Poor Relations. Compton Mackenzie
IV
EARLY next morning John dreamed that he was buying calico in an immense shop and that in a dreamlike inconsequence the people there, customers and shopmen alike, were abruptly seized with a frenzy of destruction so violent that they began to tear up all the material upon which they could lay their hands; indeed, so loud was the noise of rent cloth that John woke up with the sound of it still in his ears. Gradually it was borne in upon a brain wrestling with actuality that the noise might have emanated from the direction of a small casement in his bedroom looking eastward into the garden across a steep penthouse which ran down to within two feet of the ground. Although the noise had stopped some time before John had precisely located its whereabouts and really before he was perfectly convinced that he was awake, he jumped out of bed and hurried across the chilly boards to ascertain if after all it had only been a relic of his dream. No active cause was visible; but the moss, the stonecrop and the tiles upon the penthouse had been clawed from top to bottom as if by some mighty tropical cat, and John for a brief instant savored that elated perplexity which generally occurs to heroes in the opening paragraphs of a sensational novel.
"It's a very old house," he thought, hopefully, and began to grade his reason to a condition of sycophantic credulity. "And, of course, anything like a ghost at seven o'clock in the morning is rare—very rare. The evidence would be unassailable. … "
After toadying to the marvelous for a while, he sought a natural explanation of the phenomenon and honestly tried not to want it to prove inexplicable. The noise began again overhead; a fleeting object darkened the casement like the swift passage of a bird and struck the penthouse below; there was a slow grinding shriek, a clatter of broken tiles and leaden piping; a small figure stuck all over with feathers emerged from the herbaceous border and smiled up at him.
"Good heavens, my boy, what in creation are you trying to do?" John shouted, sternly.
"I'm learning to toboggan, Uncle John."
"But didn't I explain to you that tobogganing can only be carried out after a heavy snowfall?"
"Well, it hasn't snowed yet," Harold pointed out in an offended voice.
"Listen to me. If it snows for a month without stopping, you're never to toboggan down a roof. What's the good of having all those jolly hills at the back of the house if you don't use them?"
John spoke as if he had brought back the hills from America at the same time as he was supposed to have brought back the toboggan.
"There's a river, too," Harold observed.
"You can't toboggan down a river—unless, of course, it gets frozen over."
"I don't want to toboggan down the river, but if I had a Canadian canoe for the river I could wait for the snow quite easily."
John, after a brief vision of a canoe being towed across the Atlantic by the Murmania, felt that he was being subjected to the lawless exactions of a brigand, but could think of nothing more novel in the way of defiance than:
"Go away now and be a good boy."
"Can't I … " Harold began.
"No, you can't. If those chickens' feathers. … "
"They're pigeons' feathers," his nephew corrected him.
"If those feathers stuck in your hair are intended to convey an impression that you're a Red Indian chief, go and sit in your wigwam till breakfast and smoke the pipe of peace."
"Mother said I wasn't to smoke till I was twenty-one."
"Not literally, you young ass. Why, good heavens, in my young days such an allusion to Mayne Reid would have been eagerly taken up by any boy."
Something was going wrong with this conversation, John felt, and he added, lamely:
"Anyway, go away now."
"But, Uncle John, I. … "
"Don't Uncle John me. I don't feel like an uncle this morning. Suppose I'd been shaving when you started that fool's game. I might have cut my head off."
"But, Uncle John, I've left my spectacles on one of the chimneys. Mother said that whenever I was playing a rough game I was to take off my spectacles first."
"You'll have to do without your spectacles, that's all. The gardener will get them for you after breakfast. Anyway, a Red Indian chief in spectacles is unnatural."
"Well, I'm not a Red Indian any longer."
"You can't chop and change like that. You'll have to be a Red Indian now till after breakfast. Don't argue any more, because I'm standing here in bare feet. Go and do some weeding in the garden. You've pulled up all the plants on the roof."
"I can't read without my spectacles."
"Weed, not read!"
"Well, I can't weed, either. I can't do anything without my spectacles."
"Then go away and do nothing."
Harold shuffled off disconsolately, and John rang for his shaving water.
At breakfast Hilda asked anxiously after her son's whereabouts; and John, the last vestige of whose irritation had vanished in the smell of fried bacon and eggs, related the story of the morning's escapade as a good joke.
"But he can't see anything without his spectacles," Hilda exclaimed.
"Oh, he'll find his way to the breakfast table all right," John prophesied.
"These bachelors," murmured Hilda, turning to her mother with a wry little laugh. "Hark! isn't that Harold calling?"
"No, no, no, it's the pigeons," John laughed. "They're probably fretting for their feathers."
"It's to be hoped," said old Mrs. Touchwood, "that he's not fallen into the well by leaving off his spectacles like this. I never could abide wells. And I hate to think of people leaving things off suddenly. It's always a mistake. I remember little Hughie once left off his woollen vests in May and caught a most terrible cold that wouldn't go away—it simply wouldn't go."
"How is Hugh, by the way?" John asked.
"The same as ever," Hilda put in with cold disapproval. She was able to forget Harold's myopic wanderings in the pleasure of crabbing her youngest brother.
"Ah, you're all very hard on poor Hughie," sighed the old lady. "But he's always been very fond of his poor mother."
"He's very fond of what he can get out of you," Hilda sneered.
"And it's little enough he can, poor boy. Goodness knows I've little enough to spare for him. I wish you could have seen your way to do something for Hughie, Johnnie," the old lady went on.
"John has done quite enough for him," Hilda snapped, which was perfectly true.
"He's had to leave his rooms in Earl's Court," Mrs. Touchwood lamented.
"What for? Getting drunk, I suppose?" John inquired, sternly.
"No, it was the drains. He's staying with his friend, Aubrey Fenton, whom I cannot pretend to like. He seems to me a sad scapegrace. Poor little Hughie. I wish everything wasn't against him. It's to be hoped he won't go and get married, poor boy, for I'm sure his wife wouldn't understand him."
"Surely he's not thinking of getting married," exclaimed John in dismay.
"Why no, of course not," said the old lady. "How you do take anybody up, Johnnie. I said it's to be hoped he won't get married."
At this moment Emily came in to announce that Master Harold was up on the roof shouting for dear life. "Such a turn as it give Cook and I, mum," she said, "to hear that garshly voice coming down the chimney. Cook was nearly took with the convolsions, and if it had of been after dark, mum, she