After an infancy of more than common docility and a young childhood of
few explicit revolts, the boy of twelve years old enters upon a phase
which the bystander may not well understand but may make shift to note as
an impression.
Like other subtle things, his position is hardly to be described but by
negatives. Above all, he is not demonstrative. The days are long gone
by when he said he wanted a bicycle, a top hat, and a pipe. One or two
of these things he has, and he takes them without the least swagger. He
avoids expression of any kind. Any satisfaction he may feel with things
as they are is rather to be surprised in his manner than perceived in his
action. Mr. Jaggers, when it befell him to be astonished, showed it by a
stop of manner, for an indivisible moment--not by a pause in the thing he
chanced to be about. In like manner the boy cannot prevent his most
innocent pleasures from arresting him.
He will not endure (albeit he does not confess so much) to be told to do
anything, at least in that citadel of his freedom, his home. His elders
probably give him as few orders as possible. He will almost ingeniously
evade any that are inevitably or thoughtlessly inflicted upon him, but if
he does but succeed in only postponing his obedience, he has, visibly,
done something for his own relief. It is less convenient that he should
hold mere questions, addressed to him in all good faith, as in some sort
an attempt upon his liberty.
Questions about himself one might understand to be an outrage. But it is
against impersonal and indifferent questions also that the boy sets his
face like a rock. He has no ambition to give information on any point.
Older people may not dislike the opportunity, and there are even those
who bring to pass questions of a trivial kind for the pleasure of
answering them with animation. This, the boy perhaps thinks, is "fuss,"
and, if he has any passions, he has a passionate dislike of fuss.
When a younger child tears the boy's scrapbook (which is conjectured,
though not known, to be the dearest thing he has) he betrays no emotion;
that was to be expected. But when the stolen pages are rescued and put
by for him, he abstains from taking an interest in the retrieval; he will
do nothing to restore them. To do so would mar the integrity of his
reserve. If he would do much rather than answer questions, he would
suffer something rather than ask them.
He loves his father and a friend of his father's, and he pushes them, in
order to show it without compromising his temperament.
He is a partisan in silence. It may be guessed that he is often occupied
in comparing other people with his admired men. Of this too he says
little, except some brief word of allusion to what other men do _not_ do.
When he speaks it is with a carefully shortened vocabulary. As an author
shuns monotony, so does the boy shun change. He does not generally talk
slang; his habitual words are the most usual of daily words made useful
and appropriate by certain varieties of voice. These express for him all
that he will consent to communicate. He reserves more by speaking dull
words with zeal than by using zealous words that might betray him. But
his brevity is the chief thing; he has almost made an art of it.
He is not "merry." Merry boys have pretty manners, and it must be owned
that this boy's manners are not pretty. But if not merry, he is happy;
there never was a more untroubled soul. If he has an almost grotesque
reticence, he has no secrets. Nothing that he thinks is very much
hidden. Even if he did not push his father, it would be evident that the
boy loves him; even if he never laid his hand (and this little thing he
does rarely) on his friend's shoulder, it would be plain that he loves
his friend. His happiness appears in his moody and charming face, his
ambition in his dumbness, and the hopes of his life to come in ungainly
bearing. How does so much heart, how does so much sweetness, all
unexpressed, appear? For it is not only those who know him well that
know the child's heart; strangers are aware of it. This, which he would
not reveal, is the only thing that is quite unmistakable and quite
conspicuous.
What he thinks that he turns visibly to the world is a sense of humour,
with a measure of criticism and of indifference. What he thinks the
world may divine in him is courage and an intelligence. But carry
himself how he will, he is manifestly a tender, gentle, and even
spiritual creature, masculine and innocent--"a nice boy." There is no
other way of describing him than that of his own brief language.