‘Hullo,’ he said, ‘here’s the Wild Man.’ The Wild Man from Borneo was in those days an object of affection with the general public. ‘Sit down and make yourself comfortable. Now, what can I do for you?’

The armchair was too big for Eustace: his feet hardly touched the floor.

‘It’s about Hilda,’ he said.

‘Well, Hilda’s a nice girl, what about her?’ said Mr. Cherrington, his voice still jovial. Eustace hesitated and then said with a rush:

‘You see, she doesn’t want me to go to school.’

Mr. Cherrington frowned, and sipped at his glass.

‘I know, we’ve heard her more than once on that subject. She thinks you’ll get into all sorts of bad ways.’ His voice sharpened; it was too bad that his quiet hour should be interrupted by these nursery politics. ‘Have you been putting your heads together? Have you come to tell me you don’t want to go either?’

Eustace’s face showed the alarm he felt at his father’s change of tone.

‘Oh, no, Daddy. At least—well—I . . .’

‘You don’t want to go. That’s clear,’ his father snapped.

‘Yes, I do. But you see . . .’ Eustace searched for a form of words which wouldn’t lay the blame too much on Hilda and at the same time excuse him for seeming to shelter behind her. ‘You see, though she’s older than me she’s only a girl and she doesn’t understand that men have to do certain things’—Mr. Cherrington smiled, and Eustace took heart—‘well, like going to school.’

‘Girls go to school, too,’ Mr. Cherrington said. Eustace tried to meet this argument. ‘Yes, but it’s not the same for them. You see, girls are always nice to each other; why, they always call each other by their Christian names even when they’re at school. Fancy that! And they never bet or’ (Eustace looked nervously at the whisky decanter) or drink, or use bad language, or kick each other, or roast each other in front of a slow fire.’ Thinking of the things that girls did not do to each other, Eustace began to grow quite pale.

‘All the better for them, then,’ said Mr. Cherrington robustly. ‘School seems to be the place for girls. But what’s all this leading you to?’

‘I don’t mind about those things,’ said Eustace eagerly. ‘I . . . I should quite enjoy them. And I shouldn’t even mind, well, you know, not being so good for a change, if it was only for a time. But Hilda thinks it might make me ill as well. Of course, she’s quite mistaken, but she says she’ll miss me so much and worry about me, that she’ll never have a peaceful moment, and she’ll lose her appetite and perhaps pine away and . . .’ He paused, unable to complete the picture. ‘She doesn’t know I’m telling you all this, and she wouldn’t like me to, and at school they would say it was telling tales, but I’m not at school yet, am I? Only I felt I must tell you because then perhaps you’d say I’d better not go to school, though I hope you won’t.’

Exhausted by the effort of saying so many things that should (he felt) have remained locked in his bosom, and dreading an angry reply, Eustace closed his eyes. When he opened them his father was standing up with his back to the fireplace. He took the cigar from his mouth and puffed out an expanding cone of rich blue smoke.

‘Thanks, old chap,’ he said. I’m very glad you told me, and I’m not going to say you shan’t go to school. Miss Fothergill left you the money for that purpose, so we chose the best school we could find; and why Hilda should want to put her oar in I can’t imagine—at least, I can, but I call it confounded cheek. The very idea!’ his father went on, working himself up and looking at Eustace as fiercely as if it was his fault, while Eustace trembled to hear Hilda criticized. ‘What she needs is to go to school herself. Yes, that’s what she needs.’ He took a good swig at the whisky, his eyes brightened and his voice dropped. ‘Now I’m going to tell you something, Eustace, only you must keep it under your hat.’

‘Under my hat?’ repeated Eustace, mystified. ‘My hat’s in the hall. Shall I go and get it?’

His father laughed. ‘No, I mean you must keep it to yourself. You mustn’t tell anyone, because nothing’s decided yet.’

‘Shall I cross my heart and swear?’ asked Eustace anxiously. ‘Of course, I’d rather not.’

‘You can do anything you like with yourself as long as you don’t tell Hilda,’ his father remarked, ‘but just see the door’s shut.’

Eustace tiptoed to the door and cautiously turned the handle several times, after each turn giving the handle a strong but surreptitious tug. Coming back still more stealthily, he whispered, ‘It’s quite shut.’

‘Very well, then,’ said Mr. Cherrington. ‘Now give me your best ear.’

‘My best ear, Daddy?’ said Eustace, turning his head from side to side. ‘Oh, I see!’ and he gave a loud laugh which he immediately stifled. ‘You just want me to listen carefully.’

‘You’ve hit it,’ and between blue, fragrant puffs Mr. Cherrington began to outline his plan for Hilda.

While his father was speaking Eustace’s face grew grave, and every now and then he nodded judicially. Though his feet still swung clear of the floor, to be taken into his father’s confidence seemed to add inches to his stature.

‘Well, old man, that’s what I wanted to tell you,’ said his father at length. ‘Only you mustn’t let on, see? Mum’s the word.’

‘Wild horses won’t drag it out of me, Daddy,’ said Eustace earnestly.

‘Well, don’t you let them try. By the way, I hear your friend Dick Staveley’s back.’

Eustace started. The expression of an elder statesman faded from his face and he suddenly looked younger than his years.

‘Oh, is he? I expect he’s just home for the holidays.’

‘No, he’s home for some time, he’s cramming for Oxford or something.’

‘Cramming?’ repeated Eustace. His mind suddenly received a most disagreeable impression of Dick, his hero, transformed into a turkey strutting and gobbling round a farmyard.

‘Being coached for the ’Varsity. It may happen to you one day. Somebody told me they’d seen him, and I thought you might be interested. You liked him, didn’t you?’

‘Oh, yes,’ said Eustace. Intoxicating visions began to rise, only to be expelled by the turn events had taken. ‘But it doesn’t make much difference now, does it? I mean, I shouldn’t be able to go there, even if he asked me.’

Meanwhile, Hilda on her side had not been idle. She turned over in her mind every stratagem and device she could think of that might keep Eustace at home. Since the evening when she so successfully launched her bombshell about the unsatisfactory state of education and morals at St. Ninian’s, she felt she had been losing ground. Eustace did not respond, as he once used to, to the threat of terrors to come; he professed to be quite pleased at the thought of being torn limb from limb by older stronger boys. She didn’t believe he was really unmoved by such a prospect, but he successfully pretended to be. When she said that it would make her ill he seemed to care a great deal more; for several days he looked as sad as she did, and he constantly, and rather tiresomely, begged her to eat more—requests which Hilda received with a droop of her long, heavy eyelids and a sad shake of her beautiful head. But lately Eustace hadn’t seemed to care so much. When Christmas came he suddenly discovered the fun of pulling crackers. Before this year he wouldn’t even stay in the room if crackers were going off; but now he revelled in them and made almost as much noise as they did, and his father even persuaded him to grasp the naked strip of cardboard with the explosive in the middle, which stung your fingers and made even grown-ups pull faces. Crackers bored Hilda; the loudest report did not make her change her expression, and she would have liked to tell Eustace how silly he looked as, with an air of triumph, he clasped the smoking fragment; but she hadn’t the heart to. He might be at school already, his behaviour was so unbridled. And he had a new way of looking at her, not unkind or cross or disobedient, but as if he was a gardener tending a flower and watching to see how it was going to turn out. This was a reversal of their roles; she felt as though a geranium had risen from its bed and was bending over her with a watering-can.