by Forrest Reid
“So I have,” Mother replied, “but I don’t expect it will kill me.”
Tom was pleased—though not with Daddy naturally. As for Mother, he couldn’t see what she had done except sit in the car and afterwards unpack, both of which he had done himself. He hustled her out as fast as he could. “Rough or smooth?” he called.
“Rough,” Mother said “and don’t be knocking the balls over the wire netting or else I’ll stop.”
“I must play my ordinary game,” Tom replied; and Mother said: “That’s not anybody’s ordinary game, and it’s when you’re fielding the balls that you usually do it. So remember I’ve warned you!”
Tom promised to be careful.
They played two sets, Mother winning the first easily, because Tom found that he was off his game. While announcing this he couldn’t help wondering what one’s game was? His appeared to be something that happened about twice a season. He won the second set however—not without suspicions. He didn’t often win—except against Pascoe, who was putrid—and in spite of the bad light, which certainly was in his favour, he didn’t feel that his performance had been brilliant. “Of course I was trying,” Mother assured him, but he didn’t believe she’d been trying very hard. She could be quite good when she liked, and used to play in tournaments before she was married. He balanced his racquet on the end of one finger—a sign that the tennis was over. “Why are people who are rotten at games called rabbits?” he asked her; but she didn’t know why.
There must be a reason, all the same: or at least there must have been a reason the first time the term was used. Tom began to let down the net, his mind still running on the question of rabbits, and how they could have earned their unathletic reputation. Why rabbits any more than hedgehogs? Rabbits were rather lively as a matter of fact; he’d watched them himself, in the evenings, from the battlements of the Fort. Besides, the only game any animals played was tig, which required no skill. Except cats, perhaps, who played a sort of one-sided soccer if they could get a ball, and were obviously good at it—quick as lightning. . . .
He imagined a very small tennis court, with a low net, and four rabbits contesting a final. All round were the spectators—a motley gathering—not only rabbits, but ducks, squirrels, sea-gulls, several fox-terriers, a bulldog, and a polecat. The babel of encouragement was amazing. . . .
Mother, who was watching him and waiting patiently, at this point asked: “What is the problem?”
Tom finished his task and straightened himself. “Nothing. Only a tournament,” he explained. “The bulldog was the umpire and they didn’t dare to dispute any of his decisions. When he thought a rally had gone on long enough he just said ‘Out!’ and they had to stop.”
“Well, come along,” Mother murmured, without seeking further enlightenment.
But at supper, and apropos of nothing, she suddenly declared: “I’ve been thinking it over, and I’ve made up my mind that it would be the greatest mistake possible to send Tom as a boarder. It wouldn’t do at all.”
Daddy was so taken by surprise that he nearly spilled his tea. “But, my dear!” he expostulated, “it’s all settled. And he’s only to go as a weekly boarder, which means that you’ll have him at home on Saturdays and Sundays. Mr. Rouse was particularly urgent about it. Actually, what he would like is to do away with day-boys altogether: he told me so. Besides, it’s not as if Tom would be going to a school where he knew nobody. Pascoe will be in the same House with him.”
“Pascoe isn’t Tom,” Mother answered briefly.
Daddy couldn’t deny this, so he put the matter from a different angle. “There’s the distance to be considered,” he pointed out, “and the time it would take. Going to and from school, Tom would have to travel twelve miles every day—and right through the centre of town.”
“Of course he’ll have his dinner at school,” Mother said, “and most of the way he’ll be in the tram. . . . I don’t pretend it’s ideally convenient,” she added, yielding the point, “but the only alternative would be for us to move.”
“Or for Tom to go as a weekly boarder,” Daddy repeated. “It’s really a concession on Mr. Rouse’s part to allow him to come home for the week-ends; the other boys only get the half-term holiday, and that’s all Pascoe will be getting. . . . Also,” he went on, “Tom would have to catch two trams, which means an extra delay, and there’s the walk from our house to the terminus.”
“I know,” Mother admitted. “As I say, it’s not ideal. We’ll have to wait and see how it turns out. But he needn’t always go in the tram. On fine days he could ride to school on a bicycle, and in that case he needn’t go near town. If he went by the road under the Castlereagh Hills it would be just as short—probably shorter. I suppose you’ll have to speak to Mr. Rouse about it at once, but I shouldn’t think he’d raise any difficulties. . . . At all events,” she added firmly, “even if he is silly about it, it can’t be helped. We’re certainly not going to send Tom as a boarder simply because Mr. Rouse wants to do away with day-boys. For one thing the idea’s absurd. As if the people living round about the school—some of them within a stone’s throw of it—are going to send their sons as boarders because of Mr. Rouse’s fads!”
Daddy sighed. “I’ve spoken to him already, as you know; and it’s a little late in the day to go back on arrangements that have actually been made.”
“Made by you and Mr. Rouse,” Mother reminded him. “I never approved of the plan.”
“You agreed to it at the time, when we first talked it over.”
“You mean I was bullied into it,” Mother corrected.
“Bullied!” poor Daddy exclaimed.
“Well, argued—it comes to the same thing: I never liked the idea or no arguments would have been necessary. And as for being too late to change—that’s nonsense. People must have time to think things over. If Mr. Rouse doesn’t want to take Tom as a day-boy he needn’t, but I suppose I know more about my own son than he does. . . . However, if you like I’ll speak to him myself: it might be better if I did.”
“Why?” Daddy inquired, raising his eyebrows.
“Well, I only mean if you don’t care to do it.”
“If anybody is to speak to him,” Daddy said in an offended voice, “I should think I’m the proper person.”
“I think so, too,” Mother at once agreed. “I merely suggested doing it myself because I’m not in the least in awe of Mr. Rouse.”
“Neither am I,” Daddy replied.
“I should hope not!” said Mother.
This left Daddy silent, but he looked neither convinced nor pleased. “He’ll think it most peculiar,” he presently began again, evidently thinking so himself—“as if we didn’t know our own minds.”
“Perhaps,” Mother murmured. “But I don’t see really that it matters very much what he thinks. He’ll have nothing to do with Tom after their first interview.”
“I don’t mind trying it,” Tom at this juncture put in obligingly.
It was a pretty safe speech, of course, and he knew this or perhaps he wouldn’t have made it. Mother took no notice of it whatever, but Daddy immediately chirped up. “You see!” he said.
“Yes, I see,” Mother answered dryly. And there, for the time, discussion ended.
Tom really was extremely pleased—especially about the bicycle. The only drawback to the plan was in relation to Pascoe. It was a bit rough on Pascoe undoubtedly, and he’d have to write and tell him at once. Most of Tom’s own nervousness about going as a boarder had been removed by the knowledge that Pascoe would be going too, and Pascoe might have had similar feelings. On the other hand he mightn’t; certainly he’d never expressed them. Pascoe was about the least nervous person Tom knew. In his own way he was just as tough as Brown—tougher in fact, for Brown, Tom suspected, would cut a much less dashing and self-confident figure if he happened to get among boys different from himself, whereas nothing could alter Pascoe. The lucky thing for Brown was that there always were boys like himself, and always
a majority of them.
Mother’s sudden decision, none the less, puzzled him. He knew she would get her own way in the end, but, like Daddy, he felt that Mr. Rouse might be annoyed. And he couldn’t imagine what had made her change. It couldn’t be because of anything he had said to her, for he had accepted the fact that he was to go as a boarder without protest, and had even, in more optimistic moments, thought he might like it. At any rate the prospect hadn’t troubled him much. Not really—not deeply. He had always known that if he disliked it—that is to say, if he was actually unhappy—neither Daddy nor Mother would force him to stay on.
The mystery behind Mother’s change of plan, however, was a good deal less important than the change of plan itself, and it was in a very contented frame of mind that Tom went up to bed. Soon Daddy and Mother came up also, but he did not hear them, for by that time he was sleeping peacefully.
Another hour or two passed, and perhaps now the sleep was not so peaceful. A watcher—a guardian angel—Gamelyn—might have noted that every now and again he stirred uneasily—might have heard something broken and uneasy in his breathing. Presently his face began to twitch, and then his hands. Something louder than a sigh, yet not loud enough to be a moan, coming from his own throat, almost awakened him, but apparently did not change the nature of his dream. Then a sudden noise that was neither sigh nor moan, and quite outside the dream, did awaken him—and with a start.
He sat up and switched on the light, while the noise continued—a violent scuffling in the chimney. That was no bird; that was Henry—Henry surprised and very angry, because he had fallen into the trap Tom had set for him. Henry seemed to think it a trap anyhow, though all Tom had done was to pull down the iron flap and thus close the opening over the grate. Henry had come down, had found the way unexpectedly barred, and was now swearing at this and at the difficulty of getting up again. Not that Tom could hear him swearing; but the row he was making showed that he was far from accepting the situation calmly.
Defeat it certainly was, and presently the sounds of scuffling grew fainter, and at last they ceased. About thirty seconds afterwards a wild caterwauling burst out from all directions—from the window-sill, from the garden below, and from the roof above. “Gracious!” Tom cried, springing out of bed and running to the window. Two grey shapes that were actually looking in at once vanished, but down on the lawn there was light enough for him to distinguish other shapes—at least a dozen of them. And he wasn’t the only one to be awakened either, for he heard a window going up and Daddy’s voice “shooing” at the invaders. There was an immediate stillness, as of silent parley, but no retreat; the invaders remained obstinately at their posts—a whole line of them. This was more than Tom could stand. A martial spirit flamed up in him; he rushed from his room and down the stairs; grabbed a walking-stick of Daddy’s, and hurriedly unbarred the door. Out into the garden he ran, while the enemy fled before him. In a trice there was not a cat visible; but Tom continued the pursuit—shouting and flourishing his stick—beating the shrubs with it, but without raising a single opponent. Next he heard Daddy’s voice calling to him from the porch. Daddy too had come down, though he had waited to put on slippers and a dressing-gown.
Tom in a fever of excitement returned to the house. Daddy himself seemed astonished at what had happened, and together they went upstairs. The light was on in Mother’s and Daddy’s room, so Tom popped in his head. “Did you ever hear anything like it?” he spluttered. “And it was Henry who came down my chimney. He came down again tonight; only I shut it before I went to bed, so he got caught!”
Mother was now sitting up. “Do you mean to say he’s still in the chimney?” she asked. “You must let him out at once. If he’s been struggling there all this time, goodness knows what he’ll be like!”
“Oh, he’s out!” cried Tom. “He’s away over the roof; but he had to climb up!”
“Are you sure he’s out?” Mother questioned unbelievingly. “You’d better open the chimney and see.”
“Quite sure. I heard him. But it was he who brought the others. Just imagine it! That’s what the place has been like the whole time we were away!”
Tom’s eyes were round and shining. Mother had begun to laugh, however. “Yes, dear; don’t get so excited about it! I suppose now you’ll lie awake for the rest of the night. Dry your feet, at all events, before you get back into bed.”
He left them, but he could hear her and Daddy still talking as he returned to his own room. He was excited, but he also felt justified, and on the whole triumphant. Perhaps this would give them an inkling of the truth! At any rate, if they didn’t now see what Henry was really like, they never would!
CHAPTER TWENTY
HAVING GIVEN himself away so completely—for this was no mere outburst of ill-temper such as had led to the scratching of Phemie—Henry, for all Tom could see, might now do the most reckless things. He had shown his hand, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that an accident had shown it. Henry’s cards had all tumbled on the floor face upwards, with a startling display of trumps and aces; and though he might try to gather them up again, in the hope that they’d be forgotten, this hope was a pretty poor one. Or at least it ought to have been poor; only with players so guileless and inexperienced as Daddy and Mother nobody could tell what would happen. They seemed incapable of grasping anything beyond the fact that Henry had made a few friends, and Mother still clung to the idea of birds in the chimney—in pursuit of whom, apparently, Henry had made his descent. That is to say, if he ever had made one; for, to Tom’s astonishment, next morning saw her provokingly sceptical on the point.
Daddy, it is true, didn’t think much of the “birds in the chimney” theory; but Daddy’s own theory, that Henry simply had found a way of getting in and out of the house during their absence, though obviously the right one, didn’t lead him to the right conclusions. It led him instead to several anecdotes in which cats who had been removed to new homes performed extraordinary feats of pedestrianism in order to get back to their old ones. This was to prove to Tom that Henry in coming down the chimney had merely acted after his kind; the attachment cats conceived for places being notorious. And when Tom reminded him of the army Henry had recruited, he got out of that difficulty too. Such feline gatherings were also in character. Daddy remembered how, when he was a boy, the lawn of an empty house next door to theirs was the recognized meeting-place of every cat in the neighbourhood; so that frequently he had been sent out by his mother to disperse them, just as Tom had done last night. Henry’s food and milk, too, left in the porch for him every day by William, might well have proved an additional attraction.
These and similar remarks, made while he and Tom were working in the garden next morning, showed that Daddy misunderstood the entire situation. Tom did not express his view, but he did admit that he wasn’t particularly fond of Henry, which Daddy thought strange, seeing that he had always shown so marked a sympathy with animals. Daddy mentioned several early examples of this which Tom himself had forgotten. They were childish certainly—things one would conceal from Pascoe, for instance—but Tom found them amusing. On the whole he and Daddy passed a very pleasant morning.
It was a queer kind of day—warm, even close, yet much more like autumn than summer. Daddy said it was autumn, and indeed it had autumn’s yellow misty look, even while the sun was shining. Some of the leaves were beginning to change colour—especially the chestnut leaves, which were already falling. The creeper above the porch was crimson, the dahlias were in full bloom, and the sweet-pea was over. It was among the pea-rows and bean-rows that Tom and Daddy were at work, cutting down and tidying up. The withered plants Tom wheeled away in a barrow, dumping them down on a bare patch of soil beyond the strawberry bed; and as the heap grew it reminded him of the evening at Aunt Rhoda’s—the Yorkshire terriers, Pascoe in Etons, the bonfire. . . .
In the afternoon he was left to his own devices, because Mother and Daddy went out in the car. Nothing further about school had been
mentioned in his presence, and he had asked no questions, nevertheless he had a strong suspicion that they had gone to interview Mr. Rouse. Again he thought of a bonfire. William was against it—as usual. William was still collecting rubbish—damp heavy stuff that would not burn easily and he objected to Tom’s using up the more inflammable material, which he said he needed for a foundation. It was William’s invariable policy to object. His kind of bonfire was one which merely smoked and smouldered for a couple of days. But he was obstinate as a mule, and far more disobliging, so Tom in the end left him, and left the garden, and set out with a vague idea of looking for mushrooms.
He wandered across the dreaming fields, but only found some puff-balls. A few of the blackberries were black, but they were hard and sour, and when he spat them out he discovered that they had mysteriously turned red again in his mouth. Presently, and quite by accident, he came to the lane leading to the old graveyard. He had not been in the graveyard for ages, so he determined to visit it now, and see if there were as many rabbits as William said. He scrambled through the hedge and dropped down into the narrow grassy track.
Mushrooms grew in the graveyard, Tom remembered; but Mother wouldn’t touch any that were gathered there, though Daddy said this was mere prejudice, because all the bodies must have crumbled into dust long ago. And in fact, at first sight, it would have been hard to recognize it as a graveyard at all. Not a headstone was left standing in its original position. Some still survived, indeed, but they were propped up against the broken wall that surrounded the whole enclosure, and their inscriptions, as Tom knew, were for the most part indecipherable.
When he entered, through a gap on the north side, the place looked for all the world like some ancient earthworks, except that the surface was everywhere uneven—all heights and hollows, hummocks and tussocks with a sprinkling of bushes, of whin and bramble. It was impossible to tell where the paths had once been, where individual graves had been; and when you crossed the long tangled grass your feet unexpectedly sank into holes, or sometimes struck against a hidden fragment of stone. Walking over it gave Tom a queer feeling, not altogether pleasant, though this was entirely due to the suggestions of a too active imagination. He trod gingerly, his eyes lowered to watch carefully each footstep, as if he feared he might tread on something he did not wish to tread on. A movement in the grass of frog or rabbit, a flutter of a bird in the brambles, would have made him jump. But there was no movement; the afternoon, which had clouded over, was profoundly still; the air stagnant and heavy. Tom had been gazing at the ground immediately before him, but as he approached the side wall he looked up, and then, and not till then, became aware of something extraordinary. Ranged along what was left of the wall were perhaps a score of tomb-stones—broken oblong slabs, chipped and stained and lichened—and on each of these stones, seated motionless and upright, was a cat. Tom stood stock still: it was like a scene one might come on in a dream, but hardly in waking life. Not a movement, as Tom stood there in astonishment. The cats might have been asleep, had it not been for their wide-open watching eyes—green eyes, yellow eyes—bright, steadfast, and beautiful. It was the strangest sight he had ever beheld. Each cat had his own stone, and took not the slightest notice of any other cat. There was something weird in their stillness, in their presence in this spot, in the fixity of their gaze. They might have been entranced, or simply lost in meditation.