OLD TIMES AND NEW
It struck me, as I stood up in Mr B.'s carriage to look at the old house
which had so well survived the changes and chances of half-a-century,
that at the beginning of that half-century the cash cost of happiness
was very much lighter than it is at the end; and not the cash cost of
happiness only, but of material well-being, domestic plenty, social
position, everything necessary to the comfort and dignity of a
gentleman. I do not speak of the poor labouring class; I do not say--I
do not for a moment think--that the old times on the whole were better
than the new; but I believe they were better in a few things, and
amongst other things in this--the good taste of people in the matter of
money.
Five hundred a year was then a good income. The fortunate possessor did
not usually thirst for more. He could keep a large, substantial house
amply provided, and take his family for an outing yearly, and still save
something. He had not fifty thousand trivial drains upon his purse, as
we have, consuming our substance we know not how; he saw his return for
what he spent, and he knew what he wanted, and it was not much. His good
home, his county town, his local meet of hounds--they were not
necessarily duller than the crush of interests in our more fevered
world. He grew his own fruit and vegetables, if not his own pork and
butter. Housekeeping was thrifty, as a matter of duty, apart from any
thought of saving. I knew an earl who took a lump of meat out of a
pig-tub and ordered it to be washed and cooked for his dinner, by way of
pointing a moral to wasteful kitchenmaids. Out of five hundred pounds a
year, the wife would ask, perhaps, twenty pounds as her personal
allowance. Her clothes were always good, with rarely a button or a darn
wanting, but they were made at home or in the National School--fine
linen under-garments (with, of course, silk stockings) and white calico
petticoats, seamed and tucked exquisitely, but not "enriched" with miles
of lace, as in our own costly fashion. She wore aprons to protect her
neat gowns--a black silk ornamental apron in the afternoon. Her best
silk dress was best for a dozen years, the Paisley shawl of her marriage
outfit never out of fashion. The local dressmaker came to sew for the
children--eighteenpence a day and her meals; she remade the same frock
twice or thrice: turning it on the first occasion, putting it together
after washing on the second, cutting it down for a younger child on the
third; and everything was lined throughout, to enhance the durability of
those everlasting stuffs. Girls went to balls in white book-muslin and a
pink or blue sash; the whole costume, with shoes and gloves, might have
cost a pound; yet we were supposed to be well dressed--we really were,
according to the modest requirements of the time. So that it is easy to
understand why the possessor of five hundred pounds a year not only felt
himself passing rich, but actually was so. A farmer--a "gentleman-farmer,"
as he was called, the class to which we belonged--with half that income
clear of farm expenses, was in a position to envy no man. I fancy that
was something like my father's situation when we were at T----. But he
was constitutionally incapable of managing money--he could not hold
it--and it is mother I think of when I think how ample and orderly that
old home was. The housewife of those days--so humbly inferior to her
lord and master as she was content to consider herself, although he
might not be worthy to tie her shoes (to adjust her sandals,
rather)--she was the home-maker, the heroine of her day, although nobody
knew it, herself least of all. Certainly she had the advantage over her
descendants of those good old contented servants which are never heard
of nowadays, because the feudal age is past; they were the
foundation-stones of the domestic edifice, which for lack of them is now
unsettled, decaying, in some sort out of date. But apart altogether from
consideration of such conditions as were of the times and not of her
individual choice, did she not know her business well? I ask you, dear
friends, who were young with me.
Her grand-daughters laugh at her little fads and nostrums, but they had
their value and meaning to her and us. I have known of a modern lady, a
collector of curios, getting hold of that, to her, amusing article, a
copper warming-pan. Having been so lucky as to get hold of it, she hung
it up on a wall by a ribbon round its handle, for an ornament. The
housewife of the fifties did know better than that. She raked red coals
into it, poked it between the sheets at the bottom of a bed, and in a
few minutes made that bed the cosiest, the blissfullest, the most
sleep-compelling nest to tuck an ailing child into on a winter's night
that was ever contrived by human intelligence in any generation. I would
like once more to hear that smothered rattle up and down, to smell that
delicious scorchy odour of the warmed sheets, to feel that sensation of
transcendent comfort as I sank to rest; but, of course, I never shall.
Now, when I fear to be kept awake with the shivers of a raw night, I
fall back on a hot-water bottle or a brick baked in the kitchen oven.
The magic warming-pan, where still extant, hangs cold and useless on the
wall. The present generation does not know its value; no, not even in
chilly England, where I found so many unexpected survivals of things I
had supposed for ages out of date. It seems to me--not always, of
course, nor even often, but now and then--that the homes of my childhood
were more really comfortable than the corresponding homes of to-day.
That there was real comfort in them, and that at a price far less than
we pay for our comfort, is, at any rate, indisputable.
Deadly dull they would be to us to-day, I know. I saw something of the
life, about the eastern counties, in several families that had brought
it down unchanged to the twentieth century, and I asked myself, "How
could I stand this now?" I could not stand it, with all my love of peace
and quiet, of which I have never been able to get enough. It would drive
me melancholy mad. But in the days to which these self-contained and
unawakened homes belong, it was not dull. Was it, reader? To the best of
my recollection, we did not know what boredom meant.
The procession of the hours passed before my eyes when I looked at my
old home--one day so like another that I could not lose myself amongst
them.
No morning tea, of course. I blush to add, no bath. I do not remember a
bathroom in any house--not even that of my maternal grandfather, a
physician of some distinction in his day, who dictated the laws of
hygiene not only to us but to many county families. A portable bath was
part of the furniture of every decent house--we had one so large that
the frequent monthly nurse made her bed in it--but, like the
warming-pan, it was not for common use; it was a medical appliance
chiefly. Such is the case, I find, in many English houses still. We
children were severely scrubbed and scoured in washing-tubs every
Saturday night--"tub night"--and we did a great deal of sea bathing in
summer; between whiles we ran constant risk of being sent from table to
obliterate the line of demarcation between the washed and unwashed
portions of face and neck. Dirty little pigs! We used to dress first,
and then seek the sparing sponge. This was after the nurse of infancy
had been replaced by the nursery governess, who, to the best of my
recollection, was no more particular herself.
There was some excuse for us in those bitter English winters. To go warm
from the "keeping-room" fire to the ice-cold linen sheets was bad
enough--I recall the nightly struggle for courage to put feet down into
them; to have to get out again into a temperature that froze the towels
on the horse so that they would stand up by themselves like boards--that
froze one's breath on the sheets so that I have scratched my face on the
crystals as on pins--was a sharper ordeal. Small wonder that we hurried
into our clothes, or that the stiff, blue, chilblained fingers shrank
from wet on the top of cold. I remember a winter night when my ewer
split in halves with a loud report, and the water within rolled out upon
the floor like a lump of glass; there had been a fire in the room
overnight too, a luxury dispensed with, as a rule, in the case of
children who had passed out of the nursery into rooms of their own. It
was in the same winter that I inadvertently touched an iron railing with
my bare hand, and skin and metal stuck together. This, however, was not
at T----.
My doctor-grandfather did not pull-to the curtains round his and
grandmother's bed. I know, because I used to sleep in their room when
visiting them by myself, and gaze upon them from my cot in the corner as
they slept--both in nightcaps, hers deeply frilled over the face, his
cone-shaped, with the tasselled point hanging over one ear. But it was
the the rule to draw them--that is what they were there for--and my
father and mother did so. The room itself was made airtight first. To
have slept with a window open would have seemed to them the act of a
deliberate suicide. Curtains having been drawn over bolted windows, six
more (of flowered damask, very thick) were drawn round the canopied
four-poster, turning it into a small tent; a pleated valance round the
top obviated the danger of ventilation where the rings ran upon the
rods. The occupants entered the enclosure by an aperture on either side,
closed it carefully, sank into the yielding depths of the billowy
feather-bed, and slept like tops. At any rate, I never heard that they
did not. More than that, there are people who can sleep under almost the
same conditions still. I had had an idea that feather-beds had been
extinct for thirty years, at least, but last year I reposed on no less
than four separate ones in four separate houses; yes, and slept well
upon them all. I got so used to feather-beds at last that on my return
home I had to send my hair mattress to be teased before I could
reconcile myself to it again. Almost everywhere I went in England I used
to go up to bed to find the windows of my room closed and locked under
the drawn blinds--part of the housemaid's preparations for the night;
whereas I am accustomed to sleep with three wide open, and to wish that
roof and walls could be dispensed with. Although I adjusted myself so
easily to the feather-bed, I drew the line at the shut-up room; the
fresh night air was indispensable. But I would sometimes find the
bedclothes damp in the morning, and the clothes I had taken off too
clammy to put on again. I had forgotten that peculiarity of English
nights.
My mother, when I knew her first, did her hair of a morning in two
parts; the hinder half was brushed back, tied tightly, and disposed in
braids around a high comb; the front drooped in beautiful golden
ringlets on either side of her face. But when she was thirty or so she
dressed like the sedate old lady that we took her then to be. She tucked
her fair hair under a cap--a large cap, with streamers of ribbon hanging
down from below the ears like untied bonnet-strings. There was a dummy
head of pasteboard (which went by the name of Jane Winter), with a
proper face to it, and a hollow neck with an opening within which to
stow away materials, on which her caps were made. It may possibly have
been because she was perennially convalescing from confinements that she
wore caps as a habit at so early an age, but I think not; I believe
them to have been the sign of departed youth. When you became a mother,
though you might be still in your teens, a large cap was part of the
"sitting-up" costume. I remember standing at mother's side by open
drawers, while Cousin E., "expecting" for the first and last time,
displayed the elaborate preparations made for her infant and herself. I
did not know what they meant, but I see now the white cap of blond lace
and gauze ribbon that she twirled about on her doubled fist. I saw her
in it too on the happy day when I was first allowed to sit on a stool at
her feet and nurse the baby. She looked beautiful in it, with her
girlish face and mass of dark hair. On emerging from invalid retirement
she left it off, so I suppose it was a sort of glorified substitute for
the universal nightcap.
With regard to other clothing, all persons claiming to be
gentlefolk--the division of classes was strongly marked in those
days--wore Irish linen shifts and shirts and silk stockings; no matter
how poor nor how outwardly shabby they went, they must conform in those
particulars or lose caste. My two grandmothers, both wealthier than we
were, were sticklers for the finest material, and some of their silk
stockings (white, like all stockings) and exquisite under-garments came
down to their descendants to be darned and darned as long as they would
hold together. When they were worn out--no cotton; a lady would live on
bread and water sooner than come to that. Much of this linen nether-wear
was made in the National Schools, where sewing was an important feature
in the education of the poor. The ladies of the neighbourhood gave their
material and instructions, and from time to time inspected the process
of manufacture. Often have I accompanied a village patroness on this
errand, stood shyly by while she studied the fine stitching--one thread
drawn and the tiny beading done on the crossing threads, two backward
and two forward--and the tiny gathers "stroked" to a regularity that no
machine could better, the little craftswomen dropping their dutiful
curtsies to her when she deigned to commend their work. I do not know
who was paid for it when it was done.
Winter and summer these linen garments were, I believe, worn next the
skin. I forget what the fashion of the early fifties decreed to be worn
immediately over them, except stays that had busks of solid wood, and
had to be laced down the back every time they were put on. But I
remember watching, in that room up yonder, my mother tying her bustle
round her waist. It was a stuffed roll like a sand-bag, reaching from
hip to hip, designed to set her skirts out behind; and the skirts
hanging under and over it were numerous and full. As for gowns--the deep
point in front, the patterned flounces, bell sleeves combined with white
muslin bishop sleeves, large lace collars fastened under a spreading
ribbon bow or cameo brooch the size of a small plate, "habit-shirts"
(for filling in the long and narrow V of an open-fronted bodice)--memory
supplies but a jumble of these things. It does not matter. History has
preserved the modes of the time, and I presume we kept up with them as
well as country-folk could do.
In the nursery our clothes were more defined in style. Though snow lay
on the ground, we went bare-armed and bare-necked--down to the latest
baby, whose little sleeves would be tied up with ribbons at the
shoulders. To put long sleeves to a child's frock was a thing unheard
of; they were given to us with the first "gown," which, with its
lengthened skirt and fastenings in front, signified the estate of
womanhood. Sandalled shoes, very thin in the sole, were correct indoor
wear. The other end of me was showered over with tubular ringlets
hanging nearly to my waist. The painful process of preparing them--the
relentless thoroughness with which our nurse (mother was gentler) rolled
up a strand of hair a few inches, "chucked" it tight upon its rag,
rolled it a little more and chucked it again, and finally tied it close
to the stretched scalp, with odd hairs dragging at their too tenacious
roots, continuing the torture for half-an-hour or more--this was one of
the sorrows of childhood in the fifties, and no small one either. Our
nursery toilet was completed by the "feeder" tied on before each meal
and removed after. We went downstairs--when mother was "about"--to the
row of bread-and-milk basins that I, for one, hated the sight of, except
in the season when a sprinkle of strawberries or raspberries and a
little sugar were dropped into them; the youngest aunt being unaware of
such a weak relaxation of rules. Discipline imposed that bread-and-milk
upon us every day of our lives, no matter how we rebelled against it. We
might be bribed to get it down by promises of a taste of the adults'
dishes afterwards--the fat gravy from the bacon was a valued perquisite;
but there was no dispensing with the nauseous preliminary. I have not
been able to eat bread-and-milk since.
Mother came downstairs with her key-basket. What she did with all those
keys I do not know, but they were evidently precious. She carried them,
with the plate-basket, to her room, nightly; a maid retrieved the latter
when she took up father's shaving water, but the little brown basket of
keys was never beyond reach of the mistress's hand. She set it down
beside the tea-tray while she administered breakfast. And I had not been
three days in England before I saw the exact duplicate of that little
brown basket, with all the keys in it, go through exactly the same
performance. How oddly it struck me. For in Australia we know not
key-baskets--never have done so far as I know. If you were to lock
sideboard or store-closet against your respectable maids in this country
they would not stay with you. And I should not blame them.
I suppose mother's tea-caddy was locked--certainly tea was a terrible
price those days. I often opened the lid of the quaint box, which had
two lidded receptacles inside, one for black tea, one for green, and a
special caddy spoon to ladle it out with. She made the tea herself from
a blending of the two kinds, to which she added a dust of carbonate of
soda, apparently to increase the look of strength. She drew the water
from the hissing urn, kept at the boil by a red-hot metal core slipped
into a cylinder in the middle of it. She and father, like many others,
drank the decoction pure, without sugar or milk.
After breakfast he went to his farm work; she also--and she was the
better farmer of the two, although he was bred to the trade and she was
not. His soul was in the hunting-field and the lighter distractions of
his life, and money slid through his pockets as water through a sieve;
it was she, from first to last, who kept things together as best she
could. She had had the sheltered and dainty girlhood of the well-born
and well-to-do, who had such (to us, and especially to us who are
British colonists) strange ideas of the privileges and immunities of
their class; needless to say she had never done "work," in the real
sense of the word, for that was the portion of the "common people." But
now she sent fowls and eggs to market; and butter of her own
manufacture--butter in large quantities, as I remember, for I used to
sit on a high chair in the dairy with her and watch her make it. She
always made a special pat for me, with no salt in it; which is how I
like butter to this day. I could see again, as I looked along the side
of the old house, that cool dairy, with the shelf of crockery pans all
round it and the big churn in the middle, on the red-flagged floor; I
leaned again on the edge of the table where she worked under my studious
eye, her white arms bare to above the elbow, the dim green light on her
lily-fair face--light filtered through a wooden lattice and the shadows
of an elderberry-tree, from the fruit of which was made yearly many a
stone jarful of strong wine, for mulling with sugar and spices to warm
us for bed o' winter nights and before going to an unheated church on
winter Sunday mornings.
Besides elderberry wine mother made gooseberry wine, currant wine,
ginger wine, cowslip wine--all manner of wines; the cellar was kept
stocked with a large variety, costing next to nothing. She used them
where the modern hostess uses tea in the entertainment of company.
Afternoon callers had cake and wine offered to them, and the careful
wife of a wasteful husband did not squander the port and sherry. They
were for the solemn dinners--to swim upon a shining mahogany sea in the
best decanters, set in baize-bottomed boats of pierced silver--and for
Christmas and other festivals. There was always a "best" of
everything--glass, china, silver, napery--sacred to state occasions.
Every year also she brewed beer in the brew-house, barrels of it, for
the supply of the field labourers (to whom it was given at eleven A.M.
to wash down their luncheon of bread and pork), as well as for household
use. Her cordials, her jams and jellies, her pickles of all sorts, her
mushroom "ketchup," her raspberry vinegar and cherry brandy, her bottles
of capers (the seeds of nasturtiums), her jars of garnered honey, her
ropes of onions, her carefully cured hams and bacons, hanging thickly
from the beams of the timbered kitchen ceiling--punctually were all
these things stocked in their season, excellently prepared, by her own
hands, when illness did not compel her to use a deputy. She and the
other village ladies were rival cooks. Each had her special family
recipes, and they took pride in comparing them.
Baking day occurred twice a week. Then was the great oven in the wall
filled with blazing faggots, and the kitchen tables with the dough of
bread and pastry and the batter of cakes; anon the smouldering ashes
were raked out, and the long-handled flat shovel fed loaves and meat
pies and sweet confectionery into the warm-breathing cavern; presently
the house was odorous with appetising scents, and the pantry was stocked
for the time being. Amongst the delicacies would be a little cake of my
own making. I would spend the morning over that bit of material, brought
to the colour of a slate pencil, while mother manipulated the rest,
going and coming, flushed and busy, but loving to keep me by her, to
prattle to her while she worked. It seems to me that I must have been
her constant companion before the governesses came.
The joint for dinner was not baked--never. It was hung by a "jack" over
a dripping-pan before the square red fire, which roasted it crisp and
brown as the machine slowly turned it round and round. Sometimes the
machine went wrong (it wound up like a clock), and sometimes a coal
would fall into the pan and make the gravy gritty, but, on the whole, I
fancy that way of cooking meat has not been much improved upon. The
outside fat seemed to take on layers of richness with every spoonful of
fire-cleared dripping poured over it. The gravy that was the residue of
this had a surpassing quality, particularly when upheaved upon the bosom
of a puffy-edged Yorkshire pudding, or when mingled with the cream that
hares were basted with. Unsoddened and undiluted by the steam of the
ovens, the whole goodness was preserved to flesh and juice. Unless it is
that distance lends enchantment to this roast of old.
The Yorkshire pudding or the roast gravy with some other plain
pudding--boiled batter or Norfolk dumplings--made the first course of
the midday dinner (as it does still in some conservative families), and
the midday dinner was moved on to three o'clock for company and on state
occasions. The meat and vegetables made the second course; after these
the sweets and cheese (home-made), as now, with dessert only on Sundays
and holidays. A jug of brown ale, drawn from a barrel perennially on
tap, would grace the table, which had no decoration of flowers, but
relied for distinction upon the quality of its napery and silver. We
dined with our parents mostly, and were not oppressively treated in
respect of good things, unless the youngest aunt was present.
After dinner father took his arm-chair and his long-stemmed
churchwarden, mother her indefatigable needle. Or perhaps she and I
would walk out together to call upon our neighbours--those who received
us in the keeping-room (aptly named), where we could enjoy the informal
intercourse that was in character with the place, or those who invited
us to the parlour, the primness, comfortlessness, reserve and
artificiality of which were reflected in our demeanour, as in that of
the lady of the house. When Mrs H. was summoned without notice to
interview a caller here, she kept that caller waiting while she changed
her gown, put on her best cap, got out her best decanters and silver
cake-basket; her daughter similarly revised her costume before she
allowed herself to be seen, although they always "dressed" for midday
dinner and the afternoon, after their kitchen and farm work of the
morning. But when we appeared unexpectedly, Mrs H.'s up-thrown hands and
H.M.'s "Lawk-a-daisy-me!" would express not consternation but ready
welcome; and in that dear old keeping-room, with its beamed ceiling
almost on our heads, we were friends and not company, and could open
hearts and mouths as freely as we liked. That is, the grown-ups
could--not I. "Little girls must be seen and not heard," was the
admonition addressed to me when I attempted to join in the conversation.
My part was to listen, which I did so well that I could almost fill a
book with the interesting family secrets and village scandals
unconsciously confided to my retentive child's memory.
There was a lady spoken of who went to bed when her baby was dying, and
who, on rising in the morning, showed disappointment that it was not
dead, and resentment towards the Good Samaritan (H.M. herself) who had
sat up with it all night, and whose skill had pulled it through. There
was another lady who, having come into a fortune of thousands, had wept
because a hundred or two belonging to it had been left to someone else,
the reason of those tears being that the odd money would have enabled
the weeper to refurnish her house without breaking into the rounded bulk
of the big legacy. There was yet another, a devoted whist-player, who
had been caught by some extraordinarily smart person in the practice of
an ingenious swindle. She would say to her husband, clearly her partner
in guilt as in the game, although somehow he escaped censure: "Dear, it
is your turn," or: "How warm the room is!" or: "Come, go on," or "See
what the time is "--_i.e._ drop some seeming innocent remark beginning
with a certain letter, according as she wanted him to lead diamonds,
hearts, clubs or spades. This was evidently regarded as a most
horrifying tale, and I could not see why--for a long time. Nor was it
easy to fathom the significance of that one about the governess and
tutor, who were expelled together from a great house in the
neighbourhood, because they had been discovered love-making when they
should have been attending to their duties. The warning about "little
pitchers"--dropped, it was fondly supposed, unnoticed by me--would now
and then spoil the dénouement of a story; but there were dozens and
dozens that came to me complete, to be understood in later years, if not
at the time. On our way home from these casual symposia I would
question mother upon points that puzzled me. Often she would say: "Never
mind," or: "You would not understand"; but more often she gave me the
information I wanted. She excused herself for this unfashionable
weakness in a mother of the period by explaining (the plea for all
indulgence) that I was "different from other children."
Five-o'clock tea was not afternoon tea. It was the family evening meal.
Ham, brawn (we called it pork-cheese), or some fancy meat, cold, and
laid out in slices on a plate, was there for sandwiching between bread
and butter similarly prepared; or the savoury might be shrimps or crab,
or radishes or cress; jams of great variety, and particularly cakes,
filled the rest of the table space that was not occupied by the
tea-tray, crowned with its hissing urn. And for this meal no white cloth
was used; nor do I remember such a thing as a finger-napkin at any meal.
It seemed to be the adjunct of the finger-glass, which we did not aspire
to.
Tea was made as at breakfast, but not for us; we had ours in the
nursery, of bread-and-treacle or bread-and-dripping, and our mugs held
milk and water--except only on such great occasions as Christmas days
and birthdays, when we were allowed what we called "gunpowder tea,"
which was our milk-and-water sugared and slightly coloured with a few
spoonfuls from the grown-ups' teapot. In winter a pair of tallow candles
illuminated the scene. The grandparents used wax candles--one
grandfather used four at a time, and six for company, in six big silver
candlesticks--but ours were usually made, like so much else that other
people bought at shops, by mother's ingenious hands. Snuffers
accompanied them. Some that I have seen were such works of art as well
as curiosities that I wonder I have not heard of them amongst the hoards
of bric-à-brac collectors. We possessed one beautiful pair in chased and
pierced silver, the box patterned like a watch-case; and another of the
same metal, finely worked, which had a spring inside the little door
that snuffed the black wick into the receiver; and the trays of both
matched in style and workmanship. I do not know what became of
them--thrown away, probably, as antiquated rubbish, when oil lamps came
in.
It was by the light of a tallow candle that mother did the exquisite
needlework that nobody can do now, in these effulgent evenings. You
almost need a microscope to see the stitches of her fairy-like
baby-clothes. Father read his paper quite comfortably by the same dim
flame. And people wore spectacles in old age only, and never complained,
in my hearing, of ailing or deficient eyes. Why was that?
Although mother, when not needed for social purposes, sewed on until
supper-time, my interminable seam was laid aside. I might thread beads
or dress dolls or make kettle-holders. Also, the rule that barred
story-books, as one would bar cards or dancing, during the serious work
hours of the day, was relaxed after tea, and I could batten on "Peter
Parley" and _The Child's Companion_ and "The Swiss Family
Robinson"--when I was old enough--without incurring the reproach
attaching to the dissipated and idle. My earliest fairyland I found in
pictures, about which I wove stories of my own. We took a small penny
periodical filled with descriptions and illustrations of the contents
of the Great Exhibition; this did not much appeal to me, although I
remember its woodcuts well. I preferred the lovely Annuals, with their
large-eyed and small-mouthed Lady Blessingtons, and the pocket-books,
annuals also, which, in addition to their blank pages, contained prize
poems and a variety of things, chief amongst them engravings of the
country seats of the nobility and gentry. In these palaces and gardens I
wandered in fancy, the possessor of them all. But the book I loved most,
at the beginning of books, was a handsomely bound collection of tales or
sketches, the author of which was (I think) a Mrs Ellis, and the
moral--interpreted at a later age--something to do with the temperance
question. The letterpress was a blank to me; the steel engravings bound
together at the end of the volume I pored over by the hour. One was
called "Lady Montfort parting from her Children." She was a beautiful
creature in a spacious bare neck and a chaplet of roses, tearing herself
wildly from the embraces of a large family trying to hold her back. She
was going to have an operation for something, and the doctor was going
to perform it with the drunkard's shaking hand and kill her. All I then
knew was that she was parting from her children for the last time, and I
used to weep over their fate and dream about it. Another picture
represented a girl in a high-waisted, pillow-case-like gown and flowered
coal-scuttle bonnet (a fashion gone out before I came in), accompanied
by another, her maid, similarly but more plainly attired, leaning, from
the outside road, over a gate belonging to an ideal parsonage house. I
do not know whether drink had caused the late incumbent to die
prematurely or to be expelled from his living, but in any case it was
responsible for throwing his daughter upon the world. "Looking towards
my home and knowing I nevermore should call it mine," was the touching
legend inscribed upon the page. I would have given worlds to know how
she got on, poor thing. The picture of an after-dinner gentleman being
supported out of the dining-room by the butler and footman, and meeting
some outraged relative at the door, was too subtly tragic for my
understanding.
Children (according to their view) were sent to bed too soon; they
always have been, and always will be. But that was not a grievance of
mine. As a nursery child, not yet at the stage of learning letters, I
practically lived downstairs with my parents--at such times as the
youngest aunt was not there to prevent it. Father took me out on
horseback about the farm, seated on a pad in front of him within his
arms, mother in the gig with her when she went to her old home or
shopping to L----; and I believe I could always manage to sit up to
supper, if I begged hard and long enough. I was a thoroughly spoilt
child. Father's excuse was that I "could not spoil," but I am
discounting that fond belief by displaying the spoilt child's base
ingratitude--remembering how love carried to extremes indulged my
heart's desires, and blaming that love in print! If, while shopping with
my mother, I lost my heart to a ducky little parasol (it was of grey
watered silk, with white silk lining, deep fringe and a handle jointed
in the middle), I would find it next day, springing out on me from some
artful ambush, "With Father's Love." For years, on opening the piano
for practice, I used to find one spring day the first cucumber of the
season, because I was particularly fond of cucumbers. He did not care
what it cost, if only he could be the first to treat me. And I purse my
lips at their dear shades and shake a reproving head. Still, the fact
remains that I sat up of a night when I ought to have been in bed, and
even at times when we had "parlour company."
For well I remember the whist tables that entertained our circle on
winter evenings, in that room to the left of the hall at T----, and
myself sitting at the elbow of one of my parents to watch the mysterious
cards and the mutations in the four little piles of coin. It was the
rigour of the game, without a doubt--no talk, no levity, but a still and
solemn concentration upon the play; and I think I must have been rather
a good child, after all, to have been allowed to be there to look on at
it.
I remember one other evening pastime of the grown-ups at this period,
and my curious participation in it--table-turning. There was an
epidemic--probably the first--of enthusiasm for this method of occult
research. And round the heavy "centre table," which was a feature of the
drawing-rooms of the time, friends gathered to consult the oracle or to
deride it, as the case might be. In our house they compromised on an
open-minded curiosity tempered with the feeling that "there really must
be something in it"--something supernatural, they meant. Interests and
credulity were strengthened by my performances at the game. I was
supposed to be a mere onlooker, "to be seen and not heard," as usual,
but perhaps the chain of hands was not long enough, or perhaps I wanted
to join in, and the let-the-little-dear-do-what-she-likes habit of the
house admitted me to a place accordingly; at any rate, I one day found
myself perched on a book-piled chair in the circle of earnest inquirers
round the centre table, my thumbs in contact, the tips of my fourth
fingers overlapping the tips of those on either side of me.
Long had the company sat in silent suspense, the solid piece of
furniture--round-topped, and supported by a stout pedestal and claw feet
resting on mahogany lions' backs--refusing to make a sign; but no sooner
was my influence brought to bear upon it than it began to creak and
groan, and was presently lumbering like a Wombwell elephant about the
room, with us after it, scrambling over stools and other impedimenta to
hold fast to it as long as possible. In recording events of so long ago,
and particularly a matter of this kind, I wish to make full allowance
for unconscious exaggeration; but that the table was declared too heavy
to be pushed into such movements, and that I was frequently sent for to
start them when older hands failed to do so, are circumstances that seem
particularly clear to me.
I suppose, as my fellow-tableturners said at the time, there must have
been "something" in me, as well as in "it," if I have rightly described
what happened. I mentioned in my "Thirty Years in Australia" a German
doctor who in his old age became a spiritualist, and tried hard to
persuade me to lend myself to séance purposes, because, he said, I had
that in me which marked me out as a medium. Might it possibly have been
the same "something" that he divined? Well, I neither know nor care. The
little mysteries are all embraced in the big Mystery, which would not
be mysterious if we had the power to understand it. I was always that
kind of a sceptic which believes in there being a reason for everything.
When I was a girl I saw ghosts--unmistakably visible ghosts--and even in
their presence, certain that they could not be flesh and blood
creatures, and paralysed with horror to know it, I was able to keep this
attitude of mind. Since nothing else ailed me that I knew of, I said to
myself, "I am going mad"; and I was quite correct in my diagnosis, since
what was really happening to me was the beginning of brain fever. I
never had or showed the slightest leaning towards or interest in
so-called supernatural phenomena. Occult "science" is to me what Mrs
Harris was to Betsy Prig. The table-turning craze soon passed, as far as
my people were concerned, and I never, even to that extent, dabbled in
the black arts again.
The social evening, in those old days, began after the five-o'clock tea
and ended with the nine-o'clock supper. This was a great meal, always.
The cloth was spread for it as for dinner, and chairs drawn up and
carving-knives flourished. The cold joint, with pickles, cold fowl, meat
pie, the occasional crab or lobster, the cucumber in its season, any
left-over trifles of sweet pastry and creams, cheese--with beer, of
course--that was the meal which our forebears found it possible to sleep
on, and (which is much more surprising) some of their descendants enjoy
without discomfort to this day. In the four houses of the four
feather-beds the custom has never been abrogated.
Supper over, and dishes returned to the pantry, the elders at once
prepared for bed--to burrow in those mounds of feathers with their
heads in nightcaps, and nothing but their own exhausted breath to live
on the long night through. Doors and windows--the latter barricaded at
nightfall with wooden shutters (hinged and flattened into the wainscoted
window-frame by day) drawn over them and fixed with an iron bar
across--were severally examined in the most careful manner by whoever
was head of the establishment for the time being. Servants might shut
the house, but the responsibility of making sure that it was safe for
the dark hours was too great to be left to them. I suppose there was
some reason for this in the social conditions of the time. Perhaps
father's military (yeomanry) accoutrements--which I never saw him wear,
but which he was said to have worn, and certainly possessed--had some
connection with his actions in preparing his house of a night as if for
an expected siege. I know that any suspicious noise occurring after he
had done so brought him and his blunderbuss upon the scene in the
shortest possible space of time. And that raids did sometimes take place
was proved by the sad story of a friend of ours, whose melancholy visage
was accounted for by the fact that he had once shot a burglar dead
without meaning it. He saw an unlawful hand intruded through a sawn-out
gap in his window-shutter, and, calculating that the hand was well above
the owner's body, fired at it from within the room. Alas! On the
shoulders of him who worked from the ground was an unsuspected second
man, and he received the charge in his breast. It was told us of the
heart-broken doer of that deed that "he never smiled again."
So, the guard having gone the rounds, the humdrum duties of the
day--that never palled--were ended. Master and mistress, bearing
key-basket and plate-basket (the plate having been duly counted),
trudged upstairs to that bed which was virtually their bedroom also. And
slept!