'But I not,' said June, shaking her head with a sort of solemn triumph, as though she thought it was very clever of her not to believe everything, and a great advance on the easy faith of her mother's youthful years; 'there isn't any hares with baskets, but only mummies.'
Then the mother stooped down and whispered that it was to be a secret between them, and June was so pleased at sharing a secret with her mother that she has faithfully kept it ever since, and has never breathed a doubt to April and May, who firmly believe in him to this day. I saw the mother a little while ago, and she told me so.
The Tea Party
The tea party began, very properly, with a German grace, and then April sat where the teapot was and poured out the tea; but the little cups came back to be filled again so quickly that she had no peace, and couldn't get on with her bread and butter, and as May and June wouldn't wait they began to help themselves, June drinking three cups to the other babies' one, so that by the time the party was over she was extremely full and unpopular. But she liked the feeling of being full, and as for being unpopular what did she care? She laughed till the tears rolled down her cheeks at the discomfiture of the others, when they found that even turning the teapot and milk jug upside down failed to produce another drop. They had had five cups each, and June had had fifteen. Saints would have been provoked at such gross unfairness and revolting greediness. April glared at her across the table: 'Guttersnipe!' she cried, in a voice of thunder.
'Look here, babies,' interrupted the mother from the other end of the room, feeling that the next thing to happen would be April's flinging herself upon June and sitting on her and jumping up and down, this being a favourite form of punishment, and knowing that people with fifteen cups of tea inside them mustn't be jumped on; 'look here, babies, at all the tunes I've made for you to-day. Did you ever hear of such a good mummy? Don't you want me to tell you the stories belonging to them?'
She knew this suggestion would bring them crowding round. It always did. There was nothing they loved so much as being told stories. Séraphine told them blood-curdling ones in French, all about bears and wolves coming to gobble up children who didn't prize and cherish their nurses as much as they deserved; you know the sort of story, I am sure,—the sort that makes your hair try to stand on end in the night if you wake up and begin to think of them. The babies' hair couldn't stand on end because it was too long, and besides, it was safely wrapped up in curl papers; but even if it could have it wouldn't have, for happily they were tough babies, and refused to be anything but amused by Séraphine's bears. I suppose nearly every baby has to pass through the stage of having to listen to the results in bears and black men of their nurse's fruitful imaginings, and it is a mercy if the victim is tough enough not to mind. When this mother I am telling you about was small, which she was in the days that for you children are merely pre-historic, during the greater part of three years she woke up every night and shivered for two or three hours, sick with fright, and very cold; and what do you think she was afraid of? A thing called the Crack of Doom, which her nurse had told her would usher in the Last Day; and the Last Day, said the nurse, might be expected to begin any night. The baby lay awake trembling, waiting to hear the crack, sure it would be a most horrible bang, her ears stuffed with as much of her stockings as would go in, besides her fingers, in abject misery every night for all that long time, when she might have been comfortably asleep. So when she grew up, and turned into a mother, she was thankful that her babies were so tough; and I hope all children who read this will try and be tough too, and refuse to be made wretched by such silly tales.
There was quite a little packet of tunes in the mother's hand, for, as I said, she had actually managed to write six that day. The babies sat at her feet, and she began to tell them the nursery rhymes, beginning with Hush-a-bye, Baby, and its perilous position, left in its cradle on the top of a tree. They thought the poor hush-a-bye baby couldn't have had a very nice mummy, and asked if it was smashed, and if so whether it ever got mended again, and what became of the cradle, and if Lieber Gott wasn't very angry with the mummy for letting her baby get broken, and a great many other questions that were not always easy to answer.
This is its tune: