scarecrows and men.—jan refuses to “make gearge.”—uncanny.—“jan’s off.”-the moon and the clouds.
the picture gave jan great pleasure, but it proved a stumbling-block on the road to learning.
to “make letters” on his slate had been the utmost of his ambition, and as he made them he learned them. but after the cheap jack’s visit his constant cry was, “jan make pitchers.” and when abel tried to confine his attention to the alphabet, he would, after a most perfunctory repetition of a few letters that he knew, and hap-hazard blunders over fresh ones, fling his arms round abel’s neck and say coaxingly, “abel dear, make janny pitchers on his slate.”
abel’s pictures, at the best, were of that style of wall decoration dear to street boys.
“make a pitcher of a man,” jan would cry. and abel did so, bit by bit, to jan’s dictation. thus “make’s head. make un round. make two eyes. make a nose. make a mouth. make’s arms. make’s fingers,” etc. and, with some “free-handling,” abel would strike the five fingers off, one by one, in five screeching strokes of the slate-pencil. but his art was conventional, and when jan said, “make un a miller’s thumb,” he was puzzled, and could only bend the shortest of the five strokes slightly backwards to represent the trade-mark of his forefathers.
and when a little later jan said one day, “’tis a galley crow, that is. now make a pitcher of a man, abel dear!” abel found that the scarecrow figure was the limit of his artist powers, and thenceforward it was jan who “made pitchers.”
he drew from dawn to dusk upon the little slate which he wore tied by a bit of string to the belt of his pinafore. he drew his foster-mother, and abel, and the kitten, and the clock, and the flower-pots in the window, and the windmill itself, and every thing he saw or imagined. and he drew till his slate was full on both sides, and then in very primitive fashion he spat and rubbed it all out and began again. and whenever jan’s face was washed, the two faces of his slate were washed too; and with this companion he was perfectly happy and constantly employed.
now it was abel who gave the subjects for the pictures, and jan who made them, and it was good abel also who washed the slate, and rubbed the well-worn stumps of pencil to new points upon the round-house floor.
they often went together to a mound at some little distance, where, seated side by side, they “made a mill” upon the slate, jan drawing, and abel dictating the details to be recorded.
“put in the window, jan,” he would say; “and another, and another, and another, and another. now put the sails. now put the stage. now put daddy by the door.”
on one point jan was obstinate. he steadily refused to “make gearge” upon his slate in any capacity whatever. perhaps it was in this habit of constantly gazing at all things about him, in order to commit them to his slate, which gave a strange, dreamy expression to jan’s dark eyes. perhaps it was sky-gazing, or the windmiller’s trick of watching the clouds, or perhaps it was something else, from which jan derived an erectness of carriage not common among the children about him, and a quaint way of carrying his little chin in the air as if he were listening to voices from a higher level than that of the round-house floor.
if he had lived farther north, he could hardly have escaped the suspicion of uncanniness. he was strangely like a changeling among the miller’s children.
to gratify that old whim of his about the red shawl, his doting foster-mother made him little crimson frocks; and as he wandered over the downs in his red dress and a white pinafore, his yellow hair flying in the breeze, his chin up, his black eyes wide open, with slate in one hand, his pencil in the other, and the sandy kitten clinging to his shoulder (for jan never lowered his chin to help her to balance herself), he looked more like some elf than a child of man.
he had queer, independent ways of his own, too; freaks,—not naughty enough for severe punishment, but sufficiently out of the routine and unexpected to cause mrs. lake some trouble.
he was no sooner firmly established on his own legs, with the power of walking, or rather toddling, independent of help, than he took to making expeditions on the downs by himself. he would watch his opportunity, and when his foster-mother’s back was turned, and the door of the round-house opened by some grist-bringer, he would slip out and toddle off with a swiftness decidedly dangerous to a balance so lately acquired.
sometimes mrs. lake would catch sight of him, and if her hands were in the wash-tub, or otherwise engaged, she would cry to the nurse-boy, “abel, he be off! jan’s off.” a comic result of which was that jan generally announced his own departure in the same words, though not always loud enough to bring detection upon himself.
when his chance came and the door was open, he would pause for half a moment on the threshold to say, in a tone of intense self-satisfaction, “he be off. abel! janny’s off!” and forthwith toddle out as hard as he could go. as he grew older, he dropped this form; but the elfish habit of appearing and disappearing at his own whim was not cured.
it was a puzzle as well as a care to mrs. lake. all her own children had given trouble in their own way,—a way much the same with all of them. they squalled for what they wanted, and, like other mothers of her class, she served them whilst her patience lasted, and slapped them when it came to an end. they clung about her when she was cooking, in company with the cats, and she put tit-bits into their dirty paws, and threw scraps to the clean paws of the cats, till the nuisance became overwhelming, and she kicked the cats and slapped the children, who squalled for both. they dirted their clothes, they squabbled, they tore the gathers out of her dresses, and wailed and wept, and were beaten with a hazel-stick by their father, and pacified with treacle-stick by the mother; and so tumbled up, one after the other, through childish customs and misdemeanors, almost as uniform as the steps of the mill-ladders.
but the customs and misdemeanors of the foster-child were very different.
his appetite to be constantly eating, drinking, or sucking—if it were but a bennet or grass-stalk—was less voracious than that of the other children. mrs. lake gave him benjamin’s share of treacle-stick, but he has been known to give some of it away, and to exchange peppermint-drops for a slate-pencil rather softer than his own. he would have had benjamin’s share of “bits” from the cupboard, but that the other children begged so much oftener, and mrs. lake was not capable of refusing any thing to a steady tease. he could walk the whole length of a turnip-field without taking a munch, unless he were hungry, though even dear old abel invariably exercised his jaws upon a “turmut.” and he made himself ill with hedge-fruits and ground-roots seldomer than any other member of the family.
so far, jan gave less trouble than the rest. but then he had a spirit of enterprise which never misled them. from the effects of this, abel saved his life more than once. on one occasion he pulled him out of the wash-tub, into which he had plunged head-foremost, in a futile endeavor to blow soap-bubbles through a fragment of clay-pipe, which he had picked up on the road, and which made his lips sore for a week, besides nearly causing his death by drowning.
from diving into the deepest recesses of the windmill it became hopeless to try to hinder him, and when abel was fairly taken into the business mrs. lake relied upon his care for his foster-brother. and jan was wary and nimble, for his own part, and gave little trouble. his great delight was to gaze first out of one window, and then out of the opposite one; either blinking as the great sails drove by, as if they would strike him in the face, or watching the shadows of them invisible, as they passed like noon-day ghosts over the grass.
his habit of taking himself off on solitary expeditions neither the miller’s hazel-stick nor mrs. lake’s treacle-stick could cure by force or favor.
one november evening, just after tea, jan disappeared, and the yellow kitten also. when his bed-time came, mrs. lake sought him high and low, and abel went carefully, mill-candlestick in hand, through every floor, from the millstones to the machinery, but in vain. neither he nor the kitten was to be found.
it was when the kitten, in chase of her own tail, tumbled in sideways through the round-house door, that mrs. lake remembered that jan might possibly have gone out, and she ran out after him.
the air was chill and fresh, but not bitterly cold. the moon rode high in the dark heavens, and a flock of small white clouds passed slowly before its face and spread over the sky. the shadows of the driving sails fell clearly in the moonlight, and flitted over the grass more quickly than the clouds went by the moon.
mrs. lake was not susceptible to effects of scenery, and she was thinking of jan. as she ran round the windmill, she struck her foot against what proved to be his body, and, stooping, saw that he was lying on his face. but when she snatched him up with a cry of terror, she found that he was not dead, nor even hurt, but only weeping pettishly.
in the first revulsion of feeling from her fright, she was rather disposed to shake her recovered treasure, as a relief to her own excitement. but abel, whose first sight of jan was as the light of the mill-candle fell on his tear-stained face, said tenderly, “what be amiss, janny?”
“jan can’t make un,” sobbed his foster-brother.
“what can’t janny make? tell abel, then,” said the nurse-boy.
jan stuck his fists into his eyes, which were drying fast, and replied, “jan can’t make the moon and the clouds, abel dear!”
and abel’s candle being at that moment blown out by a gust of wind, he could see jan’s slate and pencil lying at some distance apart upon the short grass.
on the dark ground of the slate he had made a round, white, full moon with his soft slate-pencil, and had tried hard to draw each cloud as it passed. but the rapid changes had baffled him, and the pencil-marks were gray compared with the whiteness of the clouds and the brightness of the moon, and the slate, though dark, was a mockery of the deep, deep depths of the night-sky.
and in his despair he had flung the slate one way and the pencil another, and there they lay under the moonlight; and the sandy kitten, who could see more clearly on this occasion than any one else, was dancing a fandango upon poor jan’s unfinished sketch.
