Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (57 page)

‘
Our
changes are all over, dear,' cooed the mother; ‘and now I am getting used to your size and your tan (you're very brown,Georgie), I see you haven't changed in the least. You're exactly like the pater.'

The father beamed on this man after his own heart, –‘youngest major in the army, and should have had the VC, sir,' – and the butler listened with his professional mask off when Master Georgie spoke of war as it is waged to-day, and his father cross-questioned. The pater had retired when the Martini-Henry was a new thing and the Maxim unborn.

They went out on the terrace to smoke among the roses, and the shadow of the old house lay long across the wonderful English foliage, which is the only living green in the world.

‘Perfect! By Jove, it's perfect!' Georgie was looking at the round-bosomed woods beyond the home paddock, where the white pheasant-boxes were ranged; and the golden air was full of a hundred sacred scents and sounds. Georgie felt his father's arm tighten in his.

‘It's not half bad – but
hodie mihi
,
cras tibi
,isn't it? I suppose you'll be turning up some fine day with a girl under your arm, if you haven't one now, eh?'

‘You can make your mind easy, sir. I haven't one.'

‘Not in all these years?' said the mother.

‘I hadn't time, mummy. They keep a man pretty busy, these days, in the service, and most of our mess are unmarried, too.'

‘But you must have met hundreds in society – at balls, and so on?'

‘I'm like the Tenth, mummy: I don't dance.'

‘Don't dance! What have you been doing with yourself, then – backing other men's bills?' said the father.

‘Oh, yes; I've done a little of that too; but you see, as things are now, a man has all his work cut out for him to keep abreast of his profession, and my days were always too full to let me lark about half the night.'

‘Hmm!' – suspiciously.

‘It's never too late to learn. We ought to give some kind of housewarming for the people about, now you've come back. Unless you want to go straight up to town, dear?'

‘No. I don't want anything better than this. Let's sit still and enjoy ourselves. I suppose there will be something for me to ride if I look for it?'

‘Seeing I've been kept down to the old brown pair for the last six weeks because all the others were being got ready for Master Georgie, I should say there might be,' the father chuckled. ‘They're reminding me in a hundred ways that I must take the second place now.'

‘Brutes!'

‘The pater doesn't mean it, dear; but every one has been trying to make your home-coming a success; and you
do
like it, don't you?'

‘Perfect! Perfect! There's no place like England – when you've done your work.'

‘That's the proper way to look at it, my son.'

And so up and down the flagged walk till their shadows grew long in the moonlight, and the mother went indoors and played such songs as a small boy once clamoured for, and the squat silver candlesticks were brought in, and Georgie climbed to the two rooms in the west wing that had been his day and night nursery and his playroom in the beginning. Then who should come to tuck him up for the night but the mother? And she sat down on the bed, and they talked for a long hour, as mother and son should, if there is to be any future for the empire. With a simple woman's deep guile she asked questions and suggested answers that should have waked some sign in the face on the pillow, and there was neither quiver of eyelid nor quickening of breath, neither evasion nor delay in reply. So she blessed him and kissed him on the mouth, which is not always a mother's property, and said something to her husband later, at which he laughed profane and incredulous laughs.

All the establishment waited on Georgie next morning, from the tallest, six-year-old, ‘with a mouth like a kid glove,Master Georgie,' to the under-keeper strolling carelessly along the horizon, Georgie's pet rod in his hand, and ‘There's a four-pounder risin' below the lasher. You don't 'ave 'em in Injia, Mast— Major Georgie.' It was all beautiful beyond telling, even though the mother insisted on taking him out in the landau (the leather had the hot Sunday smell of his youth) and showing him off to her friends at all the houses for six miles round; and the pater bore him up to town and a lunch at the club, where he introduced him, quite carelessly, to not less than thirty ancient warriors whose sons were not the youngest majors in the army and had not been mentioned in recent gazettes. After that it was Georgie's turn; and remembering his friends, he filled up the house with that kind of officer who lives in cheap lodgings at Southsea or Montpelier Square, Brompton – good men all, but not well off. The mother perceived that they needed girls to play with; and as there was no scarcity of girls, the house hummed like a dovecote in spring. They tore up the place for amateur theatricals; they disappeared into the gardens when they ought to have been rehearsing; they swept off every available horse and vehicle, especially the governess-cart and the fat pony (Georgie could not see where the fun came in here); they fell into the trout-ponds; they picnicked and they tennised; and they sat on gates in the twilight, two by two, and Georgie found that he was not in the least necessary to their entertainment.

‘My word!' said he, when he saw the last of their dear backs. ‘They told me they've enjoyed 'emselves, but they haven't done half the things they said they would.'

‘I know they've enjoyed themselves – immensely,' said the mother. ‘You're a public benefactor, dear.'

‘Now we can be quiet again, can't we?'

‘Oh, quite. I've a very dear friend of mine that I want you to know. She couldn't come with the house so full, because she's an invalid, and she was away when you first came. She's a Mrs Lacy.'

‘Lacy! I don't remember the name about here.'

‘No; they came after you went to India – from Oxford. Her husband died there, and she lost some money, I believe. Theybought The Firs on the Bassett Road. She's a very sweet woman, and we're very fond of them both.'

‘She's a widow, didn't you say?'

‘She has a daughter. Surely I said so, dear?'

‘Does she fall into trout-ponds, and gas and giggle, and “Oh, Major Cottar!” and all that?'

‘No, indeed. She's a very quiet girl, and very musical. She always came over here with her music-books – composing, you know; and she generally works all day, so you won't—'

‘Talking about Miriam?' said the pater, coming up. The mother edged toward him within elbow-reach. There was no finesse about Georgie's father. ‘Oh, Miriam's a dear girl. Plays beautifully. Rides beautifully, too. She's a regular pet of the household. Used to call me—' The elbow went home, and, ignorant but obedient always, the pater shut himself off.

‘What used she to call you, sir?'

‘All sorts of pet names. I'm very fond of Miriam.'

‘Sounds Jewish – Miriam.'

‘Jew! You'll be calling yourself a Jew next. She's one of the Herefordshire Lacys. When her aunt dies—' Again the elbow.

‘Oh, you won't see anything of her, Georgie, She's busy with her music or her mother all day. Besides, you're going up to town tomorrow, aren't you? I thought you said something about an Institute meeting?' The mother spoke.

‘Go up to town
now!
What nonsense!' Once more the pater was shut off.

‘I had some idea of it, but I'm not quite sure,' said the son of the house. Why did the mother try to get him away because a musical girl and her invalid parent were expected? He did not approve of unknown females calling his father pet names. He would observe these pushing persons who had been only seven years in the county.

All of which the delighted mother read in his countenance, herself keeping an air of sweet disinterestedness.

‘They'll be here this evening for dinner. I'm sending the carriage over for them, and they won't stay more than a week.'

‘Perhaps I shall go up to town. I don't quite know yet.' Georgie moved away irresolutely. There was a lecture at theInstitute on the supply of ammunition in the field, and the one man whose theories most irritated Major Cottar would deliver it. A heated discussion was sure to follow, and perhaps he might find himself moved to speak. He took his rod that afternoon and went down to thresh it out among the trout.

‘Good sport, dear!' said the mother from the terrace.

‘'Fraid it won't be, mummy. All those men from town, and the girls particularly, have put every trout off his feed for weeks. There isn't one of 'em that cares for fishin' – really. Fancy stampin' and shoutin' on the bank, and tellin' every fish for half a mile exactly what you're goin' to do, and then chuckin' a brute of a fly at him! By Jove, it would scare
me
if I was a trout!'

But things were not as bad as he had expected. The black gnat was on the water, and the water was strictly preserved. A three-quarter-pounder at the second cast set him for the campaign, and he worked downstream, crouching behind the reed and meadow-sweet; creeping between a hornbeam hedge and a foot-wide strip of bank, where he could see the trout, but where they could not distinguish him from the background; lying almost on his stomach to switch the blue-upright (black gnat tail-fly) sidewise through the checkered shadows of a gravelly ripple fenced on three sides by overarching trees; or throat-deep in the rank hemlocks. But he had known every inch of the water since he was four feet high. The aged and astute between the sunk roots of trees, with the large and fat that lay in the frothy scum below some strong rush of water, sucking as lazily as carp, came to trouble in their turn, at the hand that duplicated so delicately the flicker and wimple of an egg-dropping fly. That was so consoling an afternoon that Georgie found himself five miles from home when he ought to have been dressing for dinner. The housekeeper had taken good care that her boy should not go empty, and before he changed to the white moth he sat down to excellent claret with sandwiches of potted egg and things that adoring women make and men never notice. Then back, the pipe between his teeth, to surprise the otter grubbing for fresh-water mussels, the rabbits on the edge of the beechwoods foraging m the clover,and the policeman-like white owl stooping to the little field-mice, till the moon was strong, and he took his rod apart, and went home through well-remembered gaps in the hedges. He fetched a compass round the house, for though he might have broken every law of the establishment every hour, the law of his boyhood was unbreakable: after fishing you went in by the garden back door, cleaned up in the outer scullery, and did not present yourself to your elders and your betters till you had washed and changed.

‘Half-past ten, by Jove! Well, we'll make the sport an excuse. They wouldn't want to see me the first evening, at any rate. Gone to bed, probably.' He skirted by the open French windows of the drawing-room. ‘No, they haven't. They look very comfy in there.'

He could see his father in his own particular chair, the mother in hers, and the back of a girl at the piano by the big potpourri jar. The gardens looked half divine in the moonlight, and he turned down through the roses to finish out his pipe.

A prelude ended, and there floated out a voice of the kind that in his childhood he used to call ‘creamy' – a full, true contralto; and this is the song that he heard, every syllable of it:

Over the edge of the purple down,

Where the single lamp-light gleams,

Know ye the road to the Merciful Town

That is hard by the Sea of Dreams –

Where the poor may lay their wrongs away,

And the sick may forget to weep?

But we–pity us! Oh, pity us!

We wakeful; ah, pity us! –

We must go back with Policeman Day –

Back from the City of Sleep!

Weary they turn from the scroll and crown,

Fetter and prayer and plough –

They that go up to the Merciful Town,

For her gates are closing now.

It is their right in the baths of Night

Body and soul to steep:

But we–pity us! ah, pity us!

We wakeful; oh, pity us! –

We must go back with Policeman Day –

Back from the City of Sleep!

Over the edge of the purple down,

Ere the tender dreams begin,

Look–we may look–at the Merciful Town,

But we may not enter in.

Outcasts all, from her guarded wall

Back to our watch we creep:

We–pity us! ah, pity us!

We wakeful; oh, pity us! –

We that go back with Policeman Day –

Back from the City of Sleep!

At the last echo he was aware that his mouth was dry and unknown pulses were beating in the roof of it. The housekeeper, who would have it that he must have fallen in and caught a chill, was waiting to catch him on the stairs, and, since he neither saw nor answered her, carried a wild tale abroad that brought his mother knocking at the door.

‘Anything happened, dear? Harper said she thought you weren't—'

‘No; it's nothing. I'm all right, mummy.
Please
don't bother.'

He did not recognise his own voice, but that was a small matter beside what he was considering. Obviously, most obviously, the whole coincidence was crazy lunacy – ‘blind rot.' He proved it to the satisfaction of Major George Cottar, who was going up to town to-morrow to hear a lecture on the supply of ammunition in the field; and having so proved it, the soul and brain and heart and body of Georgie cried joyously: ‘That's the Lily Lock girl – the Lost Continent girl – the Thirty-Mile Ride girl – the Brushwood girl!
I
know her!'

He waked, stiff and cramped in his chair, to reconsider the situation by sunlight, when it did not appear normal. But aman must eat, and he went to breakfast, his heart between his teeth, holding himself severely in hand.