Merrick Leonard
The Quaint Companions
CHAPTER VII
The two boys had a daily governess, and Vivian was her favourite. She was an unsympathetic person, who prided herself on being extremely just, and she was careful to explain that as David was much younger than Vivian, she set him much shorter tasks. She also talked a great deal about "the spirit of emulation, which she was afraid he lacked." To supply the deficiency she offered a prize to the child who earned the greater number of marks by the end of the term. Vivian took the lead, and kept it; and when David knew hopeful moments and promised to catch him up yet, Miss Fewster always answered reprovingly that "she feared he had let his half-brother get too far ahead." After which David the downcast made less progress still.
She found him inattentive. She told him once how bewilderingly far from the earth the sun was, and how comparatively close was the moon. In the same minute he asked her if the moon wasn't "much the nearest to Heaven." She sighed, and recapitulated figures.
David's most violent emotions at this period shook him on the mornings when she was late. It occasionally happened that she did not arrive at all, and then he was free to sit in the garden, doing nothing – "like a girl." (He was always hearing now that he was like a girl; he began to think it would be rather nice to know one.) His feverish hope, as the clock ticked on; the passion of suspense in which he went out to watch for Miss Fewster, praying that she wouldn't appear; the sickening thud of his heart as she turned the corner, seemed physically to weaken him. And always she exclaimed briskly, "So you came to meet me, eh?" And knowing that she saw through him, he would force a hopeless smile and murmur that he had. His thought of the lost garden tied a knot in his throat during the lesson hours, and the droning of the bees grew so loud sometimes that it was impossible to understand what she said. It was really the garden that stood in the way of his writing his exercises, so full was it of sounds, and scents, and of fluttering shadows that he liked to see. In the drawing-room there was a silver inkstand which he knew the Queen had given to his "pops," and one day he thought that if he could have this royal object to dip his pen in, the exercises might be easier. So Lee, who was nettled by the comparisons, lent it to him gladly, and Miss Fewster shuddered. But the Queen's inkstand did not win David the prize.
"Isn't it strange that he never sings?" Ownie asked Lee reproachfully. "Nearly every child sings, or tries to, when he's playing about; they say this boy can't hum a bar."
Lee frowned, and looked away. She was telling him something that he knew already.
"Well, what of it?" he said.
"Well, isn't it strange? If he is going to sing at all – " She felt that if he had sung, he would have done something to justify his existence.
"Nobody can tell if he'll sing, as a man, till he's about eighteen. He won't sing as a child, of course."
"Humph," she said.
"What do you mean by 'humph'? Who wants him to sing as a child?" exclaimed Lee angrily; "why the hell should he?"
"One would think you wanted him to, by your tone!" said the woman. "I'm sorry I inquired, I'm sure. I was wondering what he would do when he grew up if he hadn't a voice."
"He'll do better than I've done, I hope, anyhow. There are worse troubles than having no voice."
"That's lucky for you," she retorted; "if you go on in the way you're going, you won't have one long!"
He rapped out an oath:
"Which skunk said that?"
"Which?" she sniggered. "Everybody!"
"Some man, of course! Drinks my champagne, and runs me down to my wife behind my back."
"Runs you down?" she echoed. "Do you think any man – or any woman either – could tell me more about you than I know?"
"And a lot you care, don't you?"
"I should care if you lost your voice," she said shamelessly. David was all ears behind a picture-book during this conversation.
As the boys grew older, they knew that their parents constantly quarrelled, just as the servants, and the tradespeople, and the neighbours knew it. Vivian, as was natural, had imbibed the servants' view, and held his stepfather a brute who beat "poor mamma" in the night. He called him to David once "a black beast," and in the scuffle that followed, the younger child got badly beaten; his indignation was stronger than his arms. David understood quite early that his father was looked down on because he was black; he realised that it was a disgrace not to be white. That explained why grandmamma had called him "poor little fellow," and why mamma only kissed him when visitors were present. It explained why her rare kisses fell on his cheek like the flick of a wet flannel. He began to see things. And in gabbling his Collects to Miss Fewster, he pronounced with fervour the petition: "Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord!"
Once he asked Lee where he was born.
"In Savannah, sonny."
Miss Fewster's geography lessons had not extended to Savannah. David wanted to know where it was.
"In America, my boy."
"Are there other people like you and me in America, pops?"
"Oh yes, heaps of them," said Lee after a stare.
David was puzzled. He had always believed his pops so wise, and really he seemed to have done a very thoughtless thing indeed. He would have been more sensible himself.
"If I'd been you, I should have stopped there," he said at last. "Then nobody would have noticed you so much."
Lee laughed, without being amused.
"You see I wanted to be noticed," he answered; "all artists do."
"Is that why you came to England?"
"Well, it's why I stayed here. I came with my father and mother when I was no bigger than you are."
"Shall I be an artist too, pops, when I'm a man?"
"I hope you will."
"And shall I marry a white girl, like you did?"
"I hope you won't," said Lee from his heart.
"Why?" asked David.
"Because the coloured man who marries a white girl is a fool, David. He won't be happy."
"I don't think I should like to marry a black one, pops."
"Then you'd better not marry at all," replied Lee. He reflected. "Don't tell your mamma what I've said."
This was before David went to school. Vivian and he were sent to a day-school in the neighbourhood after Miss Fewster turned the corner for the last time, and the elder child reported that "David was an awful little duffer in the playground." The authorities were not much more flattering about his mental attainments. The only high marks that he ever secured were in the composition-class, in which he generally got "double-six" – and was humbled if he didn't. For the rest, he was not ambitious. It was always "Harris" who brought home a prize bound in calf at the end of the term, though it was "Lee" who used to read it. "Harris" was popular, and conspicuous in the lower-school Eleven; "Lee" was a solitary, and usually went out with a "duck's egg." On the horizontal bar "Harris" was as good as many of the boys in trousers; "Lee" could barely manage to pull himself up to his chin.
He was just ten when he fell in love. She was a governess, who took some of the junior classes. Before he left in the evening he used to steal back into the silent schoolroom to say "good night" to her. He always found her standing at the wide window, looking out at the sunset, or the stars. She was still young enough to have her dreams – old enough to be weary. He never told her that he loved her, but she used to lend him her own books, and once she called him "David," and that day he walked up Belsize Park Gardens quivering with joy. Vivian said: "Can't you talk, fat-head?" – and he couldn't.
From the fly-leaves of the books he learnt that her name was Minnie. The knowledge was rapture; for a week he felt that he moved in a different world from the other boys, who only knew her as "Miss Pugh." Once she asked him if he was fond of poetry. He associated it with "Casabianca" and "The Collier's Dying Child," but he would not have sunk in her esteem for a whole holiday, and he said "Yes." So she lent him Tennyson – a shabby volume, with her favourite passages marked. The pencil-marks were very scholastic and precise, and the passages were very sad and sentimental. Poor Miss Pugh! The hardest duty of the governess was to discipline the woman. But David was too young to read the poetry in the margin.
And he was too young to understand the book, but parts of "Maud" he read again and again, and they throbbed in him. They translated what he felt while his father sang, and what the shadows were always hinting in the garden. It was as if he had been waiting for a chord, and it had come. The melody of sense intoxicated him. To put the garden into words, and make music at the same time – how wonderful! Not long afterwards a master discovered him poring dejectedly over original and precocious verse when he ought to have been engaged with declensions, and passed sentence, whereat the versifier gave way to tears.
"I don't like to see boys cry when they're punished, Lee; it isn't English!" said the Englishman, meaning that it wasn't brave.
David looked at him, aggrieved.
"I am crying," he explained, "because I couldn't say what I meant." But henceforth he spoiled his paper more guardedly.
When Vivian was thirteen, Ownie complained that he ought to be at a public school, instead of at Belsize Manor. It was "only right," she declared – "they owed him such advantages" – and Elisha, who had never refused her anything but men to flirt with, answered carelessly, "All right, my dear. Why didn't you say so before? Let him go to Eton or Harrow then, where the swells go. Send him to any place you like." The boy's own wish was to accompany one of his chums to a college on the south coast, and though Ownie parted reluctantly with the idea of Eton or Harrow where the swells went, she gave him his way in the end. She told the cook to see that his playbox was properly filled, and his stepfather presented him with a five-pound note. He made joyous adieux. David, it was understood, would follow him about two years later.
It was when the time came for David to proceed to the college that Vivian began to unburthen his mind to Ownie. The confidential period was not long-lived, but during that Easter recess they used to walk up and down the garden together, disparaging the man who kept them. In one of their conversations, the lad said impetuously:
"I do wish that Dave could be sent somewhere else, you know, mater! I shall get awfully boshed when he joins – it's rather hard lines on a fellow. Why can't he stop at the Manor?"
She sighed. "Will it be very bad for you, dear?"
"Well, a fellow's bound to be boshed. Of course he won't be in my form, but everybody 'll know who he is. It's rather hard lines, having a half-brother who's a blacky."
"Hush! Try and make the best of it," she said, squeezing his arm; "I'm afraid it's too late to send him anywhere else now. We all have things to put up with, Vivie; I have, as well as you."
"Y-e-s," he returned. "It's a good job he won't be in my form. I don't mind so tremendously much. The first time anybody gives me any cheek I'll jolly well sock their heads. Oh, I know you have things to put up with; by Jove, I wonder how you stand the governor sometimes!"
"We learn to stand things as we get older," she replied. "What can't be cured must be endured, Vivie."
"He's such a – I mean leaving his being a negro out of it altogether – he's such a cad. It does lick me how you ever did it, mater!"
"Did it?" she murmured. Her heart missed a beat.
"Well, married him! You never got on with him – I don't see how you could have expected to. Why, I can remember your rows when I was a kid. I think it was awful. I can't make out how you could do it, I'm hanged if I can!"
She winced – the colour in her face fluttered a little. For an instant she was ashamed. Her son looked very tall to her, and her sale looked very foul. But when she answered, her tone was saint-like.
"I had a great deal to consider, dear," she said, "more than you are old enough to understand. To begin with, there was you. And another thing: I was very young, and your grandmother – Anyhow I did do it, and we must make the best of it, Vivie, while it lasts."
She drew his arm round her waist, and was humiliated to feel that it lay there limply. They strolled for a minute in silence, both thinking of the last words that had escaped her.
"It's beastly, going out with him, you know," went on the boy. "And he's got no tact – you'd think he'd know a fellow didn't like it! We met some chaps in Regent Street the other day – chaps in the Fourth; I saw 'em grin as they went by. He didn't see. He was as cool as a cucumber – lugged me into a shop and stood tuck. He'd have lugged them in too, if I'd given him half a chance. You'd have been much happier if you hadn't taken him, mater; it would have been a jolly sight better for both of us."
"Not for you," she said; "I'm sure of that, I've always felt that. Of course there are drawbacks for you now, but, later on, you'll appreciate the benefits. I'm sure that when you're older you'll say I didn't make the sacrifice for nothing. I found it hard to do – I prayed to God to make me strong enough; but the knowledge that I was able to bring you up to be a gentleman has helped me to bear it all." She nodded sadly. "When you're a man, and getting on, you needn't see any more of him than you want to!" she added.
So when Vivian went back to the school, David went too; and the little mulatto's experiences there did nothing to lessen the sensitiveness that had been bred in him. He found his form-mates brutal, and his masters contemptuous. Probably he exaggerated their contempt – circumstances had made him morbid – but those with whom he was brought in contact were not magnanimous, and neither his race nor his temperament was any passport to their favour.
He was bullied atrociously. The taunt of "dirty nigger" embittered his life. When it could not be made aloud, it was written on scraps of paper and passed to him under cover of Latin grammars. A favourite amusement of the form was to pin him to the ground while one of the number set fire to his hair, and when it was discovered that he was the weakest among them, they punched his head and wrenched his ears twenty times a day. Often he used to drag himself away from their sports, to hide in the Gothic corridors, or slink round the great cricket field, crying with pain; but to be found "blubbing" meant worse pain to follow, for then half-a-dozen stalwart lads would hack his shins, and twist his puny arms till he writhed on his knees in agony.
What he dreaded most were the classes which were held twice a week in an annexe of the college. The master who took these always withdrew for five or ten minutes in the middle of the afternoon, and no sooner had he gone than a shower of blows drove David to mount a desk by the window and keep watch, while the other boys had larks. The outcome was always the same. His cry of "Cave!" suppressed the frolics in good time, but the uplifted face of the little beaten sentry through the glass met the master's eyes the instant he set foot in the courtyard, and he re-entered with a stereotyped inquiry:
"Has anybody moved here besides Lee?"
To this there was a chorus of "No, sir."
Then he said, "Lee, fifty lines;" and by-and-by he came to say, "Two hundred lines." So twice a week David got an imposition as well as the kicks and blows. Apparently it never struck the man as noteworthy that the undesirable post of sentinel was always filled by the same boy; it never occurred to him to draw deductions from the fact. He was abnormally obtuse, even for a schoolmaster.
Elisha had not been sent to a public school himself, and when David went home, a false shame kept him from-owning that he was ill-treated. However, as he got bigger, the worst of his physical sufferings ceased. But he was always twitted with his colour, always made to feel that he was a lower thing than the lusty young English lads who insulted him with filthy verses and obscene cartoons. He never found a chum in the college in all the terms that he was there; his real companion was his father in the holidays.
It was a queer fellowship between the morbid youth and the despised husband. Before David was sixteen, he was Lee's confidant in all matters. He heard about his debts and debauches, and his difficulty in reconciling the diminished income with the expenses. He also advised. Though the fees remained the same, the engagements were far fewer, and the prodigal father waded in a sea of debt perpetually now; he talked of the money "I used to make," and of "What my voice was once." There was an afternoon in the practice-room when he gave way to despair, sobbing across the piano like a mourner across a grave; but that was after a late night when his nerves were out of order. David prescribed a couple of glasses of port and a cigar for him, and he was soon cheerful enough to suggest a dinner up West. The tenor and his ugly son were familiar figures in the Regent Street restaurants, "Café, and Café-au-lait" somebody had nick-named them.
At the age of sixteen "Café-au-lait" was a man in his knowledge of one side of life – a man in his reflections and self-restraint – though he still trembled under the masters' glances, and boggled over his Cæsar. He boggled, indeed, over everything except the very occasional essays that demanded no dry-as-dust facts; when he was at liberty to draw on his imagination the essays were a pleasure to him. Lee's was not the nature to expurgate the subject which rankled in him most, and the warning that had escaped him to the child was amplified a thousandfold to the boy.
David understood. Marriage had spoilt his father's life; marriage was the forbidden fruit in his own. The warnings seemed superfluous to him, after what he had seen at home and at school. He no longer wanted to know a girl; he laughed when Lee said, "Remember all I've told you when you're mad about some woman yourself. Your wife would treat you as your mother has treated me. You'd suffer hell every time a white man spoke to her."
"There's no fear of my ever marrying, father."
"Ah!" said Lee, who knew more of temptation.
"I've seen too much."
"But you haven't seen the woman. When she comes along you'll fool yourself. She'll be 'so different' from everybody else; I thought your mother 'so different' before I got her. By God, we hadn't been married a month when she threw it in my face that I was a negro!"
David brought him some verses one day, and asked him nervously if they could be set and sung. For the first time he was timid with his father.
Lee said, "Why do you break your head in your holidays writing things? You're always scribbling in your bedroom, I hear. What do you write about, sonny?"
David looked more confused still.
"Things come," he said; "there's so much to write about. I hope – "
"What do you hope?"
"I hope I shall always write. I've got it in me," he blurted.
"You just pray for a voice instead," his father answered; "it will pay you a heap better. Let fools hammer out the words for you! It's not the chaps that write things who have good times, my boy; it's the fellows that sing, or publish 'em." He read the lines slowly, while the author trembled. "I don't understand what it's meant to be," he said; "is it a hunting song? It's all about the fox's suffering, instead of the people's sport."
David winced: "The fox does suffer, doesn't he?"
"I daresay; but the people enjoy themselves. A hunting song must be jolly – Pink and Tallyho! Have you ever been to a meet? It's a very pretty sight, let me tell you."
"I know it is; but I didn't try to feel like the people who dress up to kill the fox – I tried to feel like the fox they all want to kill."
"What's the good of that? Foxes don't, buy songs. You should have thought about the fun and the cheers. It's all on the wrong side; it's wrong-headed, that's what it is."
"I did think about the cheers – I thought how they must sound to the fox. And I thought when he sees a crowd of big men and women on horses, with a pack of hounds, chasing him to death, the field must look like the world to his fright. He has run till he's breathless, his legs 'll hardly carry him. The crowd are gaining on him and his heart feels as if it's going to burst. They swoop nearer and nearer, and he's bedraggled, and panting, and dead beat. Oh yes, I thought of the cheers – he hears them right to the end. And then the dogs fall on him – such a lot of dogs – and a man sticks a knife into his body, and the lady who's there when he dies carries away a piece of the corpse, and feels proud. It sounds like a game of savages, father."
"Whatever it is, you won't alter it, sonny. You don't suppose you're going to make the world any better?"
This was really David's most sanguine hope. But he looked modest.
"Anyhow, I can write the truth," he said.
"The truth? Who the devil wants the truth?" replied the nigger. "People hate the truth, especially English people; there's nothing English people detest so much. And they always deny it… I'll tell you what you might do if you feel like that – you might make it a bull-fight and go for the brutality of foreigners. But even then it would be no good for music. If you want to do lyrics, you must write about love, or the valour of Englishmen. Nothing else is any use. Nobody would sing this."
"I don't want to write about love," said David; "I only write what I feel. There are plenty of things in the world besides women and war. 'No good for music'? Why, some of it is music! Listen to this." He declaimed his pet stanza entreatingly, and waxed boastful. "Can't you hear it? They came, the last two lines, all by themselves; they just ran into my head, and sang themselves on to the paper. I know they're good. You'll see! Wait till I'm famous. When I bring out a volume of poems, and everybody is talking about it, you won't think I'm so stupid for wanting to write. I tell you I've got it in me."
"Lord! I wish you had had a better mother," said Lee, dismayed at literary ambition.
Ownie, grown rather stout, and puffy under the eyes, used to read novels in the drawing-room, while the pair strolled up and down the garden, talking. She was forty-nine now. When they turned, the lad could see her – the woman who was contemptuous of them both. She wore black; Mrs. Tremlett had recently died. The crape recalled to Lee the little parlour in Regency Square, the period of his courtship.
Her mind was at this time chiefly occupied by the thought of Vivian. He had left school, and she wondered what was to be done with him. He himself had no definite views on the subject. When she broached the matter to him, he said lightly that he was hanged if he knew. On the whole, he thought he preferred the Army, and as the Army was out of the question, he would try his hand at anything they liked. He was cheerful and indifferent.
"Business?" she suggested.
"I don't mind," he said. "Where's the oof to come from, though? Will he part?" Between Ownie and Vivian, Lee was generally referred to as "he."
"I daresay a little could be found to give you a start with, dear, but I don't know what you could do. I had better speak to him about it. You're so young, and you see we don't know many business people."
"I'll tell you what – I'll go to the Cape," he said. "Singleton, a fellow who left last term, is going out there. That would be rather jolly. It would suit me better than an office."
"Go to the Cape?" exclaimed Ownie. "Whatever would you do at the Cape? Don't talk nonsense; I'm not going to have you packed off to the world's end like that. You must stop in London, where I can see you. You're all I've got, remember!" She was hurt that he could propose such a thing.
"Oh, well," he demurred, "that's rot, you know, mater! A fellow can't sit in his mother's lap all his life. Singleton has got a mother too, I suppose, but it doesn't prevent him doing the best he can for himself."
Ownie was silent for a moment. Then she said: "We must try to find you something that you'll like quite as well, dear," and there was a little touch of sadness in her voice. She was reluctant to acknowledge it, but it had forced itself upon her more than once that her handsome young son was a shade selfish. It was the fault that jarred upon her most in others.
Time had not left her complacence unimpaired. The menace of the future was in her reveries, and she had lost her youth, and her figure, and her admirers. Decrepit foreigners who smelt of pomatum, and dyed their moustaches purple, were the only men who languished at her now. Even her youngest captives had ceased to adore her when they heard Vivian, five feet ten in his socks, calling her "Mater." And she had never reproached him, even in her thoughts; she felt it was rather cruel that he wasn't more attached to her.
She very often attempted to discuss the subject of his career with Lee; but Lee found it easier to tip his stepson an occasional sovereign and let him loaf, than to give the matter serious consideration. Vivian was idle for the best part of a year; and when he made a beginning it was only in a West-End concert-hall as assistant business-manager. It was a depressing drop from the altitude on which his mother had foreseen him – he was paid thirty shillings a week, and the position was quite subordinate. But unless she sold some of her jewellery to put him into a profession, there seemed to be nothing else for him to do – and he did not incline to any profession except the Army.
So the elder boy went to town every day now and began to cultivate the air of an impresario, and the younger continued to meet his Muse clandestinely in the college grounds and write surreptitious verse. Then, in the middle of a term – one morning during the Euclid hour – he was summoned from the college by telegram, and sped to the station sick with fear. Lee was in the provinces, very ill.