CHAPTER II—CHILDISH SORROWS AND CHILDISH COMFORTERS

In delicate schoolboy slang, I was a new-bug—a thing to be poked and despised, and not to be spoken to for the first few days. There were other new-bugs, which was some consolation; but we were too shy to get acquainted. We moped about the playground sullen and solitary, like crows on a plowed field. Every now and then some privileged person, who was not a new-bug, would bang our shins with a hockey-stick; after which we would hop about on one leg for a time, looking more like crows than ever.

The Snow Lady had packed fifty oranges in my box. I made holes in the tops of them with my thumb and rammed in lumps of sugar, sucking out the juice. Not because I was greedy, but because there seemed nothing else to do, I ate every one of the fifty the first day. The following night I was ill, which did not help my popularity. One dark-haired person, about my own age, with a jolly freckled face, took particular offense at my misdemeanor. His real name was Buzzard, but he was nicknamed the Bantam because of his size and his temper. He never said a word about the oranges, but he punished me for having been ill by stamping on my toes. He did this whenever he passed me, looking in the opposite direction in an absent-minded fashion. My quietness in putting up with him seemed to irritate him.

The afternoon was frosty; I was hobbling miserably about the playground with Ruthita’s muffler round my throat. It was a delicate baby-pink, and the Bantam easily caught sight of it. He came up and jerking it from me, trod on it. I had never fought in my life, but my wretchedness made me reckless. I thought of little Ruthita and the long cold hours she had spent in making it. It seemed that he had insulted her. I hit him savagely on the nose.

Immediately there were cries of, “A fight! A fight!” Games were stopped. Boys came running from every direction. Even the new-bugs lifted up their heads and began to take an interest in the landscape.

“Now you’ve done it,” the Bantam shouted.

He started out, accompanied by the crowd to the bottom of the playground. I followed. The laboratory, a long black shed, stood there, with a roof of galvanized iron and rows of bottles arranged in the windows. Behind it we were out of sight of masters, unless they happened to be carrying on experiments inside.

A ring was formed. The Bantam commenced to take off his coat and collar. I did likewise. A horrid sickening sense of defenselessness came over me. I experienced what the early Christians must have felt when they gazed round the eager amphitheatre, and heard the lions roaring.

A big fellow stepped up. “Here, new-bug, d’you know how to fight?”

When I shook my head, he grinned at me cheerfully. “Hold your arms well up, double your fists, and go for him.”

The advice was more easy to give than to put into action. The Bantam was on top of me in a flash. He made for my face at first, but I lowered my head and kept my arms up, so he was content to pummel me about the body. He hurt, and hurt badly; I had never been treated so roughly.

Something happened. Perhaps it was a fierce realization of the injustice of everything—the injustice of being sent there by people whom I loved, the injustice of not being spoken to, the injustice of the boys jeering because I was getting thrashed. I felt that I did not care how much I got damaged if only I might kill the Bantam. He thumped me on the nose as I looked up; my eyes filled with tears. I dashed in at him, banging him about the head. I heard his teeth rattle. I heard the shouting, “Hurrah! Go it, new-bug. Well done, new-bug.” In front of me the wintry sunset lay red. I remember wondering whether it was sunset or blood. Then the Bantam tried to turn and run. I caught him behind the ear. He tripped up and fell. I stood over him, doubtful whether he were dead. Just then the door of the laboratory opened. The boys began to scatter, shouting to one another, “The Creature! Here he comes. The Creature!” The Bantam picked himself up and followed the crowd.

A man came round the side of the shed. He looked something like Dot-and-Carry-One, only he was smaller. His hair was the color of a badger’s, shaggy and unbrushed. His face was stubbly and besmirched with different colored chalks from his fingers. His clothes were stained and baggy. He approached sideways, crabwise, in a great hurry, with one hand stretched out behind and one in front, like flappers. His gestures were those of a servant in a Chinese etching; they made him absurdly conspicuous by their self-belittlement. Beyond everything, he was dirty.

“What they been beating you for?” he inquired in his shorthand way of talking. “You hit him first! What for?” He pulled a stump of a pencil out of his mouth as though he were drawing a tooth. After that I could hear him more clearly. “A muffler? He trod on it? Well, that’s nothing to fight about. Oh, your sister gave it you? That’s different.”

The last two sentences were spoken very gently—quite unlike the rest, which had been angry. “Humph! His sister gave it him!”

He took me by the hand and led me into the shed, closing the door behind him. An iron stove was burning. The outside was red hot; it glowered through the dusk. Running round the sides of the room were taps and basins, and above them bottles. Ranged on the table in the middle were stands, bunsen-burners and retorts. He went silently about his work. He was melting sulphur in a crucible.

Every now and then the sulphur caught and burnt with a violet flame; and all the while it made a suffocating smell.

I felt scared. I didn’t know what he was going to do with me. The boys had called him The Creature, which sounded very dreadful. He had dragged me into his den just like the ogres the Snow Lady read about.

Presently his experiment ended. He gave me a seat by the stove, and came and sat beside me. He didn’t look at all fierce now. He struck me as old and discouraged.

“Always fight for your sister,” he said. Then after a pause, “What’s she called?”

I found myself telling him that she wasn’t really my sister, that her name was Ruthita, and that she had knitted me the muffler. He patted me on the knee as I talked. He might almost have been The Spuffler.

“Boys are horrid beasts,” he said. “They don’t mean to be unkind. They, don’t think—that’s all. Soon you’ll be one of them.”

He led the way out of the laboratory, turning the key behind him. The bell in the tower was ringing for supper. The school was all lit up. He climbed the railing which divided the playground from the football field, telling me to follow. We passed across the meadows to the village, which lay on the northward side of Eden Hill; it snuggled among trees. The cottages were straw-thatched. Frost glistened on the window-panes, behind which lamps were set. Unmelted snow glimmered here and there in the gardens in patches among cabbage stumps. We turned in at a gate. The Creature raised the latch of the door and we entered.

How cozy the little house was after the bare stone corridors and cold, boarded dormitories. All the furnishings of the room into which he led me were worn and out-of-date; but they had a homelike look about them which atoned for their shabbiness. The walls bulged. Pictures hung awry upon them. The springs of the sofa had burst; you sank to an unexpected depth when you sat upon it. The carpet was threadbare; patch-work rugs covered the worst places. Yet for all its poverty, you knew that it was a room in which people had loved and been kind to one another. An atmosphere of memory hung about it.

The Creature appeared to be his own house-keeper. He left me alone while he went somewhere into the back to get things ready. I could hear him striking matches and jingling cups against saucers.

As I sat looking curiously round at wax-fruit in glass-cases and a stuffed owl on the mantel-shelf, the door was pushed open gently. An old lady entered. She trod so lightly, gliding her feet along the floor, that I should not have heard her save for the turning of the handle. She was dressed from head to foot in clinging muslin. Her face and hands were so frail and white that you could almost see through them. Her faded hair fell disordered and scanty about her shoulders. Her eyes were unnaturally large and luminous. She showed no surprise at seeing me. She looked at me so stealthily that she seemed to establish a secret. Crossing her hands on her breast she courtesied, and then asked me as odd a question as was ever addressed to a little boy. “Are you my Lord?”

“If you please, mam,” I faltered, “I’m Dante Cardover.”

Her look of intense eagerness faded, and one of almost childish disappointment took its place. She moved slowly about the room, from corner to corner, bowing to people whom I could not see and whispering to herself.

My host came shuffling along the passage. He was carrying a tea-tray. When he saw the woman, he set it hurriedly down on the table and went quietly towards her. “Gipie,” he said, “Egypt, we’re not alone; we have a guest. Tell them to go away.”

He spoke to her soothingly, as though she were a child. Her eyes narrowed, the strained far-away expression left her face. She made a motion with her hand, dismissing the invisible persons. He led her to me. It was strange to see a grown woman follow so obediently.

“Gipie,” he said, “I want you to listen to me. This boy is my friend. They were fighting him up there,” jerking his head in the direction of the school. “He’s lonely; so I brought him to you. Tell him that you care.”

The old lady lifted her hands to my shoulders—such pale hands. “I’m sorry,” she said. It was like a child repeating a lesson.

He introduced us. “This is my sister, Egypt; and this is Dante Cardover.”

I don’t know what we talked about. I can only remember that the little old man and woman were kind to me and gave me courage. There are desolate moments in life when one hour of sympathy calls out more gratitude than years of easy friendship.

That night as the Creature walked back with me from his cottage, he told me to come to him whenever I was lonely. At the Red House he explained my absence to the house-master. I went upstairs to the dormitory, with its rows of twelve white beds down either side, feeling that I had parted from a friend.

As I undressed in the darkness the Bantam spoke to me. “Didn’t mean to fight you, Cardover. Make it up.”

So I made it up that night with the boy whose nose I had punched. He was a decent little chap when off his dignity. We began to make confidences in whispers; I suppose the darkness helped us. He told me that his father was in India and that he hadn’t got a mother. I told him about the Snow Lady, and Hetty, and Uncle Obad; I didn’t tell him about Ruthita because of the muffler. Then I began to ask him about the Creature. I wanted to know if that was his name. The Bantam laughed. “Course not. He’s Murdoch the stinks’ master. We call him the Creature ’cause he looks like one. Weren’t you funky when he took you to his rabbit-hutch? Was Lady Zion there?”

“Lady Zion?”

“Yes. Lady Zion Holy Ghost she calls herself. She’s his sister, and she’s balmy.”

He was going to enter into some interesting details about her, when the monitor and the elder boys came up. He hid his face in the pillow and pretended to be sleeping soundly.

“The Bantam needs hair-brushing,” the monitor announced. “Here you, wake up. You’re shamming.” He pulled the clothes off the Bantam’s bed with one jerk. The Bantam sat up, rubbing his eyes with a good imitation of having just awakened.

“Out you come.”

One boy held his hands and another his legs, bending his body into a praying attitude. He fought like a demon, but to no purpose. They yanked his night-shirt up, while the monitor laid into him with the bristly side of a hairbrush. He addressed him between each blow. “That’s one for bullying a new-bug. And that’s another for fighting. And that’s another for being licked and getting in a funk, etc.” By the time they had done he was sobbing bitterly. Then the light went out.

I suppose I ought to have been glad at being avenged; but I wasn’t. Somehow I felt that the big boys had punished him not from a sense of justice, but only because they were big and wanted to amuse themselves. Then I got to thinking what a long way off India was, and how dreadful it must make a boy feel never to see his father. It had been a long while dark in the dormitory and almost everyone was breathing heavily. I stretched out my hand across the narrow alley which separated me from the Bantam.

“Bantam,” I whispered.

He snuffled.

“Bantam.”

I felt his fingers clutch my hand. I crept out and put my arms about him. Then I got into his bed and curled up beside him, and so we both were comforted.