They were all out on the lawn. Anne waited for Jerry to get up and take
her into Wyck, to buy chocolates.
Every time Jerrold laughed his mother laughed too, a throaty, girlish
giggle.
"I love Jerry's laugh," she said. "It's the nicest noise he makes."
Then, suddenly, she stopped it. She stopped it with a word.
"If you're going into Wyck, Jerry, you might tell Yearp----"
Yearp.
He got up. His face was very red. He looked mournful and frightened too.
Yes, frightened.
"I--can't, Mother."
"You can perfectly well. Tell Yearp to come and look at Pussy's ears, I
think she's got canker."
"She hasn't," said Jerry defiantly.
"She jolly well has," said Eliot.
"Rot."
"You only say that because you don't like to think she's got it."
"Eliot can go himself. _He's_ fond of Yearp."
"You'll do as you're told, Jerry. It's downright cowardice."
"It isn't cowardice, is it, Daddy?"
"Well," said his father, "it isn't exactly courage."
"Whatever it is," his mother said, "you'll have to get over it. You go
on as if nobody cared about poor Binky but yourself."
Binky was Jerry's dog. He had run into a motor-bicycle in the Easter
holidays and hurt his back, so that Yearp, the vet, had had to come and
give him chloroform. That was why Jerrold was afraid of Yearp. When he
saw him he saw Binky with his nose in the cup of chloroform; he heard
him snorting out his last breath. And he couldn't bear it.
"I could send one of the men," his father was saying.
"Don't encourage him, Robert. He's got to face it."
"Yes, Jerrold, you'd better go and get it over. You can't go on funking
it for ever."
Jerrold went. But he went alone, he wouldn't let Anne go with him. He
said he didn't want her to be mixed up with it.
"He means," said Eliot, "that he doesn't want to think of Yearp every
time he sees Anne."
ix It was true that Eliot was fond of Yearp's society. He would spend hours
with him, learning how to dissect frogs and rabbits and pigeons. He
drove about the country with Yearp seeing the sick animals, the ewes at
lambing time and the cows at their calving. And he spent half the
midsummer holidays reading _Animal Biology_ and drawing diagrams of
frogs' hearts and pigeons' brains. He said he wasn't going to Oxford or
Cambridge when he left Cheltenham; he was going to Barts. He wanted to
be a doctor. But his mother said he didn't know what he'd want to be in
three years' time. She thought him awful, with his frogs' hearts and
horrors.