Chapter 19

An Interloper

David and I had a tremendous adventure. It was this, he passed
the night with me. We had often talked of it as a possible
thing, and at last Mary consented to our having it.

The adventure began with David's coming to me at the unwonted
hour of six P.M., carrying what looked like a packet of
sandwiches, but proved to be his requisites for the night done up
in a neat paper parcel. We were both so excited that, at the
moment of greeting, neither of us could be apposite to the
occasion in words, so we communicated our feelings by signs; as
thus, David half sat down in a place where there was no chair,
which is his favourite preparation for being emphatic, and is
borrowed, I think, from the frogs, and we then made the
extraordinary faces which mean, "What a tremendous adventure!"

We were to do all the important things precisely as they are done
every evening at his own home, and so I am in a puzzle to know
how it was such an adventure to David. But I have now said
enough to show you what an adventure it was to me.

For a little while we played with my two medals, and, with the
delicacy of a sleeping companion, David abstained on this
occasion from asking why one of them was not a Victoria Cross.
He is very troubled because I never won the Victoria Cross, for
it lowers his status in the Gardens. He never says in the
Gardens that I won it, but he fights any boy of his year who says
I didn't. Their fighting consists of challenging each other.

At twenty-five past six I turned on the hot water in the bath,
and covertly swallowed a small glass of brandy. I then said,
"Half- past six; time for little boys to be in bed." I said it
in the matter-of-fact voice of one made free of the company of
parents, as if I had said it often before, and would have to say
it often again, and as if there was nothing particularly
delicious to me in hearing myself say it. I tried to say it in
that way.

And David was deceived. To my exceeding joy he stamped his
little foot, and was so naughty that, in gratitude, I gave him
five minutes with a matchbox. Matches, which he drops on the
floor when lighted, are the greatest treat you can give David;
indeed, I think his private heaven is a place with a roaring
bonfire.

Then I placed my hand carelessly on his shoulder, like one a
trifle bored by the dull routine of putting my little boys to
bed, and conducted him to the night nursery, which had lately
been my private chamber. There was an extra bed in it tonight,
very near my own, but differently shaped, and scarcely less
conspicuous was the new mantel-shelf ornament: a tumbler of milk,
with a biscuit on top of it, and a chocolate riding on the