第50章

Loves of my youth, whither are ye vanished? Tubby of the golden locks; Langley of the dented nose; Shamus stout of heart but faint of limb, easy enough to "down," but utterly impossible to make to cry:

"I give you best;" Neal the thin; and Dicky, "dicky Dick" the fat;

Ballett of the weeping eye; Beau Bunnie lord of many ties, who always fought in black kid gloves; all ye others, ye whose names I cannot recollect, though I well remember ye were very dear to me, whither are ye vanished, where haunt your creeping ghosts? Had one told me then there would come a day I should never see again your merry faces, never hear your wild, shrill whoop of greeting, never feel again the warm clasp of your inky fingers, never fight again nor quarrel with you, never hate you, never love you, could I then have borne the thought, I wonder?

Once, methinks, not long ago, I saw you, Tubby, you with whom so often I discovered the North Pole, probed the problem of the sources of the Nile, (Have you forgotten, Tubby, our secret camping ground beside the lonely waters of the Regent's Park canal, where discussing our frugal meal of toasted elephant's tongue--by the uninitiated mistakable for jumbles--there would break upon our trained hunters' ear the hungry lion or tiger's distant roar, mingled with the melancholy, long-drawn growling of the Polar Bear, growing ever in volume and impatience until half-past four precisely; and we would snatch our rifles, and with stealthy tread and every sense alert make our way through the jungle--until stopped by the spiked fencing round the Zoological Gardens?) I feel sure it was you, in spite of your side whiskers and the greyness and the thinness of your once clustering golden locks.

You were hurrying down Throgmorton Street chained to a small black bag. I should have stopped you, but that I had no time to spare, having to catch a train at Liverpool Street and to get shaved on the way. I wonder if you recognised me: you looked at me a little hard, I thought. Gallant, kindly hearted Shamus, you who fought once for half an hour to save a frog from being skinned; they tell me you are now an Income Tax assessor; a man, it is reported, with power of disbelief unusual among even Inland Revenue circles; of little faith, lacking in the charity that thinketh no evil. May Providence direct you to other districts than to mine.

So Time, Nature's handy-man, bustles to and fro about the many rooms, making all things tidy, covers with sweet earth the burnt volcanoes, turns to use the debris of the ages, smoothes again the ground above the dead, heals again the beech bark marred by lovers.

In the beginning I was far from being a favourite with my schoolmates, and this was the first time trouble came to dwell with me. Later, we men and women generally succeed in convincing ourselves that whatever else we may have missed in life, popularity in a greater or less degree we have at all events secured, for without it altogether few of us, I think, would care to face existence. But where the child suffers keener than the man is in finding himself exposed to the cold truth without the protecting clothes of self-deception. My ostracism was painfully plain to me, and, as was my nature, I brooded upon it in silence.

"Can you run?" asked of me one day a most important personage whose name I have forgotten. He was head of the Lower Fourth, a tall youth with a nose like a beak, and the manner of one born to authority. He was the son of a draper in the Edgware Road, and his father failing, he had to be content for a niche in life with a lower clerkship in the Civil Service. But to us youngsters he always appeared a Duke of Wellington in embryo, and under other circumstances might, perhaps, have become one.

"Yes," I answered. As a matter of fact it was my one accomplishment, and rumour of it maybe had reached him.

"Run round the playground twice at your fastest," he commanded; "let me see you."

I clinched my fists and charged off. How grateful I was to him for having spoken to me, the outcast of the class, thus publicly, I could only show by my exertions to please him. When I drew up before him I was panting hard, but I could see that he was satisfied.

"Why don't the fellows like you?" he asked bluntly.

If only I could have stepped out of my shyness, spoken my real thoughts! "0 Lord of the Lower Fourth! You upon whom success--the only success in life worth having--has fallen as from the laps of the gods! You to whom all Lower Fourth hearts turn! tell me the secret of this popularity. How may I acquire it? No price can be too great for me to pay for it. Vain little egoist that I am, it is the sum of my desires, and will be till the long years have taught me wisdom. The want of it embitters all my days. Why does silence fall upon their chattering groups when I draw near? Why do they drive me from their games? What is it shuts me out from them, repels them from me? I creep into the corners and shed scalding tears of shame. I watch with envious eyes and ears all you to whom the wondrous gift is given.

What is your secret? Is it Tommy's swagger? Then I will swagger, too, with anxious heart, with mingled fear and hope. But why--why, seeing that in Tommy they admire it, do they wait for me with imitations of cock-a-doodle-do, strut beside me mimicking a pouter pigeon? Is it Dicky's playfulness?--Dicky, who runs away with their balls, snatches their caps from off their heads, springs upon their backs when they are least expecting it?