Читать книгу The Tree of Heaven - Sinclair May - Страница 8

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It seemed that Nicky would always be like that. Whatever happened, and something was generally happening to him, he didn't care. When he scaled the plaster flower-pot on the terrace, and it gave way under his assault and threw him down the steps on to the gravel walk, he picked himself up, displaying a forehead that was a red abrasion filled in with yellow gravel and the grey dust of the smashed flower-pot, and said "I don't care. I liked it," before anybody had time to pity him. When Mary-Nanna stepped on his train and broke the tender, he said "It's all right. I don't care. I shall make another." It was no use Grannie saying, "Don't care came to a bad end"; Nicky made it evident that a bad end would be life's last challenge not to care. No accident, however unforeseen, would ever take him at a disadvantage.

Two years passed and he was just the same.

Frances and Anthony agreed behind his back that Nicky was adorable.

But his peculiar attitude to misfortune became embarrassing when you had to punish him. Nicky could break the back of any punishment by first admitting that it was a good idea and then thinking of a better one when it was too late. It was a good idea not letting him have any cake for tea after he had tested the resilience of the new tyres on his father's bicycle with a penknife; but, Nicky said, it would have been more to the purpose if they had taken his steam-engine from him for a week.

"You didn't think of that, did you, Mummy? I thought of it," said Nicky.

Once he ran away over the West Heath, and got into the Leg of Mutton Pond, and would have been drowned if a total stranger hadn't gone in after him and pulled him out. That time Nicky was sent to bed at four o'clock in the afternoon. At seven, when his mother came to tuck him up and say Good-night, she found him sitting up, smiling and ready.

"Mummy," he said, "I think I ought to tell you. It isn't a bit of good sending me to bed."

"I should have thought it was, myself," said Frances. She almost suspected Nicky of insincerity.

"So it would have been," he assented, "if I didn't 'vent things. You see, I just lie still 'venting things all the time. I've 'vented three things since tea: a thing to make Daddy's bikesickle stand still with Daddy on it; a thing to squeeze corks out of bottles; and a thing to make my steam-engine go faster. That isn't a punishment, is it, Mummy?"

They said that Nicky would grow out of it. But two more years passed and Nicky was still the same.

And yet he was not the same. And Dorothy, and Michael and John were not the same.

For the awful thing about your children was that they were always dying. Yes, dying. The baby Nicky was dead. The child Dorothy was dead and in her place was a strange big girl. The child Michael was dead and in his place was a strange big boy. And Frances mourned over the passing of each age. You could no more bring back that unique loveliness of two years old, of five years old, of seven, than you could bring back the dead. Even John-John was not a baby any more; he spoke another language and had other feelings; he had no particular affection for his mother's knee. Frances knew that all this dying was to give place to a more wonderful and a stronger life. But it was not the same life; and she wanted to have all their lives about her, enduring, going on, at the same time. She did not yet know that the mother of babies and the mother of boys and girls must die if the mother of men and women is to be born.

Thoughts came to Frances now that troubled her tranquillity.

Supposing, after all, the children shouldn't grow up as she wanted them to?

There was Nicky. She could do nothing with him; she could make no impression on him.

There was Michael. She couldn't make him out. He loved them, and showed that he loved them; but it was by caresses, by beautiful words, by rare, extravagant acts of renunciation, inconsistent with his self-will; not by anything solid and continuous. There was a softness in Michael that distressed and a hardness that perplexed her. You could make an impression on Michael--far too easily--and the impression stayed. You couldn't obliterate it. Michael's memory was terrible. And he had secret ways. He was growing more and more sensitive, more and more wrapped up in Himself. Supposing Michael became a morbid egoist, like Anthony's brother, Bartholomew?

And there was Dorothy. She went her own way more than ever, with the absolute conviction that it was the right way. Nothing could turn her. At thirteen her body was no longer obedient. Dorothy was not going to be her mother's companion, or her father's, either; she was Rosalind Jervis's companion. She seemed to care more about little fat, fluffy Rosalind than about any of them except Nicky. Dorothy was interested in Michael; she respected his queer thoughts. It was as if she recognized some power in him that could beat her somewhere some day, and was humble before a thing her cleverness had failed to understand. But it was Nicky that she adored, not Michael; and she was bad for Nicky. She encouraged his naughtiness because it amused her.

Frances foresaw that a time would come, a little later, when Nicky and Dorothy would be companions, not Nicky and his mother.

In the evenings, coming home from the golf-links, Frances and Anthony discussed their children.

Frances said, "You can't make any impression on Nicky. There seems to be no way that you can get at him."

Anthony thought there was a way. It was a way he had not tried yet, that he did not want to try. But, if he could only bring himself to it, he judged that he could make a distinct impression.

"What the young rascal wants is a thorough good spanking," said Anthony.

Nicky said so too.

The first time he got it Nicky's criticism was that it wasn't a bad idea if his father could have pulled it off all right. But he said, "It's no good if you do it through the cloth. And it's no good unless you want to hurt me, Daddy. And you don't want. And even if you did want, badly enough to try and hurt, supposing you spanked ever so hard, you couldn't hurt as much as my earache. And I can bear that."

"He's top dog again, you see," said Frances, not without a secret satisfaction.

"Oh, is he?" said Anthony. "I don't propose to be downed by Nicky."

Every instinct in him revolted against spanking Nicky. But when Williams, the groom, showed him a graze on each knee of the pony he had bought for Frances and the children, Anthony determined that, this time, Nicky should have a serious spanking.

"Which of them took Roger out?"

"I'm sure I don't know, sir," said Williams.

But Anthony knew. He lay in wait for Nicky by the door that led from the stable yard into the kitchen garden.

Nicky was in the strawberry bed.

"Was it you who took Roger out this afternoon?"

Nicky did not answer promptly. His mouth was still full of strawberries.

"What if I did?" he said at last, after manifest reflection.

"If you did? Why, you let him down on Golders Hill and cut his knees."

"Holly Mount," said Nicky.

"Holly Mount or Golders Hill, it's all the same to you, you young monkey."

"It isn't, Daddy. Holly Mount's much the worst. It's an awful hill."

"That," said Anthony, "is why you're forbidden to ride down it. You've got to be spanked for this, Nicky."

"Have I? All right. Don't look so unhappy, Daddy."

Anthony did much better this time. Nicky (though he shook with laughter) owned it very handsomely. And Anthony had handicapped himself again by doing it through the cloth. He drew the line at shaming Nicky. (Yet--could you have shamed his indomitable impudence?)

But he had done it. He had done it ruthlessly, while the strawberries were still wet on Nicky's mouth.

And when it was all over Michael, looking for his father, came into the school-room where these things happened. He said he was awfully sorry, but he'd taken Roger out, and Roger had gone down on his knees and cut himself.

No, it wasn't on Holly Mount, it was at the turn of the road on the hill past the "Spaniards."

Anthony paid no attention to Michael. He turned on Michael's brother.

"Nicky, what did you do it for?"

"For a rag, of course. I knew you'd feel such a jolly fool when you found it wasn't me."

"You see, Daddy," he explained later, "you might have known I wouldn't have let Roger down. But wasn't it a ripping sell?"

"What are you to do," said Anthony, "with a boy like that?"

Frances had an inspiration. "Do nothing," she said. Her tranquillity refused to be troubled for long together.

"Nicky's right. It's no good trying to punish him. After all, why punish Nicky? It isn't as if he was really naughty. He never does unkind things, or mean things. And he's truthful."

"Horribly truthful. They all are," said Anthony.

"Well, then, what does Nicky do?"

"He does dangerous things."

"He forgets."

"Nothing more dangerous than forgetting. We must punish him to make him remember."

"But it doesn't make him remember. It only makes him think us fools."

"You know what it means?" said Anthony. "We shall have to send him to school."

"Not yet," said Frances.

School was the thing in the future that she dreaded. Nicky was only nine, and they were all getting on well with Mt. Parsons. Anthony knew that to send Nicky to school now would be punishing Frances, not Nicky. The little fiend would only grin in their faces if they told him he was going to school.

It was no use trying to make impressions on Nicky. He was as hard as nails. He would never feel things.

Perhaps, Frances thought, it was just as well.