More loud laughter. “Oh, we appear to you to be birds of rapid passage, do we? Well, it might easily be, my son! I like your grit and determination anyway, and sense of duty. If ever you find yourself in Cape Town, come and see me. Capricorn Importers Limited. Remember that word, Capricorn. Think of goats eating corn, my son. D’you like chocolate?”
The boy was given a large packet, and touching his cap, hurried off down the road.
H’m, not at all a bad sort of fellow, thought Richard, as leaving the window, he went to the bathroom, lest it be filling beyond his usual nine inches. He could not bear the idea of wasting water, or anything else. Besides, it was a householder’s duty to conserve water in a drought.
*
During tea, animated by the idea of joining the Rifle Club, Richard said to Phillip, “Would you care to come for a ride with me tonight, old chap? We can go as far as the Seven Fields together, then you can come home by yourself, to do your homework. The exercise will do you good. I am going to watch the firing on the range there.”
“No thank you Father.”
“Oh, do go with your Father,” said Hetty. “It would be such a nice ride for you.”
“There’s no need to persuade him, Hetty. A volunteer is worth a dozen press-men. Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be off.” He rose from the table.
“Go on, go when you’re asked!” whispered Hetty to the boy, as soon as Richard was out of the room.
“The boy would much prefer to be with his own sort,” called out Richard, as he lifted his Sunbeam from its place by the wall in the lavatory. “Well Hetty, don’t expect me back much before dimmit-light. I want to make the most of the long evenings.”
*
As soon as Father had left the house, Phillip went next door by the back way. He found Kimberley sitting at the kitchen table with the cook, and Winnie, the daily girl who went home to Randiswell at night. It was a surprise to hear Kimberley speak English like an ordinary boy, and not like in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
“What does ‘futsack’ mean?” Phillip asked him. “Is it a very rude expression?”
“It means ‘Go away’, baas,” replied the black boy, solemnly.
“Like getting the sack, sort of, eh?”
“Yes, baas.”
Phillip liked being called ‘Baas’. He felt kindly towards Kimberley as he went into the front room.
“Hullo! hullo!” All the faces looked at him. “Come and sit beside me, Phillip,” said Gran’pa. Tom Turney made a place beside his chair.
“Draw up the stool, that’s right, m’boy, only don’t let the cat hook your food off your plate.” He carved some ham, and put it on Phillip’s plate. “Have a glass of wine and water with it, it will put colour into your cheeks, m’boy.”
Phillip had a helping of pickled pears as well. It was a party! Every moment he liked the newcomers more and more. They were all so merry and bright, particularly Uncle Charley, whose gold teeth were to be seen again and again as he laughed, telling Uncle Hugh about the voyage, and life in Cape Town since the war.
“By God, Charley,” said Uncle Hugh, as he took the cigar offered him at the end of the meal. “By God, old man, I can’t tell you how good it is to hear the laughter of Jove in the Benighted Swamp.” He bit the end of the cigar with his teeth.
“Here, wait a moment m’boy,” said Gran’pa. “Don’t spoil a good cigar!”
But Uncle Hugh had already twisted off the end, before Gran’pa could unfasten the cutter from his watch-chain.
“Our respectable suburbanites must be thinking in their top flats in Charlotte Road that it was Stentor himself shaking the tiles off Mr. Antill’s jerry-built roofs!” went on Uncle Hugh. “The churchwardens of St. Cyprian’s too, must be damned glad that ‘the tower is not yet built’ for otherwise the bricks would have come tumbling about their ears.”
Uncle Hugh lit the cigar, and sucked hard. The children laughed at his comical face as he took it from his mouth and stared at it.
“What cabbage family turned this offspring out to fend for itself, Charley?”
Phillip saw Grannie give a quick look in the direction of Gran’pa. He remembered that Gran’pa had kicked Charley out, long ago.
Uncle Hugh took another pull; and then addressing Charley, with a serious, perturbed air, he said, “By God, brother, whence did you get this specimen of mummified matter? What old dorp produced it?”
Phillip thought this was very funny. He laughed. Cousin Tommy was laughing, too, and exchanging glances with Uncle Charley.
“You should not take the name of the Almighty in vain, dear,” said Grannie, who, with lace cap on hair and shawl over shoulders was sitting at the other end of the table, sipping her gruel. “Think of the dear children. If Phillip repeats what he hears——”
The children were watching their uncle sucking at the black cigar.
“Here, use the spike,” said Gran’pa, unfastening his gold cigar cutter from his watch-chain. “Pass it down, will ye?”
“No no, sir, do not let me contaminate Treyer and Freyburg’s best with this dried Afrikaner biltong.” Uncle Hugh coughed. “What in the name of all that’s mysterious is the brand, Charley? The Black Death, or the Would-be-Widow’s Friend? How did you acquire it, from some ju-ju rite, some voodoo how-do?” He rolled it in his fingers, near his ear. “Do I hear it hissing? Can it be that it is full of potential lightning, and the foul vapours of the witch Sycorax? Is it by-blow of some November night, the fifth to be exact? Is this the weed that turned the hair of Dingaan grey, and caused Allan Quatermain to prophesy an eclipse of the moon?”
Phillip thought that Uncle Hugh was awfully funny. He had stuck the cigar on a fork, and held it out over the table, far away from his nose. “Phew! I am back in the old picket lines with a vengeance!”
“Don’t spoil a good cigar,” repeated Gran’pa.
“Surely the language of Euphues, sir, is inapplicable to this specimen of Terminus Dessicatus Elephantibus! It should join those other relics of tropical travel on the walls of the Savage Club.”
Then, as Uncle Hugh was pretending that the cigar on his fork was an airship, sailing through the sky with smoke behind it, it suddenly went off with a loud bang! In the air was the smell of a Chinese cracker. It was a wonderful joke! Uncle Charley laughed loudest of all. Gran’pa made little noises, like his usual he-he-he; but Phillip saw that Gran’ma only smiled. He saw that she was clutching the arms of her chair. Grannie did not look as though she had really enjoyed the joke. He remembered Mother saying that Grannie must be careful of her heart; and then he thought no more about it, but searched with cousin Tom for any smouldering pieces on the carpet. Oh, it was tremendous fun now that Uncle Charley had come home!
Uncle Charley was an awfully nice man. Later, Tommy told him that he had given the cab runner five shillings, as he had a wife and family. Phillip was glad, for two reasons. It showed that Uncle Charley was very rich; and the runner had obviously been, like Cranmer’s people, very poor.
Chapter 22
THE WHIRLIGIG
AFTER what he considered to be a highly satisfactory visit to the Seven Fields rifle range people, Richard went on to the Fish Ponds, and beyond. Cycling along the ridge of the North Downs, he dismounted at a point where, looking to the north-north-west, he could see a cluster of glints in the blue misty horizon. It pleased him to think that the sun at that moment was making an obtuse angle between itself at one point, the distant Sydenham ridge at a second, and himself among the waving barley fields completing the triangle. It was a very wide angle, for the reflected glints, shimmering in the ascending heat, were visibly shifting and diminishing almost momentarily as the sun moved to the west.
The sun was swinging down towards the unseen ocean: even so, the great mass of its rolling body, every flame of its hydrogen fires brilliant upon the great curved extent, was such that it would take an appreciable time to pass any given point in the southern glass front of the Crystal Palace. What was the speed of light,
ninety thousand odd miles per second? And what was the diameter, or rather half the circumference, of the sun? Oh dash it all, he had enough of figures during the day! There it was, rolling and flaming along, its power maintaining the life of the earth, and for a few moments he, the sun, and Paxton, the designer of the Crystal Palace, as well as those associated with him and indeed the entire project—glaziers, foundrymen (for the framework was iron) and even the window-cleaners (if they still cleaned the glass)—for a few moments he and the sun and the originators and begetters of the vast glass building were in conjunction.
It was an exalting thought, a comforting thought. All the life of the planet was balanced and in relation to itself, physical and otherwise. Why, his own Sunbeam bicycle illustrated that fact! The balls in their cones, which bore the hubs which held the spokes which secured the rims that held the tyres—the balls were like stars in a system, revolving round one another. The Sunbeam had been made at Wolverhampton, the earth had been made—where? In far blue space, in the infinite universe; and the earth was but a satellite of one of the smallest ageing stars, according to an article by H. G. Wells in The Daily Trident. The sun was a dwarf-yellow star; it was burning itself out; a few more trillion years, and the earth would be in darkness, frozen like the moon. And even as he stood there, near a disused windmill half of whose sails had rotted and fallen, Richard told himself that he was in process of observing part of the declining incandescence, as demonstrated in the rapid diminishment of the sun’s rays upon the Crystal Palace.
He watched the last reflection fading away. Ah well, a few moments nearer death!
Deprived of that impersonal gleam, his thoughts wandered into the state of his personal dilemma; he thought of the increase in the number of the Turneys next door in terms of his own violated privacy, and sighed. If only he had seized his opportunity years ago, to escape to Australia! He should have taken his chance when Mr. Turney had insulted him, and ordered him out of the house. By now he might have been a fruit farmer, with his own copyhold—instead of a failure, an office hack in the City, unwanted by both wife and children in his own home.
Well, if Phillip was wise, he would emigrate when he left school.
The Crystal Palace was now a faint grey chrysalis in the hazy distance. Richard returned to the roadway, and took up his cycle. With one foot on the step, he pushed off with the other, mounted the saddle, found the pedals. He had never thrown a leg over the saddle, as other men did, including Mr. Mundy the vicar, now in his sixty-fifth year—twenty years the senior of Richard Maddison.
When Richard got home that evening he found a woeful Phillip, with tear-stained face, standing in his nightshirt in the kitchen—so unusual a sight (not the tears, but the nightshirt downstairs) that at once he asked what was the matter. On being told, he said “Oh!” and looked judicially at his son.
“Now you will know, old chap, what it feels like to have your things spoiled. One lives and learns by experience!”
What had happened was that Phillip, bubbling over with his new friendship with young Tommy Turney, had shown him all his treasures, including the wooden custard-powder box, inlaid with sawdust, on which lay the blown eggshells of linnet and tomtit, robin and hedge sparrow, wagtail, wren, jay, and, best of all, the cuckoo. The box was in the corner cupboard of his room, with his other toys and possessions.
“I say, you must meet my friend Desmond when he comes home from school, Tommy old boy! We’ll have a wonderful time together! I’ll take you in my woods, and we’ll fish in the ponds on Reynard’s Common! It will be wonderful! Look, I’ll show you my eggs, if you promise not to touch them.”
Phillip, rattling on nineteen to the dozen, as Hetty sometimes said, gave Tommy the history of each specimen; and Tommy listened, fascinated.
The boys were to have a bath before bed. Tommy, the junior, had his first; then it was Phillip’s turn. When he returned to the bedroom, Tommy was apparently asleep in the wooden folding bed that lay beside his own. Phillip thought he would take another look at his birds’ eggs, of which he knew every blotch, spot, hair-line, tint, speckle, and texture of shell—the cuckoo’s egg, for example, being ever so much smaller than such a large bird would suggest; the shell was considerably thicker than any other egg of its size; the yoke had seemed more redly concentrated when he had blown it, over a basin of water, with a glass blow-pipe at the neat round hole drilled in the side.
Putting the wooden box on his counterpane, Phillip opened it. He stared. The eggs were gone.
He awakened Tommy. He accused Tommy of having taken them. Tommy’s sheepish denials made Phillip sharper. In a tone of voice derived from his father, he demanded to know, where were his eggs? Pulling Tommy out of bed, he threatened to inform the police unless he “produced” the eggs. Then, looking under Tommy’s pillow, he found them. Every one was crushed.
“Well,” remarked Richard, a couple of hours later, from his armchair in the sitting room, “this will at least teach your best boy, Hetty, to appreciate what it feels like to have his things taken and spoiled by another! I had some butterflies once, you know; and some good chisels, and other tools. It seems to be a clear case of the whirligig of Time, doesn’t it? The law of meum et tuum works both ways, as now he has found out, to his sorrow.”
Richard spoke mildly; things were evened up a bit better now, he felt.
*
There was a lot of noise nowadays from next door, particularly in the morning. It started fairly early. Phillip recognised the voice of Uncle Charley singing behind the opposite bathroom window, down the glass of which steam ran in streams. From the adjoining bedroom Aunt Flo sang, too, in her high tremulant voice. She had been trained for the concert platform, said Mother, and marriage to Uncle Charley at the age of sixteen had interrupted a very promising career.
“A woman has to give up everything for her children, you see, dear, unless she can afford a retinue of servants.” Hetty went on to explain that, less than a year after Aunt’s marriage her little girl, Petal, had come along; and now Petal was to have singing lessons, in order to achieve what Aunt Flo had missed through marriage. Petal’s voice added to the nest of singing birds, as Father called it at breakfast. Father said also that the starling on the chimney-pot—a new one had taken the place of the bird shot by Phillip—would henceforward be adding to its repertory the Bride of Lammermuir, La Traviata, Our Miss Gibbs, Floradora, Cherry Ripe and the Tune the Old Tom Cat Died of.
“Father used to sing a song in his tub once, Uncle Hugh. It was ‘The Arab’s Farewell to his Steed’. He always sang that as the bath-water was running in.”
“Ah,” said Uncle Hugh, “I expect that particular nag bolted as soon as the Old Man came to live next door, my son.”
“Why, Uncle Hugh?”
“Perhaps the shock caused him to sing the song as the bath-water was running out, and so the nag went down the drain.”
Phillip was puzzled by this reply; but Uncle Hugh would not explain. He never did explain anything; but looked tired when he was asked.
It was not always singing that came from next door in the morning. The Charles Turneys had the bedroom next to Richard’s; and one morning, quietly, he shut his window to keep out the loud and even strident noises of bickering, which his nervous nature found unbearable. At breakfast Hetty said they would settle down in time.
“Everything is new to them, Dickie. I think it best to pretend not to notice anything too much at first.”
Did he connect her remark with “something nearer home”? she wondered. She had not intended any implication. Richard was silent.
After a couple of nights it was discovered that there was room for Tommy in Gran’pa’s house, after all. So Tommy moved into the box room, nearly opposite Phillip’s room. Kimberley, the black boy, continued to spend the night in the broom cupboard under Gran’pa’s stairs.
Petal was in the room immediately opposite Phillip’s. About this fact he had already made a discovery as fascinating as it was secret: if he went
to bed without a light, and kept quiet, he could lie on the end of his bed and watch through a space of a couple of inches, under the sash of his open window, what happened when Petal came up to bed.
There were lace curtains over Petal’s bedroom window, and venetian blinds; but for some reason the blinds stopped about a foot short when let down. Peering under his sash, Phillip could watch Petal, through the lace curtains, brushing her hair, as she sat on the bed in her camisole. Petal had long black hair. On hot nights she sat on a stool before the looking glass with only her vest on, so that he could see her shape above the waist. And one wonderful night she brushed her hair after taking off her vest, and he saw her breasts, pink, soft, and alluring—a sight that filled him with longing. Every night he kept vigil on his bed, to watch Petal brush her hair, to hear her singing softly her favourite song, “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal”, and if he were lucky, to see glimpses of her naked body.
Part of the excitement he felt was caused by knowing that it was what Father would call forbidden fruit. If Father caught him playing peeping Tom, he would be very angry, call him a dirty little beast, and probably thrash him, as he had once long ago, when he had asked Mavis to let him see her body under the front-room table. So Phillip listened carefully while he watched in the darkness, ready at a slippered tread on the stairs to turn round and dive under the sheets, and pretend to be asleep.
Petal by day was not Petal by night. By day she was ordinary; by night she was like a lovely dream, which he gazed upon and felt only holy thoughts, which were sad, too, for some reason. Petal by night was of a world which he would never, never be able to enter. Helena Rolls lived in that world, and so did the migrant birds, who had to make such perilous journeys, in which many died, and all for the sake of springtime in England.
Chapter 23
DOCTOR BRIGHTON
Young Phillip Maddison Page 33
