Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  He turned the key, pushed the door, and was astonished to hear the notes of a violin. An unfamiliar bowler and fawn overcoat, with velvet collar, lay on the chair at the bottom of the stairs. The door of the parlour was half open. His son stood just inside the room, his mouth open, staring at the player. Richard took a deep breath. He recognised Hugh Turney, his brother-in-law. He frowned. Why had he come, and at that hour? Had he not warned Hetty that Hugh was an unfit person to have in the house, particularly where there was a young child?

  Hetty was in the kitchen, where three places for a meal were laid upon the table. So Hugh was expected to sit at table with them! Good God, what was she thinking about? But all the Turneys were like that, impervious to any idea of what was right and proper. He felt a desire to walk out of the house, to walk away for ever. His wife was entirely untrustworthy.

  “How nice that you are back, dear,” said Hetty, with hurried cheerfulness. “You must be hungry, and all is ready. I’ve got some nice brawn, and some of your favourite mango chutney. Did you see Hughie? He has some splendid news.” Her cheeks had gone pink, and she avoided looking at him.

  “Oh,” said Richard. He drew a deep breath. He was agitated. He turned away, hesitated, then faced her. He turned away again to close the door.

  “Why did you let him into the house?” he asked with lowered voice.

  “Oh, it’s quite all right, dear, please don’t worry. He’s quite cured of his arthritis. And he is about to enter on his new career. Please, Dickie, do not worry about him being here.”

  “But I do worry! And I do not believe in this arthritis story! Oh, very well, have it your own way! But don’t say I did not warn you, if your son develops an incurable disease!”

  “Hush, Dickie, please, Hughie may hear you!”

  The violin music had ceased. Richard’s face was pale. He breathed faster with agitation. “I’ve a very good mind to——”

  With an effort he controlled the impulse to tell her that Hugh Turney did not suffer from arthritis, but from an unmentionable disease connected with the depths of immorality. Sidney Cakebread, Hugh Turney’s brother-in-law, had himself told him so; but in confidence; and one’s word was one’s bond. How would his wife feel if her son were contaminated? But he had given his word, and so she would have to learn the truth from someone else. In his distress, Richard cried, after closing the kitchen door, “Very well, I wash my hands of the entire business! I am no longer master in my own house, apparently! You give me your promise not to allow your brother in the house, and at the first opportunity you break it! Do not tell me to hush! I shall not be hushed!”

  Hetty leaned against the polished steel plate-rack above the kitchen range. Kettle-steam strayed by her shoulder. She had been dreading the return of her husband; she had been unable to ask her brother to go. Hughie had been so happy, having at last found the kind of work that he really wanted to do, after all the years of unhappiness with Papa, who had insisted on putting him into the family Firm.

  Richard had turned to leave the kitchen when there came an excited banging on the lower panels of the door. A child’s voice was crying out behind it. He opened the door, and a little boy ran wide-eyed into the room. He wore a sailor’s blouse of white, with a broad square collar lined with dark blue lines, a pleated white skirt, white socks, and black button boots. He seemed almost overcome with some tremendous news.

  “Ning-a-ning man, Mummie! Ning-a-ning man!” he cried, with shining face. Then, aware of a difference in his mother’s attitude, and of his father standing there, he looked from one face to the other face; the eager attitude diminished, his thumb went into his mouth, and he began to suck it.

  “Take your finger out of your mouth, Phillip,” said Richard. As the child did not move, he bent down and pulled the hand with a movement almost abrupt. The child stood still on the linoleum floor, his eyes now round, as he stared up at his father so high above him.

  From outside in the road came the strains of a barrel-organ playing Il Trovatore.

  “Oh dear!” said Hetty. “He’s late today. He usually comes on Saturdays before you get back.”

  “Ning-a-ning man!” exclaimed the child. “Penny Mummy p’e! Penny Mummy p’e!”

  There was a glazed earthenware pot on the kitchen shelf where Hetty kept her small change. The child took the coin, and hurried away, full of eager delight to give it to the ning-a-ning man.

  “Don’t you teach your son to say ‘thank you’?”

  “I do generally, dear. Only he gets so excited when he hears music.”

  Richard also loved music; and he had not forgotten his own childish excitement when he had first heard a concertina played in the village street by a wandering sailor. The memory softened him, and he decided that he must be civil to his brother-in-law. Repressing a desire to say that Hughie’s knife and fork and plate, and particularly his glass, must be washed separately in carbolic afterwards, he left the kitchen to greet the unwelcome guest with a moderate show of civility.

  The guest had already left, apparently. Extra music was audible through the open front door. The fellow was showing off of course—he should be a music-hall turn. And going to the door, Richard received a surprise.

  For Hugh Turney was a music-hall turn. Richard’s reaction was one of disgust that any connexion of his could make such an exhibition of himself. Hugh Turney was bowing and scraping with the blatant gestures of a clown. He wore a yellow blouse with loose sleeves, a crimson cap with hanging tassel, silk knee breeches of the same colour, and yellow stockings with black shoes of patent leather with large silver buckles. His face bore no grease-paint; its usual pallor was accentuated by his dark eyes and black moustache, a larger moustache than when Richard had seen him last, and waxed at the points in what Richard considered to be a vulgar fashion. The fellow was a bounder.

  Others apparently did not think so. The Italian organ-grinder, wearing a broken bowler, almost green with age, acid rain, and sulphurous fog, was grinning with delight. Phillip was jumping up and down, holding on to the iron gate. Mrs. Feeney had come out of her house below, having forgotten to put on her black bonnet, and was smiling at the gay sight. Children down the street were yelling to others, to run quickly. Across the way a door opened, and a very old man, his rusty double-breasted jacket and stove-pipe trousers hanging on his bony frame, moved slowly towards his gate with the aid of two sticks, while a great-granddaughter held him by a piece of greasy cord tied round his middle.

  This was Matthew Pooley, a local wonder, who had received three telegrams from the Queen congratulating him on his last three successive birthdays; for he had passed his centenary, and now existed in the hope of his immediate relations that he would live to see the century out.

  The old labourer was alive in only a small part of his mind and bones and sinews. A leathery moleskin cap covered his bald head. His yellow face was rutted as though the cart-wheels leading off the autumn fields of his past labouring had impressed themselves out of decaying memory upon his face. He stared shakily at the sight before him; he took some time to formulate a word; and then from blue lips a single sound fell, heard by no one. It was “Frenchie”. The old man connected the sight of Hugh Turney with one of the great fears current during his boyhood—Napoleon Bonaparte.

  As more people came to stare at the sight, Richard returned into the house, aloof and disgusted. It was only what might be expected of a Turney. Gone were his eager visions of leading wife and child into the new house that afternoon. He retired to his room upstairs, to continue with the packing of his intimate possessions, preparatory for the move during the following week. By then, Mr. Wilton had promised, the gas would be laid on.

  In his particular room was visible another cause for exasperation. One of his boxes of butterflies, left piled by him in the corner, each secured with string lest it fall open during removal and the precious contents be destroyed, had obviously been opened. The string had been cut. There it lay on the floor. Beside it was the wing of a butte
rfly. Opening the box, while his long thin nostrils distended themselves slightly, Richard saw what he had feared, but not really expected to find: most of the fritilleries within were damaged, the pins askew, bodies broken, wings in fragments.

  So Hetty had allowed the boy to play there, despite all that had been said! It was monstrously unfair! She favoured the child before himself! He knew, from bitter experience, that she would, as soon as he mentioned it, find some excuse for it, even at the cost of deliberate lies—her Turney blood showing itself. Why could she never be frank and honest with him? She seemed incapable of being straightforward. Richard sat on a cane-bottomed chair and held his head in his hands.

  What was the good of hoping for any improvement? She would ruin the boy, who already was developing a whine in his voice, as he followed her about, clinging to her skirts, usually sucking his thumb, after he had thrown all his toys out of his cot. The boy was growing up to be a namby-pamby. His mother pandered to him. Had he not heard her talking to him, almost crooning, abasing herself before him as he lay in his cot after his evening tub in tepid water—Richard believed that hot water in a bath had a deteriorating influence on human character. Hetty had pleaded with him in his cot afterwards, bit of a boy that he was, for a goodnight kiss! “Don’t you want to kiss Mummie good night, Sonny? Don’t you want to kiss Mummie?” Then that little bit of a boy remaining silent, until his mother’s footfalls reached the bottom of the stairs, when, of course, there were howls of despair from up above. And what did his mother do but trip all the way upstairs again, being entirely at the child’s beck and call!

  There was a knock on the door. “Oh, come in.” It was Hetty.

  “Hughie is just going, dear,” she said. “I thought you would like to say how do you do to him before he departed.”

  “Oh, did you really, now? I suppose you haven’t been telling him what I said to you?”

  “No, dear, of course not. He has to get back to town, for a rehearsal, he says.”

  “A rehearsal?”

  “He is going to be Gonzalo, the Wandering Violinist, dear. He has a very important part at the Tivoli, and has to rehearse.”

  “I should have thought he had done his rehearsal already. How long has he been here?”

  “Only about an hour, Dickie.”

  “Did he come in that extraordinary garb?”

  “No, dear, of course not! He changed in the front room.”

  This information caused Richard’s lips to tighten; but he made no remark. He followed Hetty downstairs.

  “Hullo, Hugh,” he said, with a faint smile. “Hetty says you are just off. Won’t you stay and take pot luck?”

  “No no, old man, thanks all the same, but I never take luncheon,” replied the other. Hugh Turney had changed back into tweed jacket and trousers swiftly; then the Wandering Violinist outfit had been stuffed into a gladstone bag, watched by Phillip, who peered at everything he did, from removing the large ear-rings clipped to his lobes to snapping the lock on the bag and drawing the straps through their brass buckles.

  “Well, old girl, we must meet again when there is more time to have a chat,” said Hugh as he pulled on his dog-skin gloves.

  “I’ll say goodbye, Hugh, and I wish you every success for the new venture.”

  “Thank you, Dick, I shall need it. Now will you give me your opinion—I’ve asked your noble son here, but he is prejudiced—d’you mind telling me which strikes you as the better name—Gonzalo the Wandering Violinist, or, more simply, Normo the Ning-a-ning Man?”

  “Ning-a-ning man, Mummie! Ning-a-ning man come!”

  “Yes, dear, he did come, but hush, Uncle Hugh is speaking.”

  “Well, if you ask my opinion, Hugh, to be perfectly frank, I do not feel myself properly qualified to give an opinion on the matter.”

  Hugh Turney hid his desire to scoff at this typical Dickybird remark. Hetty did her best to help.

  “I like Gonzalo the Wandering Violinist, Hugh. At least I think I do. Though the Ning-a-ning Man is more homely, perhaps. Really, I like both.”

  Very helpful, thought Richard, as he withdrew from the group about the door-mat. He disliked prolonged farewells, especially by or outside an open door. He went into the kitchen, to find the stone jar of carbolic acid, meaning to go over, with a damp rag, every possible place which might have been touched by Hugh Turney.

  At the gate Hetty was saying, “Don’t leave it so long before we meet again, Hugh dear. Come one afternoon early, if you can, and we will have a picnic tea on the Hill, it is lovely up there. You know we are moving to our own house, don’t you? So we shan’t be here much longer.”

  “Yes, Mamma told me. You’ll miss your old Ning-a-ning man, won’t you, Pilly boy?”

  The child stared up at him. “Bile inn, p’e, Uncle Hoo, more bile inn, p’e.”

  “He appreciates the broken-hearted clown, bless him,” said Hugh, caressing the boy’s hair with a hand. “Your boy’s got the artistic temperament, Hetty—poor little devil.”

  “Yes, he loves beautiful things, I am sure. The trouble is, if he sees a thing which Dickie has interested him in, he immediately wants it.”

  “Don’t we all? Well, not necessarily what your respected spouse, the Man in the Moon, is interested in, perhaps—but human nature is entirely based on imitation, Hett.”

  “Still, you won’t be a naughty boy and take Daddy’s butterflies again, will you, Phil?”

  “No, no,” said the child, earnestly. “Pilly naughty boy!”

  “Dickie’s butterflies mean such a lot to him—to Dickie, I mean,” explained Hetty.

  “And to Pilly boy, too, of course, if he sees them through his papa’s eyes first. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery! When’s the other due, Hett?”

  “In June, Hugh. Now, dear, I don’t want to hurry you, but Dickie will want his meal. You know the new address, do you? Number eleven Hillside Road. Let me know how you get on, won’t you, and don’t leave it so long next time.”

  “Any news of Theodora?” asked Hugh.

  “I haven’t heard for quite six months, Hughie. I think she is still in Greece.”

  Richard was waiting, with his own bowl and flannel (which he had decided to burn afterwards) in the kitchen. The smell of carbolic had turned him faint, his interior already being in a state of interior bubbling due to lack of food, and incipient exhaustion. Would they never say goodbye to one another? Must they gossip their heads off on his threshold, like any other occupant of Comfort Road? Had they no idea of good form?

  At last the door was shut, and Richard’s feelings could be vented. Hetty tried not to show her tears as, standing in the parlour, while Richard wiped all possible places which Hughie might have touched with his person, she endured complaints about what, to her, had been a happy chance visitation. Her husband’s attitude was inexplicable to her: a fuss over nothing at all.

  “I gave you every possible hint that I did not w r ant your brother in the house, did I not, repeatedly? And the moment my back is turned you flout my authority in my own house, and without a thought of possible consequences! If you care nothing for me, at least you should think of your little donkey boy, who is being spoiled by your indulgence to his every whim! Oh, I can see it happening! I am not deceived! Well, let me tell you this, once and for all! I will seek protection in a way you will not like if your brother Hugh comes here again! It is my duty to protect innocent life!”

  Hetty stared at Richard in puzzlement, and fear. She knew he was exacting, and was easily upset, but she had not seen him in such a state before. What could be the matter with him? Was he ill, or sickening for some illness? Just because her brother had sat in the “Sportsman”, the armchair in green Russian leather Mamma had given him for a Christmas present when they first came to Comfort House, he was working himself up into a rage.

  “Do you hear me?” cried Richard, flinging the cloth into the pail of disinfectant. “Either you obey my behests honourably, or you leave my house! Yes, it has co
me to that! Do you hear what I am saying?”

  His voice was thin and high with agitation. He was breathing fast. His face was pale and strained. What could have come over him? The child stood between them, looking up first at one face, then the other. His eyes were dull, almost mournful. “No, no,” he muttered, and began to cry.

  “Send the boy out of the room, please! I have something to say to you! You have only yourself to blame for what you are going to hear!”

  Hetty took Phillip into the kitchen. The fireguard was up and fastened to its hooks. She lifted the edges of the tablecloth and laid them over the table. She hid the poker on the rack. She shut the cupboard doors. She locked the scullery door. What else could he touch, upset, break, and so make Dickie——? Perhaps he was hungry. She gave him a crust of bread, hastily spread with beef dripping. “Now be a good boy, Sonny, stop crying dear, and for goodness gracious’ sake don’t do anything to annoy your father. Mummy won’t be gone long, play with your golliwog, there’s a dear little son.” She left him sitting on the floor, the safest place, thumb in mouth, and clutching with his other hand a fragment of silk, part of an old petticoat of hers. To Hetty this was most pathetic: for she had not been able to feed him at her breast, and from an early time the piece of silk, called Hanky, had been the substitute.

  “You may consider that I am being unreasonable, and altogether guilty of exceptionable conduct,” began Richard, in a determinedly quiet voice, when she had returned to the front room. “So perhaps the time has come to tell you a certain fact. I feel it is my duty to communicate to you a certain fact, as it were under duress, for I am breaking a confidence in telling you; but since you do not seem able to accept what I ask of you in a loyal manner, I have no other alternative. Very well, then! I requested you not to admit your brother into this house for a very good and proper reason. You have thought he has suffered for some time from rheumatism, or neuritis, or arthritis, have you not?”