Part 27

The first effect of the young woman upon Peter was a considerable but indeterminate excitement. It was neither pleasurable nor unpleasurable, but it hung over the giddy verge of being unpleasant. It made him want to be very large, handsome and impressive. It also made him acutely ashamed of wanting to be very large, handsome and impressive. It turned him from a simple boy into a conflict of motives. He wanted to extort admiration from Adela. Also he wanted to despise her utterly. These impulses worked out to no coherent system of remarks and gestures, and he became awkward and tongue-tied.

Adela wanted to be shown all over the house and garden. She put her arm about Joan in a manner Peter thought offensive. Then she threw back her hair at him over her shoulder and said, shooting a glance at him, “You come too.”

Cheek!

Still, she was a guest, and so a fellow had to follow with his hands in his pockets and watch his own private and particular Joan being ordered about and—what was somehow so much more exasperating—_pawed_ about.

At what seemed to be the earliest opportunity Peter excused himself, and went off to the outhouse in which he had his tools and chemicals and things. He decided he would rig up everything ready to make Sulphuretted Hydrogen—although he knew quite well that this was neither a large, handsome, nor impressive thing to do. And then he would wait for them to come along, and set the odour going.

But neither of the girls came near his Glory Hole, and he was not going to invite them. He just hovered there unvisited, waiting with his preparations and whistling soft melancholy tunes. Finally he made a lot of the gas, simply because he had got the stuff ready, and stank himself out of his Glory Hole into society again.

At supper, which had become a sort of dinner that night, Adela insisted on talking like a rather languid, smart woman of the world to Nobby. Nobby took her quite seriously. It was perfectly sickening.

“D’you hunt much?” said Adela.

“Not in England,” said Nobby. “There’s too many hedges for me. I’ve a sailor’s seat.”

“All my people hunt,” said Adela. “It’s rather a bore, don’t you think, Mr. Sydenham?”

Talk like that!

Two days passed, during which Peter was either being bored to death in the company of Adela and Joan or also bored to death keeping aloof from them. He cycled to Ware with them, and Adela’s cycle had a change speed arrangement with a high gear of eighty-five that made it difficult to keep ahead of her. Beast!

And on the second evening she introduced a new card game, Demon Patience, a scrambling sort of game in which you piled on aces in the middle and cried “Stop!” as soon as your stack was out. It was one of those games, one of those inferior games, at which boys in their teens are not nearly as quick as girls, Peter discovered. But presently Joan began to pull ahead and beat Adela and Peter. The two girls began to play against each other as if his poor little spurts didn’t amount to anything. They certainly didn’t amount to very much.

Adela began to play with a sprawling eagerness. Her colour deepened; her manners deteriorated. She was tormented between ambition and admiration. When Joan had run her out for the third time, she cried, “Oh, Joan, you Wonderful Darling!”

And clutched and kissed her!...

All the other things might have been bearable if it had not been for this perpetual confabulating with Joan, this going off to whisper with Joan, this putting of arms round Joan’s neck, this whispering that was almost kissing Joan’s ear. One couldn’t have a moment with Joan. One couldn’t use Joan for the slightest thing. It would have been better if one hadn’t had a Joan.

On the mill-pond there was a boat that Joan and Peter were allowed to use. On the morning of the fifth day Joan found Peter hanging about in the hall.

“Joan.”

“Yes?”

“Come and muck about in Baker’s boat.”

“If Adela——”

“Oh, _leave_ Adela! We don’t want her. She’d stash it all up.”

“But she’s a visitor!”

“Pretty rotten visitor! What did you bring her here for? She’s rotten.”

“She’s not. She’s all right. You’re being horrid rude to her. Every chance you get. I like her.”

“Silly tick, she is!”

“She’s taller than you are, anyhow.”

“Nyar Nyar Nyar Nyar,” said Peter in a singularly ineffective mockery of Adela’s manner. Adela appeared, descending the staircase. Peter turned away.

“Peter wants to go in the boat on the mill-pond,” said Joan, as if with calculated wickedness.

“Oh! I _love_ boats!” said Adela.

“What was a chap to do but go?”

But under a thin mask of playfulness Peter splashed them both a lot—especially Adela. And in the evening he refused to play at Demon Patience and went and sat by himself to draw. He tried various designs. He was rather good at drawing Mr. Henderson, and he did several studies of him. Then the girls, who found Demon Patience slow with only two players, came and sat beside him. He was inspired to begin an ugly caricature of Adela.

He began at the eyes.

Joan knew him better than Adela. She saw what was coming. Down came her little brown paw on the paper. “No, you don’t, Petah,” she said.

Peter looked into her face, hot against his, and there was a red light in his eyes.

“Leago, Joan,” he said.

A struggle began in which Adela took no share.

The Sydenham blood is hot blood, and though it doesn’t like hurting rabbits it can be pretty rough with its first cousins. But Joan was still gripping the crumpled half of the offending sheet when Aunt Phyllis, summoned by a scared Adela, came in. The two were on the hearthrug, panting, and Joan’s teeth were deep in Peter’s wrist; they parted and rose somewhat abashed. “My _dears_!” cried Aunt Phyllis.

“We were playing,” said Joan, flushed and breathless, but honourably tearless.

“Yes,” said Peter, holding his wrist tight. “We were playing.”

“Romping,” said Aunt Phyllis. “Weren’t you a little rough? Adela, you know, isn’t used to your style....”

After that, Peter shunned further social intercourse. He affected a great concentration upon experimental chemistry and photography, and bicycled in lonely pride to Waltham Cross, Baldock, and Dunmow. He gave himself up to the roads of Hertfordshire. When at last Adela departed it made no difference in his aloofness. Joan was henceforth as nothing to him; she was just a tick, a silly little female tick, an associate of things that went “Nyar Nyar Nyar.” He hated her. At least, he would have hated her if there was anything that a self-respecting Caxtonian could hate in a being so utterly contemptible. (Yet at the bottom of his heart he loved and respected her for biting his wrist so hard.)

Deprived of Adela, Joan became very lonely and forlorn. After some days there were signs of relenting on the part of Peter, and then came his visitor, Wilmington, a boy who had gone with him from White Court to Caxton, and after that there was no need of Joan. With a grim resolution Peter shut Joan out from all their pursuits. She was annihilated.

The boys did experimental chemistry together, made the most disgusting stinks, blew up a small earthwork by means of a mine, and stained their hands bright yellow; they had long bicycle rides together, they did “splorjums” in the wood, they “mucked about” with Baker’s boat. Joan by no effort could come into existence again. Once or twice as Peter was going off with Wilmington, Peter would glance back and feel a gleam of compunction at the little figure that watched him going. But she had her Adelas. She and Adela wrote letters to each other. She could go and write to her beastly Adela now....

“Can’t Joan come?” said Wilmington.

“She’s only a tick,” said Peter.

“She’s not a bad sort of tick,” said Wilmington.

(What business was it of his?)

Joan fell back on Nobby, and went for walks with him in the afternoon.

Then came a complication. Towards the end Wilmington got quite soppy on Joan. It showed.

Aunt Phyllis suggested charades for the evening hour after dinner. Wilmington and Peter played against each other, and either of them took out any people he wanted to act with him. Aunt Phyllis was a grave and dignified actress and Nobby could do better than you might have expected. Peter did Salome. (Sal—owe—me; doing sal volatile for Sal.) He sat as Herod, crowned and scornful with the false black beard, and Joan danced and afterwards brought the football in on a plate. Aunt Phyllis did pseudo-oriental music. But when Wilmington saw Joan dance he knew what it was to be in love. He sat glowering passion. For a time he remained frozen rigid, and then broke into wild hand-clapping. His ears were bright red, and Aunt Phyllis looked at him curiously. It was with difficulty that his clouded mind could devise a charade that would give him a call upon Joan. But he thought at last of Milton. (Mill-tun.)

“I want you,” he said.

“Won’t Aunty do?”

“No, _you_. It’s got to be a girl.”

He held the door open for her, and stumbled going out of the room. He was more breathless and jerky than ever outside. Joan heard his exposition with an unfriendly expression.

“And what am I to do then?” she asked....

“And then?...”

They did “Mill” and “Tun” pretty badly. Came Wilmington’s last precious moments with her. He broke off in his description of Milton blind and Joan as the amanuensis daughter. “Joan,” he whispered, going hoarse with emotion. “Joan, you’re lovely. I’d die for you.”

A light of evil triumph came into Joan’s eyes.

“Ugly thing!” said Joan, “what did you come here for? You’ve spoilt my holidays. Let _go_ of my hand!... Let’s go in and do our tableau.”

And afterwards when Wilmington met Joan in the passage she treated him to a grimace that was only too manifestly intended to represent his own expression of melancholy but undying devotion. In the presence of others she was coolly polite to him.

Peter read his friend like a book, but refrained from injurious comment, and Wilmington departed in a state of grave nervous disarray.

A day passed. There was not much left now of the precious holidays. Came a glowing September morning.

“Joe-un,” whooped Peter in the garden—in just the old note.

“Pee-tah!” answered Joan, full-voiced as ever, distant but drawing nearer.

“Come and muck about in Baker’s boat.”

“Right-o, Petah!” said Joan, and approached with a slightly prancing gait.

§ 11

Growing out of his Red Indian phase Peter moved up into the Lower Sixth and became a regular cynical man of the world with an air of knowing more than a thing or two. He was, in fact, learning a vast number of things that are outside the books; and rearranging many of his early shocks and impressions by the help of a confusing and increasing mixture of half-lights. The chaotic disrespect of the young went out of his manner in his allusion to school affairs, he no longer spoke of various masters as “Buzzy,” “Snooks,” and “the Croker,” and a curious respectability had invaded his demeanour. The Head had had him in to tea and tennis. The handle of the prefect’s birch was perhaps not more than a year now from his grip, if he bore himself gravely. He reproached Joan on various small occasions for “thundering bad form,” and when Wilmington came, a much more wary and better-looking Wilmington with his heart no longer on his sleeve, the conversation became, so to speak, political. They talked at the dinner-table of the behaviour of so-and-so and this-and-that at “High” and at “Bottoms” and on “the Corso”; they discussed various cases of “side” and “cheek,” and the permanent effect of these upon the standing and reputations of the youths concerned; they were earnest to search out and know utterly why Best did not get his colours and whether it was just to “super” old Rawdon. They discussed the question of superannuation with Oswald very gravely. “Don’t you think,” said Oswald, “if a school takes a boy on, it ought to see him through?”

“But if he doesn’t work, sir?” said Wilmington.

“A school oughtn’t to produce that lassitude,” said Oswald.

“A chap ought to _use_ a school,” said Peter.

That was a new point of view to Oswald and Joan.

Afterwards came Troop, a larger boy than either Peter or Wilmington, a prefect, a youth almost incredibly manly in his manner, and joined on to these discussions. Said Oswald, “There ought not to be such a thing as superannuation. A man ought not to be let drift to the point of unteachable incapacity. And then thrown away. Some master ought to have shepherded him in for special treatment.”

“They don’t look after us to that extent, sir,” said Troop.

“Don’t they teach you? Or fail to teach you?”

“It’s the school teaches us,” said Peter, as though it had just occurred to him.

“Still, the masters are there,” said Oswald, smiling.

“The masters are there,” Troop acquiesced. “But the life of the school is the tradition. And a big chap like Rawdon hanging about, too big to lick and too stupid for responsibility—— It breaks things up, sir.”

Oswald was very much interested in this prefect’s view of the school life. Behind his blank mask he engendered questions; his one eye watched Troop and went from Troop to Peter. This manliness in the taught surprised him tremendously. Peter was acquiring it rapidly, but Troop seemed to embody it. Oswald himself had been a man early enough and had led a hard life of mutual criticism and exasperation with his fellows, but that had been in a working reality, the navy; this, he reflected, was a case of cocks crowing inside the egg. These boys were living in a premature autonomous state, an aristocratic republic with the Head as a sort of constitutional monarch. There was one questionable consequence at least. They were acquiring political habits before they had acquired wide horizons. Were the political habits of a school where all the boys were of one race and creed and class, suitable for the problems of a world’s affairs?

Troop, under Oswald’s insidious leading, displayed his ideas modestly but frankly, and they were the ideas of a large child. Troop was a good-looking, thoroughly healthy youth, full of his grave responsibilities towards the school and inclined to claim a liberal attitude. He was very great upon his duty to “make the fellows live decently and behave decently.” He was lured into a story of how one youth with a tendency to long hair had been partly won and partly driven to a more seemly coiffure; how he had dealt with a games shirker, and how a fellow had been detected lending socialist pamphlets—“not to his friends, sir, I shouldn’t mind that so much, but pushing them upon any one”—and restrained. “Seditious sort of stuff, sir, I believe. No, I did not _read_ it, sir.” Troop was for cold baths under all circumstances, for no smoking under sixteen and five foot six, and for a simple and unquestioning loyalty to any one who came along and professed to be in authority over him. When he mentioned the king his voice dropped worshipfully. Upon the just use of the birch Troop was conscientiously prolix. There were prefects, he said, who “savaged” the fellows. Others swished without judgment. Troop put conscience into each whack.

Troop’s liberalism interested Oswald more than anything else about him. He was proud to profess himself no mere traditionalist; he wanted Caxton to “broaden down from precedent to precedent.” Indeed he had ambitions to be remembered as a reformer. He hoped, he said, to leave the school “better than he found it”—the modern note surely. His idea of a great and memorable improvement was to let the Upper Fifth fellows into the Corso after morning service on Sunday. He did not think it would make them impertinent; rather it would increase their self-respect. He was also inclined to a reorganization of the afternoon fagging “to stop so much bawling down the corridor.” There ought to be a bell—an electric bell—in each prefect’s study. No doubt that was a bit revolutionary—Troop almost smirked. “It’s all very well for schools like Eton or Winchester to stick to the old customs, sir, but we are supposed to be an Up-to-Date school. Don’t you think, sir?” The egg was everything to this young cockerel; the world outside was naught. Oswald led him on from one solemn puerility to another, and as the big boy talked in his stout man-of-the-world voice, the red eye roved from him to Peter and from Peter back to Troop. Until presently it realized that Peter was watching it as narrowly. “What does Peter really think of this stuff?” thought Oswald. “What does Nobby really think of this stuff?” queried Peter.

“I suppose, some day, you’ll leave Caxton,” said Oswald.

“I shall be very sorry to, sir,” said Troop sincerely.

“Have you thought at all——”

“Not yet, sir. At least——”

“Troop’s people,” Peter intervened, “are Army people.”

“I see,” said Oswald.

Joan listened enviously to all this prefectorial conversation. At Highmorton that sort of bossing and influencing was done by the junior staff....

Oswald did his best to lure Troop from his administrative preoccupations into general topics. But apparently some one whom Troop respected had warned him against general topics. Oswald lugged and pushed the talk towards religion, Aunt Phyllis helping, but they came up against a stone wall. “My people are Church of England,” said Troop, intimating thereby that his opinions were banked with the proper authorities. It was not for him to state them. And in regard to politics, “All my people are Conservative.” One evening Oswald showed him a portfolio of drawings from various Indian temples, and suggested something of the complex symbolism of the figures. Troop thought it was “rather unhealthy.” But—turning from these monstrosities—he had hopes for India. “My cousin tells me, sir, that cricket and polo are spreading very rapidly there.” “Polo,” said Oswald, “is an Indian game. They have played it for centuries. It came from Persia originally.” But Troop was unable to imagine Indians riding horses; he had the common British delusion that the horse and the ship were both invented in our islands and that all foreign peoples are necessarily amateurs at such things. “I thought they rode elephants,” said Troop with quiet conviction....

Troop was not only a great experience for Oswald, he also exercised the always active mind of Joan very considerably.

Peter, it seemed, hadn’t even mentioned her beforehand.

“Hullo!” said Troop at the sight of her. “Got a sister?”

“Foster-sister,” said Peter, minimizing the thing. “Joan, this is Troop.”

Joan regarded him critically. “Can he play D.P.?”

“Not one of my games,” said Troop, who was chary of all games not usually played.

“It’s a game like Snap,” said Peter with an air of casual contempt, and earned a bright scowl.

For a day or so Troop and Joan kept aloof, watching one another. Then she caught him out rather neatly twice at single wicket cricket; he had a weakness for giving catches to point and she had observed it. “Caught!” he cried approvingly. Also she snicked and slipped and at last slogged boldly at his patronizing under-arm bowling. “Here’s a Twister,” he said, like an uncle speaking to a child.

Joan smacked it into the cedar. “_Twister!_” quoth Joan, running.

After that he took formal notice of her, betraying a disposition to address her as “Kid.” (Ralph Connor was at that time adding his quota to the great British tradition. It is true he wrote in American about cowboys—but a refined cowboy was the fullest realization of an English gentleman’s pre-war ideals—and Ralph Connor’s cowboys are essentially refined. Thence came the “Kid,” anyhow.) But Joan took umbrage at the “Kid.” And she disliked Troop’s manner and influence with Peter. And the way Peter stood it. She did not understand what a very, very great being a prefect is in an English public school, she did not know of Troop’s superbness at rugger, it seemed to her that it was bad manners to behave as though a visit to Pelham Ford were an act of princely condescension. She was even disposed to diagnose Troop’s largeness, very unjustly, as fat. So she pulled up Troop venomously with “My name’s not Kit, it’s Joan. J.O.A.N.”

“Sorry!” said Troop. And being of that insensitive class whose passions are only to be roused by a smacking, he began to take still more notice of her. She was, he perceived, a lively Kid. He felt a strong desire to reprove and influence her. He had no suspicion that what he really wanted to do was to interest Joan in himself.

Joan’s tennis was incurably tricky. Troop’s idea of tennis was to play very hard and very swiftly close over the net, but without cunning. Peter and Wilmington followed his lead. But Joan forced victory upon an unwilling partner by doing unexpected things.

Troop declared he did not mind being defeated, but that he was shocked by the spirit of Joan’s play. It wasn’t “sporting.”

“Those short returns aren’t done, Kid,” he said.

“I do them,” said Joan. “Ancient.”

Peter and Wilmington were visibly shocked, but Troop showed no resentment at the gross familiarity.

“But if every one did them!” he reasoned.

“I could take them,” said Joan. “Any one could take them who knew how.”

The dispute seemed likely to die down into unverifiable assertions.

“Peter can take them,” said Joan. “He drops them back. But he isn’t doing it today.”

Peter reflected. Troop would never understand, but there was something reasonable in Joan’s line. “I’ll see to Joan,” he said abruptly, and came towards the middle of the net.

The game continued on unorthodox but brilliant lines. “I don’t call this tennis,” said Troop.

“If you served to her left,” said Peter.

“But she’s a girl!” protested Troop. “_Serve!_”

He made the concessions that are proper to a lady, and Joan scored the point after a brief rally with Peter. “Game,” said Joan.

Troop declared he did not care to play again. It would put him off tennis. “Take me as a partner,” said Joan. “No—I don’t think so, thanks,” said Troop coldly.

Every one became thoughtful and drifted towards the net. Oswald approached from the pergola, considering the problem.

“I’ve been thinking about that sort of thing for years,” he remarked, strolling towards them.

“Well, sir, aren’t you with me?” asked Troop.

“No. I’m for Joan—and Peter.”

“But that sort of trick play——”

“No. The way to play a game is to get all over the game and to be equal to anything in it. If there is a stroke or anything that spoils the game it ought to be barred by the rules. Apart from that, a game ought to be worked out to its last possibility. Things oughtn’t to be barred in the interests of a few conventional swipes. This cutting down of a game to just a few types of stroke——”

Peter looked apprehensive.

“It’s laziness,” said Oswald.

Troop was too puzzled to be offended. “But you have to work tremendously hard, sir, at the proper game.”

“Not mentally,” said Oswald. “There’s too much good form in all our games. It’s just a way of cutting down a game to a formality.”

“But, for instance, sir, would you bowl grounders at cricket?”

“If I thought the batsman had been too lazy to learn what to do with them. Why not?”

“If you look at it like _that_, sir!” said Troop and had no more to say. But he went away marvelling. Oswald was a V.C. Yet he looked at games like—like an American, he played to win; it was enough to perplex any one....

“Must confess I don’t see it,” said Troop when Oswald had gone....

When at last Troop and Wilmington departed Oswald went with them to the station—the luggage was sent on in the cart—and walked back over the ploughed ridge and up the lane with Peter. For a time they kept silence, but Troop was in both their minds.

“He’s a good sort,” said Peter.

“Admirable—in some ways.”

“I thought,” said Peter, “you didn’t like him. You kept on pulling his leg.”

So Peter had seen.

“Well, he doesn’t exercise his brain very much,” said Oswald.

“Stops short at his neck,” said Peter. “Exercise, I mean.”