THE SHADOWS.
All this hilarity does not imply the total absence of sadness in those
bright days. I had lived and suffered too long in solitude not to have
reserved a private corner for unuttered griefs, into which no regard of
sister or stranger could ever penetrate. It is extraordinary the art
with which a circle of children can make one chosen by mutual consent
feel in all things, at every moment of the day, an intruder. The two
elder than I were sworn friends, the three younger likewise; both groups
united as allies. I stood between them, an outsider. I shared their
games, it is true, as I shared their meals; but when they had any
secrets to impart, I was left out in the cold. I daresay now, on looking
back, that had my sullen pride permitted a frank and genial effort, I
might easily enough have broken down this barrier. But I was morbidly
sensitive, and these young barbarians were very rough and hard. Not
ill-natured, but most untender.
I wonder if any other child has been so ruthlessly stabbed by home
glances as I. The tale of the Ugly Duckling is, I believe, as common as
all the essential legends of human grief and human joy. My dislike of
large families is born of the conviction that every large family holds a
victim. Amid so many, there is always one isolated creature who weeps in
frozen secrecy, while the others shout with laughter. The unshared
gaiety of the group is a fresh provocation of repulsion on both sides,
and not all the good-will of maturity can serve to bridge that first
sharp division of infancy. The heart that has been broken with pain in
childhood is never sound again, whatever the sequel the years may offer.
To escape the blighting influence of cynicism and harshness is as much
as one may hope for; but the muffled apprehension of ache, the rooted
mistrust bred by early injustice, can never be effaced.
I cannot now remember the cause of all those dreadful hours, of all
those bitter, bitter tears, nor do I desire to recall them. But I still
see myself many and many a day creeping under the bed that none might
see me cry, and there sobbing as if the veins of my throat should burst.
Always, I have no doubt, for some foolish or inadequate cause: a
hostile look in response to some spontaneous offer of affection, a
disagreeable word when a tender one trembled on my lips, some fresh
proof of my isolation, a rough gesture that thrust me out of the home
circle as an intruder, and a scornful laugh in front of me as the merry
band wandered off among the rocks and left me forlorn in the garden. A
robuster and less sensitive nature would have laughed down all these
small troubles, and have scampered into their midst imperious and
importunate. A healthier child, with sensibilities less on the edge of
the skin, not cursed with what the French call an _ombrageux_ temper,
would have broken through this unconscious hostility, and have captured
her place on the domestic hearth--would probably not have been aware of
an unfriendly atmosphere.
But this same morbid sensitiveness, mark of my unblessed race, has been
the unsleeping element of martyrdom in my whole existence. "Meet the
world with a smile," said a wise and genial friend of mine, "and it will
give you back a smile." But how can one smile with every nerve torn in
the dumb anguish of anticipated pain and slight? How can one smile
burdened by the edged sensibilities and nervousness of sex and race,
inwardly distraught and forced to face the world, unsupported by
fortune, family, or friends, with a brave front? It is already much not
to cry. But I shed all my tears in childhood, and left my sadness behind
me. When the bigger troubles and tragedies came, as they speedily did, I
found sustainment and wisdom in arming myself with courage and gaiety,
and so I faced the road. I had then, as ever since, plenty of pleasure
to temper unhappiness, plenty of bright rays to guide me through the
obscurities of sentiment and suffering. An unfailing beam of humour then
and now shed its smile athwart the dim bleak forest of emotions through
which destiny bade me cut my way.
One dark moment of peculiar bitterness now makes me smile. I record it
as proof of the tiny mole-hills of childhood that constitute mountains.
It shows the kind of booby I was, and have ever been, but none the less
instructs upon the nature of infant miseries.
We were walking along the road one afternoon with Miss Kitty. A public
vehicle tore down the hill led by four horses, three white and one
brown. We were four: I the eldest, and my three pretty step-sisters.
Birdie shouted--
"Oh, look at the three lovely white horses! That's us three. Angela is
the brown horse."
I regarded this choice as a manifest injustice. There was no reason on
earth that I should be a brown horse any more than one of my
step-sisters. I was angry and sore at what I deemed a slight, and
cried--
"I won't be the brown horse. I'll be one of the white horses, or else
I'll go away and leave you."
"No, you won't, and you may go if you like. We don't want you. We're
three nice white horses."
Here was an instance when I might have laughed down the exclusiveness of
these proud babies. But no. I must turn back, and walk home alone, sulky
and miserable, nursing my usual feeling of being alone in a cold
universe.
An hour of terrible fright for all of us was the morning Birdie fell
into Colamore Harbour. We were coming down from Killiney Hill, a lovely
spot more prosperous lands might envy us. Birdie walked inside, in a
pretty short frock of pale green alpaca, and a new hat with red poppies
among the ribbon. In those days Birdie and I ran it closely as infant
beauties. Her hair was a shade more flaxen than mine, and the roses of
her cheeks a shade paler. She was fatter, too, and less vapoury; but I
carried the palm as an ethereal doll, with a classic profile. Alas! the
promise of that period was never fulfilled. Both profile and pride of
beauty vanished on the threshold of girlhood, to make way for the
appearance of a dairymaid in their distinguished stead.
The wall of Colamore Harbour was protected by an iron chain that swung
low from the big stones that divided the festoons. Birdie's foot
slipped, and the child in a twinkling tumbled over, and plunged, with a
hollow crash, into the heavy grey sea. Happily there were bathing-women
and fishermen within hail, and as quickly as she had taken an unexpected
bath, Birdie was once more in our midst, dripping like a Newfoundland,
white and shaking with terror. One of the big boys took her up in his
arms and tenderly carried her home. We all followed, awed and
hysterical.
My mother was standing in the front garden talking to the gardener, when
the party marched in upon her. She frowned as Birdie was deposited on
the gravel path in a woeful state--her wet green skirt clinging to her
little legs, the discoloured poppies of her hat flat upon the wet
ribbon.
"Change that child's clothes," said my mother, indifferently, as if she
were all her life accustomed to the sight of a terrified child rescued
from the deep, and went on talking to the gardener.
It would be a bold and inhuman assertion to make, and certainly one I am
far from maintaining, that harsh treatment is the proper training of
children. But my mother's method has undoubtedly answered better than
that of many a tender or self-sacrificing mother. It built us in an
admirable fashion for adversity,--taught us to rely upon ourselves,
taught us, above all, that necessary lesson, how to suffer and not
whine. It is only when I observe how feebly and shabbily a spoiled woman
can face trouble and pain, that I feel one may with reason cherish some
pride of the power of enduring both with a smile. And when, stupefied
and shamed, I contemplate the petty trickeries to which worldliness and
untruthfulness can reduce a woman, the infamous devices a slender purse
can drag educated ladies into, thus am I partially consoled for the
sufferings of childhood. It is much, when one fronts battle, to have
been reared in an atmosphere of absolute rectitude, of truthful and
honourable instinct. It is a blessing indeed when love includes all
this. But bleak as the start was, I would not have had it otherwise at
the cost of these great and virile virtues. And since it would appear
that the Irish habit of boasting is an incorrigible weakness, and that
even in these democratic days my people still persist in descending from
kings who have slept in peace over seven hundred years, and may without
any extravagant scorn of fact be presumed to have passed for ever into
the state of legend, I am glad to acknowledge the priceless debt of
common-sense to a Scottish mother. Kings are all very well in their way,
especially if they happen to be reigning; but when one learns as
authentic fact that an Irish journalist has offered an article to an
unknown editor, accompanied with a letter stating that the blood of
seven kings runs in his veins, one feels that such a race is all the
more rational for a little foreign blood to modify the imperishable and
universal blight of royalty.