Читать книгу The Vagaries of Tod and Peter - L. Allen Harker - Страница 3

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A small boy coming down to the drawing-room at half-past five for the sacred hour of play, found a visitor absorbing his mother’s attention. For five minutes or so he politely refrained from interrupting their conversation, and he wandered about the room, a little disconsolate perhaps, but in that state of being described by nurses as “not a bit of trouble.” When, however, the five minutes lengthened into ten, he felt that direct action of some sort was imperative. So he advanced upon the lingering guest, laid small, imperative hands upon her knee; and lifting an anxious face to hers, enquired in honeyed tones: “Is you going to stay very much longer?”

That was in the forgotten, by some regretted, by many derided, nineties.

The other day I was having tea with a charming friend, wise mother of many sons, when the youngest, aged two, came for the sacred hour. It was pleasant in that drawing-room and I made no haste to go. Whereupon he came to me and, with a gracious, even a gallant, gesture, held out his hand to me with the utmost friendliness, conversing the while perpetually and emphatically in a manner difficult for the uninitiated to follow. Pleased and flattered, I took the kind little hand, which pulled me to my feet. He then firmly led me to the door and out to the top of the staircase, and was preparing to escort me downstairs and to the front door, when his mother ran after us and fetched us back.

Whatever else is changing in the present; bewildering world, there is one section of the community that is essentially Conservative, not to say “Die Hard.”

Outside my window there is a long, straggling street of old cottages which have altered very little since the fourteenth century, and in those little old houses dwell many children who play in the street, games that were doubtless popular “in Thebes’s streets three thousand years ago.”

The adult attitude towards children has changed even during the last fifty years, and largely for the better. Yet the child’s attitude towards his playmate, and even towards the omniscient grown-up, is fundamentally what it has been throughout the ages.

The early nineteenth century is often quoted by deprecators of the twentieth as a time when the attitude of youth towards age was particularly praiseworthy in its modesty and reverence. Such people, who are perhaps a little prone to forget their own youthful viewpoint, tell us that in those golden days children accepted without question the opinions of those who were set in authority over them, and were almost invariably obedient, contented and unenterprising. Yet, researches in the literature published especially for children by that “friend of youth,” John Newbery, at “the corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard,” in his little “gilt books”—most of them published between 1745 and 1802—prove that badly-behaved children were by no means uncommon, and that over-indulgent parents were not unknown. In the “Histories of More Children than One; or, Goodness Better than Beauty,” Master John and Miss Mary Strictum, who, as their names imply, are models of deportment, are unfavorably contrasted with Master Thomas and Miss Kitty Bloomer.

Thomas insists upon his papa’s horse being brought into the parlour for him to ride round the room. His mamma tried “to persuade him not to want it, but he would have his own way.”

“Thomas was much pleased to have it, but Kitty was afraid of it and did not like that it should stay. She therefore began to scream and beg it might go out. ‘Pray take it out!’ said she. ‘It shall go out; it shan’t stay.’

“‘It shan’t go out. It shall stay!’ said her brother.

“They made such a noise that they frightened the horse, and he began to kick and prance,” and all manner of disasters followed. Not even the most weak-minded modern parent could go further than this in the way of indulgence.

Even in so didactic a work as “The First Principles of Religion and the Existence of a Deity Explained in a Series of Dialogues Adapted to the Capacity of the Infant Mind,” you will find a child as human and engaging as any infant born since the Armistice. In this work the particular infant selected for enlightenment is one Maria, made after no formal pattern. Throughout the long and deadly dialogues her nimble mind outpaces mamma’s ponderous aphorisms. As, when that lady discourses on the awful consequences of taking God’s name in vain, Maria demands demurely: “But would it not be politer and prettier to say either Mr. or Mrs., and not plain God?”

Again, when her mother, as an example of the evils of slyness, relates how “the two Misses Quick had pincushions of the same make, but Miss Betty’s was larger than Miss Sally’s,” and Miss Sally by a subterfuge manages to exchange her own for her sister’s, Maria says thoughtfully: “Do you think then, Mamma, that it signifies to God which of the Miss Quicks had the larger pincushion?”

Could the most recent Realist ask a more searching question?

At Christmas time the papers seemed full of descriptions of blasé children who insisted on going to expensive shops to choose their own presents, who scoffed at fairies or Santa Claus, and scouted the idea of any sort of childlike party. I do not move in plutocratic circles, so I cannot vouch for either the truth or falsehood of these dismal revelations. But I do know that the vast majority of gently-bred children born before and during the years that followed 1914 are easily pleased, and are grateful for very small mercies in the way of amusement, because nothing else is possible to the greater part of the upper middle class for financial reasons. And no one who, in recent years, has been to “Peter Pan” and looked round the crowded theatre gloriously garlanded with chubby, rosy faces, and heard the full-throated affirmative that greets the question “Do you believe in fairies?” can doubt that children are still pretty sound on subjects of that sort.

This being so, is it incredibly bold or superlatively simple, on my part, to have ventured to collect into a little sheaf some fugitive sketches of the kind of children I have known during the last twenty-five years?

Perhaps it is, and that being so, I can only quote the lines in which Mr. Kipling has once and for all time summed up the humble plea of the free-lance:

When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,

He’d ’eard men sing by land an’ sea;

An’ what he thought ’e might require,

’E went an’ took—the same as me!

Cirencester

1923