Neil and Tintinnabulum

An Interlude for Parents

By J. M. Barrie

In writing a story a safe plan must be to imitate your favourite author. Until he was nine, when he abandoned the calling, Neil was my favourite author, and I therefore decide to follow his method of dividing the story into short chapters so as to make it look longer.

When he was nine I took him to his preparatory, he prancing in the glories of the unknown until the hour came for me to go, “the hour between the dog and the wolf,” and then he was afraid. I said that in the holidays all would be just as it had been before, but the newly-wise one shook his head; and on my return home, when I wandered out unmanned to look at his tool-shed, I found these smashing words in his writing pinned to the door:

This Establishment is now Permanently Closed.

I went white as I saw that Neil already understood life better than I did.

Soon again he was on the wing. Here is interesting autobiographical matter I culled years later from the fly-leaf of hisCæsar: “Aetat 12, height 4 ft. 11, biceps 8¼, kicks the beam at 6-2.”

The reference is to a great occasion when Neil stripped at his preparatory (clandestinely) for a Belt with the word “Bruiser” on it. I am reluctant to boast about him (this is untrue), yetmust mention that he won the belt, with which (such are the ups and downs of life) he was that same evening gently belted by his preceptor.

It is but fair to Neil to add that he cut a glittering figure in those circles: captain of the footer, and twenty-six against Juddy’s.

“And even then,” his telegram to me said, “I was only bowled off my pads.”

A rural cricket match in buttercup time with boys at play, seen and heard through the trees; it is surely the loveliest scene in England and the most disarming sound. From the ranks of the unseen dead, for ever passing along our country lanes on their eternal journey, the Englishman falls out for a moment to look over the gate of the cricket field and smile. Let Neil’s 26 against Juddy’s, the first and perhaps the only time he is to meet the stars on equal terms, be our last sight of him as a child. He is walking back bat in hand to the pavilion, an old railway carriage. An unearthly glory has swept over the cricket ground. He tries to look unaware of it; you know the expression and the bursting heart. Our smiling Englishman who cannot open the gate waits to make sure that this boy raises his cap in the one right way (without quite touching it, you remember), and then rejoins his comrades. Neil gathers up the glory and tacks it over his bed. “The End,” as he used to say in his letters.

I never know him quite so well again. He seems henceforth to be running to me on a road that is moving still more rapidly in the opposite direction.

The scene has changed. Stilled is the crow of Neil, for he is now but one of the lowliest at a great public school, where he reverberates but little. The scug Neil fearfully running errandsfor his fag-master is another melancholy reminder of the brevity of human greatness.

Lately a Colossus he was now infinitely less than nothing. What shook him was not the bump as he fell, but the general indifference to his having fallen. He lay there like a bird in the grass winded by a blunt-headed arrow, and was cold to his own touch. The Bruiser Belt and his score against Juddy’s had accompanied him to school on their own legs, one might say, so confident were they of a welcome from his mantelshelf, but after an hour he hid them beneath the carpet. Hidden by him all over that once alluring room, as in disgrace, were many other sweet trifles that went to the making of the flame that had been Neil; his laugh was secreted, say in the drawer of his desk; his pranks were stuffed into his hat-box, his fell ambitions were folded away between two pairs of trousers, and now and then a tear would mix with the soapy water as he washed his cheerless face.

In that dreadful month or more I am dug up by his needs and come again into prominence, gloating because he calls for me, sometimes unable to do more than stand afar off on the playing field, so that he may at least see me nigh though we cannot touch. The thrill of being the one needed, which I had never thought to know again. I have leant over a bridge, and enviously watching the gaiety of two attractive boys, now broken to the ways of school, have wished he was one of them, till I heard their language and wondered whether this was part of the necessary cost.

Leaden-footed Neil in the groves that were to become so joyous to him. He had to refashion himself on a harsher model, and he set his teeth and won, blaming me a little for not having broken to him the ugly world we can make it. One by one his hidden parts peeped out from their holes and ran to him, once more to make his wings; stronger wings than of yore, though some drops of dew had to be shaken off.

By that time my visits were being suffered rather than acclaimed. It was done with an exquisite politeness certainly, but before I was out of sight he had dived into some hilarious rumpus. Gladly for his sake I knew my place.

His first distinct success was as a gargler.

“WE GENERALLY GARGLE A SONG”

“You remember how I used to hate gargling at home,” says an early letter, “and you forced me to do it. Jolly good thingyou did force me.” His first “jolly” at that school. At once I began to count them.

“Everyone has to gargle just now,” he continues, “and we all do it at the same time, and it must sound awfully rum to people passing along the street. We generally gargle a song, and there was a competition in ‘Home, sweet Home’ among the scugs at m’ tutor’s, and the judge said I gargled it longest.”

Soon afterwards he had the exultation of being recognised as an entity by one of the masters.

“I was walking with Dolman mi.,” his letter says, “and we met a new beak called Tiverley and he pretended to fence with me and said ‘Whose incomparable little noodle are you?’” This, apparently, was all that happened, but Neil adds with obvious elation, “It was awfully decent of him.” (Hail to thee, Tiverley, may “a house” anon be thy portion for heartening a new boy in the dwindling belief that he exists.)

Dolman mi. evidently had no run on this occasion, but he is older and more famous than Neil (which makes the thing the more flattering). It is a school whither many royal scions are sent, and when camera men go down to photograph the new one, Dolman mi. usually takes his place. He has already been presented to newspaper readers as the heir to three thrones. Of course it is the older boys who select, scrape and colour him (if necessary) for this purpose, but they must see something in him that the smaller boys don’t see.

Neil’s next step was almost a bound forward; he got a tanning from the head of the house. This also he took in the proper spirit, boasting indeed of the vigour with which Beverley had laid on. (Thee, also, Beverley, I salute, as the Immensity who raised Neil from the ranks of the lowly, the untanned.)

Quite the amiable, sensible little schoolboy, readers may be saying, but that Neil was amiable or sensible I indignantly deny.He was merely waiting; that shapely but enquiring nose of his was only considering how best to strike once more for leadership. So when the time came he was ready; and he has been striking ever since, indeed, there is nothing that I think he so much resembles as a clock that has got out of hand.

All the other small boys in his house had the same opportunity, but they missed it. It was provided by some learned man (name already tossed to oblivion) who delivered unto them a lecture entitledHelp One Another. The others behaved in the usual way, cheered the lecturer heartily when he took a drink of water, said “Silly old owl!” as they went out and at once forgot his Message. Not so Neil. With the clearness of vision that always comes to him when anything to his own advantage is toward, he saw that the time and the place and the loved one (himself) had arrived together. Portents in the sky revealed to him that hismétierat school was to Help Others. There would be something sublime about it had he not also seen with the same vividness that he must make a pecuniary charge of threepence. He decided astutely to begin with W. W. Daly.

As we write these words an extraordinary change comes over our narrative. In the dead silence that follows this announcement to our readers you may hear, if you listen intently, a scurrying of feet, which is nothing less than Neil being chased out of the story. The situation is one probably unparalleled in fiction.

Elated by your curiosity we now leave Neil for a moment (say, searching with his foot for a clean shirt among a pile of clothing on the floor), mount to the next landing and enter the second room on the left, the tenant of which immediately dives beneath his table under the impression that we are a fag-master shouting“Boy.” We drag him out and present him to you as W. W. Daly. He is five feet one, biceps 7¾, and would probably kick the beam at about 6½ stone. He is not yet celebrated for anything except for being able to stick pins into his arm up to the head; otherwise a creature of small account who, but for Neil’s patronage, would never have risen to the distinction of being written about, except perhaps by his mother.

W. W.’s first contact with school was made dark by a strange infirmity, an incapacity to remember the Latin equivalent for the word “bell.” Many Latin words were as familiar to him as his socks (perhaps even more so, for he often wears the socks of others), and those words he would give you on demand with the brightness of a boy eager to oblige; but daily did his tutor insist (like one who will have nothing for breakfast but eggs and bacon) on having “bell” alone. Daily was W. W. floored.

It is now that Neil appears with his sunny offer of Help. He took up the case so warmly that he entirely neglected his own studies, which is one of his failings. True he charged threepence (which we shall henceforth write as 3d., as it is so sure to come often into these chronicles), but this detracts little from his grandeur, for the mere apparatus required cost him what he calls a bob.

His first procedure was to affix to the bell-pull a card bearing in bold letters the device “Tintinnabulum.” This seems simple but was complicated by there being no bell in W. W.’s room. Neil bought a bell (W. W. being “stony”), and round the walls he constructed a gigantic contrivance of wire and empty ginger-beer bottles, culminating at one end in the bell and at the other end in W. W.’s foot as he lay abed. The calculation, a well-founded one, was that if the sleeper tossed restlessly the bell would ring and he would awake. He was then, as instructed by Neil, first, to lie still but as alert as if visited by a ghost, and to think hard for the word. If, however, it still eluded him he was to turnupon it the electric torch, kept beneath his pillow for this purpose and borrowed at 1d.per week from Dolman mi., spot the tricky “Tintinnabulum” in its lair and say the word over to himself a number of times before returning to his slumbers, something attempted, something done to earn a night’s repose.

All this did W. W. conscientiously do, and if there was delay in bringing Tintinnabulum to heel the fault was not that of Neil, but of inferior youths who used to substitute cards inscribed “Honorificabilitudinitatibus,” “Porringer,” “Xylobalsamum,” “Beelzebobulus,” and other likely words.

Eventually he achieved; a hard-won ribbon for his benefactor whom we are about to call Neil for the last time.

There was a feeling among those who had betted on the result that it should be celebrated in no uncertain manner, and a dinner with speeches not being feasible (though undoubtedly he would have liked it), he was re-christened Tintinnabulum, and the name stuck.

So Tintinnabulum let it be henceforth in these wandering pages. Neil the disinherited may be pictured pattering back to me on his naked soles and knocking me up in the night.

“Neil,” I cry (in dressing gown and a candle), “what has happened? Have you run away from school?”

“Rather not,” says the plaintive ghost, shivering closer to the fire, “I was kicked out.”

“By your tutor?” I ask blanching.

“No, by Tintinnabulum. He is becoming such a swell among the juniors that he despises me and the old times. And now he has kicked me out.”

“Drink this hot milk, Neil, and tell me more. What are those articles you are hugging beneath your pyjamas?”

“They are the Bruiser Belt and the score against Juddy’s. He threw them out after me.”

“Don’t take it so much to heart, Neil. I’ll find an honoured place for them here, and you and I will have many a cosy talk by the fire about Tintinnabulum.”

“I don’t want to talk about him,” he says, his hands so cold that he spills the milk, “I would rather talk about the days before there was him.”

Well, perhaps that was what I meant.

Cruel Tintinnabulum.

Soon after the events described in our last chapter I knew from Tintinnabulum’s letters that he was again Helping. They were nevertheless communications so guarded as to be wrapped in mystery.

His letters from school tend at all times to be more full of instruction for my guidance than of information about where he stands in his form. I notice that he worries less than did an older generation about how I am to dress when I visit him, but he is as pressing as ever that the postal order should be despatched at once, and firmly refuses to write at all unless I enclose stamped envelopes. On important occasions he even writes my letters for me, requesting me to copy them carefully and not to put in any words of my own, as when for some reason they have to be shown to his tutor. He then writes, “Begin ‘Dear T.’ (not ‘Dearest T.’), and end ‘Yours affec.’ (not ‘Yours affectionately’).”

The mysterious letters that preceded the holidays were concerned with W. W. Daly, whom I was bidden (almost ordered) to invite to our home for that lengthy period, “as his mother is to be away at that time on frightfully important business in which I have a hand.”

I was instructed to write “Dear Mrs. Daly (not “dearest”), I understand that you are to be away on important business during the holidays, and so I have the pleasure to ask you to allow your son to spend the holidays with me and my boy who is a general favourite and very diligent. Come, come, I will take no refusal, and I am, Yours affec.”

I did as I was told, but as I now heard of the lady for the first time I thought it wisest not to sign my letter to her “Yours affec.” Thus did I fall a victim to Tintinnabulum’s wiles.

What could this frightfully important business of Mrs. Daly’s be in which he “had a hand”?

“ON IMPORTANT OCCASIONS HE EVEN WRITES MY LETTERS FOR ME.”

You may say (when you hear of his dark design) that I should at once have insisted on an explanation, but explanations are barred in the sport that he and I play, which is the greatest of all parlour games, the Game of Trying to Know Each Other without asking questions. It is strictly a game for two, who, I suppose, should in perfect conditions be husband and wife; it is played silently and it never lasts less than a life-time. In panegyrics on love (a word never mentioned between us two players), the game is usually held to have ended in a draw when they understand each other so well that before the one speaks or acts the other knows what he or she is going to say or do. This, however, is a position never truly reached in the game, and if it were reached, such a state of coma for the players could only be relieved by a cane in the hand of the stronger, or by the other bolting, to show him that there was one thing about her which he had still to learn.

No, no, these doited lovers when they think the haven is in sight have set sail only. Tintinnabulum and I have made a hundred moves, but we are well aware that we don’t know each other yet; at least, I don’t know Tintinnabulum, I won’t swear that he does not think that he at last knows me. So when he brought W. W. home with him for the holidays it was for me to find out without inquiry how he had been helping Mrs. Daly (and for what sum). He knew that I was cogitating, I could see his impertinent face regarding me demurely, as if we were at a chess board and his last move had puzzled me, which indeed was the situation.

All I knew of her was that she had lately remarried and that W. W. had been invited to spend his holidays with us while she was away on her honeymoon.

Good heavens, could Tintinnabulum have had some Helping part in the lady’s marriage? This boy is beginning to scare me.

I studied him and W. W. at their meals and stole uponthem at their play. There could not have been more cherubic faces.

But then I remembered the two cherubic faces I had watched from a bridge.

I went to Tintinnabulum’s bedchamber and told him I could not rest until I knew what he had been doing to that lady. In the days of Neil it had been a room of glamour, especially the bed therein, where were performed nightly between 6.15 and 6.30 precisely, the brighter plays of Shakespeare, two actors, but not a sign of them anywhere unless you became suspicious of the hump in the coverlet. Never have the plays gone with greater merriment since Mr. Shakespeare made up “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in his Judith’s hump.

No glamour of course in the room of a public schoolboy, unless it was provided by his discarded raiment, which lay like islands on the floor. However, I found Tintinnabulum in affable humour, sitting tailor-like in bed, dressed in half of his pyjamas, reading a book and eating an apple. He had doubtless found the apple or the book just as he was about to enter the other half of his night attire.

“What could I have been doing to her?” he asked invitingly. (He likes to be hunted.)

The robing of him having been completed, I said with humorous intent, “You may have been luring her into matrimony against her better judgment.”

“She is nuts on him,” Tintinnabulum said, taking my remark seriously.

“But you can’t have had anything to do with it?”

He nodded, with his teeth in the apple.

“Of course this is nonsense,” I said, though with a sinking, “you don’t know her.”

“I didn’t need to know her for a thing like that.”

I tried sarcasm. “I should have thought it was essential.” He shook his head.

“I heard W. W. say to-day,” I continued in the same vein, “that she is spending the honeymoon on the Riviera; you are not implying, are you, that it was you who sent her there?”

“At any rate, if it hadn’t been for me,” he replied, taking a good bite, “she wouldn’t be on the Riviera and there wouldn’t be a honeymoon.”

I became alarmed. “Take that apple out of your mouth and tell me what you mean.”

The mysterious boy of the so open countenance, as he told me the queer tale in bed that night, was superbly unaware of its queerness, and was more interested in standing on his head to see how far his feet would reach up the wall. He far exceeded the record that had been left by Neil.

“I wasn’t the one who made her fond of the chappie,” he said by way of beginning. “She did that bit herself.”

“Very generous of you to give her that amount of choice,” I conceded.

“But she stuck there,” said he. “It was W. W. who told me how she had stuck. W. W. has a sister called Patricia. Their mother’s name is Mildred. That is all I know about her,” he added with great lightness of touch, “except that I worked the marriage.”

This was the first time I had heard of W. W.’s having a sister.

“He doesn’t speak about her much,” Tintinnabulum explained, “because they are twins. I say, don’t let on to him that I told you he was a twin.”

So far as I can gather, W. W. keeps the existence of his girl twin dark from boys in general in case it should make them think less of him.

“He didn’t ask me to help him out till things were in an awful mess at home, and then he showed me some of Patricia’s letters.”

“If I were cross-examining you,” I pointed out, “I should say that your statement is not quite clear. Tell the Jury what you mean, and don’t blow the apple pits at the portrait of your uncle the bishop.”

“I bet you I get him in the calves twice in three shots,” he said.

“An ignoble ambition,” I told him; “answer my question.”

“Well, you see, Patricia had found out all about her mother’s being fond of the man. His name begins with K, but I forget the rest of it.”

I ventured to say that the least he could do for a man whose life he had so strangely altered was to remember his name.

“W. W. will know it,” he said with the carelessness of genius.

“Even now,” I pressed him, “I don’t see where you come in. Did Patricia object to Mr. K.?”

“Oh, no, she thinks no end of him. So does W. W.” He added handsomely, “I wouldn’t have let her get married if they had shied at it.”

“In that case——”

“It wasn’t Patricia that was the bother,” he explained, running the apple up and down his arm like a mouse, “it was Mrs. Daly. You know how funny ladies are about some things.”

“I do not,” I said severely.

“Well, it was about marrying a second time. Mrs. Daly couldn’t make up her mind whether it would be fair to W. W. and Patricia. She knew they liked him all right, but not whether they liked him as much as that.”

“Tell me how Patricia found all this out, and don’t bump about so much.”

“She was watching,” he replied airily. “She is that kind. I daresay the thing wasn’t difficult to find out if all the stuff she said in her letters to W. W. was true. They were awful letters, saying her mother was in anguishes about what was the best thing to do for her progeny. One letter would say, ‘Mr. K. made a lovely impression on mother to-day and I don’t think she can resist much longer.’ Then the next would say, ‘I fear all is up, for they have been crying together in the drawing-room, and when he left he banged the door.’”

“Their mother hadn’t a notion,” Tintinnabulum assured me, making an eye-glass of the apple, “that they knew there was anything in the wind.”

“Nor would they have had any such notion,” I rapped out, “if they had been children of an earlier date.”

“I suppose we are cleverer now,” he admitted. He became introspective. “I expect the war did it. It’s rummy what a difference the war has made. Before the war no one could hold two eggs in his mouth and hop across a pole. Now everyone can do it.”

I requested him to stick to the point.

“Why didn’t Patricia the emancipated go to her mother and inform her that all was well?”

“That is the very thing W. W. and she bickered about in their letters. He was always writing to her to do that, but she said it would be unladylike.”

“Very un-shingled of her to trouble about that,” I got in. “But had she any proposal to make to W. W.?”

“Rather. She was always badgering W. W. to write to their mother saying they knew all and wanted her to go at it blind. She thought it would come better from him, being male. Thatwas what made him come to me in the end. He told me all about it and asked me if I could help.”

“And what was your reply?” I asked with some interest. “Don’t tell me,” I added hurriedly (we were back at the game, you see), “I want to guess. You said immediately, ‘All right’?”

He approved.

“Did it ever strike you,” I enquired curiously, “that you might not be able to help?”

“I can’t remember,” the unfathomable one answered. “I say, would you like to see me do a dive over your head?”

Offer declined.

“You see,” he continued, “W. W. is rather—rather——”

“Rather a retiring boy when there is trouble ahead,” I suggested. “Well, what did you devise?”

“I said I couldn’t do anything until I knew the colour of Patricia’s hair and eyes.”

This took me aback, though it is quite in Tintinnabulum’s manner.

“How could that help?” I had to enquire instead of risking a move.

“I couldn’t get a beginning,” he insisted doggedly, “till I found out that.” (To this day I don’t know what he meant.)

“No difficulty in finding out from W. W.,” I said.

Here I was wrong. W. W. had no idea of the colour of his dear little sister’s eyes but presumed that, as he and she were twins, their eyes must be of the same hue. There followed a scene, undoubtedly worthy of some supreme artist, in which, by the light of a match, Tintinnabulum endeavoured to discover colour of W. W.’s eyes, W. W. being again unable to supply desired information. The match always going out just as Tintinnabulum was on the eve of discovery, it was decided by him that W. W. should write to his twin for particulars (letter dictated by Tintinnabulum).Patricia’s reply was, “Who is it that wants to know? Eyes too expressive to be blue, too lovely to be grey,” and it irritated the two seekers after truth.

“We didn’t ask her what colour they were not,” Tintinnabulum said to me witheringly, “but what colour they were.”

In the end, rather than bother any more with her, they risked putting her eyes down as browny black. This determined, Tintinnabulum apprized his client that Patricia was to write the letter that would make their mother happy. This nearly led to a rupture.

W. W.(sitting, as they say in the plays, though he might as well be standing): She can’t write a letter to mother when they are living in the same house.

Tintinnabulum(rising, because W. W. sat): It would be a letter to you.

W. W.(contemptibly): That brings me into the thing again.

Tintinnabulum: Shut up and listen. The letter isn’t to be posted. Your mother will find it lying open on Patricia’s desk and read it on the sly.

W. W.(nobly): My mother never does things on the sly.

Tintinnabulum(comprehensively): Oh.

W. W.(hedging): What would the letter say?

Tintinnabulum: It would show her that you and Patricia knew what she was after and both wanted her to marry the chappie, and then she could put it back where she found it and never let on that she had seen it and make all her arrangements with a happy heart.

W. W.: That is what we want, but mother wouldn’t read a letter on the sly.

Tintinnabulum(after thinking it out when he should have been doing his prep.): Look here, if she is so fussy we can tell Patricia to leave the letter open on the floor as if it had blown there, and then when your mother picks it up to put it back on the desk she can’t help taking a look at it.

W. W.: Would that not be reading it on the sly?

Tintinnabulum(with cheerful cynicism): Not for a woman.

W. W.(depressed): It will be an awfully difficult letter to write.

Tintinnabulum(exultant): Fearfully.

W. W.: I don’t think Patricia could do it.

Tintinnabulum: Not she. I’ll do it. Then you copy my letter and she copies yours.

W. W.: 3d.?

Tintinnabulum: Tons more than that.

This scheme was carried out, Tintinnabulum, after a thoughtful study of Patricia’s epistolary style, producing something in this manner, no doubt with the holy look on his face that is always there when he knows he is concocting a masterpiece. (I regret that he has forgotten what he said in the introductory passage, which dealt in an artful feminine manner with her garments and was probably a beauty.)

“Darling Doubly Doubly,

... oh dear, I am so unhappy because I fear the match between darlingest mummy and Mr. K. is not to be hit off. Oh dear, she blows hot and cold and it makes me bleed to see the poor man’s anguishes, and you and me wanting it so much. If only I could think of a lady-like way to tell mummy that we know she wants it and that we want her to go ahead, but I cannot, and it would need a wonder of a man to do it. Oh dear, how lovely it would be, oh dear, how I wish I knew some frightfully clever person, oh dear——”

“I stopped there,” Tintinnabulum told me. “I meant to put in a lot more before I finished, but I wouldn’t let myself go on.”

“Why?” I asked eagerly, aware that he had reached a great moment in his life.

“Because,” he said heavily, “I saw all at once that I had come to the end.” (We are so undemonstrative that I did not embrace him).

The letter was left as arranged, on Mrs. Daly’s floor, and I may say at once that everything went as planned by the Master. Can we not see Mildred (all authors have a right to call their heroine by her Christian name), opening the door of that room? Her beautiful face is down-cast, all the luckier for Tintinnabulum and Co., for she at once sees the life-giving sheet. She picks it up, meaning to replace it on the desk whence it has so obviously fluttered, when a word catches her eye, and not intending to read she reads. An exquisite flush tints her face as she recognises Patricia’s inimitable style. The happy woman is now best left to herself (Come away, Tintinnabulum, you imp).

Dear (not dearest) heroine, you little know who is responsible for your raptures, the indifferent lad now trying to twist one leg round his neck as he finishes his apple. Grudge us not the few minutes in which for literary purposes we have snatched you from the shores of the blue Mediterranean. Thither we now return you to cloudless days and to your K., roses in your cheeks (Tintinnabulum’s roses). And you, O lucky K., when you encounter boys of thirteen, might do worse than have a mysterious prompting to give them a franc or so. I wish you both very happy, and I am, yours affec.

“Shall I send them your love?” I almost hear myself saying to Tintinnabulum.

“If you like,” he replies, preoccupied with what is left of an apple when the apple itself has gone. For it must be admitted of him that he has not boasted of his achievement. His only comment was modesty itself, “Two bob,” he said.

It is almost appalling to reflect that no woman who knows Tintinnabulum (and has two bob) need remain single. Andwhat character apples have, even when being consumed; if I had given him an orange or a pear this chapter would be quite different. With such deep thoughts I put out his light, and took away the other apple which he had hidden beneath his pillow.

As the holidays waned (and after W. W. was safely stowed away in bed) Tintinnabulum gratified me by being willing to talk about Neil. If you had heard us at it you would have sworn that those two had no very close connection, that Neil was merely some interesting whipper-snapper who had played about the house until the manlier Tintinnabulum arrived. He was always spoken of between us as Neil, which obviously suited Tintinnabulum’s dignity, but I wonder how I took to it so naturally myself. I hope I am not a queer one.

By that arrangement Tintinnabulum can make artful enquiries, not unwistful, into his own past, and I can seem (thus goes the game) not to know that he is doing so. He can even commend Neil.

“Pretty decent of him,” he says, discussing the Bruiser Belt and the score against Juddy’s.

“I didn’t think he had it in him,” is even stronger about the sea-trout Neil had landed and been so proud of that he would not lie prone till it was put in a basin by his bedside. He had then slept with one arm over the basin.

Strongest of all is to say that Neil was mad, at present a term not only of approval but even of endearment at the only school that counts (Tintinnabulum speaking). Sometimes we talk of the dark period when Neil, weeping over his first Latin grammar, used to put a merry tune on the gramophone to accompany his woe. He continued to weep as he studied, but always rose at theright time to change the tune. This is a heart-breaker of a memory to me, and Tintinnabulum knows it and puts his hand deliciously on my shoulder (that kindest gesture of man to man).

“The gander must have been mad, quite mad,” he says hurriedly.

How Neil would like to hear Tintinnabulum saying these nice things about him.

Perhaps we all have a Neil. Have you ever wakened suddenly in the night, certain that you heard a bell ring as it once rang or a knocking on your door as only one could knock or a voice of long ago, quite close? Sometimes you rise and wander the house; more often, after waiting alert for a repetition of the sound, you decide that you have been dreaming or that it was the creaking of a window or a board. But I daresay it was none of these things. I daresay it was your Neil.

Perhaps you have become something quite different from what he meant to be. Perhaps he wants to get into the house, not to gaze proudly at you but to strike you.

Some drop their Neil deliberately and can recall clearly the day of the great decision, but most are unaware that he has gone. For instance, it may have been Neil who married the lady and you who gradually took his place, so like him in appearance that she is as deceived as you. Or it may be that she has found you out and knows who it is that is knocking on the door trying to get back to her. You might be scared if you knew that though she is at this moment attending to your wants with a smile for you on her face, her passionate wish is to be done with you. On the other hand, you may be the better fellow of the two. Let us decide that this is how it is.

The last week of the holidays was darkened for Tintinnabulum and W. W. by the shadow of a letter demanded of them by their tutor. It had to be on one of three subjects:

(a) Your Favourite Walk.(b) Your Favourite Game.(c) What shall I do next Half?

(a) Your Favourite Walk.

(b) Your Favourite Game.

A nasty tag attached to m’ tutor’s order said “the letter must be of great length.” Little had they troubled about it till the end loomed, but then they rumbled wrathfully; well was it for their tutor he heard not what they said of him.

Tintinnabulum of course was merely lazy, or on principle resented writing anything for less than 3d.Grievous, however, was the burden on W. W., whose gifts lie not in a literary direction. He is always undone by his clear-headed way of putting everything he knows on any subject into the first sentence. He had a shot at (a), (b) and (c).

Attempt on (a).“My favourite walk is when I do not have far to go to it.” (Here he stuck.)

Attempt on (b).“The game of cricket is my favourite game, and it consists of six stumps, two bats and a ball.” After wandering round the table many times he added, “Nor must we forget the bails.” (Stuck again.)

Attempt on (c).“Next half is summer half, so early school will be half an hour earlier.” (Final stick.)

He then abandoned hope and would, I suppose, have had to run away to sea (if boys still do that) had not Help been nigh.

For a consideration (and you can now guess exactly how much it was) Tintinnabulum offered to write W. W.’s letter for him. I did not see it till later (as you shall learn), indeed the episode was purposely kept dark from me. The subject chosen was “My Favourite Walk,” because Tintinnabulum had a book entitled Walks and Talks with the Little Ones, which never before had he thought might come in handy. Of course such a performer by no means confined himself to purloining from this work, though he did have something to say about how W. W. wandered along his walk carrying a little book into which he put “interestingplants.” Anything less like W. W. thus engaged I cannot conceive, unless it be Tintinnabulum himself.

The miscreant also carefully misspelt several words, as being natural to W. W. Unfortunately (his fatal weakness) he could not keep his own name out of the letter, and he made W. W. say that the favourite walk was “near the house of my kind friend Tintinnabulum, and you know him, sir, for he is in your house, and I mess with him, which is very lucky for me, all the scugs wanting to mess with him and nobody wanting me.”

Could brainy critics, peeled for the pounce, read that human document they would doubtless pause to enquire into its hidden meaning. On the surface it was written (a) to get 3d.out of W. W., (b) to give relief to Tintinnabulum’s ego. To the ordinary reader (with whom to-day we have no concern) this might suffice, but the digger would ask, what is the philosophy of life advanced by the author, is the whole thing an allegory and if so, what is Tintinnabulum’s Message; in short, is he, like the commoner writers, merely saying what he says, or, like the big chaps, something quite different?

Had his tutor considered the letter thus, we might have had a most interesting analysis of it (and no one would have been more interested than Tintinnabulum). But though a favourite of mine (and also of Tintinnabulum) his tutor is just slightly Victorian, and he went for the letter like one of the illiterate.

It was not seen by me until the two hopefuls returned to school, when I received it from their tutor with another one which is uncommonly like it. Investigation has elicited the following data, for which kindly allow me to use (a), (b) and (c) again, as I have taken a fancy to them.

(a) Letter is read and approved by W. W.

(b) W. W. on reflection objects to passage about the honour of messing with Tintinnabulum.

(d) MS. haughtily returned to the author.

(e) The author alters a few words and sends in letter as his own.

(f) W. W. has made a secret copy of the letter and sends it in as his, with the objectionable passage deleted.

(g) Their tutor smells a rat.

(h) He takes me into his confidence.

(i) Days pass but I remain inactive.

(j) He puts the affair into the hands of Beverley, the head of the house.

(k) Triumph of Miss Rachel.

Miss Rachel who is an old friend of ours is slight and frail, say 5 ft. 3, her biceps cannot be formidable and I question whether she could kick the beam however favourably it was placed for her. She is such an admirer of Tintinnabulum that he occasionally writhes, in his fuller knowledge of the subject.

Having led a quiet and uneventful life (so far as I know), Miss Rachel suddenly shoots into the light through her acquaintance with the Beverleys of Winch Park, which is, as it were, nothing; but the great Beverley, Beverley the thunderous, who is head of m’ tutor’s house, is a scion of that family; and now you see what a swell Miss Rachel has become. When Neil (as he then was) was entered for that great school she wrote to Beverley—fancy knowing someone who can write to Beverley—telling him (to Neil’s indignation) what a darling her young friend was and hoping Beverley would look after him and make him his dear little fag. Months elapsed before a reply came, but when it did come it really referred to Tintinnabulum and contained these pregnant words: “As to the person in whom you are interested, I look after him a good deal, and the more I see of him the more I lick him.”

Miss Rachel showed me the letter with exultation. So kind of him, she said, though she was a little distressed that a strapping fellow like Beverley should spell so badly.

More recently I had a letter from Tintinnabulum, which I showed to her as probably denoting the final transaction in the affair of the letter.

“W. W. and I,” it announced very cheerily, “saw Beverley yesterday in his room and he gave each of us six of the best.”

“How charming of Beverley!” Miss Rachel said.

“The best what?” she enquired, but I cannot have heard her, for I made no answer.

I learn that sometimes she thinks it was probably cakes and at other times fives balls, which she knows to be in great demand at that school. I shall not be surprised if Miss Rachel sends a dozen of the best to Beverley.

I note that the dozen of the best shared by these two odd creatures seems to have made them pals again. The proof is that though they began the new half by messing with other youths they are now once more messing together.

“That priceless young cub, W. W.,” occurs in one letter of Tintinnabulum’s.

“W. W. is the lad for me,” he says in the next.

Again, I have a note of thanks for hospitality from W. W. in which he remarks, “Tintinnabulum is as ripping as ever.” This, however, is to be discounted, as, though the letter is signed W. W. Daly, I recognise in it another hand, I recognise this other hand so clearly that I can add a comment in brackets (3d.).

Yes, I can do so (because of a game I have long been playing), but any other person would be deceived, just as m’ tutor was atfirst deceived by the epistles on the favourite walk. He told me that these were so fragrant of W. W. that he had thought Tintinnabulum must be the copy-cat. Indeed, thus it was held until W. W. nobly made confession.

What I must face is this, that Tintinnabulum, being (alas) an artist, has been inside W. W. Not only so, he has since his return to school been inside at least half a dozen other boys, searching for Collinses for them.

A Collins, as no one, perhaps except Miss Austen, needs to be told, is the fashionable name for a letter of thanks for hospitality to a host or hostess. Thus W. W.’s letter to me was a Collins. Somehow its fame has spread through his house, and now Tintinnabulum is as one possessed, writing threepenny Collinses for the deficient. They are small boys as yet, but as the quality of his Help is trumpeted to other houses I conceive Fields, Blues and Choices knocking at his door and begging for a Collins. It will be a great day for Tintinnabulum when Beverley applies.

The Collins letter is a fine art in which those who try the hardest often fall most heavily, and perhaps even m’ tutor or the Provost Himself, at his wit’s end how to put it neatly this time, will yet crave a 3d.worth. It may even be that readers grown grey in the country’s service, who quake at thought of the looming Collins, would like to have Tintinnabulum’s address. It is refused; but I mention, to fret them, that his every Collins is guaranteed different from all his other Collinses, and to be so like the purchaser that it is a photograph.

If you were his client you could accept Saturday to Monday invitations with a light heart. But don’t, when he is at your Collins, go near him and the babe lest he clutch it to his breast and growl. He has the great gift of growling, which will yet make him popular with another sex.

His concentration on the insides of others is of course very disturbing to me, but I should feel still more alarmed if I heard that he had abandoned the monetary charge and, for sheer love of the thing, was turning out Collinses gratis.

To-day there comes a ray of hope from a harassed tutor, who writes that Tintinnabulum has deserted the Collins for googly bowling, the secrets of which he is pursuing with the same terrific intensity. I can picture him getting inside the ball.

You readers may smile when I tell you why I have indited these memories and fancies. It was not done for you but for me, being a foolish attempt to determine, by writing the things down (playing over by myself some of the past moves in the game), whether Tintinnabulum really does like me still. That he should do so is very important to me as he recedes farther from my ken down that road which hurries him from me. I cannot, however, after all, give myself a very definite answer. He no longer needs me of course, as Neil did, and he will go on needing me less. When I think of Neil I know that those were the last days in which I was alive.

Tintinnabulum’s opinion of himself, except when he is splashing, is lowlier than was Neil’s; some times in dark moods it is lowlier than makes for happiness. He has hardened a little since he was Neil, coarsened but strengthened. I comfort myself with the curious reflection that the best men I have known have had a touch of coarseness in them.

Perhaps I have made too much of the occasional yieldings of this boy whom I now know so superficially. The new life is building seven walls around him. Are such of his moves in the game as I can follow merely an expert’s kindness to an indifferent player?

On the other hand, I learn from a friendly source that he has spoken of me with approval, once at least, as “mad, quite mad,” and I know that my battered countenance, about which I am very “touchy” excites his pity as well as his private mirth. On the last night of the holidays he was specially gruff, but he slipped beneath my door a paper containing the words “I hereby solemnly promise never to give you cause for moral anxiety,” and signed his name across a postage stamp to give the document a special significance. Nevertheless, W. W. and he certainly do at times exchange disturbing glances of which I am the object, and these, I notice, occur when I think I am talking well. Again, if I set off to tell a humorous story in company nothing can exceed the agony on Tintinnabulum’s face. Yet I am uncertain that this is not a compliment, for if he felt indifferently toward me why should he worry about my fate?

During those holidays a master at his old preparatory sent me a letter he had received from Tintinnabulum (whom he called Neil), saying that as it was about me he considered I ought to read it. But I had not the courage to do so. Quite likely it was favourable, but suppose it hadn’t been. Besides, it was not meant for me to see, and I cling to his dew-drop about my being mad. On the whole, I think he is still partial to me. Corroboration, I consider, was provided at our parting, when he so skilfully turned what began as a tear into a wink and gazed at me from the disappearing train with what I swear was a loving scowl.

What will become of Tintinnabulum? There was a horror looking for him in his childhood. Waking dreams we called them, and they lured Neil out of bed in the night. It was always the same nameless enemy he was seeking, and he stole about in various parts of the house in search of it, probing fiercely for it in cupboards, or standing at the top of the stairs pouring out invective and shouting challenges to it to come up. I have known thesmall white figure defend the stair-head thus for an hour, blazing rather than afraid, concentrated on some dreadful matter in which, tragically, none could aid him. I stood or sat by him, like a man in an adjoining world, waiting till he returned to me, for I had been advised, warned, that I must not wake him abruptly. Gradually I soothed him back to bed, and though my presence there in the morning told him, in the light language we then adopted, that he had been “at it again” he could remember nothing of who the enemy was. It had something to do with the number 7; that was all we ever knew. Once I slipped from the room, thinking it best that he should wake to normal surroundings, but that was a mistake. He was violently agitated by my absence. In some vague way he seemed on the stairs to have known that I was with him and to have got comfort from it; he said he had gone back to bed only because he knew I should be there when he woke up. I found that he liked, “after he had been an ass,” to wake up seeing me “sitting there doing something frightfully ordinary, like reading the newspaper,” and you may be sure that thereafter that was what I was doing.

After he had been a year or two at his preparatory, Neil did a nice thing for me; one of a thousand. I had shaken my head over his standing so low in Maths, though he was already a promising classic, and had said that it was “great fun to be good at what one was bad at.” A term or two later when he came home he thrust the Maths prize into my hand. “But it wasn’t fun,” he growled. (It was Neil’s growl before it was Tintinnabulum’s.) He came back to blurt out, “I did it because in those bad times you were always sitting there with the newspaper when I woke.”

By becoming Tintinnabulum he is not done with his unknown foe, though I think they have met but once. On this occasion his dame had remained with him all night, as he had been slightly unwell, and she was amused, but nothing more, to see him, withoutobserving her, rise and search the room in a fury of words for something that was not there. The only word she caught was “seven.” He asked them not to tell me of this incident, as he knew it would trouble me. I was told, and, indeed, almost expected the news, for I had sprung out of bed that night thinking I heard Neil once again defending the stair. By the time I reached Tintinnabulum it had ceased to worry him. “But when I woke I missed the newspaper,” he said with his adorable smile, and again putting his hand on my shoulder. How I wished “the newspaper” could have been there. There are times when a boy can be as lonely as God.

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