Donkey Boy

by Henry Williamson

  Richard, on the other hand, regarded his day in the City as a grind; the street noises and constant movements wore upon ear and eye; pleasant anticipations of returning home, of seeing Hetty and the odd little boy, whom he dearly loved, and the baby, who had become Mavie, a personality to him since she had smiled at him, of a quiet and pleasant meal with Hetty in the cool sitting or garden room, of work in the garden afterwards, at carpenter’s bench in the spare room upstairs, or tennis at the Club—to Richard his homecoming at evening was always keenly anticipated, and being insufficiently fed during the day, he had not the resistance to disappointment. He received a salary of sixteen pounds five shillings every half-quarter, and the investment of his remaining capital, after house and furniture had been paid for, produced a further fifty-six pounds per annum. For years his mind had been set on the need to save every possible penny, against illness or other contingency; and by now the habit had become a satisfaction in itself. He kept a record, in his meticulous handwriting, of every halfpenny spent, and balanced his books at the end of every month.

  Mona was afraid of “The Master”. She cowered within herself in his presence, over-awed and often tongue-tied. Her attitude discomposed him, made him withdraw into himself, with the effect of mutual tension.

  Phillip formed his feelings from those in the house: he responded, like any other young child, to the spirit of his human surroundings. During the day he was generally happy and interested; there was wonder in all things, keen delight or apprehension in the unexpected. Aunty Bigge often came in, first rattling the brass flap of the letter-box, to be greeted with a little dance of joy. Mrs. Feeney’s black bonnet wobbling up the path or seen approaching up the road from Mummy’s bedroom window as he helped her to make the beds by standing in the verandah out of the way, gave him equal joy.

  Good-boy-don’t-annoy watched for Milk-oo man, too, and Basket-grocer man, and Butcher-man stripey-blue apron and wooden sheep on shoulder (the wooden trug, with two handles at each end, looked to the child like the half a split sheep hanging in the butcher’s shop in Randiswell) and Black Goal-man with black horse and waggon, and Ning-a-ning-man with ning-a-ning wormy up the road (organ-grinder hauling barrel organ up the steep road from kerb to kerb, in a series of zigzags).

  In this manner, being good-boy-don’t-annoy, he helped his mother to make the beds on fine mornings, by keeping watch on the balcony beyond the open door. He watched the sparrows on the roof above, chattering and quarrelling, the cats in the gardens below, the people who came and went out of the houses up and down the road.

  He stood there with his new friend in his hand one morning, inside its box. The new friend was a woodlouse. It was a sad moment when, having given his friend a bath, he pulled the plug and his friend went down the hole that gurgled like Minnie snoring.

  It was through his small son that Richard came to like Mona. One day he overheard her saying to him, as she put on his coat before taking him out in the mail-cart one Saturday afternoon, “You’re a lucky boy, Phil, you don’t ’arf know ’ow lucky, your dad don’t never belt you or your mum.”

  “Pill lucky boy.”

  “Yus, and you’re lucky to ’ave Mona to ’old your ’and in the darkness, too.”

  “’An’ Minnie-mony-mummie.”

  “Say ‘Fank you, Mona’, like a good little boy, in German.”

  “Danke schön, Minnie!” he cried, for this was now a joke.

  “Now say it properly. Say ‘Fank you, Mona’, in English. Go on, say ‘Fank you, Mona!”

  “DANKE SCHÖN, Minnie!” shouted Phillip, with great glee. Then appearing unexpectedly round the door, there was Daddy holding up a silver-papered bar of Callard and Bowser’s cherry toffee.

  “And what have I here for a good boy?”

  “Tiff-tiff, Daddy got tiff-tiff!”

  The silver paper was carefully removed; the ivory-handled knife taken from the waistcoat pocket; the bar tapped across the middle. One half for Phillip—“What do you say, dear?” urged a kneeling and anxious Mona. “Danke schön, Farver!”

  “And a piece for you, Mona.”

  “Oh fank you, sir!”

  “Don’t bite it up, suck it and so save your teeth.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, sir,” echoed Phillip.

  “Now take the boy on the Hill, Mona, and do not let him touch any dogs, and don’t speak to strange men, will you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You funny little chap!” said Richard, picking him up and hugging him, before going to sit in his deck-chair in the back garden, well-pleased with life.

  It was a warm September afternoon, towards the equinox. Yellow leaves hung among the dull green of the elms in the waste land beyond the creosoted garden fence. Mr. Bigge, over the dividing fence of the lower garden, was making a rockery. The boundary fence being his, he had nailed above the posts wooden extensions to which he had fixed supporting wires for Virginia Creeper. He wanted privacy in his garden, having on two occasions overheard his neighbour speaking to his wife in a tone of voice that distressed him.

  Richard did not suspect the reason for the extremely soft-spoken, evasive Josiah Bigge wanting to secrete himself in his garden. He thought that Mr. Bigge did not wish to be overlooked, a feeling he could understand. There was the five-foot high fence between his own garden and that of No. 12 above, a house at present unoccupied. That garden was overgrown with weeds. All he knew was that the FOR SALE board by the front garden gate had been removed some weeks previously, so presumably it had found a purchaser.

  Had Hetty seen anyone looking over the house? he had enquired of her the previous Saturday afternoon. Hetty had dreaded the question; the thought of it coming from Richard, one day, had affected her milk; and when at last the question had come, she replied evasively, and made an excuse to leave the room soon afterwards.

  Richard did not notice her concealed agitation; and finding her a little time afterwards in the front room, sitting on the sofa by the open window, where the leaves of the aspidistra risped slightly in the dry breeze, he thought she was resting there; and mindful of her needs while nursing the baby, he made some remark, and left her alone. He did not know that she was feeling sick with apprehension, indecision, powerlessness. O, sooner or later Dickie would have to be told! If only she could summon up sufficient courage to tell him!

  Now, a week later, as the quarter day of Michaelmas approached, Richard was about to find out for himself who his upper neighbour was to be. The revelation came while he was lying in the deck chair in the garden, his face held to the sun standing high in the south-west over the slated roof of the Bigge’s house.

  It was half an hour before tea; and after tea he was going to change into flannels for the Club. On the following Saturday the tournament was to be held, the last meeting of the season. Then—goodbye to summer! How swiftly the year had flown! Soon the mists of autumn would collect the smoke of London—four hundred tons of it dropping on Greater London every day—into cold, clammy, muffling fogs. For a moment the thought was appalling; but he consoled himself by thinking that there would be the meetings of the Antiquarian Society, and Whist Drives, and lectures with slides of the Magic Lantern. He had not had a real holiday that year, deeming that the expenses of the baby’s coming did not justify himself taking one; but long rides into Kent and Surrey on the Starley Rover, and tennis most evenings had been ample compensation, he told Hetty. It had been a wonderful summer.

  “I am so glad, dear,” said Hetty. “For you have worked so very hard and did deserve a real holiday.” She herself had had none at all, unless the fortnight in bed after having Mavis could be called a holiday. Sometimes, by what he said, Richard seemed to think it had been.

  *

  The air was still. Josiah Bigge over the fence worked quietly and industriously; only his old gardening hat, of faded Panama straw, the black band a little frayed with age, was occasionally visible, as he rose up to stretch himself. Mr. Bi
gge never turned in the direction of his next-door garden. Richard was well content with him as a neighbour: a mutual bowing, raising of hats, elementary weather reports—beyond such things the worlds of the two men did not meet.

  Richard, with closed eyes, basked in the heat of the sun on his face. This was his idea of bliss. His temples, cheeks, neck, wrists, the backs of his hands clasping the wooden arms of the deck-chair, were brown. He felt the sun entering his being through the lids of his eyes: he was of the sun itself; surrendered to his god, the sun. He drew a deep breath of contentment, sighed himself away upon celestial radiance. An omnipotent, sempiternal power seemed to be bearing him away from ordinary living to a realm delicious with a warm peach-like sleep, in remote lands of blissful solitude.

  In memory of the peaches on a southern flint wall of his old home at Rookhurst, Richard had planted a little peach tree in the flower bed raised above the gravel path on which his chair stood. Its thin branches were trained against the fence. There had been no blossom on it that year; it had been planted out late; but in his mind he could feel the warm flushed fruit, soft with softest down, hanging there in another summer—a token, a link, an assurance.

  Afar off he heard the ringing of the front door bell inside the house. The french windows of the sitting room were wide open. The further door of the sitting room was open, for the summer air to wander at will through the entire house. He heard Hetty open the front door. He heard voices. He waited in a calm suspense; almost indifferent: and hearing nothing more, lapsed once more into radiant ease, his head now leaning to one side. He would resist no more, he would yield to drowsiness and sleep.

  *

  In the front room, Hetty was in conversation with her mother. The door was closed upon the new carpet seldom trodden upon, the two new armchairs seldom sat in, the maple-wood Windsor table in the centre, the half a dozen upright mahogany chairs with black leather upholstered seats standing in various places by the walls, seldom used. There was a piano in one corner; a maple-wood side-board by another wall; a Chippendale side-table with china-ware on lace doyleys; photographs in frames; a bowl of pot-pourri, made of rose-leaves from Cross Aulton; another bowl filled with lavender-seed also from Surrey to balance it. There were Red Indian moccasins of moose-hide entirely sewn with minute coloured beads, brought from Canada by Hetty years before, when she and Papa had gone to see Charley in Manitoba; a clutch of prairie hen’s eggs in a basket; a whip-poor-will’s egg.

  There were pictures on the walls, Dresden china figures on the mantelpiece, and other gifts and possessions valued as in a museum.—for this was the drawing room, the best room, the front room where almost formal visitations were made. And here Hetty was closeted with Sarah Turney, who had arrived unexpectedly with Thomas, her husband, to look over the house next door with a view to living there.

  Outside the open middle window, beyond the clipped privet hedge, a familiar horse and carriage was drawn up. Hetty had first seen them from her bedroom, where she had gone to feed baby. Her feelings were such that she had dreaded she would faint. Through the open door of the balcony she heard her father’s voice speaking to Jim, the coachman; then to her Mamma. She had heard Mamma asking Papa to go into the empty house, saying she would join him before very long.

  Thomas Turney, who with grim humour knew how Richard would probably take the news, opened the front door with the labelled key and entered his new house for the first time. He had bought it, with several others in the neighbourhood, for investment, through an agent employed by his solicitors.

  Hetty, biting her nails, had felt unable to go down even when she heard the front door bell ring; but fear of Dickie going first to the door had impelled her to run down the stairs. She was pale with her emotions.

  Sarah tried to comfort her. Sarah had done her best, in her gentle way, to indicate to Tom what their daughter’s feelings were, while assuring Tom that otherwise Hetty could not but be happy that her mother and father had decided to move nearer to her. But could it not be one of the other three houses he had purchased? There were two in Charlotte Road, and the third near the bottom of Hillside Road.

  Before coming to No. 12 Hillside Road, Mr. and Mrs. Turney had visited the other three. Washing on a line visible from the window of a downstairs room had decided against the first; children’s voices in dissension over the garden wall another; the lower house in Hillside Road had its front door cheek-by-jowl with its neighbour; none of them was satisfactory.

  The front door of No. 12, with its stained glass leaded panels on the upper half, opened to his key. He went in, liking the sound of his feet on the new bare boards. It was compact, delightfully small and would be simple to run after Maybury. He opened some of the windows in the front room facing the sun, and let in fresh air, then went down the passage, with its three steps, to the room with its farther end almost entirely open to the east, with tall french windows. Thistles, docks, and stems and sprays of seeded, yellowing gix, grew outside against the lower panes of glass.

  He opened these windows, approving the view of the steep slopes of grassy hill over the back fence. Five bedrooms up above, two good rooms downstairs, one east, the other west—open ground beyond both. He cleared his throat, and spat into the tall mass of deciduous weeds, unaware that, on the other side of the fence, his son-in-law was extended there, half-asleep.

  *

  Lying in the deck-chair, Richard was content. His mind moved from warm, nectarine drowsiness, and hung suspended, without definition or thought or self, as on a thread from the sun, He became aware of movement through dry grasses, a remote crackling of stems and stalks far away over the harvest-hazy plain of Colham. And then a blackness seemed to be where the tawny blood of the sun had floated him, shutting out all but the heat-sense directly in front. He felt the blackness immediately behind his head, and a presence there without definition: and as clear thought returned upon him, he was aware of being regarded over the wooden fence. This was the fancy; for no presence was audible there, except by the cessation of movement through dry grass. He waited, disbelieving the fancy.

  Then with a start he heard a voice calling out behind him, “How d’ye do? Having a rest in the sun, eh?” Preparatory to raising himself out of the canvas slump of the chair, pressing upon the creaking wooden arms to turn around, he heard the soft, apologetic tones of Mr. Bigge coming from between the wires of the lower fence’s extension. “Oh yes, yes, how do you do,” and Richard saw in front of him the faded Panama raised as the bearded, bespectacled face bowed several times in succession. Richard remained still.

  “My name is Turney, sir!” said the voice behind him. Richard smelled cigar smoke.

  The gentle, mellifluous voice in front replied, “My name is Bigge, sir. How do you do,” and the head bowed its little bows again.

  “I expect you know my daughter and grandson, eh? And my son-in-law here in the chair, I’ve disturbed his nap. Well Dick, how are ye? I expect Hetty has told you her mother and I are thinking of coming to live here?”

  Mr. Bigge, after further bobbing, discreetly disappeared from view. Richard got on his feet, and shook the hand of Mr. Turney over the thin branches of the young peach tree extended, cruciform, upon his side of the dark wooden fence.

  Chapter 8

  ANTIQUARIAN ANTICIPATIONS

  RICHARD DID not play well at St. Simon’s Tennis Club that evening. In his depressed state he allowed himself to be inveigled into a doubles game with three members previously unknown to him; and this despite the fact that Miranda MacIntosh was sitting, alone in a row of deck chairs, racquet in hand, waiting to be greeted and invited.

  The Vicar was not present; in his study not far away he had composed, and now was rehearsing, another of the celebrated sermons that induced in Hetty, and in hundreds of others of his congregation, such enthusiasm. For Mr. Mundy, who at Oxford had revealed a talent for dramatic acting so obvious in his friends’ eyes that they had lamented its loss to the stage, knew how to move and impress his audience by t
he controlled and directed use of his own emotions, which were varied and experienced.

  When the doubles game was over, another four, including Miranda MacIntosh, played a long and close set. There being no others to play when that was finished, except the waiting four, Richard played again with his former partner, for their revenge, he said. While they were playing Miranda MacIntosh said goodnight to the three sitting members, and left, to Richard’s disappointment.

  What was he thinking of, he asked himself. Apparently it was not of the game he was playing; for he and his partner, Miss Danks—who played every ball underhand and avoided all volleys as unladylike and certainly would not have dreamed of serving overhand and so expose her person like Miss MacIntosh, of whom Miss Danks thoroughly disapproved both as woman and as secretary to the Vicar—were soon beaten.

  During the week that followed, Richard looked forward to the tournament, and particularly to the idea of inviting Hetty to accompany him to the Club, for the end-of-season tea. There was to be a special table laid under the trees to carry many good things, he said, including a large bowl of her favourite compôte de fruit, and an equally large bowl of Cornish clotted cream. This Miranda MacIntosh had confided in him.

  He did not ask Hetty until the Friday night, keeping it to himself all the week as a surprise; and then he learned that some of the Cross Aulton furniture was to arrive the following day, and that Hetty had promised Mrs. Turney to be there to tell the men where to stand the various pieces. Richard felt acute disappointment; but said nothing. He had wanted Hetty at the tournament to prove to himself that Miranda MacIntosh meant nothing to him, and to help resolve for him his own contrary feelings.

  In the tournament the Maddison-MacIntosh partnership collapsed in the second round. They were beaten by a pair he had thought of previously as rabbits. He did not attempt to serve his cannon-ball service, and played generally without spirit.