Chapter 23

Pilkington's

On attaining the age of eight, or thereabout, children fly away
from the Gardens, and never come back. When next you meet them
they are ladies and gentlemen holding up their umbrellas to hail
a hansom.

Where the girls go to I know not, to some private place, I
suppose, to put up their hair, but the boys have gone to
Pilkington's. He is a man with a cane. You may not go to
Pilkington's in knickerbockers made by your mother, make she ever
so artfully. They must be real knickerbockers. It is his stern
rule. Hence the fearful fascination of Pilkington's.

He may be conceived as one who, baiting his hook with real
knickerbockers, fishes all day in the Gardens, which are to him
but a pool swarming with small fry.

Abhorred shade! I know not what manner of man thou art in the
flesh, sir, but figure thee bearded and blackavised, and of a
lean tortuous habit of body, that moves ever with a swish. Every
morning, I swear, thou readest avidly the list of male births in
thy paper, and then are thy hands rubbed gloatingly the one upon
the other. 'Tis fear of thee and thy gown and thy cane, which
are part of thee, that makes the fairies to hide by day; wert
thou to linger but once among their haunts between the hours of
Lock-out and Open Gates there would be left not one single gentle
place in all the Gardens. The little people would flit. How
much wiser they than the small boys who swim glamoured to thy
crafty hook. Thou devastator of the Gardens, I know thee,
Pilkington.

I first heard of Pilkington from David, who had it from Oliver
Bailey.

This Oliver Bailey was one of the most dashing figures in the
Gardens, and without apparent effort was daily drawing nearer the
completion of his seventh year at a time when David seemed unable
to get beyond half-past five. I have to speak of him in the past
tense, for gone is Oliver from the Gardens (gone to Pilkington's)
but he is still a name among us, and some lordly deeds are
remembered of him, as that his father shaved twice a day. Oliver
himself was all on that scale.

His not ignoble ambition seems always to have been to be wrecked
upon an island, indeed I am told that he mentioned it
insinuatingly in his prayers, and it was perhaps inevitable that
a boy with such an outlook should fascinate David. I am proud,
therefore, to be able to state on wood that it was Oliver himself
who made the overture.

On first hearing, from some satellite of Oliver's, of Wrecked
Islands, as they are called in the Gardens, David said wistfully
that he supposed you needed to be very very good before you had
any chance of being wrecked, and the remark was conveyed to
Oliver, on whom it made an uncomfortable