Part 4

When we were boys there was no part of the Christmas festivities to which we looked forward more eagerly than the singing of carols from house to house on Christmas Eve. If the night fell wild and rainy, we had to abandon our tuneful journey and content ourselves with singing indoors. But if it was a dry night, we set forth joyfully, even though a disquieted moon and inattentive stars foretold a wet Christmas. Our hearts were lighter than men’s hearts can be, as we clattered down the lanes, fortified by a hot supper and possibly a scalding tumblerful of mulled claret. We would always start at the houses of friends, and then, made bold by success, we would sing our glad tidings to any house which had a lit window. For the credit of human nature it may be said that we were made welcome wherever we went. Sometimes people offered us money, which our code forbade us to accept, though we should have liked it well enough; more frequently we were asked to come in and have something to eat or drink, offers with which even the infinite capacity of youth could by no means cope. If the night was frosty it was pleasant to toast ourselves for a minute or two in front of the fire before going out again into a world of frozen ruts, sparkling hedgerows, and mysterious shadows, wherein we felt ourselves veritable figures of romance.

And, indeed, we ourselves sang better than we knew. However cheerfully and noisily we might undertake the expedition, it was not long before we became aware that other spirits were abroad. The simple words and merry tunes which we sang suddenly became wonderfully significant. Between the verses we heard the sheep calling on far hills while the shepherd kings rode down to Bethlehem with their gifts. The trees and fields and houses took up the chant, and our noises were blended with that deep song of the Universe which the new ears of the young hear so often and so clearly. When our carol was over there would fall a great silence that seemed to our quickened senses to be but a gentler and sweeter music of hope and joy. As we passed from one house to the next we spoke to each other in whispers for fear we should break the spell that held the night enchanted. Even as we heard other noises when we sang, so now we heard the sound of other feet that trod the same glad road as our own. From being a half-dozen of little boys come out to have some fun on Christmas eve, we had become a small section of a great army. Tramp, tramp, the joyful feet fell before and behind us along the road, and when we stopped to sing, the whole night thrilled into a triumphant ecstasy of song. On such nights the very earth, it seemed, sang carols.

It is, perhaps, our vivid recollection of the glories of those memorable Christmas Eves that leads us to be gentle with the little boys and girls who sing at our door to-night. We have all listened to the eloquent persons who can prove that Christmas is not what it used to be. They point to the decadence of pantomime, the decay of the waits and mummers, and the democratic impudence of those who demand Christmas-boxes. Well, it may be—but children do like modern pantomimes in spite of the generalisations of critics; and though a Salvation Army band is an unpicturesque substitute for such a village orchestra as is described in “Under the Greenwood Tree,” it at least satisfies the ear of the sentimentalist at two o’clock of a frosty morning. That Christmas-boxes are a nuisance is no new discovery. We find Swift grumbling to Stella about them exactly two hundred years ago. Mummers, we are told, are still to be found in the country; five years back we saw them ourselves and were satisfied that they had learnt their rather obscure rhymes from their fathers before them, and not from any well-meaning society for faking old customs.

This said, it must be admitted that carol-singers are not what they were. Of the long procession of ragged children who have sung “While shepherds watched their flocks by night” at our gate this December, not one had taken the trouble to learn either the words or the tune accurately. When asked to sing some other carol they broke down, and it was apparent that they were trusting to their hungry and thinly clad appearance rather than to their singing as a means to obtain alms from the charitable. Sometimes—this we fear is really a modern note—the father was waiting in the background to collect the takings! It is rather difficult to know what to do in such cases, for the children may be punished if they are not successful; and yet the practice of sending insufficiently clad children into the streets on a winter’s night is hardly to be encouraged.

Nevertheless, though the abuse is manifest, we would hesitate to say that the custom of singing carols at our doors should be stopped. It is difficult to read the heart of a child aright, but it seems to us at least possible that a few of the children win more than a mere handful of pennies from their singing. Though they mumble their words to a tune they only half remember, it is not likely that the spirit that made wonderful the Christmas Eves of long ago shall altogether pass them by. Surely the night conspires with lights of the world to enchant them, and for their own ears their voices achieve beauty beyond the measure of mortal song.

In truth, this is a dream that we can ill afford to spare. It seems a pity, however, that the children are not taught carol-singing at school, especially as they are now often taught, to our great content, the old games and dances. Many of the older carols are really beautiful, both in the homely simplicity of their words and in the unaffected charm of the airs to which they are set. The desire of the average child for song is extraordinary—as extraordinary, perhaps, as the regrettable contempt of the average adult for poetry. Last year we were present at the dress rehearsal of the pantomime at Drury Lane, and we heard a theatreful of poor children sing the music-hall ditties of the hour with wonderful spirit and intensity. Our emotions were mixed. Mingled with the natural pleasure that they should be enjoying themselves was something of regret for the sad lives that so small a treat should rouse to ecstasy. Afterwards we felt sorry that the children had nothing better to sing. We have no prejudice against music-hall songs in general. They are not as intelligent as they might be, but they serve their time in pleasing, harmlessly enough, a number of people who also are not as intelligent as they might be. But somehow the lyres of little singing children deserve better fare than this. We look forward to a time when they will have it.

THE MAGIC CARPET

THERE were two rugs in the library, and for some time we used to dispute the vexed question of their relative merits. Æsthetically, there was something to be said for both of them. The rug that stood by the writing-desk from which father wrote to the newspapers was soft and furry; indeed, it was almost as pleasant a couch as the sofa with the soft cushions in the drawing-room, which was taboo. Moreover, it lent itself very readily to such fashionable winter sport as bear-hunting, providing as it did a trackless prairie, a dangerous marsh, or the quarry itself as the adventure required. The joys of the other rug were of a calmer kind, and were, perhaps, chiefly due to its advantageous position before the fire. It was pleasant to toast oneself on a winter evening and trace with idle fingers the agreeable deviations of its pattern. Sometimes it might be the ground plan of a make-up city, with forts and sweet-shops and palaces for our friends; sometimes it would be a maze, and we would pursue, with bated breath, the vaulted passages that led to the dread lair of the Minotaur. But such plots as these were of passive, rather than active, interest. Reviewing the argument dispassionately, Fenimore Cooper may have had a slight advantage over Nathaniel Hawthorne; bear-hunting may have been a little more popular than the dim excitements of Greek myth.

But while the discussion was at its height, there dawned in the East the sun that was to prove fatal to Perseus and the Deerslayer alike. I do not know from which of our uncles “The Arabian Nights” first came to an enraptured audience; but I am sure that an uncle must have been responsible for its coming, for as a gift it was avuncular in its splendour. We quickly realised that the world had changed, and took the necessary steps to welcome our new guest. The old lamp in the hall that had graced the illicit doings of pirates and smugglers in the past was thenceforward the property of Aladdin; a strange bottle that had been Crusoe’s served to confine the unfortunate genie; and with quickening pulses we discovered that in the fireside rug we possessed no less a treasure than the original magic carpet.

I must explain that we were not like those fortunate children of whom Miss Nesbit writes with such humorous charm. To us there fell no tremendous adventures; we might polish Aladdin’s lamp till it shone like the moon without gaining a single concrete acid-drop for our pains. But the “Arabian Nights” gave us all that we ever thought of seeking either in books or toys in those uncritical days—a starting-point for our dreams. And this, I take it, is the best thing that a writer can give a child, and it was for lack of this that we considered the works of Lewis Carroll silly, while finding one of the books of Miss Molesworth—I wish I could recall its name—a masterpiece of fancy and erudition.

So when the din of the schoolroom did not suit my mood, or the authorities were unduly didactic, I would slip away to the twilit library and guide the magic carpet through the delicate meadows of my dreams. The fire would blaze and crackle in the grate and fill my eyes with tears, so that it was easy to fancy myself in a sparkling world of sunshine. And from the shadows of the room little creatures would creep out to touch my glowing cheeks with cool, soft fingers, or to pluck timidly at the sleeve of my coat. I did not endeavour to give these shy companions of the dark any definite place in my universe. Their sympathetic reticence was reassuring in that room of great leaping shadows, and I was glad that they should keep me company in the blackness, a thing so terrible when I woke up at night in my bed. Sometimes, perhaps, I wondered how they could bear to live in the place where nightmare was; but for the rest I accepted their society gladly and without question. There was plenty of room on the carpet for such quiet fellows, and if they liked to accompany me on my travels I, at least, would not prevent them.

It did not occur to me at the time, as it certainly does now, that I should never again be so near to fairyland as I was then. I was inclined to be sceptical concerning the actual existence of the supernatural, though I recognised that a judicious acceptance of its theories set a new kingdom beneath one’s feet for play. And it is only now that I realise how wonderfully vivid my dreams were, with what zest of timid life the little shadow-folk thrilled and trembled round me. It is true that I remained conscious of my normal environment; the fire, the dark room, and the bookcases were all there, and even a kind of quiet sense of the World beyond the Door, the hall and the passages and my brothers and sisters at their quarrels. But it was as if these things had become merely an idea in my mind, while my feet were set on the pleasant roads of a new world. The thing that I had hoped became true; and the truth that I had been taught lingered in my mind only as a familiar story, a business of second-hand emotions, neither very desirable nor very interesting. The little folk gathered and whispered round me in the dark, and there was full day in the world that was my own.

It was hard to leave that world for this other place, which even now I cannot understand; but when some errant Olympian or righteously indignant brother had dragged me from my lair, I did not attempt to defend myself from the charge of moodiness. I had no words to tell them what they had done, and I could only stand blinking beneath the light of the gas in the hall, and endeavour to recall their wholly tiresome rules and regulations for the life of youth. Dimly I knew that my right place was before the fire in the library, and I wondered whether the little folk could use the Magic Carpet without me, or whether they stayed expectant in the shadows, like me, a little lonely, and a little chill. But in those days moodiness was only a lesser crime than sulkiness, and I had perforce to fold up my fancies and pass, an emotional bankrupt, into the unsympathetic world of the playroom. To-morrow, perhaps, the Magic Carpet might be mine again; meanwhile, I would exist.

Peter Pan has asked us a good many times whether we believe in fairies. It is, of course, a matter of faith, to be accepted or denied, but not to be discussed. For my part, I think of a little boy nodding on a rug before the fire on many a winter’s evening, and I clap my hands. Gratitude could do no less.

STAGE CHILDREN

I DO not know that at any time Hastings is a very lively place. The houses have acquired a habit of being vacant, and even the front, with its bath-chairs, its bandstands that are silent on Sundays, and its seats upon which one may not smoke, is more suggestive of Puritans and invalids than of pleasure. If Time should suddenly drop a week from the due order of days, it is easy to imagine that those bath-chairs, those unfragrant shelters, those much-labelled houses would startle the dreaming tourists with vacant faces of dead men. But when in late March the day has squandered its gold, and the earth is saddened with the gentle greyness of the dusk, when, moreover, the cheerful sea has deserted the shore, creeping far out to leave dull acres of untrodden sand, waste and bitter with salt, a man might surely be forgiven if he cried aloud against the extreme cruelty of Nature, the timid injustice of man.

Being of Anglo-Saxon blood, I did not give definite expression to the melancholy which the quenched seascape had invoked. I contented myself with leaning on the rail, and sneering at the art of the cripple who had made mathematically exact scratchings of Windsor Castle and the Eddystone Lighthouse on the sand. There was something almost humorously impertinent about that twisted figure with one foot bowing and hopping for pennies in front of a terrible back-cloth of dreamy grey. How could a man forget the horrors of infinite space, and scratch nothings on the blank face of the earth for coppers? His one foot was bare so that his Silver-like activities might not spoil his pictures, and when he was not hopping he shivered miserably. As I saw him at the moment he stood very well for humanity—sordid, grotesque, greedy of mean things, twisted and bruised by the pitiless hand of Nature.

And then in a flash there happened one of those miracles which rebuke us when we lack faith. Through the shadows which were not grey but purple there burst a swarm of children running on light feet across the sands. They chased each other hither and thither, stooped to gather shells and seaweed, and inspected the works of the cripple with outspoken admiration. Regarding my mournful and terrible world in detail, they found it beautiful with pink shells and tangled seaweed and the gallant efforts of men. So far from being terrified or humiliated by the sombre wastes of sand and sky, they made of the one a playing-ground, and woke the other with echoes of their shrill laughter. Perhaps they found that the sea was rather larger than the Serpentine, perhaps they thought that the sands were not so well lit as Kingsway; but, after all, they were making holiday, and at such a time things are different. They laughed at space.

For these were London children, and all the resources of civilisation had not been able to deprive them of that sense of proportion which we lose with age. The stars are small and of little importance, and even the sun is not much larger than a brandy-ball. But a golden pebble by the seashore is a treasure that a child may hold in its hand, and it is certain that never a grown-up one of us can own anything so surely. We may search our memories for sunsets and tresses of dead girls, but who would not give all their faded fragrance for one pink shell and the power to appreciate it? So it was that I had found the world wide and ugly and terrible, lacking the Aladdin’s lamp of imagination, which had shown the children that it was a place of treasure, with darkness to make the search exciting. They flitted about the beach like eager moths.

Yet on these children Civilisation had worked with her utmost cunning, with her most recent resource. For they were little actors and actresses from Drury Lane, touring in a pantomime of their own; wise enough in the world’s ways to play grown-up characters with uncommon skill, and bred in the unreality of the footlights and the falsehood of grease-paints. Nevertheless, coming fresh from the elaborate make-belief of the theatre and the intoxicating applause, they ran down to the sea to find the diamonds and pearls that alone are real. If this is not wisdom I know not where wisdom lies, and, watching them, I could have laughed aloud at the thought of the critics who have told me that the life of the stage makes children unnatural. There are many wise and just people who do not like to see children acting, forgetting perhaps that mimicry is the keynote of all child’s play, and that nothing but this instinct leads babies to walk upright and to speak with their tongues. Whether they are on the stage or not, children are always borrowing the words and emotions of other people, and it is a part of the charm of childhood that through this mask of tricks and phrases the real child peeps always into the eyes and hearts of the elect.

And this is why I know nothing more delightful than the spectacle of a score of children playing at life on the stage. They may have been taught how to speak and how to stand, and what to do with their hands; they may know how to take a prompt, and realise the importance of dressing the stage; every trick and mannerism of the grown-up actor or actress may be theirs; yet, through their playing there will sound the voice of childhood, imaginative, adventurous, insistent, and every performance will supply them with materials for a new game. So it was with these children, whose sudden coming had strewn the melancholy beach with pearls. I had seen them in the dimness of a ballet-room under Drury Lane Theatre; now, with a coin, I bought the right to see them on a stage built with cynical impertinence in the midst of the intolerant sea. The play, indeed, was the same, and the players, but the game was different. The little breaks and falterings which the author had not designed, the only half-suppressed laughings which were not in the prompt-copy, bore no relationship, one might suppose, to the moral adventures of Mother Goose. But far across the hills the spring was breaking the buds on the lilac, and far along the shore the sea was casting its jewels, and even there in the theatre I could see the children standing on tiptoe to pick lilac, and stooping on the sands to gather pearls. They did not see that they were in a place of lank ropes and unsmoothed boards soiled with the dust of forgotten pageants and rendered hideous by the glare of electric lights; and they were right. For in their eyes there shone only that place of adventure which delights the feet of the faithful, whether they tread the sands, or the stage, or the rough cobbles of Drury Lane. To the truly imaginative a theatre is a place of uncommon possibilities; our actors and actresses, and even our limelight-men, are not imaginative, and so, I suppose, they find it ugly. The game is with the children.

And truly they play it for what it is worth, and they are wise enough to know that it is worth all things, alike on the boards of the theatre and on the wider, but hardly less artificial, stage of civilised life. We who are older tremble between our desire for applause and our unconquerable dread of the angers of the critical gods and the gaping pit, and it is for this reason that every bitter-wise adult knows himself to be little better than a super, a unit of a half-intelligent chorus, who may hope at best to echo with partial accuracy the songs and careless laughters of the divine players. There is something pathetic in the business; for we, too, were once stars, and thought, finely enough, to hold the heavens for ever with our dreams. But now we are glad if the limelight shines by accident for a moment on our faces, or if the stage-manager gives us but one individual line. We feel, for all the sad fragrance of our old programmes and newspaper-cuttings, that it is a privilege to play a part in the pageant at all. The game is with the children; but if we are wise, there is still somewhere at the back of the stage a place where each one of us can breathe the atmosphere of enchantment and dream the old dreams. No Arcadia is ever wholly lost.

OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE

WHEN I hear grown-up people discussing the University Boat Race I smile sadly and hold my peace. They may say what they like about the latest Oxford trial, or the average weight per man of the Cambridge crew, but deep in my heart there stays the conviction that they are making a ludicrous mistake in speaking about the Boat Race at all. Once I knew all about it, and even now I think I could put them right if I wished. But what is the use of arguing with persons who, under the absurd pretext of fairness, pretend to find praiseworthy features in both crews? Even the smallest boy knew better than that in the days when the Boat Race was really important. I will not say that there did not exist weaklings even then, who wobbled between Oxford and Cambridge in an endeavour to propitiate both factions. But they usually suffered the fate of wobblers by having to join one side or the other, while still incurring the scorn of both.

The Boat Race dawned upon us each year as a strange and bewildering element in our social relationships. We would part one night on normal terms, and the morrow would find us wearing strange favours, and regarding our friends of yesterday with open and passionate dislike. For the sake of a morsel of coloured ribbon old friendships would be shattered and brother would meet brother with ingenious expressions of contempt. There was no moderate course in the matter. A boy was either vehemently Cambridge or intolerably Oxford, and it would have been easier to account for the colour of his hair than to explain how he arrived at his choice of a university. Some blind instinct, some subtle influence felt, perhaps, in the dim, far-off nursery days may have determined this weighty choice; but the whole problem was touched with the mystery that inspired the great classical and modern snowball fights, when little boys would pound each other almost into a state of unconsciousness for the sake of a theory of education. Our interest in the Boat Race as a boat race was small, and quite untroubled by any knowledge of the respective merits of the crews. But we wore their colours in our buttonholes, and the effect of these badges on our lives was anarchic. We saw blue.