Of my earliest childhood I can form no consecutive picture; I shall
therefore pass over it quickly. Certain incidents stand out with
extraordinary vividness, but the chain uniting them is wanting, and
it is even impossible for me to be quite sure as to the order in
which they occurred. Some are so trivial that I do not know why I
should remember them; others, at the time, doubtless, more important,
have now lost their significance; and countless others, again, I
must have completely forgotten. But it occurs to me, on looking back
deliberately, that I have changed very little from what I was in those
first years. I have developed, but what I was then I am now, what I
cared for then I care for now. In other words, like everybody else,
I came into this world a mere bundle of inherited instincts, for the
activity of which I was no more responsible than for the falling of
last night’s rain.
Of the dawning of consciousness I have no recollection whatever. Back
farther than anything else there reach two impressions――one, of being
set to dance naked on a table, amid the laughter of women, and the
rhythmic clapping of their hands; the other, probably later in date,
of what must have been a house-cleaning, stamped on my mind by an
inexplicable fear of those flakey collections of dust which gather
under furniture that has not been moved for a long time. By then I had
certainly learned to talk, for those flakes of dust I called “quacks.”
I do not know where the name came from, nor why I should have disliked
“quacks,” but they affected me with a strange dread, and here was a
whole army of them where I had never seen but one or two. Some stupid
person running after me with a broom pretended to sweep them over me,
and I started bawling at the top of my voice. Then, for consolation,
I was lifted up to bury my nose in a bowl of violets, and the colour
and sweetness of the flowers took away my trouble. Probably it was
later than this that I first became aware of a peculiar sensibility to
dress――not to underclothing, but to my outer garments. To be dressed in
a new suit of clothes gave me a curious physical pleasure――a feeling
purely sensual, and that must, I imagine, have been connected with the
dawn of obscure sex instincts. Such things can be of little interest
save to the student of psychology, and it would be tedious to catalogue
them in full, but I have no doubt myself that if they, and others,
had been intelligently observed, the whole of my future could have
been cast from them. To me, I confess, they throw a disquieting light
upon all human affairs, reviving that sombre figure of destiny which
overshadowed the antique world.
Another and happier instinct which I brought with me from the unknown
was an intense sympathy with animals. There was not a cat or dog or
goat or donkey in the village that I had not struck up a friendship
with. I even carried this sympathy so far as to insist on feeding daily
the ridiculous stone lions which flanked the doorsteps at Derryaghy
House. I don’t think I ever actually believed that their morning meal
of stale bread gave much pleasure to these patient beasts, and I had
with my own eyes seen sparrows and thrushes――who very soon came to look
out for me――snatch it from them before my back was turned; still, I
persevered, stroking their smooth backs, kissing their cold muzzles,
just as I lavished depths of affection on a stuffed, dilapidated,
velvet elephant who for many years was my nightly bed-fellow.
My only impressions of my mother go back to those days or, possibly,
earlier――a voice singing gay songs to the piano, while I dropped
asleep in my bed upstairs――and then, again, somebody lifting me out of
this bed to kiss me, the close contact of a face wet with tears, the
pressure of arms that held me clasped tightly, that even hurt a little.
That is all. I cannot remember how she looked, or anything else. On the
evening when she said good-bye to me and left our house, I knew she was
crying, but, though it called up in me a sort of solemn wonder, I did
not understand it, and went to sleep almost as soon as she put me back
into my bed. It was not till next day that my own tears came, with the
first real sorrow I had known.
* * * * *
There follows now a sort of blank in my recollections, which continues
on to my ninth or tenth year. I do not know why this period should
have been so unproductive of lasting impressions. It is like a
tranquil water over which I bend in the hope of seeing some face or
vision ripple to the surface, but my hope is disappointed. Nothing
emerges――not even a memory of any of those ailments, measles and what
not, from which, in common with other children, I suppose I must have
suffered. Nor can I recollect learning to read. I can remember quite
well when I couldn’t read, for I have a very distinct recollection of
lying on my stomach, on the parlour floor, a book open in front of
me, along whose printed, meaningless lines I drew my finger, turning
page after page till the last was reached, though what solemn pleasure
I could have got from so dull a game――surely the most tedious ever
invented――I now utterly fail to comprehend.
I was always very fond of being read to, except when the story had
a moral, or was about pious children, when I hated it. The last of
these moral tales I listened to was called “Cassy.” I particularly
disliked it, but I can remember now only one scene, where Cassy comes
into an empty house at night, and discovers a corpse there. This had an
effect on my mind which for several days made me extremely reluctant
to go upstairs by myself after dark. “Jessica’s First Prayer,”
“Vinegar Hill,” “The Golden Ladder”――how I loathed them all! Every
Sunday, after dinner, my father would take some such volume from the
shelf, open it, and put on his spectacles. Holding the book at a long
distance from his eyes, he would read aloud in a monotonous, unanimated
voice, while I sat on a high-backed chair and listened, for I was
not allowed to play the most innocent game, nor even to go out for a
walk. These miserable tales were full of the conversions of priggish
children; of harrowing scenes in public-houses or squalid city dens.
Some of them were written to illustrate the Ten Commandments; others
to illustrate the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer. They contained not
the faintest glimmer of imagination or life: from cover to cover they
were ugly, dull, unintelligent, full of death, poverty and calamity.
On the afternoon when “Cassy’s” successor was produced――I forget its
name――in a state of exasperation, brought about by mingled boredom and
depression, I snatched the book out of my father’s hands and flung it
on the fire. I was whipped and sent to bed, but anything was better
than “Vinegar Hill,” and next Sunday, also, I refused to listen. Again,
with tingling buttocks, I was banished to the upper regions, but really
I had triumphed, for when the fateful day came round once more, the
book-case was not opened, and I had never again to listen to one of
those sanctimonious tales.
Fairy stories and animal stories were what I liked best, while some of
the old nursery rhymes and jingles had a fascination for me.
“How many miles to Babylon?
Three score and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?――
Yes, and back again.”
Was it some magical suggestion in the word “candlelight” that
invariably evoked in a small child’s mind a definite picture of an old
fantastic town of towers and turrets, lit by waving candles, and with
windows all ablaze in dark old houses? Many of these rhymes had this
quality of picture making:
“Hey, diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon:
The little dog laughed
To see such sport
When the dish ran away with the spoon.”
That, I suppose, is pure nonsense, yet the magic was there. Before and
after the cow made her amazing leap the stuff was a mere jingle: it
was the word “Moon” that brought up the picture: and I saw the white,
docile beast, suddenly transformed, pricked by the sting of midsummer
madness, with lowered head and curling horns, poised for flight, for
the wonderful upward leap, while a monstrous, glowing moon hung like a
great scarlet Chinese lantern in the clouds, low against a black night.
At this time I had few books I cared for, but as I grew older, and my
powers of understanding increased, I found more, for up at Derryaghy
House was a whole library in which I might rummage without any other
interference than that my father could exercise from a distance.
Sometimes when I brought a book home which he did not approve of, he
would send me back with it; but if I had begun it I always finished it.
I had made this a rule; though, on the other hand, if I had not begun
it, I let my father have his way.
Everything connected with the East had a deep attraction for me――or,
shall I say, what I imagined the East to be――a country of magicians and
mysterious talismans, of crouching Sphinxes and wonderful gardens. I
delighted in the more marvellous stories in the “Arabian Nights,” and
I regretted infinitely that life was really not like that. To go for a
walk and fall straightway on some wonderful adventure, that was what I
should have loved. I remember poring over a big folio of photographs of
Eastern monuments. Those mystical, winged beasts with human heads, in
their attitude of eternal waiting and listening, touched some chord in
my imagination: they had that strangeness which I adored, and at the
same time they had an odd familiarity. I appeared to remember――but, oh,
so dimly!――having seen them before, not in pictures, but under a hot,
heavy, languid sun, long, long ago. The luxuriousness, the softness and
sleepy charm of the Asiatic temper――I had something in common with it,
I could understand it. The melodious singing of a voice through the
cool twilight; the notes of a lute dying slowly into silence; another
voice, low and clear and musical, reading from the “Koran”――where
had I heard all that? I pictured great coloured bazaars, where grave
merchants with long white beards sat cross-legged and silent, where
beautiful, naked, golden-skinned slaves stood waiting for a purchaser,
where you could buy silken carpets that would carry you over the world,
and black, ebony horses, swifter than light.
* * * * *
Mrs. Carroll had given me one of the upstairs rooms at Derryaghy to
be my very own, and had let me furnish it myself from a store of
old, out-moded furniture, which, for I know not how long, had been
gathering dust and cobwebs in a kind of immense, low attic called the
lumber-room. Everything was more or less threadbare and worn, but I had
plenty to choose from, and the actual rummaging was as exciting as an
adventure on a desert island. I had discovered a quaint little piano,
with but two or three octaves of notes, and most of those silent, save
for a twangling of wires. This I thought must be Prudence Carroll’s
spinet, for it looked exactly like the one in her portrait; indeed,
that had been my principal reason for bringing it downstairs. With
Prudence Carroll I had been in love all my life, and sometimes, in the
dusk, when I struck very softly one of the cracked treble notes of the
spinet, I would imagine her spirit stealing on tip-toe up behind me
to listen. Another discovery, and perhaps the most exciting, was of
an old davenport, with a secret drawer at the back of it――not so very
secret, perhaps, since I had found it without looking for it, owing to
the weakness of the spring, and my own energetic dusting. Inside was
nothing more interesting than some old accounts, written on discoloured
paper, but anybody who opened it to-day would, I fancy, find more
appropriate documents....
There was a cushioned window-seat, low and deep, and from it I could
look out over the sea. In summer, with the window wide open, I could
listen to it also, and to all kinds of lovely songs coming through
it, dreamy and happy and sad. For there was a sort of undercurrent of
dreaming that ran through my life. The romance surrounding the picture
of Prudence Carroll, that peculiar, brooding quality of mind by which
I could give to such things a kind of spiritual life that had for me
an absolute reality, was, perhaps, only too characteristic of a mental
condition which might unsympathetically be called that of perpetual
wool-gathering. Though I played cricket and football, and bathed and
knocked about generally with the other boys in the village, I had no
close friend, and I dreamed of an imaginary playmate. For this playmate
and myself I invented appropriate adventures. He had a name, which I
shall not write here, and I still think he was an extraordinarily nice
boy, but he dropped out of my existence about my fifteenth year. I
had my secret world, too, where such adventures took place. Behind
this inner, imaginative life must have lurked a vague dissatisfaction
with life as I actually found it. Now and then I read something which
appeared to me to describe my other world, and, as I chanced on such
suggestions more frequently in verse than in prose, I became a great
reader of poetry. The passages that echoed so familiarly, though so
faintly, from my mysterious, lovely land, brought it up before me very
much as the scent of a flower may call up a vision of a high-walled
summer garden. Whether any reality lay behind it, I don’t know that I
even asked myself; but, on drowsy summer afternoons, dream and reality
would float and mingle together, and I would feel intensely happy.
As I write I would give much to be able to live over again one of those
summer afternoons, when the air hung heavy with the scent of mignonette
and roses, and Mrs. Carroll sat reading or working, while I lay in the
grass on my back at her feet, and the low sound of the sea splashed
through the silence of my sleepy thoughts, and the booming of a bee
was the slumberous soul of June or July heat turned to music. In those
hours my other world was very, very near.
Afterwards I sometimes wondered if there were a place where those lived
days were laid away, or if their beauty, happiness and peace, must be
quite lost. They had a quality of peacefulness that for me no later
days have had: I seemed to dip deep into their cleansing dreamy quiet,
as into a clear sea.
Other dreams I had, that were not so pleasant, but they came only
at night. One I still remember vividly was unfortunately typical of
many. I seemed to be walking down a street with another boy, when
our attention was attracted by the high, bare wall of a house. There
was something, I know not what, about this house, which made it
different from its neighbours and aroused our curiosity. We noticed
in the wall, almost on the street level, a small window. This window
was open, and a fatal fascination drew us to it at once. I watched my
friend crawl through, for we knew the house was empty; then I followed
him, the opening being just wide enough to admit me. Inside, we found
ourselves on a gigantic marble staircase, spiral in form, and winding
up and down as far as we could follow it with our eyes. There were
no windows except the one we had entered by, and it, somehow, was
invisible from inside, yet the place was perfectly lighted. There
were no landings, no doors, nothing but this staircase, absolutely
uniform in its construction, with low, broad, marble steps which wound
down and down, and up and up. The place resembled a vast, still well,
and we could not hear the slightest sound as we stood listening. The
steps were very shallow, and we ran lightly down. The other boy went
more quickly than I did, and in a little while I lost sight of him,
though I still heard his footsteps, growing ever fainter, till at last
they died away, and the stillness closed in about me with a strange
heaviness. I continued to follow him, but all at once I noticed that
the stairs I trod were darker and stained with damp. A faint chill
odour and feeling of damp and decay rose, too, into my face, and the
light was growing dimmer. I knew I was going down into a great vault
or tomb far below the ground, a charnel-house, an unknown place of
death. I caught sight far below me of a light as of a lamp burning, and
I had an intuition, a consciousness that came to me in a flash, that
my companion had awakened something. This knowledge brought with it
a memory of mysterious horror, a memory that I had been here before.
Then, with an ever increasing terror, I began to run up the steps I
had just run down, but my feet had grown heavy and my limbs weak. Up
and up I hurried, seeing nothing before me but an endless stretch of
winding marble stairs. I did not know where my window was, I might even
now have passed it. I heard nothing, but I knew I was being followed,
and that whatever it was that followed me was gaining on me rapidly. I
could hardly breathe: an agony of fear shook me. Then I heard close to
my ear the bark of a dog. It was the window. I dropped on my knees and
squeezed my head and shoulders through; I was almost free when I felt
myself grasped from behind and with a scream I woke, shaking, panting,
bathed in sweat.
There came a time when these nightmares occurred so frequently that
I got to be able to waken myself out of them. While I was actually
dreaming――when I would have run a few steps down the stair, for
example――a sudden foresight of what was coming would dawn upon me, and
by a violent struggle I would break through the net of sleep and sit
up in bed. Many of these dreams were connected with a dark, mahogany
wardrobe which stood in my father’s bedroom. When I had begun to dream
and found myself in that room I knew something evil was going to
happen, and I would watch the wardrobe door and struggle violently to
wake myself before it should open. Even when I was wide awake, and in
broad daylight, this so ordinary piece of furniture came to have, for
me, a sinister aspect. It was odd that I should have suffered so from
these grisly nocturnal terrors, for in ordinary life I was not in any
way a coward. A feeling of shame made me keep them a profound secret,
and as I grew older they diminished, till by the time I was fifteen
they had practically ceased.
* * * * *
Perhaps I should here attempt some slight description of my father,
whom I have already mentioned, and of my home. My father was the
National schoolmaster at Newcastle, County Down, and our house was next
door to the school. My bedroom window looked out over the sea, about
a hundred yards away, and behind the house were the Mourne Mountains,
and the Derryaghy estate, which took in the lower slopes of Slieve
Donard. Our house, when the Virginian creeper that covered it was red,
looked pretty enough from the road, but was poorly and even meagrely
furnished. The most that could be said for it was that it was clean
and tidy. The few attempts at ornamentation would have been better
away――the two or three pictures, the hideous vases on the mantelpiece.
My father had a strong liking for illuminated texts, and there were
several of these, in gilt frames, in every room in the house, including
the kitchen and the bath-room. What furniture there was was modern,
cheap, and objectionable: it was characteristic of my father that he
had never even bought himself a comfortable arm-chair.
He was a tall man, thin and grizzled, pale, and dressed always in an
ill-cut, ready-made, black tail-coat and waistcoat, with dark gray
trousers. I always disliked his clothes, especially the two shining
buttons at the back of his coat. He wore a beard and moustache, both
somewhat ragged, and his brown eyes were indescribably melancholy. His
hands and feet were very coarse and large. There was power in his face,
but there was a depressing lack of anything approaching geniality. He
gave me the impression that he did everything from a sense of duty,
and nothing because he took a pleasure in it. The seriousness of his
expression was truly portentous: it was impossible that anything in
the world could matter so much as that. He was not well-off――that is
obvious from the position he occupied――but he lived in a way that was
unnecessarily economical. He was by no means ungenerous if it were
some case of distress that had come to his knowledge, but in ordinary
life he was excessively near. The only luxuries he had ever permitted
himself were these coloured texts, and they cost little.
When I was with him I never felt quite at my ease, and this made me
sulky and perpetually on the defensive. I was not more with him than
I could help, and as we lived alone together, with only an old woman
who came in every day to look after the house and do the cooking, it
must have been easy for him to see that I avoided his society. I never
pretended to myself to have any particular affection for him, and I
don’t even know that it would have mended matters if I had.
One night, when I was about fourteen, I woke up in the dark, with the
consciousness that it was very late and that I was not alone in my
room. The next moment I knew my father was there, kneeling beside my
bed. I lay absolutely quiet: I knew he was praying, and praying for me.
Presently I heard him sigh, and then rise noiselessly to his feet, but
I gave no sign. I heard him move away, I heard my door being softly
closed, the faint click of the latch as it slipped into its place. I
lay on with my eyes wide open, wondering why he had come in like this.
I did not like it. It made me feel uncomfortable, as all emotions do
when we are unable to respond to them. I believed my father cared for
me far more than for anything else in the world, yet somehow that did
not help matters. It was not the sort of love that begets love in
return. Though he loved me, I felt he did not trust me, or rather that
he believed I had an infinite capacity for yielding to temptation. By
this time I understood that when my mother left home she had gone to
somebody else. I knew at any rate that she was living, for she had sent
a sum of money for my education, which my father had returned, though
some scruple of conscience had made him think it right to tell me he
had done so. But he explained nothing and I asked no questions. As I
lay awake that night I thought of all this, and it occurred to me
that it might have much to do with his extraordinary anxiety about my
religious and moral life. He was afraid, and I lay awake for a long
time trying to puzzle out what it was he was afraid of.
* * * * *
It was quite impossible for him to make me religious. For one thing,
it was not in my nature. It was not so much that I disbelieved what
I was taught of religion, as that these instructions aroused in me
an implacable antagonism. I did not like the notion of an all-seeing
God, for instance. Imperfectly grasped, this conception represented
to my mind a kind of tyranny, a kind of espionage, which I strongly
resented. Moreover, I detested Sundays and everything connected with
them. When I went to church it was with a face like a thunder-cloud,
and once there, with an incredible obstinacy, I would shut my ears to
all that went on, prayers, hymns, and sermon. This fact, combined with
so many others, tended, as time passed, to make my relations with my
father more and more strained, for he was religious in the narrowest
and severest fashion. I remember his taking me, one Sunday evening,
when I was between twelve and thirteen, to hear a preacher who had come
from a considerable distance to hold two special services. The occasion
stands out from all others, because it was the only one upon which I
was startled out of my habitual attitude of sulky defiance. For the
first three-quarters of an hour all went as usual, and when the sermon
was about to begin I prepared myself to think of other things. But the
text, or texts, delivered in a quiet, impressive voice, arrested my
attention.
“For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom:
and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and
pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from
heaven.... Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young
men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: and I will
show wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood and
fire, and vapour of smoke: the sun shall be turned into darkness, and
the moon into blood.... And then shall they see the Son of Man coming
in a cloud, with power and great glory.”
In spite of myself the words thrilled me with their vivid, menacing
suggestiveness, and I listened intently to what followed. It seemed
apparent that the end of the world was at hand. The signs were taken
up one by one, and it was shown, to my growing discomfiture, that all
had been fulfilled: nothing remained but the sounding of the last
trumpet, which, according to the preacher――he seemed even to regard
it as highly probable――might take place that very night. By the time
he had reached this point my disquietude had become abject fear, and
I joined fervently in the last prayer. But why had I never been told
of this imminent danger? When we got back from church, it was a very
subdued boy who sat by his father’s side, a Bible open on the parlour
table in front of him. I read with a feverish haste to prove my changed
way of life, and, it must be confessed, also to keep off as long as
possible the hour of bed-time. There was a horrible plausibility about
what I had heard. The concluding words kept ringing in my ears. “I see
no reason why it should not be this very night.” “Wouldn’t it, in fact,
be just the kind of thing that _would_ happen at night?” I asked myself
piteously; and I was tormented by a dread of the hideous trumpet note,
by a bloody moon, and by the apparition of dead and shrouded bodies,
rising up with glaring eyeballs and tied jaws and all the mouldering
signs of the grave――dreadful, galvanized corpses, risen from their
wormy beds to meet their Lord in the air. At length I could put off my
bed-time no longer. I could see my father was not convinced by the open
Bible, and, with his usual suspiciousness, had become curious as to
what passages I was so interested in. Ten minutes later, on my knees
in my small, candle-lit bedroom, I was lying to my God of a tremendous
love I had begun to feel for Him; but in spite of this I passed an
abominable night. In the morning I continued my miserable hypocrisy,
grovelling before this frightful Deity for Whom I had developed so
sudden and demonstrative an affection, and Whom, at the same time, I
begged naïvely not to come. Gradually, but not for several days, these
terrors faded, receiving their death-blow when my father told me that
all Jews must return to Jerusalem before the last day. Now there was a
Jewish family living at Castlewellan, whom I thought I could keep my
eye on, and as I had heard nothing of their moving I felt fairly safe.
* * * * *
Very quickly I became more emancipated as I began to think things
out for myself, and a year later I could laugh at these early fears.
My father told me a crude anecdote which he had read, I think, in
Mark Pattison’s “Memoirs.” A man in a public-house in Leicestershire
had used the oath, “God strike me blind,” and instantly he had been
struck blind by a flash of lightning. On becoming converted he had
recovered his sight while taking the Sacrament. This edifying tale was,
I believe, vouched for by a friend and disciple of Cardinal Newman’s,
but to me, I confess, it seemed as stupid and revolting as anything
I had ever heard. My father declared it to be true, yet I secretly
doubted it, and that afternoon, in my own room, standing by the window,
I said aloud, and very deliberately, “God strike me blind! God strike
me blind!” I waited with a mingled trepidation and incredulity, as if
I had thrown some mysterious bomb into the unknown. A sea-gull flew
past the window, white against the dark autumn sky: the leaves of the
Virginian creeper trembled and grew still. I said again and in a louder
voice, “God strike me blind!” But no flash of lightning followed. Down
below, on the beach, the gray waves curled over with a slow musical
splash. I looked into the sky, but it was calm and untroubled, and I
decided that the story was a myth.
Most of my religious difficulties were, however, metaphysical. The
conception of eternity was one I could not grasp. I could, in a vague
way, figure myself as living on for ever, but I could not with the
same facility move my mind backward. I seemed able to imagine that
there might be no end, but I could not imagine that there had been no
beginning. “If there had been no beginning, how could we ever have
got as far as this?” I asked myself. “Where I am now――this particular
moment――must be at a certain distance from something, or it cannot be
anywhere. But if there is no beginning, then this moment cannot be any
further on than yesterday was!” My brain grew dizzy with vain efforts
to think impossible thoughts. I would break a stick and say, “God can
make it that I haven’t broken it. But if I shut my eyes, and when I
open them the stick is whole, that will only show He has mended it. Yet
He is all-powerful!” And so on, and so on; for whatever point I took
up, sooner or later I was met by an insoluble problem. These problems
were, nevertheless, just what fascinated me. The practical ethics
of religion, that I should simply be good and encourage in myself a
variety of Christian virtues――that kind of thing did not interest me
in the least. As a matter of fact, I possessed singularly few of these
virtues. It is true that I detested any kind of meanness or cruelty,
that I was truthful, straightforward, and, in certain directions,
loving and gentle enough; but I was egotistical, proud, and ludicrously
self-conscious, quick tempered, flying into violent passions for very
little, and, above all, I had a stubbornness nothing could move.