One had the feeling about Guy that the world must be his to do what he liked with; that he could do or have whatever he set his heart on. He threw his head right back when he laughed, and opened his mouth very wide. Anyone who heard Guy laugh was bound to laugh too. You could not help it; it made the world full of laughter.
He used to sing with Cousin Delia a great deal. His voice was a pleasure to her, and his love for the songs she loved.
I remember them singing the ‘Agnus Dei’ from Mozart’s Third Mass one winter evening in the long drawing-room. Guy looked so tall and big in the lamplight, and Cousin Delia so happy; and he let himself go and sang with all his might. It was exciting and wonderful.
Sometimes people came to stay—various cousins and second cousins—and sometimes Guy and Hugo brought friends back from Winchester; but most of them did not count very much.
Guy used to hunt too, and made friends with people he met out hunting. They would come to meals and sometimes spend the night. We liked them when they came, but did not miss them when they went away. We were I think too contented by ourselves. Later when they were at Oxford they made friends who counted in a different way, and became a part of all our lives.
Hugo was very happy at this time. When I think of him in those years, it is generally happy. He did not laugh as Guy did, loud, with his head thrown back; his was a lower, more gurgling kind of laughter; but his eyes danced and his whole face twinkled.
I remember his laughing at me one day in the hay. They were making hay on the grass hill below the wood, and we had been helping, and he threw himself down on one of the new-made ‘pikes,’ and Guy and I had buried him; and he burrowed out, and his head came through all tangled and stuck over with hay, and his dark laughing eyes shone out of the nest of hay like some wild, but not frightened animal.
One summer we had a passion for Conrad, and read aloud to each other up in our Happy Tree. Another time it was Shakespeare that we discovered for ourselves. Hugo knew a great deal of poetry by heart, more than anyone I have met, but he was not a mooning, moping sort of boy as poetical people are supposed to be. He loved games and swimming and fishing and dancing too—when we were older and used to dance.
I think one of the special qualities about both Guy and Hugo was the way they enjoyed so many different things.
We used to fish in the stream very often—long afternoons with the sun flickering through the willows on to the clear bright water. There was a big pool to the east of the house, below the temple, with a willow slanting out across it, almost horizontally, from the bank, and the bank was rather high. There were perch there, and ling. Sometimes Cousin John would come with us and teach us the art of ‘casting,’ or tell us about places he had fished in in Norway, and in Persia. He had been in the diplomatic service when he was a young man, before he married. He knew endless curious unrelated things, about places and people and armour and folklore, and the history of weapons of all sorts