“HIGH UP IN A BEECH-TREE TO LEARN POEMS”
From twelve to one there were “Lessons”; then dinner, and tongues like jackdaws raiding a pantry for silver spoons. In the afternoon those who went for a walk towards the stranger parts, went for a walk. Some stayed at home in a little parlour and sang in chorus together like a charm of wild birds. Some did their mending and darning, their hemming and feather-stitching, and some did sums. Some played on the fiddle, and some looked after their bullfinches and bunnies and bees and guinea-pigs and ducks. Then there were the hens and the doves and the calves and the pigs to feed, and the tiny motherless lambs, too (when lambs there were) with bottles of milk. And sometimes of an afternoon Miss Rawlings would come in and sit at a window just watching her Pigtails, or would read them a story. And Dr. Sheppard asseverated not once, but three times over, that if she went on bringing them sweetmeats and candies and lollipops and suckets to such an extent, not a single sound white ivory tooth of their nine hundred or so would be left in the Pigtails’ heads. So Miss Rawlings kept to Sundays.
At five was tea-time: jam on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays; jelly on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays; and both on Sundays. From six to seven there were “Lessons,” and when the little Pigtails were really tired, which was always before nine, they just slipped off to bed. Some of them had munched their supper biscuits and were snug in bed indeed even before the rest had sung the evening hymn. And the evening hymn was always “Eternal Father”—for being all of them so extremely happy they could not but be “in peril on the deep.” For happiness in this world may fly away like birds in corn, or butterflies before rain. And on Sundays they sang “Lead, kindly light” too, because Miss Rawlings’s mother had once been blessed by the great and blessed Cardinal Newman. And one Pigtail played the accompaniment on her fiddle, and one on the sweet-tongued viola, and one on the harpsichord; for since Miss Rawlings had read “Barbara Allan” she had given up pianofortes. And then, sleepy and merry and chattering, they all trooped up to bed.
So this was their Day. And all night, unseen, the stars shone in their splendour above the roof of Trafford House, or the white-faced moon looked down upon the sleeping garden and the doves and the pigs and the lambs and the flowers. And at times there was a wind in the sky among the clouds; and at times frost in the dark hours settled like meal wheresoever its cold brightness might find a lodging. And when the little Pigtails awoke, there would be marvellous cold fronds and flowerets on their windowpanes, and even sometimes a thin crankling slat of ice in their water-jugs. On which keen winter mornings you could hear their teeth chattering like monkeys cracking nuts. And so time went on.
On the very next June 1, there was a prodigious Garden Party at Trafford House, with punts on the lake and refreshments and lemonade in a tent in the park, and all the Guardianesses and Aunts and Stepmothers and Matrons and Female Friends were invited to come and see Miss Rawlings’s little Pigtails. And some brought their sisters, and some their nieces and nephews. There were Merry-go-Rounds, Aunt Sallies, Frisk-and-Come-Easies, a Punch and Judy Show, a Fat Man, a Fortune-Teller, and three marvellous acrobats from Hong Kong. And there were quantities of things to eat and lots to see, and Kiss-in-the-Ring, and all broke up after fireworks and “God Save the Queen” at half-past nine.
The house, as I keep on saying, was called Trafford House, but the Home was called “The Home of all the little Barbara Allans and such like, with Brown Eyes, Narrow Cheekbones, Beaver Hats, and Pigtails, Ltd.” And it was “limited” because there could be only thirty of them, and time is not Eternity.
And now there were only three things that prevented Miss Rawlings from being too intensely happy to go on being alive; and these three were as follows: (a) She wanted to live always at the House—but how could the Parish get on without her? (b) What was she going to do when the Pigtailers became 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, etc., and grown-up? And (c) How could she ever possibly part with any of them or get any more?
For, you see, Miss Rawlings’s first-of-all Barbara Allan was aged 10, and had somehow managed to stay there. But because, I suppose, things often go right in this world when we are not particularly noticing them, and don’t know how, all these difficulties simply melted away at last like butter in the sun.
In the first place, Miss Rawlings did at last (in 1888, to be exact, one year after Queen Victoria’s first Jubilee), did, I say, at last go to live at the Home of all the little Barbara Allans and such like with Brown Eyes, Beaver Hats, and Pigtails, Ltd. She was called The Matron’s Friend, so as not to undermine the discipline. When her Parish wanted her, which was pretty often, the Parish (thirty or forty strong) came to see her in her little parlour overlooking the pond with the punts and the water-lilies.
Next, though how, who can say, the little Pigtails somehow did not grow up, even though they must have grown older. Something queer happened to their Time. It cannot have been what just the clocks said. If there wasn’t more of it, there was infinitely more in it. It was like air and dew and sunbeams and the South Wind to them all. You simply could not tell what next. And, apart from all that wonderful learning, apart even from the jam and jelly and the Roast Beef of Old England, they went on being just the right height and the right heart for ten. Their brown eyes never lost their light and sparkle. No wrinkles ever came in their three-cornered faces with the high cheek-bones; and not a single grey or silver hair into their neat little pigtails that could at any rate be seen.