by Forrest Reid
CHAPTER TWO
WHEN TOM next opened his eyes it was broad daylight and the sun was shining. But after listening for a minute or two he knew it must still be pretty early, for he could hear none of the domestic sounds which usually began about seven. He rather liked those early-morning sounds—Phemie’s violent assault upon the kitchen range—which always seemed to be resisting tooth and nail—and Mary’s more circumspect movements in the dining-room and study. Phemie, Mary, and William composed the indoor and outdoor staff, and Phemie and Mary were sisters though you never would have guessed this to look at them. Phemie—whose full name was Euphemia—was several years older than Mary, and bossed her like anything. Both were Roman Catholics, while William was a Protestant and an Orangeman, and walked with an orange-and-purple sash over his shoulder on the twelfth of July. Phemie had been crossed in love many years ago, and now hated men though she didn’t mind boys. She had a loud voice, muscles of iron, and a temper which Mother said all cooks inherited from the cook in Alice in Wonderland. Nevertheless, Tom preferred her to Mary, though he preferred Mary to William, who was the gardener, and lived with his wife and family in a cottage not far from the old Ballysheen graveyard, about a mile away.
All this district was Ballysheen, and Doctor Macrory said there had once been a church near the graveyard, though nothing was left of it at present except a few stones. And even the loose stones had nearly all been carted away at one time and another to build walls and byres and cottages. For that matter, Doctor Macrory said there must long ago have been another house—a big house—where Tom’s own house now stood. It had disappeared completely, and was not mentioned in any local history, but the builders had discovered traces of it when they were laying the foundations, and Doctor Macrory himself had poked about while the digging was going on. Doctor Macrory was very much. interested in things of that sort. By profession he was a physician, but his hobby was archæology, and he had written several pamphlets on the subject. Tom hadn’t read the pamphlets, but he had seen them, Daddy possessed them, and they were bound in green paper, with Celtic designs.
All Daddy’s friends were scientific, which, according to Mother, accounted for the narrowness of their views, their lack of imagination, and the irritating way in which they pooh-poohed anything they couldn’t understand. It was queer that Tom’s friend Pascoe should be scientific too, because Tom, Mother said, took after her family, and was a Collet.
On the other hand, she had one day told him that he got his brains from Daddy, though they were a different kind of brains. This seemed a little complicated, and became still more so when in answer to his question as to how they were different, she discovered that the person he really took after must be Uncle Stephen, of whose existence Tom had not till that moment heard. So sometimes he was a Collet and sometimes he wasn’t; it depended a good deal on the humour Mother happened to be in, and whether she was pleased with him or not.
In one particular, however, she rarely varied her opinion, and this was that neither he nor Daddy possessed as much practical sense as a child of six. Six was mother’s favourite age; it was always a child of six who would have known better than to say or do whatever it was that Tom or Daddy might have said or done; and when Tom pointed out that you can’t remain six for ever, she laughed, and replied that if he and Daddy hadn’t it was only because they were five. This appeared to worry her more about Tom than about Daddy, though there were occasions when it had the contrary effect, and then she would kiss him. But Tom himself knew that he was different from Daddy, who was never in a hurry to do things, and never got heated or excited no matter what happened, whereas both Tom and Mother did. He wondered if Uncle Stephen did: it was natural to wonder about a person you resembled and who was so mysterious as Uncle Stephen. He couldn’t make out what Mother thought of him. He didn’t believe she knew much about him. Yet he hovered there somehow in the background, a distinctly romantic figure. Once, ages ago, he had asked her if she would rather have Uncle Stephen than Daddy, which had annoyed her a little, though afterwards she had repeated it as a joke. . . .
* * *
Henry some time during the night must have moved down to the foot of the bed, where he now lay asleep, curled up in a black circle. Tom felt a lazy inclination to pet him, and called “Puss, puss”, but it produced no effect. So he raised his feet under the bed-clothes, making an uncomfortable hill. Still Henry did not budge; only he gave Tom a long secret look out of green slits of eyes before closing them again. That was like him: he never did anything unless he wanted to do it himself. It had been a most peculiar look too, Tom presently thought; just as if Henry knew something about him—something faintly discreditable. Tom believed he did know things. Only why had he looked like that? It wasn’t on the whole a friendly look—rather the reverse—though it certainly suggested that there was some kind of understanding between them. The more Tom considered it the less he liked it. There wasn’t any understanding between them. Henry knew nothing about him except what everybody else knew, so he had no right to pretend that he did. Tom raised his feet again, this time higher, lifting Henry up in a kind of loose sprawling crescent, so that he looked as if he had either no bones or else were dead. Yet even then he wouldn’t move. He merely opened his mouth showing a tiny scrap of pink, and emitted a faintly irritated mew. He had suddenly become an ordinary cat again.
He had no business to keep changing about like this. Ordinary cats didn’t. Therefore, by the rules of logic, Henry couldn’t be an ordinary cat, whatever he might pretend. Pascoe had produced electric sparks from him, though of course that didn’t prove much, except that he was crammed with electricity. But Henry did things on his own account—queer, very nearly magical things—when he and Tom were alone together in the house. Before the others, even before Pascoe, he put on an innocent expression, as if he had never done anything more thrilling than to lap up a saucer of milk. But when only Tom was there it was a different story. Then he no longer troubled to look innocent. It seemed to be Henry’s opinion that Tom didn’t matter, and just to show this he would start off by making the whole house queer. He had done it yesterday evening when they were alone and Tom was at his lessons. Henry had walked to the study door and scratched on it—his usual sign that he wanted to be let out. Then, when the door was opened, he had strolled slowly on down the passage as if he were going to the kitchen, while Tom, pondering, had stood watching him as far as the corner. Yet when he had turned back into the study again and shut the door, there Henry was—on the hearthrug, washing his face, just as if he had never left the room at all. Meanwhile, the things in the study had changed their places: Tom’s Latin Grammar, which he had left open on the sofa, was now on the floor, closed, and the frame with his photograph in it had been moved forward from the other photographs—he was sure that if it had been like that before he must have noticed it. It was strange—very strange. And if it came to that, who was Henry, and where had he come from? Nobody knew. He had simply walked through the open back door into the kitchen one afternoon about a month ago, and Phemie had immediately decided that he had come to bring her luck and mustn’t be turned away. That was all nonsense, of course, as even Phemie soon knew. The very next day she had upset a pot of boiling water and scalded her foot. But why had Henry come? He was a full-grown cat, sleek and lithe, with a coat like black satin: anybody could see he had never been hungry or homeless in his life.
And certainly he hadn’t troubled himself to bring much luck to poor Phemie! She had broken a teapot and a vegetable dish on the day after the scalding, and Henry had ceased to be a kitchen cat. His next move had been to wile himself into the good graces of Daddy. This had been accomplished easily—merely by following Daddy about the garden and jumping up on the arm of his chair. Daddy tried not to look flattered, and said nothing; but every time Mother said—and she said it about five times a day—“Henry’s devoted to Daddy!” it was easy to see he was as pleased as Punch.
Tom knew better. The devotion was mere polic
y. He could prove it. Henry wasn’t in the least interested in games with string, for example. They bored him. Tom had tried him again and again, and he had simply yawned or turned his back. Yet if Daddy dangled a piece of string or waved his handkerchief, Henry immediately crouched and quivered and pounced.
That wasn’t how he behaved with Tom. Once, when he was sitting alone in the drawing-room at dusk, tired of reading and too lazy to get up and turn on the light, Henry had actually begun to play the piano to him. Only a note or two—very, very softly, and really rather beautifully—for it had sounded more as if the piano were singing in its sleep than being played. Tom had liked it, and so most surely had Henry; but did ordinary cats play the piano?
Then there was the matter of the tennis balls, more mysterious still, because this time Henry hadn’t been there. And mind you, Tom himself had put the tennis balls away in their cardboard box, and put the box on the oak chest which stood beside the cloakroom door. Yet he had hardly been in the cloakroom a minute before he heard a bouncing noise in the hall, and, running out, found the tennis balls, all six of them, rolling over the carpet in different directions, with nobody to roll them, nobody near them.
When things like this happened, you couldn’t help beginning to wonder why. And they had happened pretty often of late, usually in the evening. They didn’t frighten you, perhaps—in fact they were rather exciting—but they did give you a queer feeling of uncertainty, as if nothing was quite what it seemed, and things like tennis balls, or photograph frames, or pianos for that matter, were a good deal more alive than they had any right to be. It was Henry’s doing, of course, and he knew that Tom knew it was. He knew and didn’t care—which was probably the meaning of the strange look he had given him just now. What Henry’s green eyes had said was: “I know, and you know, that there’s something most unusual going on in this house; but the others don’t know, and if you tell them they won’t believe you. That’s why it doesn’t matter about you, and why it wouldn’t matter if you did tell. They’d only make fun of you—especially that daddy of yours, who thinks you’re queer enough as it is.”
“He doesn’t think me queer,” Tom contradicted, but without much conviction; and Henry didn’t even bother to open his eyes. This annoyed Tom, so he continued with more spirit: “Anyway, you’ll get down off the bed.” And he jumped out himself and pushed Henry on to the floor.
It was a poor argument, and he felt a little ashamed, so he picked Henry up again and set him once more where he had been. “You needn’t start purring,” he told him. “I only did that because I don’t approve of bullying: I still think you’re pretty awful.”
Saying which, he took off his pyjamas, and stood in a patch of sunlight, letting the sun stroke his naked body with its warm breath. He liked it, and liked the feeling of the carpet under his bare feet. Henry, seeing him up, jumped down from the bed and began scratching at the door, but Tom watched him unsympathetically. “Why don’t you go?” he asked in a cold voice. “It’s too much trouble to do a magic, I suppose. Go on—vanish! I won’t be surprised.”
In spite of this sarcasm, Henry merely lifted his voice in a very unmagical mew, so Tom had to open the door for him. Then he went to the window and looked out into the garden. The garden was bright with its first dewy freshness, and as usual. there was a squabble going on among the birds. Of all the quarrelsome creatures! And they were supposed to be so angelic. Probably it was the row they were kicking up which had attracted Henry, who, as Tom was well aware, could get out by jumping from the bathroom window-sill to the roof of the coalhouse. Yes, there he was, gliding between the bushes like a black panther. But the birds saw him also, and with a sudden whirr of wings rose in a cloud. The birds detested Henry, and had every reason to do so, for he hunted them from morning till night. Often he got one too; an absent-minded bird had no chance whatever with Henry: Tom could quite understand their feelings. . . .
A flat lawn with a sagging tennis net in the middle of it stretched in front of the house. All round this lawn were flowerbeds and trellises festooned with rambler roses. On the left was a line of trees, and on the right a border of flowering shrubs—syringas, azaleas, rhododendrons—just now a splash of brilliant colour. Tom could smell the perfumes that drifted from them, and he could smell the roses and the grass. Suddenly he wanted to be out there.
He put on a shirt, a pair of grey flannel shorts, stockings, slippers, a jacket. He knew he should have taken a bath, or at least washed properly, but all he did was to pour a little water into a basin and give a perfunctory dab or two at his face with a sponge. He was on the point of leaving the room when he remembered his prayers and knelt down by the bed. He had two prayers—one in prose and one in verse. The poetry prayer he always said last. Both were short, but they included, Mother told him, everything he really needed. They left out of account, none the less, a lot of things he really wanted—a bulldog, a donkey, long trousers, hairs on his legs, a bicycle, not to miss catches at cricket, and not to be called “Skinny”. Sometimes Tom added these items, sometimes he omitted them. In spite of past failures he put them all in to-day, like a Christmas or a birthday list, where one leaves the final choice to the giver.
He ran downstairs, put on his shoes in the kitchen, emptied the biscuit jar in the dining-room (it was nearly empty, anyway), and went out through the side door into the garden. It was a fairly large garden, walled all round to the height of some five feet, but not too large to be looked after by one man. Tom thought at first of marking the tennis court, the lines of which were rather faint, till he remembered that it was William’s day for cutting the grass. That altered matters. If William found the court freshly marked he would make this an excuse for leaving it alone—“not liking to interfere with Master Tom’s work.” William was splendid at excuses, and, like Henry, so plausible, that though actually the most frightful slacker, he was regarded by everybody as a model of industry. “Slow but sure,” Daddy would say of him; or “Hurried work’s usually scamped”—things like that, when it ought to have been: “William does as little as he can, and never anything you ask him.” Only it wasn’t easy to tell exactly how slow William was, because through long association with the garden he had acquired a kind of protective colouring and his movements were veiled. If you merely glanced at him as he stood with a hoe or a spade in his hand between two bean-rows or stooping over the cabbages, he produced an illusion of activity, but if you watched him closely, as Tom had done, this illusion vanished and a curious affinity between William and the sun-dial emerged. Not that Tom would have cared, if he hadn’t been such a grumbler. But he bemoaned his lot every time you spoke to him, so that you’d have thought he was a slave driven by Egyptian taskmasters. He wouldn’t, for instance, be in the least grateful if Tom were to cut the grass for him now: he’d just accept it as a matter of course and point out how it might have been done better.
Tom had reached this point in his summing-up of William when the hall-door opened and Mary appeared, carrying a long-handled brush with which she began to sweep out the porch. The instant she caught sight of the figure on the lawn she stopped. “What are you doing there, Master Tom?” she asked in a tone of suspicion and disapproval.
Tom was amused. “Admiring the view,” he replied; at which Mary gave a sniff—inaudible, but perfectly perceptible even from that distance. She took no further notice of him, however, from which he deduced that she regarded his remark as cheek.
As a matter of fact the old house did look rather nice, he thought. There was honeysuckle climbing up one side of the porch, and clematis climbing up the other, while ampelopsis spread over the walls. Also he like the oriel windows and red-tiled roof and irregular chimney stacks. Not that the house was really old, having been built by the people from whom Daddy had bought it; but it had been designed from the beginning to have an old-fashioned appearance—warm, comfortable, and homely—and it really had been that kind of house until Henry had begun to play tricks with it.
Still, Tom coul
dn’t stare at it for ever, even to impress the suspicious Mary, so he took a path through the shrubbery, which terminated in a small green postern door set in the angle where the south and west walls met. This door was locked at night, but the key was always left in the lock, and next moment Tom was outside the garden, on the high bank of a glen thickly carpeted with long green spiky bluebell leaves, and overgrown with larch, hazel and birch trees. The glen was long and very narrow, as if at some remote volcanic period the earth had split asunder here. A stream ran through it, which never dried up even in the hottest summer, and Tom scrambled down to it, because the walking was easier there. He saw a squirrel and stopped to look at him; he disturbed a hare who had come down from the meadows and at Tom’s approach fled up to them again. He followed the stream, jumping from side to side of it, and as he proceeded the steep banks of the glen gradually grew shallower, till at last the ground was level, and only a field of meadow grass bright with buttercups lay between him and the river. In wet weather the ground was soft and boggy here, so that cows sometimes sank up above their knees and had to be hauled out by ropes, but just now it was firm enough. Anyhow, Tom knew every inch of it, and passing lightly between two beds of yellow irises, and scrambling through a hedge, reached the towpath.