LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

would exclaim, and Maud would say: “Do you think there is something worrying the child? Sometimes when children have something on their minds that they don’t know how to tell you about …”

      Pen believed in discipline, and these tantrums somehow seemed always to develop into a personal issue between him and the boy. He was more stern with Dan than with Alastair because he had made up his mind that Dan, unlike Alastair, could be moulded into a Thatcher.

      The victoria had given place to a motorcar as the family conveyance. Going out in the “devil-wagon ,” as Pen called it, was always an adventure; the wheels never quite fitted the ruts in the narrow clay roads, and sometimes they would have to crawl along for miles behind a farmer in a gig who, pretending not to hear their honking, refused to turn out for the city folks and their newfangled contraption. Sometimes they went through the park, past the quarry where workmen had found the mammoth’s tusks, and out to Cholera Point, where years ago during a cholera plague, people had been buried five or six at a time in a great pit. Every August a gipsy caravan bivouacked on the point, now grassy and treeless.

      One Sunday in August they drove there, Joanna sitting beside her mother, Pen on the seat between the two boys to keep them from fighting.

      “Mother, why do gipsies live in carts?”

      “Gipsies are like that, Dan. They live on kekkeno mush’s poov ; that means no man’s land. They are queer people, dears. They come when they like and go when they like.”

      “It must be fun not to live in a house and go where you like. Mother, do they like it?”

      “I expect they do.”

      “And do they do what they like, Mother?”

      “Well, not exactly. No one does. But they do what they like more than most people. They have the sun and stars over them, and they don’t care much what people think of them.”

      “I wish I were a gipsy. Could I be a gipsy when I grow up, do you think?”

      Maud gave Pen a queer look.

      “My dear boy,” said Pen. “You can get away from most people, but there is one person you can’t get away from. Do you know whom I mean?”

      “No, Father, who?”

      “You can’t get away from yourself. Don’t try.”

      “Why aren’t we all gipsies?” asked Dan.

      “A man maun dree his weird,” said Maud. This proverb was one of several she had inherited from her ancestors; these sayings were her only obvious link with Scotland.

      Dan could not tell when he had first realized that his father was not happy like Mother or Uncle Charles or Aunt Fanny. Father talked to you as if you were a grown-up . This was flattering, but you never felt quite as much at ease as you did with Uncle Charles. You could never be with Father without knowing you were being taught. But Dan admired his father tremendously and was a little afraid of him. His father knew everything. And he kept on pounding at people — and they listened! He was never unfair. Never! But sometimes Dan felt dimly that he was not angry at anything Dan had done but at Dan himself.

      “Well, laddie, dreaming as usual?” asked Maud with a smile in her voice.

      “I hope I don’t have to grow up,” said Dan, suddenly listless.

      “Why ever not?”

      “I don’t want to. I might have to do things I don’t want to.”

      II

      Peace reigned at the breakfast table. The children had passed the age when their attention had, figuratively speaking, to be caught and rubbed into the porridge, and they ate with silent fervour, thinking of what they would do with the summer day. The gipsies were at Cholera Point again, Uncle Charles said, and there was going to be a gipsy wedding.… Pen, whose vitality was low in the morning, had shut himself off from the world behind a newspaper. Civilized people, he believed, ought not to speak to one another until after breakfast. Maud was reading her letters.

      The psychic sense possessed by experienced husbands told Pen that Maud had ceased reading and was waiting for him to look up. With a sigh he put down the paper and asked: “What is it, Maud?”

      “Oh, nothing, Pen.”

      That sounded dangerous to his peace of mind. With apprehension he asked: “Whom is the letter from?”

      “Murdo.”

      “What does he say?”

      Maud scanned Murdo’s letter again hurriedly. It was written in his bold, impatient hand with two ink splotches from a too vigorously dotted i. … “The children must be getting past the puppy stage,” Murdo had written. “Do bring them up, Maud, with some regard for the past; anything but this grovelling mediocrity of mind, this cheap scepticism without style or quality. A man ought to believe what his parents teach him to believe. Tell my Ishmaelitish brother-in-law that I’ll christen your children yet, in spite of him!” Maud passed the raw material of this letter through the sieve of her sex, the mesh of which is tact, and began:

      “Murdo is to go to China from Japan. He thinks trouble is brewing in China.” She gave Pen a smile and a little shrug, in which Murdo’s wish to be in the thick of trouble was delicately transformed into a woman’s humorous comment on the sex in general. “Murdo says his hair is turning grey.” Maud smiled uneasily under the special quality of his look, and uttered the unspoken thought between them.

      “We are, too,” she said.

      Pen dwelt on the picture of Murdo facing the little death of middle age. “So he goes off to China to find trouble,” he thought.

      “Murdo mailed the letter at Shanghai just before sailing. He’s staying with us just long enough to do his business — less than a week. He says the West upsets him. Then he is going back by way of England.”

      “I see,” said Pen.… Out of the corner of his eye he observed that Daniel was kicking Alastair under the table — or was it Alastair kicking Daniel? “Boys!” he said sharply. Joanna winced at her father’s tone and came behind his chair, smoothing out the frown from his forehead; she could not bear to see anyone frown. “Daddy, are you good?” she asked anxiously. He could not help smiling.

      The children clattered out of the room.

      “It will be pleasant to see Murdo again,” said Pen generously.

      “Pen, the children will be in their teens before we know it, and we’re not getting younger ourselves. Couldn’t we have them christened? Murdo could do it.” He put his hand over hers, but she stiffened it slightly against him.

      “You want it very much, Maud, don’t you?”

      “It’s right to. After all, we’re Christians.”

      “Do you think Joanna is well enough? … The excitement — you know what the doctor said —”

      “We could have it in Ardentinny.”

      “Well, since you want it so much.… But mind you, my dear, I’ll have no one for godfather but myself. That’s my responsibility!”

      Maud’s eyes glistened with tears. “You’re so just , Pen. You have such true ideas for the children, and yet you always make me feel that you want my beliefs — though I dare say they are often only women’s ideas — to count, too. And I can’t tell you how much … I think almost everyday of my life how lucky the children are to have you to give them a broader view — to give them intellectual breadth, Pen.”

      Pen smiled a little ruefully. No one knew how to make him hug his fetters like Maud, he thought.… “You know, Maud, I often think I’ve spent my life ploughing the sky. What seems important to me — loyalty to reason — other people simply do not think about. It seems to me that a zealot who isn’t ruthless enough to stay a zealot is nature’s most abhorred vacuum.”

      “Pen?”

Скачать книгу