IV
The first big change came when Hugo went to school.
Guy had gone two years before, when he was ten years old. That made a break in our lives, of course; we missed Guy badly, but it seemed somehow in the order of things and natural. It had always been settled for Guy to go away to school when he was ten. He had accepted the idea, and Hugo and I accepted it for him. He was ready to go, and there was nothing tragic in the separation.
He went and came back, and went again and came back again. The term time while he was away passed not interminably, and he slipped back into our life each holiday time without a serious break.
With Hugo it was quite different. We had known that it was intended for him to go some time, but vaguely. Cousin Delia had said so at the time Guy went, and Guy spoke of it from time to time. But it had not seemed real or imminent, and had not worried us. Just as we grown-up people live always with the knowledge of death in front of us, yet do not think of it much, until it comes certainly near.
So two years went by after Guy’s going, and we had grown accustomed to life with him only sometimes there, and were as happy as before, and as free from care. Then, a month after Hugo’s tenth birthday, Cousin Delia told him that he was going to school with Guy the next autumn.
It was June. I found him lying in the hayfield, quite still, on his face with the long flowering grasses and the buttercups above his head.
I had known something was the matter, but I did not know what it was. I was up in our house in the Happy Tree, and I knew suddenly that something had happened bad, that Hugo was in trouble. I came down from the tree and looked for him, and for a long time I could not find him. I looked for him in the Walled Garden, by the Frog Pond, in the Ruin; I knew he was not in the wood; then I went down to the stream and walked along it; and then I began to wonder if Hugo was dead. Then as I came back from the stream I found him, lying like that, in the long grass.
I sat down beside him in the long grass and asked him what had happened, and at first he did not answer.
Two white butterflies were chasing each other backwards and forwards over his head. The buttercups nodded and swayed in the faint wind, and the soft, feathery heads of the grass.
They touched against my cheek, too, as I sat there, squatting on my knees. They were almost as tall as I was.
I bent down and touched him and spoke to him again.
“I am going to school in the autumn,” Hugo said at last, and his voice sounded muffled as though it came from a long way off, and was not his.
It was like being shot—like the world stopping. I sat straight up again; even so the grass came level with my head.
I could not realize it at first; it seemed too dreadful to believe; and then a blind resistance came over me, an unreasoning impulse to protect him from this unbearable thing. I felt much older and stronger than Hugo and very fierce.
I snuggled down beside him and put my arm round his neck. He seemed suddenly very little and helpless, with no one in the world to protect him except me.
‘You shan’t go, Hugo,’ I was saying. ‘I won’t let them. . . . They mustn’t do it.’
Hugo shook his head.
‘It is no good, Helen,’ he said. ‘I shall have to go. I don’t want to. I am afraid of it—and nothing will ever be the same any more.’
I thought he was crying, but he wasn’t, for he sat up then and looked at me.
His face was quite white and his eyes that were always big and dark looked bigger and darker. His whole face looked pinched and tragic as though he saw and understood so much beyond this one thing.
And I realized suddenly, for the first time, the relentlessness of time and the inevitability of change. I understood that I could not resist, and what that meant.
Something was passing, a door was closing, and nothing in the world could hold it open. Hugo was helpless, and I was helpless; and every one. We could not stand still and we could not go back; and what we had had, we could never have again.
I shut my eyes very tight and tried to understand, and a queer feeling came over me that in one moment more I would understand everything—the secret of life and the universe—something unutterably splendid and complete, but the moment passed, the secret receded. It had gone, and I could not grasp it; only the sense of helplessness remained, and of inevitability.
‘Is this growing up?’ I asked Hugo.
And he nodded.
‘I think it is the beginning of growing up,’ he said.
We sat very still for a long time, holding hands and not speaking. The butterflies had fluttered away, but the sun shone just as brightly; birds were singing in the willows by the stream, and somewhere up by the house the dogs were barking.
‘Can you bear it, Hugo?’ I asked at last.
And he answered:
‘I don’t know. They will try and take away my inside world, and perhaps they will take it away, and then what can I do?’
I said:
‘Our inside worlds are too private for that. They wouldn’t know about them at a place like school.’
He said:
‘I have thought of that. One might keep it quite hidden away and pretend.’
I said:
‘People don’t know anything about what one thinks except here, you know, Hugo, and if they don’t know they can’t do any harm.’
‘That’s what Mother says,’ he answered. ‘She says no one can take one’s inside world away ever; and nothing can matter too badly while one has that—but she says one must learn to live outside as well, and school does that—and Guy does that, of course.’
‘Oh, Hugo, what shall I do when you are gone?’
‘I suppose dying is like this,’ Hugo said seriously. ‘One going away—the other being left behind. It happens to every one and yet it is just as bad.’
When we went indoors I found Cousin Delia in the drawing-room. She was standing by the end window, looking out into the rose garden, and her back was to me.
I called her and she looked round. She held out her hand to me and I ran up to her.
‘Must Hugo go to school?’ I asked her, and she nodded her head. I looked up and saw she had been crying.
‘Dear heart, he must—isn’t it cruel?’ she said, and I felt as though I had said already all that I was going to say, and she had answered all. I threw my arms round her and burst into tears.
‘Oh, Cousin Delia, I can’t bear it!’ I cried.
She called me her pet and kissed me, and said again to me what she said to Hugo; it was kinder to him really to send him now, she said.
‘Life will be hard for Hugo,’ she said. ‘I know that. I have always known it; but it will be worse if we put it off. We can’t run away,’ she said. ‘We can’t shut ourselves up for always. He has to go out into the world and fight some time, you know, Helen. Oh, my little Hugo—I would save him if I could!’ She turned suddenly away and sobbed.
I had never seen her cry; she was so quiet and calm as a rule; my mother called her cold—and it frightened me, I felt more than ever that something momentous had happened.
That afternoon we sat in our Happy Tree and told stories and talked very solemnly, about school and life and growing up. After tea Cousin John took us riding on our ponies. He was kind and cheerful as he always was, and did not seem to feel that anything tragic was happening at all. He never understood things as Cousin Delia did, but we enjoyed our ride and were happier after it; and the next morning when we woke up, the grief was less.
This sounds, I expect, a great fuss about nothing. What is it, you will say one little say—boy going to school? But even now, when I think of that day, it seems just as heart-breaking, just as momentous, as it did then. It is not, after all, the event itself that makes the tragedy, or significance, but the effect of that event on the people concerned. Guy’s going to school was not tragic; Hugo’s was. It was like going to the war; like being killed—at least in one way—something terrible to be faced and gone through with; and he did face it and go through with it; and it was not less painful because we were children.