Fortitude. Hugh Walpole
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“Yes, father.”
“Why do you disobey me like this?”
“I don't know. I try to be good.”
“You are growing into an idle, wicked boy. You are a great trouble to your mother and myself.”
“Yes, father. I want to be better.”
Even now he could admire his father's strength, the bull-neck, the dark close-cropped hair, but he was cold, and the blood had come where he bit his lip—because he must not cry.
“You must learn obedience. Take off your nightshirt.”
He took it off, and was a very small naked figure in the starlight, but his head was up now and he faced his father.
“Bend over the bed.”
He bent over the bed, and the air from the window cut his naked back. He buried his head in the counterpane and fastened his teeth in it so that he should not cry out. …
During the first three cuts he did not stir, then an intolerable pain seemed to move through his body—it was as though a knife were cutting his body in half. But it was more than that—there was terror with him now in the room; he heard that little singing noise that came through his father's lips—he knew that his father was smiling.
At the succeeding strokes his flesh quivered and shrank together and then opened again—the pain was intolerable; his teeth met through the coverlet and grated on one another; but before his eyes was the picture of Stephen slowly straightening himself before his enemy and then that swinging blow—he would not cry. He seemed to be sharing his punishment with Stephen, and they were marching, hand in hand, down a road lined with red-hot pokers.
His back was on fire, and his head was bursting and the soles of his feet were very, very cold.
Then he heard, from a long way away, his father's voice:
“Now you will not disobey me again.”
The door closed. Very slowly he raised himself, but moving was torture; he put on his night-shirt and then quickly caught back a scream as it touched his back. He moved to the window and closed it, then he climbed very slowly on to his bed, and the tears that he had held back came, slowly at first, and then more rapidly, at last in torrents. It was not the pain, although that was bad, but it was the misery and the desolation and the great heaviness of a world that held out no hope, no comfort, but only a great cloud of unrelieved unhappiness.
At last, sick with crying, he fell asleep.
III
The first shadow of light was stealing across the white undulating common and creeping through the bare trees of the desolate garden when four dark figures, one tall, two fat, and one small, stole softly up the garden path. They halted beneath the windows of the house; the snow had ceased falling, and their breath rose in clouds above their heads. They danced a little in the snow and drove their hands together, and then the tall figure said:
“Now, Tom Prother, out with thy musick.” One of the fat figures felt in his coat and produced four papers, and these were handed round.
“Bill, my son, it's for thee to lead off at thy brightest, mind ye. Let 'em have it praper.”
The small figure came forward and began; at first his voice was thin and quavering, but in the second line it gathered courage and rang out full and bold:
As oi sat under a sicymore tree A sicymore tree, a sicymore tree, Oi looked me out upon the sea On Christ's Sunday at morn.
“Well for thee, lad,” said the tall figure approvingly, “but the cold is creepin' from the tips o' my fingers till my singin' voice is most frozen. Now, altogether.”
And the birds in the silent garden woke amongst the ivy on the distant wall and listened:
Oi saw three ships a-sailin' there— A sailin' there, a-sailin' there, Jesu, Mary, and Joseph they bare On Christ's Sunday at morn.
A small boy curled up, like the birds, under the roof stirred uneasily in his sleep and then slowly woke. He moved, and gave a little cry because his back hurt him, then he remembered everything. The voices came up to him from the garden:
Joseph did whistle and Mary did sing, Mary did sing, Mary did sing, And all the bells on earth did ring For joy our Lord was born. O they sail'd in to Bethlehem, To Bethlehem, to Bethlehem; Saint Michael was the steersman, Saint John sate in the horn. And all the bells on earth did ring, On earth did ring, on earth did ring; “Welcome be thou Heaven's King, On Christ's Sunday at morn.”
He got slowly out of bed and went to the window. The light was coming in broad bands from the East and he could hear the birds in the ivy. The four black figures stood out against the white shadowy garden and their heads were bent together. He opened his window, and the fresh morning air swept about his face.
He could hear the whispers of the singers as they chose another carol and suddenly above the dark iron gates of the garden appeared the broad red face of the sun.
CHAPTER III
OF THE DARK SHOP OF ZACHARY TAN, AND OF THE DECISIONS THAT THE PEOPLE IN SCAW HOUSE CAME TO CONCERNING PETER
I
But it was of the nature of the whole of life that these things should pass. “Look back on this bitterness a year hence and see how trivial it seems” was one of the little wisdoms that helped Peter's courage in after years. And to a boy of twelve years a beating is forgotten with amazing quickness, especially if it is a week of holiday and there have been other beatings not so very long before.
It left things behind it, of course. It was the worst beating that Peter had ever had, and that was something, but its occurrence marked more than a mere crescendo of pain, and that evening stood for some new resolution that he did not rightly understand yet—something that was in its beginning the mere planting of a seed. But he had certainly met the affair in a new way and, although in the week that followed he saw his father very seldom and spoke to him not at all beyond “Good morning” and “Good night,” he fancied that he was in greater favour with him than he had ever been before.
There were always days of silence after a beating, and that was more markedly the case now when it was a week of holidays and no Parlow to go to. Peter did not mind the silence—it was perhaps safer—and so long as he was home by six o'clock he could spend the day where he pleased. He asked Mrs. Trussit about the carol-singers. There was a little room, the housekeeper's room, to which he crept when he thought that it was safe to do so. She was a different Mrs. Trussit within the boundary of her kingdom—a very cosy kingdom with pink wall-paper, a dark red sofa, a canary in a cage, and a fire very lively in the grate. From the depths of a big arm-chair, her black silk dress rustling a little every now and then, her knitting needles clinking in the firelight, Mrs. Trussit held many conversations in a subdued voice with Peter, who sat on the table and swung his legs. She was valuable from two points of view—as an Historian and an Encyclopædia. She had been, in the first place, in the most wonderful houses—The Earl of Twinkerton's, Bambary House, Wiltshire, was the greatest of these, and she had been there for ten years; there were also Lady Mettlesham, the Duchess of Cranburn, and, to Peter, the most interesting of all, Mr. Henry Galleon, the famous novelist who