Complete Works of Lewis Carroll (78 page)

‘But that is only half the picture,’ I said.
‘Besides working for oneself, may there not be the helping of others?’

‘Surely, surely!’
Lady Muriel exclaimed in a tone of relief, looking at her father with sparkling eyes.

‘Yes,’ said the Earl, ‘so long as there were any others needing help.
But, given ages and ages more, surely all created reasons would at length reach the same dead level of satiety.
And then what is there to look forward to?’

‘I know that weary feeling,’ said the young Doctor.
‘I have gone through it all, more than once.
Now let me tell you how I have put it to myself.
I have imagined a little child, playing with toys on his nursery-floor, and yet able to reason, and to look on, thirty years ahead.
Might he not say to himself "By that time I shall have had enough of bricks and ninepins.
How weary Life will be!"
Yet, if we look forward through those thirty years, we find him a great statesman, full of interests and joys far more intense than his baby-life could give—joys wholly inconceivable to his baby-mind—joys such as no baby-language could in the faintest degree describe.
Now, may not our life, a million years hence, have the same relation, to our life now, that the man’s life has to the child’s?
And, just as one might try, all in vain, to express to that child, in the language of bricks and ninepins, the meaning of "politics", so perhaps all those descriptions of Heaven, with its music, and its feasts, and its streets of gold, may be only attempts to describe, in our words, things for which we really have no words at all.
Don’t you think that, in your picture of another life, you are in fact transplanting that child into political life, without making any allowance for his growing up?’

‘I think I understand you,’ said the Earl.
‘The music of Heaven may be something beyond our powers of thought.
Yet the music of Earth is sweet!
Muriel, my child, sing us something before we go to bed!’

‘Do,’ said Arthur, as he rose and lit the candles on the cottage-piano, lately banished from the drawing-room to make room for a ‘semi-grand’.
‘There is a song here, that I have never heard you sing.

"Hail to thee, blithe spirit!

Bird thou never wert, That from Heaven, or near it,Pourest thy full heart!"‘

he read from the page he had spread open before her.

‘And our little life here,’ the Earl went on, ‘is, to that grand time, like a child’s summer-day!
One gets tired as night draws on,’

he added, with a touch of sadness in his voice, ‘and one gets to long for bed!
For those welcome words "Come, child, ‘tis bed-time!"‘

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

TO THE RESCUE!

‘IT isn’t bed-time!’
said a sleepy little voice.
‘The owls hasn’t gone to bed, and I s’a’n’t go to seep wizout oo sings to me!’

‘Oh, Bruno!’
cried Sylvie.
‘Don’t you know the owls have only just got up?
But the frogs have gone to bed, ages ago."

‘Well, I aren’t a frog,’ said Bruno.

‘What shall I sing?’
said Sylvie, skilfully avoiding the argument.

‘Ask Mister Sir,’ Bruno lazily replied, clasping his hands behind his curly head, and lying back on his fern-leaf, till it almost bent over with his weight.
‘This aren’t a comfable leaf, Sylvie.
Find me a comfabler—please!’
he added, as an after-thought, in obedience to a warning finger held up by Sylvie.
‘I doosn’t like being feet-upwards!’

It was a pretty sight to see—the motherly way in which the fairy-child gathered up her little brother in her arms, and laid him on a stronger leaf.
She gave it just a touch to set it rocking, and it went on vigorously by itself, as if it contained some hidden machinery.
It certainly wasn’t the wind, for the evening-breeze had quite died away again, and not a leaf was stirring over our heads.

‘Why does that one leaf rock so, without the others?’
I asked Sylvie.
She only smiled sweetly and shook her head.
‘I don’t know why,’ she said.
‘It always does, if it’s got a fairy-child on it.
It has to, you know.’

‘And can people see the leaf rock, who ca’n’t see the Fairy on it?’

‘Why, of course!’
cried Sylvie.
‘A leaf’s a leaf, and everybody can see it; but Bruno’s Bruno, and they ca’n’t see him, unless they’re eerie, like you.’

Then I understood how it was that one sometimes sees—going through the woods in a still evening—one fern-leaf rocking steadily on, all by itself.
Haven’t you ever seen that?
Try if you can see the fairy-sleeper on it, next time; but don’t pick the leaf, whatever you do; let the little one sleep on!

But all this time Bruno was getting sleepier and sleepier.
‘Sing, sing!’
he murmured fretfully.
Sylvie looked to me for instructions.

‘What shall it be?’
she said.

‘Could you sing him the nursery-song you once told me of?’
I suggested.
‘The one that had been put through the mind-mangle, you know.
"The little man that had a little gun", I think it was.’

‘Why, that are one of the Professor’s songs!’
cried Bruno.
‘I likes the little man; and I likes the way they spinned him—like a teetle-totle-tum.’
And he turned a loving look on the gentle old man who was sitting at the other side of his leaf-bed, and who instantly began to sing, accompanying himself on his Outlandish guitar, while the snail, on which he sat, waved its horns in time to the music.

In stature the Manlet was dwarfish—

No burly big Blunderbore he:

And he wearily gazed on the crawfish

His Wifelet had dressed for his tea.

‘Now reach me, sweet Atom, my gunlet,

And hurl the old shoelet for luck:

Let me hie to the bank of the runlet,

And shoot thee a Duck!’

She has reached him his minikin gunlet:

She has hurled the old shoelet for luck:

She is busily baking a bunlet,

To welcome him home with his Duck.

On he speeds, never wasting a wordlet,

Though thoughtlets cling, closely as wax,

To the spot where the beautiful birdlet

So quietly quacks.

Where the Lobsterlet lurks, and the Crablet

So slowly and sleepily crawls:

Where the Dolphin’s at home, and the Dablet

Pays long ceremonious calls:

Where the Grublet is sought by the Froglet:

Where the Frog is pursued by the Duck:

Where the Ducklet is chased by the Doglet—

So runs the world’s luck!

He has loaded with bullet and powder:

His footfall is noiseless as air:

But the Voices grow louder and louder,

And bellow, and bluster, and blare.

They bristle before him and after,

They flutter above and below,

Shrill shriekings of lubberly laughter,

Weird wailings of woe!

They echo without him, within him:

They thrill through his whiskers and beard:

Like a teetotum seeming to spin him,

With sneers never hitherto sneered.

‘Avengement,’ they cry, ‘on our Foelet!

Let the Manikin weep for our wrongs!

Let us drench him, from toplet to toelet,

With Nursery-Songs!

‘He shall muse upon "Hey!
Diddle!
Diddle!"

On the Cow that surmounted the Moon:

He shall rave of the Cat and the Fiddle,

And the Dish that eloped with the Spoon:

And his soul shall be sad for the Spider,

When Miss Muffet was sipping her whey,

That so tenderly sat down beside her,

And scared her away!

‘The music of Midsummer-madness

Shall sting him with many a bite,

Till, in rapture of rollicking sadness,

He shall groan with a gloomy delight:

He shall swathe him, like mists of the morning,

In platitudes luscious and limp,

Such as deck, with a deathless adorning,

The Song of the Shrimp!

‘When the Ducklet’s dark doom is decided,

We will trundle him home in a trice:

And the banquet, so plainly provided,

Shall round into rose-buds and rice:

In a blaze of pragmatic invention

He shall wrestle with Fate, and shall reign:

But he has not a friend fit to mention,

So hit him again!’

He has shot it, the delicate darling!

And the Voices have ceased from their strife:

Not a whisper of sneering or snarling,

As he carries it home to his wife:

Then, cheerily champing the bunlet

His spouse was so skilful to bake, He hies him once more to the runlet,

To fetch her the Drake!

‘He’s sound asleep now,’ said Sylvie, carefully tucking in the edge of a violet-leaf, which she had been spreading over him as a sort of blanket: ‘good night!’

‘Good night!’
I echoed.

‘You may well say "good night"!’
laughed Lady Muriel, rising and shutting up the piano as she spoke.
‘When you’ve been nid—nid—nodding all the time I’ve been singing for your benefit!
What was it all about, now?’
she demanded imperiously.

‘Something about a duck?’
I hazarded.
‘Well, a bird of some kind?’
I corrected myself, perceiving at once that that guess was wrong, at any rate.

‘Something about a bird of some kind!’
Lady Muriel repeated, with as much withering scorn as her sweet face was capable of conveying.
‘And that’s the way he speaks of Shelley’s Sky-Lark, is it?
When the Poet particularly says "Hail to thee, blithe spirit!
Bird thou never wert!"‘

She led the way to the smoking-room, where, ignoring all the usages of Society and all the instincts of Chivalry, the three Lords of the Creation reposed at their ease in low rocking-chairs, and permitted the one lady who was present to glide gracefully about among us, supplying our wants in the form of cooling drinks, cigarettes, and lights.
Nay, it was only one of the three who had the chivalry to go beyond the common-place ‘thank you’, and to quote the Poet’s exquisite description of how Geraint, when waited on by Enid, was moved