The Raft
place. Then he thought it over for some days in horror; he had been
too generous--he wanted to go back on his bargain. His mother found him
crying one night; she suspected that he had been sleeping little by the
dark blue rings under his eyes. She coaxed him, and he told her.
Another sign of his 'maginativeness was his anxiety to know whether cows
had souls.
“That boy thinks too much,” said his father; “he needs to rough and
tumble with other boys of his own age. At ten his worst trouble should
be tummy-ache.”
Nan smiled. “But Peter's different, you know.”
“I know. But, if he's to grow up strong, he must change. Little woman, I
don't like it.”
“Billy boy, I sometimes think it's our doing, yours and mine. When we
put toys in the empty nursery before he was born, before he was thought
of, we were making him a 'maginative child.”
“The sins of the parents, eh?”
“Not that. The love of the parents shall be visited upon the children
unto the third and----”
“Pepperminta, you know more about God and Peter and love than I do.
You're right, and you're always right. How is it that you learn so much
by sitting so quiet?”
Matters came to a head through Kay. In the cottage where they stayed,
Peter slept with her in the same bed, in a narrow room beneath a sloping
roof. She was nervous to be left alone there--it was so dark, so far
away, so strange; Peter, a willing martyr, went to bed with her at
the same time. Lying awake in the dark or twilight, he would tell her
stories.
“Listening, Kay?”
“Yeth,” in a little drowsy voice.
As she grew more sleepy she would snuggle closer with her lips against
his face, till at last he knew by her regular breathing that his
audience was indifferent to his wildest fancies.
One evening his parents returned from a ride and, entering the house,
heard a stifled sobbing.
“What's that?”
“Must be the children.”
“You wait here, Nan. I'll go up and quiet them.”
“No, I'll come, up too.”
As they climbed the stairs and reached the landing, they made out words
which were in the wailing: “I don't want to be a dead 'un. I don't want
to be a dead 'un.”
It was Kay's voice. Peter, leaning over her, was whispering frightened
comfort.
When Nan and Billy had taken them in their arms and lit the candle, the
tragedy was explained. Peter had been enlarging on the magnificence of
heaven and the beauties of the future life. Things went well until
Kay realized that there was no direct communication by trains or
buses between heaven and her parents. She didn't want to go there. Its
magnificence, unshared by anyone she loved, was terrifying. She didn't
want to be a dead 'un. She kept repeating it in spite of Peter's best
efforts at consolation.
It was some time before it was safe to blow the candle out and leave
them. Death was very imminent in their minds.
Downstairs, when it was all over, Billy looked across at Nan, his brow
puckered with annoyance and his lips twitching with laughter. “That
decides it.”
“Decides! How? What does it decide?”
“Something that I've thought of for a long time. Peter's too
imaginative. He's not a good companion for Kay.”
“How can you say that? We all know how gentle he is with her.”
“That's just it. It's good for neither of them. Now that Jehane and Ocky
are at Sandport it makes things easier; they can keep an eye on him.”
“An eye on Peter!”
Billy leant across the table, turning down the lamp and turning it up
again. He was gaining time. “It's for his own good. You don't suppose I
like it. It'll be hard for all of us.” He spoke huskily.
Nan plucked at the table-cloth. She was almost angry. “You mean that you
want to send him to school at Sand-port--send my little Peterkins away?”
“Sandport's famous for its schools.”
“But Billy, you couldn't be so cruel. He's so young and sensitive. His
heart would break.”
“Rubbish. I was sent to boarding-school when I was eight. I've
survived.”
“You! You were different--but Peter!”
She voiced the common fallacy of mothers, that their husbands as boys
were of coarser fibre than their children. She bowed her head on her
arms beneath the lamp and cried. Her little Peter to be thrust out and
made lonely, simply because he had too much imagination! It was cruel!
CHAPTER XIII--PRICKCAUTIONS
There was no withstanding his questions. Peter had to be told why: it
was because he was too Peterish. He was going for the good of Kay. All
these years in trying so hard to love her, he had been harming her--it
amounted to that as he understood it. He was being sent to school that
he might learn to be like other children--like Riska and Eustace, for
instance.
“When I'm quite like them, can I come home?”
Ah, that was in the future.
Unknowingly he had committed an indiscretion, the penalty for which
was exile--the indiscretion was called “'magination.” He felt horribly
ashamed, even though Grace did assure him that some of the very greatest
people had been guilty of the same mistake.
“Why, Master Peter, you're gettin' orf lightly, that you are. There was
once a young fellah as dreamed dreams about sheaves bowin' down to 'im,
and the moon and stars makin' a basin for 'im. D'yer know wot 'appened?”
“I think that's silly,” said Peter. “How could the moon and stars make a
basin?”
“'Tain't silly neither, 'cause it says it in the Bible. Any-'ow, when
'e told 'is dreams d'yer know wot 'appened? 'Is h'eleven brethren, they
chucked 'im in a pit--yes, they did. And there 'e'd 'ave stayed for
keeps if it 'adn't been for a passin' circus as saw 'e was queer and put
'im in their show, and took 'im away into Egypt. Oh my, for a boy wiv
'magination, you're gettin' orf light.”
“What did he do in the circus? Did he ever come home again?”
“'E grew to be a ruler in h'Egypt and saved 'is pa and ma and eleven
brethren, when they wuz starvin'.”
“P'raps I'll do that for all of you one day.”
“Yer silly little monkey! There yer go again wiv yer queer sayin's.”
Peter had been to the Agricultural Hall in Islington and had seen people
in side-shows without arms and legs: bearded women; elastic-skinned
men; horrid persons with one body and two heads or with a little twin,
without even one head, growing out of their chests and waggling their
pitiful legs. He wasn't like that in his body; but he supposed he must
be something like it inside his head. The belief that he was somehow
deformed made him too humble, too abashed to protest; anything that was
for his little sister's sake must be right. But he wished that
someone had warned him earlier; only in this did he feel himself
betrayed.--Anyhow, never in his wildest fancies had he supposed that the
moon and stars could make basins--and that boy Joseph had turned out all
right. Now he was going to his particular Egypt to get cured.
Taking him on his knee, his father had explained matters. He was to be
a little knight and not to cry. He was to ride out into the world alone
for the good of the lady he loved best. One day he would return to her,
and then----.
With his mother it was different; she wept and quite evidently expected
him to weep too. She didn't want him to go. It was not her doing. She
loved him to be Peterish; she would not have him otherwise. To her he
could confess.
“It's here, mother,” tapping his breast; “I can't help it really. But
I'll try.”
No, he couldn't help it--that was the worst of it--any more than he
could help hearing the whistling angel. He could pretend that he wasn't
Peter, just as he had pretended not to hear the angel whistle. But he
would not be able to change; he could only learn to wear a disguise. If
school could teach him to do that, years hence he might prove worthy to
live again at Topbury. Because he felt that he was to blame, he strove
to be very brave; if his eyes filled with tears sometimes, it wasn't
because he wanted them to.
The respite shortened. Letters passed to and fro between his father
and Uncle Waffles, between his mother and Aunt Jehane. Their contents,
discussed at the breakfast table, cast a gloom over all the day. Many
schools were offered, but the best for Peter's particular case was one
kept by Miss Lydia Rufus. Aunt Jehane would look after his clothes, and
he could spend his Saturdays at Madeira Lodge.
Madeira Lodge! That was the house at Sandport which sheltered Uncle
Waffles. It was stamped in red letters at the top of his note-paper and
proclaimed magnificence. It rather tickled Peter's father's sense of
humor.
“Anything from Madeira Lodge 'smorning?” he would say, with a twinkle,
as he sorted out the letters. “But why stop half-way in intemperance?
Why not Port Wine Terrace, Moselle Park, in the town of Champagne?
Ocky's too modest.”
Or he would say, “Lord Sauterne of Beer Castle informs his nephew that
Miss Rufus's pupils require a Bible, an Eton suit and two pairs of
house-shoes.”
Peter would greet his father's jokes with a strained but gallant little
smile. “We men must keep up the women's courage,” his father had told
him.
It was hard to keep up other people's courage when your own was down to
zero.
By the time they left the cottage in North Wales everything had been
arranged. There was just one short fortnight left in which to get
Peter's wardrobe together, mark his linen and finish off his mending
and sewing. The mornings were spent in visits to shops, where boots and
gloves and suits were fitted on and purchased. A knight when he rides
into the world alone must set out duly caparisoned.
And Peter was thankful for the rush and muddle; he found it increasingly
difficult not to cry, especially when his mother strained him to her
breast and gazed down on him lovingly with her dear wet eyes. He was
glad that people should have so much to do, for he hardly knew how to
conduct himself since the discovery of his awful blemish. He was afraid
to show his affection for his little sister in the old fond ways, and he
could think of no new ways of showing it.
He had come to the last day. It was one of those days when summer droops
her eyes and confesses that she has grown old. There was just a hint
of tears in the sky--a blue film of vapor which softened the valiant
smiling of grass and leaves decaying. In the garden the last of the
roses were falling and Virginia creeper lay like crusted blood upon the
walls. It was as though summer, like a spendthrift woman, put red upon
her cheeks to pretend she was not dying. Peter, in his sensitive way,
was conscious of the sadness of this vain pretending, this mimicking a
beauty that was gone. He was doing the same: preparing for to-morrow
and at the same time trying to persuade himself that the present was
forever--that to-morrow would never dawn.
He ran up and down the house trying to seem merry and excited, watching
his boxes being corded, laughing and chattering--talking of when
he would return for Christmas. “We men must keep up the women's
courage”--one of the women was Kay. He was doing his best to be a little
knight; it hurt sometimes, especially when his mother looked up from
fitting socks and shoes into odd corners of his boxes, unhappy and
surprised. She must think him hard-hearted; she should never guess.
After lunch, having watched his opportunity, he slipped out of the house
without letting anyone know where he was going. His face was set in a
solemn expression of serious determination. He scuttled down the Terrace
and down the Crescent, till he came within sight of the cab-stand; he
was relieved to find that Mr. Grace, as he called Grace's father, was
disengaged. Mr. Grace was a fat, red-faced man, and like many fat and
red-faced men had his grievance. His appearance was against him. People
judged him circumstantially and said that he drank. Even Grace said it.