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      “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! Go away, Joanna,” thundered Dan, so she went away and was sick. In the end it was the parents who had to give in hours afterward and invent a pretext for unlocking the door.

      “You’re a passionate child. A passionate child!” Pen would exclaim, and Maud would say: “Do you think there is something worrying the child? Sometimes when children have something on their minds that they don’t know how to tell you about …”

      Pen believed in discipline, and these tantrums somehow seemed always to develop into a personal issue between him and the boy. He was more stern with Dan than with Alastair because he had made up his mind that Dan, unlike Alastair, could be moulded into a Thatcher.

      The victoria had given place to a motorcar as the family conveyance. Going out in the “devil-wagon ,” as Pen called it, was always an adventure; the wheels never quite fitted the ruts in the narrow clay roads, and sometimes they would have to crawl along for miles behind a farmer in a gig who, pretending not to hear their honking, refused to turn out for the city folks and their newfangled contraption. Sometimes they went through the park, past the quarry where workmen had found the mammoth’s tusks, and out to Cholera Point, where years ago during a cholera plague, people had been buried five or six at a time in a great pit. Every August a gipsy caravan bivouacked on the point, now grassy and treeless.

      One Sunday in August they drove there, Joanna sitting beside her mother, Pen on the seat between the two boys to keep them from fighting.

      “Mother, why do gipsies live in carts?”

      “Gipsies are like that, Dan. They live on kekkeno mush’s poov ; that means no man’s land. They are queer people, dears. They come when they like and go when they like.”

      “It must be fun not to live in a house and go where you like. Mother, do they like it?”

      “I expect they do.”

      “And do they do what they like, Mother?”

      “Well, not exactly. No one does. But they do what they like more than most people. They have the sun and stars over them, and they don’t care much what people think of them.”

      “I wish I were a gipsy. Could I be a gipsy when I grow up, do you think?”

      Maud gave Pen a queer look.

      “My dear boy,” said Pen. “You can get away from most people, but there is one person you can’t get away from. Do you know whom I mean?”

      “No, Father, who?”

      “You can’t get away from yourself. Don’t try.”

      “Why aren’t we all gipsies?” asked Dan.

      “A man maun dree his weird,” said Maud. This proverb was one of several she had inherited from her ancestors; these sayings were her only obvious link with Scotland.

      Dan could not tell when he had first realized that his father was not happy like Mother or Uncle Charles or Aunt Fanny. Father talked to you as if you were a grown-up . This was flattering, but you never felt quite as much at ease as you did with Uncle Charles. You could never be with Father without knowing you were being taught. But Dan admired his father tremendously and was a little afraid of him. His father knew everything. And he kept on pounding at people — and they listened! He was never unfair. Never! But sometimes Dan felt dimly that he was not angry at anything Dan had done but at Dan himself.

      “Well, laddie, dreaming as usual?” asked Maud with a smile in her voice.

      “I hope I don’t have to grow up,” said Dan, suddenly listless.

      “Why ever not?”

      “I don’t want to. I might have to do things I don’t want to.”

      II

      Peace reigned at the breakfast table. The children had passed the age when their attention had, figuratively speaking, to be caught and rubbed into the porridge, and they ate with silent fervour, thinking of what they would do with the summer day. The gipsies were at Cholera Point again, Uncle Charles said, and there was going to be a gipsy wedding.… Pen, whose vitality was low in the morning, had shut himself off from the world behind a newspaper. Civilized people, he believed, ought not to speak to one another until СКАЧАТЬ