الفصل الفصل 2 · A HOLIDAY

. A HOLIDAY

The masterful wind was up and out, shouting and chasing, the lord of

the morning. Poplars swayed and tossed with a roaring swish; dead leaves

sprang aloft, and whirled into space; and all the clear-swept heaven

seemed to thrill with sound like a great harp.

It was one of the first awakenings of the year. The earth stretched

herself, smiling in her sleep; and everything leapt and pulsed to

the stir of the giant's movement. With us it was a whole holiday;

the occasion a birthday--it matters not whose. Some one of us had had

presents, and pretty conventional speeches, and had glowed with that

sense of heroism which is no less sweet that nothing has been done to

deserve it. But the holiday was for all, the rapture of awakening Nature

for all, the various outdoor joys of puddles and sun and hedge-breaking

for all. Colt-like I ran through the meadows, frisking happy heels in

the face of Nature laughing responsive. Above, the sky was bluest of the

blue; wide pools left by the winter's floods flashed the colour back,

true and brilliant; and the soft air thrilled with the germinating touch

that seemed to kindle something in my own small person as well as in the

rash primrose already lurking in sheltered haunts. Out into the brimming

sun-bathed world I sped, free of lessons, free of discipline and

correction, for one day at least. My legs ran of themselves, and though

I heard my name called faint and shrill behind, there was no stopping

for me. It was only Harold, I concluded, and his legs, though shorter

than mine, were good for a longer spurt than this. Then I heard it

called again, but this time more faintly, with a pathetic break in the

middle; and I pulled up short, recognising Charlotte's plaintive note.

She panted up anon, and dropped on the turf beside me. Neither had any

desire for talk; the glow and the glory of existing on this perfect

morning were satisfaction full and sufficient.

“Where's Harold;” I asked presently.

“Oh, he's just playin' muffin-man, as usual,” said Charlotte with

petulance. “Fancy wanting to be a muffin-man on a whole holiday!”

It was a strange craze, certainly; but Harold, who invented his own

games and played them without assistance, always stuck staunchly to

a new fad, till he had worn it quite out. Just at present he was a

muffin-man, and day and night he went through passages and up and down

staircases, ringing a noiseless bell and offering phantom muffins to

invisible wayfarers. It sounds a poor sort of sport; and yet--to pass

along busy streets of your own building, for ever ringing an imaginary

bell and offering airy muffins of your own make to a bustling thronging

crowd of your own creation--there were points about the game, it

cannot be denied, though it seemed scarce in harmony with this radiant

wind-swept morning!

“And Edward, where is he?” I questioned again.

“He's coming along by the road,” said Charlotte. “He'll be crouching

in the ditch when we get there, and he's going to be a grizzly bear and

spring out on us, only you mustn't say I told you, 'cos it's to be a

surprise.”

“All right,” I said magnanimously. “Come on and let's be surprised.” But

I could not help feeling that on this day of days even a grizzly felt

misplaced and common.

Sure enough an undeniable bear sprang out on us as we dropped into the

road; then ensued shrieks, growlings, revolver-shots, and unrecorded

heroisms, till Edward condescended at last to roll over and die, bulking

large and grim, an unmitigated grizzly. It was an understood thing, that

whoever took upon himself to be a bear must eventually die, sooner or

later, even if he were the eldest born; else, life would have been all

strife and carnage, and the Age of Acorns have displaced our hard-won

civilisation. This little affair concluded with satisfaction to all

parties concerned, we rambled along the road, picking up the defaulting

Harold by the way, muffinless now and in his right and social mind.

“What would you do?” asked Charlotte presently,--the book of the

moment always dominating her thoughts until it was sucked dry and cast

aside,--“what would you do if you saw two lions in the road, one on each

side, and you didn't know if they was loose or if they was chained up?”

“Do?” shouted Edward, valiantly, “I should--I should--I should--”

His boastful accents died away into a mumble: “Dunno what I should do.”

“Shouldn't do anything,” I observed after consideration; and really it

would be difficult to arrive at a wiser conclusion.

“If it came to DOING,” remarked Harold, reflectively, “the lions would

do all the doing there was to do, wouldn't they?”

“But if they was GOOD lions,” rejoined Charlotte, “they would do as they

would be done by.”

“Ah, but how are you to know a good lion from a bad one?” said Edward.

“The books don't tell you at all, and the lions ain't marked any

different.”

“Why, there aren't any good lions,” said Harold, hastily.

“Oh yes, there are, heaps and heaps,” contradicted Edward. “Nearly all

the lions in the story-books are good lions. There was Androcles' lion,

and St. Jerome's lion, and--and--the Lion and the Unicorn--”

“He beat the Unicorn,” observed Harold, dubiously, “all round the town.”

“That PROVES he was a good lion,” cried Edwards triumphantly. “But the

question is, how are you to tell 'em when you see 'em?”

“_I_ should ask Martha,” said Harold of the simple creed.

Edward snorted contemptuously, then turned to Charlotte. “Look here,” he

said; “let's play at lions, anyhow, and I'll run on to that corner and

be a lion,--I'll be two lions, one on each side of the road,--and

you'll come along, and you won't know whether I'm chained up or not, and

that'll be the fun!”

“No, thank you,” said Charlotte, firmly; “you'll be chained up till

I'm quite close to you, and then you'll be loose, and you'll tear me in

pieces, and make my frock all dirty, and p'raps you'll hurt me as well.

_I_ know your lions!”

“No, I won't; I swear I won't,” protested Edward. “I'll be quite a new

lion this time,--something you can't even imagine.” And he raced off to

his post. Charlotte hesitated; then she went timidly on, at each step

growing less Charlotte, the mummer of a minute, and more the anxious

Pilgrim of all time. The lion's wrath waxed terrible at her approach;

his roaring filled the startled air. I waited until they were both

thoroughly absorbed, and then I slipped through the hedge out of the

trodden highway, into the vacant meadow spaces. It was not that I was

unsociable, nor that I knew Edward's lions to the point of satiety; but

the passion and the call of the divine morning were high in my blood.

Earth to earth! That was the frank note, the joyous summons of the day;

and they could not but jar and seem artificial, these human discussions

and pretences, when boon Nature, reticent no more, was singing that

full-throated song of hers that thrills and claims control of every

fibre. The air was wine; the moist earth-smell, wine; the lark's song,

the wafts from the cow-shed at top of the field, the pant and smoke of

a distant train,--all were wine,--or song, was it? or odour, this

unity they all blended into? I had no words then to describe it, that

earth-effluence of which I was so conscious; nor, indeed, have I

found words since. I ran sideways, shouting; I dug glad heels into the

squelching soil; I splashed diamond showers from puddles with a stick;

I hurled clods skywards at random, and presently I somehow found myself

singing. The words were mere nonsense,--irresponsible babble; the tune

was an improvisation, a weary, unrhythmic thing of rise and fall: and

yet it seemed to me a genuine utterance, and just at that moment the

one thing fitting and right and perfect. Humanity would have rejected it

with scorn, Nature, everywhere singing in the same key, recognised and

accepted it without a flicker of dissent.

All the time the hearty wind was calling to me companionably from where

he swung and bellowed in the tree-tops. “Take me for guide to-day,” he

seemed to plead. “Other holidays you have tramped it in the track of the

stolid, unswerving sun; a belated truant, you have dragged a weary foot

homeward with only a pale, expressionless moon for company. To-day

why not I, the trickster, the hypocrite? I, who whip round corners and

bluster, relapse and evade, then rally and pursue! I can lead you the

best and rarest dance of any; for I am the strong capricious one, the

lord of misrule, and I alone am irresponsible and unprincipled, and obey

no law.” And for me, I was ready enough to fall in with the fellow's

humour; was not this a whole holiday? So we sheered off together,

arm-in-arm, so to speak; and with fullest confidence I took the jigging,

thwartwise course my chainless pilot laid for me.

A whimsical comrade I found him, ere he had done with me. Was it in

jest, or with some serious purpose of his own, that he brought me plump

upon a pair of lovers, silent, face to face o'er a discreet unwinking

stile? As a rule this sort of thing struck me as the most pitiful

tomfoolery. Two calves rubbing noses through a gate were natural and

right and within the order of things; but that human beings, with

salient interests and active pursuits beckoning them on from every side,

could thus--! Well, it was a thing to hurry past, shamed of face,

and think on no more. But this morning everything I met seemed to be

accounted for and set in tune by that same magical touch in the air;

and it was with a certain surprise that I found myself regarding these

fatuous ones with kindliness instead of contempt, as I rambled by,

unheeded of them. There was indeed some reconciling influence abroad,

which could bring the like antics into harmony with bud and growth and

the frolic air.

A puff on the right cheek from my wilful companion sent me off at

a fresh angle, and presently I came in sight of the village church,

sitting solitary within its circle of elms. From forth the vestry

window projected two small legs, gyrating, hungry for foothold, with

larceny--not to say sacrilege--in their every wriggle: a godless sight

for a supporter of the Establishment. Though the rest was hidden, I knew

the legs well enough; they were usually attached to the body of Bill

Saunders, the peerless bad boy of the village. Bill's coveted booty,

too, I could easily guess at that; it came from the Vicar's store

of biscuits, kept (as I knew) in a cupboard along with his official

trappings.

For a moment I hesitated; then I passed on my way. I protest I was not

on Bill's side; but then, neither was I on the Vicar's, and there was

something in this immoral morning which seemed to say that perhaps,

after all, Bill had as much right to the biscuits as the Vicar, and

would certainly enjoy them better; and anyhow it was a disputable point,

and no business of mine. Nature, who had accepted me for ally, cared

little who had the world's biscuits, and assuredly was not going to let

any friend of hers waste his time in playing policeman for Society.

He was tugging at me anew, my insistent guide; and I felt sure, as I

rambled off in his wake, that he had more holiday matter to show me. And

so, indeed, he had; and all of it was to the same lawless tune. Like a

black pirate flag on the blue ocean of air, a hawk hung ominous; then,

plummet-wise, dropped to the hedgerow, whence there rose, thin and

shrill, a piteous voice of squealing.

By the time I got there a whisk of feathers on the turf--like scattered

playbills--was all that remained to tell of the tragedy just enacted.

Yet Nature smiled and sang on, pitiless, gay, impartial. To her, who

took no sides, there was every bit as much to be said for the hawk

as for the chaffinch. Both were her children, and she would show no

preferences.

Further on, a hedgehog lay dead athwart the path--nay, more than dead;

decadent, distinctly; a sorry sight for one that had known the fellow in

more bustling circumstances. Nature might at least have paused to shed

one tear over this rough jacketed little son of hers, for his wasted

aims, his cancelled ambitions, his whole career of usefulness cut

suddenly short. But not a bit of it! Jubilant as ever, her song went

bubbling on, and “Death-in-Life,” and again, “Life-in-Death,” were its

alternate burdens. And looking round, and seeing the sheep-nibbled heels

of turnips that dotted the ground, their hearts eaten out of them in

frost-bound days now over and done, I seemed to discern, faintly, a

something of the stern meaning in her valorous chant.

My invisible companion was singing also, and seemed at times to be

chuckling softly to himself, doubtless at thought of the strange

new lessons he was teaching me; perhaps, too, at a special bit of

waggishness he had still in store. For when at last he grew weary of

such insignificant earthbound company, he deserted me at a certain

spot I knew; then dropped, subsided, and slunk away into nothingness.

I raised my eyes, and before me, grim and lichened, stood the ancient

whipping-post of the village; its sides fretted with the initials of a

generation that scorned its mute lesson, but still clipped by the stout

rusty shackles that had tethered the wrists of such of that generation's

ancestors as had dared to mock at order and law. Had I been an infant

Sterne, here was a grand chance for sentimental output! As things were,

I could only hurry homewards, my moral tail well between my legs, with

an uneasy feeling, as I glanced back over my shoulder, that there was