Читать книгу Six Common Things - E F Benson - Страница 3

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Certain early years of childhood have to most of us, though we have perhaps become since then middle-aged and quite prosaic, an air of mystery, of romance, of a vague vastness, that remains to us long after we have decided once and for all that we are average and commonplace individuals. It is a difficult question to decide whether we were happier as children than we are now; and we are apt to be biased by the obvious palpable happiness that all children, who are real children, can find in simple ordinary things, which are no longer sufficient to produce in us any absorbing bliss. But if the joys of childhood are entirely absorbing, it is equally true that its troubles are productive of the same fine order of emotion, and the bliss of the first half-crown is quite counterbalanced by the blind misery of the dentist. Though now a half-crown does not convert the whole of life into a garden of Sharon, we have our compensation in the power to look beyond that hour in the dentist’s chair, and to realise that though our immediate horizon is black with clouds, tea-time will come as usual at five o’clock, and that the visit to the dentist will be numbered with the dead joys and sorrows of this uncertain world.

The explanation is simple enough; a child lives wholly in the present moment, whether it is sweet or bitter, while the ordinary adult can conceive a future, and can dwell in the past. Moreover, by whatever names we may call ourselves, whether we are pessimists or the “morbid fin de siècle outcome of a disillusioned and over cultivated civilisation”—it is easy enough to find sufficiently bad names for the most modern of our race—the fact remains, that however flat and stale the present appears to us, however uninteresting the future, we still look with something of longing and regret on our own past years. We forget all that was unpleasant, pessimists though we be, and to us now, childhood was a long sunny day, without any lessons to do, and full of strange lovely mysteries. I remember being promised by an elder brother in return for some small service, a purple box with stars upon it, that was in a wood. I do not think that the purple box ever existed; certainly I never got it, yet I used to lie awake at night thinking of it, and wondering when it would come; whereas what I do not remember is the period when the advent of the purple box passed in my mind from being imminent to being remote, and the first moment when I realised that it was not going to come at all. That the moment was bitter I do not doubt, but that I have forgotten; what does remain with me, is the mystery and the joy that hung round the purple box which I have never yet set eyes on.

When I was eight years old, we moved from a midland county town into a house near Truro, deep in the rural heart of Cornwall. I think I shall never forget the first sight of primroses growing wild in the lanes. We had arrived at the house late one night, and after the long journey, we children were put to bed at once. But I awoke early the next morning, and saw in my room a light that was altogether unfamiliar to me, and which I thought then and think still, is one of the most lovely things in the world. It is the light which comes from the level rays of the sun, when they shine through fresh green leaves. You may see it on most days of the year, if you care to look for it; whether you seek it at morning or evening in some little hollow fringed by tender beech trees, or loveliest of all, where young elms and ashes lean and listen together over a brook which makes its valley melodious, or whether you see it, as I saw it now for the first time, reflected on to the whitewashed ceiling of a small bedroom. It is an aqueous quivering light, full of tender shifting shadows and dim tranquillity, too delicate for words. Child as I was, I felt something of its spell, and dressed quickly and went out, and at that moment realised consciously for the first time something of what a spring morning is always ready to tell us, if we will only stand quiet and listen to its message.

It was just half-past six, and from where I stood at the front door, I looked over a long deep Cornish valley stretching away to the east and lost in morning. Thin skeins of fine cloud still lingered on the lower slopes of the hills, and in the centre of the valley the dim forms of houses, and the steeples of the Truro churches pricked the mist. The fields that sloped gently away from my feet were shining with the early May dew; to the right stretched a mossy bird-haunted lawn, and in the air there was the keen scent of morning, that indescribable suggestion of something too ethereal to call fragrance, and which seems only the smell of pure and complete cleanliness.

I followed a little path that led to a small copse, and there in the hedge—I could show you the place to this day—I saw for the first time a clump of wild primroses. I had never heard of Linnæus and the gorse, and I think it would have seemed to me rather profane to introduce primroses into my prayers, but I certainly felt that life would be something quite different ever afterwards.

The next days were full of beautiful surprises. Hens really did lay eggs in totally unexpected places, and on the second evening I found one in a hawthorn hedge. Cows were milked visibly, and the milk was good to drink. There was a hay-rick with a little niche in it, where one could lie in fragrant seclusion, and watch the mysteries of poultry life. Best of all there was a hedge-sparrow’s nest, in which one morning there appeared what might have been a piece of blue sky. Later there were four half-naked little forms, with veiled eyes and open mouths, which by degrees grew feathered and timid, and stared at me with apprehension. It was all strange and new and beautiful.

Near the hay-rick was a creviced wall, the home of tiny spiral snail shells, who lived in a wide forest of moss and lichen, and went out walking to see their friends on damp evenings.

We soon started a collection of these, and looked out their names in a green conchological manual, which described them as “minute shells.” This was taken to be a compound substantive, evidently constructed on the same principle as the word hour-glass.

About a week after we came to live in this new earth, I remember a great gale, which raged for two or three days, and on the second morning I was standing at the window of the nursery which looked towards the north, and heard during a temporary lull, a low rhythmical thunder, the sound of which for some reason, frightened me, and I was told it was the sound of the Atlantic waves seven miles away. That morning a great elm-tree was blown down, and I ran out, hoping to find something new and wonderful among the leaves at the top of the tree, now placed unexpectedly within my reach. I was just turning away disappointed, for the topmost branch seemed to be like any other branch, when I caught sight of a piece of blue mottled eggshell on the ground, and lying near it a little unfledged rook, dead and crushed.

The gardener said it was a pity it was so young, for a few more weeks would have qualified it for a rook pie. I thought it extremely unfeeling of him, and we buried the little body that afternoon with much ceremony in the shrubbery, and over its grave put a cross, formed of two hazel-twigs, and came in to tea with the feeling that we had done something very pious, and that it was rather like Sunday. At the same time I felt that we had had a perfectly charming time, and next morning I searched carefully round the neighbourhood of the fallen tree hoping to find another dead rook, or indeed anything capable of receiving decent and Christian burial.

These things are trifles, are they not? I found a dead rabbit here in the woods yesterday, and I did not get an empty box of Pears’ soap, and dig its grave under the cedar tree. It would have been quite ridiculous. Yet I thought that I would like to feel once more the childish instinct that made me bury the young rook that had rocked securely in the nest to the soft breeze, till that morning, when a blind gust overturned its home and its world. We have learnt so much since these dim childish days, and yet, after all, we are so little wiser: the mysteries of childhood have ceased to interest us, but not because we have found the key to them. The mystery is there in all its old beauty; it is we who have changed; we can calculate the force per square inch of the wind that lays our elm trees low, and the young dead rook may lie and rot. The gardener was quite right; it was a pity it did not live to qualify for a rook pie. That would have been far more useful. Yet I remember the burial of that young rook under the white flowering laurustinus more keenly than I remember any rook pie. The moral is that there are at least two ways of looking at everything, and which is the better, who shall say?

The next great joy was the aquarium. Measured by the limitations of actual space and cubic contents, the capacities of the aquarium were not large, for it was only a brown earthen-ware bowl with a diameter of about eighteen inches; but its potentialities were infinite. We had even dim ideas of rearing a salmon parr in it.

The happy hunting ground, from which the treasures of the aquarium were drawn, was a little stream that ran swiftly over gravelly soil about half-a-mile from our house. On each side of it stretched low lying water meadows, rich with rag-wort and meadow-sweet, among which one day we found a lark’s nest. Every now and then the stream spread out into shallow tranquil pools, overhung by thick angular hawthorns. Sticklebacks made their nests under the banks; small trout flashed through the clear shallows, and the caddice-worms collected the small twigs which fell from the trees, and made of them the rafters of their houses.

It was by such pools as these that we spent hours dabbling in the stream and filling small tin cans with water snails and caddices, for subsequent transference to the aquarium: here, too, we watched for the salmon parr, which did not exist, and laid dark plots against the little trout, which treated them with severe disdain, and here one evening we caught a stickleback. It was my sister’s doing, but I considered then, and consider still, that the credit was as much mine as hers.

It was this way: she had been poking our net as usual among the débris that lay in the backwater of the pool, and had found four caddices and two water snails, one of which was a new sort. She had just said “That’s all,” and was preparing to throw the rest back into the stream, when I saw something move at the bottom of the net, and there among the dead leaves and twigs lay a live stickleback. That night, the aquarium, which usually lived in an empty coach house, was moved solemnly up to the nursery. The idea of Gray’s cat and the gold fish was too strong for us: besides, if the cat did get at our stickleback, the aquarium would not be deep enough to drown it; and in any case the nervous shock to the stickleback might be fatal.

The week that followed was the balmiest period the aquarium ever knew. One morning, as we were watching the stickleback, a small gauzy being crawled up from the water and rested on the edge of the bowl. There was a bright sun shining, and in a moment or two his water-logged wings grew rapidly firm and iridescent, he fanned them up and down, and they became larger and more wonderful under our very eyes..... Ah well, it was only a caddice-worm turning into a fly. Such things happen very often.

The aquarium was paved with pieces of spa which we had picked up at Torquay the year before, and bright smooth sea pebbles. I am afraid the caddices would have preferred a little wholesome mud, but that was not to be thought of. Round the edge crept the water snails, and the caddice-worms hid among the spa and pebbles, and walked over each other, with a fine disregard of the laws of politeness. But the king of our water world was the stickleback: it is a very common fish, but to us there was only one, and that one was ours.

Every other day the aquarium used to be emptied out and fresh water was put in. This operation required some delicacy of handling. The water was strained through a very narrow piece of netting into the little drain outside the coach-house. Snails, caddice-worms, and stickleback were caught in the netting, and instantly placed in a temporary hotel, in the shape of an old washing basin, filled with water. Two tadpoles, which also belong to this period, used to cause us some uneasiness at such times. They would hide among the spa, at the bottom of the aquarium, at the imminent risk of being crushed as it was tilted up; besides this, the stickleback used to make short runs at them, and they did not get on at all well together. What we were to do when they became frogs, was a momentous question. If I had known French, I should have expressed my feelings about them by saying that they would be likely to have become déclassés by living with our stickleback in a palace of spa: as it was, I simply felt that it would be unsuitable to turn them back into the somewhat dirty pool from which they came, but that the impropriety of their continuing to live as frogs with the stickleback and the caddice-worms was more glaring still. They were decidedly of a different class; as long as they were tadpoles it did not matter; all classes meet as children. Again, they would soon be several sizes too large for the aquarium, and as our nurse said, they would be “all over.”

It was during one of these cleanings out that the great catastrophe happened. The stickleback, according to custom, was swimming fiercely and defiantly round the sinking water in the aquarium. He would always do this till there was scarcely any left, then make a sudden rush against the netting and try to swim through it, a feat which he never accomplished, but which he never perceived was impossible. How it happened I do not quite know, something caused me to let the water out less discreetly than usual; the last pint came with a sudden rush, and my sister who was holding the netting, dropped one corner of it. At this moment the stickleback charged, and for once passed the netting, and the next moment the flow of water had carried him down the drain.

For a space we sat silent, and then my sister said, with a curious tone in her voice which I had never heard before, but which I now associate with other griefs which we have been through together, “It is gone.”

We silently placed the netting with the caddice-worms and water snails in the basin, and extracted the tadpoles from the spa. We had not got the heart to arrange and clean out the aquarium, and it lay there empty, with the spa and pebbles scattered over the cobbled yard.

Later in the morning we came back again, and arranged it as usual. As our heads were bent together over it, while we placed the pebbles at the bottom, I saw two large tears roll from her eyes on to the red earthen-ware rim of the bowl, and when we had finished, we both looked at the little drain-hole where the stickleback had vanished, and our eyes met. We had not spoken about it since she said “It is gone.”

“I am so sorry,” she whispered, “oh, why did I let go of the net?” and another tear ran down her cheek.

“Don’t mind so much,” I said, “it was more my fault than yours. Something jogged my elbow.”

But we never caught another stickleback.