Part 12

“Darkness Ogre” was more exciting in a dreadful kind of way than Ogre. It was only played in winter, and all the blinds and curtains were drawn and all the lights put out. You didn’t need to hide. You just got into a corner and stood still, holding your breath. And the Ogre took off his boots and put on felt slippers, and all the noise he made was a rustle and a creak, and you were never sure that it was him—unless he betrayed himself by whispering “Yumpty-Ow.” He creaked rather more than most, but that was a matter for delicate perceptions. There were frightful moments when you could hear him moving about and feeling about in the very room where you stood frozen, getting nearer and nearer to you. You had to bite your knuckles not to scream.

Once when they were playing Darkness Ogre, Peter was in a corner of Mrs. Sheldrick’s room with Sydney Sheldrick, the third of the Sheldrick sisters, and they were crowding up very close together. And suddenly Sydney put her arms round Peter and began to kiss his ears and cheek. Peter resisted, pushed her away from him. “Ssh,” said Sydney. “You be my little sweetheart.” Peter resisted this proposal with vigour. Then they heard the Ogre creaking down the passage. Sydney drew Peter closer to her, but Peter struggled away from her and made a dash for the further door. He was almost caught. He escaped because somebody else started into flight from the corner of the landing outside the studio and drew the Ogre off the scent.

Afterwards Peter avoided secluded corners when Sydney was about.

But somehow he could not forget what had happened. He kept on thinking of Sydney for a time, and after that she seemed always to be a little more important than the rest of his older schoolmates. Perhaps it was because she took more notice of him. She wanted to help his work, and she would ruffle his hair or pinch his ear as she went past him. She wore a peculiar long jersey so that you could distinguish her from the others quite a long way off. She had level brows and a radiant smile, her shoulders were strong and her legs and feet were very pretty. He noted how well she walked. She always seemed to be looking at Peter. When he shut his eyes and thought of her he could remember her better than he could other people. He did not know whether he liked her or disliked her more than the others; but he perceived that she had in some way become exceptional.

§ 7

Young Winterbaum was another of Miss Murgatroyd’s pupils who made a lasting impression on Peter. He was dark-eyed and fuzzy-haired, the contour of his face had a curious resemblance to that of a sheep, and his head was fixed on in a different way so that he looked more skyward and down his face at you. His expression was one of placid self-satisfaction; his hands twisted about, and ever and again he pranced as he walked. He had a superfluity of gesture, and his voice was a fat voice with the remotest possible hint of a lisp. He had two little round, jolly, frizzy, knock-about sisters who ousted Joan and Peter from their position as the little darlings of the school. The only boy in the school who at all resembled him was young Cuspard, but young Cuspard had not the same bold lines either in his face or conduct; he was red-haired, his nose was a snout instead of a hook, and instead of rather full, well-modelled lips he had that sort of loose mouth that blows. Young Winterbaum said his nose had the Norman arch, and that it showed he was aristocratic and one of the conquerors of England. He was second cousin to a peer, Lord Contango. It was only slowly that Peter came to apprehend the full peculiarity of young Winterbaum.

The differences in form and gesture of the two boys were only the outward and visible signs of profound differences between their imaginations. For example, the heroes of Peter’s romancings were wonderful humorous persons, Nobbys and Bungo Peters, and his themes adventures, struggles, quests that left them neither richer nor poorer than before in a limitless, undisciplined, delightful world, but young Winterbaum’s hero was himself, and he thought in terms of achievement and acquisition. He was a King and the strongest and bravest and richest of all Kings. He had wonderful horses, wonderful bicycles, wonderful catapults and an astonishing army. He counted these things. He walked from the other direction to school, and though no one knew it but himself, he walked in procession. Guards went before him and behind him, and ancient councillors walked beside him. And always he was going on to fresh triumphs and possessions.

He had a diplomatic side to him. He was prepared to negotiate upon the matter of kingship. One day he reached the crest above the school while it was still early, and found Joan and Peter sitting and surveying the playground, waiting for the first bell before they ran down. He stood beside Peter.

“All this is my Kingdom,” he said, waving both his arms about over the Weald. “I am King of all this, I have a great army.”

“Not over this part,” said Peter modestly but firmly.

“You be King up to here,” said young Winterbaum. “You have an army too.”

“_I_ want a kingdom too,” said Joan.

Young Winterbaum proposed a fair division of Peter’s kingdom between Joan and Peter.

Peter let Joan have what young Winterbaum gave her. It took some moments to grasp this new situation. “My kingdom,” he said suddenly, “goes right over to those ponds there and up to the church.”

“You can’t,” said young Winterbaum. “_I’ve_ claimed that.”

Peter grunted. It did not seem worth while to have a kingdom unless those ponds were included.

“But if you like I’ll give your people permission to go over all that country whenever they like.”

Peter still felt there was a catch in it somewhere.

“I’ve got a hundred and seven soldiers,” said young Winterbaum. “And six guns that shoot.”

Joan was surprised and shocked to hear that Peter had five hundred soldiers.

“Each of my soldiers, each one, counts as a thousand men,” said young Winterbaum, getting ahead again.

Then the first bell rang and suspended the dispute. But Peter went down to the school with a worried feeling. He wished he had thought of claiming all Surrey as his kingdom first. It was a lamentable oversight. He was disposed to ask the eldest Sheldrick girl whether young Winterbaum really had a _right_ to claim all the Weald. There was a reason in these things....

Young Winterbaum had an extraordinary knack of accentuating possessions. Joan and Peter were very pleased and proud to have bicycles; the first time they arrived upon them at the school young Winterbaum took possession of them and examined them thoroughly. They were really good bicycles, excellent bicycles, he explained, and new, not second-hand; but they were not absolutely the best sort. The best sort nowadays had wood rims. He was going to have a bicycle with wood rims. And there ought to be a Bowden brake in front as well as behind; the one in front was only a spoon brake. It was a pity to have a spoon brake; it would injure the tyre. He doubted if the tubing was helical tubing. And the bell wasn’t a “King of the Road.” It was no good for Peter to pretend it had a good sound, “the King of the Road” had a better sound. When young Winterbaum got his bicycle _his_ bell was going to be a “King of the Road, 1902 pattern.”...

Young Winterbaum was always doing this with things, bringing them up into the foreground of life, grading them, making them competitive and irritating. There was no getting ahead of him. He made Peter feel that the very dust in the Winterbaum dustbin was Grade A. Standard I. while The Ingle-Nook was satisfied with any old makeshift stuff.

Young Winterbaum’s clothes were made by Samuelson’s, the best boys’ tailor in London; there was no disputing it because there was an advertisement in _The Daily Telegraph_ that said as much; he was in trousers and Peter had knickerbockers; he wore sock suspenders, and he had his name in gold letters inside his straw hat. Also he had a pencil-case like no other pencil-case in the school. He was always proposing a comparison of pencil-cases.

His imagination turned precociously and easily to romance and love and the beauty of women. He read a number of novelettes that he had borrowed from his sister’s nurse. He imparted to Peter the idea of a selective pairing off of the species, an idea for which _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ had already prepared a favourable soil. It was after he had seen Joan dance her dance when that play was performed and heard the unstinted applause that greeted her, that he decided to honour her above all the school with his affections. Previously he had wavered between the eldest Sheldrick girl because she was the biggest, tallest and heaviest girl in the school (though a formidable person to approach) and little Minnie Restharrow who was top in so many classes. But now he knew that Joan was “it,” and that he was in love with her.

But some instinct told him that Peter had to be dealt with.

He approached Peter in this manner.

“Who’s your girl, Peter?” said young Winterbaum. “Who is your own true love? You’ve got to have some one.”

Peter drew a bow at a venture, and subconscious processes guided the answer. “Sydney Sheldrick,” he said.

Young Winterbaum seemed to snatch even before Peter had done speaking. “I’m going to have Joan,” he said. “She dances better than any one. She’s going to be, oh!—a lovely woman.”

Peter was dimly aware of an error. He had forgotten Joan. “I’m going to have Joan too,” he said.

“You can’t have two sweethearts,” said young Winterbaum.

“I _can_. I’m going to. I’m different.”

“But Joan’s mine already.”

“Get out,” said Peter indignantly. “You can’t have her.”

“But she’s mine.”

“Shut it,” said Peter vulgarly.

“I’ll fight you a duel for her. We will fight a real duel for her.”

“You hadn’t better begin,” said Peter.

“But I mean—you know—a duel, Peter.”

“Let’s fight one now,” said Peter, “’f you think you’re going to have Joan for _your_ girl.”

“We will fight with swords.”

“Sticks.”

“Yes, but _call_ them swords. And we shall have to have seconds and a doctor.”

“Joan’s my second.”

“You can’t have Joan. _My_ second’s the Grand Duke of Surrey-Sussex.”

“Then mine’s Bungo-Peter.”

“But we’ve got no sticks.”

“I know where there’s two sticks,” said Peter. “Under the stairs. And we can fight in the shrubbery over by the fence.”

The sticks were convenient little canes. “They ought to have hilts,” said young Winterbaum. “You ever fenced?”

“Not much,” said Peter guardedly.

“I’ve often fenced with my cousin, the honourable Ralph—you know. Like this—guard. One. Two. You’ve got to have a wrist.”

They repaired to the field of battle. “We stand aside while the seconds pace out the ground,” explained young Winterbaum. “Now we shake hands. Now we take our places.”

They proceeded to strike fencer-like attitudes. Young Winterbaum suddenly became one of the master swordsmen of the world, but Peter was chiefly intent on where he should hit young Winterbaum. He had got to hit him and hurt him a lot, or else he would get Joan. They crossed swords. Then young Winterbaum feinted and Peter hit him hard on the arm. Then young Winterbaum thrust Peter in the chest, and began to explain at once volubly that Peter was now defeated and dead and everything conclusively settled.

But nobody was going to take away Peter’s Joan on such easy terms. Peter, giving his antagonist no time to complete his explanation, slashed him painfully on the knuckles. “I’m _not_ dead,” said Peter, slashing again. “I’m not dead. See? Come on!”

Whereupon young Winterbaum cried out, as it were with a trumpet, in a loud and grief-stricken voice. “Now I shall _hurt_ you. That’s too much,” and swiped viciously at Peter’s face and raised a weal on Peter’s cheek. Whereupon Peter, feeling that Joan was slipping from him, began to rain blows upon young Winterbaum wherever young Winterbaum might be supposed to be tender, and young Winterbaum began to dance about obliquely and cry out, “Mustn’t hit my legs. Mustn’t hit my legs. Not fair. Oo-oh! my knuckles!” And after one or two revengeful slashes at Peter’s head which Peter—who had had his experiences with Joan in a rage—parried with an uplifted arm, young Winterbaum turned and ran—ran into the arms of Miss Murgatroyd, who had been attracted to the shrubbery by his cries....

It was the first fight that had ever happened in the school of St. George and the Venerable Bede since its foundation.

“He said I couldn’t fight him,” said Peter.

“He went on fighting after I’d pinked him,” said young Winterbaum.

Neither of them said a word about Joan.

So Miss Murgatroyd made a great session of the school, and the two combatants, flushed and a little heroic, sat on either side of her discourse. She said that this was the first time she had ever had to reprove any of her pupils for fighting. She hoped that never again would it be necessary for her to do so. She said that nothing we could do was quite so wicked as fighting because nothing was so flatly contradictory to our Lord’s commandment that we should love one another. The only fight we might fight with a good conscience was the good fight. In that sense we were all warriors. We were fighters for righteousness. In a sense every one was a knight and a fighter, every girl as well as every boy. Because there was no more reason why girls should not fight as well as boys. Some day she hoped this would be recognized, and girls would be given knighthoods and wear their spurs as proudly as the opposite sex. Earth was a battlefield, and none of us must be dumb driven cattle or submit to injustice or cruelty. We must not think that life was made for silken ease or self-indulgence. Let us think rather of the Red Indian perpetually in training for conflict, lean and vigorous and breathing only through his nose. No one who breathed through his or her open mouth would ever be a fighter.

At this point Miss Murgatroyd seemed to hesitate for a time. Breathing was a very attractive topic to her, and it was drawing her away from her main theme. She was, so to speak, dredging for her lost thread in the swift undertow of hygienic doctrine as one might dredge for a lost cable. She got it presently, and concluded by hoping that this would be a lesson to Philip and Peter and that henceforth they would learn that great lesson of Prince Kropotkin’s that co-operation is better than conflict.

Neither of the two combatants listened very closely to this discourse. Peter was wrestling with the question whether a hot red weal across one’s cheek is compatible with victory, and young Winterbaum with the still more subtle difficulty of whether he had been actually running away or merely stepping back when he had collided with Miss Murgatroyd, and what impression this apparently retrograde movement had made on her mind and upon the mind of Peter. Did they understand that sometimes a swordsman _had_ to go back and could go back without the slightest discredit?...

§ 8

After this incident the disposal of Joan ceased to be a topic for conversation between young Winterbaum and Peter, and presently young Winterbaum conveyed to Peter in an offhand manner that he adored Minnie Restharrow as the cleverest and most charming girl in the school. She was indeed absolutely the best thing to be got in that way. She was, he opined, cleverer even than Miss Murgatroyd. He was therefore, he intimated, in love with Minnie Restharrow. It was a great passion.

So far as Peter was concerned, he gathered, it might be.

All the canons of romance required that Peter, having fought for and won Joan, should thereupon love Joan and her only until he was of an age to marry her. As a matter of fact, having disposed of this invader of his private ascendancy over Joan, he thought no more of her in that relationship. He decided, however, that if young Winterbaum was going to have a sweetheart he must have one too, and mysterious processes of his mind indicated Sydney Sheldrick as the only possible person. It was not that Peter particularly wanted a sweetheart, but he was not going to let young Winterbaum come it over him—any more than he was going to let young Winterbaum be King of more than half of Surrey. He was profoundly bored by all this competitiveness, but obscure instincts urged him to keep his end up.

One day Miss Murgatroyd was expatiating to the mother of a prospective pupil upon the wonderful effects of coeducation in calming the passions. “The boys and girls grow up together, get used to each other, and there’s never any nonsense between them.”

“And don’t they—well, take an interest in each other?”

“Not in that way. Not in any _undesirable_ way. Such as they would if they had been morbidly separated.”

“But it seems almost unnatural for them not to take an interest.”

“Experience, I can assure you, shows otherwise,” said Miss Murgatroyd conclusively.

At that moment two figures, gravely conversing together, passed across the lawn in the middle distance; one was a well-grown girl of thirteen in a short-skirted gymnasium dress, the other a nice-looking boy of ten, knickerbockered, bare-legged, sandalled, and wearing the art green blouse of the school. They looked the most open-air and unsophisticated children of modernity it was possible to conceive. This is what they were saying:

“Sydney, when I grow up I’m going to marry you. You got to be my sweetheart. See?”

“You darling! Is that what you have to tell me? I didn’t think you loved me a little bit.”

“I’m going to marry you,” said Peter, sticking to the facts of the case.

“I’d hug you. Only old Muggy is looking out of the window. But the very first chance I get I’ll kiss you. And you’ll have to kiss me back, mind, Peter.”

“Where some one can’t see us,” Peter stipulated.

“Oh! I _love_ spooning,” said the ardent Sydney. “’Member when I kissed you before?...”

“The girls refine the boys and the whole atmosphere is just a _family_ atmosphere,” Miss Murgatroyd was explaining at the window.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH THE HIGH CROSS PREPARATORY SCHOOL

§ 1

From the time when he was christened until he was ten, Lady Charlotte Sydenham remained only a figure in the remotest background of Peter’s life. Once or twice he saw her in the downstairs room at The Ingle-Nook with his aunts bristling defensively beside her, and once she came to the school, and each time she looked at him with a large, hard, hostile smile and said: “And ha-ow’s Peter?” and then with a deepening disapproval: “Ha-ow’s Joan?” But that did not mean that Lady Charlotte had done with Joan and Peter, nor that she had relinquished in the slightest degree her claims to dominate their upbringing. She was just letting them grow up a little “according to their mother’s ideas, poor woman,” and biding her time. She wrote every now and then to Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe, just to remind them of her authority, and she wrote two long and serious letters to Oswald about what was to be done. He answered her briefly in such terms as: “Let well alone. Religion comes later.” Oswald had never returned to England. He had been in Uganda now for five long years, and her fear of him was dying down. She was beginning to think that perhaps he did not care very much for Joan and Peter. He had had blackwater fever again. Perhaps he would never come home any more.

Then in the years 1901 and 1902 she had been much occupied by a special campaign against various London socialists that had ended in a libel case. She was quite convinced that all socialists were extremely immoral people, she was greatly alarmed at the spread of socialism, and so she wrote and employed a secretary to write letters to a number of people marked “private and confidential,” warning them against this or that prominent socialist. In these she made various definite statements which, as her counsel vainly tried to argue, were not to be regarded as statements of fact so much as illustrations of the tendency of socialist teaching. She was tackled by a gentleman in a red necktie named Bamshot, of impregnable virtue, in whom her free gift of “numerous illegitimate children” had evoked no gratitude. Her efforts to have him “thoroughly cross-examined” produced no sympathy in either judge or jury. All men, she realized, are wicked and anxious to shield each other. She left the court with a passionate and almost uncontrollable desire to write more letters about Bamshot and more, worse than ever, and with much nastier charges. And it was perhaps a subconscious effort to shift the pressure of this dangerous impulse that turned her mind to the state of spiritual neglect in which Joan and Peter were growing out of childhood.

A number of other minor causes moved her in the same direction. She had had a violent quarrel about the bill with the widow of an Anglican clergyman who kept her favourite pension at Bordighera; and she could still not forgive the establishment at Pallanza that, two years before, had refused to dismiss its head-waiter for saying “Vivent les Boers!” in her hearing. She had been taking advice about a suitable and thoroughly comfortable substitute for these resorts, and meanwhile she had stayed on in England—until there were oysters on the table. Lady Charlotte Sydenham had an unrefined appetite for oysters, and with oysters came a still less refined craving for Dublin stout. It was an odd secret weakness understood only by her domestics, and noted only by a small circle of intimate friends.

“I don’t seem to fancy anything very much today, Unwin,” Lady Charlotte used to say.

“I don’t know if you’d be tempted by a nice oyster or two, m’lady. They’re very pick-me-up things,” the faithful attendant would suggest. “It’s September now, and there’s an R in the month, so it’s safe to venture.”

“Mm.”

“And if I might make so bold as to add a ’arf bottle of good Guinness, m’lady. It’s a tonic. Run down as you are.”

Without oysters neither Lady Charlotte nor Unwin would have considered stout a proper drink for a lady. And indeed it was not a proper drink for Lady Charlotte. A very little stout sufficed to derange her naturally delicate internal chemistry. Upon the internal chemistry of Lady Charlotte her equanimity ultimately depended. There is wrath in stout....

Then Mr. Grimes, who had never ceased to hope that considerable out-of-court activities might still be developed around these two little wards, had taken great pains to bring Aunt Phœbe’s _Collected Papers of a Stitchwoman (Second Series)_ and her little precious volume _Carmen Naturæ_ before his client’s notice.

These books certainly made startling reading for Lady Charlotte. She had never seen the first “Stitchwoman” papers, she knew nothing of Swinburne, Ruskin, Carlyle, the decadents, nothing of the rich inspirations of the later Victorian period, and so the almost luscious richness of Aunt Phœbe’s imagination, her florid verbiage, her note of sensuous defiance, burst almost devastatingly upon a mind that was habituated to the ordered passions and pearly greys of Mrs. Henry Wood’s novels _More Leaves, Good Words_, and _The Quiver_.