“That’s about it,” said the man who had first spoken. “Perhaps you’ll put us on our way. It’s time we were getting back.”
“We’ll go with you. Give him your hand, dear, and bring him along.”
“I _did_ t’lute ’em,” Jasper said again, feeling that an important ceremony had somehow been scamped.
Both the men stood up, and the one who had spoken to Nannie jogged his friend with his elbow, saying: “And so do we salute you, young man,” and they both did.
The man put down his hand and touched the top of Jasper’s Persian lamb cap, and laughed:
And hand in hand they followed Nannie to St. Dunstan’s.
“Now you know what it’s like for the poor enchanted ones,” Barbara said, taking her hands from Jasper’s eyes.
Jasper looked very solemn. “Poor ’chanted ones,” he echoed; “I’ll t’lute ’em and kiss my hand _and_ kirtsey ne’st time I meet ’em.”
“You talk to them, my dear,” said sensible Nannie; “they’ll like that better than all your salutin’s.”
This Jasper was most ready to do at great length in his little high voice that the poor enchanted ones came to recognize a long way off. But all the same he never failed to “t’lute and kiss his hand _and_ kirtsey.” No signs of respect and affection could be too much, Barbara said.
“It’s the worst thing of all, so we must love them most.”
Fairies and angels were inextricably mixed up in Barbara’s mind, and when her mother came to kiss her good-night on Christmas Eve, she murmured sleepily: “I simply can’t ’astinguish between God and Father Christmas, so I mus’ just let it alone.”
Even the toys were much affected by the war. Jasper’s Teddy Bear wore an expression not unlike the pathetic puzzled look of his brethren in the Mappin Circle, now that nobody threw them buns, sat they on their tails never so pleadingly. Alison had made him the brassard of a special constable, and he always wore it when he went out with Jasper in the pram. The lady dolls had all become V.A.D.’s or bus conductors or window-cleaners, and one quite recent acquisition was a land girl.
As for the doll’s house, it wore a martial yet festive air, for the flags of all the allies were stuck in a tight band of string with which Alison had bound it thrice just under the roof.
It was not a new doll’s house. In fact as doll’s houses go it was almost venerable. It had belonged to grannie’s mother, and was built in the early part of Queen Victoria’s reign. Unlike modern doll’s houses, it did not open in front. In front it was square and solid, with two large windows on either side of the door, which had glass panels, and actually opened and shut, and there were three oblong windows on the next floor. The roof was made of real little slates, with chimneys at either end of it. The ground floor was a shop, with two black counters that could be taken out and dusted, and the walls were fitted with innumerable shelves and cupboards. It was a silversmith’s shop, and on the brass plates under the windows were, on one, “David Strachan, Silversmith and Jeweler,” on the other, “By Appointment to Her Majesty Queen Victoria.” By which it could be seen that it was a Scottish jeweler’s shop, for nobody called “Strachan” could be of any other nationality. Moreover, there were tiny toddy-ladles of various sizes among the stock-in-trade.