الفصل الفصل 18 · LUSISTI SATIS

. LUSISTI SATIS

Among the many fatuous ideas that possessed the Olympian noddle, this

one was pre-eminent; that, being Olympians, they could talk quite freely

in our presence on subjects of the closest import to us, so long as

names, dates, and other landmarks were ignored. We were supposed to

be denied the faculty for putting two and two together; and, like the

monkeys, who very sensibly refrain from speech lest they should be set

to earn their livings, we were careful to conceal our capabilities for

a simple syllogism. Thus we were rarely taken by surprise, and so were

considered by our disappointed elders to be apathetic and to lack the

divine capacity for wonder.

Now the daily output of the letter-bag, with the mysterious discussions

that ensued thereon, had speedily informed us that Uncle Thomas was

intrusted with a mission,--a mission, too, affecting ourselves. Uncle

Thomas's missions were many and various; a self-important man, one

liking the business while protesting that he sank under the burden, he

was the missionary, so to speak, of our remote habitation. The

matching a ribbon, the running down to the stores, the interviewing a

cook,--these and similar duties lent constant colour and variety to

his vacant life in London and helped to keep down his figure. When the

matter, however, had in our presence to be referred to with nods and

pronouns, with significant hiatuses and interpolations in the French

tongue, then the red flag was flown, the storm-cone hoisted, and by a

studious pretence of inattention we were not long in plucking out the

heart of the mystery.

To clinch our conclusion, we descended suddenly and together on Martha;

proceeding, however, not by simple inquiry as to facts,--that would

never have done,--but by informing her that the air was full of school

and that we knew all about it, and then challenging denial. Martha was

a trusty soul, but a bad witness for the defence, and we soon had it all

out of her. The word had gone forth, the school had been selected; the

necessary sheets were hemming even now; and Edward was the designated

and appointed victim.

It had always been before us as an inevitable bourne, this

strange unknown thing called school; and yet--perhaps I should say

consequently--we had never seriously set ourselves to consider what it

really meant. But now that the grim spectre loomed imminent, stretching

lean hands for one of our flock, it behoved us to face the situation,

to take soundings in this uncharted sea and find out whither we were

drifting. Unfortunately, the data in our possession were absolutely

insufficient, and we knew not whither to turn for exact information.

Uncle Thomas could have told us all about it, of course; he had been

there himself, once, in the dim and misty past. But an unfortunate

conviction, that Nature had intended him for a humourist, tainted all

his evidence, besides making it wearisome to hear. Again, of such among

our contemporaries as we had approached, the trumpets gave forth

an uncertain sound. According to some, it meant larks, revels,

emancipation, and a foretaste of the bliss of manhood. According to

others,--the majority, alas!--it was a private and peculiar Hades, that

could give the original institution points and a beating. When Edward

was observed to be swaggering round with a jaunty air and his chest

stuck out, I knew that he was contemplating his future from the one

point of view. When, on the contrary, he was subdued and unaggressive,

and sought the society of his sisters, I recognised that the other

aspect was in the ascendant. “You can always run away, you know,” I

used to remark consolingly on these latter occasions; and Edward would

brighten up wonderfully at the suggestion, while Charlotte melted into

tears before her vision of a brother with blistered feet and an empty

belly, passing nights of frost 'neath the lee of windy haystacks.

It was to Edward, of course, that the situation was chiefly productive

of anxiety; and yet the ensuing change in my own circumstances and

position furnished me also with food for grave reflexion. Hitherto I

had acted mostly to orders. Even when I had devised and counselled any

particular devilry, it had been carried out on Edward's approbation,

and--as eldest--at his special risk. Henceforward I began to be anxious

of the bugbear Responsibility, and to realise what a soul-throttling

thing it is. True, my new position would have its compensations.

Edward had been masterful exceedingly, imperious, perhaps a little

narrow; impassioned for hard facts, and with scant sympathy for

make-believe. I should now be free and untrammelled; in the conception

and carrying out of a scheme, I could accept and reject to better

artistic purpose.

It would, moreover, be needless to be a Radical any more. Radical I

never was, really, by nature or by sympathy. The part had been thrust

on me one day, when Edward proposed to foist the House of Lords on our

small Republic. The principles of the thing he set forth learnedly and

well, and it all sounded promising enough, till he went on to explain

that, for the present at least, he proposed to be the House of Lords

himself. We others were to be the Commons. There would be promotions, of

course, he added, dependent on service and on fitness, and open to both

sexes; and to me in especial he held out hopes of speedy advancement.

But in its initial stages the thing wouldn't work properly unless he

were first and only Lord. Then I put my foot down promptly, and said

it was all rot, and I didn't see the good of any House of Lords at all.

“Then you must be a low Radical!” said Edward, with fine contempt. The

inference seemed hardly necessary, but what could I do? I accepted the

situation, and said firmly, Yes, I was a low Radical. In this monstrous

character I had been obliged to masquerade ever since; but now I could

throw it off, and look the world in the face again.

And yet, did this and other gains really out-balance my losses?

Henceforth I should, it was true, be leader and chief; but I should also

be the buffer between the Olympians and my little clan. To Edward

this had been nothing; he had withstood the impact of Olympus without

flinching, like Teneriffe or Atlas unremoved. But was I equal to the

task? And was there not rather a danger that for the sake of peace and

quietness I might be tempted to compromise, compound, and make terms?

sinking thus, by successive lapses, into the Blameless Prig? I don't

mean, of course, that I thought out my thoughts to the exact point here

set down. In those fortunate days of old one was free from the hard

necessity of transmuting the vague idea into the mechanical inadequate

medium of words. But the feeling was there, that I might not possess the

qualities of character for so delicate a position.

The unnatural halo round Edward got more pronounced, his own demeanour

more responsible and dignified, with the arrival of his new clothes.

When his trunk and play-box were sent in, the approaching cleavage

between our brother, who now belonged to the future, and ourselves,

still claimed by the past, was accentuated indeed. His name was painted

on each of them, in large letters, and after their arrival their owner

used to disappear mysteriously, and be found eventually wandering round

his luggage, murmuring to himself, “Edward----,” in a rapt, remote sort

of way. It was a weakness, of course, and pointed to a soft spot in

his character; but those who can remember the sensation of first seeing

their names in print will not think hardly of him.

As the short days sped by and the grim event cast its shadow longer and

longer across our threshold, an unnatural politeness, a civility scarce

canny, began to pervade the air. In those latter hours Edward himself

was frequently heard to say “Please,” and also “Would you mind fetchin'

that ball?” while Harold and I would sometimes actually find ourselves

trying to anticipate his wishes. As for the girls, they simply

grovelled. The Olympians, too, in their uncouth way, by gift of carnal

delicacies and such-like indulgence, seemed anxious to demonstrate that

they had hitherto misjudged this one of us. Altogether the situation

grew strained and false, and I think a general relief was felt when the

end came.

We all trooped down to the station, of course; it is only in later

years that the farce of “seeing people off” is seen in its true colours.

Edward was the life and soul of the party; and if his gaiety struck one

at times as being a trifle overdone, it was not a moment to be critical.

As we tramped along, I promised him I would ask Farmer Larkin not to

kill any more pigs till he came back for the holidays, and he said he

would send me a proper catapult,--the real lethal article, not a kid's

plaything. Then suddenly, when we were about half-way down, one of the

girls fell a-snivelling.

The happy few who dare to laugh at the woes of sea-sickness will perhaps

remember how, on occasion, the sudden collapse of a fellow-voyager

before their very eyes has caused them hastily to revise their

self-confidence and resolve to walk more humbly for the future. Even so

it was with Edward, who turned his head aside, feigning an interest in

the landscape. It was but for a moment; then he recollected the hat he

was wearing,--a hard bowler, the first of that sort he had ever owned.

He took it off, examined it, and felt it over. Something about it seemed

to give him strength, and he was a man once more.

At the station, Edward's first care was to dispose his boxes on the

platform so that every one might see the labels and the lettering

thereon. One did not go to school for the first time every day! Then he

read both sides of his ticket carefully; shifted it to every one of his

pockets in turn; and finally fell to chinking of his money, to keep his

courage up. We were all dry of conversation by this time, and could only

stand round and stare in silence at the victim decked for the altar.

And, as I looked at Edward, in new clothes of a manly cut, with a hard

hat upon his head, a railway ticket in one pocket and money of his own

in the other,--money to spend as he liked and no questions asked!--I

began to feel dimly how great was the gulf already yawning betwixt us.

Fortunately I was not old enough to realise, further, that here on this

little platform the old order lay at its last gasp, and that Edward

might come back to us, but it would not be the Edward of yore, nor could

things ever be the same again.

When the train steamed up at last, we all boarded it impetuously with

the view of selecting the one peerless carriage to which Edward might

be intrusted with the greatest comfort and honour; and as each one found

the ideal compartment at the same moment, and vociferously maintained

its merits, he stood some chance for a time of being left behind. A

porter settled the matter by heaving him through the nearest door; and

as the train moved off, Edward's head was thrust out of the window,

wearing on it an unmistakable first-quality grin that he had been saving

up somewhere for the supreme moment. Very small and white his face

looked, on the long side of the retreating train. But the grin was

visible, undeniable, stoutly maintained; till a curve swept him from

our sight, and he was borne away in the dying rumble, out of our placid

backwater, out into the busy world of rubs and knocks and competition,

out into the New Life.

When a crab has lost a leg, his gait is still more awkward than his

wont, till Time and healing Nature make him totus teres atque rotundus

once more. We straggled back from the station disjointedly; Harold, who

was very silent, sticking close to me, his last slender props while

the girls in front, their heads together, were already reckoning up

the weeks to the holidays. Home at last, Harold suggested one or two

occupations of a spicy and contraband flavour, but though we did our

manful best there was no knocking any interest out of them. Then I

suggested others, with the same want of success. Finally we found

ourselves sitting silent on an upturned wheelbarrow, our chins on our

fists, staring haggardly into the raw new conditions of our changed

life, the ruins of a past behind our backs.

And all the while Selina and Charlotte were busy stuffing Edward's

rabbits with unwonted forage, bilious and green; polishing up the cage

of his mice till the occupants raved and swore like householders in

spring-time; and collecting materials for new bows and arrows, whips,

boats, guns, and four-in-hand harness, against the return of Ulysses.

Little did they dream that the hero, once back from Troy and all its

onsets, would scornfully condemn their clumsy but laborious armoury

as rot and humbug and only fit for kids! This, with many another like

awakening, was mercifully hidden from them. Could the veil have been

lifted, and the girls permitted to see Edward as he would appear a short

three months hence, ragged of attire and lawless of tongue, a scorner of

tradition and an adept in strange new physical tortures, one who

would in the same half-hour dismember a doll and shatter a hallowed

belief,--in fine, a sort of swaggering Captain, fresh from the Spanish

Main,--could they have had the least hint of this, well, then perhaps--.

But which of us is of mental fibre to stand the test of a glimpse into

futurity? Let us only hope that, even with certain disillusionment

ahead, the girls would have acted precisely as they did.

And perhaps we have reason to be very grateful that, both as children

and long afterwards, we are never allowed to guess how the absorbing

pursuit of the moment will appear, not only to others, but to ourselves,

a very short time hence. So we pass, with a gusto and a heartiness that

to an onlooker would seem almost pathetic, from one droll devotion to

another misshapen passion; and who shall care to play Rhadamanthus, to

appraise the record, and to decide how much of it is solid achievement,

and how much the merest child's play?