I
The things I remember about my earliest infancy are not in the least
romantic.
First, I think, come two pictures, both perfectly distinct, and both
connected with domestic servants. The one is of a firelit interior,
below street level: an immense kitchen, with shining copper vessels in
it, an extremely hot and red fire, and a tall screen covered over with
pictures. An enormously large woman in a blue and white print gown
sits toasting herself before the fire; and a less immense female, in
white print with sprays of pink flowers on it, is devoting herself to
me. This last was Amelia; a cheerful, comely, buxom, and in the main
kindly creature, as I remember her. In the kitchen was a well-scrubbed
table of about three-quarters of a mile in length, and possessed of as
many legs as a centipede, some of which could be moved to support
flaps. (To put a measuring-tape over that table nowadays, or over
other things in the kitchen, for that matter, might bring
disappointment, I suppose.) These legs formed fascinating walls and
boundaries for a series of romantic dwelling-places, shops, caves, and
suchlike resorts, among which a small boy could wander at will, when
lucky enough to be allowed to visit this warm apartment at all. The
whole place was pervaded by an odour indescribably pleasing to my
infantile nostrils, and compact of suggestions of heat acting upon
clean print gowns, tea-cakes done to a turn, scrubbed wood, and hot
soap-suds.
But the full ecstasy of a visit to this place was only attained when I
was lifted upon the vast table by the warm and rosy Amelia, and
allowed to leap therefrom into her extended arms; she rushing toward
me, and both of us emitting either shrill or growling noises as the
psychological moment of my leap was reached. At the time I used to
think that springing from a trapeze, set in the dome of a great
building, into a net beneath, must be the most ravishing of all joys;
but I incline now to think that my more homely feat of leaping into
Amelia's warm arms was, upon the whole, probably a pleasanter thing.
This memory is of something which I believe happened fairly
frequently. My other most distinct recollection of what I imagine to
have been the same period in history is of a visit, a Sunday afternoon
visit, I think, paid with Amelia. I must have been of tender years,
because, though during parts of the journey I travelled on my own two
feet, I recollect occasional lapses into a perambulator, as it might
be in the case of an elderly or invalid person who walks awhile along
a stretch of level sward, and then takes his ease for a time in
victoria or bath-chair.
I remember Amelia lifting me out from my carriage in the doorway of
what I regarded as a very delightful small house, redolent of strange
and exciting odours, some of which I connect with the subsequent gift
of a slab of stuff that I ate with gusto as cake. My mature view is
that it was cold bread-pudding of a peculiarly villainous clamminess.
It is interesting to note that my delight in this fearsome dainty was
based upon its most malevolent quality: the chill consistency of the
stuff, which made it resemble the kind of leathery jelly that I have
seen used to moisten the face of a rubber stamp withal.
In this house--it was probably in a slum, certainly in a mean
street--one stepped direct from the pavement into a small kitchen,
where an elderly man sat smoking a long clay pipe. A covered stairway
rose mysteriously from one side of this apartment into the two
bedrooms above. A door beside the stairway opened into a tiny scullery,
from which light was pretty thoroughly excluded by the high, black wall
which dripped and frowned no more than three feet away from its
window. I have little doubt that this scullery was a pestilent place.
At the time it appealed to my romantic sense as something rather
attractive.
The elderly man in the kitchen was Amelia's father. That in itself
naturally gave him distinction in my eyes. But, in addition, he was an
old sailor, and, with a knife which was attached to a white lanyard,
he could carve delightful boats (thoroughly seaworthy in a wash-hand
basin) out of ordinary sticks of firewood. It is to be noted, by the
way, a thing I never thought of till this moment, that these same
sticks and bundles of firewood have a peculiarly distinctive smell of
their own. It is the smell of a certain kind of grocer's shop whose
proprietor, for some esoteric reason, calls himself an 'Italian
warehouse-man.' In later life I occasionally visited such a shop,
between Fleet Street and the river, when I had rooms in that locality.
Boat-building figured largely in that visit to Amelia's parents. (The
girl had a mother; large, flaccid, and, on this occasion, partly
dissolved in tears.) But the episode immediately preceding our
departure is what overshadowed everything else for me that day, and
for several subsequent nights. Amelia and the tearful mother took me
up the dark little stairway, and introduced me to Death. They showed
me Amelia's sister, Jinny, who died (of consumption, I believe) on the
day before our visit. I still can see the alabaster white face, with
its pronounced vein-markings; the straight, thin form, outlined
beneath a sheet, in that tiny, low-ceiled, airless garret. What a
picture to place before an infant on a sunny Sunday afternoon! It
might be supposed that I had asked to see it, for I remember Amelia
saying, as one about to give a child a treat:
'Now, mind, Master Nicholas, you're to be a very good boy, and you're
not to say a word about it to any one.'
But, no, I do not think I can have desired the experience, for to this
day I cherish a lively recollection of the agony of sick horror which
swam over me when, in obedience to instructions given, I suffered my
lips to touch the marble-like face of the dead girl.
How strange is that unquestioning obedience of childhood! Recognition
of it might well give pause to careless instructors of youth. The kiss
meant torture to me, in anticipation and in fact. But I was bidden,
and never dreamed of refusing to obey. No doubt, there was also at
work in me some dim sort of infantile delicacy. This was an occasion
upon which a gentleman could have no choice....
Ah, well, I believe Amelia was a dear good soul, and I am sure I hope
she married well, and lived happily ever after. I have no recollection
whatever of how or when she drifted out of my life. But the visit to
Jinny's deathbed, and the exciting leaps from the immeasurably long
kitchen table into Amelia's print-clad arms, are things which stand
out rather more clearly in my recollection than many of the events of,
say, twenty years later.