PRIDE OF LIFE
I
Peter never saw Dawson's again. When the summer holidays had run some
three weeks a letter arrived stating, quite simply and tersely that,
owing to the non-payment by evading parents of bills long overdue and to
many other depressing and unavoidable circumstances Mr. Barbour and that
House of Cards, his school, had fallen to pieces. There at any rate was
an end to that disastrous accumulation of brick and mortar, and the harm
that, living, it had wrought upon the souls and bodies of its victims
its dying could not excuse. No tears were shed for Dawson's.
Peter, at the news, knew that now his battle never could be won. That
battle at any rate must be left behind him with his defeat written large
upon the plain of it, and this made in some unrealised way the penalty
of the future months harder to bear. He had, behind him, defeat. Look at
it as he might, he had been a failure at Dawson's--he had not done the
things that he had been put there to do--and yet through the disaster he
knew that in so far as he had refused to bend to the storm so far there
had been victory; of that at any rate he was sure.
So he turned resolutely from the past and faced the future. It was
as though suddenly Dawson's had never existed--a dream, a fantasy, a
delirium--something that had left no external things behind it and had
only in the effect that it had worked upon himself spiritually made its
mark. He faced his House....
Scaw House had seemed to him, during these last three years, merely an
interlude at Dawson's. There had been hurried holidays that had been
spent in recovering from and preparing for the term and the House had
scarcely, and only very quietly, raised its head to disturb him. He had
not been disturbed--he had had other things to think about--and now he
was very greatly disturbed indeed; that was the first difference that
he consciously realised. The disturbance lay, of course, partly in the
presence of his father and in the sense that he had had growing upon
him, during the last two years, that their relationship, the one to the
other, would, suddenly, one fine day, spring into acute emotion. They
were approaching one another gradually as in a room whose walls were
slowly closing. “Face to face--and then body to body--at last, soul to
soul!”
He did not, he thought, actively hate his father; his father did not
actively hate him, but hate might spring up at any moment between them,
and Peter, although he was only sixteen, was no longer a child. But the
feeling of apprehension that Scaw House gave him was caused by wider
influences than his father. Three years at Dawson's had given Peter an
acute sense of expecting things, it might be defined as “the glance over
the shoulder to see who followed”--some one was always following at Scaw
House. He saw in this how closely life was bound together, because
every little moment at Dawson's contributed to his present active fear.
Dawson's explained Scaw House to Peter. And yet this was all morbidity
and Peter, square, broad-shouldered, had no scrap of morbidity in his
clean body. He did not await the future with the shaking candle of the
suddenly awakened coward, but rather with the planted feet and the bared
teeth of the bull-dog....
He watched the faces of his father, his aunt and Mrs. Trussit. He
observed the frightened dreams of his grandfather, the way that old
Curtis the gardener would suddenly cease his fugitive digging and glance
with furtive eyes at the windows of the house; about them were the dark
shadows of the long passages, the sharp note of some banging door in a
distant room, the wail of that endless wind beyond the walls. He felt
too that Mrs. Trussit and his aunt were furtively watching him. He never
caught them in anything tangible but he knew that, when his back was
turned, their eyes followed him--questioning, wondering.
Something must be done or he could not answer for his control. If he
were not to return to Dawson's, what then?
It was his seventeenth birthday one hot day towards the end of August,
and at breakfast his father, without looking up from his paper, said:
“I have made arrangements for you with Mr. Aitchinson to enter his
office next week. You'll have to work--you've been idling long enough.”
The windows were wide open, the lawn was burning in the sun, bees
carried the scent of the flowers with them into the air that hung like
shining metal about the earth, a cart rattled as though it were a giant
clattering his pleasure at the day down the road. It was a wonderful day
and somewhere streams were flowing under dark protecting trees, and the
grass was thick in cool hollows and the woods were so dense that no
blue sky reached the moss, but only the softest twilight ... and
old Aitchinson, the town's solicitor, with his nutcracker face, his
snuffling nose, his false teeth--and the tightly-closed office, the
piles of paper, the ink, the silly view from the dusty windows of
Treliss High Street--and life always in the future to be like that until
he died.
But Peter showed no emotion.
“Very well, father--What day do I go?”
“Monday--nine o'clock.”
Nothing more was said. At any rate Aitchinson and his red tape and
his moral dust would fill the day--no time then to dwell on these dark
passages and Mrs. Trussit's frightened eyes and the startled jump of the
marble clock in the dining-room just before it struck the hour....
II
And so for weeks it proved. Aitchinson demanded no serious
consideration. He was a hideous little man with eyes like pins, shaggy
eyebrows, a nose that swelled at the end and was pinched by the sharpest
of pince-nez, cheeks that hung white and loose except when he was hungry
or angry, and then they were tight and red, a little body rather dandily
dressed with a flowered waistcoat, a white stock, a skirted coat and
pepper-and-salt trousers--and last of all, tiny feet, of which he
was inordinately proud and with which, like Agag, he always walked
delicately. He had a high falsetto voice, fingers that were always
picking, like eager hens, at the buttons on his waistcoat or the little
waxed moustache above his mouth, and hair that occupied its time in
covering a bald patch that always escaped every design upon it. So much
for Mr. Aitchinson. Let him be flattered sufficiently and Peter saw
that his way would be easy. The wizened little creature had, moreover,
a certain admiration for Peter's strength and broad shoulders and used
sometimes in the middle of the morning's work to ask Peter how much
he weighed, whether he'd ever considered taking up prize-fighting as a
profession, and how much he measured across the chest.
There were two other youths, articled like Peter, stupid sons of honest
Treliss householders, with high collars, faces that shone with soap and
hair that glistened with oil, languid voices and a perpetual fund of
small talk about the ladies of the town, moral and otherwise. Peter did
not like them and they did not like Peter. One day, because he was
tired and unhappy, he knocked their heads together, and they plotted to
destroy him, but they were afraid, and secretly admired what they called
his coarse habits.
The Summer stole away and Autumn crept into its place, and at the end
of October something occurred. Something suddenly happened at Scaw
House that made action imperative, and filled his brain all day so that
Aitchinson's office and his work there was only a dream and the people
in it were shadows. He had heard his mother crying from behind her
closed door....
He had been coming, on a wet autumnal afternoon, down the dark stairs
from his attic and suddenly at the other end of the long passage there
had been this sound, so sudden and so pitiful coming upon that dreary
stillness that he had stopped with his hands clenched and his face white
and his heart beating like a knock on a door. Instantly all those
many little moments that he had had in that white room with that
heavy-scented air crowded upon him and he remembered the smile that she
had always given him and the way that her hair lay so tragically about
the pillow. He had always been frightened and eager to escape; he felt
suddenly so deeply ashamed that the crimson flooded his face there in
the dark passage. She had wanted him all these years and he had allowed
those other people to prevent him from going to her. What had been
happening to her in that room? The sound of her crying came to him as
though beseeching him to come and help her. He put his hands to his
ears and went desperately into the dark wet garden. He knew now when he
thought of it, that his behaviour to his mother had been, during these
months since he had left Dawson's, an unconscious cowardice. Whilst he
had been yet at school those little five minutes' visits to his mother's
room might have been excused, but during these last months there had
been, with regard to her, in his conscience, if he had cared to examine
it, sharp accusation.
The defence that she did not really want to see him, that his presence
might bring on some bad attack, might excite her, was no real defence.
He had postponed an interview with her from day to day because he
realised that that interview would strike into flame all the slumbering
relations that that household held. It would fling them all, as though
from a preconcerted signal, into war....
But now there could be only one thought in his mind. He must see his
mother--if he could still help her he must be at her service. There was
no one whom he could ask about her. Mrs. Trussit now never spoke to him
(and indeed never spoke to any one if she could help it), and went
up and down the stairs in her rustling black and flat white face and
jingling keys as though she was no human being at all but only a walking
automaton that you wound up in the morning and put away in the cupboard
at night--Mrs. Trussit was of no use.
There remained Stephen, and this decided Peter to break through that
barrier that there was between them and to find out why it had ever
existed. He had not seen Stephen that summer at all--no one saw
Stephen--only at The Bending Mule they shook their heads over him and
spoke of the wild devil that had come upon him because the woman he
loved was being tortured to death by her husband only a mile away. He
was drinking, they said, and his farm was going to ruin, and he
would speak to nobody--and they shook their heads. It was not through
cowardice that Peter had avoided him, but since those three years at
Dawson's he had been lonely and silent himself, and Stephen had never
sent for him as he would have done, Peter thought, if he had wanted him.
Now the time had come when he could stand alone no longer....
He slipped away one night after supper, leaving that quiet room with his
aunt playing Patience at the table, his old grandfather mumbling in his
sleep, his father like a stone, staring at his paper but not, Peter was
sure, reading any of it.
Mrs. Trussit, silent before the fire in her room, his aunt not seeing
the cards that she laid upon the table, his father not reading his
paper--for what were they all listening?
It was a fierce night and the wind rushed up the high road as though it
would tear Peter off his feet and fling him into the sea, but he walked
sturdily, no cap on his head and the wind streaming through his hair.
Some way along the road he found a child crying in a ditch. He loved
children, and, picking the small boy up, he found that he had been sent
for beer to the Cap and Feathers, at the turn of the road, and been
blown by the wind into the ditch and was almost dead with terror. At
first at the sight of Peter the child had cried out, but at the touch
of his warm hand and at the sound of his laugh he had been suddenly
comforted, and trotted down the road with his hand in Peter's and his
tears dried.
Peter's way with the children of the place was sharp and entirely
lacking in sentiment--“Little idiot, to fall into the ditch like
that--not much of the man about you, young Thomas.”
“Isn't Thomas,” said the small boy with a chuckle, “I be Jan Proteroe,
and I beant afeart only gert beast come out of hedge down along with
eyes and a tail--gum!”
He would have told Peter a great deal more but he was suddenly
frightened again by the dark hedges and began to whimper, so Peter
picked him up and carried him to his cottage at the end of the road and
kissed him and pushed him in at the lighted door. He was cheered by the
little incident and felt less lonely. At the thought of making Stephen
once more his friend his heart warmed. Stephen had been wanting him,
perhaps, all this time to come to him but had been afraid that he might
be interfering if he asked him--and how glad they would be to see one
another!
After all, they needed one another. They had both had hard times, they
were both lonely and no distance nor circumstances could lessen that
early bond that there had been between them. Happier than he had been
for many weeks, he struck off the road and started across the fields,
stumbling over the rough soil and plunging sometimes into ditches and
pools of water. The rain had begun to fall and the whispering hiss that
it made as it struck the earth drowned the more distant noise of the sea
that solemnly broke beyond the bending fields. Stephen's farm stood
away from all other houses, and Peter as he pressed forward seemed to
be leaving all civilisation behind him. He was cold and his boots were
heavy with thick wet mud and his hair was soaked.
Beyond the fields was a wood through which he must pass before he
reached Stephen's farm, and as the trees closed about him and he heard
the rain driving through the bare branches the world seemed to be
full of chattering noises. The confidence that he had had in Stephen's
reception of him suddenly deserted him and a cold miserable unhappiness
crept about him in this wet, heaving world of wind and rain and bare
naked trees. Like a great cry there seemed to come suddenly to him
through the wood his mother's voice appealing for help, so that he
nearly turned, running back. It was a hard, cruel place this world--and
all the little ditches and hollows of the wood were running with brown,
stealthy water.
He broke through it at last and saw at the bottom of the hill Stephen's
house, and he saw that there were no lights in the windows. He stood
on the breast of the little hill for a moment and thought that he would
turn back, but it was raining now with great heaviness and the wind at
his back seemed to beat him down the hill. Suddenly seized with terror
at the wood behind him, he ran stumbling down the slope. He undid the
gate and pitched into the yard, plunging into great pools of water and
seeing on every side of him the uncertain shapes of the barns and sheds
and opposite him the great dark front of the house, so black in its
unfriendliness, sharing in the night's rough hostility.
He shouted “Stephen,” but his voice was drowned by the storm and the
gate behind him, creaking on its hinges, answered him with shrill cries.
He found the little wicket that led into the garden, and, stepping over
the heavy wet grass, he banged loudly with the knocker on the door and
called again “Stephen.” The noise echoed through the house and then the
silence seemed to be redoubled. Then pushing the great knocker, he found
to his surprise that the door was unfastened and swung back before
him. He felt his way into the dark hall and struck a match. He shouted
“Stephen” once more and his voice came echoing back to him. The place
seemed to be entirely deserted--the walls were wet with damp, there were
no carpets on the floor, a window at the end of the passage showed its
uncurtained square.
He passed into the kitchen, and here he found two candles and lighted
them. Here also he found signs of life. On the bare deal table was a
half-finished meal--a loaf of bread, cheese, butter, an empty whisky
bottle lying on its side. Near these things there was a table, and on
the floor, beside an overturned chair, there was a gun. Peter picked it
up and saw that it was unloaded. There was something terribly desolate
about these things; the room was very bare, a grandfather clock ticked
solemnly in the corner, there were a few plates and cups on the dresser,
an old calendar hung from a dusty nail and, blown by the wind from the
cracked window, tip-tapped like a stealthy footstep against the wall.
But Peter felt curiously certain that Stephen was going to return;
something held him in his chair and he sat there, with his hands on the
deal table, facing the clock and listening. The wind howled beyond the
house, the rain lashed the panes, and suddenly--so suddenly that his
heart leapt to his mouth--there was a scratching on the door. He went
to the door and opened it and found outside a wretched sheep-dog, so
starved that the bones showed through the skin, and so weak that he
could scarcely drag himself along. Peter let him in and the animal came
up to him and looked up in his eyes and, very faintly, wagged his tail.
Peter gave him the bread, which the dog devoured, and then they both
remained silent, without moving, the dog's head between Peter's knees.
The boy must have slept, because he woke suddenly to all the clocks in
the house striking midnight, and in the silence the house seemed to be
full of clocks. They came running down the stairs and up and down the
passages and then, with a whir and a clatter, ceased as instantly as
they had begun.
The house was silent again--the storm had died down--and then the dog
that had been sleeping suddenly raised its head and barked. Somewhere
in the distance a door was banged to, and then Peter heard a voice, a
tremendous voice, singing.
There were heavy steps along the passage, then the kitchen door was
banged open and Stephen stood in the doorway. Stephen's shirt was
open at the neck, his hair waved wildly over his forehead, he stood,
enormous, with his legs apart, his eyes shining, blood coming from a cut
in his cheek, and in one of his hands was a thick cudgel. Standing there
in the doorway, he might have been some ancient Hercules, some mighty
Achilles.
He saw Peter, recognised him, but continued a kind of triumphal hymn
that he was singing.
“Ho, Master Peter, I've beat him! I've battered his bloody carcass! I
came along and I looked in at the winder and I saw 'im a ill-treatin' of
'er.
“I left the winder, I broke the glass, I was down upon 'im, the dirty
'ound, and”--(chorus)--“I've battered 'is bloody carcass! Praise be the
Lord, I got 'im one between the eyes--”
“Praise be, I 'it him square in the jaw and the blood came a-pourin' out
of his mouth and down 'e went, and--
(Chorus) “I've battered 'is bloody carcass--
“There she was, cryin' in the corner of the room, my lovely girl, and
there 'e was, blast 'is bones, with 'is 'and on her lovely 'air, and--
(Chorus) “I've battered 'is bloody carcass.
“I got 'im one on the neck and I got 'im one between 'is lovely eyes and
I got 'im one on 'is lovely nose, and 'e went down straight afore me,
and--
(Chorus) “I've battered 'is bloody carcass!”
Peter knew that it must be Mr. Samuel Burstead to whom Stephen was
referring, and he too, as he listened, was suddenly filled with a sense
of glory and exultation. Here after all was a way out of all trouble,
all this half-seen, half-imagined terror of the past weeks. Here too
was an end to all Stephen's morbid condition, sitting alone by himself,
drinking, seeing no one--now that he'd got Burstead between the eyes
life would be a vigorous, decent thing once more.
Stephen stopped his hymn and came and put his arm round Peter's neck.
“Well, boy, to think of you coming round this evening. All these months
I've been sittin' 'ere thinking of you--but I've been in a nasty, black
state, Master Peter, doing nothing but just brood. And the devils got
thicker and thicker about me and I was just going off my head thinking
of my girl in the 'ands of that beast up along. At last to-night I
suddenly says, 'Stephen, my fine feller, you've 'ad enough of this,' I
says. 'You go up and 'ave a good knock at 'im,' I says, 'and to-morrer
marnin' you just go off to another bit o' country and start doin'
something different.' Up I got and I caught hold of this stick here and
out up along I walked. Sure enough there 'e was, through the winder,
bullyin' her and she crying. So I just jumped through the winder and was
up on to 'im. Lord, you should 'ave seen 'im jump.
“'Fair fight, Sam Burstead,' I says.
“'Yer bloody pirate!' says 'e.
“'Pirate, is it?' says I, landing him one--and at that first feel of my
'and along o' 'is cheek all these devils that I've been sufferin' from
just turned tail and fled.
“Lord, I give it 'im! Lord, I give it 'im!
“He's living, I reckon, but that's about all 'e is doing. And then,
without a word to 'er, I come away, and here I am, a free man ... and
to-morrer marning I go out to tramp the world a bit--and to come back
one day when she wants me.”
And then in Peter there suddenly leapt to life a sense of battle, of
glorious combat and conflict.
As he stood there in the bare kitchen--he and Stephen there under the
light of the jumping candle--with the rain beating on the panes,
the trees of the wood bending to the wind, he was seized, exalted,
transformed with a sense of the vigour, the adventure, the surprising
energy of life.
“Stephen! Stephen!” he cried. “It's glorious! By God! I wish I'd been
there!”
Stephen caught him by the arm and held him. The old dog came from under
the table and wagged his tail.
“Bless my soul,” said Stephen, looking at him, “all these weeks I've
been forgetting him. I've been in a kind of dream, boy--a kind o' dream.
Why didn't I 'it 'im before? Lord, why didn't I 'it 'im before!”
Peter at the word thought of his mother.
“Yes,” he thought, with clenched teeth, “I'll go for them!”