`The Young Idea

THE alternations of feeling in that first dialogue between Tom and Philip Continued to mark their intercourse even after many weeks of schoolboy intimacy. Tom never quite lost the feeling that Philip, being the son of a `rascal, was his natural enemy, never thoroughly overcame his repulsion to Philips deformity: deformity: he was a boy who adhered tenaciously to impressions once received: as with all minds in which mere perception predominates over thought and emotion, the external remained to him rigidly what it was in the first instance. But then, it was impossible not to like Philips company when he was in a good humour: he could help one so well in ones Latin exercises, which Tom regarded as a kind of puzzle that could only be found out be a lucky chance; and he could tell such wonderful fighting stories about Hal of the Wynd, for example, and other heroes who were especial favourites with Tom, because they laid about them with heavy strokes. He had small opinion of Saladin whose scimitar could cut a cushion in two in an instant: who wanted to cut cushions? That was a stupid story, and he didnt care to hear it again. But when Robert Bruce on the black pony rose in his stirrups and lifting his good battle-axe cracked at once the helmet and the skull of the too-hasty knight at Bannockburn, then Tom felt all the exaltation of sympathy and if he had had a cocoanut at hand, he would have cracked it at once with the poker. Philip in his happier moods, indulged Tom to the top of his bent, heightening the crash and bang and fury of every fight with all the artillery of epithets at his command. But he was not always in a good humour or happy mood. The slight spurt of peevish susceptibility which had escaped him in their first interview, was a symptom of a perpetually recurring mental ailment - half of it nervous irritability, half of it the heart-bitterness produced by the sense of his deformity. In these fits of susceptibility every glance seemed to him to be charged either with offensive pity or with ill-repressed disgust - at the very least it was an indifferent glance, and Philip felt indifference as a child of the south feels the chill air of a northern spring. Poor Toms blundering patronage when they were out of doors together would sometimes make him turn upon the well-meaning lad quite savagely, and his eyes, usually sad and quiet, would flash with anything but playful lightning. No wonder Tom retained his suspicions of the humpback. But Philips self-taught skill in drawing was another link between them: for Tom found, to his disgust, that his new drawing-master gave him no dogs and donkeys to draw, but brooks and rustic bridges and ruins all with a general softness of black-lead surface indicating that nature, if anything, was rather satiny; and as Toms feeling for the picturesque in landscape was at present quite latent, it is not surprising that Mr Goodrichs productions seemed to him an uninteresting form of art. Mr Tulliver having a vague intention that Tom should be put to some business which included the drawing out of plans and maps, had complained to Mr Riley, when he saw him at Mudport, that Tom seemed to be learning nothing of that sort: whereupon that obliging adviser had suggested that Tom should have drawing lessons. Mr Tulliver must not mind paying extra for drawing: let Tom be made a good draughtsman, and he would be able to turn his pencil to any purpose. So it was ordered that Tom should have drawing lessons; and whom should Mr Stelling have selected as a master if not Mr Goodrich, who was considered quite at the head of his profession within a circuit of twelve miles round Kings Lorton? By which means Tom learned to make an extremely fine point to his pencil and to represent landscape with a `broad generality which, doubtless from a narrow tendency in his mind to details, he thought extremely dull.

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