My first memories are fragmentary and isolated and contemporaneous, as
though one remembered vaguely some early day of the Seven Days. It seems
as if time had not yet been created, for all are connected with emotion
and place and without sequence.
I remember sitting upon somebody's knee, looking out of a window at a wall
covered with cracked and falling plaster, but what wall I do not remember,
and being told that some relation once lived there. I am looking out of
another window in London. It is at Fitzroy Road. Some boys are playing in
the road and among them a boy in uniform, a telegraph boy perhaps. When I
ask who the boy is, a servant tells me that he is going to blow the town
up, and I go to sleep in terror.
After that come memories of Sligo, where I live with my grandparents. I am
sitting on the ground looking at a mastless toy boat, with the paint
rubbed and scratched, and I say to myself in great melancholy, "it is
further away than it used to be," and while I am saying it I am looking at
a long scratch in the stern, for it is especially the scratch which is
further away. Then one day at dinner my great-uncle William Middleton
says, "we should not make light of the troubles of children. They are
worse than ours, because we can see the end of our trouble and they can
never see any end," and I feel grateful for I know that I am very unhappy
and have often said to myself, "when you grow up, never talk as grown-up
people do of the happiness of childhood." I may have already had the night
of misery when, having prayed for several days that I might die, I had
begun to be afraid that I was dying and prayed that I might live. There
was no reason for my unhappiness. Nobody was unkind, and my grandmother
has still after so many years my gratitude and my reverence. The house was
so big that there was always a room to hide in, and I had a red pony and a
garden where I could wander, and there were two dogs to follow at my
heels, one white with some black spots on his head and the other with long
black hair all over him. I used to think about God and fancy that I was
very wicked, and one day when I threw a stone and hit a duck in the yard
by mischance and broke its wing, I was full of wonder when I was told that
the duck would be cooked for dinner and that I should not be punished.
Some of my misery was loneliness and some of it fear of old William
Pollexfen my grandfather. He was never unkind, and I cannot remember that
he ever spoke harshly to me, but it was the custom to fear and admire him.
He had won the freedom of some Spanish city for saving life, but was so
silent that his wife never knew it till he was near eighty, and then from
the chance visit of some old sailor. She asked him if it was true and he
said it was true, but she knew him too well to question and his old
shipmate had left the town. She too had the habit of fear. We knew that he
had been in many parts of the world, for there was a great scar on his
hand made by a whaling-hook, and in the dining-room was a cabinet with
bits of coral in it and a jar of water from the Jordan for the baptising
of his children and Chinese pictures upon rice-paper and an ivory
walking-stick from India that came to me after his death. He had great
physical strength and had the reputation of never ordering a man to do
anything he would not do himself. He owned many sailing ships and once,
when a captain just come to anchor at Rosses Point reported something
wrong with the rudder, had sent a messenger to say "send a man down to
find out what's wrong." "The crew all refuse" was the answer. "Go down
yourself" was my grandfather's order, and when that was not obeyed, he
dived from the main deck, all the neighbourhood lined along the pebbles
of the shore. He came up with his skin torn but well informed about the
rudder. He had a violent temper and kept a hatchet at his bedside for
burglars and would knock a man down instead of going to law, and I once
saw him hunt a group of men with a horsewhip. He had no relation for he
was an only child, and being solitary and silent, he had few friends. He
corresponded with Campbell of Islay who had befriended him and his crew
after a shipwreck, and Captain Webb, the first man who had swum the
Channel and who was drowned swimming the Niagara Rapids, had been a mate
in his employ and became a close friend. That is all the friends I can
remember and yet he was so looked up to and admired that when he returned
from taking the waters at Bath his men would light bonfires along the
railway line for miles, while his partner William Middleton whose father
after the great famine had attended the sick for weeks, and taken cholera
from a man he carried in his arms into his own house and died of it, and
was himself civil to everybody and a cleverer man than my grandfather,
came and went without notice. I think I confused my grandfather with God,
for I remember in one of my attacks of melancholy praying that he might
punish me for my sins, and I was shocked and astonished when a daring
little girl--a cousin I think--having waited under a group of trees in the
avenue, where she knew he would pass near four o'clock on the way to his
dinner, said to him, "if I were you and you were a little girl, I would
give you a doll."
Yet for all my admiration and alarm, neither I nor anyone else thought it
wrong to outwit his violence or his rigour; and his lack of suspicion and
a certain helplessness made that easy while it stirred our affection. When
I must have been still a very little boy, seven or eight years old
perhaps, an uncle called me out of bed one night, to ride the five or six
miles to Rosses Point to borrow a railway-pass from a cousin. My
grandfather had one, but thought it dishonest to let another use it, but
the cousin was not so particular. I was let out through a gate that opened
upon a little lane beside the garden away from ear-shot of the house, and
rode delighted through the moonlight, and awoke my cousin in the small
hours by tapping on his window with a whip. I was home again by two or
three in the morning and found the coachman waiting in the little lane. My
grandfather would not have thought such an adventure possible, for every
night at eight he believed that the stable-yard was locked, and he knew
that he was brought the key. Some servant had once got into trouble at
night and so he had arranged that they should all be locked in. He never
knew, what everybody else in the house knew, that for all the ceremonious
bringing of the key the gate was never locked.
Even to-day when I read "King Lear" his image is always before me and I
often wonder if the delight in passionate men in my plays and in my poetry
is more than his memory. He must have been ignorant, though I could not
judge him in my childhood, for he had run away to sea when a boy, "gone to
sea through the hawse-hole" as he phrased it, and I can but remember him
with two books--his Bible and Falconer's "Shipwreck," a little
green-covered book that lay always upon his table; he belonged to some
younger branch of an old Cornish family. His father had been in the Army,
had retired to become an owner of sailing ships, and an engraving of some
old family place my grandfather thought should have been his hung next a
painted coat of arms in the little back parlour. His mother had been a
Wexford woman, and there was a tradition that his family had been linked
with Ireland for generations and once had their share in the old Spanish
trade with Galway. He had a good deal of pride and disliked his
neighbours, whereas his wife, a Middleton, was gentle and patient and did
many charities in the little back parlour among frieze coats and shawled
heads, and every night when she saw him asleep went the round of the house
alone with a candle to make certain there was no burglar in danger of the
hatchet. She was a true lover of her garden and before the care of her
house had grown upon her, would choose some favourite among her flowers
and copy it upon rice-paper. I saw some of her handiwork the other day and
I wondered at the delicacy of form and colour and at a handling that may
have needed a magnifying glass it was so minute. I can remember no other
pictures but the Chinese paintings, and some coloured prints of battles in
the Crimea upon the wall of a passage, and the painting of a ship at the
passage end darkened by time.
My grown-up uncles and aunts, my grandfather's many sons and daughters,
came and went, and almost all they said or did has faded from my memory,
except a few harsh words that convince me by a vividness out of proportion
to their harshness that all were habitually kind and considerate. The
youngest of my uncles was stout and humorous and had a tongue of leather
over the keyhole of his door to keep the draught out, and another whose
bedroom was at the end of a long stone passage had a model turret ship in
a glass case. He was a clever man and had designed the Sligo quays, but
was now going mad and inventing a vessel of war that could not be sunk,
his pamphlet explained, because of a hull of solid wood. Only six months
ago my sister awoke dreaming that she held a wingless sea-bird in her arms
and presently she heard that he had died in his mad-house, for a sea-bird
is the omen that announces the death or danger of a Pollexfen. An uncle,
George Pollexfen, afterwards astrologer and mystic, and my dear friend,
came but seldom from Ballina, once to a race meeting with two postillions
dressed in green; and there was that younger uncle who had sent me for the
railway-pass. He was my grandmother's favourite, and had, the servants
told me, been sent away from school for taking a crowbar to a bully.
I can only remember my grandmother punishing me once. I was playing in the
kitchen and a servant in horseplay pulled my shirt out of my trousers in
front just as my grandmother came in and I, accused of I knew not what
childish indecency, was given my dinner in a room by myself. But I was
always afraid of my uncles and aunts, and once the uncle who had taken the
crowbar to the bully found me eating lunch which my grandmother had given
me and reproved me for it and made me ashamed. We breakfasted at nine and
dined at four and it was considered self-indulgent to eat anything
between meals; and once an aunt told me that I had reined in my pony and
struck it at the same moment that I might show it off as I rode through
the town, and I, because I had been accused of what I thought a very dark
crime, had a night of misery. Indeed I remember little of childhood but
its pain. I have grown happier with every year of life as though gradually
conquering something in myself, for certainly my miseries were not made by
others but were a part of my own mind.