A Little Treachery

33

A disturbing circumstance had long been clamouring for her attention. It was the behaviour of Simon. To begin with, when they had attempted to seat him apart from Emmy, there had been a terrible outcry. Settled according to his wishes, he was still agitated; he was rude and out-of-hand. Certainly the conduct of the young men set him no good example. Besides, they teased him, carelessly, with injudicious roughness, working him up, exciting him more and more. He began to boast – he could not boast fast enough, and his inventions were of the wildest.

This amused his audience, and in the intervals of their own discussion they idly egged him on.

‘So you’re a gunman, are you, sonny?’

‘Yes,’ cried Simon, stammering in his haste and with his lisp rampant, ‘I’m a gunman – I’m a very good gunman! – a dreadful gunman!’

‘Your pop must be proud of you.’

And Simon’s uncontrolled treble rose again. ‘Yes, I am, I hit our baby – I hit him on the head with the bottle. Yes, I took the old baby and put him under the summer-house where we stayed, and I stuffed him in and I tied the shawl over his mouth. When they aren’t looking, I hit him!’

‘Why, I say, you aren’t a gunman, you’re a cosh-boy.’ The young men quizzed the little fellow waggishly, while Emmy, catching Catherine’s eye, raised her brows and jerked her head in the child’s direction, as much as to say, ‘There, what did I tell you? And what can you expect?’

‘Yes,’ shrilled Simon, beside himself. ‘Yes. I’m a cosh-boy, too!’

Catherine looked on with a slight, fixed, uneasy smile by which she unconsciously sought to hide her feelings from the others. But she was no longer listening. She had suddenly remembered Olive Hungerford’s face looking down at the little boy with fear and repugnance. She had had several kind and conscientious letters from the young woman since Simon had come to her, with enclosures for the child, and all his belongings had shown evidences of a delicate care. It was impossible to see Olive Hungerford as the unscrupulous stepmother. Had the child done something really hurtful, then? Perhaps he had pinched or smacked the baby, or merely showed ill-will towards it – a little boy of deeply jealous and markedly sensuous nature, who had been an only child, indulged and adored, then pushed aside – a child with temper spoiled by jealousy, a little savage at heart, like all children. It would be enough to make a fond young mother, feeling that her darling was menaced, afraid of the little desperado, wild to get rid of him. The shade of pathos she had discovered in the young woman now seemed explained. She had felt herself, no doubt, in a dreadful dilemma. Perhaps she had never dared to tell the doting father quite all that had happened? So Catherine pondered over this, preoccupied.

But she was sharply recalled. The business had gone from bad to worse. At last Simon’s true condition had caught their eye, they perceived that he had ‘a mash on Emmy’, and this, making a genuine appeal to their humour, had caused them to drop their own subject and turn their full attention on the child. Now what was the frantic anxiety of Simon to do himself justice! He strained every nerve to make a display. There was no longer any mistaking the fact – the little boy was trying with all his might to stand up to the men, to hold his own with them, to crow against them, against Greg who had called Emmy his girl, or Roy who paddled with Emmy’s hand now and again or tickled her; and this circumstance pepped up the whole thing for the young men, turning an insipid game with a child into a real bit of sport, which included Emmy.

Simon had no chance from that moment. His speech grew throaty and hampered as he strove to speak like a man. He could not find words and then he struck out at Roy or Greg with his fists. His very features seemed to change. The curious primitive cast of his little head became more pronounced as he thrust out his thick lips, which looked almost to be swollen, making the lower half of his face project more than usual; while the hot flush on his sunburned skin had the effect of darkening it. He was transformed, he was ugly; and this was so marked that suddenly Catherine was aware of Greg speaking aside to her, and urging her, ‘Why, look at that kid – what a funny thing! Touch of the tar-brush, plain as Jane, isn’t it?’

But she thought it was more, horribly more, like watching one possessed and speaking by the evil spirit within him.

Still she made no move. Every instinct cried out to one to hide, in pity, the helpless exposure. But a kind of doubt as to the nature of what was happening, a kind of timid and inexperienced disbelief, perhaps held her back; and perhaps there was not wanting some remote strain of dark and cruel curiosity. But she had not forgotten the feeling and anxious face of Hungerford as he had requested her, ‘You won’t let him go too near the stream? It’s deep.’

Yes, deep. Not deep enough. How simple to trust someone you have injured so! And the moral languor overcame her, the paralysis of deep damage.

It was Emmy who brought the scene to a close. She suddenly lost patience with a tiresome child and administered a rough scolding. ‘You wicked little devil! I won’t have anything more to do with you. No, get off, I don’t love you in the least. No, not one bit. Give me my two boys in London. Well, now I shall send for them. You never touched the poor baby – I don’t believe you. No, that’s enough – hands off!’

Hearing these fearful words from Emmy, Simon stopped dead; and for a moment they had a view of a poor little blank and frightened face in their midst. Then came the natural climax to all this orgy of emotion – a paroxysm of weeping. Sobs burst from his chest, he wrung his hands, but he did not cry aloud, there was no uproar, he did not blubber or howl; only said brokenly between heaving sobs that it was a bad baby – he had only wanted to make it go away! ‘I wanted to make him go away!’ And with weeping face blindly lifted to Emmy, he begged, softly supplicating, ‘Emmy, make everyone go away! Make them go away, Emmy!’ He had no other means of expressing his untimely desire for Emmy, born of his great need to have someone of his own, someone constant, so that a mother’s face might turn on him again, but this monotonous cry demanding that everyone else should go away from her. Perhaps he did not see anything in the world between Emmy and a great, hopeless abandonment. Utterly oblivious of his status as a dreadful gunman, he sat there with the fantastic grimace of the infant weeper which, big boy though he was, he did not even try to hide. Would no one have pity?

Catherine, in the midst of this terrible scene, got to her feet, imagining people approaching to turn them out, and was thankful to find herself backed by Emmy. Simon now howled, and so their exit was made in a glare of publicity, the young men adding very unnecessarily to the commotion with their loud, jocular voices. Emmy was crosser than anyone had ever seen her.

She was cross with her brother, too, whom she loudly declared to have shown ‘bad manners’ in giving them the slip. In short, a touch of anxiety was now perceptible in Emmy – but it was not for Simon, whom she pushed roughly before her and who provided excuse enough to hasten home.

‘There, it’s always the way with Greg,’ she said as they went on, having taken leave of the young men. ‘He means well, but lay off the drink, no, he can’t. I wouldn’t go with a man who soaks, and so I’ve let him know. As for that Roy, he’s a rat. They aren’t either of them any use to me, those two. . . . I’m real sorry Ferdy wasn’t with us. Ferdy’s a good-looker – only that he’s lost an eye, as I told you. He’s tall, aristocratic. Gentlemanly, Ferdy is – looks it, anyway – for that’s a word I don’t see why you shouldn’t use. You wouldn’t have had to be ashamed of Ferdy. . . . And did you spot Mrs S. sitting and looking at us like a hanging judge? Well, she was. I gave her a slight wave, but she passed me up, for some reason.

‘What I say is, it’s all the fault of this –’ and she gave Simon a vicious push. Then she related a displeasing tale of infant precocity which had come her way. Simon clung to her hand.

‘Are you going to take that job?’ Catherine asked calmly.