PROFILES OF CHILDHOOD.
The flow of the day in my city home is lost for me. But pictures and
portraits stand out, sometimes blurred, sometimes surprisingly distinct,
upon a confused background. There was food enough for curiosity and
dreaming in the pauses of suffering. I must have lived for several days
in an enchanted world solely by the single glimpse I had of my
godfather.
He had sent me a present of a book about cocks and hens, largely
illustrated. I was sitting in the store-room poring over it in the
dreary society of Mrs. Clement, the new housekeeper. The previous one,
Mrs. Dudley, I remember vaguely as a stern unsympathetic person, with
crimped iron-grey hair under a voluminous cap trimmed with puce ribbons.
She once forced me to swallow a Gregory-powder in a delusive snare of
black-currant jam. I must have swallowed medicines before and since, and
yet the taste and smell and look of that nauseous powder are still with
me whenever my mind reverts to those days. Hence my delight when I
learned that Mrs. Dudley was going away, and my cordial welcome of her
successor, Mrs. Clement.
"So she's in here," somebody cried, rapping with a stick upon the door
ajar.
I looked up from my book and saw a wonderful sight, of which I was
afterwards vividly reminded in a French school by a picture of the
famous "Postillon de Longjumeau," a jaunty figure with a pointed black
beard and a tall wide-brimmed hat on one side. He bore himself
gallantly, wore top-boots, a long coat with several little capes to it,
and carried a smart riding-whip in his hand. This was my godfather.
I had never seen him before, and to my lasting regret I have never seen
him since. He was out in '48, was proscribed, and had wandered about
strange lands. He died in China, having first sent my mother a pretty
case of Imperial tea, which she distributed in minute portions to all
her friends, measuring the tea out with a small silver egg-cup. As fast
as each consumed her portion, she returned for another, and as my mother
had always a greater pleasure in giving than in receiving, my
godfather's present was soon exhausted.
I remember being swung up in the air and shrieking in pretended fright,
for children, sensational and dramatic little creatures, must persuade
themselves there is an element of peril and adventure in their tamest
diversions. Not to imagine oneself afraid is to miss the peculiar zest
of enjoyment.
When I was seated gravely on his knee, my godfather asked me to spell
out a few lines of his book.
"Cocks and hens--eh? Just suit a little girl from the country," he
laughed, helping me to hold the book.
"I had a little dog at Mamma Cochrane's. I liked it better than cocks
and hens," I protested meekly.
"Wants a dog now, does she? Queer little woman! She's still too pale,
Mrs. Clement, much too pale and thin. Fretting for her Mamma Cochrane, I
suppose. Well, I'll see if I can't get her a nice dog with curly hair,
that'll cry 'Bow-wow' when you pull its tail. Know where China is,
missy?"
I had heard of a china doll, and my Mamma Cochrane had two beautiful
black-and-white china dogs. I supposed at once that China was a land
where the dogs and dolls were all of china, and I wondered if the
people were of china too. My godfather laughed as only a big man with a
beard seems to be able to laugh. I was sure you could hear him down in
the hall and up in the nursery. It was very comforting, that loud laugh,
and I became instantly communicative, and told him all I knew about
America and New York. He said it took a much bigger boat to go to China,
which was farther off than New York, and that there were crocodiles in
the rivers that ate men, and there was so much sunshine that the people
were quite yellow.
After that, whenever it was unusually sunny, I was safe to astonish
somebody by saying I supposed it was always like that in China. Somehow,
the image of my jovial godfather was melted in a great glare of yellow
light, through which yellow faces came and went, up and down long
rivers, where unknown monsters, understood to be crocodiles, tossed
about in a ruthless quest of man.
Mrs. Clement, the housekeeper, is another portrait that stands out in
luminous relief from a crowd of unremembered faces. Her dress was
seemingly as unalterable as a uniform. It consisted of a black silk
gown, very wide at the base and gathered in at a slim waist, a white
lawn fichu trimmed with delicate lace, and fastened with a gold brooch
containing the features of a young man with a dark moustache.
I never dared to ask her who the young man was. She was kind to me, but
she kept me at arm's-length by her terrible sadness, and infant
curiosity was the last thing she encouraged. Her face was pale, her thin
yellow hair was pale, and her blue eyes were pale. Those faded hues
suited the melancholy of her smile and regard.
Seeing me persecuted and unhappy, she took me under her protection, and
would let me sit for hours at her feet in the storeroom, while she
mended linen.
I read to her, and when I was tired of reading I told her stories of my
past. Like grown-up mourners, it relieved me to talk of my sorrow and
describe the paradise down there beside the pond and the applewoman's
stall.
She listened with mild interest, and I was not so engrossed in my own
troubles as not to remark the sadness of Mrs. Clement. The children
up-stairs were sure she had committed some dreadful murder, and was
brooding in remorseful reminiscence. They did not like her, because she
once scolded them for their treatment of me; but nothing they could say
would induce me to think ill of my melancholy friend, and I continued
to sit at her feet and watch her in wonder and awe.
Her niece Eily came into our service shortly afterwards. She had a
beautiful fresh face like a wild-flower, made up of sweet dark-blue
eyes, a blossom of a mouth, and morning hues upon her cheek. She was a
girl made to beguile sense and sternness, and transform the lion to a
lamb. Everybody immediately loved her, she had such a delicious way of
saying "Ah, sure!" and lifting up a pair of the most Irish of eyes in
bewitching appeal.
My parents adopted her as a sort of daughter, and a mere hint of a lover
at her heels was enough to wake the Quixote in my stepfather. They
married her afterwards to a promising young Englishman, my father giving
her away and my mother supplying the trousseau.
The Englishman was so enamoured of all things Irish that he gave the
most flagrantly Hibernian names to his children, in opposition to Eily's
romantic tastes, who adored every out-of-the-way name of fiction. When I
met them, years afterwards, his affected drawl and pretty suspicion of
lisp managed to give a foreign charm to our common name "Paddy," by
which the eldest boy was called.
Eily's face was just the same wild-flower, a little faded and drawn,
and "Ah, sure!" was still on the tip of her tongue in all the beguiling
glamour of Erin. But what a sad change! Tears looked fatally near the
surface, and the smile was deprecating and anxious.
She had fallen from petted servitude into troubled servitude, and longed
for the clatter of her aunt's household keys among the linen and china
and preserve-presses of the storeroom. She longed for my stepfather's
cheery "Well, Eily, little puss," and instead had to listen to an
exacting husband's complaints of her deficiencies as housekeeper and
sick-nurse. He had married a bird, and grumbled incessantly because it
lacked the solid capacities of a cow.
"And your aunt, Eily?" I asked.
"Poor aunt died long ago. She never recovered the death of her only
child, Frank, who was drowned going out to America."
So the young man in the brooch was Mrs. Clement's son, after all, and
her melancholy, that had so puzzled my childhood, was not the gloom of
remorse but the stamp of a common bereavement.
By the side of my grandfather's avenue of rose-trees ran a neighbour's
garden. My grandfather was on nodding terms with his neighbour; but
there sometimes came a bright-faced lad with a flaxen down upon his
upper lip. His name caught my fancy, and I thought a fairy prince could
not have a finer one. It now represents to the world a figure so very
different from the vague but pleasant profile memory likes to dwell
upon, that I permit myself to doubt if that kind boy and the O'Donovan
Rossa of New York can be the same person.
The stripling I recall seems to me to have been eternally singing or
whistling. I specially remember one song he was fond of--"Love among the
Roses."
He would look across the low hedge and sing out, "Where's my little
wife?" I kept it as a delightful secret from all the world that I was
married to a boy called O'Donovan Rossa. The world is a cold confidant
in such delicate matters, and has a way of looking as if it did not take
little children seriously.
But O'Donovan Rossa had a little sister of his own whom he loved
devotedly, so he knew all about little girls and their ways, and
appeared to understand my conversation. So few grown-up people do
understand the conversation of children, and children know this.
He would spring over the hedge just like a mythical personage, and
tumble unexpectedly on the grass-plot beside me, and my daisy-chains
were matter of absorbing interest to him. Then what stories he had about
blue dragon-flies, humming-birds, and bewitched crows! You may imagine
if I looked forward to visits to grandpapa Cameron's cottage, with such
a prospective attraction.
I did not disdain the rougher friendship of Dennis, my grandfather's
gardener. He was a cheery individual with a very red face. He once gave
me an orange and a penny when I arrived with cheeks and eyelids swollen
from crying, with a conviction that I could bear my sorrows no longer. I
ate my orange, and suddenly the world seemed brighter, and when I went
off alone to purchase a pennyworth of crab-apples at a fruit-shop hard
by, I began to take pleasure at the thought of to-morrow.
I was further consoled by one of grandpapa's shining five-shilling
pieces, and then Dennis called me to fetch him a tool, shouting, "Look
sharp now, and do something for your living," and I was so enchanted
that all sense of desolation and ill-usage left me.
It is so easy to make a child happy that it is a mystery to me how the
art is not universal with grown-up persons.
Among the blurred memories of days so remote is a ball given in the big
town house. The excitement could not but reach us up-stairs beneath the
stars. The nurse and housemaid were equally aflame, and stood watching
the guests from the corner of the topmost landing, that commanded a
glimpse of the drawing-room lobby. The rustle of silk and the sort of
perfumed chatter that belongs to gatherings in full dress reached us,
broken and vague like the beautiful fancies of dreams. Our little feet
pattered with yearning to be down below in the thick of social
pleasures, and we shouted out our recognition of each side face as a
guest crossed the lobby. It was not the brilliant assortment of silks
and satins and laces, the gleam of jewelled array, or the chatter that
intoxicated me; it was the first blast of music that rolled up to us,
and the penetrating charm of the fiddles.
I was always less looked after than the others, and watching my
opportunity, I slipped down-stairs in my nightdress; I felt I must hear
those fiddles nearer, and see how people looked when they danced. Mrs.
Clement saw me a few steps above the drawing-rooms, and wanted to carry
me back to bed; but I prayed so hard for one look, that she took me into
her arms, and, skirting the lobby, went in on tip-toe to the cardroom,
at the top of the drawing-rooms, where several persons were playing at
little tables. Some of the guests looked up at the melancholy lady in
black silk with the little child in its night-dress, staring in
bewilderment at them. But Mrs. Clement placed her finger on her lips,
and they smiled at me and continued their play.
They were playing "Il Bacio," and even now I can never hear that
tinkling waltz without a throb. It brought tears to my eyes then, and
all night it formed the accompaniment of my dreams. The only couple I
clearly saw in that paradise of colour, light, scent, and sound was my
stepfather, who whirled past us with a tall dark girl in amber satin,
who was smiling most radiantly as she danced.
This girl springs into my pictures of childhood in an odd inconsequent
way. She was very handsome, of the sparkling brunette type, with white
teeth, and hard bright eyes as black as the hair that rippled low down
on either temple, and was caught under the ear in an old-fashioned bunch
of ringlets. She was under my mother's protection, who was very kind and
generous to her, having an inscrutable liking for strangers,--above
all, needy strangers. She was a woman to turn her back inevitably upon a
friend in prosperity, and court him in poverty. There was nothing of the
snob in my mother, I must admit.
Another vivid picture I have of this young girl is a gloomier and more
impressive one. I cannot tell why I was chosen for that drive. I suppose
it was because I looked so delicate and unhappy that my stepfather
insisted on having me. He drove a pair of spirited horses, and I sat
opposite my mother and the dark young girl. She did not smile once that
day, and the extreme sadness of her face riveted my attention. I thought
I had never seen any one so beautiful and interesting, and I wondered
why her eyes kept continually filling with tears.
She and my mother whispered mysteriously from time to time, and the
disconnected words that reached my ears were no enlightenment for my
puzzled brain. Ordinarily I was too dreamy or too excited to have much
curiosity for my fellows. I preferred my own thoughts to speculations
upon creatures so dull and undiverting as big people. But this day it
was different. A brilliant young lady in long dresses, with a glittering
ring upon her finger, whom my parents treated with every kindness and
consideration, could be just as miserable apparently as a small
neglected girl. It was truly a wonderful discovery.
We drove along the Kilmainham road, I now know, and as we went farther
north, the pretty girl's tears flowed more freely, only she did not cry
as we children cry. She bit her lips, and every moment thrust her
handkerchief angrily into her eyes. My mother seemed to scold her for
having wished to come that way, and I thought wanted to divert her
attention from something the girl was evidently anxious to see.
We stopped near a large building, and there was my stepfather turned
towards us and talking a strange jargon. From dint of puzzling over each
word, I arrived at the extraordinary conclusion that somebody this young
girl loved was in prison, that it was not wicked apparently to be locked
up in prison, and that the woodwork they were gazing at, my stepfather
with his hat in his hand, was something bad men were getting ready for
her friend's destruction. The young girl stared up at the woodwork with
streaming passionate eyes, and then buried her face in her handkerchief,
and rocked from side to side in a dreadful way. We were driving on, and
I gazed up to see what my stepfather was doing. He, too, was wiping away
tears, and his hat was right down upon his eyes.
The mystery was solved years afterward. This girl was engaged to a
political prisoner recently condemned to death. My mother used to take
her to see him at Kilmainham Jail, and she had insisted on being driven
round by the prison the day before the execution.
My grandmother lies farther back, a fainter picture in that world of
unsatisfactory grown-up people. While she lived, her favourite present
to each of her granddaughters was either a grey or green silk dress,
with a poky bonnet and ribbons to match. In the grey we must have looked
like little Quakeresses, and in the green like a gathering of the
"gentle people" out of the moonlit woods, our proper dominion.
Her I remember indistinctly as a thin-lipped, unpleasant-looking woman,
who had a fixed opinion that children must either be "saucy" or "bold."
I was bold, because I was always too frightened of her to say anything,
saucy or meek.
She used to lie in bed or on the parlour sofa, sipping egg-flip and
reading religious books. She was very devout; but her religion, I
suspect, served neither to brighten her own nor any one else's life. It
had a sombre, vinegary aspect, more concerned with punishment due than
pleasure merited, more attuned to severity than Christian mildness.
By some unaccountable process she melted out of my existence, having
darkened it for some months, from which I infer that her death passed
unnoted by me or was not explained to me. I did not see her dead, and
can record no gentle deed of hers living. She never kissed me, but
sometimes shook my hand in a loose gentlemanly fashion, and exhorted me
not to be so "bold."
Once she nearly broke my heart. The cook had made some damson jam, and
while I was alone in the parlour turning over the leaves of one of
grandpapa's music-books, which looked so mysteriously wonderful to me,
she carried in a specimen bowl, and left it on the table with some loose
coppers. I still see that bowl. It was white, and had a wreath of pink
roses.
When I tired of my music-book, I wandered by a natural impulse into
temptation. The bowl was out of my reach, but I soon remedied that by
drawing over a chair and climbing upon it. I dipped my finger into the
bowl, and then put it into my mouth. It tasted, as indeed I fully
anticipated, good. You may imagine the alacrity with which I continued
the operation, without any heed of the blotches of jam that dropped upon
the table.
Both the hall-door and parlour-door were open, and I heard loud sobbing.
I was acquainted with sorrow myself, which was a reason I never heard a
child's cry unmoved. I slipped off my chair, and ran out into the hall.
A ragged little follow sat on the doorstep, crying as if his heart would
burst. I raced down the steps, and sat by his side to comfort him. He
had cut his foot, and I asked him if it would not hurt less if he had
some apples to eat. Crab-apples always soothed my own immeasurable woes
and lightened the pangs of solitude for me. The weeping boy looked at me
sullenly, and nodded.
In I flew again and came out with the coppers grasped in my jammy palm,
and holding the bowl of damson jam tightly wedged between my pinafore
and both hands.
"There's splendid jam here," I said, and invited the sufferer to dip his
finger into the bowl.
He did so, and stopped crying. He was quite consoled, and nearly emptied
the bowl in the avidity of his appreciation. Then I gave him the
coppers, and told him the name of the shop where he could get lots of
the nicest crab-apples. The hall-door was still open, and the parlour
was empty when I carried back the bowl. I left it on the table, and went
out into the garden to talk to Dennis.
I had no idea of having done wrong. At nurse's I was free to take what I
liked, and I was not at all familiar with the sin of stealing. Judge,
then, my surprise when cook came out for me with a flaming face, and
assured me I "would catch it." I stopped playing, and felt chill with
apprehension. What was going to happen to me now? Grandpapa was not
there to protect me, and I had not much faith in Dennis's power to save
me.
Cook dragged me up-stairs, scolding me all the way. She called me a
thief, a robber, and said I was worse than the dreadful highwaymen they
wrote of in books. I whimperingly protested. I was not a thief, I cried
indignantly; I was not a robber. I did not know what a highwayman was,
but I was sure I was not that either.
"Ah! you'll catch it," was all cook deigned to reply.
How grossly and wickedly mismanaged children are by people who do not
think or stop to study them! So many tears and tremors and moments of
black despair, because angry and impatient persons will not take the
trouble to use the right words and correct with justice and sense. To
abuse an ignorant little child in disproportionate language, at an age
when imagination exaggerates and magnifies everything, for an impulsive
action and an inconsequent error, and tell her "she would catch it," is
surely a hideous perversion of strength and power.
Relatively speaking, that moment was not less vivid and awful for me
than the worst hour of a heretic in the days of the Inquisition. And I
had as little faith in the justice or kindness of my judges as any
wretch of those times.
My grandmother sat in bed with her glass of egg-flip in her hand,
presiding relentlessly over my castigation. Again I was informed that my
crime was an appalling one. I had robbed money and robbed jam. There was
no softening of my grandmother's face when I said, through my sobs of
terror, that I only took the money to give it to a little boy that had
hurt his foot and was crying. Cook administered an unmerciful whipping,
as if there were not beatings enough for me without cause down in the
big town house I hated.
No, verily; there are times, when I look at happier children to-day and
remember that poor unhappy little child of years ago, I feel there are
wrongs we cannot be expected to forgive, scars no time can efface,
blunders no after good will ever rectify. I could weep to-day as
bitterly for that little child, so alone, so throbbing with untamed
fears, as ever she wept for herself then.