Across the Stream - The Original Classic Edition. Benson Edward

while Archie enjoyed his three minutes in these voluminous and grown-up lendings. And now perhaps for him, too, not for three minutes only,

       but for every day... and he took a leap back into bed again as Blessington's tread sounded on the boards outside.

       Archie pretended to be asleep, for he wanted to be awakened by Blessington and hear his birthday greetings. He loved the return of consciousness in the morning--when he had not already been awake, and speculating about Grandmamma Tintagel on the lawn--to find Blessington, with her hand on his shoulder, gently stirring him, and her face close to his, whispering to him, "Eh, it's time to

       get up." So this morning, not for the first time, he simulated sleep in order to recapture that lovely sense of being awakened by love. (You must understand that he did not put it to himself like that, for Archie, just at the age of six, was not a mature and self-con- scious prig, but he wanted to know what Blessington's greeting to him would be, when she thought she woke him up on the morning of his sixth birthday.)

       From the narrow chink of his eyelids not quite closed, he could see some of her movements. She took the exciting suit of sailor-clothes from the bottom of his bed, and laid it on the chair where she always put his clothes with a flannel shirt of a quite unusual shape, and his socks on top. Already Archie had heartburnings at the knowledge of his knowledge of the sailor-suit. Blessington meant it to be a surprise to him, and a surprise he determined it should be. In the interval there was another surprise: how would Blessington wake him? She would be sure to rise to the immense importance of the occasion. She moved quietly about; she shut the windows, and brought in his bath. And then she came close up to his bed. He felt her hand stealing underneath the bedclothes to his shoulder and she shook it gently--"Eh, Master Six," she said.

       Oh, she had done exactly the right thing! She had divined Archie, as he had divined himself, knowing himself. That was just the only thing to think about this morning. He ceased to imagine: Blessington, out of her simplicity of love, had given the real birthday greeting.

       He rolled a little sideways, and there was her face close to his, and her hand still underneath his bedclothes. He put up both of his hands and caught it.

       "Many happy returns," said Blessington. "Wake up, my darling: it's your birthday. Happy returns," she repeated.

       Archie released her hand and flung his arm round her neck.

       "Oh, Blessington, isn't it fun?" he said. "What did you do when you were six?"

       "I got up directly," said Blessington, kissing him, "and had my bath and put my clothes on. Now, will you do the same, for I'm going downstairs for ten minutes, and then I shall be back."

       "All right," said Archie.

       11

       She went out, and Archie again, as with the question of Abracadabra last night, felt he must make it a surprise that there were sailor-clothes on his chair. It was quite likely that he would not be supposed to notice them at once, and so he stripped off his night-shirt, and took his bath in the prescribed manner. He had to lie down on the floor first of all, and wave his legs about; then he had to

       stand upright, still with no clothes on, and put his hands each side of his waist, and wave his body about eight times in each direction. Then he was allowed to pour out the hot water into his bath, in order to encourage himself, but before he stepped into that delicious steamy warmth he had to bend down eight times with a long frosty expulsion of breath, and stand up eight times with a great draught of cold air in his lungs. All this had been explained to him by a stranger--not Mr. Johnson--who, a year ago, had come into his nursery and had been very much interested in his anatomy. Archie understood that this was a doctor, though he didn't give him any medicine, but had merely showed him how to do these things, after first putting a sort of plug on Archie's chest which communicated with two other plugs that the stranger put in his ears. Then Archie had to say "ninety-nine" several times, which seemed to

       be a sort of game, though it didn't lead any further (the doctor, for instance, didn't say "a hundred"), and then he had to promise to practise those contortions every morning.

       All this was done, and Archie fled from the cold of the morning to his bath. The water was of that divinest temperature so that when he stopped still it was lovely, but when he moved he almost screamed with the rapturous heat of it. It cooled a little as he sat in it, and, still remembering that he was six, he poured a sponge-full down his spine. That over, he might wash his face and his neck, and well behind his ears with soap. Up till a few months ago Blessington had always superintended the bath, and done these things

       for him; but now he did them for himself as agent, with Blessington as inspector-general in the background, who might always make the strictest scrutiny into the place behind the ears and the toe-nails to see that the effects of the bath were perfectly satisfactory. If not, Blessington superintended again for the next three mornings; so Archie was very careful, since it was so much grander to wash oneself than to be washed by anybody else.

       Then came the most exciting part of the bath, for close at the side of it was a big tin full of the coldest possible water. He had then to stand up in his bath, and, after washing his face in the cold water, to put cold water everywhere within reach of him on one arm and then the other, on a chest, on a stomach, on one leg and on another right down to the foot, and finally (a vocal piece) to squeeze a full sponge down his back. Archie squealed at this, and flew for a towel.

       He flung himself into his new clothes and was already half-dressed when

       Blessington returned.

       "Oh, Blessington," he said, "look at me, and they're just as easy to manage as the old ones, and may I go to see Harry after breakfast and show him?"

       "Master Harry will be here for tea," said Blessington.

       "Yes, but I want him to know sooner than that. Did they come just ordinarily, like other clothes? Or are they a birthday present?" "Well, I should say they were a birthday present," said Blessington.

       "Who from?" demanded Archie. And then suddenly he guessed.

       "Oh, Blessington," he said. "I like them better than anything!" he said.

       "Well, dear, and I wish you health to wear them and strength to tear them," she said. "Eh, but how you're disarranging my cap!" Archie promptly handselled his clothes by spilling egg on the coat, and bread-and-butter upside down on the trousers, and, when the

       time came for him to make his public entry into the world, was seized with a sudden fit of shyness at the thought of anybody seeing him. The housemaid would stare, and William would laugh, and Marjorie would pretend not to know him, and for the moment of leaving the day-nursery (which from this morning was to be known as Archie's sitting-room) he would almost have wished himself back in his knickerbockers. But the remembered rough touch of the serge on his legs provided encouragement, and soon the new glories burst upon a sympathetic and not a mocking world. They were at breakfast downstairs, and Archie, though he had already had his, was bidden by his father to have a cup of coffee, which he poured out himself at the side-table, and to drink it slowly, and at the bottom of it, among the melted sugar, there came to his astonished eyes the gleam of silver, and there was a new half-crown with his father's happy returns. Thereafter came a hurried visit to Harry, a motor drive with his mother and Jeannie, Archie sitting on the box-seat and permitted to blow the bugle practically as often as he wanted, and the return to dinner, to find that the two things he liked best, namely boiled rabbit and spotted dog pudding, formed that memorable repast.

       12

       Up till now he had received only two birthday presents, the clothes and the half-crown, and he could not help feeling that a visit from Abracadabra was more than likely, since no one else had made the slightest allusion to clock-work trains or pens that wrote without being dipped. But in the afternoon, as he returned home from his walk with Blessington and Jeannie in the early dusk, he received an impression which was to be more inextricably connected with his sixth birthday than even the sailor suit. They were within a few yards of the front-door when there ran out of the bushes Cyrus, the great blue Persian cat. He held something in his mouth, which Archie saw to be a bird. There he stood for a moment with the gleaming eyes of the successful hunter, and twitching tail, and then trotted in front of them towards the porch. Simultaneously