Thesea, like all very large things, can only be intimately understood by children. If we can conceive a sensible grown-up person looking at the sea for the first time, we feel that he should either yawn or wish to drown himself. But a child would take a sample of it in a bucket, and consider that in all its aspects; and then it would know that the sea is a great many bucketfuls of water, and further that by an odd freak of destiny this water is not fit to drink. Storms and ships and sand-castles and lighthouses and all the other side-shows would follow later; but in the meantime the child would have seen the sea in a bucket, as it had previously seen the moon in a looking-glass, so would know all about it. The moon is a variable and interesting kind of lamp; the sea is buckets and buckets and buckets fullof water. I think the stars are holes in a sort of black curtain or ceiling, and the sun is a piece of brightness, except at sunset or in a mist, when it is a whole Dutch cheese. The world is streets and fields and the seaside and our house.
I doubt whether a child has any sense of what I may call the appeal of breadth. If it is confronted with a fine view, it will concentrate its interest on a windmill or a doll’s house, and the seaside is no more than a place where one wears no shoes or stockings, and the manufacture of mud pies becomes suddenly licit. The child does not share the torments of the adult Londoner, who feels that there is no room in the world to stretch his arms and legs, and therefore wins a pathetic sense of freedom in seeing the long yellow sands and the green wastes of the sea. Nor is it at all excited by the consideration that there is a lot more sea beyond the horizon; the extent of its interest in the water is the limit to which it may paddle.
Yet in some dim, strange way the child realises æsthetic values more here than elsewhere. I am quite sure it can see no realbeauty in its normal surroundings. Sunsets and small houses lit for evening, the shining streets after rain, and even flowers and pictures and dolls, are never beautiful to a child in the sense that a story or an idea may be beautiful. But tacitly, for a child has no language to express such things, something of the blueness of the sea seems to seek expression in its eyes, something of the sparkle of the sand seems to be tangled in its hair, something of the sunshine burns in its rounded calves that glow like brown eggs. A child is always a thing of wonder. But on the edge of the sea this wonder deepens until the artificial observer is abashed. A seaside child is no creature to be petted and laughed over; it were as easy to pet the tireless waters, and to laugh over the grave of a little cat; children whom one has known very well indeed in town will find new playing fields by the sea into which it is impossible to follow them. Dorothy weighs five stone four pounds at Maida Vale; at Littlehampton the sea wind blows her along like a feather; she is become a wispy, spiritual thing, afaint, fair creature a-dance on light feet that would make the fairy-girl of a poet’s dream seem clumsy by comparison. She is nearer to us when she paddles. The warm sand creeping up through her toes, the silver thread of coolness about her legs, these things are within our comprehension though they fall no more within our experience. But when she flings herself along the beach with the wild hair and loose limbs and the song of an innocent Bacchante, when she bids the gold sands heave up and support her body, tired with play, when she stoops to gather diamonds and pearls from the shore made wet and smooth by the retreating waves, she is as far from us and our human qualities as a new-awakened butterfly. There have been sea-washed moments when I should not have been astonished if she had flung out a pair of mother-of-pearl wings and stood in the blue sky, like a child saint in a stained-glass window. There have been other moments when she has approached me with a number of impossible questions in wanton parody of her simple London self. Between these two extremes her moods varyfrom second to second, and she plays upon them as Pan upon his pipes, and to much the same tune. She loves the long tresses of seaweed and the pink shells like the nails of her own little hands; and her coloured pail, when she is not the architect of sea-girt palaces, is a treasury of salty wonders. To climb the rough rocks and call them mountains, to drive back the waves with a chiding foot, and to alter the face of Nature with a wooden spade, these were not tasks for the domesticated creature who shares the hearth-rug with the cat at home. But the spirit of the sea has changed Dorothy; she is now a little more and a little less than child; and she recognises no comrades but those other nymphs of the sea, who hold the beach with the sparkle of wet feet and careless petticoats, who run hither and thither in search of the big adventure, while their parents and guardians sleep in the sun. It is hard that age should deprive us of so many privileges, and least of all can we spare the glamour of the sands of the sea. Yet to the adult mind Brighton beach, sprinkled with newspapers and washed bya sea whose surface is black with smuts, brings little but disgust. We insist on having our fairy-lands clean and end, too often, by finding no fairy-land at all. The sea, after all, is no more than water that may be caught in a bucket; the sand may glitter on a child’s spade, and we who believe that the essential knowledge of the thing is ours are no wiser than the children. For me the sea is a restless and immeasurable waste of greens and blues and greys, and I know that its strength lies in its monotony. It is not the noisy turbulence of storms that moves me to fear, but the dull precision of the tides and the tireless succession of waves. And my impression is no truer than the children’s and lends itself less readily to a sympathetic manner of living. I feel that if I could once more hold the ocean in my bucket, if the whole earth might be uprooted by my spade, I should be nearer to a sense of the value of life than I am now. I see the children go trooping by with their calm eyes, not, as is sometimes said, curious, but rather tolerant of life, and I know that for them the universe is merely an aggregate of details,some agreeable and some stupid, while I must needs depress myself by regarding it as a whole. And this is the proved distinction between juvenile and adult philosophies, if we may be permitted to regard a child’s very definite point of view as the effect of a philosophy. Life is a collection of little bits of experience; the seaside bits are pleasant, and there is nothing more to be said.
Whenthe winter fires were burning their merriest in the grates, or when the summer sun was melting to crimson shadows down in the western fields, we, pressing our noses on the window-panes in placable discussion of the day’s cricket, or dreaming our quiet dreams on the playroom floor, would hear a heart-breaking pronouncement fall tonelessly from the lips of the Olympians: “Come, children, it is time you were in bed!” It needed no more than that to bring our hearts to zero with a run, and set our lips quivering in eloquent but supremely useless protest. Against this decree there was, we knew, no appeal; and we pleaded our hopeless cause rather from habit than from any expectation of success. And even while we uttered passionate expressions of our individual wakefulness, andvowed our impatience for the coming of that golden age when we should be allowed to sit up all night, we were collecting the honoured toys that shared our beds, in mournful recognition of the inevitable.
It was not that we had any great objection to bed in itself, but that fate always decreed that bed-time should fall in the brightest hour of the day. No matter what internecine conflicts, whether with the Olympians or each other, had rendered the day miserable, when bed-time drew near the air was sweet with the spirit of universal brotherhood, as though in face of our common danger we wished to propitiate the gods by means of our unwonted merit. Feuds were patched up, confiscated property was restored to its rightful owner, and brother hailed brother with a smiling countenance and that genial kind of rudeness that passed with us for politeness. This was the time of day, too, when the more interesting kind of Olympian would make his appearance, uncles—at least, we called them uncles—who could perform conjuring tricks and tell exciting stories, and aunts who kissed us, but had a compensatingvirtue in that they had been known to produce unexpected sweets. The house that might have been a gloomy prison of dullness during the long day became, by a sudden magic, entertaining and happily alive. The kitchen was fragrant with the interesting odours that come from the cooking of strange adult viands; the passages were full of strong men who could lift small boys to the ceiling without an effort, and who would sometimes fling sixpences about with prodigal lavishness; the whole place was gay with parcels to be opened, and lively, if incomprehensible, conversation. And ever while we were thrilling to find that our normal environment could prove so amusing, the Olympians would realise our existence in their remote eyries of thought, and would send us, stricken with barren germs of revolt, to our uneventful beds.
On me, as the youngest of the brothers, the nightly shock should have fallen lightly; for I was but newly emancipated from the shameful ordeal of going to bed for an hour in the afternoon, and I could very well remember, though I pretended I hadforgotten, the sensations of that drowsy hour, when the birds sang so loudly outside the window and the sun thrust fingers of dusty gold through the crannies of the blind. I should therefore probably have been reconciled to the common lot, which spelt advancement to me, had I not newly discovered the joy of dreaming those dreams that men have written in books for the delight of the young. The Olympians were funny about books. They gave them to us, or at the least smiled graciously when other people gave them to us, but the moment rarely arrived when they could endure to see us reading, or spoiling our eyes as their dreadful phrase ran. And especially at nightfall, when the shadows crept in from the corners of the room and made the pages of the dullest book exciting, it was inviting an early bed-time to be detected in the act of reading. As sure as the frog was about to turn into a prince or the black enchantress had appeared with her embarrassing christening present, the book would be taken from my hands and I would be threatened with the compulsory wearing of old-maidish spectacles—an endthat would make me an object of derision in the eyes of man. And even if I shut the book of my own accord, and sat nodding before the fire, working out the story in my own fashion with some one I knew very well to play the part of hero, some ruthless adult would accuse me of being “half asleep already,” and the veil of illusion would be torn beyond repair.
In winter-time the bedroom would seem cold after the comfortable kingdom of the hearth-rug, and the smell of scented soap was a poor substitute for the friendly fragrance of burning logs. So we would undress as quickly as possible, and lie cuddled up in the chilly bed-clothes, holding our own cold feet in our hands as if they belonged to somebody else. But if it happened that one of us had a bad cold, and there was a fire in the bedroom, we would keep high festival, sitting in solemn palaver round the camp-fire, and toasting our pink toes like Arctic explorers, while the invalid lay in bed crowing over his black-currant tea or hot lemonade. It was pleasant, too, when natural weariness had driven us toour beds, to lie there and watch the firelight laughing on the walls; and the invalid, for the time being, was rather a popular person.
In summer-time getting into bed was a far more complex process, for the youth of the night held us wakeful; and if the weather were warm, bed was an undesirable place as soon as we had exhausted such coolness as lingered in the sheets. Then we would devote ourselves to pillow-fighting, which was, I think, a more humorous sport for elder brothers than for younger, or we would express our firm intention of sleeping all night on the floor under tents made of the bedclothes. The best of this resolution was that it made bed seem so comfortable, when we climbed back after the first fine romance of camping-out had worn off. Thunderstorms we loved with a love not untouched by awe, and we would huddle together at the window, measuring the lightning, appraising the thunder, and listening to the cool thresh of the rain on the garden below.
There were rare nights—nights of great winds—when we would suddenly realise thatfear had entered into the room, and that, after all, we were children in a world of men. Our efforts to talk resulted in tremulous whispers that bred fear rather than allayed it, and though we would not even then admit it, we knew that we were possessed with a great loneliness. Sooner or later some cunning spirit would suggest a pilgrimage to the realms of the Olympians, and treading the warm stair-carpet with our bare feet, we would journey till we heard the comforting sound of their laughter and the even murmur of their conversation. Sometimes we would stay there till we grew sleepy, and the fear passed away, so that we could tiptoe back to bed, wondering a little at ourselves; sometimes the Olympians would discover us, and comfort our timid hearts with rough words and sweet biscuits. In the morning we would pretend that the whole business had been only an adventure, and we were not above bragging of our courage in daring the ire of the grown-up people. But we knew better.
Itis very true, as Mr. Chesterton must have remarked somewhere, that the cult of simplicity is one of the most complex inventions of civilisation. To eat nuts in a meadow when you can eat a beefsteak in a restaurant is neither simple nor primitive; it is merely perverse, in the same way that the art of Gauguin is perverse. A shepherd-boy piping to his flock in Arcady and a poet playing the penny whistle in a Soho garret may make the same kind of noise; but whereas the shepherd-boy knows no better, the poet has to pretend that he knows no better. So I reject scornfully the support of those amateurs who profess to like street-organs because they are the direct descendants of the itinerant ballad-singers of the romantic past; or because they represent the simple musical tastes of the majorityto-day. I refuse to believe that in appreciating the sound of the complex modern instruments dragged across London by Cockneys disguised as Italians the soul of the primitive man who lurks in some dim oubliette of everybody’s consciousness is in any way comforted. I should imagine that that poor prisoner, if civilisation’s cruelty has not deprived him of the faculty of hearing, is best pleased by such barbaric music as the howling of the wind or the sound of railway-engines suffering in the night; and indeed every one must have noticed that sometimes certain sounds unmusical in themselves can arouse the same emotions as the greatest music.
But it is not on this score that street-organs escape our condemnation; their music has certain defects that even distance cannot diminish, and they invariably give us the impression of a man speaking through his nose in a high-pitched voice, without ever pausing to take breath. If, in spite of this, we have a kindness for them, it is because of their association with the gladdest moments of childhood. To the adult earthey bring only desolation and distraction, but to the children the organ-man, with his curly black hair and his glittering earrings, seems to be trailing clouds of glory. For them the barrel-organ combines the merits of Wagner, Beethoven, Strauss, and Debussy, and Orpheus would have to imitate its eloquent strains on his lute if he wished to captivate the hearts of London children.
When I was a child the piano-organ and that terrible variant that reproduces the characteristic stutter of the mandoline with deadly fidelity were hardly dreamed of, but the ordinary barrel-organ and the prehistoric hurdy-gurdy, whose quavering notes suggested senile decay, satisfied our natural craving for melody. It is true that they did not make so much noise as the modern instruments, but in revenge they were almost invariably accompanied by a monkey in a little red coat or a performing bear. I always had a secret desire to turn the handle of the organ myself; and when—too late in life to enjoy the full savour of the feat—I persuaded a wandering musician to let me make the experiment, I was surprised to findthat it is not so easy as it looks to turn the handle without jerking it, and that the arm of the amateur is weary long before the repertoire of the organ is exhausted. It is told of Mascagni that he once taught an organ-man how to play his notorious Intermezzo to the fullest effect; but I fancy that in professional circles the story would be discredited, for the arm of the practised musician acquires by force of habit a uniform rate of revolution, and in endeavouring to modify that rate he would lose all control over his instrument.
Personally, I do not like hearing excerpts from Italian opera on the street-organs, because that is not the kind of music that children can dance to, and it is, after all, in supplying an orchestra for the ballroom of the street that they best justify their existence. The spectacle of little ragged children dancing to the music of the organ is the prettiest and merriest and saddest thing in the world. In France and Belgium they waltz; in England they have invented a curious compound of the reel, the gavotte, and the cakewalk. The best dancers inLondon are always little Jewesses, and it is worth anybody’s while to go to Whitechapel at midday to see Miriam dancing on the cobbles of Stoney Lane. There is not, as I once thought, a thwarted enchanter shut up inside street-organs who cries out when the handle turns in the small of his back. But why is it that I feel instinctively that magicians have drooping moustaches and insinuating smiles, if it is not that my mind as a child founded its conception of magicians on itinerant musicians? And they weave powerful spells, strong enough to make these poor little atomies forget their birthright of want and foot it like princesses. Children approach their amusements with a gravity beside which the work of a man’s life seems deplorably flippant. A baby toddling round a bandstand is a far more impressive sight than a grown man circumnavigating the world, and children do not smile when they dance—all the laughter is in their feet.
When from time to time “brain-workers” write to the newspapers to suggest that street musicians should be suppressed I feelthat the hour has almost come to start a movement in favour of Votes for Children. It is disgraceful, ladies and gentlemen, that this important section of the community, on whom the whole future of the nation depends, should have no voice in the forming of the nation’s laws! This question of street-organs cannot be solved by banishing them to the slums without depriving many children of a legitimate pleasure. For,sub rosa, the children of Park Lane—if there are any children in Park Lane—and even the children of “brain-workers,” appreciate the music of street organs quite as much as their humble contemporaries. While father buries his head under the sofa-cushions and composes furious letters to theTimesin that stuffy hermitage, little noses are pressed against the window-pane, little hands applaud, and little feet beat time on the nursery floor upstairs. This is one of those situations where it is permissible to sympathise with all parties, and unless father can achieve an almost inhuman spirit of tolerance I see no satisfactory solution.
For children must have music; they musthave tunes to think to and laugh to and live to. Funeral marches to the grave are all very well for the elderly and disillusioned, but youth must tread a more lively measure. And this music should come like the sunshine in winter, surprisingly, at no fixed hour, as though it were a natural consequence of life. One of the gladdest things about the organ-man in our childhood was the unexpectedness of his coming. Life would be dragging a little in schoolroom circles, when suddenly we would hear the organ clearing its throat as it were; we would all run to the window to wave our hands to the smiling musician, and shout affectionate messages to his intelligent monkey, who caught our pennies in his little pointed cap. In those days we had all made up our minds that when we grew up we would have an organ and a monkey of our own. I think it is rather a pity that with age we forget these lofty resolutions of our childhood. I have formed a conception of the ideal street-organist that would only be fulfilled by some one who had realised the romance of that calling in their youth.
How often, when the children have been happiest and the dance has been at its gayest, I have seen the organ-man fold music’s wings and move on to another pitch in search of pennies! I should like to think that it is a revolt against this degraded commercialism that inspires the protests of the critics of street music. The itinerant musician who believed in art for art’s sake would never move on so long as he had an appreciative audience; and sometimes, though I am afraid this would be the last straw to the “brain-workers,” he would arrive at two o’clock in the morning, and the children, roused from their sleep, would hear Pan piping to his moonlit flocks, and would believe that they were still in the pleasant country of dreams.
Nowthat the Houndsditch affair has been laid aside by the man in the street and it is once more possible for a bearded Englishman to tread the pavements of London without reproach, I may perhaps venture to give some account of a secret society with which I have been intimately connected, without earning the reputation of a monger of sensations.
Some four or five years ago I met a picturesque journalist who told me that he had once been at pains to worm out the secrets of an anarchist society in London, and had incorporated his discoveries in a volume so marvellous that no editor or publisher would believe it. I only remember one incident of all his wonderful adventures. He was led by an anarchist comrade into a small shop in the Strand, thence into acellar, and thence along a series of passages and caverns that ultimately brought him out in Seven Dials! Even Mr. Chesterton’s detective-anarchists in the “Man who was Thursday” could not beat this. For my part I shall not try, but shall content myself with a straightforward narration of facts.
I should think it was about last July that I first noticed that the children of my neighbourhood, with whom I have some small acquaintance, were endeavouring to assume a sinister aspect, and were wearing a cryptic button with a marked air of secrecy. When I came out for my morning walk the front garden would be animated with partially concealed children like the park in Mr. Kipling’s “They,” and though I have long realised that suburban front gardens do not lend themselves to the higher horticulture, I felt the natural embarrassment of the man who does not know whether he is expected to expel trespassers or welcome bashful visitors. In the circumstances I affected not to notice that the lilac was murmurous with ill-suppressed laughter and that the laurels were waving tumultuously; but it washardly reassuring to discover on my return that a large red cross and the letters T. S. had been chalked on my gate by an unknown hand. For a moment I wondered whether the children had been reading “Sentimental Tommy,” for these were the initials and the methods of Mr. Barrie’s luckless hero, but the age and genial contempt for scholarship of the investing forces made this unlikely. On the fourth day, finding one of the band momentarily separated from her comrades, I ventured acoup d’etat. Pointing to the letters on her secret button, I remarked, “I see you belong to the Teapot Society.”
“I don’t” she said indignantly; “it’s the Terror Society I belong to.”
The secret was out, but I thought it wiser to conceal my triumph. Evidently, however, my discovery troubled the band, for next morning I received asoi-disantanonymous letter of caution signed in full by all the members. I felt that the moment had arrived for definite action, especially as the cat who honours my house with his presence, and whose summer morningbasking-place is in the front garden, had been much upset by this recurrent invasion of his privacy. I wrote a humble letter to the Society, apologising for my crimes and begging that I might be allowed to become a member, and placed it outside on the path. Five minutes later two very unembarrassed children appeared in my study, and introduced themselves as Captain and Secretary of the Terror Society.
The Captain was very frank with me.
“Of course, we didn’t really want to frighten you,” she said, “but we had to get you to become a member somehow or other.”
“But I’m afraid I’m not much good at conspiracies,” I said modestly.
“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” the Captain answered kindly. “You can be honourable Treasurer. You know we want a lot of things for our house.”
I began to see what part I had in the scheme of things. “What are the rules of the Society?” I asked in all innocence, and thereby flung the Secretary into confusion.
“You see, she wrote them out,” the Captainexplained, “and she doesn’t want you to read them because of the spelling. But they’re only make-up rules, so you needn’t bother about them. Don’t you want to see the house?”
“Captain,” I said firmly, “it is my one wish. Lead on!”
“You ought really to be blindfolded,” the Captain whispered to me as we went along, “but I used my handkerchief to wrap up some of cook’s toffee this morning, and it’s rather sticky.”
“Don’t apologise,” I murmured hastily; “I don’t mind not being blindfolded a bit. Besides, I’m practically a member, and you mustn’t blindfold members; it isn’t done.”
The Captain seemed relieved. “I knew you would make a good treasurer,” she said with cheerful inconsequence. “But, look! there’s the house.”
The headquarters or club-house of the Terror Society stood beside the allotment gardens at the top of the hill, and may, at some less honourable period of its history, have served as a place for storing tools. In the course of their trespassings thechildren had found it lying empty, and had obtained permission from the landlord to have it for their very own. I have implied that the feminine element was predominant in the Society, and, recalling the wigwams and log huts of my own childhood, the difference between the ideals of boys and girls was sharply brought home to me when I crossed the threshold. The walls were papered with sentimental pictures out of Christmas numbers and literally draped with curtains; there were vases filled with flowers in every corner, and in the middle of this boudoir three of the members were drinking tea. In a sense, perhaps, the girls were to be commended for finding the true romance in domesticity, but I could not help wondering what Captain Shark of the barqueRapacious, that faithful friend of my boyhood, would have thought of a Terror Society run on such principles. However, I saw that the eyes of the members were upon me, and I hastened to do my duty as an honourable member. “It’s wonderful,” I said. “How on earth did you manage to do it all yourselves?”
The children all fell to apportioning the credit—all, that is, save the Captain, who seemed to me a very businesslike fellow.
“You see, Mr. Treasurer,” she said, “we want some more of those camp-stools and a lock to keep out burglars, and some knives and forks, and a tin of biscuits and a pail and candles and a candlestick and a clothes-brush and a little bell to ring at dinner-time and a knocker for the door.”
Fortunately she paused to take breath.
“My dear Captain,” I interrupted quickly, “I have a sovereign in the savings-bank, and if you come with me to-morrow we’ll draw it out, and do the best we can with the money. But tell me, am I really a member?”
“Of course you are!”
“Then where’s my mysterious button?”
The Captain frowned. “Jessie will have to paint you one, but the ribbon costs a penny.”
“That makes twenty shillings and a penny,” said the Secretary. It was indeed a businesslike Society.
The next day the Captain and I did a lotof miscellaneous shopping, and two days later the button was left at my door by a small boy. Then for a fortnight I heard nothing of the Society or its members, and no sinister invasion of the morning occurred to disturb the far peace in the eyes of my cat. At last I met the Captain in the road, and though she endeavoured to elude me, I succeeded in getting her into a corner.
“Well, Captain,” I said, “how’s the Terror Society?”
The Captain looked gloomy. “Haven’t you heard?” she said. “The Terror Society is all over.”
“Finished already!” I cried in astonishment. “Why, what have you done with the house?”
“It has been given to another society,” she said without a blush.
“Another society?”
“Yes, the Horror Society. I am Captain.”
I considered this news for a moment. “Well, I suppose I’m a member of the new society?” I ventured.
The Captain shook her head sadly. “I’mso sorry,” she said, “but the H. S. has a rule that no grown-ups are admitted!”
That is why, though I myself was a member of the Terror Society, I yet feel myself at liberty to write about it. For as on inquiry I discovered that the ranks of the Horror Society differed in no wise from those of the Terror Society save for the exclusion of the honourable Treasurer, I cannot help feeling that I have been rather badly treated.
Icannotremember how old I was when I wrote the thrilling poem about the tiger who swallowed the horse, nor am I quite certain that it was my first literary effort, but I know that I was still at the tight knickerbocker stage, and that my previous poems, if there had been any, had remained secrets of my own. It was due to a cousin that my conspiracy against the world of common sense was finally discovered. Woman-like, she tickled my ears with flattery, and persuaded me to let her read the precious document; and then, as soon as she had it in her hand, she fled to the camp of the Olympians, leaving me alone in the little dark room to reflect on the guiles of the sex. With straining ears I waited for the distant chorus of mocking laughter that would announce my failure, while my bodytingled all over with shame. Yet beneath my fear I was conscious that I had not been wholly unwilling to be betrayed. It seemed to me that if I proved to be a great poet, my future traffic with the Olympians might be of a more agreeable character than it had been previously. On the other hand, I felt that life would be impossible if they greeted my poem with scorn. Conceived and perfected in solitude, it had become an intimate part of myself, and I turned dark thoughts to the purple berries that grew in the shrubbery, and provided us with wholly innocuous poison for our arrows. Even then, it would seem, I had an instinctive knowledge of the tragedy of failing as a poet.
And then, while I yet waited in suspense, I heard the sound of footsteps and knew that my cousin was returning. In a flash I realised how stupid I had been to remain in the room, when I might have hidden myself in some far corner of the attic and appeared no more until my shame had been forgotten. My legs trembled in sudden panic, and it seemed to me that my face was ticking like a clock. I received my firstcritic with my head buried in the cushions of the sofa.
Looking back, I perceive that the Olympians rose to the occasion, but at the time I could hardly believe my good-fortune. Long after my cousin had gone away I lay on the sofa turning over the pleasant message in my mind—and the magic half-crown in my hand. Praise I had desired, if not expected; but that the Olympians—whose function in life was to divert our tips into a savings-bank account that meant nothing to us, that these stern financiers should give me a whole half-crown in one sum, unhindered by any restrictions in the spending, was incredible. Yet I could feel its rough edge in the dark; and considering its source, I formed an erroneous idea of the influence of the arts on the minds of sane grown-up people, from which even now I am not wholly delivered.
After a while, with a mind strangely confused between pride and modesty, I stole into the room where the others were sitting. But with a quick sense of disappointment I saw that I need not have concernedmyself at all with the proper attitude for a young poet to adopt. The Olympians, engaged in one of their meaningless discussions, did not notice my entrance, and only my brothers were interested when I crept silently into their midst.
“What are you going to spend it on?” they whispered.
Oddly, for I was the youngest of four, this success of mine was responsible for a literary outburst in our normally uncultured schoolroom, and one of the fruits of that intellectual disturbance, in the shape of a manuscript magazine, lies before me. It contains an editorial address to the “friendly reader,” two short stories full of murders, a quantity of didactic verse, and the first instalment of a serial, which commences gravely: “My father was a bootmaker of considerable richness.” Of literary achievement or even promise it would be hard to find a trace in these yellowing pages, but there is an enthusiasm behind every line of them that the critic would seek in vain in modern journalism. Indeed, those were the days in which to write, when paper andpencil and half an hour never failed to produce a masterpiece, and the finished work invariably thrilled the artist with “out-landish pride.” I cannot recall that any further half-crowns rewarded our efforts, and possibly that is the reason why three of the four boys who wrote that magazine are now regenerate and write no more.
And even the fourth must own to having lost that fine, careless trick of throwing off masterpieces, and to regretting, in moments of depression, the generous Olympian impulse that enabled him to barter his birthright of common sense for a silver coin with a rough edge. And the Olympians—they, too, have regretted it, I suppose, for the goddess of letters is an exacting mistress, and we do not willingly see our children engaging in her irregular service. Yet I do not see what else they could have done at the time.
A little while ago I discovered a small girl, to whom I act as a kind of illegal uncle, in the throes of lyrical composition. With soft words and flattering phrases, borrowed, perhaps, from the cousin of the past, I won the paper from her grasp. It was like allthe poetry that children have ever written, and I was preparing to banter the young author when I saw that she was regarding me with curious intentness, and that her face turned red and white by turns. Even if my intentions had been honourable I could not have disregarded her signs of distress. “I think it’s very nice indeed,” I said; “I’ll give you half a crown for it.”
As her fingers closed on the coin I felt inclined to raise a shout of triumph. For now that I had paid the half-crown back I should be able gradually—for, of course, the habit of years is not broken in a minute—to stop writing. My only fear is that my conscience may have gone to sleep in my long years of aloofness from simplicity; for though I already detect a note of vagueness in the eyes of my niece, and her mother complains that she is becoming untidy, I hold my peace, and offer no explanation. For I feel sure that if I did I should recover my half-crown.
Inthe well-ordered garden of every well-ordered house—that is, every house that numbers children in its treasury—there lies, screened perhaps by some inconvenient shrubbery but none the less patent to the stars and the winds and the polite visitor, a tormented patch of earth where sway in dubious security of tenure a number of sickly plants. For days they have lain parched and neglected in the summer sun; for days they have been beaten down into a morass by torrents poured from an excited watering-pot; their roots have regarded heaven for no less a period than their heads; and in the face of such unnatural conditions Ceres, one fancies, must have fallen back in confusion and left them to struggle on as best they can unaided. It is only the most hardyof plants that may survive the attentions of a youthful gardener, and it is a tribute to Nature’s obstinacy that any survive at all. I have in my mind a garden of this kind, and thereby hangs one of those rather tragic stories which grown-up people are apt to consider funny. The garden lay below an old brick wall, which must, I think, have faced south, for, as I remember it, it was always lit by the sun. It was the property of three children, and their separate estates were carefully marked off by decorative walls of shells and freakish pebbles. Here, early and late, two of the children waged a gallant war against Nature, thwarting and checking her with a hundred delicate attentions; but on the third had fallen that pleasant mood when it is nicer to lie in the shade and to dream of wine than to labour in the vineyard. His garden was a tangle of weeds and of healthy, neglected plants, and when the inevitable awakening came he saw that it would require days of unprofitable work to turn the wilderness into a proper garden. Yet to hear the uninformed comparisons of visitors was a shameful ordeal not to beborne. He solved the problem, I still think, in a very spirited manner. He cleared the garden by the simple process of removing plants and weeds alike, and sowed the ground with seeds, purchased alas! with a shilling extracted quite illegally from his money-box. But the secrecy of these movements had not escaped the notice of the Olympians, and later there fell on his horrified ears an entirely new and obviously truthful theory of botany; it seemed that the word “thief” could be plainly deciphered on the flowers of dishonest gardeners. There were no blossoms in that little boy’s garden that year. Like the monk in Browning’s poem, he pinched off all the buds before the sun was up.
They were simple flowers we sought to cultivate in those days, simple flowers with beautiful names. Violets and snowdrops, the reticent but cheerful pansy, otherwise known as “three faces under a hood,” love-lies-bleeding, wallflowers, stocks, and London pride, or “none so pretty”; of these and their unaffected comrades we made our gardens. Spades and pickaxes were denied us, but thesimple gardening tools were ours, and he has lived in darkness who has not experienced the keen joy of smacking the earth with the convex side of a trowel. My hands tingle when I remember how sore weeding made the finger-tips, and there is something in the last ecstatic chuckle of a watering-pot as it runs dry that lingers in the ear. I am aware that there are persons of mature years who can find pleasure in the performance of simple garden tasks. But I am afraid that subconsciously it is the æsthetic aspect of flowers that attracts them, and that their gardening is only a means to an end. No such charge could be brought against our efforts. We cared little about flowers or results of any sort; we only wanted to garden, and it troubled us not at all that the labours of one day destroyed those of the day before. To dig a deep hole and to fill it with water when completed is, as far as I have observed, no part of the ordinary gardener’s daily work, but it was our favourite effort, and a share in the construction of these ornamental waters was the greatest favour that we could grant to afriend. There were always captivating insects with numerous and casual legs to be discovered in the digging, and great stones that parted from the earth as reluctantly as nuggets. And when we had hollowed a cup in the earth we would pour in the sea and set our hearts floating upon its surface in paper ships. The sides of the hole would crumble down into the water like real cliffs, and every little fall would send a real wave sparkling across the surface of the ocean. Then there were bays to be cut and canals, and soundings to be taken with pieces of knotted string weighted with stones. Water has been the friend of children ever since Moses floated in his little ark of rushes to the feet of Pharaoh’s daughter.
I question whether they know very much about this sort of gardening at Kew, a place which is, however, beloved of children for the sake of the excellent spiral staircases in the palm-houses. But every sensible child has the art at its finger-tips, and in the time that we take to reach Brighton in a fleet motor they will construct a brand new sea for themselves—a sea with harbours andislands and sunken reefs, a perfect sea of wonder and romance.
If we are prepared to set aside our preconceived ideas as to what a garden ought to be, we must own that the children are not far wrong after all. A garden is only a world in miniature, with prairies of flowers and forests of roses and gravel paths for the wide, dusty roads. When we plant flowers in our garden it is as though we added new territories to our empire, new reds and blues and purples to our treasury of colours. And so when a child has wrought a fine morning’s havoc in its little patch of ground it has added it may be an ocean, it may be only a couple of stars to the kingdom of imagination which we may no longer see. It only needs a sunny hour or two, a trowel, and a pair of dirty hands to change a few square yards of earth into a world. And the child may be considered fortunate in being able to express itself perfectly in terms of dust. Our books and pictures cumber the earth, our palaces strike the skies, and yet it is our common tragedy that we have not found expression; whiledown the garden behind the lilac-bushes at this very moment Milton may have developed Lycidas into a sticky marsh, and Shakespeare may have compressed Hamlet into a mud-pie. The works of the children end as they begin in dust; but we cannot pretend that ours are more permanent.
Iamwilling to acknowledge that until lately, when I was privileged to entertain a cat under my roof for a fortnight, my knowledge of these noble beings was only academic. I had read what the poets have to say about them—Wordsworth and Swinburne, Cowper and Gray; I knew that “cat” was the only word in the English language that had a vocative, “puss”; I knew that Southey mourned that his kitten should ever attain to cathood, that the Egyptians were very fond of cats and that Lord Roberts is not. Then I had seen cats in the street, and admired the spirit with which a homeless cat with no visible means of subsistence would put shame into the heart of a well-fed terrier. Lying awake by night I had heard their barbaric song ringing like a challenge in the ears of civilisation, and hadwondered whether some unknown Strauss might not revolutionise the music of the future by aid of their passionate harmonies. But I had never moved in their society, and therefore I would not understand them. In those days I should probably have thought that the recent message of the Postmaster-General to the Press, to the effect that cats of the old General Post Office had been found comfortable homes, was trivial. And I remember with shame that I watched the malevolent antics of the caricature of a cat that appears in the “Blue Bird” without indignation.
I do not propose to give the events of the fortnight in detail, but rather to summarise them for the benefit of others who, like myself, may be called upon unexpectedly to entertain a feline guest. The name of my visitor was Kim, though I am told that most cats are called William Pitt, after the statesman. He was a short-haired tabby cat, some eighteen months old, and a fine, large fellow for his age. While he was with me he usually wore a white waistcoat, and there was a white mark on his face, as if somemilk had been spilled there when he was a kitten. His eyes were very large and of the colour of stage sunlight, and they haunted me from the moment when I raised the lid of the hamper in which he arrived. They were always significant and always inscrutable, but I could not help staring into them in the hope of discovering their meaning. I think he knew they fascinated me, for he would keep them wide open and full of secrets for hours at a time.
I had been informed that his name was Kim because he was the little friend of all the world, but at the first I found him reticent and of an independent disposition. I had always believed that cats purred when you stroked them, but when I stroked him he would endure it in silence for a minute and then retire to a corner of the room and make an elaborate and, under the circumstances, uncomplimentary toilet. In my inexperience I was afraid that he had taken a dislike to me, but one evening, after he had been with me three days, he climbed into my lap and went to sleep. My pipe was on the mantelpiece, and as Kim weighedover twelve pounds my legs grew very cramped; but I knew better than to disturb him, and he slept very comfortably till two in the morning. He repeated this compliment on several occasions, but when I lifted him into my lap he always got off immediately, and made me feel that I had been ill-treating him. His choice of sleeping-places was strange. If I was reading, he waited till I laid the book down on the table and then fell asleep on top of it. When I was writing and he had grown weary of turning his head from side to side to follow the birdlike flight of the pen to the ink-pot, he loved to settle himself down on the wet manuscript and blink drowsily at my embarrassment. Once when I ventured to lift him off he sulked under the table all the afternoon, and I did not repeat the experiment. He seemed to be a very sensitive cat.
Of course he was too old to play with me, but he had famous games by himself with corks and pieces of paper. Sooner or later he would drive these under one of the bookcases, and would sit down and mewplaintively until I went and raked them out for him. Then he would get up and walk away as if such toys were beneath his dignity. The one fault I found in his character was this constant emphasis of an inferiority that I was quite willing to confess. A generous cat would have realised that I was trying to do my best, and would have pardoned my hundred errors of judgment. Kim never wearied of putting me in my place, and turned a scornful tail to my heartfelt apologies. When he was dozing in the evening on the hearthrug he was very angry if any one put coals on the fire, even though he had been warned beforehand of what was about to happen. He would look at me with an air of noble reproach and stalk away to the window, where, perched on the back of a window-seat, he would stay for hours, patiently observant of the sounds and smells of the night.
But it was at mealtimes that he made me realise most the strength of his individuality. I had imagined that all cats were fond of milk, but Kim quickly disillusioned me, and it was as the result of a series of experimentsthat I discovered that he would only drink new milk raised to a certain temperature, and not then if he thought I was watching him. For the first twenty-four hours after he arrived he would eat nothing, though I tried to tempt him with chicken, sardines, and fillet of sole. Once or twice he gave a little plaintive mew, but for the most part he succeeded in giving me the impression of a brave heart enduring the pangs of a consuming hunger with noble fortitude. At the end of that period, when he had reduced me to despair, he relieved himself and me by stealing a haddock. After that the task of feeding him was comparatively easy. I would prepare him a dinner and pretend to eat it myself with great enjoyment; then I would leave the room as if I had suddenly remembered an appointment. When I returned the plate would be empty—that is, as empty as a cat’s dignity will allow him to leave a plate, and a few delicate impressions of Kim’s paws on the tablecloth would tell me that all was well. The irritating motive that underlay this graceless mannerism was clear to me. He would not bebeholden to me for so much as a sardine, and he was willing to steal all his meals so long as he could remain independent. I think, too, that it amused him to undermine my moral character by making me deceitful.
Incidentally, a cookery-book for cats is badly needed. Unlike dogs, they are gourmets rather than gourmands, and their appetites seem to languish if they do not have a continual change of fare. They have subtle palates; Kim liked gorgonzola cheese and curried rabbit, but he would not eat chicken in any form. I found anchovy sauce very useful to make a meal savoury that Kim had not thought palatable enough to steal, and the wise host will hold this condiment in reserve for such occasions. There is no relying on their likes or dislikes; they will eat something with avidity one day and reject it with infinite distaste the next.
On the whole it was a busy fortnight, and it was not without a certain relief that I said farewell to my emotional guest and sent him back to his owner. Designedly, as I believe, he had succeeded in making me painfully self-conscious, so that I could not doanything without being led to feel that in some way I was sinning against the laws of hospitality. It was pleasant to realise that my life was once more my own, and that I was free from the critical inspection of those significant, inscrutable eyes. I have commented on the independence of his character; it would be unjust if I failed to mention the one exception. One night I was awakened by a soft paw, a paw innocent of all claws, patting me gently on the cheek, and in the dark I was aware of Kim sitting on my pillow. I supposed that he was lonely and put up my hand to stroke him. Then for once in a way the proudest of sentient beings was pleased to drop the mask of his pride and purr loudly and without restraint. In the morning he treated me with exaggerated coldness, but I was not cheated into believing that his friendliness had been a dream. There are possibilities about Kim; and I believe that if he were to stop with me for two years we should come to a very tolerable understanding.
Ofthe nameless classics which were of so much concern to all of us when we were young, the most important were certainly those salt and blusterous volumes that told of pirates. It was in vain for kindly relatives to give us books on Nelson and his like; for their craft, beautiful though they might be to the eye, had ever the moralities lurking between decks, and if we met them it was only that we might make their crews walk the plank, and add new stores of guns and treasure to the crimson vessel with the sinister flag which it was our pleasure to command.
And yet the books that gave us this splendid dominion, where are they now? In truth, I cannot say. Examination of recent boys’ books has convinced me thatthe old spirit is lacking, for if pirates are there, it is only as the hapless victims of horrible British crews with every virtue save that one which youth should cherish most, the revolutionary spirit. Who would be a midshipman when he might be a pirate? Yet all the books would have it so, and even Mr. Kenneth Grahame, who knows everything that is worth knowing, does not always take the right side in such matters. The grown-up books are equally unsatisfactory to the inquiring mind. “Treasure Island,” which is sometimes loosely referred to as if it were a horn-book for young pirates, hardly touches the main problems of pirate life at all. Stevenson’s consideration for “youth and the fond parient” made him leave out all oaths. No ships are taken, no lovely females captured, nobody walks the plank, and Captain John Silver, for all the maimed strength and masterfulness that Henley suggested to the author, falls lamentably short of what a pirate should be. Captain Teach, of theSarah, in the “Master of Ballantrae,” is better, and there were the makings of a very good pirate captainin the master himself, but this section of the book is too short to supply our requirements. The book must be all pirates. Defoe’s “Captain Singleton” repents and is therefore disqualified, and Marryat’s “Pirate” is, as Stevenson said, “written in sand with a saltspoon.” Mr. Clark Russell, in one of his romances, ingeniously melts a pirate who has been frozen for a couple of centuries into life, but though he promises well at first, his is but a torpid ferocity, and ends, as it began, in words. Nor are the histories of the pirates more satisfying. Captain Johnson’s “History of Notorious Pirates” I have not seen, but any one who wishes to lose an illusion can read the trial of William Kidd and a few of his companions in the State trials of the year 1701. The captain of theAdventure Galleyappears to have done little to merit the name of pirate beyond killing his gunner with a bucket, and the miserable results of his pilferings bear no relationship to the enormous hoard associated with his name in “The Gold Bug” of Poe, though there is certainly a familiar note in finding included among hiscaptives a number of barrels of sugar-candy, which were divided in shares among the crew, the captain himself having forty shares. The Turkish pirates mentioned in “Purchas” cut a very poor figure. You can read there how four English youths overcame a prize crew of thirteen men who had been put in the shipJacob. In a storm they slew the pirate captain, for with the handle of a pump “they gave him such a palt on the pate as made his brains forsake the possession of his head.” They then killed three of the other pirates with “cuttleaxes,” and brought the ship safely into Spain, “where they sold the nine Turkes for galley-slaves for a good summe of money, and as I thinke, a great deale more than they were worth.” Not thus would the chronicles have described the pirates who fought and caroused with such splendid devotion in my youth. To die beneath the handle of a pump is an unworthy end for a pirate captain. The “History of the Buccaneers of America,” written by a brother of Fanny Burney, a book which was the subject of one of Mr. Andrew Lang’sappreciative essays, is nearer the mark, for among other notable fellows mentioned therein is one François L’Olonnois, who put to death the whole crew of a Spanish ship, ninety men, by beheading them, performing himself the office of executioner. One of the gentlemen in this book turned buccaneer in order to pay his debts, while it is told of another that he shot one of his crew in church for behaving irreverently during Mass. Sir Henry Morgan and Richard Sawkins performed some pretty feats of piracy, but their main energies were concerned in the sacking of towns, and the whole book suffers from an unaccountable prejudice which the author displays against the brave and hard-working villains of whom he writes.
In truth, these real pirates are disappointing men to meet. They are usually lacking in fierceness and in fidelity to the pirate ideals of courage and faithfulness to their comrades, while the fine nobility of character which was never absent from those other pirates is unknown in the historical kind. Few, if any, of them merit the oldPortuguese punishment for pirates, which consisted in hanging them from the yards of their own ship, and setting the latter to drift with the winds and waves without rudder or sails, an example for rogues and a source of considerable danger to honest mariners.
If that were a fitting end for great knaves, the meaner ruffians must be content with the pump-handle and the bucket.
It is hard if our hearts may not go out to those gloomy vessels, with their cargoes of gold and courage and rum, that sail, it seems, the mental seas of youth no more. Were they really bad for us, those sanguinary tussles, those star-lit nights of dissipation? A pinafore would wipe away a deal of blood, and the rum, though we might drink it boiling like Quilp, in no wise lessened our interest in home-made cake. But these regrets are of yesterday, and to-day I must draw what consolation I may from the kindly comment of Mr. Lang: “Alluring as the pirate’s profession is, we must not forget that it had a seamy side, and was by no means all rum andpieces-of-eight. And there is something repulsive to a generous nature in roasting men because they will not show you where to steal hogs.”
Heused to play to me in the magic hour before bedtime, when, in the summer, the red sun threw long shadows across the lawn, and in winter the fire burned brighter and brighter in the hearth. This was the hour when all the interminable squabbles of the schoolroom were forgotten, and even the noisiest of us would hush his voice to listen drowsily to a fairy-tale, or to watch the palaces raise aloft their minarets, and crumble to dull red ash in the heart of the fire. It was then that I would see him sitting astride of the fireguard and puffing out his cheeks over his shining flute. Even in the most thrilling moments of fairy stories, when Cinderella lost her crystal slipper or Sister Ann saw the cloud of dust from the summit of Bluebeard’s tower, his shrill melodies would ring in my ears andquicken my sleepy senses with the desire to hear more of this enchanted music. I knew that it was real magic, but I did not find it strange, because as far as I knew I had heard it all my life. Perhaps he had played to me when I yet lay in my cradle, and watched the night-light winking on the nursery ceiling; but I did not try to remember whether this was so. I was content to accept my strange musician as a fact of my existence, and to feel a sense of loss on the rare evenings when he failed me. I did not know how to dance, but sometimes I would tap my feet on the floor in time to the music, till some one would tell me not to fidget. For no one else would either see him or hear him, which proved that it was real magic, and flattered my sense of possession. It was evident that he came for me alone.
The years passed, and in due course the imaginative graces of my childhood were destroyed by the boys of my own age at school. They compelled me to exchange a hundred star-roofed palaces, three distinct kingdoms of dreams, and my enchantedflute-player for a threadbare habit of mimicry that left me cold and unprotected from the winds in the large places of life. There was something at once pathetic and ridiculous in our childish efforts to imitate our elders, but as it seemed that our masters and grown-up relatives were in the conspiracy to make us materialistically wise before our time, a boy would have needed a rare force of character to linger with his childhood and refuse to ape the man. So, for a while, I saw my glad musician no more, though sometimes I thought I heard him playing far away, and the child within me was warmed and encouraged even while my new-found manhood was condemning the weakness. I knew now that no man worthy of the name was escorted through life by a fairy flute-player, and that dreamers and wool-gatherers invariably sank to be poets and musicians, persons who wear bowler-hats with frock-coats, have no crease in their trousers, and come to a bad end. Fortunately, all education that is repressive rather than stimulating is only skin-deep, and it was inevitable that sooner or later I shouldmeet the flute-player again. One Saturday afternoon in high summer I avoided cricket and went for a long walk in the woods, moved by a spirit of revolt against all the traditions and conventions of boy-life; and presently, in a mossy clearing, all splashed and wetted by little pools of sunlight, I found him playing to an audience of two squirrels and a redstart. When he saw me he winked the eye that glittered over his parading fingers, as though he had left me only five minutes before, but I had not listened long before I realised that I must pay the price of my infidelity. It was the old music and the old magic, but try as I might I could not hear it so clearly as I had when I was a child. The continuity of my faith had been broken, and though he was willing to forgive, I myself could not forget those dark years of doubt and denial; and while I often met him in the days that followed, I never won back to the old childish intimacy. I sought his company eagerly and listened passionately to his piping, but I was conscious now that this was a strange thing, and sometimes when hesaw by my eyes that I was moved by wonder rather than by the love of beauty, he would put his flute in his pocket and disappear. The world is an enchanted place only to the incurious and tranquil-minded.
Nevertheless, though like all boys I had been forced to discard my childish dreams before I had really finished with them, the lovely melodies of the flute-player served to enrich my latter years at school with much of the old enchantment. Often enough he would play to me at night during preparation, and I would spend my time in trying to set words to his tunes instead of doing my lessons. It was then that I regretted the lost years that had dulled my ear and prevented me from winning the inmost magic of his song, compared with which my verses seemed but the shadow of a shadow. Yet I saw that he was content with my efforts, and gradually made the discovery that while great achievement is granted to the fortunate, it is the fine effort that justifies a man to himself. What did it matter whether my songs were good or bad? They were the highest expression I could find for therapture of beauty that had filled my heart as a child when I had been gifted to see life with clean and truthful eyes. For the songs the flute-player played to me were the great dreams of my childhood, the dreams that a wise man prolongs to the day of his death.
I do not hear him often now, for I have learnt my lesson, and though my hands tremble and my ear deceives me, I am by way of being a flute-player myself. This article, it is clear, is a child’s dream, and so have been, and will be, I hope, all the articles I shall ever write. What else should we write about? We have learnt a few long words since we grew up, and a few crimes, but no new virtues. That is why I like to get back to the nursery floor, and play with the old toys and think the old thoughts. We knew intuitively then a number of beautiful truths that circumstance appears to deny now, and we grown men are the poorer in consequence. It is folly to find life ugly when the flute lies within our reach and we can pipe ourselves back to the world of beauty with a song made of an old dream.
As for the flute-player, if I see him no more with wakeful eyes, I know that he is never very far away. Likely enough one of these wintry evenings, in the hour before bedtime, when the fire burns brighter and brighter in the hearth, I shall look up and see him sitting astride of the fireguard and puffing out his cheeks over his shining flute. Not many nights ago I heard some one playing the flute out in the street, and I went down and found a poor fellow blowing his heart out for raresous. There was not much enchantment about him—he had been dismissed from a music-hall orchestra for drinking red wine to excess—but he was a real flute-player, and I could well imagine that such a man might be driven to intemperance by the failure to achieve those “unheard melodies” not to be detected by the sensual ear. To be a bad flute-player must be rather like being a bad poet, a joyous but sadly finite life. He was a sad dog, this earthly musician, and he frankly conceived the ideal state as a kind of communal Bodega where thirsty souls could find peace in satiety. I gave him fivepence tohelp him on his way, and left him to make doleful music in the night till he had enough money to supply his crimson dreams. But he ought not to have said that my flute-player was only an amateur.