IX

On the following Sunday, when the Vicar was making his preparations to

go into the drawing-room for his nap—all the actions of his life were

conducted with ceremony—and Mrs. Carey was about to go upstairs, Philip

asked:

“What shall I do if I’m not allowed to play?”

“Can’t you sit still for once and be quiet?”

“I can’t sit still till tea-time.”

Mr. Carey looked out of the window, but it was cold and raw, and he

could not suggest that Philip should go into the garden.

“I know what you can do. You can learn by heart the collect for the

day.”

He took the prayer-book which was used for prayers from the harmonium,

and turned the pages till he came to the place he wanted.

“It’s not a long one. If you can say it without a mistake when I come

in to tea you shall have the top of my egg.”

Mrs. Carey drew up Philip’s chair to the dining-room table—they had

bought him a high chair by now—and placed the book in front of him.

“The devil finds work for idle hands to do,” said Mr. Carey.

He put some more coals on the fire so that there should be a cheerful

blaze when he came in to tea, and went into the drawing-room. He

loosened his collar, arranged the cushions, and settled himself

comfortably on the sofa. But thinking the drawing-room a little chilly,

Mrs. Carey brought him a rug from the hall; she put it over his legs

and tucked it round his feet. She drew the blinds so that the light

should not offend his eyes, and since he had closed them already went

out of the room on tiptoe. The Vicar was at peace with himself today,

and in ten minutes he was asleep. He snored softly.

It was the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany, and the collect began with the

words: O God, whose blessed Son was manifested that he might destroy

the works of the devil, and make us the sons of God, and heirs of

Eternal life. Philip read it through. He could make no sense of it. He

began saying the words aloud to himself, but many of them were unknown

to him, and the construction of the sentence was strange. He could not

get more than two lines in his head. And his attention was constantly

wandering: there were fruit trees trained on the walls of the vicarage,

and a long twig beat now and then against the windowpane; sheep grazed

stolidly in the field beyond the garden. It seemed as though there were

knots inside his brain. Then panic seized him that he would not know

the words by tea-time, and he kept on whispering them to himself

quickly; he did not try to understand, but merely to get them

parrot-like into his memory.

Mrs. Carey could not sleep that afternoon, and by four o’clock she was

so wide awake that she came downstairs. She thought she would hear

Philip his collect so that he should make no mistakes when he said it

to his uncle. His uncle then would be pleased; he would see that the

boy’s heart was in the right place. But when Mrs. Carey came to the

dining-room and was about to go in, she heard a sound that made her

stop suddenly. Her heart gave a little jump. She turned away and

quietly slipped out of the front-door. She walked round the house till

she came to the dining-room window and then cautiously looked in.

Philip was still sitting on the chair she had put him in, but his head

was on the table buried in his arms, and he was sobbing desperately.

She saw the convulsive movement of his shoulders. Mrs. Carey was

frightened. A thing that had always struck her about the child was that

he seemed so collected. She had never seen him cry. And now she

realised that his calmness was some instinctive shame of showing his

feelings: he hid himself to weep.

Without thinking that her husband disliked being wakened suddenly, she

burst into the drawing-room.

“William, William,” she said. “The boy’s crying as though his heart

would break.”

Mr. Carey sat up and disentangled himself from the rug about his legs.

“What’s he got to cry about?”

“I don’t know…. Oh, William, we can’t let the boy be unhappy. D’you

think it’s our fault? If we’d had children we’d have known what to do.”

Mr. Carey looked at her in perplexity. He felt extraordinarily

helpless.

“He can’t be crying because I gave him the collect to learn. It’s not

more than ten lines.”

“Don’t you think I might take him some picture books to look at,

William? There are some of the Holy Land. There couldn’t be anything

wrong in that.”

“Very well, I don’t mind.”

Mrs. Carey went into the study. To collect books was Mr. Carey’s only

passion, and he never went into Tercanbury without spending an hour or

two in the second-hand shop; he always brought back four or five musty

volumes. He never read them, for he had long lost the habit of reading,

but he liked to turn the pages, look at the illustrations if they were

illustrated, and mend the bindings. He welcomed wet days because on

them he could stay at home without pangs of conscience and spend the

afternoon with white of egg and a glue-pot, patching up the Russia

leather of some battered quarto. He had many volumes of old travels,

with steel engravings, and Mrs. Carey quickly found two which described

Palestine. She coughed elaborately at the door so that Philip should

have time to compose himself, she felt that he would be humiliated if

she came upon him in the midst of his tears, then she rattled the door

handle. When she went in Philip was poring over the prayer-book, hiding

his eyes with his hands so that she might not see he had been crying.

“Do you know the collect yet?” she said.

He did not answer for a moment, and she felt that he did not trust his

voice. She was oddly embarrassed.

“I can’t learn it by heart,” he said at last, with a gasp.

“Oh, well, never mind,” she said. “You needn’t. I’ve got some picture

books for you to look at. Come and sit on my lap, and we’ll look at

them together.”

Philip slipped off his chair and limped over to her. He looked down so

that she should not see his eyes. She put her arms round him.

“Look,” she said, “that’s the place where our blessed Lord was born.”

She showed him an Eastern town with flat roofs and cupolas and

minarets. In the foreground was a group of palm-trees, and under them

were resting two Arabs and some camels. Philip passed his hand over the

picture as if he wanted to feel the houses and the loose habiliments of

the nomads.

“Read what it says,” he asked.

Mrs. Carey in her even voice read the opposite page. It was a romantic

narrative of some Eastern traveller of the thirties, pompous maybe, but

fragrant with the emotion with which the East came to the generation

that followed Byron and Chateaubriand. In a moment or two Philip

interrupted her.

“I want to see another picture.”

When Mary Ann came in and Mrs. Carey rose to help her lay the cloth.

Philip took the book in his hands and hurried through the

illustrations. It was with difficulty that his aunt induced him to put

the book down for tea. He had forgotten his horrible struggle to get

the collect by heart; he had forgotten his tears. Next day it was

raining, and he asked for the book again. Mrs. Carey gave it him

joyfully. Talking over his future with her husband she had found that

both desired him to take orders, and this eagerness for the book which

described places hallowed by the presence of Jesus seemed a good sign.

It looked as though the boy’s mind addressed itself naturally to holy

things. But in a day or two he asked for more books. Mr. Carey took him

into his study, showed him the shelf in which he kept illustrated

works, and chose for him one that dealt with Rome. Philip took it

greedily. The pictures led him to a new amusement. He began to read the

page before and the page after each engraving to find out what it was

about, and soon he lost all interest in his toys.

Then, when no one was near, he took out books for himself; and perhaps

because the first impression on his mind was made by an Eastern town,

he found his chief amusement in those which described the Levant. His

heart beat with excitement at the pictures of mosques and rich palaces;

but there was one, in a book on Constantinople, which peculiarly

stirred his imagination. It was called the Hall of the Thousand

Columns. It was a Byzantine cistern, which the popular fancy had

endowed with fantastic vastness; and the legend which he read told that

a boat was always moored at the entrance to tempt the unwary, but no

traveller venturing into the darkness had ever been seen again. And

Philip wondered whether the boat went on for ever through one pillared

alley after another or came at last to some strange mansion.

One day a good fortune befell him, for he hit upon Lane’s translation

of The Thousand Nights and a Night. He was captured first by the

illustrations, and then he began to read, to start with, the stories

that dealt with magic, and then the others; and those he liked he read

again and again. He could think of nothing else. He forgot the life

about him. He had to be called two or three times before he would come

to his dinner. Insensibly he formed the most delightful habit in the

world, the habit of reading: he did not know that thus he was providing

himself with a refuge from all the distress of life; he did not know

either that he was creating for himself an unreal world which would

make the real world of every day a source of bitter disappointment.

Presently he began to read other things. His brain was precocious. His

uncle and aunt, seeing that he occupied himself and neither worried nor

made a noise, ceased to trouble themselves about him. Mr. Carey had so

many books that he did not know them, and as he read little he forgot

the odd lots he had bought at one time and another because they were

cheap. Haphazard among the sermons and homilies, the travels, the lives

of the Saints, the Fathers, the histories of the church, were

old-fashioned novels; and these Philip at last discovered. He chose

them by their titles, and the first he read was The Lancashire Witches,

and then he read The Admirable Crichton, and then many more. Whenever

he started a book with two solitary travellers riding along the brink

of a desperate ravine he knew he was safe.

The summer was come now, and the gardener, an old sailor, made him a

hammock and fixed it up for him in the branches of a weeping willow.

And here for long hours he lay, hidden from anyone who might come to

the vicarage, reading, reading passionately. Time passed and it was

July; August came: on Sundays the church was crowded with strangers,

and the collection at the offertory often amounted to two pounds.

Neither the Vicar nor Mrs. Carey went out of the garden much during

this period; for they disliked strange faces, and they looked upon the

visitors from London with aversion. The house opposite was taken for

six weeks by a gentleman who had two little boys, and he sent in to ask

if Philip would like to go and play with them; but Mrs. Carey returned

a polite refusal. She was afraid that Philip would be corrupted by

little boys from London. He was going to be a clergyman, and it was

necessary that he should be preserved from contamination. She liked to

see in him an infant Samuel.

X

The Careys made up their minds to send Philip to King’s School at

Tercanbury. The neighbouring clergy sent their sons there. It was

united by long tradition to the Cathedral: its headmaster was an

honorary Canon, and a past headmaster was the Archdeacon. Boys were

encouraged there to aspire to Holy Orders, and the education was such

as might prepare an honest lad to spend his life in God’s service. A

preparatory school was attached to it, and to this it was arranged that

Philip should go. Mr. Carey took him into Tercanbury one Thursday

afternoon towards the end of September. All day Philip had been excited

and rather frightened. He knew little of school life but what he had

read in the stories of The Boy’s Own Paper. He had also read Eric, or

Little by Little.

When they got out of the train at Tercanbury, Philip felt sick with

apprehension, and during the drive in to the town sat pale and silent.

The high brick wall in front of the school gave it the look of a

prison. There was a little door in it, which opened on their ringing;

and a clumsy, untidy man came out and fetched Philip’s tin trunk and

his play-box. They were shown into the drawing-room; it was filled with

massive, ugly furniture, and the chairs of the suite were placed round

the walls with a forbidding rigidity. They waited for the headmaster.

“What’s Mr. Watson like?” asked Philip, after a while.

“You’ll see for yourself.”

There was another pause. Mr. Carey wondered why the headmaster did not

come. Presently Philip made an effort and spoke again.

“Tell him I’ve got a club-foot,” he said.

Before Mr. Carey could speak the door burst open and Mr. Watson swept

into the room. To Philip he seemed gigantic. He was a man of over six

feet high, and broad, with enormous hands and a great red beard; he

talked loudly in a jovial manner; but his aggressive cheerfulness

struck terror in Philip’s heart. He shook hands with Mr. Carey, and

then took Philip’s small hand in his.

“Well, young fellow, are you glad to come to school?” he shouted.

Philip reddened and found no word to answer.

“How old are you?”

“Nine,” said Philip.

“You must say sir,” said his uncle.

“I expect you’ve got a good lot to learn,” the headmaster bellowed

cheerily.

To give the boy confidence he began to tickle him with rough fingers.

Philip, feeling shy and uncomfortable, squirmed under his touch.

“I’ve put him in the small dormitory for the present…. You’ll like

that, won’t you?” he added to Philip. “Only eight of you in there. You

won’t feel so strange.”

Then the door opened, and Mrs. Watson came in. She was a dark woman

with black hair, neatly parted in the middle. She had curiously thick

lips and a small round nose. Her eyes were large and black. There was a

singular coldness in her appearance. She seldom spoke and smiled more

seldom still. Her husband introduced Mr. Carey to her, and then gave

Philip a friendly push towards her.

“This is a new boy, Helen, His name’s Carey.”

Without a word she shook hands with Philip and then sat down, not

speaking, while the headmaster asked Mr. Carey how much Philip knew and

what books he had been working with. The Vicar of Blackstable was a

little embarrassed by Mr. Watson’s boisterous heartiness, and in a

moment or two got up.

“I think I’d better leave Philip with you now.”

“That’s all right,” said Mr. Watson. “He’ll be safe with me. He’ll get

on like a house on fire. Won’t you, young fellow?”

Without waiting for an answer from Philip the big man burst into a

great bellow of laughter. Mr. Carey kissed Philip on the forehead and

went away.

“Come along, young fellow,” shouted Mr. Watson. “I’ll show you the

school-room.”

He swept out of the drawing-room with giant strides, and Philip

hurriedly limped behind him. He was taken into a long, bare room with

two tables that ran along its whole length; on each side of them were

wooden forms.

“Nobody much here yet,” said Mr. Watson. “I’ll just show you the

playground, and then I’ll leave you to shift for yourself.”

Mr. Watson led the way. Philip found himself in a large play-ground

with high brick walls on three sides of it. On the fourth side was an

iron railing through which you saw a vast lawn and beyond this some of

the buildings of King’s School. One small boy was wandering

disconsolately, kicking up the gravel as he walked.

“Hulloa, Venning,” shouted Mr. Watson. “When did you turn up?”

The small boy came forward and shook hands.

“Here’s a new boy. He’s older and bigger than you, so don’t you bully

him.”

The headmaster glared amicably at the two children, filling them with

fear by the roar of his voice, and then with a guffaw left them.

“What’s your name?”

“Carey.”

“What’s your father?”

“He’s dead.”

“Oh! Does your mother wash?”

“My mother’s dead, too.”

Philip thought this answer would cause the boy a certain awkwardness,

but Venning was not to be turned from his facetiousness for so little.

“Well, did she wash?” he went on.

“Yes,” said Philip indignantly.

“She was a washerwoman then?”

“No, she wasn’t.”

“Then she didn’t wash.”

The little boy crowed with delight at the success of his dialectic.

Then he caught sight of Philip’s feet.

“What’s the matter with your foot?”

Philip instinctively tried to withdraw it from sight. He hid it behind

the one which was whole.

“I’ve got a club-foot,” he answered.

“How did you get it?”

“I’ve always had it.”

“Let’s have a look.”

“No.”

“Don’t then.”

The little boy accompanied the words with a sharp kick on Philip’s

shin, which Philip did not expect and thus could not guard against. The

pain was so great that it made him gasp, but greater than the pain was

the surprise. He did not know why Venning kicked him. He had not the

presence of mind to give him a black eye. Besides, the boy was smaller

than he, and he had read in The Boy’s Own Paper that it was a mean

thing to hit anyone smaller than yourself. While Philip was nursing his

shin a third boy appeared, and his tormentor left him. In a little

while he noticed that the pair were talking about him, and he felt they

were looking at his feet. He grew hot and uncomfortable.

But others arrived, a dozen together, and then more, and they began to

talk about their doings during the holidays, where they had been, and

what wonderful cricket they had played. A few new boys appeared, and

with these presently Philip found himself talking. He was shy and

nervous. He was anxious to make himself pleasant, but he could not

think of anything to say. He was asked a great many questions and

answered them all quite willingly. One boy asked him whether he could

play cricket.

“No,” answered Philip. “I’ve got a club-foot.”

The boy looked down quickly and reddened. Philip saw that he felt he

had asked an unseemly question. He was too shy to apologise and looked

at Philip awkwardly.