Tod, playing some mysterious jungle game under the grubby laurels and
aucubas that hedged the side walk leading to No. 13 Spaniards Row, heard
two respectable loiterers passing judgment upon his father.
“That silly fool Western will never make any money.”
Tod was a combative child and very clannish, and he pushed a solid round
head through the laurel leaves, and retorted upon these Pentworth
financiers.
“Boo! Only a silly fool wants to make money!”
The elder of the two, it was Mr. Joab Twain of Twain’s Stores, turned an
enormous and angry face on the child.
“Who’s that?”
“Me,” said Tod.
“The Western brat! Sort of language you’d expect from a little atheist.”
“I’m not a brat,” said Tod, “and three of the eggs Mother bought of you
yesterday was rotten.”
He made a rapid, backward retreat through the shrubbery, scrambled over
the little, low red-brick wall, descended into the garden, and found his
father in his shirt-sleeves preparing to beat the parlour carpet.
Tod flew at him and then stopped dead, solemn as a professor of
political economy.
“I say, Daddy——”
“My son——?”
“Jus’ heard ol’ Twain say you was a silly fool and couldn’t make money.”
Western threw up his head and laughed.
“It’s true—confound him. We haven’t the penny-three-farthing soul, Tod,
my boy. Come on and beat carpets.”
If ever a child loved his father, and had good cause to love him, that
child was Tod Western. In later years he never lost the very vivid
memory of the man, the memory that many such incidents had left him,
glimpsing him in the mirror of a boy’s devoted hero worship, a tall man
with a Spanish air, head up, black hair waved back, blue eyes a little
fierce and ironical. The old velvet coat, soft shirt and collar, cherry
coloured tie, knickers and stockings, were part of the beloved picture.
For William Western was an original, in that he had not bowed the knee
to the gods of Pentworth town, had refused the black coat and the
commercial credo, and dressed himself in the Lincoln green of the merry
men of Sherwood. He was generous and he was always short of money. He
had the mischievous and affectionate heart of a boy, and a genius for
getting the last drop of happiness out of the simplest things of life.
Smugness and the dull materialism of Pentworth bored him, but he was
never conquered by them. Tod could remember occasional strange rages,
times when that boy father of his seemed to mount a big horse and go
galloping around and flashing a sword at queer, intangible beasts of
slime and shadow. Then he would come down off that horse and laugh, kiss
Tod’s mother, and perhaps chase Tod round the garden.
There were two whacking the dust of that parlour carpet. William Western
using a hollystick, Tod a little bamboo cane, when Tod leant forward on
all fours, regarding a frayed patch in front of him.
“Here’s where your chair has the fidgets, Daddy.”
“Get’s excited, does it? ‘Wish this chap wouldn’t talk so much—and such
tosh!’ It’s a respectable, middle-class chair, Tod, and likes
comfortable sermons on a Sunday before the roast beef and Yorkshire
pudding.”
“My chair fidgets a bit,” said Tod.
“There are signs of it elsewhere, my boy.”
Then the other voice chimed in:
“Oh, Tod, where did you do that?”
Tod twisted round to face his mother—mother with the gold brown hair
and eyes that were so calm and yet always ready to smile.
“Done what, Mummy?”
“Frayed your particular bit of carpet, my son,” said his father.
Tod ran a tentative hand over a certain portion of his figure.
“Yes, that’s a fragment of shirt, my child.”
“Must have happened sliding down the wall by the church steps,” said
Tod, very solemn.
“Oh, Tod!” said his mother.
Tod got up and kissed her.
“Couldn’t you put in a nice bit of leavver, Mummy? I’m so sorry.”
Western struck the carpet a resounding smack.
“That’s what a wanton destruction of good shoddy deserves! Great
Jehovah, I’ve forgotten to develop Miss Trilby’s plates!”
“I’ve done it, Will,” said his wife with a mother smile.
Western arose and imitated his son.
“There never was anyone like your mother, Tod,” he confessed.
No man knew better than William Western that it was his wife who had
held the gates and walls of this Château Gaillard of a home.
Western’s Photographic Studio was the only temple of its kind in
Pentworth town, and Western was a most irresponsible and autocratic
priest. The shop had been built in front of one of the little old red
houses in Spaniards Row, and its two bulging bow-windows with the white
door in between looked like a pair of high-powered spectacles perched on
the blunt nose of Western’s house. Tod’s father had a reckless sense of
humour. He could take a good picture, if the subject pleased him; he
loved children and would spend an hour playing with some shy child till
he had surprised it in a moment of naturalness. The adults of Pentworth
gave him no such romantic possibilities, and he did not ask for them.
“Jam ’em in chairs up against a bit of rockery. That’s all that’s
wanted. See they’ve got their cuffs down and their gold chains showing.”
And that was all he did. He plastered his walls and windows with the
obviousness of Pentworth, its staring stolidity, its bony head and
bucolic gawkishness, its absurd Sabbath clothes all put on for the
occasion. There were various mayors of Pentworth in robes and chains;
family groups looking thoroughly stiff and uncomfortable; girls sitting
in the same Louis Quinze chair with young men posed rather sheepishly
behind them; other young men trying to look negligent and at ease while
perched on a flat-topped bit of rustic furniture; old ladies with dogs
and cats, and their laps and bosoms very much in the foreground; young
women who simpered or looked sternly stolid; boys with cricket bats;
brides and bridegrooms who did not seem quite sure whether they belonged
to each other.
“Slap ’em up against a bit of rockery. Jam their heads in a vice and let
’em stare. Give ’em something to hold—a prayer book, a Malacca cane,
somebody else’s hand—anything. Give ’em something obvious, something
they needn’t trouble to understand.”
Now and again he caught a temperament, a face, a naturalness that piqued
him, and then he made a picture of it, and would spoil a dozen plates in
the adventure. Perhaps it was a little country girl with something of
the Tess about her, or a sailorman who had forgotten to worry about
being respectable, or an old shepherd who lived with his sheep and the
weather. He painted pictures too, rather wild water-colours of marsh,
and downlands, and mysterious thundercloud smitten woods. They hung in
the studio, but nobody ever bought them. He also catalogued himself as a
painter of miniatures, and he had painted several of his wife, and one
of Tod. Miss Timperley of Gore Hall had once given him a commission and
had then accused him of making her squint.
“But you do squint, madam,” he had said in self-defence.
Such sincerity is not made for this world.
The house in Spaniards Row held the heart of Tod’s childhood. It was a
queer house, a Puck’s palace that played tricks on you and always got
the best of the game. The front of it was all red, the back all white,
but it did not deign to be divided so dogmatically. It had queer gables,
juttings out of odd wings and outhouses, little brick excrescences,
unexpected chimneys, windows that winked at you goblin fashion. There
were two back doors, a side door and a front door, all painted a blurred
bluish green. No. 13 delighted in little yards and passages, and funny
poky outhouses and cellars that just existed on mystery and did nothing
for a living. There was a pump, a rain-water cistern that suggested all
sorts of subterranean and watery horrors if you lifted the stone slab; a
brick baking-oven fit to hold forty thieves; a coal-cellar that any
decent dragon might have coveted. The interior of the house was just as
mysterious and unexpected. It was full of passages and cupboards and odd
bits of staircase, and every room had a different mood. The shabby old
furniture that Nancy Western had brought with her marriage, the white
chintz curtains, faded rose-bud wall-papers, were part of the same
picture. Tod used to play at Bogey by hiding in the oak chest on the
landing, or he would barricade the attic stairs with a couple of old
trunks, a derelict towel-horse, and an assortment of cardboard boxes,
and await attack by his father. His father would advance up the stairs
with the fur rug from the parlour over his head and shoulders, and armed
with a battered dish-cover and rolling pin. Tod held the stairs with
paper darts and a curtain pole. There would be great excursions, shouts,
battle cries, clashing of dish-cover and curtain pole, and some
disorganisation of the lumber forming the barricade.
“I’m King Borrabarroo, the terrible—terrible sabbige, Wahoo,
Borrabarroo! I smell the blood of Tod—the Englishman.”
“I’m Tod, the giant-killer. I’ve cut off the heads of ten sabbiges, and
I’ve killed hundreds of Frenchmen.”
Sometimes the fort was stormed, but King Borrabarroo never survived the
adventure.
Then there were those rambling pilgrimages afield, when Tod learnt about
wild birds, and trees, and flowers. There were half days in the
Pentworth woods, and Tod could remember spending one whole night under
the stars, cuddling close up to his father, with Western’s old brown
mackintosh drawn over him beside a gipsy fire.
Mummy had looked rather grave next day.
“Will, you shouldn’t!”
“It was dry as a haystack, dear. And we had a fire to frighten the bears
and wolves. Hadn’t we, Tod?”
“And we cooked pertaters in it, Mummy.”
Nancy Western had kissed both her savages and fed them on tea and boiled
eggs.
It was not given to the Tod of those days to understand the beloved soul
of his mother. Finance did not affect him and if there were worries at
No. 13 Spaniards Row, they were not clouds to the child. Nancy Western
was a happy woman. Her irresponsible, lovable boy of a man was worth the
little contriving frowns that his originalities sometimes placed upon
her forehead. She was his mother and his mistress and his wife. She
managed his house, performed miracles with his money, made good his
casual attitude towards the commercial part of Pentworth, and yet kept
him as a lover. Western was no fool, but a very human and wise rebel. He
knew what life had given him in his wife’s shining eyes, and her soft,
full-hearted laughter. He knew that she had had every right to be
exasperated—how much she forgave, and how greatly he loved her for that
smiling, understanding, human soul of hers. She was Romance, and had
never ceased to be Romance, and his home had never been sordid.
Tod had glimpses of his father as a lover. Those summer Sundays were the
great days. The picnic basket would be packed the night before, and they
would catch the train that always started so adventurously and
inconveniently early and landed them at Yerrow or Wivelsea in time for a
second breakfast. There were sea days and woodland days, days on the
chalk hills with lunch and tea under some windblown thorn. Sometimes it
rained, but Western was a genius with a couple of mackintoshes and an
umbrella, and life was always a bit of Crusoe’s island. Tod noticed that
his mother laughed more, and looked pinker, and brighter about the eyes
on those days. She wore her pretty frocks—the white frock with the pink
ribbons, or the green one edged with white. Most of the time Tod’s
father had an arm round her, or he was sitting so that he could touch
her or give a playful tweak to the hair. Tod remembered a day in the
Yerrow woods when he had trundled off to look at an ant-hill near the
camping ground, and had come back to find his mother in his father’s
arms and being kissed, as he—Tod—was never kissed. Tod had sneaked off
again, and spent half an hour stirring up the ant-heap with a stick.
Six days out of seven Mummy was cooking, or cleaning, or mending
clothes, or shut up in that funny little dark-room where Daddy messed
about with bottles and dishes and things. Tod never remembered seeing
her out of temper, except on one of those Saturday afternoons when Uncle
Remus drove over from Lydhurst. Tod came on them in the garden, down by
the three old apple trees, and his mother was very white and Uncle Remus
very red.
“Never dare to say that to me again.”
“You needn’t flare out like that, Nan. There’s no denying that Will’s a
poor hand at business.”
“I didn’t marry him for that, did I? He’s the best man in the world, and
he has made me happy.”
Tod did not like Uncle Remus. He was long and meagre, with a figure that
had concavities where bulges should have been. He had weak, shifty eyes,
a fringe of grey hair, a neck like a turkey’s and a wonderful blue and
everted lower lip. That lip used to fascinate Tod, especially when Uncle
Remus ate peas with a knife.
“Doesn’t it get cut, Uncle?”
“Get cut, boy? What?”
“Your lip.”
Uncle Remus made some sort of remark about a strap and its uses.
He was a farmer, pretty well-to-do, and he wore a hard felt hat, green
with age, and black clothes that looked rusty. The last thing Uncle
Remus ever did was to part with money. He avoided the sacrifice, dodged
it, walked round it, ignored it unless it was too obviously part of the
day’s business. Never once did Tod get a sixpence out of him, and Uncle
Remus got nothing out of Tod. He thought him a bold and cheeky little
beast, and Tod christened his uncle “Old-bug-in-the-Bed,” though how he
had come by the phrase no one ever knew! His father roared when he first
heard it; his mother went red, began a reproof, and then laughed like
her husband.
Even at the age of seven Tod had some understanding of his father’s
attitude towards the world of Pentworth town. Pentworth thought William
Western an eccentric fool; it also disliked him, because it had an
unpleasant suspicion that Western managed to laugh at Pentworth’s
opinion. When you have labelled a man as a fool, it is most improper for
him to turn round and laugh at you. There had been occasions, of which
Tod, of course, knew nothing, when his father had got up at public
meetings and said the most ironical, scathing and truthful things with a
happy smile on his face. Pentworth, especially the commercial part of
Pentworth, did not like that sort of man. He was an uncomfortable
neighbour, the kind of person who upsets the middle-class “Christian,”
who talked about money-changers and scourages, and who reminded fat
people that their God’s feet had been washed by a harlot.
That his father was at war with Pentworth Tod guessed quite shrewdly,
but the spiritual inspiration of the feud was beyond the grasp of the
child.
Tod remembered quite a number of Western’s queer sayings, and they stuck
in his memory, to be pulled out and used in after years.
“I’m not a penny-in-the-slot machine.”
“Christ was born before the commercial traveller.”
“Black-coated, slimy slaves!”
“Up with Ruskin, down with the robbers.”
“You never need fear playing dirty tricks so long as you keep them out
of the newspapers.”
“This country with a penny-three-farthing soul.”