Not that in an existence so passive riddles never came my way. As one
morning I brushed past a bush of lads' love (or maidens' ruin, as some
call it), its fragrance sweeping me from top to toe, I stumbled on the
carcass of a young mole. Curiosity vanquished the first gulp of horror.
Holding my breath, with a stick I slowly edged it up in the dust and
surveyed the white heaving nest of maggots in its belly with a peculiar
and absorbed recognition. "Ah, ha!" a voice cried within me, "so this is
what is in wait; this is how things are"; and I stooped with lips drawn
back over my teeth to examine the stinking mystery more closely. That
was a lesson I have never unlearned.
One of a rather different kind had another effect. I was sitting in the
garden one day watching in the distance a jay huffling and sidling and
preening its feathers on a bit of decrepit fencing. Suddenly there fell
a sharp crack of sound. In a flash, with a derisive chattering, the jay
was flown: and then I saw Adam Waggett, half doubled up, stealing along
towards the place. I lay in wait for him. With catapult dangling in one
hand, the other fist tight shut, he came along like a thief. And I cried
hollowly out of my concealment, "Adam, what have you there?"
Such a picture of foolish shame I have never seen. He was compelled none
the less to exhibit his spoil, an eye-shut, twinkle-tailed,
needle-billed Jenny Wren crumpled up in his great, dirty paw. Fury burnt
up in me like a fire. What I said to him I cannot remember, but it was
nothing sweet; and it was a cowed Adam Waggett that loafed off as
truculently as he could towards the house, his catapult and victim left
behind him. But that was his lesson rather than mine, and one which _he_
never forgot.
When in my serener moods Pollie's voice would be heard slyly hallooing
for me, I would rouse up with a shock to realize again the little cell
of my body into which I had been confined. Then she and I would eat our
luncheon, a few snippets of biscuit, a cherry or two, or slice of apple
for me, and for her a hunch of bread and bacon about half my size in
length and thickness. I would turn my back on her, for I could not
endure to see her gobble her meal, having an abhorrence of cooked flesh,
and a dainty stomach. Still, like most children I could be greedy, and
curious of unfamiliar foods. To a few forbidden black currants which I
reached up and plucked from their rank-smelling bush, and devoured, skin
and all, I owe lesson Number 3. This one, however, had to be repeated.
Childhood quickly fleets away. Those happy, unhappy, far-away days seem
like mere glimpses of a dragon-fly shimmering and darting over my garden
stream, though at the actual time they more closely resembled, perhaps,
a continuous dream broken into bits of vivid awakening.
As I grew older, my skirts grew longer, my desire for independence
sharper, and my wits more inquiring. On my seventeenth birthday I put up
my hair, and was confirmed by a bishop whom my godmother persuaded to
officiate in the house. It was a solemn occasion; but my mother was a
good deal concerned about the lunch, and I with the ballooning lawn
sleeves and the two square episcopal finger-tips disposed upon my head.
The experience cast a peaceful light into my mind and shook my heart,
but it made me for a time a little self-conscious of both my virtue and
my sins. I began to brood not only on the deplorable state of my own
soul, but also on Pollie's and Mrs Ballard's, and became for a time a
diminutive Miss Fenne. I suppose innocence is a precarious bliss. On the
other hand, if one's mind is like a dead mole's belly, it is wise, I
think, to examine it closely but not too often, and to repeat that
confirmation for one's self every morning and evening.
As a young child I had been, of course, as naturally religious as a
savage or an angel. But even then, I think, I never could quite believe
that Paradise was a mere Fenne-land.
Once I remember in the midst of my multiplication table I had broken out
unannounced with, "Then _God_ made the world, mamma?"
"Yes, my dear."
"And all things in the forests and the birds in the sky and--and moles,
and this?" I held down my limp, coral-coloured arithmetic.
"Yes," said she.
I wondered a while, losing myself, as if in wanderings like Ariel's,
between the clouds. "What, mamma, did He make them of?" my voice
interrupted me.
"He made them," said my mother steadily, "of His Power and Love."
Rapidly I slid back into her company. "And can we, can I, make things of
_my_ power and love?"
"I suppose, my dear," replied my mother reflectively and perhaps
thinking of my father in his study, over his Paper and Hops, "it is only
_that_ in life that is really worth doing."
"Then," I said sagely, "I _suspects_ that's how Mullings does the
garden, mamma."
Long before Miss Fenne's and the bishop's visitation my mother had set
about teaching me in earnest. A governess--a Miss Perry--was our first
experiment. Alas, apart from her tendency to quinsy, it was I who was
found wanting. She complained of the strain on her nerves. My mother
feared that quinsy was catching; and Miss Perry had no successor.
Reading was always a difficulty. My father bought me as tiny old books
as could be found, including a dwarf Bible, a midget Pickering
Shakespeare, and a grammar (with a menagerie for frontispiece) from
which I learned that "irony is a figure which intends the reverse of
what it speaks, and under the masque of praise, conceals the most biting
satyr"; and the following stanza:--
Hail Energeia! hail my native tongue
Concisely full, and musically strong;
Thou with the pencil hold'st a glorious strife,
And paint'st the passions equal to the life.
My mother agreed that _strung_ would be preferable to "_strong_," and
explained that "the passions" did not signify merely ill-temper; while,
if I pecked over-nicely at my food, my father would cry "Hail Energeia!"
a challenge which rarely failed to persuade me to set to.
My grandfather sent me other pygmy books from Paris, including a minute
masterpiece of calligraphy, _Une Anthologie de Chansons pour une
Minuscule Aimante et Bien-aimee par P. de R_. These I could easily carry
about with me. I soon learned to accustom my arms and shoulders to
bulkier and more cumbrous volumes. My usual method with a common-sized
book was to prop it up towards the middle of the table and then to seat
myself at the edge. The page finished, I would walk across and turn over
a fresh leaf. Thus in my solitude I studied my lessons and read again
and again my nursery favourites, some of them, I gather, now
undeservedly out of fashion.
Perhaps even better than fiction or folk-tales, I liked books of
knowledge.
There were two of these in particular, _The Observing Eye; or Lessons to
Children on the Three Lowest Divisions of Animal Life--The Radiated,
Articulated, and Molluscous_, and _The Childhood of the World_. Even at
nine I remarked how nimbly the anonymous author of the former could skip
from St Paul to the lobster; and I never wearied of brooding on Mr
Clodd's frontispiece. This depicts a large-headed and seemingly
one-legged little girl in a flounced frock lying asleep under a wall on
which ivy is sprawling. For pillow for herself and her staring doll
there lies on the ground a full-sized human skull, and in the middle
distance are seen the monoliths of Stonehenge. Beyond these gigantic
stones, and behind the far mountains, rises with spiky rays an enormous
Sun.
_I_ was that child; and mine her sun that burned in heaven, and he a
more obedient luminary than any lamp of man's. I would wonder what she
would do when she awoke from sleep. The skull, in particular, both
terrified and entranced me--the secret of all history seemed to lie
hidden in the shadows beneath its dome. Indeed I needed no reminder from
Mr Clodd that "Children (and some grown-up people too) are apt to think
that things are wonderful only when they are big, which is not true."
I knew already, out of nowhere, that "the bee's waxen cell is more
curious than the chimpanzee's rough hut" (though I should have dearly
liked to see the latter); and that "an ant is more wonderful than the
huge and dull rhinoceros." Such is childishness, however: I pitied the
poor rhinoceros his "dull." Over such small things as a nut, a shell, a
drop of rain-water in a buttercup, a frond of frost (for there were cold
winters at Lyndsey in those days), I would pore and pore, imbibing the
lesson that the eye alone if used in patience will tell its owner far
more about an object than it can merely see.
Among my few framed pictures I cannot resist mentioning one by a painter
of the name of Bosch. Below the middle of it kneeled naked Adam and Eve
with exquisite crimped hair on their shoulders; and between them stood
God. All above and beneath them, roamed the animals, birds, insects, and
infinitesimals of Eden, including a long-tailed monkey on an elephant, a
jerboa, a dancing crocodile, and--who but our cat Miaou, carrying off a
mouse! An astonishing, inexhaustible piece of thoughtfulness. I loved
Mynheer Bosch.
Shameful dunce Miss M. may remain, but she did in her childhood
supremely enjoy any simple book about the things of creation great or
small. But I preferred my own notions of some of them. When my father of
a dark, clear night would perch me up at a window to see the
stars--Charles's Wain and the Chair; and told me that they were huge
boiling suns, roaring their way through the vast pits of space, I would
shake my head to myself. I was grateful for the science, but preferred
to keep them just "stars." And though I loved to lave my hands in a
trickle of light that had been numberless years on its journey to this
earth, that of a candle also filled me with admiration, and I was
unfeignedly grieved that the bleak moon was naught but a sheer hulk,
sans even air or ice or rain or snow.
How much pleasanter it would be to think that her shine was the
reflection of our cherry orchards, and that her shadows were just
Kentish hay-ricks, barns, and oast-houses. It was, too, perhaps rather
tactless of my father to beguile me with full-grown authors' accounts of
the Lives of the Little. Accomplished writers they may be, but--well,
never mind. As for the Lives of the Great, I could easily adjust
Monsieur Bon Papa's spyglass and reduce them to scale.
My father taught me also to swim in his round bath; and on a visit to
Canterbury purchased for me the nimblest little dun Shetland pony, whom
we called Mopsa. I learned to become a fearless rider. But hardy though
her race may be, perhaps I was too light a burden to satisfy Mopsa's
spirit. In a passing fit of temper she broke a leg. Though I had stopped
my ears for an hour before the Vet came, I heard the shot.
My mother's lessons were never very burdensome. She taught me little,
but she taught it well--even a morsel of Latin. I never wearied of the
sweet oboe-like nasal sound of her French poems, and she instilled in me
such a delight in words that to this day I firmly believe that things
are at least twice the better and richer for being called by them. Apart
from a kind of passionate impatience over what was alien to
me--arithmetic, for instance, and "analysis"--and occasional fits of the
sulks, which she allowed to deposit their own sediment at leisure, I was
a willing, and, at times, even a greedy scholar. Apparently from infancy
I was of a firm resolve to match my wits with those of the common-sized
and to be "grown-up" some day.
So much for my education, a thing which it seems to me is likely to
continue--and specially in respect of human nature--as long as I keep
alive. With so little childish company, without rivalry, I was inclined
to swell myself out with conceit and complacency. "It's easy holding
down the latchet when nobody pulls the string." But whatever size we may
be, in soul or body, I have found that the world wields a sharp pin, and
is pitiless to bubbles.
Though inclined to be dreamy and idle when alone, I was, of course, my
own teacher too. My senses were seven in number, however few my wits. In
particular I loved to observe the clustering and gathering of plants,
like families, each of a shape, size, and hue, each in their kind and
season, though tall and lowly were intermingled. Now and then I would
come on some small plant self-sown, shining and flourishing, free and
clear, and even the lovelier for being alone in its kind amid its
greater neighbours. I prized these discoveries, and if any one of them
was dwarfed a little by its surroundings I would cosset it up and help
it against them. How strange, thought I, if men so regarded each other's
intelligence. If from pitying the dull-witted the sharp-witted slid to
mere toleration, and from toleration to despising and loathing. What a
contest would presently begin between the strong-bodied stupid and the
feeble-bodied clever, and how soon there would be no strong-bodied
stupid left in the world! They would dwindle away and disappear into
Time like the mammoth and the woolly bear. And then I began to be sorry
for the woolly bear and to wish I could go and have a look at him.
Perhaps this is putting my old head on those young shoulders, but when
I strive to re-enter the thoughts of those remote days, how like they
seem to the noisy wasting stream beside which they flowed on, and of
whose source and destination I was unaware.
All this egotism recalls a remark that Mrs Ballard once made apropos of
some little smart repartee from Miss M. as she sat beside her pasteboard
and slapped away at a lump of dough, "Well _I_ know a young lady who's
been talking to the young man that rubbed his face with a brass
candlestick."