🥀 _“Do you bite your thumb at us, Sir?” “I do bite my thumb, Sir.” “Do
you bite your thumb at us, Sir?” “No, Sir, I do not bite my thumb at
you, Sir; but I bite my thumb, Sir.”_
🥀 Across the “backy-garden,” at the rear of the house where the Children
dwelt—the child of tumult, his luminous little dark sister, and the
somewhat older ones—and over the young poplars from George Meredith’s
garden, ran a small street with shops and lodgings. It was very full of
children, and sometimes they leant so far out of the upper windows that
the question arose in the Children’s home, Would a neighbourly present
of nursery window-bars be received with little or with much contempt, or
perhaps declined, and if so with offended feelings or without? The
Children themselves did not encourage the project. The children at the
back were very proud, they said. And how did they show the passion? It
was asked. “Well, mother, they come to the window, and black their boots
at us.”
🥀 Of all the many surprises of childish replies, this was not the least.
It was given in great gravity and good faith. To these young observers
the action of their opposite neighbours admitted no other
interpretation, albeit there had been no exchange of covert verbal
defiances, such as, “Do you black your boots at us?” “We do black our
boots.” “Do you black your boots at us?” “We do not black our boots at
you; but we black our boots.” The demonstration was not of battle, as “I
will frown as I pass by, and let them take it as they list”—but of sole,
sufficient pride, silent, detached, lifted between heaven and earth, at
the second-floor windows of its appropriate street. It was not for a
mere grown-up person to introduce doubts, or to suggest how far from the
usual manifestations of pride, how different from its customary pomps,
is the symbolism of blacking and of boots. No doubt the children were
right, and declined our symbolism on their own good authority.
🥀 Their conclusion as to the boots had probably its own obscure
justification, and was not due to unworthy suspiciousness, for the
Children were disposed to friendliness, and would have inclined rather
to a lenient than to a severe interpretation of the act of demonstrative
blacking, had there been room for doubt. At a taller and quite remote
row of windows appeared the heads of other children, of whom Pride
seemed to have made no victims. At least there appeared among them no
signs of blacking. With these the more usually intelligible language of
toys was the means of communication. At long range—so long that a
walking duck could hardly be distinguished from a mechanical alligator,
and dolls looked as much alike as the heroines of a year’s novels—toy
was held up for sympathetic and companionable rivalry with toy; and
across intervening roofs, by means that yet remain a mystery, the pet
names of both batches of children had been announced and exchanged.
Never was so enterprising and prosperous a friendship on facilities so
slender. The delays, hesitations, and reserves of acquaintances begun in
the ordinary ways, in houses, in Kensington Gardens, or otherwise on
point-blank terms, never troubled these mutual advances. Or so it
seemed. But with some surprise the mother of the Children, walking with
them, perceived that they cast looks askance, neither wholly strange nor
in any wise intimate, at another walking group, equally lowering, gloomy
with an equal kind of unavowed intelligence, and with an equally
embarrassed mother. The children of Pride, walking in the street perhaps
with those very boots new-blacked, could hardly have been watched with
more sombre or more cloudy eyes. Afraid lest her young ones should have
committed the _grossièreté_ of making enemies, the mother of the
Children asked them, in their unwonted silence, who it was that they
seemed to be cutting. With surprise she then heard that these strangers,
seen at full length, were they whose distant eager heads were invested
with so much childish friendship in the windows under the skies. Within
an hour or so after that unfriendly encounter, with its shadowy
strangeness and vigilance of eyes, all was restored at the high
back-windows, and a London sunset showed the ambiguous toys—new ones,
just bought in the course of that walk estranged—the signalling hands,
and the jostling heads unequal of height, at their former intercourse,
candid, clear, familiar, and full of spirit and drama.
🥀 Distance seemed to set these gallant little creatures free from some
of the disadvantages of the world and from the uneasiness of crowds.
They were released in a world barely sprinkled with people within hail
of one another, glad of recognition, and made friends by intervening
space, and liberty partaken.
🥀 Perhaps it was the childish solitude that made the
window-communication so clear. Almost painful to the writer is still the
memory of introductions in childhood. Ah, to be placed in front of three
little natives in white embroidery, and bidden to talk with them in
Genoese, or in any human tongue, with parents artificially listening in
compliment to the stranger’s children, but solicitous for their own!
There are moments that are literally difficult to live through, and this
was of them. Solitude and a garden hedge between, or some such other
slight defence and distance, and Genoese no doubt would have flowed.
🥀 Nor can one easily forget the unexpressed misgivings at those
invitations to play with the stranger’s children in the gardens of the
Tuileries. It was already depressing enough to stand on a counter to be
fitted, and to hear the _modiste_ tell one’s mother that one ought to
have the _petit jupon bouffant_ which one had not, and that no coat
could have justice without it. But to be accosted, under this visible
disability, by the children of Paris, little girls obviously furnished
with the _petit jupon bouffant_—this was the cause of a dumb shyness.
“_Veux-tu venir jouer avec moi?_” So ran the invariable invitation of
the charming Parisians, little citizens so well civilized as to need no
defences, no barriers, no return to the space and the distances of birds
in search of primitive confidence, or to the rarity of angels in quest
of natural courage. The English child kept in the after years of life
the sense of national defeat that attended the consent to that unequal
game. If Waterloo was won upon the playing-fields of Eton, it has been
many times avenged on the playing-grounds of the garden of the
Tuileries.
🥀 Otherwise, and the conditions being more free and more nearly equal,
to play with strangers, to play internationally, was a great delight.
The game, being all dramatic, did away with any need for close knowledge
of the actor. Since yonder boy was a spirited horse of uncertain temper,
his temper as a boy was of small importance. There was no need even for
names when all the players alike were terra-cotta pipkins for sale, to
be known as sound or cracked by their voices under a blow. Quarrels
never arose in these encounters of an hour. Our playfellows were toys of
the liveliest animation, but without so much perceptible character as
might chance to ruffle our own. The concert of Europe was undisturbed.
🥀 One only remembrance is fraught with some self-reproach. It is that of
two little English girls, who chose to frighten all the children of an
Italian village and sweep the hill of them. It was done without malice,
but with a horrid sense of dominance; and without violence except that
of mere running. The population—sad to remember—was so gentle that its
full number of children, of several ages, were thus to be hunted down
the slopes of the chestnut-woods, by the onset of a couple of capricious
foreign girls. But so it was. The day was a _festa_, and the children,
carrying their shoes, strolled on the hill-side, between the cypresses
and the belfries. All things go in unequal groups on such an
afternoon—little companies of church-bell tunes, young men playing at
bowls, no one alone. The village children loitered principally about the
steep avenues to the church. But when the two slender invaders began to
give chase, the first group scattered, and then the next, perhaps not
knowing how little formidable were the hunters; then a third broke, a
fourth wheeled. Young Italians do not run without clamour, and the
outcry of the dismay of all those children seemed the wilder that the
two pursuers kept their breath for the hunting. One swept the wood,
another charged down the narrow road. They joined, they closed upon the
quarry, or in open order cut off the escape of scattered fugitives. Of
the little villagers there was not found one to resist, or so much as to
question the attack. They cried out to each other, pointing the probable
way to safety as they ran. That they must run was the one thing they
were sure of, and they sped over rough and smooth, heads down, so that
the heights were presently clear of them, and their last clamours
dropped as they reached the shelter of the street, like the cries of
birds that wheel and settle after an alarm. The two representatives of
the predominant races, who cannot have measured nine feet between them,
sat down in the conquered district, flushed with success. Alas!