There were five in the family and Dicky, nearly nine, was the youngest but one. Dicky’s father was a country doctor, and, like many country doctors, he led rather a hard life. The sick people he visited lived miles apart, and many were too poor to pay him properly.
Dr. Brook was a tall, pale man with grizzled hair turning to grey. He was clever, and he had a quick, short way of talking. He seemed to make up his mind about everything in a moment, and if you asked him a question, he answered as though it ought not to have been necessary to explain.
Dicky would have been surprised to hear that his father was a kind man, but kind he was. He hated attending upon well-to-do people who had nothing much the matter with them, though he knew he must visit them to make enough money to bring up his own children properly.
He would remember this while he was driving miles out of his way to see some poor cottager, and so, when he arrived at the cottage, he was usually in a bad temper. On the other hand, when he was calling on old Mrs. Varden at The Grange, who was sound as a bell and would probably live to be ninety, he was always thinking of those who really wanted looking after. Then, instead of smiling sympathetically, while she told him how queer she had felt in the middle of the night three weeks ago, or how well her nephews were doing, he would stand in front of the fire in her cosy sitting-room, look up at the ceiling with a stern expression, and rattle the keys in his pocket in a manner which said plainly, “How much longer shall I have to listen to this stuff?” So, although everybody thought Dr. Brook “a very clever doctor,” few people were fond of him.
All day he went bumping and rushing along the country lanes and roads in his shabby, muddy car, which he never had time to clean properly; and when he got home his day’s work was not over. In the evening he turned schoolmaster and taught his children.
Dicky’s mother had died when his brother Peregrin was born. Ella, the eldest of the children, a grown-up girl, kept house and taught Dicky and Peregrin in the morning. She was very like her father in many ways, only her cleverness had turned to music. She played the violin beautifully, and she was dying to get away from home and become a famous musician. Dr. Brook knew this and was very sorry for her; but he could not let her go till Dicky and Peregrin went to school. She had to be a governess till then. The other two boys had done very well. They had both got scholarships, and little Peregrin was as sharp as a needle.
Altogether the doctor had to admit he was very blessed in his children. But there was Dicky! Dicky was a dunce, there was no doubt about it—at least, so Ella reported. And when Dicky showed his smudgy exercise-books to his father in the evenings, his father thought it only too true.
Dicky dreaded the evening every day. He did not much mind his sister Ella’s crossness. He was used to it. But there was something awful about the weary quiet way his father used to ask, “Do you understand now?” Dicky had then to say “Yes,” and presently his father would find out he hadn’t understood at all. There would be a still longer pause, and at last his father would sigh, “Unhappy boy, what will become of you!”
This was far worse than being slapped by Ella, though her ring sometimes really did hurt. His father would then repeat what he had said before, twice, very slowly, as though he were dropping the words drop by drop into a medicine glass, looking at Dicky all the time, till Dicky’s lips began to quiver and his eyes to fill, when his father would say hastily, pulling out his watch, “There, there. It’s time for bed. Run along. Kiss me.” Then Dicky’s one desire was to get out of the room before bursting into tears. He did not mind if it happened outside the door or upstairs. Indeed, it was rather a comfort to cry, especially if he could only get hold of Jasper, the black spaniel, to hug and talk to while he was crying. But he was terrified at breaking down before his father. He somehow felt if he did, he might never stop sobbing, or that something else dreadful would happen. One evening it did happen.
The day had been altogether a bad day. Dicky had got up that morning feeling as if his head was rather smaller and lighter than usual. It felt about the size of an apple. Ella had had a fat letter that morning from her bosom friend, at the Royal College of Music in London. Lessons were always worse on the days she heard from her, and that morning it was true also, for once in a way, that Dicky had really not been “trying.” He had begun by making thirty-four mistakes in his French dictation—and he was rather glad. During arithmetic he had amused himself by imagining that the numbers had different characters, and that some of them were very pleased to find themselves side by side in the sums. The result was that all his sums were wrong, and he had exasperated Ella by telling her that it was the fault of number 8, who was a quarrelsome widow and wore spectacles.