OSWALD TAKES CONTROL

Joan and Peter by H. G. Wells, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. OSWALD TAKES CONTROL

OSWALD TAKES CONTROL

§ 1

While Mr. Sycamore was regaling himself with the discomfiture of Lady Charlotte, Oswald Sydenham was already walking about the West End of London.

He had come upon a fresh crisis in his life. He was doing his best to accept some thoroughly disagreeable limitations. His London specialist had but confirmed his own conviction. It was no longer possible for him to continue in Africa. He had reached the maximum of blackwater fever permitted to normal men. The next bout—if there was a next bout—would kill him. In addition to this very valid reason for a return, certain small fragments of that Egyptian shell long dormant in his arm had awakened to mischief, and had to be removed under the more favourable conditions to be found in England. He had come back therefore to a land where he had now no close friends and no special occupations, and once more he had to begin life afresh.

He had returned with extreme reluctance. He could not see anything ahead of him in England that gripped his imagination at all. He was strongly tempted to have his arm patched up, and return to Africa for a last spell of work and a last conclusive dose of the fever germ. But in England he might be of use for a longer period, and a kind of godless conscience in him insisted that there must be no deliberate waste in his disposal of his life.

For some time he had been distressed by the general ignorance in England of the realities of things African, and by the general coarsening and deterioration, as he held it to be, of the Imperial idea. There was much over here that needed looking into, he felt, and when it was looked into then the indications for further work might appear. Why not, so far as his powers permitted, do something in helping English people to realize all that Africa was and might be. That was work he might do, and live. In Africa there was little more for him to do but die.

That was all very well in theory. It did not alter his persuasion that he was going to be intolerably lonely if he stayed on in England. Out there were the Chief Commissioner and Muir and half a dozen other people for whom he had developed a strong affection; he was used to his native servants and he liked them; he had his round of intensely interesting activities, he was accustomed to the life. Out there, too, there was sunshine. Such sunshine as the temperate zone can never reproduce. This English world was a grey, draughty, cloudy, lonely world, and one could not always be working. That sunshine alone meant a vast deprivation.

This sort of work he thought of doing and which seemed the only thing now that he could possibly do, wasn’t, he reflected uncomfortably, by any means the work that he could do best. He knew he was bad-tempered. Ill-health intensified a natural irritability. He knew his brain was now a very uncertain instrument, sometimes quite good, sometimes a weary fount of half-formed ideas and indecisions. As an advocate of the right way in Africa, he would do some good no doubt; but he would certainly get into some tiresome squabbles, he would bark his knuckles and bruise his shins. Nevertheless—cheerless though the outlook was—it was, he felt, the work he ought to do.

“Pump up enthusiasm,” said Oswald. “Begin again. What else can I do?”

But what he was pumping up that afternoon in London was really far more like anger. Rage and swearing were the natural secretions of Oswald’s mind at every season of perplexity; he became angry when other types would be despondent. Where melancholic men abandon effort, men of the choleric type take to kicking and smashing. Where the former contract, the latter beat about and spread themselves. Oswald, beneath his superficial resignation, was working up for a quarrel with something. His instinct was to convert the distress of his developing physical insufficiencies into hostility to some external antagonist.

He knew of, and he was doing his best to control, this black urgency to violent thoughts and conclusions. He wanted to kick and he knew he must not yet waste energy in kicking. He was not justified in kicking. He must not allow his sense of personal grievance against fate to disturb his mind. He must behave with a studied calm and aloofness.

“Damn!” said Oswald, no doubt by way of endorsing this decision.

Pursuant to these virtuous resolutions this tall, lean, thwarted man, full of jealous solicitude for the empire he had helped enlarge, this disfigured man whose face was in two halves like those partially treated portraits one sees outside the shops of picture-cleaners, was engaged in comporting himself as much as possible like some pleasant, leisurely man of the world with no obligation or concern but to make himself comfortable and find amusement in things about him. He was doing his best to feel that there was no hurry about anything, and no reason whatever for getting into a state of mind. Just a calm quiet onlooker he had to be. He was, he told himself, taking a look round London as a preliminary to settling down there. Perhaps he was going to settle down in London. Or perhaps in the country somewhere. It did not matter which—whichever was the most pleasant. It was all very pleasant. Very pleasant indeed. A life now of wise lounging and judicious, temperate activities it had to be. He must not fuss.

He had arrived in England the day before, but as yet, except for a brief note to Mr. Sycamore, he had notified no one of his return. He had put up at the Climax Club in Piccadilly, a proprietary club that was half hotel, where one could get a sitting-room as well as a bedroom; and after a visit to his doctor—a visit that confirmed all his worst apprehensions of the need of abandoning Africa for ever—he had spent the evening in the club trying to be calm over the newspapers and magazines. But when one is ill and tired as Oswald was, all that one reads in the newspapers and magazines is wrong and exasperating.

It was 1903; the time when Mr. Joseph Chamberlain returned from South Africa to launch his Tariff Reform agitation—and Oswald was temperamentally a Free Trader. The whole press, daily, weekly, monthly, was full of the noises of the controversy. It impressed him as a controversy almost intolerably mean. His Imperialism was essentially a romantic and generous imagination, a dream of service, of himself, serving the Empire and of the Empire serving mankind. The tacit assumption underlying this most sordid of political campaigns that the Empire was really nothing of the kind, that it was an adventure of exploitation, a national enterprise in the higher piracy, borrowing a faded picturesqueness from the scoundrelism of the Elizabethan and Jacobean buccaneers, the men who started the British slave trade and the Ulster trouble and founded no Empire at all except the plantations of Virginia and Barbados, distressed and perplexed his mind almost unendurably. It was so maddeningly plausible. It was so manifestly the pathway of destruction.

After throwing The National Review into a distant armchair and then, when he met the startled eye of a fellow member, trying to look as though that was his usual way with a magazine, he sought distraction in Southey’s “Doctor,” which happened to be in the club library. After dinner he went out for a stroll in the West End, and visited the Alhambra. He found that more soothing than the papers. The old excitement of the human moth at the candles of vice he no longer felt. He wondered why these flitting allurements had ever stirred him. But he liked the stir and the lights and the pleasant inconsecutive imbecility of the entertainment.

He slept fairly well. In the morning a clerk of Mr. Sycamore’s telephoned to say that that gentleman was out of town, he had been called down to see Lady Charlotte Sydenham, but that he would be back, and would probably try to “get” Oswald about eleven in the evening. He had something important to tell Oswald. The day began cloudy, and repented and became fine. By midday it was, for London, a golden day. Yet to Oswald it seemed but a weak solution of sunshine. If you stood bareheaded in such sunshine you would catch a chill. But he made the best of it. “October mild and boon,” he quoted. He assured himself that it would be entertaining to stroll about the West End and look at the shops and mark the changes in things. He breakfasted late at one of the windows overlooking the Green Park, visited the club barber, walked along to his tailor, bought three new hats and a stout gold-banded cane with an agate top in Bond Street, a pair of boots, gloves and other sundries. Then he went into his second club, the Plantain, in Pall Mall, to read the papers—until he discovered that he was beginning to worry about Tariff Reform again. He saw no one he knew, and lunched alone. In the afternoon he strolled out into London once more.

He was, he found, no longer uncomfortable and self-conscious in the streets of London. His one-sided, blank-sided face did not make him self-conscious now as it used to do, he had reconciled himself to his disfigurement. If at first he had exaggerated its effect, he now inclined to forget it altogether. He wore hats nowadays with a good broad brim, and cocked them to overshadow the missing eye; his dark moustache had grown and was thick and symmetrical; he had acquired the habit of looking at himself in glasses so as to minimize his defaced half. It seemed to him a natural thing now that the casual passer-by should pull up for the fraction of a second at the sight of his tall figure, or look back at him as if to verify a first impression. Didn’t people do that to everybody?

He went along Pall Mall, whose high gentility was still in those days untroubled by the Royal Automobile Club and scarcely ruffled by a discreet shop or so; he turned up through St. James’s Street to Piccadilly with a reminiscent glance by the way down Jermyn Street, where he had had his first experiences of restaurants and suchlike dissipations in his early midshipman days. How far away those follies seemed now! The shops of Bond Street drew him northward; the Doré Gallery of his childhood, he noted, was still going on; he prowled along Oxford Street as far as the Marble Arch—Gillows was still Gillows in those days, and Selfridge had yet to dawn on the London world—and beat back by way of Seymour Street to Regent Street. He nodded to Verrey’s, where long ago he had lunched in a short plaid frock and white socks under the auspices of his godmother, old Lady Percival Pelham. It was all very much as he had left it in ’97. That fever of rebuilding and rearrangement which was already wrecking the old Strand and sweeping away Booksellers’ Row and the Drury Lane slums and a score of ancient landmarks, had not yet reached the West End. There was the same abundance of smart hansom cabs crawling in the streets or neatly ranked on the stands; the same populous horse omnibuses, the same brightly dressed people, and, in Regent Street and Piccadilly, the same too-brightly-dressed women loiterers, only now most of them were visibly coarse and painted; there were the same mendicants and sandwich-men at the pavement edge. Perhaps there were more omnibuses crowding upon one another at Piccadilly and Oxford Circuses, and more people everywhere. Or perhaps that was only the effect of returning from a less crowded world.

Now and then he saw automobiles, queer, clumsy carriages without horses they seemed to be, or else low, heavy-looking vehicles with a flavour of battleship about them. Several emitted bluish smoke and trailed an evil smell. In Regent Street outside Liberty’s art shop one of these mechanical novelties was in trouble. Everybody seemed pleased. The passing cabmen were openly derisive. Oswald joined the little group of people at the pavement edge who were watching the heated and bothered driver engaged in some obscure struggle beneath his car.

An old gentleman in a white waistcoat stood beside Oswald, and presently turned to him.

“Silly things,” he said. “Noisy, dangerous, stinking things. They ought to be forbidden.”

“Perhaps they will improve,” said Oswald.

“How could that thing improve?” asked the old gentleman. “Lotto dirty ironmongery.”

He turned away with the air of a man for whom a question had been settled. Oswald followed him thoughtfully....

He resumed his identifications. Piccadilly Circus! Here was the good old Café Monico; yonder the Criterion....

But everything seemed smaller.

That was the thing that struck him most forcibly; London revisited he discovered to be an intense little place.

It was extraordinary that this should be the head of the Empire. It seemed, when one came back to it, so entirely indifferent to the Empire, so entirely self-absorbed. When one was out beyond there, in Uganda, East Africa, Sudan, Egypt, in all those vast regions where the British were doing the best work they had ever done in pacification and civilization, one thought of London as if it were a great head that watched one from afar, that could hear a cry for help, that could send support. Yet here were these people in these narrow, brightly served streets, very busy about their own affairs, almost as busy and self-absorbed as the white-robed crowd in the big market-place in Mengo, and conspicuously, remarkably not thinking of Africa—or anything of the sort. He compared Bond Street and its crowded, inconvenient side-walks with one of the great garden vistas of the Uganda capital, much to the advantage of the latter. He descended by the Duke of York’s steps, past the old milk stall with its cow, into the Mall. Buckingham Palace, far away, was much less impressive than the fort at Kampala on its commanding hill; the vegetation of St. James’s Park and its iron fencing were a poor substitute for the rich-patterned reed palisades and the wealth of fronds that bordered the wide prospects of the Uganda capital. All English trees looked stunted to Oswald’s eyes.

Towards the palace, tree-felling was in progress, the felling of trees that could never be replaced; and an ugly hoarding veiled the erection of King Edward’s pious memorial to Queen Victoria, the memorial which later her grandson, the Kaiser, was to unveil.

He went on into Whitehall—there was no Admiralty Arch in those days, and one came out of the Mall by way of Spring Gardens round the corner of an obtrusive bank. Oswald paused for a minute to survey the squat buildings and high column of Trafalgar Square, pale amber in the October sunshine, and then strolled down towards Westminster. He became more and more consciously the loitering home-comer. He smiled at the mounted soldiers in their boxes outside the Horse Guards, paused at and approved of the architectural intentions of the new War Office, and nodded to his old friends, the Admiralty and the Colonial Office. Here they brewed the destinies of the Old World outside Europe and kept the Seven Seas. He played his part with increased self-approval. He made his way to Westminster Bridge and spent some time surveying the down river prospect. It was, after all, a little ditch of a river. St. Paul’s was fairly visible, and the red, rusty shed of Charing Cross station and its brutal iron bridge, fit monument of the clumsy looting by “private enterprise” that characterized the Victorian age, had never looked uglier.

He crossed from one side of the bridge to the other, leant over the parapet and regarded the Houses of Parliament. The flag was flying, and a number of little groups of silk-hatted men and gaily dressed ladies were having tea on the terrace.

“I wonder why we rule our Empire from a sham Gothic building,” thought Oswald. “If anything, it ought to be Roman....”

He turned his attention to the traffic and the passers-by. “They don’t realize,” he said. “Suppose suddenly they were to have a mirage here of some of the lands and cities this old Parliament House controls?”

A little stout man driving a pony-trap caught his attention. It was a smart new pony-trap, and there was a look of new clothes about its driver; he smoked a cigar that stuck upward from the corner of his mouth, and in his button-hole was a red chrysanthemum; his whole bearing suggested absolute contentment with himself and acquiescence in the universe; he handled his reins and drew his whip across the flanks of his shining cob as delicately as if he was fly-fishing. “What does he think he is up to?” asked Oswald. A thousand times he had seen that Sphinx of perfect self-contentment on passing negro faces.

“The Empire doesn’t worry him,” said Oswald.

§ 2

It was worrying Oswald a lot. Everything was worrying Oswald just then. It is a subtle question to answer of such cases whether the physical depression shapes the despondent thought, or whether the gnawing doubt prepares the nervous illness. His confidence in his work and the system to which he belonged had vanished by imperceptible degrees.

For some years he had gone about his work with very few doubts. He had been too busy. But now ill-health had conspired with external circumstances to expose him to questionings about things he had never questioned before. They were very fundamental doubts. They cut at the roots of his life. He was beginning to doubt whether the Empire was indeed as good a thing and as great a thing as he had assumed it to be.... The Empire to which his life had been given.

This did not make him any less an Imperialist than he had been, but it sharpened his imperialism with a sense of urgency that cut into his mind.

Altogether Oswald had now given nearly eighteen years to East and Central Africa. His illness had called a halt in a very busy life. For two years and more after his last visit to England, he had been occupied chiefly in operations in and beyond the Lango country against Kabarega and the remnant of the rebel Sudanese. He had assisted in the rounding-up of King Mwanga, the rebel king of Uganda, and in setting up the child king and the regency that replaced him. At the end of 1899 his former chief, Sir Harry Johnston, had come up from British Central Africa as Special Commissioner to Uganda, and the work of land settlement, of provincial organization, of railways and postal development had gone on apace. Next year indeed war had come again, but it was the last war in this part of the world for some time. It was caused by the obstinate disposition of the Nandi people to steal the copper wire from the telegraph poles that had been set up in their country. Hitherto their chief use for copper wire had been to make bracelets and anklets for their married women. They were shocked by this endless stretching out of attenuated feminine adornment. They did their best to restore it to what they considered was its proper use. It was a homely misunderstanding rather than a war. Oswald had led that expedition to a successful explanation. Thereafter the leading fact in the history of Uganda until the sleeping sickness came had been the construction of the railway from the coast to Lake Victoria Nyanza.

In Uganda as in Nyasaland Oswald Sydenham had found himself part of a rapid and busy process of tidying up the world. For some years it had carried him along and determined all his views.

The tidying-up of Africa during the closing years of the nineteenth century was indeed one of the most rapid and effective tidyings up in history. In the late ’eighties the whole of Africa from the frontiers of lower Egypt down to Rhodesia had been a world of chaotic adventure and misery; a black world of insecure barbarism invaded by the rifle, and the Arab and European adventurers who brought it. There had been no such thing as a school from Nubia to Rhodesia, and everywhere there had been constant aimless bloodshed. Long ages of conflict, arbitrary cruelty and instinctive fierceness seemed to have reached a culmination of destructive disorder. The increasing light that fell on Africa did but illuminate a scene of collapse. The new forces that were coming into the country appeared at first as hopelessly blind and cruel as the old; the only difference was that they were better armed. The Arab was frankly a slaver, European enterprise was deeply interested in forced labour. The first-fruits of Christianity had been civil war, and one of Oswald’s earliest experiences of Uganda had been the attack of Mwanga and his Roman Catholic adherents upon the Anglicans in Mengo, who held out in Lugard’s little fort and ultimately established the soundness of the Elizabethan compromise by means of a Maxim gun. It was never a confident outlook for many years anywhere between the Zambesi and the Nile cataracts. Probably no honest man ever worked in west and central Africa between 1880 and 1900 who escaped altogether from phases of absolute despair; who did not face with a sinking heart, lust, hatred, cunning and treachery, black intolerance and ruthless aggression. And behind all the perversities of man worked the wickedness of tropical Nature, uncertain in her moods, frightful in her storms, fruitful of strange troubles through weed and parasite, insect and pestilence. Yet civilization had in the long run won an astonishing victory. In a score of years, so endless then, so brief in retrospect, roads that had been decaying tracks or non-existent were made safe and open everywhere, the railway and the post and telegraph came to stay, vast regions of Africa which since the beginning of things had known no rule but the whim and arbitrary power of transitory chiefs and kings, awoke to the conception of impartial law; war canoes vanished from the lakes and robber tribes learnt to tend their own cattle and cultivate their gardens. And now there were schools. There were hospitals. Perhaps a quarter of a million young people in Uganda alone could read and write; the percentage of literacy in Uganda was rapidly overtaking that in India and Russia.

On the face of it this was enough to set one thinking of the whole world as if it were sweeping forward to universal civilization and happiness. For some years that had been Oswald’s habit of mind. It had been his sustaining faith. He had gone from task to task until this last attack of blackwater fever had arrested his activities. And then these doubts displayed themselves.

From South Africa, that land of destiny for western civilization, had come the first germ of his doubting. Sir Harry Johnston, Oswald’s chief, a frank and bitter critic of the New Imperialism that had thrust up from the Cape to Nyasaland under the leadership of Cecil Rhodes, helped to shape and point his scepticism. The older tradition of the Empire was one of administration regardless of profit, Johnston declared; the new seemed inspired by conceptions of violent and hasty gain. The Rhodes example had set all Africa dancing to the tune of crude exploitation. It had fired the competitive greed of the King of the Belgians and unleashed blood and torture in the Congo Free State. The Congo State had begun as a noble experiment, a real attempt at international compromise; it had been given over to an unworthy trustee and wrecked hideously by his ruthless profit-hunting. All over the Empire, honest administrators and colonial politicians, friendly explorers and the missionaries of civilization, were becoming more and more acutely aware of a heavy acquisitive thrust behind the New Imperialism. Usually they felt it first in the treatment of the natives. The earlier ill-treatment of the native came from the local trader, the local planter, the white rough; now as that sort of thing was got in hand and men could begin to hope for a new and better order, came extensive schemes from Europe for the wholesale detachment of the native from his land, for the wholesale working and sweating of the native population....

Had we defeated the little robbers only to clear the way for organized imperial robbery?

Such things were already troubling Oswald’s mind before the shock of the South African war. But before the war they amounted to criticisms of this administration or that, they were still untouched by any doubts of the general Imperial purpose or of the Empire as a whole. The South African war laid bare an amazing and terrifying amount of national incompetence. The Empire was not only hustled into a war for which there was no occasion, but that war was planned with a lack of intelligent foresight and conducted with a lack of soundness that dismayed every thoughtful Englishman. After a monstrous wasteful struggle the national resources dragged it at last to a not very decisive victory. The outstanding fact became evident that the British army tradition was far gone in decay, that the army was feebly organized and equipped, and that a large proportion of its officers were under-educated men, narrow and conventional, inferior in imagination and initiative to the farmers, lawyers, cattle-drovers, and suchlike leaders against whom their wits were pitted. Behind the rejoicings that hailed the belated peace was a real and unprecedented national humiliation. For the first time the educated British were enquiring whether all was well with the national system if so small a conquest seemed so great a task. Upon minds thus sensitized came the realization of an ever more vigorous and ever more successful industrial and trade competition from Germany and the United States; Great Britain was losing her metallurgical ascendancy, dropping far behind in the chemical industries and no longer supreme upon the seas. For the first time a threat was apparent in the methods of Germany. Germany was launching liner after liner to challenge the British mercantile ascendancy, and she was increasing her navy with a passionate vigour. What did it mean? All over the world the British were discovering the German. And the German, it seemed, had got this New Imperialism that was in the British mind in a still harsher, still less scrupulous and still more vulgar form. “Wake up, England,” said the Prince of Wales returning from a visit to Canada, and Oswald heard the phrase reverberating in Uganda and talked about it and thought it over continually.

(And Lord Rosebery spoke of “efficiency.”)

But now when Oswald sought in the newspapers for signs of this waking up that he desired, he found instead this tremendous reiteration of the ideas of the New Imperialism, acquisitive, mercenary, and altogether selfish and national, which he already so profoundly disliked. The awakening he desired was an awakening of the spirit, an awakening to broader ideas and nobler conceptions of the nation’s rôle in the world’s affairs. He had hoped to find men talking of great schemes of national education, of new schools of ethnology, of tropical botany and oriental languages that would put the Imperial adventure on a broad basis of understanding and competent direction. Instead, he found England full of wild talk about “taxing the foreigner.” A hasty search for national profit he refused to recognize as an awakening. For him indeed it had far more of the quality of a nightmare.

§ 3

It is remarkable how much our deeper convictions are at the mercy of physiological jolts.

Before the renewed attacks of fever had lowered his vitality, Oswald had felt doubtful of this and that, but he had never doubted of the ultimate human triumph; he had never even doubted that the great Empire he served would survive, achieve its mission triumphantly, and incorporate itself in some way with a unified mankind. He himself might blunder or fail, there might be all sorts of set-backs, but in the end what he called Anglo-Saxonism would prevail, the tradition of justice and free speech would be justified by victory, and the darkest phase of the Martyrdom of Man end. But now the fever had so wrought on his nerves and tissues that he no longer enjoyed this ultimate confidence. He could think that anything might fail. He could even doubt the stability of the Victorian world.

One night during this last illness that had brought him home he fell thinking of Zimbabwe and the lost cities of Africa, and then presently of the dead cities of Yucatan, and then of all the lost and vanished civilizations of the world, of the long succession of human failures to secure any abiding order and security. With this he mingled the suggestion of a recent anthropological essay he had read. Two races of men with big brains and subtle minds, the Neanderthal race and the Cro-Magnon race, it was argued very convincingly, had been entirely exterminated before the beginnings of our present humanity. Our own race too might fail and perish and pass away. In the night with a mounting temperature these were very grisly and horrible thoughts indeed. And when at last he passed from such weary and dismal speculations to sleep, there came a dream to crown and perpetuate his mood, a dream that was to return again and again.

It was one of those dreams that will sometimes give a nightmare reality of form and shape to the merest implications of the waking life, one of those dreams that run before and anticipate and perhaps direct one’s daylight decisions. That black artist of delirium who throws his dark creations upon our quivering mental screens, had seized and utilized all Oswald’s germinating misgivings and added queer suggestions of his own. Through a thousand irrelevant and transitory horrors one persistent idea ran through Oswald’s distresses. It was the idea of a dark forest. And of an endless effort to escape from it. He was one of the captains of a vaguely conceived expedition that was lost in an interminable wilderness of shadows; sometimes it was an expedition of limitless millions, and the black trees and creepers about him went up as high as the sky, and sometimes he alone seemed to be the entire expedition, and the darkness rested on his eyes, and the thorns wounded him, and the great ropes of the creepers slashed his face. He was always struggling to get through this forest to some unknown hope, to some place where there was light, where there was air and freedom, where one could look with brotherly security upon the stars; and this forest which was Life, held him back; it held him with its darkness, it snared him with slime and marshy pitfalls, it entangled him amidst pools and channels of black and blood-red stinking water, it tripped him and bound him with its creepers; evil beasts snared his followers, great serpents put them to flight, inexplicable panics and madnesses threw the long straggling columns into internecine warfare, incredible imbecilities threatened the welfare of the entire expedition. He would find himself examining the loads of an endless string of porters, and this man had flung away bread and loaded his pack with poisonous fungi, and that one had replaced ammunition by rust and rubbish and filth. He would find himself in frantic remonstrance with porters who had flung aside their loads, who were sullenly preparing to desert; or again, the whole multitude would be stricken with some strange disease with the most foul and horrible symptoms, and refuse the doubtful medicines he tendered in his despair; or the ground would suddenly breed an innumerable multitude of white thin voracious leeches that turned red-black as they fed....

Then far off through the straight bars of the tree stems a light shone, and a great hope sprang up in him. And then the light became red, a wavering red, a sudden hot breeze brought a sound of crackling wood and the soughing of falling trees, spires and flags and agonized phantoms of flame rushed up to the zenith; through the undergrowth a thousand black beasts stampeded, the air was thick with wild flights of moths and humming-birds, and he realized that the forest had caught fire....

That forest fire was always a climax. With it came a burning sensation in loins and back. It made him shout and struggle and fight amidst the black fugitives and the black thickets. Until the twigs and leaves about him were bursting into flames like a Christmas tree that is being lit up. He would awaken in a sweating agony.

Then presently he would be back again in the midst of that vague innumerable expedition in the steamy deep grey aisles of the forest, under the same gathering sense of urgent necessity, amidst the same inextricable thickening tangle of confusions and cross-purposes.

In his waking moments Oswald, if he could, would have dismissed that dream altogether from his mind. He could argue that it was the creation of some purely pathological despondency, that it had no resemblance, no parallelism, no sort of relation to reality. Yet something of its dark hues was reflected in his waking thoughts. Sometimes this reflection was so faint as to be scarcely perceptible, but always it was there.

§ 4

The Plantain, to which Oswald drifted back to dine, was a club gathered from the ends of the earth and very proud of the fact; it was made up of explorers, travellers, colonial officials, K.C.M.G.’s and C.M.G.’s. It was understood to be a great exchange of imperial ideas, and except for a group or so of members who lived in and about London, it had no conversation because, living for the most part at different ends of the earth, its members did not get to know each other very well. Occasionally there was sporting gossip. Shy, sunburnt men drifted in at intervals of three or four years, and dined and departed. Once a member with a sunstroke from India gave way to religious mania, and tried to preach theosophy from the great staircase to three lonely gentlemen who were reading the telegrams in the hall. He was removed with difficulty. The great red-papered, white-painted silences of the club are copiously adorned with rather old yellow maps of remote regions, and in the hall big terrestrial and celestial globes are available for any members who wish to refresh their minds upon the broad facts of our position in space. But the great glory of the club is its wealth of ethnological and sporting trophies. Scarcely is there a variety of spear, stabbing or disembowelling knife, blowing tube, bow, crossbow, or matchlock, that is not at the disposal of any member nimble enough to pluck it from the wall. In addition there is a vast collection of the heads of beasts; everywhere they project from walls and pillars; heads of bison, gazelles and wart-hogs cheer the souls of the members even in the humblest recesses. In the dining-room, above each table, a hippopotamus or a rhinoceros or a tiger or a lion glares out with glassy eyes upon the world, showing every item in its dentition. Below these monsters sits an occasional empire-builder, in the careful evening dress of the occasional visitant to civilization, seeming by contrast a very pallid, little, nicely behaved thing indeed.

To the Plantain came Oswald, proposing to dine alone, and in this dining-room he discovered Slingsby Darton, the fiscal expert, a little Cockney with scarcely any nose at all, sitting with the utmost impudence under the largest moose. Oswald was so pleased to discover any one he knew that he only remembered that he detested Slingsby Darton as he prepared to sit down with him. There was nothing for it then but to make the best of him.

Oswald chose his dinner and his wine with care. Red wines were forbidden him, but the wine waiter had good authority, authority from India and gastrically very sensitive, for the Moselle he recommended. And in answer to Slingsby Darton’s enquiries, Oswald spread out his theory that he was an amiable, pleased sort of person obliged to come home from Uganda, sorry to leave Uganda, but glad to be back in the dear old country and “at the centre of things,” and ready to take up anything——

“Politics?” said Slingsby Darton. “We want a few voices that have got out of sight of the parish pump.”

Politics—well, it might be. But it was a little hard to join on to things at first. “Fearful lot of squabbling—not very much doing. Not nearly as much as one had hoped.”

That seemed a restrained, reasonable sort of thing to say. Nor was it extravagant to throw out, “I thought it was ’Wake up, England’; but she seems just to be talking in her sleep.”

Out flares the New Imperialism at once in Oswald’s face. “But have you read Chamberlain’s great speeches?” Slingsby Darton protests.

“I had those in mind,” said Oswald grimly.

Both gentlemen were in the early phase of encounter. It was not yet time to join issue. Slingsby Darton heard, but made no retort. Oswald was free to develop his discontents.

Nothing seemed to be getting done, he complained. The army had been proved inefficient, incapable even of a colonial war, but what were we doing?

“Exactly,” said Slingsby Darton. “You dare not even whisper ’conscription.’”

Oswald had not been thinking of that but of a technical reorganization, more science, more equipment. But all that he could see in the way of a change were “these beastly new caps.” (Those were the days of the hated ’Brodrick.’) Then economic reorganization hung fire. “Unemployed” processions grew bigger every winter. (“Tariff,” whispered Darton. “Intelligent organization,” said Oswald.) Then education——

“Education,” said Oswald, “is at the heart of the whole business.”

“I wouldn’t say that altogether,” said Slingsby Darton.

“At the heart of the whole business,” Oswald repeated as though Slingsby Darton had not spoken. “The people do not know. Our people do not understand.” The Boer war had shown how horribly backward our education was—our higher education, our scientific and technical education, the education of our officials and generals in particular. “We have an empire as big as the world and an imagination as small as a parish.” But it would be a troublesome job to change that. Much too troublesome. Oswald became bitter and accusatory. His living side sneered. It would bother a lot of Balfour’s friends quite uncomfortably. The dear old Church couldn’t keep its grip on an education of that sort, and of course the dear old Church must have its grip on education. So after a few large-minded flourishes, the politicians had swamped the whole question of educational reform in this row about church schools and the Passive Resistance movement, both sides only too glad to get away from reality. Oswald was as bitter against the Passive Resister as he was against the Church.

“I don’t know whether I should give quite the primary place to education,” said Slingsby Darton, battling against this tirade. “I don’t know whether I should quite say that. Mr. Chamberlain——”

The fat, as the vulgar say, was in the fire.

October, 1903, was a feverish and impassioned time in English affairs. From Birmingham that month the storm had burst. With a great splash Mr. Joseph Chamberlain had flung the issue of Protection into the sea of political affairs; huge waves of disturbance were sweeping out to the uttermost boundaries of the empire. Instead of paying taxes we were to “tax the foreigner.” To that our fine imperial dream had come. Over dinner-tables, in trains and smoking-rooms, men were quarrelling with their oldest friends. To Oswald the conversion of Imperialism into a scheme for world exploitation in the interests of Birmingham seemed the most atrocious swamping of real issues by private interests that it was possible to conceive. The Sydenham strain was an uncommercial strain. Slingsby Darton was manifestly in the full swirl of the new movement, the man looked cunning and eager, he put his pert little face on one side and raised his voice to argue. A gathering quarrelsomeness took possession of Oswald. He began to speak very rapidly and pungently. He assumed an exasperating and unjustifiable detachment in order to quarrel better. He came into these things from the outside, he declared, quite unbiased, oh! quite unbiased. And this “nail-trust organizer’s campaign” shocked him—shocked him unspeakably. Here was England confessedly in a phase of inefficiency and deterioration, needing a careful all-round effort, in education, in business organization, in military preparation. And suddenly drowning everything else in his noise came “this demagogue ironmonger with his panacea!”

Slingsby Darton was indignant. “My dear Sir! I cannot hear you speak of Mr. Chamberlain in such terms as that!”

“But consider the situation,” said Oswald. “Consider the situation! When of all things we want steady and harmonious constructive work, comes all the uproar, all the cheap, mean thinking and dishonest spouting, the music-hall tricks and poster arguments, of a Campaign.”

Slingsby Darton argued. “But, my dear Sir, it is a constructive campaign! It is based on urgent economic needs.”

Oswald would have none of that. Tariff Reform was a quack remedy. “A Zollverein. Think of it! With an empire in great detached patches all over the world. Each patch with different characteristics and different needs. A child could see that a Zollverein is absurd. A child could see it. Yet to read the speeches of Chamberlain you’d think a tariff could work geographical miracles and turn the empire into a compact continent, locked fast against the foreigner. How can a scattered host become a band of robbers? The mere attempt takes us straight towards disaster.”

“Straight away from it!” Slingsby Darton contradicted.

Oswald went on regardlessly. “An empire—scattered like ours—run on selfish and exclusive lines must bring us into conflict with every other people under the sun,” he asserted. “It must do. Apart from the utter and wanton unrighteousness, apart from the treason to humanity. Oh! I hate this New Imperialism. I hate it and dread it. It spoils my sleep at nights. It worries me and worries me....”

Slingsby Darton thought he would do better to worry about this free trade of ours which was bleeding us to death.

“I do not speak as one ignorant of the empire,” said Oswald. “I have been watching it——”

Slingsby Darton, disregarded, maintained that he, too, had been watching.

But Oswald was now at the “I tell you, Sir,” stage.

He declared that the New Imperialism came from Germany. It was invented by professors of Weltpolitik. Milner had grafted it upon us at Balliol. But German conditions were altogether different from ours, Germany was a geographical unity, all drawn together, unified by natural necessity, like a fist. Germany was indeed a fist—by geographical necessity. The British empire was like an open hand. Must be like an open hand. We were an open people—or we were nothing. We were a liberalizing power or we were the most pretentious sham in history. But we seemed to be forgetting that liberal idea for which we stood. We swaggered now like owners, forgetting that we were only trustees. Trustees for mankind. We were becoming a boastful and a sprawling people. The idea of grabbing half the world—and then shutting other peoples out with tariffs, was—Oswald was losing self-control—“a shoving tradesman’s dream.” And we were doing it—as one might expect “a trust-organizing nail-maker”—phrase rubbed in with needless emphasis—to do it. We were shoving about, treading on everybody’s toes—and failing to educate, failing to arm. Yes—shoving. It was a good word. He did not mind how many times he used it. “This dream of defying the world without an army, and dominating it without education!” The Germans were at least logical in their swagger. If they shoved about they also armed. And they educated. Anyhow they trained. But we trod on everybody’s toes and tried to keep friends all round....

So Oswald—under the moose—while Slingsby Darton did what he could by stabbing an objection at him now and again. It became clearer and clearer to Slingsby Darton that the only possibility before him of holding his own, short of throwing knives and glasses at Oswald, was to capture the offensive.

“You complain of a panacea,” he said, poking out two arresting fingers at Oswald. “That Tariff Reform is a panacea. But what of education? What of this education of yours? That also is a panacea.”

And just then apt to his aid came Walsall and the Bishop of Pinner from their table under the big, black, clerical-looking hippopotamus. Walsall was a naturalist, and had met Oswald in the days of his biological enthusiasm; the Bishop of Pinner had formerly been the Bishop of Tanganyika and knew Oswald by repute. So they came over to greet him and were at once seized upon as auxiliaries by Slingsby Darton.

“We’re getting heated over politics,” said Slingsby Darton, indicating that at least Oswald was.

“Every one is getting heated over politics,” said the bishop. “It’s as bad as the Home Rule split.”

“Sydenham’s panacea is to save the world by education. He won’t hear of economic organization.”

The bishop opened eyes and mouth at Oswald until he looked like the full moon....

On that assertion of Slingsby Darton’s they drifted past the paying-desk to the small smoking-room, and there they had a great dispute about education beneath a gallery audience, so to speak, composed of antelope, Barbary sheep, gnu, yaks, and a sea lion. Oswald had never realized before how passionately he believed in education. It was a revelation. He discovered himself. He wanted to tell these men they were uneducated. He did succeed in saying that Mr. Chamberlain was “essentially an uneducated man.”

Walsall was a very trying opponent for a disputant of swift and passionate convictions. He had a judicial affectation, a Socratic pose. He was a grey, fluffy-headed man with large tortoiseshell spectacles and a general resemblance to a kind wise owl. He liked to waggle his head slowly from side to side and smile. He liked to begin sentences with “But have you thought——?” or “I think you have overlooked——” or “So far from believing that, I hold the exact converse.” He said these things in a very suave voice as though each remark was carefully dressed in oil before serving.

He expressed grave doubts whether there was “any benefit in education—any benefit whatever.”

But the argument that formed that evening’s entertainment for the sea lion and those assorted ruminating artiodactyls was too prolonged and heated and discursive to interest any but the most sedulous reader. Every possible sort of heresy about education seemed loose that night for the affliction of Oswald. Slingsby Darton said, “Make men prosperous and education will come of its own accord.” Walsall thought that the sort of people who benefited by education “would get on anyhow.” He thought knowledge was of value according to the difficulty one experienced in attaining it. (Could any sane man really believe that?) “I would persecute science,” said Walsall, “and then it would be taken care of by enthusiasts.”

“But do you know,” said Oswald, with an immense quiet in his manner, “that there is a—a British Empire? An empire with rather urgent needs?”

(Suppressed murmur from Slingsby Darton: “Then I don’t see what your position is at all!”)

Walsall disputed these “needs.” Weren’t we all too much disposed to make the empire a thing of plan and will? An empire was a growth. It was like a man, it grew without taking thought. Presently it aged and decayed. We were not going to save the empire by taking thought.

(Slingsby Darton, disregarded, now disagreeing with Walsall.)

“Germany takes thought,” Oswald interjected.

“To its own undoing, perhaps,” said Walsall....

The bishop’s method of annoyance was even blander than Walsall’s, and more exasperating to the fevered victim. He talked of the evils of an “educated proletariat.” For a stable community only a certain proportion of educated people was advisable. You could upset the social balance by over-educating the masses. “We destroy good, honest, simple-souled workers in order to make discontented clerks.” Oswald spluttered, “You must make a citizen in a modern population understand something of the State he belongs to!”

“Better, Faith,” said the bishop. “Far better, Faith. Teach them a simple Catechism.”

He had visited Russia. He had been to the coronation of the Tzar, a beautiful ceremony, only a little marred by a quite accidental massacre of some of the spectators. Those were the days before the Russo-Japanese war and the coming of the Duma. There was much to admire in Russia, the good bishop declared; much to learn. Russia was the land of Mary, great-souled and blessed; ours alas! was the land of bustling Martha. Nothing more enviable than the political solidarity of Russia—“after our warring voices.... Time after time I asked myself, ’Aren’t we Westerns on the wrong track? Here is something—Great. And growing greater. Something simple. Here is obedience and a sort of primitive contentment. Trust in the Little White Father, belief in God. Here Christianity lives indeed.’”

About eleven o’clock Walsall was propounding a paradox. “All this talk of education,” he said, “reminds me of the man who tried to lift himself by his own ears. How, I ask myself, can a democracy such as ours take an intelligent interest in its destiny unless it is educated, and how can it educate itself unless it takes an intelligent interest in its destiny? How escape that dilemma?”

“A community,” said Oswald, grappling with this after a moment, “a community isn’t one mind, it’s a number of minds, some more intelligent, some less. It’s a perpetual flow of new minds——”

Then something gave way within him.

“We sit here,” he said in a voice so full of fury that the mouth of the bishop fell open, “and while we talk this half-witted, half-clever muck to excuse ourselves from getting the nation into order, the sands run out of the glass. The time draws near when the empire will be challenged——”

He stood up abruptly.

“Have you any idea,” he said, “what the empire might be? Have you thought of these hundreds of millions to whom we might give light—had we light? Are we to be a possessing and profit-hunting people because we have not the education to be a leaderly people? Are we to do no better than Rome and Carthage—and loot the provinces of the world? Loot or education, that is the choice of every imperial opportunity. All England, I find, is echoing with screams for loot. Have none of us vision? None?”

The bishop shook his head sadly. The man, he thought, was raving.

“What is this vision of yours?” sneered Walsall. “Ten thousand professors?”

“After all,” said Slingsby Darton with a weary insidiousness, “we do not differ about our fundamental idea. You must have funds. You must endow your schools. Without Tariff Reform to give you revenue——”

But Oswald was not going to begin over again.

“I ought to be in bed,” he said, looking at his watch. “My doctor sends me to bed at ten....”

“My God!” he whispered as he put on his coat under the benevolent supervision of an exceptionally fine Indian buffalo.

“What is to happen to the empire,” he cried, going out into the night and addressing himself to the moon, to the monument which commemorates the heroic incompetence of the Duke of York, and to an interested hansom cabby, “what is to happen to the empire—when these are its educated opinions?”

§ 5

But it is high time that Joan and Peter came back into this narrative. For this is their story, it bears their names on its covers and on its back and on its title-page and at the head of each left-hand page. It has been necessary to show the state of mind, the mental condition, the outlook, of their sole guardian when their affairs came into his hands. This done they now return by telephone. Oswald had not been back in the comfortable sitting-room at the Climax Club for ten minutes before he was rung up by Mr. Sycamore and reminded of his duty to his young charges. A club page called Mr. Sydenham to the receiver in his bedroom.

In those days the telephone was still far from perfection. It had not been in general use for a decade.... Mr. Sycamore was audible as a still small voice.

“Mr. Sydenham? Sycamore speaking.”

“No need to be,” said Oswald. “You haven’t been speaking to me.”

“Who am I speaking to? I want Mr. Sydenham. Sycamore speaking.”

“I’m Mr. Sydenham. Who are you? No need to be sick of your speaking so far as I’m concerned. I’ve only just been called to the telephone——”

“Your solicitor, Sycamore. S.Y.C.A.M.O.R.E.”

“Oh! Right O. How are you, Mr. Sycamore? I’m Sydenham. How are those children?”

“Hope you’re well, Mr. Sydenham?”

“Gaudy—in a way. How are you?”

“I’ve been with Lady Charlotte today. I don’t know if you’ve heard anything of——”

Whop! Whop. Bunnik. Silence.

After a little difficulty communication with Mr. Sycamore was partially restored. I say partially because his voice had now become very small and remote indeed. “I was saying, I don’t know if you understand anything of the present state of affairs.”

“Nothing,” said Oswald. “Fire ahead.”

“Can you hear me distinctly? I find you almost inaudible.”

Remonstrances with the exchange led after a time to slightly improved communications.

“You were saying something about a fire?” said Mr. Sycamore.

“I said nothing about a fire. You were saying something about the children?”

“Well, well. Things are in a very confused state, Mr. Sydenham. I hope you mean to take hold of their education. These children are not being educated, they are being fought over.”

“Who’s thinking over them?”

“No one. But the Misses Stubland and Lady Charlotte are fighting over them.... F.I.G.H.T.I.N.G. I want you to think over them.... You—yes.... Think, yes. Both clever children. Great waste if they are not properly educated.... Matters are really urgent. I have been with Lady Charlotte today. You know she kidnapped them?”

“Kidnapped?”

A bright girlish voice, an essentially happy voice, cut into the conversation at this point. “Three minutes up,” it said.

Empire-building language fell from Oswald. In some obscure way this feminine intervention was swept aside, and talk was resumed with Mr. Sycamore.

It continued to be a fragmentary talk, and for a time the burthen of some unknown lady complaining to an unknown friend about the behaviour of a third unknown named George, stated to lack “gumption,” interwove with the main theme. But Mr. Sycamore did succeed in conveying to Oswald a sense of urgency about the welfare of his two charges. Immediate attention was demanded. They were being neglected. The girl was ill. “I would like to talk it over with you as soon as possible,” said Mr. Sycamore.

“Can you come and breakfast here at eight?” said the man from the tropics.

“Half past nine,” said the Londoner, and the talk closed.

The talk ended, but for a time the bell of Oswald’s telephone remained in an agitated state, giving little nervous rings at intervals. When he answered these the exchange said “Number please,” and when he said, “You rang me,” the exchange said, “Oh, no! we didn’t....”

“An empire,” whispered Oswald, sitting on the edge of his bed, “which cannot even run a telephone service efficiently....”

“Education....”

He tried to recall his last speech at the club. Had he ranted? What had they thought of it? What precisely had he said? While they sat and talked muck—his memory was unpleasantly insistent upon that “muck”—the sands ran out of the hour-glass, a new generation grew up.

Had he said that? That was the point of it all—about the new generation. A new generation was growing up and we were doing nothing to make it wiser, more efficient, to give it a broader outlook than the generation that had blundered into and blundered through the Boer war. Had he said that? That was what he ought to have said.

§ 6

For a long time he sat on his bed, blank-minded and too tired to finish undressing. He got to bed at last. But not to sleep. He found that the talk in the club had disturbed his mind almost unendurably. It had pointed and endorsed everything that he had been trying not to think about the old country. Now, too weary and too excited to sleep, he turned over and over again, unprofitably and unprogressively, the tangled impressions of his return to England.

How many millions of such hours of restless questioning must have been spent by wakeful Englishmen in the dozen years between the Boer war and the Great war; how many nocturnally scheming brains must have explored the complicated maze of national dangers, national ambitions, and national ineptitude! If “Wake up, England,” sowed no great harvest of change in the daylight, it did at any rate produce large phantom crops at night. He argued with Walsall over and over again, sometimes wide awake and close to the point, sometimes drowsily with the discussion becoming vague and strangely misshapen and incoherent. Was Walsall right? Was it impossible to change the nature and quality of a people? Must we English always be laggards in peace and blunderers in war? Were our achievements accidents, and our failures essential? Was slackness in our blood? Surely a great effort might accomplish much, a great effort to reorganize political life, to improve national education, to make the press a better instrument of public thought and criticism. To which Walsall answered again with, “How can a democratic community take an intelligent interest in its destinies unless it is educated, and how can it educate itself unless it takes an intelligent interest in its destinies?”

Oswald groaned and turned over in bed.

Thought passed by insensible degrees into dreaming and dreaming shallowed again to wakefulness. Always he seemed to be arguing with Walsall and the bishop for education and effort; nevertheless, now vaguely apprehended as an atmospheric background, now real and close, the black forest of his African nightmare was about him. Always he was struggling on and always he was hoping to see down some vista the warm gleam of daylight, the promise of the open. And Walsall, a vast forest owl with enormous spectacles, kept getting in the way, flapping hands that were really great wings at him and assuring him that there was no way out. None. “This forest is life. This forest will always be life. There is no other life. After all it isn’t such a very bad forest.” Other figures, too, came and went; a gigantic bishop sitting back in an easy chair blocked one hopeful vista, declaring that book-learning only made the lower classes discontented and mischievous, and then a stupidly contented fat man smoking a fat cigar drove in a gig athwart the line of march. He said nothing; he just drove his gig. Then somehow an automobile came in, a most hopeful means of escape, except that it had broken down; and Oswald was trying to repair it in spite of the jeering of an elderly gentleman in a white waistcoat. Suddenly the whole forest swarmed with children. There were countless children; there were just two children. Instead of a multitudinous expedition Oswald found himself alone in the black jungle with just two children, two white and stunted children who were dying for the air and light. No one had cared for them. One was ill, seriously ill. Unless the way out was found they could not live. They were Dolly’s children, his wards. But what was he to do for them?...

Then far ahead he saw that light of the great conflagration, that light that promised to be daylight and became a fire....

“Black coffee,” said Oswald during one of the wide-awake intervals. “Cigars. Talk. Over-excited.... I ought to be more careful.... I forget how flimsy I am still....

“I must get my mind off these things. I’ll talk to old Sycamore tomorrow and see about this little master Peter Stubland and his foster-sister. I’ll go into the matter thoroughly. I haven’t thought of them before.

“I wonder if the boy still takes after Dolly....

“After all,” he said, rolling over, “it’s true. Education is the big neglected duty of the time. It’s fundamental. And what am I doing? It’s just England—England all over—to let that boy be dragged up. I ought to see about him—now. I’ll go down there....

“I’ll go and stay with Aunt Charlotte for a day or so. I’ll send her a wire tomorrow.”

§ 7

The quiet but observant life of old Cashel at Chastlands was greatly enlivened by the advent of Oswald.

Signs of a grave and increasing agitation in the mind of Cashel’s mistress became evident immediately after the departure of Mr. Sycamore. Manifestly whatever that gentleman had said or done—old Cashel had been able to catch very little—had been of a highly stimulating nature. So soon as he was out of the house, Lady Charlotte abandoned her sofa and table, upsetting her tonic as she did so, and still wearing her dressing-gown and cap, proceeded to direct a hasty packing for Italy. Unwin became much agitated, and a housemaid being addressed as a “perfect fool” became a sniffing fount of tears. There was a running to and fro with trunks and tea-baskets, a ringing of bells, and minor orders were issued and countermanded; the carriage was summoned twice for an afternoon drive and twice dismissed. When at last the lace peignoir was changed for a more suitable costume in which to take tea, Lady Charlotte came so near to actual physical violence that Unwin abruptly abandoned her quest of a perfect pose for wig and cap, and her ladyship surprised and delighted Cashel with a blond curl cocked waggishly over one eye. She did not have tea until half-past five.

She talked to herself with her hard blue eyes fixed on vacancy. “I will not stay here to be insulted,” she said.

“Rampageous,” whispered Cashel on the landing. “Rumbustious. What’s it all about?”

“Cashel!” she said sharply as he was taking away the tea-things.

“M’lady.”

“Telephone to Mr. Grimes and ask him to take tickets as usual for myself and Unwin to Pallanza—for tomorrow.”

It was terrible but pleasing to have to tell her that Mr. Grimes would now certainly have gone home from his office.

“See that it is done tomorrow. Tomorrow I must catch the eleven forty-seven for Charing Cross. I shall take lunch with me in the train. A wing of chicken. A drop of claret. Perhaps a sandwich. Gentleman’s Relish or shrimp paste. And a grape or so. A mere mouthful. I shall expect you to be in attendance to help with the luggage as far as Charing Cross....”

So she was going after all.

“Like a flight,” mused Cashel. “What’s after the Old Girl?”...

He grasped the situation a little more firmly next day.

The preparations for assembling Lady Charlotte in the hall before departure were well forward at eleven o’clock, although there was no need to start for the station until the half hour. A brief telegram from Oswald received about half-past ten had greatly stimulated these activities....

Unwin, very white in the face—she always had a bilious headache when travelling was forward—and dressed in the peculiar speckled black dress and black hat that she considered most deterrent to foreign depravity, was already sitting stiffly in the hall with Lady Charlotte’s purple-coloured dressing-bag beside her, and Cashel having seen to the roll of rugs was now just glancing through the tea-basket to make sure that it was in order, when suddenly there was the flapping, rustling sound of a large woman in rapid movement upon the landing above, and Lady Charlotte appeared at the head of the stairs, all hatted, veiled and wrapped for travelling. Her face was bright white with excitement. “Unwin, I want you,” she cried. “Cashel, say I’m in bed. Say I’m ill and must not be disturbed. Say I’ve been taken ill.”

She vanished with the agility of a girl of twenty—except that the landing was of a different opinion.

The two servants heard her scuttle into her room and slam the door. There was a great moment of silence.

“Oh, Lor’!” Unwin rose with the sigh of a martyr, and taking the dressing-bag with her—the fittings alone were worth forty pounds—and pressing her handkerchief to her aching brow, marched upstairs.

Cashel, agape, was roused by the ringing of the front door bell. He opened to discover Mr. Oswald Sydenham with one arm in a sling and a rug upon the other.

“Hullo, Cashel,” he said. “I suppose my room isn’t occupied? My telegram here? How’s Lady Charlotte?”

“Very poorly, sir,” said Cashel. “She’s had to take in her bed, sir.”

“Pity. Anything serious?”

“A sudden attact, sir.”

“H’m. Well, tell her I’m going to inflict myself upon her for a day or so. Just take my traps in and I’ll go on with this fly to Limpsfield. Say I’ll be back to dinner.”

“Certainly, sir.”

The old man bustled out to get in the valise and Gladstone bag that constituted Oswald’s luggage. When he came into the hall again he found the visitor scrutinizing the tea-basket and the roll of rugs with his one penetrating eye in a manner that made him dread a question. But Oswald never questioned servants; on this occasion only he winked at one.

“Nothing wrong with the arm, sir?” asked old Cashel.

“Nothing,” said Oswald, still looking markedly at the symptoms of imminent travel. “H’m.”

He went out to the fly, stood ready to enter it, and then swivelled round very quickly and looked up at his aunt’s bedroom window in time to catch an instant impression of a large, anxious face regarding him.

“Ah!” said Oswald, and returned smiling grimly into the hall.

“Cashel,” he called.

“Sir?”

“Her ladyship is up. Tell her I have a few words to say to her before she goes.”

“Beg pardon, sir——”

“Look here, Cashel, you do what I tell you.”

“I’ll tell Miss Unwin, sir.”

He went upstairs, leaving Oswald still thinking over the rugs. Yes, she was off! She had got everything; pointed Alpine sticks, tea-basket, travelling campstool. It must be Switzerland or Italy for the winter at least. A great yearning to see his aunt with his own eye came upon Oswald. He followed Cashel upstairs quietly but swiftly, and found him in a hasty whispered consultation with Unwin on the second landing. “Oh my ’ed’ll burst bang,” Unwin was saying.

“’Er ladyship, sir,” she began at the sight of Oswald.

“Ssh!” he said to her, and held her and Cashel silent with an uplifted forefinger while he listened to the sounds of a large powerful woman going to bed swiftly and violently in her clothes.

“I must go in to her, sir,” said Unwin breaking the silence. “Poor dear! It’s a very sudden attact.”

The door opened and closed upon Unwin.

“Lock the door on him, you—you Idiot!” they heard Lady Charlotte shout—too late.

The hated and dreaded visage of Oswald appeared looking round the corner of the door into the great lady’s bedroom. Her hat had been flung aside, she was tying on an unconvincing night cap over her great blond travelling wig; her hastily assumed nightgown betrayed the agate brooch at her neck.

“How dare you, sir!” she cried at the sight of him.

“You’re not ill. You’re going to cut off to Italy this afternoon. What have you done to my Wards?”

“A lady’s sick room! Sacred, Sir! Have you no sense of decency?”

“Is it measles, Auntie?”

“Go away!”

“I daren’t. If I leave you alone in this country for a year or two you’re bound to get into trouble. What am I to do with you?”

“Unbecoming intrusion!”

“You ought to be stopped by the Foreign Office. You’ll lead to a war with Italy.”

“Go for a doctor, Cashel,” she cried aloud in her great voice. “Go for the doctor.”

“M’lady,” very faintly from the landing.

“And countermand the station cab, Cashel,” said Oswald.

“If you do anything of the sort, Cashel!” she cried, and sitting up in bed clutched the sheets with such violence that a large spring-sided boot became visible at the foot of the bed. The great lady had gone to bed in her boots. Aunt and nephew both glared at this revelation in an astonished silence.

“How can you, Auntie,” said Oswald.

“If I choose,” said Lady Charlotte. “If I choose——Oh! Go away!”

“Back to dinner,” said Oswald sweetly, and withdrew.

He was still pensive upon the landing when Unwin appeared to make sure that the station cab was not countermanded....

Under the circumstances he was not surprised to find on his return from The Ingle-Nook that he was now the only occupant of Chastlands. Aunt Charlotte had fled, leaving behind a note that had evidently been written before his arrival.

My dear Nephew,—I am sorry that my arrangements for going abroad this winter, already made, prevent my welcoming you home for this uninvited and totally unexpected visit. I am sure Cashel and the other servants will take good care of you. You seem to know the way to their good graces. There are many things I should have liked to talk over with you if you had given me due and proper notice of your return as you ought to have done, instead of leaving it to a solicitor to break the glad tidings to me, followed by a sixpenny telegram. As it is, I shall just miss you. I have to go, and I cannot wait. All my arrangements are made. I suppose it is idle to expect civility from you ever or the slightest attention to the convenances. The Sydenhams have never shone in manners. Well, I hope you will take those two poor children quite out of the hands of those smoking, blaspheming, nightgown-wearing Limpsfield women. They are utterly unfit for such a responsibility. Utterly. I would not trust a pauper brat in their hands. The children require firm treatment, the girl especially, or they will be utterly spoilt. She is deceitful and dishonest, as one might expect; she gave Mrs. Pybus a very trying time indeed, catching measles deliberately and so converting the poor woman’s house into a regular hospital. I fear for her later. I have done my best for them both. No doubt you will find it all spun into a fine tale, but I trust your penetration to see through a tissue of lies, however plausible it may seem at the first blush. I am glad to think you are now to relieve me of a serious responsibility, though how a single man not related to her in the slightest degree can possibly bring up a young girl, even though illegitimate, without grave scandal, passes my poor comprehension. No doubt I am an old fashioned old fool nowadays! Thank God! I beg to be excused!

Your affectionate AuntCharlotte.

Towards the end of this note her ladyship’s highly angular handwriting betrayed by an enhanced size and considerable irregularity, a deflection from her customary calm.

§ 8

Oswald knocked for some time at the open green door of The Ingle-Nook before attracting any one’s attention. Then a small but apparently only servant appeared, a little round-faced creature who looked up hard into Oswald’s living eye—as though she didn’t quite like the other. She explained that “Miss Phyllis” was not at home, and that “Miss Phœbe mustn’t be disturved.” Miss Phœbe was working. Miss Phyllis had gone away with Mary——

“Who’s Mary?” said Oswald.

“Well, Sir, it’s Mary who always ’as been ’ere, Sir,”—to Windsor to be with Miss Joan. “And it’s orders no one’s allowed to upset Miss Phœbe when she’s writing. Not even Lady Charlotte Sydenham, Sir. I dursn’t give your name, Sir, even. I dursn’t.”

“Except,” she added reverentially, “it’s Death or a Fire.”

“You aren’t the Piano, per’aps?” she asked.

Oswald had to confess he wasn’t.

The little servant looked sorry for him.

And that was in truth the inexorable law now of The Ingle-Nook. Aunt Phœbe was taking herself very seriously—as became a Thinker whose Stitchwoman papers, deep, high, and occasionally broad in thought, were running into a sale of tens of thousands. So she sat hard and close at her writing-table from half-past nine to twelve every morning, secluded and defended from all the world, correcting, musing deeply over, and occasionally reading aloud the proofs of the third series of Stitchwoman papers. (Old Groombridge, the occasional gardener, used to listen outside in awe and admiration. “My word, but she do give it ’em!” old Groombridge used to say.) Oswald perceived that there was nothing to do but wait. “I’ll wait,” he said, “downstairs.”

“I suppose I ought to let you in,” said the little servant, evidently seeking advice.

“Oh, decidedly,” said Oswald, and entered the room in which he had parted from Dolly six years ago.

The door closed behind the little servant, and Oswald found himself in a house far more heavily charged with memories than he could have expected. The furniture had been but little altered; it was the morning time again, the shadow masses fell in the same places, it had just the same atmosphere of quiet expectation it had had on that memorable day before the door beyond had opened and Dolly had appeared, subdued and ashamed, to tell him of the act that severed them for ever. How living she seemed here by virtue of those inanimate things! Had that door opened now he would have expected to see her standing there again. And he was alive still, strong and active, altered just a little by a touch of fever and six short years of experience, but the same thing of impulse and desire and anger, and she had gone beyond time and space, beyond hunger or desire. He had walked between this window and this fireplace on these same bricks on which he was pacing now, spitting abuse at her, a man mad with shame and thwarted desire. Never had he forgiven her, or stayed his mind to think what life had been for her, until she was dead. That outbreak, with gesticulating hands and an angry, grimacing face, had been her last memory of him. What a broken image he had made of himself in her mind! And now he could never set things right with her, never tell her of his belated understanding and pity. “I was a weak thing, confused and torn between my motives. Why did you—you who were my lover—why did you not help me after I had stumbled?” So the still phantom in that room reproached him, a phantom of his own creation, for Dolly had never reproached him; to the end she had had no reproaches in her heart for any one but herself because of their disaster.

“Hold tight to love, little people,” he whispered. “Hold tight to love.... But we don’t, we don’t....”

Never before had Oswald so felt the tremendous pitifulness of life. He felt that if he stayed longer in this room he must cry out. He walked to the garden door and stood looking at the empty flagstone path between the dahlias and sunflowers.

It was all as if he had but left it yesterday, except for the heartache that now mingled with the sunshine.

“Pat—whack—pat—whack”; he scarcely heeded that rhythmic noise.

Peter had gone out of his head altogether. He walked slowly along the pathway towards the little arbour that overhung the Weald. Then, turning, he discovered Peter with a bat in his hand, regarding him....

Directly Oswald saw Peter he marvelled that he had not been eager to see him before. The boy was absurdly like Dolly; he had exactly the same smile; and directly he saw the gaunt figure of his one-eyed guardian he cried out, “It’s Nobby!” with a voice that might have been hers. There was a squeak of genuine delight in his voice. He wasn’t at all the sturdy little thing in a pinafore that Oswald remembered. He seemed indeed at the first glance just a thin, flat-chested little Dolly in grey flannel trousers.

He had obviously been bored before this happy arrival of Oswald. He had been banging a rubber ball against the scullery with a cricket-bat and counting hits and misses. It is a poor entertainment. Oswald did not realize how green his memory had been kept by the Bungo-Peter saga, and Peter’s prompt recognition after six years flattered him.

The two approached one another slowly, taking each other in.

“You remember me?” said Oswald superfluously.

“Don’t I just! You promised me a lion’s skin.”

“So I did.”

He could not bear to begin this new relationship as a defaulter. “It’s on its way to you,” he equivocated, making secret plans.

Peter, tucking his bat under his arm and burying his hands in his trouser pockets, drew still nearer. At a distance of four feet or thereabouts he stopped short and Oswald stopped short. Peter regarded this still incredible home-comer with his head a little on one side.

“It was you, used to tell me stories.”

“You don’t remember my telling you stories?”

“I do. About the Ba-ganda who live in U-ganda. Don’t you remember how you used to put out my Zulus and my elephants and lions on the floor and say it was Africa. You taught us roaring like lions—Joan and me. Don’t you remember?”

Oswald remembered. He remembered himself on all fours with the children on the floor of the sunny playroom upstairs, and some one sometimes standing, sometimes sitting above the game, some one who listened as keenly as the children, some one at whom he talked about that world of lakes as large as seas, and of trackless, sunless forests and of park-like glades and wildernesses of flowers, and about strings of loaded porters and of encounters with marvelling people who had never before set eyes on a European....

§ 9

The idea that the guardianship of Peter was just a little duty to be seen to, vanished at the sight of him in favour of the realization of a living relationship. There are moments when small boys of ten in perfect health and condition can look the smallest, flimsiest, and most pathetic of created things—and at the same time preternaturally valiant and intelligent. They take on a likeness to sacred flames that may at any moment flicker out. More particularly does this unconscious camouflage of delicacy occur in the presence of parents and guardians already in a state of self-reproach and emotional disorder. Mr. Grimes with an eye to growth had procured a grey flannel suit a little too large for Peter, but it never occurred to Oswald that the misfit could be due to anything but a swift and ominous shrinkage of the boy. He wanted to carry him off forthwith to beer and cream and sea-bathing.

But these were feelings he knew he must not betray.

“I must tell you some more stories,” he said. “I’ve come back to England to live.”

“Here?”—brightly.

“Well, near here. But I shall see a lot of you now, Peter.”

“I’ll like that,” said Peter. “I’ve often thought of you....”

A pause.

“You broken your arm?” said Peter.

“Not so bad as that. I’ve got to have some bits of shell taken out.”

“That Egyptian shell? When you got the V.C.?”

“I never told you of the Egyptian shell?” asked Oswald.

“Mummy did. Once. Long ago.”

Another pause.

“This garden’s not so greatly altered, Peter,” said Oswald.

“There’s a Friendship’s Garden up that end,” said Peter, indicating the end by a movement of his head. “But it isn’t much. Aunt Phœbe started it and forgot it. Every one who came was to plant something. And me and Joan have gardens, but they’ve got all weedy now.”

“Let’s have a look at it all,” said Oswald, and guardian and ward strolled towards the steep.

“The Dahlias are splendid this year,” Oswald remarked, “and these Japanese roses are covered with berries. Splendid, aren’t they? One can make a jelly of them. Quite a good jelly. And let me see, wasn’t there a little summerhouse at the end of this path where one looked over the Weald? Ah! here it is. Hardly changed at all.”

He sat down. Here he had talked with Dolly and taken her hand....

He bestirred himself to talk.

“And exactly how old are you now, Peter?”

“Ten years and two months,” said Peter.

“We’ll have to find a school for you.”

“Have you been in Africa since I saw you?” Peter asked, avoiding the topic.

“Since you saw me going off,” said Oswald, and the man glanced at the boy and the boy glanced at the man, and each was wondering what the other remembered. “I’ve been in Uganda all the time. There’s been fighting and working. Some day you must go to Uganda and see all that has been done. We’ve made a good railway and good roads and telegraphs. We’ve put down robbers and cruelty.”

“And shot a lot of lions?”

“Plenty. The lions were pretty awful for a bit. About Nairobi and along the line.”

“Shot ’em when they were coming at you?”

“One was coming straight at me.”

“That’s my skin,” said Peter.

Oswald made no answer.

“I’d like to go to Africa,” said Peter.

“You shall.”

He decided to begin at once upon his neglected task of making an Imperial citizen according to the ideas that prevailed before the advent of the New Imperialism. “That sort of thing,” he said, “is what we Englishmen are for, you know, Peter. What our sort of Englishman is for anyhow. We have to go about the world and make roads and keep the peace and see fair play. We’ve got to kill big beasts and climb hard mountains. That’s the job of the Englishman. He’s a sort of policeman. A sort of working guardian. Not a nosy slave-driver trying to get rich. He chases off slave-drivers. All the world’s his beat. India, Africa, China, and the East, all the seas of the world. This little fat green country, all trim and tidy and set with houses and gardens, isn’t much of a land for a man, you know—unless he’s an invalid. It’s a good land to grow up in and come back to die in. Or rest in. But in between, no!”

“No,” said Peter.

“No.”

“But you haven’t come back to die, Uncle Nobby?”

“No fear. But I’ve had to come back. I’m resting. This old arm, you know, and all that sort of thing. Just for a time.... And besides I want to see a lot of you.”

“Yes.”

“You have to grow up here and learn all you can, science and all sorts of things, so that you can be a useful man—wherever you have to go.”

“Africa,” said Peter.

“Africa, perhaps. And that’s why one has to go to school and college—and learn all about it.”

“They haven’t taught me much about it yet,” said Peter.

“Well, you haven’t been to much in the way of schools,” said Oswald.

“Are there better schools?”

“No end. We’re going to find one,” said Oswald.

“I wish school was over,” said Peter.

“Why? You’ve got no end to learn yet.”

“I want to begin,” said Peter, looking out across the tumbled gentleness of the Weald.

“Begin school?”

“No, begin—Africa, India—doing things.”

“School first,” said Oswald.

“Are there schools where you learn about guns and animals and mountains and foreign people?” said Peter.

“There must be,” said Oswald. “We’ll find something.”

“Where you don’t do Latin and parsing and ’straction of the square root.”

“Oh! those things have their place.”

“Did you have to do them, Uncle Nobby?”

“Rather.”

“Were they useful to you?”

“At times—in a way. Of course those things are good as training, you know—awfully good. Harden up the mental muscles, Peter.”

Peter made no reply to that.

Presently Peter said, “Shall I learn about machines?”

“When you’ve done some mathematics, Peter.”

“I’d like to fly,” said Peter.

“That’s far away yet.”

“There was a boy at that school, his father was an engineer; and he said that flying machines were coming quite soon.”

This was beyond Oswald’s range.

“The French have got a balloon that steers about,” he said. “That’s as near as we are likely to come to flying for a long time yet.”

“This boy said that he meant a real flying machine, not a balloon. It was to be heavier than air. It would fly like a kite or a bird.”

“I doubt if we’ll see that in my lifetime,” said Oswald; “or yours,” blind to the fate that had marked Peter for its own.

“H’m,” said Peter, with a shadow falling upon one of his brightest dreams. (Nobby ought to know these things. His word ought surely to be final. Still, after all, this chap’s father was an engineer.) “I’d love to fly,” said Peter.

§ 10

Something with the decorative effect of a broad processional banner in a very High Church indeed, appeared upon the flagstone path. It was Aunt Phœbe.

She had come out into the garden half an hour before her usual time. But indeed from the moment when she had heard Oswald and Peter talking in the garden below she had been unable to write more. After some futile attempts to pick up the lost thread of her discourse, she had gone to her bedroom and revised her toilet, which was often careless in the morning, so as to be more expressive of her personality. She was wearing a long djibbah-like garment with a richly embroidered yoke, she had sandals over her brown stockings, and rather by way of symbol of authorship than for any immediate use she bore a big leather portfolio. There was moreover now a gold-mounted fountain pen amidst the other ingredients of the cheerful chatelaine that had once delighted Peter’s babyhood.

She seemed a fuller, more confident person than Oswald remembered. She came eloquent with apologies. “I have to make an inexorable rule,” she said, “against disturbances. As if I were a man writer instead of a mere woman. Between nine and one I am a woman enclosed—cloistered—refused. Sacred hours of self-completeness. Unspeakably precious to me. Visitors are not even announced. It is a law—inflexible.”

“We must all respect our work,” said Oswald.

“It’s over now,” said Aunt Phœbe, smiling like the sun after clouds. “It’s over now for the day. I am just human—until tomorrow again.”

“You are writing a book?” Oswald asked rather ineptly.

“The Stitchwoman; Series Three. Much is expected; much must be given. I am the slave now of a Following.”

Aunt Phœbe went to the wall and stood with her fine profile raised up over the view. She was a little breathless and twitching slightly, but very magnificent. Most of her hair was tidy. “Our old Weald, does it look the same?” she asked.

“Quite the same,” said Oswald, standing up beside her.

“But not to me,” she said. “Indeed not to me. To me every day it is different. Always wide, always wonderful, but different, always different. I know it so well.”

Oswald felt she had worked a “catch” on him. He was faintly nettled.

“Still,” he said, “fundamentally one must recognize that it’s the same Weald.”

“I wonder,” said Aunt Phœbe suddenly, looking at him very intently, and then, as if she tasted the word, “Fundamentally?”

“I don’t know,” she added.

Oswald was too much annoyed to reply.

“And what do you think of your new charge?” she asked. “I don’t know whether Peter quite understands that yet. The young squire goes to the men. He casts aside childish things, and rides out in his little Caparison to join the ranks. Do you know that, Peter? Mr. Sydenham is now your sole guardian.”

Peter looked at Oswald and smiled shyly, and his cheeks flushed.

“I think we shall get on together,” said Oswald.

“Would that it ended there! You take the girl too?”

“It is not my doing,” said Oswald.

Aunt Phœbe addressed the Weald.

“Poor Dolly! So it is that the mother soul cheats itself. Through the ages—always self-abnegation for the woman.” She turned to Oswald. “If she had had time to think I am certain she would not have excluded women from this trust. Certain. What have men to do with education? With the education of a woman more particularly. The Greater from the Less. But the thing is done. It has been a great experiment, a wonderful experiment; teaching, I learnt—but I doubt if you will understand that.”

There was a slight pause. “What exactly was the nature of the experiment?” asked Oswald modestly.

“Feminine influence. Dominant.”

Oswald considered. “I don’t know if you include Lady Charlotte,” he threw out.

“Oh!” said Aunt Phœbe.

“But she has played her part, I gather.”

“Feminine! No! She is completely a Man-made Woman. Quintessentially the Pampered Squaw. Holding her position by her former charms. A Sex Residuum. Relict. This last outrage. An incident—merely. Her course of action was dictated for her. A Man. A mere solicitor. One Grimes. The flimsiest creature! An aspen leaf—but Male. Male.”

Stern thoughts kept Aunt Phœbe silent for a time. Then she remarked very quietly, “I shook him. I shook him well.”

“I hope still to have the benefit of your advice,” said Oswald gravely.

“Nay,” she said. But she was pleased. “A shy comment, perhaps. But the difference will be essential. Don’t expect me to guide you as you would wish to be guided. That phase is over between men and women. We hand the children over—since the law will have it so. Take them!”

And then addressing the Weald, Aunt Phœbe, in vibrating accents, uttered a word that was to be the keynote of a decade of feminine activities.

“The Vote,” said Aunt Phœbe, getting a wonderful emotional buzz into her voice. “The Vo-o-o-o-o-te.”

§ 11

So it was that Oswald found himself fully invested with his responsibilities.

There was a terrifying suggestion in Aunt Phœbe’s manner that he would presently have to clap Peter’s hat on, make up a small bundle of Peter’s possessions, and fare forth with him into the wide world, picking up the convalescent at Windsor on the way, but that was a misapprehension of Aunt Phœbe’s intentions. And, after all, it was Peter’s house and garden if it came to that. For a time at least things could go on as they were. But the task of direction was now fully his. Whether these two young people were properly educated or not, whether they too became slackers and inadequate or worthy citizens of this great empire, rested now entirely in his hands.

“They must have the best,” he said....

The best was not immediately apparent.

From Chastlands and his two rooms at the Climax Club Oswald conducted his opening researches for the educational best, and whenever he was at Chastlands he came over nearly every day to The Ingle-Nook on his bicycle. It was a well-remembered road. Scarcely was there a turn in it that did not recall some thought of the former time when he had ridden over daily for a sight of Dolly; he would leave his bicycle in a clump of gorse by the high road that was surely an outgrown fragment of the old bush in which he had been wont to leave it six years before; he would walk down the same rusty path, and his heart would quicken as it used to quicken at the thought of seeing Dolly. But presently Peter began to oust Dolly from his thoughts. Sometimes Peter would be standing waiting for him by the high road. Sometimes Peter, mounted on a little outgrown bicycle, would meet him on the purple common half way.

A man and a boy of ten are perhaps better company than a man and a boy of fifteen. There’s so much less egotism between them. At any rate Peter and Oswald talked of education and travel and politics and philosophy with unembarrassed freedom. Oswald, like most childless people, had had no suspicion of what the grey matter of a bright little boy’s brain can hold. He was amazed at Peter’s views and curiosities. It was Oswald’s instinct never to talk “down” to man, woman or child. He had never thought about it, but if you had questioned him he would have told you that that was the sort of thing one didn’t do. And this instinct gave him a wide range of available companionship. Peter had never conceived such good company as Oswald. You could listen to Oswald for hours. They discoursed upon every topic out of dreamland. And sometimes they came very close even to that dreamland where Bungo Peter adventured immortally. Oswald would feel a transfiguring presence, a touch of fantasy and half suspect their glorious companion.

Much of their talk was a kind of story-telling.

“How should we go to the Congo Forest?” Peter would ask. “Would one go by Nairobi?”

“No, that’s the other way. We’d have to go——”

And forthwith Nobby and Peter were getting their stuff together and counting how many porters they would need....

“One day perhaps we’d come upon a place ’fested with crocodiles,” Peter would say.

“We would. You would be pushing rather ahead of the party with your guns, looking for anything there might be—pushing through tall reeds far above your head,” Oswald would oblige.

“You’d be with me,” insisted Peter....

It was really story-telling....

It was Peter’s habit in those days when he was alone to meditate on paper. He would cover sheet after sheet with rapidly drawn scenes of adventure. One day Oswald found himself figuring in one of these dream pictures. He and Peter were leading an army in battle. “Capture of Ten War Elephants” was the legend thereon. But he realized how clearly the small boy saw him. Nothing was spared of the darkened, browless side of his face with its asymmetrical glass eye, the figure of him was very long and lean and bent, with its arm still in its old sling; and it was drawn manifestly with the utmost confidence and admiration and love....

Peter’s hostility to schools was removed very slowly. The lessons at High Cross had scarred him badly, and about Miss Mills clung associations of the utmost dreariness. Still it was Oswald’s instinct to consult the young man on his destiny.

“There’s a lot you don’t know yet,” said Oswald.

“Can’t I read it out of books?” asked Peter.

“You can’t read everything out of books,” said Oswald. “There’s things you ought to see and handle. And things you can only learn by doing.”

Oswald wanted Peter to plan his own school.

Peter considered. “I’d like lessons about the insides of animals, and about the people in foreign countries—and how engines work—and all that sort of thing.”

“Then we must find a school for you where they teach all that sort of thing,” said Oswald, as though it was merely a question of ordering goods from the Civil Service Stores....

He had much to learn yet about education.

§ 12

But Oswald was still only face to face with the half of his responsibility.

One morning he found Peter at the schoolroom table very busy cutting big letters out of white paper. Beside him was a long strip of Turkey twill from the dressing-up box that The Ingle-Nook had plagiarized from the Sheldricks. “I’m getting ready for Joan,” said Peter. “I’m going to put ’Welcome’ on this for over the garden gate. And there’s to be a triumphal arch.”

Hitherto Peter had scarcely betrayed any interest in Joan at all, now he seemed able to think of no one else, and Oswald found himself reduced abruptly from the position of centre of Peter’s universe to a mere helper in the decorations. But he was beginning to understand the small boy by this time, and he took the withdrawal of the limelight philosophically.

When Aunt Phyllis and Joan arrived they found the flagged path from the “Welcome” gate festooned with chains of coloured paper (bought with Peter’s own pocket-money and made by him and Oswald, with some slight assistance and much moral support from Aunt Phœbe in the evening) to the door. The triumphal arch had been achieved rather in the Gothic style by putting the movable Badminton net posts into a sort of trousering of assorted oriental cloths from the dressing-up chest, and crossing two heads of giant Heracleum between them. Peter stood at the door in the white satin suit his innocent vanity loved—among other rôles it had served for Bassanio, Prince Hal, and Antony (over the body of Cæsar)—with a face of extraordinary solemnity. Behind him stood Uncle Nobby.

Joan wasn’t quite the Joan that Peter expected. She was still wan from her illness and she had grown several inches. She was as tall as he. And she was white-faced, so that her hair seemed blacker than ever, and her eyes were big and lustrous. She came walking slowly down the path with her eyes wide open. There was a difference, he felt, in her movement as she came forward, though he could not have said what it was; there was more grace in Joan now and less vigour. But it was the same Joan’s voice that cried, “Oh, Petah! It’s lovely!” She stood before him for a moment and then threw her arms about him. She hugged him and kissed him, and Uncle Nobby knew that it was the smear of High Cross School that made him wriggle out of her embrace and not return her kisses.

But immediately he took her by the hand.

“It’s better in the playroom, Joan,” he said.

“All right, Joan, go on with him,” said Oswald, and came forward to meet Aunt Phyllis. Aunt Phœbe was on the staircase a little aloof from these things, as became a woman of intellect, and behind Aunt Phyllis came Mary, and behind Mary came the Limpsfield cabman with Aunt Phyllis’s trunk upon his shoulder, and demolished the triumphal arch. But Peter did not learn of that disaster until later, and then he did not mind; it had served its purpose.

The playroom (it was the old nursery rechristened) was indeed better. It was all glorious with paper chains of green and white festooned from corner to corner. On the floor to the right under the window was every toy soldier that Peter possessed drawn up in review array—a gorgeous new Scots Grey band in the front that Oswald had given him. But that was nothing. The big armchair had been drawn out into the middle of the room, and on it was Peter’s own lion-skin. And a piece of red stair-carpet had been put for Joan to go up to the throne upon. And beside the throne was a little table, and on the table was a tinsel robe from Clarkson’s and a wonderful gilt crown and a sceptre. Oswald had brought them along that morning.

“The crown is for you, Joan!” said Peter. “The sceptre was bought for you.”

Little white-faced Joan stood stockishly with the crown in one hand and the sceptre in the other. “Put the crown on, Joan,” said Peter. “It’s yours. It’s a rest’ration ceremony.”

But she didn’t put it on.

“It’s lovely—and it’s lovely,” whispered Joan in a sort of rapture, and stared about her incredulously with her big dark eyes. It was home again—home, and Mrs. Pybus had passed like an evil dream in the night. She had never really believed it possible before that Mrs. Pybus could pass away. Even while Aunt Phyllis and Mary had been nursing her, Mrs. Pybus had hovered in the background like something more enduring, waiting for them to pass away as inexplicably as they had come. Joan had heard the whining voice upon the stairs every day and always while she was ill, and once Mrs. Pybus had come and stood by her bedside and remarked like one who maintains an argument, “She’ll be ’appy enough ’ere when she’s better again.”

No more Mrs. Pybus! No more whining scoldings. No more unexpected slaps and having to go to bed supperless. No more measles and uneasy misery in a bed with grey sheets. No more dark dreadful sayings that lurked in the mind like jungle beasts. She was home, home with Peter, out of that darkness....

And yet—outside was the darkness still....

“Joan,” said Peter, trying to rouse her. “There’s a cake like a birthday for tea....”

When Oswald came in she was still holding the gilt crown in her hand.

She let Peter take it from her and put it on her head, still staring incredulously about her. She took the sceptre limply. Peter was almost gentle with this strange, staring Joan.

§ 13

For some days Oswald regarded Joan as a grave and thoughtful child. She seemed to be what country people call “old-fashioned.” She might have been a changeling. He did not hear her laugh once. And she followed Peter about as if she was his shadow.

Then one day as he cycled over from Chastlands he heard a strange tumult proceeding from a little field on Master’s farm, a marvellous mixture of familiar and unfamiliar sounds, an uproar, wonderful as though a tinker’s van had met a school treat and the twain had got drunk together. The source of this row was hidden from him by a little coppice, and he dismounted and went through the wood to investigate. Joan and Peter had discovered a disused cowshed with a sloping roof of corrugated iron, and they had also happened upon an abandoned kettle and two or three tin cans. They were now engaged in hurling these latter objects on to the resonant roof, down which they rolled thunderously only to be immediately returned. Joan was no longer a slip of pensive dignity, Peter was no longer a marvel of intellectual curiosities. They were both shrieking their maximum. Oswald had never before suspected Joan of an exceptionally full voice, nor Peter of so vast a wealth of gurgling laughter. “Keep the Pot-A-boilin’” yelled Joan. “Keep the Pot-A-boilin’.”

“Hoo!” cried Peter. “Hoo! Go it, Joan. Wow!”

And then, to crown the glory, the kettle burst. It came into two pieces. That was too perfect! The two children staggered back. Each seized a half of the kettle and kicked it deliberately. Then they rolled away and fell on their stomachs amidst the grass, kicking their legs in the air.

But the spirit of rowdyism grows with what it feeds upon.

“Oh, let’s do something reely awful!” cried Joan. “Let’s do something reely awful, Petah!”

Peter’s legs became still and stiff with interrogation.

“Oh, Petah!” said Joan. “If I could only smash a window. Frow a brick frough a real window, a Big Glass Window. Just one Glass Window.”

“Where’s a window?” said Peter, evidently in a highly receptive condition.

From which pitch of depravity Oswald roused him by a prod in the back....

§ 14

But after that Joan changed rapidly. Colour crept back into her skin, and a faintly rollicking quality into her bearing. She became shorter again and visibly sturdier, and her hair frizzed more and stuck out more. Her laugh and her comments upon the world became an increasingly frequent embroidery upon the quiet of The Ingle-Nook. She seemed to have a delusion that Peter was just within earshot, but only just.

Oswald wondered how far her recent experiences had vanished from her mind. He thought they might have done so altogether until one day Joan took him into her confidence quite startlingly. He was smoking in the little arbour, and she came and stood beside him so noiselessly that he did not know she was there until she spoke. She was holding her hands behind her, and she was regarding the South Downs with a pensive frown. She was paying him the most beautiful compliment. She had come to consult him.

“Mrs. Pybus said,” she remarked, “that every one who doesn’t believe there’s a God goes straight to Hell....

“I don’t believe there’s a God,” said Joan, “and Peter knows there isn’t.”

For a moment Oswald was a little taken aback by this simple theology. Then he said, “D’you think Peter’s looked everywhere, Joan?”

Then he saw the real point at issue. “One thing you may be sure about, Joan,” he said, “and that is that there isn’t a Hell. Which is rather a pity in its way, because it would be nice to think of this Mrs. Pybus of yours going there. But there’s no Hell at all. There’s nothing more dreadful than the dreadful things in life. There’s no need to worry about Hell.”

That he thought was fairly conclusive. But Joan remained pensive, with her eyes still on the distant hills. Then she asked one of those unanswerable children’s questions that are all implication, imputation, assumption, misunderstanding, and elision.

“But if there isn’t a Hell,” said Joan, “what does God do?”

§ 15

It was after Joan had drifted away again from these theological investigations that Oswald, after sitting some time in silence, said aloud and with intense conviction, “I love these children.”

He was no longer a stranger in England; he had a living anchorage. He looked out over the autumnal glories of the Weald, dreaming intentions. These children must be educated. They must be educated splendidly. Oswald wanted to see Peter serving the empire. The boy would have pluck—he had already the loveliest brain—and a sense of fun. And Joan? Oswald was, perhaps, not quite so keen in those days upon educating Joan. That was to come later....

After all, the empire, indeed the whole world of mankind, is made up of Joans and Peters. What the empire is, what mankind becomes, is nothing but the sum of what we have made of the Joans and Peters.

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This book is part of the public domain. H. G. Wells (2020). Joan and Peter. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg. Retrieved October 2022, from https://www.gutenberg.org/files/61426/61426-h/61426-h.htm

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