Fortitude | Page 9

rewards rather
than chastisement met with no success. The hopeless fact of it all was
that it had very little to do with his own actions; his father behaved in
the same way to every one, and Mrs. Trussit, the housekeeper, old
Curtis the gardener, Aunt Jessie, and all the servants, shook under his
tongue and the cold glitter of his eyes, and certainly the maids would
long ago have given notice and departed were it not that they were all
afraid to face him. Peter knew that that was true, because Mrs. Trussit
had told him so. It was this hopeless feeling of indiscriminate
punishment that made everything so bad. Until he was eight years old
Peter had not been beaten at all, but when he was very young indeed he
had learnt to crawl away when he heard his father's step, and he had
never cried as a baby because his nurse's white scared face had
frightened him so. And then, of course, there was his mother, his poor
mother--that was another reason for silence. He never saw his mother
for more than a minute at a time because she was ill, had been ill for as
long as he could remember. When he was younger he had been taken
into his mother's room once or twice a week by Mrs. Trussit, and he
had bent down and kissed that white tired face, and he had smelt the
curious smell in the room of flowers and medicine, and he had heard
his mother's voice, very far away and very soft, and he had crept out
again. When he was older his aunt told him sometimes to go and see
his mother, and he would creep in alone, but he never could say
anything because of the whiteness of the room and the sense of
something sacred like church froze his speech. He had never seen his
father and mother together.
His mornings were always spent with old Parlow, and in the afternoon
he was allowed to ramble about by himself, so that it was only at
mealtimes and during the horrible half-hour after supper before he went
up to bed that he saw his father.

He really saw more of old Curtis the gardener, but half an hour with his
father could seem a very long time. Throughout the rest of his life that
half-hour after supper remained at the back of his mind--and he never
forgot its slightest detail. The hideous dining-room with the large
photographs of old grandfather and grandmother Westcott in ill-fitting
clothes and heavy gilt frames, the white marble clock on the
mantelpiece, a clock that would tick solemnly for twenty minutes and
then give a little run and a jump for no reason at all, the straight
horsehair sofa so black and uncomfortable with its hard wooden back,
the big dining-room table with its green cloth (faded a little in the
middle where a pot with a fern in it always stood) and his aunt with her
frizzy yellow hair, her black mittens and her long bony fingers playing
her interminable Patience, and then two arm-chairs by the fire, in one
of them old grandfather Westcott, almost invisible beneath a load of
rugs and cushions and only the white hairs on the top of his head
sticking out like some strange plant, and in the other chair his father,
motionless, reading the _Cornish Times_--last of all, sitting up straight
with his work in front of him, afraid to move, afraid to cough,
sometimes with pins and needles, sometimes with a maddening impulse
to sneeze, always with fascinated glances out of the corner of his eye at
his father--Peter himself. How happy he was when the marble clock
struck nine, and he was released! How snug and friendly his little attic
bedroom was with its funny diamond-paned window under the shelving
roof with all the view of the common and the distant hills that covered
Truro! There, at any rate, he was free!
He was passing now through the Square, and he stopped for an instant
and looked up at the old weather-beaten Tower that guarded one side of
it, and looked so fine and stately now with the white snow at its foot
and the gleaming sheet of stars at its back. That old Tower had stood a
good number of beatings in its day--it knew well enough what courage
was--and so Peter, as he turned up the hill, squared his shoulders and
set his teeth. But in some way that he was too young to understand he
felt that it was not the beating itself that frightened him most, but rather
all the circumstances that attended it--it was even the dark house, the
band of trees about it, that first dreadful moment when