§ 8
They found the ladies rather, it seemed, by accident than design, waiting upon a sandy common rich with purple heather and bordered by woods of fir and spruce. They had been waiting some time, and it was clear that the sight of the yellow caravan relieved an accumulated anxiety. Bealby rejoiced to see them. His soul glowed with the pride of chocolate resisted and William overcome. He resolved to distinguish himself over the preparation of the midday meal. It was a pleasant little island of green they chose for their midday pitch, a little patch of emerald turf amidst the purple, a patch already doomed to removal, as a bare oblong and a pile of rolled-up turfs witnessed. This pile and a little bank of heather and bramble promised shelter from the breeze, and down the hill a hundred yards away was a spring and a built-up pool. This spot lay perhaps fifty yards away from the high road and one reached it along a rutty track which had been made by the turf cutters. And overhead was the glorious sky of an English summer, with great clouds like sunlit, white-sailed ships, the Constable sky. The white horse was hobbled and turned out to pasture among the heather, and William was sent off to get congenial provender at the nearest public house. “William!” shouted Mrs. Bowles as he departed, shouting confidentially into his ear, “Get your clothes mended.”
“Eh?” said William.
“Mend your clothes.”
“Yah! ’E did that,” said William viciously with a movement of self-protection, and so went.
Nobody watched him go. Almost sternly they set to work upon the luncheon preparation as William receded. “William,” Mrs. Bowles remarked, as she bustled with the patent cooker, putting it up wrong way round so that afterwards it collapsed, “William—takes offence. Sometimes I think he takes offence almost too often.... Did you have any difficulty with him, Dick?”
“It wasn’t anything, miss,” said Bealby meekly.
Bealby was wonderful with the firelighting, and except that he cracked a plate in warming it, quite admirable as a cook. He burnt his fingers twice—and liked doing it; he ate his portion with instinctive modesty on the other side of the caravan and he washed up—as Mr. Mergleson had always instructed him to do. Mrs. Bowles showed him how to clean knives and forks by sticking them into the turf. A little to his surprise these ladies lit and smoked cigarettes. They sat about and talked perplexingly. Clever stuff. Then he had to get water from the neighbouring brook and boil the kettle for an early tea. Madeleine produced a charmingly bound little book and read in it, the other two professed themselves anxious for the view from a neighbouring hill. They produced their sensible spiked walking sticks such as one does not see in England; they seemed full of energy. “You go,” Madeleine had said, “while I and Dick stay here and make tea. I’ve walked enough to-day....”
So Bealby, happy to the pitch of ecstacy, first explored the wonderful interior of the caravan,—there was a dresser, a stove, let-down chairs and tables and all manner of things,—and then nursed the kettle to the singing stage on the patent cooker while the beautiful lady reclined close at hand on a rug.
“Dick!” she said.
He had forgotten he was Dick.
“Dick!”
He remembered his personality with a start. “Yes, miss!” He knelt up, with a handful of twigs in his hand and regarded her.
“Well, Dick,” she said.
He remained in flushed adoration. There was a little pause and the lady smiled at him an unaffected smile.
“What are you going to be, Dick, when you grow up?”
“I don’t know, miss. I’ve wondered.”
“What would you like to be?”
“Something abroad. Something—so that you could see things.”
“A soldier?”
“Or a sailor, miss.”
“A sailor sees nothing but the sea.”
“I’d rather be a sailor than a common soldier, miss.”
“You’d like to be an officer?”
“Yes, miss—only—”
“One of my very best friends is an officer,” she said, a little irrelevantly it seemed to Bealby.
“I’d be a Norficer like a shot,” said Bealby, “if I ’ad ’arf a chance, miss.”
“Officers nowadays,” she said, “have to be very brave, able men.”
“I know, miss,” said Bealby modestly....
The fire required attention for a little while....
The lady turned over on her elbow. “What do you think you are likely to be, Dick!” she asked.
He didn’t know.
“What sort of man is your stepfather?”
Bealby looked at her. “He isn’t much,” he said.
“What is he?”
Bealby hadn’t the slightest intention of being the son of a gardener. “’E’s a law-writer.”
“What! in that village.”
“’E ’as to stay there for ’is ’ealth, miss,” he said. “Every summer. ’Is ’ealth is very pre-precocious, miss....”
He fed his fire with a few judiciously administered twigs.
“What was your own father, Dick?”
With that she opened a secret door in Bealby’s imagination. All stepchildren have those dreams. With him they were so frequent and vivid that they had long since become a kind of second truth. He coloured a little and answered with scarcely an interval for reflection. “’E passed as Mal-travers,” he said.
“Wasn’t that his name?”
“I don’t rightly know, miss. There was always something kep’ from me. My mother used to say, ‘Artie,’ she used to say: ‘there’s things that some day you must know, things that concern you. Things about your farver. But poor as we are now and struggling.... Not yet.... Some day you shall know truly—who you are.’ That was ’ow she said it, miss.”
“And she died before she told you?”
He had almost forgotten that he had killed his mother that very morning. “Yes, miss,” he said.
She smiled at him and something in her smile made him blush hotly. For a moment he could have believed she understood. And indeed, she did understand, and it amused her to find this boy doing—what she herself had done at times—what indeed she felt it was still in her to do. She felt that most delicate of sympathies, the sympathy of one rather over-imaginative person for another. But her next question dispelled his doubt of her though it left him red and hot. She asked it with a convincing simplicity.
“Have you any idea, Dick, have you any guess or suspicion, I mean, who it is you really are?”
“I wish I had, miss,” he said. “I suppose it doesn’t matter, really—but one can’t help wondering....”
How often he had wondered in his lonely wanderings through that dear city of day-dreams where all the people one knows look out of windows as one passes and the roads are paved with pride! How often had he decided and changed and decided again!