Fallen Into the Pit

felt at him with sudden exasperated palms, and her ice was melting, but into a rage which would need some manipulating. “You’re wet through, child! Heavens!” she moaned, “you’re supposed to be thirteen, not three!”

She usually listened, and tonight she wouldn’t listen. She was always just, yet tonight she didn’t care whether he thought her just or not. She didn’t give him a chance to explain, she just flamed at him as soon as he opened his mouth. It was a shock to his understanding, and he simply could not accept or believe in it.

“But, Mummy, I—yes, I know, I fell in the brook, but it was because—”

“I don’t want to hear a word about it. Upstairs!” said Bunty, and pointed a daunting finger.

“Yes, I’ll go, really, only please, I want to explain about—”

“It’s too late for explanations. Do as you’re told, this minute.”

George, an almost placating echo in the background, said dryly: “Better go to bed, quick, my lad, before something worse happens to you.”

“But, Dad, this is important! I’ve got to talk to you about—”

“You’ve got to get out of those wet things, and go to bed,” said George inflexibly, “and if I were you I’d do it without any arguing.”

“No, honestly, I’m not trying to make any excuses, it’s—” Bunty said, in the awfully quiet voice which indicated that the end of her patience was in sight: “Upstairs, and into that bathroom, without one more word, do you hear?”

It wasn’t fair, and it wasn’t like her, and Dominic simply couldn’t believe it. A flash of anger lit for a moment in the middle of his confusion and bewilderment. He burst out, almost with a stamp of his clay-heavy foot: “Mummy, you’ve got to listen to me! Don’t be so unreasonable!”

Bunty moved with a suddenness which was not natural to her, but an efficiency which was characteristic, boxed both his ears briskly, took him by the scruff of his neck, and ran him stumbling and shrilling out of the room up the stairs, and into the bathroom, quite breathless with indignation. She sat him down upon the cork-topped stool, and swooped down upon the taps of the bath as if she would box their ears, too, but only turned them on with a crisp savagery which made him draw his toes respectfully out of her way as she swept past him.

“Get out of those clothes, and be quick about it.” She stooped to feel the temperature of the water, and alter the flow, and when she turned on him again he had got no farther than dropping his jacket sulkily on the floor, and very slowly unfastening his collar and tie. She made a vexed noise of exasperation, slapped his hands aside quite sharply, and began to unbutton his shirt with a hard-fingered, severe speed which stung him to offended resistance. He jerked himself back a little from her hands, and pushed her away, childishly hugging his damp clothes to him. “Mummy! Don’t treat me like a baby! I can do it myself.”

“I shall treat you like a baby just as long as you insist on behaving like one. Do it yourself, then, and look sharp about it, or I shall do it for you.”

She went away, and he heard her moving about for a moment in his bedroom, and then she came back with his pyjamas, and his hairbrush, and gave an ominous look in his direction because he was still not in the bath. The look made him move a little faster, though he did it with an expression of positive mutiny. She was in a mood he didn’t know at all, and therefore anything could happen, especially anything bad; and the bath seemed to him the safest place, as well as the place where she desired him to go. He wanted to assert himself, of course, he wanted to vindicate his male dignity, his poor, tender male dignity which had had its ears soundly boxed, exactly as if it had still been a mere sprig of self-conceit; but she looked at him with a pointed female look, and reversed the hairbrush suggestively in her hand, and Dominic took refuge in the bath very quickly, with only a half-swallowed sob of rage.

The silver shield, which he had fished carefully out of the pocket of his flannels and secreted in his tooth-mug while she was out of the room, must on no account be risked. If it came within her sight she might very likely, in her present mood, sweep it into the waste-bin. But he was in agony about it all the time that she was bathing him. For she wouldn’t trust him to get rid of the clay unaided, even though he protested furiously that he was perfectly competent, and flushed and flamed at her miserably: “Mummy, you’re indecent!” She merely extinguished the end of his protest with a well-loaded sponge, and unfairly, when he was blind and dumb, and could not argue, told him roundly that she intended to get him clean, and to see to it herself, and further added with genuine despondency that she didn’t see how it was ever to be done.

The battle was a painful one. Having no other means of expressing his resentment of such treatment, Dominic developed more, and more obstructive, knees and elbows than any boy ever had before. Bunty, retaliating, adjusted his suddenly unpliable body to the positions she required by a series of wet and stinging slaps. The tangled head which would not bend to the pressure of her fingers was tugged over by a lock of its own wet hair, instead. Dominic fought his losing fight in silence, except when her vigorous onslaught on the folds of his ears dragged a squeal of protest from him:

“Mummy, you’re hurting!”

“Serve you right!” she said smartly. “How do you suppose I’m ever going to get you clean without hurting? You need scrubbing all over.” But for all that, she went more gently, even though the glimpses he got of her face in the pauses of the battle, between soapings and towelings and the rasp of the loofah, did not indicate any softening in her anger and disapproval. Still, in spite of her prompt: “Serve you right!” so determinedly repeated, she wiped his eyes for him quite nicely when he complained that the soap was in them; and suddenly, when her fingers were so soft and slow with the warm towel on his sore, sulky face, he wanted to give in, and say he was sorry, and it was all his fault, even the bathroom war. But when he got one eye open and glimpsed her face, it still looked dauntingly severe, and the words retreated hurriedly, and left an unsatisfied coldness in his mouth. And then he was angrier than ever, so angry that he determined to make one more attempt to assert himself. The thought of his hardworking evening, the feel of the little shield stealthily retrieved and secretly cradled in his hand as he pulled on his pyjamas, stung him back to outer realities.

He waited until he was padding after her into his bedroom, his hair smugly brushed, his tired mind stumbling with sleep but goaded with hurt self-importance. Bunty laid the brush on his tall-boy, turned down the bed, and motioned him in. He felt the sharp edges of his discovery denting his palm, but she didn’t look any more approachable than before, and there was still no safe ground for him to cross to reach her.

“I’ll bring you up some hot milk,” she said, “when you’re in bed. Though you don’t deserve it.”

But for that fatal afterthought he would have got across to her safely, but as it was he turned back in a passion of spleen, and said ungraciously: “I don’t want any, thank you!” He wasn’t going to want anything she said he didn’t deserve.

He hesitated at the foot of the bed, gazing at her with direct, resentful eyes, his newly washed chestnut hair