she frisked and capered rhythmically by a kind of instinct whenever
Dolly played the piano. So Dolly showed her steps and then more steps.
Peter did not take to dancing so readily as Joan and his disposition was
towards burlesque. Joan danced for the love of dancing, but Peter was
inventive and turned his dances into expression. He invented the Fat
Dance, with a pillow under his pinafore, the Thin Dance, with a concave
stomach and a meagre expression, the One Leg dance and the Bird Dance,
this latter like the birds about the crumbs in winter time. Also the
Tipsy Dance, bacchic, which Arthur thought vulgar and discouraged. Dolly
taught Joan the Flower Dance, with a very red cap like a pistil, and
white silk skirt petals upheld by her arms. These she opened slowly, and
at last dropped and then drooped. This needed a day of preparation.
Peter produced his first remembered æsthetic judgment on a human being
on this occasion.
“_Pritty_ Joan,” he said with conviction, as she stood flushed and
bright-eyed after the dance, and with that he went and kissed her.
“He’s beginning young,” said Arthur.
It is what all parents say, and it is true of all children. But parents
keep on saying it....
Before he was fully four Peter was conducting an æsthetic analysis of
his world. He liked some of the tunes Dolly played and disapproved of
others. He distributed “pritty” lavishly but by no means
indiscriminately over the things of the world. “Oh pritty fo’wers,” was
the primordial form of these expanding decisions. But he knew that Nobby
was not pretty.
Arthur did his best to encourage and assist these budding appreciations.
One evening there was a beautiful still sunset. The sun went down, a
great flattening sphere of reddening gold sinking into vast levels of
blue over the remoter hills. Joan had already been carried off to bed,
but Arthur seized upon Peter and stood him in the window seat. “Look,”
said Arthur. Peter looked intently, and both his parents sat beside him,
watching his nice little round head and the downy edge of his intent
profile.
“Look,” said Arthur, “it goes. It goes. It’s going ... going ...
going....”
The sun became a crescent, a red scimitar, a streak of fire.
“Ah!” said Arthur, “it’s gone.”
Came an immense pause.
“Do it _adain_, Dadda,” said Peter with immense approval. “Do it
adain....”
§ 3
The theory of Ideals played almost as important a part in the early
philosophy of Peter as it did in the philosophy of Plato. But Peter did
not call them “Ideals,” he called them “toys.” Toys were the simplified
essences of things, pure, perfect and manageable; Real Things were
troublesome, uncontrollable, over complicated and largely irrelevant. A
Real Train, for example, was a poor, big, clumsy, limited thing that was
obliged to go to Red Hill or Croydon or London, that was full of stuffy
unnecessary strangers, usually sitting firmly in the window seats, that
you could do nothing satisfactory with at all. A Toy Train was your very
own; it took you wherever you wanted, to Fairyland or Russia or
anywhere, at whatever pace you chose. Then there was a beautiful rag
doll named “Pleeceman,” who had a comic, almost luminous red nose, and
smiled perpetually; you could hit Joan with him and make her squawk and
yet be sure of not hurting her within the meaning of the law; how
inferior was the great formless lump of a thing, with a pale uneventful
visitor’s sort of face we saw out of the train at Caterham! Nobody could
have lifted him by a leg and waved him about; and if you had shied him
into a corner, instead of all going just anyhow and still smiling, he
would probably have been cross and revengeful. How inferior again was
the Real Cow, with its chewing habits, its threatening stare and moo and
its essential rudeness, to Suzannah, the cow on the green board. Perhaps
the best real things in the world were young pigs....
But this much is simply to explain how it was that Peter was grateful
but not overwhelmed to find that there was also a real Nobby in
existence as well as his beloved fetish. And this Nobby was, as real
things went, much better than one could have expected him to be. Peter’s
heart went out to him from the very first encounter, and never found
reason to relinquish him again.
Nobby wasted a good lot of time that might have been better employed in
play, by talking to Mummy; and when a little boy set himself to rescue
his friend from so tepid an occupation, Mary showed a peculiar
disposition to thwart one. “Oh! _leave_ them alone,” she said, with the
tart note in her voice. “I’m sure they don’t want either of you.”
Still Mummy didn’t always get Nobby, and a little boy and girl could
hear him talk and play about with him. When he told really truly things
it was better than any one else telling stories. He had had all sorts of
experiences; he had been a sailor; _he knew what was inside a ship_.
That had been a growing need in Peter’s life. All Peter’s ships had been
solid hitherto. And Nobby had been in the same field, practically
speaking, with lions ever so many times. Lions, of course, are not
nearly so dreadful as bears in a little boy’s world; bears are the most
dreadful things in the world (especially is this true of the black,
under-bed bear, _Ursus Pedivorus_) but lions are dreadful enough. If one
saw one in a field one would instantly get back over the stile again and
go home, Mary or no Mary. But one day near Nairobi, Nobby had come upon
a lion in broad daylight right in the middle of the path. Nobby had
nothing but a stick. “I was in a hurry and I felt annoyed,” said Nobby.
“So I just walked towards him and waved my stick at him, and shouted to
him to get out of my way.”
“_Yes?_” breathless.
“And he went. Most lions will get away from a man if they can. Not
always though.”
A pause. There was evidently another story to that. “Tell us,” said
Mummy, more interested even than the children.
Big Nobby made model African villages out of twigs and suchlike nothings
in the garden, and he brought down Joan and Peter boxes of Zulu warriors
from London to inhabit them. Also he bought two boxes of “Egyptian camel
corps.” One wet day he “made Africa” on the nursery floor. He made
mountains out of books and wood blocks, and put a gold-mine of gold
paper therein; he got in a lot of twigs of box from the garden and made
the most lovely forest you can imagine; he built villages of bricks for
the Zulus; he put out the animals of Peter’s Noah’s ark in the woods.
“Here’s the lion,” he said, propping up the lion against the tree
because of its broken leg.
“Gurr Woooooah!” said Joan.
“Exactly,” said Nobby, encouraging her.
“Waar-oooh. Waaaa!” said Joan, presuming on it.
“Bang!” said Peter. “You’re _dead_, Joan,” and stopped any more of that.
§ 4
Then one day an extraordinary thing happened. It was towards lunch-time,
and Mary was bringing Joan and Peter home from a walk in the woods. Joan
was tired, but Peter had been enterprising and had run on far ahead; he
was trotting his fat legs down the rusty lane that ran through the
bushes close to the garden fence when he saw Nobby’s lank form coming
towards him from the house, walking slowly and as if he couldn’t see
where he was going. Peter was for slipping into the bushes and jumping
out at him and saying “Boo.” Then he saw Nobby stop and stand still and
stare back at the house, and then, most wonderful and dreadful! this
great big grown-up began to sob and cry. He said “Ooo-er!” just as Peter
did sometimes when he felt unendurably ill-used. And he kept raising his
clenched fists as if he was going to shake them—and not doing so.
“I will go to Hell,” said Nobby. “I will go to Hell.”
In a passion!
(Peter was shocked and ashamed for Nobby.)
Then Nobby turned and saw Peter before Peter could hide away from him.
He stopped crying at once, but there was his funny face all red and
shiny on one side.
“Hullo, old Peter boy,” said Nobby. “I’m off. I’m going right away. Been
fooled.”
So that was it. But hadn’t he Africa and lions and elephants and black
men to go to, a great Real Play Nursery instead of a Nursery of Toys?
Why make a fuss of it?
He came to Peter and lifted him up in his arms. “Good-bye, old Peter,”
he said. “Good-bye, Peter. Keep off the copper punching.” He kissed his
godson—how wet his face was!—and put him down, and was going off along
the path and Peter hadn’t said a word.
He wanted to cry too, to think that Nobby was going. He stared and then
ran a little way after his friend.
“Nobby,” he shouted; “good-bye!”
“Good-bye, old man,” Nobby cried back to him.
“Good-bye. Gooood-bye-er.”
Then Peter trotted back to the house to be first with the sad but
exciting news that Nobby had gone. But as he came down from the green
wicket to the house he looked up and saw his father at the upstairs
window, gazing after Nobby with an unusual expression that perplexed
him, and in the little hall he found his mother, and she had been crying
too, though she was pretending she hadn’t. They knew about Nobby.
Something strange was in the air, perceptible to a little boy but
utterly beyond his understanding. Perhaps Nobby had been naughty. So he
thought it best to change the subject, and began talking at once about a
wonderful long bicycle with no less than three men on it—not two, Mummy,
but three—that he had seen upon the highroad. They had thin white silk
shirts without sleeves, and rode furiously with their heads down. Their
shirts were blown out funnily behind them in the middles of their backs.
They went like _that_!...
All through the midday meal nobody said a word about Nobby....
Nobody ever did say anything about Nobby again. When on a few occasions
Peter himself talked appreciatively of Nobby nobody, unless it was Joan
now and then, seemed the least bit interested....
One side consequence of Oswald’s visit had been the dethronement of the
original Nobby. The real Nobby had somehow thrust the toy Nobby into the
background. Perhaps he drifted into the recesses of some box or
cupboard. At any rate when Peter thought of him one day he was nowhere
to be found. That did not matter so much as it would have done a couple
of months before. Now if the bears and “burdlars” got busy in the
night-nursery Peter used to pretend that the pillow was the real Nobby,
the Nobby who wasn’t even afraid of lions and had driven off one with a
stick. A prowling bear hadn’t much chance against a little boy who
snuggled up to _that_ Nobby.
§ 5
Mummy was rather dull in those days, and Daddy seemed always to be
looking at her. Daddy had a sort of inelasticity in his manner too.
Suddenly Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Phœbe appeared, and it was announced that
Daddy and Mummy were going off to Italy. It was too far for them to take
little boys and girls, they said, and besides there were, oh! _horrid_
spiders. And Peter must stay to mind the house and Joan and his aunts;
it wasn’t right not to have some man about. He was to have a sailor suit
with trousers also, great responsibilities altogether for a boy not much
over four. So there was a great kissing and going off, and Joan and
Peter settled down to the rule of the aunts and only missed Mummy and
Daddy now and then.
Then one day something happened over the children’s heads. Mary had red
eyes and wouldn’t say why; the aunts had told her not to do so.
Phyllis and Phœbe decided not to darken the children’s lives by wearing
mourning, but Mary said that anyhow she would go into black. But neither
Joan nor Peter took much notice of the black dress.
“Why don’t Mummy and Daddy come back?” asked Peter one day of Aunt
Phœbe.
“They’ve travelled to such wonderful places,” said Aunt Phœbe with a
catch in her voice. “They may not be back for ever so long. No. Not till
Peter is ever so big.”
“Then why don’t they send us cull’d poce-cards like they did’t first?”
said Peter.
Aunt Phœbe was so taken aback she could answer nothing.
“They just forgotten us,” said Peter and reflected. “They gone on and
on.”
“Isn’t Nobby ever coming back either?” he asked, abruptly, displaying a
devastating acceptance of the new situation.
“But who’s Nobby?”
“That’s Mr. Oswald Sydenham,” said Mary.
“He’s coming back quite soon,” said Aunt Phœbe. “He’s on his way now.”
“’Cos he _promised_ me a lion skin,” said Peter.
§ 6
Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe found themselves two of the four guardians
appointed under Arthur’s will.
It had been one of Arthur’s occasional lapses into deceit that he
destroyed the will which made Oswald the sole guardian of Joan—so far as
he could dispose of Joan—and Peter, without saying a word about it to
Dolly. He had vacillated between various substitutes for Oswald up to
the very moment when he named the four upon whom he decided finally, to
his solicitor. Some streak of jealousy or pride, combined with a doubt
whether Oswald would now consent to act, had first prompted the
alteration. Instead he had decided to shift the responsibility to his
sisters. Then a twinge of compunction had made him replace Oswald. Then
feeling that Oswald might still be out talked or out voted by his
sisters, he had stuck in the name of Dolly’s wealthy and important
cousin, Lady Charlotte Sydenham. He had only seen her twice, but she had
seemed a lady of considerable importance and strength of character.
Anyhow it made things fairer to the Sydenham side.
But Phyllis and Phœbe at once assumed, not without secret gladness, that
the burthen of this responsibility would fall upon them. Oswald Sydenham
was away in the heart of Africa; Lady Charlotte Sydenham was also
abroad. She had telegraphed, “Unwell impossible to return to England six
weeks continue children’s life as hitherto.” That seemed to promise a
second sleeping partner in the business.
The sisters decided to continue The Ingle-Nook as the children’s home,
and made the necessary arrangements with Mr. Sycamore, the family
solicitor, to that end.
They discussed their charges very carefully and fully. Phyllis was for a
meticulous observance of Arthur’s known or assumed “wishes,” but Phœbe
took a broader view. Mary too pointed out the dangers of too literal an
adhesion to precedent.
“We want everything to go on exactly as it did when _they_ were alive,”
said Phyllis to Mary.
“Things ’ave got to be different,” said Mary.
“Not if we can help it,” said Aunt Phyllis.
“They’ll _grow_,” said Mary after reflection.
Phœbe became eloquent in the evening.
“We are to have the advantages of maternity, Phyllis, without—without
the degradation. It is a solemn trust. Blessed are we among women,
Phyllis. I feel a Madonna. We _are_ Madonnas, Phyllis. Modern Madonnas.
Just Touched by the Wings of the Dove.... These little souls dropped
from heaven upon our knees.... Poor Arthur! It is our task to guide his
offspring to that high destiny he might have attained. _Look_, Phyllis!”
With her flat hand she indicated the long garden path that Dolly had
planned.
Phyllis peered forward without intelligence. “What is it?” she asked.
Phyllis perceived that Phœbe was flushed with poetical excitement. And
Phœbe’s voice dropped mystically to a deep whisper. “Don’t you see?
_White lilies!_ A coincidence, of course. But—Beautiful.”
“For a child with a high destiny, I doubt if Peter is careful enough
with his clothes,” said Phyllis, trying to sound a less Pre-Raphaelite
note. “He was a perfect little Disgrace this afternoon.”
“The darling! But I understand.... Joan too has much before her,
Phyllis. As yet their minds are blank, _tabula rasa_; of either of them
there is still to be made—_anything_. Peter—upon this Rock I set—a New
Age. When women shall come to their own. Joan again. Joan of Arc.
Coincidences no doubt. But leave me my fancies. Fancies—if you will. For
me they are no fancies. Before the worlds, Phyllis, we were made for
this.”
She rested her chin on her hand, and stared out into the blue twilight,
a brooding prophetess.
“Only a woman can understand a woman,” she said presently. “Not a Word
of this, Phyllis, to Others.”
“I wish we had bought some cigarettes this afternoon,” said Phyllis.
“The little red glow,” reflected Phœbe indulgently. “It helps. But I
don’t want to smoke tonight. It would spoil it. Smoke! Let the Flame
burn clear awhile.... We will get in cigarettes tomorrow.”
§ 7
Joan and Peter remained unaware of the great destinies before them. More
observant persons than they were might have guessed there were deep
meanings in the way in which Aunt Phœbe smoothed back their hair from
their foreheads and said “Ah,” and bade them “Mark it well” whenever she
imparted any general statement, but they took these things merely as her
particular way of manifesting the irrational quality common to all
grown-up people. Also she would say “Dignity! Your mission!” when they
howled or fought. It was to the manuscript that grew into a bigger and
bigger pile upon what had been Arthur’s writing-desk in Arthur’s
workroom, that she restricted her most stirring ideas. She wrote there
daily, going singing to it as healthy young men go singing to their
bathrooms. She splashed her mind about and refreshed herself greatly.
She wrote in a large hand, punctuating chiefly with dashes. She had
conceived her book rather in the manner of the prophetic works of the
admired Mr. Ruskin—with Carlylean lapses. It was to be called _Hail
Bambino and the Grain of Mustard Seed_. It was all about the
tremendousness of children.
The conscientious valiance of Aunt Phœbe was very manifest in the
opening. “Cæsar,” the book began, “and the son of Semele burst strangely
into this world, but Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, Newton, Darwin, Robert
Burns, were born as peacefully as you or I. Nathless they came for such
ends—if indeed one can think of any ending thereto!—as blot out the
stars. Yesterday a puling babe—for Jesus puled, Mohammed puled, let us
not spare ourselves, Newton, a delicate child, puled most
offensively—Herod here and bacteria there, infantile colic, tuberculosis
and what not, searched for each little life, in vain, and so today
behold springing victoriously from each vital granule a tree of
Teaching, of Consequence, that buds and burgeons and shoots and for ever
spreads so that the Gates of Hell may not prevail against it! Here it is
the Tree of Spirituality, here the Tree of Thought, predestined
intertwiner with the Tree of Asgard, here in our last instance a
chanting Beauty, a heartening lyrical Yawp and Whirlaboo. And forget it
not, whatever else be forgotten, the Word of the Wise, ‘_as the twig is
bent the tree inclines_.’ So it is and utterly that we realize the
importance of education, the pregnant intensity of the least urgency,
the hint, the gleam, the offering of service, to these First Tender
Years.”
Here Aunt Phœbe had drawn breath for a moment, before she embarked upon
her second paragraph; and here we will leave Aunt Phœbe glowing amidst
her empurpled prose.
Joan and Peter took the substitution of Aunt Phœbe muttering like a
Sibyl overhead and Aunt Phyllis, who was really amusing with odd
drawings and twisted paper toys and much dancing and running about, in
the place of Daddy and Mummy, with the stoical acceptance of the very
young. About Daddy and Mummy there hung a faint flavour of departure but
no sense of conclusive loss. No clear image and expectation of a return
had been formed. No day of definite disappointment ever came. After all
the essential habitual person, Mary, was still there, and all the little
important routines of child-life continued very much as they had always
done.
Yet there was already the dawn of further apprehensions in Peter’s mind
at least. One day Peter picked up a dead bird in the garden, a bird dead
with no injuries manifest. He tried to make it stand up and peck.
“It ain’t no good, Master Peter; it’s dead,” said Mary.
“What’s dead?” said Peter.
“_That_ is.”
“_Gone_ dead,” said Peter.
“And won’t ever go anything else now—except smell,” said Mary.
Peter reflected. Later he revisited the dead bird and was seen in
profound meditation over it. Then he repaired to Aunt Phyllis and
confided his intention of immortality.
“Peter,” he said, “not go dead—nohow.”
“Of course not,” said Aunt Phyllis. “He’s got too much sense. The idea!”
This was reassuring. But alone it was not enough.
“Joan not go dead,” he said. “No.”
“Certainly she shan’t,” said Aunt Phyllis and awaited further decisions.
“Pussy not go dead.”
“Not until ninety times nine.”
“Aunt Phyllis not go dead. Marewi not go dead.”
He reflected further. He tried, “Mummy and Daddy not go dead....”
Then after thought, “When are Daddy and Mummy coming back again?”
Aunt Phyllis told a wise lie. “Some day. Not for a long time. They’ve
gone—oh, ever so far.”
“Farther than ever so,” said Peter.
He reflected. “When they come back Peter will be a Big Boy. Mummy and
Daddy ’ardly know ’im.”
And from that time, Daddy and Mummy ceased to be thought of further as
immediate presences, and became hero and heroine in a dream of tomorrow,
a dream of returning happiness when life was dull, of release and
vindication when life was hard, a pleasant dream, a hope, a basis for
imaginative anticipations and pillow fairy tales, sleeping Parents like
those sleeping Kings who figure in the childhood of nations, like King
Arthur or Barbarossa. Sometimes it was one parent and sometimes it was
the other that dominated the thought, “When Mummy comes back.... When
Daddy comes back.”
Joan learnt very soon to say it too.
§ 8
Death was too big a thing for Peter to comprehend. He had hardly begun
yet with life. And he had made not even a beginning with religion. He
had never been baptized; he had learnt no prayers at his mother’s knee.
The priceless Mary had come to the Stublands warranted a churchwoman,
but as with so many of her class, her orthodoxy had been only a
professional uniform to cloak a very keen hostility and contempt for the
clergy, and she dropped quite readily into the ways of a household in
which religion was entirely ignored. The first Peter heard of religion
was at the age of four and a half, and that was from a serious friend of
Mary’s, a Particular Baptist, who came for a week’s visit to The
Ingle-Nook. The visitor was really distressed at the spiritual outlook
of the two children. She borrowed Peter for a “little walk.” She thought
she would begin with him and try Joan afterwards. Then as plainly and
impressively as possible she imparted the elements of her faith to Peter
and taught him a brief, simple prayer. “He’s a Love,” she told Mary,
“and so Quick! It’s a _shime_ to keep him such a little heathen. I
didn’t say that prayer over twice before he had it Pat.”
Mary was rather moved by her friend’s feelings. She felt that she was
going behind the back of the aunts, but nevertheless she saw no great
harm in what had happened. The deaths of Arthur and Dolly had shaken
Mary’s innate scepticism; she had a vague feeling that there might be
grave risks, well worth consideration, beyond the further edge of life.
Aunt Phyllis was the first of the responsible people overhead to
discover what had happened. Peter loved his prayer; it was full of the
most beautiful phrases; no words had ever so filled his mouth and mind.
There was for example, “For Jesus Krice sake Amen.” Like a song. You
could use it anywhere. Aunt Phyllis found him playing trains with his
bricks in the nursery one afternoon. “_Hoo!_ Chuff-Chuff. Chuff-Chuff.
Change for Reigate, change for London. For Jesus Krice sake Amen.”
Aunt Phyllis sat down in the little chair. “Peter,” she said, “who is
this Jesus Krice?”
Peter was reluctant to give information. “I know all about ’im,” he
said, and would at first throw no other light on the matter.
Then he relented and told a wonder. He turned his back on his brick
train and drew close to Aunt Phyllis. His manner was solemn and
impressive exactly as Mary’s friend’s had been; his words were as slow
and deliberate. “Jesus Krice could go dead and come alive again,” he
said, “over and over, whenever He wanted to.”
And having paused a moment to complete the effect of this marvel, Peter
turned about again, squatted down like a little brown holland mushroom
with a busy little knob on the top, and resumed his shouting. “_Hoo!_
Chuff-Chuff. Chuff-Chuff. Chuff.”
§ 9