Chapter I: AM willing to leave to other and more skilful hands the pleasure of

narrating the joys and trials of county cricket, club cricket, and the splendid cricket of country houses and village greens. Not that my task is the more modest, for, having a just regard for relative values, I think that it is of cricket I write, such cricket as small boys play in dreams (ah, me, those sixes that small boys hit in dreams!); such cricket as the ghosts enjoy at nights at Lord’s. It is well for the eye to take pleasure in shining flannels and ivory-white boots; there is a thrill in the science of the game, the swerve of the new red ball, the quick play of the batsmen’s feet; but I think that when good cricketers die it is not to such elaborate sport as this that they betake themselves in the happy playing-fields. To mow the astonished daisies in quick retort to the hardly gentlemanly sneak; to pull like Mr. Jessop because one knows no better; to be bowled by every straight yorker; to slog at full pitches with close-shut eyes; thus and thus only is the cricket of Arcadia.

In its simplest form we played it in the garden after dinner, but even here environment and our imaginations combined to make it complicated. The lawn was small, and there were flower-beds and windows to be considered. The former did not trouble us very much; indeed, we lopped the French lilies with a certain glee, but a broken window was a more serious business, and lofty drives to the off were therefore discouraged. Yet once, I recollect, the ball was sent through the same window three times in an afternoon. Of course, the unfortunate batsman who allowed his enthusiasm thus to outdrive his discretion was out, as also was he who hit the ball into the next garden. But this latter rule was rather conventional than imposed by necessity, for we were fortunate in the possession of a charming neighbour; and sometimes youth, adventuring in search of cricket-balls, would be regaled with seed-cake and still lemonade, and return rampant to his comrades. But the great zest of our games lay in our impersonation of real famous cricketers. We would take two county sides, and divide the rôles of their members amongst us, so that each of us would represent two or three members of each team. The score-sheets of these matches would convey a strange impression to the erudition of the New Zealander. For the greatest cricketers failed to score frequently, and, indeed, inevitably if they happened to be left-handed bats. So far our passion for accuracy carried us, but, like Tom Sawyer, we had to “lay on” that we bowled left-handed when it was in the part, while realistic impersonations of lightning bowlers were too dangerous to the batsman to be permitted.

These great contests did not pass without minor disagreements. The rights of age were by no means waived, and in those days I was firmly convinced that the l.b.w. rule had been invented by the M.C.C. to assist elder brothers in getting their rights. Moreover, there was always high argument over the allocation of the parts of the more popular cricketers. My sister, I remember, would retire wrathfully from the game if she were not allowed to be K. J. Key, and so, when Surrey was playing, we had to permit her to be titular captain. Girls are very keen at cricket, but they are not good at it. Or perhaps in the course of the game “W. G.” would find it necessary to chase Lockwood all over the field for bowling impudently well. Yet while we mimicked our elders we secretly thought Olympian cricket a poor, unimaginative game without any quarrels. It was thrilling to bat for the honour of Mr. Fry, or to make a fine catch in the long field for Mr. Mason’s sake, but our personal idiosyncrasies also had their value.

When we went away for our holidays it was ours to adventure with bat and ball on unaccustomed grounds: meadow cricket was tiresome, for the ball would hide itself in the long grass; and seaside cricket, though exhilarating, was too public a business to be taken really seriously. But cricket in the pinewoods was delightful—almost, I think, the best cricket of all. The soft needles made an admirable pitch, and we had all the trees for fielders. If you hit the ball against a tree full-pitch, you were out, and it was strange how those patient, silent fieldsmen, who never dropped catches, seemed to arrange themselves, as the game progressed, in the conventional places in the field. Point would be there, and mid-off, and some safe men in the slips. Overhead the birds would call in the trees, and there were queer echoes when you hit the ball hard, as though Pan were watching from some dim pavilion and crying his applause. Really I wonder how we dared, or perhaps it were fitter to wonder why we dare no longer.

The oddest cricket I ever played was with a gardener, a reticent, impassive man, who came and played with me when sudden mumps had exiled me from my holiday-making comrades. He would bowl to me silently for hours, only parting his lips now and again to murmur the name of the stump which he proposed to hit with his next ball, and no efforts of mine could prevent his grim prophecies from being fulfilled. When I gave him his innings he would pat my widest and most wily balls back to me politely until he thought I was tired, and then he would let me bowl him. This unequal contest was not cricket as I knew it, but it fascinated me nevertheless. At night in my bed I would hit his bowling all over the world and upset his stumps with monotonous ease. By day I could only serve his humour. The devil was in the man.

The bats with which we played were normal save in size, but the balls varied. In times of prosperity we had real leather cricket-balls, but the balls known as “compos” were more common. When new they had a noble appearance, but use made them rough and like dry earth in the hand, and then they were apt to sting the fingers of the unwary cricketer. The most perilous kind of ball of all was the size of a cricket-ball, but made of solid rubber, and deadly alike to batsman and fieldsman. For some reason or other the proper place in which to carry a cricket-ball was the trousers, or rather knickerbockers, pocket. The curious discomfort of this practice lingers in the mind. Soft balls are of no use in real cricket; but if you bore a hole in them and fill them with water they make very good bombs for practical anarchists.

Later came school cricket, but it is significant that the impression that lingers is of the long drives home in the dusk from out-matches rather than of the cricket itself. We would walk up the hills to rest the horses, playing “touch” and imprisoning unfortunate glow-worms in wooden matchboxes. And later still came visits to Lord’s and the Oval, when it was my fortune to see some of our old heroes in the flesh. Certainly they made more runs than they had been wont to do in the past, but— It is not wise to examine our heroes too closely, though I am not alone in thinking that first-class cricketers are lacking a little in the old spirit. Indeed, how can they hope to keep it, they who are grown so wise?

THE BOY IN THE GARDEN

THERE were two kinds of gardening to employ our sunny hours—the one concerned with the vast tracts of the Olympians, the other with the cultivation of those intimate patches of earth known as “the children’s gardens,” wherein was waged an endless contest between Nature and our views of what a garden should be. Of the joys of this nobler order of tillage I have written elsewhere, and I may not penetrate now into that mysterious world beyond the shrubbery, where plants assumed the proportions of mammoth trees, and beds of mustard-and-cress took the imaginative eye of youth as boundless prairies. But if the conventional aims of grown-up gardening set limits to our fancy, if their ideal of beauty in the garden—unfriendly as it was to cricket and the fiercer outbreaks of Indians—was none of ours, we found, nevertheless, certain details in the process by which they sought to attain their illusory ends stimulating and wholly delightful. Flowers might inspire in us no more than a rare and short-lived curiosity, but the watering-pot (and even better the garden-hose) were our very good friends. Tidiness was no merit in the garden of our dreams, but our song of joy rose straight to heaven with the smoke of bonfires. Meadows were more to our taste than the prim culture of lawns, but in our hands the lawn-mower became a flaming chariot, and we who drove it as unscorched Phaetons praised for the zest with which we pursued our pleasure by all Olympus.

It was one of the charms of childhood that such praise would sometimes fall from the lips of our rulers as suddenly and as mysteriously as their censure. It was pleasant, after a gorgeous afternoon spent in extinguishing imaginary conflagrations with the garden hose to be congratulated on the industry with which we had watered the flowers. It was pleasant to be rewarded with chocolates from France for burning witches on the rubbish-heap behind the greenhouse. As a matter of fact, we never “helped” the gardener unless it suited us, and we would have hidden in the shrubbery a whole day rather than be entrapped into half an hour’s weeding—an occupation which we regarded in the light of a severe punishment. And the odd confusion in the grown-up mind between right and wrong never ceased to intrigue us. When my elder brother, in a sentimental hour, flung a wreath of roses on to the stately head of the aunt of the moment, we knew that it was a pretty thought, very happily translated into action; but the Olympians treated it as a crime. Yet it was not his fault that the thorns tore her hair; had there been any thornless roses he would probably have used them. And, being honest, we wondered no less when we were praised for playing with the garden-hose, that coiled about our legs like wet snakes, and made our stockings wet on the warmest summer day; for in our hearts we knew that into any occupation so pleasant must surely enter the elements of crime. But the rulers of our destiny would bid us change our wet clothes with a calm brow, and would congratulate each other on our interest in the garden. We lived in a strange world.

The judgments of the gardener we could better understand, though, alas! we had to sum him up as unreliable. He was a twisted little man who had been to sea in his youth, and we knew that he had been a pirate because he had a red face, an enormous clasp-knife, and knew how to make every imaginable kind of knot. Moreover, there was a small barrel in the tool-house that had manifestly held gunpowder once upon a time. Such evidence as this was not to be refuted, but we had to conclude that he had been driven from the High Seas in disgrace, for he was pitifully lacking in the right pirate spirit. No pirate, we felt, would have taken the tale of our petty misdeeds to the Olympian courts for settlement, yet this is what Esau did under cover of a duplicity that aggravated the offence. In one and the same hour he would expound to us the intricacies of the Chinese knot with many friendly and sensible observations, and tell the shocked Olympians that we had thrown his rose-sticks all over the garden in the manner of javelins. Captain Shark, of the barque _Rapacious_, would not have acted like this, if it was conceivable that that sinister hero could have turned gardener. Perhaps he would have smitten us sorely with the Dutch hoe, or scalped us with his pruning-knife by means of a neat twist learnt in Western America, but whatever form his revenge might have assumed he would have scorned to betray us to the people who had forgotten how to play. Esau was a sad knave.

And, unlike the Olympians, he had no illusions as to the value of our labours in the garden, treating our generous assistance with the scantiest gratitude, and crediting our enthusiasm with the greater part of Nature’s shortcomings. Whenever our horticultural efforts became at all spirited he would start up suddenly from behind a hedge and admonish us as the boy in “Prunella” admonishes the birds. He would not allow us to irrigate the flower-beds by means of a system of canals; he checked, or at least attempted to check, our consumption of fruit, deliciously unripe (has any one noticed that an unripe greengage eaten fresh from the tree is a gladder thing than any ripe fruit?); he would not let us play at executions with the scythe, or at avalanches with the garden-roller. The man’s soul was a cabbage, and I fear that he regarded us as a tiresome kind of vermin that he might not destroy.

Nevertheless, as the Olympians liked to see us employed in the garden, he could not wholly refuse our proffered aid, and he would watch our adventures with the garden-hose and the lawn-mower, with his piratical features incarnadined, as it were, by the light of his lurid past. Naturally, water being a good friend of children, to water the garden was the most popular task of all, and as I was the youngest brother it was but rarely that I was privileged to experience that rare delight. To feel the cool rush of the water through fingers hot with play and the comfortable trickle down one’s sleeve, to smite a plant with muddy destruction and to hear the cheerful sound made by the torrent in falling on to the soaked lawn—these and their fellow-emotions may not be those of adult gardeners, but they are not to be despised. But as I have said, they were not for me, and usually I had to be content with mowing the lawn, an occupation from which I drew a full measure of placid enjoyment.

Age dims our realisation of the emotional significance of our own actions, and it is only by an effort of memory that I can arrive at the philosophy of the contented mower of lawns. I suppose that professional gardeners find the labour monotonous, lacking both the artistic interest of such work as pruning and the scientific subtleties of cucumber-growing; but youth has the precious faculty of finding the extraordinary in the commonplace, and I had only to drag the lawn-mower from its rugged bed among the forks and spades in the tool-house, to embark on a sea of intricate and diverse adventure.

The very appearance of the thing was cheery and companionable, with its hands outstretched to welcome mine, and its coat of green more vivid than any lawn. To seize hold of its smooth handles was like shaking hands with an old friend, and as it rattled over the gravel path it chattered to me in the gruff tones of a genial uncle. Once on the smooth lawn its voice thrilled to song, tremulous and appealing, and filled with the throbbing of great wings. Even now I know no sound that cries of the summer so poignantly as the intermittent song of the lawn-mower heard far off through sunny gardens. And cheered by that song I might drive my chariot, or it might be my plough, where I would. Not for me the stiff brocaded pattern beloved of Esau; I made curves, skirting the shadows of the tall poplars or cutting the lawn into islands and lagoons. Over the grass-box—or the nose-bag, as we called it—the grass danced like a mist of green flies, and I beheaded the daisies with the zest of a Caligula, pausing sometimes to marvel at those modest blossoms that survived my passage. I marvelled, too, with the cold inhumanity of youth, at the injudicious earthworms that tried to stay my progress, and perished for their pains. Sometimes a stray pebble would grate unpleasantly on the blades and waken my lulled senses with a jerk; sometimes I would drive too close to a flower-bed, and munched fragments of pansies and wallflowers would glow amongst the grass in the grass-box.

No doubt a part of my enjoyment lay in the feeding of that natural spirit of destructiveness that present-day Olympians satisfy with frequent gifts of clockwork toys, ingenious mechanisms very proper to be inquired into by young fingers. But there was more in it than that. I liked the smell of the newly cut grass, and I would run my fingers through it and press damp, warm handfuls of it to my face to win the full savour of it. I even liked the more pungent odour of the grass-heap where last week’s grass lay drying in the sun. And the effort necessary to drive the worker of wonders across the lawn gave me a pleasant sense of my own sturdiness.

But the fact remains that, with all these reasons, I cannot wholly fathom the true philosophy of lawn-mowing with my adult mind. I have set down all the joys that I remember, but some significant fact, some essential note of enchantment, is missing. What did I think about as I pressed to and fro with my lawn-mower? Sometimes, perhaps, I was a ploughman, guiding vast horses along the crests of mountains, and pausing now and again to examine the treasures that my labour had revealed in the earth, leather bags of guineas and jewelled crowns that sparkled through their mask of clay. Sometimes I might be a charioteer driving a team of mad horses round the circus for Nero’s pleasure, or a fireman driving a fire-engine scatheless through bewildered streets. But with all I believe that sometimes I was no more than a little boy, mowing the lawn of a sunny garden, loving the task for its own sake, and inspired by no subtler spirit than that which led Esau to cultivate cabbages with dogged enthusiasm. It would not do to condemn that dishonoured pirate because he saw heaven as a kitchen-garden and regarded flowers as the fond toys of the Olympian dotage. He, too, had his illusions; he, too, while he sowed the seed had visions of an impossible harvest. His ultimate fate eludes my memory, but doubtless he has finished with his husbandry by now. I, too, no longer mow the lawn save when arrayed in fantastic knickerbockers and dream-shod as of yore I trim the grass-plats of sleep with a lawn-mower that sings as birds no longer sing. What the purpose of my youthful labours may have been I do not know. . . . _Parturiunt montes, nascetur ridiculus mus_. Perhaps I was already enrolled in the employment agency of destiny as a writer of idle articles.

CHILDREN AND THE SEA

THE sea, like all very large things, can only be intimately understood by children. If we can conceive a sensible grown-up person looking at the sea for the first time, we feel that he should either yawn or wish to drown himself. But a child would take a sample of it in a bucket, and consider that in all its aspects; and then it would know that the sea is a great many bucketfuls of water, and further that by an odd freak of destiny this water is not fit to drink. Storms and ships and sand-castles and lighthouses and all the other side-shows would follow later; but in the meantime the child would have seen the sea in a bucket, as it had previously seen the moon in a looking-glass, so would know all about it. The moon is a variable and interesting kind of lamp; the sea is buckets and buckets and buckets full of water. I think the stars are holes in a sort of black curtain or ceiling, and the sun is a piece of brightness, except at sunset or in a mist, when it is a whole Dutch cheese. The world is streets and fields and the seaside and our house.

I doubt whether a child has any sense of what I may call the appeal of breadth. If it is confronted with a fine view, it will concentrate its interest on a windmill or a doll’s house, and the seaside is no more than a place where one wears no shoes or stockings, and the manufacture of mud pies becomes suddenly licit. The child does not share the torments of the adult Londoner, who feels that there is no room in the world to stretch his arms and legs, and therefore wins a pathetic sense of freedom in seeing the long yellow sands and the green wastes of the sea. Nor is it at all excited by the consideration that there is a lot more sea beyond the horizon; the extent of its interest in the water is the limit to which it may paddle.

Yet in some dim, strange way the child realises æsthetic values more here than elsewhere. I am quite sure it can see no real beauty in its normal surroundings. Sunsets and small houses lit for evening, the shining streets after rain, and even flowers and pictures and dolls, are never beautiful to a child in the sense that a story or an idea may be beautiful. But tacitly, for a child has no language to express such things, something of the blueness of the sea seems to seek expression in its eyes, something of the sparkle of the sand seems to be tangled in its hair, something of the sunshine burns in its rounded calves that glow like brown eggs. A child is always a thing of wonder. But on the edge of the sea this wonder deepens until the artificial observer is abashed. A seaside child is no creature to be petted and laughed over; it were as easy to pet the tireless waters, and to laugh over the grave of a little cat; children whom one has known very well indeed in town will find new playing fields by the sea into which it is impossible to follow them. Dorothy weighs five stone four pounds at Maida Vale; at Littlehampton the sea wind blows her along like a feather; she is become a wispy, spiritual thing, a faint, fair creature a-dance on light feet that would make the fairy-girl of a poet’s dream seem clumsy by comparison. She is nearer to us when she paddles. The warm sand creeping up through her toes, the silver thread of coolness about her legs, these things are within our comprehension though they fall no more within our experience. But when she flings herself along the beach with the wild hair and loose limbs and the song of an innocent Bacchante, when she bids the gold sands heave up and support her body, tired with play, when she stoops to gather diamonds and pearls from the shore made wet and smooth by the retreating waves, she is as far from us and our human qualities as a new-awakened butterfly. There have been sea-washed moments when I should not have been astonished if she had flung out a pair of mother-of-pearl wings and stood in the blue sky, like a child saint in a stained-glass window. There have been other moments when she has approached me with a number of impossible questions in wanton parody of her simple London self. Between these two extremes her moods vary from second to second, and she plays upon them as Pan upon his pipes, and to much the same tune. She loves the long tresses of seaweed and the pink shells like the nails of her own little hands; and her coloured pail, when she is not the architect of sea-girt palaces, is a treasury of salty wonders. To climb the rough rocks and call them mountains, to drive back the waves with a chiding foot, and to alter the face of Nature with a wooden spade, these were not tasks for the domesticated creature who shares the hearth-rug with the cat at home. But the spirit of the sea has changed Dorothy; she is now a little more and a little less than child; and she recognises no comrades but those other nymphs of the sea, who hold the beach with the sparkle of wet feet and careless petticoats, who run hither and thither in search of the big adventure, while their parents and guardians sleep in the sun. It is hard that age should deprive us of so many privileges, and least of all can we spare the glamour of the sands of the sea. Yet to the adult mind Brighton beach, sprinkled with newspapers and washed by a sea whose surface is black with smuts, brings little but disgust. We insist on having our fairy-lands clean and end, too often, by finding no fairy-land at all. The sea, after all, is no more than water that may be caught in a bucket; the sand may glitter on a child’s spade, and we who believe that the essential knowledge of the thing is ours are no wiser than the children. For me the sea is a restless and immeasurable waste of greens and blues and greys, and I know that its strength lies in its monotony. It is not the noisy turbulence of storms that moves me to fear, but the dull precision of the tides and the tireless succession of waves. And my impression is no truer than the children’s and lends itself less readily to a sympathetic manner of living. I feel that if I could once more hold the ocean in my bucket, if the whole earth might be uprooted by my spade, I should be nearer to a sense of the value of life than I am now. I see the children go trooping by with their calm eyes, not, as is sometimes said, curious, but rather tolerant of life, and I know that for them the universe is merely an aggregate of details, some agreeable and some stupid, while I must needs depress myself by regarding it as a whole. And this is the proved distinction between juvenile and adult philosophies, if we may be permitted to regard a child’s very definite point of view as the effect of a philosophy. Life is a collection of little bits of experience; the seaside bits are pleasant, and there is nothing more to be said.

ON GOING TO BED

WHEN the winter fires were burning their merriest in the grates, or when the summer sun was melting to crimson shadows down in the western fields, we, pressing our noses on the window-panes in placable discussion of the day’s cricket, or dreaming our quiet dreams on the playroom floor, would hear a heart-breaking pronouncement fall tonelessly from the lips of the Olympians: “Come, children, it is time you were in bed!” It needed no more than that to bring our hearts to zero with a run, and set our lips quivering in eloquent but supremely useless protest. Against this decree there was, we knew, no appeal; and we pleaded our hopeless cause rather from habit than from any expectation of success. And even while we uttered passionate expressions of our individual wakefulness, and vowed our impatience for the coming of that golden age when we should be allowed to sit up all night, we were collecting the honoured toys that shared our beds, in mournful recognition of the inevitable.

It was not that we had any great objection to bed in itself, but that fate always decreed that bed-time should fall in the brightest hour of the day. No matter what internecine conflicts, whether with the Olympians or each other, had rendered the day miserable, when bed-time drew near the air was sweet with the spirit of universal brotherhood, as though in face of our common danger we wished to propitiate the gods by means of our unwonted merit. Feuds were patched up, confiscated property was restored to its rightful owner, and brother hailed brother with a smiling countenance and that genial kind of rudeness that passed with us for politeness. This was the time of day, too, when the more interesting kind of Olympian would make his appearance, uncles—at least, we called them uncles—who could perform conjuring tricks and tell exciting stories, and aunts who kissed us, but had a compensating virtue in that they had been known to produce unexpected sweets. The house that might have been a gloomy prison of dullness during the long day became, by a sudden magic, entertaining and happily alive. The kitchen was fragrant with the interesting odours that come from the cooking of strange adult viands; the passages were full of strong men who could lift small boys to the ceiling without an effort, and who would sometimes fling sixpences about with prodigal lavishness; the whole place was gay with parcels to be opened, and lively, if incomprehensible, conversation. And ever while we were thrilling to find that our normal environment could prove so amusing, the Olympians would realise our existence in their remote eyries of thought, and would send us, stricken with barren germs of revolt, to our uneventful beds.

On me, as the youngest of the brothers, the nightly shock should have fallen lightly; for I was but newly emancipated from the shameful ordeal of going to bed for an hour in the afternoon, and I could very well remember, though I pretended I had forgotten, the sensations of that drowsy hour, when the birds sang so loudly outside the window and the sun thrust fingers of dusty gold through the crannies of the blind. I should therefore probably have been reconciled to the common lot, which spelt advancement to me, had I not newly discovered the joy of dreaming those dreams that men have written in books for the delight of the young. The Olympians were funny about books. They gave them to us, or at the least smiled graciously when other people gave them to us, but the moment rarely arrived when they could endure to see us reading, or spoiling our eyes as their dreadful phrase ran. And especially at nightfall, when the shadows crept in from the corners of the room and made the pages of the dullest book exciting, it was inviting an early bed-time to be detected in the act of reading. As sure as the frog was about to turn into a prince or the black enchantress had appeared with her embarrassing christening present, the book would be taken from my hands and I would be threatened with the compulsory wearing of old-maidish spectacles—an end that would make me an object of derision in the eyes of man. And even if I shut the book of my own accord, and sat nodding before the fire, working out the story in my own fashion with some one I knew very well to play the part of hero, some ruthless adult would accuse me of being “half asleep already,” and the veil of illusion would be torn beyond repair.

In winter-time the bedroom would seem cold after the comfortable kingdom of the hearth-rug, and the smell of scented soap was a poor substitute for the friendly fragrance of burning logs. So we would undress as quickly as possible, and lie cuddled up in the chilly bed-clothes, holding our own cold feet in our hands as if they belonged to somebody else. But if it happened that one of us had a bad cold, and there was a fire in the bedroom, we would keep high festival, sitting in solemn palaver round the camp-fire, and toasting our pink toes like Arctic explorers, while the invalid lay in bed crowing over his black-currant tea or hot lemonade. It was pleasant, too, when natural weariness had driven us to our beds, to lie there and watch the firelight laughing on the walls; and the invalid, for the time being, was rather a popular person.

In summer-time getting into bed was a far more complex process, for the youth of the night held us wakeful; and if the weather were warm, bed was an undesirable place as soon as we had exhausted such coolness as lingered in the sheets. Then we would devote ourselves to pillow-fighting, which was, I think, a more humorous sport for elder brothers than for younger, or we would express our firm intention of sleeping all night on the floor under tents made of the bedclothes. The best of this resolution was that it made bed seem so comfortable, when we climbed back after the first fine romance of camping-out had worn off. Thunderstorms we loved with a love not untouched by awe, and we would huddle together at the window, measuring the lightning, appraising the thunder, and listening to the cool thresh of the rain on the garden below.

There were rare nights—nights of great winds—when we would suddenly realise that fear had entered into the room, and that, after all, we were children in a world of men. Our efforts to talk resulted in tremulous whispers that bred fear rather than allayed it, and though we would not even then admit it, we knew that we were possessed with a great loneliness. Sooner or later some cunning spirit would suggest a pilgrimage to the realms of the Olympians, and treading the warm stair-carpet with our bare feet, we would journey till we heard the comforting sound of their laughter and the even murmur of their conversation. Sometimes we would stay there till we grew sleepy, and the fear passed away, so that we could tiptoe back to bed, wondering a little at ourselves; sometimes the Olympians would discover us, and comfort our timid hearts with rough words and sweet biscuits. In the morning we would pretend that the whole business had been only an adventure, and we were not above bragging of our courage in daring the ire of the grown-up people. But we knew better.

STREET-ORGANS

IT is very true, as Mr. Chesterton must have remarked somewhere, that the cult of simplicity is one of the most complex inventions of civilisation. To eat nuts in a meadow when you can eat a beefsteak in a restaurant is neither simple nor primitive; it is merely perverse, in the same way that the art of Gauguin is perverse. A shepherd-boy piping to his flock in Arcady and a poet playing the penny whistle in a Soho garret may make the same kind of noise; but whereas the shepherd-boy knows no better, the poet has to pretend that he knows no better. So I reject scornfully the support of those amateurs who profess to like street-organs because they are the direct descendants of the itinerant ballad-singers of the romantic past; or because they represent the simple musical tastes of the majority to-day. I refuse to believe that in appreciating the sound of the complex modern instruments dragged across London by Cockneys disguised as Italians the soul of the primitive man who lurks in some dim oubliette of everybody’s consciousness is in any way comforted. I should imagine that that poor prisoner, if civilisation’s cruelty has not deprived him of the faculty of hearing, is best pleased by such barbaric music as the howling of the wind or the sound of railway-engines suffering in the night; and indeed every one must have noticed that sometimes certain sounds unmusical in themselves can arouse the same emotions as the greatest music.

But it is not on this score that street-organs escape our condemnation; their music has certain defects that even distance cannot diminish, and they invariably give us the impression of a man speaking through his nose in a high-pitched voice, without ever pausing to take breath. If, in spite of this, we have a kindness for them, it is because of their association with the gladdest moments of childhood. To the adult ear they bring only desolation and distraction, but to the children the organ-man, with his curly black hair and his glittering earrings, seems to be trailing clouds of glory. For them the barrel-organ combines the merits of Wagner, Beethoven, Strauss, and Debussy, and Orpheus would have to imitate its eloquent strains on his lute if he wished to captivate the hearts of London children.

When I was a child the piano-organ and that terrible variant that reproduces the characteristic stutter of the mandoline with deadly fidelity were hardly dreamed of, but the ordinary barrel-organ and the prehistoric hurdy-gurdy, whose quavering notes suggested senile decay, satisfied our natural craving for melody. It is true that they did not make so much noise as the modern instruments, but in revenge they were almost invariably accompanied by a monkey in a little red coat or a performing bear. I always had a secret desire to turn the handle of the organ myself; and when—too late in life to enjoy the full savour of the feat—I persuaded a wandering musician to let me make the experiment, I was surprised to find that it is not so easy as it looks to turn the handle without jerking it, and that the arm of the amateur is weary long before the repertoire of the organ is exhausted. It is told of Mascagni that he once taught an organ-man how to play his notorious Intermezzo to the fullest effect; but I fancy that in professional circles the story would be discredited, for the arm of the practised musician acquires by force of habit a uniform rate of revolution, and in endeavouring to modify that rate he would lose all control over his instrument.

Personally, I do not like hearing excerpts from Italian opera on the street-organs, because that is not the kind of music that children can dance to, and it is, after all, in supplying an orchestra for the ballroom of the street that they best justify their existence. The spectacle of little ragged children dancing to the music of the organ is the prettiest and merriest and saddest thing in the world. In France and Belgium they waltz; in England they have invented a curious compound of the reel, the gavotte, and the cakewalk. The best dancers in London are always little Jewesses, and it is worth anybody’s while to go to Whitechapel at midday to see Miriam dancing on the cobbles of Stoney Lane. There is not, as I once thought, a thwarted enchanter shut up inside street-organs who cries out when the handle turns in the small of his back. But why is it that I feel instinctively that magicians have drooping moustaches and insinuating smiles, if it is not that my mind as a child founded its conception of magicians on itinerant musicians? And they weave powerful spells, strong enough to make these poor little atomies forget their birthright of want and foot it like princesses. Children approach their amusements with a gravity beside which the work of a man’s life seems deplorably flippant. A baby toddling round a bandstand is a far more impressive sight than a grown man circumnavigating the world, and children do not smile when they dance—all the laughter is in their feet.

When from time to time “brain-workers” write to the newspapers to suggest that street musicians should be suppressed I feel that the hour has almost come to start a movement in favour of Votes for Children. It is disgraceful, ladies and gentlemen, that this important section of the community, on whom the whole future of the nation depends, should have no voice in the forming of the nation’s laws! This question of street-organs cannot be solved by banishing them to the slums without depriving many children of a legitimate pleasure. For, _sub rosa_, the children of Park Lane—if there are any children in Park Lane—and even the children of “brain-workers,” appreciate the music of street organs quite as much as their humble contemporaries. While father buries his head under the sofa-cushions and composes furious letters to the _Times_ in that stuffy hermitage, little noses are pressed against the window-pane, little hands applaud, and little feet beat time on the nursery floor upstairs. This is one of those situations where it is permissible to sympathise with all parties, and unless father can achieve an almost inhuman spirit of tolerance I see no satisfactory solution.

For children must have music; they must have tunes to think to and laugh to and live to. Funeral marches to the grave are all very well for the elderly and disillusioned, but youth must tread a more lively measure. And this music should come like the sunshine in winter, surprisingly, at no fixed hour, as though it were a natural consequence of life. One of the gladdest things about the organ-man in our childhood was the unexpectedness of his coming. Life would be dragging a little in schoolroom circles, when suddenly we would hear the organ clearing its throat as it were; we would all run to the window to wave our hands to the smiling musician, and shout affectionate messages to his intelligent monkey, who caught our pennies in his little pointed cap. In those days we had all made up our minds that when we grew up we would have an organ and a monkey of our own. I think it is rather a pity that with age we forget these lofty resolutions of our childhood. I have formed a conception of the ideal street-organist that would only be fulfilled by some one who had realised the romance of that calling in their youth.

How often, when the children have been happiest and the dance has been at its gayest, I have seen the organ-man fold music’s wings and move on to another pitch in search of pennies! I should like to think that it is a revolt against this degraded commercialism that inspires the protests of the critics of street music. The itinerant musician who believed in art for art’s sake would never move on so long as he had an appreciative audience; and sometimes, though I am afraid this would be the last straw to the “brain-workers,” he would arrive at two o’clock in the morning, and the children, roused from their sleep, would hear Pan piping to his moonlit flocks, and would believe that they were still in the pleasant country of dreams.

A SECRET SOCIETY

NOW that the Houndsditch affair has been laid aside by the man in the street and it is once more possible for a bearded Englishman to tread the pavements of London without reproach, I may perhaps venture to give some account of a secret society with which I have been intimately connected, without earning the reputation of a monger of sensations.

Some four or five years ago I met a picturesque journalist who told me that he had once been at pains to worm out the secrets of an anarchist society in London, and had incorporated his discoveries in a volume so marvellous that no editor or publisher would believe it. I only remember one incident of all his wonderful adventures. He was led by an anarchist comrade into a small shop in the Strand, thence into a cellar, and thence along a series of passages and caverns that ultimately brought him out in Seven Dials! Even Mr. Chesterton’s detective-anarchists in the “Man who was Thursday” could not beat this. For my part I shall not try, but shall content myself with a straightforward narration of facts.

I should think it was about last July that I first noticed that the children of my neighbourhood, with whom I have some small acquaintance, were endeavouring to assume a sinister aspect, and were wearing a cryptic button with a marked air of secrecy. When I came out for my morning walk the front garden would be animated with partially concealed children like the park in Mr. Kipling’s “They,” and though I have long realised that suburban front gardens do not lend themselves to the higher horticulture, I felt the natural embarrassment of the man who does not know whether he is expected to expel trespassers or welcome bashful visitors. In the circumstances I affected not to notice that the lilac was murmurous with ill-suppressed laughter and that the laurels were waving tumultuously; but it was hardly reassuring to discover on my return that a large red cross and the letters T. S. had been chalked on my gate by an unknown hand. For a moment I wondered whether the children had been reading “Sentimental Tommy,” for these were the initials and the methods of Mr. Barrie’s luckless hero, but the age and genial contempt for scholarship of the investing forces made this unlikely. On the fourth day, finding one of the band momentarily separated from her comrades, I ventured a _coup d’etat_. Pointing to the letters on her secret button, I remarked, “I see you belong to the Teapot Society.”

“I don’t” she said indignantly; “it’s the Terror Society I belong to.”

The secret was out, but I thought it wiser to conceal my triumph. Evidently, however, my discovery troubled the band, for next morning I received a _soi-disant_ anonymous letter of caution signed in full by all the members. I felt that the moment had arrived for definite action, especially as the cat who honours my house with his presence, and whose summer morning basking-place is in the front garden, had been much upset by this recurrent invasion of his privacy. I wrote a humble letter to the Society, apologising for my crimes and begging that I might be allowed to become a member, and placed it outside on the path. Five minutes later two very unembarrassed children appeared in my study, and introduced themselves as Captain and Secretary of the Terror Society.

The Captain was very frank with me.

“Of course, we didn’t really want to frighten you,” she said, “but we had to get you to become a member somehow or other.”

“But I’m afraid I’m not much good at conspiracies,” I said modestly.

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” the Captain answered kindly. “You can be honourable Treasurer. You know we want a lot of things for our house.”

I began to see what part I had in the scheme of things. “What are the rules of the Society?” I asked in all innocence, and thereby flung the Secretary into confusion.

“You see, she wrote them out,” the Captain explained, “and she doesn’t want you to read them because of the spelling. But they’re only make-up rules, so you needn’t bother about them. Don’t you want to see the house?”

“Captain,” I said firmly, “it is my one wish. Lead on!”

“You ought really to be blindfolded,” the Captain whispered to me as we went along, “but I used my handkerchief to wrap up some of cook’s toffee this morning, and it’s rather sticky.”

“Don’t apologise,” I murmured hastily; “I don’t mind not being blindfolded a bit. Besides, I’m practically a member, and you mustn’t blindfold members; it isn’t done.”

The Captain seemed relieved. “I knew you would make a good treasurer,” she said with cheerful inconsequence. “But, look! there’s the house.”

The headquarters or club-house of the Terror Society stood beside the allotment gardens at the top of the hill, and may, at some less honourable period of its history, have served as a place for storing tools. In the course of their trespassings the children had found it lying empty, and had obtained permission from the landlord to have it for their very own. I have implied that the feminine element was predominant in the Society, and, recalling the wigwams and log huts of my own childhood, the difference between the ideals of boys and girls was sharply brought home to me when I crossed the threshold. The walls were papered with sentimental pictures out of Christmas numbers and literally draped with curtains; there were vases filled with flowers in every corner, and in the middle of this boudoir three of the members were drinking tea. In a sense, perhaps, the girls were to be commended for finding the true romance in domesticity, but I could not help wondering what Captain Shark of the barque _Rapacious_, that faithful friend of my boyhood, would have thought of a Terror Society run on such principles. However, I saw that the eyes of the members were upon me, and I hastened to do my duty as an honourable member. “It’s wonderful,” I said. “How on earth did you manage to do it all yourselves?”

The children all fell to apportioning the credit—all, that is, save the Captain, who seemed to me a very businesslike fellow.

“You see, Mr. Treasurer,” she said, “we want some more of those camp-stools and a lock to keep out burglars, and some knives and forks, and a tin of biscuits and a pail and candles and a candlestick and a clothes-brush and a little bell to ring at dinner-time and a knocker for the door.”

Fortunately she paused to take breath.

“My dear Captain,” I interrupted quickly, “I have a sovereign in the savings-bank, and if you come with me to-morrow we’ll draw it out, and do the best we can with the money. But tell me, am I really a member?”

“Of course you are!”

“Then where’s my mysterious button?”

The Captain frowned. “Jessie will have to paint you one, but the ribbon costs a penny.”

“That makes twenty shillings and a penny,” said the Secretary. It was indeed a businesslike Society.

The next day the Captain and I did a lot of miscellaneous shopping, and two days later the button was left at my door by a small boy. Then for a fortnight I heard nothing of the Society or its members, and no sinister invasion of the morning occurred to disturb the far peace in the eyes of my cat. At last I met the Captain in the road, and though she endeavoured to elude me, I succeeded in getting her into a corner.

“Well, Captain,” I said, “how’s the Terror Society?”

The Captain looked gloomy. “Haven’t you heard?” she said. “The Terror Society is all over.”

“Finished already!” I cried in astonishment. “Why, what have you done with the house?”

“It has been given to another society,” she said without a blush.

“Another society?”

“Yes, the Horror Society. I am Captain.”

I considered this news for a moment. “Well, I suppose I’m a member of the new society?” I ventured.

The Captain shook her head sadly. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “but the H. S. has a rule that no grown-ups are admitted!”

That is why, though I myself was a member of the Terror Society, I yet feel myself at liberty to write about it. For as on inquiry I discovered that the ranks of the Horror Society differed in no wise from those of the Terror Society save for the exclusion of the honourable Treasurer, I cannot help feeling that I have been rather badly treated.

THE PRICE OF PEACE