§ 10
Joan and Peter detested each other’s friends from the beginning. The quarrel that culminated in that amazing speech of Joan’s, had been smouldering between them for a good seven years. It went right back to the days when they were still boy and girl.
To begin with, after their first separation they had had no particular friends; they had had acquaintances and habits of association, but the mind still lacks the continuity necessary for friendship and Euclid until the early teens. The first rift came with Adela Murchison. Joan brought her for the summer holidays when Peter had been just a year at Caxton.
That was the first summer at Pelham Ford. Aunt Phyllis was with them, but Aunt Phœbe was in great labour with her first and only novel, a fantasia on the theme of feminine genius, “These are my Children, or Mary on the Cross.” (It was afterwards greatly censored. Boots, the druggist librarian, would have none of it.) She stayed alone, therefore, at The Ingle-Nook, writing, revising, despairing, tearing up and beginning again, reciting her more powerful passages to the scarlet but listening ears of Groombridge and the little maid, and going more and more unkempt, unhooked, and unbuttoned. Oswald, instead of resorting to the Climax Club as he was apt to do when Aunt Phœbe was imminent, abode happily in his new home.
Adela was a month or so older than Peter and, what annoyed him to begin with, rather more fully grown. She was, as she only too manifestly perceived, a woman of the world in comparison with both of her hosts. She was still deeply in love with Joan, but by no means indifferent to this dark boy who looked at her with so much of Joan’s cool detachment.
Joan’s romantic dreams were Joan’s inmost secret, Adela’s romantic intentions were an efflorescence. She was already hoisting the signals for masculine surrender. She never failed to have a blue ribbon astray somewhere to mark and help the blueness of her large blue eyes. She insisted upon the flaxen waves over her ears, and secretly assisted them to kink. She had a high colour. She had no rouge yet in her possession but there was rouge in her soul, and she would rub her cheeks with her hands before she came into a room. She discovered to Joan the incredible fact that Oswald was also a man.
With her arm round Joan’s waist or over her shoulder she would look back at him across the lawn.
“I say,” she said, “he’d be frightfully good-looking—if it wasn’t for that.”
And one day, “I wonder if Mr. Sydenham’s ever been in love.”
She lay in wait for Oswald’s eye. She went after him to ask him unimportant things.
Once or twice little things happened, the slightest things, but it might have seemed to Joan that Oswald was disposed to flirt with Adela. But that was surely impossible....
The first effect of the young woman upon Peter was a considerable but indeterminate excitement. It was neither pleasurable nor unpleasurable, but it hung over the giddy verge of being unpleasant. It made him want to be very large, handsome and impressive. It also made him acutely ashamed of wanting to be very large, handsome and impressive. It turned him from a simple boy into a conflict of motives. He wanted to extort admiration from Adela. Also he wanted to despise her utterly. These impulses worked out to no coherent system of remarks and gestures, and he became awkward and tongue-tied.
Adela wanted to be shown all over the house and garden. She put her arm about Joan in a manner Peter thought offensive. Then she threw back her hair at him over her shoulder and said, shooting a glance at him, “You come too.”
Cheek!
Still, she was a guest, and so a fellow had to follow with his hands in his pockets and watch his own private and particular Joan being ordered about and—what was somehow so much more exasperating—pawed about.
At what seemed to be the earliest opportunity Peter excused himself, and went off to the outhouse in which he had his tools and chemicals and things. He decided he would rig up everything ready to make Sulphuretted Hydrogen—although he knew quite well that this was neither a large, handsome, nor impressive thing to do. And then he would wait for them to come along, and set the odour going.
But neither of the girls came near his Glory Hole, and he was not going to invite them. He just hovered there unvisited, waiting with his preparations and whistling soft melancholy tunes. Finally he made a lot of the gas, simply because he had got the stuff ready, and stank himself out of his Glory Hole into society again.
At supper, which had become a sort of dinner that night, Adela insisted on talking like a rather languid, smart woman of the world to Nobby. Nobby took her quite seriously. It was perfectly sickening.
“D’you hunt much?” said Adela.
“Not in England,” said Nobby. “There’s too many hedges for me. I’ve a sailor’s seat.”
“All my people hunt,” said Adela. “It’s rather a bore, don’t you think, Mr. Sydenham?”
Talk like that!
Two days passed, during which Peter was either being bored to death in the company of Adela and Joan or also bored to death keeping aloof from them. He cycled to Ware with them, and Adela’s cycle had a change speed arrangement with a high gear of eighty-five that made it difficult to keep ahead of her. Beast!
And on the second evening she introduced a new card game, Demon Patience, a scrambling sort of game in which you piled on aces in the middle and cried “Stop!” as soon as your stack was out. It was one of those games, one of those inferior games, at which boys in their teens are not nearly as quick as girls, Peter discovered. But presently Joan began to pull ahead and beat Adela and Peter. The two girls began to play against each other as if his poor little spurts didn’t amount to anything. They certainly didn’t amount to very much.
Adela began to play with a sprawling eagerness. Her colour deepened; her manners deteriorated. She was tormented between ambition and admiration. When Joan had run her out for the third time, she cried, “Oh, Joan, you Wonderful Darling!”
And clutched and kissed her!...
All the other things might have been bearable if it had not been for this perpetual confabulating with Joan, this going off to whisper with Joan, this putting of arms round Joan’s neck, this whispering that was almost kissing Joan’s ear. One couldn’t have a moment with Joan. One couldn’t use Joan for the slightest thing. It would have been better if one hadn’t had a Joan.
On the mill-pond there was a boat that Joan and Peter were allowed to use. On the morning of the fifth day Joan found Peter hanging about in the hall.
“Joan.”
“Yes?”
“Come and muck about in Baker’s boat.”
“If Adela——”
“Oh, leave Adela! We don’t want her. She’d stash it all up.”
“But she’s a visitor!”
“Pretty rotten visitor! What did you bring her here for? She’s rotten.”
“She’s not. She’s all right. You’re being horrid rude to her. Every chance you get. I like her.”
“Silly tick, she is!”
“She’s taller than you are, anyhow.”
“Nyar Nyar Nyar Nyar,” said Peter in a singularly ineffective mockery of Adela’s manner. Adela appeared, descending the staircase. Peter turned away.
“Peter wants to go in the boat on the mill-pond,” said Joan, as if with calculated wickedness.
“Oh! I love boats!” said Adela.
“What was a chap to do but go?”
But under a thin mask of playfulness Peter splashed them both a lot—especially Adela. And in the evening he refused to play at Demon Patience and went and sat by himself to draw. He tried various designs. He was rather good at drawing Mr. Henderson, and he did several studies of him. Then the girls, who found Demon Patience slow with only two players, came and sat beside him. He was inspired to begin an ugly caricature of Adela.
He began at the eyes.
Joan knew him better than Adela. She saw what was coming. Down came her little brown paw on the paper. “No, you don’t, Petah,” she said.
Peter looked into her face, hot against his, and there was a red light in his eyes.
“Leago, Joan,” he said.
A struggle began in which Adela took no share.
The Sydenham blood is hot blood, and though it doesn’t like hurting rabbits it can be pretty rough with its first cousins. But Joan was still gripping the crumpled half of the offending sheet when Aunt Phyllis, summoned by a scared Adela, came in. The two were on the hearthrug, panting, and Joan’s teeth were deep in Peter’s wrist; they parted and rose somewhat abashed. “My dears!” cried Aunt Phyllis.
“We were playing,” said Joan, flushed and breathless, but honourably tearless.
“Yes,” said Peter, holding his wrist tight. “We were playing.”
“Romping,” said Aunt Phyllis. “Weren’t you a little rough? Adela, you know, isn’t used to your style....”
After that, Peter shunned further social intercourse. He affected a great concentration upon experimental chemistry and photography, and bicycled in lonely pride to Waltham Cross, Baldock, and Dunmow. He gave himself up to the roads of Hertfordshire. When at last Adela departed it made no difference in his aloofness. Joan was henceforth as nothing to him; she was just a tick, a silly little female tick, an associate of things that went “Nyar Nyar Nyar.” He hated her. At least, he would have hated her if there was anything that a self-respecting Caxtonian could hate in a being so utterly contemptible. (Yet at the bottom of his heart he loved and respected her for biting his wrist so hard.)
Deprived of Adela, Joan became very lonely and forlorn. After some days there were signs of relenting on the part of Peter, and then came his visitor, Wilmington, a boy who had gone with him from White Court to Caxton, and after that there was no need of Joan. With a grim resolution Peter shut Joan out from all their pursuits. She was annihilated.
The boys did experimental chemistry together, made the most disgusting stinks, blew up a small earthwork by means of a mine, and stained their hands bright yellow; they had long bicycle rides together, they did “splorjums” in the wood, they “mucked about” with Baker’s boat. Joan by no effort could come into existence again. Once or twice as Peter was going off with Wilmington, Peter would glance back and feel a gleam of compunction at the little figure that watched him going. But she had her Adelas. She and Adela wrote letters to each other. She could go and write to her beastly Adela now....
“Can’t Joan come?” said Wilmington.
“She’s only a tick,” said Peter.
“She’s not a bad sort of tick,” said Wilmington.
(What business was it of his?)
Joan fell back on Nobby, and went for walks with him in the afternoon.
Then came a complication. Towards the end Wilmington got quite soppy on Joan. It showed.
Aunt Phyllis suggested charades for the evening hour after dinner. Wilmington and Peter played against each other, and either of them took out any people he wanted to act with him. Aunt Phyllis was a grave and dignified actress and Nobby could do better than you might have expected. Peter did Salome. (Sal—owe—me; doing sal volatile for Sal.) He sat as Herod, crowned and scornful with the false black beard, and Joan danced and afterwards brought the football in on a plate. Aunt Phyllis did pseudo-oriental music. But when Wilmington saw Joan dance he knew what it was to be in love. He sat glowering passion. For a time he remained frozen rigid, and then broke into wild hand-clapping. His ears were bright red, and Aunt Phyllis looked at him curiously. It was with difficulty that his clouded mind could devise a charade that would give him a call upon Joan. But he thought at last of Milton. (Mill-tun.)
“I want you,” he said.
“Won’t Aunty do?”
“No, you. It’s got to be a girl.”
He held the door open for her, and stumbled going out of the room. He was more breathless and jerky than ever outside. Joan heard his exposition with an unfriendly expression.
“And what am I to do then?” she asked....
“And then?...”
They did “Mill” and “Tun” pretty badly. Came Wilmington’s last precious moments with her. He broke off in his description of Milton blind and Joan as the amanuensis daughter. “Joan,” he whispered, going hoarse with emotion. “Joan, you’re lovely. I’d die for you.”
A light of evil triumph came into Joan’s eyes.
“Ugly thing!” said Joan, “what did you come here for? You’ve spoilt my holidays. Let go of my hand!... Let’s go in and do our tableau.”
And afterwards when Wilmington met Joan in the passage she treated him to a grimace that was only too manifestly intended to represent his own expression of melancholy but undying devotion. In the presence of others she was coolly polite to him.
Peter read his friend like a book, but refrained from injurious comment, and Wilmington departed in a state of grave nervous disarray.
A day passed. There was not much left now of the precious holidays. Came a glowing September morning.
“Joe-un,” whooped Peter in the garden—in just the old note.
“Pee-tah!” answered Joan, full-voiced as ever, distant but drawing nearer.
“Come and muck about in Baker’s boat.”
“Right-o, Petah!” said Joan, and approached with a slightly prancing gait.