i do not know that at any time hastings is a very lively place. the houses have acquired a habit of being vacant, and even the front, with its bath-chairs, its bandstands that are silent on sundays, and its seats upon which one may not smoke, is more suggestive of puritans and invalids than of pleasure. if time should suddenly drop a week from the due order of days, it is easy to imagine that those bath-chairs, those unfragrant shelters, those much-labelled houses would startle the dreaming tourists with vacant faces of dead men. but when in late march the day has squandered its gold, and the earth is saddened with the gentle greyness of the dusk, when, moreover, the cheerful sea has deserted the shore, creeping far out to leave dull acres of untrodden sand, waste and bitter with salt, a p. 85man might surely be forgiven if he cried aloud against the extreme cruelty of nature, the timid injustice of man.

being of anglo-saxon blood, i did not give definite expression to the melancholy which the quenched seascape had invoked. i contented myself with leaning on the rail, and sneering at the art of the cripple who had made mathematically exact scratchings of windsor castle and the eddystone lighthouse on the sand. there was something almost humorously impertinent about that twisted figure with one foot bowing and hopping for pennies in front of a terrible back-cloth of dreamy grey. how could a man forget the horrors of infinite space, and scratch nothings on the blank face of the earth for coppers? his one foot was bare so that his silver-like activities might not spoil his pictures, and when he was not hopping he shivered miserably. as i saw him at the moment he stood very well for humanity—sordid, grotesque, greedy of mean things, twisted and bruised by the pitiless hand of nature.

and then in a flash there happened one of p. 86those miracles which rebuke us when we lack faith. through the shadows which were not grey but purple there burst a swarm of children running on light feet across the sands. they chased each other hither and thither, stooped to gather shells and seaweed, and inspected the works of the cripple with outspoken admiration. regarding my mournful and terrible world in detail, they found it beautiful with pink shells and tangled seaweed and the gallant efforts of men. so far from being terrified or humiliated by the sombre wastes of sand and sky, they made of the one a playing-ground, and woke the other with echoes of their shrill laughter. perhaps they found that the sea was rather larger than the serpentine, perhaps they thought that the sands were not so well lit as kingsway; but, after all, they were making holiday, and at such a time things are different. they laughed at space.

for these were london children, and all the resources of civilisation had not been able to deprive them of that sense of proportion which we lose with age. the stars are p. 87small and of little importance, and even the sun is not much larger than a brandy-ball. but a golden pebble by the seashore is a treasure that a child may hold in its hand, and it is certain that never a grown-up one of us can own anything so surely. we may search our memories for sunsets and tresses of dead girls, but who would not give all their faded fragrance for one pink shell and the power to appreciate it? so it was that i had found the world wide and ugly and terrible, lacking the aladdin’s lamp of imagination, which had shown the children that it was a place of treasure, with darkness to make the search exciting. they flitted about the beach like eager moths.

yet on these children civilisation had worked with her utmost cunning, with her most recent resource. for they were little actors and actresses from drury lane, touring in a pantomime of their own; wise enough in the world’s ways to play grown-up characters with uncommon skill, and bred in the unreality of the footlights and the falsehood of grease-paints. nevertheless, coming fresh from the elaborate make-belief p. 88of the theatre and the intoxicating applause, they ran down to the sea to find the diamonds and pearls that alone are real. if this is not wisdom i know not where wisdom lies, and, watching them, i could have laughed aloud at the thought of the critics who have told me that the life of the stage makes children unnatural. there are many wise and just people who do not like to see children acting, forgetting perhaps that mimicry is the keynote of all child’s play, and that nothing but this instinct leads babies to walk upright and to speak with their tongues. whether they are on the stage or not, children are always borrowing the words and emotions of other people, and it is a part of the charm of childhood that through this mask of tricks and phrases the real child peeps always into the eyes and hearts of the elect.

and this is why i know nothing more delightful than the spectacle of a score of children playing at life on the stage. they may have been taught how to speak and how to stand, and what to do with their hands; they may know how to take a p. 89prompt, and realise the importance of dressing the stage; every trick and mannerism of the grown-up actor or actress may be theirs; yet, through their playing there will sound the voice of childhood, imaginative, adventurous, insistent, and every performance will supply them with materials for a new game. so it was with these children, whose sudden coming had strewn the melancholy beach with pearls. i had seen them in the dimness of a ballet-room under drury lane theatre; now, with a coin, i bought the right to see them on a stage built with cynical impertinence in the midst of the intolerant sea. the play, indeed, was the same, and the players, but the game was different. the little breaks and falterings which the author had not designed, the only half-suppressed laughings which were not in the prompt-copy, bore no relationship, one might suppose, to the moral adventures of mother goose. but far across the hills the spring was breaking the buds on the lilac, and far along the shore the sea was casting its jewels, and even there in the theatre i could see the children standing on tiptoe to p. 90pick lilac, and stooping on the sands to gather pearls. they did not see that they were in a place of lank ropes and unsmoothed boards soiled with the dust of forgotten pageants and rendered hideous by the glare of electric lights; and they were right. for in their eyes there shone only that place of adventure which delights the feet of the faithful, whether they tread the sands, or the stage, or the rough cobbles of drury lane. to the truly imaginative a theatre is a place of uncommon possibilities; our actors and actresses, and even our limelight-men, are not imaginative, and so, i suppose, they find it ugly. the game is with the children.

and truly they play it for what it is worth, and they are wise enough to know that it is worth all things, alike on the boards of the theatre and on the wider, but hardly less artificial, stage of civilised life. we who are older tremble between our desire for applause and our unconquerable dread of the angers of the critical gods and the gaping pit, and it is for this reason that every bitter-wise adult knows himself to be little p. 91better than a super, a unit of a half-intelligent chorus, who may hope at best to echo with partial accuracy the songs and careless laughters of the divine players. there is something pathetic in the business; for we, too, were once stars, and thought, finely enough, to hold the heavens for ever with our dreams. but now we are glad if the limelight shines by accident for a moment on our faces, or if the stage-manager gives us but one individual line. we feel, for all the sad fragrance of our old programmes and newspaper-cuttings, that it is a privilege to play a part in the pageant at all. the game is with the children; but if we are wise, there is still somewhere at the back of the stage a place where each one of us can breathe the atmosphere of enchantment and dream the old dreams. no arcadia is ever wholly lost.