Читать книгу Told by Peter - Mary Grant Bruce - Страница 3

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SIX weeks ago I should simply have hooted if anyone had suggested to me that I might as well write a book. For that matter, I did hoot when Binkie first came out with the notion. It was easy to see that Binkie didn’t think much of it herself, and that it wasn’t her own bright idea at all, because she got pretty confused when I said what I thought of it.

Nevertheless, she stuck to the point, for Binkie is like that; all she needs is a bit of opposition, and then she is apt to drive in her toes like a mule and argue that black is white. Dad says it’s a way women have, but Binkie is beginning rather too early, if you ask me.

Well, I hooted, and we argued, and presently it came out that it was really Miss Tarrant’s idea. Miss Tarrant is Binkie’s governess, and even if she is a girl she is a pretty good sort—unless she happens to be teaching, when Binkie says she is a holy terror. Luckily for me, I do not see her at those times. Outside the schoolroom you would sometimes think she is quite young. She swims better than most people, and she can take us both on at tennis and beat us 6-3. Even at cricket she isn’t too bad; she bowls under-arm, but she manages to get a nasty screw on the ball and sends it down fairly fast.

When she came to Weeroona she didn’t know the first little thing about a horse, and she was deadly scared of bullocks and cows. But I’ll admit that she was game. We had no end of fun teaching her to ride. I have always regretted that we didn’t keep a tally of the number of times she fell off, because that sort of a record is very useful when any kind of argument grows heated. But she stuck to riding, even if she couldn’t always stick to the saddle, and now she is quite useful on a horse.

Altogether, Binkie and I have found out that it’s worth while paying attention to what Miss Tarrant says when she’s serious, though of course we have never let her see this; and when Binkie admitted that it was her notion that I ought to write a book it set me thinking. Not that I gave in to Binkie. I just told her she was a silly ass, and so was anyone else who had such a rotten idea.

Binkie got annoyed at that, and she picked up my lunch-tray and made for the door, remarking as she went that I’d won the Junior Essay prize at my silly old school, and if I could do that, there was no earthly reason why I shouldn’t write something a bit more interesting. She was so worked up that she caught the tray on the side of the bedpost, and the cruet things flew in several directions, and the lid of the pepper-pot came off. I had no idea how pepper could spread. I ducked under the sheet a second too late, and for some time there was nothing to be heard in my room but loud and prolonged sneezing.

Well, when that was all over, and gosh, it was funny to see Binkie trying to sweep up the pepper and sneezing more and more the harder she swept, I started thinking. Of course it was all rot about the Essay prize. That was for writing about General Clive, and I mugged it all up in the School library—there was a chap called Lord Macaulay whose book was very useful. If everyone had their rights that prize ought to have gone to Macaulay, but I think he’s dead. Writing that sort of bilge isn’t like writing something really decent like a book of adventure, and I had sense enough to know it. But it struck me that it might be fun to try what I could do in the adventure line.

Not what you would call fun at ordinary times, of course. I can’t imagine anything more awful, if I had two legs in working order. But when a fellow is planked into bed for simply ages, with one leg stuck out in front of him under a sort of wigwam, and the leg and all the inside of the wigwam are often absolutely full of aches—well, you get a different notion of fun. Fun becomes something—anything—that keeps you from feeling the aches and from remembering things. Things like the horses, and bathing, and the cricket season going on with you knocked out of the Second Eleven, and mighty little chance of playing football next winter. And lots more.

Mother says the way to dodge those thoughts is to swop them for other thoughts; she knows jolly well it’s no good just saying “Don’t think about them.” But she says one can practise the swopping business. When I’m feeling blue she has a way of strolling in with a new jig-saw, or a wire-puzzle outfit, or something. There was one pretty bad day when she came along to get me to help her to design a play-house she wants me and Binkie to build for ourselves when I’m better. Some play-house, too; we added all sorts of ideas to it as we went along, and it will be big enough to keep all our private possessions in. It will have a verandah with built-in bunks so that we can sleep there when we like. It was Mother’s suggestion that grown-ups should only be admitted to it by special invitation of the owners.

We spent all that afternoon drawing plans, and when we’d got it just right I coloured it, and it looked gorgeous. I made an awful mess of the bedspread with the paints, but Mother didn’t seem to care, she was so keen on getting the job done thoroughly. I was thinking about it, going to sleep that night, and it struck me it had all been part of her idea of swopping unpleasant thoughts for jolly ones. Well, it worked that day, anyhow; I’d enjoyed myself frightfully.

But Mother is too busy to spend many afternoons like that, and she can’t always have something new up her sleeve, no matter how hard she tries. Me being like this gives her a heap of extra work in any case, though she never lets on that she’s tired. So I began wondering about this book notion of Miss Tarrant’s, and it seemed to me there might be something in it, if only I could get interested enough.

Miss Tarrant herself came in while I lay there thinking. She had a present for me. Rather a jolly thing, a writing-board made of a bit of three-ply covered with blue cloth. It has a large-sized writing-pad fixed on to it, and there is a loop of stuff that holds a ripping Eversharp pencil.

“There!” said Miss Tarrant, “I’ve made you your whole trade-outfit, and there’s nothing to hinder you from becoming an author immediately.”

I said it was jolly good of her, but that the author part was all tosh, and people with smashed legs didn’t write books.

She said: “That’s all you know, Peter.” She told me about a chap called Henley; she didn’t know for certain if he’d had a smashed leg, but probably he’d never had time to have one, because he was always too busy having operations. There was hardly any part of him that doctors weren’t constantly carving up in sections. She said he never knew what it was to be free from simply awful pain, and he knew he never would be, so he wrote things to keep his mind happy, since his body was past praying for. Poetry chiefly. I’m not much on that sort of thing, but it sounded pretty good when Miss Tarrant told me some of it, with her voice very low, the way she always says verses. There was one line she gave me specially to think about:

“My head is bloody, but unbowed.”

“That’s for you,” she said. “Your head may not be bloody at the moment, but that’s because you have such an energetic mother when it comes to mopping up damaged sons. There was an occasion, though, when it really was quite a nasty mess. So Henley’s line fits your head well enough—and now your job is to keep it unbowed, in spite of all the aches under the wigwam. And you will, too, Peter.”

“Tough job sometimes,” I said.

“Yes, tough enough, I know. I believe it will help—really—if you make up your mind to write down the whole story. A pity not to write it, too, because it certainly was an adventure. Have a shot at it, at all events; I’m told that authors become so worked up when they once start that they fling their ink-bottles at anyone who dares to interrupt them, even with a tea-tray. That’s the only reason I haven’t given you an ink-bottle.”

I said: “Well, I could fling this writing-board, if you think it would stand up to it.”

“Oh, do try it!” she begged. “Try it on your father first. Only please let Binkie and me know, so that we can take up a handy position in the offing to see the show.”

“Will I just!” I said. “One broken leg is all I want at one time. But truly, Miss Tarrant, it’s awful rot to think of me writing a book. Why, I’d never be able to think up a title, to start with.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” she said. “I’m told that all the best authors find their titles come to them quite unexpectedly—just like a broken leg. They float to them out of the blue.”

“Is that how you imagine broken legs come?” I growled. “Mine came out of——”

“Sh-sh!” she said. “Don’t give it away yet, you donkey. You must always keep the exciting surprises to the last when you’re an author. Think of your poor readers, and have a heart!”

“My poor readers!” I said. “I should jolly well think they would be poor. In a lunatic asylum, I should say.”

“Oh, not until after they’ve read your book,” she assured me. “It’s perfectly frightful to think what authors do to their readers. I knew an author once who wrote a very sad tale, and a girl wrote to her and told her that at one painful happening in the book she had cried so hard that the gold stopping in her front tooth fell out!”

So I said that if I could only pull that off on her it would be worth writing a book, and she said, “You can’t—I haven’t got a gold stopping. If I had I would gladly lay it at your feet.” And then we became quite impolite to each other, until I was laughing too much to think up any more insults. Miss Tarrant suddenly gasped, and looked at her watch.

“Oh, my goodness!” she said. “I left that unhappy Binkie to copy out French sentences, and by this time she’s probably raving. Peter, you have an appalling effect on me. Get on with being an author, and I will go and try to justify my overpaid existence.” She put her hand on my head for a second. “ ‘Bloody, but unbowed,’ old man,” she said, and her eyes looked all funny. Then she went for her life to the schoolroom.

Well, that didn’t get me any nearer to becoming an author. So I reckoned I had better put the word “author” out of my mind altogether, because it could never be me, and just think about writing down all that happened these last hols. That was easier, since I need only write for myself, and no eye but mine would ever look on it, and I needn’t put in any flowery patches like I, I mean Macaulay, did about Clive.

And I could write just as I liked, too, and use bad grammar and slang if I wanted to, with no reader to say me nay like form-masters do. So it really wouldn’t be a book at all, but just a record of a very queer time; and perhaps if Binkie behaved herself I might read it to her in our new play-house when we’d built it.

This made it seem a much less alarming job, and I thought that anyhow I would write a little bit of it, perhaps just one chapter, to see how I got on. But I did wish I could find a title first, because then it would feel as if I’d really begun. I tried hard to think of one, but they all seemed to have been used before; or else they gave away the secrets, which is an infuriating thing many authors do, and always puts me right off a book.

So I gave it up at last, because I wanted to make a start before tea, and I got the Eversharp ready and tried it on the cover of the writing-pad. It worked all right, so I turned back the cover to really make a beginning.

And there, on the first page, was my title, painted in red and blue, the way Miss Tarrant paints things, with idiotic little drawings all round it—bucking horses, motor-boats, skulls and cross-bones and performing seals and aeroplanes looping and people diving off rocks, and lots of things that hadn’t a thing to do with my story. And one of me in bed with my leg under the wigwam—me looking at the writing-board in horror, and sucking the pencil, with all my hair standing on end. The title was this:

TOLDBYPETER.