Young Phillip Maddison (39 page)

Phillip saw Mr. Mundy leaving his bike outside the Rolls’ house. He waited in his gateway, concealed by the privet hedge. He heard Mr. Mundy come out, Mrs. Rolls talking in her usual happy way, laughing as much as Mr. Mundy. Next Mr. Mundy entered the Pye gate, and ran up the hearth-stoned steps. From there he came to Phillip’s house—that boy meanwhile having disappeared over the brick wall of the porch, to hide in Mr. Bigge’s passage below. What was Mr. Mundy after?

When the jovial figure had gone, Phillip climbed back, and sought information from his mother. Mr. Mundy had come to ask her to help in the forthcoming Garden Party in the vicarage, It was to raise money for the Memorial Fund of the late King, in the fourth week of August.

“I told Mr. Mundy, dear, that unfortunately we were going to our country cousins in the latter half of August, but we would be back in time to take tickets.”

“For me, too?” asked Phillip. When his mother said yes, if he liked, at once apprehensive excitement overcame him. The Rolls would be there!

Phillip knew vaguely that some people did not approve of Mr. Mundy, because he had married his secretary after his old wife’s death. The new Mrs. Mundy did not come calling, like the old one, Mother had said. Mrs. Rolls, he understood, was among those who did not entirely approve of Mr. Mundy’s marriage.

*

Desmond had gone away to Felixstowe for his holiday, so Phillip was alone again. Tommy was not much good for a friend. What could he do with himself, now that nesting for the year was over? The Backfield was rather dull, after the real country places. However, there were his spiders to visit. He had a number of them in the garden, his favourite being a strange black one, something like an ordinary garden spider, but much more secret and shy.

Sometimes in the day time the big brown white-spotted garden spiders sat or hung in the centre of their webs; but the black spider never left its hiding place by day. It crouched there unmoving, its rather dented-looking body close against its corner in the creosoted boards of the back fence. Only once at night had he seen it in the centre of its web; and when he gave it a fly he had been keeping in a wooden Beecham’s Pill box, the spider dropped down at once on a line and vanished. It never seemed to feed; its web was never broken; and the gnats that got tangled there were never picked off, as the brown spiders sometimes did with their minute flies, stopping a few moments only to masticate them in their bull-horn jaws, turning them into liquid almost immediately, wings and all.

Phillip went into the kitchen, to catch flies. He was expert in this. One sweep of his right hand, and the fly, however swift, was held. It was a moment’s work to remove it with his left
finger and thumb. He could sweep up half a dozen flies, one after another, and get them all safely into the pill box. One by one they were jerked into the geometrical patterns, to hang in the threads dotted with gum, while he watched, fascinated.

Down ran the brown spider on its thick rope to the centre. There it waited a moment, while the spoke of the radial web nearest to the buzzing or struggling fly carried the vibrations to its legs. Down fell the spider, making a half outward turn as it hung with its forelegs, and with its hindlegs it pulled from its spinnerets thick skeins of white-blue silk; and turning the fly over and over, it bound it up like a mummy. Then came the intense moment. Peering with wide eyes, Phillip saw its bull-horn jaws open, its battery of eyes glinting tinily as the horns were thrust in, and a small gum-like drop would come out of the enwound fly. If it were a house-fly’s head that was pierced, it would show bright red blood. Ooh! Phillip was not sure whether he really liked spiders, or not.

Then up went the spider. If it was hungry it would carry the bundle on its two hind legs, which were clawed. Up the rope it went, rapidly, then turning round in its silken arbour, it would adjust itself, get a firm hang with its back legs, then draw up the package, and open its pursey mouth to start rasping and sucking. Soon the fly would be shrunken and moist-black, as the spider turned it over and then over again, to try other tasty places, just as Uncle Charley did with his cigar as he smoked it—far too fast, said Gran’pa.

“Dammit it all, guv’nor,” Uncle Charley had said, “Can’t I smoke how I want to? By God, sir, I’m not a child any more to be brow-beaten.” Then Grannie had said something about using God’s name in vain before the children, and Uncle Charley had walked out of the room, laughing. After that they had moved to Joy Farm.

There was one spider which had had so many flies that it did not come down to any further ones put in its web. It was an old web, left with its gaps for several days. In addition to the houseflies, this particular spider had gorged itself on a butterfly, a grasshopper, several daddy-longlegs, and a bee; now it sulked in its arbour above its ruined web. He supposed it was making more silk for itself, while digesting its enormous catch; anyway, it was not interested in any more house-flies. So he tried with a grass, twisting it between finger and thumb, usually an unfailing
attraction; still it did not move. He prodded it out of its eyrie, and as it dropped, on many strands almost as thick as sinew, he caught the sinew, and as the spider was climbing up, swung it lightly into another web.

Seeing its danger, the spider dropped again; once more he swung it on its line, and put it back in the web. A battle began, legs and horns inaudibly clashing: then both spiders dropped away at the same time. They were equally matched. Cowards, said Phillip, and holding one in each closed hand, while shaking them lest he get bitten, he bore them away to another kind of web in the virginian creeper which covered the fence between the Bigges and his own garden.

Here lived the Black Widow. Her web was like a carpet, with curled edges strengthened by many strands gummed to the stems of creeper above. At the fence end it narrowed into a tunnel, and down the tunnel stood the Black Widow, small of body but with long legs looking prickly with short savage hairs. The Black Widow could run at a great pace, forwards and back again. Her speciality was in dragging her prey into the tunnel, so rapidly and strongly that the tearing of threads could be heard, as they caught in the single stout claws at the end of each leg. This monster had eyes that glittered like a cluster of diamonds, her horned jaws were prolonged, she stood over the victim after biting it, until it died and then she took it back to the very end of the tunnel, where wings of flies and a clutter of legs and shell-like husks told of past feasts.

Phillip dropped one of the fat short-legged garden spiders in the web. The Black Widow rushed out, to be met by the fat brown garden spider on her back, with rather feebly open jaws.

Without pause, the Black Widow rushed back. Both cowards, thought Phillip, while relieved that the helpless fat spider had not been bitten. He allowed it to climb away, and set the second one on the creeper. He did not like any spiders who were fat and big; they were the females, and they ate their tiny, frail husbands.

What was wanted for the Black Widow was a wasp.

There were some in Gran’pa’s house, in the glass trap standing on the kitchen sill. There was some beer in the lower rim of the trap; wasps flew to the open narrow top, attracted by the smell, crawled down inside the glass funnel, which widened at the bottom, and fell into the beer. There were hundreds of them
sometimes in the trap, some swimming, others feebly kicking, nearly drowned; or acting as rafts to the newly-wet and struggling, above the beer-logged corpses on the bottom.

What was needed was a fresh one, to be trapped in a wine-glass, covered with a piece of cardboard, and taken to the web. That would be a proper fight, like Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion of the world, against a tiger. Wasp v. Black Widow. If the Widow funked again, he would put her in a garden-spider’s web, where she would not be able to run away, but have to fight it out. It was very cruel, of course, and he knew he was mean to torture them like that; but spiders were cruel, and it was tit for tat.

Taking a wine-glass from Gran’pa’s mahogany side-board, no one being about, Phillip got a wasp. He jerked it into the Widow’s web. It buzzed angrily; the Widow rushed out to see what it was. The danger colours, as Father called them, black and yellow, made her rush back again. The wasp began to bite its way out of the web, and was crawling away, tearing threads as it did so, when the Widow ran out again, and seizing it, pulled it back by a wing towards the tunnel. Phillip felt an uneasy, fascinating, guilty feeling as he saw what he had done, for the wasp seemed not to have a chance: he knew that the Widow’s poison would soon travel along the nerves of the wing. Should he smash them all up together? Then his feelings gave way to relief, as the wasp, bending backwards from its waist as thin as a bit of black cotton, stabbed the Black Widow in the thorax. Literally punctured, she seemed to shrink, while the wasp, already stricken, began to tremble, its movements to slacken. It was, at any rate, a satisfactory ending; and telling himself that in future he would not interfere in what Father called the Balance of Nature, Phillip went away. It was really unkind to hurt poor little insects, who were all afraid of one another. What a beastly little bully he was!

“Please God, forgive me,” he thought, a little insincerely.

*

In this partly chastened mood he went indoors for his magazine, and a cushion, meaning to climb the elm and sit on his favourite branch, half way up, hidden by leaves, and read
The
Field.

It was a hot day, an open blue sky, and there was no better place to spend the morning. He had rigged up a string and pulley
on the trunk, and by this means could haul up a basket containing a bottle of lemonade, a slice of cake, and anything else Mother gave him for his eleven o’clock lunch. It saved him getting down, and helped to preserve the pleasant feeling of being a tree-dweller.

Before opening his grimy-edged magazine—nevertheless much less finger-and-thumbed than in winter—he read again a letter he had received by post that morning from Cranmer. The letter was the more welcome, as Cranmer worked in the tanning yard belonging to the firm of which Mrs. Rolls’ father, Mr. Gould, was one of the directors.

The letter asked how he was getting on, and if he was going to the seaside soon, and then told about Cranmer’s work. He was a drayman’s boy, and they had to get the skins from the shambles in Deptford, where bullocks were slaughtered for the market. Cranmer said he got some of the ears for stewing, as perks. Which was a bit of orl rite. Carramba, what a way to spell!

Cranmer was in the pink, he assured Phillip, as he hoped he was too. He longed to meet his old chum again. Wot-o the Bloodhounds. Cranmer spelt that word right.

Phillip examined the letter critically, each stroke of the pen, each shaky word. It was scrawled on a page torn from a penny exercise book. The paper smelt of leather. The ink, on what seemed to have been a very rusty nib, judging by the digs and splutters here and there, made Phillip think of a pond filled with old boots, dead cats, and decaying vegetation. It was a faint and watery mud-colour, with dried grit in some of the strokes. Phillip sniffed again. The ink smelt faintly of leather, or tanning—the same smell that came in the railway carriage on the way to London Bridge.

Phillip’s fancy about the muddy pond had some basis in fact: the liquid had indeed come out of a hole, after being mixed, for some long period, with organic matter, to wit, dead flies and fag-ends which had found their way into the public ink-well in one of His Britannic Majesty’s post offices in Bermondsey.

In a way, too, Phillip thought that the letter seemed like Mr. Gould himself, although he had never spoken to him; but he had seen him once outside Turret House: a man in a long grey-green coat, muffler round neck; big grey hat cleft on top, with a large upcurled brim bound with white-grey ribbon; a drooping grey
moustache; leathery sort of yellow-grey face. Phillip had never been in a tan yard; but somehow Mr. Gould’s appearance must be due to the fact that most of his life had been spent in yellow fog and the yellow-brown smell of the Bermondsey tan yards which came into the train to London Bridge. Apart from all that, Mr. Gould was a very important man, high-up, as he was the Churchwarden of St. Simon’s church.

Phillip, reclining on a cushion in the elm, green leaves and specks of sunshine rustling and burnishing around him, felt himself to be very happy, in the very buoyancy of summer. He was reading about the golden eagle in Scotland when through the open french windows came the sound of a piano. Then he heard Petal’s voice. She came to practise every morning. Some of her songs were lovely, particularly
Solvieg’s
Song,
which he had never heard before she sang it. Mavis and Doris sang things like
When
you
come
down
the
Vale,
Lad,
there’s
music
in
the
air,
Little
Grey
Home
in
the
West,
and other soppy songs like them. Petal’s songs were rather sad, and faraway, yet somehow very clear.

Petal was singing
Now
Sleeps
the
Crimson
Petal.
The words of that song were absolutely beautiful. Phillip, after hearing Petal sing them for the first time, had sought them in his mother’s book of Tennyson’s poems, which had a scorched back.

words which brought secret tears to his eyes, as he thought of the night-sky, and falling stars, which really were meteors, raining down in their last fire from ancient broken worlds. A meteor was silent, and it did
slide.
In winter, when they were to be seen most, the sky was blue-black, looking hard, a sort of blue-black ice in which little shining gems were stuck. He thought many things like that, but always he must keep his thoughts to himself, else others would scoff. When Mavis had returned from the Ursulines convent at Thildonck, where Mother had been as a girl, she had brought back a hammered silver sandal-wood box, shaped like a chapel, as a present for Mother. He had been surprised to learn she had made it; and then had told her about his nests that spring, and how sad they looked when the young birds had flown away, and the lanes and coverts were all empty. Mavis had said he was putting it on, then seeing a tear in his eye, she had pointed at it, as she always had done since he could
remember, and laughed, making him furious with rage, and swearing that he would never again try and tell her anything.