I
“What have they done to him, Maurice?”
“I don’t know,” said the doctor, very thoughtfully indeed. “I don’t know.”
“There’s something.”
“Yes.”
“It’s horrible—and one can never know.”
“The Aviolets won’t think that there’s anything to know.”
“She will.”
“Yes,” said the doctor again, as deliberately as before, but with the slightest possible narrowing of his eyes as he spoke. “Yes, she’ll know, all right.”
Miss Lucian put her work down and clasped one hand over the other with a curious effect of earnestness.
“I never saw anything quite like the look in that boy’s eyes when she brought him here this afternoon. And yet I—I can’t place it. What in God’s name was it?”
“I don’t know.”
A sound of impatience broke from her.
“I tell you I don’t know, Henrietta. I’m not even certain that we’re not exaggerating.”
“Maurice!”
“I don’t mean the fact, but its significance.”
“What fact?”
“The fact that something or someone, at that public school, has altered Cecil Aviolet radically, in some way that’s indefinable. It’s not the normal evolution of a type, Henrietta, nor the development of an individuality—it’s something apart from those. And I don’t know what it is.”
“Has he been—frightened?” she half whispered.
“I don’t think it’s that. He may have been frightened—but I don’t think it’s that now.”
“He wasn’t ever a coward,” Henrietta declared vehemently. “I don’t care what any one says, he was a plucky little boy enough.”
“I have never thought him a coward,” said the doctor quietly. “But for all that, he may have been frightened.”
“Bullying?”
“He’s not the sort that gets bullied, much. And I don’t think—mind you, this is only conjecture—but I don’t think he’d mind being bullied, if it only meant being knocked about.”
Henrietta looked at him without speaking. She was aware that the doctor was rather stating aloud the terms of a problem that absorbed him than addressing his sister consciously.
“Do you remember his grandfather whipping him once as a little boy, and his mother saying that he’d been so brave? And even Sir Thomas was pleased with him for that.... You see, the physical isn’t the weak link in the chain for Cecil at all. It’s other things that he minds. He’s most vulnerable where the average Englishman is most impervious.”
The doctor smiled a little, gravely. “His sensibilities—in the French sense of the word.”
“Do you mean his vanity?”
“It’s more than that, with him. It’s his self-respect that’s at stake, always and all the time. At least, that’s how I see it.”
“You mean he’s lost it at that place. Horrible!”
The doctor made a gesture of negation with both hands. “How can I say I know? I don’t know. He’s lost something—and I think he’s acquired something, too. There’s a sort of power of withdrawal about him now.”
“Withdrawal....” She pondered for a moment on the word, knowing his habit of phraseology and the value that a trained mind attaches to the exact word.
“Withdrawal—then you don’t mean a line of defence?”
“No. Or at least only in the negative sense. As far as I can see, and that, Henrietta, is a very little way indeed—the boy hasn’t put up a defence at all—or if he has it’s gone down. He reminds me of that description in one of Newbolt’s things:
‘All night long, in a dream untroubled of hope
He brooded, clasping his knees.’
‘Untroubled of hope.’ Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes. Oh, poor little Cecil—at his age!”
“I may be wrong.”
But Henrietta did not think that her brother was wrong.
They saw Cecil Aviolet several times during his holidays. He seemed to like coming to them, and Dr. Lucian encouraged his visits.
One day he said to him casually: “Most youngsters get bullied during their first term. Between ourselves, didn’t you find that?”
“No,” said Cecil, and added, a shade too promptly, “no—I think the fellows like me, rather. I’ve got heaps of friends already.”
He looked up with his disarming, ingenuous smile, and immediately afterwards looked down. The doctor had seen Cecil Aviolet do just exactly that, once before. He had been a little boy then, taxed by his grandmother with the theft of a toy. And he had denied it, with that same look.
“How do you like the games?” the doctor asked abruptly.
“Awfully. I didn’t know if I should or not, you know, but I do, most awfully.”
“That’s good.”
“Some fellows funk things, you know, their first term—House-runs especially. There was one boy who tried to get a medical exemption after his first run. He tried to pretend he had a heart, you know. But of course it was no go, and some of the fellows found out.”
“H’m. I wouldn’t give much for your friend’s popularity after that.”
“Well, it was a rotten sort of thing to do, wasn’t it?” said Cecil seriously. “I can understand it in a way, because it was my first term, too, of course, and one does find it a most awful sweat, just at first. But I just stuck it out, like other fellows. I must say I can’t understand trying to get out of anything in that sort of way.” He eyed the doctor thoughtfully.
“It seems extraordinary, somehow, to have thought of doing a thing like that,” he said. “It would never have occurred to me, anyway.”
Into the doctor’s kind, watchful eyes there came a sudden gleam, as of enlightenment. He looked at Cecil without speaking.
“Of course, I don’t set up for being braver than other people—far from it—but I do think it’s stupid to try and fake illness so as to get out of things. It only means that they don’t believe one another time, and one gets a reputation for slackness besides—and then they work one all the harder. That’s how I felt about the whole thing—it was such a stupid thing to have done.”
“To tell a lie is almost always a stupid thing to do,” said the doctor gently.
“I suppose so. Do you remember I used to tell crackers when I was a kid, doctor?”
The doctor, continuing to look at Cecil, remained silent.
The test of silence is one which singularly few people can stand. Dr. Lucian was not surprised that Cecil should break forth volubly after one uneasy second.
“School cured me of that, practically—Hurst, I mean. But still, I suppose, having been like that makes it easier for me to understand another fellow not being absolutely straight. I wasn’t so tremendously down on him as some of them were.”
“Was it the funking or the lie that they objected to most?”
“Oh, the funking, of course. But I was rather sorry for him, personally. I couldn’t ever have done what he did myself, but I was sorry for him,” repeated Cecil.
“I see,” said Dr. Lucian, and felt that he did indeed see.
“Absolutely typical,” he reflected, when Cecil had gone. “The pitiful attempt at bluff—telling me about ‘another fellow’—himself, of course, poor lad—and thinking he’s disarmed suspicion forevermore because he’s alluded to his own past habit of lying. They all argue the same way, God help them: ‘They’ll think: “He’d never have gone out of his way to tell us about that, if it had had anything to do with him.”’ What can one do for him? Nothing. Whatever’s wrong with him was dormant while he was at Hurst, but this place has played him some devil’s trick. He’s done for, unless something or someone gets hold of him and shoves some self-respect into him. Half his time he doesn’t really know what he’s saying—he’s in a fog—only that blind instinct left, to hide what he thinks his real self for fear of being despised. And he would be despised—that’s the devil of it—ninety-nine per cent of that wretched lad’s fellow-creatures would actually dare to despise and condemn him for a congenital misfortune that’s about as much within his own control as an inheritance of tuberculosis!”
The doctor groaned aloud at the thought.
As he had surmised, the Aviolets were perfectly well satisfied with Cecil on his return from that first term spent at his public school. They spoke of him now with a certain complacence, excepting always Ford, who seldom mentioned the boy save with semi-contempt.
“Sour grapes, my fine fellow, I daresay,” the doctor muttered to himself. He by no means forgave Ford Aviolet his old hostility towards Cecil’s mother, and it was nothing at all to him that now-a-days Rose, and Rose’s ineradicable characteristics, were accepted at Squires with matter-of-course amiability by the old people.
She came to them as usual during Cecil’s holidays, and Dr. Lucian wondered whether her quick intuition had told her everything that her bewildered reasoning powers would be least able to explain.
But she said nothing to him, and the doctor could easily divine reasons for her silence.
Lucian, however, already uneasy, was sharply awakened to a new perception of possible vexation of spirit for Rose in the always uncongenial atmosphere at Squires.
Ford and Diana, paying to the Aviolets one of their interminable visits, tendered to him a casual invitation, and the doctor one day went with them to the house.
It was the first time that he had seen Rose for months, and he noticed with a pang that for the only time since he had known her, her glorious physique had suffered some slight deterioration. She was thinner, and her face struck him as indefinably altered.
Suddenly he understood. “Good God, she’s left off using rouge!” thought the doctor.
Luncheon was as elaborate a function as it was unlively conversationally; but the doctor became gradually aware of undercurrents.
Ford, before the angry bewilderment of Rose, and innocently seconded by the bland obtuseness of his wife’s life-long habit of “chaff,” and the entire unconsciousness of the two old people, Sir Thomas and Lady Aviolet, was baiting the boy Cecil.
“No invitations to stay away these holidays, Cecil?”
“No, Uncle Ford.”
“Ah, well, of course that’s very fortunate for us. We shall have the benefit of your society all the time, I take it.”
“You must come and stay with us, Cecil, for a bit,” said Diana kindly. “I daresay Grandmama will be able to spare you.”
“Ah, but can Cecil bear to leave home?” Ford pretended to deliberate. “But no doubt a public-school boy can do these things; they’re a strange race, public-school boys. Have you found that, Cecil?”
The boy stared at his uncle with absolutely lustreless eyes and made no answer. Ford emitted a very slight laugh.
There was an odd sense of isolation for Lucian in finding himself thus alone to estimate the strange, hidden value of their surface intercourse. Rose, as he well knew, had no inner metre for the gauging of complexities. More and more, she reminded him of some magnificent dumb animal, quick to sense enmity, turning this way and that, unable to escape the goad, and incapable of retaliation in kind, but with inarticulate, pent-up forces gathering for some long-deferred onrush that might yet send down all before it.
She spoke now from the other side of the table. “What are you laughing at, Ford?”
The aggression in her manner was quite unmistakeable, and Lucian saw Diana open astonished eyes, and Sir Thomas draw his heavy brows more closely together.
The least flicker passed across Cecil’s young face, with its new, strangely shuttered look, and without turning his head he shot a glance at his mother from the corners of his eyes.
“What are you laughing at, Ford?” said Rose contemptuously.
“At my nephew,” Ford answered very gently. “He amuses me, that’s all. His manners are so refreshing.”
“Take your elbows off the table, Cecil,” said Lady Aviolet quickly.
“Do you still make your own cheeses here, Lady Aviolet?” said the doctor. “That’s a fine one you have there.”
The old lady, gratified, began to speak of her dairy. She was very proud of it. Ford glanced at the doctor.
The doctor gave him a grim little nod. “Quite right,” he silently assured Ford, “I’m up to your game, and I’m out to stop it. And I don’t mind your knowing it, either.”
Nobody else knew it.
Diana Aviolet was listening, her lips ajar, to her mother-in-law, Sir Thomas was signing imperatively to a servant, Rose was looking at her boy, Cecil, the doctor thought, seemed impervious to everything except to some inner preoccupation that had become part of his being.
Quite suddenly, a very horrible recollection came to Dr. Lucian.
He had once seen a trapped animal that was being devoured alive by vermin.
For an instant, he sought in vain for the association with his present surroundings. The next moment the analogy had flashed upon him, sickening him momentarily.
“That boy—his soul is being slowly devoured alive——”
“And so,” said Lady Aviolet, “we always send one cheese to the show every year. It encourages the dairymaid so much.”
“Splendid!” said the doctor.
“Are you interested in cheese, Lucian?” Ford Aviolet inquired politely.
“In everything,” the doctor retorted curtly.
“How delightful! A lesson to the youth of the present day, who are interested in nothing.”
“I don’t agree.”
It was Rose, of course, who hurled the contradiction, with ill-judged weightiness, into the carefully trivial key in which Ford had set his remark.
“Nor I.” The doctor, doing his best with her ineptitude, essayed a generality. “One generation is always more or less mysterious to the other.”
“You think so? Take my young nephew now——”
“Why be personal?” the doctor inquired crisply.
“Why not?”
“I’m sure Cecil doesn’t mind,” said Diana. Her little laugh struck the doctor as singularly inane.
“Cecil will have learnt to stand a little friendly teasing by now, no doubt,” Ford observed.
The doctor did not fail to perceive the implication, and he saw that Rose also had not missed it. Cecil remained listless and indifferent.
“Cecil has his life before him, we will hope, in which to learn more interesting things than elementary accomplishments, which, so far as I am aware, he acquired in the nursery. Now you and I,” the doctor addressed himself very directly to Ford Aviolet, “you and I, my dear fellow, have left our adventurous days behind us. Achievement, romance, success—it’s all behind us, not ahead of us. The future doesn’t belong to us at all. We shall only have the privilege of watching the present generation, to which you so casually alluded just now. Our mark, if it was ever made at all, was made in the past.”
The doctor’s gaze travelled cheerfully and deliberately round the safe, solid interior that had constituted Ford’s environment for so many years, and came to rest, still cheerful, still deliberate, and wholly implacable, on Ford’s face.
“They say that history always repeats itself,” said Lady Aviolet, boredom in her voice.
Ford, returning the doctor’s look, ignored his mother’s irrelevance. “Very interesting, although I fancy you and I are not exactly contemporaries to a day, doctor. But the point? May I confess that I don’t quite understand——?”
“Oh, I think you do. I fancy you and I understand one another in all essentials.” The significance in Dr. Lucian’s tone was entirely undisguised.
Ford made a graceful little gesture of acquiescence. “You have said it.”
“Said what?” his wife inquired, laughing. “Really, you two are quite mysterious. Are you going to play billiards this afternoon?”
“No, Di,” said her husband. “Dr. Lucian is too strong for me—at billiards.”
“I am sure you play a very good game, Ford. Then what are the plans for this afternoon, I wonder?”
The inquiry came from Lady Aviolet, and her subsequent engineering of entirely unimportant projects and half-hearted suggestions continued until lunch was over.
Afterwards the doctor approached Rose.
“Henrietta hopes that you are coming to see her very soon. Her sciatica is so bad now that she gets about very little.”
“I’m so sorry.”
There was never anything perfunctory about Rose’s emotions, and her face was eloquent.
“It was very nice of Cecil to come and see us so soon. We both appreciated that,” said the doctor tentatively.
“He wanted to come. Look here, you’re not going away immediately, are you?”
“It depends on whether you can let me stay and talk to you for a little while,” the doctor answered frankly. “That’s what I came for.”
Rose looked at him with a strange mingling of pleasure and wistfulness in her brown eyes. Then she sat down and invited him by a gesture to do the same.
The odious word “coquettish” was of all others, Lucian reflected, the least applicable to her simplicity.
“What do you think of Ces?” she abruptly began.
“Not satisfactory, altogether. What was his report like?”
“Not bad. There was something about a want of keenness—but you couldn’t expect him to be very keen, his first term. His lessons are just ordinary—history, good.”
“What does he say himself?”
“He says he’s all right.”
She hesitated for a moment, then said very low: “But I don’t believe him.”
“No?”
“You don’t either?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“But why? What is it?”
“I don’t know. My dear—don’t look so frightened. It may be nothing—almost nothing. Remember, he’s only been back with you for a few days—he’s permeated with the atmosphere of the place he’s left. You’ve got his trust, in the ultimate issue, even if it’s overlaid now by God knows what. He’ll tell you what’s wrong—if anything is wrong—himself.”
Rose leant back in her armchair and he saw that she was trembling.
They were silent for a little while.
At last, as though he had silently made her aware of his anguish of sympathy for her pain, Rose turned towards him again.
“I’m glad you don’t try to pretend that it’s all right, and I’m only imagining things. But, of course, I knew you wouldn’t do that. You always understand,” she said gratefully.
“I think so, where you’re concerned,” he gravely agreed. “Tell me, have you found any other—understanding, on this particular point?”
“Oh, no! I’m sure they haven’t noticed anything at all. You know how stupid they are!”
Lucian smiled, at the very familiarity of the words and of Rose’s contemptuous tone.
“I didn’t mean here, so much as at school. Has Cecil made any friends?”
“I haven’t heard of any. There’s a master he likes, I think—a clergyman called Mr. Perriman. He’s quite young.”
“I wonder if Cecil will ‘get religion’?”
“Oh, I hope not!” cried Cecil’s mother with candid alarm. “I’ve seen enough of that with Uncle A. He’s the limit, him and his texts.”
“Cecil’s needn’t take that form. In fact I should say nothing would be less likely.”
“Well, what did you mean, then?”
“Only the sort of sudden awakening of religious susceptibilities that very often attacks young people. It’s an instinctive emotional outlet, really. They outgrow it, generally, or else it falls into its rightful place.”
“It seems to me more like a girl than a boy,” said Rose distrustfully.
“Perhaps. It was only an idea, and I’m not sure that it wouldn’t be a very good thing for Cecil. Don’t you think he wants an incentive?”
She nodded. “D’you know, I found something in a book the other day that made me think of Ces? I want to show it to you. I don’t like good poetry as a rule, you know, like Browning and all that. I never can understand it. But this came home to me, somehow, like something I’d always known but hadn’t ever thought about properly. A sort of recognizing.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to fetch it.” She paused for a moment and then said pleadingly: “Perhaps you’ll be able to say that it’s not true. I hope you will. I daresay I didn’t really understand half of it.”
But as he read the page that she put before him, Lucian marvelled only at her having understood so well.
NEURASTHENIA.[1]
Curs’d from the cradle and awry they come,
Masking their torment from a world at ease;
On eyes of dark entreaty, vague and dumb,
They bear the stigma of their souls’ disease.
Bewildered by the shadowy ban of birth
They learn that they are not as others are,
Till some go mad, and some sink prone to earth,
And some push stumbling on without a star.
“It made me think of Ces, you know,” she repeated.
He closed the book.
“He’s been different, from the time he was a tiny child. I’ve always known it, really, though he was the loveliest little boy and good, too. You do remember what a dear little boy he was when he first came here?” she entreated.
“Yes, I do,” said the doctor stoutly. “And we’ve that foundation to work upon, and the fact that the boy loves you. Your son is not going to ‘push on without a star,’ Rose.”
“That’s the very phrase that haunts me,” she half whispered.
“We’ll exorcise it, between us. Let him come down to us often, won’t you?”
“Indeed, I will. He’ll be only too glad. He doesn’t much like being here, this time. You saw how Ford behaved to him?”
“I did.”
“I could wring his beastly neck,” said Mrs. Aviolet violently.
“Will you forgive me if I tell you that you make that desire a great deal too evident? I’ve known Ford Aviolet for years, and I know him for a bully. Every time he sees that he’s hurt you, and angered you, it gives him a sense of power. And so he’ll go on doing it.”
“He can only touch me through Cecil.”
“He knows that well enough.”
“Why on earth haven’t he and Diana got any children? It’s absurd of them,” declared Rose with vehemence.
“I suppose it’s a disappointment to everyone.”
“Of course it is! They don’t want Cecil to have Squires, and I’m sure I don’t want him to have it. But he’ll have to, if Diana can’t pull herself together.”
Rose had spoken with her usual energy, and Mrs. Ford Aviolet, entering at the moment, said pleasantly:
“What’s that about me?”
“That I must say good-bye to you,” the doctor declared promptly. “I ought to go and see quite a number of patients. Thank you for a very pleasant respite.”
“Oh, must you go? Rose, Cousin Catherine sent me to find you. It’s about plans for to-morrow. She wants to know something, I’m not sure what.”
“All right,” said Rose. She picked up her book, and gave her hand to Dr. Lucian.
Almost involuntarily, he wrung it hard in his—that big, broad hand of hers, that was yet always soft and warm—but she did not wince.
“Good-bye. Give my love to Henrietta.”
She went away, and Lucian was preparing to go when Diana said suddenly:
“There was just one thing—if you can spare a moment.”
“Certainly,” said the doctor, much surprised.
Diana’s perennial smile seemed a little uncertain, wavering as though she were nervous, but she courageously kept it on her lips.
“It’s about my sister-in-law, Rose. I know Miss Lucian is a friend of hers—and you, too, of course. And I wondered if perhaps she’d been talking to you about Cecil.”
She paused, but Lucian felt no inclination to help her out. He remained unsympathetically silent.
“I do so wish that we could get her to take it more lightly.”
“It?”
“Cecil—everything to do with Cecil. I’m really awfully fond of Rose, Dr. Lucian, and it quite worries me to see her upsetting herself like this. Of course I know she is upset, any one could see it. The very way she looks at Cecil—it’s enough to make the boy hopelessly self-conscious. I daresay you noticed at lunch. Ford chaffs him the least little bit in the world, and Rose either loses her temper, or looks as though she were going to cry. It’s really wonderful that Cecil isn’t a great deal more of a spoilt child than he is.”
“Do you think that you understand Cecil, Mrs. Aviolet?”
“Is there much to understand in a boy of that age?”
“You think there isn’t?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Diana was obviously uneasy at the turn taken by the conversation. “I suppose a boy of Cecil’s age can’t be very interesting, except to his mother, but at the same time——”
“I can assure you that I find Cecil very interesting indeed, quite apart from his connection with Squires. From a psychological point of view, you know, Cecil is rather—unique.”
“Oh, medically! Do you mean that sort of thing?”
Lucian smiled at the clumsy idiom.
“Cecil can hardly be described as the normal schoolboy, I’m afraid.”
“Don’t you think so?” She seemed vaguely surprised. “I must say I’ve always thought him fairly ordinary. Quite a nice boy, of course, and school has improved him a great deal. Ford always said it would.”
“Yes. It’s supposed to improve all boys, isn’t it?”
She looked more surprised than ever.
“Don’t you think it does?”
“Oh, I daresay. I’ve uttered platitudes on the subject, like everyone else. But I think Cecil’s mother was in the right of it, years ago, when she said that a thing might be good for ninety-nine people and all wrong for the hundredth.”
“That old nonsense! I beg your pardon, Dr. Lucian, but I thought even Rose had forgotten the fuss about Cecil going to school by this time. Why, Hurst made a different child of him.”
“I daresay.”
“Even his mother saw that.”
“It cured him of telling lies?”
Diana looked rather shocked. “Oh, poor little fellow! One would rather forget that he ever did such a thing.”
“The soul never forgets,” said the doctor brusquely.
“These things can be transmuted, or they can be suppressed—but they don’t vanish into nothingness because we all agree that it’s more charitable, or more polite, to forget about them. However, please forgive me. It’s a hobby-horse of mine, and I can’t resist a canter every now and then.”
Diana’s little civil laugh assured him, if he had needed any such assurance, that his energetic diatribe had conveyed to her the minimum of significance possible.
“I mustn’t keep you any longer. But do, if possible, try and get Rose to take the whole question of Cecil less seriously. He’s really quite all right in every possible way, if she’d only believe it, poor dear!”
The doctor shook hands with Mrs. Aviolet. “But I’m afraid,” he observed in valediction, “that I can’t do as you ask. You see, I agree with your sister-in-law. The question of Cecil, to my mind, demands just exactly that.”
“What?”
“To be taken seriously,” said the doctor, his voice very grave.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Edmund Gosse.