Dream Days | Page 7

stomach
with your big knife. No relations would be likely to come interfering

with you when thus blissfully occupied. And yet I did not wish--just
yet-- to have done with relations entirely. They should be made to feel
their position first, to see themselves as they really were, and to
wish--when it was too late--that they had behaved more properly.
Of all professions, the army seemed to lend itself the most thoroughly
to the scheme. You enlisted, you followed the drum, you marched,
fought, and ported arms, under strange skies, through unrecorded years.
At last, at long last, your opportunity would come, when the horrors of
war were flickering through the quiet country-side where you were
cradled and bred, but where the memory of you had long been dim.
Folk would run together, clamorous, palsied with fear; and among the
terror- stricken groups would figure certain aunts. "What hope is left
us?" they would ask themselves, "save in the clemency of the General,
the mysterious, invincible General, of whom men tell such romantic
tales?" And the army would march in, and the guns would rattle and
leap along the village street, and, last of all, you--you, the General, the
fabled hero--you would enter, on your coal-black charger, your pale set
face seamed by an interesting sabre-cut. And then--but every boy has
rehearsed this familiar piece a score of times. You are magnanimous, in
fine--that goes without saying; you have a coal-black horse, and a
sabre-cut, and you can afford to be very magnanimous. But all the same
you give them a good talking-to.
This pleasant conceit simply ravished my soul for some twenty minutes,
and then the old sense of injury began to well up afresh, and to call for
new plasters and soothing syrups. This time I took refuge in happy
thoughts of the sea. The sea was my real sphere, after all. On the sea, in
especial, you could combine distinction with lawlessness, whereas the
army seemed to be always weighted by a certain plodding submission
to discipline. To be sure, by all accounts, the life was at first a rough
one. But just then I wanted to suffer keenly; I wanted to be a poor devil
of a cabin boy, kicked, beaten, and sworn at-- for a time. Perhaps some
hint, some inkling of my sufferings might reach their ears. In due
course the sloop or felucca would turn up--it always did--the
rakish-looking craft, black of hull, low in the water, and bristling with
guns; the jolly Roger flapping overhead, and myself for sole

commander. By and by, as usually happened, an East Indiaman would
come sailing along full of relations--not a necessary relation would be
missing. And the crew should walk the plank, and the captain should
dance from his own yardarm, and then I would take the passengers in
hand--that miserable group of well-known figures cowering on the
quarterdeck!--and then--and then the same old performance: the air
thick with magnanimity. In all the repertory of heroes, none is more
truly magnanimous than your pirate chief.
When at last I brought myself back from the future to the actual present,
I found that these delectable visions had helped me over a longer
stretch of road than I had imagined; and I looked around and took my
bearings. To the right of me was a long low building of grey stone, new,
and yet not smugly so; new, and yet possessing distinction, marked
with a character that did not depend on lichen or on crumbling
semi-effacement of moulding and mullion. Strangers might have been
puzzled to classify it; to me, an explorer from earliest years, the place
was familiar enough. Most folk called it "The Settlement"; others, with
quite sufficient conciseness for our neighbourhood, spoke of "them
there fellows up by Halliday's"; others again, with a hint of derision,
named them the "monks." This last title I supposed to be intended for
satire, and knew to be fatuously wrong. I was thoroughly acquainted
with monks--in books--and well knew the cut of their long frocks, their
shaven polls, and their fascinating big dogs, with brandy-bottles round
their necks, incessantly hauling happy travellers out of the snow. The
only dog at the settlement was an Irish terrier, and the good fellows
who owned him, and were owned by him, in common, wore clothes of
the most nondescript order, and mostly cultivated side-whiskers. I had
wandered up there one day, searching (as usual) for something I never
found, and had been taken in by them and treated as friend and
comrade. They had made me free of their ideal little rooms, full of
books and pictures, and clean of the antimacassar taint; they had shown
me their chapel, high, hushed, and faintly scented, beautiful with a
strange new beauty born both of