It was just after tea, when Laurie had persuaded his mother to have one of her rare cigarettes, that, without knocking, Mr. Straike walked in.
Laurie hadn’t believed it could happen. He knew they mustn’t meet on the wedding morning, and his wishes, rather than his reason, had covered this evening with the same immunity. He sat fixed with his cigarette in his hand, without the wit to rise, for some instants; at once he sensed that this was just what Mr. Straike would have expected of his normal manners. He got up; but now his mother (having first put out her cigarette with a shy guilty look) had got up first, and Mr. Straike was kissing her warmly.
For a moment Laurie felt he was being subjected to an obscene outrage which would be recognized as such anywhere in the civilized world. He waited for his mother to protest and remind Mr. Straike that he was there. Then he saw Aunt Olive looking sentimental, and understood that it would go on happening, probably, for years, and that when it stopped he ought to be sorry.
His mother sat down with a pretty, flattered look; Mr. Straike, pressed, accepted tea. He then devoted himself for several minutes to Laurie, making himself emphatically pleasant. Laurie looked at the raw, red hand, close to his mother’s on the table; it was like a rough thumb rubbing a wound. He felt that none of this was really addressed to him. He imagined Mr. Straike saying, “Observe how I am being nice to your ill-mannered, sulky, and (I suspect) neurotic son. It is for your sake I am doing this so much against the grain. I trust it is appreciated.”
“No doubt you’re enjoying the, hrrm, relative lenities of civil hospital routine?”
“Well, they seem rather strong on discipline so far. After all they’re the regulars, in a way.”
“Ah, yes, I do seem to remember at the other place there were certain signs of improvisation.” (The teacups, Laurie thought.) “In fact, I well recall saying to your mother in the train that if conchies must be employed to wait upon war casualties, possibly in the hope of arousing some vestigial sense of shame, they might at least be kept where they need not affront the eye, in suitable activities such as scrubbing latrines, and so on.”
A bright spinning anger seemed to press outward against Laurie’s temples and eyes. He felt light, as in the first stage of drink. He said coolly, “How did you guess? When I met my best friend he was doing that very thing.”
Mr. Straike said, “Urhm,” and decided not to see the point. “Then no doubt his reaction to their arrival was ‘For this relief, much thanks.’ ” It was a tactical error; it gave the enemy time.
“Oh, well,” said Laurie pleasantly, “we all reacted to their arrival, of course. But actually, we found persecuting Christians awfully overrated. Perhaps we needed lions or something. Perhaps we ought to have tried burning them alive. Perhaps we just needed to be civilians and not soldiers. I wouldn’t know.”
Mr. Straike wore his dog-collars large; but the creased red skin of his neck had become tinged with purple, and Laurie saw a large Adam’s apple surface twice.
“Laurie, my dear.”
He turned at the sound of her voice, suddenly shaken as if after physical violence. Anger might have toughened and braced him; but he saw something worse, a cloudy misgiving. He knew that by her own standards she was fully committed, and would be quite unequal in any case to the ordeal of escape; that if he urged it on her she would deny with conviction that any such thought had touched her mind. They sat looking at each other across the used tea things, gagged and helpless. Laurie got to his feet.
“I’m sorry,” he said with difficulty. “We got to know these chaps and like them. I oughtn’t to have been rude about it. Will you excuse me, Mother? I’ll just go out and look for Gyp.” As he got to the door he thought his mother called after him; but he pretended not to hear.
It was twilight. He walked up behind the house to the warren, needing his stick but thinking that if you were with a dog, a stick didn’t show. He gave his special whistle and called, “Come on, boy, come on.”
It was lonely and quiet on the warren, in the lee of the firs. The colonnades opened into deep tunnels of dusk, till over a rise he saw a lake of gold sky and a lace of birches.
Childe Maurice hunted the silver wood,
He whistled and he sang,
“I think I see the woman coming
That I have lovèd lang.”
He had known Childe Maurice by heart for years. The tale of this young outlaw, the hidden love-child whom his stepfather murdered, taking him for the lover instead of the son, had always gripped Laurie’s imagination. He had never wondered why.
He could not find Gyp, and the unfamiliar jerk of walking downhill made his leg ache. When he got back the blackout was up, and his mother waiting for him in the porch. As soon as they had looked at each other, he knew what it was she had to say.
“Mother. Where’s Gyp?”
“Laurie darling. Oh, dear, I am sorry. It was dreadful of me not to have told you before.”
He stared at her, stonily. Part of him refused it entirely; the rest said bitterly that she should have no help with this.
“Where is he? It’s late. It’s his dinnertime. Do you know where he is?”
“Darling.” She had only looked at him for a moment. “Poor old dog. You know, he was …”
Laurie walked past her, through the hall to the corner under the turn of the stairs. The basket was gone. There was only a large crate labelled GLASS WITH CARE.
He turned around. “What did he die of? You didn’t tell me he was sick.”
His mother tucked in her lower lip, and he saw that she was beginning to have a sense of injury. “Dear, one doesn’t write worrying letters to people in hospital.”
“But Gyp was mine. He was my dog.” Like a child he said helplessly, “He was a birthday present, he belonged to me.”
“Dear, of course I know, but you’ve not been home for a long time” (Gyp must have noticed that too, Laurie thought), “and we had to do what we thought best.”
“We?”
“Laurie,” said his mother with grieved gentle dignity, “you’re not trying to make me unhappy, are you?”
“He wasn’t sick at all, was he? You had him put down.” She didn’t answer. “He was all right when I was here. You had him put down because that—” Carefully he said, “because that man didn’t want to be bothered with him.”
Now he knew that in his absence she had been reviewing the scene at the tea-table and protecting herself against its meaning. “Laurie, dear, I know you’re upset, but that is a very unfair, unkind thing to say.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t like to be unkind.” He must have known, Laurie thought. Dogs always do. He must have wondered what it was he’d done.
“Laurie!” He must have been staring through her.
He said, “You would never have done this before. Did you decide he’d be better off that way?”
He saw her eyes, frightened behind their anger as she recognized what she had hidden from herself. “Mother—”
“Aha! So there you both are!” Aunt Olive came tripping out of the kitchen, a fall of fine pearl-gray trailing from her arm.
“Oh, Olive, dear, how good of you. Did it need pressing again?” He saw that this intolerable interruption had come to her as a rescue.
“Mother, please could we—”
“Later, dear, not just now. Look at poor Olive doing everything by herself. Be a dear boy and just see if there’s room in there for the air-twist glasses.”
He got out the case from the recess under the stairs, remembering how he had trained Gyp to sleep there when he was three months old. The first night he had cried a good deal, but Laurie had known it wouldn’t do to give in to him and fetch him upstairs. He had gone down himself, wrapped in his eiderdown, and Mrs. Timmings had found them both asleep there in the morning; but of course, he had only been at his prep school then.