“Will you be a soldier?” she asked.
“And be bawled at by duffers? No fear!” said I. “Leave that to the
plough-boys.”
“But an officer?”
“I don’t know,” I said, evading a shameful difficulty.
“I’d rather go into the navy.”
“Wouldn’t you like to fight?”
“I’d like to fight,” I said. “But a common soldier it’s no honour to
have to be told to fight and to be looked down upon while you do it,
and how could I be an officer?”
“Couldn’t you be?” she said, and looked at me doubtfully; and the
spaces of the social system opened between us.
Then, as became a male of spirit, I took upon myself to brag and lie my
way through this trouble. I said I was a poor man, and poor men went
into the navy; that I “knew” mathematics, which no army officer did;
and I claimed Nelson for an exemplar, and spoke very highly of my
outlook upon blue water. “He loved Lady Hamilton,” I said, “although
she _was_ a lady—and I will love you.”
We were somewhere near that when the egregious governess became
audible, calling “Beeee-âtrice! Beeee-e-âtrice!”
“Snifty beast!” said my lady, and tried to get on with the
conversation; but that governess made things impossible.
“Come here!” said my lady suddenly, holding out a grubby hand; and I
went very close to her, and she put her little head down upon the wall
until her black fog of hair tickled my cheek.
“You are my humble, faithful lover,” she demanded in a whisper, her
warm flushed face near touching mine, and her eyes very dark and
lustrous.
“I am your humble, faithful lover,” I whispered back.
And she put her arm about my head and put out her lips and we kissed,
and boy though I was, I was all atremble. So we two kissed for the
first time.
“_Beeee-e-e_-â-trice!” fearfully close.
My lady had vanished, with one wild kick of her black-stocking leg. A
moment after, I heard her sustaining the reproaches of her governess,
and explaining her failure to answer with an admirable lucidity and
disingenuousness.
I felt it was unnecessary for me to be seen just then, and I vanished
guiltily round the corner into the West Wood, and so to love-dreams and
single-handed play, wandering along one of those meandering bracken
valleys that varied Bladesover park. And that day and for many days
that kiss upon my lips was a seal, and by night the seed of dreams.
Then I remember an expedition we made—she, I, and her half-brother—into
those West Woods—they two were supposed to be playing in the
shrubbery—and how we were Indians there, and made a wigwam out of a
pile of beech logs, and how we stalked deer, crept near and watched
rabbits feeding in a glade, and almost got a squirrel. It was play
seasoned with plentiful disputing between me and young Garvell, for
each firmly insisted upon the leading _rôles_, and only my wider
reading—I had read ten stories to his one—gave me the ascendency over
him. Also I scored over him by knowing how to find the eagle in a
bracken stem. And somehow—I don’t remember what led to it at all—I and
Beatrice, two hot and ruffled creatures, crept in among the tall
bracken and hid from him. The great fronds rose above us, five feet or
more, and as I had learnt how to wriggle through that undergrowth with
the minimum of betrayal by tossing greenery above, I led the way. The
ground under bracken is beautifully clear and faintly scented in warm
weather; the stems come up black and then green; if you crawl flat, it
is a tropical forest in miniature. I led the way and Beatrice crawled
behind, and then as the green of the further glade opened before us,
stopped. She crawled up to me, her hot little face came close to mine;
once more she looked and breathed close to me, and suddenly she flung
her arm about my neck and dragged me to earth beside her, and kissed me
and kissed me again. We kissed, we embraced and kissed again, all
without a word; we desisted, we stared and hesitated—then in a suddenly
damped mood and a little perplexed at ourselves, crawled out, to be
presently run down and caught in the tamest way by Archie.
That comes back very clearly to me, and other vague memories—I know old
Hall and his gun, out shooting at jackdaws, came into our common
experiences, but I don’t remember how; and then at last, abruptly, our
fight in the Warren stands out. The Warren, like most places in England
that have that name, was not particularly a warren, it was a long slope
of thorns and beeches through which a path ran, and made an alternative
route to the downhill carriage road between Bladesover and Ropedean. I
don’t know how we three got there, but I have an uncertain fancy it was
connected with a visit paid by the governess to the Ropedean vicarage
people. But suddenly Archie and I, in discussing a game, fell into a
dispute for Beatrice. I had made him the fairest offer: I was to be a
Spanish nobleman, she was to be my wife, and he was to be a tribe of
Indians trying to carry her off. It seems to me a fairly attractive
offer to a boy to be a whole tribe of Indians with a chance of such a
booty. But Archie suddenly took offence.
“No,” he said; “we can’t have that!”
“Can’t have what?”
“You can’t be a gentleman, because you aren’t. And you can’t play
Beatrice is your wife. It’s—it’s impertinent.”
“But” I said, and looked at her.
Some earlier grudge in the day’s affairs must have been in Archie’s
mind. “We let you play with us,” said Archie; “but we can’t have things
like that.”
“What rot!” said Beatrice. “He can if he likes.”
But he carried his point. I let him carry it, and only began to grow
angry three or four minutes later. Then we were still discussing play
and disputing about another game. Nothing seemed right for all of us.
“We don’t want you to play with us at all,” said Archie.
“Yes, we do,” said Beatrice.
“He drops his aitches like anything.”
“No, ’e doesn’t,” said I, in the heat of the moment.
“There you go!” he cried. “E, he says. E! E! E!”
He pointed a finger at me. He had struck to the heart of my shame. I
made the only possible reply by a rush at him. “Hello!” he cried, at my
blackavised attack. He dropped back into an attitude that had some
style in it, parried my blow, got back at my cheek, and laughed with
surprise and relief at his own success. Whereupon I became a thing of
murderous rage. He could box as well or better than I—he had yet to
realise I knew anything of that at all—but I had fought once or twice
to a finish with bare fists. I was used to inflicting and enduring
savage hurting, and I doubt if he had ever fought. I hadn’t fought ten
seconds before I felt this softness in him, realised all that quality
of modern upper-class England that never goes to the quick, that hedges
about rules and those petty points of honour that are the ultimate
comminution of honour, that claims credit for things demonstrably half
done. He seemed to think that first hit of his and one or two others
were going to matter, that I ought to give in when presently my lip
bled and dripped blood upon my clothes. So before we had been at it a
minute he had ceased to be aggressive except in momentary spurts, and I
was knocking him about almost as I wanted to do; and demanding
breathlessly and fiercely, after our school manner, whether he had had
enough, not knowing that by his high code and his soft training it was
equally impossible for him to either buck-up and beat me, or give in.
I have a very distinct impression of Beatrice dancing about us during
the affair in a state of unladylike appreciation, but I was too
preoccupied to hear much of what she was saying. But she certainly
backed us both, and I am inclined to think now—it may be the
disillusionment of my ripened years—whichever she thought was winning.
Then young Garvell, giving way before my slogging, stumbled and fell
over a big flint, and I, still following the tradition of my class and
school, promptly flung myself on him to finish him. We were busy with
each other on the ground when we became aware of a dreadful
interruption.
“Shut up, you _fool!_” said Archie.
“Oh, Lady Drew!” I heard Beatrice cry. “They’re fighting! They’re
fighting something awful!”
I looked over my shoulder. Archie’s wish to get up became irresistible,
and my resolve to go on with him vanished altogether.
I became aware of the two old ladies, presences of black and purple
silk and fur and shining dark things; they had walked up through the
Warren, while the horses took the hill easily, and so had come upon us.
Beatrice had gone to them at once with an air of taking refuge, and
stood beside and a little behind them. We both rose dejectedly. The two
old ladies were evidently quite dreadfully shocked, and peering at us
with their poor old eyes; and never had I seen such a tremblement in
Lady Drew’s lorgnettes.
“You’ve never been fighting?” said Lady Drew.
“You have been fighting.”
“It wasn’t proper fighting,” snapped Archie, with accusing eyes on me.
“It’s Mrs. Ponderevo’s George!” said Miss Somerville, so adding a
conviction for ingratitude to my evident sacrilege.
“How could he _dare?_” cried Lady Drew, becoming very awful.
“He broke the rules” said Archie, sobbing for breath. “I slipped,
and—he hit me while I was down. He knelt on me.”
“How could you _dare?_” said Lady Drew.
I produced an experienced handkerchief rolled up into a tight ball, and
wiped the blood from my chin, but I offered no explanation of my
daring. Among other things that prevented that, I was too short of
breath.
“He didn’t fight fair,” sobbed Archie.
Beatrice, from behind the old ladies, regarded me intently and without
hostility. I am inclined to think the modification of my face through
the damage to my lip interested her. It became dimly apparent to my
confused intelligence that I must not say these two had been playing
with me. That would not be after the rules of their game. I resolved in
this difficult situation upon a sulky silence, and to take whatever
consequences might follow.