In the matter of general culture and attainments, we youngsters
stood on pretty level ground. True, it was always happening that
one of us would be singled out at any moment, freakishly, and
without regard to his own preferences, to wrestle with the
inflections of some idiotic language long rightly dead; while
another, from some fancied artistic tendency which always failed
to justify itself, might be told off without warning to hammer
out scales and exercises, and to bedew the senseless keys with
tears of weariness or of revolt. But in subjects common to either
sex, and held to be necessary even for him whose ambition soared
no higher than to crack a whip in a circus-ring--in geography,
for instance, arithmetic, or the weary doings of kings and
queens--each would have scorned to excel. And, indeed, whatever
our individual gifts, a general dogged determination to shirk and
to evade kept us all at much the same dead level,--a level of
Ignorance tempered by insubordination.
Fortunately there existed a wide range of subjects, of
healthier tone than those already enumerated, in which we were
free to choose for ourselves, and which we would have scorned to
consider education; and in these we freely followed each his own
particular line, often attaining an amount of special knowledge
which struck our ignorant elders as simply uncanny. For Edward,
the uniforms, accoutrements, colours, and mottoes of the
regiments composing the British Army had a special glamour. In
the matter of facings, he was simply faultless; among chevrons,
badges, medals, and stars, he moved familiarly; he even knew the
names of most of the colonels in command; and he would squander
sunny hours prone on the lawn, heedless of challenge from bird or
beast, poring over a tattered Army List. My own accomplishment
was of another character --took, as it seemed to me, a wider and
a more untrammelled range. Dragoons might have swaggered in
Lincoln green, riflemen might have donned sporrans over tartan
trews, without exciting notice or comment from me. But did you
seek precise information as to the fauna of the American
continent, then you had come to the right shop. Where and why the
bison "wallowed"; how beaver were to be trapped and wild turkeys
stalked; the grizzly and how to handle him, and the pretty
pressing ways of the constrictor,--in fine, the haunts and the
habits of all that burrowed, strutted, roared, or wriggled
between the Atlantic and the Pacific,--all this knowledge I took
for my province. By the others my equipment was fully recognized.
Supposing a book with a bear-hunt in it made its way into the
house, and the atmosphere was electric with excitement; still, it
was necessary that I should first decide whether the slot had
been properly described and properly followed up, ere the work
could be stamped with full approval. A writer might have won fame
throughout the civilized globe for his trappers and his realistic
backwoods, and all went for nothing. If his pemmican were not
properly compounded, I damned his achievement, and it was heard no
more of.
Harold was hardly old enough to possess a special subject of
his own. He had his instincts, indeed, and at bird's-nesting they
almost amounted to prophecy. Where we others only suspected eggs,
surmised possible eggs, hinted doubtfully at eggs in the
neighbourhood, Harold went straight for the right bush, bough, or
hole as if he carried a divining-rod. But this faculty belonged
to the class of mere gifts, and was not to be ranked with
Edward's lore regarding facings, and mine as to the habits of
prairie-dogs, both gained by painful study and extensive travel
in those "realms of gold," the Army List and Ballantyne.
Selina's subject, quite unaccountably, happened to be naval
history. There is no laying down rules as to subjects; you just
possess them--or rather, they possess you--and their genesis or
protoplasm is rarely to be tracked down. Selina had never so much
as seen the sea; but for that matter neither had I ever set foot
on the American continent, the by-ways of which I knew so
intimately. And just as I, if set down without warning in the
middle of the Rocky Mountains, would have been perfectly at home,
so Selina, if a genie had dropped her suddenly on Portsmouth
Hard, could have given points to most of its frequenters. From
the days of Blake down to the death of Nelson (she never
condescended further) Selina had taken spiritual part in every
notable engagement of the British Navy; and even in the dark days
when she had to pick up skirts and flee, chased by an ungallant
De Ruyter or Van Tromp, she was yet cheerful in the consciousness
that ere long she would be gleefully hammering the fleets of the
world, in the glorious times to follow. When that golden period
arrived, Selina was busy indeed; and, while loving best to stand
where the splinters were flying the thickest, she was also a
careful and critical student of seamanship and of maneuvre. She
knew the order in which the great line-of-battle ships moved into
action, the vessels they respectively engaged, the moment when
each let go its anchor, and which of them had a spring on its
cable (while not understanding the phrase, she carefully noted
the fact); and she habitually went into an engagement on the
quarter-deck of the gallant ship that reserved its fire the
longest.
At the time of Selina's weird seizure, I was unfortunately away
from home, on a loathsome visit to an aunt; and my account is
therefore feebly compounded from hearsay. It was an absence I
never ceased to regret--scoring it up, with a sense of injury,
against the aunt. There was a splendid uselessness about the
whole performance that specially appealed to my artistic sense.
That it should have been Selina, too, who should break out this
way--Selina, who had just become a regular subscriber to the
"Young Ladies' Journal," and who allowed herself to be taken out
to strange teas with an air of resignation palpably assumed--this
was a special joy, and served to remind me that much of this
dreaded convention that was creeping over us might be, after all,
only veneer. Edward also was absent, getting licked into shape at
school; but to him the loss was nothing. With his stern practical
bent he wouldn't have seen any sense in it--to recall one of his
favourite expressions. To Harold, however, for whom the gods had
always cherished a special tenderness, it was granted, not only
to witness, but also, priestlike, to feed the sacred fire itself.
And if at the time he paid the penalty exacted by the sordid,
unimaginative ones who temporarily rule the roost, he must ever
after, one feels sure, have carried inside him some of the white
gladness of the acolyte who, greatly privileged, has been
permitted to swing a censer at the sacring of the very Mass.
October was mellowing fast, and with it the year itself; full
of tender hints, in woodland and hedgerow, of a course well-nigh
completed. From all sides that still afternoon you caught the
quick breathing and sob of the runner nearing the goal.
Preoccupied and possessed, Selina had strayed down the garden and
out into the pasture beyond, where, on a bit of rising ground
that dominated the garden on one side and the downs with the old
coach-road on the other, she had cast herself down to chew the
cud of fancy. There she was presently joined by Harold,
breathless and very full of his latest grievance.
"I asked him not to," he burst out. "I said if he'd only please
wait a bit and Edward would be back soon, and it couldn't matter
to him, and the pig wouldn't mind, and Edward'd be pleased and
everybody'd be happy. But he just said he was very sorry, but
bacon didn't wait for nobody. So I told him he was a regular
beast, and then I came away. And--and I b'lieve they're doing it
now!"
"Yes, he's a beast," agreed Selina, absently. She had forgotten
all about the pig-killing. Harold kicked away a freshly thrown-up
mole-hill, and prodded down the hole with a stick. From the
direction of Farmer Larkin's demesne came a long-drawn note of
sorrow, a thin cry and appeal, telling that the stout soul of a
black Berkshire pig was already faring down the stony track to
Hades.
"D' you know what day it is?" said Selina presently, in a low
voice, looking far away before her.
Harold did not appear to know, nor yet to care. He had laid
open his mole-run for a yard or so, and was still grubbing at it
absorbedly.
"It's Trafalgar Day," went on Selina, trancedly; "Trafalgar
Day--and nobody cares!"
Something in her tone told Harold that he was not behaving
quite becomingly. He didn't exactly know in what manner; still,
he abandoned his mole-hunt for a more courteous attitude of
attention.
"Over there," resumed Selina--she was gazing out in the
direction of the old highroad--" over there the coaches used to
go by. Uncle Thomas was telling me about it the other day. And
the people used to watch for 'em coming, to tell the time by, and
p'r'aps to get their parcels. And one morning--they wouldn't be
expecting anything different--one morning, first there would be a
cloud of dust, as usual, and then the coach would come racing by,
and then they would know! For the coach would be dressed in
laurel, all laurel from stem to stern! And the coachman would be
wearing laurel, and the guard would be wearing laurel; and then
they would know, then they would know!"
Harold listened in respectful silence. He would much rather
have been hunting the mole, who must have been a mile away by
this time if he had his wits about him. But he had all the
natural instincts of a gentleman; of whom it is one of the
principal marks, if not the complete definition, never to show
signs of being bored.
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