Theywere deep and wide and tall, and filled as to the lower shelves with a number of objects which no child of spirit could find interesting any longer. Here were the battered fragments of the presents of bygone birthdays, of which the true ownership was dubious, because we none of us would confess that we had ever been young enough to receive such childish gifts. Here also were foolish trifles from forgotten Christmas-trees, useless objects employed by the fraudulent to give their trees a deceitful appearance of wealth. Then there were the presents that were too useful: the elevating gifts of aunts and the improving offerings of god-parents, things that either trespassed on the arid land of lessons or presumed some grown-up virtue which the recipient neither had nor coveted. The Olympianswould refer to these dull possessions in the aggregate as “the children’s toys”; but we knew better. Our true treasures, the things we loved, never saw the inside of that unromantic depository save through the thoughtless tidying of our rulers. The works of watches and mechanical toys, our soldiers and cannon of brass, our fleet of walnut boats and empty cartridge-cases—these things and their brothers slept under our pillows or in the very private cardboard boot-box under the bed. By day those that were being employed were spread about the floor or strained our pockets to bursting-point. The people who were too old to know any better referred to them contemptuously as “rubbish,” a word we privately reserved for their aggravating presents. And though the long interval that separated dinner and tea on wet days might weary us of our immediate jewels, it was not in the cupboard that we sought relief from Boredom. It is true that now and again some Gentleman Adventurer would climb on a chair and investigate the shelves that were supposed to be beyondour reach, to return with piratical spoil of matches and cotton and citrate of magnesia, a cate that tingles pleasantly on the tongue of youth. But even from this point of view it could not compare with the rich cupboards of the kitchen and the dining-room, those Meccas of piracy that filled our dreams with monstrous raisins and pickled onions, a successful pilgrimage to which would assure a man the admiring homage of his comrades for days to come.
In short, we were content to regard the toy-cupboard as a harmless hobby of the grown-up people, and we were not far wrong. It was not for them to understand that one general cupboard could not hold the real treasures of four children, whose sense of possession was keen even to the point of battle. It was a dustbin for toys that had been found out, and we would have scorned to display its sordid contents to our friends. To them, if they were worthy, were revealed the true mysteries, the things that we fought for and made into dreams, the sun and moon and stars of our imaginative heaven. Sentimental elders might greet it with tears fortheir lost youth if they wished; we received their congratulations calmly, and kept our pity for their insanity to ourselves.
In truth, the thing was a symbol for all our relations with grown-up people. They always seemed so sensible and yet they could not understand. If we fell off the banisters on to our heads they would overwhelm us with sympathy, when every one knows that a big lump on the head is a thing to be proud of. But if a well-meaning aunt insisted on reading to us for a whole afternoon in the horse-chestnut season we were expected, and even commanded, to be grateful for this undesired favour. And so it was in the matter of toys. Sometimes, by accident as it were, they gave us sensible things that we really wanted. But as a rule their presents were concrete things that gave our imaginations no chance. We only wanted something to make a “think” about, but few of the official presents were suitable for this purpose. One of the gifts that delighted me most as a child was a blue glass dish, large and shallow. Filled with water it became a real blue sea, very proper forthe navigation of smaller craft. Empty and subverted it became the dome of an azure city. And holding it before my eyes I would see a blue world, a place the existence of which I had previously only suspected. An ocean, a city, and a world combine to make a better present than a commonplace toy. Once in a blue moon I have seen strange sights, and something of the glamour of that dish is with me even now.
Naturally, in course of time an uncommon significance became attached to such things as this, and I should have no more thought of keeping my blue sea in the same cupboard as my brother’s maxim gun than he would have allowed that excellent weapon to be the bedfellow of my sister’s famous one-legged nigger doll. We realised far better than our elders the meaning of their favourite shibboleth, “a place for everything”; we knew that the sea air would rust a cannon, and that poor Dorothy could swim but poorly with her one dusky leg. So we tacitly left the cupboard as a place wherein the grown-ups could keep the toysthey gave us to please themselves, and found exclusive and more sympathetic hiding-places for our treasures. Now and again a toy might pass through both stages of existence. Mechanical toys did not amuse us at all, until the donors were tired of playing with them, and we might pull them to pieces and make them our very own. And the costly gifts of uncles were useless until the authorities had ceased to see that we took care of them. But these doubtful cases apart, we would divide our presents into their respective groups as soon as we had removed the wrappings. “This and this can go into the cupboard, but this shall go to bed with me to-night!” It was not the person who “understands” children who was most fortunate in the choice of gifts.
For the rest, with unconscious satire, we constituted the toy-cupboard the state prison of the nursery. Refractory dolls and kittens, and soldiers awaiting court-martial, repented their crimes in its depressing gloom, and this was really the only share it had in our amusements. Beyond that it stood merely for official “play,” a melancholy traffic inwhich we never indulged. Its shelves were crowded with the illusions of grown-up people, and, if we considered it at all, it was in the same aspect in which we were wont to regard them. They were obviously well-meaning, but somehow or other they lacked understanding, and the nursery cupboard was full in consequence.
Imethim first at Lord’s, the best place, perhaps, in all London for making acquaintances and even friends. Even if he had not worn a light suit of clothes that drew the critical eye inevitably to his monstrous girth he would have been conspicuous as occupying with difficulty the space provided for two persons on an afternoon when seats were at a premium. But though I own to no prejudice against flesh in itself, it was not his notable presence that induced me to speak to him, but rather the appealing glances that he threw to right and left of him when he thought to have detected that fine wine of the game which, tasted socially, changes a cricket match to a rare and solemn festival. Such an invitation is one that no one for whom cricket is an inspiration can refuse, and it was natural that thereafter we shouldpraise and criticise in wise and sympathetic chorus.
The acquaintance thus begun warmed to intimacy at the Oval and Canterbury, and I began to seek his easily recognisable figure on cricket-grounds with eagerness, to feel a pang of disappointment if he was not there. For though to his careless eye his great moonlike face might suggest no more than good-natured stupidity, I had soon discovered that this exuberance of form barely concealed a delicate and engaging personality, that within those vast galleries of flesh there roamed the timid spirit of a little child. I have said that to the uncritical his face might seem wanting in intelligence, but it was rather that the normal placidity of his features suggested a lack of emotional sensitiveness. Save with his eyes—and it needed experience to read their message—he had no means of expressing his minor emotions, no compromise between his wonted serenity and the monstrous phenomenon of his laughter, that induced a facial metamorphosis almost too startling to convey an impression of mirth. If normally his facemight be compared with a deep, still pool, laughter may be said to have stirred it up with a stick, and the consequent ripples seemed to roll to the very extremities of his body, growing in force as they went, so that his hands and feet vibrated in humorous ecstasy.
Later, when, in one of his quaint interrogative moods, he showed me a photograph of himself as a child, I was able to give form to the charming spirit that Nature had burdened with this grievous load. I saw the picture of a strikingly handsome little boy, with dark, wide eyes and slightly parted lips that alike told of a noble sense of wonder. This, I felt, was the man I knew, whose connection with that monstrous shape of flesh had been so difficult to trace. Yet strangely I could recognise the features of the boy in the expansive areas of the man. In the light of the photograph he resembled one of those great cabbage-roses that a too lavish season has swollen beyond all flowerlike proportions, yet which are none the less undeniably roses. Others might find him clumsy, elephantine, colossal; thenceforward he was for me clearly boyish.
His voice varied more in tone and quality than that of any other man I have ever met, and over these variations he seemed to have little control; and this, too, made it very difficult for strangers to detect the trippings and hesitancies, gentle, wayward, and infinitely sensitive, of his childlike temperament. Within the limits of one simple utterance he would achieve sounds resembling the drumming of sudden rain on galvanised iron and the ecstatic whistlings of dew-drunk birds. It was sometimes difficult to follow the purport of his speech for sheer wonder at the sounds that slid and leaped and burst from his lips. His voice reminded me of a child strumming on some strange musical instrument of extraordinary range and capacity which it had not learned how to play. His laughter was ventriloquial and rarely bore any accountable relationship to the expressions of mirth of ordinary men. It was like an explosive rendering of one of those florid scales dear to piano-tuners, but sometimes it suggested rather an earthquake in his boots.
He dwelt in a little flat that seemed likethe upper floor of a doll’s-house when related to its proprietor, and here it was his delight to dispense a hospitality charmingly individual. His meals recalled nothing so much as the illicit feasts held in school dormitories, and when he peered curiously into his own cupboards he always looked as if he were about to steal jam. He would produce viand after viand with the glee of a successful explorer, and in terms of his eager hospitality the most bizarre cates appeared congruous and even intimately connected, so that at his board grown men would eat like schoolboys, with the great careless appetite of youth.
He had a fine library and a still finer collection of mechanical toys, which were for him a passion and a delight. It was pleasant to see him set some painted piece of clockwork careering on the hearthrug, stooping over it tenderly, with wondering eyes, and hands intent to guard it from disaster. It was pleasant, too, to hear him recite Swinburne, of whom he was a passionate admirer; for, though his voice would be as rebellious as ever, his wholebody would thrill and pulse with the music of the poet. He always touched books softly because he loved them. Of bonfires he spoke reverently, though a London flat hardly lent itself to their active exploitation; and I remember that he told me once that nothing gave him a keener sense of what he had lost in growing up than the scent of burning twigs and leaves. Yet if he felt this loss, what should it have been for us who had come so much farther than he!
Himself a child, he was beloved of children and treated by them as an equal; but I never knew another child who was so easily and continuously amused. The Hippodrome, the British Museum, the Tower of London, and the art of Messrs. Maskelyne and Devant alike raised in him the highest enthusiasm, which he expressed with charming but sometimes embarrassing freedom. Alone of all men, perhaps, he found the Royal Academy wholly satisfying, and it could be said of him truly that if he did not admire the picture he would always like the frame. He had a huge admiration for any one who did anything, and he liked riding in lifts.
Though he treated women with elaborate courtesy, their society made him self-conscious, and he, who could direct his body featly enough in a crowded street, was apt to be clumsy in drawing-rooms. Perhaps it was for this reason that they had apparently played no marked part in his life, and I may be wrong in attaching any special significance to a phrase he made one quiet evening in his flat. We had been speaking of the latest sensation in our group of mutual acquaintances, of the marriage of Phyllis, daintiest and most witty of cricket-lovers, to a man in whom the jealously critical eyes of her friends could perceive no charm; but the conversation had dwindled to silence when he said, “Surely his love can make any man lovely!”
Then, as if the subject were closed, he fell to speaking of his latest pocket-knife with boyish animation; but the phrase dwelt in my mind, though the image of the brave boy with wide eyes and lips parted in wonder was all that I ever knew of the man who made it.
When we were boys there was no part of the Christmas festivities to which we looked forward more eagerly than the singing of carols from house to house on Christmas Eve. If the night fell wild and rainy, we had to abandon our tuneful journey and content ourselves with singing indoors. But if it was a dry night, we set forth joyfully, even though a disquieted moon and inattentive stars foretold a wet Christmas. Our hearts were lighter than men’s hearts can be, as we clattered down the lanes, fortified by a hot supper and possibly a scalding tumblerful of mulled claret. We would always start at the houses of friends, and then, made bold by success, we would sing our glad tidings to any house which had a lit window. For the credit of human nature it may be said that we were made welcomewherever we went. Sometimes people offered us money, which our code forbade us to accept, though we should have liked it well enough; more frequently we were asked to come in and have something to eat or drink, offers with which even the infinite capacity of youth could by no means cope. If the night was frosty it was pleasant to toast ourselves for a minute or two in front of the fire before going out again into a world of frozen ruts, sparkling hedgerows, and mysterious shadows, wherein we felt ourselves veritable figures of romance.
And, indeed, we ourselves sang better than we knew. However cheerfully and noisily we might undertake the expedition, it was not long before we became aware that other spirits were abroad. The simple words and merry tunes which we sang suddenly became wonderfully significant. Between the verses we heard the sheep calling on far hills while the shepherd kings rode down to Bethlehem with their gifts. The trees and fields and houses took up the chant, and our noises were blended with that deep song of the Universe which the new ears of the younghear so often and so clearly. When our carol was over there would fall a great silence that seemed to our quickened senses to be but a gentler and sweeter music of hope and joy. As we passed from one house to the next we spoke to each other in whispers for fear we should break the spell that held the night enchanted. Even as we heard other noises when we sang, so now we heard the sound of other feet that trod the same glad road as our own. From being a half-dozen of little boys come out to have some fun on Christmas eve, we had become a small section of a great army. Tramp, tramp, the joyful feet fell before and behind us along the road, and when we stopped to sing, the whole night thrilled into a triumphant ecstasy of song. On such nights the very earth, it seemed, sang carols.
It is, perhaps, our vivid recollection of the glories of those memorable Christmas Eves that leads us to be gentle with the little boys and girls who sing at our door to-night. We have all listened to the eloquent persons who can prove that Christmas is not what it used to be. They point to the decadenceof pantomime, the decay of the waits and mummers, and the democratic impudence of those who demand Christmas-boxes. Well, it may be—but children do like modern pantomimes in spite of the generalisations of critics; and though a Salvation Army band is an unpicturesque substitute for such a village orchestra as is described in “Under the Greenwood Tree,” it at least satisfies the ear of the sentimentalist at two o’clock of a frosty morning. That Christmas-boxes are a nuisance is no new discovery. We find Swift grumbling to Stella about them exactly two hundred years ago. Mummers, we are told, are still to be found in the country; five years back we saw them ourselves and were satisfied that they had learnt their rather obscure rhymes from their fathers before them, and not from any well-meaning society for faking old customs.
This said, it must be admitted that carol-singers are not what they were. Of the long procession of ragged children who have sung “While shepherds watched their flocks by night” at our gate this December, not one had taken the trouble to learn eitherthe words or the tune accurately. When asked to sing some other carol they broke down, and it was apparent that they were trusting to their hungry and thinly clad appearance rather than to their singing as a means to obtain alms from the charitable. Sometimes—this we fear is really a modern note—the father was waiting in the background to collect the takings! It is rather difficult to know what to do in such cases, for the children may be punished if they are not successful; and yet the practice of sending insufficiently clad children into the streets on a winter’s night is hardly to be encouraged.
Nevertheless, though the abuse is manifest, we would hesitate to say that the custom of singing carols at our doors should be stopped. It is difficult to read the heart of a child aright, but it seems to us at least possible that a few of the children win more than a mere handful of pennies from their singing. Though they mumble their words to a tune they only half remember, it is not likely that the spirit that made wonderful the Christmas Eves of long ago shallaltogether pass them by. Surely the night conspires with lights of the world to enchant them, and for their own ears their voices achieve beauty beyond the measure of mortal song.
In truth, this is a dream that we can ill afford to spare. It seems a pity, however, that the children are not taught carol-singing at school, especially as they are now often taught, to our great content, the old games and dances. Many of the older carols are really beautiful, both in the homely simplicity of their words and in the unaffected charm of the airs to which they are set. The desire of the average child for song is extraordinary—as extraordinary, perhaps, as the regrettable contempt of the average adult for poetry. Last year we were present at the dress rehearsal of the pantomime at Drury Lane, and we heard a theatreful of poor children sing the music-hall ditties of the hour with wonderful spirit and intensity. Our emotions were mixed. Mingled with the natural pleasure that they should be enjoying themselves was something of regret for the sad lives that so small atreat should rouse to ecstasy. Afterwards we felt sorry that the children had nothing better to sing. We have no prejudice against music-hall songs in general. They are not as intelligent as they might be, but they serve their time in pleasing, harmlessly enough, a number of people who also are not as intelligent as they might be. But somehow the lyres of little singing children deserve better fare than this. We look forward to a time when they will have it.
Therewere two rugs in the library, and for some time we used to dispute the vexed question of their relative merits. Æsthetically, there was something to be said for both of them. The rug that stood by the writing-desk from which father wrote to the newspapers was soft and furry; indeed, it was almost as pleasant a couch as the sofa with the soft cushions in the drawing-room, which was taboo. Moreover, it lent itself very readily to such fashionable winter sport as bear-hunting, providing as it did a trackless prairie, a dangerous marsh, or the quarry itself as the adventure required. The joys of the other rug were of a calmer kind, and were, perhaps, chiefly due to its advantageous position before the fire. It was pleasant to toast oneself on a winter evening and trace with idle fingersthe agreeable deviations of its pattern. Sometimes it might be the ground plan of a make-up city, with forts and sweet-shops and palaces for our friends; sometimes it would be a maze, and we would pursue, with bated breath, the vaulted passages that led to the dread lair of the Minotaur. But such plots as these were of passive, rather than active, interest. Reviewing the argument dispassionately, Fenimore Cooper may have had a slight advantage over Nathaniel Hawthorne; bear-hunting may have been a little more popular than the dim excitements of Greek myth.
But while the discussion was at its height, there dawned in the East the sun that was to prove fatal to Perseus and the Deerslayer alike. I do not know from which of our uncles “The Arabian Nights” first came to an enraptured audience; but I am sure that an uncle must have been responsible for its coming, for as a gift it was avuncular in its splendour. We quickly realised that the world had changed, and took the necessary steps to welcome our new guest. The old lamp in the hall that had graced the illicitdoings of pirates and smugglers in the past was thenceforward the property of Aladdin; a strange bottle that had been Crusoe’s served to confine the unfortunate genie; and with quickening pulses we discovered that in the fireside rug we possessed no less a treasure than the original magic carpet.
I must explain that we were not like those fortunate children of whom Miss Nesbit writes with such humorous charm. To us there fell no tremendous adventures; we might polish Aladdin’s lamp till it shone like the moon without gaining a single concrete acid-drop for our pains. But the “Arabian Nights” gave us all that we ever thought of seeking either in books or toys in those uncritical days—a starting-point for our dreams. And this, I take it, is the best thing that a writer can give a child, and it was for lack of this that we considered the works of Lewis Carroll silly, while finding one of the books of Miss Molesworth—I wish I could recall its name—a masterpiece of fancy and erudition.
So when the din of the schoolroom did not suit my mood, or the authorities wereunduly didactic, I would slip away to the twilit library and guide the magic carpet through the delicate meadows of my dreams. The fire would blaze and crackle in the grate and fill my eyes with tears, so that it was easy to fancy myself in a sparkling world of sunshine. And from the shadows of the room little creatures would creep out to touch my glowing cheeks with cool, soft fingers, or to pluck timidly at the sleeve of my coat. I did not endeavour to give these shy companions of the dark any definite place in my universe. Their sympathetic reticence was reassuring in that room of great leaping shadows, and I was glad that they should keep me company in the blackness, a thing so terrible when I woke up at night in my bed. Sometimes, perhaps, I wondered how they could bear to live in the place where nightmare was; but for the rest I accepted their society gladly and without question. There was plenty of room on the carpet for such quiet fellows, and if they liked to accompany me on my travels I, at least, would not prevent them.
It did not occur to me at the time, asit certainly does now, that I should never again be so near to fairyland as I was then. I was inclined to be sceptical concerning the actual existence of the supernatural, though I recognised that a judicious acceptance of its theories set a new kingdom beneath one’s feet for play. And it is only now that I realise how wonderfully vivid my dreams were, with what zest of timid life the little shadow-folk thrilled and trembled round me. It is true that I remained conscious of my normal environment; the fire, the dark room, and the bookcases were all there, and even a kind of quiet sense of the World beyond the Door, the hall and the passages and my brothers and sisters at their quarrels. But it was as if these things had become merely an idea in my mind, while my feet were set on the pleasant roads of a new world. The thing that I had hoped became true; and the truth that I had been taught lingered in my mind only as a familiar story, a business of second-hand emotions, neither very desirable nor very interesting. The little folk gathered and whispered round me inthe dark, and there was full day in the world that was my own.
It was hard to leave that world for this other place, which even now I cannot understand; but when some errant Olympian or righteously indignant brother had dragged me from my lair, I did not attempt to defend myself from the charge of moodiness. I had no words to tell them what they had done, and I could only stand blinking beneath the light of the gas in the hall, and endeavour to recall their wholly tiresome rules and regulations for the life of youth. Dimly I knew that my right place was before the fire in the library, and I wondered whether the little folk could use the Magic Carpet without me, or whether they stayed expectant in the shadows, like me, a little lonely, and a little chill. But in those days moodiness was only a lesser crime than sulkiness, and I had perforce to fold up my fancies and pass, an emotional bankrupt, into the unsympathetic world of the playroom. To-morrow, perhaps, the Magic Carpet might be mine again; meanwhile, I would exist.
Peter Pan has asked us a good many times whether we believe in fairies. It is, of course, a matter of faith, to be accepted or denied, but not to be discussed. For my part, I think of a little boy nodding on a rug before the fire on many a winter’s evening, and I clap my hands. Gratitude could do no less.
Idonot know that at any time Hastings is a very lively place. The houses have acquired a habit of being vacant, and even the front, with its bath-chairs, its bandstands that are silent on Sundays, and its seats upon which one may not smoke, is more suggestive of Puritans and invalids than of pleasure. If Time should suddenly drop a week from the due order of days, it is easy to imagine that those bath-chairs, those unfragrant shelters, those much-labelled houses would startle the dreaming tourists with vacant faces of dead men. But when in late March the day has squandered its gold, and the earth is saddened with the gentle greyness of the dusk, when, moreover, the cheerful sea has deserted the shore, creeping far out to leave dull acres of untrodden sand, waste and bitter with salt, aman might surely be forgiven if he cried aloud against the extreme cruelty of Nature, the timid injustice of man.
Being of Anglo-Saxon blood, I did not give definite expression to the melancholy which the quenched seascape had invoked. I contented myself with leaning on the rail, and sneering at the art of the cripple who had made mathematically exact scratchings of Windsor Castle and the Eddystone Lighthouse on the sand. There was something almost humorously impertinent about that twisted figure with one foot bowing and hopping for pennies in front of a terrible back-cloth of dreamy grey. How could a man forget the horrors of infinite space, and scratch nothings on the blank face of the earth for coppers? His one foot was bare so that his Silver-like activities might not spoil his pictures, and when he was not hopping he shivered miserably. As I saw him at the moment he stood very well for humanity—sordid, grotesque, greedy of mean things, twisted and bruised by the pitiless hand of Nature.
And then in a flash there happened one ofthose miracles which rebuke us when we lack faith. Through the shadows which were not grey but purple there burst a swarm of children running on light feet across the sands. They chased each other hither and thither, stooped to gather shells and seaweed, and inspected the works of the cripple with outspoken admiration. Regarding my mournful and terrible world in detail, they found it beautiful with pink shells and tangled seaweed and the gallant efforts of men. So far from being terrified or humiliated by the sombre wastes of sand and sky, they made of the one a playing-ground, and woke the other with echoes of their shrill laughter. Perhaps they found that the sea was rather larger than the Serpentine, perhaps they thought that the sands were not so well lit as Kingsway; but, after all, they were making holiday, and at such a time things are different. They laughed at space.
For these were London children, and all the resources of civilisation had not been able to deprive them of that sense of proportion which we lose with age. The stars aresmall and of little importance, and even the sun is not much larger than a brandy-ball. But a golden pebble by the seashore is a treasure that a child may hold in its hand, and it is certain that never a grown-up one of us can own anything so surely. We may search our memories for sunsets and tresses of dead girls, but who would not give all their faded fragrance for one pink shell and the power to appreciate it? So it was that I had found the world wide and ugly and terrible, lacking the Aladdin’s lamp of imagination, which had shown the children that it was a place of treasure, with darkness to make the search exciting. They flitted about the beach like eager moths.
Yet on these children Civilisation had worked with her utmost cunning, with her most recent resource. For they were little actors and actresses from Drury Lane, touring in a pantomime of their own; wise enough in the world’s ways to play grown-up characters with uncommon skill, and bred in the unreality of the footlights and the falsehood of grease-paints. Nevertheless, coming fresh from the elaborate make-beliefof the theatre and the intoxicating applause, they ran down to the sea to find the diamonds and pearls that alone are real. If this is not wisdom I know not where wisdom lies, and, watching them, I could have laughed aloud at the thought of the critics who have told me that the life of the stage makes children unnatural. There are many wise and just people who do not like to see children acting, forgetting perhaps that mimicry is the keynote of all child’s play, and that nothing but this instinct leads babies to walk upright and to speak with their tongues. Whether they are on the stage or not, children are always borrowing the words and emotions of other people, and it is a part of the charm of childhood that through this mask of tricks and phrases the real child peeps always into the eyes and hearts of the elect.
And this is why I know nothing more delightful than the spectacle of a score of children playing at life on the stage. They may have been taught how to speak and how to stand, and what to do with their hands; they may know how to take aprompt, and realise the importance of dressing the stage; every trick and mannerism of the grown-up actor or actress may be theirs; yet, through their playing there will sound the voice of childhood, imaginative, adventurous, insistent, and every performance will supply them with materials for a new game. So it was with these children, whose sudden coming had strewn the melancholy beach with pearls. I had seen them in the dimness of a ballet-room under Drury Lane Theatre; now, with a coin, I bought the right to see them on a stage built with cynical impertinence in the midst of the intolerant sea. The play, indeed, was the same, and the players, but the game was different. The little breaks and falterings which the author had not designed, the only half-suppressed laughings which were not in the prompt-copy, bore no relationship, one might suppose, to the moral adventures of Mother Goose. But far across the hills the spring was breaking the buds on the lilac, and far along the shore the sea was casting its jewels, and even there in the theatre I could see the children standing on tiptoe topick lilac, and stooping on the sands to gather pearls. They did not see that they were in a place of lank ropes and unsmoothed boards soiled with the dust of forgotten pageants and rendered hideous by the glare of electric lights; and they were right. For in their eyes there shone only that place of adventure which delights the feet of the faithful, whether they tread the sands, or the stage, or the rough cobbles of Drury Lane. To the truly imaginative a theatre is a place of uncommon possibilities; our actors and actresses, and even our limelight-men, are not imaginative, and so, I suppose, they find it ugly. The game is with the children.
And truly they play it for what it is worth, and they are wise enough to know that it is worth all things, alike on the boards of the theatre and on the wider, but hardly less artificial, stage of civilised life. We who are older tremble between our desire for applause and our unconquerable dread of the angers of the critical gods and the gaping pit, and it is for this reason that every bitter-wise adult knows himself to be littlebetter than a super, a unit of a half-intelligent chorus, who may hope at best to echo with partial accuracy the songs and careless laughters of the divine players. There is something pathetic in the business; for we, too, were once stars, and thought, finely enough, to hold the heavens for ever with our dreams. But now we are glad if the limelight shines by accident for a moment on our faces, or if the stage-manager gives us but one individual line. We feel, for all the sad fragrance of our old programmes and newspaper-cuttings, that it is a privilege to play a part in the pageant at all. The game is with the children; but if we are wise, there is still somewhere at the back of the stage a place where each one of us can breathe the atmosphere of enchantment and dream the old dreams. No Arcadia is ever wholly lost.
WhenI hear grown-up people discussing the University Boat Race I smile sadly and hold my peace. They may say what they like about the latest Oxford trial, or the average weight per man of the Cambridge crew, but deep in my heart there stays the conviction that they are making a ludicrous mistake in speaking about the Boat Race at all. Once I knew all about it, and even now I think I could put them right if I wished. But what is the use of arguing with persons who, under the absurd pretext of fairness, pretend to find praiseworthy features in both crews? Even the smallest boy knew better than that in the days when the Boat Race was really important. I will not say that there did not exist weaklings even then, who wobbled between Oxford and Cambridge in an endeavour to propitiateboth factions. But they usually suffered the fate of wobblers by having to join one side or the other, while still incurring the scorn of both.
The Boat Race dawned upon us each year as a strange and bewildering element in our social relationships. We would part one night on normal terms, and the morrow would find us wearing strange favours, and regarding our friends of yesterday with open and passionate dislike. For the sake of a morsel of coloured ribbon old friendships would be shattered and brother would meet brother with ingenious expressions of contempt. There was no moderate course in the matter. A boy was either vehemently Cambridge or intolerably Oxford, and it would have been easier to account for the colour of his hair than to explain how he arrived at his choice of a university. Some blind instinct, some subtle influence felt, perhaps, in the dim, far-off nursery days may have determined this weighty choice; but the whole problem was touched with the mystery that inspired the great classical and modern snowball fights, when little boys would poundeach other almost into a state of unconsciousness for the sake of a theory of education. Our interest in the Boat Race as a boat race was small, and quite untroubled by any knowledge of the respective merits of the crews. But we wore their colours in our buttonholes, and the effect of these badges on our lives was anarchic. We saw blue.
It was my fate to drift, fatally and immutably Cambridge, into a school that had a crushing Oxford majority. In these circumstances, the light-blue ribbon became, for the small and devoted band that upheld the Cambridge tradition of valour, the cause of endless but never conclusive defeats, the symbol of a splendid martyrdom. Try as we might, we found ourselves always in a minority, and, to add to our bitterness, these years of luckless warfare coincided with a series of Cambridge defeats, and we knew ourselves the supporters of a forlorn and discredited cause. And yet, Fate having decreed that we should be Cambridge, we did not falter before our hopeless task of convincing the majority that it was made of baser stuff than we. We would arrivein the morning with our colours stitched to our coats, and when, overwhelmed by numbers, we lost our dear favours we would retire to a place apart, repair the loss from a secret store of ribbon, and dash once more into the fray. The others might be Oxford when they had a mind to, but we were Cambridge—Cambridge all the time.
Our contests were always fierce, but only once so far as I remember did they become really venomous. Some ingenious Cambridge mind had hit on the idea of protecting his badge with a secret battery of pins, and there ensued a series of real and desperate fights that threatened our clan with physical extinction. The trouble passed as suddenly as it had arisen; a mysterious rumour went round the clans that pins were bad form; and there was a lull while Cambridge treated their black eyes and Oxford put sticking-plaster on their torn fingers. Pleasanter to remember is the famous retort of L—, an utterance so finely dramatic that even to-day I cannot recall it without a thrill. Caught apart from his comrades, he was surrounded by the Oxford rabble, androbbed of his colours. “You aren’t Cambridge now,” said one of his assailants, mockingly. “Ah, but the sky is Cambridge!” he replied, and indeed it was. We had our little victories to dull the edge of our defeats.
And yet, probably, we of Cambridge were not altogether sorry when the Boat Race was over, and the business might be forgotten for another eleven months, for we had but little rest while the war of the ribbons was in the air. If we sought to take a quiet walk round the quad, the chance was that a boy, too small perhaps to keep a favour even for a minute, but with a light-blue heart, would run up with tidings of some comrade hardly beset in the cloisters, and the battle must be begun again. These contests were sometimes the cause of temporary friendships, for in the course of the tumult one would find oneself indebted to a year-long enemy for the timely discomfiture of one’s opponent, who in his turn might be, normally, one’s bosom companion. For no tie was sacred enough to overcome this vernal madness of the Blues. If a fellow was base enough to be Oxford, his presencein the world was unnecessary, his society tabooed. And, as I have said, even brothers would bang each other’s heads for the beauty of the Idea.
Then came a day when age and responsibility changed our views on a good many things, and the Boat Race was not spared. Forgetful of the old triumphs and the old despairs, we preferred to treat ourselves and life in more sober terms, while smiling tolerantly at the little boys playing their rough games beneath our feet. Leaning forward with hands eager to clutch our manhood, we would not for worlds have compromised our new position by taking an interest in such childish trifles as coloured ribbons. So the game went on without us, and the measure of our loss is the measure of the loss of the earth when the spring melts into summer.
To-day I hear persons discussing the Boat Race in railway-carriages, and in face of their dispassionate judgments I ask myself whether they can ever have sung for it and fought for it, and, let it be added, wept for it, as I have done. In truth, I suppose theyhave; for boys do not differ widely in these essential things. But these people do not fight; they do not even wear the ribbon! While it is open to a man to ignore the Boat Race altogether, I cannot understand his approaching the contest in so miserable a spirit.
Isupposethat every one has made the acquaintance of the subject of this little biography at some time or other, though to others he may not have appeared as he has appeared to me, and, as I know, he has been called by many names. Indeed, when I consider that there have been men and women who have sought his society with a passionate eagerness, it is clear to me that his disguises must be extremely subtle, and that he employs them with a just regard for the personalities of his companions. For while some have found in his society the ultimate splendour of life, for me he has always been wearisome and ridiculously mean.
Of course it may be that I have known him too long, for even as a child I was accustomed to find him at my side, an unwelcome guest who came and went by no law thatmy youthful mind could determine. Certainly in those days he was more capricious, and the method of argument by repetition, which he still employs, was only too well calculated to weary and distress a child. But for the rest, the Harold whom I knew then was materially the Harold whom I know now. Conceive a small man so severely afflicted with St. Vitus’s dance that his features are hardly definable, endow him with a fondness for clothes of dull colours grievously decorated with spots, and a habit of asking meaningless questions over and over again in an utterly unemotional voice, and you will be able to form a not unfair estimate of the joys of Harold’s society. There have been exceptions, however, to the detestable colourlessness of Harold’s appearance. I have seen him on occasion dressed in flaming red, like Mephistopheles, and his shrill staccato voice has pierced my head like a corkscrew. But these manifestations have always been brief, and might even be considered enjoyable when compared with the unrestful monotony of Harold’s society in general.
Who taught me to call him by the name of Harold I do not know, but in my youthful days the man’s character was oddly associated with the idea of virtue as expounded in the books I read on Sunday afternoons. That I hated him was, I felt, merely a fitting attribute in one whose instincts were admittedly bad, but I did not allow the consideration to affect my rejoicings when I escaped from his company. Curiously, too, I perceived that the Olympians were with me in this, and since the moral soundness of those improving books was beyond question, I had grave doubts as to their ultimate welfare. But it was always an easy task to detect the Olympians tripping in their own moralities; they had so many.
As time went on, and I grew out of the Sunday books and all that they stood for, I came to believe that I was growing out of Harold too. His appearances became rare, and, from his point of view, a little ineffective. It pleased me to consider with a schoolboy’s arrogance that he was little more than a child’s nightmare, and that ifa man turned to fight him Harold would vanish. For a while Harold, in his cunning, played up to this idea. He would seek my side timidly, and fly at a word. The long, sleepless nights of childhood and the weary days were forgotten, and I made of him a jest. Sometimes I wondered whether he really existed.
And then he came. At first I was only mildly astonished when I found that nothing I could say would make him leave me, but as the hours passed the old hatred asserted itself, and to fight the little man with the dull voice and the cruel spots on his clothes seemed all that there was in life to do. The hours passed into days and nights, and sometimes I was passive in the hope that he might weary, sometimes I shouted answers to his questions—the same answer to the same question—over and over again. I felt, too, that if I could only see his features plainly for a moment he would disappear, and I would stare at him until the sky grew red as my eyes. But I could not see him clearly, and the world became a thing of dull colours, terrible with spots.By now I was fighting him with a sense of my own fatuity, for I felt that nothing would make this man fight fairly. His voice had fallen to a passionless whisper and the spots on his clothes swelled into obscene blotches and burst like over-ripe fruit. It was then that the chloroform clutched me by the throat. I have never known anything on earth more sweet.
Since then, it seems to me, Harold has never been quite the same. He comes to see me now and again, and sometimes even he lingers by my side. But there is a note of doubt about him that I do not remember to have noticed before—some of his former spirit would seem to be lacking, and I am forced to wonder sometimes whether Harold is not ageing. And, though it may appear strange, the thought inspires me with a certain regret. I do not like the man, and I should be mad to seek him of my own accord, but in fairness I must acknowledge that in a negative way he has contributed to all the pleasures I have enjoyed. Sunsets and roses and the white light of the stars—I owe my appreciation of them all to Harold;and I know that it is by aid of his keen realism that I have founded the city of my dreams. It will be a grey world when Harold is no more.
Whenall the world was young and we were young with it there was no occupation more pleasing to our infant minds than the digging of great holes in that placid and maternal earth that endured the trampling of our childish feet with patience, and betrayed no realisation of the extraordinary miracle of life that had set us dancing in the fields and valleys of the world. As repentant children trace with curious finger on their mother’s foreheads the lines that they themselves have set there, so we followed the furrows on the forehead of our mother Earth with our little spades, smoothing here and deepening there, and not the less contented that our labours had but a vague and illusory aim. Sometimes, perhaps, we had a half-formed ambition to dig to those dim and incredible Antipodes where children walkhead downwards, clinging to the earth with their feet, like the flies on the playroom’ ceiling. Sometimes, perhaps, we dug for treasure, immense masses of golden coin, like those memorable hoards described in “Treasure Island” and the “Gold Bug.” Or, again, it might be that we planned vast caves and galleries wherein tawny pirates and swart smugglers might carouse, shocking the echoes with blood-curdling oaths, and drinking boiling rum like Quilp. We dug, in fine.
There seems to be some element in the human mind that is definitely attracted by the digging of holes, for it is not only children who are interested by the spectacle. The genial excavators whose duty it is to make havoc of the London streets never fail to draw an attentive and apparently appreciative audience, whether of loafers or philosophers the critic may not lightly determine. They gaze into the pit with countenances of abysmal profundity, that appear to see all, to understand all, and to express nothing in particular. It is possible that they are placidly enjoying the reflection that beneaththe complex contrivances of our civilisation, beneath London itself, the virgin earth lies unturned and unaffected. Perhaps, as each spadeful of earth reaches the surface, they perceive, like a child watching the sawdust trickle from the broken head of a doll, that here is the raw material of which worlds are made. Perhaps they do not think at all, but merely derive a mild satisfaction from watching other people work. Yet it is at least agreeable to believe that they are watchers for the unexpected, that they have discovered the great truth that if you dig long enough you will probably dig something up.
We children knew this very well, and we never dug without feeling the thrill proper to treasure-seekers. Even half a brick becomes eventful when found in these circumstances, and the earth had a hundred pleasant secrets in the shape of fragments of pottery, mysterious lumps of metal and excited insects for those who approached her reverently, trowel in hand. It was this variety of treasure that made us prefer inland diggingto those more fashionable excavations that are carried on at the seaside. Sand is a friendly substance in which to dig, and it is very convenient to have a supply of water like the sea close at hand when it is necessary to fill a pond or add a touch of realism to a moat. But the ease with which sand obeys the spade soon becomes monotonous, and the seaside in general suffers from an air of having been elaborately prepared for children to play there. Our delving operations in the garden had the charm of nominal illegality, and the brown earth had a hundred moods to thwart and help and enchant us continually. Sometimes we dug with scientific precision; sometimes we set to work with fury, flinging the earth to all sides in our eagerness to rob her of her secrets. A philosopher might have found in us a striking instance of the revolt of civilised man against Nature; a woman would have noticed that we were getting our pinafores dirty.
And though we liked digging for its own sake, we were not unmindful of the possibilities of a good big hole. From its cooldepths we could obtain a new aspect of the sky; and, cunningly roofed over with branches and earth, it made a snug retreat for a harassed brigand and a surprising pitfall for the unwary gardener. In smaller cavities we concealed treasure of stones decked with the colours left behind by the painters at the last spring-cleaning, and if we could not wholly convince ourselves of their intrinsic value, they at least bore adequate resemblance to the treasures of Aladdin’s cave, as revealed to us in pantomime. We kept the knowledge of the spots where these treasures were buried a close secret, even from each other, and it was etiquette for the finder of one of these repositories to remove its contents and conceal them elsewhere. The conflict between seeker and finder never languished, and men who rose up millionaires would go to bed paupers.
Like all sincere artists, we did not allow our own efforts to hinder a just appreciation of those of others, and we had the utmost admiration for rabbits, down whose enchanted burrows we would peerlongingly, reflecting wisely how fine a home it must be that had so romantic and fascinating an entrance. For us half the charm of “Alice” lay in the natural and sensible means by which she reached her wonderland, though we could never bring ourselves to forgive the author for pretending that his clearly veracious narrative was only a dream. This, we recognised, was an obvious grown-up device for preventing the youthful from slipping away from governesses to wonderlands of their own, and true enough we found rabbit-holes oddly reluctant to admit our small bodies, even though we widened their mouths with our trowels. Looking-glasses, it may be mentioned, proved no less refractory, and at this day, it is said, children find it impossible to emulate the flying feats of “Peter Pan,” though they carefully follow the directions. It is clear that these grown-up authors are not wholly straightforward with their youthful readers, but guard the Olympian interests by concealing some essential part of the ritual in these matters. Sooner or later the children find them out, and expel them fromall nurseries, playrooms, gardens, and places where youth and wisdom congregate.
But if we could not tread those long corridors into which the rabbits scuttled so featly on our approach, there was nothing to hinder us from digging a tunnel to fairyland of our own. The grand project formed, all the forces of the garden would unite, and we would dig seriously for an hour or so. At the end of that time somebody’s foot would be hurt by a spade, or some bright spirit would suggest that we should fill the hole with water and call it a lake. Or, perhaps, it would be teatime—at all events, we never got to fairyland at all. Or did we? As we grow old our memories fade, but dimly I seem to remember a garden that was like no garden I have found in grown-up places. It is possible that we did reach fairyland, treading the same road that Alice and Cinderella and Aladdin had trod before us. Perhaps a grown-up writer may be pardoned for forgetting.
Iamwilling to leave to other and more skilful hands the pleasure of narrating the joys and trials of county cricket, club cricket, and the splendid cricket of country houses and village greens. Not that my task is the more modest, for, having a just regard for relative values, I think that it is of cricket I write, such cricket as small boys play in dreams (ah, me, those sixes that small boys hit in dreams!); such cricket as the ghosts enjoy at nights at Lord’s. It is well for the eye to take pleasure in shining flannels and ivory-white boots; there is a thrill in the science of the game, the swerve of the new red ball, the quick play of the batsmen’s feet; but I think that when good cricketers die it is not to such elaborate sport as this that they betake themselves in the happy playing-fields. To mow the astonisheddaisies in quick retort to the hardly gentlemanly sneak; to pull like Mr. Jessop because one knows no better; to be bowled by every straight yorker; to slog at full pitches with close-shut eyes; thus and thus only is the cricket of Arcadia.
In its simplest form we played it in the garden after dinner, but even here environment and our imaginations combined to make it complicated. The lawn was small, and there were flower-beds and windows to be considered. The former did not trouble us very much; indeed, we lopped the French lilies with a certain glee, but a broken window was a more serious business, and lofty drives to the off were therefore discouraged. Yet once, I recollect, the ball was sent through the same window three times in an afternoon. Of course, the unfortunate batsman who allowed his enthusiasm thus to outdrive his discretion was out, as also was he who hit the ball into the next garden. But this latter rule was rather conventional than imposed by necessity, for we were fortunate in the possession of a charming neighbour; and sometimes youth,adventuring in search of cricket-balls, would be regaled with seed-cake and still lemonade, and return rampant to his comrades. But the great zest of our games lay in our impersonation of real famous cricketers. We would take two county sides, and divide the rôles of their members amongst us, so that each of us would represent two or three members of each team. The score-sheets of these matches would convey a strange impression to the erudition of the New Zealander. For the greatest cricketers failed to score frequently, and, indeed, inevitably if they happened to be left-handed bats. So far our passion for accuracy carried us, but, like Tom Sawyer, we had to “lay on” that we bowled left-handed when it was in the part, while realistic impersonations of lightning bowlers were too dangerous to the batsman to be permitted.
These great contests did not pass without minor disagreements. The rights of age were by no means waived, and in those days I was firmly convinced that the l.b.w. rule had been invented by the M.C.C. to assist elder brothers in getting their rights. Moreover,there was always high argument over the allocation of the parts of the more popular cricketers. My sister, I remember, would retire wrathfully from the game if she were not allowed to be K. J. Key, and so, when Surrey was playing, we had to permit her to be titular captain. Girls are very keen at cricket, but they are not good at it. Or perhaps in the course of the game “W. G.” would find it necessary to chase Lockwood all over the field for bowling impudently well. Yet while we mimicked our elders we secretly thought Olympian cricket a poor, unimaginative game without any quarrels. It was thrilling to bat for the honour of Mr. Fry, or to make a fine catch in the long field for Mr. Mason’s sake, but our personal idiosyncrasies also had their value.
When we went away for our holidays it was ours to adventure with bat and ball on unaccustomed grounds: meadow cricket was tiresome, for the ball would hide itself in the long grass; and seaside cricket, though exhilarating, was too public a business to be taken really seriously. But cricket in the pinewoods was delightful—almost, Ithink, the best cricket of all. The soft needles made an admirable pitch, and we had all the trees for fielders. If you hit the ball against a tree full-pitch, you were out, and it was strange how those patient, silent fieldsmen, who never dropped catches, seemed to arrange themselves, as the game progressed, in the conventional places in the field. Point would be there, and mid-off, and some safe men in the slips. Overhead the birds would call in the trees, and there were queer echoes when you hit the ball hard, as though Pan were watching from some dim pavilion and crying his applause. Really I wonder how we dared, or perhaps it were fitter to wonder why we dare no longer.
The oddest cricket I ever played was with a gardener, a reticent, impassive man, who came and played with me when sudden mumps had exiled me from my holiday-making comrades. He would bowl to me silently for hours, only parting his lips now and again to murmur the name of the stump which he proposed to hit with his next ball, and no efforts of mine could prevent his grim prophecies from being fulfilled. When I gavehim his innings he would pat my widest and most wily balls back to me politely until he thought I was tired, and then he would let me bowl him. This unequal contest was not cricket as I knew it, but it fascinated me nevertheless. At night in my bed I would hit his bowling all over the world and upset his stumps with monotonous ease. By day I could only serve his humour. The devil was in the man.
The bats with which we played were normal save in size, but the balls varied. In times of prosperity we had real leather cricket-balls, but the balls known as “compos” were more common. When new they had a noble appearance, but use made them rough and like dry earth in the hand, and then they were apt to sting the fingers of the unwary cricketer. The most perilous kind of ball of all was the size of a cricket-ball, but made of solid rubber, and deadly alike to batsman and fieldsman. For some reason or other the proper place in which to carry a cricket-ball was the trousers, or rather knickerbockers, pocket. The curious discomfort of this practice lingers in themind. Soft balls are of no use in real cricket; but if you bore a hole in them and fill them with water they make very good bombs for practical anarchists.
Later came school cricket, but it is significant that the impression that lingers is of the long drives home in the dusk from out-matches rather than of the cricket itself. We would walk up the hills to rest the horses, playing “touch” and imprisoning unfortunate glow-worms in wooden matchboxes. And later still came visits to Lord’s and the Oval, when it was my fortune to see some of our old heroes in the flesh. Certainly they made more runs than they had been wont to do in the past, but— It is not wise to examine our heroes too closely, though I am not alone in thinking that first-class cricketers are lacking a little in the old spirit. Indeed, how can they hope to keep it, they who are grown so wise?
Therewere two kinds of gardening to employ our sunny hours—the one concerned with the vast tracts of the Olympians, the other with the cultivation of those intimate patches of earth known as “the children’s gardens,” wherein was waged an endless contest between Nature and our views of what a garden should be. Of the joys of this nobler order of tillage I have written elsewhere, and I may not penetrate now into that mysterious world beyond the shrubbery, where plants assumed the proportions of mammoth trees, and beds of mustard-and-cress took the imaginative eye of youth as boundless prairies. But if the conventional aims of grown-up gardening set limits to our fancy, if their ideal of beauty in the garden—unfriendly as it was to cricket and the fiercer outbreaks of Indians—was noneof ours, we found, nevertheless, certain details in the process by which they sought to attain their illusory ends stimulating and wholly delightful. Flowers might inspire in us no more than a rare and short-lived curiosity, but the watering-pot (and even better the garden-hose) were our very good friends. Tidiness was no merit in the garden of our dreams, but our song of joy rose straight to heaven with the smoke of bonfires. Meadows were more to our taste than the prim culture of lawns, but in our hands the lawn-mower became a flaming chariot, and we who drove it as unscorched Phaetons praised for the zest with which we pursued our pleasure by all Olympus.
It was one of the charms of childhood that such praise would sometimes fall from the lips of our rulers as suddenly and as mysteriously as their censure. It was pleasant, after a gorgeous afternoon spent in extinguishing imaginary conflagrations with the garden hose to be congratulated on the industry with which we had watered the flowers. It was pleasant to be rewarded with chocolates from France for burningwitches on the rubbish-heap behind the greenhouse. As a matter of fact, we never “helped” the gardener unless it suited us, and we would have hidden in the shrubbery a whole day rather than be entrapped into half an hour’s weeding—an occupation which we regarded in the light of a severe punishment. And the odd confusion in the grown-up mind between right and wrong never ceased to intrigue us. When my elder brother, in a sentimental hour, flung a wreath of roses on to the stately head of the aunt of the moment, we knew that it was a pretty thought, very happily translated into action; but the Olympians treated it as a crime. Yet it was not his fault that the thorns tore her hair; had there been any thornless roses he would probably have used them. And, being honest, we wondered no less when we were praised for playing with the garden-hose, that coiled about our legs like wet snakes, and made our stockings wet on the warmest summer day; for in our hearts we knew that into any occupation so pleasant must surely enter the elements of crime. But the rulers of our destinywould bid us change our wet clothes with a calm brow, and would congratulate each other on our interest in the garden. We lived in a strange world.
The judgments of the gardener we could better understand, though, alas! we had to sum him up as unreliable. He was a twisted little man who had been to sea in his youth, and we knew that he had been a pirate because he had a red face, an enormous clasp-knife, and knew how to make every imaginable kind of knot. Moreover, there was a small barrel in the tool-house that had manifestly held gunpowder once upon a time. Such evidence as this was not to be refuted, but we had to conclude that he had been driven from the High Seas in disgrace, for he was pitifully lacking in the right pirate spirit. No pirate, we felt, would have taken the tale of our petty misdeeds to the Olympian courts for settlement, yet this is what Esau did under cover of a duplicity that aggravated the offence. In one and the same hour he would expound to us the intricacies of the Chinese knot with many friendly and sensible observations,and tell the shocked Olympians that we had thrown his rose-sticks all over the garden in the manner of javelins. Captain Shark, of the barqueRapacious, would not have acted like this, if it was conceivable that that sinister hero could have turned gardener. Perhaps he would have smitten us sorely with the Dutch hoe, or scalped us with his pruning-knife by means of a neat twist learnt in Western America, but whatever form his revenge might have assumed he would have scorned to betray us to the people who had forgotten how to play. Esau was a sad knave.
And, unlike the Olympians, he had no illusions as to the value of our labours in the garden, treating our generous assistance with the scantiest gratitude, and crediting our enthusiasm with the greater part of Nature’s shortcomings. Whenever our horticultural efforts became at all spirited he would start up suddenly from behind a hedge and admonish us as the boy in “Prunella” admonishes the birds. He would not allow us to irrigate the flower-beds by means of a system of canals; he checked, or at leastattempted to check, our consumption of fruit, deliciously unripe (has any one noticed that an unripe greengage eaten fresh from the tree is a gladder thing than any ripe fruit?); he would not let us play at executions with the scythe, or at avalanches with the garden-roller. The man’s soul was a cabbage, and I fear that he regarded us as a tiresome kind of vermin that he might not destroy.
Nevertheless, as the Olympians liked to see us employed in the garden, he could not wholly refuse our proffered aid, and he would watch our adventures with the garden-hose and the lawn-mower, with his piratical features incarnadined, as it were, by the light of his lurid past. Naturally, water being a good friend of children, to water the garden was the most popular task of all, and as I was the youngest brother it was but rarely that I was privileged to experience that rare delight. To feel the cool rush of the water through fingers hot with play and the comfortable trickle down one’s sleeve, to smite a plant with muddy destruction and to hear the cheerful sound madeby the torrent in falling on to the soaked lawn—these and their fellow-emotions may not be those of adult gardeners, but they are not to be despised. But as I have said, they were not for me, and usually I had to be content with mowing the lawn, an occupation from which I drew a full measure of placid enjoyment.
Age dims our realisation of the emotional significance of our own actions, and it is only by an effort of memory that I can arrive at the philosophy of the contented mower of lawns. I suppose that professional gardeners find the labour monotonous, lacking both the artistic interest of such work as pruning and the scientific subtleties of cucumber-growing; but youth has the precious faculty of finding the extraordinary in the commonplace, and I had only to drag the lawn-mower from its rugged bed among the forks and spades in the tool-house, to embark on a sea of intricate and diverse adventure.
The very appearance of the thing was cheery and companionable, with its hands outstretched to welcome mine, and its coatof green more vivid than any lawn. To seize hold of its smooth handles was like shaking hands with an old friend, and as it rattled over the gravel path it chattered to me in the gruff tones of a genial uncle. Once on the smooth lawn its voice thrilled to song, tremulous and appealing, and filled with the throbbing of great wings. Even now I know no sound that cries of the summer so poignantly as the intermittent song of the lawn-mower heard far off through sunny gardens. And cheered by that song I might drive my chariot, or it might be my plough, where I would. Not for me the stiff brocaded pattern beloved of Esau; I made curves, skirting the shadows of the tall poplars or cutting the lawn into islands and lagoons. Over the grass-box—or the nose-bag, as we called it—the grass danced like a mist of green flies, and I beheaded the daisies with the zest of a Caligula, pausing sometimes to marvel at those modest blossoms that survived my passage. I marvelled, too, with the cold inhumanity of youth, at the injudicious earthworms that tried to stay my progress, and perished fortheir pains. Sometimes a stray pebble would grate unpleasantly on the blades and waken my lulled senses with a jerk; sometimes I would drive too close to a flower-bed, and munched fragments of pansies and wallflowers would glow amongst the grass in the grass-box.
No doubt a part of my enjoyment lay in the feeding of that natural spirit of destructiveness that present-day Olympians satisfy with frequent gifts of clockwork toys, ingenious mechanisms very proper to be inquired into by young fingers. But there was more in it than that. I liked the smell of the newly cut grass, and I would run my fingers through it and press damp, warm handfuls of it to my face to win the full savour of it. I even liked the more pungent odour of the grass-heap where last week’s grass lay drying in the sun. And the effort necessary to drive the worker of wonders across the lawn gave me a pleasant sense of my own sturdiness.
But the fact remains that, with all these reasons, I cannot wholly fathom the true philosophy of lawn-mowing with my adultmind. I have set down all the joys that I remember, but some significant fact, some essential note of enchantment, is missing. What did I think about as I pressed to and fro with my lawn-mower? Sometimes, perhaps, I was a ploughman, guiding vast horses along the crests of mountains, and pausing now and again to examine the treasures that my labour had revealed in the earth, leather bags of guineas and jewelled crowns that sparkled through their mask of clay. Sometimes I might be a charioteer driving a team of mad horses round the circus for Nero’s pleasure, or a fireman driving a fire-engine scatheless through bewildered streets. But with all I believe that sometimes I was no more than a little boy, mowing the lawn of a sunny garden, loving the task for its own sake, and inspired by no subtler spirit than that which led Esau to cultivate cabbages with dogged enthusiasm. It would not do to condemn that dishonoured pirate because he saw heaven as a kitchen-garden and regarded flowers as the fond toys of the Olympian dotage. He, too, had his illusions; he, too, while he sowed the seed hadvisions of an impossible harvest. His ultimate fate eludes my memory, but doubtless he has finished with his husbandry by now. I, too, no longer mow the lawn save when arrayed in fantastic knickerbockers and dream-shod as of yore I trim the grass-plats of sleep with a lawn-mower that sings as birds no longer sing. What the purpose of my youthful labours may have been I do not know. . . .Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Perhaps I was already enrolled in the employment agency of destiny as a writer of idle articles.