Part 6

Moreover if you called “Mare-_wi_,” then when the lights came Joan would sit up in her cot and stare sleepily while you were being scolded. She would say that she _knew_ there weren’t such things. And you would be filled with an indefinable sense of foolishness. Behind an impenetrable veil of darkness with an intervening floor space acrawl with bears and “burdlars” she could say such things with impunity. In the morning one forgot. Joan in the daytime was a fairly amusing companion, except that she sometimes tried to touch Nobby. Once Peter caught her playing with Nobby and pretending that Nobby was a baby. One hand took Nobby by the head, and the other took Joan by the hair. That was the time when Peter had his first spanking, but Joan was careful not to touch Nobby again.

Generally Joan was passable. Of course she was an intrusion and in the way, but if one wanted to march round and round shouting “Tara-ra-ra, ra-ra, ra-ra, Tara _boom_ de ay,” banging something, a pan or a drum, with Nobby, she could be trusted to join in very effectively. She was good for noise-marches always, and they would not have been any fun without her. She had the processional sense, and knew that her place was second. She talked also in a sort of way, but it was not necessary to listen. She could be managed. If, for example, she touched Peter’s bricks he yelled in a soul-destroying way and went for her with a brick in each hand. She was quick to take a hint of that sort.

It was Arthur’s theory that little children should not be solitary. Mutual aid is the basis of social life, and from their earliest years children must be accustomed to co-operation. They had to be trained for the co-operative commonwealth as set forth in the writings of Prince Kropotkin. Mary thought differently. So Arthur used to go in his beautiful blue blouse and sit in the sunny nursery amidst the toys and the children, inciting them to premature co-operations.

“Now Peter put a brick,” he used to say.

“Now Joan put a brick.”

“Now Dadda put a brick.”

Mary used to watch proceedings with a cynical and irritating expression.

“Peter’s tower,” Peter would propose.

“_Our_ tower,” Arthur used to say.

“Peter knock it over.”

“No. No one knock it over.”

“Peter put _two_ bricks.”

“Very well.”

“Dadda not put any more bricks. No. Peter finish it.”

“Na-ow!” from Joan in a voice like a little cat. “_Me_ finish it.”

Arthur wanted to preserve against this original sin of individualism. He got quite cross at last imposing joyful and willing co-operation upon two highly resistant minds.

Mary’s way was altogether different. She greatly appreciated the fact that Dolly and Arthur had had the floor of the nursery covered with cork carpet, and that Arthur at the suggestion of Aunt Phœbe had got a blackboard and chalks in order to instil a free gesture in drawing from the earliest years. With a piece of chalk Mary would draw a line across the floor of the nursery, fairly dividing the warmth of the stove and the light of the window.

“That’s your bit, Peter,” she would say, “and that’s your bit, Joan. Them’s your share of bricks and them’s yours. Now don’t you think of going outside your bit, either of you, whatever you do. Nohow. Nor touch so much as a brick that isn’t yours.”

Whereupon both children would settle down to play with infinite contentment.

Yet these individualists were not indifferent to each other. If Joan wanted to draw on the blackboard with chalk, then always Peter wanted to draw on the blackboard with chalk at the same time, and here again it was necessary for Mary to mark a boundary between them; and if Peter wanted to build with bricks then Joan did also. Each was uneasy if the other was not in sight. And they would each do the same thing on different sides of their chalk boundary, with a wary eye on the other’s proceedings and with an endless stream of explanation of what they were doing.

“Peter’s building a love-i-lay house.”

“Joan’s building, oh!—a lovelay-er house. Wiv a cross on it.”

“Why not build one lovely house for both of you?” said Arthur, still with the Co-operative Commonwealth in mind.

Neither child considered that his proposal called for argument. It went over their heads and vanished. They continued building individually as before, but in silence lest Arthur should be tempted to intervene again.

§ 2

Joan was a dancer from the age of three.

Perhaps she got some hint from Dolly, there is no telling; but anyhow she frisked and capered rhythmically by a kind of instinct whenever Dolly played the piano. So Dolly showed her steps and then more steps. Peter did not take to dancing so readily as Joan and his disposition was towards burlesque. Joan danced for the love of dancing, but Peter was inventive and turned his dances into expression. He invented the Fat Dance, with a pillow under his pinafore, the Thin Dance, with a concave stomach and a meagre expression, the One Leg dance and the Bird Dance, this latter like the birds about the crumbs in winter time. Also the Tipsy Dance, bacchic, which Arthur thought vulgar and discouraged. Dolly taught Joan the Flower Dance, with a very red cap like a pistil, and white silk skirt petals upheld by her arms. These she opened slowly, and at last dropped and then drooped. This needed a day of preparation. Peter produced his first remembered æsthetic judgment on a human being on this occasion.

“_Pritty_ Joan,” he said with conviction, as she stood flushed and bright-eyed after the dance, and with that he went and kissed her.

“He’s beginning young,” said Arthur.

It is what all parents say, and it is true of all children. But parents keep on saying it....

Before he was fully four Peter was conducting an æsthetic analysis of his world. He liked some of the tunes Dolly played and disapproved of others. He distributed “pritty” lavishly but by no means indiscriminately over the things of the world. “Oh pritty fo’wers,” was the primordial form of these expanding decisions. But he knew that Nobby was not pretty.

Arthur did his best to encourage and assist these budding appreciations.

One evening there was a beautiful still sunset. The sun went down, a great flattening sphere of reddening gold sinking into vast levels of blue over the remoter hills. Joan had already been carried off to bed, but Arthur seized upon Peter and stood him in the window seat. “Look,” said Arthur. Peter looked intently, and both his parents sat beside him, watching his nice little round head and the downy edge of his intent profile.

“Look,” said Arthur, “it goes. It goes. It’s going ... going ... going....”

The sun became a crescent, a red scimitar, a streak of fire.

“Ah!” said Arthur, “it’s gone.”

Came an immense pause.

“Do it _adain_, Dadda,” said Peter with immense approval. “Do it adain....”

§ 3

The theory of Ideals played almost as important a part in the early philosophy of Peter as it did in the philosophy of Plato. But Peter did not call them “Ideals,” he called them “toys.” Toys were the simplified essences of things, pure, perfect and manageable; Real Things were troublesome, uncontrollable, over complicated and largely irrelevant. A Real Train, for example, was a poor, big, clumsy, limited thing that was obliged to go to Red Hill or Croydon or London, that was full of stuffy unnecessary strangers, usually sitting firmly in the window seats, that you could do nothing satisfactory with at all. A Toy Train was your very own; it took you wherever you wanted, to Fairyland or Russia or anywhere, at whatever pace you chose. Then there was a beautiful rag doll named “Pleeceman,” who had a comic, almost luminous red nose, and smiled perpetually; you could hit Joan with him and make her squawk and yet be sure of not hurting her within the meaning of the law; how inferior was the great formless lump of a thing, with a pale uneventful visitor’s sort of face we saw out of the train at Caterham! Nobody could have lifted him by a leg and waved him about; and if you had shied him into a corner, instead of all going just anyhow and still smiling, he would probably have been cross and revengeful. How inferior again was the Real Cow, with its chewing habits, its threatening stare and moo and its essential rudeness, to Suzannah, the cow on the green board. Perhaps the best real things in the world were young pigs....

But this much is simply to explain how it was that Peter was grateful but not overwhelmed to find that there was also a real Nobby in existence as well as his beloved fetish. And this Nobby was, as real things went, much better than one could have expected him to be. Peter’s heart went out to him from the very first encounter, and never found reason to relinquish him again.

Nobby wasted a good lot of time that might have been better employed in play, by talking to Mummy; and when a little boy set himself to rescue his friend from so tepid an occupation, Mary showed a peculiar disposition to thwart one. “Oh! _leave_ them alone,” she said, with the tart note in her voice. “I’m sure they don’t want either of you.”

Still Mummy didn’t always get Nobby, and a little boy and girl could hear him talk and play about with him. When he told really truly things it was better than any one else telling stories. He had had all sorts of experiences; he had been a sailor; _he knew what was inside a ship_. That had been a growing need in Peter’s life. All Peter’s ships had been solid hitherto. And Nobby had been in the same field, practically speaking, with lions ever so many times. Lions, of course, are not nearly so dreadful as bears in a little boy’s world; bears are the most dreadful things in the world (especially is this true of the black, under-bed bear, _Ursus Pedivorus_) but lions are dreadful enough. If one saw one in a field one would instantly get back over the stile again and go home, Mary or no Mary. But one day near Nairobi, Nobby had come upon a lion in broad daylight right in the middle of the path. Nobby had nothing but a stick. “I was in a hurry and I felt annoyed,” said Nobby. “So I just walked towards him and waved my stick at him, and shouted to him to get out of my way.”

“_Yes?_” breathless.

“And he went. Most lions will get away from a man if they can. Not always though.”

A pause. There was evidently another story to that. “Tell us,” said Mummy, more interested even than the children.

Big Nobby made model African villages out of twigs and suchlike nothings in the garden, and he brought down Joan and Peter boxes of Zulu warriors from London to inhabit them. Also he bought two boxes of “Egyptian camel corps.” One wet day he “made Africa” on the nursery floor. He made mountains out of books and wood blocks, and put a gold-mine of gold paper therein; he got in a lot of twigs of box from the garden and made the most lovely forest you can imagine; he built villages of bricks for the Zulus; he put out the animals of Peter’s Noah’s ark in the woods. “Here’s the lion,” he said, propping up the lion against the tree because of its broken leg.

“Gurr Woooooah!” said Joan.

“Exactly,” said Nobby, encouraging her.

“Waar-oooh. Waaaa!” said Joan, presuming on it.

“Bang!” said Peter. “You’re _dead_, Joan,” and stopped any more of that.

§ 4

Then one day an extraordinary thing happened. It was towards lunch-time, and Mary was bringing Joan and Peter home from a walk in the woods. Joan was tired, but Peter had been enterprising and had run on far ahead; he was trotting his fat legs down the rusty lane that ran through the bushes close to the garden fence when he saw Nobby’s lank form coming towards him from the house, walking slowly and as if he couldn’t see where he was going. Peter was for slipping into the bushes and jumping out at him and saying “Boo.” Then he saw Nobby stop and stand still and stare back at the house, and then, most wonderful and dreadful! this great big grown-up began to sob and cry. He said “Ooo-er!” just as Peter did sometimes when he felt unendurably ill-used. And he kept raising his clenched fists as if he was going to shake them—and not doing so.

“I will go to Hell,” said Nobby. “I will go to Hell.”

In a passion!

(Peter was shocked and ashamed for Nobby.)

Then Nobby turned and saw Peter before Peter could hide away from him. He stopped crying at once, but there was his funny face all red and shiny on one side.

“Hullo, old Peter boy,” said Nobby. “I’m off. I’m going right away. Been fooled.”

So that was it. But hadn’t he Africa and lions and elephants and black men to go to, a great Real Play Nursery instead of a Nursery of Toys? Why make a fuss of it?

He came to Peter and lifted him up in his arms. “Good-bye, old Peter,” he said. “Good-bye, Peter. Keep off the copper punching.” He kissed his godson—how wet his face was!—and put him down, and was going off along the path and Peter hadn’t said a word.

He wanted to cry too, to think that Nobby was going. He stared and then ran a little way after his friend.

“Nobby,” he shouted; “good-bye!”

“Good-bye, old man,” Nobby cried back to him.

“Good-bye. Gooood-bye-er.”

Then Peter trotted back to the house to be first with the sad but exciting news that Nobby had gone. But as he came down from the green wicket to the house he looked up and saw his father at the upstairs window, gazing after Nobby with an unusual expression that perplexed him, and in the little hall he found his mother, and she had been crying too, though she was pretending she hadn’t. They knew about Nobby. Something strange was in the air, perceptible to a little boy but utterly beyond his understanding. Perhaps Nobby had been naughty. So he thought it best to change the subject, and began talking at once about a wonderful long bicycle with no less than three men on it—not two, Mummy, but three—that he had seen upon the highroad. They had thin white silk shirts without sleeves, and rode furiously with their heads down. Their shirts were blown out funnily behind them in the middles of their backs. They went like _that_!...

All through the midday meal nobody said a word about Nobby....

Nobody ever did say anything about Nobby again. When on a few occasions Peter himself talked appreciatively of Nobby nobody, unless it was Joan now and then, seemed the least bit interested....

One side consequence of Oswald’s visit had been the dethronement of the original Nobby. The real Nobby had somehow thrust the toy Nobby into the background. Perhaps he drifted into the recesses of some box or cupboard. At any rate when Peter thought of him one day he was nowhere to be found. That did not matter so much as it would have done a couple of months before. Now if the bears and “burdlars” got busy in the night-nursery Peter used to pretend that the pillow was the real Nobby, the Nobby who wasn’t even afraid of lions and had driven off one with a stick. A prowling bear hadn’t much chance against a little boy who snuggled up to _that_ Nobby.

§ 5

Mummy was rather dull in those days, and Daddy seemed always to be looking at her. Daddy had a sort of inelasticity in his manner too. Suddenly Aunt Phyllis and Aunt Phœbe appeared, and it was announced that Daddy and Mummy were going off to Italy. It was too far for them to take little boys and girls, they said, and besides there were, oh! _horrid_ spiders. And Peter must stay to mind the house and Joan and his aunts; it wasn’t right not to have some man about. He was to have a sailor suit with trousers also, great responsibilities altogether for a boy not much over four. So there was a great kissing and going off, and Joan and Peter settled down to the rule of the aunts and only missed Mummy and Daddy now and then.

Then one day something happened over the children’s heads. Mary had red eyes and wouldn’t say why; the aunts had told her not to do so.

Phyllis and Phœbe decided not to darken the children’s lives by wearing mourning, but Mary said that anyhow she would go into black. But neither Joan nor Peter took much notice of the black dress.

“Why don’t Mummy and Daddy come back?” asked Peter one day of Aunt Phœbe.

“They’ve travelled to such wonderful places,” said Aunt Phœbe with a catch in her voice. “They may not be back for ever so long. No. Not till Peter is ever so big.”

“Then why don’t they send us cull’d poce-cards like they did’t first?” said Peter.

Aunt Phœbe was so taken aback she could answer nothing.

“They just forgotten us,” said Peter and reflected. “They gone on and on.”

“Isn’t Nobby ever coming back either?” he asked, abruptly, displaying a devastating acceptance of the new situation.

“But who’s Nobby?”

“That’s Mr. Oswald Sydenham,” said Mary.

“He’s coming back quite soon,” said Aunt Phœbe. “He’s on his way now.”

“’Cos he _promised_ me a lion skin,” said Peter.

§ 6

Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe found themselves two of the four guardians appointed under Arthur’s will.

It had been one of Arthur’s occasional lapses into deceit that he destroyed the will which made Oswald the sole guardian of Joan—so far as he could dispose of Joan—and Peter, without saying a word about it to Dolly. He had vacillated between various substitutes for Oswald up to the very moment when he named the four upon whom he decided finally, to his solicitor. Some streak of jealousy or pride, combined with a doubt whether Oswald would now consent to act, had first prompted the alteration. Instead he had decided to shift the responsibility to his sisters. Then a twinge of compunction had made him replace Oswald. Then feeling that Oswald might still be out talked or out voted by his sisters, he had stuck in the name of Dolly’s wealthy and important cousin, Lady Charlotte Sydenham. He had only seen her twice, but she had seemed a lady of considerable importance and strength of character. Anyhow it made things fairer to the Sydenham side.

But Phyllis and Phœbe at once assumed, not without secret gladness, that the burthen of this responsibility would fall upon them. Oswald Sydenham was away in the heart of Africa; Lady Charlotte Sydenham was also abroad. She had telegraphed, “Unwell impossible to return to England six weeks continue children’s life as hitherto.” That seemed to promise a second sleeping partner in the business.

The sisters decided to continue The Ingle-Nook as the children’s home, and made the necessary arrangements with Mr. Sycamore, the family solicitor, to that end.

They discussed their charges very carefully and fully. Phyllis was for a meticulous observance of Arthur’s known or assumed “wishes,” but Phœbe took a broader view. Mary too pointed out the dangers of too literal an adhesion to precedent.

“We want everything to go on exactly as it did when _they_ were alive,” said Phyllis to Mary.

“Things ’ave got to be different,” said Mary.

“Not if we can help it,” said Aunt Phyllis.

“They’ll _grow_,” said Mary after reflection.

Phœbe became eloquent in the evening.

“We are to have the advantages of maternity, Phyllis, without—without the degradation. It is a solemn trust. Blessed are we among women, Phyllis. I feel a Madonna. We _are_ Madonnas, Phyllis. Modern Madonnas. Just Touched by the Wings of the Dove.... These little souls dropped from heaven upon our knees.... Poor Arthur! It is our task to guide his offspring to that high destiny he might have attained. _Look_, Phyllis!”

With her flat hand she indicated the long garden path that Dolly had planned.

Phyllis peered forward without intelligence. “What is it?” she asked.

Phyllis perceived that Phœbe was flushed with poetical excitement. And Phœbe’s voice dropped mystically to a deep whisper. “Don’t you see? _White lilies!_ A coincidence, of course. But—Beautiful.”

“For a child with a high destiny, I doubt if Peter is careful enough with his clothes,” said Phyllis, trying to sound a less Pre-Raphaelite note. “He was a perfect little Disgrace this afternoon.”

“The darling! But I understand.... Joan too has much before her, Phyllis. As yet their minds are blank, _tabula rasa_; of either of them there is still to be made—_anything_. Peter—upon this Rock I set—a New Age. When women shall come to their own. Joan again. Joan of Arc. Coincidences no doubt. But leave me my fancies. Fancies—if you will. For me they are no fancies. Before the worlds, Phyllis, we were made for this.”

She rested her chin on her hand, and stared out into the blue twilight, a brooding prophetess.

“Only a woman can understand a woman,” she said presently. “Not a Word of this, Phyllis, to Others.”

“I wish we had bought some cigarettes this afternoon,” said Phyllis.

“The little red glow,” reflected Phœbe indulgently. “It helps. But I don’t want to smoke tonight. It would spoil it. Smoke! Let the Flame burn clear awhile.... We will get in cigarettes tomorrow.”

§ 7

Joan and Peter remained unaware of the great destinies before them. More observant persons than they were might have guessed there were deep meanings in the way in which Aunt Phœbe smoothed back their hair from their foreheads and said “Ah,” and bade them “Mark it well” whenever she imparted any general statement, but they took these things merely as her particular way of manifesting the irrational quality common to all grown-up people. Also she would say “Dignity! Your mission!” when they howled or fought. It was to the manuscript that grew into a bigger and bigger pile upon what had been Arthur’s writing-desk in Arthur’s workroom, that she restricted her most stirring ideas. She wrote there daily, going singing to it as healthy young men go singing to their bathrooms. She splashed her mind about and refreshed herself greatly. She wrote in a large hand, punctuating chiefly with dashes. She had conceived her book rather in the manner of the prophetic works of the admired Mr. Ruskin—with Carlylean lapses. It was to be called _Hail Bambino and the Grain of Mustard Seed_. It was all about the tremendousness of children.

The conscientious valiance of Aunt Phœbe was very manifest in the opening. “Cæsar,” the book began, “and the son of Semele burst strangely into this world, but Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, Newton, Darwin, Robert Burns, were born as peacefully as you or I. Nathless they came for such ends—if indeed one can think of any ending thereto!—as blot out the stars. Yesterday a puling babe—for Jesus puled, Mohammed puled, let us not spare ourselves, Newton, a delicate child, puled most offensively—Herod here and bacteria there, infantile colic, tuberculosis and what not, searched for each little life, in vain, and so today behold springing victoriously from each vital granule a tree of Teaching, of Consequence, that buds and burgeons and shoots and for ever spreads so that the Gates of Hell may not prevail against it! Here it is the Tree of Spirituality, here the Tree of Thought, predestined intertwiner with the Tree of Asgard, here in our last instance a chanting Beauty, a heartening lyrical Yawp and Whirlaboo. And forget it not, whatever else be forgotten, the Word of the Wise, ‘_as the twig is bent the tree inclines_.’ So it is and utterly that we realize the importance of education, the pregnant intensity of the least urgency, the hint, the gleam, the offering of service, to these First Tender Years.”

Here Aunt Phœbe had drawn breath for a moment, before she embarked upon her second paragraph; and here we will leave Aunt Phœbe glowing amidst her empurpled prose.