Dream Days, by Kenneth Grahame

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DREAM DAYS
BY
KENNETH GRAHAME

Contents

THE TWENTY-FIRST OF OCTOBER
DIES IRAE
MUTABILE SEMPER
THE MAGIC RING
ITS WALLS WERE AS OF JASPER
A SAGA OF THE SEAS
THE RELUCTANT DRAGON
A DEPARTURE

Dream Days
THE TWENTY-FIRST OF
OCTOBER

In the matter of general culture and attainments, we youngsters
stood on pretty level ground. True, it was always happening that
one of us would be singled out at any moment, freakishly, and
without regard to his own preferences, to wrestle with the
inflections of some idiotic language long rightly dead; while
another, from some fancied artistic tendency which always failed
to justify itself, might be told off without warning to hammer
out scales and exercises, and to bedew the senseless keys with
tears of weariness or of revolt. But in subjects common to
either sex, and held to be necessary even for him whose
ambition soared no higher than to crack a whip in a circus-ring--
in geography, for instance, arithmetic, or the weary doings of
kings and queens--each would have scorned to excel. And, indeed,
whatever our individual gifts, a general dogged determination to
shirk and to evade kept us all at much the same dead level,--a
level of ignorance tempered by insubordination.

Fortunately there existed a wide range of subjects, of healthier
tone than those already enumerated, in which we were free to
choose for ourselves, and which we would have scorned to consider
education; and in these we freely followed each his own
particular line, often attaining an amount of special knowledge
which struck our ignorant elders as simply uncanny. For Edward,
the uniforms, accoutrements, colours, and mottoes of the
regiments composing the British Army had a special glamour.
In the matter of facings he was simply faultless; among chevrons,
badges, medals, and stars, he moved familiarly; he even knew the
names of most of the colonels in command; and he would squander
sunny hours prone on the lawn, heedless of challenge from bird or
beast, poring over a tattered Army List. My own accomplishment
was of another character--took, as it seemed to me, a wider and a
more untrammelled range. Dragoons might have swaggered in
Lincoln green, riflemen might have donned sporrans over tartan
trews, without exciting notice or comment from me. But did you
seek precise information as to the fauna of the American
continent, then you had come to the right shop. Where and why
the bison "wallowed"; how beaver were to be trapped and wild
turkeys stalked; the grizzly and how to handle him, and the
pretty pressing ways of the constrictor,--in fine, the haunts and
the habits of all that burrowed, strutted, roared, or wriggled
between the Atlantic and the Pacific,--all this knowledge I took
for my province. By the others my equipment was fully
recognized. Supposing a book with a bear-hunt in it made its way
into the house, and the atmosphere was electric with excitement;
still, it was necessary that I should first decide whether the
slot had been properly described and properly followed up, ere
the work could be stamped with full approval. A writer might
have won fame throughout the civilized globe for his trappers and
his realistic backwoods, and all went for nothing. If his
pemmican were not properly compounded I damned his achievement,
and it was heard no more of.

Harold was hardly old enough to possess a special subject of his
own. He had his instincts, indeed, and at bird's-nesting they
almost amounted to prophecy. Where we others only suspected
eggs, surmised possible eggs, hinted doubtfully at eggs in the
neighbourhood, Harold went straight for the right bush, bough, or
hole as if he carried a divining-rod. But this faculty belonged
to the class of mere gifts, and was not to be ranked with
Edward's lore regarding facings, and mine as to the habits of
prairie-dogs, both gained by painful study and extensive travel
in those "realms of gold," the Army List and Ballantyne.

Selina's subject, quite unaccountably, happened to be naval
history. There is no laying down rules as to subjects; you just
possess them--or rather, they possess you--and their genesis or
protoplasm is rarely to be tracked down. Selina had never so
much as seen the sea; but for that matter neither had I ever
set foot on the American continent, the by-ways of which I knew
so intimately. And just as I, if set down without warning in the
middle of the Rocky Mountains, would have been perfectly at home,
so Selina, if a genie had dropped her suddenly on Portsmouth
Hard, could have given points to most of its frequenters. From
the days of Blake down to the death of Nelson (she never
condescended further) Selina had taken spiritual part in every
notable engagement of the British Navy; and even in the dark days
when she had to pick up skirts and flee, chased by an ungallant
De Ruyter or Van Tromp, she was yet cheerful in the consciousness
that ere long she would be gleefully hammering the fleets of the
world, in the glorious times to follow. When that golden period
arrived, Selina was busy indeed; and, while loving best to stand
where the splinters were flying the thickest. she was also a
careful and critical student of seamanship and of manoeuvre. She
knew the order in which the great line-of-battle ships moved into
action, the vessels they respectively engaged, the moment when
each let go its anchor, and which of them had a spring on its
cable (while not understanding the phrase, she carefully noted
the fact); and she habitually went into an engagement on the
quarter-deck of the gallant ship that reserved its fire the
longest.

At the time of Selina's weird seizure I was unfortunately away
from home, on a loathsome visit to an aunt; and my account is
therefore feebly compounded from hearsay. It was an absence I
never ceased to regret--scoring it up, with a sense of injury,
against the aunt. There was a splendid uselessness about the
whole performance that specially appealed to my artistic sense.
That it should have been Selina, too, who should break out
this way--Selina, who had just become a regular subscriber to the
"Young Ladies' Journal," and who allowed herself to be taken out
to strange teas with an air of resignation palpably assumed--this
was a special joy, and served to remind me that much of this
dreaded convention that was creeping over us might be, after all,
only veneer. Edward also was absent, getting licked into shape
at school; but to him the loss was nothing. With his stern
practical bent he wouldn't have seen any sense in it--to recall
one of his favourite expressions. To Harold, however, for
whom the gods had always cherished a special tenderness, it was
granted, not only to witness, but also, priestlike, to feed the
sacred fire itself. And if at the time he paid the penalty
exacted by the sordid unimaginative ones who temporarily rule the
roast, he must ever after, one feels sure, have carried
inside him some of the white gladness of the acolyte who, greatly
privileged, has been permitted to swing a censer at the sacring
of the very Mass.

October was mellowing fast, and with it the year itself; full of
tender hints, in woodland and hedgerow, of a course well-nigh
completed. From all sides that still afternoon you caught the
quick breathing and sob of the runner nearing the goal.
Preoccupied and possessed, Selina had strayed down the garden and
out into the pasture beyond, where, on a bit of rising ground
that dominated the garden on one side and the downs with the old
coach-road on the other, she had cast herself down to chew the
cud of fancy. There she was presently joined by Harold,
breathless and very full of his latest grievance.

"I asked him not to," he burst out. "I said if he'd only please
wait a bit and Edward would be back soon, and it couldn't
matter to HIM, and the pig wouldn't mind, and Edward'd be
pleased and everybody'd be happy. But he just said he was very
sorry, but bacon didn't wait for nobody. So I told him he was a
regular beast, and then I came away. And--and I b'lieve they're
doing it now!"

"Yes, he's a beast," agreed Selina, absently. She had forgotten
all about the pig-killing. Harold kicked away a freshly thrown-
up mole-hill, and prodded down the hole with a stick. From the
direction of Farmer Larkin's demesne came a long-drawn note of
sorrow, a thin cry and appeal, telling that the stout soul of a
black Berkshire pig was already faring down the stony track to
Hades.

"D'you know what day it is?" said Selina presently, in a low
voice, looking far away before her.

Harold did not appear to know, nor yet to care. He had laid
open his mole-run for a yard or so, and was still grubbing at it
absorbedly.

"It's Trafalgar Day," went on Selina, trancedly; "Trafalgar Day--
and nobody cares!"

Something in her tone told Harold that he was not behaving quite
becomingly. He didn't exactly know in what manner; still, he
abandoned his mole-hunt for a more courteous attitude of
attention.

"Over there," resumed Selina--she was gazing out in the direction
of the old highroad--"over there the coaches used to go by.
Uncle Thomas was telling me about it the other day. And the
people used to watch for 'em coming, to tell the time by, and
p'r'aps to get their parcels. And one morning--they wouldn't be
expecting anything different--one morning, first there would be a
cloud of dust, as usual, and then the coach would come racing
by, and THEN they would know! For the coach would be dressed
in laurel, all laurel from stem to stern! And the coachman would
be wearing laurel, and the guard would be wearing laurel; and
then they would know, then they would know!"

Harold listened in respectful silence. He would much rather have
been hunting the mole, who must have been a mile away by this
time if he had his wits about him. But he had all the natural
instincts of a gentleman; of whom it is one of the principal
marks, if not the complete definition, never to show signs of
being bored.

Selina rose to her feet, and paced the turf restlessly with a
short quarter-deck walk.

"Why can't we DO something?" she burst out presently.
"HE--he did everything--why can't we do anything for him?"

"WHO did everything?" inquired Harold, meekly. It was useless
wasting further longings on that mole. Like the dead, he
travelled fast.

"Why, Nelson, of course," said Selina, shortly, still looking
restlessly around for help or suggestion.

"But he's--he's DEAD, isn't he?" asked Harold, slightly
puzzled.

"What's that got to do with it?" retorted his sister, resuming
her caged-lion promenade.

Harold was somewhat taken aback. In the case of the pig, for
instance, whose last outcry had now passed into stillness, he had
considered the chapter as finally closed. Whatever innocent
mirth the holidays might hold in store for Edward, that
particular pig, at least, would not be a contributor. And now he
was given to understand that the situation had not materially
changed! He would have to revise his ideas, it seemed.
Sitting up on end, he looked towards the garden for assistance in
the task. Thence, even as he gazed, a tiny column of smoke rose
straight up into the still air. The gardener had been sweeping
that afternoon, and now, an unconscious priest, was offering his
sacrifice of autumn leaves to the calm-eyed goddess of changing
hues and chill forebodings who was moving slowly about the land
that golden afternoon. Harold was up and off in a moment,
forgetting Nelson, forgetting the pig, the mole, the Larkin
betrayal, and Selina's strange fever of conscience. Here was
fire, real fire, to play with, and that was even better than
messing with water, or remodelling the plastic surface of the
earth. Of all the toys the world provides for right-minded
persons, the original elements rank easily the first.

But Selina sat on where she was, her chin on her fists; and
her fancies whirled and drifted, here and there, in curls and
eddies, along with the smoke she was watching. As the quick-
footed dusk of the short October day stepped lightly over the
garden, little red tongues of fire might be seen to leap and
vanish in the smoke. Harold, anon staggering under armfuls of
leaves, anon stoking vigorously, was discernible only at fitful
intervals. It was another sort of smoke that the inner eye of
Selina was looking upon,--a smoke that hung in sullen banks round
the masts and the hulls of the fighting ships; a smoke from
beneath which came thunder and the crash and the splinter-rip,
the shout of the boarding party, the choking sob of the gunner
stretched by his gun; a smoke from out of which at last she saw,
as through a riven pall, the radiant spirit of the Victor,
crowned with the coronal of a perfect death, leap in full
assurance up into the ether that Immortals breathe. The dusk was
glooming towards darkness when she rose and moved slowly down
towards the beckoning fire; something of the priestess in her
stride, something of the devotee in the set purpose of her eye.

The leaves were well alight by this time, and Harold had just
added an old furze bush, which flamed and crackled stirringly.

"Go 'n' get some more sticks," ordered Selina, "and shavings, 'n'
chunks of wood, 'n' anything you can find. Look here--in the
kitchen-garden there's a pile of old pea-sticks. Fetch as many
as you can carry, and then go back and bring some more!"

"But I say,--" began Harold, amazedly, scarce knowing his sister,
and with a vision of a frenzied gardener, pea-stickless and
threatening retribution.

"Go and fetch 'em quick! " shouted Selina, stamping with
impatience.

Harold ran off at once, true to the stern system of discipline in
which he had been nurtured. But his eyes were like round O's,
and as he ran he talked fast to himself, in evident disorder of
mind.

The pea-sticks made a rare blaze, and the fire, no longer
smouldering sullenly, leapt up and began to assume the appearance
of a genuine bonfire. Harold, awed into silence at first, began
to jump round it with shouts of triumph. Selina looked on
grimly, with knitted brow; she was not yet fully satisfied.
"Can't you get any more sticks?" she said presently. "Go and
hunt about. Get some old hampers and matting and things out of
the tool-house. Smash up that old cucumber frame Edward shoved
you into, the day we were playing scouts and Mohicans. Stop
a bit! Hooray! I know. You come along with me."

Hard by there was a hot-house, Aunt Eliza's special pride and
joy, and even grimly approved of by the gardener. At one end, in
an out-house adjoining, the necessary firing was stored; and to
this sacred fuel, of which we were strictly forbidden to touch a
stick, Selina went straight. Harold followed obediently,
prepared for any crime after that of the pea-sticks, but pinching
himself to see if he were really awake.

"You bring some coals," said Selina briefly, without any palaver
or pro-and-con discussion. "Here's a basket. I'LL manage the
faggots!"

In a very few minutes there was little doubt about its being a
genuine bonfire and no paltry makeshift. Selina, a Maenad now,
hatless and tossing disordered locks, all the dross of the young
lady purged out of her, stalked around the pyre of her own
purloining, or prodded it with a pea-stick. And as she prodded
she murmured at intervals, "I KNEW there was something we
could do! It isn't much--but still it's SOMETHING!"

The gardener had gone home to his tea. Aunt Eliza had driven out
for hers a long way off, and was not expected back till quite
late; and this far end of the garden was not overlooked by any
windows. So the Tribute blazed on merrily unchecked. Villagers
far away, catching sight of the flare, muttered something about
"them young devils at their tricks again," and trudged on beer-
wards. Never a thought of what day it was, never a thought for
Nelson, who preserved their honest pint-pots, to be paid for in
honest pence, and saved them from litres and decimal coinage.
Nearer at hand, frightened rabbits popped up and vanished with a
flick of white tails; scared birds fluttered among the
branches, or sped across the glade to quieter sleeping-quarters;
but never a bird nor a beast gave a thought to the hero to whom
they owed it that each year their little homes of horsehair,
wool, or moss, were safe stablished 'neath the flap of the
British flag; and that Game Laws, quietly permanent, made la
chasse a terror only to their betters. No one seemed to know,
nor to care, nor to sympathise. In all the ecstasy of her burnt-
offering and sacrifice, Selina stood alone.

And yet--not quite alone! For, as the fire was roaring at its
best, certain stars stepped delicately forth on the surface of
the immensity above, and peered down doubtfully--with wonder at
first, then with interest, then with recognition, with a start of
glad surprise. THEY at least knew all about it, THEY
understood. Among THEM the Name was a daily familiar
word; his story was a part of the music to which they swung,
himself was their fellow and their mate and comrade. So they
peeped, and winked, and peeped again, and called to their laggard
brothers to come quick and see.

. . . . . . .

"The best of life is but intoxication;" and Selina, who during
her brief inebriation had lived in an ecstasy as golden as our
drab existence affords, had to experience the inevitable
bitterness of awakening sobriety, when the dying down of the
flames into sullen embers coincided with the frenzied entrance of
Aunt Eliza on the scene. It was not so much that she was at once
and forever disrated, broke, sent before the mast, and branded as
one on whom no reliance could be placed, even with Edward safe at
school, and myself under the distant vigilance of an aunt; that
her pocket money was stopped indefinitely, and her new Church
Service, the pride of her last birthday, removed from her own
custody and placed under the control of a Trust. She sorrowed
rather because she had dragged poor Harold, against his better
judgment, into a most horrible scrape, and moreover because, when
the reaction had fairly set in, when the exaltation had fizzled
away and the young-lady portion of her had crept timorously back
to its wonted lodging, she could only see herself as a plain
fool, unjustified, undeniable, without a shadow of an excuse or
explanation.

As for Harold, youth and a short memory made his case less
pitiful than it seemed to his more sensitive sister. True, he
started upstairs to his lonely cot bellowing dismally, before him
a dreary future of pains and penalties, sufficient to last to the
crack of doom. Outside his door, however, he tumbled over
Augustus the cat, and made capture of him; and at once his
mourning was changed into a song of triumph, as he conveyed his
prize into port. For Augustus, who detested above all things
going to bed with little boys, was ever more knave than fool, and
the trapper who was wily enough to ensnare him had achieved
something notable. Augustus, when he realized that his fate was
sealed, and his night's lodging settled, wisely made the best of
things, and listened, with a languorous air of complete
comprehension, to the incoherent babble concerning pigs and
heroes, moles and bonfires, which served Harold for a self-sung
lullaby. Yet it may be doubted whether Augustus was one of those
rare fellows who thoroughly understood.

But Selina knew no more of this source of consolation than of the
sympathy with which the stars were winking above her; and it was
only after some sad interval oftime, and on a very moist
pillow, that she drifted into that quaint inconsequent country
where you may meet your own pet hero strolling down the road, and
commit what hair-brained oddities you like, and everybody
understands and appreciates.

DIES IRAE

Those memorable days that move in procession, their heads just
out of the mist of years long dead--the most of them are full-
eyed as the dandelion that from dawn to shade has steeped itself
in sunlight. Here and there in their ranks, however, moves a
forlorn one who is blind--blind in the sense of the dulled
window-pane on which the pelting raindrops have mingled and run
down, obscuring sunshine and the circling birds, happy fields,
and storied garden; blind with the spatter of a misery
uncomprehended, unanalysed, only felt as something corporeal in
its buffeting effects.

Martha began it; and yet Martha was not really to blame. Indeed,
that was half the trouble of it--no solid person stood full
in view, to be blamed and to make atonement. There was only a
wretched, impalpable condition to deal with. Breakfast was just
over; the sun was summoning us, imperious as a herald with
clamour of trumpet; I ran upstairs to her with a broken bootlace
in my hand, and there she was, crying in a corner, her head in
her apron. Nothing could be got from her but the same dismal
succession of sobs that would not have done, that struck and hurt
like a physical beating; and meanwhile the sun was getting
impatient, and I wanted my bootlace.

Inquiry below stairs revealed the cause. Martha's brother was
dead, it seemed--her sailor brother Billy; drowned in one of
those strange far-off seas it was our dream to navigate one day.
We had known Billy well, and appreciated him. When an
approaching visit of Billy to his sister had been announced,
we had counted the days to it. When his cheery voice was at last
heard in the kitchen and we had descended with shouts, first of
all he had to exhibit his tattooed arms, always a subject for
fresh delight and envy and awe; then he was called upon for
tricks, jugglings, and strange, fearful gymnastics; and lastly
came yarns, and more yarns, and yarns till bedtime. There had
never been any one like Billy in his own particular sphere; and
now he was drowned, they said, and Martha was miserable, and--and
I couldn't get a new bootlace. They told me that Billy would
never come back any more, and I stared out of the window at the
sun which came back, right enough, every day, and their news
conveyed nothing whatever to me. Martha's sorrow hit home a
little, but only because the actual sight and sound of it gave me
a dull, bad sort of pain low down inside--a pain not to be
actually located. Moreover, I was still wanting my bootlace.

This was a poor sort of a beginning to a day that, so far as
outside conditions went, had promised so well. I rigged up a
sort of jurymast of a bootlace with a bit of old string, and
wandered off to look up the girls, conscious of a jar and a
discordance in the scheme of things. The moment I entered the
schoolroom something in the air seemed to tell me that here, too,
matters were strained and awry. Selina was staring listlessly
out of the window, one foot curled round her leg. When I spoke
to her she jerked a shoulder testily, but did not condescend to
the civility of a reply. Charlotte, absolutely unoccupied,
sprawled in a chair, and there were signs of sniffles about her,
even at that early hour. It was but a trifling matter that had
caused all this electricity in the atmosphere, and the girls'
manner of taking it seemed to me most unreasonable. Within the
last few days the time had come round for the despatch of a
hamper to Edward at school. Only one hamper a term was permitted
him, so its preparation was a sort of blend of revelry and
religious ceremony. After the main corpus of the thing had been
carefully selected and safely bestowed--the pots of jam, the
cake, the sausages, and the apples that filled up corners so
nicely--after the last package had been wedged in, the girls had
deposited their own private and personal offerings on the top. I
forget their precise nature; anyhow, they were nothing of any
particular practical use to a boy. But they had involved some
contrivance and labour, some skimping of pocket money, and much
delightful cloud-building as to the effect on their enraptured
recipient. Well, yesterday there had come a terse
acknowledgment from Edward, heartily commending the cakes and the
jam, stamping the sausages with the seal of Smith major's
approval, and finally hinting that, fortified as he now was,
nothing more was necessary but a remittance of five shillings in
postage stamps to enable him to face the world armed against
every buffet of fate. That was all. Never a word or a hint of
the personal tributes or of his appreciation of them. To us--to
Harold and me, that is--the letter seemed natural and sensible
enough. After all, provender was the main thing, and five
shillings stood for a complete equipment against the most
unexpected turns of luck. The presents were very well in their
way--very nice, and so on--but life was a serious matter, and the
contest called for cakes and half crowns to carry it on, not gew-
gaws and knitted mittens and the like. The girls, however,
in their obstinate way, persisted in taking their own view of the
slight. Hence it was that I received my second rebuff of the
morning.

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