A Traveller in Little Things

by W. H. Hudson

She looked at me and then away, and her beautiful blue intelligent eyes told me plainly that she did not, and that she felt baffled and worried.

After an interval she pointed to the hedge. "Look at the leaves," she said. "I could go and count a hundred leaves, couldn't I? Well, would that be a hundred years?"

And no further could we get, since I could not make out just what the question meant. At first it looked as if she thought of the leaves as an illustration—or a symbol; and then that she had failed to grasp the idea of time, or that it had slipped from her, and she had fallen back, as it were, to the notion that a hundred meant a hundred objects, which you could see and feel. There appeared to be no way out of the puzzle-dom into which we had both got, so that it came as a relief to both of us when she heard her mother calling—calling her back into a world she could understand.

I believe that when we penetrate to the real mind of girl children we find a strong likeness in them even when they appear to differ as widely from one another as adults do. The difference in the little ones is less in disposition and character than in unlikeness due to unconscious imitation. They take their mental colour from their surroundings. The red men of America are the gravest people on the globe, and their children are like them when with them; but this unnatural gravity is on the surface and is a mask which drops or fades off when they assemble together out of sight and hearing of their elders. In like manner our little ones have masks to fit the character of the homes they are bred in.

Here I recall a little girl I once met when I was walking somewhere on the borders of Dorset and Hampshire. It was at the close of an autumn day, and I was on a broad road in a level stretch of country with the low buildings of a farmhouse a quarter of a mile ahead of me, and no other building in sight. A lonely land with but one living creature in sight—a very small girl, slowly coming towards me, walking in the middle of the wet road; for it had been raining a greater part of the day. It was amazing to see that wee solitary being on the lonely road, with the wide green and brown earth spreading away to the horizon on either side under the wide pale sky. She was a sturdy little thing of about five years old, in heavy clothes and cloth cap, and long knitted muffler wrapped round her neck and crossed on her chest, then tied or bound round her waist, thick boots and thick leggings! And she had a round serious face, and big blue eyes with as much wonder in them at seeing me as I suppose mine expressed at seeing her. When we were still a little distance apart she drew away to the opposite side of the road, thinking perhaps that so big a man would require the whole of its twenty-five yards width for himself. But no, that was not the reason of her action, for on gaining the other side she stopped and turned so as to face me when I should be abreast of her, and then at the proper moment she bent her little knees and dropped me an elaborate curtsey; then, rising again to her natural height, she continued regarding me with those wide-open astonished eyes! Nothing in little girls so deliciously quaint and old-worldish had ever come in my way before; and though it was late in the day and the road long, I could not do less than cross over to speak to her. She belonged to a cottage I had left some distance behind, and had been to the farm with a message and was on her way back, she told me, speaking with slow deliberation and profound respect, as to a being of a higher order than man. Then she took my little gift and after making a second careful curtsey proceeded slowly and gravely on her way.

Undoubtedly all this unsmiling, deeply respectful manner was a mask, or we may go so far as to call it second nature, and was the result of living in a cottage in an agricultural district with adults or old people:—probably her grandmother was the poor little darling's model, and any big important-looking man she met was the lord of the manor!

What an amazing difference outwardly between the rustic and the city child of a society woman, accustomed to be addressed and joked with and caressed by scores of persons every day—her own people, friends, visitors, strangers! Such a child I met last summer at a west-end shop or emporium where women congregate in a colossal tea-room under a glass dome, with glass doors opening upon an acre of flat roof.

There, one afternoon, after drinking my tea I walked away to a good distance on the roof and sat down to smoke a cigarette, and presently saw a charming-looking child come dancing out from among the tea-drinkers. Round and round she whirled, heedless of the presence of all those people, happy and free and wild as a lamb running a race with itself on some green flowery down under the wide sky. And by-and-by she came near and was pirouetting round my chair, when I spoke to her, and congratulated her on having had a nice holiday at the seaside. One knew it from her bare brown legs. Oh yes, she said, it was a nice holiday at Bognor, and she had enjoyed it very much.

"Particularly the paddling," I remarked.

No, there was no paddling—her mother wouldn't let her paddle.