It caused no sensation in Pentworth when Clarence Todhunter Western put
on trousers, and became the little father of the man he was to be, a
sturdy figure, not too long in the leg, and with a close-cropped,
squirish and intelligent head. He was a high-spirited, passionate child,
with his mother’s colouring and his father’s eyes. He looked at you
squarely, and smiling if you pleased him, showing a fine row of strong
white teeth. Girls called him a “brown boy,” and thought him rather
plain.
Mr. Jacks and Gruff were the only creatures who showed any particular
interest in Tod’s trousers.
Mr. Jacks met Tod in Conduit Street, and appeared greatly impressed.
“Well, well, Tod, old man—that’s fine. Funny sort of world anyway.
We’ll be old buffers in ten years.”
Mr. Jacks’ simplicity—sharp people called it foolishness—always
appealed to Tod. He liked to go fishing and bird-studying with Jacks;
they were just boys together; there was no talking up and down about it.
Gruff showed his interest in Tod’s trousers by walking round him and
sniffing at them. Gruff seemed to distrust trousers, and the change in
Tod disturbed him.
“A sign of incipient and respectable dullness, old man,” said the dog;
“you’ll get irritable and kick me some day. Or you’ll be going walks
with a thing in a petticoat, and I’ll be gooseberry. O lord!”
There was no burking the fact that Tod discovered Romance ten days after
that notable advance in costume, and Romance dawned on him in the blue
eyes and yellow hair of “Giggles.”
Tod first saw Miss Millie Hornblower sitting on her father’s garden
wall, and eating strawberries out of the hollow of a rhubarb leaf. The
brick wall was old and mossy, with a mass of green orchard trees behind
it, and a rose or two showing red as fire. The girl was wearing a light
blue linen dress, tan shoes, and brown stockings, and her yellow hair
was all fluffed out like smoke.
“Hallo, boy.”
“Hallo,” said Tod.
She slipped a strawberry between her restless red lips, tossed her hair,
and threw the stalk at Tod. It hit him on the collar and made a little
red mark.
“Like one?”
“Thank you.”
“Please.”
She stretched out the leaf, and then drew it back again with a
mischievous giggle.
“What’s your name, first.”
“Tod.”
“What a silly name.”
“It’s short for Todhunter,” said the boy.
“Toadhunter? Oh, horrid! Haven’t you got a nicer name than that?”
“Clarence.”
She considered “Clarence,” swinging her legs and looking at him with
feline curiosity. The child had a way with her, and a restless,
mischievous yet lean sauciness that promised to mature and trouble many
men. She was very bold at twelve, mainly because she had not learnt to
hide her boldness. Sex cunning and middle-class morality were to teach
her that.
Tod had his strawberry, and a chat with Miss Hornblower. The Hornblowers
had but lately come to Pentworth, where Mr. Hornblower was in charge of
the local management of a coal merchant’s business. It appeared that the
Hornblowers had just bought a new drawing-room carpet—a very gorgeous
affair; that Dad thought of keeping a pony and trap; and that she—Miss
Hornblower—was going to receive piano lessons from the organist of St.
Luke’s. Tod accepted all this information with proper awe and interest.
Miss Hornblower had a fine appreciation of her social position, and she
meant other people to appreciate it also. Humility does not pay in
middle-class England, and Millie had absorbed the wisdom of her parents.
“What’s your father?”
“He’s dead,” said Tod.
There was nothing interesting to her in the fact that Tod’s father was
dead.
“Where do you live?”
“Number thirteen Spaniards Row. My mother owns the photographic studio.”
“Oh, you keep a shop!” said Miss Hornblower.
Her exclamatory tone challenged him.
“It’s not a shop, but a studio. My dad painted pictures.”
“Did he sell them?” asked the girl.
“He painted ’em for pleasure,” said Tod, lured from the strict truth by
her feminine fascinations.
Miss Hornblower offered him another strawberry.
“It’s quite gentlemanly to paint pictures,” she announced. “Where do you
go to school?”
“Chipperton’s. Prospect House.”
“I know some of the boys there, Bertie Blimmer and Tom Cassilis.”
Tod felt that he might have serious things to say to Messrs. Blimmer and
Cassilis.
That was the beginning of Tod’s first romance, and it occurred in spite
of Mr. Chipperton and his mother. The strange part of it was that this
boy was inspired to a sensitive and adventurous chivalry by this vain
and precocious little chit who had learnt all the elemental tricks of
the fully sexed woman. Nature does not intend a man to have ideals, she
adapts her sorcery and makes use of these ideals, and in the great game
of fooling him nearly all the poets and romancers have blindly and
wilfully aided her in her deceit. Tod had taken to reading boy’s tales
and romances, and his head was full of wonderful young women who were
beautiful as angels, sweet as nectar, gentle as white pigeons, and pure
as the forest dew. A boy fought for one of them, suffered for her,
rescued her from all sorts of wonderful perils and iniquities, and in
the end some good old man blessed them, and they loved each other for
ever and ever.
Mr. Chipperton believed in that sort of tale, and in that hypothetical
young heroine, but he was a bachelor, and he regarded the actual thing
in petticoats with immense and cowardly suspicion. He did not like girls
loitering about the playground gate. He approved most thoroughly of the
“caterpillar” formation in which Miss Rumble sent her young ladies to
take their daily exercise. Mr. Chipperton, that most representative
English moralist, having taken up a thoroughly false and artificial
position on the sex question, found himself harassed and outmanœuvered,
and was always being fooled behind his back. The pity of it all is that
these good people teach youth a false and lying philosophy, arm them
with brittle and treacherous weapons that are apt to break when the
great truths of life put them to the test. The man and the woman who
search for sincerity find themselves doomed to re-learn much of
mischievous stuff that was taught them in earlier years. They are lucky
if the “sugar romance” and the “pretty-pretty-happy-forever-after”
school of morals have not already involved them in some sordid and
tragic partnership.
Nancy Western might have helped her boy had she had more knowledge of
this primitive romance, and had she lived longer. She was a woman—one
of the very few women—who had been happily married and had found
complete and human satisfaction in her man. The very rich and tender
memories of her marriage made her perhaps a little slow in the matter of
fearing for her boy. He was a child still, and the man in him seemed a
long way off. She did not want to go forward and meet the man in him.
She longed to keep him as a boy, hers, unshared by any other feminine
thing.
It must be confessed too that Tod’s love for and admiration of his
mother sent him off on life’s adventure with the notion that all women
were like her. He had all the instinctive chivalry of the clean and
healthy boy whose mother had given him a charming and happy childhood.
He thought that all girls were like the girls he read of in those books
of adventure. Wholesome books no doubt, if life were like that, and a
boy were never to become a man. If Nancy Western could have foreseen the
future and thought about it, in a thoroughly, un-English, honest, and
intelligent way, she might have burnt those books, forgathered with
other wise and devoted women and insisted on some new sort of literature
for children. She might have realised that English parents do not face
the great problems, that they shrink from telling their own boys and
girls the truth.
Tod was enslaved by Millie Hornblower’s yellow hair and audacious eyes.
He thought her a very wonderful creature, and fit to take her place in
any of those romantic books. He haunted Bridge Street and Mill Lane, and
was thrilled if he had a glimpse of the lady. He hung about on Sundays
and waited to see her go to church, and even had the courage to take off
his little bowler hat to Mrs. Hornblower and her daughter.
“Who’s that little boy?”
Tod blushed shamefully. Little boy indeed! When he was in a mood to
encounter and to slay dragons.
Pertinacity had its reward. He met Miss Hornblower in Bridge Street one
Friday evening; she had been adopting a rather distant and ladylike
attitude, and the innocent Tod imagined that he must have offended her.
He pushed his school cap over the back of his head, blushed and stopped.
“Lovely evening.”
“It’s quite a nice evening,” said Miss Hornblower, and giggled.
Then she made that amazing suggestion.
“Let’s go for a walk.”
Tod stepped straight into heaven.
They went down over the bridge and along the path across the river
meadows, Tod trying to make gallant and intelligent conversation, and
failing abjectly. He wished a mad dog or a tramp or something would
attack Millie, so that he could express in wild action what he could not
put into words.
“I liked your mother’s dress on Sunday,” he observed, after wondering
whether this wonderful creature was interested in dogs.
“Was it a nice dress?”
“Rather. But not half as nice as yours.”
Millie gave him a quick, challenging look.
“Don’t believe you noticed what colour mine was.”
“Yes I did—white with blue bows.”
She patted his shoulder, and Tod wanted to die for her.
“What a shy boy you are!”
“I’m not shy.”
“Yes, you are. You couldn’t say bo! to Mr. Chipperton if he came round
that corner.”
“Yes, I could,” said Tod.
And surely enough Mr. Chipperton did stalk round that corner, arms
swinging, bumpy forehead rather moist, the serious man taking his
serious exercise. He stared at Tod, and threw a disapproving and
mistrustful look at Millie.
“Evening, Western.”
“Good evening, sir,” and Tod lifted his cap.
His enchantress showed a sudden haughtiness when Mr. Chipperton had
passed.
“I don’t like cowards,” she said.
Tod was grieved, desolated, angry with himself, but not in the least
angry with her.
“I couldn’t be rude to him, could I?” he argued. “And old Chips is quite
a decent sort.”
“He ought to have taken his hat off to you,” said Miss Hornblower, “when
he saw you were walking with a lady.”
She turned back with all the airs of a very superior young woman who had
been piqued and offended, and Tod could find nothing to say to her.
She left him in Bridge Street.
“Good night, Mr. Western.”
“Good night,” said Tod, jerking his cap, and thinking that girls were
most amazingly sensitive creatures and most easily offended.
Tod was a boy with plenty of sentiment and very little pocket-money, and
it never occurred to him that pocket-money could count with so proud and
peerless a creature as his lady. The Dorotheas and Lornas and Dianas in
the story books never stopped to wonder whether young John Splendid had
a shilling with which to buy them cakes and ale. They expected him to be
strong and bold and adoring, to loiter under walls and in gardens for a
glimpse of them, to treasure gloves and bits of ribbon, to throw flowers
and little love letters into their windows, to smite all villains
fiercely and repeatedly, to be devoted, sentimental, tender.
Poor Tod followed his new romantic instincts and the teachings of the
books. He became the very son of his father, a little Quixote, who made
up bunches of roses, and clove pinks and sweet peas, tagged a label to
them and then tossed them with fear and trembling over Mr. Hornblower’s
garden wall.
“To the most beautiful _and_ lovely Queen of Pentworth.”
“A little token from your loyal and devoted knight and worshipper, Tod
Clarence Western.”
“To the noble lady whom I love.”
Also he tried his hand at poetry, and sent fragments of it with flowers.
“Your hair is like the brightest gold,
Your eyes are bluer than the sea.
But why is your sweet heart so cold
When I am sunk in misery?”
This particular appeal fell into the hands of Mr. Hornblower, who
happened to be forking potatoes, and who made dreadful fun of it at the
tea-table.
“Tell the little gentleman to take a Gregory powder, Millie. Your hair
is like the brightest gold, is it? Gosh, he’s got it badly!”
Millie giggled, but she rather liked Tod’s very flattering despair.
There were other boys who had fallen under her spell, but they were not
so romantic and devoted as Tod. She relented, and allowed Tod an
assignation at the gate under the scrubby old laurels at the end of the
garden.
Tod was not so eloquent as his flowers or his poetry; he was ever rather
a shy boy with girls and women, and this sudden nearness to his princess
filled him with awe.
“Awfully good of you to let me come and talk to you,” he said.
“You rather like talking to me, then?” sang the siren.
“It’s music,” said Tod; “and isn’t your hair wonderful?”
She shook it at him.
“Would you like a little bit to keep?”
“Would you give it me?”
“If you’ll swear on your honour.”
“What do you want me to swear?” Tod asked.
“That you’ll never look at any other girl, and that you’ll fight any
other boy who wants to talk to me. There’re lots, you know.”
“I’ll do that,” said Tod. “Give me your hand to hold.”
She gave him her hand through the bars of the gate, and Tod removed his
cap, knelt down, and made his vow.
“I’ll always love Millie Hornblower,” he declaimed, “and I’ll defend her
from all ruffians, dogs and rivals, with all my heart and strength. I’ll
be her knight and her servant till I die, please God, Amen.”
With that he kissed her brown little fingers, and got up—blushing.
“You’ll give me the lock of hair now,” he said. “I’ll put it in a little
bag and carry it over my heart.”
“I’ll have to get some scissors.”
She slipped away, and Tod stood there in a prayerful and exultant mood,
a mood that was suddenly disturbed by the appearance of another boy, a
boy with a snub nose and freckles, wearing a disgustingly clean collar,
and a silver watch chain displayed across his black waistcoat.
It was Tom Cassilis, a very sulky looking Tom Cassilis, with green
jealousy in his eyes.
“Hallo.”
“Hallo,” said Tod, beginning to bristle.
“What’s the joke?” said Master Cassilis.
“What joke?”
“Bet me she’d have you here, and I owe her sixpence. You’re a
gooseberry, you loony.”
“It’s a lie,” said Tod.
“Call me a liar.”
“Liar.”
They did not trouble to take off their coats, but plunged into battle
like two good paladins fighting for the love of a fair lady. Tod felt a
particular rage against Master Cassilis’s clean collar, and the swagger
of that silver watch chain. He made haste to ruin both, while Miss
Hornblower, returning with a bit of yellow hair wrapped up in a piece of
pink tissue paper, watched the fray through the slats of the gate, and
felt sweet and good and pleased with her own beauty.
“Oh, you bad boys!”
The boys took no notice of her; they were too busy with each other. Tod
had made Master Cassilis’s nose bleed. He closed with his rival and,
getting the under hold, threw the other boy and destroyed the last
vestiges of vanity that challenged him in the other’s person. Tom
Cassilis rolled and kicked, and began pinching, but Tod dropped that by
a throttle hold that clinched his victory.
“Say ‘I’m a liar.’”
“Shan’t,” gulped Cassilis.
He let Master Cassilis up when that gentleman had recanted.
“It’s my gate,” said Tod. “Don’t you ever come here again, or I’ll
thrash you worse.”
The beaten one was on the edge of tears, and Tod felt a sudden pity for
him.
“Couldn’t help it, Tom, could I? Shake hands.”
“Shan’t,” blubbered the other boy, walking off, dabbing his bleeding
nose with a dirty handkerchief.
Miss Hornblower looked on Tod with favour after that stout proof of his
devotion. He fought three more boys in the next ten days, vanquished
them, and was vexed by no more rivals.
Giggles allowed him to buy her a little German-silver ring and to put it
on her third finger.
“You’re mine, you know, now,” said Tod, “mine—for ever and ever.”