WILLIAM’S family had come up to London for a holiday. They had brought William with them chiefly because it was not safe to leave William behind. William was not the sort of boy who could be trusted to live a quiet and blameless life at home in the absence of his parents. He had many noble qualities, but he had not that one. So William gloomily and reluctantly accompanied his family to London.
William’s elder sister and mother lived in a whirl of shopping and theatres; William’s elder brother went every day to see a county cricket match, and returned in a state of frenzied excitement to discuss the play and players all the evening without the slightest encouragement from any one; William’s father foregathered with old cronies at his club or slept in the hotel smoking-room.
It was open to William to accompany any of the members of his family. He might shop and attend matinées with his mother and Ethel, he might go (on sufferance) to watch cricket matches with Robert, or he might sleep in the smoking-room with his father.
He was encouraged by each of them to join some other member of the family, and he occasionally managed to evade them all and spend the afternoon sliding down the banisters (till firmly, but politely, checked by the manager of the hotel), watching for any temporary absence of the liftman during which he might try to manipulate the machine itself or contending with the most impudent-looking page-boy in a silent and furtive rivalry in grimaces. But, in spite of this, he was supremely bored. He regarded the centre of the British Empire with contempt.
“Streets!” he said, with devastating scorn, at the end of his first day here. “Shops! Huh!”
William’s soul pined for the fields and lanes and woods of his home; for his band of boon companions, with whom he was wont to wrestle, and fight, and trespass, and plot dare-devil schemes, and set the world at defiance; for the irate farmers who helped to supply that spice of danger and excitement without which life to William and his friends was unendurable.
He took his London pleasures sadly.
“Oh—history!” he remarked coldly, when they escorted him round Westminster Abbey. His only comment on being shown the Tower was that it seemed to be takin’ up the whole day, not that there was much else to do, anyway.
His soul yearned for the society of his own kind. The son of his mother’s cousin, who lived near, had come to see him one day. He was a tall, pale boy, who asked William if he could fox-trot, and if he didn’t adore Axel Haig’s etchings, and if he didn’t prefer Paris to London. The conversation was an unsatisfactory one, and the acquaintance did not ripen.
But, accompanying his family on various short cuts in the back streets of London, he had glimpsed another world, a world of street urchins, who fought and wrestled, and gave vent to piercing whistles, and hung on to the backs of carts, and paddled in the gutter, and rang front-door bells and fled from policemen. He watched it wistfully. Socially, his tastes were not high. All he demanded from life was danger and excitement and movement and the society of his own kind. He liked boys, crowds of boys, boys who shouted and whistled and ran and courted danger, boys who had never heard of any silly old etchings.