CHAPTER XVIII

At the other end I was met by my cousin George, a big, red-haired hobbledehoy of seventeen, with a curiously small face, bright brown eyes with a reddish light in them, and a freckled skin. George, I remembered, used to be amusing, and when I saw him standing on the platform my spirits rose a little. He proposed that I should send on my luggage, and that we ourselves should walk, as he wanted to make a call on the way. When we had arranged this we set out. I had not been so frequently in Belfast that I did not take an interest in the streets. Just now, it being Saturday afternoon, they were full of people, and at the end of the Queen’s Bridge some kind of noisy meeting――religious or political――was in full swing, but we did not stop to listen. Presently we turned to our left into a long straight street lined with unattractive, unprosperous-looking shops, and so narrow that in one place there was not room for two trams to pass. There was a liberal sprinkling of public-houses, of cheap clothiers and greengrocers, while here and there the gilded sign of a pawnbroker hung out over the greasy pavement. I was about to ask why we had chosen such a disagreeable route, when George touched my arm and said cheerfully, “Here we are.”

“Here!” I echoed, with involuntary dismay. “But――――”

“We live over the shop,” George explained. He had noticed my surprise, however, and had coloured.

I pretended to have been only astonished that we had reached our journey’s end so quickly, but I don’t know that George was deceived. Inwardly I was furious with my father for arranging for me to come to live in such a place, with a public lavatory hardly ten yards away, and facing the windows. The crowded street, the mean, dingy houses, the mean, dingy people, the noise and rattle of innumerable trams: it was all disgusting, even beyond my expectations! And I was to live here! I simply wouldn’t do it.

“We haven’t been here very long,” George continued. “We used to be round in Shaftesbury Square.” Then, as I stood motionless on the pavement, “Aren’t you coming in?”

I followed him into the shop in silence. As he pushed open the door a bell answered with a clear, decisive ping. There was a shop on either side of the passage――one stocked with pipes, tobacco, cigarettes, and sweets; the other with newspapers, stationery, and cheap editions of books in hideous paper bindings. In the tobacco department there was nobody; in the stationery department a girl was moving about, fixing things. She turned round on our entrance and George introduced me: “My cousin, Mr. Peter Waring, Miss Izzy.”

Miss Izzy and I shook hands. She smiled brightly upon me and hoped I was in good health. She evidently knew all about me, and had no need of George’s introduction. I observed that she had a lot of glossy, brown hair, which she wore twisted up in a coil on the top of her head in a way I had never seen hair arranged before, and which was kept in its place by long things like skewers, with large coloured balls at their ends. She wore a pince-nez, and was neatly dressed in dark blue, with a white linen collar and white cuffs, rather mannish in type. It was very plain to me that Miss Izzy had a great deal of style. She had also good features, but her femininity had been slightly eclipsed by a tremendous air of business efficiency, and by the severity of her pince-nez. I had never yet seen anybody nearly so business-like as Miss Izzy looked, and if I had been an employer of labour I should have engaged her as manager at a large salary on the spot. Through the open door there came the shrill angry voices of small boys playing football in an alley at the side of the house. There was a squabble in progress, a cross-fire of abusive language suddenly broken by cries of, “Start a new match――Start a new match.”

George was standing against the counter, and had begun to pick his teeth with a pin extracted from the bottom of his waistcoat. Miss Izzy went back to her task of arranging a pile of new books, evidently just come in. She was working out an elaborate pattern with their pictured covers, and as she did so she read the titles aloud. “‘The Hour of Vengeance,’” she proclaimed. “‘In Love’s Sweet Bondage,’” she added, more dreamily. “‘The Clue of the Broken Ruby’; ‘Cynthia Cyrilhurst’――it’s well for people that have names like that!”

“I don’t think much of it,” said George.

Miss Izzy sighed, “It’s better than some, any way.”

“Don’t you like your own name?” I ventured.

“My Christian name’s all right. But there’s no use being called Althea, if it isn’t going to be backed up by anything! Althea Izzy is neither one thing nor another.”

“You can easily remedy that!” declared George, gallantly, from the midst of his dental experiments.

Miss Izzy scrutinised him. “It wouldn’t be McAllister that would do it,” she said.

But George continued placidly to attend to his teeth. “I hear Miss Johnson’s getting married at eight o’clock next Friday,” he remarked.

Miss Izzy bounced round, knocking over a box of note-paper. “How do _you_ know?” she demanded, glaring at him.

“Oh, I just heard,” said George, calmly. He carefully inspected the pin before returning it to his waistcoat.

“‘Just heard!’――through the key-hole, I suppose. It strikes me you ‘just hear’ a deal you’re not meant to. And they don’t want it talked about――mind that!”

“Why don’t they want it talked about,” I asked.

“Because they want a quiet wedding. She’s in a bakery, and he’s a clerk in Nicholl’s, and, if it got out, the church would be full.”

The conversation was at this point interrupted by the entrance of Uncle George, who appeared in the doorway, coming in from the street. He was a quiet, gray little man, and his movements always reminded me of those of a small dog in a strange room, wandering about, sniffing furtively at the legs of chairs and tables. He was timid, and when he spoke to you he rubbed his hands together with an affectation of cheerfulness that was directly contradicted by his dark, melancholy eyes. He had always struck me as being kind in his intentions, and I regretted that they had seemed to count for so little when opposed to Aunt Margaret’s. Uncle George was afraid of Aunt Margaret. He had an air of assuming that there was perfect harmony between them, but I had noticed that he rarely made a remark in her presence without glancing at her to see how she would take it. He reminded me of one of those old photographs one discovers at the backs of frames, their features almost obliterated from long exposure. His whole face, indeed, in its pale irregularity, had a suggestion of vagueness, as if it had been softly sponged over. His manner too――there was something in it which seemed to blur, to rub out, the impression of everything he said. His mind was lit by a kind of twilight in which the outlines of things were lost, in which opposites ceased to be contradictory, and impossibilities found a friendly shelter. And this twilight was reflected in his eyes, in their vague credulity, in the mildness of his glance, which peeped out innocently from under ridiculously fierce and bushy eyebrows. I knew Uncle George had failed in his business some years ago, and it was difficult to believe that he could ever be successful. His interest was not primarily in such things, but in the church, where he was a more perpetual figure than the minister, and in the church meetings, which he never missed, and which he sometimes even got up. I rather liked him; there was something about him that made it easy to talk to him; and though he was desperately religious, and held the same severe doctrines as my father, his nature was so little aggressive that in practice he was the most kindly and human creature in the world.

“How are you?” he asked, shaking my hand. “We’re very glad to see you. How’s your father?” His left eye twitched slightly while he talked, giving him a comical appearance of winking very knowingly.

“Quite well, thank you,” I answered.

“Haven’t you been upstairs yet? Haven’t you seen your Aunt Margaret? Why didn’t you take him to see mother, George? Well, come along now, it’s time for tea. I think you might leave the shop, Miss Izzy, and come too――a special occasion, you know, a special occasion!” he laughed and patted me on the shoulder.

“Thanks, I’ve had my tea already,” Miss Izzy returned, without enthusiasm. “And you’re having yours upstairs to-night,” she added, somewhat tartly, seeing him move in the wrong direction.

“Oh! In the parlour; in honour of this young man; a special occasion, a special occasion!” He repeated his pleasantry, chuckling softly and rubbing his hands, while it was all I could do to keep from returning his friendly and unconscious wink.

“I’d rather stay here than run up and down stairs every time the bell rings,” Miss Izzy continued, the invitation to tea evidently rankling in her mind. From behind his father’s back George blew a kiss to her.

Aunt Margaret welcomed me without effusion. She was an enormous woman, dark, middle-aged, and with a peculiar smile that always made me feel uneasy. Her lips parted and her teeth became visible, but otherwise her face underwent no change, the expression in her hard, shining, black eyes did not alter. It was, somehow, not a smile at all, but a grimace, and disappeared with a startling suddenness, leaving no trace behind it. When her face was at rest, her lips drew in, as if by some mysterious suction. She wore a wig, and it was this I think that helped to make her look peculiar, and even slightly uncanny. I had been told that she suffered from some obscure, internal disease, which at times caused her great pain, but though she was white and fat and puffy, she presented no appearance of being an invalid. As she kissed me, a ceremony I would gladly have dispensed with, I became conscious of a vague, sickly odour, reminding me of the smell of a chemist’s shop.

Uncle George asked her if tea would soon be ready, but she gave him no answer; she only smiled in her strange fashion, and began to question me about my father and my journey――one would have thought I had been travelling all day. Two small boys held her by her voluminous skirts, my cousins, Gordon and Thomas. They were about six or seven, I suppose, and singularly unattractive, the kind of children who have perpetual colds and are never provided with an adequate supply of pocket-handkerchiefs.

I shook hands with Gordon and Thomas; I really couldn’t do anything more; but their mother noticed my omission, for they had raised damp, red-nosed, little faces to be kissed, and though she only smiled again, I was convinced that already she had taken a dislike to me. Possibly her dislike dated back to an earlier period than our present meeting, but, with a boy’s subtle instinct, I was certain of its existence. Just then the door opened and another child entered the room. This was Alice, a little girl of ten. She completed the family, though there had been several others, who had died in infancy. Alice I did not kiss either. Looking up, I saw my aunt’s hard black eyes fixed upon me. I gave her back stare for stare, without flinching, and she turned away, with that curious, grimacing smile I now hated.

Alice herself did not appear to resent my coldness; she hung on to my arm and laughed up at me as if we were the oldest friends in the world. She was a strange, elf-like child, with a pale face and big black eyes that were not hard like her mother’s. She looked as if she had been allowed all her life to sit up too late. She was small for her age, and extraordinarily fragile; she was like a little figure cut out of a Sime drawing.

Meanwhile Uncle George, who had been out in the rain, and had removed his boots, was sitting before the gas-stove, presenting the soles of two large, gray-socked feet to the red bars. A light steam began to rise from them, and Uncle George declared that his new boots must “let in,” and that he had a good mind to take them back to the man he had bought them from, and that it was too bad. I sat down near him and talked to him, while I watched the steam float up from his feet. Aunt Margaret was getting tea ready in another room, and little Alice hovered behind my chair. Every now and again she leaned over the back of it and said something. She brought a book to show me, and while I looked at it she put her arms round my neck and kissed my cheek.

“Run away, Alice, and quit bothering Peter,” said Uncle George. “It’s queer the way she’s taken to you,” he added in a gratified whisper. “She’s usually that shy you couldn’t coax her out of a corner!” Alice retreated, but almost immediately came back, and again put her arms round me. She held her small white face close to mine and looked at me with her great black eyes and smiled. She gave me an impression of a little house haunted by queer and not altogether pleasant ghosts, and yet somehow I felt sorry for her, and I stroked her thin hand that rested on my sleeve, delicate and light as a leaf.

“You’re a lovely big boy,” she whispered in my ear, rubbing her face up and down against my jacket, as if it had been the fur of an animal.

I couldn’t help laughing, and she cuddled close against me, her chin on my shoulder. “She must be awfully nervous,” I thought, for the thunderous approach of one of those hideous traction-engines, that I was soon to find were a feature of the town, made her tremble.

When we sat down to tea Alice insisted on sitting beside me. I had an idea, possibly suggested by Miss Izzy’s words, that the room we were in was not often used. I hoped it wasn’t, for it was stuffy and uncomfortable, and so small that you felt everywhere beneath the table the warm proximity of other people’s limbs. I hated being cramped in this way; it seemed to me that all the time I was breathing other people’s breaths, and once I got this notion into my head I couldn’t forget it. The furniture was cheap, flimsy, and uncomfortable. The curtains, the gaudy vases, the hideous wall-paper, were of the brightest and least accordant colours, and I even preferred our parlour at home, where, if the things were not less ugly, there were fewer of them. Several pictures hung on the walls, and one hung directly in front of me. It was an engraving, and represented a young man in armour visibly torn between a desire for virtue, embodied in a flaxen-haired lady in floating white drapery, and a deplorable weakness for all that another lady might be taken as symbolising. This latter person was a brunette, and rather more scantily, though quite decently, draped. She held a glass of champagne in her hand, waving it triumphantly aloft, like a torch. I confess that the work fascinated me, for it was my first acquaintance with the type of art it represented.

“A fine picture,” murmured Uncle George, seeing me gazing at it. “It’s a Royal Academy picture that!”

I said nothing. I did not know what a Royal Academy picture was, nor did I admire this example. It was not so much that the figures looked like unsuccessful waxworks, as that the banality of the moral irritated me. It was the first time I had ever seen art of this extremely ethical character, and in its spirit it reminded me of my old friends in the “Golden Ladder Series.”

I hoped tea would not last much longer. In the small room, the large yellow slices of an extremely odoriferous cheese made the atmosphere heavy and unpleasant. Moreover, when this cheese was offered to me with hard, pink, sugared biscuits, I didn’t quite know what to do. I had refused several things already, and I knew Aunt Margaret thought I was turning up my nose at the food provided for me, and provided specially, I could guess, from the behaviour of the others, because it was my first night. So I accepted the cheese and sugared biscuits, and struggled through them.

After tea George asked if we were going to have “worship” now or later? We had it “now,” and as soon as we rose from our knees he suggested that we should “go out for a bit.”

“Where are you going to?” Aunt Margaret inquired.

“Oh, I don’t know: up the street just. We can’t sit in the house all the evenin’. It’s quite fine now.”

I was nothing loath, and clattered down the stairs after him. As soon as we were outside George’s uncertainty as to our destination appeared to vanish. “Did you ever see a boxing match?” he asked.

“A boxing match?”

“A fight――a prize-fight――whatever you like to call it. Come on an’ we’ll go to the Comet, only for the Lord’s sake don’t say anythin’ about it at home!”

“Are you not allowed to go?”

“Allowed! Wait till you know them a bit better. The boss’s idea of an enjoyable evenin’ is some Sankey and Moody touch.”

We turned down a side street, and then another and another, till I completely lost my bearings; but very soon George said, “There it is, Coxy. You’re goin’ to see a bit of life, eh?” and pointed to a small theatre at the opposite side of the road. Above the entrance, a round purplish globe threw down a pool of light on the dirty pavement. A number of men and youths in caps, and with mufflers round their necks, hung about the door, talking and spitting, and at the corner some small boys looked on. George pushed boldly in and I followed. We took tickets for the front seats from an extremely friendly and pock-marked person, who wore a black patch over one eye. When we got inside we found there were not many spectators in our part of the house, but the pit, at the back, was already crowded.

“That’s the thunder and lightning over there,” said George, jocosely, “in other words, the nuts. How would you like to be in among them?” But the stragglers who kept dropping in and taking seats all round us did not seem to me to be very different.

A branch of lights hung from the ceiling, and other lights fell from the flies on to the curtainless stage. A kind of gray mist, doubtless the accumulated smoke of many nights, floated in the air, and a sickly-looking youth was hammering out music-hall tunes on a worn-out, toneless piano. The stage was quite bare, save for three double rows of yellow wooden chairs, that composed three sides of a parallelogram, and within which was a space marked off by a thick rope stretched about four stout posts clamped to the floor. Over this rope, at two diagonally opposite corners, hung towels, and in each corner was a chair, a heap of sawdust, a basin, a sponge, and a water-bottle. There was no person on the stage, and these bare accessories, possibly because I saw them now for the first time, had to my eyes a most suggestive appearance. I began to feel excited: this unadorned stage appeared to me to be distinctly thrilling.

By degrees the house filled up. The audience, though mixed, was on the whole a very rough one, and there were no women.

“Twig the peelers,” said George, and I noticed half a dozen policemen lounge in and take up positions in different parts of the auditorium.

At about five minutes to eight even the chairs on the stage were filled, and, at eight sharp, an important person with a cigar stepped into the ring, and made a short speech introducing the first pair of boxers. He retired amid loud applause, but the boxers, to my surprise, turned out to be a couple of half-grown, ill-nourished, ill-washed lads, no older than myself. They were naked except for short linen drawers, and it seemed to me that it would have been no harm had they been put into a bath prior to their appearance. They grinned sheepishly at the audience, amongst whom they evidently recognised “pals”; and these “pals,” in turn, greeted them with cries of “Go it, Bob,” “Go on, the wee lad,” “Go on, the stripes”――this last in allusion to Bob’s unambitious costume, which had all the appearance of being simply a pair of bathing-drawers. They shook hands in a nerveless way, without looking at each other, and began to spar feebly. Bob was so thin you could count his ribs, and the big gloves at the ends of his long skinny arms looked like gigantic puff-balls. The “wee lad” was sturdier, but he seemed to me to be slightly deformed. Even to my inexperienced eye it was perfectly obvious that the main concern of both was not to get hurt, and they hadn’t finished the first round before the audience was shouting, “Take them off them! Take them off them!” This was in allusion to the gloves, but they also shouted other things, most of which I daresay I had heard before, though never so many at one time, and I reflected that George had managed to steer fairly clear of the “Sankey and Moody touch.”

The referee cautioned the unfortunate combatants, but the second round was no better than the first, and in the middle of the third round the fight was stopped. The sleek, well-fed persons occupying the chairs, and the more impatient persons occupying the auditorium, had not paid their money for stuff of that sort. There followed a fresh pair of boxers, older, more experienced, and this time things were sufficiently brisk. The battle was a hard, ding-dong struggle, and it was at least exciting. At the sight of the first dark ugly streak of blood on one of those white faces I felt a little queer, in fact my impulse was to go away; but as round after round passed, and I watched the blood from the same wound burst out afresh in each, it began to quicken a sort of unsuspected lust of cruelty in me, and I took pleasure in it, I wanted the fight to be a real one, the thud of a blow that got home thrilled me. It was as if I had undergone some transformation. The dirty theatre, the low faces, the foul language, ceased to matter. I was carried out of myself. I longed at the same time for the fight to continue, and for its climax. There would be only three more rounds, and I wanted, before the last, to see somebody knocked out. The man whose face was bleeding was the heavier of the two, but I thought he had little chance. He was out-matched, he must have known it himself, and yet he continued to come up with a kind of dogged stupidity. His seconds spat water into his face, sponged him, rubbed him and fanned him, slapped him with towels and massaged his muscles; but the artificial invigoration this produced lasted only a few moments after the beginning of each round, and, as I watched him weakening, I could feel myself delivering the blows that dazed him, my muscles tightened and slackened, I could hardly sit in my seat. “Now he’s got him,” I said aloud, as he staggered into the ring for the last time. There was a blow and a crash on the boards. The referee was counting over him, one――two――three――four――five――six――seven――eight; and then this helpless creature, out of whose swollen, hideous face all humanity had been battered, staggered up almost blindly. He did not even lift his hands to protect himself from the blow that smashed him down again, and with that dull thud on the floor the fight came to an end. He lay on after the counting had stopped, and as I watched him being supported, almost carried, out of the ring, while the victor received congratulations, a pang of misgiving assailed me. There was no doubt the whole thing was absolutely brutal, and there was equally no doubt that when it had been most brutal I had been most pleased.

I should like to be able to add that I got up and left the theatre. I did not. I reflected that _the_ fight was still to come: I even waited for it eagerly, and when it took place, I was disappointed because nobody bled, and because the decision was given on points at the end of the twelfth round.

As we walked home I proved to George that boxing matches were really all right; that they were infinitely less dangerous than football matches. Every one of my arguments convinced George, and after I had finished he found some for himself, which I accepted as equally incontrovertible. Considering that there was nobody to take up an opposite point of view, our apologies might have appeared hardly necessary, but George was able to give me, in addition, a list of all the good qualities fighting brought out, or even brought into existence. Most of these did not exactly fit in with my more superficial impression of the audience, and there were others I could not help feeling many of them would be better without――courage, for instance. I had a dim idea that a little extra courage might result in a majority of them figuring at the next Assizes.

But when we were three-quarters way home I said to George, “It was all pretty beastly, and that’s why we liked it――eh?”

He got quite offended, telling me that if _he_ had thought it beastly he wouldn’t have waited on to the end, as I did.

This was just possible, yet my opinion of George sank. “If you admire it so much,” I said, “I’ll give you a turn any time you like.”

George was silent, and flushed slightly.

“Well?” I kept on, pugnaciously.

George mumbled something, I don’t know what, and I saw that I had actually frightened him. We walked the rest of the way home in silence. George was angry with me, but when we were in the house and had sat down to supper he became friendly again. As I discovered later, company was the one thing absolutely indispensable to him; he could have kept on being angry with me, and, indeed, would have enjoyed doing so, had he had anybody else to talk to, but solitude he could not bear. And I, on my side, forgot his having sulked on the way home, just as, later on, I was to forget more than one unpleasant thing, simply because he amused me, because he could always make me laugh.

After supper I said good-night to the others, and George and I went upstairs. George went in front of me and lit the gas in the bedroom. “Is this my room?” I asked, noticing that there were two beds in it.

“Yours an’ mine,” George answered.

His reply was unexpected. I had never slept with anybody in my life, and it had not occurred to me that I should not have a room to myself. I said nothing, but George, who was far from stupid, saw I did not like the arrangement. “There is no other room,” he admitted frankly. “I thought you knew. I thought ma put it in her letter.”

“I didn’t see her letter,” I murmured.

“Oh, we’ll be all right together, won’t we?” George went on, pacifically. “You can have your bed moved wherever you would like it best.” He had already begun to undress, and, after hanging up his jacket, he took a photograph from an inside pocket and handed it to me. It was the photograph of a lady extremely lightly clad. “I’ve better ones than that,” said George, with a peculiar smile. He went to a corner near the window and raised a loose board. From the hollow beneath he drew out a large fat envelope, but, as he looked at me, he hesitated. “I’ll show them to you some other time,” he suddenly said, and returned the envelope to its hiding-place. He undressed rapidly, and got into bed.

I took longer, and all the time I felt George’s eyes fixed on me curiously. I hated this lack of privacy. It wasn’t that I hadn’t undressed hundreds of times before other boys, when we were going to bathe; but this was different. I disliked the feeling of not being alone. I hated to have somebody watch me all the time I was taking off my clothes, or folding them. I determined to write to my father in the morning.

When I was in bed and in the dark I wanted to think of Katherine. I did this every night; I looked forward to it, because it seemed to me that this was the hour when everything became clearer; besides, there was always the chance that if I thought of her I might dream of her. But now George began to talk.

“Do you know any girls?” he asked.

“No,” I answered, shortly.

“Don’t you like them?” George persisted.

“No.”

“What do you think of Miss Izzy? Not bad――eh?”

“I don’t know anything about her.”

George was silent a few minutes. Then, just as I was beginning to think my own thoughts, he began again.

“She’s nothin’ compared to Miss Johnson――the girl we were talkin’ about to-day――who’s gettin’ married. Miss Johnson was in the shop before Miss Izzy came. Ma sacked her for givin’ lip. Ma sacks them all.”

George continued to talk until he grew sleepy, and I had no choice but to listen.