He did not seem to want his mother. “Won’t you kiss me, Sonny?” Hetty pleaded. He stared at her, then turned away his head. “Ah, he is forgetting me already,” she said, shaking her head slowly.
“Ach no, Gnadige Frau,” said the German woman. “It is not so. It is the pflegemutter who is to be forgotten. Always this is so in my life, Gnadige Frau. First there are the kinder of the wohlgebornen baronin, but they grow up and leave me, all my dear Fruhjahrsweizen! Ach, and the Dinkelweizen——” Minnie was happy again now, remembering her earlier years at Rookhurst. “The Dinkelweizen bringing them butterscotch into the nursery, he was so kind a big brother to Viccy and Dora, and to Hilary, mein lieb’ Ganschen!”
Hetty did not comprehend the German words, but she understood the feeling of them. So that was the reason of her tears; how very natural! Minnie loved the little children she had brought up, only to lose them! A real mother had the same feeling, too, for Mamma had often said, “Ah, Hetty, if only all of you were small again!” and she would sigh. Charlie her eldest, grown up and gone away, and never writing any letters; and nowadays, said Mamma, she seldom saw Hughie. Dorrie and her little ones were near to her, that was a blessing; and Joey the youngest was living at home, going up to Sparhawk Street in Holborn every day, for on leaving school he had gone into the Firm. Yes, she understood Minnie’s feelings about her charges growing up, and being lost to her. Minnie must be lonely, too, being in a country so far away from her own people. She must be as kind to Minnie as she could be. Minnie was one in a hundred, really.
Dinkelweizen—what a curious name for Dickie! Whatever did it mean? Hetty did not like to ask Minnie, so she waited until Dickie was in a good mood after his dinner that night. He had carved another scraper, and was pleased because he had seen a thrush singing on the top of the elm tree at the bottom of the garden.
Then Richard told her that his nickname with Minnie had been Dinkelweizen, “Bearded Wheat”, and that his youngest sisters, Augusta, Victoria, and Theodora, had been Die Drei Fruhjahrsweigen, “the Three Spring Wheat Stalks”. Hetty began to feel that they had come from a world of enchantment, of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, so different from her own as a child. Fancy Papa, or Mamma, calling Charlie, even if he had a beard, which would have been black of course, Bearded Wheat! Or Dorrie or herself a Spring Wheat Stalk! She began to smile as the picture of Dickie grew in her mind, his long face swaying on a stalk in the wind, his beard growing upwards into his hair, as the wind swayed him to and fro, to and fro, and as a thin leaf-like arm slowly came up from beside the stalk to hold on his top-hat, she broke into laughter. Mr. Dinkelweizen, no longer the Man in the Moon, but the Man in the Corn!
“Well, what is the joke? Do share it with me.”
“Oh nothing, dear, really, only my fancy.”
Seeing his face, “Really, Dickie, I was not laughing at the nickname. It is really a very beautiful idea. I have only met Theodora of your sisters, of course, and I love her very dearly, for she is my great friend. An ear of wheat is very beautiful, I am sure, and with the corn-cockles in it, and the blue scabious of June.” Scabious was the colour of Dickie’s eyes, a dreamy blue, the blue of the summer sky. The Man in the Corn, so different from other men!
Hetty felt the tears brimming in her eyes, at the picture of Dickie as a head of bearded wheat, a man in a fairy story locked in the corn, crying voicelessly with the wind for freedom; Dickie in the cornfields around her when she was a child, waiting to be set free by love; Dickie as a spirit among the butterflies and herb-fields of Cross Aulton, and the scent of lavender when the old roots were being burned on the bonfires of autumn. She brushed a tear off her lashes.
“Come come,” said Richard, watching her from the green leather armchair. “What an odd lot you women are, to be sure! You are all the same,” he went on tolerantly. “Minnie was turning on the water-works yesterday, then the boy followed suit, and now you! There must be something in the atmosphere of this house. The yellow clay holds perhaps the water from draining away.” He returned to the pages of his familiar Daily Trident.
Later, having set aside the newspaper, he suggested a game of chess. They sometimes played at night, but Hetty had not yet won a game. However, it gave something for Dickie to think about, and she was always hoping that a sudden brilliant move of hers would enable her to call out, “Check mate!”
But not tonight. As they were sipping their cups of cocoa, brought in on a tray by Minnie, Hetty said, “What does ‘ganschen’ mean, Dickie?”
“What? Oh, ‘little goose’. Gosling. That was Hilary’s nickname, and I think I shall apply it to you.”
“Yes, dear,” said Hetty, gratefully, feeling herself to be a little nearer to the world of her husband and Minnie. She kissed him on the top of his head, as he settled comfortably into the armchair, to read his paper during the half hour of peace before he would follow Hetty upstairs to bed.
*
Despite his affinity to Minnie, The Daily Trident was Richard Maddison’s only companion, of like mind with himself, in his house. It shared his inner life. Its pages, particularly the articles on the English countryside, bicycling, gardening, fishing and other sports and games, made him feel that he enjoyed a full life as he read the pages in the train to and from London Bridge, keeping the best of them for the armchair at night, together with the first pipe of the day in one or another of his several briars.
The Daily Trident had appeared in May of the previous year. He had purchased a copy of No. 1 out of curiosity. For weeks upon the hoardings around the station, on end walls of various houses and warehouses, behind the glass fronts of empty shops had been displayed yellow posters on which large blue and red letters announced The Daily Trident, “a penny newspaper for one halfpenny”. At first he had dismissed them as vulgar and flamboyant, and repeated to Hetty what he had heard in train and office, that it was an amateur affair, engineered by a young Irish journalist. But one morning, as he was crossing London Bridge, together with thousands of others upon both pavements, two donkeys had moved by the kerbs on either side, each led by a figure in white. Upon the flanks of each small grey reluctant animal were hanging yellow boards, in red and blue lettering declaring, I do not intend to read The Daily Trident,
For days the animals were to be seen, walking lethargically upon sett-stone and wooden block of various London streets, until one morning many men in white coats at every corner it seemed, were selling copies of the first number of The Daily Trident, getting rid of them as fast as they could collect and pouch brown copper coins bearing the heads of Queen Victoria, William IV, the Georges, and even a small greenish ha’penny, on its face the words The Anglesea Mines 1788, and on its rim Payable in Anglesea, London or Liverpool. Richard secured his copy with this antique but legal coin, which he had received in change somewhere, and folded it carefully for inspection of its value later on. His own paper was The Morning Post, the only true Tory newspaper for him.
The first thing he read, during his luncheon interval of forty minutes, decided at once for him that it was the sort of paper he had always wanted to read. It startled him. There was the truth about Mr. Turney, his father-in-law, to a T! Later in the evening of the same day he cut out the piece and gummed it upon the fly-leaf of his pocket diary.
STRANGE DOUBLES.
VERY ORDINARY PERSONAGES OFTEN MISTAKEN FOR ROYALTIES.
There is scarcely a distinguished personage in this country who has not a living counterpart who delights in copying all his peculiarities of manner and speech. The moment a man acquires prominence people are accustomed to search for any marked characteristic that he may possess, and when these are found in individuals resembling him in features and figure, identification becomes difficult, and errors frequent.
Not so very long ago our Embassy in Paris was greatly perturbed by the information that the Prince of Wales had landed at Calais. During the three hours that elapsed between the departure of the mail train at the port and its arrival at Amiens, telegraph wire and Chann
el cable had carried many electric dots and dashes of the Morse Code between the City of Light and our own Foreign Office….
“And I bet everything I possess that the impostor was Mr. Thomas William Turney!” had muttered Richard to himself, recalling the story Hetty had told him in the summer-house of her garden, before they had decided to be married in secret, owing to the choleric opposition of her respected parent. The story was that she had been coming home from her school in Belgium, when upon arrival at Dover, Mr. Turney, on hearing that the Prince of Wales was expected from Paris, had had the cheek to walk off the boat before all the other passengers, and passing down between the lines of cheering people, he had raised his hat to left and right, while smoking a large cigar. The impostor had reached the train waiting in the station with hands in pocket and bearded chin held close into his buttoned ulster, in order to be lost among the crowd.
That story, for his son-in-law Richard, illustrated the entire character of the old man. Mr. Turney was an impostor—a humbug—a hypocrite—a charlatan—a bogus fellow. Had he not brazenly assumed the coat armour of the extinct Norman family of Le Tournet, while his son Hugh, according to Theodora, even claimed to be the heir to a barony in abeyance? That was the family he had, in a period of loneliness after Mother’s death, married into!
*
Now, towards the end of the third year of his marriage, Richard Maddison had arrived at the conclusion that no spiritual or mental communication with Hetty, or with any other Turney, was possible; and since he knew no one else, apart from the fellows at the office, The Daily Trident, with its reiterated, almost pronged policy of fidelity to King, Country, and Empire through the triple virtues of Faith, Hope, and Vigilance, was the bedfellow of his mind. Let radicals call it the Yellow Press; he knew the truth when he saw it: he had a mind of his own in such matters.
Chapter 4
DIAMOND JUBILEE
“MINNIE Mummie, Minnie Mummie, Minnie Mummie!”
Hetty stopped at the head of the stairs. The plaintive voice almost whispered down the passage. Sonny was in his cot. The door was half open. He was frightened when it was closed.
“I am just coming, Sonny. Mummie just coming.”
“Minnie Mummie, p’e.”
The word minnie meant a kiss. Or an embrace. Or security, affection, safety. Hetty knew this. She loved Minnie now, the two women sometimes embraced. It was sad that Minnie was soon to go away. Her father was ill and lonely in the Black Forest country, and at last his only daughter was going home. She would wait to see the Gnadige Frau safely delivered of her little one, and strong again on her feet, before she left.
Minnie’s father had had a stroke, and she must not delay the journey. Such tears, such a commotion of feeling! She must return to her dear father. Bayen called her to the smell of the pine trees once more, to the yoked oxen; but never, never would she forget her little ganschen, her little gosling who was not, as his pappy declared, an eselfunge, a donkey boy!
Much as she loved Minnie, Hetty could never bring herself to tell her her own secret name she had for Sonny—Little Mouse. For his eyes were round and big, like those of the little mouse which had so terrified her in the front room at Comfort House, before she knew what it was, when it had opened the sitting-room door one night before her baby was born. She had watched it gathering wool from the mat for its nest, and taking it down the hole by the pipe in the floor. But Hetty had given away her secret unwittingly. She had asked Minnie what was the German word for mouse; and Minnie exclaimed, “Ach, the small mouse among the corn is what he is to you, his true mother. Haselmaus! His nest bound to the Dinkelweizen!” And Minnie had laughed merrily with Hetty, while Phillip jumped and laughed with the happiness in the faces above him.
Now Haselmaus was wanting his true Mummy!
Going along the passage, Hetty opened the door. Little Mouse was standing up in his cot. Golly was flung on the floor, beside Hanky. She stooped with difficulty to pick them up. Beside them was a child’s book of lithographed pictures, Streuvelpeter, which Dickie had given him for his birthday present, with the words in English. (Would he have bought it if he had known that the Firm had printed the book? There was the name at the bottom of the last page, Mallard, Carter and Turney Ltd., Sparhawk Street, Holborn, London, E.C.)
There was something about the book that faintly distressed Hetty, with its pictures of the stumps of poor Peter’s thumbs dripping blood after a tailor’s shears had snipped them off, because he had sucked them; it might have happened to Sonny, and all because she had not been able to—— Still, that was life, she supposed. Habits of carelessness or forgetfulness did lead to frightful fates, sometimes. But was not Sonny too young to think of another boy being carried into the air, shot by a fox, or drowned over a quay? Would it not frighten Sonny, and perhaps give him nightmares? But Hetty had not dared to speak like this to her husband; she had hardly dared even to think it to herself.
Having comforted the child, who had thrown out his cherished objects in order to bring her to him for a kiss, she settled him down in his cot with a piece of barley sugar, with Golly and Hanky beside him, and Thumb ready to follow the sweet. Before leaving the room, she hid Streuvelpeter on the top shelf of the cupboard, under her folded piles of disused clothing that she was keeping to make into clothes for the children.
She went slowly along the passage, and down the stairs to the sitting-room, to rest, for her labour pains were upon her.
Minnie had already gone to leave a message at Dr. Cave-Browne’s, and to warn Mrs. Birkett, the midwife, in the High Road beyond. Mrs. Bigge next door had promised to keep an eye on Hetty. Every now and then she called out, quietly but cheerfully, from her back door, into the open southern window of the Maddisons’ sitting-room.
“Are you there, Mrs. Emm? Are you all right, dear? There now, of course you are! Now tell me, would you like me to pop in and make you a nice cup of tea?”
Hetty would like nothing better. The little woman went on, “Josiah, my hubby, says I am an inveterate popper, In and Out Again he calls me; but it’s best to be neighbourly while we can be, don’t you think, dear?”
“Oh yes; thank you ever so much for coining in,” replied Hetty, laughing with relief, because Mrs. Bigge as a popper seemed so funny. She thought of a vetch pod popping in the sun; Mrs. Bigge’s shape was that of a pea pod, from her square-piled hair to the square-cut end of skirt above black button boots. Mrs. Bigge noticed Hetty’s glance at her boots, for she said:
“No trailing dust on my skirts, dear; why bring part of the street with you into the house? Let them have their fashions, and I will have mine.” Mrs. Bigge’s personality popped like a black vetch pod ripe in the sun. And like the pea in bloom, she was fragrant; and then Hetty turned away from her fancy. She was in pain again.
Through the floor came a faint thud. Down the stairs floated a cry.
“Minnie p’e, Minnie p’e Mummie, Minnie p’e Mummie.”
“Ah, the little pet!” exclaimed Mrs. Bigge, popping out of the chair. “Is it his rest-time-dear? If not, let me bring him down, dear. Aunty will take care of him.” She went up the stairs, calling out in her deep voice, “Auntie is coming, dear! Auntie is coming! I know where you are, in the end room; many’s the time I’ve heard your little voice through the open window. It’s your new Auntie, dear, just coming!”
Mrs. Bigge went smilingly to the boy. He stood clasping the wooden rail, a mournful look in his face that went straight to her heart. A tear lay on one cheek. Then she saw the reason: the boy had messed himself.
She lifted him out of the cot, and carried him into the bathroom. “I’m just giving his hands and face a little wash, dear,” she called down the stairs. “He’ll soon be right as rain.”
“Oh, thank you, Mrs. Bigge.”
She ran some water into the basin and washed the boy, wondering why he was so very thin. Was he getting enough food? She had some cream-buns, and would bring one in for him.
“Do you like cream buns, dear
? What would you say if Auntie were to give you a nice cream bun?”
The child did not reply. She lifted him down from the basin; he was rigid, holding himself away from her. She sat him on her knee, and dried him on a towel that smelt faintly of tobacco and bay rum.
Down in the kitchen, Hetty wondered what was going on up in the bathroom. She heard the water-closet rattle, and the flush of water.
“A little accident, dear, my little pet has had, but we have put it all right, haven’t we?” said Mrs. Bigge, arriving with the child in her arms. “He is such a good little man, aren’t you, dear?”
The child was less rigid. He had a dread of messing himself, nearly as great as his dislike of being placed upon his small round enamel pot, that so restricted movement when he felt he must move. He was afraid of movement at times. When he had slept in the cot beside his mother sometimes a terrifying loneliness had overcome him; but he had been afraid to call to her to bring her over him, for the safety of her face, because Daddy might be cross with Mummie.
When he had called to Minnie from his cot beside her, Minnie had taken him into bed with her. She had cuddled him. Minnie was too hot, and her arms stopped him from moving when he wanted to. “Oh, do lie still, lieb’ ganschen, and let Minnie sleep.” So he would lie still, rigidly motionless. Perhaps Minnie might realise that her gosling with the faraway blue eyes was weeping in silence, but why was that? Ach, perhaps he had a tummy-pain! His head was hot. So at six o’clock next morning there was another ordeal, a brown thick liquid to be swallowed out of a cup, with a horrid smell, called licorice powder. And after his bread and milk for breakfast, Minnie had sat him on his pot, while changing her yellow skirt to a black one. Then putting on cloak and bonnet, she said he must be quick, quick! for the storch was coming today, to bring him a little brother, or a little sister. And she must go for the good doctor, and he must be quick, lieb’ ganschen.
Donkey Boy Page 5