The Elderbrook Brothers

by Gerald Bullet

  ‘See here,’ said the Doctor, ‘I’ve got some scent on my handkerchief. If you’re a good boy, Felix, I’ll give you a sniff of it, see? And I’ll tell you what: your mummy’s coming to see you. This very day, if you’re a good boy.’

  Felix did not at all like the scent on Dr Pearce’s handkerchief, but before he could say so the doctor had vanished and the sparkle of the snow changed to golden flowers in a green field. Felix was not at all surprised to find himself in this field, which nearly but not quite reminded him of something he had known in another life or another dream. He knew he was in a dream, but that knowledge did not in the least diminish its reality: he neither remembered what had happened before nor wondered what was to come, even though a kind of serene expectancy, a sense of looking for something or someone, kept him gently moving on. It seemed that only one thing was wanting to make this place the heaven it so nearly was; and in the moment of so thinking the want was fulfilled and forgotten, for now there was a stream winding its way through the meadow, and Felix, knee-deep in grass, was bending over the live, clear, magnifying water, enjoying the shapes and varying browns of the pebbles below, seeing without intrusion all the secrets of that lovely water-world. He felt, without handling them, the hard cool shining smoothness of those pebbles, enamelled in their everlasting wash; his ductile consciousness darted with silver fishes in and out of hidden crannies, to and from the shadow of rocky shelters and floating weed; seeing a worm, embedded and at ease, he knew the luxury of mud. Above him spread the green boughs of a willow, filled with flirting fluttering life, and as soon as he remembered the birds they began singing. Then he became suddenly afraid, began saying to himself, with desperate self-reassurance, what a good job it was that Jerry Cockle wasn’t with him; and at once, prompt to his cue, the destroyer appeared, Jerry Cockle himself. Big bland eyes, dark tousled head, lithe young body full of animal spirits, there he was, the other side of the stream, delighted to have found his friend Felix again. You couldn’t help liking Jerry: that was just the trouble. Because you liked him, because there was a sort of love between you, you could do nothing but hate him when he did the things he did in his crazy, cruel moods. Felix could never decide whether there was something left out of Jerry’s make-up or something devilish put into it. Birds, rabbits, squirrels, field-mice, he was insatiably curious about them, irresistibly attracted, but as a cat is curious, as a cat is attracted. And now, at a second glance, Felix saw him in his true shape: sleek, sinuous, furry, crouching to spring. To frighten the birds into safety, to warn the fishes, to put all the world of creatures on their guard, Felix flung up his arms and shouted ‘Shoo!’ But his voice cracked, he was left impotently gasping and wheezing, and the cat, looming larger across the stream, seemed unperturbed. How he wished that the heavens would open and rain fire on this enemy! But the first drop, suddenly splashing on his open hand, proved to be not fire but blood; and now the sky was red with vengeance, and thunder came drumming from the ends of the earth and rose to a crackling climax. It sounded like the whistling of a train emerging from a tunnel, and when the train came into the station Felix knew that his mother was somewhere hidden in it, and he ran up the platform looking into every carriage, but he couldn’t find her and the train began moving away faster and faster and he couldn’t find her and he called out and the train wouldn’t stop and he ran after the train into a wood full of shadows and moonlight and the sparkle of the snow. All night he ran and all next day, no longer knowing what he was looking for. All day and all night till after many days he reached the very edge of the world. There he stopped dead, on the brink of infinite emptiness, but the edge of the world came to meet him, the ground under his feet was a moving disk that grew smaller and smaller till at last it was as small and smooth as a sixpenny piece, a spinning coin upon which, with a vast grey nothing around and above and below him, he struggled to keep his balance. A long agonized moment … and he pitched forward into the void.

  But someone was holding him. ‘Had a nice sleep, darling?’ His mother was with him. He was propped up in bed. It hurt: not the same, but badly.

  ‘No, don’t try to move,’ she said.

  ‘I want to lie down, Mummy. I’m so sleepy.’

  ‘Try to sleep like that, darling. We’ll take care of you.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he murmured fretfully. And was asleep again.

  The next time he woke they had a little conversation, with Sister in watchful benevolent attendance. He found, to his great surprise and satisfaction, that he had had an operation and was now a hero. He felt proud and important, as well as horribly sick. Being sick so often was itself a matter for some pride. He never cried, or hardly ever. He always tried not to let them see him crying, and with such success that he was voted the very best patient they had ever had. He was brave and docile and they treated him like a king.

  He had Mummy for three days. Then she went back to look after poor Father, and Faith took her place at his bedside.

  ‘Where do you sleep, Faith?’ he asked her. ‘Can’t you sleep here, with me?’

  ‘What, in your bed?’ she said, smiling.

  ‘I’d make room for you,’ said Felix. ‘Do you live with Mr Williams?’

  ‘Mr and Mrs Williams, yes,’ said Faith. ‘Isn’t it kind of them?’

  ‘Bend down. I want to whisper…. Are they really nice?’

  Faith assured him that they were really nice. ‘They couldn’t be nicer if I belonged to them,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve often wondered,’ said Felix. ‘He’s awfully old, but still …’

  She laughed. ‘What nonsense!’

  ‘Dan, Dan, he’s a funny old man.’

  ‘What do you mean, Felix?’

  ‘The Head of course. That’s our song about him,’ he said airily, with a shy grin.

  She made a mock-severe face at him. ‘I can see you’re getting well again, young man.’

  § 12

  Gradually, as he grew stronger, this illness resolved itself into a series of visits received. As soon as he was washed and smartened up, as soon as all traces of his decreasingly exiguous meals were removed, he would sit back and receive tribute from the outside world. He thought it was awfully decent of chaps to come and see him in their not very plentiful spare time, and shyly said so. Come they did, treating him as a person of consequence. Hollis and Abbott came together, and stayed ten minutes, saying little, sheepishly polite, so great was their awe of Sister and of the much-rumoured operation. They seemed surprised to find that Felix retained his full complement of limbs: surreptitious glances at the shape made by the bedclothes were eloquent of sensational conjectures on this point.

  Jerry Cockle came too, and he too was uneasy, with more reason. Between Felix and Jerry there was a bond of affection, of time spent together, fun shared, secrets confided; but in their innermost hearts they were divided by a question which would never be answered because it would never be asked. The form of asking and answering had been duly gone through, but trust was wanting, belief faltered, an unspoken unspeakable doubt remained. One day, meeting him unexpectedly in Long-barrow Wood, Jerry had fished out of his pocket, with triumphant glee, a bird’s nest full of unfledged finches: there were seven of them, tight packed as though growing from one stem, their fixed-wide mouths looking like the flowering climax of some fantastic tropical plant. You had to look twice to realize that they were alive: alive, naked, mercifully witless, wanting only food. Jerry was proud of his capture, having risked his neck for it by climbing an impossible tree, and he first stared and then looked sulky when Felix expressed another point of view. ‘All right, soppy! Will you fight me for them?’ In his present mood it was touch and go whether he would throw the birds on the ground and trample on them. Felix said: ‘If you like, but what’s the good? Tell you what, Jerry: let’s put them back. I expect their mother’s still somewhere near. How long have you had them?’ In the end, after some argument, Jerry said he would: he would put the nestlings back where he found them. But to save hi
s face, or for some other private reason, he had to make a condition, and the condition was that Felix should give his word of honour to stay where he was till Jerry came back. Not only was he not to follow him: he was not even to try, Jerry said, to find the place. Nothing short of that would satisfy this curious boy, and Felix had to promise. What happened afterwards, except that Jerry rejoined him half an hour later, Felix would never know. He asked and was answered, and in the pause that followed he knew, and Jerry knew, that the worst had happened. He knew, and Jerry knew, that the answer told him nothing, and for the simplest of reasons. Where there is no trust there can be attraction but no friendship, even though the form of friendship remain. In demanding trust, if that had been the idea, Jerry had demanded more than Felix at that moment could give him. No word was said to the purpose; they talked volubly of other things; but beneath the talk a desolating silence persisted. The breach was invisible and absolute.

  He came to the infirmary, winningly eager to be friends, but bringing that silence with him. ‘Did it hurt much?’ he said. And: ‘When are you coming back, do you know?’ He had a new story about Mr Lamble, who twelve months earlier had been Felix’s form-master, and he gave an excited, exclamatory, giggling account of a recent hockey-match at which Mr Lamble had acted as referee. The two stories were inextricably mixed together in Jerry’s narrative, though they seemed to have no connection except Mr Lamble himself. Both Mr Lamble and his friend Mr Plover were said to be at daggers drawn with the sarcastic Mr Fletton, the headmaster’s second-in-command: a circumstance much to their credit in the general estimation. Mr Fletton had a fanatical dislike of smoking, and the other day (so Jerry’s story ran) he had found Mr Lamble smoking his pipe in the masters’ Common Room with a pile of exercise books in front of him which he was busy marking. ‘Working or smoking, which is it?’ said Mr Fletton. ‘Both,’ said Mr Lamble. ‘So you can do two things at once, can you, Lamble? What a talented young fellow you are!’ ‘I can do better than that, dear Mr Fletton,’ said Lamble. ‘I can do three things at once. I can work, I can smoke, and I can mind my own business.’ On the face of it the story was an improbable one, but boys who had suffered much in their time from Mr Fletton’s tongue were resolved to believe it. The hockey-match was tame by comparison. St Swithins played hockey as well as football and cricket, all games being in theory optional, though the moral obligation to play something was in practice irresistible. There was a school of thought which considered hockey a girlish pastime, but Jerry Cockle made this particular match sound like a massacre. ‘And would you believe it, Brooky, we’ve had a challenge from a Girls’ High School. Imagine the cheek of them!’

  And all this while the two boys were thinking, not of hockey, nor yet of Mr Lamble’s brilliant retort, but of that strange uncomfortable moment in Longbarrow Wood last summer, when invisibly, without sign or sound, the delicate filament of their comradeship, drawn too tight, had snapped.

  Mr Surrey’s visit carried no such undertones. Long, fair, freckled, curly-headed, Arthur Surrey was the very newest and youngest of the masters and a prime favourite with the Head, who, in introducing him to the little boys he was to teach, had rather the air of Santa Claus presenting them with an exceptionally large and beautiful toy-rabbit to play with. ‘The son of my oldest friend,’ he said superfluously; and stood smiling encouragement while Mr Surrey, plunging straight into his duties, set the whole class noisily chanting their multiplication tables. Frank and sunny was Mr Surrey’s style, guileless and good-natured with no complicating humour or reserve in his character. He flung himself with a will into teaching the little boys, doing it (as the Scriptures enjoined) with all his might; but his secret ambition, which he confided to everyone, which he carolled from the housetops, which he sunned with his smiles and nourished with his heart’s blood, was to be a missionary, to carry the light of Camden Town into darkest Africa. In addition to taking a form he taught games and exercised a brotherly supervision over the rough-and-tumble of the playground during break, saying at intervals ‘Now then, old chap! Not too rough with the little fellows!’ or ‘Break away there, boys! It’s a playground, not a battlefield.’ Into almost every lesson Mr Surrey contrived to drag a mention of Dr Livingstone, or some other hero of what he was fond of calling the mission field, a phrase that encouraged the boys— though all but the smallest knew better—to picture all heathendom as a large green meadow vocal with hymn-singing blacks.

  ‘Well, Elderbrook old man, how are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine, sir.’

  ‘That’s the style. Soon be out and about again. You’ve had a bit of a rough passage, I know.’

  Though one could hardly help liking Mr Surrey, in spite of his being such an ass, Felix was embarrassed by the solemn gleam in his eye. He was afraid Mr Surrey was going to call him a brave fellow or something of that kind. To be applauded by Sister for being a good patient was pleasant enough, but Mr Surrey’s laudations were sometimes of a kind to make one squirm.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Felix. As soon as the words were out of his mouth he realized, with regret, that perhaps they sounded ‘modest’.

  ‘Yes, a rough passage,’ Mr Surrey insisted. ‘But you weren’t afraid, were you? You knew who the Pilot was.’

  ‘Er … yes,’ said Felix uncertainly. But his puzzled look betrayed him.

  ‘Jesus, who else?’ said Mr Surrey. ‘Our Saviour and our Friend in Need. We can always take our troubles to Him. Always. That’s the good news I’m hoping to carry with me across the ocean, Elderbrook, some day, when God wills. I am with you always, that’s what He said. And He meant it, just like that. It’s quite simple, the old simple gospel. No long words. Nothing mysterious. Just honest, healthy religion, and English, through and through, like cricket and footer. We know the rules and we must play the game. You know why. You don’t need me to tell you,’ said Mr Surrey, resolved to do just that. ‘It’s because we’ve got such a grand Captain, eh?’ He gave his audience an intent earnest look, then suddenly grinned, and seemed to shake himself, saying heartily: ‘Well, well! No more preaching!’ He rose to his feet and shook hands. ‘Buck up and get strong again, old chap. We all miss our Elderbrook.’

  § 13

  Upmarden did not greatly concern itself with what went on outside Mercestershire. Why should it? Within those broad confines (or narrow, if you chose to think them so) the whole human drama of love and birth and death had ample scope; and no matter how far you travelled, no matter in what distant hemispheres of the mind you searched, you would get no deeper knowledge of reality than your own lives or the lives of your nearest neighbours could give you. National and imperial affairs scarcely touched these private lives. That the Queen was immured in Balmoral or Windsor, nursing her years-old grief, was a fixed fact, like the sun in heaven; but unlike that luminary it did not affect the cycle of the seasons, or the price of cattle, or the leap of young blood in springtime. It was wonderful, if you stopped to think of it, that in that small, stubborn, unimaginative personage the might and majesty of a great Empire was symbolized; but so it had always been within the memory of all but the very oldest, and that it would not be so for ever was beyond normal imagining. The year of the Diamond Jubilee was made memorable, for at least one of the Elderbrooks, not by solemn thoughts of the Queen’s majesty but by the gift of a satchel from Aunt Dolly. It was a thing of beauty and Guy fell in love with it instantly. Its shape and colour, and especially its smell, enchanted him. Yet he was uneasily conscious of being already too big to carry a satchel and was shy of exhibiting it among schoolmates who, like himself, had never felt the need for such an aid to the acquisition of learning; moreover he would very soon, he hoped, be leaving them. But it gave him a profound secret satisfaction to have it hanging from, a nail in the wall at his bed-head, in the room which he still shared with Matthew. There he left it, and there it served the purpose of a shelf for the books Mr Cowlin lent him. In the early days of its possession it was the first thing he looked for on waking.
r />   In the world beyond Mercestershire astonishing things happened, but with rare exceptions they made no great impression on the Elderb rooks and their neighbours. They were remote and scarcely real, little more than a confused rambling serial story brought into the house every day in the form of the Mercester Chronicle. The death of the aged Mr. Gladstone provoked Joe to an unwonted outburst of moralizing, for Mr Gladstone was a great hero of his; the rush to the Klon-dyke goldfields, the year before, had provided Guy and Felix with a new game in the summer holidays, a successor to the shipwrecks and explorings of earlier years; young Felix, who at the time had a fancy for following in the footsteps of Irving, received a personal shock when he read how a popular actor of melodrama had been stabbed to death by a demented stranger at the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre: for days he could think of little else, and for a long time the incident retained for him a curious vividness, as though it were happening to himself. But the larger, the world events made less mark at Up-marden than, for example, the compulsory muzzling of old Rover the sheepdog, in the interests of a government campaign against rabies: a matter, this, for indignation, Rover being one of the most amiable and harmless of his kind. And for the children that too was of small account compared with the brief annual excitement of the Boat Race. Each year, with dramatic suddenness, came a day when every child in the neighbourhood was asking every other child: ‘Are you Oxford or Cambridge?’ And everyone ‘was Oxford’, because Oxford always won: everyone except, for the same reason, Guy. Guy, a perverse supporter of the traditionally losing side, had at last his reward; but the victory of Cambridge came too late for him to flaunt it among his neighbours, for by then he was translated to another sphere.

  Of the three brothers, Matthew was the most diligent reader of the newspaper and the least likely to be much concerned by its news. He was the stay-at-home, and to read of things beyond his horizon had a sharper appeal for him not because he rebelled against his destiny but rather because he had embraced it. He was not, as Felix was, cast out into a strange world for two-thirds of the year; he did not, as Guy did, dream of escape into a vaguely triumphant future; he remained rooted in the tradition of his fathers. He was a farmer born and bred, and a gardener too: unusual combination. He had, as they said, green fingers. He had an uncanny sense of when it was best to do what, and a way with animals, and a feeling for weather that enabled him, nine times out of ten, to forestall its vagaries. Joe Elderbrook was in the habit of boasting to neighbours that Matt was a better farmer than his dad. And the more Matthew read in the newspaper of the miseries and dangers endured by workers in some urban industries, such as lead poisoning in the manufacture of china, and phosphorus poisoning in the making of matches, subjects dragged into unwelcome prominence as the century neared its end, the more was he persuaded that if farming had not chosen him he would have chosen farming. It was an arduous but satisfying life. You did not get rich on it, but with care and contriving and hard work you paid your way, and at least you did not condemn your work-people to an early death, as these big manufacturers didn’t mind doing: of if they did mind, Matthew argued, why did they raise such an outcry against proposals to eliminate the dangers?