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The search for a soul begins when our eyes open, and closes only when they close, but the choice of the individual’s goal is unconsciously settled by himself in childhood.

Heredity, family constellation, environment, weak organs, cruel circumstances, gross pampering or neglect all leave their diverse influences on the child. They are the material of his development but he himself chooses the form this material will take.

My reason for writing these memoirs only up to the age of eighteen is that after adolescence we enter a new region of living where we cease to be an object with whom life is still at play, and become subjects playing upon life. When we take a hand in this final game, we no longer want to show it to the other players. A veil must come down between what we are and what we wish others to think us. Subjects deceive even the wariest observer as objects never can.

People very often question why psychologists attach such value to the earliest stages of “Tommy and Jane.” “Why,” they say, “must we perpetually listen to the prattlings of young children? Young children have no experience; they don’t think; they have dirty habits; they make a noise. Why do not psychologists, if they really do know anything of the make-up of the human soul, write of adults, who will be far less boring, don’t wet their beds, and will sometimes remind us of ourselves?”

Unfortunately, the psychologists have discovered that the selves of which we like to be reminded are often but shifting masks, which we put on or take off before the looking glass of our vanity, in order—when our toilet is successfully accomplished—to please, and often to misinform, both others and ourselves. Whereas our childhood’s scheme of life is an unconscious permanent pattern which we have chosen before the age of five to accompany us through life, and unless we are faithfully prepared to go back to our prototypes “Tommy and Jane” and to find out what they created for us at those early ages, we shall never know what is the real face behind the mask, and only catch up with our actual selves in moments of despair or when contrition has torn its way through all the veils of self-deception to the core of our broken hearts.

“I am thyself—what hast thou done to me?” Rossetti cries in the most poignant of his sonnets. “And I—and I thyself! Lo each one saith, And thou, thyself, to all eternity!”

Our first choice of a self, since it is made in the dark spaces of early childhood (subject to the inferiority feeling of helplessness and smallness of stature), cannot be a very successful one and it is not perhaps surprising that we hardly like to be reminded of it. Yet unless we learn how to unmask this early choice, and so find out what is the direction we have chosen to follow, we shall not be able to change it.

“Individual Psychology”—Adler’s great contribution to the life of thought—is a method by which we can discover what these early selves are founded upon, and if they were mistakenly founded, how to change them.

If our childhood pattern is a more or less normal one, capable of adjusting to the lessons of life, we can often remove these early obstructions and self-deceptions for ourselves; but if we have become very heavily handicapped by our early choice and rigid, instead of adjustable to the spur of experience, we shall need the help of a trained psychiatrist. Otherwise we shall repeat the mistakes and catastrophes of our childhood through our adult life and often ruin, one by one, all our future relationships.

“The painted panes” to an individual psychologist are the colours with which each one of us chooses to paint his windows.

Childhood is the workshop of the soul, and I believe that we should study far more carefully than we yet do what materials we provide and what tools are put into the hands of these young and inexperienced workmen, who have to build their whole future upon what they can make out from our instructions, and alas! from our examples! Nevertheless the child’s own creative “choice” remains supreme.

Out of physical or environmental inferiorities many children have even developed superior powers and abilities. Demosthenes was not satisfied with a stutter, he put pebbles in his mouth as well, so that he could practise speaking on the sea shore till he became the greatest orator the world has ever known. Dickens, perhaps the most imaginative writer of his era, was without education, neglected and forsaken by his family at the age of ten. Abraham Lincoln was one of the world’s greatest statesmen, though born to the grim poverty and ignorance of a backwoodsman.

Where the child oftenest goes wrong as an architect is when he comes up against what Adler called “the family constellation.” In the family every child has endless opportunities of using or abusing his courage. He is training himself for his future relations with his wife, his children and his friends by the way he chooses to behave to his parents and to his brothers and sisters. If a child cannot get on at home it is unlikely that he will be able to make a home where other children can get on.

The great question of the freedom of the human will must largely depend on whether the human being is free to will. What kind of a self—? decides the question of freedom. A pampered or a neglected child cannot be free to will. A tyrant is incapable of controlling his own heart and mind. A coward has chosen to be the prey of tyrants so that he may escape the duties and obligations of freedom. A man cannot be free who prefers his short desires to his long ones. He cannot be free if his dislikes are greater than his likes. Above all he cannot be free if he is the centre of his own egocentric world and cannot see beyond it.

Adler taught that all neurosis is an attempt to escape from personal responsibility, and that courage is the health of the soul.

I have tried in this fragment of an autobiography to write the truth about my own early and mistaken choice of character as well as to portray the influences which no doubt strengthened my choice. I had inevitably to show a critical attitude towards others besides myself. My parents are dead and cannot suffer from my criticisms but I hope that I have not acted with disrespect towards their memories since the mistakes I believe that they made were largely due to the insincerities and sentimentalities of their period, while the debt that I owe them for their unfailing love is one that I could never repay.

Such a study as I have attempted with myself as its chief victim must be written without glamour and cannot seek to be, in the ordinary sense of the word, entertaining.

It is most damning if it is flattering. It has only one aim and can have only one merit, that it is as true as I am able to make it.

De Quincey, that master of intensive insight into the human heart, was convinced that candour must be the chief aim of all sound autobiography. “If,” he writes of his own self-portrait, “he were really able to pierce the haze which so often envelops, even to himself, his own secret springs of action and reserve, there cannot be a life moving at all under intellectual impulses that would not, through that single force of absolute frankness, fall within the reach of a deep, solemn and sometimes even of a thrilling interest.” I cannot claim to have performed any such work of art in this autobiography, but I do claim to be judged by the same aim as De Quincey’s since this memoir is how, and no otherwise, the child I wrote about became the human being that I am.

P. B.

Search for a Soul

Children who are born in May start well in the world and look on sunshine as their natural heritage. This summer in the blood can last a whole life through, especially if behind the outward shining a background of human love gives the child courage.

I was in this way among the most fortunate of children, for I was born on the night when May turns into June in the year 1882—and my parents were young; and having suffered the sharp bereavement of the loss of a boy a year before, they gave me a double share of their hearts.

My first memory is of sunshine, sitting on a green bank and knocking off the heads of grasses my mother held out to me for the purpose. This vigorous and vicious action must have given an undue amount of pleasure to be remembered so long—as my mother assured me that I was only eighteen months old at the time; no familiar green bank being identifiable in our history until long after I had related the memory. I can also well remember my first journey to a new home when I was little over two years old. The Wantage Hill has impressed many people by its stubborn length—so that it is not surprising that it impressed a baby on the eternity of a wet afternoon, especially one who was not allowed to get out and pick the drenched bluebells in the hedges. The one horse climbed slowly—the rest of the family got out and walked to ease it. My mother and I were left alone inside watching the rain, the bluebells, the freed walkers and the steaming horse. I remember nothing else—what we thought of the Vicarage in the Berkshire village of Fawley-under-the-Downs when we arrived that wet, February day I have no idea. The memories of the two years we spent there (we seldom stayed for more than two years anywhere) are not consecutive, but many of them are very clear; and probably the most formative of a lifetime.

My mother was delicate, extremely beautiful, and very happy. My father was in the best of health and radiant with good spirits. By birth and upbringing he was American—but only of one generation, since Francis Bottome, his father, had emigrated from a village in Derbyshire at the age of twenty-four—and his mother Margaret MacDonald’s parents came direct from the Isles. My mother was Yorkshire on both sides. Her father was a Yorkshire Leatham; her mother, Rachel Pease, the sister of Sir Joseph Pease, of Darlington. But the Isles were, I suppose, the strongest element in us, for all of us took after my grandmother, Margaret Bottome, with her deep, dark eyes, black hair, and soft, strong voice; none of us after our beautiful, blue-eyed, wild-rose complexioned mother. I had two elder sisters, Wilmett and Mary, though I cannot remember them very well at this time. They seem a mere blur at the back of my mind, and far more plainly stands out the half pleasant, half unpleasant shock of the birth of my baby brother. I did not want him, for I had been—and thought I safely was “Baby” par excellence. I had all the rights and privileges common to the youngest. My elder sisters were almost inconceivably older than myself—five and nearly seven years’ seniority kept them well away from all my prerogatives. Why then should anything else happen to shake me? Yet the earthquake came. The nurse, “Gibby”—brought, as I eventually found out, from some obscure heaven (for she was an angel) purposely to minister to the new arrival—I had believed to be exclusively mine. One dreadful early morning her extremely red face with a self-congratulatory expression peered over my cot. “What,” she rather inanely questioned me, “would you like best in the world?” I replied automatically, “A doll.” “Well, it’s better than a doll,” she foolishly told me, “but quite like one. Guess again, for there is something in the house for you now.” I never did guess, and when told felt my heart struggle and sink. “A baby!” It did belong to me, I was told, but rather curiously to my mother also. My mother I had not seen for several days, but “Gibby,” functioning as always with a happy, casual ease, had so soothed the atmosphere of nursery life that I must confess I had not seriously missed her. I was taken to see the baby. It was an extremely thin, ugly and unresponsive mite, yet I began to like it. It was alive. Later on, so I was assured, it would be more alive still. Very soon the creature began to respond to me—it watched me with its enormous brown eyes—it smiled at me when I leaned over and gently poked it—quite soon it gurgled and waved and set up quite an amicable relationship with me. I was allowed to hold it; and it became “George.”

I may say that though I loved my sister Mary with a life-long depth of sisterly affection, and hated my sister Wilmett with a fervent passion, probably the deepest of my family feelings was for this strange creature that shared my nursery—a child but not a girl—a fellow baby; and a companion though strangely limited as to power, and seldom sharing my hopes and ambitions. Yet I took care of him—I played with him endless games that more and more amused him—and less and less amused me—and I continued to be probably the happier and almost certainly the better for this shared kingdom. Gibby quite shamelessly preferred George to all the world—but my mother, though she loved him equally, made me feel that nothing whatever had happened to interfere with her love for me. We both of us had acquired a further object of affection—that was all.

The bells were rung for him in the little Downs Church which was almost as much part of us as the Vicarage. They had been rang a fortnight before—on the birth of the heir to Wooley—Philip Wroughton—an arrival patiently expected for so many years while six little sisters had preceded him; and now the Vicar’s boy had the bells rung for him as well—and the whole victorious village pealed and rocked for these two new babies as if such a thing as a birth had never yet occurred to them. For all the villagers’ babies came into the world without a bell.

The “little Wroughtons” as they were spoken of in the Vicarage were our only companions and we were their nearest—though I fancy not their only ones. They lived on the Downs, and horses, flashing dog-carts, delicate, silent deer, red-eyed ferrets, dogs, rabbits, and hot-house grapes all played mysterious and fascinating parts in their odd lives. We admired the Wroughton children very much; and, indeed, one of them I secretly worshipped for her beauty, her delicate features, her long, fair hair—and even longer, slim black legs. They were a slightly hard and violent group, apt to bounce silently off the seats of dog-carts and be left high and dry, sitting in the dusty Berkshire roads, for they were very stoical and would never have dreamed of making any kind of fuss about an accident. Their dresses were inconceivably short and generally white muslin. Sometimes they wore scarlet coats. They were much more silent than we were, having learned the value of secretiveness from animals—and possibly from Nurse Ranger, a startling and terrible person who took some kind of control of their lives when they were indoors. They took good care, of course, that this happened as seldom as possible. When out of doors they evaded all authority. I seem to remember them mostly out of doors. They were led by their eldest, Dorothy, as we were, of course, by Wilmett. The tribes mixed without, as far as I remember, any friction whatever—but not so their leaders. On one terrible occasion Dadi slapped Wilmett’s face. Wilmett had, I think, earned it—but she refused to visit Wooley again until she received an apology. She refused for us, too, and for long days the battle of the wills swayed now this way—and now that. Dadi at first refused to apologise and the Downs were closed to us. But in the end—being a good-natured girl—and prompted by an extremely good-natured mother—she consented to some form of recantation—the slap was removed from Wilmett’s cheek. Harmony was once more restored to the clans, the Downs re-opened. Wilmett’s honour was restored; and Dadi had mysteriously lost none of hers.

We were a very religious family. Wilmett at the age of three and a half was once seen expounding some weighty problem to Mary just turned two. “What are you saying to Mary, darling?” my mother gently murmured. “Oh, I’m only off on that old Trinity again!” my eldest sister nonchalantly replied. The Trinity, however, did not trouble me. I kept strictly to Baby Jesus, Guardian Angels and the Good Shepherd.

The Berkshire Downs being one of the best possible regions for sheep, my practical mind decided that the Good Shepherd must be somewhere about with them, and on one occasion, seeing a flock of sheep just outside the garden gate—which happened to be negotiable—I slid out and joined them.

The Good Shepherd was walking in front of his flock, and so did not notice the addition to his company; nor for some time did I draw his attention to it. I wanted to get to Paradise—I did not want to be returned to the nursery; and as I had already come to the conclusion that it is difficult for older people to understand what children want—I thought it best never to draw their attention to it unless absolutely necessary.

I merely walked thoughtfully along, my pink sun-bonnet about the same height as the backs of the sheep I was among. Patter-patter-patter went their neat little feet—and how dusty and suffocating the air they beat up from the white road was—and how far away we seemed to be from the sheep and hills in the nursery picture! Where were the quantities of white lambs playing in a field among equal quantities of flowers? These sheep were anything but white—and had not been lambs for a long time. Nor were there any flowers to be seen anywhere near them. I felt severe about that picture and distrustful of the artist’s acumen. Suddenly a butcher’s cart appeared from nowhere. The sheep scattered, the shepherd drew to one side of the road and looked round: “Hi, you baby,” he said, or words to that effect, “what be you a’doin’ of?”

I felt ruffled, challenged, out of place, and cannot remember finding an answer to such a foolish question, but the butcher knew me—he was, in fact, our butcher—and soon put the matter to rights. There are no pictures in nurseries of lovely butchers carrying exhausted babies home to their nurseries; but there really was one such butcher, and I had far more confidence in him afterwards than in any Good Shepherd—in fact, I had the feeling that shepherds weren’t particularly good; tactless, I thought, and their sheep utterly uncompanionable and smelly. My nursery received me with joy—my mother understood perfectly what had taken place, though she was unable to clear up the question at all satisfactorily. The Good Shepherd, however, she explained, quite definitely, did not reside on the Berkshire Downs.

I went to church as often as possible, but I did not associate it with God. I loved bending forward on a red hassock and saying in a loud, impassioned voice “Lor’-d’liver-us” which I thought was one word—and a very good one. I was pleased to see my father in a costume I thought becoming to him. I was told not to speak to him in church—and I didn’t. I found plenty of other things to amuse myself with—and could speak to him at any time. I was fascinated by a choir boy with a tooth out—whose name was Ernest. Our cook—Lizzie—referred to him as a “Love-child.” This I thought was the height of felicity—to be a child universally loved, a sort of fairy godchild amongst children—and to have a gap in your front row of teeth while other children had none. But I was not destined to meet “Ernest” in the flesh, though I begged for this privilege. He simply inhabited my dreams. I have only one other recollection of this particular church, but it is an extremely vivid one. We were all dressed to go to morning service; the bells were ringing; Wilmett, Mary and myself were in the drawing-room alone where the Dresden china shepherd and shepherdess sparkled coolly at us from the mantelpiece; and Wilmett deliberately set to work to madden me. She was the eldest and had more than her share of the Power instinct. I am told I was not a “naughty” child. I made mistakes but not purposefully aggravating ones. I felt that it was, on the whole, pleasanter to please than to annoy; but I disliked—I indeed utterly repudiated—the authority of my eldest sister. I cannot imagine refusing to do what Mary suggested, but doing what my sister Wilmett ordered me to do was quite another matter. I expected the heavens to fall, but I refused. They very often did fall; but I still refused.

On this occasion I had to stand a particularly long and savage grilling—no-one was at hand to aid me. I stood it for a long time then I leaned deliberately forward—deep into the black velvet sleeve of her Sunday frock, and into my eldest sister’s arm beneath it, I buried my teeth. I can feel to this hour the succulent fury of that bite! Horrified, all but petrified, Wilmett shrieked: “Now you’ve got to be punished!” My mother entered. A flurry of dumb agony followed my sister’s clear worded accusal. Mary was dragged in as an unwilling but cowardly witness; and then my mother’s eyes on my face, and the intense relief of her quiet voice: “How terribly you must have aggravated your little sister, Wilmett, for her to have dreamed of biting you!” No punishment, no explanation necessary, no words at all, only Wilmett ferociously disappointed of revenge—and the feeling in my own mind that though understood I had not been wholly exonerated. It was a terrible thing then to bite even the most aggravating of sisters! The church bells stopped ringing. We were whisked out onto the drive and down the flat white road; and the cool, dusty, innocuous, objective church blotted out the storm.

The second year of my life ran with a golden ease, and I only remember one sharp check that happened on my third birthday. Our household consisted, besides my parents and three sisters, of a cook called Lizzie, with a fierce, high, clean temper and an extremely kind heart; a lovable, red-cheeked house parlour-maid, very appropriately named Rose; and the gardener, my greatest friend (next to a bustling Airedale—Laddie) whose name was Ado. Besides being wholly a gardener, Ado was half a gypsy. He was red-headed with ginger eyes and eyebrows and a long upper lip. As far as we were concerned he was the most staid, respectable and reliable of human beings. There seemed to be no great reason for Lizzie’s expending the main supply of her active temper upon so estimable a being, but Lizzie, we afterwards learned, was in love with Ado and therefore bent upon eradicating what she believed to be the gypsy element in him before marriage. Next to Lizzie, Ado’s affections were concentrated upon myself, and to celebrate my third birthday he presented me with what I felt to be a miracle. It was a double white tulip in a pot, which he planted before my exultant eyes in a small piece of well-dug ground which he described as my garden. He told me that the white tulip needed regular and careful watering or it would die, and then went off to his dinner.

I was alone on the terrace with this immaculate flower. I suppose the tulip must have been a very fine specimen—standing tall and stately with its white cup lifted to the sky. I know my heart was bound up in it. I know that I felt I owed it any and every sacrifice; all that I wanted of it in return was that it should remain alive and beautiful forever—and, of course, mine. A dreadful fear began to invade my suspicious imagination. How long had Ado been gone? How soon should it be watered again? Ado had already just watered it. Would it not die if it were not watered again? Should I not water it at once to make assurance doubly sure? I had a small and easily handled watering can, but it was nowhere in sight. Instead, full on the path leading to a water-tap in the garden wall was Ado’s enormous forbidden watering can, a thing that in less flurried moments I should not have myself considered that I was capable of lifting. But love, we are told, finds out the way—though perhaps not always the right way—of dealing with its desired object, and I therefore hurled myself upon the watering can, which I found empty, and dragged it with comparative ease to the tap. I had never tried turning this tap before, and for a long while it resisted my wildest efforts, until it occurred to me that instead of using all the force I had in one direction, I might better use all the force I had in the opposite direction. This satisfied the tap and it turned accordingly.

A bright shaft of water soon filled the huge can to its brim, splashing me pretty considerably while doing so—but it was as nothing compared to the wetting I got carrying this monster my own height and slopping in every direction as I staggered manfully across the sunny terrace. How long it took me in the heat of this summer noon to struggle to the side of my white tulip I shall never know, but I do well remember the agony of effort this accomplishment took—the blinding heat—the pounding fear, which made my heart seem twice the size of the rest of me. When I reached my tulip’s side there it was blooming as highly and serenely as before; and wanting nothing whatever except to be left alone. I tipped the watering can, too full almost to pour, and the flood came. The tulip reeled, staggered, and fell forward into a bath of muddy water, its proud head bowed forever.

I remember to this day the helpless chill of my grief as I stood looking at what my love had done to the object of its devotion. I had quite literally watered the life out of it. Not only had it met a terrible doom, but I had provided the doom myself. My trembling hands had forced it on its way to death. I don’t know how long I stood there. I don’t know who found me or tried to administer comfort to me. I never lost the completeness of my faith in Ado. I knew he had told me to water the tulip with the best intent, but nature, I suppose, had got the better of him and that black spot—so dreaded by the wisest surgeons—had darkened even Ado’s forethought.

There was something in the Universe that from that day I deeply distrusted, or had I not distrusted it before, and was not this distrust the reason of the tulip’s doom?

Why had I taken upon myself to determine that the tulip must be watered by myself almost immediately after it had been watered by Ado, and not at least awaited his return? Why had I not trusted life a little more and myself a little less? Why had I been so certain that I was right and not based this always rather dubious assumption upon what the tulip appeared to want? It had stood there in perfect health and firmness before I started meddling with it. There was no sign of its flagging or needing any further attention. When I told Adler this early memory he looked very grave for a moment as if he saw that there was something in many other tulips that this hidden arrogance was likely to endanger before the lesson was fully learned. He murmured in a low voice, as if he were speaking to himself, the one word: “Mistrauisch!” Suspicious of life, too certain of my own driving will, too unwilling to learn first the laws of the universe before trying to apply them, too anxious to be in the right, too fearful of failing to meet a self-provided test and come out of it triumphant!

Again and again in after life I was to see or feel in myself, or in some other person dear to me, an imaginary danger—one that had no real concern with me—and put out all my powers to save it; and again and again I have watched the white tulip fall, impeded by the arrogance of my interference, suffering because of this interposition, “some divine mischance with a glassy countenance.”

Not all white tulips were as wholly innocent as the one I drowned on my third birthday. Nor, thank heaven, did all the objects of my care come to so quick and formidable an end. Nevertheless, the over-watered tulip was an indication of a very faulty life plan.

During this autumn my mother’s ill health flung its first real shadow over us. Her lungs became slightly threatened and the doctor suggested a winter in the South of France. I have a feeling that at this time the fabric of that enchanting happiness that hung about our early lives first began to be shaken. It was not that my father loved my mother any the less, nor she him, but the tremendous gulf between their hidden aims began to show through the wear and tear of everyday life. My mother dreaded life. She hated unknown and uncontrollable forces. She had no confidence whatever in herself—or in my father—or in destiny. Her early youth had been very unhappy till she met my father—then, and only then, had she become important and idolized, and the overwhelming warmth, tenderness and exultation of this experience was perhaps too tremendous for so starved a heart. She set to work unconsciously to hold my father away from any and every other contact. She wanted him for herself alone. She did not interfere with his parish duties, but she always refused to share them. No clergyman’s wife I ever knew so sedulously avoided any contact whatever with her husband’s duties. She did not even wish to hear about them. Above all, she would not allow—if she could help it—any social life under her own roof. Her husband, her home, and her babies were all she would acknowledge as her business in life. If my father demanded more of her in any direction she promptly became too ill to allow of even the slightest effort. There was never really anything at all serious the matter with my mother. She had, we were often assured by many able physicians, a particularly good constitution and sound organs. She thought she had contracted malaria at my birth. She had frequent and severe headaches. I do not know what would have happened to her at the hands of modern science. Many doctors from time to time tried to bring her out of these fancied ailments even then—but she merely disposed of the doctors, never of the ailments.

At first we all, including my father, believed in my mother’s illnesses and were terrified of them. Then I think very gradually and painfully my father’s eyes were opened, but ours were not. She was for her children not only madly dear—but mysteriously threatened. Outsiders very often thought that there was really nothing the matter with this beautiful and blooming young woman—so happy in her home and in her children; and probably “young Mrs. Wroughton” of Wooley Park—an outspoken hale and hearty person, may have dropped a hint that my mother might better bestir herself. My mother, at any rate, hardly shared at all in the devoted friendship that linked Wooley and its three generations with the rest of us; nor in any other of my father’s warm and open-hearted friendships. She went to church constantly, she read enormously; she was the loving, gentle and beneficent background of our lives, but more and more she withdrew into herself like a sea-anemone at the mere touch of any outside hand. All her rare intelligence, her sparkling humour, her perfectly sweet, sound temper were confined to the home. She did an occasional kind act for one of my father’s “poor people” outside it; but she avoided even these contacts unless they were forced upon her by accident. She behaved with the same sweet courtesy with which she treated her happy servants—for her servants were peculiarly happy, and went with us wherever we went if it were physically possible, but from this time onward all our moves were the result of my mother’s diseases. It cost her a great deal to leave us for the South of France, and she never after this one absence failed to take the whole of her family with her when her health became endangered.

But before this break occurred, we enjoyed the first of those American visits which became the romance of our lives. Unhappy and anxious about my mother’s illnesses and not, perhaps, too happy about their brilliant eldest son’s possible future with an invalid wife, the American grandparents crossed the ocean, accompanied by the flashing visit of a young Uncle Frank on his way to take up a medical “vocation year” at Berlin. They arrived like tropical birds upon a foreign shore. Seen through a veil of entrancing Christmas presents arriving yearly in a wooden packing case, but now face to face, they transcended our fondest expectations.

My grandmother I only remembered on this first occasion as a Presence, something large and fiery, and full of the most stimulating sense of drama, but always benevolent and pleasing drama; gales of laughter beset her path; her eyes danced and flashed with beneficent lightning; her deep, emphatic voice seemed a kind of human thunder with no ill effects.

My grandfather was on an altogether smaller scale; but to an over-sensitive child he was probably more reassuring. I loved him as I have never loved anyone before or since—he was the only wholly flawless human being I have yet met—except my mother. He had very blue eyes like fine flax, silvery white hair and pink cheeks. He spoke in a low voice, took me long walks and taught me to look at every flower we passed. When I was tired he carried me on his back. He took me to the Downs, where the long grasses waved and the earth smelt sweet of wild thyme and let me roll down the gentler slopes till I felt quite sick. He answered all my questions shortly and to the point. No doubt he spoiled me, and I was already spoiled, for I cannot remember having any friction whatever with any grown-up person until the dreadful day when my mother swiftly vanished, leaving us alone in the hands of a fiend, whom I had already once met in the drawing-room. I had known then, by a mere glance of the eye, that this personage was wholly false and dangerous; and I am surprised that my mother, generally a shrewd judge of character, should have been taken in by the false, cloying manners of Miss—we will call her “Smith.”

She called me “a darling little girl,” but I seemed to feel the quiver of the shark’s fin beneath the pleasant surface even then, though no doubt I let her kiss me. My mother was pleased with her excellent testimonials, and thankful that she was at least a partially trained nurse. She was to take us to three strange but kind, rich, Quaker cousins until my parents returned in the spring. Within a year of her leaving us she became the permanent inmate of a mental hospital. Sane—while we were in her care those terrible five months—she was certainly not. I am sure what I felt when I first saw her, was what Adler said he instinctively felt, if he came into the same room with it; “the cold logic of insanity.” Miss Smith was a confirmed sadist, and she set to work immediately to torture the three little girls left in her care. When I cried she used to throw me—in the depths of winter—into ice-cold baths. She whipped us with or without the slightest provocation. She tied my always exemplary sister Mary to the legs of tables. Every night, when she came up to bed, she tickled me till I went nearly out of my mind with excitement, terror and sheer hatred.

The cousins lived a detached and ceremonious existence in a distant part of the house. Wilmett behaved throughout this period like a heroine from history. She was only nine years old, but she confronted the three unbelieving and indignant cousins with long and perfectly accurate histories of our tortures. She withstood Miss Smith, in the more terrible of her very ferocious tempers, to the face. She fought her like a wild cat when she beat me, until Miss Smith preferred only to practise her orgies behind my sister’s back. Wilmett was punished, she was deprived of privileges, she was treated by the incredulous cousins as a moral delinquent—she, who had been her mother’s glory and the household model of behaviour—but she never gave up trying to defend us.

At last Miss Smith played into Wilmett’s hands. She had punished Mary by putting her legs into scalding hot water till they blistered, then she hastily covered them with black woollen stockings and her legs became violently inflamed. Wilmett now had ocular proof for her tales. She succeeded in dragging the least incredulous and kindest of the three cousins to look at Mary’s legs. A doctor was hastily summoned and Mary was asserted to be very ill, as no doubt she was; sick with fear as well as with actual blood poisoning. For some mysterious reason, the cousins failed even then to dismiss Miss Smith; but the worst of our physical tortures decreased from that hour.

Miss Smith must have been privately censured, though Wilmett was never exonerated; but the cousins took to popping into the nursery at unexpected and far more frequent intervals. Mary was no longer tied to table legs, nor do I suspect that I was given again the “trial by water”; or even at all severely beaten; but never for one moment did my fears—my hate—my appalled conviction of something wholly against nature in charge of us—subside.

It only shows to what depths of cowardice a rule of terror can reduce almost any helpless and exposed human being, let alone a child, that when my mother returned home, only my courageous sister, Wilmett, dared tell her the truth. Mary and I funked the whole business. Only when Mary was publicly confronted with Wilmett did my sister’s flashing eyes and unfettered tongue prove more terrifying than the fear of Miss Smith’s Gestapo methods, and Mary in her turn confessed to the persecutions we had all three equally endured. My mother, from being the gentlest of human beings, became a tigress. Miss Smith went—but not until she had been told what my mother and father thought of her. Alas, my cowardice endured to the end! On that last wild, emotional morning of her departure, when with crocodile tears she demanded if I had not always—and did not now—love her, pinching my arm as she held it till the pain nearly made me sick, I told her that I had—that I did! No cock crew when I betrayed my own honour and that of the nursery—but not even St. Peter felt more profoundly dissatisfied with himself than I did as her carriage wheels receded into the distance.

The sun soon shone again with its accustomed splendour. My mother had made a good recovery. Whatever rifts had appeared in the joy of her love had been completely healed by my father’s anxious care. She knew she had his whole, unchanged heart, and for a while this satisfied her. A charming nursery governess healed our distrust of the whole race of keepers, and for a year and a half, till that hot, long summer when the wells dried up, the sheep died, and Victoria had, I think, her Golden Jubilee, I do not remember the faintest family shadow upon the blue horizon.

My sisters, it is true, were allowed lessons and I wasn’t, but I made this up by sitting under the schoolroom table and memorizing whatever they were taught. I trained my memory to such a tune that it was soon enough for me to hear long poems read through twice, to learn and to become word perfect in them. I did not learn to read—in fact, I made up my mind never to learn to read—but why should I? I remembered all I heard—and received a great deal of praise for the correctness and indelibility with which I repeated and, indeed, retained it. When I was two and a half I was put on the dining-room table and recited to my admiring American relatives “When lovely woman stoops to folly,” a poem which, of course, I was wholly unable to understand, but by which I was greatly, for some reason or other, impressed. The poems became longer as I grew older; and I understood them a little better.

Books early became my greatest indoor pleasure. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass I practically knew by heart. All George MacDonald’s children’s books, Kingsley’s Water Babies and more old-fashioned and long-winded classics such as the Swiss Family Robinson, Masterman Ready and other classics went down equally well. My mother and father were both beautiful readers and read aloud to us, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and practically all of Dickens, from our earliest years. We listened spellbound; and my sister Wilmett sometimes allowed us to “play” Knights of the Round Table to her alternate King Arthur and Lancelot. Mary and I never were allowed to play either of these roles, but we were permitted to play Guinevere in turns, as Guinevere was considered rather poor sport. “Oh, golden hair with which I used to play not knowing,” Wilmett would compassionately murmur as I lay on the floor at her feet and grovelled. But we infinitely preferred playing the Greek classics, which we had taken for our own from a children’s translation. Wilmett was, of course, always Achilles, but I was sometimes allowed to be Hector, and dragged around the room by the hair at her chariot wheels, while Mary preferred the rather less exhausting if minor role of Andromache, saying good-bye to me before the overthrow took place, with an exquisite sense of finality. My sister Wilmett made up such marvellous games that it never occurred to us to doubt her perfect right to the chief characters, though I remember feeling extremely humiliated and rebellious when I mentioned having had a dream of Jesus taking me into a field full of flowers and introducing me to a lamb that did not run away, as the Berkshire lambs invariably did, at my enraptured approach. “How dare you dream of Jesus?” demanded my sister. “Don’t you know that only the eldest child is ever allowed to dream of Jesus? Why, even Mary mustn’t. She can dream of the Virgin if she likes—but Jesus belongs to me!”

My mother’s health flagged during the long, hot Jubilee summer of drought and drizzle, where in our dry and chalky village, even human beings were forced to take their drinking water from a well believed to be the grave of a donkey, and do almost without water for any other purposes. If the donkey really had got into this well, it was a most acrobatic and incomprehensible feat on the part of so large a quadruped, for even the smallest donkey must have been at least twice the size of the well’s opening. The dew-ponds dried up on the downs, and many sheep died.

Nor did the birth of my mother’s last child, an only boy, George, in September, do anything to restore her health. She discovered the village under the Berkshire Downs was too damp and bleak to live in, so my father gave up this well-loved parish, a bad thing for a young clergyman, however brilliant, to do, particularly one who already laboured under the disadvantage of having been born in another country and was therefore suspected of inherent flightiness; and accepted instead a damper, if not bleaker, living under the Quantock Hills.

Over Stowey was the real home of my heart, although I never forgot Fawley nor the white Downs roads, the long, dry grasses whispering to the low skies, the wide tranquil fields, with here and there among the wheat or barley the vivid spark of a blood-red poppy or a serene cornflower, blue as my mother’s eyes. Still less could I forget the mysterious trembling of the bright harebells on the Downs themselves, the scent of tiny herbs, the low turf grasses that sprang resiliently under a tired child’s feet, and were so sweet to roll over face downwards on a summer’s day.

On the threshold of my earliest consciousness I shall always find a flock of sheep. All the life of Fawley was centred in this rich and harmless animal. We thought, talked and ate sheep from January, when the first lambs were dropped, through the long slow spring, to that later hot summer hour when the shearing took place and the whole air rang with their ineffectual bleatings, contradicting that beautiful but misleading scriptural statement, “as a sheep before its shearers is dumb and openeth not its mouth.”

My father once took me to the shearing but I became too absorbed in the sheep’s terrors so that he never took me again. It wrung my heart to watch the sheep huddled into bunches by wildly barking dogs, seized by rough, if expert, hands, and tossed from one excited man to another, tucked under strong arms, held down remorselessly, while the great flashing shears clipped in long swathes—with sometimes a spurt of blood—till all their pompous alderman’s coats were changed into beggarly bareness, and each sheep tossed out of its weighty middle age, back into the physical semblance of its slim and scanty youth. I felt as dazed and “It is none of I” as the poor sheep themselves must have felt when they found in spite of their inmost convictions that they had become a nudist colony.

Sheep passing like a storm of heavy raindrops in the dawn towards the Downs. Sheep crowding round the farmer to lick the salt from his hands; lambs dancing like a frieze of air-free Maenads on a spring bank against a sunset sky—these pictures always remain with me. Had I been a painter I am sure I should have devoted myself to painting sheep, and my chef-d’œuvre would have been a black lamb. For I had for these rare and almost forbidden creatures the fervent affection of a fellow rebel’s heart. To be a black sheep I felt was a cruel, but somehow a gallant, fate.

But I never loved those dry, white roads of Berkshire as I loved the West Country. The beauty of the waterfalls and streams, the deep, red earth, the strong, wiry bracken, the low heather hills, the fragrant drenched woods full of moss and ferns; these were the masterpieces of my childhood’s world.

The Rectory garden of Over Stowey was a much vaster domain than the Fawley garden, with Ado more god-like than ever in it. A great, red may tree crowned the lawn, and Ado had a greenhouse, and a paddock, let alone a stable and a stable-yard.

We now possessed a donkey called Fanny who lived to an incredible age from sheer obstinacy. Having all her life refused everything presented to her, when she reached a normal old age she refused to die; in fact, only a few years ago I was told that she was living yet. A shy and well-bred mare called Skylark was lent to us for a happy but breathless period, since she was the cause of innumerable hairbreadth escapes and one or two actual accidents as well as the only quarrel I ever had with Ado. I went against his express command into Skylark’s loosebox alone to give her apples. She was nervous about this forced entry, but eventually took the apple held out to her on the flattened palm of my hand quite courteously, and even distinguished herself later when Laddie, the airedale, accidentally flung me between her hooves, by keeping still as a statue till I was extricated by a mysteriously enraged Ado.

Even the nursery was larger than the Fawley nursery and had more windows with a magnolia tree trained under one of them. Not even Adam could have more enjoyed the surprises of creation than I enjoyed watching the large slow buds opening, nor have felt more personally responsible than I felt for their welfare. The church was a beautiful old Somersetshire church just across the road, and I never hear a chime of bells that does not carry me back into the old stone porch full of expectation of what I might find there.

I am afraid it was not God I was looking for, for at the age of six I suddenly became a complete sceptic. This complete overthrow of my lively faith was the result of being informed by my sister, Wilmett, that there were no fairies. No fairies, I said fiercely to myself, then no God! Whatever inhabited the heaven and influenced the sun I had hitherto dumped together and accepted as solidly and with as much conviction as the bread and butter on my plate at tea time. When this revelation reached me I was, as usual, on the duller kind of walks, scattering a red sorrel seed in order to attract the fairies’ attention. Wilmett took this opportunity of flinging the bomb-shell of their non-existence upon my path.

It was always difficult not to believe Wilmett. She spoke as one with authority, not as the scribes speak. Her sense of responsibility was so great, her innate dignity so dire, that I knew well she would not have trifled with a lie to save her life. There could be no fairies if Wilmett said there were not. There could be no God—no infant Jesus—no galaxy of heaven—it was a great shock. I liked saying my prayers, I liked Bible picture books and their graphic stories. I particularly enjoyed sitting on a footstool at my mother’s feet while she read to me—over and over again at my express desire—the story of the Holy Innocents. The tears rolled down my cheeks as I listened to this terrible story, torn between the beauty of their innocence and the agony of their premature doom; and perhaps not uninfluenced in my choice of subject by the thought that the victims were all baby brothers. Herod seemed to have had a sentiment about girl babies rather similar to my own. But now all this became mere twaddle invented by the grown-up world to please or to restrain children.

It is true that I continued to say my now colourless prayers, and willingly attended frequent church services, but these were mere concessions to good and devoted parents—or else used to further my own ends. I enjoyed going to church because I found in the faces of the congregation—all new to me, and even when grown less new, sufficiently mysterious—a perfect vent for my active imagination. Each of these people had a life, and from my earliest years a life was a story. More interesting still if I did not know the story, I could make it up. I think I may truthfully say that I became a successful novelist at the age of four or five.

My father was a very good preacher, earnest, eloquent and with a voice of great power and beauty. I think he was the best natural elocutionist I ever heard, not that at this time I ever listened to what he had to say, but the rich music of his voice acted as a stimulating accompaniment to my own thoughts. Other children might be bored or restless in church. They might have to fall back on surreptitious sweet-suckings, cards out of hymn books, the leers and mysterious gestures of choir boys, but none of these paltry time-killing manoeuvres were necessary to me. I was content without external props. Had I not just created that purple-faced farmer’s wife, who little guessed through what splendid and tragic experiences she was rapidly passing! That bilious-looking dressmaker by the pillar, who couldn’t get enough exercise, and wouldn’t have enjoyed it if she could, had just had her heart broken and was dying of consumption. No doctor had sounded her lungs—but I had. She was mercifully unaware that her lover had been snatched from her breaking heart, but I knew all about it—I had snatched him. When I had finished with her I let my roving eyes pick out the next most attractive victim. Women were my first choice—like the directors of Hollywood I believed them to have a picturesque lustre denied to men. They died better. Little Nell, for instance, faded more excruciatingly—with a greater thud against the door of the reader’s heart—than little Paul Dombey. Still I had to admit that “What are the wild waves saying, Sister, the whole day long?” ran little Nell’s last lingering farewells pretty close.

My father always preached for twenty minutes, and, if tired, for longer. There was the Litany and the Ten Commandments, both good for prolonged and uninterrupted fantasies. The prayers, once I knew them—and I took care to memorize them thoroughly so as to manage a well-timed response—I never gave a thought to, but I did break off from my own inventions to join in any soul-rollicking hymn that might be going. My favourites were the Passion hymns; these I knew by heart and taught them to my dolls. “Weary of earth, and laden with my sin” and “Lead Kindly Light” I added to this collection—solely on account of their gloom. No doll—and I had nine of them—dared scamp a line of these potent and tragic hymns. “There is a green hill far away without a city wall” was my chief favourite. It did for me what a Tintoretto Crucifixion in Venice did for me later on when I discovered it in a small dark church on one of the side canals—it simply transported me into the scene of the crucifixion so that afterwards I should have found it difficult to believe that I had not been there, and had not heard the last words, nor met the eyes of the happy thief who clearly knew that Paradise was his, since he had found a friend who understood, and yet loved him. Somehow, when all the rest of my religion vanished I could not quite give up the Jesus of the Cross.

No-one but Lizzie knew that I was now an atheist. I told her about it in the kitchen in return for a cake fresh from the oven, but as Lizzie did not appear to take much notice of it, I told no-one else. Nevertheless it made a great deal of difference to my inner consciousness. Up to six years old I had literally never been frightened by anything in the outside world. I saw no reason for fear, since God or my guardian angel were obviously preoccupied with the question of my personal safety; but now I realized that I was on my own in a most precarious universe. A hideous storm of terror took possession of me at this period, as if just to show me how dreadful a place a Godless world can be.

No doubt Somersetshire boys are no worse than any other boys, but they were in these remote days stupider—and since more stupid—more cruel. One Sunday I went by myself into the outer world beyond the stable door, and on the roadside I discovered a group of young louts torturing a long slow-worm by burning it to death with matches. They had already succeeded in burning off its tail. Only Hitler’s attack upon the Jews has ever roused in me so dire a passion of hatred as I felt for those boys. I ordered them to stop, and as they saw no reason why they should stop, I danced in front of them on the tips of my toes screaming and yelling with impotent rage and beating at them with my small fists. So violent and piercing were my cries that they reached Lizzie in the kitchen, who dashed out of the back door to my rescue. She soon disposed of the boys and let the poor remains of the slow-worm wriggle off into tail-less security.

Lizzie’s anger was always a frightening thing; but on this occasion it could not be frightful enough to please me. I certainly wanted the snake saved—but I even more wanted the boys penalized.

However, the incident did not end in personal triumph. After dinner I was told to take a pudding across the fields to an old cottage woman who lived quite near and liked her Sunday pudding from the Rectory. There were no obvious dangers between the paddock and the old woman’s cottage and I reached it in safety and was graciously rewarded by the old lady’s stimulated surprise and delight. She regularly had her Sunday puddings from us, but she liked to take them in the form of a miracle. I then prepared to return the way I had come, but what I had all along secretly feared took place. The boys were there at the bottom of the field between me and the paddock. They were standing on the bank of a muddy pool we called “The Pond,” which was the boundary between our domain and the outer world. This time neither Lizzie nor Ado was within call. I was alone in a hostile Universe with six monstrous louts threatening to take their revenge upon me by throwing me into the yellow, scum-covered pond. The pond, I knew, was incalculably deep; and what was even worse than death, my dignity was at their mercy. I knew that I was personally helpless. I had only deep within me the sense that I was for some inexplicable and mysterious reason more important than they were. They hated me; they jeered and threatened me. They wanted to treat me as they had treated the worm. Nor did I see any particular reason for their failing to carry out their wishes. I couldn’t expect the Holy Ghost feeling I had about my special importance to occur to them. Yet it was my only defence. I clung to it, and showed it in the only way I could show it. I did not expose my fear. I would not turn back, neither would I hasten my steps. I would cross the field, passing close by them, till I reached the paddock, then I should have to turn my back on them, which would be the worst of all, while I slowly walked up the paddock to the garden gate.

Being by nature a confirmed pessimist, I did not expect to escape my doom. But I was always an active pessimist, so, slowly but unhesitatingly, no doubt like the Lady of Shalott “with a glassy countenance” but no other sign of fear or even of attention, I walked straight toward the jeering boys, crossed the field past the horrible yellow pond and into the paddock. I had to turn my back on them then, and could no longer see what my enemies were doing or what “frightful fiend did close behind me tread,” but I reached the Rectory gate in astonishing safety. I got inside it. They still shouted after me—but from another world now—beyond the pale. I was out of their power; the laurels hid me—and I ran. But something ran with me and beat me to the post. I could not out-pace my fears. When I reached the nursery I was breathless and exhausted. There was our infinitely secure King-Baby and his devoted nurse, but not even the bars on the nursery windows nor the wicket-gate that kept George from falling downstairs shut out my fears. I would have died rather than express them. Gibby remarked on my paleness; had I, she demanded, fallen down and hurt myself? Did I feel well? Had anything happened to me? I shook my head. Nothing had happened to me. Only for the first time in my life I had been afraid, helplessly afraid, without protection and without power. Probably there is no feeling so horrible as impotent fear against a fellow man. The elements may destroy you, but they do not threaten your dignity. But fear of your brother man, when you know yourself to be his equal, and yet realize that you have no power to prove it, is the sourest potion to which Fate can treat you.

Perhaps, since for thousands of years she has treated half the human race to this bitter drink, it is not surprising that inferiority, resentments, and hostilities should embitter family life and creep into wider enmities, until even whole nations must seek to prove—by trying to destroy each other—which is the Top Dog.

It is a dangerous theory to confuse value with force. Theoretically I knew that I was as valuable as those big cruel louts; but I knew that I was helpless against their brute significance.

From that hour I hated boys. Not known boys, since my few male acquaintances were completely innocuous and even friendly specimens, but boys in the abstract.

I hated because I feared; and not until I ceased to fear because I loved, did I discover that part of the origin of my hate was my own arrogance.

The difficulty in writing truthfully about parents is that the tone of criticism or the flavour of sentimentalism is bound to creep in. Parents are an excellent alibi: “I might have done better if only my parents had understood me—brought me up more wisely—given me a more suitable education,” etc.; though it is often to be found that another member of the same family has turned out, notwithstanding all these obstacles, very well indeed. Devoted sons and daughters can also make an alibi of their devotion—so as to explain why they preferred to descend through history as examples of filial piety rather than to do their job of work in the less appreciative outside world.

I shall have to unmask my parents psychologically in the same manner that I unmask myself; but I hope to show—what I myself believe—that they were in many ways above the average of human beings and excellent parents. They were certainly uncommonly enlightened in the bringing up of their children, considering the age in which they lived. They neither slave-drove us nor coddled us. They were born, my father in 1851 and my mother in 1853.

Nevertheless, in spite of the good opinion they justly enjoyed in their world, they made extremely little use of their gifts and opportunities, and did nothing whatever to help us to take advantage of ours.

I do not blame them for that—since they lived in a period in which science had nothing to do with education, and children became equipped for life accidentally through that rough nurse, Experience, rather than by any apprenticeship to a skilled craftsman.

My mother herself was wholly unequipped for real life. As a child she was taught nothing useful; she was treated with great personal unkindness; and when not actually neglected she was exposed to gross physical dangers without the training to get the better of them. All her family loved horses, and she was forced to share their riding exploits from three years old, with neither the same taste nor aptitude. She was persistently bullied by two rough elder sisters and spent the greater part of her time hiding under the schoolroom table. Her father died when she was five years old; her mother left her children chiefly to nurses and governesses, and she was brought up in an extremely rich, religious, and sporting family. Everything was done for her that she ought to have been taught to do for herself; and everything was expected of her that she had not been trained to perform.

Fear was the natural result of this inadequate training; and this fear—though she tried to make up for it by the depth and strength of her love to us—she handed on to her children.

Fear drenched all her actions; saturated her thoughts; and turned an otherwise courageous and healthy human being into a chronic invalid. Her religion was her main interest, but it was of what might be termed an institutional rather than a personal kind. My mother had been born and brought up a Quaker, and of her own accord, greatly against the wishes of her family and relatives, she had insisted on being baptized into the Church of England at fifteen. The Church was more than a mainstay to her throughout her life—it was in a sense her first Romance; perhaps because—like my father, her second romance—it was the thing she had fought for against the overwhelming mass of her relatives’ wills and opinions. No-one wanted Margaret Leathem to join the Church of England; no-one wanted her to marry an American who—according to the ideas of the period—could only be an adventurer. Margaret did both. There is no question in my mind that my mother had great courage. I have seen her use it again and again; the tragedy was that she was unaware how much she had, and how easily she could use it—if she tried. Fear drove her under the schoolroom table all her life when she could have more than held her own—had she come out from under it.

My father was definitely better equipped for life than my mother and had far fewer handicaps. He was the eldest of four sons, and—born into a poor clergyman’s family—had early in life to set to work to help his mother. What he mainly suffered from was an over-severe, probably a jealous, young father, and a mother of quite peculiar dynamic power, who made him her best friend.

Religion was also his main interest, but his religion was a wholly different, and far more personal and emotional kind than my mother’s. My grandmother, Margaret MacDonald Bottome, was the most vigorous and impassioned Christian I have ever met; and it was therefore natural that my father’s religion should be of a strong, emotional and active kind. I must say that in some ways I think he was the best Priest I ever knew—though not at all an orthodox or formally correct one; but in the plain Gospel sense of the Sermon on the Mount he was wholly consistent throughout his life. He was at all times prepared to clothe the naked; feed the hungry; visit the sick or those in prison, and help anyone who was in need. More than this, he did it with a vim and a profound, eager tenderness such as I have seldom come across.

After his death we received a mass of letters from unknown people who had once been in trouble and whom he had helped out of it; it was obvious to see they had loved him as the poor and needy must have loved the Master he tried to serve. I also came on a drawer filled to the brim with IOU’s which had never been redeemed—or called in. Once I remonstrated with my father for giving away so much money to people whom I often thought were unworthy. My father looked a little sheepish and rubbed his nose, as he often did when his mitigations of rigour were found out; then he suddenly shot a gleam from his piercing dark eyes into mine: “Tell me,” he said, “which would you rather I did—gave something to ninety humbugs or send one starving honest man away unfed?”

He had many faults, and they often appeared to my strict and nervous mother to be dark abysses of moral danger. He was careless, convivial, full of a sort of fun that only one in ten of the people he met appreciated, and his duties hung sometimes too lightly upon him. My mother’s obligations were relieved by punctilious observance of the letter of the law, and I doubt if she ever failed to fulfil them; but my father only obeyed the Law of the Spirit, and I doubt if he ever failed to heed this inner call—though many small observances of the Letter which a clergyman of the Church of England might well have observed no doubt eluded him.

He had certain superficial faults, vanities and wilfulnesses, which came, I think, from the freedom and joy of his dynamic nature rather than from any evil source. I think that my mother always thought that he ought to take life more seriously, though during the first years of her release from her own stern and strenuous life, she was very glad he didn’t.

The real difficulty of their married life may have been that my father missed too greatly the tremendous demonstrative strength of his mother’s love, its generosity and its perpetual stimulus—which my mother was quite unable to give him. She expected instead the constant encouragement of a warm and persistent care—a glorified nurse-lover—and this my father was too manly and natural a human being to be able to provide. He never lost his love for her, but her weakness, and her inability to share his work and his interests, wore him out body and soul. If he had loved her less he could have carried out his tasks more easily; if my mother had been less afraid of her love for him—or where obedience to it would take her—she, too, I think, could have enlarged and enriched the life she gave him and handed on to us. I think my mother loved her husband and children with the whole force of her nature; but it never occurred to her, nor was she ever taught, that a human being must be trained to work as well as to love; nor did she understand that the value of this love was universal and had to be used outside her own family, or—as indeed was the case—it would slowly atrophy and become a concentration upon herself. My father and mother’s love was the one lasting devotion of a lifetime, but it was, after the first delight and release of its early years, an increasing tragedy in which all their children shared.

Until my late teens I looked on my mother as an image of unmitigated perfection; as regards my father, I fear even from the first I was slightly critical, though affectionate.

My earliest recollection of him is of being allowed to watch him shave at Fawley, when he appeared to be a sort of incarnate gaiety. I never came across a human being more loving, more happy, more the maker of happiness in others, than my father in those early years. Being a grave child, preoccupied with my own imaginings, I sometimes thought he laughed too much.

At Over Stowey, when I was five years old, I began to find definite flaws in his character. He was incalculable. Why, for instance, did he tell me that if I wanted to catch birds I had only to put salt on their tails, and then resent the result of this misleading information?

Naturally I had believed him. I took salt—unfortunately, in his favourite silver salt spoons—on my afternoon walk and found the whole scheme quite impracticable; inadvertently, in the heat of the chase, I lost the salt spoons. But was this a reason for such a sharp and unintelligible scolding? I retired under the gooseberry bushes, where I had found an inviolable retreat, and wept bitterly.

He taught me spelling, and again this fierce and unfair antagonism rose up between us. He asked me to spell “Mention.” To help me, he said very plainly: “M—E—N.” “Men,” I quickly answered. “Now,” he said, “the rest is easy—‘tion.’ ” “Shone,” I haltingly replied. His great brows met, his fierce eyes glared, he called me—a reproach I particularly resented—“stupid.”

I do not think my father understood children. Perhaps he was a little jealous of them. He always called us “my mother’s children,” and left us almost wholly to her unflagging attention. But when he was needed in any conspicuous way—and this did happen—he never failed us.

The one of us who needed and loved him most, and to whom he showed a careful tenderness, was Mary. Mary, who was the second girl in the family, when a boy was hoped for, came barely fourteen months later than Wilmett, before my mother had recovered from a very tedious first birth. My mother did not want her; could not nurse her; and never gave her the understanding and the flawless love which she gave to the rest of us. Perhaps the death of a boy child a little over a year later made her turn Mary into a sort of scapegoat for her sorrow; but the treatment she gave this exceedingly pretty and highly interesting second daughter did the child, as a human being, untold harm, and was indeed bad for the whole family. Without blaming my mother, whom we all regarded—as my father himself regarded her—as an angel, I began to notice the difference in Mary’s treatment when I was between five and six years old. I did not consciously say to myself, “Mother is unkind to Mary,” but I thought with a disturbed and unhappy sympathy that Mary seemed dogged by disaster. It is interesting that though Mary was constantly blamed and scolded, I never believed that she had done wrong. Children are very difficult to fool. What is said makes little or no difference to them; what is done, or inwardly felt, by their elders is judged at its source.

Wilmett made up all our games and took the leading part in everything we did—including our fantasy world of fairies, in which she played the role of the Fairy Queen. Mary was never allowed any say in the matter. She was so obviously crushed by our elder sister’s domination that my mother’s family pointed out the fact to my mother in no uncertain manner, and as a sort of sop to the family criticism Mary was sent off on a visit to a neighbouring aunt, alone.

This gave her the brilliant idea of starting a game of her own. She returned from this visit asserting that she had been to a theatre and seen a play—which we should do well to act. It was a play of her own invention and she had never been to any theatre. However, even my sister Wilmett could not gainsay so high a form of authority, and the play was acted, with great success, before an adult audience. It was an excellent piece of invention on Mary’s part. Her imagination was the equal of any child’s—and this was its first fruit.

Unfortunately her ten-year-old conscience began to nag her. She had chosen the moment for the play to be acted, of Aunt Emma’s return visit, and uncomfortable comments were exchanged between my mother and this aunt about plays and children. One night Mary burst into tears and told Wilmett she thought she must have dreamed the play and not been to the theatre at all. Wilmett, who had already begun to nurse dark suspicions, said harshly: “Either you’ve lied—or you haven’t. Which is it?” Mary’s tears grew in volume. Mother was sent for, and Mary confessed. Mother comforted her, and the merciful oblivion of night blotted out her guilt. But daylight brought disgrace; and darkness fell over the whole household. Gibby was guilty of the only unkindness I ever knew her bring forth—she turned Mary out of the nursery. My parents did nothing terrible—they were indeed the least terrible of parents. My mother merely extracted an apology from Mary to Aunt Emma for the wrongful cloak of her name; and suggested Mary’s remaining in her room for half an hour to think over her crime. Father showed her a special tenderness; he put his arm round her and led her into his study, where, drawing her on to his knee, he told her, “You know, Mary, the trouble with making things up is that it doesn’t work—unless you say they are made up, they get found out!” And this, my sister tells me, was the only thing said at the time which seemed to her to make sense, so that she always remembered it. She thought it highly unfair, however, that she should have to be punished, or to apologise to Aunt Emma. What made the most impression upon me—and I was most deeply impressed by the whole affair—was that I could see no wrong whatever in Mary’s action; on the contrary, I greatly admired her for the play. Why shouldn’t I? Here was Mary who had been able to invent a play, which we had all acted before a grown-up audience, who had applauded us to the echo!

It was an unchallengeable work of genius—and it was Mary’s. If she chose to say she had seen it in a theatre, it was perhaps unfortunate to make such an over-statement about a perfectly good first-hand invention, but why all this fuss about it?

I am sorry to say that I was unable to grasp the point of the Lie; though it did occur to me as a pity that my Aunt Emma should be visiting us at the time. Mary might, I thought—and still think—have waited for a season in which no witness could have risen up against her.

But far worse befell this poor child than an hour of remorse. Her creative life was brought abruptly to a cruel end. Mary had hoped this play would be the happy beginning of an imaginary world where she could be allowed opportunities for endless further invention. The shock of her punishment—the agony of her remorse—resulted in her becoming stone deaf in one ear; and it may have also helped to bring about a severe illness that took place within a few weeks of inflammation of the kidneys. Had my parents understood that when a child does wrong the question to ask is not what it has done, but why it has done it, much might have been saved this imaginative and sensitive child, who might indeed have had a wholly different and richer future. This is one of the reasons why it is generally safer not to punish children. I can only remember one punishment of my own, which had far slighter consequences. I do not think it did me any particular good, but on the other hand it was practically harmless.

I was about six years old when it took place, and well accustomed to going to Mattins every Sunday, but I had never yet been to Evensong.

It was a lovely summer afternoon and we were having tea under the pink may tree when the idea occurred to me. Gibby was taking George out in the pram for a walk, and I, of course, should, in the natural course of events, have accompanied her. On the other hand, as far as I knew, no child of my age had ever been to Evensong; it was launching myself out upon an unknown sea. I should be going alone with my mother—in itself a treat. The choice was allowed me, and I plumped for Evensong. “But remember,” my mother said, rather sternly for her, “you must stay right through the service to the end. I cannot take you out if you should change your mind.”

I agreed, for I knew very little about my mind; and nothing at all about Evensong.

The bells chimed out with their sublime, light-hearted promises, floating across the garden walls. I was dressed up; I took my mother’s slim white hand; we went off together; grown up, as it were; peaceful; triumphant.

I don’t know how far Evensong—which was sadly like any other church service—had gone before I began to visualize the possibility that Gibby and baby George might discover a new waterfall. But there it was, hanging before me, a sheet of iridescent lawn, bigger, splashier, more ethereal, than any I had yet laid eyes on. The vision clutched me. There was nothing I cared for “beneath the visiting moon” more than waterfalls. Gibby hardly cared for them at all; George—barely one year old—did not notice what lay upon his daily path; but I loved each stream, each pool, and above all each cascade, their every drop, the clash and clamour of their flight through space, their white feathery glory, the drenched ferns under their spray—was I to miss them all? I grabbed my mother’s hand; she bent down to me. I whispered the terrible words that I wanted to go out. She shook her beautiful head. I said with a dreadful hiss that summed up all my being that “I must!” I felt the tears storming my eyes; she saw them. “Would there be only tears?” she must have asked herself—or yells? She took me out. Gibby, who was always a slow starter, was still in the garden. I was thrust through the gate towards her—disgraced, enfranchised—but not left behind. I took my place beside the pram. My mother hurried back to her interrupted service. We found no waterfall.

Gibby, who had perhaps a laxer moral nature than my mother, did not reproach me, but my conscience did. We had a heavy, dusty, unsuccessful walk. When we returned I took refuge in my dolls, but my mother, like an avenging angel, returning from church, took them away from me. “Since you could not keep your promise to me you must not play with your dolls till tomorrow,” she awe-fully informed me. Such a thing had never taken place between us—nor did it ever again.

It was sheer unadulterated agony such as Eve must have felt at the garden gate of Paradise, when she met the Angel’s eyes and asked if she might not come back—because I am sure Eve tried at least once to go back; and perhaps cared more for the Angel, as I did, than she cared for Paradise.

Gibby, who never interfered as a rule between us and our mother, now broke this rule. “She wanted so much to find a new waterfall,” she explained, knowing all explanation was beyond me. “You see, she thought we might come on it without her.”

“She broke her promise,” said my mother inexorably.

I gave up the dolls without a murmur. My heart was too dry for me even to want to play with them.

Perhaps this was a good moral lesson. Perhaps from this moment on I thought more seriously of promises than I should otherwise have done. I am not sure—perhaps I only thought more seriously of waterfalls.

I had no real first-hand irreconcilable griefs until I was nearly seven. It was true I had known sorrow when my mother left us for the South of France, and felt the pains inflicted upon me by the evil Miss Smith; but these were transitory ills and left no great mark upon me. But when Gibby was snatched from us, without rhyme or reason, it was a first-class tragedy.

I was well aware of the fact that Gibby never came up the kitchen stairs (which she always used in preference to the others which were open to her) without a jug of beer under her apron. I supposed you wore jugs of beer as you wore aprons, one on the top of the other. I knew Gibby was often sleepy, but there seemed no great harm in that; and then one day she was ill and had to go to bed and have the doctor. The doctor insisted upon seeing my parents, and the next thing I knew was that one awful morning at dawn Gibby put on her bonnet and her coat, the carrier came for her luggage, and I realized that she was leaving us for ever.

I lay on the floor by George’s wicket-gate in my nightgown and sobbed and shrieked. I roused George to cry with me: I went on rousing him whenever he wished to stop; and soon he was picked up and carried off to my mother’s room, where his sorrow abruptly ceased.

Mine went on. For some reason I was overlooked; but I did not seek attention. A certain amount of my grief may have been drama, but most of it was pure agony.

Never had I dreamed of such grief, and my direct response to it was anger. I made the welkin ring; I bit the rug; I flung myself against the door. If I had had knives handy, I should have cut myself like the Prophets of Baal till the blood ran. Why should we lose Gibby? Why? Why? Why? She didn’t want to go; she looked sick with misery. She cried, too! Gibby, who was so kind, so wise, so calm, so inalienably just! Gibby, who never interfered, never misunderstood, never provoked or hurt a child! Gibby, who in her placid firmness, never let a child hurt another one.

Worn out with tears, I wept on, a sodden, shivering heap upon the bare floor that bitter winter morning, until Rose discovered me two hours later, and took me to her bed—where I felt vaguely comforted and interested since I had never been in Rose’s bed before—but unassuaged; for Rose did not know, or loyally (for all the servants loved Gibby) knowing, would not tell me why this parting had occurred.

The curious thing is that at the breakfast table, when that strange, far-off meal took place, I do not remember asking my mother or my father why Gibby had gone away, as people say, for “good.” I let the question go on tearing out my heart till my grief dulled.

It was not till many years later that I learned how reluctantly and sadly my parents had decided that for the sake of our safety they must part from her. Gibby had long been a secret drinker; and baby George once nearly died from the result of her intemperance; yet perhaps our whole lives would have been different had we kept her.

Over Stowey as I knew it in 1889 has long ago ceased to exist spiritually, though I doubt if it has altered materially; so it seems worth while to try to repicture its still, but vigorous life to the modern eye.

Nether Stowey—our nearest neighbour, three miles away—which had a real village street, a larger church, and shops, had been the home of the poet Coleridge. We were an altogether less showy affair. We lay in a fold of the Quantocks under steep red fields, the moor above us, and an occasional white seagull swooping over our bright earth. Mostly we were thatched cottages, very deeply thatched, and we had no street, though several cottages clustered round the beautiful old church. The Vicarage was quite a large commodious house; and except for five old ladies called the “Miss Wards,” we were the only “gentry” in the village. We lived just opposite the church and churchyard, and even had a lodge. Down the road from us was the village schoolhouse; the Miss Wards’ pear-espaliered small but gardened mansion was on the long, long road to Bridgwater, our nearest metropolis, nine miles away. Across the fields lay Quantock Lodge, and I think Quantock Lodge owned us all—it certainly disposed of the living. The miller, my father’s best friend, lived off the Bridgwater road; and the farmers, big, red-faced, cider-drinking, weather-soaked men, were dotted about the fields here and there. All I remember about them is that their voices were very deep and soft; their faces very red; their gaiters tough and wet; and when you visited the farms you floated about on clouds of thick yellow cream. It came out of the mild-eyed red cows, that weren’t always quite as mild as they looked, because I was several times chased by them—not, I think, by bulls, which were well looked after. But I knew all about the cows and their produce, because I was several times allowed to try to milk them—not as easy as it looks—and disliked the warm milk offered me as a reward.

Alfoxden was within walking distance of our home, and all the ferned lanes and deep coombs lying under the heather-covered hills were Wordsworth and Coleridge country. Every yard of them must have been trodden by William, Dorothy and Samuel in that first rapturous summer of their immortal friendship. Their ears must have listened to our cuckoos, and their hearts stilled to our nightingales.

My father took the deepest interest in the Lake poets, and one of our chief family friendships sprang up between ourselves and the Ernest Hartley Coleridges, the poet’s grandson and his four children. E. H. C., Dykes Campbell, and my father, roamed the Coleridge country one gorgeous spring for weeks together, gleaning as they went from village to village any old Coleridge or Wordsworth memories that yet lingered among their inhabitants. I do not know what literary masterpiece, if any, came of these summer wanderings, but the holy names floated about us in a specially vivid and abiding manner.

I learned The Ancient Mariner by heart, and to the astonishment of our two visitors repeated canto after canto of it, simply from having heard them read it aloud. All three were beautiful readers. My father read with the most expression, so that the words were lit by their special meanings and moved straight into pictures. E. H. C. had the true, rather monotonous and yet fascinating, poet’s chant—you rolled along in his rhythm as if you were being carried by a great wave. I cannot remember Dykes Campbell’s speciality of diction, but as he was a very fine scholar I should suppose that he gave the intellectual content the most strongly of the three. Anyhow, whichever read, I lay on the hearth-rug and listened to them as long as I was allowed to remain out of bed, with the result that the hero-worship my earliest years imbibed was that of visitant poets.

There was no way of leaving Over Stowey—or of getting there—except by the carrier’s cart; unless, of course, as most people did, you owned horses yourself. I remember the carrier’s horse was white, and that the speed impulse had been wholly denied him. It was thought exceptional if he reached Bridgwater two and a half hours from the time he set out.

Over Stowey was purely feudal in my day. Every woman and child in it curtsied to the squire’s family, the five Miss Wards, and to ourselves. Every man’s cap was reverently lifted. But it was feudal in a different sense from Fawley. The Wroughtons belonged to Wooley almost, if not quite, as much as Wooley belonged to the Wroughtons; and they acted and reacted upon each other accordingly. Their care for their villagers was both more intense and more human than the Stanleys’ control of Over Stowey. I do not think it would be fair to say that whatever can be said for the Feudal System could be said for Fawley, and whatever can be said against it could have been said against Over Stowey; but something near this statement would probably be true. The Stanleys were good enough people. Mrs. Stanley—a daughter of Lord Tavistock—was a usually sincere and kindly woman, beloved by all who knew her; but they both belonged to the great world, and no doubt played an honourable part in it; and Over Stowey hardly belonged to any world at all. It just grew under the Quantocks. Quantock Lodge was more the Stanleys’ recreation than their home. They may have looked after their property as well—or better—than the Wroughtons could afford to look after theirs—since the Stanleys were rich and the Wroughtons were poor—but they gave nothing of themselves towards it.

When they were at Quantock Lodge they filled it with the big world they belonged to, but when they were not entertaining, they were (except the two youngest children) in London or elsewhere. I daresay the Stanleys’ word was law in Over Stowey—so was old Mrs. Wroughton’s word at Fawley; but everyone in Fawley knew that with old Mrs. Wroughton’s word—let alone “young Mrs. Wroughton’s” word—went their staunch, warm hearts. The Stanleys were remote, and Mr. Stanley, when not bad tempered, was inhuman. He was attached to my father, and my father to him; but that was nothing in his favour. I can well imagine my father walking arm in arm with the Devil on one side and the strictest saint on the other—neither willing to part with him, however much they may have hated the company of the other. He would have found a joke that was equally new and welcome to both, to keep them together and in his company.

The little Stanleys were our only playfellows. Henry was already out in a world that was soon, alas! to see the last of him, for he was killed a few years later—in the Boer War. Evelyn came between my sisters in age, and Edward was a year older than I.

My sister Wilmett from the first took a firm stand about Quantock Lodge. Whatever their pretensions were, she determined that on the part of the Vicarage there was to be no truckling to them. “Wilmett dear,” Mrs. Stanley said to her on one occasion, anxiously contemplating some devastating garden frolic, “I do hope you’re not spoiling your best frock.” Wilmett drew herself up to the full height of her eleven years: “Mrs. Stanley,” she said coldly, “I should never dream of wearing anything but my second best frock when I come to tea at Quantock Lodge.”

I rather liked Edward. He had fair hair, meek blue eyes and a quiet manner. He contributed nothing towards our entertainment or his own, but he was mobile and could be stimulated into some form of temporary animation when sufficiently egged on by myself. I used to connect him in my mind with the little Princes murdered in the Tower. Edward, I thought, would have lent himself easily to being murdered. He was to all intents and purposes spiritually massacred by a most savage and ferocious French mademoiselle. Wilmett, of course, withstood this yellow-visaged monster to the face. Mademoiselle tried to organize all our games and introduced French songs (I always slightly shiver at hearing them even now) which we were forced to sing with her, dancing in an idiotic ring. I don’t think Wilmett particularly minded the songs; but she preferred to organize games herself, and we all deeply resented the really cruel way in which Mademoiselle treated Edward. She bullied him to a frazzle, and I rather think she owed her ultimate removal to an impassioned recital of Edward’s wrongs given to Mrs. Stanley by Wilmett.

Evelyn was of the same make as Edward; a very languid, whitish blonde, with long sugar-like teeth which stuck out slightly, and pale silky hair. At ten years old she was unable to button her own boots. She was not, however, at all a disagreeable child, and as far as she could be animated I think that Wilmett and Mary animated her.

The Quantock Lodge gardens were a vast and visionary world, kept in perfect order by armies of skilful gardeners. I have never cared for geraniums or lobelias since. I believe the view was splendid. I disliked the inside of the Lodge, however, considerably more than I disliked the garden. The butler was unhelpful as a man; and there was a clipped black poodle with red eyes who both barked and bit.

At times he rushed out from behind an immense white statue of Hercules wielding a club that stood in the large and sombre hall. I was never quite sure which was Hercules and which was Mr. Stanley—both, I understood, had unreliable tempers and were not to be lightly crossed—but Mr. Stanley, I gathered, as a rule wore more clothes.

Without Wilmett, wild horses could not have dragged me up those steps inside Quantock Lodge; even with Wilmett holding me firmly by the hand, and on the lookout for the poodle, I swallowed nervously and always enjoyed going out of that vast doorway far more than going into it. Father, on the other hand, was very happy with the Stanleys, managing without difficulty to love, and be loved, by them both.

Whenever they had one of their massive and formidable dinner parties that ran to fourteen courses, and were sometimes served on gold plate, my father was their honoured and probably their most brilliant guest. My mother, who in her young years was both beautiful and a wit, was an equally successful guest; but she disliked long meals and in course of time got herself excused from the dinner parties, which Father then attended alone. He generally brought back with him peaches and nectarines, and marvellous bonbons, pressed upon him by kind Mrs. Stanley; so that we quite looked forward to the dinner parties and considered them as part of our own entertainment.

The Stanleys were in their way most generous and considerate neighbours, but compared to the Wroughtons, I fear they simply did not exist. They were shadows—and we had had the substance. The Wroughtons were unforgettably our own; and the Stanleys were merely stately denizens of a planet so other than our own that I was surprised that my father took so bitterly to heart their subsequent behaviour.

When we decided to leave Over Stowey, against Mr. Stanley’s express will and advice, my father still supposed he had retained their friendship. But when we returned some eight years later, the American experiment having nearly killed my mother, to re-make our home in England, my father simply could not understand why he should have become less than nothing to the Stanleys, who did not even take the trouble to cross Grosvenor Square to return my mother’s call, at our English grandmother’s—who lived on the opposite side of the Square. My father had been their “parson,” on their property, and accepted as such. Now he was no longer on their property; they had another parson; and why should they wish to see any of us again?

I had another equally disagreeable impression of the Feudal System in Over Stowey; though this time it was my own nursery which drew the equivocal social line.

There was a child about my own age in one of the cottages close by called Hannah, whom I infinitely preferred to either Evelyn or Edward. We met behind the tombstones in the churchyard; and from the first Hannah warned me of our approaching doom. “Don’t ’ee tell nobody,” she recommended in a deep hoarse voice that was part of her charm, “that you’m be playin’ erlong er me—or they’ll stop we sure-lye.” Hannah was an active child, capable of swift decisions, and not averse to carrying out with more physical skill than my own, the various plans that occurred to either or both of us. But somehow or other these blithe meetings leaked out. I was told to play with Hannah no more, and strictly confined to the Vicarage garden. Hannah had been right. She was, so my nurse severely told me, “only a village child,” a thing I had rather supposed until then, that I was myself.

Much concerned, I took the matter to a higher court. My mother, I felt, would surely not draw these curious geographical distinctions. My mother’s tender blue eyes clouded. She made a dubious pause, which I had already learnt to interpret from grown-ups as the threshold of subterfuge, before she answered me. “Hannah might,” my mother gently murmured, “have things in her head—and you could catch them!” She did not say what things. I might, I thought, as I turned sadly away, like the young man in the Bible obstructed by his great possessions, have wished to catch these things; but I knew better than to try to carry on this bootless controversy. I was always on the lookout for Hannah after this—so that I could wave to her—but I only remember this occurring once; and then she put out her tongue at me. I can well understand her choice of this last derisive symbol. She thought that I had betrayed her. She did not know that something other than ourselves had betrayed us both.

It was at this time that Wilmett first, and subsequently both my sisters, went to boarding school—eleven miles away at Taunton. It might, of course, have been the other end of the world as far as I was concerned. I was alone with my glory; and I don’t think I liked it very much.

Taking the rough with the smooth, I preferred the active if interfering presence of my elder sisters. Mary, I should always have missed, but I did not only miss my beloved and kindly sister Mary. There was no-one now to egg me on with bitter jeers, and by example, to run along the tops of gates, as Wilmett did, or strain my far smaller legs to leap rapid streams seeming, to my aghast vision, no better than cataracts. Mary, less ambitious and more sensible than I, had the sense to refuse Wilmett’s severe provocations, but I rarely, if ever, refused them. I resented them—but I took the leap—and when successful, how deep was my sense of triumph!

We were always being pushed into danger by Wilmett—from flood, from fire, from wild animals—but always extricated from it safely and just in time, by the same inexorable but protective hand.

How often, and with what tremulous rapture, Wilmett would rouse us to go mushrooming, at what we thought was dawn, and it may have been six o’clock. Gibby slept late and heavily, and Wilmett had us safely off, dressed and superficially washed, without a sound—out into the sweet-scented, dew-swept earth.

After fifty years, these miraculous summer dawns still stand out in my memory shivering, still and fair, though I am relieved to think I shall no longer be breathlessly pursued by playful cart-horses, or irritated rams, as sometimes was our fate. However, with Wilmett’s instant presence of mind, physical aid, and skilled direction, we were all three spirited on to the top of a hedge or gate, or across a beneficent ditch, just in time, with the savage animal left to paw the earth unsatisfied, but pleasingly spectacular, below or behind us.

What I don’t remember is if we ever returned with the mushrooms.

In the winter Wilmett devised other but equally exciting games. There was one called “Christian Martyrs” that I shall never forget. This was not a game I whole-heartedly liked, though it was desperately dramatic. It involved, and Wilmett made it a point of conscience that it should involve, the giving up of a doll or two to be burned alive—seldom her own dolls, which were, I must admit, in better repair than mine. It was not, however, really pleasant to me to think of even my oldest doll being burned alive. There were moments when I wondered if Martyrdom were worth it. But I must confess there was something intensely exciting in the whole affair—a gladiatorial thrill, I suppose. All the dolls in the house were dragged out to sit in a circle and hear the chosen martyr make her Confession of Faith. She made it. Wilmett pronounced the sentence. Mary and I were allowed—nay, commanded—to turn down our thumbs; then the Executioner—also Wilmett, and I did not envy her this important role—placed the dedicated doll in the centre of the nursery fire, and we all sat back and watched it burn. I could just bear it, for sawdust—and in those days dolls were mostly made of sawdust—burns quickly; until one awful day when a kid doll was chosen as a martyr—and I think that not even Wilmett knew that kid dolls writhe.

To the stronger nerves of Wilmett and Mary this quivering victim may have been an additional excitement, but to me it was sheer torture. I burned with the doll, screaming at the top of my voice I flung myself across the fire-guard towards it, and, but for the sudden interposition of Gibby, straight into the fire. With one hand she snatched me from the flames and with the other she seized the tongs and extracted the still blazing Christian Martyr.

“No more of this game in my nursery!” she sternly and wisely pronounced; and even Wilmett, momentarily humbled, accepted the verdict.

As for me, I refused my tea and cried myself sick, for what had been retrieved from the flames was beyond all repair, and I never believed beyond the reach of pain, as Gibby tried in vain to assure me.

Wilmett’s going to boarding school one term before Mary had been a concession to family opinion, on the part of my mother. Her whole family had now become anxiously convinced that Mary was suffering from the strength of Wilmett’s character and from Mother’s lack of love for this second child. My mother did not wish to believe this, and therefore spoiled any measures that she conceded, to avert further criticism. “Certainly,” she said, “let us see what sending Wilmett alone will do for Mary!” And three months later she complacently asserted, “Mary is just the same,” and sent Mary to join Wilmett.

As if three months, under my mother’s critical eyes, could undo the work of eleven slave-driven years! I often think that had all of us been sent to a nursery school where we should have learnt independence of each other, and true give and take, our whole lives would have been different. These family relationships, and their unhindered sway, are terribly underestimated, both for good and evil, in the formation of character. My eldest sister, relieved of the cruel weight of her precocious responsibilities, might not have died young; Mary would have happily developed her creative imagination; I might have become both more practical and less “fearful”; and even George, the one among us who had a normal educational life, might well have had an easier and more carefree future, had he been less at the mercy of three elder sisters.

My godmother had urged my having no education at all before seven; and this, had I been at a kindergarten or taught craftsmanship of any kind instead, might have been no bad thing; but as learning was a forbidden fruit, it made education appear to me in the light of a treat—so that I sat under the schoolroom table and learned all my sisters’ lessons by heart. No-one taught me what I might have profitably learned, anything about nature, or how to handle mechanical or material things. When the two sisters both went to school, and I was approaching seven, my father gave me irregular lessons on subjects that I could not understand, and both my father and my mother tried in vain to teach me how to read. I refused point-blank to learn. I well remember making up my mind that I never would learn to read since reading was obviously for me a superfluous activity.

Fortunately, my godmother, hearing of this shocking disability in an otherwise intelligent child, sent me Andrew Lang’s Yellow Fairy Book, with the sole condition that no-one was to read a word of it aloud to me. It had most beguiling and enchanting pictures; yellow was my favourite colour. I asked everyone in the house to read it to me; I took it out into the garden to Ado; nobody—not even Ado—would yield to my most impassioned persuasions. In a fortnight I had read the Yellow Fairy Book from cover to cover; and after this I practically did nothing else but read for the rest of my life. It was a pity, for during these years and those that were to come after, when I could so easily and happily have acquired useful and more social accomplishments such as music, dancing, sewing, cooking, any art or craft or even sport, I was taught nothing at all but what was in books; and all my life, in consequence, I have suffered from a dismal sense of inferiority, as regards anything and everything—except books.

Shortly after Wilmett’s disappearance a miracle took place. The event stands out in my life as the golden apples of the Hesperides must have stood out to Ulysses from the rest of his hazardous voyages.

We had a sudden windfall visit from a family of American artists. My father had a great friend, George Herbert MacCord who was a well-known American painter of his day. It seemed he had wisely married and even more wisely become the father of three girls nearly the right ages to match ours. Betty was midway between Mary and myself, Georgie was my exact age, and Maida was midway between George and myself.

They turned up in a blaze of strange transatlantic and bohemian glory—overnight. They were to share our nursery—everything we had, for that matter—and how they enriched what they shared! Uncle Herbert and Aunt Emma, as we from courtesy called their parents, merely shone upon us for a few poor days or weeks, then they went on to paint Venice, or wherever it was they wanted—young and unencumbered—to paint; and left behind them the three golden apples of their love. I don’t remember how long a time they stayed with us—did Ulysses remember how long he stayed in the Garden of the Hesperides? It could never have been long enough.

These three children were wholly different from us—from the little Stanleys or the little Wroughtons—they were more grown up, they were in other ways younger—they were from the core outwards—freer. We knew them in an instant; and forever. They were—and are—our sisters. At any time, in any world, under any circumstances, if Betty, Georgie or Maida were to look in, it would, upon both sides, be the same unfluttered felicity. We should see, as we always used to see, what would be most fun to do—and if not interfered with too drastically by Providence—we should incontinently set out to do it.

I was always much struck with a description in Tolstoi’s War and Peace, where poor Natasha looks into the eyes of an experienced young roué who is trying to seduce her, and sees that the barriers are down between them and her whole soul is exposed to him. This was an unpleasant and indeed fatal experience for Natasha, but I think this falling of barriers can take place in a way that makes equally well for life-long security and understanding. Perhaps it is what Shakespeare meant when he says that the marriage of true minds does not admit “impediments.”

It was in just such a way that we as a whole family cemented our friendship with the MacCords. For months these children shared with us our nursery, the Seven Wells coombs, the Quantock Hills, the deep red earth, the slow and kindly Somersetshire life. When they left us, they had pushed open the door of our living to a wider, brisker world.

I suspect that my father often felt Over Stowey a very narrow life. He had not nearly enough to do, though he did what there was extraordinarily well. He not only filled his beautiful church to the brim, but he got to know—as they had never been known before—the hard-headed, cider-drinking farmers as if they were his brothers. He carried off the slow-thinking, inarticulate but intelligent miller, travelling with him second class, to visit America, and gave him the time of his life—and an uncheckable subject for future conversation. He shared in the sports of the neighbourhood, and was a particularly successful fisherman. I much enjoyed (when he chose trout streams within my reach) accompanying him, and became quite expert at breaking the necks of the small silvery spotted trout, so that they should not find breathing so disagreeable as they appeared to do out of water. My father told me that it did not hurt them to have their necks broken, while it did to breathe air, and I believed him. They seemed to lie quite contentedly, after I had dealt with them, in the grass-filled fishing basket, to be carried home for tea. During these excursions I must have enjoyed my father very much, though I do not remember talking to him at all. But I loved anything to do with streams and could have sat silent and secretly employed for hours upon their banks, watching everything that moved in the water or out of it. Nothing in a hedge or ditch escaped me, and it seems rather a pity that my concentrated vigilance was never attached to any scientific aim.

Once a year, at Easter, we were taken to the Daffodil Fields to pick a whole laundry basket full of those golden dancers which were to be sent to London to a children’s hospital. This was a great yearly event for us. We picked like tigers—thinking of those sick children who had never seen any meadows at all and who, we were firmly convinced, would have no daffodils but ours. Later on in the summer we were often taken to “Kilve’s delightful shore.” Behind the cliffs round the farm in which we were staying grew shoals of cowslips, and these also, for some good, but somehow less pictorial purpose, we were told to pick and make into cowslip balls. As a reward we were given cowslip tea to drink—a beverage I persisted in expecting to like, from the paradisaical nature of cowslips. Such nectar could not, I thought, fail to be delicious; but I never liked it; and I also disliked giving up the cowslips when they had been made into balls—whether they were going to sick children or not.

One day, when all of us including our mother, were paddling on the shore (my doctor uncle Frank mercifully being one of the party) my mother cut an artery in her toe on a sharp point of rock. I remember perfectly the rhythmic spurting of the blood, and the absorbed white face of my uncle as he improvised a tourniquet. My mother showed no fear at all, but we were bundled away into the torturing distance, till all danger was over. I think I could find that rock on that shore today if I were suddenly transported there, though it is over fifty years since I last saw it.

These Kilve outings were great occasions, for there was very little life in Over Stowey itself, and what there was I should imagine we knew nothing about. Occasionally a pig was killed, and once Wilmett insisted upon our attending the execution, but I was retrieved from this horror before it took place—I think by Ado—and Mary was made so ill by the spectacle that it was never again attempted. I think even Wilmett’s spartan soul suffered a slight revolt. She also insisted on visiting a dead baby, and shook hands with all the mourners at the funeral, to the delight of the whole village.

The Hunts, however, are among the gayest of my memories for I never saw any animals killed and therefore thoroughly enjoyed the early starts in the donkey-cart, with Fanny in a good and spirited humour, and Nurse Barker driving with George, round-eyed with excitement, upon her lap.

Nurse Barker was Gibby’s successor, if one can talk of anyone being successor to a guardian angel. Nurse Barker was large, quiet, fair and kind; and I fancy not at all intelligent. I never objected to her, or cared for her; neither did George. There was one specially good point about her: she had relations on the Quantock Hills, where most of the Hunts took place, and so willingly exerted herself to take us there.

These sharp-set early winter mornings, the smell of dead bracken and heather, the wild sweetness of streams and waterfalls, the dancing horses, scarlet coats, and excited hounds, were a glorious business.

I never thought of what they were hunting, or what the little panic-driven animal must have felt, pursued by such a jocund company, nor was it likely to be brought home to me, for Fanny was not quite the animal—even in her most excited and competitive moments—to get us anywhere near in at the death. We simply trundled through the heather, up and down the steep red hills, sometimes seeing the galloping horses afar off, or hearing the huntsman’s wild and ringing calls, sometimes watching at the start the hounds fan out across a field, seeming to lift it as they ran; but in the end we just wound up in Nurse Barker’s relations’ cottage and had a cup of hot tea, with sometimes Devonshire cream and home-made jam; and returned without mentioning it, because Nurse Barker had been told not to take us into strange cottages for fear of infection. Infection was a word that meant nothing to us, or to Nurse Barker, so we were very ready at a hint from her to suppress all connection with it.

My love of sport came to an abrupt end when a stag out on a trial run was hunted through the Vicarage garden. The great, terrified, sweating beast ran close by me. His wild eyes, full of urgent anguish, sent their message straight into my child’s heart. I never forgot this message; nor could I ever bear again the thought of a sport that tortured animals.

Whenever I have had the chance I have made friends of animals and birds and studied their ways; and I am certain that until we have grown more deeply into the law of loving our neighbours as ourselves and have extended this sense of neighbourhood to include the whole “universe groaning and travailing in pain until now” we shall not begin to know the joys and riches of this little planet. Birds, and almost all living animals, are innately friendly and full of individual character, which they will share with anyone who understands and loves them. There are two chief qualities that bring enmity between animals and human beings, and they are the same two qualities that rouse antagonism between nations—cowardice or a desire to dominate. If there is no desire to dominate, and no invitation of weakness to provoke domination on the part of the animal, or the human being, there can be friendship between man and beast. But so long as fear and greed (for what is the desire to dominate another human creature but greed?) exist in the heart of man, there must still be enmity. What is needed by man and beast alike is Anna Letitia Waring’s

It is true that the tiger, the cobra and the wild boar have very little to teach man up to the present; but they have not yet found much to learn from him either.

The background of our lives at Over Stowey was the weather, plants, and animals. I do not think I should be so sensitive to the spirit of a place, and so quickly at home in each new environment, if my awakening years had not been spent in Over Stowey—that kindly “plot of earth.” Over Stowey floated away from me; but it did not close its heart to me; nor are the gates of my memory ever shut to its silent voices.

I think I could go back to the Seven Wells Coomb tomorrow and find each stream I knew and loved there; and listen till through the soft and fragrant dampness of the trees and ferns I caught again the far-off thunder of the waterfalls.

When I was told that we were going to America to live I saw the gates of Paradise open without the hint of a fiery sword between us and the Tree of Life.

I am sorry to say that my sense of bliss was not decreased by learning that my sisters must remain behind in boarding school until our new home was ready to receive us all. I cannot remember a pang of pity for them, or a cloud upon my own selfish horizon, although I fancy that had I known it the decision to take me was a very near thing.

Nurse Barker refused to leave Somerset, and at the last moment my mother secured the services of a German Fräulein who, after accompanying us across the ocean, which she wished to put between herself and her husband and four children, turned out to be no fräulein at all; and on our arrival incontinently left us.

But this lucky loss was mercifully hidden in the future, and accompanied by the serene Nurse Barker, we all went to Bournemouth, where Wilmett and Mary were placed as boarders at the school selected for them, which I also attended from our lodgings over the Quadrant confectioner’s for a few chilly hours every day. I had, as a matter of fact, spent some weeks in advance with Wilmett and Mary as a boarder at this kindly establishment; and perhaps it was the acute and agonized homesickness from which I suffered, in spite of its friendly atmosphere, that induced my mother to include me in the American adventure.

Those last English days often return to me as the pinnacle of irresponsible expectation without hint of anxiety. In after life we have some little share in earning our own happiness and know it hazardous to keep, but in early childhood it is sometimes thrust upon us and we believe that it will be eternal. The smell of freshly-baked cakes and buns, the lovely pink figures on a wedding cake under a frost-white bell; the chimes of St. Peter’s Church opposite us—the joy of crossing the Common with a Day Girl, older than myself, who had black curls all over her head cut short like a boy’s, and who was actually related to “Humes,” my favourite shop in Bournemouth, remain a rosary of undistinguishable joys—all bathed alike in the glory of our approaching departure.

I think my mother was not at all averse to this new plunge. She had already twice visited America, and each time it had been a great personal triumph; nor had she suffered any inconveniences which she could not easily sustain. She did not realize that on this occasion she was, as people say, going “for good”; and that what she would have to face would be a new home; and an adjustment to a new, and by no means effortless, existence.

My mother had never had to run a house with less than three servants in her life. She could neither cook, sew, nor house-clean. She was trained to be waited on from her birth; and she had never had any other kind of training. To be delicate and to be a saint were her achieved aims. Everybody thought she was a saint; and everybody knew that she was delicate. She was worshipped by her husband and children; and she had cut herself off almost entirely from her own relations, with whom she had never been able to get on.

I seem to see her, those last English days, surrounded by a halo that she was never in quite the same secure and comfortable manner, to wear again; while Nurse Barker worked hard to get everything ready for our departure and my father—plucked by some invisible hand from our midst—had already disappeared across the Atlantic Ocean. I cannot say I missed him. The people with whom my life was bound up at this time were my mother and George. A terrible thing nearly happened to George—and in a sense by my fault—during one of those last Bournemouth days.

George and I were playing on the shore; George near the waves, and I at some little distance from him picking up shells. Nurse Barker occupied a background, too far away to play any immediate part in what followed. I heard the thunder of approaching hooves and saw three riders advancing rapidly towards us—in fact they were almost upon me. I screamed a warning to George (who was securely outside their path) to stay where he was; but instead of running towards him, which would have ensured his remaining in safely, I ran away from him, across the track of the horses. George followed me, stumbled and fell beneath them. The three horses miraculously leapt over him in turn, without a hoof touching him. But I thought I had led him into instant death.

The riders dismounted, and we picked up George who was roaring with natural indignation, but otherwise scatheless; Nurse Barker, it seemed to me most unfairly, was sharply scolded by the horsemen. George promptly recovered; but I died all that day the deaths he might have died. I crept up to an attic where no-one could find me and demanded that God should instantly destroy me for my cowardice, a request which I was a little disconcerted to find was completely disregarded by the Deity. I cried myself sick; I missed a meal, and then like a more or less healthy child forgot all about it. But I think something remained to me from that bitter turmoil of spirit—never again did I in the years that followed, when I became George’s sole nursery maid and guardian, let him run any risk which I could conceivably take upon myself. I cared deeply if unconsciously for all the other members of my family; but George was in a special sense my business; and I would have left anyone or given up anything in order to fly to his assistance.

It was probably a very good thing for George when my mother, at about this time, told me very seriously and sternly that under no circumstances was I ever to exert authority over him. “You see,” she wisely explained, “Wilmett and Mary are a very great deal older than he is, and it would be very bad for him to be ordered about by all three of his elder sisters. You do not like being ordered about by your elder sisters yourself so you ought to understand that George wouldn’t like being ordered about by all three of them. It is true you are nearly five years older than he is—and therefore, however violent or naughty he is—I shall expect you to defend yourself, and to take care of him—without ever hurting him. Promise me you will never, never hurt him—whatever he does to you!”

I made this promise very solemnly and carried it out to the letter. I probably still remained quite as tyrannical as it was at all good for George or myself that I should be; but I went almost too far in allowing George to hurt me—with or without provocation—without the slightest physical retaliation. He beat me up with cricket bats; he pulled me by the hair round the room; he threw open pocket knives at me. I had to train myself into a desperate stoicism for George was extremely strong, and during this period, equally violent. He had been very much spoiled by a series of devoted nurses; and to be suddenly exposed to the inept ministrations of a playfellow must have seemed to him a singularly poor substitute for a skilled nurse. However, we learned from each other. In order to save my precarious existence I amused him without too great an exploitation of my own wishes, and in order to be amused, George spared my life. His heart was on the whole, I fancy, a good deal tenderer than mine was, for he always exacted from me before any game was played, or story was told, “Now Parpa, not even a kitten must be pricked with a pin!”

I cannot remember the parting from my sisters. I fancy my mother, whose understanding of children’s acute emotions was profound, spared us the pang of any spoken goodbyes. But I remember that we parted from Nurse Barker in a veritable shower bath of tears, all of which were her own. For some mysterious reason neither George nor I ever felt anything but a lukewarm regard for this most good and kind woman. She never did us any harm, or spoke a harsh word to either of us. I cannot remember that she had any faults at all, and yet with one accord, we coldly despised her; and all the love and care she had devotedly shown us appear to have been completely thrown away.

I fancy she must have spoiled us, and children never forgive and perhaps never should forgive (as it undermines the very springs of their character) spoiling on the part of those in authority. Gibby we would have died for or with; but while we adored, we obeyed. But looking back on the cared for—and soon to be uncared for—stages of our young existence, I have no doubt whatever that to fend for and look after themselves is best for children, as it undoubtedly is for grown-up people.

Liverpool was a short but horrible experience. Never before had I seen streets and streets full of dirty, ragged, half-starved-looking people.

I suppose we had been taken for reasons of convenience to a little hotel close to the docks, and docks are notoriously dingy. Outside our windows we could see people streaming past, like creatures out of an inferno. I was shaken and horrified by the sight of them. From that moment I lost all sense of fundamental security. Only a layer as thin as a biscuit appeared to stretch between absolute want and complete security. I believed that through this thin crust any child might drop at any time.

Decent poverty I had hitherto accepted as by no means fearful, and possibly a condition not without justice. But desperate poverty I believed then and have ever since believed is a travesty of human life.

Our poor people in Fawley and Over Stowey were always given puddings, strong soup, rather drab but substantial winter garments—generally by us, and I knew—or thought I knew—all about them. But these evil, suffering-looking scarecrows prowling, only a thickness of a wall away—where were their puddings? Where their holeless garments?

I was amazed at my mother’s serenity. Why should we eat disagreeably cooked but copious chops, and sleep in comfort, surrounded by the cold and starving? Yet my mother sat on each of our beds as usual; and sang in her lovely happy voice the wonderful German Lieder, which usually gave me so much pleasure; but this night they seemed to turn a knife in my wound, nor did I have the slightest regret when, waking to the lashing rain and wind, I looked my last on what seemed to me the dirty and cruel little Island which had hitherto been to us all a safe and happy home.

It was February in 1890 when we sailed to the New World on the City of Chicago, a poor old boat which went down on its next voyage in a gale, off the coast of Ireland.

On her last voyage, the City of Chicago had exactly the kind of shipwreck I should have liked. All the passengers were saved, though they had to climb rocks and cliffs in the dark and rain, a most pleasurable experience in which I felt George and I would have played no mean part. Our potential and unloved Aunt Annie, who actually experienced this adventure related it to us a year later and she seemed to have looked at the whole thing from an entirely different point of view. The pleasure of the experience was lost upon her; while obviously Providence had missed its stroke in depriving us of the adventure. “What a pity it wasn’t us! And what a pity Aunt Annie wasn’t drowned!” were the two ideas which occurred to me at the same time with equal force. We ourselves had simply endured rough crossing during which all of us—except my invalid mother—were frantically sick. Fräulein was the most frantic—she ate nothing for several days, and then insisted on having a Bismarck herring fried in oil. George had a violent toothache, and on the doctor refusing to do anything for him, my mother, rising to a desperate height of courage, went to see the captain. She returned in triumph, accompanied by both doctor and captain. George was relieved of his tooth; both of us were carried up on deck where we promptly recovered, and had the time of our lives. My mother found immediately friendly shipmates to keep eyes on us—and Fräulein remained below with her Bismarck herrings.

It was on this voyage that I made my first American friend. Mysteriously, although a boy, his name was “Poll.” He was the same age that I was, and we played draughts together hour by friendly hour. Appropriately enough, considering my future career, the boy belonged to the famous publishing house of Harper’s. Although I never profited by our acquaintance in order to become one of their writers, I liked “Poll” Harper very much; and it was not for some time afterwards that it filtered slowly into my English mind that his real name was “Paul.”

Every child discovers a new world at the dawn of each fresh day, so that it is less startling to a child than it might be to a grown-up person to wake up one fine morning in a new country.

America seemed rather to slide into me, than to shock me. We landed on a bright, cold February day. The sky was a brilliant blue. “The most ancient Heavens” were—whether inspired by Duty or by Liberty, “fresh and strong.”

“Poll” pointed out the Statue of Liberty to me. It was mixed up with pigeons, blue sky and a marvellous smell that I shall remember to my dying day, as if lake water and peanut brittle had been happily blended together.

I did not know why for days I was so enchanted with the faculty of smell. I kept imploring indifferent people thinking of practically everything else, “to smell just smell this air!” They said: “What’s wrong with it?” but of course what I wanted them to realize was that there was something about the new smell that was superlatively right. I have sometimes asked myself if it wasn’t the smell of freedom? In Europe’s ancient, hidebound lands, the people belong to their countries. Laws made pitilessly by little men with long-ago minds hold back the forces of youth—but here on this soil my rebel spirit knew once and for all that America belonged to its people. It was a land newly won, creatively occupied, raw and unfinished in my childhood, but oh how tinglingly alive!

Fifty years ago there were no motors; but there were incredible cable cars shooting perilously about the streets, while high up in the air, cheek by jowl with bedroom windows, railway trains with enormous engines puffed and roared—presenting in front of themselves fan-shaped iron aprons upon which, I was told (and hoped one day to see with my own eyes) they made a beneficent habit of catching cows.

There was more noise than I had ever heard before. London growled, but New York mingled roars with screams. High, unexpected warnings rent the bracing air—everything seemed to be either trying to get at you, or past you. Nothing remained, or apparently could keep, still. Sky scrapers—mere toys to the monsters of today, but giants to an English child—flat-ironed their way upwards towards the stars. In between these ungainly sprawlers were often to be found strange open spaces upon which goats nibbled thoughtfully at empty tomato cans. Red Indians painted on wood with real feathers stood outside every tobacco shop. They were exactly how I had planned red Indians to be—except that they were not alive. Ladies spat unashamedly in the streets. “There are,” my mother grimly remarked on observing the striking gadgets of her hotel bedroom, “luxuries here—but no necessities.”

Perhaps a child’s imagination prefers luxuries to necessities. I had never lived in a hotel before, though had there been an alternative I should, I am sure, have preferred it, but, as it was, I was whole-heartedly satisfied with all that came our way; and a great deal in the shape of ice cream and candy almost immediately did. What must have added to my sense of well being was that Fräulein almost instantly left us, for good, declaring, not without justice, that George would certainly murder her if she stayed any longer. George hated what he persistently thought of as her gibberish—the dreadful new tongue in which she spoke to him, just at an age when he had barely taken sufficient trouble to master his own; and at that period what George hated, he attacked.

The house of my grandparents was full of grown sons and not large enough to contain growing grandchildren as well, so that until our new house at Yonkers was fully finished we had to remain in the red velvet, rather stuffy hotel bedrooms and sitting-room, into which we had been genially pushed on our arrival. Everything that we were at all accustomed to, vanished almost immediately. Mother was taken to a nursing home for an operation. Father had to go to Yonkers to finish his preparations for our arrival. Grandmother and the uncles visited us almost daily; and Uncle George, a full-blown clergyman, the eldest of the uncles, produced “Fanny.” Fanny was only fourteen but she was known to be a child of impeccable religion and reliability; and she was left in complete charge of us. The landlady of the hotel gushed violently over our parents, promising to be more than a mother to us, but as soon as our parents had vanished in a strange mist of hollow reassurances, we realized, not without relief, that we had seen the last of her.

The world was now not only new—it was empty; nor, unfortunately, had I forgotten either Liverpool or Oliver Twist which had been read out loud to us just before we started.

“Now,” I thought when I had put both George and myself to bed, without the faintest co-operation on the part of Fanny, who, after one look at George and before it was even necessary for him to lift his powerful voice and hand against her, swiftly subsided into a paper-backed novel, and chewing gum, “Now is the time for us to fall through the earth into a Hell of crime and squalor?”

I may say that I waited for this to happen, with a good deal of terror but also a certain amount of interest. The Unknown, even the dreadful Unknown, is not without its fascination for a child who is, at heart, the most consistent of adventurers.

At any rate I was now fully prepared for what followed; the very first time we went out with Fanny to Central Park we got lost.

It was the largest and most entertaining park I had ever been in, filled to the brim with “squiddles” as both George and I preferred to pronounce them. The squirrels—however pronounced—were our undoing. We followed them first down one path, and then down another, until Fanny, soaked in her chewing-gum romances, dropped out of the universe.

I soon realized what had happened, but I knew better than to let George know that we irretrievably lost. With a false air of gaiety, I pursued first one path and then another, and tried to drive the alien figures of portly women into the lithe and youthful form of Fanny. We had no money. We knew nobody. I had forgotten the way back to the hotel. Every boy we passed became the Artful Dodger, and every innocent old man Fagin. I had only one hope, while I entertainingly told George thrilling stories, directing his weary feet (but as yet unharrowed mind) towards the park gates, to where perhaps we might find a policeman. These men were, I knew, put there to unravel all mysteries. They were the Lighthouses of every city and no boat that turned at their bidding was ever shipwrecked. At least an hour after I had given up the hopeless search for Fanny, George became suspicious and extremely tired. “Are we lost?” he asked accusingly, as the story, now becoming feebler and feebler, paused in its flight.

“Of course not,” I bravely lied, delighted to find that I could, and feeling much better for it. “We can go back to Fanny whenever we like—only we don’t like!”

George shook his head at this doubtful statement, but abstained from yelling. He deeply despised Fanny still, but he knew she was the way home. At long last, before sheer terror seized him, my eyes lit on the immense and reassuring form of an enormous policeman. He fulfilled my utmost expectation. It appeared that he was Irish, and when he heard that we had just arrived from the “ould country” he was as thrilled by our company as we were by his. It now mattered nothing that there were no traces of Fanny. I knew the name of our hotel and the policeman knew everything else.

He carried George on his shoulder and led me by the hand. We met, or it seemed to me that the policeman simply evoked, an Italian on a street corner selling roasted chestnuts over an enchanting brazier. You could see their red-hot preparations and take them popping from the burning coals. The policeman bought us two bags full and I ate steadily all the way home, walking on air. I hate to think now what poor Fanny must have been suffering, but at the time I never gave her a thought. She had gone back to the hotel in remorseful anguish, feeling no doubt less religious and less reliable than she had ever felt in her life before; and too frightened even to dare to tell the landlady of her loss. We found her bathed in tears and chewing gum harder than ever. However, all was well that ended well. Fanny was comforted by the remains of the chestnuts; and we promised not to reveal what had actually happened—to our guardian visitors next day.

Fanny had learned her lesson and never again allowed herself to be left behind. On the whole I think we might have done much worse than Fanny. She was never any real trouble to either of us. From the first she had consigned the whole care of George to me, which was indeed just as well, for George, with that innate conservatism which was to remain with him throughout his life, resented any form of the unknown, while almost too prepared on his own terms, to accept the evils of the known. Beyond the fact that I was terrified about Mother—the word operation was practically the same to me as execution—and therefore felt it heartless and not even appetizing to eat the sweets now pronounced “candies” showered upon us by grandparents and uncles, I should have been contented enough. But I could not get rid of that unfathomable fear; I watched every expression of our visitors’ faces, no word they uttered escaped me. “Could they say this—could they smile like that?” I asked myself, “if Mother were really dead?”

These visits, so full of tenderness but with hats on, had a hollow ring. Their presents, were they not perhaps bribes to prevent the realization of icy fact? My father’s familiar face, when he was able to pay us a visit, certainly was a relief. He made no bones about entering extremely seriously into my anxiety about Mother. One day, leaving George to the ministrations of Grandma and Uncle Frank, he actually had the sense to take me to the nursing home where my mother, who had only had a very slight operation, lay in bed looking supremely well and beautiful; and here I was told, and I partially believed, that she was eventually to be restored to us. Fortunately we hurried back since George had refused the ministrations of Grandmother and Uncle Frank, and roared steadily in crimson fury until I was returned to him, when he simply hit me, with all the force and skill engendered by his longing. I knew the blow meant nothing, and though reeling under it, we were soon at peace together, eating the now pleasurable contents of our visitors’ parcels.

Mother really was restored to us the following week; and the next thing I remember was the Hudson.

Yonkers was at this time only a little country town splashed down some distance from New York—of which it is now a seething portion; and on the banks, or at any rate high above them, of the mighty river Hudson.

It seems strange to call such a romantic great river by such an unostentatious name as Hudson; had it been called the Guadalquiver I could better have understood it.

There it was, however, rolling along, vast like a sea—sometimes containing large chunks of ice, between its high wooded cliffs—the famous Palisades as they were inspiringly called. The river, under our following eyes, made a straight plunge into the city we had now definitely got the better of—New York; but that was not the direction that enchanted us. We had turned our backs once and for all on an ocean that led only to England; and looked instead up the river into the vast unexplored continent of America, away from cities—to where there were real Red Indians, real grizzly bears—rattlesnakes and Rocky Mountains—but we never, during our childhood, got there. Meanwhile we paid our first visit to a real American home.

I think it was almost a pity that the Baldwins were so rich. Their house, in which we were supremely comfortable and happy, was simply a vision of beauty. The spacious rooms shone with cleanliness and bright colours. There were more towels and of more exquisite shades and fabrics than I have ever seen before or since—it seemed impious to dry mere human hands on them. Perhaps they were what I was afterwards to know as “guest towels” and not meant for the life of every day; and there was Caroline.

I don’t suppose that Caroline was the worst child who has ever lived; but she was at any rate the worst child that I had as yet encountered.

It was, I fancy, her aim in life to attract adverse attention—and she fully lived up to it. She lay on the drawing-room floor with her legs high in the air and screamed like a peacock and she did this, not only every now and then, as any child might for the mere fun of the thing, but with the steady continuity of an anxious engine waiting outside a tunnel. She disobeyed frantically any and every suggestion put to her by her parents, and all her father and mother ever said to her as she lay squealing and writhing on the drawing-room floor, interrupting any conversation that might otherwise have taken place, was “My, Caroline! how you do act!”

We loved the Baldwins—all except Caroline—but I never remember seeing them again, though I think they continued to be important friends of my father’s.

When our home was ready I imagine it was rather horrible; it certainly seemed so after the spacious brilliance of the Baldwins’. I don’t visualize, curiously enough (as I remember all the rooms in my previous homes), any of the inside of this house except a rather large room in the basement which contained the bath, fixed to the wall, with hot and cold water taps. It was pointed out to us with some pride, as in England we had only had portable tin ones; but my father’s pride lessened when one day it became filled with the contents of the cesspool. This does seem to have impressed me, because I remember staring in fascinated horror at its contents.

Not surprisingly, both my mother and George became very ill with septic throats, while I incontinently went one better and developed actual diphtheria.

I remember one dreadful night when I nearly died, and a very big doctor sat on my bed and shook his head at me, saying in a melancholy voice, “Well, I can’t do any more for the child!” My throat was almost unendurably sore and I appeared incapable of swallowing, but my uppermost feeling was that of intense annoyance; “This is nonsense!” I thought to myself, speech being beyond me. “What is he a doctor for?” and my relief was great when he departed. All that night my father and mother never left me, and in spite of my distress, I had a feeling of extraordinary solidity and reassurance as if their presence made a strength that I was profiting by; when the morning came the choking had stopped and I remembered the sense of their loving and sustaining presence long after I had forgotten the pain.

I soon realized that my feeling for my parents was wholly different from that of the children round me. I was by nature a rebel, yet the will of my parents was not only law to me—it was an agreeable law. I loved them far too much, sceptic as I was, to doubt that they knew best. Apparently American children did doubt that their parents were anything like so good judges of what they should or should not do—as they themselves were, but I never shared their feeling. It simply never passed through my mind to disobey my parents. I must admit that my obedience was never put to a severe test. My mother always explained to me exactly what she wanted me to do and why she wanted me to do it; and as far as my father was concerned, I very seldom saw him. When I did, I looked upon him as a somewhat erratic but pleasant boon companion. Still, had either of them told me to jump over the moon, I should—without looking for a place to land—have jumped.

The Baldwins recommended my first American school. It was a day school, held in a clean, spacious, sunny wooden house, and every hour was filled by quite extraordinarily amusing work which appeared to me purely in the light of play. Body and mind were developed simultaneously. We danced, sang, moulded in clay and wielded fret-saws, while learning history and geography, and even arithmetic, in effortless ease, and with almost equal interest.

Ninety per cent of the American children of my day went, in a less luxurious and more arduous manner, to public schools, and I often wonder if we should not have profited by greater exposure to the proletarian spirit. But I suppose it was felt by my parents that we needed special attention while being broken into the American scene, and quite possibly we should have stood less well a full exposure, after our nursery existence, to the proletarian gale. As it was, I never remember that we were teased or suffered any inconvenience from our British birth and training. We were accepted as part of the European family from which at one remove or another most American children had sprung.

It is true that American history books pointed out, in no uncertain manner, the moral obliquity of the British Empire. Hitherto I had always supposed, like any British Israelite, that whatever England had done was right and specially smiled upon by the Almighty; but now I began to be not quite so sure. The British officer, for instance, who paid Red Indians for each scalp of a Rebel girl child of thirteen brought in to him, savoured of undue harshness.

Wilmett was thirteen. She would certainly have been a Rebel child had the occasion been offered her. I might have my own mild wishes to see Wilmett slightly lowered in the scale of family life—but not to the point of being scalped by Red Indians. I felt vaguely relieved to think that she was still in Bournemouth; and that the Revolutionary war was over—rather, as it turned out, to the disadvantage of the British Empire. Still, George the Third was no hero of mine. John Bright—who had always to be kept rather dark as a great-uncle in England—I found was looked upon as a distinct asset in America. My teacher was young and very kind to me. I was allowed to say “bean” instead of “bin” when referring to the past participle of “to be.” “She doesn’t mean any harm by it,” our teacher told the rather indignant class. “It’s just the way she’s been brought up.”

George, who was now rising four, was deposited by me, and later fetched, from a kindergarten near by, and I am sorry to say that his first school career was carried on under a cloud. He was said to be terribly “rough” and twice nearly expelled for violence. Once he pinched a little girl’s arm black and blue; and once he used a pin upon a little boy’s posterior in a lethal manner. He never told me why, but no doubt he had his reasons.

I am at a loss to understand why George, who, when he returned to England six years later, became instantaneously and serenely mild (except perhaps upon the football field) and remained so, should have had so ferocious a reputation in America.

Was he simply spoiled to death? Were my ministrations, however confined as to authority, too galling? Did he miss being the King-Baby of an English nursery, with the whole attention of at least one mature woman at his absolute disposal? Did he resent being surrounded by contemporaries, a mere shuffled-about street urchin—instead of a protected and isolated individual? Was he horrified by the new intonations and habits of his contemporaries?

Whatever the cause, George, like my mother, never really settled down to America. Superficially he became, as was but natural considering his tender age, more American than any of us—but the hard core of his nature remained indestructibly British. He never exposed it, but no doubt he paid for this rigid suppression of his real personality, by his irritated nerves. Mother proceeded to die of America but George, stronger and better balanced as he eventually became, simply developed a strong proclivity to kill. At six he became the leader of what was known in our new home as the “Clinton Avenue gang” and though I think he did no great harm to any of his victims, a kitten used up at least seven of its lives under his practised hand, while boys considerably older than himself obeyed his every nod. The streets were now our home, and I was left in entire charge of George. I had to keep my eyes open, and my head screwed on the right way, since my control of him was limited to the amount of interest I was able to excite. I often think a certain facility for dialogue that I am said to possess may have been developed under the strain and difficulty of successfully amusing George.

He had an uncorrectable passion for occasionally shooting across the road just in front of a cable car, escaping it by a hair’s breadth. In order to protect him I ran hand in hand with him, nearest to the cable car, without sharing his taste; and I well remember my indignation, when a kindly lady sharply scolded me for daring to expose my baby brother to such terrible danger. George, though still fortunately a good deal smaller than I, was pitilessly the stronger.

I think we were fortunate not to be more set upon by other children. I cannot remember in Yonkers anything worse happening to us than a small boy thumbing his nose at George and telling him to go to Hell. George had never been told anything about the infernal regions, and he at once asked me interestedly, “What Hill is he talking about?” and lost interest on being told by me that there was no such place. I was myself less sure of this fact, and indeed was rather disturbed by what I had overheard from my elders who dealt seriously with the subject. My mother would not say whether she believed in Hell or not; but I was reassured by my grandmother who came down with no uncertain emphasis upon the side of the angels. “All you’ve got to remember,” she told me, “is that God is love. Nothing else matters—and when we die, God is the Person to whom we are going!”

That seemed satisfactory, for all that I had been told about God sounded like an amalgamation of the American Uncles. I can only remember one disagreeable incident occurring in our street life at Yonkers. Workmen building a house laughed down at my large Chinese doll and its tonsured head, from the scaffolding, in a most jeering and wounding manner.

“Can Chinese babies help looking like my doll, and having their heads shaved?” I asked my mother indignantly when I reached home; and I date, from that anguished and enraged moment, my hate and indignation at all race distinctions. To be at once both unreasonable and cruel has always seemed to me just cause for human indignation.

Whatever America may have been like in those days for grown-up people who were new to it, children always found themselves at a premium. I never saw anyone purposely unkind to a child.

Babies died like flies through the long hot summer; and diphtheria and malaria played havoc among them all the year round. Medical science, scrupulous hygiene and skilled child culture have by now got the better of the child mortality in the United States without changing the love and care still the general lot of the American child.

Perhaps there was an unconscious psychic factor at work as well, which still continues to make youth unduly favoured in the U.S.A.

Not only were children precious because they were difficult to rear but because their youth matched the whole spirit of a country that was keenly aware of its own newness of life; in America, as Alice Meynell says in her charming poem on a growing boy, “Antiquity is Young.”

Whatever the cause may have been, “to be young” fifty years ago in America “was very Heaven.” No-one looked down on a child. Nothing severe was in the atmosphere. It seemed that everyone had some sort of chance to get anywhere—or to be anybody.

There may have been poverty and squalor in Yonkers—there may even have been crime, but I never saw any; and George and I went everywhere—and saw very nearly everything.

There were not many coloured people in Yonkers then, but whenever we met them, we loved them. We used to talk to them by the hour together.

I had been warned against them mysteriously by Uncle George, from whom, in spite of his many lovable and beautiful qualities, warnings seemed almost too often to emanate, but I am glad to say I never paid the least attention to those warnings, nor did either George or myself have any occasion to regret our complete confidence in every coloured face we saw. Coloured people may have had their faults when dealt with on strictly business lines; but a child’s business was always safe with them.

I think our home life, though our house itself must have been unpleasant, was very happy during the year we spent at Yonkers. My mother and father were delighted at being reunited after their first long separation. My mother for a time had distinctly better health after her operation. I think, too, that alone with my father and her two youngest, my mother was more adjustable and single-hearted than when the elder ones joined her. She must have had to face—and faced extremely bravely—harder living conditions in Yonkers than she ever had to face again. She never attempted to get a nurse and what I couldn’t do, she did for both of us, as well as superintending her household.

It is true George and I were off her hands from nine o’clock till seven except Saturdays and Sundays; but we were never off her heart or out of her mind. We moved away from her, and back towards her again, with the regularity of returning tides. She was always our goal—and she was always there, unchangeably serene and tender; and prepared to meet every demand we made upon her. Her children were her life—and she obstinately refused any other life; but no-one could say she did not reach the height of her profession. I doubt if a better mother for young children ever existed. But my father still had to manage his parish without the slightest assistance from her, socially or otherwise. Nevertheless, he made a great success of Yonkers. His church simply filled to the brim, and I always remember him during those five years of our American life as laughing. America was his real home. Everything that happened in it was familiar to him; and everyone who met him was his potential or actual friend.

His parents and brothers often came to see him at Yonkers, and he, more often still, went into New York to see them.

It is true that my mother did not like Yonkers; but then, she didn’t have to stay there permanently. My father had been offered the charge for only a year with the option of staying on permanently at the end of it. I think she was still not without hope that she might like some other place in this great country well enough to live in. Even our first (and indeed our only) party merely upset the equilibrium temporarily; and that it was upset was entirely my fault.

I suppose my mother never really wanted to give the party; but she acquiesced in it. She even gave way to the idea of chicken salad followed by ice cream, without which no American party was then considered complete. It was unfortunate that it happened to be the only way in which my mother disliked eating chicken.

The party was to consist of every single one of our American relatives who lived sufficiently near us to be able to manage the journey. My grandmother had endless sisters and brothers—all married, and most with sizeable families; but as a matter of fact only twenty-four of them were able to come. Still, twenty-four was quite a lot of people to entertain in one small wooden house with a single, though capable, Swedish “girl.”

Most of the family were MacDonalds, Grandpa Bottome’s relations having all—with the exception of a brother George in Canada—remained in Derbyshire.

The MacDonalds were a dark, powerful and lively clan. None of them was quite as dynamic as my grandmother, though I believe Aunt Molly Tate ran her a good second. Some of them were extremely prosperous, others less so, but all had managed to get along in this world and were equally—if not even better—prepared for the next. I think they were all anxious to welcome and love their nephew Will’s English wife and family, if my mother had given them the chance; but as we never saw any of them again, except the Willis MacDonalds, I gather she did not react very favourably towards them.

It was Saturday and I had been told to take George off somewhere for the whole day, a handsome picnic lunch being provided, and not to return until five o’clock when it would be time to dress for the party. The guests were expected towards seven. We knew what beautiful new clothes we were going to wear—we knew what food—including angel cake—something we vaguely supposed sent down from Heaven by special emissary to clergymen’s families about to give parties—we were going to eat. It was a gala day; and we were both prepared to make the most of it. George, poor child, was even unnaturally good. It was perhaps fortunate that he did not know that he was not going to have any party at all.

Spring was upon us. Not the slow, chilly suggestion of better things to come which we were accustomed to after an English winter, but a sudden gorgeous plunge into ardent sudden heat. Buds shot out almost by the hour, birds sang their heads off, the scents in the air were more penetrating and magical than ever. We went to bed drunk with syringa every night; and our hearts woke to sudden gusts from lilac bushes the next morning. Nothing, we thought, could have been a pleasanter prelude to a party—than just such a day in the country.

George and I set out with the world before us; and were almost immediately joined by half the children we knew. It was decided, as we wavered along the road together out of the town, that the Woods should be our final destination.

The Woods were a long way out of the town—perhaps two or three miles; but the day was nearly as young as we were. We reached the Woods before it grew too hot for pleasure; and found everything that Woods contain for a child’s delight, in their shade.

I can’t think what happened to the Day—it simply went past us like a flash of lightning. George continued in a most propitious mood and only once gave me some anxious moments when he suddenly disappeared and I found him climbing rapidly down a precipitous siding onto a railway track. However, I retrieved him by some rather clever foot work, getting well beneath him, and then prising him upwards—bribed with the thought of the picnic basket at the top. None of us had a watch, and before we knew where we were the Woods had grown unaccountably dark. It was, as a matter of fact, seven o’clock—the Hour of the Party—and not a sign of us!

Our harrowed parents were in no mood to entertain guests. Long before we had accomplished the long miles home, search parties were sent out to look for us. No-one in the town had seen us. Supper was indefinitely postponed. Horrors—for a famous kidnapping had just taken place—were all the guests had to sup on. No-one knew in what direction we had gone. We had left the house at nine a.m. and it was now eight!

We were at last found, by my father in a fury, just as we turned into our own gate. His terror took the form of a sharp, public explosion. Before all the new relations my character was torn irremediably to tatters. I was told how naughty, how cruel, how thoughtless, how unbelievably untrustworthy I was! George, naturally enough, was not reproached at all, though to do him justice he would willingly have shared my disgrace. He was simply carried off in Mother’s arms to bed—and ice cream was, I believe, almost immediately administered to him.

Still, he missed the party.

As for me, the reproaches begun by my father, whose anger was as usual swiftly appeased, were rather unduly protracted by the grandparents and Uncle George. They had to explain (and I now believe rather in my defence) to those who did not know me, how inexplicable and exceptionally iniquitous my conduct was. Such a Phyllis was not the one they knew—it was indeed hardly the one I was prepared to know myself. It became more than I could bear, and worn out by heat, anxiety, haste and remorse—unsustained by those long-distant sandwiches—I burst into tears and remained in them. I never was a crying child, practically nothing could make me cry; not the lash of Wilmett’s tongue, nor the iron strength of George’s fists, but this was a blue moon occasion, and I did full justice to it.

I cried silently but with unconcealed agony, face downwards on the sofa in the back parlour. Nothing would induce me to meet those strange relations of mine or to touch the supper now spread out for all of us, and being consumed with belated gusto in the dining-room. Commands, appeals and threats failed in turn to move me. I remained contorted with sobs, on one of the hardest sofas known to man—not that I minded the hardness of that sofa; on the contrary I wanted it to be still harder; Aberdeen adamant would not have been hard enough.

But after they had all rather reproachfully vanished, an Angel came to me in my Gethsemane. The Angel was my Uncle Frank. Neither the party nor the festal supper was anything to him compared to a child in tears. He simply gave up his supper and sat by me. I doubt if he said very much or needed to. I knew well enough I needn’t explain to him that none of us had a watch, nor that the day had unaccountably shrunk. He knew all about that kind of day. He knew all about everything. He was my Uncle Frank. By and by when his hand and quiet voice had restored to me a vague feeling that agony had been known to pass, he left me to return with two plates of ice cream.

It would have been quite impossible for me to have eaten anything else; but the ice cream slid down between the retreating sobs quite easily.

In some bleak way I imagine that I even enjoyed it. I know I liked his having brought his own ice cream to eat with me.

I didn’t do so badly out of the party after all. For though I loved all three uncles all their lives, and later on made out of the youngest of them my best friend, I never loved the others quite as I loved my Uncle Frank. Indeed, I doubt if I was ever to love, with quite so disinterested and confident a passion, anyone else in my long life, as I loved him.

Nor was I the only one to love him with sustained delight, for before his premature death, I imagine he had earned more love than many men who had lived the full span of human life, while he died—like his Master before him—at the age of thirty-three.

After I had explained to Uncle Frank that I really couldn’t bear to look or be looked at by any of the new relations—shaken as I still was by my shame—he carried me upstairs to bed, and sat with me till I slept.

I awoke next morning to find no party at all—and no disgrace—only my mother’s face smiling down at me as if nothing bad had ever happened, so that I began to believe that I was the same Phyllis after all.

In my early life, and probably even today, it is not sufficiently understood that a child’s education should include at least a rudimentary grasp of religion, sex, and money. Without a basic knowledge of these three primary facts in a normal human being’s life—subjects which stir the emotions, create events and opportunities, and if they do not wholly decide must greatly influence an individual’s personality—no human being’s education can have a safe foundation.

Religion taken in its undogmatic and vital sense is the actual relationship between a man and his goal. The child has not yet chosen his goal, but when he has chosen it—he will follow it; and such a goal, conscious or unconscious, will become his religion. A child whose goal is self-advancement—and whose God is himself—cannot be happy or successful in any of his human relationships because his aim is egocentric, and consequently unsharable with others. Whereas a child whose goal is that of personal contribution towards human brotherhood will be certain to succeed in his personal relationships, and to become of use to all those with whom he is brought in contact. A man who loves God—or to use a less anthropological term which perhaps means the same thing, Life itself—cannot put himself before his neighbour. Nor can he admit class, race or sex distinctions.

Children make this choice between an egocentric or a “good neighbour goal” very early in life; and it is therefore a vital part of a child’s education to put the facts on which to base his choice before him as simply and as soon as possible.

If he is a spoilt or pampered child he will almost certainly take the egocentric choice and become potentially neurotic or even delinquent as a human being. The world is suffering from an unprecedented outbreak of spoilt children at the moment. But the “long arm,” as Adler used to call it, of the teacher may stretch out over the insufficient reach of the parent, and help the child to reconsider his choice. This is why the psychological training of teachers, and public respect and understanding of the importance of their profession, are of such vital significance to the future of the world.

It is too wide a problem, as Adler used to point out, to train all parents how to bring up their children—but it is not beyond the good sense of modern society to train its teachers how to understand the make-up of a living child.

The child’s opinion of himself is the strongest creative element in his personality; but much of his early education must depend on how he sees his parents behave. Children are not easy to fool. A child rarely follows an adult’s precepts unless substantiated by his conduct.

My mother and father both taught me a great deal about their religion, but what I learned from them was, that my mother was afraid of life, and that my father—who was very seldom with his children—when he was with us, was highly irresponsible. He might scold us one day for a thing which he would accept as a good joke upon another. There is nothing a child dreads more than this type of inconsistency in adults. A child knows very little about life; and if what he learns is to be constantly contradicted, he soon feels hopelessly at sea. If I accepted my father’s religion I found myself without a compass; if I accepted my mother’s, I had to accept with it her own sense of insecurity.

Neither the problems of sex nor money were rightly explained to any of us.

Probably the sooner and more unconsciously a child learns the laws of reproduction the better. For during our earlier years no fact unaccompanied by physical pain rouses either fear or antagonism. Nor at a time when everything that dawns upon our opening minds is a marvel, do these particular facts seem any more surprising, let alone disconcerting, than any others.

The reproduction of loved animals is probably the easiest method of arriving at the explanation of our own reproductive methods. A little girl of five who anxiously explained to a strange taxi driver, “Please don’t think Judy’s greedy because she’s so fat. It’s just that she’s got her puppies in her stomach till it’s time for them to come out!” had a practical grasp of essentials which had been assimilated by her without that undue embarrassment which could be seen upon the face of the taxi driver. A child’s vocabulary is nothing like so large as its gift of intelligent observation, so that short and factual explanations are always the best.

If adults tell a child too much, he invariably drops the subject and is in danger of taking no further interest in it. “I can always understand, Mother, until you begin to explain!” a little girl with obvious justification remarked to an over-conscientious parent.

Money is only of importance to a child because of the artificial value put upon it by our faulty civilization; still it does seem advisable to let a child share as early as possible the responsibility of his family’s economic situation, so that he may train himself to be a help rather than a hindrance. I myself suffered for many years from a wholly false estimate of my family’s fortunes. My mother was constantly telling us how poor we were—and in what danger we stood from debt and disaster. The very reverse of this happened to be true, as she had a substantial private income in addition to my father’s earnings; but it made an indelible effect upon my mind, and I stinted myself and strained every nerve to ease this appalling state of things, while falling over backwards to reach a point in age and knowledge at which I could start earning my own living. I fancy that my eldest sister’s health was undermined by the enormous strain put on her during her adolescence, as nurse, family factotum, and star pupil all at the same time—simply to release us from a purely imaginary financial emergency. If either my mother or father had said, “We have enough for us all to live on comfortably, but not extravagantly, until you are all thoroughly trained in any profession you want to follow,” I imagine we should have all four grown up more cheerfully and with less tension; or better still, had either of them said, “When you have learned your lessons well—and thoroughly understood them—you will be able to earn your own living,” I think we should have been both more carefree and more wisely energetic. We were given pocket money on the smallest possible scale; but never trained as to how much should be spent on our necessities.

But if money and sex confronted us as mysteries without sense or personal bearing, religion was at least taught us very thoroughly. Hymns, texts, collects, the Catechism rolled from our tongues with almost uncanny ease.

In spite of these aids to living, the acid test of religion was not met by both these unequivocally religious people. Deeply sincere as they both were in their different ways neither of my parents made much practical use of his religion. We children struggled in vain—according to our individual life patterns—to get this mysterious and vital factor to work in our own favour. Wilmett was always deeply religious, Mary, I fancy, not much less so—though perhaps in a more passive and less aggressive manner. Personally, I never felt satisfied either with religion or without it. I knew there was something in it which was probably truer than anything else; but strive as I might I broke my teeth against it, in all the various forms in which it was presented to me. I loved the Gospel stories; but no-one I knew behaved the least like Christ. I enjoyed church services; but I saw no connection whatever between them and anybody’s daily life. I was often praised when I knew that I was not good; and occasionally blamed when I did not feel naughty. “Are you sure that God is as real to you as bread and butter?” I once asked my mother at an early age. She fixed her beautiful blue eyes on mine and told me that bread and butter were much less real to her than God. But even this failed to convince me. If she believed in God why was she so often afraid? For she was afraid. I knew this because I felt her fear in my own blood. She was the dearest being on earth to me. I was part of her, and I felt infected by her fear. Yet I knew long before the text was impressed upon me from without, that love and fear were incompatible.

I had no curiosity, let alone knowledge, about my body or its functions. At nine years old I was both mentally and physically unaware of the existence of sex. I had never heard anything about it, and what I read, went off me like water off a duck’s back. When George was born I had discovered that his body was slightly different from my own; but as mine seemed to function just as satisfactorily, I felt no sense of disadvantage from the slight difference I had observed; nor had it occurred to me to ask why we should not both of us have been made the same. Many English children with sheltered lives like ours grew to adolescence floating about in the same sea of ignorance—some women even up to the time of their marriage. Sex enlightenment came to me at Yonkers and was in some ways the most terrifying experience of my life.

Our young and pleasant teacher, as she often did, was reading a story out loud to the whole class when my listening ear caught a palpable misstatement. I put up my hand. “Why,” I demanded, “did the mother expect her baby before it came? Did God tell her it was coming in a dream like Joseph’s?”

There was a momentary hushed pause. The teacher to my astonishment blushed scarlet; and the whole class burst into a gale of most disconcerting laughter.

It is always painful to a child to have its vast sea of ignorance exposed to more knowing eyes; and I was conscious that there was something exceptionally cruel and jeering in this particular laughter. The teacher stopped it at once; turning to me she said kindly, “I think we had better talk about this together after the school is over.”

When the other children had gone home, and she seemed determined to keep me till the last one had gone, she said rather doubtfully, “I think you ought to ask your mother to tell you more about how babies come! I don’t like to do it without her leave!”

“But I know how they come,” I told her impatiently; “angels bring them by night to their mothers!”

She still shook her head in an unconvinced manner. I felt rather offended that she declined to tell me more herself, if more she really knew; but I was always quite ready to ask my mother anything; so I hurried home and asked her.

My mother, too, flushed in an unaccountable manner; but she took me in her arms and then and there unrolled before my horrified eyes, an amazing—a most complicated and a wholly tragic—picture of the life between the sexes. The pains of childbirth—the greater physical strength of men—their far from greater moral strength—the white slave traffic—nothing was spared me. Even worse than the alarming pictures her words evoked, was her obvious terror of the facts that she was relating to me. It was her fear and evident repulsion that shook me to the foundations of my being. And yet I suppose no woman ever had less reason for terror of sex than my mother. She had had a perfectly miserable childhood; an invalid youth; and everything she knew of human happiness—love—freedom—health—had come to her out of her relationship with my father. I am quite sure now that it was not sex which worked such havoc upon my mother’s feelings and consequently upon my own. I think she was simply afraid of life; and had chosen sex as an excuse for not playing her part in it. She had, it is true, suffered greatly in childbirth; but every child she had had, she had chosen to have; and to the day of my father’s death I know she loved him—“in her fashion.” She froze visibly and grew old the moment he was taken from her.

Yet sheer uncontrollable terror lurked behind every word she uttered and reached to the depths of my being.

No doubt I was an extremely good and dramatic audience, as any child of nine might be whose mother had a great gift for expression, and used it to reveal the hidden pitfalls of an underworld into which apparently a child might inadvertently fall at any moment.

I became nearly frantic with rage and terror. She tried to soothe me but in vain. I was utterly unsoothable and inconsolable. It was not that I wanted to be a man—God forbid! I wanted to be out of such a world altogether! Most of my anger was directed against God; if this was the way He made man, and played about with women, what sort of a God was He? My mother brought in Adam and Eve and the serpent; but what need was there of any serpent? This business about man and woman was quite enough to unseat Paradise for me. My terror was a far more formidable and lasting affair than my rage. I had never forgotten Liverpool. Now there was this new monster. Were not Poverty and Crime handicaps enough without dragging in sex? Besides I loved my fellow man—I did not wish to think of him as an enemy to be guarded against—but as a friend to be loved.

However, by next morning I hit upon a device which kept me going very satisfactorily for the next few years. I did not doubt that what my mother had told me was true; but I determined to live my whole life as if it were not true! Certain basic risks I might have to run, certain precautions it might be safer for me to take. For instance, it might be wise to acquire as soon as it was feasible both a bulldog and a revolver; and never to go out without them.

But my dreams—my future—the husband and twelve children I had happily intended to possess—I would now arrive at in a different way from that of Nature’s. No Law of God for me! No! Utterly dissatisfied with the world as it had been presented to me, I would become my own creator. Omar Khayyám expressed my present mood perfectly though I was not to find this verse till later:

Surely I could find a Lover who would do this with me—and for me? With this unfortunate aim, but without any further immediate trouble about sex, I once more set out upon my path in life with superficial serenity.

Nevertheless I was no doubt a good deal shaken inwardly; and the amount of suppression which I managed so successfully to maintain, must have influenced me very adversely.

Perhaps my sudden development into a tomboy rather than a bookworm dates from this event. I still read omnivorously but I spent the greater part of my free time practising wild feats of physical strength and endurance. I climbed trees, ran races; I jumped incredible heights with a truly terrifying energy. On one vainglorious occasion I wrestled and threw every member of my Sunday School class—some of them girls of twelve years old, before the angelic and beautiful teacher, whose name was Margaret Scribner (a publisher’s daughter again!), had arrived to stop me. “I can’t believe my eyes,” she gasped, as I flung my last classmate panting at her feet. “Why, Phyllis Bottome, I always thought you such a gentle little English girl!”

I retired into that role immediately; and indeed I do not know why I ever came out of it. Partly it may have been a wish to maintain a physical ascendancy of some kind over my brother George; but more probably still I was secretly refusing my role as a woman, because my mother had made it too unpalatable for me.

The next burning event that happened to us at Yonkers was the return of the sisters. Wilmett and Mary had been away from us for full six months; and the excitement over their return was intense.

It might be supposed that as I had been a trusted “eldest” for this protracted period in the life of a child, I might not have rejoiced whole-heartedly at an event which was to sink me into comparative insignificance. I had been the single child-companion of my mother; and I had been George’s mainstay without competition or counter attraction. Now I was to be neither of these things any more; yet such problems in a child’s mind work differently from adult expectation. I was enchanted by the return of my sisters. Nothing is more enriching to a younger child than older children in the same family. Parents make the climate of the home, but contemporaries, especially those a little further along the road, open up adventures ahead; and blaze the trail of childhood. To me my two elder sisters, in their separate ways, acted like fortunes in the bank. What I would lose by their return never occurred to me, what I would gain appeared inexhaustible riches.

From Wilmett I knew that I should get the bright edge of danger—the full challenge of her superior and formidable powers. In Mary I was equally certain I should once more find that deep confidence and sense of security in comradeship which formed the basis of our intimacy. Mary and I were weak compared to Wilmett but we stood or fell together.

Looking back over my own experience of family life, as one of five children (for even the baby “Christian” who died at sixteen months formed an important part of our mental and moral atmosphere) I am wholly convinced that large families are a magnificent training for the individual. Once taken for granted that they should not be too large for their parents to control or to support—the more the merrier. Instead of your seeing the expanding universe through the blinkers of a single individuality you see it through several. You are not limited by one set of characteristics, nor intimidated by difficulties that your raw heart has to face entirely alone. Each member of my family was to me a fresh pair of eyes and ears, a new way of regarding the universe, and supplied me with a fresh style of surmounting difficulties.

I did not altogether care for Wilmett’s way of taking life, a sort of direct challenge to everything that came along: “Here’s a rock, let’s bump it”; and yet I must often have profited by her splendid courage and the energetic way in which she never shirked a single duty—her own or other people’s; while Mary’s kind unselfishness may well have put a check upon my irresponsible hedonism. George brought out in me—perhaps most of all my family—certain powers of easy adjustment and detachment which were to be of immense benefit to my whole working life. I am not sure that I did not in a real sense love George more than I loved my sisters—that is to say that I did for him with a better grace than I ever did for them. George was never a demonstrative person—but I think I may have in my turn supplied him with something essential or he would not later on in his maturer school age when some overwhelming tragedy had sent him up a cherry tree to cry in shadowed peace—have sharply waggled the branches as I passed unseeingly beneath him—so that I might look up and take a share of his agony.

I did not confide my own sorrows to any of my family; I was a most unconfiding child; but I constantly compared myself with them, and, as it were, used them as so many test tubes for emotions that might otherwise have overwhelmed me.

It is true that I know many only children who have done remarkably well in life. Among my personal acquaintances I remember three only children who rose to fame. One to worldwide fame; but another factor may have accounted for this: each of these children had an exceptionally remarkable mother. Most of the only children known to me, however, had narrower horizons, less courage, and more ego-centricity than those with brothers and sisters. Only children often appear to be weighed down like Atlas by the feeling that their father’s and mother’s whole world hangs from their shoulders; and depends upon their actions. Whereas most children in a large family strike out bravely into the wide sea of life watching their brothers and sisters bobbing along beside them, sharing to the limit of their capacities the great experiment of living.

My father and mother were, of course, radiantly happy at the safe arrival of their two elder daughters. Wilmett and Mary now twelve and a half and fourteen were marvellously pretty girls with large dark MacDonald eyes, long sweeping black locks and clear complexions. I can remember a dress that Wilmett almost immediately acquired in which she looked quite ravishing. It was made of what used to be called in America “châlet,” a sort of thin woollen material covered with tiny pink roses tied with blue ribbon.

As by now I knew half the children of Yonkers, it gave me great pleasure to go about among them, surreptitiously pointing her out and saying, “Look—that’s my sister, Wilmett!”

As a matter of fact, I loved Mary far better than Wilmett, but she was less spectacular; and did not go down so well with an American audience.

I don’t think Wilmett ever really liked America. Probably she came too late to it with her British habits too firmly fixed. Also by now my mother must have been privately deciding against the American scene, and would certainly have shared her distaste for it with her eldest daughter.

Mary, on the other hand, though finding the switch-over at first harder and more frightening than Wilmett found it, took a deep root in American life; and just as I did, soon discovered that her sense of personal worth and the chances ahead of her widened out in every direction.

From this period dates, though only in a shadowy way, the breakup of our family unity. We had until then been a model of what happy family life should be—diversity without friction. My father and mother’s central harmony had been so deep that it radiated out into all of us. We loved more than we differed. We had our quarrels and our jealousies, but they were without depth or continuity. Now we became sharply divided into two separate camps, and “Love with unconfinèd wings” ceased to rule over us.

In one camp were my mother, Wilmett and George, in the other, my father and Mary. I was not wholly in either camp. My mother remained the centre of my interest, but while Wilmett was unable to change or even to shake the tie between us, her presence was very disturbing; and a constant irritant to our companionship. Before Wilmett’s return I had been my mother’s only companion-child. I was now still as much her child; but I had wholly ceased to be her companion. Whereas with my father and Mary I found myself in a most pleasant, carefree atmosphere. They never scolded, criticized or ordered me about. I knew they were outlaws moving under a cloud of Mother’s and Wilmett’s perpetual disapproval; but I failed to discover—nor have I ever since discovered—that they did anything whatever to deserve it. Not that I found myself questioning the justice of these constant rebukes, at the time; I merely suffered the same sharp sense of personal guilt that a dog suffers when anyone else is punished in his presence. My mother’s rebukes were always very gentle; but her scorn was cutting. I never blamed her for it. I thought she must be right. I simply felt that everything else was wrong all round.

My father and Wilmett fought openly and with increasing violence. Wilmett was my mother’s confidante, and, poor child, she was too often used as her weapon. Unconsciously, no doubt, she made a great deal of mischief between her parents; but that must have been nothing compared to the harm that being used as a weapon by them must have done to her.

The breach between my parents widened slowly but surely. My father took to golf as a sort of escape from the baffling disappointment of his home life. My mother made her health an increasing alibi against social life. Not that she—before her children—ever disputed with my father or even refused outright what he demanded; but we knew she opposed him; and even if she hadn’t, her headaches did. She never had headaches before our life at Yonkers. But once they had started, they were used to incapacitate her at intervals, from carrying out any social task laid upon her by my father.

There were no outward signs of the conflict and disorder in my parents’ relationship but my father took to golf, and my mother took to headaches, because they no longer took to each other.

Wilmett and Mary’s being sent to boarding school at Garden City for the next few years hardly mended matters. There was an unquiet spirit where once there had been a sense of perfect harmony.

Under these circumstances any decision taken was likely to be a wrong one. No two people looking in different directions and pulling different ways can make a right decision, on what affects them both equally.

My father, after a year’s extremely successful work at Yonkers, from which his fame as a preacher spread widely, was offered the choice of three livings: Yonkers itself, with a better house to be built for our future home; West Chester, an old-fashioned, charming town not far from New York, with a good church life, and the sort of congregation among whom I believe my mother might have felt more at home; and Jamaica, Long Island, a rather ramshackle small town not far from Brooklyn into which it has now been wholly swallowed.

Either Yonkers or West Chester would have been a better choice for the whole family. Jamaica was low-lying and swampy; it had no great educational advantages, nor much culture or church life. Worse still, it was almost out of reach of New York and our busy American relations. To get to them we had to cross two ferries, travel in a railway train, and take a cable car, or an overhead railway, before we reached their home.

My father’s family, far from being an added factor in my mother’s discontent, was her chief support against it. They were all devoted to her and she to them. My grandmother was a phenomenal mother-in-law. She got on with all her daughters-in-law as if she had chosen them for her own. Jealous as my mother was by nature, I never heard her say a word against my grandmother. She often told me that she loved her far better than she loved her own mother and felt far more like a daughter to her. My grandfather must have been an even greater boon, for he was steadily and implacably British. The MacDonalds, though they had come from the Isles, were all born under the Stars and Stripes; and were American to the core. But my grandfather had not left England until he was four and twenty and I doubt if he had changed at all. He was quiet, benevolent and orderly; and he deeply loved and respected my mother.

My uncles, too, adored her; and she welcomed them all with open arms. They were, in fact, her only society.

Nevertheless, Jamaica was chosen; and it put them all beyond our reach.

We were to have a good rectory house in Clinton Avenue, a pleasant tree-shaded street that led eventually into what country there was. Within walking distance was a wood that contained dog-roses, squirrels, snakes, poison ivy, and a good skating pond. On its outskirts stood in a very ramshackle way what was called “The Italian House.” We were told never to go near it. The Italian families, a good many too many to be housed under one roof, we were vaguely told were “bad” and might act dangerously. Of course we always went as near the Italian House as we dared. I remember it had a turret and was bright raspberry pink; and that when we met any of the Italians they always smiled at us in a most disarming manner.

In those days most of the American houses were made of wood; and ours had a piazza almost all round it, with several steps leading up to it, and a yard at the back, containing grape vines, several cherry trees, and a chicken house, on the roof of which George regularly tore the seats of his trousers.

Unfortunately, our Clinton Avenue house was not immediately available; it had to be painted inside as well as altered in various ways to suit us; and for several months we had to stay in a small unequivocally bad hotel near the station. It was called Petit’s, and there was no other. Petit was a most unpleasant man; and Mrs. Petit was still more unpleasant. The only attractive feature of the hotel was a snow-white parrot, who loved Petit with passion, and hated Mrs. Petit with an articulate fury denied to the rest of us.

A good deal of drama was caused by this triangular situation. You never knew when it was Mrs. Petit sobbing because Mr. Petit had hit her, or the Parrot imitating her sobbing because he wanted to rouse her temper in order that Mr. Petit should hit her.

There was also a monkey in the yard; but we cared for the monkey less, as it said nothing, but smelt; and on one occasion scratched George’s cheek.

I think Petit’s Hotel must have been the drop too much for my mother. She was extremely poorly all the time we were there. George was very ill with malaria; I followed with less severe chills and fever, but a very sharp attack of tonsillitis. My mother nursed us both with skill and devotion; and without any help at all. The only silver lining to our cloud was that Uncle Frank came down from New York several times to see us; and ordered me to have nothing but ice cream to eat. Not the kind of prescription that a sick child ever forgets. His mere presence was enough to heal us; and it infinitely reassured and consoled my mother. She had a profound faith in him both as a man and a doctor, which we all shared.

Winter came on us, raw and cold and wild—as we had never known it. I tried to make ice cream from the snow on the roof, mixed with orange juice, for myself and George; but it was strangely cheerless.

I also started going to school at Miss King’s academy for young ladies, behind a high fence. Like all American girls’ schools that I ever came across, it was extremely good, with young, intelligent teachers and happily instructed children. There were two charming friend-teachers called Miss Dunn and Miss Burnett who were strangely kind to a little English girl still steeped in old traditions. They invited me to tea with them and gave me what they thought were English muffins; and they told me that Nelson, Drake, Gordon, and Livingstone really were heroes. I learned everything I could from them, particularly poetry. I have often hoped that their lives were half as happy as they made mine. I thought Miss Dunn very beautiful. She had classical features and dark hair, and I have never read Poe’s “Helen, thy beauty is to me” without seeing again her cameo-like profile.

Wilmett and Mary were breaking the American ice at quite a fashionable boarding school at Garden City, where Wilmett set an almost ferociously high standard of conduct, and fought rather harder than need have been against American history books.

Strangely enough I fail to remember my father as being ever visible at this time. Probably he was actively employed fitting up the new house. With a fresh charge, a sick wife, and two very ill children, this must have been a cheerless interlude.

However, his Vestry, the new Parish generally, even the awe-inspiring Miss King, who was the financial mainstay of Grace Church, fell in love with him at first sight and remained in love with him till he was dragged from their midst, five years later, like a tooth from its socket.

Miss King stands out in my mind with extreme clarity. She always wore black velvet on Sundays and spat to right and left of her, as she approached the church porch—two things which appeared to me at the time as incompatible. She was very stout, walked leaning heavily on a gold-headed cane, and said exactly what came into her mind, in a deep hoarse voice. She was immensely feared and respected all over Jamaica. I suppose my father, too, respected her, but he never feared her; he made her laugh. He even stopped her talking out loud in church, a habit which horrified my mother; but which the Almighty had hitherto seemed to take quite quietly. “How did you do it?” I asked my father, as we were returning from church together. “Well,” my father replied, “I simply said to her, ‘Let’s take it in turns. Will you begin next Sunday or shall I?’ ”

Every autumn on Thanksgiving Day we went to dine at Miss King’s. She lived in the biggest house in Jamaica surrounded by land. It was not what I was accustomed to consider either a park or a garden; it was just land. On one of these occasions George distinguished himself by eating five helpings of turkey as well as three helpings of Christmas pudding and several mince pies. Although he was only five years old at the time, his sense of dignity was such that my mother dared not infringe it by more than a whispered warning.

Overcome by the effects of this feast, he had to lie on the sofa afterwards with all his waistcoat buttons undone. “If I faint,” he was heard to mutter, “don’t revive me.”

It was from Petit’s Hotel that my father, in a desperate effort to remedy our situation, went to a New York registry office and found Maggie. The Clinton Avenue home now blossomed like a rose. Maggie was a raw Irish Catholic just out of the old country, and she was one of the best women in the world and soon became the family mainstay.

Maggie had a heart of gold, a temper that flamed up and went out like a match, a spirit that from morning till night shone with sunshine and laughter.

She had huge feet, and danced in the drawing-room whenever she heard music; and yet my mother loved her.

Maggie baked, washed, ironed, cleaned, and did all the housework of six people and herself without turning a hair; and while cooking three first-class meals a day.

She got good wages, though far less than she deserved; and her church rooked her with sickening regularity. Perhaps she received spiritual compensation. She was certainly one of the best practising Christians I ever knew, and made the lives of any children in her vicinity richer and more glamorous.

Her relationship with my father was one long duet of brilliant, confidential jokes. She stood slightly in awe of my mother but loyally carried out all her wishes. Wilmett, I think, may have been a cross to Maggie but they had a strong mutual respect for each other’s working powers; still I remember Maggie standing up to Wilmett on several occasions, and I fancy from the pleasure I received from listening in, that Wilmett must have got the worst of it.

Maggie was my chief friend and confidante. She was my guide and support in the new world of the Jamaica streets which were somehow tougher than those of Yonkers.

She never told on me when I evaded authority; on the contrary she helped me to evade it by covering up my tracks; and she did the same for George. She told the most reposeful generous lies in our defence, but I don’t think they did us any harm. They did not make us think less highly of the truth; they merely made us think more highly of Maggie.

Whenever we had any special cause for fear, or anything inimical happened to us, we went home through the kitchen, and the worst of it was lifted from our shoulders before we had to face family life in the sitting-room.

The green house with the white shutters was not to be an easy home. In fact, I think my father was less happy in it as time went on; but it was his home. He had made it for us; given it to us; and he tried hard to make the best of it.

If he had had my grandmother’s wise and sympathetic love closer at hand, or the steadying companionship of his stricter clergyman brother George, who was his intellectual equal as well as his spiritual confidant, I believe that my father’s great talents would have held him to the path he had chosen; and perhaps he would even have been able to persuade my mother to take a share in his work. As it was, although he never neglected his church or the duties of his parish, he spent more and more of his time on the golf links, and chose as his chief companions men with similar tastes to his own.

In the evenings he played cards for small stakes with his cronies, which my mother considered—from her severe Quaker standpoint—was nothing less than actual gambling. He drank whisky in a convivial way, and once in a blue moon to an unwise extent. My mother magnified these rare lapses until his whole conduct became for her a spectacle of moral ruin. This was in itself a tragedy of a wholly unnecessary kind; but it led to a far greater tragedy since my mother turned her vivid imagination into a means of setting Wilmett and myself against my father. She had forfeited the power to do this with Mary; and George was too young to be influenced consciously by her attitude of disapproval; but her power over Wilmett and myself was supreme. For years she sapped the love and the respect of the two children who had most natural affinity with my father. She undermined our confidence in him; and darkened his pleasure and pride in us as a father. Whenever a neurotic person wants an excuse for his own weakness he finds it essential to build up a case against his life-partner. This acts as an alibi for his own refusal to accept the duties of life. What Adler calls the “If—but” sets in, to ease their consciences. “If only your father——” or “I would be able to do this—but your mother.” How many children’s hearts have been undermined and discouraged by these fatal and misleading parental confidences! Looking back down the long crowded road of memory to the almost empty slate of my early childhood with its clear but limited vision, it is difficult to fix the cause of events, or to remember what connected one with the other. Yet I know that all my Jamaica life I was puzzled by the fact that outside my home my father was a glorious and adored being, praised and admired by everyone I met; while under his own roof he was an outlaw, and at times, even a criminal. He seemed, at home, to move for ever under a domestic cloud, with sudden thunder and lightning spurts of anger proceeding from him at intervals. Yet there were still many halcyon hours when sunshine reigned once more between our parents and love appeared a law that bound us all together. Even when the cloud darkened I think I knew that somewhere behind it lay hidden in my father’s heart something to which my whole being deeply responded.

If he were an outlaw had I not a secret feeling—that only a little farther down the road I might become—or perhaps already secretly was—an outlaw with him?

The America of my Jamaica life is so wholly a country of the past that I find it difficult to describe it without seeming to falsify the present. This is not a record of America as it is now—but America as it was then, when reputable citizens made a club of the drug store; and disreputable ones a club of the saloon. When women lived lives of almost complete separation from their men after the courting age; and their house was their kingdom or their prison. When children were spoiled, wild, and incredibly intelligent, and in the long run, if they did not die young, turned out very like their parents. The reality of the war between the North and the South was forgotten, but its romance lingered in a profound and universal tenderness for military titles. It was almost offensive not to call a man “Colonel” when he was over forty. Politics was a racket few scrupulous men cared to enter; business was every man’s immediate goal. If you were a “good” business man—you did not need to go to Heaven, you were already there.

Life was at once much more direct and primitive and far more friendly than in England. It was also miraculous. I shall never forget walking down the Jamaica main street one day on my way to school and seeing a house moving. My hair, like Macbeth’s when the woods of Dunsinane crept towards him, literally rose on my scalp. Here was a fully dressed house with curtains flapping in the windows, and all its furniture inside, trundling cheerfully on piles, dragged by a traction engine.

Wooden houses, I found, were often moved in this way, sometimes only from one street to another, sometimes farther afield to a distant town.

It seemed suddenly to open up all the possibilities of my new unfettered existence. In America, I envisaged you could always start somewhere else. You could shift the very roof over your head to another part of the sky. Nothing remained immovable, defeated, finished.

A girl at school was pointed out to me as the daughter of a millionaire—reduced to beggary the year previously, she had disappeared completely; but her father having once more climbed sufficiently far up the ladder of fortune, she had returned to us. A year later he was once more a millionaire; and my school-fellow was swept wholly beyond our ken. People behaved much better—or much worse—than we were at all accustomed to having people behave. Besides we knew more about them when they did behave better or worse. “You must never get into the newspapers,” my Uncle George informed us soon after our arrival. “If by any chance you are involved in a street accident, or questioned by a policeman, you must be prepared to give a false name and address.”

Side by side with acts of great heroism and generosity, acts of extreme meanness and selfishness stood out in a horrifying manner. One bitter winter night, a little wooden house burned down in the next street, in the course of a few wild flaming minutes. The family in their night clothes just escaped with their lives, but their next door neighbours, a prosperous, church-going Dutch family, refused point-blank to take them in. The result of this inhumanity was that one of the exposed children died from pneumonia.

The whole community was so much distressed and angered that they came to my father to ask him to let this cruel family know what was publicly thought of their behaviour. There was no legal redress, but they were not content to leave the matter unpenalized.

I remember very well the grim faces of the leading citizens who had come to see my father, and how they softened as he read out to them a letter that I think for its sheer, simple Christianity must have been worse for the family to read than any sharp indictment. They nodded solemnly to each other when my father had finished. “That’ll do, Parson,” one of them said. “We figured out something sterner maybe, but I guess that’ll do all right,” and off they went with their letter.

The next morning I met the little Dutch girl, one of my school-fellows whom this selfish family had produced. “Well,” she said irately, referring to the burnt-out family, “we hadn’t had them in our house before. Why should we in the middle of the night? They were the same people, weren’t they?” I remember thinking to myself then, what I have frequently thought since, that in any question of emotion argument is futile. If she could only feel anger and annoyance, when everyone else felt pity and a desire to help—what words were there to change her? Still she may have learned something because when she arrived at the school all her classmates turned their backs on her and refused to speak to her for the rest of the day.

Public opinion meant a great deal in those days in small American towns. Even now it has a very strong though probably more subtle influence; but when people read less and there were no films, no radio, no motorcars nor aeroplanes to bring in a wider opinion from the outside world, public opinion was a tremendous power. It was difficult to live against it, or to refuse the moral standards of your fellows. Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street was a true picture of America’s small town life. But I sometimes think a book could also be written to show that this public moral standard was not wholly harmful. It was harmful if it had been formed against the laws of nature, or prevented thought, if it held too rigidly to empty conventions or traditions, but a determined moral code had a certain steadying and helpful effect in the making of good citizens. “Bad men” were unpopular in small communities. They were despised—they were known. They could not get away with their lack of skill and industry as Hitler and Mussolini got away with theirs. The Nazi brood, in every country they have penetrated, have been able to move about like typhoid carriers, poisoning whole communities.

This could not have happened in the America of my childhood. People, when they heard immoral doctrines, not only knew them for immoral but they guessed why they were preached. “That’s only old So-and-so—don’t listen to the stuff he talks,” they would tell their children. “He just wants to get away with it!”

Bad lots were not tarred and feathered and run out of the town on rails in my time; but that method of public expulsion had happened within the memory of older people still living. No-one was lynched and there were no vigilante in the East, but there was a very definite and severe ostracism practised against people who broke moral laws. Public opinion acted both ways; if it was sometimes unduly severe, it was also practically merciful. No-one could have starved in our Jamaica days. Certainly no-one in my father’s parish. They would have come to him; and acting with him and for him were a circle of anxious earnest charitable people, who made it one of their main duties to help all their fellow citizens who were in need. They had quite a different way of doing it from our English way. If a woman was too ill to look after her children, someone volunteered to go right in and do her work for her; another neighbour would take her children into their homes and look after them; and if anyone lost his job, until he could get a new one, there was a fund run and often supplied by my father himself, for helping to bridge the gap. Everyone would try to get a workless man a job. It became the active concern of the community till he was in work again.

People’s ways were much more public and open-handed than our English ways. Popular children—or children like ourselves to whom people for their fathers’ sake wanted to be specially kind—were given “surprise parties.”

The mothers of their schoolmates would consult together to bring different kinds of food, and then turn up suddenly one evening with their offerings and all their children to have games, dances, and supper together, under the chosen children’s roof. My mother hated this unprepared-for festivity, and literally refused to have it thrust upon her. The social consequences to ourselves might have been dire, had not a truly kind and understanding neighbour declared our house was not yet ready for visitors and offered to give the surprise party for us under her roof instead. My mother reluctantly agreed to this compromise but she refused to adjust her taste to those of our schoolmates’ parents, and I remember the terrible scorn with which our dowdy party frocks were treated by other daintily dressed little American girls. Our frocks were made of what was known as Swiss muslin with rather clumsily embroidered white flowers round the edge of our skirts. Worse even than the frocks were our Roman sashes, which, if they were ever seen at all in the United States, were used solely as covers for mantelpieces. The hostility roused by those garments was truly formidable. My uncles fortunately intervened upon this problem of our wardrobes, and at last my mother yielded. We had henceforward skirts of the right length and materials of the right texture; but proper colours my mother resisted to the last. She bought me a green and black gingham at a time when little girls only wore pink or blue; and when one summer all children went in white, she insisted on my maintaining colours.

My mother never yielded about the surprise parties either, nor would she allow the Vestrymen’s wives to look through her drawers or her linen cupboard. No doubt they did want to see exactly what she had; but they equally wanted to help supply whatever she was without.

At last my mother succeeded in making herself perfectly plain. Her doorbell was always to be rung; and no-one need expect to enter her house without an invitation. She herself would go nowhere.

It must have said well for the extreme gentleness of her manners and the sweetness of her disposition that in spite of those exclusive habits, several of our neighbours were to become her friends. Of course they all adored my father; but even adoration of my father would not have withstood my mother’s determination to be accepted in her own way or not at all, if she had not seemed to some of them at least worth what she cost. My mother had her friends even in Jamaica; and where she was friendly, she was deeply prized.

The fact that George and I lived on the streets and were dependent for our society upon our own efforts was quite extraordinarily good for us. George, because of his unusual physical strength, natural courage, and complete absence of back chat, soon found his niche in what was known as the Clinton Avenue gang, and became its highly popular leader. I think he was a very nice if violent child, resourceful, swift, energetic and truthful. I hovered in the background with an eye always upon him ready to rush to his assistance if he needed me. I was always his spokesman—for talk was not his strong suit; but I do not remember his ever having got into any serious situation.

I had myself no great difficulty in making friends apart from one rather serious barrier, for which I myself was wholly responsible. I would not have a boy friend. I daresay this was a great mistake, but taking into consideration my English bringing-up and the fact that my mother had frightened me off the whole masculine sex, it was not altogether a surprising error. Our next door neighbour, Hattie Haviland, was a lovely child of my own age; and I soon became attached to her. Hattie returned my affection, but pointed out to me her brother Jack had suggested to her that it would be more suitable all round if I were to become his girl friend as well. Apparently this would regularize Hattie’s and my association. What, I asked, did having a boy friend exactly mean? Hattie told me—I had in the long run (it needn’t, Hattie explained, happen immediately) to kiss and be kissed by him. I considered the programme with care, but without confidence. I had the boy over. I see-sawed with him and thought him quite a nice little boy. He gave me a bunch of violets; but it stopped there. I refused his further offers, not because I preferred any other little boy, but in spite of my adoration for Hattie whom I permanently lost by my refusal, it seemed to me I couldn’t put up with what was expected of me.

I had one other even more severe set-back. Opposite our house, a little farther down the road, lived a little girl with golden curls whose name was Aggie. She had brilliant blue eyes, chewed gum incessantly, and had almost as light a foot on fences and up trees as my own. I really did adore Aggie. She had a neat gift for persiflage, and always knew her own mind with a precision and inflexibility entirely unknown to myself. I entreated Aggie to be my girl friend. “No,” she said bluntly, “I dasn’t have a girl friend that hasn’t got a boy friend! I like you all right but it would look funny. You go get a boy friend and then come back.”

I retired discouraged, and finally took my problem to Maggie. Maggie paused in her washing, ironing, or baking, and gazed seriously at me across the kitchen table. “Phyll-us,” she told me, “you’re too tony! That’s what it is—too dog-gone tony! Now you’ve got to learn to like what the other children like—or you’ll get left. You gotta forget the Ould Country and wade right in!”

I gazed solemnly back at Maggie. It seemed to me that I had already forgotten the Old Country. I loved the new country with ecstasy. Every new day glittered with a fresh miracle. What was keeping me back? What dead Hand held me fast? Why was I too “tony”? What more could I forget?

Even Maggie could not answer these questions; for what I could not forget was in my blood. I remained what I was—however happily transplanted—a little English girl.

It was difficult getting about Jamaica in the winter, and quite impossible in the surrounding country. Even the streets of New York in those days were roughly paved; and the sidewalks uneven; but here in Long Island the roads were very nearly impassable unless deep snow fell and became hard enough to sleigh over or toboggan down.

George and I were each given toboggans by the uncles, and flinging ourselves face downwards on these celestial wooden tongues, we whirled down hills, with the other children, tingling with ecstasy and whipped with ice cold air.

We slid on any ice we saw rather than skated, for which I think we were rather mistakenly thought too young; but we were allowed roller skates, and made the most of these rather anti-social but pleasantly hair-raising joys.

Whether we were really physically stronger than the American children of our own age, or merely being strangers, had to use our last ounce of effort in order to appear so, I am not sure, but we were considered rather outstanding in our physical performances. We climbed higher, jumped farther, ran faster than any of the children round about our own age; and we were a good deal respected in consequence. I imagine we might have had street battles and nationalistic tussles had we been less capable of giving a good account of ourselves.

Also, of course, at a crisis we stuck together like glue. Any child who lifted a hand against George would have had to settle with a tigress; and George would have hurled himself like a catapult into the fray, against any odds, on my behalf. However, I think it says rather well for the standard of moral life in both Yonkers and Jamaica that the nursery-sheltered little English children lived and played for years on their streets and never once came in contact with a serious reverse—mental, moral, or physical.

In fact, this open life, playing with any child we saw, talking with any grown-up on equal terms, who cared to talk to us, was a most humane and liberal education.

Such a pleasantly adventurous natural life knocks all isolating day-dreams out of a child and sets it at once in the main stream of existence so that it can meet life on its own terms, without fear or favour. Whatever mistakes George and I made in our future lives, we always had one universal and incalculable piece of education in our favour, we knew how to get on with other people—almost any other person.

One thing we all enjoyed greatly in our new home was the way in which my father was paid for his services. It was as if the earth itself paid him. Funerals, weddings, baptisms, whatever particular event called for some special effort on his part, were promptly repaid by mysterious visits, generally under cover of darkness, with packages shyly left in the hall. These sometimes turned out to be barrels of cider, sacks of potatoes, a chicken—or even once a turkey—fruits or vegetables, from the outlying farms.

These distant farmsteads were fascinating to visit in the winter. A sleigh would be driven into town to fetch and return my father. Once or twice I was allowed to go with him. A hot water bottle was packed under the straw at our feet, fur robes were wrapped all round me; and off we set to the merry music of sleigh bells behind fast trotting horses. We whirled through air like iced wine, into the empty white country. We seemed to be speeding through infinity—the houseless naked land stretched so far all round us, without a sign of human occupation. Here and there we passed a dark and silent wood. Wolves, I naturally felt, might turn up at any moment now; but the thought of this only added an edge to the thrilling feeling of romance. They never did turn up. Only at the end of the drive, a long white homely farm with great barns round it, awaited us. A lovely warm room to thaw us out and a grand meal of fried, or better still, broiled chicken, hot breads, mince pies, and general rapture. Big, shy, silent country people greeted us, who vaguely but pleasantly reminded me of Over Stowey; but they soon thawed out under my father’s jovial manner, as swiftly as our frozen bodies thawed out in the furnace heated rooms.

These were my father’s real friends. They were very hard worked and perhaps not nearly so prosperous as they seemed to a child. They seldom came into town; and I don’t remember ever seeing them in my home; but I believe they came sometimes to see my father in his study which had a side door of its own, on which the knocker was seldom still. Unheralded and sudden weddings were a never-ceasing amusement to all of us. At any hour of the day or night, a shy tongue-tied young couple might turn up, with or without relations or witnesses, and demand the marriage tie. The only formalities necessary, unless they were under eighteen, was the register brought from the church and my father’s surplice. The bridegroom was always sent for them and I believe my father kept them there on purpose to give him time to talk to the bride and make sure of her full consent. Often my mother and Maggie were called upon to act as witnesses; and then, in almost the twinkling of an eye, the boy and girl had become man and wife.

One of these surprise marriages is particularly vivid to me, for my father insisted on sending “George,” the bridegroom, away for a couple of hours, while he and my mother separately interviewed “Lavinia,” the bride. She was in tears when she arrived, and although she clung to George she admitted that she was acting against her parents’ wishes. She looked very young, and my father wanted to make quite sure that she really knew what she was doing.

Lavinia made great friends with us all. She was very pretty when she had stopped crying, and quite devoted to George. When George came back, my father had half an hour’s talk with him alone, in his study; and then the marriage took place in the front sitting-room, and I was allowed to be present.

After the wedding was over, we all had supper together before they went off into the night. Lavinia kissed us all good-bye and wrote to us several times afterwards.

It was in these ways, and on these occasions, that I sometimes think my father was the best clergyman I have ever known. He took every human being exactly as he found him; and always treated them all as if they were his brothers. It used sometimes to disconcert the more respectable members of his congregation, when they saw him exchanging jokes and sitting on the steps of our piazza with a very dirty ragged old Irishwoman, who used to come and see him sometimes on her tramping rounds. She was never any less dirty, rowdy or ragged for these occasional meetings, nor did my father ever speak to her about her dirtiness or her bad language; they just sat on our stoop together and enjoyed each other’s jokes.

Fifty years ago, summers in America were taken very seriously indeed. Schools closed the first week in June and did not reopen till the end of September. Life unbent in every direction all round. Those who could afford sea or mountains went to them. Men deposited their wives in summer hotels or wooden cottages, and came and went for long weekends, with a more prolonged break in August.

Children played; adolescents got engaged and disengaged; the middle-aged gossiped; the old—when there were any old—looked on. They could gossip, too, but not with so much entertainment, for their contemporaries, at any rate, did harm with less vim, and usually on a smaller scale. Summer was for all ages a gala period of enchantment and security, except for the occasional natural excitement of a tornado or a forest fire.

We seemed to have left Jamaica in another world when we reached Quogue, Long Island. I think my father fondly thought it would make up for all that my mother had suffered and completely reconcile her to American life.

I have never been back to Quogue since those three ecstatic summers that seemed at the time to enclose Eternal Bliss, but I have been told that the empty, rather featureless Long Island beaches facing the Atlantic, have now become highly fashionable and thickly populated summer resorts. But in my childhood Quogue, Good Grounds, Southampton and Easthampton were very sparsely inhabited. Without motor cars they were at insuperable distances from each other, dumped down in flat, pine-wooded land, with low dunes sloping onto golden beaches. Each small slumbrous village was a mere lonely outpost of civilization, containing nothing beyond one drug store which mercifully sold as well as its pills and potions, stamps, stationery, crab-nets, tinned goods, hairpins, bathing apparel, and a few paper-backed novels. A tennis club, possibly a church, a few wooden hostels, and a handful of summer cottages comprised what life there was. The Atlantic took up all the rest of the room and most of our time, roaring or murmuring as the fancy took it. We lived on it, or in it, all day long, and were sung to sleep by it at night.

Hardly anything ever happened from month’s end to month’s end. It was simply hotter or less hot. Once we had a thunder storm on a gigantic scale when it really seemed as if the end of the world had come. George and I retired under the sofa in the drawing-room and everyone was prepared to rush out of the house at a moment’s notice when it was struck by the lightning, which danced a majestic saraband on the front patch of grass we proudly called “the lawn.” The heavens slid open and banged to, with terrific reverberations. I felt quite sure that the final trumpet was at Gabriel’s lips, and the Dead about to rise. I told George reassuringly that our guardian angels would be sure to come and fetch us, but there was a touch of cold scepticism at the bottom of my own heart. “Now,” I thought to myself, “or—never!” The rain came in a solid sheet instead, and the only remaining danger was that we might now be drowned instead of burned.

The tornado was a more serious and personally exciting adventure. I had always cultivated the idea of flight, and now I found myself without any effort of my own—except to go on breathing during transit—lifted bodily over a high fence, and deposited a little roughly in the opposite direction from that which I had intended—nor could I change my direction or get my breath, until I was scooped up bodily by Uncle Frank who had risked his life to go out and find me; and now struggled stubbornly to get us both inside a door which fought against our entry like a wild beast. I could not hear what Uncle Frank screamed to me by way of warning or precaution though I was in his arms, but I clung firmly to some portion of his person, “bomb-happy,” and wishing we could, now we had got together again, continue indefinitely our flight through the air. Instead of which the door was at last loosened from within and we found ourselves completely winded, and hurled face downwards on the kitchen floor.

The forest fire took place, I think, the following summer, in the middle of the night. It may have begun rather earlier as I believe Father and the uncles had gone out to fight it some time before, but the first we knew about it was Wilmett’s serious face and her determined voice telling us to get up at once and put our clothes on. Neither of us was frightened, though pleasantly excited, since Wilmett appeared as usual in complete command of the situation. There is nothing so infectious as courage, and Wilmett was made of it. She had us dressed and downstairs in no time, and then prepared food and drink for us and against the uncles’ return.

Mother was also calm and smiling but insisted on our sitting close to her on the piazza out of doors ready for instant departure in the direction of the sea. It was not completely dark, for there was a lurid red light in the distance, and a queer acrid taste in the air. But what could have been more pleasurable than to go down to the sea in the middle of the night with the best company in the world? It had always seemed both to George and myself that the night was a pure waste of time, and now at last it was going to be put to some practical use! I almost saw the waves coming in out of the darkness with whispering white edges. But it was not to be; the little wooden houses were saved. The wind changed, Father and the uncles returned covered with black smuts but triumphant, and drank all the beer in the house. We, having seen nothing and gone nowhere, were remorselessly dragged back to bed by Wilmett who had by now become unaccountably cross.

Grandpa and Grandma do not seem to have taken any active part in these threatened adventures so I think they could not have been welded into this particular part of our summer. They came and went a good deal on account of religious conferences and special engagements. We subsequently built a much more spacious cottage with Uncle Frank for the ensuing summers, and this they definitely made their headquarters; and I think they had a very pacifying effect upon both ourselves and the uncles.

Grandma, in spite of her immense personality, was a tower of harmony and strength in a household. No-one would have thought lightly of defying her—not even Wilmett—but the subject, somehow, between Grandma and Wilmett never came up. Perhaps this was due to my grandmother’s massive common sense, but perhaps even more to her power of loving and, consequently, of winning love, in others. She was so strong that I cannot think why we none of us found her tyrannical, but we never did. She sat upstairs in her bedroom a good deal, writing letters or articles and sewing with exquisite skill anything we had torn, or that needed creating in the way of clothes; and very often Wilmett sat and sewed with her. Grandma seemed to belong more to Wilmett—who proudly called her “my girl grandmother”—than she did to the rest of us. But I remember noticing even then that as long as Grandma was in the house Father and Wilmett never had those painful, gladiatorial scenes.

Mother, too, seemed less ill, and laughed more. I never remember hearing my grandmother criticize anything or anyone while she lived with us. She praised inordinately, and when she had any fault to find—which was only when the fault was already found and on the tapis, as it were, of family life—it was always my grandmother who found a less bitter way of taking it—and of lessening the difference between the culprit and the ninety and nine just persons. My grandfather, I imagine, was stricter than my grandmother but he was very quiet and gentle, and as he was never strict to me, I seem only to remember him as an undiluted blessing of the kind which should always be attached to family life if possible. He was, however, more detached from his own family than they were from each other, and though he never objected to their wild and exuberant ways, he never took part in them, whereas my grandmother was whirled along by her four sons, in and out of all their jokes, love affairs, rows, failures or successes—as if she were—as indeed I imagine she always was in spirit—their contemporary. Her interest indeed was part of their fun.

The beach was a mile and a half away from us, and large crowded stage coaches drawn by kindly jogging horses, with old coloured drivers—delightful and kindly men—ran between our wooden houses and the sea. For those who could afford to pay a dime a journey, “Uncle Zebedee” or Uncle Jeremiah became treasured portions of our lives. Very often, though, we were without the dime that would have entitled us to luxury, but sometimes even then Uncle Zebedee would slow down his steeds, when he saw us wistfully trudging through the heavy sand, and allow me to sit on the steps holding on by one hand, and securely pinioning George to my side with the other. How passionately grateful I used to feel, to be spared that long heavy walk under the hot noon sun with a cross, tired little boy of four, having to be coaxed and persuaded home in time to meet the fierce eyes and voice of Wilmett—full of reproaches at my not having brought him back by the stroke of one!

The beach itself was unutterable bliss. There were rows of arbours covered with baked brown leaves to keep the sun off us; and stretches of wooden bathing huts where everyone had his own little house, for a small weekly sum, and no-one but one of your own family could take your hut. There was a shower at the end of each street where fresh water took the stickiness out of your bathing suit, which you then passed on to a red-bearded, red-nosed man called “Hiram” who managed to return it to you, dry and comfortable, within a miraculously short space of time with the help of an extremely powerful sun. A good man, I thought him, until I was told he drank and had once spoken offensively to an uncle. From thenceforth he was my enemy; but I still owed him my dry bathing suits.

I always thought it was extremely foolish of my family to refuse to allow me to learn to swim. I had no fear whatever of the Atlantic—this, in fact, was their ground for not allowing me to learn—but I was in far more danger without the art of swimming than with it, for as I thought nothing of the waves, I very often got caught off my feet by them, and carried out of my depth, and more than once was nearly drowned in consequence.

On one of these occasions I was saved by a man I intensely disliked, just as I was going down for the third time. I was very badly frightened. No-one was near me—I had dog-stepped myself tired, and could no longer keep afloat, also I had forgotten how to shut my mouth, so that my chest felt as if it would burst. I have always thought since that those who speak of drowning as a pleasant form of death know nothing whatever about it. However, Dr. Maclean’s watchful attention fell upon me in time; and just as I had abandoned all hope, I saw his cold, codfish eyes rapidly approaching me, on the back of what I thought was my last wave. I had just sense enough left not to clutch him. He got me back to the beach and to my passionate indignation hung me upside down, and shook what appeared to be gallons of water out of me. I never forgave him this indignity, though I felt no resentment whatever at the Atlantic Ocean, and as soon as my breath had returned in a normal way into my body, went out again with one of the uncles. They took me every morning in turn, beyond the breaking of the waves, into a vast and happy space, where, kicking along beside them, with one hand on a strong shoulder, I had all the joy of having conquered the secrets of the sea; and none of the responsibility for my own security, which would have been so good for me.

Bathing in salt water (when young, preferably rough) has always seemed to me one of the most perfect physical sensations known to man; but of course it should consist of understanding and making use of the laws of the sea. Not to be able to dive, swim and float without consciousness of effort, is simply a deplorable waste of time and opportunity.

Part of every child’s education should, and probably now to a great extent does, consist of knowing how to do things which enlarge the physical scope. The more a child can do with his body, the less trouble it will be for him throughout his life. Not to use every physical power we possess in a sound and scientific way is to be like a person who owns a Stradivarius violin—and has never learned to play upon it. No-one can know the sea—or any other element—who cannot shift for himself on it.

My memory of the beach at Quogue is that the weather was always fine; the sea inexhaustibly changeable; and the other people on it—including the other children—inexplicably pleasant and kind. Bathing made us very hungry and thirsty; and generally, just as these pangs became formidable, an uncle turned up who became good for a bottle of Sarsaparilla or root beer; with luck, accompanied by candy or a doughnut. These temperate but luscious liquids slid down our grateful throats as no other drinks have ever so satisfactorily slid. I cannot think whatever the uncles spent upon us—and it must by and large have amounted to a good deal—was wasted. George invariably preferred candy, though he took both when they were both provided; but I had—until his unfortunate falling out with one of the uncles—a deep sympathy for Hiram’s red nose. I used to study my own rather anxiously on getting up. Was he not almost unduly exposed, since it was he who sold Sarsaparilla and orange juice, to such fearful temptations? However, I had reason subsequently to understand that it was not Sarsaparilla or orange juice that he drank.

Usually our day began at the Tennis Club. Father, Wilmett, and all the uncles were members, so that we had a right of entry into this sacrosanct abode, though there again we were discouraged from games of skill by never being allowed upon the tennis courts. However, as we arrived very early in the morning when the croquet lawns were empty, we were allowed to play upon them until the grown-ups came. Mary and I became highly proficient at this game and were lifted to the realms of bliss by being taken on as partners by the uncles. It was not modern croquet and I daresay we were hardly as good as I thought we were at the time; however, our interest was passionate, our tempers were good, and our eyes were keen so that we could, and did, put in a couple of hours a day at croquet very comfortably indeed.

We were not allowed to bathe before eleven o’clock; and since no-one besides ourselves cared to play croquet in the heat of the afternoon, we had the courts to ourselves both early and late. Resting for a brief space after lunch was obligatory; but George and I usually saw that the space was brief; and slipping out unobserved by our more somnolent elders, we launched ourselves upon the welcoming universe, till darkness drove us home. We bathed again; explored distant beaches; climbed trees; and went crab-fishing in a nearby creek. We found a dangerous and solitary lake that suddenly connected up with distant tides, turning the land under our feet to water.

We had been told not to go into the pine woods that extended for miles between us and Good Grounds, because of bad coloured men; but we crept in and out of their nearer reaches; and never met a bad coloured man before—or since.

There was always, however, a hot, hushed, forbidden feeling about the pine woods. When there was no wind anywhere else, the tops of the pines imprisoned wind enough to whisper. No birds sang. Mosquitoes bit worse there than elsewhere, and this was saying a good deal. It seemed a suitable place, too, for a crime; and Mary and I decided to use the woods for that purpose. We were both extremely fond of sugared almonds; and George was even more fond of them than we were. By chance we had inherited a quarter; and we decided to expend the whole of this vast sum upon sugared almonds, escape with them into the woods, and eat them by ourselves.

We both knew it was a wicked thing to do; in fact, it was three wicked things rolled into one. It was wicked to expend a whole quarter on candy; a dime was reasonable, and a nickel natural; but a quarter—never! It was wicked to go really deep into the woods. It was worse than wicked, it was heartless—to cheat George.

Nevertheless, with the settled ingenuity of hardened criminals we executed successfully all three crimes. We bought the candy; made our escape from George; and reached the woods in safety, unobserved by man, black or white. We walked deeper and deeper into the woods, under the tall pine trees, over the hot sweet-scented pine needles. The woods became more and more silent, solitary and dim. Our speech dwindled into silence. We crept at last onto a convenient log, and gazing at each other with a fearful air, ate solemnly sweet by sweet, through the whole packet. We were not sick; we were never found out. Nothing indeed inimical, except for this uneasy, slinking sense of sin, happened to us. Yet it was curious how little, if at all, we enjoyed those almonds! Perhaps if all punishment or restraint were removed—except the self-restraint which is caused by Public Opinion when reasonably based upon a common standard—there would be no continuous wrong doing. Shakespeare may have meant this, when he said that conscience makes cowards of us all. Next time we had money with which to buy candy, we gave George rather more than his share.

During those long and splendid Quogue summers, we had no formal education but we were exposed to highly intelligent and friendly grown-up people.

My Uncle George was not only very nearly a saint, he was also a poet and an inveterate scholar-reader. He and my father were brilliant conversationalists; and my grandmother was the most dramatic and entertaining talker to whom I have ever listened. We hung on her lips whenever she opened them.

Nobody ever talked down to us—or prevented us from listening to the spate of grown-up talk that rolled through the cottage. Nothing was ever talked about that could have done us any harm though I remember being once brought up rather short when, overhearing a conversation between my mother and Uncle George, I asked why poor Oscar Wilde, whom I knew to be a poet and a famous writer, should be sent to prison? Uncle George merely groaned; and my mother answered rather vaguely that he was unfortunately a bad man, who had done a great deal of harm to other people. I had as a matter of fact read a book of his that I found in one of the uncles’ rooms called Dorian Grey. It had not pleased me; yet I thought it hardly a sufficient ground for imprisonment. It flashed into my mind that Uncle George would not have groaned, nor my mother been vague, if that dire bogey I had so successfully buried, had not cropped up again. So I asked no more questions about Oscar Wilde though I continued to be haunted by the thought of that brilliant being blotted out behind the darkness of prison walls.

I had read Little Dorrit so I knew all about prisons. Besides, among my acquaintance was a very nice man, the son of an English church dignitary, who had once unfortunately forged a cheque and been to prison for two years in consequence. My father had invited him to dinner and asked me to be specially nice to him, but to avoid the subject of prisons. I did not mention prisons; but greatly to his surprise, I earnestly pressed upon him all the sugar there was on the table; and I wished that I could then do something of the same kind for Oscar Wilde.

Uncle George suggested—perhaps by way of changing the conversation—that if I cared to learn without a single slip the whole poem by Tennyson called “The Lady of Shalott” he would give me in return a five-pound box of Huyler’s candy. This was the best candy in the world; and five pounds of it seemed like being offered the whole of the Army and Navy Stores. The imagination boggled at ever coming to an end of five pounds of candy.

I spent the next three days learning “The Lady of Shalott.” I learned it swinging on the top of trees; and in the troughs of waves I sang it; on the banks of the creek; and lying on golden sand dunes, I murmured it to the unlistening waves. I learned it inside out and upside down. I was the Lady of Shalott. The mirror was my own; the curse; the willows; and the distant towers. Sir Lancelot looked like Uncle Frank; I borrowed—in my mind’s eye—a white dress of Wilmett’s to float singing into Camelot. I strolled to and fro within the “four grey walls and four grey towers,” I overlooked “a space of flowers,” and then I found a boat and started off upon my last voyage. I sang until I died; and at length floated “silent into Camelot.”

I have learned many poems before and since; in fact, from that moment learning poetry became for many years half the business of my life; but I have never lived any poem visually and orally as deeply as I lived “The Lady of Shalott.”

Towards sunset of the third day I stood at Uncle George’s knee and recited the poem from end to end and word perfect. I can see him now, sitting gravely by the open window, the book on his crossed knees, though he, too, knew every word of it by heart, glancing up at me from time to time, with eyes that, like my own, saw only the vision of the Lady of Shalott. He knew I did not only say the poem to him, we lived it together.

I don’t remember if anyone else was in the room; nor what comment he made upon it—if any; but I had the feeling that he was satisfied.

Sometimes Uncle George was very stern; and he was always very dignified. He was a spartan, undemonstrative man without the gaiety of his brothers; but I was never afraid of him again; nor did I ever afterwards mind, when he corrected me for one of my many failings.

Children live two lives, a primary life dependent upon their senses, and only truly accessible to their contemporaries; and a second exploratory life upon the fringe of their elders’ personalities. This interchange of lives is often confusing to the children themselves and equally confusing to their elders.

The primary life of our Quogue summers was healthy; but it was empty for George and myself since we were taught nothing and left, on the whole, to shift for ourselves.

This bound me more, I think, than I should otherwise have been bound, to the secondary world of our grown-ups. My three uncles were all under thirty years of age and one or other of them was always more or less involved in a romance.

Of the private events of my Uncle George’s life I knew nothing at the time. He was extremely reserved and confided in no-one. He looked, however, very sad; he was often a little stern, but his conversation was well worth the entire attention of any listening child. He had more wit than his three brothers though almost no lightness of heart, and could quote from memory at any moment with exquisite appositeness, pages from major or minor poets.

Harry, the youngest, and my brother George’s favourite on account of his athletic prowess, was barely twenty-one. He and my father were the most rowdy of the four brothers, and I privately thought Harry a trifle brutal and beneath the dignity of an uncle. I should have been astonished had anyone told me he was destined to become my life-long, perhaps my best, friend. At this early season of his life his love affairs were frequent, brisk and volatile, and the talk of the entire neighbourhood. We were no sooner roused to anxious interest over one young and lovely girl playing on the fringe of the ocean, in what was then considered the height of daring in a girl’s bathing costume—and would now over-clothe a grandmother—when she would be rudely snatched from our hovering imagination, to be replaced by another. My Uncle George suggested that we should type a letter of congratulation equally suitable for all the engagements of the younger uncles with the name left blank—to be filled in or erased as the objects changed.

I noticed that my grandmother, though always noncommittally enthusiastic to each of Harry’s flames in turn, never discussed them, or in their absence even mentioned them, except in swift support if my mother or father—or more frequently my Uncle George—spoke of the engaging young woman with disapproval. She took, however, the romances of her elder sons a good deal more seriously. She wanted Uncle George to be happy and she saw that he wasn’t; though I doubt if even she knew why he wasn’t.

She understood the difficulties that beset Uncle Frank, who was almost too attractive to women to remain long unattached, and might at any moment find a choice thrust upon him rather than be left free to choose himself. Interested as I was in all three of my uncles, I identified myself with Uncle Frank. If he got what he wanted I felt that my heart would be satisfied; and if he failed I knew that I should fail with him; and somehow, in spite—perhaps because—of his fascination for women—Uncle Frank’s romances did seem doomed to perpetual failure.

There was his first and in a sense perhaps his only love—Katherine, who was engaged to him for over a year, and then threw him over for a richer man.

There was a very beautiful married woman, a Catholic dévotée who would never accept divorce or desert her children, but who found it difficult not to hover on the brink of doing both for Uncle Frank’s sake. There were two handsome and threatening young widow patients and a brilliant girl who was too worldly to marry Uncle Frank, and too fond of him not to try to prevent his marrying anyone else.

This girl, Isabel, used to meet him at five o’clock on a summer morning at a boathouse by a distant lake. I knew all about it and watched out, in order to tell him if the coast was clear for his safe return. I disliked both widows but I did not dislike the brilliant and naughty Isabel. Uncle Frank was greatly attracted by her and so was I, but I was a little afraid of her, and I rather fancy that Uncle Frank was also a little afraid of Isabel.

Then there was Margaret.

All of us liked Margaret. She was the only child of pleasant elderly Bostonians who possessed a summer cottage not far from our own. There was nothing whatever against her. Margaret was not pretty but she was nice-looking, graceful and intelligent. Grandmother used to call her “my little white rose.” Perhaps that was the trouble—she was too like a white rose—for I fear Margaret was a trifle colourless, and she was definitely too fond. She couldn’t help showing, even to a child of nine, that she was hopelessly head over heels in love with Uncle Frank.

Once when she was invited to dine with us on a Sunday, and Uncle Frank had made ice cream in a freezer which he had previously cleaned out with paraffin, she insisted on eating the whole of her portion and declaring it delicious. Even I had only managed to gulp down two teaspoonfuls, and no-one else, including Uncle Frank himself, had managed more than one.

One day while dropping further than I had intended from a tree I rather badly sprained an ankle. I was crawling home twisted with pain, when Uncle Frank caught sight of me, picked me up, carried me home and ministered to my needs. He established me in the living-room close to an open window overlooking the piazza, telling me not to move till he came to take me to bed.

I suppose that he then forgot all about me, for after a time he proceeded to have a highly confidential talk with my father on the piazza, a few feet from my head.

It was about Margaret. He had found her asleep, as he thought, lying in a hammock and, bending over her, half in fun and half in earnest, had kissed her. Margaret woke up, threw her arms round his neck and confessed her love. Was he now obliged to marry her? He was fond of her, but he did not want to marry her; and he was very definitely not in love with Margaret. However, he realized that she was a serious, unflirtatious girl, whole-heartedly in love with him. If my father thought it was his duty to marry Margaret, he would go through with it.

Rather to my astonishment, my father said he did think Uncle Frank should marry her. I thought it unlike my father to take so conventional a view of a kiss, and I am sure that even in that sentimental and artificial period in which the world then functioned, my father’s rendering of this obligation would have been considered a trifle over-strict. However, he was always chivalrous and tender-hearted about women, and I expect that he could not bear to have Margaret’s feelings hurt, and believed that Uncle Frank, if he did not care for her then, might very well come to care for her once they were engaged.

I lay dumb and stricken with horror. For one thing I felt as if I had committed a mortal sin by overhearing such a conversation at all; and for another I was quite sure that my father’s solution of the problem would not work.

Some instinct told me that it was far more cruel to live a lie than to be knocked down by any truth.

It was long past my bedtime before Uncle Frank remembered me. In fact, it seemed to me that I spent eternity turning over in my mind whether I dared confess my depravity—or should remain forever guilty and unconfessed—and wondering what, in any case, would become of Uncle Frank and Margaret. In a very odd way I found my sympathies equally identified with each of them. The humiliation of a woman scorned—and the exasperation of a man caught in a snare against his will—pulled me first one way, and then the other. It was not a simple problem nor could I sympathize whole-heartedly with either of them without, as it were, slightly condemning the other. Yet I thought both wholly admirable and wholly innocent. I loved Uncle Frank far more—yet I too was a woman so that perhaps in the end I was sorriest for Margaret.

At last Uncle Frank came to carry me to bed, and I confessed with tears the agony of my eavesdropping. Uncle Frank let me off very lightly. He looked grave, but said I was not to mind. I was only to keep what I had heard a secret from everybody, and to be particularly nice always to Margaret.

This was not as easy as it sounded. The secret I kept well long after both of them were dead; but it was difficult to talk naturally or freely to Margaret—at any rate as she wished me to talk to her. Because she wished to talk to me almost exclusively about Uncle Frank. She asked me to tell her what Uncle Frank thought of her and what he said about her to me—and to the rest of the family. And to all her questions I could only shake my head, and go on shaking my head like a Chinese mandarin. It relieved, rather than surprised me, when Wilmett told me in triumph that Margaret had said she could not understand why the uncles thought me so intelligent. A dear little girl—yes—a good little girl—yes—but surely, surely, poor Margaret had exclaimed, a phenomenally stupid little girl!

Perhaps the engagement might have come off after all, and even resulted in a happy marriage, had it not been for the dread word “hysterical” applied to Margaret by Uncle Frank’s friend and much older partner—that disagreeable, stony-hearted man with the eyes of a codfish, who had once saved me from drowning, Dr. Maclean. The dread word “hysterical” was at this period very lightly applied to all women who had anything the matter with them, to which a doctor could not assign a visible cause. It was a term only applicable to women and generally to young women. I have never thought Margaret was hysterical, though I think she may have been anaemic and was certainly unhappy, because she did not feel very sure of herself or her lover. However, that was what Dr. Maclean told my Uncle Frank that she was; and it was not an accusation that Uncle Frank was able to take at all lightly.

Uncle Frank was devoted to my mother and had always believed that he could in time cure her of all her ailments; and he was, through those long summers at Quogue, under the same roof, slowly beginning to believe that not only could he not restore her health—but that since she was not discoverably ill—she could never be made discoverably well. It was natural that he should wish to escape finding himself in the same dilemma as my father, the constantly agitated husband of an invalid wife. None of this came through to me as a child except perhaps what was the secret source of the whole failure. I felt perfectly conscious of Wilmett’s antagonism to Uncle Frank—and that both of them—devoted as they were to my mother—wanted completely different things for her. I believe that Uncle Frank, so wise and kind—so, in a sense, modern—might have helped my mother towards an improved state of health had it not been for the tug-of-war that took place between him and Wilmett.

Wilmett, robbed of her English life, and feeling her prestige, as the eldest child in a household she understood, taken from her in America, reacted very badly to our American life. She was too old to play with other children, too young to become a “young lady.” At sixteen she was neither out of school, nor in any available social swim. She felt isolated, at a loose end, and an enemy, in hostile land. My mother’s ill health was her only excuse for her overwhelming urge for power. She really needed my mother’s illnesses—they were her raison d’être—and here was Uncle Frank taking—or trying to take—them away from her. Worse than this, I was his favourite niece and I was Wilmett’s bête noire. Moreover, during her absence in England, my mother had come to lean on Uncle Frank as she used to lean on Wilmett.

I do not now see what Wilmett could do, other than what she proceeded to do—undermine Uncle Frank’s influence over my mother by hook and by crook. Had they co-operated, they might between them have saved my mother; but, as they were divided against each other, their antagonism merely helped to destroy her.

Quogue that had been chosen by my father as a paradise in which my mother was to regain her lost belief in the American scene, became the battlefield, in which she was driven out of it for ever.

The end was not yet in sight. Only as the long, lovely summer months passed over us, one child at least was conscious of the prolonged and never acknowledged undercurrent of tragedy.

My father’s whole future was at stake, but I am sure that he never realized what were the forces in league against him. He had the warmest love and admiration both for his brother and his eldest child and it would have been incredible to him that their secret antagonism should be used against his life work. Fortunately or unfortunately he belonged to a world which was psychologically ignorant of what two loved beings can do against each other—at the expense of a third. My mother was not perhaps wholly a victim to their opposing affections. She was devoted to them both equally and she wished to retain them both. She had learned to rely on Uncle Frank as a physician as well as a friend and brother—she relied on Wilmett as her strongest and least critical ally. But there was one ally upon which my mother relied more even than upon either of them—and that was the use she made of her own ill health. She could not sacrifice that for anyone’s sake—and she could be made to resent bitterly anyone who asked her to try.

In the first round of this invisible tug-of-war, the honours were even. My mother owed her life to both protagonists equally. Almost on her first arrival at Quogue she had a severe five-months’ miscarriage and only the fact that Uncle Frank was in the house at the time, coupled with the unflagging courage and support of Wilmett, saved her. For the time being, Wilmett did, and wanted to do, what Uncle Frank told her—they worked with one aim, and their triumph was a mutual success.

It was one of the few occasions when I realized, with a passion of admiration and gratitude, the value of Wilmett’s courage; for a brief moment even, she and I saw eye to eye, and felt heart to heart.

She stood on the kitchen steps in the early summer morning, white-faced and determined to share with me the test of mother’s emergency.

“Phyllis,” she said, “take George away now and keep him away till the evening. Mother is terribly ill—we shan’t know till tonight if she can live or not. The house must be kept quiet. Will you do this—will you keep him away?”

She did not even say I had got to take George away. She spoke to me as man to man, and knowing what depended on it—I instantly agreed. I took the money Wilmett thrust into my hand to buy food for George and myself; swallowing a hideous lump in my throat, I retrieved him from the wood pile, and wooed him off with me into the cold and empty world.

It was a dreadful day before the season had set in, or the summer people had arrived. There was a strong cold wind, blowing sand and grit into our faces, alternating with squalls of rain off the ocean.

We walked for miles along the empty sand dunes, where nothing stirred but long dry grasses and an occasional sandpiper. I thought it wisest to take George to an unknown place, where he would—however rebellious—be lost beyond his own ability to return if I failed to control him. He was in a particularly difficult mood because, although he knew nothing about mother’s illness, he was probably conscious that there was something to fear; consequently, he felt belligerent with nothing to be belligerent about. After direct resistance, I had reluctantly agreed, as we passed Hiram’s food shack on the beach, to expend the whole of the sum entrusted to us upon chocolates.

I was unable to swallow anything myself, so George consumed the lot, and shorty afterwards became extremely and violently sick. It came on to rain in bucketfuls and we took shelter in a disused and mournful boathouse, on the borders of a tidal lake. Here I racked my brains to tell George stories till, curled up at the bottom of a boat, he fell into a feverish sleep. I would rather have had him crying or sick. I would rather have told him stories till I dropped than sit in the dark boathouse silent and alone, listening to the rain and thinking of Mother.

When George woke the rain had stopped and he agreed, though without enthusiasm, to help me hunt for purple iris in a bog.

I wondered, while with fierce passion I fought with the sharp reeds and plunged in bog pools for the evasive flowers, if my mother would ever see the flags I picked for her. George soon evinced a masculine contempt for the pursuit, and only being allowed to throw stones everywhere at everything, kept him going. I picked till my aching arms were full and my clothes drenched with muddy water. George refused to carry any of the flowers home, which was natural as he had never seen any particular sense in picking them at all.

I don’t know how many miles we trudged before we reached home, plastered with mud from head to foot, and completely exhausted. But I remember that when George began with joy to pick up familiar landmarks and to realize we were nearly home, my heart felt like a stone. All day long I had yearned to go home, but now I dreaded our return as much as I had longed for it. It was almost as if by staying away I was keeping my mother alive. However, there was no escaping our destination. George was becoming more and more worn out and clamouring loudly for supper and bed. We went to the kitchen door hoping we should reach Maggie first, but it was Wilmett who was on the lookout for us—perhaps she had been reproached for so drastically exiling us without reference to the rest of the family, or perhaps we were merely later than she had meant us to be, but whatever was her reason, she was extremely angry with me.

George was swept into Maggie’s arms with promises of immediate refreshment and succour, but Wilmett refused me even admittance until I had flung away the filthy weeds with which my arms were full. Mother was alive—that much I did succeed in dragging from her—but of course I couldn’t see her—of course she didn’t want bog iris—how could I have been so naughty, so dirty and so silly as to go into bogs after them? Gone was the co-operation and the sudden respect and confidence we had felt for each other in that hour of dark agony; and anger and rebellion took their place. Frustration and disgrace swallowed hope. I never cried when Wilmett scolded me. I seldom answered her, but I suppose my bitter silences were answers, and probably I found them not only the easiest method of retaliation for one with a limited vocabulary, but also the most satisfactory in the annoyance they caused Wilmett. In this particular scene, however, I did not want to hurt Wilmett; I merely wanted to retain the iris. Suddenly I knew that they were to be salvaged—my exhaustion lifted. Behind Wilmett I saw the friendly eyes of my Uncle Frank and heard his voice quite literally as if it were the voice of an angel.

I was taken inside into the warm kitchen, iris and all—and I was promised, not without a tactful reference to Wilmett, that the best of them should be immediately placed in water and carried to my mother’s room, and better still than this, I myself should be there to see her pleasure at the gift of them. I could stand in the doorway, all wet and muddy as I was, so that I should know for certain that no-one was trying to fool me into thinking she was alive when she wasn’t.

Tides of relief and joy surged through me. From the open doorway my mother’s face looked curiously white and small, but her blue eyes were the same. She smiled exactly as she always smiled, at me; and at the purple iris; and nothing else mattered any more.

The silver lining of my mother’s illness was that in order to make room for a trained nurse Mary and I were sent on a visit to the MacCords. There have been few happier weeks in my lifetime than those which we proceeded to spend reunited to our beloved sister-friends. We had not seen them since their visit to us in another life, at the Over Stowey Rectory.

Mary and I were always enchanted to be on our own together. We shared all our tasks, conspiracies and illusions. Rid alike of Wilmett’s ordered tyranny, and the care of the obstreperous George, we floated out upon the halcyon sea of complete irresponsibility. Mother was going to get better—and we were without a cloud upon our horizon.

The MacCords were exactly as successful as hosts as they had been as guests. I had the added pleasure of seeing Mary really treated for the first time with all the admiration and respect due to her as a person. She was our eldest. Her freed imagination was our kingdom, into which we all alike plunged—or perhaps her imagination was rather a republic than a kingdom, for I cannot remember that any one of us took an unequal share in the general harmony.

An artist’s home is always a paradise for a child, because it follows no hard and fast routine. Light rather than Time is the measure of an artist’s day; and unnecessary duties are seldom entertained. The MacCords had bought an old white farmhouse set in the midst of apple orchards. There was a pine wood on one side of it and a croquet lawn on the other; behind it stretched orchards spread with buttercups. I don’t know how far the orchards stretched, but we never seemed to come to the end of “the apple tree, the singing and the gold.” Beyond a few little household cares, we had no obligations; and we lived under no pressure from grown-up controls.

The companionship of our contemporaries was perhaps what we had until now most missed in our American life. George and I had had cronies among street urchins and school-fellows alike. But these were children without either roots or background, and often strangely ferocious and sometimes unappetizing in their personal habits. For purposes of roller-skating, tobogganing in the winter or bathing in the summer, or as sharers in the brief school rushes into playgrounds, they were pleasant enough. But they were only ships that pass in the night and speak to each other in passing. What they said hardly counted. We never shared their ideas because as far as I knew they hadn’t any.

The MacCords were a wholly different cup of tea. Music, poetry, pictures, and the secrets of the universe were our mutual pastimes. We spent the long golden morning hours in the orchard climbing trees, eating the sun-warmed bright juices of Eve’s peculiar fruit—nor was this only a physical rapture. We shared to the full Eve’s deeper curiosities. Together we climbed the tree of knowledge as well as that of Life. Betty, Georgie and Maida were painters’ children and their mother was a very fine pianist. Painting and music were in their blood, just as drama and poetry were in ours. Our different contributions met and mingled in supreme felicity. These children’s eyes and hands were those of skilled craftsmen. They were gentle-mannered to the core, though curiously enough they seemed to have no religion whatever.

I suppose both “Uncle Herbert” and “Aunt Emma,” as we were allowed to call them, had creeds. In fact, I know that they were very dimly “Episcopal” and may, intermittently, when it suited them, have visited churches. But at Morristown nothing of this sort occurred. For the first time in our lives we were godless; and we found it curiously pleasant. Nothing was said about prayers, meals slipped by without grace, Sundays without services. The words “Sunday School” were never so much as mentioned. And yet, at the time of my childhood in America almost every child, even the most persistently wild, went as a matter of course to Sunday School. Yet, miracle of miracles—the MacCords were perversely and singularly good. I might truthfully say they were much better than we were. They were pleasant-tempered, generous and fair as playmates, without the apparent need of any spiritual sustenance.

Accidents of a disagreeable nature of course occasionally took place. I was once stung by a hornet on the croquet lawn. Mary and I both ate too many apples, and while writhing disconsolately in great pain on my bed, I was outraged to discover that Mary, who had eaten far more apples than I had, could continue to run about without a qualm. But no form of moral disagreement or painful human clash took place between the three MacCord sisters and ourselves. The only flaw in the complete felicity of our family party was that Aunt Emma—otherwise a perfect hostess—was often very sharp to Betty. There was no discoverable reason for this sharpness since Betty was, as a matter of fact, Aunt Emma’s chief support and mainstay—much as Wilmett was Mother’s, except that Betty was utterly without ill temper, or the desire to dominate. She was a rather nobly industrious, and most unselfish child, very tall for her age, and did everything she handled with consummate skill but with a slow-motion effect. Later on in life Betty besides being an artist was a cordon bleu, and made food that tasted like poetry. She was also an expert dressmaker, carrying designs of her own creation in her head, and cutting them out faultlessly without a pattern. The results rivalled Molyneux.

In spite of her craftsmanlike activities, Aunt Emma was painfully unjust to Betty in marked contrast to the wisdom and tenderness she displayed towards the rest of us. I can only account for her unkindness by the hidden tragedy between Aunt Emma and her husband—a tragedy that was a few years later to break up their home. I suppose that Betty, who resembled her father in features, may have resembled him also in some remote fastness of the soul only (and perhaps mistakenly) perceived by her anxious mother. Uncle Herbert was extremely handsome, and whenever we saw him, which was chiefly in the evenings, a most benevolent and gentle person. There was, however, a spoilt streak in his nature, and a curious lack of reality which Aunt Emma was determined not to see re-created in any of her children.

I shall never forget the gratitude and delight with which I watched Uncle Herbert paint, when in an unusually expansive moment, he had told me I might come into his studio.

I sat breathlessly on a stool behind him, while I saw for the first time something take place between Life itself and a man’s mind and hand.

The picture was that of a sunset behind an old and empty boat. Notes of the sketch had already been taken from nature, and he was evoking it from memory by the same sunset light. I hardly dared breathe as I watched colour flood into form, and life spring out of both.

There was a river in the foreground, and Uncle Herbert was particularly good at making water catch colour from the sky and yet retain its own liquid version of it.

I never knew whether it was an hour or a minute before he threw down his brush and said, “There! I shan’t do any more to it. There isn’t enough light!” But the picture was made. The sunset was there; the river—the derelict boat and the something more that was art itself.

It was our daily habit, while climbing the orchard trees, to produce plays to act in the evening. Mary and I created these dramas. We shouted each step of the plot to each other, from branch to branch, while Betty and Georgie decided and designed suitable costumes and scenery. Maida was rather young and frail for these active morning excursions, but she came in later on for rehearsals, and always had a small and pictorial piece of dramatic “fat” on the stage, specially thought out for her.

Aunt Emma had endless “properties,” which she allowed us to use as costumes, and so good did our elders think our performances were that the elect of Morristown were invited on more than one occasion to act as audience.

We all enjoyed ourselves passionately in the scenes we had created, far too much so to suffer from stage fright, and I only remember one awkward moment; when eloping as a bride with the lovely Georgie as my reluctant groom (she, too, wanted the part of the bride) over the top of a high screen, I was caught and suspended head downwards, by the high scarlet heel of my slipper. However, I easily freed myself, and sent the slipper skywards to fall into the laps of my audience, while carrying on grimly with the elopement, an unrehearsed effect which was greatly appreciated by both audience and fellow actors.

In the long sultry afternoons, Aunt Emma read Sir Walter Scott aloud to us, while we lay under the pine trees. I can’t think how we managed this siesta in the presence, as I feel sure we must have been, of hordes of New Jersey mosquitoes, but Aunt Emma read aloud uncommonly well and perhaps we were too enthralled by Kenilworth and Woodstock and too keyed up to the heroic to take any notice of attacks by mere insects, however ferocious.

The MacCords had very little money, and though I believe Uncle Herbert always sold his pictures—and even sold them well—what little Aunt Emma ever received for housekeeping purposes ran easily enough to romantic and fascinating parties. We drank iced root beer and ate light celestial foods, while listening to music under trees filled with Chinese lanterns suspended earlier by our anxious hands; while in the grasses at our feet and under the pine trees, fire-flies flickered and set their tiny flames as if for parties of their own.

It surprised me that there were no pet animals in a place that seemed so singularly appropriate for them; but I had the good fortune occasionally to meet a calf that strayed into our orchard, though I wished it had had some way of sharing my affection other than by winding its long tongue round my fingers and attempting to swallow them.

Relieved as we were to hear of our mother’s improvement, I think our hearts sank a little when we were told that we were to return to Quogue.

and the interlude of Morristown and the MacCords was soon to sink into the hoarded, but unsubstantial, gold of memory.

To any cared-for child a return home is a re-entry into Paradise, for however happy are the visits of a child, his main need in his slender helplessness against life is the security of his family life. To me, my mother was a climate “more lovely and more temperate” than any summer day. It hardly seemed that I had a right to the wonderful visit at Morristown until I was in her room (which she still kept—as her heart was very weak after her illness) and could see for myself her share of our happiness, smiling at me from her welcoming eyes. This return to Quogue was an even happier homecoming than I had envisaged, for not only was my mother well on the road towards recovery, but Wilmett, who had been terribly quelled and put in her place by a starched dragon of a trained nurse, was overjoyed to have her kingdom restored to her; and I never remember her sway to have been milder.

The three sisters exchanged endless and most unusually amicable confidences. We could hardly believe in the shocking depravity of the nurse. She had actually, we heard with bated breath, turned Wilmett out of Mother’s room, and only allowed infrequent visits, at stated intervals. We were relieved to hear that Uncle Frank had behaved irreproachably, and done his utmost to relieve the situation. Uncle George was, of course, always what he ought to be—even in Wilmett’s eyes; and Harry had wisely absented himself as much as possible. The grandparents were away at conferences in the White Mountains, and George had been very little trouble. George himself gave us a vociferous welcome. Conservative as he was by nature, the Devils he knew were always preferable to the sunniest of unknown angels; and he had not appreciated his partial farming out to an attractive widow patient of Uncle Frank’s with two spoiled children. No rock ever clung to its limpet more systematically than he to my side for the next few days.

It looked as if the family weather had now set fair for the rest of the summer. But a cloudburst was just round the corner. One day my father, proudly left in charge of my mother for the afternoon, confused the two medicines he was to administer and gave her a tablespoonful of digitalis instead of a drop, believing it to be her tonic. By some miracle Uncle Frank had returned unexpectedly early from his rounds and was in the house when this accident happened. He and Wilmett fought hour by hour for my mother’s life, while my father locked himself up alone in Uncle Frank’s consulting room to await the issue. Mary ran to and fro with jugs of black coffee between the kitchen and the bedroom door; and George and I were once more exiled till nightfall.

I caught a flying glimpse of my father’s face, staring out of the window, as I ran past the piazza; and the despair in his eyes settled on my heart and ran with me. I never read Coleridge’s words even now:

without smelling the golden-rod in the field behind our house at Quogue into which we had incontinently plunged. I was hunted by the very shape of Fear. I could not communicate it to George; but I am sure he knew that we were being hunted.

I was, however, a practical child, and it occurred to me that we had better do something to remove or placate the Power that threatened us. So I suggested to George that we should kneel down at once and pray. This he was very reluctant to do, as he saw no immediate cause for it, and pointed out as a conclusive argument that he had never prayed out of doors before. However, I suppose my urgency was catching for at last I succeeded in persuading him to kneel at my side in the dead heat of three o’clock in the afternoon; and with the golden-rod high above our heads, I prayed for my mother’s recovery, as I have never prayed for anything, before—or since.

It seemed so simple a thing for a good God to grant—if indeed there was one!

Something sceptical within me made me present my prayer in the light of a bargain. If my mother’s life was granted—I secretly informed that hard blue sky—then indeed I would believe there was a God above us, and act accordingly. George simply recited his usual evening prayer, as hurriedly as possible, before with an alacrity I could not share, he started to climb trees.

I think it was Uncle George, very solemn and very kind, who called us in at dusk with the news that my mother was at last conscious. He agreed that I might go and kiss my father good night although we could not see Mother. I couldn’t say anything to my father when I saw him. He still looked grey and his eyes were quite as sad—but not perhaps so empty—as when he had no hope.

God had granted my prayer; but though my mother survived his blunder, something in my father had died forever. Bitter panic-stricken words of Wilmett’s added to his own defenceless anguish were too much for his inner courage and I think quite literally he was never the same man again.

I did not realize this at the moment, and as I threw my arms round him, it seemed to me as if he had suddenly been restored to me after a long and dangerous journey. Yet little by little I think I guessed that he had been invisibly deposed from the headship of the family, and that Wilmett had taken his place. Nominally his position was the same but actually it was now always to Wilmett that my mother first turned. Wilmett was not yet sixteen, though a child of such magnificent courage and resourcefulness that she appeared much older; so she could not be blamed for the role she unconsciously assumed, of family arbiter.

Twice, it seemed to her, she had saved my mother’s life; twice, however innocently, my father had endangered it.

Wilmett was not going to let any such accident happen a third time.

George put the whole situation in a nutshell, when with the unerring instinct of childhood he called through the open window, “Who says I’m to come in to bed? For if it’s Father I won’t come, but if it’s Wilmett I must!”

One other scene belongs to this epoch and stands out with peculiar violence against the backcloth of memory. It was a painful and inexplicable scene, and, perhaps, therefore, all the more haunting. My father had been romping all over the house with one of his younger brothers; roars of laughter accompanied this friendly horse-play. There was nothing unusual in the occurrence; Uncle George never romped; but the three others were chronically boisterous; and usually we all enjoyed the spectacle. But for some unknown reason the whole affair deeply offended my mother. She tried to stop the laughter and failed. Never before had I seen her become angry. It was the one thing she simply never was—but now her great blue eyes filled with positive fury. A climax was reached when a wet sponge from my father’s hand sailed through the air, landing not on, but close to, my mother. “You shall not sleep in my room tonight!” she flashed out at my father and then ran upstairs into her room banging the door behind her.

I cannot think that the wet sponge was the real cause of this unexpected dénouement, but whatever the cause, the results were serious enough. Flushed conversations among our elders took place all over the house. Wilmett was furiously angry with Father. The uncles were all three portentously grave, my father wretchedly miserable. Nobody could persuade my mother, through the closed door, to accept or even listen to an apology.

Wilmett insisted that my father should be made to sleep on a hard couch in Uncle Frank’s consulting room.

Finally Uncle George went up alone to my mother’s door, knocked and was admitted.

For a long time nothing happened. Meanwhile it was decided that little George should be put to bed by Mary and myself—mere underlings to whom he greatly objected, since this evening ceremony was always held by Mother or at least by Wilmett; but on this occasion Wilmett felt too involved to absent herself. Nothing but the promise to read out loud to George turn by turn, every one of the ten plagues of Egypt, prevented a formidable demonstration of his displeasure.

George never cared for the Bible except at bedtime, but in order to postpone being left alone with the night, he would have had no objection to the Scriptures being read to him from cover to cover. When the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart had reached its historic limit, George fortunately fell asleep, and Mary and I went downstairs to join the others still simmering in suspense. We felt like criminals ourselves as we crept past my mother’s door—for had we too not laughed—Judas-like—at the flying sponge? We could hardly believe our eyes, when the door of my mother’s room slowly opened and Uncle George appeared with my mother on his arm. They came downstairs side by side, chatting and laughing together as if nothing had happened. No-one ever knew what my Uncle George had said to my mother to induce her to change her mind, but the couch in Uncle Frank’s consulting room remained unoccupied.

To have a saint in the household, though sometimes rather a sobering influence upon active children, is a great asset to any family, and no-one who knew him will ever doubt that my Uncle George was a saint.

The first interest I ever took in clothes awakened at Quogue; and promptly went to sleep again till my late teens.

I was nine years old, and I suppose it was the first time I had ever been offered a choice. Probably I had worn the out-grown garments of my older sisters; but on this occasion there were no out-grown garments suitable for my Sunday dress, and my mother asked me; “What colour would you like your new dress to be, Phyllis?”

For a moment—with all the emotions of stout Cortez confronting his new world—I stood,

then I exclaimed, “I want a dress the colour of a poppy.”

Wilmett crushingly replied, “That’s impossible. Little girls don’t wear scarlet.”

But my mother, with her eyes reassuringly on mine, murmured approvingly, “But perhaps scarlet under white muslin wouldn’t be too bright—and it would be scarlet.”

Surprisingly, Wilmett unbent. “She could have scarlet baby ribbons round the waist and sleeves,” she angelically improvised, “and scarlet shoes.” I could hardly believe my ears: and I saw my mother hesitate at the brilliance of the prospect. After all, she had been brought up a Quaker; and these shoes were going to church. But I suppose a silent pleading of my eyes bore down her scruples, for she suddenly fell for the scarlet slippers, and there was I a few days later on my way to the little wooden church, wrapped in glory. A large leghorn hat, wreathed with poppies, on my head, my feet clad like those of the unfortunate maiden in the Hans Andersen fairy tale, who wore high-heeled scarlet shoes while crossing a bog with a loaf of bread to give to the poor, and sank—loaf and all—to the bottom.

I had no illusions as to the small part my own looks played in this vision. I took it for granted, as was well drilled into me by Wilmett and borne out by the looking glass, that I was nothing to look at. I was a sallow little girl with big dark eyes, too large a mouth, a rather incoherent nose, and very little in the way of a chin; but the scarlet dress was in itself a

Nor was it at all hidden by the white transparent muslin above it. The baby ribbons upheld it, and the scarlet slippers accentuated it. It was all I had dreamed that a scarlet dress should be. It shocked my Uncle George. “Surely, surely, Daisy,” he said to my mother, “this child’s dress is much too theatrical for church!”

“Not a bit of it,” Uncle Frank indulgently chipped in, “consider the lilies of the field, George, not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these.”

It was a very hot Sunday; but I did not feel the heat—for me there was no dust upon the highway—even the sermon could not be too long, or too boring; it gave me all the more time to consider my deep felicity. If I were treating any discouraged little girl who had unfortunately found that to be a delinquent paid her better than morality, one of the first things I should do would be to ask her to choose a dress for herself, because I know from my own experience how greatly such an outward and visible sign helps to secure an inward and spiritual grace.

Usually I felt faint in that hot church, but on this occasion I did not faint: I had no need to—indeed, I felt so secure that it would have been impossible for me to faint, however bad the atmosphere became.

The church at Quogue never seemed to me to have anything to do with the Gospels of Jesus Christ. To go to it, Sunday after Sunday, was just a hall mark of gentility. Episcopalians in my childhood were, as we should say now, “posh.” They had to be fairly well off and acknowledged as socially acceptable. I never saw any “poor” person in the church at Quogue, let alone anyone who looked in the least “lost.” Nor did I ever hear an honest word spoken in it. I instinctively felt that had my father preached—or even read the Lessons—something—if not everything—would have come alive. I daresay my father did not believe anything like all he said, but he really believed some of it. However, my father never was in the church at Quogue, as he always returned to his own Grace Church, Jamaica, for the weekends, so that all I could get from this Sunday occasion to which the “best” people of Quogue resorted, at the hottest hour of the day once every week, instead of disporting in the waves—was the social spectacle, which I was unable to enjoy as I might have otherwise done, threatened, as I was, by physical disaster. At last Uncle Frank insisted, on account of some slight congenital defect he had discovered in my heart, that I should give up this religious practice altogether during the summer months.

I was both relieved and remorsefully appalled by this decision. After all, the whole family went to church with the utmost regularity, including George, and in childhood, to be left out of any occasion in which the whole family partakes, is to feel the nostalgia of an exile. Something of the Jacobin epitaph smote my spirit, when I saw them streaming steadily off to church on a Sunday morning, and I could have written

although I had genuinely disliked the church—had it not been for the all-sustaining presence of Uncle Frank himself. If it were not too hot, he would take me with him on his morning rounds, celestially bumping side by side in a buggy behind an old white horse over the sandy roads. If he considered the sun too powerful he would establish me on the piazza in the best hammock dedicated to Mother, to read till his return and then continue the reading out loud. We chose as a rule those books which my Uncle George thought Mother should not allow me to read. Chief among them I remember Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm and Jane Eyre. I fancy that what Uncle George did not want me to appreciate in these books went off me like water off a duck’s back. In the Story of an African Farm what I really enjoyed was the morbid horror of one particular sentence of Olive Schreiner’s, which I used to repeat to myself, in moments of gloom, with a never-ceasing relish, “a striving and a striving and an ending in nothing.”

The sheer, secret, savage horror of Rochester’s mad wife in Jane Eyre, however, haunted me for years, and certainly added to the fear I felt for all who had or might develop unsteady minds. It seemed to me that I might wake up any morning and find that I had developed into a lunatic during the night, or, alternatively, that I might be desperately attacked by any sane-looking person with whom I might come in contact. But after all, perhaps this morbid anxiety helped to push me forward towards the study of insanity, which certainly led to my writing Private Worlds. Practically all is grist that comes to the mill of a creative artist. Like Heine, out of our great sorrows we make “little songs,” and sometimes the sorrows of others, or our own, may condense themselves into short stories.

I fancy it was wise of my mother to give me a free field in my reading and very few of the books that were to be found in our house could have been “bad” for anybody, and though I often read books far beyond my intellect, the little that I did take in, because I liked it, was advantageous to my whole development.

Uncle Frank, on our Sunday rambles, introduced me to all his patients, but I only remember one of them with whom he was anxious for me to make friends. She was exactly my own age and the daughter of a millionaire. This gave her a romantic background though she turned out to be rather a dull child. However, we enjoyed together one of the most perfect days of my whole life.

We were given a day’s yachting by ourselves, though under the protection of two reliable boatmen, on a large still-water lake.

The lake had channels which connected it with other spaces of tidal waters, and only the dunes lay between it and the ocean. We chose an anchorage while we bathed, a spot completely solitary—with nothing living between sea and sky but an occasional seagull. The boatmen retired to a suitable distance behind the dunes, while we undressed and helped fasten each other into inflated lifebelts. Released from any sort of garment, pink as shrimps, we sank into that ineffable blue water and saw, clear as in any mirror, thirty or forty feet beneath us, a dance of rainbows on the lake floor.

For long, timeless hours we did exactly as we liked, ministered to by earth, air and water and miraculously unhindered by man. The care of George taken from my shoulders made me feel as irresponsible as a wandering cloud.

Like the genii of the Lamp, the invisible boatmen had only to be called upon to obey our every whim or to protect us from any dangers. A big lunch of celestial variety, washed down with mysteriously iced ginger ale, awaited our appetite. “This,” I thought to myself, “is what being a millionaire’s daughter means!”

Eventually something—perhaps dusk or the hint of one of the genii—took us from the lakeside back to Edith’s home. Here she opened a cupboard in a room much larger than I had ever seen, which contained forty pairs of children’s boots and shoes. Lovely things they were, all fresh as paint and many of them coloured—like blue forget-me-nots or pink wild roses. In an instant I saw what could be done with them. “Let’s,” I cried with rapture, “give them all away at once—to poor children.”

“But they’re my shoes,” gasped the affronted Edith, “all my shoes!”

“Nonsense,” I said sharply, “you’ve only got one pair of feet, haven’t you?”

I must have forgotten my own scarlet slippers at the moment—though even if I had remembered them I should perhaps have let them off as “ewe lambs,” my only alternative being the sand shoes I had on; but what more could anyone want? Still I should not have grudged Edith a choice of that superb collection. It was its quantity that appalled my Quaker senses. A heavy silence fell between us. Edith flushed crimson, and shut the door of the closet with decision. I lost the spectacle of the rest of her enormous wardrobe by my tactlessness; but I was relieved to hear later on that Edith had not borne malice; but on the contrary had asked that she might have the little English girl to play with her again.

Fate and Time, however, intervened, and I never saw Edith again; but the sand dunes and the murmuring blue lake water, our pink and shapely bodies like the “naked Humans” in my father’s photograph album of Roman statues, I saw for the rest of my life.

Poor, pleasant little rich girl—she was burned to death a few years later in a terrible and unnecessary accident!

I can only hope that she enjoyed that one perfect summer day we shared together as much as I enjoyed it.

There are certain landmarks in human relationships which, hardly noticed at the time, can be of life-long significance. Such a landmark took place between my sister Wilmett and myself during our first summer at Quogue.

It happened before my father had been so fortunate as to find Maggie. Wilmett was fifteen and I was barely nine. My mother was ill, and our newly arrived and inarticulate Finnish cook vanished overnight; no-one could be found to take her place, and for ten of the hottest days of a very hot summer, Wilmett ran our household of ten persons almost single-handed.

It was not surprising that under the stress and physical exhaustion of this ordeal, which she carried through with triumphant success, she should have been more irritable than usual; nor that my careless, light-hearted ways, always provoking to her, should have provoked her to distraction. I cannot remember what dire event produced the cataract of reproach and rage which finally broke over me; I only know that I, too, was unnerved by heat and exhaustion, and that her scalding words hurt me unbearably. I was at all times a rare crier and I never cried in public, so that I slipped away from her dry-eyed and silent, to find some private spot in which to indulge my woe.

In England I had always had the gooseberry bushes; no-one but myself ever willingly pierced their hedge of thorns; while in winter I took the lavatory as my inviolable shelter. But everything and everywhere seemed more accessible or audible in Quogue, and I was forced to go across the street to a room, shared with Mary, where we were both momentarily sleeping. I could count on Mary’s not being there at the hottest hour of the afternoon, as I knew that she was reading out loud to George at the cottage; and there I lay face downwards on the bed, sobbing my embittered heart out.

I did not hear the door open, but I heard a gasp of horror, and turning my head, I saw Wilmett looking down at me. She sank on her knees by the bedside imploring me to tell her what was wrong. I was too far down the road of my despair to attempt a subterfuge. “I can’t bear it any more,” I sobbed. “You’re too cruel to me—I want to die.” I neither knew nor cared what would be the result of this confession; but I certainly did not expect what did happen. Wilmett burst into tears and, throwing her arms round me, implored my forgiveness.

I was too startled to cry any more. I simply stared and stared at the beautiful agonized face, full of remorseful love, while I listened as if to a fairy tale, to her dramatic statements of affection.

It was unbelievable, but it seemed that she who had given me so much pain did not hate me. She had, so she told me, a peculiar and tender affection and pride in me. I listened incredulously, but it was as if the Heavens had opened.

I understood then, as I gazed at her, that in my heart, too, there had been more love than hate. I had admired her only too much; it was the feeling that I could not please her which had made me defy her. She was my unrealizable Ideal, the heroine whom I could never be, and whom I secretly longed to copy, and publicly flouted because I was convinced of my incapacity on any field to be anything but her inferior.

I couldn’t, of course, explain this to her, but I could tell her that I loved her. Joy and unutterable harmony swept over our troubled spirits. There could hardly have been two happier girls in Quogue that burning summer afternoon. Something had been released in us both which could, had a channel been found for it, have sweetened and enriched both our lives.

Wilmett explained without condemnation all the vexation of her spirit at my deficiencies, the strangeness of her new life, the consuming jealousy which seemed to spoil even her homecoming to her parents. She was sparing of me and unsparing of herself. She would never, she promised me, be angry again; and I would never be aggravating. We planned with ardour and unclouded expectation the future of our new relationship. Wilmett would stop ordering me about, and I, understanding the reasonableness of her wishes, would no longer flout them.

Was there at the bottom of my mistrustful heart one cold, small spot of fear? Did I know even then that there was no such perfect relationship? Wilmett was so beautiful, so dramatic, so convincing because so profoundly convinced, that I refused to let myself be warned. There was not one cloud upon the far horizon of that long summer day.

Only with the sunset, poor tired beautiful Wilmett, provoked again, forgot her certitude. Another, an even more passionate cascade of scolding descended upon my head. I had not even done what she thought I had this time. I looked at her with astonished eyes. I tried to find courage to explain, but at the anger burning in her eyes, at the high sound of her ranting, once more my defensive hostility swept in front of my heart. I would not explain—I would not show her my love! I was too proud to fight!

It was not the last time that Wilmett made an emotional appeal to my hard heart, but it was the last time I ever let her in. I could not give her what she asked henceforward because something in me refused to believe in the sincerity of her appeals.

The feeling of actual loss that I endured over this dream which never came true was too acute for me to risk belief in it again.

I think now that I was unjust and cowardly not to launch myself once more upon the sea of emotional surrender. Wilmett was dramatic-hearted, and her sincerity, acute if not lasting, could not shine out in any other way. She was generous and I was niggardly of emotion. I asked too little and for too long; and Wilmett perhaps too much and for too short a time.

There were six years between us. She was an authoritative, reliable eldest child and I was an irresponsible rebel. How could we share our conflicting ideals even for the sake of a peace each of us needed, but for which neither of us was prepared to pay the price?

The curious part of our perpetual tug-of-war was that my father never, and my mother very seldom, alluded to our continuous conflict.

My father’s silence was perhaps due to an old-fashioned sense of sentimental loyalty that prevented his discussing his eldest child with a younger one. He was intensely proud of Wilmett even when she behaved most unfairly and unkindly to him. I think also that he knew she was unconsciously the tool of my mother’s opposition to his wishes. If Wilmett was hard on him or hard on me, he realized the family burden that weighed down her nerves and soured her temper; and, since he in many ways so greatly profited by her courage and willingness to bear responsibility, he would not add a feather’s weight to what she carried by criticism of her methods. He was sometimes very angry with Wilmett, but he loved her with an unchanging pride and gratitude, till she was taken from him.

My mother’s attitude was less free from blame because she understood what Wilmett was doing to me and deeply regretted it. She and I were so intimate and outspoken with each other, that I could and did remonstrate with her at my treatment; but while she fully admitted my wrongs, she urged me not to ask either help or support from her. Wilmett, she explained, did so much for her that she simply could not intervene to save me from these outbursts of temper and perpetual criticism, without appearing ungrateful, and risking the loss of that support which she so greatly needed. I accepted this plea as exonerating my mother from all activity on my behalf, but I hardly respected her for making it. There was, I felt, such a thing as human justice; and both my father and mother refused, where Wilmett was concerned, to execute it.

There was much less open fire in my disposition than in Wilmett’s. I was always amenable to my parents’ wishes and seldom intemperate in the expression of my own. They had, therefore, nothing to fear from leaving me to Wilmett’s mercy. So Wilmett remained an undisputed family tyrant and I became a more and more unsatisfied and resentful rebel.

A little common-sense reasoning, and some firmness, on their part, might have helped us both and made the whole family atmosphere a much less sultry one. Human relationships do not happen by chance; they happen by training and self-discipline. But this training of the inner self, and this discipline of the immature mind, need great honesty and fairness on the part of the adults who make the home background. My mother lacked courage to deal fundamentally with her children’s problems and my father’s mind and heart were too absorbed by the increasing weight of his own. The child who suffered most at their hands was the one who tried her hardest to help them; and the worst victim of poor Wilmett’s unfettered generosity was herself.

Miss King’s Select Academy for Young Ladies was a good, if old-fashioned, school. Certainly Miss Dunn and Miss Burnett, the two teachers with whom I did most of my work, were excellent teachers as well as delightful human beings, to whom I was personally devoted; but I must admit that my school life was not a pleasurable or even a very vital part of my Jamaica existence.

Until I went to boarding school in New York when I was twelve years old, I never had any desire for knowledge strong enough to float me over the obstacles between my anxious heart and so considerable a goal. During my Jamaica school days I suffered all the agonies of an over-ambitious child, and woke rigid with apprehension every morning at the thought of school. I seldom ate any breakfast but drank strong black coffee which merely added to my nervousness by quickening the already too rapid beating of my heart.

The main cause of this morbid state of apprehension was that I never did my homework properly, trusting to my phenomenal memory to cram pages of words into my brain at the last minute, and to the quickness of my emergency wits to tide me over my awkward questions which threatened to expose my unprepared state.

The failure to learn home lessons was not wholly my own fault since the moment I returned from school I was expected to take over the care and amusement of George until his bedtime. This left me barely an hour before I went to bed myself to force the preparation of too many subjects into an already tired brain.

Had I been allowed a quiet period to myself between tea and supper it would certainly have lessened my state of tension even if I had not learned better methods of work. But the real source of the trouble was the mistaken way in which children were brought up forty years ago. Education should not be an ordeal to a normal child—still less a prestige test—though it is difficult to see, as long as competition is encouraged as the backbone of our educational system, how the prestige element is to be avoided. We were encouraged by our teachers, even by the best of them, to shine rather than to acquire a good working knowledge of our subject, so that many of us, including myself, suffered from the centipede complex—and never knew which of our hundred feet to begin moving first.

There was a further defect in our school curriculum—we had too many subjects. This resulted in our not being able to concentrate sufficiently on any one subject, in order to master or enjoy it. Speed rather than understanding, quantity rather than quality, were the unconscious aims of our whole education.

There were subjects even at nine and ten years old which I would willingly have taken great pains to understand. I had a strong taste for history, literature, and what was known to us as “Rhetoric” as well as English grammar. These four subjects, as well as a nursery-long proficiency in Scripture, were all pieces of cake as far as I was concerned, but there were too many of them at a time—and when to these were added subjects for which I had a strong natural loathing, such as mathematics, geography (then taught in a dull and lifeless fashion) and French—which in my first New York boarding school was hardly so much taught as laceratingly inflicted by a bad-tempered French woman with the most terrible eyebrows I ever saw, like a twin pair of jet black caterpillars, and with the voice of an infuriated corncrake—antagonism pure and simple took the place of attention. The moment I entered those classrooms, a determined blankness took possession of my mind, and I was already tense with resistance before a figure appeared on the blackboard or “Mademoiselle” had had time to thunder forth a French infinitive. When any normally intelligent child cannot learn a lesson, it is a sure sign that he does not want to learn it; and the only cure is to make the lesson sufficiently interesting—or in stubborn cases to change the teacher.

Mathematics were not insuperably difficult to me, at my New York school; and as for Euclid later on, I lapped it up like cream; and I doubt if any child would resist the charms of geography taught as it is now taught.

My schoolmates in Jamaica did not form an important part of my life because they lived in distant parts of the town, and my intimates were those of our immediate neighbourhood. However, there was one exception. I soon began to take an interest in a girl rather older than myself, but in the same class, whose name was Mamie Tapp. At first I did not like Mamie. She was a forthright, quick-tempered child, with a wholly different background from my own. A curious kind of semi-hostility, semi-admiration sprang up between us.

Mamie had straight black hair, small but very bright observant dark eyes, and a most determined chin. In her work, she was energetic, accurate and thorough. She was generally the top of the class except for those subjects in which I had a natural proficiency, or had gained an unnatural advantage from special home training.

What I admired about Mamie was her aplomb—and her rather relentless courage. I think she both distrusted and admired me. I had no aplomb and was extremely shy; but I had imagination which sometimes gave me rather an unfair advantage over her, and though she probably resented my manners, they were undoubtedly an improvement upon her own. I think the latent hostility between us would soon have been aggravated into a direct enmity but for a fortunate occurrence, which bound us permanently together. Miss Burnett offered a prize to the child in her class who should best recite “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” The whole school was to judge the issue by ballot vote.

It did not occur to me as conceivable that I should win this prize, but since I had known the poem by heart since I was three years old and could have recited it backwards while standing on my head—learning it at least presented no obstacle. What I doubted was my courage when it came to the point of facing the whole school as an audience.

I was extremely nervous before the test took place. Every disaster that could happen took place in my imagination over and over again.

I arrived at the schoolhouse breathless and despairing. I wished that I were dead. However, several children recited the poem before it came to my turn, and recited it so badly that my anguish began to lessen. “Surely, surely,” I told myself, “I can’t do worse than this!”

Then Mamie Tapp stood up. Mamie was a horse of quite a different colour. She was not nervous. She was word perfect. Her natural humour and spirit caught up with the underlying jests of Lewis Carroll. She recited the poem very well indeed, and won enthusiastic applause. I decided that she would deservedly win the first prize and felt rather relieved that I need no longer compete for it.

Then it was my turn. From the first verse, the audience was curiously, almost unpleasantly still; but I soon forgot all about the audience, because by the second verse I had got rid of my fears altogether and had begun to enjoy the poem. Those villains, the Walrus and the Carpenter, got away with nothing. The poor little oysters received full value for their pathetic plea, and the tiff between the sun and the moon rounded off the exquisite tale with dramatic felicity. There was no sound at all when I had finished, and then suddenly I was almost frightened by the outburst of applause. I knew then that I had won the prize; and to tell the truth, I felt rather ashamed of myself because it had been so easy.

It was a silver teaspoon in a blue velvet box. There was a second prize won by Mamie Tapp—a book of poems by James Whitcomb Riley—including my favourite poem of Little Orphant Annie. I could only hope that the strained smile with which I received the banal offering of the teaspoon—neither flesh nor fowl, since it couldn’t be played with, and there were plenty of teaspoons for use at home—did justice to the occasion. The envy I succeeded in repressing was bitter.

A little later I found Mamie in the cloakroom by herself. She was not crying for she was far too brave a child for tears, but she was grieving with crimson cheeks over the poems I coveted. “I might have known you’d win that first prize!” she said bitterly. “And I wanted that teaspoon—it would have meant something at my home—this book don’t mean a thing! My family will just despise it!” “But,” I cried aghast, “Mamie—I don’t want the teaspoon. I’d love to have the book instead!” A flash of joy lit Mamie’s gloomy countenance. “Is that so?” she demanded. “You mean it? You really want the book?” I nodded with passionate conviction. “Then we’ll swap!” cried Mamie. “But we can’t!” I cried in an agony of fresh apprehension. “Miss Burnett and Miss Dunn—they wouldn’t like it! They meant something different for us both. It wouldn’t be polite!” “Oh shucks!” cried Mamie impatiently, “who cares what they meant? If you ask them—they’ll have to let you have it! Didn’t you win the prize? Come on!” It was an awful ordeal, but I am glad to think I did not flinch from it. This was the kind of thing that made me admire Mamie—her courage was always executant. She came out into the open—and never required a wall to back on. Mine was of less valorous a nature; but on this occasion Mamie was my wall.

Miss Burnett and Miss Dunn were easily found, and summoning all my courage, I explained falteringly what was our dilemma. Both the prizes were beautiful but we liked each other’s best. Miss Burnett and Miss Dunn looked a little surprised, and Miss Burnett said very firmly, “Do you fully realize, Phyllis, that the spoon cost a great deal more than the book? It is the first prize.” She did not seem to understand the drear insignificance of a teaspoon compared with poems.

“I do—oh, I do want the book most!” I whispered on the verge of tears. “Then you can have it!” Miss Dunn said quickly, and suddenly, astonishingly, I found Mamie’s arms were round my neck, and the sternly undemonstrative child had actually kissed me!

From that moment all our hostility vanished. As companions we were admirably suited to each other. Both were adventurous and “greeted the unseen” and even the “unknown” “with a cheer.” I think that Mamie was a tougher and more reliable child than I was; but I had more ideas and a more fluent vocabulary. The class followed us blind wherever we led, in work or play.

In spring and summer we roamed the distant woods for dog-roses. In winter we went far afield to find ponds for sliding, or hills for tobogganing.

Mamie was extraordinarily nice about George. All my other girl friends complained of having a small boy “tagging round.” Often they refused my company unless I would desert him, but Mamie made no such claims. “He’s a good sport,” she told the others. “Let him tag! Phyllis can’t help having a little brother, can she?”

Once when we were in the woods together, accompanied by my beloved pug puppy, Lucky, we met a rather determined and most unpleasant snake.

The whole thing flashed upon us in a nightmare picture. The snake coiled to spring upon our path and Lucky—a phenomenally stupid dog—leaned gingerly forward to sniff at it. Fear petrified me, but in a flash Mamie had acted. She simply lifted Lucky backward by his curly tail, as one lifts a boiling kettle off the hob by its handle.

The forked head shot out, a split second too late. Lucky was saved. Of such stuff was Mamie made, and I often wonder to what uses Life put her prompt and valorous spirit.

Our intercourse was, alas! as short as it was felicitous. Miss King’s Academy suddenly closed and I was sent away to boarding school. Mamie Tapp dropped out of my existence, but forty years later she wrote me a letter to say that she supposed I was the “Phyllis” who had been her best friend at school.

Both my father and mother were far beyond their age in their educational theories. They were as modern and liberal as the teachers of today. They even thought that girls should be as well educated as boys and have the same privileges, though considerably more duties. But when it came to putting their enlightened theories into action, they bogged down before the heaviness of fact.

The only member of our family to receive a normal education was my brother George. He was the only one whose physical and social needs were seriously considered. From his school days on, his pocket money and financial allowances were, as far as my parents could afford it, ample; whereas the three of us had microscopic dress allowances and our social opportunities were never taken into account at all. “Please, God, make us stylish. Our clothes are all wrong,” my sister Wilmett was heard praying aloud at her bedside in the early stages of our American life. There is no doubt that God consented to the prayer of one who always helped herself, for Wilmett, with the aid of The Ladies’ Home Journal, soon began to make her own clothes; and rapidly became stylish.

But I don’t think, at the time, any of us in the least resented George’s unconscious supremacy. He was our baby and we entered whole-heartedly into our parents’ conspiracy to spoil him. We contented ourselves as girls, with having a great deal more freedom of act and tongue than our contemporaries. I cannot remember ever being checked for the expression of a thought, however revolutionary, by either parent.

We knew that we were expected to earn our own livings but it did not occur to any of us at the time that we were not being trained to carry out this purpose. Wilmett was extremely musical and had a beautiful singing voice. Music was, therefore, considered to be her special province, and something or other, though seldom the best thing, was usually done to help her develop her gift.

Mary was a good scholar and had a particular aptitude for teaching; but nothing was ever done to help her carry out her wishes.

I was too young for my tastes to act as guides to my education, but it was obvious that I had an overwhelming interest in books, and it was supposed that I might develop, if left to myself, some connection with literature.

During Mary’s second year at the Garden City School she had a very severe attack of rheumatic fever, and this seemed a sufficient reason for recalling both sisters to their home. For a time they joined George and myself at Miss King’s Select Academy for Young Ladies. Unfortunately, this very pleasant if mediocre school came to an abrupt end. I have nothing but pleasant memories associated with it. All the teachers were intelligent, well-mannered and kindly. Our French teacher, an American lady of great charm, who has survived into the nineties, gave me no indication of the tortures the French language was to assume later in the hands of a native Frenchwoman. Miss Dunn and Miss Burnett were my firm friends and I enjoyed every lesson they ever taught me. Even for mathematics, I evinced no great repugnance in its earlier stages, and could master its uninteresting problems as well as the next child.

The close of Miss King’s School threw us back into the unprepared bosom of our family. Wilmett decided not to attend school any further. Mary, George and myself, after a half-hearted debate on boarding schools, were sent daily to an uneducated, neurotic and wholly incapable lady, who wanted to earn her living and thought that imparting what she didn’t know was the easiest method of earning it. She took a fancy to me at first, and showed it by heaping flattery and admiration upon my meagre acquirements. I saved her a great deal of trouble by learning all my lessons by heart and avoiding any other form of brain work. Mary bore, for only a few months, the complete inability of this lady to teach her anything; and then her complaints became so strenuous and searching that my father removed her; and it was decided that at fifteen it would be enough for Mary to take French and Latin from a retired French professor who lived in the neighbourhood. Undoubtedly Mary did learn something from Monsieur Vinot and enjoyed learning it, but she had no companionship with her contemporaries, and no practical training towards a career as a teacher.

I had at least one companion of my own age who shared my studies. She was an extremely nice, neat little girl, called Nelly, who worked much harder than I did. Her parents were well-to-do farmers, and drove her in and out daily from their farm, some distance away, at great inconvenience to themselves; and I think her education was considered extremely important to her family.

I was once invited to spend a day with her at her home, and was given a most gorgeous and substantial meal at a table with a large number of rather formidable-looking, hard-working, grown-up relatives. I was considerably impressed by this background of Nelly’s, and astonished at the high place she held in it, as it seemed to me by virtue of what I knew to be a very poor sort of education. I feared that this solid and substantial family would one day find out that all the trouble they took to give Nelly a first-class education had been hardly worth it.

During my first period at Miss H.’s, Nelly was scornfully and unkindly treated by our educator until my downfall reinstated her in lonely glory. But what was particularly estimable in the quiet Nelly was that she never disliked me for the undue preference shown me at first, and never exulted when the tap of Miss H.’s uncertain favour was abruptly turned off from me, and turned on lavishly for her.

Nelly had pink cheeks, blue eyes and flaxen hair. She was exactly like the description of the skipper’s daughter in “The Schooner Hesperus, which sailed the wintry seas,” and I never subsequently recited this poem without envisaging the pretty and placid Nelly sailing unmoved towards her doom.

I fell from Miss H.’s grace by an act of moral courage rather infrequent in my career. Miss H. slapped George with a wooden ruler. She slapped him very hard and, though I think he may have been more astonished than hurt, he burst into wild and bitter tears and refused to be comforted. I threatened and stormed at Miss H. I would, I said, immediately inform my parents of what she had done, and if she could not teach George without violence, I insisted that she should leave him alone. I was very, very angry; angrier than Miss H., for I succeeded in really dismaying her. Wilmett and Mother supported my outburst, and reinforced it by a visit to Miss H. From that hour George was neither punished nor educated. He was simply kept quiet between the hours of nine a.m. and one p.m. and that was the end of it. As he was only five at the time, perhaps this hardly mattered, but Miss H. saw to it that there should be a victim. All my lessons went wrong from that moment; nothing I could ever do pleased or won any further recognition from her. Nelly was held up as my unapproachable model, even upon subjects in which it was evident to Nelly herself that she knew nothing whatever. I was an ambitious child and felt this fall from achievement greatly. That it was unjust, though no more unjust than my previous height, deepened my resentment.

I don’t remember ever trying to make my parents understand what was happening. I just went on hopelessly from day to day, falling lower and lower. I worked hard because I really wanted to learn something, but I became more and more convinced that the heroine of the Story of an African Farm was right when she described all human effort as “a striving and a striving and an ending in nothing.”

Apart from my unsuccessful school life, I think this must have been the best year of our Jamaica period. My mother, reinforced by Wilmett’s daily companionship, was fairly well. My father benefited equally by Wilmett’s active interest in his church. Wilmett, herself, may have benefited by constantly hearing his praises and learning to share in the general admiration and love which followed his Jamaica career. It would have been impossible, for an ardent and generous nature such as Wilmett’s, to have worked for anyone so whole-heartedly adored as my father and not to have shared in the general attempt to serve and please him. Her two best friends were loyal church workers, and at least some of the glory attached to my father’s public life must have followed him back into the four walls of his home.

My life was always sweetened by Mary’s presence and, as she helped me look after George as well, I was often freed to carry on friendships and amusements of my own.

I only remember one outstanding fight with Wilmett during this halcyon period. She had made up her mind that, as she was to live at home and had retired from school, her authority over me must be publicly acknowledged. She was, so she told me, now grown up and I must be prepared to recognize the difference. I refused to admit that there was any difference. To me she was exactly the same; her hair could be put up and her skirts could be longer, but my soul was still my own. “Very well,” Wilmett said with passion, “if you won’t obey me, you must be made to,” and she undertook to persuade my mother of the necessity for this operation. I think Wilmett must have found my mother much more difficult to persuade than usual; but at least she was persuaded to make a fresh effort. She stopped me on the middle of the stairs and, in an embarrassed voice, asked me to “try to do more often what Wilmett tells you.” My heart turned to stone. It was a moment of unforgettable, ineradicable horror. “Mother,” I said desperately, “I’ll do anything in the world you tell me except obey Wilmett. If you make me do that—I shall die.”

In a sense, I still believe this would have been true and that something vital to my future would have perished under this new form of dictatorship. At any rate, I convinced my mother that she had asked too much. She loved me better than to use her power over me by violating my whole nature. “Very well,” she said quietly, “I won’t ask you to obey Wilmett; but to come to me whenever she tells you what to do and to decide with me whether it is best to do it or not.” This was not a complete victory, but neither was it a complete defeat. My immediate point was gained. Orders continued to come from Wilmett in constant and regular succession, but they were not the ten commandments. I had an alternative to carrying them out and Wilmett knew that I had this alternative.

It was during my tenth year that I became partially reconvinced of the authority of the Christian faith. The influence behind this emergence from scepticism was my Uncle George.

It was impossible not to take my Uncle George’s religion seriously. My father, too, was a clergyman, but I was by no means convinced that his beliefs upon any subject were founded on fact. I had no great confidence in his moral nature since I instinctively knew that my mother hadn’t. If he were liable to stray in the simple habits of his daily life, why not in his grasp of the far more uncertain facts of an invisible universe? I loved my father dearly; I listened to him with great attention; I enjoyed his sermons, for he was a great orator and had a beautiful voice, but I remained incredulous of his assumptions.

“Uncle George,” I asked, on finding my uncle conveniently alone in Father’s study, “what makes you believe Christianity is true?” He was silent for a long moment but his eyes met mine with the directness of an equal. “I think,” he said at last, “there is some evidence in church history of the truth of Christianity and perhaps even more in each person’s individual conscience. This you must find out for yourself; but I can lend you a book about church history.”

I don’t remember the name of the church history he lent me, but I know that it seemed very convincing at the time; though perhaps the deepest source of my conviction was that Uncle George believed it. He had not pretended that such conviction was either easy or complete.

I had felt in my own sceptical heart—meeting the look he gave me—that he too felt doubts as profound, or perhaps profounder, than my own. “What’s your favourite text?” I asked him on a later occasion; and this time he replied to me without any hesitation at all, “ ‘Lord,’ ” he said quietly, “ ‘I believe, help thou my unbelief.’ ”

Just before my eleventh birthday it was decided that the whole family should spend the summer in England with my grandmother Fowler.

Grandpapa Bottome, who was always secretly hoarding small sums of money for the purpose of revisiting his native land, decided that he had saved enough to accompany us. He would go his own way and visit the haunts of his youth; and my grandmother Fowler, with a house full of servants and an enormous garden, would ensure our financial security.

I do not remember our actual arrival at Moor Hall, but what happened the next morning is as ineffaceable as if it took place yesterday instead of half a century earlier.

Mary, with a face full of portentous gravity, led me to the water closet, a haunt favoured by us both for confidential communications out of Wilmett’s reach. Locking the door securely behind us, she turned and said, “Phyllis, dear Grandpapa has joined the great majority!” The words may have been more or less unintelligible to me but I knew instantly what she meant. Grandpapa, my friend, my protector, the person in whose calm and gentle presence I felt the most complete and unhindered intimacy, had ceased to exist. The ground under my feet was hollow and nothing seemed real any more. I hardly took in what Mary went on to tell me. His oldest friend had met him as arranged at Tavistock in a high dog-cart. Driving down the steep hill that led to his home, the horse stumbled, Grandpapa fell head forward on to the stony road and never recovered consciousness.

The whole day was catastrophic. I met my father weeping uncontrollably on the stairs while my mother tried to comfort him. I had never dreamed that a grown man could cry—least of all my merry father. A few hours later he and my mother disappeared with luggage into the bleak unknown that had swallowed Grandpapa. I saw no reason to expect that they would ever return. George, too young to know what had hit him, sensed disaster of some kind and ferociously resented it. He was turned over to me for a prolonged period to amuse; and was not amusable. Finally Wilmett, with great and unexpected kindness, relieved me. I could, she told me, help to make wreaths for Grandpapa’s funeral. What seemed a large number of us, reinforced by first cousins, collected in a summer-house in the garden while respectful and sympathetic gardeners brought relays of flowers; even hot-house blooms were placed at our disposal. Wilmett showed us all how to manipulate them over wire frames and, although she was not the eldest grandchild present, no-one ventured to question her authority.

On any other occasion I cannot imagine an exercise more to my taste, but those flowers were not as other flowers—“a jocund company.” They were heavy with my grief and those long hours, on one of the few fine days that gloomy summer contained, were among the saddest of my life. How could I connect that smiling, blue-eyed presence with Heaven or a coffin? With flowers I could connect him, for he had told me everything I knew about flowers. Every walk we took, he named and explained the family from which each blossom came. White and pink clover were the sweeter to me all my life for the stories he had told me of the visiting bees, kept alive all winter by the precious store of honey that they drew from these convenient and friendly flowers. He did not trouble me with Latin names but with yellow ladies’ slippers—love-lies-bleeding—Jack in the Pulpit—Sweet William—Solomon’s Seal, and Love-in-the-Mist—I knew and loved them all. I think I owed to him the feeling I have had always that life is sacred in flowers and animals and far nearer than we dream to the life within ourselves. To the wise old Methodist, who wrote many fine hymns, and had spent seven years of his life apart, teaching the Black Foot Indians a religion they could understand, all life was part of the same mystery, “and every common bush afire with God.”

While our parents were away at Tavistock, Wilmett was extraordinarily kind to me. She stood between me and all the dangers and pitfalls of the new formalities and the uncomfortable English habits thrust so suddenly upon my dazed and grief-stricken mind. Her naturally generous heart rose always to meet great emergencies, while too preoccupied with the mint and cummin of everyday life to be calm or reasonable over smaller ones. Under her careful shepherding I felt untroubled by commands or reproaches and free to deal as best I could with my first experience of death.

All summer long, however, I was troubled not only by the sense that Grandpapa would never come back, but by the feeling that he was quite definitely somewhere else, was indeed, if I could only get through to him, within my reach, behind some obstacle of sound and sense which I might, if left sufficiently alone and at peace, overcome.

I suppose that I was nearer a mental breakdown than at any other time of my life. I was forever listening, when left alone, and I took every opportunity to escape into solitude. I stopped the pretence of any form of activity and just waited, tense with expectation, for something to come through from the other side of silence. I never moved until someone from the normal world came back to break the spell. Every night I lay awake hour after hour, until my mother came to visit me on her way to bed, when I would shriek aloud—half from relief, and half perhaps from the desire to compel and delay her momentary presence.

I am sure that at home this unnatural condition would have passed off in a few days but I was not at home. I was in a strange and, to me, most hostile atmosphere of Victorian formality. I was forced, at an age when I had been the free and happy companion of grown-up uncles, back into the nursery, where I had to be superintended by strange and ignorant women. No doubt my pride was hurt beyond bearing by that submerged nursery atmosphere, and what added the last touch of ignominy was that my first cousin—a boy—barely a year older than myself, was allowed downstairs for all his meals.

Not that I really liked downstairs better than up; but at least Wilmett and Mary were downstairs; and my mother’s presence would have made Hell itself tolerable.

Day after day, week after week, it rained. I don’t know what would have happened to me had it not been for the kind act of my step-uncle, Kennie Fowler, a man who subsequently became one of my greatest friends. I was not the only unhappy person in Moor Hall. There was poor Kennie, a sad, delicate, portentously serious man; and his sister “Aunt Jo” a very graceful, elegant and dissatisfied young woman. I don’t think their stepmother, Rachel Fowler, meant to be unkind to them. She simply disliked their being there—and there seemed nowhere else to put them. They hadn’t got professions; they were, in their late twenties, unmarried, and it would have been considered—though it could easily have been afforded—quite improper for them to live anywhere else. My grandmother at forty-six was still a good-looking woman, and she possessed, as well as her looks, five thousand a year. Her second marriage, breaking up the dullness and loneliness of her long widowhood which had stretched from twenty-six to her present age, was incredibly happy. But even a happy marriage has its victims and Uncle Kennie and Aunt Jo belonged to this category. Perhaps this is why they enchanted me. They never told me they disliked their home, resented another’s control, and would have given anything to escape it; but I both shared and sensed the bleakness of their outlook.

They were, moreover, fond of quiet children and I was unnaturally and securely quiet. I was allowed to help Aunt Jo arrange the flowers; and Uncle Kennie found out that I was fond of reading and made me free of the only possession he enjoyed, the use of a library behind the dining-room. There I found and read the novels of George Meredith and, inadvertently, to Uncle George’s extreme horror when it was discovered that I had read it, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

But these books, though I burrowed slowly and securely into them, meant nothing to me compared to my great discovery. I found Shelley. Shelley set fire to my summer. He lit my heart from end to end. All readers have one poet, who, apart from his immortal ideas, has for them some special individual message. To me, in my eleventh year, Shelley was and remained my poet. Single poems I have loved better than Shelley’s—in much later life Shakespeare swallowed him—but here and now in Shelley’s poems was what I wanted, set to music I had never heard and, once having heard, was never to forget.

There is only one way of really enjoying poetry and Uncle George had set me on its path. It should be learned by heart and, preferably, I thought at the time, sung aloud on the tops of trees. This became my habit. Moor Hall was full of trees, fortunately most of them chestnuts, an excellent tree to climb and possessing, as King Charles the First found, the best kind of leaves for concealment.

Among the poems I learned this summer and shared with the winds, was Shelley’s “Ode to Liberty” and “Ode to the West Wind,” “Skylark” and “Cloud,” “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and the “Lines written in Dejection near Naples.” As for “Swiftly, walk over the Western Seas, Spirit of Night”—I sang it to myself all day long. Unfortunately, one day I inadvertently sang it aloud to Grandpapa Fowler.

I was sitting in a convenient notch near the top of a chestnut tree, rather too near the house, and had not noticed the unusual presence of my grandfather beneath this tree. He was panic-stricken when he saw where I was and became furiously angry. “Come down! Come down! At once!” he shouted, “and never do such a disgraceful naughty thing again!” Of course, I had to come down, covered with horror at the idea that I had discovered a new sin, but fortunately quite unaware that I was in the slightest physical danger. I was greatly upset by his obvious rage, but descended with peaceful speed, to stand trembling before him. “Never! Never,” this inexplicable tyrant shouted at me, “do such a terrible thing again!”

I had the sense to tuck Shelley behind my back; and I took the greatest care ever afterwards to choose trees under which I was practically certain my step-grandfather would never walk.

One memory of this summer stands out with peculiar vividness in my mind, perhaps because of the new sense I felt, after my Grandpa Bottome’s death, of impermanence.

I was watching Wilmett and my cousin Muriel Richardson play tennis. They were seventeen and both extremely good-looking girls. Muriel had the Irish beauty of black hair and pink and white complexion. Wilmett had immense dark eyes and a clear olive skin. Raphael once painted a lady in white satin, who hangs in the Pitti Gallery in Florence, exactly like my sister Wilmett at seventeen.

The sun shone on their slim, graceful, swift-moving figures—the gravel path glistened with light—and in the rose garden near by, the bees’ persistent humming was thick with rapture. I don’t know that I felt happy myself but I thought with a kind of pang, “I must seize and keep this moment! I must never forget what Wilmett and Muriel look like now—nor the sunshine—nor the rose garden—nor the way the pebbles glitter on the path!” Nor have I ever lost it. Wilmett was to die a few years later and Muriel to live a lonely and, for many years, frustrated life—but the picture of them at the peak of their young beauty still seems to me a part of life itself.

At the bottom of the long lawn stretching from the large, old-fashioned house, was a pond or, as it ran through the spacious grounds and then vanished, it may even have been one of England’s tea-cup rivers. At any rate, it held a little island and swans sailed by on it. I had there one of those secret experiences of childhood which are at the same time precious and incommunicable. I had been told particularly not to go too near this water, and whenever I could I naturally found myself in its immediate vicinity.

On one occasion, safely hidden in some bushes which approached its edge, I saw a wasp had fallen into the stream and was drowning. The trunk of a fallen tree hung out far over the water and I crept along it face downwards, with a small twig in one hand with which I succeeded in rescuing the half-drowned wasp. It was extremely difficult getting back to land, wasp and all, but I achieved the feat and have rarely enjoyed a greater feeling of satisfaction. I held it for certain that as I had saved this wasp from death, all other wasps would from this moment onward renounce any intention to sting me. As an actual fact, on this and for several summers after, no wasp did. No doubt this immunity was really due to the fact that I had no further fear of them; but at the time it served to reinforce in me the very strong feeling I already had of some secret bond between all living creatures, ready to be expanded into actual friendship at the merest hint of opportunity. I also think I might not have thought and felt so much about this wasp if I had had anyone to play with; but this summer was, as far as human companionship went, the emptiest of my life. I did not even have the stimulating charge of George, as a temporary nurse had been found for him.

One more storm of rather pointless emotion closed this summer, as far as I was concerned. Wilmett and Sybil, who were the two oldest of the grand-daughters, for reasons best known to themselves, decided that they were too old to receive Uncle Kennie’s dry little peck on the cheek with which at strictly formal moments of parting and meeting he greeted us all impartially.

Grandma Fowler in a peculiarly tactless and forbidding manner publicly announced that in the future no grandchild over twelve years of age should be kissed by Kennie. Personally, this fact had nothing to do with me. I could have been kissed by him for two years longer, nor had I ever attached, any more than he had, the slightest importance to the ceremony. But my resentment was overwhelming. That he should be publicly defrauded of a privilege well within his rights as an uncle was more than I could bear. It seemed to damage indelibly the prestige of all uncles, a race to whom I owed—and paid—a passionate loyalty. What, I asked myself, could I do about it? I could perhaps have kissed him with more fervour myself, but this did not occur to me and, in any case, I knew him well enough to realize that the one thing he least liked was fervour. No—but could I not secretly convey some little benefit or anonymous mark of regard upon him? I had no money or I would have bought him a book and slipped it onto his shelves. Suddenly I saw in a flash what I could do.

Every evening at precisely six o’clock, the butler carried into the hall and placed upon a table, especially provided for the purpose, a tray full of exquisite button-holes, to be worn by all those privileged to come down for dinner. Either each person chose his own on going up to dress, or, should he overlook this small activity, one would nevertheless be sent up to his room a few minutes later. Now, I knew by careful observation every grown-up person’s habits in the house. I had learned them in order to avoid, if possible, meeting any of them except Aunt Jo. I knew, therefore, that Uncle Kennie never went up to his bedroom until after the dressing gong had sounded, and seldom then for he was always getting into trouble for his belated presence at meals.

I would, therefore, choose for him the very most perfect button-hole there was before anyone else had a chance and put it on his dressing-table. I hung about for several days before the exact moment came and the coast was wholly clear. There upon the tray I saw exactly what I wanted. It was a very large purple passion flower with a white centre delicately surrounded by maiden-hair fern.

I darted down the stairs, seized this blossom on its wired stem, and with equal swiftness and secrecy found my way to his empty room. There I left it—as planned—exactly on the centre of his dressing-table. Then I pursued my lawful path to the nursery at the top of the house and took up my watch between the banisters the moment the dinner gong was struck, to gaze at the procession starting arm in arm from the drawing-room two flights below me to the dining-room, a flight below them. This was a dinner party night and there were eight to ten couples; last but one, with some strange lady on his arm, came Uncle Kennie; and he was wearing a small pink rose bud in his button-hole.

The explanation for this painful defeat came to me from Uncle Kennie himself ten years later, when we first became friends. He had not remembered the incident but of course a passion flower was far too large for a gentleman’s button-hole. If he thought about it at all, he had thought the butler had made a foolish mistake. “But the really funny part of it is,” he told me, “I really wanted to stop kissing the older grand-daughters! I was shy and it was an ordeal for me. Besides, to tell the truth, Wilmett was never a favourite of mine. I daresay I did resent your grandmother’s way of putting it, but relief was my real emotion! What, however, I do remember about the summer was that Jo and I were seriously concerned about you. I never knew so silent a child. You almost never spoke.”

This retreat into silence was a new thing to me and I imagine that it was the direct result of shock, reinforced by my acute dislike of the nursery situation.

Still I trained myself very carefully into these steady silences and used them to avoid social intercourse whenever I felt at a disadvantage. It never, however, interfered with my actively expressing whatever was on my mind when I considered the occasion favourable; and I gave it up once and for all upon the death of my sister Wilmett.

Our homecoming was inevitably a sad one. A row of young uncles, faces set in unfamiliar gravity, awaited us on the wharf and we were driven at once to Grandmother’s. There she stood, in a room full of flowers, dressed in snowy white from head to foot.

In any room into which she came, my grandmother drew all eyes to her. She was an erect, squarely built woman, crowned with a mass of snow-white hair above firm black brows and immense dark eyes. She had a massive chin and but for the extraordinary lively serenity of her expression could have seemed a most formidable, as she was a magnetic, figure. A verse of Wordsworth’s best describes her presence:

Love was really an “unerring light” to my grandmother and she used it to solve every problem as it came up. At the moment she was using it to solve grief, and to infect us all with her own courage.

I think she deeply felt the loss of her life-long partner; but for Grandpapa, I am sure, the greater tragedy would have been for him to return. He had—dear, kind, firm little figure that he was—and stoutly as he held his place in the memory of all who knew him—outlived his usefulness and given, except to one or two of us in his own family circle, all that he came into the world to give. One of his hymns still shines out in the American Hymn book with a peculiar felicity. He was seventy years old when he died, dying with as little trouble to anyone else as he had always lived.

For the last twenty years of his life, my grandmother had become the leading figure in his household. He had not been unkindly deposed by her; his wishes and his words were always respected but he was outside the picture of her great public life. It could not be otherwise. The world needed from her what he was powerless to give. Her presence was of such dynamic significance that it was impossible to overlook it; with all four sons their mother’s work came first; and any statement or stricture of my grandfather’s was often unheard or roughly pushed aside.

Nothing but the fact that both my grandparents had framed their actual lives on the Gospels could have made the situation run as smoothly as it did; sometimes my grandfather was querulous and peevish and sometimes my grandmother tossed him aside as an avalanche sweeps its path clear of obstacles, but fundamentally both were kind and true to each other and to the virtues they always tried to practise. So that with humility, patience, generosity and kindness they had made of their long married life, in spite of this switch of leadership, a pleasant and kindly business. Now it was over and my grandfather lay at rest in the small green island of his forefathers, while my grandmother pursued her larger way, lonely but unhindered, with a continent for her ever widening activities.

Probably the two who missed him most were his homesick daughter-in-law and the youngest of his grand-daughters, to whom his quiet presence had always seemed “port after stormy seas.”

A tremendous change was, I now found, in front of me. Miss H. with rosy little Nelly had vanished into limbo. I was to go at once to boarding school in New York City.

Perhaps Wilmett’s hand was the firmest behind this separation; but my mother, having visited the Clewer Sisters while in England, had been deeply interested to hear of a boarding school run by a branch Sisterhood of St. John the Baptist in 17th Street. The thought that I could be companionated by Anglican Nuns and brought up in a High Church atmosphere, no doubt greatly influenced my mother’s willingness to part with me. Except for her strange unfairness to my sister Mary, my mother had no favourites. Wilmett was her prop and stay; George was her boy and her baby; and I was a sort of fantasy child, an escape to my mother for all her dreams. It was a sacrifice for her to give up my active worship and daily companionship but it was a sacrifice she willingly accepted, partly because she loved me enough to see the harm my constant friction with Wilmett did to us both, and also because, in a sense, she made the escape with me into her romantic love for the Catholic Church. I don’t know that she exactly wanted me to become a nun, but if I had done so, I know she would have gloried—and shared—in my vocation.

Strangely enough, Uncle George, who was passionately Protestant, had so great an influence over both my parents that they gave their consent to a curious interview between us which took place at my grandmother’s before I was sent to school.

I had never seen my Uncle George so upset and agitated. He paced up and down the room while I sat on a window seat in awe-stricken silence, trying to take in what lay behind all this anxiety and fervour. I must, he began by telling me, of course respect my parents’ wishes and, since they wanted me to go to this convent school, I must go there; but he had received their permission to point out its dangers to me.

The real danger was the Church of Rome. Never had I heard so dire a tale of perfidy, tyranny and general under-cutting of the Christian Faith as Rome and all her misled children were putting over upon an innocent world; and what Rome was trying to do to the world, I gathered these devout-looking but menacing women, who called themselves Anglican Sisters, were about to do to me. I was definitely jeopardized; this precipice lurked before me; only my conscience, my individual and innate sense of right and wrong—if that—could possibly save me from disaster. Would I make him a solemn promise before I passed out of the sane freedom of my home into this hot-bed of spiritual infection—if any of these Sisters or their Priests tried to make me believe in Roman doctrines, would I immediately let him know?

He then told me what were the chief and most mischievous of these doctrines, asking me with tragic intensity what I thought of them: the Mass, Confession, the idolatry of prayers to the Virgin and Saints. Would I be prepared against them and could I honestly repudiate them now for his immediate relief and satisfaction? I could and did. I thought the idea of the Mass, as he presented it, hideous; I did not want to go to Confession; I saw that since I could pray direct to God, prayers to the Virgin and Saints were redundant.

I was indeed, as always, very much impressed by my Uncle George, without being really certain what I was being impressed about.

I know now that what impressed me was his basic sincerity. He spoke to me as mind to mind, ignoring the years between, ignoring his own great knowledge and my wide sea of ignorance. I was out on the same ocean, and he cared for nothing except that I should be guided by the same compass and lit by the same stars.

But the influence that underlay all influences with me was my mother’s. She loved these Sisters and their creed. To her, all that to Uncle George was anathema, was pure spiritual romance.

I did not tell her what Uncle George had said to me, nor did she ask me. She had no need to ask me, for well she knew that what she wanted me to feel went deeper than anything my Uncle George wanted me to think.

I think that between eleven and twelve years of age is a very good time in a girl’s life for her to leave her home. I know that until I went to boarding school, I was without a sense of separate personality. The family practise seemed to me the law of life. I had my private pangs and resentments but their colouring was that of my home and I failed to envisage a life outside it.

It would have been hard for me at any time to leave home, but what made it particularly hard was that both physically and mentally, at eleven years of age, I had reached a precocious maturity.

This early physical maturity was, no doubt, due to my ceaseless and inexpert acrobatic tendencies. I jumped my own height, over 5 feet 6 inches, and ran like a deer. This perpetual straining of myself to reach some hidden goal was, of course, excessive, but had I had any gymnastic or sport training I might well have learned something useful without doing myself any permanent physical damage. Unfortunately, the body, its habits and its powers, were practically taboo in the minds of my parents. The soul was what they thought needed all the care and teaching that could be procured for it.

In consequence, I suffered with exaggerated intensity and at seventeen had to have a serious operation. From eleven until I had this operation I was hardly without pain or physical inconvenience of one kind or another.

The wisdom of my doctor Uncle Frank and the kindly discipline of Sister Elise Monica largely prevented me, however, from becoming invalid minded. My uncle insisted on special care being taken of me at certain times and Sister Elise Monica, the Sister Superintendent of St. John the Baptist, braced me to bear what little inconvenience I had.

As far as I can remember, she only spoke to me once of my physical infirmity during the whole time I was under her care.

“You have a physical handicap,” she then said to me in her usual abrupt manner, “which I shall not overlook—but I expect you to overlook it! Because of this trouble, however hard you work, you cannot win the highest marks in your weekly reports. I shall not expect this of you! If you win ninety per cent of what you should, I shall be wholly satisfied. It will be the same to me as if you had won one hundred per cent without it; but if you should consider that since you cannot win top marks you need not try to win ninety per cent, I should be greatly disappointed in you.”

Any report over ninety per cent was made out in red ink; any that was under or on the exact mark, in black. I think if Sister Elise Monica had not made it plain to me that I could win the true value of these precious red reports—even if they had often to be made out for me in black—I should have made a very poor thing of my nearly two years’ education. But from the moment I came under her care, the real joy in learning, the feeling that I was able to master something that would be of use to me in after life, took hold of me.

I actually started my school life so ill that it seemed doubtful if I should even get there; and it was arranged for me to stop off for a few days with my grandmother to be under my uncle’s care. However, my mother begged me to spare her a second good-bye, or any further postponement of our parting, so I made the necessary effort and went straight to school. Sister Elise Monica received us, and while she kept my mother to talk to, she sent me straight to bed, accompanied by a tall fair girl called Elise who was kind to me.

“I can’t stay,” she explained, when we had reached the neat little cell, which I could stretch across with an arm from wall to wall; “just undress and get into bed and Sister A. will come and look after you. She’s the one that most of the little girls like; the one you’ve just seen is the Head; some of us like her best but most of the girls prefer Sister A. You’ll see why when she comes.”

Elise vanished. I put my clothes away and got into bed. It was very solemn, very strange, terribly silent. I shouldn’t see my mother again. I hadn’t really seen Sister Elise Monica—I had only been conscious of the parting with my mother.

At last Sister A., whose name I will not mention as she left the Sisterhood a few years later under a cloud, knocked at my door. She glided in softly and gazed down at me in a way I didn’t like. She was yellow-looking with a long upper lip, but she had beautiful dark eyes of which she made the utmost use. I took an instinctive and overpowering aversion to her—which might more dangerously, as with many other girls it was, have been an instinctive and overpowering affection. Her manner was caressingly tender and she set out to make me cry. I was in great pain and appallingly homesick. At the moment I should have liked nothing better than to weep wildly in almost any arms; but I suspected that Sister A. was trying to break me down so that she could, by her sympathy and compassion, gain a lasting influence over me. I therefore fell back on my habit of resistance to tears; and Sister A. was unable to win from me any emotional response.

I did not allow myself the release of a single tear until the security and darkness of the night put me beyond the danger of intrusion.

I saw Sister Elise Monica next morning; but she did not make any immediate or great impression upon me. She was short, brusque and severe in manner; her eyes twinkled unexpectedly, and when they twinkled her face changed and her rather rough red cheeks and steady blue eyes began somehow to remind me of Gibby. I think I very soon realized that here was a nature that could always be trusted—a human being who, however severe and undemonstrative, would never let any child down. This impression deepened with every day I was under her care, nor did it cease when I was taken far away and never saw her again. Long years afterwards, at many crises in my life, those keen eyes seemed once more to seek my own without pity but with determined expectation.

I soon found that there was an enormous difference between her and Sister A. who was her next in command. If you did anything wrong or earned a “conduct mark,” Sister Elise Monica never let it pass; but to little breakages of unserious rules which could easily get you “order marks” she was often curiously blind. For instance, it would have merited a “bad conduct mark” had you dared to enter another girl’s room; and Sister Elise Monica would have seen that you got it; but it only deserved an “order mark” if you spoke to another girl in the passages or on the stairs; and Sister Elise Monica cleared her throat loudly, and wore creaky shoes, so that she never came upon you unawares in passages or pounced, as Sister A. did, to give to any girl, not one of her favourites, an “order mark” for speaking to another; while she was known to let her favourites break even a serious rule and keep their conduct sheet clean of marks.

This was only one of the many differences between these two Sisters. I was afraid of Sister Elise Monica but only because I deeply respected her. I never dreamed of any intimacy with her, nor did the question of like or dislike come up in my mind. Still, if I had been in any serious trouble I should have gone to her. Sister A. on the other hand, I feared far more deeply. It seemed to me that almost any evil might come up and hit you while she was about. She had a band of devoted adherents and an atmosphere of emotion and secrecy, of special privilege and curious religious fervour, hung about this band. They were under obligation never to mention what she told them or what were the religious observances which she permitted them to share with her. Later on I was to possess as my greatest friend one of her special band, but not even Claude would tell me what were the secrets that bound her to Sister A. Each of us had a Sister as religious instructress, and Sister A. taught the younger girls music and played the organ in chapel. All our other lessons were given to us by young and extremely able teachers from the outside world. The Sisters lived their own lives, as far as we were concerned, in secrecy in their own community house next to the school, and only a few carefully selected Sisters came into our sphere. We went to chapel twice a day, morning and evening, in blue veils; and there we saw all of them in the choir, including the Mother Superior who, if anything went hideously wrong, or at stated school festivals, we might see awesomely, face to face. I only remember one fearful occasion on which she asserted her supremacy, when the youngest girl in the school, called Georgie, wickedly stole a flower intended for the altar.

This was a crime so appalling that no-one short of the Mother Superior could deal with it, and Georgie was led before the Presence; but curiously enough Georgie was not at all alarmed; nor did the end of the world come upon that occasion. It did come, however, when Georgie once again broke the laws of the universe by slipping a footstool into the aisle just as the chaplain, with closed eyes, marched up it from the sacristy to the altar. She had to see whether his eyes were really shut or not. He stepped over the footstool so we knew what many of us had already suspected, that he had half shut his eyes in order to look holy or perhaps to avoid the sight of us.

This time Georgie got into severe trouble, and was absent for the entire day. A year later, Georgie, that reprobate of twelve years, became absent for ever. She died very quickly and suddenly from pneumonia and the Sisters, it seemed, horrified as they had all been at her rebellious nature, were red-eyed and strangely sad at her swift parting—and as for the flowers for the altar—we knew that this time she could have had them all.

My acute homesickness was very soon dissolved by the interest and curiosity which I took in the new world round me.

Never before had I stood alone on the threshold of a society of contemporaries. I was both thrilled and bewildered by the variety of opportunities presented to my vivid imagination by the sight of so many strange human beings. The School and the Community formed two worlds—connecting at occasional points but more deeply sundered, one from the other. The world of the Sisters was secret, consecrated and romantic; most of them belonged to God; very little of them belonged to us—and yet their consecration and the silent rule under which they faithfully served had a strong unconscious influence upon us all. How ardently I peered and poked at the veil that hung between us; how awe-inspiring I found those gliding black forms and silent upright figures, kneeling up as straight as walking sticks in the seven-lamped glow of our chapel! How I longed to know exactly what it felt like to be a nun! How withdrawn were they really from the world we lived in? How much nearer the Invisible? What were their rewards—and what their penalties for having made such great sacrifices? Their silences were terrible. Almost any question touching on their vocation received the rebuke of silence.

The Sisters were aloof and austere, and their very gentleness had an aweing quality. They were severe without being angry; and any plane they put one in seemed very much lower than their own.

Only four of them lived with us all the time: Sister Elise Monica who was our Superior; Sister A. who acted sometimes as her deputy and who taught the younger girls music; Sister Raphael Grace; and Sister Agnes Maria. The last two were very much younger and, as a matter of fact, were still novices; but we called them “Sister,” and though there was a slight difference in their veils, they were arrayed in much the same long, flowing lines of black and white.

Sister Agnes Maria was my religious instructress and I became extremely attached to her. She was small, neat and upright with a clear, beautiful skin and very fine and kind blue eyes. I fear I gave her a good deal of trouble. Sister Elise Monica once told me that Sister Agnes Maria had begged to be relieved of her charge because of the fearful persistency and awkwardness of my questioning; and my impious refusal to take “the Church teaches” as an answer. “Perhaps it would be better,” Sister Elise Monica said with her icy twinkle, “if you reserved these difficult doctrinal questions for me, if you really consider them of sufficient importance to your spiritual welfare! Perhaps, however, you may discover, if you think the matter over carefully, that you can be quite as good as you are at all likely to be, without these questions taking up quite so much of your time or Sister Agnes Maria’s.” The hint was enough. I begged Sister Agnes Maria not to give me up and she agreed to give me a further trial. I promised from now on, whenever she said “The Church teaches,” I would stop asking questions.

I became less sceptical as I became more romantic; but the ultimate question of all religions, why revelation should be accepted and upon what evidence, never ceased to trouble me.

What was really most astonishing to me and so pleasant that it lit my whole school career was the discovery that I could hold my own among my school companions. Pursued always by a deep sense of inferiority, it was highly agreeable to me to win any evidence of social success. I liked and was liked by all the girls of my own age—with one exception—and I reached an even higher pinnacle than this—the elder girls soon showed a pleasant and kindly interest in me.

I was just at the age to be drawn, as by a magnet, to their graceful and alluring personalities—creatures of dynamic possibilities and endlessly varying charms; a gallery, as it were, of potential Wilmetts without any antagonism. Poems filtered through into my dreaming mind, expressing the charms not only of one, but I think at least a dozen charmers.

This writing of poems was a delightful pastime though I fear it interfered with my lessons. To catch each girl’s separate spell, to catalogue her charms, to find words to express the excitement and felicity of her presence became my habitual and, for a while, secret occupation. However, Lena, who shared my desk and made a point of discovering my secrets, soon exposed this one. I was terrified when I discovered that the elder girls knew; but strangely enough, I found these young Olympians were not angry with me. On the contrary, they were excited and even pleased by these tributes to their charms. My poems became a source of entertainment to them as well as to myself. What made them perhaps of greater significance than they were worth, was that I neither would nor indeed could, write them to order. I had to be charmed first.

In spite of the time I expended upon this doubtful avocation, I began to enjoy my lessons more and more. Our teachers were keen and fresh from college and I had plenty of time in which to prepare my work, and no alternative duties. Hitherto I had been a shamefully bad mathematical student but to my astonishment and delight I took to mathematics, as taught by Miss Macconochie, as a kitten takes to cream. She had gorgeous, Venetian red-gold hair, a pink and white complexion, and a tall and graceful presence. Sunshine came into a room with her and left at her departure. All mathematical problems took on a remarkable clarity in her presence. I soon became the best blackboard exponent of problems in the class, the answers flew into my head as pat and smooth as butter. The work I prepared in her absence, however, went less well, and alas! when the acid test of an examination in arithmetic took place, I fell from top to bottom of the class; and it was discovered that I had understood nothing at all. I can only suppose that I was an unconscious thought reader and that so long as Miss Macconochie was in the room I was using her brain for my solutions. Once she was removed, so were the solutions.

She also taught, and taught extremely well, “English” under which heading came grammar, composition, and rhetoric. This work I did on a more genuine basis, and though only older girls were taught rhetoric, I was eventually allowed to join their class when it was found that I actually knew the answers to questions they had failed in. I only wish I had had more of such teaching and over a longer period.

I was, however, a good deal less fortunate in my music. Sister A. taught me; and she made it quite plain that, as I had had the temerity not to adore her, I was a castaway. I believe I have a genuine taste for music. I was really fond of it and anxious to learn, and if I could read a piece by sight I could play it, and a good deal better, by heart. Sister A., however, treated me and my efforts with a cool disdain; nothing I did ever pleased her and she gave me the lowest marks she could. She sat by my side, icy and discouraging; and any remarks which came from her were reproofs. One dreadful day when I had stumbled through Mendelssohn’s “Venetian Boat Song” without actual wrong notes for the first time, she said, “You can play this piece at the Musical next week.”

“Musicals” were recurring concerts to which came the Mother Superior and all her flock; even relations of girls who lived in New York were permitted to attend; and all the staff were present by obligation. Not all of us performed, but we all dressed up, sat in a row at the back of the stage fronting the audience, and ate ice cream and angel cake, after it was all over.

As a new girl I had not supposed that I should be asked to perform at all. If I ever had to, I had naturally expected that I might be called upon to recite, which, even though it would terrify me, would be within my powers.

I stared at Sister A., shocked into an agony of terror. “But I don’t know this piece!” I cried. “I can only just play it! Oh Sister A., I can’t possibly play on the piano before people. Really and truly I can’t!”

“You can do what you are told, I suppose,” Sister A. said coldly, “as well as any other child.”

So desperate was my plight, and so short a time stretched between me and this ordeal by public torture that I took what courage I still possessed and decided to appeal to Sister Elise Monica in person.

At a certain hour of the day, any child had leave to speak to her about anything really important. She sat in her office and we had only to knock at the door; but of course none of us did, except at the last gasp. Goaded by desperation, I sought for permission, knocked at her door at the appointed hour, and heard her clear incisive voice announce “Come in.”

I stood before her sick, silent and, I should think, visibly trembling. I now believe that Sister Elise Monica loved me; it never occurred to me that she did, but I was told, later on, that she had said so, long after I had left school, though even now I expect I should tremble if asked to face her. “Well,” she said with her usual disinfectant sharpness, “what is it you want, child?” As it would have been more frightening not to want anything, having entered her sanctum, I told her the truth. “I can’t play at the Musical,” I said. “I’ve only just learned the ‘Venetian Boat Song’ and I don’t really know it. Besides, I can’t play properly anyhow! If I have to do anything, might I recite?”

Sister Elise Monica, when in doubt, rubbed her long sharp nose, and she rubbed it now. “I have been told,” she said at last, “that you have made a good deal of improvement in your music lately. I think we must be prepared to take Sister A.’s word for it. She thinks you can play the ‘Venetian Boat Song.’ As for reciting instead, if you suppose that you can do that well, that would seem to me a reason why there is no particular need for you to do it.” I thought this form of reasoning silly but of course I couldn’t say so. The Sisters always thought you should not do what you enjoyed doing; and should do what you didn’t. However, I saw that I was doomed and said nothing more. If I had to play at the Musical, I was quite sure that I should die, but it would be useless to try to convince Sister Elise Monica that I had no other alternative than death, to doing what I was told.

“Well,” she said, rubbing her nose again, after a still longer pause, “if that’s all you’ve got on your mind, child, you can go. If it would be any help to you, you can have an extra half-hour’s practise a day; I’ll arrange for it on your schedule and take off something else. Just do the best you can; it’s what we’ve all got to do; and we can’t any of us do any better.”

I was too busy contriving my premature death to pay much attention to this consolatory remark, but I remembered it, as I think I have remembered everything Sister Elise Monica ever said to me; and I was grateful for the extra half-hour’s practice.

I ate almost nothing for the few days before the Musical and slept badly. When I did sleep I had nightmares of such appalling ferocity that even my waking thoughts were preferable. I literally thought of nothing else except what lay before me. I doubt if a condemned murderer dreads his execution as greatly as I dreaded that Musical.

The day broke. I think it must have been winter; and I know that it was dark. We dressed in our Sunday best, feeling like sacrificial lambs arrayed for slaughter, for by now every girl performer was as frightened as I was.

One girl—how I envied her—was to recite a poem called “The Briar Rose.” I knew every word of it by heart and used to prompt her, without the book, while she was learning it. Before the curtain rose, we took our seats in a row at the back of the stage.

The nuns processed in, with their usual precision, behind the Mother Superior. This was the first time—when the curtain rose—that I had seen them all face to face; but they might have all had one face—for all I noticed at the moment of their differences. Only the Mother Superior, sitting in an armchair, with the sisters streaming away on each side of her in the shape of a horseshoe, I could distinguish, terror or no terror. She had a far longer and sharper nose than even Sister Elise Monica.

The girl who recited “The Briar Rose” did it a great deal better than I had expected. She only left out one verse, and as it was a long ballad poem of unselfish suicide, she could have dispensed with several other verses without anyone’s noticing it.

The eldest girl in the school played Chopin. It sounded wonderful to me, though I don’t know how it would have sounded to Chopin. The Mother Superior thought highly of it. She not only clapped her hands, but actually smiled—the only time I ever saw her smile; and all the nuns smiled just after her.

I was about six numbers down the programme and each number had done better than the last. My name was called. Sister A. stood before me; was there in her eyes a malignant light? My feet moved. I reached the piano. Sister A. adjusted it to my height. I sat down. For a moment she stood beside me in that tremendous void, telling the audience that I was about to play the “Venetian Boat Song” by Mendelssohn. But was I about to play it? It is a mistake to suppose that your heart is on your left side when you are really frightened. It is between your chest and throat and it tries—as you yourself are trying—to get out.

I played the first two bars. They seemed to go quite well. I knew the notes were right; but I saw nothing beyond the first two bars; so I played them again; and there was still nothing. An aching void stretched before me; no sound came from it; my fingers stiffened into icicles—I could not play those first two bars again.

Sister A. had left my side; now she came back. She asked what was the matter with me; but I knew that she was my enemy. Speech was as impossible to me by now as the “Venetian Boat Song.” I simply turned round on the piano stool and looked at the Mother Superior. It was, I felt, up to her to act. I could do no more.

The nuns fluttered mysteriously to and fro. The Mother Superior beckoned to Sister A. and spoke to her in a firm whisper. Sister A. came back to the piano, without looking at me, and led me back to my seat. I was told, by the kindest of the teachers, not to mind.

I sat it out quite quietly with burning cheeks, tasting the sharpness of death for the rest of the concert; then I asked to be excused, and crept off to my darkened cell where I could lie face downwards on my bed “and weep away this life of care.”

Sister Elise Monica sent the oldest girl in the school, Amy Irvine, a particular friend of mine, up to me. This was an unprecedented concession, for she was actually told to go into my room and do what she could to comfort me.

I acknowledged with gratitude both her presence and her kindness, but I was far beyond the help of any human aid.

Before she went to bed, Sister Elise Monica herself came into my room. I knew her footstep but I could not look up into her face. For a long time she said nothing, and then she said even more dryly than usual, “You’ll feel better in the morning.” To my surprise I believed her; but it was not yet morning.

Eventually I slept, and Sister Elise Monica was justified. I did feel better when I woke. Death receded rapidly and disgrace became a distant cloud. To my great relief, and I think by command, no-one spoke to me about my disaster except Sister A. and she simply said, “I think you could have played the ‘Venetian Boat Song’ had you chosen to play it!”

Birds, no doubt, could get away from snakes if they chose. The trouble is there comes a moment when choice—which is largely an affair of courage—fails to act and terror, the worst of dictators, steps in and takes its place.

The chief handicap of my childhood and indeed of my later life, until I learned that it could be remedied, was that I was at the mercy of other people’s opinion of me. I had no authentic existence apart from it. A good opinion sent me and what gifts I had, soaring; a bad opinion, and I sank beyond the reach of any plummet’s sounding.

I think I had no free opinion of myself at all apart from the opinion of others. I might have learned it, had I had the courage, from either Sister Elise Monica or Uncle George; for they both possessed that independence of human judgment which gives freedom. But I belonged to the unfortunate race of spoilt children—too over-sensitized by possessive love, too fondly praised, so that I wanted to please, as if to give pleasure was a test of moral worth. I had not learned that real worth—nine times out of ten—gives pain; nor that pain may be as salutary as pleasure to the human soul.

Sister Elise Monica never made any comment to me upon my failure, but, mysteriously, I never had another music lesson from Sister A. I was told she was too busy to continue to teach me, and I was handed on to a very pleasant lady from outside, who made me feel that music was within the reach even of my stumbling fingers.

Out of the pageant of the Olympians, one of the older girls stood, in my eyes supreme.

Beau Bryan came from the far West and rode horses bareback. Perhaps she did not break in bucking broncos at the risk of her life; but I saw her doing it. She had black curls, marvellous for tossing. Her eyes were dare-devils, blue-green, and easy to set sparkling; but it was her wide generous mouth that I loved best. Her lips were a deep natural pink—it was before the days of lipstick—and they opened on rows of small blue-white teeth, regular as lumps of sugar.

She sat opposite me at table, and it was my special joy when her smile—a most beautiful and kindly spectacle—deepened till dimples appeared in either cheek; and her teeth showed.

I never dared to speak to her; but my best and longest poems were written to Beau Bryan. Whatever ballads I learned by heart—that of the strenuous lady who forcibly detained the curfew bell or that of Kate Barlass who won her name by using her arm as a bolt against King James’s murderers—had Beau Bryan’s face and borrowed her erect free carriage.

Even Joan of Arc, though the Sisters told me she was Sainted and not to be compared to mere human beings, had, whenever I thought of her, the same habit of tossing black curls while she climbed ladders, to breach walls, in order to rout my fellow countrymen.

It was not long before Beau Bryan heard of my poems and stopped me in the passage to ask if it were true that they were about her. I stammered that it was, but that the poems were wholly unworthy of their subject. However, she insisted upon seeing them and even asked for copies to keep.

She spoke to me often after that if we met in the passage and always smiled whenever her eyes met mine. She was sixteen and I was barely twelve, so that this was as far as our relationship carried.

I doubt if I wished for any deeper intimacy. I preferred my girl deities at a distance, so that the paltriness of fact could not contradict the licence of my dreams.

Beau Bryan was absorbed in a romantic friendship with our new French mistress who, incredibly young and extremely lovely, had taken the place of the dragon with black caterpillar eyebrows, to the relief of the entire school.

We learned later that it had cost the Sisters a good deal of anxious consultation before they dared accept Mademoiselle’s excellent testimonials.

There she was at any rate with an impeccable French accent, and an enchanting smile. I do not think she was a good teacher but we all adored her and tried hard to learn whatever she saw fit to teach us.

Beau Bryan gave Mademoiselle Georgette her instant protection and fellowship; and this developed on both sides into an ardent and warm-hearted friendship of a kind that the Sisters frowned upon most severely.

Their relationship was far too open and above board to be in the least harmful, but the Sisters were unaware of what constituted innocence, and lumped all emotion into the category of “danger,” so they did their best either to break it up or drive it under.

They were unsuccessful, until Sister Elise Monica wisely suggested that rather than force them apart they should be asked to widen their friendship, in order to take in one of the older girls. Beau Bryan agreed to this, and accepted Elise who had a weak face and a weaker conscience as a third. Elise had always adored Beau Bryan and now adored Mademoiselle as well; and neither of them minded whether Elise was there or not.

Elise was deeply religious. She took, to the fullest extent allowed by the girls, the whole gamut of religious experiences. She went constantly to Confession; she never omitted to make her Communion on Saints day as well as Sundays. She fasted more severely than we were obliged to fast, and was allowed to attend a yearly Retreat in the Community House. Elise was not considered by the rest of us—nor, I fancy, by Sister Elise Monica—as the best girl in the school. The Chopin-player, Ethel Pierce, carried off, in our eyes, the highest moral honours. She was the strictest scholar and the most duty-loving and conscientious girl in the school. She would have scorned to tell even the whitest of lies and I doubt if she ever had even an order mark against her, let alone the breaking of a conduct rule; but probably next to her, in current moral values, stood the chapel-loving Elise. Since Elise was now the partner of all the spare time that Mademoiselle and Beau Bryan had at their disposal, the Sisters could at length draw breath.

But Beau Bryan did not ride bareback horses for nothing; adventure was the breath of her life, and this was fire to Mademoiselle’s tow. Elise, thrilled to the core by a sense of sin, was not unwilling to share any adventure that need not be found out.

Secretly, Beau Bryan managed to smuggle her brother’s clothes into the school direct from a bribed postman; and attiring herself in them, Beau Bryan, with Mademoiselle on her arm, roamed the New York streets on spring evenings; and on one occasion at least, they even went to a respectable hotel and danced.

Elise rarely, if ever, accompanied them, but she was their only confidante and stole the portress’ key on her way back from evening chapel, hiding it under her veil, so that they could get out after the portress had vanished for the night.

Suddenly Elise’s conscience began to tick. Gradually it was borne in upon her that her soul was in mortal peril unless she gave away her friends. I think she hoped to do this without Beau Bryan finding out how the leak had been sprung. Sister A., to whom Elise confided everything, promised her this special protection; but as soon as Sister A. had the whole story pat, she went with it to Sister Elise Monica, perhaps not disagreeably unmindful of the fact that Beau Bryan had always preferred Sister Elise Monica to herself; and Sister Elise Monica insisted on everything being brought out into the light of day.

The whole school took violent sides for or against the conscience of Elise. For myself, I had no doubts whatever; I felt as Huckleberry Finn felt—if I had a “yaller dog” like Elise’s conscience, I would have “pizened it.” The bomb burst. Elise’s confession became public property. Elise came away from her interview with Sister Elise Monica, without the martyr’s crown, purple in the face and sobbing convulsively.

All of us now knew roughly what would happen. Beau Bryan might or might not be expelled; but the worst would certainly happen to Mademoiselle. None of us, however, had anticipated the full severity of her doom. Mademoiselle Georgette fell as into an oubliette of God. She was never, by any one of us, seen again.

A severe and unapproachable Sister stood outside her door as a sentinel night and day for three days and nights until final arrangements were made for her. Secretly during the hours of darkness, Mademoiselle was driven from our door. One day there was no sentry outside her room—and no Mademoiselle inside it.

I should not have liked to be Elise and have had to meet those blazing eyes of Beau Bryan’s, nor to have had to listen to her withering scorn. Sister A.’s girls—to a man—approved of Elise’s conscience, but all the rest of us, even the immaculate Ethel Pierce, were bitterly and scornfully against it. The whole school was for Beau Bryan’s acquittal, and with bated breath watched her go alone, the day after Mademoiselle’s disappearance, into Sister Elise Monica’s office.

No-one ever knew what took place between Beau Bryan and Sister Elise Monica. They were closeted together for at least an hour while we all trembled. Beau Bryan came out as she had gone in, close-lipped, tearless, with angry, haunted eyes. To our unanimous relief she stayed on. It was a long time before the anger died out of her and, when it went, it seemed to me that some of her dauntless gaiety went with it.

Sister Elise Monica gave her no punishment, for well she knew that Beau’s punishment was what had happened to Mademoiselle.

Beau’s fun had cost Mademoiselle her reputation and her job. So at least we all supposed at the time. But knowing Sister Elise Monica better now, I think perhaps it hadn’t. Perhaps the reason why Mademoiselle was closeted for three mortal days in her room was in order that something else should be found for her. Severity of a dire kind I am sure was shown her, for after all she had betrayed a trust; but Sister Elise Monica would not have forgotten that Mademoiselle was only twenty-one, and a homesick stranger. Nor would she have doubted on whom the real responsibility for the adventure lay. Beau Bryan was a dynamic, forceful girl, while Mademoiselle was pliant and gentle as a flower.

I am sure now that Mademoiselle’s future was not so completely blasted by this one youthful escapade as we all thought at the time; but for days afterwards we all went about hushed “as at a funeral.”

I was enthralled by my school life. In addition to my free communication with my contemporaries and to the fact that I really enjoyed my studies, and the new use of my mind on them, the Sisters themselves fascinated me. They were full of mystery—their prayers, their long black veils, their soft, stern manners, their sacrifices, and their spiritual compensations were a continual romance. They had a world of their own, shared with the Invisible. Yet slender links—the chapel, our blue veils, our ordered silences—bound us to them. We, too, had our prayers; we, too, could struggle at the feet of an invisible God; we, too, could imagine ourselves, and in moments of exaltation very probably did, as one with the Eternal. My home life never became less dear to me; but it had receded. Even my mother, in spite of her short though frequent letters, seemed very far away. The only member of my family who stood out at this time and became more real to me was my father. He came to see me quite often and took me to my grandmother’s on holidays. I had never seen him alone like this before, and he became extremely dear to me. The moment I heard his beautiful deep voice—and it was the kind of voice you did hear—even in a Sisterhood—I trembled with joy, and as soon as permission came, danced down the main staircase which we never used except to go to the Visitors’ Room, and into his arms.

There he would be in the stiff bare little Visitors’ Room with his tremendous black moustache and sparkling eyes, usually attired in a long yellow ulster. “Phyllis, are you quite sure your father is a Priest?” Sister Elise Monica once anxiously asked me, having seen the ulster, and who could blame her?

Out we slipped, arm in arm, from the cloistered school into the vivid noisy life of the New York streets, and for an hour or two I would hear and share our family records: the extraordinary news, for instance, that my sister Wilmett was to go for a whole year, perhaps longer, to stay with my English grandmother. She was to winter in Egypt, and then was to “come out.” She was to leave my ailing mother and the rampant George in the sole care of Mary, who was to shoulder these duties, added to her occasional hours of Latin and French, still superintended by Monsieur Vinot.

I don’t even now know quite whose was this tremendous decision, but Uncle Frank had been rightly disturbed for some time over the amount of work Wilmett at seventeen performed and the condition of her nerves, due to the constant friction she took part in and enlarged, between my father and mother. I think Uncle Frank believed that as long as Wilmett remained actively nursing my mother there was no chance of her recovery. An opportune letter from my Grandmother Fowler arrived, possibly inspired by her friend, Margaret Bottome (the other, the “real,” as we called her, grandmother), inviting Wilmett to make the trip and be her visitor expense free. Mother loved Wilmett far too well to stand in her light, and though Wilmett at first rebelled, all her thoughts and affections were bound up, like my mother’s, with England, so that she finally succumbed to the temptation. It was found by a London specialist who saw her on her arrival that Wilmett was on the verge of what used to be called a “decline.” In modern language, she was threatened with tuberculosis, and though with plenty of milk, rest, and freedom from care, she seemed quickly to pick up her old strength and vitality, the threat remained. It was difficult to think of our home without Wilmett for she was the pivot upon which everything turned; but Mary, undertaking her chief responsibilities, became a faithful drudge, and I fancy peace of a precarious but not unpleasant kind settled upon the Jamaica household.

Meanwhile, at school, after the formidable episode of Beau Bryan and Mademoiselle Georgette, we all became for a time extremely good. My confirmation was in sight, and I was led out at intervals for special religious instruction, either from a Sister alone or, more infrequently, to a downstairs room where the chaplain, who could never look us in the face, talked while gazing over our heads at the wall behind us, to a group of candidates, upon doctrinal matters.

These Confirmation Classes began by being extremely dull, but suddenly I pricked up my ears. What was the chaplain saying? Yes! He quite distinctly said it! He said that Confession was essential to salvation and that those who had been instructed in its sacramental values and refused to take part in it, could not expect to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. I asked him to repeat this statement. Sister Agnes Maria shuddered. He repeated it—with emphasis. Neither my father nor mother, who were previously instructed, went to Confession. I said, “Do you mean people who don’t go to Confession go to Hell?” The chaplain said he did.

I had, up to this moment, intended, in spite of Uncle George, to go to Confession as a preliminary to Confirmation. Now I quite swiftly knew I wouldn’t. Heaven, for me, was a place where I should be once more joined, this time for ever, to parents I had every reason to enjoy. I would not go there alone even if I could. Hell for all of us, or for none of us, should be my choice.

Sister Agnes Maria knew what she was in for. I said no more to the chaplain, but I fell upon her the moment I had the opportunity. “I won’t go to Confession,” I told her plainly, “so I can’t be confirmed. I don’t believe it is necessary for salvation, but if it is, I won’t go; and if it isn’t, I needn’t. Neither my father nor mother go to Confession.”

Sister Agnes Maria did her best. She tried to unwind herself from the chaplain’s statement without letting him down. But she was a truthful girl, and she could not deny what the chaplain had actually said; that was why I had made him repeat it. At length Sister Agnes Maria said, “You must see Sister Elise Monica, Phyllis, it is very dreadful you should be so obstinate, and I am sure you misunderstood what the chaplain really meant. What he said must mean ‘generally necessary for salvation.’ I daresay there are really good people, like your parents, who do not fully understand the greatness of the privilege and therefore will not be judged too severely for overlooking it.”

“They mustn’t be judged at all,” I said firmly, “if it isn’t necessary.”

I then saw Sister Elise Monica. There was no twinkle in her eyes. She looked extremely stern. “What is this I hear,” she demanded, “that you are rebelling against the chaplain’s teaching on Confession? I am astonished that you should put your ignorance against the knowledge of an instructed Priest. What is it you object to in his teaching?”

“If my father and mother are to go to Hell, I want to go too,” I explained falteringly. “I really do, Sister!”

She rubbed her nose. “There must be some mistake,” she said in a kinder voice. “We’ll see what he really did say! But you must not dream of giving up the sacrament of confession—or of refusing to be confirmed. That would be very wrong—and quite beside the point. Your parents do not go to Confession themselves, but they approve of it; and allow it in your case. Therefore, there can be no obstacle to it. As to their going to Hell, that, of course, is nonsense, and you should not get such foolish and extreme fancies into your head.”

“But he did say it,” I insisted. “I asked him to say it again to make sure he meant it! Sister Agnes Maria heard him say it.”

“Even chaplains can make mistakes sometimes,” Sister Elise Monica said rather grimly after a pause, “and children often do! Now that is enough. If I were you I should pray to be made more humble and more sensible. But I think,” she added with her sudden delightful smile, “that it is quite natural you should not wish to go to Heaven without your very good parents. Nor will there be any real necessity.”

I went away half relieved and half ashamed; but to my intense astonishment and to the relief of the whole school we never had another Confirmation Class with the chaplain. A few weeks later he vanished from the chapel and we saw him no more. He had never seen us. A dreadful rumour reached us, later substantiated, that he had gone over to Rome, taking two or three of the Sisters with him! Meanwhile, a very kind old clergyman from the Church of the Transfiguration accepted us in his Confirmation Class, and we heard no more about Hell.

Whether it was before or after this episode, I forget, but the school passed through a really severe moral crisis from which (though a shadow of it rested on us all for weeks) I escaped being involved, by luck rather than by virtue. All the school participated in the scandal, except Ethel Pierce and myself. Neither of us knew what was going on at all. We were kept in ignorance, no doubt for sufficient reasons: Ethel Pierce because she would most certainly have put a stop to it, and I because I might have been shocked or in some way or other reacted unfavourably to the episode. I am glad that I was never put to the proof for I have no reason to suppose that my moral nature would have been as strong as my social one.

Midnight feasts were the chief feature of this moral débâcle, but I think there were side issues of which I was never informed. There were three girls (a family of sisters) in the school, who had low tastes and completely amoral characters. Where they came from or what their home environment had been I have no idea. Two were older girls and one was my deskmate and contemporary. I fancy that since they were both rich and greedy, the idea of the feasts must have emanated from them. They certainly smuggled the food in and all the girls, except Ethel Pierce and myself, joined in the midnight orgies.

The first we knew about it was the terrifying appearance of Sister Elise Monica after morning prayers in the chapel. She swept into the schoolroom looking like the Day of Judgment. It was impossible not to know before she opened her mouth that something appalling and unusual in its nature had happened. She stood at the teacher’s desk looking down on us for a long time before she spoke; and guilty or innocent, we all trembled.

It was not so much her controlled anger that was terrifying—though she was angry; it was her heart-broken sorrow that the elder girls—and so many of them—had betrayed her trust. Like all people who are trustworthy themselves, Sister Elise Monica was unsuspicious by nature. She did not expect to be disappointed in those she trusted; and we all saw that she was bitterly disappointed in us. The Mother Superior had had to be told about it; and all the Sisters knew, and were praying hard about it. Our little world was shaken to its foundations.

Sister Elise Monica began by telling us that something had happened so much more serious than simple rule-breaking that she felt she must speak to us all together as a corporate body, equally and individually responsible for the moral standard of the school. I can’t remember what she then said to us, but I can remember the deep impression her talk made upon us. Afterwards she saw each one of us separately in her office. I daresay there was a good deal more to it than the feasts. A systematic, sly evasion of rules had begun to permeate the whole school, undesirable books were being passed about secretly among the older girls; the whole fabric of the school, built probably too strictly upon an artificial standard of behaviour, had begun to crack. Probably those three sisters were at the root of it. They openly scoffed at any form of religion and had no recognized standard of behaviour. I had always disliked my deskmate because she rifled my desk, read my poems without my leave, cribbed my work, and was a greasy child, physically repellent; but I certainly had no wish to see her expelled. However, expelled they all three were, though I am not sure whether this mischance took place as a direct result of the feasts or on account of something worse—I never knew what—whispered about mysteriously after their departure.

Morally, the expulsion—which was paraded rather than hushed up—was a less salutary warning than might have been expected. For all three sisters showed unmistakable signs of joy at being expelled. They wanted more to eat, less to do, and more fun; and were under the impression that almost anywhere else they would be more likely to get what they wanted.

Nor do I think this was mere bravado. I think they really hated the atmosphere of the school, which most of us loved. I fancy the very strenuous community life and the Sisters’ emphasis on religious duties did them as much harm as they—baffled and antagonized by what they could not understand—tried to do to the school.

Awful as was Sister Elise Monica’s public lecture to us, I heard afterwards that the private interviews were infinitely worse. Mine was very brief and not unpleasant. But I felt guilty, both during it and for a long time afterwards, because it was not more unpleasant.

Sister Elise Monica told me to sit down and quietly asked me what I had known about the facts she had just related to the school. I said, “Nothing.” And she said, “So I have understood from the older girls, but I wanted to hear it from your own lips. Well, my dear child, it is a very good thing when your comrades believe that you will not consent to evil and so do not even try to lead you into temptation; but do not forget there is an even better thing—and that is if you are led into temptation you then show the strength to resist it! I hope when this opportunity comes to you, as sooner or later it comes to us all, you will show this strength of resistance.” She looked at me long and searchingly but with great kindness and then dismissed me.

I knew in my heart of hearts that I had only got off by an accident and I did not like the feeling.

Ethel Pierce enhanced my discomfort by speaking to me for the first time in order to express her doubt of my integrity. I had a deep respect for Ethel Pierce. She was hard as a rock and close as a fish. I think she had what is known as a New England conscience. “Phyllis,” she said firmly, “I want you to tell me the truth! We are the only two girls in this school who were not invited to those feasts. I know why I wasn’t—I should have put a stop to them. But would you have even refused if you had been invited? Sister Elise Monica believes that you would—but I don’t!”

Again I shook a baffled head. How could I be sure—nor am I sure to this day—whether I would have refused or not? Like Tomlinson, I hung “twixt Heaven and Hell,” neither good enough to be sure of one, nor bad enough to tumble whole-heartedly into the other. But it certainly gave me a little more confidence in myself—then and later—to remember that Sister Elise Monica had believed in my powers of resistance.

As we approached Easter, the whole network of religion which the Sisters had woven round us, tightened. Not only were our imaginations stretched by fasts and meditations, towards the passion and death of Christ, but a specially chosen group of us were preparing to accept three sacraments—Confession, Confirmation and our First Communion during Holy Week.

What exact effect these holy mysteries might have on me was uncertain, but I felt sure that something important would take place.

Once I was a communicant I would automatically become a living part of Christ. Before this act took place I must be washed pure of my sins by the act of confession. Confirmation would be my final choice when I was to vow to uphold this new relationship upon which my new life was to be built. The Sisters made it all quite plain, and more than plain—emphatic.

I was barely twelve years old and there was something very satisfactory to the Sisters in my beginning my dedication so early under their careful auspices.

Unfortunately there was almost a row as to where the chief of these ceremonies was to take place. My father expressed a firm and decided wish that I should return home on Holy Thursday and receive the Eucharist in his church and from his hands on Easter Day. This was a terrible blow. The Sisters took a natural pleasure and pride in having their girls receive their First Communion at school in their own beloved and decorated chapel.

They themselves prepared us hour by hour for the great ceremony. The fasts, services, and instructions thickened through Holy Week, and by the time that Easter Sunday dawned, the blessed group of dedicated girls, guided and led to the chapel, were to the watchful Sisters, lambs saved and brought into the fold—on the very wings of their prayers. It was unthinkable that their youngest lamb—spiritually rather a stormy and difficult lamb, but now resigned and even eager for their shepherding, should just stray off at the last minute to a strange fold, and be ministered to by a peculiar shepherd who didn’t look like a priest, and who wore, on secular occasions, a yellow ulster.

They did everything they could to persuade my parents to give up their demand. Sister Elise Monica was, I am sure, at her most formidable. She had a private interview with my father. She wrote to my mother. At last she came to me, stern and sad. “Your father,” she told me with faithful exactitude, “wishes you to go home in order to take the sacrament at his church but he has left the final decision to yourself.” I saw she did not approve of his having left me to decide, but she said no more either before or after my decision.

I was torn between conflicting loyalties. I knew what, if I went home, I must give up. The beauty of the chapel, which at Easter was always turned into a garden of flowers; the hushed and mysterious comings and goings of the thrilled and thrilling Sisters; the loaded silences; the blessed sense of secrecy and privilege—of being linked for the first time with these secluded, dedicated saints—the fellowship of the girls who had been prepared with me—the incense, the lights, the mystery—as we knelt in our blue veils together, their consecrated hearts beating as hard as mine. Nowhere else would I find this shared ecstasy “withheld, occult, untrod.”

Was this religion—and was to bitterly grieve and disappoint my father not religion at all—but something else—on an altogether lower level? In my father’s simple church full of casual strangers there would be no feeling that Eternity was hovering intent upon us—yet I am glad to think I did not hesitate to disappoint even those schooled eyes which put no pressure on me, but which I well knew so longed for my participation in the school ritual. I said quite firmly to Sister Elise Monica, “I think I must go home,” and home I went; but not until the other two lesser sacraments had already taken place.

Confession was a great affair. I was most carefully prepared and I was extremely nervous; but strangely enough, I remember nothing whatever of what took place between me and my Father Confessor. It was not the chaplain—but a much older priest and one with whom I had had no previous discussions. So at least there was no ill will between us.

“You are an extremely blessed child,” Sister Elise Monica said, kissing me for the first time, on my way to the chapel. “You are to receive three sacraments in one week.” She herself fastened my blue veil, and Sister Agnes Maria led me to the chapel. I had my confession all written out, which must have been some comfort to me.

Confirmation took place on the day following; and it was a much more memorable, and no less terrifying affair.

We all went together with a teacher, not a Sister, to the Little Church Around the Corner. “Now I want you to understand,” Sister Elise Monica told us before our departure, “that whatever the custom of the church is, you must wear your new white veils which we have specially provided for you.” We promised that we would.

The very first thing that happened, in the big hushed vestry into which we had been duly led, and through the open door of which we saw a most impressive congregation filling the whole church, was that the Rector said we were not to wear our own white veils but mob caps provided by the church. Here they were, spread out on a table, nasty little things made of white tulle and elastic. The long, graceful white veils so carefully provided for us by the Sisters were to be discarded. The nervous and agitated teacher turned to me—I don’t know why, for I was the youngest of the candidates—“Phyllis,” she said despairingly, “I am afraid Sister Elise Monica will be most displeased if you don’t all wear your veils, but the Rector says you can’t! What shall we do?”

I looked at the Rector. He had bushy eyebrows and a long upper lip, but I did not think he was nearly as formidable as Sister Elise Monica; besides, I was used to clergy. “Please,” I said, “if I can’t wear my veil, I can’t be confirmed at all.”

The Rector looked at me with outraged severity; but he was expecting the Bishop. He did not want trouble, and what he saw in my eyes was trouble. He scowled fiercely at me, “You can’t mean you won’t be confirmed because you have to wear a cap?” he irately demanded. “I never heard of such nonsense! What difference can it make whether you wear a cap or a veil?” “We promised Sister Elise Monica to be confirmed in our veils,” I told him, though my legs shook. “So we just can’t be confirmed without them.” There was a long pause.

I was suddenly aware that all the girls meant to do exactly what I did. It was a queer and rather pleasant feeling. There may be more security in having authority with you; but there is a special pride in being the leader of a rebellion.

The Rector looked from me to the other girls; perhaps he also came to the conclusion that to lose one was to lose all. Suddenly he threw up his hand and gave way. “Wear the veils then!” he said testily, “but it will look most unseemly, and I know the Bishop won’t like it!”

We hastily tied on the symbols of our defiance; and followed our teacher into the seats reserved for us. I was, by special permission, to join my beloved friends, Betty and Georgie MacCord, already awaiting us. They were dressed in beautiful white party frocks trimmed with lace and wore long white gloves; both looked lovely but almost more lovely than a religious ceremony indicated. I tried to fasten my mind upon the service, but there was a good deal else to remember. Just when—and how—to go up the aisle towards the altar; exactly where to kneel before the Bishop; and when to cease to kneel. The Rector’s scowl, too, followed me into my prayers. Perhaps the Bishop would refuse to lay his hands on veils? The church was very hot and stuffy. My heart beat very hard and fast. I knew I could faint in church and I thought that perhaps on this occasion I might try. But then how upset the Sisters would be! I firmly wedged my mind back into my prayers. The Bishop entered—apparently quite calm—and took the service as if he had never heard of a choice between caps and veils. He was the famous Bishop Potter of New York, and I knew that my Uncle George thought a lot of him. His address was long, but I did not find it stimulating. Everything went, however, extremely well. I doubt if any other candidates had been trained in church behaviour as the Sisters had trained us. Betty and Georgie were frankly untrained and followed my every movement with flattering but unnerving solicitude. It was an anxious business, but it all went off exactly as Sister Elise Monica had arranged.

We knelt in an orderly way before the Bishop and made our short responses correctly. The Bishop laid his hands upon our heads with practised skill; but however hard I tried, I could not—and did not—feel any differently afterwards. Surely this was the moment for the Holy Ghost to function—the laying on of Hands was, as it were, His cue. If only I could have seen little flames break out upon our bowed heads; if only a dove could have flown in front of the altar!

But nothing pictorial took place. We filed back to our places. The church grew hotter and hotter; the scent of the lilies stronger and stronger. I began to think about the MacCords’ party to which I had been invited. Should I—or should I not—be allowed to attend it? Was it wrong of the MacCords to have a party upon so religious an occasion? Were lace, white Japanese silk, long gloves and ice cream correct parts of Confirmation? If not—why not? I tried to remember exactly what the Bishop had said. There had been too much of it—but Sister Elise Monica would want all the points. The service was suddenly over. I was not allowed to go to the party; but hustled back to school.

Uncle George stood at the door of the church and looked severely at me, as if to see what marks of Rome adorned my brow. My father couldn’t come because of Holy Week. A feeling of guilt stole over me because I had been confirmed and had not been able to feel anything. It was not even dispelled by Sister Elise Monica’s saying to me, “I am very glad, dear, that you remembered what you were told about the veils, and helped your teacher, by speaking up, to retain them. It would have been very dreadful indeed for you to have been confirmed in a cap.”

The last few months of my school life at St. John the Baptist’s were—I don’t know whether to say shone on, or over-shadowed, by my first great friendship. It is difficult to say where friendship ends and love begins in a child’s mind. I was unconscious of sex or sexual impulses, too deeply unconscious of them, perhaps, to understand the difference in quality between the friendship with Claude and any other friendship I had yet known. Yet all the wealth, the untutored bliss, the adventure and the kinship that the kingdom of another personality can bring, were in this friendship.

It was an unreal world that Claude and I entered upon, like Edgar Allan Poe’s “Kingdom by the Sea,” yet I think “the Angels above” could well have envied us, for the heart-lifting emotions that we experienced. Never before had I found a friend of my own. Our beloved MacCords, the little Wroughtons, the whole Coleridge family had all been family friends—chosen for us by our father and mother, and more or less equally shared, and put in their places for us by family opinion.

Claude was unknown to my family and I had an instinct that she would always remain unknown to them.

I had chosen her by myself, and round her I persistently wove all the romance of my being.

Like Yeats’s lover, I put my dreams under her feet.

I had, in fact, begun to dream about her long before I saw her.

Claude came from the South, and some months earlier had been sent for, to go to her mother’s death-bed. Sister A., whose special protégée she was, told us Claude had been very ill, and asked us on her return, to show her every sign of sympathy and care in our power, since reopening her life at school would be a terrible ordeal for her. We must all, she wound up by saying, pray for her.

I never expected to be able to do more than pray for Claude since I was one of the youngest and she one of the oldest girls, but I asked questions about her and was told that she was very much liked, and yet by being a Southerner, somehow “different” from the rest of the school.

Sister A. went to meet her and brought her back one gloomy, winter afternoon, almost lost in black, very small, and exquisitely made, pale with a thick creamy skin, like a heavy petalled flower. Her hair was black and so were her eyes. They looked very large and bright filled with unshed tears. Claude was not pretty, but she was just as sad as I had pictured her. Without sorrow myself, I ardently admired it in others and identified myself with it. In all the heaped-up woes of the sad universe, I felt sure, however, there was no sorrow so acute and irrevocable as the loss of a mother. Mine was my whole world to me and the ground under my feet, so that for any child who had lost a mother my sympathy was unbounded.

All the girls in the school were sorry for Claude but I think none of them was so sorry—so almost wrapped up in her sorrow—as I was.

Perhaps Claude felt this, too; perhaps being a Southerner among Northerners made her feel a special sympathy for an exiled English child; but for whatever reason, Claude stooped from the Olympian heights of her natural circle to my twelve-year-old insignificance, and made me her greatest friend.

We had very few opportunities to develop our deep affection, for if there was one thing the Sisters were more determined to suppress than any other, it was a special friendship; and if there was one kind of special friendship that they viewed with more dismay than another, it was any friendship between an older and a younger girl. Yet for some time no great notice was taken of ours. Sister A., who particularly enjoyed spying upon and breaking up any affection not directed towards herself, was satisfied that her own influence over Claude remained supreme, and knew that had she made any report of our friendship, Claude, as the elder girl, would have been the one to suffer most by it. Instead, Sister A. suggested that Claude should win my entire confidence (which indeed was already hers) and bring me over to the secret band of Sister A.’s disciples. This, however, Claude never succeeded in doing; for her sake I gave up all criticism of her idol, but I could never agree to like or seek the companionship of Sister A. My distaste only deepened and no doubt jealousy added to its strength.

Except for Sister A., there were no clouds upon my horizon. I woke every morning scheming how and where to meet Claude, and went to sleep at night to dream of her. As we were both quick-witted, we achieved against all odds, many isolated moments. We exchanged notes and messages and filled each other’s days with sparkles of the rapture that we felt would be unending, had we had greater opportunities for being together.

Claude was reckless by nature, and I was reckless by devotion so that we broke every rule that stood between us—surprisingly enough—without being discovered. We had one great advantage: Claude among the older girls, and I among the younger ones, were declared by secret ballot to be the two most popular girls in the school. We were therefore gladly given a good deal of undue support. Other girls watched doors for us, or signalled advancing danger, down passages.

There was no particular object in our stolen meetings except that little by little, listening entranced, I learned the whole marvellous history of Claude’s precocious Southern life. It was hardly a surprise to me, but it was a thrilling and never satiated absorption, to learn that Claude at sixteen was passionately pursued by dozens of stimulating suitors. She was even engaged to be married to four different Wills simultaneously, none of them knowing of the existence of this tie between Claude and the others. Her existence was hectic, and her life even at moments endangered by a great talent for intrigue and the constant assistance of a coloured mammy to keep all her suitors going at the same time, much in the manner of a skilled conjuror throwing into the air and catching dozens of whirling plates.

I did vaguely wonder why Claude should be engaged to four men at the same time, as ultimately she could only marry one, but Claude explained that she loved them all for different reasons; and doubted that more than one would be eligible when it came to the point of marriage. Probably the one she loved the most never would be eligible, because he was wild and drank. This Will immediately became my favourite, and I spent a good deal of time in suggestions for his reform. All the Wills were very handsome, very dashing, and all were skilled horsemen. At her wedding Claude might have had at least three young Lochinvars riding in from the West.

Claude was far more to me than just another girl; she was the romantic and impassioned South.

Ardent abolitionist as Harriet Beecher Stowe and my own instincts had made me, I suddenly found myself devoted adherent of a slave-owning family.

Claude worshipped Robert Lee, she loathed Abraham Lincoln and all the “Yankees.” She more than loathed them; she deeply despised them. She assured me over and over again that the South was the Negroes’ best friend, that it had never been beaten—but had been betrayed.

She made me a Royalist without a King, a Confederate—who would have died to free a slave.

I used to escape, assisted by some friendly scout from my music room where I was supposed to be practising, to find Claude in a distant room on her piano stool, and sit at her feet, while all this new lore was poured into my ecstatic ears. Warned in time, I would return fleetly, to bang a few last bars into the ear of a watchful Sister on her rounds. I don’t know how long these undiscovered meetings could have continued had not Fate intervened even more drastically than Sister Elise Monica, but I think they would have been discovered even before Fate struck, had not one of the nicest elder girls, Amy Irvine, pointed out to me that Claude’s risks were far greater than my own.

At Claude’s invitation I had several times taken my life in my hands, and while Sister Elise Monica was out of her room for early Mass, I would run into Claude’s room, a few doors off, sit on her bed, and listen to more of her enchantments, returning just as Sister’s heavy footsteps could be heard advancing up the stairs.

I had no idea why Claude should be expelled, if my matutinal visits were discovered, but the mere idea of it chastened me into giving them up.

The Sisters’ code was always quite beyond my understanding, for most of the things which they considered important sins were allowed to me at home. I therefore became a little more cautious, but even more interested in our abbreviated meetings.

Then the blow fell. We were to go back to England—not for a visit—but for good.

My father broke it to me, on one of our frequent outings together. The doctor had said my mother could not live if she remained any longer in this country. She could digest nothing but Horlick’s Malted Milk and she was just fading into a decline.

My father resigned his living. He made no bones about it to me; he hated as I did this flight from his country. He did not realize the cause of my agony because of course I never told him why it would break my heart to go, but I saw that it was breaking his. He said, “This is the end of my career, Phyllis, and it’s like death.” Piously I pointed out to him that after any death, resurrection followed, to be snubbed for my priggishness, but beneath the snub I felt the sympathy of our common loss. Alone of the whole family, my father and I were as one. This my father fully realized, and though disturbed, he was considerably gratified by the strength of my horrified resistance to the idea. Yet my resistance was as hollow as his own. Mother’s life was at stake and there was nothing to be done but go, cost what it might. My father must sacrifice his career, and I, what was at the time my whole heart.

I thought of nothing but Claude. I took for granted that the parting between us was final. The world rocked in darkness and the veil of the temple was rent from top to bottom. Strangely enough, the person who best understood, and who certainly enabled me best to bear my grief, was Sister Elise Monica.

She had never said much to me about my friendship for Claude. I had understood through Claude’s relationship with Sister A., that all the Sisters disapproved of our friendship, but actually all that Sister Elise Monica herself had ever said to me on the subject, and that on an occasion when the interview between us was ostensibly for another purpose, was, “I hear that you are great friends with one of the older girls. Do you not like those of your own age?” “Yes,” I said, “I do like all of them, but not quite so much!”

Sister Elise Monica rubbed her nose and said thoughtfully, “Well, I suppose it can’t be helped, but try to like the younger ones a little more!”

Now, with my heart torn to fiddle strings, I had no fear left, so I went to Sister Elise Monica, and told her how I hated to leave America and above all how I hated to leave Claude.

I begged that we might have on my last night one hour together, in order to say good-bye.

To my surprise, for it was from the Sisters’ point of view an immense concession, Sister Elise Monica promptly granted my request.

She told me that it was unusual, and that had it not been for my immediate and final departure, it would not have been possible, but she would allow it under certain conditions.

We might have half an hour alone together in the Visitors’ Room after evening chapel. We were to be sure to take off our blue veils and fold them up properly before the talk began. She herself would call for us when our time was up.

Characteristically, she gave us a full hour. I sat on the floor at Claude’s feet and cried my heart out. Claude comforted me all she could. Indeed, I have always thought perhaps this end to our friendship was the simplest and least disillusioning we could have had—for, after all, Claude was too much my senior not to have got tired sooner or later of an adoring child. Even now, though truly saddened by our parting, she was not as I was—broken to pieces—perhaps she was even secretly a little relieved.

She even thought that we should meet again. She did not share the stubborn instinct that reigned in my heart. For I knew well enough that we should never meet again. Women, with our names, might meet again—and, indeed, a quarter of a century later did meet—in memory and kindness, but these two girls, who said good-bye, with their blue chapel veils neatly folded on a chair beside them, and the tears pouring down their cheeks, would never meet again—this was their death-bed.

When Sister Elise Monica came for us, the door closed on Claude for the last time.

Sister Elise Monica sat down between me and my despair.

“If this love is to be of any value to you,” she said sternly, “you must be brave about it.”

This was all she said to me about my friendship with Claude, but I stopped crying. I even listened to her as she went on talking; I did not believe that I cared for anything but Claude, yet I know now that some of my sorrow, perhaps the deepest, was in leaving Sister Elise Monica herself.

“The Sisters and I have often talked of your future,” she said at last. “We do not think you have our vocation. Some of us think, however, that you might become a good missionary. I must confess that this is my own idea. I find in you some of the qualities of a missionary, yet you must remember that a missionary must do all that he does to the glory of God only. If you do any of it for your own glory, you cannot become a good missionary.”

I left school next day, and it was the end of my education.

I was to have in the long, dim, uncertain future stretching before me greater joys and far greater sorrows, but I was never to know “glad, confident morning” again.

No doubt I dramatized the sheer horror of our return to England. At Liverpool I felt (or thought I felt) as if I were stepping into my coffin. The only pleasures I had were in the past and I spent all the time at my disposal in brooding over it.

Yet I believe we landed on a fine morning in May, and I am bound to admit that when we reached our London destination, the flower-filled home of my grandmother in Grosvenor Square, where the footman used to throw fresh cream down the kitchen sinks, and everything bloomed and shone under the hands of thirteen servants (though probably the odd man and the tweeny maid did most of the work), I felt awed if not enchanted by my new surroundings.

The centre of all these grandeurs was Wilmett herself, looking as if it all belonged to her by divine right of youth and beauty. Beneath my envy of this beautiful sister lurked a fiery pride in her, and never had it felt so gratified as at this reunion. She was nearly twenty years old and at the peak of her girlish beauty. Both my grandparents loved and admired her; and had set off her charms by lovely clothes, far beyond our power to have contrived for her.

Wilmett had always had the poise and carriage of the courageous heart, and when she entered a room it was with a marvellous ease and dignity, as if she was sure of her welcome.

I was deeply impressed by this grown-up aspect of my restored sister. It even seemed to me that it might put our whole awkward relationship on a happier footing. I felt for the first time, not only a mere child in her presence, but a humble and deeply admiring child.

What particularly impressed and gratified me was the open-hearted loyalty of her greeting to us, combined with her offhand and yet somehow attractive and gracious treatment of a barbaric male, standing beside her, by the mantelpiece. Ted Leathern, a second cousin of my mother’s, for some obscure reason, shared this family reunion. He stood there by Wilmett’s side, impeccably clad, hard as polished steel, with that peculiar blend of insolence and detachment common to his type. He couldn’t be rude when he thought it unnecessary—but how marvellously he knew how, if he did think it was necessary! Meanwhile he took no interest whatever in Wilmett’s restored family, though he continued to take a semi-detached, half-amused and half-admiring interest in Wilmett herself.

I think he was more than a little in love with her or he wouldn’t have been there at all. He wanted to see what her people were like, and now he saw; and I imagine that he was thoroughly and permanently disenchanted by us.

As a family we were never smart, and on this occasion, after a long journey, we were tired and dishevelled as well as quite excessively American; and obviously not the kind of family whose natural habitat was Grosvenor Square.

I received a very strong impression of my cousin Ted Leathern, an impression I reproduced some twenty years later in The Dark Tower. Even on this occasion of our first meeting I had a great desire to describe him just as he was. He entered my disgusted imagination as a secure and strange piece of human architecture. Needless to say, I never addressed a word to him, and I doubt if I was even the momentary object of his hard, light eyes.

He was the sort of man pre-eminently with whom to hunt tigers; and all my sympathy would have been with the tigers. I fancy it was his complete want of imagination that made him seem to me so formidable and repellent a figure. At this moment of re-entry into the British Isles, I felt that such a specimen as Ted Leathern was one of the chief obstacles to anybody’s ever enjoying them. The cold eyes of a mountain lion in the zoo were an exact reproduction of Ted Leathern’s. Yet Wilmett was neither afraid of him nor embarrassed by the poor appearance we presented to his contemptuous regard.

She flew her love and loyalty like a flag; and indeed it was with extreme difficulty that she was subsequently persuaded by our united efforts to remain in London with the grandparents for the season while we all retired to the country.

It was my father’s wish to spend the summer at Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, a small and hideous seaside village on the mud flats and low sandy downs of the Bristol Channel. The golf was good and an old friend of his, a determined golfer, was spending the season there with his family as an added inducement.

My mother was quite content to go where my father pleased for the moment; and as Somerset had been the last scene of his professional labours, it might be supposed to lead to fresh employment. My father was to have one serious rebuff before we went there. His former patron and, as he thought, his true and devoted friend, possessed the house opposite to my grandmother’s in Grosvenor Square. However, these important people failed to cross the Square. They saw my father for a few hurried and unsatisfactory moments, but my mother had ceased to exist for them. Their children, who had been almost our daily playmates, had

After six years of American democracy, it was a curious experience.

I think it was about this time that golf became the supreme interest of my father’s life. He had never been in any real sense a “domestic” man, nor companionable—though highly attractive—to any of his children. Now he became simply less and less companionable. It must be remembered that he was a bitterly disappointed, lonely and heart-hungry man.

His mother’s love, her overwhelming generosity and courage had trained all her sons to expect too much help, rather than too little, from the women they loved. My father, in revenge for having so much less than he expected, did not take what there was. He became a stranger in his home. At times he would attempt some contact with his children, and his charm, his élan and open-heartedness—for he never spoke to us from above-below, but always man to man—gained a quick response. But he would soon tire of the difficult business of being a companion to a child—he was perhaps too much of a child himself to enjoy it—and once more we would lose sight of him from morning till night. Yet in spite of my father’s constant absence, he influenced all of us. Without him I could never have felt the same happy interest in human beings, or the same receptiveness to new scenes and experiences. Also, without him, I should have found my life, which was at this time extremely dull, a good deal duller.

Burnham-on-Sea had no advantages whatever for a child of my age. George was still young enough to enjoy the beach and what chance companions he found there. Mary was at her former school in Bournemouth, acting as pupil-teacher. Wilmett remained for the rest of the season in London. My only companions, as the windy dull days flickered past, were my books. During this first year of English life, I plunged into Henry James and learned by heart most of The Barrack Room Ballads.

These Kipling recitations pleased my father very much, and he would call for them at most inappropriate times and before still more inappropriate audiences. We severely shocked a very pleasant, high-church clergyman’s family, by our choice of recitations, and our relations became strained for some time. For a few weeks I went to a horrible old-fashioned girls’ school where the children lay on their backs on the floor to improve their figures. I found these children morons—and rough morons at that—and insisted on being freed from their grisly activities.

I was just a few months younger than Juliet when romance claimed me. It was to me, not only my first, but a very serious love affair, though today it would hardly pass as a flirtation.

No doubt I had been trained towards this premature experience by Claude’s enchanting idylls; but it is interesting that even at this early age I seemed to know by instinct how to deal with my part of our mutual attraction.

Harry was a most astonishing lover for a bookworm. He was twenty years old, a smart specimen of Sandhurst cadet, and every inch a soldier. My heart had been won before he put in an appearance by his mother. She was small, dark and racy. In some ways she reminded me of Claude. She lifted me to the seventh heaven by her notice, sunk as I was by a shamed sense of incapacity and illness. She even thought me “clever.” This much prized word had never been applied to me before; and her flattery went to my head like gin. We had some wonderful talks together about books. I thought her the most enchanting as well as the most brilliant woman in the world. She had written an article for the Fortnightly on “The Making of Bricks.” They made bricks at Bridgwater which was the family home. I doubted at the time if Lamb could have competed with her essay. She loved her eldest son, Harry, better than anything else in the world. He was six foot one, blue-eyed, and fair; and I thought his photograph—which I still possess (though I don’t quite know where to lay my hands on it)—that of the handsomest man in the world. As I had some common sense, as well as being a natural pessimist, I felt sure he would fall in love with Wilmett.

They both came to Burnham at about the same time; and there was no question that Harry was instantly attracted by her. He had a light baritone voice and used to sing “Over the Sea to Skye,” to her accompaniment. Wilmett also sang to him while his mother played Tosti’s “Good-bye,” and a peculiarly gruelling song of Christina Rossetti’s, “For a Dream’s Sake,” for her. As soon as this began, I slipped back into my old English neurosis. I became “too proud to fight.”

I withdrew from speech and I rather markedly avoided Harry on those rare occasions when he noticed my existence. Harry, however, began to notice it more; and what had been instinct on my part soon became tactics. Wilmett, though not the least in love with Harry (she was three deep in more serious “beaux” at the moment, and considered Harry under-age), felt it natural to collect Harry, and set to work to do so.

There was a good deal of trouble over an incident which occurred at a dance (to which, of course, I was too young to go). Harry kissed Wilmett, she declared against her will; and Harry fell into deep disgrace. I was entirely on Wilmett’s side; and looked upon Harry’s performance as little less than criminal.

The first opportunity that occurred I told him that I considered he had behaved abominably. To my intense astonishment, he apologised with deep humility, and as if his sin had been against myself. It was I, he told me, not Wilmett, who was the object of all his thoughts and feelings. It was true he had kissed Wilmett, but only because he thought she had expected it. I must surely realize that he would never offend, in any way whatever, any girl whom he considered seriously as an object of respect and devotion, such as he felt for me? Wilmett, I knew, took a lighter view of flirtation than I did. For my sake, however, Harry promised he would apologise to Wilmett. He apologised and was promptly forgiven, but what was less forgivable unfortunately, was the fact that soon became evident; Harry had transferred his entire attention to me.

We were not, in the modern sense of the word, lovers; we were simply ardently attracted friends, who might, in the far distant future, have become lovers. We talked and walked together for the next few weeks, unfolding all our thoughts and claims upon the Universe.

As Harry was going to India for five years, where he might find no woman to look after his wardrobe, he had learned to darn; and he used to darn my stockings for me with consummate care and kindness, while I read Henry James out loud to him, sitting in a small windless cemetery, behind the sand dunes. It was the only place where we could be at peace and alone together.

We used to meet by a scarlet letter box in a hedge and walk up a deeply shaded lane. There were seats in the cemetery, flanked by stiff geraniums, and nobody ever came there except ourselves.

We did not make a secret of our meetings, but neither did we make a point of talking about them to our families. We were free to come and go as we pleased; and the cemetery was where—as often as we dared—we went.

At first our two families were mildly amused by our sudden friendship. I do not think Wilmett could have liked this sudden annexation of her loosely held property, but she was surprisingly generous about it. She even told me that a scarlet beret I used to wear—when I brushed my hair properly—suited me.

But later on both families became alarmed by the increasing seriousness of our infatuation, and interferences began. My mother was extremely careful of my feelings but she told me that I was far too young to carry on such an ardent friendship with a young man of Harry’s age; had he been my own age, it wouldn’t have mattered. But Harry was not another child, and how he behaved really did matter. The agonizing part of the whole affair was that the chief objection to our friendship came from Harry’s mother. At first she had enjoyed seeing us together and called us “Psyche and Adonis”; but now she suddenly became furious—furious with me, of course, not with Harry. If she had not been blinded by jealousy, she would have seen that I still loved her best—better even than Harry—and that a kind and understanding talk from her would have disposed—without bitterness—of the whole affair. A wiser woman would have seen that neither my heart nor my unawakened senses were involved—only for the first time my power-sense had been set free. I found I could do what I liked with another human being.

Harry, in fact, was my first mouse, quite the finest mouse that a kitten of thirteen could ever have found to play with. He loved me, he treated me with absolute deference and rigid respect. Like Keats’s hero in the “Pot of Basil,” “his passion was both meek and wild,” and as for me, I was enchanted by the whole experience.

We had to part. Harry had to return to Sandhurst and then to sail in a few months’ time to India, but not before I had promised to await his return; and not to go into a Sisterhood, with which I had threatened him, till he was free to ask my hand in marriage.

The night before he left, his mother relented a little. She played his accompaniments and Harry sang “Beauty’s Eyes” for the last time. I knew it was for me, alone, though our combined families were present.

Early next morning we met at the letter box in the wind and the rain. Harry gave me as a parting present his favourite poems of Matthew Arnold, with his name written in and the date—the 19th of August—on which we parted.

I am glad to think that he fulfilled the career we had so often talked of together and eventually became a general. We never met again, except for a few fluttered, disenchanting moments, under vigilant eyes, when Harry came back on his first leave from India.

Perhaps I should never have become a writer if I had married Harry; or Harry a general, had he married me; but even without any such sequel to our first love affair, we must have done something for each other’s imaginations in those few weeks of perpetual conversation.

Since I had rather more imagination than Harry possessed, I imagine that he did me a greater service than I was able to do him, yet I like to think that though all correspondence was forbidden between us, and our parting at the letter box was final, Harry, too, carried away with him an innocent and happy memory of the child in the scarlet beret, to whom he had shown such deep and tender chivalry.

Blown out of Burnham by harsh October gales, we decided to spend the winter in London lodgings where Wilmett could continue her singing lessons. My father had accepted the care of St. Luke’s, Camberwell, while its rector, Hugh Boswell Chapman, went abroad for the winter. This enabled my father to spend half his time with us in our lodgings; and half in the Camberwell rectory, well looked after by Hugh Boswell’s housekeeper.

Wilmett chose our lodgings for us in Coleherne Road close to Earl’s Court Station. We gradually found out that it was a street of most unsavoury reputation, well deserved. I don’t know why we didn’t move, but having settled for the winter at a price she knew we could afford, close to the church she wished to attend, my mother clung to our far from respectable abode. Above us, the best drawing-room was given up to a beautiful blonde from Vienna who looked more bored than any human being I had ever met. She was visited regularly by a laconic young Englishman who brought with him baskets full of champagne. They both, I imagine from the empty bottles on the staircase, drank quantities of this liquid.

Gloom, silence, and empty champagne bottles became for me symbols of a life of sin. I was ordered by Wilmett to stop smiling at the blonde when I met her on the doorstep, so I never learned the reason for her boredom.

One evening at dusk on my way to daily Evensong at St. Matthew’s Church, a kindly policeman stopped me and warned me not to go down the Coleherne Road in the dark. He looked astonished when I told him that I lived there, explaining that I went to Evensong regularly at six o’clock every day. He told me that he would always be standing between our house and the church in the middle of the road and would keep on the lookout for me at that hour, and on his days off, warn his mate to do the same. Perhaps owing to the presence of his stalwart form, no-one ever molested me. My father was less fortunate for he was once stopped thirty times, on a winter’s evening, between the Earl’s Court Station and the Coleherne Road, by street walkers.

This was the last lap of Queen Victoria’s reign.

The Good—a stationary fragment of the population—kept secure on their golden islands of prosperity, were simply the untempted. I doubt if they really knew, and very few of them cared, what went on in the struggling mainland of poverty, disease, and dirt which was the life of the greater part of Great Britain.

It was even considered that “fallen women” preserved their more fortunate sisters’ virtue—at a somewhat heavy price. Our fellow man apparently in those days was so easily tempted that practically nothing prevented him from running amok and raping right and left, except a holocaust of girls and women secretly set aside for the purpose, by a policy of poverty and starvation.

What was thought of those girls who “fell” we have only to read Dickens’ account of “Little Emily” in David Copperfield to realize.

Even as late as 1914 in Queen Charlotte’s lying-in hospital unmarried girls were not allowed visits from their own mothers, while their more fortunate “married” sisters might see whomsoever they liked.

Industriously prosperous England, at the peak of her power and her riches, was perhaps lower, morally and intellectually, than at any other period of her existence.

These secret tragedies of the poor and the outcast beat in on my child’s mind with a persistent ferocity.

My life was incredibly empty except for its dreams. I had no outside interests at all, no companionship with my contemporaries, no usefulness, and no training except what I gave myself. I spent vast oceans of time in day-dreaming and religious observances.

My mother had eight Mudie books delivered in a wooden box weekly, and upon them I browsed. I supplemented them, on my father’s advice, by classics which he borrowed for me from his friends.

I learned an incredible number of poems by heart. I went to church once, if not twice, a day, and three times on Sunday. I wrote tremendous letters to Mary, and, though gradually less often, to Claude. I never got Harry out of my mind, though he became less and less like Harry and more and more like a peculiar blend of my favourite heroes—Cardinal Newman, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Shelley.

Restored to each other after their long parting, Wilmett and my mother closed together into an intimacy of heart and mind which shut out the rest of the world. Father and I were nearly always in trouble, and as much as possible outside the house.

We prowled for hours through the wet and foggy streets, visiting, half for shelter and half for knowledge, museums and picture galleries in a bewildering and undirected manner.

The clip-clop of hansom cabs was always in our ears, and the vague smell of straw, sweat, and horses always in our nostrils. I had a strange feeling of kinship with the street singers, who stood or strolled from corner to corner, only I had no song and no-one gave me any pennies. But the streets were almost as much mine as theirs; and I wondered if their sad, empty lives were very much gloomier than my own.

My father and I became very good companions, enjoying the same jokes and avoiding the same puddles. Sometimes we visited friends of my father’s who had nothing to do with the rest of our family, and I was always proud and amazed at the respect and affection my father roused in these outsiders, who listened with enchanted interest to the brilliance of his conversation. At home, my father was never brilliant. He either talked too much or not at all. Often he hesitated and paused, unhappily losing the point of what should have been, and was, in the right society, the pungent character of his picturesque mind.

My mother used to listen to him, with critical eyes, and her small pointed finger marking the place in her book, to which she was obviously anxious to return. She was never rude to him, and very seldom unkind, but she was discouraging and, unfortunately, my father was a very easily discouraged person.

Wilmett’s impatience with us both was more obvious, and her flashes of temper became more and more frequent. Perhaps she missed the ease and opulence of her years in Grosvenor Square where she had had space and time always at her disposal, and where her beauty and charm were not confined to imaginary heroes and heroines, nor her interests to Mother’s symptoms and the strange habits of the landlady and our fellow lodgers. Wilmett had her singing lessons and practised for three hours daily on the piano. She possessed a beautiful clear, mezzo-soprano voice which her teacher assured her was powerful enough for grand opera. Her heart was more or less engaged by a young officer she had met in Egypt and from whom she had been forcibly separated before any actual engagement took place, partly by Grandma and partly by Lord Kitchener’s edict that none of his officers in the Egyptian army should marry. An earlier, perhaps more emphatic love affair of Wilmett’s had also ended by the intrusion of elders. This love affair with the son of one of my father’s best and oldest friends had, on both sides, a good deal to recommend it; but her lover’s father was both rich and ambitious for his son, and our own parents were both proud and hurt that Wilmett was not more warmly received by his family, so they withdrew her from all contact with Bob as speedily as possible. Wilmett’s affections cannot have been too deeply engaged, I fancy, or she would not have been so easy to withdraw. Without his parents’ consent the young man could not have married for years, and Wilmett, already conscious that she could attract almost anyone she liked, really preferred—and continued to prefer for some time—her birds in bushes. Without meaning to, my mother succeeding in putting off all her three daughters from their natural function as women.

Wilmett attracted men, but did not clinch these attractions. Mary never even allowed herself to think of attracting men, and seriously avoided them; while I contented myself with imagining and creating the sort of heroes I was not at all likely to meet in real life.

I only remember one outstanding incident in this prolonged and gloomy winter, and that was my father’s having a very dangerous abscess in his throat which, for some strange reason, having been entirely neglected by all of us, had to be lanced at the last possible moment by the light of a match. None of us looked after my father during this illness; he was nursed, however, by the Camberwell housekeeper, and I remember having a feeling of unhappy helplessness and guilt when I saw how grey and haggard he looked, even after he was supposed to be well.

I did not judge my mother or Wilmett for their neglect; but I felt unable to share their curious condemnation of my father for having this illness, which apparently they could only consider as a wrong done to my mother. After all, I thought to myself, it was my father who had the sore throat.

With the spring came a new offer for my father. The senior curate of the important church of St. Peter’s, Bournemouth, had had a breakdown; would my father care to take his place for a year?

Fifty years ago Bournemouth was not a large, second-rate town, flooded by summer holiday makers; but a place of special physical and spiritual attractions for well-to-do people all the year round. I think there were no poor in Bournemouth when I was young. Rich, delicate people retired into pleasant expensive villas under pine trees on sandy soil, or stayed at equally expensive well-run hotels. Invalids with weak chests bloomed on its two great cliffsides, East and West, under an army of pines. Donkey chairs or Bath chairs pulled by old men, more obstinate and slower than the donkeys, were at the beck and call of anyone who could pay two shillings an hour for their services. I have a feeling that the donkeys cost another sixpence an hour because there had to be a donkey-boy as well. Very slowly and sedately, these pleasant and comfortable vehicles meandered through the gardens and up the steep cliff sides.

The old men were adept at wooing their invalids into sheltered spots with views, where they could safely leave them and go off and smoke on the nearest invisible seat. The donkeys, too, knew where and when to stop; and the boys had a magic facility for disappearing and reappearing at convenient intervals.

There were a great many doctors in Bournemouth and a great many invalids who never got well—or ill; many, too, who were so ill that they rather too promptly died. For not all tubercular patients yielded to Bath chairs and the British climate, only slightly mitigated by sand and pine trees.

There were even more churches and curates than doctors and donkey chairs; and what curates there were in those days! Looking back on them now, they remind me of the flowers and fruit of California: so large, so luscious, so bright and vivid were those prosperous and pleasant young men! Everybody wanted the Bournemouth curates. They were an unfailing source of comfort, interest, and entertainment to the invalids; and they acted as discreet safety valves for their anxious and often irritated relatives.

As a family, Bournemouth had undoubted attractions for us all. It was celebrated for its climate; my mother loved it; and there were unusually good educational and musical facilities.

I don’t know quite how well my father fitted into the ways of St. Peter’s Church. He had to swallow his pride to become a curate again after nearly twenty years of being his own master; but the Senior Curate of St. Peter’s was a very important person. On him fell the chief sermons and the major share of parochial responsibility. The Vicar was a clever but very sick man. There were three lesser curates beneath my father’s sway, with whom we soon became awe-inspiringly intimate. None of them liked, nor I think were liked by, the Vicar; but my father, with his usual unconscious skill, got on with them all very easily. They were jealous of him, no doubt, but they soon found him almost startlingly harmless. He cared for none of the things they wanted and forgot to assume any authority over them. He preferred the less rich parishioners; he even took on with enthusiasm the Home for Incurables, where the poorer invalids, who could not afford hotels, villas, or even lodgings, were sent in a lump to die of T.B. and where they usually did die of it.

It was true that my father preached the curates and even the Vicar off their legs, but he made no fuss about it, and was always willing to be fobbed off with “daughter” churches, leaving the pulpit of St. Peter’s to the less oratorically gifted.

The Vicar, however, soon insisted on my father’s preaching at St. Peter’s in the evening, when he found that he was so great a “draw.” He often said sarcastic things to my father as he did to all his curates, but they were said with a smile; and my father always took them as jokes and repeated them with enthusiasm. Wit was always a pleasant thing to my father—his own or anybody else’s; and he used to try his own jokes off on the curates, not always successfully.

I don’t suppose my father was happy at St. Peter’s, Bournemouth. Our lodgings were, as usual, bad, and we had no social life, except curates; but I was so much happier myself that I fear I was less responsive to my father’s feelings than usual.

I was allowed to go to Grammar School for part-time lessons, where, to my intense surprise and delight, I found I could understand Euclid, and where I made an intense and highly educational friendship with our French teacher, Mademoiselle Darius.

Mellie Darius died some years ago, long after our friendship had gone overboard into the ocean of memory. Perhaps I never knew her as well as I thought I did. She was, when I was fourteen, a very handsome, intelligent and ambitious young woman of seven and twenty. She had a lovely figure and rode a bicycle like a winged angel. Mellie had no money but she had a grim determination to become the prosperous head-mistress of a fashionable girls’ school; and she eventually attained her ambition through sheer drive and the ruthless use of her intellect and her charm.

She fascinated whomever she wanted to fascinate; and interested business men in her ambition financially while she influenced useful women to co-operate with her as social backers. She had, beneath her soft, caressing manner, a heart as hard as the nether millstone; nevertheless, I think Mellie loved me after her fashion.

She would have been willing to overlook my lack of money and social power had I given up my will to her and used my gifts, such as they were, in her service. I loved her very dearly, and would, I think, have given up anything I had to her, except the freedom of my will. On this—a few years later—we broke; but for the next few years Mellie, and all she taught me, swept over my parched life like the waters of the Nile over the barren Egyptian desert. She taught me the essence of French literature. She took away from me, with her Latin matter-of-course attitude towards sex, half my fears. She gave me courage and taught me to believe in my own abilities. She laughed me out of many morbid imaginings. She had no religion; but she respected mine. No doubt, little by little, the clear force of her precise and factual mind cut its way through my unreal church life, and helped to set me on my feet as a human being in a physical universe; but she never spoke against the Church or its worship.

Although she was thirteen years my elder, she did not make me feel my inferiority to her in our many arguments.

We had one chief point of difference which we never gave up—the Dreyfus trial. Mellie could not bear to see what she thought was the dishonour of France, the showing up before the world of her army officers as liars and traitors. To her, the punishment or even the death of one innocent man—if Dreyfus were innocent, which she refused to believe—was not too heavy a price to pay to save the good name of the French army. It was her one—her only sentimentality. Whereas to me the punishment of Dreyfus was as terrible a proof of human cruelty and dishonesty as the trial of Jesus Christ. I could not see them separately. I was convinced of Dreyfus’ innocence and equally sure of his rights.

To and fro we paced the bracken-covered Commons of Bournemouth, Mellie pushing her bicycle through the wet fallen leaves, the rain against our faces, our hearts burning within us. We never stopped talking of Dreyfus till the trial ended. Neither of us could give way to the other, or cease to state and restate our passionate convictions.

Seeing me so happy and interested in my French lessons, my mother allowed me to have private lessons at home with Mellie as well as class ones. I had many opportunities now of being with her and each hour seemed given to me by the gods. I sometimes watched her, with anguished eyes, as she skimmed through the crowded narrow Christchurch road, breasting the traffic as a strong swimmer faces the heavy surf of a rough sea.

“Mellie,” I once asked her, “how can you go through all these dangers, picking your way so fast without an instant’s hesitation?” “Perhaps,” she said, “because I don’t see the dangers you speak of—I am too busy looking for my way out.”

Another joy added to my Bournemouth days was the presence of Mary. For a time she rejoined us, and with the last ebbing passion of my religious zeal I persuaded her much against her will to go to Confession, almost at the moment when, for good and all, I renounced the habit myself. Perhaps the vigour of my arguments was due to the shaking of my own conviction.

Little by little the Church was losing its hold on me. I did not give up church-going, but the spirit was already out of it. What made me most uncertain of my religious life was the growing antagonism between Wilmett and myself. She, too, was now at home and was no doubt conscious of my infringement of her chief prerogatives. My mother loved my companionship, and Mary, accustomed now to stand on her own feet or to share my eager explorations on equal terms, would no longer accept Wilmett’s domination. No day passed without some bitter battle. One day I went to my mother and said, “I ought to go to Evensong but I can’t. I hate Wilmett! I hate her terribly! I wish she were dead!” My mother said quietly, “I am sure you are mistaken. I don’t believe that you really hate her, and I think you had much better go to Evensong.”

I went; but my hatred went with me. On my return, Wilmett came into my room. I think my mother had been talking to her in the interval and had asked her to try to improve the situation by an appeal to my better feelings. Unfortunately, at the moment, I had no better feelings.

I had never before put my anger against Wilmett into words, but when she told me that it was my duty to love her, I suddenly found my tongue. A storm of bitter words sprang up in me, and I found myself lashing out at her with a command of language equally astonishing and releasing. I watched her face whiten under them. “Phyllis!” she gasped, “you can’t say such things to me! You can’t mean them! If you feel half what you say, you can never go to the Sacrament again!” “That,” I told her, “is my business—not yours! You can’t take my God away from me as well as everything else! It is no use your asking me for love any more. I have none to give you. If you don’t want to hear what I think of you, you had better leave me alone.”

To my surprise, she did. She turned and left the room without another word.

I should have felt triumphant, and indeed, for a minute or two, I was relieved to have got rid of her presence as well as to have expressed my mind; but it soon occurred to me that I had not only sent Wilmett away, but that my own faith in a God of Love had gone with her. I was dashed against the riddle of the Universe. How to believe in love—and act against it? I began to realize not only that I was inconsistent to go to church at all, but that church was useless to me in helping me out of my predicaments.

No-one could have gone to church more than I had, nor, I had been told, could have behaved better while there. I really went to pray and to receive whatever benefits prayer bestowed upon the believer. But I had received no benefits. Not only did I behave exactly as badly at home as if I had never prayed at all, but this whole problem of my relationship to Wilmett grew steadily worse instead of better.

There was nothing I had found, or could find in the church which helped me to behave differently in my life at home or changed one of my problems. What, in fact—and it was a question which more and more besieged me—had the religion of the Church to do with life? I did not ask either of my parents this question, dearly as I loved them, for I was perfectly aware they would have muffed it. I did not ask my Father Confessor for I was on the point of giving him up. I had a feeling that though I tried to tell him what was the matter with me, he took the view that I was on the whole a good little girl getting on very nicely, and nothing I had hitherto said had been able to alter his conviction.

I just had sense enough not to blame Wilmett wholly for my badness, for well I knew that if there had been no Wilmett, I should have found something else to be bad about.

Religion, for the next few years, rather took the place of sex in my adaptive mind. It was there; it was unsatisfactory; and I would therefore pay as little real attention to it as possible.

There was very little social life attached to my Bournemouth school. For one thing, most of the girls were boarders while I was a mere “day” girl—and a part-time one at that, so that I simply came and went to a class schedule and saw practically nothing of my school companions beyond sitting in the same classroom. There was, however, one exception: twins, some three or four years older than myself, inconspicuous-looking girls with glasses, who shared my literature and French lessons, took a fancy to me.

It was rather an exasperated fancy, for there were many things about my behaviour and uncertain methods of attacking knowledge which scandalized their orderly and highly conscientious minds. They were scholar’s children; their father was Professor Henry Jackson of Trinity College, Cambridge, the greatest Greek scholar of his day. However—like me they did—in a curious tormented and tormenting manner; and I became a frequent inmate of their home, a big house on the pine-scented golf links.

Their mother was a dynamic invalid, who had become permanently and dramatically bedridden. She could not stand the Cambridge climate, or perhaps a modern psychologist would have suspected that to live in Cambridge with her husband’s tremendous reputation over-shadowing her, was what she really couldn’t stand. It was, at any rate, decided that she should make a home at Bournemouth to which, in his vacations, her husband sometimes came. He was a dearly loved parent and to all his children’s friends he was an extraordinarily fascinating and kindly human being. Professor Jackson had the true art of all creative teachers; he could throw a bridge across from his sage’s mind for any willing child to cross by. To meet him was a stimulating and lasting event. It was a cruel business that robbed his own children of his constant companionship and the example of his work life; but until we learn to debunk ourselves of at least a few of our unnecessary human frailties, jealousy and vanity will continue to break up our homes and darken our doorsteps.

I was very much interested by my association with the Jackson family. The whole household was austere, honest, well-to-do, and active. It was quite different from anything to which I was accustomed. The brusque speech, the orderly habits, the unnervingly factual and accurate minds of the carefully trained children both awed and exasperated me. I realized only too plainly that I was a defective and unequipped child of fourteen.

I was inwardly ashamed of my scattered knowledge and helpless habits; but I somehow nevertheless expected to be taken far more seriously than I deserved. I knew I had a charm these children hadn’t got—and didn’t want.

I found that they ignored or disapproved of my sense of humour in a way that I could scarcely tolerate. They thought I was too light-minded, and I thought they were too serious—and perhaps we were both right.

Mrs. Jackson I only saw on two occasions, though she ruled every action and almost every word and thought in her household.

It was like being taken before the Great White Throne on the Day of Judgment to appear before her awful and imperilled Presence. I expected her to die during the interview and I did not know quite what to do about it.

Mrs. Jackson, however, treated me with great self-control and kindness, and did not look so ill as I had expected. She told me several of my most outstanding faults; and asked me to give her a death-bed promise to remain the true friend of the twins throughout my entire life.

I really liked the twins and I made the promise, which I subsequently failed to keep; but neither did she keep her death-bed promise to me, for she survived for over a quarter of a century.

I have often wished I had more enjoyed this intimacy so kindly and truly offered me, but the twins became jealous of a much greater friendship that I formed a few years later, and nothing would serve them but that I should choose between this friendship and theirs; so, forced into this direct issue, I gave them up. They should not have used this constriction on me, but I think, had I entered more whole-heartedly into their fellowship, perhaps they would have felt less reason to feel jealous of other claims upon me.

One other opportunity of acquiring knowledge I did not throw away. Bournemouth ran a winter series of Oxford Extension lectures, and I attended with breathless interest a course upon the Cinque Cento—its art and artists.

One lecture in particular was a curious source of inspiration to me. The students were asked to write a paper, giving their reasons for thinking Savonarola either a saint or a charlatan.

I threw myself into this subject with passionate fervour. The librarian of the Free Library came to my assistance and I collected and read every obtainable book or lecture upon the Florentine leader. I identified myself passionately with his strange and stormy figure; perhaps Savonarola symbolized the stage through which I myself was passing—between faith and scepticism. At any rate, I did an honest bit of work on him; and was asked by the lecturer to speak to him in private about my paper. He first asked for my solemn assurance that no-one had helped me write the paper. I was able to assure him that no-one but himself had even read the MS. I was always shy and secretive about my early writing. Then to my relief and astonishment he said: “Well, I must tell you it is a most original and interesting piece of work. It is so well done that I have been obliged to give you the highest marks in my power, but I must draw your attention to the fact that you have not answered the question put to the class: ‘Was Savonarola a saint or a charlatan?’ ”

“Don’t you see,” I explained, “I believe—I can’t help believing—that he was a little of both? Savonarola truly believed that he was led by God, but he also led God, in the direction he wanted to follow.” The lecturer admitted that if I really felt this to be the truth, I was to be excused for not exactly meeting the specified question. He finally told me to try to improve my handwriting—a piece of advice I have not yet assimilated.

His subsequent lectures on other of the great figures of the Renaissance greatly helped to prepare my mind for my future Italian visits—I knew what to look for when I reached Italy, and relished the pictures and immortal monuments in a way that would have been impossible to me without the background of those lectures. I think perhaps the Oxford Extension lectures were the only genuine piece of education I ever had—for in them the appetite met the facts and the facts the appetite.

Towards the end of this Bournemouth period, I was left alone with my father and mother in rather better lodgings opposite St. Peter’s Church. One morning at an early celebration, a determined-looking old lady came up to me as I knelt at the end of a pew. “Please, child,” she whispered to me, “when you go up to the altar, kneel on one side of my husband, and help him when he has to rise. I shall kneel on the other, and show you what to do.” I followed her out into the aisle and did as she bade me. The tall old man at her side was, I saw, a little shaky. She held his arm and we knelt, one on each side of him, before the altar. I helped him to rise, putting my hand under his arm, as she did.

After the service was over, the old lady came up to me in the churchyard, with the tall old man still holding on to her arm. “I thought you might like to know,” she said kindly, “that the gentleman you helped this morning is Mr. Gladstone. He wishes to thank you personally for your assistance.” I looked up into the most magnificent pair of human eyes I ever saw. They were dark, piercing and fiery; and they seemed to plunge deep into my heart. I put my hand in his blue-veined, knotted hand, and gazed astonished and yet not alarmed into the wonderful old eagle’s face looking so kindly down at me. When I told my father of the incident, he said, “Never forget that you shook hands with Mr. Gladstone—one of the best and greatest men in the world.” Mr. Gladstone died a few weeks later, and I believe this celebration at St. Peter’s, Bournemouth, was the last occasion on which he attended church.

We three, my mother and father and myself, were very happy together for this short period. There seemed no sense of strain between us. My mother was living exactly as she liked to live, opposite St. Peter’s Church, surrounded by its influences, while my father worked without parochial responsibilities or social claims in the very surroundings she would have chosen for him. Everyone admired his preaching. She was worshipped by us both without conflict or jealousy.

Into this security, however, Fate dropped one of its many bombshells. A telegram arrived to say that George was dangerously ill with pneumonia at school. Both parents instantly went to him and I was shifted, for an anguished ten days, to the home of a married curate.

George nearly died; he was sinking into the coma which precedes death, when the nurse, in a panic, poured raw brandy down his throat by mistake. George promptly came round, and taking hold of life again, pulled through.

Left alone, in a long agony of silent suspense, I spent hours in St. Peter’s Church, on my knees praying for George’s recovery. I offered up Harry and all my dream future with him without a qualm, for suddenly I knew that George meant more to me than any half imaginary lover. “Never let me see or hear of Harry again,” I told the Deity, “if you will only let George live!” I don’t know what actual profit it occurred to me that the Deity would gain by this sacrifice of Harry, but I meant my side of the bargain.

The relief of George’s recovery was so intense that going out into the spring gardens, the whole world seemed renewed to me; and as Goethe said, “beautiful as on the day of creation.”

George, at school far away, living his new masculine life, might seem hardly to belong to me any more; but George, endangered and set free from danger, shook the very core of my heart.

The summer after George’s illness we spent at Broadstairs. Fifty years ago, Broadstairs was a quiet little seaside village between the big tripper-crowded towns of Margate and Ramsgate. Broadstairs had a picturesque, almost an elegant air, of its own. Dickens had found and described for ever a house where Esther lived with her guardian. We passed “Bleak House” often on our daily walks. People who would not have been seen in Ramsgate or Margate came for their whole summers to the lodgings and precise little villas of Broadstairs. Behind it stretched

I believe this was a happy though purposeless summer. George slipped back into his old allegiance for the last time, and I devoted the long summer days chiefly to his amusement. When it was wet and stormy we sat on the floor and played as of old interminable games of “china animals.” These lay figures of our fancy were to be bought in small square cardboard boxes for half a crown; inside these boxes were the china figures of mother and two children, wrapped in wood shavings. Our favourites were the fox and squirrel families, but we enjoyed the more exotic and less seldom found boxes of monkeys, and at times stooped to the mere domestics, such as cats and mice. These creatures, driven through the gates of my imagination, had to undergo every possible physical vicissitude—volcanoes, tidal waves, earthquakes, fires and floods—with the one proviso from the listening George that “not even a kitten must be pricked with a pin.”

I was sorry to have to check myself on so many brinks of disaster but the alternative of George’s misery and disgust was generally sufficient to keep tragedy at bay. Besides, it was fun making the animals outwit their emergencies.

I seem to remember that during this summer Mother was more delicate than usual and that Wilmett’s whole attention was focused upon her. Father and Mary were, I think, absent. Father was probably visiting his parents in America; while Mary may have been still carrying on her pupil-governess career.

It is difficult to entertain a small boy—and a convalescent one of eleven—with nothing beyond china animals and the beach, and we fell back—George and I—rather heavily upon Negro minstrels whom we followed from spot to spot along the cliffs and beach till they must have got to know us nearly as well as we knew them.

One other influence broke into this empty summer. A clerical friend of Uncle George’s called Creighton Spencer, almost in the rank of American uncles, joined us for several weeks. He had been quite recently married, very happily as he told us, but had suffered “a nervous breakdown” perhaps from the continued presence of his mother-in-law; and had been advised by his doctor to take a complete change and rest from both his parish and his domesticity.

Creighton Spencer brought America back to me. Perhaps this was why our friendship so peculiarly thrived. He was thirty-six and I was fifteen, but we made a very good companionship, and used to sit for hours upon the beach together with an eye on George while we talked of his country which was my Eldorado; and of Johanna, the wife whom he adored but found, reinforced by the full strength of a dynamic mother-in-law, a little difficult, I gathered, to live up to. Like my Uncle George, Creighton Spencer was both Broad Church and devoted to literature. He was at pains to develop, brace, and guide my taste for books. Creighton was a realist and did not at all approve of my more romantic ideals. When I recited “The Blessed Damozel” to him, he outraged my sensibilities by pointing out that Rossetti could not possibly have “heard her tears” unless they dropped upon a tin plate.

Creighton’s hard common sense, the precision and clarity of his judgments, were nevertheless an immense source of interest and pleasure to me. I think, too, that he helped to clear away much that was morbid and sentimental in my literary tastes. Donne took the place of Rossetti from this period, and I began to grow towards Shakespeare and the Elizabethans.

Creighton ate quantities of buns which endeared him to George as he always brought a large paper bag full of them on to the beach to share with us. He talked a great deal to me about the enriching force of married life and implored me not to marry an Englishman but to come over to America and let him help me choose an American husband.

Finally, Creighton went back to Johanna and I never saw him again.

I think we returned to Bournemouth when George re-started school, for it was certainly there, in the course of our next winter, that I had the worst moral shock of my life. Fifteen is not a good age for such shocks, and my health was shaken as well as my heart.

One of my father’s friends, a man intimately connected with us in many ways, a very strong churchman and weekly communicant, became a pervert and seduced children who had been placed under his care. Their enraged parents wished to prosecute and have him imprisoned, but my father, both for his friend’s sake and for that of the children themselves, tried to prevent, and indeed succeeded in preventing, any public exposure. He got his friend abroad, counselled and comforted the injured parents and their children, and both financially and spiritually helped the three poor sisters who were dependent on their pervert brother’s exertions. They were middle-aged ladies, quite untrained to earn their own living. Perhaps it was their dependence on him that was largely responsible for their poor brother’s moral breakdown. My father found it almost impossible to convince them that their brother’s breakdown was moral because they knew nothing whatever about the sin he was supposed to have committed.

As I was alone with my mother at the time, she made me her confidante in the whole affair, sharing my father’s letters with me and even showing me some of our perverted friend’s.

Perhaps if I had lived a more normal life and had friends of my own age or suitable amusements, I should not have been so horrified and upset by the whole affair. I had never before envisaged that innocence could be betrayed by vice. To me, the children involved were irretrievably ruined. I saw no future for them although I knew no blame attached to them. I simply believed that they had now nothing to look forward to but death.

This was bad enough, and no doubt a fit subject for some of the extreme gloom and sleeplessness that overwhelmed me; but what was certainly most curious and more morbid still, was the agony of pity that I felt for the culprit, a man I had hitherto greatly disliked. I almost identified myself with him and what I imagined to be his desperate remorse.

The thought of his suffering ate into me like an acid. What chance had he of even a moment’s peace and comfort, what sunshine could ever warm him, what beauty dare delight him, after his fall? If only I could in some way assist him to meet his doom! Poison, for instance. Could it not be procured and offered to him in order to put him out of his misery? Or perhaps my father could discover some other means of suicide which would be more suitable and less agonizing? My mother thought not. She seemed surprised and even a little vexed at my suggestion. She was willing and even anxious to talk out the whole subject with me, but not, I gathered, to take any definite action. My father was doing, and would do, all that was necessary; and God would do the rest. We could, of course, pray for Mr. T. but I gathered my mother didn’t particularly wish even to pray for him.

It was a pity that I could not have mentioned our trouble to Mellie Darius; she would certainly have been less surprised and shocked by it than my mother, and she would have cleared up some of my worst fears and agonies. However, my lips were sealed, and even if they had not been, I had no vocabulary for this new sin.

Victorian times were strange. No sacrilegious modern had pushed back the purdah that hung in front of women’s minds. Sarah Grand was only just about to write The Heavenly Twins, and it was five years or more before Wells wrote Ann Veronica. So we stumbled on, reading what we did not realize, and living with our eyes turned away from life.

The wonder was that more girls did not die from “declines” than actually did, for we were all “declining” one thing or another all the time, just at the moment when an appetite for life should have been at its heartiest.

By and by, in spite of myself, this dread cloud lifted. Life jerked me forward again. I was torn reluctantly from Mellie and the sane and friendly Jacksons, and found myself once more in London lodgings and, as usual, without friends or occupation.

Father had temporarily accepted the chaplaincy of Guy’s hospital; while waiting for a living, he became very much beloved there in the course of the next few months, and was urged to accept the chaplaincy as a permanence. I cannot think why he didn’t, as Mother loved London and it would have fitted in with Wilmett’s singing. There were, however, no preaching facilities for my father, though I am inclined to think he would soon have been invited to preach in many London churches and that his life might have developed in a most interesting way; but I think the main objection was that London life would be too expensive. It was at this time that Wilmett had a last chance to escape her destiny. My mother had been partly brought up with her first cousin, Beatrice Pease, who was an only child and a great heiress.

Beatrice married the Earl of Portsmouth and had no children of her own. She was greatly attached to my mother and took a fancy to Wilmett whom she had met frequently at Grosvenor Square. She now offered to have her presented at Court and chaperon her through a London season. She would take all expenses upon herself and Wilmett, with her magnificent looks and charm, would no doubt make a good and suitable marriage. It seems to me we spent most of this winter in a family conflict over this offer. Naturally I wished Wilmett to accept it. Not only would it have removed Wilmett from my path; but I had (although I was unaware of it) a burning pride and admiration for this flower of our flock. I wanted her to be admired and courted and taken out of gloomy lodgings where she could meet nobody and go nowhere. Mary, I am sure, would have shared this feeling. I don’t know what my father felt, but I realized that my mother was definitely against the whole idea. She did not say so and I doubt if she would have attempted to stop Wilmett’s going if Wilmett had evinced any overpowering desire for it. But Wilmett was absorbed in her singing and believed herself destined for a great musical career. She may have feared, too, that Beatrice would have wished to control her in a way in which she had never been controlled before. At any rate, eventually Wilmett said “no,” and the ostrich feathers and the glorious court dress with a train faded slowly away from us for ever. With them went the last chance Wilmett had for health and happiness.

This third winter in London was one of the keys to my whole future life. For the first time since I left the United States I found a purpose and flung myself whole-heartedly into it. Near where we lived on Campden Hill, friends of my father’s had started a private Shakespearean club, to which we were all invited. Wilmett was averse to my joining it as it was for “grown-up people” and I was not yet sixteen but my father and mother both came to my rescue and, trembling with joy and excitement, I presented myself one evening with my sisters on the Fenesseys’ hospitable doorstep. The Fenesseys were both Shakespearean scholars and highly critical readers. From the first they took me under their wing and very soon I was invited to recite to them. They were extraordinarily kind to me and interested in my efforts, and told my parents that it was quite obvious I must be trained.

There was a successful American elocution teacher then in London whom they thought was the right person to train me either for the stage or for public recitation of a kind then given by Clifford Harrison. Miss Fanny Mason accepted me as a pupil and I joined her class with fervour. Now I had really found what I wanted to do and knew that I could learn how to do it. In a few weeks I became one of her most promising pupils. I devoted hours of every day to learning by heart, according to Miss Mason’s methods, and soon acquired twenty-five different programmes, each lasting two hours to two hours and a half, in which I was word perfect. I learned to recite both prose and poetry, but curiously enough, from my point of view, Miss Mason decided that my special gift was that of a comedian. I was rather shocked to discover this myself, but Mr. Fenessey comforted me by saying that the best education for the great tragic actress he believed I could become, was to be equally capable of comedy. “Shade is nothing,” he explained to me, “without light. By nature you seem to be provided with all the tragic intensity you need. So now reach out and break up your shadows into art.”

One very interesting and subsequently helpful discipline I learned from Miss Mason was to rely wholly on myself. We were never allowed any prompting; either we remembered or we sat down shamed; or we had the intelligence and presence of mind to improvise till we did remember. I always remembered. I think by the knowledge that I must remember or fail I learned whatever I had to learn so thoroughly that nothing short of a dog fight under my nose could have put me off it. Continual recitation without failure of memory certainly strengthens the heart. I cannot say I was not nervous during those years of public recitation to small private audiences. I was too anxious to succeed and not aware of the unnecessary tension which is a part of all prestige education; I never was nervous enough to break down, nor, once started, did I fail to enjoy the quiet attention of my audience and gain from it an added zest in the pleasure of my work. I really loved what I learned and hoped to make each appreciated point an equal pleasure to my audience. Once or twice I wrote little sketches to add to the programmes which Miss Mason encouraged us in doing, but I was too young to do this well and, besides, I had the sense to prefer Anthony Hope’s Dolly Dialogues, Mark Twain, or Kipling’s short stories to any crude efforts of my own.

I think it was this winter that we renewed our Coleridge friendship and Gerard Coleridge, my partner in age, became for the next few years my most intimate, and indeed, my only contemporary friend. It was a curious relationship; intellectually we became increasingly intimate and acted as grindstones for each other’s expanding minds, but there was always between us a curious gulf of untouched emotion which neither ever crossed. Gerard was an extraordinarily good fellow, “a man’s man” rather than a woman’s. He had a slow, powerful brain, an extremely hot, flash-in-the-pan temper, and was, though a decent and high-minded human being, extremely self-centred. From the time we were fifteen and sixteen (he was a year older than myself) till we were twenty and twenty-one, we spent part of all his holidays together. Neither of our parents objected to this constant relationship. Once Mr. Coleridge said to me, “Phyllis, promise me you’ll not let Gerard grow up into a commonplace pig!” as if he even welcomed the influence I suppose he thought we had on each other; but I do not think I believed in this influence, either on Gerard’s part or my own. I know that I was astonished and almost dismayed at the very beautiful and touching letter he wrote me the night before he married.

We became engaged simultaneously, without hint or preparation, in different countries to people the other had never met or even heard about, and the only shadow on our engagements was the fear that the other might resent it. Neither of us did, but curiously, without a word of explanation to each other, we withdrew from our five years’ fellowship.

I think we both realized that wholly without sentiment as our relationship had been, it had nevertheless gone too deep into the habit of mental sharing to be bearable to our chosen life partners. We only met half a dozen times afterwards, over more than a quarter of a century, but when we did meet, it was as if we had never parted. When I heard of his death a few months ago, half my youth rose up and joined him. When someone asked him if he was never in love with me, he said, “I couldn’t be in love with Phyllis. She was immaculate; but she was my dearest friend.” I think he made a mistake in the word “immaculate.” I was ignorant and afraid of sex, not “immaculate”; but probably it was this deep unconscious fear in me which froze in him any possibility of a deeper feeling. All the Coleridges were my friends; for the younger of the twins, Walter, and the eldest sister, Margaret, my affection was perhaps deepest, but with neither did I have anything like the same young, unemotional, ardently intellectual tie that bound me to Gerard. To our long and vital friendship our fairy godmothers gave every gift in friendship’s repertoire, except a touch of passion.

The threat that had been hanging over me physically for the last few years, now took effect. I had to have the operation my Uncle Frank had foreseen. It was a fairly serious operation and unusual at my age, and I doubt if our kind family doctor was an expert surgeon. But in those days I had no such doubts, I was sure he was the best doctor in the world, and I only hoped I should prove not too despicable as a patient. That I should be perfectly well soon afterwards, I took for granted.

I had prepared myself for a good deal of personal terror beforehand, but when I saw our kindly doctor’s anxious face, all my own fears left me, and I set to work to think out some mutually successful jokes to share with him instead.

I had a curious dream under the ether.

I found myself rushing towards an iron bar against which I knew I should be shattered to pieces. Just as I reached it the bar changed into a sound. The word “God!” rang in my ears, and I felt myself slipping through a soft darkness into an ocean of light, and filled with inexpressible felicity. I found myself one of a circle of invisible but positive beings—all moving together—in a rhythmic dance. The sense of relief and harmony was overwhelming, until suddenly I felt I was being drawn back, into my body lying outstretched beneath me on a bed. A dreadful sense of weight and disappointment came over me, and I woke up saying: “Don’t bring me back!”

As soon as I became definitely conscious, I was extremely happy in the Nursing Home. The nurses sat on my bed at all hours of the day or night, and I felt as if I was a welcome guest at a continuous party. I loved the daily visits of my big doctor with his long golden beard and sparkling blue eyes. I was allowed to choose whatever I liked to eat, and one of my family came daily to see me, bringing me books, and gossip. It was almost disappointing to be well enough to go back into our rather gloomy lodgings, especially as George, whose Easter holidays it was, had been consigned to our uncle’s with Wilmett. However, neither George nor I, together or apart, were to make much of these particular holidays. A selfish fellow-lodger, who was just recovering from a successfully concealed and virulent type of measles, asked to be allowed to rest in our small sitting-room where George and I were playing together, on her way downstairs. We both took the infection. George developed measles at my uncle’s; valiantly nursed by Wilmett, he just escaped pneumonia though his temperature rose to 105°; and I, weakened no doubt by my operation, had pneumonia and very nearly died of it.

Mary slept in my room, and nursed me with unrelaxing zeal and kindness, night and day. I am sure that what kept me alive was the presence of Mary and the book, an interminable and romantic one, called Janice Meredith, which she read aloud to me almost without a break. It was the story of a girl-heroine in the American Civil War. What that girl didn’t do, and didn’t suffer—would hardly be worth mentioning. Hercules strangling serpents at three years old was nothing to her. Rattlesnakes, swamps, pistol-studded gangsters, prolonged scenes of escaped outrage—she took them all in her stride. Coughing for five nights without a let-up, would have been jam and joy for her.

Still, I think it was a pity that our beloved physician should have chosen this particular moment to warn me that the career I had planned on the stage could never, with my now weakened lungs, take place.

My teacher, Fanny Mason, had removed the last real barrier between me and the stage by offering to finance me for the first two years if necessary, either on the stage or as a public recitationist. Also, to my intense joy and pride—Pennell, who had heard me give a recital, offered me a job in Charlie’s Aunt at the peak of its run—on a tour of the provinces, and at the princely sum of three pounds a week.

At sixteen I felt that there was really no time at all to lose, and now my future had become unmanageably taken out of my eager hands.

We had a tiny little second sitting-room, where we took our meals, and which I was allowed to use as a study in between times. The window looked down on a paved courtyard, and if I had been perfectly sure that by jumping out of it I could have ended the interminable dull days of my convalescence, and the blank insignificance of my future, I believe I should have taken the spring. Like all spoilt and over-sensitive children, I was impatient and mistrustful of life; and anxious to take matters into my own hands. “Neck or nothing” is the chosen method of a neurotic child. It takes a saint like Teresa to say, in moments of desperation, “Lord—this affair goes badly—see to it Thyself.” My religion was not solid enough to stand against the urge towards suicide which now beset me, nor was even my fancied love for my mother of sufficient strength; but I was, I think, a naturally healthy girl, and a new interest cropping up, soon put an end to my defeatist longings.

My father had from time to time been offered several small, damp, obscure country livings which he had hitherto refused. Suddenly a new project was laid before him. Would he take charge for nine months of the parish of Swanscombe in Kent—a sort of basic slum in the country, between the small river towns of Dartford and Gravesend and inhabited almost exclusively by cement workers?

If he would, and if another living could be found in the interval for its present vicar now suffering from a nervous breakdown, my father would be offered Swanscombe as a permanence.

There was very little to be said for Swanscombe. It was inundated with smoke from seventy-two chimneys—its inhabitants were chiefly migrant workers without traditions and totally indifferent to all ideas of religion. The place, however, was dry, the stipend adequate. There was a house of a convenient size. We didn’t know what else to do, so we agreed to at least a nine months’ try-out.

The whole scheme was enhanced for me by having a house at all, where Mellie Darius promised to come for the summer holidays.

The courtyard window lost all temptation for me; and the spring rushed in to take its place.

I asked to be allowed to put up my hair and wear long dresses and after a fearful battle with Wilmett, this tremendous boon was allowed me. Wilmett’s argument was that never before seventeen was such a privilege permitted, and mine that since I was now as tall as she, I had a perfect right to the same evidence of growth.

Mrs. Wroughton called upon us one day, bringing with her the two loveliest of her girls, Florence and Winnie. They were to be driven on the front seat of a four-in-hand out to some festive spot, and they burst into our dismal little lodgings like a garden of flowers. I had never seen anything or anyone as beautiful as Winnie was at eighteen. She had not only very perfect features, and a colour as lovely as any rose—but she had a sort of dancing light—the freshness and radiance of a dream. I hardly think she trod upon the ground, it seemed to spring up under her feet. Florrie with less élan and enchantment, was nevertheless a most lovely girl. I had not seen them since we were children together. They took my breath away—they were so foreign to our world—so rare and beautiful a sight! It was like the visit of Birds of Paradise to London Sparrows. Mrs. Wroughton looked at me with gleaming eyes. “I don’t need to ask how old you are!” she said, laughing at my newly acquired long brown dress that swept the floor—“You’re thirty-nine!” The Wroughtons were just as they had always been—nicer and gayer and harder than anyone else I had ever known. Their hardness was a refuge to me. I liked the stiff, formidable feel of it; and I liked even better their violent candour, for they never thought of anything they didn’t say. Natural and unafraid, and as good-humoured as their mother, they made of this visit an unforgettable experience. They never came again. Nor perhaps did they need to, perhaps it was even better that they shouldn’t.

Spring rushed into summer and our first visit to Swanscombe was both a happy and a successful experiment. My father hurled himself with great zest and energy into this new opportunity. He visited for hours every day, and the people took to him and he to the people. My mother enjoyed the complete absence of any social life. Wilmett was only to spend the holidays with us, as she had found a lodging for herself in West Kensington, which suited her for her singing.

Mary and I, left to our own devices, became the most ardent of curates. We each took over a district to visit. Mary decided that girls should be her field—and boys were to be mine. She started a girls’ Bible Class and a girls’ Club, while I started a Band of Hope and a Club for boys between the ages of 13 and 18. These boys, who left school just at an age when they had begun to enjoy their school work, were thrown into the factory on dangerous and tedious jobs. They soon forgot the little they had learned at school, and many became incapable of reading or writing. In the evening there was nothing for them except the streets, no employment, no amusements, until the brief moment of their falling in love—before the grim up-hill task of homemaking shut down upon them, under its most adverse conditions.

Cement work was well enough paid but it was an exhausting, unhealthy job. The men worked either in the quarries or in the factory, or loading and unloading at the docks. The hours were long and the work uncertain. There were no jobs that did not require great physical strength and endurance, added to which the white powdery cement covered the workers from head to foot and settled on their respiratory organs.

Some of the club boys worked in barges on the river, some loaded and unloaded ships—often for twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch—others worked in the factory itself, as “point boys” on the small railway or, more dangerous still, ran across great kilns on a narrow board, pushing a wheelbarrow, while below them the red-hot furnaces blazed and roared—a horrible descent if a foot slipped, without a chance of rescue.

When there were accidents at the factory—and some of its workers always spoke of it as the Death Factory, there were no ambulances that could be sent for—no doctors or nurses were at hand—the injured man or boy was put on a rough horse-driven cart and joggled over three miles to the nearest hospital. For five years these boys—their work conditions, their unemployment, and their accidents—burned in on my heart.

Sometimes I fought, as well as my fears and inexperience allowed me, against the authorities, to gain improvements in work conditions, but I received little or no encouragement from my father. Perhaps he thought it was useless—perhaps his strong personal loyalty to the patron of his living prevented him from seeing the workers’ point of view. He was always sympathetic to individual cases, but he did not fight for causes. Although I think if he had been ten years younger and less personally discouraged, he would have fought for them.

Meanwhile he was perfect to work for. He never interfered with our efforts; only gave advice when called upon; and always seemed satisfied with anything that worked.

Mary and I liked the people and they seemed to like us. Ostensibly we only called to take them the magazine which cost a penny, and we weren’t supposed to leave the magazine unless we got the penny, but we often did, and made it up out of our scanty pocket money. We were always asked in, and just sat down and talked about the children and their troubles. It would have been ridiculous for us at twenty and sixteen to offer advice, and I don’t think either of us ever did. We hadn’t any money and they knew we hadn’t. But they had troubles and they had children and they liked talking about them. Once in a blue moon we were able to help a trifle. We could offer school treats or a little food for the sick, and give away our old clothes. Our help was always on the smallest possible scale; and I hardly ever remember being asked for anything, however great the need. Stoicism and a sort of blithe indifference or desperation was what struck me most about these cement workers and their families of fifty years ago. I remember lifting a three days’ old baby with great care, and her mother saying to me with a grim laugh, “Nah! don’t yer be too keerful of ’er, Miss—she’ll ’ave to learn to rough it!” When I asked another friend of mine how many children she had had, she replied, “Thirteen, an’ no churchyard luck neither!” They had too many difficulties to make for happy living, but they were genuinely kind, dramatic people and interested in living. I think I rebelled against the conditions of their life more than they did, but I do not think it was a life which human beings should have to live. It was terrible to see the gay and eager young ones pass into dullness and apathy.

I don’t know what Mellie Darius made of our new home, but for these summer holidays she was a great success, and somehow or other she lifted our social horizon and took us further afield. We walked into the orchards a few miles behind our village, we went to garden parties, and visited other clergymen’s families.

My father enjoyed Mellie enormously, but what was more surprising still was the way in which she contrived to please and interest my mother. Wilmett she treated as if she were the same age, and a good comrade. I was not even jealous of the clever, sparring freemasonry that took place between these two young and attractive women. To Mary she was gentle and charming, and to me the heroine of my dreams. She slept in my attic bedroom, and I knew that she gave me an intimacy that none of the rest shared.

She must have been truly fond of me, I think, to put up with the strange, physically simple and spartan life, which was all we had to share with her.

At the summer’s end, Mellie asked my mother to let me go back with her to Bournemouth to continue my studies, at the school where she worked, and under her care. My mother, as usual, left the decision to me. I was greatly tempted to go with Mellie, and I think it would have been a wise decision; but at the time it looked to me like a selfish desertion of my family duty. I did not realize how badly I needed education and the life of my own contemporaries.

I felt that Mary and I were bound up together, in what I thought of as “our work.”

Mellie never forgave my refusal, and from that moment we began to drift apart. I still loved and admired her, but I felt that unless I yielded myself absolutely to her implacable will, she had no place for me in her life.

I think that it was just after she left us in the early autumn of our first winter at Swanscombe that a young American friend of my father, George Edward Barton, whom we used to call G.E.B., came to visit us. He was a young Bostonian architect who had come on his first visit to England, in order to meet Henry James.

With awe and with delight this great meeting had taken place, just before his visit to us, and his description of it fired my blood. What courage, what brilliance, I felt, must be at work in his own mind—to fit him for so magnificent an ordeal!

For hours, sitting on a footstool by my father’s side, I used to listen to the talk between him and G.E.B. I could not join in it. I did not know enough. The world they talked of—countries, books and men—circled above my head, but how I longed to be able, in their offhand and casual manner, to let loose the flood of thoughts that struggled and beat about the narrow shores of my untrained mind! It was the vocabulary that floored me—and perhaps I lacked courage. I did not dare to lay my poor little treasures alongside of their Aladdin’s hoards.

In silence I built up a relationship with G.E.B., which was entirely one of dreams. It did not surprise me that G.E.B. far preferred Wilmett—that was in the natural order of things. He was twenty-seven, and though I had my hair up, I was only sixteen. He was never to know how greatly a chance remark of his influenced my whole future life. I told him that I had wanted to be an actress but had had to give it up. “Don’t you think,” he said, “it would be far more fun to write your own ideas instead of merely to act those of other people?”

I instantly began to write a book which was entitled The Sorrows of the World but I must admit that I never finished it. There were too many sorrows, and I had the grace to realize that I might not yet know everything that was necessary to know about them all. But the schooling in words that this exercise involved prepared me for the novel I was to begin—and finish a few months later.

My astonishment was great when, before G.E.B. left us, he suggested acting as my escort across the ocean. Uncle Frank had offered me a home under his roof with my American grandmother. It was a tremendous offer; and to have for a companion on a limitless voyage the hero of my dreams was even more of a spiritual adventure. Once again my parents placed the decision in my own hands. My mother sent me out for a walk by the riverside. “Go, and make up your mind,” she told me, “but, oh, how I shall miss you if you decide to go!”

This excursion in making up my mind was of great interest to me. I didn’t make it up—for I found that my mind was already made.

I might never have left the Vicarage porch for all the good that long walk did me. I knew I could not make my mother miss me, nor put the Atlantic Ocean between me and her pleading eyes.

When our family doctor first saw the little lumps that had risen on Wilmett’s neck after a slight, but curiously prolonged attack of influenza, I was struck by his look of shocked horror, instantly overlaid by excessive cheerfulness. “This won’t do, you know,” he boomed in his friendly voice, “you’ll have to go to the seaside at once, and get rid of these.” There was, however, nothing sinister in this suggestion, and the financial obstacles that usually arose when remedies of this kind were loose upon the air, disappeared when Grandma Fowler promptly swooped down upon us in a carriage and pair; and carried Wilmett off to the most expensive hotel at Eastbourne.

This was the spring when Mafeking was relieved, and we were in London on the day when the word “Mafeking” passed into the language.

It is impossible to describe the long slow agony of that siege or its effect upon the whole Island. Perhaps after two years’ ill-conceived and unprepared-for war, exposed to the just and fierce criticisms of the civilized world, some of us were already beginning to think that it was a blow alike upon the intelligence and humanity of our great country. Certainly there was something like a guilty frenzy in the feeling most of us had for the young hero who held against overwhelming odds this obscure and exposed village. Day after golden day of that astonishingly beautiful spring we woke torn with fear—to feel a leaden weight upon our breasts—and at the last gasp, when it was incredible that the starving group of heroes could hold out any longer, everyone went mad with joy to know the miracle had been achieved.

London went punch-drunk to celebrate this small, terrific event. How much of this feeling was the relief of a bad conscience in escaping punishment, and how much genuine enthusiasm for the vicarious heroism of Baden Powell, it would be impossible to measure—but relief and enthusiasm swept all of us alike into an unreal world of enchantment and escape.

The summer stretched before us—endless, cloudless and gay.

Even our small family fortunes were lifted to a higher sphere. My father had been offered and accepted a locum tenens in the delightful village of Betchworth, Surrey, for six months, in order to give the dejected Vicar of Swanscombe time to make up his mind whether he would leave it or not.

Never before had we—by the mere fluke of circumstance—inhabited a handsome well-furnished home set in a garden that was the pride and joy of the best gardener in a neighbourhood that specialized in gardens. Never before, and never again, were we three girls—against our own family background—to taste a normal social life.

I was told by a Betchworth inhabitant twenty years later, that the impact of Betchworth upon us was nothing to the impact we, as a family, made upon the tranquil, conventional country life of Betchworth.

We might, my informant told me, have been a travelling circus, or a tribe of miracle-working gypsies dropped from the skies, into that quiet country vicarage.

Everyone in the Parish loved their vicar, Canon Saunders, and his family of three daughters born and brought up there were a part of the place.

It was not expected that any change, however temporary, could be one for the better. Still, however deeply the Saunders had been loved, they had not astonished.

Now the Parish suddenly found themselves listening to a preacher, who set them smiling, weeping and trembling by turns. They had never seen a beauty who sang as Wilmett sang, or a strange creature half-child, half-woman, who recited like a professional; and last but by no means least—for the people of Betchworth were nothing if they were not sporting—never had they seen a boy of thirteen who was so fine a cricketer as George.

George was a quiet, modest boy, who brought to any game he took part in a style that was certainly an acquisition.

Mary, too, if not so resonant or spectacular a personality at first sight, produced incredible talents for charming children. She told self-made fairy-tales that held the little Betchworth boys and girls spellbound.

It was as if the Pied Piper had come to dwell among them.

My mother, of course, instantly made it plain that she would refuse all social opportunities. But invitations poured in just the same. Never was a clergyman’s family so fêted.

Wilmett, Mary and I, taking it in turns to accompany my father, were invited out to dinner five nights out of the seven. My father held dinner tables enthralled, and we made the evenings’ entertainment afterwards. I don’t think we were ever jealous of each other. We seldom performed on the same occasion, and our gifts were so completely different that no form of competition arose between us. I thought Wilmett one of the world’s finest singers, and Wilmett accepted with surprise—but she did accept—the curious wish the Betchworth people had to hear me recite.

I had at my disposal my original twenty-five different programmes of prose and verse; and during the summer I constantly added to them. Miss Mason had helped me choose most of them, and I think it is quite possible that she was right in thinking I could have made my living as a diseuse even if I did not go on the stage. I was always nervous before I began to recite but never when I had once felt out my audience; and I had no difficulty whatever with my memory. Once you knew you had nothing to fall back upon but yourself you avoided all occasions of falling. I have found this training an immense help in public speaking. Interruptions which might otherwise have been a difficulty, have never broken my train of thought. It was perhaps odd that I was wholly unaware at the time of the sensation we created in this sober neighbourhood, but I was so deeply humiliated by our complete absence of physical prowess, that I completely overlooked any credit that came to us from other directions.

Wilmett could play a little vague tennis and even golf—but not of a kind that came anywhere near the Betchworth standard. None of us played hockey, and this seemed the worst and most indelible stain on our characters.

A very kind lady, the mother of a large and handsome family of young people, told me sternly one lovely summer afternoon as I sat sedately watching the tennis of my contemporaries instead of participating in it, “My dear child, you seem to me to know nothing. You can’t ride, swim, or play tennis, golf or hockey. You really don’t seem capable of anything at all! It is most deplorable! And I think it my duty to tell you that you and your sisters will never get on in England unless you learn to play games!” She was, I think, afraid of giving this strenuous advice to Wilmett; but her words sank deep into my heart and indeed clouded all my dreams.

I didn’t know quite what to do about it. I couldn’t play tennis by myself—nobody had time to teach me golf; and we hadn’t got a horse nor was there anything handy for swimming in. Still her words produced something. For although I did nothing about the games, I promptly sat down and wrote a book—a whole book—in the last golden summer of our family life. It was my first completed novel, and I called it Life, the Interpreter.

Reproof and criticism have generally been answered by me, with some form of activity, at any stage of my career—but seldom or never by the form suggested. The poor lady who wanted me to learn golf would certainly not have received any pleasure from reading my novel. Nor indeed should she have received any pleasure from it, since it was a very bad novel.

It was about people and experiences of which I knew nothing and it had been terribly easy to write. In fact, the words dripped from my pen. All that I can say for it as a novel is that it had a beginning, a middle and an end; and a definite amount of story. I read it to nobody, and concealed the whole process, as far as possible.

Almost more happened in this one summer at Betchworth, than ever happened in any one summer of my life.

I made a great and lasting friendship with a woman older than my mother. Ellen Mary Gurney belonged to a distant branch of my great-grandmother Emma Gurney’s family; and her garden, almost as beautiful as ours, touched our own.

We drove together an innocent and phlegmatic white pony, which we took it in turns to guide, in the long summer afternoons through lanes full of wild roses and honeysuckle; and up the slopes of Box Hill to where Meredith was living.

In the evenings, I slipped across the lawn, and crossing the stile that led to her garden, sat with her till bedtime.

“Elena”—as she let me call her—had been brought up in the pre-Raphaelite circle. She had had drawing lessons from Ruskin; and had known Christina Rossetti. She had even passed Gabriel on the stairs at the Mount-Temples which had been second home to her. She was one of a large rich family of Gurneys, left orphans and growing up under the lavish care of Mrs. Russell Gurney—the Recorder’s wife.

In her early youth, Elena had suffered a startling tragedy—her three sisters were drowned together in the Nile while travelling in Egypt. Later in life she was to suffer other and perhaps worse family tragedies. Her brother Edmund Gurney committed suicide; another went out of his mind and never regained it. They were all, I think, over-sensitive and too deeply conscientious.

Elena, when I met her, was tall and austere-looking, but still rather beautiful. She had an innocent and guileless look; and there was in her character, plainly influenced as it was by a practised religion, a great steadiness, as strong as iron.

I think it was this steady singleness of mind that so greatly attracted my wavering and unstable mind to her.

For seven years until her death at sixty-one Elena opened to me her heart and her home. All her experiences became mine, her carefully trained knowledge was at my service; and I knew that I possessed her quiet and sternly controlled love.

Elena was a very strong Anglo-Catholic and she renewed in me, for a time at least, the religion the Sisters had taught me. However, she united with its rigid and severe church standard, a definite respect for beauty which I had never before felt so free to follow.

Elena believed Art, beauty and the culture of living were all parts of religion itself. She wanted me to look well-dressed. She kept a beautifully run and cared-for household; she even believed in eating food in a palatable form.

My mother thought this attitude of Elena’s worldly, but to me it was a door thrown open into an authorized fairy-land. I went in very gaily; I even trained myself to appreciate my new liberty, by reading Ruskin. I re-read Newman and learned Keble’s best hymns by heart, though I thought them rather inferior as poetry; and infinitely preferred Blake. I was enchanted by an offer from Elena to take me abroad for the winter paying half my expenses; and bitterly disappointed when my mother quite definitely refused the offer. This was the only time I can remember my mother refusing me outright anything I really wanted whole-heartedly to do; and it was a great shock to me. Perhaps she was a little jealous of this older woman’s influence over me, although she apparently approved of it; and upon matters of religion and education they were in complete accord. There were, however, practical reasons for my remaining at home, of which I was perhaps wilfully unaware.

Mary was about to set off on a great adventure to America, to spend a year with Grandma and Uncle George. Grandma and Uncle George and Harry were all visiting us this summer, and there was an unusual amount of excitement coming and going. There was a shadow, too, hanging over us. Wilmett had returned from Eastbourne fully recovered as it seemed, and looking more blooming than ever, but the lumps on her neck had not altogether disappeared, and might, our doctor told us, have to be operated on. I could not, however, see why I should be sacrificed for this bare possibility. Had I not had an operation myself that was no interference to Wilmett?

But reluctantly I acquiesced when the old familiar argument smote my ears—we simply could not afford even half my expenses abroad for a few months. All the more reason, I privately told myself, to finish my novel as soon as possible and begin to earn my own living.

On the other side of the garden, there was another house in which lived a mother and daughter deeply at variance with each other. The mother was dying from Graves’ disease, but this, strangely enough, had increased rather than lessened their antagonism.

I was, by some accident, drawn into their confidence and visited each frequently. I had never before seen the approach of death, and it moved and distressed me terribly not to be able to help my new friend with her labouring breath, or to decrease by some means or other the even more terrible hate with which the dying woman was preoccupied. She and her middle-aged daughter were both interesting and clever women, but all their powers seemed sucked into this painful and useless tug-of-war. The daughter, who was very stout and plain, believed that her mother’s neglect of her, when she had scarlet fever as a child, was responsible for her ungainly figure, and had robbed her of love and marriage.

The mother’s hate was, she told me, grief, at the evil she had discovered in her daughter’s character.

I felt disloyal at receiving both their confidences and also inconvenienced by agreeing with neither of them; and finally I asked my father, who was regularly visiting the dying woman, what I could do about the matter; and which of them was really in the right?

My father looked at me for a long moment with his tender, laughing eyes: “Do nothing!” he said at last, “but go on being as good to them both as you can! Perhaps neither of them is right, but you can see for yourself, they’re unhappy human beings having a hard time.” A few days later the mother died. I was very glad she was at rest at last. She was the first dead person I had ever seen. I carried in to her the flowers I had brought to give her living, and saw with awe and relief how peaceful and beautiful her tortured face now looked—with all its problems solved. But her daughter’s problem remained alive. When I went downstairs, I found her in the hall, red with passion. “She needn’t have died!” she shouted at me outside that quiet room. “She did it on purpose to spite me!”

In the early part of the summer, before the arrival of the American relatives, Wilmett began her last and most thorough romance. This young man was a friend of my Uncle Harry’s, and had already visited us several times in London. Now he spent several weekends with us while their romance grew stronger. There was really nothing against such an engagement, and from the first Arthur’s attraction to Wilmett was as plain as hers to him, so that we all began to take a happy issue for granted.

All Wilmett’s love affairs took place out loud and were of extraordinary interest to the whole family. Wilmett showed a little more anxiety than usual because she was genuinely in love, and she wanted to know exactly what Mary and I thought of everything Arthur had said to her—or she in reply had said to Arthur.

Mary and I were her enthusiastic supporters in the matter, and invariably disappeared with or without tact, whenever Arthur turned up. Nothing, we felt, could be better than for Arthur to marry Wilmett—better for her—and incidentally, better for us. Wilmett once married, we thought—and our coast would be incredibly clear.

A change had taken place this summer in our family relationships. I had come out quite definitely as Mary’s champion against Wilmett’s and Mother’s continuous persecutions of Mary. I had always deeply resented these attacks, but had hitherto found myself without a weapon. Now I found that I had a tongue; and I used it. My mother was horrified and complained to my father about it. But my father replied: “No, Daisy, I won’t interfere. I think it will do you and Wilmett no harm to be answered back!” My mother then dropped her criticisms of Mary in my presence, though Wilmett, of course, continued them with added fury. However, she was at a disadvantage, for besides my use of words, I had a very easily controlled temper. I did not lose it when I fought her; and our battles became one-sided scenes in which she very often got the worst of it. I wish now that I had not added to the discouragement of the illness which hung over her. But none of us had really yet grasped that she was seriously threatened; and I rejoiced in my new powers and used them remorselessly whenever the opportunity occurred.

It was an incredible summer, day followed golden day without a break. The heat was tropical. We sat out in our sweet-scented garden far on into the night; and the moon lit the colours of a great lily that bloomed in Elena’s garden almost as vividly as the light of day.

No day was ever long enough for me. I often got up at five to pick and arrange the flowers with which I filled the house. My mother had to make a rule that not more than eleven vases should be used in any one room.

We had well-trained and kindly maids, left us by the Saunders family. Marvels of fruit and vegetables poured in on us from the garden. We ate better than my mother’s incredible parsimony had ever allowed us to eat before, or would allow us to eat afterwards.

The American relatives arrived, and were as fond and as exciting an extension of the family as ever.

Grandma and I went up to London for a few days together, to visit Grandma Fowler, at the height of the season in Grosvenor Square; and Grandma Bottome extracted my first evening dress from my English grandmother.

At first it threatened to be a very dull and disappointing affair. Grandma offered me a grey taffeta silk skirt of her own; and a piece of emerald satin, of which to make a bodice. Peckham, her maid, who was an excellent dressmaker, sniffed at it privately. “I shall never be able to make anything of that, Miss Phyllis,” she told me. But Grannie Bottome soon put an end to the catastrophe. “Rachel,” she said, “give the child what she wants! This is her first evening dress! Let her choose it, and let it be new! You’re far too generous to want to limit the child’s pleasure!” And my grandmother Fowler, who I think had never been accused of generosity before, promptly succumbed.

I went out free and untrammelled with Peckham as a guide, and we bought yards and yards of daffodil yellow satin and white chenille to trim it.

Four years later, for in my youth an evening dress had to last for a long time, I was to meet my future husband in this dress; and I have always thought that the daffodil satin decided his choice.

My American grandmother also saved me on this visit from a great embarrassment of a more spiritual nature—a fervid evangelical friend of both grandmothers kept pursuing me into corners and asking me to decide whether or not “I loved my Saviour.” I found this question quite beyond me. If I said “No!” it seemed rude, and was not altogether true. If I said “Yes,” on the other hand, it seemed to imply a far more settled faith than I really possessed.

Finally in despair I asked my Grannie Bottome what I should say! “Tell her,” my grandmother replied in a flash, “that it is your Saviour’s business not hers, to find out whether you love Him or not!”

This long and perfect summer, so full of new experiences and so real in promise, ended on a note of doubt. Mary, it seemed, went a little unwillingly forth on her great adventure. Wilmett was to have the operation on her glands, after all, and it did not sound as light a one as we had hoped. Arthur had not yet proposed to her.

We had only made up our minds—oddly, I think, after the immense success and pleasures of the Betchworth summer—that Swanscombe, where we already knew there were no such pleasures or advantages, should be our future home.

After Betchworth we went into our old Campden Grove lodgings, behind St. Mary Abbots Church.

London, at the time of the South African war, is as lost now as Atlantis. The sound and sight of it have both vanished forever. The traffic was a continuous low rumble like the noise of waves beating on a distant shore. This massive sound never wholly stopped though it decreased or increased at certain intervals, until silence swallowed it between three and five a.m. Even then you might hear an occasional roisterer pass by, or if you were very watchful and lived near the city, the carts rattled in over the cobbles coming from the country to Covent Gardens with fruit and vegetables.

The London streets were full of noises we never hear now. Cabs were whistled for from doorsteps with persistent shrillness; postmen knocked every hour with short volleys of reverberating sound up one side of the street and down the other. Street singers and hurdy-gurdies, with or without monkeys, were to be found at nearly every corner. On Sundays there were muffin bells. On weekdays, only hardened London cooks could distinguish the musical and conflicting cries of hawkers. All well-to-do people had balconies that bloomed with flowers from April till October.

To walk up Park Lane was to pace between the walk of herbaceous borders. On one side, Hyde Park brimmed with brilliant flower-beds, while on the other the balconies of the birdcage little houses rivalled them with tubs and hanging baskets.

No buses defiled this stately thoroughfare, only hansoms rustled and slithered, among glittering private carriages. Horses shone like satin; “thick jewelled shone the saddle leather.”

Open victorias showed their human nosegays to the best advantage. Older and less pictorial great people rolled smoothly past in “barouche landaux.” These four-seated equipages had two seats fronting the horses for the principal travellers, stately and spacious, and two back to the horses, humbler and less comfortable. Unimportant young men, children, governesses or nurses sat in these seats. You could see better out of them and you could sometimes catch what the footmen said to the coachmen in a careful undertone.

I do not think that women were any better-looking when I was young, but they had very little else to be, so that everything was done to accentuate what looks they possessed. They wore a great many more clothes, and in order to indicate that at least their bodies were slim, they pinched their waists. My own waist was a natural twenty, yet by a very slight effort in a corset, it became eighteen. We wore large flowered hats in the summer, appropriately called “picture hats,” and in the winter rather small and tight ones. For sporting or everyday purposes, girls wore hard-brimmed sailor hats, which were very unbecoming except to Wilmett. I can even remember muffs—but I was a child when they began to run out—women already having something better to do with their hands, than just to keep them warm.

Men in London wore top hats always in the afternoon, and often in the morning, but “Derby” hats were beginning to come in among the less fashionable.

We rode in horse buses, if possible just behind the driver, where we could get the best view, or for long distances in the underground railway. There was no Tube. The people we knew, however, generally had their own carriages or else rode in hansoms.

Wilmett occasionally, when dressed up or on pleasure bent, drove in a hansom; and Father if he was in a hurry; but Mary and I never rode in them. There were no motors, no telephones, no cinemas, no radios and, of course, no aeroplanes. My mother was thought mad to let us go about alone. All human beings with an income over five hundred a year were, I think, more conscious of themselves, and of each other, than such people would be now. Our individual lives had an acknowledged importance. There was far more time to get to know each other intimately, and to build up long, intense and often disastrous private relationships. We all had much longer memories with much less to remember.

The Poor, as Tennyson’s Lincolnshire Farmer grimly but aptly described them, “in a lump were bad.” There was not much else open to them.

These profound contrasts were a great trouble to an imaginative young girl with observant eyes, who wasn’t very busy.

I think after Betchworth I felt more acutely aware of these cruel contrasts than usual. We seemed to pass from the brightest sunshine into a dark, interminable tunnel. The first thing that had to be done, after George had gone back to school and Mary been seen off to America, was for Wilmett to see the surgeon chosen to operate upon her, should such an operation be found necessary.

Arthur Sheilds, I believe one of the first surgeons of the day, was chosen. Father flatly refused to go near him. He could not bear the thought of Wilmett’s illness and feared, I think, that he might break down under an adverse verdict. Mother promised to go with alacrity, but on the day of the appointment remained in bed with a headache; so I went with Wilmett as I did on all subsequent occasions when Arthur Sheilds’s “kid-gloved blizzards” broke over our defenceless heads.

I think on this first occasion, in a pea-souper of the most appalling blackness, we took a hansom. Wilmett looked very young and beautiful, and in triumphant health; it was the last time she was to go out into the world, without her arm in a sling. She was nervous and disappointed that Mother was not with her, but she was very sweet about my going. I doubt if it seemed natural to the eminent surgeon or to our own family doctor, when they found they had no-one but a child of seventeen, to whom to impart their verdict. They imparted it, however, without knowing it, for after Sheilds had examined Wilmett, he deliberately sat down as if he were tired, and said over his shoulder to our hovering friend, “So that’s that.”

A moment later he was cheerfully explaining to Wilmett that she must, he thought, have a little surgical treatment, “to get rid of these glands, for you!” “Do you mean an operation?” Wilmett asked with her great eyes dilated in horror. “Well—yes——” Mr. Sheilds admitted, “I do mean an operation.” “Will it be dangerous?” Wilmett demanded. “All operations can be dangerous,” Mr. Sheilds answered evasively. “You have youth—good organs—everything necessary to see you through.” “And what would happen if I didn’t have the operation?” Wilmett asked yet again. “You can’t not have it,” Mr. Sheilds said severely. “You mean I’d die if I didn’t?” Wilmett persisted in a low, awed voice, her eyes fixed on him. “We don’t need to think about that,” our own doctor boomed reassuringly. “Of course you’ll have it—and of course it will go splendidly!” But Wilmett never took her eyes off Mr. Sheilds. She hadn’t yet got to the bottom of her basket. “Mr. Sheilds,” she asked quietly, “exactly what is the matter with me—is it really my glands—or is it cancer?” There was the longest possible pause before Arthur Shields answered her, then he said grimly but not unkindly, “Aren’t bad glands bad enough for you, Miss Bottome?” “Glands! glands! glands, of course!” boomed our pleasant old family friend as if he were finding a particular relish in repeating the name of Wilmett’s terrifying vicissitude. “Are they tubercular?” Wilmett went on inexorably for she knew quite a lot about illness. “That we can’t decide before we’ve opened them up,” Mr. Sheilds told her a little impatiently. “Either they’re tubercular or it is cancer!” I told myself, when he had finished; and I greatly feared that Wilmett would have come to the same conclusion. But the answer to Wilmett’s last question, would the operation disfigure her much, reassured her so much, that I think the answer to the earlier one slipped her vigilance. Both doctors promised her that the trouble was too low down for any scar to show.

Her beautiful throat was untouched by the swelling. I myself could see that the lump went down from just above the breast under her right arm.

I saw our own doctor alone for a few moments while Mr. Sheilds said good-bye to Wilmett. “Tell your parents,” he urged, “that she must have this operation at once. Of course I will see them myself as well, but be sure to repeat to them what you heard Mr. Sheilds say just now! She can’t not have it.” I promised, and indeed I always memorized and repeated to my parents exactly what took place at these consultations. What I didn’t tell them were the inferences I drew from the doctors’ behaviour to Wilmett. I knew they would not have been so kind, so reassuring, so anxious to respond to her every wish or question, had they not realized how grave was the issue.

They wanted to make things easy for her, and you do not want to make things easy for people unless they are hard.

Wilmett underwent the operation a week later, and got through it with unruffled courage. She showed me with great pride a tiny line left with flowers from Arthur, “Keep a stiff upper lip—love—Arthur.” “I think it means more,” she said, “than if he wrote quite a lot, don’t you?” We only knew ourselves, after Wilmett’s death, that Arthur had seen Mr. Sheilds after the operation to ask if marriage was possible and had been told that her case was hopeless.

The Nursing Home she was in was quite a distance from our lodgings, but I went to visit her every day for the three weeks she was kept there.

My mother was quite ill all this winter with constant neuralgia, and other troubles, and my father had to spend a great deal of his time at Swanscombe; when he was with us, he needed my constant help, to buy furniture and household needs of all kinds for the new vicarage. I was so busy that I could not attend any of my recitation classes, and I quite forgot my MS. of Life, the Interpreter till one day I saw an advertisement in a literary paper from an agent called “Watts,” when I sent him my typed MS. and asked him to let me know if he thought the book suitable for publication. Almost ten days later I got a letter from him asking me to call at the office.

I told no-one of this adventure, but went off by myself to the city, and after some difficulty found my way to his handsome office. Mr. Watts was an immense, stout man with a magnificent head of golden curb. He looked rather like a somnolent, but kind-hearted lion.

He told me he had read my MS. himself, with great interest, and would be willing to try to place it for me. All I had to do was to pay a preliminary fee of three guineas, and give him ten per cent of any profits the book might bring in. As it was a first book that would probably be small.

The only trouble about this breath-taking prospect, was that I hadn’t got the three guineas. Three shillings would have been a very silver lining to any cloud of mine.

Mr. Watts, however, with incredible generosity, told me that on account of my youth, and absence of means, he would in this case consent to waive the preliminary fee; and I went out of his office as if I were travelling on air. But the book and its uncertain future were soon sunk in fresh and extreme anxiety, about Wilmett. One day I found her, with a lot of colour and talking rather excitedly about a possible visit from Arthur Sheilds. Our own doctor came in, and asked me to go into the sitting-room with him for a few moments. “Look here,” he said very unhappily, “I want you to help me about your sister. I ought not to ask you, I know—you’re much too young! But I have to speak to somebody—I cannot take the whole responsibility! Your sister has a bad turn and I’ve asked Sheilds to call. He may be able to drain the poison from the wound—in which case she’ll get over it—but if the poison doesn’t drain off—well—she won’t get over it! Ought I to tell your parents until we know which way it is going? I’d much rather your mother didn’t know.”

Father was at the moment in Swanscombe. He could, I know, have been wired for—but I also knew that he would instantly have communicated his anxiety to Mother; besides himself having had to face the shock and suspense of bad news at a distance. On the other hand if Wilmett were to die without seeing them—would they ever forgive me—or I forgive myself? “Will she be conscious and want to see them?” I asked. “No, I don’t think so,” he said; “anyhow, on no account must she realize there is any danger, while she is conscious!” “All right then,” I said, “let’s wait and see!” The relief in his eyes was unmistakable. “I think that is best myself,” he told me, “now go back to your sister, and don’t let her have any idea that anything is in the wind. Tell her Sheilds’s visit is just a routine affair and that I expected it. Don’t stay long, her temperature is 103 degrees. I’ll come round tomorrow the moment I know which way things are going.”

Wilmett was very suspicious at first because she had thought Mr. Sheilds was not coming to see her again; still, in Wilmett’s way, this surprise visit was a pleasure to her. She was a little in love already with this saturnine middle-aged surgeon who was so unexpectedly kind to her.

It was part of the secret of her charm that, without touching the deeper feelings of her own heart, almost any man could rouse in Wilmett a sense of attraction.

We talked gaily together as sisters talk. We had grown strangely near together since her illness—as if I had become older, and she younger; and then I kissed her good-bye. “You’ll come tomorrow?” she asked eagerly as I reached the door, though she knew I would always come. “Oh yes!” I said, waving my hand to her; but I only just held the smile on my lips in safety, until the door had closed behind me.

I was glad my father was away, because I doubted if I could have kept the truth from him. He would have wanted too much to know exactly how Wilmett was; but I had no inclination to give way before my mother. I didn’t want to upset her, and also, I think I knew, she did not want to be upset.

There was no-one else with whom I could talk. Elena had gone abroad. Mellie seldom wrote to me. Mary was so far away that I dared not tell her anything that would frighten her, so there was nothing to do but fight my fear by myself for twenty-four hours.

At last, late in the afternoon of a black November day, I heard the familiar clop, clop, of our doctor’s brougham check outside our door. In a second I was down the stairs, and at the top of the steps. “It’s all right!” he told me cheerfully. “Her temperature’s dropped. She’ll get over this now.”

I let him go upstairs to Mother alone, while I sat on the stairs tasting my reprieve. I think even then, I knew it was only a reprieve. “She’ll get over this now,” had a time limit. Still it was a reprieve.

Sister Teresa speaks sometimes of the “Black night of the Soul.” I felt as if I had been in it; and now the dawn had lifted. It is curious how stubborn hope is. Again and again I knew that Wilmett would never recover—yet hope came back into my heart like a tide and pushed away my doubts.

My grandmother was in the country on a round of visits, but she had left her carriage and pair behind her, to share between my mother and Aunt Jo, who lived in Mount Street. The sharing worked out, I think, rather differently from her intentions, for Aunt Jo had the carriage every day, and told us that if any occasion should make it absolutely necessary for us to have it, we were to let her know.

Still she was very sympathetic about Wilmett’s operation, and sent her flowers and lovely bed jackets for her illness. She was even sweeter to me, of whom she was, I believe, genuinely fond. “Do come and see me, my poor child,” she told me during a short sudden descent upon our lodgings, “whenever you can spare the time from your two invalids.”

One day I thought I could. It was necessary at last to ask for the carriage to take Wilmett, when she left the Nursing Home, to the station.

She was to go to Broadstairs as soon as she was fit to travel, and Grandma’s carriage would not shake her like an ordinary four-wheeler. I gave Mother her lunch, and started off for Mount Street, to fit in this precious visit before I was due at Wilmett’s Nursing Home.

To save time I ate no lunch. It was a long walk up Park Lane, and it had begun to rain before I got to Aunt Jo’s. I longed to see her as I have seldom longed to see anyone. If only I could tell someone how worried I was about Wilmett! How worried about moving Mother to Swanscombe when she was so poorly—and into a new home, with a new, and of course inferior, doctor! Then there were expenses—furniture, housekeeping, George’s Christmas holidays—my brain spun with these problems that had so suddenly passed from Wilmett’s shoulders on to mine.

I wouldn’t tell Aunt Jo about the scene I had had with our doctor the day before, but no doubt it was an additional cloud. He had come downstairs from Mother’s room, and walked about the drawing-room as if he had been stung by a hornet. He had implored me not to let myself be sacrificed as my sister had been, not to nurse Mother and do endless Parish work for my father at Swanscombe at the same time. He begged me to remember that I had had one bad breakdown, and might well have another.

He had impressed me very much, and even succeeded in frightening me a little. He was a very large, kind, impressive man, and I thought omnipotent—rather like God; but I reminded myself that he wasn’t God; so that he had really only succeeded in exalting me into a firmer sense of dedication than I had felt before. I intended to do exactly what he had pleaded with me to avoid, and I should probably do it now with still more vim. But I realized then, as I never had before, that illnesses were not in themselves admirable or useful things; and I did not really want to pay the price that Wilmett had paid before me. Perhaps, I thought, Aunt Jo, who must be as good as she was beautiful, could throw further light on the matter.

I found Aunt Jo, in a charming Edwardian room full of gilt French clocks and delicate pastel shades. She had had a smart friend to lunch and they were both beautifully dressed in the height of fashion without a hair out of place, sitting over the open fire. A footman brought a coffee-tray into the room just after me. I was glad to see that he had thoughtfully provided an extra cup. I expect that I looked like a wind-swept tramp. It was raining and I had no umbrella.

“My dear,” Aunt Jo said, with a lift of her lovely eyebrows, “what do you want?” She did not ask me to sit down by the fire, nor did she offer me a cup of that delicious coffee.

I told her what I wanted, and she agreed at once to send the carriage for Wilmett—but rather as if it were her carriage. She took down the date and the hour; and turned me out of the room with her eyes.

Perhaps this little scene would not have remained so indelibly written on my mind if I had not had the extravagant expectations of an over-sensitive child. As it was, it changed all my views. I suddenly realized, as I walked down the shallow deep-piled stairs, that beautiful things meant nothing. You could have everything in the world, you could know, as I somehow believed Aunt Jo knew, everything of importance to be known, and you could have a manner as sympathetic as be-damned; and yet not be kind at all.

I realized that I should have done much better to have told my troubles to the footman.

Wilmett went off buoyantly to Broadstairs; Father and I, calling for her in state in Grandma’s carriage at the little Nursing Home, swept her off to the station. Nurse Hilton went with her for a week to help settle her down, but Wilmett did not look like an invalid any more, she had set her face towards life. Mr. Sheilds had told her she could soon start singing again, though of course she could not play the piano just yet, as she must keep her arm in a sling for a few weeks. Arthur was coming to Broadstairs to stay with her before his return to America. This time Wilmett was quite sure that Arthur meant to propose to her; and all her courage and her fortitude reinforced her expectation.

Only one incident marred her complete happiness. Wilmett had set her heart on seeing Mother before she left London. The doctor had not wanted her to add this fresh exertion to her journey; and Father had strongly urged Mother to go and see Wilmett instead. He was angrier than I had ever seen him when she refused. Our doctor, when Father demanded if my mother couldn’t safely drive to the Nursing Home, admitted that she could. Finally I added my persuasions to theirs for I well knew that Wilmett longed for this sight of her mother, and would not be reconciled to leaving London without it. At last my mother said to me in desperation: “Tell Wilmett, I’ll try to come and see her—if she insists——” I gave the message, adding that our doctor was sure it would do her no harm. Wilmett was silent for a moment, then she said gently, and it was very unlike Wilmett to be gentle when she was disappointed, “Give her my love, and tell her I don’t insist.”

I now think—and perhaps Wilmett knew this at the time—that it was not a failure of love on my mother’s part so much as sheer panic pain. My mother was not only a pessimist but she knew more than the rest of us did about the onslaughts of tubercle. Like Hagar turning away from the thirst-stricken Ishmael in the desert, she was saying to herself: “Let me not see the death of the child!”

When Wilmett left us, the lynch pin dropped out of our home. If there had been plans to make, problems to solve or responsibilities to shoulder, Wilmett had undertaken them all. She did not only devise, she actively carried out all the main tasks of our household. The price she had to pay for her continuous if mistaken heroism she was paying now. It cost her her life.

As a family we had all been brought up—as my parents themselves were—by an emotional, rather than by a factual method; and with the unrealizable goal of perfection set before us. Wilmett had an ardent sense of duty, manipulated and driven forward by the strength of her own wishes. Like Lady Caroline in Oscar Wilde’s play, she felt that “it was her speciality to be right.”

My mother believed passively what she taught Wilmett to believe, but it must I think have often disturbed her to see “the banner with the strange device,” which she had put into her child’s hand, carried so strenuously and so far ahead, into the forefront of every battle!

Both Wilmett and I idolized my mother. Our lives were filled to the brim with her opinions and illusions. Her prejudices became our principles; but as we were both a great deal more active than she was, we lost no opportunity of putting them into effect. It took me years to rid myself of her constant depreciation of my father; and Wilmett never quite got over it, though I think during her last illness she began to lean upon him, and look up to him in a new way. Now that I am older than my father was when he died, I can understand and appreciate him as I never did before, and without feeling the harsh resentment towards my mother, which—after I was nineteen years old—was the reaction to my long slavery to her thoughts and wishes. I now believe, too, that my mother herself really possessed many of the virtues which she prided herself upon having; and that only fear prevented her from using them. It was as if she froze herself away from carrying out her natural abilities.

She had accepted my father’s tremendously idealized version of her, when they were first in love, and she felt there was nothing more she need do about it. Nor did my father until his death really cease to idealize my mother, though he had bitter awakenings. These, and the recriminations which poured forth from them, my mother forgave, but she looked upon them as wicked outbreaks, which it would have been ridiculous and unnecessary for her to take seriously. My father could not live without love. His early life had been based on his emotional relationship with his dynamic mother. He needed in his wife the same sweep of generosity, enthusiasm for a mutual cause, and strong moral activity, which had acted all his young life as the wind in his sails. My parents both belonged to a generation that was far less intimate, yet far more loyal in its relationships than ours, and their perpetual and useless search for what they needed in each other sapped their vitality both as parents and workers. My mother had no outside interests, and my father, without her co-operation, could not successfully carry out those he had. With Wilmett’s unflagging support withdrawn, they were dazed with perplexity and unhappiness. Certainly they could not in this first frightful emergency—standing alone—decide what was best to be done for her. They were only too thankful to take the first advice that offered, and let Wilmett go to Broadstairs to stay as a paying guest with a young doctor who was an acquaintance of our London doctor. He had a wife, and could give Wilmett some medical supervision. The Courtneys received Wilmett into their home, and were on the whole very kind and thoughtful to her—though I think wholly inadequate for the situation they found themselves in.

When I had seen Wilmett off, with her dreadful operation behind her, gay as I had not seen her for months, and as I was never to see her again, I wilfully shut my eyes to her danger; and devoted myself to the work in hand. I packed and unpacked for the entire family, and helped my father to give the last touches to the Swanscombe vicarage before moving back to London, to travel down with, and install, my invalid mother. I then set myself with vim, to be the two curates my father needed in Mary’s absence; while nursing my mother the rest of the time. I was as happy as the day was short; and all my days were far too short for what I wanted to perform. By now I had recovered from my operation and subsequent illness, or else I was too busy to notice whether I had recovered from them or not.

I was allowed to keep two dogs, who were my constant companions and acted as light relief in my strenuous existence. Our doctor had extracted from my parents before we left London a promise that I should have a daily walk, if possible in the country away from the seventy-two belching chimneys. This, except for exercise for the dogs, simmered down to one walk a week with my father—generally on Mondays—a very long and physically exhausting walk, which, however, we all greatly enjoyed—the bull mastiff “John,” “Tommy,” the fox terrier, my father and myself.

After walking through a mile and a half of mean streets, we could reach the lovely Kentish lanes and orchards that stretched behind Swanscombe, or wander through woods full of bluebells and wind anemones in the early spring.

We talked endlessly and happily together planning out our parish work; or as Rossetti used to call it—“rattling the fundamentals.” My father’s mind was very undogmatic and full of wonder. He did nothing to discourage any ideas I had—and never attempted to enforce his own upon me.

About this time, a mysterious and heartening letter reached me from Andrew Lang, who was at this time reader for Longmans Green & Co. He had read Life, the Interpreter, he told me, with great interest. Was he right in surmising that it was a first book? and would I mind telling him my age before he decided to advise Longmans to publish it? This last question perturbed me very much. Would he think seventeen too young to write a novel, as Wilmett did? Should I be guilty of dishonesty if I stretched the point to my present maturer age of eighteen? I stretched it; and to my great relief Andrew Lang wrote by return of post, that it was just my being so young that made the book worth publishing; though how he could think me young at eighteen passed my comprehension; and indeed I have never felt quite so old since.

I think this acceptance of my book gave my parents a ray of pleasure in their dark winter, though I am rather glad the book itself, in its pretty yellow cover, scattered all over with violets, was not actually published in Wilmett’s lifetime to haunt her with the promise she was not to share.

My mother read, and was enchanted with the proofs of my novel; my father, more wisely critical, was satisfied with it as a beginning.

I had chosen, as was then the fashion, lines of poetry or immortal prose, to head each chapter; and I find that I now wholly agree with one of my critics who wrote, that it was astonishing anyone who could choose such exquisite literature to head her chapters, could write such abject prose.

I suffered, for the next ten years, from a complete absence of objective or seasoned criticism, while I continued to produce novels—whose fate in a more prolific age would and should have been the waste-paper basket. During this winter and spring, however, I had not much time to write. My father urged, that after my success as a diseuse at Betchworth I ought to study the chief feminine roles of Shakespeare, and himself assisted me in this task. But my chief occupation was the boys’ club, which with the steady and unflagging help of Miss Hardy and Miss Dybal had now become a widely known and prized social activity. Boys of all sorts and conditions poured in on us three nights weekly, and eventually five. As we grew to understand them and their problems, the scope of our work constantly widened. The club ran two football and two cricket teams. Ground had to be begged for and obtained for playing on, money collected (though the boys paid for most of their things themselves) for running expenses. Treats were organized. Boys who fell out of work for one reason or another, had to be found fresh jobs. Some of our boys were delinquents and experiments had to be made in moral training. Some successes and some failures marked these courses, but on the whole the boys were remarkably good and decent human specimens, and as they really prized their organized playtime, they behaved with reasonable care in order to keep it. We never had to expel a boy—though that course was often urged upon us by outsiders, and occasionally by some of the ultra-respectable boys themselves. “Giv’ him a chanct—an’ then anuver chanct—and then anuver chanct—Gawd—you’d think the world was made of chances!” one of the shining lights (whom I had been urged to expel on many previous occasions) bitterly expostulated with me. My father, however, was always with me in these mitigations of rigour. He too believed, as I did, that the world was made of “chances.”

The worst of our moral problems, however, was not a boy at all—but a little girl of eleven who looked exactly like a Botticelli angel. She was left on our doorstep with an empty purse, out of which her mother asserted she had stolen ten shillings; and her mother’s curses, in what might be termed an open letter to ourselves. Mabel had a marvellously glib and touching story to tell, which my father half-believed and half-disbelieved. “Here, Phyllis,” he told me, “find out if you can what she’s really up to!”

I doubted Mabel from the first. If she had been out all night in the rain, for instance—why was her long golden hair so meticulously brushed and tidy? But I spent the next few years trying to keep her out of prison, or what was still worse, out of her mother’s hands. Mabel was a cruel little devil without a word of truth in her, and she stole with consummate skill, often under my nose. She could—and did—in later life take in almost anybody—especially the clergy. She even succeeded once in fooling a Bishop; she was confirmed three times. Her greatest coup, however, was in persuading the Matron of a Reformatory that she was—as the Matron wrote me—“a little innocent far more sinned against than sinning, and I regret that a clergyman’s daughter like yourself, should be so sceptical about her. Might I suggest that you should learn to walk by faith and not by sight?” A week later Mabel absconded—not by sight—with the Matron’s watch, five pounds, and another girl. Mabel succeeded in keeping her freedom for the next six months, then the other girl, by an unguarded reference, led to the recapture of both.

When I last heard of Mabel, she had obtained a position as a trained nurse in a workhouse hospital—without having a nurse’s training. If any of those old people should have been at all inconvenient to nurse, I do not think their lives would have been worth a moment’s purchase.

I missed Elena terribly, and Mary even more during this long winter, and I should have liked to continue my dramatic lessons in London, but Mary was to return in the summer, and news of Wilmett, though contradictory, was on the whole reassuring. Arthur’s visit had taken place. Wilmett did not write quite so fully about this as usual. He had not proposed to her, but Wilmett thought—or said that she thought—he was only waiting till she got perfectly well.

George had now risen very high in his Preparatory School world. He was not only Captain of the first cricket eleven and of the first school football team, but Captain of the School as well. He was a good-looking boy, tall for his age, sagacious and quiet. He had a curious knack of doing whatever had to be done with precision and without display.

Father and I went to see him for a final visit just before he went to Public School, on his last Sports’ day.

It was a great occasion, and George won five of the chief events out of seven. While he was executing a high jump (one I knew with pride that I had helped to teach him) he twisted his wrist on landing. He made no complaint, but I saw he had sprained it; and I obtained permission to take him off and get it properly bound up. I remember the thrill of pride and satisfaction I felt, when he quietly plumped himself down on my knees to have it bound up, as he used to do when I told him stories. He was so much the pride and flower of his School that I think his sudden jolt into insignificance when he went to Public School a few months later, was too sharp an experience for him. He did well subsequently both at games and work at Public School and at Cambridge, but I doubt if he took the place his abilities warranted. These sudden elevations and dethronements in English schoolboy life are not morally or mentally wise in their effect upon individual development.

Aggressive over-confident boys may improve under setbacks, though they may be embittered by them and come to believe themselves strangers in a hostile world; but boys like my brother George, naturally diffident and easily discouraged, find it extremely difficult after such a Humpty Dumpty tumble to climb another and a harder ladder.

This last Sports’ day was a lovely day in spring and I well remember my father’s pride and joy in his son’s successful prowess. The Headmaster of the Preparatory School was a delightful, intelligent fellow, an artist by aptitude, and a teacher by happy accident. Mr. Counsel and his young wife both understood and loved George, and lifted our hearts with their praise of him, mingled with jokes at his inveterate silences. The contrast between George and my father grew sharper with the years. My father worshipped George, terrified him, and drove him into constant flights. George was unexaggerated, self-contained, and lived in a world of understatement. My father was exuberant, brilliantly expressive, and past master in the art of graphic enlargement. My father was too widely different—not only from George himself, but from all the men and boys George saw about him, and wanted himself to be like—to make a real relationship possible between them. I often wonder whether his grandsons, whom he never saw, would not have understood my father better than his only son; yet I am sure that being my father’s son made George an uncommonly good parent in his time. He knew well enough, from the many shocks to his own feelings, what mistakes not to make with his own two sons.

Three months after her operation, Wilmett was to come to us at Swanscombe for a couple of nights, in order to report to Arthur Sheilds in London.

We had heard that her arm was still in a sling and that there were some lumps showing, yet she appeared stronger than after her operation, and we did not at once notice any decided change for the worse in her. She was frightened, as we all were frightened, at these returning lumps, but what we immediately feared was a fresh operation.

As usual Father refused to go to the consultation, and Mother found a bad headache to keep her in bed. Wilmett cried for a moment when she saw that once more she had only me to fall back on. It must have seemed strange to her—when she had done so much for both my parents—that they could do so little for her.

This time she and Arthur Sheilds knew each other better. There was no beating about the bush. While he was examining her, he said over his shoulder, to our observing agitated old friend, “You can see for yourself!” Wilmett asked quickly, “I needn’t have another operation, need I?” “No,” Mr. Sheilds replied, repeating her words carefully, “you needn’t have another operation.”

Wilmett looked radiantly happy for a moment; and then puzzled. “But will they go down by themselves,” she asked, “when I go back to Broadstairs? It hasn’t seemed to do me much good till now.” “You needn’t go back to Broadstairs unless you want to!” Mr. Sheilds surprisingly replied. “Do whatever you like! How would you like to go to Tasmania or New Zealand for next winter, or a voyage round the world?” Wilmett stared at him; he might just as well have asked her if she wanted to take a journey to the moon. “Or you can go home if you prefer,” he added, more mysteriously still. “Do anything that will make you happy.” “Of course I’m happiest at home,” Wilmett said after a queer little pause, “but Mr. Sheilds, last time I saw you, you said I must not go home at all—even for a night—because of the smoke! Why doesn’t it matter any more?” Her eyes met mine, they said to me, “He means it doesn’t matter what I do now, because I can’t get well!”

Mr. Sheilds opened his lips to speak and then closed them again, while our old friend hurriedly explained for him: this time of the year—May and June—perhaps the smoke wouldn’t matter so much; later on in the summer if it wasn’t decided that she should go abroad at once—Tasmania was an enchanting part of the world of course—then she must return to Broadstairs for July and August! “Not the smoke and the heat together, that wouldn’t do at all.” He went on explaining and over-explaining; but I don’t think either of us paid much attention to him, we were still listening to what Mr. Sheilds hadn’t said. All the way home Wilmett quarrelled with me for not agreeing with her that she was doomed; but I knew she was secretly relieved that I pretended not to believe it.

She stayed at home for the next few weeks and we discussed New Zealand and Tasmania. She was not enthusiastic about them, and refused point-blank to go alone. I am glad to remember that I agreed to go with her to Tasmania. We thought it better than New Zealand and knew nothing about either of them. We all seemed to take for granted that my mother couldn’t go. Mary would be home by then, and wouldn’t want to be driven straight off again. Besides, Wilmett expressed a wish that it should be me.

I began to see that there was a change in Wilmett, though it was very hard to define exactly what it was; for one thing, she didn’t have a single temper while she was with us, and for another she did not seem so interested in all the family concerns. It was almost as if she were on a visit to us at Swanscombe, and not a part of our home. She spent a great deal of her time with Mother, and got on almost perfectly well with my father and myself; but she seemed grave and preoccupied, as if her mind was concentrated upon some important problem—which, in order to enter into our small concerns, she had to break off from, and must hurry back to, when she had listened long enough.

Her shoulder ached a great deal but she complained very seldom. Once she called me into her bedroom as I passed the door, and I found her sitting on the bed with a small open cardboard box beside her. “Phyllis,” she said, “I want you to burn these for me—they’re Arthur’s letters, and his ties—and little things—he used and I kept—when we were together. I can’t manage to do it with one arm. He is married now, and I don’t want to keep them any more.” She looked at me, with that queer grave look which was so unlike her—and said, “You see, I have no incentive to live now.”

It is not possible to forgive myself for what followed. I let her go back to Broadstairs alone. No other idea had occurred to any of us at the moment; but it should have occurred to me. I was too happy in my new life, too busy after years of empty loneliness—too companionated and companionating, to understand where my true duty lay.

Duty, to children of my education, was set dangerously high and off the track of natural life, so that it became a smoke screen for our wishes. God was an ace we had up our sleeves and played at convenient moments. I thought, or I believed that I thought because I wished, that it was my duty to stay at Swanscombe, helping my father and mother.

Wilmett went back to Broadstairs at the end of June, and a few weeks later she wrote begging Mother to visit her. Mother refused, and Wilmett wrote again asking for me; and I, too, refused. My mother reproached me sharply, and appealed to my father to urge me to go. My father with a queer look at her replied, “I don’t understand either of you, Daisy; but Wilmett asked first for you.” My mother said no more. I knew they both wanted me to go, but who was to run their errands?

My father spent more and more of his time away on distant golf links; and less and less in his parish. He did many of his duties superlatively well. He still visited his sick, and preached and took his Sunday Services with devotion and eloquence; but he was hardly ever at home.

Ten years earlier I think he would have understood and worked for the people of Swanscombe as a whole, and in the same enthusiastic friendly spirit in which he had started his work there—but his courage and his ardour had been sapped, and he retreated now into a small church circle of sympathetic and devoted people. To them, he was the best of friends, the truest of kind and loving human beings, the most brilliant and least arrogant mind that they had ever known. He gave them all he had; and they loved him as he deserved to be loved—but he gave now on a smaller scale—not lavishly as he had once given, and he did not think outside the bounds of his parish as he used to think, when he was a younger and more helpful man.

A few weeks later we had a telegram from Mrs. Courtney to say that she was bringing Wilmett home in two days’ time, and that a letter would follow from Dr. Courtney. It was a frightened but guarded letter. Wilmett wanted to come home; she was less well and needed expert nursing.

Even then my poor mother wanted to stop Wilmett’s coming, but this time she found both my father and myself fiercely against her. Too late, I would now have given my life to give Wilmett what she no longer wanted.

We tried to hide our shock when we saw her. Only two months previously she had left us looking nearly her normal self; now she was so thin, that when I helped her upstairs—for she was too weak even to sit up for tea in the sitting-room—I had nearly to carry her. “Now,” she whispered to me half laughing, half crying, “you’re the big sister and I’m the little one!” She was coughing nearly all the time. “I shall come downstairs for Christmas,” she told me, when I had got her safe in bed; but she never came downstairs again.

Nurse Hilton, her former nurse whom she loved and who adored her, was fortunately free. She came at once and stayed with Wilmett till the end.

It took a long time for Wilmett to die. Mary came back from America a few weeks later, with a magnificent smart new hat with what looked like an albatross on it. She had wonderful American clothes and presents for all of us. I can remember how hurt she was, at the little attention all her gifts and foreign experiences won from my parents. They did the best they could—and my father was whole-heartedly relieved and happy to have Mary at home again, but their minds were absorbed in their sick child.

Never was I so glad to see anyone as I was to see Mary. She was my friend of friends—the sharer of all my hopes and fears; and yet neither of us could taste the gladness we felt in each other. There was a wall between.

The hardest part was Mary’s, for she felt herself estranged from Wilmett.

The old relationship, which had been the strongest in Mary’s life until she was sixteen, had been destroyed by Wilmett’s and Mother’s ceaseless criticism and nothing could put it together again—not Wilmett’s new, terrible gentleness—nor Mary’s leaden-hearted pity.

Wilmett was too ill to break the habits of the sick room. It was already part of her life that I should be with her every day for the hours Nurse Hilton was off duty. My father could not bear to be with her for more than a few minutes at a time, nor could my mother stand the cold of her open windows. Wilmett liked my reading out loud to her; and believed in my nursing powers. It is very hard to change things when people are dying; and the dying cannot change themselves. To me it was everything that Mary was there, but to Mary herself it seemed nothing.

I had a sharp attack of influenza just before Christmas, and much to my mother’s surprise and grief I accepted an invitation to go to Torquay for ten days to say with our patron’s family. The doctor and Nurse Hilton both urged me to go, and I had a feeling that I was too tired to go on without a break. Nurse Hilton said, “Your sister may continue in this condition for months—you must get stronger to face what is ahead!” So I went—but I felt like a sleepy disciple in Gethsemane—I counted the days till I got back. The moist, lazy, comfortable Torquay days with the rich, kind Whites were an extended torture. I thought Wilmett much weaker when I got back, but her cough was less. I had three more weeks with her. Arthur Sheilds and our London doctor came down in a flurry of shocked panic, a few days later.

This visit was a dreadful ordeal for my parents, but it cheered and helped Wilmett. My mother rose to it like the heroine I believe she always secretly was. It was to her they turned—after they had been with Wilmett—to give their verdict. My father went into his study and shut the door on them.

Nothing was done about infection though we were warned not to kiss Wilmett; but when she said to me in a frightened way, “Phyllis, they don’t kiss me any more!” of course I went on kissing her. I don’t think she was often frightened, but I used to watch her grave accusing eyes clinging to one thing after another in the room, as if she were afraid to let any familiar thing out of her sight.

The night she died, she said as I was leaving the room, “Are any of you writing to George? If you are, tell him not to forget his old chum!” She fell asleep earlier than usual. For days her heavy cardiac breathing had been heard all over the house, but this night it sounded quieter.

At midnight Nurse Hilton looked in to see if Wilmett wanted anything. She found her asleep with her head resting on her hand. She went in again at four o’clock in the morning, and found Wilmett lying in the same position, only she had ceased to breathe.

Mary was sharing Nurse Hilton’s room with her, and together they washed, and did all the last offices for Wilmett. They decided to wait for me to wake and break their loss to my parents. I woke saying to myself a poem of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s called “My Sister’s Sleep”:

When I saw Mary’s face at the door, I knew without words what had happened.

I thought it would be terrible to tell my mother, but she gave a long sigh of relief: “Thank God!” she said, “my darling has escaped at last!” My father said, “I can’t bear it!” and turned his face to the wall.

I went back to Wilmett’s room by myself, after I had told them. When I found myself in her empty, silent room I knew that my childhood had gone with her.

It was not for some hours later that the marks of her illness faded out. Beauty came back into her face again, and youth; but when I first looked at her, there was nothing but emptiness—the emptiness of a body robbed of a great spirit—the emptiness of my own heart that had not known how to love.

What I minded most, after my parents’ grief, was the shock and loss to George. But curiously enough, with that incalculable resiliency of extreme youth, George quickly forgot her.

When he grew up, he simply couldn’t remember that Wilmett had existed. Perhaps it was because so much of his early consciousness stopped with her. She was nearly twelve years older than he was, and had been like a young, wise mother to him. She had loved him too well, to let her control of him be irksome. I think theirs was her happiest human relationship.

Now that I look back on my own education as a child I believe that more than half of it came from Wilmett; and did not cease with her death. Nor was it an education wholly without benefits.

It is true that I had acquired very little accurate or practical knowledge. I had chosen a bad goal, and had a faulty method of approaching life, yet I was older and more responsible for my age than most girls of eighteen are today. I could not drive a car, or play outdoor games; but I could and did face life with a certain amount of resiliency and fortitude. I knew how to bring up a child, and how to nurse the sick. I was trained, in my boys’ club and Parish work, in co-operation. I was beginning to earn my own living, and could have done so in a very short time, in either of my two professions. Yet, the main task in life had not even been presented to me—I was unable to dis-associate my thoughts from my wishes; and therefore had no moral freedom.

This made me a constant danger to myself and others. My goal was a prestige goal and, in consequence, I lacked social interest. I had had the immense advantage of loving parents, who had done nothing to undermine my creative confidence. I had known intimately many good and understanding people. I believed in life and was eagerly prepared to do my share towards improving it; but there was a flaw in the golden bowl of my youth—as there is in many others’ golden bowls—I had not learned that there is no way of improving anything, until one has learned how to improve one’s self.

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

A cover which is placed in the public domain was created for this ebook.

[The end of Search for a Soul by Phyllis Bottome]