quarrel that culminated in that amazing speech of Joan’s, had been
smouldering between them for a good seven years. It went right back to
the days when they were still boy and girl.
To begin with, after their first separation they had had no particular
friends; they had had acquaintances and habits of association, but the
mind still lacks the continuity necessary for friendship and Euclid
until the early teens. The first rift came with Adela Murchison. Joan
brought her for the summer holidays when Peter had been just a year at
Caxton.
That was the first summer at Pelham Ford. Aunt Phyllis was with them,
but Aunt Phœbe was in great labour with her first and only novel, a
fantasia on the theme of feminine genius, “These are my Children, or
Mary on the Cross.” (It was afterwards greatly censored. Boots, the
druggist librarian, would have none of it.) She stayed alone, therefore,
at The Ingle-Nook, writing, revising, despairing, tearing up and
beginning again, reciting her more powerful passages to the scarlet but
listening ears of Groombridge and the little maid, and going more and
more unkempt, unhooked, and unbuttoned. Oswald, instead of resorting to
the Climax Club as he was apt to do when Aunt Phœbe was imminent, abode
happily in his new home.
Adela was a month or so older than Peter and, what annoyed him to begin
with, rather more fully grown. She was, as she only too manifestly
perceived, a woman of the world in comparison with both of her hosts.
She was still deeply in love with Joan, but by no means indifferent to
this dark boy who looked at her with so much of Joan’s cool detachment.
Joan’s romantic dreams were Joan’s inmost secret, Adela’s romantic
intentions were an efflorescence. She was already hoisting the signals
for masculine surrender. She never failed to have a blue ribbon astray
somewhere to mark and help the blueness of her large blue eyes. She
insisted upon the flaxen waves over her ears, and secretly assisted them
to kink. She had a high colour. She had no rouge yet in her possession
but there was rouge in her soul, and she would rub her cheeks with her
hands before she came into a room. She discovered to Joan the incredible
fact that Oswald was also a man.
With her arm round Joan’s waist or over her shoulder she would look back
at him across the lawn.
“I say,” she said, “he’d be _frightfully_ good-looking—if it wasn’t for
_that_.”
And one day, “I wonder if Mr. Sydenham’s ever been in love.”
She lay in wait for Oswald’s eye. She went after him to ask him
unimportant things.
Once or twice little things happened, the slightest things, but it might
have seemed to Joan that Oswald was disposed to flirt with Adela. But
that was surely impossible....
The first effect of the young woman upon Peter was a considerable but
indeterminate excitement. It was neither pleasurable nor unpleasurable,
but it hung over the giddy verge of being unpleasant. It made him want
to be very large, handsome and impressive. It also made him acutely
ashamed of wanting to be very large, handsome and impressive. It turned
him from a simple boy into a conflict of motives. He wanted to extort
admiration from Adela. Also he wanted to despise her utterly. These
impulses worked out to no coherent system of remarks and gestures, and
he became awkward and tongue-tied.
Adela wanted to be shown all over the house and garden. She put her arm
about Joan in a manner Peter thought offensive. Then she threw back her
hair at him over her shoulder and said, shooting a glance at him, “You
come too.”
Cheek!
Still, she was a guest, and so a fellow had to follow with his hands in
his pockets and watch his own private and particular Joan being ordered
about and—what was somehow so much more exasperating—_pawed_ about.
At what seemed to be the earliest opportunity Peter excused himself, and
went off to the outhouse in which he had his tools and chemicals and
things. He decided he would rig up everything ready to make Sulphuretted
Hydrogen—although he knew quite well that this was neither a large,
handsome, nor impressive thing to do. And then he would wait for them to
come along, and set the odour going.
But neither of the girls came near his Glory Hole, and he was not going
to invite them. He just hovered there unvisited, waiting with his
preparations and whistling soft melancholy tunes. Finally he made a lot
of the gas, simply because he had got the stuff ready, and stank himself
out of his Glory Hole into society again.
At supper, which had become a sort of dinner that night, Adela insisted
on talking like a rather languid, smart woman of the world to Nobby.
Nobby took her quite seriously. It was perfectly sickening.
“D’you hunt much?” said Adela.
“Not in England,” said Nobby. “There’s too many hedges for me. I’ve a
sailor’s seat.”
“All my people hunt,” said Adela. “It’s rather a bore, don’t you think,
Mr. Sydenham?”
Talk like that!
Two days passed, during which Peter was either being bored to death in
the company of Adela and Joan or also bored to death keeping aloof from
them. He cycled to Ware with them, and Adela’s cycle had a change speed
arrangement with a high gear of eighty-five that made it difficult to
keep ahead of her. Beast!
And on the second evening she introduced a new card game, Demon
Patience, a scrambling sort of game in which you piled on aces in the
middle and cried “Stop!” as soon as your stack was out. It was one of
those games, one of those inferior games, at which boys in their teens
are not nearly as quick as girls, Peter discovered. But presently Joan
began to pull ahead and beat Adela and Peter. The two girls began to
play against each other as if his poor little spurts didn’t amount to
anything. They certainly didn’t amount to very much.
Adela began to play with a sprawling eagerness. Her colour deepened; her
manners deteriorated. She was tormented between ambition and admiration.
When Joan had run her out for the third time, she cried, “Oh, Joan, you
Wonderful Darling!”
And clutched and kissed her!...
All the other things might have been bearable if it had not been for
this perpetual confabulating with Joan, this going off to whisper with
Joan, this putting of arms round Joan’s neck, this whispering that was
almost kissing Joan’s ear. One couldn’t have a moment with Joan. One
couldn’t use Joan for the slightest thing. It would have been better if
one hadn’t had a Joan.
On the mill-pond there was a boat that Joan and Peter were allowed to
use. On the morning of the fifth day Joan found Peter hanging about in
the hall.
“Joan.”
“Yes?”
“Come and muck about in Baker’s boat.”
“If Adela——”
“Oh, _leave_ Adela! We don’t want her. She’d stash it all up.”
“But she’s a visitor!”
“Pretty rotten visitor! What did you bring her here for? She’s rotten.”
“She’s not. She’s all right. You’re being horrid rude to her. Every
chance you get. I like her.”
“Silly tick, she is!”
“She’s taller than you are, anyhow.”
“Nyar Nyar Nyar Nyar,” said Peter in a singularly ineffective mockery of
Adela’s manner. Adela appeared, descending the staircase. Peter turned
away.
“Peter wants to go in the boat on the mill-pond,” said Joan, as if with
calculated wickedness.
“Oh! I _love_ boats!” said Adela.
“What was a chap to do but go?”
But under a thin mask of playfulness Peter splashed them both a
lot—especially Adela. And in the evening he refused to play at Demon
Patience and went and sat by himself to draw. He tried various designs.
He was rather good at drawing Mr. Henderson, and he did several studies
of him. Then the girls, who found Demon Patience slow with only two
players, came and sat beside him. He was inspired to begin an ugly
caricature of Adela.
He began at the eyes.
Joan knew him better than Adela. She saw what was coming. Down came her
little brown paw on the paper. “No, you don’t, Petah,” she said.
Peter looked into her face, hot against his, and there was a red light
in his eyes.
“Leago, Joan,” he said.
A struggle began in which Adela took no share.
The Sydenham blood is hot blood, and though it doesn’t like hurting
rabbits it can be pretty rough with its first cousins. But Joan was
still gripping the crumpled half of the offending sheet when Aunt
Phyllis, summoned by a scared Adela, came in. The two were on the
hearthrug, panting, and Joan’s teeth were deep in Peter’s wrist; they
parted and rose somewhat abashed. “My _dears_!” cried Aunt Phyllis.
“We were playing,” said Joan, flushed and breathless, but honourably
tearless.
“Yes,” said Peter, holding his wrist tight. “We were playing.”
“Romping,” said Aunt Phyllis. “Weren’t you a little rough? Adela, you
know, isn’t used to your style....”
After that, Peter shunned further social intercourse. He affected a
great concentration upon experimental chemistry and photography, and
bicycled in lonely pride to Waltham Cross, Baldock, and Dunmow. He gave
himself up to the roads of Hertfordshire. When at last Adela departed it
made no difference in his aloofness. Joan was henceforth as nothing to
him; she was just a tick, a silly little female tick, an associate of
things that went “Nyar Nyar Nyar.” He hated her. At least, he would have
hated her if there was anything that a self-respecting Caxtonian could
hate in a being so utterly contemptible. (Yet at the bottom of his heart
he loved and respected her for biting his wrist so hard.)
Deprived of Adela, Joan became very lonely and forlorn. After some days
there were signs of relenting on the part of Peter, and then came his
visitor, Wilmington, a boy who had gone with him from White Court to
Caxton, and after that there was no need of Joan. With a grim resolution
Peter shut Joan out from all their pursuits. She was annihilated.
The boys did experimental chemistry together, made the most disgusting
stinks, blew up a small earthwork by means of a mine, and stained their
hands bright yellow; they had long bicycle rides together, they did
“splorjums” in the wood, they “mucked about” with Baker’s boat. Joan by
no effort could come into existence again. Once or twice as Peter was
going off with Wilmington, Peter would glance back and feel a gleam of
compunction at the little figure that watched him going. But she had her
Adelas. She and Adela wrote letters to each other. She could go and
write to her beastly Adela now....
“Can’t Joan come?” said Wilmington.
“She’s only a tick,” said Peter.
“She’s not a bad sort of tick,” said Wilmington.
(What business was it of his?)
Joan fell back on Nobby, and went for walks with him in the afternoon.
Then came a complication. Towards the end Wilmington got quite soppy on
Joan. It showed.
Aunt Phyllis suggested charades for the evening hour after dinner.
Wilmington and Peter played against each other, and either of them took
out any people he wanted to act with him. Aunt Phyllis was a grave and
dignified actress and Nobby could do better than you might have
expected. Peter did Salome. (Sal—owe—me; doing sal volatile for Sal.) He
sat as Herod, crowned and scornful with the false black beard, and Joan
danced and afterwards brought the football in on a plate. Aunt Phyllis
did pseudo-oriental music. But when Wilmington saw Joan dance he knew
what it was to be in love. He sat glowering passion. For a time he
remained frozen rigid, and then broke into wild hand-clapping. His ears
were bright red, and Aunt Phyllis looked at him curiously. It was with
difficulty that his clouded mind could devise a charade that would give
him a call upon Joan. But he thought at last of Milton. (Mill-tun.)
“I want you,” he said.
“Won’t Aunty do?”
“No, _you_. It’s got to be a girl.”
He held the door open for her, and stumbled going out of the room. He
was more breathless and jerky than ever outside. Joan heard his
exposition with an unfriendly expression.
“And what am I to do then?” she asked....
“And then?...”
They did “Mill” and “Tun” pretty badly. Came Wilmington’s last precious
moments with her. He broke off in his description of Milton blind and
Joan as the amanuensis daughter. “Joan,” he whispered, going hoarse with
emotion. “Joan, you’re lovely. I’d die for you.”
A light of evil triumph came into Joan’s eyes.
“Ugly thing!” said Joan, “what did you come here for? You’ve spoilt my
holidays. Let _go_ of my hand!... Let’s go in and do our tableau.”
And afterwards when Wilmington met Joan in the passage she treated him
to a grimace that was only too manifestly intended to represent his own
expression of melancholy but undying devotion. In the presence of others
she was coolly polite to him.
Peter read his friend like a book, but refrained from injurious comment,
and Wilmington departed in a state of grave nervous disarray.
A day passed. There was not much left now of the precious holidays. Came
a glowing September morning.
“Joe-un,” whooped Peter in the garden—in just the old note.
“Pee-tah!” answered Joan, full-voiced as ever, distant but drawing
nearer.
“Come and muck about in Baker’s boat.”
“Right-o, Petah!” said Joan, and approached with a slightly prancing
gait.
§ 11
Growing out of his Red Indian phase Peter moved up into the Lower Sixth
and became a regular cynical man of the world with an air of knowing
more than a thing or two. He was, in fact, learning a vast number of
things that are outside the books; and rearranging many of his early
shocks and impressions by the help of a confusing and increasing mixture
of half-lights. The chaotic disrespect of the young went out of his
manner in his allusion to school affairs, he no longer spoke of various
masters as “Buzzy,” “Snooks,” and “the Croker,” and a curious
respectability had invaded his demeanour. The Head had had him in to tea
and tennis. The handle of the prefect’s birch was perhaps not more than
a year now from his grip, if he bore himself gravely. He reproached Joan
on various small occasions for “thundering bad form,” and when
Wilmington came, a much more wary and better-looking Wilmington with his
heart no longer on his sleeve, the conversation became, so to speak,
political. They talked at the dinner-table of the behaviour of so-and-so
and this-and-that at “High” and at “Bottoms” and on “the Corso”; they
discussed various cases of “side” and “cheek,” and the permanent effect
of these upon the standing and reputations of the youths concerned; they
were earnest to search out and know utterly why Best did not get his
colours and whether it was just to “super” old Rawdon. They discussed
the question of superannuation with Oswald very gravely. “Don’t you
think,” said Oswald, “if a school takes a boy on, it ought to see him
through?”
“But if he doesn’t work, sir?” said Wilmington.
“A school oughtn’t to produce that lassitude,” said Oswald.
“A chap ought to _use_ a school,” said Peter.
That was a new point of view to Oswald and Joan.
Afterwards came Troop, a larger boy than either Peter or Wilmington, a
prefect, a youth almost incredibly manly in his manner, and joined on to
these discussions. Said Oswald, “There ought not to be such a thing as
superannuation. A man ought not to be let drift to the point of
unteachable incapacity. And then thrown away. Some master ought to have
shepherded him in for special treatment.”
“They don’t look after us to that extent, sir,” said Troop.
“Don’t they teach you? Or fail to teach you?”
“It’s the school teaches us,” said Peter, as though it had just occurred
to him.
“Still, the masters are there,” said Oswald, smiling.
“The masters are there,” Troop acquiesced. “But the life of the school
is the tradition. And a big chap like Rawdon hanging about, too big to
lick and too stupid for responsibility—— It breaks things up, sir.”
Oswald was very much interested in this prefect’s view of the school
life. Behind his blank mask he engendered questions; his one eye watched
Troop and went from Troop to Peter. This manliness in the taught
surprised him tremendously. Peter was acquiring it rapidly, but Troop
seemed to embody it. Oswald himself had been a man early enough and had
led a hard life of mutual criticism and exasperation with his fellows,
but that had been in a working reality, the navy; this, he reflected,
was a case of cocks crowing inside the egg. These boys were living in a
premature autonomous state, an aristocratic republic with the Head as a
sort of constitutional monarch. There was one questionable consequence
at least. They were acquiring political habits before they had acquired
wide horizons. Were the political habits of a school where all the boys
were of one race and creed and class, suitable for the problems of a
world’s affairs?
Troop, under Oswald’s insidious leading, displayed his ideas modestly
but frankly, and they were the ideas of a large child. Troop was a
good-looking, thoroughly healthy youth, full of his grave
responsibilities towards the school and inclined to claim a liberal
attitude. He was very great upon his duty to “make the fellows live
decently and behave decently.” He was lured into a story of how one
youth with a tendency to long hair had been partly won and partly driven
to a more seemly coiffure; how he had dealt with a games shirker, and
how a fellow had been detected lending socialist pamphlets—“not to his
friends, sir, I shouldn’t mind that so much, but pushing them upon any
one”—and restrained. “Seditious sort of stuff, sir, I believe. No, I did
not _read_ it, sir.” Troop was for cold baths under all circumstances,
for no smoking under sixteen and five foot six, and for a simple and
unquestioning loyalty to any one who came along and professed to be in
authority over him. When he mentioned the king his voice dropped
worshipfully. Upon the just use of the birch Troop was conscientiously
prolix. There were prefects, he said, who “savaged” the fellows. Others
swished without judgment. Troop put conscience into each whack.
Troop’s liberalism interested Oswald more than anything else about
him. He was proud to profess himself no mere traditionalist; he wanted
Caxton to “broaden down from precedent to precedent.” Indeed he had
ambitions to be remembered as a reformer. He hoped, he said, to leave
the school “better than he found it”—the modern note surely. His idea
of a great and memorable improvement was to let the Upper Fifth
fellows into the Corso after morning service on Sunday. He did not
think it would make them impertinent; rather it would increase their
self-respect. He was also inclined to a reorganization of the
afternoon fagging “to stop so much bawling down the corridor.” There
ought to be a bell—an electric bell—in each prefect’s study. No doubt
that was a bit revolutionary—Troop almost smirked. “It’s all very well
for schools like Eton or Winchester to stick to the old customs, sir,
but we are supposed to be an Up-to-Date school. Don’t you think, sir?”
The egg was everything to this young cockerel; the world outside was
naught. Oswald led him on from one solemn puerility to another, and as
the big boy talked in his stout man-of-the-world voice, the red eye
roved from him to Peter and from Peter back to Troop. Until presently
it realized that Peter was watching it as narrowly. “What does Peter
really think of this stuff?” thought Oswald. “What does Nobby really
think of this stuff?” queried Peter.
“I suppose, some day, you’ll leave Caxton,” said Oswald.
“I shall be very sorry to, sir,” said Troop sincerely.
“Have you thought at all——”
“Not yet, sir. At least——”
“Troop’s people,” Peter intervened, “are Army people.”
“I see,” said Oswald.
Joan listened enviously to all this prefectorial conversation. At
Highmorton that sort of bossing and influencing was done by the junior
staff....
Oswald did his best to lure Troop from his administrative preoccupations
into general topics. But apparently some one whom Troop respected had
warned him against general topics. Oswald lugged and pushed the talk
towards religion, Aunt Phyllis helping, but they came up against a stone
wall. “My people are Church of England,” said Troop, intimating thereby
that his opinions were banked with the proper authorities. It was not
for him to state them. And in regard to politics, “All my people are
Conservative.” One evening Oswald showed him a portfolio of drawings
from various Indian temples, and suggested something of the complex
symbolism of the figures. Troop thought it was “rather unhealthy.”
But—turning from these monstrosities—he had hopes for India. “My cousin
tells me, sir, that cricket and polo are spreading very rapidly there.”
“Polo,” said Oswald, “is an Indian game. They have played it for
centuries. It came from Persia originally.” But Troop was unable to
imagine Indians riding horses; he had the common British delusion that
the horse and the ship were both invented in our islands and that all
foreign peoples are necessarily amateurs at such things. “I thought they
rode elephants,” said Troop with quiet conviction....
Troop was not only a great experience for Oswald, he also exercised the
always active mind of Joan very considerably.
Peter, it seemed, hadn’t even mentioned her beforehand.
“Hullo!” said Troop at the sight of her. “Got a sister?”
“Foster-sister,” said Peter, minimizing the thing. “Joan, this is
Troop.”
Joan regarded him critically. “Can he play D.P.?”
“Not one of my games,” said Troop, who was chary of all games not
usually played.
“It’s a game like Snap,” said Peter with an air of casual contempt, and
earned a bright scowl.
For a day or so Troop and Joan kept aloof, watching one another. Then
she caught him out rather neatly twice at single wicket cricket; he had
a weakness for giving catches to point and she had observed it.
“Caught!” he cried approvingly. Also she snicked and slipped and at last
slogged boldly at his patronizing under-arm bowling. “Here’s a Twister,”
he said, like an uncle speaking to a child.
Joan smacked it into the cedar. “_Twister!_” quoth Joan, running.
After that he took formal notice of her, betraying a disposition to
address her as “Kid.” (Ralph Connor was at that time adding his quota to
the great British tradition. It is true he wrote in American about
cowboys—but a refined cowboy was the fullest realization of an English
gentleman’s pre-war ideals—and Ralph Connor’s cowboys are essentially
refined. Thence came the “Kid,” anyhow.) But Joan took umbrage at the
“Kid.” And she disliked Troop’s manner and influence with Peter. And the
way Peter stood it. She did not understand what a very, very great being
a prefect is in an English public school, she did not know of Troop’s
superbness at rugger, it seemed to her that it was bad manners to behave
as though a visit to Pelham Ford were an act of princely condescension.
She was even disposed to diagnose Troop’s largeness, very unjustly, as
fat. So she pulled up Troop venomously with “My name’s not Kit, it’s
Joan. J.O.A.N.”
“Sorry!” said Troop. And being of that insensitive class whose passions
are only to be roused by a smacking, he began to take still more notice
of her. She was, he perceived, a lively Kid. He felt a strong desire to
reprove and influence her. He had no suspicion that what he really
wanted to do was to interest Joan in himself.
Joan’s tennis was incurably tricky. Troop’s idea of tennis was to play
very hard and very swiftly close over the net, but without cunning.
Peter and Wilmington followed his lead. But Joan forced victory upon an
unwilling partner by doing unexpected things.
Troop declared he did not mind being defeated, but that he was shocked
by the spirit of Joan’s play. It wasn’t “sporting.”
“Those short returns aren’t done, Kid,” he said.
“I do them,” said Joan. “Ancient.”
Peter and Wilmington were visibly shocked, but Troop showed no
resentment at the gross familiarity.
“But if every one did them!” he reasoned.
“I could take them,” said Joan. “Any one could take them who knew how.”
The dispute seemed likely to die down into unverifiable assertions.
“Peter can take them,” said Joan. “He drops them back. But he isn’t
doing it today.”
Peter reflected. Troop would never understand, but there was something
reasonable in Joan’s line. “I’ll see to Joan,” he said abruptly, and
came towards the middle of the net.
The game continued on unorthodox but brilliant lines. “I don’t call this
tennis,” said Troop.
“If you served to her left,” said Peter.
“But she’s a girl!” protested Troop. “_Serve!_”