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.
When next day 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.
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 la vie de Boheme. Shops came first, of course,
and he flattened his nose successively against the window with the
india-rubber 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, and 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--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, whose ducks he had been shying stones
at 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 call
up; but as things were, he could only stand and blubber hopelessly,
caring, indeed, little now what further ill 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
words, swung his horse round smartly, and they were in the town again
by the time Harold had recovered himself sufficiently to furnish some
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 dropped 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 ha whole sawdust family along with her; and the farmer appeared
as pleased and proud as if he hat been asked to a garden-party at
Marlborough House. Really, those Olympians have certain good points, far
down in them. I shall 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 our stupid masculine way, thought all her happiness
sprang from possession of the long-coveted tea-service.
“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 humourist, 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 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 out-balance 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.
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 props 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 care 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?