The Raft
because she was in the minority, sided with Jehane. That her quiet,
madonna-like adoration of Glory should have turned into tigerish
protective passion attracted him strangely.
That evening Barrington had some friends to dine with him--men and women
of his world, whose good opinion he valued. During dinner and afterwards
in the drawingroom, Waffles had been ousted from the conversation; their
talk was all of books and travel--things he did not understand. He felt
cold-shouldered--crowded out. He resented it, and was determined to show
them that he also could be clever.
He waited for an opening-. A pause in the conversation occurred. He
sprang into the gap. That he was irrelevant did not matter.
“Heard a good riddle the other day. Wonder if any of you can answer it.”
All eyes turned in his direction. He cleared his throat and fumbled at
his collar. “If a cat ate a haddock and a dog chased the cat, and
the cat jumped over the wall, what relation would the dog bear to the
haddock?”
There was embarrassed silence. Every face wore a puzzled expression.
Barrington pulled his cigar from his mouth and gazed sternly at the
glowing ash.
At last a lady, who wrote poetry, took compassion on him. She tapped him
on the arm. “I can't think of any answer. Put me out of my suspense. I'm
so anxious to learn.”
Waffles beamed his acknowledgments. “That's the answer,” he said
eagerly; “there isn't any answer.”
Barrington ceased to be vexed with his cigar and laughed coldly.
“You mustn't mind my cousin. He's a genial ass. Sometimes it takes
him like that.--Let's see, what were we discussing when we were
interrupted?”
So there were two people with wounded feelings in that company. Ocky saw
Jehane slip out of the room, and he followed. On the stairs she halted.
“Why are you following?”
“I'm not wanted. Confound their stupidity.”
“But why should you follow me?”
“Because you're the same as I am. That's why you left; you're not at
home here. Look how they behaved about Glory. I say, it's our last
evening together. Won't you give me--”
But, ridiculous as it appeared to her, an almost maidenly fear took
hold of her; she fled. He found her in the dark, at the top of the tall
house; she was leaning over her child's cot sobbing. He grew out of
himself, stronger, better; against her will, he folded her to him.
“Won't you give me your answer, darling?”
Silence.
“I'll be very good to Glory.”
Still silence.
“Oh, Jehane, I'm so foolish--such a weak, foolish fellow; I need your
strength. With you I could be a man.” Then all that was maternal awoke
in her. She remembered how she had seen him looking empty-handed, while
those clever men and women had stared. “You musn't mind my cousin. He's
a genial ass. Sometimes it takes him like that.”--Cruel! Cruel! She took
his head and pressed it to her bosom, kissing him on the forehead.
Nan, disturbed by their disappearance, found them kneeling,
hand-in-hand, beside Glory.
That night as she sat before her mirror undressing, she let her hands
fall to her side, listless. Barrington stole up behind her and kissed
her on the neck, rubbing his face against hers.
“That's what Peter calls softying.”
“But you weren't thinking of Peter, little woman.”
“How did you know that?”
“You looked sad. What's the trouble?”
She bent back her head, so that their eyes met and their lips were near
to touching. “If I hadn't been there that day, would you have loved
Jehane instead?”
“Pepperminta, I was in love with you when we played together at
Cassingland. Why ask foolish questions?”
“Because it's happened.”
“You don't mean--?”
“Yes. She's taken him, and I'm sure she doesn't want him.”
Barrington drew himself upright, then stooped over her; he was realizing
the perfect joy of his own union with a startled sense of thankfulness.
“Poor people,” he murmured.
Three months later Jehane was married. The wedding was quiet; there
were none but family-guests. No one felt that it was an affair to boast
about. It took place from the Professor's house at Oxford; Mr. Tudor
performed the ceremony. Glory was being left with Nan till the honeymoon
was ended. All morning Jehane's face had been gloomy; perhaps she
already had her doubts. Certainly Mr. Waffles did not show to advantage
in art Oxford atmosphere. He was too boisterous. His shoes were too
shiny. The colors of his tie and button-hole clashed. His clothes looked
ready-made. At parting with her mother, Jehane did the unexpected--she
wept.
On their drive to the station through austere streets, with bright
glimpses of college quadrangles and young bloods in shooting-jackets and
dancing-slippers, sauntering bareheaded, Waffles grew more exuberant and
irrepressible; his ill-timed gaiety grated on her nerves. Having taken
their seats in the carriage, the train was delayed in starting. He hung
his head out of the window, jerking jocular remarks to her across his
shoulder. She did not answer him, but sat with her hands folded in her
lap and her eyes cast down. He could not make her out; up to now she
had responded so readily to his merriment. At all costs he must make her
laugh.
The station-master was passing down the platform, his hands clasped
beneath his flapping coat-tails. Not every station-master guards the
gate-way to a seat of learning. This particular station-master felt the
full importance of his position and carried himself with his stomach
thrust forward and his head thrown back.
Waffles leant from the window and beckoned frantically. When the
official came up, he commenced to jabber in invented gibberish,
desperately gesticulating with his hands.
“Don't understand you,” the official said tartly; “don't talk no foreign
langwidge.”
Waffles paused in his torrent of palaver and winked solemnly at a group
of undergraduates who stood watching. They happened to be pupils of
the Professor. Then, as though an inspiration had burst upon him, he
inquired, “Parlez-vous Français?”
“Nong. I do not,” snapped the station-master, annoyed that his lack of
scholarship should be exposed in this manner.
He was moving away, when Waffles produced his crowning witticism, to
which all the rest had been preface. Jehane would certainly laugh now.
“Hi! Station-master! Does this train go to Oxford?”
He had one glimpse of the insulted official's countenance, then he felt
himself grabbed by the arm and drawn violently back into the carriage.
“Do you want to make me ashamed of you already. Sit down and behave
yourself.”
“But darling--”
“Oh, be quiet. Aren't you ever solemn? Is nothing sacred?”
Exceedingly puzzled and utterly extinguished, he did as he was bade,
waiting like a small boy expecting to be spanked.
That was how they began life together.
CHAPTER VII--THE WHISTLING ANGEL
Peter can quite well remember the events which led up to that strange
happening; not that the events or the happening seemed strange at the
time--they grew into his life so naturally. He thought, if he thought at
all, that to all little boys came the same experience; he would not have
believed you had you told him otherwise.
He had recently achieved his fourth birthday and the garden, which was
his out-door nursery, was a-flutter with tremulous spring-flowers.
That night his mother sent away the nurse, and undressed and bathed him
herself. She wanted to be foolish to her heart's content, laughing and
singing and crying over him. Only the slender laburnum, with the kind
old mulberry-tree peering over its shoulder, watched them through the
window. The laburnum was a young girl, his mother told him, with shaky
golden curls; the mulberry, whose arms were propped with crutches, was
her grandfather.
As Peter's mother squeezed the sponge down his back, she stooped her
pretty head, kissing some new part of his wet little body as though
she were making a discovery. And she called him love-words, Peterkins,
Precious Lamb, Ownest; and she pushed him away from her, saying he did
not belong to her, that so she might feel the eager arms clasped more
fiercely about her neck.
When he had been rolled in the towel, his big father entered and took
him, rubbing his prickly chin against Peter's neck; nor would he give
him up. It was a long time before he was popped into his pink, woolly
nightgown. Even then, when he was safe in bed, they stayed by him--his
mother humming softly, while his father knelt to be able to kiss her
without bending. Shadows came out from the cupboard and crept toward
the window, pushing back the daylight; the daylight dodged across the
ceiling, hid in the mulberry where it slept till morning, came back and
peeped in at him tenderly, and vanished. His eyes grew heavy; the next
thing he remembers is an early breakfast, a cab at the door and being
told to be the goodest little boy in the world. He was hugged till he
was breathless; then he saw the face of his beautiful mother, her eyes
red with weeping, leaning out of the cab-window throwing kisses, growing
distant and yet more distant down the terrace.
In later years he knew where they went--to Switzerland to re-live their
honeymoon. At the time he thought they were gone forever.
Grace, his nurse, did her best to comfort him, blowing his nose so
severely that he looked to see if it had come off in the handkerchief.
For Grace he had a great respect. She was a good-natured lump of a girl,
who beat a drum for the Salvation Army under gas-lamps and fought a
never ending battle with herself to pronounce her name correctly. Mr.
Barrington had threatened that the penalty for failing was dismissal.
Now the violence of her emotion and the absence of her employers made
her reckless. “There, little Round Tummy, Grice'll taik care of you,
don't you blow bubbles like that. You'll cry yourself dry, that you
will, and drown us.”
An awful suggestion! He pictured the dining-room flooded with his tears,
the furniture floating and Grace swimming for her life. He turned off
the tap to just the littlest dribble. If he'd stopped at once, Grace
would have ceased to be sorry.
She did not keep her promise to take care of him. On the contrary, she
conducted him through London on the tops of buses and left him at a
strange house. It belonged to the “smacking lady,” a name which he had
given to Jehane since an unfortunate occurrence previously mentioned.
He had been taught to call her Auntie to her face, but she went by the
other name inside his head.
On many points his memories of this period are muddled. When he was not
in disgrace, he was allowed to play with Glory; if he had been specially
good, he was privileged to splash in the same bath with her before being
put to bed. But this was not often; it appeared that quite suddenly,
since coming to the smacking lady's house, he had developed an
extraordinary faculty for being bad. She said that he was spoilt, and
shut him up in rooms to make him better. He did his best to improve, for
he believed that his naughtiness was the cause of his mother's absence;
she would never come back, unless he became “the goodest little boy in
the world.” To judge by the smacking lady's countenance, he did his best
to no purpose.
Her man was the one bright spot in his tragedy; and even he seemed a
little afraid of her. He did not champion Peter in her presence, but he
would take him out of rooms--oh, so stealthily--and carry him to the
end of the garden where a river ran, along the floor of which fishes
flashed, pursued by their shadows. There he would tell him funny
stories--stories of Peter's world and within the compass of Peter's
understanding; and he would laugh first to warn Peter when he was going
to be really funny----
Peter had again been bad, shut up in a room and rescued by the smacking