The Golden Scarecrow Part 6

It was a different relations.h.i.+p, this, from any other that Ernest Henry had ever known, but there was no doubt at all about its pleasant flavour. Just as in other days he had watched for his friend's appearance, so now he waited for that evening hour that always brought his father. The door would open, the square, set figure would appear....

Very pleasant, indeed. Meanwhile Ernest Henry was instructed that the right thing to say on his father's appearance was "Dada."

But he knew better. His father's name was really "d.a.m.n."

VI

The days and weeks pa.s.sed. There had been no sign of his friend.... Then the crisis came.

That old wall-to-screen marathon had been achieved, and so contemptuously banished. There was now the great business of marching without aid from one end of the room to the other. This was a long business, and always. .h.i.therto somewhere about the middle of it Ernest Henry had sat down suddenly, pretending, even to himself, that his shoe _hurt_, or that he was bored with the game, and would prefer some other.

There came, then, a beautiful spring evening. The long low evening sun flooded the room, and somewhere a bell was calling Christian people to their prayers, and somewhere else the old man with the harp, who always came round the Square once every week, was making beautiful music.

Ernest Henry's father had taken the nurse's place for an hour, and was reading a _Globe_ with absorbed attention by the window; Mr.

Wilberforce, senior, was one of London's most famous barristers, and the _Globe_ on this particular afternoon had a great deal to say about this able man's cleverness. Ernest Henry watched his father, watched the light, heard the bell and the harp, felt that the hour was ripe for his attempt.

He started, and, even as he did so, was aware that, after he had succeeded in this great adventure, things--that is, life--would never be quite the same again. He knew by now every stage of the first half of his journey. The first instalment was defined by that picture of the garden and the roses and the peac.o.c.ks; the second by the beginning of the square brown nursery table; and here there was always a swift and very testing temptation to cling, with a sticky hand, to the hard and s.h.i.+ning corner. The third division was the end of the nursery table where one was again tempted to give the corner a final clutch before pa.s.sing forth into the void. After this there was nothing, no rest, no possible harbour until the end.

Off Ernest Henry started. He could see his father, there in the long distance, busied with his paper; he could see the nursery table, with bright-blue and red reels of cotton that nurse had left there; he could see a discarded railway engine that lay gaping there half-way across, ready to catch and trip him if he were not careful. His eyes were like saucers, the hissing noise came from between his teeth, his forehead frowned. He pa.s.sed the peac.o.c.k, he flung contemptuously aside the proffered corner of the table; he pa.s.sed, as an Atlantic liner pa.s.ses the Eddystone, the table's other end; he was on the last stretch.

Then suddenly he paused. He lifted his head, caught with his eye a pink, round cloud that sailed against the evening blue beyond the window, heard the harpist, heard his father turn and exclaim, as he saw him.

He knew, as he stood there, that at last the moment had come. His friend had returned.

All the room was buzzing with it. The dolls fell in a neglected heap, the train on the carpet, the fire behind the fender, the reels of cotton that were on the table--they all knew it.

His friend had returned.

His impulse was, there and then, to sit down.

His friend was whispering: "Come along!... Come along!... Come along!"

He knew that, on his surrender, his father would make sounds like, "Well, old man, tired, eh? Bed, I suggest." He knew that bed would follow. Then darkness, then his friend.

For an instant there was fierce battle between the old forces and the new. Then, with his eyes upon his father, resuming that hiss that is proper only to ostlers, he continued his march.

He reached the wall. He caught his father's leg. He was raised on to his father's lap, was kissed, was for a moment triumphant; then suddenly burst into tears.

"Why, old man, what's the matter?"

But Ernest Henry could not explain. Had he but known it he had, in that rejection of his friend, completed the first stage of his "Pilgrimage from this world to the next."

CHAPTER III

ANGELINA

I

Angelina Braid, on the morning of her third birthday, woke very early.

It would be too much to say that she knew it was her birthday, but she awoke, excited. She looked at the glimmering room, heard the sparrows beyond her windows, heard the snoring of her nurse in the large bed opposite her own, and lay very still, with her heart thumping like anything. She made no noise, however, because it was not her way to make a noise. Angelina Braid was the quietest little girl in all the Square.

"You'd never meet one nigher a mouse in a week of Sundays," said her nurse, who was a "gay one" and liked life.

It was not, however, entirely Angelina's fault that she took life quietly; in 21 March Square, it was exceedingly difficult to do anything else. Angelina's parents were in India, and she was not conscious, very acutely, of their existence. Every morning and evening she prayed, "G.o.d bless mother and father in India," but then she was not very acutely conscious of G.o.d either, and so her mind was apt to wander during her prayers.

She lived with her two aunts--Miss Emmy Braid and Miss Violet Braid--in the smallest house in the Square. So slim was No. 21, and so ruthlessly squeezed between the opulent No. 20 and the stout ruddy-faced No. 22, that it made one quite breathless to look at it; it was exactly as though an old maid, driven by suffragette wildness, had been arrested by two of the finest possible policemen, and carried off into custody. Very little of any kind of wildness was there about the Misses Braid. They were slim, neat women, whose rather yellow faces had the flat, squashed look of lawn gra.s.s after a garden roller has pa.s.sed over it. They believed in G.o.d according to the Reverend Stephen Hunt, of St.

Matthew-in-the-Crescent--the church round the corner--but in no other kind of G.o.d whatever. They were not rich, and they were not poor; they went once a week--Fridays--to visit the poor of St. Matthew's, and found the poor of St. Matthew's on the whole unappreciative of their efforts, but that made their task the n.o.bler. Their house was dark and musty, and filled with little articles left them by their grand-parents, their parents, and other defunct relations. They had no friendly feeling towards one another, but missed one another when they were separated.

They were, both of them, as strong as horses, but very hypochondriacal, and Dr. Armstrong of Mulberry Place made a very pleasant little income out of them.

I have mentioned them at length, because they had a great deal to do with Angelina's quiet behaviour. No. 21 was not a house that welcomed a child's ringing laughter. But, in any case, the Misses Braid were not fond of children, but only took Angelina because they had a soft spot in their dry hearts for their brother Jim, and in any case it would have been difficult to say no.

Their att.i.tude to children was that they could not understand why they did not instantly see things as they, their elders, saw them; but then, on the other hand, if an especially bright child did take a grown-up point of view about anything _that_ was considered "forward" and "conceited," so that it was really very difficult for Angelina.

"It's a pity Jim's got such a dull child," Miss Violet would say. "You never would have expected it."

"What I like about a child," said Miss Emmy, "is a little cheerfulness and natural spirit--not all this moping."

Angelina was not, on the whole, popular.... The aunts had very little idea of making a house cheerful for a child. The room allotted to Angelina as a nursery was at the top of the house, and had once been a servant's bedroom. It possessed two rather grimy windows, a faded brown wallpaper, an old green carpet, and some very stiff, hard chairs. On one wall was a large map of the world, and on the other an old print of Romans sacking Jerusalem, a picture which frightened Angelina every night of her life, when the dark came and the lamp illuminated the writhing limbs, the falling bodies, the tottering walls. From the windows the Square was visible, and at the windows Angelina spent a great deal of her time, but her present nurse--nurses succeeded one another with startling frequency--objected to what she called "window-gazing." "Makes a child dreamy," she said; "lowers her spirits."

Angelina was, naturally, a dreamy child, and no amount of nurses could prevent her being one. She was dreamy because her loneliness forced her to be so, and if her dreams were the most real part of her day to her that was surely the faults of her aunts. But she was not at all a quick child; although to-day was her third birthday she could not talk very well, could not p.r.o.nounce her r's, and lisped in what her trail of nurses told her was a ridiculous fas.h.i.+on for so big a girl. But, then, she was not really a big girl; her figure was short and stumpy, her features plain and pale with the pallor of her first Indian year. Her eyes were large and black and rather fine.

On this morning she lay in bed, and knew that she was excited because her friend had come the night before and told her that to-day would be an important day. Angelina clung, with a desperate tenacity, to her memories of everything that happened to her before her arrival on this unpleasant planet. Those memories now were growing faint, and they came to her only in flashes, in sudden twists and turns of the scene, as though she were surrounded by curtains and, every now and then, was allowed a peep through. Her friend had been with her continually at first, and, whilst he had been there, the old life had been real and visible enough; but on her second birthday he had told her that it was right now that she should manage by herself. Since then, he had come when she least expected him; sometimes when she had needed him very badly he had not appeared.... She never knew. At any rate, he had said that to-day would be important.... She lay in bed, listening to her nurse's snores, and waited.

II

At breakfast she knew that it was her birthday. There were presents from her aunts--a picture-book and a box of pencils--there was also a mysterious parcel. Angelina could not remember that she had ever had a parcel before, and the excitement of this one must be prolonged. She would not open it, but gazed at it, with her spoon in the air and her mouth wide open.

"Come, Miss Angelina--what a name to give the poor lamb!--get on with your breakfast now, or you'll never have done. Why not open the pretty parcel?"

"No. Do you think it is a twain?"

"Say train--not twain."

"Train."

"No, of course not; not a thing that shape."

"Oh! Do you think it's a bear?"

"Maybe--maybe. Come now, get on with your bread and b.u.t.ter."

"Don't want any more."

"Get down from your chair, then. Say your grace now."