When the spring came, it was Aunt Mary-Ben who saw to the placing of a little white marble marker—it was only a foot wide, and lifted itself above the earth no more than three inches—on which raised letters said FRANCIS.
Mary-Jim’s pregnancy went splendidly after that, and on September 12 the subject of Simon Darcourt’s biography was born, and christened, in the Anglican Church, Francis Chegwidden Cornish.
So your man makes his appearance on the scene at last, said the Lesser Zadkiel. You were at the birth, of course?
–Where else would I be, said the Daimon Maimas. I’d been on the job, so to speak, since the boy was conceived on December the tenth, 1908, at 11:37 p.m.
–What precisely was it you needed to do? said the Biographical Angel.
–Obey orders, of course. When Francis was conceived—at the very moment of the Major’s fortunate orgasm, They summoned me and said This is yours; do well by him but don’t show off.
–Had you been showing off?
–I never think that a few flourishes do any harm to a life and perhaps I have overdone it, once or twice. But They take a very different view. When They gave me Francis They said, don’t show off, and I tried my best not to show off. That family needed an influence like me.
–You found them dull?
–My dear Zadkiel, we haven’t even touched on Blairlogie. There was dullness for you! But it’s been my experience, over several aeons, that a good dull beginning does no harm to an interesting life. Your man runs so hard to get away from the dullness he was born to that you can do very interesting things with him. Put them into his head to do himself, that’s to say. Without me, Francis would just have been a good, solid citizen like the rest of them. Of course, I knew all there was to know about the burial of the first Francis. There was a rum thing, as the Major said at the time.
–You haven’t any pity, Maimas.
–Neither have you, Zadkiel, and don’t pretend you have. Long, long ago—if we must talk as though time had any meaning for us—I learned that when a tutelary spirit like myself is given a life to watch over, pity merely makes a mess of things. Far better to put your man over the hurdles and scrape him through the hedges, and toughen him up. It is not my work to protect softies.
–Well, shall we get on with the story, now that we have reached Francis? It was necessary to tell about his immediate forebears in some detail, because they were what was bred in his bone, which poor Darcourt wants to find out.
–Yes, but now I am on the job—I, Maimas the Daimon, the Tutelary Spirit, the Indwelling Essence. Though he was a McRory, and a Cornish, and all that goes with such a mixture, I also was what was bred in his bone, right from the instant of his conception. And that made all the difference.
Part Two
It was in a garden that Francis Cornish first became truly aware of himself as a creature observing a world apart from himself. He was almost three years old, and he was looking deep into a splendid red peony. He was greatly alive to himself (though he had not yet learned to think of himself as Francis) and the peony, in its fashion, was also greatly alive to itself, and the two looked at each other from their very different egotisms with solemn self-confidence. The little boy nodded at the peony and the peony seemed to nod back. The little boy was neat, clean, and pretty. The peony was unchaste, dishevelled as peonies must be, and at the height of its beauty. It was a significant moment, for it was Francis’s first conscious encounter with beauty—beauty that was to be the delight, the torment, and the bitterness of his life—but except for Francis himself, and perhaps the peony, nobody knew of it, or would have heeded if they had known. Every hour is filled with such moments, big with significance for someone.
It was his mother’s garden, but it would be foolish to pretend that it was Mary-Jim’s creation. She cared little for gardens, and had one only because it was the sort of thing a young matron in her position was expected to possess. Her husband would have protested if she had not had a garden, for he had determined ideas about what women liked. Women liked flowers; on certain occasions one gave them flowers; on certain occasions one told them they were like flowers—though it would not have done to tell a woman she looked like a peony, a beautiful but whorish flower. The garden was the work of Mr. Maidment, and it reflected the dull, geometrical character of Mr. Maidment’s mind.
It was uncommon for Francis to be in the garden unattended. Mr. Maidment did not like boys, whom he knew to be plant-tramplers and bloom-snatchers, but at this magical moment Bella-Mae had left him to himself because she had to go indoors for a moment. Francis knew she had gone to pee, which she did frequently, having inherited the weak bladder of her family, the Elphinstones. Bella-Mae did not know that Francis knew, because one of her jobs was to protect Francis from bruising contacts with reality, and in her confused and grubby mind, little boys ought not to know that adults had such creatural needs. But Francis did know, even though he was not fully aware who Francis was, and he felt a minute guilt at his knowledge. He was not yet such a close reasoner as to suspect that if Bella-Mae were thus burdened with the common needs of life, his parents might also share them. The life of his parents was god-like and remote. Their clothes did not come off, obviously, though they changed several times a day; but he had seen Bella-Mae take off her clothes, or at least shrug and struggle them off under her nightdress, because she slept in the nursery with him. She also brushed her coarse rusty hair a hundred times every night, for he had heard her counting, and was usually fast asleep before she had reached the century stroke.
Bella-Mae was called Nanny, because that was what the Major insisted she be called. But Bella-Mae, who was Blairlogie to the core of her being, thought it a silly thing to call her by a name that was not hers. She thought Major and Mrs. Cornish stuck-up and she took no pride in being a child’s nurse. It was a Job, and she did it as well as she could, but she had her own ideas, and sometimes smacked Francis when he had not been very bad, as a personal protest against the whole Cornish manner of life, so out of tune with Blairlogie ideas.
Within the time between his meeting and recognition of the peony and his fourth year, Francis came to know that Bella-Mae was Awful. She was plain, if not downright ugly, and grown women ought to be beautiful, like his mother, and smell of expensive scent, not starch. Bella-Mae frequently made him clean his teeth with brown soap, as she did herself, and declared it to be wholesome; she took no stock in the tooth-powder with which the nursery was supplied. This was Awful. More Awful still was her lack of respect for the holy ikons which hung on the nursery wall. These were two vividly coloured pictures of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and once a month she scrubbed their glass with Bon Ami, saying under her breath: “Come on, you two, and get your faces washed.” If the Major had known that, he would have given Bella-Mae what-for. But of course he did not know, because Francis was not a squealer, a kind of person Bella-Mae held in abhorrence. But if he was not a squealer, Francis was a noticer, and he kept a mental dossier on Bella-Mae which would certainly have led to her dismissal if his parents had known what it contained.