Some few years ago a brief account of me found its way into one or two
country newspapers. I have been told, that it reappeared, later, in
better proportion, in the Metropolitan Press! Fortunately, or
unfortunately, very little of this account was true. It related, among
other things, that I am accustomed to wear shoes with leaden soles to
them to keep me from being blown away like thistledown in the wind, that
as a child I had narrowly escaped being scalded to death in a soup
tureen, that one of my ancestors came from Poland, that I am an expert
painter of miniatures, that I am a changeling and can speak the fairy
tongue. And so on and so forth.
I think I can guess where my ingenuous biographer borrowed these fables.
He meant me no harm; he was earning his living; he made judicious use of
his "no doubts" and "it may be supposed"; and I hope he amused his
readers. But by far the greater part of his account was concerned with
mere _physical_ particulars. He had looked at me in fancy through
spectacles which may or may not have been rosy, but which certainly
minified. I do not deserve his inches and ounces, however flattering his
intentions may have been. It is true that my body is among the smaller
works of God. But I think he paid rather too much attention to this
fact. He spared any reference not only to my soul (and I am not
ungrateful for that), but also to my mind and heart. There may be too
much of all three for some tastes in the following pages, and
especially, perhaps, of the last. That cannot be helped. Finally, my
anonymous journalist stated that I was born in Rutlandshire--because, I
suppose, it is the smallest county in England.
That was truly unkind of him, for, as a matter of fact, and to begin at
the (apparent) beginning, I was born in the village of Lyndsey in
_Kent_--the prettiest country spot, as I believe, in all that county's
million acres. So it remains to this day in spite of the fact that
since my childhood its little church with its decaying stones and
unfading twelfth--or is it thirteenth?--century glass has been
"restored," and the lord of the manor has felled some of its finest
trees, including a grove of sweet chestnuts on Bitchett Heath whose
forefathers came over with the Romans. But he has not yet succeeded in
levelling the barrow on Chizzel Hill. From my window I looked out
(indeed, look out at this moment) to the wave-like crest of this beloved
hill across a long straggling orchard, and pastures in the valley, where
cattle grazed and sheep wandered, and unpolled willows stooped and
silvered in the breeze. I never wearied of the hill, nor ever shall, and
when, in my girlhood, my grandfather, aware of this idle, gazing habit
of mine, sent me from Geneva a diminutive telescope, my day-dreams
multiplied. His gift, as an old Kentish proverb goes, spread butter on
bacon. With his spyglass to my eye I could bring a tapping green
woodpecker as close as if it were actually laughing at me, and could all
but snuff up the faint rich scent of the cowslips--paggles, as we called
them, in meadows a good mile away.
My father's house, Stonecote, has a rather ungainly appearance if viewed
from across the valley. But it is roomy and open and fairly challenges
the winds of the equinoxes. Its main windows are of a shallow bow shape.
One of them is among my first remembrances. I am seated in a bright
tartan frock on a pomatum pot--a coloured picture of Mr Shandy, as I
remember, on its lid--and around me are the brushes, leather cases,
knick-knacks, etc., of my father's dressing table. My father is shaving
himself, his chin and cheeks puffed out with soapsuds. And now I look at
him, and now at his reflection in the great looking-glass, and every
time _that_ happens he makes a pleasant grimace at me over his
spectacles.
This particular moment of my childhood probably fixed itself on my mind
because just as, with razor uplifted, he was about to attack his upper
lip, a jackdaw, attracted maybe by my gay clothes, fluttered down on the
sill outside, and fussing and scrabbling with wing and claw pecked hard
with its beak against the glass. The sound and sight of this bird with
its lively grey-blue eyes, so close and ardent, startled me. I leapt up,
ran across the table, tripped over a hairbrush, and fell sprawling
beside my father's watch. I hear its ticking, and also the little
soothing whistle with which he was wont to comfort his daughter at any
such mishap. Then perhaps I was five or six.
That is a genuine memory. But every family, I suppose, has its little
pet traditions; and one of ours, relating to those early years, is
connected with our kitchen cat, Miaou. She had come by a family of
kittens, and I had crept, so it was said, into her shallow basket with
them. Having, I suppose, been too frequently meddled with, this old
mother cat lugged off her kittens one by one to a dark cupboard. The
last one thus secured, she was discovered in rapt contemplation of
myself, as if in debate whether or not it was her maternal duty to carry
me off too. And there was I grinning up into her face. Such was our
cook's--Mrs Ballard's--story. What I actually remember is different. On
the morning in question I was turning the corner of the brick-floored,
dusky passage that led to the kitchen, when Miaou came trotting along
out of it with her blind, blunt-headed bundle in her mouth. We were
equally surprised at this encounter, and in brushing past she nearly
knocked me over where I stood, casting me at the same moment the
queerest animal look out of her eyes. So truth, in this case, was not so
strange as Mrs Ballard's fiction.
My father was then a rather corpulent man, with a high-coloured face,
and he wore large spectacles. His time was his own, for we were
comfortably off on an income derived from a half-share in the small
fortune amassed by my grandfather and his partner in a paper mill. He
might have been a more successful, though not perhaps a happier, man if
he had done more work and planned to do less. But he only so far
followed his hereditary occupation as to expend large quantities of its
best "handmade" in the composition of a monograph: _The History of Paper
Making_. This entailed a vast accumulation of books and much solitude. I
fancy, too, he believed in the policy of sleeping on one's first
thoughts.
Since he was engaged at the same time on similar compilations with the
Hop and the Cherry for theme, he made indifferent progress in all three.
His papers, alas, were afterwards sold with his books, so I have no
notion of what became of them or of their value. I can only hope that
their purchaser has since won an easy distinction. These pursuits, if
they achieved little else but the keeping of "the man of the house"
quiet and contented, proved my father, at any rate, to be a loyal and
enthusiastic Man of Kent; and I have seen to it that a fine Morello
cherry-tree blossoms, fruits, and flourishes over his grave.
My father was something of a musician too, and could _pizzicato_ so
softly on his muted fiddle as not to jar even my too sensitive ear. He
taught me to play chess on a little board with pygmy men, but he was apt
to lose interest in the game when it went against him. Whereas it was
then that our old friend, Dr Grose, played his hardest. As my father's
hands were rather clumsy in make, he took pains to be gentle and adroit
with me. But even after shaving, his embrace was more of a discipline
than a pleasure--a fact that may partly account for my own
undemonstrativeness in this direction.
His voice, if anything, was small for his size, except when he discussed
politics with Dr Grose; religion or the bringing up of children with my
godmother, Miss Fenne; or money matters with my mother. At such times,
his noise--red face and gesticulations--affected one of his listeners,
as eager as possible to pick up the crumbs, far more than ever thunder
did, which is up in the clouds. My only other discomfort in his company
was his habit of taking snuff. The stench of it almost suffocated me,
and at tap of his finger-nail on the lid of his box, I would scamper off
for shelter like a hare.
By birth he came of an old English family, though no doubt with the
usual admixtures. My mother's mother was French. She was a Daundelyon.
The blood of that "sweet enemy" at times burned in her cheek like a
flag; and my father needed his heaviest guns when the stormy winds did
blow, and those colours were flying. At such moments I preferred to hear
the engagement from a distance, not so much (again) because the mere
discord grieved me, as to escape the din. But usually--and especially
after such little displays--they were like two turtle-doves, and I did
my small best to pipe a decoy.
My father had been a man past forty when he married my mother. She about
fifteen years younger--a slim, nimble, and lovely being, who could slip
round and encircle him in person or mind while he was pondering whether
or not to say Bo to a goose. Seven years afterwards came I. Friends, as
friends will, professed to see a likeness between us. And if my mother
could have been dwindled down to be of my height and figure, perhaps
they would have been justified.
But in hair and complexion, possibly in ways, too, I harked back to an
aunt of hers, Kitilda, who had died of consumption in her early
twenties. I loved to hear stories of my great-aunt Kitilda. She sang
like a bird, twice ran away from her convent school, and was so fond of
water that an old gentleman (a friend of Mr Landor's, the poet) who fell
in love with her, called her "the Naiad."
My mother, in her youth at Tunbridge Wells, had been considered "a
beauty," and had had many admirers--at least so Mrs Ballard, our cook,
told Pollie: "Yes, and we know who might have turned out different if
things hadn't been the same," was a cryptic remark she once made which
filled two "little pitchers" to overflowing. Among these admirers was a
Mr Wagginhorne who now lived at Maidstone. He had pocketed his passion
but not his admiration; and being an artist in the same sense that my
father was an author, he had painted my mother and me and a pot of
azaleas in oils. How well I remember those interminable sittings, with
the old gentleman daubing along, and cracking his beloved jokes and
Kentish cobbs at one and the same time. Whenever he came to see us this
portrait was taken out of a cupboard and hung up in substitution for
another picture in the dining-room. What became of it when Mr
Wagginhorne died I could never discover. My mother would laugh when I
inquired, and archly eye my father. It was clear, at any rate, that
author was not jealous of artist!
My mother was gentle with me, and had need to be; and I was happier in
her company than one might think possible in a world of such
fleetingness. I would sit beside her workbox and she would softly talk
to me, and teach me my lessons and small rhymes to say; while my own
impulse and instinct taught me to sing and dance. What gay hours we
shared. Sewing was at first difficult, for at that time no proportionate
needles could be procured for me, and I hated to cobble up only coarse
work. But she would give me little childish jobs to do, such as
arranging her silks, or sorting her beads, and would rock me to sleep
with her finger to a drone so gentle that it might have been a distant
bee's.
Yet shadows there were, before the darkness came. Child that I was, I
would watch gather over her face at times a kind of absentness, as if
she were dreaming of something to which she could give no name, of some
hope or wish that was now never to be fulfilled. At this I would grow
anxious and silent, doubting, perhaps, that I had displeased her; while,
to judge from her look, I might not have been there at all.
Or again, a mischievousness and mockery would steal into her mood. Then
she would treat me as a mere trivial plaything, talking _small_ things
to me, as if our alphabet consisted of nothing but "little o"--a letter
for which I always felt a sort of pity: but small affection. This habit
saddened my young days, and sometimes enraged me, more than I can say. I
was _always_ of a serious cast of mind--even a little priggish perhaps;
and experience had already taught me that I could share my mother's
thoughts and feelings more easily than she could share mine.