Uncle Gerald laughed and said it wasn't quite that, but he "told it again," and then suggested that it would be nice if Ronnie, having heard one, learned what a poet called Keats had said about a nightingale: and Ronnie, who had a quick ear and retentive memory, learned two long verses—the end of the poem, Uncle Gerald said, and used to repeat them to his uncle to their mutual pride and satisfaction.
And now as he sat beside this cornfield there sounded in his head the lines—
"Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears among the alien corn;
* * * * *
Forlorn! the very word is like a bell...."
That was just what Ronnie was. He spared no pity for Ruth, though he knew all about her—for Uncle Gerald had told him. At all events she had not had to go and live with an aunt at Golder's Green, and with odious, priggish, plump cousins, who made fun of the way he talked, and took no interest whatever in India.
He detested Golder's Green. The house seemed so small and pokey, and the garden so prim, after the great rooms in India and Uncle Gerald's kindly, wandering old house and big friendly garden. The trim roads and jumbled, pretty little houses weighed upon him with a deadly weight of depression, though he couldn't have told why. There were no dogs either, only a large aloof cat called "Ra," that Aunt Hildegarde used to enthrone on a cushion, placed on a kind of pillar, while she and visiting ladies, attired in straight, sad-coloured garments, sandals, and digitated socks, sat round about upon the floor and enthused upon his wondrous beauty and wisdom. Ronnie would have liked Ra, if he might have stroked and cuddled him, but the children were not allowed to touch him, as he was supposed to be fierce and resentful of such attentions.
Ronnie was always in trouble, always doing or, even more often, saying what he ought not. Seeing ladies who wore veils on their heads, and had bare feet and sandals, he asked if they were ayahs; on being told hastily "of course not," he suggested that they were Parsi ladies, and was severely snubbed in consequence.
He was slow and clumsy over the little handicrafts his cousins practised with such skill and industry, and when Cedric and Githa irritated him beyond bearing he tried to beat them, which caused a frightful commotion and filled the whole household with consternation.
His aunt and uncle were not like Uncle Gerald in the matter of answering questions. To be sure, they told him all sorts of things he didn't particularly want to know, or knew already; but they refused to answer questions. They held his cousins up to him as models, a fatal thing to do, and they made no allowance for a lonely little boy suddenly transported to an entirely new environment. They were cold, too, sniffy and uninterested in all he had to say about Uncle Gerald, and this he resented extremely. He could not know that they were a centre of light and leading in the most superior set in Golder's Green, and that there existed between them and Uncle Gerald the deep-seated, never-expressed, hearty dislike of the poseur for the simple and sincere.
Had he but known it, Uncle Gerald took care that he never came across them more often than the very remote connection warranted. But Aunt Hildegarde was mother's only sister, and she seemed the natural guardian for Ronnie, and Uncle Gerald never interfered in other people's concerns. But he had his doubts, and his heart was sore for the frank, talkative little boy when he left him.
Nobody was actively unkind. He had plenty to eat, a nice room which he shared with Cedric, who was destined for a school all fads and flannel-shirts, and already could make his own bed and empty his washing-basin—matters wherein Ronnie was hopelessly ignorant, and showed no aptitude when Cedric tried to teach him. That was the mischief: Cedric and Githa were always teaching, and let him know it; and it roused every evil disposition in Ronnie; so that he was rapidly becoming a sort of Ishmael both in feeling and in fact.