PREPARING TO FACE THE WORLD.
Was it six weeks or six months since I left that big town house, a
disgraced and blighted little being? Time to a child is so unequal a
matter. A month may seem a century, a year appear vaguer than a dream.
Indeed, I have never yet been able to tell myself how long a space of
time actually separated my good-bye to Kildare and my departure for
England. Multiplied experiences combined to mislead me.
Simultaneously with the opening of the cab-door opened the big door of
my stepfather's house, and a group of little golden heads showed in the
dark frame. Feet and hands and voluble lips and eyes played together,
and for a very brief while I enjoyed the sensations of a heroine.
This small world was excited prospectively at the thought of my coming
adventures. I was soon to represent to them the unknown, the elsewhere,
the eternal dream of "far fair foreign lands." Things were to happen to
me that never yet happened to mortal. I was to be snubbed by and to
subdue a haughty people. Perhaps if I did something extremely outrageous
I should be put into prison, with chains round my feet and wrists.
Pending which, I was to travel for several hours by land and several
hours by water.
"She has come already," they shouted gleefully. "Oh, such a dreadful
person, Angela! taller than papa, and the skin is quite tight round her
eyes and mouth as if she couldn't laugh."
She was, indeed, an odd-looking woman, the jailer to whom my parents so
unconcernedly confided me. Not unkind, but austere and grotesque in her
black cap and long black veil. She had left a Tipperary village to
become a lady of Mercy in the English convent, and to her was intrusted
the care of my deported self. In religion her name was Sister Clare, and
the impression she has left on me is that of an inoffensive policeman
masquerading in woman's attire, with limbs too long for a decorous
management of them, honest, cold blue eyes, and, instead of the vivid
hues of life upon the lean cheek, discoloured parchment drawn without a
wrinkle tightly over the high-boned impassible visage.
I had the bad taste to show fright upon sight of her lugubrious garb of
postulant, and like the little savage I was, passionately declined her
proffered kiss; but when my stepfather held me on his knees beside her,
and spoke to her with his charming affability, I let myself be coaxed
into equable endurance of the queer picture. I saw then that she was not
dangerous. Indulgence lurked beneath the austere expression, and if the
glance was cold, it was neither hard nor cruel.
Up-stairs in the nursery the hours passed tumultuously in a frenzy of
discussion. Each little head was busy forging its theory of deportment
and action in circumstances so strange and adventurous as those of a
baby girl going out alone among the sharks and foreigners of a cold
undreamed-of world. The immediate fear was that I should disgrace my
land by my Kildare accent. My eldest sister contemptuously declared that
I talked "just like that disgusting little girl with the oily black
ringlets"; and the imminence of a shower at the abrupt reference to the
dear and absent Mary Jane, so far away, so unconscious of my perils and
terrors and importance, averted an outburst of indignation at the wanton
insult cast upon her picturesque head.
It was regarded as an aggravation of my imperfections that I could not
write, else I might have kept up the lively excitement of my departure
by a raw account of my adventures. But by the time I should have
mastered the difficult art of writing and spelling, I should probably
have forgotten all my wonderful experiences, and they would have lost
all interest in the story of my early travels.
If my mother had been an early Christian or a socialist, she could not
have shown herself a more inveterate enemy of personal property. Never
through infancy, youth, or middle age has she permitted any of her
offspring to preserve relics, gifts, or souvenirs. Treasures of every
kind she pounced upon, and either destroyed or gave away,--partly from a
love of inflicting pain, partly from an iconoclastic temper, but more
than anything from a despotic ferocity of self-assertion. The preserving
of relics, of the thousand and one little absurdities sentiment and
fancy ever cling to, implied something beyond her power, something she
could not hope to touch or destroy, implied above all an inner life
existing independent of her harsh authority. The outward signs of this
mental independence she ever ruthlessly effaced.
And my desolation was great when I found the old wooden box I had
brought up from Kildare empty of all my beloved little relics of a
fugitive happiness and of yearned-for friends. Gone the mug with
somebody else's name upon it, gone the plate with the little white knobs
and the painted black dog, gone my book about cocks and hens, the gift
of that vision of romance, my godfather, swallowed up radiantly in
Chinese yellow. Gone, alas! Stevie's "Robinson Crusoe" and his knife,
and every tiny possession of a tiny sentimentalist, whose heart was so
famished for love and kind words and kisses, and clung the more eagerly
for this to these poor trifles.
I sat on the floor beside my empty box, and refused to be comforted.
These things were to have softened the rigours of exile, might have gone
with me to the scaffold as sustainment and benediction, if I had the
misfortune to rouse the ire of that mysterious being, the Queen, whom
Mary Jane depicted as sitting on a high throne, with a crown on her head
and a knife in her hand for the necks of the unruly Irish.
But I had nothing now to take to bed with me, nothing to hug and weep
over, nothing to tell my sorrows to when the society and persecution of
big people become intolerable. I stood, or rather sat, alone in a
desolate universe, with the violated coffin of my regrets in front of
me. Being worn out with all I had gone through that day, I probably fell
asleep sobbing against the empty box, and night robbed me of any further
sense of misfortune.