Young Tom or Very Mixed Company

by Forrest Reid

  Pascoe now held up the kite and instructed Tom what to do. “Run as hard as you can against the wind, and we’ll soon see if she’s all right.”

  She was. A fair wind was blowing down the field, and as Tom ran into it the kite rose behind him, and once it had reached a certain height did all the rest itself. It rose nearly straight, and as rapidly as he could let out the cord. Then, each in turn held it, so as to judge of the strength of its pull. The only disappointing thing was that neither Roger nor Barker showed the slightest interest—indeed actually turned their backs and looked the other way: Pincher would at least have barked. . . .

  Presently it was so high up that it floated against the sky like a seagull. It could mount no higher now unless it broke free, for the cord had run out. So Tom and Pascoe sat down on the damp grass and gazed up at it, while James-Arthur returned to his work.

  “I bet Roger or Barker couldn’t hold it: I bet it would pull them up.”

  “Of course. I bet it would pull up even a small boy; or if it didn’t, at any rate he’d have to let it go.”

  “Let’s send up messengers,” Pascoe said.

  He straightway produced a dozen messengers from his pocket, evidently prepared beforehand, for they were circular discs of thick white paper with a nick cut at the side so that they could be slipped over the string. It was the strangest thing, for the messengers, caught by the wind, rose right up till they reached the kite itself, yet they wouldn’t fly up at all if you just flung them loose into the air. Tom had never before even heard of messengers, and asked Pascoe if he had invented them. But he hadn’t, and thought probably it was Chinese boys who had. The messengers were better fun than the kite itself, but they were quickly exhausted. After that, just holding the string became rather a bore, so they crossed the field and tied it to the top bar of a gate, while they played, for lack of anything better, a game of cocks and hens.

  “I suppose that’s why kites went out of fashion,” Pascoe presently remarked.

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s nothing more to do once they’re up in the air. Daddy says all the boys flew them when he was a boy; and there was a particular season for them, and for tops and marbles. But none of the boys have them now. Even James-Arthur had never seen one.”

  “Neither had I—except in a picture.”

  “That’s what I mean. They’re not much use really, except for the sport of making them. I wonder where I could find out how to make a box-kite?”

  “They’re as good as boats anyway,” Tom declared. “There’s nothing to do with them either, except watch them.”

  Pascoe agreed. “It was really Daddy who wanted me to make a kite—I expect just because he used to fly them himself. The first time I made one he helped me with it. . . . Here’s your father, too; come out specially, I suppose, because he used to have one.”

  It was true, for there he was, approaching from the far end of the meadow, which at any ordinary time would have been a most unlikely place for him to take a walk. Pascoe’s brow was puckered slightly, and he said slowly; “I wonder what they’d do if they were left all alone with tops and marbles, and it was the proper season. . . . I mean, if there was nobody to watch them. I bet they’d play, if they were sure no one would ever hear about it.”

  “I don’t believe Daddy would,” Tom answered loyally.

  “Not even if it was the season?” Pascoe murmured, which made Tom glance at him suspiciously; but Daddy had already hailed them, and they ran to meet him.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  TOM wished Pascoe would come home again. He had been away now for over a fortnight, staying at the seaside with some aunt or other who lived in Donegal, and a picture-postcard received that morning, mentioning that he was bathing every day, and hoping Tom was well, said not a word about when he expected to return. Also there was another reason why Tom had found the postcard unsatisfactory. Pascoe had been so very particular about leaving his address and getting him to promise to write (which he had done, quite a long letter, all four pages of a sheet of notepaper), yet this brief scrawl was the sole communication he had got in reply—nine words, two of which were Pascoe’s name.

  He wouldn’t have minded this had he only sent a postcard himself—which was all he would have sent had not Pascoe made such a fuss about letters. But he had not only made the fuss, he had even invented a special cipher in which the letters were to be written, so that if they fell into the wrong hands they would be unreadable by anyone who didn’t know the code. And the cipher was so extremely complicated that even with the code before him it had taken Tom hours to write his first page. After that, he had abandoned it; and Pascoe hadn’t bothered to use it at all. . . .

  Another and much queerer thing was that he had wanted Tom to make a compact by which they should solemnly bind themselves by a “blood oath” to continue to be chums after school recommenced. Tom had said of course they would continue, but he hadn’t seen any necessity for the shedding of blood. Why, he had asked, should school make a difference? Pascoe, however, seemed to think it might, and this distrustful attitude had struck Tom as very strange until it occurred to him that Pascoe appeared to have made no friends at his previous school. He had gathered this in the first days of their acquaintance—not just from Brown’s remarks, which probably were prejudiced—but from one or two let drop by Pascoe himself, though these had made little impression at the time, and later had been forgotten. The “blood compact” reminded him. It was as if Pascoe feared Tom might find somebody at school he would prefer for a special chum, though how a compact was to prevent this was hard to understand. In point of fact Tom already knew somebody he would have preferred—James-Arthur—but naturally he kept this to himself, nor could he see how it made the slightest difference in his friendship with Pascoe, which was of another and more practical kind, consisting largely in doing things together, or making things—like the kite and the aquarium—for Pascoe took no interest in ordinary regulation games such as tennis or croquet. After one or two unsuccessful trials, Tom had abandoned these as hopeless; but there was no doubt, though he might be a dud at orthodox games, Pascoe was jolly good at planning unorthodox ones—or rather schemes—and at carrying them out. So it was not surprising that in his absence Tom should miss him, and find himself now and then at a loose end. Occasionally he played a game of croquet or tennis with Mother; and every day with Roger and Barker he went over to Denny’s on the very improbable chance of finding James-Arthur doing something at which he could help; but this was all. . . .

  By far the best of these days had been that of the mowing of the great meadow, when in the evening he had ridden back to the farmhouse on Apollo, one of the solemn old carthorses. True, Apollo was so big, or else so preoccupied with private meditations, that he never seemed to know whether Tom was on his back or not, but pursued his way, or halted to sample some attractive specimen of vegetation, just as it pleased him. On this particular evening he had stopped to drink from a well, and in spite of coaxings and expostulations had drunk so much that he had got broader and broader till it was like balancing yourself on a cask. Tom, to be sure, may only have imagined this increase in bulk, for at no time were his legs long enough to obtain a proper grip, but the fact remained that when one of the men gave Apollo a playful smack with his open hand, and Apollo, surprised at this unexpected treatment, broke into a lumbering trot, Tom had slid gently off behind. Then everybody laughed, including James-Arthur, but they soon set him up again.

  It had been a good day, and in the general atmosphere of rough friendliness he had felt very happy. He had eaten his supper that evening in Denny’s kitchen, and afterwards walked home with James-Arthur. “Would you like me to fetch the owl?” James-Arthur had asked. “Just you watch and I’ll bring him in a minute.”

  They paused in the deepening twilight by some beech-trees, and now James-Arthur locked his hands together and blew between his upright thumbs, producing a “Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo!” He next mimicked the squeak of a
mouse—once, twice, thrice—at irregular intervals—and soon after, sure enough, there was the owl, floating soundless as a ghost above their heads.

  “You can always bring him,” said James-Arthur, “but he won’t stay when he sees it’s only us.”

  Tom was filled with admiration, for this was far better than any artificial bird-call, and James-Arthur promised to teach him how to do it. They walked on, while the moon, large as a harvest moon, rose up over the trees and threw their shadows and the shadows of the trees on the silvered grass. James-Arthur had his arm round Tom’s shoulder. He often walked like this, though only when there was nobody else there. Yet in spite of the intimacy thus created, he always called him “Master Tom”, never just Tom, which would have shown that they were really chums and was what Tom would have liked.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ONE morning, a few days after the arrival of Pascoe’s postcard, he was in the garden stretched full length on the grass in what to most people would have seemed an extremely uncomfortable position for reading; nevertheless Tom was reading, and with profound interest, a work Doctor Macrory had lent him. This was The Library of Apollodorus, and Mother, who had glanced through it, thought it a most extraordinary choice on the doctor’s part. In some amusement she had turned the leaves of the two learned-looking volumes, with their Greek text printed on one page, and Sir James Frazer’s English translation on the page opposite. Yet at the same time she could not help feeling pleased, for it showed that Doctor Macrory, who was a very intelligent man, must think Tom no ordinary little boy, and, since she certainly shared this opinion, she was content to leave the rest to be tested by experiment. As a matter of fact the doctor had made no mistake: the tales Apollodorus had to tell of Greek gods and heroes, though he boiled them down to their bare bones, as it were—presenting them without embellishment, and in the somewhat sparse and dry manner of an historian concerned only with plain facts and not at all with their imaginative treatment—Tom found as absorbing as those of Grimm or Asbjörnsen. More so, in a sense, because he could not help feeling that what had once been accepted as truth might really be true, or at any rate partly true; while as for the imaginative treatment, he could supply that himself. He supplied it, indeed, so lavishly, that though separated in time by nearly two thousand years, he and the ancient Greek mythologist became collaborators—a result all the more easily reached because Apollodorus made not the slightest attempt to criticize or explain his material. The only stumbling-block lay in the pronunciation of a good many unfamiliar names, and since Tom tackled these in the boldly sporting manner of Mr. Silas Wegg, it was a very minor one.

  He had reached the story of the little boy Glaukos, who, while pursuing a mouse, fell into a jar of honey and was drowned (though a little later restored to life by a medicinal herb brought by a kindly serpent), when suddenly he heard a low whistle, and glancing up, saw James-Arthur at the gate. He was surprised, for James-Arthur had not often visited the house, and that he should come at such an hour, when naturally he ought to be working, made it more surprising still. James-Arthur waited at the gate, but he did not open it, so Tom jumped up and ran to see what he wanted. He was standing in the road, looking grave and rather troubled, and in his arms was a squirrel—a dead squirrel.

  For a moment there was silence; then James-Arthur said: “I brought him, Master Tom: I thought maybe you’d wish to have him: he’s yours—the one you made a pet of, that lived in the big oak-tree in the meadow. . . . Now he’s dead. . . . Young Sabine shot him.”

  Tom had turned very white, and James-Arthur shuffled his feet and looked uncomfortable.

  “I think maybe he didn’t know he was yours,” he went on, in a gruff, awkward attempt at consolation. Then abruptly and with a complete change of manner he added: “But he must have known he was tame, for you can see he shot him from quite close—dirty bastard! He was always that anyway.”

  Tom took the small body in silence. He looked down at it as it lay limply in his arms. The eyes were filmed and half closed, the little hands, once so quick to take nuts and cherries, were closed too, and a trickle of blood had smeared and matted the thick red fur.

  “I thought maybe you’d wish to have him,” said James-Arthur again; “so you could bury him in the garden.”

  “Thank you.”

  James-Arthur looked at him and did not seem to know what more to say. “I can’t stop, Master Tom, for I have a cart waiting . . . but I’m sorry.”

  “Yes,” said Tom. And after a pause he added; “I know you are.”

  He brought the body into the garden, holding it close to him. He kissed the soft fur and his face puckered, as if the tears he had kept back were on the point of falling. But suddenly a wave of furious anger swept through him. He carried Edward up to the loft and laid him gently on the table. For a minute or two he stood motionless, his face still white, but his mouth now firmly set; then he descended the ladder and set off for the Rectory.

  He had no definite plan of action in view; certainly it was not Max he was in search of, for he knew he could do little or nothing even if he did meet him: nevertheless his mind was filled with hatred and the desire for revenge. Not that he believed an interview with Mr. Sabine would achieve anything. A few perfunctory words perhaps, and an expression of regret, but that would be all; he had no expectation that Max would be punished. The first momentary thought of getting James-Arthur to give him what he deserved he had abandoned also, for that would only be to create trouble for James-Arthur himself—possibly serious trouble, both for him and his mother, if Mr. Sabine took the matter up, as he would be sure to do. Tom didn’t know much about Mr. Sabine, but he knew the gun had come from him—Max himself had told Pascoe so—and that he approved of his shooting.

  Uncertain what he should do, yet his mind seething with passion, he hurried along, meeting nobody on the road; and when he reached the Rectory and rang the bell it was Miss Sabine he asked for. The maid—Phemie’s and Mary’s friend—invited him to come in, because Miss Sabine was busy in the kitchen making jam, and he might have to wait for a minute or two. Tom muttered that he would wait where he was. He had heard Althea’s voice in the distance, and did not wish to talk to her just now. Besides, in the brief space occupied by this exchange of words, he had caught sight of Max’s gun leaning against the hat stand, where it had evidently been left temporarily; and in a flash he had made up his mind. The maid departed to tell Miss Sabine he was there, and five seconds later Tom was scudding down the garden path and along the road, with the gun in his hand.

  He made directly for the river, and once or twice glanced back over his shoulder, but nobody was following. Nevertheless it was not till he had reached the tow-path that he paused to draw breath. He stood motionless now, with the gun in his hands, as if for the first time he had begun to realize what he had done, and what it must lead to. The moment the gun was missed, though this might not be till Max himself missed it, the whole thing would be clear to everybody. That, however, did not matter, was indeed just as he would have wished, for the secret destruction of the gun would somehow have been nothing. He lifted it by the barrel and brought it down with all his force on the path; but either the ground was too soft, or he was not strong enough, for it did not break, nor did he try again, but flung it out into the middle of the river, where, with a splash, it sank.

  Tom stood watching the ripples spreading out in a widening circle, yet feeling no relief beyond a momentary satisfaction. What he had done was useless, altered nothing, could not bring Edward back to life. It was a poor kind of revenge too; but the right kind, which would have been to fight Max and hammer him till he sobbed and begged for mercy, was beyond his power. Walking back to his own house, he felt more and more depressed. Nor could he now tell anybody—not even Mother—to whom he naturally would have gone for sympathy. He had an impulse to seek out James-Arthur and tell him, for he would know at once from James-Arthur’s manner whether he thought what he had done a rotten as well as a futile thing; and by t
he time he had reached home and climbed up once more to the loft, he had begun to wish he had not done it, and then again to be glad he had done it. He cried a little as he stroked Edward’s soft fur and placed his body in a box—with a straw bed for it to lie on—and presently took the box down and buried it in the shrubbery. He marked the spot where he would put up a stone with Edward’s name on it when Pascoe came back. Edward was nothing to Pascoe; Pascoe had never even seen him: but he would help, and make everything neat and orderly—and more than ever, Tom, in his unhappiness, wished he was there now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  DURING lunch he was so silent that Daddy asked him what was the matter. He returned the answer usually given in these circumstances, but he could see that, whatever Daddy might think of it, it did not convince Mother. She kept on glancing at him, and in the end asked him if he had a headache. Why a headache? Tom wondered gloomily, but he tried to look more animated. He was quite well, he repeated, yet, though Mother did not press him further, he knew this was only because Daddy was there, and not because she was satisfied. To set him at his ease she began to talk of other things—chiefly of the visitors she was expecting for tea that afternoon. Tom listened with a wandering attention. He could have informed her that he too was expecting a visitor—but one who probably would inquire for Daddy. . . .

  He escaped as soon as he could, seizing the opportunity while Mother was giving directions to Mary, and ran out into the garden, where, like Adam and Eve, he took refuge in the shrubbery. Here before long he was discovered by Roger, who with his usual cleverness grasped the situation at once, and here they both skulked out of sight, while keeping a sharp watch on the approach to the house.