POLLYOOLY MEETS THE UNPLEASANT PRINCE
Tea over, the Honourable John Ruffin proposed that he should take them to
the sands; and Pollyooly agreed eagerly. But as they came out of the
house, two little girls, bare-legged and wearing sandals, passed them.
He looked from them to Pollyooly's stout shoes and black stockings,
stopped short and said firmly:
"We must change all this."
He turned to the right down the street and led them into the chief shop
of the village. Apparently he was well known there, for the proprietor
greeted him with respectful warmth. He bought sandals, bathing-dresses,
blue linen frocks, a sunbonnet for Pollyooly, a linen hat for the Lump,
spades and buckets.
Loaded with these purchases he came out into the street, and took his way
back to Mrs. Wilson's, saying:
"You must hurry up and change into these things. First impressions are
so important at the seaside; people have so much leisure to be pernickety
in; and you _must_ look all right!"
Pollyooly was not long making the change; and when she came out of the
house in the blue linen frock and sunbonnet, he smiled at her with warm
approval and said:
"There's no doubt about it, you have got the knack of wearing clothes,
Pollyooly."
To Pollyooly his utterance was entirely cryptic; but she gathered that it
was complimentary and returned his smile.
He took them down to the sands; and they were soon at the height of
happiness, building a castle, paddling, and picking up shells. He left
them to it; and went for a stroll down the sea wall. Since it was a hot
evening, at seven he fetched them to bathe; and since he let them bathe
in their own timid way, the timid way of children bathing for the first
time, they enjoyed it exceedingly. The Lump found eight inches of water
deep enough for him, Pollyooly eighteen.
The next morning they bathed again at seven.
The house was near enough to the sea to allow them to go straight from
their bedrooms to it in their bathing dresses. After their bath the
Honourable John Ruffin returned firmly to bed for an hour and so gave
Pollyooly time to make a leisurely and complete breakfast before grilling
his bacon. He had explained to Mrs. Wilson that it was necessary to his
happiness that it should be grilled by Pollyooly, and she had raised no
objection. She observed the process with interest, but not with approval.
"All that time spent over cooking a few slices of bacon!" she said with
the womanly air of one sniffing, when it was transferred from the
frying-pan to the dish.
Pollyooly's brow puckered in a thoughtful frown; and she said gravely:
"But that's the only way to get it right."
Mrs. Wilson sniffed outright.
After his breakfast the Honourable John Ruffin departed to Littlestone to
golf; and Pollyooly and the Lump went down to the sands. There are no
niggers, pierrots, or bands at Pyechurch, only a few donkeys and a
cocoanut-shy. But at low tide there are a thousand acres of firm sand, a
children's paradise. Pollyooly enjoyed it beyond words: not only the
sands and the sea but also the freedom from care. Food, excellent food
and plenty of it, awaited them, paid for, at Mrs. Wilson's.
The Lump was the cause of Pollyooly's first introduction to
fellow-sojourners in this delectable land. A little girl of four, with
very large brown eyes, who was playing near them, was quite suddenly
attracted by him, and without further ado took possession of him.
Pollyooly was pleased that he should have a playmate of his own age; the
little girl's nurse, observing that they were dressed as other children
and that Pollyooly spoke "prettily," and was inclined to be uncommonly
haughty with her, assented to the acquaintance. The little brown-eyed
girl's blue-eyed sister, Kathleen, who was seven, mothered her little
sister, whose name was Mary. Also now and again she mothered the Lump;
but Pollyooly was not jealous.
At first the Lump was somewhat taken aback by this sudden acquisition of
a female friend; but his remarkable placidity stood him in good stead,
and he endured it with an even mind. Presently indeed he seemed to be
taking pleasure in it, for he began to bully her in the manliest fashion.
Then the mother of the little girls joined them and was at once charmed
by the Lump. Pollyooly found no need to display the airs of a red
Deeping, with which she had been treating the nurse, to her; and
presently they were chatting in the friendliest way. Mrs. Gibson, as the
nurse called her, seemed as taken with Pollyooly's serious outlook on
life as with the charm of the Lump; and presently she asked her if her
mother would let them come to tea with Kathleen and Mary and to games on
the sands after it that afternoon.
Pollyooly explained that they were staying with their cousin John, who
had gone to golf at Littlestone and would not be back till late;
therefore she accepted the invitation herself. Mrs. Gibson was impressed
by the discovery that cousin John was the Honourable John Ruffin; but she
expressed her surprise that he should have gone away for the day and left
them to themselves without a nurse to look after them. Pollyooly, with
an air of considerable dignity, assured her that she would never dream of
trusting the Lump to a nurse; and Mrs. Gibson admitted that she was right.
Pollyooly and the Lump enjoyed the party exceedingly. There were a dozen
children, fellow-guests; and at tea the manners of the Lump, under
Pollyooly's anxious eye, were beyond reproach. Her hands indeed troubled
her, and she kept them out of sight as much as she could. After all they
were not very large hands to withdraw from view. After tea the younger
children played in the charge of nurses; the elder children, to the
extreme delight of Pollyooly, who loved to run fleetly, disported
themselves in more swift and violent games. She had much to tell the
Honourable John Ruffin on his return from Littlestone. He congratulated
her warmly on their début.
The next day she found herself well launched in the society of the sands,
with many playmates, and entered upon the fullest and most delightful
life. But there is always a fly in the finer ointments; and the
Pyechurch fly was Prince Adalbert of Lippe-Schweidnitz.
That morning Pollyooly had her first sight of him. She and the Lump were
playing with Kathleen and Mary, when Kathleen cried in a tone of dismay,
"Here's the prince!" picked up Mary, who would have gone quicker on her
own feet, and staggered off toward their nurse with her.
Pollyooly picked up the Lump and came with her, though she could see no
reason for Kathleen's dismay, for the prince was but a fat little boy of
ten, small-eyed, thick-lipped, and snub-nosed. His white sailor suit
seemed to give his ugliness its full values.
Under the wing of their nurse Kathleen and Mary surveyed him with the
eyes of terror; and Kathleen poured into Pollyooly's attentive ear the
story of his dreadful doings: how he had pushed a little boy over the
edge of the sea-wall, kicked several others; how he had hit little girls
with their own spades and pulled the hair of others; how he never passed
a carefully built castle without kicking a breach in it, and always threw
any spades or buckets he could lay hands on far into the sea.
Pollyooly observed this terror with the unimpressed eye of a connoisseur.
When she had lived with her Aunt Hannah in the little slum at the back of
the King's Bench Walk, she had fought many battles with the small boys of
Alsatia; and she was not at all impressed by the physique of the prince.
She was of the opinion that Henry Wiggins would make very short work of
him; and she could hold Henry Wiggins (by the hair) with her left hand
and smack him with her right till she was nearly as tired of smacking as
he was of being smacked. She knew that she could because she had done it.
The prince came to the castle they themselves had been building and
kicked down one wall of it.
"If only you weren't a prince, I'd teach you, my fine young gentleman,"
said the nurse softly.
"You mind the Lump! I'll go and smack him hard!" cried Pollyooly with
eager confidence.
"No! No! He's a _prince_! You mustn't touch a _prince_, miss!" cried
the nurse in a tone of the last horror, gripping Pollyooly's wrist
tightly. "Besides, he'd hurt you. He's a very nasty, spiteful little
boy."
"Oh, I don't mind him! I'm not afraid of a little boy like that!" cried
Pollyooly; and she tugged at the restraining grip, hard but in vain,
eying the pest with the bright light of battle in her eyes.
"I wouldn't let my children play with him like some people do just
because he's a prince--not was it ever so. I should be frightened all
the time," said the nurse.
"If he ever touches the Lump, I'll teach him!" Said Pollyooly with a
cold, impressive ferocity.
"If ever he touches one of us, papa will spank him hard. Papa doesn't
care much for princes," said Kathleen.
"I should think he didn't--if they're like that," said Pollyooly with
conviction.
They watched the devastating royal progress with indignant eyes. The
back view of the prince was nearly as unpleasant as the front, for he
slouched along with his fat little figure hunched forward in a very ugly
fashion. The children fled before him as he came, and from the shelter
of their nurses, or their mothers, angrily watched him destroy the
castles they had built. But most of their mothers regarded him with a
gloating admiration; they felt that the beach was more glorious for his
royal presence.
About forty yards behind him came a companion figure, his equerry the
Baron von Habelschwert, a stout, pig-eyed, snub-nosed man of forty-five
who walked with the stiffness of a ramrod of the best Bessemer steel.
His legs were, unfortunately, rather short, and since the lower part of
his body was of a fine protuberant rotundity which the breadth of his
shoulders and the thickness of his chest failed dismally to equal, he
displayed an uncommonly exact resemblance of a perambulating pear. He
had a rich expanse of fat cheek and a small, but dimpled, chin. He was
saved by his fierce moustache, which, upturned in the imperial fashion,
gave him the ferocious air required by his military profession and his
sentiments of a superman of the latest Prussian brand.
Happiness sat enthroned upon his brow. A passion for blacking is a
distinguishing characteristic of his military caste; and his natural love
of licking the boots of members of the many royal families of the
Fatherland was finding its full expression. In Prince Adalbert he had a
perpetual boot to lick. Sometimes indeed the boot licked him: that very
morning the prince had kicked his shins in a masterly fashion, on being
invited to wash his face for the day. The baron bore it very well.
His clothes fitted him with an extreme, but somewhat unfortunate,
military tightness. They were of an unpleasant greenish tint which did
not match the green Homberg hat he wore. In his right hand he carried a
short cane and yellow gloves. The morning was hot; his boots were patent
leather. Diffusing an agreeable odour of pomatum on the breeze, he
walked with the air of one taking his ease in a conquered country, for he
was one of the gallant German war-party, and he looked forward with
touching certainty to the day when the mailed fist of his imperial master
should sweep England with fire and sword from sea to sea. He often
talked in a gloating fashion of that great day to his young charge.
Possibly that was one of the reasons which induced Prince Adalbert of
Lippe-Schweidnitz to make so free with the castles and persons of the
children of the so-soon-to-be-subjugated English.
The ogres of the sands having disappeared down the beach, the children
repaired the damage to their castles and once more played in peace. That
afternoon there was another royal progress of the same devastating kind
but more complete, since the prince surprised a little girl and pulled
her hair. The fond English mothers still observed him with a gloating
air, happy to be on the same stretch of sand with him. They said
indulgently to one another: "Boys will be boys," or, with conviction:
"Such a manly little fellow."
This time the Baron von Habelschwert walked only fifteen yards behind the
prince. He smiled benignly on the destruction of the castles; plainly he
felt that his young charge was treating the so-soon-to-be-subjugated
English in the right spirit.
There was only one check to the royal progress. The sand-castle on which
Pollyooly and Kathleen had worked so hard stood directly in the line of
it. Kathleen and Mary fled to their nurse at the approach of the prince,
calling wildly to Pollyooly to follow. Pollyooly leaving the Lump in the
castle, stepped out of it, and spade in hand calmly awaited the coming of
the prince.
When he was three yards from her she said quietly but very distinctly:
"You keep away."
[Illustration: "You keep away"]
The prince advanced two steps and stopped. There was that in Pollyooly's
deep blue eyes which gave him pause. He advanced another step, and
stopped again. Then he called her "pig-dog," in his native tongue,
turned aside, and pursued his way. As he went he kept looking back at
her, scowling malevolently.
Pollyooly gazed after him with unchanging face. She would have liked to
put her tongue a long way out at him; but she felt that red Deepings did
not do so.
The nurse came down to the castle with Kathleen and Mary, and said in a
tone of respectful awe:
"However you dare, miss! And him a prince too!"
"I don't care a pin for him," said Pollyooly calmly.
She stepped back to the castle and continued the work of construction.