school, found, as a consequence, that she was out. She had probably gone
Pevensey way, thought the maid, with some of the older young ladies and
one of the governesses. And it was out Pevensey way that we presently
recognised upon the beach, among a heterogeneous collection of empty
shoes and stockings, some big-brimmed straw hats with the school ribbon
upon them. Their owners were for the most part thigh-deep in the English
Channel with their skirts tucked conveniently round their plump waists.
And they were being watched from the shore by a very pleasant young
lady, who looked rather wistfully as if she would like to be out there
too. Yes, she told us, Claire was in the water with the others, probably
among the deeper ones who were getting their knickers wet. Surveying the
melee with an expression of polite concern, she was rather afraid that
it would be a little difficult to make Claire understand who we were.
But if we wouldn't mind waiting for a minute or two they would all be
coming in to dry their legs before going back to prep.
Presently some floating atom of wreckage took them unanimously eastward,
splashing through the shallows, until the governess, waving a white
handkerchief, brought them gingerly ashore across a little bank of
rather slippery-looking rock. There was a general shaking out and
rearranging of tousled manes, yellow and chestnut and black, and a
modest dropping of skirts to the demurer level of shining wet knees.
The little party drifted slowly towards us, their brown feet lingering
wholesomely across the sands.
"You'll know Claire," said the governess, "by the bandage round her
instep. I oughtn't really to have let her paddle."
Esther's eyes became a little anxious.
"But what has been the matter?" she asked.
The governess smiled.
"Oh, nothing very serious," she said. "And I think you must ask Claire
herself. Tales out of school, you know."
And then the least tidy, perhaps, of the damsels detached herself
suddenly from her comrades, and came down upon us at top speed,
regardless of pebbles.
"Have you got me off prep?" she asked earnestly, after she had kissed us
and found her shoes and stockings. And having explained to her that we
were going to take her out to tea for a pre-birthday treat--she was
going to be sixteen next week--we inquired about the bandage. It was the
result, we discovered, of an illegal (and unconfirmed) raid upon a
neighbouring dormitory, during which, by a kind of Homeric retribution,
a stray tin-tack had wounded her unprotected foot.
"But it's about well now, I should think," she said, undoing the
bandage, and turning up a salmon-pink sole for our inspection. And we
were obliged to confess that it was.
She rolled up the bandage into a little ball, and threw it down the
beach.
"I wish we could _always_ go barefoot," she sighed. And for the moment I
felt inclined to agree with her. For the happy foot, as T. E. Brown has
said, swings rather from the heart than from the hip. And there are few
prettier things in nature than the restless, romping legs of the average
healthy little maiden. They are her life's joy made visible; so that it
really seems a shame, if a necessary one, to imprison them in even the
airiest of stockings and the most hygienic of leather shoes.
Blue gingham petticoats,
White blown aprons,
Five pairs of plump legs
Twinkling down the hill,
Black imprisoned plump legs,
Fretful for the stream bed,
Tired of shoes and stockings,
Dancing like a rill,
Dancing down the hillside,
So come the children,
Like a rill in sunshine,
So dance they,
Seek the solemn waters,
Marching to the ocean,
Set the solemn waters
Laughing at their play.
So into my heart come,
Silver it with laughter,
Lest among the shadows
Lost should be its way,
So into my heart come
Rosamund and Daphne,
Marian and Rosemary,
And little baby May.
Claire and her companions had been paddling in the big ocean itself; and
being comparatively dignified did not of course wear aprons. Moreover,
as I had the strongest reasons for believing, they were at this moment
quite innocent of petticoats. But the little poem comes back to me as I
write.
"And next week," she proceeded ruefully, "I shall have to go into blobs
and half-masters."
We stared at her rather blankly.
"All the girls do, you know," she added, "when they turn sixteen."
"But blobs----" I began.
"And half-masters?" puzzled Esther.
"When your hair's neither up nor down," Claire explained, "with a big
fat bow on it. And when you have to wear skirts a foot below your
knees."
She rolled over, and struck her toes into the sand.
"It's to show," she finished pathetically, "that you're too grown up to
be spanked and not old enough to have visiting cards."
Which seems to suggest that even sixteen may have its tragedies, though
its capacity for ices remains happily unimpaired. Or would you call them
growing pains? And are all pains growing pains?
Ever yrs.,
P. H.
XX
_To Horace Harding, c/o Major Alec Cameron, Glen Bruisk, Sutherland,
N.B._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_August_ 17, 1910.
MY DEAR HORACE,
So you have yielded at last. Your fine contempt for the gentlest art has
begun to dissolve. And being on the very brink of one of the snuggest of
sea-trout lochs you think that you must really have a cast or two upon
its waters. There are people who will tell you, of course, that it's a
blind man's game, or very nearly so, this loch trout fishing. But let
the blue waters--crinkled, if fortune smiles, with the daintiest of
ripples--be their immediate and sufficient refutation. And some day they
may behold you casting one of Mrs. Richardson's artfullest duns over
those senior wranglers among trout that lurk in the disillusioned depths
of the Itchen.
At the same time I am not forwarding you an outfit for your birthday
present, as you so delicately suggest, firstly because you tell me that
Major Cameron can easily fix you up with all that is necessary; but
principally because I am not quite comfortable in my mind as to your
real motive for caressing the surface of Loch Bruisk. I should like to
be just a little surer that it is a genuine regard for _salmo trutta_
rather than a merely altruistic (though very praiseworthy) desire to be
properly companionable to Miss Graham, who is, as you tell me, so
awfully keen about it.
It is of course a very strong point in her favour, and I remember her
brother quite well. He plays half for Richmond, I think, and you
introduced us to one another at Queen's. And his sister--I don't
remember that you have mentioned her to me before--may of course be the
means to an end--an instrument chosen by a merciful Providence whereby a
new channel of enjoyment is about to be revealed to you. But on the
other hand, I can't help feeling that with your duty done, cheerfully
and bravely, as I have no doubt will be the case--and Miss Graham
away--the yearning to catch trout may conceivably leave you. So I am
sending you instead my very best wishes for the happiest of birthdays,
and a hope that you have many others yet in store for you.
I am glad that you have determined to go up for your second medical some
time next year, and note that you have taken away volumes of anatomy and
physiology in your trunk. If you will accept my paternal advice,
however, you will leave them there until you have decided that your
health is sufficiently recuperated to return either to Cambridge or
Harley Street. I don't want you to curtail your holidays. I have far too
much respect both for holidays in general and yourself in particular.
For it's one of the most pathetic features about the genuine old codger
(and one of his surest signs too) that his periods of recreation tend to
become progressively shorter--and not always by force of circumstances.
They may actually begin to bore him. He may even have to make an effort
of will to prolong them for his ultimate good--to school himself into
regarding them as cures. Thus, while at twenty-two a summer vacation of
less than two months is too monstrous to be seriously considered, at
forty-two one becomes grateful for a fortnight, could do with three
weeks, but is apt to find a month just a trifle too long. Whereas at
fifty-two---- So don't curtail them. And yet better is it to curtail
them than to pollute. And unless you particularly need them for
preserving specimens of the local flora or maintaining the creases upon
your Sunday trousers, you should never, never, never pack technical
books in a holiday trunk. It is to put poison--or at any rate
water--into the wine that you are to pour out before the gods of
mountain and moor and loch. And though they are generous they are proud.
And they will surely make you repent it--not merely because it is
tactless, as though you should make Miss Dolly--I think that was her
name?--the staple article of your conversations with Miss Graham; and
not merely because it shows your ignorance, as though you should munch
ginger-nuts with that fine old port which your uncle has dug up for your
especial benefit; but because--far worse--it is an evidence of
double-dealing. And no god, not even the presiding deity of the tiniest
mountain ash, is going to stand that. If you read your Bible, as I hope
you do, you will have been warned concerning this simultaneous worship
of two contrary masters, and the doom that must certainly befall it. And
that's why no really wise schoolmaster ever sets his pupils a holiday
task, though there are still, I'm afraid, a few foolish ones left. I
hardly like to think that mine can have been among them; and yet there's
no doubt that "Marmion," the "Lady of the Lake," the "Cloister and the
Hearth," and several other peaks upon the literary landscape remain
clouded to me for ever.
You would have thought this a sufficiently clear lesson, perhaps, upon
the point that I am pressing into you. But it wasn't. And I remember
consecrating a golden September in Fife to the mastery of my materia
medica. There's a moor, for instance, somewhere between Dunfermline and
Rumbling Bridge that will eternally be associated in my mind with the
preparations of opium. I can recall in all its hideous detail some such
afternoon's tramp as this:--
"By George, that's a fine piece of colouring, the sunlight on that dying
heather over there, Tinct: Camph: Co: strength of opium one in two
hundred and forty. There are the Ochils again, pil: plumbi cum opio,
strength of opium one in eight---- Damn, I forgot to look for that big
trout when I crossed the burn just now. Extractum opii, strength of
opium two in one" (it sounds improbable--even theological--but if you
look it up you will discover it to be correct, and I have never found
the knowledge in the least important). And, as a result, that particular
moor will always whisper to me unhealthily of morphia, while the
preparations of opium had to be learned all over again in something
less than six weeks' time.
And you will generally find it to be the case, I think, that the work
which has desecrated the holiday can seldom stand either the test of an
examination or the more valuable one of practical appliance. For it's
the term's work, the good, solid, everyday's grind in the
dissecting-room or the physiological theatre, and later in the wards and
the out-patient department, that is the bone and marrow of your
pre-graduate education. Without it no amount of feverish cramming will
ever make you efficient, though it may occasionally perhaps save you
from being deservedly ploughed. And with it no cramming should be
necessary--or at most a very little. For there are still a few subjects,
alas, demanded by examining boards that can be learned, I suppose, in no
other way--such as the preparations of opium before mentioned, with
their respective strengths and all that appertains unto them, and the
ingredients of various obscure powders that you will never hear about
again. In after life you will always refer to your pharmacopeia if you
want information upon these subjects, and no normal mind has either the
capacity or the desire to retain their details for so long as
twenty-four hours after they have been required in the examination-room.
But as a general rule, and one that is happily gaining ground every
year, you will find that your examiners will far prefer to discover in
you the evidences of a functionally active, if somewhat lightly stored,
mind than a kind of _pate de foie gras_, fattened up for the occasion,
but too inert, as a result, to leave him quite happy about its future.
And that's why it's always a good thing to take life easily during the
last week before your papers have to be written. Go abroad, mix with
normal men and women, to whom examinations are just episodes in the
lives of other people, fearsome but remote. And remind yourself in their
unruffled company that, after all, they _are_ merely episodes. You won't
forget anything really important in that time. If you do, you can never
properly have known it. While as for the trimmings, you will be more
than compensated for the shedding of a few of these by the sanity and
freshness with which your brain will come to its ordeal--as an example
of the reverse of which there occurs to me the vision of a pallid young
man who addressed me about six weeks ago in the hospital lobby. He was
very much frightened. I didn't know who he was. Indeed I don't think
that I had ever seen him before. And the remnants of a natural modesty
were evidently struggling to hold him back. But Circumstance, and the
awful fact that in less than an hour's time he was due for a _viva_ upon
the Thames Embankment, forced him trembling towards me. He wiped his
forehead--I was the only likely subject within range at the moment, and
his train was to leave in exactly seven and a half minutes.
"I can remember the hooklets," he gasped, "but _would_ you mind telling
me, sir, which of the tapeworms it is that has four suckers?"
Poor boy--I could see that his whole future was pivoting miserably upon
those forgotten suckers; and, by an excessively fortunate accident, I
happened to have some notes for a lecture upon the subject in one of my
pockets.
"If you'll wait a moment," I told him honestly, "I think that I can let
you know. But I really couldn't tell you offhand."
He looked at me anxiously, and I could see my reputation tottering in
his eyes as I searched about for my pocket-book.
"Nor could your examiners, you know," I assured him, "unless they had
just primed themselves beforehand, or carried notes upon their
cuffs--which they probably do."
His brow cleared amazingly at this, and I could see that the relative
importance of knowing, without reference, the precise number of a
tapeworm's suckers was beginning to define itself a little more clearly
to his distressed understanding. So I read out my notes to him, and he
dashed upon his way, relieved if not rejoicing. But you mustn't ever
become like that, you know, although it's not so difficult to do so as
you may think.
And lastly, if there should be a Miss Graham--I speak in the abstract,
of course, and very, very tentatively--she must be allowed to share none
of the homage that every respectable examination insists upon
monopolising. She may still be the goddess in your car. For on the whole
I think that goddesses (of the right sort) make for careful driving. But
at present your eyes must be chiefly upon the reins. You must forgive me
for touching upon a topic that you will probably find extremely
irrelevant, but there are certain things in a Highland country house
that are curiously apt to wander a little from their true perspective. I
ought to have mentioned, by the way, that Churchills are sending you a
gun, which I hope may arrive safely with this letter. For though I am
quite open to conviction about the fishing, I feel rather more certain
about the shooting. It was pre-Grahamite, you see--you haven't told me
her Christian name--pre-Dollyite, pre-Berylite--and even, if I remember
rightly, pre-Looite; so that I think it may safely be accepted as being
integral and not merely adventitious. Anyway, there's the gun, and I
hope that you'll kill many grouse with it in spite of your sister Molly
and her humanitarian comrades. For grouse, like men, must die on a day,
and better the quick shot in mid-flight than to crawl away, and to
perish slowly in the corner as most of us, alas, will probably have to
do when our sunset days come round.
I expect you will already have had letters from mother and Molly, if not
from Tom and Claire, who are staying with Lady Wroxton at Stoke, and
defying the Thames Conservancy in the matter of mixed bathing during
most of the forbidden hours. You heard, no doubt, or saw in the papers,
that Rupert Morris has had a K added to his C.B.; which means, I
suppose, that his little scrap on the frontier was more important than
he led us to suppose. In any case, nobody, I should think, has deserved
his title more, and quite certainly no one will value it less. He is
expected home, I believe, about the end of September, and you will
probably meet him at Stoke, where Molly (having squared her conscience)
is presently to assist in the extra housekeeping demanded by the
partridges and pheasants. With much love,
Yr. affect. father,
P. H.
XXI
_To Miss Josephine Summers, The Cottage, Potham, Beds._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_August_ 25, 1910.
MY DEAR AUNT JOSEPHINE,
I have, of course, frequently seen many of the pictures that you
mention, and have also read some of the stories of which, as you say,
each illustration professes to tell one. I don't think however that I
have seen the particular one of the signalman which you enclose; and it
certainly seems a coincidence that he should be pressing his left hand
so vehemently upon the precise spot at which your cook also is so apt to
suffer pain. And it is odd too that, like her, he would appear to be so
thoroughly respectable that their common affliction becomes a little
difficult to understand. It is not, as you say, as if either of them
gave one the least impression of being in any degree _loose_ or
_rackety_. At the same time, from a close examination of the signalman's
anatomy, I don't think that the organs so frequently mentioned in his
very eloquent account of himself are those most likely to be affected.
And perhaps your cook may also be happily under a similar
misapprehension. And that is why, before taking the pills that have been
so markedly blessed to the signalman, I would suggest the outward
application of a little friction with the open palm of someone else's
hand in which have been previously placed a few drops of turpentine. It
will be so far less expensive, you see; and, even if not finally
successful, will at any rate do no harm. But I have great hopes.
Your affect. nephew,
PETER HARDING.
XXII
_To Reginald Pole, S.Y. Nautilus, Harwich._
91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_August_ 30, 1910.
MY DEAR REGGIE,
When one of your youngest journalists from Franciscan House called upon
me last night, I guessed at once that you were either away from home or
that you had given the lad _carte blanche_ to collect material for a
"silly season" discussion, without adding an Olympian hint or two as to
where he had best go hunting. As a matter of fact both surmises turned
out to be correct; and I even seemed to detect in him a certain air of
relief as he admitted the first, while he was still young enough to feel
rather important with regard to the second. Unhappy youth--how should he
know that he had run into the very jaws of your arch-enemy?
It was a college friendship with Horace, he informed me, that was his
excuse for calling upon me, although of course he knew quite well that I
was an eminent authority on the subject in hand. This was so obvious an
afterthought that I couldn't help asking him what the subject might be.
He told his lie so nicely, you see, and was so humbly aware of its small
worth. He coloured a little.
"Are we nervous?" he said.
I pushed over the tobacco-jar, and asked him to fill his pipe.
"I hope not," I replied, and he coloured a little more.
"You don't understand," he explained. "That is to be the headline of the
discussion. At least, that was what I'd thought myself. But some of the
other fellows have suggested, 'Are we _more_ nervous?' or 'Where are our
National Nerves?' or 'National Neurosis; are we suffering from it?'"
I nodded.
"Yours is the shortest," I said.
"Just so," he replied, "and, I think, the most arresting."
"And who's going to write the first letter?" I asked.
"Well," he stammered, "I rather expect it will be me."
"And you'll call yourself 'A London Physician,' I suppose?"
"Something like that," he confessed. "You see, a newspaper discussion
like this is all right when once it's started--that is, if it's a live
one, as Mr. Pole calls it. The other letters simply pour in."
"From Balham and Holloway and Tottenham and Ilford----"
"Oh yes," he smiled, "and from Kensington and Mayfair as well."
"You think that a good many of your readers will like to tell the public
all about their nerves?"
"Thousands of 'em," he said confidently.
"And you'll select a certain number of letters from each district, and
fill up a couple of your daily columns for nothing?"
"That's the idea. And we shall give a lot of pleasure too."
"And the writers and the writers' friends will rush to buy copies, I
suppose, and cut out their letters, and stick them in albums."
He laughed.
"I shouldn't wonder," he said. "Making personal friends for the
paper--that's what Mr. Pole calls it. He says that nothing pays better."
"And presently, perhaps, you'll collect all the letters, and put them in
a little booklet of which you'll sell large numbers for sixpence in a
comfortable dressing-gown of advertisements."
"Possibly," he said, "if it goes really well."
I looked at him for a moment, upon the threshold of his life-work. He
was a nice boy, though the shades of Franciscan House were fast closing
about him.
"D'you think it's worth it?" I asked him.
"Why rather," he said. "Pays like anything."
"Forty per cent, perhaps?"
"Very likely."
"The Franciscan heaven," I admitted, and he winced a little. By which I
knew, of course, that he was as yet no true Franciscan--who never
winces, and whose conscience, to use a borrowed phrase, is merely his
accomplice.
"Do you object to forty per cent?" he asked.
"_Per se?_" I answered, "not at all."
"But to the correspondence perhaps?"
"I'm not enamoured of the idea," I confessed. "Are you?"
He reached for the ash-tray, and knocked out his pipe.
"We must give 'em what they want, you know," he said.
I bowed.
"The Franciscan creed," I told him. "But perhaps they don't know yet
that they do want it."
"Then we must show 'em," he replied.
"The Franciscan gospel," I sighed, for, as I have said, he was a nice
boy, still trailing a wisp or two of glory.
"And besides," he went on, "people always like to talk about their weak
nerves, don't they?"
He was getting in under my guard now to bleed me of copy, so I stepped
aside.
"Play cricket?" I asked him.
"A bit," he confessed.
"Ever stopped a rot?"
"Sometimes," he replied warily.
"How did you do it?" I inquired.
He laughed again.
"Now you're getting at me, aren't you?" he said.
"Of course I am. Haven't you been trying to get at me?"
"Do you think you're going to score?" he asked.
"I shouldn't wonder," I told him; "because you didn't encourage those
panicky fellow-batsmen of yours to talk about their nerves, did you? On
the contrary, you swaggered a bit yourself, and told 'em that the
bowling was poor stuff. You didn't even tell 'em to forget that growing
excavation behind their belt-buckles. You were subtler. You took it for
granted that they hadn't got one. You surrounded 'em with the proper
atmosphere. You were more than half a nerve specialist already--the
better half. You infected them with your own health. But what are you
proposing to do now?"
The journalist in him died hard.
"Then you think there _is_ a rot?" he asked.
"I didn't say so."
He put his pipe in his pocket, and picked up his hat and gloves.
"After all," he smiled, "you've only been preaching the old doctrine of
responsibility, you know. And the modern journalist is a detached
person." But I shook my head.
I repeat that he was a nice boy, and had borne my little pi-jaw with
admirable fortitude.
"Only semi-detached," I ventured, "with a half-educated brother next
door."