knew already, out of nowhere, that “the bee’s waxen cell is more curious than the chimpanzee’s rough hut” (though I should have dearly liked to see the latter); and that “an ant is more wonderful than the huge and dull rhinoceros.” Such is childishness, however: I pitied the poor rhinoceros his “dull.” Over such small things as a nut, a shell, a drop of rain-water in a buttercup, a frond of frost (for there were cold winters at Lyndsey in those days), I would pore and pore, imbibing the lesson that the eye alone if used in patience will tell its owner far more about an object than it can merely see.
Among my few framed pictures I cannot resist mentioning one by a painter of the name of Bosch. Below the middle of it kneeled naked Adam and Eve with exquisite crimped hair on their shoulders; and between them stood God. All above and beneath them, roamed the animals, birds, insects, and infinitesimals of Eden, including a long-tailed monkey on an elephant, a jerboa, a dancing crocodile, and—who but our cat Miaou, carrying off a mouse! An astonishing, inexhaustible piece of thoughtfulness. I loved Mynheer Bosch.
Shameful dunce Miss M. may remain, but she did in her childhood supremely enjoy any simple book about the things of creation great or small. But I preferred my own notions of some of them. When my father of a dark, clear night would perch me up at a window to see the stars—Charles’s Wain and the Chair; and told me that they were huge boiling suns, roaring their way through the vast pits of space, I would shake my head to myself. I was grateful for the science, but preferred to keep them just “stars.” And though I loved to lave my hands in a trickle of light that had been numberless years on its journey to this earth, that of a candle also filled me with admiration, and I was unfeignedly grieved that the bleak moon was naught but a sheer hulk, sans even air or ice or rain or snow.
How much pleasanter it would be to think that her shine was the reflection of our cherry orchards, and that her shadows were just Kentish hay-ricks, barns, and oast-houses. It was, too, perhaps rather tactless of my father to beguile me with full-grown authors’ accounts of the Lives of the Little. Accomplished writers they may be, but—well, never mind. As for the Lives of the Great, I could easily adjust Monsieur Bon Papa’s spyglass and reduce them to scale.
* * * *
My father taught me also to swim in his round bath; and on a visit to Canterbury purchased for me the nimblest little dun Shetland pony, whom we called Mopsa. I learned to become a fearless rider. But hardy though her race may be, perhaps I was too light a burden to satisfy Mopsa’s spirit. In a passing fit of temper she broke a leg. Though I had stopped my ears for an hour before the Vet came, I heard the shot.
My mother’s lessons were never very burdensome. She taught me little, but she taught it well—even a morsel of Latin. I never wearied of the sweet oboe-like nasal sound of her French poems, and she instilled in me such a delight in words that to this day I firmly believe that things are at least twice the better and richer for being called by them. Apart from a kind of passionate impatience over what was alien to me—arithmetic, for instance, and “analysis”—and occasional fits of the sulks, which she allowed to deposit their own sediment at leisure, I was a willing, and, at times, even a greedy scholar. Apparently from infancy I was of a firm resolve to match my wits with those of the common-sized and to be “grown-up” some day.
So much for my education, a thing which it seems to me is likely to continue—and specially in respect of human nature—as long as I keep alive. With so little childish company, without rivalry, I was inclined to swell myself out with conceit and complacency. “It’s easy holding down the latchet when nobody pulls the string.” But whatever size we may be, in soul or body, I have found that the world wields a sharp pin, and is pitiless to bubbles.
Though inclined to be dreamy and idle when alone, I was, of course, my own teacher too. My senses were seven in number, however few my wits. In particular I loved to observe the clustering and gathering of plants, like families, each of a shape, size, and hue, each in their kind and season, though tall and lowly were intermingled. Now and then I would come on some small plant self-sown, shining and flourishing, free and clear, and even the lovelier for being alone in its kind amid its greater neighbours. I prized these discoveries, and if any one of them was dwarfed a little by its surroundings I would cosset it up and help it against them. How strange, thought I, if men so regarded each other’s intelligence. If from pitying the dull-witted the sharp-witted slid to mere toleration, and from toleration to despising and loathing. What a contest would presently begin between the strong-bodied stupid and the feeble-bodied clever, and how soon there would be no strong-bodied stupid left in the world! They would dwindle away and disappear into Time like the mammoth and the woolly bear. And then I began to be sorry for the woolly bear and to wish I could go and have a look at him. Perhaps this is putting my old head on those young shoulders, but when I strive to re-enter the thoughts of those remote days, how like they seem to the noisy wasting stream beside which they flowed on, and of whose source and destination I was unaware.
All this egotism recalls a remark that Mrs Ballard once made apropos of some little smart repartee from Miss M. as she sat beside her pasteboard and slapped away at a lump of dough, “Well I know a young lady who’s been talking to the young man that rubbed his face with a brass candlestick.”
Chapter Four
In the midst of my eighteenth year fortune began to darken. My mother had told me little of the world, its chances and changes, cares and troubles. What I had learned of these came chiefly from books and my own speculations. We had few visitors and from all but the most familiar I was quickly packed away. My mother was sensitive of me, for both our sakes. But I think in this she was mistaken, for when my time came, Life found me raw, and it rubbed in the salt rather vigorously.
My father had other views. He argued for facing the facts, though perhaps those relating to fruit and paper are not very intimidating. But he seldom made his way against my mother, except in matters that concerned his own comfort. He loved me fondly but throughout my childhood seems to have regarded me as a kind of animated marionette. When he came out from his Mills and Pockets it amused him to find me nibbling a raspberry beside his plate. He’d rub his round stubbly head, and say, “Well, mamma, and how’s Trot done this morning?” or he would stoop and draw ever so heedfully his left little finger down my nose to its uttermost tip, and whisper: “And so to Land’s End, my love.” Now and then I would find his eyes fixed on me as if in stupefaction that I was actually his daughter.
But now that I was getting to be a young woman and had put up my hair, and the future frowned near, this domestic problem began seriously to concern him. My mother paled at the very mention of it. I remember I had climbed up on to his writing desk one morning, in search of a pair of high boots which I had taken off in his study the evening before. We had been fishing for sticklebacks. Concealed from view, while the wind whined at the window, I heard a quarrel between my father and mother about me which I will never repeat to mortal ear. It darkened my mind for days, and if…but better not.
At this time anxiety about money matters must have begun its gnawing in my poor father’s brains. And I know what that means. He had recommended to others and speculated himself in some experiment in the cultivation of the trees from which the Chinese first made paper, and had not only been grossly cheated, but laughed at in the press. The Kentish Courier—I see his ears burning now—had referred to him as “the ingenious Mr Tapa”; and my mother’s commiseration had hardly solaced him: “But, my dear, you couldn’t have gone to Canton by yourself. We must just draw in our horns a little.” The ingenious Mr Tapa patted the hand on his shoulder, but his ears burned on.
“Besides,” my mother added, with a long, sighing breath, as she seated herself again, “there are the books.” He plucked his spectacles off, and gazed vaguely in her direction: “Oh, yes, yes, there are the books.”
Nor was he long daunted by this attack. He fell in love with some notion of so pickling hop-poles that
