What is there to do but hang one’s head, and plead guilty?
Boys are his pet aversion. Whether boys have in some way a fellowship with the gods (which I suspect), or whether they are victoriously antagonistic, it matters not. They are to the gardener so many creatures whom he classes along with snails, bullfinches, rabbits and wasps as “varmints.”
One can hear him sometimes invoking a god of the name of Gum. “By Gum! them young varmints a-been ’ere again. By Gum!”
He then makes an offering to this god in the shape of a bonfire, the smell of which is more than most scents for wonder.
It is when Walter makes a bonfire that he is more god-like than ever. He stands, a thick figure, deep in the chest, broad in the shoulder, by the pile of dead leaves, twigs, and garden rubbish, the smoke enveloping him in misty wreaths, and the sun flashing on his fork as he pitches fresh fuel on the smouldering fire. A tongue of flame, greedily licking up leaves and dry sticks, lights on his impassive face, and a quivering orange streak along the muscles of his arms. We are fascinated by his arms. They contain, I believe, the history of his mortal life and ambitions, and are a key to his hidden emotions.
On one arm is a ship under full sail, done in blue and red tattoo. Below the ship is the word “Jane”; below that is a twist of rope. On the other arm is a heart, the initials S.M., and an anchor.
When we were young these two arms of Walter’s were an entire literature to us. We read him first, I think, a pirate, very grim and horrible, and we translated “S.M.” as Spanish Main. A little later we dropped the idea of the pirate, and took to the notion that Walter had been (if he was not still) a smuggler who landed cargoes of rum from the good ship “Jane,” and deposited them with the landlord of the “Saucy Mariner.” It is noticeable that we left out the heart in all these romances. Then, at some impressionable moment, Walter became a seaman who had given his heart to Sarah Mainwaring, which name we got from a man who had given us a dog, and in spite of that we accepted it as fact. I think we once descended so low as to think that the whole thing had no nautical significance, and was a secret sign of some terrible society who met for purposes of revenge. This, of course, was the result of contemporary reading.
Then came the great day upon which Walter was definitely asked what the signs and pictures on his arms did mean.
“Mind out,” was all the answer we got, and Walter retired with the wheelbarrow to his citadel—the potting shed.
It was tried again a little later, and this time met with a little better response, because, I suppose, we had done more than half his day’s work for him.