The Retreat_Machinations of Henry

by Forrest Reid

  “Shall I bathe or not?” he was asking himself, and the question was difficult to answer, for though he wanted to be able to remark at breakfast that he had had a bathe in the river he wasn’t really fond of cold water, nor even sure that it agreed with him. “I’m afraid a lot of things don’t agree with me, Tom mused. “I’m quite easily made ill.” And he particularly wished not to be ill just before the exams, because he was rather a dab at exams, though not such a dab as Pascoe. But he really knew far more than Pascoe did, only the kinds of things he knew weren’t so useful. Besides, he was hopeless at mathematics.

  He stood with his greyish, greenish eyes fixed doubtfully on the water, while the wind made little whisperings and songs as it swept over the rushes. Then he knelt down to try the temperature with his hand. This experiment elicited a sigh; nevertheless, after the briefest hesitation, he divested himself of his clothes and stepped cautiously into the shallow water at the edge. Why was it, he wondered, that he should think of leeches and eels at such a moment, instead of darting silver fish? But he did think of them, and dreaded at every step lest he should put his foot on something soft and fat and slimy which would move. He took only three or four steps and then stood still, not much more than knee-deep, among a patch of dark broad glossy leaves. He splashed a little water over himself, wetting his dim brown hair, and this was the bathe.

  Buzz! A large bumble-bee, after some preliminary fussing, alighted on Tom’s shoulder and began to walk down his . body, which looked very white among the dark leaves, though his hands and neck and freckled blunt-featured face were sunburned. The bee tickled him, but not unpleasantly. He was a very handsome bee, with an air of importance, and his black and orange velvet coat was rich and splendid. He looked so important, indeed, that Tom fancied he must be a Mayor or an Alderman at the very least. People like Daddy (who was a professor), and Doctor Macrory (who was an archæologist), and Mr. Holbrook (who taught music), hadn’t at all such an important air. This was the kind of affluent, pompous bee who would be a Member of Parliament, or a City Councillor, and whose wife would open Sales of Work.

  Tom poured more water over his head—to make sure that it would look sufficiently wet at breakfast—and while he was doing this an old grey horse came plodding along round the bend of the river. A rope was attached to the horse, a barge to the rope, and there was a man walking by the horse’s head, and another man standing at the helm of the barge, steering it. The man who was walking was on the farther side of the horse, so that he did not notice Tom, but the steersman spied him at once and bawled out at the top of his voice: “Hi, Joe, here’s a water-lily!” This caused Joe to lean a beery stubbly face over the horse’s back, and it also drew a laugh from him. They were really very rude! Tom thought.

  But there was not much time for thinking and he would have done better to have acted. “Look out for that bloody rope!” he heard the steersman shout. “What the——”

  Tom heard no more, for just then the rope reached him and he was swept off his feet—splash!—on the flat of his back. He emerged spluttering, spitting, choking, and very angry. The horse had already passed him as he floundered to the bank and scrambled out. It was lucky, Tom thought, that he had been so close to the bank, or the barge might have gone over him. Much they would have cared even if he had been drowned! He would have liked to tell them his opinion of them, but it was the bargemen who shouted remarks. These were derisive and indecent—eked out by much raucous laughter. The man who was leading the horse was not even funny: the steersman was—a little. The old grey horse, unaware of the accident, was the only respectable member of the trio.

  Tom dried himself, partly with his pocket handkerchief, and partly with his trousers. But he never remained cross for long, and before the barge had disappeared round the next bend he had ceased to be either angry or shocked. After all, it had been his own fault. With a little presence of mind he could easily have avoided the rope, and the bargemen couldn’t possibly have stopped the barge. So he finished dressing and trotted happily back to the house.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE BELL had rung and Daddy and Mother were already at the breakfast-table when Tom appeared. He kissed them both and sat down.

  “What have you been doing to your hair?” was Mother’s expected question.

  “It’s only water,” Tom replied. “I had a bathe.”

  Mother rose beautifully to this. “A bathe!” she repeated incredulously.

  “Yes,” said Tom, “in the river.”

  “But why?” Mother, after all, was less impressed than he had hoped. In fact she was looking at him in quite the wrong way. “Is this some new fad?” she went on, though Tom had no fads at all. “I’ve told you before that I don’t think it’s safe for you to bathe in the river—particularly by yourself. You might easily step into a hole that was out of your depth. It’s just the sort of thing you would do.”

  Tom’s light and airy manner had to be abandoned. “I want to learn to swim,” he protested. “And I can’t learn on dry land.”

  “You can’t learn without somebody to teach you,” Mother said, “and there’s nobody now James-Arthur’s gone. Besides, you’ll have plenty of opportunities in the holidays, and it’s much easier to learn in the sea than in fresh water. Everybody knows that rivers are dangerous.”

  They were far more dangerous than she imagined, Tom reflected, but he kept this to himself. “It isn’t dangerous if I stay close to the bank,” he argued. “Lots of boys bathe in the river.”

  “Not alone,” Mother answered, “and not boys like you. There are just as likely to be holes near the bank as anywhere else. The bed of a river isn’t like the seashore: one minute you may be in three feet of water and the next in ten.”

  “I doubt if he was in three feet of water,” Daddy here interposed. He had been glancing at the newspaper, but he now gazed over the top of it at his son. “I should put it at eighteen inches in spite of those dripping locks.”

  This guess was so very nearly accurate that Tom blushed. It was like Daddy to take that tone, he thought, and he had half a mind to tell him how nearly drowned he had been!

  For that matter Mother did not seem too pleased at the interruption either. “You surely don’t approve of his bathing by himself!” she said to Daddy. “Suppose he got caught in the weeds. In some places the river’s thick with them, and even if he could swim, you know what Tom’s like!”

  “Yes,” said Daddy playfully, “I know what he’s like. Probably it was a naiad or an undine who enticed him in. I can’t imagine anything less attractive overcoming his natural distaste for cold water.”

  Tom smiled, but only from a sense of duty. He knew that Daddy was alluding to an adventure he had had when he was smaller, and had then been foolish enough to talk about. He wouldn’t be so foolish now, nor was he going to be drawn into the trap.

  “Was it a water-nymph, Tom?” Daddy went on teasingly. But Tom merely smiled again and remained discreetly silent.

  Mother, to the surprise of both of them, suddenly came to his rescue. “It’s rather strange that you should want to encourage him, Edgar, considering the attitude you take up at other times about such things!”

  Daddy looked taken aback—indeed quite startled. “How am I encouraging him?” he asked. “And what attitude do you mean?”

  “Your usual attitude,” Mother returned. “I understood that you disapproved of fairy tales and thought they did a lot of harm. I’ve certainly heard you say so.”

  “Only when people believe in them,” Daddy answered mildly; “and Tom, we know, has long since passed that stage.”

  “Still,” Mother persisted, “if he told you that he had seen a water-nymph you’d be annoyed with him.”

  Daddy did not reply, but he looked at Tom for sympathy, which the latter withheld. It served him jolly well right, Tom thought: perhaps he wouldn’t be in such a hurry to butt in another time; and he met Daddy’s gaze with serene and slightly derisive eyes.

  This had the
effect of making him come to his own assistance. “I don’t quite grasp, my dear, the precise object of this attack. It can hardly be that you yourself have seen a water-sprite. At least, if you have, you’ve kept remarkably silent about it.”

  “Yes, that’s what I mean,” Mother said quietly. “It must be so comfortable to be able to feel like that.”

  “Like what?” Daddy asked, not looking too comfortable.

  “To be so sure about everything that you can afford to be indulgent and ironical.”

  “But——” Daddy protested, half laughing.

  “I don’t mean about water-nymphs especially,” mother went on, “though they’ll do as an example. They can’t exist, we know, because their existence isn’t recorded in scientific books and you yourself have neither photographed nor dissected one.”

  “Who’s being ironical now?” Daddy asked meekly. “The scientist is as open to conviction as most people, I expect; and if he demands a little more evidence than some it’s because it’s his job not to take things on trust.”

  “It may be his job,” Mother returned, “but if nothing was taken on trust life would be a very poor affair.”

  “Very,” Daddy agreed. “I’m only suggesting that trustfulness may be combined with common sense—and that all witnesses aren’t equally reliable.”

  The last words were intended for him, Tom supposed, and Mother perhaps thought so too, for she asked after the briefest pause: “What exactly do you mean by that?”

  Daddy glanced up quickly. “But surely, my dear——!” he exclaimed in a tone of deprecation. Then, as Mother only waited, he gave a little shrug. “Let us put it this way then, for the sake of argument. If Doctor Macrory were to tell you that a water-nymph haunted the river, it would be a rather different thing, wouldn’t it, than if the news came from Tom?”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” answered Mother without hesitation; and since Daddy merely opened and closed his mouth soundlessly, while his eyes expressed a kind of wonder: “Why should I believe Doctor Macrory rather than Tom?” she asked sharply.

  Daddy sighed. “That’s not the point,” he murmured. “It’s not a question of veracity or inveracity. We’ll suppose that neither of them would deliberately tell a lie. Still, there would remain several reasons for attaching more weight to Doctor Macrory’s evidence than to Tom’s. A: he has a trained mind and a trained eye, which Tom hasn’t. B: neither his friends nor his enemies could describe him as imaginative. C: he’s a shrewd and far from impressionable man, whereas Tom is only a small boy, and one, moreover, with a distinct taste for the marvellous.”

  “Yet Tom has very good sight,” Mother interrupted before Daddy could get on to D, E, and F; “much better, I should think, than Doctor Macrory, who has to wear glasses. And we were talking about seeing things.”

  “Yes, yes,” Daddy assented, at the same time taking up the newspaper in token of surrender. “Fortunately he hasn’t seen anything in the present instance,” he added, “so we may dismiss the arguments as hypothetical.”

  Clearly this was funking it, and Tom guessed from Mother’s face that she thought so too. At any rate she wasn’t going to dismiss the argument, nor abandon her advantage. “You’ll admit, I suppose, that William Blake was a genius?” she said; and Tom could see, though he didn’t know why, that if Daddy answered “Yes”, he was going to place himself in a corner.

  Yet he made the admission: he seemed to have reached a stage when he would admit nearly anything; and immediately afterwards he put a question of his own. “Much as we might like to regard Tom as a genius, we haven’t up to the present found any particular grounds for doing so, have we?”

  He said it quite pleasantly, and even with a conciliatory smile which included not only Mother but Tom. Nevertheless, it was an error in judgement, and he might have known that. Tom knew it at all events; for whether Mother believed he was a genius or not, she certainly wasn’t going to allow other people to deny that he was. “I’m not talking about Tom,” she said, but in a way which plainly him. showed she was thinking about him. “I’m talking of somebody whom you admit to be a man of genius, yet whose every statement both you and Doctor Macrory would dismiss as absurd—too absurd even to be worth a moment’s consideration.”

  This was odd, and Tom couldn’t help popping in with “Who was William Blake?” though directly afterwards he remembered, for they had learned one of his poems at school last term—Tyger Tyger burning bright. And straightway he ceased to pay attention to Daddy and Mother, and began instead to say the poem softly over to himself.

  “Tyger Tyger burning bright

  In the forests of the night,

  What immortal hand or eye

  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

  He liked it better than any other poem he knew. . . . Except perhaps Ulalume—and he repeated what he knew of that also, but as he had never learned it he could only remember little bits here and there. . . .

  When he once more listened to what Daddy and Mother were saying, it was to find that the conversation had lapsed into trivial remarks about roses and William, so he brought it round again to the other William by a variation of his original question. “What was William Blake like? he asked.

  He was really curious to know, or at least to hear some of the statements which Daddy and Doctor Macrory would have dismissed as absurd. He had an inkling that perhaps he wouldn’t find them absurd. Mother evidently didn’t; though it was never so easy to tell what Mother thought as it was to tell what Daddy thought—or at least to be sure that in the meantime she wouldn’t have thought something else.

  It was Daddy who answered him, with just the slightest lifting of one eyebrow. “He was very like your mother in his opinion of scientists,” Daddy said cautiously. “In other respects a good deal of light is thrown by the only recorded remark of Mrs. Blake: ‘You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old, and he put his head to the window and set you a-screaming.’”

  There was a mewing at the window at that moment, and Tom turned round quickly. But it was only Henry, and he got up to let him in. He opened the window, and of course Henry entered as slowly as possible, just to keep him standing there. It was easy to see that he was doing it on purpose, for he paused when he was half-way through, and made no further movement.

  “Come on, hurry up!” cried Tom impatiently, giving him a push.

  Henry at this actually uttered a word which shocked Tom, even though he didn’t quite catch it. At the same time he alighted on the floor with an extraordinary thud.

  “Good gracious!” Mother exclaimed. “You’d think he was a ton weight!”

  “It’s his sins,” said Tom darkly. “It’s a wonder he can jump at all.”

  He came back to the table and for a minute or two sat wrapped in thought. “Daddy!” he said abruptly, and then paused to think again. But Daddy was staring at him, so he completed his sentence. “Did God really look in at the Blakes’ window?”

  “Never you mind about——” Mother began, but abruptly checked herself. And just as well, too! for he was sure she had nearly said “Never you mind about God.” She changed it, however, to “Never you mind about the Blakes. You’re slow enough as it is.”

  Tom glanced round at the clock on the chimney-piece, for it was his music morning; but there was loads of time, so he made a secret sign to Daddy to answer his question. But Daddy wouldn’t: he might argue with Mother, but he would never go against her in practice. For this reason it was much more useful to have Mother on your side than Daddy; in fact it was no use having Daddy at all unless you had Mother too, though if you had Mother without Daddy you very soon got him also.

  Tom pondered over this, and also over the Blake family, while he pursued an intermittent course with his breakfast. His progress was slow; he was invariably the last to finish. And this wasn’t because he had a large appetite. It was because he couldn’t help stopping to think. With the consequence, Mother said, that meals, which for other p
ersons were intervals of relaxation, for her were the most arduous tasks of the day. Instead of enjoying them she had to spend her whole time in waking Tom up and goading him into swallowing each mouthful: he had been less trouble in the days when he was fed with a spoon.

  This of course was an exaggeration. Mother was very prone to that. Really she exaggerated most frightfully, though she objected when Tom did. And what was the use of asking him why he couldn’t be like Daddy and talk and eat at the same time? She knew it was Uncle Stephen he was like, not Daddy. Anyhow the way she put it made it sound as if Daddy talked with his mouth full.

  He thought of the barge and wondered how far up the river it had got by now. He thought of his accident, and the narrow escape he had had. It grew narrower and narrower the more he considered it, until at last it seemed to him that only by a miracle had he been plucked from the closing jaws of Death. He felt a strong desire to describe the miracle, but on the other hand he was sure that it would make Mother more nervous than ever about his bathing in the river—might make her definitely forbid him to bathe there again, which at present she had forgotten to do. . . .

  “Tom!” Mother cried so suddenly that he jumped. Hastily he swallowed a mouthful of toast, with the result that he choked and then had a fit of coughing. But instead of being sorry for what she had done, Mother only said: “Well, I haven’t time to sit here all morning!” and got up from the table. Daddy followed her, which left Tom all alone; so he got up too, though he hadn’t really finished, and very likely would feel faint and ill through starvation long before lunch time. But it was their fault: he wasn’t going to sit on eating by himself. He collected his school books from the study, got his cap from the cloakroom, and went out.

  The sun was much hotter now than it had been before breakfast, and the shadows were deeper. The wind, too, had died, and the dew had been sucked up from the grass. Henry had come out, and with his back turned to Tom was sitting on the path under the study window, playing.