THE HOME OF CHILDHOOD
There was another old home--an earlier one--that on my first walk in
D---- I went to look at. Its associations were even more keenly dear,
and archæologically it was immensely the most interesting.
I was astonished to see how very, very old it was, and for the first
time was curious about its evidently extensive history. There was a
monastic suggestion in its thick walls and crow-stepped gables, and the
oaken door exactly like a church door, and the peculiar irregularity of
the grouping of its parts. Nothing was changed, except that a horrid
little office had been built into a corner that was once a sunless well
between masonry, containing only evergreen shrubs and a dense mat of
lilies-of-the-valley; but the office was an excrescence so glaringly
alone by itself that one could treat it as if it were a tradesman's cart
awaiting orders. Nothing else seemed to have been altered; even the
bay-tree, from which we gathered leaves to flavour cookings, stood in
the little front court as of yore, and the old ivy was, I am sure, the
old ivy of fifty, possibly a hundred, if not a thousand, years ago. I
viewed the place now with instructed eyes, which told me that
half-a-century was a mere fraction of its age.
The guide-book says nothing about it. Old dwelling-houses are too thick
on the ground in England to have any distinction unconnected with famous
persons and events; this was no more to the town of D---- in 1908 than
it was to us when we left it for the modern four-square house with the
pillared portico and stone lions on the lawn, down there near the
station. At neither time was there a doubt of the latter's incomparable
superiority.
But I had come from the land of the raw and new, the domain of the
social vagrant and the speculative builder, and I could appreciate the
charm of this relic of antiquity, for the first time. I stood at the
gate, and tried to think how it had come there. The clue was in the name
of the lane beside it--Priory Road--and in the guide-book statement that
the fine old rectory, in the gardens of which we used to lose arrows and
balls over the wall dividing it from ours, stood "on the site of a
Benedictine Priory."
Then I tried to reconstruct the plan of the interior, and remembered
that the floor under the cocoanut matting of the dining-room was of cold
stone slabs; the passages the same, and I think there was a press of
black wood, that became store cupboards, built into an end of that room.
Entering the arched front door, of such pronounced ecclesiastical
design, mother's store-room was the first thing you came to, a room that
opened out of the front hall on your right hand. Passing through that
hall and opening the door that faced you, you were dropped straight into
the drawing-room down a short flight of steps. One window of that
apartment looked out towards the road (I fancy the excrescent office
blocked it); another, and a door, opened directly upon the garden,
gravelled nearly all over, with, at one side, a group of large and very
old yew-trees, roofing a circular wooden bench. In the right-hand
drawing-room wall a third door opened, at the top of another flight of
steps, into what we called the music-room--really a cosier sitting-room,
incidentally enclosing the piano, and without so many draughts in it;
and a fourth door in a fourth wall led you into the stone-flagged
passage connecting with our refectory and the domestic offices, and to
the foot of the staircase. Surely that plan was never drawn with a view
to the convenience of a lay family!
Upstairs the arrangement was still more unconventional, although it may
have been conventual, for aught I know. That window over the arched main
entrance--it was open, and its muslin curtains fluttering in the
breeze--belonged to one of three rooms so tucked into the many-cornered
structure that they described a sort of triangle; one was hemmed in by
two, the only way in and out being through one or other of those two,
which also intercommunicated, the point of common junction being a sort
of square entry place, having the three doors in its panelled sides. For
some reason the inmost, which was also to the person in the road the
outermost, room was reserved as a guest chamber--the aunts used it; but
once it was given to a male visitor, who wanted to be out early. His
dilemma was a cruel one, seeing that his window was in a sheer wall and
he had no rope ladder. He could gain freedom only through my parents'
room or through that occupied by their daughters, now grown from babies
to little girls. After long listening in our joint vestibule, he chose
the former path, as the least of two evils; but, although he crept on
stockinged feet, my mother was awake. She made some alterations after
that. It seems to me they should have been made before.
Over that window above the front door another and smaller window looked
down on me. I met its gaze with a shrinking eye and the cold creeps down
my back--yes, even after all those years and years! You reached the
little sloping walled room behind it through a suite of attics at the
top of dark and lonely stairs; the first room was the servants', who,
however, were not there when I went to bed; the next had only ghosts in
it, and the locked door of a lumber-room out of which I nightly expected
some shape of horror to spring forth on me as I breathlessly scurried
past; the last--with this window in it--was where I slept with my
governess.
Seven governesses in succession reigned over us, for in my circle it was
considered rather shocking to send girls to boarding-school, which was
quite the proper place for boys; and I can truthfully affirm that I
never learned anything which would now be considered worth learning
until I had done with them all and started foraging for myself. I did
have a few months of boarding-school at the end--obtained by hard
teasing for it--and a very good school for its day it was, but it left
no lasting impression on my mind, except that of great unhappiness. The
unhappiness had nothing to do with its being a boarding-school, but
solely to its not being Home. Home is a place that I never do get away
from without immediately wishing myself back in it.
Of the first two governesses--technically the nursery governesses--I
remember little but their names and the circumstance that one of them
was a nobleman's grand-daughter. Her mother had eloped with a poor
tutor, and been cast out of her world in consequence--so closely does
one generation resemble another in some of its practices, if not in all.
The next--I think the next--was she who once turned that gable room into
a torture-chamber, worthy successor of heretic-persecuting Mediæval
monks, if any such preceded her. Only I was not a heretic, but an
innocent, fairly well-behaved, carefully cherished child.
She came from L----, a neighbouring town of county importance, and it
was darkly hinted that her father kept a boot-shop there. Anyway, she
gave herself great airs. Before coming to us she had been governess at
S---- Hall, and her late pupil, Rosamond U----, was thrown in our faces
all day long. If they were not so well known, I would like to write the
omitted names in full, and express to Rosamond U----, if she be living,
the sympathy I have since felt for her in that long-past experience
common to us both; but at the time I loathed her beyond everybody, with
the solitary exception of our joint governess. Rosamond was so
beautiful, so good, such a perfect lady!--the continual foil to her
successors. Miss H---- sniffed behind backs at everything in our house,
because it was so different from what she had been accustomed to. I
slept in her room--alas!--and when she was beautifying herself for the
evening and father called for her at the foot of the stairs, she used to
inform me, with that ugly smile of hers, that at S---- Hall Mr U----
always came upstairs to her door and escorted her to the drawing-room on
his arm--he was such a perfect gentleman! She must have been a liar,
than which one is accustomed to believe there is nothing worse; but she
was worse--a vile woman all through. I have never in my life disclosed
the horrors of the nights I spent with her; her threats of revenge, if I
should do so, sealed my lips at the time, and my mortal terror of her,
even after she was gone, for years more; and then I was ashamed to
speak. My poor parents died ignorant of what they had exposed me to in
my tender childhood. I, so extravagantly beloved and cared for! Possibly
Rosamond U----'s rank saved her from the like treatment. When I think of
Miss H----, and I hate to think of her--even now she could taint the
English landscape--when I do think of her, it is to wish I could tell
all the parents in the world about her, as a warning against the
promiscuous governess and against leaving any governess unwatched.
Better the poorest boarding-school, where there is the safety of
publicity, a thousand times. In L---- I had a married cousin, whose
little bridesmaid I had been, and whose baby, that I was allowed to
nurse on a footstool, lured me to stay with her once or twice; but I
clung to her side all the time lest perchance I should sight Miss H----
half-a-mile off, after she had left our employ and lost all power over
me. One day at church--great St Margaret's, so full of people--I caught
a distant glimpse of the dull, sallow face, and nearly fainted as I
stood.
Happily, there were other and more wholesome memories connected with
that attic room. But it was still a tragedy that came first to my mind
when I thought of Miss H----'s successor, Miss W----. For it was in her
reign that I very nearly committed suicide.
She was not like--nobody was like--Miss H----, but she was not above
using power unfairly when she was put out. I had been nasty to her in
some way, and she returned the compliment by formulating a specific
complaint of me to father--actually of _me_, his queen, to _him_, my
devoted slave. She was a pretty young woman, and he, poor man, just as
human as could be. He used to take her walks of an evening when he
thought she needed exercise, and on other evenings would sit entranced
for hours while she sang "Should he Upbraid" and "Good-bye, Sweetheart"
and "When the Swallows homeward fly," and scores of other nice things,
to him. And that accounts now, although it did not then, for the
astounding circumstance that he punished me at her behest. I was not
whipped, of course, but I was sent to my room in disgrace and ordered to
stay there. Never shall I forget my mingled astonishment, rage and
despair under the unprecedented calamity. I would not have minded, I
thought, if I had really done the thing she had accused me of. But I was
an innocent victim, and it was father--_father_--who had been set
against me! Simply I could not bear it. I resolved to put an end to my
wretched existence there and then. "When he comes and finds me dead upon
the floor, then he will be sorry," was the reflection that was to
console me in my last moments. But, although I crept into mother's room
and ransacked her medicine cupboard for the fatal dose, I did not find
it; I lived to make friends with father again, and to suffer many more
hours of anguish over troubles that were not worth it.
Another episode of Miss W----'s reign came to my mind when I could clear
it of the smoke of the darker memories. The brother and sister next
below me were the victims of her wrath on this occasion. I was away from
home, and my sister was promoted to the attic room and my place in the
governess's bed. She noticed, as I had done, Miss W----'s habit of
performing half her evening toilet by candlelight and the rest in the
dark; she discovered that the unseen part of the process consisted in
dabbing the skin with Rowland's Kalydor for the improvement of a
much-valued complexion. She told the second brother--a person of
humour--who promptly turned the knowledge to account. Together they
unearthed the secret bottle of Kalydor, adulterated the contents with
ink, re-hid it in its supposed safe place. Night came, and an evening
party. Miss W---- dressed herself with special care and splendour, and
duly extinguished her candles before applying the finishing touch. She
had fine shoulders and arms, now well displayed, and was particularly
careful to anoint them thoroughly with her favourite cosmetic. Then she
swept downstairs. We had dark staircases and dim halls then, and somehow
she did not realise the situation until the drawing-room lights and the
eyes and laughs of the assembled company revealed it to her. I am sorry
I did not see the dramatic dénouement. There were violent hysterics, I
was told, and a terrible hullabaloo. Father, in a towering passion,
rushed upstairs and thrashed the children all round, innocent and guilty
together, lest he should miss out a possible participant in the crime.
We had two more English governesses, and one French. One of the former
had taught a family of cousins and was reported to be very clever; but
she had a fiery, ungovernable temper, and did not stay long enough to
prove her gifts. She was a tiny woman, and pretty in a bird-like,
sharp-nosed, bright-eyed way, and she became engaged to one of the men
who admired her; and one day he came to see her, and from the hall where
he was taking off his hat and coat overheard her "giving tongue" to our
stately youngest aunt, with her customary fierceness and fluency. She
was unaware of his propinquity until he marched in to inform her that he
had not really known her until that moment, and that, as a consequence
of the revelation, his offer of marriage was revoked. It was
characteristic of her that she turned on him with a furious repudiation
of any desire whatever to be his wife. She died an elderly, if not old,
maid some years later.
The other Englishwoman was a dear--and not much else. We loved her, but
we did not learn much from her. As for our French companion--it was for
French conversation that she was engaged--she was all the time learning
English herself. Poor little Eugénie Léonie de B----! She had a white
face and big, lustrous black eyes, and pretty frocks, supplied by her
mother, herself a governess in an English family of higher consequence
than ours. The boys used to tease Eugénie about Waterloo and frogs, and
she would burst into rages and tears because her limited vocabulary
denied her the power of arguing for her country on equal terms. She was
a dear little thing, and we were all fond of her, and she of us; she
took the place of another sister while she lived with us, and there was
mutual and bitter grief when she went away. But she did not teach us
French to any extent. We taught her English instead.
In short, there was not one, I am convinced, amongst them all--with the
possible exception of the lady with the temper--who could have passed a
proper examination in the subjects she professed to teach. No one asked
for a certificate of competency other than her own word and that of her
friends. Miss W---- certainly had the warrant of the principal of the
best ladies' school in L----, but there was no warrant for principals of
schools. They conducted their own examinations and gave judgment in
their own way, which might be any way. All I learned effectually during
my brief experience of boarding-school was a long poem by N P. Willis;
I was letter-perfect in it for break-up day, but, when the moment came
for me to distinguish myself and the school, stage fright paralysed me
and I could not utter a word. At least, that is the only scholastic
achievement that I can now recall to mind.
In the final result we were able to read and write--not "cypher," in my
case; and I could play the piano pretty well (by ear), and my brothers
vastly better--especially the eldest--and, later on, one sister also.
But that was because music was a passion born in us; it had to come out,
wild or cultivated, and our teachers could take little credit for such
proficiency as we attained. Instead of making me read scores and
understand them, they played my new pieces over to me before setting me
to them. It was not only a labour-saving system, but produced the most
immediately effective results. I was a brilliant performer of
"Woodlands" (descriptive of a gathering and bursting storm and the
warbling of little birds after it), and of the "Duet in D," before I
could puzzle out a hymn-tune that had not been sung or played to me. The
elder brother, who went to school in L---- (whence he used to be brought
home suddenly every now and then, at death's door, for mother to nurse
to life again), had lessons from a master and the advantage of knowing
something of the basis of the art; yet his music was before all things
the instinctive speech and poetry of a soul that was not made for this
prosaic world. It was hard to get him to play to listeners--to "show
off" what was really a great accomplishment from the most common point
of view. But in twilight and firelight, or with only me, who was his
constant chum, his extemporisation was so exquisite that I used to sit
and cry as I listened to it. Once a great musician listened to it,
unknown to him, and told our mother that her son was destined to set the
Thames on fire some day. He died at seventeen. When he was too weak to
sit on the music stool by himself, I used to stand behind him and
support his weight against my chest to enable him to enjoy his communion
with the divine and beautiful as long as he could.
He died in March; and in June of the same year the second brother, two
and a half years younger, was laid beside him. This dear boy, so
sweet-tempered, so gay, so unselfish, hid facts that should have been
attended to while the other was yet alive, because all his thoughts were
for him and he never had any for himself, and his own life was in danger
before it was known that he was ill. But an organist friend had promised
him the glory of playing the whole Sunday service in a neighbouring
church (St Peter's, Great Yarmouth, where we were living at the time),
and, with his complaint already past hope, he went off to this task,
simply full of it, and performed it triumphantly. It was his last act in
life, and through all his delirium until he died his fingers were
playing up and down the sheet, showing that his stricken brain made
music for him to the last.
The sister was like them both in that one and only respect. She was a
delightful extemporiser on the piano, expressing thus all her wayward
moods as they alternated so quickly in her passionate little soul.
Continually she surprised herself as well as us with some beautiful
improvisation, and then burst into tears because she could not repeat
it. And all that budding genius to be swept out of the world, without a
chance to flower and bear fruit! It is a sad reflection--the waste of
valuable things in life, the persistent superfluity of the valueless.
However, such gifts as the then numerous family could lay claim to were
hidden as it were in the "plain egg of the nightingale" while our
development was in the hands of the governesses. They were
intellectually limited, spiritually common, all unlearned, and the
majority of them underbred. The fact being that, taking the average of
the seven, they fairly represented their class--the governess class of
my young days. Naturally, in this case, we more or less fairly
represented the class of those who were supposed to be well educated.
But I must except the youngest aunt from this category. She was a
governess--but not the average governess--and it was never _her_ opinion
that we were well educated. She frequently deplored my own lack of
opportunities to improve, and made generous, if vain, efforts to provide
them. Before she entered upon her career as instructress of foreign
young high-mightinesses, she spent years on her own studies abroad, and
she offered to keep me at school in Germany if my parents would send me
to her there. I know we were all fools, father, mother and self, but I
clung to them and they clung to me, and "No, no, a thousand times no!"
was our unanimous reply. "You are standing in the child's light," wrote
the youngest aunt from Heidelberg, but that was not fair, for they would
have sent me and broken their hearts over it if I had wanted to go. But
if the youngest aunt had invited me to join her in heaven, the
joylessness of the prospect would have been the same. So she instituted
a system of correspondence, as the best she could do in the
circumstances. I was to write long and regular letters to her, to which
she was to reply, correcting their grammar and composition and otherwise
enlightening my neglected mind. I performed my part of this contract not
wholly without pleasure in it, and I have no doubt that I owe to her my
first taste for literature and the bent towards authorship which
afterwards became a fixed line. I remember that it was to her I
submitted an early MS., while as yet it was a secret that I wrote
stories. This one was all about moated granges and Mediæval castles and
the splendours of what I imagined to be high life. How just her
criticism was! And how--naturally, on that account--it hurt my feelings
then, when I was professionally so young and innocent. "A boudoir,"
smiled she, "is not a room that a lady keeps all to herself, as she
does her bedroom. And she does not have 'tapers' on the dressing-table,
but candles. And why don't you write what you understand?" That advice,
which is of the best to-day, was astonishingly good for those days.
In later years her letters were like novels themselves. Her reticence
about things one burned to know concerning the private lives of her
royal employers was impenetrable, but outside of that what food for the
romantic imagination! There was the death of her pupil, a young princess
of S----, and later the semi-dissolution of her father's kingdom--two
events that the youngest aunt took bitterly to heart and discoursed of
eloquently. There was that mandate of the Czar to her and another pupil,
wintering in Dresden, to return instantly to St Petersburg, and the
journey of the party in bullet-proof railway carriages through Poland in
revolt. The train crawled along so slowly, on account of the fighting on
the line, that they were nearly starved, and when it reached a station
where food might be obtained no one but the youngest aunt had the pluck
to leave its shelter. The English tutor of her pupil's brother (the
children were fatherless wards of the Russian Emperor) cowered in his
corner paralysed with fright; the youngest aunt could not find words to
express her contempt for him. She gathered up her skirts--it was
necessary to hold them high, she said, because the ground was running
with blood--and sallied forth to forage alone, returning with a little
black bread and some dirty water, procured with great difficulty and by
a heavy bribe. I remember that the youngest aunt was all indignation
against "ungrateful Poland," which shows how the finest judgment can be
affected by the personal point of view. At the end of the perilous
journey there was a solemn service of thanksgiving for the deliverance
of the Lord's Anointed out of the hands of bloodthirsty rebels. Her
sketches of these and other stirring scenes taught me something of the
world outside my village or country town; they supplied plots for many
early romances that never saw the light.
On the whole, school work was a deadly uninteresting, and therefore
unprofitable, business in my time, no matter what the qualifications of
teachers. The notion of making it a pleasure as well as a discipline, of
breathing into its dry bones any breath of knowledgeable life, seemed
not to occur to anybody. The idea that it was anything but a penalty for
being young certainly never occurred to _us_. It is not surprising when
one considers other aspects of the social system prevailing at the
period. But it does seem strange that a theory of education so
essentially stupid on the face of it should still persist to the extent
we see in these more enlightened days. And yet--not so strange. Nothing
is really strange when you think it out. The schools, most humanly and
naturally, keep their old alliance with the Church, clinging to the old
dogmas which have been the roots of their being and the symbols of their
power for so long; inevitably resisting, while they can, on behalf of
all sorts of vested interests, the Spirit of Progress which they must
know to be ultimately irresistible. When I see growing children who have
spent morning and afternoon at school fagging wearily at "prep" through
the evening when they ought to be recruiting with a game or in their
beds, I marvel at the hidebound conservatism which can thus ignore the
laws of health and the rights of the individual, freely recognised as
paramount in other directions. But again--what is there to marvel at?
There are scores of good, common-sense business men to whom Compulsory
Greek is a sacred thing, and there are thousands and thousands of truly
saintly women who would not have a hand laid on the Athanasian Creed for
anything. Not to speak of the innumerable brave fellows, souls of
honour, flowers of chivalry, who believe as devoutly as they believe in
God that the world would go to pieces utterly without its armies and
navies.
How often we hear elderly people gushing over their school days! "Ah,
those were the happy days!" When I hear them I know exactly what they
mean--not the school part of school days, but the free parts in between.
I am not of those who sentimentally deceive themselves in this
matter--the school parts to me were never happy. I have always known it.
And when I came back to the scenes of my schooldays, when I stood in
that quiet road at D---- and looked up at the window of the room under
the crow-stepped gable, I realised with a shudder how unutterably
wretched they had been sometimes.
But it is time I dragged my spirit eyes from that sad little nook in the
house of dreams. I will not look at it again. I will take Memory through
the ghost-haunted attics behind it and down the twisty stairs, to the
lower floors and the garden and the company of my dear family, where she
can play about much more cheerfully.