Such a life and such a household encouraged unchildlike emotions. I
was puzzled far too soon in life by the puzzle of all life. I could
not reconcile the wrath of Jehovah with the love of Christ, or the
harshness of my Great-Aunt with the kindness of my Grandmother, which
was the near and earthly form of that discrepancy. The world was a
mysterious battlefield between Wrath and Love, as No. 8 Bear Lawn
was a nearer and more familiar battle-place between Aunt Jael and
Grandmother. Hell versus Heaven was another aspect of the battle. These
two words were part of our daily life. They helped to make the two
battles seem but one; for all the innumerable struggles between Aunt
Jael and my Grandmother were conducted in the words and in the ways of
our religion.
Our whole life was indeed our religion, or rather our religion was our
life. From morn till night our daily life at Bear Lawn was an incessant
preparation for our eternal life above. First we said our own private
bedside prayers and read our "bedroom portions" of the Word. Then down
in the dining-room after breakfast, Aunt Jael read the Word and prayed
aloud for half-an-hour or more; the same after supper in the evening.
Then, last thing at night, my Grandmother came to my room and prayed
with me by my bedside. We lived in the world of our faith in a complete
and intense way almost beyond the understanding of a modern household,
however God-fearing. The promises of the faith, the unsearchable riches
of Christ, the hope of God, the fear of Hell were our mealtime topics.
Sin, as personified by me, was a fruitful subject. Both my Grandmother
and Aunt Jael returned to it unwearied, the former mournfully because
she loved me, the latter with a rough relish because she loved me not.
The main principles of our faith may be summed up in a few
capital-letter words. First, there was THE LORD: the God whom all
men worship: Who is One. My child's difficulty was that He seemed
to be Two. There was Aunt Jael's God, a Prince of battles, revenge
and judgment, dipping His foot in the blood of enemies and the
tongue of His dogs in the same; a King terrible in anger, dark as a
thundercloud; Jehovah, the great I AM. There was my Grandmother's
God, a loving Heavenly Father, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy,
pitying His children like a Father, Whose mercy was from everlasting to
everlasting, Whose loving kindness was for ever.
"I will avenge," thundered Aunt Jael from her horsehair throne.
"God is Love," replied my Grandmother.
There was the WORLD, a comprehensive word which covered all concerts,
entertainments, parties--whatever they might be, for I cannot say I
knew--all merrymakings, junketings, outings, pleasures, joys; all books
save _the_ Book; all affection save for things above; all finery,
furbelows, feathers, frills; smart clothes, love of money, lollipops,
light conversation and unheavenly thoughts. Everything was of this
world worldly which did not savour strongly of the next. There was
the FLESH or the World made manifest in our bodies. It existed to be
"mortified," chiefly by dancing attendance on Aunt Jael. Not to be up
and about, getting Aunt Jael's morning cup-of-tea was fleshly, though
it does not seem to have been fleshly to drink the same. Then there was
the DEVIL, styled Personal, whom Mrs. Cheese in a fit of regrettable
blasphemy once identified with Some One Else, and though the blasphemy
shocked, I cannot truly say it pained me.
"She'm the very Dow'l hissel, th' ole biddy," said our bonds-woman one
day after an encounter in the kitchen in which "th' ole biddy" had
brandished big words, and had ended by brandishing the frying-pan also
before leaving the beaten Mrs. Cheese to blaspheme, and later to be
soothed by th' ole biddy's sister.
Then there was the BEAST, the _so-called_ Pope of Rome: and his
Mistress, that great WHORE that sitteth upon many waters, that Woman
sitting upon a scarlet-coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy,
having seven heads and ten horns, that Strumpet arrayed in purple and
scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a
golden cup in her hand full of abominations, upon whose forehead was
her name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS
AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH--known also, in cravener circles, as the
Roman Catholic Church. Beast and Whore were inextricably mixed up in my
mind: an amorphous twin mass of scarlet and monstrous horror. I hated
them with the passionate hate of ignorance, religion and mystery.
There were the ELECT, the Saints, the Few, God's Chosen Ones. There
was the ROOM they worshipped in, the BLOOD which redeemed them, the
GRACE which sustained them, and the eternal Rest or REWARD on High they
aspired to. There was the WAY they reached it, the PLAN of Salvation
which shewed them the Way, and the BOOK in which the Plan was to be
found.
The Book! We read it aloud together twice a day, and privately many
times. We delved into its pages early and late, in season and out of
season. They say that the old Cromwellians were men of one book; No.
8 Bear Lawn was a house of one book with very vengeance, for Aunt
Jael would suffer no trumpery sugar-tales such as "The Pilgrim's
Progress"--a book which many even of the staunchest Puritans stooped, I
have learnt later, to peruse. There were other books in the dining-room
bookcase--works of devotion, exhortation and exposition that I shall
speak of later--but until I was ten years old, my Grandmother and Aunt
decided I should read no other word whatsoever save _The_ Book. Looking
back, I do not regret their decision.
Day and night we searched the Scriptures. Aunt Jael and Grandmother
discussed them interminably, and sometimes I dared to join in. Our
preferences varied, and were the best index of our characters. Aunt
Jael's favourite book was without doubt the Proverbs. Its salt old
wisdom found echo in her mind. Its continual exhortations to chasten
and to correct, nor ever to spare the rod, because of the crying of the
chastened one, appealed to her nearly. They were quoted at me daily;
usually, alas, as the prelude to offensive action with the thorned
stick. Job was another favourite, and the din and bloodshed of the
Books of Kings. Jeremiah, prophesying vengeance and horror, was her
best-loved Prophet. Parts of Isaiah found favour too, most of all the
thirty-fourth chapter where the prophet sings of the wild terrors that
shall fill the day of the Lord's vengeance, when the screech-owl shall
make her resting place in Zion and the vultures be gathered together.
Of the Psalms she read most the forty-sixth, "God is our refuge and
strength!" and the sixty-eighth, "Let God arise, let His enemies be
scattered." Ah, she was an Old Testament woman. "Eye for eye, tooth
for tooth" was a dispensation she could follow better than "Love your
enemies." The law of Moses was more acceptable in her sight than the
Law of Christ, Jehovah's word from the mountain than the Sermon on the
Mount. The Epistle to the Romans, where Saint Paul scolds and scourges
the saints of the Imperial City, was her favourite New Testament book.
She loved the whole Bible, however, and knew it better than any one I
have ever met except my Grandmother. She kept all the commandments,
except perhaps the tenth. For she coveted Miss Salvation Clinker's fine
white teeth. Her own were few--and black.
My Grandmother was a New Testament woman. She loved the Gospels best:
the story of Jesus. She knew--and lived--better than any one the Sermon
on the Mount, but came most often to St. John: the third chapter,
"God so loved the world"; the tenth, "I am the Good Shepherd"; and
the fifteenth, "I am the True Vine." She read through the Epistles
every week, quoting most often from I Corinthians XIII--the Charity
chapter--and the Epistles of John. In the Old Testament, she loved
best the Psalms. She knew them of course by heart, as did I. The
twenty-third and the hundred-and-third meant most to her. Aunt Jael's
favourite, the savage sixty-eighth, was alien to her whole faith. She
would not say she disliked it--to dislike a word or a letter of God's
Word would have been sin. She obeyed the ten commandments that God gave
to Moses and the two greater ones that Christ gave to the questioning
scribe. She loved the Lord, and she loved her neighbours as herself.
She was the only Christian I have ever met.
My own early loves in the Book I can record faithfully. From the age of
four to the age of twelve, I always used the same copy; a large musty
old Bible that had belonged to my Mother, though not too large to hold
comfortably in both hands. It was heavily marked.
There were three different kinds of mark: in ordinary black lead
pencil, to show chapters I was studying with Grandmother and Aunt
Jael, or portions I had to learn by heart; in blue crayon to indicate
well-liked places; in red crayon to mark the passages I loved best of
all. That old Bible is open before me now as I write: the red marks
are faded a little, but they still tell me what I liked best in those
far-off days, and (nearly always) like best still.
My preferences fell under three main heads. First, the bright-coloured
stories of the beginning of the Bible, the wondrous lives of the men
who began the world: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac,
Jacob and Esau, Joseph and Benjamin; with Princes such as Chedorlaomer
the King of Elam, Tidal King of nations, and Pharaoh, full of dreams.
There were revengeful women and some who suffered revenge: Hagar turned
forth by Sarah into the wilderness of Beersheba; Lot's wife on whom
God took vengeance and turned into a pillar of salt, and Potiphar's,
who took vengeance on Joseph. There were mysterious places: Eden and
Egypt, Ur of the Chaldees, the Wilderness and the Cities of the Plain,
the land of Canaan flowing with milk and honey, and the slime pits of
Siddim into which the Kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fell. Wonders of
earth and heaven: the Tower of Babel, the Serpent in the garden, the
Tree of Knowledge; the Creation, the Plagues and the Flood; the Ark of
refuge and the fugitive Dove.
My second bent was for the mournful places of the Word; a morbid taste,
but then so was I. The gloom of Job and the menace of Lamentations
and the Woes of Matthew XXIV seemed to belong to our forbidding
house. Up in the dim blueness of the attic I would declaim aloud the
twenty-fourth chapter, where Christ spoke of the signs of His coming:
wars and rumours of wars, famine and pestilence and earthquakes:
"Wheresoever the carcase is, there the eagles will be gathered
together."
In my weak childish treble it must have sounded comic, though nobody
ever laughed except, maybe, the God above the attic skylight. More even
than gloom, I love pure sorrow: Ecclesiastes, where the Preacher talks
of the sadness of all life, the eternal misery of Man; and the story of
the Passion, the Son of Man Who tasted human bitterness and death. The
subtlety of the Preacher may have been beyond me; it needs no wit but a
child's understanding of English words to feel his unplumbable woe in
her heart. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities:
all is vanity. While Gethsemane saw the whole world's sorrow in a
night-time.
My third, and chief, happiness was in the words. Passages there are
of sounding wrath or matchless imagery. I did not understand them,
for they pass all understanding. But I loved them, plastered them
marginally with three thicknesses of red crayon, cried them aloud. I
have counted, and the books with most markings are these four: The
Psalms, the Song of Solomon, Isaiah, and The Revelation. In the last I
revelled with a pure ecstasy of awe: in the sixth chapter, where the
sun becomes black as sack-cloth of hair, and the moon as blood; in the
twenty-first, which tells of the City of Heaven, a city of pure gold,
like unto clear glass, the foundations of whose rocks are garnished
with jasper and sapphire and chalcedony and emerald and sardonyx and
sardius and chrysolyte and beryl and topaz and chrysoprasus and jacinth
and amethyst, whose light is the Lamb; most of all in the seventh
chapter: "What are these which are arrayed in white robes? And whence
came they? _These are they which came out of great tribulation_ and
have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."
My Psalms, as I called them, as against Grandmother's or Aunt Jael's
protégés, were the hundred-and-thirty-seventh, _By the waters of
Babylon_, and the twenty-fourth, _Who is the King of glory?_
However much I might write about the Book, it would fail to fill the
place in this record that it filled in our lives, of which it moulded
the very moods. Aunt Jael as lover of the Mosaic law and student of the
Proverbs, was herself stern lawgiver and sayer of dark sayings. She
ruled. Ruled my Grandmother (nearly always and in nearly everything,
though there were exceptions); ruled me (except in one or two awful
occasions I shall tell of); ruled Mrs. Cheese (until the latter's
Exodus); ruled the household, ruled the Meeting, and could have ruled
the whole world with a due sense of her fitness for the post. The old
armchair was her throne, the thorned stick her sceptre. As a woman she
had, as I can see now, many high qualities. She did her duty as she saw
it; was honourable and straightforward. She loved the truth, especially
when it was unpalatable to other people. She had a deep fund of
common-sense. She was a thrifty, hard-headed, sensible house-wife; and,
as I said before, observed with zeal some nine of the Commandments.
But of kinder or more endearing qualities I remember none. No doubt
some of the child's bitterness and the child's bias remain with me
still--perhaps it is merely vain to imagine that I hold the scales
evenly and do not let prejudice weight memory--but I look across many
years and see, as I believe the world saw, a hard bad old woman.
Heaven, they say, forgives those who love much; maybe it forgives also
those who are little loved, for they need forgiveness most. Aunt Jael
started life hard, but I feel certain that the hardness was made a
hundredfold harder because no love--no lover--had ever come her way.
Bitter because she had no family of her own, she strove to embitter her
sister's. Cheated of the two things we women need most--lordship and
love--in revenge she lorded it over everybody, and loved not a soul
in the world. Not but what she could have wedded many a time if she'd
felt so inclined, including some as "others" didn't mind stooping to
take though they were her leavings; not but what--in short, to all the
tragical-comical backward boastings of the unchosen woman she would
treat us at times. It was one of her few weaknesses, and I have since
wondered if, failing to deceive six-year-old me, she succeeded in
deceiving herself. During a tirade of this kind, I always fell a-musing
what "Uncle Jael" would have been like. I decided he would wear smoked
black glasses, like the man who came to tune our old piano; because
I once fancied that Aunt Jael's eyes had rested upon the latter with
a suspicion of unwonted coyness. This must have been a freak of my
imagination, if not of Aunt Jael's after-dinner brandy. "For two good
qualities," she used to say, "I thank and praise the Lord. That he has
preserved me all my life from all wanton sentiment; and that it has
pleased Him to make me the most fearless and outspoken woman in this
town."
What I have said about my Grandmother's pastures in the Bible shows
what manner of woman she was. Yet not quite completely. She was gentle
and forgiving, and the most unselfish human being I have ever met, or
ever shall; but this and more. She was as shrewd a housewife as her
sister; a woman of common-sense and plain seeing. Nor was she weak
or meek. She gave in to Aunt Jael, certainly; but on principle, that
is through strength rather than weakness. And whenever she chose to
fight ungloved, she would usually beat her sister. I was the chief
battle-ground. When Aunt Jael's abuse or ill-treatment of me became too
outrageous, Grandmother would show fight, and on her day could leave
Aunt Jael drubbed and apologetic upon the stricken field. But if my
Grandmother thus defended me to Aunt Jael, she never had a good word
to say of me to myself, or to the Lord. Every night at my bedside she
poured out my wickedness before my Maker; and in all her life she only
praised me once. With rare instinct she refused to water the plant
of self-righteousness which she saw ready to flourish in me like the
bay-tree. In her mild way she could be as outspoken as her sister;
indeed what with the two of them and Mrs. Cheese, who "called a spade
a spade, and a pasnip a pasnip," ours was a stark outspoken house, a
dark palace of Plain Speaking. Despite all my Grandmother's loveliness
of character, she lacked one thing. Demonstrative affection, warm
clinging love, the encircling arm, the kiss, the gentle madness, the
dear embrace,--things I did not know the existence of till a later
unforgettable moment, though they were the mystery, the hunger, never
perfectly visualized, never in the heart understood, that till that
moment I was seeking always to solve, to satisfy; the thing I cried for
passionately without knowing what thing it was--these had no meaning
for her, no place ever in her life. The nearest she had known was in
her love for my mother. Did they kiss? I wonder. In all the years of
her love and goodness to me, she never once kissed me upon the mouth,
nor hugged me, nor let me hug her; nor said the word for which my
little wild heart was waiting. For so good and affectionate a woman
she was strangely phlegmatic. As she did not embrace in love, nor did
she weep in sorrow. Even when my mother died, her eyes, she told me,
were dimmed for a moment only. It was the Lord's will: wherefore weep?
Yet I have seen her shedding tears of joy over a missionary chronicle
which told of the conversion of some African negro. She had tears, that
is, for the Lord; as her strongest love was for Him. Humans mattered
much; but less. Thus I was lonely.
To give a picture of myself in those early days I find harder, though
once again the Bible helps. I liked the imaginative old stories of
Genesis, I liked the sad and gloomy books, I liked mysterious words;
that is, I was imaginative, morbid, and fond of the unknown and
the beautiful: much what any other child brought up under the same
circumstances would have been. If not a remarkable, and certainly not
a clever child, I was no less certainly out-of-the-ordinary. With
my morbid environment it was inevitable. I was serious, solemn and
sensitive beyond what any child should be. In fact my oddness really
amounted to this, that I was unchildlike--chiefly because I was
unhappy. If ever there were a moping miserable little guy, it was I. I
had no companions of my own age whatever, nor up till just before the
time I left Tawborough for Torribridge had I ever been alone with any
other child for half an hour in my life. Aunt Jael forbade intercourse
with worldly children, and my Grandmother agreed. They were an unknown
race. All my companions were old women; the youngest, Mrs. Cheese, was
sixty. I was never allowed to play with the Lawn children, indeed never
allowed to play with anybody or "at" anything. I was kept indoors all
day long to mope about in the gloomy house.
The distractions allowed were two: searching the Scriptures, and plain
sewing. At six in the morning I got up, and, from the age of five or
six onwards, made my own bed and dusted my bedroom. Then I went into
Aunt Jael's room, and helped her to dress. Aunt Jael was usually in
an evil temper first thing, and the only coin in which she repaid my
services was hard words and harder bangs. It was a painful half-hour
passed in an atmosphere of laces and buttons, hooks and eyes, blows
and maledictions. Sometimes if I failed to do her boots up quickly
enough, she would kick me. The next duty was helping Mrs. Cheese and
Grandmother with the breakfast, which was eaten at half past seven
punctually. After breakfast, prayers; then I dusted the dining-room;
then from nine to eleven, two wretched hours with Aunt Jael styled
Lessons, a hotchpotch of Proverbs, pothooks and multiplication-tables,
served up with the usual seasoning of cuffs and imprecations. Every day
I cried wretchedly, though tears brought nothing but the stick--and
tears again. From eleven to twelve I sewed with my Grandmother; at noon
we had dinner. After dinner Grandmother usually studied the Word in
her bedroom, while Aunt Jael snored in her chair: I was left to moon
about the house alone, with no plaything, no books, no companions; no
resources whatever but my own imagination. I would sit for hours in
the great blue attic, talking to myself, inventing imaginary scenes in
which I triumphed over Aunt Jael and humbled her before the world, or
reciting from the Word, or often merely weeping. After supper, came
prayers and reading the Word; then bedside prayers with my Grandmother;
then bed, which was not a much happier place, as I dreamt often,
usually nightmares of hell and eternity, Satan and Aunt Jael.
It was a dreary life. I was a dreary little girl, and I must have
looked it. No photograph was ever taken to perpetuate the prim, sulky,
pale Quakerish little object I am told I was. My odd appearance was not
helped by decent clothes. There was to be no indulgence of the Flesh,
and I was dressed with due unbecomingness, always in the same way. I
wore a dark green corduroy blouse and skirt, and a little corduroy
bonnet to match, bedecked with a gaunt duck's feather. For winter I had
an ugly black overcoat with a cape. I had black woollen mittens and
square hobnailed boots.
I had no martyr's idea of myself, however, no exquisite self-pity,
and any trace of such that may appear here is to be laid at the
door of the authoress aged fifty, not of her chrysalis aged five.
All I knew was that I was miserable. I had a child's sure instinct
for injustice. I knew it was unjust that Aunt Jael should beat and
abuse me all day long. I hated her bitterly, and hate makes no one
happier. Lovelessness is even worse than hate, and the two beset me. My
Grandmother loved me tenderly no doubt, but her ways were not my ways.
She had no understanding of what I longed for. I wanted somebody--I
only half guessed this, not daring to believe the visualization when
it suggested itself--in whose bosom I could bury my face and cry for
pure happiness. I would whimper myself to sleep thinking of my mother.
Sometimes I seemed to see her as an angel. She looked kind and radiant,
and comforted me. When my Grandmother caught me crying for my mother, I
would say it was because of Aunt Jael's latest flogging.
Fear ruled me. The Devil and Hell frightened me terribly, and Eternity
more. The thought of living for ever and ever and ever, the attempt
of my child's mind to picture everlastingness, to visualize my own
soul living through the pathless spaces of a billion years, and to be
still no nearer the end than at the beginning,--this morbid unceasing
trick of my imagination filled me with an ecstasy of fear, that froze
and numbed my brain. I would sit up in bed too terrified to scream,
voiceless with fear. My heart beat wildly. The realization that there
was no hope, no way out--oh, heart, none ever--that because I was once
born I must live for all eternity, seized my body and brain alike. I
would jump out of bed, cry brokenly "God, God" in wild agony of soul,
until, at last, the terror passed. Then, in a strange way, the blood
rushed warmly back into my brain, and a languorous feeling of ease
succeeded the terror of a moment before. Sometimes I was wicked and
foolish enough to suffer the horror of thus "thinking Eternity out"
for the sake of the luxurious backwash of comfort and physical peace
which followed. But most often the terror came imperiously, and I
could not escape it. I would be looking at the stars, I would think of
their ineffable distances, then from eternity in space my mind would
be dragged as by some devil to eternity in time, and I would have to
live through the terror of the attempt--against my own will as it
were--to think out, to live out, the meaning of living for ever. It is
the worst agony the poor human soul can know; for a child, unnameable.
There is no escape. The soul must go through the agony of the whole
visualization--it may only be seconds, though it seems (perhaps is)
Eternity Itself--right to the moment when the brain and body can abide
the horror no longer, and from the very depths the soul cries out to
"God."
A happy healthy child would know nothing of such bogeys; but I was
neither. I was puny and ailing; I rarely went out of doors. Market on
a Friday morning, Meeting on Sundays, and an afternoon walk once in a
long while constituted my record of outings. The only real advantage
I gained from this unhappy and unhealthy life was the development of
a quite unusual power of instinct and intuition. Shut up all day long
with no companions but the same three faces, I could read every mood
and movement of them with unerring skill. Like the savage, or any one
else who lives in an abnormally narrow world, I felt things rather than
knew them. And the thing I felt and knew most sorely was that I was
wretched. And when Aunt Jael moralized and said, "You are a privileged
child indeed," I felt and knew that she was lying.
"Your holy kinsfolk, your saintly mother, your godly surroundings, your
exceptional chances of grace, all show you to be a Child of Privilege."
All this, from the earliest days that I could understand, was usual
enough. One day, however, when I was about five, she paused here with
an air of special importance that I scented at once, then proceeded,
"Your Grandmother and I have come to a decision, Child. Everything
points out that the Lord has chosen you for special privileges, and
special works for Him. If you were a boy, Child, the way would be
clear. We should train you for the Ministry of His Word. Yet the way
has been made plain. Your Grandmother and I have decided, after much
seeking of the Lord in prayer, that your lot is to be cast--(she
looked towards my Grandmother for confirmation, and concluded
majestically)--_in the field of foreign labour_. You will bear witness
to the Lord among the heathen. 'Go ye into all the world and preach the
Gospel, for lo! I am with you alway'!"
I looked appealingly towards my Grandmother. "Yes," she said, "I think
it is the Lord's will."
So that was my life work. I was to spend Eternity as a missionary.
"You are indeed a Child of Privilege," Aunt Jael was booming.