The Raft
me want to be good. Never thought I'd want to be that.”
“What did you think?”
For a moment a fierce look came into his eyes. “What does an animal
think of when it's trapped? It thinks of all the ways in which it can
get back at the people who put it there. But now----.” He picked up
the wall-flowers and smelt them. “She brought them this morning--the
littlest one, with the gray hair and tiny hands. They were all wet with
dew when she brought them. You need to go to prison, Peter, to know what
flowers can mean to a chap.”
There was a tap at the door. Miss Madge entered, bringing some beef-tea.
When she had gone Ocky said, “They take it in turns.”
Peter remembered how, going always into separate rooms with them, they'd
taken turns in owning himself and Kay when they were children. How
rarely life had allowed them to love anything!
Uncle Waffles' thoughts seemed to have been following the same track. He
paused, with the cup half-way to his mouth. “Those women ought to have
married.--Been in prison most of their lives, you said? But I don't
know; marriage can be a worse hell.” He turned to Peter. “D'you remember
at Sandport how she'd never let me kiss her? It was like that from the
first. She kept me hungry. I stole to make her love me. She was always
talking about her first husband and making me jealous. And yet----.”
He stopped and gazed vacantly across the room to where sparrows
fluttered on the sill and sunlight fell. Peter supposed that he had
forgotten what he was going to have said. Suddenly his face became
all purpose and pleading. He flung back the bedclothes and leant out,
gripping Peter's shoulders till they hurt. “I'd steal again to-morrow
to get one day of her bought affection. My God, how I've longed for her!
Make her come to me. You must, Peter. You shall. Don't tell her who I
am. Oh, don't refuse me.”
The sharp agony and desperate determination of a man so drifting and
careless took Peter aback. He recalled those days when he had hidden him
in the stable--it had been the same then. He had always been urging that
Je-hane should be persuaded to walk in the garden that he might catch
a glimpse of her. The one strong loyalty of his weak existence had been
the love of this woman.
“Get her to come to you!” Peter said. “But how? She wouldn't. She----”
Ocky burried his face in the pillow. How thin he was and listless! How
spent! How----. What was the word? How smashed! It was as though in the
human quarry some chance stone of calamity had fallen on him, making him
a moral cripple. He was what he was through the sort of accident that
might happen to any man--to the Faun Man, if Eve refused to love him;
even to Peter himself.
The boy pulled the clothes back over the man. “Somehow--I don't know
how--somehow I'll do it. I promise.”
After that, whenever Peter entered the white room, he saw how his uncle
watched for someone to follow.
The Misses Jacobite had found a doctor who supported their opinion that
their guest must be kept in bed. The prison fare and long confinement
had broken down his constitution. The doctor didn't know what had done
it; he advised food and rest.
From time to time Peter brought visitors to the room overlooking the
garden. His father came and was shocked by the wasted look of the man
who, in earlier years, had been his friend. It was of those earlier
years that they chose to speak, by an instinctive courtesy; they, at
least, had been happy territory. They recalled together their schoolday
pranks--the canings they had earned, the football matches they had lost
or won, the holidays when they had broken boundaries, going on some
secret adventure. But, when Barrington rose to go, Ocky said, “Don't
come again, Billy. You used to hate to hear me call you Billy; you'll
dislike it just as much when I'm better. We've both been forgetting what
I am, and what I've done. If you come again we may remember. For years
I've worried you; well, that's ended. But--you're a man of the world,
and you understand. I'm a jail-bird--and I don't want to spoil the
memory of this hour. Good-bye, old man.”
It turned out that Mr. Grace hadn't slept on his box so soundly that
evening of Peter's return--at least, not so soundly as to keep his eyes
shut.
“All swank on my part, Mr. Peter,” he said; “she's been h'at me for
years, my darter Grice 'as, and I don't mean to get conwerted. H'I'm not
a-goin' ter come ter 'eaven, so long as 'er voice is the only voice as
calls me. 'Eaven 'ud be 'ell, livin' wiv 'er in the same 'ouse, if I wuz
ter do that. We'd be for h'everlastin' prayin' and floppin'. Not but wot
religion 'as its uses; but not for me in 'er sense. That's why I shut me
h'eyes when she was a-bellowin' at the corner. But I saw yer. 'Ow is the
old bloke nar? Your uncle, I mean, meanin' no disrespeck. I've h'often
thought that if we 'ad met under 'appier h'auspices--h'auspices is one
of my Grice's words--we might 'ave been pals.”
Peter brought about the 'appier h'auspices. One afternoon Cat's Meat
halted before the house and Mr. Grace climbed down from his box, a bag
of apples in one hand and his whip in the other. He was very red in the
face and embarrassed; he had anything but a sick-room appearance, though
he often drove in funeral processions. He was immensely careful about
the wiping of his feet. Peter tried to coax him to leave his whip in
the hall; he wouldn't. He seemed to think that it lent him dignity, and
explained his status in the world. So it was clutching a bag of apples
and clasping his whip against his chest, that he entered the white room
where the birds hopped in and out.
Ocky Waffles, shifting his position on the bed, caught sight of the
weather-beaten, alcoholic figure. Before he could say a word, in a
thick, husky voice Mr. Grace offered his apologies.
“'Ere. 'Ave 'em. I 'ear you ain't well.” He swung the bag of apples on
to the bed. “Bought 'em from a gal off a barrer” He paused awkwardly.
“That was good of you,” said Ocky. “Come and sit down.”
Mr. Grace scratched his head. “I dunno as I want to sit down. I dunno
as you and me is friends. Remember the last time we met and h'all the
trouble we 'ad? You wuz a nice old cough-drop in them days. I 'ad to 'it
yer wiv this 'ere whip--the wery same one--to make yer let go o' the top
o' the gate and fall inter the stable. Well, I 'it yer in kindness; but
it's because I 'it yer that I dunno whether you and me is friends.”
“We're friends,” said Ocky.
Mr. Grace sat down. It was most curious, all this. He hadn't got his
bearings. This chap, lying in a decent bed and waited on hand and foot
by ladies, was Mr. Waffles, if you please. But he had been an old
cock who climbed walls to avoid policemen, and rode about at night in
philanthropic cabs. He turned to him gruffly. “Eat one o' them there
apples. Bought 'em from a gal off a barrer.--Did h'I tell yer that
h'already?” It was a sign that the truce was established.
Mr. Grace became a frequent caller. An odd friendship grew up between
these two men, both broken on the wheel of feminine perversity. They
exchanged notes on their experiences. Ocky spoke to the old cabby with
greater freedom than to anyone, save Peter. Jehane had always said of
him that he found it easy to be sociable with underlings and ostlers.
In this case he found it easy because of the wide charity of the
underling's personal laxity. Sometimes Miss Effie would steal in and
read to them of a man who chose his companions from among publicans and
sinners. Mr. Grace would pay her the closest attention and ask her
to repeat certain passages; he was picking up pointers, with which to
challenge his daughter's confident assertions concerning God's unvarying
severity.
And then Jehane! She came one afternoon to Topbury to visit Nan. She had
heard nothing; nothing was told her. Peter waited for an opportunity to
get her to himself. In the garden after dinner the others contrived to
leave them together.
“Going up to Oxford, Peter? Oh, well, it's good to have opportunities
and a father with money. My poor Eustace, he'll never have that. I
might, while you're there----.”
She paused; the thought had just occurred to her--a new plan for
marrying off her girls “I might let Glory and Riska visit my father and
mother while you're there. It would be pleasant for all of you. Would
you like that?”
“Splendid,” said Peter.
She eyed him, suspecting the sincerity of his enthusiasm.
“Of course, if you don't want your cousins---.”
“I do,” he assured her. “I'm going to Calvary College; that's just
opposite Professor Usk's house. I'll be able to see plenty of them.”
Then, knowing how she liked to be appealed to as a person with superior
knowledge, “I wish you'd tell me some of the things I mustn't do; Oxford
etiquette's so full of _mustn'ts_.”
She laughed; the hard lines softened about her mouth. Talking about
Oxford made her think of her girlhood, when to be the daughter of a don
was to be something akin to an aristocrat. Those days were sufficiently
far removed for her to have forgotten their dread of spinsterhood, and
for her to remember only their glamour. “You must never use tongs to
your sugar,” she said; “only freshers do that--you must help yourself
with your fingers. And, let me see! You must never wear your cap and
gown unless it's positively necessary. You mustn't speak to a second
or third-year man unless he speaks to you first.--Oh, there are so many
_mustn'ts_ at Oxford; it would take all evening.”
And then, “Did your mother ever tell you the story of how we first met
Billy? It had been raining, and we were waiting to go on the river. I
put my head out of the window to see if the storm was over, and there
was your father looking up at me. I used to tease your mother by
pretending that I was in love with him. I shouldn't wonder--I expect
she still believes I wanted him. You see, Nan and I were inseparable as
girls. We used to be horribly scared of not marrying--we didn't know
as much about marriage then. We used to think that girls were born on a
raft and that only a man could come to their rescue. Funny idea, wasn't
it?”
“And if the man didn't come?”
“Why, if the man didn't come, we believed girls missed
everything--believed they got blown out to sea, out of sight of land and
starved with thirst. That was what made your mother so jealous, when I
pretended to be in love with Billy. She was afraid she'd lose her one
and only chance of getting safe ashore to the land of matrimony.” That
was Jehane's public version of how love had miscarried between herself
and Barrington.
So she ran on, remembering and remembering, as they walked the garden
path from the mulberry to the pear trees, forth and back, back and
forth, while the sunset reddened the creepers on the walls and the
loft-window, from which Ocky had watched in vain for her coming, looked
down on them emptily.
When it was time for her to be getting on her way, Peter volunteered to
accompany her to the station. They chose the Lowbury Station instead of
the Topbury, because it would take longer and they could continue their
conversation about Oxford, her Promised Land of the past. “You must have
had good times as a girl.”
Good times! Hadn't she? She painted for him the joys of Eights' Week,
the excitement of the Toggers, the tremendous elations of a young and
vivid 'Varsity world. She painted them for him as romantic realities
which she had lived to the full and lost. And the odd thing was that she
believed that she had been happy then. All her life it had been _then_
that she had been happy. Her Eldorados had always been behind her--never
in the To-days or the To-morrows. When she pitied herself, her otherwise
barren nature blossomed into a tragic luxuriance that was almost noble,
and entirely picturesque.