Fortitude

H >> Hugh Walpole >> Fortitude

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There were also many cries of "Shame, Comber," "Dirty game," and even "Well
played young Westcott!"

He knew as he wept bitter tears into his blood-stained hands that his reign
was at an end.

There were indeed, for the time at any rate, no more "rags," and Peter
might, an he would, have reigned magnificently over the Lower School. But
he was as silent and aloof as ever, and was considered "a sidey devil, but
jolly plucky, by Gad."

And for himself he got at any rate the more continued companionship of
Cards, who languidly, and, perhaps a younger Sir Willoughby Patterne "with
a leg," admired his muscle.

IV

Finally, towards the end of the term, Peter and Bobby Galleon may be seen
sitting on a high hill. It is a Sunday afternoon in spring, and far away
there is a thin line of faintly blue hills. Nearer to view there are grey
heights more sharply outlined and rough, like drawing paper--painted with
a green wood, a red-roofed farm, a black church spire, and a brown ploughed
field. Immediately below them a green hedge hanging over a running stream
that has caught the blue of the sky. Above them vast swollen clouds
flooding slowly with the faint yellow of the coming sunset, hanging
stationary above the stream and seeming to have flung to earth some patches
of their colour in the first primroses below the hedge. A rabbit watches,
his head out of his hole.

The boys' voices cut the air.

"I say, Bobby, don't you ever wonder about things--you never seem to want
to ask questions."

"No, I don't suppose I do. I'm awfully stupid. Father says so."

"It's funny your being stupid when your father's so clever."

"Do you mind my being stupid?"

"No--only I'd like you to want to know things--things like what people are
like inside--their thinking part I mean, not their real insides. People
like Mother Gill and old Binns and Prester Ma: and then what one's going to
do when one's grown up--you never want to know that."

"No, it'll just come I suppose. Of course, I shan't be clever like the
governor."

"No, I don't think you will."

Once again: "Do you mind my being so stupid, Peter?"

"No--I'm awfully stupid too. But I like to wonder about things. There was
once a man I met at home with rings and things who lived in London...."
Peter stops, Galleon wouldn't be interested in that.

"Anyhow, you know, you've got Cards--he's an awfully clever chap."

"Yes, he's wonderful," Peter sighs, "and he's seen such a lot of things."

"Yes, but you know I don't think Cards really cares for you as much as I
do." This is an approach to sentiment, and Peter brushes it hastily aside:

"I like you both awfully. But I say, won't it be splendid to be grown up in
London?"

"I don't know--lots of fellows don't like it."

"That's nothing," Peter says slowly, "to do with its not being splendid!"

And the rabbit, tired of listening to such tiresome stuff, thinks that they
must be very young boys indeed.

CHAPTER VI

A LOOKING-GLASS, A SILVER MATCH-BOX, A GLASS OF WHISKY, AND--VOX POPULI

I

Peter, thirteen to sixteen!--and left, so it appears, very much the same,
as far as actual possessions go, at the end of it as at the poverty-struck
commencement. Friendship, Honour, Glory--how these things came and went
with him during these years might have a book to themselves were it not
that our business is with a wider stage and more lasting issues--and there
is but little room for a full-fledged chronicle. Though Dawson's--and to
take the history of Miss Gill only--of her love affair with the curate, of
her final desperate appeal to him and of his ultimate confession that he
was married already--provides a story quite sufficient for three excellent
volumes. Or there is the history of Benbow, that bucolic gentleman into
whose study we led Peter a chapter or two ago, Head for this year or two of
Dawson's--soon to be head of nothing but the dung-heap and there to crow
only dismally--with a childlike Mrs. Benbow, led unwittingly to Dawson's
as a lamb to the slaughter-house--later to flee, crying, back to her
hearth and home, her life smashed to the tiniest pieces and no brain nor
strength to put it together again. Or there is the natural and interesting
progression, on the part of any child, behind whose back those iron gates
of Dawson's have swung, from innocence to knowledge, from knowledge to
practice, from practice to miserable Submission, Concealment, and a merry
prospective Hell--this is a diverting study with which it would be easy to
fill these pages....

But the theme is Peter's education, and Dawson's is only an incident to
that history--an incident that may be taken by the percipient reader, for
a most admirable Symbol--even an early rehearsal of a Comedy entitled
"How to Learn to be a Man, or The World as a Prancing Ground."...

But with Peter, if you take him from that first asking Mrs. Trussit
(swinging his short legs from the table and diving into the mixed biscuit
tin). "Is it, Mrs. Trussit, like David Copperfield?"... to his meeting
of her again, he still rather short-legged but no longer caring over
much for mixed biscuits, in his sixteenth year, with Dawson's over and
done with--"No, Mrs. Trussit, not in the least like," and grimly said in
addition, the changes, alterations and general growing-up Development may
be said to be inside him rather than out, and there they are vital enough.

With those three and a half years it is a case of Things sticking out, like
hillocks in a flat country, and it is retrospection rather than impressions
at the time that show what mattered and what did not. But, on the whole,
the vital things at Dawson's are pretty plain to the eye and must be
squeezed into a chapter as best they can.

Treliss, as it appeared in the holidays, seemed to Peter to change very
little. His relations with his father were curiously passive during this
time, and suggested, in their hint of future developments, something
ominous and uneasy. They scarcely ever spoke to one another, and it was
Peter's object to avoid the house as often as possible, but in his father's
silence now (Peter himself being older and intuitively sharper as to the
reason of things) he saw active dislike, and even, at times, a suggested
fear. Outwardly they--his father, his grandfather, his aunt, Mrs.
Trussit--had changed not at all; his grandfather the same old creature of
grey hairs and cushions and rugs, his father broad and square and white in
the face with his black hair carefully brushed, his aunt with her mittens
and trembling hands and silly voice, Mrs. Trussit with her black silk gown
and stout prosperous face--Oh! they were all there, but he fancied--and
this might easily be imagination--that they, like the portraits of the old
Westcotts about the walls, watched him, as he grew, knowing that ever, as
the months passed, the day came nearer when father and son must come to
terms. And beyond this he had, even at this early time, a consciousness
that it was round his mother's room that the whole matter hung--his mother
whom he saw once or twice a week for a very little time in the morning,
when that old terror of the white silent room would creep upon him and hold
him tongue-tied.

And yet, with it all, he knew, as every holiday came, more clearly, that
again and again they, his mother and himself, were on the verge of speech
or action. He could see it in her eyes, her beautiful grey eyes that moved
him so curiously. There were days when he was on the edge of a rush of
questions, and then something held him back--perhaps the unconscious
certainty that his mother's answers would precipitate his relations with
his father--and he was not, as yet, ready.

Anyhow a grim place, Scaw House, grimmer with every return to it, and
not a brightly coloured interlude to Dawson's, grim enough in its own
conditions. The silence that was gradually growing with Peter--the fixed
assurance, whether at home or at school, that life was easier if one said
nothing--might have found an outlet in Stephen's company, but here again
there was no cheerful chronicle.

Each holiday showed Peter less of Stephen than the last had done, and he
was afraid to ask himself why this was. Perhaps in reality he did not know,
but at any rate he was sure that the change was in Stephen. He cared for
Stephen as devotedly as ever, and, indeed, in that perhaps he needed him
more than ever and saw him so little, his affection was even stronger than
it had been. But Stephen had changed, not, Peter knew, in any affection
towards himself, but in his own habits and person. Burstead--his old
enemy--had taken a farm near his own farm, in order, so they said at The
Bending Mule, that he might flaunt Mrs. Burstead (once Stephen's
sweetheart) in Stephen's face.

They also said that Burstead beat his wife and ill-used her horribly, and
that she would give all her soul now that she was Stephen Brant's wife, but
that she was a weak, silly young woman, poor thing. They said that Stephen
knew all this, and that he could hear her crying at nights, and that it was
sending him off his head--and that he was drinking. And they shook their
heads, down at The Bending Mule, and foreboded ill. Moreover, that old
lady, Mrs. Brant, had died during Peter's first year at Dawson's, and
Stephen was alone now. He had changed in his appearance, his beard tangled
and untidy, his clothes unbrushed and his eyes wild and bloodshot, and once
Peter had ventured up to Stephen's farm and had climbed the stairs and
had opened the door and had seen Stephen (although it was early evening)
sitting all naked on his bed, very drunk and shouting wildly--and he had
not recognised Peter. But the boy knew when he met him again, sober this
time, by the sad look in his eyes, that Stephen must go his way alone now,
lead him where it would.... A boy of fifteen could not help.

And so those holidays were more and more lonely, as the days passed and
Peter's heart was very heavy. He did not go often to The Bending Mule now
because Stephen was not there. He went once or twice to Zachary Tan's shop,
but he did not see Mr. Zanti again nor any one who spoke of London. He had
not, however, forgotten Mr. Zanti's talk of looking-glasses. As he grew and
his mind distinguished more clearly between fact and fancy, he saw that it
was foolish to suppose that one saw anything in looking-glasses but the
immediate view. Tables and chairs, walls and windows, dust and fire-places,
there was the furniture of a looking-glass. Nevertheless during his first
year at school he had, on occasions, climbed to his dormitory, seen that he
was alone and then gazed into his glass and thought of London ... London
in his young brain, being a place of romantic fog, pantomime, oranges,
fat, chivalrous old gentlemen, Queen Victoria and Punch and Judy. Nothing
had happened--of course nothing had happened--it was only very cold and
unpleasant up there all alone, and, at the end of it, a silly thing to do.

And then one night something did happen. He woke suddenly and heard in the
distance beyond the deep breathing of twenty-four sleepers, a clock strike
three. He turned and lay on his back; he was very sleepy and he did not
know why he had wakened. The long high room was dark, but directly opposite
him beyond the end of his bed, the light seemed to shine full on to the
face of his looking-glass. As he sat up in bed and looked at it seemed
to stand out like a sheet of silver.

He gripped the sides of the bed and stared. He rubbed his eyes. He could
see no reflection in the glass at all but only this shining expanse, and
then, as he looked at it, that too seemed to pass away, and in its place
at first confusedly, like smoke across the face of the glass, and then,
settling into shape and form, there appeared the interior of a room--a
small low-roofed dark room. There was a large fire burning, and in front
of it, kneeling on the floor, with their backs to Peter, were two men, and
they were thrusting papers into the fire. The glass seemed to stretch and
broaden out so that the whole of the room was visible, and suddenly Peter
saw a little window high in the top of the wall, and behind that window was
a face that watched the two men.

He wanted to warn them--he suddenly cried out aloud "Look out!" and with
that he was wide awake and saw that his glass could be only dimly discerned
in the grey of the advancing morning--and yet he had heard that clock
strike three!... So much for confusing dreams, and so vivid was it that in
the morning he remembered the face at the window and knew that he would
recognise it again if he saw it.

II

But out of the three years there stand his relations with Cards and young
Galleon, a symbol of so much that was to come to him later. As he grew in
position in the school Cards saw him continually. Cards undoubtedly admired
his stocky, determined strength, his grey eyes, his brusque speech, his
ability at games. He did not pretend also that he was not flattered by
Peter's attentions. Curiously, for so young a boy, he had a satirical
irony that showed him the world very much in the light that he was always
afterwards to see it. To Cards the world was a show, a Vanity Fair--a place
where manner, _savoir-faire_, dignity, humour and ease, mattered
everything; he saw also that there was nothing by which people are so
easily deceived.

Peter had none of these things; he would always be rough, he would never be
elegant, and afterwards, in life, Cards did not suppose that he would see
very much of Peter, their lives would be along different paths; but now,
more genuinely perhaps than ever again, Cards was to admire that honest
bedrock of feeling, of sentiment, of criticism, of love and anger, that
gave Peter his immense value.

"There is a fellow here," wrote Cards to his mother, "whom I like very
much. He's got a most awful lot of stuff in him although he doesn't say
much and he looks like nothing on earth sometimes. He's very good at
football, although he's only been here a year. His name is Westcott--Peter
Westcott. I expect I'll bring him back one holiday."

But, of course, he never did. Peter, when it came to actuality, wouldn't
look right at home. It was during Peter's second year that these things
were happening, and, all this time, Peter was climbing slowly to a very
real popularity. Cards was leaving at the end of this second year--had he
stayed until the end of the third his superficialities would have been most
severely tested.

To him Peter gave all that whole-hearted love and devotion that only
Stephen had known before. He gave it with a very considerable sense of
humour and with no sentiment at all. He saw Cards quite clearly, he watched
his poses and his elaborate pretences, and he laughed at him sometimes and
called him names.

Cards' pride was, on several occasions, distinctly hurt by this laughter,
but his certain conviction of his own superiority always comforted him.
Nor was Peter ever sentimental in his attitude. He never told Cards that
he cared for him, and he even hung back a little when Cards was in a
demonstrative mood and wanted to be told that he was "wonderful." Cards
sometimes wondered whether Peter cared for him at all and whether he wasn't
really fonder of that "stupid ass Galleon" who never had a word to say
for himself. Peter's grey eyes would have told Cards a great deal if
he had cared to examine them, but he did not know anything about eyes.
Peter noticed, a little against his will, that as he advanced up the
school so Cards cared increasingly about him. He grasped this discovery
philosophically; after all, there were many fellows who took their colour
from the world's opinion, and it was natural enough that they should.
He himself regarded his growing popularity as a thing of no importance
whatever; it did not touch him anywhere at all because he despised and
hated the place. "When the time does come," he said once to Cards, "and
one is allowed to do things, I'll stop a lot of this filth."

"You'll have your work cut out," Cards told him. "What does it all matter
to us? Let 'em wallow--and they'll only hate you."

Cards added this because he knew that Peter had a curious passion for being
liked. Cards wanted to be admired, but to be liked!... what was the gain?
But that second year was, in spite of it all, the best time that Peter had
ever had. There was warmth of a kind in their appreciation of him. He was
only fifteen and small for his age, but his uncompromising attitude about
things, his silence, his football, gave him a surprising importance--but
even now it was respect rather than popularity. He was growing more like a
bull-dog than ever, his hair was stiff and short, rather shaggy eyebrows, a
square jaw, his short legs rather far apart, a broad back and thick strong
arms.

Now that Stephen had slipped so sadly into the background he built up his
life about Cards. He put everything into that room--not the old room that
had held Stephen, but a new shining place that gained some added brilliance
from the fact that its guest realised so little the honour that was done
him. He would lie awake at night and think about Cards, of the things that
he would do for him, of the way that he would serve him, of the guardian
that he would be.

And then, as that summer term, at the end of the second year, wore on the
pain of Cards' departure grew daily more terrible. He didn't know, as the
days advanced, how he would be able to bear that place without Cards. There
would be no life, no interest, and all the disorganisation, the immorality,
the cruelty would oppress him as they had never oppressed him before.
Besides next year he would be a person of some importance--he would
probably be Captain of the Football and a Monitor...everything would be
terribly hard. Of course there was old Bobby Galleon, who was a very good
chap and really fond of Peter, but there was no excitement about _that_
relationship. Bobby was quite ready to play servant to Peter's master, and
Peter could never respect any one very much who did that. Beside Cards, so
brilliant, so handsome, with such an "air," old Bobby really didn't come
off very well.

Bobby also at times was inclined to be a little sentimental. He used to ask
Peter whether he liked him--whether he would miss him if he died--and he
used to tell Peter that he would very gladly die for him. There were things
that one didn't--if one had self-respect--say.

That year the summer was of a blazing heat. Every morning saw a sky of
steely blue, the corn stood like a golden band about the hills, and little
clouds like the softest feathers were blown by the Gods about the world. A
mist clung about the distant hills and clothed them in purple grey. As the
term grew to its close Peter felt that the world was a prison of coloured
steel, and that Dawson's was a true Hell...he would escape from it with
Cards. And then when he saw that such an escape would be running away and
a confession of defeat--he turned back and held his will in command.

Cards looked upon his approaching departure as a great deliverance. He was
to be a man immediately; not for him that absurdly dilatory condition of
pimples and hobbledehoy boots that mark a transition period. Dawson's had
been the most insignificant sojourn in the tent of the enemy, and the
world, it was implied, had lamented his enforced absence. But, as the end
of term flung its shadows in front of it in the form of examinations, and
that especial quality of excited expectancy hovering about the corridors,
Cards felt, for the first time in his existence, a genuine emotion. He
minded, curiously, leaving Peter. He felt, although in this he wrongly
anticipated the gods, that he would never see him again, and he calculated
perhaps at the little piece of real affection and friendship that stood out
from the Continental Tour that he wished Life to be, like a palm tree on
the limitless desert. And yet it was characteristic of them both that on
the last day when, seated under a hedge at the top of the playing fields,
the school buildings a grey mist below them and the air tensely rigid with
heat, they said good-bye to one another, it was Cards who found all the
words.

Peter had nothing to say at all; he only clutched at tufts of grass, lugged
them from the earth and flung them before him. But Cards, as usual, rose to
the occasion.

"You know, Peter, it's been most splendid knowing you here. I don't think
I'd ever have got through Dawson's if it hadn't been for you. It's a hell
of a place and I suppose if the mater hadn't been abroad so much I should
never have stayed on. But it's no use making a fuss. Besides, it's only for
a little while--one will have forgotten all about it in a year's time."

Peter smiled. "You will, I shan't."

"Why, of course you will. And you must come and stay with us often. My
mother's most awfully anxious to know you. Won't it be splendid going out
to join her in Italy? It'll be a bit hot this time of year I expect."

Peter seemed to struggle with his words. "I say--Cards--you
won't--altogether--forget me?"

"Forget you! Why, good Lord, I'll be always writing. I'll have such lots to
tell you. I've never liked any one in all my life (this said with a great
sense of age) as I've liked you!"

He stood up and fumbled in his coat. Peter always remembered him, his dark
slim body against the sky, his hair tumbled about his forehead, the grace
and ease with which his body was balanced, the trick that he had of swaying
a little from the hips. He felt in his pocket.

"I say--I've got something for you. I bought it down in the town the other
day and I made them put your name on it." He produced it, wrapped in tissue
paper, out of his pocket, and Peter took it without a word. It was a silver
match-box with "Peter Westcott from his friend Cardillac," and the month
and the year printed on it.

"Thanks most awfully," Peter said gruffly. "Jolly decent of you. Good-bye
old man."

They shook hands and avoided each other's eyes, and Cardillac had a sudden
desire to fling the Grand Tour and the rest of it to the dogs and to come
back for another year to Dawson's.

"Well, I must get back, got to be in library at four," he said.

"I'm going to stop here a bit," said Peter.

He watched Cards walk slowly down the hill and then he flung himself on his
face and pursued with a vacant eye the efforts of an ant to climb a swaying
blade of grass ... he was there for a long time.

III

And so he entered into his third year at Dawson's with a dogged
determination to get through with it as well as possible and not to miss
Cards more than he could help. He did, as an actual fact, miss Cards
terribly. There were so many places, so many things that were connected
with him, but he found, as a kind of reward, that Bobby Galleon was more of
a friend than before. Now that Cards had departed Galleon came a little out
of his shell. He anticipated, obviously with very considerable enjoyment,
that year when he would have Peter all to himself. Bobby Galleon's virtue
was, at any rate, that one was not conscious of him, and during the time of
Peter's popularity he was useful without being in the very least evident.
When that year was over and he had seen the last shining twinkle of Cards'
charms and fascinations he looked at Peter a little wistfully, "Peter,
old man, next year will be topping...." and Peter, the pleasant warmth
of popularity about him, felt that there was a great deal to be said for
Galleon after all.

* * * * *

But with the first week of that third year trouble began. Things lifted
between the terms, into so different an air; at the end of the summer with
Peter's authority in prospect and his splendid popularity (confined by no
jailer-like insistence on rules) around him that immediate year seemed
simple enough. But in the holidays that preceded the autumn term something
had occurred; Peter returned in the mists and damp of September with every
eye upon him. Although only fifteen and a half he was a Monitor and Captain
of the Football ... far too young for both these posts, with fellows
of a great size and a greater age in the school, but Barbour (his nose
providing, daily, a more lively guide to his festal evenings) was seized
by Peter's silence and imperturbability in the midst of danger, "That
kid's got guts" (this a vinous confidence amongst friends) "and will
pull the place up--gettin' a bit slack, yer know--Young? Lord bless yer,
no--wonderful for his age and Captain of the Football--that's always
popular."

So upon Peter the burden of "pulling things up" descended. How far Cards
might have helped him here it is difficult to say. Cards had, in his
apparently casual contempt of that school world, a remarkably competent
sense of the direction in which straws were blowing. That most certainly
Peter had not, being inclined, at this stage of things, to go straight for
the thing that he saw and to leave the outskirts of the subject to look
after themselves. And here Bobby Galleon was of no use to him, being
as blundering and near-sighted and simple as a boy could very well be.
Moreover his implicit trust in the perfection of that hero, Peter, did not
help clarity of vision. He was never aware of the causes of things and only
dimly noticed effects, but he was unflinchingly faithful.

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