I GO TO SCHOOL, AND GRANNIE LEAVES IT.
It is an evil thing to break up a family before the natural period of
its dissolution. In the course of things, marriage, the necessities of
maintenance, or the energies of labour guiding ‘to fresh woods and
pastures new,’ are the ordered causes of separation.
Where the home is happy, much injury is done the children in sending
them to school, except it be a day-school, whither they go in the
morning as to the labours of the world, but whence they return at night
as to the heaven of repose. Conflict through the day, rest at night, is
the ideal. A day-school will suffice for the cultivation of the
necessary public or national spirit, without which the love of the
family may degenerate into a merely extended selfishness, but which is
itself founded upon those family affections. At the same time, it must
be confessed that boarding-schools are, in many cases, an antidote to
some of the evil conditions which exist at home.
To children whose home is a happy one, the exile to a school must be
bitter. Mine, however, was an unusual experience. Leaving aside the
specially troubled state in which I was when thus carried to the
village of Aldwick, I had few of the finer elements of the ideal home
in mine. The love of my childish heart had never been drawn out. My
grandmother had begun to do so, but her influence had been speedily
arrested. I was, as they say of cats, more attached to the place than
the people, and no regrets whatever interfered to quell the excitement
of expectation, wonder, and curiosity which filled me on the journey.
The motion of the vehicle, the sound of the horses’ hoofs, the
travellers we passed on the road--all seemed to partake of the
exuberant life which swelled and overflowed in me. Everything was as
happy, as excited, as I was.
When we entered the village, behold it was a region of glad tumult!
Were there not three dogs, two carts, a maid carrying pails of water,
and several groups of frolicking children in the street--not to mention
live ducks, and a glimpse of grazing geese on the common? There were
also two mothers at their cottage-doors, each with a baby in her arms.
I knew they were babies, although I had never seen a baby before. And
when we drove through the big wooden gate, and stopped at the door of
what had been the manor-house but was now Mr Elder’s school, the aspect
of the building, half-covered with ivy, bore to me a most friendly
look. Still more friendly was the face of the master’s wife, who
received us in a low dark parlour, with a thick soft carpet and rich
red curtains. It was a perfect paradise to my imagination. Nor did the
appearance of Mr Elder at all jar with the vision of coming happiness.
His round, rosy, spectacled face bore in it no premonitory suggestion
of birch or rod, and although I continued at his school for six years,
I never saw him use either. If a boy required that kind of treatment,
he sent him home. When my uncle left me, it was in more than
contentment with my lot. Nor did anything occur to alter my feeling
with regard to it. I soon became much attached to Mrs Elder. She was
just the woman for a schoolmaster’s wife--as full of maternity as she
could hold, but childless. By the end of the first day I thought I
loved her far more than my aunt. My aunt had done her duty towards me;
but how was a child to weigh that? She had taken no trouble to make me
love her; she had shown me none of the signs of affection, and I could
not appreciate the proofs of it yet.
I soon perceived a great difference between my uncle’s way of teaching
and that of Mr Elder. My uncle always appeared aware of something
behind which pressed upon, perhaps hurried, the fact he was making me
understand. He made me feel, perhaps too much, that it was a mere step
towards something beyond. Mr Elder, on the other hand, placed every
point in such a strong light that it seemed in itself of primary
consequence. Both were, if my judgment after so many years be correct,
admirable teachers--my uncle the greater, my school-master the more
immediately efficient. As I was a manageable boy to the very verge of
weakness, the relations between us were entirely pleasant.
There were only six more pupils, all of them sufficiently older than
myself to be ready to pet and indulge me. No one who saw me mounted on
the back of the eldest, a lad of fifteen, and driving four of them in
hand, while the sixth ran alongside as an outrider--could have wondered
that I should find school better than home. Before the first day was
over, the sorrows of the lost watch and sword had vanished utterly. For
what was possession to being possessed? What was a watch, even had it
been going, to the movements of life? To peep from the wicket in the
great gate out upon the village street, with the well in the middle of
it, and a girl in the sunshine winding up the green dripping bucket
from the unknown depths of coolness, was more than a thousand watches.
But this was by no means the extent of my new survey of things. One of
the causes of Mr Elder’s keeping no boy who required chastisement was
his own love of freedom, and his consequent desire to give the boys as
much liberty out of school hours as possible. He believed in freedom.
‘The great end of training,’ he said to me many years after, when he
was quite an old man, ‘is liberty; and the sooner you can get a boy to
be a law to himself, the sooner you make a man of him. This end is
impossible without freedom. Let those who have no choice, or who have
not the same end in view, do the best they can with such boys as they
find: I chose only such as could bear liberty. I never set up as a
reformer--only as an educator. For that kind of work others were more
fit than I. It was not my calling.’ Hence Mr Elder no more allowed
labour to intrude upon play, than play to intrude upon labour. As soon
as lessons were over, we were free to go where we would and do what we
would, under certain general restrictions, which had more to do with
social proprieties than with school regulations. We roamed the country
from tea-time till sun-down; sometimes in the Summer long after that.
Sometimes also on moonlit nights in Winter, occasionally even when the
stars and the snow gave the only light, we were allowed the same
liberty until nearly bedtime. Before Christmas came, variety, exercise,
and social blessedness had wrought upon me so that when I returned
home, my uncle and aunt were astonished at the change in me. I had
grown half a head, and the paleness, which they had considered a
peculiar accident of my appearance, had given place to a rosy glow. My
flitting step too had vanished: I soon became aware that I made more
noise than my aunt liked, for in the old house silence was in its very
temple. My uncle, however, would only smile and say--
‘Don’t bring the place about our ears, Willie, my boy. I should like it
to last my time.’
‘I’m afraid,’ my aunt would interpose, ‘Mr Elder doesn’t keep very good
order in his school.’
Then I would fire up in defence of the master, and my uncle would sit
and listen, looking both pleased and amused.
I had not been many moments in the house before I said--
‘Mayn’t I run up and see grannie, uncle?’
‘I will go and see how she is,’ my aunt said, rising.
She went, and presently returning, said
‘Grannie seems a little better. You may come. She wants to see you.’
I followed her. When I entered the room and looked expectantly towards
her usual place, I found her chair empty. I turned to the bed. There
she was, and I thought she looked much the same; but when I came
nearer, I perceived a change in her countenance. She welcomed me
feebly, stroked my hair and my cheeks, smiled sweetly, and closed her
eyes. My aunt led me away.
When bedtime came, I went to my own room, and was soon fast asleep.
What roused me I do not know, but I awoke in the midst of the darkness,
and the next moment I heard a groan. It thrilled me with horror. I sat
up in bed and listened, but heard no more. As I sat listening, heedless
of the cold, the explanation dawned upon me, for my powers of
reflection and combination had been developed by my enlarged experience
of life. In our many wanderings, I had learned to choose between roads
and to make conjectures from the _lie_ of the country. I had likewise
lived in a far larger house than my home. Hence it now dawned upon me,
for the first time, that grannie’s room must be next to mine, although
approached from the other side, and that the groan must have been hers.
She might be in need of help. I remembered at the same time how she had
wished to have me by her in the middle of the night, that she might be
able to tell me what she could not recall in the day. I got up at once,
dressed myself, and stole down the one stair, across the kitchen, and
up the other. I gently opened grannie’s door and peeped in. A fire was
burning in the room. I entered and approached the bed. I wondered how I
had the courage; but children more than grown people are moved by
unlikely impulses. Grannie lay breathing heavily. I stood for a moment.
The faint light flickered over her white face. It was the middle of the
night, and the tide of fear inseparable from the night began to rise.
My old fear of her began to return with it. But she lifted her lids,
and the terror ebbed away. She looked at me, but did not seem to know
me. I went nearer.
‘Grannie,’ I said, close to her ear, and speaking low; ‘you wanted to
see me at night--that was before I went to school. I’m here, grannie.’
The sheet was folded back so smooth that she could hardly have turned
over since it had been arranged for the night. Her hand was lying upon
it. She lifted it feebly and stroked my cheek once more. Her lips
murmured something which I could not hear, and then came a deep sigh,
almost a groan. The terror returned when I found she could not speak to
me.
‘Shall I go and fetch auntie?’ I whispered.
She shook her head feebly, and looked wistfully at me. Her lips moved
again. I guessed that she wanted me to sit beside her. I got a chair,
placed it by the bedside, and sat down. She put out her hand, as if
searching for something. I laid mine in it. She closed her fingers upon
it and seemed satisfied. When I looked again, she was asleep and
breathing quietly. I was afraid to take my hand from hers lest I should
wake her. I laid my head on the side of the bed, and was soon fast
asleep also.
I was awaked by a noise in the room. It was Nannie laying the fire.
When she saw me she gave a cry of terror.
‘Hush, Nannie!’ I said; ‘you will wake grannie:’ and as I spoke I rose,
for I found my hand was free.
‘Oh, Master Willie!’ said Nannie, in a low voice; ‘how did you come
here? You sent my heart into my mouth.’
‘Swallow it again, Nannie,’ I answered, ‘and don’t tell auntie. I came
to see grannie, and fell asleep. I’m rather cold. I’ll go to bed now.
Auntie’s not up, is she?
‘No. It’s not time for anybody to be up yet.’
Nannie ought to have spent the night in grannie’s room, for it was her
turn to watch; but finding her nicely asleep as she thought, she had
slipped away for just an hour of comfort in bed. The hour had grown to
three. When she returned the fire was out.
When I came down to breakfast the solemn look upon my uncle’s face
caused me a foreboding of change.
‘God has taken grannie away in the night, Willie,’ said he, holding the
hand I had placed in his.
‘Is she dead?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he answered.
‘Oh, then, you will let her go to her grave now, won’t you?’ I
said--the recollection of her old grievance coming first in association
with her death, and occasioning a more childish speech than belonged to
my years.
‘Yes. She’ll get to her grave now,’ said my aunt, with a trembling in
her voice I had never heard before.
‘No,’ objected my uncle. ‘Her body will go to the grave, but her soul
will go to heaven.’
‘Her soul!’ I said. ‘What’s that?’
‘Dear me, Willie! don’t you know that?’ said my aunt. ‘Don’t you know
you’ve got a soul as well as a body?’
‘I’m sure _I_ haven’t,’ I returned. ‘What was grannie’s like?’
‘That I can’t tell you,’ she answered.
‘Have you got one, auntie?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is yours like then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But,’ I said, turning to my uncle, ‘if her body goes to the grave, and
her soul to heaven, what’s to become of poor grannie--without either of
them, you see?’
My uncle had been thinking while we talked.
‘That can’t be the way to represent the thing, Jane; it puzzles the
child. No, Willie; grannie’s body goes to the grave, but grannie
herself is gone to heaven. What people call her soul is just grannie
herself.’
‘Why don’t they say so, then?’
My uncle fell a-thinking again. He did not, however, answer this last
question, for I suspect he found that it would not be good for me to
know the real cause--namely, that people hardly believed it, and
therefore did not say it. Most people believe far more in their bodies
than in their souls. What my uncle did say was--
‘I hardly know. But grannie’s gone to heaven anyhow.’
‘I’m so glad!’ I said. ‘She will be more comfortable there. She was too
old, you know, uncle.’
He made no reply. My aunt’s apron was covering her face, and when she
took it away, I observed that those eager almost angry eyes were red
with weeping. I began to feel a movement at my heart, the first
fluttering physical sign of a waking love towards her. ‘Don’t cry,
auntie,’ I said. ‘I don’t see anything to cry about. Grannie has got
what she wanted.’
She made me no answer, and I sat down to my breakfast. I don’t know how
it was, but I could not eat it. I rose and took my way to the hollow in
the field. I felt a strange excitement, not sorrow. Grannie was
actually dead at last. I did not quite know what it meant. I had never
seen a dead body. Neither did I know that she had died while I slept
with my hand in hers. Nannie, seeing something peculiar, had gone to
her the moment I left the room, and had found her quite cold. Had we
been a talking family, I might have been uneasy until I had told the
story of my last interview with her; but I never thought of saying a
word about it. I cannot help thinking now that I was waked up and sent
to the old woman, my great-grandmother, in the middle of the night, to
help her to die in comfort. Who knows? What we can neither prove nor
comprehend forms, I suspect, the infinitely larger part of our being.
When I was taken to see what remained of grannie, I experienced nothing
of the dismay which some children feel at the sight of death. It was as
if she had seen something just in time to leave the look of it behind
her there, and so the final expression was a revelation. For a while
there seems to remain this one link between some dead bodies and their
living spirits. But my aunt, with a common superstition, would have me
touch the face. That, I confess, made me shudder: the cold of death is
so unlike any other cold! I seemed to feel it in my hand all the rest
of the day.
I saw what seemed grannie--I am too near death myself to consent to
call a dead body the man or the woman--laid in the grave for which she
had longed, and returned home with a sense that somehow there was a
barrier broken down between me and my uncle and aunt. I felt as near my
uncle now as I had ever been. That evening he did not go to his own
room, but sat with my aunt and me in the kitchen-hall. We pulled the
great high-backed oaken settle before the fire, and my aunt made a
great blaze, for it was very cold. They sat one in each corner, and I
sat between them, and told them many things concerning the school. They
asked me questions and encouraged my prattle, seeming well pleased that
the old silence should be broken. I fancy I brought them a little
nearer to each other that night. It was after a funeral, and yet they
both looked happier than I had ever seen them before.