The Retrospect Part 6

Deadly dull they would be to us to-day, I know. I saw something of the life, about the eastern counties, in several families that had brought it down unchanged to the twentieth century, and I asked myself, "How could I stand this now?" I could not stand it, with all my love of peace and quiet, of which I have never been able to get enough. It would drive me melancholy mad. But in the days to which these self-contained and unawakened homes belong, it was not dull. Was it, reader? To the best of my recollection, we did not know what boredom meant.

The procession of the hours pa.s.sed before my eyes when I looked at my old home--one day so like another that I could not lose myself amongst them.

No morning tea, of course. I blush to add, no bath. I do not remember a bathroom in any house--not even that of my maternal grandfather, a physician of some distinction in his day, who dictated the laws of hygiene not only to us but to many county families. A portable bath was part of the furniture of every decent house--we had one so large that the frequent monthly nurse made her bed in it--but, like the warming-pan, it was not for common use; it was a medical appliance chiefly. Such is the case, I find, in many English houses still. We children were severely scrubbed and scoured in was.h.i.+ng-tubs every Sat.u.r.day night--"tub night"--and we did a great deal of sea bathing in summer; between whiles we ran constant risk of being sent from table to obliterate the line of demarcation between the washed and unwashed portions of face and neck. Dirty little pigs! We used to dress first, and then seek the sparing sponge. This was after the nurse of infancy had been replaced by the nursery governess, who, to the best of my recollection, was no more particular herself.

There was some excuse for us in those bitter English winters. To go warm from the "keeping-room" fire to the ice-cold linen sheets was bad enough--I recall the nightly struggle for courage to put feet down into them; to have to get out again into a temperature that froze the towels on the horse so that they would stand up by themselves like boards--that froze one's breath on the sheets so that I have scratched my face on the crystals as on pins--was a sharper ordeal. Small wonder that we hurried into our clothes, or that the stiff, blue, chilblained fingers shrank from wet on the top of cold. I remember a winter night when my ewer split in halves with a loud report, and the water within rolled out upon the floor like a lump of gla.s.s; there had been a fire in the room overnight too, a luxury dispensed with, as a rule, in the case of children who had pa.s.sed out of the nursery into rooms of their own. It was in the same winter that I inadvertently touched an iron railing with my bare hand, and skin and metal stuck together. This, however, was not at T----.

My doctor-grandfather did not pull-to the curtains round his and grandmother's bed. I know, because I used to sleep in their room when visiting them by myself, and gaze upon them from my cot in the corner as they slept--both in nightcaps, hers deeply frilled over the face, his cone-shaped, with the ta.s.selled point hanging over one ear. But it was the the rule to draw them--that is what they were there for--and my father and mother did so. The room itself was made airtight first. To have slept with a window open would have seemed to them the act of a deliberate suicide. Curtains having been drawn over bolted windows, six more (of flowered damask, very thick) were drawn round the canopied four-poster, turning it into a small tent; a pleated valance round the top obviated the danger of ventilation where the rings ran upon the rods. The occupants entered the enclosure by an aperture on either side, closed it carefully, sank into the yielding depths of the billowy feather-bed, and slept like tops. At any rate, I never heard that they did not. More than that, there are people who can sleep under almost the same conditions still. I had had an idea that feather-beds had been extinct for thirty years, at least, but last year I reposed on no less than four separate ones in four separate houses; yes, and slept well upon them all. I got so used to feather-beds at last that on my return home I had to send my hair mattress to be teased before I could reconcile myself to it again. Almost everywhere I went in England I used to go up to bed to find the windows of my room closed and locked under the drawn blinds--part of the housemaid's preparations for the night; whereas I am accustomed to sleep with three wide open, and to wish that roof and walls could be dispensed with. Although I adjusted myself so easily to the feather-bed, I drew the line at the shut-up room; the fresh night air was indispensable. But I would sometimes find the bedclothes damp in the morning, and the clothes I had taken off too clammy to put on again. I had forgotten that peculiarity of English nights.

My mother, when I knew her first, did her hair of a morning in two parts; the hinder half was brushed back, tied tightly, and disposed in braids around a high comb; the front drooped in beautiful golden ringlets on either side of her face. But when she was thirty or so she dressed like the sedate old lady that we took her then to be. She tucked her fair hair under a cap--a large cap, with streamers of ribbon hanging down from below the ears like untied bonnet-strings. There was a dummy head of pasteboard (which went by the name of Jane Winter), with a proper face to it, and a hollow neck with an opening within which to stow away materials, on which her caps were made. It may possibly have been because she was perennially convalescing from confinements that she wore caps as a habit at so early an age, but I think not; I believe them to have been the sign of departed youth. When you became a mother, though you might be still in your teens, a large cap was part of the "sitting-up" costume. I remember standing at mother's side by open drawers, while Cousin E., "expecting" for the first and last time, displayed the elaborate preparations made for her infant and herself. I did not know what they meant, but I see now the white cap of blond lace and gauze ribbon that she twirled about on her doubled fist. I saw her in it too on the happy day when I was first allowed to sit on a stool at her feet and nurse the baby. She looked beautiful in it, with her girlish face and ma.s.s of dark hair. On emerging from invalid retirement she left it off, so I suppose it was a sort of glorified subst.i.tute for the universal nightcap.

With regard to other clothing, all persons claiming to be gentlefolk--the division of cla.s.ses was strongly marked in those days--wore Irish linen s.h.i.+fts and s.h.i.+rts and silk stockings; no matter how poor nor how outwardly shabby they went, they must conform in those particulars or lose caste. My two grandmothers, both wealthier than we were, were sticklers for the finest material, and some of their silk stockings (white, like all stockings) and exquisite under-garments came down to their descendants to be darned and darned as long as they would hold together. When they were worn out--no cotton; a lady would live on bread and water sooner than come to that. Much of this linen nether-wear was made in the National Schools, where sewing was an important feature in the education of the poor. The ladies of the neighbourhood gave their material and instructions, and from time to time inspected the process of manufacture. Often have I accompanied a village patroness on this errand, stood shyly by while she studied the fine st.i.tching--one thread drawn and the tiny beading done on the crossing threads, two backward and two forward--and the tiny gathers "stroked" to a regularity that no machine could better, the little craftswomen dropping their dutiful curtsies to her when she deigned to commend their work. I do not know who was paid for it when it was done.

Winter and summer these linen garments were, I believe, worn next the skin. I forget what the fas.h.i.+on of the early fifties decreed to be worn immediately over them, except stays that had busks of solid wood, and had to be laced down the back every time they were put on. But I remember watching, in that room up yonder, my mother tying her bustle round her waist. It was a stuffed roll like a sand-bag, reaching from hip to hip, designed to set her skirts out behind; and the skirts hanging under and over it were numerous and full. As for gowns--the deep point in front, the patterned flounces, bell sleeves combined with white muslin bishop sleeves, large lace collars fastened under a spreading ribbon bow or cameo brooch the size of a small plate, "habit-s.h.i.+rts"

(for filling in the long and narrow V of an open-fronted bodice)--memory supplies but a jumble of these things. It does not matter. History has preserved the modes of the time, and I presume we kept up with them as well as country-folk could do.

In the nursery our clothes were more defined in style. Though snow lay on the ground, we went bare-armed and bare-necked--down to the latest baby, whose little sleeves would be tied up with ribbons at the shoulders. To put long sleeves to a child's frock was a thing unheard of; they were given to us with the first "gown," which, with its lengthened skirt and fastenings in front, signified the estate of womanhood. Sandalled shoes, very thin in the sole, were correct indoor wear. The other end of me was showered over with tubular ringlets hanging nearly to my waist. The painful process of preparing them--the relentless thoroughness with which our nurse (mother was gentler) rolled up a strand of hair a few inches, "chucked" it tight upon its rag, rolled it a little more and chucked it again, and finally tied it close to the stretched scalp, with odd hairs dragging at their too tenacious roots, continuing the torture for half-an-hour or more--this was one of the sorrows of childhood in the fifties, and no small one either. Our nursery toilet was completed by the "feeder" tied on before each meal and removed after. We went downstairs--when mother was "about"--to the row of bread-and-milk basins that I, for one, hated the sight of, except in the season when a sprinkle of strawberries or raspberries and a little sugar were dropped into them; the youngest aunt being unaware of such a weak relaxation of rules. Discipline imposed that bread-and-milk upon us every day of our lives, no matter how we rebelled against it. We might be bribed to get it down by promises of a taste of the adults'

dishes afterwards--the fat gravy from the bacon was a valued perquisite; but there was no dispensing with the nauseous preliminary. I have not been able to eat bread-and-milk since.

Mother came downstairs with her key-basket. What she did with all those keys I do not know, but they were evidently precious. She carried them, with the plate-basket, to her room, nightly; a maid retrieved the latter when she took up father's shaving water, but the little brown basket of keys was never beyond reach of the mistress's hand. She set it down beside the tea-tray while she administered breakfast. And I had not been three days in England before I saw the exact duplicate of that little brown basket, with all the keys in it, go through exactly the same performance. How oddly it struck me. For in Australia we know not key-baskets--never have done so far as I know. If you were to lock sideboard or store-closet against your respectable maids in this country they would not stay with you. And I should not blame them.

I suppose mother's tea-caddy was locked--certainly tea was a terrible price those days. I often opened the lid of the quaint box, which had two lidded receptacles inside, one for black tea, one for green, and a special caddy spoon to ladle it out with. She made the tea herself from a blending of the two kinds, to which she added a dust of carbonate of soda, apparently to increase the look of strength. She drew the water from the hissing urn, kept at the boil by a red-hot metal core slipped into a cylinder in the middle of it. She and father, like many others, drank the decoction pure, without sugar or milk.

After breakfast he went to his farm work; she also--and she was the better farmer of the two, although he was bred to the trade and she was not. His soul was in the hunting-field and the lighter distractions of his life, and money slid through his pockets as water through a sieve; it was she, from first to last, who kept things together as best she could. She had had the sheltered and dainty girlhood of the well-born and well-to-do, who had such (to us, and especially to us who are British colonists) strange ideas of the privileges and immunities of their cla.s.s; needless to say she had never done "work," in the real sense of the word, for that was the portion of the "common people." But now she sent fowls and eggs to market; and b.u.t.ter of her own manufacture--b.u.t.ter in large quant.i.ties, as I remember, for I used to sit on a high chair in the dairy with her and watch her make it. She always made a special pat for me, with no salt in it; which is how I like b.u.t.ter to this day. I could see again, as I looked along the side of the old house, that cool dairy, with the shelf of crockery pans all round it and the big churn in the middle, on the red-flagged floor; I leaned again on the edge of the table where she worked under my studious eye, her white arms bare to above the elbow, the dim green light on her lily-fair face--light filtered through a wooden lattice and the shadows of an elderberry-tree, from the fruit of which was made yearly many a stone jarful of strong wine, for mulling with sugar and spices to warm us for bed o' winter nights and before going to an unheated church on winter Sunday mornings.

Besides elderberry wine mother made gooseberry wine, currant wine, ginger wine, cowslip wine--all manner of wines; the cellar was kept stocked with a large variety, costing next to nothing. She used them where the modern hostess uses tea in the entertainment of company.

Afternoon callers had cake and wine offered to them, and the careful wife of a wasteful husband did not squander the port and sherry. They were for the solemn dinners--to swim upon a s.h.i.+ning mahogany sea in the best decanters, set in baize-bottomed boats of pierced silver--and for Christmas and other festivals. There was always a "best" of everything--gla.s.s, china, silver, napery--sacred to state occasions.

Every year also she brewed beer in the brew-house, barrels of it, for the supply of the field labourers (to whom it was given at eleven A.M.

to wash down their luncheon of bread and pork), as well as for household use. Her cordials, her jams and jellies, her pickles of all sorts, her mushroom "ketchup," her raspberry vinegar and cherry brandy, her bottles of capers (the seeds of nasturtiums), her jars of garnered honey, her ropes of onions, her carefully cured hams and bacons, hanging thickly from the beams of the timbered kitchen ceiling--punctually were all these things stocked in their season, excellently prepared, by her own hands, when illness did not compel her to use a deputy. She and the other village ladies were rival cooks. Each had her special family recipes, and they took pride in comparing them.

Baking day occurred twice a week. Then was the great oven in the wall filled with blazing f.a.ggots, and the kitchen tables with the dough of bread and pastry and the batter of cakes; anon the smouldering ashes were raked out, and the long-handled flat shovel fed loaves and meat pies and sweet confectionery into the warm-breathing cavern; presently the house was odorous with appetising scents, and the pantry was stocked for the time being. Amongst the delicacies would be a little cake of my own making. I would spend the morning over that bit of material, brought to the colour of a slate pencil, while mother manipulated the rest, going and coming, flushed and busy, but loving to keep me by her, to prattle to her while she worked. It seems to me that I must have been her constant companion before the governesses came.

The joint for dinner was not baked--never. It was hung by a "jack" over a dripping-pan before the square red fire, which roasted it crisp and brown as the machine slowly turned it round and round. Sometimes the machine went wrong (it wound up like a clock), and sometimes a coal would fall into the pan and make the gravy gritty, but, on the whole, I fancy that way of cooking meat has not been much improved upon. The outside fat seemed to take on layers of richness with every spoonful of fire-cleared dripping poured over it. The gravy that was the residue of this had a surpa.s.sing quality, particularly when upheaved upon the bosom of a puffy-edged Yorks.h.i.+re pudding, or when mingled with the cream that hares were basted with. Unsoddened and undiluted by the steam of the ovens, the whole goodness was preserved to flesh and juice. Unless it is that distance lends enchantment to this roast of old.

The Yorks.h.i.+re pudding or the roast gravy with some other plain pudding--boiled batter or Norfolk dumplings--made the first course of the midday dinner (as it does still in some conservative families), and the midday dinner was moved on to three o'clock for company and on state occasions. The meat and vegetables made the second course; after these the sweets and cheese (home-made), as now, with dessert only on Sundays and holidays. A jug of brown ale, drawn from a barrel perennially on tap, would grace the table, which had no decoration of flowers, but relied for distinction upon the quality of its napery and silver. We dined with our parents mostly, and were not oppressively treated in respect of good things, unless the youngest aunt was present.

After dinner father took his arm-chair and his long-stemmed churchwarden, mother her indefatigable needle. Or perhaps she and I would walk out together to call upon our neighbours--those who received us in the keeping-room (aptly named), where we could enjoy the informal intercourse that was in character with the place, or those who invited us to the parlour, the primness, comfortlessness, reserve and artificiality of which were reflected in our demeanour, as in that of the lady of the house. When Mrs H. was summoned without notice to interview a caller here, she kept that caller waiting while she changed her gown, put on her best cap, got out her best decanters and silver cake-basket; her daughter similarly revised her costume before she allowed herself to be seen, although they always "dressed" for midday dinner and the afternoon, after their kitchen and farm work of the morning. But when we appeared unexpectedly, Mrs H.'s up-thrown hands and H.M.'s "Lawk-a-daisy-me!" would express not consternation but ready welcome; and in that dear old keeping-room, with its beamed ceiling almost on our heads, we were friends and not company, and could open hearts and mouths as freely as we liked. That is, the grown-ups could--not I. "Little girls must be seen and not heard," was the admonition addressed to me when I attempted to join in the conversation.

My part was to listen, which I did so well that I could almost fill a book with the interesting family secrets and village scandals unconsciously confided to my retentive child's memory.

There was a lady spoken of who went to bed when her baby was dying, and who, on rising in the morning, showed disappointment that it was not dead, and resentment towards the Good Samaritan (H.M. herself) who had sat up with it all night, and whose skill had pulled it through. There was another lady who, having come into a fortune of thousands, had wept because a hundred or two belonging to it had been left to someone else, the reason of those tears being that the odd money would have enabled the weeper to refurnish her house without breaking into the rounded bulk of the big legacy. There was yet another, a devoted whist-player, who had been caught by some extraordinarily smart person in the practice of an ingenious swindle. She would say to her husband, clearly her partner in guilt as in the game, although somehow he escaped censure: "Dear, it is your turn," or: "How warm the room is!" or: "Come, go on," or "See what the time is "--_i.e._ drop some seeming innocent remark beginning with a certain letter, according as she wanted him to lead diamonds, hearts, clubs or spades. This was evidently regarded as a most horrifying tale, and I could not see why--for a long time. Nor was it easy to fathom the significance of that one about the governess and tutor, who were expelled together from a great house in the neighbourhood, because they had been discovered love-making when they should have been attending to their duties. The warning about "little pitchers"--dropped, it was fondly supposed, unnoticed by me--would now and then spoil the denouement of a story; but there were dozens and dozens that came to me complete, to be understood in later years, if not at the time. On our way home from these casual symposia I would question mother upon points that puzzled me. Often she would say: "Never mind," or: "You would not understand"; but more often she gave me the information I wanted. She excused herself for this unfas.h.i.+onable weakness in a mother of the period by explaining (the plea for all indulgence) that I was "different from other children."

Five-o'clock tea was not afternoon tea. It was the family evening meal.

Ham, brawn (we called it pork-cheese), or some fancy meat, cold, and laid out in slices on a plate, was there for sandwiching between bread and b.u.t.ter similarly prepared; or the savoury might be shrimps or crab, or radishes or cress; jams of great variety, and particularly cakes, filled the rest of the table s.p.a.ce that was not occupied by the tea-tray, crowned with its hissing urn. And for this meal no white cloth was used; nor do I remember such a thing as a finger-napkin at any meal.

It seemed to be the adjunct of the finger-gla.s.s, which we did not aspire to.

Tea was made as at breakfast, but not for us; we had ours in the nursery, of bread-and-treacle or bread-and-dripping, and our mugs held milk and water--except only on such great occasions as Christmas days and birthdays, when we were allowed what we called "gunpowder tea,"

which was our milk-and-water sugared and slightly coloured with a few spoonfuls from the grown-ups' teapot. In winter a pair of tallow candles illuminated the scene. The grandparents used wax candles--one grandfather used four at a time, and six for company, in six big silver candlesticks--but ours were usually made, like so much else that other people bought at shops, by mother's ingenious hands. Snuffers accompanied them. Some that I have seen were such works of art as well as curiosities that I wonder I have not heard of them amongst the h.o.a.rds of bric-a-brac collectors. We possessed one beautiful pair in chased and pierced silver, the box patterned like a watch-case; and another of the same metal, finely worked, which had a spring inside the little door that snuffed the black wick into the receiver; and the trays of both matched in style and workmans.h.i.+p. I do not know what became of them--thrown away, probably, as antiquated rubbish, when oil lamps came in.

It was by the light of a tallow candle that mother did the exquisite needlework that n.o.body can do now, in these effulgent evenings. You almost need a microscope to see the st.i.tches of her fairy-like baby-clothes. Father read his paper quite comfortably by the same dim flame. And people wore spectacles in old age only, and never complained, in my hearing, of ailing or deficient eyes. Why was that?

Although mother, when not needed for social purposes, sewed on until supper-time, my interminable seam was laid aside. I might thread beads or dress dolls or make kettle-holders. Also, the rule that barred story-books, as one would bar cards or dancing, during the serious work hours of the day, was relaxed after tea, and I could batten on "Peter Parley" and _The Child's Companion_ and "The Swiss Family Robinson"--when I was old enough--without incurring the reproach attaching to the dissipated and idle. My earliest fairyland I found in pictures, about which I wove stories of my own. We took a small penny periodical filled with descriptions and ill.u.s.trations of the contents of the Great Exhibition; this did not much appeal to me, although I remember its woodcuts well. I preferred the lovely Annuals, with their large-eyed and small-mouthed Lady Blessingtons, and the pocket-books, annuals also, which, in addition to their blank pages, contained prize poems and a variety of things, chief amongst them engravings of the country seats of the n.o.bility and gentry. In these palaces and gardens I wandered in fancy, the possessor of them all. But the book I loved most, at the beginning of books, was a handsomely bound collection of tales or sketches, the author of which was (I think) a Mrs Ellis, and the moral--interpreted at a later age--something to do with the temperance question. The letterpress was a blank to me; the steel engravings bound together at the end of the volume I pored over by the hour. One was called "Lady Montfort parting from her Children." She was a beautiful creature in a s.p.a.cious bare neck and a chaplet of roses, tearing herself wildly from the embraces of a large family trying to hold her back. She was going to have an operation for something, and the doctor was going to perform it with the drunkard's shaking hand and kill her. All I then knew was that she was parting from her children for the last time, and I used to weep over their fate and dream about it. Another picture represented a girl in a high-waisted, pillow-case-like gown and flowered coal-scuttle bonnet (a fas.h.i.+on gone out before I came in), accompanied by another, her maid, similarly but more plainly attired, leaning, from the outside road, over a gate belonging to an ideal parsonage house. I do not know whether drink had caused the late inc.u.mbent to die prematurely or to be expelled from his living, but in any case it was responsible for throwing his daughter upon the world. "Looking towards my home and knowing I nevermore should call it mine," was the touching legend inscribed upon the page. I would have given worlds to know how she got on, poor thing. The picture of an after-dinner gentleman being supported out of the dining-room by the butler and footman, and meeting some outraged relative at the door, was too subtly tragic for my understanding.

Children (according to their view) were sent to bed too soon; they always have been, and always will be. But that was not a grievance of mine. As a nursery child, not yet at the stage of learning letters, I practically lived downstairs with my parents--at such times as the youngest aunt was not there to prevent it. Father took me out on horseback about the farm, seated on a pad in front of him within his arms, mother in the gig with her when she went to her old home or shopping to L----; and I believe I could always manage to sit up to supper, if I begged hard and long enough. I was a thoroughly spoilt child. Father's excuse was that I "could not spoil," but I am discounting that fond belief by displaying the spoilt child's base ingrat.i.tude--remembering how love carried to extremes indulged my heart's desires, and blaming that love in print! If, while shopping with my mother, I lost my heart to a ducky little parasol (it was of grey watered silk, with white silk lining, deep fringe and a handle jointed in the middle), I would find it next day, springing out on me from some artful ambush, "With Father's Love." For years, on opening the piano for practice, I used to find one spring day the first cuc.u.mber of the season, because I was particularly fond of cuc.u.mbers. He did not care what it cost, if only he could be the first to treat me. And I purse my lips at their dear shades and shake a reproving head. Still, the fact remains that I sat up of a night when I ought to have been in bed, and even at times when we had "parlour company."

For well I remember the whist tables that entertained our circle on winter evenings, in that room to the left of the hall at T----, and myself sitting at the elbow of one of my parents to watch the mysterious cards and the mutations in the four little piles of coin. It was the rigour of the game, without a doubt--no talk, no levity, but a still and solemn concentration upon the play; and I think I must have been rather a good child, after all, to have been allowed to be there to look on at it.

I remember one other evening pastime of the grown-ups at this period, and my curious partic.i.p.ation in it--table-turning. There was an epidemic--probably the first--of enthusiasm for this method of occult research. And round the heavy "centre table," which was a feature of the drawing-rooms of the time, friends gathered to consult the oracle or to deride it, as the case might be. In our house they compromised on an open-minded curiosity tempered with the feeling that "there really must be something in it"--something supernatural, they meant. Interests and credulity were strengthened by my performances at the game. I was supposed to be a mere onlooker, "to be seen and not heard," as usual, but perhaps the chain of hands was not long enough, or perhaps I wanted to join in, and the let-the-little-dear-do-what-she-likes habit of the house admitted me to a place accordingly; at any rate, I one day found myself perched on a book-piled chair in the circle of earnest inquirers round the centre table, my thumbs in contact, the tips of my fourth fingers overlapping the tips of those on either side of me.

Long had the company sat in silent suspense, the solid piece of furniture--round-topped, and supported by a stout pedestal and claw feet resting on mahogany lions' backs--refusing to make a sign; but no sooner was my influence brought to bear upon it than it began to creak and groan, and was presently lumbering like a Wombwell elephant about the room, with us after it, scrambling over stools and other impedimenta to hold fast to it as long as possible. In recording events of so long ago, and particularly a matter of this kind, I wish to make full allowance for unconscious exaggeration; but that the table was declared too heavy to be pushed into such movements, and that I was frequently sent for to start them when older hands failed to do so, are circ.u.mstances that seem particularly clear to me.

I suppose, as my fellow-tableturners said at the time, there must have been "something" in me, as well as in "it," if I have rightly described what happened. I mentioned in my "Thirty Years in Australia" a German doctor who in his old age became a spiritualist, and tried hard to persuade me to lend myself to seance purposes, because, he said, I had that in me which marked me out as a medium. Might it possibly have been the same "something" that he divined? Well, I neither know nor care. The little mysteries are all embraced in the big Mystery, which would not be mysterious if we had the power to understand it. I was always that kind of a sceptic which believes in there being a reason for everything.

When I was a girl I saw ghosts--unmistakably visible ghosts--and even in their presence, certain that they could not be flesh and blood creatures, and paralysed with horror to know it, I was able to keep this att.i.tude of mind. Since nothing else ailed me that I knew of, I said to myself, "I am going mad"; and I was quite correct in my diagnosis, since what was really happening to me was the beginning of brain fever. I never had or showed the slightest leaning towards or interest in so-called supernatural phenomena. Occult "science" is to me what Mrs Harris was to Betsy Prig. The table-turning craze soon pa.s.sed, as far as my people were concerned, and I never, even to that extent, dabbled in the black arts again.

The social evening, in those old days, began after the five-o'clock tea and ended with the nine-o'clock supper. This was a great meal, always.

The cloth was spread for it as for dinner, and chairs drawn up and carving-knives flourished. The cold joint, with pickles, cold fowl, meat pie, the occasional crab or lobster, the cuc.u.mber in its season, any left-over trifles of sweet pastry and creams, cheese--with beer, of course--that was the meal which our forebears found it possible to sleep on, and (which is much more surprising) some of their descendants enjoy without discomfort to this day. In the four houses of the four feather-beds the custom has never been abrogated.

Supper over, and dishes returned to the pantry, the elders at once prepared for bed--to burrow in those mounds of feathers with their heads in nightcaps, and nothing but their own exhausted breath to live on the long night through. Doors and windows--the latter barricaded at nightfall with wooden shutters (hinged and flattened into the wainscoted window-frame by day) drawn over them and fixed with an iron bar across--were severally examined in the most careful manner by whoever was head of the establishment for the time being. Servants might shut the house, but the responsibility of making sure that it was safe for the dark hours was too great to be left to them. I suppose there was some reason for this in the social conditions of the time. Perhaps father's military (yeomanry) accoutrements--which I never saw him wear, but which he was said to have worn, and certainly possessed--had some connection with his actions in preparing his house of a night as if for an expected siege. I know that any suspicious noise occurring after he had done so brought him and his blunderbuss upon the scene in the shortest possible s.p.a.ce of time. And that raids did sometimes take place was proved by the sad story of a friend of ours, whose melancholy visage was accounted for by the fact that he had once shot a burglar dead without meaning it. He saw an unlawful hand intruded through a sawn-out gap in his window-shutter, and, calculating that the hand was well above the owner's body, fired at it from within the room. Alas! On the shoulders of him who worked from the ground was an unsuspected second man, and he received the charge in his breast. It was told us of the heart-broken doer of that deed that "he never smiled again."

So, the guard having gone the rounds, the humdrum duties of the day--that never palled--were ended. Master and mistress, bearing key-basket and plate-basket (the plate having been duly counted), trudged upstairs to that bed which was virtually their bedroom also. And slept!

CHAPTER VIII

SOME EARLY SUNDAYS

All the Sundays of my childhood came to life again when, driving from T----, we pa.s.sed the mouth of a gra.s.sy by-road, a little way down which stood the church of my earliest wors.h.i.+ppings. We were due to drink tea at my grandfather's old home, now occupied by one of his great-grandsons, and had scant time for more lingerings on the way if we were to keep our appointment punctually; but the sight of the familiar square, squat tower was too much for me, and I said to M. and Mr B.: "Oh, I must, I _must_ have just one look!" They drove me into the lane and, scrambling down, I ran up the path through the churchyard, glancing from side to side at the same old tombstones and gra.s.sy mounds, numbering baby graves of our own household amongst them, every one with its memories of Sunday loiterers sitting and standing about until all friends had pa.s.sed and the bells had stopped; and my objective was a rood-screen, which not only had a lively story to it, but had persuaded me in the course of years that it was possibly a treasure of ecclesiastical art worth finding by one now educated to know its value.

I might have been disappointed if I had seen it; I certainly was deeply disappointed at not seeing it. A wicket gate in the porch was locked against me. I ran along the wall and tried to peer into the windows, but I could see nothing, except my mental picture of the past--the three-decker, the carved screen, the two square pews in the chancel, the open seats outside.

It is rather curious that they were open seats at that time of day, when otherwise the church was quite early Victorian in its ways. I know that in the next decade, when the zeal for church restoration became noticeable, the stubborn defence of vested interests in the hereditary pews was the greatest obstacle to be overcome, and I have known it prove insuperable for nearly a decade more. Even the pews in the chancel of the church here at H----, one sacred to the old-maid daughters of the rector (when in residence, which was only for a small portion of the year), the other occupied by one of my uncles and his family, were open; not like the s.p.a.cious room, with panelled walls and blue silk curtains all round above the level of his tall head, in which my maternal grandfather maintained at public wors.h.i.+p the same privacy that he enjoyed at home. It is true that every seat, except the hard "free"

forms at the back, belonged to a certain house, as legally and exclusively as the walled box which it had superseded; but there was a republican aspect, generally abhorrent to genteel persons, in the uniform open benches, which marked no divisions of caste between the highest and the lowest; the old box, on the contrary, indicated the status of its owner almost as accurately as his house. The carpet, cus.h.i.+ons, ha.s.socks, curtains were part of his personal establishment; if he were a big man, he would probably have a stove within the luxurious enclosure, by which to doze in comfort when the weather was cold. And it was usual for the wall immediately above him to be more or less covered with tablets to the memory of his deceased ancestors. When he died himself, the blue or red curtains which had preserved his n.o.bility from the gaze of vulgar wors.h.i.+ppers would be changed for hangings of black cloth, and the mourning hatchment would be put up.

In this little church the organist was the National School master, down at the bottom of the building, and his instrument in my time was a concertina. There was no vestry. The parson put his things on in the chancel (in one church that I knew he first dragged his things out of the altar, which made a convenient store-chest for the loose "properties" of the place), his sacerdotal toilet being performed quite openly before the a.s.sembled congregation, in front of a looking-gla.s.s hung upon a chancel pillar; the interest we took in this piece of ritual was great or greater according as the man was shy and nervous or self-confident and vain. The canopied three-decker embraced the whole area of ritual proper, except on the rare occasions--the three enjoined by the rubric, I suppose--when Holy Communion was celebrated. In the bottom pen the clerk bawled the responses, in the middle one the parson recited prayers and lessons, in the upper (having changed his surplice for a black gown) he preached.

Usually the parson was a curate, domestically familiar to us; sometimes he was the stout and stately rector. When he came to the beautiful embowered house that at other times wore blinds over its windows, and his haughty high-nosed daughters to that chancel pew which at other times stood empty, then it behoved the parish, literally, to sit up.

With him we were comparatively at ease, but confronted with them we simply shook in our shoes. They did their parish work with vigour while they were about it. The "poor" were visited all round, scolded for their injudicious management of households on ten or twelve s.h.i.+llings a week, which, they were a.s.sured, would be an ample income if "crowdy" (a kind of meal porridge, I think--we never heard of it except from them) were subst.i.tuted for the unnecessary luxuries they indulged in; and I believe the rectory kitchen doled broken victuals to the deserving. My father nursed a man's grudge against these well-meaning women chiefly on account of the crowdy suggestion so persistently thrust upon his farm labourers; the offensive word was so often on his lips that I have never forgotten it. He was always contrasting the existing regime with that of the late rector, who used to like to play whist and ride to hounds with him, and of whom I remember nothing but the fact of his death. My father and I, driving past the rectory gates, saw a gig slowly moving up and down before them. "Hullo!" said father, pulling up. "What's the matter?"

The man in charge of the gig mournfully shook his head. "You don't say so?" father e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, with even greater mournfulness. That was all. It meant that the doctor was inside, and that the rector was dying.

The existing regime, however, did not leave us out in the cold. The rector came at least once during his visit to his parish, and his daughters once, to call on us--cake-and-wine calls--and similarly honoured the houses of the other village gentry. The old man was as affable as he knew how to be; the entertaining of the old-young ladies was the formidable affair. If there was not time to set things in apple-pie order before they reached the front door, what flurry and fret and vexation of heart! Well for me if I was not doing punishment on the stairs at that awful moment!

But the story of the rood-screen that I so wanted to see, and could not, is the vivid memory of all.

The rector was in residence. He was putting on his robes in the chancel, before the looking-gla.s.s, with the dignified leisureliness that was his wont. The congregation was coming in. Amongst them was a lady from one of the farmhouses (called "The Manor," an ancient house which her family lived, instead of died, in, surrounded by a moat of stagnant water covered with a.r.s.enic-green duckweed--which house, or its site, there was not time to look for), and she was followed by a domestic pet, a raven.

She knelt to her preliminary prayer. Rising from her knees she beheld the presumptuous bird sitting on the desk edge of her pew, regarding her quizzically with his head c.o.c.ked to one side. I was watching him in ecstasy, but she--a gentle, fair woman, whose face as I then saw it I could identify in a crowd to-day--flushed crimson with consternation and shame. She put out a flurried hand to secure him, but he hopped out of her reach; further efforts resulted in his free flight through the church to perch on the top of the screen. There he sat, and defied the congregation to catch him--to the pa.s.sionate delight, I am sure, of every child present. His poor mistress, however, was overwhelmed. She sat still, trembling and cowering, her cheeks like peonies; and the rector, when he realised the situation, was furious.