A SQUARE PEG
“I told him plainly beforehand that if he did not get a scholarship this term he must go into business. He has not won a scholarship, and, situated as you are, any other course would be absurd.”
Uncle Henry shut his mouth with a snap, while he stared fixedly over his sister’s head that he might not see the pleading in her eyes as she said timidly:
“But fourteen is so young, Henry, and Rodney is so small for his age——”
“I fail to see that his size has anything to do with it; and you, Felicia, must learn to face things as they are, not as you would have them. If you defer for one moment the chance of Rodney’s making his own living, you are doing an injustice both to him and to his sisters. Pardon my plain speaking, but he is the son of an exceedingly poor widow and must be dealt with accordingly.”
Through the open windows came the sound of a boy’s laughter and the ring of a smartly struck cricket ball. Uncle Henry waved his hand in the direction of the sound, saying:
“There, you see; that’s what his education at present amounts to; he’s a pretty bat, and doubtlesslooks forward to a life all flannels and cider-cup and yells of admiration when he makes a few runs; the sooner all that nonsense is knocked out of him the better.”
“But Rodney is not idle, Henry,” his mother pleaded; “his form-master and the Head both speak well of him and say that he has a very good chance next year, although he has missed this; you know the exam. came on just after his father’s death, when the boy was dreadfully upset.”
“I have made you an offer, you may take it or leave it. You can put him into one of my businesses; there will be no premium, and I’ll pay for his board at a thoroughly good boarding-house I know of in Mecklenburg Square, where he will be well looked after. In the meantime you must try to let this house, and then you can come up and live in the suburbs, and he can live with you and go to business every day by train; the little girls can go to a High School. With the many claims I have upon me, this is all that I can do, and I must serve you in the way that seems best to me.”
Uncle Henry sat down and took up the newspaper in token that the subject was thoroughly threshed out. He had gone into business at fourteen, and now at little past thirty had a house in Grosvenor Gardens and a “place down the river.” He had married at six-and-twenty, “going where money was.” The names of his two sons were down for Harrow, while his wife already talked of the time when she should “present” their baby girl. He quite acknowledged that it was his duty to help his sister now that the collapse of thoseAustralian banks had practically beggared her; but there was at the back of his mind a lurking satisfaction that the way he had chosen should be one calculated to destroy those castles of tradition her husband had been so fond of building. It was a perpetual annoyance both to his wife and to himself that Rodney and his sisters should be so very different in appearance from their own children; that, clean or dirty, these children without a sixpence should so strongly resemble the old family portraits that his brother-in-law’s ridiculous will forbade to be sold; that they should in speech and bearing so unmistakably be gentlefolk, and yet be his own sister’s children seemed to him a proof of nature’s ineptitude.
To be sure he and Felcourt had been on friendly enough terms, but he had always—though through no fault of Felcourt’s—been conscious that his brother-in-law and his ancestors for generations belonged to a class which only of late, and that not altogether with enthusiasm, has opened its doors to successful men of Uncle Henry’s stamp.
Rodney’s mother went and stood by the open window. The active white figures flying between the wickets on the wide lawn seemed all blurred and indistinct, and she lifted her slim hand to her throat to still its throbbing ache; she was not a strong-minded woman. All she had asked of life was the power to make folks happy, and to be loved; and hitherto her desire had been generously fulfilled. Married at eighteen to a man who, taking her out of somewhat sordid and uncongenial surroundings, made her queen of a householdwhere gaiety and good manners had been vassals for generations, she readily adapted herself to the new atmosphere, and became a sweet-voiced echo of her husband, and for fourteen years was absurdly happy. Then Rodney Felcourt died, and six months afterward came the collapse of the Australian banks.
Uncle Henry had a way of carrying through any course of action he had determined upon, and by the beginning of October his nephew Rodney found himself taking his exercise in the Gray’s Inn Road instead of in the playing-fields at school. The change of life was so radical and so sudden that the child hardly understood what had happened. Like the old woman in the nursery rhyme, he was forever exclaiming, “This be never I!” in melancholy astonishment. He was learning to tie up parcels, he stuck on endless quantities of postage stamps, and occasionally addressed a few envelopes for one of the typists. He did what he was told as well as he could, the day seemed endlessly long, and by evening he was so tired that he went to bed soon after the seven-o’clock dinner. A young boy for his age, he was quite unprecocious and unformed; hitherto his place in the universe had been clearly defined and not difficult to fill; to do well in his form, thus pleasing the “mater” and his form-master, to be “decent” to his little sisters at home, and “jolly” with the chaps at school, to be good at games and get into the “house” eleven, and to be absolutely “straight” in word, deed, and across country—such was Rodney’s conception of the whole dutyof boy, and he had acted up to it with considerable success. Now, life was not only complicated but unintelligible, and he was too bewildered even to rebel against a fate that kept him tying up parcels indifferently well when he felt that by all the ordinary standards of conduct he ought to have been writing Latin verses.
Every Sunday he wrote neat, stilted little letters to his mother, which informed her that he had been to church at the Foundling, was going for a walk in the afternoon, that he was well and hoped that she was well, and that he was her very loving son. Felicia crushed the paper against her cheek in the vain attempt to extract from it something real and Rodney-like. She thought of the school letters last term, how full of life they had been, how numerous the requests they contained! Rodney never asked for anything now, and she knew that the boy was holding himself well in hand lest any part of the truth might hurt her.
At the end of October, Cecil Connop came back from Paris. His arrival was announced in all the papers, for he was of some importance in literary circles; his great ability was acknowledged on all sides, the more freely that he was something of a failure. Though his work was widely read and appreciated by cultivated people, he was not popular. His appearance was quite ordinary, and he made no attempt to resemble any historical personage. He abhorred advertisement, considering that his published writings had no sort of connection with his private life. His readers were quite ignorant as to whether he had a mother ornot, and his personal friends suffered under no apprehension that their loves or their bereavements would figure, flimsily disguised, in his next book. His rooms in Jermyn Street had never been photographed, and only his servant knew whether he liked his bath hot or cold. The fact was that Cecil Connop kept one face for the world and quite another for the old friends who loved him—a proceeding so out of date among literary people as to be almost medieval. But it has its advantages for such as like curtains to their windows. According to his own account he never had any money, and was, when in England, in hourly danger of Holloway Jail; but he paid his card debts and never seemed to lack any of the things that go toward making life pleasant.
Felicia’s letter announcing little Rodney’s apprenticeship was a great surprise to Cecil. He had, of course, heard of her serious losses, but he knew that her brother was a wealthy man and “people always manage somehow”; that in this case they hadn’t “managed” came upon him with quite an unpleasant shock.
For some reason which she would not define even to herself, Felicia had not asked any of her friends then in town to look up Rodney. She was absolutely certain in her own mind that he had no business there, but circumstances were too strong for her, and she dared not offend Henry. When she read in the paper that Cecil had returned to town she felt distinctly relieved. Here was an understanding person who would ask no questionsand could be depended upon to give a faithful account of the child.
Cecil wrote at once to Rodney asking him to lunch at his club on the following Saturday, and to Felicia, to say how pleased he would be to do what he could for him while he was in town.
Rodney sat on the edge of his bed, too tired to undress. His flannels and “sweater” were spread on the pillow, and from time to time the boy laid his face down on them, inhaling the clean, woolly smell. He had of course never worn them since he came to London—Uncle Henry had not thought it necessary to make any arrangement as to how Rodney should spend his Saturdays—yet the sight of them comforted him. He was beginning to employ that saddest of all philosophies, that nothing can take from us the good times we have had. He had eaten hardly anything all day, and the ache in his throat was well nigh intolerable. His door opened, and the maid announced: “A gentleman to see you, sir. Said he’d come up here.”
Cecil had come before his letter. As the open door betrayed the listless little figure with the scattered flannels the whole situation was revealed to him in a flash, and for the hundredth time in a not over well-spent life he cursed the folly which had rendered him so incapable of helping his friends in any material way. When Rodney realized who was his visitor, he simply flung himself bodily upon him, and Cecil Connop, who was tender-hearted and easily touched, kissed him and had been rapturously kissed in return before he had time to consider whether the boy would beoffended or not. Then they both sat on the bed and for the first time for six weeks Rodney chattered. One of the boarders, a girl who did typewriting in Chancery Lane, passing his doorway, stopped and smiled as she heard the ripple of Rodney’s laughter; she waited for a full minute, enjoying the unwonted sound, then passed on to her own room unaccountably cheered. People in that house were too busy and too tired to laugh!
When Cecil Connop got back to his rooms he sat and smoked for a long time before he wrote the following letter to Felicia Felcourt:
“To-night I have spent an hour with Rodney, and find him apparently well and cheerful. I cannot faithfully report upon his appearance, as it was candle-light and I did not see him very distinctly. He talked freely enough about you all at home, about his old school, about myself; but, when I come to think of it, said nothing about his business. You will, I know, pardon me if I ask you in all seriousness—is this necessary? The whole time I was with him I had a curious sense that he was playing truant and ought to be at school; and there is one thing that an expression in your letter impels me to say at the risk of being impertinent: no amount of money in the world is such a possession as the breeding you and his dead father have given your boy. Forgive this frankness and believe me that I feel with you the more keenly that I am so conscious of my own gross impotence to help.”
“To-night I have spent an hour with Rodney, and find him apparently well and cheerful. I cannot faithfully report upon his appearance, as it was candle-light and I did not see him very distinctly. He talked freely enough about you all at home, about his old school, about myself; but, when I come to think of it, said nothing about his business. You will, I know, pardon me if I ask you in all seriousness—is this necessary? The whole time I was with him I had a curious sense that he was playing truant and ought to be at school; and there is one thing that an expression in your letter impels me to say at the risk of being impertinent: no amount of money in the world is such a possession as the breeding you and his dead father have given your boy. Forgive this frankness and believe me that I feel with you the more keenly that I am so conscious of my own gross impotence to help.”
On Saturdays Rodney left business at one, and on this particular Saturday flew back to “Meck”to change into his “Etons,” when he hied him on the top of an omnibus to lunch with Cecil Connop at his club. When he was seated opposite to his host, that gentleman proceeded to examine him critically. The boy was unmistakably a gentleman: everything about him, from the long slender hands of which he was so unconscious, to the way he looked his companion straight in the eyes, proclaimed him to come of a race who had spent their days otherwise than in tying up parcels. Men passing in and out looked pleasantly at the pretty boy who was so plainly enjoying the unwonted experience; but Cecil noted that he was very thin, that after the first flush of greeting was past the little high-bred face was pale, and that there were black shadows under the long-lashed grey eyes. Moreover, although there was everything for lunch calculated to please a boy, he ate hardly anything.
“Are they decent to you at your place of business?” asked Cecil, carefully pouring cognac into his coffee.
“You see,” said Rodney slowly, “I don’t seem to know anybody....” Then, with a twinkle of amusement, “They call me a fool when I make mistakes, which is pretty often, and if I do things right nobody says anything.”
During the next week or two Cecil made a point of seeing Rodney from time to time, and after each meeting he felt more and more convinced that the boy’s health was failing. He did not complain, but the sedentary life was beginning to tell upon a constitution that had never been so tried. Hebegan to stoop, and even with Cecil his laugh was by no means so ready or so frequent as it had been.
Felicia, although at first much comforted by Cecil’s account of Rodney, longed after him as only widowed woman can long for her son; but she had promised her brother that she would not attempt to see the boy for three months lest it should unsettle him, and it only wanted three weeks of the stipulated time.
Rodney had not seen Cecil for a fortnight; he was out of town, but this Rodney did not know. It was Saturday, and a smell of onion curry pervaded the boarding-house, the Square garden looked hopelessly uninviting, and he felt that he could endure neither the one nor the other a moment longer. So he hied him to Pall Mall to see if he could catch a glimpse of his friend. A conspicuously forlorn little figure, he strolled slowly past the many clubs, when a man coming hastily down some steps stared hard at Rodney, and, fixing his eyeglasses more firmly on his nose, turned and walked swiftly after him.
“Felcourt! Felcourt! What are you doing here?” asked a sharp, nervous voice, and Rodney started violently as his house-master, “Fireworks Fenton,” caught him by the shoulder and shook him.
“You young ass! Why didn’t you write and tell me all about it?” said “Fireworks Fenton” an hour later, as he angrily thumped a tea-table in “Stewart’s” till the cups jumped off their saucers.“We all thought you’d gone to another school, and here have you missed a whole term, and lost flesh and muscle, and forgotten everything you ever knew. I’ve no patience with you; it’s preposterous, and must be put an end to at once! Give me your uncle’s address and your mother’s——” and “Fireworks” glared at Rodney through his eyeglasses, and Rodney sat swallowing uncomfortable things in his throat, while his heart felt lighter than it had been for many a long week. It was so good to be bullied in that particular fashion once more. Now he dared to look forward. He didn’t in the least know how it was to be managed, but his old master had told him he was to come back to school next term, andhealways got his own way even with the Head himself. “Fireworks” was not afraid of twenty Uncle Henries—“Worthy but mistaken, worthy but mistaken,” he had muttered more than once during his late pupil’s explanations. Rodney went with him to Paddington to see him off, and it was only as the train steamed out of the station that “Fireworks Fenton” recollected that he had omitted the special business he had come up to town to do. But he only frowned and muttered: “That ridiculous little Felcourt put it out of my head, but I’m glad I found him—glad I found him. What fools these dear women are! What fools! What fools!” and whenever he turned over a sheet of newspaper (of which he didn’t read a line), he frowned again, exclaiming: “What fools!”
The particular fool Mr. Fenton had in his mind found two letters beside her plate on the followingTuesday morning. She knew both the handwritings, and gave a little sigh as she opened that from Rodney’s house-master: it would be to ask how Rodney was getting on: he had always been fond of the boy, and she had told him nothing.
“You will, I hope, acquit me of frivolous interference,” ran the letter, “in matters that do not concern me, when I tell you that I have seen Rodney and heard from him of the very great change it has been necessary to make in his life. I greatly wish that I had known sooner your reasons for taking him away from school, as I think one of the chief obstacles could have been, and still can be, easily removed. Dear Mrs. Felcourt, it is with considerable diffidence that I venture to ask you to do me a great favor, namely, to allow me to undertake Rodney’s education; my one stipulation being that he should come back to my house. You know that where there are twenty to thirty boys, one more or less makes but little difference, and in becoming responsible for the school fees, I am doing no more than my headmaster did for me. My mother was left a widow with five children and very little of this world’s gear. I am fully aware how much I shall be the gainer if you allow me to have Rodney, for, young as he is, he had a distinct influence upon that mysterious and fluctuating commodity, the ‘tone of the house,’ and I have not the slightest doubt that he will be able to make his own way by aid of scholarships, ultimately earning his own living nearly as soon as if he had remained in business.“Forgive me where I have expressed myself clumsily, and believe me,“Faithfully yours,“Reginald Fenton.”
“You will, I hope, acquit me of frivolous interference,” ran the letter, “in matters that do not concern me, when I tell you that I have seen Rodney and heard from him of the very great change it has been necessary to make in his life. I greatly wish that I had known sooner your reasons for taking him away from school, as I think one of the chief obstacles could have been, and still can be, easily removed. Dear Mrs. Felcourt, it is with considerable diffidence that I venture to ask you to do me a great favor, namely, to allow me to undertake Rodney’s education; my one stipulation being that he should come back to my house. You know that where there are twenty to thirty boys, one more or less makes but little difference, and in becoming responsible for the school fees, I am doing no more than my headmaster did for me. My mother was left a widow with five children and very little of this world’s gear. I am fully aware how much I shall be the gainer if you allow me to have Rodney, for, young as he is, he had a distinct influence upon that mysterious and fluctuating commodity, the ‘tone of the house,’ and I have not the slightest doubt that he will be able to make his own way by aid of scholarships, ultimately earning his own living nearly as soon as if he had remained in business.
“Forgive me where I have expressed myself clumsily, and believe me,
“Faithfully yours,“Reginald Fenton.”
It was a long time before Felicia took up the other letter, which was from Cecil Connop, and of this one sentence stood out in letters of fire to the exclusion of everything else:
“I don’t believe the boy’s health will stand it, Felicia; come and see for yourself.”
Felicia packed her smallest box and went.
When Rodney came back from business that evening Selina, the parlormaid, informed him that a lady was waiting in the drawing-room to see him. Selina, usually so grim, was all “nods and becks and wreathed smiles”; she liked Rodney, though he did “throw about his clothes something shameful.”
He was very tired and his head ached, as it always did in the evening lately, but something in the maid’s tone made him forget his weariness, and he raced up the stairs certain that only one lady could have produced such unwonted geniality on Selina’s part. But he paused on the mat outside the door; suppose it should only be his aunt! She had never come yet, but she might, and how was Selina to know that he did not care particularly for his aunt?
The door opened suddenly from the inside.
“Iknewnobody else would come upstairs like that. What were you waiting for, you dear goose?”—and Rodney’s mother inspected her boy for herself.
Next day she went to see her brother at his office, and told him that she had decided to accept Mr. Fenton’s offer. She rather surprised Uncle Henry, she was so decided and so cool; he did notknow that Cecil Connop had got up two hours earlier than usual, in order to have plenty of time to fortify Felicia for the interview, only leaving her at the office door.
“Do you think he will refuse to have anything more to do with us?” she had asked timidly.
“He couldn’t be so absurdly unjust,” answered Cecil stoutly; “but, even if he were, you have Rodney to think of. It is a chance in a thousand; it would be worse than madness to throw it away. He’s a square little peg, is Rodney; you’ll never fit him into that hole.”
Uncle Henry gave in quite graciously, though he was not best pleased. Had he but known it, he revenged himself upon Mr. Fenton for his interference by writing him a solemn letter of thanks, in which he spoke of his “generous, nay munificent offer.” “Fireworks Fenton,” very red and uncomfortable, rolled the letter into a ball and dropped it into his waste-paper basket, exclaiming:
“Pompous idiot!”
When Rodney went home his little sisters found him more delightful than ever, but he was reticent as regarded his experiences in London, describing it briefly as “a beastly hole.”
On his return to school “Fireworks Fenton” sent for him the very first evening.
“A row already, Felcourt!” exclaimed his best friend in dismay.
But Rodney ran along the passage and knocked at the study door without any fears on that score. As he closed the door behind him it was the master who looked embarrassed, as he jerked out:
“I’m pleased to see you back, Felcourt. Remember that if you are in any way perplexed, or get into trouble ... or ... do you want any pocket-money, by the way?” and “Fireworks” bent anew over the letter he was writing.
“No, sir, I have the usual pocket-money, thank you; but please I would like to——”
“Now, Felcourt, don’t you see that I’m busy? Go away, go away!”
“But please, sir——”
“I know perfectly well all the absurd and ridiculous things you would say, and I very much prefer that you should not say them. One thingIhave to say, attend to your English prose! I have a distinct recollection that your spelling of English is revolting—positively revolting. Attend to it!”