(the headmaster raised his eyebrows as he reached this phrase), Mr.
Jones continued:
“I fear that I cannot fall in with your suggestion of a private
boarding-house for my dear nephew. In the first place it is too
expensive, and in the second place I wish him to go into Mr.
Mannock’s house if you can satisfy me that he is of the considerate
and forbearing disposition that a man placed in his responsible
position ought to be. I am pressed for time, as I sail on May 1st for
Bombay, and an early answer will greatly oblige.
“Yours truly,
“T. JONES.”
Tod and Peter had the very greatest fun in filling in the form of
application. They had long ago decided that the youthful Archibald
was to enter on the Classical side, that he was destined for the
Church, that his father was “deceased,” but as to the late gentleman’s
profession they squabbled. Peter wanted Army or Indian Civil; Tod was
in favor of Navy or Church; when Peter suddenly recollected that there
were “lists and things” in most of the recognized professions and that
an “inquisitive old buffer like the Pot would be certain to look him
up.”
Finally they decided that the deceased one had better be a “merchant.”
Peter wanted to add “prince,” but Tod, the far-seeing, pointed out that
such affluence would hardly coincide with an objection to one of the
smaller boarding-houses on the score of expense.
Finally they despatched their entrance form “to the bursar,”
elaborately filled up in the scholarly handwriting of Mr. Theopompus
Jones, the handwriting that so puzzled the Principal of Harchester by
its haunting resemblance to that of one of his masters.
Again the Pot was prompt and courteous, and by return the twins were
gloating over another letter, which, however, again disappointed them
by its brevity.
“DEAR SIR (it ran),
“As your time in this country is indeed getting short, I would advise
you at once to confer personally with Mr. Mannock as to whether he
can find room for your nephew or not; for, in the event of his having
no vacancy, you still may be enabled to place the boy in one of the
other houses.”
“Oh, the shuffler!” Peter shouted indignantly. “The quibbler! The
sanctimonious humbug! _He_ thinks he’s diddled Theopompus Jones, does
he? He’ll find out his mistake before very long; it’ll be Theopompus
Jones has diddled _him_. I wouldn’t trust that man with a bad
halfpenny. He can’t answer a straight question, that’s what he can’t
do--and yet to hear him talk....”
“I say,” interrupted Tod, “suppose they send in the bill, what’ll we
do?”
“You don’t propose we should pay it, do you, you young ass?” Peter
returned scornfully. “They never send ’em in till just before term,
sometimes not till after. Don’t you remember how the pater grumbled
last autumn because it _didn’t_ come, and he wanted everything settled
up before he sailed?”
“So does Mr. Jones want it all settled before he sails,” Tod remarked
gaily. “He ought to write to old Pig-Face to-night.”
This the dual Mr. Jones did, and, as before, received an answer by
return of post from Mr. Mannock, who, strange to say, had just one
vacancy, and expressed his willingness that Archibald Jones should fill
that same. And Mr. T. Jones, refraining from further researches into
the character of Mr. Mannock, wrote with his own scholarly hand, or
rather hands, a letter which announced the pending arrival of Archibald.
By this time the holidays were nearly over, and the twins began to be
somewhat anxious as to the termination of Mr. Jones’ correspondence
with the authorities at Harchester School. But their good genius did
not desert them at the last moment, for just the day before they left
Wales, when they were at their wits’ end for a satisfactory ending to
the episode, they came across the “List of Members” of their uncle’s
club; and, idly turning over the leaves, Tod found that there were no
fewer than thirteen members of the same surname as the anxious uncle of
their creation and three of them had “T” for their initial. Instantly
Tod’s resource was stimulated, and he despatched three letters in the
most scholarly of handwritings to his headmaster, to Mr. Mannock,
and to the bursar respectively, announcing his immediate departure
for London and requesting that all future communications might be
addressed to him at the club in question.
In his letter to Mr. Mannock, he informed him that Archibald would be
sent one day earlier than that given for the return of the other boys,
as he, Mr. Jones, would be so much occupied in arrangements for his
voyage that he would be unable to give the boy the careful supervision
his sensitive disposition and delicate health demanded.
“We shan’t see their pompous old letters and bills and things,” sighed
Peter, “but it will liven up the Jones fraternity at uncle’s club--it’s
a good thing he’s not going back to town just yet, or he might hear
something--and Pig-Face will simply raise Cain when that precious
Archibald mysteriously disappears. We’re sure to hear about that,
anyway; two of his chaps are in my form, jolly decent chaps they are,
too.”
“Mind you never _ask_ anything about it,” said Tod warningly. “They
might suspect something, and if we were ever found to have had any hand
in this we’d be sacked, sure as a gun. We’ve had our fun and now we
must jolly well keep it dark. By the time it’s all finished I should
say both the Head and old Pig-Face will have done their thousand lines
apiece, shouldn’t you?”
* * * * *
“Curious thing that fellow never turning up, isn’t it?” one of the
“decent chaps” in Mr. Mannock’s house remarked to Peter, some three
days after term had begun. “Pig-Face is in an awful stew about
it--afraid the boy’s been murdered or something.”
“What boy? What d’you mean?” Peter asked innocently. “Who hasn’t come
back?”
“No one hasn’t come back; it’s a new chap hasn’t turned up at all. Both
he and his people have mysteriously disappeared, vamoosed, vanished!
Awfully funny thing. There’s no end of a fuss.”
“P’r’aps he changed his mind at the last minute,” Peter suggested.
“P’r’aps he heard something about old Pig-Face and funked it.”
“I don’t know,” said the other. “Old Pig-Face looks awfully worried.
Shouldn’t wonder if we had detectives down, and all sorts of games.”
Peter looked thoughtful for a minute, and then, to the astonishment of
his friend, who was really impressed by the enigma, doubled up with
uncontrollable laughter.
The assistance of Scotland Yard, however, was not called in; for, on
writing to the Bishop and Admiral given as references by Mr. T. Jones
(boldly lifted, address and all, from “Who’s Who,” by the ingenious
Tod), the headmaster of Harchester received an emphatic disclaimer from
each of these gentlemen of any knowledge of any such person. Moreover,
an inquiry at the post office of the Welsh village from which Mr.
Jones’ letters were dated only elicited the laconic response of “Gone
away--address not known.”
Katie had received and faithfully followed her instructions.
Every Jones of the whole thirteen in that club was approached in
vain, and inquiry at the shipping office only elicited the fact that,
plentiful as persons bearing that patronymic appeared to be, no
passenger of that name had sailed by that particular boat.
The authorities at Harchester came to the unwelcome conclusion that
they had been hoaxed; and all that remained of the incident were
certain letters, treasured, on the one hand for purposes of possible
identification, on the other for more frivolous reasons.
“TONY”
Tony sat in the gutter, wondering what would be the coolest thing to
do. The front doors of all the houses in the dull, quite respectable
street, wherein he dwelt, were close shut, as were also the
white-curtained windows, lest dust should blow in and sully these
hall-marks of houses that possess a front “best room.” The neighboring
children were all away; some at the recreation ground, some to paddle
their feet in the nearest approach to a river the town boasted--a
little muddy stream about a foot deep at the best of times; now a sort
of pea soup.
But on this August afternoon Tony felt too slack and too sticky to
seek any amusement that necessitated a walk; so, having been thrust
out of the back door by his mother, who was washing and wanted no boys
“clutterin’ round”--he strolled lanquidly to the front, quite sure that
here, at any rate, he would be left in peace, as the dwellers in Eva
Terrace never used their front doors except on Sundays.
Just then a man carrying a bag came running down the road, which was a
short cut to the station.
“Here, youngster!” he shouted, throwing the bag to Tony. “Carry this
for me, and I’ll just do it! Run after me for all you’re worth!”
Tony caught the bag dexterously and ran. He could run faster than the
man, and was soon jogging on ahead of him. At the station Tony got
sixpence for his pains, thrust it deep into his right trouser pocket,
and walked soberly away.
Infinite possibilities were opened up by this unexpected windfall, and
he had no intention of mentioning it at home. His people were poor,
but not poorer than their neighbors; his brothers and sisters were all
older than he, and in his case Benjamin’s lot was not accompanied by
the advantages with which it is generally accredited.
A lonely child was Tony, gentle and biddable enough, quick at his
books, and happiest in his school hours, when people let him alone, and
he succeeded in pleasing the clever, testy schoolmaster, whose life
was embittered by a constant struggle with an overwhelming desire to
whack the young demons who tormented him. He had been “summonsed” twice
by irate parents; so now he restrained himself at the expense of his
teaching powers and his nerves generally.
Tony stopped in the middle of the road and smacked his pocket.
“I’ll go to the baths to-morrow morning,” he said aloud, “and see them
young nobs swim; it’s only threepence before nine.”
A great excitement--unshared, unmentioned--had lately come into Tony’s
life. Every morning for the last week, about eight o’clock he had
watched for two boys who went by on bicycles with towels strapped
on to their handle-bars. One was quite a little boy, far less than
Tony himself; the other bigger, and in his eyes less interesting; and
in a few minutes after them came one for whom Tony had conceived the
extravagant, unreasoning admiration children will sometimes lavish on
somebody with whom they have never exchanged, or hope to exchange, two
words; someone unconscious of their existence as they are the richer
for that other’s.
Everybody in Tony’s locality knew the recruiting sergeant by sight:
“Sergeant” who taught drill and gymnastics to all the “young gen’lemen”
in the neighborhood. But Tony adored him, not only because he was so
tall and good looking--and Tony was strenuously certain that it is a
goodly thing to be upstanding and to have broad shoulders, instead
of the champagne-bottle variety carried by his brothers and their
like--but because he knew that the sergeant wished him well; inasmuch
as that he, even he also, was one of the hundred and fifty odd boys
in the parish schools of St. James’s. For now that the war fever was
somewhat abating, now that Sergeant himself had come back from the
front that he might send more soldiers out there, he had offered to
drill the boys in St. James’s schools twice a week for love. And it
could not be arranged.
The authorities, while granting the utility of algebra and French to
those in the seventh standard, who were presently to form the bulk and
bulwark of the nation, saw no good reason why an attempt should be made
to give them straight backs and broad chests. So Sergeant, who loved
his country, and was, in his way, something of a philanthropist, sighed
and swore, and “put the question by.”
But Tony, who had heard the subject canvassed, and listened to the
lamentations of the boys, was filled with a passion of gratitude, which
found no expression save in a constant hanging round corners to see his
idol pass.
* * * * *
Tony sat on his bed naked, in a patch of moonlight, admiring his own
legs.
“My body be whiter nor theirn,” he said to himself, and indeed, his
limbs looked radiantly fair in the mellow light. “But my arms beant so
’ard as ’is’n for all ’e be such little chap,” he continued, pinching
the soft flesh of the upper arm in a dissatisfied way.
Tony was too excited to sleep just yet--such a great deal had happened
in the last two days. In all his ten years he had never felt as he felt
now--and yet, from an outsider’s point of view, what a little thing it
was!
The day before he had gone to the swimming bath, intending just to
watch. It was empty, save for Sergeant and the two boys who went with
him every morning. The water looked so clear, and there seemed so much
room in the big bath, that Tony undressed and went in.
He paddled shyly about in the shallow end, admiring the two boys, who
dived off the spring-board and the pulpit and swam under water, while
Sergeant roared directions at them, and flung them head over heels in
the deep end, in a fashion that filled Tony with surprise.
The big boy was practising side-stroke, when the little one, whom
Sergeant, for some reason or other, called the “swashbuckler,” swam
down the bath toward Tony, remarking cheerfully:
“You’ll get rheumatism if you paddle so. Shall I show you the first
exercise?”
He was such a little boy, but he swam like a frog. His square, freckled
face was so friendly that Tony forgot that he himself was an “oik,” and
therefore his sworn foe, and said, “Please, sir!” in the meekest of
tiny whispers.
“You must kneel on the edge further down, and let me chuck you in,” was
the next command--and Sergeant stopped in the very middle of a shout to
chuckle and whisper:
“Blest if the swashbuckler isn’t giving a swimming lesson on his own
account!”
And now Tony sat on the edge of his bed and remembered two wonderful
mornings, and pondered what it could be that made that friendly little
boy so different from all the other boys he knew. And through all his
thinking, like the refrain of a song, sounded a sentence he had once
heard at Sunday school. He could not remember the whole of it; but
five words seemed to batter at his brain as though demanding instant
comprehension and attention--“_The temple of your body._”
Tony nodded as though in answer to a spoken word. He pictured Sergeant
cleaving the water with his long arms, the muscles standing out on his
white shoulders.
“I s’pose,” said Tony softly, as if in answer to that unseen,
persistent voice, “some folks ’as temples for bodies, and some folks
’as on’y tin churches, or, so to speak, a public.... I’d like a temple
myself for ch’ice.”
He was not very sure what a temple was, but in a vague way he _was_
assured that it was something large and beautiful; and his conception
was helped out by hazy recollections of Sunday school and Solomon, and
thoughts of a building spacious and white.
“There used to be a free night,” he continued, reverting again to the
actual, “but the Corpeeration stopped it--I wonder w’y? It’s tuppence
after six, that’s a shillin’ a week--’ow can pore boys get that?--an’
I promised ’im as I’d learn the others w’en I could get a chanst, when
he’s learned me....”
Tony’s voice faltered, he was getting sleepy. He gave his smooth white
arms another stroke, slipped into his nightshirt, and got into bed.
“E’ve give oi a shillin’ to pay for four more mornin’s, till ’e do go
away,” he whispered ecstatically as he laid his head on the pillow, and
Tony fell asleep.
That evening Tony’s elder brother “Earny,” who cleaned bicycles, and
was ’prenticed to a dealer in the neighborhood, wanted his Sunday
necktie, for he purposed to “walk out with his young lady.” He ran
upstairs to the room he shared with Tony and another brother, to find
the little boy fast asleep, worn out by unusual exercise and varied
emotions.
Earny could not find his tie, and on lifting Tony’s trousers to see
if by any chance it was hidden beneath them, a shilling rolled out of
the pocket and finished spinning with a clang, just in the very centre
of the patch of moonlight where a quarter of an hour earlier Tony had
decided that he, at all events, “would ’ave a temple for ch’ice.”
“’Ullo!” thought Earny to himself, “where did that kid collar a bob?
’E bin a’ter no good, I’ll be boun’, so secret-like and sayin’ nothin’
to nobody. Serve ’im right if I buys some smokes with ’un;” and Earny
departed quietly, without having fulfilled his original intention of
waking Tony that he might look for the missing necktie.
At nine o’clock the following morning Tony still lay upon his bed,
wide-eyed, white-cheeked, with blank despair writ large upon his face.
Breakfast was over long ago, his family had all departed to their daily
work; his mother was ironing in the kitchen, he could hear the bump of
the iron as she slammed it on the table; the bedroom could wait till
one of the girls came in at dinner-time, so no one interfered with Tony.
He knew that it was his brother who must have taken the shilling--the
precious shilling that had meant so much to him. He knew that he had
no redress, no one would believe him if he told them how he came by
it, and in his utter misery he was too poor-spirited even to think of
reprisals. His whole imagination centred round the dreadful certainty
that Sergeant and the little gen’leman and the little gen’leman’s
brother would think him a fraud. For a brief space the sun had shone
out on his drab life, discovering hitherto undreamt-of colors in the
landscape, but now....
“I can never watch for ’em no more,” he said, with a hard, tearless sob.
Presently he stood out on the floor and shook his nightshirt about his
feet; he dressed quickly, and did not even wash his face as he was wont
to do.
“’Tain’t no use for the likes of me to try,” he said bitterly.
Then he went to his brother’s drawer and stole the bundle of cigarettes
he found there, and went out and smoked under the railway bridge till
his body was as sick as his heart.
A SQUARE PEG
“I told him plainly beforehand that if he did not get a scholarship
this term he must go into business. He has not won a scholarship, and,
situated as you are, any other course would be absurd.”
Uncle Henry shut his mouth with a snap, while he stared fixedly over
his sister’s head that he might not see the pleading in her eyes as she
said timidly:
“But fourteen is so young, Henry, and Rodney is so small for his
age----”
“I fail to see that his size has anything to do with it; and you,
Felicia, must learn to face things as they are, not as you would have
them. If you defer for one moment the chance of Rodney’s making his
own living, you are doing an injustice both to him and to his sisters.
Pardon my plain speaking, but he is the son of an exceedingly poor
widow and must be dealt with accordingly.”
Through the open windows came the sound of a boy’s laughter and the
ring of a smartly struck cricket ball. Uncle Henry waved his hand in
the direction of the sound, saying:
“There, you see; that’s what his education at present amounts to; he’s
a pretty bat, and doubtless looks forward to a life all flannels and
cider-cup and yells of admiration when he makes a few runs; the sooner
all that nonsense is knocked out of him the better.”
“But Rodney is not idle, Henry,” his mother pleaded; “his form-master
and the Head both speak well of him and say that he has a very good
chance next year, although he has missed this; you know the exam. came
on just after his father’s death, when the boy was dreadfully upset.”
“I have made you an offer, you may take it or leave it. You can put
him into one of my businesses; there will be no premium, and I’ll
pay for his board at a thoroughly good boarding-house I know of in
Mecklenburg Square, where he will be well looked after. In the meantime
you must try to let this house, and then you can come up and live in
the suburbs, and he can live with you and go to business every day by
train; the little girls can go to a High School. With the many claims
I have upon me, this is all that I can do, and I must serve you in the
way that seems best to me.”
Uncle Henry sat down and took up the newspaper in token that the
subject was thoroughly threshed out. He had gone into business at
fourteen, and now at little past thirty had a house in Grosvenor
Gardens and a “place down the river.” He had married at six-and-twenty,
“going where money was.” The names of his two sons were down for
Harrow, while his wife already talked of the time when she should
“present” their baby girl. He quite acknowledged that it was his
duty to help his sister now that the collapse of those Australian
banks had practically beggared her; but there was at the back of his
mind a lurking satisfaction that the way he had chosen should be one
calculated to destroy those castles of tradition her husband had been
so fond of building. It was a perpetual annoyance both to his wife and
to himself that Rodney and his sisters should be so very different
in appearance from their own children; that, clean or dirty, these
children without a sixpence should so strongly resemble the old family
portraits that his brother-in-law’s ridiculous will forbade to be sold;
that they should in speech and bearing so unmistakably be gentlefolk,
and yet be his own sister’s children seemed to him a proof of nature’s
ineptitude.
To be sure he and Felcourt had been on friendly enough terms, but he
had always--though through no fault of Felcourt’s--been conscious that
his brother-in-law and his ancestors for generations belonged to a
class which only of late, and that not altogether with enthusiasm, has
opened its doors to successful men of Uncle Henry’s stamp.
Rodney’s mother went and stood by the open window. The active white
figures flying between the wickets on the wide lawn seemed all blurred
and indistinct, and she lifted her slim hand to her throat to still its
throbbing ache; she was not a strong-minded woman. All she had asked of
life was the power to make folks happy, and to be loved; and hitherto
her desire had been generously fulfilled. Married at eighteen to a man
who, taking her out of somewhat sordid and uncongenial surroundings,
made her queen of a household where gaiety and good manners had
been vassals for generations, she readily adapted herself to the new
atmosphere, and became a sweet-voiced echo of her husband, and for
fourteen years was absurdly happy. Then Rodney Felcourt died, and six
months afterward came the collapse of the Australian banks.
Uncle Henry had a way of carrying through any course of action he had
determined upon, and by the beginning of October his nephew Rodney
found himself taking his exercise in the Gray’s Inn Road instead of in
the playing-fields at school. The change of life was so radical and so
sudden that the child hardly understood what had happened. Like the old
woman in the nursery rhyme, he was forever exclaiming, “This be never
I!” in melancholy astonishment. He was learning to tie up parcels,
he stuck on endless quantities of postage stamps, and occasionally
addressed a few envelopes for one of the typists. He did what he was
told as well as he could, the day seemed endlessly long, and by evening
he was so tired that he went to bed soon after the seven-o’clock
dinner. A young boy for his age, he was quite unprecocious and
unformed; hitherto his place in the universe had been clearly defined
and not difficult to fill; to do well in his form, thus pleasing the
“mater” and his form-master, to be “decent” to his little sisters at
home, and “jolly” with the chaps at school, to be good at games and get
into the “house” eleven, and to be absolutely “straight” in word, deed,
and across country--such was Rodney’s conception of the whole duty of
boy, and he had acted up to it with considerable success. Now, life was
not only complicated but unintelligible, and he was too bewildered even
to rebel against a fate that kept him tying up parcels indifferently
well when he felt that by all the ordinary standards of conduct he
ought to have been writing Latin verses.
Every Sunday he wrote neat, stilted little letters to his mother, which
informed her that he had been to church at the Foundling, was going for
a walk in the afternoon, that he was well and hoped that she was well,
and that he was her very loving son. Felicia crushed the paper against
her cheek in the vain attempt to extract from it something real and
Rodney-like. She thought of the school letters last term, how full of
life they had been, how numerous the requests they contained! Rodney
never asked for anything now, and she knew that the boy was holding
himself well in hand lest any part of the truth might hurt her.
At the end of October, Cecil Connop came back from Paris. His arrival
was announced in all the papers, for he was of some importance in
literary circles; his great ability was acknowledged on all sides, the
more freely that he was something of a failure. Though his work was
widely read and appreciated by cultivated people, he was not popular.
His appearance was quite ordinary, and he made no attempt to resemble
any historical personage. He abhorred advertisement, considering that
his published writings had no sort of connection with his private life.
His readers were quite ignorant as to whether he had a mother or not,
and his personal friends suffered under no apprehension that their
loves or their bereavements would figure, flimsily disguised, in his
next book. His rooms in Jermyn Street had never been photographed, and
only his servant knew whether he liked his bath hot or cold. The fact
was that Cecil Connop kept one face for the world and quite another
for the old friends who loved him--a proceeding so out of date among
literary people as to be almost medieval. But it has its advantages for
such as like curtains to their windows. According to his own account
he never had any money, and was, when in England, in hourly danger of
Holloway Jail; but he paid his card debts and never seemed to lack any
of the things that go toward making life pleasant.
Felicia’s letter announcing little Rodney’s apprenticeship was a great
surprise to Cecil. He had, of course, heard of her serious losses, but
he knew that her brother was a wealthy man and “people always manage
somehow”; that in this case they hadn’t “managed” came upon him with
quite an unpleasant shock.
For some reason which she would not define even to herself, Felicia had
not asked any of her friends then in town to look up Rodney. She was
absolutely certain in her own mind that he had no business there, but
circumstances were too strong for her, and she dared not offend Henry.
When she read in the paper that Cecil had returned to town she felt
distinctly relieved. Here was an understanding person who would ask no
questions and could be depended upon to give a faithful account of the
child.
Cecil wrote at once to Rodney asking him to lunch at his club on the
following Saturday, and to Felicia, to say how pleased he would be to
do what he could for him while he was in town.
Rodney sat on the edge of his bed, too tired to undress. His flannels
and “sweater” were spread on the pillow, and from time to time the
boy laid his face down on them, inhaling the clean, woolly smell. He
had of course never worn them since he came to London--Uncle Henry
had not thought it necessary to make any arrangement as to how Rodney
should spend his Saturdays--yet the sight of them comforted him. He was
beginning to employ that saddest of all philosophies, that nothing can
take from us the good times we have had. He had eaten hardly anything
all day, and the ache in his throat was well nigh intolerable. His door
opened, and the maid announced: “A gentleman to see you, sir. Said he’d
come up here.”
Cecil had come before his letter. As the open door betrayed the
listless little figure with the scattered flannels the whole situation
was revealed to him in a flash, and for the hundredth time in a not
over well-spent life he cursed the folly which had rendered him so
incapable of helping his friends in any material way. When Rodney
realized who was his visitor, he simply flung himself bodily upon him,
and Cecil Connop, who was tender-hearted and easily touched, kissed
him and had been rapturously kissed in return before he had time to
consider whether the boy would be offended or not. Then they both sat
on the bed and for the first time for six weeks Rodney chattered. One
of the boarders, a girl who did typewriting in Chancery Lane, passing
his doorway, stopped and smiled as she heard the ripple of Rodney’s
laughter; she waited for a full minute, enjoying the unwonted sound,
then passed on to her own room unaccountably cheered. People in that
house were too busy and too tired to laugh!
When Cecil Connop got back to his rooms he sat and smoked for a long
time before he wrote the following letter to Felicia Felcourt:
“To-night I have spent an hour with Rodney, and find him apparently
well and cheerful. I cannot faithfully report upon his appearance,
as it was candle-light and I did not see him very distinctly. He
talked freely enough about you all at home, about his old school,
about myself; but, when I come to think of it, said nothing about
his business. You will, I know, pardon me if I ask you in all
seriousness--is this necessary? The whole time I was with him I had a
curious sense that he was playing truant and ought to be at school;
and there is one thing that an expression in your letter impels me
to say at the risk of being impertinent: no amount of money in the
world is such a possession as the breeding you and his dead father
have given your boy. Forgive this frankness and believe me that I
feel with you the more keenly that I am so conscious of my own gross
impotence to help.”
On Saturdays Rodney left business at one, and on this particular
Saturday flew back to “Meck” to change into his “Etons,” when he hied
him on the top of an omnibus to lunch with Cecil Connop at his club.
When he was seated opposite to his host, that gentleman proceeded
to examine him critically. The boy was unmistakably a gentleman:
everything about him, from the long slender hands of which he was so
unconscious, to the way he looked his companion straight in the eyes,
proclaimed him to come of a race who had spent their days otherwise
than in tying up parcels. Men passing in and out looked pleasantly at
the pretty boy who was so plainly enjoying the unwonted experience;
but Cecil noted that he was very thin, that after the first flush of
greeting was past the little high-bred face was pale, and that there
were black shadows under the long-lashed grey eyes. Moreover, although
there was everything for lunch calculated to please a boy, he ate
hardly anything.
“Are they decent to you at your place of business?” asked Cecil,
carefully pouring cognac into his coffee.
“You see,” said Rodney slowly, “I don’t seem to know anybody....” Then,
with a twinkle of amusement, “They call me a fool when I make mistakes,
which is pretty often, and if I do things right nobody says anything.”
During the next week or two Cecil made a point of seeing Rodney from
time to time, and after each meeting he felt more and more convinced
that the boy’s health was failing. He did not complain, but the
sedentary life was beginning to tell upon a constitution that had never
been so tried. He began to stoop, and even with Cecil his laugh was by
no means so ready or so frequent as it had been.
Felicia, although at first much comforted by Cecil’s account of Rodney,
longed after him as only widowed woman can long for her son; but she
had promised her brother that she would not attempt to see the boy for
three months lest it should unsettle him, and it only wanted three
weeks of the stipulated time.
Rodney had not seen Cecil for a fortnight; he was out of town, but
this Rodney did not know. It was Saturday, and a smell of onion curry
pervaded the boarding-house, the Square garden looked hopelessly
uninviting, and he felt that he could endure neither the one nor the
other a moment longer. So he hied him to Pall Mall to see if he could
catch a glimpse of his friend. A conspicuously forlorn little figure,
he strolled slowly past the many clubs, when a man coming hastily down
some steps stared hard at Rodney, and, fixing his eyeglasses more
firmly on his nose, turned and walked swiftly after him.
“Felcourt! Felcourt! What are you doing here?” asked a sharp, nervous
voice, and Rodney started violently as his house-master, “Fireworks
Fenton,” caught him by the shoulder and shook him.
* * * * *
“You young ass! Why didn’t you write and tell me all about it?” said
“Fireworks Fenton” an hour later, as he angrily thumped a tea-table in
“Stewart’s” till the cups jumped off their saucers. “We all thought
you’d gone to another school, and here have you missed a whole term,
and lost flesh and muscle, and forgotten everything you ever knew.
I’ve no patience with you; it’s preposterous, and must be put an end
to at once! Give me your uncle’s address and your mother’s----” and
“Fireworks” glared at Rodney through his eyeglasses, and Rodney sat
swallowing uncomfortable things in his throat, while his heart felt
lighter than it had been for many a long week. It was so good to be
bullied in that particular fashion once more. Now he dared to look
forward. He didn’t in the least know how it was to be managed, but his
old master had told him he was to come back to school next term, and
_he_ always got his own way even with the Head himself. “Fireworks”
was not afraid of twenty Uncle Henries--“Worthy but mistaken, worthy
but mistaken,” he had muttered more than once during his late pupil’s
explanations. Rodney went with him to Paddington to see him off, and
it was only as the train steamed out of the station that “Fireworks
Fenton” recollected that he had omitted the special business he
had come up to town to do. But he only frowned and muttered: “That
ridiculous little Felcourt put it out of my head, but I’m glad I found
him--glad I found him. What fools these dear women are! What fools!
What fools!” and whenever he turned over a sheet of newspaper (of which
he didn’t read a line), he frowned again, exclaiming: “What fools!”
The particular fool Mr. Fenton had in his mind found two letters
beside her plate on the following Tuesday morning. She knew both the
handwritings, and gave a little sigh as she opened that from Rodney’s
house-master: it would be to ask how Rodney was getting on: he had
always been fond of the boy, and she had told him nothing.
“You will, I hope, acquit me of frivolous interference,” ran the
letter, “in matters that do not concern me, when I tell you that I
have seen Rodney and heard from him of the very great change it has
been necessary to make in his life. I greatly wish that I had known
sooner your reasons for taking him away from school, as I think one
of the chief obstacles could have been, and still can be, easily
removed. Dear Mrs. Felcourt, it is with considerable diffidence that
I venture to ask you to do me a great favor, namely, to allow me
to undertake Rodney’s education; my one stipulation being that he
should come back to my house. You know that where there are twenty
to thirty boys, one more or less makes but little difference, and
in becoming responsible for the school fees, I am doing no more
than my headmaster did for me. My mother was left a widow with five
children and very little of this world’s gear. I am fully aware how
much I shall be the gainer if you allow me to have Rodney, for,
young as he is, he had a distinct influence upon that mysterious and
fluctuating commodity, the ‘tone of the house,’ and I have not the
slightest doubt that he will be able to make his own way by aid of
scholarships, ultimately earning his own living nearly as soon as if
he had remained in business.
“Forgive me where I have expressed myself clumsily, and believe me,
“Faithfully yours,
“REGINALD FENTON.”
It was a long time before Felicia took up the other letter, which was
from Cecil Connop, and of this one sentence stood out in letters of
fire to the exclusion of everything else:
“I don’t believe the boy’s health will stand it, Felicia; come and see
for yourself.”
Felicia packed her smallest box and went.
When Rodney came back from business that evening Selina, the
parlormaid, informed him that a lady was waiting in the drawing-room to
see him. Selina, usually so grim, was all “nods and becks and wreathed
smiles”; she liked Rodney, though he did “throw about his clothes
something shameful.”
He was very tired and his head ached, as it always did in the evening
lately, but something in the maid’s tone made him forget his weariness,
and he raced up the stairs certain that only one lady could have
produced such unwonted geniality on Selina’s part. But he paused on the
mat outside the door; suppose it should only be his aunt! She had never
come yet, but she might, and how was Selina to know that he did not
care particularly for his aunt?
The door opened suddenly from the inside.
“I _knew_ nobody else would come upstairs like that. What were you
waiting for, you dear goose?”--and Rodney’s mother inspected her boy
for herself.
Next day she went to see her brother at his office, and told him that
she had decided to accept Mr. Fenton’s offer. She rather surprised
Uncle Henry, she was so decided and so cool; he did not know that
Cecil Connop had got up two hours earlier than usual, in order to have
plenty of time to fortify Felicia for the interview, only leaving her
at the office door.
“Do you think he will refuse to have anything more to do with us?” she
had asked timidly.
“He couldn’t be so absurdly unjust,” answered Cecil stoutly; “but, even
if he were, you have Rodney to think of. It is a chance in a thousand;
it would be worse than madness to throw it away. He’s a square little
peg, is Rodney; you’ll never fit him into that hole.”
Uncle Henry gave in quite graciously, though he was not best pleased.
Had he but known it, he revenged himself upon Mr. Fenton for his
interference by writing him a solemn letter of thanks, in which he
spoke of his “generous, nay munificent offer.” “Fireworks Fenton,” very
red and uncomfortable, rolled the letter into a ball and dropped it
into his waste-paper basket, exclaiming:
“Pompous idiot!”
When Rodney went home his little sisters found him more delightful
than ever, but he was reticent as regarded his experiences in London,
describing it briefly as “a beastly hole.”
On his return to school “Fireworks Fenton” sent for him the very first
evening.
“A row already, Felcourt!” exclaimed his best friend in dismay.
But Rodney ran along the passage and knocked at the study door without
any fears on that score. As he closed the door behind him it was the
master who looked embarrassed, as he jerked out:
“I’m pleased to see you back, Felcourt. Remember that if you are in
any way perplexed, or get into trouble ... or ... do you want any
pocket-money, by the way?” and “Fireworks” bent anew over the letter he
was writing.
“No, sir, I have the usual pocket-money, thank you; but please I would
like to----”
“Now, Felcourt, don’t you see that I’m busy? Go away, go away!”
“But please, sir----”
“I know perfectly well all the absurd and ridiculous things you would
say, and I very much prefer that you should not say them. One thing
_I_ have to say, attend to your English prose! I have a distinct
recollection that your spelling of English is revolting--positively
revolting. Attend to it!”
A TWENTIETH-CENTURY MISOGYNIST
What a place to be in is an old library! It seems as though all the
souls of all the writers that have bequeathed their labors to these
Bodleians were reposing here, as in some dormitory, or middle state.
I do not want to handle or profane the leaves, their winding sheets.
I could as soon dislodge a shade. I seem to inhale learning walking
amid their foliage; and the odor of their old moth-scented coverings
is fragrant as the first bloom of those sciential apples which grew
amid the happy orchard.--CHARLES LAMB.
I
Every Easter holidays the schoolmaster went back to Oxford. Head of a
flourishing preparatory school in the north, a bachelor, absorbed in
his boys, strenuous, matter-of-fact, he yet retained after some twenty
years of monotonous grind a romantic affection for the dear city of his
youthful dreams.
He always put up at the King’s Arms, that ancient hostel with the
undulating floors, where the ale is brown and strong, and the cold beef
tender and streaky. On his very first day he hied him to a solitude he
loved, paid his modest threepence, and mounted to a favorite haunt of
his--the picture-gallery of the Bodleian Library.
It was always empty; it almost always is empty. Undergraduates know
it not; artistic and intellectual residents appear to scorn its
prosaic portraits of bygone poets and college benefactors, its humble
curiosities. Visitors seldom trouble themselves to mount the few
extra steps leading to it from the world-famed library below. But
the schoolmaster loved to wander up and down the second gallery. He
loved the double archway with the traceried roof, where the statue
of William, Earl of Pembroke, stands in the centre, and the two wide
bay windows are filled with pale stained glass, and one has a deep,
comfortable seat.
As usual, the gallery seemed deserted, and the schoolmaster let
the peace of its solitude slide into his soul, till his spirit was
compassed about with a great calm. He strolled slowly through the
gallery, his hands, holding his straw hat, clasped behind him. He
always uncovered the instant he entered the little modest door in the
corner of the great quadrangle that leads to so many wonders. Presently
he reached the archway where he was wont to sit and dream.
With a start of surprise he discovered that it was already tenanted.
Under the portraits of Ben Jonson and Joseph Trapp, curled up in
a corner of the deep window-seat, his muddy boots reposing on the
sacred oak, was a boy--a small, thin boy in Norfolk jacket and
knickerbockers, apparently about twelve years old, who read absorbedly
a popular illustrated magazine. He never looked up as the schoolmaster
approached. Apparently he neither heard his footstep nor realized that
the newcomer had paused to stare at him in speechless astonishment.
Amazement, accompanied by extreme annoyance, was the schoolmaster’s
predominant emotion. There seemed to him something incongruous to the
verge of irreverence in anyone daring to read a modern magazine under
the very roof of the building that contained so much of venerable
scholarship.
It is true that the boy was perfectly quiet. Beyond the turning of
his page, he made no sound of any sort, and the schoolmaster found
himself watching this reader with a sort of dreadful fascination. He
longed that the child should reach the bottom of his page and look
up. He even gave a little cough to attract his attention. But the boy
seemed absolutely unconscious of either the stranger’s presence or his
scrutiny, and read on unmoved, smiling occasionally at what he read.
The schoolmaster fussed to the end of the gallery, pausing at every
window to look out over the roofs at the towers and spires of Oxford.
Then he fussed back again along the other side, where the view consists
of the grey-walled quadrangle, a veritable “haunt of ancient peace.”
The peace that had enveloped him on his first entry spread her wings
and fled. Irritation and curiosity had taken her place, and as he
reached the archway again he stopped and looked at the motionless
little figure in the window.
The boy was no longer reading.
The magazine lay on the window-seat beside him. His knees were drawn up
to his chin, his arms clasped about them, and he stared unblinkingly
at the portrait of Abraham Cowley on the wall that faced him.
The schoolmaster walked round the statue of William of Pembroke
till he, too, faced the boy. This time the child certainly glanced
in his direction, but the glance was of the most cursory order, and
wholly without interest. In an instant he had returned to his grave
contemplation of the poet, and the schoolmaster might himself have been
the statue of William of Pembroke for any interest he excited.
The boy was pale and thin-faced, with large, hollow eyes and a tall,
wide forehead--a scholar’s forehead, as the schoolmaster, accustomed
for years to the observation of boys, had already noted. But what
latent scholarship was displayed in the reading of that obnoxious
magazine? And what business, the schoolmaster asked himself angrily,
had a boy of that age to be boxed up indoors on a fine afternoon in the
Easter holidays?
The schoolmaster was a conscientious man in the pursuit of his
calling. From the very first he had taught himself to look upon boys
as individuals. He loved them; he whole-heartedly wished them well.
They were to him of most absorbing interest; but he liked to get away
from them sometimes, and nowhere had he been able to pass so completely
from his ordinary life of a hundred petty duties and anxieties as in
the high solitude of that deserted gallery, set in the very centre of
the scenes he held most dear, now spoilt and desecrated by this young
interloper with his horrid modern magazine. Why on earth did he choose
to come here?
The schoolmaster could bear it no longer. “Boy,” he exclaimed, “why do
you come and read here?”
Slowly the boy turned his melancholy eyes upon his questioner.
“Because,” he answered, civilly enough, but without any enthusiasm, “it
is generally perfectly quiet here.”
There was the faintest perceptible emphasis on the “generally,” not so
much impertinent as gently reproving. Having answered, he turned his
eyes again upon the chubby, smiling countenance of Abraham Cowley, and
silence fell upon them like a pall.
The schoolmaster was baffled, but more curious than ever. He was quite
conscious of the implied reproach in the “generally,” and he noted the
absence of the courteous “sir” with which any properly constituted boy
would conclude a remark made to an elder. But he could not feel that
the boy had been willfully rude. He would try again. “May I ask,” he
said pleasantly, “why you are so fond of looking at the portrait of
Abraham Cowley?”
Again the boy shifted his gaze from the smug charms of the poet to the
worn and somewhat homely features of his questioner.
“I like him cos he’s so good-tempered--in this one,” was the brief
reply.
The schoolmaster came and stood beside the boy, and looked at the
portrait. Above it was another, also by Kneller, but representing him
as thin and severe-looking.
“They’re very different, aren’t they?” the schoolmaster remarked.
“You’d hardly think they were the same man, would you?”
“I expect,” the boy said solemnly, “in the top one he’s been married.”
This startling supposition fairly took away the schoolmaster’s breath.
He racked his brains to remember all he had ever heard or read of
Abraham Cowley, and couldn’t for the life of him recollect whether he
was married or not. It is not in the nature of a true schoolmaster to
leave a youthful mind in the darkness of ignorance if he can be the
bearer of a torch whose light may pierce that gloom, so he said: “I
expect it was his political troubles that caused so marked a change in
his appearance. Do you know anything about him?”
“No, but I like him.”
“Shall I tell you about him?”
“No, thank you,” the boy answered politely, but with firm finality.
He took up his magazine again, opened it, spread it upon his knees, and
in one instant was absorbed in its pages.
The schoolmaster sat down on the window-seat and gazed alternately
at the boy and at the portraits of Ben Jonson and Joseph Trapp above
his head. Since he had been a little boy himself he had never felt
so snubbed. He was wholly unaccustomed to be a cypher in the eyes of
boys, and suddenly with devastating force there was flung upon him
the conviction that he never saw a real boy at all--that the boys
he saw were all carefully expurgated editions arranged to suit his
sensibilities.
A wild spirit of enterprise seduced the schoolmaster. He felt himself
as one who after long sailing in smooth, familiar waters suddenly
sights an unknown and precipitous shore.
He had come to Oxford to get away from the boys he thought he knew.
What if, at Oxford, he received real enlightenment with regard to a boy
he did not know? The sunshine faded and the gallery grew dark. Outside,
he heard the soft patter of a heavy April shower.
“You ought not to read in this light,” he said suddenly, “you will hurt
your eyes.”
The boy looked up surprised at this fresh interruption, but he
obediently closed his book: there is something almost irresistible in
the commands of those accustomed to exert authority.
“Do you come here often?” asked the schoolmaster.
“Yes, whenever I’ve got threepence to get in.”
“Has no one ever told you that when you are talking to an older man it
is considered polite to say ‘sir’?”
“No. I don’t know many old men, nor men at all, for the matter of that.”
“Why, Oxford is full of men.”
“That may be. I don’t know ’em. I only wish I did.”
The boy spoke bitterly and his eyes were full of gloom.
“Don’t you go to school?” this “older man” asked anxiously.
“No, I’m too delicate, so they say.”
“Who teaches you, then?”
“A guv’ness. I say, do you think we _ought_ to talk here?”
“I see no reason why not. This isn’t the library, there is no notice
enforcing silence.”
The boy looked as if he wished there was. He sat perfectly mute, with
his eyes fixed on the placid portrait over the schoolmaster’s head.
“Wouldn’t you like to come downstairs with me and see some of the
curiosities in the library?” the schoolmaster suggested beguilingly.
“No, thank you.”
Really it was most difficult to make any headway with this boy. But the
schoolmaster possessed to the full the necessary perseverance of his
craft, so he continued his catechism:
“Do your parents live in Oxford?”
“I haven’t got any parents, they’re dead.”
“Dear me, how sad! With whom do you live, then?”
“Aunts.”
Written words can in nowise express the snappiness with which the boy
ejaculated this monosyllable. The schoolmaster felt unaccountably
chilled and worsted, and silence fell upon them once more.
The black cloud had passed over the Bodleian, the rain ceased, and the
sun shone out again. The boy swung his feet off the window-seat, put on
his cap and picked up his magazine, and without a word of farewell,
strolled nonchalantly out of the gallery, leaving the schoolmaster to
exclaim when he had finally vanished, “Well, of all the curmudgeony
boys it has ever been my lot to meet, there goes the most curmudgeony!”
II
Yet he found it difficult to dismiss the ungracious youngster from his
thoughts. Next afternoon he sought the gallery again, but there was
no little figure curled up in the deep window-seat. The poet Cowley
smiled serenely, the gallery was deserted, dignified, reposeful as
of yore: with all its mellow charm of faded coloring, that even the
luminous stillness of that April afternoon could not burnish into real
brightness. But the usual sense of pleasant well-being, and ordered
peace, failed to enwrap the soul of the schoolmaster. Even as the day
before he had found the presence of the reading figure in the window
irritating and incongruous, so to-day he found its absence singularly
disturbing. He walked once round the gallery, sat a few minutes looking
at the portrait of Cowley and wondering what mysterious charm it
held for the queer child who loved it, and so into the dear familiar
irregular streets, where he scanned every boy who passed, in the hope
of coming across his small acquaintance of the day before. He went
every day to the gallery, but no boy was there. He almost gave up hope
of ever seeing him again, but he did not forget; and when, eight days
after their first meeting, he mounted to the gallery and saw the
little figure crouched in the window as before, with a gaily covered
magazine open on his knees, the schoolmaster’s heart beat a little
faster, and he hurried forward, exclaiming: “Where have you been all
these days?”
The boy started at his greeting, looked up, and a smile of recognition
changed his face so absolutely that the schoolmaster felt a queer
tightening in the muscles of his throat.
“I don’t get my pocket-money till a Friday,” the boy explained. “I
couldn’t come before.”
“Well, now you are here, let’s have a chat together,” the schoolmaster
said genially. “We both like this place, let’s tell each other the
reasons why, and see if they’re the same.”
He sat down beside the boy, just out of reach of the muddy boots. The
boy, his magazine still held open on his knees, surveyed his neighbor
with dark, mournful eyes. Now that the smile had ceased to lighten
his face, the schoolmaster was shocked at the sharpness of the thin
cheekbones, the hollows and the blue shadows under the solemn eyes.
“I can’t tell you why I like it,” said the boy, “’cept p’r’aps because
it’s so quiet, no one ever talks here, and there’s no women.”
“But women can come here if they like,” the schoolmaster objected.
“They never _do_ like, not when I’m here,” the boy exclaimed eagerly.
“I’ve been here every week for months and months and I’ve never seen
one.”
“But why do you object to women?” the schoolmaster persisted. “We
should be in a poor case without them, most of us.”
“_I_ don’t object to them,” the boy said wearily; “it’s them objects to
us, and they do talk so--talk and talk and talk about their sufferings.”
“Sufferings?” the schoolmaster repeated.
“_You_ know,” said the boy impatiently, “women’s sufferings and votes
and things, and Parliament and injustice and that.”
“Suffrage, suffrage, you mean suffrage!” cried the schoolmaster.
“It’s all the same, that’s what they talk about, and inferiority and
that. One can’t help being born a boy, can one?”
“_Help_ it!” exclaimed the schoolmaster. “Why, who’d be born anything
else if they had their choice?”
The boy’s pale cheeks flushed. “Do you really mean that?” he asked
eagerly.
“Of course I do. It’s a glorious thing to be a boy who’s going to be a
man.”
“_They_ don’t think so, they say it’s much better to be a girl; they’re
sorry I’m a boy.”
“Oh, come,” the schoolmaster said chaffingly. “You can’t expect me to
believe that. They may say so in a kind of joke, but they don’t really
mean it.”
“Do you know my aunts?”
“Well, no; but I expect they are very like other ladies, who often say
what they don’t mean.”
The boy gave one scornful glance in the direction of the schoolmaster,
lowered his eyes to the printed page, and was instantly absorbed.
The schoolmaster felt that he was dismissed. He had been weighed in
the balance, and found wanting in sympathy and insight, a mere stupid
looker-on at the outside of things. Five minutes ago the boy had
welcomed him. Now, it was as though the child had risen with the royal
prerogative, and closed the interview. The schoolmaster sighed deeply.
The boy looked up. His eyes were the color of a still pool in a
Devonshire trout stream, brown, with olive-green shadows, suggesting
depths unfathomable. The schoolmaster instantly seized upon the small
concession, exclaiming: “I came here every day in the hope of seeing
you again, and now that you are here, you sit and read. Don’t you think
it’s rather unkind?”
The boy flushed hotly, and once more the transforming smile illumined
his face as he said: “You came here on purpose to see me? Why?”
“Well, you see, I’ve known a good many boys in my time, and I thought
you seemed a bit lonely....”
The hungry eyes devoured him, and the schoolmaster stopped in the
middle of his sentence, for, like all Englishmen, he dreaded any
manifestation of feeling, and the boy looked as if he were about to
cry. His fears were groundless, however, for the child only said: “How
many boys have you known?”
“Rather over a thousand, I fancy. You see, it has been my business to
have to do with boys for over twenty years.”
“Over a thousand boys--and I don’t know one! How unfair things are, and
beastly.”
The boy looked enviously at the grizzled man who had known so many
boys; and the man looked pityingly at this boy who seemed to have been
somehow cheated of all that makes youth joyous.
“How is it you have no friends of your own age?” he said presently.
“Why don’t you beg your aunts to send you to school? You’d probably get
stronger directly you got there, with the regular games and busy life.”
“My aunts don’t like schools. They say boys learn to be tyrants and
bullies at school.”
“Oh, do they? You couldn’t have fifty tyrants in one place, or they’d
be the death of one another, like the Kilkenny cats.”
“My aunts say,” the boy continued, “that I’m to be a result. I won’t
be a result. It’s beastly to be a result. I’ll be a policeman when I’m
grown up. Just you wait. I’ll stand outside Parliament, and if a woman
comes near I’ll carry her to jail. You see if I don’t.”
The boy spoke with such vindictive bitterness that the schoolmaster was
shocked.
“I have no doubt,” he said soothingly, “that your aunts have good
reasons for many of their views. You cannot possibly judge of such
questions for many years to come.”
“You’d judge if you heard it all day long like I do,” the boy retorted.
“It’s only here I get away from it. Here in this nice quiet with that
fat, contented chap smiling at me; and now you’ve been and made me
talk about it, so even _he_ will know. You’ve gone and spoilt my
place--it’s too bad.”
The boy looked as if he was really going to cry this time, and the
schoolmaster felt dreadfully guilty.
“Tell me about your parents,” he said hastily. “Do you remember them?”
“My father died before I was born, and my mother just after--she always
was very unwise.”
“My dear boy, you ought not to speak about your mother like that. You
shock me.”
“Well, _they_ say so.”
“If anyone was to say to me that my mother was unwise, I’d--I’d knock
him down!” the schoolmaster exclaimed.
“P’r’aps you knew her?”
“Thank God, yes!”
“Ah, I didn’t, you see--and I don’t think I could knock Aunt Amabel
down--she’s very strong.”
“Of course not, of course not,” the schoolmaster said hastily. “I never
suggested such a thing for a moment. I expect you misunderstand your
aunts, and it is possible that they don’t quite understand you.”
The boy said nothing. He no longer stared at Cowley’s portrait. He
stared at the schoolmaster, and in his melancholy gaze was concentrated
all the bitterness and disappointment of his twelve short years.
“Let us come out and walk by the Cher,” said the schoolmaster.
The boy followed him obediently, and as they turned into Catharine
Street, slipped his hand into that of his new acquaintance.
“Twelve years old,” thought that worthy, “and he takes a fellow’s hand.
Poor little chap!” Aloud he said: “Boys generally take each other by
the arm, you know.”
Instantly his companion seized him by his, and arm in arm they sought
the sheltered walk loved well by Joseph Addison.
III
After that they met every day in the quadrangle of the Bodleian by
appointment, and together mounted to their favorite seat in the
picture-gallery. The boy no longer read a magazine; instead, he asked
questions--endless, anxious, exhaustive questions--as to the usual
doings and habits of boys who lived with each other and were brought up
by men. All his ideas on the subject were gathered from school stories,
and in consequence were crude and chimerical in the extreme. It was
undoubtedly a shock to him when this kindly friend of his frankly
admitted that he had frequently caned boys, and that he was supposed
to have “rather a heavy hand.” And the schoolmaster was still more
shocked at the bitterness of soul he discovered in this queer, quiet
boy. He gathered that the aunts--generally spoken of as “they”--were
ladies wholly absorbed in politics and every kind of movement for the
emancipation of women, and the schoolmaster pictured them as members
of the shrieking sisterhood, ill-favored and ill-dressed, oblivious of
the fact that feminine political opinions do not necessarily march in
elastic-sided boots. When the boy did condescend to mention one of his
aunts by name it was always of “Aunt Amabel” he spoke. She appeared
to be the guiding spirit of the trio, busy, strong, and energetic,
spending what time she could spare from politics in the pursuit of
all those games from which the unfortunate boy was debarred by lack
of comrades, and the schoolmaster found himself thinking with quite
unusual enthusiasm of the sister who kept house for him. At times he
had regretted her exclusively domestic talents. Now he even began to
share her serene conviction that women were, on the whole, so much
superior to men that only the very foolish could wish to resemble them.
In the course of their long talks the schoolmaster had enlightened
his companion as to what constituted, in his simple creed, the whole
duty of boy; and so far as his ideals related to honor and courage and
truthfulness, he found the child singularly receptive and responsive;
but when he touched on the chivalry that should be shown to women, when
he tried to arouse the protective instinct that is generally so deeply
rooted and spontaneous in even the most rough and tumble average boy,
he was met by blank incomprehension, or a veiled hostility that puzzled
and depressed him. “If this,” thought he to himself, “is the result
of the feminist movement on the rising generation of men, God help the
next generation of women!”
The men had come up, and the schoolmaster’s holiday was nearly ended.
In two days more he would need to return to his duties in the North,
to look after the cricket pitches in the playing-fields, and to see
that all was shipshape for the boys’ next term. For the last time he
met his sad-faced little friend in Catharine Street. This time they did
not go up to the picture-gallery. It was a sunny day in late April,
when Oxford seems to burgeon and blossom in a riotous ecstasy of youth
and gladness. River and playing-fields were gay with lithe, flannelled
figures, and everywhere the air was sweet with the scent of opening
lilacs.
“We’ll go on the river this afternoon,” cried the schoolmaster when he
spied the little figure waiting for him; “it’s far too fine to be boxed
up indoors. I’ll take you in a Canadian canoe. You must sit very still,
you know. You don’t think your aunts would mind, do you?”
“They’re in London. Aunt Amabel comes back to-night, but she’ll be off
again in a day or two; she’s always going to meetings. I’m jolly glad
she’s been away this week; she might have wanted to interfere----”
“I don’t think she would mind your coming out with me, or I wouldn’t
take you. You must tell her all about it this evening. I’ll give you my
card to show her, and you can explain how we met.”
The boy’s dark eyes were mutinous as he took the proffered card and
put it in his pocket, but he said nothing. On the river in the bright
sunshine the schoolmaster noticed how very ill he looked, and a great
desire possessed this kindly soul to make things easier for the boy.
The sight of the black shadows encircling the sombre eyes that should
have been so bright with youth and hope decided the schoolmaster to do
what he most hated doing--to interfere in another’s affairs, where he
had no possible excuse or even reason for so doing.
He walked back with the boy to his home, one of the large, ugly,
comfortable houses “standing in its own grounds,” that have sprung
up on the outskirts of beautiful old Oxford: a house that looked
excessively well-to-do and trim and neat. “Nothing of Mrs. Jellyby
here,” thought the schoolmaster.
“Shan’t I see you again?” asked the boy in a husky whisper, as they
reached his gate. “It’ll be awful when you’re gone.”
“We’ll see, we’ll see,” the schoolmaster said hastily. “I can’t make an
arrangement now. Good-bye, my boy. God bless you!”
The boy’s wistful eyes were more than he could bear. The man turned
hastily and walked away, nor once looked back at the watching figure by
the gate.
Next morning he called upon Aunt Amabel about ten o’clock. The less
conventional the hour, the more possible did he feel it might be
to explain his errand. She was at home and would see him. The boy
had evidently done his bidding. As he followed the maid from the
drawing-room to the study, he prayed that some Pentecostal gift of
tongues might be vouchsafed to him.
Aunt Amabel was seated at a large knee-hole table covered with
papers. She rose as he came into the room and held out her hand.
The business-like table, the litter of papers, was exactly what the
schoolmaster had expected, but the lady was wholly unlike the lady of
his dreams. Tall, well-dressed, good-looking, and by no means old, she
made things harder for him by her welcome. “You are the gentleman who
has been so good to Reginald? It is kind of you to call. I am most
pleased to meet you. He is a somewhat unusual boy, is he not? We rather
pride ourselves on his taste for old buildings, and things that do not
generally appeal to boys.”
The schoolmaster mumbled some vague politeness and seated himself upon
a chair which faced the knee-hole table. Aunt Amabel’s eyes were dark,
like the boy’s, but they were bright and lively, and she turned them
now upon her visitor with full inquiring gaze.
“I came,” the schoolmaster said bluntly, “to see you about your nephew.
He is not well, and I think his state of health arises largely from the
fact that he has no companions of his own age, nor suitable interests.
Why don’t you send him to school?”
As he spoke he was perfectly conscious that this self-possessed
young woman was misjudging him, and the knowledge made him even less
diplomatic than usual.
“We have never considered him strong enough for school life. He is an
unusual child of difficult temperament. He would be extremely unhappy
at school.”
There was a superior finality in the lady’s tone that roused all the
fighting element in the schoolmaster. “He could hardly be more unhappy
than he is at present,” he said sharply. “I know that this must appear,
as indeed it is, a piece of unwarrantable interference on my part, but,
having become really interested in the boy, I could not reconcile it to
my conscience to leave Oxford without warning you that if you persist
in keeping your nephew away from the natural companionship, amusements,
and employments of his age, he will wither away as surely as a plant
withers when light and air are withheld from it. That boy will die.”
He shook a thick forefinger at her, and the scorn died out of her eyes.
The men who most countenance the woman’s movement are seldom masterful.
Aunt Amabel began to like this dictatorial man. It was a new, and not
altogether disagreeable, experience to be rated.
“You have a school, haven’t you?” she asked, sweetly.
The schoolmaster’s dun-colored face crimsoned. “My dear young lady,”
he answered hotly, “if you imagine that I came to see you because I
was touting for another pupil, pray dismiss the idea from your mind.”
This time it was Aunt Amabel who blushed. “I came because, knowing a
good deal of boys, I feel sure that your nephew is delicate because
he is lonely and unoccupied; he is a very boyish boy, a boy who needs
the companionship of his own kind. You have an excellent preparatory
school quite near here. Try for a term--see what it does for Reginald.”
“To be quite candid,” said Aunt Amabel, “we do not care for the
training, mental or moral, that boys receive at the average preparatory
school.”
“Try one that’s not average,” he interrupted. “There are plenty of
them, all fads and flannel shirts and girls thrown in. He won’t learn
anything, but what does that matter? It’s health and youth and gladness
that you want for him, and a normal point of view; at present that
child’s a perfect misogynist.”
The lady started at the word, and at this critical moment her nephew
came into the room. At first he did not see his friend of the Bodleian;
when he did he stopped short, looking from his aunt to her visitor with
puzzled, timid eyes.
“Reginald,” said Aunt Amabel, “this gentleman says you are lonely and
unhappy, and that you would really like to go to school. Is this so?”
“Yes.”
The timid look faded from the boy’s eyes to be replaced by one that was
almost stern, so earnest was it.
“Why have you never said anything to me about it? You have never
complained.”
“What was the use?”
“But how could we know you were not happy if you never said anything?”
“He knew, without my never saying anything.” The boy pointed at the
schoolmaster, who sat with downcast eyes.
“So it appears,” the lady said somewhat tartly, “although you seem to
me to have said a good deal. That will do, Reginald; you may go.”
But Reginald did not go. He looked at the schoolmaster, and he looked
at his aunt. He took a step forward, exclaiming earnestly: “If you will
let me be like other boys, Aunt Amabel, I won’t be a policeman when I’m
grown up; I’ll give it up; I’ll truly be something else.” The boy spoke
as one who promises to part with some long-cherished and imperishable
ideal.
“Oh, child!” exclaimed poor, puzzled Aunt Amabel, “I can’t imagine what
you are talking about. _Do_ run away.”
“You see,” said the boy sadly to the schoolmaster, “she never _can_
understand,” and he hastened from the room.
The schoolmaster rose. “Believe me,” he said gently, “I do not want
your nephew for a pupil. I’d far rather keep him as a friend--I don’t
mean to say that a master can’t be a friend to his boys, but the
relationship must necessarily be a little different, and it has been a
pleasant experience to come across a boy under quite new circumstances.
I wouldn’t spoil it for the world.”
Aunt Amabel looked down, and the schoolmaster noticed that her
eyelashes were long and very black. “I am sure you mean kindly,” she
said gently, “and you may be sure I shall give every consideration to
what you have said.”
When her strange visitor had gone she sat for a long time quite still
in front of her table, staring with unseeing eyes at the many papers
scattered upon it. She knitted her black eyebrows and thought and
thought, but apparently to no purpose, for presently she said to
herself: “What _could_ he mean by calling that little boy a misogynist,
and what on earth could the child mean about not being a policeman?”
The boy was waiting for the schoolmaster at the gate as he went out.
“Well, was it any use?” he cried eagerly.
“My dear chap,” said that gentleman, “you are a little noodle. That’s
what you are.”
And the boy, as he trotted by the schoolmaster’s side, found something
vaguely comforting in this cryptic speech.