MAX RUNS AMUCK
Greenways was overwhelmed with horror. It felt it ought to draw a veil of mist round its face and shrink from the public gaze instead of standing there brazenly smiling as usual amid its trees and flowers and pretending it was the abode of innocence and content.
Miss Bibby was extremely upset, sufficiently so to be nearly helpless in the crisis. The little girls whispered together with horrified and excited eyes and more than inclined to a theory that nothing short of a cable to New Zealand recalling their parents could adequately deal with the present situation.
Anna, who had quarrelled with her baker, said she was not in the least surprised, for men and boys were all the same, downright black at heart.
But Max stood fast in his iniquity.
Max, four-year old Max—whose “trousers” [p206] did not measure three inches in the inner seam of the leg—Max, who was not yet entirely initiated into the difficulties of speech, had broken forth into “language!”
No one knew where he could have possibly heard the hair-raising phrase. Certainly there was the gardener, Blake, about the premises who, being of the downright black-hearted sex, might have let fall the words Max had evidently garnered and laid by with such care and accuracy until occasion offered.
But he was so surly and monosyllabic a man that the children gave him the widest of berths, and therefore that theory was unlikely.
Anna aspersed the character of Larkin. A boy with hair that colour, she maintained, must be subject to periodical explosions, and it was probably during one of them that Max had secreted his bit of dynamite. But the little girls gave Larkin the warmest testimonials. In all the time they had known him he had never been guilty of anything stronger than “My jiggery!”
It all began with a bib at breakfast time.
When Anna would have tied it around Max’s neck, as she or some other person in her position had done for years, he jerked his head suddenly aside. “Take it away,” he said.
“But, darling,” said Miss Bibby, who [p207] was serving out the porridge, “you must have your bib on; don’t be naughty. Look, it’s the pretty one with Jack Sprat on it. Tie it on, Anna.”
Max ducked skilfully just as Anna brought the tapes together.
“Just look at ’im,” said the girl.
“Come, come, Max,” said Miss Bibby, “you don’t want to spoil that pretty coat with your porridge. Why, it’s your new coat with a pocket in! Let Anna tie it now, quickly.”
Again Anna essayed her task. Max held still till the square of huckaback portraying the economic existence of Jack Sprat and his wife was well beneath his chin, and the tapes gathered once more up into Anna’s hands.
Then he gave a movement like a plunging horse, seized the offending article and flung it with all his force across the table where it fell and floated upon the milk Muffie had poured over her porridge.
“Very well, Anna,” said Miss Bibby, “take the bib away and you need not wait. Master Max does not want any breakfast.”
This was quite true, for Master Max had quite satisfied his morning appetite by a surreptitious ten minutes at the mulberry tree while the three little girls were having their hair brushed.
[p208]
“Can I go?” he said eagerly.
“You mean, may I?” Miss Bibby said mechanically.
“Well, may I?”
“Certainly not. You will sit quite still as a gentleman should when ladies are still eating.”
Max cast a lowering glance at the ladies.
“Well, make her hurry,” he said; “look at her taking anover lot of leam.” He glared at Muffie.
“I shall take six lots of cream, if I choose,” said Muffie. “I’ve got to put something on to take away the taste of your horrid dirty bib.”
“It was a clean one, Muffie, or I should have passed you a fresh plateful,” said Miss Bibby; “at the same time that does not excuse Max for his ill-behaviour. Max, before I can overlook your conduct you must apologize to Muffie and to Anna.”
Muffie looked important; she rather enjoyed being apologized to.
Max sat very square on the big books of his chair; possibly their presence beneath him encouraged his rebellion by reminding him that until he took a firm stand against it a month or two ago a high chair had been considered fitted to his dignity.
“I’ve done wiv bibs,” he announced, and he looked the whole table fairly in the face.
[p209]
Pauline and Muffie and Lynn giggled a little. They had begun to recognize vaguely that Max was not exactly as they were.
When he stood with his little legs planted far apart and his little hands thrust deep in his knickerbocker pockets, and his little head cocked on one side, some subtle breath of a spirit, masculine and essentially opposed to their own, was wafted towards them.
“I’ve done wiv bibs,” he repeated.
“That will do, Max,” said Miss Bibby, coldly. “I shall consider you in disgrace, until you have told Anna and Muffie you are sorry.”
“I’ve done wiv bibs,” shouted Max.
“Go and stand in that corner, Max,” Miss Bibby said with unexpected sternness in her tone.
Max scrambled off his chair as if he could hardly reach the place indicated fast enough.
He ran right into the corner—gave a hard kick at the skirting board and made a rush for the door.
“I’ve done wiv bibs,” he shrieked, and tore away as fast as his legs could carry him into the garden.
“Go on with your breakfast, Lynn,” said Miss Bibby with as much calmness as she could muster,—“sit down immediately, Muffie—” for Muffie, excited by the unusual happening, had flown to the window to see [p210] where the rebel was heading for, “Max has forgotten himself, I am afraid.”
This was ever Miss Bibby’s phrase—ever her gentle optimism. If you lost your temper, your manners, your courage, any of your higher qualities, you had “forgotten yourself,” forgotten the fine, upright man you were by nature and become for a moment the shadowy ghost of that black unknown self that ever dogs one.
“As I have finished, I will ask you to excuse me, little girls,” Miss Bibby continued, rising from her seat. In point of fact, she had not yet consumed the whole of her slender meal, but who was to say what a boy with such a red, fierce little face might be doing?
She crossed the grass with troubled eyes. Max was too busy a little man to have fits like this often.
Now and again in wet weather, certainly, when he could not work off any superfluous steam in the garden, he had lately taken to flinging himself flat on the floor and kicking, if thwarted in any way. And Miss Bibby had vaguely recognized that this was due to his being deprived so long of the healthy moral tone of the presence of his mother and father—the latter in especial.
Anna opined that the easiest way to get him out of these “tantrums” was to bribe [p211] him with the offer of a large piece of chocolate.
“He’s only a baby,” she would say excusingly, “and besides, he’s a boy—it’s in him and it’s got to come out,—same as a measle rash. You’d think there’d be some med’cin for it, wouldn’t you?”
Kinross would have enjoyed the notion—the need of a Tonic for Eliminating the Black Corpuscles from the Blood of Boys.
Max saw Miss Bibby coming. In truth he had almost forgotten his recent revolt against law and order, for during his tumultuous passage through the garden, he had come across one of the guinea-pigs that had escaped from its bondage. An exciting chase had followed, but he had won, and in the satisfaction consequent upon victory he might have even been induced to overlook Miss Bibby’s behaviour.
But then he saw the gentle reproach in her eyes, and noted (the Judge himself had not the faculty of lightning observation possessed by his son) the nervous, half-conciliatory trepidation of her manner. He thrust his hands as deeply as they would go into his inadequate pockets and met her gaze unblinking.
“Why, Maxie,” she said, “I can’t believe this is the good little boy who was here yesterday. No, it is some other bad little fellow who has taken his suit and looks like him. [p212] Do you think if I look carefully about I could find my good little boy again?”
Max would have none of such folly.
“I’m me,” he said determinedly.
Miss Bibby sought to gather him up in her arms—the natural instinct. For indeed when your rebel’s “trousers” measure but three inches in the inner seam you cannot regard him as other than a baby.
But he held fast to the wire fence of the guinea-pigs’ run.
“I won’t be nursed,” he said. She stood ten minutes cajoling him, wheedling, coaxing, threatening. No, he would not return to his corner and work out his punishment, even though the punisher was eagerly offering to reduce the duration of it to “exactly three minutes, Max darling,—see, by this pretty little watch, and then we can all be friends again.”
No, Max would have no traffic at all in the offer of such an ignominious position.
“Well, see here, Max,” said the helpless lady recognizing and bowing at last to the stronger will, “if I let you off the corner will you run in and kiss Muffie and Anna to show you are sorry?” (The word “apologize” was eliminated now from this last treaty.)
No, Max would not kiss either Anna or Muffie. They were both “bad girls.”
“Very well, Max,” said Miss Bibby, “you [p213] only leave me one resort. I shall shut you up until you are good.”
“I can run licker than you,” was Max’s reply, and he ducked beneath her arm and dashed across the garden.
Miss Bibby’s blood rose high and she started to follow him. But how may a lady who for at least twenty years has done nothing but walk sedately ever expect or wildly hope to catch up a pair of brown muscular little legs? She was brought up panting, with her hand at her side before they had circled the bamboos three times and the quarry was plainly as fresh as ever. But:
“Escape me never, beloved,
While I am I and you are you.”
was Miss Bibby’s attitude now. She called to Anna to help with the chase. And Anna came cheerfully as well as of necessity, for Max had crushed mulberries on her snowy kitchen table, in an endeavour to “invent cochineal,” and it would take her hours to eradicate the stain.
The little girls came too—they felt it was more than half a game, for Max’s face was perfectly smiling and good-natured.
So Pauline stood guard at the waratahs, and Lynn and Anna prevented any more dodging at the bamboos, and Miss Bibby cut [p214] off the retreat to the house and Muffie worried him in the rear.
Surely, surely by tactics like these they drove him right into a corner. Had there been a fence he would have shown fight a little longer by scrambling up it and continuing the chase on the other side. But they had headed him to a hedge, an African box thorn hedge, and there was nothing more to be done. So he stuck his legs apart, and put his hands in his pockets and surveyed his captors as they closed in round him. And it seemed satisfactory to his self-respect that it had taken five of them—two quite grown-up, too—to beat him.
But Anna was singularly without the capacity for admiring fine deeds and simply grasped him firmly around the middle and bore him to the house.
He kicked all the way, merely to maintain his self-respect.
“Where shall I put ’im?” gasped the girl, stumbling along the hall, the other four at her heels.
“Here, here,” said Miss Bibby, opening the sitting-room door, and running across the floor to close and lock the French windows.
Anna stood him down on his feet and gave him one good, if unauthorized, shake for all the kicks she had received.
“There!” she said, as a woman will.
“The boy glared round at his victors.”
[p215] And it was precisely at this point the “language,” feelingly alluded to before, happened.
The boy glared round at his victors, now all grouped at the door.
“You beasly girls,” he said.
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