God's Sparrows. Philip Child
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valiantly.… It was fun to hear their mother singing
“Ma mère, hélas, mariez-moi,
Puisque le temps est à plaisir …”
when you did not know what the words meant and could not see Mother. It made her seem like a different person and yet the same. “It would be perfect,” Dan thought, “if only I could stay downstairs in the dining room with Mother and Father and listen. Grown-ups can go where they like.”
Little knows the gosling what the gander thinks.
At such times Pen Thatcher, sitting with Maud’s family in the dining room, felt himself an alien. The Burnets, who regarded Ardentinny as a Burnet stronghold, always outnumbered the Thatchers, most of whom lived in the States. Pen sometimes wondered whether, in marrying Maud Burnet (whom he loved), he had not really married Ardentinny. The house had been left to him because Maud’s father believed that “a man should be master in his own household.” But the Burnets still regarded it as their castle, and not even marriage had been allowed to make any difference in their family solidarity.
The room surrounded the Burnets and Pen with an atmosphere of dignity and tradition which did not belong to the new world. It was unmistakably a room in which one dined rather than “had dinner.” In these years no modern chandelier of gas jets illumined too garishly the dark reticence of wainscoted corners; candles gleamed mellowly upon silver and upon oak panelling brought from Scotland years ago by Maud’s grandfather. Two ancestral Burnets in oils occupied panels on the west side of the room. They were Sir Murdo Burnet of Ardentinny Castle in Scotland, in the scarlet uniform and be-demned-careful-what-you-say -sir expression of a British general, and his wife, a dark, wild beauty in Gainsborough silks, bareheaded, with her hand touching the poised head of a greyhound nobly alive at her side. There could be no doubt that Sir Murdo felt at home in the eighteenth-century world upon which he stared with cold eyes. “I am a Burnet of Ardentinny,” he seemed to say, “and pray, sir, who may you be?”
Since the general’s time, the Burnets had run true to form. They were all sure of themselves and of their place in society. They were cavaliers by instinct, even Maud who was one of the good rather than brilliant Burnets, and they loved dash, colour, tradition, in fact all those things which Pen in his private mind called “swank.”
The Burnet ancestor irked Pen. He sometimes fancied that the general’s intolerant question was directed at none other than himself. “Pray, sir, who may you be? A demned puritan in my household, sir! ”
Pen was by temperament and inheritance a New England puritan and by conviction a doubter. He was a puritan who had strayed from his own heritage into this tory background. Murdo Burnet, Pen’s brother-in-law , who was a medical missionary in Japan, called him a zealot in search of a conviction. At forty-five he was slightly bald, with marked furrows on his forehead, and he had the prematurely middle-aged look of a man who already eats and drinks failure for his daily fare and wakes to it in the small hours of the morning.
One day Dan stared into the mirror over the mantelpiece at the dark little boy’s face — it might have been a stranger’s — and the thought suddenly flashed upon him: “Isn’t it queer that I’m me?”
Dan had his times of fancy, but he was practical, too. He spent hours trying to find out how the piano worked. Aunt Euphemia Burnet, unable to explain, told him that the sounds were made by little fairies who stood on the wires and sang.
“Shucks! Why do fairies have to have wires in order to sing?” asked Dan reasonably.
He recognized vaguely that Aunt Euphemia was silly, but of course, as one of the family you “loved” her. The best thing about her was her parrot, which had once belonged to a spellbinding revivalist. When there were visitors, Aunt Euphemia had to cover the cage with a cloth because the sight of “two or three gathered together” always made the parrot cry: “Prrt. Prrt. Down on your knees, sinners!”
The family were always in the background somewhere, so on the whole you took them for granted, though some of them you avoided as much as you could. For instance, you avoided Aunt Fanny because “she has a lot of common sense about making children behave!” Uncle Daniel Thatcher, who taught at Toronto University, did not count, though he was Father’s brother and Father always wanted you to talk to him; he was not an uncle like Uncle Charles. He lived in Toronto, and besides, he was old. Dan did not avoid Uncle Charles because he never seemed exactly like a grown-up . Uncle Charles took him to his first football game. “Now,” said Uncle Charles, “the object of the game is to batter the other side until they lie down and let you put the ball behind the goal post. We are cheering for the Tigers. They have yellow and black stockings; and mind you make a lot of noise. Enjoy yourself and, well — don’t ask me too many questions.” Uncle Charles cocked his hat at a jauntier angle and sucked in his breath with excitement; it was impossible to be with him and not have fun.
The children did not go to school yet because Joanna was “not very well” and Pen thought it unkind to let the boys go without her. Instead they had a tutor, an old Austrian gentleman who taught them languages and the three R ’s. Sometimes they played with the Elton children who lived next to Ardentinny.
“Do you think it is wise to encourage the Elton children?” said Fanny, the practical Burnet, to Maud. “It looks — well, people might think —”
“Why, they’re nice children, and I feel sorry for the poor little things — no real mother.”
The Eltons were queer. Mr. Elton’s first wife had divorced him for the most obvious of all reasons, and he had married a divorcée for his second wife. He was a successful man but his morals — everyone knew what “morals” meant — were not impeccable. Wellington was not used to divorce.… Beatrice was the clever Elton, Cynthia the pretty one, and Eustace was the general nuisance whom Joanna in particular disliked. When the boys quarrelled, as they frequently did, Joanna, who could not bear arguing, would dissolve into tears.
“You must be careful with Joanna,” said Pen to Dan, “you must be very careful not to excite her.”
“Why, Father?” asked Dan, and saw his father wince.… Pen said with irritation:
“Doesn’t it matter to you that your sister is not well?”
Dan was what was called a difficult child. His father could never understand where Dan got his temper and his dour obstinacy, for like many irritable people, Pen thought of himself as a patient man. Dan could not bear to see suffering. Once, while he was still a baby, Maud fell and broke her arm, and Dan, shocked at the sight of his mother suffering and not knowing what to do, began to punch her. He was not a handsome, winning boy like Alastair, who made the hearts of maiden ladies melt when he was called in to shake hands at Maud’s afternoon teas. Alastair was a Burnet, and he had the faculty of never appearing in the wrong.
“That boy has a vicious streak,” said Fanny of Dan.
“Fanny!” exclaimed Maud, up in arms in an instant. “How can you say such a thing?”
“Well, if it had not been for Dan’s temper, Joanna’s sickness —” began Fanny, but Maud would not let her go on.
“That was an accident! Don’t ever think it anything else.”
Once, when Dan was six, his parents overheard him calling Alastair a liar and locked him into his room until he should repent. He upset all the furniture, broke all the glass in the pictures, and would not come to a state of grace. “Alastair is a liar!” he screamed over and over again so loudly that the nearest neighbours down Galinée Street could have heard him. “Alastair may not have told the truth,” shouted Maud to the accompaniment of thumps from the other side of the door, “and if so, he will be punished. But you are being punished because it isn’t nice, it is not brotherly to say that about Alastair.” “He did lie. He did !” It always made Joanna sick at her stomach when Dan was unhappy. Presently, she came to the door and whispered through the keyhole:
“Dan, I have a piece of cake for you. Please tell Mother you’re sorry.”
“No!