‘Do you think that I don’t feel that, too?’ she asked. ‘Can’t you see that the wife who is mother of nothing must feel it more than the husband who is father of nothing? Besides, you make your books—you are father to them. What do I do? I order dinner.’
And yet—it seems to me so strange now—I did not see. There was bitterness in her words, but all I thought was that there was no bitterness in her voice, or her face, or her smile. I did not quite understand that, I remember, but Helen has told me since that she did not mean me to. She wanted—well, her plan evolves itself.
And then she took my arm again.
‘It is nearly a month since dear Legs went away,’ she said, ‘since we have actually heard and seen him. The last we heard was that he wanted us to buck up. Do you know, I think we have bucked up. But we have been doing that singly; we have somehow lived rather apart, dear. Surely it is better to buck up together. I think the idea of a young museum is a very good one. Let us put all the things we can’t throw away into his room. We have never used the room before, because Legs might always rush down and want a bed; and so let us keep it like that. We might call it the nursery.’
And so the young museum was started. Helen had all manner of tender trifles for it, all connected with Legs. She had all sorts of things I had known nothing of: little baby garments, Legs’ bottle, some baby socks. Then there were child things as well: ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ the depressing Swiss family called Robinson, a far better Robinson called Crusoe.
And thus the nursery grew. ‘Treasure Island’ went there; a rocking-horse, which I remembered of old days, was brought down from an attic. Oh, how well, when I saw him again, I remembered him! He had a green base, nicely curved, on which he pranced to and fro, and my foot had once been under it when he pranced, so that I lost a toenail, and was rewarded with sixpence for stopping crying. He had a hollow interior, the only communication with which were the holes of the pommels, and on another dreadful day my sister had dropped a three-penny-bit into one of them, with some idea of making a bank. A bank it was, but the capital was irrecoverable. The coin was still there, for now I took up the whole horse with ease, that steed which had so often carried me, and heard a faint chink from his stomach. He had a wild eye, too, and flaming red nostrils, and the paint smelt just the same as ever. And Helen produced a Noah’s ark, in which the paint was of familiar odour, but different, and there was Ham without a stand, and Mrs. Noah in a neat brown ulster, and Noah with a beard, and one good foot, but the other was a pin. Elephants were there with pink trunks (I never could understand why), and enormous ducks with pink bills (which now threw a light on the colour of the elephants’ trunks, since I suppose that a brush full of pink was indiscriminately bestowed), and small spotted tigers, and nameless beasts which we called lynxes, chiefly because we did not know what they were, and did not know what lynxes were, so they were probably the ones. The ark itself had Gothic windows, and a mean white bird, with a piece of asparagus in its mouth, painted on the roof, probably indicated the dove and the leaf.
We must have spent two days over the nursery, and during those days we concentrated there all the young things of the house, and when it was finished it was a motley room. There were photographs of Legs everywhere; all his papers were kept; everything that had any connection with Legs and with youth was crammed into it. And when it was finished we found that we sat there together, instead of paying secret visits to the room, and we played at Noah’s ark, sitting on the carpet, and played at soldiers, clearing a low table which had been Helen’s nursery-table (for you cannot play soldiers on the floor, since they stagger on a carpet), and peas from pea-shooters sent whole rows of Grenadiers down like ninepins. But we could neither of us ride the rocking-horse, so instead we tilted him backwards and forwards, and pretended he was charging the foe.
Of course, all reasonably-minded readers will say we were two absurd people. We both of us disagree altogether. For you have to judge of any proceedings by its effects, and the effect in this case was that Legs’ injunction that we should ‘buck up’ became a habit. That inimitable youth which Legs gave the home, he, his bodily presence, had gone. But somehow the atmosphere was recaptured. We played at youth, at childhood, till it became real again. For a household without youth in it is a dead household; a puppy or a kitten may supply it, or an old man of eighty may supply it. But youth of some kind must be part of one’s environment. Else the world withers.
Another thing has happened to me personally. I have said that at the beginning of the year I looked forward into the future through two transparencies, one sunlit, the other dark. But now the dark one (I can express it in no other way) had been withdrawn. Dear Legs’ death was not quite identical with it, for it was not withdrawn then. But during the month that followed it gradually melted away. I can trace just two causes for it.
The first was this: In ineptitude of spirit I had reasoned to myself that the death of the body logically implied the merging of the life into the one central life. But after his death Legs became to my spirit more individual than ever. And the second cause was this establishment of the nursery. Though youth might have passed for oneself, it still lived. One was wrong, too (at least I was), in thinking it had passed from oneself. Else how did I feel so singularly annoyed when Helen shot down with a wet pea a whole regiment of my Life Guards? I was annoyed; I am still. It was a perfect fluke that the Colonel on horseback fell in such a way that he more than decimated his own regiment. And I am sure Helen shook the table, else why should the Brigadier-General, posted in the extreme rear, have fallen off the table altogether? She won.