Part 21

The door closed behind the little servant, and Oswald found himself in a house far more heavily charged with memories than he could have expected. The furniture had been but little altered; it was the morning time again, the shadow masses fell in the same places, it had just the same atmosphere of quiet expectation it had had on that memorable day before the door beyond had opened and Dolly had appeared, subdued and ashamed, to tell him of the act that severed them for ever. How living she seemed here by virtue of those inanimate things! Had that door opened now he would have expected to see her standing there again. And he was alive still, strong and active, altered just a little by a touch of fever and six short years of experience, but the same thing of impulse and desire and anger, and she had gone beyond time and space, beyond hunger or desire. He had walked between this window and this fireplace on these same bricks on which he was pacing now, spitting abuse at her, a man mad with shame and thwarted desire. Never had he forgiven her, or stayed his mind to think what life had been for her, until she was dead. That outbreak, with gesticulating hands and an angry, grimacing face, had been her last memory of him. What a broken image he had made of himself in her mind! And now he could never set things right with her, never tell her of his belated understanding and pity. “I was a weak thing, confused and torn between my motives. Why did you—you who were my lover—why did you not help me after I had stumbled?” So the still phantom in that room reproached him, a phantom of his own creation, for Dolly had never reproached him; to the end she had had no reproaches in her heart for any one but herself because of their disaster.

“Hold tight to love, little people,” he whispered. “Hold tight to love.... But we don’t, we don’t....”

Never before had Oswald so felt the tremendous pitifulness of life. He felt that if he stayed longer in this room he must cry out. He walked to the garden door and stood looking at the empty flagstone path between the dahlias and sunflowers.

It was all as if he had but left it yesterday, except for the heartache that now mingled with the sunshine.

“Pat—whack—pat—whack”; he scarcely heeded that rhythmic noise.

Peter had gone out of his head altogether. He walked slowly along the pathway towards the little arbour that overhung the Weald. Then, turning, he discovered Peter with a bat in his hand, regarding him....

Directly Oswald saw Peter he marvelled that he had not been eager to see him before. The boy was absurdly like Dolly; he had exactly the same smile; and directly he saw the gaunt figure of his one-eyed guardian he cried out, “It’s Nobby!” with a voice that might have been hers. There was a squeak of genuine delight in his voice. He wasn’t at all the sturdy little thing in a pinafore that Oswald remembered. He seemed indeed at the first glance just a thin, flat-chested little Dolly in grey flannel trousers.

He had obviously been bored before this happy arrival of Oswald. He had been banging a rubber ball against the scullery with a cricket-bat and counting hits and misses. It is a poor entertainment. Oswald did not realize how green his memory had been kept by the Bungo-Peter saga, and Peter’s prompt recognition after six years flattered him.

The two approached one another slowly, taking each other in.

“You remember me?” said Oswald superfluously.

“Don’t I just! You promised me a lion’s skin.”

“So I did.”

He could not bear to begin this new relationship as a defaulter. “It’s on its way to you,” he equivocated, making secret plans.

Peter, tucking his bat under his arm and burying his hands in his trouser pockets, drew still nearer. At a distance of four feet or thereabouts he stopped short and Oswald stopped short. Peter regarded this still incredible home-comer with his head a little on one side.

“It was you, used to tell me stories.”

“You don’t remember my telling you stories?”

“I do. About the Ba-ganda who live in U-ganda. Don’t you remember how you used to put out my Zulus and my elephants and lions on the floor and say it was Africa. You taught us roaring like lions—Joan and me. Don’t you remember?”

Oswald remembered. He remembered himself on all fours with the children on the floor of the sunny playroom upstairs, and some one sometimes standing, sometimes sitting above the game, some one who listened as keenly as the children, some one at whom he talked about that world of lakes as large as seas, and of trackless, sunless forests and of park-like glades and wildernesses of flowers, and about strings of loaded porters and of encounters with marvelling people who had never before set eyes on a European....

§ 9

The idea that the guardianship of Peter was just a little duty to be seen to, vanished at the sight of him in favour of the realization of a living relationship. There are moments when small boys of ten in perfect health and condition can look the smallest, flimsiest, and most pathetic of created things—and at the same time preternaturally valiant and intelligent. They take on a likeness to sacred flames that may at any moment flicker out. More particularly does this unconscious camouflage of delicacy occur in the presence of parents and guardians already in a state of self-reproach and emotional disorder. Mr. Grimes with an eye to growth had procured a grey flannel suit a little too large for Peter, but it never occurred to Oswald that the misfit could be due to anything but a swift and ominous shrinkage of the boy. He wanted to carry him off forthwith to beer and cream and sea-bathing.

But these were feelings he knew he must not betray.

“I must tell you some more stories,” he said. “I’ve come back to England to live.”

“_Here?_”—brightly.

“Well, near here. But I shall see a lot of you now, Peter.”

“I’ll like that,” said Peter. “I’ve often thought of you....”

A pause.

“You broken your arm?” said Peter.

“Not so bad as that. I’ve got to have some bits of shell taken out.”

“That Egyptian shell? When you got the V.C.?”

“I never told you of the Egyptian shell?” asked Oswald.

“Mummy did. Once. Long ago.”

Another pause.

“This garden’s not so greatly altered, Peter,” said Oswald.

“There’s a Friendship’s Garden up that end,” said Peter, indicating the end by a movement of his head. “But it isn’t much. Aunt Phœbe started it and forgot it. Every one who came was to plant something. And me and Joan have gardens, but they’ve got all weedy now.”

“Let’s have a look at it all,” said Oswald, and guardian and ward strolled towards the steep.

“The Dahlias are splendid this year,” Oswald remarked, “and these Japanese roses are covered with berries. Splendid, aren’t they? One can make a jelly of them. Quite a good jelly. And let me see, wasn’t there a little summerhouse at the end of this path where one looked over the Weald? Ah! here it is. Hardly changed at all.”

He sat down. Here he had talked with Dolly and taken her hand....

He bestirred himself to talk.

“And exactly how old are you now, Peter?”

“Ten years and two months,” said Peter.

“We’ll have to find a school for you.”

“Have you been in Africa since I saw you?” Peter asked, avoiding the topic.

“Since you saw me going off,” said Oswald, and the man glanced at the boy and the boy glanced at the man, and each was wondering what the other remembered. “I’ve been in Uganda all the time. There’s been fighting and working. Some day you must go to Uganda and see all that has been done. We’ve made a good railway and good roads and telegraphs. We’ve put down robbers and cruelty.”

“And shot a lot of lions?”

“Plenty. The lions were pretty awful for a bit. About Nairobi and along the line.”

“Shot ’em when they were coming at you?”

“One was coming straight at me.”

“That’s my skin,” said Peter.

Oswald made no answer.

“I’d like to go to Africa,” said Peter.

“You shall.”

He decided to begin at once upon his neglected task of making an Imperial citizen according to the ideas that prevailed before the advent of the New Imperialism. “That sort of thing,” he said, “is what we Englishmen are for, you know, Peter. What our sort of Englishman is for anyhow. We have to go about the world and make roads and keep the peace and see fair play. We’ve got to kill big beasts and climb hard mountains. That’s the job of the Englishman. He’s a sort of policeman. A sort of working guardian. Not a nosy slave-driver trying to get rich. He chases off slave-drivers. All the world’s his beat. India, Africa, China, and the East, all the seas of the world. This little fat green country, all trim and tidy and set with houses and gardens, isn’t much of a land for a man, you know—unless he’s an invalid. It’s a good land to grow up in and come back to die in. Or rest in. But in between, no!”

“No,” said Peter.

“No.”

“But you haven’t come back to die, Uncle Nobby?”

“No fear. But I’ve had to come back. I’m resting. This old arm, you know, and all that sort of thing. Just for a time.... And besides I want to see a lot of you.”

“Yes.”

“You have to grow up here and learn all you can, science and all sorts of things, so that you can be a useful man—wherever you have to go.”

“Africa,” said Peter.

“Africa, perhaps. And that’s why one has to go to school and college—and learn all about it.”

“They haven’t taught me much about it yet,” said Peter.

“Well, you haven’t been to much in the way of schools,” said Oswald.

“Are there better schools?”

“No end. We’re going to find one,” said Oswald.

“I wish school was over,” said Peter.

“Why? You’ve got no end to learn yet.”

“I want to begin,” said Peter, looking out across the tumbled gentleness of the Weald.

“Begin school?”

“No, begin—Africa, India—doing things.”

“School first,” said Oswald.

“Are there schools where you learn about guns and animals and mountains and foreign people?” said Peter.

“There must be,” said Oswald. “We’ll find something.”

“Where you don’t do Latin and parsing and ’straction of the square root.”

“Oh! those things have their place.”

“Did you have to do them, Uncle Nobby?”

“Rather.”

“Were they useful to you?”

“At times—in a way. Of course those things are good as training, you know—awfully good. Harden up the mental muscles, Peter.”

Peter made no reply to that.

Presently Peter said, “Shall I learn about machines?”

“When you’ve done some mathematics, Peter.”

“I’d like to fly,” said Peter.

“That’s far away yet.”

“There was a boy at that school, his father was an engineer; and he said that flying machines were coming quite soon.”

This was beyond Oswald’s range.

“The French have got a balloon that steers about,” he said. “That’s as near as we are likely to come to flying for a long time yet.”

“This boy said that he meant a real flying machine, not a balloon. It was to be heavier than air. It would fly like a kite or a bird.”

“I doubt if we’ll see that in my lifetime,” said Oswald; “or yours,” blind to the fate that had marked Peter for its own.

“H’m,” said Peter, with a shadow falling upon one of his brightest dreams. (Nobby ought to know these things. His word ought surely to be final. Still, after all, this chap’s father was an engineer.) “I’d love to fly,” said Peter.

§ 10

Something with the decorative effect of a broad processional banner in a very High Church indeed, appeared upon the flagstone path. It was Aunt Phœbe.

She had come out into the garden half an hour before her usual time. But indeed from the moment when she had heard Oswald and Peter talking in the garden below she had been unable to write more. After some futile attempts to pick up the lost thread of her discourse, she had gone to her bedroom and revised her toilet, which was often careless in the morning, so as to be more expressive of her personality. She was wearing a long djibbah-like garment with a richly embroidered yoke, she had sandals over her brown stockings, and rather by way of symbol of authorship than for any immediate use she bore a big leather portfolio. There was moreover now a gold-mounted fountain pen amidst the other ingredients of the cheerful chatelaine that had once delighted Peter’s babyhood.

She seemed a fuller, more confident person than Oswald remembered. She came eloquent with apologies. “I have to make an inexorable rule,” she said, “against disturbances. As if I were a man writer instead of a mere woman. Between nine and one I am a woman enclosed—cloistered—refused. Sacred hours of self-completeness. Unspeakably precious to me. Visitors are not even announced. It is a law—inflexible.”

“We must all respect our work,” said Oswald.

“It’s over now,” said Aunt Phœbe, smiling like the sun after clouds. “It’s over now for the day. I am just human—until tomorrow again.”

“You are writing a book?” Oswald asked rather ineptly.

“The Stitchwoman; Series Three. Much is expected; much must be given. I am the slave now of a Following.”

Aunt Phœbe went to the wall and stood with her fine profile raised up over the view. She was a little breathless and twitching slightly, but very magnificent. Most of her hair was tidy. “Our old Weald, does it look the same?” she asked.

“Quite the same,” said Oswald, standing up beside her.

“But not to me,” she said. “Indeed not to me. To me every day it is different. Always wide, always wonderful, but different, always different. I know it so well.”

Oswald felt she had worked a “catch” on him. He was faintly nettled.

“Still,” he said, “fundamentally one must recognize that it’s the same Weald.”

“I wonder,” said Aunt Phœbe suddenly, looking at him very intently, and then, as if she tasted the word, “Fundamentally?”

“I don’t know,” she added.

Oswald was too much annoyed to reply.

“And what do you think of your new charge?” she asked. “I don’t know whether Peter quite understands that yet. The young squire goes to the men. He casts aside childish things, and rides out in his little Caparison to join the ranks. Do you know that, Peter? Mr. Sydenham is now your sole guardian.”

Peter looked at Oswald and smiled shyly, and his cheeks flushed.

“I think we shall get on together,” said Oswald.

“Would that it ended there! You take the girl too?”

“It is not my doing,” said Oswald.

Aunt Phœbe addressed the Weald.

“Poor Dolly! So it is that the mother soul cheats itself. Through the ages—always self-abnegation for the woman.” She turned to Oswald. “If she had had time to think I am certain she would not have excluded women from this trust. Certain. What have men to do with education? With the education of a woman more particularly. The Greater from the Less. But the thing is done. It has been a great experiment, a wonderful experiment; teaching, I learnt—but I doubt if you will understand that.”

There was a slight pause. “What exactly was the nature of the experiment?” asked Oswald modestly.

“Feminine influence. Dominant.”

Oswald considered. “I don’t know if you include Lady Charlotte,” he threw out.

“Oh!” said Aunt Phœbe.

“But she has played her part, I gather.”

“Feminine! No! She is completely a Man-made Woman. Quintessentially the Pampered Squaw. Holding her position by her former charms. A Sex Residuum. Relict. This last outrage. An incident—merely. Her course of action was dictated for her. A Man. A mere solicitor. One Grimes. The flimsiest creature! An aspen leaf—but Male. Male.”

Stern thoughts kept Aunt Phœbe silent for a time. Then she remarked very quietly, “I shook him. I shook him _well_.”

“I hope still to have the benefit of your advice,” said Oswald gravely.

“Nay,” she said. But she was pleased. “A shy comment, perhaps. But the difference will be essential. Don’t expect me to guide you as you would wish to be guided. That phase is over between men and women. We hand the children over—since the law will have it so. Take them!”

And then addressing the Weald, Aunt Phœbe, in vibrating accents, uttered a word that was to be the keynote of a decade of feminine activities.

“The Vote,” said Aunt Phœbe, getting a wonderful emotional buzz into her voice. “The Vo-o-o-o-o-te.”

§ 11

So it was that Oswald found himself fully invested with his responsibilities.

There was a terrifying suggestion in Aunt Phœbe’s manner that he would presently have to clap Peter’s hat on, make up a small bundle of Peter’s possessions, and fare forth with him into the wide world, picking up the convalescent at Windsor on the way, but that was a misapprehension of Aunt Phœbe’s intentions. And, after all, it was Peter’s house and garden if it came to that. For a time at least things could go on as they were. But the task of direction was now fully his. Whether these two young people were properly educated or not, whether they too became slackers and inadequate or worthy citizens of this great empire, rested now entirely in his hands.

“They must have the best,” he said....

The best was not immediately apparent.

From Chastlands and his two rooms at the Climax Club Oswald conducted his opening researches for the educational best, and whenever he was at Chastlands he came over nearly every day to The Ingle-Nook on his bicycle. It was a well-remembered road. Scarcely was there a turn in it that did not recall some thought of the former time when he had ridden over daily for a sight of Dolly; he would leave his bicycle in a clump of gorse by the high road that was surely an outgrown fragment of the old bush in which he had been wont to leave it six years before; he would walk down the same rusty path, and his heart would quicken as it used to quicken at the thought of seeing Dolly. But presently Peter began to oust Dolly from his thoughts. Sometimes Peter would be standing waiting for him by the high road. Sometimes Peter, mounted on a little outgrown bicycle, would meet him on the purple common half way.

A man and a boy of ten are perhaps better company than a man and a boy of fifteen. There’s so much less egotism between them. At any rate Peter and Oswald talked of education and travel and politics and philosophy with unembarrassed freedom. Oswald, like most childless people, had had no suspicion of what the grey matter of a bright little boy’s brain can hold. He was amazed at Peter’s views and curiosities. It was Oswald’s instinct never to talk “down” to man, woman or child. He had never thought about it, but if you had questioned him he would have told you that that was the sort of thing one didn’t do. And this instinct gave him a wide range of available companionship. Peter had never conceived such good company as Oswald. You could listen to Oswald for hours. They discoursed upon every topic out of dreamland. And sometimes they came very close even to that dreamland where Bungo Peter adventured immortally. Oswald would feel a transfiguring presence, a touch of fantasy and half suspect their glorious companion.

Much of their talk was a kind of story-telling.

“How should we go to the Congo Forest?” Peter would ask. “Would one go by Nairobi?”

“No, that’s the other way. We’d have to go——”

And forthwith Nobby and Peter were getting their stuff together and counting how many porters they would need....

“One day perhaps we’d come upon a place ’fested with crocodiles,” Peter would say.

“We would. You would be pushing rather ahead of the party with your guns, looking for anything there might be—pushing through tall reeds far above your head,” Oswald would oblige.

“You’d be with me,” insisted Peter....

It was really story-telling....

It was Peter’s habit in those days when he was alone to meditate on paper. He would cover sheet after sheet with rapidly drawn scenes of adventure. One day Oswald found himself figuring in one of these dream pictures. He and Peter were leading an army in battle. “Capture of Ten War Elephants” was the legend thereon. But he realized how clearly the small boy saw him. Nothing was spared of the darkened, browless side of his face with its asymmetrical glass eye, the figure of him was very long and lean and bent, with its arm still in its old sling; and it was drawn manifestly with the utmost confidence and admiration and love....

Peter’s hostility to schools was removed very slowly. The lessons at High Cross had scarred him badly, and about Miss Mills clung associations of the utmost dreariness. Still it was Oswald’s instinct to consult the young man on his destiny.

“There’s a lot you don’t know yet,” said Oswald.

“Can’t I read it out of books?” asked Peter.

“You can’t read everything out of books,” said Oswald. “There’s things you ought to see and handle. And things you can only learn by doing.”

Oswald wanted Peter to plan his own school.

Peter considered. “I’d like lessons about the insides of animals, and about the people in foreign countries—and how engines work—and all that sort of thing.”

“Then we must find a school for you where they teach all that sort of thing,” said Oswald, as though it was merely a question of ordering goods from the Civil Service Stores....

He had much to learn yet about education.

§ 12

But Oswald was still only face to face with the half of his responsibility.

One morning he found Peter at the schoolroom table very busy cutting big letters out of white paper. Beside him was a long strip of Turkey twill from the dressing-up box that The Ingle-Nook had plagiarized from the Sheldricks. “I’m getting ready for Joan,” said Peter. “I’m going to put ’Welcome’ on this for over the garden gate. And there’s to be a triumphal arch.”

Hitherto Peter had scarcely betrayed any interest in Joan at all, now he seemed able to think of no one else, and Oswald found himself reduced abruptly from the position of centre of Peter’s universe to a mere helper in the decorations. But he was beginning to understand the small boy by this time, and he took the withdrawal of the limelight philosophically.

When Aunt Phyllis and Joan arrived they found the flagged path from the “Welcome” gate festooned with chains of coloured paper (bought with Peter’s own pocket-money and made by him and Oswald, with some slight assistance and much moral support from Aunt Phœbe in the evening) to the door. The triumphal arch had been achieved rather in the Gothic style by putting the movable Badminton net posts into a sort of trousering of assorted oriental cloths from the dressing-up chest, and crossing two heads of giant Heracleum between them. Peter stood at the door in the white satin suit his innocent vanity loved—among other rôles it had served for Bassanio, Prince Hal, and Antony (over the body of Cæsar)—with a face of extraordinary solemnity. Behind him stood Uncle Nobby.

Joan wasn’t quite the Joan that Peter expected. She was still wan from her illness and she had grown several inches. She was as tall as he. And she was white-faced, so that her hair seemed blacker than ever, and her eyes were big and lustrous. She came walking slowly down the path with her eyes wide open. There was a difference, he felt, in her movement as she came forward, though he could not have said what it was; there was more grace in Joan now and less vigour. But it was the same Joan’s voice that cried, “Oh, Petah! It’s lovely!” She stood before him for a moment and then threw her arms about him. She hugged him and kissed him, and Uncle Nobby knew that it was the smear of High Cross School that made him wriggle out of her embrace and not return her kisses.

But immediately he took her by the hand.

“It’s better in the playroom, Joan,” he said.

“All right, Joan, go on with him,” said Oswald, and came forward to meet Aunt Phyllis. Aunt Phœbe was on the staircase a little aloof from these things, as became a woman of intellect, and behind Aunt Phyllis came Mary, and behind Mary came the Limpsfield cabman with Aunt Phyllis’s trunk upon his shoulder, and demolished the triumphal arch. But Peter did not learn of that disaster until later, and then he did not mind; it had served its purpose.