You readers may smile when I tell you why I have indited these memories
and fancies. It was not done for you but for me, being a foolish attempt
to determine, by writing the things down (playing over by myself some of
the past moves in the game), whether Tintinnabulum really does like me
still. That he should do so is very important to me as he recedes
farther from my ken down that road which hurries him from me. I cannot,
however, after all, give myself a very definite answer. He no longer
needs me of course, as Neil did, and he will go on needing me less. When
I think of Neil I know that those were the last days in which I was
alive.
Tintinnabulum’s opinion of himself, except when he is splashing, is
lowlier than was Neil’s; some times in dark moods it is lowlier than
makes for happiness. He has hardened a little since he was Neil,
coarsened but strengthened. I comfort myself with the curious reflection
that the best men I have known have had a touch of coarseness in them.
Perhaps I have made too much of the occasional yieldings of this boy
whom I now know so superficially. The new life is building seven walls
around him. Are such of his moves in the game as I can follow merely an
expert’s kindness to an indifferent player?
On the other hand, I learn from a friendly source that he has spoken of
me with approval, once at least, as “mad, quite mad,” and I know that my
battered countenance, about which I am very “touchy” excites his pity as
well as his private mirth. On the last night of the holidays he was
specially gruff, but he slipped beneath my door a paper containing the
words “I hereby solemnly promise never to give you cause for moral
anxiety,” and signed his name across a postage stamp to give the
document a special significance. Nevertheless, W. W. and he certainly do
at times exchange disturbing glances of which I am the object, and
these, I notice, occur when I think I am talking well. Again, if I set
off to tell a humorous story in company nothing can exceed the agony on
Tintinnabulum’s face. Yet I am uncertain that this is not a compliment,
for if he felt indifferently toward me why should he worry about my
fate?
During those holidays a master at his old preparatory sent me a letter
he had received from Tintinnabulum (whom he called Neil), saying that as
it was about me he considered I ought to read it. But I had not the
courage to do so. Quite likely it was favourable, but suppose it hadn’t
been. Besides, it was not meant for me to see, and I cling to his
dew-drop about my being mad. On the whole, I think he is still partial
to me. Corroboration, I consider, was provided at our parting, when he
so skilfully turned what began as a tear into a wink and gazed at me
from the disappearing train with what I swear was a loving scowl.
What will become of Tintinnabulum? There was a horror looking for him in
his childhood. Waking dreams we called them, and they lured Neil out of
bed in the night. It was always the same nameless enemy he was seeking,
and he stole about in various parts of the house in search of it,
probing fiercely for it in cupboards, or standing at the top of the
stairs pouring out invective and shouting challenges to it to come up. I
have known the small white figure defend the stair-head thus for an
hour, blazing rather than afraid, concentrated on some dreadful matter
in which, tragically, none could aid him. I stood or sat by him, like a
man in an adjoining world, waiting till he returned to me, for I had
been advised, warned, that I must not wake him abruptly. Gradually I
soothed him back to bed, and though my presence there in the morning
told him, in the light language we then adopted, that he had been “at it
again” he could remember nothing of who the enemy was. It had something
to do with the number 7; that was all we ever knew. Once I slipped from
the room, thinking it best that he should wake to normal surroundings,
but that was a mistake. He was violently agitated by my absence. In some
vague way he seemed on the stairs to have known that I was with him and
to have got comfort from it; he said he had gone back to bed only
because he knew I should be there when he woke up. I found that he
liked, “after he had been an ass,” to wake up seeing me “sitting there
doing something frightfully ordinary, like reading the newspaper,” and
you may be sure that thereafter that was what I was doing.
After he had been a year or two at his preparatory, Neil did a nice
thing for me; one of a thousand. I had shaken my head over his standing
so low in Maths, though he was already a promising classic, and had said
that it was “great fun to be good at what one was bad at.” A term or two
later when he came home he thrust the Maths prize into my hand. “But it
wasn’t fun,” he growled. (It was Neil’s growl before it was
Tintinnabulum’s.) He came back to blurt out, “I did it because in those
bad times you were always sitting there with the newspaper when I woke.”
By becoming Tintinnabulum he is not done with his unknown foe, though I
think they have met but once. On this occasion his dame had remained
with him all night, as he had been slightly unwell, and she was amused,
but nothing more, to see him, without observing her, rise and search the
room in a fury of words for something that was not there. The only word
she caught was “seven.” He asked them not to tell me of this incident,
as he knew it would trouble me. I was told, and, indeed, almost expected
the news, for I had sprung out of bed that night thinking I heard Neil
once again defending the stair. By the time I reached Tintinnabulum it
had ceased to worry him. “But when I woke I missed the newspaper,” he
said with his adorable smile, and again putting his hand on my shoulder.
How I wished “the newspaper” could have been there. There are times when
a boy can be as lonely as God.
[Illustration: “I DID IT BECAUSE YOU WERE ALWAYS SITTING THERE WITH THE
NEWSPAPER WHEN I WOKE”]
What is the danger? What is it that he knows in the times during which
he is shut away and that he cannot remember to tell to himself or to me
when he wakes? I am often disturbed when thinking of him (which is the
real business of my life), regretting that, in spite of advice and
warnings, I did not long ago risk waking him abruptly, when, before it
could hide, he might have clapped seeing eyes upon it, and thus been
able to warn me. Then, knowing the danger, I would for ever after be on
the watch myself, so that when the moment came, I could envelop him as
with wings. These are, of course, only foolish fears of the dark, and
with morning they all fly away. Tintinnabulum makes very merry over
them. I have a new thought that, when he is inside me, he may leave them
there deliberately to play upon my weakness for him and so increase his
sock allowance. Is the baffling creature capable of this enormity? With
bowed head I must admit he is. I make a note, to be more severe with him
this half.
[Illustration]