When I awoke next morning the sun was shining, and, after my hair had
been brushed smooth over my forehead, I was sitting up in bed, eating
for breakfast the smallest of bantam eggs with the smallest of silver
spoons, when the door opened with a bang and a small figure tumbled into
my room.
It was a boy, two years older than myself. He wore a grey Norfolk jacket
and knickerbockers, but the peculiarity of his dress was a white felt
hat of enormous size, which, being soiled and turned down in the brim,
and having a hole in the crown with a crop of his brown hair sticking
through it, gave him the appearance of a damaged mushroom.
Except that on entering he tipped up his head so that I saw his face,
which was far from beautiful and yet had two big blue eyes--as blue as
the bluest sea--he took no notice of my presence, but tossed a
somersault in the middle of the floor, screwed his legs over the back of
a chair, vaulted over a table and finally stood on his hands with his
legs against the wall opposite to my bed, and his inverted countenance
close to the carpet.
In this position, in which he was clearly making a point of remaining as
long as possible, while his face grew very red, we held our first
conversation. I had hitherto sat propped up as quiet as a mouse, but now
I said:
"Little boy, what's your name?"
"Mart," was the answer.
"Where do you come from?"
"Spitzbergen."
I cannot remember that this intelligence astonished me, for when the
inverted face had become scarlet, and the legs went down and the head
came up, and my visitor tossed several somersaults over the end of my
bed, to the danger of my breakfast tray, and then, without a word more,
tumbled out of the room, I was still watching in astonishment.
I did not know at that time that these were the ways which since the
beginning of the world have always been employed by savages and boys
when they desire to commend themselves to the female of their kind, so
that when the doctor's wife came smiling upstairs I asked her if the
little boy who had been to see me was not quite well.
"Bless you, yes, dear, but that's his way," she said, and then she told
me all about him.
His name was Martin Conrad and he was her only child. His hat, which had
awakened my interest, was an old one of his father's, and it was the
last thing he took off when he undressed for bed at night and the first
thing he put on in the morning. When the hole came into its crown his
mother had tried to hide it away but he had always found it, and when
she threw it into the river he had fished it out again.
He was the strangest boy, full of the funniest fancies. He used to say
that before he was born he lived in a tree and was the fellow who turned
on the rain. It was with difficulty that he could be educated, and every
morning on being awakened, he said he was "sorry he ever started this
going to school." As a consequence he could not read or write as well as
other boys of his age, and his grammar was still that of the peasant
people with whom he loved to associate.
Chief among these was our gardener, old Tommy the Mate, who lived in a
mud cabin on the shore and passed the doctor's house on his way to work.
Long ago Tommy had told the boy a tremendous story. It was about Arctic
exploration and an expedition he had joined in search of Franklin. This
had made an overpowering impression on Martin, who for mouths afterwards
would stand waiting at the gate until Tommy was going by, and then say:
"Been to the North Pole to-day, Tommy?"
Whereupon Tommy's "starboard eye" would blink and he would answer:
"Not to-day boy. I don't go to the North Pole more nor twice a day now."
"Don't you, though?" the boy would say, and this would happen every
morning.
But later on Martin conceived the idea that the North Pole was the
locality immediately surrounding his father's house, and every day he
would set out on voyages of exploration over the garden, the road and
the shore, finding, by his own account, a vast world of mysterious
things and undiscovered places. By some means--nobody knew how--the boy
who could not learn his lessons studied his father's German atlas, and
there was not a name in it north of Spitzbergen which he had not got by
heart. He transferred them all to Ellan, so that the Sky Hill became
Greenland, and the Black Head became Franz Josef Land, and the Nun's
Well became Behring Strait, and Martha's Gullet became New Siberia, and
St. Mary's Rock, with the bell anchored on it, became the pivot of the
earth itself.
He could swim like a fish and climb a rock like a lizard, and he kept a
log-book, on the back pages of the Doctor's book of visits, which he
called his "diarrhea." And now if you lost him you had only to look up
to the ridge of the roof, or perhaps on to the chimney stack, which he
called his crow's nest, and there you found him, spying through his
father's telescope and crying out:
"Look-out ahead! Ice floes from eighty-six latitude fourteen point
north, five knots to the starboard bow."
His mother laughed until she cried when she told me all this, but there
is no solemnity like that of a child, and to me it was a marvellous
story. I conceived a deep admiration for the doctor's boy, and saw
myself with eyes of worship walking reverently by his side. I suppose my
poor lonely heart was hungering after comradeship, for being a
sentimental little ninny I decided to offer myself to the doctor's boy
as his sister.
The opportunity was dreadfully long in coming. It did not come until the
next morning, when the door of my room flew open with a yet louder bang
than before, and the boy entered in a soap-box on wheels, supposed to be
a sledge, and drawn by a dog, an Irish terrier, which being red had been
called William Rufus. His hat was tied over his ears with a tape from
his mother's apron, and he wore a long pair of his father's knitted
stockings which covered his boots and came up to his thighs.
He did not at first take any more notice of me than on the previous day,
but steering his sledge round the room he shouted to his dog that the
chair by the side of my bed was a glacier and the sheep-skin rug was
floating ice.
After a while we began to talk, and then, thinking my time had come, I
tried to approach my subject. Being such a clever little woman I went
artfully to work, speaking first about my father, my mother, my cousin,
Nessy MacLeod, and even Aunt Bridget, with the intention of showing how
rich I was in relations, so that he might see how poor he was himself.
I felt myself a bit of a hypocrite in all this, but the doctor's boy did
not know that, and I noticed that as I passed my people in review he
only said "Is she any good?" or "Is he a stunner?"
At length my great moment came and with a fluttering heart I took it.
"Haven't you got a sister?" I said.
"Not _me_!" said the doctor's boy, with a dig of emphasis on the last
word which cut me to the quick.
"Wouldn't you like to have one?"
"Sisters isn't no good," said the doctor's boy, and he instanced "chaps"
at school--Jimmy Christopher and others--whose sisters were afraid of
everything--lobsters and crabs and even the sea.
I knew I was as timid as a hare myself, but my lonely little heart was
beginning to bleed, and as well as I could for my throat which was
choking me, I said:
"I'm not afraid of the sea--not crabs neither."
In a moment the big mushroom hat was tipped aside and the sea-blue eyes
looked aslant at me.
"Isn't you, though?"
"No."
That did it. I could see it did. And when a minute afterwards, I invited
the doctor's boy into bed, he came in, stockings and all, and sat by my
right side, while William Rufus, who had formed an instant attachment
for me, lay on my left with his muzzle on my lap.
Later the same day, my bedroom door being open, so that I might call
downstairs to the kitchen, I heard the doctor's boy telling his mother
what I was. I was a "stunner."