The Retreat

by Forrest Reid

  “Brown!” called Miss Jimpson hysterically, and Brown himself seemed suddenly to awaken to realities. He hopped down from the form, looking for once, Tom thought, rather disconcerted. One of the smaller boys had begun to weep.

  “Don’t be silly, Donnelly!” snapped Miss Jimpson with a touch of temper. She had made a rapid recovery and now proceeded to control the situation. “It’s all over,” she declared, “whatever it was. A most unusual thing to happen—in this climate at any rate—but due of course to some atmospheric disturbance. A kind of small cyclone, I .suppose, such as they often have in the tropics. I must say I’ve been half expecting something of the sort all morning. . . . And now, will the end boy in each row kindly gather up the papers on the floor. The others keep their seats.”

  Since Tom was not at the end of a row, he remained seated. Nevertheless, what had happened was so remarkable that Miss Jimpson did not insist on an immediate resumption of the lesson.

  “Was it a cloudburst?” Saunderson asked, and Miss Jimpson temporized. She glanced out of the window and saw only one heavy patch of cloud in a vividly blue sky.

  “Well,” she hesitated, “something of that sort, no doubt; though I don’t suppose there can be a cloudburst without rain. But some kind of electrical disturbance at all events, which will probably clear the air. As I say, in tropical climates such sudden storms are quite common, and nobody thinks anything of them.”

  Miss Jimpson spoke in her most confident and businesslike tone, yet her explanation was not entirely successful, for little Donnelly piped up in a voice still broken by woe: “It was in the room. I saw it. It came right in through the window, and there was a man in it.”

  “A man in it?” Miss Jimpson repeated briskly. She hadn’t the least notion what the child was talking about, but in the circumstances felt it better to reassure him. “What do you mean, Donnelly?” she went on, smiling, yet kind. “As I tell you, the whole disturbance was caused by the meeting of two opposed electric currents in the air. Surely you can understand that! Just like a railway collision. It was the collision which produced the flash, the thunder, and a sort of air storm. In fact it was just the same as an ordinary thunderstorm except that there was no rain. . . . And of course it happened more suddenly and was over more quickly.”

  “But I saw him,” said Donnelly unhappily.

  Miss Jimpson’s voice grew a shade firmer. “You mustn’t talk nonsense, Donnelly,” she said. “There was no ‘him’, as you call it, to see. You were startled—as indeed we all were—and when one’s frightened it’s very easy to imagine things.”

  “I saw him,” Donnelly repeated obstinately.

  Miss Jimpson paused, and seemed on the point of losing patience, but laughed instead. “What was he like, Donnelly?” she asked. “I suppose you can describe him since you saw him so clearly. You’d better tell us, because none of the rest of us saw anything.”

  “Yes, I can describe him,” Donnelly replied unexpectedly and rather defiantly. “He was all hunched up, with a cloud round him, and he had a dark cross face and white eyes.”

  “I saw him too,” Tom felt tempted to put in; only everybody had begun to laugh at Donnelly, and Donnelly himself had turned as red as a poppy. Tom didn’t want to be laughed at, and above all he didn’t want to be questioned.

  “I saw him too,” he suddenly said.

  Miss Jimpson looked at him coldly for about half a minute. Then she remarked: “In that case, Barber, you’d better write out for me fifty times: ‘I must not try to make myself interesting by telling fibs.’”

  “But I did,” Tom persisted.

  “A hundred times,” said Miss Jimpson.

  She was awful, Tom thought, and for two ticks he’d bring the whole thing back again.

  Only, had he done it? There was the figure drawn on his scribbler; he looked down at it; but he had said something, too. It had been only a single word, and now it was gone: he couldn’t remember anything except that it had begun with an A and that the next letter was Z. At least, he was almost sure it was. Az—Az—what? He mumbled over imaginary words beginning with “az”, but knew they weren’t right, and indeed nothing happened. Could it have been only his imagination? But in that case how had young Donnelly seen it? And he had seen more than Tom had!

  Meanwhile, though he tried to avoid looking at her, he kept on catching Miss Jimpson’s eye, and Miss Jimpson’s was witheringly sceptical. She had no right to look at him like that, Tom felt, or to accuse him of telling lies; though somehow it was really her remark about trying to make himself interesting which rankled most. He never tried to make himself interesting—at least very seldom—and certainly he hadn’t tried then, he hadn’t wanted to speak at all. There she was again! Why couldn’t she look at Donnelly? Just because Donnelly had said it first she didn’t bother about him. Maybe, however, it was because she had repented and was filled with remorse. Only she didn’t a bit look as if she was filled with remorse, though you never could tell, and Tom resolved to wait on after school to give her a chance of apologizing. Also of cancelling his imposition. He had now a couple of impositions to do, and all because of Pascoe and Donnelly. Yes, he would wait.

  On the other hand, he wanted very much to question Donnelly as to what exactly he had seen. Perhaps Donnelly would wait too—outside. He scribbled a brief note, folded it, wrote Donnelly’s name on it, and passed it to the boy in front of him. Anxiously he watched the surreptitious progress of the note from hand to hand until finally it reached its destination. He watched Donnelly opening it and reading it. For a minute or so nothing happened. Then, to his intense surprise and indignation, Donnelly, instead of writing a reply, simply turned round and made a face at him. Tom was furious. That miserable little squirt, who blubbed every time he missed a question, and in winter came to school wrapped up in so many mufflers that he had practically to be unpacked! He felt a violent uprush of the most Brown-like impulses. He contorted his face into an expression of frightful pugnacity, but Donnelly seemed merely to find it funny and screwed up his face too. Then he nudged the boy next him, who turned round and grinned. Tom had only partly recovered from these insults when the bell rang.

  With the first note of the clapper Miss Jimpson’s head disappeared behind the raised lid of her desk, and it was not till the scuffling and noise of escaping pupils had died into silence that it emerged again. Then she gazed across the empty room in surprise. “What are you waiting for, Barber?” she asked.

  It wasn’t a very easy question to answer, and Tom’s mumble failed to enlighten Miss Jimpson, who, moreover, betrayed no sign at all of wishing to apologize. “Come closer,” she said. “I can’t hear what you say.”

  So Tom got up, and in some confusion advanced to within a foot of the raised platform upon which were Miss Jimpson, her desk, and the blackboard.

  “Come up here,” Miss Jimpson said, “and don’t look so scared—I shan’t eat you.”

  Tom climbed the three steps and stood beside her. Still he did not speak, and Miss Jimpson, who was tying exercise books into a bundle, suddenly smiled at him. “Well,” she asked, “what is it?”

  Tom swallowed hastily. “I wasn’t telling lies,” he answered. “I did think I saw something.”

  Miss Jimpson looked at him calmly, and whether it was because school was over or not, she seemed much more approachable than before. Also, Tom thought, she looked rather pale and fagged, and a wisp of dark hair had come loose and fallen down over her left ear. “We all saw something,” she presently observed. “We saw that it got quite dark for a few minutes, and we saw a flash of lightning.”

  “It was a part of the darkness,” Tom told her.

  Miss Jimpson unexpectedly placed her two hands on his shoulders, and her eyes were now bright and friendly. “Tell me this, Tom Barber,” she said. “If Donnelly hadn’t been scared out of his wits and imagined all that nonsense, would you have said a word?”

  Tom was obliged to confess that he wouldn’t.

  “Well the
n?” pursued Miss Jimpson.

  “All the same I did see it—think I saw it, I mean. . . . Smoky—with two eyes.”

  Miss Jimpson looked very hard into Tom’s own two eyes before she answered. “This is very absurd. And especially coming from a comparatively big boy like you.”

  Tom did not deny its absurdity, and Miss Jimpson herself, after a brief reflection, appeared to recognize that that was hardly the point. “You really weren’t telling fibs?” she resumed.

  “No,” said Tom.

  Miss Jimpson once more pondered, and she looked rather nice while she was doing so: she was really quite pretty, Tom decided. “In that case, what do you suggest ought to be done about it?” she asked. “By me, I mean?”

  Tom told her what he thought should be done. “I don’t think I ought to get an imposition,” he said.

  “I don’t think so either,” Miss Jimpson agreed. “So we’ll wipe that out.”

  “Thank you, Miss Jimpson,” Tom replied. “Thank you very much.”

  Miss Jimpson laughed. She had finished tying up her bundle. “Let us hope there will be no more thunderstorms,” she declared. “They seem to affect our nerves. We were all of us a little upset.”

  “Especially Brown,” Tom couldn’t help reminding her.

  “Yes, Brown,” Miss Jimpson echoed, frowning a little. She glanced at him questioningly, as if struck by a sudden suspicion. “I don’t quite know what came over Brown,” she murmured doubtfully.

  But Tom’s candour was apparent. “Neither did he,” was all he answered.

  Miss Jimpson looked relieved. “I thought at the time he didn’t,” she said; “otherwise I should have had to take more notice of it.”

  “Do you think——” Tom began, and then stopped. “They were bird screams he was making,” he went on after a pause. “Like a macaw.”

  “A macaw!” Miss Jimpson repeated wonderingly.

  “Yes—a kind of parrot.”

  But Miss Jimpson, for some unknown reason, now appeared to be less interested in Brown than Tom himself, and it was upon him that her gaze was fixed in reflective scrutiny. “You’re a very strange boy, Tom Barber,” she murmured. “And I believe even much stranger than you allow anybody to suspect. Is that right?”

  “I don’t know,” said Tom.

  “What do they think about you at home?” Miss Jimpson continued. “Not that it matters much, because it’s sure to be wrong.”

  “Why?” asked Tom, gravely.

  “Oh, I don’t know—except that it usually is. At any rate,” she added, “I feel that a cup of tea is what we both need to restore us to perfect sanity. If you were to invite me I know I’d accept.”

  This frankness put Tom in a distinctly awkward position, and he blushed. “I’d like very much to invite you,” he stammered. “But you see I—I’m afraid I couldn’t pay for you—nor even for myself.”

  “That is a difficulty,” Miss Jimpson admitted. “Wait for me in the porch all the same. . . . I’ve only to put on a hat and won’t keep you more than three minutes. But I simply must have a cup of tea, and I hate sitting in a teashop by myself.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  SO FIVE minutes later Tom and Miss Jimpson were walking down the road together under the lime trees. Miss Jimpson looked even nicer in her hat than she did without it: Tom felt quite pleased to be walking with her. Then he remembered that he ought to be on the outside of the pavement, and changed his position.

  “Where are we going?” he inquired.

  “I suppose to Nicholson’s,” Miss Jimpson thought. “It’s the nearest place and probably at this hour we’ll have it all to ourselves. The room upstairs is rather nice if you can get a table at the window; but I expect you’ve been there before.”

  “Only once,” said Tom. “With Mr. Holbrook. . . . We had ices.”

  What a thing to say! He could have kicked himself. And he had said it in such a clear voice too—like somebody announcing a hymn. Miss Jimpson would think he was awful! Anybody would, for that matter! And covered with confusion, he determined that he wouldn’t accept an ice even if she offered him one.

  “We’ll have ices,” Miss Jimpson said. “That’s a splendid idea, but I must have tea too.”

  It wasn’t a splendid idea; it was the very reverse; yet if he told her now that he didn’t care for ices it would be a lie. The whole thing had been spoiled just by that one unfortunate speech. “I didn’t mean——” he protested.

  “Here we are,” Miss Jimpson said, not listening to him, but passing under the striped red-and-white awning into the shop, so that he could only follow her as she walked straight on through it and up the stairs at the back. The stairs led to a bright sunny room on the first floor, containing half a dozen small white-clothed tables; and, to add to his embarrassment, the very first thing he saw was Brown seated at one of these. He was indeed the only person there, and Miss Jimpson nodded to him and smiled, while Brown smiled back and stared at them , though without ceasing to absorb refreshment. It was like him to come here and gorge himself in solitude. Tom could see from the two empty dishes that it was his third ice he was finishing. He had always more money than anybody else, and he spent practically the whole of it on grub. Miss Jimpson passed on to a table placed in the bow-window, and as Tom was following her, Brown stuck out a treacherous foot over which he came to grief.

  “Sorry, Skinny!” Brown whispered, abstracting the last remains of his ice with a red and flexible tongue; but Tom, whose face was now the colour of Brown’s tongue, ignored the apology and hurried after Miss Jimpson.

  He sat down opposite her and refrained from glancing round, though he could hardly help doing so when he heard Brown pushing back his chair. He listened to his footsteps crossing the room, and a moment later clattering down the stairs.

  Well, Brown was gone—that was one comfort—and he breathed more freely. All the same, he wished Brown hadn’t been there at all, for he knew the sort of story he would make of it. He would accuse Tom of being Miss Jimpson’s pet and of sucking up to her: it would be all over the school to-morrow, with additions and embellishments of the kind that Brown thought funny. If he did try to be funny, Tom determined that he would jolly well remind him of the ass he had made of himself, standing up on the form flapping his wings. You would have thought after such an exhibition he might have kept quiet for a bit, but he seemed to have forgotten about it already. Other people wouldn’t have forgotten, though; no fear of that: and it was the first time within Tom’s memory that Brown had placed himself in a position when he could be ragged. . . .

  Only there was nobody to rag him. Tom’s brief elation sank as he remembered Brown’s powers of retaliation. He knew very well that even if he had the courage to attempt it, it wouldn’t come off. You can’t rag people like Brown. For one thing, they don’t care, and for another, Brown would rather like it, because it would give him an excuse to resort to physical measures, which he would pursue happily until Tom apologized.

  Still, he was glad that Henry had tried to turn Brown into a bird. He hadn’t succeeded, but he had at least made him look a fool. Henry almost deserved a saucer of cream for that. Unless Brown really had done it on purpose; and somehow, in spite of Miss Jimpson’s doubts, it now seemed to Tom that this was more likely to be the truth. Anyhow it was what he would say and what the others would think. Besides, Miss Jimpson secretly, Tom thought, had let it pass because she didn’t much care about tackling Brown, and after all, everybody had been making a row. To connect it with Henry was nonsense. That part, he knew, he was just pretending, in order to make it more exciting and mysterious. And he felt a sudden inclination to talk to Miss Jimpson about Henry. It was rotten that he couldn’t. But she would think he was either mad or else silly. That was the worst of it. He wished he knew somebody like the Blakes to whom you could talk about such things. The only possible person Tom had was Pascoe, who wasn’t really possible except in the sense that he never repeated what you told him. As for believing, or half belie
ving, or even pretending to believe (which was really all that was necessary), Pascoe was no good at all. He was too literal, too matter-of-fact, too like the celebrated child of six.

  The temptation to experiment on Miss Jimpson was strong, and Tom very nearly yielded to it. Was there the slightest chance that she was less commonsensical than she looked? Spoon in hand, he gazed at her over his strawberry ice. Should he throw out just one cautious hint and see what happened? But he knew what would happen, what invariably happened, and since she had already said that she thought him strange, there didn’t seem to be much use in making her think him stranger. In his uncertainty he kept on glancing at her until suddenly he perceived that she had noticed this and was evidently puzzled by it. So he looked out of the window instead, watching the people passing on the opposite side of the road.

  “If I weren’t practically sure that I know them already,” was Miss Jimpson’s not very original remark, “I might be inclined to risk a penny.”

  Tom turned round from the window. How could she possibly know them? She didn’t, of course, but he had better make certain. “What was I thinking?” he demanded.

  “That I ought to have passed the age for ices,” said Miss Jimpson. “Nothing but disapproval can explain that frowning brow.” Then, rather curiously, she asked the point-blank question: “How old do you think I am, Barber? Or Tom; for I’m going to call you Tom now that we’re alone.”

  Tom hesitated—not because he couldn’t give a pretty good guess at Miss Jimpson’s age, but because he knew most people preferred to be thought younger than they were.