“Then mine’s Bungo-Peter.”
“But we’ve got no sticks.”
“I know where there’s two sticks,” said Peter. “Under the stairs. And we
can fight in the shrubbery over by the fence.”
The sticks were convenient little canes. “They ought to have hilts,”
said young Winterbaum. “You ever fenced?”
“Not much,” said Peter guardedly.
“I’ve often fenced with my cousin, the honourable Ralph—you know. Like
this—guard. One. Two. You’ve got to have a wrist.”
They repaired to the field of battle. “We stand aside while the seconds
pace out the ground,” explained young Winterbaum. “Now we shake hands.
Now we take our places.”
They proceeded to strike fencer-like attitudes. Young Winterbaum
suddenly became one of the master swordsmen of the world, but Peter was
chiefly intent on where he should hit young Winterbaum. He had got to
hit him and hurt him a lot, or else he would get Joan. They crossed
swords. Then young Winterbaum feinted and Peter hit him hard on the arm.
Then young Winterbaum thrust Peter in the chest, and began to explain at
once volubly that Peter was now defeated and dead and everything
conclusively settled.
But nobody was going to take away Peter’s Joan on such easy terms.
Peter, giving his antagonist no time to complete his explanation,
slashed him painfully on the knuckles. “I’m _not_ dead,” said Peter,
slashing again. “I’m not dead. See? Come on!”
Whereupon young Winterbaum cried out, as it were with a trumpet, in a
loud and grief-stricken voice. “Now I shall _hurt_ you. That’s too
much,” and swiped viciously at Peter’s face and raised a weal on Peter’s
cheek. Whereupon Peter, feeling that Joan was slipping from him, began
to rain blows upon young Winterbaum wherever young Winterbaum might be
supposed to be tender, and young Winterbaum began to dance about
obliquely and cry out, “Mustn’t hit my legs. Mustn’t hit my legs. Not
fair. Oo-oh! my knuckles!” And after one or two revengeful slashes at
Peter’s head which Peter—who had had his experiences with Joan in a
rage—parried with an uplifted arm, young Winterbaum turned and ran—ran
into the arms of Miss Murgatroyd, who had been attracted to the
shrubbery by his cries....
It was the first fight that had ever happened in the school of St.
George and the Venerable Bede since its foundation.
“He said I couldn’t fight him,” said Peter.
“He went on fighting after I’d pinked him,” said young Winterbaum.
Neither of them said a word about Joan.
So Miss Murgatroyd made a great session of the school, and the two
combatants, flushed and a little heroic, sat on either side of her
discourse. She said that this was the first time she had ever had to
reprove any of her pupils for fighting. She hoped that never again would
it be necessary for her to do so. She said that nothing we could do was
quite so wicked as fighting because nothing was so flatly contradictory
to our Lord’s commandment that we should love one another. The only
fight we might fight with a good conscience was the good fight. In that
sense we were all warriors. We were fighters for righteousness. In a
sense every one was a knight and a fighter, every girl as well as every
boy. Because there was no more reason why girls should not fight as well
as boys. Some day she hoped this would be recognized, and girls would be
given knighthoods and wear their spurs as proudly as the opposite sex.
Earth was a battlefield, and none of us must be dumb driven cattle or
submit to injustice or cruelty. We must not think that life was made for
silken ease or self-indulgence. Let us think rather of the Red Indian
perpetually in training for conflict, lean and vigorous and breathing
only through his nose. No one who breathed through his or her open mouth
would ever be a fighter.
At this point Miss Murgatroyd seemed to hesitate for a time. Breathing
was a very attractive topic to her, and it was drawing her away from her
main theme. She was, so to speak, dredging for her lost thread in the
swift undertow of hygienic doctrine as one might dredge for a lost
cable. She got it presently, and concluded by hoping that this would be
a lesson to Philip and Peter and that henceforth they would learn that
great lesson of Prince Kropotkin’s that co-operation is better than
conflict.
Neither of the two combatants listened very closely to this discourse.
Peter was wrestling with the question whether a hot red weal across
one’s cheek is compatible with victory, and young Winterbaum with the
still more subtle difficulty of whether he had been actually running
away or merely stepping back when he had collided with Miss Murgatroyd,
and what impression this apparently retrograde movement had made on her
mind and upon the mind of Peter. Did they understand that sometimes a
swordsman _had_ to go back and could go back without the slightest
discredit?...
§ 8
After this incident the disposal of Joan ceased to be a topic for
conversation between young Winterbaum and Peter, and presently young
Winterbaum conveyed to Peter in an offhand manner that he adored Minnie
Restharrow as the cleverest and most charming girl in the school. She
was indeed absolutely the best thing to be got in that way. She was, he
opined, cleverer even than Miss Murgatroyd. He was therefore, he
intimated, in love with Minnie Restharrow. It was a great passion.
So far as Peter was concerned, he gathered, it might be.
All the canons of romance required that Peter, having fought for and won
Joan, should thereupon love Joan and her only until he was of an age to
marry her. As a matter of fact, having disposed of this invader of his
private ascendancy over Joan, he thought no more of her in that
relationship. He decided, however, that if young Winterbaum was going to
have a sweetheart he must have one too, and mysterious processes of his
mind indicated Sydney Sheldrick as the only possible person. It was not
that Peter particularly wanted a sweetheart, but he was not going to let
young Winterbaum come it over him—any more than he was going to let
young Winterbaum be King of more than half of Surrey. He was profoundly
bored by all this competitiveness, but obscure instincts urged him to
keep his end up.
One day Miss Murgatroyd was expatiating to the mother of a prospective
pupil upon the wonderful effects of coeducation in calming the passions.
“The boys and girls grow up together, get used to each other, and
there’s never any nonsense between them.”
“And don’t they—well, take an interest in each other?”
“Not in that way. Not in any _undesirable_ way. Such as they would if
they had been morbidly separated.”
“But it seems almost unnatural for them not to take an interest.”
“Experience, I can assure you, shows otherwise,” said Miss Murgatroyd
conclusively.
At that moment two figures, gravely conversing together, passed across
the lawn in the middle distance; one was a well-grown girl of thirteen
in a short-skirted gymnasium dress, the other a nice-looking boy of ten,
knickerbockered, bare-legged, sandalled, and wearing the art green
blouse of the school. They looked the most open-air and unsophisticated
children of modernity it was possible to conceive. This is what they
were saying:
“Sydney, when I grow up I’m going to marry you. You got to be my
sweetheart. See?”
“You darling! Is that what you have to tell me? I didn’t think you loved
me a little bit.”
“I’m going to marry you,” said Peter, sticking to the facts of the case.
“I’d hug you. Only old Muggy is looking out of the window. But the very
first chance I get I’ll kiss you. And you’ll have to kiss me back, mind,
Peter.”
“Where some one can’t see us,” Peter stipulated.
“Oh! I _love_ spooning,” said the ardent Sydney. “’Member when I kissed
you before?...”
“The girls refine the boys and the whole atmosphere is just a _family_
atmosphere,” Miss Murgatroyd was explaining at the window.
CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
THE HIGH CROSS PREPARATORY SCHOOL
§ 1
From the time when he was christened until he was ten, Lady Charlotte
Sydenham remained only a figure in the remotest background of Peter’s
life. Once or twice he saw her in the downstairs room at The Ingle-Nook
with his aunts bristling defensively beside her, and once she came to
the school, and each time she looked at him with a large, hard, hostile
smile and said: “And ha-ow’s Peter?” and then with a deepening
disapproval: “Ha-ow’s Joan?” But that did not mean that Lady Charlotte
had done with Joan and Peter, nor that she had relinquished in the
slightest degree her claims to dominate their upbringing. She was just
letting them grow up a little “according to their mother’s ideas, poor
woman,” and biding her time. She wrote every now and then to Aunts
Phyllis and Phœbe, just to remind them of her authority, and she wrote
two long and serious letters to Oswald about what was to be done. He
answered her briefly in such terms as: “Let well alone. Religion comes
later.” Oswald had never returned to England. He had been in Uganda now
for five long years, and her fear of him was dying down. She was
beginning to think that perhaps he did not care very much for Joan and
Peter. He had had blackwater fever again. Perhaps he would never come
home any more.
Then in the years 1901 and 1902 she had been much occupied by a special
campaign against various London socialists that had ended in a libel
case. She was quite convinced that all socialists were extremely immoral
people, she was greatly alarmed at the spread of socialism, and so she
wrote and employed a secretary to write letters to a number of people
marked “private and confidential,” warning them against this or that
prominent socialist. In these she made various definite statements
which, as her counsel vainly tried to argue, were not to be regarded as
statements of fact so much as illustrations of the tendency of socialist
teaching. She was tackled by a gentleman in a red necktie named Bamshot,
of impregnable virtue, in whom her free gift of “numerous illegitimate
children” had evoked no gratitude. Her efforts to have him “thoroughly
cross-examined” produced no sympathy in either judge or jury. All men,
she realized, are wicked and anxious to shield each other. She left the
court with a passionate and almost uncontrollable desire to write more
letters about Bamshot and more, worse than ever, and with much nastier
charges. And it was perhaps a subconscious effort to shift the pressure
of this dangerous impulse that turned her mind to the state of spiritual
neglect in which Joan and Peter were growing out of childhood.
A number of other minor causes moved her in the same direction. She had
had a violent quarrel about the bill with the widow of an Anglican
clergyman who kept her favourite pension at Bordighera; and she could
still not forgive the establishment at Pallanza that, two years before,
had refused to dismiss its head-waiter for saying “Vivent les Boers!” in
her hearing. She had been taking advice about a suitable and thoroughly
comfortable substitute for these resorts, and meanwhile she had stayed
on in England—until there were oysters on the table. Lady Charlotte
Sydenham had an unrefined appetite for oysters, and with oysters came a
still less refined craving for Dublin stout. It was an odd secret
weakness understood only by her domestics, and noted only by a small
circle of intimate friends.
“I don’t seem to fancy anything very much today, Unwin,” Lady Charlotte
used to say.
“I don’t know if you’d be tempted by a nice oyster or two, m’lady.
They’re very pick-me-up things,” the faithful attendant would suggest.
“It’s September now, and there’s an R in the month, so it’s safe to
venture.”
“Mm.”
“And if I might make so bold as to add a ’arf bottle of good Guinness,
m’lady. It’s a tonic. Run down as you are.”
Without oysters neither Lady Charlotte nor Unwin would have considered
stout a proper drink for a lady. And indeed it was not a proper drink
for Lady Charlotte. A very little stout sufficed to derange her
naturally delicate internal chemistry. Upon the internal chemistry of
Lady Charlotte her equanimity ultimately depended. There is wrath in
stout....
Then Mr. Grimes, who had never ceased to hope that considerable
out-of-court activities might still be developed around these two little
wards, had taken great pains to bring Aunt Phœbe’s _Collected Papers of
a Stitchwoman (Second Series)_ and her little precious volume _Carmen
Naturæ_ before his client’s notice.
These books certainly made startling reading for Lady Charlotte. She had
never seen the first “Stitchwoman” papers, she knew nothing of
Swinburne, Ruskin, Carlyle, the decadents, nothing of the rich
inspirations of the later Victorian period, and so the almost luscious
richness of Aunt Phœbe’s imagination, her florid verbiage, her note of
sensuous defiance, burst almost devastatingly upon a mind that was
habituated to the ordered passions and pearly greys of Mrs. Henry Wood’s
novels _More Leaves, Good Words_, and _The Quiver_.
“’With what measure ye mete,’” she read, “’so shall it be meted unto you
again,’ and the Standard that Man has fixed for woman recoils now upon
his head. Which standard is it to be,—His or Hers? No longer can we
fight under two flags. Wild oats, or the Immaculate Banner? Question to
be answered shrewdly, and according to whether we deem it is Experience
or Escape we live for, now that we are out of Eden footing it among the
sturdy, exhilarating thistles. What will ye, my masters?—pallid man
unstained, or seasoned woman? Judgment hesitates. Judgment may indeed
hesitate. I, who sit here stitching, mark her hesitation,
myself—observant. Is it too bold a speculation that presently golden
lassies as well as golden lads will sow their wild oats bravely on the
slopes of life? Is it too much to dream of that grave mother of a
greater world, the Woman of the Future, glancing back from the glowing
harvest of her life to some tall premonition by the wayside?—her One
Wild Oat! the crown and seal of her education!”
“Either she means nothing by that,” said Lady Charlotte, “or she means
just sheer depravity. Wild Oat, indeed! Really! To call it _that!_ With
Joan on her hands already!”
And here again is a little poem from _Carmen Naturæ_, which also
impressed Lady Charlotte very unfavourably:
THE MATERIALIST SINGS
Put by your tangled Trinities
And let the atoms swing,
The merry magic atoms
That trace out everything.
These ancient gods are fantasies,
Mere Metaphors and Names;
But I can feel the Vortex Ring
Go singing through my veins.
No casket of a pallid ghost,
But all compact of thrills,
My body beats and throbs and lives,
My Mighty Atom wills.
“I _don’t_ know what the world is coming to,” said Lady Charlotte. “In
other times a woman who ventured to write such blasphemy would have been
Struck Dead....”
“Thrills again!” said Lady Charlotte, turning over the offending pages.
“In a book that any one may read. Exposing her thrills to any Bagman who
chooses to put down three and sixpence for the pleasure. Imagine it,
Unwin!”
Unwin did her best, assuming an earnest expression....
Other contributory influences upon Lady Charlotte’s state of mind were
her secret anxiety for the moral welfare of the realm now that Queen
Victoria had given place to the notoriously lax Edward VII., and the
renascence of sectarian controversies in connexion with Mr. Balfour’s
Education Act. Anglicanism was rousing itself for a new struggle to keep
hold of the nation’s children, the Cecils and Lord Halifax were ranging
wide and free with the educational dragnet, and Lady Charlotte was a
part of the great system of Anglicanism. The gale that blows the ships
home, lifts the leaves.... But far more powerful than any of these
causes was the death of a certain Mr. Pybus, who was Unwin’s
brother-in-law; he died through an operation undertaken by a plucky
rather than highly educated general practitioner, to remove a neglected
tumour. This left Unwin’s sister in want of subsidies, and while Unwin
lay in bed one night puzzling over this family problem, it occurred to
her that if her sister could get some little girl to mind——...
§ 2
Mr. Grimes was very helpful and sympathetic when Lady Charlotte
consulted him. He repeated the advice he had given five years ago, that
Lady Charlotte should not litigate but act, and so thrust upon the other
parties the onus of litigation. She should obtain possession of the two
children, put them into suitable schools—“I don’t see how we can put
that By-blow into a school,” Lady Charlotte interpolated—and refuse to
let the aunts know where they were until they consented to reasonable
terms, to the proper religious education of the children, to their
proper clothing, and to their separation. “Directly we have the
engagement of the Misses Stubland not to disturb the new arrangement,”
said Mr. Grimes, “we shall have gained our point. I see no harm in
letting the children rejoin their aunts for their holidays.”
“That woman may corrupt them at any time,” said Lady Charlotte.
“On that point we can watch and enquire. Of course, the boy might stay
at the school for the holiday times. There is a class of school which
caters for that sort of thing. That we can see to later.”...
Mr. Grimes arranged all the details of the abduction of Joan and Peter
with much tact and imagination. As a preliminary step he made Lady
Charlotte write to Aunt Phœbe expressing her opinion that the time was
now ripe to put the education of the children upon a rational footing.
They were no longer little children, and it was no longer possible for
them to go on as they were going. Peter was born an English gentleman,
and he ought to go to a good preparatory school for boys forthwith;
Joan’s destinies in life were different, but they were certainly
destinies for which play-acting, running about with bare feet, and
dressing like a little savage could be no sort of training. Lady
Charlotte (Mr. Grimes made her say) had been hoping against hope that
some suggestion for a change would come from the Misses Stubland. She
could not hope against hope for ever. She must therefore request a
conference, at which Mr. Grimes could be present, for a discussion of
the new arrangements that were now urgently necessary. To this the
Misses Stubland replied evasively and carelessly. In their reply Mr.
Grimes, without resentment, detected the hand of Mr. Sycamore. They were
willing to take part in a conference as soon as Mr. Oswald Sydenham
returned. They had reason to believe he was on his way to England now.
Lady Charlotte, still guided by Mr. Grimes, then assumed a more
peremptory tone. She declared that in the interests of both children it
was impossible for things to go on any longer as they had been going.
Already the boy was ten. The plea that nothing could be done until Mr.
Sydenham returned was a mere delaying device. The boy ought to go to
school forthwith. Lady Charlotte was extremely sorry that the Misses
Stubland would not come to any agreement upon this urgent matter. She
could not rest content with things in this state, and she would be
obliged to consider what her course of action—for the time had come for
her to take action—must be.
With the way thus cleared, Mr. Grimes set his forces in motion. “Leave
it to me, Lady Charlotte,” he said. “Leave it to me.” A polite young man
appeared one morning seated in a chariot of fire outside the road gate
of the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede. He was in one of
those strange and novel portents, a “motor-car.” This alone made him
interesting and attractive, and it greatly impressed young Winterbaum to
discover that the visitor had come about Joan and Peter. Young
Winterbaum went out to scrutinize the motor-car and its driver, and see
if there was anything wrong about it. But it was difficult to
underestimate.
“It’s a petrol car,” he said. “Belsize.... Those are fine lamps.”
Miss Murgatroyd gathered that the guardians of Joan and Peter found it
necessary to interview the children, and had sent the car to fetch them.
“Miss Stubland said nothing of this when I saw her the day before
yesterday,” said Miss Murgatroyd. “We do not care for interruptions in
the children’s work.”
The young man explained that the case was urgent. “Lady Charlotte has
been called away. And she must see the children before she goes out of
England.”
There was something very reassuring about the motor-car. They departed
cheerfully to the ill-concealed envy and admiration of young Winterbaum.
The young man had red hair, a white, freckled face, and a costly and
remarkable made-up necktie of green plush. The expression of his pale
blue eyes was apprehensive, and ever and again he blew. His efforts at
conversation were fragmentary and unilluminating. “I got to take you for
a long ride,” he said, seating himself between Peter and Joan. “A lovely
long ride.”
“Where?” said Joan.
“You’ll see in a bit,” said the young man.
“We going to Chastlands?” asked Peter.
“No,” said the young man.
“Then where are we going?” said Peter.
“These here cars’ll do forty—fifty miles an hour,” said the young man,
changing the subject.
In a little while they had passed beyond the limits of Peter’s knowledge
altogether, and were upon an unknown road. It was astonishing how the
car devoured the road. You saw a corner a long way off and then
immediately you were turning this corner. The car went as swiftly up the
hills as down. It said “honk.” The trees and hedges flew by as if one
was in a train, and behind we trailed a marvellous cloud of dust. The
driver sat before us with his head sunken between his hunched-up
shoulders; he never seemed to move; he was quite different from the
swaying, noble coachman with the sun-red face, wearing a top hat with a
waist and a broad brim, who sat erect and poised his whip and drove Lady
Charlotte’s white horse.
§ 3
For a time the road ran undulating between high hedges and tall trees
and through villages, and all along to the right of it were the steep,
round-headed Downs. Then came a little town, and the automobile turned
off into a valley that cut the Downs across and opened out more and
more, and then came heathery common and a town, and then lanes and many
villages, flat meadows and flatter, poplars, and then another town with
a bridge, and then across long levels of green a glimpse of the big
tower of Windsor Castle. “This is Runnymede, where Magna Carta was
signed,” said the young man suddenly. “And that’s Windsor, where the
King lives—when he isn’t living somewhere else, as he usually does....
He’s a _’ot_ un is the King.... See the chap there sailing a boat?”
They went right into Windsor and had a glimpse of the great gates of the
Castle and the round tower very near to them, and then they turned down
a steep, narrow, paved street and so came into a district of little mean
villas in rows and rows. And outside one of these the car stopped.
“Here we are,” said the young man.
“Where are we?” asked Peter.
“Where we get out,” said the young man. “Time we had a feed.”
“Dinnah,” said Joan, with a bright expression, and prepared to descend.
A small, white-faced, anxious woman appeared at the door. She was
wearing amiability as one wears a Sabbath garment. Moreover, she had a
greyish-black dress that ended in a dingy, stiff buff frilling at the
neck and wrists.
“You Mrs. Pybus?” asked the young man.
“I been expecting you a nour,” said Mrs. Pybus, acquiescing in the name.
“Is this the young lady and gentleman?”
That again was a question that needed no answer. The group halted
awkwardly on the doorstep for a few seconds. “And this is Miss Joan?”
said Mrs. Pybus, with a joyless smile. “I didn’t expect you to be ’arf
yr’ size. And what a short dress they put you in! You must ’ave regular
shot up. Makes you what I call leggy....”
This again was poor as a conversational opening.
“’Ow old might you be, dearie?” asked Mrs. Pybus.
“I’m eight,” said Joan. “But I’ll be nine soon.”
The young man for inscrutable reasons found this funny. He guffawed.
“She’s eight,” he said to the world at large; “but she’ll be nine soon.
That’s good, that is!”
“If you’re spared, you shud say,” said Mrs. Pybus. “You’re a big eight,
any’ow. ’Ow old are _you_, dear?”