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Where this sudden inspiration came from, he then had no idea; but come
it did, in the very nick of time, and helped him to dry his tears. The
day of destiny also came, and his courage was put to the test. He knew
well enough, of course, that of the operation he would feel nothing.
But the sight of the hard, white, narrow pallet on which he had to
lie, the cold glint of the remorseless instruments, the neatly folded
packages of lint and cotton-wool, and the faint, horrible smell of
chloroform turned him rather sick for a minute. Then he glanced
downwards, with a sense of almost affectionate yearning, at the limb
he was about to lose. "Good-bye, dear old leg!" he murmured, with a
little laugh which smothered a rising sob. "We've had some lovely
ramps together, but the best of friends must part."

Afterwards, during the long days of dreary convalescence, he began to
feel an interest in what remained of it; and then he found himself
taking a sort of �sthetic pleasure in the smooth, beautifully-rounded
stump, which really was in its way quite an artistic piece of work. At
last, when the flesh was properly healed, and the white skin growing
healthily again around his abbreviated member, he grew eager to make
acquaintance with his new leg; for of course it was never intended
that he should perform the rest of his earthly pilgrimage with only a
leg and a half--let the added half be of what material it might. And
his excitement may be better imagined than described when, one
afternoon, the surgeon came in with a most wonderful object in his
arms--a lovely prop of bright, black, burnished wood, set off with
steel couplings and the most fascinating straps you ever saw. And the
best of all was the socket, in which his soft white stump fitted as
comfortably as though they had been made for one another--as, in fact,
one of them had been. It was a little difficult to walk just at first,
for Austin was accustomed to begin by throwing out his foot, whereas
now he had to begin by moving his thigh; this naturally made him
stagger, and for some time he could only get along with the aid of a
crutch. But to be able to walk again at all was a great achievement,
and then, if you only looked at it in the proper light, it really was
great fun.

There was, however, one person who, probably from a defective sense of
humour, was unable to see any fun in it at all. Aunt Charlotte would
have given her very ears for Austin, but her affection was of a
somewhat irritable sort, and generally took the form of scolding. She
was not a stupid woman by any means, but there was one thing in the
world she never could understand, and that was Austin himself. He
wasn't like other boys one bit, she always said. He had such a queer,
topsy-turvy way of looking at things; would express the most
outrageous opinions with an innocent unconsciousness that made her
long to box his ears, and support the most arrant absurdities by
arguments that conveyed not the smallest meaning to her intellect.
Look at him now, for instance; a cripple for life, and pretending to
see nothing in it but a joke, and expressing as much admiration for
his horrible wooden leg as though it had been a king's sceptre! In
Aunt Charlotte's view, Austin ought to have pitied himself immensely,
and expressed a hope that God would help him to bear his burden with
orthodox resignation to the Divine will; instead of which, he seemed
totally unconscious of having any burden at all--a state of mind that
was nothing less than impious. Austin was now seventeen, and it was
high time that he took more serious views of life. Ever since he was a
baby he had been her special charge; for his mother had died in giving
him birth, and his father had followed her about a twelvemonth later.
She had always done her duty to the boy, and loved him as though he
had been her own; but she reminded onlookers rather of a conscientious
elderly cat with limited views of natural history condemned by
circumstances to take care of a very irresponsible young eaglet. The
eaglet, on his side, was entirely devoted to his protectress, but it
was impossible for him not to feel a certain lenient and amused
contempt for her very limited horizon.

"Auntie," he said to her one day, "you're just like a frog at the
bottom of a well. You think the speck of blue you see above you is the
entire sky, and the water you paddle up and down in is the ocean. Why
can't you take a rather more cosmic view of things?"

This extraordinary remark occurred in the course of a wrangle between
the two, because Austin insisted on his pet cat--a plump, white,
matronly creature he had christened 'Gioconda,' because (so _he_ said)
she always smiled so sweetly--sitting up at the dinner-table and being
fed with tit-bits off his own fork; and Aunt Charlotte objected to
this proceeding on the ground that the proper place for cats was in
the kitchen. Austin, on his side, averred that cats were in many ways
much superior to human beings; that they had been worshipped as gods
by the philosophical Egyptians because they were so scornful and
mysterious; and that Gioconda herself was not only the divinest cat
alive, but entitled to respect, if only as an embodiment and
representative of cat-hood in the abstract, which was a most important
element in the economy of the universe. It was when Aunt Charlotte
stigmatised these philosophical reflections as a pack of impertinent
twaddle that Austin had had the audacity to say that she was like a
frog.

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Books | Photos | Paul Mutton | Fri 14th Mar 2025, 3:52

Austin and His Friends by Frederic H. Balfour