The Quaint Companions

"We learn to stand things as we get older," she replied. "What can't be cured must be endured, Vivie."

"He's such a – I mean leaving his being a negro out of it altogether – he's such a cad. It does lick me how you ever did it, mater!"

"Did it?" she murmured. Her heart missed a beat.

"Well, married him! You never got on with him – I don't see how you could have expected to. Why, I can remember your rows when I was a kid. I think it was awful. I can't make out how you could do it, I'm hanged if I can!"

She winced – the colour in her face fluttered a little. For an instant she was ashamed. Her son looked very tall to her, and her sale looked very foul. But when she answered, her tone was saint-like.

"I had a great deal to consider, dear," she said, "more than you are old enough to understand. To begin with, there was you. And another thing: I was very young, and your grandmother – Anyhow I did do it, and we must make the best of it, Vivie, while it lasts."

She drew his arm round her waist, and was humiliated to feel that it lay there limply. They strolled for a minute in silence, both thinking of the last words that had escaped her.

"It's beastly, going out with him, you know," went on the boy. "And he's got no tact – you'd think he'd know a fellow didn't like it! We met some chaps in Regent Street the other day – chaps in the Fourth; I saw 'em grin as they went by. He didn't see. He was as cool as a cucumber – lugged me into a shop and stood tuck. He'd have lugged them in too, if I'd given him half a chance. You'd have been much happier if you hadn't taken him, mater; it would have been a jolly sight better for both of us."

"Not for you," she said; "I'm sure of that, I've always felt that. Of course there are drawbacks for you now, but, later on, you'll appreciate the benefits. I'm sure that when you're older you'll say I didn't make the sacrifice for nothing. I found it hard to do – I prayed to God to make me strong enough; but the knowledge that I was able to bring you up to be a gentleman has helped me to bear it all." She nodded sadly. "When you're a man, and getting on, you needn't see any more of him than you want to!" she added.

So when Vivian went back to the school, David went too; and the little mulatto's experiences there did nothing to lessen the sensitiveness that had been bred in him. He found his form-mates brutal, and his masters contemptuous. Probably he exaggerated their contempt – circumstances had made him morbid – but those with whom he was brought in contact were not magnanimous, and neither his race nor his temperament was any passport to their favour.

He was bullied atrociously. The taunt of "dirty nigger" embittered his life. When it could not be made aloud, it was written on scraps of paper and passed to him under cover of Latin grammars. A favourite amusement of the form was to pin him to the ground while one of the number set fire to his hair, and when it was discovered that he was the weakest among them, they punched his head and wrenched his ears twenty times a day. Often he used to drag himself away from their sports, to hide in the Gothic corridors, or slink round the great cricket field, crying with pain; but to be found "blubbing" meant worse pain to follow, for then half-a-dozen stalwart lads would hack his shins, and twist his puny arms till he writhed on his knees in agony.

What he dreaded most were the classes which were held twice a week in an annexe of the college. The master who took these always withdrew for five or ten minutes in the middle of the afternoon, and no sooner had he gone than a shower of blows drove David to mount a desk by the window and keep watch, while the other boys had larks. The outcome was always the same. His cry of "Cave!" suppressed the frolics in good time, but the uplifted face of the little beaten sentry through the glass met the master's eyes the instant he set foot in the courtyard, and he re-entered with a stereotyped inquiry:

"Has anybody moved here besides Lee?"

To this there was a chorus of "No, sir."

Then he said, "Lee, fifty lines;" and by-and-by he came to say, "Two hundred lines." So twice a week David got an imposition as well as the kicks and blows. Apparently it never struck the man as noteworthy that the undesirable post of sentinel was always filled by the same boy; it never occurred to him to draw deductions from the fact. He was abnormally obtuse, even for a schoolmaster.

Elisha had not been sent to a public school himself, and when David went home, a false shame kept him from-owning that he was ill-treated. However, as he got bigger, the worst of his physical sufferings ceased. But he was always twitted with his colour, always made to feel that he was a lower thing than the lusty young English lads who insulted him with filthy verses and obscene cartoons. He never found a chum in the college in all the terms that he was there; his real companion was his father in the holidays.

It was a queer fellowship between the morbid youth and the despised husband. Before David was sixteen, he was Lee's confidant in all matters. He heard about his debts and debauches, and his difficulty in reconciling the diminished income with the expenses. He also advised. Though the fees remained the same, the engagements were far fewer, and the prodigal father waded in a sea of debt perpetually now; he talked of the money "I used to make," and of "What my voice was once." There was an afternoon in the practice-room when he gave way to despair, sobbing across the piano like a mourner across a grave; but that was after a late night when his nerves were out of order. David prescribed a couple of glasses of port and a cigar for him, and he was soon cheerful enough to suggest a dinner up West. The tenor and his ugly son were familiar figures in the Regent Street restaurants, "Café, and Café-au-lait" somebody had nick-named them.

At the age of sixteen "Café-au-lait" was a man in his knowledge of one side of life – a man in his reflections and self-restraint – though he still trembled under the masters' glances, and boggled over his Cæsar. He boggled, indeed, over everything except the very occasional essays that demanded no dry-as-dust facts; when he was at liberty to draw on his imagination the essays were a pleasure to him. Lee's was not the nature to expurgate the subject which rankled in him most, and the warning that had escaped him to the child was amplified a thousandfold to the boy.

David understood. Marriage had spoilt his father's life; marriage was the forbidden fruit in his own. The warnings seemed superfluous to him, after what he had seen at home and at school. He no longer wanted to know a girl; he laughed when Lee said, "Remember all I've told you when you're mad about some woman yourself. Your wife would treat you as your mother has treated me. You'd suffer hell every time a white man spoke to her."

"There's no fear of my ever marrying, father."

"Ah!" said Lee, who knew more of temptation.

"I've seen too much."

"But you haven't seen the woman. When she comes along you'll fool yourself. She'll be 'so different' from everybody else; I thought your mother 'so different' before I got her. By God, we hadn't been married a month when she threw it in my face that I was a negro!"

David brought him some verses one day, and asked him nervously if they could be set and sung. For the first time he was timid with his father.

Lee said, "Why do you break your head in your holidays writing things? You're always scribbling in your bedroom, I hear. What do you write about, sonny?"

David looked more confused still.

"Things come," he said; "there's so much to write about. I hope – "

"What do you hope?"

"I hope I shall always write. I've got it in me," he blurted.

"You just pray for a voice instead," his father answered; "it will pay you a heap better. Let fools hammer out the words for you! It's not the chaps that write things who have good times, my boy; it's the fellows that sing, or publish 'em." He read the lines slowly, while the author trembled. "I don't understand what it's meant to be," he said; "is it a hunting song? It's all about the fox's suffering, instead of the people's sport."

David winced: "The fox does suffer, doesn't he?"

"I daresay; but the people enjoy themselves. A hunting song must be jolly – Pink and Tallyho! Have you ever been to a meet? It's a very pretty sight, let me tell you."

"I know it is; but I didn't try to feel like the people who dress up to kill the fox – I tried to feel like the fox they all want to kill."

"What's the good of that? Foxes don't, buy songs. You should have thought about the fun and the cheers. It's all on the wrong side; it's wrong-headed, that's what it is."

"I did think about the cheers – I thought how they must sound to the fox. And I thought when he sees a crowd of big men and women on horses, with a pack of hounds, chasing him to death, the field must look like the world to his fright. He has run till he's breathless, his legs 'll hardly carry him. The crowd are gaining on him and his heart feels as if it's going to burst. They swoop nearer and nearer, and he's bedraggled, and panting, and dead beat. Oh yes, I thought of the cheers – he hears them right to the end. And then the dogs fall on him – such a lot of dogs – and a man sticks a knife into his body, and the lady who's there when he dies carries away a piece of the corpse, and feels proud. It sounds like a game of savages, father."

"Whatever it is, you won't alter it, sonny. You don't suppose you're going to make the world any better?"

This was really David's most sanguine hope. But he looked modest.

"Anyhow, I can write the truth," he said.

"The truth? Who the devil wants the truth?" replied the nigger. "People hate the truth, especially English people; there's nothing English people detest so much. And they always deny it… I'll tell you what you might do if you feel like that – you might make it a bull-fight and go for the brutality of foreigners. But even then it would be no good for music. If you want to do lyrics, you must write about love, or the valour of Englishmen. Nothing else is any use. Nobody would sing this."

"I don't want to write about love," said David; "I only write what I feel. There are plenty of things in the world besides women and war. 'No good for music'? Why, some of it is music! Listen to this." He declaimed his pet stanza entreatingly, and waxed boastful. "Can't you hear it? They came, the last two lines, all by themselves; they just ran into my head, and sang themselves on to the paper. I know they're good. You'll see! Wait till I'm famous. When I bring out a volume of poems, and everybody is talking about it, you won't think I'm so stupid for wanting to write. I tell you I've got it in me."

"Lord! I wish you had had a better mother," said Lee, dismayed at literary ambition.

Ownie, grown rather stout, and puffy under the eyes, used to read novels in the drawing-room, while the pair strolled up and down the garden, talking. She was forty-nine now. When they turned, the lad could see her – the woman who was contemptuous of them both. She wore black; Mrs. Tremlett had recently died. The crape recalled to Lee the little parlour in Regency Square, the period of his courtship.

Her mind was at this time chiefly occupied by the thought of Vivian. He had left school, and she wondered what was to be done with him. He himself had no definite views on the subject. When she broached the matter to him, he said lightly that he was hanged if he knew. On the whole, he thought he preferred the Army, and as the Army was out of the question, he would try his hand at anything they liked. He was cheerful and indifferent.

"Business?" she suggested.

"I don't mind," he said. "Where's the oof to come from, though? Will he part?" Between Ownie and Vivian, Lee was generally referred to as "he."

"I daresay a little could be found to give you a start with, dear, but I don't know what you could do. I had better speak to him about it. You're so young, and you see we don't know many business people."

"I'll tell you what – I'll go to the Cape," he said. "Singleton, a fellow who left last term, is going out there. That would be rather jolly. It would suit me better than an office."

"Go to the Cape?" exclaimed Ownie. "Whatever would you do at the Cape? Don't talk nonsense; I'm not going to have you packed off to the world's end like that. You must stop in London, where I can see you. You're all I've got, remember!" She was hurt that he could propose such a thing.

"Oh, well," he demurred, "that's rot, you know, mater! A fellow can't sit in his mother's lap all his life. Singleton has got a mother too, I suppose, but it doesn't prevent him doing the best he can for himself."

Ownie was silent for a moment. Then she said: "We must try to find you something that you'll like quite as well, dear," and there was a little touch of sadness in her voice. She was reluctant to acknowledge it, but it had forced itself upon her more than once that her handsome young son was a shade selfish. It was the fault that jarred upon her most in others.

Time had not left her complacence unimpaired. The menace of the future was in her reveries, and she had lost her youth, and her figure, and her admirers. Decrepit foreigners who smelt of pomatum, and dyed their moustaches purple, were the only men who languished at her now. Even her youngest captives had ceased to adore her when they heard Vivian, five feet ten in his socks, calling her "Mater." And she had never reproached him, even in her thoughts; she felt it was rather cruel that he wasn't more attached to her.

She very often attempted to discuss the subject of his career with Lee; but Lee found it easier to tip his stepson an occasional sovereign and let him loaf, than to give the matter serious consideration. Vivian was idle for the best part of a year; and when he made a beginning it was only in a West-End concert-hall as assistant business-manager. It was a depressing drop from the altitude on which his mother had foreseen him – he was paid thirty shillings a week, and the position was quite subordinate. But unless she sold some of her jewellery to put him into a profession, there seemed to be nothing else for him to do – and he did not incline to any profession except the Army.

So the elder boy went to town every day now and began to cultivate the air of an impresario, and the younger continued to meet his Muse clandestinely in the college grounds and write surreptitious verse. Then, in the middle of a term – one morning during the Euclid hour – he was summoned from the college by telegram, and sped to the station sick with fear. Lee was in the provinces, very ill.

CHAPTER VIII

In the first days of an intended tour he had taken a slight cold. He had to leave for Birmingham on the morrow, and he reached it chilled and shivering. To sing was out of the question. He remained in the hotel, and ordered hot drinks and additional blankets. Next morning he woke with a cough, and sent for a doctor; but the cough grew worse in spite of medical aid, and when he was joined by a companion whom he had been expecting, he was found in bed with pneumonia.

He was asleep when David arrived. In the sitting-room the companion was having dinner. David accepted her presence without astonishment. She said she supposed he must be hungry, and told him to ring the bell; he answered that he was not hungry in the least. She had peroxide-of-hydrogen hair, and painted cheeks, and a coarse voice. He sat in an armchair by the fire, and looked at her.

"How soon shall I be able to go in?" he asked, trembling.

"They'll tell 'im you're here when 'e wakes up," she said, with her mouth full. "You'd better have something to eat, you know. 'David' your name is, isn't it?"

"Yes. I couldn't eat anything, thank you. Who is taking care of him?" He knew already that the companion wasn't.

"The doctor sent round two nurses from the hospital – a day nurse and a night nurse. He's in a bad way. You should see how thin 'e's got."

"Will he – get well?" inquired his son, with a jerk.

"Let soap so," said the woman. She refilled her glass, and emptied the bottle. "Have some champagne?"

He shook his head. "I wish he'd wake."

"You better had," she rejoined; "there's nothing like champagne when you're feeling low." The waiter reappeared with the sweets. "Bring up another bottle," she said, "and a green chartrooze. I don't think I'll take any of those. What's that one – the floppy thing with the pink-and-white stuff on it?"

The waiter murmured that it was trifle.

"No, I don't want any." She made a wretched pun, and told him to pass her the cigarettes. The box was a silver one that belonged to the sick man; the boy winced to see her careless hand thrust in it. He wondered what the waiter thought of her, wondered that his father wasn't ashamed – and knew a gust of self-reproach for condemning him to-night. A lump rose suddenly in his throat, his eyeballs pricked; he stared hard at the fire in a struggle to keep back the tears that were starting… To his shame he felt one trickling down his cheek.

"Don't you smoke?" asked the woman.

"Not now," he muttered, and knew that his voice had betrayed him.

She turned to him surprised. "What's the matter with you?"

"Nothing," he said angrily; "what should there be?"

In the road, a piano-organ reeled out a cadenza, and then stopped short. After the sharp silence that ensued, the roll of the traffic seemed to fill the room. The cork popped, and he drank his wine at a draught.

"Go on."

"I don't want any more."

"Sure?" She tilted her glass. "Well, here's to Temperance, and down with champagne!"

Though he no longer watched her, he was intensely conscious of her presence; it weighed upon his senses, he resented it with every nerve. The odour of her cigarette permeated his thoughts while he waited, and he fancied that he could hear her breathe.

The nurse came in, and said that Lee was asking for him. She warned him not to remain more than a few minutes. The sight of her strengthened the boy. As he followed this clean-faced woman in her sober dress, a tinge of confidence lightened his apprehension.

Lee had altered painfully. His words were whispers. In the first moments there seemed something unreal in seeing him lying there so weak.

"Davie."

"Father."

"Sit down."

"Why didn't you wire before, father?"

"It was time enough."

"You're getting on nicely, they say."

"Perhaps."

"Do they know at home?"

Lee bent his head. "The papers. But I don't want her here. I told her she needn't come."

"But she may, and – "

"Oh no; she won't want to."

There was a pause. Then he said in firmer tones:

"This is a bad business, sonny."

"It'll be all right."

"Have you seen Julia?"

"The woman in there? Yes."

"She's a good sort, Julia – looks after everything. Most of 'em would have cleared out and left me."

David wondered what awaited her elsewhere. He turned very cold – the illusion frightened him, for in health Lee had had no illusions.

"A good sort," murmured the man, "eh?"

"Yes," said the boy, faintly.

"She's got a friend here now – comes in to see her sometimes – but it must be very slow for her; not many women would have stopped. See that she's comfortable, Davie."

"I'll see to it, father."

Lee closed his eyes, and his thoughts wandered through the years to a morning when he followed a widow about Brighton, and overtook her on Marine Parade. The sun shone out to him again, and he heard the wash of the waves on the beach. He came back to David.

"If I don't pull through, it'll be an awful mess," he said. "God knows what I owe I I wish I'd put a bit by for you."

"You'll have plenty of time to put by in, father. Don't talk nonsense about not pulling through; in a month you'll be as strong as ever."

The woman who was called Julia opened the door, and whisked over to the dressing-table.

"Sorry to bother," she said; "there's another bill from the chemist's come in; I've got no money left."

"Take some," said the dying man. "Where do you keep the key?"

She unlocked the drawer, and whisked out again. There had been a rustle of bank-notes.

"A good sort, Julia," he repeated; "looks after everything. I must give her something, Davie… There's my scarf-pin somewhere about – it'll do for her tie."

David left him soon, mindful of the nurse's instructions, and at nine o'clock the doctor paid another visit.

"I should like to have a physician down from town, if you don't mind," stammered the lad; "the best we can get."

"Just as you please," said the practitioner, stiffly. "But the treatment in these cases – "

David felt shy, and was annoyed with himself for being so. The sense, inherited and acquired, of racial inferiority cowed him as he opposed his opinion to the authoritative stranger's.

"Yes, if you don't mind, I should like a physician," he insisted, after an inward struggle. Embarrassment lent a ring of defiance to his voice, and the doctor thought him a cub.

So the telegram was written, and the cub went out with it himself.

When he returned to the sitting-room, Julia was playing cards for coppers with a faded woman in shabby black, who was presented to him as "Mrs. Hayes." A brandy bottle and a syphon stood between the glasses on the table; and when Mrs. Hayes won a shilling she tittered: "Lucky at love, unlucky at cards, my dear!" As she put on her bonnet, she gave a start. "There! I meant to 'ave bought sixpenn'orth, against my being bad again in the night, dear," she exclaimed; "the pubs 'll be shut by now!" And then her hostess summoned the waiter, and Mrs. Hayes carried another bottle home under her cape.

It was in these surroundings, rather more than a week after the consultation, that the tenor died.

CHAPTER IX

And Ownie – in weeds for the second time in her life – sighed as she had sighed when she lost Harris, "I don't know what will become of me!" Though her youth was gone, her egoism remained, and even the solicitor was touched by the pathos of her helplessness. "I was a good wife," she said, having had a week to convince herself of it; "it's hard that he never made any provision for the future."

David did not return to school, and Vivian, who found his mother's lamentations wearisome when he was at home, began to thaw towards his half-brother, and discussed matters with him.

"The mater is selfish, you know," he said; "she only thinks of herself. It's deuced rough on you and me, but she never talks about that. I suppose we shall have to go into a poky little house somewhere, and pig along with one or two servants eh?" He was unconsciously picturing the environment in which he had been born.

"I suppose so," said David.

"Good Lord! When one remembers all the money that was made, you know, it's awful. They ought to have saved. The idea of spending every bob, and never thinking about to-morrow! I don't blame him any more than her, of course," he added hastily; "it was her fault too; but I wish they had let me go to the Cape. It isn't a lively look-out to live in a tin-pot house here, and come home to find the mater fretting over her lost splendours. That's what it will be – she isn't the woman to be cheerful when things go wrong. I shan't be able to stand it; I know I shan't. I shall cut it after a bit, and take a room up West."

"She won't let you. Besides, she may need your salary."

"What?"

"Well, who's going to keep her if we don't?"

"Oh, I say!" exclaimed Vivian, "do you mean to tell me we shall be as poor as all that?"

"I don't know. I hope we shan't. I'm sure I don't want to live at home either now; but it's likely enough, isn't it?"

Vivian pondered.

"There's her jewellery," he said at last; "that's worth a lump, you know. As to your not living at home either, one of us will have to, it's certain! She can't be left by herself; it wouldn't be right."

"I don't think that my going would trouble her; she has never wanted me. If she does, of course I'll stop. The thing is, I don't know what sort of berth I can expect to get. I'm afraid it won't be very easy for – for a fellow like me to get anything to do, will it?" He tried to force a laugh. "I've never been in demand so far."