Читать книгу Joan and Peter - H. G. Wells - Страница 12

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One day Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Phœbe came down.

Both sisters participated in the Stubland break back to colour, but while Aunt Phyllis was a wit and her hats a spree Aunt Phœbe was fantastically serious and her hats went beyond a joke. They got their stuffs apparently from the shop of William Morris and Co., they had their dresses built upon Pre-Raphaelite lines, they did their hair plainly and simply but very carelessly, and their hats were noble brimmers or extravagant toques. Their profiles were as fine almost as Arthur’s, a type of profile not so suitable for young women as for golden youth. They were bright-eyed and a little convulsive in their movements. Beneath these extravagances and a certain conversational wildness they lived nervously austere lives. They were greatly delighted with Peter, but they did not know what to do with him. Phyllis held him rather better than Phœbe, but Phœbe with her chatelaine amused him rather more than Phyllis.

“How happy a tinker’s baby must be,” said Aunt Phœbe, rattling her trinkets: “Or a tin-smith’s.”

“I begin to see some use in a Hindoo woman’s bangles,” said Aunt Phyllis, “or in that clatter machine of yours, Phœbe. Every young mother should rattle. Make a note of it, Phœbe dear, for your book....”

“Whatever you do with him, Dolly,” said Aunt Phœbe, “teach him anyhow to respect women and treat them as his equals. From the Very First.”

“Meaning votes,” said Aunt Phyllis. “Didums want give um’s mummy a Vote den.”

“Never let him touch butcher’s meat in any shape or form,” said Aunt Phœbe. “Once a human child tastes blood the mischief is done.”

“Avoid patriotic songs and symbols,” prompted Aunt Phyllis, who had heard these ideas already in the train coming down.

“And never buy him toy soldiers, drums, guns, trumpets. These things soak deeper into the mind than people suppose. They make wickedness domestic.... Surround him with beautiful things. Accustom him——”

She winced that Arthur should hear her, but she spoke as one having a duty to perform.

“Accustom him to the nude, Dolly, from his early years. Associate it with innocent amusements. Retrieve the fall. Never let him wear a hat upon his head nor boots upon his feet. As soon tie him up into a papoose. As soon tight-lace. A child’s first years should be one long dream of loveliness and spontaneous activity.”

But at this point Peter betrayed signs that he found his aunts overstimulating. He released his grip upon the thimble-case of the chatelaine. His face puckered, ridges and waves and puckers of pink fatness ran distractedly over it, and he threw his head back and opened a large square toothless mouth.

“Mary,” cried Dolly, and a comfortable presence that had been hovering mistrustfully outside the door ever since the aunts appeared, entered with alacrity and bore Peter protectingly away.

“He must be almost entirely lungs,” said Aunt Phœbe, when her voice could be heard through the receding bawl. “Other internal organs no doubt develop later.”

“Come out to the stone table under the roses,” said Dolly. “We argue there about Peter’s upbringing almost every afternoon.”

“Argue, I grant you,” said Aunt Phœbe, following her hostess and dangling her chatelaine from one hand as if to illustrate her remarks, “but argue rightly.”

When Oswald came over in the afternoon he was disposed to regard the two aunts as serious reinforcements to Arthur’s educational heresies. Phyllis and Phœbe were a little inclined to be shy with him as a strange man, and he and Arthur did most of the talking, but they made their positions plain by occasional interpolations. Arthur, supported by their presence, was all for letting Peter grow up a wild untrammelled child of nature. Oswald became genuinely distressed.

“But education,” he protested, “is as natural to a human being as nests to birds.”

“Then why force it?” said Phyllis with dexterity.

“Even a cat boxes its kittens’ ears!”

“A domesticated cat,” said Phœbe. “A civilized cat.”

“But I’ve seen a wild lioness——”

“Are we to learn how to manage our young from lions and hyenas!” cried Phœbe.

They were too good for Oswald. He saw Peter already ruined, a fat, foolish, undisciplined cub.

Dolly with sympathetic amusement watched his distress, which his living half face betrayed in the oddest contrast to his left hand calm.

Arthur had been thinking gracefully while his sisters tackled their adversary. Now he decided to sum up the discussion. His authoritative manner on these occasions was always slightly irritating to Oswald. Like so many who read only occasionally and take thought as a special exercise, Arthur had a fixed persuasion that nobody else ever read or thought at all. So that he did not so much discuss as adjudicate.

“Of course,” he said, “we have to be reasonable in these things. For men a certain artificiality is undoubtedly natural. That is, so to speak, the human paradox. But artificiality is the last resort. Instinct is our basis. For the larger part the boy has just to grow. But We watch his growth. Education is really watching—keeping the course. The human error is to do too much, to distrust instinct too much, to over-teach, over-legislate, over-manage, over-decorate——”

“No, you don’t, my gentleman,” came the voice of Mary from the shadow under the old pear tree.

“Now I wonder——” said Arthur, craning his neck to look over the rose bushes.

“Diddums then,” said Mary. “Woun’t they lettim put’tt in ’s mouf? Oooh!”

“Trust her instinct,” said Dolly, and Arthur was restrained.

Oswald took advantage of the interruption to take the word from Arthur.

“We joke and sharpen our wits in this sort of talk,” he said, “but education, you know, isn’t a joke. It might be the greatest power in the world. If I didn’t think I was a sort of schoolmaster in Africa.... That’s the only decent excuse a white man has for going there.... I’m getting to be a fanatic about education. Give me the schools of the world and I would make a Millennium in half a century.... You don’t mean to let Peter drift. You say it, but you can’t mean it. Drift is waste. We don’t make half of what we could make of our children. We don’t make a quarter—not a tenth. They could know ever so much more, think ever so much better. We’re all at sixes and sevens.”

He realized he wasn’t good at expressing his ideas. He had intended something very clear and compelling, a sort of ultimatum about Peter.

“I believe in Sir Francis Galton,” Aunt Phœbe remarked in his pause; saying with stern resolution things that she felt had to be said. They made her a little breathless, and she fixed her eye on the view until they were said. “Eugenics. It is a new idea. A revival. Plato had it. Men ought to be bred like horses. No marriage or any nonsense of that kind. Just a simple scientific blending of points. Then Everything would be different.”

“Almost too different,” Arthur reflected....

“When I consider Peter and think of all one could do for him——” said Oswald, still floundering for some clenching way of putting it....