When he was let up he remained convinced that "Da" had done a dreadful
thing. Though he did not wish to bear witness against her, he had been
compelled, by fear of repetition, to seek his mother and say: "Mum,
don't let 'Da' hold me down on my back again."
His mother, her hands held up over her head, and in them two plaits of
hair--"couleur de feuille morte," as little Jon had not yet learned
to call it--had looked at him with eyes like little bits of his brown
velvet tunic, and answered:
"No, darling, I won't."
She, being in the nature of a goddess, little Jon was satisfied;
especially when, from under the dining-table at breakfast, where he
happened to be waiting for a mushroom, he had overheard her say to his
father:
"Then, will you tell 'Da,' dear, or shall I? She's so devoted to him";
and his father's answer:
"Well, she mustn't show it that way. I know exactly what it feels like
to be held down on one's back. No Forsyte can stand it for a minute."
Conscious that they did not know him to be under the table, little Jon
was visited by the quite new feeling of embarrassment, and stayed where
he was, ravaged by desire for the mushroom.
Such had been his first dip into the dark abysses of existence. Nothing
much had been revealed to him after that, till one day, having gone down
to the cow-house for his drink of milk fresh from the cow, after Garratt
had finished milking, he had seen Clover's calf, dead. Inconsolable,
and followed by an upset Garratt, he had sought "Da"; but suddenly
aware that she was not the person he wanted, had rushed away to find his
father, and had run into the arms of his mother.
"Clover's calf's dead! Oh! Oh! It looked so soft!"
His mother's clasp, and her:
"Yes, darling, there, there!" had stayed his sobbing. But if Clover's
calf could die, anything could--not only bees, flies, beetles and
chickens--and look soft like that! This was appalling--and soon
forgotten!
The next thing had been to sit on a bumble bee, a poignant experience,
which his mother had understood much better than "Da"; and nothing of
vital importance had happened after that till the year turned; when,
following a day of utter wretchedness, he had enjoyed a disease composed
of little spots, bed, honey in a spoon, and many Tangerine oranges.
It was then that the world had flowered. To "Auntie" June he owed that
flowering, for no sooner was he a little lame duck than she came rushing
down from London, bringing with her the books which had nurtured her
own Berserker spirit, born in the noted year of 1869. Aged, and of many
colours, they were stored with the most formidable happenings. Of
these she read to little Jon, till he was allowed to read to himself;
whereupon she whisked back to London and left them with him in a heap.
Those books cooked his fancy, till he thought and dreamed of nothing but
midshipmen and dhows, pirates, rafts, sandal-wood traders, iron horses,
sharks, battles, Tartars, Red Indians, balloons, North Poles and other
extravagant delights. The moment he was suffered to get up, he rigged
his bed fore and aft, and set out from it in a narrow bath across green
seas of carpet, to a rock, which he climbed by means of its mahogany
drawer knobs, to sweep the horizon with his drinking tumbler screwed to
his eye, in search of rescuing sails. He made a daily raft out of the
towel stand, the tea tray, and his pillows. He saved the juice from his
French plums, bottled it in an empty medicine bottle, and provisioned
the raft with the rum that it became; also with pemmican made out of
little saved-up bits of chicken sat on and dried at the fire; and with
lime juice against scurvy, extracted from the peel of his oranges and a
little economised juice. He made a North Pole one morning from the whole
of his bedclothes except the bolster, and reached it in a birch-bark
canoe (in private life the fender), after a terrible encounter with a
polar bear fashioned from the bolster and four skittles dressed up
in "Da's" nightgown. After that, his father, seeking to steady his
imagination, brought him Ivanboe, Bevis, a book about King Arthur, and
Tom Brown's Schooldays. He read the first, and for three days built,
defended and stormed Front de Boeuf's castle, taking every part in the
piece except those of Rebecca and Rowena; with piercing cries of: "En
avant, de Bracy!" and similar utterances. After reading the book about
King Arthur he became almost exclusively Sir Lamorac de Galis, because,
though there was very little about him, he preferred his name to that of
any other knight; and he rode his old rocking-horse to death, armed
with a long bamboo. Bevis he found tame; besides, it required woods and
animals, of which he had none in his nursery, except his two cats, Fitz
and Puck Forsyte, who permitted no liberties. For Tom Brown he was as
yet too young. There was relief in the house when, after the fourth
week, he was permitted to go down and out.