The Wish House and Other Stories (21 page)

‘Quick, Ju!’ he cried, ‘we’re close to the sea. I can hear it! Listen! That’s where they’ve went. P’raps we can catch them if we was in time. They didn’t mean to go without us. They’ve only forgot.’

‘Iss,’ said Judy. ‘They’ve only forgotted. Less go to the sea.’

The hall-door was open and so was the garden-gate.

‘It’s very, very big, this place,’ he said, looking cautiously down the road, ‘and we will get lost; but I will find a man and order him to take me back to my house – like I did in Bombay.’

He took Judy by the hand, and the two ran hatless in the direction of the sound of the sea. Downe Villa was almost the last of a range of newly-built houses running out, through a field of brick-mounds, to
a heath where gypsies occasionally camped and where the Garrison Artillery of Rocklington practised. There were few people to be seen, and the children might have been taken for those of the soldiery who ranged far. Half an hour the wearied little legs tramped across heath, potato-patch, and sand-dune.

‘I’se so tired,’ said Judy, ‘and Mamma will be angry.’

‘Mamma’s
never
angry. I suppose she is waiting at the sea now while Papa gets tickets. We’ll find them and go along with them. Ju, you mustn’t sit down. Only a little more and we’ll come to the sea. Ju, if you sit down I’ll
thmack
you!’ said Punch.

They climbed another dune, and came upon the great grey sea at low tide. Hundreds of crabs were scuttling about the beach, but there was no trace of Papa and Mamma, not even of a ship upon the waters – nothing but sand and mud for miles and miles.

And ‘Uncleharri’ found them by chance – very muddy and very forlorn – Punch dissolved in tears, but trying to divert Judy with an ‘ickle trab’, and Judy wailing to the pitiless horizon for ‘Mamma, Mamma!’ – and again ‘Mamma!’

All this time not a word about Black Sheep. He came later, and Harry the black-haired boy was mainly responsible for his coming.

Judy – who could help loving little Judy? – passed, by special permit, into the kitchen and thence straight to Aunty Rosa’s heart. Harry was Aunty Rosa’s one child, and Punch was the extra boy about the house. There was no special place for him or his little affairs, and he was forbidden to sprawl on sofas and explain his ideas about the manufacture of this world and his hopes for his future. Sprawling was lazy and wore out sofas, and little boys were not expected to talk. They were talked to, and the talking to was intended for the benefit of their morals. As the unquestioned despot of the house at Bombay, Punch could not quite understand how he came to be of no account in this his new life.

Harry might reach across the table and take what he wanted; Judy might point and get what she wanted. Punch was forbidden to do either. The grey man was his great hope and stand-by for many
months after Mamma and Papa left, and he had forgotten to tell Judy to ‘bemember Mamma’.

This lapse was excusable, because in the interval he had been introduced by Aunty Rosa to two very impressive things – an abstraction called God, the intimate friend and ally of Aunty Rosa, generally believed to live behind the kitchen-range because it was hot there – and a dirty brown book filled with unintelligible dots and marks. Punch was always anxious to oblige everyone. He therefore welded the story of the Creation on to what he could recollect of his Indian fairy tales, and scandalized Aunty Rosa by repeating the result to Judy. It was a sin, a grievous sin, and Punch was talked to for a quarter of an hour. He could not understand where the iniquity came in, but was careful not to repeat the offence, because Aunty Rosa told him that God had heard every word he had said and was very angry. If this were true why didn’t God come and say so, thought Punch, and dismissed the matter from his mind. Afterwards he learned to know the Lord as the only thing in the world more awful than Aunty Rosa – as a creature that stood in the background and counted the strokes of the cane.

But the reading was, just then, a much more serious matter than any creed. Aunty Rosa sat him upon a table and told him that A B meant ab.

‘Why?’ said Punch. ‘A is a and B is bee.
Why
does A V mean ab?’

‘Because I tell you it does,’ said Aunty Rosa, ‘and you’ve got to say it.’

Punch said it accordingly, and for a month, hugely against his will, stumbled through the brown book, not in the least comprehending what it meant. But Uncle Harry, who walked much and generally alone, was wont to come into the nursery and suggest to Aunty Rosa that Punch should walk with him. He seldom spoke, but he showed Punch all Rocklington, from the mudbanks and the sand of the back-bay to the great harbours where ships lay at anchor, and the dockyards where the hammers were never still, and the marine-store shops, and the shiny brass counters in the offices where Uncle Harry went once every three months with a slip of blue paper and received sovereigns in exchange; for he held a wound-pension. Punch heard, too, from his lips the story of the battle of Navarino, where the sailors of the Fleet, for three days afterwards, were deaf as posts and could only sign to each other. ‘That was because of the noise of the guns,’ said Uncle Harry, ‘and I have got the wadding of a bullet somewhere inside me now.’

Punch regarded him with curiosity. He had not the least idea what
wadding was, and his notion of a bullet was a dockyard cannonball bigger than his own head. How could Uncle Harry keep a cannonball inside him? He was ashamed to ask, for fear Uncle Harry might be angry.

Punch had never known what anger – real anger – meant until one terrible day when Harry had taken his paint-box to paint a boat with, and Punch had protested. Then Uncle Harry had appeared on the scene and, muttering something about ‘strangers’ children’, had with a stick smitten the black-haired boy across the shoulders till he wept and yelled, and Aunty Rosa came in and abused Uncle Harry for cruelty to his own flesh and blood, and Punch shuddered to the tips of his shoes. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he explained to the boy, but both Harry and Aunty Rosa said that it was, and that Punch had told tales, and for a week there were no more walks with Uncle Harry.

But that week brought a great joy to Punch.

He had repeated till he was thrice weary the statement that ‘the Cat lay on the Mat and the Rat came in’.

‘Now I can truly read,’ said Punch, ‘and now I will never read anything in the world.’

He put the brown book in the cupboard where his schoolbooks lived and accidentally tumbled out a venerable volume, without covers, labelled
Sharpe’s Magazine.
There was the most portentous picture of a griffin on the first page, with verses below. The griffin carried off one sheep a day from a German village, till a man came with a ‘falchion’ and split the griffin open. Goodness only knew what a falchion was, but there was the griffin, and his history was an improvement upon the eternal cat.

‘This,’ said Punch, ‘means things, and now I will know all about everything in all the world.’ He read till the light failed, not understanding a tithe of the meaning, but tantalized by glimpses of new worlds hereafter to be revealed.

‘What is a “falchion”? What is a “e-wee lamb”? What is a “base ussurper”? What is a “verdant me-ad”?’ he demanded with flushed cheeks, at bedtime, of the astonished Aunty Rosa.

‘Say your prayers and go to sleep,’ she replied, and that was all the help Punch then or afterwards found at her hands in the new and delightful exercise of reading.

‘Aunty Rosa only knows about God and things like that,’ argued Punch. ‘Uncle Harry will tell me.’

The next walk proved that Uncle Harry could not help either; but he allowed Punch to talk, and even sat down on a bench to hear about the griffin. Other walks brought other stories as Punch ranged
farther afield, for the house held large store of old books that no one ever opened – from
Frank Fairlegh
in serial numbers, and the earlier poems of Tennyson, contributed anonymously to
Sharpe’s Magazine
, to ‘62 Exhibition Catalogues, gay with colours and delightfully incomprehensible, and odd leaves of
Gulliver’s Travels.

As soon as Punch could string a few pot-hooks together he wrote to Bombay, demanding by return of post ‘all the books in all the world’. Papa could not comply with this modest indent, but sent
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
and a Hans Andersen. That was enough. If he were only left alone Punch could pass, at any hour he chose, into a land of his own, beyond reach of Aunty Rosa and her God, Harry and his teasements, and Judy’s claims to be played with.

‘Don’t disturve me, I’m reading. Go and play in the kitchen,’ grunted Punch. ‘Aunty Rosa lets
you
go there.’ Judy was cutting her second teeth and was fretful. She appealed to Aunty Rosa, who descended on Punch.

‘I was reading,’ he explained, ‘reading a book I
want
to read.’

‘You’re only doing that to show off,’ said Aunty Rosa. ‘But we’ll see. Play with Judy now, and don’t open a book for a week.’

Judy did not pass a very enjoyable playtime with Punch, who was consumed with indignation. There was a pettiness at the bottom of the prohibition which puzzled him.

‘It’s what I like to do,’ he said, ‘and she’s found out that and stopped me. Don’t cry, Ju – it wasn’t your fault –
please
don’t cry, or she’ll say I made you.’

Ju loyally mopped up her tears, and the two played in their nursery, a room in the basement and half underground, to which they were regularly sent after the midday dinner while Aunty Rosa slept. She drank wine – that is to say, something from a bottle in the cellaret – for her stomach’s sake, but if she did not fall asleep she would sometimes come into the nursery to see that the children were really playing. Now bricks, wooden hoops, ninepins, and chinaware cannot amuse for ever, especially when all Fairyland is to be won by the mere opening of a book, and, as often as not, Punch would be discovered reading to Judy or telling her interminable tales. That was an offence in the eyes of the law, and Judy would be whisked off by Aunty Rosa, while Punch was left to play alone, ‘and be sure that I hear you doing it’.

It was not a cheering employ, for he had to make a playful noise. At last, with infinite craft, he devised an arrangement whereby a table could be supported as to three legs on toy bricks, leaving the fourth to bring down on the floor. He could work the table with one hand
clear and hold a book with the other. This he did till an evil day when Aunty Rosa pounced upon him unawares and told him that he was ‘acting a lie’.

‘If you’re old enough to do that,’ she said – her temper was always worst after dinner – ‘you’re old enough to be beaten.’

‘But – I’m – I’m not a animal!’ said Punch aghast. He remembered Uncle Harry and the stick, and turned white. Aunty Rosa had hidden a light cane behind her, and Punch was beaten then and there over the shoulders. It was a revelation to him. The room door was shut, and he was left to weep himself into repentance and work out his own gospel of life.

Aunty Rosa, he argued, had the power to beat him with many stripes. It was unjust and cruel, and Mamma and Papa would never have allowed it. Unless perhaps, as Aunty Rosa seemed to imply, they had sent secret orders. In which case he was abandoned indeed. It would be discreet in the future to propitiate Aunty Rosa, but, then, again, even in matters in which he was innocent, he had been accused of wishing to ‘show off. He had ‘shown off before visitors when he had attacked a strange gentleman – Harry’s uncle, not his own – with requests for information about the griffin and the falchion, and the precise nature of the Tilbury in which Frank Fairlegh rode – all points of paramount interest which he was bursting to understand. Clearly it would not do to pretend to care for Aunty Rosa.

At this point Harry entered and stood afar off, eyeing Punch, a dishevelled heap in the corner of the room, with disgust.

‘You’re a liar – a young liar,’ said Harry, with great unction, ‘and you’re to have tea down here because you’re not fit to speak to us. And you’re not to speak to Judy again till Mother gives you leave. You’ll corrupt her. You’re only fit to associate with the servant. Mother says so.’

Having reduced Punch to a second agony of tears, Harry departed upstairs with the news that Punch was still rebellious.

Uncle Harry sat uneasily in the dining-room. ‘Damn it all, Rosa,’ said he at last, ‘can’t you leave the child alone? He’s a good enough little chap when I meet him.’

‘He puts on his best manners with you, Henry,’ said Aunty Rosa, ‘but I’m afraid, I’m very much afraid, that he is the Black Sheep of the family.’

Harry heard and stored up the name for future use. Judy cried till she was bidden to stop, her brother not being worth tears; and the evening concluded with the return of Punch to the upper regions
and a private sitting at which all the blinding horrors of Hell were revealed to Punch with such store of imagery as Aunty Rosa’s narrow mind possessed.

Most grievous of all was Judy’s round-eyed reproach, and Punch went to bed in the depths of the Valley of Humiliation. He shared his room with Harry and knew the torture in store. For an hour and a half he had to answer that young gentleman’s questions as to his motives for telling a lie, and a grievous lie, the precise quantity of punishment inflicted by Aunty Rosa, and had also to profess his deep gratitude for such religious instruction as Harry thought fit to impart.

From that day began the downfall of Punch, now Black Sheep.

‘Untrustworthy in one thing, untrustworthy in all,’ said Aunty Rosa, and Harry felt that Black Sheep was delivered into his hands. He would wake him up in the night to ask him why he was such a liar.

‘I don’t know,’ Punch would reply.

‘Then don’t you think you ought to get up and pray to God for a new heart?’

‘Y-yess.’

‘Get out and pray, then!’ And Punch would get out of bed with raging hate in his heart against all the world, seen and unseen. He was always tumbling into trouble. Harry had a knack of cross-examining him as to his day’s doings, which seldom failed to lead him, sleepy and savage, into half a dozen contradictions – all duly reported to Aunty Rosa next morning.