Ernie

“ In ten minutes, breaking away from all support, he led, as they descended through the dripping forest in the gloom and chill of very early morning. It was the others who called to him for guidance in the tangled woods. Lord Ernie was in the lead. Throughout the difficult woods he was ever in front, and singing:
“Fire that lights but does not burn! And wind that blows the heart to flame! ”

“ The oil lamp, suspended from the ceiling, trembled; the Pasteur looked apprehensively at the shuttered windows; and Lord Ernie, with startling abruptness, stood up. His eyes were shining. His voice was brisk, alert, and deep.
“The wind, the wind!” he cried. “Think what it’ll be up there! We shall feel it on our bodies!” His enthusiasm was like a rush of air across the table. “And the fire!” he went on. “The flames will lick all over, and tear about the sky. I feel wild and full of them already! ”

“ He knew in himself the omnipotence of the lesser elemental deities. Yet, as sympathetic observer, he can but have felt a tithe of what Lord Ernie felt.
“We are the whirlwind and we are the fire!” he cried aloud with the rushing worshippers. “We are unconquerable and immense! We destroy the lukewarm and absorb the weak! For we can make evil into good by bending it all one way!⁠ ⁠...”
The roar swept thunderingly past him, catching at his voice and body. He felt himself snatched forward by the wind. ”

“ And as she felt his approach, the savage power of him, his fierce virility, and was conscious of the reality of the danger, she resolved to meet it and fend it off. He should save Ernie instead of destroying her. And the way was clear. If this new intellectual life, the seeds of which the engineer had been sowing so patiently for so long in the unkempt garden of Ernie's spirit became a reality for him, a part of himself, growing in such strength as to strangle the weeds of carelessness, he was saved—so much Ruth saw. ”

“ Lord Ernie had been quiet and preoccupied, silent rather, but never listless. He was peaceful, perhaps subdued a little, yet with a suppressed energy in his bearing that Hendricks watched with secret satisfaction. The tutor, closely observant, detected nothing out of gear; life stirred strongly in him; there was purpose, interest, will; there was desire; but there was nothing to cause alarm.
Availing himself then of the lad’s absorption in his own affairs, he wandered forth alone upon his [52] sentimental tour of inspection. No ghost of emotion rose to stalk beside him. ”

“ After Hazard comes Ernestine. She is twelve, and is frequently called Ernie,—which name suits her just as well as Haze’s names do him; for she is really more of a boy than a girl, we think, despite her charming blue eyes and rose-leaf complexion. Ernie is very, very pretty, has sweet ways and a really lovely disposition; but, for all this, she is rather a trying child, for she is continually getting into scrapes, tearing her frocks, breaking the furniture, etc.,—and she always means so well that it is hard to scold her. ”

“ There was a sense of vitality in the room⁠—as though a rush of active movement had just passed through it. Both windows stood wide open, and the roar of voices was clearly audible. Lord Ernie turned his head to listen.
“That’s only the village people drinking and shouting,” said Hendricks, closely watching each movement that he made. “It’s perfectly natural, Bindy, that you feel too excited to sleep. We’re in the mountains. The air stimulates tremendously⁠—it makes the heart beat faster.” He decided not to press the lad with questions. ”

“ He felt out of his depth, his authority impaired, and under these temporary [49] disadvantages he might so easily make a grave mistake, injuring instead of helping. While Lord Ernie finished his undressing he leaned out of the window, taking great draughts of the keen night air, watching the blazing fires and listening to the roar of voices, now dying down into the distance. ”

“ Lord Ernie liked him thoroughly, admiring his vigour with a smile of tolerant good-nature through his ceaseless cigarette smoke. They were almost like two boys together. “You are a chap and a half, Mr. Hendricks. You really ought to be in the Cabinet with my father.” Hendricks would deliver up his useless parcel at the castle gates, pocket the thanks and the hard-earned fee, and go back to his arduous life of teaching and writing in dingy lodgings. ”

“ They met together on the rounded top, stumbled, clutched one another frantically, then slid with waving arms and flying cloaks down the slippery surface of damp moss⁠—laughing wildly.
“Fool!” cried Hendricks, saving himself. “What in the world⁠—?”
“You called,” laughed Bindy, picking himself up and dropping back to his place in the rear again. “It’s the wind, not me; it’s in our feet. Half the time you’re shouting and jumping yourself!”
And it was a few minutes after this that Lord Ernie suddenly forged ahead. ”

“ After that, Ernie always mixed a little grayish paste in his cup of yogurt at suppertime.
Ernie stopped aging altogether.
After his sister's coffin was lowered past the margins of green matting into the ground, Ernie shook hands with the minister, walked Bert Willis and Herman Schover to their car and told them he thought he'd better drive home with some relatives who'd turned up. Actually he just wanted to stay behind a while. It was a beautiful blue-and-white summer day; the tidy suburban cemetery had caught his fancy, and now he felt like a quiet stroll. ”

“ Ernie was on the lift that evening. He stood in the corridor, listening to the hubbub in the hall, and waiting for the first rush of visitors who had arranged themselves and appropriated keys, when he saw a man emerge from Madame's private sitting-room at the end of the passage.
Then he came marching resolutely down the corridor, absorbed, swift, direct, with eyes neither to right nor left, wearing a Burberry, and the short tooth-brush moustache that was still the rage in the British Army; a young man of a type so familiar to Ernie that he smiled on recognizing it. ”

“ Then suddenly, Ernie, looking up, made a revelation, irrelevant, yet to my ear terrible and astounding, but fortunately incomprehensible to my companion. What did that little vigilant creature ever fail to remark?
"Mirry make tea," he said, or seemed to say, and my face paled and flushed alternately, until my brain swam.
"Make tea?" sail the voice of Mrs. Clayton, apparently at a great distance. "No, I will make the tea, Ernie, as long as we stay together. Mirry does not know how to draw tea like an Englishwoman." ”

“ I'll bet he's one even in his sleep. He looks the part, dresses the part, thinks the part. He don't work at it, he lives it. Talk about this four dimension stuff. Ernie gets along with two—up the column from the bottom, and both ways from the decimal point.
Not such a bad-lookin' chap, Ernie, only a bit stiff from the waist up. You know, like he had his spine in a cast. Then there's the neck-apple. Ernie fits his into a high white wing collar and sets it off with a black ascot tie and a pearl stickpin. Also he sports the only black cutaway that's worn reg'lar into the General Offices. ”

“ And buy her ribbons for her neck, and treat her,
So that no woman at the fair should beat her
In having pleasure at a man's expense.
She planned to meet him at the chapel fence.
So Ernie went; and Jimmy took his mother,
Dressed in her finest with a Monmouth shawl,
And there was such a crowd she thought she'd smother,
And O, she loved a pep'mint above all.
Clash go the crockeries where the cheapjacks bawl,
Baa go the sheep, thud goes the waxwork's drum,
And Ernie cursed for Anna hadn't come.
He hunted for her up and down the place,
Raging and snapping like a working brew. ”

“ He would never make a politician, much less a statesman. The family title would be borne by a nincompoop. Yet all the machinery was there, one felt⁠—if only it could be driven, made to go. It was sad. Lord Ernie was heir to great estates, with a name and position that might influence thousands.
And Hendricks had been a good selection, with his virility and gentle, understanding firmness. He understood the problem. “You’ll do what no one else could,” the anxious father told him, “for he worships you, and you can sting without hurting him. ”

“ Ernie, I'm sure your knowledge of romantic novels is shamefully deficient, it's clear from your manners, but in the earlier ones—not in style now—the hero is described as tall, manly, broad-shouldered, Anglo-Saxon features, etcetera, etcetera, but there's one thing he always has, something that sounds like poetic over-enthusiasm if you stop to analyze it, a physical impossibility, but that I have to admit you, Ernie, actually have. ”

“ He looked at his small hands and arms, then extended them wistfully.
"Ernie will tell good Jesus," he said, "and he will make Ernie grow big—ever so big—to tie the man and put him in a bag like Clayton's cat."
The burlesque was irresistible, and none the less so that the child was so direfully in earnest. To his infant imagination no worse disaster than had befallen Clayton's cat could be devised. This animal, adored by him, had been bagged and exiled, perhaps drowned for aught I know, for stealing cheese from the cupboard sacred to Clayton, by that vengeful potentate, to the despair of Ernie. ”

“ Clayton, with such a noble soul, such intelligence as this child possesses, he may fill a pulpit, and save erring souls, or write such beautiful poems and romances as shall thrill the heart, or draw from an instrument sounds as divine as De Beriot's, or paint a picture, and immortalize his name; there is nothing too good, too great for Ernie to do, should God grant him life to achieve ”

“ I've passed an examination, Ernie, a university examination. I've learnt a lot of French and Italian and some German and about music. I've got a pianola and I'd love to play it to you or Morty. He was always the one for music. Often and often I think of you. Tell mother, show her this letter, and let me know soon about you all and don't think unkind things of me. 'Member the good times we had, Ernie, when we dressed up at Christmas and father didn't know us in the shop, and how you made me a doll's house for my birthday. ”

“ The uneasiness he felt about Lord Ernie became alarm. His conscience pricked him.
‘More than he could assimilate,’ continued Leysin. ‘It broke him. Yet, had outlets been provided, had he been taught how to use it, this elemental energy drawn direct from Nature——’ He broke off abruptly, struck perhaps by the expression in his listener’s eyes. ‘It seems incredible, doesn’t it, in the twentieth century? I know.’
‘Evil?’ asked Hendricks, stammering rather.
‘Why evil?’ was the impatient reply. ‘How can any force be evil? ”

“ His heart was high and very steady as he turned into his father's study. The winter had tried the old man, who was no longer now able to take the hill as formerly. Instead the pair dawdled along to Beech-hangar; and there, sitting among the tree-roots, under the fine web of winter beech-twigs, Ernie told his father the essential fact about his love. ”

“ So, spurred on by this proud ambition, Ernie has done wonderfully:—even succeeding in subduing her mercurial temperament to such a degree that “there is not a betther gur-rul in all the school than me an’ me hated rival, Lulu Jennings,” as she was moved to confess last Saturday night.
This aforesaid rival is a “creature,” according to Ernie and her chum, Mary Hobart. She has shifty little eyes, a thin, blond pigtail, and “no shape to her legs, at all.” Also, she smells of cheap perfume. Yet these imperfections might be forgiven her, if only she were what the girls call “straight.” ”

“ But if Ernie was simple, he was not blind. When he was not on the lift, he acted as Boots for the Third Floor; and no man could work there without seeing what he saw.
Mr. Pigott, once meeting his old pupil in Church Street, asked him how he liked his job.
"Not so bad, sir," Ernie answered without enthusiasm. "Some I likes; and some I dislikes; and most I don't mind." ”

“ But I have so much on my mind these days, with this tiresome visit and your mumps and the shadow of war and heaven knows what.”
“But, father,” said the prince, following up his advantage, “please don’t ask me to permit this monstrous thing. It’s not honorable. It’s not princely.”
The king patted his son’s silk pajamaed shoulder.
“Pish-tush, Ernie!” he said playfully. “I wish you wouldn’t always be so devilishly idealistic. You’re so high-minded one needs to get on a stepladder to talk to you. Wake up, Ernie. You’re old enough now not to believe in Santa Claus any longer.” ”

“ Hendricks and Lord Ernie, the latter impatient in the road beyond, saw her tall figure stoop to embrace him. “I shall pray all night: I shall watch from my window for your return. God, who speaks from the whirlwind, and whose pathway is the fire, will go with you. Remember the younger men; it is ever the younger men that they seek to take⁠ ⁠... !” Her words were half hysterical. The kiss was given and taken; the open doorway framed her outline a moment; then the buttress of the church blotted her out, and they were off.
VII And at once the curious confusion of strong wind was upon them. ”

“ Then Ernie began again:—“How good everybody has been! Uncle George even offered to pay for the operation. I’m glad we didn’t have to accept, though;—and we ought to be very thankful, too, Elizabeth, about the boarders. The oatmeal was burned this morning,—did you notice?—and they never said ‘boo’! Just think, if Mrs. Hudson had been here!”
“I know it,” I answered. “Oh, Ernie, if Robin and Geof pull through, there is not another thing in the world we could dare to ask for!” ”