About a week later, after a visit of a couple of days to Manchester,
Edwin went out into the garden as usual when breakfast was finished, and
discovered George standing on the wall. The boy had learned how to
climb the wall from his own side of it without help.
"I say!" George cried, in a loud, rough, angry voice, as soon as he saw
Edwin at the garden door. "I've got to go off in a minute, you know."
"Go off? Where?"
"Home. Didn't they tell you in your house? Auntie Janet and I came to
your house yesterday, after I'd waited on the wall for you I don't know
how long, and you never came. We came to tell you, but you weren't in.
So we asked Miss Clayhanger to tell you. Didn't Miss Clayhanger tell
you?"
"No," said Edwin. "She must have forgot." It occurred to him that even
the simple and placid Maggie had her personal prejudices, and that one
of them might be against this child. For some reason she did not like
the child. She positively could not have forgotten the child's visit
with Janet. She had merely not troubled to tell him: a touch of that
malice which, though it be as rare as radium, nevertheless exists even
in the most benignant natures. Edwin and George exchanged a silent,
puzzled glance.
"Well, that's a nice thing!" said the boy. It was.
"When are you going home?"
"I'm going _now_! Mr Orgreave has to go to London to-day, and mamma
wrote to Auntie Janet yesterday to say that I must go with him, if he'd
let me, and she would meet me at London. She wants me back. So Auntie
Janet is taking me to Knype to meet Mr Orgreave there--he's gone to his
office first. And the gardener has taken my luggage in the barrow up to
Bleakridge Station. Auntie's putting her hat on. Can't you see I've
got my other clothes on?"
"Yes," said Edwin, "I noticed that."
"And my other hat?"
"Yes."
"I've promised auntie I'll come and put my overcoat on as soon as she
calls me. I say--you wouldn't believe how jammed my trunk is with that
paint box and everything! Auntie Janet had to sit on it like anything!
I say--shall you be coming to Brighton soon?"
Edwin shook his head.
"I never go to Brighton."
"But when I asked you once if you'd been, you said you had."
"So I have, but that was an accident."
"Was it long since?"
"Well," said Edwin, "you ought to know. It was when I brought that
parcel for you."
"Oh! Of course!"
Edwin was saying to himself: "She's sent for him on purpose. She's
heard that we're great friends, and she's sent for him! She means to
stop it! That's what it is!" He had no rational basis for this
assumption. It was instinctive. And yet why should she desire to
interfere with the course of the friendship? How could it react
unpleasantly on her? There obviously did not exist between mother and
son one of those passionate attachments which misfortune and sorrow
sometimes engender. She had been able to let him go. And as for
George, he seldom mentioned his mother. He seldom mentioned anybody who
was not actually present, or necessary to the fulfilment of the idea
that happened to be reigning in his heart. He lived a life of
absorption, hypnotised by the idea of the moment. These ideas succeeded
each other like a dynasty of kings, like a series of dynasties, marked
by frequent dynastic quarrels, by depositions and sudden deaths; but
George's loyalty was the same to all of them; it was absolute.
"Well, anyhow," said he, "I shall come back here. Mother will have to
let me."
And he jumped down from the wall into Edwin's garden, carelessly, his
hands in his pockets, with a familiar ease of gesture that implied
practice. He had in fact often done it before. But just this time--
perhaps he was troubled by the unaccustomed clothes--having lighted on
his feet, he failed to maintain his balance and staggered back against
the wall.
"Now, clumsy!" Edwin commented.
The boy turned pale, and bit his lip, and then Edwin could see the tears
in his eyes. One of his peculiarities was that he had no shame whatever
about crying. He could not, or he would not, suffer stoically. Now he
put his hands to his back, and writhed.
"Hurt yourself?" Edwin asked.
George nodded. He was very white, and startled. At first he could not
command himself sufficiently to be able to articulate. Then he
spluttered, "My back!" He subsided gradually into a sitting posture.
Edwin ran to him, and picked him up. But he screamed until he was set
down. At the open drawing-room window, Maggie was arranging curtains.
Edwin reluctantly left George for an instant and hurried to the window,
"I say, Maggie, bring a chair or something out, will you? This dashed
kid's fallen and hurt himself."
"I'm not surprised," said Maggie calmly. "What surprises me is that you
should ever have given him permission to scramble over the wall and
trample all about the flower-beds the way he does!"
However, she moved at once to obey.
He returned to George. Then Janet's voice was heard from the other
garden, calling him: "George! Georgie! Nearly time to go!"
Edwin put his head over the wall.
"He's fallen and hurt his back," he answered to Janet, without any
prelude.
"His back!" she repeated in a frightened tone.
Everybody was afraid of that mysterious back. And George himself was
most afraid of it.
"I'll get over the wall," said Janet.
Edwin quitted the wall. Maggie was coming out of the house with a large
cane easy-chair and a large cushion. But George was now standing up,
though still crying. His beautiful best sailor hat lay on the winter
ground.
"Now," said Maggie to him, "you mustn't be a baby!"
He glared at her resentfully. She would have dropped down dead on the
spot if his wet and angry glance could have killed her. She was a
powerful woman. She seized him carefully and set him in the chair, and
supported the famous spine with the cushion.
"I don't think he's much hurt," she decided. "He couldn't make that
noise if he was, and see how his colour's coming back!"
In another case Edwin would have agreed with her, for the tendency of
both was to minimise an ill and to exaggerate the philosophical attitude
in the first moments of any occurrence that looked serious. But now he
honestly thought that her judgement was being influenced by her
prejudice, and he felt savage against her. The worst was that it was
all his fault. Maggie was odiously right. He ought never to have
encouraged the child to be acrobatic on the wall. It was he who had
even put the idea of the wall as a means of access into the child's
head.
"Does it hurt?" he inquired, bending down, his hands on his knees.
"Yes," said George, ceasing to cry.
"Much?" asked Maggie, dusting the sailor hat and sticking it on his
head.
"No, not much," George unwillingly admitted. Maggie could not at any
rate say that he did not speak the truth.
Janet, having obtained steps, stood on the wall in her elaborate
street-array.
"Who's going to help me down?" she demanded anxiously. She was not so
young and sprightly as once she had been. Edwin obeyed the call.
Then the three of them stood round the victim's chair, and the victim,
like a god, permitted himself to be contemplated. And Janet had to hear
Edwin's account of the accident, and also Maggie's account of it, as
seen from the window.
"I don't know what to do!" said Janet.
"It is annoying, isn't it?" said Maggie. "And just as you were going to
the station too!"
"I--I think I'm all right," George announced.
Janet passed a hand down his back, as though expecting to be able to
judge the condition of his spine through the thickness of all his
clothes.
"Are you?" she questioned doubtfully.
"It's nothing," said Maggie, with firmness.
"He'd be all right in the train," said Janet. "It's the walking to the
station that I'm afraid of... You never know."
"I can carry him," said Edwin quickly.
"Of course you can't!" Maggie contradicted. "And even if you could
you'd jog him far worse than if he walked himself."
"There's no time to get a cab, now," said Janet, looking at her watch.
"If we aren't at Knype, father will wonder what on earth's happened, and
I don't know what his mother would say!"
"Where's that old pram?" Edwin demanded suddenly of Maggie.
"What? Clara's? It's in the outhouse."
"I can run him up to the station in two jiffs in that."
"Oh yes! Do!" said George. "You must. And then lift me into the
carriage!"
The notion was accepted.
"I hope it's the best thing to do," said Janet, apprehensive and
doubtful, as she hurried off to the other house in order to get the
boy's overcoat and meet Edwin and the perambulator at the gates.
"I'm certain it is," said Maggie calmly. "There's nothing really the
matter with that child."
"Well, it's very good of Edwin, I'm sure," said Janet.
Edwin had already rushed for the perambulator, an ancient vehicle which
was sometimes used in the garden for infant Benbows.
In a few moments Trafalgar Road had the spectacle of the bearded and
eminent master-printer, Edwin Clayhanger, steaming up its muddy pavement
behind a perambulator with a grown boy therein. And dozens of persons
who had not till then distinguished the boy from other boys, inquired
about his identity, and gossip was aroused. Maggie was displeased.
In obedience to the command Edwin lifted George into the train; and the
feel of his little slippery body, and the feel of Edwin's mighty arms,
seemed to make them more intimate than ever. Except for dirty
tear-marks on his cheeks, George's appearance was absolutely normal.
Edwin expected to receive a letter from him, but none came, and this
negligence wounded Edwin.