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The Little White Bird; Or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens

by J. M. Barrie · English · Gutenberg #1376 · 370,201 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Little White Bird; Or, Adventures in Kensington Gardens

Author: J. M. Barrie


        
Release date: July 1, 1998 [eBook #1376]
                Most recently updated: October 29, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1376

Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD; OR, ADVENTURES IN KENSINGTON GARDENS ***

THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD

OR ADVENTURES IN KENSINGTON GARDENS

By J.M. Barrie




CONTENTS

         I. David and I Set Forth Upon a Journey
        II. The Little Nursery Governess
       III. Her Marriage, Her Clothes, Her Appetite, and an
            Inventory of Her Furniture.
        IV. A Night-Piece
         V. The Fight For Timothy
        VI. A Shock
       VII. The Last of Timothy
      VIII. The Inconsiderate Waiter
        IX. A Confirmed Spinster
         X. Sporting Reflections
        XI. The Runaway Perambulator
       XII. The Pleasantest Club in London
      XIII. The Grand Tour of the Gardens
       XIV. Peter Pan
        XV. The Thrush's Nest
       XVI. Lock-Out Time
      XVII. The Little House
     XVIII. Peter's Goat
       XIX. An Interloper
        XX. David and Porthos Compared
       XXI. William Paterson
      XXII. Joey
     XXIII. Pilkington's
      XXIV. Barbara
       XXV. The Cricket Match
      XXVI. The Dedication




THE LITTLE WHITE BIRD




I. David and I Set Forth Upon a Journey

Sometimes the little boy who calls me father brings me an invitation
from his mother: “I shall be so pleased if you will come and see me,”
 and I always reply in some such words as these: “Dear madam, I decline.”
 And if David asks why I decline, I explain that it is because I have no
desire to meet the woman.

“Come this time, father,” he urged lately, “for it is her birthday, and
she is twenty-six,” which is so great an age to David, that I think he
fears she cannot last much longer.

“Twenty-six, is she, David?” I replied. “Tell her I said she looks
more.”

I had my delicious dream that night. I dreamt that I too was twenty-six,
which was a long time ago, and that I took train to a place called
my home, whose whereabouts I see not in my waking hours, and when I
alighted at the station a dear lost love was waiting for me, and we went
away together. She met me in no ecstasy of emotion, nor was I surprised
to find her there; it was as if we had been married for years and parted
for a day. I like to think that I gave her some of the things to carry.

Were I to tell my delightful dream to David's mother, to whom I have
never in my life addressed one word, she would droop her head and raise
it bravely, to imply that I make her very sad but very proud, and she
would be wishful to lend me her absurd little pocket handkerchief. And
then, had I the heart, I might make a disclosure that would startle her,
for it is not the face of David's mother that I see in my dreams.

Has it ever been your lot, reader, to be persecuted by a pretty woman
who thinks, without a tittle of reason, that you are bowed down under
a hopeless partiality for her? It is thus that I have been pursued for
several years now by the unwelcome sympathy of the tender-hearted and
virtuous Mary A----. When we pass in the street the poor deluded soul
subdues her buoyancy, as if it were shame to walk happy before one she
has lamed, and at such times the rustle of her gown is whispered words
of comfort to me, and her arms are kindly wings that wish I was a little
boy like David. I also detect in her a fearful elation, which I am
unaware of until she has passed, when it comes back to me like a faint
note of challenge. Eyes that say you never must, nose that says why
don't you? and a mouth that says I rather wish you could: such is the
portrait of Mary A---- as she and I pass by.

Once she dared to address me, so that she could boast to David that I
had spoken to her. I was in the Kensington Gardens, and she asked would
I tell her the time please, just as children ask, and forget as they
run back with it to their nurse. But I was prepared even for this, and
raising my hat I pointed with my staff to a clock in the distance. She
should have been overwhelmed, but as I walked on listening intently, I
thought with displeasure that I heard her laughing.

Her laugh is very like David's, whom I could punch all day in order to
hear him laugh. I dare say she put this laugh into him. She has been
putting qualities into David, altering him, turning him forever on a
lathe since the day she first knew him, and indeed long before, and all
so deftly that he is still called a child of nature. When you release
David's hand he is immediately lost like an arrow from the bow. No
sooner do you cast eyes on him than you are thinking of birds. It is
difficult to believe that he walks to the Kensington Gardens; he always
seems to have alighted there: and were I to scatter crumbs I opine he
would come and peck. This is not what he set out to be; it is all the
doing of that timid-looking lady who affects to be greatly surprised by
it. He strikes a hundred gallant poses in a day; when he tumbles, which
is often, he comes to the ground like a Greek god; so Mary A---- has
willed it. But how she suffers that he may achieve! I have seen him
climbing a tree while she stood beneath in unutterable anguish; she had
to let him climb, for boys must be brave, but I am sure that, as she
watched him, she fell from every branch.

David admires her prodigiously; he thinks her so good that she will be
able to get him into heaven, however naughty he is. Otherwise he would
trespass less light-heartedly. Perhaps she has discovered this; for, as
I learn from him, she warned him lately that she is not such a dear as
he thinks her.

“I am very sure of it,” I replied.

“Is she such a dear as you think her?” he asked me.

“Heaven help her,” I said, “if she be not dearer than that.”

Heaven help all mothers if they be not really dears, for their boy
will certainly know it in that strange short hour of the day when every
mother stands revealed before her little son. That dread hour ticks
between six and seven; when children go to bed later the revelation has
ceased to come. He is lapt in for the night now and lies quietly there,
madam, with great, mysterious eyes fixed upon his mother. He is summing
up your day. Nothing in the revelations that kept you together and
yet apart in play time can save you now; you two are of no age, no
experience of life separates you; it is the boy's hour, and you have
come up for judgment. “Have I done well to-day, my son?” You have got to
say it, and nothing may you hide from him; he knows all. How like your
voice has grown to his, but more tremulous, and both so solemn, so
unlike the voice of either of you by day.

“You were a little unjust to me to-day about the apple; were you not,
mother?”

Stand there, woman, by the foot of the bed and cross your hands and
answer him.

“Yes, my son, I was. I thought--”

But what you thought will not affect the verdict.

“Was it fair, mother, to say that I could stay out till six, and then
pretend it was six before it was quite six?”

“No, it was very unfair. I thought--”

“Would it have been a lie if I had said it was quite six?”

“Oh, my son, my son! I shall never tell you a lie again.”

“No, mother, please don't.”

“My boy, have I done well to-day on the whole?”

Suppose he were unable to say yes.

These are the merest peccadilloes, you may say. Is it then a little
thing to be false to the agreement you signed when you got the boy?
There are mothers who avoid their children in that hour, but this will
not save them. Why is it that so many women are afraid to be left alone
with their thoughts between six and seven? I am not asking this of
you, Mary. I believe that when you close David's door softly there is a
gladness in your eyes, and the awe of one who knows that the God to whom
little boys say their prayers has a face very like their mother's.

I may mention here that David is a stout believer in prayer, and has had
his first fight with another young Christian who challenged him to the
jump and prayed for victory, which David thought was taking an unfair
advantage.

“So Mary is twenty-six! I say, David, she is getting on. Tell her that I
am coming in to kiss her when she is fifty-two.”

He told her, and I understand that she pretended to be indignant. When I
pass her in the street now she pouts. Clearly preparing for our meeting.
She has also said, I learn, that I shall not think so much of her when
she is fifty-two, meaning that she will not be so pretty then. So little
does the sex know of beauty. Surely a spirited old lady may be the
prettiest sight in the world. For my part, I confess that it is they,
and not the young ones, who have ever been my undoing. Just as I was
about to fall in love I suddenly found that I preferred the mother.
Indeed, I cannot see a likely young creature without impatiently
considering her chances for, say, fifty-two. Oh, you mysterious girls,
when you are fifty-two we shall find you out; you must come into the
open then. If the mouth has fallen sourly yours the blame: all the
meannesses your youth concealed have been gathering in your face. But
the pretty thoughts and sweet ways and dear, forgotten kindnesses linger
there also, to bloom in your twilight like evening primroses.

Is it not strange that, though I talk thus plainly to David about his
mother, he still seems to think me fond of her? How now, I reflect, what
sort of bumpkin is this, and perhaps I say to him cruelly: “Boy, you are
uncommonly like your mother.”

To which David: “Is that why you are so kind to me?”

I suppose I am kind to him, but if so it is not for love of his mother,
but because he sometimes calls me father. On my honour as a soldier,
there is nothing more in it than that. I must not let him know this, for
it would make him conscious, and so break the spell that binds him and
me together. Oftenest I am but Captain W---- to him, and for the best of
reasons. He addresses me as father when he is in a hurry only, and never
have I dared ask him to use the name. He says, “Come, father,” with an
accursed beautiful carelessness. So let it be, David, for a little while
longer.

I like to hear him say it before others, as in shops. When in shops he
asks the salesman how much money he makes in a day, and which drawer he
keeps it in, and why his hair is red, and does he like Achilles, of whom
David has lately heard, and is so enamoured that he wants to die to meet
him. At such times the shopkeepers accept me as his father, and I cannot
explain the peculiar pleasure this gives me. I am always in two minds
then, to linger that we may have more of it, and to snatch him away
before he volunteers the information, “He is not really my father.”

When David meets Achilles I know what will happen. The little boy will
take the hero by the hand, call him father, and drag him away to some
Round Pond.

One day, when David was about five, I sent him the following letter:
“Dear David: If you really want to know how it began, will you come and
have a chop with me to-day at the club?”

Mary, who, I have found out, opens all his letters, gave her consent,
and, I doubt not, instructed him to pay heed to what happened so that he
might repeat it to her, for despite her curiosity she knows not how
it began herself. I chuckled, guessing that she expected something
romantic.

He came to me arrayed as for a mighty journey, and looking unusually
solemn, as little boys always do look when they are wearing a great
coat. There was a shawl round his neck. “You can take some of them off,”
 I said, “when we come to summer.”

“Shall we come to summer?” he asked, properly awed.

“To many summers,” I replied, “for we are going away back, David, to see
your mother as she was in the days before there was you.”

We hailed a hansom. “Drive back six years,” I said to the cabby, “and
stop at the Junior Old Fogies' Club.”

He was a stupid fellow, and I had to guide him with my umbrella.

The streets were not quite as they had been in the morning. For
instance, the bookshop at the corner was now selling fish. I dropped
David a hint of what was going on.

“It doesn't make me littler, does it?” he asked anxiously; and then,
with a terrible misgiving: “It won't make me too little, will it,
father?” by which he meant that he hoped it would not do for him
altogether. He slipped his hand nervously into mine, and I put it in my
pocket.

You can't think how little David looked as we entered the portals of the
club.




II. The Little Nursery Governess

As I enter the club smoking-room you are to conceive David vanishing
into nothingness, and that it is any day six years ago at two in the
afternoon. I ring for coffee, cigarette, and cherry brandy, and take my
chair by the window, just as the absurd little nursery governess comes
tripping into the street. I always feel that I have rung for her.

While I am lifting the coffee-pot cautiously lest the lid fall into the
cup, she is crossing to the post-office; as I select the one suitable
lump of sugar she is taking six last looks at the letter; with the aid
of William I light my cigarette, and now she is re-reading the delicious
address. I lie back in my chair, and by this time she has dropped the
letter down the slit. I toy with my liqueur, and she is listening to
hear whether the postal authorities have come for her letter. I scowl at
a fellow-member who has had the impudence to enter the smoking-room, and
her two little charges are pulling her away from the post-office. When
I look out at the window again she is gone, but I shall ring for her
to-morrow at two sharp.

She must have passed the window many times before I noticed her. I know
not where she lives, though I suppose it to be hard by. She is taking
the little boy and girl, who bully her, to the St. James's Park, as
their hoops tell me, and she ought to look crushed and faded. No doubt
her mistress overworks her. It must enrage the other servants to see her
deporting herself as if she were quite the lady.

I noticed that she had sometimes other letters to post, but that
the posting of the one only was a process. They shot down the slit,
plebeians all, but it followed pompously like royalty. I have even seen
her blow a kiss after it.

Then there was her ring, of which she was as conscious as if it rather
than she was what came gaily down the street. She felt it through her
glove to make sure that it was still there. She took off the glove and
raised the ring to her lips, though I doubt not it was the cheapest
trinket. She viewed it from afar by stretching out her hand; she stooped
to see how it looked near the ground; she considered its effect on the
right of her and on the left of her and through one eye at a time. Even
when you saw that she had made up her mind to think hard of something
else, the little silly would take another look.

I give anyone three chances to guess why Mary was so happy.

No and no and no. The reason was simply this, that a lout of a young man
loved her. And so, instead of crying because she was the merest nobody,
she must, forsooth, sail jauntily down Pall Mall, very trim as to her
tackle and ticketed with the insufferable air of an engaged woman. At
first her complacency disturbed me, but gradually it became part of my
life at two o'clock with the coffee, the cigarette, and the liqueur. Now
comes the tragedy.

Thursday is her great day. She has from two to three every Thursday for
her very own; just think of it: this girl, who is probably paid several
pounds a year, gets a whole hour to herself once a week. And what does
she with it? Attend classes for making her a more accomplished person?
Not she. This is what she does: sets sail for Pall Mall, wearing all her
pretty things, including the blue feathers, and with such a sparkle
of expectation on her face that I stir my coffee quite fiercely. On
ordinary days she at least tries to look demure, but on a Thursday she
has had the assurance to use the glass door of the club as a mirror in
which to see how she likes her engaging trifle of a figure to-day.

In the meantime a long-legged oaf is waiting for her outside the
post-office, where they meet every Thursday, a fellow who always wears
the same suit of clothes, but has a face that must ever make him free of
the company of gentlemen. He is one of your lean, clean Englishmen,
who strip so well, and I fear me he is handsome; I say fear, for your
handsome men have always annoyed me, and had I lived in the duelling
days I swear I would have called every one of them out. He seems to be
quite unaware that he is a pretty fellow, but Lord, how obviously Mary
knows it. I conclude that he belongs to the artistic classes, he is
so easily elated and depressed; and because he carries his left thumb
curiously, as if it were feeling for the hole of a palette, I have
entered his name among the painters. I find pleasure in deciding that
they are shocking bad pictures, for obviously no one buys them. I feel
sure Mary says they are splendid, she is that sort of woman. Hence the
rapture with which he greets her. Her first effect upon him is to make
him shout with laughter. He laughs suddenly haw from an eager exulting
face, then haw again, and then, when you are thanking heaven that it is
at last over, comes a final haw, louder than the others. I take them to
be roars of joy because Mary is his, and they have a ring of youth
about them that is hard to bear. I could forgive him everything save his
youth, but it is so aggressive that I have sometimes to order William
testily to close the window.

How much more deceitful than her lover is the little nursery governess.
The moment she comes into sight she looks at the post-office and sees
him. Then she looks straight before her, and now she is observed, and he
rushes across to her in a glory, and she starts--positively starts--as
if he had taken her by surprise. Observe her hand rising suddenly to her
wicked little heart. This is the moment when I stir my coffee violently.
He gazes down at her in such rapture that he is in everybody's way, and
as she takes his arm she gives it a little squeeze, and then away they
strut, Mary doing nine-tenths of the talking. I fall to wondering what
they will look like when they grow up.

What a ludicrous difference do these two nobodies make to each other.
You can see that they are to be married when he has twopence.

Thus I have not an atom of sympathy with this girl, to whom London is
famous only as the residence of a young man who mistakes her for someone
else, but her happiness had become part of my repast at two P.M., and
when one day she walked down Pall Mall without gradually posting a
letter I was most indignant. It was as if William had disobeyed orders.
Her two charges were as surprised as I, and pointed questioningly to
the slit, at which she shook her head. She put her finger to her eyes,
exactly like a sad baby, and so passed from the street.

Next day the same thing happened, and I was so furious that I bit
through my cigarette. Thursday came, when I prayed that there might
be an end of this annoyance, but no, neither of them appeared on that
acquainted ground. Had they changed their post-office? No, for her eyes
were red every day, and heavy was her foolish little heart. Love had put
out his lights, and the little nursery governess walked in darkness.

I felt I could complain to the committee.

Oh, you selfish young zany of a man, after all you have said to her,
won't you make it up and let me return to my coffee? Not he.

Little nursery governess, I appeal to you. Annoying girl, be joyous as
of old during the five minutes of the day when you are anything to me,
and for the rest of the time, so far as I am concerned, you may be as
wretched as you list. Show some courage. I assure you he must be a very
bad painter; only the other day I saw him looking longingly into the
window of a cheap Italian restaurant, and in the end he had to crush
down his aspirations with two penny scones.

You can do better than that. Come, Mary.

All in vain. She wants to be loved; can't do without love from morning
till night; never knew how little a woman needs till she lost that
little. They are all like this.

Zounds, madam, if you are resolved to be a drooping little figure till
you die, you might at least do it in another street.

Not only does she maliciously depress me by walking past on ordinary
days, but I have discovered that every Thursday from two to three she
stands afar off, gazing hopelessly at the romantic post-office where she
and he shall meet no more. In these windy days she is like a homeless
leaf blown about by passers-by.

There is nothing I can do except thunder at William.

At last she accomplished her unworthy ambition. It was a wet Thursday,
and from the window where I was writing letters I saw the forlorn soul
taking up her position at the top of the street: in a blast of fury I
rose with the one letter I had completed, meaning to write the others in
my chambers. She had driven me from the club.

I had turned out of Pall Mall into a side street, when whom should I
strike against but her false swain! It was my fault, but I hit out at
him savagely, as I always do when I run into anyone in the street. Then
I looked at him. He was hollow-eyed; he was muddy; there was not a haw
left in him. I never saw a more abject young man; he had not even the
spirit to resent the testy stab I had given him with my umbrella. But
this is the important thing: he was glaring wistfully at the post-office
and thus in a twink I saw that he still adored my little governess.
Whatever had been their quarrel he was as anxious to make it up as she,
and perhaps he had been here every Thursday while she was round the
corner in Pall Mall, each watching the post-office for an apparition.
But from where they hovered neither could see the other.

I think what I did was quite clever. I dropped my letter unseen at his
feet, and sauntered back to the club. Of course, a gentleman who finds
a letter on the pavement feels bound to post it, and I presumed that he
would naturally go to the nearest office.

With my hat on I strolled to the smoking-room window, and was just in
time to see him posting my letter across the way. Then I looked for
the little nursery governess. I saw her as woe-begone as ever; then,
suddenly--oh, you poor little soul, and has it really been as bad as
that!

She was crying outright, and he was holding both her hands. It was a
disgraceful exhibition. The young painter would evidently explode if he
could not make use of his arms. She must die if she could not lay her
head upon his breast. I must admit that he rose to the occasion; he
hailed a hansom.

“William,” said I gaily, “coffee, cigarette, and cherry brandy.”


As I sat there watching that old play David plucked my sleeve to ask
what I was looking at so deedily; and when I told him he ran eagerly to
the window, but he reached it just too late to see the lady who was to
become his mother. What I told him of her doings, however, interested
him greatly; and he intimated rather shyly that he was acquainted with
the man who said, “Haw-haw-haw.” On the other hand, he irritated me by
betraying an idiotic interest in the two children, whom he seemed to
regard as the hero and heroine of the story. What were their names? How
old were they? Had they both hoops? Were they iron hoops, or just wooden
hoops? Who gave them their hoops?

“You don't seem to understand, my boy,” I said tartly, “that had I not
dropped that letter, there would never have been a little boy called
David A----.” But instead of being appalled by this he asked, sparkling,
whether I meant that he would still be a bird flying about in the
Kensington Gardens.

David knows that all children in our part of London were once birds in
the Kensington Gardens; and that the reason there are bars on nursery
windows and a tall fender by the fire is because very little people
sometimes forget that they have no longer wings, and try to fly away
through the window or up the chimney.

Children in the bird stage are difficult to catch. David knows that many
people have none, and his delight on a summer afternoon is to go with me
to some spot in the Gardens where these unfortunates may be seen trying
to catch one with small pieces of cake.

That the birds know what would happen if they were caught, and are even
a little undecided about which is the better life, is obvious to every
student of them. Thus, if you leave your empty perambulator under the
trees and watch from a distance, you will see the birds boarding it and
hopping about from pillow to blanket in a twitter of excitement; they
are trying to find out how babyhood would suit them.

Quite the prettiest sight in the Gardens is when the babies stray from
the tree where the nurse is sitting and are seen feeding the birds, not
a grownup near them. It is first a bit to me and then a bit to you,
and all the time such a jabbering and laughing from both sides of the
railing. They are comparing notes and inquiring for old friends, and so
on; but what they say I cannot determine, for when I approach they all
fly away.

The first time I ever saw David was on the sward behind the Baby's Walk.
He was a missel-thrush, attracted thither that hot day by a hose which
lay on the ground sending forth a gay trickle of water, and David was on
his back in the water, kicking up his legs. He used to enjoy being told
of this, having forgotten all about it, and gradually it all came back
to him, with a number of other incidents that had escaped my memory,
though I remember that he was eventually caught by the leg with a long
string and a cunning arrangement of twigs near the Round Pond. He never
tires of this story, but I notice that it is now he who tells it to me
rather than I to him, and when we come to the string he rubs his little
leg as if it still smarted.

So when David saw his chance of being a missel-thrush again he called
out to me quickly: “Don't drop the letter!” and there were tree-tops in
his eyes.

“Think of your mother,” I said severely.

He said he would often fly in to see her. The first thing he would do
would be to hug her. No, he would alight on the water-jug first, and
have a drink.

“Tell her, father,” he said with horrid heartlessness, “always to have
plenty of water in it, 'cos if I had to lean down too far I might fall
in and be drownded.”

“Am I not to drop the letter, David? Think of your poor mother without
her boy!”

It affected him, but he bore up. When she was asleep, he said, he would
hop on to the frilly things of her night-gown and peck at her mouth.

“And then she would wake up, David, and find that she had only a bird
instead of a boy.”

This shock to Mary was more than he could endure. “You can drop it,”
 he said with a sigh. So I dropped the letter, as I think I have already
mentioned; and that is how it all began.




III. Her Marriage, Her Clothes, Her Appetite, and an Inventory of Her
Furniture

A week or two after I dropped the letter I was in a hansom on my way to
certain barracks when loud above the city's roar I heard that accursed
haw-haw-haw, and there they were, the two of them, just coming out of
a shop where you may obtain pianos on the hire system. I had the merest
glimpse of them, but there was an extraordinary rapture on her face, and
his head was thrown proudly back, and all because they had been ordering
a piano on the hire system.

So they were to be married directly. It was all rather contemptible,
but I passed on tolerantly, for it is only when she is unhappy that
this woman disturbs me, owing to a clever way she has at such times of
looking more fragile than she really is.

When next I saw them, they were gazing greedily into the window of the
sixpenny-halfpenny shop, which is one of the most deliciously dramatic
spots in London. Mary was taking notes feverishly on a slip of paper
while he did the adding up, and in the end they went away gloomily
without buying anything. I was in high feather. “Match abandoned,
ma'am,” I said to myself; “outlook hopeless; another visit to the
Governesses' Agency inevitable; can't marry for want of a kitchen
shovel.” But I was imperfectly acquainted with the lady.

A few days afterward I found myself walking behind her. There is
something artful about her skirts by which I always know her, though
I can't say what it is. She was carrying an enormous parcel that might
have been a bird-cage wrapped in brown paper, and she took it into
a bric-a-brac shop and came out without it. She then ran rather than
walked in the direction of the sixpenny-halfpenny shop. Now mystery
of any kind is detestable to me, and I went into the bric-a-brac
shop, ostensibly to look at the cracked china; and there, still on the
counter, with the wrapping torn off it, was the article Mary had sold
in order to furnish on the proceeds. What do you think it was? It was a
wonderful doll's house, with dolls at tea downstairs and dolls going to
bed upstairs, and a doll showing a doll out at the front door. Loving
lips had long ago licked most of the paint off, but otherwise the thing
was in admirable preservation; obviously the joy of Mary's childhood, it
had now been sold by her that she might get married.

“Lately purchased by us,” said the shopwoman, seeing me look at the toy,
“from a lady who has no further use for it.”

I think I have seldom been more indignant with Mary. I bought the doll's
house, and as they knew the lady's address (it was at this shop that I
first learned her name) I instructed them to send it back to her with
the following letter, which I wrote in the shop: “Dear madam, don't be
ridiculous. You will certainly have further use for this. I am, etc.,
the Man Who Dropped the Letter.”

It pained me afterward, but too late to rescind the order, to reflect
that I had sent her a wedding present; and when next I saw her she had
been married for some months. The time was nine o'clock of a November
evening, and we were in a street of shops that has not in twenty years
decided whether to be genteel or frankly vulgar; here it minces in the
fashion, but take a step onward and its tongue is in the cup of the
ice-cream man. I usually rush this street, which is not far from my
rooms, with the glass down, but to-night I was walking. Mary was in
front of me, leaning in a somewhat foolish way on the haw-er, and they
were chatting excitedly. She seemed to be remonstrating with him for
going forward, yet more than half admiring him for not turning back, and
I wondered why.

And after all what was it that Mary and her painter had come out to do?
To buy two pork chops. On my honour. She had been trying to persuade
him, I decided, that they were living too lavishly. That was why she
sought to draw him back. But in her heart she loves audacity, and that
is why she admired him for pressing forward.

No sooner had they bought the chops than they scurried away like two
gleeful children to cook them. I followed, hoping to trace them to their
home, but they soon out-distanced me, and that night I composed the
following aphorism: It is idle to attempt to overtake a pretty young
woman carrying pork chops. I was now determined to be done with her.
First, however, to find out their abode, which was probably within easy
distance of the shop. I even conceived them lured into taking their
house by the advertisement, “Conveniently situated for the Pork
Emporium.”

Well, one day--now this really is romantic and I am rather proud of
it. My chambers are on the second floor, and are backed by an anxiously
polite street between which and mine are little yards called, I think,
gardens. They are so small that if you have the tree your neighbour has
the shade from it. I was looking out at my back window on the day
we have come to when whom did I see but the whilom nursery governess
sitting on a chair in one of these gardens. I put up my eye-glass to
make sure, and undoubtedly it was she. But she sat there doing nothing,
which was by no means my conception of the jade, so I brought a
fieldglass to bear and discovered that the object was merely a lady's
jacket. It hung on the back of a kitchen chair, seemed to be a furry
thing, and, I must suppose, was suspended there for an airing.

I was chagrined, and then I insisted stoutly with myself that, as it
was not Mary, it must be Mary's jacket. I had never seen her wear such
a jacket, mind you, yet I was confident, I can't tell why. Do clothes
absorb a little of the character of their wearer, so that I recognised
this jacket by a certain coquetry? If she has a way with her skirts that
always advertises me of her presence, quite possibly she is as cunning
with jackets. Or perhaps she is her own seamstress, and puts in little
tucks of herself.

Figure it what you please; but I beg to inform you that I put on my
hat and five minutes afterward saw Mary and her husband emerge from the
house to which I had calculated that garden belonged. Now am I clever,
or am I not?

When they had left the street I examined the house leisurely, and a
droll house it is. Seen from the front it appears to consist of a door
and a window, though above them the trained eye may detect another
window, the air-hole of some apartment which it would be just like
Mary's grandiloquence to call her bedroom. The houses on each side of
this bandbox are tall, and I discovered later that it had once been
an open passage to the back gardens. The story and a half of which it
consists had been knocked up cheaply, by carpenters I should say rather
than masons, and the general effect is of a brightly coloured van that
has stuck for ever on its way through the passage.

The low houses of London look so much more homely than the tall ones
that I never pass them without dropping a blessing on their builders,
but this house was ridiculous; indeed it did not call itself a house,
for over the door was a board with the inscription “This space to be
sold,” and I remembered, as I rang the bell, that this notice had been
up for years. On avowing that I wanted a space, I was admitted by an
elderly, somewhat dejected looking female, whose fine figure was not
on scale with her surroundings. Perhaps my face said so, for her first
remark was explanatory.

“They get me cheap,” she said, “because I drink.”

I bowed, and we passed on to the drawing-room. I forget whether I have
described Mary's personal appearance, but if so you have a picture of
that sunny drawing-room. My first reflection was, How can she have found
the money to pay for it all! which is always your first reflection when
you see Mary herself a-tripping down the street.

I have no space (in that little room) to catalogue all the whim-whams
with which she had made it beautiful, from the hand-sewn bell-rope which
pulled no bell to the hand-painted cigar-box that contained no cigars.
The floor was of a delicious green with exquisite oriental rugs; green
and white, I think, was the lady's scheme of colour, something cool, you
observe, to keep the sun under. The window-curtains were of some rare
material and the colour of the purple clematis; they swept the floor
grandly and suggested a picture of Mary receiving visitors. The piano
we may ignore, for I knew it to be hired, but there were many dainty
pieces, mostly in green wood, a sofa, a corner cupboard, and a most
captivating desk, which was so like its owner that it could have sat
down at her and dashed off a note. The writing paper on this desk had
the word Mary printed on it, implying that if there were other Marys
they didn't count. There were many oil-paintings on the walls, mostly
without frames, and I must mention the chandelier, which was obviously
of fabulous worth, for she had encased it in a holland bag.

“I perceive, ma'am,” said I to the stout maid, “that your master is in
affluent circumstances.”

She shook her head emphatically, and said something that I failed to
catch.

“You wish to indicate,” I hazarded, “that he married a fortune.”

This time I caught the words. They were “Tinned meats,” and having
uttered them she lapsed into gloomy silence.

“Nevertheless,” I said, “this room must have cost a pretty penny.”

“She done it all herself,” replied my new friend, with concentrated
scorn.

“But this green floor, so beautifully stained--”

“Boiling oil,” said she, with a flush of honest shame, “and a
shillingsworth o' paint.”

“Those rugs--”

“Remnants,” she sighed, and showed me how artfully they had been pieced
together.

“The curtains--”

“Remnants.”

“At all events the sofa--”

She raised its drapery, and I saw that the sofa was built of packing
cases.

“The desk--”

I really thought that I was safe this time, for could I not see the
drawers with their brass handles, the charming shelf for books, the
pigeon-holes with their coverings of silk?

“She made it out of three orange boxes,” said the lady, at last a little
awed herself.

I looked around me despairingly, and my eye alighted on the holland
covering. “There is a fine chandelier in that holland bag,” I said
coaxingly.

She sniffed and was raising an untender hand, when I checked her.
“Forbear, ma'am,” I cried with authority, “I prefer to believe in that
bag. How much to be pitied, ma'am, are those who have lost faith in
everything.” I think all the pretty things that the little nursery
governess had made out of nothing squeezed my hand for letting the
chandelier off.

“But, good God, ma'am,” said I to madam, “what an exposure.”

She intimated that there were other exposures upstairs.

“So there is a stair,” said I, and then, suspiciously, “did she make
it?”

No, but how she had altered it.

The stair led to Mary's bedroom, and I said I would not look at that,
nor at the studio, which was a shed in the garden.

“Did she build the studio with her own hands?”

No, but how she had altered it.

“How she alters everything,” I said. “Do you think you are safe, ma'am?”

She thawed a little under my obvious sympathy and honoured me with some
of her views and confidences. The rental paid by Mary and her husband
was not, it appeared, one on which any self-respecting domestic could
reflect with pride. They got the house very cheap on the understanding
that they were to vacate it promptly if anyone bought it for building
purposes, and because they paid so little they had to submit to the
indignity of the notice-board. Mary A---- detested the words “This space
to be sold,” and had been known to shake her fist at them. She was as
elated about her house as if it were a real house, and always trembled
when any possible purchaser of spaces called.

As I have told you my own aphorism I feel I ought in fairness to record
that of this aggrieved servant. It was on the subject of art. “The
difficulty,” she said, “is not to paint pictures, but to get frames for
them.” A home thrust this.

She could not honestly say that she thought much of her master's work.
Nor, apparently, did any other person. Result, tinned meats.

Yes, one person thought a deal of it, or pretended to do so; was
constantly flinging up her hands in delight over it; had even been
caught whispering fiercely to a friend, “Praise it, praise it, praise
it!” This was when the painter was sunk in gloom. Never, as I could well
believe, was such a one as Mary for luring a man back to cheerfulness.

“A dangerous woman,” I said, with a shudder, and fell to examining a
painting over the mantel-shelf. It was a portrait of a man, and had
impressed me favourably because it was framed.

“A friend of hers,” my guide informed me, “but I never seed him.”

I would have turned away from it, had not an inscription on the picture
drawn me nearer. It was in a lady's handwriting, and these were the
words: “Fancy portrait of our dear unknown.” Could it be meant for me? I
cannot tell you how interested I suddenly became.

It represented a very fine looking fellow, indeed, and not a day more
than thirty.

“A friend of hers, ma'am, did you say?” I asked quite shakily. “How do
you know that, if you have never seen him?”

“When master was painting of it,” she said, “in the studio, he used to
come running in here to say to her such like as, 'What colour would you
make his eyes?'”

“And her reply, ma'am?” I asked eagerly.

“She said, 'Beautiful blue eyes.' And he said, 'You wouldn't make it
a handsome face, would you?' and she says, 'A very handsome face.' And
says he, 'Middle-aged?' and says she, 'Twenty-nine.' And I mind him
saying, 'A little bald on the top?' and she says, says she, 'Not at
all.'”

The dear, grateful girl, not to make me bald on the top.

“I have seed her kiss her hand to that picture,” said the maid.

Fancy Mary kissing her hand to me! Oh, the pretty love!

Pooh!

I was staring at the picture, cogitating what insulting message I could
write on it, when I heard the woman's voice again. “I think she has
known him since she were a babby,” she was saying, “for this here was a
present he give her.”

She was on her knees drawing the doll's house from beneath the sofa,
where it had been hidden away; and immediately I thought, “I shall slip
the insulting message into this.” But I did not, and I shall tell you
why. It was because the engaging toy had been redecorated by loving
hands; there were fresh gowns for all the inhabitants, and the paint on
the furniture was scarcely dry. The little doll's house was almost ready
for further use.

I looked at the maid, but her face was expressionless. “Put it back,”
 I said, ashamed to have surprised Mary's pretty secret, and I left the
house dejectedly, with a profound conviction that the little nursery
governess had hooked on to me again.




IV. A Night-Piece

There came a night when the husband was alone in that street waiting. He
can do nothing for you now, little nursery governess, you must fight it
out by yourself; when there are great things to do in the house the man
must leave. Oh, man, selfish, indelicate, coarse-grained at the best,
thy woman's hour has come; get thee gone.

He slouches from the house, always her true lover I do believe,
chivalrous, brave, a boy until to-night; but was he ever unkind to her?
It is the unpardonable sin now; is there the memory of an unkindness
to stalk the street with him to-night? And if not an unkindness, still
might he not sometimes have been a little kinder?

Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight: always to try to be a
little kinder than is necessary?

Poor youth, she would come to the window if she were able, I am sure,
to sign that the one little unkindness is long forgotten, to send you
a reassuring smile till you and she meet again; and, if you are not to
meet again, still to send you a reassuring, trembling smile.

Ah, no, that was for yesterday; it is too late now. He wanders the
streets thinking of her tonight, but she has forgotten him. In her great
hour the man is nothing to the woman; their love is trivial now.

He and I were on opposite sides of the street, now become familiar
ground to both of us, and divers pictures rose before me in which Mary
A---- walked. Here was the morning after my only entry into her house.
The agent had promised me to have the obnoxious notice-board removed,
but I apprehended that as soon as the letter announcing his intention
reached her she would remove it herself, and when I passed by in the
morning there she was on a chair and a foot-stool pounding lustily at it
with a hammer. When it fell she gave it such a vicious little kick.

There were the nights when her husband came out to watch for the
postman. I suppose he was awaiting some letter big with the fate of a
picture. He dogged the postman from door to door like an assassin or a
guardian angel; never had he the courage to ask if there was a letter
for him, but almost as it fell into the box he had it out and tore it
open, and then if the door closed despairingly the woman who had been at
the window all this time pressed her hand to her heart. But if the news
was good they might emerge presently and strut off arm in arm in the
direction of the pork emporium.

One last picture. On summer evenings I had caught glimpses of them
through the open window, when she sat at the piano singing and playing
to him. Or while she played with one hand, she flung out the other for
him to grasp. She was so joyously happy, and she had such a romantic
mind. I conceived her so sympathetic that she always laughed before he
came to the joke, and I am sure she had filmy eyes from the very start
of a pathetic story.

And so, laughing and crying, and haunted by whispers, the little nursery
governess had gradually become another woman, glorified, mysterious. I
suppose a man soon becomes used to the great change, and cannot recall a
time when there were no babes sprawling in his Mary's face.

I am trying to conceive what were the thoughts of the young husband on
the other side of the street. “If the barrier is to be crossed to-night
may I not go with her? She is not so brave as you think her. When she
talked so gaily a few hours ago, O my God, did she deceive even you?”

Plain questions to-night. “Why should it all fall on her? What is the
man that he should be flung out into the street in this terrible hour?
You have not been fair to the man.”

Poor boy, his wife has quite forgotten him and his trumpery love. If she
lives she will come back to him, but if she dies she will die triumphant
and serene. Life and death, the child and the mother, are ever meeting
as the one draws into harbour and the other sets sail. They exchange a
bright “All's well” and pass on.

But afterward?

The only ghosts, I believe, who creep into this world, are dead young
mothers, returned to see how their children fare. There is no other
inducement great enough to bring the departed back. They glide into the
acquainted room when day and night, their jailers, are in the grip, and
whisper, “How is it with you, my child?” but always, lest a strange face
should frighten him, they whisper it so low that he may not hear. They
bend over him to see that he sleeps peacefully, and replace his sweet
arm beneath the coverlet, and they open the drawers to count how many
little vests he has. They love to do these things.

What is saddest about ghosts is that they may not know their child. They
expect him to be just as he was when they left him, and they are easily
bewildered, and search for him from room to room, and hate the unknown
boy he has become. Poor, passionate souls, they may even do him an
injury. These are the ghosts that go wailing about old houses, and
foolish wild stories are invented to explain what is all so pathetic and
simple. I know of a man who, after wandering far, returned to his early
home to pass the evening of his days in it, and sometimes from his chair
by the fire he saw the door open softly and a woman's face appear.
She always looked at him very vindictively, and then vanished. Strange
things happened in this house. Windows were opened in the night. The
curtains of his bed were set fire to. A step on the stair was loosened.
The covering of an old well in a corridor where he walked was cunningly
removed. And when he fell ill the wrong potion was put in the glass by
his bedside, and he died. How could the pretty young mother know that
this grizzled interloper was the child of whom she was in search?

All our notions about ghosts are wrong. It is nothing so petty as lost
wills or deeds of violence that brings them back, and we are not nearly
so afraid of them as they are of us.

One by one the lights of the street went out, but still a lamp burned
steadily in the little window across the way. I know not how it
happened, whether I had crossed first to him or he to me, but, after
being for a long time as the echo of each other's steps, we were
together now. I can have had no desire to deceive him, but some reason
was needed to account for my vigil, and I may have said something that
he misconstrued, for above my words he was always listening for other
sounds. But however it came about he had conceived the idea that I was
an outcast for a reason similar to his own, and I let his mistake pass,
it seemed to matter so little and to draw us together so naturally.
We talked together of many things, such as worldly ambition. For long
ambition has been like an ancient memory to me, some glorious day
recalled from my springtime, so much a thing of the past that I must
make a railway journey to revisit it as to look upon the pleasant fields
in which that scene was laid. But he had been ambitious yesterday.

I mentioned worldly ambition. “Good God!” he said with a shudder.

There was a clock hard by that struck the quarters, and one o'clock
passed and two. What time is it now? Twenty past two. And now? It is
still twenty past two.

I asked him about his relatives, and neither he nor she had any. “We
have a friend--” he began and paused, and then rambled into a not very
understandable story about a letter and a doll's house and some unknown
man who had bought one of his pictures, or was supposed to have done so,
in a curiously clandestine manner. I could not quite follow the story.

“It is she who insists that it is always the same person,” he said. “She
thinks he will make himself known to me if anything happens to her.” His
voice suddenly went husky. “She told me,” he said, “if she died and I
discovered him, to give him her love.”

At this we parted abruptly, as we did at intervals throughout the night,
to drift together again presently. He tried to tell me of some things
she had asked him to do should she not get over this, but what they were
I know not, for they engulfed him at the first step. He would draw back
from them as ill-omened things, and next moment he was going over them
to himself like a child at lessons. A child! In that short year she had
made him entirely dependent on her. It is ever thus with women: their
first deliberate act is to make their husband helpless. There are few
men happily married who can knock in a nail.

But it was not of this that I was thinking. I was wishing I had not
degenerated so much.

Well, as you know, the little nursery governess did not die. At eighteen
minutes to four we heard the rustle of David's wings. He boasts about
it to this day, and has the hour to a syllable as if the first thing he
ever did was to look at the clock.

An oldish gentleman had opened the door and waved congratulations to
my companion, who immediately butted at me, drove me against a wall,
hesitated for a second with his head down as if in doubt whether to toss
me, and then rushed away. I followed slowly. I shook him by the hand,
but by this time he was haw-haw-hawing so abominably that a disgust of
him swelled up within me, and with it a passionate desire to jeer once
more at Mary A--

“It is little she will care for you now,” I said to the fellow; “I
know the sort of woman; her intellectuals (which are all she has to
distinguish her from the brutes) are so imperfectly developed that she
will be a crazy thing about that boy for the next three years. She has
no longer occasion for you, my dear sir; you are like a picture painted
out.”

But I question whether he heard me. I returned to my home. Home! As if
one alone can build a nest. How often as I have ascended the stairs
that lead to my lonely, sumptuous rooms, have I paused to listen to
the hilarity of the servants below. That morning I could not rest: I
wandered from chamber to chamber, followed by my great dog, and all were
alike empty and desolate. I had nearly finished a cigar when I thought
I heard a pebble strike the window, and looking out I saw David's father
standing beneath. I had told him that I lived in this street, and I
suppose my lights had guided him to my window.

“I could not lie down,” he called up hoarsely, “until I heard your news.
Is it all right?”

For a moment I failed to understand him. Then I said sourly: “Yes, all
is right.”

“Both doing well?” he inquired.

“Both,” I answered, and all the time I was trying to shut the window.
It was undoubtedly a kindly impulse that had brought him out, but I was
nevertheless in a passion with him.

“Boy or girl?” persisted the dodderer with ungentlemanlike curiosity.

“Boy,” I said, very furiously.

“Splendid,” he called out, and I think he added something else, but by
that time I had closed the window with a slam.




V. The Fight For Timothy

Mary's poor pretentious babe screamed continually, with a note of
exultation in his din, as if he thought he was devoting himself to a
life of pleasure, and often the last sound I heard as I got me out of
the street was his haw-haw-haw, delivered triumphantly as if it were
some entirely new thing, though he must have learned it like a parrot. I
had not one tear for the woman, but Poor father, thought I; to know that
every time your son is happy you are betrayed. Phew, a nauseous draught.

I have the acquaintance of a deliciously pretty girl, who is always
sulky, and the thoughtless beseech her to be bright, not witting wherein
lies her heroism. She was born the merriest of maids, but, being a
student of her face, learned anon that sulkiness best becomes it, and so
she has struggled and prevailed. A woman's history. Brave Margaret, when
night falls and thy hair is down, dost thou return, I wonder, to thy
natural state, or, dreading the shadow of indulgence, sleepest thou even
sulkily?

But will a male child do as much for his father? This remains to be
seen, and so, after waiting several months, I decided to buy David a
rocking-horse. My St. Bernard dog accompanied me, though I have always
been diffident of taking him to toy-shops, which over-excite him.
Hitherto the toys I had bought had always been for him, and as we durst
not admit this to the saleswoman we were both horribly self-conscious
when in the shop. A score of times I have told him that he had much
better not come, I have announced fiercely that he is not to come. He
then lets go of his legs, which is how a St. Bernard sits down, making
the noise of a sack of coals suddenly deposited, and, laying his head
between his front paws, stares at me through the red haws that make his
eyes so mournful. He will do this for an hour without blinking, for he
knows that in time it will unman me. My dog knows very little, but what
little he does know he knows extraordinarily well. One can get out of my
chambers by a back way, and I sometimes steal softly--but I can't
help looking back, and there he is, and there are those haws asking
sorrowfully, “Is this worthy of you?”

“Curse you,” I say, “get your hat,” or words to that effect.

He has even been to the club, where he waddles up the stairs so exactly
like some respected member that he makes everybody most uncomfortable.
I forget how I became possessor of him. I think I cut him out of an old
number of Punch. He costs me as much as an eight-roomed cottage in the
country.

He was a full-grown dog when I first, most foolishly, introduced him
to toys. I had bought a toy in the street for my own amusement. It
represented a woman, a young mother, flinging her little son over her
head with one hand and catching him in the other, and I was entertaining
myself on the hearth-rug with this pretty domestic scene when I heard
an unwonted sound from Porthos, and, looking up, I saw that noble and
melancholic countenance on the broad grin. I shuddered and was for
putting the toy away at once, but he sternly struck down my arm with
his, and signed that I was to continue. The unmanly chuckle always
came, I found, when the poor lady dropped her babe, but the whole thing
entranced him; he tried to keep his excitement down by taking huge
draughts of water; he forgot all his niceties of conduct; he sat in holy
rapture with the toy between his paws, took it to bed with him, ate it
in the night, and searched for it so longingly next day that I had to go
out and buy him the man with the scythe. After that we had everything of
note, the bootblack boy, the toper with bottle, the woolly rabbit
that squeaks when you hold it in your mouth; they all vanished as
inexplicably as the lady, but I dared not tell him my suspicions, for he
suspected also and his gentle heart would have mourned had I confirmed
his fears.

The dame in the temple of toys which we frequent thinks I want them
for a little boy and calls him “the precious” and “the lamb,” the while
Porthos is standing gravely by my side. She is a motherly soul, but
over-talkative.

“And how is the dear lamb to-day?” she begins, beaming.

“Well, ma'am, well,” I say, keeping tight grip of his collar.

“This blighty weather is not affecting his darling appetite?”

“No, ma'am, not at all.” (She would be considerably surprised if
informed that he dined to-day on a sheepshead, a loaf, and three
cabbages, and is suspected of a leg of mutton.)

“I hope he loves his toys?”

“He carries them about with him everywhere, ma'am.” (Has the one we
bought yesterday with him now, though you might not think it to look at
him.)

“What do you say to a box of tools this time?”

“I think not, ma'am.”

“Is the deary fond of digging?”

“Very partial to digging.” (We shall find the leg of mutton some day.)

“Then perhaps a weeny spade and a pail?”

She got me to buy a model of Canterbury Cathedral once, she was so
insistent, and Porthos gave me his mind about it when we got home. He
detests the kindergarten system, and as she is absurdly prejudiced in
its favour we have had to try other shops. We went to the Lowther Arcade
for the rocking-horse. Dear Lowther Arcade! Ofttimes have we wandered
agape among thy enchanted palaces, Porthos and I, David and I, David and
Porthos and I. I have heard that thou art vulgar, but I cannot see how,
unless it be that tattered children haunt thy portals, those awful yet
smiling entrances to so much joy. To the Arcade there are two entrances,
and with much to be sung in laudation of that which opens from the
Strand I yet on the whole prefer the other as the more truly romantic,
because it is there the tattered ones congregate, waiting to see the
Davids emerge with the magic lamp. We have always a penny for them,
and I have known them, before entering the Arcade with it, retire (but
whither?) to wash; surely the prettiest of all the compliments that are
paid to the home of toys.

And now, O Arcade, so much fairer than thy West End brother, we are told
that thou art doomed, anon to be turned into an eating-house or a hive
for usurers, something rankly useful. All thy delights are under notice
to quit. The Noah's arks are packed one within another, with clockwork
horses harnessed to them; the soldiers, knapsack on back, are kissing
their hands to the dear foolish girls, who, however, will not be left
behind them; all the four-footed things gather around the elephant, who
is overful of drawing-room furniture; the birds flutter their wings; the
man with the scythe mows his way through the crowd; the balloons tug
at their strings; the ships rock under a swell of sail, everything is
getting ready for the mighty exodus into the Strand. Tears will be shed.

So we bought the horse in the Lowther Arcade, Porthos, who thought it
was for him, looking proud but uneasy, and it was sent to the bandbox
house anonymously. About a week afterward I had the ill-luck to meet
Mary's husband in Kensington, so I asked him what he had called his
little girl.

“It is a boy,” he replied, with intolerable good-humour, “we call him
David.”

And then with a singular lack of taste he wanted the name of my boy.

I flicked my glove. “Timothy,” said I.

I saw a suppressed smile on his face, and said hotly that Timothy was as
good a name as David. “I like it,” he assured me, and expressed a hope
that they would become friends. I boiled to say that I really could not
allow Timothy to mix with boys of the David class, but I refrained, and
listened coldly while he told me what David did when you said his toes
were pigs going to market or returning from it, I forget which. He
also boasted of David's weight (a subject about which we are uncommonly
touchy at the club), as if children were for throwing forth for a wager.

But no more about Timothy. Gradually this vexed me. I felt what a
forlorn little chap Timothy was, with no one to say a word for him, and
I became his champion and hinted something about teething, but withdrew
it when it seemed too surprising, and tried to get on to safer ground,
such as bibs and general intelligence, but the painter fellow was so
willing to let me have my say, and knew so much more about babies than
is fitting for men to know, that I paled before him and wondered why the
deuce he was listening to me so attentively.

You may remember a story he had told me about some anonymous friend.
“His latest,” said he now, “is to send David a rocking-horse!”

I must say I could see no reason for his mirth. “Picture it,” said he,
“a rocking-horse for a child not three months old!”

I was about to say fiercely: “The stirrups are adjustable,” but thought
it best to laugh with him. But I was pained to hear that Mary had
laughed, though heaven knows I have often laughed at her.

“But women are odd,” he said unexpectedly, and explained. It appears
that in the middle of her merriment Mary had become grave and said to
him quite haughtily, “I see nothing to laugh at.” Then she had kissed
the horse solemnly on the nose and said, “I wish he was here to see
me do it.” There are moments when one cannot help feeling a drawing to
Mary.

But moments only, for the next thing he said put her in a particularly
odious light. He informed me that she had sworn to hunt Mr. Anon down.

“She won't succeed,” I said, sneering but nervous.

“Then it will be her first failure,” said he.

“But she knows nothing about the man.”

“You would not say that if you heard her talking of him. She says he is
a gentle, whimsical, lonely old bachelor.”

“Old?” I cried.

“Well, what she says is that he will soon be old if he doesn't take
care. He is a bachelor at all events, and is very fond of children, but
has never had one to play with.”

“Could not play with a child though there was one,” I said brusquely;
“has forgotten the way; could stand and stare only.”

“Yes, if the parents were present. But he thinks that if he were alone
with the child he could come out strong.”

“How the deuce--” I began

“That is what she says,” he explained, apologetically. “I think she will
prove to be too clever for him.”

“Pooh,” I said, but undoubtedly I felt a dizziness, and the next time
I met him he quite frightened me. “Do you happen to know any one,” he
said, “who has a St. Bernard dog?”

“No,” said I, picking up my stick.

“He has a St. Bernard dog.”

“How have you found that out?”

“She has found it out.”

“But how?”

“I don't know.”

I left him at once, for Porthos was but a little way behind me. The
mystery of it scared me, but I armed promptly for battle. I engaged
a boy to walk Porthos in Kensington Gardens, and gave him these
instructions: “Should you find yourself followed by a young woman
wheeling a second-hand perambulator, instantly hand her over to the
police on the charge of attempting to steal the dog.”

Now then, Mary.

“By the way,” her husband said at our next meeting, “that rocking-horse
I told you of cost three guineas.”

“She has gone to the shop to ask?”

“No, not to ask that, but for a description of the purchaser's
appearance.”

Oh, Mary, Mary.

Here is the appearance of purchaser as supplied at the Arcade:--looked
like a military gentleman; tall, dark, and rather dressy; fine Roman
nose (quite so), carefully trimmed moustache going grey (not at all);
hair thin and thoughtfully distributed over the head like fiddlestrings,
as if to make the most of it (pah!); dusted chair with handkerchief
before sitting down on it, and had other oldmaidish ways (I should like
to know what they are); tediously polite, but no talker; bored face; age
forty-five if a day (a lie); was accompanied by an enormous yellow dog
with sore eyes. (They always think the haws are sore eyes.)

“Do you know anyone who is like that?” Mary's husband asked me
innocently.

“My dear man,” I said, “I know almost no one who is not like that,” and
it was true, so like each other do we grow at the club. I was pleased,
on the whole, with this talk, for it at least showed me how she had
come to know of the St. Bernard, but anxiety returned when one day from
behind my curtains I saw Mary in my street with an inquiring eye on
the windows. She stopped a nurse who was carrying a baby and went into
pretended ecstasies over it. I was sure she also asked whether by any
chance it was called Timothy. And if not, whether that nurse knew any
other nurse who had charge of a Timothy.

Obviously Mary suspicioned me, but nevertheless, I clung to Timothy,
though I wished fervently that I knew more about him; for I still met
that other father occasionally, and he always stopped to compare notes
about the boys. And the questions he asked were so intimate, how Timothy
slept, how he woke up, how he fell off again, what we put in his bath.
It is well that dogs and little boys have so much in common, for it was
really of Porthos I told him; how he slept (peacefully), how he woke
up (supposed to be subject to dreams), how he fell off again (with one
little hand on his nose), but I glided past what we put in his bath
(carbolic and a mop).

The man had not the least suspicion of me, and I thought it reasonable
to hope that Mary would prove as generous. Yet was I straitened in
my mind. For it might be that she was only biding her time to strike
suddenly, and this attached me the more to Timothy, as if I feared she
might soon snatch him from me. As was indeed to be the case.




VI. A Shock

It was on a May day, and I saw Mary accompany her husband as far as the
first crossing, whence she waved him out of sight as if he had boarded
an Atlantic-liner. All this time she wore the face of a woman happily
married who meant to go straight home, there to await her lord's
glorious return; and the military-looking gentleman watching her with a
bored smile saw nothing better before him than a chapter on the Domestic
Felicities. Oh, Mary, can you not provide me with the tiniest little
plot?

Hallo!

No sooner was she hid from him than she changed into another woman; she
was now become a calculating purposeful madam, who looked around her
covertly and, having shrunk in size in order to appear less noticeable,
set off nervously on some mysterious adventure.

“The deuce!” thought I, and followed her.

Like one anxious to keep an appointment, she frequently consulted her
watch, looking long at it, as if it were one of those watches that do
not give up their secret until you have made a mental calculation. Once
she kissed it. I had always known that she was fond of her cheap little
watch, which he gave her, I think, on the day I dropped the letter, but
why kiss it in the street? Ah, and why then replace it so hurriedly in
your leather-belt, Mary, as if it were guilt to you to kiss to-day, or
any day, the watch your husband gave you?

It will be seen that I had made a very rapid journey from light thoughts
to uneasiness. I wanted no plot by the time she reached her destination,
a street of tawdry shops. She entered none of them, but paced slowly
and shrinking from observation up and down the street, a very figure of
shame; and never had I thought to read shame in the sweet face of Mary
A----. Had I crossed to her and pronounced her name I think it would
have felled her, and yet she remained there, waiting. I, too, was
waiting for him, wondering if this was the man, or this, or this, and I
believe I clutched my stick.

Did I suspect Mary? Oh, surely not for a moment of time. But there
was some foolishness here; she was come without the knowledge of her
husband, as her furtive manner indicated, to a meeting she dreaded and
was ashamed to tell him of; she was come into danger; then it must be
to save, not herself but him; the folly to be concealed could never have
been Mary's. Yet what could have happened in the past of that honest boy
from the consequences of which she might shield him by skulking here?
Could that laugh of his have survived a dishonour? The open forehead,
the curly locks, the pleasant smile, the hundred ingratiating ways
which we carry with us out of childhood, they may all remain when the
innocence has fled, but surely the laugh of the morning of life must go.
I have never known the devil retain his grip on that.

But Mary was still waiting. She was no longer beautiful; shame had
possession of her face, she was an ugly woman. Then the entanglement
was her husband's, and I cursed him for it. But without conviction, for,
after all, what did I know of women? I have some distant memories of
them, some vain inventions. But of men--I have known one man indifferent
well for over forty years, have exulted in him (odd to think of it),
shuddered at him, wearied of him, been willing (God forgive me) to
jog along with him tolerantly long after I have found him out; I know
something of men, and, on my soul, boy, I believe I am wronging you.

Then Mary is here for some innocent purpose, to do a good deed that were
better undone, as it so scares her. Turn back, you foolish, soft heart,
and I shall say no more about it. Obstinate one, you saw the look on
your husband's face as he left you. It is the studio light by which he
paints and still sees to hope, despite all the disappointments of his
not ignoble ambitions. That light is the dower you brought him, and he
is a wealthy man if it does not flicker.

So anxious to be gone, and yet she would not go. Several times she made
little darts, as if at last resolved to escape from that detestable
street, and faltered and returned like a bird to the weasel. Again she
looked at her watch and kissed it.

Oh, Mary, take flight. What madness is this? Woman, be gone.

Suddenly she was gone. With one mighty effort and a last terrified look
round, she popped into a pawnshop.

Long before she emerged I understood it all, I think even as the door
rang and closed on her; why the timid soul had sought a street where she
was unknown, why she crept so many times past that abhorred shop before
desperately venturing in, why she looked so often at the watch she might
never see again. So desperately cumbered was Mary to keep her little
house over her head, and yet the brave heart was retaining a smiling
face for her husband, who must not even know where her little treasures
were going.

It must seem monstrously cruel of me, but I was now quite light-hearted
again. Even when Mary fled from the shop where she had left her watch,
and I had peace of mind to note how thin and worn she had become, as
if her baby was grown too big for her slight arms, even then I was
light-hearted. Without attempting to follow her, I sauntered homeward
humming a snatch of song with a great deal of fal-de-lal-de-riddle-o in
it, for I can never remember words. I saw her enter another shop, baby
linen shop or some nonsense of that sort, so it was plain for what
she had popped her watch; but what cared I? I continued to sing most
beautifully. I lunged gayly with my stick at a lamp-post and missed
it, whereat a street-urchin grinned, and I winked at him and slipped
twopence down his back.


I presume I would have chosen the easy way had time been given me, but
fate willed that I should meet the husband on his homeward journey, and
his first remark inspired me to a folly.

“How is Timothy?” he asked; and the question opened a way so attractive
that I think no one whose dull life craves for colour could have
resisted it.

“He is no more,” I replied impulsively.

The painter was so startled that he gave utterance to a very oath of
pity, and I felt a sinking myself, for in these hasty words my little
boy was gone, indeed; all my bright dreams of Timothy, all my efforts to
shelter him from Mary's scorn, went whistling down the wind.




VII. The Last of Timothy

So accomplished a person as the reader must have seen at once that I
made away with Timothy in order to give his little vests and pinafores
and shoes to David, and, therefore, dear sir or madam, rail not overmuch
at me for causing our painter pain. Know, too, that though his sympathy
ran free I soon discovered many of his inquiries to be prompted by a
mere selfish desire to save his boy from the fate of mine. Such are
parents.

He asked compassionately if there was anything he could do for me, and,
of course, there was something he could do, but were I to propose it I
doubted not he would be on his stilts at once, for already I had reason
to know him for a haughty, sensitive dog, who ever became high at the
first hint of help. So the proposal must come from him. I spoke of the
many little things in the house that were now hurtful to me to look
upon, and he clutched my hand, deeply moved, though it was another house
with its little things he saw. I was ashamed to harass him thus, but he
had not a sufficiency of the little things, and besides my impulsiveness
had plunged me into a deuce of a mess, so I went on distastefully. Was
there no profession in this age of specialism for taking away children's
garments from houses where they were suddenly become a pain? Could I
sell them? Could I give them to the needy, who would probably dispose of
them for gin? I told him of a friend with a young child who had already
refused them because it would be unpleasant to him to be reminded of
Timothy, and I think this was what touched him to the quick, so that he
made the offer I was waiting for.

I had done it with a heavy foot, and by this time was in a rage with
both him and myself, but I always was a bungler, and, having adopted
this means in a hurry, I could at the time see no other easy way out.
Timothy's hold on life, as you may have apprehended, was ever of the
slightest, and I suppose I always knew that he must soon revert to the
obscure. He could never have penetrated into the open. It was no life
for a boy.

Yet now, that his time had come, I was loath to see him go. I seem
to remember carrying him that evening to the window with uncommon
tenderness (following the setting sun that was to take him away), and
telling him with not unnatural bitterness that he had got to leave me
because another child was in need of all his pretty things; and as the
sun, his true father, lapt him in its dancing arms, he sent his love to
a lady of long ago whom he called by the sweetest of names, not knowing
in his innocence that the little white birds are the birds that never
have a mother. I wished (so had the phantasy of Timothy taken possession
of me) that before he went he could have played once in the Kensington
Gardens, and have ridden on the fallen trees, calling gloriously to me
to look; that he could have sailed one paper-galleon on the Round Pond;
fain would I have had him chase one hoop a little way down the laughing
avenues of childhood, where memory tells us we run but once, on a long
summer-day, emerging at the other end as men and women with all the fun
to pay for; and I think (thus fancy wantons with me in these desolate
chambers) he knew my longings, and said with a boy-like flush that the
reason he never did these things was not that he was afraid, for he
would have loved to do them all, but because he was not quite like other
boys; and, so saying, he let go my finger and faded from before my eyes
into another and golden ether; but I shall ever hold that had he been
quite like other boys there would have been none braver than my Timothy.

I fear I am not truly brave myself, for though when under fire, so far
as I can recollect, I behaved as others, morally I seem to be deficient.
So I discovered next day when I attempted to buy David's outfit,
and found myself as shy of entering the shop as any Mary at the
pawnbroker's. The shop for little garments seems very alarming when you
reach the door; a man abruptly become a parent, and thus lost to a
finer sense of the proprieties, may be able to stalk in unprotected, but
apparently I could not. Indeed, I have allowed a repugnance to entering
shops of any kind, save my tailor's, to grow on me, and to my tailor's I
fear I go too frequently.

So I skulked near the shop of the little garments, jeering at myself,
and it was strange to me to reflect at, say, three o'clock that if I had
been brazen at half-past two all would now be over.

To show what was my state, take the case of the very gentleman-like man
whom I detected gazing fixedly at me, or so I thought, just as I had
drawn valiantly near the door. I sauntered away, but when I returned
he was still there, which seemed conclusive proof that he had smoked
my purpose. Sternly controlling my temper I bowed, and said with icy
politeness, “You have the advantage of me, sir.”

“I beg your pardon,” said he, and I am now persuaded that my words
turned his attention to me for the first time, but at the moment I was
sure some impertinent meaning lurked behind his answer.

“I have not the pleasure of your acquaintance,” I barked.

“No one regrets it more than I do,” he replied, laughing.

“I mean, sir,” said I, “that I shall wait here until you retire,” and
with that I put my back to a shop-window.

By this time he was grown angry, and said he, “I have no engagement,”
 and he put his back to the shop-window. Each of us was doggedly
determined to tire the other out, and we must have looked ridiculous. We
also felt it, for ten minutes afterward, our passions having died away,
we shook hands cordially and agreed to call hansoms.

Must I abandon the enterprise? Certainly I knew divers ladies who would
make the purchases for me, but first I must explain, and, rather
than explain it has ever been my custom to do without. I was in this
despondency when a sudden recollection of Irene and Mrs. Hicking
heartened me like a cordial, for I saw in them at once the engine and
decoy by which David should procure his outfit.

You must be told who they were.




VIII. The Inconsiderate Waiter

They were the family of William, one of our club waiters who had been
disappointing me grievously of late. Many a time have I deferred dining
several minutes that I might have the attendance of this ingrate. His
efforts to reserve the window-table for me were satisfactory, and I
used to allow him privileges, as to suggest dishes; I have given him
information, as that someone had startled me in the reading-room by
slamming a door; I have shown him how I cut my finger with a piece
of string. William was none of your assertive waiters. We could have
plotted a murder safely before him. It was one member who said to him
that Saucy Sarah would win the Derby and another who said that Saucy
Sarah had no chance, but it was William who agreed with both. The
excellent fellow (as I thought him) was like a cheroot which may be
smoked from either end.

I date his lapse from one evening when I was dining by the window. I had
to repeat my order “Devilled kidney,” and instead of answering brightly,
“Yes, sir,” as if my selection of devilled kidney was a personal
gratification to him, which is the manner one expects of a waiter, he
gazed eagerly out at the window, and then, starting, asked, “Did you
say devilled kidney, sir?” A few minutes afterward I became aware that
someone was leaning over the back of my chair, and you may conceive my
indignation on discovering that this rude person was William. Let me
tell, in the measured words of one describing a past incident, what next
took place. To get nearer the window he pressed heavily on my shoulder.
“William,” I said, “you are not attending to me!”

To be fair to him, he shook, but never shall I forget his audacious
apology, “Beg pardon, sir, but I was thinking of something else.”

And immediately his eyes resought the window, and this burst from him
passionately, “For God's sake, sir, as we are man and man, tell me if
you have seen a little girl looking up at the club-windows.”

Man and man! But he had been a good waiter once, so I pointed out the
girl to him. As soon as she saw William she ran into the middle of Pall
Mall, regardless of hansoms (many of which seemed to pass over her),
nodded her head significantly three times and then disappeared (probably
on a stretcher). She was the tawdriest little Arab of about ten years,
but seemed to have brought relief to William. “Thank God!” said he
fervently, and in the worst taste.

I was as much horrified as if he had dropped a plate on my toes. “Bread,
William,” I said sharply.

“You are not vexed with me, sir?” he had the hardihood to whisper.

“It was a liberty,” I said.

“I know, sir, but I was beside myself.”

“That was a liberty again.”

“It is my wife, sir, she--”

So William, whom I had favoured in so many ways, was a married man. I
felt that this was the greatest liberty of all.

I gathered that the troublesome woman was ailing, and as one who likes
after dinner to believe that there is no distress in the world, I
desired to be told by William that the signals meant her return to
health. He answered inconsiderately, however, that the doctor feared the
worst.

“Bah, the doctor,” I said in a rage.

“Yes, sir,” said William.

“What is her confounded ailment?”

“She was allus one of the delicate kind, but full of spirit, and you
see, sir, she has had a baby-girl lately--”

“William, how dare you,” I said, but in the same moment I saw that this
father might be useful to me. “How does your baby sleep, William?” I
asked in a low voice, “how does she wake up? what do you put in her
bath?”

I saw surprise in his face, so I hurried on without waiting for an
answer. “That little girl comes here with a message from your wife?”

“Yes, sir, every evening; she's my eldest, and three nods from her means
that the missus is a little better.”

“There were three nods to-day?”

“Yes, sir.

“I suppose you live in some low part, William?”

The impudent fellow looked as if he could have struck me. “Off Drury
Lane,” he said, flushing, “but it isn't low. And now,” he groaned,
“she's afeared she will die without my being there to hold her hand.”

“She should not say such things.”

“She never says them, sir. She allus pretends to be feeling stronger.
But I knows what is in her mind when I am leaving the house in the
morning, for then she looks at me from her bed, and I looks at her from
the door--oh, my God, sir!”

“William!”

At last he saw that I was angry, and it was characteristic of him to beg
my pardon and withdraw his wife as if she were some unsuccessful dish.
I tried to forget his vulgar story in billiards, but he had spoiled
my game, and next day to punish him I gave my orders through another
waiter. As I had the window-seat, however, I could not but see that the
little girl was late, and though this mattered nothing to me and I had
finished my dinner, I lingered till she came. She not only nodded three
times but waved her hat, and I arose, having now finished my dinner.

William came stealthily toward me. “Her temperature has gone down, sir,”
 he said, rubbing his hands together.

“To whom are you referring?” I asked coldly, and retired to the
billiard-room, where I played a capital game.

I took pains to show William that I had forgotten his maunderings, but
I observed the girl nightly, and once, instead of nodding, she shook her
head, and that evening I could not get into a pocket. Next evening
there was no William in the dining-room, and I thought I knew what had
happened. But, chancing to enter the library rather miserably, I
was surprised to see him on a ladder dusting books. We had the room
practically to ourselves, for though several members sat on chairs
holding books in their hands they were all asleep, and William descended
the ladder to tell me his blasting tale. He had sworn at a member!

“I hardly knew what I was doing all day, sir, for I had left her so
weakly that--”

I stamped my foot.

“I beg your pardon for speaking of her,” he had the grace to say. “But
Irene had promised to come every two hours; and when she came about
four o'clock and I saw she was crying, it sort of blinded me, sir, and
I stumbled against a member, Mr. B----, and he said, 'Damn you!' Well,
sir, I had but touched him after all, and I was so broken it sort of
stung me to be treated so and I lost my senses, and I said, 'Damn you!'”

His shamed head sank on his chest, and I think some of the readers
shuddered in their sleep.

“I was turned out of the dining-room at once, and sent here until the
committee have decided what to do with me. Oh, sir, I am willing to go
on my knees to Mr. B----”

How could I but despise a fellow who would be thus abject for a pound a
week?

“For if I have to tell her I have lost my place she will just fall back
and die.”

“I forbid your speaking to me of that woman,” I cried wryly, “unless you
can speak pleasantly,” and I left him to his fate and went off to
look for B----. “What is this story about your swearing at one of the
waiters?” I asked him.

“You mean about his swearing at me,” said B----, reddening.

“I am glad that was it,” I said, “for I could not believe you guilty of
such bad form. The version which reached me was that you swore at each
other, and that he was to be dismissed and you reprimanded.”

“Who told you that?” asked B----, who is a timid man.

“I am on the committee,” I replied lightly, and proceeded to talk of
other matters, but presently B----, who had been reflecting, said: “Do
you know I fancy I was wrong in thinking that the waiter swore at me,
and I shall withdraw the charge to-morrow.”

I was pleased to find that William's troubles were near an end without
my having to interfere in his behalf, and I then remembered that he
would not be able to see the girl Irene from the library windows,
which are at the back of the club. I was looking down at her, but
she refrained from signalling because she could not see William, and
irritated by her stupidity I went out and asked her how her mother was.

“My,” she ejaculated after a long scrutiny of me, “I b'lieve you are
one of them!” and she gazed at me with delighted awe. I suppose William
tells them of our splendid doings.

The invalid, it appeared, was a bit better, and this annoying child
wanted to inform William that she had took all the tapiocar. She was to
indicate this by licking an imaginary plate in the middle of Pall
Mall. I gave the little vulgarian a shilling, and returned to the club
disgusted.

“By the way, William,” I said, “Mr. B---- is to inform the committee
that he was mistaken in thinking you used improper language to him, so
you will doubtless be restored to the dining-room to-morrow.”

I had to add immediately, “Remember your place, William.”

“But Mr. B---- knows I swore,” he insisted.

“A gentleman,” I replied stiffly, “cannot remember for many hours what a
waiter has said to him.”

“No, sir, but--”

To stop him I had to say, “And--ah--William, your wife is decidedly
better. She has eaten the tapioca--all of it.”

“How can you know, sir?”

“By an accident.”

“Irene signed to the window?”

“No.”

“Then you saw her and went out and--”

“How dare you, William?”

“Oh, sir, to do that for me! May God bl--”

“William.”

He was reinstated in the dining-room, but often when I looked at him I
seemed to see a dying wife in his face, and so the relations between us
were still strained. But I watched the girl, and her pantomime was so
illuminating that I knew the sufferer had again cleaned the platter on
Tuesday, had attempted a boiled egg on Wednesday (you should have seen
Irene chipping it in Pall Mall, and putting in the salt), but was in a
woful state of relapse on Thursday.

“Is your mother very ill to-day, Miss Irene?” I asked, as soon as I had
drawn her out of range of the club-windows.

“My!” she exclaimed again, and I saw an ecstatic look pass between her
and a still smaller girl with her, whom she referred to as a neighbour.

I waited coldly. William's wife, I was informed, had looked like nothing
but a dead one till she got the brandy.

“Hush, child,” I said, shocked. “You don't know how the dead look.”

“Bless yer!” she replied.

Assisted by her friend, who was evidently enormously impressed by
Irene's intimacy with me, she gave me a good deal of miscellaneous
information, as that William's real name was Mr. Hicking, but that he
was known in their street, because of the number of his shirts, as Toff
Hicking. That the street held he should get away from the club before
two in the morning, for his missus needed him more than the club needed
him. That William replied (very sensibly) that if the club was short of
waiters at supper-time some of the gentlemen might be kept waiting for
their marrow-bone. That he sat up with his missus most of the night, and
pretended to her that he got some nice long naps at the club. That what
she talked to him about mostly was the kid. That the kid was in another
part of London (in charge of a person called the old woman), because
there was an epidemic in Irene's street.

“And what does the doctor say about your mother?”

“He sometimes says she would have a chance if she could get her kid
back.”

“Nonsense.”

“And if she was took to the country.”

“Then why does not William take her?”

“My! And if she drank porty wine.”

“Doesn't she?”

“No. But father, he tells her 'bout how the gentlemen drinks it.”

I turned from her with relief, but she came after me.

“Ain't yer going to do it this time?” she demanded with a falling face.
“You done it last time. I tell her you done it”--she pointed to her
friend who was looking wistfully at me--“ain't you to let her see you
doing of it?”

For a moment I thought that her desire was another shilling, but by a
piece of pantomime she showed that she wanted me to lift my hat to her.
So I lifted it, and when I looked behind she had her head in the air and
her neighbour was gazing at her awestruck. These little creatures are
really not without merit.

About a week afterward I was in a hired landau, holding a newspaper
before my face lest anyone should see me in company of a waiter and his
wife. William was taking her into Surrey to stay with an old nurse of
mine, and Irene was with us, wearing the most outrageous bonnet.

I formed a mean opinion of Mrs. Hicking's intelligence from her pride in
the baby, which was a very ordinary one. She created a regrettable scene
when it was brought to her, because “she had been feared it would not
know her again.” I could have told her that they know no one for years
had I not been in terror of Irene, who dandled the child on her knees
and talked to it all the way. I have never known a bolder little hussy
than this Irene. She asked the infant improper questions, such as “Oo
know who gave me this bonnet?” and answered them herself. “It was
the pretty gentleman there,” and several times I had to affect sleep,
because she announced, “Kiddy wants to kiss the pretty gentleman.”

Irksome as all this necessarily was to a man of taste, I suffered
still more acutely when we reached our destination, where disagreeable
circumstances compelled me to drink tea with a waiter's family. William
knew that I regarded thanks from persons of his class as an outrage, yet
he looked them though he dared not speak them. Hardly had he sat down
at the table by my orders than he remembered that I was a member of the
club and jumped up. Nothing is in worse form than whispering, yet again
and again he whispered to his poor, foolish wife, “How are you now?
You don't feel faint?” and when she said she felt like another woman
already, his face charged me with the change. I could not but conclude
from the way she let the baby pound her that she was stronger than she
pretended.

I remained longer than was necessary because I had something to say to
William which I feared he would misunderstand, but when he announced
that it was time for him to catch a train back to London, at which his
wife paled, I delivered the message.

“William,” I said, backing away from him, “the head-waiter asked me to
say that you could take a fortnight's holiday. Your wages will be paid
as usual.”

Confound him.

“William,” I cried furiously, “go away.”

Then I saw his wife signing to him, and I knew she wanted to be left
alone with me.

“William,” I cried in a panic, “stay where you are.”

But he was gone, and I was alone with a woman whose eyes were filmy. Her
class are fond of scenes. “If you please, ma'am!” I said imploringly.

But she kissed my hand; she was like a little dog.

“It can be only the memory of some woman,” said she, “that makes you so
kind to me and mine.”

Memory was the word she used, as if all my youth were fled. I suppose I
really am quite elderly.

“I should like to know her name, sir,” she said, “that I may mention her
with loving respect in my prayers.”

I raised the woman and told her the name. It was not Mary. “But she has
a home,” I said, “as you have, and I have none. Perhaps, ma'am, it would
be better worth your while to mention me.”


It was this woman, now in health, whom I intrusted with the purchase of
the outfits, “one for a boy of six months,” I explained to her, “and one
for a boy of a year,” for the painter had boasted to me of David's rapid
growth. I think she was a little surprised to find that both outfits
were for the same house; and she certainly betrayed an ignoble curiosity
about the mother's Christian name, but she was much easier to brow-beat
than a fine lady would have been, and I am sure she and her daughter
enjoyed themselves hugely in the shops, from one of which I shall never
forget Irene emerging proudly with a commissionaire, who conducted her
under an umbrella to the cab where I was lying in wait. I think that was
the most celestial walk of Irene's life.

I told Mrs. Hicking to give the articles a little active ill-treatment
that they might not look quite new, at which she exclaimed, not being in
my secret, and then to forward them to me. I then sent them to Mary and
rejoiced in my devilish cunning all the evening, but chagrin came in the
morning with a letter from her which showed she knew all, that I was her
Mr. Anon, and that there never had been a Timothy. I think I was never
so gravelled. Even now I don't know how she had contrived it.

Her cleverness raised such a demon in me that I locked away her letter
at once and have seldom read it since. No married lady should have
indited such an epistle to a single man. It said, with other things
which I decline to repeat, that I was her good fairy. As a sample of the
deliberate falsehoods in it, I may mention that she said David loved me
already. She hoped that I would come in often to see her husband, who
was very proud of my friendship, and suggested that I should pay him my
first visit to-day at three o'clock, an hour at which, as I happened to
know, he is always away giving a painting-lesson. In short, she wanted
first to meet me alone, so that she might draw the delicious, respectful
romance out of me, and afterward repeat it to him, with sighs and little
peeps at him over her pocket-handkerchief.

She had dropped what were meant to look like two tears for me upon the
paper, but I should not wonder though they were only artful drops of
water.

I sent her a stiff and tart reply, declining to hold any communication
with her.




IX. A Confirmed Spinster

I am in danger, I see, of being included among the whimsical fellows,
which I so little desire that I have got me into my writing-chair to
combat the charge, but, having sat for an unconscionable time with pen
poised, I am come agitatedly to the fear that there may be something in
it.

So long a time has elapsed, you must know, since I abated of the ardours
of self-inquiry that I revert in vain (through many rusty doors) for the
beginning of this change in me, if changed I am; I seem ever to see this
same man until I am back in those wonderful months which were half of
my life, when, indeed, I know that I was otherwise than I am now; no
whimsical fellow then, for that was one of the possibilities I put to
myself while seeking for the explanation of things, and found to be
inadmissible. Having failed in those days to discover why I was driven
from the garden, I suppose I ceased to be enamoured of myself, as of
some dull puzzle, and then perhaps the whimsicalities began to collect
unnoticed.

It is a painful thought to me to-night, that he could wake up glorious
once, this man in the elbow-chair by the fire, who is humorously known
at the club as a “confirmed spinster.” I remember him well when his
years told four and twenty; on my soul the proudest subaltern of my
acquaintance, and with the most reason to be proud. There was nothing he
might not do in the future, having already done the biggest thing, this
toddler up club-steps to-day.

Not, indeed, that I am a knave; I am tolerably kind, I believe, and most
inoffensive, a gentleman, I trust, even in the eyes of the ladies who
smile at me as we converse; they are an ever-increasing number, or so it
seems to me to-night. Ah, ladies, I forget when I first began to notice
that smile and to be made uneasy by it. I think I understand it now, and
in some vague way it hurts me. I find that I watch for it nowadays, but
I hope I am still your loyal, obedient servant.

You will scarcely credit it, but I have just remembered that I once had
a fascinating smile of my own. What has become of my smile? I swear I
have not noticed that it was gone till now; I am like one who revisiting
his school feels suddenly for his old knife. I first heard of my smile
from another boy, whose sisters had considered all the smiles they knew
and placed mine on top. My friend was scornful, and I bribed him to
mention the plebiscite to no one, but secretly I was elated and amazed.
I feel lost to-night without my smiles. I rose a moment ago to look for
it in my mirror.

I like to believe that she has it now. I think she may have some other
forgotten trifles of mine with it that make the difference between that
man and this. I remember her speaking of my smile, telling me it was my
one adornment, and taking it from me, so to speak, for a moment to let
me see how she looked in it; she delighted to make sport of me when she
was in a wayward mood, and to show me all my ungainly tricks of voice
and gesture, exaggerated and glorified in her entrancing self, like a
star calling to the earth: “See, I will show you how you hobble round,”
 and always there was a challenge to me in her eyes to stop her if I
dared, and upon them, when she was most audacious, lay a sweet mist.

They all came to her court, as is the business of young fellows, to
tell her what love is, and she listened with a noble frankness, having,
indeed, the friendliest face for all engaged in this pursuit that can
ever have sat on woman. I have heard ladies call her coquette, not
understanding that she shone softly upon all who entered the lists
because, with the rarest intuition, she foresaw that they must go away
broken men and already sympathised with their dear wounds. All wounds
incurred for love were dear to her; at every true utterance about love
she exulted with grave approval, or it might be a with a little “ah!” or
“oh!” like one drinking deliciously. Nothing could have been more fair,
for she was for the first comer who could hit the target, which was her
heart.

She adored all beautiful things in their every curve and fragrance, so
that they became part of her. Day by day, she gathered beauty; had she
had no heart (she who was the bosom of womanhood) her thoughts would
still have been as lilies, because the good is the beautiful.

And they all forgave her; I never knew of one who did not forgive her;
I think had there been one it would have proved that there was a flaw in
her. Perhaps, when good-bye came she was weeping because all the pretty
things were said and done with, or she was making doleful confessions
about herself, so impulsive and generous and confidential, and so devoid
of humour, that they compelled even a tragic swain to laugh. She made a
looking-glass of his face to seek wofully in it whether she was at all
to blame, and when his arms went out for her, and she stepped back so
that they fell empty, she mourned, with dear sympathy, his lack of
skill to seize her. For what her soft eyes said was that she was always
waiting tremulously to be won. They all forgave her, because there was
nothing to forgive, or very little, just the little that makes a dear
girl dearer, and often afterward, I believe, they have laughed fondly
when thinking of her, like boys brought back. You ladies who are
everything to your husbands save a girl from the dream of youth, have
you never known that double-chinned industrious man laugh suddenly in
a reverie and start up, as if he fancied he were being hailed from
far-away?

I hear her hailing me now. She was so light-hearted that her laugh is
what comes first across the years; so high-spirited that she would have
wept like Mary of Scots because she could not lie on the bare plains
like the men. I hear her, but it is only as an echo; I see her, but it
is as a light among distant trees, and the middle-aged man can draw no
nearer; she was only for the boys. There was a month when I could have
shown her to you in all her bravery, but then the veil fell, and from
that moment I understood her not. For long I watched her, but she was
never clear to me again, and for long she hovered round me, like a dear
heart willing to give me a thousand chances to regain her love. She was
so picturesque that she was the last word of art, but she was as young
as if she were the first woman. The world must have rung with gallant
deeds and grown lovely thoughts for numberless centuries before she
could be; she was the child of all the brave and wistful imaginings of
men. She was as mysterious as night when it fell for the first time upon
the earth. She was the thing we call romance, which lives in the little
hut beyond the blue haze of the pine-woods.

No one could have looked less elfish. She was all on a noble scale,
her attributes were so generous, her manner unconquerably gracious, her
movements indolently active, her face so candid that you must swear her
every thought lived always in the open. Yet, with it all, she was a wild
thing, alert, suspicious of the lasso, nosing it in every man's hand,
more curious about it than about aught else in the world; her quivering
delight was to see it cast for her, her game to elude it; so mettlesome
was she that she loved it to be cast fair that she might escape as it
was closing round her; she scorned, however her heart might be beating,
to run from her pursuers; she took only the one step backward, which
still left her near them but always out of reach; her head on high now,
but her face as friendly, her manner as gracious as before, she is yours
for the catching. That was ever the unspoken compact between her and the
huntsmen.

It may be but an old trick come back to me with these memories, but
again I clasp my hands to my brows in amaze at the thought that all this
was for me could I retain her love. For I won it, wonder of the gods,
but I won it. I found myself with one foot across the magic circle
wherein she moved, and which none but I had entered; and so, I think, I
saw her in revelation, not as the wild thing they had all conceived
her, but as she really was. I saw no tameless creature, nothing wild
or strange. I saw my sweet love placid as a young cow browsing. As I
brushed aside the haze and she was truly seen for the first time, she
raised her head, like one caught, and gazed at me with meek affrighted
eyes. I told her what had been revealed to me as I looked upon her, and
she trembled, knowing she was at last found, and fain would she have
fled away, but that her fear was less than her gladness. She came to me
slowly; no incomprehensible thing to me now, but transparent as a pool,
and so restful to look upon that she was a bath to the eyes, like banks
of moss.

Because I knew the maid, she was mine. Every maid, I say, is for him
who can know her. The others had but followed the glamour in which she
walked, but I had pierced it and found the woman. I could anticipate her
every thought and gesture, I could have flashed and rippled and mocked
for her, and melted for her and been dear disdain for her. She would
forget this and be suddenly conscious of it as she began to speak, when
she gave me a look with a shy smile in it which meant that she knew I
was already waiting at the end of what she had to say. I call this the
blush of the eye. She had a look and a voice that were for me alone; her
very finger-tips were charged with caresses for me. And I loved even her
naughtinesses, as when she stamped her foot at me, which she could
not do without also gnashing her teeth, like a child trying to look
fearsome. How pretty was that gnashing of her teeth! All her tormentings
of me turned suddenly into sweetnesses, and who could torment like this
exquisite fury, wondering in sudden flame why she could give herself to
anyone, while I wondered only why she could give herself to me. It may
be that I wondered over-much. Perhaps that was why I lost her.

It was in the full of the moon that she was most restive, but I brought
her back, and at first she could have bit my hand, but then she came
willingly. Never, I thought, shall she be wholly tamed, but he who knows
her will always be able to bring her back.

I am not that man, for mystery of mysteries, I lost her. I know not how
it was, though in the twilight of my life that then began I groped for
reasons until I wearied of myself; all I know is that she had ceased to
love me; I had won her love, but I could not keep it. The discovery came
to me slowly, as if I were a most dull-witted man; at first I knew only
that I no longer understood her as of old. I found myself wondering what
she had meant by this and that; I did not see that when she began to
puzzle me she was already lost to me. It was as if, unknowing, I had
strayed outside the magic circle.

When I did understand I tried to cheat myself into the belief that there
was no change, and the dear heart bleeding for me assisted in that poor
pretence. She sought to glide to me with swimming eyes as before, but it
showed only that this caressing movement was still within her compass,
but never again for me. With the hands she had pressed to her breast she
touched mine, but no longer could they convey the message. The current
was broken, and soon we had to desist miserably from our pretences.
She could tell no more than I why she had ceased to love me; she was
scarcely less anxious than I that I should make her love me again, and,
as I have said, she waited with a wonderful tolerance while I strove
futilely to discover in what I was lacking and to remedy it. And when,
at last, she had to leave me, it was with compassionate cries and little
backward flights.

The failure was mine alone, but I think I should not have been so
altered by it had I known what was the defect in me through which I let
her love escape. This puzzle has done me more harm than the loss of her.
Nevertheless, you must know (if I am to speak honestly to you) that I do
not repent me those dallyings in enchanted fields. It may not have been
so always, for I remember a black night when a poor lieutenant lay down
in an oarless boat and let it drift toward the weir. But his distant
moans do not greatly pain me now; rather am I elated to find (as the
waters bring him nearer) that this boy is I, for it is something to
know that, once upon a time, a woman could draw blood from me as from
another.

I saw her again, years afterward, when she was a married woman playing
with her children. She stamped her foot at a naughty one, and I saw the
gleam of her teeth as she gnashed them in the dear pretty way I can't
forget; and then a boy and girl, fighting for her shoulders, brought
the whole group joyously to the ground. She picked herself up in the old
leisurely manner, lazily active, and looked around her benignantly,
like a cow: our dear wild one safely tethered at last with a rope of
children. I meant to make her my devoirs, but, as I stepped forward, the
old wound broke out afresh, and I had to turn away. They were but a
few poor drops, which fell because I found that she was even a little
sweeter than I had thought.




X. Sporting Reflections

I have now told you (I presume) how I became whimsical, and I fear it
would please Mary not at all. But speaking of her, and, as the cat's
light keeps me in a ruminating mood, suppose, instead of returning Mary
to her lover by means of the letter, I had presented a certain clubman
to her consideration? Certainly no such whimsical idea crossed my mind
when I dropped the letter, but between you and me and my night-socks,
which have all this time been airing by the fire because I am subject to
cold feet, I have sometimes toyed with it since.

Why did I not think of this in time? Was it because I must ever remain
true to the unattainable she?

I am reminded of a passage in the life of a sweet lady, a friend of
mine, whose daughter was on the eve of marriage, when suddenly her lover
died. It then became pitiful to watch that trembling old face trying to
point the way of courage to the young one. In time, however, there came
another youth, as true, I dare say, as the first, but not so well known
to me, and I shrugged my shoulders cynically to see my old friend once
more a matchmaker. She took him to her heart and boasted of him; like
one made young herself by the great event, she joyously dressed her pale
daughter in her bridal gown, and, with smiles upon her face, she cast
rice after the departing carriage. But soon after it had gone, I chanced
upon her in her room, and she was on her knees in tears before the
spirit of the dead lover. “Forgive me,” she besought him, “for I am old,
and life is gray to friendless girls.” The pardon she wanted was for
pretending to her daughter that women should act thus.

I am sure she felt herself soiled.

But men are of a coarser clay. At least I am, and nearly twenty years
had elapsed, and here was I burdened under a load of affection, like a
sack of returned love-letters, with no lap into which to dump them.

“They were all written to another woman, ma'am, and yet I am in hopes
that you will find something in them about yourself.” It would have
sounded oddly to Mary, but life is gray to friendless girls, and
something might have come of it.

On the other hand, it would have brought her for ever out of the wood of
the little hut, and I had but to drop the letter to send them both back
there. The easiness of it tempted me.

Besides, she would tire of me when I was really known to her. They all
do, you see.

And, after all, why should he lose his laugh because I had lost my
smile?

And then, again, the whole thing was merely a whimsical idea.

I dropped the letter, and shouldered my burden.




XI. The Runaway Perambulator

I sometimes met David in public places such as the Kensington Gardens,
where he lorded it surrounded by his suite and wearing the blank face
and glass eyes of all carriage-people. On these occasions I always
stalked by, meditating on higher things, though Mary seemed to think me
very hardhearted, and Irene, who had become his nurse (I forget how,
but fear I had something to do with it), ran after me with messages,
as, would I not call and see him in his home at twelve o'clock, at which
moment, it seemed, he was at his best.

No, I would not.

“He says tick-tack to the clock,” Irene said, trying to snare me.

“Pooh!” said I.

“Other little 'uns jest says 'tick-tick,'” she told me, with a flush of
pride.

“I prefer 'tick-tick,'” I said, whereat she departed in dudgeon.

Had they had the sense to wheel him behind a tree and leave him, I would
have looked, but as they lacked it, I decided to wait until he could
walk, when it would be more easy to waylay him. However, he was a
cautious little gorbal who, after many threats to rise, always seemed to
come to the conclusion that he might do worse than remain where he was,
and when he had completed his first year I lost patience with him.

“When I was his age,” I said to Irene, “I was running about.” I
consulted them casually about this matter at the club, and they had all
been running about at a year old.

I made this nurse the following offer: If she would bring the dilatory
boy to my rooms and leave him there for half an hour I would look at
him. At first Mary, to whom the offer was passed on, rejected it with
hauteur, but presently she wavered, and the upshot was that Irene,
looking scornful and anxious, arrived one day with the perambulator.
Without casting eyes on its occupant, I pointed Irene to the door: “In
half-an-hour,” I said.

She begged permission to remain, and promised to turn her back, and so
on, but I was obdurate, and she then delivered herself of a passionately
affectionate farewell to her charge, which was really all directed
against me, and ended with these powerful words: “And if he takes off
your socks, my pretty, may he be blasted for evermore.”

“I shall probably take off her socks,” I said carelessly to this.

Her socks. Do you see what made Irene scream?

“It is a girl, is it not?” I asked, thus neatly depriving her of
coherent speech as I pushed her to the door. I then turned round to--to
begin, and, after reflecting, I began by sitting down behind the hood of
his carriage. My plan was to accustom him to his new surroundings before
bursting on the scene myself.

I had various thoughts. Was he awake? If not, better let him
wake naturally. Half-an-hour was a long time. Why had I not said
quarter-of-an-hour? Anon, I saw that if I was to sit there much longer I
should have said an hour, so I whistled softly; but he took no notice.
I remember trying to persuade myself that if I never budged till Irene's
return, it would be an amusing triumph over Mary. I coughed, but still
there was no response. Abruptly, the fear smote me. Perhaps he is not
there.

I rose hastily, and was striding forward, when I distinctly noticed a
covert movement somewhere near the middle of the carriage, and heard a
low gurgle, which was instantly suppressed. I stopped dead at this sharp
reminder that I was probably not the only curious person in the room,
and for a long moment we both lay low, after which, I am glad to
remember, I made the first advance. Earlier in the day I had arranged
some likely articles on a side-table: my watch and chain, my bunch of
keys, and two war-medals for plodding merit, and with a glance at these
(as something to fall back upon), I stepped forward doggedly, looking
(I fear now) a little like a professor of legerdemain. David was sitting
up, and he immediately fixed his eyes on me.

It would ill become me to attempt to describe this dear boy to you,
for of course I know really nothing about children, so I shall say only
this, that I thought him very like what Timothy would have been had he
ever had a chance.

I to whom David had been brought for judgment, now found myself being
judged by him, and this rearrangement of the pieces seemed so natural
that I felt no surprise; I felt only a humble craving to hear him
signify that I would do. I have stood up before other keen judges and
deceived them all, but I made no effort to deceive David; I wanted to,
but dared not. Those unblinking eyes were too new to the world to be
hooded by any of its tricks. In them I saw my true self. They opened for
me that pedler's pack of which I have made so much ado, and I found
that it was weighted less with pretty little sad love-tokens than with
ignoble thoughts and deeds and an unguided life. I looked dejectedly at
David, not so much, I think, because I had such a sorry display for him,
as because I feared he would not have me in his service. I seemed to
know that he was making up his mind once and for all.

And in the end he smiled, perhaps only because I looked so frightened,
but the reason scarcely mattered to me, I felt myself a fine fellow at
once. It was a long smile, too, opening slowly to its fullest extent (as
if to let me in), and then as slowly shutting.

Then, to divert me from sad thoughts, or to rivet our friendship, or
because the time had come for each of us to show the other what he could
do, he immediately held one foot high in the air. This made him slide
down the perambulator, and I saw at once that it was very necessary to
replace him. But never before had I come into such close contact with
a child; the most I had ever done was, when they were held up to me, to
shut my eyes and kiss a vacuum. David, of course, though no doubt he
was eternally being replaced, could tell as little as myself how it
was contrived, and yet we managed it between us quite easily. His
body instinctively assumed a certain position as I touched him, which
compelled my arms to fall into place, and the thing was done. I felt
absurdly pleased, but he was already considering what he should do next.

He again held up his foot, which had a gouty appearance owing to
its being contained in a dumpy little worsted sock, and I thought he
proposed to repeat his first performance, but in this I did him an
injustice, for, unlike Porthos, he was one who scorned to do the same
feat twice; perhaps, like the conjurors, he knew that the audience were
more on the alert the second time.

I discovered that he wanted me to take off his sock!

Remembering Irene's dread warnings on this subject I must say that I
felt uneasy. Had he heard her, and was he daring me? And what dire thing
could happen if the sock was removed? I sought to reason with him, but
he signed to me to look sharp, and I removed the sock. The part of him
thus revealed gave David considerable pleasure, but I noticed, as a
curious thing, that he seemed to have no interest in the other foot.

However, it was not there merely to be looked at, for after giving me
a glance which said “Now observe!” he raised his bare foot and ran his
mouth along the toes, like one playing on a barbaric instrument. He then
tossed his foot aside, smiled his long triumphant smile and intimated
that it was now my turn to do something. I thought the best thing I
could do would be to put his sock on him again, but as soon as I tried
to do so I discovered why Irene had warned me so portentously against
taking it off. I should say that she had trouble in socking him every
morning.

Nevertheless I managed to slip it on while he was debating what to do
with my watch. I bitterly regretted that I could do nothing with it
myself, put it under a wine-glass, for instance, and make it turn into
a rabbit, which so many people can do. In the meantime David, occupied
with similar thoughts, very nearly made it disappear altogether, and I
was thankful to be able to pull it back by the chain.

“Haw-haw-haw!”

Thus he commented on his new feat, but it was also a reminder to me, a
trifle cruel, that he was not my boy. After all, you see, Mary had not
given him the whole of his laugh. The watch said that five and twenty
minutes had passed, and looking out I saw Irene at one end of the street
staring up at my window, and at the other end Mary's husband staring up
at my window, and beneath me Mary staring up at my window. They had all
broken their promise.

I returned to David, and asked him in a low voice whether he would give
me a kiss. He shook his head about six times, and I was in despair. Then
the smile came, and I knew that he was teasing me only. He now nodded
his head about six times.

This was the prettiest of all his exploits. It was so pretty that,
contrary to his rule, he repeated it. I had held out my arms to him, and
first he shook his head, and then after a long pause (to frighten me),
he nodded it.

But no sooner was he in my arms than I seemed to see Mary and her
husband and Irene bearing down upon my chambers to take him from me, and
acting under an impulse I whipped him into the perambulator and was off
with it without a license down the back staircase. To the Kensington
Gardens we went; it may have been Manitoba we started for, but we
arrived at the Kensington Gardens, and it had all been so unpremeditated
and smartly carried out that I remember clapping my hand to my head in
the street, to make sure that I was wearing a hat.

I watched David to see what he thought of it, and he had not yet made
up his mind. Strange to say, I no longer felt shy. I was grown
suddenly indifferent to public comment, and my elation increased when
I discovered that I was being pursued. They drew a cordon round me near
Margot Meredith's tree, but I broke through it by a strategic movement
to the south, and was next heard of in the Baby's Walk. They held both
ends of this passage, and then thought to close on me, but I slipped
through their fingers by doubling up Bunting's Thumb into Picnic Street.
Cowering at St. Govor's Well, we saw them rush distractedly up the Hump,
and when they had crossed to the Round Pond we paraded gaily in the
Broad Walk, not feeling the tiniest bit sorry for anybody.

Here, however, it gradually came into David's eyes that, after all, I
was a strange man, and they opened wider and wider, until they were the
size of my medals, and then, with the deliberation that distinguishes
his smile, he slowly prepared to howl. I saw all his forces gathering
in his face, and I had nothing to oppose to them; it was an unarmed man
against a regiment.

Even then I did not chide him. He could not know that it was I who had
dropped the letter.

I think I must have stepped over a grateful fairy at that moment, for
who else could have reminded me so opportunely of my famous manipulation
of the eyebrows, forgotten since I was in the fifth form? I alone of
boys had been able to elevate and lower my eyebrows separately; when
the one was climbing my forehead the other descended it, like the two
buckets in the well.

Most diffidently did I call this accomplishment to my aid now, and
immediately David checked his forces and considered my unexpected
movement without prejudice. His face remained as it was, his mouth open
to emit the howl if I did not surpass expectation. I saw that, like the
fair-minded boy he has always been, he was giving me my chance, and
I worked feverishly, my chief fear being that, owing to his youth,
he might not know how marvellous was this thing I was doing. It is an
appeal to the intellect, as well as to the senses, and no one on earth
can do it except myself.

When I paused for a moment exhausted he signed gravely, with unchanged
face, that though it was undeniably funny, he had not yet decided
whether it was funny enough, and, taking this for encouragement, at it
I went once more, till I saw his forces wavering, when I sent my left
eyebrow up almost farther than I could bring it back, and with that I
had him, the smile broke through the clouds.

In the midst of my hard-won triumph I heard cheering.

I had been vaguely conscious that we were not quite alone, but had not
dared to look away from David; I looked now, and found to my annoyance
that I was the centre of a deeply interested gathering of children.
There was, in particular, one vulgar little street-boy--

However, if that damped me in the moment of victory, I was soon to
triumph gloriously in what began like defeat. I had sat me down on one
of the garden-seats in the Figs, with one hand resting carelessly on the
perambulator, in imitation of the nurses, it was so pleasant to assume
the air of one who walked with David daily, when to my chagrin I saw
Mary approaching with quick stealthy steps, and already so near me that
flight would have been ignominy. Porthos, of whom she had hold, bounded
toward me, waving his traitorous tail, but she slowed on seeing that I
had observed her. She had run me down with my own dog.

I have not mentioned that Porthos had for some time now been a visitor
at her house, though never can I forget the shock I got the first time
I saw him strolling out of it like an afternoon caller. Of late he has
avoided it, crossing to the other side when I go that way, and rejoining
me farther on, so I conclude that Mary's husband is painting him.

I waited her coming stiffly, in great depression of spirits, and noted
that her first attentions were for David, who, somewhat shabbily, gave
her the end of a smile which had been begun for me. It seemed to relieve
her, for what one may call the wild maternal look left her face, and
trying to check little gasps of breath, the result of unseemly running,
she signed to her confederates to remain in the background, and turned
curious eyes on me. Had she spoken as she approached, I am sure her
words would have been as flushed as her face, but now her mouth puckered
as David's does before he sets forth upon his smile, and I saw that she
thought she had me in a parley at last.

“I could not help being a little anxious,” she said craftily, but I must
own, with some sweetness.

I merely raised my hat, and at that she turned quickly to David--I
cannot understand why the movement was so hasty--and lowered her face
to his. Oh, little trump of a boy! Instead of kissing her, he seized her
face with one hand and tried to work her eyebrows up and down with the
other. He failed, and his obvious disappointment in his mother was as
nectar to me.

“I don't understand what you want, darling,” said she in distress, and
looked at me inquiringly, and I understood what he wanted, and let
her see that I understood. Had I been prepared to converse with her, I
should have said elatedly that, had she known what he wanted, still she
could not have done it, though she had practised for twenty years.

I tried to express all this by another movement of my hat.

It caught David's eye and at once he appealed to me with the most
perfect confidence. She failed to see what I did, for I shyly gave her
my back, but the effect on David was miraculous; he signed to her to go,
for he was engaged for the afternoon.

What would you have done then, reader? I didn't. In my great moment I
had strength of character to raise my hat for the third time and walk
away, leaving the child to judge between us. I walked slowly, for I knew
I must give him time to get it out, and I listened eagerly, but that
was unnecessary, for when it did come it was a very roar of anguish. I
turned my head, and saw David fiercely pushing the woman aside, that he
might have one last long look at me. He held out his wistful arms and
nodded repeatedly, and I faltered, but my glorious scheme saved me,
and I walked on. It was a scheme conceived in a flash, and ever since
relentlessly pursued, to burrow under Mary's influence with the boy,
expose her to him in all her vagaries, take him utterly from her and
make him mine.




XII. The Pleasantest Club in London

All perambulators lead to the Kensington Gardens.

Not, however, that you will see David in his perambulator much longer,
for soon after I first shook his faith in his mother, it came to him to
be up and doing, and he up and did in the Broad Walk itself, where he
would stand alone most elaborately poised, signing imperiously to the
British public to time him, and looking his most heavenly just before he
fell. He fell with a dump, and as they always laughed then, he pretended
that this was his funny way of finishing.

That was on a Monday. On Tuesday he climbed the stone stair of the
Gold King, looking over his shoulder gloriously at each step, and
on Wednesday he struck three and went into knickerbockers. For the
Kensington Gardens, you must know, are full of short cuts, familiar to
all who play there; and the shortest leads from the baby in long
clothes to the little boy of three riding on the fence. It is called the
Mother's Tragedy.

If you are a burgess of the gardens (which have a vocabulary of their
own), the faces of these quaint mothers are a clock to you, in which you
may read the ages of their young. When he is three they are said to wear
the knickerbocker face, and you may take it from me that Mary assumed
that face with a sigh; fain would she have kept her boy a baby longer,
but he insisted on his rights, and I encouraged him that I might notch
another point against her. I was now seeing David once at least every
week, his mother, who remained culpably obtuse to my sinister design,
having instructed Irene that I was to be allowed to share him with her,
and we had become close friends, though the little nurse was ever a
threatening shadow in the background. Irene, in short, did not improve
with acquaintance. I found her to be high and mighty, chiefly, I think,
because she now wore a nurse's cap with streamers, of which the little
creature was ludicrously proud. She assumed the airs of an official
person, and always talked as if generations of babies had passed through
her hands. She was also extremely jealous, and had a way of signifying
disapproval of my methods that led to many coldnesses and even
bickerings between us, which I now see to have been undignified. I
brought the following accusations against her:

That she prated too much about right and wrong.

That she was a martinet.

That she pretended it was a real cap, with real streamers, when she knew
Mary had made the whole thing out of a muslin blind. I regret having
used this argument, but it was the only one that really damped her.

On the other hand, she accused me of spoiling him.

Of not thinking of his future.

Of never asking him where he expected to go to if he did such things.

Of telling him tales that had no moral application.

Of saying that the handkerchief disappeared into nothingness, when it
really disappeared into a small tin cup, attached to my person by a
piece of elastic.

To this last charge I plead guilty, for in those days I had a pathetic
faith in legerdemain, and the eyebrow feat (which, however, is entirely
an affair of skill) having yielded such good results, I naturally cast
about for similar diversions when it ceased to attract. It lost its hold
on David suddenly, as I was to discover was the fate of all of them;
twenty times would he call for my latest, and exult in it, and the
twenty-first time (and ever afterward) he would stare blankly, as if
wondering what the man meant. He was like the child queen who, when the
great joke was explained to her, said coldly, “We are not amused,” and,
I assure you, it is a humiliating thing to perform before an infant who
intimates, after giving you ample time to make your points, that he is
not amused. I hoped that when David was able to talk--and not merely
to stare at me for five minutes and then say “hat”--his spoken verdict,
however damning, would be less expressive than his verdict without
words, but I was disillusioned. I remember once in those later years,
when he could keep up such spirited conversations with himself that he
had little need for any of us, promising him to do something exceedingly
funny with a box and two marbles, and after he had watched for a long
time he said gravely, “Tell me when it begins to be funny.”

I confess to having received a few simple lessons in conjuring, in a
dimly lighted chamber beneath a shop, from a gifted young man with a
long neck and a pimply face, who as I entered took a barber's pole from
my pocket, saying at the same time, “Come, come, sir, this will never
do.” Whether because he knew too much, or because he wore a trick shirt,
he was the most depressing person I ever encountered; he felt none of
the artist's joy, and it was sad to see one so well calculated to give
pleasure to thousands not caring a dump about it.

The barber's pole I successfully extracted from David's mouth, but the
difficulty (not foreseen) of knowing how to dispose of a barber's pole
in the Kensington Gardens is considerable, there always being polite
children hovering near who run after you and restore it to you. The
young man, again, had said that anyone would lend me a bottle or a
lemon, but though these were articles on which he seemed ever able to
lay his hand, I found (what I had never noticed before) that there is
a curious dearth of them in the Gardens. The magic egg-cup I usually
carried about with me, and with its connivance I did some astonishing
things with pennies, but even the penny that costs sixpence is
uncertain, and just when you are saying triumphantly that it will
be found in the egg-cup, it may clatter to the ground, whereon some
ungenerous spectator, such as Irene, accuses you of fibbing and
corrupting youthful minds. It was useless to tell her, through clenched
teeth, that the whole thing was a joke, for she understood no jokes
except her own, of which she had the most immoderately high opinion,
and that would have mattered little to me had not David liked them also.
There were times when I could not but think less of the boy, seeing
him rock convulsed over antics of Irene that have been known to every
nursemaid since the year One. While I stood by, sneering, he would give
me the ecstatic look that meant, “Irene is really very entertaining,
isn't she?”

We were rivals, but I desire to treat her with scrupulous fairness, and
I admit that she had one good thing, to wit, her gutta-percha tooth. In
earlier days one of her front teeth, as she told me, had fallen out, but
instead of then parting with it, the resourceful child had hammered it
in again with a hair-brush, which she offered to show me, with the dents
on it. This tooth, having in time passed away, its place was supplied by
one of gutta-percha, made by herself, which seldom came out except when
she sneezed, and if it merely fell at her feet this was a sign that the
cold was to be a slight one, but if it shot across the room she knew she
was in for something notable. Irene's tooth was very favourably known
in the Gardens, where the perambulators used to gather round her to hear
whether it had been doing anything to-day, and I would not have grudged
David his proprietary pride in it, had he seemed to understand that
Irene's one poor little accomplishment, though undeniably showy, was
without intellectual merit. I have sometimes stalked away from him,
intimating that if his regard was to be got so cheaply I begged to
retire from the competition, but the Gardens are the pleasantest club in
London, and I soon returned. How I scoured the Gardens looking for him,
and how skilful I became at picking him out far away among the trees,
though other mothers imitated the picturesque attire of him, to Mary's
indignation. I also cut Irene's wings (so to speak) by taking her to a
dentist.

And David did some adorable things. For instance, he used my pockets as
receptacles into which he put any article he might not happen to want
at the moment. He shoved it in, quite as if they were his own pockets,
without saying, By your leave, and perhaps I discovered it on reaching
home--a tin-soldier, or a pistol--when I put it on my mantle-shelf
and sighed. And here is another pleasant memory. One day I had been
over-friendly to another boy, and, after enduring it for some time David
up and struck him. It was exactly as Porthos does, when I favour other
dogs (he knocks them down with his foot and stands over them, looking
very noble and stern), so I knew its meaning at once; it was David's
first public intimation that he knew I belonged to him.

Irene scolded him for striking that boy, and made him stand in disgrace
at the corner of a seat in the Broad Walk. The seat at the corner of
which David stood suffering for love of me, is the one nearest to the
Round Pond to persons coming from the north.

You may be sure that she and I had words over this fiendish cruelty.
When next we met I treated her as one who no longer existed, and at
first she bridled and then was depressed, and as I was going away she
burst into tears. She cried because neither at meeting nor parting had
I lifted my hat to her, a foolish custom of mine, of which, as I now
learned to my surprise, she was very proud. She and I still have our
tiffs, but I have never since then forgotten to lift my hat to Irene.
I also made her promise to bow to me, at which she affected to scoff,
saying I was taking my fun of her, but she was really pleased, and I
tell you, Irene has one of the prettiest and most touching little bows
imaginable; it is half to the side (if I may so express myself), which
has always been my favourite bow, and, I doubt not, she acquired it by
watching Mary.

I should be sorry to have it thought, as you may now be thinking, that I
look on children as on puppy-dogs, who care only for play. Perhaps that
was my idea when first I tried to lure David to my unaccustomed arms,
and even for some time after, for if I am to be candid, I must own that
until he was three years old I sought merely to amuse him. God forgive
me, but I had only one day a week in which to capture him, and I was
very raw at the business.

I was about to say that David opened my eyes to the folly of it, but
really I think this was Irene's doing. Watching her with children I
learned that partial as they are to fun they are moved almost more
profoundly by moral excellence. So fond of babes was this little mother
that she had always room near her for one more, and often have I seen
her in the Gardens, the centre of a dozen mites who gazed awestruck at
her while she told them severely how little ladies and gentlemen behave.
They were children of the well-to-pass, and she was from Drury Lane, but
they believed in her as the greatest of all authorities on little ladies
and gentlemen, and the more they heard of how these romantic creatures
keep themselves tidy and avoid pools and wait till they come to a gate,
the more they admired them, though their faces showed how profoundly
they felt that to be little ladies and gentlemen was not for them. You
can't think what hopeless little faces they were.

Children are not at all like puppies, I have said. But do puppies care
only for play? That wistful look, which the merriest of them sometimes
wear, I wonder whether it means that they would like to hear about the
good puppies?

As you shall see, I invented many stories for David, practising the
telling of them by my fireside as if they were conjuring feats, while
Irene knew only one, but she told it as never has any other fairy-tale
been told in my hearing. It was the prettiest of them all, and was
recited by the heroine.

“Why were the king and queen not at home?” David would ask her
breathlessly.

“I suppose,” said Irene, thinking it out, “they was away buying the
victuals.”

She always told the story gazing into vacancy, so that David thought it
was really happening somewhere up the Broad Walk, and when she came
to its great moments her little bosom heaved. Never shall I forget the
concentrated scorn with which the prince said to the sisters, “Neither
of you ain't the one what wore the glass slipper.”

“And then--and then--and then--,” said Irene, not artistically to
increase the suspense, but because it was all so glorious to her.

“Tell me--tell me quick,” cried David, though he knew the tale by heart.

“She sits down like,” said Irene, trembling in second-sight, “and she
tries on the glass slipper, and it fits her to a T, and then the prince,
he cries in a ringing voice, 'This here is my true love, Cinderella,
what now I makes my lawful wedded wife.'”

Then she would come out of her dream, and look round at the grandees of
the Gardens with an extraordinary elation. “Her, as was only a kitchen
drudge,” she would say in a strange soft voice and with shining eyes,
“but was true and faithful in word and deed, such was her reward.”

I am sure that had the fairy godmother appeared just then and touched
Irene with her wand, David would have been interested rather than
astonished. As for myself, I believe I have surprised this little girl's
secret. She knows there are no fairy godmothers nowadays, but she hopes
that if she is always true and faithful she may some day turn into a
lady in word and deed, like the mistress whom she adores.

It is a dead secret, a Drury Lane child's romance; but what an amount of
heavy artillery will be brought to bear against it in this sad London of
ours. Not much chance for her, I suppose.

Good luck to you, Irene.




XIII. The Grand Tour of the Gardens

You must see for yourselves that it will be difficult to follow our
adventures unless you are familiar with the Kensington Gardens, as they
now became known to David. They are in London, where the King lives, and
you go to them every day unless you are looking decidedly flushed, but
no one has ever been in the whole of the Gardens, because it is so soon
time to turn back. The reason it is soon time to turn back is that you
sleep from twelve to one. If your mother was not so sure that you sleep
from twelve to one, you could most likely see the whole of them.

The Gardens are bounded on one side by a never-ending line of omnibuses,
over which Irene has such authority that if she holds up her finger
to any one of them it stops immediately. She then crosses with you in
safety to the other side. There are more gates to the Gardens than one
gate, but that is the one you go in at, and before you go in you speak
to the lady with the balloons, who sits just outside. This is as near to
being inside as she may venture, because, if she were to let go her hold
of the railings for one moment, the balloons would lift her up, and she
would be flown away. She sits very squat, for the balloons are always
tugging at her, and the strain has given her quite a red face. Once she
was a new one, because the old one had let go, and David was very sorry
for the old one, but as she did let go, he wished he had been there to
see.

The Gardens are a tremendous big place, with millions and hundreds of
trees, and first you come to the Figs, but you scorn to loiter there,
for the Figs is the resort of superior little persons, who are forbidden
to mix with the commonalty, and is so named, according to legend,
because they dress in full fig. These dainty ones are themselves
contemptuously called Figs by David and other heroes, and you have a key
to the manners and customs of this dandiacal section of the Gardens when
I tell you that cricket is called crickets here. Occasionally a rebel
Fig climbs over the fence into the world, and such a one was Miss Mabel
Grey, of whom I shall tell you when we come to Miss Mabel Grey's gate.
She was the only really celebrated Fig.

We are now in the Broad Walk, and it is as much bigger than the other
walks as your father is bigger than you. David wondered if it began
little, and grew and grew, till it was quite grown up, and whether the
other walks are its babies, and he drew a picture, which diverted
him very much, of the Broad Walk giving a tiny walk an airing in a
perambulator. In the Broad Walk you meet all the people who are worth
knowing, and there is usually a grown-up with them to prevent their
going on the damp grass, and to make them stand disgraced at the corner
of a seat if they have been mad-dog or Mary-Annish. To be Mary-Annish
is to behave like a girl, whimpering because nurse won't carry you, or
simpering with your thumb in your mouth, and it is a hateful quality,
but to be mad-dog is to kick out at everything, and there is some
satisfaction in that.

If I were to point out all the notable places as we pass up the Broad
Walk, it would be time to turn back before we reach them, and I simply
wave my stick at Cecco's Tree, that memorable spot where a boy called
Cecco lost his penny, and, looking for it, found twopence. There has
been a good deal of excavation going on there ever since. Farther up the
walk is the little wooden house in which Marmaduke Perry hid. There is
no more awful story of the Gardens by day than this of Marmaduke Perry,
who had been Mary-Annish three days in succession, and was sentenced to
appear in the Broad Walk dressed in his sister's clothes. He hid in
the little wooden house, and refused to emerge until they brought him
knickerbockers with pockets.

You now try to go to the Round Pond, but nurses hate it, because they
are not really manly, and they make you look the other way, at the Big
Penny and the Baby's Palace. She was the most celebrated baby of the
Gardens, and lived in the palace all alone, with ever so many dolls, so
people rang the bell, and up she got out of her bed, though it was past
six o'clock, and she lighted a candle and opened the door in her nighty,
and then they all cried with great rejoicings, “Hail, Queen of England!”
 What puzzled David most was how she knew where the matches were kept.
The Big Penny is a statue about her.

Next we come to the Hump, which is the part of the Broad Walk where all
the big races are run, and even though you had no intention of running
you do run when you come to the Hump, it is such a fascinating,
slide-down kind of place. Often you stop when you have run about
half-way down it, and then you are lost, but there is another little
wooden house near here, called the Lost House, and so you tell the man
that you are lost and then he finds you. It is glorious fun racing down
the Hump, but you can't do it on windy days because then you are not
there, but the fallen leaves do it instead of you. There is almost
nothing that has such a keen sense of fun as a fallen leaf.

From the Hump we can see the gate that is called after Miss Mabel Grey,
the Fig I promised to tell you about. There were always two nurses with
her, or else one mother and one nurse, and for a long time she was a
pattern-child who always coughed off the table and said, “How do you
do?” to the other Figs, and the only game she played at was flinging a
ball gracefully and letting the nurse bring it back to her. Then one
day she tired of it all and went mad-dog, and, first, to show that she
really was mad-dog, she unloosened both her boot-laces and put out her
tongue east, west, north, and south. She then flung her sash into a
puddle and danced on it till dirty water was squirted over her frock,
after which she climbed the fence and had a series of incredible
adventures, one of the least of which was that she kicked off both her
boots. At last she came to the gate that is now called after her, out of
which she ran into streets David and I have never been in though we have
heard them roaring, and still she ran on and would never again have been
heard of had not her mother jumped into a bus and thus overtaken her.
It all happened, I should say, long ago, and this is not the Mabel Grey
whom David knows.

Returning up the Broad Walk we have on our right the Baby Walk, which is
so full of perambulators that you could cross from side to side stepping
on babies, but the nurses won't let you do it. From this walk a passage
called Bunting's Thumb, because it is that length, leads into Picnic
Street, where there are real kettles, and chestnut-blossom falls into
your mug as you are drinking. Quite common children picnic here also,
and the blossom falls into their mugs just the same.

Next comes St. Govor's Well, which was full of water when Malcolm the
Bold fell into it. He was his mother's favourite, and he let her put her
arm round his neck in public because she was a widow, but he was also
partial to adventures and liked to play with a chimney-sweep who had
killed a good many bears. The sweep's name was Sooty, and one day when
they were playing near the well, Malcolm fell in and would have been
drowned had not Sooty dived in and rescued him, and the water had washed
Sooty clean and he now stood revealed as Malcolm's long-lost father. So
Malcolm would not let his mother put her arm round his neck any more.

Between the well and the Round Pond are the cricket-pitches, and
frequently the choosing of sides exhausts so much time that there is
scarcely any cricket. Everybody wants to bat first, and as soon as he
is out he bowls unless you are the better wrestler, and while you are
wrestling with him the fielders have scattered to play at something
else. The Gardens are noted for two kinds of cricket: boy cricket, which
is real cricket with a bat, and girl cricket, which is with a racquet
and the governess. Girls can't really play cricket, and when you
are watching their futile efforts you make funny sounds at them.
Nevertheless, there was a very disagreeable incident one day when some
forward girls challenged David's team, and a disturbing creature called
Angela Clare sent down so many yorkers that--However, instead of telling
you the result of that regrettable match I shall pass on hurriedly to
the Round Pond, which is the wheel that keeps all the Gardens going.

It is round because it is in the very middle of the Gardens, and when
you are come to it you never want to go any farther. You can't be good
all the time at the Round Pond, however much you try. You can be good in
the Broad Walk all the time, but not at the Round Pond, and the reason
is that you forget, and, when you remember, you are so wet that you may
as well be wetter. There are men who sail boats on the Round Pond,
such big boats that they bring them in barrows and sometimes in
perambulators, and then the baby has to walk. The bow-legged children
in the Gardens are these who had to walk too soon because their father
needed the perambulator.

You always want to have a yacht to sail on the Round Pond, and in the
end your uncle gives you one; and to carry it to the Pond the first
day is splendid, also to talk about it to boys who have no uncle is
splendid, but soon you like to leave it at home. For the sweetest
craft that slips her moorings in the Round Pond is what is called a
stick-boat, because she is rather like a stick until she is in the water
and you are holding the string. Then as you walk round, pulling her,
you see little men running about her deck, and sails rise magically and
catch the breeze, and you put in on dirty nights at snug harbours which
are unknown to the lordly yachts. Night passes in a twink, and again
your rakish craft noses for the wind, whales spout, you glide over
buried cities, and have brushes with pirates and cast anchor on coral
isles. You are a solitary boy while all this is taking place, for two
boys together cannot adventure far upon the Round Pond, and though you
may talk to yourself throughout the voyage, giving orders and executing
them with dispatch, you know not, when it is time to go home, where you
have been or what swelled your sails; your treasure-trove is all locked
away in your hold, so to speak, which will be opened, perhaps, by
another little boy many years afterward.

But those yachts have nothing in their hold. Does anyone return to this
haunt of his youth because of the yachts that used to sail it? Oh, no.
It is the stick-boat that is freighted with memories. The yachts are
toys, their owner a fresh-water mariner, they can cross and recross
a pond only while the stick-boat goes to sea. You yachtsmen with your
wands, who think we are all there to gaze on you, your ships are only
accidents of this place, and were they all to be boarded and sunk by the
ducks the real business of the Round Pond would be carried on as usual.

Paths from everywhere crowd like children to the pond. Some of them are
ordinary paths, which have a rail on each side, and are made by men
with their coats off, but others are vagrants, wide at one spot and at
another so narrow that you can stand astride them. They are called Paths
that have Made Themselves, and David did wish he could see them doing
it. But, like all the most wonderful things that happen in the Gardens,
it is done, we concluded, at night after the gates are closed. We have
also decided that the paths make themselves because it is their only
chance of getting to the Round Pond.

One of these gypsy paths comes from the place where the sheep get their
hair cut. When David shed his curls at the hair-dresser's, I am told, he
said good-bye to them without a tremor, though Mary has never been quite
the same bright creature since, so he despises the sheep as they run
from their shearer and calls out tauntingly, “Cowardy, cowardy custard!”
 But when the man grips them between his legs David shakes a fist at him
for using such big scissors. Another startling moment is when the man
turns back the grimy wool from the sheeps' shoulders and they look
suddenly like ladies in the stalls of a theatre. The sheep are so
frightened by the shearing that it makes them quite white and thin, and
as soon as they are set free they begin to nibble the grass at once,
quite anxiously, as if they feared that they would never be worth
eating. David wonders whether they know each other, now that they are
so different, and if it makes them fight with the wrong ones. They are
great fighters, and thus so unlike country sheep that every year they
give Porthos a shock. He can make a field of country sheep fly by merely
announcing his approach, but these town sheep come toward him with no
promise of gentle entertainment, and then a light from last year breaks
upon Porthos. He cannot with dignity retreat, but he stops and looks
about him as if lost in admiration of the scenery, and presently he
strolls away with a fine indifference and a glint at me from the corner
of his eye.

The Serpentine begins near here. It is a lovely lake, and there is a
drowned forest at the bottom of it. If you peer over the edge you can
see the trees all growing upside down, and they say that at night there
are also drowned stars in it. If so, Peter Pan sees them when he is
sailing across the lake in the Thrush's Nest. A small part only of the
Serpentine is in the Gardens, for soon it passes beneath a bridge to
far away where the island is on which all the birds are born that become
baby boys and girls. No one who is human, except Peter Pan (and he is
only half human), can land on the island, but you may write what you
want (boy or girl, dark or fair) on a piece of paper, and then twist
it into the shape of a boat and slip it into the water, and it reaches
Peter Pan's island after dark.

We are on the way home now, though, of course, it is all pretence that
we can go to so many of the places in one day. I should have had to be
carrying David long ago and resting on every seat like old Mr. Salford.
That was what we called him, because he always talked to us of a lovely
place called Salford where he had been born. He was a crab-apple of
an old gentleman who wandered all day in the Gardens from seat to seat
trying to fall in with somebody who was acquainted with the town of
Salford, and when we had known him for a year or more we actually did
meet another aged solitary who had once spent Saturday to Monday in
Salford. He was meek and timid and carried his address inside his hat,
and whatever part of London he was in search of he always went to the
General Post-office first as a starting-point. Him we carried in triumph
to our other friend, with the story of that Saturday to Monday, and
never shall I forget the gloating joy with which Mr. Salford leapt at
him. They have been cronies ever since, and I notice that Mr. Salford,
who naturally does most of the talking, keeps tight grip of the other
old man's coat.

The two last places before you come to our gate are the Dog's Cemetery
and the chaffinch's nest, but we pretend not to know what the Dog's
Cemetery is, as Porthos is always with us. The nest is very sad. It
is quite white, and the way we found it was wonderful. We were having
another look among the bushes for David's lost worsted ball, and instead
of the ball we found a lovely nest made of the worsted, and containing
four eggs, with scratches on them very like David's handwriting, so we
think they must have been the mother's love-letters to the little ones
inside. Every day we were in the Gardens we paid a call at the nest,
taking care that no cruel boy should see us, and we dropped crumbs,
and soon the bird knew us as friends, and sat in the nest looking at us
kindly with her shoulders hunched up. But one day when we went, there
were only two eggs in the nest, and the next time there were none. The
saddest part of it was that the poor little chaffinch fluttered about
the bushes, looking so reproachfully at us that we knew she thought we
had done it, and though David tried to explain to her, it was so
long since he had spoken the bird language that I fear she did not
understand. He and I left the Gardens that day with our knuckles in our
eyes.




XIV. Peter Pan

If you ask your mother whether she knew about Peter Pan when she was a
little girl she will say, “Why, of course, I did, child,” and if you
ask her whether he rode on a goat in those days she will say, “What
a foolish question to ask; certainly he did.” Then if you ask your
grandmother whether she knew about Peter Pan when she was a girl, she
also says, “Why, of course, I did, child,” but if you ask her whether he
rode on a goat in those days, she says she never heard of his having a
goat. Perhaps she has forgotten, just as she sometimes forgets your name
and calls you Mildred, which is your mother's name. Still, she could
hardly forget such an important thing as the goat. Therefore there was
no goat when your grandmother was a little girl. This shows that, in
telling the story of Peter Pan, to begin with the goat (as most people
do) is as silly as to put on your jacket before your vest.

Of course, it also shows that Peter is ever so old, but he is really
always the same age, so that does not matter in the least. His age
is one week, and though he was born so long ago he has never had a
birthday, nor is there the slightest chance of his ever having one. The
reason is that he escaped from being a human when he was seven days'
old; he escaped by the window and flew back to the Kensington Gardens.

If you think he was the only baby who ever wanted to escape, it shows
how completely you have forgotten your own young days. When David heard
this story first he was quite certain that he had never tried to escape,
but I told him to think back hard, pressing his hands to his temples,
and when he had done this hard, and even harder, he distinctly
remembered a youthful desire to return to the tree-tops, and with that
memory came others, as that he had lain in bed planning to escape as
soon as his mother was asleep, and how she had once caught him half-way
up the chimney. All children could have such recollections if they would
press their hands hard to their temples, for, having been birds before
they were human, they are naturally a little wild during the first few
weeks, and very itchy at the shoulders, where their wings used to be. So
David tells me.

I ought to mention here that the following is our way with a story:
First, I tell it to him, and then he tells it to me, the understanding
being that it is quite a different story; and then I retell it with his
additions, and so we go on until no one could say whether it is more
his story or mine. In this story of Peter Pan, for instance, the bald
narrative and most of the moral reflections are mine, though not all,
for this boy can be a stern moralist, but the interesting bits about the
ways and customs of babies in the bird-stage are mostly reminiscences
of David's, recalled by pressing his hands to his temples and thinking
hard.

Well, Peter Pan got out by the window, which had no bars. Standing
on the ledge he could see trees far away, which were doubtless the
Kensington Gardens, and the moment he saw them he entirely forgot that
he was now a little boy in a nightgown, and away he flew, right over the
houses to the Gardens. It is wonderful that he could fly without wings,
but the place itched tremendously, and, perhaps we could all fly if we
were as dead-confident-sure of our capacity to do it as was bold Peter
Pan that evening.

He alighted gaily on the open sward, between the Baby's Palace and the
Serpentine, and the first thing he did was to lie on his back and kick.
He was quite unaware already that he had ever been human, and thought he
was a bird, even in appearance, just the same as in his early days, and
when he tried to catch a fly he did not understand that the reason he
missed it was because he had attempted to seize it with his hand, which,
of course, a bird never does. He saw, however, that it must be past
Lock-out Time, for there were a good many fairies about, all too busy
to notice him; they were getting breakfast ready, milking their cows,
drawing water, and so on, and the sight of the water-pails made him
thirsty, so he flew over to the Round Pond to have a drink. He stooped,
and dipped his beak in the pond; he thought it was his beak, but, of
course, it was only his nose, and, therefore, very little water came up,
and that not so refreshing as usual, so next he tried a puddle, and he
fell flop into it. When a real bird falls in flop, he spreads out his
feathers and pecks them dry, but Peter could not remember what was
the thing to do, and he decided, rather sulkily, to go to sleep on the
weeping beech in the Baby Walk.

At first he found some difficulty in balancing himself on a branch, but
presently he remembered the way, and fell asleep. He awoke long before
morning, shivering, and saying to himself, “I never was out in such a
cold night;” he had really been out in colder nights when he was a bird,
but, of course, as everybody knows, what seems a warm night to a bird
is a cold night to a boy in a nightgown. Peter also felt strangely
uncomfortable, as if his head was stuffy, he heard loud noises that made
him look round sharply, though they were really himself sneezing. There
was something he wanted very much, but, though he knew he wanted it, he
could not think what it was. What he wanted so much was his mother to
blow his nose, but that never struck him, so he decided to appeal to the
fairies for enlightenment. They are reputed to know a good deal.

There were two of them strolling along the Baby Walk, with their arms
round each other's waists, and he hopped down to address them. The
fairies have their tiffs with the birds, but they usually give a civil
answer to a civil question, and he was quite angry when these two ran
away the moment they saw him. Another was lolling on a garden-chair,
reading a postage-stamp which some human had let fall, and when he heard
Peter's voice he popped in alarm behind a tulip.

To Peter's bewilderment he discovered that every fairy he met fled from
him. A band of workmen, who were sawing down a toadstool, rushed away,
leaving their tools behind them. A milkmaid turned her pail upside down
and hid in it. Soon the Gardens were in an uproar. Crowds of fairies
were running this away and that, asking each other stoutly, who was
afraid, lights were extinguished, doors barricaded, and from the grounds
of Queen Mab's palace came the rubadub of drums, showing that the royal
guard had been called out. A regiment of Lancers came charging down
the Broad Walk, armed with holly-leaves, with which they jog the enemy
horribly in passing. Peter heard the little people crying everywhere
that there was a human in the Gardens after Lock-out Time, but he never
thought for a moment that he was the human. He was feeling stuffier and
stuffier, and more and more wistful to learn what he wanted done to his
nose, but he pursued them with the vital question in vain; the timid
creatures ran from him, and even the Lancers, when he approached them up
the Hump, turned swiftly into a side-walk, on the pretence that they saw
him there.

Despairing of the fairies, he resolved to consult the birds, but now he
remembered, as an odd thing, that all the birds on the weeping beech had
flown away when he alighted on it, and though that had not troubled him
at the time, he saw its meaning now. Every living thing was shunning
him. Poor little Peter Pan, he sat down and cried, and even then he did
not know that, for a bird, he was sitting on his wrong part. It is a
blessing that he did not know, for otherwise he would have lost faith
in his power to fly, and the moment you doubt whether you can fly, you
cease forever to be able to do it. The reason birds can fly and we can't
is simply that they have perfect faith, for to have faith is to have
wings.

Now, except by flying, no one can reach the island in the Serpentine,
for the boats of humans are forbidden to land there, and there
are stakes round it, standing up in the water, on each of which a
bird-sentinel sits by day and night. It was to the island that Peter now
flew to put his strange case before old Solomon Caw, and he alighted on
it with relief, much heartened to find himself at last at home, as the
birds call the island. All of them were asleep, including the sentinels,
except Solomon, who was wide awake on one side, and he listened quietly
to Peter's adventures, and then told him their true meaning.

“Look at your night-gown, if you don't believe me,” Solomon said,
and with staring eyes Peter looked at his night-gown, and then at the
sleeping birds. Not one of them wore anything.

“How many of your toes are thumbs?” said Solomon a little cruelly, and
Peter saw to his consternation, that all his toes were fingers. The
shock was so great that it drove away his cold.

“Ruffle your feathers,” said that grim old Solomon, and Peter tried most
desperately hard to ruffle his feathers, but he had none. Then he rose
up, quaking, and for the first time since he stood on the window-ledge,
he remembered a lady who had been very fond of him.

“I think I shall go back to mother,” he said timidly.

“Good-bye,” replied Solomon Caw with a queer look.

But Peter hesitated. “Why don't you go?” the old one asked politely.

“I suppose,” said Peter huskily, “I suppose I can still fly?”

You see, he had lost faith.

“Poor little half-and-half,” said Solomon, who was not really
hard-hearted, “you will never be able to fly again, not even on windy
days. You must live here on the island always.”

“And never even go to the Kensington Gardens?” Peter asked tragically.

“How could you get across?” said Solomon. He promised very kindly,
however, to teach Peter as many of the bird ways as could be learned by
one of such an awkward shape.

“Then I sha'n't be exactly a human?” Peter asked.

“No.”

“Nor exactly a bird?”

“No.”

“What shall I be?”

“You will be a Betwixt-and-Between,” Solomon said, and certainly he was
a wise old fellow, for that is exactly how it turned out.

The birds on the island never got used to him. His oddities tickled them
every day, as if they were quite new, though it was really the birds
that were new. They came out of the eggs daily, and laughed at him at
once, then off they soon flew to be humans, and other birds came out
of other eggs, and so it went on forever. The crafty mother-birds, when
they tired of sitting on their eggs, used to get the young one to break
their shells a day before the right time by whispering to them that now
was their chance to see Peter washing or drinking or eating. Thousands
gathered round him daily to watch him do these things, just as you watch
the peacocks, and they screamed with delight when he lifted the crusts
they flung him with his hands instead of in the usual way with the
mouth. All his food was brought to him from the Gardens at Solomon's
orders by the birds. He would not eat worms or insects (which they
thought very silly of him), so they brought him bread in their beaks.
Thus, when you cry out, “Greedy! Greedy!” to the bird that flies away
with the big crust, you know now that you ought not to do this, for he
is very likely taking it to Peter Pan.

Peter wore no night-gown now. You see, the birds were always begging him
for bits of it to line their nests with, and, being very good-natured,
he could not refuse, so by Solomon's advice he had hidden what was left
of it. But, though he was now quite naked, you must not think that he
was cold or unhappy. He was usually very happy and gay, and the reason
was that Solomon had kept his promise and taught him many of the bird
ways. To be easily pleased, for instance, and always to be really doing
something, and to think that whatever he was doing was a thing of vast
importance. Peter became very clever at helping the birds to build their
nests; soon he could build better than a wood-pigeon, and nearly as well
as a blackbird, though never did he satisfy the finches, and he made
nice little water-troughs near the nests and dug up worms for the young
ones with his fingers. He also became very learned in bird-lore, and
knew an east-wind from a west-wind by its smell, and he could see the
grass growing and hear the insects walking about inside the tree-trunks.
But the best thing Solomon had done was to teach him to have a glad
heart. All birds have glad hearts unless you rob their nests, and so as
they were the only kind of heart Solomon knew about, it was easy to him
to teach Peter how to have one.

Peter's heart was so glad that he felt he must sing all day long,
just as the birds sing for joy, but, being partly human, he needed an
instrument, so he made a pipe of reeds, and he used to sit by the shore
of the island of an evening, practising the sough of the wind and the
ripple of the water, and catching handfuls of the shine of the moon, and
he put them all in his pipe and played them so beautifully that even the
birds were deceived, and they would say to each other, “Was that a fish
leaping in the water or was it Peter playing leaping fish on his pipe?”
 and sometimes he played the birth of birds, and then the mothers would
turn round in their nests to see whether they had laid an egg. If you
are a child of the Gardens you must know the chestnut-tree near the
bridge, which comes out in flower first of all the chestnuts, but
perhaps you have not heard why this tree leads the way. It is because
Peter wearies for summer and plays that it has come, and the chestnut
being so near, hears him and is cheated.

But as Peter sat by the shore tootling divinely on his pipe he sometimes
fell into sad thoughts and then the music became sad also, and the
reason of all this sadness was that he could not reach the Gardens,
though he could see them through the arch of the bridge. He knew he
could never be a real human again, and scarcely wanted to be one, but
oh, how he longed to play as other children play, and of course there
is no such lovely place to play in as the Gardens. The birds brought him
news of how boys and girls play, and wistful tears started in Peter's
eyes.

Perhaps you wonder why he did not swim across. The reason was that he
could not swim. He wanted to know how to swim, but no one on the island
knew the way except the ducks, and they are so stupid. They were quite
willing to teach him, but all they could say about it was, “You sit down
on the top of the water in this way, and then you kick out like that.”
 Peter tried it often, but always before he could kick out he sank. What
he really needed to know was how you sit on the water without sinking,
and they said it was quite impossible to explain such an easy thing as
that. Occasionally swans touched on the island, and he would give them
all his day's food and then ask them how they sat on the water, but as
soon as he had no more to give them the hateful things hissed at him and
sailed away.

Once he really thought he had discovered a way of reaching the Gardens.
A wonderful white thing, like a runaway newspaper, floated high over
the island and then tumbled, rolling over and over after the manner of a
bird that has broken its wing. Peter was so frightened that he hid, but
the birds told him it was only a kite, and what a kite is, and that it
must have tugged its string out of a boy's hand, and soared away. After
that they laughed at Peter for being so fond of the kite, he loved it
so much that he even slept with one hand on it, and I think this was
pathetic and pretty, for the reason he loved it was because it had
belonged to a real boy.

To the birds this was a very poor reason, but the older ones felt
grateful to him at this time because he had nursed a number of
fledglings through the German measles, and they offered to show him how
birds fly a kite. So six of them took the end of the string in their
beaks and flew away with it; and to his amazement it flew after them and
went even higher than they.

Peter screamed out, “Do it again!” and with great good-nature they did
it several times, and always instead of thanking them he cried, “Do it
again!” which shows that even now he had not quite forgotten what it was
to be a boy.

At last, with a grand design burning within his brave heart, he begged
them to do it once more with him clinging to the tail, and now a hundred
flew off with the string, and Peter clung to the tail, meaning to drop
off when he was over the Gardens. But the kite broke to pieces in the
air, and he would have drowned in the Serpentine had he not caught hold
of two indignant swans and made them carry him to the island. After this
the birds said that they would help him no more in his mad enterprise.

Nevertheless, Peter did reach the Gardens at last by the help of
Shelley's boat, as I am now to tell you.




XV. The Thrush's Nest

Shelley was a young gentleman and as grown-up as he need ever expect to
be. He was a poet; and they are never exactly grown-up. They are people
who despise money except what you need for to-day, and he had all that
and five pounds over. So, when he was walking in the Kensington Gardens,
he made a paper boat of his bank-note, and sent it sailing on the
Serpentine.

It reached the island at night: and the look-out brought it to Solomon
Caw, who thought at first that it was the usual thing, a message from a
lady, saying she would be obliged if he could let her have a good one.
They always ask for the best one he has, and if he likes the letter he
sends one from Class A; but if it ruffles him he sends very funny ones
indeed. Sometimes he sends none at all, and at another time he sends a
nestful; it all depends on the mood you catch him in. He likes you to
leave it all to him, and if you mention particularly that you hope he
will see his way to making it a boy this time, he is almost sure to send
another girl. And whether you are a lady or only a little boy who wants
a baby-sister, always take pains to write your address clearly. You
can't think what a lot of babies Solomon has sent to the wrong house.

Shelley's boat, when opened, completely puzzled Solomon, and he took
counsel of his assistants, who having walked over it twice, first with
their toes pointed out, and then with their toes pointed in, decided
that it came from some greedy person who wanted five. They thought this
because there was a large five printed on it. “Preposterous!” cried
Solomon in a rage, and he presented it to Peter; anything useless which
drifted upon the island was usually given to Peter as a play-thing.

But he did not play with his precious bank-note, for he knew what it
was at once, having been very observant during the week when he was an
ordinary boy. With so much money, he reflected, he could surely at last
contrive to reach the Gardens, and he considered all the possible ways,
and decided (wisely, I think) to choose the best way. But, first, he had
to tell the birds of the value of Shelley's boat; and though they were
too honest to demand it back, he saw that they were galled, and they
cast such black looks at Solomon, who was rather vain of his cleverness,
that he flew away to the end of the island, and sat there very depressed
with his head buried in his wings. Now Peter knew that unless Solomon
was on your side, you never got anything done for you in the island, so
he followed him and tried to hearten him.

Nor was this all that Peter did to gain the powerful old fellow's good
will. You must know that Solomon had no intention of remaining in office
all his life. He looked forward to retiring by-and-by, and devoting his
green old age to a life of pleasure on a certain yew-stump in the Figs
which had taken his fancy, and for years he had been quietly filling his
stocking. It was a stocking belonging to some bathing person which had
been cast upon the island, and at the time I speak of it contained a
hundred and eighty crumbs, thirty-four nuts, sixteen crusts, a pen-wiper
and a boot-lace. When his stocking was full, Solomon calculated that he
would be able to retire on a competency. Peter now gave him a pound. He
cut it off his bank-note with a sharp stick.

This made Solomon his friend for ever, and after the two had consulted
together they called a meeting of the thrushes. You will see presently
why thrushes only were invited.

The scheme to be put before them was really Peter's, but Solomon did
most of the talking, because he soon became irritable if other people
talked. He began by saying that he had been much impressed by the
superior ingenuity shown by the thrushes in nest-building, and this
put them into good-humour at once, as it was meant to do; for all the
quarrels between birds are about the best way of building nests. Other
birds, said Solomon, omitted to line their nests with mud, and as a
result they did not hold water. Here he cocked his head as if he had
used an unanswerable argument; but, unfortunately, a Mrs. Finch had come
to the meeting uninvited, and she squeaked out, “We don't build nests to
hold water, but to hold eggs,” and then the thrushes stopped cheering,
and Solomon was so perplexed that he took several sips of water.

“Consider,” he said at last, “how warm the mud makes the nest.”

“Consider,” cried Mrs. Finch, “that when water gets into the nest it
remains there and your little ones are drowned.”

The thrushes begged Solomon with a look to say something crushing in
reply to this, but again he was perplexed.

“Try another drink,” suggested Mrs. Finch pertly. Kate was her name, and
all Kates are saucy.

Solomon did try another drink, and it inspired him. “If,” said he, “a
finch's nest is placed on the Serpentine it fills and breaks to pieces,
but a thrush's nest is still as dry as the cup of a swan's back.”

How the thrushes applauded! Now they knew why they lined their nests
with mud, and when Mrs. Finch called out, “We don't place our nests on
the Serpentine,” they did what they should have done at first: chased
her from the meeting. After this it was most orderly. What they had been
brought together to hear, said Solomon, was this: their young friend,
Peter Pan, as they well knew, wanted very much to be able to cross to
the Gardens, and he now proposed, with their help, to build a boat.

At this the thrushes began to fidget, which made Peter tremble for his
scheme.

Solomon explained hastily that what he meant was not one of the cumbrous
boats that humans use; the proposed boat was to be simply a thrush's
nest large enough to hold Peter.

But still, to Peter's agony, the thrushes were sulky. “We are very busy
people,” they grumbled, “and this would be a big job.”

“Quite so,” said Solomon, “and, of course, Peter would not allow you
to work for nothing. You must remember that he is now in comfortable
circumstances, and he will pay you such wages as you have never been
paid before. Peter Pan authorises me to say that you shall all be paid
sixpence a day.”

Then all the thrushes hopped for joy, and that very day was begun the
celebrated Building of the Boat. All their ordinary business fell into
arrears. It was the time of year when they should have been pairing, but
not a thrush's nest was built except this big one, and so Solomon soon
ran short of thrushes with which to supply the demand from the mainland.
The stout, rather greedy children, who look so well in perambulators
but get puffed easily when they walk, were all young thrushes once, and
ladies often ask specially for them. What do you think Solomon did? He
sent over to the house-tops for a lot of sparrows and ordered them to
lay their eggs in old thrushes' nests and sent their young to the ladies
and swore they were all thrushes! It was known afterward on the island
as the Sparrows' Year, and so, when you meet, as you doubtless sometimes
do, grown-up people who puff and blow as if they thought themselves
bigger than they are, very likely they belong to that year. You ask
them.

Peter was a just master, and paid his workpeople every evening. They
stood in rows on the branches, waiting politely while he cut the paper
sixpences out of his bank-note, and presently he called the roll, and
then each bird, as the names were mentioned, flew down and got sixpence.
It must have been a fine sight.

And at last, after months of labor, the boat was finished. Oh, the
deportment of Peter as he saw it growing more and more like a great
thrush's nest! From the very beginning of the building of it he slept by
its side, and often woke up to say sweet things to it, and after it was
lined with mud and the mud had dried he always slept in it. He sleeps in
his nest still, and has a fascinating way of curling round in it, for it
is just large enough to hold him comfortably when he curls round like a
kitten. It is brown inside, of course, but outside it is mostly green,
being woven of grass and twigs, and when these wither or snap the walls
are thatched afresh. There are also a few feathers here and there, which
came off the thrushes while they were building.

The other birds were extremely jealous and said that the boat would not
balance on the water, but it lay most beautifully steady; they said the
water would come into it, but no water came into it. Next they said that
Peter had no oars, and this caused the thrushes to look at each other
in dismay, but Peter replied that he had no need of oars, for he had a
sail, and with such a proud, happy face he produced a sail which he had
fashioned out of his night-gown, and though it was still rather like a
night-gown it made a lovely sail. And that night, the moon being full,
and all the birds asleep, he did enter his coracle (as Master Francis
Pretty would have said) and depart out of the island. And first, he knew
not why, he looked upward, with his hands clasped, and from that moment
his eyes were pinned to the west.

He had promised the thrushes to begin by making short voyages, with them
to his guides, but far away he saw the Kensington Gardens beckoning to
him beneath the bridge, and he could not wait. His face was flushed, but
he never looked back; there was an exultation in his little breast that
drove out fear. Was Peter the least gallant of the English mariners who
have sailed westward to meet the Unknown?

At first, his boat turned round and round, and he was driven back to the
place of his starting, whereupon he shortened sail, by removing one of
the sleeves, and was forthwith carried backward by a contrary breeze, to
his no small peril. He now let go the sail, with the result that he was
drifted toward the far shore, where are black shadows he knew not the
dangers of, but suspected them, and so once more hoisted his night-gown
and went roomer of the shadows until he caught a favouring wind, which
bore him westward, but at so great a speed that he was like to be broke
against the bridge. Which, having avoided, he passed under the bridge
and came, to his great rejoicing, within full sight of the delectable
Gardens. But having tried to cast anchor, which was a stone at the end
of a piece of the kite-string, he found no bottom, and was fain to hold
off, seeking for moorage, and, feeling his way, he buffeted against a
sunken reef that cast him overboard by the greatness of the shock, and
he was near to being drowned, but clambered back into the vessel. There
now arose a mighty storm, accompanied by roaring of waters, such as he
had never heard the like, and he was tossed this way and that, and
his hands so numbed with the cold that he could not close them. Having
escaped the danger of which, he was mercifully carried into a small bay,
where his boat rode at peace.

Nevertheless, he was not yet in safety; for, on pretending to disembark,
he found a multitude of small people drawn up on the shore to contest
his landing, and shouting shrilly to him to be off, for it was long past
Lock-out Time. This, with much brandishing of their holly-leaves, and
also a company of them carried an arrow which some boy had left in the
Gardens, and this they were prepared to use as a battering-ram.

Then Peter, who knew them for the fairies, called out that he was not an
ordinary human and had no desire to do them displeasure, but to be their
friend; nevertheless, having found a jolly harbour, he was in no temper
to draw off therefrom, and he warned them if they sought to mischief him
to stand to their harms.

So saying, he boldly leapt ashore, and they gathered around him with
intent to slay him, but there then arose a great cry among the women,
and it was because they had now observed that his sail was a baby's
night-gown. Whereupon, they straightway loved him, and grieved that
their laps were too small, the which I cannot explain, except by saying
that such is the way of women. The men-fairies now sheathed their
weapons on observing the behaviour of their women, on whose intelligence
they set great store, and they led him civilly to their queen, who
conferred upon him the courtesy of the Gardens after Lock-out Time, and
henceforth Peter could go whither he chose, and the fairies had orders
to put him in comfort.

Such was his first voyage to the Gardens, and you may gather from the
antiquity of the language that it took place a long time ago. But Peter
never grows any older, and if we could be watching for him under the
bridge to-night (but, of course, we can't), I daresay we should see
him hoisting his night-gown and sailing or paddling toward us in the
Thrush's Nest. When he sails, he sits down, but he stands up to paddle.
I shall tell you presently how he got his paddle.

Long before the time for the opening of the gates comes he steals back
to the island, for people must not see him (he is not so human as all
that), but this gives him hours for play, and he plays exactly as real
children play. At least he thinks so, and it is one of the pathetic
things about him that he often plays quite wrongly.

You see, he had no one to tell him how children really play, for the
fairies were all more or less in hiding until dusk, and so know nothing,
and though the birds pretended that they could tell him a great deal,
when the time for telling came, it was wonderful how little they really
knew. They told him the truth about hide-and-seek, and he often plays
it by himself, but even the ducks on the Round Pond could not explain to
him what it is that makes the pond so fascinating to boys. Every night
the ducks have forgotten all the events of the day, except the number of
pieces of cake thrown to them. They are gloomy creatures, and say that
cake is not what it was in their young days.

So Peter had to find out many things for himself. He often played ships
at the Round Pond, but his ship was only a hoop which he had found on
the grass. Of course, he had never seen a hoop, and he wondered what
you play at with them, and decided that you play at pretending they
are boats. This hoop always sank at once, but he waded in for it, and
sometimes he dragged it gleefully round the rim of the pond, and he was
quite proud to think that he had discovered what boys do with hoops.

Another time, when he found a child's pail, he thought it was for
sitting in, and he sat so hard in it that he could scarcely get out of
it. Also he found a balloon. It was bobbing about on the Hump, quite as
if it was having a game by itself, and he caught it after an exciting
chase. But he thought it was a ball, and Jenny Wren had told him that
boys kick balls, so he kicked it; and after that he could not find it
anywhere.

Perhaps the most surprising thing he found was a perambulator. It was
under a lime-tree, near the entrance to the Fairy Queen's Winter Palace
(which is within the circle of the seven Spanish chestnuts), and Peter
approached it warily, for the birds had never mentioned such things to
him. Lest it was alive, he addressed it politely, and then, as it gave
no answer, he went nearer and felt it cautiously. He gave it a little
push, and it ran from him, which made him think it must be alive after
all; but, as it had run from him, he was not afraid. So he stretched out
his hand to pull it to him, but this time it ran at him, and he was so
alarmed that he leapt the railing and scudded away to his boat. You must
not think, however, that he was a coward, for he came back next night
with a crust in one hand and a stick in the other, but the perambulator
had gone, and he never saw another one. I have promised to tell you also
about his paddle. It was a child's spade which he had found near St.
Govor's Well, and he thought it was a paddle.

Do you pity Peter Pan for making these mistakes? If so, I think it
rather silly of you. What I mean is that, of course, one must pity him
now and then, but to pity him all the time would be impertinence. He
thought he had the most splendid time in the Gardens, and to think you
have it is almost quite as good as really to have it. He played without
ceasing, while you often waste time by being mad-dog or Mary-Annish. He
could be neither of these things, for he had never heard of them, but do
you think he is to be pitied for that?

Oh, he was merry. He was as much merrier than you, for instance, as you
are merrier than your father. Sometimes he fell, like a spinning-top,
from sheer merriment. Have you seen a greyhound leaping the fences of
the Gardens? That is how Peter leaps them.

And think of the music of his pipe. Gentlemen who walk home at night
write to the papers to say they heard a nightingale in the Gardens, but
it is really Peter's pipe they hear. Of course, he had no mother--at
least, what use was she to him? You can be sorry for him for that, but
don't be too sorry, for the next thing I mean to tell you is how he
revisited her. It was the fairies who gave him the chance.




XVI. Lock-Out Time

It is frightfully difficult to know much about the fairies, and almost
the only thing known for certain is that there are fairies wherever
there are children. Long ago children were forbidden the Gardens, and
at that time there was not a fairy in the place; then the children were
admitted, and the fairies came trooping in that very evening. They can't
resist following the children, but you seldom see them, partly because
they live in the daytime behind the railings, where you are not allowed
to go, and also partly because they are so cunning. They are not a bit
cunning after Lock-out, but until Lock-out, my word!

When you were a bird you knew the fairies pretty well, and you remember
a good deal about them in your babyhood, which it is a great pity you
can't write down, for gradually you forget, and I have heard of children
who declared that they had never once seen a fairy. Very likely if they
said this in the Kensington Gardens, they were standing looking at a
fairy all the time. The reason they were cheated was that she pretended
to be something else. This is one of their best tricks. They usually
pretend to be flowers, because the court sits in the Fairies' Basin,
and there are so many flowers there, and all along the Baby Walk, that
a flower is the thing least likely to attract attention. They dress
exactly like flowers, and change with the seasons, putting on white when
lilies are in and blue for blue-bells, and so on. They like crocus and
hyacinth time best of all, as they are partial to a bit of colour, but
tulips (except white ones, which are the fairy-cradles) they consider
garish, and they sometimes put off dressing like tulips for days, so
that the beginning of the tulip weeks is almost the best time to catch
them.

When they think you are not looking they skip along pretty lively, but
if you look and they fear there is no time to hide, they stand quite
still, pretending to be flowers. Then, after you have passed without
knowing that they were fairies, they rush home and tell their mothers
they have had such an adventure. The Fairy Basin, you remember, is all
covered with ground-ivy (from which they make their castor-oil), with
flowers growing in it here and there. Most of them really are flowers,
but some of them are fairies. You never can be sure of them, but a good
plan is to walk by looking the other way, and then turn round sharply.
Another good plan, which David and I sometimes follow, is to stare them
down. After a long time they can't help winking, and then you know for
certain that they are fairies.

There are also numbers of them along the Baby Walk, which is a
famous gentle place, as spots frequented by fairies are called. Once
twenty-four of them had an extraordinary adventure. They were a girls'
school out for a walk with the governess, and all wearing hyacinth
gowns, when she suddenly put her finger to her mouth, and then they
all stood still on an empty bed and pretended to be hyacinths.
Unfortunately, what the governess had heard was two gardeners coming to
plant new flowers in that very bed. They were wheeling a handcart with
the flowers in it, and were quite surprised to find the bed occupied.
“Pity to lift them hyacinths,” said the one man. “Duke's orders,”
 replied the other, and, having emptied the cart, they dug up the
boarding-school and put the poor, terrified things in it in five rows.
Of course, neither the governess nor the girls dare let on that they
were fairies, so they were carted far away to a potting-shed, out of
which they escaped in the night without their shoes, but there was a
great row about it among the parents, and the school was ruined.

As for their houses, it is no use looking for them, because they are
the exact opposite of our houses. You can see our houses by day but you
can't see them by dark. Well, you can see their houses by dark, but you
can't see them by day, for they are the colour of night, and I never
heard of anyone yet who could see night in the daytime. This does not
mean that they are black, for night has its colours just as day has,
but ever so much brighter. Their blues and reds and greens are like ours
with a light behind them. The palace is entirely built of many-coloured
glasses, and is quite the loveliest of all royal residences, but the
queen sometimes complains because the common people will peep in to see
what she is doing. They are very inquisitive folk, and press quite hard
against the glass, and that is why their noses are mostly snubby. The
streets are miles long and very twisty, and have paths on each side made
of bright worsted. The birds used to steal the worsted for their nests,
but a policeman has been appointed to hold on at the other end.

One of the great differences between the fairies and us is that they
never do anything useful. When the first baby laughed for the first
time, his laugh broke into a million pieces, and they all went skipping
about. That was the beginning of fairies. They look tremendously busy,
you know, as if they had not a moment to spare, but if you were to ask
them what they are doing, they could not tell you in the least. They are
frightfully ignorant, and everything they do is make-believe. They have
a postman, but he never calls except at Christmas with his little box,
and though they have beautiful schools, nothing is taught in them; the
youngest child being chief person is always elected mistress, and when
she has called the roll, they all go out for a walk and never come back.
It is a very noticeable thing that, in fairy families, the youngest
is always chief person, and usually becomes a prince or princess; and
children remember this, and think it must be so among humans also, and
that is why they are often made uneasy when they come upon their mother
furtively putting new frills on the basinette.

You have probably observed that your baby-sister wants to do all sorts
of things that your mother and her nurse want her not to do: to stand up
at sitting-down time, and to sit down at standing-up time, for instance,
or to wake up when she should fall asleep, or to crawl on the floor when
she is wearing her best frock, and so on, and perhaps you put this down
to naughtiness. But it is not; it simply means that she is doing as
she has seen the fairies do; she begins by following their ways, and
it takes about two years to get her into the human ways. Her fits of
passion, which are awful to behold, and are usually called teething,
are no such thing; they are her natural exasperation, because we don't
understand her, though she is talking an intelligible language. She is
talking fairy. The reason mothers and nurses know what her remarks mean,
before other people know, as that “Guch” means “Give it to me at once,”
 while “Wa” is “Why do you wear such a funny hat?” is because, mixing so
much with babies, they have picked up a little of the fairy language.

Of late David has been thinking back hard about the fairy tongue, with
his hands clutching his temples, and he has remembered a number of their
phrases which I shall tell you some day if I don't forget. He had heard
them in the days when he was a thrush, and though I suggested to him
that perhaps it is really bird language he is remembering, he says not,
for these phrases are about fun and adventures, and the birds talked of
nothing but nest-building. He distinctly remembers that the birds used
to go from spot to spot like ladies at shop-windows, looking at the
different nests and saying, “Not my colour, my dear,” and “How would
that do with a soft lining?” and “But will it wear?” and “What hideous
trimming!” and so on.

The fairies are exquisite dancers, and that is why one of the first
things the baby does is to sign to you to dance to him and then to cry
when you do it. They hold their great balls in the open air, in what
is called a fairy-ring. For weeks afterward you can see the ring on the
grass. It is not there when they begin, but they make it by waltzing
round and round. Sometimes you will find mushrooms inside the ring, and
these are fairy chairs that the servants have forgotten to clear away.
The chairs and the rings are the only tell-tale marks these little
people leave behind them, and they would remove even these were they not
so fond of dancing that they toe it till the very moment of the opening
of the gates. David and I once found a fairy-ring quite warm.

But there is also a way of finding out about the ball before it takes
place. You know the boards which tell at what time the Gardens are to
close to-day. Well, these tricky fairies sometimes slyly change the
board on a ball night, so that it says the Gardens are to close at
six-thirty for instance, instead of at seven. This enables them to get
begun half an hour earlier.

If on such a night we could remain behind in the Gardens, as the famous
Maimie Mannering did, we might see delicious sights, hundreds of
lovely fairies hastening to the ball, the married ones wearing their
wedding-rings round their waists, the gentlemen, all in uniform, holding
up

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