Spring had waxed to summer, summer waned to autumn. Then my aunt and I one morning, waiting at the breakfast table, saw through the open window my mother skipping, dancing, pirouetting up the garden path. She held a letter open in her hand, which as she drew near she waved about her head, singing:
“Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, then comes Wednesday morning.”
She caught me to her and began dancing with me round the room.
Observed my aunt, who continued steadily to eat bread and butter:
“Just like ‘em all. Goes mad with joy. What for? Because she’s going to leave a decent house, to live in a poky hole in the East End of London, and keep one servant.”
To my aunt the second person ever remained a grammatical superfluity. Invariably she spoke not to but of a person, throwing out her conversation in the form of commentary. This had the advantage of permitting the party intended to ignore it as mere impersonal philosophy. Seeing it was generally uncomplimentary, most people preferred so to regard it; but my mother had never succeeded in schooling herself to indifference.
“It’s not a poky hole,” she replied; “it’s an old-fashioned house, near the river.”
“Plaistow marshes!” ejaculated my aunt, “calls it the river!”
“So it is the river,” returned my mother; “the river is the other side of the marshes.”
“Let’s hope it will always stop there,” said my aunt.
“And it’s got a garden,” continued my mother, ignoring my aunt’s last remark; “which is quite an unusual feature in a London house. And it isn’t the East End of London; it is a rising suburb. And you won’t make me miserable because I am too happy.”
“Drat the woman!” said my aunt, “why can’t she sit down and give us our tea before it’s all cold?”
“You are a disagreeable thing!” said my mother.
“Not half milk,” said my aunt. My aunt was never in the least disturbed by other people’s opinion of her, which was perhaps well for her.
For three days my mother packed and sang; and a dozen times a day unpacked and laughed, looking for things wanted that were always found at the very bottom of the very last box looked into, so that Anna, waiting for a certain undergarment of my aunt’s which shall be nameless, suggested a saving of time:
“If I were you, ma’am,” said Anna, “I’d look into the last box you’re going to look into first.”
But it was found eventually in the first box-the box, that is, my mother had intended to search first, but which, acting on Anna’s suggestion, she had reserved till the last. This caused my mother to be quite short with Anna, who she said had wasted her time. But by Tuesday afternoon all stood ready: we were to start early Wednesday morning.
That evening, missing my mother in the house, I sought her in the garden and found her, as I had expected, on her favourite seat under the great lime tree; but to my surprise there were tears in her eyes.
“But I thought you were glad we were going,” I said.
“So I am,” answered my mother, drying her eyes only to make room for fresh tears.
“Then why are you crying?”
“Because I’m sorry to leave here.”
Grown-up folks with their contradictory ways were a continual puzzle to me in those days; I am not sure I quite understand them even now, myself included.
We were up and off next day before the dawn. The sun rose as the wagon reached the top of the hill; and there we paused and took our farewell look at Old Jacob’s Tower. My mother cried a little behind her veil; but my aunt only said, “I never did care for earwigs in my tea;” and as for myself I was too excited and expectant to feel much sentiment about anything.
On the journey I sat next to an exceptionally large and heavy man, who in his sleep – and he slept often – imagined me to be a piece of stuffing out of place. Then, grunting and wriggling, he would endeavour to rub me out, until the continued irritation of my head between the window and his back would cause him to awake, when he would look down upon me reprovingly but not unkindly, observing to the carriage generally: “It’s a funny thing, ain’t it, nobody’s ever made a boy yet that could keep still for ten seconds.” After which he would pat me heartily on the head, to show he was not vexed with me, and fall to sleep again upon me. He was a good-tempered man.
My mother sat occupied chiefly with her own thoughts, and my aunt had found a congenial companion in a lady who had had her cap basket sat upon; so I was left mainly to my own resources. When I could get my head free of the big man’s back, I gazed out of the window, and watched the flying fragments as we shed the world. Now a village would fall from us, now the yellow corn-land would cling to us for awhile, or a wood catch at our rushing feet, and sometimes a strong town would stop us, and hold us, panting for a space. Or, my eyes weary, I would sit and listen to the hoarse singing of the wheels beneath my feet. It was a monotonous chaunt, ever the same two lines:
“Here we suffer grief and pain,
Here we meet to part again,”
followed by a low, rumbling laugh. Sometimes fortissimo, sometimes pianissimo; now vivace, now largo; but ever those same two lines, and ever followed by the same low, rumbling laugh; still to this day the iron wheels sing to me that same song.
Later on I also must have slept, for I dreamt that as the result of my having engaged in single combat with a dragon, the dragon, ignoring all the rules of Fairyland, had swallowed me. It was hot and stuffy in the dragon’s stomach. He had, so it appeared to me, disgracefully overeaten himself; there were hundreds of us there, entirely undigested, including Mother Hubbard and a gentleman named Johnson, against whom, at that period, I entertained a strong prejudice by reason of our divergent views upon the subject of spelling. Even in this hour of our mutual discomfort Johnson would not leave me alone, but persisted in asking me how I spelt Jonah. Nobody was looking, so I kicked him. He sprang up and came after me. I tried to run away, but became wedged between Hop-o’-my-Thumb and Julius Caesar. I suppose our tearing about must have hurt the dragon, for at that moment he gave vent to a most fearful scream, and I awoke to find the fat man rubbing his left shin, while we struggled slowly, with steps growing ever feebler, against a sea of brick that every moment closed in closer round us.
We scrambled out of the carriage into a great echoing cave that might have been the dragon’s home, where, to my alarm, my mother was immediately swooped down upon by a strange man in grey.
“Why’s he do that?” I asked of my aunt.
“Because he’s a fool,” answered my aunt; “they all are.”
He put my mother down and came towards us. He was a tall, thin man, with eyes one felt one would never be afraid of; and instinctively even then I associated him in my mind with windmills and a lank white horse.
“Why, how he’s grown,” said the grey man, raising me in his arms until my mother beside me appeared to me in a new light as quite a little person; “and solid too.”
My mother whispered something. I think from her face, for I knew the signs, it was praise of me.
“And he’s going to be our new fortune,” she added aloud, as the grey man lowered me.
“Then,” said my aunt, who had this while been sitting rigid upon a flat black box, “don’t drop him down a coal-mine. That’s all