Harold Begbie - The Story of Baden-Powell / 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps'

Another of his amusements at this time was sketching. He got into the habit of holding his pencil or paint-brush in the left hand, and his watchful mother was troubled in her mind as to the wisdom of allowing a possible Botticelli to play pranks with his art. One day Ruskin called when this doubt was in her mind, and to him the question was propounded. Without a moment's reflection he counselled the mother to let the boy draw in whatsoever manner he listed, and together they went to find the young artist at his work. In the play-room they discovered one brother reading hard at astronomy, and Ste with a penny box of water-colours painting for dear life—with his left hand.

"Now I'll show you how to paint a picture," said Ruskin, and with a piece of paper on the top of his hat and B.-P.'s penny box of paints at his side he set to work, taking a little china vase for a model. Both the vase and the picture are now in the drawing-room of Mrs. Baden-Powell's London house. The result of Ruskin's advice was that B.-P. continued to draw with his left hand, and now in making sketches he finds no difficulty in drawing with his left hand and shading in at the same time with his right.

There is an incident of his childhood which I must not forget to record. At a dinner-party at the Baden-Powells', when Ste was not yet three years old, the guests being all learned and distinguished men, such as Buckle and Whewell, Thackeray was handing Mrs. Baden-Powell into dinner when he noticed that one of the little children was following behind. This was the future scout of the British Army, and the young gentleman, according to his wont, was just scrambling into a chair when Thackeray, fumbling in his pocket, produced a new shilling, and said in his caressing voice, "There, little one, you shall have this shilling if you are good and run away." Ste quietly looked up at his mother, and not until she told him that he might go up to the nursery did he shift his ground. But he carried that shilling with him, and now it is one of his most treasured possessions.

While he was doing lessons at home Baden-Powell gave evidence of his bent. He was fond of geography, and few things pleased him more than the order to draw a map. His maps, by the way, were always drawn with his left hand, and were astonishingly neat and accurate. Then in his spare hours, with scissors and paper, he would cut out striking resemblances of the most noted animals in the Zoo, and these—elephants and tigers, monkeys and bears—were "hung" by his admiring brothers with due honour on a large looking-glass in the schoolroom, there to amuse the juvenile friends of the family. He had the knack, too, of closely imitating the various sounds made by animals and birds, and one of his infant jokes was to steal behind a person's chair and suddenly break forth "with conspuent doodle-doo." And, again, when he was a little older, living at Rosenheim, I.W., there was surely the future defender of Mafeking in the little chap in brown Holland on the sands of Bonchurch digging scientific trenches with wooden spade, and demonstrating to his governess the impregnability of his sand fortress. With his sister and brother, little Ste was once out with this governess on a country ramble near Tunbridge Wells, when the governess discovered that she had walked farther than she intended and was in strange country. Ste was elated. But enquiry elicited the information that the party was not lost, and that they could return home by a shorter route; then was Baden-Powell miserable and cast down. He protested that he wanted the party to get lost so that he could find the way home for them.

B.-P. reflecting on the After-deck of the Pearl ToList

A favourite holiday haunt was Tunbridge Wells, where Ste's grandfather owned a spacious and a fair demesne. Here, with miles of wood for exploration, brothers and sister were in their element. They would climb into the highest chestnut trees in the woods, taking up hampers and hay for the construction of nests, and at that exalted altitude play all manner of wild and romantic games. And yet they would also take up books into those cool branches and do lessons! Of Ste at this period his governess remarks, "It gave him great pleasure to enter a new rule in arithmetic"—an illuminative sentence, in which one sees the governess as well as the child.

It was here in Tunbridge Wells that Ste, with little Baden, now Guardsman and inventor of war-kites, spent laborious days in constructing a really serviceable dam in the river, digging there a deep hole in order to make themselves a luxurious bathing-place. From early infancy they had been taught to do for themselves. Master B.-P. could dress and undress himself before he was three years old, and at three he could speak tolerably well in German as well as English. The children were encouraged to get knowledge as some other children are encouraged to get bumptiousness; their parents delighted, and showed the children their delight, whenever a child did something sensible and clever; there was no unintelligent admiration of precocity.

The boys dug their own gardens, and from five years of age each child kept a most careful book of his expenditure by double entry. Their pennies went chiefly in books and presents, and omnibuses for long excursions out of London. There was no prohibition as to sweets, but never a penny of these earnest young double-entry bookkeepers found its way to the tuck-shop. However, a joke among the brothers was the following constant entry in the book of one of them: "Orange, £0:0:1." But no chaff was strong enough to correct that healthy appetite, and "Orange, £0:0:1" went on through the happy years.

At eleven years of age, Ste was packed off to a small private school, and here he distinguished himself in the same manner, though of course on a smaller scale, as Mr. Gladstone did at Eton. His moral courage, coupled with his athletic prowess, made him the darling of the little school, and the headmaster sorrowfully told his mother when the boy's two years' schooling were over that he would thankfully keep him there without fee of any kind, because by force of character the plucky little fellow had raised the entire moral tone of the school.

And now we come to what I regard as the most important part of our hero's life. In the last chapter I said we should have to say something about B.-P.'s big brother, the sailor, Warington, named after his grandmother, who was a Warington of Waddon Park. The very name Warington, even though it be spelled with a single 'r,' has an inspiring sound, and while Thackeray lives will ever be linked with all that is true and straightforward in the human heart. Imagine the reverence felt for Warington by the young brothers when he came home from a sea voyage! Not only were there the broad square shoulders, the deep chest, and the bronzed face to compel admiration; but a masterful and commanding manner withal, a stern eye and a rousing voice—and the overwhelming and crushing fact that he was a British Naval officer! Warington had been born ten years before Ste, and it is a mighty good thing for B.-P. (and he would be the first to admit it) that this was the case. For I believe that the resourcefulness of Baden-Powell is the result of the early training which he received at the hands of Warington; without that training he would have grown up a delightful and an amusing fellow, but, I suspect, as so many delightful and amusing people are, ineffective. And that is just what B.-P. is not.

You must know that in the spring holidays the boys spent their days in ranging field and copse "collecting," riding ponies, often with their faces towards the tail-end, attending to their innumerable pets, and doing a certain amount of reading of their own free will. Ste's study was mainly history and geology, and it was his custom to embellish the pages of the books he was reading with suitable illustrations as he went along. With these amusements, and always a good many productions of Ste's original comedies, the spring holidays slipped away pleasantly enough. But in the summer holidays came Warington fresh from the sea, with abounding energy and indomitable will, and recreation then was of a sterner kind.