Jasper was a cause of anxiety at these functions, because he would put a whole plate in his mouth at once. The V.A.D. doll fell over backward, she was so shocked. Such voluptuous gastronomic joys as chocolate éclaires and cream buns woke no responsive thrill in Jasper’s breast, for he had never either seen nor tasted one or the other, so when called upon to pretend to eat something, he seized the nearest thing of handy size.
The children’s house had a basement, but George’s mother lived in a beautiful Willet house that had none, so that autumn he and his mother and their maids used to run over “to spend the raid” with Jasper’s household when the first maroons sounded.
After the Zeppelin raids the doll’s house had been brought down from the nursery to a room in the basement where there was a gas fire, and the children used to play with it and enact many thrilling dramas while the raids were going on. As George had prophesied, London got it particularly hot during the harvest moon of 1917, with five raids in eight nights.
They had all just got back from a holiday in the country and, with the exception of Barbara, who was gun-shy and hated the noise, they really felt the strain far less than the grown-ups.
Jasper usually slept most of the time in his mother’s arms, but after a particularly loud crash would rouse himself to murmur with sleepy complacency: “That was a good one. We got ’em that time.”
But Barbara, when the barrage was unusually deafening and prolonged, remarked rather piteously: “How it must ’asturb the poor angels!”
It was during the very last raid of all, in May of the following year, that something happened to the doll’s house. It was on a Sunday night, and the maroons didn’t start till eleven o’clock. George and his household hurried over as soon as he had got some clothes on, and Jasper woke up and was very talkative and cheerful. Arrayed in a blue dressing-gown and bed-shoes, he ran about the room, interfering with George and his sisters in their arrangement of the Strachan family, and shouting lustily in concert with the louder crashes.
He wasn’t often allowed to touch the interior of the doll’s house, for his methods were too Bolshevist, and he was inclined to instigate conduct wholly opposed to the characters of so douce and respectable a family.
That night Barbara insisted that Jeannie, the maid, and the baby should take refuge under one of the counters, while Mr. and Mrs. Strachan and the shop assistants crouched behind the other.