IT is a very fine thing to be a real Prince. There are points about a
Pirate Chief, and to succeed to the Captaincy of a Robber Band is a
truly magnificent thing. But to be an Heir has also about it something
extremely captivating. Not only a long-lost heir--an heir of the
melodrama, strutting into your hitherto unsuspected kingdom at just the
right moment, loaded up with the consciousness of unguessed merit and of
rights so long feloniously withheld--but even to be a common humdrum
domestic heir is a profession to which few would refuse to be
apprenticed. To step from leading-strings and restrictions and one glass
of port after dinner, into property and liberty and due appreciation,
saved up, polished and varnished, dusted and laid in lavender, all
expressly for you--why, even the Princedom and the Robber Captaincy,
when their anxieties and responsibilities are considered, have hardly
more to offer. And so it will continue to be a problem, to the youth in
whom ambition struggles with a certain sensuous appreciation of life's
side-dishes, whether the career he is called upon to select out of the
glittering knick-knacks that strew the counter had better be that of an
heir or an engine-driver.
In the case of eldest sons, this problem has a way of solving itself. In
childhood, however, the actual heirship is apt to work on the principle
of the "Borough-English" of our happier ancestors, and in most cases of
inheritance it is the youngest that succeeds. Where the "res" is
"angusta," and the weekly books are simply a series of stiff hurdles at
each of which in succession the paternal legs falter with growing
suspicion of their powers to clear the flight, it is in the affair of
clothes that the right of succession tells, and "the hard heir strides
about the land" in trousers long ago framed for fraternal
limbs--_frondes novas et non sua poma_. A bitter thing indeed! Of those
pretty silken threads that knit humanity together, high and low, past
and present, none is tougher, more pervading, or more iridescent, than
the honest, simple pleasure of new clothes. It tugs at the man as it
tugs at the woman; the smirk of the well-fitted prince is no different
from the smirk of the Sunday-clad peasant; and the veins of the elders
tingle with the same thrill that sets their fresh-frocked grandchildren
skipping. Never trust people who pretend that they have no joy in their
new clothes.
Let not our souls be wrung, however, at contemplation of the luckless
urchin cut off by parental penury from the rapture of new clothes. Just
as the heroes of his dreams are his immediate seniors, so his heroes'
clothes share the glamour, and the reversion of them carries a high
privilege--a special thing not sold by Swears and Wells. The sword of
Galahad--and of many another hero--arrived on the scene already hoary
with history, and the boy rather prefers his trousers to be legendary,
famous, haloed by his hero's renown--even though the nap may have
altogether vanished in the process.
But, putting clothes aside, there are other matters in which this
reversed heirship comes into play. Take the case of Toys. It is hardly
right or fitting--and in this the child quite acquiesces--that as he
approaches the reverend period of nine or say ten years, he should still
be the unabashed and proclaimed possessor of a hoop and a Noah's Ark.
The child will quite see the reasonableness of this, and, the goal of
his ambition being now a catapult, a pistol, or even a sword-stick, will
be satisfied that the titular ownership should lapse to his juniors, so
far below him in their kilted or petticoated incompetence. After all,
the things are still there, and if relapses of spirit occur, on wet
afternoons, one can still (nominally) borrow them and be happy on the
floor as of old, without the reproach of being a habitual baby
toy-caresser. Also one can pretend it's being done to amuse the younger
ones.
None of us, therefore, grumbled when in the natural course of things the
nominal ownership of the toys slipped down to Harold, and from him in
turn devolved upon Charlotte. The toys were still there; they always had
been there and always would be there, and when the nursery door was
fast shut there were no Kings or Queens or First Estates in that small
Republic on the floor. Charlotte, to be sure, chin-tilted, at last an
owner of real estate, might patronise a little at times; but it was
tacitly understood that her "title" was only a drawing-room one.
Why does a coming bereavement project no thin faint voice, no shadow of
its woe, to warn its happy, heedless victims? Why cannot Olympians ever
think it worth while to give some hint of the thunderbolts they are
silently forging? And why, oh, why did it never enter any of our thick
heads that the day would come when even Charlotte would be considered
too matronly for toys? One's so-called education is hammered into one
with rulers and with canes. Each fresh grammar or musical instrument,
each new historical period or quaint arithmetical rule, is impressed on
one by some painful physical prelude. Why does Time, the biggest
Schoolmaster, alone neglect premonitory raps, at each stage of his
curriculum, on our knuckles or our heads?
Uncle Thomas was at the bottom of it. This was not the first mine he
had exploded under our bows. In his favourite pursuit of fads he had
passed in turn from Psychical Research to the White Rose and thence to a
Children's Hospital, and we were being daily inundated with leaflets
headed by a woodcut depicting Little Annie (of Poplar) sitting up in her
little white cot, surrounded by the toys of the nice, kind, rich
children. The idea caught on with the Olympians, always open to
sentiment of a treacly, woodcut order; and accordingly Charlotte, on
entering one day dishevelled and panting, having been pursued by yelling
Redskins up to the very threshold of our peaceful home, was curtly
informed that her French lessons would begin on Monday, that she was
henceforth to cease all pretence of being a trapper or a Redskin on
utterly inadequate grounds, and moreover that the whole of her toys were
at that moment being finally packed up in a box, for despatch to London,
to gladden the lives and bring light into the eyes of London waifs and
Poplar Annies.
Naturally enough, perhaps, we others received no official intimation of
this grave cession of territory. We were not supposed to be interested.
Harold had long ago been promoted to a knife--a recognised, birthday
knife. As for me, it was known that I was already given over, heart and
soul, to lawless abandoned catapults--catapults which were confiscated
weekly for reasons of international complications, but with which Edward
kept me steadily supplied, his school having a fine old tradition for
excellence in their manufacture. Therefore no one was supposed to be
really affected but Charlotte, and even she had already reached Miss
Yonge, and should therefore have been more interested in prolific
curates and harrowing deathbeds.
Notwithstanding, we all felt indignant, betrayed, and sullen to the
verge of mutiny. Though for long we had affected to despise them, these
toys, yet they had grown up with us, shared our joys and our sorrows,
seen us at our worst, and become part of the accepted scheme of
existence. As we gazed at untenanted shelves and empty, hatefully tidy
corners, perhaps for the first time for long we began to do them a tardy
justice.
There was old Leotard, for instance. Somehow he had come to be sadly
neglected of late years--and yet how exactly he always responded to
certain moods! He was an acrobat, this Leotard, who lived in a
glass-fronted box. His loose-jointed limbs were cardboard, cardboard his
slender trunk; and his hands eternally grasped the bar of a trapeze. You
turned the box round swiftly five or six times; the wonderful unsolved
machinery worked, and Leotard swung and leapt, backwards, forwards, now
astride the bar, now flying free; iron-jointed, supple-sinewed,
unceasingly novel in his invention of new, unguessable attitudes; while
above, below, and around him, a richly-dressed audience, painted in
skilful perspective of stalls, boxes, dress-circle, and gallery, watched
the thrilling performance with a stolidity which seemed to mark them out
as made in Germany. Hardly versatile enough, perhaps, this Leotard;
unsympathetic, not a companion for all hours; nor would you have chosen
him to take to bed with you. And yet, within his own limits, how fresh,
how engrossing, how resourceful and inventive! Well, he was gone, it
seemed--merely gone. Never specially cherished while he tarried with us,
he had yet contrived to build himself a particular niche of his own.
Sunrise and sunset, and the dinner-bell, and the sudden rainbow, and
lessons, and Leotard, and the moon through the nursery windows--they
were all part of the great order of things, and the displacement of any
one item seemed to disorganise the whole machinery. The immediate point
was, not that the world would continue to go round as of old, but that
Leotard wouldn't.
Yonder corner, now swept and garnished, had been the stall wherein the
spotty horse, at the close of each laborious day, was accustomed to doze
peacefully the long night through. In days of old each of us in turn had
been jerked thrillingly round the room on his precarious back, had dug
our heels into his unyielding sides, and had scratched our hands on the
tin tacks that secured his mane to his stiffly-curving neck. Later, with
increasing stature, we came to overlook his merits as a beast of burden;
but how frankly, how good-naturedly, he had recognised the new
conditions, and adapted himself to them without a murmur! When the
military spirit was abroad, who so ready to be a squadron of cavalry, a
horde of Cossacks, or artillery pounding into position? He had even
served with honour as a gun-boat, during a period when naval strategy
was the only theme; and no false equine pride ever hindered him from
taking the part of a roaring locomotive, earth-shaking, clangorous,
annihilating time and space. Really it was no longer clear how life,
with its manifold emergencies, was to be carried on at all without a
fellow like the spotty horse, ready to step in at critical moments and
take up just the part required of him.
In moments of mental depression, nothing is quite so consoling as the
honest smell of a painted animal; and mechanically I turned towards the
shelf that had been so long the Ararat of our weather beaten Ark. The
shelf was empty, the Ark had cast off moorings and sailed away to
Poplar, and had taken with it its haunting smell, as well as that
pleasant sense of disorder that the best conducted Ark is always able to
impart. The sliding roof had rarely been known to close entirely. There
was always a pair of giraffe-legs sticking out, or an elephant-trunk,
taking from the stiffness of its outline, and reminding us that our
motley crowd of friends inside were uncomfortably cramped for room and
only too ready to leap in a cascade on the floor and browse and gallop,
flutter and bellow and neigh, and be their natural selves again. I think
that none of us ever really thought very much of Ham and Shem and
Japhet. They were only there because they were in the story, but nobody
really wanted them. The Ark was built for the animals, of
course--animals with tails, and trunks, and horns, and at least three
legs apiece, though some unfortunates had been unable to retain even
that number. And in the animals were of course included the birds--the
dove, for instance, grey with black wings, and the red-crested
woodpecker--or was it a hoopoe?--and the insects, for there was a dear
beetle, about the same size as the dove, that held its own with any of
the mammalia.
Of the doll-department Charlotte had naturally been sole chief for a
long time; if the staff were not in their places to-day, it was not I
who had any official right to take notice. And yet one may have been
member of a Club for many a year without ever exactly understanding the
use and object of the other members, until one enters, some Christmas
day or other holiday, and, surveying the deserted armchairs, the
untenanted sofas, the barren hat-pegs, realises, with depression, that
those other fellows had their allotted functions, after all. Where was
old Jerry? Where were Eugenie, Rosa, Sophy, Esmeralda? We had long
drifted apart, it was true, we spoke but rarely; perhaps, absorbed in
new ambitions, new achievements, I had even come to look down on these
conservative, unprogressive members who were so clearly content to
remain simply what they were. And now that their corners were unfilled,
their chairs unoccupied--well, my eyes were opened and I wanted 'em
back!
However it was no business of mine. If grievances were the question, I
hadn't a leg to stand upon. Though my catapults were officially
confiscated, I knew the drawer in which they were incarcerated, and
where the key of it was hidden, and I could make life a burden, if I
chose, to every living thing within a square-mile radius, so long as the
catapult was restored to its drawer in due and decent time. But I
wondered how the others were taking it. The edict hit them more
severely. They should have my moral countenance at any rate, if not
more, in any protest or countermine they might be planning. And, indeed,
something seemed possible, from the dogged, sullen air with which the
two of them had trotted off in the direction of the raspberry-canes.
Certain spots always had their insensible attraction for certain moods.
In love, one sought the orchard. Weary of discipline, sick of
convention, impassioned for the road, the mining-camp, the land across
the border, one made for the big meadow. Mutinous, sulky, charged with
plots and conspiracies, one always got behind the shelter of the
raspberry-canes.
* * * * *
"You can come too if you like," said Harold, in a subdued sort of way,
as soon as he was aware that I was sitting up in bed watching him. "We
didn't think you'd care, 'cos you've got to catapults. But we're goin'
to do what we've settled to do, so it's no good sayin' we hadn't ought
and that sort of thing, 'cos we're goin' to!"
The day had passed in an ominous peacefulness. Charlotte and Harold had
kept out of my way, as well as out of everybody else's, in a purposeful
manner that ought to have bred suspicion. In the evening we had read
books, or fitfully drawn ships and battles on fly-leaves, apart, in
separate corners, void of conversation or criticism, oppressed by the
lowering tidiness of the universe, till bedtime came, and disrobement,
and prayers even more mechanical than usual, and lastly bed itself
without so much as a giraffe under the pillow. Harold had grunted
himself between the sheets with an ostentatious pretence of overpowering
fatigue; but I noticed that he pulled his pillow forward and propped his
head against the brass bars of his crib, and, as I was acquainted with
most of his tricks and subterfuges, it was easy for me to gather that a
painful wakefulness was his aim that night.
I had dozed off, however, and Harold was out and on his feet, poking
under the bed for his shoes, when I sat up and grimly regarded him. Just
as he said I could come if I liked, Charlotte slipped in, her face rigid
and set. And then it was borne in upon me that I was not on in this
scene. These youngsters had planned it all out, the piece was their own,
and the mounting, and the cast. My sceptre had fallen, my rule had
ceased. In this magic hour of the summer night laws went for nothing,
codes were cancelled, and those who were most in touch with the
moonlight and the warm June spirit and the topsy-turvydom that reigns
when the clock strikes ten, were the true lords and lawmakers.
Humbly, almost timidly, I followed without a protest in the wake of
these two remorseless, purposeful young persons, who were marching
straight for the schoolroom. Here in the moonlight the grim big box
stood visible--the box in which so large a portion of our past and our
personality lay entombed, cold, swathed in paper, awaiting the carrier
of the morning who should speed them forth to the strange, cold,
distant Children's Hospital, where their little failings would all be
misunderstood and no one would make allowances. A dreamy spectator, I
stood idly by while Harold propped up the lid and the two plunged in
their arms and probed and felt and grappled.
"Here's Rosa," said Harold, suddenly. "I know the feel of her hair. Will
you have Rosa out?"
"Oh, give me Rosa!" cried Charlotte, with a sort of gasp. And when Rosa
had been dragged forth, quite unmoved apparently, placid as ever in her
moonfaced contemplation of this comedy-world with its ups and downs,
Charlotte retired with her to the window-seat, and there in the
moonlight the two exchanged their private confidences, leaving Harold to
his exploration alone.
"Here's something with sharp corners," said Harold, presently. "Must be
Leotard, I think. Better let _him_ go."
"Oh, yes, we can't save Leotard," assented Charlotte, limply.
Poor old Leotard! I said nothing, of course; I was not on in this piece.
But, surely, had Leotard heard and rightly understood all that was going
on above him, he must have sent up one feeble, strangled cry, one faint
appeal to be rescued from unfamiliar little Annies and retained for an
audience certain to appreciate and never unduly critical.
"Now I've got to the Noah's Ark," panted Harold, still groping blindly.
"Try and shove the lid back a bit," said Charlotte, "and pull out a dove
or a zebra or a giraffe if there's one handy."
Harold toiled on with grunts and contortions, and presently produced in
triumph a small grey elephant and a large beetle with a red stomach.
"They're jammed in too tight," he complained. "Can't get any more out.
But as I came up I'm sure I felt Potiphar!" And down he dived again.
Potiphar was a finely modelled bull with a _suede_ skin, rough and
comfortable and warm in bed. He was my own special joy and pride, and I
thrilled with honest emotion when Potiphar emerged to light once more,
stout-necked and stalwart as ever.
"That'll have to do," said Charlotte, getting up. "We dursn't take any
more, 'cos we'll be found out if we do. Make the box all right, and
bring 'em along."
Harold rammed down the wads of paper and twists of straw he had
disturbed, replaced the lid squarely and innocently, and picked up his
small salvage; and we sneaked off for the window most generally in use
for prison-breakings and nocturnal escapades. A few seconds later and we
were hurrying silently in single file along the dark edge of the lawn.
Oh, the riot, the clamour, the crowding chorus, of all silent things
that spoke by scent and colour and budding thrust and foison, that
moonlit night of June! Under the laurel-shade all was still ghostly
enough, brigand-haunted, crackling, whispering of night and all its
possibilities of terror. But the open garden, when once we were in
it--how it turned a glad new face to welcome us, glad as of old when the
sunlight raked and searched it, new with the unfamiliar night-aspect
that yet welcomed us as guests to a hall where the horns blew up to a
new, strange banquet! Was this the same grass, could these be the same
familiar flower-beds, alleys, clumps of verdure, patches of sward? At
least this full white light that was flooding them was new, and
accounted for all. It was Moonlight Land, and Past-Ten-o'clock Land, and
we were in it and of it, and all its other denizens fully understood,
and, tongue-free and awakened at last, responded and comprehended and
knew. The other two, doubtless, hurrying forward full of their mission,
noted little of all this. I, who was only a super, had leisure to take
it all in, and, though the language and the message of the land were not
all clear to me then, long afterwards I remembered and understood.
Under the farthest hedge, at the loose end of things, where the outer
world began with the paddock, there was darkness once again--not the
blackness that crouched so solidly under the crowding laurels, but a
duskiness hung from far-spread arms of high-standing elms. There, where
the small grave made a darker spot on the grey, I overtook them, only
just in time to see Rosa laid stiffly out, her cherry cheeks pale in the
moonlight, but her brave smile triumphant and undaunted as ever. It was
a tiny grave and a shallow one, to hold so very much. Rosa once in,
Potiphar, who had hitherto stood erect, stout-necked, through so many
days and such various weather, must needs bow his head and lie down
meekly on his side. The elephant and the beetle, equal now in a silent
land where a vertebra and a red circulation counted for nothing, had to
snuggle down where best they might, only a little less crowded than in
their native Ark.
[Illustration: A DEPARTURE
"_As we turned to go, the man in the moon, tangled in elm boughs, caught
my eye for a moment._"]
The earth was shovelled in and stamped down, and I was glad that no
orisons were said and no speechifying took place. The whole thing was
natural and right and self explanatory, and needed no justifying or
interpreting to our audience of stars and flowers. The connexion was not
entirely broken now--one link remained between us and them. The Noah's
Ark, with its cargo of sad-faced emigrants, might be hull down on the
horizon, but two of its passengers had missed the boat and would
henceforth be always near us; and, as we played above them, an elephant
would understand, and a beetle would hear, and crawl again in spirit
along a familiar floor. Henceforth the spotty horse would scour along
far-distant plains and know the homesickness of alien stables; but
Potiphar, though never again would he paw the arena when bull-fights
were on the bill, was spared maltreatment by town-bred strangers, quite
capable of mistaking him for a cow. Jerry and Esmeralda might shed their
limbs and their stuffing, by slow or swift degrees, in uttermost parts
and unguessed corners of the globe; but Rosa's book was finally closed,
and no worse fate awaited her than natural dissolution almost within
touch and hail of familiar faces and objects that had been friendly to
her since first she opened her eyes on a world where she had never been
treated as a stranger.
As we turned to go, the man in the moon, tangled in elm-boughs, caught
my eye for a moment, and I thought that never had he looked so friendly.
He was going to see after them, it was evident; for he was always
there, more or less, and it was no trouble to him at all, and he would
tell them how things were still going, up here, and throw in a story or
two of his own whenever they seemed a trifle dull. It made the going
away rather easier, to know one had left somebody behind on the spot; a
good fellow, too, cheery, comforting, with a fund of anecdote; a man in
whom one had every confidence.
[Illustration]
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes:
Repeated story titles were deleted to avoid redundancy in reading.
Varied hyphenation has been retained.
Obvious punctuation errors repaired.