"Why, he carried me back as merrily as if he'd never seen snow in all his life."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN.

OUR NOVEL.

A SUMMER HOLIDAY ACHIEVEMENT.

Sub-Chapter I.

THE PLOT.

It was a bold undertaking, no doubt, at our tender age, to propose to take the world by storm. But others had done it before us.

We had read our _Wonderful Boys_ and our _Boyhood of Great Men_ carefully and critically. We had seen that Mozart had composed music at six, and written it down very untidily too; we had seen that Marlborough had, by sheer cheek, been made an officer at about our age; that David Wilkie, one of the dullest of boys, had painted pictures while at school; that Scott, a notorious blockhead, had written poetry at thirteen; and that James Watt, at the same age, with very little education, had pondered over the spout of a tea-kettle.

All this we had seen, and been very greatly impressed, for surely, if some of these very ordinary boys had succeeded in startling their generation, it would be strange, if we two--Sydney Sproutels and Harry Hullock, who had just carried off the English composition prize at Denhamby--couldn't write something between us that would make the world "sit up."

That English composition prize had really been a great feather in our caps. It was the first thing of the kind we had done--not the first English composition, but the first sustained literary effort--and it had opened our eyes to the genius that burned within us.

The exercise had been to expand the following brief anecdote into an interesting narrative which should occupy two pages of Denhamby paper with twenty lines in a page:--

"Orpheus, son of Oeagrus and Calliope, having lost his wife, Eurydice, followed her to Hades, where, by the charm of his music, he received permission to conduct her back to earth, on condition that he should not look behind him during the journey. This condition he broke before Eurydice had quite reached earth, and she was in consequence s.n.a.t.c.hed back into Hades."

I need not say that two pages of Denhamby paper were all too short to express all we had to say on this delightful subject. I, being by nature a poet, could have used all my s.p.a.ce in describing the beauties of the spring morning on which Orpheus made his unusual expedition; while Hullock, whose genius was of a more practical order, confided to me afterwards that if he had had room he had intended to introduce a stirring conversation between the widower and his wife's ghost, in which the latter would make certain very stringent conditions before consenting to return once more to household duties.

However, by dint of severe self-denial, we both managed to restrain our muses to the forty lines prescribed, and sent in our compositions with quite a feeling of envy for the examiner who would have to read them.

When the results were announced, the doctor publicly stated that "though many of the compositions were meritorious, yet, on the whole, those of Sproutels and Hullock showed most originality, and, indeed, gave considerable promise. The prize would be shared between them."

Of course, after that, all question as to our calling in life was at an end, and the sooner we "fleshed" our pens before the world the better.

So it was arranged that Hullock was to get his father and mother to invite me for the midsummer holidays, and that before Denhamby saw us again, "Our Novel" should be started.

The Hullock family, it is necessary to say here, consisted of my partner, his two parents, a maiden aunt, and a sister. Mr Hullock, a good and worthy little man, who had not had all the advantages of education which his son possessed, was a retired coal merchant, spending the afternoon of his days at Saint Leonards.

His wife, as kind and motherly as she was tall and portly, treated me like her own son from the moment I entered her house.

And with her to look after me, and Alice to fall in love with, and Harry to collaborate with, I was about as comfortable as a restless genius could be--that is, I should have been so had it not been for the damp and frigid influence of Aunt Sarah, who sympathised neither with genius nor youth, and certainly not with the two in combination. Twenty times a day she grieved me by calling me "silly little boy," and twenty times a day she exasperated me by reminding Harry, and, through him, me, that "little boys should be seen and not heard."

However, we decided to ignore this uncongenial influence, and bury our sorrows in "Our Novel."

"Tell you what," said Harry, as we walked on the pier the first evening, "we ought to look sharp and get our plot."

"Wouldn't it be better to settle on the characters and get the plot afterwards?"

"All serene!" said Harry; "can you suggest any one for a hero?"

Harry said this in a half significant, half off-hand manner, which made it evident to me he expected I should at once nominate him.

But, in my judgment, Harry hardly possessed all the qualifications necessary for the hero of our novel. So I replied, half significantly, half off-handedly too--

"Hadn't _you_ better think of some one?"

Here we were in a fix at the very start. For Harry insisted he would much rather that I should select, and I was equally anxious for him to do it.

At length we compromised the matter and decided we should make the hero a mixture of two fellows--the fellow Harry liked best and the fellow I liked best.

After this amicable arrangement it was comparatively clear sailing. We had not to look far for the heroine, and it occurred to both of us that it would be original as well as pleasant to make the villain a female and middle-aged. As for minor characters, we were able to draw on our acquaintance at Denhamby to supply them, and, failing that, Harry was magnanimous enough to offer his father and mother as "not bad for some of the side plots."

We had got our characters. That one walk on the pier settled them all.

We also stopped a bit to watch the people, we entered into conversation with a sailor (who turned out to be deaf), and insinuated ourselves into the front of a street row, all with a view to reproducing our observations on life into "Our Novel."

The street row indeed furnished an inspiration for our plot. It was the arrest of a make-believe Italian female organ-grinder, whose offence appeared to be that she was carrying about in a cradle attached to the organ an infant that did not belong to her. And as the infant brought her in much more money than her music did, she protested in very strong English against having it removed.

With the quickness of genius we saw in this incident the pivot on which our novel should be made to turn.

The baby was the heroine, the organ-grinder the villain who had stolen her from her high-born station in life. Two of the characters fitted at a blow! We had even got the high-born parents ready if required, and when sixteen years later the little truant was to discover her n.o.ble station, we had our hero ready to take her home!

Between the pier-gate and Warrior Square we had the whole story worked out.

"What has kept you little boys out so late?" asked a voice as we entered Mr Hullock's hall. "It's not right. You should have been in bed by eight."

It was Aunt Sarah! and we secretly condemned her on the spot to a public execution in our last chapter.

As we undressed that evening another point was cleared up.

"We can't keep the hero hanging about sixteen years before we bring him in," said Harry.

"Humph," I observed, "unless we said `sixteen years pa.s.sed' at the end of the first chapter, and then we might get him in in the second."

"It strikes me," said Harry dubiously, "he ought to be in it all through. What do you say to making him another stolen baby belonging to another organ? Just as likely to have two stolen as one."

It did occur to me that if it came to that, all the characters in the story might begin life in this romantic way. However, there seemed no objection to starting the hero in an organ-grinder's cradle, and we closed with the suggestion at once and got into bed.

I woke very early. I had the hero on my mind. I wanted him to be a good one after the best model, and I could not help thinking that the Harry in him ought not to be overdone. Besides, if he was to make himself pleasant to the heroine, the less he was like Harry and the more he was like Harry's chief friend the better. For sisters in fiction never make much of their brothers, but they often make a lot of their brothers' friends.

I nudged Harry with my elbow, in order to represent the case to him from this point of view. I did it delicately and in a most conciliatory manner.

"I was thinking, old man, as Alice is the heroine and you're her brother, I might--don't you know--perhaps you'd like if--well, what I mean to say is, perhaps I'd better do the gush, when it comes to that."

Happily Harry was scarcely awake, and did not take in all my meaning.

"All serene," said he, "we'll have as little of that as we can."

"I mean I think you'd do the parts about the villain and that sort of thing better--don't you?"

But as Harry was asleep again I had to take silence for consent.