Joan and Peter — The High Cross Preparatory School Part 1
§ 1 From the time when he was christened until he was ten, Lady Charlotte Sydenham remained only a figure in the remotest background of Peter’s life.
Once or twice he saw her in the downstairs room at The Ingle-Nook with his aunts bristling defensively beside her, and once she came to the school, and each time she looked at him with a large, hard, hostile smile and said: “And ha-ow’s Peter?
” and then with a deepening disapproval: “Ha-ow’s Joan?
” But that did not mean that Lady Charlotte had done with Joan and Peter, nor that she had relinquished in the slightest degree her claims to dominate their upbringing.
She was just letting them grow up a little “according to their mother’s ideas, poor woman,” and biding her time.
She wrote every now and then to Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe, just to remind them of her authority, and she wrote two long and serious letters to Oswald about what was to be done.
He answered her briefly in such terms as: “Let well alone.
Religion comes later.
” Oswald had never returned to England.
He had been in Uganda now for five long years, and her fear of him was dying down.
She was beginning to think that perhaps he did not care very much for Joan and Peter.
He had had blackwater fever again.
Perhaps he would never come home any more.
Then in the years 1901 and 1902 she had been much occupied by a special campaign against various London socialists that had ended in a libel case.
She was quite convinced that all socialists were extremely immoral people, she was greatly alarmed at the spread of socialism, and so she wrote and employed a secretary to write letters to a number of people marked “private and confidential,” warning them against this or that prominent socialist.
In these she made various definite statements which, as her counsel vainly tried to argue, were not to be regarded as statements of fact so much as illustrations of the tendency of socialist teaching.
She was tackled by a gentleman in a red necktie named Bamshot, of impregnable virtue, in whom her free gift of “numerous illegitimate children” had evoked no gratitude.
Her efforts to have him “thoroughly cross-examined” produced no sympathy in either judge or jury.
All men, she realized, are wicked and anxious to shield each other.
She left the court with a passionate and almost uncontrollable desire to write more letters about Bamshot and more, worse than ever, and with much nastier charges.
And it was perhaps a subconscious effort to shift the pressure of this dangerous impulse that turned her mind to the state of spiritual neglect in which Joan and Peter were growing out of childhood.
A number of other minor causes moved her in the same direction.
She had had a violent quarrel about the bill with the widow of an Anglican clergyman who kept her favourite pension at Bordighera; and she could still not forgive the establishment at Pallanza that, two years before, had refused to dismiss its head-waiter for saying “Vivent les Boers!
” in her hearing.
She had been taking advice about a suitable and thoroughly comfortable substitute for these resorts, and meanwhile she had stayed on in England—until there were oysters on the table.
Lady Charlotte Sydenham had an unrefined appetite for oysters, and with oysters came a still less refined craving for Dublin stout.
It was an odd secret weakness understood only by her domestics, and noted only by a small circle of intimate friends.
“I don’t seem to fancy anything very much today, Unwin,” Lady Charlotte used to say.
“I don’t know if you’d be tempted by a nice oyster or two, m’lady.
They’re very pick-me-up things,” the faithful attendant would suggest.
“It’s September now, and there’s an R in the month, so it’s safe to venture.
” “Mm.
” “And if I might make so bold as to add a ’arf bottle of good Guinness, m’lady.
It’s a tonic.
Run down as you are.
” Without oysters neither Lady Charlotte nor Unwin would have considered stout a proper drink for a lady.
And indeed it was not a proper drink for Lady Charlotte.
A very little stout sufficed to derange her naturally delicate internal chemistry.
Upon the internal chemistry of Lady Charlotte her equanimity ultimately depended.
There is wrath in stout....
Then Mr. Grimes, who had never ceased to hope that considerable out-of-court activities might still be developed around these two little wards, had taken great pains to bring Aunt Phœbe’s _Collected Papers of a Stitchwoman (Second Series)_ and her little precious volume _Carmen Naturæ_ before his client’s notice.
These books certainly made startling reading for Lady Charlotte.
She had never seen the first “Stitchwoman” papers, she knew nothing of Swinburne, Ruskin, Carlyle, the decadents, nothing of the rich inspirations of the later Victorian period, and so the almost luscious richness of Aunt Phœbe’s imagination, her florid verbiage, her note of sensuous defiance, burst almost devastatingly upon a mind that was habituated to the ordered passions and pearly greys of Mrs. Henry Wood’s novels _More Leaves, Good Words_, and _The Quiver_.
“’With what measure ye mete,’” she read, “’so shall it be meted unto you again,’ and the Standard that Man has fixed for woman recoils now upon his head.
Which standard is it to be,—His or Hers?
No longer can we fight under two flags.
Wild oats, or the Immaculate Banner?
Question to be answered shrewdly, and according to whether we deem it is Experience or Escape we live for, now that we are out of Eden footing it among the sturdy, exhilarating thistles.
What will ye, my masters?
—pallid man unstained, or seasoned woman?
Judgment hesitates.
Judgment may indeed hesitate.
I, who sit here stitching, mark her hesitation, myself—observant.
Is it too bold a speculation that presently golden lassies as well as golden lads will sow their wild oats bravely on the slopes of life?
Is it too much to dream of that grave mother of a greater world, the Woman of the Future, glancing back from the glowing harvest of her life to some tall premonition by the wayside?
—her One Wild Oat!
the crown and seal of her education!
” “Either she means nothing by that,” said Lady Charlotte, “or she means just sheer depravity.
Wild Oat, indeed!
Really!
To call it _that!
_ With Joan on her hands already!
” And here again is a little poem from _Carmen Naturæ_, which also impressed Lady Charlotte very unfavourably: THE MATERIALIST SINGS
Put by your tangled Trinities And let the atoms swing, The merry magic atoms That trace out everything.
These ancient gods are fantasies, Mere Metaphors and Names;
But I can feel the Vortex Ring Go singing through my veins.
No casket of a pallid ghost, But all compact of thrills, My body beats and throbs and lives, My Mighty Atom wills.
“I _don’t_ know what the world is coming to,” said Lady Charlotte.
“In other times a woman who ventured to write such blasphemy would have been Struck Dead....
” “Thrills again!
” said Lady Charlotte, turning over the offending pages.
“In a book that any one may read.
Exposing her thrills to any Bagman who chooses to put down three and sixpence for the pleasure.
Imagine it, Unwin!
” Unwin did her best, assuming an earnest expression....
Other contributory influences upon Lady Charlotte’s state of mind were her secret anxiety for the moral welfare of the realm now that Queen Victoria had given place to the notoriously lax Edward VII.
, and the renascence of sectarian controversies in connexion with Mr. Balfour’s Education Act.
Anglicanism was rousing itself for a new struggle to keep hold of the nation’s children, the Cecils and Lord Halifax were ranging wide and free with the educational dragnet, and Lady Charlotte was a part of the great system of Anglicanism.
The gale that blows the ships home, lifts the leaves....
But far more powerful than any of these causes was the death of a certain Mr. Pybus, who was Unwin’s brother-in-law; he died through an operation undertaken by a plucky rather than highly educated general practitioner, to remove a neglected tumour.
This left Unwin’s sister in want of subsidies, and while Unwin lay in bed one night puzzling over this family problem, it occurred to her that if her sister could get some little girl to mind——...
§ 2 Mr. Grimes was very helpful and sympathetic when Lady Charlotte consulted him.
He repeated the advice he had given five years ago, that Lady Charlotte should not litigate but act, and so thrust upon the other parties the onus of litigation.
She should obtain possession of the two children, put them into suitable schools—“I don’t see how we can put that By-blow into a school,” Lady Charlotte interpolated—and refuse to let the aunts know where they were until they consented to reasonable terms, to the proper religious education of the children, to their proper clothing, and to their separation.
“Directly we have the engagement of the Misses Stubland not to disturb the new arrangement,” said Mr. Grimes, “we shall have gained our point.
I see no harm in letting the children rejoin their aunts for their holidays.
” “That woman may corrupt them at any time,” said Lady Charlotte.
“On that point we can watch and enquire.
Of course, the boy might stay at the school for the holiday times.
There is a class of school which caters for that sort of thing.
That we can see to later.
”...
Mr. Grimes arranged all the details of the abduction of Joan and Peter with much tact and imagination.
As a preliminary step he made Lady Charlotte write to Aunt Phœbe expressing her opinion that the time was now ripe to put the education of the children upon a rational footing.
They were no longer little children, and it was no longer possible for them to go on as they were going.
Peter was born an English gentleman, and he ought to go to a good preparatory school for boys forthwith;
Joan’s destinies in life were different, but they were certainly destinies for which play-acting, running about with bare feet, and dressing like a little savage could be no sort of training.
Lady Charlotte (Mr. Grimes made her say) had been hoping against hope that some suggestion for a change would come from the Misses Stubland.
She could not hope against hope for ever.
She must therefore request a conference, at which Mr. Grimes could be present, for a discussion of the new arrangements that were now urgently necessary.
To this the Misses Stubland replied evasively and carelessly.
In their reply Mr. Grimes, without resentment, detected the hand of Mr. Sycamore.
They were willing to take part in a conference as soon as Mr. Oswald Sydenham returned.
They had reason to believe he was on his way to England now.
Lady Charlotte, still guided by Mr. Grimes, then assumed a more peremptory tone.
She declared that in the interests of both children it was impossible for things to go on any longer as they had been going.
Already the boy was ten.
The plea that nothing could be done until Mr. Sydenham returned was a mere delaying device.
The boy ought to go to school forthwith.
Lady Charlotte was extremely sorry that the Misses Stubland would not come to any agreement upon this urgent matter.
She could not rest content with things in this state, and she would be obliged to consider what her course of action—for the time had come for her to take action—must be.
With the way thus cleared, Mr. Grimes set his forces in motion.
“Leave it to me, Lady Charlotte,” he said.
“Leave it to me.
” A polite young man appeared one morning seated in a chariot of fire outside the road gate of the School of St. George and the Venerable Bede.
He was in one of those strange and novel portents, a “motor-car.
” This alone made him interesting and attractive, and it greatly impressed young Winterbaum to discover that the visitor had come about Joan and Peter.
Young Winterbaum went out to scrutinize the motor-car and its driver, and see if there was anything wrong about it.
But it was difficult to underestimate.
“It’s a petrol car,” he said.
“Belsize....
Those are fine lamps.
” Miss Murgatroyd gathered that the guardians of Joan and Peter found it necessary to interview the children, and had sent the car to fetch them.
“Miss Stubland said nothing of this when I saw her the day before yesterday,” said Miss Murgatroyd.
“We do not care for interruptions in the children’s work.
” The young man explained that the case was urgent.
“Lady Charlotte has been called away.
And she must see the children before she goes out of England.
” There was something very reassuring about the motor-car.
They departed cheerfully to the ill-concealed envy and admiration of young Winterbaum.
The young man had red hair, a white, freckled face, and a costly and remarkable made-up necktie of green plush.
The expression of his pale blue eyes was apprehensive, and ever and again he blew.
His efforts at conversation were fragmentary and unilluminating.
“I got to take you for a long ride,” he said, seating himself between Peter and Joan.
“A lovely long ride.
” “Where?
” said Joan.
“You’ll see in a bit,” said the young man.
“We going to Chastlands?
” asked Peter.
“No,” said the young man.
“Then where are we going?
” said Peter.
“These here cars’ll do forty—fifty miles an hour,” said the young man, changing the subject.
In a little while they had passed beyond the limits of Peter’s knowledge altogether, and were upon an unknown road.
It was astonishing how the car devoured the road.
You saw a corner a long way off and then immediately you were turning this corner.
The car went as swiftly up the hills as down.
It said “honk.
” The trees and hedges flew by as if one was in a train, and behind we trailed a marvellous cloud of dust.
The driver sat before us with his head sunken between his hunched-up shoulders; he never seemed to move; he was quite different from the swaying, noble coachman with the sun-red face, wearing a top hat with a waist and a broad brim, who sat erect and poised his whip and drove Lady Charlotte’s white horse.
§ 3 For a time the road ran undulating between high hedges and tall trees and through villages, and all along to the right of it were the steep, round-headed Downs.
Then came a little town, and the automobile turned off into a valley that cut the Downs across and opened out more and more, and then came heathery common and a town, and then lanes and many villages, flat meadows and flatter, poplars, and then another town with a bridge, and then across long levels of green a glimpse of the big tower of Windsor Castle.
“This is Runnymede, where Magna Carta was signed,” said the young man suddenly.
“And that’s Windsor, where the King lives—when he isn’t living somewhere else, as he usually does....
He’s a _’ot_ un is the King....
See the chap there sailing a boat?
” They went right into Windsor and had a glimpse of the great gates of the Castle and the round tower very near to them, and then they turned down a steep, narrow, paved street and so came into a district of little mean villas in rows and rows.
And outside one of these the car stopped.
“Here we are,” said the young man.
“Where are we?
” asked Peter.
“Where we get out,” said the young man.
“Time we had a feed.
” “Dinnah,” said Joan, with a bright expression, and prepared to descend.
A small, white-faced, anxious woman appeared at the door.
She was wearing amiability as one wears a Sabbath garment.
Moreover, she had a greyish-black dress that ended in a dingy, stiff buff frilling at the neck and wrists.
“You Mrs. Pybus?
” asked the young man.
“I been expecting you a nour,” said Mrs. Pybus, acquiescing in the name.
“Is this the young lady and gentleman?
” That again was a question that needed no answer.
The group halted awkwardly on the doorstep for a few seconds.
“And this is Miss Joan?
” said Mrs. Pybus, with a joyless smile.
“I didn’t expect you to be ’arf yr’ size.
And what a short dress they put you in!
You must ’ave regular shot up.
Makes you what I call leggy....
” This again was poor as a conversational opening.
“’Ow old might you be, dearie?
” asked Mrs. Pybus.
“I’m eight,” said Joan.
“But I’ll be nine soon.
” The young man for inscrutable reasons found this funny.
He guffawed.
“She’s eight,” he said to the world at large; “but she’ll be nine soon.
That’s good, that is!
” “If you’re spared, you shud say,” said Mrs. Pybus.
“You’re a big eight, any’ow.
’Ow old are _you_, dear?
” Peter was disliking her quietly with his hands in his pockets.
He paused for a moment, doubting whether he would answer to the name of “dear.
” “Ten,” he said.
“Just ten?
” asked the young man as if alert for humour.
Peter nodded, and the young man was thwarted.
“I suppose you’ll be ready for something to eat,” said Mrs. Pybus.
“’Adn’t you better come in?
” They went in.
The room they entered was, perhaps, the most ordinary sort of room in England at that time, but it struck upon the observant minds of Joan and Peter as being strange and remarkable.
They had never been before in an ordinary English living-room.
It was a small, oblong room with a faint projection towards the street, as if it had attempted to develop a bow window and had lacked the strength to do so.
On one side was a fireplace surmounted by a mantelshelf and an “overmantel,” an affair of walnut-wood with a number of patches of looking-glass and small brackets and niches on which were displayed an array of worthless objects made to suggest ornaments, small sham bronzes, shepherdesses, sham Japanese fans, a disjointed German pipe and the like.
In the midst of the mantelshelf stood a black marble clock insisting fixedly that the time was half-past seven, and the mantelshelf itself and the fireplace were “draped” with a very cheap figured muslin that one might well have supposed had never been to the wash except for the fact that its pattern was so manifestly washed out.
The walls were papered with a florid pink wallpaper, and all the woodwork was painted a dirty brownish-yellow colour and “grained” so as to render the detection of dirt impossible.
Small as this room was there had been a strenuous and successful attempt to obliterate such floor space as it contained by an accumulation of useless furniture; there were flimsy things called whatnots in two of its corners, there was a bulky veneered mahogany chiffonier opposite the fireplace, and in the window two ferns and a rubber plant in wool-adorned pots died slowly upon a rickety table of bamboo.
The walls had been a basis for much decorative activity, partly it would seem to conceal or minimize a mysterious skin disease that affected the wallpaper, but partly also for a mere perverse impulse towards litter.
There were weak fret work brackets stuck up for their own sakes and more or less askew, and stouter brackets entrusted with the support of more “ornaments,” small bowls and a tea-pot that valiantly pretended they were things of beauty; there were crossed palm fans, there was a steel engraving of Queen Victoria giving the Bible to a dusky potentate as the secret of England’s greatness; there was “The Soul’s Awakening,” two portraits of George and May, and a large but faded photograph of the sea front at Scarborough in an Oxford frame.
A gas “chandelier” descended into the midst of this apartment, betraying a confused ornate disposition in its lines, and the obliteration of the floor space was completed by a number of black horsehair chairs and a large table, now “laid” with a worn and greyish-white cloth for a meal.
Such were the homes that the Victorian age had evolved by the million in England, and to such nests did the common mind of the British resort when it wished to meditate upon the problems of its Imperial destiny.
Joan and Peter surveyed it open-mouthed.
The table was laid about a cruet as its central fact, a large, metallic edifice surmounted by a ring and bearing weary mustard, spiritless pepper, faded cayenne pepper, vinegar and mysteries in bottles.
Joan and Peter were interested in this strange object and at the same time vaguely aware of something missing.
What they missed were flowers; on this table there were no flowers.
There was a cold joint, a white jug of beer and a glass jug of water, and pickles.
“I got cold meat,” said Mrs. Pybus, “not being sure when you were coming.
” She arranged her guests.
But she did not immediately begin.
She had had an idea.
She regarded Peter.
“Now, Peter,” she said, “let me ’ear you say Grice.
” Peter wondered.
“Say Grice, dearie.
” “Grice,” said Peter.
The young man with the red hair was convulsed with merriment.
“That’s good,” he said.
“That’s reely Good.
Kids _are_ amusing.
” “But I tole you to say Grice,” said Mrs. Pybus, ruffled.
“I said it.
” The young man’s voice squeaked as he explained.
“He doesn’t know _’ow_ to say Grace,” he said.
“Never ’eard of it.
” “Is it a catch?
” asked Peter.
The young man caught and restrained a fresh outburst of merriment with the back of his hand, and then explained again to Mrs. Pybus.
“’E’s a perfec’ little ’eathen,” said Mrs. Pybus.
“I _never_ did.
They’ll teach you to say grice all right, my boy, before you’re very much older.
Mark my words.
” And with a sort of businesslike reverence Mrs. Pybus gabbled her formula.
Then she proceeded to carve.
As she carved she pursed her lips and frowned.
The cold meat was not bad, but the children ate fastidiously, and Joan, after her fashion, left all her fat.
This attracted the attention of Mrs. Pybus.
“Eat it up, dearie,” said Mrs. Pybus.
“Wiste not, want not.
” “I don’t eat fat.
” “But you _must_ eat fat,” said Mrs. Pybus.
Joan shook her head.
“We’ll ’ave to teach you to eat fat,” said Mrs. Pybus with a dangerous gentleness.
For the time, however, the teaching was not insisted upon.
“Lovely bits!
Enough to feed a little dog,” said Mrs. Pybus, as she removed Joan’s plate to make way for apple tart.
The conversation was intermittent.
It was as if they waited for some further event.
The young man with the red hair spoke of the great world of London and the funeral of Lord Salisbury.
“’E was a great statesman, say what you like,” said the young man with red hair.
He also spoke of Holbein’s attempt to swim the channel.
“They say ’e oils ’imself all over,” said the young man.
“Lor’!
” said Mrs. Pybus.
“It can’t be comfortable,” said the young man; “say what you like.
” Presently the young man broke a silence by saying: “These here Balkans seem to be giving trouble again.
” “Troublesome lot they are,” said Mrs. Pybus.
“Greeks and Macedonians and Turks and Bulgarians and such.
It fair makes my head spin, the lot of them.
Servians there are too, and Montenegroes.
Too many of ’em altogether.
Cat and dog.
” “Are them the same Greeks that used to be so clever?
” asked Mrs. Pybus.
“_Used_ to be,” said the young man with a kind of dark scorn, and suddenly began to pick his teeth with a pin.
“They can’t even speak their own language now—not properly.
Fair rotten,” the young man added.
He fascinated Joan.
She had never watched anything like him.
But Peter just hated him.
§ 4 Upon this scene there presently appeared a new actor.
He was preluded by a knocking at the door, he was ushered in by Mrs. Pybus who was opening and shutting her mouth in a state of breathless respect; he was received with the utmost deference by the young man with red hair.
Indeed, from the moment when his knocking was heard without, the manner and bearing of the red-haired young man underwent the most marvellous change.
An agitated alacrity appeared in his manner; he stood up and moved nervously; by weak, neck-ward movements of his head he seemed to indicate he now regretted wearing such a bright green tie.
The newcomer appeared in the doorway.
He was a tall, grey-clad, fair gentleman, with a face that twitched and a hand that dandled in front of him.
He grinned his teeth at the room.
“So thassem,” he said, touching his teeth with his thumbnail.
He nodded confidentially to the red-haired young man without removing his eyes from Joan and Peter.
He showed still more of his teeth and rattled his thumbnail along them.
Then he waved his hand over the table.
“Clear all this away,” he said, and sat down in the young man’s chair.
Mrs. Pybus cleared away rapidly, assisted abjectly by the young man.
Mr. Grimes seemed to check off the two children.
“You’re Joan,” he said.
“I needn’t bother about you.
You’re provided for.
Peter.
Peter’s our business.
” He got out a pocket-book and pencil.
