Young Phillip Maddison Page 5

  What had Mr. Pye put through their letter-box? A Valentine? Phillip was thrilled with the mystery. Could it be, as Polly had said, that he was sweet on Mrs. Rolls? Surely not, for they were both quite old.

  After a safe interval, Phillip crept down the asphalt pavement on the opposite side of the road. He walked down until he was beyond range of the lamp-post light outside Mr. Groat’s in No. 9; and then, darting over the flinty road, he walked up rapidly to his own house, keeping close to the garden fences, then rushing through the gate and so to his front door as though he were being pursued.

  He gave a small ring on the bell, thinking it best not to use the knocker, since Father was at home. Mother, making cocoa in the kitchen, came to the door. Observing that the sitting room door was half-open, Phillip wiped his boots carefully on the mat, hoping Father would hear; then he gave his mother the library book, saying in a voice loud enough to be heard in the sitting room, “It’s most interesting, all about when you first met Father, Mum. I thought you and Father would like to look at it, as it’s Antiquarianism.”

  “Thank you, dear, what a very kind thought.”

  In the kitchen, Hetty glanced at the book, and whispered, “Show it to your Father first, dear! I am sure he would appreciate your doing so.”

  “Ah, I wonder what you are up to now!” said Mavis.

  “Shut up!” hissed Phillip. “Must you glue your optics on me for ever?”

  He led his mother into the scullery.

  “Mum,” he whispered. “I think I will join the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel!”

  Hetty looked surprised. What had he been up to now?

  “Yes dear, of course, if you feel you should. Is anything the matter?”

  “Of course not! I only thought I would join, that’s all.”

  “Very well, Sonny. Now have your cocoa, dear, and then take the book down to your Father.”

  He delayed over drinking his cocoa, to put off the moment of being in Father’s presence. The girls were in giggling mood: they annoyed him, taking glances at him, as though they had some secret. At last they prepared to go upstairs to have their baths, excited by the thought of all three getting into what Father always called “the tub”, together.

  Phillip, calling Polly into the front room, told her what he had seen outside Turret House. Then, struck by a sudden fear, he said goodnight, and taking the book, went down to the sitting-room. Would Mr. Mundy call to see Father that night, now that the fog was gone? Or would the police be told first? Any moment there might be a knock on the front door, a loud urgent ring of the electric bell.

  Father was sitting in his green leather armchair, reading The Daily Trident.

  “Good evening, Father.”

  “Hullo, old chap. How’s the fog?”

  “It’s cleared off, Father.”

  “That is good news.”

  Phillip seated himself quietly, in his usual place at the table, behind Father’s chair. Father usually read the paper all through, then he had a game of chess with Mother. Phillip put the library book on the plush cloth of the table, quietly by Father’s side.

  Not long afterwards Hetty came down, and took up her basket of darning beside her chair. Phillip blinked at her, and indicated the book with his nose.

  After a few moments, when Father did not move, he said, with another glance at her, “I think I would like to learn to play chess, you know, Mum.”

  Richard put down the paper, and got on his feet, to stretch himself. Standing with back to the crackling coke fire, he looked at Phillip quizzically, and said, “Who is this I see before me? What does this sudden glory foretell? Bless my soul, you are scarcely recognisable, Phillip.”

  “I thought it a good thing to let him air his best clothes, Dickie. Tomorrow he is going to have his photograph taken.”

  “For heaven’s sake let the boy speak for himself, Hetty! And there is no need for you to speak in that apologetical tone of voice. After all, I merely asked a question.”

  “Yes dear, of course, naturally.”

  This familiar remark of Hetty’s seemed to irritate Richard.

  “What do you mean by that expression? I must have heard it a thousand times in my married life, and each time I have wondered what exactly you meant by it. ‘Of course’ means a matter of course, or habit. But your habit is always to try and come between me and Phillip. ‘Naturally’ presumably means what is natural. Is it natural for a mother always to be shielding her son?”

  Hetty smiled. There was sadness and resignation, together with an unquenchable sense of fun, in her eyes. Suddenly the fun departed; acute sadness remained, a sense of tragedy, of the perpetual, unchangeable sameness of Dickie always taking the simplest thing she said, in the wrong way. “I hardly dare ever say anything,” she once confessed, in a tearful moment, to Phillip. “Father always takes it the wrong way.”

  “Well, Phillip,” said Richard, turning to his son, who was sitting unnaturally still. “This is indeed a surprise. Are you intending to call on your best girl, it being St. Valentine’s Eve?”

  Richard spoke in the chaffing tones that always disconcerted Phillip, used as he was to a tension of resistance against his father. Richard however, was also sensitive, though in different degree; and his sense of decorum would never permit him knowingly to embarrass his son. He knew nothing of the Valentine painted by Polly Pickering; his remark came from an article he had been reading in The Daily Trident on the origins of St. Valentine, and old country beliefs about birds pairing off on that date. Phillip thought Father was chipping him. He made no reply. Then to his relief, Father said, “Well, so you want to learn to play chess, do you?”

  “Yes, I would, please, Father.”

  “I wonder what put that idea into your head?”

  “I don’t know, Father.”

  “Come, old chap,” said Richard, in kindly mood, regarding the prim, wide-eyed boy. “Share the secret with me!”

  Before Phillip could think, there was a ring of the front door bell. He started.

  “Hullo, what have you been up to now?” said Richard, jokingly, seeing the start. “What’s in the wind this time?”

  Hetty saw the boy’s pale face.

  “Is there anything the matter, dear?” she said. “Tell Father if there is,” as she opened the sitting room door.

  “Oh, be quiet!” exclaimed Richard, in mild exasperation. “Let the boy speak for himself.”

  Hetty went up the stairs to the front door. With beating heart, Phillip listened.

  “There’s nothing to tell, Father.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  Richard picked up his newspaper, seated himself in his armchair, and looked again at what he had already read—the words of a big-moustached man whose photograph appeared in the middle of the article designed to rouse an apathetic nation against the danger of the projected Kiel Canal from Baltic to North Sea. They mean war, these people, who rejoice under the heel of militarism, wrote the prophet, Robert Blatchford. Richard wondered why he wrote in The Daily Trident, since this ex-sergeant of the army was supposed to be a Socialist. However, there was some sense in what Robert Blatchford now wrote.

  Richard had never forgotten what his mother, of a Bavarian family destroyed in Bismarck’s war of federation, had always said about the Prussians. Sitting in the chair, his thoughts reverted to what his sister Theodora had recently written to him in a letter containing what he considered to be a farrago of nonsense about the wrongness of England generally, and in particular in the Englishman’s attitude to the subject races of the Empire. And this was the very same Dora who was making a nuisance of herself in the agitation for the franchise to women. Dora, more of a crank than ever! A woman without a true vocation. She had never grown up.

  But Theodora Maddison had not written to her brother what she had written to her sister-in-law. Dora had written to Hetty, among other things, these words:

  I do not think that I have ever known such an unhappy little boy as Phillip used to b
e. It is so strange, Hetty, that history in our family, as among the nations, seems to be repeating itself. “There is nothing new under the sun”—yes, I know what the old biblical poet says—but surely signs are not wanting of a revival of ancient Truth, of a spiritual awareness in the world, which shall bring Light anew into our struggling humanity, and fulfil the dreams of the artists and poets of the ancient world.

  Be gentle with my brother, dear Hetty. He is a lonely man, very proud, and has suffered much from the previous generation, more perhaps than we shall ever know. Cause and effect, effect and cause: only God can, with His infinite mercy, see beyond the dark forces which beset us all, the misunderstandings which isolate all of us, each in their different perplexities. Be patient, dear friend; and never cease to believe in the ultimate goodness of mankind.

  When Richard looked up from his paper again, a few moments later, and turned in his chair to look at Phillip, an incredulous expression came over his face. The boy’s neck was bent, his face hidden; a slight choking noise came from him. Tears were dropping upon the plush table-cloth!

  “Good heavens, what’s the matter now? Why are the waterworks turned on?”

  Phillip hid his face the more.

  “Well, I’m blowed!” said Richard. “You are a most extraordinary cuss!”

  “What’s the matter, Sonny, don’t you feel well?” asked Hetty, returning to the room, an envelope in her hand. “What has happened, Dickie?”

  “I’m blest if I can understand any of you!” cried Richard, seeing tears in his wife’s eyes. “You are a weepy lot, all of you! Come on, Phillip, chuck it! Be a man! You really must learn to cease taking refuge in tears if anything goes wrong! What you will do when you grow up, and go out into the world, I hardly dare think! Come on now, old chap, tell us all about it!”

  Sensible of Father’s rough sympathy, Phillip felt more hopeless. He was ashamed, too. And what was the letter in Mother’s hand? Was it a summons, already?

  “Tell your parents, dear, if anything is wrong,” said Hetty.

  Ah, it was a summons. He would kill himself. It was the end of his life. He gulped, and said the first thing that came into his head—one, indeed, of many worries. “I can’t learn my Latin, Father.”

  “Why ever did you not say so at first?” said Richard, indulgently. “If that is all that is troubling you, I can assure you that it is the normal worry of every small boy when first he goes to school. Why, do you know, I could not make much headway with my Latin, when I was a boy at a private school. Just do your best, and stick it out, that’s my advice to you. Things will come easier later on.”

  “Yes,” said Hetty, smiling. “Everything is difficult at first. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try try again’.”

  Phillip tried to look suitably grateful for this advice.

  Encouraged by the look on his son’s face, Richard went on, in some relief that at last the boy seemed to want to listen to him.

  “Everything has to be learnt, you know, old chap. Just like riding a bicycle, or a horse. Suddenly you acquire balance, and then you wonder how you could ever have found it difficult.” He pulled out his watch. “Now Hetty, do you feel like a game of chess, old girl?”

  Hetty laughed, remembering when he had objected to her asking him, once, if he felt like a boiled egg for his tea. Dickie feeling like a boiled egg! She laughed and laughed. The tears in her eyes had been of tenderness—how kind of the little girls to send Phillip a Valentine!

  “What is tickling you now?” asked Richard. “’Pon my soul, you are a pair, you two! First the waterworks, then nothing can stop you laughing. Come on, tell a fellow the joke.”

  The envelope lay on the cloth. Phillip got up and looked at it. He recognised the hand-writing.

  “Why, it’s for me!”

  He opened it. He saw at once it was a joke—the girls, of course. Mavis’ doing, obviously. There was a Cupid, in an Eton suit, looking over the shoulder of a fat man in a large black hat and black cloak, obviously Mr. Pye, who was kneeling to slip an envelope through a letter-box. Then he read the verse underneath.

  I stand and sigh

  The bluebell’s blue

  I’ve got my eye

  On who knows who?

  Was this meant to be Polly’s hint to him, just because once, long ago, they had been childish sweethearts? Obviously Mavis had written the poem. He put it in his pocket.

  Mother and Father were staring at the chess-board. Phillip opened History of the Borough, which was by an Old Boy of his school, Mr. Graham, and turned the pages to find something of interest. He found an old-fashioned picture of the High Street, trees beside the muddy high road, a wooden Roe Buck Inn set back behind a long wooden horse-trough, and a coach standing in front, a man holding the horse’s head. The date was 1810. There was another picture on the opposite page, of the Old Roebuck in 1830, and Plough Green in front of it, and the brook on the other side of the road. There was a chestnut tree near the inn, and the book said it had, according to local tradition, been planted in 1683, and was the parent tree of those in Bushey Park.

  The stream which ran through the village, passed the “Roebuck”, and joined the Randisbourne at the bridge, which at this spot yielded many a good fish to the angler.

  Why that was just near where the Obelisk was now! He passed over the bridge twice every day, going to and coming from school, but he had never seen any fish, except stickle-backs. Sometimes he had seen boys with glass jars paddling among the old pails, rags and thrown-away things on the stony bottom, hunting for them.

  Phillip yawned.

  Hetty saw the yawn, and said, “Why not go to bed dear? I expect the girls are out of the bathroom by now.”

  “Have I got to have their water?”

  “No dear, of course not. Only don’t take too much.”

  “And not too hot—it’s enervating, Phillip,” said Richard.

  He got up. “Goodnight, Father, goodnight, Mother.”

  About five minutes later, when Richard called “Check mate”, Hetty got up, saying, “I’ll just go and see if Phillip is all right, Dickie.”

  “Ah, you do not like leaving your best boy for long, do you?”

  “Well, he doesn’t look very well just now, Dickie. I won’t be long.”

  *

  The door closed behind her; and with a sigh of relief, Richard settled himself at his ease for the first time that evening. Picking up the book on the tablecloth at his elbow, he opened the title page. The History of the Borough, with an Itinerary looked interesting; and for the next hour and a half, while Hetty went next door to see her parents, and Richard sipped his cup of hot-water—to flush the system, as recommended by a regular medical correspondent in The Daily Trident—he was absorbed in the pages, while thinking of what he might have missed by not continuing in the local Antiquarian Society, its field-days organised and led by the vicar of St. Simon, Mr. Mundy, accompanied by that siren, Miranda MacIntosh, for whom, in his secret thoughts, Richard still felt at times a sort of sentimental affinity, mingled with thoughts of dislike and derision for that Amazonian beauty: thus to dismiss from his mind the half-shameful erotic feelings which he had felt to be unworthy of himself, apart from the fact of his being a married man, and a father.

  To his further secret guilt, Richard was now aware that some of these thoughts had been transferred to his daughter Mavis. He must take himself in hand!

  Against the sky outside, seen through the uncurtained french windows looking on the garden, was a greenish flash. He got up to look, and saw by the clear haze of light in the lower sky that the fog had cleared. The glow came over the rooftops from the distant High Street, where electric trams ran in a blaze of light from shops and tall light standards—a street remembered by Richard for its darkness at night, relieved at long intervals by lamp-posts with single gas-jets when first he had come to the district; when horse-drawn waggons, loaded with corn and vegetables, had moved on their way through the borough to the Old Kent Road, and the m
arkets of London.

  There was quietness then—and peace.

  Chapter 5

  SWEET VIOLETS

  THE Backfield, an area behind the garden fences of Hillside Road of about eight acres, was considered by Phillip to be his particular property. It was steep, grassy land, the upper slopes of which opened in wide cracks in summer, being yellow clay. In the highlands of this wilderness, among bird-sown thorn bushes, Phillip had his camp. He was the leader of a band of boys by virtue of ideas rather than of strength. Here they baked potatoes in the embers of a camp-fire, and conducted war with any rival bands that came that way, which was seldom.

  Phillip had been forbidden by his father to climb the garden fence into the Backfield. He had been forbidden, too, to climb over the spiked railings, five feet high, which enclosed the L.C.C. park, called the Hill, to the north. The main reason, said Richard, was that it was bad manners to trespass on other people’s land. In vain had Phillip, once, feebly suggested that the Backfield had no legal owner. It had been enclosed, he said, by Antill the builder, who hoped that after twenty years the land would become his, by a squatter’s title.

  “I don’t know where you get that idea from, my boy. I know only that it is not my land, and therefore you will not go upon it.”

  Phillip forebore to say that he had heard about it from Gran’pa Turney. Gran’pa had declared that, as title could not be proved by Antill, no action for trespass could be sustained in court.

  “Then it can belong to anyone who squats for twenty years, Gran’pa?”

  “Certainly, m’boy. Why, are you going to enclose a bit of it?”

  “Yes, Gran’pa, I have already, the bit above the red ballast heap. That’s where our camp is, you know. We defend it from all comers.”

  “He-he-he,” laughed Gran’pa. “You mean your prize-fighter friend does, don’t you?”

  Phillip did not like this reference to the boy who did his fighting for him. Peter Wallace, Phillip’s right-hand man as he called him, was Scots. He was one of a family of brothers and sisters living in Charlotte Road. Peter Wallace was a sturdy, round-headed boy with close-clipped hair. He wore steel-framed glasses, being very near-sighted. He had an effective, indeed an invincible way of dealing with any opponent in a fight. Quietly Peter would remove his glasses, while his opponent stood on guard, waiting for the usual procedure of doing first dags, then cowardies—challenge and acceptance—before the real blows of combat. Quietly Peter would fold his spectacles, and put them in their case, while appearing to ignore the other boy facing him. Without glasses Peter could not see; his eyes and face were therefore expressionless; but suddenly he leapt upon his dim-seen opponent, flung his weight upon him, enwrapped him with his muscular arms, got the helpless boy’s head under his left arm, while with the fist of his right hand he jabbed again and again at the downheld face until no fight was left in his adversary.