THE LAST DAYS OF HAPPINESS.
After the vivid impression of Stevie's death, the days are a blank.
Memory only revives upon a fresh encounter with my kind.
A little boy, a friend of my parents, was sent down to nurse's to gain
strength by a first-hand acquaintance with cows' milk and the life of
the fields. Louie was an exciting friend. He had the queerest face in
the world, like that of an old and wrinkled baby's, for mouth a comical
slit, and two twinkling grey eyes as small as a pig's. His hair was
white, and he grinned from morning till night, so that, like the
Cheshire cat, he rises before me an eternal grin.
He taught me a delightful accomplishment, which afforded me
entertainment for several months--the repetition of nursery rhymes. He
possessed a book of this fanciful literature, and his private store as
well was inexhaustible.
We spent a day of misery together once because he could not remember
the end of one that began--
"There was an old man who supposed
The street door was partially closed."
For nights I dreamed of that old man, and wondered and wondered what
happened because of his error about the street door. I beheld him,
grey-haired, with a nightcap on his hair, with a dressing-gown wrapped
round him and held in front by one hand, while the other grasped a
candle, and the old man looked fearfully over his shoulder at the door.
I must have seen something to suggest this clear picture, but I cannot
tell what it was.
Sometimes his face underwent all sorts of transformations, resembled in
turn every animal I had ever seen and several new monsters I was
unacquainted with. The eyes changed places with the mouth and the ears
distorted themselves into noses. Before I had done with him, he had
become quite a wonderful old man.
Our great amusement was to repeat the rhymes in a way of our own
invention, taking turns to be chief and echo. This was how we did it:--
_Louie._ "There was an old man of the
_Angela._ Hague
_Louie._ Whose ideas were extremely
_Angela._ vague.
_Louie._ He built a
_Angela._ balloon
_Louie._ To examine the
_Angela._ moon,
_Louie._ This curious old man of the
_Angela._ Hague."
My passionate admiration of the courage of the young lady of Norway made
me always insist on taking the principal part when it came to her turn.
The neighbors used to drop in of an evening, and add the enthusiasm of
an audience to our own. They were specially proud of me as almost
native-grown, and my eagerness to show off the attractions of the young
lady of Norway generally resulted in my suppressing Louie's final rhyme.
This was what we made of it:--
_Angela._ "There was a young lady of
_Louie._ Norway
_Angela._ Who occasionally sat in the
_Louie._ doorway;
_Angela._ When the door squeezed her
_Louie._ flat,
_Angela._ She exclaimed, 'What of
_Louie._ that?'
_Angela._ This courageous young lady of
_Louie._ Norway."
Poor Louie, I learnt years afterwards, went to the dogs, and was
despatched to the Colonies by an irate father. He was last heard of as a
music-hall star at Sydney.
What sends bright and laughing children forth to a life of shame? Louie
was the kindest little comrade on earth, unselfish, devoted, and of a
tenderness only surpassed by my nurse's. Was this not proved when I
began to droop and pine, missing the picture of Stevie kneeling on his
sofa and staring out of the window?
I cannot say how long after Stevie's death it was before this want broke
out as a fell disease. I worried everybody about the absence of that
tragic face, and plied nurse with unanswerable questions. Neither Mary
Jane nor the brindled cat, not even the applewoman and her tempting
trays, nor the pond, nor my new terrier-pup that often washed my face,
had power to comfort me.
I went about disconsolate, and was glad of a listener to whom it was all
fresh, to discourse upon heaven and the queer means that were taken to
despatch little children thither--an ugly box, when wings would be so
much prettier.
Louie listened to me as I, with a burning cheek, told the roll of my
sorrows and unfolded my ideas of the mysteries that surrounded me.
Louie was not an intelligent listener, but he made up for his deficiency
by an exquisite sense of comradeship. He would hold my hand and protest
in the loudest voice that it was a shame, the while I suspect his mind
ran on those nursery rhymes. But he loved me, there can be no doubt of
that. I think he meant to marry me when we grew up.
I know when illness and a dreadful cough overtook me, he would let me
lie on the floor with my head in his lap, while the exertion of coughing
drew blood from my ears and nose. This too, he cried, was an awful
shame.
I once saw him watch me through a convulsion with tears in his eyes, and
I was immediately thrilled with the satisfaction of being so interesting
and so deeply commiserated. It filled me with the same artistic emotion
that followed my appreciation of the melancholy of my wordless singing.
Deep down in the heart of childhood--even bitterly suffering
childhood--is this dramatic element, this love of sensation, this vanity
of artist. So much of childhood is, after all, make-believe, unconscious
acting. We are ill, and we cannot help noting the effect of our illness
upon others. The amount of sympathy we evoke in grown-up people is the
best evidence of our success as experimental artists with life. Even
when we cower under a bed to weep away from our kind, we secretly hope
that God or our guardian angel is watching us and feeling intensely
sorry for us; and our finest conception of punishment of cruel elders is
their finding us unexpectedly dead, and their being consumed with
remorse for their flagrant injustice to such virtue as ours.
Who can limit the part as admiring audience a child condemns his
guardian angel to play? For him, when humanity is cold and
unobservant--as humanity too often is in the eyes of childhood--does he
so gallantly play the martyr, the hero, the sufferer in proud silence.
For his admiration did a little sister of mine once put her hand in the
fire. She thought it was heroic, like the early Christians, and hoped
her guardian angel would applaud, while common elders shouted in angry
alarm.
Ah, never prate so idly of the artlessness and the guilelessness of
children. They are as full of vanity and innocent guile and all the arts
and graces as the puppies and kittens we adore.
How much, for instance, had the hope of praise and admiration to do
with Louie's magnanimous kindness in that affair of the gipsies? I lay
ill and exhausted from coughing on the sofa when he rushed in, panting
with eagerness, to tell me that the gipsies had arrived over-night and
were camped on the green, where they had a merry-go-round. I had never
seen a gipsy, but Mary Jane had, and she often told me the most
surprising things about them--how dark they were, how queerly they
spoke, and how romantic they looked, like strange people in story-books.
Of course I pined to see them, and the thought that I was chained to my
sofa, when outside the world was all agog, and rapture awaited happier
children upon the green, filled my eyes with tears.
I turned my face to the wall and wept bitterly. My heart was heavy with
the sombre hate of Cain, and when I looked gloweringly at the blest
little Abel by my side, he looked quite as miserable as my evil, envious
heart could desire. His comic face underwent a variety of contortions
before finally he made up his mind to blurt out an offer to forego the
pleasures of the green, and stay with me.
But I was not a selfish child, and generosity always spurred me to
emulation. Besides, I was already greatly comforted by the extent of
Louie's sympathy, so I ordered him off to see the gipsies, and come back
and tell me what a merry-go-round was like.
Still I did not mend, in spite of all nurse's care and tenderness, and
it was decided to remove me to town. This was the decision of my
stepfather, who was probably nervous since Stevie had dropped out of
life in that quick and quiet way.
How well I remember the last day among all my dear friends! Mary Jane,
Louie, and I, hand in hand, walked about all our favourite spots. The
applewoman gave me an entire trayful of crab-apples, and wished I might
come back with my rosy cheeks. I asked her to kiss me, and then she
thrust a bun into my hand, and said huskily, "God bless you, my little
lady!"
We went across to Mary Jane's, and I had a conviction that my heart was
broken. I was going away into the land of the ogres and witches, and
though I should probably be happy at last, since all things come right
in children's tales, vague terror held me at the prospect of the unknown
trials that awaited me. Mary Jane's mamma gave me raspberry vinegar and
my tears mingled with the syrup. I asked to be let look once more at
the views of New York, and then asked her if she would feel very sorry
at my death.
They were still consoling me, and I was sobbing wildly in the arms of
Mary Jane's mamma, while Louie relieved his stricken soul by protesting
repeatedly that "it was an awful shame," when nurse and Jim Cochrane, in
his Sunday clothes, came to carry me off to the car. All the village
flocked to see me off, and breathed cordial love and benediction upon my
departure.
Kindly Irish peasants, with their pretty speech and pretty manners! Is
there any other race whose common people can throw such warmth and
natural grace into greetings and farewell? Big-hearted, foolish,
emotional children, upon whose sympathetic faces, at their ugliest,
still play the smiles and frowns, the lights and shadows of expressive
and variable childhood. How they cheered and soothed me with their kind
words, their little gifts, their packages of comfits and posies, a
blue-and-white mug with somebody else's name in gilt letters upon it,
and a tiny plate with a dog in a circle of fascinating white knobs.
This was the end of my brief sovereignty. Though of those old
associations, for which I was destined to yearn so passionately many a
year, memory may have become so dim as to leave only a trace of blurred
silhouettes upon an indistinct background emerging from a haze of
multiplied experience, I like to think that I owe to that bright start
the humour and courage that have served to help me through a clouded
life.