Fortitude

H >> Hugh Walpole >> Fortitude

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"The primrose path" was, of course, open to Peter. He was popular enough,
at the beginning of that Autumn term, to do anything, and, had he followed
the "closed-eyes" policy of his predecessor, smiling pleasantly upon all
crime and even gently with his own authority "lending a hand," all would
have been well. There were boys with strangely simple names, simple
for such criminals--Barton, Jerrard, Watson, West, Underbill--who were
old-established hands at their own especial games, and they saw no reason
at all for disturbance. "Young Westcott had better not come meddling
here," they muttered darkly, having discerned already a tendency on his
part to show disapproval. Nothing happened during the first term--no
concrete incident--but Peter had stepped, by the end of it, from an
exultant popularity to an actual distrust and suspicion. The football
season had not been very successful and Peter had not the graces and charm
of a leader. He distrusted the revelation of enthusiasm because he was
himself so enthusiastic and his silence was mistaken for coldness. He hated
the criminals with the simple names and showed them that he hated them and
they in their turn, skilfully and with some very genuine humour, persuaded
the school that he cut a very poor figure.

At the absurd concert that closed the Autumn term (Mr. Barbour, red-nosed
and bulging shirt-front, hilariously in the chair) Peter knew that he had
lost his throne. He had Bobby--there was no one else--and in a sudden
bitterness and scorn at the fickle colour of that esteem that he had valued
so highly he almost wished that he were altogether alone.... Bobby only
accentuated things.

Nothing to go home to--nothing to come back to. The Christmas holidays over
he returned to the Easter term with an eager determination to improve
matters.

It was geniality that he lacked: he knew that that was the matter with him,
and he felt a kind of despair about it because he seemed to return at the
end of every holiday from Cornwall with that old conviction in his head
that the easiest way to get through the world was to stand with your back
to the wall and say nothing ... and if these fellows, who thought him so
pleasant last year, thought him pleasant no longer, well, then he must put
up with it. He had not changed--there he was, as ever.

But the Easter term was a chronicle of mistakes. He could not be genial to
people who defied and mocked him; he found, dangerously, that they could
all be afraid of him. When his face was white and his voice very quiet and
his whole body tense like a bow, then they feared him--the biggest and
strongest of those criminals obeyed. He was sixteen now and he could when
he liked rule them all, and gradually, as the term advanced, he used his
strength more and more and was more and more alone. Days would come when he
would hate his loneliness and would rush out of it with friendly advances
and always he would be beaten back into his reserve again. Had only Cards
been there!... But what side would Cards have taken? Perhaps Peter was
fortunate in that the test was not demanded. Poor Bobby simply did not
understand it at all. Peter! the most splendid fellow in the world! What
were they all up to? But that point of view did not help matters. No other
monitor spoke to Peter now if he could help it, and even the masters,
judging that where there was smoke there must be fire, passed him coldly.
That Easter term, in the late winds and rains of March, closed hideously.
The Easter holidays, although perhaps he did not realise it, were a
deliberate backing for the ordeal that was, he knew, to come.

He faced it on his return almost humorously, prepared, with a
self-consciousness that was unusual in him, for all the worst things, and
it is true enough that they were as bad as they could be. Bobby Galleon
shared in it all, of course, but he had never been a popular person and he
did not miss anything so long as there was Peter. Once he said, as Cards
had said before:

"Leave 'em alone, Peter. After all, we can't do anything. They're too many
for us, and, most important thing of all, they aren't worth it."

"Not much," said Peter, "things have got to be different."

Things were not different. They _were_ too many for him, but he struggled
on. The more open bullying he stopped, and there were other things that he
drove into dark corners. But they remained there--in those corners. There
were so many dark places at Dawson's, and it began to get on his brain so
that he heard whispers and suspicions and marked the trail of the beast at
every minute of the day. He could find nothing now in the open--they were
too clever for him. The Captain of the Citadel--Ellershaw--was as he knew
the worst fellow in the school, but there was nothing to be done, nothing
unless something were caught in the open. As the term advanced the whispers
grew and he felt that there were plots in the air. He was obeyed, Ellershaw
and some of the others were politer than they had ever been, and for many
weeks now there had been no disturbance--then suddenly the storm broke.

One hot afternoon he was sitting in his study alone, trying to read. Things
seemed to him that day at their very worst, there was no place to which he
might turn. People were playing cricket beyond his window. Some fly buzzed
on his window pane, the sunlight was golden about his room and little
ladders of dust twisted and curved against the glare--the house was very
still. Then suddenly, from a neighbouring study, there were sounds. At
first they did not penetrate his day dream, then they caught his ear and he
put his book down and listened. The sounds were muffled; there was laughter
and then some one cried out.

He knew that it was Jerrard's study and he hated Jerrard more than any one
in the school. The fellow was a huge stupid oaf, low down in the middle
fourth, but the best bowler that the school had; yes, he hated him. He
opened his study door and listened. The passage was deserted, and, for a
moment, there was no sound save some one shouting down in the cricket field
and the buzzing of the fly on the pane. Then he heard voices from behind
Jerrard's door.

"No, I say--Jerrard--don't give me any more--please ... please don't."

"There I say--hold his mouth open; that's right, pour it down. We'll have
him singing in a moment."

"Oh I say--" there were sounds of a struggle and then silence again. At
last there began the most horrible laughter that Peter had ever known;
weak, silly, giggling, and little excited cries.

Then Jerrard's voice: "There, that will do; he's merry enough now."

Peter waited for no more, but strode across the passage and flung open the
door. Some chairs were overturned; Jerrard and a friend, hearing the door
open, had turned round. Leaning against the table, very flushed, his eyes
shining, his hair covered with dust, waving his arms and singing in a
quivering voice, was a small boy, very drunk. A glass and a whisky bottle
were on the table.

"You damned hound!" Peter was trembling from head to foot. "You shall get
kicked out for this."

Peter closed the door quietly behind him, and went back to his study. Here
at last was the moment for which he had been waiting. Jerrard should be
expelled if he, Peter, died in the attempt. Jerrard was the school's best
bowler; he was immensely popular ... it would, indeed, be a matter of life
and death. On that same evening he called a meeting of the Monitors; they
were bound to meet if one of their number had anything of sufficient
importance to declare, but they came reluctantly and showed Peter that they
resented his action. When they heard what Peter had to say their attitude
was even more mutinous. Jerrard, the school's best bowler, was their one
thought. The end of the term was at hand, and the great match of the
year against Radford, a neighbouring school, approached. Without Jerrard
Dawson's would be hopelessly defeated. If Barbour heard of the incident
Jerrard would be expelled; Barbour might be reluctant to act, but act he
must. They were not, by an absurd and ancient rule, allowed to punish any
grave offence without reporting it to the head-master. If, therefore, they
took any action at all, it must be reported, Jerrard would be expelled, a
boon companion and the great cricket match of the year, would be lost. And
all this through that interfering prig of a Westcott! Any ordinary fellow
would have shut his eyes to the whole affair. After all what is there to
make a fuss about in having a rag with a kid? What are kids for? Thus the
conclave sourly regarding Peter who watched them in turn, and sat sternly,
ominously militant. They approached him with courtesy; Ellershaw showed him
what this might mean to the school were it persisted in. After all, Jerrard
was, in all probability, sorry enough ... it was a rotten thing to do--he
should apologise to them. No, Peter would have none of it, they must 'act;
it must be reported to the Head. He would, if necessary, report it himself.

Then they turned and cursed him, asking him whom he thought that he was,
warned him about the way that the school would take his interference when
the school knew, advised him for his own good to drop the matter; Peter was
unmoved.

Barbour was informed; Jerrard was expelled--the school was beaten in the
cricket match by an innings.

Then the storm broke. Peter moved, with Bobby Galleon, through a cloud of
enemies. It was a hostility that cut like a knife, silent, motionless, but
so bitter that every boy from Ellershaw to the tiniest infant at the bottom
of the first took it as the _motif_ of his day. That beast Westcott was the
song that rang through the last fortnight.

Bobby Galleon was cowed by it; he did not mind his own ostracism, and
he was proud that he could give practical effect to his devotion for
his friend, but deep down in his loyalty, there was an unconfessed
suspicion as to whether Peter, after all, hadn't been a little unwise and
interfering--what was the good of making all this trouble? He even wondered
whether Peter didn't rather enjoy it?

And Peter, for the first time in his school life, was happy. There was
something after all in being up against all these people. He was a general
fighting against tremendous odds. He would show them next year that they
must obey.

On the last afternoon of the term he sat alone in his study. Bobby was with
the matron, packing. He was conscious, as he sat there, of the sound of
many feet shuffling. There were many whispers beyond his door, and yet a
great silence.

He waited for a little, and then he opened his door and looked out. As he
did so the bell for roll-call rang through the building, and he knew that
it was his roll.

Afternoon roll-call was always taken in the gymnasium, a large empty room
beyond the study passage, and it was the custom for boys to come up as
their name was about to be called and thus to pass on.

But to-day he saw that the whole of the school was gathered there, along
the dusky passage and packed, in a silent motionless throng, into the
gymnasium.

He knew that they were all there with a purpose, and suddenly as he
realised the insult that they intended, that spirit of exultation came upon
him again. Ah! it was worth while, this battle!

They made way in silence as he passed quietly to the other end of the
gymnasium and stood, a little above them, on the steps that led to the
gallery. He started the roll-call with the head of the school and the sixth
form ... there was no answer to any name; only perfect silence and every
eye fixed upon him. For a wild moment he wished to burst out upon them, to
crash their heads together, to hurt--then his self-control returned. Very
quietly and clearly he read through the school list, a faint smile on his
lips. Bobby Galleon was the only boy, out of three hundred, who answered.

When he had finished he called out as was the custom, "Roll is over," then
for a brief instant, with the list in his hand, smiling, he faced them all.
Every eye was upon him--Ellershaw, West, Barton smiling a little, some
faces nervous, some excited, all bitterly, intensely hostile ... and he
must return next year!

He came down from the steps and walked very slowly to the door, and then as
his fingers touched the handle there was a sound--a whisper, very soft and
then louder; it grew about his ear like a shot ... the whole school,
motionless as before, was hissing him.

There was no word spoken, and he closed the door behind him.

IV

That same night he walked, before chapel, with Bobby to the top of the
playing fields. The night was dark and heavy, with no moon nor stars--but
there was a cool wind that touched his cheek.

"Well, I've been a pretty good failure, Bobby. You've stuck to me like a
brick. I shall never forget it.... But you know never in all my life have I
been as happy as I was this afternoon. The devils! I'll have 'em under next
year."

"That's not the way--" Bobby tried timorously to explain.

"Oh, yes, it is.... Anyhow it's my way. I wonder what there is about me
that makes people hate me so."

"People don't."

"Yes, they do. At home, here--it's all the same. I'm always having to fight
about something, always coming up against things."

"I suppose it's your destiny," said Bobby. "You always say it's to teach
you pluck."

"That's what an old chap I knew in Cornwall said. But why can't I be let
alone? How I loved that bit last year when the fellows liked me--only the
decent things never last."

"It'll be all right later," Bobby answered, thinking that he had never seen
anything finer than the way Peter had taken that afternoon. "In a way," he
went on, "you fellows are lucky to get a chance of standing up against that
sort of thing; it's damned good practice. Nobody ever thinks I'm worth
while."

"Well," said Peter, throwing a clod of dark, scented earth into the air
and losing sight of it in the black wall about him--"Here's to next year's
battle!"

CHAPTER VII

PRIDE OF LIFE

I

Peter never saw Dawson's again. When the summer holidays had run some three
weeks a letter arrived stating, quite simply and tersely that, owing to
the non-payment by evading parents of bills long overdue and to many other
depressing and unavoidable circumstances Mr. Barbour and that House of
Cards, his school, had fallen to pieces. There at any rate was an end
to that disastrous accumulation of brick and mortar, and the harm that,
living, it had wrought upon the souls and bodies of its victims its dying
could not excuse. No tears were shed for Dawson's.

Peter, at the news, knew that now his battle never could be won. That
battle at any rate must be left behind him with his defeat written large
upon the plain of it, and this made in some unrealised way the penalty of
the future months harder to bear. He had, behind him, defeat. Look at it
as he might, he had been a failure at Dawson's--he had not done the things
that he had been put there to do--and yet through the disaster he knew
that in so far as he had refused to bend to the storm so far there had
been victory; of that at any rate he was sure.

So he turned resolutely from the past and faced the future. It was
as though suddenly Dawson's had never existed--a dream, a fantasy, a
delirium--something that had left no external things behind it and had only
in the effect that it had worked upon himself spiritually made its mark. He
faced his House....

Scaw House had seemed to him, during these last three years, merely an
interlude at Dawson's. There had been hurried holidays that had been spent
in recovering from and preparing for the term and the House had scarcely,
and only very quietly, raised its head to disturb him. He had not been
disturbed--he had had other things to think about--and now he was very
greatly disturbed indeed; that was the first difference that he consciously
realised. The disturbance lay, of course, partly in the presence of his
father and in the sense that he had had growing upon him, during the last
two years, that their relationship, the one to the other, would, suddenly,
one fine day, spring into acute emotion. They were approaching one another
gradually as in a room whose walls were slowly closing. "Face to face--and
then body to body--at last, soul to soul!"

He did not, he thought, actively hate his father; his father did not
actively hate him, but hate might spring up at any moment between them, and
Peter, although he was only sixteen, was no longer a child. But the feeling
of apprehension that Scaw House gave him was caused by wider influences
than his father. Three years at Dawson's had given Peter an acute sense of
expecting things, it might be defined as "the glance over the shoulder to
see who followed"--some one was always following at Scaw House. He saw
in this how closely life was bound together, because every little moment
at Dawson's contributed to his present active fear. Dawson's explained
Scaw House to Peter. And yet this was all morbidity and Peter, square,
broad-shouldered, had no scrap of morbidity in his clean body. He did not
await the future with the shaking candle of the suddenly awakened coward,
but rather with the planted feet and the bared teeth of the bull-dog....

He watched the faces of his father, his aunt and Mrs. Trussit. He observed
the frightened dreams of his grandfather, the way that old Curtis the
gardener would suddenly cease his fugitive digging and glance with furtive
eyes at the windows of the house; about them were the dark shadows of the
long passages, the sharp note of some banging door in a distant room, the
wail of that endless wind beyond the walls. He felt too that Mrs. Trussit
and his aunt were furtively watching him. He never caught them in anything
tangible but he knew that, when his back was turned, their eyes followed
him--questioning, wondering.

Something must be done or he could not answer for his control. If he were
not to return to Dawson's, what then?

It was his seventeenth birthday one hot day towards the end of August, and
at breakfast his father, without looking up from his paper, said:

"I have made arrangements for you with Mr. Aitchinson to enter his office
next week. You'll have to work--you've been idling long enough."

The windows were wide open, the lawn was burning in the sun, bees carried
the scent of the flowers with them into the air that hung like shining
metal about the earth, a cart rattled as though it were a giant clattering
his pleasure at the day down the road. It was a wonderful day and somewhere
streams were flowing under dark protecting trees, and the grass was thick
in cool hollows and the woods were so dense that no blue sky reached the
moss, but only the softest twilight ... and old Aitchinson, the town's
solicitor, with his nutcracker face, his snuffling nose, his false
teeth--and the tightly-closed office, the piles of paper, the ink, the
silly view from the dusty windows of Treliss High Street--and life always
in the future to be like that until he died.

But Peter showed no emotion.

"Very well, father--What day do I go?"

"Monday--nine o'clock."

Nothing more was said. At any rate Aitchinson and his red tape and his
moral dust would fill the day--no time then to dwell on these dark passages
and Mrs. Trussit's frightened eyes and the startled jump of the marble
clock in the dining-room just before it struck the hour....

II

And so for weeks it proved. Aitchinson demanded no serious consideration.
He was a hideous little man with eyes like pins, shaggy eyebrows, a nose
that swelled at the end and was pinched by the sharpest of pince-nez,
cheeks that hung white and loose except when he was hungry or angry, and
then they were tight and red, a little body rather dandily dressed with
a flowered waistcoat, a white stock, a skirted coat and pepper-and-salt
trousers--and last of all, tiny feet, of which he was inordinately proud
and with which, like Agag, he always walked delicately. He had a high
falsetto voice, fingers that were always picking, like eager hens, at the
buttons on his waistcoat or the little waxed moustache above his mouth, and
hair that occupied its time in covering a bald patch that always escaped
every design upon it. So much for Mr. Aitchinson. Let him be flattered
sufficiently and Peter saw that his way would be easy. The wizened little
creature had, moreover, a certain admiration for Peter's strength and
broad shoulders and used sometimes in the middle of the morning's work
to ask Peter how much he weighed, whether he'd ever considered taking up
prize-fighting as a profession, and how much he measured across the chest.

There were two other youths, articled like Peter, stupid sons of honest
Treliss householders, with high collars, faces that shone with soap and
hair that glistened with oil, languid voices and a perpetual fund of small
talk about the ladies of the town, moral and otherwise. Peter did not
like them and they did not like Peter. One day, because he was tired and
unhappy, he knocked their heads together, and they plotted to destroy him,
but they were afraid, and secretly admired what they called his coarse
habits.

The Summer stole away and Autumn crept into its place, and at the end of
October something occurred. Something suddenly happened at Scaw House that
made action imperative, and filled his brain all day so that Aitchinson's
office and his work there was only a dream and the people in it were
shadows. He had heard his mother crying from behind her closed door....

He had been coming, on a wet autumnal afternoon, down the dark stairs from
his attic and suddenly at the other end of the long passage there had been
this sound, so sudden and so pitiful coming upon that dreary stillness that
he had stopped with his hands clenched and his face white and his heart
beating like a knock on a door. Instantly all those many little moments
that he had had in that white room with that heavy-scented air crowded
upon him and he remembered the smile that she had always given him and the
way that her hair lay so tragically about the pillow. He had always been
frightened and eager to escape; he felt suddenly so deeply ashamed that
the crimson flooded his face there in the dark passage. She had wanted him
all these years and he had allowed those other people to prevent him from
going to her. What had been happening to her in that room? The sound of her
crying came to him as though beseeching him to come and help her. He put
his hands to his ears and went desperately into the dark wet garden. He
knew now when he thought of it, that his behaviour to his mother had been,
during these months since he had left Dawson's, an unconscious cowardice.
Whilst he had been yet at school those little five minutes' visits to his
mother's room might have been excused, but during these last months there
had been, with regard to her, in his conscience, if he had cared to examine
it, sharp accusation.

The defence that she did not really want to see him, that his presence
might bring on some bad attack, might excite her, was no real defence. He
had postponed an interview with her from day to day because he realised
that that interview would strike into flame all the slumbering relations
that that household held. It would fling them all, as though from a
preconcerted signal, into war....

But now there could be only one thought in his mind. He must see his
mother--if he could still help her he must be at her service. There was no
one whom he could ask about her. Mrs. Trussit now never spoke to him (and
indeed never spoke to any one if she could help it), and went up and down
the stairs in her rustling black and flat white face and jingling keys as
though she was no human being at all but only a walking automaton that you
wound up in the morning and put away in the cupboard at night--Mrs. Trussit
was of no use.

There remained Stephen, and this decided Peter to break through that
barrier that there was between them and to find out why it had ever
existed. He had not seen Stephen that summer at all--no one saw
Stephen--only at The Bending Mule they shook their heads over him and spoke
of the wild devil that had come upon him because the woman he loved was
being tortured to death by her husband only a mile away. He was drinking,
they said, and his farm was going to ruin, and he would speak to
nobody--and they shook their heads. It was not through cowardice that Peter
had avoided him, but since those three years at Dawson's he had been lonely
and silent himself, and Stephen had never sent for him as he would have
done, Peter thought, if he had wanted him. Now the time had come when he
could stand alone no longer....

He slipped away one night after supper, leaving that quiet room with his
aunt playing Patience at the table, his old grandfather mumbling in his
sleep, his father like a stone, staring at his paper but not, Peter was
sure, reading any of it.

Mrs. Trussit, silent before the fire in her room, his aunt not seeing the
cards that she laid upon the table, his father not reading his paper--for
what were they all listening?

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