The Elderbrook Brothers

by Gerald Bullet

  Matthew jumped to his feet; the elder brother, whose privilege, symbol of budding manhood, had been poached upon by this cheeky youngster.

  ‘What d’ you want here? Anything wrong at home?’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ said Guy.

  ‘Then who told you to come here? They don’t want kids like you.’

  ‘I told myself,’ said Guy. ‘That’s who told me.’

  He left it at that, saying nothing of the brooding anger, the forlornness, the conflict, and at last the passionate resolve not to be left out of everything just because he was the unwanted middle one. He said nothing of all that, because it was not in the part he meant to play, not in the picture of himself he was willing to exhibit.

  ‘How did you get here?’ Matthew hotly demanded, speaking at random, for the question could hardly advance his cause.

  ‘On my two legs, dear brother,’ said Guy, with a bland smile. He half-glanced at Miss Linnet, inviting her approval.

  ‘On your two legs, eh?’ came the harsh voice of Joe Elderbrook, cruel as a whip. ‘Then on your two legs you shall go back, my boy. And look sharp about it!’

  An order from their father was something no son of Joe Elderbrook had ever been known to ignore. Guy recognized the voice of his doom, yet regretted nothing of his adventure. He had asserted himself, and he had won a compassionate glance from the strange young woman to whom Matthew, he supposed, had been showing off. He was secretly as much fortified, as Matthew was embarrassed, by the presence of Eva Linnet at this quarrel. But for her he might have broken down, might have stormed and blubbered like the unlucky little schoolboy he was. She, by being there, and being a ‘lady’ and a stranger, made the supreme effort of self-control both imperative and worth while.

  ‘All right, Father.’ He turned on his heel. ‘It’s only seven miles,’ he said, over his shoulder.

  Matthew watched his brother’s diminishing figure, and the sight cost him a pang. He would have liked to join Guy on that walk, and make it up and have everything between them as before. Making it up was a simple and oft-recurring ceremony among the three brothers. One of them would say, after a decent interval: ‘I say, shall we make it up?’ And the other: ‘Yes, all right.’ And from that moment all anger would be buried and forgotten. But now, by something he could not fully understand, Matthew was cut off from that comfort. Guy had not been quite himself. He had been like someone consciously playing a part, performing a set task. And this vaguely disturbed Matthew.

  What more insistently disturbed him, however, was that he had put himself wrong, he felt, with Eva Linnet. Taken by surprise he had behaved churlishly to his young brother and so shown himself in a disagreeable light to one whose good opinion had suddenly become important to him.

  He gave a sidelong glance at that heavenly profile. He thought he could read disapproval there. Perhaps even dislike.

  ‘I expect you think we’re a rum family, don’t you, Miss Linnet?’

  She shrugged her elegant little shoulders. She smiled indifferently.

  ‘What’s your brother’s name?’ she asked. ‘He’s a nice little boy.’

  ‘Guy? Oh, he’s all right,’ said Matthew.

  The talk trickled on. The day was golden calm. But the spell was broken. Matthew’s moment was gone.

  § 10

  SUDDENLY, as it seemed, Felix was home for the holidays. Guy and Emily had met him at Lutterthorpe. They saw his small excited face at the carriage window as the train came in, and got to the door just in time to help him out with his tin trunk. In the warmth of embracing him Emily said to herself he’s just the same, just the same. But she lied, and knew it. She knew he was just a little different. Other things and other lives had worked upon him and changed him: the cord was at last broken and her youngest delivered to the world.

  Guy too was aware of a difference. He tried to cast it out with a charmed word.

  ‘Ship’s sinking, Mr Mate!’

  It was a sign between them: ritual beginning of an old familiar game. But Felix’s answer—‘All hands to the boats!’—lacked something of its former conviction, and Guy felt himself defeated. Nor did Felix pursue the theme: he had too much else to say. He talked very fast and almost at the top of his voice, Felix who had always been considered a quiet little boy. His noisiness did not disconcert Emily: she knew it to be his way of dealing with an emotional crisis and only in part a reflection of his new importance. But to Guy it wore a more desolating aspect. He felt that his loss of Felix was confirmed, not ended, by this homecoming.

  ‘We have morning prayers every day,’ said Felix, ‘and roll-call. They call everybody’s name and you have to say Here. If you’re absent or late you get an impot.’

  ‘Do you?’ Guy would not ask what an impot was.

  ‘Hollis got two last term. But Abbott didn’t. Nor did I.’

  ‘Who are they? Just boys?’

  Guy wanted to ask: do you like them better than me? And holding back the question made him feel swollen and red.

  ‘We’re the Three Highwaymen,’ said Felix, innocently dropping salt in the wound. ‘Abbott specially,’ he added after a pause, unconscious of any hiatus. ‘He helps me with my Latin a bit. He’s been doing it longer.’

  ‘Do you have Latin?’ said Guy.

  He felt sad and ashamed. For the moment there was no anger in him. It was not easy, in Felix’s presence, to be angry with this young brother for being at a school where recondite mysteries like Impots and Latin were part of the day’s work. It was easier to do that when he wasn’t there.

  ‘Yes, and French too,’ said Felix. ‘I’m going to swot up my first conjugation during the hols.’

  It was impossible that Felix should not feel his importance a little. But though not every school had ‘hols’—the Upmarden children had to make the best of mere holidays—he was guiltless of consciously exhibiting his new lingo. Guiltless? Well, nearly.

  ‘Have you brought books and things back with you?’ Guy asked.

  ‘Yes, I’ll show you if you like,’ said Felix. ‘Rather a fag, but still. It’s awfully dry sort of stuff, Latin.’

  ‘I expect it is,’ said Guy enviously.

  As the holidays wore on the strangeness wore off, and the old relationship was all but restored when the summer term arrived to cut it short again. It was during this next term, and on a Saturday evening of all times, that Mr Cowlin, on his way home from The Two Shoes at By-End Corner, chanced upon a strange and portentous sight: a boy, under no visible compulsion, reading a book. His astonishment was not diminished when upon coming closer he recognized the boy as Guy Elderbrook. Guy too was taken by surprise. The last person he expected to have peering in at him over the field gate was Mr Cowlin.

  ‘Well, Guy?’ said Mr Cowlin, coming to a halt.

  He had had a whisky or two and was feeling sociable. He was a neighbour as well as the schoolmaster. He believed himself to be not a bad fellow at heart, and not actively disliked by the children, and in this belief he was justified. Not so well founded was the consolatory notion that however little the young wretches learnt, however indifferent they might be to the intellectual fare offered them, he was doing his duty so long as a semblance of outward discipline was maintained. That certain prize pupils should be capable of reciting the Capes of Europe, a list of dates beginning with 1066, sundry tables of weights and measures, and a few of the simpler axioms of Euclid, was gratifying proof that they had mastered geography, history, and mathematics. As for the others, it was enough if they refrained, in class, from eating, conversing, kicking and pinching each other, giggling, wilfully coughing, making rude oral noises, putting out derisive tongues, spilling ink, carrying white mice in their pockets, releasing specimens of the local fauna at inconvenient moments (spiders and beetles from matchboxes, young frogs from caps and dirty handkerchiefs), and too frequently adopting the subterfuge of saying ‘May I leave the room, please?’ That these activities should be kept in check, that every male child should be addressed
by its surname and affix the word ‘sir’ to its answers: this was discipline. Outside school, however, one could unbend. One could, for example, address young Elderbrook as Guy.

  ‘Improving the shining hour?’ said Mr Cowlin.

  Shining the hour was. A beautiful evening, warm and still young. But the question seemed to need no answer, and Guy did not offer one. He made no verbal response at all, but merely grinned, bashfully, and with a hasty movement pushed his book out of sight.

  ‘I can see you have a piece of literature there,’ said Mr Cowlin. ‘Some mighty product of the human intellect, no doubt. A pennyworth of blood and thunder, eh?’ He extended his hand commandingly. ‘Show me.’

  Neither he nor Guy could question his right to pry. It was established by long custom, part of the accepted order of things. Evasion and trickery were possible, and were often practised, but direct disobedience was a thing seldom even thought of.

  The book changed hands.

  ‘Dear me!’ said Mr Cowlin, turning its pages. ‘A Latin primer. So this is how you spend your leisure hours, my young friend?’

  He began, by force of habit, in a spirit of genial sarcasm, but ended in sheer wonderment. The surprise was too much. The rebuke sobered him. It dammed up his flow of facetious pomposities. That a boy in his school should have a desire for learning was a shattering astonishment, and the confession implied by that astonishment might be even more shattering. It did not bear looking at too closely.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Guy. ‘Now and again.’

  Mr Cowlin gave him a long considering look. ‘How far have you got?’

  ‘Not very far,’ Guy admitted uneasily. ‘Only bits here and there,’ he added, understating his achievement.

  ‘Which page?’ Mr Cowlin insisted. ‘Do you know your declensions? Let’s hear the first. Go ahead.’

  That was an easy one. He had learnt the inevitable mensa orally from Felix and had it pat.

  ‘Good,’ said Mr Cowlin. ‘Now second declension.’

  ‘Shall I say puer or dominus, sir?’ Guy was excited and beginning to show off. It had flashed into his mind that old Cowlin might come in useful.

  ‘Please yourself,’ said Cowlin. ‘No, we’ll take it as said. What about verbs? Future indicative of moneo?

  During that brief recital he said to himself: he’s not a fool, he’s teachable. He felt an impulse to help the boy, and equally a desire to impress him. In his mind’s eye he saw his shelf of Latin authors—Virgil, Horace, and the rest—with the dust of years thick upon them.

  ‘I’ve got some books at home that might interest you. What do you say?’ Unconsciously he had dropped his schoolmaster manner and spoke as to an equal.

  ‘What, now, sir?’

  ‘No time like the present.’

  Guy climbed over the gate and joined Mr Cowlin on his walk home. He spent no time in idle wonder at the unexpected turn of events: he was too busy thinking ahead. His vague plans for the future were taking shape, and it now seemed possible that Mr Cowlin—Mr Cowlin of all people!—would have a hand in them.

  Mr Cowlin occupied a small house in Upmarden Lane, opposite The Plough and Gaiters. He lived alone and made his own breakfast every morning, but took his main meals at Mrs Gruntle’s cottage, twenty yards up the road. Mrs Gruntle, the relict of a postman long deceased, had for at least ten years cherished the extraordinary notion that she might one day be persuaded to become Mrs Cowlin; but Cowlin, in whose eyes she was a very ordinary harmless amiable elderly woman and nothing more, remained blessedly unaware of the project. His back windows looked out on a small garden and orchard, which healthily occupied some of his too abundant leisure, and to a wide view of green hills and sky. Mrs Gruntle had never set foot inside his house: the privilege of cleaning for him belonged to a succession of village ‘daily’ girls. He was, in genera], a reserved but not unneighbourly man. He joined, if from a slight distance, in the conversation that went on pretty continuously at The Plough and Gaiters; and if ever he sighed for better company he never sought it.

  He led Guy into a large untidy room, into which the summer evening light struggled with difficulty through one small west window. It was the room of a bachelor and a recluse. The two chairs, as well as the table, were scattered with books; and there were other books dropped on the floor. The warm air stank of upholstery and stale tobacco. On the walls were a few old prints, picked up at auction sales. A first glance might have suggested that the man who lived here was a great reader, but the true inference to be drawn from the sight of so many scattered books was less flattering to their owner. Cowlin’s was an indolent and restless spirit. Almost every volume represented an unfulfilled intention: nowadays he seldom read in the same book for thirty consecutive minutes.

  ‘Here’s Virgil,’ said Mr. Cowlin. ‘Do you know about him? No, of course you don’t: how could you?’

  He began discoursing on Virgil, his life, and the sort of man he was; but broke off to go to the sideboard and mix himself a whisky and soda. Having swallowed one glassful quickly at the sideboard, he poured out another to bring back with him to the hearthrug, where he stood straddled in front of an empty grate, in the attitude of a man warming his hindquarters.

  ‘He wrote,’ said Mr Cowlin, ‘a beautiful thing on farming. You’ll like that, you a farmer’s son.’ Lodging his glass on the mantelpiece he began turning Virgil’s pages: jerkily, with a kind of fury, as though he owed it an obscure grudge. ‘Here you are: Haec super arvorum cultu pecorumque canebam et super arboribus. Thus, or so, I sang of the cultivation, or care, of fields, of cattle, and of trees. That’s what he says. And that’s what he did. Tilling, planting, cattle-rearing, beekeeping. That was before the Christian era began, if you please. Country life doesn’t change much. Devilish long time ago: I was only a child at the time,’ said Mr Cowlin, with a sudden laugh. ‘You stick to it, my boy. Get a good grounding. I’ll see you do. I’ll help you. Then you’ll be able to read this for yourself, eh?’

  Mr Cowlin was excited: by whisky, by the Georgics, by his own expanding benevolence. He felt suddenly that all things were possible; that he was being given a blessed, belated chance to justify his unnecessary existence. Gratitude to the unconscious author of his happiness beamed from his moist eye.

  ‘You see?’ said Mr Cowlin lyrically. ‘Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere terram vertere … Nice stuff, my boy. Nice, practical, beautiful stuff.’

  Guy said ‘Yes, sir!’ and did his best to sound rapturous. He was seeing an entirely new Mr Cowlin, and though but dimly understanding this enthusiasm he saw that it was likely to prove very useful to himself. It was queer, too, to think of things going on much the same all those years ago; but he did not in the least want to read any old book for its own sake. The important thing was to learn Latin, to show them all that he could.

  ‘Get knowledge,’ said Mr Cowlin solemnly, his utterance thickening a little. ‘Get it while you ‘re young, young Elderbrook. Knowledge, the old boy said, is power. Don’t forget that. Don’t f’get it. Knowledge idge power.’

  Guy did not forget it. Knowledge was power. And power meant getting your own way and not playing second fiddle to anyone. Not Felix, not Matthew, not anyone.

  § 11

  The playground was transfigured. The yelling and the snowballing had been prodigious. Young Mr Surrey, the new master, said ‘It’s the sparkle of the snow, old chap: you’ll soon feel better.’ But it wasn’t the sparkle of the snow and Felix didn’t soon feel better. The sickness became a pain, and before morning school was over he was dizzy with it and had to be taken to Matron. Almost the next thing he knew, he was in bed, with three hot water bottles for company. The sparkle of the snow was in his mind still; the phrase itself ran among his thoughts; he wondered, now and again, what was going to happen to him, but did not trouble to ask. There were other boys in the long, green, unfamiliar dormitory. They seemed very far away. Felix did not want them and made no effort to communicate with them: he did not know what he wanted exce
pt his mother, or Faith, or someone from home: anyone from home would have been nice. Meanwhile there was this person called Sister, and presently there was the Doctor. Sister he knew, but only just. She was the one Matron sent you to when you had to have medicine. With her long nose and glazed complexion and severe manner she had seemed on those occasions a forbidding personage, but now she was different, friendly and comforting. She too said the pain would soon be better, and it was, a little, almost at once. Because he submitted without fuss to all her ministrations she said he was a good boy and a clever one. Her approval made him feel safe with her.

  Dr Pearce he did not know at all. His small ailments hitherto had never carried him as far as the school doctor, who but for his neat black coat and starched linen would have looked more like a retired prizefighter. He had a bald round head and small pig-eyes. To the irreverent children he was known, in fact, as Piggy Pearce. The only hair on his face was a pair of ferocious black eyebrows which—so the absurd story ran—he affixed to himself every Monday morning with glue. Luckily he was a good doctor, or good enough. His odd appearance did not repel Felix: it only added another touch of strangeness to his already strange situation. After examining the patient, a process which involved much tapping and prodding and asking of questions, Dr Pearce said ‘M’yes … I see’ in a tone of thoughtful satisfaction, picked up his little black bag, and departed. At his next visit he was more communicative. Sister was in attendance as usual, smiling benignly. Their kindly conspiratorial air was designed to suggest that Felix was in for a great treat. The boy was not deceived, but he did not care and was not frightened. Thinking things over in the night he had decided that he was probably going to die, but the thought was a largely empty one, the words had no meaning, and he still wanted nothing except his mother and to be rid of pain: in his fancy the two things went together. And, as if they could read his thoughts, it was just that that Dr Pearce and Sister were now promising him.