The Elderbrook Brothers (6 page)

‘You ought to try it some day,' said Matthew, wishing only to hear her voice again; for politeness sets a certain limit to silent staring.

‘What about you?' Miss Linnet retorted. ‘I suppose you're a champion player?'

He felt himself reddening, but without resentment. To be talking on equal terms with this unearthly beautiful being was as much as any boy could wish: what was said did not matter. He looked at her in simple wonder, with a faint smile dawning in his face, scarcely able to believe that she was there, in the solid flesh, and no dream.

If she had met his glance then it would perhaps have told her more than she could reasonably guess and more than he himself could have been said to know. But her attention was distracted. She was looking elsewhere.

‘Who's this coming?' she said.

He followed the direction of her eyes and a spasm of surprise and disenchantment surged up in him.

‘It's Guy. My young brother. What the world's he doing here?'

Guy approached slowly, hands in pockets, with an air of extreme nonchalance that masked a conscious audacity.

Matthew jumped to his feet; the elder brother, whose privilege, symbol of budding manhood, had been poached upon by this cheeky youngster.

‘What d' you want here? Anything wrong at home?'

‘Not that I know of,' said Guy.

‘Then who told you to come here? They don't want kids like you.'

‘I told myself,' said Guy. ‘That's who told me.'

He left it at that, saying nothing of the brooding anger, the
forlornness, the conflict, and at last the passionate resolve not to be left out of everything just because he was the unwanted middle one. He said nothing of all that, because it was not in the part he meant to play, not in the picture of himself he was willing to exhibit.

‘How did you get here?' Matthew hotly demanded, speaking at random, for the question could hardly advance his cause.

‘On my two legs, dear brother,' said Guy, with a bland smile. He half-glanced at Miss Linnet, inviting her approval.

‘On your two legs, eh?' came the harsh voice of Joe Elderbrook, cruel as a whip. ‘Then on your two legs you shall go back, my boy. And look sharp about it!'

An order from their father was something no son of Joe Elderbrook had ever been known to ignore. Guy recognized the voice of his doom, yet regretted nothing of his adventure. He had asserted himself, and he had won a compassionate glance from the strange young woman to whom Matthew, he supposed, had been showing off. He was secretly as much fortified, as Matthew was embarrassed, by the presence of Eva Linnet at this quarrel. But for her he might have broken down, might have stormed and blubbered like the unlucky little schoolboy he was. She, by being there, and being a ‘lady' and a stranger, made the supreme effort of self-control both imperative and worth while.

‘All right, Father.' He turned on his heel. ‘It's only seven miles,' he said, over his shoulder.

Matthew watched his brother's diminishing figure, and the sight cost him a pang. He would have liked to join Guy on that walk, and make it up and have everything between them as before. Making it up was a simple and oft-recurring ceremony among the three brothers. One of them would say, after a decent interval: ‘I say, shall we make it up?' And the other: ‘Yes, all right.' And from that moment all anger would be buried and forgotten. But now, by something he could not fully understand, Matthew was cut off from that comfort. Guy had not been quite himself. He had been like
someone consciously playing a part, performing a set task. And this vaguely disturbed Matthew.

What more insistently disturbed him, however, was that he had put himself wrong, he felt, with Eva Linnet. Taken by surprise he had behaved churlishly to his young brother and so shown himself in a disagreeable light to one whose good opinion had suddenly become important to him.

He gave a sidelong glance at that heavenly profile. He thought he could read disapproval there. Perhaps even dislike.

‘I expect you think we're a rum family, don't you, Miss Linnet?'

She shrugged her elegant little shoulders. She smiled indifferently.

‘What's your brother's name?' she asked. ‘He's a nice little boy.'

‘Guy? Oh, he's all right,' said Matthew.

The talk trickled on. The day was golden calm. But the spell was broken. Matthew's moment was gone.

SUDDENLY, as it seemed, Felix was home for the holidays. Guy and Emily had met him at Lutterthorpe. They saw his small excited face at the carriage window as the train came in, and got to the door just in time to help him out with his tin trunk. In the warmth of embracing him Emily said to herself he's just the same, just the same. But she lied, and knew it. She knew he was just a little different. Other things and other lives had worked upon him and changed him: the cord was at last broken and her youngest delivered to the world.

Guy too was aware of a difference. He tried to cast it out with a charmed word.

‘Ship's sinking, Mr Mate!'

It was a sign between them: ritual beginning of an old familiar game. But Felix's answer—‘All hands to the boats!'—lacked
something of its former conviction, and Guy felt himself defeated. Nor did Felix pursue the theme: he had too much else to say. He talked very fast and almost at the top of his voice, Felix who had always been considered a quiet little boy. His noisiness did not disconcert Emily: she knew it to be his way of dealing with an emotional crisis and only in part a reflection of his new importance. But to Guy it wore a more desolating aspect. He felt that his loss of Felix was confirmed, not ended, by this homecoming.

‘We have morning prayers every day,' said Felix, ‘and roll-call. They call everybody's name and you have to say
Here
. If you're absent or late you get an impot.'

‘Do you?' Guy would not ask what an impot was.

‘Hollis got two last term. But Abbott didn't. Nor did I.'

‘Who are they? Just boys?'

Guy wanted to ask: do you like them better than me? And holding back the question made him feel swollen and red.

‘We're the Three Highwaymen,' said Felix, innocently dropping salt in the wound. ‘Abbott specially,' he added after a pause, unconscious of any hiatus. ‘He helps me with my Latin a bit. He's been doing it longer.'

‘Do you have Latin?' said Guy.

He felt sad and ashamed. For the moment there was no anger in him. It was not easy, in Felix's presence, to be angry with this young brother for being at a school where recondite mysteries like Impots and Latin were part of the day's work. It was easier to do that when he wasn't there.

‘Yes, and French too,' said Felix. ‘I'm going to swot up my first conjugation during the hols.'

It was impossible that Felix should not feel his importance a little. But though not every school had ‘hols'—the Upmarden children had to make the best of mere holidays—he was guiltless of consciously exhibiting his new lingo. Guiltless? Well, nearly.

‘Have you brought books and things back with you?' Guy asked.

‘Yes, I'll show you if you like,' said Felix. ‘Rather a fag, but still. It's awfully dry sort of stuff, Latin.'

‘I expect it is,' said Guy enviously.

As the holidays wore on the strangeness wore off, and the old relationship was all but restored when the summer term arrived to cut it short again. It was during this next term, and on a Saturday evening of all times, that Mr Cowlin, on his way home from The Two Shoes at By-End Corner, chanced upon a strange and portentous sight: a boy, under no visible compulsion, reading a book. His astonishment was not diminished when upon coming closer he recognized the boy as Guy Elderbrook. Guy too was taken by surprise. The last person he expected to have peering in at him over the field gate was Mr Cowlin.

‘Well, Guy?' said Mr Cowlin, coming to a halt.

He had had a whisky or two and was feeling sociable. He was a neighbour as well as the schoolmaster. He believed himself to be not a bad fellow at heart, and not actively disliked by the children, and in this belief he was justified. Not so well founded was the consolatory notion that however little the young wretches learnt, however indifferent they might be to the intellectual fare offered them, he was doing his duty so long as a semblance of outward discipline was maintained. That certain prize pupils should be capable of reciting the Capes of Europe, a list of dates beginning with 1066, sundry tables of weights and measures, and a few of the simpler axioms of Euclid, was gratifying proof that they had mastered geography, history, and mathematics. As for the others, it was enough if they refrained, in class, from eating, conversing, kicking and pinching each other, giggling, wilfully coughing, making rude oral noises, putting out derisive tongues, spilling ink, carrying white mice in their pockets, releasing specimens of the local fauna at inconvenient moments (spiders and beetles from matchboxes, young frogs from caps and dirty handkerchiefs), and too frequently adopting the subterfuge of saying ‘May I leave the room, please?' That these activities should be kept in check,
that every male child should be addressed by its surname and affix the word ‘sir' to its answers: this was discipline. Outside school, however, one could unbend. One could, for example, address young Elderbrook as Guy.

‘Improving the shining hour?' said Mr Cowlin.

Shining the hour was. A beautiful evening, warm and still young. But the question seemed to need no answer, and Guy did not offer one. He made no verbal response at all, but merely grinned, bashfully, and with a hasty movement pushed his book out of sight.

‘I can see you have a piece of literature there,' said Mr Cowlin. ‘Some mighty product of the human intellect, no doubt. A pennyworth of blood and thunder, eh?' He extended his hand commandingly. ‘Show me.'

Neither he nor Guy could question his right to pry. It was established by long custom, part of the accepted order of things. Evasion and trickery were possible, and were often practised, but direct disobedience was a thing seldom even thought of.

The book changed hands.

‘Dear me!' said Mr Cowlin, turning its pages. ‘A Latin primer. So this is how you spend your leisure hours, my young friend?'

He began, by force of habit, in a spirit of genial sarcasm, but ended in sheer wonderment. The surprise was too much. The rebuke sobered him. It dammed up his flow of facetious pomposities. That a boy in his school should have a desire for learning was a shattering astonishment, and the confession implied by that astonishment might be even more shattering. It did not bear looking at too closely.

‘Yes, sir,' said Guy. ‘Now and again.'

Mr Cowlin gave him a long considering look. ‘How far have you got?'

‘Not very far,' Guy admitted uneasily. ‘Only bits here and there,' he added, understating his achievement.

‘Which page?' Mr Cowlin insisted. ‘Do you know your declensions? Let's hear the first. Go ahead.'

That was an easy one. He had learnt the inevitable
mensa
orally from Felix and had it pat.

‘Good,' said Mr Cowlin. ‘Now second declension.'

‘Shall I say
puer
or
dominus
, sir?' Guy was excited and beginning to show off. It had flashed into his mind that old Cowlin might come in useful.

‘Please yourself,' said Cowlin. ‘No, we'll take it as said. What about verbs? Future indicative of
moneo?

During that brief recital he said to himself: he's not a fool, he's teachable. He felt an impulse to help the boy, and equally a desire to impress him. In his mind's eye he saw his shelf of Latin authors—Virgil, Horace, and the rest—with the dust of years thick upon them.

‘I've got some books at home that might interest you. What do you say?' Unconsciously he had dropped his schoolmaster manner and spoke as to an equal.

‘What, now, sir?'

‘No time like the present.'

Guy climbed over the gate and joined Mr Cowlin on his walk home. He spent no time in idle wonder at the unexpected turn of events: he was too busy thinking ahead. His vague plans for the future were taking shape, and it now seemed possible that Mr Cowlin—Mr Cowlin of all people!—would have a hand in them.

Mr Cowlin occupied a small house in Upmarden Lane, opposite The Plough and Gaiters. He lived alone and made his own breakfast every morning, but took his main meals at Mrs Gruntle's cottage, twenty yards up the road. Mrs Gruntle, the relict of a postman long deceased, had for at least ten years cherished the extraordinary notion that she might one day be persuaded to become Mrs Cowlin; but Cowlin, in whose eyes she was a very ordinary harmless amiable elderly woman and nothing more, remained blessedly unaware of the project. His back windows looked out on a small garden and orchard, which healthily occupied some of his too abundant leisure, and to a wide view of green hills and sky. Mrs Gruntle had never
set foot inside his house: the privilege of cleaning for him belonged to a succession of village ‘daily' girls. He was, in genera], a reserved but not unneighbourly man. He joined, if from a slight distance, in the conversation that went on pretty continuously at The Plough and Gaiters; and if ever he sighed for better company he never sought it.

He led Guy into a large untidy room, into which the summer evening light struggled with difficulty through one small west window. It was the room of a bachelor and a recluse. The two chairs, as well as the table, were scattered with books; and there were other books dropped on the floor. The warm air stank of upholstery and stale tobacco. On the walls were a few old prints, picked up at auction sales. A first glance might have suggested that the man who lived here was a great reader, but the true inference to be drawn from the sight of so many scattered books was less flattering to their owner. Cowlin's was an indolent and restless spirit. Almost every volume represented an unfulfilled intention: nowadays he seldom read in the same book for thirty consecutive minutes.