big _Surti_ boy, with the red and gold turban. Judy, already tucked
inside her mosquito-curtains, was nearly asleep. Punch had been allowed
to stay up for dinner. Many privileges had been accorded to Punch within
the last ten days, and a greater kindness from the people of his world
had encompassed his ways and works, which were mostly obstreperous. He
sat on the edge of his bed and swung his bare legs defiantly.
‘Punch-_baba_ going to bye-lo?’ said the _ayah_ suggestively.
‘No,’ said Punch. ‘Punch-_baba_ wants the story about the Ranee that was
turned into a tiger. Meeta must tell it, and the _hamal_ shall hide
behind the door and make tiger-noises at the proper time,’
‘But Judy-_baba_ will wake up,’ said the _ayah_.
‘Judy-_baba_ is waked,’ piped a small voice from the mosquito-curtains.
‘There was a Ranee that lived at Delhi. Go on, Meeta,’ and she fell fast
asleep again while Meeta began the story.
Never had Punch secured the telling of that tale with so little
opposition. He reflected for a long time. The _hamal_ made the
tiger-noises in twenty different keys.
‘’Top!’ said Punch authoritatively. ‘Why doesn’t Papa come in and say he
is going to give me _put-put_?’
‘Punch-_baba_ is going away,’ said the _ayah_. ‘In another week there
will be no Punch-_baba_ to pull my hair any more.’ She sighed softly,
for the boy of the household was very dear to her heart.
‘Up the Ghauts in a train?’ said Punch, standing on his bed. ‘All the
way to Nassick where the Ranee-Tiger lives?’
‘Not to Nassick this year, little Sahib,’ said Meeta, lifting him on his
shoulder. ‘Down to the sea where the cocoa-nuts are thrown, and across
the sea in a big ship. Will you take Meeta with you to _Belait_?’
‘You shall all come,’ said Punch, from the height of Meeta’s strong
arms. ‘Meeta and the _ayah_ and the _hamal_ and Bhini-in-the-Garden, and
the salaam-Captain-Sahib-snake-man.’
There was no mockery in Meeta’s voice when he replied—‘Great is the
Sahib’s favour,’ and laid the little man down in the bed, while the
_ayah_, sitting in the moonlight at the doorway, lulled him to sleep
with an interminable canticle such as they sing in the Roman Catholic
Church at Parel. Punch curled himself into a ball and slept.
Next morning Judy shouted that there was a rat in the nursery, and thus
he forgot to tell her the wonderful news. It did not much matter, for
Judy was only three and she would not have understood. But Punch was
five; and he knew that going to England would be much nicer than a trip
to Nassick.
* * * * *
Papa and Mamma sold the brougham and the piano, and stripped the house,
and curtailed the allowance of crockery for the daily meals, and took
long counsel together over a bundle of letters bearing the Rocklington
postmark.
‘The worst of it is that one can’t be certain of anything,’ said Papa,
pulling his moustache. ‘The letters in themselves are excellent, and the
terms are moderate enough.’
‘The worst of it is that the children will grow up away from me,’
thought Mamma; but she did not say it aloud.
‘We are only one case among hundreds,’ said Papa bitterly. ‘You shall go
Home again in five years, dear.’
‘Punch will be ten then—and Judy eight. Oh, how long and long and long
the time will be! And we have to leave them among strangers.’
‘Punch is a cheery little chap. He’s sure to make friends wherever he
goes.’
‘And who could help loving my Ju?’
They were standing over the cots in the nursery late at night, and I
think that Mamma was crying softly. After Papa had gone away, she knelt
down by the side of Judy’s cot. The _ayah_ saw her and put up a prayer
that the _memsahib_ might never find the love of her children taken away
from her and given to a stranger.
Mamma’s own prayer was a slightly illogical one. Summarised it ran: ‘Let
strangers love my children and be as good to them as I should be, but
let _me_ preserve their love and their confidence for ever and ever.
Amen.’ Punch scratched himself in his sleep, and Judy moaned a little.
Next day they all went down to the sea, and there was a scene at the
Apollo Bunder when Punch discovered that Meeta could not come too, and
Judy learned that the _ayah_ must be left behind. But Punch found a
thousand fascinating things in the rope, block, and steam-pipe line on
the big P. and O. Steamer long before Meeta and the _ayah_ had dried
their tears.
‘Come back, Punch-_baba_’ said the _ayah_.
‘Come back,’ said Meeta, ‘and be a _Burra Sahib_’ (a big man).
‘Yes,’ said Punch, lifted up in his father’s arms to wave good-bye.
‘Yes, I will come back, and I will be a _Burra Sahib Bahadur_!’ (a very
big man indeed).
At the end of the first day Punch demanded to be set down in England,
which he was certain must be close at hand. Next day there was a merry
breeze, and Punch was very sick. ‘When I come back to Bombay,’ said
Punch on his recovery, ‘I will come by the road—in a broom-_gharri_.
This is a very naughty ship.’
The Swedish boatswain consoled him, and he modified his opinions as the
voyage went on. There was so much to see and to handle and ask questions
about that Punch nearly forgot the _ayah_ and Meeta and the _hamal_, and
with difficulty remembered a few words of the Hindustani once his
second-speech.
But Judy was much worse. The day before the steamer reached Southampton,
Mamma asked her if she would not like to see the _ayah_ again. Judy’s
blue eyes turned to the stretch of sea that had swallowed all her tiny
past, and she said: ‘_Ayah!_ What _ayah_?’
Mamma cried over her and Punch marvelled. It was then that he heard for
the first time Mamma’s passionate appeal to him never to let Judy forget
Mamma. Seeing that Judy was young, ridiculously young, and that Mamma,
every evening for four weeks past, had come into the cabin to sing her
and Punch to sleep with a mysterious rune that he called ‘Sonny, my
soul,’ Punch could not understand what Mamma meant. But he strove to do
his duty; for, the moment Mamma left the cabin, he said to Judy: ‘Ju,
you bemember Mamma?’
‘’Torse I do,’ said Judy.
‘Then _always_ bemember Mamma, ’r else I won’t give you the paper ducks
that the red-haired Captain Sahib cut out for me.’
So Judy promised always to ‘bemember Mamma.’
Many and many a time was Mamma’s command laid upon Punch, and Papa would
say the same thing with an insistence that awed the child.
‘You must make haste and learn to write, Punch,’ said Papa, ‘and then
you’ll be able to write letters to us in Bombay.’
‘I’ll come into your room,’ said Punch, and Papa choked.
Papa and Mamma were always choking in those days. If Punch took Judy to
task for not ‘bemembering,’ they choked. If Punch sprawled on the sofa
in the Southampton lodging-house and sketched his future in purple and
gold, they choked; and so they did if Judy put up her mouth for a kiss.
Through many days all four were vagabonds on the face of the earth—Punch
with no one to give orders to, Judy too young for anything, and Papa and
Mamma grave, distracted, and choking.
‘Where,’ demanded Punch, wearied of a loathsome contrivance on four
wheels with a mound of luggage atop—‘_where_ is our broom-_gharri_? This
thing talks so much that I can’t talk. Where is our _own_
broom-_gharri_? When I was at Bandstand before we comed away, I asked
Inverarity Sahib why he was sitting in it, and he said it was his own.
And I said, “I will _give_ it you”—I like Inverarity Sahib—and I said,
“Can you put your legs through the pully-wag loops by the windows?” And
Inverarity Sahib said No, and laughed, _I_ can put my legs through the
pully-wag loops. I can put my legs through _these_ pully-wag loops.
Look! Oh, Mamma’s crying again! I didn’t know I wasn’t not to do _so_.’
Punch drew his legs out of the loops of the four-wheeler: the door
opened and he slid to the earth, in a cascade of parcels, at the door of
an austere little villa whose gates bore the legend ‘Downe Lodge.’ Punch
gathered himself together and eyed the house with disfavour. It stood on
a sandy road, and a cold wind tickled his knickerbockered legs.
‘Let us go away,’ said Punch. ‘This is not a pretty place.’
But Mamma and Papa and Judy had left the cab, and all the luggage was
being taken into the house. At the doorstep stood a woman in black, and
she smiled largely, with dry chapped lips. Behind her was a man, big,
bony, gray, and lame as to one leg—behind him a boy of twelve,
black-haired and oily in appearance. Punch surveyed the trio, and
advanced without fear, as he had been accustomed to do in Bombay when
callers came and he happened to be playing in the veranda.
‘How do you do?’ said he. ‘I am Punch.’ But they were all looking at the
luggage—all except the gray man, who shook hands with Punch, and said he
was ‘a smart little fellow.’ There was much running about and banging of
boxes, and Punch curled himself up on the sofa in the dining-room and
considered things.
‘I don’t like these people,’ said Punch. ‘But never mind. We’ll go away
soon. We have always went away soon from everywhere. I wish we was gone
back to Bombay _soon_.’
The wish bore no fruit. For six days Mamma wept at intervals, and showed
the woman in black all Punch’s clothes—a liberty which Punch resented.
‘But p’raps she’s a new white _ayah_,’ he thought. ‘I’m to call her
Antirosa, but she doesn’t call _me_ Sahib. She says just Punch,’ he
confided to Judy. ‘What is Antirosa?’
Judy didn’t know. Neither she nor Punch had heard anything of an animal
called an aunt. Their world had been Papa and Mamma, who knew
everything, permitted everything, and loved everybody—even Punch when he
used to go into the garden at Bombay and fill his nails with mould after
the weekly nail-cutting, because, as he explained between two strokes of
the slipper to his sorely-tried Father, his fingers ‘felt so new at the
ends.’
In an undefined way Punch judged it advisable to keep both parents
between himself and the woman in black and the boy in black hair. He did
not approve of them. He liked the gray man, who had expressed a wish to
be called ‘Uncleharri.’ They nodded at each other when they met, and the
gray man showed him a little ship with rigging that took up and down.
‘She is a model of the _Brisk_—the little _Brisk_ that was sore exposed
that day at Navarino.’ The gray man hummed the last words and fell into
a reverie. ‘I’ll tell you about Navarino, Punch, when we go for walks
together; and you mustn’t touch the ship, because she’s the _Brisk_.’
Long before that walk, the first of many, was taken, they roused Punch
and Judy in the chill dawn of a February morning to say Good-bye; and of
all people in the wide earth to Papa and Mamma—both crying this time.
Punch was very sleepy and Judy was cross.
‘Don’t forget us,’ pleaded Mamma. ‘Oh, my little son, don’t forget us,
and see that Judy remembers too.’
‘I’ve told Judy to bemember,’ said Punch, wriggling, for his father’s
beard tickled his neck, ‘I’ve told Judy—ten—forty—’leven thousand times.
But Ju’s so young—quite a baby—isn’t she?’
‘Yes,’ said Papa, ‘quite a baby, and you must be good to Judy, and make
haste to learn to write and—and—and——’
Punch was back in his bed again. Judy was fast asleep, and there was the
rattle of a cab below. Papa and Mamma had gone away. Not to Nassick;
that was across the sea. To some place much nearer, of course, and
equally of course they would return. They came back after
dinner-parties, and Papa had come back after he had been to a place
called ‘The Snows,’ and Mamma with him, to Punch and Judy at Mrs.
Inverarity’s house in Marine Lines. Assuredly they would come back
again. So Punch fell asleep till the true morning, when the black-haired
boy met him with the information that Papa and Mamma had gone to Bombay,
and that he and Judy were to stay at Downe Lodge ‘for ever.’ Antirosa,
tearfully appealed to for a contradiction, said that Harry had spoken
the truth, and that it behoved Punch to fold up his clothes neatly on
going to bed. Punch went out and wept bitterly with Judy, into whose
fair head he had driven some ideas of the meaning of separation.
When a matured man discovers that he has been deserted by Providence,
deprived of his God, and cast without help, comfort, or sympathy, upon a
world which is new and strange to him, his despair, which may find
expression in evil-living, the writing of his experiences, or the more
satisfactory diversion of suicide, is generally supposed to be
impressive. A child, under exactly similar circumstances as far as its
knowledge goes, cannot very well curse God and die. It howls till its
nose is red, its eyes are sore, and its head aches. Punch and Judy,
through no fault of their own, had lost all their world. They sat in the
hall and cried; the black-haired boy looking on from afar.
The model of the ship availed nothing, though the gray man assured Punch
that he might pull the rigging up and down as much as he pleased; and
Judy was promised free entry into the kitchen. They wanted Papa and
Mamma gone to Bombay beyond the seas, and their grief while it lasted
was without remedy.
When the tears ceased the house was very still. Antirosa had decided
that it was better to let the children ‘have their cry out,’ and the boy
had gone to school. Punch raised his head from the floor and sniffed
mournfully. Judy was nearly asleep. Three short years had not taught her
how to bear sorrow with full knowledge. There was a distant, dull boom
in the air—a repeated heavy thud. Punch knew that sound in Bombay in the
Monsoon. It was the sea—the sea that must be traversed before any one
could get to Bombay.
‘Quick, Ju!’ he cried, ‘we’re close to the sea. I can hear it! Listen!
That’s where they’ve went. P’raps we can catch them if we was in time.
They didn’t mean to go without us. They’ve only forgot.’
‘Iss,’ said Judy. ‘They’ve only forgotted. Less go to the sea.’
The hall-door was open and so was the garden-gate.
‘It’s very, very big, this place,’ he said, looking cautiously down the
road, ‘and we will get lost; but _I_ will find a man and order him to
take me back to my house—like I did in Bombay.’
He took Judy by the hand, and the two ran hatless in the direction of
the sound of the sea. Downe Villa was almost the last of a range of
newly-built houses running out, through a field of brick-mounds, to a
heath where gypsies occasionally camped and where the Garrison Artillery
of Rocklington practised. There were few people to be seen, and the
children might have been taken for those of the soldiery who ranged far.
Half an hour the wearied little legs tramped across heath, potato-patch,
and sand-dune.
‘I’se so tired,’ said Judy, ‘and Mamma will be angry.’
‘Mamma’s _never_ angry. I suppose she is waiting at the sea now while
Papa gets tickets. We’ll find them and go along with them. Ju, you
mustn’t sit down. Only a little more and we’ll come to the sea. Ju, if
you sit down I’ll _thmack_ you!’ said Punch.
They climbed another dune, and came upon the great gray sea at low tide.
Hundreds of crabs were scuttling about the beach, but there was no trace
of Papa and Mamma, not even of a ship upon the waters—nothing but sand
and mud for miles and miles.
And ‘Uncleharri’ found them by chance—very muddy and very forlorn—Punch
dissolved in tears, but trying to divert Judy with an ‘ickle trab,’ and
Judy wailing to the pitiless horizon for ‘Mamma, Mamma!’—and again
‘Mamma!’
THE SECOND BAG
Ah, well-a-day, for we are souls bereaved!
Of all the creatures under Heaven’s wide scope
We are most hopeless, who had once most hope,
And most beliefless, who had most believed.
_The City of Dreadful Night._
All this time not a word about Black Sheep. He came later, and Harry the
black-haired boy was mainly responsible for his coming.
Judy—who could help loving little Judy?—passed, by special permit, into
the kitchen and thence straight to Aunty Rosa’s heart. Harry was Aunty
Rosa’s one child, and Punch was the extra boy about the house. There was
no special place for him or his little affairs, and he was forbidden to
sprawl on sofas and explain his ideas about the manufacture of this
world and his hopes for his future. Sprawling was lazy and wore out
sofas, and little boys were not expected to talk. They were talked to,
and the talking to was intended for the benefit of their morals. As the
unquestioned despot of the house at Bombay, Punch could not quite
understand how he came to be of no account in this his new life.
Harry might reach across the table and take what he wanted; Judy might
point and get what she wanted. Punch was forbidden to do either. The
gray man was his great hope and stand-by for many months after Mamma and
Papa left, and he had forgotten to tell Judy to ‘bemember Mamma.’
This lapse was excusable, because in the interval he had been introduced
by Aunty Rosa to two very impressive things—an abstraction called God,
the intimate friend and ally of Aunty Rosa, generally believed to live
behind the kitchen-range because it was hot there—and a dirty brown book
filled with unintelligible dots and marks. Punch was always anxious to
oblige everybody. He therefore welded the story of the Creation on to
what he could recollect of his Indian fairy tales, and scandalised Aunty
Rosa by repeating the result to Judy. It was a sin, a grievous sin, and
Punch was talked to for a quarter of an hour. He could not understand
where the iniquity came in, but was careful not to repeat the offence,
because Aunty Rosa told him that God had heard every word he had said
and was very angry. If this were true why didn’t God come and say so,
thought Punch, and dismissed the matter from his mind. Afterwards he
learned to know the Lord as the only thing in the world more awful than
Aunty Rosa—as a Creature that stood in the background and counted the
strokes of the cane.
But the reading was, just then, a much more serious matter than any
creed. Aunty Rosa sat him upon a table and told him that A B meant ab.
‘Why?’ said Punch. ‘A is a and B is bee. _Why_ does A B mean ab?’
‘Because I tell you it does,’ said Aunty Rosa, ‘and you’ve got to say
it.’
Punch said it accordingly, and for a month, hugely against his will,
stumbled through the brown book, not in the least comprehending what it
meant. But Uncle Harry, who walked much and generally alone, was wont to
come into the nursery and suggest to Aunty Rosa that Punch should walk
with him. He seldom spoke, but he showed Punch all Rocklington, from the
mudbanks and the sand of the back-bay to the great harbours where ships
lay at anchor, and the dockyards where the hammers were never still, and
the marine-store shops, and the shiny brass counters in the Offices
where Uncle Harry went once every three months with a slip of blue paper
and received sovereigns in exchange; for he held a wound-pension. Punch
heard, too, from his lips the story of the battle of Navarino, where the
sailors of the Fleet, for three days afterwards, were deaf as posts and
could only sign to each other. ‘That was because of the noise of the
guns,’ said Uncle Harry, ‘and I have got the wadding of a bullet
somewhere inside me now.’
Punch regarded him with curiosity. He had not the least idea what
wadding was, and his notion of a bullet was a dockyard cannon-ball
bigger than his own head. How could Uncle Harry keep a cannon-ball
inside him? He was ashamed to ask, for fear Uncle Harry might be angry.
Punch had never known what anger—real anger—meant until one terrible day
when Harry had taken his paint-box to paint a boat with, and Punch had
protested. Then Uncle Harry had appeared on the scene and, muttering
something about ‘strangers’ children,’ had with a stick smitten the
black-haired boy across the shoulders till he wept and yelled, and Aunty
Rosa came in and abused Uncle Harry for cruelty to his own flesh and
blood, and Punch shuddered to the tips of his shoes. ‘It wasn’t my
fault,’ he explained to the boy, but both Harry and Aunty Rosa said that
it was, and that Punch had told tales, and for a week there were no more
walks with Uncle Harry.
But that week brought a great joy to Punch.
He had repeated till he was thrice weary the statement that ‘the Cat lay
on the Mat and the Rat came in.’
‘Now I can truly read,’ said Punch, ‘and now I will never read anything
in the world.’
He put the brown book in the cupboard where his school-books lived and
accidentally tumbled out a venerable volume, without covers, labelled
_Sharpe’s Magazine_. There was the most portentous picture of a griffin
on the first page, with verses below. The griffin carried off one sheep
a day from a German village, till a man came with a ‘falchion’ and split
the griffin open. Goodness only knew what a falchion was, but there was
the Griffin, and his history was an improvement upon the eternal Cat.
‘This,’ said Punch, ‘means things, and now I will know all about
everything in all the world.’ He read till the light failed, not
understanding a tithe of the meaning, but tantalised by glimpses of new
worlds hereafter to be revealed.
‘What is a “falchion”? What is a “e-wee lamb”? What is a “base
_us_surper”? What is a “verdant me-ad”?’ he demanded with flushed
cheeks, at bedtime, of the astonished Aunty Rosa.
‘Say your prayers and go to sleep,’ she replied, and that was all the
help Punch then or afterwards found at her hands in the new and
delightful exercise of reading.
‘Aunty Rosa only knows about God and things like that,’ argued Punch.
‘Uncle Harry will tell me.’
The next walk proved that Uncle Harry could not help either; but he
allowed Punch to talk, and even sat down on a bench to hear about the
Griffin. Other walks brought other stories as Punch ranged farther
afield, for the house held large store of old books that no one ever
opened—from _Frank Fairlegh_ in serial numbers, and the earlier poems of
Tennyson, contributed anonymously to _Sharpe’s Magazine_, to ‘62
Exhibition Catalogues, gay with colours and delightfully
incomprehensible, and odd leaves of _Gulliver’s Travels_.
As soon as Punch could string a few pot-hooks together he wrote to
Bombay, demanding by return of post ‘all the books in all the world.’
Papa could not comply with this modest indent, but sent _Grimm’s Fairy
Tales_ and a Hans Andersen. That was enough. If he were only left alone
Punch could pass, at any hour he chose, into a land of his own, beyond
reach of Aunty Rosa and her God, Harry and his teasements, and Judy’s
claims to be played with.
‘Don’t disturve me, I’m reading. Go and play in the kitchen,’ grunted
Punch. ‘Aunty Rosa lets _you_ go there.’ Judy was cutting her second
teeth and was fretful. She appealed to Aunty Rosa, who descended on
Punch.
‘I was reading,’ he explained, ‘reading a book I _want_ to read.’
‘You’re only doing that to show off,’ said Aunty Rosa. ‘But we’ll see.
Play with Judy now, and don’t open a book for a week.’
Judy did not pass a very enjoyable playtime with Punch, who was consumed
with indignation. There was a pettiness at the bottom of the prohibition
which puzzled him.
‘It’s what I like to do,’ he said, ‘and she’s found out that and stopped
me. Don’t cry, Ju—it wasn’t your fault—_please_ don’t cry, or she’ll say
I made you.’
Ju loyally mopped up her tears, and the two played in their nursery, a
room in the basement and half underground, to which they were regularly
sent after the mid-day dinner while Aunty Rosa slept. She drank
wine—that is to say, something from a bottle in the cellaret—for her
stomach’s sake, but if she did not fall asleep she would sometimes come
into the nursery to see that the children were really playing. Now
bricks, wooden hoops, ninepins, and chinaware cannot amuse for ever,
especially when all Fairyland is to be won by the mere opening of a
book, and, as often as not, Punch would be discovered reading to Judy or
telling her interminable tales. That was an offence in the eyes of the
law, and Judy would be whisked off by Aunty Rosa, while Punch was left
to play alone, ‘and be sure that I hear you doing it.’
It was not a cheering employ, for he had to make a playful noise. At
last, with infinite craft, he devised an arrangement whereby the table
could be supported as to three legs on toy bricks, leaving the fourth
clear to bring down on the floor. He could work the table with one hand
and hold a book with the other. This he did till an evil day when Aunty
Rosa pounced upon him unawares and told him that he was ‘acting a lie.’
‘If you’re old enough to do that,’ she said—her temper was always worst
after dinner—‘you’re old enough to be beaten.’