David Blaize

CHAPTER X

David’s soft grey hat with house-colours on it was tilted over his eyes to screen them from the sun, and he lay full length on the hot dry sand above high-water mark on the beach at Naseby, stupefied and simmering with content. His arms, bare to the elbow in rolled-up shirt sleeves, were extended, and he kept filling his hands with sand and letting it ooze out again through the interstices of his fingers in a pleasant, tickling manner, hourglass fashion, though the action evoked in him neither edifying nor melancholy reflection on the subject of the passing of time. Beside him lay two coats and two bags of golf-clubs, for he and Maddox, with whom he was staying, had just come back from a morning round of golf, and had gone down to the shore to bathe before lunch. They had tossed up as to which of them should go to fetch towels, and, Maddox having lost, had just disappeared up the steep, crumbling path that led to the top of the sand-cliffs, where was perched the house his mother usually took for the summer holidays. A few hundred yards farther north these cliffs broke into tumbled sand-dunes and stretches of short, velvety turf, where greens nestled in Elysian valleys surrounded by saharas.

Maddox would be absent some ten minutes, and David let his lazy thoughts float down the stream of the very pleasant thinkings which made up his extreme contentment. He did not direct them, but let them drift, going swiftly here, eddying round there, while the memory-shores of the last few months glided by. In the first place, and perhaps most important of all, he was staying here with his friend – this was an eddy; he went round and round in it. Though he had been here three days already, passing them entirely with Maddox, playing golf with him, playing tennis with him, bathing with him, and quite continuously talking to him, David could not get used to this amazing situation. He called him “Frank” too, just as if he was nobody in particular, and at the thought of it David rolled over on to his side, wriggling, and said “Lord!”

It was but a little more than a year ago that he had been, in his own phrase, “a scruggy little devil with stag-beetles,” capable, it is true, of hero-worship, and able to recognise a hero when he saw him, for had not his heart burned within him when, going up for his scholarship examination, the demigod had thrown a careless word to him? It was quite sufficient then that Maddox, the handsomest fellow in the world, the best bat probably that Marchester had ever produced, and altogether the most glorious of created beings, should have noticed him at all: indeed, that was more than sufficient; it was sufficient that Maddox should exist. And since then only a year had passed, and here he was calling him Frank, and leaning on his arm when so disposed, and tossing him who should get towels, and staying with his mother. Often she would say something to him in French, unconscious which language she talked, and Frank would answer in French, which seemed wonderfully romantic. Though their ages were so diverse (for Frank was eighteen and David fifteen, and three years, when the combined total is so small, make a vast difference) here, staying with him, David hardly felt the gap. At school it was otherwise, a hundred seasons sundered them, but here they were equal. All difference was swallowed up in friendship, friendship even swallowed up hero-worship sometimes.

David dwelled gluttonously on the steps that had led up to this. There was that meeting at Baxminster, with the splendid adventure of the second edition of Keats, and here he made an agitated excursion into the fate of that. He and Margery had decided to sell it, and had got the enormous sum of twelve (not ten) pounds for it. But the glory of that had been abruptly extinguished, for their father had insisted that their equal shares should be invested in the savings bank, to roll up at some beggarly rate of interest, and do no good to anybody. Really, grown-up people were beyond words..

He dismissed this distressing topic and hitched on to Maddox again. Public-school life began with his installation as fag, and there hero-worship had soared like a flame day by day, until that afternoon when, after playing squash with Bags in the rain, he had gone back to the house for a bath. David had always avoided the thought of that; it remained a moment quite sundered from the rest of his intercourse with Frank, embarrassing, and to be forgotten, like the momentary opening of a cupboard where nightmare dwelt. Anyhow, it had been locked again instantly, and the key thrown away. Never a sound had again issued therefrom.

Thereafter came a flood of jolly things to swim in. After the new arrangement in Remove A, consequent on that monumental cribbing-row, he had got into the lower fifth at Easter, and would, when he went back at Michaelmas, find himself in the middle fifth. Frank had made him work with intelligence and industry as well, though the distractions of the summer-half had been frightfully alluring. For David was really coming on as a wily left-hand bowler, and it had been extremely difficult to give more than casual attention to the “Commentaries” of Julius Cæsar, when his inmost mind was wrapped up in cricket. It was not hundreds of overs, but thousands of them that David delivered in imagination when he ought to have been crossing the Alps with Hannibal, or challenging Medea’s strange use of the pluperfect when that infuriated lady was in the act of stabbing her children. But he had got his remove, and a satisfactory report of his work, so that there was peace and joy at Baxminster, and his father sanguinely prophesied that he would go up into a fresh form every term, as he himself had done.

Half-way through the summer-half had come the most intoxicating possibility, namely, that he had a chance of getting his house-colours for cricket, his very first year at school. This was a thing nearly unheard of (though, of course, Maddox had done it), but he had been tried in house-matches, and had done rather well. Then that hope had gone to the grave, for when Maddox put up the list of the completed house-eleven his name did not appear. But he had known that it was not going to do so already, and the manner of its exclusion was, secretly to him, almost a greater gratification than its appearance would have been. That, too, lying on the hot sand, he turned greedily over in his mind, licking the chops of memory.

It had happened thus. He had come one afternoon into Maddox’s study, just before the final promotions were made, and Maddox opened the subject.

“David, would you be fearfully sick if I didn’t give you your house-colours?” he asked abruptly.

David had already allowed himself to hope for, even to expect them, and the sunshine went out of life.

“I think I should,” he said. “Not that it matters a hang… I say, I’m going up town. Do you want anything?”

“No, thanks. But just wait a minute. Oh, don’t look like that!”

David’s face had taken an expression of the most Stygian gloom.

“Sorry,” he said. “Of course I was an ass to hope it.”

“No, you weren’t,” said Maddox. “But I’ve been bothering about it, and I thought I’d talk to you. It’s like this: you and Ozzy have about equal claim, and, if we weren’t such pals, I think I should toss up which of you I gave colours to. But the house would think I was favouring you if I put you in. There’s another thing, too; it’s Ozzy’s last year, and your first. I don’t know that that matters so much; so, if you find yourself left out, it’ll be because we’re pals. See?”

David moved a step nearer; the woe had gone from his face.

“Gosh, then, leave me out,” he said. “I – I prefer being left out, if that’s it.”

“Really?” asked Maddox.

“Yes, rather, and – and thanks ever so much.”

There had been no need for more than these jerked telegraphic sentences, but David went up town, treading on air, with a secret heavenly pride that was certainly among the “rippingest feelings” he had ever had. He congratulated Ozzy with complete sincerity… And here was Frank himself sliding down the crumbling sand-path with towels.

Frank threw a towel at him and knocked off his hat.

“Mother’s lunching out,” he said, “so we can bathe just as long as we please without being late. Oh, and she said to me, ‘need you’ – that’s you – ‘go away on Saturday?’ I said I’d ask you.”

David had no hesitation over this.

“No, of course I needn’t,” he said. “At least – ”

“At least?” said Frank, emptying the sand out of his shoes.

“I mean, are you sure I’m not being a bore? I should love to stop, of course. But won’t you and your mother get blasted sick of me?”

“Don’t think she will,” said Maddox gravely. “I shall rather, but it doesn’t matter. In fact, I was wondering whether perhaps you’d mind going on Friday instead of Saturday.”

David laughed.

“That’s a poor shot at getting a rise out of me,” he said. “Absolute failure. I shan’t go away on Friday or Saturday.”

Frank just shrugged his shoulders, and stifled a yawn with dreadful versimilitude. David gave him one short, anxious glance.

“And that wasn’t such a poor shot after all,” said Frank. “Just for a second you wondered if I was in earnest.”

“No, I didn’t,” said David promptly.

“And that’s a lie,” said Frank.

David gave it up, and lay back on the sand again, beginning to unbutton.

“I know it is,” he said. “You yawned jolly well.”

Frank picked up a handful of the dry powdery sand and let it trickle gently into the gap of shin that showed between the end of David’s trousers, and the beginning of his sock. This caused him to spring up.

“Lord, what’s that?” he said. “Oh, I see. Funny; I thought it was a bug of sorts.”

“Well, if you will grow so that your trousers only reach half-way down your legs, what else is to be done with the intervals?” asked Frank.

“I grew two inches last half,” said David. “I shall be taller than you before I’ve done.”

“Very likely. You will be the image of a piece of asparagus, if you like that. And certainly, if you grow up to the size of your feet, you’ll be big enough. I shall call you Spondee.”

David’s shirt was half over his head, but he paused and spoke muffled.

“Because why?” he asked.

“Because a spondee is two long feet.”

David gave a great splutter of laughter, as his shirt came off.

“Oh, quite funny,” he said. “Wish I had guessed. Jove, doesn’t the sea look good? I’m glad it was made, and – and that I didn’t die in the night. You didn’t bring down anything to eat, did you? Isn’t it bad to bathe on an empty tummy? Or is it a full one?”

“Don’t know. I’m going to bathe on my own, anyhow. David, there’s a sharp line round your neck, where your clothes begin, when you’ve got any, as if you’d painted your neck with the sprain-stuff, Iodine.”

“I did,” said David fatuously, standing nude. “Come on; the ripping old sea’s waiting for us.”

The tide was high and the beach steep, so that a few steps across the belt of sand all a-tremble in the heat, and a few strokes into the cool, tingling water, were sufficient to snatch them away from all solid things, and give them the buoyancy of liquid existences. The sea slept in the windlessness of this August weather, and, as if with long-taken breaths, a silence and alternate whisper of ripple broke along its rims. Far out a fleet of herring-boats with drooping sails hovered like grey-winged gulls; above, an unclouded sun shone on the shining watery plains, and on the two wet heads, one black, one yellow, that moved out seawards with side-stroke flashings of white arms clawing the sea, amid a smother of foam. Farther and farther they moved out, till at last David rolled over in the water, and floated on his back.

“Oh, ripping,” he said. “Good old mother sea!”

Frank turned over also and lay alongside.

“It’s like something I read yesterday,” he said. “ ‘As the heart of us – oh, something and something – athirst for the foam.’ I seem to remember it well, don’t I?”

“Yes. What is it, anyhow? Who did it?”

“Fellow called Swinburne. Good man is Swinburne, at times. Lord, you can lie down on the sea like a sofa, if you get your balance right. Oh, dear me, yes; Swinburne knows a trick or two. For instance, ‘when the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces, the mother of months in meadow and plain fills the shadows and windy places with lisp of leaves and ripple of rain. And the bright brown nightingale’ – oh, how does it go?”

He lay with head a-wash, and eyes half closed against the glare, and the spell of the magical words framed itself more distinctly in his mind.

“O listen, David,” he said. “Drink it in!”

David would have appreciated this in any case, but never had any poem so romantic a setting as when Frank repeated it to him here, as they lay side by side right out away from land, away from anything but each other and this liquid Paradise of living water.

“Oh-oh,” he said rapturously. “And what’s the name of it? Go on, though.”

Frank thought a moment.

“Can’t remember the next verse,” he said. “But it’s ‘Atalanta in Calydon.’ ”

“Oh, she’s the chap that went out hunting with her maidens,” said David confidently.

“She is. Look out, there’s a jelly-fish. All right, it’s floating by. I say, the water’s as warm as – as – I don’t know.”

“I think you’re babbling,” said David. “Go on about Atalanta. Did she have good sport?”

Maddox laughed, forgetting that he was balanced in a briny sea, and swallowed a large quantity of it.

“What’s the row?” asked David. “What did I say?”

Maddox ejected as much of the water as was accessible.

“Oh, you are such a kid,” he said, “and I keep forgetting it.”

David kicked himself into a perpendicular position and trod water.

“Well, I’m getting older as quick as I can,” he said in self-defence. “Blast! I wish it could go on for ever.”

“What?”

“As if you didn’t know! Being in the sea, and being with you, and being alive, and so on.”

“Same here,” said Frank. “Lord, but I wish I could be the sea as well.”

“Rather jam. But I don’t think I’d allow everybody to bathe in me,” said David. “Dogs, yes, and some people, not all. Or should we charge a shilling, and let anybody?”

Maddox pushed himself upright in the water.

“’Fraid we ought to come out,” he said. “It must be latish. I’ll race you to shore.”

“Right oh. Give me twenty yards start.”

“Measure them very carefully,” said Frank.

“Well, twenty strokes then,” said the wily David, shoving from Frank’s shoulder to get a movement on, and then, taking very long, slow strokes, letting his impetus exhaust itself.

“Now,” he said.

Both boys swam with the overhand side-stroke, breathing whenever their heads happened to be above water, and ploughed landwards with waves of bubble and broken water behind them. Frank overtook the other in the last thrilling ten yards, won by the length of an arm and a head, and panting, but still cool, they lay for a little in the shallow water, and then reluctantly went up over the beach to where their clothes lay. There the hot sun soon rendered superfluous the towels Frank had been at pains to fetch, and presently after they laboured up the sandy path to the house, slack and hungry and content, with the half of the wonderful day still in front of them. Once on the upward ascent David paused, his mind going back to the magic of words.

“O-o-oh,” he said again rapturously. “ ‘Blossom by blossom the spring begins.’ I shall read some more of that after lunch.”

Lunch took a considerable time, for David’s appetite, like his bones and muscles, seemed but to grow larger with the food he ate, and it was not till he had taken Frank’s evil advice and drunk a second bottle of ginger-beer that he declared himself able to turn his attention to literature again. They were going to play golf once more in half an hour, and David staggered out on to the lawn to lie on the shady terrace-bank for a short spell of Swinburne, which Frank went to fetch from his bedroom. Letters had arrived during lunch, and he found one for himself and one for David, which with Swinburne and the daily paper that would contain one important matter, namely, the result of the county match between Sussex and Surrey, he took out with him.

“There’s a letter for you,” he said, “and there’s Swinburne and the Daily Telegraph. What order of merit?”

“Oh, Telegraph first,” said David. “I bet you that Surrey – oh, this letter’s from Margery. Might just see what’s going on. I say, I know exactly how a balloon feels. But it was jolly good ginger-beer.”

Frank flopped down on the bank by him, and began opening his letter.

“What else do you expect,” he said, “if you inflate yourself with gas, as you did at lunch?”

“Don’t expect anything else,” said David thickly. “And it was you who suggested it. I think I must see what happened in the match first.”

“Well, let’s have a look too, you selfish devil,” said Maddox, putting down his half-opened letter. “Can’t you turn over, and put the paper on the grass here, so that we can read it together?”

“Lord, no,” said David. “At least it’d be a risk. But I can sit up if I do it slowly.”

Sussex, which had the good fortune to be David’s county, and for which he felt rather responsible, had done him credit on this occasion, and had won by half a dozen wickets. The rest of the paper did not seem to contain anything that mattered, and, throwing it aside, he and Frank began on their letters. Margery’s was quite short, though good of its kind, and, having finished it, David looked up, and saw that Frank was reading his, and that there was trouble in his face.

“Oh, I say, is anything wrong?” he asked.

Frank did not reply at once.

“I’ve heard from Adams,” he said at length. “There’s been a row. Some letter has been found, and Hughes isn’t to be allowed to come back in September.”

“Why? What sort of letter?” asked David.

Then, as Frank was still silent:

“Oh, something beastly, is it?” he asked. “What an ass Hughes is! He was such a nice chap, too, at my other school.”

Frank had finished reading, and was looking out over the Surrey garden, biting his lip.

“I say, Frank, what’s wrong with you?” said David.

Frank gave Adams’s letter to him.

“Read it,” he said.

David took it. It spoke of the letter written by Hughes to a boy in the house, a letter disgusting and conclusive… Then it spoke of the disgrace Hughes had brought on himself, and the misery he had brought on his father and mother. He read it and gave it back to Frank.

“Well, I’m awfully sorry, just as you are,” he said; “but if fellows will be brutes – Old Adams seems no end cut up about it. But somehow, I’d ceased to be pals with Hughes. Where’s the Swinburne?”

But still Frank did not answer, and David knitted puzzled brows.

“What’s up?” he said.

Maddox turned over on to his back, and tilted his hat over his eyes till his face was invisible.

“I might have been Hughes,” he said.

Again the memory of what David always turned his face from came into his mind.

“Oh, rot,” he said lamely, hating the subject.

Maddox was silent a moment.

“’Tisn’t quite rot,” he said. “But then there came a thing, which I dare say you’ve forgotten, only I haven’t. You came in from playing squash one wet afternoon, and you and your innocence made me suddenly see what a beast I was.”

David could not help giving a little shudder, but the moment after he was ashamed of it.

“I don’t care what you were like before,” he said. “But what I’m perfectly sure of is that since then – I remember it very well – you’ve been all right.”

“Yes.”

“There you are, then!” said David.

Frank was still lying with his hat over his face, but now he pushed it back and looked at David.

“It’s all serene for you,” he said, “because you’ve always been a straight chap. But it’s different for me. I feel just rotten.”

David scratched his head in some perplexity. The whole matter was vague and repugnant to him, and he did not want to hear more or know more. There were such heaps of jolly proper things in the world to be interested in and curious about. But he understood without any vagueness at all and with the very opposite of repulsion, that his friend was in trouble, and that he wanted sympathy with that. So the whole of his devoted little heart went out there. It was bad trouble, too, the worst trouble a fellow could have.