Chapter II: Bittersweet

H IS mother’s absence made very sad for Michael the tall thin
house in Carlington Road. He felt enclosed in the restraint
from which his mother had flown like a bird. Time stretched
before him in unimaginable reckonings. It was now the beginning
of autumn, and the leaves of the lime trees, falling to lie
stained and unlovely in sodden basements, moved Michael with a
sense of the long winter before him, with the unending black
nights and the dark wet dawns. From the window of the
night-nursery he recognized for the first time the beauty of
the unsymmetrical plane tree that now, when the poplars were
mere swishing bundles of twigs, still defied the October winds
with wide green leaves. Soon, however, by a damp frost the
plane tree was conquered, and its blobs jigged to November
gusts. Fogs began, and the morning-room was always gaslit, even
for dinner at one o’clock. Stella was peevish, and games became
impossible. The two black kittens were an entertainment and
took part with Michael in numberless dramas of revenge and
punishment, of remorse and exaggerated cherishing. These
histrionic pastimes became infused with a terrible reality,
when one day the favourite kitten jumped from Michael’s arms
over the banisters and fell on to the tiled floor of the hall,
hurting herself internally so that she had to be poisoned. He
stood by her grave in the blackened mould of the garden, and
wished poignantly that he had never spoken harshly to her, had
never banished her to a waste-paper basket prison for the
length of a long foggy afternoon.

Christmas arrived with more uniforms, with a fishmonger’s shop and a mechanical mackerel which when wound up would click in finny progress from one end of the bath to the other and back. It was wound up every Sunday afternoon for a treat, and was afterwards replaced in a high corner-cupboard that always attracted Michael’s extreme curiosity and was the object of many vows to solve its secret, when he grew bigger. All these presents came from his mother together with half a dozen books. He received no other presents except from the household. Nurse gave him a china house, romantic when illuminated by a night-light; Annie shyly placed before him a crystal globe that when shaken gave a wonderful reproduction of a snow-storm falling upon a weather-worn tin figure with a green face, blue legs and an unpainted coat. Mrs. Frith the cook gave him a box of tops, none of which he or she or anyone else could spin. In addition to these presents Santa Claus allowed him on a still December night an orange, an apple, a monkey on a stick, five nuts (three of them bad) and a selection of angular sweets. As Michael with foresight had hung up two of Nurse’s stockings as well as his own socks, he felt slightly resentful towards Santa Claus for the meagre response.

Christmas passed away in a week of extravagant rain, and a visit was paid to the pantomime of Valentine and Orson at the Surrey Theatre that reduced Michael to a state of collapse owing to the fight between the two protagonists, in which Orson’s fingers were lacerated by the glittering sword of Valentine. Nurse vainly assured him the blood was so much red paint. He howled the louder and dreamed ghastly dreams for a month afterwards.

About this time Michael read many books in a strange
assortment. Nurse had a collection of about a dozen in her
trunk from which Michael was allowed to read three to himself.
These were The Lamplighter, The Arabian
Nights in a small paper-bound volume of diminutive print, and
a Tale of the Black Rising in Jamaica which included an
earthquake. In The Arabian Nights he read over and over again
the stories of Aladdin, The Forty Thieves and Sinbad, owing to
their familiarity through earlier narratives. On Sunday
afternoons Nurse always read aloud from Baring-Gould’s Lives
of the Saints and Mrs. Gatti’s Parables from Nature, and told
the story of Father Machonochie’s death in Argyll and of his
faithful Skye terriers, whose portraits she piously possessed
in Oxford frames. Michael’s own books included at this period
several zoological works, the Swiss Family Robinson, Holiday
House, Struwwelpeter, Daddy Darwin’s Dovecote, Jackanapes, The
Battles of the British Army and an abbreviated version of
Robinson Crusoe.

The winter and cold wet spring dragged by. Day by day life
varied very little. In the morning after breakfast, if it was
fairly fine, a visit would be paid to Kensington Gardens, a
dull business; for the Round Pond was not visited, and indeed
the Gardens were only penetrated as far as the Palace, with
occasional promenades along the flower-walk for a treat. Treats
were important factors in Michael’s life. Apparently anything
even mildly pleasant came under the category of treats. It was
a treat to walk on the grass in the Gardens; it was a treat to
help to push Stella’s perambulator; it was a treat to have the
sponge floating beside him in the bath, to hum, to laugh, to
read, to stay up one minute after half-past six, to accompany
Nurse on her marketing, and most of all to roll the slabs of
unbaked dough down in the kitchen. The great principle of a
treat was its rarity. As anything that had to be asked for
became a treat automatically and as the mere fact of asking was
made a reason for refusing to grant a treat, the sacred
infrequency of the treat was secured. The result of this was
that the visit to Kensington Gardens instead of
being the jolly business it seemed to be for other children,
became a tantalizing glimpse of an unattainable paradise.
Michael would stand enraptured by the March winds, every
impulse bidding him run and run eternally through the blowy
spring weather; yet if he so much as climbed the lowest rung
of the scaly part-railings, if he dallied one moment to watch
a kite launched on the air, Nanny would haul him back to the
perambulator’s side. As for talking to other children, not
even could the magic treat effect that. If Nurse was to be
believed, conversation with strange children was the lowest
depth to which human nature could sink. The enforced
solitariness of his life bred in Michael a habit of
contemplation. Much of his morning walk was passed in a dream,
in which he seemed to be standing still while the world of
houses and trees and railings and people swam by him unheeded.
This method of existence led to several unpleasant shocks, as
when he walked into a lamp-post and bruised his nose. Nanny
used to jeer at him, calling him Little Johnny Head-in-air;
but Michael was so much used to her derogatory opinions that
he cared very little and made no attempt to cure himself of
the habit, but even encouraged himself to put himself into
these nihilistic trances.

It was probably owing to this habit that one morning Michael,
looking round in Kensington Gardens, could discern no familiar
figure. He was by himself in the middle of a broad gravel walk.
Nurse and the perambulator had vanished. For a moment a
sickening horror seized him. He would never see Carlington Road
again; he would never see Stella or his mother; he would never
go to the seaside; he was lost. Then he recalled to himself the
knowledge of his name and address: he reassured himself by
repeating both aloud, Charles Michael Saxby Fane, 64 Carlington
Road, Kensington. A name and address he had often been warned
was a talisman to enlist

the service of policemen. His heart beat more gently again; his
breathing became normal. He looked around him at the world seen
for the first time with freedom’s eyes. With waves of scent the
beds of hyacinths impressed themselves upon his memory. He was
free under a great gusty sky, free to climb railings, to pick
up shells from the gravel walk, to lie on his back in the grass
and brood upon the huge elm-trees that caught the clouds in
their net. Michael wandered along to a drinking-fountain to
which, access had often been forbidden. He drank four cups of
water from the captive metal mug: he eyed curiously the many
children who, as free as himself, ran up and down the steps of
the fountain. He wished for barley-sugar that he might offer it
to them and earn their approbation and company. He was
particularly attracted to one group consisting of three funny
little girls with splashed pinafores and holes in their
stockings, and of two little boys with holes in their
knickerbockers and half-peeled sticks. The group moved away
from the fountain and Michael followed at a distance. The group
turned somersaults over the highest railings and Michael
watched it hungrily. The group strolled on, the girls
nonchalant and enlaced, the boys still peeling their sticks
with perseverance. Michael squeezed through the railings, and
followed in the group’s wake. The two boys finished peeling
their sticks and pushed over in a heap the three little girls.
There was laughter and shouting, and a confusion of pinafores
and black stockings and hair and caps. Michael stood close to
them, wide-eyed with admiration. Suddenly the group realized
his propinquity and flocked together critically to eye him,
Michael became self-conscious and turned away; he heard
giggling and spluttering. He blushed with shame and began to
run. In a moment he fell over a turret of grass and the group
jeered openly. He picked himself up and fled towards the gate
of the Gardens, anxious only to escape
ridicule. He ran on with beating heart, with quickening breath
and sobs that rose in his throat one after another like
bubbles, breaking because he ran so fast. He was in Kensington
High Street, among the thickening crowds of people. He seemed
to hear pursuing shouts and mocking laughter. At last he saw a
policeman whose tunic he clutched desperately.

“What’s all this about?” demanded the constable.

“Please, my name is Charles Michael Saxby Fane and I live at 64 Carlington Road and I want to go home.”

Michael burst into tears and the policeman bent over and led him by a convulsed hand to the police station. There he was seated in a wooden chair, while various policemen in various states of undress came and talked kindly to him, and in the end, riding on the shoulder of his original rescuer, he arrived at the tall thin house from whose windows Nurse was peering, anxious and monkey-like.

There seemed to be endless talk about his adventure. All day the affair was discussed, all day he was questioned and worried and scolded and threatened. Treats faded from possible granting for months to come. Restrictions and repressions assumed gigantic proportions, and it was not until Nanny went upstairs to put Stella to bed and left Michael in the kitchen with Mrs. Frith and Annie that his adventure came to seem a less terrible breach of natural law. Away from Nurse, the cook and the housemaid allowed a splendid laxity to gild their point of view.

“Well, what a fuss about nothing,” said Mrs. Frith comfortably.
“I declare. And what was _she_ doing? That’s what some people
would like to know. You can’t lose a child the same as you
might lay down a thimble. I call it very careless.”

“Yes. What a shame!” Annie agreed. “Supposing he’d of been run over.”

“He might of been run over a dozen times,” said Mrs
Frith. “It’s all very fine to put all the blame on the poor
child, but what was _she_
doing?”

Then Mrs. Frith closed her right eye, tightened her mouth and very slowly nodded her head until the most of her pleated chin was buried in the bib of her apron.

“That’s what I thought,” said Annie mysteriously.

“What did you think, Annie?” Michael asked fretfully.

“She thought you hadn’t no business to be so daring,” said Mrs
Frith. “But there! Well! And I was daring myself. Very daring
_I_ was. Out and about. Hollering after boys. The slappings
I’ve had. But I enjoyed myself. And if I sat down a bit tender,
that’s better than a sore heart, I used to think.”

“I expect you enjoyed yourself,” said Annie. “I was one of the quiet ones, I was. Any little trip, and I was sick.”

“Couldn’t bear the motion, I suppose?” Cook enquired.

“Oh, it wasn’t the travelling as did it. It was the excitement. I was dreadfully sick in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral.”

“What a grand place it is, though,” said Mrs. Frith, nodding. “Oh, beautiful. So solemn. I’ve sat there with my late husband, eating nuts as peaceful as if we was in a real church. Beautiful. And that whispering gallery! The things you hear. Oh—well. I like a bit of fun, I do. I remember——”

Then Nurse came downstairs, and Michael was taken up to bed away from what he knew would be an enthralling conversation between Annie and Cook. It was hateful to be compelled to march up all those stairs farther and farther away from the cheerful voices in the basement.

August arrived without bringing Michael’s mother, and he did
not care for the days by the sea without her. Stella, to be
sure, was beginning to show signs of one day being an
intelligent companion, but Nurse under the influence of
heat grew more repressive than ever, and the whole seaside
ached with his mother’s absence. Michael was not allowed to
speak to strange children and was still dependent on rare
treats to illuminate his dulness. The landlady’s husband, Mr.
Wagland, played the harmonium and made jokes with Nurse, while
Mrs. Wagland sang hymns and whispered with Nurse. A gleam of
variety came into Michael’s life when Mr. Wagland told him he
could catch birds by putting salt on their tails, and for many
afternoons, always with a little foolscap of salt, Michael
walked about the sunburnt-grass patch in front of the house,
waiting for sparrows to perch and vainly flinging pinches of
salt in the direction of their tails.

Church was more exciting by the seaside than at home, where
every Sunday morning during the long sermon Michael subsided
slowly from a wooden bench in the gallery on to a disembowelled
hassock, or languished through the Litany with a taste of
varnish in his mouth caused by an attempt to support his
endurance by licking the back of the pew in front. Nurse told
him of wonderful churches with music and incense and candles
and scarlet and lace, but, for some reason of inexplicable
contrariness, she took Michael to an old Calvinistic church
with a fire-breathing vicar, a sniffling vicar’s wife and a
curate who sometimes clasped Michael’s head with a damp hand
that always felt as if it were still there when it had long
been removed, like a cold linseed poultice. Now at the seaside,
Michael went to a beautiful church and was so much excited by
the various events that he pressed forward, peering on tiptoe.
Luckily the two ladies in front of him were so devout and
bobbed up and down so often that he was able to see most of
what was happening. How he longed to be the little boy in
scarlet who carried a sort of silver sauce-boat and helped to
spoon what looked like brown sugar into the censer. Once during
a procession, Michael stepped out

into the aisle and tried to see what actually was carried in
the boat. But the boat-boy put out his tongue very quickly, as
he walked piously by, and glared at Michael very haughtily,
being about the same size.

After submitting without pleasure to a farewell kiss from Mrs.
Wagland, and after enduring much shame on account of Stella’s
behaviour in the crowded railway carriage, Michael came back to
Carlington Road. During the space between arrival and bed-time
he was gently happy in welcoming his toys and books, in
marvelling at the quick growth of the black kitten and in a
brief conversation with Mrs. Frith and Annie; but on the next
morning which was wet with a wetness that offered no prospect
of ever being dry, he was depressed by the thought of the long
time before Christmas, by the foreboding of yellow days of fog
and the fact that to-morrow was Sunday. He had been told to sit
in the dining-room in order to be out of the way during the
unpacking and, because he had been slow in choosing which book
should accompany him, he had been called Mr. Particular and
compelled to take the one book of all others that he now felt
was most impossible even to open. So Michael sat in the
bay-window and stared at the rainy street. How it rained, not
ferociously as in a summer storm, when the surface of the road
was blurred with raindrops and the water poured along the
gutters, carrying twigs and paper and orange-peel towards the
drain, and when there almost seemed a chance of a second flood,
an event Michael did not fear, having made up his mind to float
on an omnibus to the top of the Albert Hall which had once
impressed him with its perfect security. Now it was raining
with the dreary mediocrity of winter, dripping from the balcony
above on to the sill below, trickling down the window-panes,
lying in heavy puddles about the road, a long monotonous grey
soak. He sighed as he looked out of the window at the piece of
waste ground opposite, that was bordered

in front by a tumble-down fence and surrounded on the three
other sides by the backs of grey houses. A poor old woman was
picking groundsel with a melancholy persistence, and the torn
umbrella which wavered above her bent form made her look like a
scarecrow. Presently round the corner a boy appeared walking
very jauntily. He had neither coat nor waistcoat nor shoes nor
stockings, his shirt was open in front, and a large piece of it
stuck out behind through his breeches; but he did not seem to
mind either the rain or his tattered clothes. He whistled as he
walked along, with one hand stuck in his braces and with the
other banging the wooden fence. He went by with tousled hair
and dirty face, a glorious figure of freedom in the rain,
Michael envied him passionately, this untrammelled
fence-banging whistling spirit; and for a long time this boy
walked before Michael’s aspirations, leading them to his own
merry tune. Michael would often think of this boy and wonder
what he was doing and saying. He made up his mind in the
beeswaxed dining-room that it was better to be a raggle-taggle
wanderer than anything else. He watched the boy disappear round
the farther corner, and wished that he could disappear in such
company round corner after corner of the world beyond the grey
house-backs.

The climax of this wet morning’s despair was reached when a
chimney-sweep came into sight, whooping and halloaing nearer
and nearer. Of the many itinerant terrors that haunted polite
roads, Michael dreaded sweeps most of all. So he hastily
climbed down from the chair in the window and sat under the
dining-room table until the sound had passed, shivering with
apprehension lest it should stop by Number Sixty-four. It went
by, however, without pausing, and Michael breathed more freely,
but just as he was cautiously emerging from the table, there
was an extra loud postman’s knock which drove him back in a
panic,
so that when Nurse came fussing in to fetch him to wash his
hands for dinner, he had to invent a plausible excuse for such
a refuge. As he could not find one, he was told that for a
punishment he could not be allowed to hear the message his
mother had written at the end of what was evidently a very
important letter, to judge by the many tut-tuts the reading of
it provoked Nurse to click.

However, under the influence of tea Nanny softened, and the message was read just as the rain stopped and the sun glittered through the day-nursery window right across the room in a wide golden bar.

_Como._

_Darling Michael_ ,

_You are to go to kindergarten which you will enjoy. You
will only go for the mornings and you will have to learn
all sorts of jolly things—music and painting and writing.
Then you’ll be able to write to Mother. I’m sure you’ll be
good and work hard, so that when Mother comes home at
Christmas, you’ll be able to show her what a clever boy she
has. You would like to be in this beautiful place. As I
write I can see such lovely hills and fields and lakes and
mountains. I hope darling Stella is learning to say all
sorts of interesting things. I can’t find any nice present
to send you from here, so I’ve told Nanny that you and she
can go and buy two canaries, one for you and one for
Stella—a boy canary and a girl canary. Won’t that be fun?
Love and kisses from_

_Mother_ .

Michael sat in a dream when the letter was finished. It had raised so many subjects for discussion and was so wonderful that he could scarcely speak.

“Will mother really come home at Christmas?” he asked.

“You heard what I said.”

“Christmas!” he sighed happily.

“Aren’t you glad to go to school?” Nurse wanted to know.

“Yes, but I’d like Christmas to come,” he said.

“Was there ever in this world anyone so hard to please?” Nurse apostrophized.

“When will we go to get these canaries, Nanny?”

“Plenty of time. Plenty of time.”

“Soon, will we?”

“One more question and there’ll be no canaries at all,” said Nurse.

However, the sun shone so brightly, and the prospect of a visit
to Hammersmith Broadway on a Saturday afternoon appealed so
strongly to Nurse that she put on her bonnet and trotted off
with Michael up Carlington Road, and stopped a red omnibus, and
fussed her way into it, and held the tickets in her mouth while
she put away her purse, and told Michael not to fidget with his
legs and not to look round behind him at what was passing on
that side of the road, until at last they arrived. The
canary-shop was found, and two canaries and a bird-cage were
bought, together with packets of seed and a bird’s bath and a
pennyworth of groundsel and plantains. Nurse told Michael to
wait in the shop while the birds were being prepared for
travelling, and while she herself went to the chemist to buy a
remedy for the neuralgia which she prophesied was imminent.
Michael talked to the canary-man and asked a lot of questions
which the canary-man seemed very glad to answer; and finally
Nurse, looking much better, came back from the chemist with a
large bottle wrapped up in a newspaper. In the omnibus, going
home, Michael never took his eyes from the cage, anxious to see
how the birds bore the jolting. Sometimes they said ‘sweet,’
and then Michael would say ‘sweet,’ and a pleasant old lady
opposite would say ‘sweet,’ and soon all the people inside the
omnibus
were saying ‘sweet,’ except Nurse, who was chewing her veil
and making the most extraordinary faces.

It was very exciting to stand on tiptoe in the kitchen while Mrs. Frith cut the string and displayed the canaries in all the splendour of their cage.

“Beautiful things,” said Mrs. Frith. “I’m that fond of birds.”

“Don’t they hop!” said Annie. “Not a bit frightened they don’t seem, do they?”

“What are their names?” Mrs. Frith enquired.

Michael thought for a long time.

“What _are_ their names, Mrs. Frith?” he asked at last.

“That’s your business,” said Cook.

“Why is it?” Michael wanted to know.

“Because they’re your birds, stupid.”

“One’s Stella’s.”

“Well, Stella isn’t old enough to choose for herself. Come along, what are you going to call them?”

“You call them,” said Michael persuasively.

“Well, if they was mine I should call them——” Cook paused.

“What would you?” said Michael, more persuasively than ever.

“I’m blessed if I know. There, Annie, what does anyone call a canary?”

“Don’t ask me, I’m sure. No,” simpered Annie.

“I shouldn’t call them nothing, I shouldn’t,” Mrs. Frith finally decided. “It isn’t like dogs.”

“What’s the matter?” said Nurse, bustling into the kitchen. “Has one got out? Has one got out?”

“I was telling Master Michael here,” said Cook, “as how I shouldn’t call neither of them nothing. Not if I was he.”

“Call what? Call what?” Nurse asked quickly.

“His new dicky-birds.”

“Must have names. Yes. Yes. Must have names. Dick and Tom. Dick and Tom.”

“But one’s a girl,” Michael objected.

“Can’t be changed now. Must be Dick and Tom,” Nurse settled, blowing rapidly as usual.

The decision worried Michael considerably, but as they both turned out to be hens and laid twenty-three eggs between them next spring, it ceased to bother him any more.

The Miss Marrows’ School and Kindergarten, kept by Miss Marrow and Miss Caroline Marrow assisted by Miss Hewitt and Miss Hunt, struck Michael as a very solemn establishment indeed. Although its outward appearance was merely that of an ordinary house somewhat larger than others on account of its situation at the corner of Fairfax Terrace, it contained inside a variety of scholastic furniture that was bound to impress the novice.

At twenty minutes past nine on the first day of the autumn term, Nurse and Michael stood before a brass plate inscribed

The Misses Marrow

School and Kindergarten

while a bell still jangled with the news of their arrival. They
were immediately shown into a very small and very stuffy room
on the right of the front door—a gloomy little room, because
blinds of coloured beads shut out the unscholastic world. This
room was uncomfortably crowded with little girls taking off
goloshes and unlacing long brown boots, with little boys
squabbling over their indoor shoes, with little girls chatting
and giggling and pushing and bumping,
with little boys shouting and quarrelling and kicking and
pulling. A huddled and heated knot of nurses and nursemaids
tried to help their charges, while every minute more little
boys and more little girls and more bigger girls pushed their
way in and made the confusion worse. In the middle of the
uproar Miss Marrow herself entered and the noise was instantly
lulled.

“The new boys will wait in here and the new girls will
_quietly_ follow Helen Hungerford down the passage to Miss
Caroline’s room. Nurses need not wait any longer.”

Then a bell vibrated shrilly. There was a general scamper as the nurses and the nursemaids and the old boys and the old girls hurried from the room, leaving Michael and two other boys, both about two years older than himself, to survey each other with suspicion. The other boys finding Michael beneath the dignity of their notice spoke to each other, or rather the larger of the two, a long-bodied boy with a big head and vacant mouth, said to the other, a fidgety boy with a pink face, a frog-like smile and very tight knickerbockers:

“I say, what’s your name?”

The pink-faced boy gulped “Edward Ernest Arnott.”

“What is it then?” asked the long-bodied boy.

“Arnott is my surname. Edward and Ernest,” he gulped again, “are my Christian names.”

“Mine’s Vernon Brown. I say, what’s your father?”

“A solicitor,” said Edward. “What’s yours?”

“A cricket—I mean a critic,” said Vernon.

“What’s that?”

This seemed to upset the long-bodied boy, who replied:

“Coo! Don’t you know what a cricket is? I mean critic. You must be a kid.”

Michael thought this was the most extraordinary conversation he
had ever heard. Not even Mrs. Frith and Annie could be so
incomprehensible.

“I don’t believe you know yourself,” said the pink-faced boy, deepening to crimson.

“Don’t I? I bet I do.”

“I bet you don’t.”

“I know better than you anyway.”

“So do I than you.”

Michael would have found a conversation between two fox-terriers more intelligible. It ended abruptly, however, with the entrance of Miss Marrow, who waved them all to follow her to the severity of her own room. Edward Arnott and Vernon Brown were despatched upstairs to take their places in the class above the Kindergarten for which Michael was destined and whither he followed Miss Marrow, wondering at the size and ugliness of her. Miss Marrow’s base was a black bell, on which was set a black cushion, above which was Miss Marrow’s round beetroot-coloured face. Miss Caroline was like a green curtain through the folds of which seemed to have burst a red face like her sister’s but thinner. Miss Caroline was pleasanter than Miss Marrow and never shouted, perhaps because she was never without a cold in the head.

Michael was handed over to the care of Miss Hewitt, the
Kindergarten mistress, who was very kind and very jolly.
Michael enjoyed the Kindergarten. There he learned to write
pothooks and hangers and very soon to write proper letters. He
learned to sew alternate red and blue lines of wool upon a
piece of cardboard. He learned to weave bookmarkers with
shining slips of chocolate and yellow paper, and to pleat
chequered mats of the same material: these, when term was over,
appeared at the prize-giving, beautifully enhanced with paper
frills cut by the clever Miss Hewitt. He learned to paint texts
and to keep his pencil-box tidy and to play the treble of a
very unmelodious duet with Miss Hunt, in whose bony fingers his
own fingers would from time to time get entangled. He tried
the treble without the bass accompaniment at home on Stella,
but she cried and seemed as Annie, who was in charge, said ‘to
regular shudder.’ Altogether Kindergarten was a pleasure to
Michael, and he found the days went by more quickly, though
still far too slowly.

About a week before Christmas his mother came back, and Michael was happy. All the rooms that were only used when she was at home changed from bare beeswaxed deserts to places of perfect comfort, so rosy were the lamp-shades, so sweet was the smell of flowers and so soft and lovely were his mother’s scattered belongings. Christmas Day brought presents—a box of stone bricks, a rocking-horse, a doll’s house for Stella, boxes of soldiers, a wooden battleship, and books—Hans Andersen and Grimm and the Old French Fairy-tales. As for the stockings that year, it was amazing how much managed to get into one stocking and how deliciously heavy it felt, as it was unhooked from the end of the cot and plumped down upon the bed in the gaslight of Christmas morning. There was only one sadness that hung over the festivities—the thought that his mother would be going away in two days. Boxing Day arrived and there were ominous open trunks and the scattered contents of drawers. To-morrow she was going. It was dreadful to think of. Michael was allowed the bitter joy of helping his mother to pack, and as he stood seriously holding various articles preparatory to their entombment, he talked of the summer and heard promises that mother would spend a long long time with Michael.

“Mother,” he said suddenly, “what is my father?”

“What makes you ask that?”

“The boys at Miss Marrow’s all ask me that. Have I got a father? Must boys have fathers? Oh, mother, do tell me,” pleaded Michael.

Mrs. Fane seemed worried by this question.

“Your father was a gentleman,” she said at last.

“What is a gentleman?”

“A good man, always thoughtful and considerate to others.”

“Was that man in the photograph my father?”

“What photograph?” Mrs. Fane parried.

“By your bed at the seaside?”

“I don’t remember,” she said, “Anyway, your father’s dead.”

“Is he? Poor man!” said sympathetic Michael.

“And now run to Nanny and ask her if she remembers where mother put her large muff.”

“Nanny,” said Michael, when he had received Nurse’s information, “why did my father die?”

“Die? Die? What questions. Tut-tut! Whatever next?” And Nurse blew very violently to show how deeply she disapproved of Michael’s inquisitiveness.

That evening, just when Michael was going to bed, there came a knock at the door, and a tall fair man was shown into the drawing-room.

“How d’ye do, Mrs. Fane? I’ve come to ask you if you’ll go to the theatre to-night. Saxby is coming on later.”

“Oh, thank you very much, Mr. Prescott, but I really think I must stay in. You see,” she said smilingly, “it’s Michael’s last night of me for a long time.”

Michael stood gazing at Mr. Prescott, hating him with all his might and sighing relief at his mother’s refusal to go out.

“Oh, Michael won’t mind; will you, Michael?”

Nurse came in saying ‘Bed-time! Tut-tut-tut! Bed-time!’ and Michael’s heart sank.

“There you are,” said Mr. Prescott. “Here’s Nurse to say it’s bed-time. Now do come, Mrs. Fane.”

“Oh, I really think I ought to stay.”

“Now what nonsense. Saxby will be furiously disappointed.
You must. Come along, Michael, be a brave chap and tell your
mother she’s got to go out; and here’s something to square our
account.”

He pressed a little gold coin into Michael’s unwilling hand.

“Would you mind very much, if I went?” his mother asked.

“No,” said Michael tonelessly. The room was swimming round him in sickening waves of disappointment.

“Of course he won’t,” decided Mr. Prescott boisterously.

While he was being undressed, Nurse asked what he was holding. Michael showed the half-sovereign.

“Spoiling children,” muttered Nanny. “That’s for your money-box.”

Michael did not care what it was for. He was listening for his mother’s step. She came in, while he lay round-eyed in his cot, and leaned over to kiss him. He held her to him passionately; then he buried his face in the bedclothes and, while she rustled away from him, sobbed soundlessly for a long while.

In the morning he watched her go away until the warm
summer-time and felt abandoned as he walked through the wintry
rooms, where lately he and his mother had sat by the fire. As
for the ten-shilling piece, he thought no more about it. Soon
afterwards he fell ill with whooping-cough, he and Stella
together, and the days dragged unendurably in the stuffy
nursery away from school.