Short Stories 1927-1956 (71 page)

‘It’s not in the
room
,’
he told me. ‘It’s – it’s inside. It’s when I look right over – and turn my eyes this way, Auntie Caroline.’ They hardly wavered. ‘It began a long time ago; but – it’s only sometimes.’

‘What is only sometimes?’ I said. ‘At night, too?’

By dint of careful questioning, I discovered at length that what troubled him was no more, as I thought at the time, than a mere fancy. He told me that when he turned his eyes as far as their orbits admitted in a certain direction – and after recent experiments of this kind he had ventured to do this very seldom – he perceived a shape, a figure there. A something dark, small and stunted, I gathered, with humped shoulders and bent head, and steadily scrutinizing him. I was dismayed. Mere fancy or not, it was no wonder that a child so sensitive should be disturbed by so strange an
unpleasant
an experience as this, even if it were a pure illusion.

‘Now tell me, Philip,’ I coaxed him. ‘Here we are, alone; just you and me. Aren’t you perhaps imagining what you see? If we try, we can at once see your mother. In our minds, I mean. Can’t we? But that too would be imaginary. And next moment she is gone. There
can
be nothing. Look again.’

‘Oh, Auntie!’ he exclaimed, throwing his arms round my neck and
bursting
into tears again; ‘it’s like that horrid, horrid Satan.’

This, I confess, alarmed me, but I showed nothing of it.

‘And who has been talking to you of Satan?’ said I.

‘Nobody, nobody,’ he cried passionately. ‘I saw it in a book.’

‘Ah!’ said I. ‘Only in a book! Just a picture. That’s where it comes from, then.’

‘Yes, Auntie,’ he sobbed, ‘
now.
But what I am telling you of was before that,
before
I saw it in a book.’

I was intensely anxious to comfort the child, and assured him yet again that all this could be only fancy, that no more than a mere dream may haunt one’s memory even in the full light of the day, that God protects the young, that the innocent have nothing to fear. And I took care to say no more than I believed. ‘Now, be brave. Just try,’ I said, ‘try once again.’

‘But you see, Auntie,’ he lamented, ‘it isn’t always
there.
And oh! I can’t. I daren’t! …’

Well, my very worthy family doctor came to see him. He declared the child was run down, highly strung, and so forth. That I knew. He prescribed Parrish’s Food, and suggested, somewhat to my surprise, that he should be given half a glass of port wine every morning and afternoon. Still, when I ask for what I believe or have reason to hope will be good advice, I
take
it. And trusting that this treatment would soon mend matters, I refrained from writing to his mother. Matters did mend. We made no further reference, not the faintest, on either side, to what had troubled him. Not for some little time. Never reawaken trouble!

Little seemed amiss for a year or two. Philip spent his tenth birthday with me, and then contrary to my own conviction, but seeing how much better and more confident he was looking, I asked him in a jocular fashion, when
his favourite pudding – a jam roly-poly – was on the table, I asked him if he had ever been troubled again with those old fancies of his. He knew at once to what I was referring, and met the question very gallantly, as I thought.

‘Yes, I am now and then,’ he said, ‘but now I never really look. He’s
there
; but I think unless I tried hard, I shouldn’t see him. And at night – well, you can’t help what dreams come, can you, Auntie?’

But how different were voice, manner, air, by comparison with the previous year. This being so, it was on my lips to counsel him to make the attempt then and there. Also to tell him of a mysterious belief in what are known as guardian angels. But – although I have no wish to be uncharitable – few even of those of us who share this belief
seem
to pay any active heed to it, and in the fear that he might perhaps be laughed at on this account at school, I refrained. The adult, alas, is not always courageous enough
concerning
his convictions on behalf of childhood.

‘Well!’ I said. ‘We all have our little troubles, Philip, and we must do our best to learn to face them.’ He smiled at me. We understood one another. ‘Pattie,’ I said, ‘give Master Philip another slice of that excellent pudding.’

On reflection, it astonishes me that it never at any time occurred to me to consult an oculist. That might at once have put things right. Even people of excellent common-sense may occasionally be the prey of illusions – ghosts and similar nonsense. Charles Wesley, for example. And how easy it is, on a slight pretext, to give shape and meaning to what is purely the work of fancy. Hasn’t the famous poet Shakespeare a passage in one of his plays
concerning
‘airy nothings’ or some such words? Even the best, the most skilful of oculists – and I should have chosen a good one – might very well have ascribed the child’s fancies to a disordered liver, to those floating specks we may observe when we look at a whitewashed ceiling. As for many of these mental specialists who are so much in evidence nowadays, I have, I confess, very little patience with them, or belief in them. Again perhaps I am wrong. But tampering with a child’s mind is a dangerous experiment; and if it is put in the wrong hands, it may prove as clumsy an operation as that of a
schoolboy
using a penknife to repair his watch. And it will have much the same result.

There is one small thing I ought to add. I had discovered that this figure, this skulking shape, which Philip professed to ‘see’ at certain times, was not always
stationary.
Also, that the hump at the shoulders
appeared
to be that of folded wings which, on one occasion at least, he told me, were lifted (like a raven’s or a vulture’s); as we see in Gustave Doré’s illustrations to the poet Milton’s
Paradise
Lost
;
or is it Dante? But there again, a picture no doubt accounted for this.

The following year Philip did admirably at school. He had one illness from which he completely recovered. He still
looked
none too robust, but this was merely ‘looking’. He was a thoroughly nice, straightforward, pleasant English boy, not easy at making friends, but able to make good ones; which is all the battle. And I am thankful to say that he seemed to have inherited no adverse characteristics from his father. Nonetheless, all my confidence, all my hopes for him – and words could not express my
feelings
even now, so many years after what followed – were doomed to be shattered.

A few weeks after his twelfth birthday, June 7th, I received a telegram from his headmaster. Only six words, which shocked me more than I can say: ‘Please come at once. Grave illness.’ ‘Grave’; that one word was enough. When, within twenty-four hours of the receipt of this message, I arrived at the school and was at once closeted with the headmaster, he told me, to my consternation, that Philip, two nights before, had made an attempt to run away.

‘To run away?’ I repeated, blindly, eyeing my informant. ‘Philip? Why? Where to?’

I could see by one or two little signs that in spite of his restrained
manner
and carefully chosen words, he – the headmaster, Mr Morgan, I mean – had been shaken by what had occurred. And I had no intention of being unjust. I was merely seeking the
facts.
Indeed, a few such questions soon made it clear to me that this statement was not precisely in
accordance
with the facts. That Philip had intended to make this attempt there seemed to be little doubt, since an old discarded rope from the gymnasium had been
discovered
hidden away behind his Sunday clothes in his locker.

What seems actually to have happened was this. For reasons unknown, the poor boy had recently been neglectful of his school work. Nothing more serious than inattention and a tendency to absentmindedness – to
day-dreaming
. That far-away look in the eyes which I knew so well. He had got into trouble, too, for leaving food on his plate. Loss of appetite, I suggested. On the other hand, there had been no hint of positive unhappiness, and
certainly
not of deliberate wrong-doing. Nor, it seems, had he confided what he intended to do to any living soul in the school, not even to his closest friend or chum, a freckled, honest-looking boy named Ollitt.

On the previous Tuesday, nonetheless, a few minutes before midnight, without awakening or disturbing any one of the four boys who shared his dormitory with him, he must have risen from his bed, opened the window, and crept out on to the narrow ledge of stone beyond it. It was, as I
remember
myself, a quiet and lovely night, the more serene for its moonlight. No rope had been used; that was certain. That had remained in his locker. ‘If he had been awake – even partially awake,’ I argued silently, ‘why no rope?’
The headmaster continued to look at me, but we found no words to express our feelings.

My own conviction – and I see no reason to change it now – is that, aroused, perhaps by some evil dream, Philip had been ‘walking’ in his sleep. There was no breath of wind that night – nothing that could have alarmed the poor boy. And yet, the vivid moonlight, perhaps an inward realization of danger, something must have broken in on his sleeping mind, and aroused him – and then, no doubt, a frantic and desperate struggle to climb back into safety again. But in vain. The child, only, please God, half-conscious of his surroundings, and still under the influence of his dreams, had fallen headlong on to the flagstone path beneath the dormitory window. Within a few minutes he had been found there, unconscious, terribly injured. How little hope there was of his recovery was revealed by the headmaster’s face as we sat together, both of us fallen silent again. He himself was in no way to blame; no one was to blame; and without hesitation I then and there said so …

I was taken into the sick-room – a whitewashed, cheerful, sunny room. There was a glass of flowers on the table – pinks, I remember. The room contained five beds. Beside the furthermost of them, to the right of the other doorway and in a little cubicle, a dormitory maid was sitting – the matron herself having left the room only a few minutes before. She appeared to be reading to herself, with lowered head, from a book. She was a pale-faced little thing, looking younger than I learned she actually was – with her fair straight hair, and quiet, grey eyes. Indeed, she was little more than a child. At sight of me, she shut her book, rose from her chair, curtsied – a thing seldom seen nowadays from girls of any class – and left the room.

My dear boy lay on his back, mercifully out of pain for a while. He was tranquil, seemed to be asleep, or on the verge of being so. I sat down in the vacant chair and watched him. But that afternoon I had no word with him. During the next morning, he was in charge of the trained nurse that had been sent for. But I was allowed to sit with him again immediately after luncheon. His mother could not arrive until the next day. And then, it was feared, she would be too late. He had not heard me cross the room and slip quietly into the chair beside his bed. He lay with closed eyes, deathly pale, his head moving restlessly on his pillow. And as with sickened heart I sat watching him, his lips began to mutter, and the eyeballs beneath the closed lids to waver.

Whether he was sleeping or waking there was only one interpretation of the expression – sorrow, and, as I fancied, fear. I could not bear to see it. ‘Philip,’ I whispered, stooping over him. His features instantly became motionless.

Otherwise there was no sign that he had heard. He was listening; caught
up, it seemed, by some acute expectation. The grey eyes slowly opened and met my own. It was too late. The faint smile of welcome with which he now greeted me could not efface the darting piercing disappointment that had first been revealed in their depths. ‘Dearest Auntie Caroline,’ he whispered after a moment’s pause, putting out his hand to me. ‘Am I very ill?’

I smiled again, and bent and kissed the bloodless fingers. ‘There, my dear,’ I said. ‘Lie quietly; all will be well. And there is no need in the world to say anything unless you wish.’

The doctor himself had warned us that the boy was not to be crossed in anything. And I realized what that meant. In the brief, broken talk between us that followed, he confessed that he had some days before made up his mind to run away. To his mother I admit, not to me; and then he had
decided
otherwise.

‘Why, Philip? What had made you so unhappy?’ I ventured.

‘
Not
unhappy,’ he assured me. ‘I was too happy. But – but, you see, it was no use. It never
could
be.’

This completely perplexed me. But how ask a child why he is
happy
! ‘Then there was nothing – I was with you a while when you were asleep, my dear – there was nothing on your mind; nothing to be afraid of?’

Yet again the eyes turned restlessly in their sockets. ‘Afraid, Auntie!’ he said. ‘Oh, no. I don’t mind
that
now. Nothing to be afraid of now, I mean. It’s still there; but now – it doesn’t matter.’ And what I saw in his face at this moment was certainly neither dread, nor terror, nor even
misgiving
, nothing of that – but a grieved, profound, unutterable longing and pining.

‘Listen, Philip,’ I said; ‘your mother will soon be here, very soon.’

‘That’s lovely,’ he replied. But to my consternation – since I can truthfully say I had never in act or thought stood between them – there was
some
thing
–
a tone, an accent – wanting even in that ‘lovely’, however sincerely it was meant. What then else could he be pining for? What could I do – or say – to rest his mind, comfort him? I pondered in vain.

The plain whitewashed room was radiant with light. It was a beautiful summer morning; the airs at the window ebbed in, sweet with the flowers of the garden and the smell of new-mown hay. Out of the distance came the noise, the voices, of the boys in the playing-fields … A day of darkness, leaden clouds and pelting rain would have been easier to endure. At that time I had already steeled myself to many things in this world; but a life, I can truthfully declare, was slipping away far from me more precious than my own. I was a stranger to all this. I had never, except once before, felt helpless and forsaken. But how console a child with
that
!