Tod held his place as Miss Millie Hornblower’s devoted knight and
servant till the coming of the summer holidays brought him an unexpected
rival. Tod was not a greedy boy; he never had much pocket-money, and he
had failed to understand the secret worldliness of his enchantress’s
affection. He gave her himself when she sometimes had a desire for
caramels and chocolate creams. She liked looking at the tarts and pinky
iced things in the pastrycook’s shop, but Tod was no plutocrat and he
rated her soul above jam puffs and penny ices. He once had brought her a
paper bag full of raspberries from his mother’s garden, but Giggles had
turned up her nose at them.
“Raspberries are nasty, grubby things.”
And Tod had felt hurt.
The summer holidays brought Sydney Plumpton back to Pentworth from some
superior sort of school where they had a sixth form and Olympian young
men who were called Prefects. Sydney Plumpton was a true son of his
father, a heavy, silent, boorish animal with a big wet mouth, staring
eyes, and sandy hair. He walked about Pentworth with his hands in his
pockets, a tuft of hair sticking out under the peak of his cap, and he
never lacked sixpences or something to suck. Chipperton’s thought him a
very great man. He talked about his school’s footer team, how he was
going to get his “cap,” also a scholarship at one of the Cambridge
colleges. He hinted, too, that his house-master’s daughter was always
wanting him to kiss her, and that she gave him her father’s cigarettes
to smoke.
This Plumpton boy happened upon Miss Hornblower somewhere in Pentworth.
He was new and he wore a stand-up collar, and carried a little stick.
Miss Hornblower smiled at him, and Sydney Plumpton thought her “the
stuff.”
They happened on each another day when young Plumpton was buying
sixpennyworth of chocolate creams at Mrs. Clutterbuck’s sweetshop. Miss
Hornblower was impressed. This young man could spend money.
Sydney Plumpton waited for her outside the shop.
“Come for a walk,” he said with the air of the master.
Giggles went with him, the sexed thing acknowledging its lord.
Tod became aware of a chilliness during the next ten days. Millie grew
sarcastic and patronising and talked over his head of the things real
men did when they entertained a lady, yet Tod had no suspicions till he
met her one evening with Sydney Plumpton. They were eating sweets out of
a bag.
Tod was thunderstruck. He had always hated young Plumpton, partly
because he was his father’s son, but his hatred blazed with double
strength because of this treachery. He sensed it at once as treachery,
from the way Giggles looked at him.
The place of the meeting was the path at the foot of the Castle Mound.
The mound was planted with trees, and there was an open space at the top
where lovers used to sit. Tod jerked a thumb in the direction of the
mound.
“Come up there and be licked,” he said to Sydney Plumpton.
They went up and found the place deserted. Millie Hornblower accompanied
them. She had no prejudice against gladiatorial shows, especially when
they were in her honour, though she protested half-heartedly.
“You mustn’t fight. It isn’t nice or gentlemanly. What a nasty temper
you have, Tod Western. Mr. Plumpton hasn’t done anything to you.”
Tod gave her a blank and tragic look. Did women forget so quickly?
Now young Plumpton was two years older than Tod, a good head taller, and
very heavy and strong. He did not take the affair very seriously until
he felt Tod in action, and saw the determination in the smaller boy’s
eyes. They fought for a full ten minutes, savagely, stubbornly, till
they were both so done that their attempts to punch were ludicrous.
Tod’s right eye was bulging and his lip was cut, but he had marked young
Plumpton’s left eye for him and given him a bloody nose. Both boys were
dead pale, panting, unsteady on their feet, when two men pushed through
the trees and stopped the fight.
“Well fought, little ’un.”
“Why don’t you take on one of your own size, Fatty?”
“I’ve got to beat him,” said Tod, holding himself up by the man’s arm.
“So you have, old sport. He’s hooking it; he’s had enough.”
“Rot; I let him down easy,” said Sydney Plumpton thickly. “Come on,
Giggles.”
Then that most amazing thing happened, for Miss Hornblower, who had been
eating young Plumpton’s sweets, hooked an arm in his and offered him her
handkerchief.
“Little savage,” she said, looking destroyingly at Tod; “he never had
any manners.”
Tod stared after them, with his romantic world toppling into ruins.
“But she’s got my ring,” he said aloud.
“No, I haven’t,” retorted the voice of the lady tartly. “Cheap German
silver! Sydney’s bought me a real gold one.”
Tod was a sensitive child, and he took that little tragedy of his
greatly to heart, never having heard as yet of a thing called cynicism.
He was humiliated, bewildered, and unable to rid himself of the belief
that this trashy little yellow-haired chit with her middle-class greed
and cunning was really something fine and wonderful. Those words of hers
about “German silver” had reduced Tod to horrid shame. The sensitive and
generous nature is always at the mercy of a bold and ingenious egotism.
The girl had thought him mean, and Tod looked for the blemish in
himself. Perhaps he was mean, naturally mean like Uncle Remus. He
remembered the incident of the raspberries, and saw himself as a mean
little boy whom no girl could love.
Tod waited till it was dusk before returning to Spaniards Row. He had a
horror of meeting anyone, even his mother; he wanted to get into some
lonely corner and lick himself clean like a dog. He felt that everybody
would be laughing at him and saying, “There’s mean little Tod Western
who gave a girl a German-silver ring.”
He sneaked in by the garden door, and, of course, fell straight into the
arms of his mother, who was lighting the lamp in the passage.
“Oh, Tod!”
“It’s all right, Mother.”
“But your poor eye and lip, dear.”
“I’ve had a bit of a fight,” said Tod, “but I gave the other chap much
what he gave me.”
“And what were you fighting about?”
Tod looked embarrassed, abashed, and thoroughly miserable. He had never
told his mother about Millie Hornblower, and he did not mean to tell her
now.
“Oh, just a row with Sydney Plumpton.”
“That big boy! Why he is two years older than you are, Tod, dear. Come
and let me bathe that poor lip. Was young Plumpton trying to bully you?”
“Bully me! It was an affair of honour,” said Tod with dignity.
“I see,” said Nancy Western.
She did not catechise her boy, but took him to her own room, and made a
sweet fuss of him, and in the end Tod told her everything. He was very
solemn and serious about it, and his mother’s heart went out to him. She
happened to know more about Miss Hornblower than Tod imagined.
“I like my boy to be brave and honourable,” she told him. “But Tod,
dear, lots of little girls, and women too, are just vain and greedy.
They want presents and flattery out of men, and nothing else.”
“I’ve done with girls,” said Tod gravely, “and I don’t want to read any
more of those silly books.”
He meditated, while his mother combed his hair.
“Suppose there are girls who grow up to be like you, Mummy?” he asked
her suddenly.
“Like me, Tod?”
“Yes. You’re the most wonderful woman in the world, Mummy.”
She kissed him.
“Oh, my dear, I’m not; I loved your father very much, and I love you.
That’s all. But I want you, Tod, I want you more than you think. You’re
the one thing I have got in the world.”
Tod turned and looked at her with a sudden shine in his eyes.
“What a silly ass I’ve been! There’s no one I love like you, and no one
so pretty as you.”
“I shan’t be pretty long, Tod.”
“Yes, you will, always and always.”
She sat down suddenly on the old sofa and put an arm round him. Her face
had grown very serious and sad.
“I’ve got to tell you, Tod, dear. I haven’t been very well for quite a
long time. I didn’t tell you before——”
Tod’s eyes had grown big and questioning. He looked at his mother as he
had never looked at her before. There was fear in him, a great
tenderness, an accusing selfscorn, a sudden throwing back of his memory
to moments when he had been conscious of his mother as seeming thinner
and paler than of yore.
“Mummy, you are not ill?”
“I don’t quite know yet, dear, and the doctor isn’t quite sure either.
But I’m not so strong as I was, and I get a silly, tired feeling.”
The memory of Millie Hornblower became blotted utterly out of Tod’s
mind. He knelt on the sofa, and put his arms round Nancy Western’s neck.
“I’ve got to leave school,” he said.
“No, dear, I want you to learn all you can.”
“Well, I’ll learn,” he said almost fiercely—“I’ll learn everything. But
I’m going to work in the shop, too, and I’m going to take care of you,
and you’re going to do nothing at all.”
“Tod——”
“And we’ll go to picnics, and I’ll carry everything. And if you get
tired, Mummy, we’ll have a bath-chair like Mrs. Furnival’s and I’ll
wheel you about.”
Her eyes filled with tears.
“Dear God,” she said, “you have given me all that I asked for.”
That was the beginning of a new season in Tod’s life, perhaps the most
beautiful, the saddest and the most significant season of them all. His
mother had not spoken to him without good cause. She was a sick woman,
and before three months had passed a doomed woman, a woman with youth in
her heart and death in her body.
Tod nursed her, at least he called it nursing her, though it was more
like the mingled love of a child and a man than the carefulness of a
nurse. He brought her her tea in the morning, carried up her breakfast,
and then dashed off to school where he tried to work as she wanted him
to work, though his thoughts were in Spaniards Row. He dashed home
again, tenderly irrepressible, and did all sorts of things without being
told or prompted. There were flowers in her room, and Tod put them
there. Once or twice she had asked him for the cut glass scent-bottle on
the dressing-table, and he saved up his pocket-money and bought her
scent. He interviewed Mr. Chipperton and asked to be excused homework,
explaining the situation with a simplicity and a frankness that touched
even that dusty pedant.
“Certainly, Western, certainly. I most thoroughly approve of your—your
devotion, sir.”
But Tod was at his greatest when he waylaid the doctor, and talked to
him with the anxious gravity of a father of a family.
“How is my mother to-day, sir, please?”
“Much the same, Tod, I’m afraid.”
“What about a bath-chair, sir? You would recommend fresh air?”
“Certainly, Tod. I think I can get you the loan of a chair.”
Dr. Vance went out into Spaniards Row and swore at nothing in
particular.
“Wish I had a boy like that,” he said.
But he was so conscious of Tod that he found time to be worried, and he
had to speak of it to Tod’s mother.
“That boy of yours is a trump,” he said, sitting on the chair beside the
bed and looking thoroughly uncomfortable.
Nancy Western answered him with a strange question.
“How long am I going to live? I want you to tell me the truth.”
The doctor felt in all his pockets, scratched his cheek with his
forefinger, and then looked her straight in the eyes.
“About four months, I should say.”
“Thank you,” she said; “I must tell him.”
She told Tod that evening when it was getting dusk, making him lie
curled on the bed beside her, with his head on the pillow. And Tod did
not weep just then. He lay very still, fists clenched, face all screwed
up, his heart full of a bitter wailing that something told him had to be
suppressed.
“I’ve got to be a man—I’ve got to be a man.”
And a man he was and far bigger-hearted and finer than most, fighting
that chocking anguish in his throat and that sense of hopelessness and
bewildering desolation.
“Oh, Mummy, why must God take you away? I won’t be selfish. It’s Daddy
that wants you.”
She was heartbroken when she thought of her boy alone, left to the
negative kindness of Uncle Remus. She was dying ten years too soon, just
when she could have done so much. The business was breaking up, and
Tod’s home was going with it. In another ten years she could have seen
him settled in Pentworth, or realised those other ambitions that had
been so dear to her mother’s soul.
“Uncle Remus will give you a home, dear,” she said; “I have spoken to
him about it.”
Tod did not want to go to Uncle Remus, but he managed to blurt out: “It
will be jolly on the farm.”
Tod wept his soul out that night when he was alone in his room. His
child’s anguish was so clean and poignant that its wet eyes could see
nothing in the future but desperate and utter loneliness. There were
moments when he rebelled, and stood in his white nightshirt at his
window, and flourished a fist at the stars.
“God, you mustn’t take Mother away. If you’re a good God you’ll let Dr.
Vance make her well.”
But God faded very much out of Tod’s life during those next weeks when
his mother began to suffer exquisite pain. The boy’s heart cried out for
tangible help, and in his queer, frank way he renounced a shadowy
benignant divinity whom nobody had ever seen and who appeared to be of
no use in those hours of bitter anguish. Dr. Vance became Tod’s god,
quiet, inarticulate, brown-faced Dr. Vance, with his little syringe and
bottle of blessed balm. Tod utterly refused to go to school. They could
hardly get him out of the house, and if morphia soothed Nancy Western’s
body it was Tod that soothed her soul.
He managed to blind himself to the future by throwing himself with wild
tenderness into the present. Sickness, especially mortal sickness, can
be very wearying and repulsive, but Tod was never tired, and there was
no flinching in his eyes. He washed his mother’s face for her, and
brushed her hair, fed her, tidied the bed, fetched and carried, read to
her, kept the fire bright, or sat and held her hand.
“That there boy’s a marvel,” said Mrs. Bunce; “’e’s better than any
husband.”
The most vivid memory of Tod’s life was the memory of the night when his
mother died. It had been morphia and always morphia. She was thin,
horribly thin, and white as linen. Her lips were dry and pale. She could
hardly swallow a teaspoonful of milk, or move herself in bed.
It was winter, and Tod had slipped out and bought a tin of peaches. He
had two of them all soft and juicy ready in a saucer.
“Tod——”
Her voice was a mere whisper. Tod was with her instantly.
“Tod, you’ve made me so happy, you and your dear daddy.”
Tod held her hand.
“I’ve been so proud, Tod. You are going to be a fine man like your
father.”
“I’ll be a fine man, a great man—for you, Mummy,” said Tod with a gulp.
She lay silent awhile, and then spoke, with a faint wail in her voice,
after a spasm of pain.
“Oh, I’m so thirsty.”
Tod went for the peaches, and, kneeling on the bed, and supporting her
with one hand, fed her with a spoon. She took the fruit almost eagerly
and with a kind of pathetic pleasure.
“That was good, Tod.”
Then she lay quiet again. It was growing dusk, and there was no light in
the room save the light of the fire.
Suddenly she spoke again.
“Tod.”
“Mummy.”
“Come here and hold my hand.”
He snuggled near her. She was on the edge of the great abyss, but he did
not realise it.
“Tod, never marry—till you have been in love ten times.”
“I shan’t marry—never,” he said, “unless I find somebody like you.”
She made a queer little sound, something between a sigh and a laugh, and
lay there holding his hand.
It was about midnight when Mrs. Bunce, keeping vigil by the kitchen
fire, heard that wailing in the room above.
“Dear God,” said she, starting up, “the poor dear’s dead! God save us,
but what am I to do for that boy?”