'Tis impossible not to regret the dying out of the ancient, quaintly-pretty custom of curtseying in rural England; yet we cannot but see the inevitableness of it, when we consider the earthward drop of the body—the bird-like gesture pretty to see in the cottage child, not so spontaneous nor pretty in the grown girl, and not pretty nor quaint, but rather grotesque (as we think now) in the middle-aged or elderly person—and that there is no longer a corresponding self-abasement and worshipping attitude in the village mind. It is a sign or symbol that has lost, or is losing, its significance.
I have been rambling among a group of pretty villages on and near the Somerset Avon, some in that county, others in Wiltshire; and though these small rustic centres, hidden among the wooded hills, had an appearance of antiquity and of having continued unchanged for very many years, the little ones were as modern in their speech and behaviour as town children. Of all those I met and, in many instances, spoke to, in the village street and in the neighbouring woods and lanes, not one little girl curtseyed to me. The only curtsey I had dropped to me in this district was from an old woman in the small hill-hidden village of Englishcombe. It was on a frosty afternoon in February, and she stood near her cottage gate with nothing on her head, looking at the same time very old and very young. Her eyes were as blue and bright as a child's, and her cheeks were rosy-red; but the skin was puckered with innumerable wrinkles as in the very old. Surprised at her curtsey I stopped to speak to her, and finally went into her cottage and had tea and made the acquaintance of her husband, a gaunt old man with a face grey as ashes and dim colourless eyes, whom Time had made almost an imbecile, and who sat all day groaning by the fire. Yet this worn-out old working man was her junior by several years. Her age was eighty-four. She was very good company, certainly the brightest and liveliest of the dozen or twenty octogenarians I am acquainted with. I heard the story of her life,—that long life in the village where she was born and had spent sixty-five years of married life, and where she would lie in the churchyard with her mate. Her Christian name, she mentioned, was Priscilla, and it struck me that she must have been a very pretty and charming Priscilla about the thirties of the last century.
To return to the little ones; it was too near Bath for such a custom to survive among them, and it is the same pretty well everywhere; you must go to a distance of ten or twenty miles from any large town, or a big station, to meet with curtseying children. Even in villages at a distance from towns and railroads, in purely agricultural districts, the custom is dying out, if, for some reason, strangers are often seen in the place. Such a village is Selborne, and an amusing experience I met with there some time ago serves to show that the old rustic simplicity of its inhabitants is now undergoing a change.
I was walking in the village street with a lady friend when we noticed four little girls coming towards us with arms linked. As they came near they suddenly stopped and curtseyed all together in an exaggerated manner, dropping till their knees touched the ground, then springing to their feet they walked rapidly away. From the bold, free, easy way in which the thing was done it was plain to see that they had been practising the art in something of a histrionic spirit for the benefit of the pilgrims and strangers frequently seen in the village, and for their own amusement. As the little Selbornians walked off they glanced back at us over their shoulders, exhibiting four roguish smiles on their four faces. The incident greatly amused us, but I am not sure that the Reverend Gilbert White would have regarded it in the same humorous light.
Occasionally one even finds a village where strangers are not often seen, which has yet outlived the curtsey. Such a place, I take it, is Alvediston, the small downland village on the upper waters of the Ebble, in southern Wiltshire. One day last summer I was loitering near the churchyard, when a little girl, aged about eight, came from an adjoining copse with some wild flowers in her hand. She was singing as she walked and looked admiringly at the flowers she carried; but she could see me watching her out of the corners of her eyes.
"Good morning," said I. "It is nice to be out gathering flowers on such a day, but why are you not in school?"
"Why am I not in school?" in a tone of surprise. "Because the holidays are not over. On Monday we open."
"How delighted you will be."
"Oh no, I don'tthinkI shall be delighted," she returned. Then I asked her for a flower, and apparently much amused she presented me with a water forget-me-not, then she sauntered on to a small cottage close by. Arrived there, she turned round and faced me, her hand on the gate, and after gazing steadily for some moments exclaimed, "Delighted at going back to school—who ever heard such a thing?" and, bursting into a peal of musical child-laughter, she went into the cottage.
One would look for curtseys in the Flower Walk in Kensington Gardens as soon as in the hamlet of this remarkably self-possessed little maid. Her manner was exceptional; but, if we must lose the curtsey, and the rural little ones cease to mimic that pretty drooping motion of the nightingale, the kitty wren, and wheatear, cannot our village pastors and masters teach them some less startling and offensive form of salutation than the loud "Hullo!" with which they are accustomed to greet the stranger within their gates?
I shall finish with another story which might be entitled "The Democrat against Curtseying." The scene was a rustic village, a good many miles from any railroad station, in the south of England. Here I made the acquaintance and was much in the society of a man who was not a native of the place, but had lived several years in it. Although only a working man, he had, by sheer force of character, made himself a power in the village. A total abstainer and non-smoker, a Dissenter in religion and lay-preacher where Dissent had never found a foothold until his coming, and an extreme Radical in politics, he was naturally something of a thorn in the side of the vicar and of the neighbouring gentry.
But in spite of his extreme views and opposition to old cherished ideas and conventions, he was so liberal-minded, so genial in temper, so human, that he was very much liked even by those who were his enemies on principle; and they were occasionally glad to have his help and to work with him in any matter that concerned the welfare of the very poor in the village.
After the first bitterness between him and the important inhabitants had been outlived and amodus vivendiestablished, the vicar ventured one day to remonstrate with the good but mistaken man on the subject of curtseying, which had always been strictly observed in the village. The complaint was that the parishioner's wife did not curtsey to the vicaress, but on the contrary, when she met or passed her on the road she maintained an exceedingly stiff, erect attitude, which was not right, and far from pleasant to the other.
"Is it then your desire," said my democratic friend, "that my wife shall curtsey to your wife when they meet or pass each other in the village?"
"Certainly, that is my wish," said the vicar.
"Very well," said the other; "my wife is guided by me in such matters, and I am very happy to say that she is an obedient wife, and I shall tell her that she is to curtsey to your wife in future."
"Thank you," said the vicar, "I am glad that you have taken it in a proper spirit."
"But I have not yet finished," said the other. "I was going to add that this command to my wife to curtsey to your wife will be made by me on the understanding that you will give a similar command to your wife, and that when they meet and my wife curtseys to your wife, your wife shall at the same time curtsey to my wife."
The vicar was naturally put out and sharply told his rebellious parishioner that he was setting himself against the spirit of the teaching of the Master whom they both acknowledged, and who commanded us to give to everyone his due, with more to the same effect. But he failed to convince, and there was no curtseying.
It was sometimes pleasant and amusing to see these two—the good old clergyman, weak and simple-minded, and his strong antagonist, the aggressive working man with his large frame and genial countenance and great white flowing beard—a Walt Whitman in appearance—working together for some good object in the village. It was even more amusing, but touching as well, to witness an unexpected meeting between the two wives, perhaps at the door of some poor cottage, to which both had gone on the same beautiful errand of love and compassion to some stricken soul, and exchanging only a short "Good-day," the democrat's wife stiffening her knee-joints so as to look straighter and taller than usual.
Perhaps some reader who does not know a little girl her psychology, after that account of the Alvediston maidie who presented me with a flower with an arch expression on her face just bordering on a mocking smile, will say, "What a sophisticated child to be sure!" He would be quite wrong unless we can say that the female child is born sophisticated, which sounds rather like a contradiction in terms. That appearance of sophistication, common in little girls even in a remote rustic village hidden away among the Wiltshire downs, is implicit in, and a quality of the child's mind—thefemalechild, it will be understood—and is the first sign of the flirting instinct which shows itself as early as the maternal one. This, we know, appears as soon as a child is able to stand on its feet, perhaps even before it quits the cradle. It seeks to gratify itself by mothering something, even an inanimate something, so that it is as common to put a doll in a baby-child's hands as it is to put a polished cylindrical bit of ivory—I forget the name of it—in its mouth. The child grows up nursing this image of itself, whether with or without a wax face, blue eyes and tow-coloured hair, and if or when the unreality of the doll begins to spoil its pleasure, it will start mothering something with life in it—a kitten for preference, and if no kitten, or puppy or other such creature easy to be handled or cuddled, is at hand, it will take kindly to any mild-mannered old gentleman of its circle.
It is just these first instinctive impulses of the girl-child, combined with her imitativeness and wonderful precocity, which make her so fascinating. But do they think? They do, but this first early thinking does not make them self-conscious as does their later thinking, to the spoiling of their charm. The thinking indeed begins remarkably early. I remember one child, a little five-year-old and one of my favourites, climbing to my knee one day and exhibiting a strangely grave face. "Doris, what makes you look so serious?" I asked. And after a few moments of silence, during which she appeared to be thinking hard, she startled me by asking me what was the use of living, and other questions which it almost frightened me to hear from those childish innocent lips. Yet I have seen this child grow up to womanhood—a quite commonplace conventional woman, who when she has a child of her own of five would be unspeakably shocked to hear from it the very things she herself spoke at that tender age. And if I were to repeat to her now the words she spoke (the very thought of Byron in his know-that-whatever-thou-hast-been-'Twere-something-better-not-to-be poem) she would not believe it.
It is, however, rare for the child mind in its first essays at reflection to take so far a flight. It begins as a rule like the fledgling by climbing with difficulty out of the nest and on to the nearest branches.
It is interesting to observe these first movements. Quite recently I met with a child of about the same age as the one just described, who exhibited herself to me in the very act of trying to climb out of the nest—trying to grasp something with her claws, so to speak, and pull herself up. She was and is a very beautiful child, full of life and fun and laughter, and came out to me when I was sitting on the lawn to ask me for a story.
"Very well," I said. "But you must wait for half an hour until I remember all about it before I begin. It is a long story about things that happened a long time ago."
She waited as patiently as she could for about three minutes, and then said: "What do you mean by a long time ago?"
I explained, but could see that I had not made her understand, and at last put it in days, then weeks, then seasons, then years, until she appeared to grasp the meaning of a year, and then finished by saying a long time ago in this case meant a hundred years.
Again she was at a loss, but still trying to understand she asked me:"What is a hundred years?"
"Why, it's a hundred years," I replied. "Can you count to a hundred?"
"I'll try," she said, and began to count and got to nineteen, then stopped. I prompted her, and she went on to twenty-nine, and so on, hesitating after each nine, until she reached fifty. "That's enough," I said, "it's too hard to go the whole way; but now don't you begin to understand what a hundred years means?"
She looked at me and then away, and her beautiful blue intelligent eyes told me plainly that she did not, and that she felt baffled and worried.
After an interval she pointed to the hedge. "Look at the leaves," she said. "I could go and count a hundred leaves, couldn't I? Well, would that be a hundred years?"
And no further could we get, since I could not make out just what the question meant. At first it looked as if she thought of the leaves as an illustration—or a symbol; and then that she had failed to grasp the idea of time, or that it had slipped from her, and she had fallen back, as it were, to the notion that a hundred meant a hundred objects, which you could see and feel. There appeared to be no way out of the puzzle-dom into which we had both got, so that it came as a relief to both of us when she heard her mother calling—calling her back into a world she could understand.
I believe that when we penetrate to the real mind of girl children we find a strong likeness in them even when they appear to differ as widely from one another as adults do. The difference in the little ones is less in disposition and character than in unlikeness due to unconscious imitation. They take their mental colour from their surroundings. The red men of America are the gravest people on the globe, and their children are like them when with them; but this unnatural gravity is on the surface and is a mask which drops or fades off when they assemble together out of sight and hearing of their elders. In like manner our little ones have masks to fit the character of the homes they are bred in.
Here I recall a little girl I once met when I was walking somewhere on the borders of Dorset and Hampshire. It was at the close of an autumn day, and I was on a broad road in a level stretch of country with the low buildings of a farmhouse a quarter of a mile ahead of me, and no other building in sight. A lonely land with but one living creature in sight—a very small girl, slowly coming towards me, walking in the middle of the wet road; for it had been raining a greater part of the day. It was amazing to see that wee solitary being on the lonely road, with the wide green and brown earth spreading away to the horizon on either side under the wide pale sky. She was a sturdy little thing of about five years old, in heavy clothes and cloth cap, and long knitted muffler wrapped round her neck and crossed on her chest, then tied or bound round her waist, thick boots and thick leggings! And she had a round serious face, and big blue eyes with as much wonder in them at seeing me as I suppose mine expressed at seeing her. When we were still a little distance apart she drew away to the opposite side of the road, thinking perhaps that so big a man would require the whole of its twenty-five yards width for himself. But no, that was not the reason of her action, for on gaining the other side she stopped and turned so as to face me when I should be abreast of her, and then at the proper moment she bent her little knees and dropped me an elaborate curtsey; then, rising again to her natural height, she continued regarding me with those wide-open astonished eyes! Nothing in little girls so deliciously quaint and old-worldish had ever come in my way before; and though it was late in the day and the road long, I could not do less than cross over to speak to her. She belonged to a cottage I had left some distance behind, and had been to the farm with a message and was on her way back, she told me, speaking with slow deliberation and profound respect, as to a being of a higher order than man. Then she took my little gift and after making a second careful curtsey proceeded slowly and gravely on her way.
Undoubtedly all this unsmiling, deeply respectful manner was a mask, or we may go so far as to call it second nature, and was the result of living in a cottage in an agricultural district with adults or old people:—probably her grandmother was the poor little darling's model, and any big important-looking man she met was the lord of the manor!
What an amazing difference outwardly between the rustic and the city child of a society woman, accustomed to be addressed and joked with and caressed by scores of persons every day—her own people, friends, visitors, strangers! Such a child I met last summer at a west-end shop or emporium where women congregate in a colossal tea-room under a glass dome, with glass doors opening upon an acre of flat roof.
There, one afternoon, after drinking my tea I walked away to a good distance on the roof and sat down to smoke a cigarette, and presently saw a charming-looking child come dancing out from among the tea-drinkers. Round and round she whirled, heedless of the presence of all those people, happy and free and wild as a lamb running a race with itself on some green flowery down under the wide sky. And by-and-by she came near and was pirouetting round my chair, when I spoke to her, and congratulated her on having had a nice holiday at the seaside. One knew it from her bare brown legs. Oh yes, she said, it was a nice holiday at Bognor, and she had enjoyed it very much.
"Particularly the paddling," I remarked.
No, there was no paddling—her mother wouldn't let her paddle.
"What a cruel mother!" I said, and she laughed merrily, and we talked a little longer, and then seeing her about to go, I said, "you must be just seven years old."
"No, only five," she replied.
"Then," said I, "you must be a wonderfully clever child."
"Oh yes, I know I'm clever," she returned quite naturally, and away she went, spinning over the wide space, and was presently lost in the crowd.
A few minutes later a pleasant-looking but dignified lady came out from among the tea-drinkers and bore down directly on me. "I hear," she said, "you've been talking to my little girl, and I want you to know I was very sorry I couldn't let her paddle. She was just recovering from whooping-cough when I took her to the seaside, and I was afraid to let her go in the water."
I commended her for her prudence, and apologised for having called her cruel, and after a few remarks about her charming child, she went her way.
And now I have no sooner done with this little girl than another cometh up as a flower in my memory and I find I'm compelled to break off. There are too many for me. It is true that the child's beautiful life is a brief one, like that of the angel-insect, and may be told in a paragraph; yet if I were to write only as many of them as there are "Lives" in Plutarch it would still take an entire book—an octavo of at least three hundred pages. But though I can't write the book I shall not leave the subject just yet, and so will make a pause here, to continue the subject in the next sketch, then the next to follow, and probably the next after that.
They were two quite small maidies, aged respectively four and six years with some odd months in each case. They are older now and have probably forgotten the stranger to whom they gave their fresh little hearts, who presently left their country never to return; for all this happened a long time ago—I think about three years. In a way they were rivals, yet had never seen one another, perhaps never will, since they inhabit two villages more than a dozen miles apart in a wild, desolate, hilly district of West Cornwall.
Let me first speak of Millicent, the elder. I knew Millicent well, having at various times spent several weeks with her in her parents' house, and she, an only child, was naturally regarded as the most important person in it. In Cornwall it is always so. Tall for her years, straight and slim, with no red colour on her cheeks; she had brown hair and large serious grey eyes; those eyes and her general air of gravity, and her forehead, which was too broad for perfect beauty, made me a little shy of her and we were not too intimate. And, indeed, that feeling on my part, which made me a little careful and ceremonious in our intercourse, seemed to be only what she expected of me. One day in a forgetful or expansive moment I happened to call her "Millie," which caused her to look to me in surprise. "Don't you like me to call you Millie—for short?" I questioned apologetically. "No," she returned gravely; "it is not my name—my name is Millicent." And so it had to be to the end of the chapter.
Then there was her speech—I wondered how she got it! For it was unlike that of the people she lived among of her own class. No word-clipping and slurring, no "naughty English" as old Nordin called it, and sing-song intonation with her! She spoke with an almost startling distinctness, giving every syllable its proper value, and her words were as if they had been read out of a nicely written book.
Nevertheless, we got on fairly well together, meeting on most days at tea-time in the kitchen, when we would have nice sober little talks and look at her lessons and books and pictures, sometimes unbending so far as to draw pigs on her slate with our eyes shut, and laughing at the result just like ordinary persons.
It was during my last visit, after an absence of some months from that part of the country, that one evening on coming in I was told by her mother that Millicent had gone for the milk, and that I would have to wait for my tea till she came back. Now the farm that supplied the milk was away at the other end of the village, quite half a mile, and I went to meet her, but did not see her until I had walked the whole distance, when just as I arrived at the gate she came out of the farm-house burdened with a basket of things in one hand and a can of milk in the other. She graciously allowed me to relieve her of both, and taking basket and can with one hand I gave her the other, and so, hand in hand, very friendly, we set off down the long, bleak, windy road just when it was growing dark.
"I'm afraid you are rather thinly clad for this bleak December evening," I remarked. "Your little hand feels cold as ice."
She smiled sweetly and said she was not feeling cold, after which there was a long interval of silence. From time to time we met a villager, a fisherman in his ponderous sea-boots, or a farm-labourer homeward plodding his weary way. But though heavy-footed after his day's labour he is never so stolid as an English ploughman is apt to be; invariably when giving us a good-night in passing the man would smile and look at Millicent very directly with a meaning twinkle in his Cornish eye. He might have been congratulating her on having a male companion to pay her all these nice little attentions, and perhaps signalling the hope that something would come of it.
Grave little Millicent, I was pleased to observe, took no notice of this Cornubian foolishness. At length when we had walked half the distance home, in perfect silence, she said impressively: "Mr. Hudson, I have something I want to tell you very much."
I begged her to speak, pressing her cold little hand.
She proceeded: "I shall never forget that morning when you went away the last time. You said you were going to Truro; but I'm not sure—perhaps it was to London. I only know that it was very far away, and you were going for a very long time. It was early in the morning, and I was in bed. You know how late I always am. I heard you calling to me to come down and say good-bye; so I jumped up and came down in my nightdress and saw you standing waiting for me at the foot of the stairs. Then, when I got down, you took me up in your arms and kissed me. I shall never forget it!"
"Why?" I said, rather lamely, just because it was necessary to say something. And after a little pause, she returned, "Because I shall never forget it."
Then, as I said nothing, she resumed: "That day after school I saw Uncle Charlie and told him, and he said: 'What! you allowed that tramp to kiss you! then I don't want to take you on my knee any more—you've lowered yourself too much."
"Did he dare to say that?" I returned.
"Yes, that's what Uncle Charlie said, but it makes no difference. I told him you were not a tramp, Mr. Hudson, and he said you could call yourself Mister-what-you-liked but you were a tramp all the same, nothing but a common tramp, and that I ought to be ashamed of myself. 'You've disgraced the family,' that's what he said, but I don't care—I shall never forget it, the morning you went away and took me up in your arms and kissed me."
Here was a revelation! It saddened me, and I made no reply although I think she expected one. And so after a minute or two of uncomfortable silence she repeated that she would never forget it. For all the time I was thinking of another and sweeter one who was also a person of importance in her own home and village over a dozen miles away.
In thoughtful silence we finished our talk; then there were lights and tea and general conversation; and if Millicent had intended returning to the subject she found no opportunity then or afterwards.
It was better so, seeing that the other character possessed my whole heart.Shewas not intellectual; no one would have said of her, for example, that she would one day blossom into a second Emily Bronte; that to future generations her wild moorland village would be the Haworth of the West. She was perhaps something better—a child of earth and sun, exquisite, with her flossy hair a shining chestnut gold, her eyes like the bugloss, her whole face like a flower or rather like a ripe peach in bloom and colour; we are apt to associate these delicious little beings with flavours as well as fragrances. But I am not going to be so foolish as to attempt to describe her.
Our first meeting was at the village spring, where the women came with pails and pitchers for water; she came, and sitting on the stone rim of the basin into which the water gushed, regarded me smilingly, with questioning eyes. I started a conversation, but though smiling she was shy. Luckily I had my luncheon, which consisted of fruit, in my satchel, and telling her about it she grew interested and confessed to me that of all good things fruit was what she loved best. I then opened my stores, and selecting the brightest yellow and richest purple fruits, told her that they were for her—on one condition—that she would love me and give me a kiss. And she consented and came to me. O that kiss! And what more can I find to say of it? Why nothing, unless one of the poets, Crawshaw for preference, can tell me. "My song," I might say with that mystic, after an angel had kissed him in the morning,
Tasted of that breakfast all day long.
From that time we got on swimmingly, and were much in company, for soon, just to be near her, I went to stay at her village. I then made the discovery that Mab, for that is what they called her, although so unlike, so much softer and sweeter than Millicent, was yet like her in being a child of character and of an indomitable will. She never cried, never argued, or listened to arguments, never demonstrated after the fashion of wilful children generally, by throwing herself down screaming and kicking; she simply very gently insisted on having her own way and living her own life. In the end she always got it, and the beautiful thing was that she never wanted to be naughty or do anything really wrong! She took a quite wonderful interest in the life of the little community, and would always be where others were, especially when any gathering took place. Thus, long before I knew her at the age of four, she made the discovery that the village children, or most of them, passed much of their time in school, and to school she accordingly resolved to go. Her parents opposed, and talked seriously to her and used force to restrain her, but she overcame them in the end, and to the school they had to take her, where she was refused admission on account of her tender years. But she had resolved to go, and go she would; she laid siege to the schoolmistress, to the vicar, who told me how day after day she would come to the door of the vicarage, and the parlour-maid would come rushing into his study to announce, "Miss Mab to speak to you Sir," and how he would talk seriously to her, and then tell her to run home to her mother and be a good child. But it was all in vain, and in the end, because of her importunity or sweetness, he had to admit her.
When I went, during school hours, to give a talk to the children, there I found Mab, one of the forty, sitting with her book, which told her nothing, in her little hands. She listened to the talk with an appearance of interest, although understanding nothing, her bugloss eyes on me, encouraging me with a very sweet smile, whenever I looked her way.
It was the same about attending church. Her parents went to one service on Sundays; she insisted on going to all three, and would sit and stand and kneel, book in hand, as if taking a part in it all, but always when you looked at her, her eyes would meet yours and the sweet smile would come to her lips.
I had been told by her mother that Mab would not have dolls and toys, and this fact, recalled at an opportune moment, revealed to me her secret mind—her baby philosophy. We, the inhabitants of the village, grown-ups and children as well as the domestic animals, were her playmates and playthings, so that she was independent of sham blue-eyed babies made of sawdust and cotton and inanimate fluffy Teddy-bears; she was in possession of the real thing! The cottages, streets, the church and school, the fields and rocks and hills and sea and sky were all contained in her nursery or playground; and we, her fellow-beings, were all occupied from morn to night in an endless complicated game, which varied from day to day according to the weather and time of year, and had many beautiful surprises. She didn't understand it all, but was determined to be in it and get all the fun she could out of it. This mental attitude came out strikingly one day when we had a funeral—always a feast to the villagers; that is to say, an emotional feast; and on this occasion the circumstances made the ceremony a peculiarly impressive one.
A young man, well known and generally liked, son of a small farmer, died with tragic suddenness, and the little stone farm-house being situated away on the borders of the parish, the funeral procession had a considerable distance to walk to the village. To the church I went to view its approach; built on a rock, the church stands high in the centre of the village, and from the broad stone steps in front one got a fine view of the inland country and of the procession like an immense black serpent winding along over green fields and stiles, now disappearing in some hollow ground or behind grey masses of rock, then emerging on the sight, and the voices of the singers bursting out loud and clear in that still atmosphere.
When I arrived on the steps Mab was already there; the whole village would be at that spot presently, but she was first. On that morning no sooner had she heard that the funeral was going to take place than she gave herself a holiday from school and made her docile mother dress her in her daintiest clothes. She welcomed me with a glad face and put her wee hand in mine; then the villagers—all those not in the procession—began to arrive, and very soon we were in the middle of a throng; then, as the six coffin-bearers came slowly toiling up the many steps, and the singing all at once grew loud and swept as a big wave of sound over us, the people were shaken with emotion, and all the faces, even of the oldest men, were wet with tears—all except ours, Mab's and mine.
Our tearless condition—our ability to keep dry when it was raining, so to say—resulted from quite different causes. Mine just then were the eyes of a naturalist curiously observing the demeanour of the beings around me. To Mab the whole spectacle was an act, an interlude, or scene in that wonderful endless play which was a perpetual delight to witness and in which she too was taking a part. And to see all her friends, her grown-up playmates, enjoying themselves in this unusual way, marching in a procession to the church, dressed in black, singing hymns with tears in their eyes—why, this was even better than school or Sunday service, romps in the playground or a children's tea. Every time I looked down at my little mate she lifted a rosy face to mine with her sweetest smile and bugloss eyes aglow with ineffable happiness. And now that we are far apart my loveliest memory of her is as she appeared then. I would not spoil that lovely image by going back to look at her again. Three years! It was said of Lewis Carroll that he ceased to care anything about his little Alices when they had come to the age of ten. Seven is my limit: they are perfect then: but in Mab's case the peculiar exquisite charm could hardly have lasted beyond the age of six.
My meeting with Freckles only served to confirm me in the belief, almost amounting to a conviction, that the female of our species reaches its full mental development at an extraordinarily early age compared to that of the male. In the male the receptive and elastic or progressive period varies greatly; but judging from the number of cases one meets with of men who have continued gaining in intellectual power to the end of their lives, in spite of physical decay, it is reasonable to conclude that the stationary individuals are only so because of the condition of their lives having been inimical. In fact, stagnation strikes us as an unnatural condition of mind. The man who dies at fifty or sixty or seventy, after progressing all his life, doubtless would, if he had lived a lustrum or a decade longer, have attained to a still greater height. "How disgusting it is," cried Ruskin, when he had reached his threescore years and ten, "to find that just when one's getting interested in life one has got to die!" Many can say as much; all could say it, had not the mental machinery been disorganised by some accident, or become rusted from neglect and carelessness. He who is no more in mind at sixty than at thirty is but a half-grown man: his is a case of arrested development.
It is hardly necessary to remark here that the mere accumulation of knowledge is not the same thing as power of mind and its increase: the man who astonishes you with the amount of knowledge stored in his brain may be no greater in mind at seventy than at twenty.
Comparing the sexes again, we might say that the female mind reaches perfection in childhood, long before the physical change from a generalised to a specialised form; whereas the male retains a generalised form to the end of life and never ceases to advance mentally. The reason is obvious. There is no need for continued progression in women, and Nature, like the grand old economist she is, or can be when she likes, matures the mind quickly in one case and slowly in the other; so slowly that he, the young male, goes crawling on all fours as it were, a long distance after his little flying sister—slowly because he has very far to go and must keep on for a very, very long time.
I met Freckles in one of those small ancient out-of-the-world market towns of the West of England—Somerset to be precise—which are just like large old villages, where the turnpike road is for half a mile or so a High Street, wide at one point, where the market is held. For a short distance there are shops on either side, succeeded by quiet dignified houses set back among trees, then by thatched cottages, after which succeed fields and woods.
I had lunched at the large old inn at noon on a hot summer's day; when I sat down a black cloud was coming up, and by-and-by there was thunder, and when I went to the door it was raining heavily. I leant against the frame of the door, sheltered from the wet by a small tiled portico over my head, to wait for the storm to pass before getting on my bicycle. Then the innkeeper's child, aged five, came out and placed herself against the door-frame on the other side. We regarded one another with a good deal of curiosity, for she was a queer-looking little thing. Her head, big for her size and years, was as perfectly round as a Dutch cheese, and her face so thickly freckled that it was all freckles; she had confluent freckles, and as the spots and blotches were of different shades, one could see that they overlapped like the scales of a fish. Her head was bound tightly round with a piece of white calico, and no hair appeared under it.
Just to open the conversation, I remarked that she was a little girl rich in freckles.
"Yes, I know," she returned, "there's no one in the town with such a freckled face."
"And that isn't all," I went on. "Why is your head in a night-cap or a white cloth as if you wanted to hide your hair? or haven't you got any?"
"I can tell you about that," she returned, not in the least resenting my personal remarks. "It is because I've had ringworms. My head is shaved and I'm not allowed to go to school."
"Well," I said, "all these unpleasant experiences—ringworm, shaved head, freckles, and expulsion from school as an undesirable person—do not appear to have depressed you much. You appear quite happy."
She laughed good-humouredly, then looked up out of her blue eyes as if asking what more I had to say.
Just then a small girl about thirteen years old passed us—a child with a thin anxious face burnt by the sun to a dark brown, and deep-set, dark blue, penetrating eyes. It was a face to startle one; and as she went by she stared intently at the little freckled girl.
Then I, to keep the talk going, said I could guess the sort of life that child led.
"What sort of life does she lead?" asked Freckles.
She was, I said, a child from some small farm in the neighbourhood, and had a very hard life, and was obliged to do a great deal more work indoors and out than was quite good for her at her tender age. "But I wonder why she stared at you?" I concluded.
"Did she stare at me!—Why did she stare?"
"I suppose it was because she saw you, a mite of a child, with a nightcap on her head, standing here at the door of the inn talking to a stranger just like some old woman."
She laughed again, and said it was funny for a child of five to be called an old woman. Then, with a sudden change to gravity, she assured me that I had been quite right in what I had said about that little girl. She lived with her parents on a small farm, where no maid was kept, and the little girl did as much work or more than any maid. She had to take the cows to pasture and bring them back; she worked in the fields and helped in the cooking and washing, and came every day to the town with a basket of butter, and eggs, which she had to deliver at a number of houses. Sometimes she came twice in a day, usually in a pony-cart, but when the pony was wanted by her father she had to come on foot with the basket, and the farm was three miles out. On Sunday she didn't come, but had a good deal to do at home.
"Ah, poor little slave! No wonder she gazed at you as she did;—she was thinking how sweet your life must be with people to love and care for you and no hard work to do."
"And was that what made her stare at me, and not because I had a nightcap on and was like an old woman talking to a stranger?" This without a smile.
"No doubt. But you seem to know a great deal about her. Now I wonder if you can tell me something about this beautiful young lady with an umbrella coming towards us? I should much like to know who she is—and I should like to call on her."
"Yes, I can tell you all about her. She is Miss Eva Langton, and lives at the White House. You follow the street till you get out of the town where there is a pond at this end of the common, and just a little the other side of the pond there are big trees, and behind the trees a white gate. That's the gate of the White House, only you can't see it because the trees are in the way. Are you going to call on her?"
I explained that I did not know her, and though I wished I did because she was so pretty, it would not perhaps be quite right to go to her house to see her.
"I'm sorry you're not going to call, she's such a nice young lady. Everybody likes her." And then, after a few moments, she looked up with a smile, and said, "Is there anything else I can tell you about the people of the town? There's a man going by in the rain with a lot of planks on his head—would you like to know who he is and all about him?"
"Oh yes, certainly," I replied. "But of course I don't care so much about him as I do about that little brown girl from the farm, and the nice Miss Langton from the White House. But it's really very pleasant to listen to you whatever you talk about. I really think you one of the most charming little girls I have ever met, and I wonder what you will be like in another five years. I think I must come and see for myself."
"Oh, will you come back in five years? Just to see me! My hair will be grown then and I won't have a nightcap on, and I'll try to wash off the freckles before you come."
"No, don't," I said. "I had forgotten all about them—I think they are very nice."
She laughed, then looking up a little archly, said: "You are saying all that just for fun, are you not?"
"Oh no, nothing of the sort. Just look at me, and say if you do not believe what I tell you."
"Yes, I do," she answered frankly enough, looking full in my eyes with a great seriousness in her own.
That sudden seriousness and steady gaze; that simple, frank declaration! Would five years leave her in that stage? I fancy not, for at ten she would be self-conscious, and the loss would be greater than the gain. No, I would not come back in five years to see what she was like.
That was the end of our talk. She looked towards the wet street and her face changed, and with a glad cry she darted out. The rain was over, and a big man in a grey tweed coat was coming across the road to our side. She met him half-way, and bending down he picked her up and set her on his shoulder and marched with her into the house.
There were others, it seemed, who were able to appreciate her bright mind and could forget all about her freckles and her nightcap.
It is true that when little girls become self-conscious they lose their charm, or the best part of it; they are at their best as a rule from five to seven, after which begins a slow, almost imperceptible decline (or evolution, if you like) until the change is complete. The charm in decline was not good enough for Lewis Carroll; the successive little favourites, we learn, were always dropped at about ten. That was the limit. Perhaps he perceived, with a rare kind of spiritual sagacity resembling that of certain animals with regard to approaching weather-changes, that something had come into their heart, or would shortly come, which would make them no longer precious to him. But that which had made them precious was not far to seek: he would find it elsewhere, and could afford to dismiss his Alice for the time being from his heart and life, and even from his memory, without a qualm.
To my seven-years' rule there are, however, many exceptions—little girls who keep the child's charm in spite of the changes which years and a newly developing sense can bring to them. I have met with some rare instances of the child being as much to us at ten as at five.
One instance which I have in my mind just now is of a little girl of nine, or perhaps nearly ten, and it seemed to me in this case that this new sense, the very quality which is the spoiler of the child-charm, may sometimes have the effect of enhancing it or revealing it in a new and more beautiful aspect.
I met her at Cromer, where she was one of a small group of five visitors; three ladies, one old, the others middle-aged, and a middle-aged gentleman. He and one of the two younger ladies were perhaps her parents, and the elderly lady her grandmother. What and who these people were I never heard, nor did I enquire; but the child attracted me, and in a funny way we became acquainted, and though we never exchanged more than a dozen words, I felt that we were quite intimate and very dear friends.
The little group of grown-ups and the child were always together on the front, where I was accustomed to see them sitting or slowly walking up and down, always deep in conversation and very serious, always regarding the more or less gaudily attired females on the parade with an expression of repulsion. They were old-fashioned in dress and appearance, invariably in black—black silk and black broadcloth. I concluded that they were serious people, that they had inherited and faithfully kept a religion, or religious temper, which has long been outlived by the world in general—a puritanism or Evangelicalism dating back to the far days of Wilberforce and Hannah More and the ancient Sacred order of Claphamites.
And the child was serious with them and kept pace with them with slow staid steps. But she was beautiful, and under the mask and mantle which had been imposed on her had a shining child's soul. Her large eyes were blue, the rare blue of a perfect summer's day. There was no need to ask her where she had got that colour; undoubtedly in heaven "as she came through." The features were perfect, and she pale, or so it had seemed to me at first, but when viewing her more closely I saw that colour was an important element in her loveliness—a colour so delicate that I fell to comparing her flower-like face with this or that particular flower. I had thought of her as a snowdrop at first, then a windflower, the March anemone, with its touch of crimson, then various white, ivory, and cream-coloured blossoms with a faintly-seen pink blush to them.
Her dress, except the stocking, was not black; it was grey or dove-colour, and over it a cream or pale-fawn-coloured cloak with hood, which with its lace border seemed just the right setting for the delicate puritan face. She walked in silence while they talked and talked, ever in grave subdued tones. Indeed it would not have been seemly for her to open her lips in such company. I called her Priscilla, but she was also like Milton's pensive nun, devout and pure, only her looks were not commercing with the skies; they were generally cast down, although it is probable that they did occasionally venture to glance at the groups of merry pink-legged children romping with the waves below.
I had seen her three or four or more times on the front before we became acquainted; and she too had noticed me, just raising her blue eyes to mine when we passed one another, with a shy sweet look of recognition in them—a questioning look; so that we were not exactly strangers. Then, one morning, I sat on the front when the black-clothed group came by, deep in serious talk as usual, the silent child with them, and after a turn or two they sat down beside me. The tide was at its full and children were coming down to their old joyous pastime of paddling. They were a merry company. After watching them I glanced at my little neighbour and caught her eyes, and she knew what the question in my mind was—Why are not you with them? And she was pleased and troubled at the same time, and her face was all at once in a glow of beautiful colour; it was the colour of the almond blossom;—her sister flower on this occasion.
A day or two later we were more fortunate. I went before breakfast to the beach and was surprised to find her there watching the tide coming in; in a moment of extreme indulgence her mother, or her people, had allowed her to run down to look at the sea for a minute by herself. She was standing on the shingle, watching the green waves break frothily at her feet, her pale face transfigured with a gladness which seemed almost unearthly. Even then in that emotional moment the face kept its tender flower-like character; I could only compare it to the sweet-pea blossom, ivory white or delicate pink; that Psyche-like flower with wings upraised to fly, and expression of infantile innocence and fairy-like joy in life.
I walked down to her and we then exchanged our few and only words. How beautiful the sea was, and how delightful to watch the waves coming in! I remarked. She smiled and replied that it was very, very beautiful. Then a bigger wave came and compelled us to step hurriedly back to save our feet from a wetting, and we laughed together. Just at that spot there was a small rock on which I stepped and asked her to give me her hand, so that we could stand together and let the next wave rush by without wetting us. "Oh, do you think I may?" she said, almost frightened at such an adventure. Then, after a moment's hesitation, she put her hand in mine, and we stood on the little fragment of rock, and she watched the water rush up and surround us and break on the beach with a fearful joy. And after that wonderful experience she had to leave me; she had only been allowed out by herself for five minutes, she said, and so, after a grateful smile, she hurried back.
Our next encounter was on the parade, where she appeared as usual with her people, and nothing beyond one swift glance of recognition and greeting could pass between us. But it was a quite wonderful glance she gave me, it said so much:—that we had a great secret between us and were friends and comrades for ever. It would take half a page to tell all that was conveyed in that glance. "I'm so glad to see you," it said, "I was beginning to fear you had gone away. And now how unfortunate that you see me with my people and we cannot speak! They wouldn't understand. How could they, since they don't belong to our world and know what we know? If I were to explain that we are different from them, that we want to play together on the beach and watch the waves and paddle and build castles, they would say, 'Oh yes, that's all very well, but—' I shouldn't know what they meant by that, should you? I do hope we'll meet again some day and stand once more hand in hand on the beach—don't you?"
And with that she passed on and was gone, and I saw her no more. Perhaps that glance which said so much had been observed, and she had been hurriedly removed to some place of safety at a great distance. But though I never saw her again, never again stood hand in hand with her on the beach and never shall, I have her picture to keep in all its flowery freshness and beauty, the most delicate and lovely perhaps of all the pictures I possess of the little girls I have met.
It is not pleasant when you have had your say, made your point to your own satisfaction, and gone cheerfully on to some fresh subject, to be assailed with the suspicion that your interlocutor is saying mentally: All very well—very pretty talk, no doubt, but you haven't convinced me, and I even doubt that you have succeeded in convincing yourself!
For example, a reader of the foregoing notes may say: "If you really find all this beauty and charm and fascination you tell us in some little girls, you must love them. You can't admire and take delight in them as you can in a piece of furniture, or tapestry, or a picture or statue or a stone of great brilliancy and purity of colour, or in any beautiful inanimate object, without that emotion coming in to make itself part of and one with your admiration. You can't, simply because a child is a human being, and we do not want to lose sight of the being we love. So long as the love lasts, the eye would follow its steps because—we are what we are, and a mere image in the mind doesn't satisfy the heart. Love is never satisfied, and asks not for less and less each day but for more—always for more. Then, too, love is credulous; it believes and imagines all things and, like all emotions, it pushes reason and experience aside and sticks to the belief that these beautiful qualities cannot die and leave nothing behind: they are not on the surface only; they have their sweet permanent roots in the very heart and centre of being."
That, I suppose, is the best argument on the other side, and if you look straight at it for six seconds, you will see it dissolve like a lump of sugar in a tumbler of water and disappear under your very eyes. For the fact remains that when I listen to the receding footsteps of my little charmer, the sigh that escapes me expresses something of relief as well as regret. The signs of change have perhaps not yet appeared, and I wish not to see them. Good-bye, little one, we part in good time, and may we never meet again! Undoubtedly one loses something, but it cannot balance the gain. The loss in any case was bound to come, and had I waited for it no gain would have been possible. As it is, I am like that man inThe Pilgrim's Progress, by some accounted mad, who the more he cast away the more he had. And the way of it is this; by losing my little charmers before they cease from charming, I make them mine for always, in a sense. They are made mine because my mind (other minds, too) is made that way. That which I see with delight I continue to see when it is no more there, and will go on seeing to the end: at all events I fail to detect any sign of decay or fading in these mind pictures. There are people with money who collect gems—diamonds, rubies and other precious stones—who value their treasures as their best possessions, and take them out from time to time to examine and gloat over them. These things are trash to me compared with the shining, fadeless images in my mind, which are my treasures and best possessions. But the bright and beauteous images of the little girl charmers would not have been mine if instead of letting the originals disappear from my ken I had kept them too long in it. All because our minds, our memories are made like that. If we see a thing once, or several times, we see it ever after as we first saw it; if we go on seeing it every day or every week for years and years, we do not register a countless series of new distinct impressions, recording all its changes: the new impressions fall upon and obliterate the others, and it is like a series of photographs, not arranged side by side for future inspection, but in a pile, the top one alone remaining visible. Looking at this insipid face you would not believe, if told, that once upon a time it was beautiful to you and had a great charm. The early impressions are lost, the charm forgotten.
This reminds me of the incident I set out to narrate when I wrote "Dimples" at the head of this note. I was standing at a busy corner in a Kensington thoroughfare waiting for a bus, when a group of three ladies appeared and came to a stand a yard or two from me and waited, too, for the traffic to pass before attempting to cross to the other side. One was elderly and feeble and was holding the arm of another of the trio, who was young and pretty. Her age was perhaps twenty; she was of medium height, slim, with a nice figure and nicely dressed. She was a blonde, with light blue-grey eyes and fluffy hair of pale gold: there was little colour in her face, but the features were perfect and the mouth with its delicate curves quite beautiful.
But after regarding her attentively for a minute or so, looking out impatiently for my bus at the same time, I said mentally: "Yes, you are certainly very pretty, perhaps beautiful, but I don't like you and I don't want you. There's nothing in you to correspond to that nice outside. You are an exception to the rule that the beautiful is the good. Not that you are bad—actively, deliberately bad—you haven't the strength to be that or anything else; you have only a little shallow mind and a little coldish heart."
Now I can imagine one of my lady readers crying out: "How dared you say such monstrous things of any person after just a glance at her face?"
Listen to me, madam, and you will agree that I was not to blame for saying these monstrous things. All my life I've had the instinct or habit of seeing the things I see; that is to say, seeing them not as cloud or mist-shapes for ever floating past, nor as people in endless procession "seen rather than distinguished," but distinctly, separately, as individuals each with a character and soul of its very own; and while seeing it in that way some little unnamed faculty in some obscure corner of my brain hastily scribbles a label to stick on to the object or person before it passes out of sight. It can't be prevented; it goes on automatically; it isn'tme, and I can no more interfere or attempt in any way to restrain or regulate its action than I can take my legs to task for running up a flight of steps without the mind's supervision.
But I haven't finished with the young lady yet. I had no sooner said what I have said and was just about to turn my eyes away and forget all about her, when, in response to some remarks of her aged companion, she laughed, and in laughing so great a change came into her face that it was as if she had been transformed into another being. It was like a sudden breath of wind and a sunbeam falling on the still cold surface of a woodland pool. The eyes, icily cold a moment before, had warm sunlight in them, and the half-parted lips with a flash of white teeth between them had gotten a new beauty; and most remarkable of all was a dimple which appeared and in its swift motions seemed to have a life of its own, flitting about the corner of the mouth, then further away to the middle of the cheek and back again. A dimple that had a story to tell. For dimples, too, like a delicate, mobile mouth, and even like eyes, have a character of their own. And no sooner had I seen that sudden change in the expression, and especially the dimple, than I knew the face; it was a face I was familiar with and was like no other face in the world, yet I could not say who she was nor where and when I had known her! Then, when the smile faded and the dimple vanished, she was a stranger again—the pretty young person with the shallow brain that I did not like!
Naturally my mind worried itself with this puzzle of a being with two distinct expressions, one strange to me, the other familiar, and it went on worrying me all that day until I could stand it no longer, and to get rid of the matter, I set up the theory (which didn't quite convince me) that the momentary expression I had seen was like an expression in some one I had known in the far past. But after dismissing the subject in that way, the subconscious mind was still no doubt working at it, for two days later it all at once flashed into my mind that my mysterious young lady was no other than the little Lillian I had known so well eight years before! She was ten years old when I first knew her, and I was quite intimately acquainted with her for a little over a year, and greatly admired her for her beauty and charm, especially when she smiled and that dimple flew about the corner of her mouth like a twilight moth vaguely fluttering at the rim of a red flower. But alas! her charm was waning: she was surrounded by relations who adored her, and was intensely self-conscious, so that when after a year her people moved to a new district, I was not sorry to break the connection, and to forget all about her.
Now that I had seen and remembered her again, it was a consolation to think that she was already in her decline when I first knew and was attracted by her and on that account had never wholly lost my heart to her. How different my feelings would have been if after pronouncing that irrevocable judgment, I had recognised one of my vanished darlings—one, say, like that child on Cromer Beach, or of dozens of other fairylike little ones I have known and loved, and whose images are enduring and sacred!
Thinking of the numerous company of little girls of infinite charm I have met, and of their evanishment, I have a vision of myself on horseback on the illimitable green level pampas, under the wide sunlit cerulean sky in late September or early October, when the wild flowers are at their best before the wilting heats of summer.
Seeing the flowers so abundant, I dismount and lead my horse by the bridle and walk knee-deep in the lush grass, stooping down at every step to look closely at the shy, exquisite blooms in their dewy morning freshness and divine colours. Flowers of an inexpressible unearthly loveliness and unforgettable; for how forget them when their images shine in memory in all their pristine morning brilliance!
That is how I remember and love to remember them, in that first fresh aspect, not as they appear later, the petals wilted or dropped, sun-browned, ripening their seed and fruit.
And so with the little human flowers. I love to remember and think of them as flowers, not as ripening or ripened into young ladies, wives, matrons, mothers of sons and daughters.
As little girls, as human flowers, they shone and passed out of sight. Only of one do I think differently, the most exquisite among them, the most beautiful in body and soul, or so I imagine, perhaps because of the manner of her vanishing even while my eyes were still on her. That was Dolly, aged eight, and because her little life finished then she is the one that never faded, never changed.
Here are some lines I wrote when grief at her going was still fresh. They were in a monthly magazine at that time years ago, and were set to music, although not very successfully, and I wish it could be done again.
Should'st thou come to me againFrom the sunshine and the rain,With thy laughter sweet and free,O how should I welcome thee!
Like a streamlet dark and coldKindled into fiery goldBy a sunbeam swift that cleavesDownward through the curtained leaves;
So this darkened life of mineLit with sudden joy would shine,And to greet thee I should startWith a great cry in my heart.
Back to drop again, the cryOn my trembling lips would die:Thou would'st pass to be againWith the sunshine and the rain.