imminent travel. “H’m.”
He went out to the fly, stood ready to enter it, and then swivelled
round very quickly and looked up at his aunt’s bedroom window in time to
catch an instant impression of a large, anxious face regarding him.
“Ah!” said Oswald, and returned smiling grimly into the hall.
“Cashel,” he called.
“Sir?”
“Her ladyship is up. Tell her I have a few words to say to her before
she goes.”
“Beg pardon, sir——”
“Look here, Cashel, you do what I tell you.”
“I’ll tell Miss Unwin, sir.”
He went upstairs, leaving Oswald still thinking over the rugs. Yes, she
was _off!_ She had got everything; pointed Alpine sticks, tea-basket,
travelling campstool. It must be Switzerland or Italy for the winter at
least. A great yearning to see his aunt with his own eye came upon
Oswald. He followed Cashel upstairs quietly but swiftly, and found him
in a hasty whispered consultation with Unwin on the second landing. “Oh
my ’ed’ll burst _bang_,” Unwin was saying.
“’Er ladyship, sir,” she began at the sight of Oswald.
“Ssh!” he said to her, and held her and Cashel silent with an uplifted
forefinger while he listened to the sounds of a large powerful woman
going to bed swiftly and violently in her clothes.
“I must go in to her, sir,” said Unwin breaking the silence. “Poor dear!
It’s a _very_ sudden attact.”
The door opened and closed upon Unwin.
“Lock the door on him, you—you _Idiot!_” they heard Lady Charlotte
shout—too late.
The hated and dreaded visage of Oswald appeared looking round the corner
of the door into the great lady’s bedroom. Her hat had been flung aside,
she was tying on an unconvincing night cap over her great blond
travelling wig; her hastily assumed nightgown betrayed the agate brooch
at her neck.
“How dare you, sir!” she cried at the sight of him.
“You’re not ill. You’re going to cut off to Italy this afternoon. What
have you done to my Wards?”
“A lady’s sick room! Sacred, Sir! Have you no sense of decency?”
“Is it measles, Auntie?”
“Go _away_!”
“I daren’t. If I leave you alone in this country for a year or two
you’re bound to get into trouble. What am I to _do_ with you?”
“Unbecoming intrusion!”
“You ought to be stopped by the Foreign Office. You’ll lead to a war
with Italy.”
“Go for a doctor, Cashel,” she cried aloud in her great voice. “Go for
the doctor.”
“M’lady,” very faintly from the landing.
“And countermand the station cab, Cashel,” said Oswald.
“If you do anything of the sort, Cashel!” she cried, and sitting up in
bed clutched the sheets with such violence that a large spring-sided
boot became visible at the foot of the bed. The great lady had gone to
bed in her boots. Aunt and nephew both glared at this revelation in an
astonished silence.
“How _can_ you, Auntie,” said Oswald.
“If I choose,” said Lady Charlotte. “If I choose——Oh! _Go away!_”
“Back to dinner,” said Oswald sweetly, and withdrew.
He was still pensive upon the landing when Unwin appeared to make sure
that the station cab was not countermanded....
Under the circumstances he was not surprised to find on his return from
The Ingle-Nook that he was now the only occupant of Chastlands. Aunt
Charlotte had fled, leaving behind a note that had evidently been
written before his arrival.
_My dear Nephew,—I am sorry that my arrangements for going abroad
this winter, already made, prevent my welcoming you home for this
uninvited and totally unexpected visit. I am sure Cashel and the
other servants will take good care of you. You seem to know the way
to their good graces. There are many things I should have liked to
talk over with you if you had given me due and proper notice of your
return as you ought to have done, instead of leaving it to a
solicitor to break the glad tidings to me, followed by a sixpenny
telegram. As it is, I shall just miss you. I have to go, and I
cannot wait. All my arrangements are made. I suppose it is idle to
expect civility from you ever or the slightest attention to the
convenances. The Sydenhams have never shone in manners. Well, I hope
you will take those two poor children quite out of the hands of
those smoking, blaspheming, nightgown-wearing Limpsfield women. They
are utterly unfit for such a responsibility. Utterly. I would not
trust a pauper brat in their hands. The children require firm
treatment, the girl especially, or they will be utterly spoilt. She
is deceitful and dishonest, as one might expect; she gave Mrs. Pybus
a very trying time indeed, catching measles deliberately and so
converting the poor woman’s house into a regular hospital. I fear
for her later. I have done my best for them both. No doubt you will
find it all spun into a fine tale, but I trust your penetration to
see through a tissue of lies, however plausible it may seem at the
first blush. I am glad to think you are now to relieve me of a
serious responsibility, though how a single man not related to her
in the slightest degree can possibly bring up a young girl, even
though illegitimate, without grave scandal, passes my poor
comprehension. No doubt I am an old fashioned old fool nowadays!
Thank God! I beg to be excused!_
_Your affectionate Aunt_
CHARLOTTE.
Towards the end of this note her ladyship’s highly angular handwriting
betrayed by an enhanced size and considerable irregularity, a deflection
from her customary calm.
§ 8
Oswald knocked for some time at the open green door of The Ingle-Nook
before attracting any one’s attention. Then a small but apparently only
servant appeared, a little round-faced creature who looked up hard into
Oswald’s living eye—as though she didn’t quite like the other. She
explained that “Miss Phyllis” was not at home, and that “Miss Phœbe
mustn’t be disturved.” Miss Phœbe was working. Miss Phyllis had gone
away with Mary——
“Who’s Mary?” said Oswald.
“Well, Sir, it’s Mary who always ’as been ’ere, Sir,”—to Windsor to be
with Miss Joan. “And it’s orders no one’s allowed to upset Miss Phœbe
when she’s writing. Not even Lady Charlotte Sydenham, Sir. I dursn’t
give your name, Sir, even. I dursn’t.”
“Except,” she added reverentially, “it’s Death or a Fire.”
“You aren’t the Piano, per’aps?” she asked.
Oswald had to confess he wasn’t.
The little servant looked sorry for him.
And that was in truth the inexorable law now of The Ingle-Nook. Aunt
Phœbe was taking herself very seriously—as became a Thinker whose
_Stitchwoman_ papers, deep, high, and occasionally broad in thought,
were running into a sale of tens of thousands. So she sat hard and close
at her writing-table from half-past nine to twelve every morning,
secluded and defended from all the world, correcting, musing deeply
over, and occasionally reading aloud the proofs of the third series of
_Stitchwoman_ papers. (Old Groombridge, the occasional gardener, used to
listen outside in awe and admiration. “My word, but she do give it ’em!”
old Groombridge used to say.) Oswald perceived that there was nothing to
do but wait. “I’ll wait,” he said, “downstairs.”
“I suppose I ought to let you in,” said the little servant, evidently
seeking advice.
“Oh, decidedly,” said Oswald, and entered the room in which he had
parted from Dolly six years ago.
The door closed behind the little servant, and Oswald found himself in a
house far more heavily charged with memories than he could have
expected. The furniture had been but little altered; it was the morning
time again, the shadow masses fell in the same places, it had just the
same atmosphere of quiet expectation it had had on that memorable day
before the door beyond had opened and Dolly had appeared, subdued and
ashamed, to tell him of the act that severed them for ever. How living
she seemed here by virtue of those inanimate things! Had that door
opened now he would have expected to see her standing there again. And
he was alive still, strong and active, altered just a little by a touch
of fever and six short years of experience, but the same thing of
impulse and desire and anger, and she had gone beyond time and space,
beyond hunger or desire. He had walked between this window and this
fireplace on these same bricks on which he was pacing now, spitting
abuse at her, a man mad with shame and thwarted desire. Never had he
forgiven her, or stayed his mind to think what life had been for her,
until she was dead. That outbreak, with gesticulating hands and an
angry, grimacing face, had been her last memory of him. What a broken
image he had made of himself in her mind! And now he could never set
things right with her, never tell her of his belated understanding and
pity. “I was a weak thing, confused and torn between my motives. Why did
you—you who were my lover—why did you not help me after I had stumbled?”
So the still phantom in that room reproached him, a phantom of his own
creation, for Dolly had never reproached him; to the end she had had no
reproaches in her heart for any one but herself because of their
disaster.
“Hold tight to love, little people,” he whispered. “Hold tight to
love.... But we don’t, we don’t....”
Never before had Oswald so felt the tremendous pitifulness of life. He
felt that if he stayed longer in this room he must cry out. He walked to
the garden door and stood looking at the empty flagstone path between
the dahlias and sunflowers.
It was all as if he had but left it yesterday, except for the heartache
that now mingled with the sunshine.
“Pat—whack—pat—whack”; he scarcely heeded that rhythmic noise.
Peter had gone out of his head altogether. He walked slowly along the
pathway towards the little arbour that overhung the Weald. Then,
turning, he discovered Peter with a bat in his hand, regarding him....
Directly Oswald saw Peter he marvelled that he had not been eager to see
him before. The boy was absurdly like Dolly; he had exactly the same
smile; and directly he saw the gaunt figure of his one-eyed guardian he
cried out, “It’s Nobby!” with a voice that might have been hers. There
was a squeak of genuine delight in his voice. He wasn’t at all the
sturdy little thing in a pinafore that Oswald remembered. He seemed
indeed at the first glance just a thin, flat-chested little Dolly in
grey flannel trousers.
He had obviously been bored before this happy arrival of Oswald. He had
been banging a rubber ball against the scullery with a cricket-bat and
counting hits and misses. It is a poor entertainment. Oswald did not
realize how green his memory had been kept by the Bungo-Peter saga, and
Peter’s prompt recognition after six years flattered him.
The two approached one another slowly, taking each other in.
“You remember me?” said Oswald superfluously.
“Don’t I just! You promised me a lion’s skin.”
“So I did.”
He could not bear to begin this new relationship as a defaulter. “It’s
on its way to you,” he equivocated, making secret plans.
Peter, tucking his bat under his arm and burying his hands in his
trouser pockets, drew still nearer. At a distance of four feet or
thereabouts he stopped short and Oswald stopped short. Peter regarded
this still incredible home-comer with his head a little on one side.
“It was you, used to tell me stories.”
“You don’t remember my telling you stories?”
“I do. About the Ba-ganda who live in U-ganda. Don’t you remember how
you used to put out my Zulus and my elephants and lions on the floor and
say it was Africa. You taught us roaring like lions—Joan and me. Don’t
you remember?”
Oswald remembered. He remembered himself on all fours with the children
on the floor of the sunny playroom upstairs, and some one sometimes
standing, sometimes sitting above the game, some one who listened as
keenly as the children, some one at whom he talked about that world of
lakes as large as seas, and of trackless, sunless forests and of
park-like glades and wildernesses of flowers, and about strings of
loaded porters and of encounters with marvelling people who had never
before set eyes on a European....
§ 9
The idea that the guardianship of Peter was just a little duty to be
seen to, vanished at the sight of him in favour of the realization of a
living relationship. There are moments when small boys of ten in perfect
health and condition can look the smallest, flimsiest, and most pathetic
of created things—and at the same time preternaturally valiant and
intelligent. They take on a likeness to sacred flames that may at any
moment flicker out. More particularly does this unconscious camouflage
of delicacy occur in the presence of parents and guardians already in a
state of self-reproach and emotional disorder. Mr. Grimes with an eye to
growth had procured a grey flannel suit a little too large for Peter,
but it never occurred to Oswald that the misfit could be due to anything
but a swift and ominous shrinkage of the boy. He wanted to carry him off
forthwith to beer and cream and sea-bathing.
But these were feelings he knew he must not betray.
“I must tell you some more stories,” he said. “I’ve come back to England
to live.”
“_Here?_”—brightly.
“Well, near here. But I shall see a lot of you now, Peter.”
“I’ll like that,” said Peter. “I’ve often thought of you....”
A pause.
“You broken your arm?” said Peter.
“Not so bad as that. I’ve got to have some bits of shell taken out.”
“That Egyptian shell? When you got the V.C.?”
“I never told you of the Egyptian shell?” asked Oswald.
“Mummy did. Once. Long ago.”
Another pause.
“This garden’s not so greatly altered, Peter,” said Oswald.
“There’s a Friendship’s Garden up that end,” said Peter, indicating the
end by a movement of his head. “But it isn’t much. Aunt Phœbe started it
and forgot it. Every one who came was to plant something. And me and
Joan have gardens, but they’ve got all weedy now.”
“Let’s have a look at it all,” said Oswald, and guardian and ward
strolled towards the steep.
“The Dahlias are splendid this year,” Oswald remarked, “and these
Japanese roses are covered with berries. Splendid, aren’t they? One can
make a jelly of them. Quite a good jelly. And let me see, wasn’t there a
little summerhouse at the end of this path where one looked over the
Weald? Ah! here it is. Hardly changed at all.”
He sat down. Here he had talked with Dolly and taken her hand....
He bestirred himself to talk.
“And exactly how old are you now, Peter?”
“Ten years and two months,” said Peter.
“We’ll have to find a school for you.”
“Have you been in Africa since I saw you?” Peter asked, avoiding the
topic.
“Since you saw me going off,” said Oswald, and the man glanced at the
boy and the boy glanced at the man, and each was wondering what the
other remembered. “I’ve been in Uganda all the time. There’s been
fighting and working. Some day you must go to Uganda and see all that
has been done. We’ve made a good railway and good roads and telegraphs.
We’ve put down robbers and cruelty.”
“And shot a lot of lions?”
“Plenty. The lions were pretty awful for a bit. About Nairobi and along
the line.”
“Shot ’em when they were coming at you?”
“One was coming straight at me.”
“That’s my skin,” said Peter.
Oswald made no answer.
“I’d like to go to Africa,” said Peter.
“You shall.”
He decided to begin at once upon his neglected task of making an
Imperial citizen according to the ideas that prevailed before the advent
of the New Imperialism. “That sort of thing,” he said, “is what we
Englishmen are for, you know, Peter. What our sort of Englishman is for
anyhow. We have to go about the world and make roads and keep the peace
and see fair play. We’ve got to kill big beasts and climb hard
mountains. That’s the job of the Englishman. He’s a sort of policeman. A
sort of working guardian. Not a nosy slave-driver trying to get rich. He
chases off slave-drivers. All the world’s his beat. India, Africa,
China, and the East, all the seas of the world. This little fat green
country, all trim and tidy and set with houses and gardens, isn’t much
of a land for a man, you know—unless he’s an invalid. It’s a good land
to grow up in and come back to die in. Or rest in. But in between, no!”
“No,” said Peter.
“No.”
“But you haven’t come back to die, Uncle Nobby?”
“No fear. But I’ve had to come back. I’m resting. This old arm, you
know, and all that sort of thing. Just for a time.... And besides I want
to see a lot of you.”
“Yes.”
“You have to grow up here and learn all you can, science and all sorts
of things, so that you can be a useful man—wherever you have to go.”
“Africa,” said Peter.
“Africa, perhaps. And that’s why one has to go to school and college—and
learn all about it.”
“They haven’t taught me much about it yet,” said Peter.
“Well, you haven’t been to much in the way of schools,” said Oswald.
“Are there better schools?”
“No end. We’re going to find one,” said Oswald.
“I wish school was over,” said Peter.
“Why? You’ve got no end to learn yet.”
“I want to begin,” said Peter, looking out across the tumbled gentleness
of the Weald.
“Begin school?”
“No, begin—Africa, India—doing things.”
“School first,” said Oswald.
“Are there schools where you learn about guns and animals and mountains
and foreign people?” said Peter.
“There must be,” said Oswald. “We’ll find something.”
“Where you don’t do Latin and parsing and ’straction of the square
root.”
“Oh! those things have their place.”
“Did you have to do them, Uncle Nobby?”
“Rather.”
“Were they useful to you?”
“At times—in a way. Of course those things are good as training, you
know—awfully good. Harden up the mental muscles, Peter.”
Peter made no reply to that.
Presently Peter said, “Shall I learn about machines?”
“When you’ve done some mathematics, Peter.”
“I’d like to fly,” said Peter.
“That’s far away yet.”
“There was a boy at that school, his father was an engineer; and he said
that flying machines were coming quite soon.”
This was beyond Oswald’s range.
“The French have got a balloon that steers about,” he said. “That’s as
near as we are likely to come to flying for a long time yet.”
“This boy said that he meant a real flying machine, not a balloon. It
was to be heavier than air. It would fly like a kite or a bird.”
“I doubt if we’ll see that in my lifetime,” said Oswald; “or yours,”
blind to the fate that had marked Peter for its own.
“H’m,” said Peter, with a shadow falling upon one of his brightest
dreams. (Nobby ought to know these things. His word ought surely to be
final. Still, after all, this chap’s father was an engineer.) “I’d love
to fly,” said Peter.
§ 10
Something with the decorative effect of a broad processional banner in a
very High Church indeed, appeared upon the flagstone path. It was Aunt
Phœbe.
She had come out into the garden half an hour before her usual time. But
indeed from the moment when she had heard Oswald and Peter talking in
the garden below she had been unable to write more. After some futile
attempts to pick up the lost thread of her discourse, she had gone to
her bedroom and revised her toilet, which was often careless in the
morning, so as to be more expressive of her personality. She was wearing
a long djibbah-like garment with a richly embroidered yoke, she had
sandals over her brown stockings, and rather by way of symbol of
authorship than for any immediate use she bore a big leather portfolio.
There was moreover now a gold-mounted fountain pen amidst the other
ingredients of the cheerful chatelaine that had once delighted Peter’s
babyhood.
She seemed a fuller, more confident person than Oswald remembered. She
came eloquent with apologies. “I have to make an inexorable rule,” she
said, “against disturbances. As if I were a man writer instead of a mere
woman. Between nine and one I am a woman enclosed—cloistered—refused.
Sacred hours of self-completeness. Unspeakably precious to me. Visitors
are not even announced. It is a law—inflexible.”
“We must all respect our work,” said Oswald.
“It’s over now,” said Aunt Phœbe, smiling like the sun after clouds.
“It’s over now for the day. I am just human—until tomorrow again.”
“You are writing a book?” Oswald asked rather ineptly.
“The Stitchwoman; Series Three. Much is expected; much must be given. I
am the slave now of a Following.”
Aunt Phœbe went to the wall and stood with her fine profile raised up
over the view. She was a little breathless and twitching slightly, but
very magnificent. Most of her hair was tidy. “Our old Weald, does it
look the same?” she asked.
“Quite the same,” said Oswald, standing up beside her.
“But not to me,” she said. “Indeed not to me. To me every day it is
different. Always wide, always wonderful, but different, always
different. I know it so well.”
Oswald felt she had worked a “catch” on him. He was faintly nettled.
“Still,” he said, “fundamentally one must recognize that it’s the same
Weald.”
“I wonder,” said Aunt Phœbe suddenly, looking at him very intently, and
then, as if she tasted the word, “Fundamentally?”
“I don’t know,” she added.
Oswald was too much annoyed to reply.
“And what do you think of your new charge?” she asked. “I don’t know
whether Peter quite understands that yet. The young squire goes to the
men. He casts aside childish things, and rides out in his little
Caparison to join the ranks. Do you know that, Peter? Mr. Sydenham is
now your sole guardian.”
Peter looked at Oswald and smiled shyly, and his cheeks flushed.
“I think we shall get on together,” said Oswald.
“Would that it ended there! You take the girl too?”
“It is not my doing,” said Oswald.
Aunt Phœbe addressed the Weald.
“Poor Dolly! So it is that the mother soul cheats itself. Through the
ages—always self-abnegation for the woman.” She turned to Oswald. “If
she had had time to think I am certain she would not have excluded women
from this trust. Certain. What have men to do with education? With the
education of a woman more particularly. The Greater from the Less. But
the thing is done. It has been a great experiment, a wonderful
experiment; teaching, I learnt—but I doubt if you will understand that.”
There was a slight pause. “What exactly was the nature of the
experiment?” asked Oswald modestly.
“Feminine influence. Dominant.”
Oswald considered. “I don’t know if you include Lady Charlotte,” he
threw out.
“Oh!” said Aunt Phœbe.
“But she has played her part, I gather.”
“Feminine! No! She is completely a Man-made Woman. Quintessentially the
Pampered Squaw. Holding her position by her former charms. A Sex
Residuum. Relict. This last outrage. An incident—merely. Her course of
action was dictated for her. A Man. A mere solicitor. One Grimes. The
flimsiest creature! An aspen leaf—but Male. Male.”
Stern thoughts kept Aunt Phœbe silent for a time. Then she remarked very
quietly, “I shook him. I shook him _well_.”
“I hope still to have the benefit of your advice,” said Oswald gravely.
“Nay,” she said. But she was pleased. “A shy comment, perhaps. But the
difference will be essential. Don’t expect me to guide you as you would
wish to be guided. That phase is over between men and women. We hand the
children over—since the law will have it so. Take them!”
And then addressing the Weald, Aunt Phœbe, in vibrating accents, uttered
a word that was to be the keynote of a decade of feminine activities.
“The Vote,” said Aunt Phœbe, getting a wonderful emotional buzz into her
voice. “The Vo-o-o-o-o-te.”
§ 11
So it was that Oswald found himself fully invested with his
responsibilities.
There was a terrifying suggestion in Aunt Phœbe’s manner that he would
presently have to clap Peter’s hat on, make up a small bundle of Peter’s
possessions, and fare forth with him into the wide world, picking up the
convalescent at Windsor on the way, but that was a misapprehension of
Aunt Phœbe’s intentions. And, after all, it was Peter’s house and garden
if it came to that. For a time at least things could go on as they were.
But the task of direction was now fully his. Whether these two young
people were properly educated or not, whether they too became slackers
and inadequate or worthy citizens of this great empire, rested now
entirely in his hands.
“They must have the best,” he said....
The best was not immediately apparent.