HIS PEOPLE
It so happened that his people in Leicestershire were thinking of him.
They had been talking about him at the very time of the boy’s
inconceivable meanderings in Hyde Park. And two of them were at it
still.
On a terrace outside lighted windows a powerful young fellow, in a
butterfly collar and a corded smoking jacket, was walking up and down
with a tall girl not unlike him in the face; but their faces were only
to be seen in glimpses as they passed the drawing-room windows, and at
not less regular intervals when a red light in the sky, the source of
which was concealed by the garden foliage, became positively brilliant.
The air was sweet with the scent of honeysuckle and musk-roses and mown
grass; midges fretted in and out of the open windows. But for the lurid
lighting of the sky, with its Cyclopean suggestion of some mammoth
forge, you were in the heart of England undefiled.
“It’s no use our talking about Tony,” the tall girl said. “I think
you’re frightfully down on him; we shall never agree.”
“Not as long as you make a fool of the fellow,” said the blunt young
man.
“Tony’s no fool,” remarked Lettice Upton, irrelevantly enough.
“You know what I mean,” snapped her brother Horace. “He’s being
absolutely spoilt, and you’re at the bottom of it.”
“I didn’t give him asthma!”
“Don’t be childish, Letty.”
“But that’s what’s spoiling his life.”
“I wasn’t talking about his life. I don’t believe it, either.”
“You think he enjoys his bad nights?”
“I think he scores by them. He’d tell you himself that he never even
thinks of getting up to first school now.”
“Would you if you’d been sitting up half the night with asthma?”
“Perhaps not; but I don’t believe that happens so often as you think.”
“It happens often enough to justify him in making one good night pay
for two or three bad ones.”
“I don’t call that playing the game. I call it shamming.”
“Well, if it is, he makes up for it. They were doing Ancient Greek
Geography in his form at early school last term. Tony tackled it in his
spare time, and got most marks in the exam.”
“Beastly young swot!” quoth his elder brother. “I’m glad he didn’t
buck to me about that.”
“I don’t think there’s much danger of his bucking to you,” said
Lettice, smiling in the red light. She did not add as her obvious
reason that Horace, like many another athletic young man, was quite
incapable of sympathising with the non-athletic type. But he guessed
that she meant something of the sort, and having sensibilities of his
own, and a good heart somewhere in his mesh of muscles, he felt hurt.
“I looked after him all right,” said Horace, “the one term we were
there together. So did Fred for the next year. But it’s rather rough on
Fred and myself, who were both something in the school at his age, to
hear and see for ourselves that Tony’s nobody even in the house!”
Lettice slipped a sly hand under the great biceps of her eldest
brother.
“But don’t you see, old boy, that it makes it the worse for Tony that
you and Fred were what you were at school? They measure him by the
standard you two set up; it’s natural enough, but it isn’t fair.”
“He needn’t be a flyer at games,” said Horace, duly softened by a
little flattery. “But he might be a tryer!”
“Wait till we get a little more breath into his body.”
“A bag of oxygen wouldn’t make him a cricketer.”
“Yet he’s so keen on cricket!”
“I wish he wasn’t so keen; he thinks and talks more about it than Fred
or I did when we were in the eleven, yet he never looked like making a
player.”
“I should say he thinks and talks more about most things; it’s his
nature, just as it’s Fred’s and yours to be men of action.”
“Well, I’m glad he’s not allowed to cumber the crease this season,”
said Horace, bowling his cigarette-end into the darkness with a
distinct swerve in the air. “To have him called our ‘pocket edition,’
on the cricket-field of all places, is a bit too thick.”
Lettice withdrew her sympathetic hand.
“He’s as good a sportsman as either of you, at heart,” she said warmly.
“And I hope he may make you see it before this doctor’s done with him!”
“This doctor!” jeered Horace, quick to echo her change of tone as well.
“You mean the fool who wanted to send that kid round the world on his
own?”
“He’s no fool, Horace, and you know nothing whatever about him.”
“No; but I know something about our Tony! If he took the least care of
himself at home, there might be something to be said for letting him
go; but he’s the most casual young hound I ever struck.”
“I know he’s casual.”
Lettice made the admission with reluctance; next moment she was sorry
her sense of fairness had so misled her.
“Besides,” said Horace, “he wouldn’t be cured if he could. Think what
he’d miss!”
“Oh, if you’re coming back to that, there’s no more to be said.”
And the girl halted at the lighted windows.
“But I do come back to it. Isn’t he up in town at this moment under
this very doctor of yours?”
“He’s not my doctor.”
“But you first heard about him; you’re the innovator of the family,
Letty, so it’s no use trying to score off me. Isn’t Tony up in London
to-night?”
“I believe he is.”
“Then I’ll tell you what he’s doing at this moment,” cried Horace, with
egregious confidence, as he held his watch to the windows. “It’s after
eleven; he’s in the act of struggling out of some theatre, where the
atmosphere’s so good for asthma!” Lettice left the gibe unanswered. It
was founded on recent fact which she had been the first to deplore when
Tony made no secret of it in the holidays; indeed, she was by no means
blind to his many and obvious failings; but they interested her more
than the equally obvious virtues of her other brothers, whose
unmeasured objurgations drove her to the opposite extreme in special
pleading. She tried to believe that there was more in her younger
brother than in any of them, and would often speak up for him as though
she had succeeded. It may have been merely a woman’s weakness for the
weak, but Lettice had taught herself to believe in Tony. And perhaps of
all his people she was the only one who could have followed his
vagaries of that night without thinking the worse of him.
But she had no more to say to Horace about the matter, and would have
gone indoors without another word if Mr. Upton had not come out hastily
at that moment. He had been looking for her everywhere, he declared
with some asperity. Her mother could not sleep, and wished to see her;
otherwise it was time they were all in bed, and what there was to talk
about till all hours was more than he could fathom. So he saw the pair
before him through the lighted rooms, a heavy man with a flaming neck
and a smouldering eye. Horace would be heavy, too, when his bowling
days were over. The girl was on finer lines; but she looked like a
woman at her worst; tired, exasperated, and clearly older than her
brother, but of other clay.
That young man smoked a last cigarette in his father’s library, and
unhesitatingly admitted the subject of dissension and dissent upon the
terrace.
“I said he wasn’t doing much good there,” he added, “and I don’t think
he is. Letty stood up for him, as she always does.”
“Do you mean that he’s doing any harm?” asked Mr. Upton plainly.
“Not for a moment. I never said there was any harm in Tony. I—I
sometimes wish there was more!”
“More manhood, I suppose you’d call it?”
Mr. Upton spoke with a disconcerting grimness.
“More go about him,” said Horace. He could not say as much to his
father as he had to Letty. That was evident. But he was not the boy to
bolt from his guns.
“Yet you know how much he has to take all that out of him?” continued
Mr. Upton, with severity.
“I know,” said Horace hastily, “and of course that’s really why he’s
doing no good; but I must say that doctor of his doesn’t seem to be
doing him any either.”
Mr. Upton got excitedly to his feet, and Horace made up his mind to the
downright snub that he deserved. But by a lucky accident Horace had
turned the wrath that had been gathering against himself into quite
another quarter.
“I agree with you there!” cried his father vehemently. “I don’t believe
in the man myself; but he was recommended by the surgeon who has done
so much for your poor mother, so what could one do but give him a
trial? The lad wasn’t having a fair chance at school. This looked like
one. But I dislike his going up to town so often, and I dislike the
letters the man writes me about him. He’d have me take him away from
school altogether, and pack him off to Australia in a sailing ship. But
what’s to be done with a boy like that when we get him back again? He’d
be too old to go to another school, and too young for the University:
no use at the works, and only another worry to us all.”
Mr. Upton spoke from the full heart of an already worried man, not with
intentional unkindness, but yet with that unimaginative want of
sympathy which is often the instinctive attitude of the sound towards
the unsound. He hated sickness, and seemed at present surrounded by it.
His wife had taken ill the year before, had undergone a grave operation
in the winter, and was still a great anxiety to him. But that was
another and a far more serious matter; he had patience and sympathy
enough with his wife. The case of the boy was very different. Himself a
man of much bodily and mental vigour, Mr. Upton expected his own
qualities of his own children; he had always resented their apparent
absence in his youngest born. The others were good specimens; why
should Tony be a weakling? Was he such a weakling as was made out? Mr.
Upton was often sceptical on the point; but then he had always heard
more about the asthma than he had seen for himself. If the boy was not
down to breakfast in the holidays, he was supposed to have had a bad
night; yet later in the day he would be as bright as anybody, at times
indeed the brightest of the party. That, however, was usually when
Lettice drew him out in the absence of the two athletes; he was another
creature then, excitable, hilarious, and more capable of taking the
busy man out of himself than any of his other children. But Lettice
overdid matters; she made far too much of the boy and his complaint,
and was inclined to encourage him in random remedies. Cigarettes at his
age, even if said to be cigarettes for asthma, suggested a juvenile
pose to the man who had never studied that disorder. The specialist in
London seemed another mistake on the part of that managing Lettice, who
had quite assumed the family lead of late. And altogether Mr. Upton,
though he saw the matter from a different point of view, was not far
from agreeing with his eldest son about his youngest.
And what chance was there for a boy whose own father thought he posed,
whose brothers considered him a bit of a malingerer, and his
schoolfellows “a conscientious ass,” while his sister spoilt him for
_un enfant incompris?_ You may say it would have taken a miracle to
make an ordinary decent fellow of him. Well, it was a night of strange
happenings to the boy and his people; perhaps it was the one authentic
type of miracle that capped all in the morning.
The father had gone to bed at midnight, after an extra allowance of
whisky-and-water to take the extra worry off his mind; it did so for a
few hours only to stretch him tragically awake in the early morning.
The birds were singing down in Leicestershire as in Hyde Park. The
morning sun was slanting over town and country, and the father’s
thoughts were with his tiresome son in town. Suddenly a shrill cry came
from the adjoining room.
In a trice the wakeful man was at his sick wife’s side, supporting her
in bed as she sat up wildly staring, trembling in his arms.
“Tony!” she gasped. “My Tony!”
“I was just thinking of him!” he cried. “What about him, dear?”
“I saw him,” she quavered. “I saw him plainer than I see you now. And
I’m almost positive I heard—a shot!”