Joan and Peter — Adolescence Part 2
§ 7 The modern world tells the young a score of conflicting stories—more or less distinctly—about every essential thing.
While men like Oswald dream of a culture telling the young plainly what they are supposed to be for, what this or that or the other is for, the current method of instruction about God and state and sex alike is a wrangle that never joins issue.
For every youth and maiden who is not strictly secluded or very stupid, adolescence is a period of distressful perplexity, of hidden hypotheses, misunderstood hints, checked urgency, and wild stampedes of the imagination.
Joan’s opening mind was like some ill-defended country across which armies marched.
Came the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede, led by Miss Murgatroyd and applauded by Aunt Phœbe, baring its head and feet and knees, casting aside corsets, appealing to nature and simplicity, professing fearlessness, and telling the young a great deal less than it had the air of telling them.
Came Highmorton, a bracing wind after that relaxing atmosphere.
But Limpsfield had at least a certain honesty in its limited initiation;
Highmorton was comparatively an imposture.
With an effect of going right on beyond all established things to something finer and newer, Highmorton was really restoring prudery in a brutalized form.
It is no more vigorous to ban a topic by calling it “soppy” and waving a muddy hockey-stick at it in a threatening manner, than it is to ban it by calling it “improper” and primly cutting it dead.
There the topic remains.
A third influence had made a contributory grab at Joan; Aunt Charlotte Sydenham’s raid on the children’s education was on behalf of all that was then most orthodox.
Hers was indeed the essential English culture of the earlier Victorian age; a culture that so far as sex went was pure suppression—tempered by the broad hints and tittering chatter of servants and base people....
Stuck away, shut in, in Joan’s memory, shut in and disregarded as bees will wax up and disregard the decaying body of some foul intruder, were certain passages with Mrs. Pybus.
They carried an impression at once vague and enormous, of a fascinating unclean horror.
They were inseparably mixed up with strange incredulous thoughts of hell that were implanted during the same period.
Such scenery as they needed was supplied by the dusty, faded furnishings of the little house in Windsor, they had the same faintly disagreeable dusty smell of a home only cleansed by stray wipes with a duster and spiritless sweeping with tea-leaves.
That period had been a dark patch upon the sunlit fabric of Joan’s life.
Over it all brooded this Mrs. Pybus, frankly dirty while “doing” her house in the morning, then insincerely tidy in the afternoon.
She talked continually to, at, and round about Joan.
She was always talking.
She was an untimely widow prone to brood upon the unpleasant but enormously importunate facts that married life had thrust upon her.
She had an irresistible desire to communicate her experiences with an air of wisdom.
She had a certain conceit of wisdom.
She had no sense of the respect due to the ignorance of childhood.
Like many women of her class and type she was too egotistical to allow for childhood.
Never before had Joan heard of diseases.
Now she heard of all the diseases of these two profoundly clinical families, the Pybuses and the Unwins.
The Pybus family specialized in cancers, “chumors” and morbid growths generally; one, but he was rather remote and legendary, had had an “insec’ in ’is ’ed”; the distinction of the Unwins on the other hand was in difficult parturitions.
All this stuff was poured out in a whining monologue in Joan’s presence as Mrs. Pybus busied herself in the slatternly details of her housework.
“Two cases of cancer I’ve seen through from the very first pangs,” Mrs. Pybus would begin, and then piously, “God grant I never see a third.
” “Whatever you do, Joan, one thing I say never do—good though Pybus was and kind.
Never marry no one with internal cancer, ’owever ’ard you may be drove.
Indigestion, rheumatism, even a wooden leg rather.
Better a man that drinks.
I say it and I know.
It doesn’t make it any easier, Joan, to sit and see them suffer.
“You’ve got your troubles yet to come, young lady.
I don’t expec’ you understand ’arf what I’m telling you.
But you will some day.
I sometimes think if I ’adn’t been kep’ in ignorance things might have been better for me—all I bin called upon to go through.
” That was the style of thing.
It was like pouring drainage over a rosebud.
First Joan listened with curiosity, then with horror.
Then unavailingly, always overpowered by a grotesque fascination, she tried not to listen.
Monstrous fragments got through to her cowering attention.
Here were things for a little girl to carry off in her memory, material as she sickened for measles for the most terrifying and abominable of dreams.
“There’s poor ladies that has to be reg’lar cut open....
“I ’ad a dreadful time when I married Pybus.
Often I said to ’im afterwards, you can’t complain of _me_, Pybus.
The things one lives through!...
“’Is sister’s ’usband didn’t ’ave no mercy on ’er....
“Don’t you go outside this gate, Joan—ever.
If one of these ’ere Tramps should get hold of you....
I’ve ’eard of a little girl....
” If a congenial gossip should happen to drop in Joan would be told to sit by the window and look at the “nice picture book”—it was always that one old volume of _The Illustrated London News_—while a talk went on that insisted on being heard, now dropping to harsh whispers, now rising louder after the assurance of Mrs. Pybus: “Lord!
_She_ won’t understand a word you’re saying.
” If by chance Mrs. Pybus and her friend drifted for a time from personal or consanguineous experiences then they dealt with crimes.
Difficulties in the disposal of the body fascinated these ladies even more than the pleasing details of the act.
And they preferred murders of women by men.
It seemed more natural to them....
The world changed again.
Through the tossing distress of the measles Aunt Phyllis reappeared, and then came a journey and The Ingle-Nook and dear Petah!
and Nobby.
She was back in a world where Mrs. Pybus could not exist, where the things of which Mrs. Pybus talked could not happen.
Yet there was this in Joan’s mind, unformulated, there was a passionate stress against its formulation, that all the other things she thought about love and beauty were poetry and dreaming, but this alone of all the voices that had spoken over and about her, told of something real.
In the unknown beyond to which one got if one pressed on, was something of that sort, something monstrous, painful and dingy....
Reality!
Wax it over, little dream bees; cover it up; don’t think of it!
Back to reverie!
Be a king’s mistress, clad in armour, who sometimes grants a kiss.
§ 8 It was in the nature of Mrs. Pybus to misconceive things.
She never grasped the true relationship of Joan and Peter; Mr. Grimes had indeed been deliberately vague upon that point in the interests of the Sydenham family, the use of the Stubland surname for Joan had helped him; and so there dropped into Joan’s ears a suggestion that was at the time merely perplexing but which became gradually an established fact in her mind.
“Ow!
don’t you know?
” said Mrs. Pybus to her friend.
“Ow, no!
She’s——” (Her voice sank to a whisper.
) For a time what they said was so confidential as to convey nothing to Joan but a sense of mystery.
“Ow ’is mother ever stood ’er in the ’ouse passes my belief,” said Mrs. Pybus, coming up to the audible again.
“Why!
I’d ’ave _killed_ ’er.
But ladies and gentlemen don’t seem to ’ave no natural affections—not wot I call affections.
There she was brought into the ’ouse and treated just as if she was the little chap’s sister.
” “She’d be——?
” said the friend, trying to grasp it.
“’Arf sister,” said Mrs. Pybus.
“Of a sort.
Neither ’ere nor there, so to speak.
Not in the eyes of the law.
And there they are—leastways they was until Lady Charlotte Sydenham interfered.
” The friend nodded her head rapidly to indicate intelligent appreciation.
“It isn’t like being _reely_ brother and sister,” said Mrs. Pybus, contemplating possibilities.
“It’s neither one thing nor another.
And all wrop up in mystery as you might say.
Why, oo knows?
They might go falling in love with each other.
” “_’Orrible!
_” said Mrs. Pybus’s friend.
“It ’ad to be put a stop to,” said Mrs. Pybus.
Confirmatory nodding, with a stern eye for the little figure that sat in a corner and pretended to be interested in the faded exploits of vanished royalties, recorded in that old volume of _The Illustrated London News_....
That conversation sank down into the deeps of Joan’s memory and remained there, obscured but exercising a dim influence upon her relations with Peter.
One phrase sent up a bubble every now and then into her conscious thoughts: “half-sister.
” It was years after that she began to piece together the hidden riddle of her birth.
Mummy and Daddy were away; that had served as well for her as for Peter far beyond the Limpsfield days.
It isn’t until children are in their teens that these things interest them keenly.
It wasn’t a thing to talk about, she knew, but it was a thing to puzzle over.
Who was really her father?
Who was her mother?
If she was Peter’s half-sister, then either his father was not hers or his mother....
When people are all manifestly in a plot to keep one in the dark one does not ask questions.
§ 9 After the first violent rupture that Mr. Grimes had organized, Joan and Peter parted and met again in a series of separations and resumptions.
They went off to totally dissimilar atmospheres, Joan to the bracing and roughening air of Highmorton and Peter first to the brightness of White Court and then to the vigorous work and play of Caxton; and each time they returned for the holidays to Margate or Limpsfield or Pelham Ford changed, novel, and yet profoundly familiar.
Always at first when holidays brought them together again they were shy with each other and intensely egotistical, anxious to show off their new tricks and make the most of whatever small triumphs school life had given them.
Then in a day or so they would be at their ease together like a joint that has been dislocated and has slipped into place again.
Cambridge at last brought them nearer together, and ended this series of dislocations.
After much grave weighing of the situation by Miss Fairchild, the principal of Newton Hall, Peter, when Joan came up, was given the status of a full brother.
They grew irregularly, and that made some quaint variations of relationship.
Peter, soon after he went to Caxton, fell to expanding enormously.
He developed a chest, his limbs became great things.
There was a summer bitten into Joan’s memory when he regarded her as nothing more than a “leetle teeny female tick,” and descanted on the minuteness of her soul and body.
But he had lost some of his lightness, if none of his dexterity and balance, as a climber, and Joan got her consolations among the lighter branches of various trees they explored.
Next Christmas Joan herself had done some serious growing, and the gap was not so wide.
But it was only after her first term at Newnham that Joan passed from the subservience of a junior to the confidence of a senior.
She did it at a bound.
She met him one day in the narrow way between Sidney Street and Petty Cury.
Her hair was up and her eyes were steady;
most of her legs had vanished, and she had clothes like a real woman.
We do not foregather even with foster brothers in the streets of Cambridge, but a passing hail is beyond the reach of discipline.
“Hullo, Petah!
” she said, “what a gawky great thing you’re getting!
” Peter, a man in his second year, was so taken aback he had no adequate reply.
“You’ve grown too,” he said, “if it comes to that”;—a flavourless reply.
And there was admiration in his eyes.
An encounter for subsequent regrets.
He thought over it afterwards.
The cheek of her!
It made his blood boil.
“So long, Petah,” said Joan, carrying it off to the end....
They were sterner than brother and sister with each other.
There was never going to be anything “soppy” between them.
At fourteen, when Peter passed into the Red Indian phase of a boy’s development, when there can be no more “blubbing,” no more shirking, he carried Joan with him.
She responded magnificently to the idea of pluck.
Spartan ideals ruled them both.
And a dark taciturnity.
Joan would have died with shame if Peter had penetrated the secret romance of Joan Stubland, and the days of Peter’s sagas were over for ever.
When Peter was fifteen he was consumed by a craving for a gun, and Oswald gave him one.
“But kill,” said Oswald.
“If you let anything get away wounded——” Peter took Joan out into the wood at the back.
He missed a pigeon, and then he got one.
“Pick it up, Joan,” he said, very calmly and grandly.
Joan was white to the lips, but she picked up the bloodstained bird in silence.
These things had to happen.
Then out of a heap of leaves in front darted a rabbit.
Lop, lop, lop, went its little white scut.
_Bang!
_ and over it rolled, but it wasn’t instantly killed.
Horror came upon Joan.
She was nearest; she ran to the wretched animal, which was lying on its side and kicking automatically, and stood over it.
Its eyes were bright and wide with terror.
“Oh, how am I to _kill_ it?
” she cried, with agony in her voice; “what am I to do-o?
” She wrung her hands.
She felt she was going to pieces, giving herself away, failing utterly.
Peter would despise her and jeer at her.
But the poor little beast!
The poor beast!
There is a limit to pride.
She caught it up.
“Petah!
” she cried quite pitifully, on the verge of a whimper.
Peter had come up to her.
He didn’t look contemptuous.
He was white-lipped too.
She had never seen him look scared before.
He snatched the rabbit from her and killed it by one, two, three—she counted—quick blows—she didn’t see.
But she had met his eyes, and they were as distressed as hers.
Just for a moment.
Then he was a fifth form boy again.
He examined his victim with an affectation of calm.
“Too far back,” he said.
“Bad shot.
Mustn’t do that again.
”...
The rabbit was quite still and limp now, dangling from Peter’s hand, its eye had glazed, blood dripped and clotted at its muzzle, but its rhythmic desperate kicking was still beating in Joan’s brain.
Was this to go on?
Could she go on?
Peter’s gun and the pigeon were lying some yards away.
He regarded them and then looked down at the rabbit he held.
“Now I know I can shoot,” he said, and left the sentence unfinished.
“Bring the pigeon, Joan,” he said, ending an indecision, and picked up his gun and led the way back towards the house....
“We got a pigeon and a rabbit,” Joan babbled at tea to Oswald.
“Next time, Petah’s going to let me have the gun.
” Our tone was altogether sporting.
But there was no next time.
There were many unspoken things between Joan and Peter, and this was to be one of them.
For all the rest of their lives neither Joan nor Peter went shooting again.
Men Peter was destined to slay—but no more beasts.
Necessity never compelled them, and it would have demanded an urgent necessity before they would have faced the risk of seeing another little furry creature twist and wriggle and of marking how a bright eye glazes over.
But they were both very bitterly ashamed of this distressing weakness.
They left further shooting for “tomorrow,” and it remained always tomorrow.
They said nothing about their real feelings in the matter, and Peter cleaned and oiled his new gun very carefully and hung it up conspicuously over the mantelshelf of their common room, ready to be taken down at any time—when animals ceased to betray feeling.
§ 10 Joan and Peter detested each other’s friends from the beginning.
The quarrel that culminated in that amazing speech of Joan’s, had been smouldering between them for a good seven years.
It went right back to the days when they were still boy and girl.
To begin with, after their first separation they had had no particular friends; they had had acquaintances and habits of association, but the mind still lacks the continuity necessary for friendship and Euclid until the early teens.
The first rift came with Adela Murchison.
Joan brought her for the summer holidays when Peter had been just a year at Caxton.
That was the first summer at Pelham Ford.
Aunt Phyllis was with them, but Aunt Phœbe was in great labour with her first and only novel, a fantasia on the theme of feminine genius, “These are my Children, or Mary on the Cross.
” (It was afterwards greatly censored.
Boots, the druggist librarian, would have none of it.
) She stayed alone, therefore, at The Ingle-Nook, writing, revising, despairing, tearing up and beginning again, reciting her more powerful passages to the scarlet but listening ears of Groombridge and the little maid, and going more and more unkempt, unhooked, and unbuttoned.
Oswald, instead of resorting to the Climax Club as he was apt to do when Aunt Phœbe was imminent, abode happily in his new home.
Adela was a month or so older than Peter and, what annoyed him to begin with, rather more fully grown.
She was, as she only too manifestly perceived, a woman of the world in comparison with both of her hosts.
She was still deeply in love with Joan, but by no means indifferent to this dark boy who looked at her with so much of Joan’s cool detachment.
Joan’s romantic dreams were Joan’s inmost secret, Adela’s romantic intentions were an efflorescence.
She was already hoisting the signals for masculine surrender.
She never failed to have a blue ribbon astray somewhere to mark and help the blueness of her large blue eyes.
She insisted upon the flaxen waves over her ears, and secretly assisted them to kink.
She had a high colour.
She had no rouge yet in her possession but there was rouge in her soul, and she would rub her cheeks with her hands before she came into a room.
She discovered to Joan the incredible fact that Oswald was also a man.
With her arm round Joan’s waist or over her shoulder she would look back at him across the lawn.
“I say,” she said, “he’d be _frightfully_ good-looking—if it wasn’t for _that_.
” And one day, “I wonder if Mr. Sydenham’s ever been in love.
” She lay in wait for Oswald’s eye.
She went after him to ask him unimportant things.
Once or twice little things happened, the slightest things, but it might have seemed to Joan that Oswald was disposed to flirt with Adela.
But that was surely impossible....
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.
