Read Online The Dangerous Years by Richard Church - Free Book Online

she felt had no right to be lodged there, had frightened her. The incongruity was beyond her understanding.
    Suddenly the rivulet of sound stopped, disappeared. The boy looked up at her, breathing heavily, as though he had been running beside those rapid and tiny waters. He smiled, and she saw that his eyes were exactly like those of his father, grey, deep-set, burning, the light in them darting about so rapidly that they might have been furtive, had they not been so authoritative and enquiring. The little face, with its miniature features already exquisitely defined, was one that demanded an answer to implied questions, and searching questions. Joan wanted again to rebel.
    â€œWell!” she exclaimed, as though she had discovered him pulling the cat’s tail. But he ignored her inference that he had no right to be so precocious, or that what he had done was out of the way.
    â€œYou see what I mean?” he asked eagerly, and breaking into a peal of happy laughter, rocking himself to and fro, and gradually becoming self-conscious, prolonging the movement until it was mechanical, while the laughter died away and left him swinging there like the beam of a metronome. Joan could see his eyes calculating the movement, as his interest fastened on it. She was forgotten.
    â€œTell me,” she demanded, “how do you … what do your parents do…?”
    But she could not frame her enquiry clearly. It seemed almost indecent even to suggest that the boy had done anything abnormal. So she came down to convention, and said, “But how old are you?”
    He had obviously heard that question before. His eyes looked bored, though the rest of his features had not the firmness to add to that register.
    â€œI’m nine, and my sister’s seven. She’s a wild thing, but everybody likes her.”
    He appeared to be obsessed by the problem of being liked or disliked. Twice in this short acquaintance he had referred to it. Joan suddenly felt sorry for him. “But everybody likes you, too, I’m sure. You are Adrian, are you not?” She had recalled this bit of information given by his sister the night before.
    The boy’s mind leaped ahead. Looking at Joan almost slyly, he asked, “Then you met my Uncle Tom? Did you like him?”
    Joan could not answer at once because she saw the boy’s attention wandering off again. He had ceased rocking himself to and fro, and now began doodling at the piano, striking abrupt chords, tinkering with them, his head turned down sideways as though testing the chords for cracks, then breaking away with running passages and delicious modulations, coming back after a while to the original chords. The meander was a nice piece of improvisation.
    â€œThat’s what my uncle wants me to do,” he said.
    â€œTell me more about it,” said Joan, trying in vain to maintain her suspicion of all this abnormal conduct. The child was so disarming in his candour.
    â€œHe wants Father to let me play at concerts, and go on tour.”
    â€œAnd what does your mother say to that?”
    â€œShe doesn’t say anything. It is Father who says.”
    â€œOh, and he disapproves?”
    â€œDisapproves? What does that mean?”
    The boy frowned, as he had done before at meeting this word outside his own vocabulary. Joan concluded that he was not intelligent in everything, and this made her meanly triumphant. She began to tease him.
    â€œBut I told you that word just now.”
    He frowned more savagely, and his face flushed. Oh, temper, she thought; and that again was one up for her. But immediately she was abashed, for he turned back to the keyboard as he replied:
    â€œOh yes. I know. Approved, disapproved. I see what they mean. They mean
this
!” And he broke out again into an improvisation, first a gay dance measure, then a pause, followed by a heavy series of chords, with a shifting dissonance that dragged the tone down and down.