Rerun: Denton Welch's Doll Houses (orig. 02/13/08)

I had come to the edge of the moor again, where there were stone walls and green fields. Before nightfall I must find the hostel, somewhere near Gidleigh.

When I did arrive, I found the wooden hut at the back of the farm-house full of small boys. A young master was in charge of them. He came up to speak to me at once, telling me that they had come from a school in the north and that they always went for a jaunt in the summer.

The boys were rushing around, shouting and making such a noise with their feet in the flimsy shed that I could hardly hear what he said.

'We've got to have supper now,' he yelled; and he went off cheerfully to marshal his boys.

He seemed very strict and full of orders, I thought. The boys were not particularly obedient, and I heard him shout exasperatedly, 'That's not playing the game - do it properly - don't play the goat,' many times.

The boys were perfectly sure that he would not get too angry. They banged about with enamel plates and mugs; a group of them hung round him continually, waiting for orders, but doing nothing.

At last he had them all sitting at the trestle table with their bread and butter and cocoa before them. He appealed to their better natures, telling them not to be greedy or to eat nastily. All the time he was working very hard; his dark hair began to hang down limply over his white, damp forehedad, and his mouth was continually open.

The boys shouted all their jokes to him, asked him absurd questions, hung on his arms, and passed him food.

After the meal, when they had banged and rattled all their mugs and plates into the sink and wiped them on their dirty towels, they grouped round him in a spreading mass; the whole floor seemed to be covered with boys. An amazing silence reigned. What was going to happen? Were they going to pray?

The young master sat above them on the trestle table, swinging his feet. Several boys climbed up from the floor and clung around him. He shook them off half-heartedly, then decided to take their arms in his and hold them in subdued positions in this way.

'What's it going to be?' he asked all the boys with verve.

They shouted different names; the master decided on the most popular and called out:

'Very well, we'll have "Chestnut Tree".'

A roar of delight went up followed by as sudden a silence; then the singing and miming began.

The master led with athletic energy. He beat his chest, tapped his head, held out his hands, till the sweat grew in diamonds on his face. The chorus of piping shrill voices affected my curiously. It was such a green, unfeeling, assured sound. It was like listening to a room full of green parrots who knew that they were saying their pieces properly. It was a charming sound, but also very indifferent and cold.

Orvil took the book back with him to the crowded court and found a chair in a corner. His eye followed the glass trolleys axiously. A waiter approached and put down the teapot and hot-water jug of that frosted-looking silver found only in hotels. Orvil poured out a cup of tea and waited impatiently for the cakes. His eyes were already eating them up as the man steered the trolley towards him. The little cakes lay helpless on their plates and seemed to call to him. He took in at a glance the square ones covered with jam, sprinkled with coconut and topped with glistening cherries; the round shortbread ones with portholes to show the bright lemon curd inside; the small tarts of criss-cross lattice-work; the phallic chocolate and coffee eclairs, oozing fat worms of cream; the squares of sponge, enclosed in four hard slabs of chocolate and dressed with wicked green beauty-spots of pistachio nut.

Orvil had one of each sort put on a plate before him. He hardly dared ask for so many, and only achieved it by refusing to look at the waiter. He fixed his gaze on the distance until the waiter left him; then he bowed his head, opened the book, and began to eat.

The chatter and the music surged around him. The waves of sound broke through the deliciousness of the cakes, then receded and were forgotten again. Orvil was not concentrating, but the hyphenated words, 'press-up', 'knees-bend', 'trunk-turn', 'deep-breathing', jumped out from the printed page. His eyes also idly followed the diagrams of a coarse little man who squatted, thrust his legs out, and tucked his chin into his neck until a large vein, like a branching ivy stem, stood out on his forehead.

Although Orvil's eyes still looked down at the page, they gradually came to focus far beyond it. He thought of ruins lost in wooded valleys; kittens with black faces; toast in a Gothic Revival toast-rack like the nave of some miniature cathedral; lovely uncut stones reminiscent of sucked jujubes; a top-heavy georgian coffee-pot shaped like a funeral urn; his mother's minute ring-watch, the face the size of a sequin, with little diamonds winking all round it. He saw it again on her little finger, and remembered how miraculous it had always seemed.

One day a specialist was in the ward, examining a patient, when the patient fell down in front of him in a fit. The patient was a fat middle-aged man; he shrieked and trembled and rolled on the floor, as if he were wallowing in mud. It was a terrifying and grotesque sight, but the specialist watched it with a smile on his face. He neither raised the patient up nor prevented him from cutting his head on the corner of the bedside locker.

When at last the convulsions had subsided and the patient, with blood on his face, looked up bewildered, the specialist's smile grew even more Buddhistic and bland and he said in a fluting voice, so that other people should hear, 'Well, I must say there's one improvement this week - you're falling so much more gracefully!'

He gave a light little well-bred laugh, which at once raised up in my mind a picture of some woman with enormous bust measurement, swathed in strainingly tight red velvet. He seemed delighted with his own urbane, unsentimental wit, and I felt that at that moment he would have used the words 'heartless elegance' about himself. He seemed really to be living for a moment in his own conception of an eighteenth-century French marquise in her brilliant salon.

I suddenly began to hate the specialist for his clownish show of vanity and facetiousness. I hated him so much that my face began to burn. I felt insulted and outraged; I wanted to have the specialist publicly beaten in front of all the staring patients. I imagined his black pin-striped trousers being taken down, and his squeals of shame and pain ringing through the ward.