Donkey Boy (22 page)

At the end of the week Phillip was used to going to school in the morning, eating his sandwiches in the other room for dinner with a glass of milk poured out by Miss May, and returning with Mummy and Mavis in the afternoon. He liked school, chiefly because of the play in the back garden. He had learned, among other things, that by holding up his hand, and saying “Please Miss Fanny, may I leave the room”, that he could stay in the lavatory and look at a comic for as much as five minutes before pulling the plug, as though he had done something, before going back again. Nobody could find out, after he had pulled the plug.

One morning, when he had put up his hand to go to the lavatory, he went round all the pockets of the coats in the
cloakroom
to find out what was in them. With excitement he found quite a lot of pennies. What a wonderful discovery! He put them all in a glove, and the glove in his pocket; and after waiting in the lavatory to pull the plug, he returned to the classroom, where Miss May was telling how William Rufus was hunting deer and was shot by an arrow and a charcoal burner took him on a sledge in the New Forest in eleven hundred. He was writing down the letters 1100 when Miss Fanny came into the room and spoke to Miss May and by the awful feeling he had in his stomach he knew it was about the pennies. So he thought he would get the glove out of his pocket at once.

His desk was near the stone slab of the fireplace. The fire was not lit; the stone was clean, its hearth-stoned surface untouched by foot and unsoiled by cinder. Paper, wood, and coal lay within the iron grate, ready for a match on the first cold morning of autumn.

Miss Fanny Whittaker said, “Pay attention, children.”

They all looked up.

“Now I have something very important to say to you all. Has anyone lost any money this morning?”

She had got so far when Phillip, having pulled the glove from his pocket, threw it under the grate, and hardly had the coins jingled on the stone when he called out, “Look, I have found this!” and getting off his chair, picked up the glove, and carried it to Miss Fanny.

Miss Fanny Whittaker looked at Phillip. He held out the glove heavy with pennies. She took it without a word, exchanged a look of her dark eyes, which seemed set in some remote, far-off pain, with her sister May, standing by the blackboard with the names of the Norman Kings of England and the dates of their succession chalked upon it; and went out of the door.

The lesson was resumed. Phillip forgot about the pennies soon afterwards, which meant that no one mentioned the matter again. He never felt in the pockets for pennies again. Nor did he ever cry again, while at the school. The personalities of the Misses Whittaker were such that not one of their pupils was ever in distress. He liked painting pictures and drawing, and sums about apples and horses galloping and history where cakes were burned and Hereward the Wake had a secret path through a swamp, and Robin Hood and his Merry Men.

Richard remarked the change for the better in Phillip, and said to Hetty: “You see, I told you he needed proper discipline,” and Hetty said: “Yes, dear.” She did not show her husband the children’s reports for she did not want him to know that in the exams at the end of term Phillip had come bottom in his class in every subject. There was one consolation, in his Conduct report, which was
Good.

Christmas brought great excitement. Two rows of Japanese lanterns were hung across the sitting-room ceiling from corner to corner on Christmas Eve; while after lots of brown paper parcels of presents had been carried into the front room, the door was locked, and the key hidden in Daddy’s pocket. Then Daddy dressed up as a detective. He wore a funny hat and had a
bullseye
lantern shining in the dark of the coal-cellar. He told them a wonderful story of nearly catching a butterfly with the lantern and a net, on the Hill, only bad men attacked him and he fought them and knocked them over and they all ran away, but when
he went to look for the butterfly it was gone, and it was ever so rare, called a Camberwell Beauty. It was a wonderful lantern, and you could hide the light by turning the shutter, and no one could see you in the dark.

O, if only he could have a lantern like that for a present, to put on his raft when he went down the Thames, wearing a hat just like Daddy’s. Daddy said that one day if he was a very good boy he might give him the hat and the lantern too, to look for
butterflies
and moths with. In bed that night Phillip tossed and turned, thinking of having a hat to go over the ears in snow and a dark lantern, and of what Father Christmas had brought him, and if he would see Father Christmas when he filled his stocking hung on the rail at the bottom of the bed.

O, he could never, never go to sleep! His mind raced and raced over hundreds of things and places, far away over the sea where sharks jumped with spikes of bamboo cutting their stomachs and black men and esparto grass hammocks and lions and temples with priests burning joss sticks and Joey the old dog and the gipsy woman who might have stolen him and turned him brown all over if he had not hidden his name from her, and said he was Mr. Cornflower.

Then Phillip heard Father Christmas coming, so he closed his eyes in terrible excitement and hardly dared to breathe and he was frightened to open his eyes for Father Christmas would be sure to see, for like God he knew everything, being up in the sky and able to look down always.

There were sounds in the room and rustlings and the noise of things going into a stocking like when a stocking was pulled over a shoe in hide-and-seek in Aunty Dorrie’s house with Jerry and Ralph and when Father Christmas was gone he got out of bed to look and Mummy came into the room and said, “Oh Sonny, why are you not asleep?” and he said: “Mummy, I heard Father Christmas come just now, quick, quick, pull back the curtain and you will see him on the roof, for I heard his sleigh-bells when he came down the chimney!” And Mummy said: “Wait till the morning, dear, to look in your stocking, for you must get some sleep, you are so very very excitable, and you must rest your brain, dear.” Mummy kissed him, and he kissed Mummy, and when she was gone he looked in the stocking, smelling the orange and the apple; licking the whip-top to taste the wood and to try
and find out the colour; sucking the sugar mouse, and biting just a teeny-weeny bit off its nose; counting the nuts; feeling a box of marbles and a big glass blood-ally. There were biscuits; a sherbert bag; a licorice boot-lace; a wooden pencil box with pencils and pens in it, rubbers, and nibs; a rubber ball; and a banana. He put them all back, with a feeling that hundreds of starling birds were running up and down inside him all singing and whistling and trying to fly out of his throat.

After breakfast they all went into the front room, and
unpacked
the parcels. He had a brown football from Uncle Hilary with black stitches in the leather, which was hard and greasy like a real one; a bird-book with lovely photos from Aunt Viccy; a penknife with two blades, one big and the other small, from Aunty Bee; a disappointing prayerbook from Aunty Belle; a red book for collecting stamps and a big boy’s white jersey from Mummy; a walking stick with a silver band and a real
gunmetal
watch from Father; a box of chocolates from Aunty Bigge; a lovely box of Nürnberg gingerbread from Minnie; a pocket book with words printed on it in gold and
Mallard,
Carter,
&
Turney,
Ltd.
from Grandpa and a five shilling piece; a dozen handkerchiefs and half-a-crown from Grannie, and lots of Christmas cards, including one from Mona Monk who Mummy said was in an Institution. Phillip asked what this was and Mummy said he would not know if she told him, and after thinking about this Phillip thought that if he would not know if Mummy told him, would he know if Mummy did not tell him. So he asked Mummy to explain, and she said it was a sort of school, and he must write a nice letter of thanks to Mona, and she would also send her a parcel of clothes which Mavis had done with.

Phillip had given Daddy a box of matches, a toffee apple, and a packet of pipe-cleaners; and for Mummy some curling pins and a reel of strong thread to sew boot buttons on with, from a poor man who had come to the door one day. They were very pleased with their presents, saying they were just what they wanted, and he felt he was a good boy.

Then Daddy opened his surprise, in a big wooden case. It was a musical box, that played big thorny round tin pieces of music which clanged when you shook them. He said it was a German Polyphone. It was lovely music, like the bells of St. Simon’s
when you were walking over the Hill to hear Mr. Mundy preach and the anthem afterwards, but the Polyphone was much nicer.

The Polyphone played during dinner of turkey, Christmas pudding, and mince pies. Afterwards Daddy carried it and put it on a table in the corner of the front room, and then went back to the sitting room to read a book called
Lorna
Doone.
Mother said he might want to go to sleep, so they must creep upstairs when they went out of the front room. It was lovely in the front room, with Mummy and Mavis, with a blazing fire and lots of nuts and figs and tangerines and preserved fruits to eat. Mrs. Feeney washed up in the scullery, to give Mother a rest. Mrs. Feeney had come to cook the turkey, and was having hers in the kitchen when Father got up and said: “Please do come and join us at Table, Mrs. Feeney, it is Christmas when all old friends come together,” and Mrs. Feeney said: “Oh, I can’t do that, sir, thank you all the same, for I know my station,” and Father said: “Your place is with those who owe you so much for your good service, Mrs. Feeney,” and so Mrs. Feeney had had dinner with them. Mother said that Mr. Feeney had gone into the hospital for incurables in London and she was all alone in the world now. So Phillip gave her his sugar mouse for a Christmas present.

T
HEODORA
M
ADDISON
, after several weeks of sailing along the south and west coast of France, in a Greek schooner carrying a cargo of Turkish tobacco, arrived at the port of Bristol with the mixed feelings of one who had been abroad nearly six years. After saying goodbye to the companions of her voyage she walked to the dock gates and feeling extremely thin and emptied out, a hollow woman, took a fly to the heights of Clifton, overlooking the city, where lived a woman friend of Cambridge days, with whom she had corresponded during her sojourn abroad. It was the last year of the century, and her arrival in the land of her birth left her tremulous and exposed in isolation. She stopped her cab on Clifton Down, after the long pull up from the docks and river below, to give the horse a rest, and also to assemble her thoughts.

It was chilly in England, after the hazy blue heats of the Mediterranean Sea. And the faces of the people, so white, so shut-in upon themselves; the raggedness of the poor so pallid and dour: so unlike the brown-limbed, merry poverty of the Aegean. Theodora wept a little in her loneliness, as she walked across the grass of the common, where sheep grazed amidst thorns and holly trees. This was her country, which had driven out Byron and Shelley; this was her own, her native land; and engaged in an unjust war against a valiant minority of Dutch colonists in South Africa. Such an unpropitious start for the new century, which was to purge so much of gross materialism of the old century which had just passed away! In some disappointment she returned to the fly, and got in, the horse reluctantly leaving its unexpected feed of grass, to be jogged to Cabot Crescent, where her friend lived.

The two young women (who nevertheless thought of
themselves
as matured and staid, being twenty-six years of age) were of like mind, both classical scholars; and so neither felt an uneasiness at the meeting, only restrained joy that the other showed a splendid happiness in her face. Both were full of the project that had been discussed during many letters, to start a
school for young gentlewomen that would be based upon the truths of nature, as revealed by the great philosophers and artists of all known civilisations.

That evening, after a vegetarian supper, the two friends, wearing white hats of Bedfordshire straw with wide brims, starched linen collars with pale blue ties, white blouses, and simple dark blue skirts whose ends were a sensible two inches off the ground, to leave the dust where it belonged—Rechenda had insisted on lending her great friend a set of her clothes from Cambridge days—went for a stroll upon the Clifton Downs. It was a fine evening, and they made their way down to Brunel’s suspension bridge, which spanned the deep gorge over the estuarial curve of the Avon. Theodora still had her sea-legs; the bridge seemed to be swaying, the rocky cliff face opposite suddenly to be lurching. They were approaching, arm in arm, the centre of the bridge, when she said that she felt giddy. They had been walking in the middle of the roadway, but now the passage of several carriages,
containing
people out for an airing in the warm summer weather, made them seek the sidewalk. Theodora clung more nervously to her friend’s arm, as over the painted steel parapet the tiny ribbon of road beside the river became visible. But she
controlled
herself; and forcing her gaze upon the shining and steep mudbanks of the river below, said: “I wonder how true the story is, that a young woman fell from here soon after the opening of the bridge twenty-five years ago, and was saved by her crinoline and the soft mud below?”

“I do not believe it, Theodora. It is apocryphal. Why, surely the passage through the air would either force up the frame of the crinoline, distorting it out of its bell-like shape; or more likely the poor woman would have been turned over by the rush of air, and fallen head first. Like most stories told or opinions held by the majority, it has no basis in fact.”

They followed the last of the carriages coming in from the Somerset side, and reached
terra
firma
with its green grass once more. Theodora’s spirits lightened.

“I am sure, Rechenda, that once our school is known, it cannot fail to be but a success. We are on the verge of a wide and deep spiritual awakening, not only in this country, but throughout Europe. It is to the younger generation of women, the mothers to be, that we must look, to receive the new ideas. I will not
say our ideas, for that would surely be to show an anogance based on a mere revulsion from the modern scene; for the old poets, visionaries, and artists knew it long ago. Our principles must be based upon a synthesis of all that is clear and noble in the past. We are the heirs of their wisdom.”

“I was much impressed by the teachings of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi you sent me, Theodora. Oh, he is so clear, so true, so divinely right!”

“Is it not curious, Rechenda, that though Pestalozzi was famous in his day, a hundred years and more ago, his ideas should still be, in Keats’ phrase, ‘caviare to the general’. Look at the smoke from the factories of Bristol down in the hollow there—what truth can prevail in the wretched conditions of the slums, in the competition of the counting houses, in all the material wealth being created in such sunless places? And how strange to think that Napoleon fought, in part at least, and caused such human suffering, for much the same ideals as Pestalozzi. You know, after Napoleon was taken to St. Helena, he said that if his system could have prevailed, the ‘canaille’ of the big cities would have become the best-educated in Europe.”

“But he took to the sword to clear the way for his ideals, and so his ideals perished by the sword.”

“Yes, history reveals that there is no hope in political
revolution
. The Chinese have a saying, ‘He who slays the dragon, becomes in turn the dragon’.”

Rechenda could not resist retorting, “And they have another saying, ‘A dragon in shallow waters shall be eaten alive by shrimps’.”

They both laughed. “Well, we are agreed that our ideals must not in any sense be political. Oh, the dear man Pestalozzi in his castle at Yverdon in Switzerland—I can see him now, among his waifs and orphans, or the flowery slopes under the peaks of the eagles, giving his children—they all called him ‘Father’, you know—the love and tenderness that their very souls cried out for. Now just look at those children, by contrast, over there!”

Two bands of boys were shouting, taunting, and fighting with sticks around an overturned perambulator. Some had helmets, made of newspapers, on their heads. One boy was crying, holding a bloody nose. Some had button-hole badges in the lapels of their coats, little discs of celluloid imprinted with photographic heads
of Baden-Powell, Lord Roberts and Kitchener. They were playing a war-game; but both sides having declined to be Boers, they had combined to set upon a third group of three more ragged children, about an old perambulator filled with sticks for firing, which they had decided was a Boer läger. The boy with the bloody nose had been pushing the perambulator with his smaller friends; now it was wrecked, its contents scattered.

“You see,” said Theodora. “They have no idea what they have done. They are only reproducing the minds of their parents. The truth is not in any political action, which must always be based on material expediency.”

She spoke to the injured boy, after the others had run away, and did her best to comfort him. His smaller brother and sister stood by, looking wan. Theodora and her friend set about collecting the scattered sticks, and lifted the perambulator on its high wheels again, to fill it. Afterwards she gave each of them a penny, and the three children went away more hopefully.

“I have often thought, Rechenda, that I might perhaps serve the better if I went among the poor; but it is the ruling classes that need to know the true way, just as much as the poor. And do you know, I think I have the motto that shall express our ideal; it is one of Pestalozzi’s remarks that he made most often to his children. ‘Without love, a man is without God; and without both God and love, what is man?’”

So it was determined; and the next day the two friends, feeling that they were doing something enormously risky, went to an estate agent to make enquiries about the lease of a country house, where they would found their new school. The curriculum would include riding and callisthenics; spinning and weaving; singing and drawing; reading, writing, and arithmetic, with classics and mathematics for those who showed an aptitude; botany and natural science, cooking and gardening, should go with music, swimming and dancing.

At the end of a week the house was found, in the Quantock hills of Somerset, and near the sea. They considered taking it on a twenty-one-year lease, after an architect had been called in to advise about the practicability of certain alterations necessary for a girls’ school. They went into the details of capital expenditure, and had a deed of partnership drawn up. But before the final settlement, and to allow both of them time for reflection, Theodora,
who had written in the meantime to her brothers John and Richard telling them of her return, left Clifton for a round of visits.

The first was to be a sad one; for her eldest brother John, whom she had seen last in Devon with Jenny his wife, together with Dickie and Hetty and her baby godson Phillip, was now a widower, his wife having died in giving birth to a son, William.

So Theodora was going first to her old home at Rookhurst, to see John and his boy, who now would be five years old. Then on to London, to stay with Dickie and Hetty, and see her godson, who must be in his seventh year! It was hardly to be believed that the baby she had held on her lap, on the grey bouldered shore of Lynmouth in that remote summer of a vanished century, would now be running about, talking, and perhaps be going to school. She wondered what sort of a boy he had grown into. How she and Hetty, before he was born, had hoped that he would be a poet! Theodora felt a quickening excitement as the train took her south-eastwards, to the town of Colham, to stay a week with John; after which she was going to London, to see her nephew and godson, the little “donkey boy”, who had so very nearly died at birth, and his mother with him.

As the engine smoked through the countryside, the corn harvest already cut and stooked in field after field, and cattle lying contented in meadows that, despite the prolonged summer weather, still looked so very green after the harsh lands of the Aegean—but how she would miss the flowers in the rocks!—Theodora felt her heart renewing itself with the thoughts of England rushing upon her eyes through the open carriage window.

She sat alone in a carriage; and without reserve, she found herself speaking with the tongues of the poets—Francis Thompson, Keats, Shelley, and Shakespeare. After a time her exuberance settled to a more concrete contemplation, and with that mood many memories reappeared with startling clearness before the eye of her mind.

She thought of Sidney Cakebread with whom her youthful self had fallen so helplessly, so agonisingly in love, a condition which had impelled her to leave England. She had heard not one word of him during the years of wandering abroad: never once had Hetty mentioned him. His children must be growing up now, three boys and a little daughter. How had his marriage with
DorrieTurney fared? They had beenill-matched. Dorrie, sweet and gentle as she was by nature, knew little of the empire of the mind.

Would Dorrie have been different if she had had, say, an education at the sort of school she and Rechenda were going to build? Surely she would! The future of the world lay in the full and proper education of women. Western civilisation had fallen out of balance since the time when women had been subjugated, stultified, and treated as chattels by men who had ceased to use their bodies in natural actions, but become soft and cunning in trade, in the acquisition of property through stock markets and the counting house. And having perceived the problems of the nineteenth century in the spirit of truth, Theodora felt an immense optimism for the future.

Her visit to Rookhurst was not what she had imagined it to be. She was, indeed, shocked by the appearance of her brother John. Already his face was lined, his beard was streaked with grey, and the hair above his temples was grey, too. He appeared to have let himself go, and was by that so much a stranger to her. He lived in his library, while the house was run by an odd little housekeeper-cook, with the help of daily women coming in from the village. As for her nephew William, he was a dear little fellow, but obviously had been allowed to run far too wild, in the sense of growing up apart from his father. Obviously John had never recovered from the death of Jenny.

Theodora, after some hesitation, made suggestions to her brother, who appeared to have decided that his life was over. The house was neglected; some of the rooms had been closed, the furniture covered with sheets, the shutters barred upon the windows. They had been shut up for some years now. The outer woodwork of the house needed painting. So did the gutters, which were choked with leaves. Some of them had grass sprouting out of them a foot high. Down one wall the water from a choked lead spout, cracked by frost, had spread in a green delta, the damp blackening the plaster of the rooms within. As for the gardens, they were a wilderness. They had been bad enough during Mother’s last years, since Father had gone away, but now they were choked with thorns, unbelliferous plants, and nettles.

A feeling of helplessness gradually overcame Theodora; the spirit of the place was affecting her as it had affected her brother.
Poor man, what could she say, what could she do to help him to find himself again?

Theodora thought of telegraphing to her friend Rechenda to come and stay, as her guest, in Colham. There she would discuss the matter with her; for it seemed to Theodora that her duty lay in looking after her brother, and in particular of that nephew of hers. Obviously something was wrong in his
upbringing
. John said he was deceitful, and already showing some of the traits of their Father which had ruined the family. How
could
John misinterpret his own condition so? Had he lost all sense of cause and effect, of objectivity?