“I am,” he said.
When I had got over the shock of this disclosure, which quite took away my powers of speech, my first impulse was to feel aggrieved. Why hadn’t they told me? I might have made an even worse fool of myself. Then, with still greater force, it struck me that I ought to have known. It had been obvious from the start, too obvious. But I was like that. Two and two never made four for me, if I could make them five.
“Oughtn’t I to call you ‘my lord’?” I asked at length.
“Oh no,” he said, “not in ordinary conversation. Perhaps if you were writing me a begging letter.… But Trimingham is quite in order, if you prefer it to Hugh.”
I was amazed at his condescension. The equivocal unmistered Trimingham I had pictured to myself vanished utterly, to be replaced by the ninth Viscount, whom I somehow felt to be nine times as glorious as the first. I had never met a lord before, nor had I ever expected to meet one. It didn’t matter what he looked like: he was a lord first, and a human being, with a face and limbs and body, long, long after.
“But you haven’t told me your name,” he said.
“It’s Colston,” I brought out with difficulty.
“Mr. Colston?”
I blushed at the hit, though it was a very gentle one.
“Well, Leo is my Christian name.”
“Then I shall call you Leo if I may.”
I mumbled something. I’m afraid he must have noticed the alteration in my manner: the sidesman and the verger had shown much more pride of bearing than I did.
“Does Marian call you Leo?” he asked suddenly. “I noticed you were talking to her this morning.”
“Oh yes, she does,” I said enthusiastically. “And I call her Marian, she asked me to. Don’t you think she is a rip-ping girl?”
“Why yes, I do,” he said.
“I call her spifflicating … A 1 … I don’t know what to call her.” I wound up lamely: “I’d do anything for her.”
“What would you do?”
I scented a trap in this; I felt I had been caught boasting. There was so little I could do for her that would sound important. Thinking of what it was within the compass of small boys to do, I said:
“If a big dog attacked her, I could go for it, or of course I could run errands for her—you know, carry things and take messages.”
“That would be most useful,” said Lord Trimingham, “and kind as well. Would you like to take her a message now?”
“Crikey, yes. What shall I say?”
“Tell her I’ve got her prayer-book. She left it behind in church.”
Always glad to run, I trotted off. Marian was walking with a man, one of last night’s new-comers. I circled round them.
“Please, Marian,” I said, trying not to seem to interrupt, “Hugh asked me to tell you—”
She looked down at me, puzzled.
“Who asked you to tell me?”
“Yes, Hugh asked me to tell you—”
“But,” she said quite kindly but with a touch of impatience, “how can I tell who asked you to tell me?”
The words “Hugh,” “you,” and “who” danced before my mind and I was terribly embarrassed. “Not who,” I stammered, “Hugh.”
She still looked blank, and I said:
“Hugh, you know, Hugh the Viscount.”
They both laughed.
I was terribly ashamed. I thought she would think I was making free with his Christian name. “Did I say it wrong?” I asked. “He asked me to call him Hugh,” I added. I had only seen the word written and had forgotten how he pronounced it.
“Yes, but not who,” she said. “Hugh, like—well, stew, or phew, or whew. What words! Still, I ought to have known, I wasn’t thinking.… What did Hugh say?”
“He said he’d got your prayer-book. You left it behind in church.”
“How careless of me! I seem to forget everything. Please thank him.”
I trotted back to Lord Trimingham and gave him Marian’s message.
“Is that all she said?” he asked. He seemed disappointed. Perhaps he expected, as I had, that she would come and claim the prayer-book at once.
Outside the front door a high dogcart was drawn up. Its wheels were painted black and yellow; they had very thin spokes and were shod with indiarubber. A groom was standing by the horse’s head.
“Do you know whose turn-out that is?” asked Lord Trimingham. He seemed to have recovered from his disappointment over the prayer-book.
I said I didn’t.
“It’s Franklin, Dr. Franklin. You mustn’t call him Mister. He’s not a surgeon.”
I didn’t quite see the point of this, but I laughed dutifully. I had taken a great liking to Lord Trimingham though I couldn’t have told whether I liked the Viscount or the man.
“Doctors always come at lunch-time, it’s one of their rules,” he said.
I was emboldened to ask: “But how did you know it was Dr. Franklin?”
Lord Trimingham gave a little shrug. “Oh, I know everyone round here,” he said.
“Of course it all belongs to you really, doesn’t it?” I asked. Then I brought out a phrase I had been pondering over. “You are a guest in your own house!”
He smiled. “And very pleased to be,” he said, a little crisply.
After luncheon, just as I was about to scamper off, Mrs. Maudsley called me to her. It was always difficult for me to approach her, along the beam of that black ray that started from her eye, and I must have given the impression that I went unwillingly.
“Marcus isn’t very well,” she told me, “and the doctor says we must keep him in bed a day or two. He doesn’t think it’s anything infectious, but to be on the safe side we’re going to change your room. They’re moving your things now, I think. It’s across the passage from your old one—a room with a green baize door. Would you like me to show it to you?”
“Oh no, thank you,” I said, alarmed at the idea. “I know the green baize door.”
“And don’t go in to Marcus,” she called after me as I scurried off.
But presently my steps came slower. Should I have the room to myself, or should I be sharing it? When I opened the door, should I find someone in the room, occupying it and resenting an intruder? Perhaps one of the grown-up guests, who would take up more than his share of the bed, who would have strange ways of dressing and undressing, and might not want me to look at him?
I paused at the door and knocked on the soft baize, a muffled knock. There was no answer, so I went in. I saw at a glance my fears were groundless.
It was a very small room, almost a cell; and the bed so narrow it could only be meant for one person. My things were all there, my hairbrushes, my red collar-box; but all in different places and looking different—and I felt different, too. I tiptoed about, as though exploring a new personality. Whether I was more or less than I had been, I couldn’t decide, but I felt I was cast for a new role.
Then I remembered what Marcus had told me, about changing, and joyfully and furtively—all my movements in the new room were furtive—I began to take off my Eton suit. Then, a Robin Hood in Lincoln green, with a tingling sense of imminent adventure, I started off. I took all the precautions a bandit should take not to be observed, and I am certain no one saw me leave the house.
7
THE THERMOMETER stood at eighty-four: that was satisfactory, but I was confident it could do better.
Not a drop of rain had fallen since I came to Brandham Hall. I was in love with the heat, I felt for it what the convert feels for his new religion. I was in league with it, and half believed that for my sake it might perform a miracle.
Only a year ago I had devoutly echoed my mother’s plaintive cry: “I don’t think this heat can last much longer, do you?” Now the sick self that had set so much store by the temperate was inconceivable to me.
And without my being aware of it, the climate of my emotions had undergone a change. I was no longer satisfied with the small change of experience, which had hitherto
contented me. I wanted to deal in larger sums. I wanted to enjoy continuously the afflatus of spirit that I had when I was talking to Lord Trimingham and he admitted to being a Viscount. To be in tune with all that Brandham Hall meant, I must increase my stature, I must act on a grander scale.
Perhaps all these desires had been dormant in me for years, and the Zodiac had been their latest manifestation. But the difference was this: in those days I had known where I stood; I had never confused the reality of my private-school life with the dreams with which I beguiled my imagination. That they were unattainable was almost their point. I was a schoolboy, assiduously but unambitiously subscribing to the realities of a schoolboy’s life. The schoolboy’s standards were my standards: in my daily life I did not look beyond them. Then came the diary and the persecution; and the success of my appeal for supernatural aid slightly shook my very earthbound sense of reality. Like other dabblers in the black arts, I was willing to believe I had been taken in. But I was not sure; and now, superimposed on the grandeur of the Maudsleys, was the glory of the Triminghams militant here on earth; and the two together had upset the balance of my realistic-idealistic system. Without knowing it, I was crossing the rainbow bridge from reality to dream.
I now felt that I belonged to the Zodiac, not to Southdown Hill School; and that my emotions and my behaviour must illustrate this change. My dream had become my reality; my old life was a discarded husk.
And the heat was a medium that made this change of outlook possible. As a liberating power with its own laws it was outside my experience. In the heat the commonest objects changed their nature. Walls, trees, the very ground one trod on, instead of being cool, were warm to the touch; and the sense of touch is the most transfiguring of all the senses. Many things to eat and drink, which one had enjoyed because they were hot, one now shunned for the same reason. Unless restrained by ice, the butter melted. Besides altering or intensifying all smells, the heat had a smell of its own—a garden smell, I called it to myself, compounded of the scents of many flowers, and odours loosed from the earth, but with something peculiar to itself which defied analysis. Sounds were fewer and seemed to come from far away, as if Nature grudged the effort. In the heat the senses, the mind, the heart, the body, all told a different tale. One felt another person, one was another person.
Instinctively I looked round for Marcus, but Marcus wasn’t there. I should have to spend the afternoon by myself; the others, the companions of the Zodiac, were all engaged on their own high concerns. I would not seek them out. I had lost my fear of them; they would be kind to me if I approached them; but I should be in their way. Also I wanted, I urgently wanted, to be by myself.
How best to explore the heat, that was the question; how best to feel its power and be at one with it. Marcus and I, in our afternoon playtime, had generally hung about the house, whose less exposed ramifications had a fascination for us. I would go farther afield. The only road I knew that was not a carriage road was the path to the bathing-place, and that I took.
Even since yesterday the water-meadow seemed to have dried up. The rusty pools beside the causeway had receded; the willows shimmered in a greyish haze. I wondered if I should find the farmer bathing, but I didn’t; the place was deserted, and without the shouts and the laughter and the splashing, it frightened me as it had the first time—with some suggestion of drowning, I suppose. I mounted the black scaffold, which was almost too hot to touch, and looked down into the mirror that had been shattered by the farmer’s dive. How flawless it was now!—a darker picture of the sky.
I crossed the sluice and followed a path between rushes as tall as I was. Soon came a second, smaller sluice, but with two drop-doors instead of one. I crossed that too, and found myself in a wheat-field. It had been lately reaped; some of the swaths were lying on the ground, others had been gathered into stooks. These had a slightly different outline from our Wiltshire ones and confirmed me in my sense of being abroad.
Here for the first time I regretted my low shoes, for the stubble came over them and pricked my ankles. Still, it was not unpleasant to feel the hard, sharp thrust against my skin. I saw a gate at the far corner and, treading carefully, made my way towards it.
It opened on a deep-rutted farm road. In some places the ruts were so deep and narrow, and baked so hard, that when I put my foot into them (from a feeling that I ought to), I could hardly get it out. Supposing I was left there, held by the foot, flinging myself this way and that, like a stoat in a trap, until help came!
Beyond the fields the road seemed to vanish into the hillside; there was no sign of it on the grey-green rise ahead. But when I got there, I found it turned to the left, and switch-backed its way between spare hedgerows to a farmyard and a cottage. There it ended.
To a boy of my generation a farmyard was a challenge. It was an accepted symbol of romance, like a Red Indian’s wigwam. All sorts of adventures might await one: a fierce sheep-dog, which ought to be braved; a straw-stack, which one must slide down or admit oneself a funk.
There was no one about.
I opened the gate and went in. There, facing me, was a straw-stack with a convenient ladder running up it. Soft-footed, bending down and peering round, I made a reconnaissance. The stack was an old one, half of it had been cut away; but plenty was left to slide down. I didn’t really want to, but there was no excuse whatever not to, if I was to retain my self-respect. I could not help acting as if the eyes of the whole school were on me. Suddenly a slight panic seized me; I longed to get the sliding over; and I omitted a necessary and practical precaution always taken, and without loss of face, by experienced straw-stack sliders: to make a bed of straw to break my fall. I could have done it—there was plenty lying about—but I yielded to my sense of urgency.
The wild rush through the air, so near to flying, enraptured me: it was deliciously cool, for one thing, and devotee of heat though I now was, I saw nothing illogical in also relishing every experience that relieved me of it. I had already made up my mind to repeat the performance several times when crash! my knee hit something hard. It was a chopping-block, I afterwards discovered, submerged by the straw below the stack; but at the moment I could do nothing but moan and watch the blood flow from a long gash under my knee-cap. The fate of Jenkins and Strode flashed through my mind and I wondered if I had broken my bones or given myself concussion.
What should I have done next I don’t know, but the decision was taken out of my hands. Striding across the farmyard came the farmer, a pail of water in each hand. I remembered him—it was Ted Burgess of the swimming-pool, but he clearly didn’t remember me.
“What the devil—!” he began, and his red-brown eyes sparkled with angry lights. “What the hell do you think you’re doing here? I’ve a good mind to give you the biggest thrashing you’ve ever had in your life.”
Oddly enough this didn’t put me against him: I thought it was exactly what an angry farmer ought to say; in a way I should have been disappointed if he had spoken less harshly. But I was terribly frightened, for with his sleeves rolled up on the arms I remembered so well he looked quite capable of carrying out his threat.
“But I know you!” I gasped, as if that was sure to turn away his wrath. “We—we’ve met!”
“Met?” said he disbelievingly. “Where?”
“At the bathing-place,” I said. “You were bathing by yourself … and I came with the others.”
“Ah!” he said, and his voice and manner changed completely. “Then you are from the Hall.”
I nodded with such dignity as I could muster in my semirecumbent position, hunched up, the straws sticking into the back of my neck, feeling, and no doubt looking, very small. Now that a greater physical danger was removed, I was becoming acutely conscious of the pain in my knee. Experimentally I touched the place and winced.
“I suppose we’d better do that up for you,” he said. “Come along. Can you walk?”
He gave me his hand and pulled me up. The knee was stiff and painful, and I coul
d only hobble.
“Lucky it was Sunday,” he said, “or I shouldn’t have been here. I was taking the horses a drink when I heard you holler.”
“Did I holler?” I asked, crestfallen.
“You did,” he said, “but some lads would have cried.”
I appreciated the compliment and felt I must make him some return.
“I saw you dive,” I said. “You did it jolly well.”
He seemed pleased and then said: “You mustn’t mind if I spoke to you a bit hasty. That’s the way I am, and these old boys round here, they drive me half demented.”
I did not despise him for changing his tune when he knew where I came from: it seemed to me right, natural, and proper that he should, just as it had seemed right and proper to me to change my tune with Trimingham when I realized that he was a Viscount. I carried my hierarchical principles into my notions of morality, such as they were, and was conscientiously a respecter of persons.
We entered the house, which struck me as a mean abode, through a door that led straight into the kitchen. “This is where I mostly live,” he told me, defensively; “I’m not what you call a gentleman farmer, I’m a working one. Sit down, will you, and I’ll get something to put on that knee.”
It was not until I sat down that I realized how much the knock on my knee had shaken me up.
He came back with a tall bottle labelled “carbolic” and several pieces of rag. Then from the sink he brought a white enamelled bowl and washed the gash, which had ceased to bleed.
“You were lucky,” he said, “that it missed your knickers and your stockings. You might have spoilt that nice green suit.”
Relief surged up in me; I did feel lucky. “Miss Marian gave it to me,” I said. “Miss Marian Maudsley, at the Hall.”
“Oh, did she?” he said, swabbing the knee. “I don’t have much to do with those grand folks. Now this’ll sting a bit.” He soaked a rag in carbolic and dabbed it on the place. My eyes watered but I managed not to flinch. “You’re a Spartan,” he said, and I felt exquisitely rewarded. “Now we’ll tie it up with this.” This was an old handkerchief.