Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  17 Rawley Square,

  Kemp Town, Brighton.

  MY DEAR MRS. LEMON,

  I do not feel that I know you well enough to call you by the name my husband has always used when he has spoken to me of you, but I do want you to know that I am ever so grateful for your great kindness in looking after my little children during my recent illness. Dickie told me that Phillip looked as though he were having the time of his life, the country air must suit him, after the fogs and cold winds we have had in the late winter.

  Here it is very nice by the sea, the weather has been perfect, men having been fishing day after day on the Chain Pier and Mamma and I have had several rides on Volks’ electric railway along the front.

  I do hope the children have behaved themselves and given no trouble whatsoever. It is so very very kind of you, and Isabelle, to have had them to visit you, and next Thursday if all goes well I hope to come by an early train, arriving at Epsom some time in the a.m., and bring them home again. I am now completely restored to health, the period of quarantine being over before I came here with Mamma.

  With kind regards, and renewed thanks for all you have done,

  I remain,

  Yours very truly,

  HENRIETTA MADDISON.

  “I expect,” said Victoria, in the garden on the Thursday morning, “Hetty did not have a time-table to hand, for she has not said what time her train will arrive. Otherwise I could have sent down word to the station fly to bring her here.”

  “Perhaps she would rather find her own way, and walk up,” said Beatrice.

  Victoria did not reply at once. Her idée fixe was bothering her; she was thinking of her brother, and what a pity it was. But then, she told herself, everyone had to make his or her own life.

  “Anyway, I expect she will be here sometime. I have arranged for a cold luncheon. I hope she can eat salmon, there’s a ham, and a tongue, as well. I thought it would be nice to have a simple meal out here. What do you think, Hilary?”

  “Oh yes, it is a very pleasant place, Viccy.”

  The three were sitting in the arbour, an affair of rustic poles and palings, overgrown with rambler roses and honeysuckle. It was built in the Black Forest style. It occupied one flank of the lawn, which was also a tennis-court. Hilary was lounging in the hammock. He had brought three hammocks home from the tropics, one for Dickie, another for George, and the third for himself.

  Bee and Viccy were sitting on cushions laid under the rustic seat. It was a pleasant retreat, half in sun and half in shade. A goldfinch had a nest in an adjacent apple tree. The twitterings of the fledglings was audible every few minutes, when the parent birds flew, quite fearlessly, to their young. Victoria was fond of goldfinches, and could not bear to see them or any wild birds, in cages.

  They were talking about the theatre. Recently Hilary and Bee had been together in London, and had seen several shows, including Messenger Boy and Floradora at the Lyric. Victoria listened to their conversation, while wondering if Bee would be able to settle down with Hilary, after the excitement of her life on the stage. And why had she, suddenly, married a man so much older than herself, and a woolmaster from Bradford, of all things? He had been a worthy man, in his way, but he had been nearly thirty years her senior. Bee could have married almost anyone she had liked: then why John Murgatroyd? Could it have been for his money, or because her own father had deserted his family when Bee was only three years old, and so had lacked all her life a father’s affection?

  Victoria’s fingers were busy at her crochet-work, as she half-listened to the twitter of the goldfinches and the inconsequential talk of Bee. She was now speaking about a friend of hers who had been the centre of a ridiculous case about a year previously, when the landlady of a public house, or an hotel, appropriately named “The Hautboy”, had had the sense to refuse refreshment to that friend of Bee’s, who certainly should have known better, for appearing in what she had the effrontery to call “rational cycling dress”. It had been quite a cause célèbre, and George’s firm had briefed counsel. She had told George at the time that no action for damages could possibly succeed, and events had proved her right. Lady Harberton had lost the case. Victoria recalled the unhappy argument with George, after the verdict, George declaring that it was bad law, that the Judge had misdirected the Jury. How could he have been so obdurate as to miss the obvious rightness of the verdict?

  What Victoria had deplored was the lack of responsibility shown to society by one who should have known better. A woman, particularly a titled woman, should set the best example to others, in all things. She must uphold the traditions of her class, not debase them. Lady Harberton had revealed her lack of the sense of responsibility in other ways. She had started what she called A Sanitary Congress, and had demanded that women should all wear short skirts!

  George had declared that it was a hoax, but she had not believed it. It was a craving for sensationalism in a thoroughly vulgar age! The idiotic song people were singing, it rang through her head at times, and now Phillip had got hold of it, through Jessie, she supposed—a perfectly absurd little jingle, Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do … stylish marriage … can’t afford a carriage … only a bicycle made for two!

  How splendid was the spirit of the old Queen, by contrast! Victoria recalled the remark the Queen had made during the last Christmas, at the time of the black news after the lost battles in South Africa—No one is depressed in this House. We are not interested in the possibility of defeat. But at the same time it really had been an eye-opener to read that, of the first hundred thousand recruits for the new army, two thirds had been pronounced to be unfit. Now that was something that did need rectification!

  “What do you think, Viccy? Shall I, or shall I not?”

  “I am afraid I was day dreaming, Hilary——”

  “I was asking Bee if she would like me to buy a self-propelled carriage.”

  “A self-propelled carriage? You’re not serious, surely, Hilary?”

  “Why not? We have self-propelled ships, so why not such vehicles on the road?”

  “But if they are not stopped, they will spoil the countryside, Hilary! Look at the dust they kick up, apart from the noise! Do you like the beastly things, Bee?” she asked, expecting to be supported.

  “I think they are great fun, Viccy! Four of us had a wonderful run down to Henley last year. I nearly eloped with the driver, only he, dear boy, was already bespoke by Rosie Shoon.”

  “Rosie Shoon?”

  “A very good friend of mine, at the Gaiety.”

  “Oh.”

  “And who was the driver. Come on, tell us,” said Hilary.

  “A Cornet of Horse named Footeweke.”

  “The Marquis of Footeweke? So that’s the sort of gal you are, is it? ‘Stage-door Johnnies.’ I thought you’d given up your fast living!”

  “Well, you may as well know the sort of person you’re marrying! Anyway, I was the chaperon, you see. J. M. was alive and kicking then, and he made no objections.”

  Victoria thought that this was hardly the way to refer to one’s late husband, even if he had been a woolmaster; but she said nothing.

  “And did you get so far as Henley?” asked Hilary. “I’m interested in the internal-combustion engine. So is my chief, Robert MacKarness.”

  “But they make such a foul noise, and kick up such a dust!”

  “The dust will abate quite a lot, Viccy, now that there’s a law passed saying that only smooth tyres may be used.”

  “Well, I cannot say I approve the idea, anyway! You asked my opinion, and there it is.”

  Victoria felt that the two together, Hilary and Bee, were, in a way, in league against her. Beatrice realised this and said, “You must see Floradora, Viccy! I am sure it would delight you. We must take her to a matinee, Hilary.” Beatrice sang softly,

  O my Dolores,

  Queen of the Western Sea,

  and then hearing, during a pause, a movement on her right hand—Victoria was on her lef
t—she glanced slowly sideways and saw, through a gap in the light green leaves of the rose briars, a little face watching her.

  It vanished. She smiled to herself, but said nothing. The watch hanging on her bodice by its golden bow told that it was eleven o’clock, the boy’s bedtime; he would be so excited that his mother was coming, that enforced rest would do more harm than good. She thought of her own two little tots, at home in Tenterden in Kent, in the care of their nannie, and her mother. She was taking Hilary there to see Mamma shortly. At the end of her year of (official) mourning they were to be married.

  There was the ring of a bell in the house. Beatrice saw, through the gap in the pergola, the boy running tiptoe over the lawn towards a clump of snowberry bushes.

  “I wonder if that can be Henrietta?” said Victoria, getting up, and going towards the firench windows. Left with Hilary, Beatrice said:

  “I wonder what she’s like, darling?”

  “We’ll soon see, won’t we? I don’t suppose my brother Dick had any reason for hiding her. I’m just going upstairs, Honey Bee; I’ll be down again in a minute.” And kissing Honey Bee, Hilary went into the house by another way.

  Left alone, Beatrice arranged the shoulder frills of her black silk muslin blouse. She was entirely self-assured in what she called to herself her war-paint. Her ensemble had been carefully chosen. Yoke and neck-band were of black silk net, transparent to the top of her collar bones; below was finely pleated muslin, crossed by bands of black velvet sewn with sequins, a black silk stomacher for her twenty-one-inch waist, and a velvet hip-band lying close upon her black silk skirt. Her figure had hardly suffered from child-bearing; and on seeing her clad in this Parisian creation by Worth et Cie of New Bond Street, Hilary had risen, and so had come to the gaff. Thus Beatrice thought of it, lightly within herself.

  Hilary, self-assured, and with a fine conceit of himself, had seen it another way: that his own splendid life could be made finally perfect by having the Honey Bee always to return to, in a home of his own. Were they not, in everyway, and particularly in the basic way from which life flowed, perfectly matched? So, almost casually, these two experienced people had come mutually to the idea of marriage.

  Beatrice’s hat had been chosen to set off her fair hair and blue eyes. It was of black scalloped straw, with a cluster of small black aigrettes rising from a jet paste buckle on the crown of the hat. It was a hat smaller than the current fashion, an affair of chic and lightness of heart. From the brim in front hung a fine-gauze veil, which when tied under her chin added lure and mystery to her oval face, which had a kind of glow about it, a softness due to washing only in cow’s milk, she believed. Beatrice also liked to believe that the colour of her eyes was of that uncommon china-blue tint which had characterised the great courtesans of history. She regretted only one thing about her person: that her hair was not raven-black, but of a commonplace honey-paleness. To be sure, it was soft as silk—and since it pleased the men she liked, it did not worry her unduly.

  “After all, life is short,” said Beatrice to herself, as she got up to shake out her fine feathers, “and if one has got to be sad, one may as well be sad with a certain gaiety.” And in this mood, carrying her parasol, she walked to the clump of snowberry bushes where Phillip had hidden himself in sudden agitated inability to face his mother.

  “Phillip,” she said, “your Mummy has come.”

  There was no answer.

  Beatrice parted the bushes, and saw him sitting there, unmoving. She thought to herself, Stage fright!

  “Come on, darling, Mummy will be simply longing to see her little boy again.”

  “No, no,” he said, “I do not want to see her.”

  From the house, from a bedroom with all the windows open, could be heard the joyful cries of Mavis.

  “There, you see, my pet? Let’s go together and say ‘How d’you do’, shall we?”

  Phillip crawled further into the bushes. Beatrice thought she understood his feeling, that it would be best to leave him alone. Poor little fellow, he had missed her so much, and now his feelings were carrying him in the opposite direction.

  “I know, you’re an Indian! You’re going to give Mummy a surprise! My little boy hides, too, when I go home, at first.” She went back to the arbour, feeling within herself some of the mixed emotions of the boy.

  Hetty, too, was experiencing mixed feelings. She had prepared herself for the visit to her younger sister-in-law with some trepidation. She had a feeling that her husband’s relations did not approve of her. Sarah had understood her apprehension, and to help dispel it she had made Hetty a present of a new frock from Peter Robinson’s in Oxford Street, which had been altered by a “little woman” in Randiswell.

  As soon as Beatrice saw Hetty, coming with Victoria through the open french windows, she liked her. She understood her nervousness. Immediately she sought to put her at ease.

  “My dear, what a beautiful frock you are wearing! Oh, where did you find such a treasure? And how are you? May I call you Hetty? I have heard so much about you, I feel I know you as an old friend.” Impulsively she kissed the smiling, child-like face before her, moved by the innocence and candour of the countenance.

  Hetty’s frock was of silk taffeta in black and white stripes, with a bow at the throat, tucks on the shoulders, black lace on the bodice, braid on the skirt, a frill around the hem. White lace on her cuffs half concealed her small slim hands, one of which held the skirt up just above her ankles, exposing the frill of a petticoat, and glacé kid slippers with beads on the pointed toes, flat heels, and one-button strap. She was a picture! The bodice was boned, seamed, tucked, darted, and built up to give a high, full bustline, accentuating her small waist without the use of corsets. A sweet child-mother, with Mavis holding her other hand, determined not to lose her again. She would melt a heart of stone, thought Beatrice—and Victoria could see in her only a misfortune for her brother!

  “My dear, you look the picture of health and happiness!”

  “Oh yes!” said Hetty, with her gay little laugh. “Doctor Brighton! The sea breezes were so health-giving.”

  “Where is Phillip?” enquired Victoria. “Surely he cannot have run away again?”

  “Oh, I do hope Sonny has not been giving any trouble?”

  “Oh no, of course not, Hetty. He is a bit of a mixture, all the same, you know!” with a smile. “A pickle, I should call him.”

  “Oh dear,” said Hetty, not quite knowing how to take this.

  “The spirit of adventure is strong in him, the pet!” exclaimed Beatrice. “Have you told Hetty, Viccy, how he went to the Derby, all by himself, except for an old dog living down the road, belonging to ‘Mr. Lady Catt Sir Alfred’, as he calls our worthy ex-Lord Mayor of Birmingham?”

  Seeing Hetty’s face, she took her arm, and giving forth all her charm, said smilingly, “Phillip has quite won our hearts, the dearest little pet! I would steal him if I could! I am sure he is most intelligent. What eyes he has, full of what the French call sensibilité.”

  “Where can he have got to?” said Victoria. “He cannot be far away.”

  When they discovered Phillip concealed in the snowberry bushes, it looked as though Beatrice’s remark about wanting to steal him had already suggested a fact. He refused to come out, after repeated cajolery on the part of his aunts, and was eventually left to himself.

  Hilary joined them in the arbour, where Mavis sat beside Hetty, clinging to her mother’s skirt. While they were talking there, the boy appeared in the opening, a woeful look upon his face. When Hetty said, holding out her arms, “Aren’t you coming to me, Sonny?” he turned and ran away.

  “We’re not taking enough notice of him,” laughed Hilary.

  “I should have thought we were taking too much notice of him,” remarked Victoria.

  “Perhaps he will settle down if we leave him alone,” said Hetty.

  “He’s a naughty boy, isn’t he, Mummy? He bited the apples.” At Mavis’s unexpected statement,
Victoria cried, while a faint pink came upon her cheeks. “So that’s who it was! And you were punished for it! Oh, you poor little girl!”

  Explanations followed. Hilary chuckled. Hetty felt upset, wanting to explain that she was sure Sonny had not known what he was doing; she had never known him to do that sort of thing before.

  “Small boys are little devils, you know, they grow out of it,” said Hilary, and Beatrice gave him a grateful glance.

  Phillip refused to leave the snowberry bushes. In the end Hilary had to lug him, protesting and weeping, to the arbour. Phillip refused to go near his mother, pulling against his uncle’s hand and finally sitting down. Hilary dragged him before Hetty.

  “He needs a strong hand,” he declared, slightly out of breath. “He’s remarkably strong, despite his skinny appearance.”

  Beatrice noticed that Hetty had gone pale. Poor little mother, how sensitive she was! Why could not they leave the boy alone? She felt a momentary hardness against Hilary, and had to resist an impulse to give him a kick. As for Victoria, that woman was cold as a fish.

  At this point a maid came out, bearing a silver tray with glasses, a bowl of cracked Wenham ice, and a jug of lemon squash.

  “I think we’ll have it in the hall, shall we? It’s cooler indoors,” said Victoria, and the maid, with a bob, took the tray back again into the house.

  They got up, and Beatrice, shaking her skirt with her black gloved hand, said that she would speak to Phillip and follow them into the house.

  “First nights are always the most difficult.” She smiled at Hetty, who gave her such a sad little glance of gratitude that Beatrice felt momentarily near to tears.

  A couple of minutes later she was leading by the hand across the lawn a docile small boy, green marks on his white sailor suit, his tear-stained face set with an expression of desperate acquiescence. They sat down together in the arbour.