‘Now what shall I do with these babies of mine to-day?’ the mother was asking herself all the time she was saying Ja to every suggestion of the cook’s. Somebody from the village came and wanted to speak to her, and as it turned into a long conversation she had to send the babies back to Séraphine; and then something else happened that kept her, and it was nearly an hour before she could get away and see what was going on in the schoolroom. But the babies had made up a game for themselves that had put Séraphine to flight and was keeping them quite happy. They had got May on to the sofa, covered her well up, told her she was very ill and must sleep, and when the mother came in, April and June were striding up and down the room shouting German lullabies at the top of their voices.
‘She shall sleep,’ explained June in a stentorian whisper to her mother.
‘But how can she with such a noise going on?’
‘It isn’t one noise, it’s Wiegenlieder,’ said June offended; and turning away began again to roar out something about Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf in a voice that shook the walls.
‘Oh, she did sneeze so badly!’ whispered April, with uplifted hands; ‘Oh such a lot of times! Oh such a very lot of times!’ And seeing that May had got her arms outside the cushion she had put on her chest, she pounced on them, dragged them underneath again, smoothed the cushion with resounding pats, and, bending down, shouted schlaf Kindlein, schlaf into her ear. Séraphine was nowhere to be seen, and indeed the lullabies were very maddening. May, however, seemed to like them, and lay on the sofa quite comfortable, and pleased at doing nothing; and though she sneezed a good deal, was otherwise enjoying herself.
‘That child’s ears can’t be very sensitive,’ thought the mother, getting away as quickly as possible; and she shut all the doors between the school-room and the drawing-room, and, as lullabies were the fashion, wrote a tune for Hush-a-bye Baby.
HUSH-A-BYE BABY
Hush-a-bye, baby, on the tree top,
When the wind blows the cradle will rock;
When the bough breaks the cradle will fall,
And down comes baby and cradle and all.
By lunch time things were looking brighter. Séraphine had been so deafened by the singing that she had kept out of the way and left the babies alone; the mother was exhausted but pleased, for she had managed to write three tunes; the thermometer had gone up several degrees, the sun was shining gaily, and the babies would be able to go and skate on the stream at the end of the garden. It was the Thursday in Holy Week, and if a thaw set in soon there would still be a chance of a green Easter, and the eggs would be hidden after all in the garden. Of course if the garden is frozen up at Easter, or if it rains, the eggs have to be hidden in the house, under the tables and chairs, which is never half such fun; but where the babies lived it was nearly always fine and blue on Easter Sunday, and they had never yet been prevented from having their egg-hunt out of doors.
The mother watched them go off with their skates after lunch, jumping and running down the path that had been shovelled in the snow, and even Séraphine, the moment she got out of the house into the blessed sunshine, began to look happy, and as though life, after all, were a very pleasant thing. ‘And so it is,’ thought the mother, as she stood for a moment in the sun, breathing in the pure cold air, and sheltered by the house from the north wind, ‘and so it always will be, as long as there is sun to shine and people with the grace to say thank you.’ And she went into the house and wrote three more tunes.
When they were finished she leant back in her chair and felt rather less sure about the pleasantness of life. ‘May I never make another!’ she said to herself. ‘To-morrow is Good Friday, and the babies go to church. On Easter eve the egg- basket comes, and each one will be busy hiding her eggs. On Easter Sunday they will go to church again, and in the afternoon look for the eggs. And then perhaps the snow will be gone, and lessons will begin again, and the garden grow greener and greener every day, and never, never, never need I make any more tunes!’ And she gave a deep sigh of relief, for you see she had only made the tunes to please the babies when they had nothing else to please them, and wouldn’t have done so for any other person or reason in the world.
When, at dusk, the babies came tramping up the snow-path, jingling their skates, and very warm and cheerful, the library windows were ablaze with light. Their mother met them at the door, and told them to take off their coats quickly and come to her, for the Easter hare had been to see her and had left something for them. I don’t think the sort of hare that is called Easter ever goes to England, but in Germany they are supposed to bring all the eggs and presents at Easter in a basket, just as Father Christmas brings the presents at Christmas. The babies had often seen hares in the garden, but they never had baskets, and it was only the mother who was lucky enough to meet the real Easter hare, basket and all. As Easter time drew near she would come in from the garden and say, ‘Who do you think I met, babies, in the copse where the anemones grow?’ And they would listen with round eyes while she described the costume and conversation and conduct of the Easter hare. They used to prowl round the copse sometimes for hours, but they never saw him. ‘He’s rather shy,’ said the mother.
It was wonderful what things that Easter hare did. The library was brilliant with lamps and candles, and the lire was blazing up the great chimney, and on a low table round which stood three little chairs, the Easter hare had put a cloth, and a new dolls’ tea set that the babies had never seen, with spoons, and knives, and tiny napkins, and in the middle of the table a little flower-pot with a whole snowdrop plant growing in it. There were a great many plates of cake, and bread and butter, and pieces of scone, and jam, for the plates were so small that one of each would never have filled the babies, and there was a little dish of white radishes on one side of the snowdrop, and a little dish of red radishes on the other side of the snowdrop, and it looked as festive a banquet as any one could wish to see. ‘Oh!’ cried the babies when they came in.
‘The Easter hare did it all,’ said the mother, ‘and has lent you his best tea things. He is coming in again to-night to fetch them, because he’s giving rather a lot of parties himself just now, and can’t spare them long.’
‘Oh how dear he is!’ cried April, dancing round the little table, while May hung fondly over the radishes.
But June took her mother aside. ‘I wants to say you something,’ she said, in a voice that sounded hollow, pulling her by her dress into a remote corner.
‘Well?’ said the mother bending down.
June put her arms round her mother’s neck and drew her head close. ‘I doesn’t believe there is one Easter hare,’ she whispered in a loud and awful whisper.
‘Oh you tickle me!’ cried the mother, pulling herself up straight again with a jerk, and rubbing her ear.
‘I doesn’t believe there ever is Easter hares,’ continued June, in a tone of gloomy conviction, while her mother rubbed her tickled ear without answering, ‘nor any baskets too not. I doesn’t believe there ever did was any, either.’
The mother stood looking down at her, mechanically rubbing her ear. ‘What a dreadful baby you are,’ she murmured at last; ‘why don’t you believe in him? When I was a little girl I believed everything.’
‘But I not,’ said June, shaking her head with a sort of solemn triumph, as though she thought it was very clever of her not to believe everything, and a great advance on the easy faith of her mother’s youthful years; ‘there isn’t any hares with baskets, but only mummies.’
Then the mother stooped down and whispered that it was to be a secret between them, and June was so pleased at sharing a secret with her mother that she has faithfully kept it ever since, and has never breathed a doubt to April and May, who firmly believe in him to this day. I saw the mother a little while ago, and she told me so.
The tea party began, very properly, with a German grace, and then April sat where the teapot was and poured out the tea; but the little cups came back to be filled again so quickly that sh
e had no peace, and couldn’t get on with her bread and butter, and as May and June wouldn’t wait they began to help themselves, June drinking three cups to the other babies’ one, so that by the time the party was over she was extremely full and unpopular. But she liked the feeling of being full, and as for being unpopular what did she care? She laughed till the tears rolled down her cheeks at the discomfiture of the others, when they found that even turning the teapot and milk jug upside down failed to produce another drop. They had had five cups each, and June had had fifteen. Saints would have been provoked at such gross unfairness and revolting greediness. April glared at her across the table: Guttersnipe!’ she cried, in a voice of thunder.
‘Look here, babies,’ interrupted the mother from the other end of the room, feeling that the next thing to happen would be April’s flinging herself upon June and sitting on her and jumping up and down, this being a favourite form of punishment, and knowing that people with fifteen cups of tea inside them mustn’t be jumped on; ‘look here, babies, at all the tunes I’ve made for you to-day. Did you ever hear of such a good mummy? Don’t you want me to tell you the stories belonging to them?’
She knew this suggestion would bring them crowding round. It always did. There was nothing they loved so much as being told stories. Séraphine told them blood-curdling ones in French, all about bears and wolves coming to gobble up children who didn’t prize and cherish their nurses as much as they deserved; you know the sort of story, I am sure, — the sort that makes your hair try to stand on end in the night if you wake up and begin to think of them. The babies’ hair couldn’t stand on end because it was too long, and besides, it was safely wrapped up in curl papers; but even if it could have it wouldn’t have, for happily they were tough babies, and refused to be anything but amused by Séraphine’s bears. I suppose nearly every baby has to pass through the stage of having to listen to the results in bears and black men of their nurse’s fruitful imaginings, and it is a mercy if the victim is tough enough not to mind. When this mother I am telling you about was small, which she was in the days that for you children are merely pre-historic, during the greater part of three years she woke up every night and shivered for two or three hours, sick with fright, and very cold; and what do you think she was afraid of? A thing called the Crack of Doom, which her nurse had told her would usher in the Last Day; and the Last Day, said the nurse, might be expected to begin any night. The baby lay awake trembling, waiting to hear the crack, sure it would be a most horrible bang, her ears stuffed with as much of her stockings as would go in, besides her fingers, in abject misery every night for all that long time, when she might have been comfortably asleep. So when she grew up, and turned into a mother, she was thankful that her babies were so tough; and I hope all children who read this will try and be tough too, and refuse to be made wretched by such silly tales.
There was quite a little packet of tunes in the mother’s hand, for, as I said, she had actually managed to write six that day. The babies sat at her feet, and she began to tell them the nursery rhymes, beginning with Hush-a-bye, Baby, and its perilous position, left in its cradle on the top of a tree. They thought the poor hush-a-bye baby couldn’t have had a very nice mummy, and asked if it was smashed, and if so whether it ever got mended again, and what became of the cradle, and if Lieber Gott wasn’t very angry with the mummy for letting her baby get broken, and a great many other questions that were not always easy to answer.
This is its tune:
Then the mother told them about Jack and Jill going off so cheerfully in the morning, all clean and tidy, to the pump on the top of the hill to fetch water for their mother’s cooking; and how they began to quarrel on the way down again, as boys and girls will, instead of walking carefully over the loose stones; and how Jack, while he was reaching across to pinch his sister, stumbled, and fell, and broke his head, and the pail of water fell on the top of him, and Jill fell on the top of the pail of water, and there was a horrid mess; so that instead of two nice clean good children bringing the water to cook with, their mother, after waiting ever so long and getting crosser each minute, saw a broken pail, and a broken head, and a pair of dripping children with torn clothes and foolish faces coming into her kitchen. ‘Oh! it is a sad thing when children quarrel!’ observed the mother, pointing the moral when she had reached the end of this tragic story; and she wagged her head several times, turning up her eyes so far that the babies at her feet couldn’t see what they called the yolks of them at all, but only the whites, and were greatly impressed. They began to wag their heads too, shaking them slowly from side to side, all their sympathies being with Jack and Jill’s mother.
JACK AND JILL.
Jack and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water;
Jack fell down and broke his crown,
And Jill came tumbling after.
But June remarked that nothing would have happened if the pump hadn’t been on a hill. ‘I never did see pumps on hills,’ she added; which was very true, for where she lived there were no hills, and there was only one pump.
This is the Jack and Jill tune:
Then the mother told them about the Pussy Cat who went to London expressly to look at the Queen, but did nothing so grand as that after all, only chasing a poor little mouse under a chair and frightening it out of its wits, which of course it could have done just as well at home, and saved all the expense of the journey.
‘Was she one German puss?’ asked June.
‘Oh, the poor German pussies are much too busy getting out of the way of all the stones that are thrown at them to have time for going anywhere and enjoying themselves. This puss must have been English, and sleek, and well cared for, with a kind master and mistress to stroke it every day and give it milk.’
The babies sat looking into the fire. A contented, amiable, affectionate cat was an animal they had never yet met. Where they lived, the poor cats were forced to be wild and spend their lives hunting in the fields and forests, because if they ever appeared within reach of a stone and a person to throw it, they were certain to have a bit of themselves broken or bruised. If a man with a gun met a cat he naturally shot it. If an old maid kept a cat, as old maids sometimes will, it was sure sooner or later to come home from an evening stroll with its ears cut off by the nearest farmer, who hoped by this means to make hunting in his fields, with the rain and dew getting into the exposed parts, a thing so disagreeable that the cat would never again indulge in it, and as for the next time it came home from an evening stroll, it would probably come in the character of a corpse.
PUSSY CAT, PUSSY CAT.
Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, where have you been?
I’ve been to London to look at the Queen.
Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, what did you there?
I frighten’d a little mouse under the chair.
The babies had themselves possessed kittens that they had loved and lost. Directly they were big enough they took to treeclimbing and bird-nesting, and finally stayed away altogether. It was in their blood,: — the blood of ancient German cats, passed on through rows and rows of fathers and mothers who also had had stones thrown at them, and had climbed trees and eaten birds; and what is a poor cat to do? Rose, the black cat in the kitchen, had developed such strange and unpleasant habits of spitting and biting, and clawing, that it had been banished from the playroom. The servants only tolerated it because it killed the mice, and even they (I mean the servants, not the mice) never passed it without tweaking its tail. Think how dreadful it must be to go through life with a thing following you about behind that anyone can tweak who wants to! No wonder poor Rose’s temper was so uncertain.
But what, thought the babies, must these cats of England be like, — these glorious cats of liberty and luxury of whom their mother so often talked? Fascinating pussies with cheerful faces, unclipped ears, and ribbons round their necks, creatures who were often more spoilt than anybody else in the house, who rubbed themselves, confident and purring, against the legs of
strangers, who spent their days deliciously snoozing before the fire, who walked about with their untweaked tails straight up in the air in the excess of their contentment? The babies could hardly imagine such a happy state of things; but the mother showed them the cat pictures in English weekly papers from time to time, and there sure enough were just such cats as she had described, ribbons and all. They took a ribbon once to Rose, going up to him timidly, and offering, with polite and flattering speeches, to tie it round his neck; but he jumped off his chair and ran under a table, and, crouching down, glared at them out of the shadow with fiery eyeballs; so that they went away sorrowfully, for in his days of innocence they had loved him much.
This is the tune for Pussy Cat:
The next rhyme the mother took up was the one about Curly Locks. You English children all know it, of course, — how somebody, who evidently wanted to marry her, offered her a cushion as a perpetual seat if only she would be his, and instead of washing dishes and feeding pigs, as she was doing when he made her his offer, she was to spend her time sitting on this cushion sewing, and being fed at intervals with strawberries and sugar and cream.
‘Strawberries and cream, babies, are very nice things.’
‘Ach ja!’ sighed the babies.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 293
