Tono Bungay

BOOK THE FIRST-6

“ You’ll never be a servant—ever!”

I swore that very readily, and it is a vow I have kept by nature.

“ What will you be?” said she.

I ran my mind hastily over the professions.

“ Will you be a soldier?” she asked.

“ And be bawled at by duffers? No fear!” said I. “Leave that to the plough-boys.”

“ But an officer?”

“ I don’t know,” I said, evading a shameful difficulty.

“ I’d rather go into the navy.”

“ Wouldn’t you like to fight?”

“ I’d like to fight,” I said. “But a common soldier it’s no honour to have to be told to fight and to be looked down upon while you do it, and how could I be an officer?”

“ Couldn’t you be?” she said, and looked at me doubtfully; and the spaces of the social system opened between us.

Then, as became a male of spirit, I took upon myself to brag and lie my way through this trouble. I said I was a poor man, and poor men went into the navy; that I “knew” mathematics, which no army officer did; and I claimed Nelson for an exemplar, and spoke very highly of my outlook upon blue water. “He loved Lady Hamilton,” I said, “although she was a lady—and I will love you.”

We were somewhere near that when the egregious governess became audible, calling “Beeee-atrice! Beeee-e-atrice!”

“ Snifty beast!” said my lady, and tried to get on with the conversation; but that governess made things impossible.

“ Come here!” said my lady suddenly, holding out a grubby hand; and I went very close to her, and she put her little head down upon the wall until her black fog of hair tickled my cheek.

“ You are my humble, faithful lover,” she demanded in a whisper, her warm flushed face near touching mine, and her eyes very dark and lustrous.

“ I am your humble, faithful lover,” I whispered back.

And she put her arm about my head and put out her lips and we kissed, and boy though I was, I was all atremble. So we two kissed for the first time.

“ Beeee-e-e-a-trice!” fearfully close.

My lady had vanished, with one wild kick of her black-stocking leg. A moment after, I heard her sustaining the reproaches of her governess, and explaining her failure to answer with an admirable lucidity and disingenuousness.

I felt it was unnecessary for me to be seen just then, and I vanished guiltily round the corner into the West Wood, and so to love-dreams and single-handed play, wandering along one of those meandering bracken valleys that varied Bladesover park. And that day and for many days that kiss upon my lips was a seal, and by night the seed of dreams.

Then I remember an expedition we made—she, I, and her half-brother—into those West Woods—they two were supposed to be playing in the shrubbery—and how we were Indians there, and made a wigwam out of a pile of beech logs, and how we stalked deer, crept near and watched rabbits feeding in a glade, and almost got a squirrel. It was play seasoned with plentiful disputing between me and young Garvell, for each firmly insisted upon the leading roles, and only my wider reading—I had read ten stories to his one—gave me the ascendency over him. Also I scored over him by knowing how to find the eagle in a bracken stem. And somehow—I don’t remember what led to it at all—I and Beatrice, two hot and ruffled creatures, crept in among the tall bracken and hid from him. The great fronds rose above us, five feet or more, and as I had learnt how to wriggle through that undergrowth with the minimum of betrayal by tossing greenery above, I led the way. The ground under bracken is beautifully clear and faintly scented in warm weather; the stems come up black and then green; if you crawl flat, it is a tropical forest in miniature. I led the way and Beatrice crawled behind, and then as the green of the further glade opened before us, stopped. She crawled up to me, her hot little face came close to mine; once more she looked and breathed close to me, and suddenly she flung her arm about my neck and dragged me to earth beside her, and kissed me and kissed me again. We kissed, we embraced and kissed again, all without a word; we desisted, we stared and hesitated—then in a suddenly damped mood and a little perplexed at ourselves, crawled out, to be presently run down and caught in the tamest way by Archie.

That comes back very clearly to me, and other vague memories—I know old Hall and his g*n, out shooting at jackdaws, came into our common experiences, but I don’t remember how; and then at last, abruptly, our fight in the Warren stands out. The Warren, like most places in England that have that name, was not particularly a warren, it was a long slope of thorns and beeches through which a path ran, and made an alternative route to the downhill carriage road between Bladesover and Ropedean. I don’t know how we three got there, but I have an uncertain fancy it was connected with a visit paid by the governess to the Ropedean vicarage people. But suddenly Archie and I, in discussing a game, fell into a dispute for Beatrice. I had made him the fairest offer: I was to be a Spanish nobleman, she was to be my wife, and he was to be a tribe of Indians trying to carry her off. It seems to me a fairly attractive offer to a boy to be a whole tribe of Indians with a chance of such a booty. But Archie suddenly took offence.

“ No,” he said; “we can’t have that!”

“ Can’t have what?”

“ You can’t be a gentleman, because you aren’t. And you can’t play Beatrice is your wife. It’s—it’s impertinent.”

“ But” I said, and looked at her.

Some earlier grudge in the day’s affairs must have been in Archie’s mind. “We let you play with us,” said Archie; “but we can’t have things like that.”

“ What rot!” said Beatrice. “He can if he likes.”

But he carried his point. I let him carry it, and only began to grow angry three or four minutes later. Then we were still discussing play and disputing about another game. Nothing seemed right for all of us.

“ We don’t want you to play with us at all,” said Archie.

“ Yes, we do,” said Beatrice.

“ He drops his aitches like anything.”

“ No, ‘e doesn’t,” said I, in the heat of the moment.

“ There you go!” he cried. “E, he says. E! E! E!”

He pointed a finger at me. He had struck to the heart of my shame. I made the only possible reply by a rush at him. “Hello!” he cried, at my blackavised attack. He dropped back into an attitude that had some style in it, parried my blow, got back at my cheek, and laughed with surprise and relief at his own success. Whereupon I became a thing of murderous rage. He could box as well or better than I—he had yet to realise I knew anything of that at all—but I had fought once or twice to a finish with bare fists. I was used to inflicting and enduring savage hurting, and I doubt if he had ever fought. I hadn’t fought ten seconds before I felt this softness in him, realised all that quality of modern upper-class England that never goes to the quick, that hedges about rules and those petty points of honour that are the ultimate comminution of honour, that claims credit for things demonstrably half done. He seemed to think that first hit of his and one or two others were going to matter, that I ought to give in when presently my lip bled and dripped blood upon my clothes. So before we had been at it a minute he had ceased to be aggressive except in momentary spurts, and I was knocking him about almost as I wanted to do; and demanding breathlessly and fiercely, after our school manner, whether he had had enough, not knowing that by his high code and his soft training it was equally impossible for him to either buck-up and beat me, or give in.

I have a very distinct impression of Beatrice dancing about us during the affair in a state of unladylike appreciation, but I was too preoccupied to hear much of what she was saying. But she certainly backed us both, and I am inclined to think now—it may be the disillusionment of my ripened years—whichever she thought was winning.

Then young Garvell, giving way before my slogging, stumbled and fell over a big flint, and I, still following the tradition of my class and school, promptly flung myself on him to finish him. We were busy with each other on the ground when we became aware of a dreadful interruption.

“ Shut up, you FOOL!” said Archie.

“ Oh, Lady Drew!” I heard Beatrice cry. “They’re fighting! They’re fighting something awful!”

I looked over my shoulder. Archie’s wish to get up became irresistible, and my resolve to go on with him vanished altogether.

I became aware of the two old ladies, presences of black and purple silk and fur and shining dark things; they had walked up through the Warren, while the horses took the hill easily, and so had come upon us. Beatrice had gone to them at once with an air of taking refuge, and stood beside and a little behind them. We both rose dejectedly. The two old ladies were evidently quite dreadfully shocked, and peering at us with their poor old eyes; and never had I seen such a tremblement in Lady Drew’s lorgnettes.

“ You’ve never been fighting?” said Lady Drew.

“ You have been fighting.”

“ It wasn’t proper fighting,” snapped Archie, with accusing eyes on me.

“ It’s Mrs. Ponderevo’s George!” said Miss Somerville, so adding a conviction for ingratitude to my evident sacrilege.

“ How could he DARE?” cried Lady Drew, becoming very awful.

“ He broke the rules” said Archie, sobbing for breath. “I slipped, and—he hit me while I was down. He knelt on me.”

“ How could you DARE?” said Lady Drew.

I produced an experienced handkerchief rolled up into a tight ball, and wiped the blood from my chin, but I offered no explanation of my daring. Among other things that prevented that, I was too short of breath.

“ He didn’t fight fair,” sobbed Archie.

Beatrice, from behind the old ladies, regarded me intently and without hostility. I am inclined to think the modification of my face through the damage to my lip interested her. It became dimly apparent to my confused intelligence that I must not say these two had been playing with me. That would not be after the rules of their game. I resolved in this difficult situation upon a sulky silence, and to take whatever consequences might follow.

IX

The powers of justice in Bladesover made an extraordinary mess of my case.

I have regretfully to admit that the Honourable Beatrice Normandy did, at the age of ten, betray me, abandon me, and lie most abominably about me. She was, as a matter of fact, panic-stricken about me, conscience stricken too; she bolted from the very thought of my being her affianced lover and so forth, from the faintest memory of kissing; she was indeed altogether disgraceful and human in her betrayal. She and her half-brother lied in perfect concord, and I was presented as a wanton assailant of my social betters. They were waiting about in the Warren, when I came up and spoke to them, etc.