A DEPARTURE
It is a very fine thing to be a real Prince. There are points
about a Pirate Chief, and to succeed to the Captaincy of a Robber
Band is a truly magnificent thing. But to be an Heir has also
about it something extremely captivating. Not only a long-lost
heir--an heir of the melodrama, strutting into your hitherto
unsuspected kingdom at just the right moment, loaded up with the
consciousness of unguessed merit and of rights so long
feloniously withheld--but even to be a common humdrum domestic
heir is a profession to which few would refuse to be apprenticed.
To step from leading-strings and restrictions and one glass of
port after dinner, into property and liberty and due
appreciation, saved up, polished and varnished, dusted and laid
in lavender, all expressly for you--why, even the Princedom and
the Robber Captaincy, when their anxieties and responsibilities
are considered, have hardly more to offer. And so it will
continue to be a problem, to the youth in whom ambition struggles
with a certain sensuous appreciation of life's side-dishes,
whether the career he is called upon to select out of the
glittering knick-knacks that strew the counter had better be that
of an heir or an engine-driver.
In the case of eldest sons, this problem has a way of solving
itself. In childhood, however, the actual heirship is apt to work
on the principle of the "Borough-English" of our happier
ancestors, and in most cases of inheritance it is the youngest
that succeeds. Where the "res" is "angusta," and the weekly books
are simply a series of stiff hurdles at each of which in
succession the paternal legs falter with growing suspicion of
their powers to clear the flight, it is in the affair of clothes
that the right of succession tells, and "the hard heir strides
about the land" in trousers long ago framed for fraternal limbs--
frondes novas et non sua poma. A bitter thing indeed! Of those
pretty silken threads that knit humanity together, high and low,
past and present, none is tougher, more pervading, or more
iridescent, than the honest, simple pleasure of new clothes. It
tugs at the man as it tugs at the woman; the smirk of the
well-fitted prince is no different from the smirk of the Sunday-
clad peasant; and the veins of the elders tingle with the same
thrill that sets their fresh-frocked grandchildren skipping.
Never trust people who pretend that they have no joy in their new
clothes.
Let not our souls be wrung, however, at contemplation of the
luckless urchin cut off by parental penury from the rapture of
new clothes. Just as the heroes of his dreams are his immediate
seniors, so his heroes' clothes share the glamour, and the
reversion of them carries a high privilege--a special thing not
sold by Swears and Wells. The sword of Galahad--and of many
another hero--arrived on the scene already hoary with history,
and the boy rather prefers his trousers to be legendary, famous,
haloed by his hero's renown--even though the nap may have
altogether vanished in the process.
But, putting clothes aside, there are other matters in which
this reversed heirship comes into play. Take the case of Toys. It
is hardly right or fitting--and in this the child quite
acquiesces--that as he approaches the reverend period of nine or
say ten years, he should still be the unabashed and proclaimed
possessor of a hoop and a Noah's Ark. The child will quite see
the reasonableness of this, and, the goal of his ambition being
now a catapult, a pistol, or even a sword-stick, will be
satisfied that the titular ownership should lapse to his juniors,
so far below him in their kilted or petticoated incompetence.
After all, the things are still there, and if relapses of spirit
occur, on wet afternoons, one can still (nominally) borrow them
and be happy on the floor as of old, without the reproach of
being a habitual baby toy-caresser. Also one can pretend it's
being done to amuse the younger ones.
None of us, therefore, grumbled when in the natural course of
things the nominal ownership of the toys slipped down to Harold,
and from him in turn devolved upon Charlotte. The toys were still
there; they always had been there and always would be there, and
when the nursery door was fast shut there were no Kings or Queens
or First Estates in that small Republic on the floor. Charlotte,
to be sure, chin-tilted, at last an owner of real estate, might
patronize a little at times; but it was tacitly understood that
her "title" was only a drawing-room one.
Why does a coming bereavement project no thin faint voice, no
shadow of its woe, to warn its happy, heedless victims? Why
cannot Olympians ever think it worth while to give some hint of
the thunderbolts they are silently forging? And why, oh, why did
it never enter any of our thick heads that the day would come
when even Charlotte would be considered too matronly for toys?
One's soÄcalled education is hammered into one with rulers and
with canes. Each fresh grammar or musical instrument, each new
historical period or quaint arithmetical rule, is impressed on
one by some painful physical prelude. Why does Time, the biggest
Schoolmaster, alone neglect premonitory raps, at each stage of
his curriculum, on our knuckles or our heads?
Uncle Thomas was at the bottom of it. This was not the first
mine he had exploded under our bows. In his favourite pursuit of
fads he had passed in turn from Psychical Research to the White
Rose and thence to a Children's Hospital, and we were being daily
inundated with leaflets headed by a woodcut depicting Little
Annie (of Poplar) sitting up in her little white cot, surrounded
by the toys of the nice, kind, rich children. The idea caught on
with the Olympians, always open to sentiment of a treacly,
woodcut order; and accordingly Charlotte, on entering one day
dishevelled and panting, having been pursued by yelling Redskins
up to the very threshold of our peaceful home, was curtly
informed
that her French lessons would begin on Monday, that she was
henceforth to cease all pretence of being a trapper or a Redskin
on utterly inadequate grounds, and moreover that the whole of her
toys were at that moment being finally packed up in a box, for
despatch to London, to gladden the lives and bring light into the
eyes of London waifs and Poplar Annies.
Naturally enough, perhaps, we others received no official
intimation of this grave cession of territory. We were not
supposed to be interested. Harold had long ago been promoted to a
knife--a recognized, birthday knife. As for me, it was known that
I was already given over, heart and soul, to lawless abandoned
catapults --catapults which were confiscated weekly for reasons
of international complications, but with which Edward kept me
steadily supplied, his school having a fine old tradition for
excellence in their manufacture. Therefore no one was supposed to
be really affected but Charlotte, and even she had already
reached Miss Yonge, and should therefore have been more
interested in prolific curates and harrowing deathbeds.
Notwithstanding, we all felt indignant, betrayed, and sullen
to the verge of mutiny. Though for long we had affected to
despise them, these toys, yet they had grown up with us, shared
our joys and our sorrows, seen us at our worst, and become part
of the accepted scheme of existence. As we gazed at untenanted
shelves and empty, hatefully tidy corners, perhaps for the first
time for long we began to do them a tardy justice.
There was old Leotard, for instance. Somehow he had come to be
sadly neglected of late years--and yet how exactly he always
responded to certain moods! He was an acrobat, this Leotard, who
lived in a glass-fronted box. His loose-jointed limbs were
cardboard, cardboard his slender trunk; and his hands eternally
grasped the bar of a trapeze. You turned the box round swiftly
five or six times; the wonderful unsolved machinery worked, and
Leotard swung and leapt, backwards, forwards, now astride the
bar, now flying free; iron-jointed, supple-sinewed, unceasingly
novel in his invention of new, unguessable attitudes; while
above, below, and around him, a richly-dressed audience, painted
in skilful perspective of stalls, boxes, dress-circle, and
gallery, watched the thrilling performance with a stolidity which
seemed to mark them out as made in Germany. Hardly versatile
enough, perhaps, this Leotard; unsympathetic, not a companion for
all hours; nor would you have chosen him to take to bed with you.
And yet, within his own limits, how fresh, how engrossing, how
resourceful and inventive! Well, he was gone, it seemed--merely
gone. Never specially cherished while he tarried with us, he had
yet contrived to build himself a particular niche of his own.
Sunrise and sunset, and the dinner-bell, and the sudden rainbow,
and lessons, and Leotard, and the moon through the nursery
windows--they were all part of the great order of things, and the
displacement of any one item seemed to disorganize the whole
machinery. The immediate point was, not that the world would
continue to go round as of old, but that Leotard wouldn't.
Yonder corner, now swept and garnished, had been the stall
wherein the spotty horse, at the close of each laborious day, was
accustomed to doze peacefully the long night through. In days of
old each of us in turn had been jerked thrillingly round the room
on his precarious back, had dug our heels into his unyielding
sides, and had scratched our hands on the tin tacks that secured
his mane to his stiffly-curving neck. Later, with increasing
stature, we came to overlook his merits as a beast of burden; but
how frankly, how good-naturedly, he had recognized the new
conditions, and adapted himself to them without a murmur! When
the military spirit was abroad, who so ready to be a squadron of
cavalry, a horde of Cossacks, or artillery pounding into
position? He had even served with honour as a gun-boat, during a
period when naval strategy was the only theme; and no false
equine pride ever hindered him from taking the part of a roaring
locomotive, earth-shaking, clangorous, annihilating time and
space. Really it was no longer clear how life, with its manifold
emergencies, was to be carried on at all without a fellow like
the spotty horse, ready to step in at critical moments and take
up just the part required of him. In moments of mental
depression, nothing is quite so consoling as the honest smell of
a painted animal; and mechanically I turned towards the shelf
that had been so long the Ararat of our weather-beaten Ark. The
shelf was empty, the Ark had cast off moorings and sailed away to
Poplar, and had taken with it its haunting smell, as well as that
pleasant sense of disorder that the best conducted Ark is always
able to impart. The sliding roof had rarely been known to close
entirely. There was always a pair of giraffe-legs sticking out,
or an elephant-trunk, taking from the stiffness of its outline,
and reminding us that our motley crowd of friends inside were
uncomfortably cramped for room and only too ready to leap in a
cascade on the floor and browse and gallop, flutter and bellow
and neigh, and be their natural selves again. I think that none
of us ever really thought very much of Ham and Shem and Japhet.
They were only there because they were in the story, but nobody
really wanted them. The Ark was built for the animals, of
course--animals with tails, and trunks, and horns, and at least
three legs apiece, though some unfortunates had been unable to
retain even that number. And in the animals were of course
included the birds--the dove, for instance, grey with black
wings, and the red-crested woodpecker--or was it a hoopoe?--and
the insects, for there was a dear beetle, about the same size as
the dove, that held its own with any of the mammalia.
Of the doll-department Charlotte had naturally been sole chief
for a long time; if the staff were not in their places to-day, it
was not I who had any official right to take notice. And yet one
may have been member of a Club for many a year without ever
exactly understanding the use and object of the other members,
until one enters, some Christmas day or other holiday, and,
surveying the deserted armchairs, the untenanted sofas, the
barren hat-pegs, realizes, with depression, that those other
fellows had their allotted functions, after all. Where was old
Jerry? Where were Eugenie, Rosa, Sophy, Esmeralda? We had long
drifted apart, it was true, we spoke but rarely; perhaps,
absorbed in new ambitions, new achievements, I had even come to
look down on these conservative, unprogressive members who were
so clearly content to remain simply what they were. And now that
their corners were unfilled, their chairs unoccupied--well, my
eyes were opened and I wanted 'em back!
However, it was no business of mine. If grievances were the
question, I hadn't a leg to stand upon. Though my catapults were
officially confiscated, I knew the drawer in which they were
incarcerated, and where the key of it was hidden, and I could
make life a burden, if I chose, to every living thing within a
square-mile radius, so long as the catapult was restored to its
drawer in due and decent time. But I wondered how the others were
taking it. The edict hit them more severely. They should have my
moral countenance at any rate, if not more, in any protest or
countermine they might be planning. And, indeed, something seemed
possible, from the dogged, sullen air with which the two of them
had trotted off in the direction of the raspberry-canes. Certain
spots always had their insensible attraction for certain moods.
In love, one sought the orchard. Weary of discipline, sick of
convention, impassioned for the road, the mining-camp, the land
across the border, one made for the big meadow. Mutinous, sulky,
charged with plots and conspiracies. one always got behind the
shelter of the raspberry-canes.
***
"You can come too if you like," said Harold, in a subdued sort
of way, as soon as he was aware that I was sitting up in bed
watching him. "We didn't think you'd care, 'cos you've got to
catapults. But we're goin' to do what we've settled to do, so
it's no good sayin' we hadn't ought and that sort of thing, 'cos
we're goin' to!
The day had passed in an ominous peacefulness. Charlotte and
Harold had kept out of my way, as well as out of everybody
else's, in a purposeful manner that ought to have bred suspicion.
In the evening we had read books, or fitfully drawn ships and
battles on fly-leaves, apart, in separate corners, void of
conversation or criticism, oppressed by the lowering tidiness of
the universe, till bedtime came, and disrobement, and prayers
even more mechanical than usual, and lastly bed itself without so
much as a giraffe under the pillow. Harold had grunted himself
between the sheets with an ostentatious pretence of overpowering
fatigue; but I noticed that he pulled his pillow forward and
propped his head against the brass bars of his crib, and, as I
was acquainted with most of his tricks and subterfuges, it was
easy for me to gather that a painful wakefulness was his aim that
night.
I had dozed off, however, and Harold was out and on his feet,
poking under the bed for his shoes, when I sat up and grimly
regarded him. Just as he said I could come if I liked, Charlotte
slipped in, her face rigid and set. And then it was borne in upon
me that I was not on in this scene. These youngsters had planned
it all out, the piece was their own, and the mounting, and the
cast. My sceptre had fallen, my rule had ceased. In this magic
hour of the summer night laws went for nothing, codes were
cancelled, and those who were most in touch with the moonlight
and the warm June spirit and the topsy-turvydom that reigns when
the clock strikes ten, were the true lords and lawmakers.
Humbly, almost timidly, I followed without a protest in the
wake of these two remorseless, purposeful young persons, who were
marching straight for the schoolroom. Here in the moonlight the
grim big box stood visible--the box in which so large a portion
of our past and our personality lay entombed, cold, swathed in
paper, awaiting the carrier of the morning who should speed them
forth to the strange, cold, distant Children s Hospital, where
their little failings would all be misunderstood and no one would
make allowances. A dreamy spectator, I stood idly by while
Harold propped up the lid and the two plunged in their arms and
probed and felt and grappled.
"Here's Rosa," said Harold, suddenly. "I know the feel of her
hair. Will you have Rosa out?"
"Oh, give me Rosa!" cried Charlotte with a sort of gasp. And
when Rosa had been dragged forth, quite unmoved apparently,
placid as ever in her moonfaced contemplation of this comedy-
world with its ups and downs, Charlotte retired with her to the
window-seat, and there in the moonlight the two exchanged their
private confidences, leaving Harold to his exploration alone.
"Here's something with sharp corners," said Harold, presently.
"Must be Leotard, I think. Better let him go."
"Oh, yes, we can't save Leotard," assented Charlotte, limply.
Poor old Leotard! I said nothing, of course; I was not on in
this piece. But, surely, had Leotard heard and rightly understood
all that was going on above him, he must have sent up one feeble,
strangled cry, one faint appeal to be rescued from unfamiliar
little Annies and retained for an audience certain to appreciate
and never unduly critical.
"Now I've got to the Noah's Ark," panted Harold, still groping
blindly.
"Try and shove the lid back a bit," said Charlotte, "and pull
out a dove or a zebra or a giraffe if there's one handy."
Harold toiled on with grunts and contortions, and presently
produced in triumph a small grey elephant and a large beetle with
a red stomach.
"They're jammed in too tight," he complained. "Can't get any
more out. But as I came up I'm sure I felt Potiphar!" And down
he dived again.
Potiphar was a finely modelled bull with a suede skin, rough
and comfortable and warm in bed. He was my own special joy and
pride, and I thrilled with honest emotion when Potiphar emerged
to light once more, stout-necked and stalwart as ever.
"That'll have to do," said Charlotte, getting up. "We dursn't
take any more, 'cos we'll be found out if we do. Make the box all
right, and bring 'em along."
Harold rammed down the wads of paper and twists of straw he had
disturbed, replaced the lid squarely and innocently, and picked
up his small salvage; and we sneaked off for the window most
generally in use for prison-breakings and nocturnal escapades. A
few seconds later and we were hurrying silently in single file
along the dark edge of the lawn.
Oh, the riot, the clamour, the crowding chorus, of all silent
things that spoke by scent and colour and budding thrust and
foison, that moonlit night of June! Under the laurel-shade all
was still ghostly enough, brigand-haunted, crackling, whispering
of night and all its possibilities of terror. But the open
garden, when once we were in it--how it turned a glad new face
to welcome us, glad as of old when the sunlight raked and
searched it, new with the unfamiliar night-aspect that yet
welcomed us as guests to a hall where the horns blew up to a new,
strange banquet! Was this the same grass, could these be the same
familiar flower-beds, alleys, clumps of verdure, patches of
sward? At least this full white light that was flooding them was
new, and accounted for all. It was Moonlight Land, and Past-Ten-
o'clock Land, and we were in it and of it, and all its other
denizens fully understood, and, tongue-free and awakened at last,
responded and comprehended and knew. The other two, doubtless,
hurrying forward full of their mission, noted little of all this.
I, who was only a super, had leisure to take it all in, and,
though the language and the message of the land were not all
clear to me then, long afterwards I remembered and understood.
Under the farthest hedge, at the loose end of things, where the
outer world began with the paddock, there was darkness once
again--not the blackness that crouched so solidly under the
crowding laurels, but a duskiness hung from far-spread arms of
high-standing elms. There, where the small grave made a darker
spot on the grey, I overtook them, only just in time to see Rosa
laid stiffly out, her cherry cheeks pale in the moonlight, but
her brave smile triumphant and undaunted as ever. It was a tiny
grave and a shallow one, to hold so very much. Rosa once in,
Potiphar, who had hitherto stood erect, stout-necked, through so
many days and such various weather, must needs bow his head and
lie down meekly on his side. The elephant and the beetle, equal
now in a silent land where a vertebra and a red circulation
counted for nothing, had to snuggle down where best they might,
only a little less crowded than in their native Ark.
The earth was shovelled in and stamped down, and I was glad
that no orisons were said and no speechifying took place. The
whole thing was natural and right and self-explanatory, and
needed no justifying or interpreting to our audience of stars and
flowers. The connection was not entirely broken now--one link
remained between us and them. The Noah's Ark, with its cargo of
sad-faced emigrants, might be hull down on the horizon, but two
of its passengers had missed the boat and would henceforth be
always near us; and, as we played above them, an elephant would
understand, and a beetle would hear, and crawl again in spirit
along a familiar floor. Henceforth the spotty horse would scour
along far-distant plains and know the homesickness of alien
stables; but Potiphar, though never again would he paw the arena
when bull-fights were on the bill, was spared maltreatment by
town-bred strangers, quite capable of mistaking him for a cow.
Jerry and Esmeralda might shed their limbs and their stuffing, by
slow or swift degrees, in uttermost parts and unguessed corners
of the globe; but Rosa's book was finally closed, and no worse
fate awaited her than natural dissolution almost within touch and
hail of familiar faces and objects that had been friendly to her
since first she opened her eyes on a world where she had never
been treated as a stranger.
As we turned to go, the man in the moon, tangled in elm-boughs,
caught my eye for a moment, and I thought that never had he
looked so friendly. He was going to see after them, it was
evident; for he was always there, more or less, and it was no
trouble to him at all, and he would tell them how things were
still going, up here, and throw in a story or two of his own
whenever they seemed a trifle dull. It made the going away rather
easier, to know one had left somebody behind on the spot; a good
fellow, too, cheery, comforting, with a fund of anecdote; a man
in whom one had every confidence.
