The Dark House. I. A. R. Wylie

The cigar was a large one and Robert Stonehouse was small. At the precise moment, in fact, when he leant out of the upstairs bedroom window, instinctively seeking fresh air, he became eight years old. He did not know this, though he did know that it was his birthday and that a birthday was a great and presumably auspicious occasion. His conception of what a birthday ought to be was based primarily on one particular event when he had danced on his mother's bed, shouting, "I'm five—I'm five!" in unreasonable triumph. His mother had greeted him gravely, one might say respectfully, and his father, who when he did anything at all did it in style, had given him a toy fort fully garrisoned with resplendent Highland soldiers. And there had been a party of children whom, as a single child, he disliked and despised and whom he had ordered about unreproved. From start to finish the day had been his very own.

Soon afterwards his mother disappeared. They said she was dead. He knew that people died, but death conveyed nothing to him, and when his father and Christine went down to Kensal Green to choose the grave, he picked flowers from the other graves and sent them to his mother with Robert's love. Christine had turned away her face, crying, and James Stonehouse, whose sense of drama never quite failed him, had smiled tragically; but Robert never even missed her. His only manifestation of feeling was a savage hatred of Christine, who tried to take her place. For a time indeed his mother went completely out of his consciousness. But after a little she came back to him by a secret path. In the interval she had ceased to be connected with his evening prayer and his morning bath and all the other tiresome realities and become a creature of dreams. She grew tall and beautiful. He liked to be alone—best of all at night when Christine had put the light out—so that he could make up stories about her and himself and their new mystical intimacy. He knew that she was dead but he did not believe it. It was just one of those mysterious tricks which grown-up people played on children to pretend that death was so enormously conclusive. Though he had buried the black kitten with his own hands in the back garden, and had felt the stiffness of its pitiful body and the dank chill of its once glossy fur, he was calmly sure that somewhere or other, out of sight, it still pursued its own tail with all the solemnity of kittenhood.

One of these nights the door would open and his mother would be there. In this dream of her she appeared to him much as she had done once in Kensington High Street when he had wilfully strayed from her side and lost himself, and, being overwhelmed with the sense of his smallness and forlornness, had burst into a howl of grief. Then suddenly she had stood out from the midst of the sympathetic crowd—remote, stern and wonderful—and he had flung himself on her, knowing that whatever she might do to him, she loved him and that they belonged to one another, inextricably and for all time.

So she stood on the threshold of his darkened room, and at that vision his adoration became an agony and he lay with his face hidden in his arms, waiting for the touch of her hand that never came, until he slept.

Christine became his mother. Every morning at nine o'clock she turned the key of the pretentious mansion where James Stonehouse had set up practice for the twentieth time in his career, and called out, "Hallo, Robert!" in her clear, cool voice, and Robert, standing at the top of the stairs in his night-shirt, called back, "Hallo, Christine!" very joyously because he knew it annoyed Edith, his father's new wife, listening jealously from behind her bedroom door.

And then Christine scrubbed his ears, and sometimes, when there were no servants, a circumstance which coincided exactly with a periodical financial crisis, she scrubbed the floors. Robert's first hatred had changed rapidly to the love he would have given his mother had she lived. There was no romance about it. Christine was not omnipotent as his mother had become. He knew that she, too, was often terribly unhappy, and their helplessness in the face of a common danger gave them a sort of equality. But she was good to him, and her faithfulness was the one sure thing in his convulsed and rocking world. He clung to her as a drowning man clings to a floating spar, and his father's, "I wish to God, Christine, you'd get out and leave us alone," or, "I won't have you in my house. You're poisoning my son's mind against me," reiterated regularly at the climax of one of the hideous rows which devastated the household, was like a blow in the pit of the stomach, turning him sick and faint with fear.

But Christine never went. Or if she went she came back again. As James Stonehouse said in a burst of savage humour, "Kick Christine out of the front door and she'll come in at the back." Every morning, no matter what had happened the night before, there was the quiet, resolute scratch of her latch-key in the lock, and when James Stonehouse, sullen and menacing, brushed rudely against her in the hall, she went on steadily up the stairs to where Robert waited for her, and they fell into each other's arms like two sorrowful comrades. Ever afterwards he could conjure her up at will as he saw her then. She was like a porcelain marquise over whom an intangible permanent shadow had been thrown.

He knew dimly that she had "people" who disapproved of her devotion, and that over and over again, by some new mysterious sacrifice, she had staved off disaster. He knew that she had been his father's friend all her life and that his mother and she had loved one another. There was some bond between these three that could not be broken, and he, too, was involved—fastened on as an afterthought, as it were, but so firmly that there could be no escape. Because of it Christine loved him. He knew that he was not always a very lovable little boy. Even with her he could be obstinate and cruel—cruel because she was so much less than his mother had become—and there were times when, with a queer unchildish power of self-visualization, he saw himself as a small fair-haired monster growing black and blacker with the dark and evil spirit that was in him. But Christine never seemed to see him like that. There was some borrowed halo

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