Читать книгу: «The Golden Age», страница 7

'EXIT TYRANNUS'

THE eventful day had arrived at last, the day which, when first named, had seemed – like all golden dates that promise anything definite – so immeasurably remote. When it was first announced, a fortnight before, that Miss Smedley was really going, the resultant ecstasies had occupied a full week, during which we blindly revelled in the contemplation and discussion of her past tyrannies, crimes, malignities; in recalling to each other this or that insult, dishonour, or physical assault, sullenly endured at a time when deliverance was not even a small star on the horizon: and in mapping out the shining days to come, with special new troubles of their own, no doubt – since this is but a work-a-day world! – but at least free from one familiar scourge. The time that remained had been taken up by the planning of practical expressions of the popular sentiment. Under Edward's masterly direction, arrangements had been made for a flag to be run up over the hen-house at the very moment when the fly, with Miss Smedley's boxes on top and the grim oppressor herself inside, began to move off down the drive. Three brass cannons, set on the brow of the sunk-fence, were to proclaim our deathless sentiments in the ears of the retreating foe; the dogs were to wear ribbons; and later – but this depended on our powers of evasiveness and dissimulation – there might be a small bonfire, with a cracker or two if the public funds could bear the unwonted strain.

I was awakened by Harold digging me in the ribs, and 'She's going to-day!' was the morning hymn that scattered the clouds of sleep. Strange to say, it was with no corresponding jubilation of spirits that I slowly realised the momentous fact. Indeed, as I dressed, a dull disagreeable feeling that I could not define grew up in me – something like a physical bruise. Harold was evidently feeling it too, for after repeating 'She's going to-day!' in a tone more befitting the Litany, he looked hard in my face for direction as to how the situation was to be taken. But I crossly bade him look sharp and say his prayers and not bother me. What could this gloom portend, that on a day of days like the present seemed to hang my heavens with black?

Down at last and out in the sun, we found Edward before us, swinging on a gate and chanting a farm-yard ditty in which all the beasts appear in due order, jargoning in their several tongues, and every verse begins with the couplet:

 
'Now, my lads, come with me,
Out in the morning early!'
 

The fateful exodus of the day had evidently slipped his memory entirely. I touched him on the shoulder. 'She's going to-day!' I said. Edward's carol subsided like a water-tap turned off. 'So she is!' he replied, and got down at once off the gate. And we returned to the house without another word.

At breakfast Miss Smedley behaved in a most mean and uncalled-for manner. The right divine of governesses to govern wrong includes no right to cry. In thus usurping the prerogative of their victims they ignore the rules of the ring, and hit below the belt. Charlotte was crying, of course; but that counted for nothing. Charlotte even cried when the pigs' noses were ringed in due season; thereby evoking the cheery contempt of the operators, who asserted they liked it, and doubtless knew. But when the cloud-compeller, her bolts laid aside, resorted to tears, mutinous humanity had a right to feel aggrieved, and think itself placed in a false and difficult position. What would the Romans have done, supposing Hannibal had cried? History has not even considered the possibility. Rules and precedents should be strictly observed on both sides. When they are violated, the other party is justified in feeling injured.

There were no lessons that morning, naturally – another grievance! The fitness of things required that we should have struggled to the last in a confused medley of moods and tenses, and parted for ever, flushed with hatred, over the dismembered corpse of the multiplication-table. But this thing was not to be; and I was free to stroll by myself through the garden, and combat, as best I might, this growing feeling of depression. It was a wrong system altogether, I thought, this going of people one had got used to. Things ought always to continue as they had been. Change there must be, of course; pigs, for instance, came and went with disturbing frequency —

 
'Fired their ringing shot and passed,
Hotly charged and sank at last' —
 

but Nature had ordered it so, and in requital had provided for rapid successors. Did you come to love a pig, and he was taken from you, grief was quickly assuaged in the delight of selection from the new litter. But now, when it was no question of a peerless pig, but only of a governess, Nature seemed helpless, and the future held no litter of oblivion. Things might be better, or they might be worse, but they would never be the same; and the innate conservatism of youth asks neither poverty nor riches, but only immunity from change.

Edward slouched up alongside of me presently, with a hangdog look on him, as if he had been caught stealing jam. 'What a lark it'll be when she's really gone!' he observed, with a swagger obviously assumed.

'Grand fun!' I replied dolorously; and conversation flagged.

We reached the hen-house, and contemplated the banner of freedom lying ready to flaunt the breezes at the supreme moment.

'Shall you run it up,' I asked, 'when the fly starts, or – or wait a little till it's out of sight?'

Edward gazed round him dubiously. 'We're going to have some rain, I think,' he said; 'and – and it's a new flag. It would be a pity to spoil it. P'raps I won't run it up at all.'

Harold came round the corner like a bison pursued by Indians. 'I've polished up the cannons,' he cried, 'and they look grand! Mayn't I load 'em now?'

'You leave 'em alone,' said Edward severely, 'or you'll be blowing yourself up' (consideration for others was not usually Edward's strong point). 'Don't touch the gunpowder till you're told, or you'll get your head smacked.'

Harold fell behind, limp, squashed, obedient. 'She wants me to write to her,' he began presently. 'Says she doesn't mind the spelling, if I'll only write. Fancy her saying that!'

'O, shut up, will you?' said Edward savagely; and once more we were silent, with only our thoughts for sorry company.

'Let's go off to the copse,' I suggested timidly, feeling that something had to be done to relieve the tension, 'and cut more new bows and arrows.'

'She gave me a knife my last birthday,' said Edward moodily, never budging. 'It wasn't much of a knife – but I wish I hadn't lost it!'

'When my legs used to ache,' I said, 'she sat up half the night, rubbing stuff on them. I forgot all about that till this morning.'

'There's the fly!' cried Harold suddenly. 'I can hear it scrunching on the gravel.'

Then for the first time we turned and stared each other in the face.

The fly and its contents had finally disappeared through the gate, the rumble of its wheels had died away. Yet no flag floated defiantly in the sun, no cannons proclaimed the passing of a dynasty. From out the frosted cake of our existence Fate had cut an irreplaceable segment: turn which way we would, the void was present. We sneaked off in different directions, mutually undesirous of company; and it seemed borne in upon me that I ought to go and dig my garden right over, from end to end. It didn't actually want digging; on the other hand no amount of digging could affect it, for good or for evil; so I worked steadily, strenuously, under the hot sun, stifling thought in action. At the end of an hour or so, I was joined by Edward.

'I've been chopping up wood,' he explained, in a guilty sort of way, though nobody had called on him to account for his doings.

'What for?' I inquired stupidly. 'There's piles and piles of it chopped up already.'

'I know,' said Edward, 'but there's no harm in having a bit over. You never can tell what may happen. But what have you been doing all this digging for?'

'You said it was going to rain,' I explained hastily. 'So I thought I'd get the digging done before it came. Good gardeners always tell you that's the right thing to do.'

'It did look like rain at one time,' Edward admitted; 'but it's passed off now. Very queer weather we're having. I suppose that's why I've felt so funny all day.'

'Yes, I suppose it's the weather,' I replied. 'I've been feeling funny too.'

The weather had nothing to do with it, as we well knew. But we would both have died rather than admit the real reason.

THE BLUE ROOM

THAT nature has her moments of sympathy with man has been noted often enough, – and generally as a new discovery. To us, who had never known any other condition of things, it seemed entirely right and fitting that the wind sang and sobbed in the poplar tops, and, in the lulls of it, sudden spirts of rain spattered the already dusty roads, on that blusterous March day when Edward and I awaited, on the station platform, the arrival of the new tutor. Needless to say, this arrangement had been planned by an aunt, from some fond idea that our shy, innocent young natures would unfold themselves during the walk from the station, and that, on the revelation of each other's more solid qualities that must inevitably ensue, an enduring friendship, springing from mutual respect, might be firmly based. A pretty dream, – nothing more. For Edward, who foresaw that the brunt of tutorial oppression would have to be borne by him, was sulky, monosyllabic, and determined to be as negatively disagreeable as good manners would permit. It was therefore evident that I would have to be spokesman and purveyor of hollow civilities, and I was none the more amiable on that account; all courtesies, welcomes, explanations, and other court-chamberlain kind of business, being my special aversion. There was much of the tempestuous March weather in the hearts of both of us, as we sullenly glowered along the carriage-windows of the slackening train.

One is apt, however, to misjudge the special difficulties of a situation; and the reception proved, after all, an easy and informal matter. In a trainful so uniformly bucolic, a tutor was readily recognisable; and his portmanteau had been consigned to the luggage-cart, and his person conveyed into the lane, before I had discharged one of my carefully considered sentences. I breathed more easily, and looking up at our new friend as we stepped out together, remembered that we had been counting on something altogether more arid, scholastic, and severe. A boyish eager face and a petulant pince-nez– untidy hair – a head of constant quick turns like a robin's, and a voice that kept breaking into alto – these were all very strange and new, but not in the least terrible.

He proceeded jerkily through the village, with glances on this side and that; and 'Charming,' he broke out presently; 'quite too charming and delightful!'

I had not counted on this sort of thing, and glanced for help to Edward, who, hands in pockets, looked grimly down his nose. He had taken his line, and meant to stick to it.

Meantime our friend had made an imaginary spy-glass out of his fist, and was squinting through it at something I could not perceive. 'What an exquisite bit!' he burst out. 'Fifteenth century – no – yes it is!'

I began to feel puzzled, not to say alarmed. It reminded me of the butcher in the Arabian Nights, whose common joints, displayed on the shop-front, took to a startled public the appearance of dismembered humanity. This man seemed to see the strangest things in our dull, familiar surroundings.

'Ah!' he broke out again, as we jogged on between hedgerows: 'and that field now – backed by the downs – with the rain-cloud brooding over it, – that's all David Cox – every bit of it!'

'That field belongs to Farmer Larkin,' I explained politely; for of course he could not be expected to know. 'I'll take you over to Farmer Cox's to-morrow, if he's a friend of yours; but there's nothing to see there.'

Edward, who was hanging sullenly behind, made a face at me, as if to say, 'What sort of lunatic have we got here?'

'It has the true pastoral character, this country of yours,' went on our enthusiast: 'with just that added touch in cottage and farmstead, relics of a bygone art, which makes our English landscape so divine, so unique!'

Really this grasshopper was becoming a burden! These familiar fields and farms, of which we knew every blade and stick, had done nothing that I knew of to be bespattered with adjectives in this way. I had never thought of them as divine, unique, or anything else. They were – well, they were just themselves, and there was an end of it. Despairingly I jogged Edward in the ribs, as a sign to start rational conversation, but he only grinned and continued obdurate.

'You can see the house now,' I remarked presently; 'and that's Selina, chasing the donkey in the paddock. Or is it the donkey chasing Selina? I can't quite make out; but it's them, anyhow.'

Needless to say, he exploded with a full charge of adjectives. 'Exquisite!' he rapped out; 'so mellow and harmonious! and so entirely in keeping!' (I could see from Edward's face that he was thinking who ought to be in keeping.) 'Such possibilities of romance, now, in those old gables!'

'If you mean the garrets,' I said, 'there's a lot of old furniture in them; and one is generally full of apples; and the bats get in sometimes, under the eaves, and flop about till we go up with hair-brushes and things and drive 'em out; but there's nothing else in them that I know of.'

'O, but there must be more than bats,' he cried. 'Don't tell me there are no ghosts. I shall be deeply disappointed if there aren't any ghosts.'

I did not think it worth while to reply, feeling really unequal to this sort of conversation. Besides, we were nearing the house, when my task would be ended. Aunt Eliza met us at the door, and in the cross-fire of adjectives that ensued – both of them talking at once, as grown-up folk have a habit of doing – we two slipped round to the back of the house, and speedily put several broad acres between us and civilisation, for fear of being ordered in to tea in the drawing-room. By the time we returned, our new importation had gone up to dress for dinner, so till the morrow at least we were free of him.

Meanwhile the March wind, after dropping a while at sundown, had been steadily increasing in volume; and although I fell asleep at my usual hour, about midnight I was wakened by the stress and the cry of it. In the bright moonlight, wind-swung branches tossed and swayed eerily across the blinds; there was rumbling in chimneys, whistling in keyholes, and everywhere a clamour and a call. Sleep was out of the question, and, sitting up in bed, I looked round. Edward sat up too. 'I was wondering when you were going to wake,' he said. 'It's no good trying to sleep through this. I vote we get up and do something.'

'I'm game,' I replied. 'Let's play at being in a ship at sea' (the plaint of the old house under the buffeting wind suggested this, naturally); 'and we can be wrecked on an island, or left on a raft, whichever you choose; but I like an island best myself, because there's more things on it.'

Edward on reflection negatived the idea. 'It would make too much noise,' he pointed out. 'There's no fun playing at ships, unless you can make a jolly good row.'

The door creaked, and a small figure in white slipped cautiously in. 'Thought I heard you talking,' said Charlotte. 'We don't like it; we're afraid – Selina too! She'll be here in a minute. She's putting on her new dressing-gown she's so proud of.'

His arms round his knees, Edward cogitated deeply until Selina appeared, barefooted, and looking slim and tall in the new dressing-gown. Then, 'Look here,' he exclaimed; 'now we're all together, I vote we go and explore!'

'You're always wanting to explore,' I said. 'What on earth is there to explore for in this house?'

'Biscuits!' said the inspired Edward.

'Hooray! Come on!' chimed in Harold, sitting up suddenly. He had been awake all the time, but had been shamming asleep, lest he should be fagged to do anything.

It was indeed a fact, as Edward had remembered, that our thoughtless elders occasionally left the biscuits out, a prize for the night-walking adventurer with nerves of steel.

Edward tumbled out of bed, and pulled a baggy old pair of knickerbockers over his bare shanks. Then he girt himself with a belt, into which he thrust, on the one side a large wooden pistol, on the other an old single-stick; and finally he donned a big slouch-hat – once an uncle's – that we used for playing Guy Fawkes and Charles-the-Second-up-a-tree in. Whatever the audience, Edward, if possible, always dressed for his parts with care and conscientiousness; while Harold and I, true Elizabethans, cared little about the mounting of the piece, so long as the real dramatic heart of it beat sound.

Our commander now enjoined on us a silence deep as the grave, reminding us that Aunt Eliza usually slept with an open door, past which we had to file.

'But we'll take the short cut through the Blue Room,' said the wary Selina.

'Of course,' said Edward approvingly. 'I forgot about that. Now then! You lead the way!'

The Blue Room had in prehistoric times been added to by taking in a superfluous passage, and so not only had the advantage of two doors, but also enabled us to get to the head of the stairs without passing the chamber wherein our dragon-aunt lay couched. It was rarely occupied, except when a casual uncle came down for the night. We entered in noiseless file, the room being plunged in darkness, except for a bright strip of moonlight on the floor, across which we must pass for our exit. On this our leading lady chose to pause, seizing the opportunity to study the hang of her new dressing-gown. Greatly satisfied thereat, she proceeded, after the feminine fashion, to peacock and to pose, pacing a minuet down the moonlit patch with an imaginary partner. This was too much for Edward's histrionic instincts, and after a moment's pause he drew his single-stick, and, with flourishes meet for the occasion, strode on to the stage. A struggle ensued on approved lines, at the end of which Selina was stabbed slowly and with unction, and her corpse borne from the chamber by the ruthless cavalier. The rest of us rushed after in a clump, with capers and gesticulations of delight; the special charm of the performance lying in the necessity for its being carried out with the dumbest of dumb shows.

Once out on the dark landing, the noise of the storm without told us that we had exaggerated the necessity for silence; so, grasping the tails of each other's nightgowns, even as Alpine climbers rope themselves together in perilous places, we fared stoutly down the staircase-moraine, and across the grim glacier of the hall, to where a faint glimmer from the half-open door of the drawing-room beckoned to us like friendly hostel-lights. Entering, we found that our thriftless seniors had left the sound red heart of a fire, easily coaxed into a cheerful blaze; and biscuits – a plateful – smiled at us in an encouraging sort of way, together with the halves of a lemon, already squeezed, but still suckable. The biscuits were righteously shared, the lemon segments passed from mouth to mouth; and as we squatted round the fire, its genial warmth consoling our unclad limbs, we realised that so many nocturnal perils had not been braved in vain.

'It's a funny thing,' said Edward, as we chatted, 'how I hate this room in the daytime. It always means having your face washed, and your hair brushed, and talking silly company talk. But to-night it's really quite jolly. Looks different, somehow.'

'I never can make out,' I said, 'what people come here to tea for. They can have their own tea at home if they like – they're not poor people – with jam and things, and drink out of their saucer, and suck their fingers and enjoy themselves; but they come here from a long way off, and sit up straight with their feet off the bars of their chairs, and have one cup, and talk the same sort of stuff every time.'

Selina sniffed disdainfully. 'You don't know anything about it,' she said. 'In society you have to call on each other. It's the proper thing to do.'

'Pooh! you're not in society,' said Edward politely; 'and, what's more, you never will be.'

'Yes, I shall, some day,' retorted Selina; 'but I shan't ask you to come and see me, so there!'

'Wouldn't come if you did,' growled Edward.

'Well you won't get the chance,' rejoined our sister, claiming her right of the last word. There was no heat about these little amenities, which made up – as understood by us – the art of polite conversation.

'I don't like society people,' put in Harold from the sofa, where he was sprawling at full length – a sight the daylight hours would have blushed to witness. 'There were some of 'em here this afternoon, when you two had gone off to the station. O, and I found a dead mouse on the lawn, and I wanted to skin it, but I wasn't sure I knew how, by myself; and they came out into the garden, and patted my head – I wish people wouldn't do that – and one of 'em asked me to pick her a flower. Don't know why she couldn't pick it herself; but I said, "All right, I will if you'll hold my mouse." But she screamed, and threw it away; and Augustus (the cat) got it, and ran away with it. I believe it was really his mouse all the time, 'cos he'd been looking about as if he had lost something, so I wasn't angry with him. But what did she want to throw away my mouse for?'

'You have to be careful with mice,' reflected Edward; 'they're such slippery things. Do you remember we were playing with a dead mouse once on the piano, and the mouse was Robinson Crusoe, and the piano was the island, and somehow Crusoe slipped down inside the island, into its works, and we couldn't get him out, though we tried rakes and all sorts of things, till the tuner came. And that wasn't till a week after, and then – '

Here Charlotte, who had been nodding solemnly, fell over into the fender; and we realised that the wind had dropped at last, and the house was lapped in a great stillness. Our vacant beds seemed to be calling to us imperiously; and we were all glad when Edward gave the signal for retreat. At the top of the staircase Harold unexpectedly turned mutinous, insisting on his right to slide down the banisters in a free country. Circumstances did not allow of argument; I suggested frog's-marching instead, and accordingly frog's-marched he was, the procession passing solemnly across the moon-lit Blue Room, with Harold horizontal and limply submissive. Snug in bed at last, I was just slipping off into slumber when I heard Edward explode, with chuckle and snort.

'By Jove!' he said; 'I forgot all about it. The new tutor's sleeping in the Blue Room!'

'Lucky he didn't wake up and catch us,' I grunted drowsily; and, without another thought on the matter, we both sank into well-earned repose.

Next morning, coming down to breakfast braced to grapple with fresh adversity, we were surprised to find our garrulous friend of the previous day – he was late in making his appearance – strangely silent and (apparently) pre-occupied. Having polished off our porridge, we ran out to feed the rabbits, explaining to them that a beast of a tutor would prevent their enjoying so much of our society as formerly.

On returning to the house at the fated hour appointed for study, we were thunderstruck to see the station-cart disappearing down the drive, freighted with our new acquaintance. Aunt Eliza was brutally uncommunicative; but she was overheard to remark casually that she thought the man must be a lunatic. In this theory we were only too ready to concur, dismissing thereafter the whole matter from our minds.

Some weeks later it happened that Uncle Thomas, while paying us a flying visit, produced from his pocket a copy of the latest weekly, Psyche: a Journal of the Unseen; and proceeded laboriously to rid himself of much incomprehensible humour, apparently at our expense. We bore it patiently, with the forced grin demanded by convention, anxious to get at the source of inspiration, which it presently appeared lay in a paragraph circumstantially describing our modest and humdrum habitation. 'Case iii.,' it began. 'The following particulars were communicated by a young member of the Society, of undoubted probity and earnestness, and are a chronicle of actual and recent experience.' A fairly accurate description of the house followed, with details that were unmistakable; but to this there succeeded a flood of meaningless drivel about apparitions, nightly visitants, and the like, writ in a manner betokening a disordered mind, coupled with a feeble imagination. The fellow was not even original. All the old material was there – the storm at night, the haunted chamber, the white lady, the murder re-enacted, and so on – already worn threadbare in many a Christmas Number. No one was able to make head or tail of the stuff, or of its connexion with our quiet mansion; and yet Edward, who had always suspected the fellow, persisted in maintaining that our tutor of a brief span was, somehow or other, at the bottom of it.