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 more in this chance than met the
eye.
And outside our
gate I found Charlotte, alone and crying. Edward, it seemed, had persuaded her
to hide, in the full expectation of being duly found and ecstatically pounced
upon; then he had caught sight of the butcher’s cart, and, forgetting his
obligations, had rushed off for a ride. Harold, it further appeared, greatly
coveting tadpoles, and top-heavy with the eagerness of possession, had fallen
into the pond. This, in itself, was nothing; but on attempting to sneak in by
the back-door, he had rendered up his duckweed-bedabbled person into the hands
of an aunt, and had been promptly sent off to bed; and this, on a holiday, was
very much. The moral of the whipping-post was working itself out; and I was not
in the least surprised when, on reaching home, I was seized upon and accused of
doing something I had never even thought of. And my frame of mind was such,
that I could only wish most heartily that I had done it.
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