On a day early in the summer of the present year Miss Dinah Groom was
found lying dead off a field-path of the little obscure Wiltshire village
which she had named her "rest and be thankful." At the date of her
decease she was not an old woman, though any one marking her white hair
and much-furrowed features might have supposed her one. The hair,
however, was ample in quantity, the wrinkles rather so many under-scores
of energy than evidences of senility; and until the blinds were down over
her soul, she had looked into and across the world with a pair of eyes
that seemed to reflect the very blue and white of a June sky. No doubt
she had thought to breast the hills and sail the seas again in some
renaissance of vigour. No doubt her "retreat," like a Roman Catholic's,
was designed to be merely temporary. She aped the hermit for the sake of
a sojourn in the hermitage. She came to her island of Avalon to be
restored of her weary limbs and her blistered feet, so to speak; and
there her heart, too weak for her spirit, failed her, and she fell
amongst the young budding poppies, and died.
I use the word "heart" literally, and in no sentimental sense. To talk of
associations of sentiment in connection with this lady would be
misleading. She herself would not have repudiated any responsibility for
the term as applied to her; she would have simply failed to understand
the term itself. There was no least affectation in this. Throughout her
life of sixty years, as I gather, she acted never once upon principle.
Impulse and inclination dominated her, and she would indulge many
primitive instincts without a thought of conventions. Yet she was not
selfish; or, at least, only in the self-contained and self-protective
meaning of the word. She was a perfect animal, conscious of her supreme
brute caste, shrewd, resourceful, and the plain embodiment of truth.
Miss Groom had, I think, a boundless feeling of fellowship with beauty of
whatever description; but no least touch of that sorrow of affection
which, in its very humanity, is divine. Her unswerving creed was that
woman was the inheritrix of the earth, the reversion of which she had
wilfully mortgaged to an alien race, and that she had bartered her
material immortality for a sensation. For man she had no vulgar and
jealous contempt; but she feared and shrank from him as something moved
by scruples with which she had no sympathy. She understood the world of
Nature, and could respond to its bloodless caresses and passions. She
could _not_ understand the moodiness that dwells upon a grievance, or
that would sell its birthright of joy for a pitiful memory.
Yet (and here I must speak with discretion, for I have no sufficient data
to go upon) there was that of contradictoriness in her character that, I
have reason to believe, she had borne children, and had even been right
and particular as to their temporal welfare until such time as, in the
nature of things, they were of an age to make shift for themselves. This,
virtually, I know to be the case; and that, once quit of the primitive
maternal responsibility, she gave no more thought to them than a thrush
gives to its fledglings when she has educated them to their first
flights, and to the useful knack of cracking a snail on a stone.
My own feeling about Dinah Groom was that she had "thrown back" a long
way over the heads of heredity, and that, in her fearlessness, in her
undegenerate physique, in the animal regularity of her face and form, she
presented to modern days a startling aboriginal type.
Beautiful--save in the sense of symmetry--she can never have been to the
ordinary man; inasmuch as she would subscribe to no arbitrary standard of
his dictating. She had a high, rich colour; but her complexion must
always have been rough, and a pronounced little moustache crossed her
upper lip, like an accent to the speech that was too distinct and
uncompromising to be melodious. Her every limb and feature, however, was
instinct with capability, and, in her presence, one must always be moved
to marvel over that indescribable worship of disproportion that has grown
to be the religion of a shapely race.
* * * * *
How I first became acquainted with Miss Groom it is unnecessary to
explain. During the last three years of her life I was fortunate to be
her guest in the Wiltshire retreat for an aggregate of many months. She
took a fancy to me--to my solitariness and moroseness, perhaps--and she
not only liked to have me with her, but, after a time, she fell into
something of a habit of recalling for my benefit certain passages and
experiences of her past life. In doing this, there was no suggestion of
confidence; and I am breaking no faith in alluding to them. She was a
fine talker--rugged, unpicturesque, but with an instinctive capacity of
selection in words. If I quote her, as I wish to do, I cannot reproduce
her style; and that, no doubt, would appear bald on paper. But, at least,
the matter is all her own.
Now, I must premise that I arrogate to myself no exhibitory rights in
this lady. She was familiar with and to many from the foremost ranks of
those who "follow knowledge like a sinking star"; those great and
restless spirits to whom inaction reads stagnation. To such, in all
probability, I tell, in speaking of Dinah Groom, a twice-told tale; and,
therefore--inasmuch as I make it my business only to print what is
hitherto unrecorded--to them I give the assurance that I do not claim to
have "discovered" their friend.
* * * * *
On a wall of the little embowered sitting-room hung a queer picture, by
Ernest Griset, of the "Overwhelming of the Mammoths in the Ice." From the
first this odd conception had engaged my curiosity,--purely for its
fanciful side,--and one evening, in alluding to it, I made the not very
profound remark that Imagination had no anatomy.
"They are true beasts," said Dinah.
"They are the mastodons of Cuvier, no doubt; but, then, Cuvier never saw
a mastodon, you know."
"But I have; and I tell you Griset and Cuvier are very nearly right."