Back Aa

Englishwoman's Love-Letters, An

<h2>LETTER LXIX.</h2> Beloved: I remember my second birthday. I am quite sure of it, because my third I remember so infinitely well.—Then I was taken in to see Arthur lying in baby bridal array of lace fringes and gauze, and received in my arms held up for me by Nan-nan the awful weight and imperial importance of his small body. I think from the first I was told of him as my "brother": cousin I have never been able to think him. But all this belongs to my third: on my second, I remember being on a floor of roses; and they told me if I would go across to a clipboard and pull it open there would be something there waiting for me. And it was on all-fours that I went all eagerness across great patches of rose-pattern, till I had butted my way through a door left ajar, and found in a cardboard box of bright tinsel and flowers two little wax babes in the wood lying. I think they gave me my first sense of color, except, perhaps, the rose-carpet which came earlier, and they remained for quite a long time the most beautiful thing I knew. It is strange that I cannot remember what became of them, for I am sure I neither broke nor lost them,—perhaps it was done for me: Arthur came afterward, the tomb of many of my early joys, and the maker of so many new ones. He, dearest, is the one, the only one, who has seen the tears that belong truly to you: and he blesses me with such wonderful patience when I speak your name, allowing that perhaps I know better than he. And after the wax babies I had him for my third birthday. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LXX.</h2> Beloved: I think that small children see very much as animals must do: just the parts of things which have a direct influence on their lives, and no memory outside that. I remember the kindness or frowns of faces in early days far more than the faces themselves: and it is quite a distinct and later memory that I have of standing within a doorway and watching my mother pass downstairs unconscious of my being there,—and then, for the first time, studying her features and seeing in them a certain solitude and distance which I had never before noticed:—I suppose because I had never before thought of looking at her when she was not concerned with me. It was this unobservance of actual features, I imagine, which made me think all gray-haired people alike, and find a difficulty in recognizing those who called, except generically as callers—people who kissed me, and whom therefore I liked to see. One, I remember, for no reason unless because she had a brown face, I mistook from a distance for my Aunt Dolly, and bounded into the room where she was sitting, with a cry of rapture. And it was my earliest conscious test of politeness, when I found out my mistake, not to cry over it in the kind but very inferior presence to that one I had hoped for. I suppose, also, that many sights which have no meaning to children go, happily, quite out of memory; and that what our early years leave for us in the mind's lavender are just the tit-bits of life, or the first blows to our intelligence—things which did matter and mean much. Corduroys come early into my life,—their color and the queer earthy smell of those which particularly concerned me: because I was picked up from a fall and tenderly handled by a rough working-man so clothed, whom I regarded for a long time afterward as an adorable object. He and I lived to my recognition of him as a wizened, scrubby, middle-aged man, but remained good friends after the romance was over. I don't know when the change in my sense of beauty took place as regards him. Anything unusual that appealed to my senses left exaggerated marks. My father once in full uniform appeared to me as a giant, so that I screamed and ran, and required much of his kindest voice to coax me back to him. Also once in the street a dancer in fancy costume struck me in the same way, and seemed in his red tunic twice the size of the people who crowded round him. I think as a child the small ground-flowers of spring took a larger hold upon me than any others:—I was so close to them. Roses I don't remember till I was four or five; but crocus and snowdrop seem to have been in my blood from the very beginning of things; and I remember likening the green inner petals of the snowdrop to the skirts of some ballet-dancing dolls, which danced themselves out of sight before I was four years old. Snapdragons, too, I remember as if with my first summer: I used to feed them with bits of their own green leaves, believing faithfully that those mouths must need food of some sort. When I became more thoughtful I ceased to make cannibals of them: but I think I was less convinced then of the digestive process. I don't know when I left off feeding snapdragons: I think calceolarias helped to break me off the habit, for I found they had no throats to swallow with. In much the same way as sights that have no meaning leave no traces, so I suppose do words and sounds. It was many years before I overheard, in the sense of taking in, a conversation by elders not meant for me: though once, in my innocence, I hid under the table during the elders' late dinner, and came out at dessert, to which we were always allowed to come down, hoping to be an amusing surprise to them. And I could not at all understand why I was scolded; for, indeed, I had heard nothing at all, though no doubt plenty that was unsuitable for a child's ears had been said, and was on the elders' minds when they upbraided me. Dearest, such a long-ago! and all these smallest of small things I remember again, to lay them up for you: all the child-parentage of me whom you loved once, and will again if ever these come to you. Bless my childhood, dearest: it did not know it was lonely of you, as I know of myself now! And yet I have known you, and know you still, so am the more blest.—Good-night. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LXXI.</h2> I used to stand at the foot of the stairs a long time, when by myself, before daring to start up: and then it was always the right foot that went first. And a fearful feeling used to accompany me that I was going to meet the "evil chance" when I got to the corner. Sometimes when I felt it was there very badly, I used at the last moment to shut my eyes and walk through it: and feel, on the other side, like a pilgrim who had come through the waters of Jordan. My eyes were always the timidest things about me: and to shut my eyes tight against the dark was the only way I had of meeting the solitude of the first hour of bed when Nan-nan had left me, and before I could get to sleep. I have an idea that one listens better with one's eyes shut, and that this and other things are a remnant of our primitive existence when perhaps the ears of our arboreal ancestors kept a lookout while the rest of their senses slept. I think, also, that the instinct I found in myself, and have since in other children, to conceal a wound is a similar survival. At one time, I suppose, in the human herd the damaged were quickly put out of existence; and it was the self-preservation instinct which gave me so keen a wish to get into hiding when one day I cut my finger badly—something more than a mere scratch, which I would have cried over and had bandaged quite in the correct way. I remember I sat in a corner and pretended to be nursing a rag doll which I had knotted round my hand, till Nan-nan noticed, perhaps, that I looked white, and found blood flowing into my lap. And I can recall still the overcoming comfort which fell upon me as I let resolution go, and sobbed in her arms full of pity for myself and scolding the "naughty knife" that had done the deed. The rest of that day is lost to me. Yet it is not only occasions of happiness and pain which impress themselves. When the mind takes a sudden stride in consciousness,—that, also, fixes itself. I remember the agony of shyness which came on me when strange hands did my undressing for me once in Nan-nan's absence: the first time I had felt such a thing. And another day I remember, after contemplating the head of Judas in a pictorial puzzle for a long time, that I seized a brick and pounded him with it beyond recognition:—these were the first vengeful beginnings of Christianity in me. All my history, Bible and English, came to me through picture-books. I wept tenderly over the endangered eyes of Prince Arthur, yet I put out the eyes of many kings, princes, and governors who incurred my displeasure, scratching them with pins till only a white blur remained on the paper. All this comes to me quite seriously now: I used to laugh thinking it over. But can a single thing we do be called trivial, since out of it we grow up minute by minute into a whole being charged with capacity for gladness or suffering? Now, as I look back, all these atoms of memory are dust and ashes that I have walked through in order to get to present things. How I suffer, how I suffer! If you could have dreamed that a human body could contain so much suffering, I think you would have chosen a less dreadful way of showing me your will: you would have given me a reason why I have to suffer so. Dearest, I am broken off every habit I ever had, except my love of you. If you would come back to me you could shape me into whatever you wished. I will be different in all but just that one thing. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <h2>LETTER LXXII.</h2> Here in my pain, Beloved, I remember keenly now the one or two occasions when as a small child I was consciously a cause of pain to others. What an irony of life that once of the two times when I remember to have been cruel, it was to Arthur, with his small astonished baby-face remaining a reproach to me ever after! I was hardly five then, and going up to the nursery from downstairs had my supper-cake in my hand, only a few mouthfuls left. He had been having his bath, and was sitting up on Nan-nan's knee being got into his bed clothes; when spying me with my cake he piped to have a share of it. I dare say it would not have been good for him, but of that I thought nothing at all: the cruel impulse took me to make one mouthful of all that was left. He watched it go without crying; but his eyes opened at me in a strange way, wondering at this sudden lesson of the hardness of a human heart. "All gone!" was what he said, turning his head from me up to Nan-nan, to see perhaps if she too had a like surprise for his wee intelligence. I think I have never forgiven myself that, though Arthur has no memory of it left in him: the judging remembrance of it would, I believe, win forgiveness to him for any wrong he might now do me, if that and not the contrary were his way with me: so unreasonably is my brain scarred where the thought of it still lies. God may forgive us our trespasses by marvelous slow ways; but we cannot always forgive them ourselves. The other thing came out of a less personal greed, and was years later: Arthur and I were collecting eggs, and in the loft over one of the out-houses there was a swallow's nest too high up to be reached by any ladder we could get up there. I was intent on getting the eggs, and thought of no other thing that might chance: so I spread a soft fall below, and with a long pole I broke the floor of the nest. Then with a sudden stir of horror I saw soft things falling along with the clay, tiny and feathery. Two were killed by the breakage that fell with them, but one was quite alive and unhurt. I gathered up the remnants of the nest and set it with the young one in it by the loft window where the parent-birds might see, making clumsy strivings of pity to quiet my conscience. The parent-birds did see, soon enough: they returned, first up to the rafters, then darting round and round and crying; then to where their little one lay helpless and exposed, hung over it with a nibbling movement of their beaks for a moment, making my miserable heart bound up with hope: then away, away, shrieking into the July sunshine. Once they came back, and shrieked at the horror of it all, and fled away not to return. I remained for hours and did whatever silly pity could dictate: but of course the young one died: and I—cleared away all remains that nobody might see! And that I gave up egg-collecting after that was no penance, but choice. Since then the poignancy of my regret when I think of it has never softened. The question which pride of life and love of make-believe till then had not raised in me, "Am I a god to kill and to make alive?" was answered all at once by an emphatic "No," which I never afterward forgot. But the grief remained all the same, that life, to teach me that blunt truth, should have had to make sacrifice in the mote-hung loft of three frail lives on a clay-altar, and bring to nothing but pain and a last miserable dart away into the bright sunshine the spring work of two swift-winged intelligences. Is man, we are told to think, not worth many sparrows? Oh, Beloved, sometimes I doubt it! and would in thought give my life that those swallows in their generations might live again. Beloved, I am letting what I have tried to tell you of my childhood end in a sad way. For it is no use, no use: I have not to-day a glimmer of hope left that your eyes will ever rest on what I have been at such deep trouble to write. If I were being punished for these two childish things I did, I should see a side of justice in it all. But it is for loving you I am being punished: and not God himself shall make me let you go! Beloved, Beloved, all my days are at your feet, and among them days when you held me to your heart. Good-night; good-night always now! <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2

Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.