He had another trick of rubbing his eyes with his fist like a baby, and that made you say ‘Ah!’ too, with a melting, quick sort of pang, wanting to touch him. His eyes fluttered in a strong light: they were weak and set so far apart that, with their upward sweep, they seemed to go round the corners and, seen in profile, to be set in his head like a funny bird’s. He reminded you of something fabulous – a Chinese fairy-story. He was thin and odd and graceful; and there was a suggestion about him of secret animals that go about by night.
Once Judith saw a hawthorn hedge in winter, shining darkly with recent rain. Deep in the heart of its strong maze of twigs moved a shadowy bird pecking, darting silently about in its small magically confined loneliness after a glowing berry or two. Suddenly Judith thought of Roddy. It was ridiculous of course, but there it was: the suggestion came of itself with the same queer pull of surprise and tenderness. A noiseless, intent creature moving alone among small brilliancies in a profound maze: there was – oh, what was there that was all of Roddy in that?
He was so elastic, so mercurial in his movements, when he chose, that he did not seem true. He had a way of swinging down from the topmost branch of a tree, dropping lightly, hand below hand, as if he were floating down, and then, long before he reached the usual jumping-place, giving himself easily to the air and landing in a soft relaxed cat-like crouch.
Once they set out to attempt the huge old fir-tree at the edge of the garden. The thing was to get to the top before someone below counted fifty. Julian, Mariella, Martin tried, and failed. Then Roddy. He swung himself up and soon after leapt out from a branch and came down again, pronouncing it too uncomfortable and filthy to be bothered about. Judith looked up and saw the wild swirl of twigs so thick all the way up that no sky showed through. She said to herself: ‘I will! I will!’ and the Spirit entered into her and she climbed to the top and threw a handkerchief out of it just as Martin said fifty-seven. After that she came down again, and received congratulations. Martin gave her his lucky thripenny as a prize, and she was swollen with pride because she, the youngest, had beaten them all; and in her exaltation she thought: ‘I can do anything if I say I can,’ and tried again that evening to fly through the power of faith but failed.
Afterwards when she was resavouring in secret the sweet applause they had given her she remembered that Roddy had said nothing, – just looked at her with twinkling eyes and a bit of his downward smile; and she thought he had probably been laughing at her for her enthusiasm and her pride. She felt disillusioned, and all at once remembered her bruises and her ruined bloomers.
Roddy had no ambition. He did not feel at all humiliated if he failed to meet a challenge. If he did not want to try he did not try: not because he was afraid of foiling, for he knew his power and so did everyone else; and not because he was physically cautious, for fear was unknown to him: it was because of the fundamental apathy in him. He lived in bursts of energy followed by the most lethargic indifference.
When he chose to lead they all followed; but he did not care. He did not care whether he was liked or not. He never sought out Martin, though he accepted his devotion kindly and did not join in the sells arranged for him. But then he never joined in anything: he was not interested in personal relationships.
They were all a little afraid of him, and none of them – except Martin to whom he was as a son – liked him very much.
The things he drew were extremely odd: long dreamlike figures with thin legs trailing after them, giants and pigmies and people having their heads cut off, and ghosts and skeletons rising from graves and flapping after children; and people doing wild dances, their limbs flying about; and amusing monsters and hideous terrifying old women. His caricatures were the best. The grandmother said they were very promising. Julian was always the most successful subject, and he minded dreadfully.
Sometimes Judith sat beside him and watched his quick pencil. It was like magic. But always he soon gave up. He had scarcely any interest in his drawings once they were finished. She collected them in sheaves and took them home to gloat over. That he could execute such things and that she should be privileged to observe and to gather up after him! … His drawings were more thrilling even than the music of Julian and Charlie. She could play the piano herself quite nicely, but as for drawing, – there was another clear case of the unreliability of the Bible. However much you cried: ‘I can, I can!’ and rushed, full of fai
th, to pencil and paper, nothing whatever happened.
Once she was suddenly emboldened and said out loud the words rehearsed silently for many weeks:
‘Now draw something for me, Roddy.’
Oh, something designed from its conception for your very own, – something which could be labelled (by yourself, since Roddy would certainly refuse) ‘From the artist to Judith Earle,’ with the date: a token, a perpetual memorial of his friendship! …
‘Oh no,’ said Roddy, ‘I can’t.’ He threw down his pencil, instantly bored at the suggestion, smiled and presently wandered off.
The smile took the edge off the sting, but there was an old feeling, an oppression, as she watched him going away. It was no use trying to bring Roddy out of his labyrinthine seclusion with personal advances and pretensions to favouritism. Roddy had a power to wound far beyond his years; he seemed grown up sometimes in his crushingness.
Now and again he was very funny and invented dances on the lawn to make them laugh. His imitation of a Russian ballet-dancer was wonderful. Also he could walk on his hands or do backward somersaults into the water. This was very thrilling and made him highly respected.
Once he and Judith were the two hares in a paper chase. Roddy spied an old umbrella in the hedge and picked it up. It was tattered and gaunt and huge; and there was something friendly about it, – a disreputable reckless jollity. He carried it for a long time, swinging it round and round, and sometimes balancing it on his chin or spearing things with it. At the top of the hill they came to the pond covered with green stuff and a white starry froth of flowers. All around grew flags and forget-me-nots, and the hundred other rare enchanting trivialities of water places.
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