Sinister Street, vol. 1
by Compton MacKenzie · English · Gutenberg #33797 · 970,333 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Sinister Street, vol. 1
Author: Compton MacKenzie
Release date: September 22, 2010 [eBook #33797]
Most recently updated: June 16, 2020
Language: English
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bookcover
SOME PRESS OPINIONS
OF OTHER BOOKS BY
COMPTON MACKENZIE
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SOME PRESS OPINIONS OF
Kensington Rhymes
_By_ COMPTON MACKENZIE
_SATURDAY REVIEW:_
“These are particularly jolly rhymes, that any really good
sort of a chap, say a fellow of about ten would like. Mr.
J. R. Monsell’s pictures are exceptionally jolly too.... If
we may judge by ourselves, not only the children, but the
grown-ups of the family will be enchanted by this quite
delightful and really first-rate book.”
_DAILY MAIL:_
“Among the picture-books of the season, pride of place must
go to Mr. Compton Mackenzie’s ‘Kensington Rhymes.’ They are
full of quiet humour and delicate insight into the
child-mind.”
_OBSERVER:_
“Far the best rhymes of the year are ‘Kensington Rhymes,’
by Compton Mackenzie, almost the best things of the kind
since the ‘Child’s Garden of Verse.’”
_ATHENÆUM:_
“Will please children of all ages, and also contains much
that will not be read without a sympathetic smile by
grown-ups possessed of a sense of humour.”
_TIMES:_
“The real gift of child poetry, sometimes almost with a
Stevensonian ring.”
_OUTLOOK:_
“What Henley did for older Londoners, Mr. Compton Mackenzie
and Mr. Monsell have done for the younger generation.”
_STANDARD:_
“Our hearts go out first to Mr. Compton Mackenzie’s
‘Kensington Rhymes.’”
_SUNDAY TIMES:_
“Full of whimsical observation and genuine insight,
‘Kensington Rhymes’ by Compton Mackenzie are certainly
entertaining.”
_EVENING STANDARD:_
“Something of the charm of Christina Rossetti’s.”
_VOTES FOR WOMEN:_
“They breathe the very conventional and stuffy air of
Kensington.... We are bound to say that the London child we
tried it on liked the book.”
MARTIN SECKER, NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET, ADELPHI
SOME PRESS OPINIONS OF
The Passionate Elopement
_By_ COMPTON MACKENZIE
_TIMES:_
“We are grateful to him for wringing our hearts with the
‘tears and laughter of spent joys.’”
_SPECTATOR:_
“As an essay in literary bravura the book is quite
remarkable.”
_COUNTRY LIFE:_
“In the kindliness, the humour and the gentleness of the
treatment, it comes as near to Thackeray, as any man has
come since Thackeray.”
_DAILY CHRONICLE:_
“Thanks for a rare entertainment! And, if the writing of
your story pleased you as much as the reading of it has
pleased us, congratulations too.”
_GLOBE:_
“A little tenderness, a fragrant aroma of melancholy laid
away in lavender, a hint of cynicism, an airy
philosophy—and so a wholly piquant, subtly aromatic dish, a
rosy apple stuck with cloves.”
_GLASGOW NEWS:_
“Fresh and faded, mocking yet passionate, compact of tinsel
and gold is this little tragedy of a winter season in view
of the pump room.... Through it all, the old tale has a
dainty, fluttering, unusual, and very real beauty.”
_ENGLISH REVIEW:_
“All his characters are real and warm with life. ‘The
Passionate Elopement’ should be read slowly, and followed
from the smiles and extravagance of the opening chapters
through many sounding and poetical passages, to the
thrilling end of the Love Chase. The quiet irony of the
close leaves one smiling, but with the wiser smile of
Horace Ripple who meditates on the colours of life.”
_WESTMINSTER GAZETTE:_
“Mr. Mackenzie’s book is a novel of genre, and with
infinite care and obvious love of detail has he set himself
to paint a literary picture in the manner of Hogarth. He is
no imitator, he owes no thanks to any predecessor in the
fashioning of his book.... Mr. Mackenzie recreates (the
atmosphere) so admirably that it is no exaggeration to say
that, thanks to his brilliant scene-painting, we shall gain
an even more vivid appreciation of the work of his great
forerunners. Lightly and vividly does Mr. Mackenzie sketch
in his characters ... but they do not on that account lack
personality. Each of them is definitely and faithfully
drawn, with sensibility, sympathy, and humour.”
MARTIN SECKER, NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET, ADELPHI
SOME PRESS OPINIONS OF
CARNIVAL
_By_ COMPTON MACKENZIE
_ATHENÆUM_ :
“Mr. Mackenzie’s second novel amply fulfils the promise of
his first.... Its first and great quality is originality.
The originality of Mr. Mackenzie lies in his possession of
an imagination and a vision of life that are as peculiarly
his own as a voice or a laugh, and that reflect themselves
in a style which is that of no other writer.... A prose
full of beauty.”
_PUNCH_ :
“After reading a couple of pages I settled myself in my
chair for a happy evening, and thenceforward the
fascination of the book held me like a kind of enchantment.
I despair, though, of being able to convey any idea of it
in a few lines of criticism.... As for the style, I will
only add that it gave me the same blissful feeling of
security that one has in listening to a great musician....
In the meantime, having recorded my delight in it, I shall
put ‘Carnival’ upon the small and by no means crowded shelf
that I reserve for ‘keeps.’”
_OUTLOOK_ :
“In these days of muddled literary evaluations, it is a
small thing to say of a novel that it is a great novel; but
this we should say without hesitation of ‘Carnival,’ that
not only is it marked out to be the leading success of its
own season, but to be read afterwards as none but the best
books are read.”
_OBSERVER_ :
“The heroic scale of Mr. Compton Mackenzie’s conception and
achievement sets a standard for him which one only applies
to the ‘great’ among novelists.”
_ENGLISH REVIEW_ :
“An exquisite sense of beauty with a hunger for beautiful
words to express it.”
_ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS_ :
“The spirit of youth and the spirit of London.”
_NEW YORK TIMES_ :
“We hail Mr. Mackenzie as a man alive—who raises all things
to a spiritual plane.”
_MR. C. K. SHORTER in the SPHERE_ :
“‘Carnival’ carried me from cover to cover on wings.”
_NEW AGE_ :
“We are more than sick of it.”
MARTIN SECKER, NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET, ADELPHI
SINISTER STREET
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
CARNIVAL THE PASSIONATE ELOPEMENT KENSINGTON RHYMES
For some press opinions, see preceding pages SINISTER
STREET: VOLUME II METROPOLITAN NIGHTS These volumes are in
preparation
S I N I S T E R S T R E E T
_By COMPTON MACKENZIE_
L O N D O N : M A R T I N S E C K E R
NUMBER FIVE JOHN STREET ADELPHI MCMXIII
TO
THE REVEREND
E. D. STONE
_My dear Mr. Stone,_
_Since you have on several occasions deprecated the length of
my books, I feel that your name upon the dedicatory page of
this my longest book deserves explanation, if not apology._
_When I first conceived the idea of ‘Sinister Street,’ I must
admit I did not realize that in order to present my theme fully
in accord with my own prejudice, I should require so much
space. But by the time I had written one hundred pages I knew
that, unless I was prepared against my judgment to curtail the
original scheme, I must publish my book in a form slightly
different from the usual._
_The exigencies of commercial production forbid a six shilling
novel of eight or nine hundred pages, and as I saw no prospect
of confining myself even to that length, I decided to publish
in two volumes, each to contain two divisions of my tale._
_You will say that this is an aggravation of the whole matter
and the most impenitent sort of an apology. Yet are a thousand
pages too long for the history of twenty-five years of a man’s
life, that is to say if one holds as I hold that childhood
makes the instrument, youth tunes the strings, and early
manhood plays the melody?_
_The tradition of the English novel has always favoured length
and leisure; nor do I find that my study of French and Russian
literature leads me to strain after brevity. I do not send
forth this volume as the first of a trilogy. It is actually the
first half of a complete book. At the same time, feeling as I
do that in these days of competitive reading, the sudden vision
of over a thousand pages would be inevitably depressing, I give
you the opportunity of rest at the five-hundredth page, which
reaches a climax at least as conclusive as any climax can be
that is not death. I do not pretend that I shall not be greatly
disappointed if next January or February you feel disinclined
to read ‘Dreaming Spires’ and ‘Romantic Education,’ which will
complete the second volume. Yet I will be so considerate as to
find someone else to bear the brunt of dedication, and after
all there will be no compulsion either upon you or upon the
public to resume._
_Yours ever affectionately,_
_Compton Mackenzie._
_Let me add in postscript that ‘Sinister Street’ is a symbolic
title which bears no reference to an heraldic euphemism._
_Phillack, August 3, 1913._
VOLUME ONE
CONTAINING
I.THE PRISON HOUSE II.CLASSIC EDUCATION
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“ _The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature
imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life
between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character
undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition
thick-sighted._ “
J OHN K EATS .
CONTENTS
_BOOK ONE: The Prison House_
I. THE NEW WORLD 1
II. BITTERSWEET 20
III. FEARS AND FANTASIES 39
IV. UNENDING CHILDHOOD 46
V. THE FIRST FAIRY PRINCESS 70
VI. THE ENCHANTED PALACE 85
VII. RANDELL HOUSE 97
VIII. SIAMESE STAMPS 113
IX. HOLIDAYS IN FRANCE 129
_BOOK TWO: Classic Education_
I. THE JACOBEAN 141
II. THE QUADRUPLE INTRIGUE 159
III. PASTORAL 176
IV. BOYHOOD’S GLORY 188
V. INCENSE 208
VI. PAX 232
VII. CLOVEN HOOFMARKS 248
VIII. MIRRORS 262
IX. THE YELLOW AGE 281
X. STELLA 308
XI. ACTION AND REACTION 321
XII. ALAN 346
XIII. SENTIMENT 355
XIV. ARABESQUE 378
XV. GREY EYES 397
XVI. BLUE EYES 416
XVII. LILY 427
XVIII. EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD 447
XIX. PARENTS 469
XX. MUSIC 479
BOOK ONE
THE PRISON HOUSE
_“What youth, Goddess—what guest_
_Of Gods or mortals?”_
Matthew Arnold.
_“Slow on your dials the shadows creep,_
_So many hours for food and sleep,_
_So many hours till study tire,_
_So many hours for heart’s desire.”_
Robert Bridges.
Chapter I: _The New World_
F ROM a world of daisies as big as moons and of mountainous
green hillocks Michael Fane came by some unrealized method of
transport to the thin red house, that as yet for his mind could
not claim an individual existence amid the uniformity of a long
line of fellows. His arrival coincided with a confusion of
furniture, with the tramp of men backwards and forwards from a
cavernous vehicle very dry and dusty. He found himself
continually being lifted out of the way of washstands and
skeleton chests of drawers. He was invited to sit down and keep
quiet, and almost in the same breath to walk about and avoid
hindrance. Finally, Nurse led him up many resonant stairs to
the night-nursery which at present consisted of two square cots
that with japanned iron bars stood gauntly in a wilderness of
oilcloth surrounded by four walls patterned with a prolific
vegetation. Michael was dumped down upon a grey pillow and
invited to see how well his sister Stella was behaving. Nurse’s
observation was true enough: Stella was rosily asleep in an
undulation of blankets, and Michael, threatened by many
whispers and bony finger-shakes, was not at all inclined to
wake her up. Nurse retired in an aura of importance, and
Michael set out to establish an intimacy with the various iron
bars of his cage. For a grown-up person these would certainly
have seemed much more alike than even the houses of Carlington
Road, West Kensington: for Michael each bar possessed a
personality. Minute scratches unnoticed by the heedless adult
world lent variety of expression: slight irregularities
infused certain groups with an air of deliberate consultation.
From the four corners royal bars, crowned with brass,
dominated their subjects. Passions, intrigues, rumours,
ambitions, revenges were perceived by Michael to be seething
below the rigid exterior of these iron bars: even military
operations were sometimes discernible. This cot was guarded by
a romantic population, with one or two of whose units Michael
could willingly have dispensed: one bar in particular, set
very much askew, seemed sly and malignant. Michael disliked
being looked at by anybody or anything, and this bar had a
persistent inquisitiveness which already worried him. ‘Why
does he look at me?’ Michael would presently ask, and ‘Nobody
wants to look at such an ugly little boy,’ Nurse would
presently reply. So one more intolerable question would
overshadow his peace of mind.
Meanwhile, far below, the tramp of men continued, until suddenly an
immense roar filled the room. Some of the bars shivered and clinked,
and Michael’s heart nearly stopped. The roar died away only to be
succeeded by another roar from the opposite direction. Stella woke up
crying. Michael was too deeply frightened so to soothe himself, as he
sat clutching the pointed ears of the grey pillow. Stella, feeling that
the fretful tears of a sudden awakening were insufficient, set up a
bellow of dismay. Michael was motionless, only aware of a gigantic
heart that shook him horribly. At last the footsteps of Nurse could be
heard, and over them, the quick ‘tut-tut-tuts’ that voiced her
irritation.
“You naughty boy, to wake up your little sister.”
“What was that noise?” asked Michael.
“Your own noise,” said Nurse sharply.
“It wasn’t. It was lions.”
“And if it _was_ lions, what next?” said Nurse. “Lions will
always come, when little boys are naughty. Lions don’t like
naughty boys.”
“Michael doesn’t like lions.”
He took refuge in the impersonal speech of earlier days, and with a
grave obstinacy of demeanour resisted the unreasonableness of his
nurse.
“What was that noise, Nanny? Do tell me.”
“Why a train, of course. There’s a molly-coddle. Tut-tut!”
“A train like we rode in from down in the country?”
“Yes, a train like we rode in from down in the country!” Nurse mimicked
him in an outrageous falsetto.
“Not lions at all?”
“Not if you’re a good boy.”
“Nor bears—nor tigers—nor wolverines?”
The last was a dreadful importation of fancy from some zoological
gift-book.
“Now that’s enough,” Nurse decided.
“Nor laughing hyenas?”
“Am I to speak to you again? As if there wasn’t enough to do without
children why-why-whying morning, noon and night.”
Michael recognized finality of argument. The mention of morning, noon
and night with their dreary suggestion of the infinite and unattainable
plunged him into silence. Nurse, gratified by her victory and relieved
to find that Stella was crooning happy mysteries to a rag doll,
announced that she was prepared in return for the very best behaviour
to push the two cots against the window. This done, she left the
children to their first survey of London airs, to silent wonder amid
the cheeping of countless sparrows.
Stella sat blinking at the light and the sailing clouds. She
soon began to chant her saga. Primitive and immemorial sounds
flowed from that dewy mouth; melodies and harmonies, akin to
the day itself, voiced the progress of the clouds; and while
she told her incommunicable delight
there was actually no one to say ‘Stella, will you stop that
’umming?’ Michael could not compete with his sister in her
interpretation of the clouds’ courses. He had, indeed, tried
once or twice; but Stella either stopped abruptly, leaving him
to lag for a while with a lame tune of his own, or else she
would burst into tears. Michael preferred an inspiration more
immediately visual to Stella’s incomprehensibly boundless
observations. Michael would enjoy holding in his hand a bunch
of blue cornflowers; Stella would tear them to pieces, not
irritably, but absently in a seclusion of spacious visions. On
this occasion Michael paid no attention to Stella’s salutation
of light; he was merely thankful she showed no sign of wishing
to be amused by ‘peep-bo,’ or by the pulling of curious faces.
Both these diversions were dangerous to Michael’s peace of
mind, because at some period of the entertainment he was bound,
with disastrous results, to cross the line between Stella’s joy
and Stella’s fear. Michael turned to look out of the window,
finding the details of the view enthralling. He marked first of
all the long row of poplar trees already fresh and vivid with
young May’s golden green. Those trees, waving with their
youthfulness in the wind, extended as far as could be observed
on either side. Three in every garden were planted close to the
farthest wall. How beautiful they looked, and how the sparrows
hopped from branch to branch. Michael let his eyes rove along
the pleasant green line whose slightness and evenness caressed
the vision, as velvet might have caressed a hand running
lightly over the surface. Suddenly, with a sharp emotion of
shame, Michael perceived that the middle tree opposite his own
window was different from the rest. It was not the same shape;
it carried little blobs such as hang from tablecloths and
curtains; it scarcely showed a complete leaf. Here was a
subject for speculation indeed; and the more Michael looked at
the other trees, the more he grew ashamed for the
loiterer. This problem would worry him interminably: he would
return to it often and often. But the exquisite pleasure he
had taken in the trim and equable row was gone; for as soon as
the eye caressed it, there was this intolerably naked tree to
affront all regularity.
After the trees, Michael examined the trellis that extended along the
top of a stuccoed wall without interruption on either side. This
trellis was a curiosity, for if he looked at it very hard, the lozenges
of space came out from their frame and moved about in a blur—an odd
business presumably inexplicable for evermore like everything else.
Beyond the trellis was the railway; and while Michael was looking a
signal shot down, a distant roar drew near, and a real train rumbled
past which, beheld from Michael’s window, looked like a toy train
loaded with dolls, one of whom wore a red tam-o’-shanter. Michael
longed to be sitting once again in that moving wonderland and to be
looking out of the window, himself wearing just such another red
tam-o’-shanter. Beyond the railway was surely a very extraordinary
place indeed, with mountains of coal everywhere and black figures
roaming about; and beyond this, far far away, was a very low line of
houses with a church steeple against an enormous sky.
“Dinner-time! Tut-tut,” said Nurse, suddenly bustling into the room to
interrupt Stella’s saga and Michael’s growing dread of being left alone
in that wilderness beyond the railway lines.
“Could I be left there?” he asked.
“Left where?”
“There.” He pointed to the coal-yard.
“Don’t point!” said Nurse.
“What is that place?”
“The place where coal comes from.”
“Could I be left there?” he persisted.
“Not unless one of the coalmen came over the wall and
carried you off and left you there, which he will do unless
you’re a good boy.”
Michael caught his breath.
“Can coalmen climb?” he asked, choking at the thought.
“Climb like kittens,” said Nurse.
A new bogey had been created, black and hairy with yellow cat’s eyes
and horrid prehensile arms.
Michael and Stella were now lifted out of the cots and dumped on to the
cold oilcloth and marched into the adjacent bathroom, where their faces
and hands were sponged with a new sponge that was not only rough in
itself, but also had something that scratched buried in one of the
pores. During this operation, Nurse blew violent breaths through her
tightly closed lips. When it was over, Stella was lifted up into
Nurse’s arms; Michael was commanded to walk downstairs in front and not
to let go of the banisters; then down they went, down and down and
down—past three doors opening into furniture-heaped rooms, past a door
with upper panels of coloured glass in a design of red and amber
sparrows upon a crude blue vegetation—a beautiful door, Michael
thought, as he went by. Down and down and down into the hall which was
strewn with bits of straw and shavings and had another glass-panelled
door very gaudy. Here the floor was patterned with terra-cotta, yellow,
black and slate-blue tiles. Two more doors were passed, and a third
door was reached, opening apparently on a box into which light was let
through windows of such glass as is seen round the bottom of
bird-cages. This final staircase was even in the fullest daylight very
dim and eerie, and was permeated always with a smell of burnt grease
and damp cloths. Half-way down Michael shrunk back against Nurse’s
petticoats, for in front of him yawned a terrible cavern exuding chill.
“What’s that?” he gasped.
“Bless the boy, he’ll have me over!” cried Nurse.
“Oh, Nanny, what is it—that hole? Michael doesn’t like that hole.”
“There’s a milksop. Tut-tut! Frightened by a coal-cellar! Get on with
you, do.”
Michael, holding tightly to the banisters, achieved the ground and was
hustled into the twilight of the morning-room. Stella was fitted into
her high chair; the circular tray was brought over from behind and
thumped into its place with a click: Michael was lifted up and thumped
down into another high chair and pushed close up to the table so that
his knees were chafed by the sharp edge and his thighs pinched by a
loose strand of cane. Nurse, blowing as usual through closed lips, cut
up his meat, and dinner was carried through in an atmosphere of greens
and fat and warm, milk-and-water and threats of Gregory-powder, if
every bit were not eaten.
Presently the tramping of furniture-men was renewed and the
morning-room, was made darker still by the arrival of a second van
which pulled up at right angles to the first. In the course of dinner,
Cook entered. She was a fat masculine creature who always kept her arms
folded beneath a coarse and spotted apron; and after Cook came Annie
the housemaid, tall and thin and anæmic. These two watched the children
eating, while they gossiped with Nurse.
“Isn’t Mrs. Fane coming at all, then?” enquired Cook.
“For a few minutes—for a few minutes,” said Nurse quickly, and Michael
would not have been so very suspicious had he not observed the nodding
of her head long after there was any need to nod it.
“Is mother going to stay with us?” he asked.
“Stay? Stay? Of course she’ll stay. Stay for ever,” asserted Nurse in
her bustling voice.
“Funny not to be here when the furniture came,” said Cook.
“Yes, wasn’t it?” echoed Annie. “It _was_ funny. That’s what I
thought. How funny, I thought.”
“Not that I suppose things will be what you might call properly
arranged just yet?” Cook speculated.
“Everything arranged. Everything arranged,” Nurse snapped. “Nothing to
arrange. Nothing to arrange.”
And as if to stifle for ever any ability in Michael to ask questions,
she proceeded to cram his mouth with a dessert-spoonful of rice pudding
from her own plate, jarring his teeth with the spoon when she withdrew
it.
Then Michael’s lovely mother in vivid rose silk came into the room, and
Cook squeezed herself backwards through the door very humbly and so
quietly that Annie found herself alone before she realized the fact; so
that in order to cover her confusion and assist her retreat she was
compelled to snatch away Michael’s plate of rice pudding before he had
finished the last few clotted grains. Michael was grateful to Annie for
this, and he regarded her from that moment as an ally. Thenceforth he
would often seek her out in what she called ‘her’ pantry, there to
nibble biscuits, while Annie dried cups and swung them from brass
hooks.
“How cosy you all look,” said mother. “Darling Stella, are you enjoying
your rice pudding? And, darling Michael,” she added, “I hope you’re
being very good.”
“Oh, yes,” said Nurse, “Good! Yes. He’s very good. Oh, yes. Tut-tut!
Tut-tut!”
After this exhalation of approval Nurse blew several breaths, leaned
over him, pulled down his blue and white sailor-top, and elevated his
chin with the back of her hand.
“There’s no need to bother about the drawing-room or the dining-room or
my bedroom or, in fact, any of the rooms except the night-nursery and
the day-nursery. You’re quite straight in here. I shall be back by the
end of June.”
Nurse shook her head very violently at this, and Michael felt
tears of apprehension welling up into his eyes. Mrs. Fane
paused a moment doubtfully; then she waved beautiful slim
gloves and glided from the room. Michael listened to delicate
footsteps on the stairs, and the tinkle of small ornaments. A
bleak silence followed the banging of the front door.
“She’s gone away. I know she’s gone away,” he moaned.
“Who’s She?” demanded Nurse. “She’s the cat’s mother.”
“Mother! Mother!” he wailed. “She always goes away from Michael.”
“And no wonder,” said Nurse. “Dear, dear! Yes—tut-tut!—but goodness
gracious, she won’t be gone long. She’ll be back in June.”
“What’s June?” Michael asked.
“If you ask any more silly questions you’ll go to bed, young man; but
if you’re a good boy, I’ll tell you a story.”
“A real story? A nice long story?” asked Michael.
“I’ll tell you a story about Jack o’ my Nory
And now my story’s begun.
I’ll tell you another about Jack and his brother
And now my story’s done.”
Nurse twiddled her thumbs with a complacent look, as she smacked her
palate upon the final line.
“That isn’t a story,” said Michael sullenly. “When will mother be
back?”
“In June. That’s enough,” said Nurse.
Michael went to sleep that night, trying to materialize this
mysterious June. It came to mean a distant warmth of orange
light towards which he waited very slowly. He lay awake
thinking of June in the luminousness of a night-light shielded
from his direct vision by a basin. His hands were muffled in
fingerless gloves to prevent thumb-sucking. Suddenly upon the
quiet came a blaze of light. Had he reached June? His sleepy
eyelids uncurled to the scented vision of his beautiful mother.
But it was only gaslight playing and
fluttering over the figure of anæmic Annie taking hairpin
after hairpin from her hair. Yet there was a certain interest
in watching Annie undress. Her actions were less familiar than
those of Nurse. Her lips were softer to kiss. Then the vision
of June, rising and falling with Annie’s breath, recurred from
distances unattainable, faded again into the blackness of the
night, and after a while came back dazzling and golden. It was
morning, and in a chirping of sparrows and depth of quiet
sunlight Michael began to wonder why he was sleeping beside
Annie in a big bed. It was an experience that stood for a long
time in his memory as the first adventure of his life.
The adventure of Annie was a solitary occasion. By the
following night the regular night-nursery was ready for
occupation, and the pea-green vegetation of the walls was
hidden by various furniture. Nurse’s bed flanked by the two
cots occupied much of its space. Round the fire was a nursery
fender on which hung perpetually various cloths and clothes and
blankets and sheers which, as it was summer at the time, might
all have been dried much more easily out of doors. Pictures
were hung upon the wall—pictures that with the progress of time
became delightfully intimate experiences. They were mostly
framed chromolithographs saved from the Christmas numbers of
illustrated papers. There was Cherry Ripe—a delicious and
demure girl in a white dress with a pink sash, for whom Michael
began to feel a romantic affection. There was the picture of a
little girl eating a slice of bread-and-butter on a doorstep,
watched by a fox terrier and underneath inscribed ‘Give me a
piece, please.’ Michael did not know whether to feel more sorry
for the little girl or the dog; some sort of compassion, he
thought, was demanded. It was a problem picture insoluble over
many years of speculation. The night-nursery seemed always full
of Nurse’s clothes. Her petticoats were usually chequered or
uniform
red, preternaturally bright in contrast with the blackness of
the exterior apparel. The latter of heavy serge or similar
material was often sown with jet bugles which scratched
Michael’s face when he played ‘Hide-Oh’ among the folds of
such obvious concealment. Apart from these petticoats and
skirts, the most individual possession of Nurse’s wardrobe was
a moon-shaped bustle of faded crimson which Michael loved to
swing from the bedpost whence out of use it was suspended.
There was also in a top drawer, generally unattainable, a
collection of caps threaded with many different velvet ribbons
and often coquettish with lace flowers. Michael was glad when
Nurse put on her best cap, a proceeding which took place just
before tea. Her morning cap was so skimpy as scarcely to hide
the unpleasant smoothness of her thin hair. In the amber
summer afternoons or blue spring twilights, Nurse looked
comparatively beautiful under the ample lace, with a softer
apron and a face whose wrinkles were smoothed out by the
consciousness of leisure and the pleasant brown teapot.
Mostly, Michael was inclined to compare her with a monkey, so
squab was her nose, so long her upper lip, and such a
multitude of deep furrows twisted up her countenance. That
Nurse was ever young, Michael could not bring himself to
believe, and daguerreotypes framed in tin-foil which she
produced as evidence of youth from a square box inlaid with
mother-o’-pearl, never convinced him as a chromolithograph
might have convinced him. At the same time the stories of her
childhood, which Nurse was sometimes persuaded to tell, were
very enthralling; moreover, by the fact of her obvious
antiquity, they had the dimness and mystery of old
fairy-tales.
On the whole Michael was happy in his pea-green nursery. He was
well guarded by the iron soldiers of his cot. He liked the
warmth and the smallness of the room; he liked to be able to
climb from his cot on to
Nurse’s bed, from Nurse’s bed into Stella’s cot, and with this
expanse of safe territory he felt sorry for the chilly and
desolate and dangerous floor. Michael also liked the
day-nursery. To begin with, it possessed a curious and romantic
shape due to its nearness to the roof. The ceiling sloped on
either side of the window almost to the floor. It was not a
room that was square and obvious, for round the corner from the
door was a fairly large alcove which was not destined to lose
its romance for many years. The staircase that led up to the
day-nursery was light and cheerful owing to the skylight in the
roof. Yet this skylight Michael could have wished away. It was
a vulnerable spot which made the day-nursery just a little
uneasy at dusk—this and the cistern cupboard with its dark
boomings and hammerings and clankings and utter
inexplicableness. However, the day-nursery was a bright room,
with a cosy atmosphere of its own. The pleasantest meal of the
day was taken there, and in a black cupboard lived the golden
syrup and the heraldic mugs and the dumpy teapot and the
accessories of tea. What a much pleasanter cupboard this was
than the smaller one in the night-nursery which revealed, when
opened, slim and ugly ipecacuanha, loathsome Gregory-powder
with wooden cap and squat cork, wicked envelopes of grey
powders and slippery bottles of castor-oil. There, too, was the
liver-coloured liquorice-powder, the vile rhubarb and the
deceitful senna. In fact, apart from a bag of jaded acid-drops,
there were only two pleasant inmates of this cupboard—the
silvery and lucent syrup of squills and a round box of honey
and borax. There were no pills because Nurse objected to pills.
She was always telling Michael as he listened, sick at heart,
to the stirring-up of the Gregory-powder with a muffled spoon,
so different from the light-hearted tinkle and quick fizz of
magnesia, to be thankful he was not on the verge of taking a
pill. That she represented as something worthy of a struggle.
Michael imagined the taking of a pill to be equivalent to
swallowing a large painted ball full of a combination of all
the nastiest medicines in the world. Even the omnipotent,
omniscient Nanny could not take a pill.
There were other jolly cupboards in the day-nursery—one in particular
pasted over with ‘scraps’ and varnished—a work of art that was always
being added to for a treat. There was a patchwork hearthrug very
comfortable to lie upon beside the cat and her two black kittens. There
was Nanny’s work-table in the window, gay with coloured silks and
wools. There was a piano locked up until Michael’s first lesson, but
nevertheless wonderful on account of the smooth curve of the lid that
allowed one moment’s delicious balance and then an equally delicious
slide on to the floor.
Certainly the day-nursery was the best room in the tall thin house,
just as the morning-room was the worst. The morning-room was odious. In
it were eaten breakfast and dinner, both nasty meals. Near it was the
coal-cellar and the area-door with its grinning errand boys. The
windows afforded foothold to strange cats that stared abominably with
yellow eyes. Tramps and sweeps walked past the area-railings or looked
in evilly. Horrid gipsies smirked through the window, and pedlars often
tapped. The morning-room was utterly abominable, fit only for the
boiled mutton and caper sauce and suet puddings that loaded its table.
The kitchen, although it was next to the morning-room, was a
far pleasanter resort. So far as any ground-floor now could be
considered safe, the kitchen was safe. It looked out upon its
own fortified basement whose perforated iron staircase had a
spiked door at the top, which could be securely shut. The
kitchen contained a large number of objects of natural
interest, among which was a shallow cupboard that included upon
an attainable shelf jars of currants,
sultanas, and rice much more edible in the raw state than
cooked. There was the electric-bell case, recording with
mysterious discs a far-off summons. There was the drawer in
the kitchen table that contained, besides knives and forks, a
rolling-pin, a tin-opener, a corkscrew, skewers and, most
exciting of all, a club-shaped cage for whipping eggs. There
was also a deep drawer in the dresser which held many
revelations of the private history of Annie and Cook. Michael
could easily have spent days in the kitchen without exhausting
its treasures, and as for Cook, gross though she was and
heavily though she smelt of onions and beer, her tales were
infinitely superior to anything ever known in the way of
narration.
Towards the end of June, Mrs. Fane came back. Her arrival was
heralded by the purchase of several pots of marguerites and
calceolarias—the latter to Michael a very objectionable flower
because, detecting in it some resemblance to his dearly loved
snapdragons, he pressed open the mouth of a flower and, finding
inside a small insect, had to drop the whole pot in a shudder.
This brought the punishment of not being allowed to watch from
the steps for his mother’s cab rounding the corner into
Carlington Road, and made calceolarias for ever hateful.
However, Mrs. Fane arrived in the richness of a midsummer
twilight, and Michael forgot all about calceolarias in his
happiness. All day long for many golden days he pattered up and
down the house and in and out of all the rooms at his mother’s
heels. He held coils of picture-wire and hooks and hammers and
nails and balls of wool and reels of silk and strands of
art-muslin and spiders of cotton-wool and Japanese fans and
plumes of pampas grass and all the petty utilities and beauties
of house arrangement. By the end of July every room was finally
arranged, and Michael and Stella with their mother, accompanied
by Nurse and Annie, went down to the seaside to spend two
wonderful months. Michael was often allowed
to sit up an extra half-hour and even when he went to bed his
mother would come to hear him say his prayers. She would sit
by him, her lovely face flushed by the rose-red August sunsets
that floated in through the open window on a sound of
sea-waves. As it grew darker and, over the noise of happy
people walking about in the cool evening, a distant band
played music, his mother would lean over and kiss him good
night. He would be loath to let her go, and just as she was
closing the door quietly he would call her back and whisper
‘One more kiss,’ and because that good-night kiss was the most
enchanting moment in his day, he would whisper as he held her
to him very close, ‘Only one more, but much, much, much the
longest kiss in all the world.’
They were indeed two very wonderful months. In the morning
Michael would sit beside his mother at breakfast, and for a
great treat he would be given the segment she so cleverly cut
off from the tip of her egg. And for another treat, he would be
allowed to turn the finished egg upside down and present it to
her as a second untouched, for which she would be very grateful
and by whose sudden collapse before the tapping of the spoon,
she would be just as tremendously surprized. After the egg
would always come two delicious triangles of toast, each
balancing a single strawberry from the pot of strawberry jam.
After breakfast, Michael would walk round the heap of clinkers
in the middle of the parched seaside garden while his mother
read her letters, and very soon they would set out together to
the beach, where in time they would meet Nurse and Stella with
the perambulator and the camp-stools and the bag of greengages
or William-pears. Sand castles were made and boats were sailed
or rather were floated upside down in pools, and just as the
morning was getting too good to last, they would have to go
home to dinner, joining on to the procession of people
returning up the cliffs. Michael would
be armed with a spade, a boat with very wet sails, and
sometimes with a pail full of sea-water and diminutive fish
that died one by one in the course of the afternoon heat.
After dinner Mrs. Fane would lie down for a while, and Michael
would lie down for a great treat beside her and keep
breathless and still, watching the shadows of light made by
the bellying of the blind in the breeze. Bluebottles would
drone, and once to his bodeful apprehension a large spider
migrated to another corner of the ceiling. But he managed to
restrain himself from waking his mother.
One afternoon Michael was astonished to see on the round table by the
bed the large photograph in a silver frame of a man in knee-breeches
with a sword—a prince evidently by his splendid dress and handsome
face. He speculated during his mother’s sleep upon this portrait, and
the moment Annie had left the cup of tea which she brought in to wake
his mother Michael asked who the man was.
“A friend of mine,” said Mrs. Fane.
“A prince?”
“No, not a prince.”
“He looks like a prince,” said Michael sceptically.
“Does he, darling?”
“I think he does look like a prince. Is he good?”
“Very good.”
“What’s wrote on it?” Michael asked. “Oh, mother, when will I read
writing?”
“When you’re older.”
“I wish I was older now. I want to read writing. What’s wrote on it?”
“Always,” his mother told him.
“Always?”
“Yes.”
“Always what? Always good?”
“No, just plain ‘always,’” said Mrs. Fane.
“What a funny writing. Who wrote it?”
“The man in the picture.”
“Why?”
“To please mother.”
“Shall I write ‘always’ when I can write?” he asked.
“Of course, darling.”
“But what is that man for?”
“He’s an old friend of mother’s.”
“I like him,” said Michael confidently.
“Do you, darling?” said his mother, and then suddenly she kissed him.
That evening when Michael’s prayers were concluded and he was lying
very still in his bed, he waited for his mother’s tale.
“Once upon a time,” she began, “there was a very large and enormous
forest——”
“No, don’t tell about a forest,” Michael interrupted. “Tell about that
man in the picture.”
Mrs. Fane was staring out of the window, and after a moment’s
hesitation she turned round.
“Because there _are_ fairy-tales without a prince,” said
Michael apologetically.
“Well, once upon a time,” said his mother, “there lived in an old old
country house three sisters whose mother had died when they were quite
small.”
“Why did she die?”
“She was ill.”
Michael sighed sympathetically.
“These three sisters,” his mother went on, “lived with their father, an
old clergyman.”
“Was he kind to them?”
“According to his own ideas he was very kind. But the youngest
sister always wanted to have her own way and one day when she
was feeling very cross because her father had told her she was
to go and stay with an aunt, who should come riding along a
lane but——”
“That man,” interrupted Michael, greatly excited.
“A rider on horseback. And he said good morning, and she said good
morning, though she had no business to.”
“Why hadn’t she?”
“Because it isn’t right for girls to speak to riders on horseback
without being introduced. But the rider was very handsome and brave and
after that they met very often, and then one day he said, ‘Won’t you
ride away with me?’ and she rode away with him and never saw her father
or her sisters or the old house any more.”
Mrs. Fane had turned her face to the sunset again.
“Is that all?” Michael asked.
“That’s all.”
“Was they happy ever afterwards?”
“Very happy—too happy.”
“Are they happy now?”
“Very happy—too happy.”
“Did they live in a castle?”
“Sometimes, and sometimes they lived in a beautiful ship and went
sailing away to the most beautiful cities in the world.”
“Can’t Michael go with you?” he asked.
“Darling boy, it’s a fairy-tale.”
“Is it?” he said doubtfully.
The two wonderful months were over. One long day of packing up
was the end of them, and when they got back to London there was
more packing up, after a few days of which Mrs. Fane took
Michael in her arms and kissed him good-bye and told him to be
very good. Michael tried not to cry; but the tears were forced
out by a huge lump in his throat when he saw a cab at the door,
pointing the other way from London. He could not bear the
heaped-up luggage and Nurse’s promises of sitting up late that
evening for a great treat. He did not want to sit up late, and
when his mother whispered there was a surprize for him in the
drawing-room, he did not care at all for a surprize. But
nothing could make the minutes stay still. He was allowed to
watch the cab going down the road, but he had no heart to wave
his handkerchief in farewell, and when presently he went back
with Nurse into the thin red house and was triumphantly led
into the drawing-room, he was not raised to any particular
happiness by the lancer’s uniform, displayed on a large square
of cardboard. He suffered himself to be dressed up and to have
the scarlet breast-plate strapped around him and the plumed
helmet to be pushed over his nose and the sabre-tache to be
entangled with his legs; but there was no spirit of hope and
adventure flaming in his breast—only an empty feeling and a
desire to look out of the night-nursery window at the trains
going by with happy people inside.
Chapter II: _Bittersweet_
H IS mother’s absence made very sad for Michael the tall thin
house in Carlington Road. He felt enclosed in the restraint
from which his mother had flown like a bird. Time stretched
before him in unimaginable reckonings. It was now the beginning
of autumn, and the leaves of the lime trees, falling to lie
stained and unlovely in sodden basements, moved Michael with a
sense of the long winter before him, with the unending black
nights and the dark wet dawns. From the window of the
night-nursery he recognized for the first time the beauty of
the unsymmetrical plane tree that now, when the poplars were
mere swishing bundles of twigs, still defied the October winds
with wide green leaves. Soon, however, by a damp frost the
plane tree was conquered, and its blobs jigged to November
gusts. Fogs began, and the morning-room was always gaslit, even
for dinner at one o’clock. Stella was peevish, and games became
impossible. The two black kittens were an entertainment and
took part with Michael in numberless dramas of revenge and
punishment, of remorse and exaggerated cherishing. These
histrionic pastimes became infused with a terrible reality,
when one day the favourite kitten jumped from Michael’s arms
over the banisters and fell on to the tiled floor of the hall,
hurting herself internally so that she had to be poisoned. He
stood by her grave in the blackened mould of the garden, and
wished poignantly that he had never spoken harshly to her, had
never banished her to a waste-paper basket prison for the
length of a long foggy afternoon.
Christmas arrived with more uniforms, with a fishmonger’s shop and a
mechanical mackerel which when wound up would click in finny progress
from one end of the bath to the other and back. It was wound up every
Sunday afternoon for a treat, and was afterwards replaced in a high
corner-cupboard that always attracted Michael’s extreme curiosity and
was the object of many vows to solve its secret, when he grew bigger.
All these presents came from his mother together with half a dozen
books. He received no other presents except from the household. Nurse
gave him a china house, romantic when illuminated by a night-light;
Annie shyly placed before him a crystal globe that when shaken gave a
wonderful reproduction of a snow-storm falling upon a weather-worn tin
figure with a green face, blue legs and an unpainted coat. Mrs. Frith
the cook gave him a box of tops, none of which he or she or anyone else
could spin. In addition to these presents Santa Claus allowed him on a
still December night an orange, an apple, a monkey on a stick, five
nuts (three of them bad) and a selection of angular sweets. As Michael
with foresight had hung up two of Nurse’s stockings as well as his own
socks, he felt slightly resentful towards Santa Claus for the meagre
response.
Christmas passed away in a week of extravagant rain, and a visit was
paid to the pantomime of Valentine and Orson at the Surrey Theatre that
reduced Michael to a state of collapse owing to the fight between the
two protagonists, in which Orson’s fingers were lacerated by the
glittering sword of Valentine. Nurse vainly assured him the blood was
so much red paint. He howled the louder and dreamed ghastly dreams for
a month afterwards.
About this time Michael read many books in a strange
assortment. Nurse had a collection of about a dozen in her
trunk from which Michael was allowed to read three to himself.
These were The Lamplighter, The Arabian
Nights in a small paper-bound volume of diminutive print, and
a Tale of the Black Rising in Jamaica which included an
earthquake. In The Arabian Nights he read over and over again
the stories of Aladdin, The Forty Thieves and Sinbad, owing to
their familiarity through earlier narratives. On Sunday
afternoons Nurse always read aloud from Baring-Gould’s Lives
of the Saints and Mrs. Gatti’s Parables from Nature, and told
the story of Father Machonochie’s death in Argyll and of his
faithful Skye terriers, whose portraits she piously possessed
in Oxford frames. Michael’s own books included at this period
several zoological works, the Swiss Family Robinson, Holiday
House, Struwwelpeter, Daddy Darwin’s Dovecote, Jackanapes, The
Battles of the British Army and an abbreviated version of
Robinson Crusoe.
The winter and cold wet spring dragged by. Day by day life
varied very little. In the morning after breakfast, if it was
fairly fine, a visit would be paid to Kensington Gardens, a
dull business; for the Round Pond was not visited, and indeed
the Gardens were only penetrated as far as the Palace, with
occasional promenades along the flower-walk for a treat. Treats
were important factors in Michael’s life. Apparently anything
even mildly pleasant came under the category of treats. It was
a treat to walk on the grass in the Gardens; it was a treat to
help to push Stella’s perambulator; it was a treat to have the
sponge floating beside him in the bath, to hum, to laugh, to
read, to stay up one minute after half-past six, to accompany
Nurse on her marketing, and most of all to roll the slabs of
unbaked dough down in the kitchen. The great principle of a
treat was its rarity. As anything that had to be asked for
became a treat automatically and as the mere fact of asking was
made a reason for refusing to grant a treat, the sacred
infrequency of the treat was secured. The result of this was
that the visit to Kensington Gardens instead of
being the jolly business it seemed to be for other children,
became a tantalizing glimpse of an unattainable paradise.
Michael would stand enraptured by the March winds, every
impulse bidding him run and run eternally through the blowy
spring weather; yet if he so much as climbed the lowest rung
of the scaly part-railings, if he dallied one moment to watch
a kite launched on the air, Nanny would haul him back to the
perambulator’s side. As for talking to other children, not
even could the magic treat effect that. If Nurse was to be
believed, conversation with strange children was the lowest
depth to which human nature could sink. The enforced
solitariness of his life bred in Michael a habit of
contemplation. Much of his morning walk was passed in a dream,
in which he seemed to be standing still while the world of
houses and trees and railings and people swam by him unheeded.
This method of existence led to several unpleasant shocks, as
when he walked into a lamp-post and bruised his nose. Nanny
used to jeer at him, calling him Little Johnny Head-in-air;
but Michael was so much used to her derogatory opinions that
he cared very little and made no attempt to cure himself of
the habit, but even encouraged himself to put himself into
these nihilistic trances.
It was probably owing to this habit that one morning Michael,
looking round in Kensington Gardens, could discern no familiar
figure. He was by himself in the middle of a broad gravel walk.
Nurse and the perambulator had vanished. For a moment a
sickening horror seized him. He would never see Carlington Road
again; he would never see Stella or his mother; he would never
go to the seaside; he was lost. Then he recalled to himself the
knowledge of his name and address: he reassured himself by
repeating both aloud, Charles Michael Saxby Fane, 64 Carlington
Road, Kensington. A name and address he had often been warned
was a talisman to enlist
the service of policemen. His heart beat more gently again; his
breathing became normal. He looked around him at the world seen
for the first time with freedom’s eyes. With waves of scent the
beds of hyacinths impressed themselves upon his memory. He was
free under a great gusty sky, free to climb railings, to pick
up shells from the gravel walk, to lie on his back in the grass
and brood upon the huge elm-trees that caught the clouds in
their net. Michael wandered along to a drinking-fountain to
which, access had often been forbidden. He drank four cups of
water from the captive metal mug: he eyed curiously the many
children who, as free as himself, ran up and down the steps of
the fountain. He wished for barley-sugar that he might offer it
to them and earn their approbation and company. He was
particularly attracted to one group consisting of three funny
little girls with splashed pinafores and holes in their
stockings, and of two little boys with holes in their
knickerbockers and half-peeled sticks. The group moved away
from the fountain and Michael followed at a distance. The group
turned somersaults over the highest railings and Michael
watched it hungrily. The group strolled on, the girls
nonchalant and enlaced, the boys still peeling their sticks
with perseverance. Michael squeezed through the railings, and
followed in the group’s wake. The two boys finished peeling
their sticks and pushed over in a heap the three little girls.
There was laughter and shouting, and a confusion of pinafores
and black stockings and hair and caps. Michael stood close to
them, wide-eyed with admiration. Suddenly the group realized
his propinquity and flocked together critically to eye him,
Michael became self-conscious and turned away; he heard
giggling and spluttering. He blushed with shame and began to
run. In a moment he fell over a turret of grass and the group
jeered openly. He picked himself up and fled towards the gate
of the Gardens, anxious only to escape
ridicule. He ran on with beating heart, with quickening breath
and sobs that rose in his throat one after another like
bubbles, breaking because he ran so fast. He was in Kensington
High Street, among the thickening crowds of people. He seemed
to hear pursuing shouts and mocking laughter. At last he saw a
policeman whose tunic he clutched desperately.
“What’s all this about?” demanded the constable.
“Please, my name is Charles Michael Saxby Fane and I live at 64
Carlington Road and I want to go home.”
Michael burst into tears and the policeman bent over and led him by a
convulsed hand to the police station. There he was seated in a wooden
chair, while various policemen in various states of undress came and
talked kindly to him, and in the end, riding on the shoulder of his
original rescuer, he arrived at the tall thin house from whose windows
Nurse was peering, anxious and monkey-like.
There seemed to be endless talk about his adventure. All day the affair
was discussed, all day he was questioned and worried and scolded and
threatened. Treats faded from possible granting for months to come.
Restrictions and repressions assumed gigantic proportions, and it was
not until Nanny went upstairs to put Stella to bed and left Michael in
the kitchen with Mrs. Frith and Annie that his adventure came to seem a
less terrible breach of natural law. Away from Nurse, the cook and the
housemaid allowed a splendid laxity to gild their point of view.
“Well, what a fuss about nothing,” said Mrs. Frith comfortably.
“I declare. And what was _she_ doing? That’s what some people
would like to know. You can’t lose a child the same as you
might lay down a thimble. I call it very careless.”
“Yes. What a shame!” Annie agreed. “Supposing he’d of been run over.”
“He might of been run over a dozen times,” said Mrs
Frith. “It’s all very fine to put all the blame on the poor
child, but what was _she_
doing?”
Then Mrs. Frith closed her right eye, tightened her mouth and very
slowly nodded her head until the most of her pleated chin was buried in
the bib of her apron.
“That’s what I thought,” said Annie mysteriously.
“What did you think, Annie?” Michael asked fretfully.
“She thought you hadn’t no business to be so daring,” said Mrs
Frith. “But there! Well! And I was daring myself. Very daring
_I_ was. Out and about. Hollering after boys. The slappings
I’ve had. But I enjoyed myself. And if I sat down a bit tender,
that’s better than a sore heart, I used to think.”
“I expect you enjoyed yourself,” said Annie. “I was one of the quiet
ones, I was. Any little trip, and I was sick.”
“Couldn’t bear the motion, I suppose?” Cook enquired.
“Oh, it wasn’t the travelling as did it. It was the excitement. I was
dreadfully sick in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral.”
“What a grand place it is, though,” said Mrs. Frith, nodding. “Oh,
beautiful. So solemn. I’ve sat there with my late husband, eating nuts
as peaceful as if we was in a real church. Beautiful. And that
whispering gallery! The things you hear. Oh—well. I like a bit of fun,
I do. I remember——”
Then Nurse came downstairs, and Michael was taken up to bed away from
what he knew would be an enthralling conversation between Annie and
Cook. It was hateful to be compelled to march up all those stairs
farther and farther away from the cheerful voices in the basement.
August arrived without bringing Michael’s mother, and he did
not care for the days by the sea without her. Stella, to be
sure, was beginning to show signs of one day being an
intelligent companion, but Nurse under the influence of
heat grew more repressive than ever, and the whole seaside
ached with his mother’s absence. Michael was not allowed to
speak to strange children and was still dependent on rare
treats to illuminate his dulness. The landlady’s husband, Mr.
Wagland, played the harmonium and made jokes with Nurse, while
Mrs. Wagland sang hymns and whispered with Nurse. A gleam of
variety came into Michael’s life when Mr. Wagland told him he
could catch birds by putting salt on their tails, and for many
afternoons, always with a little foolscap of salt, Michael
walked about the sunburnt-grass patch in front of the house,
waiting for sparrows to perch and vainly flinging pinches of
salt in the direction of their tails.
Church was more exciting by the seaside than at home, where
every Sunday morning during the long sermon Michael subsided
slowly from a wooden bench in the gallery on to a disembowelled
hassock, or languished through the Litany with a taste of
varnish in his mouth caused by an attempt to support his
endurance by licking the back of the pew in front. Nurse told
him of wonderful churches with music and incense and candles
and scarlet and lace, but, for some reason of inexplicable
contrariness, she took Michael to an old Calvinistic church
with a fire-breathing vicar, a sniffling vicar’s wife and a
curate who sometimes clasped Michael’s head with a damp hand
that always felt as if it were still there when it had long
been removed, like a cold linseed poultice. Now at the seaside,
Michael went to a beautiful church and was so much excited by
the various events that he pressed forward, peering on tiptoe.
Luckily the two ladies in front of him were so devout and
bobbed up and down so often that he was able to see most of
what was happening. How he longed to be the little boy in
scarlet who carried a sort of silver sauce-boat and helped to
spoon what looked like brown sugar into the censer. Once during
a procession, Michael stepped out
into the aisle and tried to see what actually was carried in
the boat. But the boat-boy put out his tongue very quickly, as
he walked piously by, and glared at Michael very haughtily,
being about the same size.
After submitting without pleasure to a farewell kiss from Mrs.
Wagland, and after enduring much shame on account of Stella’s
behaviour in the crowded railway carriage, Michael came back to
Carlington Road. During the space between arrival and bed-time
he was gently happy in welcoming his toys and books, in
marvelling at the quick growth of the black kitten and in a
brief conversation with Mrs. Frith and Annie; but on the next
morning which was wet with a wetness that offered no prospect
of ever being dry, he was depressed by the thought of the long
time before Christmas, by the foreboding of yellow days of fog
and the fact that to-morrow was Sunday. He had been told to sit
in the dining-room in order to be out of the way during the
unpacking and, because he had been slow in choosing which book
should accompany him, he had been called Mr. Particular and
compelled to take the one book of all others that he now felt
was most impossible even to open. So Michael sat in the
bay-window and stared at the rainy street. How it rained, not
ferociously as in a summer storm, when the surface of the road
was blurred with raindrops and the water poured along the
gutters, carrying twigs and paper and orange-peel towards the
drain, and when there almost seemed a chance of a second flood,
an event Michael did not fear, having made up his mind to float
on an omnibus to the top of the Albert Hall which had once
impressed him with its perfect security. Now it was raining
with the dreary mediocrity of winter, dripping from the balcony
above on to the sill below, trickling down the window-panes,
lying in heavy puddles about the road, a long monotonous grey
soak. He sighed as he looked out of the window at the piece of
waste ground opposite, that was bordered
in front by a tumble-down fence and surrounded on the three
other sides by the backs of grey houses. A poor old woman was
picking groundsel with a melancholy persistence, and the torn
umbrella which wavered above her bent form made her look like a
scarecrow. Presently round the corner a boy appeared walking
very jauntily. He had neither coat nor waistcoat nor shoes nor
stockings, his shirt was open in front, and a large piece of it
stuck out behind through his breeches; but he did not seem to
mind either the rain or his tattered clothes. He whistled as he
walked along, with one hand stuck in his braces and with the
other banging the wooden fence. He went by with tousled hair
and dirty face, a glorious figure of freedom in the rain,
Michael envied him passionately, this untrammelled
fence-banging whistling spirit; and for a long time this boy
walked before Michael’s aspirations, leading them to his own
merry tune. Michael would often think of this boy and wonder
what he was doing and saying. He made up his mind in the
beeswaxed dining-room that it was better to be a raggle-taggle
wanderer than anything else. He watched the boy disappear round
the farther corner, and wished that he could disappear in such
company round corner after corner of the world beyond the grey
house-backs.
The climax of this wet morning’s despair was reached when a
chimney-sweep came into sight, whooping and halloaing nearer
and nearer. Of the many itinerant terrors that haunted polite
roads, Michael dreaded sweeps most of all. So he hastily
climbed down from the chair in the window and sat under the
dining-room table until the sound had passed, shivering with
apprehension lest it should stop by Number Sixty-four. It went
by, however, without pausing, and Michael breathed more freely,
but just as he was cautiously emerging from the table, there
was an extra loud postman’s knock which drove him back in a
panic,
so that when Nurse came fussing in to fetch him to wash his
hands for dinner, he had to invent a plausible excuse for such
a refuge. As he could not find one, he was told that for a
punishment he could not be allowed to hear the message his
mother had written at the end of what was evidently a very
important letter, to judge by the many tut-tuts the reading of
it provoked Nurse to click.
However, under the influence of tea Nanny softened, and the message was
read just as the rain stopped and the sun glittered through the
day-nursery window right across the room in a wide golden bar.
_Como._
_Darling Michael_ ,
_You are to go to kindergarten which you will enjoy. You
will only go for the mornings and you will have to learn
all sorts of jolly things—music and painting and writing.
Then you’ll be able to write to Mother. I’m sure you’ll be
good and work hard, so that when Mother comes home at
Christmas, you’ll be able to show her what a clever boy she
has. You would like to be in this beautiful place. As I
write I can see such lovely hills and fields and lakes and
mountains. I hope darling Stella is learning to say all
sorts of interesting things. I can’t find any nice present
to send you from here, so I’ve told Nanny that you and she
can go and buy two canaries, one for you and one for
Stella—a boy canary and a girl canary. Won’t that be fun?
Love and kisses from_
_Mother_ .
Michael sat in a dream when the letter was finished. It had raised so
many subjects for discussion and was so wonderful that he could
scarcely speak.
“Will mother really come home at Christmas?” he asked.
“You heard what I said.”
“Christmas!” he sighed happily.
“Aren’t you glad to go to school?” Nurse wanted to know.
“Yes, but I’d like Christmas to come,” he said.
“Was there ever in this world anyone so hard to please?” Nurse
apostrophized.
“When will we go to get these canaries, Nanny?”
“Plenty of time. Plenty of time.”
“Soon, will we?”
“One more question and there’ll be no canaries at all,” said Nurse.
However, the sun shone so brightly, and the prospect of a visit
to Hammersmith Broadway on a Saturday afternoon appealed so
strongly to Nurse that she put on her bonnet and trotted off
with Michael up Carlington Road, and stopped a red omnibus, and
fussed her way into it, and held the tickets in her mouth while
she put away her purse, and told Michael not to fidget with his
legs and not to look round behind him at what was passing on
that side of the road, until at last they arrived. The
canary-shop was found, and two canaries and a bird-cage were
bought, together with packets of seed and a bird’s bath and a
pennyworth of groundsel and plantains. Nurse told Michael to
wait in the shop while the birds were being prepared for
travelling, and while she herself went to the chemist to buy a
remedy for the neuralgia which she prophesied was imminent.
Michael talked to the canary-man and asked a lot of questions
which the canary-man seemed very glad to answer; and finally
Nurse, looking much better, came back from the chemist with a
large bottle wrapped up in a newspaper. In the omnibus, going
home, Michael never took his eyes from the cage, anxious to see
how the birds bore the jolting. Sometimes they said ‘sweet,’
and then Michael would say ‘sweet,’ and a pleasant old lady
opposite would say ‘sweet,’ and soon all the people inside the
omnibus
were saying ‘sweet,’ except Nurse, who was chewing her veil
and making the most extraordinary faces.
It was very exciting to stand on tiptoe in the kitchen while Mrs. Frith
cut the string and displayed the canaries in all the splendour of their
cage.
“Beautiful things,” said Mrs. Frith. “I’m that fond of birds.”
“Don’t they hop!” said Annie. “Not a bit frightened they don’t seem, do
they?”
“What are their names?” Mrs. Frith enquired.
Michael thought for a long time.
“What _are_ their names, Mrs. Frith?” he asked at last.
“That’s your business,” said Cook.
“Why is it?” Michael wanted to know.
“Because they’re your birds, stupid.”
“One’s Stella’s.”
“Well, Stella isn’t old enough to choose for herself. Come along, what
are you going to call them?”
“You call them,” said Michael persuasively.
“Well, if they was mine I should call them——” Cook paused.
“What would you?” said Michael, more persuasively than ever.
“I’m blessed if I know. There, Annie, what does anyone call a canary?”
“Don’t ask me, I’m sure. No,” simpered Annie.
“I shouldn’t call them nothing, I shouldn’t,” Mrs. Frith finally
decided. “It isn’t like dogs.”
“What’s the matter?” said Nurse, bustling into the kitchen. “Has one
got out? Has one got out?”
“I was telling Master Michael here,” said Cook, “as how I shouldn’t
call neither of them nothing. Not if I was he.”
“Call what? Call what?” Nurse asked quickly.
“His new dicky-birds.”
“Must have names. Yes. Yes. Must have names. Dick and Tom. Dick and
Tom.”
“But one’s a girl,” Michael objected.
“Can’t be changed now. Must be Dick and Tom,” Nurse settled, blowing
rapidly as usual.
The decision worried Michael considerably, but as they both turned out
to be hens and laid twenty-three eggs between them next spring, it
ceased to bother him any more.
The Miss Marrows’ School and Kindergarten, kept by Miss Marrow and Miss
Caroline Marrow assisted by Miss Hewitt and Miss Hunt, struck Michael
as a very solemn establishment indeed. Although its outward appearance
was merely that of an ordinary house somewhat larger than others on
account of its situation at the corner of Fairfax Terrace, it contained
inside a variety of scholastic furniture that was bound to impress the
novice.
At twenty minutes past nine on the first day of the autumn term, Nurse
and Michael stood before a brass plate inscribed
The Misses Marrow
School and Kindergarten
while a bell still jangled with the news of their arrival. They
were immediately shown into a very small and very stuffy room
on the right of the front door—a gloomy little room, because
blinds of coloured beads shut out the unscholastic world. This
room was uncomfortably crowded with little girls taking off
goloshes and unlacing long brown boots, with little boys
squabbling over their indoor shoes, with little girls chatting
and giggling and pushing and bumping,
with little boys shouting and quarrelling and kicking and
pulling. A huddled and heated knot of nurses and nursemaids
tried to help their charges, while every minute more little
boys and more little girls and more bigger girls pushed their
way in and made the confusion worse. In the middle of the
uproar Miss Marrow herself entered and the noise was instantly
lulled.
“The new boys will wait in here and the new girls will
_quietly_ follow Helen Hungerford down the passage to Miss
Caroline’s room. Nurses need not wait any longer.”
Then a bell vibrated shrilly. There was a general scamper as the nurses
and the nursemaids and the old boys and the old girls hurried from the
room, leaving Michael and two other boys, both about two years older
than himself, to survey each other with suspicion. The other boys
finding Michael beneath the dignity of their notice spoke to each
other, or rather the larger of the two, a long-bodied boy with a big
head and vacant mouth, said to the other, a fidgety boy with a pink
face, a frog-like smile and very tight knickerbockers:
“I say, what’s your name?”
The pink-faced boy gulped “Edward Ernest Arnott.”
“What is it then?” asked the long-bodied boy.
“Arnott is my surname. Edward and Ernest,” he gulped again, “are my
Christian names.”
“Mine’s Vernon Brown. I say, what’s your father?”
“A solicitor,” said Edward. “What’s yours?”
“A cricket—I mean a critic,” said Vernon.
“What’s that?”
This seemed to upset the long-bodied boy, who replied:
“Coo! Don’t you know what a cricket is? I mean critic. You must be a
kid.”
Michael thought this was the most extraordinary conversation he
had ever heard. Not even Mrs. Frith and Annie could be so
incomprehensible.
“I don’t believe you know yourself,” said the pink-faced boy, deepening
to crimson.
“Don’t I? I bet I do.”
“I bet you don’t.”
“I know better than you anyway.”
“So do I than you.”
Michael would have found a conversation between two fox-terriers more
intelligible. It ended abruptly, however, with the entrance of Miss
Marrow, who waved them all to follow her to the severity of her own
room. Edward Arnott and Vernon Brown were despatched upstairs to take
their places in the class above the Kindergarten for which Michael was
destined and whither he followed Miss Marrow, wondering at the size and
ugliness of her. Miss Marrow’s base was a black bell, on which was set
a black cushion, above which was Miss Marrow’s round beetroot-coloured
face. Miss Caroline was like a green curtain through the folds of which
seemed to have burst a red face like her sister’s but thinner. Miss
Caroline was pleasanter than Miss Marrow and never shouted, perhaps
because she was never without a cold in the head.
Michael was handed over to the care of Miss Hewitt, the
Kindergarten mistress, who was very kind and very jolly.
Michael enjoyed the Kindergarten. There he learned to write
pothooks and hangers and very soon to write proper letters. He
learned to sew alternate red and blue lines of wool upon a
piece of cardboard. He learned to weave bookmarkers with
shining slips of chocolate and yellow paper, and to pleat
chequered mats of the same material: these, when term was over,
appeared at the prize-giving, beautifully enhanced with paper
frills cut by the clever Miss Hewitt. He learned to paint texts
and to keep his pencil-box tidy and to play the treble of a
very unmelodious duet with Miss Hunt, in whose bony fingers his
own fingers would from time to time get entangled. He tried
the treble without the bass accompaniment at home on Stella,
but she cried and seemed as Annie, who was in charge, said ‘to
regular shudder.’ Altogether Kindergarten was a pleasure to
Michael, and he found the days went by more quickly, though
still far too slowly.
About a week before Christmas his mother came back, and Michael was
happy. All the rooms that were only used when she was at home changed
from bare beeswaxed deserts to places of perfect comfort, so rosy were
the lamp-shades, so sweet was the smell of flowers and so soft and
lovely were his mother’s scattered belongings. Christmas Day brought
presents—a box of stone bricks, a rocking-horse, a doll’s house for
Stella, boxes of soldiers, a wooden battleship, and books—Hans Andersen
and Grimm and the Old French Fairy-tales. As for the stockings that
year, it was amazing how much managed to get into one stocking and how
deliciously heavy it felt, as it was unhooked from the end of the cot
and plumped down upon the bed in the gaslight of Christmas morning.
There was only one sadness that hung over the festivities—the thought
that his mother would be going away in two days. Boxing Day arrived and
there were ominous open trunks and the scattered contents of drawers.
To-morrow she was going. It was dreadful to think of. Michael was
allowed the bitter joy of helping his mother to pack, and as he stood
seriously holding various articles preparatory to their entombment, he
talked of the summer and heard promises that mother would spend a long
long time with Michael.
“Mother,” he said suddenly, “what is my father?”
“What makes you ask that?”
“The boys at Miss Marrow’s all ask me that. Have I got a father? Must
boys have fathers? Oh, mother, do tell me,” pleaded Michael.
Mrs. Fane seemed worried by this question.
“Your father was a gentleman,” she said at last.
“What is a gentleman?”
“A good man, always thoughtful and considerate to others.”
“Was that man in the photograph my father?”
“What photograph?” Mrs. Fane parried.
“By your bed at the seaside?”
“I don’t remember,” she said, “Anyway, your father’s dead.”
“Is he? Poor man!” said sympathetic Michael.
“And now run to Nanny and ask her if she remembers where mother put her
large muff.”
“Nanny,” said Michael, when he had received Nurse’s information, “why
did my father die?”
“Die? Die? What questions. Tut-tut! Whatever next?” And Nurse blew very
violently to show how deeply she disapproved of Michael’s
inquisitiveness.
That evening, just when Michael was going to bed, there came a knock at
the door, and a tall fair man was shown into the drawing-room.
“How d’ye do, Mrs. Fane? I’ve come to ask you if you’ll go to the
theatre to-night. Saxby is coming on later.”
“Oh, thank you very much, Mr. Prescott, but I really think I must stay
in. You see,” she said smilingly, “it’s Michael’s last night of me for
a long time.”
Michael stood gazing at Mr. Prescott, hating him with all his might and
sighing relief at his mother’s refusal to go out.
“Oh, Michael won’t mind; will you, Michael?”
Nurse came in saying ‘Bed-time! Tut-tut-tut! Bed-time!’ and Michael’s
heart sank.
“There you are,” said Mr. Prescott. “Here’s Nurse to say it’s bed-time.
Now do come, Mrs. Fane.”
“Oh, I really think I ought to stay.”
“Now what nonsense. Saxby will be furiously disappointed.
You must. Come along, Michael, be a brave chap and tell your
mother she’s got to go out; and here’s something to square our
account.”
He pressed a little gold coin into Michael’s unwilling hand.
“Would you mind very much, if I went?” his mother asked.
“No,” said Michael tonelessly. The room was swimming round him in
sickening waves of disappointment.
“Of course he won’t,” decided Mr. Prescott boisterously.
While he was being undressed, Nurse asked what he was holding. Michael
showed the half-sovereign.
“Spoiling children,” muttered Nanny. “That’s for your money-box.”
Michael did not care what it was for. He was listening for his mother’s
step. She came in, while he lay round-eyed in his cot, and leaned over
to kiss him. He held her to him passionately; then he buried his face
in the bedclothes and, while she rustled away from him, sobbed
soundlessly for a long while.
In the morning he watched her go away until the warm
summer-time and felt abandoned as he walked through the wintry
rooms, where lately he and his mother had sat by the fire. As
for the ten-shilling piece, he thought no more about it. Soon
afterwards he fell ill with whooping-cough, he and Stella
together, and the days dragged unendurably in the stuffy
nursery away from school.
Chapter III: _Fears and Fantasies_
D URING whooping-cough Michael was sometimes allowed to sit in
a room called the library, which was next to his mother’s
bedroom on the first floor and was therefore a dearly loved
resort. Here he discovered the large volume of Don Quixote
illustrated by Doré that influenced his whole life. He would
pore over this work for hours, forgetting everything under a
spell of chivalry. He read the tale seriously and thought it
the saddest tale ever known. He wept over the knight’s
adventures, and big teardrops would spatter the page. He had
not yet encountered much more than mild teazing at the
Kindergarten, that with the unreasonableness of Nurse and his
mother’s absence made up the sum of the incomprehensible
crosses which he had to bear. But even these were enough to
make him sympathize with Don Quixote. He perceived that here
was a man intent upon something—he could not understand exactly
what—thwarted always by other people, thwarted and jeered at
and even physically maltreated. Yet he was a man whose room was
full of dragons and fairies, whose counterpane was the
adventurous field of little knights-at-arms, whose curtains
were ruffled by dwarfs, whose cupboards held enchanters.
Michael loved the tall thin knight and envied Sancho Panza.
When whooping-cough was over, and Michael went back to
Kindergarten, Nurse decided that he should sleep by himself in
the room next to the night-nursery. She never explained to
Michael her reasons for this step, and he supposed
it to be because lately he had always woken up when she came
to bed. This was not his fault, because Nurse always bumped
into his cot as she came, into the room, shaking it so
violently that no one could have stayed asleep. She used to
look at him in a funny way with angry staring eyes, and when
he sometimes spoke she would blow cheese-scented breath at him
and turn away and bump into the washstand.
Everything in this new room was by Michael anticipated with dread. He
would go to bed at half-past six: he would settle down in the wide
white bed that stretched a long way on either side of him: the gas
would be turned down: the door would be left ajar: Nurse’s footsteps
would gradually die away and he would be left alone.
The night was divided into two portions of equal horror. First
of all he had to concentrate on closing his mouth when asleep,
because Annie had told him a tale about a woman who slept with
her mouth open, the result of which bad habit was that one
night a mouse ran down it and choked her. Then he had to
explore cautiously with his feet the ice-cold end of the bed,
in case he should touch a nest of mice—another likely
occurrence vouched for by Annie. Then outside, various sounds
would frighten him. A dog would howl in the distance: cats
would spit and wail, making Michael wonder whether they were
coming through his window to claw his face. Presently, far up
the street, newsboys would cry hoarsely the details of a murder
or suicide. As they passed beneath his bedroom window their
voices would swell to a paralyzing roar, and as the voices died
away round the corner, Michael would be left shaking with fear.
Once he was so frightened by a succession of these
murder-shouts that he got out of bed and crept forth on to the
landing, whence he peered down between the banisters into the
quiet red light burning in the hall far below. While he was
leaning over, a door banged suddenly
on the top floor, and Michael fled barefooted down the stairs,
until he reached the cold tiles of the front hall. Should he
dare to descend still lower and disturb Nurse at her supper in
the kitchen? Or were they all lying there, Cook and Annie and
Nurse, with their throats cut? The door leading to the basement
stairs was open, and he stole down over the oilcloth, past the
yawning cellar, past the laundry-basket in the passage, past
the cupboard under the stairs, to listen by the kitchen door.
There was a murmur of voices, familiar yet unfamiliar: the
kitchen door was ajar and he peered round stealthily. There was
Nurse with a very red face in a heap on a chair, shaking her
forefinger at Mrs. Frith, who with an equally red face was
talking very indistinctly to Nurse; while between them, bolt
upright and very pale, sat Annie nervously shaving from the
cheese very thin segments which she ate from the knife’s edge.
They seemed to Michael, as he watched them, like people in a
nightmare, so unreal and horrible were they: they frightened
him more than ever, sitting there nodding at each other in the
kitchen where the blackbeetles ran slyly in and out beneath the
fender. Suddenly Annie saw Michael and waved him back; he
turned at her gesture and withdrew from sight. While he stood
shivering in the dark passage, Annie came out and, picking him
up, carried him out of hearing.
“Whatever made you come downstairs?” she panted on the first-floor
landing.
“I was frightened.”
“You frightened _me_ .”
“Who are they murdering?”
“You’ve been having a bad dream,” said Annie.
She led him upstairs again to his room and tucked him up, and at his
earnest request turned the gas a trifle higher.
“Why did Nanny and Mrs. Frith look like that?” he asked.
“They’re tired,” said Annie.
“Why?”
“They have to work so hard to look after you.”
Then she left him alone, and he fell asleep before they all came up to
bed.
Generally speaking, the first part of the night, however bad
the outside noises, was not so fearful as the second part.
Mostly the second portion of the night was preceded by a bad
dream in which Michael’s nerves were so much shaken that he had
no courage or common-sense left to grapple with the long hours
in the ghastly stillness of his room. There was one dream in
particular which he dreaded, and indeed it was the only one
that repeated itself at regular intervals without any essential
change. He would find himself alone in a long street in the
middle of the night. Usually it would be shining with wet, but
sometimes it would be dry and airless. This street stretched as
far as one could see. It had on either side lamp-posts which
burned with a steady staring illumination, long rows of
lamp-posts that converged in the farthest distance. The houses
all seemed empty, yet everyone was in some way a malignant
personality. Down this street Michael would have to walk on and
on. He would meet nobody, and the only living thing was a bony
hound that pattered behind him at whatever pace he went,
whether he ran or whether he loitered. He would in his dream be
filled with a desire to enter one of these houses, and often he
would mount the steps and knock a summons on the door—a knock
that echoed all over the gloom within. While he knocked, the
bony hound would howl in the shadows of the basement. Every
house at which he knocked Michael would be more and more
anxious to pass, more and more fearful to disturb. Yet however
much he struggled against it, he would ultimately be compelled
to knock his loud challenge. The street would now stretch for
miles of lighted lamps before
and behind him, and the knowledge would gradually be borne in
upon Michael that sooner or later in one of these grey houses
the door would open. He would hurry along, but however fast he
travelled some house would draw him inexorably to its
threshold, and he would wait in agony lest slowly the great
door should swing back to a dim hall. The climax of the dream
would now be reached. One house would simultaneously repel and
draw him more than any of those left behind. He would struggle
to go by, but he would find himself on the steps with legs
that refused to carry him away. He would knock: very slowly
the door would swing back and, convulsed and choking and
warding off horror, Michael would wake in a frenzy of fear to
his own real house of ghastly stillness, where no longer did
even a belated luggage-train or jingling hansom assure him of
life’s continuity.
He did not always wake up suddenly: sometimes he would be aware
that he was slowly waking and would struggle to keep asleep,
lying for a long time without moving a muscle, in order to
cheat himself into the belief that he was not awake. But
gradually the strain would be too much and he would have to
become conscious of the room. First of all he would turn on to
his left side and view apprehensively the door ajar. This would
seem to tremble, as he looked, to some invisible hand trying
it. Then along the wall the wardrobe would creak, and every
knot of its varnished surface would take on a fantastic
countenance. He would wonder what was inside, and try to gain
comfort and the sense of commonplace daytime existence by
counting the cats swinging on a roundabout in one of Louis
Wain’s Christmas pictures. In the corner beyond the wardrobe
was a large clothes-basket that crackled and snapped and must
surely hold somebody inside, hidden as the Forty Thieves were
hidden in the oil-jars. The fire-place, opposite the foot of
the bed, seemed a centre for the noise of mice.
How he hoped they would be content to play upon the hearth and
not venture to leap over the fender and scuttle about the
room. Then the door would begin to frighten him again, and
Michael would turn very quietly on to his back, staring at the
luminous ceiling where the gas-jet made a huge moon whose
edges wavered perpetually. But the gas-jet itself became
terrifying, when looked at too long, with its queer blue base
and slim solemn shape, so melancholy, so desolate, so
changeless. The ceiling would very soon become unendurable
because various black marks would seem with intensest
contemplation more and more like spiders and beetles. Michael
would have to give up lying on his back and turn upon his
right side. He would count each slat of the Venetian blinds
and long passionately and sadly for the grey streaks to appear
at the sides in proclamation of the approach of day. Without
these grey streaks the windows were unbearable, so menacing
were they with the unknown infinite night behind them. The
curtains, too, would quiver, and even Michael’s clothes,
heaped upon a chair, would assume a worm-like vitality. The
washstand made him feel oppressed, so silent and white were
the jug and basin and soap-dish, so cold and chill were they.
There was nothing to be done but to bury his head beneath the
clothes and, trembling, try to believe in the reality of
guardian angels. He would shut his eyes very tightly until the
wheels of coloured lights thus evoked would circle and
revolve, changing their colours in some mysterious way. These
dissolving spots were a great consolation and passed the time
for a little while, until the dread of fire began to come. He
would fling back the clothes in a paroxysm and, heedless of
any other danger, sit up with staring eyes and listening ears
and keen nostrils, dreading and imagining and doubting. Surely
he could hear a crackle; he could smell smoke. The house was
on fire; yet not for anything could he have got out of bed to
reassure himself.
What might not be underneath, a burglar, a dead body, a
murderer, a skeleton, a mad dog?
Underneath the clothes he would plunge, and then he would be sure that
someone was coming into the room to smother him. He held his breath,
waiting; with an effort he flung back the clothes again. There was
nothing but the ghastly stillness and the solemn gaslight and the
viewless blinds and the expectant door ajar. The bedposts would now
take on a sort of humanity. They would look at him and wink and shiver.
The wall-paper, normally a pattern of rosebuds and roses, began to
move, to swim with unnatural life. The cistern upstairs began to clank;
the bath began to drip. It must be blood—Nanny had been murdered. The
blood was dripping slowly. Michael choked with horror. Somebody was
tapping at the window-pane, yes, somebody was tapping. It was horrible
this endless tapping. Cats must be coming in. The wardrobe creaked and
rapped and groaned. Some of his clothes slid off the chair on to the
floor with a soft plump; Michael tried to shriek his dismay; but his
tongue was dry. Underneath him a knife was being pushed through the
bed. A death-watch was ticking in the fastness of the wall at his head.
A rat was gnawing his way into the room. Black-beetles were coming up
the stairs.
Then along the edge of the Venetian blinds appeared a blue
streak. It widened. It became more luminous. It turned from
blue to grey. It turned from grey to dimmest silver. Hark!
‘Cheep, cheep, cheep, cheep!’ The sparrows were beginning.
Their chorus rose. Their noise was cool as water to Michael’s
fever. An early cart rattled cheerfully down the road. It was
morning.
Chapter IV: _Unending Childhood_
A FTER whooping-cough came chicken-pox, and it was settled that
Michael should leave the Kindergarten where these illnesses
were caught. A French governess was to teach him every morning
and to walk with him every afternoon. Mrs. Fane wrote to Nurse
to tell her of this decision and to announce that a Madame
Flauve would on Monday next arrive at 64 Carlington Road to
superintend the education of Michael. This news reached Nurse
on the preceding Friday and threw her into an agitation. The
whole house was turned upside down: curtains were changed;
floors were beeswaxed; furniture was polished; pictures were
dusted. All Saturday and Friday a great cleaning took place,
and on Sunday every cushion was smoothed and patted; chairs
were adjusted; mats were shaken; flowers were distributed,
until in the evening Nurse and Cook and Annie, followed by
Michael, marched over the house and examined their handiwork.
“Well, I hope we shall see something worth looking at,” said Mrs.
Frith. “I never worked so hard in all my natural.”
“Oh, yes. Must get the place nice. Not going to have strange people
come here and grumble,” said Nurse.
“What is this Madame Flauve? Is she a lady?” Cook asked.
“Oh, yes. Yes. A lady. French. Very particular,” Nurse replied.
Michael wondered what his governess would be like. He never remembered
to have seen Nanny so reverently excited before.
“I’ve heard a lot about these French women,” said Mrs. Frith. “A lot
about them, I have. They live very gay, don’t they?”
“Doesn’t matter how they live. No. No. Must have everything at its
best,” Nurse insisted.
By the time the scouring of the house was done, Michael was prepared
for the advent of a creature so lovely that he made up his mind the
mere sight of her would fill him with joy. He had not settled exactly
which princess she would most nearly resemble. As he turned over the
pages of his fairy-books, he would fancy with every illustration that
here was to be seen the image of his beautiful French governess. As he
lay awake in his bed on a quiet Sunday evening, so pleasant was the
imagination of her radiancy that fears and horrors were driven away by
the power of her beauty’s spell. The night acquired something of the
peace and sanctity of Christmas Eve, when the air was hallowed by Santa
Claus on his jovial pilgrimage. He had never felt so little oppressed
by the night, so confident in the might of good.
On Monday morning Michael jigged through his dressing, jigged
downstairs to breakfast, jigged through the meal itself and jigged
upstairs to the dining-room to watch for the splendid arrival. He
tambourinated upon the window-pane a gay little tune, jigging the while
from foot to foot in an ecstasy of anticipation.
Nurse had decided that the morning-room was not a fit place for
such a paragon to perform her duties. Nor did she feel that the
day-nursery was worthy of her. So, even while Michael jigged at
his vigil, Nurse was arming the dining-room table for an
encounter with greatness. Inkpots were dusted and displayed;
blotting-pads, including
one poker-worked with a view of Antwerp Cathedral, were
unfolded. Pens and pencils and pieces of india-rubber and
pen-wipers and boxes of nibs and drawing-pins were lavishly
scattered about the green tablecloth. Various blue
exercise-books gleamed in the April sunlight and, to set the
seal upon the whole business, a calendar of Great Thoughts was
roughly divested of ninety-eight great thoughts at once, in
order that for this rare female a correct announcement should
celebrate the ninth of April, her famous date. At five minutes
to ten Nurse and Michael were both in a state of excitement;
Cook was saying that she had never regretted the inadequacy of
the kitchen arrangements of Sixty-four until this moment; and
Annie was bracing herself for the real effort, the opening of
the door to Madame Flauve. The only calm person was Stella
who, clasping a rubber doll with tight curly rubber hair and a
stomachic squeak, chanted to herself the saga of Madame
Flauve’s arrival.
At two minutes past ten Michael said somebody was coming up the
steps, and a ring confirmed his assertion. The door was opened.
Madame Flauve was heard rubbing her boots on the SALVE of the
mat, was heard putting away her umbrella in the peacock-blue
china umbrella-stand, was heard enquiring for Mrs. Fane and was
announced inaudibly by Annie.
Michael’s heart sank when he beheld a fat young French-woman
with a bilious complexion and little pig’s eyes and a dowdy
black mantle and a common black hat. As for Nurse, she sniffed
quite audibly and muttered an insincere hope that Madame Flauve
would find everything to her liking. The governess answered in
the thick voice of one who is always swallowing jujubes that
without a doubt she would find everything, and presently Nurse
left the room with many a backward glance of contempt towards
Madame Flauve.
When the lessons began (or rather before they began) a time-table was
drawn up by Madame Flauve:
Monday 10—11
11—12
12—1
French
Geography
History 2.30—4Walk Tuesday 10—11
11—12
12—1
Geography
History
French 2.30—4Walk Wednesday 10—11
11—12
12—1
History
Geography
French 2.30—4Walk Thursday 10—11
11—12
12—1
French
History
Geography 2.30—4Walk Friday 10—11
11—12
12—1
Geography
French
History 2.30—4Walk
Michael, when he saw the programme of his work, felt much depressed. It
seemed to lack variety and he was not very much cheered up to hear that
at meals only French would be spoken. Those meals were dreadful. At
first Nurse and Stella were present, but when Nanny found that Madame
wanted to teach Stella the French for knife and fork, she declined to
have dinner downstairs any longer, and Michael and Madame Flauve were
left to dine tête-à-tête on dull food and a languishing conversation.
“Madam indeed,” Nurse would sniff, when the governess had left after
tea, “I never heard of such a thing in all my life. Madam! A fine
Madam!”
“What an imperence,” agreed Mrs. Frith. “Fancy, a ordinary volgar thing
like that to go calling herself Madam, whatever shall we come to?”
“It does seem a cheek, don’t it?” said Annie.
“I never!” Cook gasped. “I never! Madam! Well, I could almost laugh at
the sauce of it. And all that cleaning as you might say for a person as
isn’t a scrap better than you and me.”
“Oh, I’ve written to Mrs. Fane,” said Nurse. “I said there must be some
mistake been made. Oh, yes, a mistake—must be a mistake.”
Michael did not much enjoy the walks with his governess. He was
always taken to a second-hand furniture-shop in the Hammersmith
Road, not a pleasant old furniture-shop with Toby mugs and
stuffed birds and coins; but a barrack full of red
washing-stands and white-handled chests of drawers. Madame
Flauve informed him that she was engaged in furnishing at that
moment, and would immediately show him a locket with the
portrait of her husband inset. Michael could not gain any clear
idea of what M. Flauve was like, since all that remained was a
nebulous profile smothered by a very black moustache. Madame
Flauve told him that M. Flauve was ‘tout-à-fait charmant, mais
charmant, mon petit. Il était si aimable, si gentil et d’un
cœur très très bon.’ Michael grew very tired of being jostled
outside the furniture-shop every afternoon, while his governess
grubbed around the ugly furniture and argued with the man about
the prices. The only article she ever bought was a commode,
which so violently embarrassed Michael that he blushed the
whole way home. But Madame Flauve often made him blush and
would comment upon subjects not generally mentioned except by
Mrs. Frith, and even by her only in a spirit of hearty
coarseness that did not make Michael feel ashamed like this
Frenchwoman’s suggestion of the nasty. He was on one occasion
very much disgusted by her remarks on the inside of an egg that
was slightly set. Yet while he was disgusted, his curiosity was
stimulated by the information imparted, and he made further
enquiries from Nurse that evening. Nanny was
horrified, and said plainly that she considered this governess
no better than a low beast and that she should write
accordingly to Mrs. Fane.
After a month or two Michael was sent back to school in the morning,
though the afternoon walks still continued for a time. When Michael
returned to the Misses Marrow, he was promoted to the class above the
Kindergarten and was set to learn the elements of Latin in a desultory
and unpractical way, that is to say he was made to learn—
Nominative,mensa,a table Vocative,mensa,O table Accusative,mensam,a
table
and the rest of the unintelligible rigmarole. He had no clear
notion what Latin was, and so far as he could make out nobody
else at the Miss Marrows’ school had any clearer notion.
Indeed, the only distinct addition to his knowledge of life was
gained from Vernon Brown who with great ingenuity had hollowed
out a cork and by the insertion of several pins in the front
had made of it a miniature cage in which he kept a fly. All the
other boys were much impressed by Vernon Brown’s achievement,
and very soon they all came to school with flies captive in
excavated corks. Michael longed to be like these bigger boys
and pined for a cage. One day Edward Arnott gave him one, and
all the rest of that day Michael watched the fly trying to
escape. When he showed it to Madame Flauve, she professed
herself shocked by the cruelty of it and begged him to release
the fly, asserting that she would find him a substitute which
would deceive all the other boys. Michael agreed to release his
captive and the long-imprisoned fly walked painfully out of his
cell. Then Madame Flauve chipped off a little piece of coal and
tied it round with one of her own hairs and showed Michael how
by cunningly twisting this hair, the coal would gain the
appearance of mobility.
Michael was doubtful at first, but Madame’s exaggerated
encouragement led him to suppose that it was safe to practise
the deception on his companions. So on the next day he
proceeded to exhibit his ‘fly.’ But everybody knew it was coal
and jeered at Michael and made him very unhappy and anxious
never again to attempt to differentiate himself or his actions
from the rest of mankind.
Michael’s mother came home towards the end of July, and Madame
Flauve vanished to her husband and house and furniture. Michael
did not regret her. Mrs. Fane asked him many questions and
particularly she wanted to know if he was perfectly happy.
Michael said ‘yes,’ and his mother seemed satisfied. She was
now very much taken up with Stella, who was a lovely little
girl with grey eyes and light brown glinting hair. Michael did
not exactly feel jealous of his sister, but he had an emotion
of disappointment that no longer could he be alone with his
mother in a fragrant intimacy from which the perpetually
sleeping Stella was excluded. Now Stella no longer slept all
the time, but, on the contrary, was very much awake and very
eager to be entertained. Michael also felt a twinge of regret
that Stella should be able out of her own self to entertain
grown-up people. He wished that he could compose these
wonderful, endless songs of hers. He could not but admit that
they were wonderful, and exactly like real poetry. To be sure
their subjects were ordinary enough. There was no magic in
them. Stella would simply sing of getting up in the morning and
of the morning bath and the towel and the bread and milk for
breakfast. She would sing, too, of the ride in the perambulator
and of the ladies who paid her compliments as she passed. It
was a little galling to Michael that he, so long his mother’s
only companion, should have to share her love with such an
insidious rival. Curious men with long hair came to the house,
apparently just to see Stella; for they took no notice
at all of Michael. These long-haired visitors would sit round
in the drawing-room, while Stella played at the piano pieces
that were not half so hummable as those which Michael had
already learned to play in violent allegretto. Stella would
sit upright in her starchiest frock and widest sash and play
without any music a long and boring noise that made Michael
feel very fidgety. He would endure it for a while and then he
would have to go out of the room. The first time he had done
this he had expected somehow that people would run after him
to bring him back. But nobody moved. Everyone was intent upon
Stella and her noise. They were all grunting and clearing
their throats and making unintelligible exclamations. Michael
was glad that they had begun to build houses in the waste
ground opposite. It was better to watch men climbing up
ladders and walking over planks and messing with lumps of
mortar than to sit there among those guttural men in an
atmosphere of Stella worship. He felt sometimes that he would
like to pinch Stella’s legs—they looked so sleek and
well-behaved, as she sat there playing the piano. Michael was
never invited to play on the drawing-room piano. He was only
allowed to play up in the day-nursery, with merely the
ambition of one day being able to reach the pedals to stir him
on.
“Ach, Mrs. Vane,” he heard these long-haired men declare. “Your
daughter is wonderful. Ach! Ach! Ach! She is a genius. She will be the
great bianist of the new generation. Ach! Ach! Ach!”
Michael began to feel that his love for his mother or her love
for him did not matter. He began to feel that only what he
himself thought and wanted did matter; and when she went away
again he was sorry, but not so sorry as he used to be. One of
these long-haired men now began to come every day to give
Stella lessons on the drawing-room piano. He would give a very
loud knock and hang up a
wide-brimmed black hat in the hall and clear his throat and
button up his coat very tightly and march into the
drawing-room to wait for Stella to be brought down. Stella
would come down the stairs with her grey eyes shining and her
hair all fuzzy and her hands smelling of pink soap, while
Nurse would blow very importantly and tell Michael not to peep
round corners. Stella’s music lessons were much grander than
Michael’s in the stuffy back-room of Miss Marrow’s. Besides,
Michael’s music lessons were now particularly unpleasant,
because Miss Hunt, his mistress, had grown two warts on her
first finger during the summer holidays, which made him feel
sick during their eternal duets.
The withdrawal of Madame Flauve from the superintendence of
Michael’s afternoon walks was apparently a great blow to Nurse.
She had acquired a habit either of retiring to the
night-nursery or of popping out of the back-door on secret
errands. Stella in the charge of Annie was perfectly happy
upstairs, and Nurse resented very strongly Michael’s enquiries
as to where she was going. Michael had no ulterior reasons for
his questions. He was sincerely interested by these afternoon
walks of Nurse, and speculated often upon her destination. She
would always return very cheerful and would often bring him
home small presents—a dark blue bird on a pin at boat-race time
(for Nurse was staunchly Oxford), a penny packet of stamps most
of which were duplicates inside, penny illustrated books of
Cock Robin or Tom Thumb; and once she brought him home a Night
Companion. This Night Companion was a club-headed stick, very
powerful and warranted to secure the owner from a murderous
attack. It was one of a row in the window of a neighbouring
umbrella-shop, a long row of Night Companions that cost one
shilling each. Michael liked his stick and took it to bed with
him and was comforted, when he woke up, by the sight of its
knotted head upon the bolster. He grew very intimate with the
stick and endowed
it with character and temperament and humanity. He would often
stare at the still unpurchased Night Companions in the shop,
trying to discover if any other of them were so beneficent and
so pleasant a companion as his own. In time he took a fancy to
another, and begged Nurse to be allowed to buy this for
Stella. Nurse was gratified by his appreciation of her present
and gave him leave to break into the ten-shilling piece to
endow Stella with a Companion. Michael himself carried it
home, wrapped in a flimsy brown paper and tied up as he
thought unnecessarily with a flimsy string. Stella was told to
take it to bed with her and did so, but by some accident
grazed her forehead on the Night Companion’s knotty head and
cried so much that it was taken away from her. This was all
the better for Michael who thenceforth had two Night
Companions—one on either side of him to guard him from the
door and the window.
Still, notwithstanding these presents, Nurse grew more and more
irritable to find Michael watching her exits from and entrances into 64
Carlington Road. Once, she was so much annoyed to see Michael’s face
pressed against the pane of the morning-room window that she slid all
the way down the area-steps and sent Michael to bed as a punishment for
peeping. At last she decided that Michael must go for walks by himself
and lest he should be lost or get into mischief, every walk must be in
the same direction, along the same road to the same place and back. He
was to walk up Carlington Road into the Hammersmith Road and along the
Kensington Road as far as the Earl’s Court Road. Here he was to stop
and turn round and walk back to Carlington Road on his traces.
Michael detested this walk. He would stump up the area-steps,
watched by Nurse, and he would walk steadily, looking neither
to the right nor to the left according to orders, as far as 44
Carlington Road. Here in the morning-room window was a small
aquarium, sadly mobile with half a
dozen pale goldfish, that Michael would be compelled to watch
for a few seconds before he turned round and acknowledged the
fact that Nurse was flicking him on with her hand. Michael
would proceed past the other houses until he came to 22
Carlington Road, where a break occurred, caused by a house
entirely different from any of the others, at the side of which
was a huge double door. This was sometimes open, and inside
could be seen men hammering with chisels at enormous statues
including representations of Queen Victoria and of a benignant
lion. Next to this house was a post office, not an ordinary
post office where stamps could be bought, but a harum-scarum
place, full of postmen running up and down and emptying bags
and hammering on letters and talking very loudly and very
quickly. By this office Carlington Road made an abrupt
rectangular turn past a tumble-down tarred fence, through whose
interstices could be seen a shadowy garden full of very long
pale grass and of trees with jet-black trunks. Beyond the trees
was a tumble-down house with big bare windows glinting amongst
the ivy. After this Carlington Road went on again with smaller
houses of a deeper red brick than those in the part where
Michael lived. They had no basements, and one could see into
their dining-rooms, so close were they to the road. When 2
Carlington Road was reached a tall advertisement hoarding
began, and for a hundred yards the walk became absolutely
interesting. Then Carlington Mansions rose majestic, and
Michael, who had been told that they were flats and had heard
people wondering at this strange new method of existence,
loitered for a moment in order to watch a man in a uniform,
sitting on a wooden chair and reading a pink newspaper. He also
read the names of people who were either out or in, and
settled, when he was older, to live in a flat in the security
of many other families and a man in a green uniform. The roar
of the Hammersmith Road burst upon him, and dreams were over
for a while, as he hurried along past eight shops, at none of
which he would dare to look since he read in a book of a boy
who had been taken off to the police station on a charge of
theft, though he was actually as innocent as Michael himself
and was merely interested by the contents of a shop window.
The next turning to Carlington Road was a queer terrace, very
quiet except that it overlooked the railway, very quiet and
melancholy and somehow wicked. Nothing ever turned down here
except an occasional dog or cat; no servants stood gossiping
by area-gates, and at the end of it loomed the tumble-down
house whose garden Michael had already seen near the post
office. He used to think as he left Padua Terrace behind him
that one day for a great adventure he would like to walk along
under its elm-trees to discover if anyone did live in those
dark houses; but he never managed to be brave enough to do so.
Michael now crossed the railway bridge and looked at the
advertisements: then followed a dull line of iron railings
with rusty pineapples on top of each of them. These were
bounded at each end by gates that were marked ‘Private. No
Thoroughfare,’ and after the second gate came the first
crossing. Michael had been told to be very careful of
crossings, and he used to poise himself on the kerb for a
moment to see if any carts were near. If none were even in
sight, he used to run across as quickly as he could. There
were three other crossings before Earl’s Court Road was
reached, and one of them was so wide that he was very glad
indeed when it was put behind him. All the way, terrace after
terrace of grim houses, set back from the high road behind
shrubberies, had to be passed, and all the way Michael used to
hum to himself for company and diversion and encouragement.
The only interesting event was a pavement-artist, and he was
very often not there. It was an exasperating and monotonous
walk, and he hated it for the gloom it shed upon all his
afternoons.
Sometimes Michael would arrive home before Nanny, and then he would
have to endure a long cross-examination upon his route. The walk was
not sufficiently interesting to invent tales about, and he resented
Nurse’s incredulous attitude and wrinkled obstinate face. Indeed,
Michael began to resent Nurse altogether, and so far as he was able he
avoided her. His scheme of things was logical: he had already a
philosophy, and his conception of the wonder inherent in everything was
evidently not unique, because the pictures in Don Quixote proved
conclusively that what Michael thought, other people besides himself
thought. He might be old-fashioned, as Nurse assured him he was; but if
to be old-fashioned was to live in the world of Don Quixote, he
certainly preferred it to the world in which Nanny lived. That seemed
to him a circumscribed and close existence for which he had no
sympathy. It was a world of poking about in medicine-cupboards, of
blind unreasonableness, of stupidity and malice and blank ugliness. He
would sit watching Nanny nibbling with her front teeth the capers of
the caper sauce, and he would hate her. She interfered with him, with
his day-dreams and toys and meals; and the only time when he wanted her
presence was in the middle of the night, when she was either drinking
her glass of ale in the kitchen or snoring heavily in the next room.
Michael’s only ambition was to live in his own world. This he would
have shared with his mother, but her visits were now so rare that it
was unwise to rely on her presence for happiness. He was learning to do
without her: Nurse he had never yet learnt to endure. She charged
ferociously into his fancies, shattering them with her fussy
interference, just as she would snatch away his clay pipe, when the
most perfect bubble was trembling on the edge of the bowl.
“Time for tea,” she would mutter. “Time for bed,” she would
chatter. Always it was time for something unpleasant.
Mrs. Frith, on the other hand, was a person whose attractions grew with
longer friendship, as Nurse’s decreased even from the small quantity
she originally possessed. As Michael month by month grew older, Mrs.
Frith expanded towards him. She found him an attentive, even a
breathless listener to her rollicking tales. Her life Michael plainly
perceived to have been crammed with exciting adventures. In earliest
youth she had been forced by cunning to outwit a brutal father with the
frightening habit of coming home in the evening and taking off his belt
to her and her brothers and her sisters. The house in which she lived
had been full of hiding-places, and Mrs. Frith, picturing herself to
Michael of less ample girth, described wonderfully how her father had
actually routed for her with a broom-handle while her mother sat
weeping into an apron. Then it appeared that it was the custom of small
boys in the street of her youth to sell liquorice-water in exchange for
pins.
“But was it nice?” asked Michael, remembering liquorice-powder.
“Lovely stuff,” Mrs. Frith affirmed. “They used to go calling up and
down, ‘Fine liquorice-water! Fine liquorice-water! Bring out your pins
and have a bottle of liquorice-water.’”
“And did you?” asked Michael.
“Did we? Of course we did—every pin in the place. There wasn’t a pin in
the whole street after those boys had gone by.”
“What else did you do when you were little, Mrs. Frith?”
“What else? Why everything.”
“Yes, but tell me what,” Michael begged, clasping his knees and looking
earnestly at Cook.
“Why once I went to a Sunday-school treat and got thrown off of
a donkey and showed more than I meant and the boys all hollered
after me going to Sunday-school
and I used to stand behind a corner and dodge them. The saucy
demons!”
These tales were endless, and Michael thought how jolly it would be to
set out early one summer morning with Mrs. Frith and look for
adventures like Don Quixote. This became a favourite day-dream, and he
used to fancy Mrs. Frith tossed in a blanket like Sancho Panza. What
company she would be, and it would be possible with two donkeys. He had
seen women as fat as her riding on donkeys by the seaside.
One day Mrs. Frith told him she was thinking of getting married again,
and on a Sunday afternoon Michael was introduced to her future husband,
a certain Mr. Hopkins, who had a shining red head and an enormous
coloured handkerchief into which he trumpeted continuously. Mr. Hopkins
also had a daughter three or four years older than Michael—a wizened
little girl called Flossie who spoke in a sort of hiss and wore very
conspicuous underclothing of red flannelette. Michael and Flossie
played together shyly under the admiring patronage of Mrs. Frith and
Mr. Hopkins, and were just beginning to be friendly when Nurse came in
and said:
“Can’t be allowed. No, no. Never heard of such a thing. Tut-tut.”
After this Nurse and Mrs. Frith did not seem to get on very well, and
Mrs. Frith used to talk about ‘people as gave theirselves airs which
they had no business to of done.’ She was kinder than ever to Michael
and gave him as many sultanas as he wanted and told him all about the
house into which she and Mr. Hopkins and Flossie would presently depart
from Carlington Road.
“Are you going away?” Michael asked, aghast.
“Going to be married,” said Mrs. Frith.
“But I don’t want you to go.”
“There, bless your heart, I’ve a good mind to stay.
I believe you’ll miss your poor old Mrs. Frith, eh, ducky?”
Everybody nice went away, Michael thought. It was extraordinary how
only nasty food and nasty people were wholesome.
Mrs. Frith’s departure was even more exciting than her stories. One
afternoon Michael found her in the kitchen, dancing about with her
skirts kilted above her knees. He was a little embarrassed at first,
but very soon he had to laugh because she was evidently not behaving
like this in order to show off, but because she enjoyed dancing about
the kitchen.
“Why are you dancing, Mrs. Frith?” he asked.
“Happy as a lark, lovey,” she answered in an odd voice. “Happy as a
lark, for we won’t go home till morning, we won’t go home till
morning,” and singing, she twirled round and round until she sank into
a wicker arm-chair. At this moment Annie came running downstairs with
Nurse, and both of them glared at Mrs. Frith with shocked expressions.
“What ever are you doing, Cook?” said Nurse.
“That’s all right, lovey. That’s All Sir Garnet, and don’t you make no
mistake. Don’t you—make no mistake.”
Here Mrs. Frith gave a very loud hiccup and waved her arms and did not
even say ‘beg pardon’ for the offensive noise.
“Michael,” said Nurse, “go upstairs at once. Mrs. Frith, get up. You
ignorant and vulgar woman. Get up.”
“And you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” said Cook to Nurse. “You old
performing monkey, that’s what you are.”
“Annie,” said Nurse, “fetch a policeman in, and go and get this woman’s
box.”
“Woman!” said Mrs. Frith. “Woman yourself. Who’s a woman? I’m
not a woman. No, I’m not. And if I am a woman, you’re not the
one to say so. Ah, I know how
many bottles have gone out of this house and come in—not by
me.”
“Hold your impudent tongue,” said Nurse.
“I shall not hold my tongue, so now,” retorted Mrs. Frith.
Michael had squeezed himself behind the kitchen door fascinated by this
duel. It was like Alice in Wonderland, and every minute he expected to
see Cook throwing plates at Nanny, who was certainly making faces
exactly like the Duchess. The area door slammed, and Michael wondered
what was going to happen. Presently there came the sound of a deep
tread in the passage and a policeman entered.
“What’s all this?” he said in a deep voice.
“Constable,” said Nurse, “will you please remove this dreadful woman?”
“What’s she been doing?” asked the policeman.
“She’s drunk.”
Mrs. Frith apparently overwhelmed by the enormity of the accusation
tottered to her feet and seized a saucepan.
“None of that now,” said the policeman roughly, as he caught her by the
waist.
“Oh, I’m not afraid of a bluebottle,” said Mrs. Frith haughtily. “Not
of a bluebottle, I’m not.”
“Are you going to charge her?” the policeman asked.
“No, no. Nothing but turn her out. The girl’s packing her box. Give her
the box and let her go.”
“Not without my wages,” said Mrs. Frith. “I’m not going to leave my
wages behind. Certaintly I’m not.”
Nurse fumbled in her purse, and at last produced some money.
“That’s the easiest way,” said the policeman. “Pay her the month and
let her go. Come on, my lady.”
He seized Mrs. Frith and began to walk her to the door as if
she were a heavy sack. Michael began to cry. He did not want
Mrs. Frith to be hurt and he felt frightened.
In the passage she suddenly broke loose and, turning round,
pushed Nurse into the laundry-basket and was so pleased with
her successful effort that she almost ran out of the house and
could presently be heard singing very cheerfully ‘White wings,
they never grow weary,’ to the policeman. In the end her trunk
was pushed down the front-door steps, and after more singing
and arguing a four-wheeler arrived and Mrs. Frith vanished for
ever from Carlington Road.
The effect of this scene on Nurse was to make her more repressive and
secretive. She was also very severe on vulgarity; and all sorts of old
words were wrapped up in new words, as when bread and dripping became
bread and honey, because dripping was vulgar. The house grew much
gloomier with Mrs. Frith’s departure. The new cook whose name Michael
never found out, because she remained the impersonal official, was very
brusque and used to say: “Now then, young man, out of my kitchen or
I’ll tell Nurse. And don’t hang about in the passage or in two-twos
you’ll be sorry you ever came downstairs.”
It was autumn again, and the weather was dreary and wet. Michael
suffered a severe shock one morning. It was too foggy to go to school
and he was sitting alone in the window of the morning-room, staring at
the impenetrable and fearful yellowness of the air. Suddenly he heard
the cry, ‘Remember, remember the Fifth of November, and gunpowder,
treason and plot,’ and, almost before he had time to realize it was the
dreaded Guy Fawkes, a band of loud-voiced boys with blackened faces
came surging down the area steps and held close to the window a nodding
Guy. Michael shrieked with fear and ran from the room, only to be told
by Nurse that she’d never heard such old-fashioned nonsense in all her
life.
During that November the fogs were very bad and, as an epidemic
term had compelled the Misses Marrow to close their school,
Michael brooded at home in the gaslit rooms
that shone dully in the street of footsteps. The long morning
would drag its length out, and dinner would find no appetite
in Michael. Stella seemed not to care to play and would mope
with round eyes saddened by this eternal gloom. Dusk was
merely marked by the drawing down of the blinds at the clock’s
hour without regard to the transit from day to night. Michael
used to wonder if it were possible that this fog would last
for ever, if for ever he would live in Carlington Road in this
yellow twilight, if his mother had forgotten there ever was
such a person as Michael Fane. But, at any rate, he would have
to grow up. He could not always be the same size. That was a
consolation. It was jolly to dream of being grown-up, to plan
one’s behaviour and think of freedom. The emancipation of
being grown-up seemed to Michael to be a magnificent prospect.
To begin with it was no longer possible to be naughty. He
realized, indeed, that crimes were a temptation to some
grown-ups, that people of a certain class committed murders
and burglaries, but as he felt no inclination to do either, he
looked forward to a life of unbroken virtue.
So far as he could ascertain, grown-up people were exempt from
even the necessity to distinguish between good and evil. If
Michael examined the Commandments one by one, this became
obvious. _Thou shalt have none other gods than me_ . Why should
one want to have? One was enough. The Children of Israel must
be different from Michael. He could not understand such
peculiar people. _Make not to thyself any graven image_ . The
only difficulty about this commandment was its length for
learning. Otherwise it did not seem to bear on present-day
life. _Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in
vain_ . This was another vague injunction. Who wanted to?
_Remember thou keep holy the Sabbath Day_ . It was obviously a
simple matter for grown-up people, who no longer enjoyed
playing with toys, to keep this commandment. At present it was
difficult to learn and difficult to keep. _Honour thy father
and thy mother_ . He loved his mother. He would always love
her, even if she forgot him. He might not love her so much as
formerly, but he would always love her. _Thou shalt do no
murder_ . Michael had no intention of doing murder. Since the
Hangman in Punch and Judy he was cured of any inclination
towards murder. _Thou shalt not commit adultery_ . Why should
he ever want to marry another man’s wife? At present he could
not imagine himself married to anybody. He supposed that as one
result of growing up he would get married. But, forewarned, he
would take care not to choose somebody else’s wife. _Thou shalt
not steal_ . With perfect freedom to eat when and where and
what one liked, why should one steal? _Thou shalt not bear
false witness_ . It would not be necessary to lie when grown
up, because one could not then be punished. _Thou shalt not
covet thy neighbour’s ox_ . He would covet nothing, for when he
was grown up he would be able to obtain whatever he wanted.
This desire to be grown up sustained him through much, even
through the long foggy nights which made his bedroom more
fearfully still than before. The room would hardly seem any
longer to exist in the murk which crept through it. The
crocus-shaped jet of the gas burned in the vaporous midnight
with an unholy flame somehow, thought Michael, as candles must
look, when at the approach of ghosts they burn blue. How
favourable to crime was fog, how cleverly the thief might steal
over the coal-yard at the back of the house and with powerful
tools compel the back-door to open. And the murderers, how they
must rejoice in the impenetrable air as with long knives they
stole out from distant streets in search of victims. Michael’s
nerves were so wrought upon by the unchanging gloom of these
wintry days that even to be sent by Nurse to fetch her thimble
or work-bag before tea was a racking experience.
“Now then, Michael, run downstairs like a good boy and fetch my
needle and cotton which I left in the morning-room,” Nurse
would command. And in the gathering dusk Michael would
practically slide downstairs until he reached the basement.
Then, clutching the object of his errand, he would brace
himself for the slower ascent. Suppose that when he reached the
hall there were two skeletons sitting on the hall chest?
Suppose that on the landing above a number of rats rushed out
from the housemaid’s closet to bite his legs and climb over him
and gnaw his face? Suppose that from the landing outside his
own room a masked burglar were stealing into his room to hide
himself under the bed? Suppose that when he arrived back at the
day-nursery, Stella and Nurse were lying with their heads
chopped off, as he had once seen a family represented by a pink
newspaper in the window of a little shop near Hammersmith
Broadway? Michael used to reach his goal, white and shaking,
and slam the door against the unseen follower who had dogged
his footsteps from the coal-cellar. The cries of a London
twilight used to oppress him. From the darkening streets and
from the twinkling houses inexplicable sounds floated about the
air. They had the sadness of church-bells, and like
church-bells they could not be located exactly. Michael thought
that London was the most melancholy city in the world. Even at
Christmas-time, behind all the gaiety and gold of a main road
lay the trackless streets that were lit, it seemed, merely by
pin-points of gas, so far apart were the lamp-posts, such a
small sad circle of pavement did they illuminate. The rest was
shadows and glooms and whispers. Even in the jollity of the
pantomime and comfortable smell of well-dressed people the
thought of the journey home through the rainy evening brooded
upon the gayest scene. The going home was sad indeed, as in the
farthest corner of the jolting omnibus they jogged through the
darkness. The painted board of places and fares
used to depress Michael. He could not bear to think of the
possibilities opened up by the unknown names beyond Piccadilly
Circus. Once in a list of fares he read the word Whitechapel
and shivered at the thought that an omnibus could from
Whitechapel pass the corner of Carlington Road. This very
omnibus had actually come from the place where murders were
done. Murderers might at this moment be travelling in his
company. Michael looked askance at the six nodding travellers
who sat opposite, at the fumes of their breath, at their hands
clasped round the handles of their umbrellas. There, for all
he knew, sat Jack the Ripper. It happened that night that one
of the travellers, an old gentleman with gold-rimmed
eye-glasses, alighted at the corner and actually turned down
Carlington Road. Michael was horrified and tugged at Nanny’s
arm to make her go faster.
“Whyever on earth are you dancing along like a bear for? Do you want to
go somewhere, you fidgety boy?” said Nurse, pulling Michael to her side
with a jerk.
“Oh, Nanny, there’s a man following us, who got out of our bus.”
“Well, why shouldn’t he get out? Tut-tut. Other people besides you want
to get out of buses. I shan’t ever take you to the pantomime again, if
you aren’t careful.”
“Well, I will be careful,” said Michael, who, perceiving the lamp in
their front hall, recovered from his fright and became anxious to
propitiate Nanny.
“So I should think,” muttered Nurse. “Tut-tut-tut-tut-tut.” Michael
thought she would never stop clicking her tongue.
About this time with the fogs and the rain and the loneliness
and constant fear that surrounded him, Michael began to feel
ill. He worried over his thin arms, comparing them with the
sleek Stella’s. His golden hair lost its lustre and became drab
and dark and skimpy. His cheeks lost their rose-red, and black
lines ringed his large and sombre blue eyes.
He cared for little else but reading, and even reading tired
him very much, so that once he actually fell asleep over the
big Don Quixote. About two hundred pages were bent underneath
the weight of his body, and the book was taken away from him
as a punishment for his carelessness. It was placed out of his
reach on top of the bookcase and Michael used to stand below
and wish for it. No entreaties were well enough expressed to
move Nurse; and Don Quixote remained high out of reach in the
dust and shadows of the ceiling. Nurse grew more and more
irrational in her behaviour and complained more and more of
the neuralgia to which she declared she was a positive martyr.
Annie went away into the country because she was ill and a
withered housemaid took her place, while the tall thin house
in Carlington Road became more grim every day.
Then a lucky event gave Michael a new interest. Miss Caroline
Marrow began to teach him the elements of Botany, and
recommended all the boys to procure window-boxes for
themselves. Michael told Nurse about this; and, though she
muttered and clicked and blew a great deal, one day a
bandy-legged man actually came and fitted Michael’s
window-sills with two green window-boxes. He spent the whole of
his spare time in prodding the sweet new mould, in levelling it
and patting it, and filling in unhappy little crevices which
had been overlooked. Then on a fine spring morning he paid a
visit to the old woman who sold penny packets of seeds, and
bought nasturtiums, mignonette, Virginia stocks and candytuft,
twelve pansy roots and twelve daisy roots. Michael’s flowers
grew and flourished and he loved his window-boxes. He liked to
turn towards his window at night now. Somehow those flowers
were a protection. He liked to lie in bed during the
sparrow-thronged mornings of spring and fancy how the birds
must enjoy hopping about in his window-boxes. He was always
careful to scatter plenty of crumbs, so that they
should not be tempted to peck up his seeds or pull to pieces
the pansy buds. He was disappointed that neither the daisies
nor the pansies smelt sweet, and when the mignonette bloomed,
he almost sniffed it away, so lovely was the perfume of it
during the blue days of June. He had a set of gardening tools,
so small and suitable to the size of his garden that rake and
hoe and spade and fork were all originally fastened to one
small square of cardboard.
But, best of all, when the pansies were still a-blowing and the
Virginia stocks were fragrant, and when from his mother’s window below
he could see his nasturtium flowers, golden and red and even
tortoiseshell against the light, his mother came home suddenly for a
surprize, and the house woke up.
“But you’re not looking well, darling,” she said.
“Oh, yes, quite well. Quite well,” muttered Nurse, “Quite well. Mustn’t
be a molly-coddle. No. No.”
“I really must see about a nice governess for you,” said Mrs.
Fane. Nurse sniffed ominously.
Chapter V: _The First Fairy Princess_
M ISS CARTHEW’S arrival widened very considerably Michael’s
view of life. Nurse’s crabbed face and stunted figure had
hitherto appropriately enough dominated such realities of
existence as escaped from the glooms and shadows of his
solitary childhood. Michael had for so long been familiar with
ugliness that he was dangerously near to an eternal
imprisonment in a maze of black fancies. He had come to take
pleasure in the grotesque and the macabre, and even on the
sunniest morning his imagination would turn to twilight and
foggy eves, to basements and empty houses and loneliness and
dust. Michael would read furtively the forbidden newspapers
that Nurse occasionally left lying about. In these he would
search for murders and crimes, and from their association with
thrills of horror, the newspapers themselves had gradually
acquired a definitely sinister personality. If at dusk Michael
found a newspaper by Nurse’s arm-chair, he would approach it
with beating heart, and before he went over to read it where
close to the window the light of day lingered, he would brood
upon his own daring, as if some Bluebeard’s revenge might
follow.
When Michael’s mother was at home, he was able to resume the
cheerfulness of the last occasion on which her company had
temporarily relieved his solitude; but always behind the
firelit confidences, the scented good mornings and good nights,
the gay shopping walks and all the joys which belonged to him
and her, stood threatening and inevitable the normal existence
with Nurse in which these
rosy hours must be remembered as only hours, fugitive and
insecure and rare. Now came Miss Carthew’s brisk and lively
presence to make many alterations in the life of 64 Carlington
Road, Kensington.
Michael’s introduction to his governess took place in the presence of
his mother and, as he stood watching the two women in conversation, he
was aware of a tight-throated feeling of pleasure. They were both so
tall and slim and beautiful: they were both so straight and clean that
they gave him the glad sensation of blinds pulled up to admit the sun.
“I think we’re going to be rather good friends,” said Miss Carthew.
Michael could only stare his agreement, but he managed to run before
Miss Carthew in order to open the door politely, when she was going
out. In bed that night he whispered to his mother how much he liked
Miss Carthew and how glad he was that he could leave the Miss Marrows’
for the company of Miss Carthew all day long.
“And all night?” he asked wistfully.
“No, not at present, darling,” she answered. “Nanny will still look
after you at night.”
“Will she?” Michael questioned somewhat doubtfully.
After Mrs. Fane went away, there was a short interval before the
new-comer assumed her duties. During this time Michael hummed
incessantly and asked Nurse a thousand questions about Miss Carthew.
“Goodness gracious, what a fuss about a governess,” commented Nanny.
“Tut-tut. It might be the Queen of England. She’ll be here quite soon
enough for everyone, I dare say.”
It fell out that Miss Carthew was to arrive on Valentine Day,
and Michael with a delicious breathlessness thought how
wonderful it would be to present her with a Valentine. He did
not dare tell Nurse of his intention; but he hoped that
by sending Valentines to every inmate of the house he might be
allowed to include Miss Carthew. Nurse was agreeable to the
notion of receiving a token, and in her company Michael set
out to a neighbouring stationer’s shop to make his purchases.
A Valentine for Cook was bought, and one of precisely the same
design for Gladys the withered housemaid, and a rather better
one for Stella, and a better one still for Nurse.
“Come along now,” said Nanny.
“Oh, but can’t I get one for Miss Carthew? Do let me.”
“Tut-tut-tut. What nonsense. I do declare. Whatever do you want to give
her a Valentine for?” Nurse demanded, as she tried to hustle Michael
from the shop.
“Oh, do let me, Nanny.”
“Well, come along, and don’t be all day choosing. Here, this will do,”
said Nurse, as she picked one from the penny tray.
But Michael had other ideas. He had noticed an exquisite Valentine of
apple-green satin painted with the rosiest of Cupids, the most crimson
of pierced hearts, a Valentine that was almost a sachet so thick was
it, so daintily fringed with fretted silver-paper.
“That one,” he declared, pointing.
“Now what have I told you about pointing?”
“That large one’s a shilling,” said the stationer.
“Come along, come along,” grumbled Nurse. “Wasting good money.”
“But I want to have that one,” said Michael.
For the first time in his life he did not feel at all afraid of Nurse,
so absolutely determined was he to present Miss Carthew with the
Valentine of his own free choice.
“I will have that one,” he added. “It’s my money.”
“You will, will you, you naughty boy? You won’t, then. So now!
You dare defy me. I never heard of such a thing. No, nothing
more this morning, thank you,”
Nurse added, turning to the stationer. “The little boy has got
all he wants. Say ‘thank you’ to the gentleman and ‘good
morning,’” Nurse commanded Michael.
“I won’t,” he declared. “I won’t.” Scowling so that his nose nearly
vanished into his forehead, and beating back the tears that were
surging to his eyes, Michael followed Nurse from the shop. As he walked
home, he dug his nails wrathfully into the envelope of Valentines, and
then suddenly he saw a drain in the gutter. He hastily stooped and
pushed the packet between the bars of the grating, and let it fall
beyond the chance of recovery. When they reached their house, Nurse
told him to give her the cards, so that they might not be soiled before
presentation.
“I’ve dropped them,” said Michael sullenly.
“Dropped them? Dropped them? What do you mean—dropped them?”
“I threw them away,” said Michael.
“On purpose?”
“Yes. I can do what I like with my own things.”
“You ungrateful wicked boy,” said Nurse, horrified by such a claim.
“I don’t care if I am,” Michael answered. “I wanted to give Miss
Carthew a Valentine. Mother would have let me.”
“Your mother isn’t here. And when she isn’t here, I’m your mother,”
said Nurse, looking more old and wrinkled and monkey-like than ever.
“How dare you say you’re my mother?” gasped the outraged son. “You’re
not. You’re not. Why, you’re not a lady, so you couldn’t ever be my
mother.”
Hereupon Nurse disconcerted Michael by bursting into tears, and
he presently found himself almost petting her and declaring
that he was very sorry for having been so unkind. He found a
certain luxury in this penitence just as he used to enjoy a
reconciliation with the black kittens.
Perhaps it was this scene with Nurse that prompted him soon
afterwards to the creation of another with his sister. The
second scene was brought about by Stella’s objection to the
humming with which Michael was somewhat insistently
celebrating the advent of Miss Carthew.
“Don’t hum, Michael. Don’t hum. Please don’t hum,” Stella begged very
solemnly. “Please don’t hum, because it makes my head hurt.”
“I _will_ hum, and every time you ask me not to hum, I’ll hum
more louder,” said Michael.
Stella at once went to the piano in the day-nursery and began to play
her most unmelodious tune. Michael ran to the cupboard and produced a
drum which he banged defiantly. He banged it so violently that
presently the drum, already worn very thin, burst. Michael was furious
and immediately proceeded to twang an over-varnished zither. So
furiously did he twang the zither that finally he caught one of his
nails in a sharp string of the treble, and in great pain hurled the
instrument across the room. Meanwhile, Stella continued to play, and
when Michael commanded her to stop, answered annoyingly that she had
been told to practise.
“Don’t say pwactise, you silly. Say practise,” Michael contemptuously
exclaimed.
“Shan’t,” Stella answered with that cold and fat stolidity of demeanour
and voice which disgusted Michael like the fat of cold mutton.
“I’m older than you,” Michael asserted.
Stella made no observation, but continued to play, and Michael,
now acutely irritated, rushed to the piano and slammed down the
lid. Stella must have withdrawn her fingers in time, for there
was no sign of any pinch or bruise upon them. However, she
began to cry, while Michael addressed to her the oration which
for a long time he had wished to utter.
“You are silly. You are a cry-baby. Fancy crying about nothing. I
wouldn’t. Everybody doesn’t want to hear your stupid piano-playing.
Boys at school think pianos are stupid. You always grumble about my
humming. You are a cry-baby.
What are little boys made of?
Sugar and spice and all that’s nice,
That’s what little boys are made of.
What are little girls made of?
Slugs and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails,
Ugh! that’s what little girls are made of.”
“They’re not,” Stella screamed. “They’re not!” Michael’s perversion of
the original rhyme made her inarticulate with grief and rage. “They’re
not, you naughty boy!”
Michael, contented with his victory, left Stella to herself and her
tears. As he hummed his way downstairs, he thought sensuously of the
imminent reconciliation, and in about ten minutes, having found some
barley-sugar buried against an empty day, Michael came back to Stella
with peace-offerings and words of comfort.
Miss Carthew arrived on the next morning and the nervous excitement of
waiting was lulled. Miss Carthew came through the rain of Valentine
Day, and Michael hugged himself with the thought of her taking off her
mackintosh and handing it to Gladys to be dried. With the removal of
her wet outdoor clothes, Miss Carthew seemed to come nearer to Michael
and, as they faced each other over the schoolroom table (for the
day-nursery in one moment had become the schoolroom), Michael felt that
he could bear not being grown up just for the pleasure of sitting
opposite to his new governess.
It was not so much by these lessons that Michael’s outlook was
widened as by the conversations he enjoyed with Miss Carthew
during their afternoon walks. She told him, so
far as she could, everything that he desired to know. She
never accused him of being old-fashioned or inquisitive, and
indeed as good as made him feel that the more questions he
asked the better she would like it. Miss Carthew had all the
mental and imaginative charm of the late Mrs. Frith in
combination with an outward attractiveness that made her more
dearly beloved. Indeed Miss Carthew had numberless pleasant
qualities. If she promised anything, the promise was always
kept to the letter. If Michael did not know his lesson or
omitted the performance of an ordained task, Miss Carthew was
willing to hear the explanation of his failure and was never
unreasonable in her judgment. One morning very soon after her
arrival, Michael was unable to repeat satisfactorily the verse
of the psalm Venite Adoremus set for him to learn.
“Why don’t you know it, Michael?” Miss Carthew asked.
“I had to go to bed.”
“But surely you had plenty of time before you went to bed?” Miss
Carthew persisted.
“Nanny wanted to go out, and I went to bed early,” Michael explained.
For a moment or two Miss Carthew considered the problem silently. Then
she rang the bell and told withered Gladys that she wished to speak to
Nurse. Presently Nurse came in, very aggressive and puckered.
“Did Michael have to go to bed very early last night?” Miss Carthew
enquired.
“Oh, yes. Yes,” Nurse blew out. “Early last night. Wednesday night.
Yes. I had to go out. Yes.”
“What time did he go to bed?” Miss Carthew went on.
“What time?” repeated Nurse. “Why the proper time, of course.”
“Don’t be insolent,” said Miss Carthew very tranquilly.
Nurse blustered and wrinkled her nose and frowned and came very close
to Miss Carthew and peered up into her face, blowing harder than ever.
“The arrangements can’t be altered for governesses,” said Nurse. “No.
Tut-tut. Never heard of such a thing.”
“The arrangements _will_ be altered. In future Michael will go
to bed at half-past seven. It’s not good for him to go to bed
earlier. Do you understand?”
“Do I understand? No, I don’t understand,” Nurse snapped.
“Very well,” said Miss Carthew. “You need not wait, Nurse.”
Nurse blinked and peered and fumed, but Miss Carthew paid so little
attention that Michael felt himself blushing for her humiliation.
However, he did not go to bed that night till half-past seven and at
the end of the week could rattle off the Venite in two breaths. It was
extraordinary how Nurse shrank into nothing at Miss Carthew’s approach,
like a witch in the presence of a good fairy.
The nights were still a trial to Michael, but gradually they
became less terrible, as Miss Carthew’s conversation gave him
something better to meditate upon than the possibilities of
disaster and crime. On the afternoon walks would be told
stories of Miss Carthew’s youth in the West Country, of cliffs
and sea-birds and wrecks, of yachting cruises and swimming, of
golden sands and magical coves and green islands. Miss
Carthew’s own father had been a captain in the Royal Navy and
she had had one brother, a midshipman, who was drowned in
trying to save the life of his friend. By all accounts the
Carthews must have lived in as wonderful a house as was ever
known. From the windows it was possible to look down into the
very sea itself, and from the front door, all wreathed in
roses, ran a winding path edged with white stones down to the
foot of the cliff.
Day and night great ships used to sail from the harbour, some
outward bound with the crew singing in the cool airs of a
summer morning, some homeward bound, battered by storms. Miss
Carthew, when a little girl, had been the intimate friend of
many coastguards, had been allowed to peep through their long
telescopes, had actually seen a cannon fired at close
quarters. Before her own eyes the lifeboat had plunged forth
to rescue ships and with her own hands she had caught fish on
quiet sunny mornings and on windless nights under the moon.
Her most valuable possession, however, must have been that
father who could sit for hours and never tell the same tale
twice, but hold all who heard him entranced with a narrative
of hostile Indians, of Chinese junks, of cannibals and wrecks
and mutinies and bombardments. It was sad to hear that Captain
Carthew was now dead: Michael would have been glad to make his
acquaintance. It was sad to hear that the Carthews no longer
lived in the West within the sound of waves and winds; but it
was consoling to learn that they still lived in the depth of
the country and that some time, perhaps during this very next
summer, Michael should certainly pay Mrs. Carthew a visit. He
would meet other Miss Carthews, one of whom was only fourteen
and could obviously without ceremony be hailed immediately as
Nancy. Of Joan and May, who were older, Michael spoke in terms
of the familiar Christian name with embarrassment, and he was
much perplexed in his own mind how he should address them,
when actually they met.
“I wish you were going to take us away for our holidays to the
seaside,” Michael said.
“Perhaps I will another time,” Miss Carthew replied. “But this year you
and Stella are going with Nurse, because Stella isn’t going to begin
lessons with me till you go to school.”
“Am I really going to school?”
“Yes, to St. James’ Preparatory School,” Miss Carthew assured him.
In consideration of Michael’s swiftly approaching adventure, he was
allowed to take in the Boy’s Own Paper monthly, and as an even greater
concession to age he was allowed to make friends with several boys in
Carlington Road, some of whom were already scholars of St. James’
Preparatory School and one of whom actually had a brother at St. James’
School itself, that gigantic red building whose gates Michael himself
would enter of right one day, however difficult at present this was to
believe.
What with the prospect of going to school in the autumn and
Miss Carthew’s tales of freedom and naval life, Michael began
to disapprove more than ever of Nurse’s manners and appearance.
He did not at all relish the notion of passing away the summer
holidays in her society. To be sure, for the end of the time he
had been invited by Mrs. Carthew’s own thin writing to spend a
week with her in Hampshire; but that was at least a month away,
and meanwhile there was this month to be endured with Nurse at
Mr. and Mrs. Wagland’s lodgings, where the harmonium was played
and conversation was carried on by whispers and the mysterious
nods of three heads. However, the beginning of August arrived,
and Miss Carthew said good-bye for a month. Wooden spades,
still gritty with last year’s sand, were produced from the
farthest corners of cupboards: mouldy shrimping nets and
dirtied buckets and canvas shoes lay about on the bed, and at
last, huddled in paraphernalia, Nurse and Stella and Michael
jogged along to the railway station, a miserable hour for
Michael, who all the time was dreading many unfortunate events,
as for the cabman to get down from his box and quarrel about
the fare, or for the train to be full, or for Stella to be sick
during the journey, or for him and her to lose Nurse, or for
all of them to get into the wrong train, or for a railway
accident
to happen, or for any of the uncomfortable contingencies to
which seaside travellers were liable.
During these holidays Michael grew more and more deeply ashamed of
Nurse, and more and more acutely sensitive to her manners and
appearance. He was afraid that people on the front would mistake him
and Stella for her children. He grew hot with shame when he fancied
that people looked at him. He used to loiter behind on their walks and
pretend that he did not belong to Nurse, and hope sincerely that nobody
would think of connecting him with such an ugly old woman. He had heard
much talk of ‘ladies and gentlemen’ at the Kindergarten, and since then
Miss Carthew had indirectly confirmed his supposition that it was a
terrible thing not to be a gentleman and the son of a gentleman. He
grew very critical of his own dress and wished that he were not
compelled to wear a sailor-top that was slightly shabby. Once Mr. and
Mrs. Wagland accompanied them to church on a Sunday morning, and
Michael was horrified. People would inevitably think that he was the
son of Mr. Wagland. What a terrible thing that would be. He loitered
farther behind than ever, and would liked to have killed Mr. Wagland
when he offered him the half of his hymn-book. This incident seemed to
compromise him finally, to drag him down from the society of Miss
Carthew to a degraded status of unutterable commonness. Mr. Wagland
would persist in digging him with his elbow and urging him to sing up.
Worse even, he once said quite audibly ‘Spit it out, sonny.’ Michael
reeled with shame.
September arrived at last, and then Michael realized suddenly
that he would have to make the journey to Hampshire alone. This
seemed to him the most astonishing adventure of his life. He
surveyed his existence from the earliest dawn of consciousness
to the last blush caused by Nurse’s abominable habits, and
could see no parallel of daring. He was about to enter upon a
direct relationship with the
world of men. He would have to enquire of porters and guards;
he would have to be polite without being prodded to ladies
sitting opposite. No doubt they would ask questions of him and
he would have to answer distinctly. And beyond this immediate
encounter with reality was School. He had not grasped how near
he was to the first morning. A feeling of hopelessness, of
inability to grapple with the facts of life seized him.
Growing old was a very desperate business after all. How
remote he was getting from Nurse, how far away from the dingy
solitude which had so long oppressed his spirit. Already she
seemed unimportant and already he could almost laugh at the
absurdity of being mistaken for a relation of hers. The world
was opening her arms and calling to him.
On the day before he was to set out for Hampshire, he and Nurse
and Stella and Mr. Wagland and Mrs. Wagland drove in a
wagonette to picnic somewhere in the country behind the sea. It
had been a dry August and the rolling chalk downs over which
they walked were uniformly brown. The knapweed was stunted and
the scabious blooms drooped towards the dusty pasture. Only the
flamy ladies’ slippers seemed appropriate to the miles of heat
that flickered against the landscape. Michael ran off alone,
sliding as he went where the drouth had singed the
close-cropped grass. The rabbits ran to right and left of him,
throwing distorted shadows on the long slopes, and once a
field-mouse skipped anxiously across his path. On the rounded
summit of the highest hill within reach he sat down near a
clump of tremulous harebells. The sky was on every side of him,
the largest sky ever imagined. Far away in front was the
shining sea, above whose nebulous horizon ships hung
motionless. Up here was the sound of summer airs, the faint
lisp of wind in parched herbage, the twitter of desolate birds,
and in some unseen vale below the bleating of a flock of sheep.
Bumble-bees droned from
flower to flower of the harebells and a church clock struck
the hour of four. The world was opening her arms and calling
to Michael. He felt up there in the silver weather as the ugly
duckling must have felt when he saw himself to be a radiant
swan. Michael almost believed, in this bewitching meditation,
that he was in a story by Hans Christian Andersen. Always in
those tales the people flew above the world whether in
snow-time or in spring-time. It was really like flying to sit
up here. For the first time Michael flung wide his arms to
grasp the unattainable; and, as he presently charged down the
hill-side in answer to distant holloas from the picnic party,
he saw before him a flock of sheep manœuvring before his
advance. Michael shouted and kept a swift course, remembering
Don Quixote and laughing when he saw the flock break into
units and gallop up the opposite slope.
“Tut-tut,” clicked Nurse. “What a mess you do get yourself into, I’m
sure. Can’t you sit down and enjoy yourself quietly?”
“Did you see me make those silly old sheep run away, Nanny?” Michael
asked.
“Yes, I did. And I should be ashamed to frighten poor animals so.
You’ll get the policeman on your tracks.”
“I shouldn’t care,” said Michael boastfully. “He wouldn’t be able to
catch me.”
“Wouldn’t he?” said Nurse very knowingly, as she laid out the tea-cups
on a red rug.
“Oh, Michael,” Stella begged, “don’t make a policeman come after you.”
Michael was intoxicated by the thought of his future. He could not
recognize the ability of any policeman to check his desires, and
because it was impossible to voice in any other way the impulses and
ambitions and hopes that were surging in his soul, he went on boasting.
“Ha, I’d like to see an old policeman run after me. I’d
trip him up and roll him all down the hill, I would. I’d put
his head in a rabbit hole. I would. I can run faster than a
policeman, I can.”
Michael was swaggering round and round the spread-out cups and saucers
and plates.
“If you put your foot on those jam sandwiches, you’ll go straight back
to the carriage and wait there till we’ve finished tea. Do you hear?”
Michael considered for a moment the possibility that Nanny might
execute this threat. He decided that she might and temporarily sobered
down. But the air was in his veins and all tea-time he could not
chatter fast enough to keep pace with the new power which was inspiring
him with inexpressible energy. He talked of what he was going to do in
Hampshire; he talked of what he was going to do on the journey; he
talked of what he was going to do at school and when he was grown up.
He arranged Stella’s future and bragged and boasted and fidgeted and
shouted, so that Nurse looked at him in amazement.
“Whatever’s the matter with you?” she asked.
Just then a tortoiseshell butterfly came soaring past and Michael,
swinging round on both his legs to watch the flight, swept half the
tea-cups with him. For a moment he was abashed; but after a long sermon
of reproof from Nurse he was much nearer to laughter than tears.
A gloomy reaction succeeded, as the party drove home through
the grey evening that was falling sadly over the country-side.
A chilly wind rustled in the hedgerows and blew the white dust
in clouds behind the wagonette. Michael became his silent self
again and was now filled with apprehensions. All that had
seemed so easy to attain was now complicated by the unknown. He
would have been glad of Miss Carthew’s company. The
green-shaded lamp and creaking harmonium of the seaside
lodgings were a dismal end to all that loveliness of wind and
silver so soon
finished. Nevertheless it had made him very sleepy and he was
secretly glad to get to bed.
The next day was a dream from which he woke to find himself
clinging affectionately to Miss Carthew’s arm and talking shyly
to Nancy Carthew and a sidling spaniel alternately, as they
walked from the still country station and packed themselves
into a pony-chaise that was waiting outside behind a dun pony.
Chapter VI: _The Enchanted Palace_
T HE dun pony ambled through the lanes to the village of
Basingstead Minor where Mrs. Carthew and her four daughters
lived in a house called Cobble Place. It stood close to the
road and was two stories high, very trim and covered with
cotoneaster. On either side of the door were two windows and
above it in a level row five more windows: the roof was
thatched. On the left of the house were double doors which led
into the stable-yard, a large stable-yard overlooked by a
number of irregular gables in the side of the house and
continually fluttered by white fantail pigeons. Into the
stable-yard the dun pony turned, where, clustered in the side
entrance of Cobble Place under a clematis-wreathed porch, stood
Mrs. Carthew and Miss May Carthew and Miss Joan Carthew, all
smiling very pleasantly at Michael and all evidently very glad
to see him safely arrived. Michael climbed out of the chaise
and politely shook hands with Mrs. Carthew and said he was very
well and had had a comfortable journey and would like some tea
very much, although if Nancy thought it was best he was quite
ready to see her donkey before doing anything else. However,
Nancy was told that she must wait, and soon Michael was sitting
at a large round table in a shady dining-room, eating hot
buttered tea-cake and chocolate cake and macaroons, with
bread-and-butter as an afterthought of duty. He enjoyed
drinking his tea out of a thin teacup and he liked the silver
and the satin tea-cosy and the yellow Persian cat purring on
the hearthrug and the bullfinch flitting from
perch to perch of his bright cage. He noticed with pleasure
that the pictures on the wall were full of interest and
detail, and was particularly impressed by two very long steel
engravings of the Death of Nelson and the Meeting of
Wellington and Blücher on the field of Waterloo. The only flaw
in his pleasure was the difficulty of addressing Miss May
Carthew and Miss Joan Carthew, and he wished that his own real
Miss Carthew would suggest a solution. As for the bedroom to
which he was taken after tea, Michael thought there never
could have been such a jolly room before. It was just the
right size, as snug as possible with its gay wall-paper and
crackling chintzes and ribboned bed. The counterpane was
patchwork and therefore held the promise of perpetual
entertainment. The dressing-table was neatly set with china
toilet articles whose individual importance Michael could not
discover. One in particular like the antler of a stag stuck
upright in a china tray he was very anxious to understand, and
when he was told it was intended for rings to hang upon, he
wished he had a dozen rings to adorn so neat a device.
After he had with Miss Carthew’s help unpacked and put his clothes
away, Michael joined Nancy in the stable-yard. He stroked the donkey
and the dun-coloured pony and watched the fantail pigeons in snowy
circles against the pale blue sky. He watched the gardener stirring up
some strange stuff for the pig that grunted impatiently. He watched the
pleasant Carthew cook shelling peas in the slanting sunlight by the
kitchen door. The air was very peaceful, full of soft sounds of lowing
cows, of ducks and hens and sheep. The air was spangled with glittering
insects: over a red wall hung down the branch of a plum tree, loaded
with creamy ovals of fruit, already rose-flushed with summer. Nancy
said they must soon go into the garden.
“Is there a garden more than this?” Michael asked.
His bedroom window had looked out on to the stable-yard.
“Through here,” said Nancy. She led the way to a door set in the wall,
which when open showed a green glowing oblong of light that made
Michael catch his breath in wonder.
Then together he and Nancy sauntered through what was surely
the loveliest garden in the world. Michael could scarcely bear
to speak, so completely did it fulfil every faintest hope. All
along the red walls were apples and pears and plums and
peaches; all along the paths were masses of flowers, phloxes
and early Michaelmas daisies and Japanese anemones and
sunflowers and red-hot pokers and dahlias. The air was so
golden and balmy that it seemed as though the sunlight must
have been locked up in this garden for years. At the bottom of
the vivid path was a stream with real fish swimming backwards
and forwards, and beyond the stream, safely guarded and
therefore perfectly beautiful, were cows stalking through a
field beyond which was a dark wood beyond which was a high hill
with a grey tower on the top of it. Some princess must have
made this garden. He and Nancy turned and walked by the stream
on which was actually moored a punt, a joy for to-morrow,
since, explained Nancy, Maud had said they were not to go on
the river this afternoon. How wonderful it was, Michael
thought, to hear his dearest Miss Carthew called Maud. Never
was spoken so sweet a name as Maud. He would say it to himself
in bed that night, and in the morning he would wake with Maud
calling to him from sleep. Then he and Nancy turned from the
tempting stream and walked up a pleached alley of withies woven
and interarched. Over them September roses bloomed with fawn
and ivory and copper and salmon-pink buds and blossoms. At the
end of the pleached alley was a mulberry tree with a seat round
its trunk and a thick lawn that ran right up to the
house itself. On the lawn Nancy and Michael played quoits and
bowls and chased Ambrose the spaniel, until the sun sent still
more slanting shadows across the garden and it was possible to
feel that night was just behind the hill beyond the stream.
The sun went down. The air grew chilly and Miss Carthew
appeared from the door, beckoning to Michael. She sat with him
in the dusky dining-room while he ate his bread and milk, and
told him of her brother the midshipman, while he looked
pensively at the picture of the Death of Nelson. Then Michael
went to the drawing-room where all the sisters and Mrs.
Carthew herself were sitting. He kissed everybody good night
in turn, and Mrs. Carthew put on a pair of spectacles in order
to follow his exit from the room with a kindly smile. Miss
Carthew sat with him while he undressed, and when he was in
bed, she told him another story and kissed him good night and
blew out the candle, and before the sound of pleasant voices
coming upstairs from the supper-table had ceased, Michael was
fast asleep.
In the morning while he was lying watching the shadows on the ceiling,
Nancy’s freckled face appeared round the door.
“Hurry up and dress,” she cried. “Fishing!”
Michael had never dressed so quickly before. In fact when he was ready,
he had to wait for Nancy who had called him before she had dressed
herself. Nancy and Michael lived a lifetime of delight in that golden
hour of waiting for breakfast.
However, at Cobble Place every minute was a lifetime of delight
to Michael. He forgot all about everything except being happy.
His embarrassment with regard to the correct way of addressing
May and Joan was terminated by being told to call them May and
Joan. He was shown the treasures of their bedrooms, the
butterfly collections, the sword of Captain Carthew, the dirk
of their brother the midshipman,
the birds’ eggs, the fossils, the bones, the dried flowers,
the photographs, the autographs, in fact everything that was
most absorbing to look at. With Mrs. Carthew he took sedate
walks into the village, and held the flowers while she
decorated the altar in church, and sat with her while she
talked to bed-ridden old women. With Nancy on one memorable
day he crossed the river and disembarked on the other side and
walked through the field of cows, through the meadowsweet and
purple loosestrife and spearmint. Then they picked
blackberries and dewberries by the edge of the wood and walked
on beneath the trees without caring about trespassing or
tramps or anything else. On the other side they came out at
the foot of the high hill. Up they walked, up and up until
they reached the grey tower at the top, and then, to Michael’s
amazement, Nancy produced the key of the tower and opened the
door.
“Can we really go in?” asked Michael, staggered by the adventure.
“Of course. We can always get the key,” said Nancy.
They walked up some winding stone steps that smelt very damp, and at
the top they pushed open a trap-door and walked out on top of the
tower. Michael leaned over the parapet and for the second time beheld
the world. There was no sea, but there were woods and streams and
spires and fields and villages and smoke from farms. There were blue
distances on every side and great white clouds moving across the sky.
The winds battled against the tower and sang in Michael’s ears and
ruffled his hair and crimsoned his cheeks. He could see the fantail
pigeons of Cobble Place circling below. He could look down on the wood
and the river they had just crossed. He could see the garden and his
dearest Miss Carthew walking on the lawn.
“Oh, Nancy,” he said, “it’s glorious.”
“Yes, it is rather decent,” Nancy agreed.
“I suppose that’s almost all of England you can see.”
“Only four counties,” said Nancy carelessly. “Berkshire and I forget
the other three. We toboggan down this hill in winter. That’s rather
decent too.”
“I’d like to come here every day,” sighed Michael. “I’d like to have
this tower for my very own. What castle is it called?”
“Grogg’s Folly,” said Nancy abruptly.
Michael wished the tower were not called Grogg’s Folly, and very soon
Nancy and he, shouting and laughing, were running at full speed down
the hill towards Cobble Place, while the stalks of the plantains
whipped his bare legs and larks flew up in alarm before his advance.
The time of his stay at Cobble Place was drawing to a close:
the hour of his greatest adventure was near. It had been a
visit of unspoiled enjoyment; and on his last night, Michael
was allowed for a treat to stay up to supper, to sit at the
round table rose-stained by the brooding lamp, while the rest
of the room was a comfortable mystery in which the
parlour-maid’s cap and apron flitted whitely to and fro. Nor
did Michael go to bed immediately after supper, for he actually
sat grandly in the drawing-room, one of a semicircle round the
autumnal fire of logs crackling and leaping with blue flames.
He sat silent, listening to the pitter-pat of Mrs. Carthew’s
Patience and watching the halma board waiting for May to
encounter Joan, while in a low voice Nancy read to him one of
Fifty-two Stories of Adventure for Girls. Bed-time came at the
end of the story and Michael was sad to say good night for the
last time and sad to think, when he got into his ribboned bed,
that to-morrow night he would be in Carlington Road among brass
knobs and Venetian blinds and lamp-posts and sounds of London.
Then came a great surprize that took away nearly all the
regrets he felt at leaving Cobble Place,
for Miss Carthew leaned over and whispered that she was coming
to live at Sixty-four.
“Oh!” Michael gasped. “With us—with Stella and me?”
Miss Carthew nodded.
“I say!” Michael whispered. “And will Stella have lessons when I’m
going to school?”
“Every morning,” said Miss Carthew.
“I expect you’ll find her rather bad at lessons,” said Michael
doubtfully.
He was almost afraid that Miss Carthew might leave in despair at
Stella’s ineptitude.
“Lots of people are stupid at first,” said Miss Carthew.
Michael blushed: he remembered a certain morning when capes and
promontories got inextricably mixed in his mind and when Miss Carthew
seemed to grow quite tired of trying to explain the difference.
“Will you teach her the piano now?” he enquired.
“Oh dear, no. I’m not clever enough to do that.”
“But you teach me.”
“That’s different. Stella will be a great pianist one day,” said Miss
Carthew earnestly.
“Will she?” asked Michael incredulously. “But I don’t like her to play
a bit—not a bit.”
“You will one day. Great musicians think she is wonderful.”
Michael gave up this problem. It was another instance of the chasm
between youth and age. He supposed that one day he would like Stella’s
playing. One day, so he had been led to suppose, he would also like fat
and cabbage and going to bed. At present such a condition of mind was
incomprehensible. However, Stella and the piano mattered very little in
comparison with the solid fact that Miss Carthew was going to live in
Carlington Road.
On the next morning before they left, Michael and Mrs.
Carthew walked round the garden together, while Mrs. Carthew
talked to him of the new life on which he was shortly going to
enter.
“Well, Michael,” she said, “in a week, so my daughter tells me, you
will be going to school.”
“Yes,” corroborated Michael.
“Dear me,” Mrs. Carthew went on. “I’m glad I’m not going to school for
the first time; you won’t like it at all at first, and then you’ll like
it very much indeed, and then you’ll either go on liking it very much
or you’ll hate it. If you go on liking it—I mean when you’re quite
old—sixteen or seventeen—you’ll never do anything, but if you hate it
then, you’ll have a chance of doing something. I’m glad my daughter
Maud is going to look after you. She’s a good girl.”
Michael thought how extraordinary it was to hear Miss Carthew spoken of
in this manner and felt shy at the prospect of having to agree verbally
with Mrs. Carthew.
“Take my advice—never ask questions. Be content to make a fool of
yourself once or twice, but don’t ask questions. Don’t answer questions
either. That’s worse than asking. But after all, now I’m giving advice,
and worst of anything is listening to other people’s advice. So pick
yourself some plums and get ready, for the chaise will soon be at the
door.”
Nurse was very grumpy when he and Miss Carthew arrived. She did
not seem at all pleased by the idea of Miss Carthew living in
the house, and muttered to herself all the time. Michael did no
more lessons in the week that remained before the autumn term
began; but he had to go with Miss Carthew to various outfitters
and try on coats and suits and generally be equipped for
school. The afternoons he spent in Carlington Road, trying to
pick up information about St. James’ Preparatory School from
the boys already there. One of these boys was Rodber, the son
of
a doctor, and probably by his manner and age and appearance
the most important boy in the school. At any rate Michael
found it difficult to believe that there could exist a boy
with more right to rule than this Rodber with his haughty eye
and Eton suit and prominent ears and quick authoritative
voice.
“Look here,” said Rodber one evening, “can you borrow your mail-cart? I
saw your sister being wheeled in one this morning. We’ve got three
mail-carts and we want a fourth for trains.”
Michael ran as fast as he could back to Sixty-four, rushed down the
area steps, rang the bell half a dozen times and tapped continuously on
the ground glass of the back door until Cook opened it.
“Whatever’s the matter?” said Cook.
Michael did not stop to answer, but ran upstairs, until breathless he
reached the schoolroom.
“Please, Miss Carthew, may we have Stella’s mail-cart? Rodber wants
it—for trains. Do let me. Rodber’s the boy I told you about who’s at
school. Oh, do let us have the cart. Rodber’s got three, but he wants
ours. May I, Miss Carthew?”
She nodded.
Michael rushed downstairs in a helter-skelter of joy and presently,
with Cook’s assistance in getting it up the steps, Michael stood
proudly by the mail-cart which was of the dogcart pattern, very light
and swift when harnessed to a good runner. Rodber examined it
critically.
“Yes, that’s a fairly decent one,” he decided.
Michael was greatly relieved by his approval.
“Look here,” said Rodber, “I don’t mind telling you, as you’ll be a new
kid, one or two tips about school. Look here, don’t tell anybody your
Christian name and don’t be cocky.”
“Oh, no, I won’t,” Michael earnestly promised.
“And don’t, for goodness’ sake, look like that when chaps speak to you,
or you’ll get your head smacked.”
This was the sum of Rodber’s advice, and presently Michael was
stationed as signalman by the junction which was a pillar-box, while
Rodber went off at express speed, bound for the next station which was
a lamp-post. A signalman’s life on the Carlington Road line was a
lonely one, and it was also a very tiring one, when any obstruction
caused the signals to be up. Michael’s arm ached excruciatingly when
Rodber’s train got entangled with Garrod’s train and Macalister’s train
had to be kept from running into them. Moreover, the signalman’s life
had none of the glories of controlling other people; a signalman on the
Carlington Road line was dependent on the train for his behaviour. He
was not allowed to interfere with the free running of any freight, but
if the engine-driver insisted he had to let him go past, and if there
was an accident, he was blamed. A signalman’s life was lonely, tiring,
humiliating and dangerous.
These few fine days of mid-September went quickly by and one evening
Rodber said casually, almost cruelly it seemed to Michael:
“Well, see you to-morrow in the break, young Fane.”
Michael wondered what on earth a ‘break’ was; he longed to ask Rodber,
but he dared not display at the very beginning of his career what would
evidently be a disgraceful ignorance, and so he said that he would see
Rodber in the ‘break’ to-morrow. He asked Miss Carthew when he got home
what a ‘break’ was, and she told him it was a large wagonette sometimes
driven by four horses. Michael was very much puzzled, but thought
school would be fun if large wagonettes were commonplace objects of
school life, and dreamed that night of driving furiously with Rodber in
a gigantic mail-cart along the Hammersmith Road.
At breakfast Miss Carthew asked Michael if he would like
her to come with him. He thought for a moment, and wished that
Rodber had invited him to accompany him that first morning.
“You know, it’s for you to choose, Michael,” said Miss Carthew.
“Well, I would like you to come,” said Michael at last.
So at ten minutes past nine they set out. All sorts of boys were going
to school along the Hammersmith Road, boys of every size carrying
satchels or bags or loose bundles of books. Most of them wore the
Jacobean cap, and Michael eyed them with awe; but many wore the cap of
St. James’ Preparatory School, and these Michael eyed with curiosity as
well as awe. He spoke very little during the walk and felt all the way
a sinking of the heart. When actually he reached the gate of Randell
House, the less formal appellation of St. James’ Preparatory School, he
longed to turn back with Miss Carthew, as he thought with sentimental
pangs of the pleasant schoolroom and of Stella sitting by Miss Carthew,
learning to read through a sunlit morning.
“Don’t come in with me,” he whispered.
“Quite right,” said Miss Carthew approvingly. “Much better without me.”
“And don’t wave, will you?” he begged. Then with an effort he joined
the stream of boys walking confidently through the big gate.
In the entrance hall a ginger-haired foxy-faced man in a green uniform
said sharply:
“New boy?”
Michael nodded.
“Stand on one side, please. Mr. Randell will see you presently.”
Michael waited. He noticed with pride that the boy next to him
had brought with him either his mother or his sister or his
governess. Michael felt very superior and was
glad he had resisted the temptation to ask Miss Carthew to
come in with him. He noticed how curiously the other boys eyed
this lady and fancied that they threw contemptuous glances at
the boy who had introduced her. Michael was very glad indeed
that he had let Miss Carthew turn back.
Chapter VII: _Randell House_
T HE preliminaries of Michael’s career at St. James’
Preparatory School passed in a dream-like confusion of thought
and action. First of all he waited anxiously in the
Headmaster’s study in an atmosphere of morocco-leather and
large waste-paper baskets. Like every other room in which
Michael had waited, whether of dentist or doctor, the outlook
from the window was gloomy and the prospect within was
depressing. He was glad when Mr. Randell led him and several
other boys towards the First Form, where in a dream, peopled by
the swinging legs of many boys, he learnt from a scarlet book
that while Cornelia loved Julia, Julia returned Cornelia’s
affection. When this fact was established in both English and
Latin, all the boys shuffled to their desks and the record of a
great affection was set down largely and painfully.
1.Cornelia Juliam amat. 2.Julia Corneliam amat.
Blotted and smudged and sprawling though it ultimately
appeared, Michael felt a great satisfaction in having dealt
successfully with two nominatives, two accusatives and a verb.
The first part of the morning passed away quickly in the
history of this simple love. At eleven o’clock a shrill
electric bell throbbed through the school, and Michael, almost
before he knew what was happening, was carried in a torrent of
boys towards the playground. Michael had never felt supreme
loneliness, even at night, until he stood in the middle of that
green prairie of recreation,
distinguishing nobody, a very small creature in a throng of
chattering giants. Some of these giants, who usually walked
about arm in arm, approached him.
“Hullo, are you a new kid?”
Michael breathed his ‘yes.’
“What’s your name?”
With an effort Michael remembered Rodber’s warning and replied simply:
“Fane.”
“What’s your Christian name?”
This was a terribly direct attack, and Michael was wondering whether it
would be best to run quickly out of the playground, to keep silence or
to surrender the information, when the quick and authoritative voice of
Rodber flashed from behind him.
“Fish and find out, young Biden.”
“Who are you calling young, young Rodber?”
“You,” said Rodber. “So you’d jolly well better scoot off and leave
this kid alone.”
“Church said I was to collar all the new kids for his army,” Biden
explained.
“Did he? Well, this kid’s in our army, so sucks! And you can tell young
Church that Pearson and me are going to jolly well lam him at four
o’clock,” announced Rodber very fiercely.
“Why don’t you tell him yourself?” asked Biden, whose teeth seemed to
project farther and farther from his mouth as his indignation grew.
“All right, Toothy Biden,” jeered Rodber. “We’ll tell the whole of your
rotten army at four o’clock, when we give you the biggest lamming
you’ve ever had. Come on, young Fane,” he went on, and Michael,
somewhat perturbed by the prospect of being involved in these
encounters, followed at his heels.
“Look here,” said Rodber presently, “you’d better
come and show yourself to Pearson. He’s the captain of our
army; and for goodness’ sake look a bit cheerful.”
Michael forced an uncomfortable grin such as photographers conjure.
Under the shade of a gigantic tree stood Pearson the leader, languidly
eating a very small and very unripe pear.
“Hullo, Pinky,” he drawled.
“I say, Pearson,” said Rodber in a reverent voice, “I know this kid at
home. He’s awfully keen to be allowed to join your army.”
Pearson scarcely glanced at Michael.
“All right. Swear him in. I’ve got a new oath written down in a book at
home, but he can take the old one.”
Pearson yawned and threw away the core of the pear.
“He’s awfully glad he’s going to join your army, Pearson. Aren’t you,
young Fane?”
“Yes, awfully glad,” Michael echoed.
“It’s the best army,” said Pearson simply.
“Oh, easily,” Rodber agreed
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