CHAPTER XXIII—TEDDY AND RUDDY

Fear is a form of loneliness; it was Ruddy who cured Teddy of that.

For years they had met in Orchid Lodge and up and down Eden Row, nodding to each other with the contemptuous tolerance of boys whose parents are friends. It was the shared memory of the adventure in the woodland that brought them together.

Two days after his return from the farm he stole out into Eden Row as night was falling. In the park, across the river, the bell for closing time was ringing. On tennis courts, between slumbering chestnuts, men in flannels were putting on their coats and gathering their shoes and rackets, while slim wraiths of girls waited for them. They swept together and drifted away through the daffodil-tinted dusk. Clear laughter floated across the river and the whisper of reluctantly departing footsteps. Park keepers, like angels in Eden, marched along shadowy paths, herding the lovers and driving them before them, shouting in melancholy tones, “All out. All out.” They seemed to be proclaiming that nothing could last.

“Hulloa!”

Teddy turned to find the sturdy figure in the midshipman’s suit leaning against the railings beside him.

“Must be rather jolly to be like that.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, don’t be a sausage.” Ruddy smiled imperturbably. “To be like them—old enough to put your arm round a girl without making people laugh.”

“Yes.”

Ruddy sank his voice. “Wonder where they all come from. Suppose they look quite proper by daylight, as though they’d never speak to a chap.”

The crowd was pouring out from the gates and melting away by twos and twos. Each couple seemed to walk in its own separate world, walled in by memories of tender things done and said. As they passed beneath lamps, the girls drew a little apart from their companions; but as they entered long intervals of twilit gloom their propriety relaxed.

Turning away from the river, the boys followed the crowd at random. Once Ruddy hurried forward to peer into a girl’s face as she passed beneath a lamp. She had flaxen hair which broke in waves about her shoulders.

Teddy flushed. He had wanted to do it himself, but something had restrained him. Secretly he admired Ruddy’s boldness. “Don’t do that,” he whispered.

“She looked pretty from the back,” Ruddy explained. “Wanted to see by her face whether her boy had been kissing her. You are a funny chap.”

They got tired of wandering. On the edge of a low garden wall, with their backs against the railing, they seated themselves. It was in a road of small villas, dotted with golden windows and shadowy with the foam of foliage.

Ruddy pulled out a cigarette. “I liked her most awfully. Us’ally I don’t like girls.”

“Desire?” Teddy’s heart bounded at being able to speak her name so frankly.

“Desire. Yes. I’ve got an idea that she’s a sort of relation. Ma won’t tell a thing about her. I can’t ask Hal—he’s too cut up. When I speak to Harriet, she says ‘Hush.’ There’s a mystingry.”

For a week Ruddy opened his heart wider and wider, till he had all but confessed that he was in love with Desire. Then one day, with the depressed air of a conspirator, he inveigled Teddy into the shrubbery of Orchid Lodge.

“Want to ask you something. You think I’m in love with that kid, Desire, don’t you? Well, I’m not.”

“I’m glad you’re not, because—you oughtn’t to be. Why you oughtn’t to be, I can’t tell you.”

“But I never was.”

“Oh, weren’t you?” Teddy shrugged his shoulders.

Up went Ruddy’s fists. His face grew red and his eyes became suspiciously wet. “You’re the only one who knows it. You’ve got to say I wasn’t. If you don’t, I’ll fight you.”

“But you’ve just said that I’m the only one who knows it. You silly chump, you’ve owned that you were in love.”

Ruddy stood hesitant; his fists fell “Don’t know what God’ll do to me. I’ve been in love with my——” He gulped. “I’m her uncle.”

For a fortnight he posed as a figure of guilt and hinted darkly at suicide. But the world at fifteen is too adventurous a place for even a boy who has been in love with his niece to remain long tragic. It was on this dark secret of his unclehood, that his momentous friendship with Teddy was founded. Mrs. Sheerug approved of it; she did all that she could to encourage it. She sent him to Mr. Quickly’s school in Eden Row which Teddy attended. From that moment the boys’ great days began.

It was Ruddy who invented one of their most exciting games, Enemies or Friends. This consisted in picking out some inoffensive boy from among their school-fellows and overwhelming him with flatteries. He was made the recipient of presents and invited to tea on half-holidays, till his suspicions of evil intentions were quite laid to rest. Then one afternoon, when school was over, he was lured into Orchid Lodge to look at the pigeons. Once within the garden walls, Orchid Lodge became a brigand’s castle, the boy a captive, and Ruddy and Teddy his captors. The boy was locked up in the tool-shed for an hour and made to promise by the most fearful threats not to divulge to his mother what had delayed him. Intended victims of this game knew quite well what fate was in store for them; a rumor of the brigands’ perfidy had leaked out. The chief sport in its playing lay in the Machiavellian methods employed to persuade the latest favorite that, whatever had happened to his predecessors, he was the great exception, beloved only for himself.

Opportunity for revenge arrived when Teddy’s first attempt at authorship was published. Mr. Quickly, the Quaker headmaster, brought out a magazine each Christmas to which his students were invited to contribute. Teddy’s contribution was entitled The Angel’s Sin. Perhaps it was inspired by remorse for his misdoings. Dearie nearly cried her eyes out when she read it, she was so impressed by its piety. But it moved his school-fellows to ridicule—especially the much-wronged boys who had spent an hour in the tool-shed. They recited it in chorus between classes; they followed him home reciting it; they stood outside the windows of his house and bawled it at him through the railings. “Heaven was silent, for one had sinned. Before the throne of God a prostrate figure lay. But the throne was wrapped in clouds. A voice rang out,” etc.

“They have no souls,” his mother whispered comfortingly.

The Angel’s Sin cost the brigands many bruises and their mothers much repairing of torn clothing. Teddy’s mother declared that it was all worth it—she had spent her life in paying the price for having genius in her family; Mrs. Sheerug was doubtful Ruddy was loyal in his public defense of Teddy, but secretly disapproving. “Stupid ass! Why did you do it? Why didn’t you write about pirates? Might have known we’d get ragged.”

Teddy shook his head. He was quite as much puzzled as Ruddy. “Don’t know. It just came to me. I had to do it.”

The Christmas holidays brought a joyous week. Teddy had a cold and was kept in bed. The light was too bad for painting, so his father came and sat with him.

“You’re younger than you were, chappie—more like what I used to be at your age. That young ruffian’s doing you good. What d’you play at?”

When penny dreadfuls were mentioned, Jimmie Boy closed one eye and squinted at his son humorously. “That’s not much of a diet—not much in keeping with The Ange’s Sin and a boy who’s going to be a genius. Tell you what I’ll do; let’s have Ruddy in and I’ll reform you.”

Then began a magic chain of nights and days. As soon as the breakfast-tray had been carried down, Jimmie Boy would commence his reading. It was Margaret of Valois that he chose as being the nearest thing in literature to a penny dreadful. Teddy, lying cosily between sheets, would listen to the booming voice, which rumbled like a gale about the pale walls of the bedroom. Seated in a great armchair, with his pipe going like a furnace and his knees spread apart before the fire, his rebel father acted out with his free hand all the glorious love scenes and stabbings. Ruddy, stretched like a dog upon the floor, his elbows digging into the carpet, gazed up at Jimmie Boy adoringly. For a week they kept company with kings and queens, listening to the clash of swords and witnessing the intrigue of stolen kisses. They wandered down moonlit streets of Paris, were present at the massacre of St. Batholomew’s Eve, and saw the Duchess of Guise, having rescued Coconnas from the blades of the Huguenots, hide him, dripping with blood, in her secret closet.

When Margaret of Valois was ended, Hereward the Wake followed, and then Rienzi.

“And that’s literature,” Jimmie Boy told them. “How about your penny dreadfuls now?”

In the afternoons Dearie would join them. “You three boys,” she called them. She always made a pretense that she was intruding, till she had been entreated in flowery romance language to enter. Then, sitting on the bed like a tall white queen, her hand clasped in Teddy’s, she would watch dreamily, with those violet eyes of hers, the shaggy head of Jimmie Boy tossing in a melody of words.

It was this week, with its delving into ancient stories, that taught him what his parents’ love really meant—it was a rampart thrown up by the soul against calamity. They had been poor and harassed and disappointed. There had been times when they had spoken crossly. But in their hearts they still stood hand-in-hand, always guarding a royal place in which they could be happy.

“I say,” whispered Ruddy, “your people—they’re toppers. Let’s go slow on the penny dreadfuls.”