Peter Ibbetson. George du Maurier
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a splendid parabolic leap; gold and silver fish, pied with purply brown. I mention them in the order of their attractiveness. The fish were too tame and easily caught, and their beauty of too civilized an order; the rare, flat, vicious dytiscus "took the cake."
Sometimes, even, we would walk through Boulogne to St. Cloud, to see the new railway and the trains—an inexhaustible subject of wonder and delight—and eat ices at the "Tête Noire" (a hotel which had been the scene of a terrible murder, that led to a cause célèbre); and we would come back through the scented night, while the glowworms were shining in the grass, and the distant frogs were croaking in the Mare d'Auteuil. Now and then a startled roebuck would gallop in short bounds across the path, from thicket to thicket, and Médor would go mad again and wake the echoes of the new Paris fortification, which were still in the course of construction.
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He had not the gift of catching roebucks!
If my father were of the party, he would yodel Tyrolese melodies, and sing lovely songs of Boieldieu, Hérold, and Grétry; or "Drink to me only with thine eyes," or else the "Bay of Dublin" for Madame Seraskier, who had the nostalgia of her beloved country whenever her beloved husband was away.
Or else we would break out into a jolly chorus and march to the tune—
"Marie, trempe ton pain, Marie, trempe ton pain, Marie, trempe ton pain dans la soupe; Marie, trempe ton pain, Marie, trempe ton pain, Marie, trempe ton pain dans le vin!"
Or else—
"La—soupe aux choux—se fait dans la marmite; Dans—la marmite—se fait la soupe aux choux."
which would give us all the nostalgia of supper.
Or else, again, if it were too hot to sing, or we were too tired, M. le Major, forsaking the realms of fairy-land, and uncovering his high bald head as he walked, would gravely and reverently tell us of his great master, of Brienne, of Marengo, and Austerlitz; of the farewells at Fontainebleau, and the Hundred Days—never of St. Helena; he would not trust himself to speak to us of that! And gradually working his way to Waterloo, he would put his hat on, and demonstrate to us, by A+B, how, virtually, the English had lost the day, and why and wherefore. And on all the little party a solemn, awe-struck stillness would fall as we listened, and on some of us the sweet nostalgia of bed!
Oh, the good old time!
The night was consecrated for me by the gleam and scent and rustle of Madame Seraskier's gown, as I walked by her side in the deepening dusk—a gleam of yellow, or pale blue, or white—a scent of sandalwood—a rustle that told of a light, vigorous tread on firm, narrow, high-arched feet, that were not easily tired; of an anxious, motherly wish to get back to Mimsey, who was not strong enough for these longer expeditions.
On the shorter ones I used sometimes to carry Mimsey on my back most of the way home (to please her mother)—a frail burden, with her poor, long, thin arms round my neck, and her pale, cold cheek against my ear—she weighed nothing! And when I was tired M. le Major would relieve me, but not for long. She always wanted to be carried by Gogo (for so I was called, for no reason whatever, unless it was that my name was Peter).
She would start at the pale birches that shone out against the gloom, and shiver if a bough scraped her, and tell me all about the Erl-king—"mais comme ils sont là tous les deux" (meaning the Prince and the Fairy) "il n'y a absolument rien à craindre."
And Mimsey was si bonne camarade, in spite of her solemnity and poor health and many pains, so grateful for small kindnesses, so appreciative of small talents, so indulgent to small vanities (of which she seemed to have no more share than her mother), and so deeply humorous in spite of her eternal gravity—for she was a real tomboy at heart—that I soon carried her, not only to please her mother, but to please herself, and would have done anything for her.
As for M. le Major, he gradually discovered that Mimsey was half a martyr and half a saint, and possessed all the virtues under the sun.
"Ah, vous ne la comprenez pas, cette enfant; vous verrez un jour quand ça ira mieux! vous verrez! elle est comme sa mère … elle a toutes les intelligences de la tête et du coeur!" and he would wish it had pleased Heaven that he should be her grandfather—on the maternal side.
L'art d'être grandpère! This weather-beaten, war-battered old soldier had learned it, without ever having had either a son or a daughter of his own. He was a born grandfather!
Moreover, Mimsey and I had many tastes and passions in common—music, for instance, as well as Bewick's wood-cuts and Byron's poetry, and roast chestnuts and domestic pets; and above all, the Mare d'Auteuil, which she preferred in the autumn, when the brown and yellow leaves were eddying and scampering and chasing each other round its margin, or drifting on its troubled surface, and the cold wet wind piped through the dishevelled boughs of the forest, under the leaden sky.
She said it was good to be there then, and think of home and the fireside; and better still, when home was reached at last, to think of the desolate pond we had left; and good, indeed, it was to trudge home by wood and park and avenue at dusk, when the bats were about, with Alfred and Charlie and Mimsey and Madge and Médor; swishing our way through the lush, dead leaves, scattering the beautiful, ripe horse-chestnut out of its split creamy case, or picking up acorns and beechnuts here and there as we went.
And, once home, it was good, very good, to think how dark and lonesome and shivery it must be out there by the mare, as we squatted and chatted and roasted chestnuts by the wood fire in the school-room before the candles were lit—entre chien et loup, as was called the French gloaming—while Thérèse was laying the tea-things, and telling us the news, and cutting bread and butter; and my mother played the harp in the drawing-room above; till the last red streak died out of the wet west behind the swaying tree-tops, and the curtains were drawn, and there was light, and the appetites were let loose.
I love to sit here, in my solitude and captivity, and recall every incident of that sweet epoch—to ache with the pangs of happy remembrance; than which, for the likes of me, great poets tell us there is no greater grief. This sorrow's crown of sorrow is my joy and my consolation, and ever has been; and I would not exchange it for youth, health, wealth, honor, and freedom; only for thrice happy childhood itself once more, over and over again, would I give up its thrice happy recollections.
That it should not be all beer and skittles with us, and therefore apt to pall, my cousins and I had to work pretty hard. In the first place, my dear mother did all she could to make me an infant prodigy of learning. She tried to teach me Italian, which she spoke as fluently as English or French (for she had lived much in Italy), and I had to translate the "Gierusalemme Liberata" into both those latter languages—a task which has remained unfinished—and to render the "Allegro" and the "Penseroso" into Miltonian French prose, and "Le Cid" into Corneillian English. Then there were Pinnock's histories of Greece and Rome to master, and, of course, the Bible; and, every Sunday, the Collect, the Gospel, and the Epistle to get by heart. No, it was not all beer and skittles.
It was her pleasure to teach, but, alas! not mine to learn; and we cost each other many a sigh, but loved each other all the more, perhaps.
Then we went in the mornings, my cousins and I, to M. Saindou's, opposite, that we might learn French grammar and French-Latin and French-Greek. But on three afternoons out of the weekly six Mr. Slade, a Cambridge sizar stranded in Paris, came to anglicize (and neutralize) the Latin and Greek we had learned in the morning, and to show us what sorry stuff the French had made of them and of their quantities.
Perhaps the Greek and Latin quantities are a luxury of English growth—a mere social test—a little pitfall of our own invention, like the letter h, for the tripping up of unwary pretenders; or else, French education being so deplorably cheap in those days, the school-masters there could not afford to take such fanciful superfluities into consideration; it was not to be done at the price.
In France, be it remembered, the King and his greengrocer sent their sons to the same school (which did not happen