Tommy Wideawake Part 1

Tommy Wideawake.

by H. H. Bashford.

I

IN WHICH FOUR MEN MAKE A PROMISE

We were sitting round the fire, in the study--five men, all of us middle-aged and sober-minded, four of us bachelors, one a widower.

And it was he who spoke, with an anxious light in his grey eyes, and two thoughtful wrinkles at the bridge of his military nose.

"Tommy," he observed, "Tommy is not an ordinary boy."

We were silent, and I could see the doctor's lips twitching beneath his moustache, as he gazed hard into the fire, and sucked at his cigar. The colonel knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and resumed:

"I suppose," he said, "that it is a comparatively unusual circ.u.mstance to find five men, unrelated by birth or marriage, who, having been friends at school and college and having reached years of maturity, find themselves resident in the same village, with that early friends.h.i.+p not merely still existent, but, if I may say so, stronger than ever."

We nodded.

"It is unusual," observed the vicar.

"As you know," proceeded the colonel, a little laboriously, for he was a poor conversationalist, "the calls of my profession have forbidden me, of late years, to enjoy as much of your company as I could have wished--and now, after a very pleasant winter together, I must once again take the Eastern trail for an indefinite period."

We were regretfully silent--perhaps also a little curious, for our friend was not wont to discourse thus fully to us.

The poet appeared even a little dismayed, owing, doubtless, to that intuition which has made him so justly renowned in his circle of admirers, for the colonel's next remarks filled us all with a similar emotion.

"Dear friends," he said, leaning forward in his chair, and placing his pipe upon the whist table, "may I--would you allow me so to trespa.s.s on this friends.h.i.+p of ours, as to ask for your interest in my only son, Thomas?"

For a minute all of us, I fancy, trod the fields of memory.

The poet's thoughts hovered round a small grave in his garden, wherein lay an erstwhile feline comrade of his solitude, whose soul had leaped into s.p.a.ce at the a.s.sault of an unerring pebble.

The vicar and the doctor would seem to have had similar reminiscences--and had I not seen a youthful figure wading complacently through my cuc.u.mber frames? We all were interested in Tommy.

Another chord was touched.

"He is motherless, you see, and very alone," the colonel pleaded, as though our thoughts had been audible.

We remembered the brief bright years, and the long grey ones, and steeled our hearts for service.

"I have seen so little of him, myself," continued the colonel. "He is at school and he will go to college, but a boy needs more than school and college can give him--he needs a hand to guide his thoughts and fancies, and liberty, in which they may unfold. He needs developing in a way in which no school or college can develop him. I would have him see nature, and learn her lessons; see men and things, and know how to discern and appreciate. I would have him a little different--wider shall I say?--than the mere stereotyped public-school and varsity product--admirable as it is. I would have him cultured, but not a wors.h.i.+pper of culture, to the neglect of those deeper qualities without which culture is a mere husk.

"I would have him athletic, but not of those who deify athletics.

"Above all, I would have him such a gentleman as only he can be who realises that the privilege of good birth is in no way due to indigenous merit."

He paused, and for a while we smoked in silence.

"He will, of course, be away at school for the greater part of each year. But if you, dear friends, would undertake--in turn, if you will--to supervise his holidays, I should be more than grateful. We grown men regard our life in terms--a boy punctuates his, by holidays--and it is in them, that I would beg of you to influence him for good."

He turned to the poet.

"Tommy," he said, "has, I feel sure, a deeply imaginative nature, and I am by no means certain that he is not poetical. In fact, I believe he once wrote something about a star, which was really quite creditable--quite creditable."

The poet looked a little bewildered.

"And I believe that Tommy has scientific bents"--the colonel looked at the doctor, who bowed silently.

Then he regarded me a little doubtfully--after a pause.

"Tommy is not an ordinary boy," he repeated, somewhat ambiguously I thought. Lastly, he turned to the vicar, "I could never repay the man who taught my boy to love G.o.d," he said simply, and we fell once more to our silence, and our smoking, while the flames leaped merrily in the old grate, and flung strange shadows over the black wainscot and polished floor.

Camslove Grange was old and serene and aristocratic, an ant.i.thesis, in all respects, to its future owner, whose round head pressed a pillow upstairs, while his spirit wandered, at play, through a boy's dreamland.

The colonel waved his hand.

"It will all be his, you see, one day," he said, almost apologetically, "and I want the old place to have a good master."

I have said that the colonel's request had filled us with dismay, and this indeed was very much the case.

We all had our habits. We all--even the doctor, who was the youngest of us by some years--loved peace and regularity. Moreover, we all, if not possessed of an actual dislike for boys, nevertheless preferred them at a considerable distance.

And yet, in spite of all these things, we could not but fall in with the colonel's appeal, both for the sake of unbroken friends.h.i.+p--and in one case, at least (he will not mind, if I confess it), for the sake of a sweet lost face.

And so it came about that we clasped hands, in the silence of the old study, where, if rumour be true, more than one famous treaty has been made and signed, and took upon our shoulders the burden of Thomas, only son of our departing friend.

The colonel rose to his feet, and there was a glad light in his eyes. He held out both hands towards us.

"G.o.d bless you, old comrades," he said. Then, in answer to a question,

"Tommy returns to school, to-morrow, for the Easter term, and his holiday will be in April, I fancy. To whom is he to go first?"

We all looked at each other with questioning eyes--then we looked at the fire.

The silence began to get awkward.

"Shall we--er--shall we toss--draw lots, that is?" suggested the vicar, rather nervously.

The idea seemed good, and we resorted to the time-honoured, yet most unsatisfactory, expedient of spinning a penny in the air.

The results, combined with a process of exclusion, left the choice between the poet and the doctor.

The vicar spun, and the poet called. "Heads!" he cried, feverishly.

And heads it was.