I
“What have they done to him, Maurice?”
“I don’t know,” said the doctor, very thoughtfully indeed. “I don’t
know.”
“There’s something.”
“Yes.”
“It’s horrible--and one can never know.”
“The Aviolets won’t think that there’s anything to know.”
“_She_ will.”
“Yes,” said the doctor again, as deliberately as before, but with the
slightest possible narrowing of his eyes as he spoke. “Yes, she’ll
know, all right.”
Miss Lucian put her work down and clasped one hand over the other with
a curious effect of earnestness.
“I never saw anything quite like the look in that boy’s eyes when she
brought him here this afternoon. And yet I--I can’t place it. What in
God’s name was it?”
“I don’t know.”
A sound of impatience broke from her.
“I tell you I don’t know, Henrietta. I’m not even certain that we’re
not exaggerating.”
“Maurice!”
“I don’t mean the fact, but its significance.”
“_What_ fact?”
“The fact that something or someone, at that public school, has altered
Cecil Aviolet radically, in some way that’s indefinable. It’s not
the normal evolution of a type, Henrietta, nor the development of an
individuality--it’s something apart from those. And I don’t know what
it is.”
“Has he been--frightened?” she half whispered.
“I don’t think it’s that. He may have been frightened--but I don’t
think it’s that now.”
“He wasn’t ever a coward,” Henrietta declared vehemently. “I don’t care
what any one says, he was a plucky little boy enough.”
“I have never thought him a coward,” said the doctor quietly. “But for
all that, he may have been frightened.”
“Bullying?”
“He’s not the sort that gets bullied, much. And I don’t think--mind
you, this is only conjecture--but I don’t think he’d mind being
bullied, if it only meant being knocked about.”
Henrietta looked at him without speaking. She was aware that the doctor
was rather stating aloud the terms of a problem that absorbed him than
addressing his sister consciously.
“Do you remember his grandfather whipping him once as a little boy,
and his mother saying that he’d been so brave? And even Sir Thomas was
pleased with him for that.... You see, the physical isn’t the weak link
in the chain for Cecil at all. It’s other things that he minds. He’s
most vulnerable where the average Englishman is most impervious.”
The doctor smiled a little, gravely. “His sensibilities--in the French
sense of the word.”
“Do you mean his vanity?”
“It’s more than that, with him. It’s his self-respect that’s at stake,
always and all the time. At least, that’s how I see it.”
“You mean he’s lost it at that place. Horrible!”
The doctor made a gesture of negation with both hands. “How can I say
I know? I _don’t_ know. He’s lost something--and I think he’s acquired
something, too. There’s a sort of power of withdrawal about him now.”
“Withdrawal....” She pondered for a moment on the word, knowing his
habit of phraseology and the value that a trained mind attaches to the
exact word.
“Withdrawal--then you don’t mean a line of defence?”
“No. Or at least only in the negative sense. As far as I can see, and
that, Henrietta, is a very little way indeed--the boy hasn’t put up
a defence at all--or if he has it’s gone down. He reminds me of that
description in one of Newbolt’s things:
‘All night long, in a dream untroubled of hope
He brooded, clasping his knees.’
‘_Untroubled of hope._’ Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes. Oh, poor little Cecil--at his age!”
“I may be wrong.”
But Henrietta did not think that her brother was wrong.
They saw Cecil Aviolet several times during his holidays. He seemed to
like coming to them, and Dr. Lucian encouraged his visits.
One day he said to him casually: “Most youngsters get bullied during
their first term. Between ourselves, didn’t you find that?”
“No,” said Cecil, and added, a shade too promptly, “no--I think the
fellows like me, rather. I’ve got heaps of friends already.”
He looked up with his disarming, ingenuous smile, and immediately
afterwards looked down. The doctor had seen Cecil Aviolet do just
exactly that, once before. He had been a little boy then, taxed by his
grandmother with the theft of a toy. And he had denied it, with that
same look.
“How do you like the games?” the doctor asked abruptly.
“Awfully. I didn’t know if I should or not, you know, but I do, most
awfully.”
“That’s good.”
“Some fellows funk things, you know, their first term--House-runs
especially. There was one boy who tried to get a medical exemption
after his first run. He tried to pretend he had a heart, you know. But
of course it was no go, and some of the fellows found out.”
“H’m. I wouldn’t give much for your friend’s popularity after that.”
“Well, it was a rotten sort of thing to do, wasn’t it?” said Cecil
seriously. “I can understand it in a way, because it was my first
term, too, of course, and one does find it a most awful sweat, just at
first. But I just stuck it out, like other fellows. I must say I can’t
understand trying to get out of anything in that sort of way.” He eyed
the doctor thoughtfully.
“It seems extraordinary, somehow, to have thought of doing a thing like
that,” he said. “It would never have occurred to _me_, anyway.”
Into the doctor’s kind, watchful eyes there came a sudden gleam, as of
enlightenment. He looked at Cecil without speaking.
“Of course, I don’t set up for being braver than other people--far from
it--but I do think it’s stupid to try and fake illness so as to get out
of things. It only means that they don’t believe one another time, and
one gets a reputation for slackness besides--and then they work one
all the harder. That’s how I felt about the whole thing--it was such a
stupid thing to have done.”
“To tell a lie is almost always a stupid thing to do,” said the doctor
gently.
“I suppose so. Do you remember I used to tell crackers when I was a
kid, doctor?”
The doctor, continuing to look at Cecil, remained silent.
The test of silence is one which singularly few people can stand. Dr.
Lucian was not surprised that Cecil should break forth volubly after
one uneasy second.
“School cured me of that, practically--Hurst, I mean. But still, I
suppose, having been like that makes it easier for me to understand
another fellow not being absolutely straight. I wasn’t so tremendously
down on him as some of them were.”
“Was it the funking or the lie that they objected to most?”
“Oh, the funking, of course. But I was rather sorry for him,
personally. I couldn’t ever have done what he did myself, but I was
sorry for him,” repeated Cecil.
“I see,” said Dr. Lucian, and felt that he did indeed see.
“Absolutely typical,” he reflected, when Cecil had gone. “The pitiful
attempt at bluff--telling me about ‘another fellow’--himself, of
course, poor lad--and thinking he’s disarmed suspicion forevermore
because he’s alluded to his own past habit of lying. They all argue
the same way, God help them: ‘They’ll think: “He’d never have gone out
of his way to tell us about that, if it had had anything to do with
_him_.”’ What can one do for him? Nothing. Whatever’s wrong with him
was dormant while he was at Hurst, but this place has played him some
devil’s trick. He’s done for, unless something or someone gets hold of
him and shoves some self-respect into him. Half his time he doesn’t
really know what he’s saying--he’s in a fog--only that blind instinct
left, to hide what he thinks his real self for fear of being despised.
And he would be despised--that’s the devil of it--ninety-nine per cent
of that wretched lad’s fellow-creatures would actually dare to despise
and condemn him for a congenital misfortune that’s about as much within
his own control as an inheritance of tuberculosis!”
The doctor groaned aloud at the thought.
As he had surmised, the Aviolets were perfectly well satisfied with
Cecil on his return from that first term spent at his public school.
They spoke of him now with a certain complacence, excepting always
Ford, who seldom mentioned the boy save with semi-contempt.
“Sour grapes, my fine fellow, I daresay,” the doctor muttered to
himself. He by no means forgave Ford Aviolet his old hostility towards
Cecil’s mother, and it was nothing at all to him that now-a-days Rose,
and Rose’s ineradicable characteristics, were accepted at Squires with
matter-of-course amiability by the old people.
She came to them as usual during Cecil’s holidays, and Dr. Lucian
wondered whether her quick intuition had told her everything that her
bewildered reasoning powers would be least able to explain.
But she said nothing to him, and the doctor could easily divine reasons
for her silence.
Lucian, however, already uneasy, was sharply awakened to a new
perception of possible vexation of spirit for Rose in the always
uncongenial atmosphere at Squires.
Ford and Diana, paying to the Aviolets one of their interminable
visits, tendered to him a casual invitation, and the doctor one day
went with them to the house.
It was the first time that he had seen Rose for months, and he noticed
with a pang that for the only time since he had known her, her glorious
physique had suffered some slight deterioration. She was thinner, and
her face struck him as indefinably altered.
Suddenly he understood. “Good God, she’s left off using rouge!” thought
the doctor.
Luncheon was as elaborate a function as it was unlively conversationally;
but the doctor became gradually aware of undercurrents.
Ford, before the angry bewilderment of Rose, and innocently seconded
by the bland obtuseness of his wife’s life-long habit of “chaff,” and
the entire unconsciousness of the two old people, Sir Thomas and Lady
Aviolet, was baiting the boy Cecil.
“No invitations to stay away these holidays, Cecil?”
“No, Uncle Ford.”
“Ah, well, of course that’s very fortunate for us. We shall have the
benefit of your society all the time, I take it.”
“You must come and stay with us, Cecil, for a bit,” said Diana kindly.
“I daresay Grandmama will be able to spare you.”
“Ah, but can Cecil bear to leave home?” Ford pretended to deliberate.
“But no doubt a public-school boy can do these things; they’re a
strange race, public-school boys. Have you found that, Cecil?”
The boy stared at his uncle with absolutely lustreless eyes and made no
answer. Ford emitted a very slight laugh.
There was an odd sense of isolation for Lucian in finding himself
thus alone to estimate the strange, hidden value of their surface
intercourse. Rose, as he well knew, had no inner metre for the gauging
of complexities. More and more, she reminded him of some magnificent
dumb animal, quick to sense enmity, turning this way and that, unable
to escape the goad, and incapable of retaliation in kind, but with
inarticulate, pent-up forces gathering for some long-deferred onrush
that might yet send down all before it.
She spoke now from the other side of the table. “What are you laughing
at, Ford?”
The aggression in her manner was quite unmistakeable, and Lucian saw
Diana open astonished eyes, and Sir Thomas draw his heavy brows more
closely together.
The least flicker passed across Cecil’s young face, with its new,
strangely shuttered look, and without turning his head he shot a glance
at his mother from the corners of his eyes.
“What are you laughing at, Ford?” said Rose contemptuously.
“At my nephew,” Ford answered very gently. “He amuses me, that’s all.
His manners are so refreshing.”
“Take your elbows off the table, Cecil,” said Lady Aviolet quickly.
“Do you still make your own cheeses here, Lady Aviolet?” said the
doctor. “That’s a fine one you have there.”
The old lady, gratified, began to speak of her dairy. She was very
proud of it. Ford glanced at the doctor.
The doctor gave him a grim little nod. “Quite right,” he silently
assured Ford, “I’m up to your game, and I’m out to stop it. And I don’t
mind your knowing it, either.”
Nobody else knew it.
Diana Aviolet was listening, her lips ajar, to her mother-in-law, Sir
Thomas was signing imperatively to a servant, Rose was looking at her
boy, Cecil, the doctor thought, seemed impervious to everything except
to some inner preoccupation that had become part of his being.
Quite suddenly, a very horrible recollection came to Dr. Lucian.
He had once seen a trapped animal that was being devoured alive by
vermin.
For an instant, he sought in vain for the association with his present
surroundings. The next moment the analogy had flashed upon him,
sickening him momentarily.
“That boy--his soul is being slowly devoured alive----”
“And so,” said Lady Aviolet, “we always send one cheese to the show
every year. It encourages the dairymaid so much.”
“Splendid!” said the doctor.
“Are you interested in cheese, Lucian?” Ford Aviolet inquired politely.
“In everything,” the doctor retorted curtly.
“How delightful! A lesson to the youth of the present day, who are
interested in nothing.”
“I don’t agree.”
It was Rose, of course, who hurled the contradiction, with ill-judged
weightiness, into the carefully trivial key in which Ford had set his
remark.
“Nor I.” The doctor, doing his best with her ineptitude, essayed a
generality. “One generation is always more or less mysterious to the
other.”
“You think so? Take my young nephew now----”
“Why be personal?” the doctor inquired crisply.
“Why not?”
“I’m sure Cecil doesn’t mind,” said Diana. Her little laugh struck the
doctor as singularly inane.
“Cecil will have learnt to stand a little friendly teasing by now, no
doubt,” Ford observed.
The doctor did not fail to perceive the implication, and he saw that
Rose also had not missed it. Cecil remained listless and indifferent.
“Cecil has his life before him, we will hope, in which to learn more
interesting things than elementary accomplishments, which, so far as
I am aware, he acquired in the nursery. Now you and I,” the doctor
addressed himself very directly to Ford Aviolet, “you and I, my dear
fellow, have left our adventurous days behind us. Achievement, romance,
success--it’s all behind us, not ahead of us. The future doesn’t belong
to us at all. We shall only have the privilege of watching the present
generation, to which you so casually alluded just now. Our mark, if it
was ever made at all, was made in the past.”
The doctor’s gaze travelled cheerfully and deliberately round the safe,
solid interior that had constituted Ford’s environment for so many
years, and came to rest, still cheerful, still deliberate, and wholly
implacable, on Ford’s face.
“They say that history always repeats itself,” said Lady Aviolet,
boredom in her voice.
Ford, returning the doctor’s look, ignored his mother’s irrelevance.
“Very interesting, although I fancy you and I are not exactly
contemporaries to a day, doctor. But the point? May I confess that I
don’t quite understand----?”
“Oh, I think you do. I fancy you and I understand one another in
all essentials.” The significance in Dr. Lucian’s tone was entirely
undisguised.
Ford made a graceful little gesture of acquiescence. “You have said it.”
“Said what?” his wife inquired, laughing. “Really, you two are quite
mysterious. Are you going to play billiards this afternoon?”
“No, Di,” said her husband. “Dr. Lucian is too strong for me--at
billiards.”
“I am sure you play a very good game, Ford. Then what are the plans for
this afternoon, I wonder?”
The inquiry came from Lady Aviolet, and her subsequent engineering of
entirely unimportant projects and half-hearted suggestions continued
until lunch was over.
Afterwards the doctor approached Rose.
“Henrietta hopes that you are coming to see her very soon. Her sciatica
is so bad now that she gets about very little.”
“I’m _so_ sorry.”
There was never anything perfunctory about Rose’s emotions, and her
face was eloquent.
“It was very nice of Cecil to come and see us so soon. We both
appreciated that,” said the doctor tentatively.
“He wanted to come. Look here, you’re not going away immediately, are
you?”
“It depends on whether you can let me stay and talk to you for a little
while,” the doctor answered frankly. “That’s what I came for.”
Rose looked at him with a strange mingling of pleasure and wistfulness
in her brown eyes. Then she sat down and invited him by a gesture to do
the same.
The odious word “coquettish” was of all others, Lucian reflected, the
least applicable to her simplicity.
“What do you think of Ces?” she abruptly began.
“Not satisfactory, altogether. What was his report like?”
“Not bad. There was something about a want of keenness--but you
couldn’t expect him to be very keen, his first term. His lessons are
just ordinary--history, good.”
“What does he say himself?”
“He says he’s all right.”
She hesitated for a moment, then said very low: “But I don’t believe
him.”
“No?”
“You don’t either?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“But why? What is it?”
“I don’t know. My dear--don’t look so frightened. It may be
nothing--almost nothing. Remember, he’s only been back with you for a
few days--he’s permeated with the atmosphere of the place he’s left.
You’ve got his trust, in the ultimate issue, even if it’s overlaid
now by God knows what. He’ll tell you what’s wrong--if anything is
wrong--himself.”
Rose leant back in her armchair and he saw that she was trembling.
They were silent for a little while.
At last, as though he had silently made her aware of his anguish of
sympathy for her pain, Rose turned towards him again.
“I’m glad you don’t try to pretend that it’s all right, and I’m only
imagining things. But, of course, I knew you wouldn’t do that. You
always understand,” she said gratefully.
“I think so, where you’re concerned,” he gravely agreed. “Tell me, have
you found any other--understanding, on this particular point?”
“Oh, no! I’m sure they haven’t noticed anything at all. You know how
stupid they are!”
Lucian smiled, at the very familiarity of the words and of Rose’s
contemptuous tone.
“I didn’t mean here, so much as at school. Has Cecil made any friends?”
“I haven’t heard of any. There’s a master he likes, I think--a
clergyman called Mr. Perriman. He’s quite young.”
“I wonder if Cecil will ‘get religion’?”
“Oh, I hope not!” cried Cecil’s mother with candid alarm. “I’ve seen
enough of that with Uncle A. He’s the limit, him and his texts.”
“Cecil’s needn’t take that form. In fact I should say nothing would be
less likely.”
“Well, what did you mean, then?”
“Only the sort of sudden awakening of religious susceptibilities that
very often attacks young people. It’s an instinctive emotional outlet,
really. They outgrow it, generally, or else it falls into its rightful
place.”
“It seems to me more like a girl than a boy,” said Rose distrustfully.
“Perhaps. It was only an idea, and I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be a
very good thing for Cecil. Don’t you think he wants an incentive?”
She nodded. “D’you know, I found something in a book the other day
that made me think of Ces? I want to show it to you. I don’t like
good poetry as a rule, you know, like Browning and all that. I never
can understand it. But this came home to me, somehow, like something
I’d always known but hadn’t ever thought about properly. A sort of
_recognizing_.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to fetch it.” She paused for a moment and then said
pleadingly: “Perhaps you’ll be able to say that it’s not true. I hope
you will. I daresay I didn’t really understand half of it.”
But as he read the page that she put before him, Lucian marvelled only
at her having understood so well.