I have pointed out that when you were walking along the Wilmslow Road towards The Beeches there was a lane that turned off to the right. It was very pleasant in those days. On the left was the high garden wall of a house, the red brick draped by the drooping branches of beech trees, and on the right you looked across parkland to a fine white stucco house. At the bottom of the lane were meadows through which the Mersey went a mazy twisting way between banks that had been raised very high to keep the floods out of the fields. From there I could see the red sandstone church at which my benefactor Mr. Oliver had ministered so long ago.
Not so long, either, when I looked at it in point of years; but when I went down to the meadows to play football with Oliver, it seemed an age since a boy of twelve began to sleep in Mr. Oliver’s loft and to learn to read and write. A boy whose life was so different from Oliver’s! There was always for me an intense satisfaction in that thought. It was difficult, looking up at the little eminence on which the church stood, not to snatch Oliver up and cry: “You shall have everything! Everything!” Because I was giving it all to myself through Oliver.
There was the question of football boots. It was in the winter after Oliver’s sixth birthday. He occasionally went out alone now, little jaunts down the village street and back. One day he returned to tell us that there were football boots in the boot shop and that the smallest pair would fit him.
“What do you want with football boots?” Nellie asked. “When you go to play football, wear your oldest boots. That will be a good way to wear them out.”
Nellie would never understand that there was no need to “wear out” everything. She disliked seeing clothes disposed of till they were threadbare, boots and shoes till soles were parting from uppers.
“But I want real football boots,” Oliver protested. “How can I play real football without real boots?”
“You’re having too much, my boy, that’s what’s the matter with you,” Nellie said severely. “It would do you good to be without a thing or two now and then. How many boys d’you think there are in the world who’ve got what you have?”
“But if Daddy can buy me things, why shouldn’t he?”
“All right. Wait till it’s you who have to do the earning.”
Nellie loved the boy with a passion that was deepened by her wonder that anything so beautiful should have sprung from her and me. But love to her carried with it a hard sense of duty. She had a Puritan fear of pleasure, and long ago she had reached the conviction that I was bad for Oliver. She never questioned my ruling in anything that concerned him. That, too, was part of her code. I was head of the household; my word was law; but before the law was promulgated she would try to have her say.
Oliver now gave me a downcast look across the table, and for once I was inclined to back up his mother’s opinion. There was no doubt about it: he was more and more inclined to think that he had only to wish for a thing to find it in his pocket. I looked at him severely. “I had no football boots when I was a boy,” I said.
And that very phrase was my undoing. I thought of the football I had played as a boy; the goal-posts chalked upon the end wall of a cul-de-sac in Hulme, the ball a tight-bound wad of brown paper, the players a handful of pale-faced urchins, and the consequence of the game for most of us a clip across the ear from our fathers for kicking our boots to bits. Oh, what would one not have given in those days for a field, a football, and a proper pair of boots!
As if the devil himself had put the words into his mouth, Oliver said: “If you had none when you were a boy, why don’t you get some now?” and the idea of myself wearing football boots and playing with Oliver flashed so charmingly in my mind that within a few hours there we were, superbly booted, running down the lane that led to the Mersey meadows, dribbling and passing and banging the ball with satisfactory reverberations against the red brick wall over which the beeches drooped their winter arms.
It was a simple game we played in the meadow. We put down our overcoats for goals, and look turns at being goalkeeper. A few boys collected and joined us. The space between the coats was narrowed when a boy was “in goal,” widened when I was. It was a grand afternoon. I shouted with the boys, got as excited as any of them; and when the light failed, and the evening air grew chill, Oliver and I pulled on our overcoats and walked along the uphill lane hand-in-hand under the brooding trees towards lamplight and firelight and tea and muffins, and there seemed nothing so crazy in the world as the idea that a boy shouldn’t have all he wanted.
*
And who wouldn’t be charmed to do anything for Oliver? He had a gracious way with him that went straight to your heart. We had extended the times of our intimacy. Instead of reading to him after he had been put to bed, I now had him in my study every evening between teatime and his bedtime, which was at half-past six. We had no prearranged way of passing the time. Sometimes we would talk; or I would read to him; or he would read to himself, or draw, sprawled on the mat, while I read. He drew very well, and I took care that there was always a good supply of paper and pencils.
By now, too, he had his own room. This was our second adventure in escape from old Moscrop’s furniture. Oliver’s room was very simple. His divan bed, a book-case to hold his favourite books, an easy chair to curl in, and a small chair against the table: that was all it came to. Nellie thought it bleak and uncomfortable. She wanted to load the walls with pictures, but I hardened my heart, knowing what sort of pictures they would be.
Well, that night after football Oliver was in a talkative mood. He roamed along the book-cases, and presently pulled out a book at random and looked through it, as he would often do, for a word he didn’t know. It was one of our favourite games at that time. Endless “conversations” which he still loved, began with a word. I lit my pipe and waited for him. He brought the book to the hearthrug and lay full length at my feet, with his head to the fire. “Covetousness,” he announced at last, boggling the pronunciation. “What does covetousness mean?”
“It means wanting what isn’t yours.”
“Like the English people wanting the gold and diamonds that belonged to the Boers?”
“That’s right,” I said. “That’s a good illustration.”
“Is covetousness wrong?” he asked, stumbling again at the word.
“It’s like a great many other things, my dear boy. If you allow it to get the upper hand of you, so that you would even steal in order to have the thing you covet, then it is wrong. You see that, don’t you?”
He nodded gravely, and I went on: “But you can say to yourself: ‘I don’t want that thing, because I should have to do something wrong to get it.’ And so you kick your covetousness out of the home.”
“But we won the war, all the same,” he said. “You said we did wrong to steal the gold and diamonds from the Boers, but we won the war. So you can do wrong and win.”
This startled me, and I said rather heavily: “You may win for a time, but in the long run it doesn’t pay to do wrong.”
“Well, how long does it pay? Do we get the gold and diamonds now?”
“It depends on what you mean by we. Some gentlemen with queer-sounding names will get them, no doubt. The rest of us will pay more for our tobacco and other things in order to pay for the war.”
Then he wanted to know how tobacco could pay for a war. That was how our “conversations” usually went, ranging far indeed from their start. Soon I was trying to give him some idea of how everything that a country spent had to come out of the pockets of the people in the country; and then we were interrupted. There was a loud tattoo at the door, and Dermot’s voice shouted: “May I come in, Bill?”
Rory was with him, and Rory rushed into the room, shouting: “Where’s The Cuckoo Clock? I want The Cuckoo Clock.”
“You want a smack on the bottom,” said Dermot, his red beard bristling with mock anger. “Is that the way to dash into a gentleman’s room, heathen that you are! Say good-evening to your Uncle Bill and to Oliver.”
“I left The Cuckoo Clock yesterday.”
“And what may the cuckoo clock be?” I demanded.
“The devil take you,” Dermot said. “You to be calling yourself a man of letters and you’ve never heard of The Cuckoo Clock. Does the name of Mrs. Molesworth mean nothing to you?”
“My infant mind was suckled on the classics,” I declared.
“So is The Cuckoo Clock a classic,” Dermot answered; “and now let’s have it, for this child will give me no peace till I’ve finished reading it to him.”
“Rory took it home,” Oliver announced.
“No!” said Rory. “We read it in your room, and I left it there yesterday.”
“You took it home,” Oliver repeated.
“He did not then, my young cock,” said Dermot, “unless he lost it on the way, because I was there when he got home, and there was no book with him then.”
Oliver looked Dermot full in the eye. “We’d better look in my room,” he said.
The Cuckoo Clock was not on the table. It was not on the floor. “And it’s not in the book-case,” said Oliver. “You took it, Rory. I remember.”
We cast our eyes along the books in the case. There was no Cuckoo Clock, but there was a book I had not seen before, and I thought I knew every book in that small library which I had myself assembled. The book that caught my eye had been covered in brown paper, and in gaudy lettering done in water-colour down the spine I read: “Adventures.” Just that.
I pulled the book out. “This is a new one,” I said. “Where did you get this from, Oliver?”
He leapt to take the book from me. I held him back with one hand, surprised at his sudden vehemence. “Here—steady!” I said. Then, as I began to flip over the pages, the colour drained from his face and he stood deadly still. I felt my heart suddenly hammer, and I wondered if I looked as pale as he did. The Cuckoo Clock I read at the top of every page as it flipped past my eyes. Cuckoo Clock! Cuckoo Clock! Liar! Thief! Oliver!
“This looks good,” I said. “We’ll go through it together. Well, Dermot, you’ve drawn a blank. Are you sure you didn’t lose the book, Rory?”
Rory looked doubtful. “I might’ve done,” he said.
The colour flowed back to Oliver’s cheek. “You must have done,” he cried; and for the first time in my life I could have struck him.
Dermot led Rory from the room. In a moment I tore the wrapping from the book, dropped it behind the book-case and threw the book into Oliver’s easy chair, sticking a cushion on top of it. Then I shouted: “Just a minute, Dermot—a last chance,” and when he and Rory were back in the room I pulled away the cushion. Rory’s face creased in his ugly, attractive grin. “I knew,” he said, and went away happy with his treasure.
*
I didn’t know what to do. I looked at Oliver for a moment, and he returned my look, level and unblinking. Then he smiled: the beautiful smile, confident of its power, that I had never been able to resist. I did not return it. I shook my head slowly and walked across the landing to my own room. I shut the door behind me and sat down before the fire.
I had often enough been a liar, as all men are liars; but I was appalled by the easy, winsome grace with which Oliver had lied.
Thief? I ransacked my mind, and could honestly say that never, so far as I could remember, had I stolen a thing. Had I been Ananias himself, and a professional pickpocket, I should nevertheless have felt at that moment as though a plank had been kicked out of the very floor of my life and I had glimpsed an abyss beneath.
For it was not enough that Oliver should be as good or as bad as I was. He must be better than I was. He was more than himself. He was myself, going on from the point where I had left off. All this had been implied in every thought I had had of the child. I felt face to face with some tremendous treason against my deepest faith.
I walked across the landing again to his room. There was a lamp hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Someone had come and lit it, and Oliver was beneath it, curled into his chair reading. The light fell upon his fair hair and the smooth childish curve of his cheek. He placed the open book face downwards on his knees and looked up with a smile. It was a smile so completely unconscious of offence that I was puzzled, almost baffled. I sat upon the hearthrug.
“Oliver,” I said, “why did you steal Rory’s book?”
“I didn’t steal it.”
“But there it was—in your book-case. You must have put it there?”
“Yes.”
“And you covered it in paper and wrote ‘Adventures’ on it so that Rory wouldn’t know it was his book.”
“Yes.”
“And you said that Rory had taken it away with him, though you knew he hadn’t. Wasn’t that a lie?”
“Yes, it was a lie. But I didn’t steal the book.”
“If that isn’t stealing, what do you call it?”
He slid from his chair and came and knelt on the hearthrug at my side. “Don’t you see,” he said frankly. “I took it because it was Rory’s. I love Rory. I wanted to have something belonging to Rory. Rory loves The Cuckoo Clock, so I wanted to have it.”
There was the sound of water flowing in the bathroom. Nellie came into the room. “Bedtime, Oliver,” she said, and stood waiting at the open door, looking like an affectionate wardress. He leapt up, and ran to her with unaccustomed alacrity. I said no more, but remained for some time sitting on the hearthrug, gazing into the fire. My heart felt strangely lightened. The explanation had been so ingenuously given that I accepted it without reserve. The child could not have invented so unusual a reason. He had done wrong, but in the motive itself I began now to see something that was not altogether unworthy. The more I thought of it the more it seemed to me that only someone out of the common, and rather finely out of the common, would have been trapped into offence by the very purity of his affections. Nevertheless, I said to myself, I had had a shock. I must watch Oliver more closely.
I was still in the room when he was brought in to bed. I did not read to him at night now that we had the afternoon interval together. The only bedtime formality now was prayers. A formality, indeed, I fear it was to me; but I knelt at one side of the bed as Nellie knelt at the other. All three of us sang the first verse of the children’s hymn:
Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,
Look upon a little child.
Then we murmured together through the Lord’s Prayer and that home-made particular prayer that every child seems to learn, asking God to bless all those people whom the child knows. After that Nellie slipped quietly out of the room. I rolled back the hearthrug, saw that the fireguard was safely in place, opened the window, and blew out the lamp. Then, with nothing but a faint fire-glow lighting the room, I knelt at the bedside and kissed him good-night. He felt warm and smelt delicious.
“And you believe what I said, don’t you?” he asked.
“Yes, old boy.”
“Then that’s all right.” He gave a great sigh, as though my good opinion were all that mattered in the world, and turned to sleep.