Adventures and Enthusiasms Part 9

"Once upon a time," said the Sun, "there was a meadow surrounded by a flint walk, where I caused the b.u.t.tercups to shine like burnished gold, and where the gra.s.s was high and green and as long as the pony and the donkey who inhabited the meadow would allow it to be. Here and there was a cowslip; while near the house were hen-coops with old hens in them whose anxious heads protruded through the bars querulously shouting instructions to their fluffy children.

"Such," said the Sun, "was the meadow, which was interesting to me chiefly because it was the playground of a small but very vigorous and restless boy named n.o.bby, whose merry inquiring face it gave me peculiar pleasure to tan and to freckle.

"A small boy can do," said the Sun, "a thousand things in a meadow like this, even without the company of a donkey and a pony, and n.o.bby did them all; while his collection of performing wood-lice was unique.

"But a morning came when he was absent. I was shining at my best, the b.u.t.tercups were glowing, there was even an aeroplane manoeuvring in the blue--which is still, I notice, a certain lure to both young and old--but no n.o.bby. The wood-lice crept about or rolled themselves into b.a.l.l.s, all unnoticed and immune.

"'This is very odd,' I heard the pony say; 'he's never neglected us before.'

"'Pa.s.sing strange,' said the donkey, who affected archaic speech. 'And on so blithe and jocund a morn too.'

"So saying they resumed their everlasting meal, but continually turned their eyes to the garden-gate through which n.o.bby would have to pa.s.s. I also kept my eyes wide for him; but all in vain; and what made it more perplexing was that n.o.bby's mother came in and fed the chickens, and n.o.bby's aunt came in with a rug and a book and settled down to be comfortable; and that meant that the boy was not absent on a visit to the town, because one of them would have gone too.

"'That settles it,' said the donkey, who had, for an a.s.s, quite a lot of sense: 'n.o.bby is ill.'

"The donkey was right--or approximately so, as I afterwards found out.

n.o.bby was ill. That is to say, he was in bed, because that morning he had sneezed--not through looking up at me, but for no reason at all--and his mother, who was a very careful mother, had at once fetched the clinical thermometer and taken his temperature, and behold it was a hundred. So n.o.bby was not allowed to get up, but now lay there watching my rays pouring into the room, and listening to the buzz of the aeroplane, and longing to be out in the meadow with the donkey and the pony and the wood-lice.

"That, however, would never do; for 'It all comes,' his mother had said, 'of sitting about in that long gra.s.s so much, and so early in the year too'--a line of argument hardly likely to appeal to a small and vigorous boy who does not reckon summer by dates and to whom prudence is as remote as one-pound Treasury notes.

"Anyway," said the Sun, "he was paying for it now, for was he not in bed and utterly sick of it, while the rest of the world was out and about and, warmed and cheered by me, completely jolly? Moreover, he didn't feel ill. No self-respecting boy would, of course, admit to feeling ill ever; but n.o.bby was genuinely unconscious of anything wrong at all. Not, however, until his temperature went down would he be allowed to get up; that was the verdict. But that was not all. Until it came down he would be allowed nothing but slops to eat.

"His mother took his temperature again before lunch, and it was still a hundred; and then at about half-past four, when human beings, I understand, get a little extra feverish, and it was still a hundred; and then at last came the night, and n.o.bby went to sleep confident that to-morrow would re-establish his erratic blood.

"On the morrow he woke long before any one else," said the Sun, "and sat up and saw that I was shining again, without the vestige of a cloud to bother me, and he felt his little body to see how hot it was, and was quite sure that at last he was normal again, but he couldn't tell until his mother was up and about. The weary hours went by, and at last she came in just before breakfast with the thermometer in her hand.

"'I'm certain I'm all right to-day,' I heard n.o.bby say. 'I feel quite cool everywhere.'

"But, alas and alack," said the Sun, "he was a hundred still.

"'My poor mite!' his mother exclaimed, and n.o.bby burst into tears.

"'Mayn't I get up? Mayn't I get up?' he moaned; 'I feel so frightfully fit,' But his mother said no, not till the temperature had gone down.

You see," added the Orb of Day, "when n.o.bbies are only-sons and those only-sons' fathers are fighting the enemy, mothers have to be more than commonly cautious and particular. You will wonder perhaps why she didn't send for the doctor, but it was for two reasons, both womanly ones, and these were that (_a_) she didn't like the _loc.u.m_, her own doctor being also at the War, and (_b_) she believed in bed and nursing as the best cure for everything.

"And so all through another long day--and when you are vigorous and robust, like n.o.bby, and accustomed to every kind of impulsive and adventurous activity, day can be, in bed, appallingly long--n.o.bby was kept a prisoner, always with his temperature at a hundred, and always with nothing to bite, and growing steadily more and more peevish and difficult, so much so that his mother became quite happy again, because it is very well known that when human invalids are testy and impatient with their nurses they are getting better.

"But when on the third morning, although n.o.bby's temper had become too terrible for words, his temperature was still a hundred, his mother began to be alarmed again. 'It's very strange,' she said to her sister, 'but he seems perfectly well and cool, and yet the thermometer makes him still a hundred. What do you think we ought to do?'

"n.o.bby's aunt, who was a wise woman, although unmarried, went up and examined her nephew for herself. 'He certainly looks all right to me,'

she said, 'and he feels all right too. Do you think that the thermometer might he faulty? Let me try it'; and with these words n.o.bby's aunt shook the thermometer down and then put it under her tongue and gave it a good two minutes, and behold it said a hundred; and then n.o.bby's mother shook it down and tried it and gave it a good two minutes, and behold it said a hundred; and the cook was a hundred too, and the gardener was a hundred, and the girl who came in to help was a hundred, and probably the donkey would have been a hundred, and the pony a hundred, if they had been tested, because a hundred was the thermometer's humorous idea of normal; and so," added the Sun, "n.o.bby's mother and aunt rushed upstairs two or three at a time, having a great sense of justice, and pulled him out of bed and dressed him and hugged him and told him to be happy once more.

"And a couple of seconds after this," said the Sun, bringing the story to a close, "I saw him again."

TWO OF MARTHA'S SONS

Mr. Kipling, dividing, in that fine poem, men into the Sons of Martha and the Sons of Mary--the Sons of Martha being the servants and the Sons of Mary the served--characteristically lays his emphasis on those who make machinery to move. Thus:

The Sons of Mary seldom bother, for they have inherited that good part, But the Sons of Martha favour their Mother of the careful soul and the troubled heart; And because she lost her temper once, and because she was rude to the Lord her Guest, Her Sons must wait upon Mary's Sons, world without end, reprieve or rest.

It is their care, in all the ages, to take the buffet and cushion the shock.

It is their care that the gear engages--it is their care that the switches lock.

It is their care that the wheels run truly--it is their care to embark and entrain, Tally, transport, and deliver duly the Sons of Mary by land and main.

Mr. Kipling, as I say, is thinking more of highly trained and efficient operatives than of the quieter ministrants; but, after all, some of Mary's Sons--possibly the majority of them--stay at home and refrain from running the Empire, and these too count upon their cousins for a.s.sistance.

A very large number of Martha's Sons, for example, become waiters; and waiters are a race to whom insufficient justice has been done by men of letters. There should be a Book of Waiters, as there was a Book of Doctors and a Book of Lawyers by the late Cordy Jeaffreson, and a Book of the Table by the late Dr. Doran. Old waiters for choice: men who have mellowed in their calling; men who have tasted wines for themselves and studied human nature when it eats and is vulnerable. I wish somebody would compile it. It should be a cosmopolitan work: England's old waiters must be there, and France's, upon whom most clubmen of any age ought to be able to enlarge fruitily. In fact, all well-stored Bohemian memories in London and Paris should yield much. And Ireland's old waiters most conspicuously must be there; but whoever is to write this book must hasten to collect the material, for in Ireland, I am told, the old waiter is vanishing. An elderly Irish gentleman with whom I was talking recently--or, rather, to whom I was listening as he searched his memory for drolleries of the past--said that the disappearance, under modern conditions, of the old humorous independent waiters of his earlier day is the one which he personally most regretted. No longer, said he, are to be found, except very occasionally, these worthy friends of the traveller--Martha's Sons at their best, or, at any rate, at their most needed. Slow they may have been, not always strictly sober, and often despotic; but they were to be counted upon as landmarks: they extended a welcome, they fed the hungry (in time), they slaked the thirsty (more quickly), and they made remarks amusing enough to fortify their good points and palliate their bad. "There was an old fellow named Terence at Limerick," said my friend, and there followed two or three characteristic anecdotes of old Terence at Limerick. "There was old Tim at Tralee," and he painted old Tim for me in a few swift strokes--red nose, creaking legs, and all. What though his nose was red and his legs creaked, Tralee is no longer worth visiting, because Tim is not there.

That was the burden of the lament. These old fellows have pa.s.sed, and the new waiters, most of whom are foreigners or girls, can never mature into anything comparable with them.

Two of my friend's stories I may tell. One is of old Dennis at Mallow, who on being asked if the light in the coffee-room could not be made brighter, said, in that charming definitive Irish way, that it could not. "Is it always like this?" my friend then inquired. "It is not, sorr," said old Dennis; "it is often worse." Not a great anecdote, but you must brave the horrors of St. George's Channel to meet with these alluring unexpectednesses of speech. Imagine an English waiter thus surprising one! The other story is of old Florence, head waiter at a certain Irish yacht club. Some sojourners in the neighbourhood, having been elected honorary members for the period of their visit, asked a few American friends to dine there, and then, even while in the boat on their way to dinner, suddenly realised that honorary members are ent.i.tled to no such privileges. It was decided to put the case to old Florence. "Have you a rule against honorary members inviting guests?"

"We have, sorr," said he. "Is it very strictly enforced? I mean, would there be any risk in breaking it?" "There would not, sorr. The only rule in this club that is never broken, sorr, is the one which forbids gratuities to be given to the waiters."

For those Sons of Martha who make their living--and not a bad one--by ministering to their hungry fellow-creatures there is no call to feel sorry. They are often not only richer but happier than their customers, and when the time comes they retire to snug little houses (of which they not infrequently own a row) with a competence, and pa.s.s the evening of life with their pipe and gla.s.s, their friends and grandchildren, moving serenely, if perhaps with a shade too plantigrade a step (the waiters' heritage), to the grave. No call, as I say, to feel sorry for them; but what of those other Sons of Martha, the railway porters, who while helping us to travel and get away from home never travel or get away from home themselves, and for ever are carrying or wheeling heavy trunks or searching for visionary cabs?

The mere fact of never having a holiday is not in itself distressing.

Holidays often are overrated disturbances of routine, costly and uncomfortable, and they usually need another holiday to correct their ravages. Men who take no holidays must not, therefore, necessarily become objects of our pity. But I confess to feeling sorry for those servants of the public who apparently not only never take a holiday themselves, but who spend all their lives in a.s.sisting others to get away.

It is probably no privation to a bathing-machine man never to enter the sea; uproariously happy in that element as his clients can be, their pleasure, in which he has no share, does not, I imagine, embitter his existence. Similarly, since a waiter either has eaten or is soon to eat, we need not waste sympathy on his unending task of setting seductive dishes before others. But it is conceivable that some of those weary and dejected men whom one sees at Victoria Station, for example, in the summer, eternally making an effort, however unsuccessful, to cope with the exodus of Londoners to the south coast, really would like also to repose on Brighton beach. But they may not. Their destiny is for ever to help others to that paradise, and remain at Victoria themselves. Just as Moses was denied the Children of Israel's Promised Land, so are the porters. The engine-driver can go, the stoker can go, the guard can go,--indeed, they must go,--but the porters get no nearer than the carriage doors and then wheel back again. And if the plight of the porters at Victoria is unenviable, think of that of the porters at the big termini on the other side of London and elsewhere when they read the labels on the luggage which they handle!--labels for the west, for the land of King Arthur; labels for the north, for delectable Highland retreats; labels for Northumberland and Yorkshire; labels for the east coast; labels for Kerry and Galway and Connemara.

FREAKS OF MEMORY

It was my fortune not long since to meet again, in the flesh, the most famous of our prophets--Old Moore, whose cautious vaticination is on sale even in the streets. To my dismay he did not recognise me. Not that a want of recognition is so rare--very far from it--but the surprise is that a being gifted with such preternatural vision should thus fail, when I, who am only an ordinary person, knew him again instantly. Long habits of fixing his penetrating gaze on the murky future have no doubt rendered the backward look less simple to him. Anyway, there we stood, I challenging him to remember me and he failing to do so. This momentary superiority of my own poor wits over those of a man who (undismayed by the refusal of events always to fall into line) foretells so much, uplifted me; but the untrustworthiness of memory is so constant and lands one in such embarra.s.sments that it is foolish for anyone to boast.

Among the marvels of the human machine, memory is, indeed, strangest.

The great bewildering fact of memory at all--of the miracle of the brain--is, of course, as far beyond our finite apprehension as the starry heavens. Of this? I never dare to think. But the minor caprices of memory may, fittingly enough, engage our wonder. The lawlessness of our prehensile apparatus, for example--the absurdly unreasoning system of selection of such things as are to be permanent--how explain these?

And why should memory be subject also to that downward tendency in life which forces us always to fight if we would save the best? It would have been just as easy, at the start, when the whole affair was in the making, to have given an upward impulse. That was not done, but the memory, at any rate, being all spirit, might have been exempted from the general law. But no; as we grow older, not only do we remember with less and less accuracy, but of what we retain much is inferior to that which once we had but now have lost.

I, for example, who once had long pa.s.sages not only from the great poets, but also from the less great but often more intimate poets,--such as Matthew Arnold and William Cory, to mention two favourites,--at the tip of the tongue, now have to recite myself to sleep with a Bab Ballad.

That piece of nonsense never fails me, but I cannot at this moment give the right sequence of any two of the quatrains of the "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam, although once, and for years, I had the whole poem complete too. I would rather have been left the wistful Persian than Gilbert's "Etiquette," but the jade Memory had other views.

Any prose that I might once have learned naturally faded first, because there was no rhyme or metre to a.s.sist retention; but why is it that there is one sentence which, never wholly mine, flits so often before the inward eye? It is in that story of Mr. Kipling's of the mutinous elephant who refused to work because his master was too long absent.

This master, one Dheesa (you will remember), having obtained leave for a jaunt, exceeded his term; and the sentence which recurs to me, hazily and hauntingly, often twice a day and usually once, with no apparent reason or provocation, is this: "Dheesa had vagabonded along the roads till he met a marriage procession of his own caste, and drinking, dancing, and tippling, had drifted past all knowledge of the lapse of time." Now, surely, out of all the thousands of books which I have read and more or less dimly remember, it is very strange that this should be almost the only sentence that is photographed on the mind.

Once I knew many psalms: I know them no longer, but I have never forgotten a ridiculous piece of dialogue in a book called "The World of Wit and Humour," which I was studying, on weekdays, at the same time, how many years ago:

"Father, I have spilt the b.u.t.ter. What shall I do?"

"Rub it briskly with a woollen fabric."

"Why?"