My Son, My Son

by Howard Spring

  *

  And who wouldn’t be charmed to do anything for Oliver? He had a gracious way with him that went straight to your heart. We had extended the times of our intimacy. Instead of reading to him after he had been put to bed, I now had him in my study every evening between teatime and his bedtime, which was at half-past six. We had no prearranged way of passing the time. Sometimes we would talk; or I would read to him; or he would read to himself, or draw, sprawled on the mat, while I read. He drew very well, and I took care that there was always a good supply of paper and pencils.

  By now, too, he had his own room. This was our second adventure in escape from old Moscrop’s furniture. Oliver’s room was very simple. His divan bed, a book-case to hold his favourite books, an easy chair to curl in, and a small chair against the table: that was all it came to. Nellie thought it bleak and uncomfortable. She wanted to load the walls with pictures, but I hardened my heart, knowing what sort of pictures they would be.

  Well, that night after football Oliver was in a talkative mood. He roamed along the book-cases, and presently pulled out a book at random and looked through it, as he would often do, for a word he didn’t know. It was one of our favourite games at that time. Endless “conversations” which he still loved, began with a word. I lit my pipe and waited for him. He brought the book to the hearthrug and lay full length at my feet, with his head to the fire. “Covetousness,” he announced at last, boggling the pronunciation. “What does covetousness mean?”

  “It means wanting what isn’t yours.”

  “Like the English people wanting the gold and diamonds that belonged to the Boers?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “That’s a good illustration.”

  “Is covetousness wrong?” he asked, stumbling again at the word.

  “It’s like a great many other things, my dear boy. If you allow it to get the upper hand of you, so that you would even steal in order to have the thing you covet, then it is wrong. You see that, don’t you?”

  He nodded gravely, and I went on: “But you can say to yourself: ‘I don’t want that thing, because I should have to do something wrong to get it.’ And so you kick your covetousness out of the home.”

  “But we won the war, all the same,” he said. “You said we did wrong to steal the gold and diamonds from the Boers, but we won the war. So you can do wrong and win.”

  This startled me, and I said rather heavily: “You may win for a time, but in the long run it doesn’t pay to do wrong.”

  “Well, how long does it pay? Do we get the gold and diamonds now?”

  “It depends on what you mean by we. Some gentlemen with queer-sounding names will get them, no doubt. The rest of us will pay more for our tobacco and other things in order to pay for the war.”

  Then he wanted to know how tobacco could pay for a war. That was how our “conversations” usually went, ranging far indeed from their start. Soon I was trying to give him some idea of how everything that a country spent had to come out of the pockets of the people in the country; and then we were interrupted. There was a loud tattoo at the door, and Dermot’s voice shouted: “May I come in, Bill?”

  Rory was with him, and Rory rushed into the room, shouting: “Where’s The Cuckoo Clock? I want The Cuckoo Clock.”

  “You want a smack on the bottom,” said Dermot, his red beard bristling with mock anger. “Is that the way to dash into a gentleman’s room, heathen that you are! Say good-evening to your Uncle Bill and to Oliver.”

  “I left The Cuckoo Clock yesterday.”

  “And what may the cuckoo clock be?” I demanded.

  “The devil take you,” Dermot said. “You to be calling yourself a man of letters and you’ve never heard of The Cuckoo Clock. Does the name of Mrs. Molesworth mean nothing to you?”

  “My infant mind was suckled on the classics,” I declared.

  “So is The Cuckoo Clock a classic,” Dermot answered; “and now let’s have it, for this child will give me no peace till I’ve finished reading it to him.”

  “Rory took it home,” Oliver announced.

  “No!” said Rory. “We read it in your room, and I left it there yesterday.”

  “You took it home,” Oliver repeated.

  “He did not then, my young cock,” said Dermot, “unless he lost it on the way, because I was there when he got home, and there was no book with him then.”

  Oliver looked Dermot full in the eye. “We’d better look in my room,” he said.

  The Cuckoo Clock was not on the table. It was not on the floor. “And it’s not in the book-case,” said Oliver. “You took it, Rory. I remember.”

  We cast our eyes along the books in the case. There was no Cuckoo Clock, but there was a book I had not seen before, and I thought I knew every book in that small library which I had myself assembled. The book that caught my eye had been covered in brown paper, and in gaudy lettering done in water-colour down the spine I read: “Adventures.” Just that.

  I pulled the book out. “This is a new one,” I said. “Where did you get this from, Oliver?”

  He leapt to take the book from me. I held him back with one hand, surprised at his sudden vehemence. “Here—steady!” I said. Then, as I began to flip over the pages, the colour drained from his face and he stood deadly still. I felt my heart suddenly hammer, and I wondered if I looked as pale as he did. The Cuckoo Clock I read at the top of every page as it flipped past my eyes. Cuckoo Clock! Cuckoo Clock! Liar! Thief! Oliver!

  “This looks good,” I said. “We’ll go through it together. Well, Dermot, you’ve drawn a blank. Are you sure you didn’t lose the book, Rory?”

  Rory looked doubtful. “I might’ve done,” he said.

  The colour flowed back to Oliver’s cheek. “You must have done,” he cried; and for the first time in my life I could have struck him.

  Dermot led Rory from the room. In a moment I tore the wrapping from the book, dropped it behind the book-case and threw the book into Oliver’s easy chair, sticking a cushion on top of it. Then I shouted: “Just a minute, Dermot—a last chance,” and when he and Rory were back in the room I pulled away the cushion. Rory’s face creased in his ugly, attractive grin. “I knew,” he said, and went away happy with his treasure.

  *

  I didn’t know what to do. I looked at Oliver for a moment, and he returned my look, level and unblinking. Then he smiled: the beautiful smile, confident of its power, that I had never been able to resist. I did not return it. I shook my head slowly and walked across the landing to my own room. I shut the door behind me and sat down before the fire.

  I had often enough been a liar, as all men are liars; but I was appalled by the easy, winsome grace with which Oliver had lied.

  Thief? I ransacked my mind, and could honestly say that never, so far as I could remember, had I stolen a thing. Had I been Ananias himself, and a professional pickpocket, I should nevertheless have felt at that moment as though a plank had been kicked out of the very floor of my life and I had glimpsed an abyss beneath.

  For it was not enough that Oliver should be as good or as bad as I was. He must be better than I was. He was more than himself. He was myself, going on from the point where I had left off. All this had been implied in every thought I had had of the child. I felt face to face with some tremendous treason against my deepest faith.

  I walked across the landing again to his room. There was a lamp hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Someone had come and lit it, and Oliver was beneath it, curled into his chair reading. The light fell upon his fair hair and the smooth childish curve of his cheek. He placed the open book face downwards on his knees and looked up with a smile. It was a smile so completely unconscious of offence that I was puzzled, almost baffled. I sat upon the hearthrug.

  “Oliver,” I said, “why did you steal Rory’s book?”

  “I didn’t steal it.”

  “But there it was—in your book-case. You must have put it there?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you
covered it in paper and wrote ‘Adventures’ on it so that Rory wouldn’t know it was his book.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you said that Rory had taken it away with him, though you knew he hadn’t. Wasn’t that a lie?”

  “Yes, it was a lie. But I didn’t steal the book.”

  “If that isn’t stealing, what do you call it?”

  He slid from his chair and came and knelt on the hearthrug at my side. “Don’t you see,” he said frankly. “I took it because it was Rory’s. I love Rory. I wanted to have something belonging to Rory. Rory loves The Cuckoo Clock, so I wanted to have it.”

  There was the sound of water flowing in the bathroom. Nellie came into the room. “Bedtime, Oliver,” she said, and stood waiting at the open door, looking like an affectionate wardress. He leapt up, and ran to her with unaccustomed alacrity. I said no more, but remained for some time sitting on the hearthrug, gazing into the fire. My heart felt strangely lightened. The explanation had been so ingenuously given that I accepted it without reserve. The child could not have invented so unusual a reason. He had done wrong, but in the motive itself I began now to see something that was not altogether unworthy. The more I thought of it the more it seemed to me that only someone out of the common, and rather finely out of the common, would have been trapped into offence by the very purity of his affections. Nevertheless, I said to myself, I had had a shock. I must watch Oliver more closely.

  I was still in the room when he was brought in to bed. I did not read to him at night now that we had the afternoon interval together. The only bedtime formality now was prayers. A formality, indeed, I fear it was to me; but I knelt at one side of the bed as Nellie knelt at the other. All three of us sang the first verse of the children’s hymn:

  Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,

  Look upon a little child.

  Then we murmured together through the Lord’s Prayer and that home-made particular prayer that every child seems to learn, asking God to bless all those people whom the child knows. After that Nellie slipped quietly out of the room. I rolled back the hearthrug, saw that the fireguard was safely in place, opened the window, and blew out the lamp. Then, with nothing but a faint fire-glow lighting the room, I knelt at the bedside and kissed him good-night. He felt warm and smelt delicious.

  “And you believe what I said, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes, old boy.”

  “Then that’s all right.” He gave a great sigh, as though my good opinion were all that mattered in the world, and turned to sleep.

  13

  Maeve dragged a chair from the house down to the middle of the lawn. Her black hair that had in it a hint of blue sheen fell in a tangled wave about her shoulders. Her skin was white almost as alabaster. Never was there colour to the child: she was all black and white, save that her eyes were as blue as they were black and her lips were as red as coral. In her cheeks and brow there was no colour. I watched from my window her wild, undisciplined grace: the slender loveliness of her legs, the flowing gestures of her arms, ending in her shapely though dirty hands.

  She sat in the chair, made a grab at chubby little Eileen and pushed her behind the chair. “Take up your shield,” she commanded; and Eileen obediently took up a large saucepan-lid and held it self-consciously. Maeve sprang from the chair and looked at her younger sister. “For the love of Mike!” she cried. “You look like a black pudding. Give me the shield.” Eileen meekly surrendered the saucepan-lid, and in Maeve’s hand it became at once a shield. “See! Like that!” said Maeve. “Remember you’re shield-bearer to the loveliest woman in Ireland.”

  She sat again, smoothed out her dress, threw back her head, and looked regal. “Captain of the guards,” she cried. “My bronze-bladed spear!”

  Rory leapt forward, and with a deep obeisance presented a long reed, which, for some reason of her own, Nellie kept standing, one of a bunch, in a porcelain jar in the hall. Maeve took the reed and held it as a queen might, with luck, hold a sceptre, “Stand on my left, Fergus MacRoy,” she commanded Rory; and to Oliver she said with a curve of her long white hand: “Husband, stand on my right.”

  When Maeve sat, Eileen and Rory seemed of her own height. Oliver, standing on Maeve’s right, out-topped them all. The summer afternoon’s sun shone on the little group: on the red dress of queenly Maeve, who knew from childhood, what her colours were; on the crumpled green of dumpy and earnest Eileen; on Rory, standing straight and stocky on Maeve’s left, his honest eyes looking forward with great earnestness from beneath his tangled mat of hair and his broad low brow; on Oliver, slightly scornful of the game, slightly condescending, his shapely curly head on its slender neck bowed a little towards Queen Maeve.

  “Now, this is what it’s all about,” Maeve chanted, “and if you want to read it for yourself you can do so in Standish O’Grady.”

  “I know it all,” Rory interrupted. “I’ve read every word Standish O’Grady has written.”

  “So you would,” said Maeve, “with father pushing him down your throat at all hours of the day and night. But that’s no reason, Fergus MacRoy, captain of the guards, for interrupting your queen. Listen, all of you, to this: ‘Queen Maeve summoned to her to Rath-Cruhane all her captains and counsellors and tributary kings. They came at once according as they had been commanded by the word of her mouth. When they were assembled, Maeve, from her high throne canopied with shining bronze, addressed them.’”

  Oliver gave a supercilious glance at the empty air above Maeve’s head. Unheeding the implication, while Rory gazed stonily ahead, Maeve went on in her rich and ringing voice that I could have listened to all day: “‘She was a woman of great stature, beautiful and of a pure complexion, her eyes large and full and blue-grey in colour, her hair dense and long and of a lustrous yellow.’”

  She flashed a scornful look at Oliver, as though daring him to comment upon that. Oliver returned the look with a smile which she refused to accept. “‘Of a lustrous yellow,’” she repeated. “‘A tiara of solid gold encircled her head, and a torque of gold her white neck.’”

  “What’s a torque?” Eileen demanded.

  “For the love of God,” said Maeve passionately, “what should a torque be, by the very sense of the words I’m speaking, but a thing to go round the neck?”

  Eileen drooped her head in contrition. Rory turned and gave her his rare crooked smile; but added: “If we don’t understand it, let’s shut up. The thing is to feel it.”

  “‘Her mantle of scarlet silk, very fine,’” Maeve proceeded, looking down with satisfaction at her red dress, “‘was gathered over her ample bosom in the ard-regal brooch of the high sovereignty of Connaught. In her right hand,”’—shaking the reed—“‘she bore a long spear with a broad blade of shining bronze. Her shield-bearer stood behind the throne. On her right hand stood her husband; on her left Fergus MacRoy, captain of her guards. Her voice, as she spoke, was full, clear and musical, and rang through the vast hall...’”

  “Saying,” cried Rory in sudden excitement, “‘It is known to you all that there is not in Banba, nor yet in the whole world, so far report speaks truly, a woman more excellent than myself.’”

  Maeve rose from the chair and threw down her reed. “Just because you know it by heart,” she cried, “is that any reason for shouting and spoiling everything? You’re just reciting it. I want to act it. Don’t you know that it’s silly tosh till it’s acted? I was going to give you all parts.”

  Rory’s face blanched and his fists clenched. “What d’you mean tosh?” he demanded, advancing his round little head as near as he could to Maeve’s face. “It’s poetry. You ask father. It belongs to the time when Ireland was the land of saints and scholars. Don’t you call it tosh.”

  “You spoiled the acting,” Maeve charged him.

  “What if I did? You’re always acting.”

  “So I am, then, and so I’ll always be.”

  They glared into one another’s faces, Rory with his fists clenched at his sides, Maev
e tall, white and scornful. Eileen stood by perplexed, clumsily holding the saucepan-lid. Oliver, practically, recovered the fallen reed.

  Slowly a smile spread over Maeve’s face, and Rory’s hands at that sight uncurled. “Of course I’m always acting,” said Maeve, “and who wouldn’t want to act lovely poetry like that?” She skipped merrily under the beech trees.

  “It is poetry. Isn’t it?” Rory demanded.

  “Of course it’s poetry, you ugly little patriot,” said Maeve. “How couldn’t it be when it’s about a lovely woman called Maeve?”

  *

  I wasn’t seeing so much of the children now because they were all by this time at Miss Bussell’s. But that was a Saturday afternoon, and on most Saturday afternoons they were at The Beeches, because the garden there was better for playing in than Dermot’s. Maeve at that time was always trying to get them to act: she was mad about acting. You would see her strike poses when she was all alone; but usually the game broke down on some silly quibble like the one that afternoon.

  Dermot’s children stayed to tea, and then Rory and Eileen set off for home. “Take care of Ugly and mind how you cross the roads,” said Maeve to Eileen in a superior grown-up fashion. She was trying hard to be self-controlled, but I could see that she was jumping with excitement inside, for I was taking her that night to the Theatre Royal.

  “I’ll take care of Ugly,” Oliver suddenly announced. “Let me go with him.”

  “And who’ll take care of you on the way home?” Nellie demanded, appearing out of the house. “I think I’d better walk with you; then you and I can come back together.”

  Oliver’s colour deepened. “I am big enough to look after my friends,” he said.

  “But Rory’s as old as you are,” Nellie argued obtusely; and I could almost see the answer forming in Oliver’s mouth before he spoke it. “But don’t you understand! I’m only pretending to take care of Rory, because I want to be with Rory.”