الفصل الفصل 11 · WHAT THEY TALKED ABOUT

. 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 shaky 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 blessed 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.