REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH
My
first memories are fragmentary and isolated and contemporaneous, as
though one remembered vaguely some early day of the Seven Days. It
seems as if time had not yet been created, for all are connected with
emotion and place and without sequence.I
remember sitting upon somebody’s knee, looking out of a window at a
wall covered with cracked and falling plaster, but what wall I do not
remember, and being told that some relation once lived there. I am
looking out of another window in London. It is at Fitzroy Road. Some
boys are playing in the road and among them a boy in uniform, a
telegraph boy perhaps. When I ask who the boy is, a servant tells me
that he is going to blow the town up, and I go to sleep in terror.After
that come memories of Sligo, where I live with my grandparents. I am
sitting on the ground looking at a mastless toy boat, with the paint
rubbed and scratched, and I say to myself in great melancholy, “it
is further away than it used to be,” and while I am saying it I am
looking at a long scratch in the stern, for it is especially the
scratch which is further away. Then one day at dinner my great-uncle
William Middleton says, “we should not make light of the troubles
of children. They are worse than ours, because we can see the end of
our trouble and they can never see any end,” and I feel grateful
for I know that I am very unhappy and have often said to myself,
“when you grow up, never talk as grown-up people do of the
happiness of childhood.” I may have already had the night of misery
when, having prayed for several days that I might die, I had begun to
be afraid that I was dying and prayed that I might live. There was no
reason for my unhappiness. Nobody was unkind, and my grandmother has
still after so many years my gratitude and my reverence. The house
was so big that there was always a room to hide in, and I had a red
pony and a garden where I could wander, and there were two dogs to
follow at my heels, one white with some black spots on his head and
the other with long black hair all over him. I used to think about
God and fancy that I was very wicked, and one day when I threw a
stone and hit a duck in the yard by mischance and broke its wing, I
was full of wonder when I was told that the duck would be cooked for
dinner and that I should not be punished.Some
of my misery was loneliness and some of it fear of old William
Pollexfen my grandfather. He was never unkind, and I cannot remember
that he ever spoke harshly to me, but it was the custom to fear and
admire him. He had won the freedom of some Spanish city for saving
life, but was so silent that his wife never knew it till he was near
eighty, and then from the chance visit of some old sailor. She asked
him if it was true and he said it was true, but she knew him too well
to question and his old shipmate had left the town. She too had the
habit of fear. We knew that he had been in many parts of the world,
for there was a great scar on his hand made by a whaling-hook, and in
the dining-room was a cabinet with bits of coral in it and a jar of
water from the Jordan for the baptising of his children and Chinese
pictures upon rice-paper and an ivory walking-stick from India that
came to me after his death. He had great physical strength and had
the reputation of never ordering a man to do anything he would not do
himself. He owned many sailing ships and once, when a captain just
come to anchor at Rosses Point reported something wrong with the
rudder, had sent a messenger to say “send a man down to find out
what’s wrong.” “The crew all refuse” was the answer. “Go
down yourself” was my grandfather’s order, and when that was not
obeyed, he dived from the main deck, all the neighbourhood lined
along the pebbles of the shore. He came up with his skin torn but
well informed about the rudder. He had a violent temper and kept a
hatchet at his bedside for burglars and would knock a man down
instead of going to law, and I once saw him hunt a group of men with
a horsewhip. He had no relation for he was an only child, and being
solitary and silent, he had few friends. He corresponded with
Campbell of Islay who had befriended him and his crew after a
shipwreck, and Captain Webb, the first man who had swum the Channel
and who was drowned swimming the Niagara Rapids, had been a mate in
his employ and became a close friend. That is all the friends I can
remember and yet he was so looked up to and admired that when he
returned from taking the waters at Bath his men would light bonfires
along the railway line for miles, while his partner William Middleton
whose father after the great famine had attended the sick for weeks,
and taken cholera from a man he carried in his arms into his own
house and died of it, and was himself civil to everybody and a
cleverer man than my grandfather, came and went without notice. I
think I confused my grandfather with God, for I remember in one of my
attacks of melancholy praying that he might punish me for my sins,
and I was shocked and astonished when a daring little girl—a cousin
I think—having waited under a group of trees in the avenue, where
she knew he would pass near four o’clock on the way to his dinner,
said to him, “if I were you and you were a little girl, I would
give you a doll.”Yet
for all my admiration and alarm, neither I nor anyone else thought it
wrong to outwit his violence or his rigour; and his lack of suspicion
and a certain helplessness made that easy while it stirred our
affection. When I must have been still a very little boy, seven or
eight years old perhaps, an uncle called me out of bed one night, to
ride the five or six miles to Rosses Point to borrow a railway-pass
from a cousin. My grandfather had one, but thought it dishonest to
let another use it, but the cousin was not so particular. I was let
out through a gate that opened upon a little lane beside the garden
away from ear-shot of the house, and rode delighted through the
moonlight, and awoke my cousin in the small hours by tapping on his
window with a whip. I was home again by two or three in the morning
and found the coachman waiting in the little lane. My grandfather
would not have thought such an adventure possible, for every night at
eight he believed that the stable-yard was locked, and he knew that
he was brought the key. Some servant had once got into trouble at
night and so he had arranged that they should all be locked in. He
never knew, what everybody else in the house knew, that for all the
ceremonious bringing of the key the gate was never locked.Even
to-day when I read “King Lear” his image is always before me and
I often wonder if the delight in passionate men in my plays and in my
poetry is more than his memory. He must have been ignorant, though I
could not judge him in my childhood, for he had run away to sea when
a boy, “gone to sea through the hawse-hole” as he phrased it, and
I can but remember him with two books—his Bible and Falconer’s
“Shipwreck,” a little green-covered book that lay always upon his
table; he belonged to some younger branch of an old Cornish family.
His father had been in the Army, had retired to become an owner of
sailing ships, and an engraving of some old family place my
grandfather thought should have been his hung next a painted coat of
arms in the little back parlour. His mother had been a Wexford woman,
and there was a tradition that his family had been linked with
Ireland for generations and once had their share in the old Spanish
trade with Galway. He had a good deal of pride and disliked his
neighbours, whereas his wife, a Middleton, was gentle and patient and
did many charities in the little back parlour among frieze coats and
shawled heads, and every night when she saw him asleep went the round
of the house alone with a candle to make certain there was no burglar
in danger of the hatchet. She was a true lover of her garden and
before the care of her house had grown upon her, would choose some
favourite among her flowers and copy it upon rice-paper. I saw some
of her handiwork the other day and I wondered at the delicacy of form
and colour and at a handling that may have needed a magnifying glass
it was so minute. I can remember no other pictures but the Chinese
paintings, and some coloured prints of battles in the Crimea upon the
wall of a passage, and the painting of a ship at the passage end
darkened by time.My
grown-up uncles and aunts, my grandfather’s many sons and
daughters, came and went, and almost all they said or did has faded
from my memory, except a few harsh words that convince me by a
vividness out of proportion to their harshness that all were
habitually kind and considerate. The youngest of my uncles was stout
and humorous and had a tongue of leather over the keyhole of his door
to keep the draught out, and another whose bedroom was at the end of
a long stone passage had a model turret ship in a glass case. He was
a clever man and had designed the Sligo quays, but was now going mad
and inventing a vessel of war that could not be sunk, his pamphlet
explained, because of a hull of solid wood. Only six months ago my
sister awoke dreaming that she held a wingless sea-bird in her arms
and presently she heard that he had died in his mad-house, for a
sea-bird is the omen that announces the death or danger of a
Pollexfen. An uncle, George Pollexfen, afterwards astrologer and
mystic, and my dear friend, came but seldom from Ballina, once to a
race meeting with two postillions dressed in green; and there was
that younger uncle who had sent me for the railway-pass. He was my
grandmother’s favourite, and had, the servants told me, been sent
away from school for taking a crowbar to a bully.I
can only remember my grandmother punishing me once. I was playing in
the kitchen and a servant in horseplay pulled my shirt out of my
trousers in front just as my grandmother came in and I, accused of I
knew not what childish indecency, was given my dinner in a room by
myself. But I was always afraid of my uncles and aunts, and once the
uncle who had taken the crowbar to the bully found me eating lunch
which my grandmother had given me and reproved me for it and made me
ashamed. We breakfasted at nine and dined at four and it was
considered self-indulgent to eat anything between meals; and once an
aunt told me that I had reined in my pony and struck it at the same
moment that I might show it off as I rode through the town, and I,
because I had been accused of what I thought a very dark crime, had a
night of misery. Indeed I remember little of childhood but its pain.
I have grown happier with every year of life as though gradually
conquering something in myself, for certainly my miseries were not
made by others but were a part of my own mind.
II
One day someone spoke to me of the voice of the conscience,
and as I brooded over the phrase I came to think that my soul,
because I did not hear an articulate voice, was lost. I had some
wretched days until being alone with one of my aunts I heard a
whisper in my ear, “what a tease you are!” At first I thought my
aunt must have spoken, but when I found she had not, I concluded it
was the voice of my conscience and was happy again. From that day
the voice has come to me at moments of crisis, but now it is a
voice in my head that is sudden and startling. It does not tell me
what to do, but often reproves me. It will say perhaps, “that is
unjust” of some thought; and once when I complained that a prayer
had not been heard, it said, “you have been helped.” I had a little
flagstaff in front of the house and a red flag with the Union Jack
in the corner. Every night I pulled my flag down and folded it up
and laid it on a shelf in my bedroom, and one morning before
breakfast I found it, though I knew I had folded it up the night
before, knotted round the bottom of the flagstaff so that it was
touching the grass. I must have heard the servants talking of the
faeries for I concluded at once that a faery had tied those four
knots and from that on believed that one had whispered in my ear. I
have been told, though I do not remember it myself, that I saw,
whether once or many times I do not know, a supernatural bird in
the corner of the room. Once too I was driving with my grandmother
a little after dark close to the Channel that runs for some five
miles from Sligo to the sea, and my grandmother showed me the red
light of an outward-bound steamer and told me that my grandfather
was on board, and that night in my sleep I screamed out and
described the steamer’s wreck. The next morning my grandfather
arrived on a blind horse found for him by grateful passengers. He
had, as I remember the story, been asleep when the captain aroused
him to say they were going on the rocks. He said, “have you tried
sail on her?” and judging from some answer that the captain was
demoralised took over the command and, when the ship could not be
saved, got the crew and passengers into the boats. His own boat was
upset and he saved himself and some others by swimming; some women
had drifted ashore, buoyed up by their crinolines. “I was not so
much afraid of the sea as of that terrible man with his oar,” was
the comment of a schoolmaster who was among the survivors. Eight
men were, however, drowned and my grandfather suffered from that
memory at intervals all his life, and if asked to read family
prayers never read anything but the shipwreck of St.
Paul.
I remember the dogs more
clearly than anyone except my grandfather and grandmother. The
black hairy one had no tail because it had been sliced off, if I
was told the truth, by a railway train. I think I followed at their
heels more than they did at mine, and that their journeys ended at
a rabbit-warren behind the garden; and sometimes they had savage
fights, the black hairy dog, being well protected by its hair,
suffering least. I can remember one so savage that the white dog
would not take his teeth out of the black dog’s hair till the
coachman hung them over the side of a water-butt, one outside and
one in the water. My grandmother once told the coachman to cut the
hair like a lion’s hair and, after a long consultation with the
stable-boy, he cut it all over the head and shoulders and left it
on the lower part of the body. The dog disappeared for a few days
and I did not doubt that its heart was broken. There was a large
garden behind the house full of apple-trees with flower-beds and
grass-plots in the centre and two figure-heads of ships, one among
the strawberry plants under a wall covered with fruit trees and one
among the flowers. The one among the flowers was a white lady in
flowing robes, while the other, a stalwart man in uniform, had been
taken from a three-masted ship of my grandfather’s called “The
Russia,” and there was a belief among the servants that the
stalwart man represented the Tsar and had been presented by the
Tsar himself. The avenue, or as they say in England the drive, that
went from the hall door through a clump of big trees to an
insignificant gate and a road bordered by broken and dirty
cottages, was but two or three hundred yards, and I often thought
it should have been made to wind more, for I judged people’s social
importance mainly by the length of their avenues. This idea may
have come from the stable-boy, for he was my principal friend. He
had a book of Orange rhymes, and the days when we re
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