MARY JANE.
Mary Jane was my first subject and my dearest friend. She lived in a
little cottage at the top of the village that caught a tail-end view of
the pond and the green from the back windows.
It is doubtful if I ever knew what calling her father followed, and I
have forgotten his name. But Mary Jane I well remember, and the view
from those back windows. She was older than I, and was a very wise
little woman, without my outbursts of high spirits and inexplicable
reveries. She had oiled black curls, the pinkest of cheeks, and black
eyes with a direct and resolute look in them, and she read stories that
did not amuse or interest me greatly, because they were chiefly
concerned with good everyday boys and girls. She tried to still a belief
in fairies by transforming them into angels, but she made splendid daisy
chains, and she could balance herself like a bird upon the branches that
overhung the pond.
Here she would swing up and down in fascinating peril, her black curls
now threatening confusion with the upper branches, her feet then
skimming the surface of the water. It was a horrible joy to watch her
and calculate the moment when the water would close over branch and
boots and curls.
My first attempt to imitate her resulted in my own immersion, and a
crowd to the rescue from the nearest public-house. After the shock and
the pleasant discovery that I was not drowned, and was really nothing
the worse for my bath, I think I enjoyed the sensation of being
temporarily regarded in the light of a public personage. But Mary Jane
howled in a rustic abandonment to grief. She told me afterwards she
expected to be taken to prison, and believed the Queen would sentence
her to be hanged. It took longer to comfort her than to doctor me.
It was some time after that before I again attempted to swing upon the
branches over the pond, but contented myself with feeding the swans from
the bank upon a flat nauseous cake indigenous to the spot, I believe,
which a shrivelled old woman used to sell us at a stall hard by. There
were flower-beds and a rural _châlet_ near the pond, which now leads me
to conclude that the green was a single-holiday resort, for I remember
a good deal of cake-crumbs, orange-peels, and empty ginger-beer bottles
about the place.
The old woman was very popular with us. Even when we had no pennies to
spend, she would condescend to chat with us as long as we cared to
linger about her stall of delights, and she sometimes wound up the
conversation by the gift of our favourite luxury, a crab-apple.
I fear there was not one of us that would not cheerfully have signed
away our future both here and hereafter for an entire trayful of
crab-apples. Each tray held twelve, placed two and two, like
school-ranks; and I know not which were the more bewitching to the eye,
the little trays or the demure double rows of little apples. The child
rich enough to hold out a pinafore for Bessy to wreck this harmony of
tray and line by pouring twelve heavenly balls into it, asked nothing
more from life in the way of pleasure.
The pride of Mary Jane's household was an album containing views of New
York, whither Mary Jane's eldest brother had gone. New York, his mother
told us, was in America. The difficulty for my understanding was to
explain how any place so big as New York could find another place big
enough to stand in. Why was New York in America and not America in New
York?
Neither Mary Jane nor her mother could make anything of my question.
They said you went across the sea in a ship to New York, and when they
added that the sea was all water, I immediately thought that they must
mean the pond, and that if I once got to the other side of it I should
probably find America and New York.
Until then I had believed the other side of the pond to be heaven,
because the sky seemed to touch the tops of the trees. But it was nicer
to think of it as America, because there was a greater certainty of
being able to get back from America than from heaven,--above all, when I
was so unexpectedly made acquainted with the extremely disagreeable
method by which little children are transported thither.
I do not know where nurse can have taken Mary Jane and me once. I have
for years cherished the idea that it was to Cork, which was a long way
off; but I am assured since that she never took me anywhere in a train,
and that certainly I never was in Cork.
This is a mystery to me, for the most vivid recollection of those early
years is a train journey with nurse and Mary Jane. I remember the train
steaming slowly into a station: the hurry, the bustle, the different
tone of voices round me, and Mary Jane's knowing exclamation, "Angela,
this is Cork, one of the biggest towns of Ireland--as fine, they say, as
Dublin."
Now, if I were never in Cork, never travelled with nurse and Mary Jane,
will any one explain to me how I came to remember those words so
distinctly? Odder still, I am absolutely convinced that nurse took my
hand in an excited grasp, and led me, bewildered and enchanted, through
interminable streets full of such a diversity of objects and interests
as dazed my imagination like a blow. Not that I was unacquainted with
city aspects; but this was all so different, so novel, so much more
brilliant than the familiar capital!
I remember the vivid shock of military scarlet in a luminous atmosphere,
and smiling foreign faces, and several ladies stopped to look at me and
cry, "Oh, the little angel!" I was quite the ideal wax doll, pretty,
delicate, and abnormally fair. I believe Mary Jane worshipped me because
of the whiteness of my skin and for my golden hair.
Memories of this journey I never made and of this town I never visited
do not end here. After eternal wanderings through quite the liveliest
streets I have ever known, without remembrance of stopping, of entrance
or greetings, I find myself in an unfamiliar room with nurse, Mary Jane,
a strange lady, and my mother. My mother was dressed in pale green
poplin, and looked miraculously beautiful. I know the dress was poplin,
because nurse said so when I touched the long train and wondered at its
stiffness.
She looked at me coldly, and said to nurse--
"That child has had sunstroke. I never saw her so red. You must wash her
in new milk."
Whereupon she rang a bell, and cried out to somebody I did not see to
fetch a basin of milk and a towel. I shuddered at the thought that
perhaps my mother would wash my face instead of nurse, for I dreaded
nothing so much as contact with that long white hand of sculptural
shape.
Among the mysteries of my life nothing seems so strange to me as the
depth of this physical antipathy to my mother. The general reader to
whom motherhood is so sacred will not like to read of it. But to
suppress the most passionate instinct of my nature, would be to suppress
the greater part of my mental and physical sufferings. As a baby I went
into convulsions, I am told, if placed in my mother's arms. As a child,
a girl, nothing has been so dreadful to me as the most momentary
endurance of her touch.
Once when I was threatened with congestion of the brain from over-study,
I used to lie in frenzied apprehension of the feel of her hand on my
brow, and she was hardly visible in the doorway before a nervous shudder
shook my frame, and voice was left me to mutter, "Don't touch me! oh,
don't touch me!" Her glance was quite as repulsive to me, and I remember
how I used to feel as if some one were walking over my grave the instant
those unsmiling blue eyes fell upon me. An instinct stronger than will,
even in advanced girlhood, inevitably compelled me to change my seat to
get without their range.
I recall this feeling, to-day quite dead, as part of my childhood's
sufferings, and I wonder that the woman who inspired it should in middle
life appear to me a woman of large and liberal and generous character,
whose foibles and whose rough temper in perspective have acquired rather
a humorous than an antipathetic aspect. But children, but girls, are
not humorists, and they take life and their elders with a lamentable
gravity.
On this occasion it was my mother who washed my face in new milk. The
fragrance and coolness of the milk were delicious, if only a rougher and
coarser hand had rubbed my cheeks.
While still submitting to the process, I stared eagerly round the room.
There was a grand piano in black polished wood, the sofa was blue velvet
and black wood, and the carpet a very deep blue. The air smelt of
gillyflowers, and there were big bunches in several vases. Yet my mother
assures me she never met me at Cork or elsewhere, never washed my face
in new milk, is unacquainted with that black piano, the blue velvet
sofa, and the gillyflowers.
She admits she did possess a pale green robe of poplin with an enormous
train, bought for a public banquet given to distinguished Americans, but
doubts if I ever saw it. Nurse, whom I questioned years after, laughed
at the idea as at a nightmare.
Still that journey to Cork, Mary Jane's words and my mother's, the bowl
of new milk, the green poplin dress, the blue-and-black sofa, the grand
piano, and the gillyflowers, remain the strongest haunting vision of
those years.
The first sampler I ever saw was worked by Mary Jane. I associate the
alphabet in red and green wool with shining blue-black curls behind a
bright-green tracery of foliage upon a blue sky.
Mary Jane used to sit upon a high bank, and work assiduously at her
sampler. I thought her achievement very wonderful, but I own I never
could see anything in coloured wools and a needle to tempt an
imaginative child. So much sitting still was dull, and the slow growth
of letters or sheep or flowers exasperating to young nerves on edge. My
affection for Mary Jane, however, was so strong, that I gallantly
endeavoured to learn from her, but it was in the butterfly season, and
there was my friend Johnny Burke racing past after a splendid white
butterfly.
What was the letter "B" in alternate stitches of red and green in
comparison with the capture of that butterfly?
So the child, the poet tells us, is always mother of the woman, and not
even the sane and sobering influence of the years has taught me that
serious matters are of greater consequence than the catching of some
beautiful butterfly. As I bartered childhood to agreeable impulses, so
have I bartered youth and middle age, and if I now am a bankrupt in the
face of diminishing impulses, who is to blame, after all, but perverse
and precarious nature?
What became of Mary Jane I have never known. Upon my memory she is
eternally impaled: a child of indefinite years from eight to eleven,
with oily ringlets and clear black eyes, pink-cheeked, smiling,
over-staid for her age (except in the matter of swinging recklessly over
the pond), working samplers, telling a group of unlettered babies
exceedingly moral tales, devoted to me and to a snub-nosed doll I
abhorred; with inexhaustible gifts, including a complete knowledge of
the views of New York, an enthusiasm for that mysterious being Mary
Stuart, and an acquaintance with national grievances vaguely embodied in
a terror of Queen Victoria's power over her Irish subjects.
She must have grown into a woman of principle and strong views.