The Kenneth Grahame Megapack, Page 24

  This morning, house-bound by the relentless indefatigable snow, I was feeling the reaction. Edward, on the contrary, being violently stage-struck on this his first introduction to the real Drama, was striding up and down the floor, proclaiming ‘Here be I, King Gearge the Third,’ in a strong Berkshire accent. Harold, accustomed, as the youngest, to lonely antics and to sports that asked no sympathy, was absorbed in ‘clubmen’: a performance consisting in a measured progress round the room arm-in-arm with an imaginary companion of reverend years, with occasional halts at imaginary clubs, where—imaginary steps being leisurely ascended—imaginary papers were glanced at, imaginary scandal was discussed with elderly shakings of the head, and—regrettable to say—imaginary glasses were lifted lipwards. Heaven only knows how the germ of this dreary pastime first found way into his small-boyish being. It was his own invention, and he was proportionately proud of it. Meanwhile Charlotte and I, crouched in the window-seat, watched, spell-stricken, the whirl and eddy and drive of the innumerable snow-flakes, wrapping our cheery little world in an uncanny uniform, ghastly in line and hue.

  Charlotte was sadly out of spirits. Having ‘countered’ Miss Smedley at breakfast, during some argument or other, by an apt quotation from her favourite classic (the Fairy Book), she had been gently but firmly informed that no such things as fairies ever really existed. ‘Do you mean to say it’s all lies?’ asked Charlotte bluntly. Miss Smedley deprecated the use of any such unladylike words in any connexion at all. ‘These stories had their origin, my dear,’ she explained, ‘in a mistaken anthropomorphism in the interpretation of nature. But though we are now too well informed to fall into similar errors, there are still many beautiful lessons to be learned from these myths—’

  ‘But how can you learn anything,’ persisted Charlotte, ‘from what doesn’t exist?’ And she left the table defiant, howbeit depressed.

  ‘Don’t you mind her,’ I said consolingly; ‘how can she know anything about it? Why, she can’t even throw a stone properly!’

  ‘Edward says they’re all rot, too,’ replied Charlotte doubtfully.

  ‘Edward says everything’s rot,’ I explained, ‘now he thinks he’s going into the Army. If a thing’s in a book it must be true, so that settles it!’

  Charlotte looked almost reassured. The room was quieter now, for Edward had got the dragon down and was boring holes in him with a purring sound; Harold was ascending the steps of the Athenæum with a jaunty air—suggestive rather of the Junior Carlton. Outside, the tall elm-tops were hardly to be seen through the feathery storm. ‘The sky’s a-falling,’ quoted Charlotte softly; ‘I must go and tell the king.’ The quotation suggested a fairy story, and I offered to read to her, reaching out for the book. But the Wee Folk were under a cloud; sceptical hints had embittered the chalice. So I was fain to fetch Arthur—second favourite with Charlotte for his dames riding errant, and an easy first with us boys for his spear-splintering crash of tourney and hurtle against hopeless odds. Here again, however, I proved unfortunate; what ill-luck made the book open at the sorrowful history of Balin and Balan? ‘And he vanished anon,’ I read: ‘and so he heard an horne blow, as it had been the death of a beast. “That blast,” said Balin, “is blowen for me, for I am the prize, and yet am I not dead.”’ Charlotte began to cry: she knew the rest too well. I shut the book in despair. Harold emerged from behind the arm-chair. He was sucking his thumb (a thing which members of the Reform are seldom seen to do), and he stared wide-eyed at his tear-stained sister. Edward put off his histrionics, and rushed up to her as the consoler—a new part for him.

  ‘I know a jolly story,’ he began. ‘Aunt Eliza told it me. It was when she was somewhere over in that beastly abroad’—(he had once spent a black month of misery at Dinan)—‘and there was a fellow there who had got two storks. And one stork died—it was the she-stork.’—(‘What did it die of?’ put in Harold.)—‘And the other stork was quite sorry, and moped, and went on, and got very miserable. So they looked about and found a duck, and introduced it to the stork. The duck was a drake, but the stork didn’t mind, and they loved each other and were as jolly as could be. By and by another duck came along—a real she-duck this time—and when the drake saw her he fell in love, and left the stork, and went and proposed to the duck: for she was very beautiful. But the poor stork who was left, he said nothing at all to anybody, but just pined and pined and pined away, till one morning he was found quite dead! But the ducks lived happily ever afterwards!’

  This was Edward’s idea of a jolly story! Down again went the corners of poor Charlotte’s mouth. Really Edward’s stupid inability to see the real point in anything was too annoying! It was always so. Years before, it being necessary to prepare his youthful mind for a domestic event that might lead to awkward questionings at a time when there was little leisure to invent appropriate answers, it was delicately inquired of him whether he would like to have a little brother, or perhaps a little sister? He considered the matter carefully in all its bearings, and finally declared for a Newfoundland pup. Any boy more ‘gleg at the uptak’ would have met his parents half-way, and eased their burden. As it was, the matter had to be approached all over again from a fresh standpoint. And now, while Charlotte turned away sniffingly, with a hiccup that told of an overwrought soul, Edward, unconscious (like Sir Isaac’s Diamond) of the mischief he had done, wheeled round on Harold with a shout.

  ‘I want a live dragon,’ he announced: ‘You’ve got to be my dragon!’

  ‘Leave me go, will you?’ squealed Harold, struggling stoutly. ‘I’m playin’ at something else. How can I be a dragon and belong to all the clubs?’

  ‘But wouldn’t you like to be a nice scaly dragon, all green,’ said Edward, trying persuasion, ‘with a curly tail and red eyes, and breathing real smoke and fire?’

  Harold wavered an instant: Pall-Mall was still strong in him. The next he was grovelling on the floor. No saurian ever swung a tail so scaly and so curly as his. Clubland was a thousand years away. With horrific pants he emitted smokiest smoke and fiercest fire.

  ‘Now I want a Princess,’ cried Edward, clutching Charlotte ecstatically; ‘and you can be the Doctor, and heal me from the dragon’s deadly wound.’

  Of all professions I held the sacred art of healing in worst horror and contempt. Cataclysmal memories of purge and draught crowded thick on me, and with Charlotte—who courted no barren honours—I made a break for the door. Edward did likewise, and the hostile forces clashed together on the mat, and for a brief space things were mixed and chaotic and Arthurian. The silvery sound of the luncheon-bell restored an instant peace, even in the teeth of clenched antagonisms like ours. The Holy Grail itself, ‘sliding athwart a sunbeam,’ never so effectually stilled a riot of warring passions into sweet and quiet accord.

  WHAT THEY TALKED ABOUT

  Edward was standing ginger-beer like a gentleman, happening, as the one that had last passed under the dentist’s hands, to be the capitalist of the flying hour. As in all well-regulated families, the usual tariff obtained in ours: half-a-crown a tooth; one shilling only if the molar were a loose one. This one, unfortunately—in spite of Edward’s interested affectation of agony—had been shakiness undisguised; but the event was good enough to run to ginger-beer. As financier, however, Edward had claimed exemption from any servile duties of procurement, and had swaggered about the garden while I fetched from the village post-office, and Harold stole a tumbler from the pantry. Our preparations complete, we were sprawling on the lawn; the staidest and most self-respecting of the rabbits had been let loose to grace the feast, and was lopping demurely about the grass, selecting the juiciest plantains; while Selina, as the eldest lady present, was toying, in her affected feminine way, with the first full tumbler, daintily fishing for bits of broken cork.

  ‘Hurry up, can’t you?’ growled our host; ‘what are you girls always so beastly particular for?’

 
‘Martha says,’ explained Harold (thirsty too, but still just), ‘that if you swallow a bit of cork, it swells, and it swells, and it swells inside you, till you—’

  ‘O bosh!’ said Edward, draining the glass with a fine pretence of indifference to consequences, but all the same (as I noticed) dodging the floating cork-fragments with skill and judgment.

  ‘O, it’s all very well to say bosh,’ replied Harold nettled: ‘but every one knows it’s true but you. Why, when Uncle Thomas was here last, and they got up a bottle of wine for him, he took just one tiny sip out of his glass, and then he said, “Poo, my goodness, that’s corked!” And he wouldn’t touch it. And they had to get a fresh bottle up. The funny part was, though, I looked in his glass afterwards, when it was brought out into the passage, and there wasn’t any cork in it at all! So I drank it all off, and it was very good!’

  ‘You’d better be careful, young man!’ said his elder brother, regarding him severely: ‘D’you remember that night when the Mummers were here, and they had mulled port, and you went round and emptied all the glasses after they had gone away?’

  ‘Ow! I did feel funny that night,’ chuckled Harold. ‘Thought the house was comin’ down, it jumped about so: and Martha had to carry me up to bed, ’cos the stairs was goin’ all waggity!’

  We gazed searchingly at our graceless junior; but it was clear that he viewed the matter in the light of a phenomenon rather than of a delinquency.

  A third bottle was by this time circling; and Selina, who had evidently waited for it to reach her, took a most unfairly long pull, and then, jumping up and shaking out her frock, announced that she was going for a walk. Then she fled like a hare; for it was the custom of our Family to meet with physical coercion any independence of action in individuals.

  ‘She’s off with those Vicarage girls again,’ said Edward, regarding Selina’s long black legs twinkling down the path. ‘She goes out with them every day now; and as soon as ever they start, all their heads go together and they chatter, chatter, chatter the whole blessèd time! I can’t make out what they find to talk about. They never stop; it’s gabble, gabble, gabble right along, like a nest of young rooks!’

  ‘P’raps they talk about birds’-eggs,’ I suggested sleepily (the sun was hot, the turf soft, the ginger-beer potent); ‘and about ships, and buffaloes, and desert islands; and why rabbits have white tails; and whether they’d sooner have a schooner or a cutter; and what they’ll be when they’re men—at least, I mean there’s lots of things to talk about, if you want to talk.’

  ‘Yes; but they don’t talk about those sort of things at all,’ persisted Edward. ‘How can they? They don’t know anything; they can’t do anything—except play the piano, and nobody would want to talk about that; and they don’t care about anything—anything sensible, I mean. So what do they talk about?’

  ‘I asked Martha once,’ put in Harold; ‘and she said, “Never you mind; young ladies has lots of things to talk about that young gentlemen can’t understand.”’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Edward growled.

  ‘Well, that’s what she said, anyway,’ rejoined Harold indifferently. The subject did not seem to him of first-class importance, and it was hindering the circulation of the ginger-beer.

  We heard the click of the front-gate. Through a gap in the hedge we could see the party setting off down the road. Selina was in the middle; a Vicarage girl had her by either arm; their heads were together, as Edward had described; and the clack of their tongues came down the breeze like the busy pipe of starlings on a bright March morning.

  ‘What do they talk about, Charlotte?’ I inquired, wishing to pacify Edward. ‘You go out with them sometimes.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said poor Charlotte dolefully. ‘They make me walk behind, ’cos they say I’m too little, and mustn’t hear. And I do want to so,’ she added.

  ‘When any lady comes to see Aunt Eliza,’ said Harold, ‘they both talk at once all the time. And yet each of ’em seems to hear what the other one’s saying. I can’t make out how they do it. Grown-up people are so clever!’

  ‘The Curate’s the funniest man,’ I remarked. ‘He’s always saying things that have no sense in them at all, and then laughing at them as if they were jokes. Yesterday, when they asked him if he’d have some more tea, he said, “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” and then sniggered all over. I didn’t see anything funny in that. And then somebody asked him about his button-hole, and he said, “’Tis but a little faded flower,” and exploded again. I thought it very stupid.’

  ‘O him,’ said Edward contemptuously: ‘he can’t help it, you know; it’s a sort of way he’s got. But it’s these girls I can’t make out. If they’ve anything really sensible to talk about, how is it nobody knows what it is? And if they haven’t—and we know they can’t have, naturally—why don’t they shut up their jaw? This old rabbit here—he doesn’t want to talk. He’s got something better to do.’ And Edward aimed a ginger-beer cork at the unruffled beast, who never budged.

  ‘O but rabbits do talk,’ interposed Harold. ‘I’ve watched them often in their hutch. They put their heads together and their noses go up and down, just like Selina’s and the Vicarage girls’. Only of course I can’t hear what they’re saying.’

  ‘Well, if they do,’ said Edward unwillingly, ‘I’ll bet they don’t talk such rot as those girls do!’ Which was ungenerous, as well as unfair; for it had not yet transpired—nor has it to this day—what Selina and her friends talked about.

  THE ARGONAUTS

  The advent of strangers, of whatever sort, into our circle had always been a matter of grave dubiety and suspicion. Indeed, it was generally a signal for retreat into caves and fastnesses of the earth, into unthreaded copses or remote outlying cowsheds, whence we were only to be extricated by wily nursemaids, rendered familiar by experience with our secret runs and refuges. It was not surprising, therefore, that the heroes of classic legend, when first we made their acquaintance, failed to win our entire sympathy at once. ‘Confidence,’ says somebody, ‘is a plant of slow growth’; and these stately dark-haired demi-gods, with names hard to master and strange accoutrements, had to win a citadel already strongly garrisoned with a more familiar soldiery. Their chill foreign goddesses had no such direct appeal for us as the mocking malicious fairies and witches of the North. We missed the pleasant alliance of the animal—the fox who spread the bushiest of tails to convey us to the enchanted castle, the frog in the well, the raven who croaked advice from the tree; and—to Harold especially—it seemed entirely wrong that the hero should ever be other than the youngest brother of three. This belief, indeed, in the special fortune that ever awaited the youngest brother, as such,—the ‘Borough-English’ of Faery,—had been of baleful effect on Harold, producing a certain self-conceit and perkiness that called for physical correction. But even in our admonishment we were on his side; and as we distrustfully eyed these new arrivals, old Saturn himself seemed something of a parvenu.

  Even strangers, however, if they be good fellows at heart, may develop into sworn comrades; and these gay swordsmen, after all, were of the right stuff. Perseus, with his cap of darkness and his wonderful sandals, was not long in winging his way to our hearts. Apollo knocked at Admetus’ gate in something of the right fairy fashion. Psyche brought with her an orthodox palace of magic, as well as helpful birds and friendly ants. Ulysses, with his captivating shifts and strategies, broke down the final barrier, and henceforth the band was adopted and admitted into our freemasonry.

  I had been engaged in chasing Farmer Larkin’s calves—his special pride—round the field, just to show the man we hadn’t forgotten him, and was returning through the kitchen-garden with a conscience at peace with all men, when I happened upon Edward, grubbing for worms in the dung-heap. Edward put his worms into his hat, and we strolled along together, discussing high matters of st
ate. As we reached the tool-shed, strange noises arrested our steps; looking in, we perceived Harold, alone, rapt, absorbed, immersed in the special game of the moment. He was squatting in an old pig-trough that had been brought in to be tinkered; and as he rhapsodised, anon he waved a shovel over his head, anon dug it into the ground with the action of those who would urge Canadian canoes. Edward strode in upon him.

  ‘What rot are you playing at now?’ he demanded sternly.

  Harold flushed up, but stuck to his pig-trough like a man. ‘I’m Jason,’ he replied defiantly; ‘and this is the Argo. The other fellows are here too, only you can’t see them; and we’re just going through the Hellespont, so don’t you come bothering.’ And once more he plied the wine-dark sea.