Читать книгу Sonia: Between Two Worlds - Stephen McKenna - Страница 4

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In 1898 the month of September found me a guest of Roger Dainton at Crowley Court in the County of Hampshire.

In the guide-books the house is described as a "stately Elizabethan mansion," but at the time of which I am writing it was still a labyrinth of drainage cuttings and a maze of scaffolding and ladders. Suddenly enriched by the early purchase of tied-houses, the Daintons had that year moved five miles away from Melton town, school and brewery. Even in those early days I suppose Mrs. Dainton was not without social aspirations, and when her husband was elected Unionist member for the Melton Division of Hampshire, she seized the opportunity of moving at one step into a house where her position was unassailable and away from a source of income that was ever her secret embarrassment.

Roger Dainton, affluent, careless and indolent, accepted the changed life with placid resignation. The syndicate shoot was left behind with the humdrum Melton Club and the infinitely small society that clustered in the precincts of the cathedral. Mrs. Dainton, big, bustling and indefatigably capable, fought her way door by door into South Hampshire society, while her husband shot statedly with Lord Pebbleridge at Bishop's Cross, yawned through the long mornings on the Bench, and, when Parliament was not sitting, lounged through his grounds in a shooting jacket with perennially torn pocket, his teeth gripping a black, gurgling briar that defied Mrs. Dainton's utmost efforts to smarten his appearance.

The atmosphere of the rambling old house was well suited to schoolboy holidays, for we rose and retired when we pleased, ate continuously, and were never required to dress for dinner. The so-called library, admirably adapted to stump cricket on wet days, contained nothing more arid than "The Sportsman," "Country Life," and bound volumes of "The Badminton Magazine," while Mrs. Dainton's spasmodic efforts to discuss the contents of her last Mudie box met with prompt and effective discouragement. The society, in a word, was healthily barbarian, from our host, aged forty-three, to his over-indulged only daughter, Sonia, aged eleven. Since the days when Tom Dainton and I were fellow-fags, it had been part of my annual programme to say good-bye to my mother and sister a week before the opening of the Melton term, cross from Kingston to Holyhead, call on Bertrand Oakleigh, my guardian, in London, and proceed to Crowley Court for the last week of the summer holidays. It was an unwritten law of our meetings that none but true Meltonians should be invited, and, though the party grew gradually in size, the rule was never relaxed.

In 1898 six of us sat down to dinner with our host and hostess on the first night of our visit. Sutcliffe, the captain of the school, sat on Mrs. Dainton's right hand—a small-boned, spectacled boy with upstanding red hair and beak-shaped nose, who was soon to be buried in Cambridge with a Trinity Fellowship rolled against the mouth of the tomb. On the other side sat Jim Loring, the Head of Matheson's, as ever not more than half awake, his sleepy grey eyes and loosely-knit big frame testifying that for years past he had overgrown his strength and would require some years more of untroubled leisure before he could overcome his natural lethargy. He had reached the school as "Loring," and though an uncle had died in the interval and his father was now the Marquess Loring, no one troubled to remember that he was in consequence Earl of Chepstow,—or indeed anything but "old Jim Loring,"—imperturbable, dreamy, detached and humourous, with quaint mediaeval ideals and a worldly knowledge somewhat in advance of his years. To me he occasionally unbent, but the rest of the microcosm—his parents and masters included—found him as enigmatic and unenthusiastic as he was placid and good-looking. "There is nothing he cannot or will do"—as Villiers, the master of the Under Sixth, had written in momentary exasperation some terms before.

At the other end of the table I sat on one side of Dainton with Draycott, the house captain of football, opposite me—a blue-eyed, fair-haired boy with a confounding knowledge of early Italian painting and a remarkable pride in his personal appearance. The two remaining chairs were occupied by Tom and Sam Dainton. Tom was at this time of Herculean build, with arms and shoulders of a giant—a taciturn boy with a deep voice, and no idea in his head apart from cricket, of which he was now captain. He and I had stumbled into the friendship of propinquity, and there had never been any reason for dropping it, though I cannot flatter myself he found my company more enlivening than I found his. On the opposite side of the table sat Sam, as yet a Meltonian only in embryo, though we expected him to be of the elect in a week's time.

The one member of the family not present was Sonia, the only daughter, who, in consideration of her eleventh birthday, had been allowed to stay up till a quarter to eight, but no later. I suppose the child got her looks from her mother, though by this time Mrs. Dainton was verging on stoutness, with a mottled skin and hair beginning to seem dry and lustreless. Sonia, with her velvety brown eyes, her white skin and her dark hair certainly owed nothing to her father, who was one of the most commonplace men I have ever met, whether in mind or appearance. Of medium height, with a weatherbeaten face and mouse-coloured hair, he was growing fleshy—with that uneven distribution of flesh that assails so many men of his age-and suggesting to an observer that eating and exercise were now moving in inverse ratio. I liked him then—as I like him still—but in looking back over seventeen years I find my regard mingled with a certain pathos; he was so ineffectual, so immature and of so uncritical a mind: above all, he was so grateful to anyone who would be polite to him in his own house.

The Entrance Examination at Melton took place the day before term, and in the afternoon Mrs. Dainton suggested that some of us should drive over to the school, inquire how Sam had fared and bring him back to Crowley Court for dinner. As the others were playing tennis, Sonia and I climbed into the high four-wheeled dogcart and were slowly driven by her father up the five-mile hill that separated us from the town.

Melton is one of those places that never change. In a hundred years' time I have no doubt it will present the same appearance of warm, grey, placid beauty as on that September afternoon, when we emerged from the Forest to find the school standing out against the setting sun like a group of temples on a modern Acropolis. Leaving the dogcart at the "Raven," we covered the last half mile on foot, and, while Dainton called on the Head, I took Sonia to Big Gateway and led her on a tour of inspection round the school. After seventeen years and for all its familiarity I can recall the beauty of the scene in its unwonted holiday desolation. Standing in the Gateway with our faces to the north, we had College to our right and the Head's house to our left; on the eastern, western and northern sides of the Great Court lay the nine boarding-houses, and through the middle of Matheson's, in line with Big Gateway, ran the Norman tunnel leading to Cloisters, Chapel and Great School.

It was Sonia's first opportunity of seeing over Melton, and she begged me to miss nothing. We crossed the worn flags of Great Court to the waterless fountain in the middle, lingered to admire the Virginia creeper swathing the crumbling grey walls as a mantle of scarlet silk, and passed through the iron-studded oak door of Matheson's. She inspected our row of studies and looked out through the closely barred windows to the practice ground of Little End, where the groundman and two assistants were erecting goal posts. For a while we wandered round Hall examining the carved tables and forms, the giant chimney-piece from which new boys had to sing their melancholy songs on the first Saturday of term, the great silver shields that the house had held in unbroken tenure for nine years, and the consciously muscular Cup Team groups that adorned the walls in two lines above the lockers.

Leaving Matheson's we strolled through Cloisters, and I pointed out the bachelor masters' quarters on one side and on the other the famous "Fighting Green," in which no fights had taken place within human memory. We put our heads inside Chapel, crossed into Great School and walked its length to the dais where stood Ockley's Chair, Bishop Adam's Birch Table and the carved seats of the Monitorial Council running in a half-circle like the places of the priests in the Theatre of Dionysus. I was still descanting on the dignity of that same Council, of which I had lately become a member, when a bell rang faintly in the distance, and we had to retrace our steps to meet the Entrance Examination candidates, who were pouring out of School Library and scattering in search of their anxious parents or guardians.

Sam Dainton headed the stream of inky-fingered twelve-year-olds, only pausing in his precipitant course down School Steps to roll his examination paper into a hard ball and thrust it inside the collar of a smaller, unknown and—so far as I could see—entirely inoffensive fellow-candidate.

"How did you get on?" asked Sonia.

"Oh, I dunno," Sam answered modestly; and then to me, "I say, Oakleigh, who were Abana and Pharpar?"

I made some discreet reference to the rivers of Damascus.

"Golly!" he moaned, with a face of woe. "I said they were the jewels in the breastplate of the High Priest. Never mind. Can't be helped. The chap in front of me said they were Eli's two sons, but that's rot, 'cos they were Gog and Magog. I got that right. Did you come over alone?"

"Your father's here," I said. "He's bribing Burgess not to read your papers. We'd better get back to Big Gateway."

We were half-way across Great Court when one of the Head's library windows opened, and Burgess, with his quaint, mannered courtesy, asked permission to have a word with me if I could spare him the time. I entered what was then, and probably is still, the untidiest room in England. Since the death of his wife ten years before, Burgess had ruled, or been ruled, with the aid of a capable housekeeper whose tenure of office depended on her undertaking never to touch a book or paper in the gloomy, low-ceilinged library. From that bargain she can never have departed. Overflowing the shelves and tables, piled up in the embrasures of the windows, littered carelessly in fireplace or wastepaper basket, lay ten years' accumulation of reports, complaints, presentation copies, text-books, magazines and daily papers.

"Some day it must all be swept and garnished, laddie," he would say when the last of twelve unsmokable pipes had disappeared behind the coal box. "But I'm an old man, broken with the cares and sorrows of this world.... Never take to smoking, laddie; it's a vile, unclean practice." And pending the day when the Augean stable was to be cleansed, he would walk down to Grantham's, the big Melton bookseller, cram the pockets of his cassock with new books, pick his way slowly back to the school, reading as rapidly as his tobacco-stained forefinger could hack the pages, and drop the newest acquisition in the handiest corner of the dusty, dim library.

"Laddie, there is a stranger within our gates, seeking admittance. He will not be denied."

Burgess's meaning was seldom to be grasped in his first or second sentence. I waited while he fumbled for a pipe in the pocket of the old silk cassock, without which none of us had ever seen him. By 1898, at the age of five-and-fifty, his physical appearance had run through the gamut of its changes and become fixed. When last we met, seventeen years later, his body was no more thin or bent, his face no more cadaverous, his brown eyes no more melancholy, his voice no more tired and his long white hair no whit less thick than on that September afternoon. And thus he will remain till a puff of wind stronger than the generality blows away the ascetic, wasted frame, and the gentle, sing-song voice is heard no more.

"Where is the divinity that doth hedge a king about?" he demanded of Dainton, or me, or the world at large. "I sat in this, my Holy Place, when a serving-man told me that one stood without and would have speech with me. I bade him begone. 'He insists,' said my serving-man." Burgess sighed and gently shrugged his shoulders. "The sons of Zeruiah are too hard for me. I bade him enter, and there came to me a lad no bigger than a man's hand. 'Thy name and business, laddie?' I asked. He told me he was known to men as 'David O'Rane,' a wanderer for the first time setting foot in the Promised Land. His speech was the speech of men in far places, who go down to the sea in ships and behold the wonders of the Lord. Shortly he bade me 'See here,' and stated that he proposed to come to my old school anyway, and that was the way he regarded the proposition."

"An American, sir?" I asked.

"An Irishman from thine own Isle of Unrest, laddie," Burgess answered. "Journeying from Dan to Beersheba, and pricking through America on his way."

He paused, and Dainton asked what had happened next.

"He is fifteen years of age—a year too old by the rules. My Shibboleths were demanded of the young men at nine-thirty this morning; by the rules he is half a day too late. Rules, the laddie told me, were for ordinary men at ordinary times. 'I, at least,' I said, 'am an ordinary man.' And he smiled and held his peace. 'Who will rid me of this proud scholar?' I asked, and he answered not a word. I threw him books, and he translated them—Homer and Thucydides and the dark places of Theocritus. 'Thou art too old, laddie,' I told him, 'for me to take thee in.' He walked to the door and I asked him whither he went. 'To a decent school,' he made answer. 'No decent school will take Melton's rejections,' I told him. 'Then let them share Melton's shame,' he rejoined. I bade him tarry and tell me of his wanderings. He sits within."

Burgess sighed and relit his pipe. I know few men who smoke more matches.

"Are you admitting him, sir?" I asked.

"The fatherless child is in God's keeping," answered Burgess. He turned to Dainton and murmured, "You recall the Liberator?"

Dainton's eyebrows moved up in quick surprise. "Oh, poor boy!" he ejaculated. It was some while before I was to understand the allusion or the comment, and I had little time now to speculate, as Burgess turned to address me.

"Laddie, he will be in Mr. Matheson's house, and will sit at the feet of Mr. Villiers in the Under Sixth. Were I a just man, I would place him in the Sixth, but I am old and broken with the cares and sorrows of this world. He must learn humility of spirit. He must fag—like Dainton minor; and be flogged like Dainton minor if he break our foolish rules. He must wait for a study and suffer on the altar of sport in all weathers, as a hundred thousand have done before him. I have communed secretly with thee, laddie, and, when thou goest hence to thine own place, lo! it will be forgotten as a dream that is past."

I bowed in acquiescence.

"Forget not this one thing," he added. "He is a stranger within our gates, having neither kith nor kin. Much will he teach us; somewhat, maybe, can we teach him. Make his path smooth, laddie."

"I'll do my best, sir," I promised. "Where's he going to be till term begins?"

"The Lord will provide," answered Burgess absently. It was his invariable formula when at a loss for a more suitable reply.

Dainton rubbed his chin thoughtfully.

"Look here, Dr. Burgess," he suggested. "Why shouldn't I take charge of him for a night and a day?"

Burgess eyed him thoughtfully.

"A night and a day are twenty-four hours," he said.

"We shall be nine to one," answered Dainton reassuringly.

"You have not seen him yet."

Burgess rose from his chair and rang the bell. A moment later the door opened, and O'Rane entered the library. He was a boy of medium height with black hair parted in the middle, after the American fashion, unusually large black eyes and bronzed face and hands. Though the black eyes sometimes lost their dreaminess and became charged with sudden passion, though the sunken cheeks and sharply outlined bones of the face gave him something of a starving animal's desperation, the reality was considerably less formidable than I had imagined from Burgess's description. In manner he was a curious mixture of the old and new. On being introduced, he drew himself up and clicked his heels, and in speaking he showed a tendency to gesticulate; then without warning his voice would take on a Western drawl, and unexpected transatlanticisms would crop up in his speech.

On learning Dainton's proposal he bowed and accepted with a guarded politeness. We made our way into Great Court, found Sonia and Sam, and set out for the "Raven." On reaching home I mentioned to Loring that we had a new boy requiring a certain amount of special consideration; we span a coin, and Loring took O'Rane for a fag, while Sam was allotted to me. The stranger within our gates said little that night or next morning, though all of us tried, one after another, to engage him in conversation. The ways of the house seemed unfamiliar to him, and he wandered round thoughtfully with his hands in his pockets, rather ostentatiously avoiding any advances.

The next evening, after an early dinner, the racing omnibus was brought round to the door. Tom Dainton, looking like a prize-fighter with his bony, red face and vast double-breasted overcoat, clambered on to the box-seat; Loring, recumbent in an arm-chair till the last possible moment, dragged his sleepy, long body upright and climbed, with a drowsy protest, to Tom's side; Sutcliffe, with his shock of red hair bared to the night and his spectacles gleaming in the light of the lamps, hurried the immaculate and aesthetic Draycott into place and scrambled up behind him. Sam, overcome with sudden timidity and a sense that the familiar was fading past recall, kissed his mother and mounted shyly, indicating a vacant seat for O'Rane. I stayed behind to check the luggage, unearth the coach-horn and wave good-bye, then leapt on the back step and gave the signal for departure.

As we started down the drive at a canter, our hosts stood silhouetted against the lights of the hall. Dainton removed one hand from the torn pocket of the old shooting-jacket and waved farewell; Mrs. Dainton bowed majestically; Sonia, bare-legged and sandalled, with a gold bracelet round one ankle and the face of a Sistine Madonna, raised both hands to her lips and blew a cloud of tempestuous kisses.

Loring turned encouragingly to Sam.

"My lad, I wouldn't be in your shoes for a thousand pounds this coming year."

Sam smiled without conviction.

"The tumbril passed rapidly down the Rue St. Honoré," Loring went on, "amid the jeers of the populace. This day's victims included the younger Dainton and the emigré O'Rane. Both preserved an attitude of stoical indifference till they came in sight of the Place de la Revolution, when Dainton broke down and wept piteously...."

"I didn't," said Sam indignantly.

Loring laughed to himself.

"Cheer up, Sambo," he said. "You're not really to be pitied. O'Rane's going to be my fag."

"Poor brute," said Draycott.

"Who? O'Rane or me?"

"O'Rane, of course."

Loring smiled round the company, turned in his seat and composed himself for slumber. O'Rane looked with interest and a shade of defiance from one face to another.