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THE GOLDEN AGE


[Illustration: “ONCE MORE WERE DAMSELS RESCUED, DRAGONS
DISEMBOWELLED.....”]


THE GOLDEN AGE

by

KENNETH GRAHAME

With Illustrations in Colour by R. J. E. Moony







New York: John Lane Company
London: John Lane, the Bodley Head
Toronto: Bell & Cockburn: MCMXIV

Copyright, 1899,
By John Lane

Copyright, 1904,
By John Lane




CONTENTS


                                   PAGE
    PROLOGUE: THE OLYMPIANS           3
    A HOLIDAY                        13
    A WHITE-WASHED UNCLE             29
    ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS           39
    THE FINDING OF THE PRINCESS      53
    SAWDUST AND SIN                  67
    ‘YOUNG ADAM CUPID’               79
    THE BURGLARS                     93
    A HARVESTING                    107
    SNOWBOUND                       121
    WHAT THEY TALKED ABOUT          133
    THE ARGONAUTS                   143
    THE ROMAN ROAD                  161
    THE SECRET DRAWER               179
    ‘EXIT TYRANNUS’                 193
    THE BLUE ROOM                   205
    A FALLING OUT                   225
    ‘LUSISTI SATIS’                 239




ILLUSTRATIONS


    “Once more were damsels rescued, dragons
         disembowelled....”                               _Frontispiece_

                                                            FACING PAGE

    “... He was always ready to constitute himself a hostile
        army or a band of marauding Indians”                        6

    “‘Where’s Harold?’ I asked presently. ‘Oh, he’s just
        playin’ muffin-man as usual’”                              16

    “When at last the atmosphere was clear of his depressing
        influence, we met despondently in the potato-cellar”       34

    “Instead of active ‘pretence,’ with its shouts and its
        perspiration, how much better—I held—to lie at ease
        and pretend to one’s self, in green and golden fancies”    40

    “... And then, my cheek on the cool marble, lulled by the
        trickle of water, I slipped into dreamland out of real
        and magic world alike”                                     64

    “‘Now we’ll go on,’ began Charlotte once more”                 70

    “Edward led the race home at a speed which one of
        Ballantyne’s heroes might have equalled but never
        surpassed”                                                 88

    “This overland route had been revealed to us one day by the
        domestic cat, when hard pressed in the course of an
        otter-hunt”                                               104

    “A straight flagged walk led up to the cool-looking old
        house, and my host, lingering in his progress at this
         rose-tree and that, forgot all about me at least twice”  112

    “Meanwhile Charlotte and I crouched in the window-seat,...”   124

    “‘She’s off with those vicarage girls again,’ said Edward”    136

    “We put the Argo’s head upstream, since that led away from
        the Larkin province”                                      148

    “Then he stood up, and he was very straight and tall, and
        the sunset was in his hair and beard as he stood there,
        high over me”                                             174

    “Westward the clouds were massing themselves in a low
        violet bank; below them, to north and south, as far
        round as the eye could reach, a narrow streak of gold
        ran out ... I turned for a last effort”                   186

    “‘I’ve been chopping up wood,’ he explained, in a guilty
        sort of way”                                              200

    “We entered in noiseless file, the room being plunged in
        darkness, except for a bright strip of moonlight on
        the floor”                                                214

    “Shops came first, of course,...”                             230

    “... Selina and Charlotte were busy stuffing Edward’s
        rabbits with unwonted forage, bilious and green”          250




PROLOGUE: THE OLYMPIANS


LOOKING back to those days of old, ere the gate shut to behind me, I
can see now that to children with a proper equipment of parents these
things would have worn a different aspect. But to those whose nearest
were aunts and uncles, a special attitude of mind may be allowed. They
treated us, indeed, with kindness enough as to the needs of the flesh,
but after that with indifference (an indifference, as I recognise,
the result of a certain stupidity), and therewith the commonplace
conviction that your child is merely animal. At a very early age I
remember realising in a quite impersonal and kindly way the existence
of that stupidity, and its tremendous influence in the world; while
there grew up in me, as in the parallel case of Caliban upon Setebos, a
vague sense of a ruling power, wilful, and freakish, and prone to the
practice of vagaries—‘just choosing so’: as, for instance, the giving
of authority over us to these hopeless and incapable creatures, when
it might far more reasonably have been given to ourselves over them.
These elders, our betters by a trick of chance, commanded no respect,
but only a certain blend of envy—of their good luck—and pity—for their
inability to make use of it. Indeed, it was one of the most hopeless
features in their character (when we troubled ourselves to waste a
thought on them: which wasn’t often) that, having absolute licence to
indulge in the pleasures of life, they could get no good of it. They
might dabble in the pond all day, hunt the chickens, climb trees in
the most uncompromising Sunday clothes; they were free to issue forth
and buy gunpowder in the full eye of the sun—free to fire cannons and
explode mines on the lawn: yet they never did any one of these things.
No irresistible Energy haled them to church o’ Sundays; yet they went
there regularly of their own accord, though they betrayed no greater
delight in the experience than ourselves.

On the whole, the existence of these Olympians seemed to be entirely
void of interests, even as their movements were confined and slow, and
their habits stereotyped and senseless. To anything but appearances
they were blind. For them the orchard (a place elf-haunted, wonderful!)
simply produced so many apples and cherries: or it didn’t—when the
failures of Nature were not infrequently ascribed to us. They never
set foot within fir-wood or hazel-copse, nor dreamt of the marvels hid
therein. The mysterious sources, sources as of old Nile, that fed the
duck-pond had no magic for them. They were unaware of Indians, nor
recked they anything of bisons or of pirates (with pistols!), though
the whole place swarmed with such portents. They cared not to explore
for robbers’ caves, nor dig for hidden treasure. Perhaps, indeed, it
was one of their best qualities that they spent the greater part of
their time stuffily indoors.

To be sure there was an exception in the curate, who would receive,
unblenching, the information that the meadow beyond the orchard was
a prairie studded with herds of buffalo, which it was our delight,
moccasined and tomahawked, to ride down with those whoops that announce
the scenting of blood. He neither laughed nor sneered, as the Olympians
would have done; but, possessed of a serious idiosyncrasy, he would
contribute such lots of valuable suggestion as to the pursuit of this
particular sort of big game that, as it seemed to us, his mature
age and eminent position could scarce have been attained without a
practical knowledge of the creature in its native lair. Then, too,
he was always ready to constitute himself a hostile army or a band
of marauding Indians on the shortest possible notice: in brief, a
distinctly able man, with talents, so far as we could judge, immensely
above the majority. I trust he is a bishop by this time. He had all the
necessary qualifications, as we knew.

These strange folk had visitors sometimes—stiff and colourless
Olympians like themselves, equally without vital interests and
intelligent pursuits: emerging out of the clouds, and passing away
again to drag on an aimless existence somewhere beyond our ken. Then
brute force was pitilessly applied. We were captured, washed, and
forced into clean collars: silently submitting as was our wont, with
more contempt than anger. Anon, with unctuous hair and faces stiffened
in a conventional grin, we sat and listened to the usual platitudes.
How could reasonable people spend their precious time so? That was ever
our wonder as we bounded forth at last: to the old clay-pit to make
pots, or to hunt bears among the hazels.

[Illustration: “... HE WAS ALWAYS READY TO CONSTITUTE HIMSELF A HOSTILE
ARMY OR A BAND OF MARAUDING INDIANS”]

It was perennial matter for amazement how these Olympians would talk
over our heads—during meals, for instance—of this or the other social
or political inanity, under the delusion that these pale phantasms of
reality were among the importances of life. We _illuminati_, eating
silently, our heads full of plans and conspiracies, could have told
them what real life was. We had just left it outside, and were all on
fire to get back to it. Of course we didn’t waste the revelation on
them, the futility of imparting our ideas had long been demonstrated.
One in thought and purpose, linked by the necessity of combating one
hostile fate, a power antagonistic ever—a power we lived to evade—we
had no confidants save ourselves. This strange anæmic order of beings
was further removed from us, in fact, than the kindly beasts who shared
our natural existence in the sun. The estrangement was fortified by an
abiding sense of injustice, arising from the refusal of the Olympians
ever to defend, to retract, to admit themselves in the wrong, or to
accept similar concessions on our part. For instance, when I flung the
cat out of an upper window (though I did it from no ill-feeling, and
it didn’t hurt the cat), I was ready, after a moment’s reflection, to
own I was wrong, as a gentleman should. But was the matter allowed to
end there? I trow not. Again, when Harold was locked up in his room
all day, for assault and battery upon a neighbour’s pig—an action he
would have scorned: being indeed on the friendliest terms with the
porker in question—there was no handsome expression of regret on the
discovery of the real culprit. What Harold had felt was not so much
the imprisonment—indeed, he had very soon escaped by the window,
with assistance from his allies, and had only gone back in time for his
release—as the Olympian habit. A word would have set all right; but of
course that word was never spoken.

Well! The Olympians are all past and gone. Somehow the sun does not
seem to shine so brightly as it used; the trackless meadows of old time
have shrunk and dwindled away to a few poor acres. A saddening doubt,
a dull suspicion, creeps over me. _Et in Arcadia ego_—I certainly did
once inhabit Arcady. Can it be that I also have become an Olympian?

[Illustration]




A HOLIDAY


THE masterful wind was up and out, shouting and chasing, the lord of
the morning. Poplars swayed and tossed with a roaring swish; dead
leaves sprang aloft, and whirled into space; and all the clear-swept
heaven seemed to thrill with sound like a great harp. It was one
of the first awakenings of the year. The earth stretched herself,
smiling in her sleep; and everything leapt and pulsed to the stir of
the giant’s movement. With us it was a whole holiday; the occasion a
birthday—it matters not whose. Some one of us had had presents, and
pretty conventional speeches, and had glowed with that sense of heroism
which is no less sweet that nothing has been done to deserve it. But
the holiday was for all, the rapture of awakening Nature for all, the
various outdoor joys of puddles and sun and hedge-breaking for all.
Colt-like I ran through the meadows, frisking happy heels in the face
of Nature laughing responsive. Above, the sky was bluest of the blue;
wide pools left by the winter’s floods flashed the colour back, true
and brilliant; and the soft air thrilled with the germinating touch
that seems to kindle something in my own small person as well as in
the rash primrose already lurking in sheltered haunts. Out into the
brimming sun-bathed world I sped, free of lessons, free of discipline
and correction, for one day at least. My legs ran of themselves, and
though I heard my name called faint and shrill behind, there was no
stopping for me. It was only Harold, I concluded, and his legs, though
shorter than mine, were good for a longer spurt than this. Then I heard
it called again, but this time more faintly, with a pathetic break in
the middle; and I pulled up short, recognising Charlotte’s plaintive
note.

She panted up anon, and dropped on the turf beside me. Neither had any
desire for talk; the glow and the glory of existing on this perfect
morning were satisfaction full and sufficient.

‘Where’s Harold?’ I asked presently.

‘Oh, he’s just playin’ muffin-man, as usual,’ said Charlotte with
petulance. ‘Fancy wanting to be a muffin-man on a whole holiday!’

It was a strange craze, certainly; but Harold, who invented his own
games and played them without assistance, always stuck staunchly to
a new fad, till he had worn it quite out. Just at present he was a
muffin-man, and day and night he went through passages and up and down
staircases, ringing a noiseless bell and offering phantom muffins to
invisible wayfarers. It sounds a poor sort of sport; and yet—to pass
along busy streets of your own building, for ever ringing an imaginary
bell and offering airy muffins of your own make to a bustling thronging
crowd of your own creation—there were points about the game, it cannot
be denied, though it seemed scarce in harmony with this radiant
wind-swept morning!

‘And Edward, where is he?’ I questioned again.

‘He’s coming along by the road,’ said Charlotte. ‘He’ll be crouching in
the ditch when we get there, and he’s going to be a grizzly bear and
spring out on us, only you mustn’t say I told you, ’cos it’s to be a
surprise.’

[Illustration: “‘WHERE’S HAROLD?’ I ASKED PRESENTLY. ‘OH, HE’S JUST
PLAYIN’ MUFFIN-MAN AS USUAL.’”]

‘All right,’ I said magnanimously. ‘Come on and let’s be surprised.’
But I could not help feeling that on this day of days even a grizzly
felt misplaced and common.

Sure enough an undeniable bear sprang out on us as we dropped into the
road; then ensued shrieks, growlings, revolver-shots, and unrecorded
heroisms, till Edward condescended at last to roll over and die,
bulking large and grim, an unmitigated grizzly. It was an understood
thing, that whoever took upon himself to be a bear must eventually die,
sooner or later, even if he were the eldest born; else, life would have
been all strife and carnage, and the Age of Acorns have displaced our
hard-won civilisation. This little affair concluded with satisfaction
to all parties concerned, we rambled along the road, picking up the
defaulting Harold by the way, muffinless now and in his right and
social mind.

‘What would you do?’ asked Charlotte presently—the book of the moment
always dominating her thoughts until it was sucked dry and cast
aside,—‘What would you do if you saw two lions in the road, one on each
side, and you didn’t know if they was loose or if they was chained up?’

‘Do?’ shouted Edward valiantly, ‘I should—I should—I should—’ His
boastful accents died away into a mumble: ‘Dunno what I should do.’

‘Shouldn’t do anything,’ I observed after consideration; and, really,
it would be difficult to arrive at a wiser conclusion.

‘If it came to _doing_,’ remarked Harold reflectively, ‘the lions would
do all the doing there was to do, wouldn’t they?’

‘But if they was _good_ lions,’ rejoined Charlotte, ‘they would do as
they would be done by.’

‘Ah, but how are you to know a good lion from a bad one?’ said Edward.
‘The books don’t tell you at all, and the lions ain’t marked any
different.’

‘Why, there aren’t any good lions,’ said Harold hastily.

‘O yes, there are, heaps and heaps,’ contradicted Edward. ‘Nearly all
the lions in the story-books are good lions. There was Androcles’ lion,
and St. Jerome’s lion, and—and—and the Lion and the Unicorn——’

‘He beat the Unicorn,’ observed Harold dubiously, ‘all round the town.’

‘That _proves_ he was a good lion,’ cried Edward triumphantly. ‘But the
question is, how are you to tell ’em when you see ’em?’

‘_I_ should ask Martha,’ said Harold of the simple creed.

Edward snorted contemptuously, then turned to Charlotte. ‘Look here,’
he said; ‘let’s play at lions, anyhow, and I’ll run on to that corner
and be a lion,—I’ll be two lions, one on each side of the road,—and
you’ll come along, and you won’t know whether I’m chained up or not,
and that’ll be the fun!’

‘No, thank you,’ said Charlotte firmly; ‘you’ll be chained up till I’m
quite close to you, and then you’ll be loose, and you’ll tear me in
pieces, and make my frock all dirty, and p’raps you’ll hurt me as well.
_I_ know your lions!’

‘No, I won’t, I swear I won’t,’ protested Edward. ‘I’ll be quite a new
lion this time—something you can’t even imagine.’ And he raced off to
his post. Charlotte hesitated—then she went timidly on, at each step
growing less Charlotte, the mummer of a minute, and more the anxious
Pilgrim of all time. The lion’s wrath waxed terrible at her approach;
his roaring filled the startled air. I waited until they were both
thoroughly absorbed, and then I slipped through the hedge out of the
trodden highway, into the vacant meadow spaces. It was not that I was
unsociable, nor that I knew Edward’s lions to the point of satiety;
but the passion and the call of the divine morning were high in my
blood. Earth to earth! That was the frank note, the joyous summons of
the day; and they could not but jar and seem artificial, these human
discussions and pretences, when boon nature, reticent no more, was
singing that full-throated song of hers that thrills and claims control
of every fibre. The air was wine, the moist earth-smell wine, the
lark’s song, the wafts from the cow-shed at top of the field, the pant
and smoke of a distant train—all were wine—or song, was it? or odour,
this unity they all blent into? I had no words then to describe it,
that earth-effluence of which I was so conscious; nor, indeed, have I
found words since. I ran sideways, shouting; I dug glad heels into the
squelching soil; I splashed diamond showers from puddles with a stick;
I hurled clods skywards at random, and presently I somehow found myself
singing. The words were mere nonsense—irresponsible babble; the tune
was an improvisation, a weary, unrhythmic thing of rise and fall: and
yet it seemed to me a genuine utterance, and just at that moment the
one thing fitting and right and perfect. Humanity would have rejected
it with scorn. Nature, everywhere singing in the same key, recognised
and accepted it without a flicker of dissent.

All the time the hearty wind was calling to me companionably from where
he swung and bellowed in the tree-tops. ‘Take me for guide to-day,’ he
seemed to plead. ‘Other holidays you have tramped it in the track of
the stolid, unswerving sun; a belated truant, you have dragged a weary
foot homeward with only a pale, expressionless moon for company. To-day
why not I, the trickster, the hypocrite? I who whip round corners and
bluster, relapse and evade, then rally and pursue! I can lead you the
best and rarest dance of any; for I am the strong capricious one,
the lord of misrule, and I alone am irresponsible and unprincipled,
and obey no law.’ And for me, I was ready enough to fall in with the
fellow’s humour; was not this a whole holiday? So we sheered off
together, arm-in-arm, so to speak; and with fullest confidence I took
the jigging, thwartwise course my chainless pilot laid for me.

A whimsical comrade I found him, ere he had done with me. Was it in
jest, or with some serious purpose of his own, that he brought me plump
upon a pair of lovers, silent, face to face o’er a discreet unwinking
stile? As a rule this sort of thing struck me as the most pitiful
tomfoolery. Two calves rubbing noses through a gate were natural and
right and within the order of things; but that human beings, with
salient interests and active pursuits beckoning them on from every
side, could thus—! Well, it was a thing to hurry past, shamed of face,
and think on no more. But this morning everything I met seemed to be
accounted for and set in tune by that same magical touch in the air;
and it was with a certain surprise that I found myself regarding these
fatuous ones with kindliness instead of contempt, as I rambled by,
unheeded of them. There was indeed some reconciling influence abroad,
which could bring the like antics into harmony with bud and growth and
the frolic air.

A puff on the right cheek from my wilful companion sent me off at a
fresh angle, and presently I came in sight of the village church,
sitting solitary within its circle of elms. From forth the vestry
window projected two small legs, gyrating, hungry for foothold, with
larceny—not to say sacrilege—in their every wriggle: a godless sight
for a supporter of the Establishment. Though the rest was hidden, I
knew the legs well enough; they were usually attached to the body of
Bill Saunders, the peerless bad boy of the village. Bill’s coveted
booty, too, I could easily guess at that; it came from the Vicar’s
store of biscuits, kept (as I knew) in a cupboard along with his
official trappings. For a moment I hesitated; then I passed on my way.
I protest I was not on Bill’s side; but then, neither was I on the
Vicar’s, and there was something in this immoral morning which seemed
to say that perhaps, after all, Bill had as much right to the biscuits
as the Vicar, and would certainly enjoy them better; and anyhow it was
a disputable point, and no business of mine. Nature, who had accepted
me for ally, cared little who had the world’s biscuits, and assuredly
was not going to let any friend of hers waste his time in playing
policeman for Society.

He was tugging at me anew, my insistent guide; and I felt sure, as
I rambled off in his wake, that he had more holiday matter to show
me. And so, indeed, he had; and all of it was to the same lawless
tune. Like a black pirate flag on the blue ocean of air, a hawk hung
ominous; then, plummet-wise, dropped to the hedgerow, whence there
rose, thin and shrill, a piteous voice of squealing. By the time I got
there a whisk of feathers on the turf—like scattered playbills—was all
that remained to tell of the tragedy just enacted. Yet Nature smiled
and sang on, pitiless, gay, impartial. To her, who took no sides, there
was every bit as much to be said for the hawk as for the chaffinch.
Both were her children, and she would show no preferences.

Further on, a hedgehog lay dead athwart the path—nay, more than dead;
decadent, distinctly; a sorry sight for one that had known the fellow
in more bustling circumstances Nature might at least have paused to
shed one tear over this rough-jacketed little son of hers, for his
wasted aims, his cancelled ambitions, his whole career of usefulness
cut suddenly short. But not a bit of it! Jubilant as ever, her song
went bubbling on, and ‘Death-in-Life’—and again, ‘Life-in-Death,’ were
its alternate burdens. And looking round, and seeing the sheep-nibbled
heels of turnips that dotted the ground, their hearts eaten out of
them in frost-bound days now over and done, I seemed to discern,
faintly, a something of the stern meaning in her valorous chant.

My invisible companion was singing also, and seemed at times to be
chuckling softly to himself,—doubtless at thought of the strange
new lessons he was teaching me; perhaps, too, at a special bit of
waggishness he had still in store. For when at last he grew weary of
such insignificant earth-bound company, he deserted me at a certain
spot I knew; then dropped, subsided, and slunk away into nothingness.
I raised my eyes, and before me, grim and lichened, stood the ancient
whipping-post of the village; its sides fretted with the initials of
a generation that scorned its mute lesson, but still clipped by the
stout rusty shackles that had tethered the wrists of such of that
generation’s ancestors as had dared to mock at order and law. Had I
been an infant Sterne, here was a grand chance for sentimental output!
As things were, I could only hurry homewards, my moral tail well
between my legs, with an uneasy feeling, as I glanced back over my
shoulder, that there was more in this chance than met the eye.

And outside our gate I found Charlotte, alone and crying. Edward, it
seemed, had persuaded her to hide, in the full expectation of being
duly found and ecstatically pounced upon; then he had caught sight of
the butcher’s cart, and, forgetting his obligations, had rushed off for
a ride. Harold, it further appeared, greatly coveting tadpoles, and
top-heavy with the eagerness of possession, had fallen into the pond.
This, in itself, was nothing; but on attempting to sneak in by the
back-door, he had rendered up his duckweed-bedabbled person into the
hands of an aunt, and had been promptly sent off to bed; and this, on
a holiday, was very much. The moral of the whipping-post was working
itself out; and I was not in the least surprised when, on reaching
home, I was seized upon and accused of doing something I had never even
thought of. And my frame of mind was such, that I could only wish most
heartily that I had done it.




A WHITE-WASHED UNCLE


IN our small lives that day was eventful when another uncle was to
come down from town, and submit his character and qualifications
(albeit unconsciously) to our careful criticism. Earlier uncles had
been weighed in the balance, and—alas!—found grievously wanting. There
was Uncle Thomas—a failure from the first. Not that his disposition
was malevolent, nor were his habits such as to unfit him for decent
society; but his rooted conviction seemed to be that the reason
of a child’s existence was to serve as a butt for senseless adult
jokes—or what, from the accompanying guffaws of laughter, appeared
to be intended for jokes. Now, we were anxious that he should have
a perfectly fair trial; so in the tool-house, between breakfast and
lessons, we discussed and examined all his witticisms one by one,
calmly, critically, dispassionately. It was no good: we could not
discover any salt in them. And as only a genuine gift of humour could
have saved Uncle Thomas—for he pretended to naught besides—he was
reluctantly writ down a hopeless impostor.

Uncle George—the youngest—was distinctly more promising. He accompanied
us cheerily round the establishment—suffered himself to be introduced
to each of the cows—held out the right hand of fellowship to the
pig—and even hinted that a pair of pink-eyed Himalayan rabbits might
arrive—unexpectedly—from town some day. We were just considering
whether in this fertile soil an apparently accidental remark on the
solid qualities of guinea-pigs or ferrets might haply blossom and
bring forth fruit, when our governess appeared on the scene. Uncle
George’s manner at once underwent a complete and contemptible change.
His interest in rational topics seemed, ‘like a fountain’s sickening
pulse,’ to flag and ebb away; and though Miss Smedley’s ostensible
purpose was to take Selina for her usual walk, I can vouch for it that
Selina spent her morning ratting, along with the keeper’s boy and me;
while if Miss Smedley walked with any one, it would appear to have been
with Uncle George.

But, despicable as his conduct had been, he underwent no hasty
condemnation. The defection was discussed in all its bearings, but
it seemed sadly clear at last that this uncle must possess some
innate badness of character and fondness for low company. We who
from daily experience knew Miss Smedley like a book—were we not only
too well aware that she had neither accomplishments nor charms—no
characteristic, in fact, but an inbred viciousness of temper and
disposition? True, she knew the dates of the English kings by heart;
but how could that profit Uncle George, who, having passed into the
army, had ascended beyond the need of useful information? Our bows and
arrows, on the other hand, had been freely placed at his disposal;
and a soldier should not have hesitated in his choice a moment. No:
Uncle George had fallen from grace, and was unanimously damned. And
the non-arrival of the Himalayan rabbits was only another nail in his
coffin. Uncles, therefore, were just then a heavy and lifeless market,
and there was little inclination to deal. Still it was agreed that
Uncle William, who had just returned from India, should have as fair a
trial as the others; more especially as romantic possibilities might
well be embodied in one who had held the gorgeous East in fee.

Selina had kicked my shins—like the girl she is!—during a scuffle in
the passage, and I was still rubbing them with one hand when I found
that the uncle-on-approbation was half-heartedly shaking the other. A
florid, elderly man, quite unmistakably nervous, he let drop one grimy
paw after another, and, turning very red, with an awkward simulation
of heartiness, ‘Well, h’are y’all?’ he said, ‘Glad to see me, eh?’ As
we could hardly, in justice, be expected to have formed an opinion on
him at that early stage, we could but look at each other in silence;
which scarce served to relieve the tension of the situation. Indeed,
the cloud never really lifted during his stay. In talking things over
later, some one put forward the suggestion that he must at some time or
other have committed a stupendous crime. But I could not bring myself
to believe that the man, though evidently unhappy, was really guilty
of anything; and I caught him once or twice looking at us with evident
kindliness, though, seeing himself observed, he blushed and turned away
his head.

When at last the atmosphere was clear of his depressing influence, we
met despondently in the potato-cellar—all of us, that is, but Harold,
who had been told off to accompany his relative to the station; and the
feeling was unanimous, that, as an uncle, William could not be allowed
to pass. Selina roundly declared him a beast, pointing out that he
had not even got us a half-holiday; and, indeed, there seemed little
to do but to pass sentence. We were about to put it to the vote, when
Harold appeared on the scene; his red face, round eyes, and mysterious
demeanour, hinting at awful portents. Speechless he stood a space:
then, slowly drawing his hand from the pocket of his knickerbockers,
he displayed on a dirty palm one—two—three—four half-crowns! We could
but gaze—tranced, breathless, mute. Never had any of us seen, in the
aggregate, so much bullion before. Then Harold told his tale.

[Illustration: “WHEN AT LAST THE ATMOSPHERE WAS CLEAR OF HIS DEPRESSING
INFLUENCE, WE MET DESPONDENTLY IN THE POTATO-CELLAR”]

‘I took the old fellow to the station,’ he said, ‘and as we went
along I told him all about the stationmaster’s family, and how I had
seen the porter kissing our housemaid, and what a nice fellow he was,
with no airs or affectation about him, and anything I thought would
be of interest; but he didn’t seem to pay much attention, but walked
along puffing his cigar, and once I thought—I’m not certain, but I
_thought_—I heard him say, “Well, thank God, that’s over!” When we
got to the station he stopped suddenly, and said, “Hold on a minute!”
Then he shoved these into my hand in a frightened sort of way, and
said, “Look here, youngster! These are for you and the other kids. Buy
what you like—make little beasts of yourselves—only don’t tell the old
people, mind! Now cut away home!” So I cut.’

A solemn hush fell on the assembly, broken first by the small
Charlotte. ‘I didn’t know,’ she observed dreamily, ‘that there were
such good men anywhere in the world. I hope he’ll die to-night, for
then he’ll go straight to heaven!’ But the repentant Selina bewailed
herself with tears and sobs, refusing to be comforted; for that in her
haste she had called this white-souled relative a beast.

‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ said Edward, the master-mind, rising—as
he always did—to the situation: ‘We’ll christen the piebald pig after
him—the one that hasn’t got a name yet. And that’ll show we’re sorry
for our mistake!’

‘I—I christened that pig this morning,’ Harold guiltily confessed; ‘I
christened it after the curate. I’m very sorry—but he came and bowled
to me last night, after you others had all been sent to bed early—and
somehow I felt I _had_ to do it!’

‘Oh, but that doesn’t count,’ said Edward hastily; ‘because we weren’t
all there. We’ll take that christening off, and call it Uncle William.
And you can save up the curate for the next litter!’

And the motion being agreed to without a division, the House went into
Committee of Supply.

[Illustration]




ALARUMS AND EXCURSIONS


‘LET’S pretend,’ suggested Harold, ‘that we’re Cavaliers and
Roundheads; and _you_ be a Roundhead!’

‘O bother,’ I replied drowsily, ‘we pretended that yesterday; and it’s
not my turn to be a Roundhead, anyhow.’ The fact is, I was lazy, and
the call to arms fell on indifferent ears. We three younger ones were
stretched at length in the orchard. The sun was hot, the season merry
June, and never (I thought) had there been such wealth and riot of
buttercups throughout the lush grass. Green-and-gold was the dominant
key that day. Instead of active ‘pretence’ with its shouts and its
perspiration, how much better—I held—to lie at ease and pretend to
one’s self, in green and golden fancies, slipping the husk and passing,
a careless lounger, through a sleepy imaginary world all gold and
green! But the persistent Harold was not to be fobbed off.

[Illustration: “INSTEAD OF ACTIVE ‘PRETENCE’ WITH ITS SHOUTS AND ITS
PERSPIRATION, HOW MUCH BETTER—I HELD—TO LIE AT EASE AND PRETEND TO
ONE’S SELF, IN GREEN AND GOLDEN FANCIES”]

‘Well then,’ he began afresh, ‘let’s pretend we’re Knights of the Round
Table; and (with a rush) _I’ll_ be Lancelot!’

‘I won’t play unless I’m Lancelot,’ I said. I didn’t mean it really,
but the game of Knights always began with this particular contest.

‘O _please_,’ implored Harold. ‘You know when Edward’s here I never get
a chance of being Lancelot. I haven’t been Lancelot for weeks!’

Then I yielded gracefully. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’ll be Tristram.’

‘O, but you can’t,’ cried Harold again. ‘Charlotte has always been
Tristram. She won’t play unless she’s allowed to be Tristram! Be
somebody else this time.’

Charlotte said nothing, but breathed hard, looking straight before her.
The peerless hunter and harper was her special hero of romance, and
rather than see the part in less appreciative hands, she would have
gone back in tears to the stuffy schoolroom.

‘I don’t care,’ I said: ‘I’ll be anything. I’ll be Sir Kay. Come on!’

Then once more in this country’s story the mail-clad knights paced
through the greenwood shaw, questing adventure, redressing wrong; and
bandits, five to one, broke and fled discomfited to their caves. Once
more were damsels rescued, dragons disembowelled, and giants, in every
corner of the orchard, deprived of their already superfluous number of
heads; while Palomides the Saracen waited for us by the well, and Sir
Breuse Saunce Pité vanished in craven flight before the skilled spear
that was his terror and his bane. Once more the lists were dight in
Camelot, and all was gay with shimmer of silk and gold; the earth shook
with thunder of hooves, ash-staves flew in splinters, and the firmament
rang to the clash of sword on helm. The varying fortune of the day
swung doubtful—now on this side, now on that; till at last Lancelot,
grim and great, thrusting through the press, unhorsed Sir Tristram
(an easy task), and bestrode her, threatening doom; while the Cornish
knight, forgetting hard-won fame of old, cried piteously, ‘You’re
hurting me, I tell you! and you’re tearing my frock!’ Then it happed
that Sir Kay, hurtling to the rescue, stopped short in his stride,
catching sight suddenly, through apple-boughs, of a gleam of scarlet
afar off; while the confused tramp of many horses, mingled with talk
and laughter, was borne to the ears of his fellow-champions and himself.

‘What is it?’ inquired Tristram, sitting up and shaking out her curls;
while Lancelot forsook the clanging lists and trotted nimbly to the
boundary-hedge.

I stood spell-bound for a moment longer, and then, with a cry of
‘Soldiers!’ I was off to the hedge, Sir Tristram picking herself up and
scurrying after us.

Down the road they came, two and two, at an easy walk; scarlet flamed
in the eye, bits jingled and saddles squeaked delightfully; while the
men, in a halo of dust, smoked their short clays like the heroes they
were. In a swirl of intoxicating glory the troop clinked and clattered
by, while we shouted and waved, jumping up and down, and the big jolly
horsemen acknowledged the salute with easy condescension. The moment
they were past we were through the hedge and after them. Soldiers were
not the common stuff of everyday life. There had been nothing like
this since the winter before last, when on a certain afternoon—bare
of leaf and monochromatic in its hue of sodden fallow and frost-nipt
copse—suddenly the hounds had burst through the fence with their mellow
cry, and all the paddock was for the minute reverberant of thudding
hoof and dotted with glancing red. But this was better, since it could
only mean that blows and bloodshed were in the air.

‘Is there going to be a battle?’ panted Harold, hardly able to keep up
for excitement.

‘Of course there is,’ I replied. ‘We’re just in time. Come on!’

Perhaps I ought to have known better; and yet——? The pigs and poultry,
with whom we chiefly consorted, could instruct us little concerning
the peace that lapped in these latter days our seagirt realm. In the
schoolroom we were just now dallying with the Wars of the Roses;
and did not legends of the country-side inform us how cavaliers had
once galloped up and down these very lanes from their quarters in the
village? Here, now, were soldiers unmistakable; and if their business
was not fighting, what was it? Sniffing the joy of battle, we followed
hard in their tracks.

‘Won’t Edward be sorry,’ puffed Harold, ‘that he’s begun that beastly
Latin?’

It did, indeed, seem hard. Edward, the most martial spirit of us all,
was drearily conjugating _amo_ (of all verbs!) between four walls,
while Selina, who ever thrilled ecstatic to a red coat, was struggling
with the uncouth German tongue. ‘Age,’ I reflected, ‘carries its
penalties.’

It was a grievous disappointment to us that the troop passed through
the village unmolested. Every cottage, I pointed out to my companions,
ought to have been loopholed, and strongly held. But no opposition
was offered to the soldiers who, indeed, conducted themselves with a
recklessness and a want of precaution that seemed simply criminal.

At the last cottage a transitory gleam of common sense flickered
across me, and, turning on Charlotte, I sternly ordered her back. The
small maiden, docile but exceedingly dolorous, dragged reluctant feet
homewards, heavy at heart that she was to behold no stout fellows slain
that day; but Harold and I held steadily on, expecting every instant to
see the environing hedges crackle and spit forth the leaden death.

‘Will they be Indians?’ asked my brother (meaning the enemy) ‘or
Roundheads, or what?’

I reflected. Harold always required direct straightforward answers—not
faltering suppositions.

‘They won’t be Indians,’ I replied at last; ‘nor yet Roundheads. There
haven’t been any Roundheads seen about here for a long time. They’ll be
Frenchmen.’

Harold’s face fell. ‘All right,’ he said: ‘Frenchmen’ll do; but I did
hope they’d be Indians.’

‘If they were going to be Indians,’ I explained, ‘I—I don’t think I’d
go on. Because when Indians take you prisoner they scalp you first,
and then burn you at the stake. But Frenchmen don’t do that sort of
thing.’

‘Are you quite sure?’ asked Harold doubtfully.

‘Quite,’ I replied. ‘Frenchmen only shut you up in a thing called the
Bastille; and then you get a file sent in to you in a loaf of bread,
and saw the bars through, and slide down a rope, and they all fire at
you—but they don’t hit you—and you run down to the seashore as hard as
you can, and swim off to a British frigate, and there you are!’

Harold brightened up again. The programme was rather attractive. ‘If
they try to take us prisoner,’ he said, ‘we—we won’t run, will we?’

Meanwhile, the craven foe was a long time showing himself; and we were
reaching strange outland country, uncivilised, wherein lions might be
expected to prowl at nightfall. I had a stitch in my side, and both
Harold’s stockings had come down. Just as I was beginning to have
gloomy doubts of the proverbial courage of Frenchmen, the officer
called out something, the men closed up, and, breaking into a trot, the
troops—already far ahead—vanished out of our sight. With a sinking at
the heart, I began to suspect we had been fooled.

‘Are they charging?’ cried Harold, very weary, but rallying gamely.

‘I think not,’ I replied doubtfully. ‘When there’s going to be a
charge, the officer always makes a speech, and then they draw their
swords and the trumpets blow, and——but let’s try a short cut. We may
catch them up yet.’

So we struck across the fields and into another road, and pounded down
that, and then over more fields, panting, down-hearted, yet hoping for
the best. The sun went in, and a thin drizzle began to fall; we were
muddy, breathless, almost dead-beat; but we blundered on, till at last
we struck a road more brutally, more callously unfamiliar than any
road I ever looked upon. Not a hint nor a sign of friendly direction
or assistance on the dogged white face of it! There was no longer any
disguising it: we were hopelessly lost. The small rain continued
steadily, the evening began to come on. Really there are moments when
a fellow is justified in crying; and I would have cried too, if Harold
had not been there. That right-minded child regarded an elder brother
as a veritable god; and I could see that he felt himself as secure
as if a whole Brigade of Guards had hedged him round with protecting
bayonets. But I dreaded sore lest he should begin again with his
questions.

As I gazed in dumb appeal on the face of unresponsive nature, the sound
of nearing wheels sent a pulse of hope through my being: increasing
to rapture as I recognised in the approaching vehicle the familiar
carriage of the old doctor. If ever a god emerged from a machine, it
was when this heaven-sent friend, recognising us, stopped and jumped
out with a cheery hail. Harold rushed up to him at once. ‘Have you been
there?’ he cried. ‘Was it a jolly fight? who beat? were there many
people killed?’

The doctor appeared puzzled. I briefly explained the situation.

‘I see,’ said the doctor, looking grave and twisting his face this
way and that. ‘Well, the fact is, there isn’t going to be any battle
to-day. It’s been put off, on account of the change in the weather.
You will have due notice of the renewal of hostilities. And now you’d
better jump in and I’ll drive you home. You’ve been running a fine rig!
Why, you might have both been taken and shot as spies!’

This special danger had never even occurred to us. The thrill of it
accentuated the cosy homelike feeling of the cushions we nestled
into as we rolled homewards. The doctor beguiled the journey with
blood-curdling narratives of personal adventure in the tented field, he
having followed the profession of arms (so it seemed) in every quarter
of the globe. Time, the destroyer of all things beautiful, subsequently
revealed the baselessness of these legends; but what of that? There
are higher things than truth; and we were almost reconciled, by the
time we were put down at our gate, to the fact that the battle had been
postponed.




THE FINDING OF THE PRINCESS


IT was the day I was promoted to a toothbrush. The girls, irrespective
of age, had been thus distinguished some time before; why, we boys
could never rightly understand, except that it was part and parcel of
a system of studied favouritism on behalf of creatures both physically
inferior and (as was shown by a fondness for tale-bearing) of weaker
mental fibre to us boys. It was not that we yearned after these
strange instruments in themselves. Edward, indeed, applied his to the
scrubbing-out of his squirrel’s cage, and for personal use, when a
superior eye was grim on him, borrowed Harold’s or mine, indifferently.
But the nimbus of distinction that clung to them—that we coveted
exceedingly. What more, indeed, was there to ascend to, before the
remote, but still possible, razor and strop?

Perhaps the exaltation had mounted to my head; or nature and the
perfect morning joined to hint at disaffection. Anyhow, having
breakfasted, and triumphantly repeated the collect I had broken down
in the last Sunday—’twas one without rhythm or alliteration: a most
objectionable collect—having achieved thus much, the small natural
man in me rebelled, and I vowed, as I straddled and spat about the
stable-yard in feeble imitation of the coachman, that lessons might go
to the Inventor of them. It was only geography that morning, any way:
and the practical thing was worth any quantity of bookish theoric. As
for me, I was going on my travels, and imports and exports, populations
and capitals, might very well wait while I explored the breathing
coloured world outside.

True, a fellow-rebel was wanted; and Harold might, as a rule, have
been counted on with certainty. But just then Harold was very proud.
The week before he had ‘gone into tables,’ and had been endowed with
a new slate, having a miniature sponge attached wherewith we washed
the faces of Charlotte’s dolls, thereby producing an unhealthy
pallor which struck terror into the child’s heart, always timorous
regarding epidemic visitations. As to ‘tables,’ nobody knew exactly
what they were, least of all Harold; but it was a step over the heads
of the rest, and therefore a subject for self-adulation and—generally
speaking—airs; so that Harold, hugging his slate and his chains, was
out of the question now. In such a matter, girls were worse than
useless, as wanting the necessary tenacity of will and contempt for
self-constituted authority. So eventually I slipped through the hedge a
solitary protestant, and issued forth on the lane what time the rest of
the civilised world was sitting down to lessons.

The scene was familiar enough; and yet, this morning, how different
it all seemed! The act, with its daring, tinted everything with new
strange hues; affecting the individual with a sort of bruised feeling
just below the pit of the stomach, that was intensified whenever his
thoughts flew back to the ink-stained smelly schoolroom. And could
this be really me? or was I only contemplating, from the schoolroom
aforesaid, some other jolly young mutineer, faring forth under the
genial sun? Anyhow, here was the friendly well, in its old place,
half-way up the lane. Hither the yoke-shouldering village-folk were
wont to come to fill their clinking buckets; when the drippings made
worms of wet in the thick dust of the road. They had flat wooden
crosses inside each pail, which floated on the top and (we were
instructed) served to prevent the water from slopping over. We used
to wonder by what magic this strange principle worked, and who first
invented the crosses, and whether he got a peerage for it. But indeed
the well was a centre of mystery, for a hornet’s nest was somewhere
hard by, and the very thought was fearsome. Wasps we knew well
and disdained, storming them in their fastnesses. But these great
Beasts, vestured in angry orange, three stings from which—so ’twas
averred—would kill a horse, these were of a different kidney, and
their dreadful drone suggested prudence and retreat. At this time
neither villagers nor hornets encroached on the stillness: lessons,
apparently, pervaded all nature. So, after dabbling awhile in the
well—what boy has ever passed a bit of water without messing in it?—I
scrambled through the hedge, shunning the hornet-haunted side, and
struck into the silence of the copse.

If the lane had been deserted, this was loneliness become personal.
Here mystery lurked and peeped; here brambles caught and held you
with a purpose of their own; here saplings whipped your face with
human spite. The copse, too, proved vaster in extent, more direfully
drawn out, than one would ever have guessed from its frontage on the
lane: and I was really glad when at last the wood opened and sloped
down to a streamlet brawling forth into the sunlight. By this cheery
companion I wandered along, conscious of little but that Nature, in
providing store of water-rats, had thoughtfully furnished provender
of right-sized stones. Rapids, also, there were, telling of canoes
and portages—crinkling bays and inlets—caves for pirates and hidden
treasures—the wise Dame had forgotten nothing—till at last, after what
lapse of time I know not, my further course, though not the stream’s,
was barred by some six feet of stout wire netting, stretched from side
to side just where a thick hedge, arching till it touched, forbade all
further view.

The excitement of the thing was becoming thrilling. A Black Flag must
surely be fluttering close by? Here was most plainly a malignant
contrivance of the Pirates, designed to baffle our gun-boats when we
dashed up-stream to shell them from their lair! A gun-boat, indeed,
might well have hesitated, so stout was the netting, so close the
hedge. But I spied where a rabbit was wont to pass, close down by the
water’s edge; where a rabbit could go a boy could follow, howbeit
stomach-wise and with one leg in the stream; so the passage was
achieved, and I stood inside, safe but breathless at the sight.

Gone was the brambled waste, gone the flickering tangle of woodland.
Instead, terrace after terrace of shaven sward, stone-edged,
urn-cornered, stepped delicately down to where the stream, now tamed
and educated, passed from one to another marble basin, in which on
occasion gleams of red hinted at gold-fish poised among the spreading
water-lilies. The scene lay silent and slumbrous in the brooding
noon-day sun: the drowsing peacock squatted humped on the lawn, no fish
leaped in the pools, no bird declared himself from the trim secluding
hedges. Self-confessed it was here, then, at last, the Garden of Sleep!

Two things, in those old days, I held in especial distrust: gamekeepers
and gardeners. Seeing, however, no baleful apparitions of either
quality, I pursued my way between rich flower-beds, in search of the
necessary Princess. Conditions declared her presence patently as
trumpets; without this centre such surroundings could not exist. A
pavilion, gold-topped, wreathed with lush jessamine, beckoned with
a special significance over close-set shrubs. There, if anywhere,
She should be enshrined. Instinct, and some knowledge of the habits
of princesses, triumphed; for (indeed) there She was! In no tranced
repose, however, but laughingly, struggling to disengage her hand from
the grasp of a grown-up man who occupied the marble bench with her.
(As to age, I suppose now that the two swung in respective scales that
pivoted on twenty. But children heed no minor distinctions. To them,
the inhabited world is composed of the two main divisions: children
and upgrown people; the latter in no way superior to the former—only
hopelessly different. These two, then, belonged to the grown-up
section.) I paused, thinking it strange they should prefer seclusion
when there were fish to be caught, and butterflies to hunt in the sun
outside; and as I cogitated thus, the grown-up man caught sight of me.

‘Hallo, sprat!’ he said with some abruptness; ‘Where do you spring
from?’

‘I came up the stream,’ I explained politely and comprehensively, ‘and
I was only looking for the Princess.’

‘Then you are a water-baby,’ he replied. ‘And what do you think of the
Princess, now you’ve found her?’

‘I think she is lovely,’ I said (and doubtless I was right, having
never learned to flatter). ‘But she’s wide-awake, so I suppose somebody
has kissed her!’

This very natural deduction moved the grown-up man to laughter; but the
Princess, turning red and jumping up, declared that it was time for
lunch.

‘Come along, then,’ said the grown-up man; ‘and you too, water-baby.
Come and have something solid. You must want it.’

I accompanied them without any feeling of false delicacy. The world,
as known to me, was spread with food each several mid-day, and the
particular table one sat at seemed a matter of no importance. The
palace was very sumptuous and beautiful, just what a palace ought
to be; and we were met by a stately lady, rather more grown-up than
the Princess—apparently her mother. My friend the Man was very kind,
and introduced me as the Captain, saying I had just run down from
Aldershot. I didn’t know where Aldershot was, but I had no manner of
doubt that he was perfectly right. As a rule, indeed, grown-up people
are fairly correct on matters of fact; it is in the higher gift of
imagination that they are so sadly to seek.

The lunch was excellent and varied. Another gentleman in beautiful
clothes—a lord presumably—lifted me into a high carved chair, and stood
behind it, brooding over me like a Providence. I endeavoured to explain
who I was and where I had come from, and to impress the company with
my own toothbrush and Harold’s tables; but either they were stupid—or
is it a characteristic of Fairyland that every one laughs at the
most ordinary remarks? My friend the Man said good-naturedly, ‘All
right, Water-baby; you came up the stream, and that’s good enough for
us.’ The lord—a reserved sort of man, I thought—took no share in the
conversation.

After lunch I walked on the terrace with the Princess and my friend the
Man, and was very proud. And I told him what I was going to be, and
he told me what he was going to be; and then I remarked, ‘I suppose
you two are going to get married?’ He only laughed, after the Fairy
fashion. ‘Because if you aren’t,’ I added, ‘you really ought to’:
meaning only that a man who discovered a Princess, living in the right
sort of Palace like this, and didn’t marry her there and then, was
false to all recognised tradition.

They laughed again, and my friend suggested I should go down to the
pond and look at the gold-fish, while they went for a stroll. I was
sleepy, and assented; but before they left me, the grown-up man
put two half-crowns in my hand, for the purpose, he explained, of
treating the other water-babies. I was so touched by this crowning
mark of friendship that I nearly cried; and I thought much more of his
generosity than of the fact that the Princess, ere she moved away,
stooped down and kissed me.

I watched them disappear down the path—how naturally arms seem to go
round waists in Fairyland!—and then, my cheek on the cool marble,
lulled by the trickle of water, I slipped into dreamland out of real
and magic world alike. When I woke, the sun had gone in, a chill wind
set all the leaves a-whispering, and the peacock on the lawn was
harshly calling up the rain. A wild unreasoning panic possessed me,
and I sped out of the garden like a guilty thing, wriggled through
the rabbit-run, and threaded my doubtful way homewards, hounded by
nameless terrors. The half-crowns happily remained solid and real to
the touch; but could I hope to bear such treasure safely through the
brigand-haunted wood? It was a dirty, weary little object that entered
its home, at nightfall, by the unassuming aid of the scullery-window:
and only to be sent tealess to bed seemed infinite mercy to him.
Officially tealess, that is; for, as was usual after such escapades,
a sympathetic housemaid, coming delicately by back-stairs, stayed him
with chunks of cold pudding and condolence, till his small skin was
tight as any drum. Then, nature asserting herself, I passed into the
comforting kingdom of sleep, where, a golden carp of fattest build, I
oared it in translucent waters with a new half-crown snug under right
fin and left; and thrust up a nose through water-lily leaves to be
kissed by a rose-flushed Princess.

[Illustration: “... AND THEN, MY CHEEK ON THE COOL MARBLE, LULLED BY
THE TRICKLE OF WATER, I SLIPPED INTO DREAMLAND OUT OF REAL AND MAGIC
WORLD ALIKE”]




SAWDUST AND SIN


A BELT of rhododendrons grew close down to one side of our pond; and
along the edge of it many things flourished rankly. If you crept
through the undergrowth and crouched by the water’s rim, it was easy—if
your imagination were in healthy working order—to transport yourself
in a trice to the heart of a tropical forest. Overhead the monkeys
chattered, parrots flashed from bough to bough, strange large blossoms
shone all round you, and the push and rustle of great beasts moving
unseen thrilled you deliciously. And if you lay down with your nose
an inch or two from the water, it was not long ere the old sense of
proportion vanished clean away. The glittering insects that darted to
and fro on its surface became sea-monsters dire, the gnats that hung
above them swelled to albatrosses, and the pond itself stretched out
into a vast inland sea, whereon a navy might ride secure, and whence at
any moment the hairy scalp of a sea-serpent might be seen to emerge.

It is impossible, however, to play at tropical forests properly, when
homely accents of the human voice intrude; and all my hopes of seeing
a tiger seized by a crocodile while drinking (_vide_ picture-books,
_passim_) vanished abruptly, and earth resumed her old dimensions,
when the sound of Charlotte’s prattle somewhere hard by broke in on my
primæval seclusion. Looking out from the bushes, I saw her trotting
towards an open space of lawn the other side the pond, chattering to
herself in her accustomed fashion, a doll tucked under either arm,
and her brow knit with care. Propping up her double burthen against a
friendly stump, she sat down in front of them, as full of worry and
anxiety as a Chancellor on a Budget night.

Her victims, who stared resignedly in front of them, were recognisable
as Jerry and Rosa. Jerry hailed from far Japan: his hair was straight
and black, his one garment cotton of a simple blue; and his reputation
was distinctly bad. Jerome was his proper name, from his supposed
likeness to the holy man who hung in a print on the staircase; though
a shaven crown was the only thing in common ’twixt Western saint and
Eastern sinner. Rosa was typical British, from her flaxen poll to the
stout calves she displayed so liberally; and in character she was of
the blameless order of those who have not yet been found out.

I suspected Jerry from the first. There was a latent devilry in his
slant eyes as he sat there moodily; and knowing what he was capable of,
I scented trouble in store for Charlotte. Rosa I was not so sure about;
she sat demurely and upright, and looked far away into the tree-tops in
a visionary, world-forgetting sort of way; yet the prim purse of her
mouth was somewhat overdone, and her eyes glittered unnaturally.

‘Now, I’m going to begin where I left off,’ said Charlotte, regardless
of stops, and thumping the turf with her fist excitedly: ‘and you must
pay attention, ’cos this is a treat, to have a story told you before
you’re put to bed. Well, so the White Rabbit scuttled off down the
passage and Alice hoped he’d come back ’cos he had a waistcoat on and
her flamingo flew up a tree—but we haven’t got to that part yet, you
must wait a minute, and—where had I got to?’

[Illustration: “‘NOW WE’LL GO ON,’ BEGAN CHARLOTTE ONCE MORE”]

Jerry only remained passive until Charlotte had got well under way, and
then began to heel over quietly in Rosa’s direction. His head fell on
her plump shoulder, causing her to start nervously.

Charlotte seized and shook him with vigour. ‘O Jerry,’ she cried
piteously, ‘if you’re not going to be good, how ever shall I tell you
my story?’

Jerry’s face was injured innocence itself. ‘Blame if you like, Madam,’
he seemed to say, ‘the eternal laws of gravitation, but not a helpless
puppet, who is also an orphan and a stranger in the land.’

‘Now we’ll go on,’ began Charlotte once more. ‘So she got into the
garden at last—I’ve left out a lot but you won’t care, I’ll tell you
some other time—and they were all playing croquet, and that’s where the
flamingo comes in, and the Queen shouted out, “Off with her head!”’

At this point Jerry collapsed forward, suddenly and completely, his
bald pate between his knees. Charlotte was not very angry this time.
The sudden development of tragedy in the story had evidently been too
much for the poor fellow. She straightened him out, wiped his nose,
and, after trying him in various positions, to which he refused to
adapt himself, she propped him against the shoulder of the (apparently)
unconscious Rosa. Then my eyes were opened, and the full measure of
Jerry’s infamy became apparent. This, then, was what he had been
playing up for! The rascal had designs, had he? I resolved to keep him
under close observation.

‘If you’d been in the garden,’ went on Charlotte reproachfully, ‘and
flopped down like that when the Queen said “Off with his head!” she’d
have offed with your head; but Alice wasn’t that sort of girl at all.
She just said, “I’m not afraid of you, you’re nothing but a pack of
cards”—O dear! I’ve got to the end already, and I hadn’t begun hardly!
I never can make my stories last out! Never mind, I’ll tell you another
one.’

Jerry didn’t seem to care, now he had gained his end, whether the
stories lasted out or not. He was nestling against Rosa’s plump form
with a look of satisfaction that was simply idiotic; and one arm had
disappeared from view—was it round her waist? Rosa’s natural blush
seemed deeper than usual, her head inclined shyly—it must have been
round her waist.

‘If it wasn’t so near your bedtime,’ continued Charlotte reflectively,
‘I’d tell you a nice story with a bogy in it. But you’d be frightened,
and you’d dream of bogies all night. So I’ll tell you one about a White
Bear, only you mustn’t scream when the bear says ‘Wow,’ like I used to,
’cos he’s a good bear really——’

Here Rosa fell flat on her back in the deadest of faints. Her limbs
were rigid, her eyes glassy. What had Jerry been doing? It must have
been something very bad, for her to take on like that. I scrutinised
him carefully, while Charlotte ran to comfort the damsel. He appeared
to be whistling a tune and regarding the scenery. If I only possessed
Jerry’s command of feature, I thought to myself, half regretfully, I
would never be found out in anything.

‘It’s all your fault, Jerry,’ said Charlotte reproachfully, when the
lady had been restored to consciousness: ‘Rosa’s as good as gold except
when you make her wicked. I’d put you in the corner, only a stump
hasn’t got a corner—wonder why that is? Thought everything had corners.
Never mind, you’ll have to sit with your face to the wall—_so_. Now you
can sulk if you like!’

Jerry seemed to hesitate a moment between the bliss of indulgence in
sulks with a sense of injury, and the imperious summons of beauty
waiting to be wooed at his elbow; then, overmastered by his passion, he
fell sideways across Rosa’s lap. One arm stuck stiffly upwards, as in
passionate protestation; his amorous countenance was full of entreaty.
Rosa hesitated—wavered—yielded, crushing his slight frame under the
weight of her full-bodied surrender.

Charlotte had stood a good deal, but it was possible to abuse even her
patience. Snatching Jerry from his lawless embraces, she reversed him
across her knee, and then—the outrage offered to the whole superior
sex in Jerry’s hapless person was too painful to witness; but though
I turned my head away the sound of brisk slaps continued to reach my
tingling ears. When I dared to look again, Jerry was sitting up as
before; his garment, somewhat crumpled, was restored to its original
position; but his pallid countenance was set hard. Knowing as I did,
only too well, what a volcano of passion and shame must be seething
under that impassive exterior, for the moment I felt sorry for him.

Rosa’s face was still buried in her frock; it might have been shame, it
might have been grief for Jerry’s sufferings. But the callous Japanese
never even looked her way. His heart was exceeding bitter within him.
In merely following up his natural impulses he had run his head against
convention, and learned how hard a thing it was; and the sunshiny world
was all black to him. Even Charlotte softened somewhat at the sight of
his rigid misery. ‘If you’ll say you’re sorry, Jerome,’ she said, ‘I’ll
say I’m sorry, too.’

Jerry only dropped his shoulders against the stump and stared out in
the direction of his dear native Japan, where love was no sin, and
smacking had not been introduced. Why had he ever left it? He would
go back to-morrow! And yet there were obstacles: another grievance.
Nature, in endowing Jerry with every grace of form and feature, along
with a sensitive soul, had somehow forgotten the gift of locomotion.

There was a crackling in the bushes behind me, with sharp short pants
as of a small steam-engine, and Rollo, the black retriever, just
released from his chain by some friendly hand, burst through the
underwood, seeking congenial company. I joyfully hailed him to stop and
be a panther, but he sped away round the pond, upset Charlotte with a
boisterous caress, and seizing Jerry by the middle, disappeared with
him down the drive. Charlotte panting, raved behind the swift-footed
avenger of crime; Rosa lay dishevelled, bereft of consciousness; Jerry
himself spread helpless arms to heaven, and I almost thought I heard a
cry for mercy, a tardy promise of amendment. But it was too late. The
Black Man had got Jerry at last; and though the tear of sensibility
might bedew an eye or two for his lost sake, no one who really knew him
could deny the justice of his fate.

[Illustration]




‘YOUNG ADAM CUPID’


NOBODY would have suspected Edward of being in love, had it not been
that after breakfast, with an overacted carelessness, ‘Anybody who
likes,’ he said, ‘can feed my rabbits,’ and he disappeared, with a
jauntiness that deceived nobody, in the direction of the orchard. Now
kingdoms might totter and reel, and convulsions play skittles with
the map of Europe; but the iron unwritten law prevailed, that each
boy severely fed his own rabbits. There was good ground, then, for
suspicion and alarm; and while the lettuce leaves were being drawn
through the wires, Harold and I conferred seriously on the situation.

It may be thought that the affair was none of our business; and indeed
we cared little as individuals. We were only concerned as members of a
corporation, for each of whom the mental or physical ailment of one of
his fellows might have far-reaching effects. It was thought best that
Harold, as least open to suspicion of motive, should be despatched to
probe and peer. His instructions were, to proceed by a report on the
health of our rabbits in particular; to glide gently into a discussion
concerning rabbits in general, their customs, practices, and vices;
and to pass thence, by a natural transition, to the female sex, the
inherent flaws in its composition, and the reasons for regarding it
(speaking broadly) as dirt. He was especially to be very diplomatic,
and then to return and report progress. He departed on his mission
gaily; but his absence was short, and his return, discomfited and in
tears, seemed to betoken some want of parts for diplomacy. He had found
Edward, it appeared, pacing the orchard, with the sort of set smile
that mountebanks wear in their precarious antics, fixed painfully on
his face, as with pins. Harold had opened well, on the rabbit subject,
but, with a fatal confusion between the abstract and the concrete, had
then gone on to remark that Edward’s lop-eared doe, with her long
hindlegs and contemptuous twitch of the nose, always reminded him of
Sabina Larkin (a nine-year-old damsel, child of a neighbouring farmer):
at which point Edward, it would seem, had turned upon and savagely
maltreated him, twisting his arm and punching him in the short ribs.
So that Harold returned to the rabbit-hutches preceded by long-drawn
wails: anon wishing, with tears and sobs, that he were a man, to kick
his love-lorn brother; anon lamenting that ever he had been born.

I was not big enough to stand up to Edward personally, so I had to
console the sufferer by allowing him to grease the wheels of the
donkey-cart—a luscious treat that had been specially reserved for me,
a week past, by the gardener’s boy, for putting in a good word on
his behalf with the new kitchen-maid. Harold was soon all smiles and
grease; and I was not, on the whole, dissatisfied with the significant
hint that had been gained as to the _fons et origo mali_.

Fortunately, means were at hand for resolving any doubts on the
subject, since the morning was Sunday, and already the bells were
ringing for church. Lest the connexion may not be evident at first
sight, I should explain that the gloomy period of church-time, with its
enforced inaction and its lack of real interest—passed, too, within
sight of all that the village held of fairest—was just the one when a
young man’s fancies lightly turned to thoughts of love. The rest of
the week afforded no leisure for such trifling; but in church—well,
there was really nothing else to do! True, noughts-and-crosses might be
indulged in on flyleaves of prayer-books while the Litany dragged its
slow length along; but what balm or what solace could be found for the
Sermon? Naturally the eye, wandering here and there among the serried
ranks, made bold untrammelled choice among our fair fellow-supplicants.
It was in this way that, some months earlier, under the exceptional
strain of the Athanasian Creed, my roving fancy had settled upon the
baker’s wife as a fit object for a life-long devotion. Her riper charms
had conquered a heart which none of her be-muslined tittering juniors
had been able to subdue; and that she was already wedded had never
occurred to me as any bar to my affection. Edward’s general demeanour,
then, during morning service was safe to convict him; but there was
also a special test for the particular case. It happened that we sat in
a transept, and, the Larkins being behind us, Edward’s only chance of
feasting on Sabina’s charms was in the all-too fleeting interval when
we swung round eastwards. I was not mistaken. During the singing of the
Benedictus the impatient one made several false starts, and at last he
slewed fairly round before ‘As it was in the beginning, is now, and
ever shall be’ was half finished. The evidence was conclusive: a court
of law could have desired no better.

The fact being patent, the next thing was to grapple with it; and my
mind was fully occupied during the sermon. There was really nothing
unfair or unbrotherly in my attitude. A philosophic affection such as
mine own, which clashed with nothing, was (I held) permissible; but the
volcanic passions in which Edward indulged about once a quarter were a
serious interference with business. To make matters worse, next week
there was a circus coming to the neighbourhood, to which we had all
been strictly forbidden to go; and without Edward no visit in contempt
of law and orders could be successfully brought off. I had sounded
him as to the circus on our way to church, and he had replied briefly
that the very thought of a clown made him sick. Morbidity could no
further go. But the sermon came to an end without any line of conduct
having suggested itself; and I walked home in some depression, feeling
sadly that Venus was in the ascendant and in direful opposition, while
Auriga—the circus star—drooped declinant, perilously near the horizon.

By the irony of fate, Aunt Eliza, of all people, turned out to be the
_Dea ex machinâ_. The thing fell out in this wise. It was that lady’s
obnoxious practice to issue forth, of a Sunday afternoon, on a visit of
state to such farmers and cottagers as dwelt at hand; on which occasion
she was wont to hale a reluctant boy along with her, from the mixed
motives of propriety and his soul’s health. Much cudgelling of brains,
I suppose, had on that particular day made me torpid and unwary.
Anyhow, when a victim came to be sought for, I fell an easy prey, while
the others fled scatheless and whooping. Our first visit was to the
Larkins. Here ceremonial might be viewed in its finest flower, and we
conducted ourselves, like Queen Elizabeth when she trod the measure,
‘high and disposedly.’ In the low oak-panelled parlour cake and currant
wine were set forth, and, after courtesies and compliments exchanged,
Aunt Eliza, greatly condescending, talked the fashions with Mrs.
Larkin; while the farmer and I, perspiring with the unusual effort,
exchanged remarks on the mutability of the weather and the steady fall
in the price of corn. (Who would have thought, to hear us, that only
two short days ago we had confronted each other on either side of a
hedge? I triumphant, provocative, derisive? He flushed, wroth, cracking
his whip, and volleying forth profanity? So powerful is all-subduing
ceremony!) Sabina the while, demurely seated with a _Pilgrim’s
Progress_ on her knee, and apparently absorbed in a brightly-coloured
presentment of ‘Apollyon Straddling Right across the Way,’ eyed me at
times with shy interest; but repelled all Aunt Eliza’s advances with a
frigid politeness for which I could not sufficiently admire her.

‘It’s surprising to me,’ I heard my aunt remark presently, ‘how
my eldest nephew, Edward, despises little girls. I heard him tell
Charlotte the other day that he wished he could exchange her for a
pair of Japanese guinea-pigs. It made the poor child cry. Boys are so
heartless!’ (I saw Sabina stiffen as she sat, and her tip-tilted nose
twitched scornfully.) ‘Now this boy here——’ (my soul descended into my
very boots. Could the woman have intercepted any of my amorous glances
at the baker’s wife?) ‘Now this boy,’ my aunt went on, ‘is more human
altogether. Only yesterday he took his sister to the baker’s shop, and
spent his only penny buying her sweets. I thought it showed such a nice
disposition. I wish Edward were more like him!’

I breathed again. It was unnecessary to explain my real motives
for that visit to the baker’s. Sabina’s face softened, and her
contemptuous nose descended from its altitude of scorn; she gave me one
shy glance of kindness, and then concentrated her attention upon Mercy
knocking at the Wicket Gate. I felt awfully mean as regarded Edward;
but what could I do? I was in Gaza, gagged and bound; the Philistines
hemmed me in.

The same evening the storm burst, the bolt fell, and—to continue the
metaphor—the atmosphere grew serene and clear once more. The evening
service was shorter than usual, the vicar, as he ascended the pulpit
steps, having dropped two pages out of his sermon-case—unperceived by
any but ourselves, either at the moment or subsequently when the hiatus
was reached; so, as we joyfully shuffled out I whispered Edward that
by racing home at top speed we should make time to assume our bows and
arrows (laid aside for the day) and play at Indians and buffaloes with
Aunt Eliza’s fowls—already strolling roostwards, regardless of their
doom—before that sedately stepping lady could return. Edward hung at
the door, wavering; the suggestion had unhallowed charms. At that
moment Sabina issued primly forth, and, seeing Edward, put out her
tongue at him in the most exasperating manner conceivable; then passed
on her way, her shoulders rigid, her dainty head held high. A man can
stand very much in the cause of love: poverty, aunts, rivals, barriers
of every sort, all these only serve to fan the flame. But personal
ridicule is a shaft that reaches the very vitals. Edward led the race
home at a speed which one of Ballantyne’s heroes might have equalled
but never surpassed; and that evening the Indians dispersed Aunt
Eliza’s fowls over several square miles of country, so that the tale
of them remaineth incomplete unto this day. Edward himself, cheering
wildly, pursued the big Cochin-China cock till the bird sank gasping
under the drawing-room window, whereat its mistress stood petrified;
and after supper, in the shrubbery, smoked a half-consumed cigar he had
picked up in the road, and declared to an awe-stricken audience his
final, his immitigable resolve to go into the army.

[Illustration: “EDWARD LED THE RACE HOME AT A SPEED WHICH ONE OF
BALLANTYNE’S HEROES MIGHT HAVE EQUALLED BUT NEVER SURPASSED”]

The crisis was past, and Edward was saved!... And yet ... _sunt
lachrymæ rerum_ ... to me watching the cigar-stump alternately
pale and glow against the dark background of laurel, a vision of a
tip-tilted nose, of a small head poised scornfully, seemed to hover
on the gathering gloom—seemed to grow and fade and grow again, like
the grin of the Cheshire cat—pathetically, reproachfully even; and the
charms of the baker’s wife slipped from my memory like snow-wreaths in
thaw. After all, Sabina was nowise to blame: why should the child be
punished? To-morrow I would give them the slip, and stroll round by
her garden promiscuous-like, at a time when the farmer was safe in the
rick-yard. If nothing came of it, there was no harm done; and if on the
contrary...!

[Illustration]




THE BURGLARS


IT was much too fine a night to think of going to bed at once, and
so, although the witching hour of nine P.M. had struck, Edward and
I were still leaning out of the open window in our nightshirts,
watching the play of the cedar-branch shadows on the moonlit lawn, and
planning schemes of fresh devilry for the sunshiny morrow. From below,
strains of the jocund piano declared that the Olympians were enjoying
themselves in their listless impotent way; for the new curate had
been bidden to dinner that night, and was at the moment unclerically
proclaiming to all the world that he feared no foe. His discordant
vociferations doubtless started a train of thought in Edward’s mind,
for he presently remarked, _à propos_ of nothing whatever that had been
said before, ‘I believe the new curate’s rather gone on Aunt Maria.’

I scouted the notion; ‘Why, she’s quite old,’ I said. (She must have
seen some five-and-twenty summers.)

‘Of course she is,’ replied Edward scornfully. ‘It’s not her, it’s her
money he’s after, you bet!’

‘Didn’t know she had any money,’ I observed timidly.

‘Sure to have,’ said my brother with confidence. ‘Heaps and heaps.’

Silence ensued, both our minds being busy with the new situation thus
presented: mine, in wonderment at this flaw that so often declared
itself in enviable natures of fullest endowment,—in a grown-up man
and a good cricketer, for instance, even as this curate; Edward’s
(apparently) in the consideration of how such a state of things,
supposing it existed, could be best turned to his own advantage.

‘Bobby Ferris told me,’ began Edward in due course, ‘that there was a
fellow spooning his sister once——’

‘What’s spooning?’ I asked meekly.

‘O _I_ dunno,’ said Edward indifferently. ‘It’s—it’s—it’s just a thing
they do, you know. And he used to carry notes and messages and things
between ’em, and he got a shilling almost every time.’

‘What, from each of ’em?’ I innocently inquired.

Edward looked at me with scornful pity. ‘Girls never have any money,’
he briefly explained. ‘But she did his exercises, and got him out of
rows, and told stories for him when he needed it—and much better ones
than he could have made up for himself. Girls are useful in some ways.
So he was living in clover, when unfortunately they went and quarrelled
about something.’

‘Don’t see what that’s got to do with it,’ I said.

‘Nor don’t I,’ rejoined Edward. ‘But any how the notes and things
stopped, and so did the shillings. Bobby was fairly cornered, for he
had bought two ferrets on tick, and promised to pay a shilling a week,
thinking the shillings were going on for ever, the silly young ass. So
when the week was up, and he was being dunned for the shilling, he
went off to the fellow and said: “Your broken-hearted Bella implores
you to meet her at sundown. By the hollow oak as of old, be it only for
a moment. Do not fail!” He got all that out of some rotten book, of
course. The fellow looked puzzled and said:

‘“What hollow oak? I don’t know any hollow oak.”

‘“Perhaps it was the Royal Oak?” said Bobby promptly, ’cos he saw he
had made a slip, through trusting too much to the rotten book; but this
didn’t seem to make the fellow any happier.’

‘Should think not,’ I said, ‘the Royal Oak’s an awful low sort of pub.’

‘I know,’ said Edward. ‘Well, at last the fellow said, “I think I know
what she means: the hollow tree in your father’s paddock. It happens to
be an elm, but she wouldn’t know the difference. All right: say I’ll be
there.” Bobby hung about a bit, for he hadn’t got his money. “She was
crying awfully,” he said. Then he got his shilling.

‘And wasn’t the fellow riled,’ I inquired, ‘when he got to the place
and found nothing?’

‘He found Bobby,’ said Edward indignantly. ‘Young Ferris was a
gentleman, every inch of him. He brought the fellow another message
from Bella: “I dare not leave the house. My cruel parents immure me
closely. If you only knew what I suffer. Your broken-hearted Bella.”
Out of the same rotten book. This made the fellow a little suspicious,
’cos it was the old Ferrises who had been keen about the thing all
through. The fellow, you see, had tin.’

‘But what’s that got to——’ I began again.

‘O _I_ dunno,’ said Edward impatiently. ‘I’m telling you just what
Bobby told me. He got suspicious, anyhow, but he couldn’t exactly call
Bella’s brother a liar, so Bobby escaped for the time. But when he
was in a hole next week, over a stiff French exercise, and tried the
same sort of game on his sister, she was too sharp for him, and he got
caught out. Somehow women seem more mistrustful than men. They’re so
beastly suspicious by nature, you know.’

‘_I_ know,’ said I. ‘But did the two—the fellow and the sister—make it
up afterwards?’

‘I don’t remember about that,’ replied Edward indifferently; ‘but Bobby
got packed off to school a whole year earlier than his people meant to
send him. Which was just what he wanted. So you see it all came right
in the end!’

I was trying to puzzle out the moral of this story—it was evidently
meant to contain one somewhere—when a flood of golden lamplight
mingled with the moon-rays on the lawn, and Aunt Maria and the new
curate strolled out on the grass below us, and took the direction of a
garden-seat which was backed by a dense laurel shrubbery reaching round
in a half-circle to the house. Edward meditated moodily. ‘If we only
knew what they were talking about,’ said he, ‘you’d soon see whether I
was right or not. Look here! Let’s send the kid down by the porch to
reconnoitre!’

‘Harold’s asleep,’ I said; ‘it seems rather a shame——’

‘O rot!’ said my brother; ‘he’s the youngest, and he’s got to do as
he’s told!’

So the luckless Harold was hauled out of bed and given his
sailing-orders. He was naturally rather vexed at being stood up
suddenly on the cold floor, and the job had no particular interest for
him; but he was both staunch and well disciplined. The means of exit
were simple enough. A porch of iron trellis came up to within easy
reach of the window, and was habitually used by all three of us, when
modestly anxious to avoid public notice. Harold climbed deftly down the
porch like a white rat, and his night-gown glimmered a moment on the
gravel walk ere he was lost to sight in the darkness of the shrubbery.
A brief interval of silence ensued; broken suddenly by a sound of
scuffle, and then a shrill long-drawn squeal, as of metallic surfaces
in friction. Our scout had fallen into the hands of the enemy!

Indolence alone had made us devolve the task of investigation on
our younger brother. Now that danger had declared itself, there
was no hesitation. In a second we were down the side of the porch,
and crawling Cherokee-wise through the laurels to the back of the
garden-seat. Piteous was the sight that greeted us. Aunt Maria was on
the seat, in a white evening frock, looking—for an aunt—really quite
nice. On the lawn stood an incensed curate, grasping our small brother
by a large ear, which—judging from the row he was making—seemed on the
point of parting company with the head it completed and adorned. The
gruesome noise he was emitting did not really affect us otherwise than
æsthetically. To one who has tried both, the wail of genuine physical
anguish is easily distinguishable from the pumped-up _ad misericordiam_
blubber. Harold’s could clearly be recognised as belonging to the
latter class. ‘Now you young—’ (whelp, _I_ think it was, but Edward
stoutly maintains it was devil), said the curate sternly; ‘tell us what
you mean by it!’

‘Well leggo of my ear then!’ shrilled Harold, ‘and I’ll tell you the
solemn truth!’

‘Very well,’ agreed the curate, releasing him, ‘now go ahead, and don’t
lie more than you can help.’

We abode the promised disclosure without the least misgiving; but even
we had hardly given Harold due credit for his fertility of resource
and powers of imagination.

‘I had just finished saying my prayers,’ began that young gentleman
slowly, ‘when I happened to look out of the window, and on the lawn
I saw a sight which froze the marrow in my veins! A burglar was
approaching the house with snake-like tread! He had a scowl and a dark
lantern, and he was armed to the teeth!’

We listened with interest. The style, though unlike Harold’s native
notes, seemed strangely familiar.

‘Go on,’ said the curate grimly.

‘Pausing in his stealthy career,’ continued Harold, ‘he gave a low
whistle. Instantly the signal was responded to, and from the adjacent
shadows two more figures glided forth. The miscreants were both armed
to the teeth.’

‘Excellent,’ said the curate; ‘proceed.’

‘The robber chief,’ pursued Harold, warming to his work, ‘joined his
nefarious comrades, and conversed with them in silent tones. His
expression was truly ferocious, and I ought to have said that he was
armed to the t——’

‘There, never mind his teeth,’ interrupted the curate rudely; ‘there’s
too much jaw about you altogether. Hurry up and have done.’

‘I was in a frightful funk,’ continued the narrator, warily guarding
his ear with his hand, ‘but just then the drawing-room window opened,
and you and Aunt Maria came out—I mean emerged. The burglars vanished
silently into the laurels, with horrid implications!’

The curate looked slightly puzzled. The tale was well sustained, and
certainly circumstantial. After all, the boy might really have seen
something. How was the poor man to know—though the chaste and lofty
diction might have supplied a hint—that the whole yarn was a free
adaptation from the last Penny Dreadful lent us by the knife-and-boot
boy?

‘Why did you not alarm the house?’ he asked.

‘Cos I was afraid,’ said Harold sweetly, ‘that p’raps they mightn’t
believe me!’

‘But how did you get down here, you naughty little boy?’ put in Aunt
Maria.

Harold was hard pressed—by his own flesh and blood, too!

At that moment Edward touched me on the shoulder and glided off through
the laurels. When some ten yards away he gave a low whistle. I replied
with another. The effect was magical. Aunt Maria started up with a
shriek. Harold gave one startled glance around, and then fled like a
hare, made straight for the back-door, burst in upon the servants at
supper, and buried himself in the broad bosom of the cook, his special
ally. The curate faced the laurels—hesitatingly. But Aunt Maria flung
herself on him. ‘O Mr. Hodgitts!’ I heard her cry, ‘you are brave! for
my sake do not be rash!’ He was not rash. When I peeped out a second
later, the coast was entirely clear.

By this time there were sounds of a household timidly emerging; and
Edward remarked to me that perhaps we had better be off. Retreat
was an easy matter. A stunted laurel gave a leg-up on to the garden
wall, which led in its turn to the roof of an out-house, up which,
at a dubious angle, we could crawl to the window of the box-room.
This overland route had been revealed to us one day by the domestic
cat, when hard pressed in the course of an otter-hunt, in which the
cat—somewhat unwillingly—was filling the title _rôle_; and it had
proved distinctly useful on occasions like the present. We were snug
in bed—minus some cuticle from knees and elbows—and Harold, sleepily
chewing something sticky, had been carried up in the arms of the
friendly cook, ere the clamour of the burglar-hunters had died away.

[Illustration: “THIS OVERLAND ROUTE HAD BEEN REVEALED TO US ONE DAY BY
THE DOMESTIC CAT, WHEN HARD PRESSED IN THE COURSE OF AN OTTER-HUNT”]

The curate’s undaunted demeanour, as reported by Aunt Maria, was
generally supposed to have terrified the burglars into flight, and
much kudos accrued to him thereby. Some days later, however, when he
had dropped in to afternoon tea, and was making a mild curatorial
joke about the moral courage required for taking the last piece of
bread-and-butter, I felt constrained to remark dreamily, and as it were
to the universe at large: ‘Mr. Hodgitts! you are brave! for my sake, do
not be rash!’

Fortunately for me, the vicar also was a caller on that day; and it was
always a comparatively easy matter to dodge my long-coated friend in
the open.




A HARVESTING


THE year was in its yellowing time, and the face of Nature a study
in old gold. ‘A field _or_, _semée_ with garbs of the same:’ it may
be false Heraldry—Nature’s generally is—but it correctly blazons the
display that Edward and I considered from the rickyard gate. Harold
was not on in this scene, being stretched upon the couch of pain: the
special disorder stomachic, as usual. The evening before, Edward, in
a fit of unwonted amiability, had deigned to carve me out a turnip
lantern, an art-and-craft he was peculiarly deft in; and Harold, as
the interior of the turnip flew out in scented fragments under the
hollowing knife, had eaten largely thereof: regarding all such jetsam
as his special perquisite. Now he was dreeing his weird, with such
assistance as the chemist could afford. But Edward and I, knowing that
this particular field was to be carried to-day, were revelling in the
privilege of riding in the empty waggons from the rickyard back to the
sheaves, whence we returned toilfully on foot, to career it again over
the billowy acres in these great galleys of a stubble sea. It was the
nearest approach to sailing that we inland urchins might compass: and
hence it ensued, that such stirring scenes as Sir Richard Grenville on
the _Revenge_, the smoke-wreathed Battle of the Nile, and the Death of
Nelson, had all been enacted in turn on these dusty quarter-decks, as
they swayed and bumped afield.

Another waggon had shot its load, and was jolting out through the
rickyard gate, as we swung ourselves in, shouting, over its tail.
Edward was the first up, and, as I gained my feet, he clutched me in a
death-grapple. I was a privateersman, he proclaimed, and he the captain
of the British frigate _Terpsichore_, of—I forget the precise number
of guns. Edward always collared the best parts to himself; but I was
holding my own gallantly, when I suddenly discovered that the floor we
battled on was swarming with earwigs. Shrieking, I hurled free of him,
and rolled over the tail-board on to the stubble. Edward executed a
war-dance of triumph on the deck of the retreating galleon; but I cared
little for that. I knew _he_ knew that I wasn’t afraid of him, but that
I was—and terribly—of earwigs: ‘those mortal bugs o’ the field.’ So I
let him disappear, shouting lustily for all hands to repel boarders,
while I strolled inland, down the village.

There was a touch of adventure in the expedition. This was not our
own village, but a foreign one, distant at least a mile. One felt
that sense of mingled distinction and insecurity which is familiar to
the traveller: distinction, in that folk turned the head to note you
curiously; insecurity, by reason of the ever-present possibility of
missiles on the part of the younger inhabitants, a class eternally
Conservative. Elated with isolation, I went even more nose-in-air than
usual: and ‘even so,’ I mused, ‘might Mungo Park have threaded the
trackless African forest and....’ Here I plumped against a soft, but
resisting body.

Recalled to my senses by the shock, I fell back in the attitude every
boy under these circumstances instinctively adopts—both elbows well up
over your ears. I found myself facing a tall elderly man, clean-shaven,
clad in well-worn black—a clergyman evidently; and I noted at once
a far-away look in his eyes, as if they were used to another plane
of vision, and could not instantly focus things terrestrial, being
suddenly recalled thereto. His figure was bent in apologetic protest.
‘I ask a thousand pardons, sir,’ he said; ‘I am really so very
absent-minded. I trust you will forgive me.’

Now most boys would have suspected chaff under this courtly style of
address. I take infinite credit to myself for recognising at once the
natural attitude of a man to whom his fellows were gentlemen all,
neither Jew nor Gentile, clean nor unclean. Of course, I took the blame
on myself; adding, that I was very absent-minded too. Which was indeed
the case.

‘I perceive,’ he said pleasantly, ‘that we have something in common.
I, an old man, dream dreams; you, a young one, see visions. Your lot
is the happier. And now—’ his hand had been resting all this time on
a wicket-gate—‘you are hot, it is easily seen;—the day is advanced,
_Virgo_ is the Zodiacal sign. Perhaps I may offer you some poor
refreshment, if your engagements will permit?’

My only engagement that afternoon was an arithmetic lesson, and I had
not intended to keep it in any case; so I passed in, while he held
the gate open politely, murmuring, ‘_Venit Hesperus, ite capellæ_:
come, little kid!’ and then apologising abjectly for a familiarity
which (he said) was less his than the Roman poet’s. A straight flagged
walk led up to the cool-looking old house, and my host, lingering in
his progress at this rose-tree and that, forgot all about me at least
twice, waking up and apologising humbly after each lapse. During
these intervals I put two and two together, and identified him as the
Rector: a bachelor, eccentric, learned exceedingly, round whom the
crust of legend was already beginning to form; to myself an object of
special awe, in that he was alleged to have written a real book. ‘Heaps
o’ books,’ Martha, my informant, said; but I knew the exact rate of
discount applicable to Martha’s statements.

[Illustration: “A STRAIGHT FLAGGED WALK LED UP TO THE COOL-LOOKING OLD
HOUSE, AND MY HOST, LINGERING IN HIS PROGRESS AT THIS ROSE-TREE AND
THAT, FORGOT ALL ABOUT ME AT LEAST TWICE”]

We passed eventually through a dark hall into a room which struck me
at once as the ideal I had dreamed but failed to find. None of your
feminine fripperies here! None of your chair-backs and tidies! This
man, it was seen, groaned under no aunts. Stout volumes in calf and
vellum lined three sides; books sprawled or hunched themselves on
chairs and tables; books diffused the pleasant odour of printers’
ink and bindings; topping all, a faint aroma of tobacco cheered and
heartened exceedingly, as under foreign skies the flap and rustle over
the wayfarer’s head of the Union Jack—the old flag of emancipation! And
in one corner, book-piled like the rest of the furniture, stood a piano.

This I hailed with a squeal of delight. ‘Want to strum?’ inquired
my friend, as if it was the most natural wish in the world—his
eyes were already straying towards another corner, where bits of
writing-table peeped out from under a sort of Alpine system of book and
foolscap.

‘O but may I?’ I asked in doubt. ‘At home I’m not allowed to—only
beastly exercises!’

‘Well, you can strum here, at all events,’ he replied; and murmuring
absently, ‘_Age, dic Latinum, barbite, carmen_,’ he made his way,
mechanically guided as it seemed, to the irresistible writing-table.
In ten seconds he was out of sight and call. A great book open on his
knee, another propped up in front, a score or so disposed within easy
reach, he read and jotted with an absorption almost passionate. I might
have been in Bœotia, for any consciousness he had of me. So with a
light heart I turned to and strummed.

Those who painfully and with bleeding feet have scaled the crags of
mastery over musical instruments have yet their loss in this: that the
wild joy of strumming has become a vanished sense. Their happiness
comes from the concord and the relative value of the notes they handle:
the pure, absolute quality and nature of each note in itself are only
appreciated by the strummer. For some notes have all the sea in them,
and some cathedral bells; others a woodland joyance and a smell of
greenery; in some fauns dance to the merry reed, and even the grave
centaurs peep out from their caves. Some bring moonlight, and some
the deep crimson of a rose’s heart; some are blue, some red, while
others will tell of an army with silken standards and march-music. And
throughout all the sequence of suggestion, up above the little white
men leap and peep, and strive against the imprisoning wires; and all
the big rosewood box hums as it were full of hiving bees.

Spent with the rapture, I paused a moment and caught my friend’s
eye over the edge of a folio. ‘But as for these Germans,’ he began
abruptly, as if we had been in the middle of a discussion, ‘the
scholarship is there, I grant you; but the spark, the fine perception,
the happy intuition, where is it? They get it all from us!’

‘They get nothing whatever from _us_,’ I said decidedly: the word
German only suggesting Bands, to which Aunt Eliza was bitterly hostile.

‘You think not?’ he rejoined doubtfully, getting up and walking about
the room. ‘Well, I applaud such fairness and temperance in so young a
critic. They are qualities—in youth—as rare as they are pleasing. But
just look at Schrumpffius, for instance—how he struggles and wrestles
with a simple γἁρ in this very passage here!’

I peeped fearfully through the open door, half-dreading to see some
sinuous and snark-like conflict in progress on the mat; but all was
still. I saw no trouble at all in the passage, and I said so.

‘Precisely,’ he cried, delighted. ‘To you, who possess the natural
scholar’s faculty in so happy a degree, there is no difficulty at all.
But to this Schrumpffius——’ But here, luckily for me, in came the
housekeeper, a clean-looking woman of staid aspect.

‘Your tea is in the garden,’ she said severely, as if she were
correcting a faulty emendation. ‘I’ve put some cakes and things for the
little gentleman; and you’d better drink it before it gets cold.’

He waved her off and continued his stride, brandishing an aorist over
my devoted head. The housekeeper waited unmoved till there fell a
moment’s break in his descant; and then, ‘You’d better drink it before
it gets cold,’ she observed again, impassively. The wretched man cast a
deprecating look at me. ‘Perhaps a little tea would be rather nice,’ he
observed feebly; and to my great relief he led the way into the garden.
I looked about for the little gentleman, but, failing to discover him,
I concluded he was absent-minded too, and attacked the ‘cakes and
things’ with no misgivings.

After a most successful and most learned tea a something happened
which, small as I was, never quite shook itself out of my memory. To
us at parley in an arbour over the high road, there entered, slouching
into view, a dingy tramp, satellited by a frowsy woman and a pariah
dog; and, catching sight of us, he set up his professional whine; and I
looked at my friend with the heartiest compassion, for I knew well from
Martha—it was common talk—that at this time of day he was certainly
and surely penniless. Morn by morn he started forth with pockets
lined; and each returning evening found him with never a sou. All this
he proceeded to explain at length to the tramp, courteously and even
shamefacedly, as one who was in the wrong; and at last the gentleman
of the road, realising the hopelessness of his case, set to and cursed
him with gusto, vocabulary, and abandonment. He reviled his eyes, his
features, his limbs, his profession, his relatives and surroundings;
and then slouched off, still oozing malice and filth. We watched the
party to a turn in the road, where the woman, plainly weary, came to a
stop. Her lord, after some conventional expletives demanded of him by
his position, relieved her of her bundle, and caused her to hang on his
arm with a certain rough kindness of tone, and in action even a dim
approach to tenderness; and the dingy dog crept up for one lick at her
hand.

‘See,’ said my friend, bearing somewhat on my shoulder, ‘how this
strange thing, this love of ours, lives and shines out in the
unlikeliest of places! You have been in the fields in early morning?
Barren acres, all! But only stoop—catch the light thwartwise—and all is
a silver network of gossamer! So the fairy filaments of this strange
thing underrun and link together the whole world. Yet it is not the old
imperious god of the fatal bow—ἑρως ανἱκατε μἁχαν—not that—nor even the
placid respectable στοργἡ—but something still unnamed, perhaps more
mysterious, more divine! Only one must stoop to see it, old fellow, one
must stoop!’

The dew was falling, the dusk closing, as I trotted briskly homewards
down the road. Lonely spaces everywhere, above and around. Only
Hesperus hung in the sky, solitary, pure, ineffably far-drawn
and remote; yet infinitely heartening, somehow, in his valorous
isolation.




SNOWBOUND


TWELFTH-NIGHT had come and gone, and life next morning seemed a trifle
flat and purposeless. But yester-eve, and the mummers were here! They
had come striding into the old kitchen, powdering the red brick floor
with snow from their barbaric bedizenments; and stamping, and crossing,
and declaiming, till all was whirl and riot and shout. Harold was
frankly afraid: unabashed, he buried himself in the cook’s ample bosom.
Edward feigned a manly superiority to illusion, and greeted these awful
apparitions familiarly, as Dick and Harry and Joe. As for me, I was
too big to run, too rapt to resist the magic and surprise. Whence came
these outlanders, breaking in on us with song and ordered masque and
a terrible clashing of wooden swords? And after these, what strange
visitants might we not look for any quiet night, when the chestnuts
popped in the ashes, and the old ghost stories drew the awe-stricken
circle close? Old Merlin, perhaps, ‘all furred in black sheep-skins,
and a russet gown, with a bow and arrows, and bearing wild geese in his
hand!’ Or stately Ogier the Dane, recalled from Faëry, asking his way
to the land that once had need of him! Or even, on some white night,
the Snow-Queen herself, with a chime of sleigh-bells and the patter
of reindeer’s feet, halting of a sudden at the door flung wide, while
aloft the Northern Lights went shaking attendant spears among the quiet
stars!

This morning, house-bound by the relentless indefatigable snow, I
was feeling the reaction. Edward, on the contrary, being violently
stage-struck on this his first introduction to the real Drama, was
striding up and down the floor, proclaiming ‘Here be I, King Gearge
the Third,’ in a strong Berkshire accent. Harold, accustomed, as the
youngest, to lonely antics and to sports that asked no sympathy, was
absorbed in ‘clubmen’: a performance consisting in a measured progress
round the room arm-in-arm with an imaginary companion of reverend
years, with occasional halts at imaginary clubs, where—imaginary
steps being leisurely ascended—imaginary papers were glanced at,
imaginary scandal was discussed with elderly shakings of the head,
and—regrettable to say—imaginary glasses were lifted lipwards. Heaven
only knows how the germ of this dreary pastime first found way
into his small-boyish being. It was his own invention, and he was
proportionately proud of it. Meanwhile Charlotte and I, crouched in
the window-seat, watched, spell-stricken, the whirl and eddy and drive
of the innumerable snow-flakes, wrapping our cheery little world in an
uncanny uniform, ghastly in line and hue.

Charlotte was sadly out of spirits. Having ‘countered’ Miss Smedley at
breakfast, during some argument or other, by an apt quotation from her
favourite classic (the _Fairy Book_), she had been gently but firmly
informed that no such things as fairies ever really existed. ‘Do you
mean to say it’s all lies?’ asked Charlotte bluntly. Miss Smedley
deprecated the use of any such unladylike words in any connexion at
all. ‘These stories had their origin, my dear,’ she explained, ‘in a
mistaken anthropomorphism in the interpretation of nature. But though
we are now too well informed to fall into similar errors, there are
still many beautiful lessons to be learned from these myths——’

[Illustration: “MEANWHILE CHARLOTTE AND I CROUCHED IN THE
WINDOW-SEAT....”]

‘But how can you learn anything,’ persisted Charlotte, ‘from what
doesn’t exist?’ And she left the table defiant, howbeit depressed.

‘Don’t you mind _her_,’ I said consolingly; ‘how can she know anything
about it? Why, she can’t even throw a stone properly!’

‘Edward says they’re all rot, too,’ replied Charlotte doubtfully.

‘Edward says everything’s rot,’ I explained, ‘now he thinks he’s going
into the Army. If a thing’s in a book it _must_ be true, so that
settles it!’

Charlotte looked almost reassured. The room was quieter now, for
Edward had got the dragon down and was boring holes in him with a
purring sound; Harold was ascending the steps of the Athenæum with
a jaunty air—suggestive rather of the Junior Carlton. Outside, the
tall elm-tops were hardly to be seen through the feathery storm. ‘The
sky’s a-falling,’ quoted Charlotte softly; ‘I must go and tell the
king.’ The quotation suggested a fairy story, and I offered to read to
her, reaching out for the book. But the Wee Folk were under a cloud;
sceptical hints had embittered the chalice. So I was fain to fetch
_Arthur_—second favourite with Charlotte for his dames riding errant,
and an easy first with us boys for his spear-splintering crash of
tourney and hurtle against hopeless odds. Here again, however, I proved
unfortunate; what ill-luck made the book open at the sorrowful history
of Balin and Balan? ‘And he vanished anon,’ I read: ‘and so he heard
an horne blow, as it had been the death of a beast. “That blast,” said
Balin, “is blowen for me, for I am the prize, and yet am I not dead.”’
Charlotte began to cry: she knew the rest too well. I shut the book in
despair. Harold emerged from behind the arm-chair. He was sucking his
thumb (a thing which members of the Reform are seldom seen to do),
and he stared wide-eyed at his tear-stained sister. Edward put off his
histrionics, and rushed up to her as the consoler—a new part for him.

‘I know a jolly story,’ he began. ‘Aunt Eliza told it me. It was when
she was somewhere over in that beastly abroad’—(he had once spent a
black month of misery at Dinan)—‘and there was a fellow there who had
got two storks. And one stork died—it was the she-stork.’—(‘What did
it die of?’ put in Harold.)—‘And the other stork was quite sorry, and
moped, and went on, and got very miserable. So they looked about and
found a duck, and introduced it to the stork. The duck was a drake,
but the stork didn’t mind, and they loved each other and were as jolly
as could be. By and by another duck came along—a real she-duck this
time—and when the drake saw her he fell in love, and left the stork,
and went and proposed to the duck: for she was very beautiful. But the
poor stork who was left, he said nothing at all to anybody, but just
pined and pined and pined away, till one morning he was found quite
dead! But the ducks lived happily ever afterwards!’

This was Edward’s idea of a jolly story! Down again went the corners
of poor Charlotte’s mouth. Really Edward’s stupid inability to see the
real point in anything was _too_ annoying! It was always so. Years
before, it being necessary to prepare his youthful mind for a domestic
event that might lead to awkward questionings at a time when there
was little leisure to invent appropriate answers, it was delicately
inquired of him whether he would like to have a little brother, or
perhaps a little sister? He considered the matter carefully in all its
bearings, and finally declared for a Newfoundland pup. Any boy more
‘gleg at the uptak’ would have met his parents half-way, and eased
their burden. As it was, the matter had to be approached all over
again from a fresh standpoint. And now, while Charlotte turned away
sniffingly, with a hiccup that told of an overwrought soul, Edward,
unconscious (like Sir Isaac’s Diamond) of the mischief he had done,
wheeled round on Harold with a shout.

‘I want a live dragon,’ he announced: ‘You’ve got to be my dragon!’

‘Leave me go, will you?’ squealed Harold, struggling stoutly. ‘I’m
playin’ at something else. How can I be a dragon and belong to all the
clubs?’

‘But wouldn’t you like to be a nice scaly dragon, all green,’ said
Edward, trying persuasion, ‘with a curly tail and red eyes, and
breathing real smoke and fire?’

Harold wavered an instant: Pall-Mall was still strong in him. The next
he was grovelling on the floor. No saurian ever swung a tail so scaly
and so curly as his. Clubland was a thousand years away. With horrific
pants he emitted smokiest smoke and fiercest fire.

‘Now I want a Princess,’ cried Edward, clutching Charlotte
ecstatically; ‘and _you_ can be the Doctor, and heal me from the
dragon’s deadly wound.’

Of all professions I held the sacred art of healing in worst horror
and contempt. Cataclysmal memories of purge and draught crowded thick
on me, and with Charlotte—who courted no barren honours—I made a
break for the door. Edward did likewise, and the hostile forces
clashed together on the mat, and for a brief space things were mixed
and chaotic and Arthurian. The silvery sound of the luncheon-bell
restored an instant peace, even in the teeth of clenched antagonisms
like ours. The Holy Grail itself, ‘sliding athwart a sunbeam,’ never
so effectually stilled a riot of warring passions into sweet and quiet
accord.

[Illustration]




WHAT THEY TALKED ABOUT


EDWARD was standing ginger-beer like a gentleman, happening, as the one
that had last passed under the dentist’s hands, to be the capitalist of
the flying hour. As in all well-regulated families, the usual tariff
obtained in ours: half-a-crown a tooth; one shilling only if the
molar were a loose one. This one, unfortunately—in spite of Edward’s
interested affectation of agony—had been shakiness undisguised; but the
event was good enough to run to ginger-beer. As financier, however,
Edward had claimed exemption from any servile duties of procurement,
and had swaggered about the garden while I fetched from the village
post-office, and Harold stole a tumbler from the pantry. Our
preparations complete, we were sprawling on the lawn; the staidest and
most self-respecting of the rabbits had been let loose to grace the
feast, and was lopping demurely about the grass, selecting the juiciest
plantains; while Selina, as the eldest lady present, was toying, in her
affected feminine way, with the first full tumbler, daintily fishing
for bits of broken cork.

‘Hurry up, can’t you?’ growled our host; ‘what are you girls always so
beastly particular for?’

‘Martha says,’ explained Harold (thirsty too, but still just), ‘that
if you swallow a bit of cork, it swells, and it swells, and it swells
inside you, till you——’

‘O bosh!’ said Edward, draining the glass with a fine pretence of
indifference to consequences, but all the same (as I noticed) dodging
the floating cork-fragments with skill and judgment.

‘O, it’s all very well to say bosh,’ replied Harold nettled: ‘but every
one knows it’s true but you. Why, when Uncle Thomas was here last, and
they got up a bottle of wine for him, he took just one tiny sip out of
his glass, and then he said, “Poo, my goodness, that’s corked!” And
he wouldn’t touch it. And they had to get a fresh bottle up. The funny
part was, though, I looked in his glass afterwards, when it was brought
out into the passage, and there wasn’t any cork in it at all! So I
drank it all off, and it was very good!’

‘You’d better be careful, young man!’ said his elder brother, regarding
him severely: ‘D’you remember that night when the Mummers were here,
and they had mulled port, and you went round and emptied all the
glasses after they had gone away?’

‘Ow! I did feel funny that night,’ chuckled Harold. ‘Thought the house
was comin’ down, it jumped about so: and Martha had to carry me up to
bed, ’cos the stairs was goin’ all waggity!’

We gazed searchingly at our graceless junior; but it was clear that
he viewed the matter in the light of a phenomenon rather than of a
delinquency.

A third bottle was by this time circling; and Selina, who had evidently
waited for it to reach her, took a most unfairly long pull, and then,
jumping up and shaking out her frock, announced that she was going
for a walk. Then she fled like a hare; for it was the custom of our
Family to meet with physical coercion any independence of action in
individuals.

[Illustration: “‘SHE’S OFF WITH THOSE VICARAGE GIRLS AGAIN,’ SAID
EDWARD”]

‘She’s off with those Vicarage girls again,’ said Edward, regarding
Selina’s long black legs twinkling down the path. ‘She goes out with
them every day now; and as soon as ever they start, all their heads go
together and they chatter, chatter, chatter the whole blessèd time!
I can’t make out what they find to talk about. They never stop; it’s
gabble, gabble, gabble right along, like a nest of young rooks!’

‘P’raps they talk about birds’-eggs,’ I suggested sleepily (the sun
was hot, the turf soft, the ginger-beer potent); ‘and about ships, and
buffaloes, and desert islands; and why rabbits have white tails; and
whether they’d sooner have a schooner or a cutter; and what they’ll be
when they’re men—at least, I mean there’s lots of things to talk about,
if you _want_ to talk.’

‘Yes; but they don’t talk about those sort of things at all,’
persisted Edward. ‘How _can_ they? They don’t _know_ anything; they
can’t _do_ anything—except play the piano, and nobody would want
to talk about _that_; and they don’t care about anything—anything
sensible, I mean. So what _do_ they talk about?’

‘I asked Martha once,’ put in Harold; ‘and she said, “Never _you_ mind;
young ladies has lots of things to talk about that young gentlemen
can’t understand.”’

‘I don’t believe it,’ Edward growled.

‘Well, that’s what she _said_, anyway,’ rejoined Harold indifferently.
The subject did not seem to him of first-class importance, and it was
hindering the circulation of the ginger-beer.

We heard the click of the front-gate. Through a gap in the hedge we
could see the party setting off down the road. Selina was in the
middle; a Vicarage girl had her by either arm; their heads were
together, as Edward had described; and the clack of their tongues came
down the breeze like the busy pipe of starlings on a bright March
morning.

‘What _do_ they talk about, Charlotte?’ I inquired, wishing to pacify
Edward. ‘You go out with them sometimes.’

‘I don’t know,’ said poor Charlotte dolefully. ‘They make me walk
behind, ’cos they say I’m too little, and mustn’t hear. And I _do_ want
to so,’ she added.

‘When any lady comes to see Aunt Eliza,’ said Harold, ‘they both talk
at once all the time. And yet each of ’em seems to hear what the other
one’s saying. I can’t make out how they do it. Grown-up people are so
clever!’

‘The Curate’s the funniest man,’ I remarked. ‘He’s always saying things
that have no sense in them at all, and then laughing at them as if
they were jokes. Yesterday, when they asked him if he’d have some more
tea, he said, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,”
and then sniggered all over. I didn’t see anything funny in that. And
then somebody asked him about his button-hole, and he said, “’Tis but a
little faded flower,” and exploded again. I thought it very stupid.’

‘O _him_,’ said Edward contemptuously: ‘he can’t help it, you know;
it’s a sort of way he’s got. But it’s these girls I can’t make out.
If they’ve anything really sensible to talk about, how is it nobody
knows what it is? And if they haven’t—and we know they _can’t_ have,
naturally—why don’t they shut up their jaw? This old rabbit here—_he_
doesn’t want to talk. He’s got something better to do.’ And Edward
aimed a ginger-beer cork at the unruffled beast, who never budged.

‘O but rabbits _do_ talk,’ interposed Harold. ‘I’ve watched them often
in their hutch. They put their heads together and their noses go up
and down, just like Selina’s and the Vicarage girls’. Only of course I
can’t hear what they’re saying.’

‘Well, if they do,’ said Edward unwillingly, ‘I’ll bet they don’t talk
such rot as those girls do!’ Which was ungenerous, as well as unfair;
for it had not yet transpired—nor has it to this day—_what_ Selina and
her friends talked about.

[Illustration]




THE ARGONAUTS


THE advent of strangers, of whatever sort, into our circle had always
been a matter of grave dubiety and suspicion. Indeed, it was generally
a signal for retreat into caves and fastnesses of the earth, into
unthreaded copses or remote outlying cowsheds, whence we were only to
be extricated by wily nursemaids, rendered familiar by experience with
our secret runs and refuges. It was not surprising, therefore, that
the heroes of classic legend, when first we made their acquaintance,
failed to win our entire sympathy at once. ‘Confidence,’ says somebody,
‘is a plant of slow growth’; and these stately dark-haired demi-gods,
with names hard to master and strange accoutrements, had to win a
citadel already strongly garrisoned with a more familiar soldiery.
Their chill foreign goddesses had no such direct appeal for us as
the mocking malicious fairies and witches of the North. We missed the
pleasant alliance of the animal—the fox who spread the bushiest of
tails to convey us to the enchanted castle, the frog in the well, the
raven who croaked advice from the tree; and—to Harold especially—it
seemed entirely wrong that the hero should ever be other than the
youngest brother of three. This belief, indeed, in the special fortune
that ever awaited the youngest brother, as such,—the ‘Borough-English’
of Faery,—had been of baleful effect on Harold, producing a certain
self-conceit and perkiness that called for physical correction. But
even in our admonishment we were on his side; and as we distrustfully
eyed these new arrivals, old Saturn himself seemed something of a
_parvenu_.

Even strangers, however, if they be good fellows at heart, may develop
into sworn comrades; and these gay swordsmen, after all, were of the
right stuff. Perseus, with his cap of darkness and his wonderful
sandals, was not long in winging his way to our hearts. Apollo knocked
at Admetus’ gate in something of the right fairy fashion. Psyche
brought with her an orthodox palace of magic, as well as helpful birds
and friendly ants. Ulysses, with his captivating shifts and strategies,
broke down the final barrier, and henceforth the band was adopted and
admitted into our freemasonry.

I had been engaged in chasing Farmer Larkin’s calves—his special
pride—round the field, just to show the man we hadn’t forgotten him,
and was returning through the kitchen-garden with a conscience at
peace with all men, when I happened upon Edward, grubbing for worms
in the dung-heap. Edward put his worms into his hat, and we strolled
along together, discussing high matters of state. As we reached the
tool-shed, strange noises arrested our steps; looking in, we perceived
Harold, alone, rapt, absorbed, immersed in the special game of the
moment. He was squatting in an old pig-trough that had been brought in
to be tinkered; and as he rhapsodised, anon he waved a shovel over his
head, anon dug it into the ground with the action of those who would
urge Canadian canoes. Edward strode in upon him.

‘What rot are you playing at now?’ he demanded sternly.

Harold flushed up, but stuck to his pig-trough like a man. ‘I’m Jason,’
he replied defiantly; ‘and this is the Argo. The other fellows are
here too, only you can’t see them; and we’re just going through the
Hellespont, so don’t you come bothering.’ And once more he plied the
wine-dark sea.

Edward kicked the pig-trough contemptuously. ‘Pretty sort of Argo
you’ve got!’ said he.

Harold began to get annoyed. ‘I can’t help it,’ he retorted. ‘It’s the
best sort of Argo I can manage, and it’s all right if you only pretend
enough. But _you_ never could pretend one bit.’

Edward reflected. ‘Look here,’ he said presently. ‘Why shouldn’t we get
hold of Farmer Larkin’s boat, and go right away up the river in a real
Argo, and look for Medea, and the Golden Fleece, and everything? And
I’ll tell you what, I don’t mind your being Jason, as you thought of it
first.’

Harold tumbled out of the trough in the excess of his emotion. ‘But we
aren’t allowed to go on the water by ourselves,’ he cried.

‘No,’ said Edward, with fine scorn: ‘we aren’t allowed; and Jason
wasn’t allowed either, I daresay. But he _went_!’

Harold’s protest had been merely conventional: he only wanted to be
convinced by sound argument. The next question was, How about the
girls? Selina was distinctly handy in a boat: the difficulty about her
was, that if she disapproved of the expedition—and, morally considered,
it was not exactly a Pilgrim’s Progress—she might go and tell; she
having just reached that disagreeable age when one begins to develop a
conscience. Charlotte, for her part, had a habit of day-dreams, and was
as likely as not to fall overboard in one of her rapt musings. To be
sure, she would dissolve in tears when she found herself left out; but
even that was better than a watery tomb. In fine, the public voice—and
rightly, perhaps—was against the admission of the skirted animal:
despite the precedent of Atalanta, who was one of the original crew.

[Illustration: “WE PUT THE ARGO’S HEAD UPSTREAM, SINCE THAT LED AWAY
FROM THE LARKIN PROVINCE”]

‘And now,’ said Edward, ‘who’s to ask Farmer Larkin? _I_ can’t; last
time I saw him he said when he caught me again he’d smack my head.
_You’ll_ have to.’

I hesitated, for good reasons. ‘You know those precious calves of his?’
I began.

Edward understood at once. ‘All right,’ he said; ‘then we won’t ask him
at all. It doesn’t much matter. He’d only be annoyed, and that would be
a pity. Now let’s set off.’

We made our way down to the stream, and captured the farmer’s boat
without let or hindrance, the enemy being engaged in the hay-fields.
This ‘river,’ so called, could never be discovered by us in any atlas;
indeed our Argo could hardly turn in it without risk of shipwreck. But
to us ’twas Orinoco, and the cities of the world dotted its shores.
We put the Argo’s head upstream, since that led away from the Larkin
province; Harold was faithfully permitted to be Jason, and we shared
the rest of the heroes among us. Then, quitting Thessaly, we threaded
the Hellespont with shouts, breathlessly dodged the Clashing Rocks,
and coasted under the lee of the Siren-haunted isles. Lemnos was
fringed with meadow-sweet, dog-roses dotted the Mysian shore, and the
cheery call of the haymaking folk sounded along the coast of Thrace.

After some hour or two’s seafaring, the prow of the Argo embedded
itself in the mud of a landing-place, plashy with the tread of cows and
giving on to a lane that led towards the smoke of human habitations.
Edward jumped ashore, alert for exploration, and strode off without
waiting to see if we followed; but I lingered behind, having caught
sight of a moss-grown water-gate hard by, leading into a garden that,
from the brooding quiet lapping it round, appeared to portend magical
possibilities.

Indeed the very air within seemed stiller, as we circumspectly passed
through the gate; and Harold hung back shamefaced, as if we were
crossing the threshold of some private chamber, and ghosts of old days
were hustling past us. Flowers there were, everywhere; but they drooped
and sprawled in an overgrowth hinting at indifference; the scent of
heliotrope possessed the place as if actually hung in solid festoons
from tall untrimmed hedge to hedge. No basket-chairs, shawls, or novels
dotted the lawn with colour; and on the garden-front of the house
behind, the blinds were mostly drawn. A grey old sun-dial dominated the
central sward, and we moved towards it instinctively, as the most human
thing in sight. An antick motto ran round it, and with eyes and fingers
we struggled at the decipherment.

TIME: TRYETH: TROTHE: spelt out Harold at last. ‘I wonder what that
means?’

I could not enlighten him, nor meet his further questions as to the
inner mechanism of the thing, and where you wound it up. I had seen
these instruments before, of course; but had never fully understood
their manner of working.

We were still puzzling our heads over the contrivance, when I became
aware that Medea herself was moving down the path from the house.
Dark-haired, supple, of a figure lightly poised and swayed, but pale
and listless—I knew her at once, and having come out to find her,
naturally felt no surprise at all. But Harold, who was trying to climb
on to the top of the sun-dial, having a cat-like fondness for the
summit of things, started and fell prone, barking his chin and filling
the pleasance with lamentation.

Medea skimmed the ground swallow-like, and in a moment was on her knees
comforting him, wiping the dirt out of his chin with her own dainty
handkerchief, and vocal with soft murmur of consolation.

‘You needn’t take on so about him,’ I observed politely. ‘He’ll cry for
just one minute, and then he’ll be all right.’

My estimate was justified. At the end of his regulation time Harold
stopped crying suddenly, like a clock that had struck its hour; and
with a serene and cheerful countenance wriggled out of Medea’s embrace,
and ran for a stone to throw at an intrusive blackbird.

‘O you boys!’ cried Medea, throwing wide her arms with abandonment.
‘Where have you dropped from? How dirty you are! I’ve been shut up here
for a thousand years, and all that time I’ve never seen any one under
a hundred and fifty! Let’s play at something, at once!’

‘Rounders is a good game,’ I suggested. ‘Girls can play at rounders.
And we could serve up to the sun-dial here. But you want a bat and a
ball, and some more people.’

She struck her hands together tragically. ‘I haven’t a bat,’ she cried,
‘or a ball, or more people, or anything sensible whatever. Never mind;
let’s play at hide-and-seek in the kitchen-garden. And we’ll race
there, up to that walnut-tree; I haven’t run for a century!’

She was so easy a victor, nevertheless, that I began to doubt, as
I panted behind, whether she had not exaggerated her age by a year
or two. She flung herself into hide-and-seek with all the gusto and
abandonment of the true artist; and as she flitted away and reappeared,
flushed and laughing divinely, the pale witch-maiden seemed to fall
away from her, and she moved rather as that other girl I had read
about, snatched from fields of daffodil to reign in shadow below, yet
permitted now and again to revisit earth and light and the frank,
caressing air.

Tired at last, we strolled back to the old sun-dial, and Harold, who
never relinquished a problem unsolved, began afresh, rubbing his finger
along the faint incisions. ‘_Time tryeth trothe._ Please, I want to
know what that means?’

Medea’s face drooped low over the sun-dial, till it was almost hidden
in her fingers. ‘That’s what I’m here for,’ she said presently in quite
a changed, low voice. ‘They shut me up here—they think I’ll forget—but
I never will—never, never! And he, too—but I don’t know—it is so long—I
don’t know!’

Her face was quite hidden now. There was silence again in the old
garden. I felt clumsily helpless and awkward. Beyond a vague idea of
kicking Harold, nothing remedial seemed to suggest itself.

None of us had noticed the approach of another she-creature—one of the
angular and rigid class—how different from our dear comrade! The years
Medea had claimed might well have belonged to her; she wore mittens,
too—a trick I detested in woman. ‘Lucy!’ she said sharply, in a tone
with _aunt_ writ large over it; and Medea started up guiltily.

‘You’ve been crying,’ said the newcomer, grimly regarding her through
spectacles. ‘And pray who are these exceedingly dirty little boys?’

‘Friends of mine, aunt,’ said Medea promptly, with forced cheerfulness.
‘I—I’ve known them a long time. I asked them to come.’

The aunt sniffed suspiciously. ‘You must come indoors, dear,’ she said,
‘and lie down. The sun will give you a headache. And you little boys
had better run away home to your tea. Remember, you should not come to
pay visits without your nursemaid.’

Harold had been tugging nervously at my jacket for some time, and I
only waited till Medea turned and kissed a white hand to us as she was
led away. Then I ran. We gained the boat in safety; and ‘What an old
dragon!’ said Harold.

‘Wasn’t she a beast!’ I replied. ‘Fancy the sun giving any one a
headache! But Medea was a real brick. Couldn’t we carry her off?’

‘We could if Edward was here,’ said Harold confidently.

The question was, What had become of that defaulting hero? We were not
left long in doubt. First, there came down the lane the shrill and
wrathful clamour of a female tongue; then Edward, running his best;
and then an excited woman hard on his heel. Edward tumbled into the
bottom of the boat, gasping ‘Shove her off!’ And shove her off we did,
mightily, while the dame abused us from the bank in the self-same
accents in which Alfred hurled defiance at the marauding Dane.

‘That was just like a bit out of _Westward Ho!_’ I remarked
approvingly, as we sculled down the stream. ‘But what had you been
doing to her?’

‘Hadn’t been doing anything,’ panted Edward, still breathless. ‘I went
up into the village and explored, and it was a very nice one, and the
people were very polite. And there was a blacksmith’s forge there, and
they were shoeing horses, and the hoofs fizzled and smoked, and smelt
so jolly! I stayed there quite a long time Then I got thirsty, so I
asked that old woman for some water, and while she was getting it her
cat came out of the cottage, and looked at me in a nasty sort of way,
and said something I didn’t like. So I went up to it just to—to teach
it manners, and somehow or other, next minute it was up an apple-tree,
spitting, and I was running down the lane with that old thing after me.’

Edward was so full of his personal injuries that there was no
interesting him in Medea at all. Moreover, the evening was closing
in, and it was evident that this cutting-out expedition must be kept
for another day. As we neared home, it gradually occurred to us that
perhaps the greatest danger was yet to come; for the farmer must
have missed his boat ere now, and would probably be lying in wait
for us near the landing-place. There was no other spot admitting of
debarcation on the home side; if we got out on the other, and made
for the bridge, we should certainly be seen and cut off. Then it was
that I blessed my stars that our elder brother was with us that day.
He might be little good at pretending, but in grappling with the stern
facts of life he had no equal. Enjoining silence, he waited till we
were but a little way from the fated landing-place, and then brought
us in to the opposite bank. We scrambled out noiselessly and—the
gathering darkness favouring us—crouched behind a willow, while Edward
pushed off the empty boat with his foot. The old Argo, borne down by
the gentle current, slid and grazed along the rushy bank; and when she
came opposite the suspected ambush, a stream of imprecation told us
that our precaution had not been wasted. We wondered, as we listened,
where Farmer Larkin, who was bucolically bred and reared, had acquired
such range and wealth of vocabulary. Fully realising at last that his
boat was derelict, abandoned, at the mercy of wind and wave—as well as
out of his reach—he strode away to the bridge, about a quarter of a
mile further down; and as soon as we heard his boots clumping on the
planks we nipped out, recovered the craft, pulled across, and made
the faithful vessel fast to her proper moorings. Edward was anxious
to wait and exchange courtesies and compliments with the disappointed
farmer, when he should confront us on the opposite bank; but wiser
counsels prevailed. It was possible that the piracy was not yet laid
at our particular door: Ulysses, I reminded him, had reason to regret
a similar act of bravado, and—were he here—would certainly advise a
timely retreat. Edward held but a low opinion of me as a counsellor;
but he had a very solid respect for Ulysses.

[Illustration]




THE ROMAN ROAD


ALL the roads of our neighbourhood were cheerful and friendly, having
each of them pleasant qualities of their own; but this one seemed
different from the others in its masterful suggestion of a serious
purpose, speeding you along with a strange uplifting of the heart.
The others tempted chiefly with their treasures of hedge and ditch;
the rapt surprise of the first lords-and-ladies, the rustle of a
field-mouse, the splash of a frog; while cool noses of brother-beasts
were pushed at you through gate or gap. A loiterer you had need to be,
did you choose one of them; so many were the tiny hands thrust out to
detain you, from this side and that. But this one was of a sterner
sort, and even in its shedding off of bank and hedgerow as it marched
straight and full for the open downs, it seemed to declare its contempt
for adventitious trappings to catch the shallow-pated. When the sense
of injustice or disappointment was heavy on me, and things were very
black within, as on this particular day, the road of character was my
choice for that solitary ramble when I turned my back for an afternoon
on a world that had unaccountably declared itself against me.

‘The Knights’ Road’ we children had named it, from a sort of feeling
that, if from any quarter at all, it would be down this track we
might some day see Lancelot and his peers come pacing on their great
war-horses; supposing that any of the stout band still survived, in
nooks and unexplored places. Grown-up people sometimes spoke of it
as the ‘Pilgrims’ Way’; but I didn’t know much about pilgrims—except
Walter in the Horselberg story. Him I sometimes saw, breaking with
haggard eyes out of yonder copse, and calling to the pilgrims as
they hurried along on their desperate march to the Holy City, where
peace and pardon were awaiting them. ‘All roads lead to Rome,’ I had
once heard somebody say; and I had taken the remark very seriously,
of course, and puzzled over it many days. There must have been some
mistake, I concluded at last; but of one road at least I intuitively
felt it to be true. And my belief was clinched by something that fell
from Miss Smedley during a history-lesson, about a strange road that
ran right down the middle of England till it reached the coast, and
then began again in France, just opposite, and so on undeviating,
through city and vineyard, right from the misty Highlands to the
Eternal City. Uncorroborated, any statement of Miss Smedley’s usually
fell on incredulous ears; but here, with the road itself in evidence,
she seemed, once in a way, to have strayed into truth.

Rome! It was fascinating to think that it lay at the other end of this
white ribbon that rolled itself off from my feet over the distant
downs. I was not quite so uninstructed as to imagine I could reach it
that afternoon; but some day, I thought, if things went on being as
unpleasant as they were now—some day, when Aunt Eliza had gone on a
visit,—some day, we would see.

I tried to imagine what it would be like when I got there. The Coliseum
I knew, of course, from a woodcut in the history-book: so to begin with
I plumped that down in the middle. The rest had to be patched up from
the little grey market-town where twice a year we went to have our hair
cut; hence, in the result, Vespasian’s amphitheatre was approached by
muddy little streets, wherein the Red Lion and the Blue Boar, with
Somebody’s Entire along their front, and ‘Commercial Room’ on their
windows; the doctor’s house, of substantial red-brick; and the façade
of the New Wesleyan chapel, which we thought very fine, were the chief
architectural ornaments: while the Roman populace pottered about in
smocks and corduroys, twisting the tails of Roman calves and inviting
each other to beer in musical Wessex. From Rome I drifted on to other
cities, faintly heard of—Damascus, Brighton (Aunt Eliza’s ideal),
Athens, and Glasgow, whose glories the gardener sang; but there was a
certain sameness in my conception of all of them: that Wesleyan chapel
would keep cropping up everywhere. It was easier to go a-building
among those dream-cities where no limitations were imposed, and one
was sole architect, with a free hand. Down a delectable street of
cloud-built palaces I was mentally pacing, when I happened upon the
Artist.

He was seated at work by the roadside, at a point whence the cool
large spaces of the downs, juniper-studded, swept grandly westwards.
His attributes proclaimed him of the artist tribe: besides, he wore
knickerbockers like myself,—a garb confined, I was aware, to boys
and artists. I knew I was not to bother him with questions, nor look
over his shoulder and breathe in his ear—they didn’t like it, this
_genus irritabile_. But there was nothing about staring in my code of
instructions, the point having somehow been overlooked: so, squatting
down on the grass, I devoted myself to the passionate absorbing of
every detail. At the end of five minutes there was not a button on him
that I could not have passed an examination in; and the wearer himself
of that homespun suit was probably less familiar with its pattern and
texture than I was. Once he looked up, nodded, half held out his
tobacco pouch, mechanically as it were, then, returning it to his
pocket, resumed his work, and I my mental photography.

After another five minutes or so had passed, he remarked, without
looking my way: ‘Fine afternoon we’re having: going far to-day?’

‘No, I’m not going any farther than this,’ I replied; ‘I _was_ thinking
of going on to Rome: but I’ve put it off.’

‘Pleasant place, Rome,’ he murmured: ‘you’ll like it.’ It was some
minutes later that he added: ‘But I wouldn’t go just now, if I were
you: too jolly hot.’

‘_You_ haven’t been to Rome, have you?’ I inquired.

‘Rather,’ he replied briefly: ‘I live there.’

This was too much, and my jaw dropped as I struggled to grasp the fact
that I was sitting there talking to a fellow who lived in Rome. Speech
was out of the question: besides I had other things to do. Ten solid
minutes had I already spent in an examination of him as a mere stranger
and artist; and now the whole thing had to be done over again, from
the changed point of view. So I began afresh, at the crown of his soft
hat, and worked down to his solid British shoes, this time investing
everything with the new Roman halo; and at last I managed to get out:
‘But you don’t really live there, do you?’ never doubting the fact, but
wanting to hear it repeated.

‘Well,’ he said, good-naturedly overlooking the slight rudeness of my
query, ‘I live there as much as I live anywhere. About half the year
sometimes. I’ve got a sort of a shanty there. You must come and see it
some day.’

‘But do you live anywhere else as well?’ I went on, feeling the
forbidden tide of questions surging up within me.

‘O yes, all over the place,’ was his vague reply. ‘And I’ve got a
diggings somewhere off Piccadilly.’

‘Where’s that?’ I inquired.

‘Where’s what?’ said he. ‘O, Piccadilly! It’s in London.’

‘Have you a large garden?’ I asked; ‘and how many pigs have you got?’

‘I’ve no garden at all,’ he replied sadly, and they don’t allow me to
keep pigs, though I’d like to, awfully. It’s very hard.’

‘But what do you do all day, then,’ I cried, ‘and where do you go and
play, without any garden, or pigs, or things?’

‘When I want to play,’ he said gravely, ‘I have to go and play in the
street; but it’s poor fun, I grant you. There’s a goat, though, not far
off, and sometimes I talk to him when I’m feeling lonely; but he’s very
proud.’

‘Goats _are_ proud,’ I admitted. ‘There’s one lives near here, and if
you say anything to him at all, he hits you in the wind with his head.
You know what it feels like when a fellow hits you in the wind?’

‘I do, well,’ he replied, in a tone of proper melancholy, and painted
on.

‘And have you been to any other places,’ I began again presently,
‘besides Rome and Piccy-what’s-his-name?’

‘Heaps,’ he said. ‘I’m a sort of Ulysses—seen men and cities, you know.
In fact, about the only place I never got to was the Fortunate Island.’

I began to like this man. He answered your questions briefly and to the
point, and never tried to be funny. I felt I could be confidential with
him.

‘Wouldn’t you like,’ I inquired, ‘to find a city without any people in
it at all?’

He looked puzzled. ‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand,’ said he.

‘I mean,’ I went on eagerly, ‘a city where you walk in at the gates,
and the shops are all full of beautiful things, and the houses
furnished as grand as can be, and there isn’t anybody there whatever!
And you go into the shops, and take anything you want—chocolates and
magic-lanterns and injirubber balls—and there’s nothing to pay; and you
choose your own house and live there and do just as you like, and never
go to bed unless you want to!’

The artist laid down his brush. ‘That _would_ be a nice city,’ he
said. ‘Better than Rome. You can’t do that sort of thing in Rome—or in
Piccadilly either. But I fear it’s one of the places I’ve never been
to.’

‘And you’d ask your friends,’ I went on, warming to my subject;
‘only those you really like, of course; and they’d each have a house
to themselves—there’d be lots of houses,—and there wouldn’t be any
relations at all, unless they promised they’d be pleasant; and if they
weren’t they’d have to go.’

‘So you wouldn’t have any relations?’ said the artist. ‘Well, perhaps
you’re right. We have tastes in common, I see.’

‘I’d have Harold,’ I said reflectively, ‘and Charlotte. They’d like it
awfully. The others are getting too old. O, and Martha—I’d have Martha
to cook and wash up and do things. You’d like Martha. She’s ever so
much nicer than Aunt Eliza. She’s my idea of a real lady.’

‘Then I’m sure I should like her,’ he replied heartily, ‘and when I
come to—what do you call this city of yours? Nephelo—something, did you
say?’

‘I—I don’t know,’ I replied timidly. ‘I’m afraid it hasn’t got a
name—yet.’

The artist gazed out over the downs. ‘“The poet says, dear city of
Cecrops,”’ he said softly to himself, ‘“and wilt not thou say, dear
city of Zeus?” That’s from Marcus Aurelius,’ he went on, turning again
to his work. ‘You don’t know him, I suppose; you will some day.’

‘Who’s he?’ I inquired.

‘O, just another fellow who lived in Rome,’ he replied, dabbing away.

‘O dear!’ I cried disconsolately. ‘What a lot of people seem to live at
Rome, and I’ve never even been there! But I think I’d like _my_ city
best.’

‘And so would I,’ he replied with unction. ‘But Marcus Aurelius
wouldn’t, you know.’

‘Then we won’t invite him,’ I said; ‘will we?’

‘_I_ won’t if you won’t,’ said he. And that point being settled, we
were silent for a while.

‘Do you know,’ he said presently, ‘I’ve met one or two fellows from
time to time, who have been to a city like yours—perhaps it was the
same one. They won’t talk much about it—only broken hints, now and
then; but they’ve been there sure enough. They don’t seem to care about
anything in particular—and everything’s the same to them, rough or
smooth; and sooner or later they slip off and disappear; and you never
see them again. Gone back, I suppose.’

‘Of course,’ said I. ‘Don’t see what they ever came away for; _I_
wouldn’t. To be told you’ve broken things when you haven’t, and stopped
having tea with the servants in the kitchen, and not allowed to have a
dog to sleep with you. But _I’ve_ known people, too, who’ve gone there.’

The artist stared, but without incivility.

‘Well, there’s Lancelot,’ I went on. ‘The book says he died, but it
never seemed to read right, somehow. He just went away, like Arthur.
And Crusoe, when he got tired of wearing clothes and being respectable.
And all the nice men in the stories who don’t marry the Princess, ’cos
only one man ever gets married in a book, you know. They’ll be there!’

‘And the men who never come off,’ he said, ‘who try like the rest, but
get knocked out, or somehow miss—or break down or get bowled over in
the melée—and get no Princess, nor even a second-class kingdom—some of
them’ll be there, I hope?’

‘Yes, if you like,’ I replied, not quite understanding him; ‘if they’re
friends of yours, we’ll ask ’em, of course.’

‘What a time we shall have!’ said the artist reflectively; ‘and how
shocked old Marcus Aurelius will be!’

The shadows had lengthened uncannily, a tide of golden haze was
flooding the grey-green surface of the downs, and the artist began
to put his traps together, preparatory to a move. I felt very low:
we would have to part, it seemed, just as we were getting on so well
together. Then he stood up, and he was very straight and tall, and the
sunset was in his hair and beard as he stood there, high over me. He
took my hand like an equal. ‘I’ve enjoyed our conversation very much,’
he said. ‘That was an interesting subject you started, and we haven’t
half exhausted it. We shall meet again, I hope?’

‘Of course we shall,’ I replied, surprised that there should be any
doubt about it.

[Illustration: “THEN HE STOOD UP, AND HE WAS VERY STRAIGHT AND TALL,
AND THE SUNSET WAS IN HIS HAIR AND BEARD AS HE STOOD THERE, HIGH OVER
ME”]

‘In Rome perhaps?’ said he.

‘Yes, in Rome,’ I answered; ‘or Piccy-the-other-place, or somewhere.’

‘Or else,’ said he, ‘in that other city—when we’ve found the way there.
And I’ll look out for you, and you’ll sing out as soon as you see me.
And we’ll go down the street arm-in-arm, and into all the shops, and
then I’ll choose my house, and you’ll choose your house, and we’ll live
there like princes and good fellows.’

‘O, but you’ll stay in my house, won’t you?’ I cried; ‘I wouldn’t ask
everybody; but I’ll ask _you_.’

He affected to consider a moment; then ‘Right!’ he said: ‘I believe you
mean it, and I _will_ come and stay with you. I won’t go to anybody
else, if they ask me ever so much. And I’ll stay quite a long time,
too, and I won’t be any trouble.’

Upon this compact we parted, and I went down-heartedly from the man who
understood me, back to the house where I never could do anything right.
How was it that everything seemed natural and sensible to him, which
these uncles, vicars, and other grown-up men took for the merest
tomfoolery? Well, he would explain this, and many another thing, when
we met again. The Knights’ Road! How it always brought consolation! Was
he possibly one of those vanished knights I had been looking for so
long? Perhaps he would be in armour next time—why not? He would look
well in armour, I thought. And I would take care to get there first,
and see the sunlight flash and play on his helmet and shield, as he
rode up the High Street of the Golden City.

Meantime, there only remained the finding it. An easy matter.

[Illustration]




THE SECRET DRAWER


IT must surely have served as a boudoir for the ladies of old time,
this little used, rarely entered chamber where the neglected old bureau
stood. There was something very feminine in the faint hues of its faded
brocades, in the rose and blue of such bits of china as yet remained,
and in the delicate old-world fragrance of pot-pourri from the great
bowl,—blue and white, with funny holes in its cover,—that stood on
the bureau’s flat top. Modern aunts disdained this out-of-the-way,
backwater, upstairs room, preferring to do their accounts and grapple
with their correspondence in some central position more in the whirl
of things, whence one eye could be kept on the carriage-drive, while
the other was alert for malingering servants and marauding children.
Those aunts of a former generation—I sometimes felt—would have suited
our habits better. But even by us children, to whom few places were
private or reserved, the room was visited but rarely. To be sure,
there was nothing particular in it that we coveted or required. Only a
few spindle-legged, gilt-backed chairs,—an old harp on which, so the
legend ran, Aunt Eliza herself used once to play, in years remote,
unchronicled; a corner-cupboard with a few pieces of china; and the old
bureau. But one other thing the room possessed, peculiar to itself; a
certain sense of privacy—a power of making the intruder feel that he
_was_ intruding—perhaps even a faculty of hinting that some one might
have been sitting on those chairs, writing at the bureau, or fingering
the china, just a second before one entered. No such violent word as
‘haunted’ could possibly apply to this pleasant old-fashioned chamber,
which indeed we all rather liked; but there was no doubt it was
reserved and stand-offish, keeping itself to itself.

Uncle Thomas was the first to draw my attention to the possibilities
of the old bureau. He was pottering about the house one afternoon,
having ordered me to keep at his heels for company—he was a man who
hated to be left one minute alone,—when his eye fell on it. ‘H’m!
Sheraton!’ he remarked. (He had a smattering of most things, this
uncle, especially the vocabularies.) Then he let down the flap, and
examined the empty pigeon-holes and dusty panelling. ‘Fine bit of
inlay,’ he went on: ‘good work, all of it. I know the sort. There’s a
secret drawer in there somewhere.’ Then as I breathlessly drew near, he
suddenly exclaimed: ‘By Jove, I do want to smoke!’ And, wheeling round,
he abruptly fled for the garden, leaving me with the cup dashed from my
lips. What a strange thing, I mused, was this smoking, that takes a man
suddenly, be he in the court, the camp, or the grove, grips him like
an Afreet, and whirls him off to do its imperious behests! Would it be
even so with myself, I wondered, in those unknown grown-up years to
come?

But I had no time to waste in vain speculations. My whole being was
still vibrating to those magic syllables ‘secret drawer’; and that
particular chord had been touched that never fails to thrill responsive
to such words as _cave_, _trap-door_, _sliding-panel_, _bullion_,
_ingots_, or _Spanish dollars_. For, besides its own special bliss,
who ever heard of a secret drawer with nothing in it? And O I did want
money so badly! I mentally ran over the list of demands which were
pressing me the most imperiously.

First, there was the pipe I wanted to give George Jannaway. George,
who was Martha’s young man, was a shepherd, and a great ally of mine;
and the last fair he was at, when he bought his sweetheart fairings,
as a right-minded shepherd should, he had purchased a lovely snake
expressly for me; one of the wooden sort, with joints, waggling
deliciously in the hand; with yellow spots on a green ground, sticky
and strong-smelling, as a fresh-painted snake ought to be; and with a
red-flannel tongue pasted cunningly into its jaws. I loved it much, and
took it to bed with me every night, till what time its spinal cord was
loosed and it fell apart, and went the way of all mortal joys. _I_
thought it very nice of George to think of me at the fair, and that’s
why I wanted to give him a pipe. When the young year was chill and
lambing-time was on, George inhabited a little wooden house on wheels,
far out on the wintry downs, and saw no faces but such as were sheepish
and woolly and mute; and when he and Martha were married, she was going
to carry his dinner out to him every day, two miles; and after it,
perhaps he would smoke my pipe. It seemed an idyllic sort of existence,
for both the parties concerned; but a pipe of quality, a pipe fitted
to be part of a life such as this, could not be procured (so Martha
informed me) for a smaller sum than eighteenpence. And meantime——!

Then there was the fourpence I owed Edward; not that he was bothering
me for it, but I knew he was in need of it himself, to pay back Selina,
who wanted it to make up a sum of two shillings, to buy Harold an
ironclad for his approaching birthday,—H.M.S. _Majestic_, now lying
uselessly careened in the toyshop window, just when her country had
such sore need of her.

And then there was that boy in the village who had caught a young
squirrel, and I had never yet possessed one, and he wanted a shilling
for it, but I knew that for ninepence in cash—but what was the good of
these sorry threadbare reflections? I had wants enough to exhaust any
possible find of bullion, even if it amounted to half a sovereign. My
only hope now lay in the magic drawer, and here I was, standing and
letting the precious minutes slip by! Whether ‘findings’ of this sort
could, morally speaking, be considered ‘keepings,’ was a point that did
not occur to me.

The room was very still as I approached the bureau; possessed, it
seemed to be, by a sort of hush of expectation. The faint odour of
orris-root that floated forth as I let down the flap, seemed to
identify itself with the yellows and browns of the old wood, till hue
and scent were of one quality and interchangeable. Even so, ere this,
the pot-pourri had mixed itself with the tints of the old brocade,
and brocade and pot-pourri had long been one. With expectant fingers
I explored the empty pigeon-holes and sounded the depths of the
softly-sliding drawers. No books that I knew of gave any general recipe
for a quest like this; but the glory, should I succeed unaided, would
be all the greater.

To him who is destined to arrive, the fates never fail to afford, on
the way, their small encouragements. In less than two minutes, I had
come across a rusty button-hook. This was truly magnificent. In the
nursery there existed, indeed, a general button-hook, common to either
sex; but none of us possessed a private and special button-hook, to
lend or to refuse as suited the high humour of the moment. I pocketed
the treasure carefully, and proceeded. At the back of another drawer,
three old foreign stamps told me I was surely on the highroad to
fortune.

Following on these bracing incentives, came a dull blank period of
unrewarded search. In vain I removed all the drawers and felt over
every inch of the smooth surfaces, from front to back. Never a knob,
spring or projection met the thrilling finger-tips; unyielding the
old bureau stood, stoutly guarding its secret, if secret it really
had. I began to grow weary and disheartened. This was not the first
time that Uncle Thomas had proved shallow, uninformed, a guide into
blind alleys where the echoes mocked you. Was it any good persisting
longer? Was anything any good whatever? In my mind I began to review
past disappointments, and life seemed one long record of failure and
of non-arrival. Disillusioned and depressed, I left my work and went
to the window. The light was ebbing from the room, and seemed outside
to be collecting itself on the horizon for its concentrated effort of
sunset. Far down the garden, Uncle Thomas was holding Edward in the air
reversed, and smacking him. Edward, gurgling hysterically, was striking
blind fists in the direction where he judged his uncle’s stomach should
rightly be; the contents of his pockets—a motley show—were strewing
the lawn. Somehow, though I had been put through a similar performance
myself an hour or two ago, it all seemed very far away and cut off from
me.

[Illustration: “WESTWARD THE CLOUDS WERE MASSING THEMSELVES IN A LOW
VIOLET BANK; BELOW THEM, TO NORTH AND SOUTH, AS FAR ROUND AS THE EYE
COULD REACH, A NARROW STREAK OF GOLD RAN OUT ..... I TURNED FOR A LAST
EFFORT”]

Westwards the clouds were massing themselves in a low violet bank;
below them, to north and south, as far round as eye could reach, a
narrow streak of gold ran out and stretched away, straight along the
horizon. Somewhere very far off, a horn was blowing, clear and thin;
it sounded like the golden streak grown audible, while the gold seemed
the visible sound. It pricked my ebbing courage, this blended strain of
music and colour. I turned for a last effort; and Fortune thereupon,
as if half-ashamed of the unworthy game she had been playing with me,
relented, opening her clenched fist. Hardly had I put my hand once more
to the obdurate wood, when with a sort of small sigh, almost a sob—as
it were—of relief, the secret drawer sprang open.

I drew it out and carried it to the window, to examine it in the
failing light. Too hopeless had I gradually grown, in my dispiriting
search, to expect very much; and yet at a glance I saw that my basket
of glass lay in shivers at my feet. No ingots nor dollars were here,
to crown me the little Monte Cristo of a week. Outside, the distant
horn had ceased its gnat-song, the gold was paling to primrose, and
everything was lonely and still. Within, my confident little castles
were tumbling down like so many card-houses, leaving me stripped
of estate, both real and personal, and dominated by the depressing
reaction.

And yet,—as I looked again at the small collection that lay within
that drawer of disillusions, some warmth crept back to my heart as
I recognised that a kindred spirit to my own had been at the making
of it. Two tarnished gilt buttons—naval, apparently—a portrait of a
monarch unknown to me, cut from some antique print and deftly coloured
by hand in just my own bold style of brush-work—some foreign copper
coins, thicker and clumsier of make than those I hoarded myself—and
a list of birds’-eggs, with names of the places where they had been
found. Also, a ferret’s muzzle, and a twist of tarry string, still
faintly aromatic! It was a real boy’s hoard, then, that I had happened
upon. He too had found out the secret drawer, this happy-starred young
person; and here he had stowed away his treasures, one by one, and had
cherished them secretly awhile, and then—what? Well, one would never
know now the reason why these priceless possessions still lay here
unreclaimed; but across the void stretch of years I seemed to touch
hands a moment with my little comrade of seasons—how many seasons?—long
since dead.

I restored the drawer, with its contents, to the trusty bureau, and
heard the spring click with a certain satisfaction. Some other boy,
perhaps, would some day release that spring again. I trusted he
would be equally appreciative. As I opened the door to go, I could
hear, from the nursery at the end of the passage, shouts and yells,
telling that the hunt was up. Bears, apparently, or bandits, were on
the evening bill of fare, judging by the character of the noises. In
another minute I would be in the thick of it, in all the warmth and
light and laughter. And yet—what a long way off it all seemed, both in
space and time, to me yet lingering on the threshold of that old-world
chamber!




‘EXIT TYRANNUS’


THE eventful day had arrived at last, the day which, when first
named, had seemed—like all golden dates that promise anything
definite—so immeasurably remote. When it was first announced, a
fortnight before, that Miss Smedley was really going, the resultant
ecstasies had occupied a full week, during which we blindly revelled
in the contemplation and discussion of her past tyrannies, crimes,
malignities; in recalling to each other this or that insult, dishonour,
or physical assault, sullenly endured at a time when deliverance was
not even a small star on the horizon: and in mapping out the shining
days to come, with special new troubles of their own, no doubt—since
this is but a work-a-day world!—but at least free from one familiar
scourge. The time that remained had been taken up by the planning
of practical expressions of the popular sentiment. Under Edward’s
masterly direction, arrangements had been made for a flag to be run up
over the hen-house at the very moment when the fly, with Miss Smedley’s
boxes on top and the grim oppressor herself inside, began to move off
down the drive. Three brass cannons, set on the brow of the sunk-fence,
were to proclaim our deathless sentiments in the ears of the retreating
foe; the dogs were to wear ribbons; and later—but this depended on our
powers of evasiveness and dissimulation—there might be a small bonfire,
with a cracker or two if the public funds could bear the unwonted
strain.

I was awakened by Harold digging me in the ribs, and ‘She’s going
to-day!’ was the morning hymn that scattered the clouds of sleep.
Strange to say, it was with no corresponding jubilation of spirits that
I slowly realised the momentous fact. Indeed, as I dressed, a dull
disagreeable feeling that I could not define grew up in me—something
like a physical bruise. Harold was evidently feeling it too, for after
repeating ‘She’s going to-day!’ in a tone more befitting the Litany, he
looked hard in my face for direction as to how the situation was to be
taken. But I crossly bade him look sharp and say his prayers and not
bother me. What could this gloom portend, that on a day of days like
the present seemed to hang my heavens with black?

Down at last and out in the sun, we found Edward before us, swinging on
a gate and chanting a farm-yard ditty in which all the beasts appear in
due order, jargoning in their several tongues, and every verse begins
with the couplet:

    ‘Now, my lads, come with me,
     Out in the morning early!’

The fateful exodus of the day had evidently slipped his memory
entirely. I touched him on the shoulder. ‘She’s going to-day!’ I said.
Edward’s carol subsided like a water-tap turned off. ‘So she is!’ he
replied, and got down at once off the gate. And we returned to the
house without another word.

At breakfast Miss Smedley behaved in a most mean and uncalled-for
manner. The right divine of governesses to govern wrong includes no
right to cry. In thus usurping the prerogative of their victims they
ignore the rules of the ring, and hit below the belt. Charlotte was
crying, of course; but that counted for nothing. Charlotte even cried
when the pigs’ noses were ringed in due season; thereby evoking the
cheery contempt of the operators, who asserted they liked it, and
doubtless knew. But when the cloud-compeller, her bolts laid aside,
resorted to tears, mutinous humanity had a right to feel aggrieved, and
think itself placed in a false and difficult position. What would the
Romans have done, supposing Hannibal had cried? History has not even
considered the possibility. Rules and precedents should be strictly
observed on both sides. When they are violated, the other party is
justified in feeling injured.

There were no lessons that morning, naturally—another grievance! The
fitness of things required that we should have struggled to the last
in a confused medley of moods and tenses, and parted for ever, flushed
with hatred, over the dismembered corpse of the multiplication-table.
But this thing was not to be; and I was free to stroll by myself
through the garden, and combat, as best I might, this growing feeling
of depression. It was a wrong system altogether, I thought, this going
of people one had got used to. Things ought always to continue as they
had been. Change there must be, of course; pigs, for instance, came and
went with disturbing frequency—

    ‘Fired their ringing shot and passed,
     Hotly charged and sank at last’—

but Nature had ordered it so, and in requital had provided for rapid
successors. Did you come to love a pig, and he was taken from you,
grief was quickly assuaged in the delight of selection from the new
litter. But now, when it was no question of a peerless pig, but only
of a governess, Nature seemed helpless, and the future held no litter
of oblivion. Things might be better, or they might be worse, but they
would never be the same; and the innate conservatism of youth asks
neither poverty nor riches, but only immunity from change.

Edward slouched up alongside of me presently, with a hangdog look on
him, as if he had been caught stealing jam. ‘What a lark it’ll be when
she’s really gone!’ he observed, with a swagger obviously assumed.

‘Grand fun!’ I replied dolorously; and conversation flagged.

We reached the hen-house, and contemplated the banner of freedom lying
ready to flaunt the breezes at the supreme moment.

‘Shall you run it up,’ I asked, ‘when the fly starts, or—or wait a
little till it’s out of sight?’

Edward gazed round him dubiously. ‘We’re going to have some rain, I
think,’ he said; ‘and—and it’s a new flag. It would be a pity to spoil
it. P’raps I won’t run it up at all.’

Harold came round the corner like a bison pursued by Indians. ‘I’ve
polished up the cannons,’ he cried, ‘and they look grand! Mayn’t I load
’em now?’

‘You leave ’em alone,’ said Edward severely, ‘or you’ll be blowing
yourself up’ (consideration for others was not usually Edward’s strong
point). ‘Don’t touch the gunpowder till you’re told, or you’ll get your
head smacked.’

Harold fell behind, limp, squashed, obedient. ‘She wants me to write to
her,’ he began presently. ‘Says she doesn’t mind the spelling, if I’ll
only write. Fancy her saying that!’

‘O, shut up, will you?’ said Edward savagely; and once more we were
silent, with only our thoughts for sorry company.

‘Let’s go off to the copse,’ I suggested timidly, feeling that
something had to be done to relieve the tension, ‘and cut more new bows
and arrows.’

‘She gave me a knife my last birthday,’ said Edward moodily, never
budging. ‘It wasn’t much of a knife—but I wish I hadn’t lost it!’

‘When my legs used to ache,’ I said, ‘she sat up half the night,
rubbing stuff on them. I forgot all about that till this morning.’

‘There’s the fly!’ cried Harold suddenly. ‘I can hear it scrunching on
the gravel.’

Then for the first time we turned and stared each other in the face.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fly and its contents had finally disappeared through the gate, the
rumble of its wheels had died away. Yet no flag floated defiantly in
the sun, no cannons proclaimed the passing of a dynasty. From out the
frosted cake of our existence Fate had cut an irreplaceable segment:
turn which way we would, the void was present. We sneaked off in
different directions, mutually undesirous of company; and it seemed
borne in upon me that I ought to go and dig my garden right over, from
end to end. It didn’t actually want digging; on the other hand no
amount of digging could affect it, for good or for evil; so I worked
steadily, strenuously, under the hot sun, stifling thought in action.
At the end of an hour or so, I was joined by Edward.

[Illustration: “‘I’VE BEEN CHOPPING UP WOOD,’ HE EXPLAINED, IN A GUILTY
SORT OF WAY”]

‘I’ve been chopping up wood,’ he explained, in a guilty sort of way,
though nobody had called on him to account for his doings.

‘What for?’ I inquired stupidly. ‘There’s piles and piles of it chopped
up already.’

‘I know,’ said Edward, ‘but there’s no harm in having a bit over. You
never can tell what may happen. But what have you been doing all
this digging for?’

‘You said it was going to rain,’ I explained hastily. ‘So I thought I’d
get the digging done before it came. Good gardeners always tell you
that’s the right thing to do.’

‘It did look like rain at one time,’ Edward admitted; ‘but it’s passed
off now. Very queer weather we’re having. I suppose that’s why I’ve
felt so funny all day.’

‘Yes, I suppose it’s the weather,’ I replied. ‘_I’ve_ been feeling
funny too.’

The weather had nothing to do with it, as we well knew. But we would
both have died rather than admit the real reason.

[Illustration]




THE BLUE ROOM


THAT nature has her moments of sympathy with man has been noted
often enough,—and generally as a new discovery. To us, who had never
known any other condition of things, it seemed entirely right and
fitting that the wind sang and sobbed in the poplar tops, and, in
the lulls of it, sudden spirts of rain spattered the already dusty
roads, on that blusterous March day when Edward and I awaited, on the
station platform, the arrival of the new tutor. Needless to say, this
arrangement had been planned by an aunt, from some fond idea that our
shy, innocent young natures would unfold themselves during the walk
from the station, and that, on the revelation of each other’s more
solid qualities that must inevitably ensue, an enduring friendship,
springing from mutual respect, might be firmly based. A pretty
dream,—nothing more. For Edward, who foresaw that the brunt of tutorial
oppression would have to be borne by him, was sulky, monosyllabic,
and determined to be as negatively disagreeable as good manners would
permit. It was therefore evident that I would have to be spokesman
and purveyor of hollow civilities, and I was none the more amiable
on that account; all courtesies, welcomes, explanations, and other
court-chamberlain kind of business, being my special aversion. There
was much of the tempestuous March weather in the hearts of both of us,
as we sullenly glowered along the carriage-windows of the slackening
train.

One is apt, however, to misjudge the special difficulties of
a situation; and the reception proved, after all, an easy and
informal matter. In a trainful so uniformly bucolic, a tutor was
readily recognisable; and his portmanteau had been consigned to the
luggage-cart, and his person conveyed into the lane, before I had
discharged one of my carefully considered sentences. I breathed more
easily, and looking up at our new friend as we stepped out together,
remembered that we had been counting on something altogether more
arid, scholastic, and severe. A boyish eager face and a petulant
_pince-nez_—untidy hair—a head of constant quick turns like a robin’s,
and a voice that kept breaking into alto—these were all very strange
and new, but not in the least terrible.

He proceeded jerkily through the village, with glances on this side and
that; and ‘Charming,’ he broke out presently; ‘quite too charming and
delightful!’

I had not counted on this sort of thing, and glanced for help to
Edward, who, hands in pockets, looked grimly down his nose. He had
taken his line, and meant to stick to it.

Meantime our friend had made an imaginary spy-glass out of his fist,
and was squinting through it at something I could not perceive. ‘What
an exquisite bit!’ he burst out. ‘Fifteenth century—no—yes it is!’

I began to feel puzzled, not to say alarmed. It reminded me of the
butcher in the _Arabian Nights_, whose common joints, displayed on the
shop-front, took to a startled public the appearance of dismembered
humanity. This man seemed to see the strangest things in our dull,
familiar surroundings.

‘Ah!’ he broke out again, as we jogged on between hedgerows: ‘and
that field now—backed by the downs—with the rain-cloud brooding over
it,—that’s all David Cox—every bit of it!’

‘That field belongs to Farmer Larkin,’ I explained politely; for of
course he could not be expected to know. ‘I’ll take you over to Farmer
Cox’s to-morrow, if he’s a friend of yours; but there‘s nothing to see
there.’

Edward, who was hanging sullenly behind, made a face at me, as if to
say, ‘What sort of lunatic have we got here?’

‘It has the true pastoral character, this country of yours,’ went on
our enthusiast: ‘with just that added touch in cottage and farmstead,
relics of a bygone art, which makes our English landscape so divine, so
unique!’

Really this grasshopper was becoming a burden! These familiar fields
and farms, of which we knew every blade and stick, had done nothing
that I knew of to be bespattered with adjectives in this way. I had
never thought of them as divine, unique, or anything else. They
were—well, they were just themselves, and there was an end of it.
Despairingly I jogged Edward in the ribs, as a sign to start rational
conversation, but he only grinned and continued obdurate.

‘You can see the house now,’ I remarked presently; ‘and that’s Selina,
chasing the donkey in the paddock. Or is it the donkey chasing Selina?
I can’t quite make out; but it’s _them_, anyhow.’

Needless to say, he exploded with a full charge of adjectives.
‘Exquisite!’ he rapped out; ‘so mellow and harmonious! and so entirely
in keeping!’ (I could see from Edward’s face that he was thinking who
ought to be in keeping.) ‘Such possibilities of romance, now, in those
old gables!’

‘If you mean the garrets,’ I said, ‘there’s a lot of old furniture
in them; and one is generally full of apples; and the bats get in
sometimes, under the eaves, and flop about till we go up with
hair-brushes and things and drive ’em out; but there’s nothing else in
them that I know of.’

‘O, but there must be more than bats,’ he cried. ‘Don’t tell me there
are no ghosts. I shall be deeply disappointed if there aren’t any
ghosts.’

I did not think it worth while to reply, feeling really unequal to this
sort of conversation. Besides, we were nearing the house, when my task
would be ended. Aunt Eliza met us at the door, and in the cross-fire of
adjectives that ensued—both of them talking at once, as grown-up folk
have a habit of doing—we two slipped round to the back of the house,
and speedily put several broad acres between us and civilisation, for
fear of being ordered in to tea in the drawing-room. By the time we
returned, our new importation had gone up to dress for dinner, so till
the morrow at least we were free of him.

Meanwhile the March wind, after dropping a while at sundown, had been
steadily increasing in volume; and although I fell asleep at my
usual hour, about midnight I was wakened by the stress and the cry of
it. In the bright moonlight, wind-swung branches tossed and swayed
eerily across the blinds; there was rumbling in chimneys, whistling in
keyholes, and everywhere a clamour and a call. Sleep was out of the
question, and, sitting up in bed, I looked round. Edward sat up too.
‘I was wondering when you were going to wake,’ he said. ‘It’s no good
trying to sleep through this. I vote we get up and do something.’

‘I’m game,’ I replied. ‘Let’s play at being in a ship at sea’ (the
plaint of the old house under the buffeting wind suggested this,
naturally); ‘and we can be wrecked on an island, or left on a raft,
whichever you choose; but I like an island best myself, because there’s
more things on it.’

Edward on reflection negatived the idea. ‘It would make too much
noise,’ he pointed out. ‘There’s no fun playing at ships, unless you
can make a jolly good row.’

The door creaked, and a small figure in white slipped cautiously in.
‘Thought I heard you talking,’ said Charlotte. ‘We don’t like it;
we’re afraid—Selina too! She’ll be here in a minute. She’s putting on
her new dressing-gown she’s so proud of.’

His arms round his knees, Edward cogitated deeply until Selina
appeared, barefooted, and looking slim and tall in the new
dressing-gown. Then, ‘Look here,’ he exclaimed; ‘now we’re all
together, I vote we go and explore!’

‘You’re always wanting to explore,’ I said. ‘What on earth is there to
explore for in this house?’

‘Biscuits!’ said the inspired Edward.

‘Hooray! Come on!’ chimed in Harold, sitting up suddenly. He had been
awake all the time, but had been shamming asleep, lest he should be
fagged to do anything.

It was indeed a fact, as Edward had remembered, that our thoughtless
elders occasionally left the biscuits out, a prize for the
night-walking adventurer with nerves of steel.

Edward tumbled out of bed, and pulled a baggy old pair of
knickerbockers over his bare shanks. Then he girt himself with a
belt, into which he thrust, on the one side a large wooden pistol,
on the other an old single-stick; and finally he donned a big
slouch-hat—once an uncle’s—that we used for playing Guy Fawkes and
Charles-the-Second-up-a-tree in. Whatever the audience, Edward, if
possible, always dressed for his parts with care and conscientiousness;
while Harold and I, true Elizabethans, cared little about the mounting
of the piece, so long as the real dramatic heart of it beat sound.

Our commander now enjoined on us a silence deep as the grave, reminding
us that Aunt Eliza usually slept with an open door, past which we had
to file.

‘But we’ll take the short cut through the Blue Room,’ said the wary
Selina.

‘Of course,’ said Edward approvingly. ‘I forgot about that. Now then!
You lead the way!’

The Blue Room had in prehistoric times been added to by taking in a
superfluous passage, and so not only had the advantage of two doors,
but also enabled us to get to the head of the stairs without passing
the chamber wherein our dragon-aunt lay couched. It was rarely
occupied, except when a casual uncle came down for the night. We
entered in noiseless file, the room being plunged in darkness, except
for a bright strip of moonlight on the floor, across which we must
pass for our exit. On this our leading lady chose to pause, seizing
the opportunity to study the hang of her new dressing-gown. Greatly
satisfied thereat, she proceeded, after the feminine fashion, to
peacock and to pose, pacing a minuet down the moonlit patch with an
imaginary partner. This was too much for Edward’s histrionic instincts,
and after a moment’s pause he drew his single-stick, and, with
flourishes meet for the occasion, strode on to the stage. A struggle
ensued on approved lines, at the end of which Selina was stabbed slowly
and with unction, and her corpse borne from the chamber by the ruthless
cavalier. The rest of us rushed after in a clump, with capers and
gesticulations of delight; the special charm of the performance lying
in the necessity for its being carried out with the dumbest of dumb
shows.

[Illustration: “WE ENTERED IN NOISELESS FILE, THE ROOM BEING PLUNGED IN
DARKNESS, EXCEPT FOR A BRIGHT STRIP OF MOONLIGHT ON THE FLOOR”]

Once out on the dark landing, the noise of the storm without told
us that we had exaggerated the necessity for silence; so, grasping
the tails of each other’s nightgowns, even as Alpine climbers rope
themselves together in perilous places, we fared stoutly down the
staircase-moraine, and across the grim glacier of the hall, to where a
faint glimmer from the half-open door of the drawing-room beckoned to
us like friendly hostel-lights. Entering, we found that our thriftless
seniors had left the sound red heart of a fire, easily coaxed into a
cheerful blaze; and biscuits—a plateful—smiled at us in an encouraging
sort of way, together with the halves of a lemon, already squeezed,
but still suckable. The biscuits were righteously shared, the lemon
segments passed from mouth to mouth; and as we squatted round the fire,
its genial warmth consoling our unclad limbs, we realised that so many
nocturnal perils had not been braved in vain.

‘It’s a funny thing,’ said Edward, as we chatted, ‘how I hate this room
in the daytime. It always means having your face washed, and your hair
brushed, and talking silly company talk. But to-night it’s really quite
jolly. Looks different, somehow.’

‘I never can make out,’ I said, ‘what people come here to tea for.
They can have their own tea at home if they like—they’re not poor
people—with jam and things, and drink out of their saucer, and suck
their fingers and enjoy themselves; but they come here from a long way
off, and sit up straight with their feet off the bars of their chairs,
and have one cup, and talk the same sort of stuff every time.’

Selina sniffed disdainfully. ‘You don’t know anything about it,’ she
said. ‘In society you have to call on each other. It’s the proper thing
to do.’

‘Pooh! _you’re_ not in society,’ said Edward politely; ‘and, what’s
more, you never will be.’

‘Yes, I shall, some day,’ retorted Selina; ‘but I shan’t ask you to
come and see me, so there!’

‘Wouldn’t come if you did,’ growled Edward.

‘Well you won’t get the chance,’ rejoined our sister, claiming
her right of the last word. There was no heat about these little
amenities, which made up—as understood by us—the art of polite
conversation.

‘I don’t like society people,’ put in Harold from the sofa, where he
was sprawling at full length—a sight the daylight hours would have
blushed to witness. ‘There were some of ’em here this afternoon, when
you two had gone off to the station. O, and I found a dead mouse on
the lawn, and I wanted to skin it, but I wasn’t sure I knew how, by
myself; and they came out into the garden, and patted my head—I wish
people wouldn’t do that—and one of ’em asked me to pick her a flower.
Don’t know why she couldn’t pick it herself; but I said, “All right,
I will if you’ll hold my mouse.” But she screamed, and threw it away;
and Augustus (the cat) got it, and ran away with it. I believe it was
really his mouse all the time, ’cos he’d been looking about as if he
had lost something, so I wasn’t angry with _him_. But what did _she_
want to throw away my mouse for?’

‘You have to be careful with mice,’ reflected Edward; ‘they’re such
slippery things. Do you remember we were playing with a dead mouse once
on the piano, and the mouse was Robinson Crusoe, and the piano was the
island, and somehow Crusoe slipped down inside the island, into its
works, and we couldn’t get him out, though we tried rakes and all sorts
of things, till the tuner came. And that wasn’t till a week after, and
then——’

Here Charlotte, who had been nodding solemnly, fell over into the
fender; and we realised that the wind had dropped at last, and the
house was lapped in a great stillness. Our vacant beds seemed to be
calling to us imperiously; and we were all glad when Edward gave the
signal for retreat. At the top of the staircase Harold unexpectedly
turned mutinous, insisting on his right to slide down the banisters in
a free country. Circumstances did not allow of argument; I suggested
frog’s-marching instead, and accordingly frog’s-marched he was, the
procession passing solemnly across the moon-lit Blue Room, with Harold
horizontal and limply submissive. Snug in bed at last, I was just
slipping off into slumber when I heard Edward explode, with chuckle
and snort.

‘By Jove!’ he said; ‘I forgot all about it. The new tutor’s sleeping in
the Blue Room!’

‘Lucky he didn’t wake up and catch us,’ I grunted drowsily; and,
without another thought on the matter, we both sank into well-earned
repose.

Next morning, coming down to breakfast braced to grapple with fresh
adversity, we were surprised to find our garrulous friend of the
previous day—he was late in making his appearance—strangely silent and
(apparently) pre-occupied. Having polished off our porridge, we ran out
to feed the rabbits, explaining to them that a beast of a tutor would
prevent their enjoying so much of our society as formerly.

On returning to the house at the fated hour appointed for study, we
were thunderstruck to see the station-cart disappearing down the
drive, freighted with our new acquaintance. Aunt Eliza was brutally
uncommunicative; but she was overheard to remark casually that she
thought the man must be a lunatic. In this theory we were only too
ready to concur, dismissing thereafter the whole matter from our minds.

Some weeks later it happened that Uncle Thomas, while paying us a
flying visit, produced from his pocket a copy of the latest weekly,
_Psyche: a Journal of the Unseen_; and proceeded laboriously to rid
himself of much incomprehensible humour, apparently at our expense. We
bore it patiently, with the forced grin demanded by convention, anxious
to get at the source of inspiration, which it presently appeared lay
in a paragraph circumstantially describing our modest and humdrum
habitation. ‘Case III.,’ it began. ‘The following particulars were
communicated by a young member of the Society, of undoubted probity and
earnestness, and are a chronicle of actual and recent experience.’ A
fairly accurate description of the house followed, with details that
were unmistakable; but to this there succeeded a flood of meaningless
drivel about apparitions, nightly visitants, and the like, writ in a
manner betokening a disordered mind, coupled with a feeble imagination.
The fellow was not even original. All the old material was there—the
storm at night, the haunted chamber, the white lady, the murder
re-enacted, and so on—already worn threadbare in many a Christmas
Number. No one was able to make head or tail of the stuff, or of its
connexion with our quiet mansion; and yet Edward, who had always
suspected the fellow, persisted in maintaining that our tutor of a
brief span was, somehow or other, at the bottom of it.

[Illustration]




A FALLING OUT


HAROLD told me the main facts of this episode some time later,—in bits
and with reluctance. It was not a recollection he cared to talk about.
The crude blank misery of a moment is apt to leave a dull bruise which
is slow to depart, if it ever do so entirely; and Harold confesses to
a twinge or two, still, at times, like the veteran who brings home a
bullet inside him from martial plains over sea.

He knew he was a brute the moment he had done it. Selina had not
meant to worry, only to comfort and assist. But his soul was one raw
sore within him, when he found himself shut up in the schoolroom
after hours, merely for insisting that 7 times 7 amounted to 47. The
injustice of it seemed so flagrant. Why not 47 as much as 49! One
number was no prettier than the other to look at, and it was evidently
only a matter of arbitrary taste and preference, and, anyhow, it
had always been 47 to him, and would be to the end of time. So when
Selina came in out of the sun, leaving the Trappers of the Far West
behind her, and putting off the glory of being an Apache squaw in
order to hear him his tables and win his release, Harold turned on her
venomously, rejected her kindly overtures, and even drove his elbow
into her sympathetic ribs, in his determination to be left alone in the
glory of sulks. The fit passed directly, his eyes were opened, and his
soul sat in the dust as he sorrowfully began to cast about for some
atonement heroic enough to salve the wrong.

Of course poor Selina looked for no sacrifice nor heroics whatever; she
didn’t even want him to say he was sorry. If he would only make it up,
she would have done the apologising part herself. But that was not a
boy’s way. Something solid, Harold felt, was due from him; and until
that was achieved, making-up must not be thought of, in order that the
final effect might not be spoilt. Accordingly, when his release came,
and Selina hung about trying to catch his eye, Harold, possessed by
the demon of a distorted motive, avoided her steadily—though he was
bleeding inwardly at every minute of delay—and came to me instead.
Needless to say, I warmly approved his plan. It was so much more
high-toned than just going and making-up tamely, which any one could
do; and a girl who had been jobbed in the ribs by a hostile elbow could
not be expected for a moment to overlook it, without the liniment of an
offering to soothe her injured feelings.

‘I know what she wants most,’ said Harold. ‘She wants that set of
tea-things in the toy-shop window, with the red and blue flowers on
’em; she’s wanted it for months, ’cos her dolls are getting big enough
to have real afternoon tea; and she wants it so badly that she won’t
walk that side of the street when we go into the town. But it costs
five shillings!’

Then we set to work seriously, and devoted the afternoon to a
realisation of assets and the composition of a Budget that might have
been dated without shame from Whitehall. The result worked out as
follows:—

                                                    _s._ _d._

    By one uncle, unspent through having been lost
    for nearly a week—turned up at last in the
    straw of the dog-kennel                           2    6

    By advance from me on security of next uncle,
    and failing that, to be called in at Christmas    1    0

    By shaken out of missionary-box with the help
    of a knife-blade. (They were our own pennies
    and a forced levy)                                0    4

    By bet due from Edward, for walking across the
    field where Farmer Larkin’s bull was, and
    Edward bet him twopence he wouldn’t—called
    in with difficulty                                0    2

    By advance from Martha, on no security at all,
    only you mustn’t tell your aunt                   1    0
                                                      ------
                                               Total  5    0

and at last we breathed again.

The rest promised to be easy. Selina had a tea-party at five on the
morrow, with the chipped old wooden tea-things that had served her
successive dolls from babyhood. Harold would slip off directly after
dinner, going alone, so as not to arouse suspicion, as we were not
allowed to go into the town by ourselves. It was nearly two miles to
our small metropolis, but there would be plenty of time for him to go
and return, even laden with the olive-branch neatly packed in shavings.
Besides, he might meet the butcher, who was his friend and would give
him a lift. Then, finally, at five, the rapture of the new tea-service,
descended from the skies; and, retribution made, making-up at last,
without loss of dignity. With the event before us, we thought it a
small thing that twenty-four hours more of alienation and pretended
sulks must be kept up on Harold’s part; but Selina, who naturally
knew nothing of the treat in store for her, moped for the rest of the
evening, and took a very heavy heart to bed.

Next day when the hour for action arrived, Harold evaded Olympian
attention with an easy modesty born of long practice, and made off for
the front gate. Selina, who had been keeping her eye upon him, thought
he was going down to the pond to catch frogs, a joy they had planned
to share together, and made after him. But Harold, though he heard her
footsteps, continued sternly on his high mission, without even looking
back; and Selina was left to wander disconsolately among flower-beds
that had lost—for her—all scent and colour. I saw it all, and, although
cold reason approved our line of action, instinct told me we were
brutes.

[Illustration: “SHOPS CAME FIRST, OF COURSE.....”]

Harold reached the town—so he recounted afterwards—in record time,
having run most of the way for fear the tea-things, which had
reposed six months in the window, should be snapped up by some other
conscience-stricken lacerator of a sister’s feelings; and it seemed
hardly credible to find them still there, and their owner willing to
part with them for the price marked on the ticket. He paid his money
down at once, that there should be no drawing back from the bargain;
and then, as the things had to be taken out of the window and packed,
and the afternoon was yet young, he thought he might treat himself to
a taste of urban joys and the _vie de Bohême_. Shops came first, of
course, and he flattened his nose successively against the window with
the indiarubber balls in it, and the clock-work locomotive; and against
the barber’s window, with wigs on blocks, reminding him of uncles,
and shaving-cream that looked so good to eat; and the grocer’s
window, displaying more currants than the whole British population
could possibly consume without a special effort; and the window of the
bank, wherein gold was thought so little of that it was dealt about in
shovels. Next there was the market-place, with all its clamorous joys;
and when a runaway calf came down the street like a cannon-ball, Harold
felt that he had not lived in vain. The whole place was so brimful of
excitement that he had quite forgotten the why and the wherefore of
his being there, when a sight of the church clock recalled him to his
better self, and sent him flying out of the town, as he realised he
had only just time enough left to get back in. If he were after his
appointed hour, he would not only miss his high triumph, but probably
would be detected as a transgressor of bounds—a crime before which a
private opinion on multiplication sank to nothingness. So he jogged
along on his homeward way, thinking of many things, and probably
talking to himself a good deal, as his habit was. He had covered
nearly half the distance, when suddenly—a deadly sinking in the pit
of his stomach—a paralysis of every limb—around him a world extinct
of light and music—a black sun and a reeling sky—he had forgotten the
tea-things!

It was useless, it was hopeless, all was over and nothing could now
be done. Nevertheless he turned and ran back wildly, blindly, choking
with the big sobs that evoked neither pity nor comfort from a merciless
mocking world around; a stitch in his side, dust in his eyes, and black
despair clutching at his heart. So he stumbled on, with leaden legs
and bursting sides, till—as if Fate had not yet dealt him her last
worst buffet of all—on turning a corner in the road he almost ran under
the wheels of a dog-cart, in which, as it pulled up, was apparent the
portly form of Farmer Larkin, the arch-enemy, at whose ducks he had
been shying stones that very morning!

Had Harold been in his right and unclouded senses, he would have
vanished through the hedge some seconds earlier, rather than pain
the farmer by any unpleasant reminiscences which his appearance
might recall; but, as things were, he could only stand and blubber
hopelessly, caring, indeed, little now what further misery might befall
him. The farmer, for his part, surveyed the desolate figure with some
astonishment, calling out in no unfriendly accents, ‘Why, Master
Harold! whatever be the matter? Baint runnin’ away, be ee?’

Then Harold, with the unnatural courage born of desperation, flung
himself on the step, and, climbing into the cart, fell in the straw
at the bottom of it, sobbing out that he wanted to go back, go back!
The situation had a vagueness; but the farmer, a man of action rather
than of words, swung his horse round smartly, and they were in the
town again by the time Harold had recovered himself sufficiently to
furnish details. As they drove up to the shop, the woman was waiting at
the door with the parcel; and hardly a minute seemed to have elapsed
since the black crisis, ere they were bowling along swiftly home, the
precious parcel hugged in a close embrace.

And now the farmer came out in quite a new and unexpected light.
Never a word did he say of broken fences and hurdles, of trampled
crops and harried flocks and herds. One would have thought the man
had never possessed a head of live stock in his life. Instead, he was
deeply interested in the whole dolorous quest of the tea-things, and
sympathised with Harold on the disputed point in mathematics as if he
had been himself at the same stage of education. As they neared home,
Harold found himself, to his surprise, sitting up and chatting to his
new friend like man to man; and before he was set down at a convenient
gap in the garden hedge, he had promised that when Selina gave her
first public tea-party, little Miss Larkin should be invited to come
and bring her whole sawdust family along with her; and the farmer
appeared as pleased and proud as if he had won a gold medal at the
Agricultural Show, and really, when I heard the story, it began to dawn
upon me that those Olympians must have certain good points, far down in
them, and that I should have to leave off abusing them some day.

At the hour of five, Selina, having spent the afternoon searching for
Harold in all his accustomed haunts, sat down disconsolately to tea
with her dolls, who ungenerously refused to wait beyond the appointed
hour. The wooden tea-things seemed more chipped than usual; and the
dolls themselves had more of wax and sawdust, and less of human colour
and intelligence about them, than she ever remembered before. It was
then that Harold burst in, very dusty, his stockings at his heels, and
the channels ploughed by tears still showing on his grimy cheeks; and
Selina was at last permitted to know that he had been thinking of her
ever since his ill-judged exhibition of temper, and that his sulks had
not been the genuine article, nor had he gone frogging by himself. It
was a very happy hostess who dispensed hospitality that evening to a
glassy-eyed stiff-kneed circle; and many a dollish _gaucherie_, that
would have been severely checked on ordinary occasions, was as much
overlooked as if it had been a birthday.

But Harold and I, in what I was afterwards given to understand was our
stupid masculine way, thought all her happiness sprang from possession
of the long-coveted tea-service.

[Illustration]




‘LUSISTI SATIS’


AMONG the many fatuous ideas that possessed the Olympian noddle, this
one was pre-eminent; that, being Olympians, they could talk quite
freely in our presence on subjects of the closest import to us, so long
as names, dates, and other landmarks were ignored. We were supposed to
be denied the faculty for putting two and two together, and like the
monkeys, who very sensibly refrain from speech lest they should be set
to earn their livings, we were careful to conceal our capabilities for
a simple syllogism. Thus we were rarely taken by surprise, and so were
considered by our disappointed elders to be apathetic and to lack the
divine capacity for wonder.

Now the daily output of the letter-bag, with the mysterious discussions
that ensued thereon, had speedily informed us that Uncle Thomas was
intrusted with a mission—a mission, too, affecting ourselves. Uncle
Thomas’s missions were many and various. A self-important man, one
liking the business while protesting that he sank under the burden, he
was the missionary, so to speak, of our remote habitation. The matching
a ribbon, the running down to the stores, the interviewing a cook—these
and similar duties lent constant colour and variety to his vacant
life in London, and helped to keep down his figure. When the matter,
however, had in our presence to be referred to with nods and pronouns,
with significant hiatuses and interpolations in the French tongue,
then the red flag was flown, the storm-cone hoisted, and by a studious
pretence of inattention we were not long in plucking out the heart of
the mystery.

To clinch our conclusion, we descended suddenly and together on Martha;
proceeding, however, not by simple inquiry as to facts—that would never
have done; but by informing her that the air was full of school and
that we knew all about it, and then challenging denial. Martha was a
trusty soul, but a bad witness for the defence, and we soon had it all
out of her. The word had gone forth, the school had been selected; the
necessary sheets were hemming even now, and Edward was the designated
and appointed victim.

It had always been before us as an inevitable bourne, this
strange unknown thing called school; and yet—perhaps I should say
consequently—we had never seriously set ourselves to consider what it
really meant. But now that the grim spectre loomed imminent, stretching
lean hands for one of our flock, it behoved us to face the situation,
to take soundings in this uncharted sea and find out whither we were
drifting. Unfortunately the data in our possession were absolutely
insufficient, and we knew not whither to turn for exact information.
Uncle Thomas could have told us all about it, of course; he had been
there himself, once, in the dim and misty past. But an unfortunate
conviction, that nature had intended him for a humorist, tainted all
his evidence, besides making it wearisome to hear. Again, of such
among our contemporaries as we had approached, the trumpets gave
forth an uncertain sound. According to some it meant larks, revels,
emancipation, and a foretaste of the bliss of manhood. According to
others—the majority, alas!—it was a private and peculiar Hades, that
could give the original institution points and a beating. When Edward
was observed to be swaggering round with a jaunty air and his chest
stuck out, I knew that he was contemplating his future from the one
point of view. When, on the contrary, he was subdued and unaggressive,
and sought the society of his sisters, I recognised that the other
aspect was in the ascendant. ‘You can always run away, you know,’ I
used to remark consolingly on these latter occasions; and Edward would
brighten up wonderfully at the suggestion, while Charlotte melted into
tears before her vision of a brother with blistered feet and an empty
belly, passing nights of frost ’neath the lee of windy haystacks.

It was to Edward, of course, that the situation was chiefly productive
of anxiety; and yet the ensuing change in my own circumstances and
position furnished me also with food for grave reflexion. Hitherto I
had acted mostly to orders. Even when I had devised and counselled any
particular devilry, it had been carried out on Edward’s approbation,
and—as eldest—at his special risk. Henceforward I began to be anxious
of the bugbear Responsibility, and to realise what a soul-throttling
thing it is. True, my new position would have its compensations. Edward
had been masterful exceedingly, imperious, perhaps a little narrow;
impassioned for hard facts, and with scant sympathy for make-believe. I
should now be free and untrammelled; in the conception and the carrying
out of a scheme, I could accept and reject to better artistic purpose.

It would, moreover, be needless to be a Radical any more. Radical I
never was, really, by nature or by sympathy. The part had been thrust
on me one day, when Edward proposed to foist the House of Lords on our
small republic. The principles of the thing he set forth learnedly and
well, and it all sounded promising enough, till he went on to explain
that, for the present at least, he proposed to be the House of Lords
himself. We others were to be the Commons. There would be promotions,
of course, he added, dependent on service and on fitness, and open
to both sexes; and to me in especial he held out hopes of speedy
advancement. But in its initial stages the thing wouldn’t work properly
unless he were first and only Lord. Then I put my foot down promptly,
and said it was all rot, and I didn’t see the good of any House of
Lords at all. ‘Then you must be a low Radical!’ said Edward, with fine
contempt. The inference seemed hardly necessary, but what could I do? I
accepted the situation, and said firmly, Yes, I was a low Radical. In
this monstrous character I had been obliged to masquerade ever since;
but now I could throw it off, and look the world in the face again.

And yet, did this and other gains really outbalance my losses?
Henceforth I should, it was true, be leader and chief; but I should
also be the buffer between the Olympians and my little clan. To Edward
this had been nothing; he had withstood the impact of Olympus without
flinching, like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved. But was I equal to the
task? And was there not rather a danger that for the sake of peace and
quietness I might be tempted to compromise, compound, and make terms?
sinking thus, by successive lapses, into the Blameless Prig? I don’t
mean, of course, that I thought out my thoughts to the exact point here
set down. In those fortunate days of old one was free from the hard
necessity of transmuting the vague idea into the mechanical inadequate
medium of words. But the feeling was there, that I might not possess
the qualities of character for so delicate a position.

The unnatural halo round Edward got more pronounced, his own demeanour
more responsible and dignified, with the arrival of his new clothes.
When his trunk and play-box were sent in, the approaching cleavage
between our brother, who now belonged to the future, and ourselves,
still claimed by the past, was accentuated indeed. His name was
painted on each of them, in large letters, and after their arrival
their owner used to disappear mysteriously, and be found eventually
wandering round his luggage, murmuring to himself, ‘Edward ——,’ in a
rapt remote sort of way. It was a weakness, of course, and pointed to a
soft spot in his character; but those who can remember the sensation of
first seeing their names in print will not think hardly of him.

As the short days sped by and the grim event cast its shadow longer and
longer across our threshold, an unnatural politeness, a civility scarce
canny, began to pervade the air. In those latter hours Edward himself
was frequently heard to say ‘Please,’ and also ‘Would you mind fetchin’
that ball?’ while Harold and I would sometimes actually find ourselves
trying to anticipate his wishes. As for the girls, they simply
grovelled. The Olympians, too, in their uncouth way, by gift of carnal
delicacies and such-like indulgence, seemed anxious to demonstrate that
they had hitherto misjudged this one of us. Altogether the situation
grew strained and false, and I think a general relief was felt when
the end came.

We all trooped down to the station, of course; it is only in later
years that the farce of ‘seeing people off’ is seen in its true
colours. Edward was the life and soul of the party; and if his gaiety
struck one at times as being a trifle overdone, it was not a moment to
be critical. As we tramped along, I promised him I would ask Farmer
Larkin not to kill any more pigs till he came back for the holidays,
and he said he would send me a proper catapult,—the real lethal
article, not a kid’s plaything. Then suddenly, when we were about
half-way down, one of the girls fell a-snivelling.

The happy few who dare to laugh at the woes of sea-sickness will
perhaps remember how, on occasion, the sudden collapse of a
fellow-voyager before their very eyes has caused them hastily to revise
their self-confidence and resolve to walk more humbly for the future.
Even so it was with Edward, who turned his head aside, feigning an
interest in the landscape. It was but for a moment; then he recollected
the hat he was wearing—a hard bowler, the first of that sort he had
ever owned. He took it off, examined it, and felt it over. Something
about it seemed to give him strength, and he was a man once more.

At the station, Edward’s first care was to dispose his boxes on the
platform so that every one might see the labels and the lettering
thereon. One did not go to school for the first time every day! Then
he read both sides of his ticket carefully; shifted it to every one
of his pockets in turn; and finally fell to chinking of his money, to
keep his courage up. We were all dry of conversation by this time, and
could only stand round and stare in silence at the victim decked for
the altar. And, as I looked at Edward, in new clothes of a manly cut,
with a hard hat upon his head, a railway ticket in one pocket and money
of his own in the other—money to spend as he liked and no questions
asked!—I began to feel dimly how great was the gulf already yawning
betwixt us. Fortunately I was not old enough to realise, further, that
here on this little platform the old order lay at its last gasp, and
that Edward might come back to us, but it would not be the Edward of
yore, nor could things ever be the same again.

When the train steamed up at last, we all boarded it impetuously
with the view of selecting the one peerless carriage to which Edward
might be intrusted with the greatest comfort and honour; and as each
one found the ideal compartment at the same moment, and vociferously
maintained its merits, he stood some chance for a time of being left
behind. A porter settled the matter by heaving him through the nearest
door; and as the train moved off, Edward’s head was thrust out of the
window, wearing on it an unmistakable first-quality grin that he had
been saving up somewhere for the supreme moment. Very small and white
his face looked, on the long side of the retreating train. But the
grin was visible, undeniable, stoutly maintained; till a curve swept
him from our sight, and he was borne away in the dying rumble, out of
our placid backwater, out into the busy world of rubs and knocks and
competition, out into the New Life.

[Illustration: “....SELINA AND CHARLOTTE WERE BUSY STUFFING EDWARD’S
RABBITS WITH UNWONTED FORAGE, BILIOUS AND GREEN”]

When a crab has lost a leg, his gait is still more awkward than
his wont, till Time and healing Nature make him _totus teres atque
rotundus_ once more. We straggled back from the station disjointedly;
Harold, who was very silent, sticking close to me, his last slender
prop, while the girls in front, their heads together, were already
reckoning up the weeks to the holidays. Home at last, Harold suggested
one or two occupations of a spicy and contraband flavour, but though
we did our manful best there was no knocking any interest out of them.
Then I suggested others, with the same want of success. Finally we
found ourselves sitting silent on an upturned wheelbarrow, our chins on
our fists, staring haggardly into the raw new conditions of our changed
life, the ruins of a past behind our backs.

And all the while Selina and Charlotte were busy stuffing Edward’s
rabbits with unwonted forage, bilious and green; polishing up the
cage of his mice till the occupants raved and swore like householders
in spring-time; and collecting materials for new bows and arrows,
whips, boats, guns, and four-in-hand harness, against the return of
Ulysses. Little did they dream that the hero, once back from Troy and
all its onsets, would scornfully condemn their clumsy but laborious
armoury as rot and humbug and only fit for kids! This, with many
another like awakening, was mercifully hidden from them. Could the
veil have been lifted, and the girls permitted to see Edward as he
would appear a short three months hence, ragged of attire and lawless
of tongue, a scorner of tradition and an adept in strange new physical
tortures, one who would in the same half-hour dismember a doll and
shatter a hallowed belief,—in fine, a sort of swaggering Captain, fresh
from the Spanish Main,—could they have had the least hint of this,
well, then perhaps——. But which of us is of mental fibre to stand the
test of a glimpse into futurity? Let us only hope that, even with
certain disillusionment ahead, the girls would have acted precisely as
they did.

And perhaps we have reason to be very grateful that, both as children
and long afterwards, we are never allowed to guess how the absorbing
pursuit of the moment will appear not only to others but to ourselves,
a very short time hence. So we pass, with a gusto and a heartiness that
to an onlooker would seem almost pathetic, from one droll devotion to
another misshapen passion; and who shall dare to play Rhadamanthus, to
appraise the record, and to decide how much of it is solid achievement,
and how much the merest child’s play?

[Illustration]




_BOOKS BY KENNETH GRAHAME_


THE GOLDEN AGE

16mo. $1.00 net. Twenty-third Edition.


THE GOLDEN AGE

An Illustrated Edition, set in old-faced type, with 18 full-page
Photogravures, Title-page, Tail-pieces, and Cover-design by Maxfield
Parrish. Sq. 8vo. $2.50 net.

    _New York Times Saturday Review._—‘The new illustrated
    edition of “The Golden Age” is published now because
    the ordinary half-tone process applied to Maxfield
    Parrish’s charming drawings, when the book was first
    illustrated, did not do justice to the artist’s work.
    The original drawings, which had been sold to many
    purchasers, were hunted up, and they have here been
    reproduced by photogravure. No artist ever caught the
    spirit of an author more surely than Maxfield Parrish
    has caught that of the staid Secretary of the Old Lady
    of Threadneedle Street, who in his leisure hours writes
    these exquisite memories of childhood.’

    _Chicago Evening Post._—‘One of the most exquisite
    pieces of illustration that has been done in America
    for some time. A more felicitous expression of the
    spirit of Mr. Grahame’s classic could not be conceived.
    In this case it is difficult to say, if indeed it were
    not invidious to say, which were the more charming, the
    more lasting in subtle beauty,—the work of brush or
    pen. Together they have made a gem for any library.’

    _New York Evening Post._—‘The publisher, at no little
    expense and labor, has sought out the original
    pictures. The result is delightful.’

    _Brooklyn Daily Eagle._—‘Decidedly it was a good
    thought, this new edition.’

    _Boston Evening Transcript._—‘In point of
    attractiveness and beauty this new edition stands by
    itself.’


DREAM DAYS

16mo. $1.00 net. Fourth Edition.


DREAM DAYS

An Illustrated Edition, set in old-faced type, with 10 full-page
Photogravures, Title-page, Tail-pieces, and Cover-design by Maxfield
Parrish. Sq. 8vo. $2.50 net.

    _Dial._—‘One of the most delightful holiday books of
    a season or two ago was the edition of Mr. Kenneth
    Grahame’s “The Golden Age,” with illustrations by Mr.
    Maxfield Parrish. Even more delightful is the companion
    volume now issued containing the same author’s
    “Dream Days.” It is hardly necessary to speak of Mr.
    Grahame’s text. His two books hold a place apart in
    the literature of childhood, and we can well envy the
    reader who has yet to make their acquaintance.’

    DR. GUY CARLETON LEE, _Baltimore Sun_.—‘Very few more
    delightful books than “Dream Days” have ever seen the
    light. If we were forced to make out a list of the
    works of literature published during the last two
    decades, that are, in our judgment, likely to be alive
    two decades hence, in the very brief list we should
    certainly include “Dream Days.”’

    _Churchman._—‘To put yourself in a child’s place, to
    think a boy’s thoughts about the happenings of everyday
    life, is a rare quality in any writer. Still more rare
    is it, perhaps, to dream the child’s dreams in literary
    form, to preserve the evanescent glow of juvenile
    fancy. In that art, as it seems to us, Kenneth Grahame
    has no present rival.’

    _Boston Evening Transcript._—‘Hardly since Robert Louis
    Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses” have we had
    such imaginative presentation of the juvenile point of
    view.’

    _Brooklyn Eagle._—‘Mr. Grahame is one of those wizards
    whose magic has created pictures of childlife exquisite
    in humour, quaint in fancy, subtle in charm. In Mr.
    Maxfield Parrish the author has an ideal illustrator.’

    _New York Tribune._—‘Mr. Parrish is one of the most
    original and effective draughtsmen that we have, and in
    this series of illustrations he is at his best. A more
    exquisitely decorated Christmas book than this it has
    not been our fortune to see.’


PAGAN PAPERS

16mo. $1.00 net. Second Edition.

    _Academy._—‘Rarely does one meet with an author whose
    wit is so apt, whose touches of sentiment are so
    genuine. His paper on tobacco is good reading, though
    one remembers Calverley and the Arcadian mixture; the
    eulogy on the loafer is second only to Mr. Stevenson’s
    praise of “The Idler.” There is too a distinct flavour
    of poetry in much of Mr. Grahame’s works. One could
    have wished “White Poppies” had been written in verse,
    were not the prose of it so delicate and adequate.’

    _Daily Chronicle._—‘Mr. Kenneth Grahame’s
    accomplishment is astounding.... His style is a
    delight, so high is its vitality, or cool its colours,
    so nimble and various its rhythms. He has read and
    assimilated Browne Burton. He has a pretty poetic
    fancy and is apt at a quaint analogy. Many forms of
    beauty—existent and non-existent—he loves with a deep
    and discriminating love.’


THE HEADSWOMAN

16mo. 50 cents net. New Edition.

    _Bookman._—‘Mr. Grahame’s cleverness does not forsake
    him when he attempts satire. “The Headswoman” is a
    pretty bit of foolery.’

    _Literary World._—‘A delightful little tale with a
    tinge of satire in it. For gracefulness of style and
    charm in the telling of a story it is in the front
    rank, and that is saying a great deal.’

    _Dundee Advertiser._—‘Humour is not dead amongst us,
    for Kenneth Grahame’s witty little romance of “The
    Headswoman” brims over with it.’

    MR. W. L. COURTNEY in _Daily Telegraph_.—‘Well we are
    more than a trifle dull, _nous autres_; and we should
    be grateful to Mr. Kenneth Grahame for throwing in a
    story or two of his own, as often as he can. Happy Mr.
    Grahame, who can weave romances as well.’

    _Scotsman._—‘Mr. Grahame has written a most charming
    book, which cannot fail to delight all who were once
    children.’

    JOHN LANE COMPANY, _The Bodley Head_, NEW YORK




       *       *       *       *       *




Transcriber’s note:

Obvious punctuation errors were corrected.

Repeated chapter titles were deleted to avoid redundancy.

Page 97, “supicious” changed to “suspicious” (beastly suspicious by)

Page 101, “stealthly” changed to “stealthy” (his stealthy career)

Page 102, “frighful” changed to “frightful” (a frightful funk)