by Ursula Bloom
Twit thought that Martin was going to kill him. He made repeated efforts to scream, but the sound would not come. He tried to run, but his legs had lost their power. He was already bruised from the beating that he had received from Mr. Andrews. He was dimly conscious of terrible pain pursuing him. An arm was twisted half out of its socket; he thought that it must be broken, it could not have hurt more had it been dislocated. The world spun round and round. It spun into luminous stars, revolving, with great stabbings of pain pricking it. It was like the top that his grandmother had given him one Christmas. You flung rings of coloured paper upon it as it spun. The papers formed splotches and stars and circles in strange patterns, all colours blurring. Suddenly he dropped into void. He had fainted.
VI
The last day of the term, Stinker burst in upon Twit. He was sitting disconsolately in an untidy class-room, faced with an involved geography paper. His arm was still in a sling.
‘Hello!’ said Stinker. ‘I say, old Combinations, here’s a go. They’ve got measles in the village. That girl of old Marty’s. Good egg that the Head pushed him out or we’d all have had it. Ugh … measles!’
‘I don’t care.’
Twit did not care about anything. He had not cared about his exams. There was only one question in the geography paper to which he had known the answer; purposely he had written the wrong reply. He wanted to fail. It was part of the complex of a strange nature that he desired nothing more than to remain at the bottom of his class.
The Grimshaws were going to the sea on the Monday. Isobel had managed to persuade George after much time and trouble, because he had not considered a seaside holiday to be necessary. But she had persisted and apartments had been booked at Cromer. Ever since she had first heard of it Jill had been wildly excited. What a chance for swimming! What an opportunity to see something more than sheep and cows and the farmer’s fat old red bull! Recently she had turned a disused hayloft into a museum, charging a penny entrance. It was a financial venture which had repaid the energy expended on it. Already it had earned ninepence, and a local vicar had got in for nothing because he had promised to contribute an ostrich egg. She now formed some hazy idea of opening an aquarium section (for which an extra penny could be charged). She would get the fish from Cromer, and bring them back in a bucket. She was also full of a homesick longing for Twit. She had an idea that he might have outstripped his baby ways, and be wiser. She hoped desperately that he might be different.
But he was in no wise different as he sat kicking his heels at the desk, and deliberately ruining his geography paper. Matron had packed his bag. By this time to-morrow he would be on his way.
‘We’re all going to Rhyl,’ announced Stinker.
‘I’m going to Cromer.’
‘Cromer’s rotten. No pierrots.’
‘I don’t like pierrots.’
‘Sucks to you, Combies; bet you a million pounds you’ve never seen them.’
‘I bet you I have.’
‘I don’t believe you’ve ever been to the seaside before, Combies.’
‘I bet I have.’
‘Well, clever, where have you been?’
Twit chewed his pen hard, and tried to think. He wished he knew more about geography, for it was occasionally useful. ‘Southampton,’ he said.
‘Whew! That isn’t sea.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘No, it isn’t.’
‘’Tis.’
‘Bet you.’ Stinker turned a contemptuous face. ‘It’s water. Whew! You don’t know anything. You’ve never been anywhere, Combies.’
‘Well, I’m going to Cromer.’
‘Cromer’s rotten.’
‘I don’t care.’
‘No pierrots at Cromer. Rhyl’s the place.’ Stinker slammed his books down noisily on a desk. ‘To-morrow’s holidays. This day next week, where shall I be? Not in this academee. If I am I’ll play the fool, and knock old Andrews off his stool.’
He went out whistling noisily.
VII
‘But of course he hasn’t changed,’ Jill told herself.
They had met him at the corner of the lane, she and Isobel. Isobel had wept a little, overcome by sentiment when she saw the carrier’s cart ambling along towards them. Jill’s grey eyes had brightened. They were going to Cromer. Only three more days! What fun it was going to be, for they had not been to the seaside since she was seven. Every year she had plugged the pump trough up and had pumped it full of water. Paddling in it, she had tried to pretend that it was the sea, and that the kitchen garden close by was a sandy beach. It had needed a lot of imagination, for the pump trough was a poor sea, and the kitchen garden was not a superb beach. This year there was no need for such pretence.
She had saved the fish money all the summer and had managed to make herself a successful if rather extraordinary bathing-dress out of red Turkey twill. Cromer was almost the day after tomorrow. In the morning it would be the day after to-morrow. She had the hours written on an old exercise-book sheet and kept between her Liberty bodice and her combinations. When she remembered she crossed them off one at a time. Sometimes she forgot a whole four hours, which was better, for it seemed to make the time go quicker.
‘What have you done to your arm?’ she asked Twit.
‘Another boy twisted it.’
‘But why?’
‘He was angry with me.’
Her mother instinct welled up within her. She wanted to protect Twit. ‘Great big bully,’ she said; ‘didn’t the master do anything about it?’
‘They expelled him.’
‘Oho.’
‘I do hope they are nice to you,’ said Isobel; ‘you look pale, and your eyes are red. Have you had any trouble with them?’
‘I want to leave school,’ he blurted out; ‘they’re horrid to me. They tease me about my combies. You don’t know, Mother, it is awful.’
Poor Isobel, knowing that if Twit left Whoreham George would never consent to another school, could not help him. ‘It will make a man of you,’ was all she could say.
Jill was fiercely indignant. They wouldn’t make a man of him at all. She knew that. He wasn’t able to protect himself, only these stupid grown-up people refused to admit it.
But at the moment Cromer absorbed everything. Cromer and a red Turkey twill bathing-dress. She had read Clement Scott’s poems and felt more than a little romantic about them. Poppyland. She would see Poppyland. It was almost too glorious to be true.
It wasn’t true.
The next morning Twit came out with measles.
‘But how did he get them?’ demanded Isobel.
Twit had no idea. If he knew, he was not going to offer any explanation. The Fates seemed to be all against him, just because he had tried to get a rise out of old Marty.
‘We can’t go to Cromer now,’ Isobel told Jill. ‘You’ll have them in ten days. It is most unfortunate, but it can’t be helped. Poor old Twitlet! He is never very lucky.’
She went into the kitchen to find him lemon jelly and sponge fingers. Later into the serene silence of an August afternoon there came the sound of vigorous if not vicious pumping. It was Jill, busily engaged in filling up the pump trough to play her pathetic game of seaside with herself.
CHAPTER IV
‘If youth knew and old age were able, there would be nothing which might not be done.’ ‒ Italian Proverb.
OUTLET.
I
For three years Twit suffered Whoreham. He suffered tortures. He sat at his miserable desk learning nothing whatsoever. Mr. Andrews believed that he had taught the boy to read. Suffice it that he could read what he wanted to, puzzling it out with difficulty and in a tedious fashion. In class Twit eschewed knowledge.
It was one summer term that he won the only prize that he was ever destined to win, and he bore it home in triumph. Isobel believed that at last he had woken up to hard facts and was trying to make good. Mr. Andrews’ garden had been overrun with snails. He had offered a reward to the
youth who could catch the largest quantity. Supplied with jam-jars in which was an amount of salt and water, Twit spent every spare moment of his time engaged in ‘snailing’ among Mr. Andrews’ rockeries and flower-beds. He finally produced four evilly-smelling jars in which he claimed to have deposited seven hundred and nineteen snails. He urged that Matron should count them! As most of these snails were in an advanced stage of decomposition Matron was not anxious. None of the other boys had passed the first two hundred, so Twit, armed with the snail prize, returned home. The snails had been particularly appealing, for the very reason that Twit loved dirt. He had not outgrown the stage when he refused to wash.
‘It will come,’ said Isobel; ‘he’ll be a dandy yet.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ announced Jill.
Shock-headed Twit had been cursed by a sallow skin which, as he explained, looked dirty whether you washed it or not. He had a pair of most exquisite hands, with the same perfect filberts that George the elder had possessed. They were long, slight hands, beautifully shaped, always encrusted in grime.
‘If I’d had your hands,’ said Jill, whose capable fingers were spatulate, ‘I’d have been proud of them. It doesn’t seem fair. You’re filthy, yet you’ve got those lovely hands. I’m clean, yet look at me.’
Jill was never gammoned by the dozens of little ways in which Twit hoodwinked Isobel. The bath placed in his room, in which he gaily sailed the soap to appear as though he had bathed diligently. The toothbrush, left in the glass; taken out for exercise only when it was re-packed to return to school. The nailbrush dropped into the basin. ‘It’s so beastly of him,’ said Jill, ‘and he’s fourteen.’
‘All boys are like that,’ Isobel excused him; ‘it’s a phase, and they pass through it.’
II
When Twit was fifteen the big split in the Grimshaw household arrived. It had been coming for years, but not too obviously. The early spring of 1910 saw it crash. Isobel and George had been drifting further and further apart. Their little bickerings had launched themselves into definite quarrels. Another woman had come into George’s life. There had been a great many women in his world, but he had not seen fit to contemplate sacrificing a wife and children to any of them before. This time, however, the children were almost grown up, and Isobel was nearing fifty. He had kept his wife short of money. She was earnestly endeavouring to keep Twit at school, where she believed that he was laying the foundation stone of a magnificent career, therefore she could not afford pretty clothes. Isobel, deprived of her husband’s love, of holidays to promote health, of attractive surroundings and frocks, was in no state to invite competition. The lady of George’s affections had three hundred a year of her own. That three hundred a year was the glitter of George’s romance.
George met Miss Smith at a boarding-house in Wales. He stayed there, remaining discreetly silent on the subject of his wife and growing family. Miss Smith was past her early loveliness ‒ if indeed she had ever been lovely ‒ and she was flattered by George’s attentions. She was well over forty and she supposed that love had passed her by. She lamented her compulsory virginity, but could do nothing to help herself. When George began with his clumsy amatory advances Miss Smith preened herself. She told him of her three hundred a year. George was utterly charmed. He mentioned marriage. He anticipated marriage by an unofficial honeymoon. Later he was forced to admit to Miss Smith that there was the certainly trying problem of Isobel. Isobel was the blockade in the plain sailing of his plan. George told the good old story of the wife and family who did not understand him, and Miss Smith believed it, and hoped that after all she would not die (officially) an old maid.
Isobel remained in ignorance of the existence of Miss Smith until some time later, when she came upon some of the letters that George had tactlessly left lying about. Challenged with it, he adopted the pose of a martyr. He was a Sir Launcelot and an Apollo in one. He never realised that there might be a good deal of Narcissus about him; he had always been in love with himself. He quoted Shelley’s love for Emilia Vivani and for Mary. He was bursting with passion, and George bursting with passion was almost ridiculous.
Isobel had no wish to break up her home, and especially just as her two children were growing up. It was a critical moment in their careers. She had no one to turn to for advice. She was born of the era in which a woman did not leave a man until she had gone through a series of protestations and lamentations. For six months she tried every means in her power to bring George to a proper sense of proportion. She quarrelled fiercely, or, what Jill considered to be even worse, she wept profusely. Sometimes Isobel declared that she would drown herself. Sometimes George vowed that he would cut his throat. Hell’s inferno reigned in the house. Jill, grown sick at heart, gave unheeded advice, and listened to pathetic confidences from Isobel and revolting confessions from George. All her youth was in an instant clutched from her. The fish business died. The museum grew dusty with disuse. The seed merchantship to which she had been aspiring through the medium of the ‘B.O.P.’ floundered into fiasco. She grew up in a night!
Unfurling to life, she had believed it to be a beautiful flower, with love the centre of a divine blossoming. Suddenly in upon her joyous adolescence came all this horror. The world was no longer a beautiful playground, delicious with birdsong, with happy games and the complexities of finance. It was no longer bright with bloom in spring and mature with fruit in autumn, it was suddenly trampled upon by the day feet of carnal disillusion … sex!
When Twit came home she made valiant efforts to keep the state of affairs from him. She need not have distressed herself. His parents’ misadventures did not worry Twit. He was entirely absorbed in the snail prize. There might be a slug prize next term, and a caterpillar one the term after. That would be excellent! All through a dragging summer holiday Jill tried to keep her young brother out of the inferno.
Then one night a fierce quarrel burst in upon the two in the old stained schoolroom.
III
It was impossible to keep it secret any longer, and after all Twit was fourteen. Across the small table Jill faced him whitely. He was busily engaged in stuffing a fish and the smell from it was loathsome.
‘He’ll smell of it for weeks,’ Jill told herself dismally, ‘because he will never think of washing it off.’ Upstairs Isobel was sobbing herself to sleep.
‘You see, Twit,’ Jill explained, ‘this can’t go on. Dad wants to bring this woman here; it will end in that and we shall have to go. We ought to have gone before.’
Twit, stitching carefully along the stomach of the roach, said, ‘I don’t believe this twine will hold. It’s been out in the sun or something, and it’s rotted.’
‘Twit, if we leave Dad we shall be awfully poor. You’ll have to go out into the world, and be an errand boy or something. I’ll have to work. I don’t know what I can do.’
‘Oh,’ said Twit.
‘I can make Mother do almost anything I want, really. She does what I tell her, but I don’t know what to tell her. She ought not to stay here, for the rows are awful. I dream about them at night …’ She felt her underlip quivering.
Twit said, ‘I have dreams too. Things chasing me. It’s generally supper.’
She rapped sharply on the schoolroom table. Her hair fell on either side her small vivid face. It was tawny and golden-brown like a lion’s mane, and there was a little of the lion’s courage in her blazing eyes. ‘You little idiot! Won’t you ever see anything but your stupid snail prize, and your stuffing fishes? We ought to help Mother. She needs someone to help her, she is nearly out of her mind with trouble and we ought to do something.’
Twit began to cry from nerves. He could never stand a tense atmosphere, and Jill frightened him. George, in the hall without, heard Twit and charged in upon the scene. It had been an uncomfortable quarrel for him, and he felt that Isobel had been rude about Miss Smith. It was paltry and petty, and most irritating. George had enough of Emily in him suddenly to pose as one of the world’s great love
rs pining for love. He was, he felt, a Lohengrin, a knight in silver armour, and the lady had flowing golden-hair and sandalled feet. George made a fetish of romance. Aestheticism still held him. He was eternally enamoured of angel sleeves and the Greek outline. Isobel had indicated the weak points in his beautiful story. Miss Smith was old ‒ had not Isobel seen a photograph? ‒ she had never been a beauty, and even three hundred a year could not make her one. It is always more annoying when a person finds fault and is correct in his fault-finding.
George was harassed and annoyed. In upon his ruffled communings came the sound of Twit’s howling.
‘Now what’s all this?’ he demanded.
‘Jill pinched my arm.’
George pointed an accusing finger at Jill, bright-eyed and defiant. ‘You can never leave the child alone. You tease him all day long. You’d better go to bed and get out of the way.’
She moved across the room; sweeping past George with a faint sneer curling her young mouth. Jill was self-opinionated; she was too sure of herself, her disdain was maddening. As she passed George she twitched her pinafore aside with a superb gesture of contempt. In the doorway she hesitated for one flashing instant.
‘He’s a damned little sneak,’ she said.
IV
Before Twit left for the new term, Jill implored him to help her. Even as she did so she realised the futility of expecting help from anyone so helpless. If anyone had got to do the thinking in the family it was herself. Isobel was weak with worry. George was flooded with romance and self-pity. Twit could not even stand alone.
During the following term Isobel left George.
Twit remained uninterested because he was having a trying time. It began with the early snow, when, on their Tuesday pilgrimage to the gym at the other end of the village, he had a snow fight. He and the rest of the Whoreham boys indulged in a battle royal with the Board School boys. It was a most excellent affray, and, had not Twit been determined to go one better than anyone else, it would have ended excellently. In the village was a youth called Horace Haines. He wore a sporting cap that his mother had bought at a rummage sale, and a pair of his father’s trousers not too ably cut down. He was the pet aversion of the Whoreham boys, because of his objectionable habit of calling ‘Yah ‒ College Stiffs!’ after them, on every conceivable occasion. In the snowball affray, Horace received a thoroughly deserved licking at the hands of Wyndham the prefect. He was also rolled in the snow. Breaking away, Horace made a most commendable escape towards the Board School itself. That was when Twit saw him. An enemy on the run always whetted Twit’s appetite, whereas an enemy standing his ground was not so attractive. Grasping two snowballs, Twit gave chase into the very schoolhouse itself. As he charged through the door, it shut ominously behind him. A remorseless hand gripped his shoulder and an irate voice said: