Chapter XII

Jim looked at his suit-case with puzzled eyes; it still seemed to him enormous. Arthur had provided him with two whole sets of underclothes, a dozen handkerchiefs, shoes as well as boots, and two perfectly good new suits.

He had never had so much in his life before, and yet Mr. Bligh, this master of equality, who saw no visible distinction between man and man, had spoken of his having no heavy luggage; and Mrs. Bligh had said,—

‘I suppose the rest of your things will arrive later?’

It was true that neither of them had shown wonder when Jim explained that there was nothing more to come, but he had already learned they never showed surprise about anything that really surprised them.

Little by little, as he took in the size and aspect of his new room, the immensity of his suit-case dwindled. There was a shining wardrobe and a tall piece of furniture, very dark but with a bloom upon it, in which quantities of small brass handles revealed drawer after empty drawer, ready for clothes which he hadn’t got. On a side table, under a big square glass, was a wonderful collection of china utensils, crowned by a big basin covered with fantastic painted birds, and a charmingly shaped jug to match it.

A number of little dishes covered with the same pattern stood on the table—the use of which he did not understand. He gave up in despair the question of where to put a tooth-brush—they all looked so much too handsome for tooth-brushes. Arthur had taught him this odd extra for his toilet; but he hadn’t said where one had better keep it.

It was a long, oak-panelled room with four windows; they were all open, and curtained with short chintz curtains which swung to and fro in the light air, as fresh and bright as flowers.

Two windows looked out over the herbaceous borders and the lawn, and two over a walled garden full of fruit and vegetables, with borders of herbs, sweet-williams, and heavy-headed pinks.

There was a gleaming paddock beyond the vegetable garden, and beyond the paddock sloped vague blue hills. Swallows darted to and fro, plunging out of the open sky in which they bathed, into their hidden nests under the eaves. They flew so fast and so unerringly that there was no use trying to mark their flight except by the stir of the leaves which closed after their passage.

Everything smelled of lavender and was clean, not as Jim understood cleanness, a painfully acquired, expensive process, chiefly utilitarian, but clean like an art, and to the point of beauty.

He drew in the fragrant air cautiously as if he hardly had the right to breathe in so exquisite a place. He did not like to take his boots off and put them on the highly polished floor, or on the soft, flowered rug in the middle of the room.

A knock at his door disturbed him afresh. He had never had knocks at his door before—it was almost as if he had a right to keep people outside. But it was followed up very quickly by a good-looking, beautifully starched housemaid. She looked full at Jim, and all the forces of derision in her took visible form.

She knew he was a boy off a barge.

How she knew it would have been impossible to tell—but little in the house escaped her non-committal roving eyes, or the trained acuteness of her well-placed ears.

Every fibre of her being resented waiting upon him. To Jim it seemed equally strange that this haughty young lady should stand in the same relation to him as he used to stand to Polly, the Miss Masters’ domestic mainstay, for whom he often ran errands. But Polly had been kind to him, and he would have liked to be kind to Emily, only he didn’t know how.

Emily, holding a brass can of hot water in her hand, sneered openly.

‘Wot d’yer use it fer?’ Jim asked nervously as he watched her transfer it with a sharp effective movement to the basin and deposit the flowered jug upon the floor.

‘Oh, wash your ’ead in it if you like, I should think by the look of you,’ said Emily with instant malice. ‘But I’m not ’ere to teach you manners, thank ’Eaven. Put your boots where they belong and don’t let me have any of your dirty ways.’

Jim scowled at her heavily.

‘You can go downstairs, my gel,’ he said coldly, ‘where you belong—wot’s ’appened to you is your ’ead’s turned—that’s your trouble!’

‘Well, I ’aven’t waited for the likes of you to turn it,’ said Emily with a high, toneless giggle. She banged the door viciously after her.

Jim poured some of the hot water into a glass and drank it gingerly. He had never drunk hot water before, but he thought he might be supposed to drink it, and if Mrs. Bligh asked him, ‘How did you like your hot water?’ it would be safer to have at least tried it.

Then he examined the books by his bedside. There was a volume of Bernard Shaw; _The Road Mender_; _Poems of Passion and of Pain_; and a French novel. They were the most incomprehensible set of books Jim had ever encountered. He tried them each by turn.

The one by Bernard Shaw had lots of words in it which seemed quite like words, but they were rattled out at you with the cut and thrust of a man who is only accustomed to use thoughts like weapons.

He did not know, as Jim knew it, that thought is a discovery and not a blade. He wounded even in the house of his friends.

As to _The Road Mender_, Jim read solidly page after page and felt exactly as if he had been eating cotton-wool. He had met road menders while he was on the barge, but they were not like this one. They were, as a rule, surly people who drank a great deal owing to the amount of dust they swallowed, and suffered from rheumatism and sore eyes. What they really liked—they expressed this with the expletives which came handiest—was Saturday nights in the Old Kent Road.

_Poems of Passion and of Pain_ were equally thrown away upon Jim. It was true he found them painful, but he was totally unmoved by what passion they contained. He came to the conclusion that the people the poems were about must have got upset rather easily.

Then he heard the boys come back from tennis. They all had separate rooms on the same floor. Their voices sounded extremely cheerful. He would have liked very much to go outside and speak to them, but he didn’t dare.

Wivvle was next door to him.

Emily returned with more brass jugs, and after a sudden pause Jim heard quite distinctly through the open windows the sound of a kiss. He had been right about Emily’s head—it was turned.

There was no harm in a kiss, but it surprised and disappointed Jim that Wivvle should have been the one to turn it. Wivvle was so handsome and straightforward and looked so much like a lord, and to Jim’s unsophisticated mind it was mean of a man with overwhelming advantages to look at a girl with none.

‘’E didn’t oughter ’ave done that,’ Jim said slowly to himself. ‘’E oughter ’ave let ’er alone.’

The sound of a mellow-voiced gong roused him from these reflections.

If music went off suddenly in the house, what did it mean?

It occurred again after a short interval, and Jim realised that it must be a modified and harmonious form of the old bells and whistles. It was a summons, and meant that you had to go somewhere else. In the hall he was picked up by Mr. Bligh, who literally swept him into the dining-room.

‘My dear fellow—— No, we don’t dress; only a smoking-jacket, and that’s not _de rigeur_. You’re perfectly all right,’ Mr. Bligh explained. ‘Nothing formal here, you know, and practically no rules at all. We’re in by ten o’clock, of course, out of consideration for the neighbourhood and all that, you know—and up with the lark. Can you manage breakfast at eight? _Good!_’

Mrs. Bligh joined them. She floated in from the garden like a white-winged moth; the neck of her soft, white dress was cut low and a string of pearls fell from it. She wore a bunch of lavender-coloured sweet peas at her waist.

She motioned to Jim to sit at her left hand. Wivvle was on her right. He had beautiful manners, gracious and perfectly natural; his unshadowed fresh boy’s eyes rested on Mrs. Bligh with frank approval.

‘Yes,’ she said, touching the sweet peas, ‘they were the right colour, thank you.’

She smiled a little, happy, companionable smile at Wivvle, which she repeated in turn for Pritchard and Ainley when they flew downstairs a moment or two later. But it was Wivvle who had given her the sweet peas. He had found time to think of them and be punctual for dinner; even though his dressing had been interrupted.

Jim’s first meal at Warren Manor was one of the worst hours of his life. Every instant of it was a fresh danger and a fresh pain.

The mere eating of it shocked and paralysed him. It was so complicated a performance; and nobody ate as he was accustomed to eat.

Arthur had warned him never to be in a hurry, and to watch what other people did. But it was very difficult to copy grace when you had only clumsiness to do it with.

And it wasn’t only the eating. The talk flowed on all round him like a foreign language; the words were sometimes familiar but the sense perpetually escaped him. They all spoke so quickly and none of them ever repeated what they said and they didn’t stick to anything.

If they began with a cricket match they were apt to end with vegetarianism or politics, and it was impossible to grasp from the clipped allusions what they really thought about any of these subjects.

What was vegetarianism, for instance? Mr. Bligh announced that he was trying it and found it wonderfully clarifying; like cold water at dawn, he explained.

Jim had fallen once into a canal at dawn, and he thought if vegetarianism was really like that excessively startling plunge he would most certainly—as soon as he found out what it was—avoid it. But by the time he had summoned courage to ask, Mr. Bligh had pounced on to the Prime Minister and was using language about him which was positively shocking. Mrs. Bligh said gently—apparently of the Government at large—‘Yes, those dreadful men——’ and wanted in the same breath to know who had won at tennis.

This produced a perfect nightmare of untranslatable banter between the boys, banter of a stiff, intellectual kind without oaths and with a strange lack of point. Jim was used to sparring matches of wit and came off extremely well in them—river repartee is a test of wit—but he wouldn’t have liked to risk a specimen before Mrs. Bligh.

Every one laughed at almost nothing, and they laughed nearly all the time.

Jim rarely laughed; he could see and perpetrate the best jokes unsmilingly, and it made his cheeks ache to keep a responsive smile to the inexplicable mirth around him.

Mrs. Bligh spoke to him twice. Once she said,—

‘Are you fond of gardening?’

(They all had a way of speaking as if you could be fond of anything you liked, quite as if you had had the opportunity to find out.) Jim said he liked a flower or two, and later on she asked if he could swim, and he said, ‘A tidy bit.’ The rest of the time she left him alone, but there was in her way of doing it a certain protective effect, as if she held a light screen of friendliness between him and solitude.

Mr. Bligh talked without discrimination to the table at large. It was true he fixed the name of each boy in turn on to a passing topic, but there was nothing less casual or more personal in his speech than the pause of a bird on a twig.

The meal, which was very pleasant and unhurried, lasted three-quarters of an hour.

Wivvle was the only boy who spoke directly to Jim, and then it was only to ask him to pass the salt, but he did it so charmingly that it seemed to Jim—who spilled a little salt in passing it—to constitute a tie.

After dinner every one went out of the door as if there was a rule about it—not the nearest person first, as would have been natural.

Mr. Bligh held Jim rather firmly by the shoulder, and in the end they went out of the door together after all the others.

‘Now, my dear boy,’ Mr. Bligh said, ‘we’ll come into the study and have a go at you. What I must get at now, you know, is what the French call the bottom of your thoughts. You must learn French one of these days—charming language—charming people—marvellous polish of manner. We are rough barbarians as compared to the Latin races, and yet, you know, there’s something about us—I hope you won’t think me insular—but I rather think there is something about us—more genuinely polite? We put ourselves out more—though, of course, we don’t express ourselves nearly so well.

‘Now, if you’ll just come in here—— You smoke, don’t you? I always encourage our boys to have cigarettes after meals. Why not? At seventeen or eighteen you have your growth—and I have a theory that what people do naturally and without suppression they do in moderation. Now we’ll come to business.’

To Jim’s surprise they really did come to business. He had not supposed that they would; he had expected instruction from his arrival on the railway; but for five hours his expectation had been increasingly baffled.

But it was not the will-o’-the-wisp it had seemed. Mr. Bligh was a conscientious scholar and an excellent instructor. In half an hour he had reached the depth of Jim’s ignorance and saw before him the extent of his task.

Jim had had a first-rate elementary education and had made very fair progress in a secondary one. He had added to this foundation by indiscriminate reading and occasional hours of study with a finished scholar. He knew some Latin and was well grounded in mathematics and history.

What he knew he knew with the unflurried thoroughness of a mind which has no chance thoughts, and no desire to evade facts. He could express what he had learned simply and directly. He understood more grammar than he had ever practised.

When he had finished his examination, Mr. Bligh leaned back thoughtfully.

‘You’ll have a great opportunity,’ he said more gravely than he usually spoke.

‘I hope you’ll have a great future. I have never seen a mind get its chance as yours has done, with so little—so little intervention of culture. You won’t object to my speaking plainly, will you?

‘I think we must have a little intervention of culture; I do really.

‘The best way is for it to filter down naturally, as I always say from class to class.

‘We each have much to learn from the other. Now, honour, you know; honour and absolute truthfulness, high-mindedness, the old code of the perfect knight—that’s all good breeding, you know—but it can be acquired—it’s what I should like to see open to any man as well as knowledge.

‘I should recommend you to study Wivvle. The other boys have it too—Pritchard belongs to an excellent family, and Ainley’s father had culture as well as brains, but he doesn’t go very far back.

‘But Wivvle! There he is. You can rely on him—our best type—in a sense without disparaging labour, you understand—of an Englishman. His word is a rock; his mind is clean. You can see for yourself his manners—and he’s a _nice_ boy—the sort you can trust through and through in every relation of life.

‘I like to think all my boys are straight. I’ve kept a good tone here, but I don’t talk much about it.

‘I give them eugenics to study and I leave ’em alone. Influence—that’s everything, isn’t it? The influence—I don’t want to boast of it—but the influence of a perfectly happy married life must carry a certain weight, mustn’t it?

‘I sha’n’t say much to you either, Barton, but I know you’ve had a different start from the rest of them—— There are just one or two things I had better put before you. I’m perfectly modern, you know—open minded—and nature, you know—I always allow for nature.’

Mr. Bligh looked vainly round the room. He made this statement in perfectly good faith, but he never _had_ allowed for nature; it always took him by surprise.

Then he put one or two things before Jim. The boy sat opposite to him with his head down.

What Mr. Bligh proceeded to say struck Jim as increasingly childish.

Memories of the life of the streets and of the subterranean viciousness of the penitentiary passed through his mind. It was all silly truck. Mr. Bligh was right about Latin and French, but he didn’t know what he was talking about now.

Wivvle and Emily—what kind of honour was that? What kind of truthfulness? Perfect in every relation in life. Then he ought not to go round giving sweet peas to ladies who believed in him.

Jim might be ignorant, but he knew enough to know that people like Mrs. Bligh wouldn’t take sweet peas from boys who kissed their housemaids. And all the rest of the stuff—morality—it wasn’t a thing off the line of housemaids, but Mr. Bligh spoke as if it were. It didn’t do any good to talk about it, unless, so to speak, the housemaid was there too; even then it probably wouldn’t do any good to talk about it.

The point was, Jim was there for other things—these liabilities were Jim’s business to put down; he knew he had them; he never ignored liabilities; but if he didn’t put them down he was a fool. They weren’t Mr. Bligh’s business.

He looked up suddenly at Mr. Bligh and cut across his carefully veiled phrases.

‘All right, sir,’ he said with smouldering eyes, ‘you needn’t ter worry. I’m not ’ere fer all that.’

It pulled Mr. Bligh up short He was a wise and tactful person in his dealings with boys, and he wasn’t accustomed to being pulled up short; but when his eyes met the fierce blue ones looking into his with so much steadiness and with such a quiet mastery of the powers of life, his own eyes shifted and fell before them.

Mr. Bligh did not know that he was a weak man trying to teach a strong man things that he had never fully learned himself, but he did feel curiously certain that he mustn’t say any more.

He suggested rather lamely that Jim should have another cigarette in the garden before turning in; and then he wondered, in his ignorance of life, if Jim wasn’t rather a dangerous boy to have in the house.

Jim walked out alone on to the darkening lawn.

It was a still night; a small crescent moon, misty as if it had been dipped in milk, leaned over a group of slender silver-birches. The sky was a pale blue shading into darkness.

Jim’s slow mind gripped his thought. Here he was in this strange scene to learn out of education what would help him to live—to live, and to beat down cages. He wanted, with a tightening of the heart, for all the world to learn to live—for the weak to live more easily and the strong more justly.

He did not want to stop at books; he wanted an honour that would transcend codes and a truth that would be safe for the weak to trust to. He did not know what powers were against him, but he knew what he held in his heart. The cry of a nightingale broke upon the still night air, high and shrill with a piercing sweetness.

Behind the carved magnolia buds he saw the flutter of a woman’s dress, and then Mrs. Bligh’s face—it might have been, he thought, made out of one of those firm, smooth flowers. She smiled at him with her finger on her lips.

Again and again the shrill, cool sweetness of the bird’s song shook the night. As they listened to it together, the intensity of his task flashed upon Jim. The contrast between what this woman knew and what he had still to learn drove the blood back from his heart. He felt, as he had not felt before Mr. Bligh, curiously humbled and at her mercy.

She did not seem like a woman to him; she was an emanation of music and moonlight. He never, then or afterward, saw her in any other way. She had no age for him, and if she had sex it was as Eve, the mother of all living, has it, with the deep sacredness of creation in her eyes.

The song ceased abruptly. Mrs. Bligh moved a little nearer to him.

‘You have been talking to my husband,’ she said gently. ‘I know you are going to have a hard time. I wanted to tell you, if you will not think me impertinent, that I feel quite sure you will do well, in spite of the hardness. Sometimes I know——’ she paused a little as if she drew her words out of some deep and difficult personal experience—‘sometimes I know that to be believed in, helps a little.’

Jim looked at her. He had no words to give her the fullness of his thanks. She took the unmasked adoration of his eyes without a change in her mild serenity.

‘I wondered,’ she said, ‘if you would care to have an extra lesson with me between six and seven every day? My husband thought perhaps you might. A lesson in how to talk as we do. It’s not so very difficult——’ She gave a little apologetic laugh.

‘It’s just,’ she said, ‘a trick like any other, but it might make things more comfortable for you while you are with us.’

But though Jim could express what he knew to Mr. Bligh in spite of being tortured by how little it was, he could express nothing of what he felt to her, though it enlarged his heart to feel it—nothing in words; his eloquent, dumb eyes said more.

‘I don’ mind if I do,’ he muttered, and turned hastily away from her.