"There was an old man who supposedThe street door was partially closed."
"There was an old man who supposedThe street door was partially closed."
"There was an old man who supposedThe street door was partially closed."
"There was an old man who supposed
The street door was partially closed."
For nights I dreamed of that old man, and wondered and wondered what happened because of his error about the street door. I beheld him, grey-haired, with a nightcap on his hair, with a dressing-gown wrapped round him and held in front by one hand, while the other grasped a candle, and the old man looked fearfully over his shoulder at the door. I must have seen something to suggest this clear picture, but I cannot tell what it was.
Sometimes his face underwent all sorts of transformations, resembled in turn every animal I had ever seen and several new monsters I was unacquainted with. The eyes changed places with the mouth and the ears distorted themselves into noses. Before I had done with him, he had become quite a wonderful old man.
Our great amusement was to repeat the rhymes in a way of our own invention, taking turns to be chief and echo. This was how we did it:—
Louie."There was an old man of theAngela.HagueLouie.Whose ideas were extremelyAngela.vague.Louie.He built aAngela.balloonLouie.To examine theAngela.moon,Louie.This curious old man of theAngela.Hague."
Louie."There was an old man of theAngela.HagueLouie.Whose ideas were extremelyAngela.vague.Louie.He built aAngela.balloonLouie.To examine theAngela.moon,Louie.This curious old man of theAngela.Hague."
Louie."There was an old man of theAngela.HagueLouie.Whose ideas were extremelyAngela.vague.Louie.He built aAngela.balloonLouie.To examine theAngela.moon,Louie.This curious old man of theAngela.Hague."
Louie."There was an old man of the
Angela.Hague
Louie.Whose ideas were extremely
Angela.vague.
Louie.He built a
Angela.balloon
Louie.To examine the
Angela.moon,
Louie.This curious old man of the
Angela.Hague."
My passionate admiration of the courage of the young lady of Norway made me always insist on taking the principal part when it came to her turn. The neighbors used to drop in of an evening, and add the enthusiasm of an audience to our own. They were specially proud of me as almost native-grown, and my eagerness to show off the attractions of the young lady of Norway generally resulted in my suppressing Louie's final rhyme. This was what we made of it:—
Angela."There was a young lady ofLouie.NorwayAngela.Who occasionally sat in theLouie.doorway;Angela.When the door squeezed herLouie.flat,Angela.She exclaimed, 'What ofLouie.that?'Angela.This courageous young lady ofLouie.Norway."
Angela."There was a young lady ofLouie.NorwayAngela.Who occasionally sat in theLouie.doorway;Angela.When the door squeezed herLouie.flat,Angela.She exclaimed, 'What ofLouie.that?'Angela.This courageous young lady ofLouie.Norway."
Angela."There was a young lady ofLouie.NorwayAngela.Who occasionally sat in theLouie.doorway;Angela.When the door squeezed herLouie.flat,Angela.She exclaimed, 'What ofLouie.that?'Angela.This courageous young lady ofLouie.Norway."
Angela."There was a young lady of
Louie.Norway
Angela.Who occasionally sat in the
Louie.doorway;
Angela.When the door squeezed her
Louie.flat,
Angela.She exclaimed, 'What of
Louie.that?'
Angela.This courageous young lady of
Louie.Norway."
Poor Louie, I learnt years afterwards, went to the dogs, and was despatched to the Colonies by an irate father. He was last heard of as a music-hall star at Sydney.
What sends bright and laughing children forth to a life of shame? Louie was the kindest little comrade on earth, unselfish, devoted, and of a tenderness only surpassed by my nurse's. Was this not proved when I began to droop and pine, missing the picture of Stevie kneeling on his sofa and staring out of the window?
I cannot say how long after Stevie's death it was before this want broke out as a fell disease. I worried everybody about the absence of that tragic face, and plied nurse with unanswerable questions. Neither Mary Jane nor the brindled cat, not even the applewoman and her tempting trays, nor the pond, nor my new terrier-pup that often washed my face, had power to comfort me.
I went about disconsolate, and was glad of a listener to whom it was all fresh, to discourse upon heaven and the queer means that were taken to despatch little children thither—an ugly box, when wings would be so much prettier.
Louie listened to me as I, with a burning cheek, told the roll of my sorrows and unfoldedmy ideas of the mysteries that surrounded me. Louie was not an intelligent listener, but he made up for his deficiency by an exquisite sense of comradeship. He would hold my hand and protest in the loudest voice that it was a shame, the while I suspect his mind ran on those nursery rhymes. But he loved me, there can be no doubt of that. I think he meant to marry me when we grew up.
I know when illness and a dreadful cough overtook me, he would let me lie on the floor with my head in his lap, while the exertion of coughing drew blood from my ears and nose. This too, he cried, was an awful shame.
I once saw him watch me through a convulsion with tears in his eyes, and I was immediately thrilled with the satisfaction of being so interesting and so deeply commiserated. It filled me with the same artistic emotion that followed my appreciation of the melancholy of my wordless singing.
Deep down in the heart of childhood—even bitterly suffering childhood—is this dramatic element, this love of sensation, this vanity of artist. So much of childhood is, after all, make-believe, unconscious acting. We are ill, and we cannot help noting the effect of our illness uponothers. The amount of sympathy we evoke in grown-up people is the best evidence of our success as experimental artists with life. Even when we cower under a bed to weep away from our kind, we secretly hope that God or our guardian angel is watching us and feeling intensely sorry for us; and our finest conception of punishment of cruel elders is their finding us unexpectedly dead, and their being consumed with remorse for their flagrant injustice to such virtue as ours.
Who can limit the part as admiring audience a child condemns his guardian angel to play? For him, when humanity is cold and unobservant—as humanity too often is in the eyes of childhood—does he so gallantly play the martyr, the hero, the sufferer in proud silence. For his admiration did a little sister of mine once put her hand in the fire. She thought it was heroic, like the early Christians, and hoped her guardian angel would applaud, while common elders shouted in angry alarm.
Ah, never prate so idly of the artlessness and the guilelessness of children. They are as full of vanity and innocent guile and all the arts and graces as the puppies and kittens we adore.
How much, for instance, had the hope ofpraise and admiration to do with Louie's magnanimous kindness in that affair of the gipsies? I lay ill and exhausted from coughing on the sofa when he rushed in, panting with eagerness, to tell me that the gipsies had arrived over-night and were camped on the green, where they had a merry-go-round. I had never seen a gipsy, but Mary Jane had, and she often told me the most surprising things about them—how dark they were, how queerly they spoke, and how romantic they looked, like strange people in story-books. Of course I pined to see them, and the thought that I was chained to my sofa, when outside the world was all agog, and rapture awaited happier children upon the green, filled my eyes with tears.
I turned my face to the wall and wept bitterly. My heart was heavy with the sombre hate of Cain, and when I looked gloweringly at the blest little Abel by my side, he looked quite as miserable as my evil, envious heart could desire. His comic face underwent a variety of contortions before finally he made up his mind to blurt out an offer to forego the pleasures of the green, and stay with me.
But I was not a selfish child, and generosity always spurred me to emulation. Besides, I wasalready greatly comforted by the extent of Louie's sympathy, so I ordered him off to see the gipsies, and come back and tell me what a merry-go-round was like.
Still I did not mend, in spite of all nurse's care and tenderness, and it was decided to remove me to town. This was the decision of my stepfather, who was probably nervous since Stevie had dropped out of life in that quick and quiet way.
How well I remember the last day among all my dear friends! Mary Jane, Louie, and I, hand in hand, walked about all our favourite spots. The applewoman gave me an entire trayful of crab-apples, and wished I might come back with my rosy cheeks. I asked her to kiss me, and then she thrust a bun into my hand, and said huskily, "God bless you, my little lady!"
We went across to Mary Jane's, and I had a conviction that my heart was broken. I was going away into the land of the ogres and witches, and though I should probably be happy at last, since all things come right in children's tales, vague terror held me at the prospect of the unknown trials that awaited me. Mary Jane's mamma gave me raspberry vinegar and my tears mingled with the syrup. I asked to be let lookonce more at the views of New York, and then asked her if she would feel very sorry at my death.
They were still consoling me, and I was sobbing wildly in the arms of Mary Jane's mamma, while Louie relieved his stricken soul by protesting repeatedly that "it was an awful shame," when nurse and Jim Cochrane, in his Sunday clothes, came to carry me off to the car. All the village flocked to see me off, and breathed cordial love and benediction upon my departure.
Kindly Irish peasants, with their pretty speech and pretty manners! Is there any other race whose common people can throw such warmth and natural grace into greetings and farewell? Big-hearted, foolish, emotional children, upon whose sympathetic faces, at their ugliest, still play the smiles and frowns, the lights and shadows of expressive and variable childhood. How they cheered and soothed me with their kind words, their little gifts, their packages of comfits and posies, a blue-and-white mug with somebody else's name in gilt letters upon it, and a tiny plate with a dog in a circle of fascinating white knobs.
This was the end of my brief sovereignty. Though of those old associations, for which Iwas destined to yearn so passionately many a year, memory may have become so dim as to leave only a trace of blurred silhouettes upon an indistinct background emerging from a haze of multiplied experience, I like to think that I owe to that bright start the humour and courage that have served to help me through a clouded life.
It would seem that happiness imprints itself more clearly and more permanently upon the mind than misery. Beyond a sense of enduring wretchedness, I can recall very little of my home life.
My sisters had a big play-room at the top of the house. Here they had ladders, which they used to rest in the four corners and climb up, pretending they were climbing up great mountains. They were much more learned than I in the matter of pretence and games. They knew all sorts of things, and could pretend anything. They had been to the pantomime, and could dance like the fairies. One of them had a brilliant imagination, and told lovely stories. In the matter of invention I have never since met her equal in children of either sex; but she was apt to carry experiment too far, for reading of somebody that hanged himself by tying a handkerchief round his neck and attaching it to a nailon the wall, she immediately proceeded to test the efficacy of the method upon the person of a pretty stepsister of four, whom she worshipped.
The child was beginning to turn colour already at the moment of rescue, and then followed the solitary instance of my stepfather's punishing one of us.
But my sisters were not kinder to me than my mother. I was an alien to them, and I loved strangers. They could not understand a sensitiveness naturally morbid, and nurtured upon affection. It was impossible that they could escape the coarsening influence of my mother's extraordinary treatment and neglect of them.
Left to grow up without love or moral training, cuffed and scolded, allowed illimitable liberty from dawn to dark, they were more like boys than girls. They never kissed one another or any one else. They were straightforward, honest, rather barbarous in their indifference to sentiment, deeply attached to each other under a mocking manner, vital, and surprisingly vivid and individual for children. There was not a particle of vanity or love of dress amongst the lot, though beauty was their common heritage. Their fault was that they never considered the sensibilities of a less breezy nature; that theywere rough, unkind, for the fun of the thing, and could never understand the suffering they inflicted upon me.
One of their fancies, seeing how I shrank from hardness of touch or look or voice, was to teach me how to run away from a ghost.
It was a very high house, with several flights of stairs, and two of these inquisitors would take me between them, and tear me at a running pace down the whole length of stairs, my heels lifted from the ground, and only the tips of my toes bruised against each stair. At night I would go to bed aching with pain and terror, and sob myself to sleep, yearning for the faces and sights and sounds that had passed out of my life.
Ah, what tears I shed in that strange home! To have cried in childhood as I cried then, incessantly and for months, sometimes for the greater part of the day under a bed, that none of these mocking young creatures might see me and laugh at me; to have stood so intolerably alone among so many, without a hand to dry my eyes, a kiss to comfort me, a soft breast against which I could rest my tired little head and sob out my tale of sorrow,—this is to start permanently maimed for the battle of life. What compensation can the years bring us for suchinjustice? Could any possible future paradise make up to us for infancy in hell?
There are faces that stand out upon memory with some kindness in them for a pitiable little outcast. Chiefly, of course, my stepfather, who was as serviceably good to me as a man's unreasoning terror of a woman's temper permitted him to be. He saved me from many a cruel beating, and when I seemed more than usually miserable, he would, with an air of secrecy and guilt that charmed me, himself help to fasten on my hat and little coat, and carry me out upon his business calls.
They used to represent me to him as a dangerous small devil, describing my outbursts of fury but suppressing the provocation; and I once heard him exclaim angrily—"I am sick of these complaints of Angela's temper. When she is with me she is better behaved and gentler than any of them. You can twist an angel into a devil if you worry and ill-use it."
I know now that he suffered for his partisanship of me, and that he forsook my cause at last from sheer weariness of spirit and flesh. He thought it better for his own peace to leave me to the mercies of my mother, concluding probably that I should not be worse off.
Our home must have resembled the American man-of-war in the vicinity of which, the French Admiral wrote, nothing was heard from morning till night but the angry voices of the officers and the howling of trounced sailors. Up-stairs in their play-room the children were happy enough, but to venture down-stairs was the hardihood of mouse in the neighbourhood of lion. One or the other, for no reason on earth, but for the impertinent or irrational obviousness of her existence, was seized by white maternal hands, dragged by the hair, or banged against the nearest article of furniture. My mother never punished her children for doing wrong; she was simply exasperated by their inconceivable incapacity to efface themselves and "lie low." To show themselves also in her vicinity was an intolerable offence which called for instant chastisement.
Servants have been known to fly to the rescue. Once when I came home from a walk, one of the nurses complained in my mother's hearing that I had wilfully splashed my boots with mud. Instantly I was grasped, and the mystery to me to-day is how I survived such treatment. One of the servants, a delicate, fair young man, called Gerald, rushed up-stairs, scarlet withindignation, and tore me from my mother's hands. I have forgotten what he said, but he gave her notice on the spot in order to express himself more freely.
Once, again, I was rescued by a young lady in a silk gown of many shades. Her face is a blank to me, but I distinctly remember the green and purple lights of her shot-silk gown, and the novel sound of her name, Anastasia Macaulay. She had come to lunch that day, and had taken a fancy to me, which was quite enough to excite my mother. The scene is indistinct. I sat on Anastasia's lap, playing with her watch-chain, and suddenly I was on the floor, with smarting face and aching back. Anastasia saved me from worse. She sent me a picture-book and a doll, but never entered the house again.
The unhappiest little child that ever drew breath has immediate compensations between the dark hours undreamed of by elders. One of the persons that lent the relief of sparkle to those sombre months, and by whose aid I wandered blithely enough down the sunny avenues of imagination, which, like a straight road running into the sky, lead to Paradise, was my Scottish grandfather.
Grandpapa was a sombre-visaged little gentleman, not in the least like his formidable daughter. He had very dark eyes, and he often assured me that Stevie got his beautiful red-brown hair from him. I needed the assurance pretty frequently, for grandpapa's hair was white. He proudly drew my attention to the fact that there was not a bald spot, however.
In all ordinary matters of existence, grandpapa was of a happy facility. He tolerated every error, every crime, I believe, except a false note or aninferior taste in music. He loved me, not because of the accuracy of my ear, for I had none to speak of, but because of my instinctive passion for music. Still, in middle life, I can say there never has been for me a grief that could resist the consolation of music well interpreted.
If grandpapa found me in a corner white and dejected, he asked no questions,—he wished to be in ignorance of his daughter's domestic affairs, which was the reason, I suppose, he so sedulously avoided the society of my stepfather—but he took me off with him to hear music or singing somewhere. In winter he took me to the pantomime, and we sat in the pit, and he indulged me with an orange to suck.
In the Dublin season he took me to the Opera or the Opera-Bouffe with equal readiness. Sometimes there were morning or afternoon concerts, and I sat out with exemplary gravity sonatas and concerts or part-singing, and woke up to genial comprehension of the ballads and simple melodies.
Grandpapa had one great charm. He never spoke to me as a child, and I rarely understood the tenth of his talk. That was why, no doubt, as a personage grandpapa appealed so delightfully to my imagination. He was a mystery, aproblem, a permanent excitement. A month or a year—perhaps, to be more accurate, a month—would elapse without my seeing him, and then suddenly he would again enter the chaos of dreams and visions, a smiling dark-eyed old gentleman, with a long black cloak flung round his shoulder and a slouched felt hat that left revealed his abundant white hair.
He would place a finger on his lip and say, "Hush!" so mysteriously, looking round the room. How well I, who lived in such fear of my mother's presence, understood that attitude and look.
I have since been assured that grandpapa was a harmless lunatic. If so, he made lunacy more attractive to a child than sanity.
"Hush! I have that to say to you, child, which common ears may not hear. These people call me Cameron. But, Angela, my real name is Hamlet. I was born at Elsinore. I will take you to Elsinore some day. It is far away in a country called Denmark. You yourself, Angela, look like a Dane, with your yellow hair and blue eyes. Come, there is a concert at Earlsfort Terrace. They play Bach. I will take you."
Could anything be more calculated to win a child's esteem and reverence than this assertionthat the world knew him by a false name?—that he was really quite another person from the person they believed him to be? Then, what sonorous words, Hamlet, Elsinore! Denmark I liked less—it sounded more like an everyday place—but Elsinore was as good as a fairy-tale in its awful beauty.
I asked him if you went in a ship over the sea to Elsinore, as Mary Jane told me you went to America; and when he nodded and said "Yes," I got to imagine there was no common sunlight on the sea as the ship crossed it to Elsinore, but the lovely white light I had seen at the theatre when the fairies danced, and all the people in the ship wore beautiful garments of white and green gauze, and there was soft music all the way, and the water shone like silver.
What I could not understand was why I should be a Dane because my eyes were blue, when grandpapa's, who was so obviously more of a Dane than I, were black. But grandpapa always frowned, and an odd flame shot into his mild glance, if you asked him questions.
He gave you facts, and expected you to make what you could of them. He was unreasonably proud, I thought, of his Scottish blood, all the same. He was a Highlander, he said, while mygrandmother, he explained contemptuously, was a Glasgow lass. My uncle Douglas, he added, favoured his side, while my mother was a blonde Ferguson. Pity it was an intelligent little girl like me did not take more after the Camerons; but I had my uncle Douglas's nose, and with a Cameron nose I need never fear the future.
This was surely an excess of faith on my grandfather's side not justified by experience. He had been only saved from the poorhouse by a thrifty and judicious if hard-hearted wife, while my splendid uncle Douglas, with his curly head of Greek god, had wandered from debt through every expensive caprice, and was drowned sailing a little pleasure-boat on one of the Killarney lakes at the inappropriate age of twenty-four.
The Cameron nose has done as little for his young brother, my uncle Willie. I have always loved the image I have made to myself of my boy-uncle Willie, chiefly, I suppose, because of his brilliant promise and early death; but largely, I believe, because not only grandpapa Cameron, but others who remember him, tell me I resemble him in character and feature.
They say it was his death, coming so soon after the blow of uncle Douglas's doom, that turned my grandfather's brain. Willie had beenarticled to a well-known architect, who, being musical like my grandfather, was interested in his musical friend's bright-faced and witty lad, with about as much knowledge of music as a healthy puppy. This lamentable deficiency, however, brought about no disastrous clash between master and pupil.
The distinguished architect loved Willie Cameron for his good-humour, his industry, his quickness, and his impromptu jingling rhymes. He made everything rhyme with a delicious comic absurdity, even the technical terms of his profession, and in consequence no one was jealous of the master's preference for his funny Scottish pupil. You see, he was so much more of an Irish than a Scottish lad. Born on Irish soil, he seems to have inherited the best of native virtues, and was universally beloved. Even his eldest sister, who never sinned on the side of tenderness, could not speak of uncle Willie without a smile.
So there were universal congratulations when Willie, barely of age, got his first commission. No one accused the architect of favouritism, though the first commission of a son could not have been of greater moment to him. Uncle Willie posted triumphantly off to the country,and the master told him to telegraph for his presence in the event of doubt or difficulty. The season was wet, and uncle Willie reached his inn that night drenched and shivering. They put him into damp sheets. The next day was no drier, and uncle Willie drove off on a car in the rain. It was his last drive alive. Ten days later what remained of him was driven to the cemetery amid plumes and crape and white flowers.
It was curious that while grandpapa Cameron was always ready to speak of his handsome son Douglas, of Willie, whom he loved best, he only spoke to me once,—that was when he showed me an indefinite boy's picture, and curtly told me it was my uncle Willie's portrait, and added, dreamily, that I was the only one of his grandchildren who resembled Willie.
That fact, perhaps, had more to do than my musical proclivities with his preference for me. He would give me five-shilling pieces from time to time, and beg me "not to mention it." I took the pieces gratefully, pleased with their brightness and largeness; but I own I found pennies more useful. A child can buy almost anything for a penny, but the only use of a silver five-shilling piece seemed to me to be able to look at it from time to time. Had I known anythingof arithmetic, I might have calculated how many pennies were contained in these big silver pieces, and have changed them for an inexhaustible store of my favourite coin.
But I was not clever enough to think of this, and by the time I was sent across the sea to school in Warwickshire a year later, I had as many as six five-shilling pieces in a box, which then did stout service in supplying cakes and sweets on the scarce occasions I was allowed to make such needful investments.
Grandpapa Cameron lived in a little cottage out of town, with a long back-garden, where he spent his time cultivating roses. He had a disagreeable old cook and a red-nosed gardener, and he saw no society but a couple of priests, who took it in turn to drop in of an evening to play cribbage.
On Sunday he went to the one church where Mozart's and Beethoven's masses were sung. Once a new hardy organist with a fanciful French taste introduced Gounod.
My grandfather's face changed. He cocked an indignant ear, turned abruptly in his seat facing the altar, and looked long and angrily up at the choir. The horrid and sentimental strains of Gounod continued, and, unable to bear it anylonger, my grandfather clapped his hat over his eyes, with a disregard for the religious prejudices of his neighbours no less brutal than the new organist's disregard for his musical sensibilities.
He walked out of church, and meditated upon his protest for a week. When I mention my belief that my grandfather had only become a convert from Scottish Presbyterianism to Roman Catholicism because of Mozart's and Beethoven's masses, it will be recognised what a desperately serious matter for him was this impertinent introduction of light French music into church.
He succeeded in gathering a cluster of musical maniacs, one of whom was his friend the distinguished architect. The four planted themselves, with arms folded and furious purpose in their eyes, not in the least like Christians come to Sunday prayers, but like heroes bent upon showing an uncompromising front to injury. They heard in silence the opening roll of the organ, then the thin sweetness of Monsieur Gounod's religious strains filled the church, and the faithful sat up to listen to the Kyrie Eleison.
A distinct and prolonged hiss burst from the lips of the four musical maniacs, and my grandfather began to pound his stick upon the floor with an eloquence that left no one in doubt asto how he would treat the organist's head if he had it within reach. The officiating priests glanced round in surprise and astonishment. People rubbed their eyes, and wondered if they were dreaming.
There sat the four maniacs, hissing, booing, knocking their sticks on the floor, and "ohing" as they do in the House of Commons. Surprise was effaced in consternation, and a priest came down to the miscreants from the altar.
"Let that fellow stop his French nonsense and we'll stop too," shouted my grandfather. "I've been coming to this church for the past twenty-five years, and during that time have paid bigger fees than any of my neighbours. Why? Because there was a decent feeling for music here. Because you respected yourselves and gave us the best. But if you're going to degrade yourselves and follow an ignoble fashion and adopt French fads—well, sir, I swear I'll wreck the church—I will indeed."
The fight ended in my grandfather's defeat, and he never put his foot again into church. He carried his indignation so far as to insult an old French acquaintance, Monsieur Pruvot, the manager of a large wine house. Still sore upon the triumph of Gounod, he was accostedaffably by Monsieur Pruvot, who cried out to him, waving his hat—
"How do you do, my dear Monsieur Camerone?"
"My name's Cameron, and I'm Mister, none of your damned French Monsieurs, Mr. Pruvot," roared my grandfather, pronouncing the mutetof the Frenchman's name with a vicious emphasis.
It is easy to imagine the amazement of the Frenchman, in ignorance of the Beethoven-Gounod episode, and who until then had always found my grandfather a genial and inoffensive neighbour. He made, by way of insinuating concessions to wrath, a complimentary remark upon "this charming little town of Dublin," pronouncing it in the French way.
"We call it Dublin, sir. Yes, I've no doubt it is a finer town than your native Bordox. I see no reason, sir, why we in Dublin should treat your town with a courtesy you, residing here, deny ours. If you can't learn to say Dublin, we may well decline to say Bordeaux. A very good morning, Mr. Pruvot."
Poor grandpapa Cameron! This was his last battle on earth, either in the interests of Beethoven or Dublin. A few days later he was found in bed with his face to the wall—dead.
The flow of the day in my city home is lost for me. But pictures and portraits stand out, sometimes blurred, sometimes surprisingly distinct, upon a confused background. There was food enough for curiosity and dreaming in the pauses of suffering. I must have lived for several days in an enchanted world solely by the single glimpse I had of my godfather.
He had sent me a present of a book about cocks and hens, largely illustrated. I was sitting in the store-room poring over it in the dreary society of Mrs. Clement, the new housekeeper. The previous one, Mrs. Dudley, I remember vaguely as a stern unsympathetic person, with crimped iron-grey hair under a voluminous cap trimmed with puce ribbons. She once forced me to swallow a Gregory-powder in a delusive snare of black-currant jam. I must have swallowed medicines before and since, and yet the taste and smell and look of that nauseouspowder are still with me whenever my mind reverts to those days. Hence my delight when I learned that Mrs. Dudley was going away, and my cordial welcome of her successor, Mrs. Clement.
"So she's in here," somebody cried, rapping with a stick upon the door ajar.
I looked up from my book and saw a wonderful sight, of which I was afterwards vividly reminded in a French school by a picture of the famous "Postillon de Longjumeau," a jaunty figure with a pointed black beard and a tall wide-brimmed hat on one side. He bore himself gallantly, wore top-boots, a long coat with several little capes to it, and carried a smart riding-whip in his hand. This was my godfather.
I had never seen him before, and to my lasting regret I have never seen him since. He was out in '48, was proscribed, and had wandered about strange lands. He died in China, having first sent my mother a pretty case of Imperial tea, which she distributed in minute portions to all her friends, measuring the tea out with a small silver egg-cup. As fast as each consumed her portion, she returned for another, and as my mother had always a greater pleasure in giving than in receiving, my godfather's present was soon exhausted.
I remember being swung up in the air and shrieking in pretended fright, for children, sensational and dramatic little creatures, must persuade themselves there is an element of peril and adventure in their tamest diversions. Not to imagine oneself afraid is to miss the peculiar zest of enjoyment.
When I was seated gravely on his knee, my godfather asked me to spell out a few lines of his book.
"Cocks and hens—eh? Just suit a little girl from the country," he laughed, helping me to hold the book.
"I had a little dog at Mamma Cochrane's. I liked it better than cocks and hens," I protested meekly.
"Wants a dog now, does she? Queer little woman! She's still too pale, Mrs. Clement, much too pale and thin. Fretting for her Mamma Cochrane, I suppose. Well, I'll see if I can't get her a nice dog with curly hair, that'll cry 'Bow-wow' when you pull its tail. Know where China is, missy?"
I had heard of a china doll, and my Mamma Cochrane had two beautiful black-and-white china dogs. I supposed at once that China was a land where the dogs and dolls were all of china,and I wondered if the people were of china too. My godfather laughed as only a big man with a beard seems to be able to laugh. I was sure you could hear him down in the hall and up in the nursery. It was very comforting, that loud laugh, and I became instantly communicative, and told him all I knew about America and New York. He said it took a much bigger boat to go to China, which was farther off than New York, and that there were crocodiles in the rivers that ate men, and there was so much sunshine that the people were quite yellow.
After that, whenever it was unusually sunny, I was safe to astonish somebody by saying I supposed it was always like that in China. Somehow, the image of my jovial godfather was melted in a great glare of yellow light, through which yellow faces came and went, up and down long rivers, where unknown monsters, understood to be crocodiles, tossed about in a ruthless quest of man.
Mrs. Clement, the housekeeper, is another portrait that stands out in luminous relief from a crowd of unremembered faces. Her dress was seemingly as unalterable as a uniform. It consisted of a black silk gown, very wide at the base and gathered in at a slim waist, a white lawnfichu trimmed with delicate lace, and fastened with a gold brooch containing the features of a young man with a dark moustache.
I never dared to ask her who the young man was. She was kind to me, but she kept me at arm's-length by her terrible sadness, and infant curiosity was the last thing she encouraged. Her face was pale, her thin yellow hair was pale, and her blue eyes were pale. Those faded hues suited the melancholy of her smile and regard.
Seeing me persecuted and unhappy, she took me under her protection, and would let me sit for hours at her feet in the storeroom, while she mended linen.
I read to her, and when I was tired of reading I told her stories of my past. Like grown-up mourners, it relieved me to talk of my sorrow and describe the paradise down there beside the pond and the applewoman's stall.
She listened with mild interest, and I was not so engrossed in my own troubles as not to remark the sadness of Mrs. Clement. The children up-stairs were sure she had committed some dreadful murder, and was brooding in remorseful reminiscence. They did not like her, because she once scolded them for their treatment of me; but nothing they could say would induce me to thinkill of my melancholy friend, and I continued to sit at her feet and watch her in wonder and awe.
Her niece Eily came into our service shortly afterwards. She had a beautiful fresh face like a wild-flower, made up of sweet dark-blue eyes, a blossom of a mouth, and morning hues upon her cheek. She was a girl made to beguile sense and sternness, and transform the lion to a lamb. Everybody immediately loved her, she had such a delicious way of saying "Ah, sure!" and lifting up a pair of the most Irish of eyes in bewitching appeal.
My parents adopted her as a sort of daughter, and a mere hint of a lover at her heels was enough to wake the Quixote in my stepfather. They married her afterwards to a promising young Englishman, my father giving her away and my mother supplying the trousseau.
The Englishman was so enamoured of all things Irish that he gave the most flagrantly Hibernian names to his children, in opposition to Eily's romantic tastes, who adored every out-of-the-way name of fiction. When I met them, years afterwards, his affected drawl and pretty suspicion of lisp managed to give a foreign charm to our common name "Paddy," by which the eldest boy was called.
Eily's face was just the same wild-flower, a little faded and drawn, and "Ah, sure!" was still on the tip of her tongue in all the beguiling glamour of Erin. But what a sad change! Tears looked fatally near the surface, and the smile was deprecating and anxious.
She had fallen from petted servitude into troubled servitude, and longed for the clatter of her aunt's household keys among the linen and china and preserve-presses of the storeroom. She longed for my stepfather's cheery "Well, Eily, little puss," and instead had to listen to an exacting husband's complaints of her deficiencies as housekeeper and sick-nurse. He had married a bird, and grumbled incessantly because it lacked the solid capacities of a cow.
"And your aunt, Eily?" I asked.
"Poor aunt died long ago. She never recovered the death of her only child, Frank, who was drowned going out to America."
So the young man in the brooch was Mrs. Clement's son, after all, and her melancholy, that had so puzzled my childhood, was not the gloom of remorse but the stamp of a common bereavement.
By the side of my grandfather's avenue of rose-trees ran a neighbour's garden. Mygrandfather was on nodding terms with his neighbour; but there sometimes came a bright-faced lad with a flaxen down upon his upper lip. His name caught my fancy, and I thought a fairy prince could not have a finer one. It now represents to the world a figure so very different from the vague but pleasant profile memory likes to dwell upon, that I permit myself to doubt if that kind boy and the O'Donovan Rossa of New York can be the same person.
The stripling I recall seems to me to have been eternally singing or whistling. I specially remember one song he was fond of—"Love among the Roses."
He would look across the low hedge and sing out, "Where's my little wife?" I kept it as a delightful secret from all the world that I was married to a boy called O'Donovan Rossa. The world is a cold confidant in such delicate matters, and has a way of looking as if it did not take little children seriously.
But O'Donovan Rossa had a little sister of his own whom he loved devotedly, so he knew all about little girls and their ways, and appeared to understand my conversation. So few grown-up people do understand the conversation of children, and children know this.
He would spring over the hedge just like a mythical personage, and tumble unexpectedly on the grass-plot beside me, and my daisy-chains were matter of absorbing interest to him. Then what stories he had about blue dragon-flies, humming-birds, and bewitched crows! You may imagine if I looked forward to visits to grandpapa Cameron's cottage, with such a prospective attraction.
I did not disdain the rougher friendship of Dennis, my grandfather's gardener. He was a cheery individual with a very red face. He once gave me an orange and a penny when I arrived with cheeks and eyelids swollen from crying, with a conviction that I could bear my sorrows no longer. I ate my orange, and suddenly the world seemed brighter, and when I went off alone to purchase a pennyworth of crab-apples at a fruit-shop hard by, I began to take pleasure at the thought of to-morrow.
I was further consoled by one of grandpapa's shining five-shilling pieces, and then Dennis called me to fetch him a tool, shouting, "Look sharp now, and do something for your living," and I was so enchanted that all sense of desolation and ill-usage left me.
It is so easy to make a child happy that it is amystery to me how the art is not universal with grown-up persons.
Among the blurred memories of days so remote is a ball given in the big town house. The excitement could not but reach us up-stairs beneath the stars. The nurse and housemaid were equally aflame, and stood watching the guests from the corner of the topmost landing, that commanded a glimpse of the drawing-room lobby. The rustle of silk and the sort of perfumed chatter that belongs to gatherings in full dress reached us, broken and vague like the beautiful fancies of dreams. Our little feet pattered with yearning to be down below in the thick of social pleasures, and we shouted out our recognition of each side face as a guest crossed the lobby. It was not the brilliant assortment of silks and satins and laces, the gleam of jewelled array, or the chatter that intoxicated me; it was the first blast of music that rolled up to us, and the penetrating charm of the fiddles.
I was always less looked after than the others, and watching my opportunity, I slipped down-stairs in my nightdress; I felt I must hear those fiddles nearer, and see how people looked when they danced. Mrs. Clement saw me a few steps above the drawing-rooms, and wanted to carryme back to bed; but I prayed so hard for one look, that she took me into her arms, and, skirting the lobby, went in on tip-toe to the cardroom, at the top of the drawing-rooms, where several persons were playing at little tables. Some of the guests looked up at the melancholy lady in black silk with the little child in its night-dress, staring in bewilderment at them. But Mrs. Clement placed her finger on her lips, and they smiled at me and continued their play.
They were playing "Il Bacio," and even now I can never hear that tinkling waltz without a throb. It brought tears to my eyes then, and all night it formed the accompaniment of my dreams. The only couple I clearly saw in that paradise of colour, light, scent, and sound was my stepfather, who whirled past us with a tall dark girl in amber satin, who was smiling most radiantly as she danced.
This girl springs into my pictures of childhood in an odd inconsequent way. She was very handsome, of the sparkling brunette type, with white teeth, and hard bright eyes as black as the hair that rippled low down on either temple, and was caught under the ear in an old-fashioned bunch of ringlets. She was under my mother's protection, who was very kind and generous toher, having an inscrutable liking for strangers,—above all, needy strangers. She was a woman to turn her back inevitably upon a friend in prosperity, and court him in poverty. There was nothing of the snob in my mother, I must admit.
Another vivid picture I have of this young girl is a gloomier and more impressive one. I cannot tell why I was chosen for that drive. I suppose it was because I looked so delicate and unhappy that my stepfather insisted on having me. He drove a pair of spirited horses, and I sat opposite my mother and the dark young girl. She did not smile once that day, and the extreme sadness of her face riveted my attention. I thought I had never seen any one so beautiful and interesting, and I wondered why her eyes kept continually filling with tears.
She and my mother whispered mysteriously from time to time, and the disconnected words that reached my ears were no enlightenment for my puzzled brain. Ordinarily I was too dreamy or too excited to have much curiosity for my fellows. I preferred my own thoughts to speculations upon creatures so dull and undiverting as big people. But this day it was different. A brilliant young lady in long dresses, with a glittering ring upon her finger, whom my parentstreated with every kindness and consideration, could be just as miserable apparently as a small neglected girl. It was truly a wonderful discovery.
We drove along the Kilmainham road, I now know, and as we went farther north, the pretty girl's tears flowed more freely, only she did not cry as we children cry. She bit her lips, and every moment thrust her handkerchief angrily into her eyes. My mother seemed to scold her for having wished to come that way, and I thought wanted to divert her attention from something the girl was evidently anxious to see.
We stopped near a large building, and there was my stepfather turned towards us and talking a strange jargon. From dint of puzzling over each word, I arrived at the extraordinary conclusion that somebody this young girl loved was in prison, that it was not wicked apparently to be locked up in prison, and that the woodwork they were gazing at, my stepfather with his hat in his hand, was something bad men were getting ready for her friend's destruction. The young girl stared up at the woodwork with streaming passionate eyes, and then buried her face in her handkerchief, and rocked from side to side in a dreadful way. We were driving on,and I gazed up to see what my stepfather was doing. He, too, was wiping away tears, and his hat was right down upon his eyes.
The mystery was solved years afterward. This girl was engaged to a political prisoner recently condemned to death. My mother used to take her to see him at Kilmainham Jail, and she had insisted on being driven round by the prison the day before the execution.
My grandmother lies farther back, a fainter picture in that world of unsatisfactory grown-up people. While she lived, her favourite present to each of her granddaughters was either a grey or green silk dress, with a poky bonnet and ribbons to match. In the grey we must have looked like little Quakeresses, and in the green like a gathering of the "gentle people" out of the moonlit woods, our proper dominion.
Her I remember indistinctly as a thin-lipped, unpleasant-looking woman, who had a fixed opinion that children must either be "saucy" or "bold." I was bold, because I was always too frightened of her to say anything, saucy or meek.
She used to lie in bed or on the parlour sofa, sipping egg-flip and reading religious books. She was very devout; but her religion, I suspect,served neither to brighten her own nor any one else's life. It had a sombre, vinegary aspect, more concerned with punishment due than pleasure merited, more attuned to severity than Christian mildness.
By some unaccountable process she melted out of my existence, having darkened it for some months, from which I infer that her death passed unnoted by me or was not explained to me. I did not see her dead, and can record no gentle deed of hers living. She never kissed me, but sometimes shook my hand in a loose gentlemanly fashion, and exhorted me not to be so "bold."
Once she nearly broke my heart. The cook had made some damson jam, and while I was alone in the parlour turning over the leaves of one of grandpapa's music-books, which looked so mysteriously wonderful to me, she carried in a specimen bowl, and left it on the table with some loose coppers. I still see that bowl. It was white, and had a wreath of pink roses.
When I tired of my music-book, I wandered by a natural impulse into temptation. The bowl was out of my reach, but I soon remedied that by drawing over a chair and climbing upon it. I dipped my finger into the bowl, and then putit into my mouth. It tasted, as indeed I fully anticipated, good. You may imagine the alacrity with which I continued the operation, without any heed of the blotches of jam that dropped upon the table.
Both the hall-door and parlour-door were open, and I heard loud sobbing. I was acquainted with sorrow myself, which was a reason I never heard a child's cry unmoved. I slipped off my chair, and ran out into the hall.
A ragged little follow sat on the doorstep, crying as if his heart would burst. I raced down the steps, and sat by his side to comfort him. He had cut his foot, and I asked him if it would not hurt less if he had some apples to eat. Crab-apples always soothed my own immeasurable woes and lightened the pangs of solitude for me. The weeping boy looked at me sullenly, and nodded.
In I flew again and came out with the coppers grasped in my jammy palm, and holding the bowl of damson jam tightly wedged between my pinafore and both hands.
"There's splendid jam here," I said, and invited the sufferer to dip his finger into the bowl.
He did so, and stopped crying. He was quite consoled, and nearly emptied the bowl in theavidity of his appreciation. Then I gave him the coppers, and told him the name of the shop where he could get lots of the nicest crab-apples. The hall-door was still open, and the parlour was empty when I carried back the bowl. I left it on the table, and went out into the garden to talk to Dennis.
I had no idea of having done wrong. At nurse's I was free to take what I liked, and I was not at all familiar with the sin of stealing. Judge, then, my surprise when cook came out for me with a flaming face, and assured me I "would catch it." I stopped playing, and felt chill with apprehension. What was going to happen to me now? Grandpapa was not there to protect me, and I had not much faith in Dennis's power to save me.
Cook dragged me up-stairs, scolding me all the way. She called me a thief, a robber, and said I was worse than the dreadful highwaymen they wrote of in books. I whimperingly protested. I was not a thief, I cried indignantly; I was not a robber. I did not know what a highwayman was, but I was sure I was not that either.
"Ah! you'll catch it," was all cook deigned to reply.
How grossly and wickedly mismanaged children are by people who do not think or stop to study them! So many tears and tremors and moments of black despair, because angry and impatient persons will not take the trouble to use the right words and correct with justice and sense. To abuse an ignorant little child in disproportionate language, at an age when imagination exaggerates and magnifies everything, for an impulsive action and an inconsequent error, and tell her "she would catch it," is surely a hideous perversion of strength and power.
Relatively speaking, that moment was not less vivid and awful for me than the worst hour of a heretic in the days of the Inquisition. And I had as little faith in the justice or kindness of my judges as any wretch of those times.
My grandmother sat in bed with her glass of egg-flip in her hand, presiding relentlessly over my castigation. Again I was informed that my crime was an appalling one. I had robbed money and robbed jam. There was no softening of my grandmother's face when I said, through my sobs of terror, that I only took the money to give it to a little boy that had hurt his foot and was crying. Cook administered an unmerciful whipping, as if there were not beatingsenough for me without cause down in the big town house I hated.
No, verily; there are times, when I look at happier children to-day and remember that poor unhappy little child of years ago, I feel there are wrongs we cannot be expected to forgive, scars no time can efface, blunders no after good will ever rectify. I could weep to-day as bitterly for that little child, so alone, so throbbing with untamed fears, as ever she wept for herself then.
I do not know how long my martyrdom in the town house had endured before I resolved to make an end of it myself. Nor do I yet quite understand how the scene that led to an excess of misery so terminated began.
I had been more contented that day than usual. The nurse had let me sit by the nursery fire while she bathed and dressed the latest addition to our family circle, a baby boy with a pink wrinkled face. Compared with that gurgling morsel of humanity, I felt very wise and old indeed. After that the nursemaid came and took me on her knee, and while perched there she sang me a song. I slept in the next room, and was not often allowed into the nursery, or I am sure the nurse and nursemaid would have made life easier for me.
Then I wandered into the play-room, and here great doings were afoot. They were getting up a transformation scene. On the top of eachladder a little girl sat, representing a fairy, and in the middle of the room a small child lay with a white cloth about her. When somebody clapped hands she sprang up, caught her skirts in either hand, and began to dance as she had seen the fairies in the pantomime.
They were all in high spirits that day, and let me look on without snubbing or laughing at me. Like all creatures unaccustomed to much mercy, this small favour filled me with joy, and I expanded upon a whiff of social equality.
Children resemble dogs in their dislike of intruders, and to these young people I daresay I, with my sulky miserable face, pale and woe-be-gone from association with sorrow and from unassuaged longing for other days, was an unattractive enough intruder. One there was who always resented my appearance in their midst more than the rest, my mother's favourite, the five-year-old queen of the establishment. My mother used to call her queen, and tell her that she was at liberty to do what she liked to me, as I was only a slave.
What a surprising amount of good must lie at the bottom of a nature so trained, that it ever developed into good-natured and generous womanhood! But to expect that the child inthose days should have been other than a little vixen to me, would be to expect the impossible.
The play was interrupted for dinner, and after dinner the troop marched up again to the play-room to resume their game. I stayed down-stairs, and stole into the storeroom to talk to Mrs. Clement. Near tea-hour she sent me on some message, and that, of course, was a proud moment for me. Children love to be sent on messages between their elders. They instantly become as inflated as a general's aide-de-camp, and hardly need a horse in imagination to place them in their own esteem above the level of other children.
How it all came about I know not. The queen and the slave encountered somewhere on the way. We met like two young puppies and snarled. The queen had a despotic notion of her own rights. She might snarl at me, but I had not the right to reply. If she struck me it was part of my punishment for being in her way, and my duty was to bear it.
I don't suppose she reasoned this way any more than the young puppy does when it flies at the throat of a mongrel it dislikes. Anyhow, she struck me. I was a proud, fiercelittle devil, and being two years her senior, I laid her low, with an ugly red stain on her white cheek.
As I do not remember how it began, so I do not recall how it ended. There is a dark blank of several hours—centuries it seemed to me—and I was in my cot sobbing myself to sleep, and telling myself that I could not bear it, and to-morrow would run away to my dear everyday parents.
Next morning I sullenly submitted to be dressed and taken down to breakfast. But the red-and-white bowl I ate my bread and milk out of no longer delighted my eye, and no amount of sugar could take the taste of bitterness out of that bread-and-milk. My stepfather came into the room, and looked at me in reproachful silence. Usually he kissed me and flung me up to the ceiling. But now that the poor miserable little worm had turned and struck the idol of the house, his own child, he had no kind word for me. He only knew of the affair what he had been told, and how many thoughtless big people can understand what goes on in the hearts of sore and lonely babies?
He may have noted the sadness of my face, but what did he know of the inward bruise, thehunger for love and sympathy, the malady of life that had begun to gnaw at my soul at an age when other little girls are out racing among the flowers in a universe bounded and heated and beautified by the love of mother and father?
Mrs. Clement must have been very busy, for she did not come to comfort me. Perhaps she, too, thought I was a fiend. But I was too proud to seek to explain matters to any one. If they wanted to believe I was bad, they might think I was as bad as ever they liked.
In my open-worked pinafore and little house slippers, bare-headed and bare-armed, I stole anxiously down-stairs. The baker was carrying in the bread, and the hall-door was open. This was my chance, and I seized it. Ah, there were the wide long streets, and however cruel the big people might be who went up and down them, at least they could not hurt me, for I did not belong to any of them.
Like a frightened hare I scurried along the pavement until I came to a big crossing. I paused here in new peril. To go over alone meant to risk contact with the wheels and horses continually rolling and stamping by. I had not the courage to do this, and I stoodgazing disconsolately across at the happy people walking so unconcernedly on the other side. While I stood there a policeman marched up in a leisurely fashion. He looked as if he might help a little girl, and I knew when robbers attacked you the proper person to assist you was a policeman.
"Please, Mr. Policeman, will you take me across the street?" I asked, going boldly up to him.
The amiable giant put out his hand, grasped my eager fingers, and I pattered along at his side as he gravely led me over the crossing. Without a word, I raced ahead; the quicker I ran, the quicker I believed I would reach Mamma Cochrane's house, and my dear friends, nurse, and Louie, and Mary Jane.
In what direction I ran I know not to-day; I seemed to have been running down interminable streets for hours and hours, till at last my feet in their thin slippers began to ache. Gradually my legs stiffened, and it was less and less easy to continue running. Nobody stopped me, but I have an idea many stared at me. I hardly knew which I most feared, to be overtaken and carried back to my mother, or to be let die of hunger in those big unfriendly streets. Eitherprospect seemed so terrible to me in a moment of lucid vision, that I at once dropped upon a doorstep and began to cry.
"What's the matter, little lady?" a tall policeman asked, with a smile of insidious kindliness.
"I want to find my everyday mamma so badly," I sobbed. "But it's so far away,—I'm very tired, and nobody is sorry for me, though I'm so unhappy."
I gazed anxiously up into the face of the big policeman, and wondered if such a very big person could possibly understand and pity the sorrows of such a very small person as myself.
"What's your name?" asked the big policeman.
"Angela."
"And where do you live, missy?"
"Oh, a drefful long way off—in a big house down there," pointing vaguely in front of me, "in a horrid big house, without any fields or flowers at all."
"Won't you come along with me, missy?" coaxed the policeman, and if he had asked me to go to prison with that look and smile, I would cheerfully have gone, I think.
He lifted me into his arms and carried me, I know now, to the nearest police-station. HereI was installed upon an inspector's knee, and an army of giants stood round me and made much of me. How the gentlemen of the force may appeal to others, I know not, but I must ever regard them as my kindest friends. They petted me prodigiously, and vied with each other in providing me with luxuries. One held a piece of bread-and-jam for me, another a slice of bread-and-honey, and various hands held out sweetmeats and cakes and apples. The thing was to satisfy everybody and devour each delicacy successively.
The amiable giants smiled upon me, and appeared to listen to my confidential chatter with admiration and delight. Out of the gloom of the domestic circle I could be expansive to rashness. Between bites, I told them the tale of my private grievances, and they shook sympathetic heads over my account of Stevie's disappearance in a queer box, and dropped their jaws when I, charmed with the sensation I had made, assured them that I too was so miserable and lonely that I would like to be put in a box and sent to heaven. I would much rather go back to Mamma Cochrane's than anything; but if I could not find her I would like to die like Stevie, unless the policemen wouldtake care of me and let me stay with them always.
The inspector was ready to adopt me on the spot; meanwhile, as I was tired and the excitement had worn off, he encouraged me to fall asleep on his knee, which I was nothing loath to do.
The rest is a vague memory. Somebody shook me, and I opened my eyes and saw my stepfather smiling at me. I thought I was at home, and rubbed my eyes, and then sat up. But I was still in the inspector's arms—I recognised his black cap and grey beard. My circle of friendly giants had vanished; but on a table beside me were heaped unfinished slices of bread and jam and honey, gingerbread nuts, shrewsbury biscuits, bulls' eyes, brandy balls, sugar-stick, and apples. A couple of policemen stood at the door and grinned in eloquent assurance of continued friendship, and the inspector had not released his comforting clasp of my wearied body.
"Papa, I'm so happy here. Don't let us go back any more to Sunday mamma. Let us stay here always with the nice policemen."
My stepfather laughed his joyous cordial laugh, and caught me in his arms. He shookhands with the inspector and the policemen, and carried me into a cab. I was still too sleepy and tired to whimper, and we had hardly set off before I was fast asleep on my stepfather's knee.