All of Beth that was not eyes at this time was ears, and her brain was
as busy as a squirrel in the autumn, storing observations and
registering impressions. It does not do to trust to a child's not
understanding. It may not understand at the moment, but it will
remember all the same--all the more, perhaps, because it does not
understand; and its curiosity will help it to solve the problem. Beth
did humorous things at this time, but she had no sense of humour; she
was merely experimenting. Her big eyes looked out of an impassive face
solemnly; no one suspected the phenomenal receptivity which that
stolid mask concealed, and, because the alphabet did not interest her,
they formed a poor opinion of her intellect. The truth was that she
had no use for letters or figures. The books of nature and of life
were spread out before her, and she was conning their contents to more
purpose than any one else could have interpreted them to her in those
days. And as to arithmetic, as soon as her father began to allow her a
penny a week for pocket-money, she discovered that there were two
half-pennies in it, which was all she required to know. She also
mastered the system of debit and credit, for, when she found herself
in receipt of a regular income, and had conquered the first awe of
entering a shop and asking for things, she ran into debt. She received
the penny on Saturday, and promptly spent it in sweets, but by Monday
she wanted more, and the craving was so imperative, that when Miss
Deeble sent her down to the empty kitchen in the afternoon, she could
not blow black-beetles with any enthusiasm, and began to look about
for something else to interest her. It being summer, the window was
open, but it was rather out of her reach. She managed, however, with
the help of her stool, to climb on to the sill, and there, in front of
her, was the sea, and down below was the street--a goodish drop below
if she had stopped to think of it; but Beth dropped first and thought
afterwards, only realising the height when she had come down plump,
and looked up again to see what had happened to her, surprised at the
thud which had jarred her stomach and made her feet sting. She picked
herself up at once, however, and limped away, not heeding the hurt
much, so delightful was it to be out alone without her hat. By the
time she got to Mary Lynch's she was Jane Nettles going on an errand,
an assumption which enabled her to enter the shop at her ease.
"Good-day," she began. "Give me a ha'porth of pear-drops, and a
ha'porth of raspberry-drops, Mary Lynch, please. I'll pay you on
Saturday."
"What are you doing out alone without your hat?" Mary Lynch rejoined,
beaming upon her. "I'm afraid you're a naughty little body."
"No, I'm not," Beth answered. "It's my own money." Mary Lynch laughed,
and helped her liberally, adding some cherries to the sweets; and, to
Beth's credit be it stated, the money was duly paid, and without
regret, she being her mother at the moment, looking much relieved to
be able to settle the debt, which shows that, even by this time, Beth
had somehow become aware of money-troubles, and also that she learned
to read a countenance long before she learned to read a book.
She straggled home with the sweets in her hand, but did not eat them,
for now she was a lady going to give a party, and must await the
arrival of her guests. She did not go in by the front door for obvious
reasons, but up the entry down which the open wooden gutter-spout ran,
at a convenient height, from the house into the street. The wash-house
was covered with delicious white roses, which scented the summer
afternoon. Beth concealed her sweets in the rose-tree, and then leant
against the wall and buried her nose in one of the flowers, loving it.
The maids were in the wash-house; she heard them talking; it was all
about what he said and she said. Presently a torrent of dirty water
came pouring down the spout, mingling its disagreeable soapy smell
with that of the flowers. Beth plucked some petals from the rose she
was smelling, set them on the soapy water, and ran down the passage
beside them, until they disappeared in the drain in the street. This
delight over, she wandered into the garden. She was always on
excellent terms with all animals, and was treated by them with
singular confidence. Towie, the cat, had been missing for some time,
but now, to Beth's great joy, she suddenly appeared from Beth could
not tell where, purring loudly, and rubbing herself against Beth's
bare legs. The sun poured down upon them, and the sensation of the
cat's warm fur above her socks was delicious. Beth tried to lift her
up in her arms, but she wriggled herself out of them, and began to run
backwards and forwards between her and a gap in the hedge, until Beth
understood that she wished her to follow her through it into the next
garden. Beth did so, and the cat led her to a little warm nest where,
to Beth's wild delight, she showed her a tiny black kitten. Beth
picked it up, and carried it, followed by the cat, into the house in a
state of breathless excitement, shrieking out the news as she ran.
Beth was immediately seized upon. What was she doing at home when she
ought to have been at school? and without her hat, too! Beth had no
explanation to offer, and was hustled off to the nursery, and there
shut up for the rest of the day. She stood in the window most of the
time, a captive princess in the witch's palace, waiting for the
fairy-prince to release her, and catching flies.
The sky became overcast, and a big gun was fired. Beth's father had
something to do with the firing of big guns, and she connected this
with the gathering gloom, stories of God striking wicked people down
with thunder and lightning for their sins, and her own naughtiness,
and felt considerably awed. Presently a little boy was carried down
the street on a bed. His face looked yellow against the sheets. He
was lying flat on his back, and had a little black cap on, which was
right out of doors, but wrong in bed. He smiled up at Beth as they
carried him under the window, and she stretched out her arms to him
with infinite pity. She knew he was going to die. They all died, that
family, or had something dreadful happen to them. Jane Nettles said
there was a curse upon them, and Beth never thought of them without a
shudder. That boy's sisters both died, and one had something dreadful
happen to her, for they dug her up again, and when they opened the
coffin the corpse was all in a jelly, and every colour of the rainbow,
according to Jane Nettles. Beth believed she had been present upon the
occasion, in a grass-grown graveyard, by the wall of an old church,
beneath which steps led down into a vault. The stones of the steps
were mossy, and the sun was shining. There was a little group of
people standing round, with pale, set, solemn faces, and presently
something was brought up, and they all pressed forward to look at it.
Beth could not see what it was for the grown-up people, and never knew
whether or not the whole picture had been conjured up by her
imagination; but as there was always a foundation of fact in the
impressions of this period of her life, it is not improbable that she
really was present at the exhumation, with the curious and
indefatigable Jane Nettles.
Opposite the nursery window, on the other side of the road, was the
butcher's shop, in front of which the butcher made his shambles. Late
in the evening he brought out a board and set it on trestles, then he
brought a sheep, lifted it up by its legs and put it on its back on
the board, tied its feet, and cut its throat. Beth watched the
operation with grave interest, but no other feeling. She had been
accustomed to see it all her life.
Presently Beth's father and mother went out together, and then Beth
stole downstairs, and out to the wash-house to find the sweets in the
white rose-tree. Mildred and Jim were doing their lessons in the
dining-room, and she burst in upon them with the sweets; but Mildred
was cross, and said:
"Don't make such a noise, Beth, my head aches."
The next day was Sunday. Beth knew it by the big black bonnet which
played such a large part in her childish recollections. She had a kind
of sensation of having seen herself in it, bobbing along to church, a
sort of Kate Greenaway child, with a head out of all proportion to the
rest of her body, and feeling singularly satisfied--a feeling,
however, which was less a recollection than an experience continually
renewed, for a nice gown or bonnet was always a pleasure to her.
In church she sat in a big square pew on one side of the aisle, and on
the other side was another pew exactly like it, in which sat a young
lady whom Beth believed to be Miss Augusta Noble in the _Fairchild
Family_. Augusta Noble was very vain, and got burnt to death for
standing on tiptoe before the fire to look at herself in a new frock
in the mirror on the mantelpiece. Beth thought it a suitable end for
her, and did not pity her at all--perhaps because she went on coming
to church regularly all the same.
After the service they climbed the Castle Hill; and there was the grey
of stonework against a bright blue sky, and green of grass and trees
against the grey, and mountainous clouds of dazzling white hung over a
molten sea; and because of the beauty of it all, Beth burst into a
passion of tears.
"What is the matter with that child?" her father exclaimed
impatiently. "It's very odd other people can bring up their children
properly, Caroline, but you never seem to be able to manage yours."
"What's the matter with you, you tiresome child?" Mrs. Caldwell
exclaimed, shaking Beth by the arm. Beth only sobbed the more. "Look,"
said her mother, pointing to a small lake left by the sea on the shore
when the tide went out, where the children used to wade knee-deep, or
bathe when it was too rough for them to go into the sea; "look,
there's the pond, that bright round thing over there. And look below,
near the Castle--that great green mound is the giant's grave. When the
giant died they buried him there, and he was so big, he reached all
that length when they laid him in the ground."
"And when he stood up where did he reach to?" said Beth, interested in
a moment.
"Oh, when he sat here, I should think he could make a footstool of his
own grave, and when he stood up he could look over the Castle."
Beth, with big dilated eyes and wet cheeks, saw him do both, and was
oppressed to tears no more that day by delight and wonder of the
beautiful; but she was always liable to these paroxysms, the outcome
of an intensity of pleasure which was positive pain. So, from the
first, she was keenly susceptible to outdoor influences, and it was
now that her memory was stored with impressions which were afterwards
of inestimable value to her, for she never lived amongst the same kind
of scenery again.
The children had the run of some gentleman's grounds, which they
called The Walks. There were banks of flowers, and sidewalks where the
London pride grew, and water, and great trees with hollows in them
where the water lodged. Beth called these fairy wells, and put her
fingers in to see how deep they were, and there were dead leaves in
them; and there, on a memorable occasion, she found her first
skeleton leaf, and told Jane Nettles she really didn't know before
that there were such things. Once there was a wasp's nest hanging from
a branch, and they met a young man coming away from it, holding a
handkerchief to his face. He stopped to tell Jane Nettles how he had
been stung, and the children wandered off unheeded to look at the
nest. It was all grey and gossamer, like cobwebs laid in layers. Beth
was an Indian scout inspecting it from behind a neighbouring tree; and
then she shelled it with sticks, but did not wait to see it surrender.
They picked up horse-chestnuts from under the trees, in the season,
and hammered the green rind off with stones for the joy of seeing the
beautiful shining, slippery, dark brown, or piebald, polished fruit
within; and also, when there were wet leaves on the ground, they
gathered walnuts from out of the long tangled grass, and stained their
fingers picking off the covering, which was mealy-green when it burst,
and smelt nice; but the nut itself, when they came to it, was always
surprisingly small. There were horrid mahogany-coloured pieces of
liver put about the walks on sticks sometimes. Jane Nettles said they
were to poison the dogs because they came in and destroyed the
flowers. Beth wondered how it was people could eat liver if it
poisoned dogs, and was careful afterwards not to touch it herself.
Most children would have worried the reason out of their nurse, but
Jane Nettles was not amiable, and Beth could never bring herself to
ask a question of any one who was likely either to snub her for
asking, or to jeer at her for not knowing. There are unsympathetic
people who have a way of making children feel ashamed of their
ignorance, and rather than be laughed at, a sensitive child will
pretend to know. Beth was extraordinarily sensitive in this respect,
and so it happened that, in later life, she sometimes found herself in
ignorance of things which less remarkable people had learnt in their
infancy for the asking.
These were certainly days of delight to Beth, but the charm of them was
due less to people than to things--to some sight or scent of nature, the
smell of new-mown hay from a waggon they had stood aside to let pass in
a narrow lane, a glimpse of a high bank on the other side of the road--a
high grassy bank, covered and crowned with trees, chiefly chestnuts, on
which the sun shone; hawthorn hedgerows from which they used to pick the
green buds children call bread-and-butter, and eat them; and one
privet-hedge in their own garden, an impenetrable hedge, on the other
side of which, as Beth imagined, all kinds of wonderful things took
place. The flowers of those early days were crocuses, snowdrops, white
roses, a little yellow flower they called ladies' fingers, sea-pinks,
and London pride--particularly London pride. In the walks Jane Nettles
used to teach her the wonderful rhyme of--
"London Bridge is broken down,
Grand, said the little Dee,
London Bridge is broken down,
Fair-Lade-ee."
And so the rhyme, London pride amongst the rock-work, the ornamental
water, a rustic bridge, shining laurel leaves, mahogany-coloured
liver, warmth, light, and sweet airs all became mingled in one
gracious memory.
People, however, as has been already shown, also came into her
consciousness, but with less certainty of pleasing, wherefore she
remembered them less, for it was always her habit to banish a
disagreeable thought if she could. One day she went into the garden
with her spade and an old tin biscuit-box. She put the box on the
ground beside her, with the lid off, and began to dig. By-and-by the
kitten came crooning and sidling up to her, and hopped into the box.
Beth instantly put on the lid, and the kitten was a corpse which must
be buried. She hurriedly dug its grave, put in the box, and covered it
up with earth. Just as she had finished, a gruff voice exclaimed:
"What are ye doing there, ye little divil?" and there was old Krangle
the gardener, looking at her over the hedge. "Dig it up again
directly," he said, and Beth, much startled, dug it up quicker than
she had buried it. The kitten had been but loosely covered, and was
not much the worse, but had got some earth in its eye, which was very
sore afterwards. People wondered what had hurt it, and Beth looked
from one to the other and listened with grave attention to their
various suppositions on the subject. She said nothing, however, and
Krangle also held his peace, which led to a very good understanding
between them. Krangle had a cancer on his lip, and Beth was forbidden
to kiss him for fear of catching it. He had a garden of his own too,
and a pig, and little boiled potatoes in his cottage. The doctor's
brother died of cancer, and Beth supposed he had been naughty and
kissed old Krangle, though she wondered he cared to, as Krangle had a
very prickly chin. The doctor often came to see papa. He used to talk
about the Bible, and then the children were sent out of the room. Once
Beth hid under the table to hear what he said. It was all about God,
whom it appeared that he did not like. He had a knob at the end of his
nose, and Beth laughed at it, in punishment of which, as she used to
believe, her own nose developed a little knob at the end. Her mind was
very much exercised about the doctor and his household. He and his
brother and sister used to live together, but now he lived alone, and
on a bed in one of the rooms, according to Jane Nettles, there were
furs, and lovely silks, satins, and laces, all being eaten by moths
and destroyed because there was no one to look after them. It seemed
such a pity, but whose were they? Where was the lady?
Bridget used to come up to the nursery when the children were in bed,
to talk to Jane Nettles, and look out of the window. Those gossips in
the nursery were a great source of disturbance to Beth when she ought
to have been composing herself to sleep. She recollected nothing of
the conversations more corrupting than that ghastly account of how the
girl was exhumed, so it is likely that the servants exercised some
discretion when they dropped their voices to a whisper, as they often
did; but these whispered colloquies made her restless and cross, and
brought down upon her a smart order to go to sleep, to which she used
to answer defiantly, "I will if you'll ask me a riddle." One of the
riddles was: "Between two sticks, between two stones, between two old
men's shin-bones. What's that?" The answer had something to do with a
graveyard, but Beth could not remember what.
She used to suffer a small martyrdom in her little crib on those
evenings from what she called "snuff up her nose," a hot, dry, burning
sensation which must have been caused by a stuffy room, and the
feverish state she tossed herself into when she was kept awake after
her regular hour for sleep. Sometimes she sat up in bed suddenly, and
cried aloud. Then Jane Nettles would push her down again on her pillow
roughly, and threaten to call mamma if she wasn't good directly.
Occasionally mamma heard her, and came up of her own accord, and shook
her by the shoulder, and scolded her. Then Beth would lie still
sobbing silently, and wretched as only a lonely, uncomprehended, and
uncomplaining child can be. No one had the faintest conception of what
she suffered. Her naughtinesses were remembered against her, but her
latent tenderness was never suspected. Once the old Doctor said:
"That's a peculiarly sensitive, high-strung, nervous child; you must
be gentle with her," and both parents had stared at him. They were
matter-of-fact creatures themselves, comparatively speaking, with a
notion that such nonsense as nervousness should be shaken out of a
child.
At dinner, one day, Beth saw little creatures crawling in a piece of
cheese she had on her plate, and uttered an exclamation of disgust.
"Those are only mites, you silly child," her father said, and then to
her horror, he took up the piece, and ate it. "Do look at that child,
Caroline!" he exclaimed, "she's turned quite pale."
Beth puzzled her head for long afterwards to know what it meant to
turn pale.
Little seeds of superstition were sown in her mind at this time, and
afterwards flourished. She found a wedding-ring in her first piece of
Christmas cake, and was told she would be the first of the party to
marry, which made her feel very important.
Being so sensitive herself, she was morbidly careful of the feelings
of others, and committed sins of insincerity without compunction in
her efforts to spare them. She and Mildred were waiting ready dressed
one day to go and pay a call with mamma. Beth had her big bonnet on,
and was happy; and Mildred also was in a high state of delight. She
said Beth's breath smelt of strawberries, and wanted to know what her
own smelt of.
"Raspberries," Beth answered instantly. It was not true, but Beth felt
that something of the kind was expected of her, and so responded
sympathetically. When they got to the house, they were shown into an
immense room, and wandered about it. Beth upset some cushions, and had
awful qualms, expecting every moment to be pounced upon, and shaken;
but she forgot her fright on approaching her hostess, and discovering
to her great surprise that she was busy doing black monkeys on a grey
ground in woolwork. She was astonished to find that it was possible to
do such wonderful work, and she wanted to be taught immediately; but
her mother made her ashamed of herself for supposing that _she_ could
do it, silly little body. They stayed dinner, and Beth cried with rage
because the servant poured white sauce over her fish, and without
asking her too. The fish was an island, and Beth was the hungry sea,
devouring it bit by bit. Of course if you put white sauce over it, you
converted it into a table with a white cloth on, or something of that
kind, which you could not eat, so the fish was spoilt. She got into a
difficulty, too, about Miss Deeble's drawing-room, which was upstairs,
overlooking the bay, and you could only see the water from the window,
so there were water-colours on the wall. Her mother smilingly tried to
explain, but Beth stamped, and stuck to her point; the water accounted
for the water-colours.
On the way home, Beth found a new interest in life. The mill had been
burnt down, and they went to see the smouldering embers, and Beth
smelt fire for the first time. The miller's family had been burnt out,
and were sheltering in a shed. One little boy had his fingers all
crumpled up from the fire. Beth's benevolence awoke. She was all
sympathetic excitement, and wanted to do something for somebody. The
miller's wife was lying on a mattress on the floor. She had a little
baby, a new one, a pudgy red-looking thing. Mrs. Caldwell fed the
other children with bread-and-milk, and Beth offered to teach them
their letters.
Mrs. Caldwell laughed at her: "_You_ teach them their letters!" she
exclaimed. "You had better learn your own properly." And Mildred also
jeered. Beth subsided, crimson with shame at being thus lowered in
everybody's estimation. She was deficient in self-esteem, and required
to be encouraged. Praise merely gave her confidence; but her mother
never would praise her. She brought all her children up on the same
plan, regardless of their different dispositions. It made Mildred vain
to praise her, and therefore Beth must not be praised; and so her
mother checked her mental growth again and again instead of helping
her to develop it. "It's no use your trying to do that, Beth, you
can't," she would say, when Beth would have done it easily, if only
she had been assured that she could.
Beth had a strange dream that night after the fire, which made a
lasting impression upon her. Dorman's Isle was a green expanse, flat
as a table, and covered with the short grass that grows by the sea. At
high tide it was surrounded by water, but when the tide was low, it
rested on great grey, rugged rocks, as the lid of a box rests upon its
sides. Between the grey of the rocks and the green of the grass there
was a fringe of sea-pinks. That night she dreamt that she was under
Dorman's Isle, and it was a great bare cave, not very high, and
lighted by torches which people held in their hands. There were a
number of people, and they were all members of her own family,
ancestors in the dresses of their day, distant relations--numbers of
strange people whom she had never heard of; as well as her own father
and mother, brothers and sisters. She knew she was under Dorman's
Isle, but she knew also that it was the dark space beneath the stage
of a theatre. When she entered, the rest of the family were already
assembled; but they none of them spoke to each other, and the doors
kept opening and shutting, and the people seemed to melt away, until
at last only three or four remained, and they were just going. She saw
the shine on the paint of the door-posts, and the smoke of the
torches, as they let themselves out. Then they had all gone, and left
her alone in a cave full of smoke. Vainly she struggled to follow
them, the doors were fast, the smoke was smothering her, and in the
agony of a last effort to escape she awoke.
In after days, when Beth began to think, she used to wonder how it was
she knew those people were her ancestors, and that the place was like
any part of a theatre. She had never heard either of ancestors or
theatres at that time. Was it recollection? Or is there some more
perfect power to know than the intellect--a power lying latent in the
whole race, which will eventually come into possession of it; but with
which, at present, only some few rare beings are perfectly endowed.
Beth had the sensation of having been nearer to something in her
infancy than she ever was again--nearer to knowing what it is the
trees whisper--what the murmur means, the all-pervading murmur which
sounds incessantly when everything is hushed, as at night; nearer to
the "arcane" of that evening on the Castle Hill when she first felt
her kinship with nature, and burst into song. It may have been
hereditary memory, a knowledge of things transmitted to her by her
ancestors along with their features, virtues, and vices; but, at any
rate, she herself was sure that she possessed a power of some kind in
her infancy which gradually lapsed as her intellectual faculties
developed. She was conscious that the senses had come between her and
some mysterious joy which was not of the senses, but of the spirit.
There lingered what seemed to be the recollection of a condition
anterior to this, a condition of which no tongue can tell, which is
not to be put into words, or made evident to those who have no
recollection; but which some will comprehend by the mere allusion to
it. All her life long Beth preserved a half consciousness of this
something--something which eluded her--something from which she
gradually drifted further away as she grew older--some sort of vision
which opened up fresh tracts to her; but whether of country, or
whether of thought, she could not say. Only, when it came to her, all
was immeasurable about her; and she was above--above in a great calm
through which she moved without any sort of effort that is known to
us; she just thought it, and was there; while humanity dwindled away
into insignificance below.
One other strange vision she had which she never forgot. With her
intellect, she believed it to have been a dream, but her further
faculty always insisted that it was a recollection. She was with a
large company in an indescribable, hollow space, bare of all
furnishments because none were required; and into this space there
came a great commotion, bright light and smoke, without heat or sense
of suffocation. Then she was alone, making for an aperture; struggling
and striving with pain of spirit to gain it; and when she had found
it, she shot through, and awoke in the world. She awoke with a
terrible sense of desolation upon her, and with the consciousness of
having traversed infinite space at infinite speed in an interval of
time which her mortal mind could not measure.
All through life, when she was in possession of her further faculty,
and perceived by that means--which was only at fitful intervals,
doubtless because of unfavourable circumstances and surroundings--she
was calm, strong, and confident. She looked upon life as from a
height, viewing it both in detail and as a whole. But when she had
only her intellect to rely upon, all was uncertain, and she became
weak, vacillating, and dependent. So that she appeared to be a
singular mixture of weakness and strength, courage and cowardice,
faith and distrust; and just what she would do depended very much on
what was expected of her, or what influence she was under, and also on
some sudden impulse which no one, herself included, could have
anticipated.