Part 6

Could brainy critics, peeled for the pounce, read that human document they would doubtless pause to enquire into its hidden meaning. On the surface it was written (_a_) to get 3_d._ out of W. W., (_b_) to give relief to Tintinnabulum’s ego. To the ordinary reader (with whom to-day we have no concern) this might suffice, but the digger would ask, what is the philosophy of life advanced by the author, is the whole thing an allegory and if so, what is Tintinnabulum’s Message; in short, is he, like the commoner writers, merely saying what he says, or, like the big chaps, something quite different?

Had his tutor considered the letter thus, we might have had a most interesting analysis of it (and no one would have been more interested than Tintinnabulum). But though a favourite of mine (and also of Tintinnabulum) his tutor is just slightly Victorian, and he went for the letter like one of the illiterate.

It was not seen by me until the two hopefuls returned to school, when I received it from their tutor with another one which is uncommonly like it. Investigation has elicited the following data, for which kindly allow me to use (_a_), (_b_) and (_c_) again, as I have taken a fancy to them.

(_a_) Letter is read and approved by W. W.

(_b_) W. W. on reflection objects to passage about the honour of messing with Tintinnabulum.

(_c_) Ultimatum issued by Tintinnabulum that the passage must be retained.

(_d_) MS. haughtily returned to the author.

(_e_) The author alters a few words and sends in letter as his own.

(_f_) W. W. has made a secret copy of the letter and sends it in as his, with the objectionable passage deleted.

(_g_) Their tutor smells a rat.

(_h_) He takes me into his confidence.

(_i_) Days pass but I remain inactive.

(_j_) He puts the affair into the hands of Beverley, the head of the house.

(_k_) Triumph of Miss Rachel.

Miss Rachel who is an old friend of ours is slight and frail, say 5 ft. 3, her biceps cannot be formidable and I question whether she could kick the beam however favourably it was placed for her. She is such an admirer of Tintinnabulum that he occasionally writhes, in his fuller knowledge of the subject.

Having led a quiet and uneventful life (so far as I know), Miss Rachel suddenly shoots into the light through her acquaintance with the Beverleys of Winch Park, which is, as it were, nothing; but the great Beverley, Beverley the thunderous, who is head of m’ tutor’s house, is a scion of that family; and now you see what a swell Miss Rachel has become. When Neil (as he then was) was entered for that great school she wrote to Beverley—fancy knowing someone who can write to Beverley—telling him (to Neil’s indignation) what a darling her young friend was and hoping Beverley would look after him and make him his dear little fag. Months elapsed before a reply came, but when it did come it really referred to Tintinnabulum and contained these pregnant words: “As to the person in whom you are interested, I look after him a good deal, and the more I see of him the more I lick him.”

Miss Rachel showed me the letter with exultation. So kind of him, she said, though she was a little distressed that a strapping fellow like Beverley should spell so badly.

More recently I had a letter from Tintinnabulum, which I showed to her as probably denoting the final transaction in the affair of the letter.

“W. W. and I,” it announced very cheerily, “saw Beverley yesterday in his room and he gave each of us six of the best.”

“How charming of Beverley!” Miss Rachel said.

“The best what?” she enquired, but I cannot have heard her, for I made no answer.

I learn that sometimes she thinks it was probably cakes and at other times fives balls, which she knows to be in great demand at that school. I shall not be surprised if Miss Rachel sends a dozen of the best to Beverley.

7. _How to Write a Collins_

I note that the dozen of the best shared by these two odd creatures seems to have made them pals again. The proof is that though they began the new half by messing with other youths they are now once more messing together.

“That priceless young cub, W. W.,” occurs in one letter of Tintinnabulum’s.

“W. W. is the lad for me,” he says in the next.

Again, I have a note of thanks for hospitality from W. W. in which he remarks, “Tintinnabulum is as ripping as ever.” This, however, is to be discounted, as, though the letter is signed W. W. Daly, I recognise in it another hand, I recognise this other hand so clearly that I can add a comment in brackets (3_d._).

Yes, I can do so (because of a game I have long been playing), but any other person would be deceived, just as m’ tutor was at first deceived by the epistles on the favourite walk. He told me that these were so fragrant of W. W. that he had thought Tintinnabulum must be the copy-cat. Indeed, thus it was held until W. W. nobly made confession.

What I must face is this, that Tintinnabulum, being (alas) an artist, has been inside W. W. Not only so, he has since his return to school been inside at least half a dozen other boys, searching for Collinses for them.

A Collins, as no one, perhaps except Miss Austen, needs to be told, is the fashionable name for a letter of thanks for hospitality to a host or hostess. Thus W. W.’s letter to me was a Collins. Somehow its fame has spread through his house, and now Tintinnabulum is as one possessed, writing threepenny Collinses for the deficient. They are small boys as yet, but as the quality of his Help is trumpeted to other houses I conceive Fields, Blues and Choices knocking at his door and begging for a Collins. It will be a great day for Tintinnabulum when Beverley applies.

The Collins letter is a fine art in which those who try the hardest often fall most heavily, and perhaps even m’ tutor or the Provost Himself, at his wit’s end how to put it neatly this time, will yet crave a 3_d._ worth. It may even be that readers grown grey in the country’s service, who quake at thought of the looming Collins, would like to have Tintinnabulum’s address. It is refused; but I mention, to fret them, that his every Collins is guaranteed different from all his other Collinses, and to be so like the purchaser that it is a photograph.

If you were his client you could accept Saturday to Monday invitations with a light heart. But don’t, when he is at your Collins, go near him and the babe lest he clutch it to his breast and growl. He has the great gift of growling, which will yet make him popular with another sex.

His concentration on the insides of others is of course very disturbing to me, but I should feel still more alarmed if I heard that he had abandoned the monetary charge and, for sheer love of the thing, was turning out Collinses gratis.

To-day there comes a ray of hope from a harassed tutor, who writes that Tintinnabulum has deserted the Collins for googly bowling, the secrets of which he is pursuing with the same terrific intensity. I can picture him getting inside the ball.

8. _He and I and Another_

You readers may smile when I tell you why I have indited these memories and fancies. It was not done for you but for me, being a foolish attempt to determine, by writing the things down (playing over by myself some of the past moves in the game), whether Tintinnabulum really does like me still. That he should do so is very important to me as he recedes farther from my ken down that road which hurries him from me. I cannot, however, after all, give myself a very definite answer. He no longer needs me of course, as Neil did, and he will go on needing me less. When I think of Neil I know that those were the last days in which I was alive.

Tintinnabulum’s opinion of himself, except when he is splashing, is lowlier than was Neil’s; some times in dark moods it is lowlier than makes for happiness. He has hardened a little since he was Neil, coarsened but strengthened. I comfort myself with the curious reflection that the best men I have known have had a touch of coarseness in them.

Perhaps I have made too much of the occasional yieldings of this boy whom I now know so superficially. The new life is building seven walls around him. Are such of his moves in the game as I can follow merely an expert’s kindness to an indifferent player?

On the other hand, I learn from a friendly source that he has spoken of me with approval, once at least, as “mad, quite mad,” and I know that my battered countenance, about which I am very “touchy” excites his pity as well as his private mirth. On the last night of the holidays he was specially gruff, but he slipped beneath my door a paper containing the words “I hereby solemnly promise never to give you cause for moral anxiety,” and signed his name across a postage stamp to give the document a special significance. Nevertheless, W. W. and he certainly do at times exchange disturbing glances of which I am the object, and these, I notice, occur when I think I am talking well. Again, if I set off to tell a humorous story in company nothing can exceed the agony on Tintinnabulum’s face. Yet I am uncertain that this is not a compliment, for if he felt indifferently toward me why should he worry about my fate?

During those holidays a master at his old preparatory sent me a letter he had received from Tintinnabulum (whom he called Neil), saying that as it was about me he considered I ought to read it. But I had not the courage to do so. Quite likely it was favourable, but suppose it hadn’t been. Besides, it was not meant for me to see, and I cling to his dew-drop about my being mad. On the whole, I think he is still partial to me. Corroboration, I consider, was provided at our parting, when he so skilfully turned what began as a tear into a wink and gazed at me from the disappearing train with what I swear was a loving scowl.

What will become of Tintinnabulum? There was a horror looking for him in his childhood. Waking dreams we called them, and they lured Neil out of bed in the night. It was always the same nameless enemy he was seeking, and he stole about in various parts of the house in search of it, probing fiercely for it in cupboards, or standing at the top of the stairs pouring out invective and shouting challenges to it to come up. I have known the small white figure defend the stair-head thus for an hour, blazing rather than afraid, concentrated on some dreadful matter in which, tragically, none could aid him. I stood or sat by him, like a man in an adjoining world, waiting till he returned to me, for I had been advised, warned, that I must not wake him abruptly. Gradually I soothed him back to bed, and though my presence there in the morning told him, in the light language we then adopted, that he had been “at it again” he could remember nothing of who the enemy was. It had something to do with the number 7; that was all we ever knew. Once I slipped from the room, thinking it best that he should wake to normal surroundings, but that was a mistake. He was violently agitated by my absence. In some vague way he seemed on the stairs to have known that I was with him and to have got comfort from it; he said he had gone back to bed only because he knew I should be there when he woke up. I found that he liked, “after he had been an ass,” to wake up seeing me “sitting there doing something frightfully ordinary, like reading the newspaper,” and you may be sure that thereafter that was what I was doing.

After he had been a year or two at his preparatory, Neil did a nice thing for me; one of a thousand. I had shaken my head over his standing so low in Maths, though he was already a promising classic, and had said that it was “great fun to be good at what one was bad at.” A term or two later when he came home he thrust the Maths prize into my hand. “But it wasn’t fun,” he growled. (It was Neil’s growl before it was Tintinnabulum’s.) He came back to blurt out, “I did it because in those bad times you were always sitting there with the newspaper when I woke.”

By becoming Tintinnabulum he is not done with his unknown foe, though I think they have met but once. On this occasion his dame had remained with him all night, as he had been slightly unwell, and she was amused, but nothing more, to see him, without observing her, rise and search the room in a fury of words for something that was not there. The only word she caught was “seven.” He asked them not to tell me of this incident, as he knew it would trouble me. I was told, and, indeed, almost expected the news, for I had sprung out of bed that night thinking I heard Neil once again defending the stair. By the time I reached Tintinnabulum it had ceased to worry him. “But when I woke I missed the newspaper,” he said with his adorable smile, and again putting his hand on my shoulder. How I wished “the newspaper” could have been there. There are times when a boy can be as lonely as God.

[Illustration: “I DID IT BECAUSE YOU WERE ALWAYS SITTING THERE WITH THE NEWSPAPER WHEN I WOKE”]

What is the danger? What is it that he knows in the times during which he is shut away and that he cannot remember to tell to himself or to me when he wakes? I am often disturbed when thinking of him (which is the real business of my life), regretting that, in spite of advice and warnings, I did not long ago risk waking him abruptly, when, before it could hide, he might have clapped seeing eyes upon it, and thus been able to warn me. Then, knowing the danger, I would for ever after be on the watch myself, so that when the moment came, I could envelop him as with wings. These are, of course, only foolish fears of the dark, and with morning they all fly away. Tintinnabulum makes very merry over them. I have a new thought that, when he is inside me, he may leave them there deliberately to play upon my weakness for him and so increase his sock allowance. Is the baffling creature capable of this enormity? With bowed head I must admit he is. I make a note, to be more severe with him this half.

[Illustration]

The Dream

HERBERT ASQUITH

My dream? Can I remember my dream? I was floating down the nursery stair, And my little terrier ran in front With his feet treading on the air; And when we came to the dining-room, The King and the Queen were there: And father and mother, two and two; And a baby elephant from the Zoo, Each on a golden chair; And three soldiers, and Mary Rose Riding an ostrich that pecked her toes, And Uncle Jim Looking very trim, Eating a kipper. And, when they had sung to the King, They all sat down in a ring, And played at hunt the slipper.

Then I saw a curling stream And yellow flow’rs in a meadow, And six little green frogs Dancing a jig in the shadow: And the tune came from a bough, “Tweet, tweet, quiver,” Sung by a little brown bird That swayed above the river.

Then we all started to dance, And Aunt Rebecca too; Uncle Jim began to prance, And the baby elephant blew A curl of smoke from his cigar, As he sat and watched the evening star. And the little brown bird sang on, Swaying above the river: But a wind came whispering down, And the leaves began to shiver.

Then with a crackly sound Uncle Jim went flat: He turned into a cricket-bat; But Aunt Rebecca grew very round And floated up like a black balloon, Higher and higher, into the Moon. The stars fell out of the sky; The baby elephant whined: “Time to get up” said nurse: And “Flap” went the blind.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

Mr. Snoogles

By Elizabeth Lowndes

Veronica lay very still in bed, then she stretched out as far as she could. Her feet travelled down to that cold region near where the sheets and blankets disappear under the mattress. She was certainly still awake, for one doesn’t stretch in dreams, and if one did one would certainly wake up.

Then she cautiously raised herself upon one elbow and looked round, slowly, at the fire. Ever since Teddy had said that Mr. Snoogles lived up the chimney she had regarded the fire with much greater interest, not to say dread. Not that Mr. Snoogles was real. He was just fun. And yet, though Veronica knew he was only fun, she often wondered how he managed to fit in the inside of the chimney—if, that is, he was at all like father, or even Dr. Blackie (who wasn’t at all big for a man). But then Teddy was the only person who claimed to have ever seen this person who had taken refuge in their chimneys, and he couldn’t be made to describe him.

In the morning and in the afternoon Mr. Snoogles was much more amusing than any shop-bought game. Veronica would laugh over him, and invent long conversations in which he said such silly things! But when the evening crept on, and the fire crackled in the grate, and flickered on the walls, it made it all so different. Why do things which aren’t true make you think they are true, at night?

Veronica remembered uneasily a curious dream. She was no longer a big girl with short hair and long thin legs; she was a green velvet pin-cushion, and pins of various sizes and colours were just about to be stuck into her before she was sent off to a village bazaar. Though that was only a dream, for a long time she never saw a pin-cushion without thinking of herself as one....

And now, to-night, she at last lay back in bed out of sight of the fire, and tried to plan adventures for the next day. Why did real adventures always pass her by?

Suddenly she heard a curious low rumbling sound. For a moment she hoped and yet dreaded that it came from the direction of the chimney, but when the sound got louder, as it did very soon, she burst out laughing, for it was only Teddy snoring. The door between their rooms was open, so no wonder she heard him. How funny, and how disappointing!

In time Veronica’s eyes closed without her noticing it, and lying there, so comfortable and so warm in bed, just on that borderland of the ordinary world of lessons and rice pudding (when one expected something else with jam on it) and that other delicious world of dreams and vague sensations.

But all at once Veronica heard a great clatter. She sat up in bed and opened her eyes wide to see in the firelight a most curious little person. He had leapt out of the chimney and dropped all the fire-irons in a heap at his feet. She could see them lying there on the white woolly mat, all at sixes and sevens.

He was very small, about as high as the poker. He had large round eyes, nearly as round as two pennies. And on his head, perched on the very top, was the lid of the nursery kettle! It was a copper kettle, and was always kept very bright.

The stranger was dressed in black and his clothes fitted him quite tight, like a well-drawn-up stocking or a glove.

Veronica gazed at him, her eyes growing almost as round as his own.

Then he stamped his foot, and raising his arms over his head, he made a low bow.

“Madam, your wish to see me, though it is only prompted by idle curiosity, has brought me down from my kingdom among the chimney pots. I have a request to make to you. Will you take my place for a few hours? I am called away on urgent private affairs, but I cannot leave my work up there unless you will give me your help.”

His voice was high and sharp. It was rather like listening to a sparrow.

[Illustration: “HE MADE A LOW BOW”]

He went straight on, without waiting for an answer. “It is a mistake to suppose that I live in the chimney. It would be most disagreeable to do so, as I should have thought you, who have imagination, would realize. But I am talking too much. I wait respectfully, Madam, for your answer. Will you help me?”

Veronica wriggled uncomfortably under the warm bedclothes.

“I will help you if I can.” She was a cautious, as well as a truthful, child, so she added hastily, “I don’t want to say I will, if I can’t. And are you—_are_ you Mr. Snoogles?”

The strange little man standing on the mat threw back his head so suddenly that the lid of the kettle fell off and bounced away behind the coal scuttle.

“Oh, how funny!” he laughed. “I shall add that to my collection. No, I’m _not_ Mr. Snoogles; but I am the person whom your brother calls Mr. Snoogles.”

“So Teddy _has_ seen you after all. Sometimes I thought Mr. Snoogles was only a game.”

“Indeed, I’m not a game. What a horrid thing to be! Imagine being a football?”

“Or a pin-cushion,” said Veronica hastily. “I know because I believed I was one once, but only for a short time,” she added, because she was truthful, but also in case Mr. Snoogles found a stray pin on the floor and, remembering what she had said, might stick it into her. He looked such a tidy man.

“I can assure you, Madam, that I will not request you to do anything at all difficult. I shall only require your services for a short period—say about ten years.”

“_Ten years?_ But in ten years I shall be quite old—that is, quite grown up. I shall be twenty-one.”

“Well, what of that? My work is much more amusing than what you do all day—lessons, walks, quarrels.”

Veronica felt a little taken aback.

“But I don’t quarrel—that is to say, not much, not nearly as much as do our cousins in the country or as the long-haired family we see in the park. Would you like to hear my names? I am not madam yet. You see, I am not married. And won’t you sit down?”

“No, I never sit down. It’s lazy. Proceed with your names. Though I know what I call you to myself.”