I am but a poor scribe; ill-versed in the craft of wielding words and
phrases, as the cultivated reader (if I should ever happen to have one)
will no doubt very soon find out for himself.
[Illustration:]
I have been for many years an object of pity and contempt to all who
ever gave me a thought--to all but _one_! Yet of all that ever lived on
this earth I have been, perhaps, the happiest and most privileged, as
that reader will discover if he perseveres to the end.
My outer and my inner life have been as the very poles--asunder; and if,
at the eleventh hour, I have made up my mind to give my story to the
world, it is not in order to rehabilitate myself in the eyes of my
fellow-men, deeply as I value their good opinion; for I have always
loved them and wished them well, and would fain express my goodwill and
win theirs, if that were possible.
It is because the regions where I have found my felicity are accessible
to all, and that many, better trained and better gifted, will explore
them to far better purpose than I, and to the greater glory and benefit
of mankind, when once I have given them the clew. Before I can do this,
and in order to show how I came by this clew myself, I must tell, as
well as I may, the tale of my checkered career--in telling which,
moreover, I am obeying the last behest of one whose lightest wish was
my law.
If I am more prolix than I need be, it must be set down to my want of
experience in the art of literary composition--to a natural wish I have
to show myself neither better nor worse than I believe myself to be; to
the charm, the unspeakable charm, that personal reminiscences have for
the person principally concerned, and which he cannot hope to impart,
however keenly he may feel it, without gifts and advantages that have
been denied to me.
And this leads me to apologize for the egotism of this Memoir, which is
but an introduction to another and longer one that I hope to publish
later. To write a story of paramount importance to mankind, it is true,
but all about one's outer and one's inner self, to do this without
seeming somewhat egotistical, requires something akin to genius--and I
am but a poor scribe.
* * * * *
"_Combien j'ai douce souvenance
Du joli lieu de ma naissance_!"
These quaint lines have been running in my head at intervals through
nearly all my outer life, like an oft-recurring burden in an endless
ballad--sadly monotonous, alas! the ballad, which is mine; sweetly
monotonous the burden, which is by Châteaubriand.
I sometimes think that to feel the full significance of this refrain one
must have passed one's childhood in sunny France, where it was written,
and the remainder of one's existence in mere London--or worse than mere
London--as has been the case with me. If I had spent all my life from
infancy upward in Bloomsbury, or Clerkenwell, or Whitechapel, my early
days would be shorn of much of their retrospective glamour as I look
back on them in these my after-years.
_"Combien j'ai douce souvenance!"_
It was on a beautiful June morning in a charming French garden, where
the warm, sweet atmosphere was laden with the scent of lilac and
syringa, and gay with butterflies and dragon-flies and humblebees, that
I began my conscious existence with the happiest day of all my
outer life.
It is true that I had vague memories (with many a blank between) of a
dingy house in the heart of London, in a long street of desolating
straightness, that led to a dreary square and back again, and nowhere
else for me; and then of a troubled and exciting journey that seemed of
jumbled days and nights. I could recall the blue stage-coach with the
four tall, thin, brown horses, so quiet and modest and well-behaved; the
red-coated guard and his horn; the red-faced driver and his husky voice
and many capes.
Then the steamer with its glistening deck, so beautiful and white it
seemed quite a desecration to walk upon it--this spotlessness did not
last very long; and then two wooden piers with a light-house on each,
and a quay, and blue-bloused workmen and red-legged little soldiers with
mustaches, and bare-legged fisher-women, all speaking a language that I
knew as well as the other commoner language I had left behind; but which
I had always looked upon as an exclusive possession of my father's and
mother's and mine for the exchange of sweet confidence and the
bewilderment of outsiders; and here were little boys and girls in the
street, quite common children, who spoke it as well and better than I
did myself.
After this came the dream of a strange, huge, top-heavy vehicle, that
seemed like three yellow carriages stuck together, and a mountain of
luggage at the top under an immense black tarpaulin, which ended in a
hood; and beneath the hood sat a blue-bloused man with a singular cap,
like a concertina, and mustaches, who cracked a loud whip over five
squealing, fussy, pugnacious white and gray horses, with bells on their
necks and bushy fox-tails on their foreheads, and their own tails
carefully tucked up behind.
From the _coupé_ where I sat with my father and mother I could watch
them well as they led us through dusty roads with endless apple-trees or
poplars on either side. Little barefooted urchins (whose papas and
mammas wore wooden shoes and funny white nightcaps) ran after us for
French half-pennies, which were larger than English ones, and pleasanter
to have and to hold! Up hill and down we went; over sounding wooden
bridges, through roughly paved streets in pretty towns to large
court-yards, where five other quarrelsome steeds, gray and white, were
waiting to take the place of the old ones--worn out, but
quarreling still!
And through the night I could hear the gay music of the bells and hoofs,
the rumbling of the wheels the cracking of the eternal whip, as I
fidgeted from one familiar lap to the other in search of sleep; and
waking out of a doze I could see the glare of the red lamps on the five
straining white and gray backs that dragged us so gallantly through the
dark summer night.
[Illustration: "A STRANGE, HUGE, TOP-HEAVY VEHICLE."]
Then it all became rather tiresome and intermittent and confused, till
we reached at dusk next day a quay by a broad river; and as we drove
along it, under thick trees, we met other red and blue and green lamped
five-horsed diligences starting on their long journey just as ours was
coming to an end.
Then I knew (because I was a well-educated little boy, and heard my
father exclaim, "Here's Paris at last!") that we had entered the capital
of France--a fact that impressed me very much--so much, it seems, that I
went to sleep for thirty-six hours at a stretch, and woke up to find
myself in the garden I have mentioned, and to retain possession of that
self without break or solution of continuity (except when I went to
sleep again) until now.
* * * * *
The happiest day in all my outer life!
For in an old shed full of tools and lumber at the end of the garden,
and half-way between an empty fowl-house and a disused stable (each an
Eden in itself) I found a small toy-wheelbarrow--quite the most
extraordinary, the most unheard of and undreamed of, humorously,
daintily, exquisitely fascinating object I had ever come across in all
my brief existence.
I spent hours--enchanted hours--in wheeling brick-bats from the stable
to the fowl-house, and more enchanted hours in wheeling them all back
again, while genial French workmen, who were busy in and out of the
house where we were to live, stopped every now and then to ask
good-natured questions of the "p'tit Anglais," and commend his knowledge
of their tongue, and his remarkable skill in the management of a
wheelbarrow. Well I remember wondering, with newly-aroused
self-consciousness, at the intensity, the poignancy, the extremity of my
bliss, and looking forward with happy confidence to an endless
succession of such hours in the future.
But next morning, though the weather was as fine, and the wheelbarrow
and the brick-bats and the genial workmen were there, and all the scents
and sights and sounds were the same, the first fine careless rapture was
not to be caught again, and the glory and the freshness had departed.
Thus did I, on the very dawning of life, reach at a single tide the
high-water-mark of my earthly bliss--never to be reached again by me on
this side of the ivory gate--and discover that to make the perfection of
human happiness endure there must be something more than a sweet French
garden, a small French wheelbarrow, and a nice little English boy who
spoke French and had the love of approbation--a fourth dimension
is required.