Free Young Phillip Maddison by Henry Williamson Page A

speak at once,” said Richard, after a silence.
    “How about you, Phillip?” said Hetty, with forced cheerfulness.
    “I may have to play football for the House this afternoon.”
    “Well, if your name is not on the list, I am sure you will want to accompany your Father, won’t you dear?”
    Before Phillip could think what to say, Richard said, “Oh, please do not force the boy to do anything he does not want to do! My Father always used to say, ‘One volunteer is worth ten press-men’.”
    “Do tell us about when you were a boy, Dads,” said Mavis. “I simply love hearing about what you did.”
    “Humph,” said Richard, not displeased. He was very fond of his elder daughter. He looked at his watch. “Another time, perhaps, my gipsy—— Hetty, I hope to be home at a quarter to two o’clock this afternoon.”
    *
    A pleasant scene greeted Richard on his return from the City. The sun was shining brilliantly after a doubtful morning; the warm bright rays of April filled the south window of the sitting room, where the table was laid for lunch. The place had beencleaned, the floors polished by Mrs. Feeney, the charwoman. Everything looked fresh, almost new—a pleasing condition for Richard, so meticulous in his sense of neatness and order, both within and without a house. No smells of cooking, or over-cooking, greeted him from the kitchen; nothing was burning, or had burned, after boiling over; instead, the scent of—could it be?—wild sweet violets had greeted his nostrils as he entered the front door.
    There they were, his favourite flowers, opposite his place at table, in a cut-glass jar with a silver rim—three dozen or so wild English violets, their stalks in clear water; and among them, in the centre of the deep purple petals, a solitary wood anemone, a wind-flower, fragile and white. Richard smiled with delight. Through the faint scent, instantly he perceived himself as a boy in the West Country, among happy brothers and sisters, bringing back from the woods the first violets of the year for Mother’s boudoir. For a moment he saw her face, as she stood at the window, in the room above and back from the porch, with its iron-studded oaken door.
    Memory, through the sense of smell, induces the most piercing of all emotions of the past, since that sense originally was old in man when sight and hearing were new. It is startling, it is stilling, it is sad when old scenes thus return, as in resurrection, from the past. Momentarily overcome, Richard stood still, by the french windows. Mother, Mother!
    “Hullo, Dads!”
    Mavis, in blue-serge gym uniform, had come silently into the room on plimsoled feet. She flung her arms round his middle, jingling his watch-chain.
    “Hullo, my gipsy! Got a kiss for your old Dads?”
    Stretching up, she kissed him on the lips, the only place on his face—apart from nose, brow, cheekbones, and eyes—which was not rough and tickly. Richard had never shaved.
    “Do you like the violets, Dads?”
    “Yes indeed. I got their scent as soon as I opened the front door.”
    “Would you like to have them, Dads?”
    “How very kind of you, Mavis. But perhaps Mother would care for them.”
    “She knows I got them for you, Dads.”
    “Well, we’ll all enjoy them, shall we?”
    He moved the glass eighteen inches or so away from his place at table, putting it in the centre of the tablecloth. Unaware of the child’s disappointment, he went on, “Where did you get them, Mavis, not round here, I’ll be bound!”
    “Not very far away, Dads! You see, we were playing lacrosse in the Rec.—I mean the Recreation Ground—this morning, and I heard two of the girls talking about some flowers they had got for Miss Wendover, you know Dads, our games mistress. I smelt them, and they were lovely. They got them from the garden of that big old empty house that goes down to the river, you know, the one you told us might be haunted when we passed on the walk one Sunday, where nobody lives, and the