A Knight on Wheels Part 6

_"Dear Little Girl,--I am only a little boy about your age, and my Daddy does not know I am writing to you._

"Put in spelling mistakes as usual."

_"My Daddy is a curate. We are very poor, and he has been ill for months. I often hear my mother crying in the night, when she thinks we are all in bed asleep. I have no sister of my own--only a little baby brother. How I wish you were my sister.

Then you might help me to earn some money for my father. Shall we pretend to be brother and sister, and then--_

"Hallo, Philip, old man. Getting tired?"

Philip had stopped writing. He was gazing dully, fixedly, and rebelliously at the paper before him. His pencil dropped from his fingers.

For nearly three years he had been a faithful secretary and a willing amanuensis. He had performed his duties mechanically, without even considering the morality of his conduct or the feelings of his correspondents. Now, suddenly, he hated Uncle Joseph and all his works.

"Why?" he wondered.

CHAPTER IV

HEREDITY

I

ON Tuesday morning Uncle Joseph went away to the City as usual, and Philip was left to his own devices. Monday had been a heavy day, for all the new appeals had been copied out and sent off. All, that is, except three. Master T. Smith's elaborately ill-spelt epistles required time for their composition, and each, of course, had to be copied out by hand, for it was not to be supposed that the Smiths possessed a typewriter. So when after breakfast Uncle Joseph discovered on the bureau three stamped and addressed envelopes still awaiting enclosures, he directed Philip to indite three further copies of Master T. Smith's celebrated appeal for a little sister, and post them with the others.

When Uncle Joseph had gone, Philip set about his task, but with no great zest. As a rule he took a professional pride in his duties, and moreover extracted a certain relish from his uncle's literary audacities. The reader will possibly have noted that at this period of his career Philip's sense of humour was much more highly developed than his sense of right and wrong. But during the past few days something very big had been stirring within him. Some people would have called it the voice of conscience--that bugbear of our otherwise happy childhood. Others would have said with more truth that it was Heredity struggling with Environment. As a matter of fact it was the instinct of Chivalry, which, despite the frantic a.s.surances of a certain section of our sisters that they stand in no need of it, still lingers shyly in the hearts of men--a survival from the days when a woman admitted frankly that her weakness was her strength, and it was a knight's glory and privilege to devote such strength as he possessed to the protection of that weakness.

Philip no longer found himself in sympathy with Uncle Joseph's enterprises. It was not the enterprises themselves to which he objected, for he realized that no one was a penny the worse for them, while many were considerably the better. But all the newly awakened heart of this small knight of ours rebelled against the idea of imposing upon a woman.

Philip felt that Uncle Joseph must be wrong about women. They could not be what he thought them--at least, not all of them. And even if Uncle Joseph were right in his opinion, Philip felt positive of one thing, and that was that no woman, however undeserving, should ever be hardly treated or made to suffer for her own shortcomings. And to this view he held tenaciously for the whole of his life.

At the present moment it caused him acute unhappiness to be compelled to sit down and pen sloppy effusions to little girls with whom he was not acquainted, asking them to be so good as to consent to become his sisters, or as an alternative send a postal order by return. But he was loyal to the hand that fed him and to the man who had been his father and his mother for the greater part of his little life. He wrote on, steadily and conscientiously, until the three letters were copied out and ready for the post.

But it is impossible to do two things at once. You cannot, for instance, write begging letters and think of blue cotton frocks simultaneously. In copying out the last letter, Philip, owing to the fact that his wits were wandering on Hampstead Heath instead of directing his pen, was guilty of a clerical error.

The residence of Master Thomas Smith, it may be remembered, was situated at 172 Laburnum Road, Balham, though overzealous philanthropists, bent upon a personal investigation into the sad circ.u.mstances of the Smith family, might have experienced some difficulty in piercing its disguise as a small tobacconist's shop. Now Philip, instead of writing out this address at the head of the sheet of dingy Silurian notepaper upon which T. Smith was accustomed to conduct his correspondence, absent-mindedly wrote "Holly Lodge, Hampstead, N.W."--a _lapsus calami_ which was destined to alter the whole course of his life, together with that of Uncle Joseph, besides bringing about the dissolution of an admirably conducted little business in the begging-letter line.

After this he folded the letter and fastened it up in the last envelope (which, by the way, was addressed to

_The Little Girl Who lives with Lady Broadhurst Plumbley Royal Hants)_,

--and sat down to luncheon. It was a cold and clammy meal, for it was washing-day, and the only hot thing in the house was James Nimmo, who, in the depths below, entangled in a maze of moist and clinging draperies, was groping blasphemously in the copper for the bluebag.

Washing-day was James Nimmo's day of humiliation. Uncle Joseph had offered more than once to have the work sent out to a laundry, but James Nimmo persisted in doing it himself, though the lamentable behaviour of the maids next door, what time he hung the crumpled result of his labours out upon the drying-green, galled him to the roots of his being.

After luncheon Philip, calling downstairs through a cloud of steam that he was going out to the post, took up the letters and his cap and ran out of the house, down the short gravel-sweep, and up the road.

Twenty minutes later he might have been observed diligently scouring Hampstead Heath in search of a blue cotton frock and a _cerise_ leather belt.

II

"Hallo, Phil!" remarked Miss Falconer, hastily crumpling up her handkerchief into a moist ball and stuffing it into her pocket. Her back had been turned, and she had not noticed his approach.

Philip climbed up on the gate beside her.

"Tell me what you have been doing since I saw you last," commanded Peggy briskly.

"I have been helping Uncle Joseph," said Philip, rather reluctantly. He was not anxious to be drawn into details upon this topic.

"Uncle Joseph?" The little girl nodded her head with an air of great wisdom. "I have been talking to Mother about him."

"What did you tell her?"

"I told her what you told me, about his not liking women; and I asked her why she thought it was."

"What did she say?" enquired Philip, much interested. Of late he had been giving this point a good deal of consideration himself.

"She said," replied Peggy, evidently quoting _verbatim_ and with great care, "that there was probably only one woman in the world who could give an answer to that question--and she never would!"

"What does that mean?" enquired the obtuse Philip.

"It means," explained Peggy, adopting the superior att.i.tude inevitable in the female, however youthful, who sets out to unfold the mysteries of the heart to a member of the unintelligent s.e.x, "that Uncle Joseph was once fond of a lady, and she threw him over."

"But I don't think that can be true," said Philip deferentially. "Uncle Joseph isn't fond of any ladies at all. You have only to hear him talk about them to know that. He thinks they are an incu--incu--something.

Anyhow, it means a heavy burden. They are Parry-sites, too. He says the only way to do one's work in life is to keep away from women. How could he be fond of one?"

"I expect he didn't always think all those things about them," replied Peggy shrewdly. "Men change with disappointment," she added, with an air of profound wisdom.

"How do you know that?" enquired Philip respectfully. Such matters were too high for him.

"I have often heard Mother say so," explained Peggy, "after Father has been in one of his tempers."

Philip pondered. Here was a fresh puzzle.

"How can your father have been disappointed?" he asked. "He is married."

"It wasn't about being married that he was disappointed," said Peggy.

"You can be disappointed about other things, you know," she explained indulgently.

"Oh," said Philip.

"Yes. Haven't you ever been disappointed yourself? Wanting to go to a party, and not being allowed to at the last minute, and all that?"

"Oh, yes," agreed Philip. "Not parties, but other things. But I didn't know grown-up people could be disappointed about anything. I thought they could do anything they liked."

Hitherto Philip, simple soul, had regarded disappointment and hope deferred as part of the necessary hardships of youth, bound to melt away in due course, in company with toothache, measles, tears, treats, early bedtimes, and compulsory education, beneath the splendid summer sun of incipient manhood. Most of us cherish the same illusion; and the day upon which we first realise that quarrels and reconciliations, wild romps and reactionary dumps, big generous impulses and little acts of petty selfishness, secret ambitions and pa.s.sionate longings, are not mere characteristics of childhood, to be abandoned at some still distant milestone, but will go on with us right through life, is the day upon which we become grown up.

To some of us that day comes early, and whenever it comes it throws us out of our stride--sometimes quite seriously. But in time, if we are of the right metal, we accept the facts of the situation, shake ourselves together, and hobble on cheerfully enough. In time this cheerfulness is increased by the acquisition of two priceless pieces of knowledge; one, that things are just as difficult for our neighbour as ourself; the other, that by far the greatest troubles in life are those which never arrive, but expect to be met halfway.