“Oh, I am lonely in this world of noises, This world of piercing senseless outcries, I hate it so! I hear the shrill, Malignant yowls of children, Growing up like all the rest Without the power of thinking. Oh, noises how accursed——”
Here her poem came to an end forever—that is to say, it had no end, was never completed, remained a fragment. Muriel jumped up, and the expressions she employed were appropriate for a maddened poet’s use, though they befitted not a maiden’s. The accursed noises across the street had become unbearable; they roused Renfrew from his petty dreams, and he straightened up in his chair to see what was going on.
“Here, here!” he said. “This isn’t the Fourth of July. Quiet down a little, will you?”
Four boys, Masters Robert Eliot, Laurence Coy, Thomas Kimball and Freddie Mears, an eight-year-old cousin of Renfrew’s, were advancing upon him, each evidently operating an imaginary machine-gun. “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bangity, Bangity, Bang! _Bang!_” they shouted with the utmost violence of their lungs.
“Stop it!” Renfrew commanded, and as the machine-guns seemed to be levelled straight at himself, he added: “Let me alone. I haven’t done anything to you. What do you want to kill _me_ for?”
He mistook their meaning, as he discovered immediately. “_Ping! Ping! Ping!_” a shrill voice cried out from the ground just behind his chair—another machine-gun, or else an “ottomatick.”
“_Pingity, pingity, ping. Ur-r-r-r-r-ping!_”
The voice was that of Renfrew’s nine-year-old sister Daisy; and looking round and down, he discovered her crouching low behind his chair, firing continuously. Renfrew perceived that he was a fortification of some sort; for although the presence of a grown person has naturally a stultifying effect upon children, they readily forget him if he remains in his own sphere; then he becomes but part of their landscape; they will use him as a castle, or perhaps as a distant Indian. Renfrew was now a log cabin.
“_Ping! Ping! Pingety ur-r-r-r-r-ping!_” Daisy shrieked from behind him. “You’re all dead! Lay down!”
“You’re dead yourself,” Robert Eliot retorted. “I guess all us four filled you fuller o’ wounds than you did us, didn’t we? Lay down yourself!”
“I won’t!” And Daisy, rising, began to argue the question vehemently. “I saw you all the time when you came around the house. I shot you first, didn’t I? Wasn’t I sayin’ ‘_Ping_,’ before ever any one of you said ‘Bang?’”