The Boy has started with a considerable capital of knowledge, gathered at school, and in a few weeks he is free of the streets—a full-grown citizen in his own kingdom, and, if you please, we will watch him for an hour. His master has given him some fish, and charged him as he values his life to deliver them at once at No. 29, Rose Terrace, and the boy departs with conscientious purpose. Half way to his destination he sees in the far distance the butcher's boy, who also has been sent in hot haste to some house where the cook is demanding the raw material for luncheon. They signal to one another with clear, penetrating, unintelligible cries like savages across a desert, and the result is that the two messengers rendezvous at the corner of Rose Terrace. What they talk about no person can tell, for their speech is their own, but by-and-by under the influence of, no doubt informing, conversation, they relax from there austere labours and lay down their baskets. A minute later they are playing marbles with undivided minds, and might be playing pitch and toss were they not afraid of a policeman coming round the corner. It is nothing to them, gay, irresponsible children of nature, that two cooks are making two kitchens unbearable with their indignation, for the boy has learned to receive complaints with imperturbable gravity and ingenious falsehood. Life for him is a succession of pleasures, slightly chastened by work and foolish impatience. As they play, a dog who has been watching them from afar with keen interest, and thoroughly understands their ways, creeps near with cautious cunning, and seizing the chance of a moment when the butcher's boy has won a “streaky” from the fishmonger, dashes in and seizes the leg of mutton. If he had been less ambitious and taken a chop, he would have succeeded, and then the boy would have explained that the chop had been lost in a street accident in which he was almost killed, but a leg of mutton is heavy to lift and a boy is only less alert than a dog. The spoil is barely over the edge of the basket, and the dog has not yet tasted its sweetness, before the boy gives a yell so shrill and fearsome that it raises the very hair on the dog's back, and the thief bolts in terror without his prey. The boy picks up the mutton, dusts it on his trousers, puts it back in the basket, gives the fishmonger a playful punch on the side of the head, to which that worthy responds with an attempted kick, and the two friends depart in opposite directions, whistling, with a light heart and an undisturbed conscience.
If any one imagines that the boy will now hurry with his fish, he does not understand the nature of the race and its freedom from enslaving rule. A few yards down Rose Terrace he comes upon the grocer's boy and the two unearth a chemist's boy, and our boy produces a penny dreadful, much tom and very fishy, but which contains the picture of a battle swimming in blood, and the three sit down for its enjoyment. When they have fairly exhausted their literature the boy receives his fee, as the keeper of a circulating library, by being allowed to dip his finger carefully wetted before into a bag of moist sugar, and to keep all that he can take out, and the grocer's boy is able to close up the bag so skilfully that the cook will never know that it has been opened. From the chemist he receives a still more enjoyable because much more perilous reward, for he is allowed to put his mouth to the spout of a syphon and, if he can endure, to take what comes—and that is the reason why syphons are never perfectly full. It occurs to the chemist at this moment that he was told to lose no time in delivering some medicines, and so he departs reluctantly; the conference breaks up, and it seems as if nothing remained for the boy but to deliver the fish. Still you never know what may happen, and as at that moment he catches sight of a motor-car, it seems a mere duty to hurry back to the top of the terrace to see whether it will break down. It does of course, for otherwise one could hardly believe it to be a motor-car, and the boy under what he would consider a call of providence, hastens to offer assistance. Other boys arrive from different quarters, interested, sympathetic, obliging, willing to co-operate with the irritated motor-man in every possible way. They remain with him twenty-five minutes till he starts again, and then three of them accompany him on a back seat, not because they were invited, but because they feel they are needed. And then the boy goes back to Rose Terrace and delivers the fish, stating with calm dignity, that he had just been sent from the shop and had run all the way.
Things are said to him at the house by the cook, who is not an absolute fool, and things may be said to him by his master at the shop, who has some knowledge of boys, but no injurious reflection of any kind affects the boy. With a mind at leisure from itself he is able to send his empty basket spinning along the street after a lady's poodle, and to accompany this attention with a yell that will keep the pampered pet on the run for a couple of streets to the fierce indignation of its mistress. And the chances are that he will foregather with an Italian monkey boy, and although the one knows no Italian and the other knows no English, they will have pleasant fellowship together, because both are boys, and in return for being allowed to have the monkey on his shoulder, and seeing it run up a waterpipe, he will give the Italian half an apple which comes out of his pocket with two marbles and a knife attached to it. If he be overtaken by a drenching shower, he covers his head and shoulders with his empty basket, sticks his hands in his pockets, and goes on his way singing in the highest of spirits, but if the day be warm he travels on the steps of a'bus when the conductor is on the roof, or on a lorry, if the driver be not surly. If it be winter time, and there be ice on the streets, he does his best, with the assistance of his friends, to make a slide, and if the police interfere, with whom he is on terms of honourable warfare, he contents himself with snowballing some prudish-looking youth, who is out for a walk with his mother. All the same he is not without his ambitions in the world, and he carries sacred ideals in the secret of his heart. He would give all that he possesses,—five lurid and very tattered books, a penknife with four blades (two broken), nineteen marbles (three glass), and a pair of white mice—to be the driver of a butcher's cart. The boy is a savage, and although you may cover him with a thin veneer of civilization he remains a savage. There is a high-class school for little boys in my district, and those at a distance are driven home in cabs that they may not get wet in winter weather and may not be over-fatigued. A cab is passing at this moment with four boys, who have invited two friends to join them, and it is raining heavily. Two boys are on the box seat with the driver, and have thoughtfully left their topcoats inside in case they might get spoiled. There is a boy with his head out at either window addressing opprobrious remarks to those on the box-seat, for which insults one of them has just lost his cap, the other two are fighting furiously in the bottom of the cab, and will come out an abject spectacle. For you may train a dog to walk on its hind legs, and you may tame a tiger, but you cannot take the boyness out of a boy.
VI.—A RESIDUARY
I
EXCEPTIONS may be allowed in theory, at least, but the rule stands impregnable in reason and practice, that a wife should have the absolute control of the household, and that no male person should meddle, even as an irresponsible critic, with the servant department. There are limits to the subjection of the gentler sex which reserves the right to choose its acts of homage to the titular head of the family. Can anything be prettier, for instance, than the deference which women of very pronounced character will show to their husbands in some affairs? “Nothing would have given me greater pleasure than to have taken a stall at your charming bazaar, but my husband absolutely forbids me, and you know what a tyrant he is about my health,” or “You really must not ask my opinion about the Eastern Question, for I am shockingly ignorant of politics, but my husband knows everything, and I have heard him say that the Government has been very weak.” It would not, however, be wise for this favoured man to trespass too far on the almost Oriental deference of his wife, or hastily to suppose that because his word was useful in saving her from the drudgery of an unfashionable bazaar or the weary drone of a conversational bore, his was a universal infallibility. This sweet spirit of passive obedience will not continue if a rash man should differ from the house manager on the technical merits of a servant, for he will then be told that his views on all such matters are less than nothing and vanity.
No man knows, nor ever expects to know, what women talk about after they have left the dining-room in stately procession and secluded themselves in the parliament of the drawing-room; but it may be guessed that the conference, among other things, reviews the incredible folly of mankind in the sphere of household affairs. How it will not give the head of the family one minute's serious concern that the cook feeds her kinsfolk with tit-bits in the kitchen, provided that his toast be crisp and his favourite dish well cooked. How he would any day give a certificate of character to the housemaid, if he were allowed to perpetrate such an absurdity, simply and solely on the ground that his bath was ready every morning, and his shaving-water hot, while he did not know, nor seem to care, that the dust was lying thick in hidden corners. How he would excuse the waitress having a miscellaneous circle of admirers, provided she did not loiter at the table and was ingenious in saving him from unwelcome callers. They compare notes on the trials of household government; they comfort one another with sympathy; they revel in tales of male innocence and helplessness, till they are amazed that men should be capable of even such light duties as fall on them in their daily callings, and are prepared to receive them kindly as they enter the room with much diffidence and make an appeal by their very simplicity to a woman's protecting care.
John Leslie was devoted to his very pretty and very managing wife, and had learned wisdom, so that he never meddled, but always waited till his advice was invited. Like other wise husbands, he could read his wife's face, and he saw that afternoon, two days before Christmas, as soon as he entered the drawing-room, that there had been trouble in the household. His kiss was received without response; her cheeks had the suggestion of a flush; her lips were tightly drawn; and there was a light in her eyes which meant defiance. She stated with emphasis, in reply to a daily inquiry, that she was perfectly well, and that everything had gone well that day. When she inquired why he should suppose that anything was wrong, he knew that it had been a black storm, and that the end thereof was not yet.