Page:Sorrell and Son - Deeping - 1926.djvu/131

 make him lose his smiling poise, and that creature was the common house-fly. In his attitude to the house-fly Mr. Porteous was a thorough pragmatist. The pink sheen of his bald head seemed to attract the unclean insects, and with words of wrath he would rise to vigorous attack. The windows would be closed, and yesterday's paper folded into a swatting stick, and Mr. Porteous would bound about the room, flapping and slamming and declaiming.

"Filthy things, Sorrell. They wipe their feet on your food, and are sick on your sugar. Take that, Beelzebub. Ha, you carrier of germs!"

He kept it up until no single fly was left alive in the schoolroom, and then he would sit down with a beaming smile and the air of having accomplished something, and peace would return. It was a peaceful room, a happy room, in spite of its austerity.

For Christopher was very sensitive to atmospheres, even more so than was his father. He had inherited his mother's strong physique and his father's temperament, and in after years he often looked back to that bare room with its uncarpeted floor and its kitchen chairs and deal table. He would remember the ink marks on the table, and the cracked pane of glass in the window overlooking the yard—the result of some devastating blow with yesterday's Daily Mail,—the green mould on the bricks of the yard, the greenish light that seemed to filter down through the great elm. Mr. Porteous's room—and the life therein—coincided with the last months of Kit's rather impersonal outlook on life. The atmosphere was clear and happy, but a little colourless and cold, for as yet sex was but vaguely present, no more than a faint glow rising above the boy's horizon.

Mr. Porteous had attained to mental and physical celibacy. He lived in his work and his books and his rotund enthusiasms, in the Boys' Club which he ran, and to which Christopher was introduced. As a social force in the polite sense Mr. Porteous was a failure, for he was not pleasing to women, but in his setting of Kit's feet upon the path of true knowledge, and in his influence upon many of the Winstonbury boys, the curate did great work.

He made Christopher play football with the Club boys, and encouraged him to box with them, and with the gloves Mr. Porteous taught him a lesson. Sorrell's son was apt