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Title: Period Piece. A Cambridge Childhood.
Author: Raverat, Gwen [Gwendolen Mary] (1885-1957)
Date of first publication: 1952
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Faber and Faber, December 1953
   [seventh impression]
Date first posted: 7 March 2011
Date last updated: 7 March 2011
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #741

This ebook was produced by
Marcia Brooks, Ross Cooling, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






  _Period Piece_




  PERIOD PIECE

  _A Cambridge Childhood_

  by
  GWEN RAVERAT

  [Illustration]

  FABER AND FABER LIMITED
  24 Russell Square
  London




  _First published in mcmlii
  by Faber and Faber Limited
  24 Russell Square London W.C.1
  Second impression November mcmlii
  Third impression November mcmlii
  Fourth impression December mcmlii
  Fifth impression January mcmliii
  Sixth impression May mcmliii
  Seventh impression December mcmliii
  Printed in Great Britain by
  Latimer Trend Co Ltd Plymouth
  All rights reserved_




  To
  FRANCES




  _Contents_


     I. PRELUDE           _page_ 15

    II. NEWNHAM GRANGE           31

   III. THEORIES                 47

    IV. EDUCATION                60

     V. LADIES                   75

    VI. PROPRIETY                98

   VII. AUNT ETTY               119

  VIII. DOWN                    139

    IX. GHOSTS AND HORRORS      162

     X. THE FIVE UNCLES         175

    XI. RELIGION                210

   XII. SPORT                   230

  XIII. CLOTHES                 253

   XIV. SOCIETY                 268




  _Preface_


This is a circular book. It does not begin at the beginning and go on to
the end; it is all going on at the same time, sticking out like the
spokes of a wheel from the hub, which is me. So it does not matter which
chapter is read first or last. On the next page is a list of the people
in the book.




  _My Mother's Family_

  John Du Puy (of Philadelphia)    The Rev. John Reynolds
              |                              |
            --+--                      +-----+--------+
              |                        |              |
  Charles Meredith Du Puy    m    Ellen Reynolds    Caroline    m    (1) 1856 Adam Slemmer
       of Philadelphia      1853  (my grandmother)   Reynolds                   d. 1868
      (my grandfather)        |   1833-1898        (my great-aunt)   (2) 1874 Richard Jebb
          1823-1898           |                       1840-1930                 d. 1905
                           ---+---
                              |
                         Maud Du Puy 1861-1947
                          (my mother)




  _My Father's Family_

                   +--William     m    Sara Sedgwick
                   |  1839-1914  1877    1839-1902
                   |  (Uncle William)    (Aunt Sara)
                   |
                   +--Henrietta   m    R.B. Litchfield
                   |  1843-1927  1871    1832-1903
                   |  (Aunt Etty)    (Uncle Richard)
                   |
                   |                                +--Gwen m Jacques Raverat
                   |                                |  b.1885
                   |                                +--Charles m Katharine Pember
                   +--George      m    Maud Du Puy--+  b. 1887
                   |  1845-1912  1884    1861-1947  +--Margaret m Geoffrey Keynes
  Charles Darwin   |  (my father)    (my mother)    |  b. 1890
      1809-1882    |                                +--William m Monica Slingsby
  (my grandfather) +--Elizabeth                        (Billy) b. 1894
      m 1839   ----+  1847-1926
  Emma Wedgwood    |  (Aunt Bessy)                      |
      1808-1896    |               {1874  Amy Ruck    --+--Bernard m Elinor Monselli
  (Grandmamma)     |               {      1850-1876     |  b. 1876
                   +--Francis     m{1883  Ellen Crofts--+--Frances m Francis Cornford
                   |  1848-1925    {        1856-1903   |  b. 1886
                   |  (Uncle Frank){        (Aunt Ellen)
                   |               {1913    Florence Maitland
                   |                        d 1920
                   |               {1882    Elizabeth Fraser
                   +--Leonard     m{        1846-1898
                   |  1850-1943    {        (Aunt Bee)
                   |  (Uncle Lenny){1900    Mildred Massingberd
                   |                        1868-1940
                   |                        (Mildred)  +--Erasmus
                   |                                   |  1881-1915
                   +--Horace      m      Ida Farrer----+--Ruth m W. Rees Thomas
                      1851-1928  1880    1854-1946     |  b. 1883
                      (Uncle Horace)     (Aunt Ida)    +--Nora m Alan Barlow
                                                          b. 1885




  CHAPTER I

  _Prelude_


In the spring of 1883 my mother, Maud Du Puy, came from America to spend
the summer in Cambridge with her aunt, Mrs. Jebb. She was nearly
twenty-two, and had never been abroad before; pretty, affectionate,
self-willed, and sociable; but not at all a flirt. Indeed her sisters
considered her rather stiff with young men. She was very fresh and
innocent, something of a Puritan, and with her strong character, was
clearly destined for matriarchy.

[Illustration]

The Jebbs, my great-uncle Dick, and my great-aunt Cara, lived at
Springfield, at the southern end of the Backs, and their house looked
across Queens' Green to the elms behind Queens' College. Uncle Dick was
later to be Sir Richard Jebb, O.M., M.P., Professor of Greek at
Cambridge, and all the rest of it; but, at that time, he held the chair
of Greek at Glasgow, and so had been obliged to resign his Trinity
fellowship and the post of Public Orator at Cambridge. However the Jebbs
spent only the winters in Glasgow, and kept on their Cambridge house for
the summers, while they waited hopefully for old Dr. Kennedy to retire,
so that Uncle Dick might succeed him in the Cambridge Professorship.
This was the Dr. Kennedy who wrote the Latin Grammar, which we all knew
very well in our youth, and he had not the slightest intention of
retiring; neither was it by any means so certain as the Jebbs chose to
consider it, that the succession would fall to Uncle Dick. However,
after keeping them waiting for thirteen years, Dr. Kennedy died in 1889,
and Uncle Dick came into his kingdom at last.

The earliest Cambridge that I can remember must have been seen by me in
reflection from my mother's mind, for it is the same picture as that
which she draws in a series of artless letters, written to her family in
Philadelphia in this summer of 1883, two years before I was born. In
this, the first Cambridge in the mirror of my mind, the sun is always
shining, and there are always ladies and gentlemen sitting in the garden
under the trees, very much occupied with each other. It was quite a
different Cambridge which I saw later on, when I looked at it with my
own eyes.

My mother had fallen into a world which was very strange to her. She
wrote home: '_I am at last at the Utopia of all my fondest dreams._' It
was a Utopia of tea-parties, dinner-parties, boat-races, lawn-tennis,
antique shops, picnics, new bonnets, charming young men, delicious food
and perfect servants; and it almost seems too good to be true. I suppose
there must have been some difficulties, even in those days; and indeed
all the right sleeves of my mother's dresses would keep on getting too
tight, from the constant tennis; and the helpings of ice-cream were far
too small for an American; but, otherwise, you would really think, from
the letters, that Unrequited Love--other people's Unrequited Love--was
the only serious trouble. And even the broken hearts of which we are
told seem to have been very quickly mended.

The Du Puys were of a good family of Huguenot descent; but they were not
well off. There were many children, and Maud could not possibly have
accepted her aunt's invitation, if her fare to England had not been paid
by her elder brother. He was now getting on well, and was generous to
his sisters. The girls had been sent to fairly good schools; but in the
case of my mother at any rate, Education, like an unsuccessful
vaccination, had not _taken_ very well. It was not a question of
schooling, but of temperament. But my mother arrived in England with a
great respect for culture, and eager to learn all she could. We find her
struggling to read Browning and Tennyson and Shelley; battering her way
with pride and tenacity through _La Petite Fadette_, and preaching the
virtues of learning French to her younger sisters. But with all her
respect for education--and no one could respect it more--learning was
never her strong point. However, she got on perfectly well without it.

[Illustration: My mother was tall and had golden-brown hair and dark
blue eyes and such a lovely complexion that people often thought that
she was made up; which would of course have been improper.]

In these early letters my mother told her family everything,
higgledy-piggledy, helter-skelter, with the most perfect simplicity. And
much of the information must have been quite mysterious to them, as she
never explained at all about the unknown people of whom she wrote:
neither who they were, nor what they did, nor where they lived. But
then, even in later life, my mother assumed that you knew all about the
people who came into her letters or conversation. If you didn't, you
ought to; and anyhow it didn't matter much. In these first letters, both
the spelling and the grammar are rather shaky, but, after a lecture from
Aunt Cara, stern endeavour improved them very much.

[Illustration: 'Sketching is such a nice occupation for a young lady',
as they used to say in those days.]

In writing to her sisters, Maud was always careful to tell them anything
which might be useful to them, if they should come to England in their
turn. She sends a list of words not to use: _somewheres_, _anywheres_,
_fix_ (as fix my dress), take it _off_ of the table; '_Dick_ [Jebb]
_says_ location _is not a good word_.' She did a good deal of painting
in oils, mostly of round ornamental plaques of her own designs of
flowers; these are rather smudgy, but have some feeling for pattern and
colour. Maud tells her young sister Carrie how she sketched King's
Chapel, and suffered very much in the process from cows, little boys and
rain. She goes on, in a kind, but patronizing way: '_I was ever so glad
to hear about your reading. Aunt Cara said that every one who is not
musical ought to be fond of poetry. So you ought to cultivate your taste
in that direction. I am reading Browning, but think he is awfully hard
to understand._' [_Too hard for you_ is implied.] '_You could not help
liking Shelley and Tennyson._'

The records of this first summer deal very largely with the fluctuations
of two or three love-affairs among her new acquaintance; for to the very
end of her life, affairs of the heart were of the greatest interest to
my mother. At the end of the summer the letters culminated in the
exciting proposal of a certain Mr. T. to herself; and with his rejection
she left Cambridge. During this time, after a slow start, she grew to
like my father more and more; and, though she never considered him
romantic, he gradually became an intimate friend, so that he was
consulted at once about Mr. T.'s proposal. But all that summer Romance,
for my mother, fluttered lightly round the figure of a much younger man,
Mr. G., who was so charming and so intelligent, and who looked so well
in his flannels; even though her aunt unkindly noticed that he had bow
legs and turned one foot in. However, nothing came of this affair. Mr.
T., Mr. G., and my father, George Darwin, were all three Fellows of
Trinity.

My father was at that time thirty-eight; the second son of Charles
Darwin, who had recently died. His health had been bad as a young man;
in fact he had never expected to live. His complaint sounds like some
sort of nervous dyspepsia (perhaps a gastric ulcer?) but it is
impossible now to make out what was wrong, or how much was physical, how
much hypochondria. He had been Second Wrangler in the Tripos, and had
held a Trinity fellowship. He was then called to the Bar, but was not
strong enough to practise. He became interested in various scientific
questions, involving mathematics; and specially in the movements of the
moon and the tides. In this year, 1883, he had just been elected Plumian
Professor of Astronomy; and was also re-elected to a Trinity Fellowship.
Maud writes: '_G.D. had a dinner-party after he was made a fellow--and
it passed off most pleasantly. In consequence he was ill all the next
day--too much for his nerves and his stomach._' But he was really now
better in health, and being of a warm, open, affectionate nature, wished
very much to get married.

[Illustration: My father at this time. He is wearing an unnaturally
fierce photographic expression. In very early days I was much confused
because his beard and the tobacco he smoked seemed to be of exactly the
same colour and texture. Did he perhaps smoke his own moustache? His
hair was made of a rather darker kind of tobacco.]

Here is my mother's description of her first sight of my father; it is
written on 18th of May 1883, the day after her arrival in Cambridge:
'_Jane came to tell me that Aunt C. wished me to come downstairs to meet
Mr. Darwin. I ran down and opened the door quickly before I could lose
courage, and G.D. quickly stepped forward blushing rosy-red and shook
hands. The first thing that struck me was his size. He is little._ [My
father was over five foot ten inches in height, but thin and slight.]
_He is intensely nervous, cannot sit still a minute. He is full of fun,
and talks differently from an American man. They are so different in
everything._' In her next letter she says: '_After any exertion he seems
utterly exhausted. He comes in to see Aunt C. every day, and sometimes
twice a day and is very convenient to do little errands and to take us
out._' Aunt Cara was evidently educating my father for ladies' society,
which was probably very good for him. Aunt Cara writes: '_He is
wonderfully improvable; already he has thrown off entirely the little
thoughtless ways that used to strike one. I laughed at him about talking
instead of waiting on the tea-table; now he says the mere sight of a
tea-pot brings him to his feet in an instant; he hands cups and cake
without intermission._'

Maud did not think much of English girls. Of a certain brilliant and
much admired girl she writes: '_I don't call her beautiful at all; in
America I think with one accord we should call her homely._' And again:
'_The English girls are so awfully susceptible; if a man speaks to them
almost, they instantly think he is desperately in love with them._' Of
herself she truly says: '_I am not at all susceptible; and that is one
difference between_ [English girls] _and me_.'

But from the beginning she liked English men--or gentlemen, as she
generally called them, in accordance with the custom of her time. Though
she thought them very cold: '_Englishmen are strange creatures. I doubt
if they ever really fall in love; they marry of course; but generally
from a prudent motive._' In spite of this defect, she admired them
exceedingly: '_The gentlemen all seem so simple and no boasting in their
manners, and one thing I notice in particular, they are all so careful
not to hurt each others' feelings. Aunt C. says that no boasting in
their talk and manners is because they have their position in life
generally, and are not obliged to talk and act to keep it. When I think
of these men and compare them with the class of gentlemen that are in
society in West Philadelphia, I "weaken". If we could only transport a
dozen girls what belles they would be. I do not think the English girls
can begin to be compared to the American girls, but the gentlemen seem
to be better. Not in a society sense, for many of them are quite
embarrassed; but in themselves. They read more and think more and know
more. The ones that we should call ordinary, they call handsome and
those we think handsome they call ordinary. Except of course Gerald
Balfour whom all call handsome._'

Gerald Balfour was a younger brother of Arthur Balfour, and was later on
Home Secretary for a time. He was often at Cambridge and Aunt Cara was
much dazzled by him; but he was perhaps now beginning to be rather tired
of her; for Maud wrote shrewdly, that '_Aunt C. does not like it very
much_', because, when she charged him with preferring his sister-in-law,
Lady Frances Balfour, to herself, he did not deny it! At first Maud,
too, was much impressed by him. She writes: '_He is just what you would
imagine an English Lord to look and be like.... He is so beautiful._'
But presently the Spirit of American Independence breaks out: '_He is
really the most conservative man that I have yet met. Believes the
higher set of people, the Lords etc., set a good example to the lower
class of people--and ever so much more stuff that I had read of but
never met anyone that believed it._'

There seem to be some indications that Aunt Cara had originally intended
another of the Darwin brothers, Frank the botanist, for Maud; hoping
perhaps to keep George under her own sway; for Maud writes: '_Aunt C.
had picked out Frank Darwin for me_ [at a party]. _She tried to be
entertaining, but evidently Frank was not entrapped, for he appeared at
the_ [boat] _races with his sister and a Miss Cross_ [Crofts]. _Aunt C.
thought he was very attentive to her. Aunt C. did not like it, she
wishes to have him as attentive to herself as G.D. So yesterday she
asked him to tennis on Monday, when I anticipate watching a great deal
of fun. It is wonderful to me to watch the way she makes people admire
her, she is a fascinating woman._' But alas, before Monday, Frank's
engagement to Miss Crofts was announced; so there was an end to Aunt
Cara's little plot. Of this marriage was born my cousin Frances Darwin,
later to be Frances Cornford.

There is a long letter about a visit to London to see an amateur
performance of a Greek play in 'Lady Freak's house' [? Freke].

'_At 12 we were all packed, I with my gray dress and red velvet hat on,
and lavender dress in a valise--Aunt C. in her best black silk dress,
with her Spanish lace dress in her box. We were seated in the cab_
[American for railway carriage] _when suddenly I was aroused by Aunt C.
saying in stentorian tones, "I have forgotten the tickets for the Greek
play"._' After some agitation they '_decided to run the risk of being
turned away_' and went off shopping to '_Picadolly_ [sic] _and Regent
Streets_'. Here Aunt C. purchased for herself '_a little black and
gold-braided bonnet, with four yellow roses and a little narrow black
velvet ribbon_,' for which she paid two pounds. There is something so
succulent about this bonnet that I have not the heart to omit it, as I
have all the numberless other things they bought. In the evening they
'_had no difficulty in getting in. . . . Gladstone, Sir Isaac Newton_
[sic], _Sir Frederic Leighton and some other great codger sat
immediately in front of us_.' [Query: Who can Sir Isaac Newton have
been?] '_Gladstone looks exactly like the caricatures of him, only his
collar is a little larger and his eyes are so keen and bright and
twinkle so when he laughs. Sir F. Leighton had charge of the scenic
effects and succeeded very well, only all the rouge and powder and Greek
dresses could not make perfect beauties of the English girls. The play
was called_ The Tale of Troy, _and this night was spoken entirely in
Greek_.' [Of which, of course, she knew not a word.] '_Mr Stephen_ [J.
K. Stephen] _was Hector and acted remarkably well_. _Lionel Tennyson as
Ulysses would have been better had he known his part. I enjoyed the play
very much and equally so the people. Such dresses!!! Words fail me for
description._'

This account has been extracted in fragments from an enormous
entanglement of to-ing and fro-ing in cabs, while they looked for rooms
for the night. They got them at last at '_the St Pancreas Hotel_'. I was
delighted to find this spelling so early, as, to the end of her days, my
mother always considered the Saint and the Internal Organ as identical.
Next day they continued their delightful shopping expeditions, and ended
up at the Royal Academy, to see the Millais and the Leightons: '_and I
think it quite rested Aunt C. after the fatigue and brainwork of
shopping._'

[Illustration: 'The Fatigue and Brainwork of Shopping.' Aunt Cara and my
mother buying a bonnet.]

They were obliged to hurry back to Cambridge as they were dining out.
'_There was a Mr Foster_ [afterwards Sir Michael Foster, the
physiologist] _who sat near me and "chaffed" (English word) me till I
almost lost my patience. I did not understand that he was teasing me,
but thought he had taken a little too much wine, which amused Aunt C.
immensely. But he insisted and insisted in such a grave way that I
really thought he did not know what he was talking about and that he was
either a fool or a little out of his mind. If I meet him again won't I
turn the tables and see if he "chaffs" me again!! Mr Verrall_ [Dr.
Verrall, Greek scholar] _took me out to dinner and proved very pleasant
(married men or little men are generally the ones that I like, he was
the former). I wore my lavender which Aunt C. thinks very becoming but
an inartistic colour. I never saw Aunt Cara look better in my life. She
really did not look over 30_.' [She was then forty-three.]

The grain of this letter has been extracted out of many pages of
details; on the other hand my mother could at times be admirably terse.
She sums up her account of a visit to Ely Cathedral, by saying: '_The
architecture was very good._' I don't see what more anybody could say
after that.

Maud was a good deal puzzled by Cambridge habits when she first came to
England. She had never learnt to dance, and was afraid that some of her
family would be shocked, when they heard that she had been to a ball.
She seems only to have been to one ball at King's that summer; and even
later there is very little mention of dances. This is probably because
she never learnt to dance well; certainly not because she disapproved of
dancing. She writes that she has not 'yet' played games on Sunday;
though she was able to enjoy very bad riddles on that day. 'Why are
women like telegrams? Because they are in advance of the mails in
intelligence.' 'Why are men like telescopes? Because women draw them
out, look through them and shut them up.' This is characteristic, for
all her life she loved puzzles and riddles. One Sunday she went to the
Round Church, which was '_almost as old as the hills_'; but '_the
English service is so long; they repeat always two creeds and the Lord's
Prayer three and often four times, and they never combine the Royal
Family in one prayer, but always there is one for Victoria and then
another for the Prince of Wales. And the sermon was rediculous_ [sic].
_I think I shall go to the chapel hereafter. They have a short service,
no sermon and good music. The college people never go to any of the
churches. Aunt C. made G.D. go to chapel for the first time for a dozen
years on Sunday. She says he is what they call an a r g o n a i s t
[sic]. I_ think _that is the word_. [Agnostic?] _But it means an infidel
who does not try to make other people infidels. So many of the people
here are that kind. They, or at least a few, go to chapel, but only for
the music._' This does not seem to shock her at all.

The gaieties, dinners and tennis continue all the summer, till in
mid-September Maud went with Aunt Cara to pay some visits in Scotland.
But first she bought a new coat. '_After looking at lots of dowdy
things, at last we were shown an exceedingly pretty brown brocaded
velvet, a kind of coat and yet a mantle, trimmed with lovely fur--I
think it was black fox which was brown. But the price was very
extravagant--seven guineas. The fur cost a guinea a yard, the clerk
said. There were about ten yards of fur on it._' This kind of
arithmetical puzzle--ten yards of guinea-a-yard fur on a seven-guinea
coat--would never have troubled my mother at all. Aunt Cara evidently
pressed her to buy it, but my mother remained firm. It was '_too good_'.
So she bought a three-guinea coat, of '_mixed red and blue cloth in
stripes_' with '_a feather trimming_' and '_capey sleeves_', '_as
stylish as can be_.'

This was the period of the 'aesthetic' dresses--(_Patience_ had appeared
first in 1881)--but both Aunt Cara and Maud considered them affected and
ridiculous. Maud writes: '_There were quite a number of aesthetic or
ascetic_ [sic] _costumes, at a Newnham Garden Party_. Those she
describes sound rather charming, though floppy. She says: '_Aunt C. has
a simply perfect tea-gown; not aesthetic, but so graceful and lovely._'
Her own favourite gown was '_my white albatross_', whatever that may
be.

At this time Uncle Dick's mother was very ill: '_In a selfish mood both
Aunt C. and I hope that she will not die at once, for we should have to
give up our tour to Scotland._' This danger was averted, and they went
off to meet George at Edinburgh, where they had two days' sightseeing
with him: '_The Scotch look sturdy, but their features are not at all
good. Their noses so lumpy and their mouths big. George D. was very
nice. In good spirits. I can see how nice he is as a brother and a
friend, and he would make a good husband, but somehow the romantic view
of a lover is left out of his disposition._'

My father was always at his best when travelling; he enjoyed it so much
and was so full of enterprise and enthusiasm, that it was no wonder that
Maud now began to find him more interesting. If not romantic as a lover
(though I believe that she presently changed her mind even about that),
he was extremely romantic as a sightseer and I can't think of
anyone--except Sir Walter Scott himself--with whom I would rather have
seen Edinburgh.

After their return to Cambridge at the end of September, the crisis of
Mr. T.'s proposal occurs rather unexpectedly. There is a tremendously
involved account of everything that happened for several days before the
event, most of it quite irrelevant. It is contained in a letter to Dear
Mamma, marked _Private_, with a list of only eight near relations to
whom it may be shewn; '_and that is_ all, all.' '_Well, in the morning I
was in my tub when Jennie came to my door and said, "Miss Maud, here is
a note which I will put under the door." I easily got it and to my_
amazement _it was a_ proposal!' She encloses the actual letter, which I
expected to find marked with the bath-water; and also a photograph of
Mr. T. He is rather handsome and looks intelligent and virtuous, but
dull; his beard, however, was vast and flowing, a great attraction in
those days. But alas, alas! he was forty-one and his legs were very
short indeed.

[Illustration: Mr. T., from the photograph which my mother sent to
Philadelphia. His hair and beard were considered very attractive, and
his legs fortunately don't show here.]

Aunt Cara writes: '_Why is there something always queer about the legs
of those attractive creatures, which catches straight the eyes of the
indifferent and makes them think our heroes common?_' [Mr. G., you
remember, had crooked legs, too.] '_T. is very manly, a good shot,
Alpine climber, tennis player, has an income of, I fancy, about 2000 a
year_'--and Aunt C. here goes into details of what a very good match it
would be. But Maud was quite clear that it would not do, even though Mr.
T. had rashly bought a large house, hoping to live there with her.
George was consulted at once; it must have been difficult for him. Maud
writes: '_Dick_ [Jebb] _asked G. D. to find out something about
Arcturus_ [the star] _which Dick wished to write in his book. So G.D.
came after dinner.... They retired to Dick's study. To my great
amusement, instead of talking about Arcturus, they talked about me and
Mr T.; G. D. thought Dick had been told. Dick said, "Why it is a
splendid match. He is rich, and is a very able man." Age did not make
any difference to him evidently_.' But George need not have been worried
by all this, for Maud writes again: '_Speaking truthfully I am nearly a
half-head taller than he is. He is rather stout. His hair is a beautiful
wavy dark brown, and he has a nice soft brown beard; I like him as a
friend, but nothing more. He is too little; imagine me marrying a man
shorter than myself. A short man though will be my fate, as it is only
that kind that like me._'

So Aunt Cara wrote a beautiful letter of refusal for Maud to copy; only
it must have been rather too beautiful, for Mr. T. did not take it
seriously. Aunt Cara writes: '_He admires her frankness and candour (I
wrote the letter myself) and he thinks her answer encouraging! Heaven
save the mark! Can't any man understand a_ "NO" _unless it is shouted at
him_? _The answer to this_ [second] _letter can't be misunderstood_.
_Still I don't believe he will give it up, unless Maud becomes engaged
to someone else. Englishmen are given to take these things more
seriously than Americans.... His legs are perfectly straight, which is
so much to the good, and his head and shoulders are fine._' Aunt Cara
obviously still thought it a pity to throw away such a good bargain; she
thinks Maud '_might get to like him_', but Maud (as usual) was firm, not
to say obstinate. She writes: '_Now don't think I am going to marry Mr
T. for I have no idea of so doing. In the first place I do not want to
marry over here, in the second I do not like him enough, in the third he
is too little, and lastly I should fulfil my predestination and be an
old maid, which I intend to do.... That is all, and I have probably
refused the only offer I shall ever have._'

So Maud copied out a second refusal; but still Aunt Cara did not give up
hope for Mr. T. She writes: '_He is by no means a brilliant match, but I
do think he is superior to anyone you are likely to meet in America. As
a husband, I believe he would make a woman happier than would G.D. for
instance, whose health would always be a very serious drawback. Still,
the match is not brilliant; but then think how rarely brilliant matches
come in one's way._ "Sure, the world is askew", _where matrimony is
concerned_.' She followed this later with a reminder: '_I do pity N. in
West Philadelphia, and you too, if you have to go there. It must be
awful to see year after year slip by and to live in a place where
nothing can happen. Mr T. would be better than that._' Aunt Cara clearly
thought that a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush, for she was
not yet sure how serious George might be, though she was very fond of
George, and in discussing him had written: '_George has by nature the
straightest of lines, a very well-proportioned figure, and a really
beautiful forehead. Nobody could call him ugly._' And again: '_Gerald_
[Balfour] _says he has the sweetest, most unspoilt nature_.' But she was
also rather afraid of appearing to press his claims, in case--as she
wrote to George himself, just after his engagement had actually taken
place--'_the Darwin family might think this was a match of my making_.
_And it wasn't_ one bit, _mind that.... If there is a suspicion I
utterly and entirely repudiate, it is that of being a match maker_.'

But Maud's views of marriage were less business-like than Aunt Cara's;
she had begun to care for George, and Mr. T.'s chance was gone. So poor
Mr. T. never married at all, and lived for the rest of his life alone in
the large house he had bought.

It is always a fascinating problem to consider who we would have been,
if our mother (or our father) had married another person; it is,
however, too large a subject to enter into properly here; and I must
merely remark that if our father had been Mr. T. we should certainly
have had magnificent beards. But then beards are very little use
nowadays, especially to females; and we should have lost over the
roundabouts--I mean the legs--which are now very important indeed. So no
doubt things were all for the best.

After this stirring event the summer ended, and Maud went away and
travelled on the Continent, with a different and highly irritating
aunt--(whose portrait can be seen on page 114). And my father pursued
her; and though he was barely three years younger than Mr. T. and of
only medium height, they got engaged at Florence in March 1884. And I
must hasten to add that my father's legs were _perfectly straight_ and
that he was two or three inches taller than she was. Though, by that
time, I believe she would have married him, even if his legs had been
crooked.




  CHAPTER II

  _Newnham Grange_


So they were married in the summer of 1884, at Erie, Pennsylvania; where
the local paper described my mother as 'a Philadelphia belle of the
first water'. And on the whole they were very happy. My mother's
calmness, good spirits and unshakable courage were very soothing to my
father's overstrung nerves; and in all the more important things she
submitted her strong will to his better judgment. She was always kind
and sympathetic to him when he was ill, and took his ailments perfectly
seriously; but, unlike a Darwin, she did not positively enjoy his
ill-health; she would really have preferred him to be well; and as a
consequence he did get very much better. Perhaps, in some ways, she
might have been happier with a younger, stronger, gayer man; and he with
someone nearer his own intellectual level; but on both sides there were
compensations, which made up for what was lacking.

That first winter of 1884-5 they rented the Jebbs' house, Springfield,
while the Jebbs spent the winter in Glasgow; and they then began to look
for a house of their own. They first made an offer, through a friend,
for the house so recently acquired by Mr. T. This strikes me as rather
tactless; at any rate Mr. T. seemed determined not to lose his house as
well as his lady, for he answered that he was going to live there
himself. Aunt Cara writes, in unconscious rhyme: '_He will think a wife
is easier to find, than another house so exactly to his mind._'

[Illustration: Newnham Grange as I first remember it. There was then a
railing down the road; later on the windows on each side of the door
were built out; otherwise it is little changed. It makes my blood run
cold to remember how we used to run, chasing each other, along the top
of the nine-foot garden wall, and jump down from that height.]

Then my father bought the family house and business place of the Beales,
just across the road from Springfield. They were Cambridge corn and coal
merchants--there is still a coal-merchant of that name in the town--and
their granaries, warehouses, cow-houses, stables and yards ran along the
west bank of the Cam, up-stream from Silver Street Bridge. The house had
no name, nor had the road; all that part of Cambridge was simply called
Newnham; so my father named it _Newnham Grange_. It was certainly a
good investment, but I am sure that he really bought the place because
he fell in love with it and all its romantic associations.

[Illustration: The river side of Newnham Grange.]

It is a late eighteenth-century house, probably built over an older one;
it faces north up the Backs; and on the south side stands on a branch of
the Cam, about half-way between the King's Mill and the Newnham Mill.
There was a water-door under one of the granaries, to which the barges
used once to bring their loads. However, though corn still sometimes
came by barge to Foster's Mill (the King's Mill) it no longer came any
farther, and the Beales' business had all moved down to the station. The
place was now too big for the two old Misses Beales, who still lived
there, so my father bought the whole estate. And my mother took to it
with enthusiasm; which was characteristically brave of her; for most
mothers would have thought the situation damp, and the river both
dangerous and smelly.

[Illustration: The King's Mill (Foster's Mill) from the end of our
garden near Silver Street Bridge. From here we used to watch the corn
sacks being hoisted up into the Mill, from barges or wagons. The Mill
was pulled down in 1928.]

And so it was; I can remember the smell very well, for all the sewage
went into the river, till the town was at last properly drained, when I
was about ten years old. There is a tale of Queen Victoria being shown
over Trinity by the Master, Dr. Whewell, and saying, as she looked down
over the bridge: 'What are all those pieces of paper floating down the
river?' To which, with great presence of mind, he replied: 'Those,
ma'am, are notices that bathing is forbidden.' However, we lived at the
upper end of the town, so it was not so very bad. That was why the
bathing places were on the upper river, on Sheeps' Green and Coe Fen.

In those days both the mills were in use. I still now feel that there is
an unnatural gap in the landscape, where Foster's Mill used to stand
before it was pulled down; and I find it hard to believe that the boys,
who now sit fishing on the parapet, have no idea that there once was a
great mill behind them. We used to spend many hours watching the fat
corn-sacks being hauled up by a pulley into the overhanging gable,
sometimes from a barge, but more often from the great yellow four-horse
wagons, which stood beneath the trapdoor. The sacks butted the trapdoors
open with their own noses, and the doors fell to, with a loud clap,
behind them. At night there was a watchman in the mill who used to
divert himself by trying to play the flute. It was a doleful sound to
hear at three in the morning, especially as he had not advanced very far
in his studies. My father, always a bad sleeper, was much worried by his
aimless tootlings, but felt it would be cruel to protest; however, in
the end, they came to an agreement which suited them both.

My father repaired the house and altered the kitchens, making them still
more vast and stony than they were before. He pulled down some of the
granaries and stables; and made a tennis-court where there had been a
cobbled yard. And he built two wooden bridges across branches of the
river, to reach the two islands. For the river here becomes exceedingly
complicated, with mill-races and weirs and millpools and various old
channels and ditches, all wandering about in the Fen. He 'threw out' a
bay-window to the drawing-room; this was a pity, as it spoilt the
Georgian symmetry of the house. But architects did not think much of
eighteenth-century architecture in those days.

[Illustration: The view up the river from our windows. Newnham Mill is
in the distance. The cows used to ford the river here four times a day,
coming and going to and from their pasture on Sheep's Green.]

From that window you could look up the river, under the arching trees,
and see far off the cows crossing the ford below the Newnham Millpool,
as they went to and from their stables to be milked, four times a day; a
very pretty sight. My mother loved watching them; she loved the whole
place, and in her romantic fervour she hopefully asked one of the old
Misses Beales if there were not a ghost in the house? The old lady
replied: 'Oh, we never speak about it! I can't tell you anything about
that.' And would say no more. So my mother assumed that there was a
ghost of some kind. Years later, this first old lady having meanwhile
died, my mother met the surviving sister, and said: 'I wish you would
tell me the story of the ghost. Your sister would not tell me anything
about it.' Miss Beales seemed displeased and surprised; and hummed and
hawed for some time; but at last she said: 'Did my sister really imply
that there was a ghost there? That was just like her. She had a very
curious sense of humour.' Which was the Victorian way of saying, that
she had been pulling my mother's leg. But whether this was really her
little joke, or whether both sisters knew of some story they wished to
conceal, we were never able to find out. No one ever saw a ghost; but we
children all knew very well where the ghost would have lived, if there
had been one; by the dark cupboard, on the top landing. The house had a
ghostly feeling anyhow.

The architect turned one of the river granaries into a long narrow
gallery, overlooking the tennis-court. This court has not proved large
enough for the fury of the modern game, but it was quite big enough for
the pat-ball tennis of those primitive times, when young and old hopped
about together in a gentle and unprofessional manner. He had intended
tennis parties to sit in this gallery to watch the game; but as it faces
north, it has always been far too cold for that. Also, as he was a
really good architect, he naturally built an elegant, carved, stone bow
window in the latest Victorian-Gothic style, on to the outer wall of
this plain old Georgian granary. This gives an agreeable exotic flavour
to the building; in fact, it is so absurd as to be rather charming. But
what very odd minds architects do have!

In summer tea was in the garden, under the great copper-beech by the
river. It was here that Miss Cecilia Beaux, a well-known American
artist, painted my mother's portrait in pastel. She was a fine
portrait-painter in the Impressionist tradition, more or less after
Manet; and this portrait of my mother is very charming. Miss Beaux was a
great friend of my mother's, and was one of the ladies I sometimes used
to chaperon (_see_ Chapter VI). She was certainly one of the very few
visitors whom I really liked; I believe I was even then interested in
her painting.

[Illustration: Cecilia Beaux making a pastel portrait of my mother under
the copper beech tree.]

At the end of the tennis-court stood the one big empty granary, which
had not been pulled down. My mother being nothing if not ingenious, used
this granary in a number of experimental ways. Sometimes she planned to
grow mushrooms on the upper floors; sometimes the first floor was a
drying-room for the washing, and the washing was done on the ground
floor, with water which the maids had to pump up from the river. (They
did not like this at all.) Sometimes the first floor was a hen-house.
The granary was built over a kind of cellar, which was always liable to
flooding; so the hens lived on the first floor, and a small door-hole
was knocked through the wall for them, from which a sort of ladder ran
down to the ground. The poor hens were supposed to go down this ladder
across the stable-yard, out through another hole in the great
carriage-door, and across the road to pasture on Queens' Green.

I don't know whether this journey was too complicated for their
well-known lack of intelligence, or whether they found the ladder too
difficult to climb, or whether they were run over by the fiery
hansom-cabs and butchers' carts of those days, but anyhow, the plan did
not succeed; and the hens were soon moved to a salubrious period
residence on the Big Island, where my mother designed for them a little
bridge of their own, across the ditch to the Lammas-land meadow. It was
rather like the Bridge of Sighs, made in wire-netting; and with a little
instruction they learnt to negotiate it.

But the hens' hole in the granary wall remained, and one of our
favourite pastimes was to swarm up a drainpipe and wriggle through the
hole into the loft; and my worst nightmares still have to do with the
time when I got stuck in the hens' door-hole, because I was too fat, and
had the greatest difficulty in getting out alive.

When I was about nine the granary became so dilapidated that something
had to be done about it; so my mother had the idea of turning it into a
flat, or upstairs house, and letting it. Then for a long time, we had
glorious fun with scaffolding rising up out of the river, and ladders,
and mortar, and workmen, and mess. Underneath the house, the ground
floor was made into a coach-house and stable for the horse my mother
always intended to keep some day, and never did. I still often feel as
if the present garage is haunted by the wistful ghost of a horse, who
never was there at all. The house is most ingeniously full of my
mother's beloved gadgets: tricks for opening the front door without
going downstairs, and for drawing up the bread in a basket; though, of
course, the architect insisted on following the well-known Victorian
principles of making the dining-room as far as possible from the
kitchen, and the bathroom as far as possible from the hot-water boiler.
This particular architect was quite explicit about it: he wrote a book
on house design, in which he said: '_The coal store should he placed as
far as possible from the kitchen, in order to induce economy in the use
of fuel._' This house was named the Granary.

Beyond the Granary, there was another strip of garden running along the
river bank, and from the very end of it I can remember seeing, in the
twilight of a June evening, the procession of boats, which used to end
the May races. The eights were dressed up with flowers and flags, and
came up into the Millpool to turn there, before going down again. It
must have been in 1892, the last time the procession took place.

The Grange was, of course, modernized inside, for my mother was always
on the side of progress. She had an enormous coal-bin built beside the
nursery door, to which the coalmen carried their sacks up the narrow
back stairs and along the wriggling roundabout passages, making a
terrible mess as they went. This was to save the maids' labour, but they
did not like the plan at all, more because it was unusual than because
of the coal dust. There was now a bathroom, too, with the bath, all
decently encased in mahogany, so that you could not see its legs. She
had installed a system of speaking tubes from the nursery to the hall;
but these were never used at all, because shouting up the short back
stairs was so much simpler, if less refined.

Anyhow our house never was the sort of place where you rang the bell for
the maid to put coal on the fire. My mother always sent a child to ask
for what was wanted, if the child could not itself do what was
necessary. I don't say she never rang the bell herself when the supply
of children ran short; but it was far more likely that she would call
out to someone passing by the door to come and do what she wanted. For
like a true American, she always left the doors ajar; no doubt she felt
it dull if they were shut. One of the four big rooms downstairs was
called the smoking-room, for smoking was not yet quite respectable,
though of course my father really smoked everywhere. It was later on
the schoolroom.

There was gaslight in the nurseries and passages and bedrooms; hissing,
unshaded gas-burners as a rule; where the brown middle of the
flower-like flame always fascinated me. There was a Colza oil lamp in
the drawing-room, and tall candles in the dining-room. But as soon as it
was possible we had the new electric light put in, though it was
considered very expensive and much too extravagant for the kitchens and
the attics; and such passage lights as there were must never be left on.
We had the telephone, too, so early that we were Number 10 on the list.
In the kitchen, near the vast iron range happily roaring the coal away,
stood the clockwork roasting-jack, behind its shiny screen; though the
screen was now chiefly used to shelter the troughs of dough, when the
bread was put down before the fire to rise; for our bread was all made
at home of stone-milled flour from Grantchester Mill.

Here at the Grange I was born in the summer of 1885, and here I and my
brothers and sister spent all our youth.

From the big night nursery window we could look right down on to the
slow green river beneath us; and if a boat went by it was reflected
upside down, as a patch of light moving across the ceiling; and the
ripples always purled in a dancing rhythm there, when the sun shone.
Across the Little Island we could see up to the weir and the footpath
along the Upper River, where I always thought the Lord walked when he
led his flock to lie down in green pastures. Here we were never out of
hearing of the faint sound of the water running over the weir; and on
windy winter nights, when we were in bed, we could hear, a long way off,
the trucks being shunted at the station and the whistling of the engines
on the line. That was when you couldn't sleep because you had a
'feverish attack' and, wonderfully, there was a fire in the night
nursery, throwing up the flickering criss-cross of the high fender on
the ceiling; and you were glad to be safe in bed, because of the lonely
dreadfulness of the night outside. And in the dark early morning we
could sometimes hear from the Big Island the crowing of the cocks, which
disturbed my father so much.

[Illustration: The weir, with Foster's Mill, Silver Street Bridge, and
Queens' College seen in the distance.]

From the day nursery window we looked across the road to the grass bank
and the lime trees opposite; and over Queens' Green to the great elms of
the Backs. The level of the Green was then lower than the road, and the
horses grazed on the smooth ancient turf, which can only be made by
hundreds of years of pasturing animals. It seemed to me the original
place about which had been written the poem, which I then thought so
lovely:

  _Buttercups and daisies--
  O the pretty flowers!
  Coming ere the spring-time,
  To tell of sunny hours._

Then the Town Council decided that the level of the Green must be
raised; and for a long time--two or three years--it was in a most
repulsive mess, while cart after cart dumped refuse there. The horses
used to flounder about and often fell on the slippery mud; and then they
would lie there as helpless in their harness as fallen knights in
armour. I used to watch them with horrified and exaggerated pity. I
should not have minded nearly so much if they had been men; but I
identified myself with the horses. At last the grass grew on the Green
again; but the old, old turf was gone and most of the daisies, too; and
it has never been so beautiful since the level was raised.

Once I was taken out of bed and carried down to the front door in my
nightgown to see the water covering the road and the Green, when a flood
had risen suddenly one night. My parents had gone out to dinner on foot,
but the frightened maids sent a four-wheeler to fetch them back in a
hurry. The water came up to the hubs of the wheels, but was not very
deep on the pavement. The cellars were awash, and my father had to wade
out into the garden to rescue a cat which was marooned on top of a wall.
We had several very delightful floods in my youth, but unfortunately the
water never quite came into the house; nor did it in the Great Flood of
1947.

Gunning records, in his _Reminiscences of Cambridge_, that there was a
very high flood in February 1795. '_There was a ball given by the
Freemasons on that evening, and a carriage was waiting to take Mrs
Beales and her party to it. The coachman (in order to save his own life
and that of his horses) was obliged to drive away, leaving the company
behind. Monsieur Corneille, a celebrated hair-dresser, whose presence
was anxiously awaited by several parties in the town, could not leave Mr
Beales's house, but was obliged to take up his residence there for the
night._' It is clear that this refers to the Grange; and also it is
pretty plain, from the context, that, apart from the cellars, the house
itself was not flooded even then; though from the height the water
reached in the Queens' Cloister Court, it must have been higher than any
flood we ever saw.

If you looked to the left out of the day-nursery window you could see
Springfield, and the beginning of Sidgwick Avenue; it was still being
made then, and we called it _The New Road_. Here, at the crossroads of
the Backs, the lame crossing-sweeper plied his trade, limping, all
crooked, across the road with his broom.

And if you looked to the right there was a small builder's yard and two
little houses, before you got to the tall trees and Silver Street
Bridge, and Queens' Essex Building. But you could not see the little
Tudor cottage which stood among the trees. Another early memory is of a
fire at night in the builders' yard opposite, and of my father in
agitation about the sparks, which were flying across the road to the
Granary.

There were railings along the road leading to the bridge, lovely
Georgian railings, now improved away; and often people were glad to
dodge behind them to escape from the terrified and terrifying herds of
cattle, which were driven with bangs and shouts, through the streets to
the Monday cattle-market. There had always been some sort of bridge,
where the bridge is now, and Desiderius Erasmus himself must often have
walked down our road when he went out from Queens' to take the air.

In the summer the thick white dust came powdering in at all the windows;
rising in clouds from the horses' hooves, and whitening the grass and
the trees across the road. And in the winter the oozy, jammy mud sloshed
about, and the street-cleaners scraped it up in delicious soupy
spoonfuls, and threw it into their carts. And everywhere and all the
time there was the smell of horses; it came in at the windows with the
dust; not very nice, but not nearly so nasty as the petrol and exhaust
smells are now. And often we heard the clattering of the feet of the
hansom-cab horses and the jingling of their bells, as they cantered by;
for they were mostly retired Newmarket race-horses, and so they always
had to pretend to gallop, to satisfy the undergraduates, however slowly
they might really be going. My cousin Nora said she knew the faces of
every one of those horses.

Then there was the rush and rattle of the butchers' traps and their
furious little ponies, whom we believed to be fed on meat to make them
fierce; and the yellow milk-carts, like Roman chariots, with their big
brass-bound churns of milk and their little dippers hooked on at the
side; and the hairy-footed shire horses, who drew the great corn-wagons
in from the country. And on Saturdays, market days, the farmers came
trotting by in their traps; and the carriers' carts plodded in with
their slow horses from villages as much as fifteen miles away. Sometimes
they were hooded carts, sometimes they were just open carts, with planks
for seats, on which sat twelve cloaked and bonneted women, six a side,
squeezed together, for the interminable journey. As late as 1914 I knew
the carrier of Croydon-cum-Clopton, twelve miles from Cambridge; his
cart started at 6.30 in the morning and got back about ten at night.
Though he was not old, he could neither read nor write; but he took
commissions all along the road--a packet of needles for Mrs. This, and a
new teapot for Mrs. That--and delivered them all correctly on the way
back.

All day long the slow four-wheelers used to go clip-clopping along to
the station. And sometimes, even slower, even heavier, yet more dismal,
there was the Plop, Plop, Plop, of the feet of the oldest horses in the
world, as they plugged along, pulling the funereal Girton cabs out to
Girton with four melancholy students in each; while the drab Newnham
girls skurried to and fro to their lectures on foot. And all the time
there were dons going 'to lecture, with the wind in their gowns'; and
undergraduates in their Norfolk jackets, setting out in pairs to do the
'Grantchester Grind' for exercise.

Nearly every day we could watch the Master of St. Catharine's riding by
on his small black pony. He was a little old man, and made an antique
and lonely figure in his clerical clothes. Even we children knew that he
had been cut by all the university, ever since the rumours about his
election to the Mastership in 1861, thirty years before; and it was said
that he had been passed over when his turn came to be Vice-Chancellor.
It was believed that, at the college election, he and another Fellow had
each promised to vote for the other. The voting was equal between these
two, but when it came to the point, Dr. Robinson voted for himself, thus
becoming Master by two votes; the affair, however, has never been very
clear. My parents used to greet him, if they met outside, for the sake
of poor Mrs. Robinson, but he was never invited to parties. Often his
daughter Mary rode out with him, on a taller horse, yet even this only
seemed to enhance his solitude.

There were still occasional old workmen riding by, with their plaited
straw bags of tools, on their high penny-farthing bicycles. Sometimes
there were lovely organ-grinders; or a stray Italian boy, with a little
shivering monkey, or even a dancing-bear. Every night the lamp-lighter
came with his long pole to turn on the gas-lights. Sometimes, of a
summer night, there were the beautiful scarlet Volunteers, marching by
in all their glory; beautiful, but vaguely frightening, casting a kind
of shadow image of what war might be, into my childish mind. And the
sound of their brass band, and of their marching feet going over the
bridge, made my heart turn right over in my stomach.

There was plenty to see; nearly all the life of Cambridge flowed
backwards and forwards over our bridge, and before our house.




  CHAPTER III

  _Theories_


From 1878 onwards, the Revised Statutes, which allowed Fellows of
colleges to marry without losing their fellowships, came into force in
one college after another. Till then, with a few exceptions, only Heads
of Houses and Professors could marry, so that the children of the
university remained few in number. But after 1878 families began to
appear; thus, though not among the eldest, I belong to the first
hatching of Fellows' children, and was born into a society which was
still small and exclusive. The town, of course, did not count at all.

I was also born into the trying position of being the eldest of the
family, so that the full force of my mother's theories about education
were brought to bear upon me; and it fell to me to blaze a path to
freedom for my juniors, through the forest of her good intentions.

I don't believe that my mother was more subject to attacks of theories
than many other parents of her time; indeed many children of my
acquaintance had parents who were more addicted to them than she was;
and, worse still, many of those parents were much more efficient in
enforcing their theory-based laws. There were some children who might
not ride bicycles, and others who were forbidden to go in boats; some
who were forced to play the violin, and others who always had to wear
mufflers; some who might not eat currant buns, and others who were
obliged to have cold baths: all kinds of fads and foolishnesses. There
were even some children who were forced to go barefoot, and others who
were forbidden to do so. Now, my mother's theories often passed off
quite quickly; and in any case there were always (thank Heaven) a good
many holes and by-passes through the walls built by her pronouncements.
Also she was often out, or away from home; and Nana, though loyal, was
eminently humane and reasonable in practice. So that, on the whole, we
were rather more free than many of our contemporaries.

Her sturdy American belief in Independence made my mother encourage us
to do things for ourselves, unlike the well-brought-up English children
of our class, some of whom simply did not know that you _could_ make a
bed yourself. No doubt it was chiefly because it happened to be
convenient, that I was occasionally given a holiday to turn out and
clean the locked store-cupboard; but the theory that we could make our
own beds, or clean our own bicycles was a great advance. We even
sometimes were made to polish our own boots, which we rather enjoyed. We
were supposed to learn to cook, too; but that is impossible, where there
is an affectionate cook in the kitchen with you, to tell you exactly
what to do, and to manage the fire for you. Once, when Margaret had had
a course of cooking lessons, she undertook, in the cook's absence, to
roast a goose for dinner; and the goose gradually froze to death as the
fire went out. There were no gas-cookers then! But the company remarked
on the delicious tomato sandwiches she made for tea that afternoon;
though it was afterwards discovered that they had been well sprinkled
with Keating's Insect Powder, in mistake for pepper. It was partly in
consequence of these views of my mother's that when, in 1940, we all
came down with a thump to the bare facts of life, we were not quite so
helpless as some of our contemporaries; though still idiotic enough,
Heaven knows.

Even when I first married it would never have occurred to me that I
could possibly be the cook myself, or that I could care for my baby
alone, though we were not at all well off at that time. It was not that
I was too proud to work--I would not have minded in the least what I
did--it was simply that I had not the faintest idea how to begin to run
a house by myself, and would not have thought it possible that I could
do it, in spite of all my mother's efforts to train us in housework. Of
course I disapproved of having servants on principle, even when they
were treated with affection and respect, as ours were at home. But this
was just an abstract theory; for I had never considered in the least how
we should get on without them; in fact it seemed to me quite inevitable
that they should be there, a necessary and very tolerable arrangement,
both for them and for us. What a distance we have travelled in the last
forty years!

Another excellent thing was that we were sometimes left to shift for
ourselves, more than was usual for children in our class and time;
though this was only partly in consequence of my mother's views on
independence. It was also largely a result of the casual
happy-go-luckiness--not unaccompanied by laziness--which was one of her
most attractive qualities. She was of course inexhaustibly energetic
about anything that interested her. She would go to great trouble and
make long expeditions to find a cook for someone else; but if a cook for
herself was needed, she was bored, and would go to almost equal trouble
to get someone else to do the tiresome job for her. 'Very important'
committee meetings used sometimes to prevent her from accompanying us on
the great family move, when we went to a hired house in Yorkshire, for
part of the summer holidays. It was my father who organized and
conducted the awful journey, with changes at Ely and York, and piles of
luggage and the maids and the dogs and the pram and the parrot and the
cot and the bath and us children; particularly Billy, who was always
sick in the train. And when we at last got to the house, it was Nana
and I who arranged everything; and my mother would arrive comfortably a
day or two later, and find us all nicely settled in. We enjoyed doing
it, and we did it perfectly well, so all was for the best. But most
mothers would have thought it their duty to do more of the fussing
themselves.

It was always so. In a sense the maids ran the house; and so long as
they showed a certain tact towards her private economies and foibles,
she was glad they should do so. But it was very definitely _her_ house
all the same; only that was the way she ran it. And on the whole it was
a success; it was comfortable, the food was always excellent, and the
maids stayed for years: the great Mrs. Phillips for nearly thirty years.
(Mrs. was a courtesy title, of course.) It was the most hospitable of
houses; the sort of place where you could bring five extra people in to
lunch unexpectedly, without upsetting anyone. Of course, during her
reign, Mrs. Phillips really ran the house completely, but appearances
were always preserved. You should have seen the skill with which Mrs.
Phillips and my mother avoided each other if they happened to be
annoyed. But even Mrs. Phillips herself had to go through the farce of
asking for every pot of jam or box of matches to be given out of the
store cupboard, for she herself was never allowed to hold the key for a
single instant.

The Inviolability of the Locked Store Cupboard was the rock bottom of
all my mother's sacred theories of housekeeping. The Opening of the
Cupboard was an unpredictable ceremony. First my mother had to be caught
at a propitious moment; then the Key had to be found; and then due
application had to be made by each maid in turn for the necessaries of
their crafts. If my mother was away, or ill, I was trusted with the Key
and performed the rites; when I always gave out twice as much as was
asked for, as I thought that being given one piece of soap at a time
made things rather difficult for the housemaid. However, with that
adaptability which is the chief asset of the human race, the maids soon
learnt the ropes: they asked for more than they needed and made little
hoards against the future; or they ostentatiously left no soap in my
mother's own bedroom; or saw to it that it was the dining-room
sugar-basin that was empty. No one really suffered; and her Bad Angel,
whose name was Economy, was appeased by the show of worship; while her
Good Angel, whose name was Serenity, reigned in all essentials.

This Good Angel also made her allow us to go about alone more than most
other children did. By the time I was eleven or twelve, I was even
allowed to bicycle alone down the Backs after dark, when I came home
from having tea with my cousins. It was very quiet and lonely there at
night; it may not have been too safe, but she was always singularly
fearless.

_I_ was afraid; but, of course, I never spoke of my fear; for it was
above all things necessary to me to see my cousins, and I was more
afraid of having my freedom curtailed than of all the terrors of
darkness and solitude.

The Backs were a frightening place, even by daylight, because it was
there, more than anywhere else, that Mad Dogs were liable to occur; or
so my cousin Frances said, and _she knew_. For she had seen there a very
mysterious figure, who was connected with mad dogs: a girl with
_red-flannel soles_ to her shoes. (I cannot imagine who she was, unless
she was the Goddess of Hydrophobia?) The possibility, the probability,
of Mad Dogs was very much in our minds; slinking about, with their red
tongues hanging out, slobbering and whining; like Caldecott's picture of
_the dog it was that died_. Of course there were real mad dogs in those
days; and sometimes our dogs had to be muzzled for a time; so we had
some excuse for our fears.

Even when we were older, and the Backs were less terrifying by day, it
was perfectly appalling at night, to have to ride through the great
gulfs of blackness between the faint gas-lamps; while shadowy lovers
were hiding in pairs behind the great elm trunks. Or perhaps worse than
lovers? Murderers? Or footpads? We only had candle or oil bicycle lamps
then, and to make matters worse they were blown out by every breath of
air; but I clenched my teeth and rode like the wind, and hoped to get
through alive. Freedom was worth any heroism. None of my cousins were
allowed to do this, so I had the recompense of feeling rather grand
about it.

But when all is said and done, our liberty was only relative; we were
only just a little more free than some of our contemporaries, and I have
no hesitation in saying that all our generation was much too carefully
brought up. As we grew towards adolescence the restrictions became
steadily more painful, for they prevented us from growing in the natural
way, just as the binding of the feet of a Chinese girl prevents growth.
Our cousins, Ruth and Nora, were very much more carefully brought up
than we were; and they suffered, both then and later, more than we did.
Frances was the sheltered and adored only child, and though she was less
unhappy at the time, she too suffered in the end from the
over-protection.

My own private theory is, that it is better to let children's teeth or
morals suffer from _laisser-aller_, than to be too vigilant about them.
But no doubt people who have been really hurt by neglect in their youth
will disagree with me. For this is a matter in which it is impossible
ever to be in the right.

Dear Reader, you may take it from me, that however hard you try--or
don't try; whatever you do--or don't do; for better, for worse; for
richer, for poorer; every way and every day:

  THE PARENT IS ALWAYS WRONG

So it is no good bothering about it. When the little pests grow up they
will certainly tell you exactly what you did wrong in their case. But,
never mind; they will be just as wrong themselves in their turn. So take
things easily; and above all, _eschew good intentions_.

       *     *     *     *     *

By all accounts I was a charming baby. As I have never been considered
particularly charming since then, I think it only just to myself to set
this on record. It fairly makes me blush to read the pages of admiration
in the old letters--not only those of my mother, but others as well. How
I have gone off since then! My mother writes of some visitor at Down:
'_For the first time I have met a typical English husband, according to
our American ideas. Cross, bad-tempered and very prejudiced.... But_
even he _was charmed by Gwen_!'

But there are dangers attached to charm. In another letter she tells how
my cousin Bernard Darwin liked playing with me, when I was one year old
and he ten. '_When Gwen is older, it will be difficult to keep her away
from Dubba (B.D.). There is such a strong liking on both sides of
George's family to marry first cousins, that I shall dread Gwen's living
so near Dubba (at Cambridge).... There is plenty of time, but when Gwen
is seventeen I am going to send her away._' This precaution did not
prove necessary; by the time I was seventeen my charm was no longer so
dangerous to the male sex.

My mother was always throwing out new ideas; some of them were rather
wild; others were so simple and sensible that they very nearly amounted
to genius; but the application of them was sometimes rather autocratic.
For instance, she rightly held that children should lead a simple life,
without over-indulgence. Of course we never had fires in our bedrooms,
unless we were really ill; but then neither did the grown-ups, so that
was all right and fair. In spite of the huge coal fires in the
sitting-rooms and the hall, the whole house was much colder and
draughtier than would now be considered tolerable.

But surely our feeding was unnecessarily austere? We had porridge for
breakfast, with salt, not sugar; and milk to drink. Porridge always
reminds me of having breakfast alone with my father, when I was so small
that I put the porridge into the spoon with my fingers, while he told me
stories in French. My mother came down later, perhaps with the sensible
idea of avoiding me and the porridge and the French. There was toast
and butter, but I never had anything stronger for breakfast, till I
tasted bacon for the first time in my life when I went to stay with
Frances, at the age of nearly ten.

It is true that twice a week we had, at the end of breakfast, one piece
of toast, spread with a thin layer of that dangerous luxury, Jam. But,
of course, not butter, too. Butter and Jam on the same bit of bread
would have been an unheard-of indulgence--a disgraceful orgy. The queer
thing is that we none of us like it to this very day. But these two
glamorous Jam-days have permanently coloured my conception of Sundays
and Wednesdays, which are both lovely dark red days. Though Wednesday,
being also Drawing Class Day, is much the redder of the two. Sunday's
delicious jam colour has been considerably paled down by Church.

Just occasionally our father used to give us, as a breakfast treat, a
taste of a special food, called by us _Speissums_; but, schismatically,
by our cousins: _Purr Meat_. There was a continual controversy over the
correct name. Fortnum and Mason called it _Hung Beef_. Some of it was
freshly grated every morning into a fluffy pile on a plate; and you put
a bit of toast, butter side down, on it, and some of it stuck on. It was
delicious. But that was later on, when the decay of morals had set in.
Margaret got it when she was quite young. I didn't.

There was only bread-and-butter and milk for tea, as Jam might have
weakened our moral fibre; and sponge-cakes when visitors came. One of my
major crimes was a propensity for nibbling the edges off the
sponge-cakes before the visitors arrived. Our cousins did not consider
that our tea-parties were very good; they were rather sorry for us. We
were generally given one piece of Maple Sugar after tea; my mother
imported it from the States. It was delicious, but not nearly enough;
and we might not ever buy sweets, which were considered very
unwholesome; except, oddly enough, butterscotch out of the
penny-in-the-slot machines at the railway stations. There was a blessed
theory that the slot machines were pure, that the Railways guaranteed
their Virtue. But we did not travel often, so I was obliged to steal
sugar whenever I could. Certainly I was greedy, but one really had to do
the best one could for oneself, in those days, when sugar was thought to
be unwholesome; and fruit, though a pleasant treat, rather dangerous.

As we grew older, our moral fibre was weakened by having either Jam or
very heavy dough-cake for tea. But not both; never both. However, this
relaxation was the beginning of the end; under our continual pressure
the food laws wore thinner and thinner, till by the time they got down
to Billy--who is nine years younger than I am--there were no regulations
left at all, and he could eat whatever was going for breakfast and tea,
just like the grown-ups themselves. And I cannot see that his character
is any the worse for it; in fact, he is probably less greedy than I am.
Ah, innocent child, he little knew how much he owed to my
self-sacrificing campaign for liberty, equality and fraternity over the
victuals.

My mother's attacks of theories were often short, but some of them were
permanent. For instance, we were never allowed to drink tea at all; for,
as a good American she considered it most dangerously stimulating,
though coffee was perfectly harmless. But we always drank great
quantities of milk, till suddenly one day, a mischief-making doctor
promulgated the revolting theory that all milk must be BOILED! Because
of _Germs_; of which we now heard for the first time, and in which we
vehemently declined to believe. So, when cold, boiled milk, _with the
skin on it_, was put before us, there was a regular riot of disgust, and
we refused to touch it; and went on refusing--with Nana's covert
sympathy--till the vile enactment was allowed to lapse, and the Theory
faded back into that limbo where Theories wander, while they are waiting
for their next incarnation. And in two or three months' time we were
happily drinking our nice, fresh, tuberculous milk again.

That was a short bout, though a sharp one. The Theory that Beef was Bad
and Mutton was Good died harder; though even my mother's 'muttonic
habits' passed off in time; and the Theory that Gingerbread Pudding gave
you cancer caused us very little trouble, as we did not much like
Gingerbread Pudding anyhow. But there was a permanent ban on brown
sugar, because it was made by negroes, who were dirty. We used to tease
her by saying that she thought the negroes' skins were not fast colour,
so that the brown came off them. I don't believe she really thought
that; but, anyhow, I have been left with an unsatisfied brown-sugar
complex to this very day.

My mother would have been a keen teetotaller, if my father had not
happened to like wine in moderation. She used to explain to us that he
only took it for the good of his digestion; but we knew very well that
that was Nonsense. All the same we were not allowed to have
brandy-butter with our plum-puddings; and she used to tell us a really
shocking story, of how her own mother, when she had to dose her children
with castor oil, used to give it in Whiskey, in order to make them take
a dislike for drink. I believe that my mother felt rather guilty because
she did not do the same by us; but mercifully she did not. Castor oil
_and_ whiskey together would really have been too much, so dreadful as
they both were! Modern children have no idea of the horrors they have
escaped, in not being brought up on castor oil. We were always having
doses of it. 'So safe', they used to say; and yet now the doctors
consider it dangerous. Sugar is good now and castor oil bad! How happy
those ideas would have made us in our day. But I expect it is only a
matter of time, till the wheel comes round again, and the doctors
reverse the verdict.

My own especial horrors were _powders_, which modern children don't have
either. It was a most unpleasant shock to be woken up, when the elders
went to bed, and to have a teaspoonful of pink powder--just like
plate-powder--with a dab of jelly on top, suddenly presented under your
sleepy nose. The powderiness of it sometimes made me really sick.

Another health theory was that, as sea-bathing was wholesome, salt in
our bath-water would do just as well as a visit to the seaside. So some
handfuls of Dr. Tidman's Sea Salt--little round pebbles--were put into
the tub we had in front of the day-nursery fire, twice a week. As the
salt was only put in when we got in ourselves it did not have time to
melt; and we disliked it exceedingly, because the pebbles were so
painful to stand or sit on. I suppose this was pure magic? I must put on
record here a cure for chilblains, which a friend tells me was practised
by her father's nurse. A red-hot poker was put into 'that which is
beneath the bed', and, as the nurse said, 'it was most mysteerus', but a
certain cure. And even in the year 1947 _a fried mouse_ was most
earnestly recommended to me as a cure for whooping cough. I dare say it
is as good as any other cure; the only difficulty is to believe in it.

Our mother was always faithful to Our Doctor, who was the only good
doctor in the world. His lightest word was enshrined like a fly in
amber, and remained a gospel truth for ever and ever; and as for Our
Dentist, in London, he was practically a god. Our Pram, too, was sacred.
It was a 'baby-carriage', brought for me from America in 1885, along
with several rocking-chairs. The pram was made of basket-work, very high
and light and rattly, with clattering wooden wheels. Many a battle did
she have with her grandchildren's nurses in the nineteen-twenties, when
they refused to be seen by the other nurses 'pushing such a
peculiar-looking object'. I believe that even Nana herself, in her day,
had something to bear on that head.

Of course, we children had a few theories of our own. One was that the
gum of cherry or plum trees was delicious, and must be eaten as a great
treat. This is a mistake, as it is quite incredibly nasty; and so is
snow with jam, which we also believed to be nice. Another theory was,
that if you swallowed the smallest speck of cork, it would swell and
swell inside, till it filled you right up and you died. There was also
the now disproved idea that bulls were infuriated by red rags; for this
reason I used to bite in my supposedly red lips if ever I met the oldest
and mildest cow; and I remember carefully concealing the red halfpenny
stamps on any letters I might be taking to the post, for the same
reason. And of course we believed, as I think all nurses and children
do, that if you cut, or even scratched, the fold of skin which joins
your thumb and first finger, you got lockjaw at once, and died in
agonies.

Another theory of my mother's was that the punishment should fit the
crime. And so once, when I had bitten the nursery-maid, I had my mouth
washed out with soap and water; and another time when I had slapped her,
I had socks tied down over my hands and had to come down to lunch and be
fed in public with a spoon, when I was quite old. A dreadful punishment
for a shy child. And when I cut off my own hair, I was made to go about
with it as it was, for several days, before I was allowed to have it cut
properly. 'It looks as if a dog had bitten it off', my mother said, as I
sat on her knee. She had a very queer look on her face, and I suddenly
realized that she was trying not to laugh at me, which mortified me very
much.

I was only once spanked that I can remember. I had been put to rest
after lunch on my mother's bed, under the muslin curtains, which fell
down from the hanging canopy. Now resting is a foolish theory, from
which many parents suffer. It is far too exhausting for children, it is
really only suitable for the old. I used to get absolutely worn out
inventing games to play during the ages when I was condemned to 'rest';
so that by the time the rest was over, I really did need a rest.
However, this time I enjoyed myself. I found on the dressing-table a
stick of red lip-salve. The white wall-paper was neatly framed by the
bed-curtains; so I began a fine, bold wall-painting, in enormous swoops
and circles. It was like frescoing the walls of Heaven. But I was
interrupted, and my father was told to spank me with a slipper. It
didn't hurt and I did not mind a bit. But I never forgot the joy of
wall-painting.

[Illustration]




  CHAPTER IV

  _Education_


My mother's theories of education were so revolutionary and sensible,
that modern thought has hardly caught up with them even now. I find her
writing, before I was six months old: '_I believe in every girl being
brought up to have some occupation when they are grown-up, just as a boy
is; it makes them much happier. Gwen is to be a mathematician._' But,
later on she, for once, was defeated; and, strange to say, retired
baffled before my obvious mathematical idiocy. This was most
exceptional, for as a rule she was quite convinced that anyone could do
anything they wished to do. For instance, till the very last year of her
life, she was always pressing me to make a lot of money by drawing comic
pictures of undergraduates, to be published as post cards. 'What
nonsense. Of course you could do it. It is quite easy for anyone who can
draw. Very silly of you not to try.' But I disappointed her in that way,
as in so many others. It makes me sorry now to think of it. I really
ought once to have tried to draw an undergraduate climbing a lamp-post.
But I never did.

She also held strongly that the education of the hands developed the
mind. But we conservative children did not agree at all; though perhaps
that was because the minds of our governesses had not been properly
developed. At any rate their efforts to teach us handicrafts were not a
success. As usual the theory was right, but the practice went wrong. We
objected very strongly to being reft away from proper lessons, such as
sums or Latin grammar, to make weak and waggly baskets, which nobody
wanted; or to fold up pieces of paper while our governess tried to make
out from the Book, what we were supposed to do next with them. It bored
us passionately, and offended our dignity. It was simply not Right to
have to do things like that in lesson time. And sewing was downright
wicked slavery.

The worst of it was that there was a strong theory that day-schools for
girls were Bad; so, though Charles went fairly young to 'Goody's [St.
Faith's], we girls were condemned to the dull confinement of the
schoolroom at home, under a series of daily governesses. This was partly
because the Perse School for Girls was not well spoken of, at that time;
but, still more, because my aunts would not have dreamt of sending my
cousins there. The upper classes did not approve of day schools, though
boarding schools for older girls might sometimes be allowed. The
Aristocracy, however, did not even hold with boarding schools, for a
peeress of our acquaintance once roused my mother to fury, by snubbing
her with the words: '_We_ do not send our daughters away to school.'
However, I believe that the real reason why we were kept at home all
those years was that my mother herself had been unhappy at school; for
if she had felt strongly that we ought to go, she would have sent us, in
spite of a hundred aunts or a million peeresses.

But really I longed to go to school, though of course I never said so.
Anything would have been better than the schoolroom at home. I can't
imagine why we four cousins of the same age could not have had a class
together? Margaret was a good deal younger, but there were Ruth and Nora
and Frances and I, all of a suitable age. Surely it would have been
exclusive enough, even for our refined family? And it would have been
such fun for us. But it was never even thought of, as far as I know; and
there were we four girls, shut up in three separate schoolrooms, with
three separate governesses. It was fantastic.

Unlike our cousins, we had daily governesses; they did not live in,
chiefly because my mother thought it would be a bore to have them in the
house; and she also had a theory that they would value their
independence. But, though they were mostly Scotch, they had not really
reached the independence level, in spite of all their whahaeing.
_Whahaeing_ is one of the chief pursuits of the Scotch, as Burns states
in his difficult poem beginning _Scots wha hae_. These ladies lived
lonely and uncomfortable lives in lodgings; and were generally in love,
though they thought we did not know it; and some of them had Family
Circumstances; and some of them had Religion as well, which made it much
worse, both for them and for us. And they whahaed about Bruce and
Wallace, and rubbed in spiders and tartans and porridge and the
insufferable and universal superiority of the Scotch (No, I will NOT say
Scots) to such an extent, that we could only get into corners and thank
our stars that we had not one drop of Scotch blood in our veins. And it
was many, many years before any of us was able to look with unprejudiced
eyes at anything Scotch again. Always excepting Scott's novels, which we
loved. I write this on purpose, so that any surviving Scotch governesses
may take warning, and learn to draw it milder. Our Nana was Scotch--her
name was Helen Jean Campbell--but she had never lived in Scotland, or
learnt the Scotch doxology.

They were all kind, good, dull women; but even interesting lessons can
be made incredibly stupid, when they are taught by people who are bored
to death with them, and who do not care for the art of teaching either.
But, of course, if these ladies had had any ambition they would not have
been teaching us, but would have made a career of it, by teaching at a
school. However, thank heaven, I also went to one or two special lessons
with real teachers, who were interested in what they were teaching.

Our daily walks with the governess were quite paralysing with dulness;
for in the winter our only form of exercise was walking, now that we
were growing too old for playing pirates and climbing trees. Ruth and
Nora had a governess, who insisted on their walking with very short
steps, because you got more exercise that way.

But, anyhow, there was always Miss Mary Greene's Wednesday Drawing
Class, which was the centre of my youthful existence. I lived in those
days from Wednesday to Wednesday; for it was not only that the drawing
was an ecstasy, but that Miss Greene's warm, generous, appreciative
nature was a great release and encouragement to me. Besides it was such
fun; the three cousins came, too, and we did exciting things, such as
exploring the vast cellars of the Cast Museum with a box of matches,
when we were supposed to be drawing _The Dying Gladiator_; or getting
locked into the Round Church with a lunatic, when we were learning about
Norman architecture.

We did all kinds of things with Miss Greene; it was not just sitting and
drawing in the studio--though that in itself was passionately
interesting, especially when we had a real model. She took us out to
draw buildings and streets and trees and animals, and we learnt about
architecture and perspective and anatomy; and she gave us lectures about
the great painters, and showed us reproductions of their work. I can
still remember nearly all the lecture on Hogarth; how he ran away with
his master's daughter, and the meaning of all the queer figures in
_Calais Gate_, and all about _Gin Lane_ and how he hated cruelty. Every
week we had homework to do: a drawing from life, and a composition on a
set subject. Charles's best composition was on the subject _A Surprise_:
three vermilion devils in a row, cocking snooks at a poor little man on
a horse, which was rearing up in most natural alarm. A very striking
work; though we did not usually consider Charles one of our best
artists. I admired Frances's pictures most of all. They seemed to me
exactly like real life, which was then my simple criterion of art;
though I do just remember thinking that she did not draw human legs
quite right, the backs of the thighs seemed to bulge in a curious way;
otherwise her pictures were perfectly beautiful.

From the time I was nine, when the Drawing Class began, I always kept a
sketchbook going, and drew everything I saw. They were bad drawings;
still I suppose I learnt something from the habit--observation, if
nothing else. Nobody had ever told me that drawing is not copying, and I
should probably not have understood if they had; but it took me a long
time to find it out for myself. All the people round me thought that
pictures ought to be photographically like reality; so of course I
thought so, too. Yet every now and then I would suddenly see a picture
in my head--usually a vision of a landscape, not a remembered scene--and
when I drew it, I did realize that it turned out better than the
landscapes I copied so laboriously from nature. But I did not realize
why this was. I am sure that no one would have picked me out of the
class as a promising artist; my colour was even worse than my drawing;
there was nothing to notice about me, except my keenness.

I was just thirteen when I was first taken abroad; we passed through
Amsterdam, where a big Rembrandt exhibition was being held. I went
absolutely mad, and set out to copy as many of the paintings as I could,
in pencil, in a grubby little sketchbook. After that, someone gave me a
little book of reproductions of Rembrandt's drawings and etchings, and I
carried it about in my pocket and slept with it by my bed for several
years. If I had been asked then what I wanted to do in later life, I
should have answered: 'to make pictures of people doing things' (i.e.
working). Some time after this, as a result of a lecture on Turner by
Miss Greene, I went all by myself to the FitzWilliam Museum, and asked
to see the Turner water-colours which are kept there. This required
considerable courage. They brought out some of those painted on
blue-tinted paper, and picked out with body-colour. I did not
understand them then, and was much disappointed. Rembrandt remained my
God. But by the time I went to the Slade, I had begun to perceive that
Turner's finest works were abstract paintings, and that he was one of
the great painters of the world. Of course, I could not have used the
word _abstract_ then, but it was what I meant, when I was bowled over by
such compositions as 'Interior at Petworth', or 'The Sea Monster'.

I always liked pictures, as long as I can remember anything; and I
always liked poetry, and knew that it did not matter whether I
understood it or not. But music left me quite cold; or, worse than that,
I thought it a terrible bore. We used occasionally to be taken to
children's concerts, where I struggled with agonies of sleepiness, or
played games with my fingers and watched the clock. It had never
occurred to me to listen, till one evening, when all the concert-party
were ragging about in the Backs on the way home, I heard a boy say: 'Oh,
do shut up, I want to think about the music.' I was quite astonished. I
knew that you _could_ think about painting or poetry, but I did not know
that you could think about music. But even after that I only listened
with my mind, not with my ears. Music moved me sensually a good deal,
but in a way which I disliked; especially brass bands, and church
organs, and Mrs. N. playing Beethoven on the piano, in her most powerful
manner. (Not that I knew that it was Beethoven then, I only assume it
now.)

I was a remarkably poor performer on the piano myself; I was, however,
apparently able to impress Margaret, when she was but young; for once we
raided her diary and discovered the following entry: '_Gwen played the
piano very beautifully, and Olwen and I lay on the floor and had pure
sad thoughts._' We tormented Margaret about her pure sad thoughts for
many a long year.

I was so ignorant and uninterested in music that when I went away to
school, at the age of sixteen, and was asked in a General Knowledge
Paper, which were my three favourite composers, I had the greatest
difficulty in naming as many as three altogether! And I had no idea what
any of them had written. It was my own fault that my development was so
lopsided; one does not assimilate what one does not find interesting.

Music, in our nursery, was represented by a barrel-organ, on which you
put round yellow cards with little holes in them, through which iron
teeth came bobbing up when you turned a handle to grind out 'The
Minstrel Boy' or 'She Wore a Wreath of Roses'. Only Charles always
insisted on making it more interesting by putting on the cards upside
down, so that the tunes were played backwards. He was a great adept at
doing things backwards; I still remember the beginning (or rather the
end) of the Greek alphabet backwards, as he taught it to me on the
platform of Rugby station: Agemo, isp, ik, if, nolispu, uat, etc. At
about this time he also invented a new language, which had _none but
irregular verbs_.

But I have wandered a long way from our governesses. My mother was a
good deal of a feminist, and she would have liked to have inspired them
with the ambition to take up some of the new professions, which were
beginning to be open to women; but she had no success. There was however
_one_ governess, of whom my mother might in time have made something;
she at any rate had enterprise.

She came to us as a holiday governess, for only a short time, and did
not have to teach us seriously, which was probably why she took the job.
Miss Z. was tall and athletic, with rolling black eyes and an incredibly
high starched collar; and she had an enormous bag of golf-clubs. Her
manners were rather slapdash, and we did not much like her, but there
was a kind of 'I could an if I would' flavour about her conversation,
which was intriguing. I remember her threatening, in joke, 'to let down
our drawers and smack our bottoms'. We thought this vulgar, but it was
interesting, as being so different from anything the other governesses
could possibly have said. She also taught Margaret (who was six) to
sing a parody of 'After the Ball is Over', which ran 'See her take off
her false hair', and so on. My mother did not like her, but let her stay
till the end of the time for which she had been engaged.

Some time afterwards a case was noticed in the paper, in which this same
Miss Z. sued a man for libel. He had been a guest in the house where she
was acting as governess, and he told her employer that he recognized her
as having been a parlourmaid in another house which he had visited. She
denied this, but it proved to be true, and she lost her case. Apparently
she had been in the habit of taking temporary jobs, sometimes as
governess, sometimes as parlourmaid. The gulf between a servant and a
governess was then unbridgeable; it was as if a shrimp had tried to turn
into a tiger. We used to wonder afterwards whether she had stolen all
those golf-clubs, though I don't believe there was much reason to think
that she had done anything worse than misrepresent her status as that of
a lady; Heaven knows that was bad enough! My mother laughed about it
all: 'Well, thank goodness, she was with us so short a time, that she
can't have done the children any harm.' The other governesses had done
much more harm, though with the best possible intentions.

The Classics at their most classic--studies not of literature but of
words and grammar--were then considered by public schoolmasters as the
only proper learning for boys; anything outside Latin and Greek were
frivolous hors-d'oeuvres. When Charles won a prize for history at
Marlborough, the headmaster wrote in his term's report: '_This shews
that he is not_ a mere mathematician.' Charles was very much hurt, and
my father sympathized with him. He believed in a wider education.

So he took care that we should learn to speak French well. He was justly
proud of his own French; and one of my earliest memories is of the
stories he used to tell us in French, about some children who walked
along a _falaise_ (a cliff) and saw a _taupe_ (a mole)--words I never
forgot. We always had French nursery-maids under Nana (poor Nana!). They
were always homesick, poor things, and used to cry and sniff in the
housemaids' cupboard. By a provision of Providence they were always
called Eugenie, so that when a new one came she could be called
Newgenie. My father had a great friend, an aristocratic French senator,
whose children used to come to stay with us, and scandalize Nana by
having a grown-up dinner when we were going to bed. But I scandalized
them by learning Latin with Charles, which they thought most unfeminine,
and really indecent.

Later, just before Charles went to Marlborough, we were sent together to
Hanover to learn German. There I attended a drawing class, where the
'nude' model was decently clothed from head to foot in pink tights; and
the street boys used to pursue us and stone us, under the very noses of
the stout and haughty policemen, with cries of '_Engelnder, Engelnder,
die Booren kommen_'--for this was during the Boer War. Here, too, we
heard of the death of Queen Victoria, which surprised me; for though I
knew it was impossible that she should live for ever, yet at the same
time I had thought that perhaps she might! She had been Queen since a
long time before my father was born, and he always seemed to me
immensely old. She might well have turned out to be immortal, I thought.

Here, too, I was revolted by the slave treatment of the servant at the
flat where we stayed in Hanover. The girl slept in a windowless attic,
up a ladder out of the kitchen. While we were there, everyone had
influenza rather badly; when the girl fell ill she just went up into her
dog-kennel, and stayed there, alone in the dark, for several days.
Nobody went near her or did anything but curse at her, for the
presumption of supposing that she was not able to do her usual work. Of
course she could have done it; she was only a peasant, and consideration
was quite wasted on peasants; they were animals, altogether beneath
humanity. Indeed I must admit that those Hanoverian peasants did look
less intelligent than a well-bred cow, as they staggered about with huge
loads of firewood on their backs and heads. But I was horrified by the
German callousness, and once shocked a peasant woman exceedingly by
helping her to pick up some wood she had dropped. She suspected me of
the most sinister motives for my action.

My father came to visit us while we were there, and I remember
overhearing him say, that he had been struck by the number of stories of
bullying and cruelty which he had heard since he had been in Germany,
particularly of the ill-treatment by parents of one among their
children. It was a new idea to me that this was possible. He was also
astonished to find that the well-known professors, whom he had come to
see, were all Jingo and Imperialist, and that they were passionate
admirers of the Kaiser.

       *     *     *     *     *

As long as Charles remained at Goody's, there was a breath of fresh air
blowing into my life from the world outside. But when he was sent away
to school I missed him dreadfully, and the stuffiness became almost
intolerable. At last, when I was nearly sixteen, I went to my parents
and asked if I could not go away to school, too. I could not think of
any other plan of escape; and though I was not very happy at school,
still I felt I was seeing the world from a new angle, and that I had not
stopped growing, as I had at home.

School upset me very much at first, and I did not think that I could
survive it, when the poison gas of homesickness settled down over my
head, with its indescribable nausea. Though it was not really
_home_-sickness, for I did not want to go home, only to escape into an
air which I could breathe. I remember the first morning, kneeling at
prayers (an alarming rite to me), and staring out of the window, when my
eyes ought to have been tight shut, and thinking: 'If only I could get
out into that garden, perhaps I might feel better; anyhow there are
some quite ordinary trees there, and some real grass'--for everything
inside the house seemed to be tainted with a nightmare horror.

For the first six months the fog hardly lifted at all; and for much of
that time I was physically unwell from misery; then my cousin Nora
joined me at school; and that one little corner of understanding made an
immense difference to me. Nora adapted herself to school far more easily
than I did.

But the smell of the poison-gas never really went away, and I still now
sometimes get a whiff of it when I have had to visit a school or stay
with incongruous people. I must confess that once, when I was quite old
and had gone to call on some strangers, the alien feeling of the
furniture became so appalling to me, after the maid had left me alone in
the drawing-room, that I scrambled disgracefully out of the window and
ran away down the drive and never returned. I can't imagine what the
lady and the maid thought when they came in and found the room empty.
Perhaps I have become their family ghost.

I was sent to a small private school; an excellent one in its way no
doubt; but it was not my way. The emphasis was all on Young-lady-hood,
slightly tinged with Christianity (C. of E. variety), and I should never
have felt comfortable there if I had stayed there for a million years.
When, a little later, I went to the Slade School, I felt perfectly happy
there at once; and I was at ease with the students, though many of them
came from backgrounds which were quite unfamiliar to me. But that seemed
like my own country. At boarding-school I was always a foreigner.

Not that I wanted to leave school; I wanted to stay on, if only I could
manage to bear it; for I was very curious about the extraordinary habits
of the girls. For instance, that first day, they were all singing: 'I am
the Honeysuckle, You are the Bee.' Why? What on earth was it? (I had
never heard a popular song in my life.) And they were all busy making
hat-pin knobs out of coloured sealing-wax. Now why in the world did they
like doing that? Nearly everything they did mystified me.

It took me some time to realize that it was considered queer to be
interested in anything whatever except horses, or things like
hat-pin-knobbing; or, of course, games or gossip. However, presently I
began to enjoy hockey myself, and I even got into the team, and felt
very grand with my red cap (like a boy's cap) pinned on to my hair. We
played in white blouses and blue skirts, which had to clear the ground
by six inches; and our waist-belts were very neat and trim over our
tight stays. And when we came in from a game--and our play was most
ferocious--all covered with mud and streaming hot, we had to go straight
into school, without having time to change, or wash, or comb our hair,
at all.

As soon as I dared I began to take part in the gossip, too, with all the
bewildered avidity of an anthropologist trying to understand the minds
of the natives. But I never really succeeded. Once, after I had married
Jacques, I dreamt that I had got to go back to school, and take him with
me, and _explain him to the Girls_. Only Nora, who knew both Jacques and
The Girls, can fully realize the nightmare impossibility of this task.

I always felt that the girls' comments on my appearance and character
were perfectly fair, though they did not err on the side of mildness,
for I knew that I was raw and uncouth. School criticism certainly
improved my manners a good deal; but my social self-confidence, never
very strong, was badly and permanently shaken by it. And my school
nickname hurt me deeply. They called me, in the Anglo-French which we
had to talk all day long, _The Gnie_; a hybrid term, neither The
Genius, nor yet _Le Gnie_. This name was ostensibly given me because I
was put into rather high classes on my first arrival; actually because
they thought me queer. How that name did sting! I suppose that was why
it stuck all through my career. Yet I passionately wanted to be an
Ordinary Person; and I tried very hard, and quite ineffectually, to
conceal all my real interests from their contempt and mockery.

[Illustration: The Gnie. Of course this is not what school was really
like, but it is what it felt like to me.]

For the chief thing I learnt at school was how to tell lies. Or rather,
how to try to tell them; for, of course, I did it very badly. Still, I
did my best to pretend that I did like what I didn't and that I didn't
like what I did. But it was no good; they knew perfectly well that there
was something wrong about me, so that I always felt inferior and out of
it, just as I did at a party. The truth was, that while I was
desperately anxious to appear exactly like everyone else, yet at the
same time, I intended at all costs to keep alive the precious little
grain of _me_, which was inside. And no one can succeed in running with
the hare and hunting with the hounds for very long.

Besides the hare got out sometimes. Once we had a debate: 'that
unhappiness is better for the character than happiness.' I could not
bear what I considered the sanctimonious falsity of this conception of
life; and Nora and I both made impassioned speeches against the motion;
but the whole school out-voted us, and, in spite of our scorn, revelled
in the purifying effects of sorrow.

There was another outburst in a French lesson. Mademoiselle M. used to
set us to write compositions on such subjects as 'Le berceau et le
tombeau' or 'L'honneur'. When she set: 'Le Mariage est une loterie' we
were very indignant, and Nora said, with her English accent: 'Ce n'aye
par vraye, Mademoiselle,' and we both argued fiercely that marriage was
a perfectly reasonable proceeding, not subject to the laws of chance.
Nora was a great comfort to me at school.

Mademoiselle was the most vivid person there. We were all rather afraid
of her tired, yellow face, above her perpetual plaid blouse and grubby
lace necktie; for when a French woman decides to be shabby, she does it
better than anyone else. She had a burning passion for teaching; a
vocation, a mission to make us learn French thoroughly. In class she
would point her finger at you suddenly, and command: 'Les cinq temps
primitifs de _moudre_' (or some other of those anarchic verbs); and if
you did not instantly reply: 'Moudre moulant, moulu, je meuds, je
moulus'--her fury could make any of us cry, even the captain of the
hockey team. The headmistress herself, a most fiery and imperial lady,
thought twice before going through Mademoiselle's classroom if she were
giving a lesson there.

Every morning, after Prayers, we were asked: 'Will anyone who spoke
English yesterday hold up her hand.' Generally about three people held
up their hands and got their bad marks; for our consciences were not too
particular about a word here or there; though there was one girl, who
had scruples, and who held up her hand every day. I believe that she did
this chiefly to annoy the authorities; in which, of course, she
succeeded; though they always ignored her gesture with dignified
blindness. But Mademoiselle's unsleeping ardour could be trusted to make
her come pouncing out of the study, if ever anyone in the farthest
corner of the house (or so it seemed) spoke English, or said shocking
things like: 'Je vais faire mon cheveu'; or 'Etes-vous froid?' And she
really did teach us to speak French without false shame, which is half
the battle.

For the rest, school is rather a dim memory to me; all hurry and scurry;
beginning in the morning with the sound of the housemaids' feet racing
along the passages, as they carried great cans of water for the
saucer-baths, which they pulled out from under our beds; and then, all
day long, running myself like a hare, from place to place, at the sound
of the bell, in the hopeless endeavour not to be late. And then, the
continual strain, the effort, of trying to understand, to imitate, to
conciliate the indigenous population of that foreign land, where I never
could get higher than the tolerance of 'It's only old Gnie' from the
kinder inhabitants. And when at last the anxious, crowded day was over,
there came the distasteful duty of _kissing_ five or six mistresses good
night. They stood in a row after Prayers, to endure this unhygienic
operation from the whole school. (How could they bear it?)

In all that time there is only one vision that I keep: a flash, seen
through the garden hedge, of some sheep in the next field, with the
frosty, winter light running along their backs. It seemed like something
from another world: the real world, to which I should escape again some
day. It kept me alive.

I must not be ungrateful: I did learn a great deal at school, and grow
and widen, too. I am glad I went there. But it is no use denying it: I
don't like boarding schools; although they are better than governesses.
Day schools might be better still, but I never went to a day school.




  CHAPTER V

  _Ladies_


When my granddaughter Anne was about five, she said to me one day:
'Grandmamma, when I am grown up, I think I shall be a witch. There are
too many ladies, don't you think?' Well, I suppose there are still too
many ladies; but there were many more too many ladies when I was young.
My whole life was surrounded by them; but from the very beginning I was
determined, like Anne, never, never to be one. I remember thinking how
pretty my mother's hands were--white, slender and charming, with her big
diamond ring on her pink-tipped finger; and I thought: 'When I'm old, I
don't want to have hands like that; I want to have hands like Nana's,
all brown and wrinkled.'

Ladies were ladies in those days; they did not do things themselves,
they told other people what to do and how to do it. My mother would have
told anybody how to do anything: the cook how to skin a rabbit, or the
groom how to harness a horse; though of course she had never done, or
even observed, these operations herself. She would cheerfully have told
an engine-driver how to drive his engine, and he would have taken it
quite naturally, and have answered: 'Yes, ma'am,' 'Very good, ma'am,'
'Quite right, ma'am,' and then would have gone on driving his engine
exactly as before, with hardly even an inward grin at the vagaries of
the upper classes; while my mother would certainly have thought his
driving much improved. But then they would both have been experts at
their own jobs, and tolerant of each others' little whims.

For instance, my mother had a theory, founded on intuition, that lard
was dirty; and it was strictly forbidden in our kitchen. But the cook
always had plenty of lard--I suppose called by some other name in the
account book--and it was quite safe, for my mother would not have
recognized the stuff if she had seen it on the kitchen table. The cook
knew well enough that part of her job was to listen to her mistress
talking about lard, or any other fad; after which she did exactly what
she had always intended to do, and got on with her work in her own way.

I remember once sitting by, much embarrassed, during the call of an
acquaintance, who held a high official position connected with the
Admiralty. My mother told him, in detail, exactly what had been done
wrong in the Archer-Shee case--that now historic scandal--about which
she knew nothing whatever, except from the newspapers; while he must
have known all about it at first hand. And as she told him what ought
now to be done to set things right, he listened, smiling and assenting,
and privately enjoying the joke, for I am sure he liked her and was
amused, not irritated, by his scolding.

I can never remember being bathed by my mother, or even having my hair
brushed by her, and I should not at all have liked it if she had done
anything of the kind. We did not feel it was her place to do such
things; though my father used to cut our finger-nails with his sharp
white-handled knife, and that we felt quite pleasant and proper. Anyhow,
there was no need for my mother to do such things, for Nana hardly ever
went out, and if she did the housemaid or the nurserymaid was left in
charge of us. About once in two or three years there was an appalling
calamity, and Nana left us poor little orphans, while she went away for
a week's holiday; but it was all arranged beforehand, and my mother did
nothing extra herself, except perhaps a little more _telling_ than
usual.

The only manual work I can ever remember her doing was unpicking old
dresses for the dressmaker to re-fashion; and, once or twice of a summer
evening, holding the nozzle of the garden-hose before handing it over to
one of us. But I must state, most emphatically, that she did not avoid
work because she felt it beneath her; it was because it bored her. So
she always got someone else to do it for her. As far as appearances
went, she would have walked about with a coal-scuttle on her head
without turning a hair. She used to laugh at Uncle Dick for refusing to
carry a parcel in the street. But she was lazy in some ways; it was the
other side of her comfortable calmness.

There is however one letter from my mother to my father, written from
Philadelphia shortly before her marriage: it contains an account of an
episode which was unique in her career. '_Just now I am resting from
painting--not artistic painting, but practical painting. I thought it
would be a pleasant little surprise for Mamma to come home and find the
dining-room entirely repainted. So I bought the paint and have been
brushing it on all the morning. . . . Now I have given it to one of the
maids to finish. It is tiresome work._' And I feel quite certain that
she never did any practical painting again.

There was also the memorable occasion when she made Corn Beef Hash. It
was in her first summer in England, when she was staying with the Jebbs,
and Gerald Balfour was coming to dinner. She writes that '_Dick was
"nervous". He asked about the dinner. Only G.B. was expected. Aunt C.
intended having soup, fish, roast beef, pudding, fruit and cheese. Dick
objected at not having an entre. It was too late to send to college and
we racked our brains to think of something easily made. Aunt C. said how
good hashes used to taste in Philadelphia. And then in fun I suggested
corn-beef hash, as we had had corn-beef in the luncheon. So, in fear
and trembling I went into the kitchen, and made it the way I thought it
ought to be. Dick and Gerald ate it as if they enjoyed it. Aunt C. asked
Dick afterwards for his opinion, and he said he thought it was good, but
looked "improvised"._'

The regular round of formal dinner-parties was very important in
Cambridge. In our house the parties were generally of twelve or fourteen
people, and everybody of dinner-party status was invited strictly in
turn. The guests were seated according to the Protocol, the Heads of
Houses ranking by the dates of the foundations of their colleges, except
that the Vice-Chancellor would come first of all. After the Masters came
the Regius Professors in the order of their subjects, Divinity first;
and then the other Professors according to the dates of the foundations
of their chairs, and so on down all the steps of the hierarchy. It was
better not to invite too many important people at the same time, or the
complications became insoluble to hosts of only ordinary culture. How
could they tell if Hebrew or Greek took precedence, of two
professorships founded in the same year? And some of the grandees were
very touchy about their rights, and their wives were even more easily
offended.

The latest bride had to wear her wedding-dress, and was taken in by the
host. It was terrifying for her, poor young thing, to walk out before
all those hawk-eyed matrons; and to remember to be ready for the hostess
to 'catch her eye' at the end of dinner. This was the signal for the
ladies to gather up their belongings and to sweep demurely out of the
room, leaving the gentlemen to their wine. And it was worst of all for
her in the drawing-room, where the ladies all fell into intimate,
low-voiced conversations about their illnesses, their children and their
servants; for she had as yet no illnesses, nor children, and knew very
little about servants. At the end--about 10.15--no one could leave until
the bride rose; and cases have been known of the bride being so
petrified by fear that, after a long wait, the kindest of the elder
ladies had to rise and propel her into doing her duty.

We children used to huddle on the stairs in our nightgowns to watch the
formal procession going from the drawing-room to the dining-room, led by
my father with the principal lady on his arm, while my mother brought up
the rear, on the arm of the most important gentleman. After they had all
swept grandly by, we could dash down and warm ourselves by the
drawing-room fire, before taking up our stations by the serving-hatch to
help finish up the good things as they came out. The strident roar of
conversation pointed by the clatter of knives and forks came through the
hatch in bursts, cut off suddenly when it was closed.

Dinner was at 7.45, and there were eight, nine, or even ten courses: I
have some of the menus. Such dinners needed good organization,
especially as they were all prepared and served by our own ordinary
three servants, with very little extra help, beyond a waitress. Some
people had special dishes sent in from the college kitchens, but my
mother considered that extravagant. Here is a dinner given by my parents
on 31st October 1885, when Sir William and Lady Thomson (the Kelvins)
came to stay. This is clearly rather a grand dinner.

  Clear Soup
  Brill and Lobster Sauce
  Chicken Cutlets and Rice Balls
  Oyster Patties
  Mutton, Potatoes, Artichokes, Beets
  Partridges and Salad
  Caramel Pudding         }
  Pears and Whipped Cream }
  Cheese Ramequins }
  Cheese Straws    }
  Ice
  Grapes, Walnuts, Chocolates and Pears

But on 1st April 1885, there were only four people at dinner: my mother,
my father, Edmund Gosse and Dew Smith, and yet they had:

  Tomato Soup
  Fried Smelts and Drawn Butter Sauce
  Mushrooms on Toast
  Roast Beef, Cauliflower and Potatoes
  Apple Charlotte
  Toasted Cheese
  Dessert: Candied Peel, Oranges, Peanuts, Raisins and Ginger

I know this because after dinner my mother left the three men alone and
came into the drawing-room and wrote it all down in a letter to her
sister. This was five months before I was born; she was twenty-three,
and she clearly felt very grand and grown-up, with three servants of her
own.

There was a cook who would not use the cream-whipper or the
egg-beater--'_so stupid of her_'; and a housemaid, who was later
dismissed for not mending my mother's gloves properly; and a Swiss
manservant, Rittler. He slept in a sort of cupboard opening out of the
pantry. One of Rittler's duties was to row the boat on the river, and a
special uniform was designed for him, for nautical service; I wish I
knew what it was like!

Rittler was obviously charming; but alas, one night '_when he came home
he had been drinking; he was not drunk, but still his breath was
strong_.' And on this pretext he was dismissed, and a good place was
found for him in America, where presumably drink did not matter. But he
was really sent away because the women servants _would_ fall in love
with him. Apparently Nana was particularly drawn towards him, though he
appears not to have been much interested in her. Poor Nana! Even now,
after so many years, it seems to me an extraordinary idea, to think of
her as a young woman, capable of falling in love. She seemed so old and
fixed in her place in the firmament. But this feeling of hers is
probably the reason why I am quite sure that I can remember Rittler,
though he left when I was only eighteen months old. After that we had
only woman servants; but my mother regretted Rittler. '_I do think
intelligence in servants adds to their value_,' she writes sadly. This
was an advanced view to hold, in those days.

[Illustration: The Hermit (Mrs. C.) coming out of the Hermitage. Here
you may also see our dog, Sancho, wishing he were the Hermitage dog. He
is standing in the road, not on the pavement, just to show how miserable
he is.]

Next door to us, at the Hermitage, there lived a lady who had eight
servants, a little dog, two horses, a carriage, a coachman and a
footman. In the Middle Ages a hermit had lived on that spot to take the
tolls for the bridge. Now the Hermitage stands there, a very large
depressing Victorian house, built of white brick, with a slate roof and
plate-glass windows, many of them barred against burglars. There, when I
was small, the Hermit of the Hermitage was Mrs. P., afterwards Mrs. C,
generally a rich widow, except during the two periods when she was a
rich wife. She had stiff white hair, done up on top, little black eyes,
and a face like a prune--a very proper prune. Dr. P. died when I was
very small; he was a Fellow of St. John's, and I can just remember the
choir of St. John's coming to sing carols under his window at Christmas
time--in the middle of the night, as it seemed to me then.

After a decent interval Mr. C, a Fellow of Trinity, decided to ask for
Mrs. P.'s hand. So he caused to be set up in the Roundabout--the Trinity
Fellow's Garden--a little artificial monticule, and on top of it to be
erected a small but elegant arbour in which he could propose to her.
This he successfully did, and the arbour and the mount, known as 'Monte
Cobbeo', stand there to this day to witness if I lie.

[Illustration: 'Music hath charms.' Seen from my mother's bedroom
window.]

They used to give very grand dinner-parties, in all the glory of
mahogany and silver and port; and after dinner Mr. C. would approach
Mrs. C. in the drawing-room, and say: 'Now, my dear, shall we let our
friends hear our Duet?' He would then hand her to the piano, and they
would perform together. Even after Mr. C.'s death (when I chiefly
remember her) we could sometimes get a fascinating glimpse, from my
mother's bedroom window, of Mrs. C. playing on the (very) grand piano,
with a brisk, prancing movement, just like that of her two overfed
horses, when the coachman brought the carriage up to the front door. She
went to the same evening concerts at the Guildhall that everyone
attended, driving there alone in state with the coachman and footman;
and passing on the way my mother, and sometimes me too, going down on
foot. But though she always bowed graciously, and often spoke to us in
the concert hall, she never once, in all the years we knew her, offered
my mother a lift. However, she sent a covered plate of hot dinner every
day to the lame and disfigured crossing-sweeper at the corner of the
Backs, and that was far more important. When she died it was found that
she had left him some money, and one of her maids married him and took
care of him for the rest of his life! Though how she could bring herself
to do so, I can't imagine. He had met with some accident, and was a
dreadful sight; and besides could not speak plainly; he was one of the
terrors of my youth, poor fellow. I believe Mrs. C. was always generous
to the poor.

The only words I can remember her saying were a comparison between her
two husbands: 'Yes, poor Francis liked his beef quite red and underdone,
but Gerard would not eat it unless it was well cooked and brown.' A good
way of remembering the difference between them.

[Illustration: Going to the concert. Mrs. C.'s carriage passes us on the
bridge.]

There were not many people in Cambridge who had carriages, apart from
the doctors, who drove about in broughams, in their top-hats and
frock-coats. But Uncle Frank and Aunt Ellen had a donkey-cart, in which
Aunt Ellen sometimes drove two donkeys tandem. One of these donkeys
first came as a foal and, for a while, he used to run free beside the
cart--showing how quiet the roads were in those days. Another friend had
a very enormous kind of dogcart, in which she drove, in a masterly way,
the horses she had bred herself. But for the most part people depended
on flies--four-wheelers--until first the tricycle, then the safety
bicycle, came in: and then bicycles gradually became the chief vehicles
for ladies paying calls. They would even tuck up their trains and ride
out to dinner on them. One summer evening my parents rode ten miles to
dine at Six Mile Bottom; their evening clothes were carried in cases on
the handlebars; for of course you couldn't possibly dine without
dressing. Right up to 1914 one always made some kind of change of dress
for dinner, even if one were alone; and for quite a small party, full
dress was usual. But when my mother came to dress that evening she found
that, though the bodice and train were there, the skirt had been left
behind--dresses were in three pieces then. So she had to borrow a very
inharmonious skirt from her hostess, who was much shorter and stouter
than herself. They rode back by moonlight.

[Illustration: My mother had the first lady's tricycle in Cambridge. Our
dog Sancho was horrified to think that anyone belonging to him should
ride such an indecent thing.]

But if we had no carriage my great-aunt Mrs. Jebb (later Lady Jebb) had
one, and my mother drove out with her nearly every day. Springfield,
where the Jebbs lived, stood across the road, behind the
crossing-sweeper's corner; it was a dull, plate-glass-windowed,
white-brick-and-slate Victorian house. But though it was even uglier
than the Hermitage, it was a very different affair; quite as comfortable
and much more amusing and less formal.

Aunt Cara was an exceedingly beautiful woman. Rembrandt's painting of
'Bathsheba' at the Louvre is a pretty good portrait of her. I once saw
her in much the same costume, and she looked quite lovely. She had
auburn hair--real auburn, not red--a charming Rubenesque complexion, and
a deep rich voice, like red velvet. She was quite unselfconscious about
her appearance--as you can afford to be if you are beautiful enough. I
have seen her playing tennis in a ridiculous little black nose-bag, tied
on with elastic, to keep the sunburn from her nose. Her amusing American
turn of conversation, complete lack of inhibitions, and great
personality, gave her a unique position in Cambridge society.

She had had a romantic history. She was born in 1840, Caroline Reynolds,
the sister of my mother's mother. Her father was an English clergyman,
who had emigrated to the States, round about 1825. At the age of sixteen
she married Lieutenant Slemmer of the United States Army. Four years
later, when in 1861 the Civil War seemed inevitable, he was sent to
command the fortifications at Pensacola in Florida. One of the many
legends about Aunt Cara concerns this time. She is said to have wept on
President Lincoln's shoulder in order to obtain promotion for her
husband, which she considered had been unjustly withheld. I began to try
to draw this scene, and at once came to the conclusion that it was
impossible to imagine Aunt Cara weeping on anyone's shoulder. I then
learnt the true story. She went, with two brothers-in-law, to an
arranged interview with the President; saying to herself, 'After all
he's only a man like any other,' by which she meant that, of course,
she could get him to do what she wanted. They found the President
sitting at a writing table; at first the conversation was rather
halting, but presently Aunt Cara, who was standing beside him, laid her
hand lightly on his shoulder, as she put forward her plea. Mr. Lincoln
smiled, and gently placed his hand on hers for a moment, and the ice was
broken. She was successful, for among the _Lincoln Papers_ is the
following note in his own handwriting: '_List of Officers I wish to
remember when I make appointments for Officers of the Regular Army_,
[several names, and last of all]--Lieut. Slemmer--_his pretty wife says
a Major or First Captain_.' Aunt Cara always said that Lincoln was the
greatest man she ever met, so perhaps she had not found him quite so
easy to manage as she had expected.

It was known at Pensacola that plans had been made by the Southern
Militia to capture the navy yard there. There was much doubt as to
whether the place should be defended, for there had been, as yet, no
fighting. (This was before the attack on Fort Sumter.) '_A council of
war was held in Captain Slemmer's house. . . . The discussion lasted a
long time without any decision being reached; at last Mrs. Slemmer_
[aged twenty] _could stand it no longer; and, with a flash of her quick
manner, she said, "Well, if you men will not defend your country's flag,
I will"._' This settled it. The garrison withdrew to Fort Pickens in the
harbour and held it against several attacks; and so, by her action, the
first shots of the war were fired. Incidentally, the North thus retained
a naval base in the Gulf of Mexico, which was of some importance to them
during the blockade of the Southern States.

There was another legend: that Mrs. Slemmer was a spy! She had been seen
walking about on the mainland, a few days before the first skirmish. She
was probably only shopping; but with Aunt Cara one never can feel quite
sure. She was a very ardent partisan of the North.

Her husband eventually became a general, and died in 1868; her only
child, a boy, had also died young. Aunt Cara then came to England to
visit relations; and among others a first cousin, Mrs. Potts, who lived
at Cambridge. There it is said that every marriageable man proposed to
her; three in one day, including the Vice-Chancellor. I do not guarantee
this; and yet, when years later, she visited the house (15 Fitzwilliam
Street) where she had once stayed with Mrs. Potts, and the lady who
lived there then, said to her: 'Lady Jebb, I believe you received three
proposals in one evening in this room?' Aunt Cara merely replied: 'Oh
no, that is absurd; one was in the garden.'

In 1874 she at last decided to marry Richard Jebb, and her house soon
became a social centre. Her popularity gave her many openings for
match-making--that delightful pursuit; but her views on affairs of the
heart were always more practical than romantic. Her letters are very
candid about this; she would try to allure a niece into paying her a
visit, by promising her a meeting with a young man, whom she describes
as '_a possible object of interest_'. '_And now he is such a very good
match! His father is rich, has just been made a Baronet, Tom is the
eldest son_,' etc., etc. In mere justice to her nieces, I must say that
this sort of thing did not appeal to them at all. It was of assistance
to her in match-making, that among her other gifts, she had a special
instinct for knowing at first sight exactly what anyone's income might
be. Money was very important to her and she thought a great deal about
her investments. She managed all Uncle Dick's affairs, and gave
excellent advice to others of the family.

She used to tell me strange stories about all the love-affairs of all
the well-known people who had confided in her; they were all mixed up
with hair-bracelets and graves and love-letters and other stage
properties; but I did not listen to them very much, for I did not then
believe that they were true; and I have unfortunately now forgotten
them all. There was, however, probably some foundation of truth in most
of them, for she could always draw confidences from a heart of stone.
Or, at least, from a man's heart of stone. She was emphatically a man's
woman, though she was always on good terms with women, too. I must admit
that I often felt a certain temptation to invent dramatic circumstances
when she tried to draw me out about my own affairs. I never did so, but
I have sometimes wondered if others were less scrupulous.

It was no wonder people liked talking to her; her conversation was
amusing, even witty; and she was well-read. There is a pleasant story of
how she once set a Jebb niece to read _Paradise Lost_ aloud to herself
and her sister Aunt Polly, in order to improve Aunt Polly's mind. The
poor old lady was terribly bored and was nearly asleep, when Aunt Cara
woke her up, by saying sternly: 'Listen now, Polly; it's Satan
speaking.'

Aunt Cara was not, I think, at all warm-hearted; but she was really kind
and generous; and as she wished people to like her, and had a pretty
shrewd idea of character, she managed to make up an excellent working
substitute for warmth of feeling. Indeed, I have often wondered whether
intelligent kindness, such as hers, is not of more value to the world at
large, than warm-hearted blundering. Of course, her worldliness shocked
me very much, as a child; but I was abominably serious and high-minded
in those days.

In 1918 she decided that she would like to spend the rest of her life in
America, away from the Horrid War; so she sold her house and much of her
furniture, and went off without showing any regret at leaving my mother
and all the friends with whom she had lived for the last forty years. My
mother felt her loss very much indeed. Aunt Cara had her horse and dog
and cat destroyed; I rather thought she had Melbourne the gardener put
down, too; but I am told that he was reprieved at the last moment. Uncle
Dick had fortunately died in 1905.

The Springfield household consisted of: first, Aunt Cara's Prime
Minister and confidant, the said Melbourne, the groom-gardener; a
perfectly round little man, a 'reg'lar Norfolk dumpling', as he justly
called himself. Next in the hierarchy came Zo, the pretty, yellow mare;
then Glen, the collie dog, given her by Mr. Carnegie; then Darius, the
Persian cat; then the three maids, who stayed for ever; and last of
all--or so we thought--poor Uncle Dick. I know that he was a scholar of
international reputation, but to our childish minds he was a figure of
extreme unimportance; a sort of harmless waif, who was kindly allowed to
live in a corner of the library, so long as he kept quiet and gave no
trouble. He used to slip furtively in and out, and never recognized us
when he met us. Margaret was astonished when he said Good morning to her
on the stairs one day, shortly before his death. I suppose he was
terrified of children. But other people besides ourselves must sometimes
have thought Uncle Dick less important than he would have wished; for
there has been handed down from his earlier days the well-known saying
of Dr. Thompson (Master of Trinity from 1866 to 1886): 'The time which
Mr. Jebb can spare from the adornment of his person, he devotes to the
neglect of his duties.'

Nearly every morning my mother used to send me across to Springfield
with a note or a message, to plan the campaign for the afternoon. I used
to run across the early morning road and through the dewy,
sweet-smelling garden, to the open front door; and go up the
Axminster-carpeted stairs to find Aunt Cara comfortably having breakfast
in bed, and reading the newspaper, with Darius on the counterpane beside
her. I did not like going there, because of the faint smell of Cat; but
I don't know whether it was Cat which made me dislike going there, or
going there which made me dislike Cat. Aunt Cara would give me an
answer to the message, and then say: 'Go down and ask Kate to give you a
piece of cake.' This made me indignant, because I was not a baby now,
and I did not like being offered cake like that--although it was
delicious cake. But even my indignation may have been caused by Cat.

[Illustration: Melbourne assisting Aunt Cara to keep in touch with
current events in Cambridge.]

Then after lunch, Melbourne would go out to Queens' Green, and catch Zo
and harness her to a kind of low, rather shabby, but elegantly built
Victoria, squeeze himself into his navy-blue coat, put on his top-hat,
take up Aunt Cara and my mother, and drive them off to the delightful
duty of paying calls. As they bowled gaily along, Glen followed barking
behind; and Melbourne drove with his head turned over his shoulder, for
he took a principal part in the conversation. He knew all there was to
know about the current events of the Cambridge world, and gave Aunt Cara
much valuable information.

[Illustration: Paying calls. People, from left to right: Zo, the pretty
bay mare, Melbourne, me (very cross), Aunt Cara, my mother (behind the
parasol), Glen the collie dog.]

Occasionally I was forced into going out in the carriage with them.
Heavens, how intolerably sulky I must have been, as, hatted and gloved,
I clung unwillingly to the narrow front seat. It was necessary to hold
on tight if one did not want to be shot out at the corners, and it made
one feel sick, and was a supreme bore as well.

[Illustration: Catching the train. Ellis is getting nervous, but my
mother refuses to start until she has collected all the things she wants
to take with her.]

One of the important duties which ladies had to perform was going to
London for the day to shop. They had to catch the 8.30 Great Northern
train to King's Cross. In those days no one ever went to St. Pancras by
the Great Eastern Railway if they could help it; and Liverpool Street
was unknown to the genteel. The early start put a great strain on the
whole household. Sometimes the Bull bus came to fetch my mother; it went
round the town picking up such people as had bespoken its services. It
cost sixpence, luggage and all. But sometimes the bus was booked up, and
then a fly from the Bull yard was ordered to come at 8 o'clock. But when
red-faced Ellis drove up to the door, my mother was nowhere near being
ready. Once, when she was leaving to catch the boat-train for New York,
she was still in her nightdress when Ellis came; and she caught the
train, too. If not actually in her nightdress when he came, she was
always still in her bedroom; perfectly calm, though all the three maids,
and Nana, and I, were running about to fetch things and to help her to
dress; while my father stood at the foot of the stairs, watch in hand,
looking worried, and calling up in his patient voice: 'Maud, you'll miss
the train.' Of course she had not attempted breakfast, and I used to put
slices of buttered toast on the seat of the cab for her. This was
important, as her day's work was so absorbing, that she never had time
for lunch, and used to come home in the evening quite famished and worn
out. When she was in the fly I used to hand in through the window her
boots and a button-hook, so that she could put them on as she went;
while she gave me in exchange her slippers to take back.

Then, just as Ellis was gathering up the reins and chucking to the
horse, she would call suddenly: 'Oh, wait a minute--there's that little
dressing-table I was going to take for a wedding present to Mrs. X's
daughter--it's in the attic, Isabel, just run and fetch it; and the
silver teapot needs mending, will you get that, Alice, please; and Gwen,
just run up on my washstand and get that empty bottle of
cough-mixture....' and so on, and so on. But at last, the dressing-table
on the roof of the fly, and buttoning her boots and eating her toast,
off she drove. We then went back and ate an enormous, leisurely, holiday
breakfast, and a feeling of delicious peace descended on the house. But
she never, never missed the train. I think she felt that it would not
have been sporting to start in time; it would not have given the train a
fair chance of getting away without her. How unlike the English side of
my family!

In the evening Economy often made her come back from the station in the
slow old tram, which went swinging and clanking along behind its one
ancient horse. What with changing 'at the Roman Catholic' and waiting
there for the other tram, she could well have walked home in the same
time. _Racing the tram_ was a Cambridge sport; a running child could
beat it easily.

So often did we have to fetch things from upstairs for my mother, that
_running up--or trotting up--on my washstand_, became a family phrase
for doing an errand or a job. There always seemed to be a great many
jobs to be done; and the thought of them reminds me of another activity
of the Cambridge Ladies: Committees: lovely Committees. How they did
enjoy them! There was a body called The Ladies' Discussion Society, of
which my mother was President or Secretary or something. Anyhow, it
entailed a great deal of adding up of accounts (chiefly done by us
children); and of checking over and addressing of cards (also largely
done by us); and of taking them round to their addresses by hand, to
save the expense of the postage. This was entirely done by us. We
strongly objected to this form of trotting up on my washstand. We did
not see why we should save the Discussing Ladies' halfpennies by the
unwilling sweat of our brows. So I am sorry to say, that when we had
delivered a few of the nearest cards we used to sneak some halfpenny
stamps out of the study and post the rest of them. Thus, in the end, my
father paid for their discussions. My mother always had a regrettable
weakness for saving halfpenny stamps.

She concentrated chiefly on the Ladies' Discussion Society, though she
had some slight brushes with the 'Charitable' Organization, as she
always called the Charity Organization. Her other chief mission was
helping to run a private laundry. This gave her plenty of scope,
especially as it had been mysteriously established (not by her) at a
place where all the water had to be pumped up by hand, by a man with one
arm. It was a pity, we thought, that laundries seemed to involve so much
arithmetic. Hard on us; very hard.

Arithmetic was not one of my mother's strong points. Nor, as a matter of
fact, was it one of mine either. But then, in my own affairs, I made
short work of the natural malignity of numbers, by never doing any
accounts at all. This made it all the more irritating to be obliged to
do other people's sums for them. My mother, in imitation of my father,
insisted on keeping accounts down to every halfpenny; but no one, least
of all herself, ever understood them. I suppose that while my father was
alive, he was able to identify and isolate the more important items from
the jungle of undergrowth in which they were ambushed; and anyhow he did
the adding and auditing himself. So that in those days we children only
had the simpler matters of the Ladies' Committees to deal with. But
after my father's death The Accounts became a constant menace to
everyone of the family. How often have I not slipped quietly out of the
room when I saw the moment approaching when I should be asked 'just to
add up that page, please'. It was so hopeless and so useless. It was
impossible to add up one page without being dragged into the
complications of all the other pages of all the other account books,
which were used indiscriminately for everything. The only system was
that every item had to be written down somewhere--on any scrap of paper,
or any page of any account book; and then, from time to time, everything
must be rounded up and added together in one enormous sum. Fortunately
no odious deductions were drawn from the resulting total, as quite often
the Credits had got mixed up with the Debits, and they had all been
added up together.

But I must in honesty add, that in later life, my mother succeeded in
living in a large house on a relatively small income, and perhaps The
Accounts helped her to do this in some mystic way which we cannot
understand.

[Illustration]




  CHAPTER VI

  _Propriety_


There was one profession to which I was very early apprenticed: that of
being chaperon to courting couples. My mother often had friends and
younger sisters staying with her; they were charming people; sociable,
and foreign enough, being American, to be very attractive; and the chief
excitement of her early life was the constant expectation that some of
the Gentlemen, who were supposed to be 'very devoted' to them, would
propose. I have since wondered how serious the supposed 'devotion' may
have been; certainly none of those particular men married Americans.
Though perhaps that was my fault; I must have been a very discouraging
chaperon. But, at any rate, I am sure my mother was always thinking that
an engagement might be announced at any moment.

[Illustration: The conscientious chaperon.]

Soon after her marriage my mother wrote to her sister about the sad
state of things she found in Cambridge. '_It is hard for the girls
here.... There is not a marrying man in Cambridge except Mr. C.; and I
should not think he would be attractive to anyone now, though they say
he used to be nice; but now he tries to look intense, and squeezes your
hand a little, when he shakes hands; all of which is not exactly
attractive in a man with gray hair. He hums all the time he is talking,
and always goes back to twenty years ago; in fact he is what you might
call prosy.... Oh, the poor English girls certainly have a hard time,
excepting in Alice Balfour's class, where they are more like American
girls. But the upper middle class think they are acting rightly by
over-protecting their daughters.... When Gwen grows up, it will be very
hard to know how to treat her. If I let her be as independent as a girl
at home, people will say in Cambridge she is fast._' And in another
letter: '_M.F._ [a girl of eighteen] _says that two undergraduates are
going to give a dance in their rooms in college. They wrote to Mrs. F.
asking if M. could go, and then said that their rooms were so small,
would she pardon them if they did not ask her--that Mrs. S. and Mrs. C._
[two most correct Cambridge ladies] _had consented to chaperon them. M.
can't go because they will not let Mrs. C. chaperon her. She says so
many of the Cambridge matrons are furious.... They say, "What right have
young men to dictate to us?" It seems unutterably vulgar to me that
girls, who are well brought up, and sons who are well brought up, should
not be allowed to associate, without every girl having her mother at her
elbow, to see that no indecency is committed. The real truth is that the
chaperons want the power in their own hands, and I believe, though they
protest against it, they really enjoy the dances. . . . I hope that when
Gwen grows up there will be a revolution in this respect, and I hope
that she will help to bring one around. Why should not M. be allowed to
go with her brother?_'

Now the odd thing about these letters is, that my mother obviously
considered herself, and really was, more unconventional and wide-minded
than the English ladies; and yet, later on, we young ones thought her
distinctly more proper than they were. Perhaps the truth was that she
was more puritanical, in an old-fashioned early-American way, while they
were more concerned with gentility and appearances. The English ladies
would not have been as shocked as she was, when she heard Spurgeon
preach, and wrote: '_Some of his sentences were hardly refined, as,_ "We
need the Lord to back us".' [I suppose because this is a sporting
phrase?] On the other hand, I am sure that none of them would have
bicycled, as she did once, from one end of Cambridge to the other,
dressed up as Father Christmas, beard and all. (Santa Claus she always
called him.) But I think she was more particular than they were about
such matters as bathing and undressing; and though parties were all
right, she would never allow friendly couples to go anywhere alone
together, no matter how old or respectable they might be.

That was where I came in; for by the time I can remember, things must
have improved since the days, when Mr. C. was the only marriageable man
in Cambridge. There always seemed to be plenty of bachelors about now,
and I was often sent along to play gooseberry in the boat, or on some
sightseeing expedition. Surely my mother must have been extra careful
about boating? A couple were never allowed to go alone in a boat, even
down the Backs; and she reproved one of her sisters for going out alone
with _two_ men for a very short time. Yet I know that an extremely
correct lady gave permission for her daughter to go from Grantchester to
Cambridge and back again, in a canoe with a young man. I am sure my
mother would have been horrified at this.

All this matter of propriety seems to me quite fantastic, especially
considering the ages and characters of the people to whom the rules were
applied. When Uncle Frank was engaged to Aunt Ellen (his second wife),
he was thirty-five, and she was twenty-seven, and a Fellow and lecturer
at Newnham; and if any two people could be more respectable I would not
like to know them. Yet, when Miss Clough, the principal of Newnham, had
been away for a few weeks my grandmother wrote: '_Frank will be glad
that Miss Clough has come back, so that he can call on Ellen again._' He
had not been able to go there at all while Miss Clough was away! She sat
in the parlour with them herself; no one else would do as a chaperon. Of
course, there could be no question of his going to Aunt Ellen's own
sitting-room; nor obviously of her going to see him. One sometimes
wonders how anyone was ever able to get engaged at all.

In her memoir, _What I Remember_, Mrs. Alfred Marshall tells a story,
which she told me herself when she was very old; how she and Miss Marion
Kennedy, both of them Newnham lecturers of nearly thirty, took rooms at
a London hotel in order to attend the wedding of their friends Professor
Henry Sidgwick and Miss Eleanor Balfour; and of how her horrified
father, the rector, sent her young brother, a boy of fourteen, posting
off in haste, to chaperon them. 'And when he came, we stayed on another
night, and even went to a theatre with him!' she told me in triumphant
amusement; and ended up: 'But I was in disgrace at home for some time
after that.'

Now in both these cases the trouble was entirely over appearances. It
would have been perfectly easy for Uncle Frank to meet Aunt Ellen in
private somewhere; or for Mrs. Marshall to deceive her young brother, if
any of them had been really bent on impropriety. But no one doubted
their integrity for a moment; it was just the look of the thing that
mattered. It is this which makes it so difficult for us nowadays to
understand what all the fuss was about.

If pushed, the elders would probably have said: 'I have no doubt that it
is quite all right for you, my dear; but it sets such a bad example to
others'; or if they were really frank: 'to the lower classes'. There
were many things we might not do, not because they were wrong in
themselves, but 'because of the maids'. We might never sew or knit or
play at cards at all on Sunday, not even Beggar-my-neighbour; and when
we went out to play tennis, we used to make our rackets into brown-paper
parcels, to avoid giving offence to the people in the street!

Surely 'the lower classes', who were so much more realistic than we
were, must have known perfectly well that this was all eye-wash? But
they were very tolerant; if rich people liked to behave in this strange
way, that was their own affair. The rich were much less tolerant, and
were apt to be self-righteous and interfering. But the poor protected
themselves by an impenetrable secrecy. I don't believe that the middle
classes of those days ever had the faintest idea of the real outlook of
the poor. It was true enough that there were two nations in England
then.

But if the Victorian views on propriety were strange, their views on
morals were even more mysterious; though we did not hear much about all
that, till we were grown-up and even married. However, there was a good
deal of gossip among us young people, and we were often puzzled by what
was reported of the grown-up attitude in such matters: even the attitude
of such wide-minded, tolerant people as our Darwin uncles and aunts.

Frances tells me that much later Aunt Etty once asked her whether X, an
artist friend, had lived with Y before their marriage. '_I answered
that I thought it very likely. Aunt Etty then said that she was sorry,
but_ [Professor] _Albert Dicey_ [a great friend of hers] _agreed with
her, that one must uphold the moral standards, and therefore she could
not give X a bed for the night, after his lecture at Dorking. She knew
that I only told X that her spare-room was occupied, and it remains a
mystery how that improved X's morals, or anyone else's either_.' You
would think, that if a man married his mistress he would be doing the
best he could, given the state of things, by 'making an honest woman of
her'. But, not at all; it made it much worse. What _would_ they have had
the poor man do? I suppose the idea was, that such a marriage would be a
travesty of a real one.

I do not find it much easier to understand Uncle Frank's attitude when
Frances, after her marriage, went with Francis Cornford to see a
well-known writer, who had just returned to live with his wife, after a
serious interruption. Apparently his return made things no better,
though it might have been thought, that he should have been commended
and encouraged for his change of heart. But, no; Uncle Frank wrote that
he was surprised that the Cornfords could go near the house.

Well, I can suppose that, _from his point of view_, it did seem rather
unnecessary of the Cornfords to start a new acquaintance with a man who
had behaved in an anti-social way; and the fact that he was an
interesting and vital person ought not to make any difference. Of course
there always have to be standards of some kind, if society is to go on
at all. And if there are standards, something must be done to keep the
standards up. _Cutting the sinners_ was their sanction then; now we do
not generally think that cutting is of very much use.

The truth was, that the gap between the standard and the reality--and
there always must be some gap--was quite abnormally wide at that time,
so that the standards were particularly false. One has only to think of
the omissions in all the mid- and late-Victorian novels, to perceive
the fantastic unreality of the outlook of decent people, from about 1850
to 1914. It is often hard to believe that these decent people were not
being deliberately hypocritical, when they were so unwilling to face the
facts; but very few of them were consciously shirking; they were merely
taking on the views of the time, as it is natural enough for unthinking
or inexperienced people to do. For nearly seventy years the English
middle classes were locked up in a great fortress of unreality and
pretence; and no one who has not been brought up inside the fortress can
guess how thick the walls were, or how little of the sky outside could
be seen through the loopholes.

But it remains very strange to me, that a man like my uncle, observant
and experienced, a man who continually questioned everything in the
physical world, should seem to accept, without question, the narrow and
unrealistic moral values of his time.

       *     *     *     *     *

To go back to my own experiences as a chaperon. Once I was sent in that
capacity, on a whole-day expedition to Lincoln. Here I was quite aware
that I (horrid little prig) took a greater interest in the cathedral
than either of my charges; who incidentally, must both have been over
thirty at the time. I imagine there must have been great hopes of
engagement-producing opportunities on that expedition; for, from letters
written by the lady many years later, it is pretty clear that her heart
had been touched; but he, I am afraid, was something of a philanderer.
At any rate, either I, or Lincoln Cathedral, were inauspicious, and he
did not rise.

I suppose my mother must have thought that I should be less of a
restraint than a grown-up companion would have been. But I doubt it. I
think the lovers must have both feared and hated me; for surely they
must have guessed how deeply I despised them. It seems to me now that,
though I could not have said so at the time, I always knew exactly what
they were after; whether it was a serious affair, or only a flirtation;
and which of the two was the pursued and which the pursuer. Fortunately
I was not, like a child I have heard of, tormented with doubts, as to
what her duty would be, supposing the gentleman should suddenly kiss the
lady. No such improper idea would ever have occurred to me; I merely
fixed my eyes calmly on the couple, and observed the poor fools as
coldly as a man of science might consider a pair of courting earwigs. I
am not at all surprised that none of the romances put under my care came
to anything.

There was one occasion which I remember very well. A young man came to
call before the ladies were ready; they were all dressing upstairs; so I
was sent down to the drawing-room to say that they would soon be ready.
'And talk to him nicely till I come,' said the lady of his heart, who
was curling her fringe at the gas-burner in her bedroom. He was quite a
nice young man, I thought; and, though bored at seeing me, he played
with me fairly well for some time. I knew he was bored, but I thought
that he might as well be useful while he waited. So we played at
illnesses, and I lay on the sofa in the flowery summer drawing-room,
full of green reflected lights; and he was the doctor and pretended to
give me medicine out of a vase from the chimney-piece. But the vase had
some dust in it, and it made me cough; and suddenly he could bear the
suspense no longer, and he went away and stood by the fireplace with his
elbow on the chimney, and had a little anguish, all by himself. I lay on
the sofa and watched him, and realized quite well that he was in a state
of insufferable agitation at the thought of seeing his lady. And it just
seemed to me too absurd and silly for words.

[Illustration: Curling her fringe.]

Then the lady came rustling in, with her fringe nicely curled and a
lovely embroidered muslin dress on; and I left them to it, and went
away, back to a proper sensible life. But years later I recognized the
sensation myself. I never can think how people can say they like being
in love!

Here is my mother's considered opinion on courtship in England: '_June,
1887. My experience of English lovers is that if they mean anything,
they come straight to the point and make it evident. But if not, they
are as friendly as they can be, without the least idea of anything
more._' One longs to know how American lovers behaved?

[Illustration: Love. How ridiculous.]

The rules of propriety are supposed to have made life very complicated
in the last century, but in practice, I can't say that I found
nineteenth-century decency harder to manage than twentieth-century
indecency. In fact, I always find it easier to pretend to be shocked,
when I am not shocked, than to pretend not to be shocked when I am. So
that, on the whole, I got on quite well in the 'nineties.

But some things were very queer. For instance, there were the river
picnics. All summer, Sheep's Green and Coe Fen were pink with boys, as
naked as God made them; for bathing drawers did not exist then; or, at
least, not on Sheep's Green. You could see the pinkness, dancing about,
quite plain, from the end of our Big Island. Now to go Up the River, the
goal of all the best picnics, the boats had to go right by the bathing
places, which lay on both sides of the narrow stream. These dangerous
straits were taken in silence, and at full speed. The Gentlemen were set
to the oars--in this context one obviously thinks of them as
Gentlemen--and each Lady unfurled a parasol, and, like an ostrich,
buried her head in it, and gazed earnestly into its silky depths, until
the crisis was past, and the river was decent again.

[Illustration: The Boat Picnic. 'Youth on the prow and Pleasure at the
helm.']

Sometimes we children were sent off to fetch a compass round about the
danger zone, and to be picked up by the boats further on; but sometimes
we went in the boats with the grown-ups. And then I--but not Charles,
which was so unfair--was given a parasol, and told to put it up, and not
to look 'because it was horrid'. I obediently put up the parasol and
carefully arranged it between myself and the ladies, so that I could see
comfortably, without hurting their feelings. For I thought the bathing
place one of the most beautiful sights in the world: the thin naked
boys dancing about in the sunlight on the bright green grass; the
splashing, sparkling river; the reckless high dives, when the slim
bodies shot down through the air like angels coming down from heaven: it
was splendid, glorious, noble; it wasn't horrid at all. It was the
ladies who were horrid; but then, poor things, they always were even
stupider than most other grown-ups.

[Illustration: The ladies, God bless 'em.]

I had not the faintest idea why they objected to passing the bathing
sheds; though, with the fuss they made, it was really extraordinary that
they never succeeded in putting ideas into my head. But they never did.

For I must here and now confess that I was completely and even
scandalously uninterested in sex, until I was nearly grown-up. Shocking!
Unnatural! you will say. Yes, certainly; I admit it; but then, think
what a lot of trouble it saved. In fact, the only horrid curiosity I can
remember, was a wish to know whether Keith at the dancing-class had
anything in the way of trousers under his kilt; and that was really only
an interest in costume.

All inconvenient questions I used to put to Nana when I was in my bath.
She must have been very clever at baffling them, for when I asked why
one had toes, she answered at once: 'Well, you wouldn't like your foot
to end in a sharp bone, would you?' The form of her answer made me
acquiesce; but on thinking it over afterwards, it seemed to me that I
could have invented lots of other ways, besides toes, for ending off
feet. For instance, a round soft flap. I rather favoured this--no
toe-nails to cut--(which had been the original cause of my question). Or
paddles like frogs' feet? And anyhow, if you came to think of it, _why
not_ a sharp bone? Would it really be so dreadful?

Another time I asked her what was the use of the interesting little
button-hole in the middle of my tummy? 'That's where you were finished
off,' she said. So I had a vision of God making a knot in the cotton,
before he broke it off to begin on another baby.

I don't know why this information made me think that babies (who
apparently grew somehow inside) came out through this hole; but I did
think so till I was nearly grown-up. And it still seems to me that it
would be a much more sensible plan, than the complicated and painful
exit arranged by the Management. But as time went on, I began to doubt
the exactness of my deduction; and when I was seventeen or eighteen, I
tried very hard, and quite unsuccessfully, to find out the truth about
the matter from Chambers' Encyclopdia. You can have no idea, if you
have not tried, how difficult it is to find out anything whatever from
an encyclopdia, unless you know all about it already; and I did not
even know what words to look up. Of course I would have died sooner than
have asked anyone about it; and I never did, but the truth just
gradually dripped through, like coffee through a percolator.

It is an interesting proof that _bustles_ were still familiar to us,
that when my mother was expecting another baby, my cousin Nora asked her
nurse: 'Why does Aunt Maud wear a bustle in front?' This was only partly
a very naughty joke on her part--though who would ever have expected
such shocking flippancy from Nora? Quiet Nora, who always reminded me of
a little, obstinate, grey Quaker donkey, so clever and sober and pretty.
But this remark was also a sort of trailer, which she hoped might lead
to more information on a subject, about which the grown-ups were being
particularly mysterious and tantalizing. But it was no good; she drew a
blank.

There were some problems which I never solved in all my youth. For
instance, there was Gloucester's Natural Son, in _King Lear_. For if bad
Edmund was a Natural Son, presumably Good Edgar must have been an
Un-natural son; and what on earth could that be? Was Edgar's birth
somehow miraculous? Like Christ's? Surely we must all be natural
children, so ordinary as we all were? We couldn't _all_ be un-natural?
And yet being natural in the play was somehow wicked, and sinister and
extraordinary.

David Copperfield was puzzling, too. He was a 'posthumous child' and was
born with a 'caul'. The French dictionary, the only one I had, gave
_posthumous_; _posthume_, which did not help me much; but for _caul_ it
gave _fillet_, and of course a _fillet_ was a string bag. How very odd.
Then someone gave me a present of _Esmond_; but my mother said I was not
to read it, because parts of it were 'not very nice'. Of course I wanted
to find out what was not nice about it; so, by a quibble, I decided that
I might read all that I could manage without cutting the pages. With
industry and perseverance this meant practically all of it, though the
pages were not cut for many a long year. But I could never discover what
was wrong with it.

But though my sex-life was so sadly simple, there were things which
shocked, nay, positively disgusted me. For instance, I once saw, through
the banisters at Down, one of my Darwin uncles give a friendly, conjugal
kiss to my aunt, his wife. I rushed away in absolute horror from this
unprecedented orgy. It seemed to me simply sickening, revolting, that
this uncle--such a nice, quiet, decent sort of man, should be Fond of
his wife: fond enough of her to kiss her in the hall! Even now I can't
bring myself to tell you which uncle it was. I tried never, never to
think about it again.

[Illustration: The dangerous impropriety of Charley's Aunt.]

And then there was _Charley's Aunt_. This was the first real play we
ever saw. It did not seem to me at all funny, only tremendous and
exciting; and, at one point, most dangerously improper. I have never
seen the play since then, but as I remember it, one of the young men
dressed up as Charley's Aunt, and ran across the stage, lifting up his
petticoats, and _showing his trousers underneath_. Nothing since then
has ever shocked me so much.

Though, now I come to think of it, I had been shocked once before in the
same sort of way. As a very small child I had been put to sleep in the
room of an old lady, an American great-aunt on a visit. When I was in
bed this elderly lady came up to dress for dinner. She wore a bonnet
with purple ostrich feathers, tied under her chin with broad ribbons;
and a purple satin dress, very grand, with velvet bits about it, here
and there. For some reason she began her toilet by taking off her skirt,
and then came up to my cot dressed in her bonnet and bodice and
feather-boa, but tailing off sadly lower down into a skimpy
under-petticoat. I was absolutely appalled at the sight, and howled and
shrieked and roared, till I had to be taken away and put to sleep
somewhere else. I still think the costume was both sinister and
indecent, but I admit that my memory of the poor lady has become
hopelessly mixed up with the pictures of the Duchess in _Alice Through
the Looking-glass_.

[Illustration: Sleeping with relations.]

This was the aunt with whom my mother was travelling in Italy, when she
got engaged to my father; and she seems to have been a perfect dragon
of propriety. My mother writes from Nice at the end of 1883: '_Such a
vial of wrath on my head I have not had for a long time. Oh, how I got
it! Aunt Em made "one request, that while I am in her charge I am
obliged to keep"; and that is "that I am not to shake hands with any
gentleman. Ladies never do." I said, "If a gentleman holds his hand out,
I am not going to put mine behind my back. I will not be rude. Aunt Cara
told me in Cambridge what I should do, if a man held out his hand."
"These are Cambridge manners," was her reply. If there had been any
cause for the scolding I should have taken it_ (maybe) _in good part,
but there was not. I had treated Mr. H. like any other tennis player_.'
The operative word in this passage is '_maybe_'; I cannot imagine my
mother ever submitting tamely to such a rating. A tactless aunt, I
think.

Much later, I was again most painfully scandalized by the lightness and
impropriety of Margaret's behaviour. She was always extremely cheeky, a
fault which requires much correction in a younger member of the family;
but in spite of our firm, but kind remonstrances, she remained always
incorrigibly uppish; even to the extent of sometimes pinching her
elders, and once or twice actually biting them! Alas, she is still the
same, though it is some time now since she last bit me.

Well, the occasion was this: we--Margaret and I--were being taken across
London by one of the American aunts; and she chose to park us at the
National Gallery, while she did some shopping near by. I should have
liked the pictures very much if I had not been so terribly afraid that
she might never come back to fetch us away. And then what would happen
to us? Supposing no one ever came and at closing time we were still
there? Should we be sent to prison? Or should we be left alone and
starving in the gallery? Or should we be just turned out, alone, into
those dreadful roaring London streets? Horrors, horrors, every way....

But Margaret was not a bit afraid; she was cross and tired and bored,
so she simply sat down on the floor of the big Italian room. What could
I do when a policeman came up (for there were policemen then in the
National Gallery) but slink off into the next room, blushing to the end
of my toes, and pretending that the impudent creature did not belong to
me? Though the denial made me feel exactly like St. Peter himself.

[Illustration: 'A Policeman's lot.']

The policeman told her to get up at once. At first she refused; but on
his reiterated command, she obeyed and went calmly into the next room
and sat down on the floor there. He followed, and the scene was repeated
several times, while I skulked about, watching through doorways. In fact
'the argument only ended with the visit', or rather with the return of
the errant aunt. And I hope she was well scolded by the policeman for
leaving us there alone.

One must always expect to suffer from the shamelessness of grown-up
relations; it can't be helped, and is part of that curious thick-skinned
obtuseness, which unfortunately seems to be an integral part of the
grown-up character. But that a child, a contemporary, should humiliate
me in this way, was unforgiveable; and I don't know if I have quite
forgiven her even now.

       *     *     *     *     *

The event I am now going to try to describe has nothing to do with the
rest of this chapter, though it is inseparably connected in my mind with
the old Victorian flirtations, which I used to supervise.

I think I was about six years old when it happened. It was on a Sunday
afternoon in early summer. There had been people to luncheon, and now
they were all sitting under the medlar tree on the Little Island.
Presently I left them and came in and went up to the night-nursery--the
long, big, old night-nursery, with the wavy floor, and the great window
at the end, which looked right down on the river beneath. The medlar
tree was just opposite on the other bank, and I could see bits of the
ladies' summer dresses through the leaves, and hear their voices and
those of the men, in a pattern of light and dark, with sometimes a
laugh, all gay and self-conscious and sociable. The sun was shining and
the river was flowing smoothly down, with the tiny noise that you could
only hear if you listened for it.

And then, with the sun shining, it began to rain. Not much, but a few
big drops falling splash, splash, on the green lilac leaves. And
suddenly the world stood still. It simply stopped, and I was quite alone
and _outside_. I did not belong, I was separate, just looking on;
_outside_.

With the next beat of my heart, the world went on again, and everything
was quite usual and ordinary. Only I had been outside. This was the
first time this happened to me, and I was much shaken and frightened,
afterwards it happened often, and I grew used to it. But it was always
terrifying and lonely, and seemed to point the contrast between ME and
all those other friendly people, who sat there talking under the trees.

[Illustration]




  CHAPTER VII

  _Aunt Etty_

  Question: _Fussy people Darwins are,
            Who's the fussiest by far?_

  Answer: _Several aunts are far from calm,
          But Aunt Etty takes the Palm._

                   (From _Christmas Conundrums, by_ Bernard.)


I have defined Ladies as people who did not do things themselves. Aunt
Etty was most emphatically such a person. She told me, when she was
eighty-six, that she had never made a pot of tea in her life; and that
she had never in all her days been out in the dark alone, not even in a
cab; and I don't believe she had ever travelled by train without a maid.
She certainly always took her maid with her when she went in a fly to
the dentist's. She asked me once to give her a bit of the dark meat of a
chicken, because she had never tasted anything but the breast. I am sure
that she had never sewn on a button, and I should guess that she had
hardly ever even posted a letter herself. There were always people to do
these things for her. In fact, in some ways, she was very like a royal
person. Once she wrote when her maid, the patient and faithful Janet,
was away for a day or two: '_I am very busy answering my own bell._' And
I can well believe it, for Janet's work was no sinecure. But, of course,
while Janet was away, the housemaid was doing all the real work; and
Aunt Etty was only perhaps finding the postage stamps for herself, or
putting on her own shawl--the sort of things she rang for Janet to do,
every five minutes all day long.

Aunt Etty was my father's elder sister Henrietta; and she had married
Uncle Richard Litchfield, who worked on the legal side of the
Ecclesiastical Commission. The Darwin brothers were always inclined to
laugh at him; indeed there still survives the unkind saying of one of
them, that 'Little Richards have long ears'. And, of course, they
sometimes laughed at Aunt Etty, too! But _I_ liked him very much,
because he talked to me as if I were quite grown-up.

He was a nice funny little man, whose socks were always coming down; he
had an egg-shaped waistcoat, and a fuzzy, waggly, whitey-brown beard,
which was quite indistinguishable, both in colour and texture, from the
Shetland shawl which Aunt Etty generally made him wear round his neck.
For her business in life, her profession, was taking care of healths,
her own and other people's.

She had been an invalid all her life; but I don't know what (if
anything) had originally been the matter with her. I should guess,
however, that she had really been delicate when young. Her tiny form,
her little monkey hands, seemed to belong to a frail, but wiry, person.
But I am quite sure that, with her iron will, she could have ignored and
controlled her ill-health, both of the nerves and of the body, if only
she had been set off in the right way when young.

The trouble was that in my grandparents' house it was a distinction and
a mournful pleasure to be ill. This was partly because my grandfather
was always ill, and his children adored him and were inclined to imitate
him; and partly because it was so delightful to be pitied and nursed by
my grandmother. She was a most remarkable woman, to outsiders appearing
rather stern and alarming, and with great independence of mind. But she
was also extremely tender-hearted, and I have sometimes thought that she
must have been rather too sorry for her family when they were unwell. A
little neglect or astringency might have done some of them a world of
good. Hundreds of letters of Grandmamma's exist, and hundreds more of
Aunt Etty's; and every single one of them, however humdrum, contains
some characteristic and charming phrase; and every one of them also
contains dangerously sympathetic references to the ill health of one, or
of several, of the family. Many of their ailments must have been of
nervous, or partly of nervous, origin; of course, there was real
physical illness, too, though no one now will ever know how much, for a
great deal of illness was left undiagnosed in those days. But of one
thing I am quite certain: that the attitude of the whole Darwin family
to sickness was most unwholesome. At Down, ill health was considered
normal.

[Illustration: Uncle Richard has been sent to bed, because Aunt Etty
suspects him of having a cold. She is feeling very anxious about him.
This is their Ruskin and Morris drawing-room at Kensington Square.]

Every time I re-read _Emma_ I see more clearly that we must be somehow
related to the Knightleys of Donwell Abbey; both dear Mr. Knightley and
Mr. John Knightley seem so familiar and cousinly. Surely no one, who had
not Darwin or Wedgwood blood in their veins, could be as cross as Mr.
John Knightley was, when he had to turn out to dine at the Weston's.
'The folly of not allowing people to be comfortable at home! And the
folly of people's not staying comfortably at home when they can!'--it
might be Uncle Frank himself speaking. But it is obvious, too, that
there is some strain of the Woodhouses of Hartfield in us, of Mr.
Woodhouse in particular. There was a kind of sympathetic gloating in the
Darwin voices, when they said, for instance, to one of us children: 'And
have you got a _bad_ sore throat, my poor cat?' which filled me with
horror and shame. It was exactly the voice in which Mr. Woodhouse must
have spoken of 'Poor Miss Taylor'. But it had one good effect: it quite
cured us of _enjoying_ ill health. I denied having a sore throat at all
if I possibly could.

I have been told that when Aunt Etty was thirteen the doctor
recommended, after she had a 'low fever', that she should have breakfast
in bed for a time. _She never got up to breakfast again in all her
life._ I admit that I know none of the facts, but I cannot think it good
mothering on the part of my grandmother to have allowed a child to slip
into such habits.

The three of her children who were most affected by the cult of ill
health, were Aunt Etty, Uncle Horace, and, later on, my father, George,
though as a boy he was strong enough. But illness, real or imaginary
(and there was certainly both), did not prevent my father and Uncle
Horace from doing a great deal of work. Unfortunately Aunt Etty, being a
lady, had no real work to do; she had not even any children to bring up.
This was a terrible pity, for she had nothing on which to spend her
unbounded affection and energy, except the management of her house and
husband; and she could have ruled a kingdom with success. As it was, ill
health became her profession and absorbing interest. But her interest
was never tinged by self-pity, it was an abstract, almost scientific,
interest; and our sympathy was not demanded. She kept her professional
life in a separate compartment from her social life.

[Illustration: Aunt Etty ordering dinner in her patent anti-cold mask.]

She was always going away to rest, in case she might be tired later on
in the day, or even next day. She would send down to the cook to ask her
to count the prune-stones left on her plate, as it was very important to
know whether she had eaten three or four prunes for luncheon. She would
make Janet put a silk handkerchief over her left foot as she lay in bed,
because it was that amount colder than her right foot. And when there
were colds about she often wore a kind of gas-mask of her own invention.
It was an ordinary wire kitchen-strainer, stuffed with antiseptic
cotton-wool, and tied on like a snout, with elastic over her ears. In
this she would receive her visitors and discuss politics in a hollow
voice out of her eucalyptus-scented seclusion, oblivious of the fact
that they might be struggling with fits of laughter. She
characteristically wrote to a proposed visitor: '_Don't come by the ten
o'clock train, but by the 3.30, so as to give me time to put you off, if
I am not well._' In the year 1920, when she was seventy-seven, one of
her little great-nieces happened to get chicken-pox in her house. Aunt
Etty wrote to Charles at Cambridge, asking him to look in the Down
family Bible to find out whether she had had the disease herself, as she
did not want to catch it. He was not able to find the Bible at once--it
was in a box at the bank--so she wrote again, very urgently. Upon which
he had the satisfaction of replying by telegram: '_Yes, you had
chicken-pox in August 1845._' (All the illnesses and vaccinations are
carefully recorded in the Down Bible, but it does not look as if it had
been much used for anything else.)

Yet all that sort of thing did not affect her relationship with us. To
us she only showed her immense interest in everything in the world, her
vitality, her affection. We all laughed at her and we all adored her.
And when there was anything to be decided or arranged she could always
do it; especially, of course, if anyone were ill. To quote from a letter
of hers: '_Anybody being ill is like champagne_ [to me] _for the time
being_.' In fact, she enjoyed her profession very much indeed.

I don't think that Uncle Richard had originally been ill, or
hypochondriacal at all, but Aunt Etty had decided that he was extremely
delicate; and he was very obliging about it. I believe that he thought
it saved trouble to obey orders; as indeed it probably did. Yet Aunt
Etty always managed to combine the proper Victorian respect for a man
and a husband, with this obedience of his over merely material affairs.
'Uncle Richard says' or 'Uncle Richard thinks' were matters of serious
importance.

At frequent intervals Janet used to bring poor Uncle Richard bowls of
Benger's food--which we called 'Uncle Richard's porridge'. He always
seemed surprised when this occurred, and a little saddened; but he set
aside his book, pushed his spectacles up on to his forehead, and ate it
up like a man. If the window had to be opened to air the room in cold
weather, Aunt Etty covered him up entirely with a dust sheet for fear of
draughts; and he sat there as patient as a statue, till he could be
unveiled.

[Illustration: Airing the room. Aunt Etty is keeping guard over Uncle
Richard during this dangerous proceeding. She is holding a thermometer
in her hand.]

Number 31 Kensington Square, where they lived, was full of Morris
wallpapers, and Morris curtains, and blue china, and peacock feathers,
and Arundel prints, and all that sort of thing; for Uncle Richard had
once been the typical cultured young man of his time. Darwins never
cared enough about Art or Fashion, to be much interested in what was
Right and Highbrow. When they bought an armchair they thought first of
whether it would be comfortable; and next of whether it would wear well;
and then, a long way afterwards, of whether they themselves happened to
like the look of it. The result, though often dull, and sometimes
unfortunate, was on the whole pleasing, because it was at any rate
unpretentious. But Uncle Richard had adored Ruskin, and worshipped
Morris, and had slept for years with a copy of _In Memoriam_ under his
pillow. He told me once how he and his friends used to wait outside the
book shops in the early morning, when they heard that a new volume of
Tennyson was to come out. He had read all Browning, too, and all
Wordsworth, and Carlyle, in fact nearly everything contemporary; and he
constantly re-read the Classics in their own classic tongues.

He was really fond of music and tried, with remarkably poor results, to
make us sing. At concerts he indulged in a special kind of intellectual
sandwich, by reading certain passages of Greek plays, while listening to
certain pieces of music. A triumph of timing occurred once, when he was
listening to the thunderstorm in the Pastoral Symphony, and reading the
thunderstorm in _Oedipus at Colonus_, and a _real_ thunderstorm took
place! The concertina was his instrument, and, of course, he only played
classical music on it. He also kept numbers of large dull photographs of
all the things you go to look at in Italy, specially of the ones that
Ruskin praised. They were all kept in green baize bags, carefully made
with buttons and buttonholes and highly suitable for moths. I have often
wondered: _why green baize?_ But I think Ruskin must have recommended
it.

In fact, Uncle Richard had done everything that an enlightened person,
flourishing in the middle of the nineteenth century, ought to do; taught
at the Working Men's College, organized great country walks, admired
Nature, and all the rest of it.

[Illustration: Janet bringing poor Uncle Richard's porridge.]

When I remember him best he was always, between the cups of Benger's
food, cutting bits out of newspapers and sticking them into scrapbooks,
for he was making a dossier of the Dreyfus case. He used to tell me all
about it, but as the case was then in a somewhat confused state--if
indeed it was ever anything else--it is perhaps pardonable that I can
only remember that there was a very wicked man, with the fascinating
female name of Esther Hazy.

We used sometimes to stay at 31 Kensington Square, all among the London
smuts (much thicker then than now); and we would sleep in the
chintz-curtained beds, surrounded by the bright patterns and the Morris
wallpapers; and enjoy the supreme delight of driving to a Gilbert and
Sullivan in a hansom cab; though we really saw more of Aunt Etty at
Down, where we spent most of the summer. The only disadvantage of going
to stay with Aunt Etty was the end of the journey, which I dreaded. For,
when we got to King's Cross, two or three cab-runners would attach
themselves to us and would follow behind the four-wheeler, all the way
to Kensington Square; hoping to get a tip for carrying our luggage
upstairs. The great heavy trunks and portmanteaux of those days had to
be carried by two men, but Aunt Etty would never let the touts into the
house; she had always engaged beforehand a most Respectable Person, the
Square-keeper, to help the cab-driver to carry up the boxes. My father
would put his head out of the cab-window, and tell the runners that they
would not be needed; but they followed us all the same, and were very
angry when we got there and they were told to go away. Once one of them
burst into tears, and my father, rather shamefacedly gave him a shilling
after all. This was supposed to be very wrong--indiscriminate charity:
helping those who begged, and not those who really needed help. I am
sure that these runners made my father quite as miserable as they made
me.

It was here, at No. 31, that I discovered Bewick, one afternoon while
Aunt Etty was having her rest. I remember lying on the sofa between the
dining-room windows with the peacock blue serge curtains, and wishing
passionately that I could have been Mrs. Bewick. Of course, I should
have liked still more to be Mrs. Rembrandt, but that seemed too
tremendous even to imagine; whereas it did not seem impossibly
outrageous to think of myself as Mrs. Bewick. She was English enough,
and homely enough, anyhow. Surely, I thought, if I cooked his roast beef
beautifully and mended his clothes and minded the children--surely he
would, just sometimes, let me draw and engrave a little tailpiece for
him. I wouldn't want to be known, I wouldn't sign it. Only just to be
allowed to invent a little picture sometimes. O happy, happy Mrs.
Bewick! thought I, as I kicked my heels on the blue sofa.

[Illustration: Mrs. Bewick.]

Of course I wanted still more, more than anything in the world, to be a
man. Then I might be a really good painter. A woman had not much chance
of that. I wanted so much to be a boy that I did not dare to think about
it at all, for it made me feel quite desperate to know that it was
impossible to be one. But I always dreamt I was a boy. If the truth must
be told, still now, in my dreams at night, I am generally a young man!

It was here too, at Kensington Square, that I first knew the dreary
pangs of jealousy. The occasion was The Jubilee Procession of 1897. Aunt
Etty had hired a room from which to see it; and as she was much afraid
of the difficulty of getting there through the morning crowds, she
characteristically made all the complicated arrangements necessary for
sleeping there the night before. And Frances and Charles were to go,
too, and _to sleep on the floor_! I was to go with my father, in the
morning, to a very good seat at the Athenum; but what was that compared
to _sleeping on the floor_? I stood in the doorstep of No. 31 in an
agony and watched them all drive away in a four-wheeler--Aunt Etty, and
Uncle Richard, and the pre-Janet maid, and Frances, and Charles--with
plenty of bags and bundles and hot-water bottles, you may be sure; and
next day all the grandeur of the Athenum was clouded by pain.

The old house at Kensington Square had a very strong flavour of its own.
It was a peculiar kind of earthly paradise--earthly, not celestial. It
was a tapestry, worked in rich, bright colours to a complex pattern, a
Morris tapestry, not a medieval one. The food was delicious, the beds
were soft, the rhythm ran smoothly, everyone was kind and good and true
and happy; and it seemed as if evil could never come near.

Down, my grandmother's house, had a different flavour, much cooler and
barer, less of the earth, less comfortable: a fresco in pale clear
colours, a simpler, larger pattern. Aunt Etty was generally at Down when
we went there, but she was only an incident there, though an important
one, bringing a breath of her own warm atmosphere with her.

When Uncle Richard died Aunt Etty moved to a house near Gomshall in
Surrey; and there she transformed a very ordinary villa into the same
Earthly Paradise we had known in London; only now there was a garden and
a wood to replace the mysterious charm of the old Kensington Square
house, where Esmond's mistress and the lovely Beatrix might have lived.


The journey to Burrow's Hill was always a happy one. One drove in the
bumpy four-wheeler up the deep narrow lane, past the sawmill and the
level-crossing, and turned steeply up the drive to the house. The door
would be opened instantly by the beaming Frances, the parlourmaid; while
deaf Nelly smiled a welcome from the stairs--Nelly, who ran about all
day long with shining copper cans of very hot water; and in the kitchen
Emily--who wore such a fascinating wig--would be preparing all the
dishes I was known to like best: boiled chicken with white sauce, and
coffee trifle so rich that really I could hardly eat it at all. And
there would be Aunt Etty on the drawing-room sofa, in her red chuddar
shawl and her little lace cap, with all her bags and books and papers
around her; and I would see again her small, downy, soft-skinned face;
and would know for certain, that here, at any rate, I was loved and
welcomed by everyone. At home I was loved to be sure; but there I was
always apt to get across the current; and though I knew that it was all
my own fault, that did not seem to make it any easier. But here we were
all godlings; benevolent, witty beings; heroes to Janet and Emily and
all the dear everlasting maids; and though we knew very well how
unheroic we really were, there was great reassurance in their affection.

All day long at Burrow's Hill one would be interrupted by Janet, coming
every few minutes with messages from Aunt Etty; it made it difficult to
settle down to any work. 'Could you please look up the date of the year
of The Great Comet for Mrs. Litchfield.' 'Mrs. Litchfield says would you
like lamb or soles best for lunch?' Mrs. Litchfield says, do you know
how long is the quarantine for mumps?' And every morning came the
message: 'Mrs. Litchfield would like to see you in her room at five
minutes to eleven' (or five minutes past twelve, or some other exact
time)--an interview which was always interesting. Even when, very
occasionally, Aunt Etty gave one of us a gentle and reasoned
remonstrance about some piece of bad behaviour, it made us feel all the
more that we belonged to her; and it had the greater effect, from the
obvious reluctance with which she spoke.

Under Uncle Richard's influence Aunt Etty had learnt, after her own
fashion, to appreciate poetry and music. Unfortunately she had no ear
for rhythm, and always applied the full measure of her drastic common
sense to all the more imaginative passages of the poets. One would be
called upon to read aloud, say, Wordworth's _Excursion_ with
her--Wordsworth was her religion--but one was never able to read more
than two or three consecutive lines without stopping to discuss
_exactly_ what the words meant; or, alternatively, for her to give
messages to Janet. One of her most engaging habits was to alter a phrase
in a poem to suit herself, if she did not happen to approve of the
poet's own version; and if she was not satisfied with her alteration,
she would apply to Frances, Margaret, or even me, to improve it for her.
I remember that Wordsworth's

  _The wind comes to me from the fields of sleep_

did not please her. What does it mean anyhow? Sleep does not grow in
fields. I said, why not try _fields of sheep_. This was not well
received. There exist five or six versions of Browning's lines in _The
Lost Mistress_,

  _For each glance of the eye so bright and black
    Though I keep with heart's endeavour,
  Your voice, when you wish the snowdrops back,
    Though it stay in my heart for ever!_

This won't do at all, because bright black eyes remind one so much of
'_the bugles on old ladies' mantles_'. She tried changing the first line
to '_eye so dark and bright_', and rhyming it with '_your voice wishing
back winter's firelight_' or '_the snowdrops pure white_' and several
other variants, none of which scan at all; and at last applied to
Frances in despair. Frances changed '_bright and black_' to '_bright and
clear_', and rhymed it with '_snowdrops here_'; and all was well. There
is a version of Wordworth's _Tintern Revisited_, entitled: _Tintern
Revisited and Improved_. The Bard himself was not above amendment, but
the alterations have unfortunately been lost.

Aunt Etty was a very fierce anti-Catholic. One evening, at Burrow's
Hill, she attacked me on the subject. I was only about eighteen and no
match for her vehemence, but I did my duty, and stood up to her as well
as I could; and my friends could not have been more surprised than I was
to find myself defending Catholicism.

She began: 'If you want a novel to hot you up against the Catholics,
I've got a most shocking one here.'

_Me_, 'Well, I don't really need one just now, thank you; but what's it
about?'

_Aunt Etty_, 'It's about a priest who rides so fast to give a man
absolution before he dies, that he KILLS his horse under him. Isn't it
_horrible_!'

_Me_ (mildly), 'Well, I suppose they believe that absolution matters
more than anything else.'

_Aunt Etty_ (almost unable to speak with indignation), 'But doesn't the
_Horse_ matter? Doesn't _Cruelty_ matter? How can they think,' etc.,
etc.

And so the battle was engaged. The whole evening the unequal contest
raged, and I was thankful when, at ten o'clock, I was able to escort her
up to bed, with all her luggage of hot-water bottles, and bags, and
books, and shawls.

By that time I had a headache myself, and I was glad to go to bed too. I
was lying peacefully reading, and beginning to feel a little calmer,
when the door burst open and a tiny frail figure, in a red dressing-gown
and a white shawl, appeared at the end of my bed. Fixing me with eyes
burning out from the deep hollows under her shaggy brows, she began
without preamble: 'I could SWALLOW the Pope of Rome, but what I can NOT
swallow is the Celibacy of the Clergy.' I think I must have become
unconscious here, for I can remember no more of the interview.

[Illustration: 'I could SWALLOW the Pope of Rome.']

Her indignation could be terrifying. Once, at Cannes, she burst into the
midst of a crowd of louts who were kicking at a dog which had been run
over; and, a tiny, furious figure, with blazing blue eyes, she terrified
the policeman and the whole unsympathetic mob into obeying her orders in
cowed submission.

Once she suddenly asked Charles at lunch how you should address the
Archbishop of Canterbury in writing to him; this was in 1920, or
thereabouts. Charles said: 'I don't know; I suppose your Grace or
something. But why do you want to write to him?' Aunt Etty said:
'Because he's been making a speech in the House of Lords, saying that
the Bolshevics are doing inexpressibly horrible things in Russia. And
when one of the other peers asked him what exactly they had been doing,
he answered it was so dreadful that he couldn't possibly speak of it.
Now, that's all wrong; there's nothing in the world that the Archbishop
of Canterbury ought not to be able to say in the House of Lords, and I'm
going to write and tell him so.' And I hope she did. This was like her
realistic attitude to life. She once said to me, about the Roman
occupation of Britain--in her most downright tone: '_Don't tell me_' (I
wasn't telling her), 'that all those Roman soldiers lived all that time
in England and didn't leave a lot of Roman babies behind them. And a
very good thing, too, I dare say.'

Margaret tells me how one spring, when Aunt Etty was quite old, she
suddenly announced that she had never heard a nightingale sing, and must
do so at once. But as the nightingale's turn did not come on till quite
late, she would get ready for bed first. So, at 10.30, Margaret pushed
her in her bath-chair up to the little wood at the end of the garden.
She was in a special bird-listening costume of red dressing-gown,
several shawls, scarves and rugs; a hot-water bottle and rubber boots;
her hair was in a wispy pigtail, and she was without her teeth. (I am
thankful to say that I never had an aunt who was afraid of seeming
ridiculous.)

At the first sight of her the nightingale, who had been singing madly up
till then, naturally left the stage; and with all a _prima donna's_
proper feelings, entirely refused to sing any more. So Aunt Etty had to
add 'not having heard a nightingale' to all the other things she had
never done.

This little wood was also the scene of a form of sport, of which Aunt
Etty can claim to be the inventor; and which certainly deserves to be
more widely known. In our native woods there grows a kind of toadstool,
called in the vernacular _The Stinkhorn_, though in Latin it bears a
grosser name. The name is justified, for the fungus can be hunted by the
scent alone; and this was Aunt Etty's great invention. Armed with a
basket and a pointed stick, and wearing a special hunting cloak and
gloves, she would sniff her way round the wood, pausing here and there,
her nostrils twitching, when she caught a whiff of her prey; then at
last, with a deadly pounce, she would fall upon her victim, and poke his
putrid carcase into her basket. At the end of the day's sport, the
catch was brought back and burnt in the deepest secrecy on the
drawing-room fire, with the door locked; _because of the morals of the
maids_. Perhaps now that there are no maids, this part of the ritual
does not matter so much. Anyhow, it was the chase and not the morality
which appealed to Aunt Etty. She used to excuse her ardour by saying:
'Some day there will be no more stinkhorns left in the wood,' but she
would have been dreadfully disappointed if that had happened. How is it
that this exhilarating and wholesome sport is so little known? There
must be many owners of fine preserves of stinkhorns, who make no use of
their privileges at all.

[Illustration: Stinkhorn hunter in full cry.]

This wood always needed a great deal of discipline: a branch lopped
here, a path widened, a tree felled there. Old Newton, the gardener, was
once sent for to Aunt Etty's bedroom, and forced to lay his hoary head
on the pillow beside her own, in order that he might see exactly which
bough should be cut back to improve the view for her, as she lay in bed.

The thought of Newton reminds me that when she received the news of my
engagement--which like all engagements was to be kept secret--she wrote
to Frances: '_I have put Gwen's dear letter in an envelope labelled_
Pigs, Newton; _so I think it will be quite safe, and no one will read
it_.'

When she was tired by day, she used to take refuge in doing her accounts
and seeing to her investments--(the mere thought of this relaxation
makes me feel tired). At night, she often lay awake, struggling with
the problem of why God allowed suffering. Like Man Friday, she asked:
'_Why God no kill the Devil?_' And like Robinson Crusoe she found the
question very difficult to answer. Crusoe himself was obliged to
'_pretend not to hear_', till he was ready to explain that '_we are
preserved to repent and be pardoned_'. Upon which Friday floored him
again with: '_So you, I, devil, all wicked, all preserve, repent, God
pardon all._' Crusoe was again forced to '_divert the discourse_', till
he could remember why God would not pardon the devil; he then gave poor
Friday a set of very specious explanations; or so they seem to the
unbeliever. Aunt Etty was far too honest to quibble, and never did
satisfy herself with an answer; but when pushed too far, she would turn
to a short list of subjects, about which she was annoyed. She kept these
ready for use as counter-irritants, so that she could feel pleasantly
indignant about them, when she was not able to sleep. During the 1914
War, the thought of Admiral Jellicoe's weak mouth was a very
satisfactory standby; and the untrustworthiness of Winston Churchill at
this time, or the immorality of H. G. Wells, often sent her comfortably
off to sleep. I feel sure that she would have forgiven Churchill now,
and would have been one of his strongest supporters; but I doubt if
Wells would ever have been accepted.

Sometimes she would say to one of us: 'Now, you must be Churchill, or
Wells, or the Pope of Rome [or anyone else who was out of favour]; and
just you _try_ to answer a few questions I shall put to you.' And then
the most devastating questions would be fired off: 'How on earth did you
expect to take the Dardanelles?' or 'You must surely agree that Adultery
is Wrong?' or 'How can you think that Confession can strengthen anyone's
sense of responsibility?' It was quite shattering. Often you were driven
into a corner, and just had to admit that you (as the culprit) had made
an unfortunate mistake; or that you hadn't exactly meant what you said
in your books. There really seemed to be no possible defence at the
time.

I must add that, hard as it may be to believe, every single word of this
chapter is true. Dear Aunt Etty, how easy it is to draw your
absurdities, how difficult to show your lovableness; yet we were all
your children, and coming to Burrow's Hill was always coming home.

Not that I want to stay at Burrow's Hill for very long. It is too
comfortable, a little stifling; and really Janet does interrupt too
often--one can't get anything done.

[Illustration: Aunt Bessy in the drawing-room at Down.]




  CHAPTER VIII

  _Down_


In one of my mother's early letters there is a sad heart-cry: 'We are
going to Down. Oh, you can't imagine how dull these English
country-houses are! There is nothing at all to do there.' Down--now
spelt Downe--in Kent, was my grandfather's house. He--Charles
Darwin--had died in 1882, three years before I was born, and after his
death my grandmother spent the winters in Cambridge and only the summers
at Down House, where we all went for long visits. Sometimes, too, she
lent us the house for the winter or spring holidays, so we knew the
place well.

[Illustration: Down House. A little game of croquet. Note my mother's
style of play.]

I am afraid it _was_ dull for my mother, and probably would have been
dull to most people. There was hardly any local society at all. There
never had been many real friends in the neighbourhood; this was chiefly
owing to my grandfather's ill health; but also partly because the
Darwins did not fit very well into any particular pigeonhole in the life
around them, though they were on good terms with all their acquaintance.
Social needs were supplied by congenial relations who came to stay.
There were still plenty of relations staying in the house when I
remember it; all kind and good and pleasant, but generally much older
than my mother. There was very little talk about any of the things in
which she was interested; only mild family jokes, and long quiet
conversations about politics; or, more often, about facts and theories;
interesting, if you were interested in general scientific ideas, but
utterly boring to her. There were no games, because no one wanted to
play, except that Uncle Frank and Bernard used sometimes to knock about
golf-balls a little. It is true that there was croquet on the lawn, but
there was generally no one to play with, except Aunt Bessy or us
children, which can't have been very amusing for her. I remember the
exasperation of a game of croquet, where no one would play seriously;
even my mother playing with one hand, while she held Billy upside down
under the other arm, because he kept on running away. There was no
riding or shooting or anything of that kind; nothing to do but to go for
long walks in the steep valleys and great lonely woods, and to get your
boots stuck in huge balls of red clay, as you crossed the heavy
plough-lands. 'A congeries of muddy lanes', Aunt Etty said scornfully of
the country round; but I thought, and still think, it beautiful. The
villages and farms all stand on the plateau of high cultivated
chalk-and-clay downland, and not in the deep waterless valleys which
intersect it.

But we Darwins never found it dull there, for we loved every moment of
life in the country; and we all, old and young alike, were apt to fly
away out of doors and windows, at the first sound of the front-door
bell. 'Visitors! Danger!' would be the cry. I truly admire my mother for
enduring so good-humouredly the long country holidays we spent at Down
or in Yorkshire; for she did not care for the country for itself; people
were her real interest. Prospects did not please her very much, but Man
was far from being vile.

But to us, everything at Down was perfect. That was an axiom. And by us
I mean, not only the children, but all the uncles and aunts who belonged
there. Uncle Horace was once heard to say in a surprised voice: 'No, I
don't really like salvias very much, _though they did grow at Down_.'
The implication, to us, would have been obvious. Of course all the
flowers that grew at Down were beautiful; and different from all other
flowers. Everything there was different. And better.

For instance, the path in front of the veranda was made of large round
water-worn pebbles, from some sea beach. They were not loose, but stuck
down tight in moss and sand, and were black and shiny, as if they had
been polished. I adored those pebbles. I mean literally, _adored_;
worshipped. This passion made me feel quite sick sometimes. And it was
adoration that I felt for the foxgloves at Down, and for the stiff red
clay out of the Sandwalk clay-pit; and for the beautiful white paint on
the nursery floor. This kind of feeling hits you in the stomach, and in
the ends of your fingers, and it is probably the most important thing
in life. Long after I have forgotten all my human loves, I shall still
remember the smell of a gooseberry leaf, or the feel of the wet grass on
my bare feet; or the pebbles in the path. In the long run it is this
feeling that makes life worth living, this which is the driving force
behind the artist's need to create.

Of course, there were things to worship everywhere. I can remember
feeling quite desperate with love for the blisters in the dark red paint
on the nursery window-sills at Cambridge, but at Down there were more
things to worship than anywhere else in the world.

       *     *     *     *     *

The magic began from the moment when John, the coachman, met us at
Orpington station with the wagonette, and we drove off through the
tunnel under the railway, all shrieking shrilly, to make the echo
answer. We drove four miles, through the deep narrow lanes, where the
trees met overhead, and there was a damp smell from the high earth banks
on each side. The lanes were so narrow that it was often hard to pass a
cart without stopping at a wider place. Then came the village, and the
wagonette rumbled round three sides of the churchyard which surrounds
the humble little old flint church, before turning up past the
blacksmith's shop and the pond, and reaching Down House. And as soon as
the door was opened, we smelt again the unmistakable cool, empty,
country smell of the house, and we rushed all over the big,
under-furnished rooms in an ecstasy of joy. They reflected the barer way
of life of the early nineteenth century, rather than the crowded, fussy
mid-Victorian period. The furnishing was ugly in a way, but it was
dignified and plain.

       *     *     *     *     *

I have said that the nursery at Down had a white painted floor; it had
green Venetian blinds, too, and a great old mulberry tree grew right up
against the windows outside. The shadows of the leaves used to shift
about on the white floor, and you could hear

[Illustration: The mulberry tree by the nursery window.]

the plop of the ripe mulberries as they fell to the ground, and the
blackbirds sang there in the early mornings. They lived permanently in
the tree in the fruit season. I used to get out of bed to listen to them
before anyone else was awake. Under the window was the pump, which
squeaked in the hot afternoons when they pumped up the drinking water
for the house. The well was supposed to be 365 feet deep. In the
passage by the nursery door hung the rope which pulled the great bell in
the roof; it was rung for meals, very loud and majestic. And on the
landing hung a swinging rope with a crossbar, on which we did all kinds
of gymnastics.

We had sponge-cakes and honeycomb for tea when we arrived; we never had
honeycomb at home. We only came down to lunch here, but we preferred
nursery meals anyhow; they were shorter and the conversation was more
interesting. Lunch downstairs always seemed to consist of Shepherd's Pie
and rich, creamy-brown Rice Pudding and Prunes; not that we minded that.
Only I hope that the grown-ups had more interesting things for dinner.

After nursery breakfast we always began by paying a round of calls on
the people who were having breakfast in bed. First of all we went to see
Grandmamma and her little fox-terrier Dicky. Grandmamma was now a very
old lady; she was over eighty before I can remember her; and she always
went out in a bath-chair. I liked her very much indeed. We used to play
on her bed with little tin pots and pans, called Pottikins and
Pannikins; and then she gave us bits of liquorice out of her
work-basket, cut up with her work-scissors. I don't think the
work-basket was ever used for anything but liquorice, which she kept for
her cough. Indeed I have the basket itself still, and it contains
nothing but some half-finished book-markers, worked in cross-stitch by
my uncles Leonard and Horace--her little boys--in the 'fifties of the
last century.

It was interesting to watch old Mathison, her maid, a most dignified
Highland lady, put Grandmamma's cap on for her over her still brown
hair--tobacco-coloured hair, like my father's. First there was a black
silk lining cap; then a white lawn cap, with beautiful crimped and
frilled edges and long lawn strings; and then, if she were going out,
yet another black hood over that. Mathison always spoke to her in the
third person: 'Does Mrs. Darwin need a shawl?' Grandmamma used to tell
us how _her_ children wore linen shifts (a new word to me) and not
woolly 'combies' as we did; and that she used to have to cut out the
postage-stamps with scissors, because perforated edges had not been
invented when she was young. And she told us how, at her boarding-school
on Paddington Green, she had been sent for as the best piano player to
play to George IV's Mrs. Fitz Herbert, when she came to visit the
school. And how she had written a little reading book for the
Sunday-schoolchildren at Maer, in Staffordshire, where she lived as a
girl, and her brothers had laughed at her because in it she had spelt
plum-pie _plumb-pie_.

[Illustration: Grandmamma in the drawing-room at Down. The chimneypiece
was just like that in the picture of Alice going through the Looking
Glass. There was the same squiggly gold clock under a glass shade, and
there were sweet-smelling cedar-wood spills in the vases. Grandmamma
holds her peggywork.]

After all the other calls we finished up with Aunt Etty, the nicest
visit of all. Here we first drew the curtains all round her four-post
bed, so that it was quite dark inside; and then, having pulled them back
again, we took off our shoes and all got into bed with her, while she
read us a chapter of the current book. She used to complain that our
Darwin feet were all stone cold, but we were quite unconscious of the
fact.

Aunt Etty was the best reader-aloud I have ever known. She could alter
bits which she did not consider suitable, skip whole pages and episodes,
and join up the narrative again with an invisible seam; or turn an
unhappy ending into a happy one, without anyone being able to guess at
the liberties she had taken with her author. But she always took the
precaution of keeping the book hidden away between times. After her
death I found a book she had once read to us: _Don John_ by Jean
Ingelow. The story is about two changelings, a bad boy and a good one.
By a series of accidents, nobody quite knows which boy belongs to which
family. In the end it is proved that the good boy is the son of the bad
parents, and _vice versa_. This was more than Aunt Etty's eugenic
conscience could bear; and in the cause of the truth that moral
tendencies are inherited like other characteristics, she changed the
entire sense of the book, so that the good boy should be descended from
the good parents and the bad from the bad; and none of us ever
discovered the fraud (though we were oldish when this occurred) till,
thirty years later, when I happened to find the book again.

Lovely books she read us, all on this system: _The Wide Wide World_,
with all the religion and the deaths from consumption left out, and all
the farm life and good country food left in; _Masterman Ready_, with
that ass Mr. Seagrave mitigated, and dear old Ready not killed by the
savages; _The Little Duke_ with horrid little Carloman spared to grow
more virtuous still; _Settlers at Home_, with the baby not allowed to
die; _The Children of the New Forest_; _The Runaway_; _The Princess and
the Goblin_, and many more.

Aunt Bessy used to read aloud to us, too, not with such mastery, but
still very pleasantly. She used to prepare her readings beforehand,
marking the places where the skips were to be. She was my father's
younger sister; unmarried, very stout and nervous, and apt to fumble her
fingers when agitated. She was not good at practical things it must be
confessed; and she could not have managed her own life without a little
help and direction now and then; but she was shrewd enough in her own
way, and a very good judge of character. She showed great daring in
being sometimes rather sceptical about Aunt Etty's ill health; for Aunt
Etty always maintained her position as the older and cleverer sister,
and the married woman. It was amusing to see the way in which the
relations between the sisters remained the same to the end of their
lives: Aunt Etty rather superior and impatient; and Aunt Bessy
submissive, but a little resentful and critical.

Even as children we knew instinctively that Aunt Bessy needed our help
and affection, for The Family was really her only interest. She was one
of those pathetic people who seem only able to enjoy things through
others. If she took you to a play, she was always glancing at your face
to see what you were feeling about it; yet she would give a perfectly
sound criticism of the play afterwards, and it would be quite her own,
and not a bit second-hand. When she went for a walk she was always
hoping to find 'a little secret p[)a]th' (as she called it in her inherited
Wedgwood tongue); because she had once explored such a p[)a]th with someone
who had enjoyed it so much, that she had been able to share in their
delight. But she was so warm-hearted and dependent on affection, that we
found it easy enough to love her.

I used to go with her at Down to '_gather the nosegays_' for the house;
down the long pebbled walk between the tall syringa and lilac bushes all
wet with dew, to the kitchen garden, where the roses were imprisoned
behind high box borders, near the empty greenhouses, where my
grandfather had once worked. We took the wooden trug full of flowers,
which smelt sweeter than any other flowers in the world, back to the
house, and arranged them in water on a green iron table, in the Old
Study, where the _Origin of Species_ had been written.

[Illustration: Aunt Bessy 'gathering the nosegays'.]

Aunt Bessy did not do very much else that was useful in those pleasant
leisurely days at Down; she read a good deal, in French as well as in
English, and went for little walks, and wrote letters; and I expect she
had some small philanthropic jobs. When she lived at Cambridge later on,
I know that she did a great deal for the old people at the workhouse.
She used to read _Little Lord Fauntleroy_ over and over again to the old
women there, because they never wanted any other book. But at Down she
seemed only to sit about on the veranda with the other ladies, reading
and talking; and what they talked about I don't know, for I never
listened to such dullnesses. No doubt the other ladies had employments
of their own at home; but every one then seemed to exist very
comfortably without anything particular to do.

Grandmamma and Aunt Bessy had only one form of 'work', in those days,
when every lady had a piece of '_company work_' in hand. We called it
_Peggywork_. They made long strips of knitting in thick wool, by pulling
the wool over the pegs of a wooden frame; and the maids sewed the strips
together into rugs afterwards. They were made in queer Victorian
colours, which one would not see now: stripes of a musty terra-cotta
along with dark red; or sage green and spinach green together; or two
shades of peacock blue. It was easy work, much easier than real
knitting, and stupid fingers could do it. Grandmamma's fingers were all
twisted up with rheumatism; and Aunt Bessy's had always been very clumsy
indeed. She could never find her way into her pocket to get out her
handkerchief--though certainly it was not always easy to find a pocket
hidden in the gathers at the back of your skirt; and she used to get
into a regular fuss when she had to put her arms into the sleeves of
her coat.

She had always been sheltered by Grandmamma, and after Grandmamma's
death she became a good deal more independent. There are two pictures of
her which remain in my mind, both of this later time, when she had a
house of her own in Cambridge. Just after my father's death we went
round to see Aunt Bessy, knowing her to be alone. She had not expected
us, and was lying down on her bed. As we went in, she sat suddenly up in
bed and threw her arms out wide, as if she wanted to embrace us all,
with a magnificent gesture of her great clumsy, cumbrous body. It was
like a figure by Giotto or Donatello, in the strength and splendour of
the movement, and in the unself-conscious passion of the feeling.

Aunt Bessy was extremely loyal to her friends. Among these was a certain
Miss S., who was rather apt to impart information to us, in a voice that
went up in a pedagogic manner, at the end of each sentence. After one of
our Christmas plays Margaret, flown with her success as an actress,
invented a short monologue, in which she _did_ Miss S. being
instructive. We considered this one of the funniest things that ever was
heard; and one morning, when we were calling on Aunt Bessy, Frances
suddenly suggested that Aunt Bessy herself might be amused by it. So,
rather against the better judgment of the rest of us, Margaret began her
performance, but she had not gone far, before Aunt Bessy drew herself up
and said, with great dignity: 'Miss S. is my oldest friend.' It was
quite dreadful; we collapsed completely, apologized, and all went home
in tears, simply shattered by remorse.

There was another ludicrous occasion when I can remember admiring Aunt
Bessy's dignity. We had been for a picnic to the Fleam Dyke, and the
wagonette had been left near a dingy little cottage on the main
Newmarket road. As Aunt Bessy and I were walking back to the carriage,
we stopped to speak to a ragged, rough-looking woman who was leaning on
the fence of her yard. She told us, among other things, that a golden
chariot had been buried in the barrow near by, '_at the time of The
Wars_'; and after a few more words, she said, with some hesitation, but
obviously offering us the greatest courtesy in her power: 'I don't know
if you'd like to see it, but the Sow is just pigging; she's had seven
already.' It is impossible to imagine anyone less suitable than Aunt
Bessy to receive such an offer; however, though terribly flustered, she
managed to thank the woman with apparent gratitude, and to excuse us
from accepting the treat, by the necessity of starting home at once. _I_
should rather have liked to see the show!

These very low-class, country-slum people used to give me the horrors.
In that same cottage garden I saw, another time, a man crawling on
all-fours, because he had drunk up all the money which had been given
him to buy a wooden leg after an accident. I believe my father helped
him to get a leg, but I don't know that things went much better even
then. This was a class ignored by the story-books; there might be
drunken and degenerate people in the towns, but in the country there
were only the Good Poor in rose-embowered cottages.

But I found even the Good Poor terrifying when I was small. There was
fat old bedridden Betsy at Down, whom it was 'kind' to go to see. She
had been laundress there for many years, and my Grandmother had
pensioned her off with a cottage and ten shillings a week. This was a
handsome sum, if you consider that twenty years later the Old Age
Pension started at five shillings a week, and no cottage. But I did not
think it a very nice cottage, though it was quite good by the standards
of the time. It was round behind the stables, in a mysterious unknown
land beyond the pigsties; two little rooms, with a door into the lane as
well as the door into the yard. The lane door had been fastened up, and
the bed had been put right across it, and across the tiny window, so
that Betsy could see everything that went along the lane; which was
precious little. The daylight showed all round the edge of the closed
door, and the floor was made of worn bricks; but there was a home-made
rag mat on it, which I admired. Betsy was so fat that she made a great
hump in the bed, and her fingers were all swollen up. An even more
sinister old woman from the Workhouse was kept there by my grandmother
to take care of her. I dreaded them both.

[Illustration: Visiting the Good Poor. People, from left to right:
Charles, Nana, Margaret, Horrid Old Woman, me, Tommy the cat, Poor Old
Betsy in bed.]

But we liked the servants at Down very much. Harriet was head housemaid
then, beautiful Harriet, with her rich voice and lovely laugh and strong
Kentish accent. She knew she was beautiful, I am sure, for she wore a
black velvet ribbon round her neck, like any duchess. I used to follow
her about and see the cook's room, and the maids' room, a huge one,
where three or four girls slept together. Once I received a shock on
seeing the men's room, a long dark attic, with a board floor, and three
beds, and hardly anything else at all. Here John the coachman, and Price
the butler, and the footman all slept together. It did not seem very
comfortable, I thought, though it was very clean. Mrs. Brummidge was the
cook; I don't see what else she could have been called, the name suited
her so perfectly; for she was exactly like a cook. You felt at once that
she cooked everything in the best possible English way--and very good
that can be--but that there would be no nonsense about any new-fangled
foreigneering dishes.

There was no bathroom at Down, nor any hot water, except in the kitchen,
but there were plenty of housemaids to run about with the big
brown-painted bath-cans. And just as everything else at Down was
perfect, so there too was the most beautiful, secret, romantic lavatory,
that ever was known; at the end of a long passage and up several steps.
It had the only window which looked out over the orchard, and was always
full of a dim green light. You looked down into the tops of the apple
trees; and when I read _Romeo and Juliet_ (which was the first
Shakespeare I read for myself) the line: 'That tips with silver all
these fruit-tree tops', always made me think of that window. But the
place of all others, where the essence of the whole house was
concentrated, was in the cupboard under the stairs, by the garden door.
It was full of ancient tennis rackets, smaller than those we use now;
and parasols and croquet mallets, and it was there that the exquisite,
special smell of the house was strongest.

There was another door into the garden--into the orchard--through the
New Study. The New Study had been left just as it was when my
grandfather died, to be shown to occasional sightseers, and often the
shutters would be left shut all day. If we wanted to go out that way we
used to dash across it at full speed, for it was rather an awful place,
faintly holy and sinister, like a church. There were many mysterious
things on the tables and shelves, including a baby in a bottle; or at
least something in alcohol, which I took to be a baby. But sometimes
when the house was full the room would be humanized by being used for a
dressing-room by one of my uncles; and then there would be a round bath
of cold water there.

The faint flavour of the ghost of my grandfather hung in a friendly way
about the whole place, house, garden and all. Of course, we always felt
embarrassed if our grandfather were mentioned, just as we did if God
were spoken of. In fact, he was obviously in the same category as God
and Father Christmas. Only, with our grandfather, we also felt,
modestly, that we ought to disclaim any virtue of our own in having
produced him. Of course it was very much to our credit, really, to own
such a grandfather; but one mustn't be proud, or show off about it; so
we blushed and were embarrassed and changed the subject. It was probably
the same wish not to seem presumptuous, which gave my uncles the odd
habit of never claiming him as their own father, in conversation with
each other. They always said: '_Your_ father said so-and-so'; to which
the other uncle often answered: 'Well he was _your_ father, too.'
Sometimes stupid people even made jokes about our being descended from
monkeys! This annoyed us very much. We thought it in bad taste.

In so far as I conceived of my grandfather at all, I thought of him as a
kind of synopsis of his five sons, my uncles; with the same warm family
voice, the same love of children and dogs; and the same gently humorous
charm and transparent honesty and absence of any sort of pretension. His
beard made him different, of course, for none of the uncles had long
beards, or white beards. Also Aunt Etty said that he had been taller
than any of them; and, when he was well, gayer, more spontaneous and
enthusiastic than they were. There was more reserve about my
grandmother, because she was a Wedgwood. My father explained to me once,
that my grandfather was rather different from his children, because he
was only half a Wedgwood, while they had a double dose of Wedgwood blood
in them, owing to the two Darwin-Wedgwood marriages in two successive
generations. 'You've none of you ever seen a Darwin who wasn't mostly
Wedgwood,' he said, rather sadly, as of a dying strain. He can hardly
have known any pure Darwin himself, as his grandfather Robert, the last
unmitigated Darwin of the line, died when he was only three.

The whole place was full of stories about my uncles as
children--innocent stories, whose chief value is to show how very unlike
Darwin family life was to the received idea of Victorian upbringing,
with its beatings and unintelligent discipline. A good sample is the
tale of how Uncle Lenny was found jumping up and down on the springs of
the new sofa, an exercise which had been forbidden. His father said:
'Oh, Lenny, Lenny!' to which Lenny replied: 'I think you had better go
out of the room.'

But there had always been a tradition of sympathetic education in our
family. There still exists a diary, written in 1797-9, about the
management of children, by my great-grandfather Josiah Wedgwood II
(1769-1843), son of Josiah I, the potter. Josiah II was a young man when
he wrote these notes about the upbringing of his very young children,
and he was clearly influenced by Rousseau and Godwin, and was
experimenting with some of their theories; but, unlike his preceptors,
he had plenty of common sense, and was never above admitting that he
might have done wrong in certain cases. He was the very opposite of a
crank, which makes his notes the more interesting. In later life his
children and nephews and friends all considered him 'the wisest of men'
and trusted him completely. He was the uncle who advised my grandfather
to accept the offer of a post on the _Beagle_, and to make his great
voyage.

His views are quite startlingly modern, and show a knowledge of
psychology, which would surprise those who think of it as a modern
science. He holds very strongly that children should be left free, as
far as possible. 'I think one can scarcely recollect with sufficient
force that every act of interference and direction does harm, and
nothing can excuse it, but the necessity of preventing a greater injury
to the child;'--a statement which he qualifies in his sensible way, by
adding that, of course, this does not mean that 'the commands and
caprices' of the children should be obeyed. The new governess finds it
rather difficult to understand this part of his doctrine, for she has
been forbidden to scold, or preach to, or punish the children; they are
not even to be made to feel disgust at filth! And she is 'to refrain
from constant and overweaning attention' to them; and to keep 'her own
independence'. But he has to explain to her several times that she is
not meant to obey _them_. As for teaching, his precepts are:

  'Nothing well done, but by inclination.'
  'Art of Education is leading inclination.'

There cannot have been many well-to-do gentlemen of that time who
actually themselves superintended the putting to bed of their
three-year-old sons. He tells a rather pathetic story of how little Jos
cried at being washed and how, acting on the correct principles, he told
the nursemaid not to scold him, but to go away and leave him all wet. I
believe little Jos would far rather have been scolded! Some of the
children's conversations are recorded: there is something very odd about
overhearing one's baby ancestors talking in bed at night, a hundred and
fifty years ago. Their talk is so like that of modern children, that one
can feel quite certain that Josiah wrote down the actual words they
used, as he stood listening behind the door.

They do not seem to have been taught anything about religion till a
little cousin came to stay, from whom 'they learnt much about God'.
'They applied to Marianne to know why God would not let Adam and Eve eat
the apple of that tree? Their instructress replied: "I suppose God
wanted it himself."' This little Jos, Josiah Wedgwood III, was my
grandmother's eldest brother; he married Caroline Darwin, my
grandfather's sister; and they were the grandparents of Ralph Vaughan
Williams, the composer.

Of course, Josiah's theories wore off in time; but a very free humane
system of education grew out of them, in which children were treated as
human beings from the first; and the upbringing at Down must have been
much the same.

Sometimes it almost seems as if life at Down must have been too happy,
the relations between parents and children too perfect; for the uncles
in all their lives never seemed quite to get away from that early
Elysium, or quite to belong to the ordinary horrid world.

Uncle William told a story, in his speech at the Darwin Centenary, which
showed the relationship between their father and his grown-up sons; and
it also illustrates my grandfather's very rare anger, only aroused by
cruelty. In 1865, Eyre, Governor of Jamaica, had repressed a rebellion
of the negroes there with considerable brutality. For this he was tried,
but an influential party took up his defence. Uncle William said: 'One
day at Down I made some flippant and derogatory remarks about the
committee which was prosecuting Eyre. My father instantly turned on me
in a fury of indignation, and told me I had better go back to
Southampton [from whence he had just come]. The next morning at seven
o'clock he came to my bedside and said how sorry he was that he had been
so angry, and that he had not been able to sleep, and with a few kind
words he left me.'

       *     *     *     *     *

Of all places at Down, the Sandwalk seemed most to belong to my
grandfather. It was a path running round a little wood which he had
planted himself; and it always seemed to be a very long way from the
house. You went right to the furthest end of the kitchen garden, and
then through a wooden door in the high hedge, which quite cut you off
from human society. Here a fenced path ran along between two great
lonely meadows, till you came to the wood. The path ran straight down
the outside of the wood--the _Light Side_--till it came to a
summer-house at the far end; it was very lonely there; to this day you
cannot see a single building anywhere, only woods and valleys. In the
summer-house faint chalk drawings of dragoons could still be made out;
they had been drawn by my father and Uncle Frank as children. That made
it romantic; but also, once, when mercifully my father was there, there
was a drunken tramp in the summer-house, and that made it dreadful.

[Illustration: The beech tree by day.]

The _Light Side_ was ominous and solitary enough, but at the
summer-house the path turned back and made a loop down the _Dark Side_,
a mossy path, all among the trees; and that was truly terrifying. There
were two or three great old trees beside the path, too, which were all
right if some grown-up person were there, but much too impressive if one
were alone. The Hollow Ash was mysterious enough; but the enormous
beech, which we called the Elephant Tree, was quite awful. It had
something like the head of a monstrous beast growing out of the trunk,
where a branch had been cut off. I tried to think it merely grotesque
and rather funny, in the daytime; but if I were alone near it, or
sometimes in bed at night, the face grew and grew until it became the
mask of a kind of brutish ogre, huge, evil and prehistoric; a face which
chased me down long dark passages and never quite caught me; a kind of
preDisney horror. Altogether the Sandwalk was a dangerous place if you
were alone.

[Illustration: The beech tree by night.]

One day Charles boasted that he had been all round the Sandwalk quite by
himself; so naturally, as an elder sister, I had got to do so too. I
took Billy in the pram for company, and set off bravely enough; but my
heart sank into my boots when the kitchen garden door banged behind me
and shut me off from the civilized world. However, by whistling and
singing and talking brightly to Billy, I got safely down the Light Side,
and there was no tramp in the summer-house. But when I turned back down
the Dark Side, the strangest rustlings and whisperings began to flit
about all over the wood. I held my head up and walked along briskly, but
the sighings and shiverings followed me as I went; and someone seemed to
be saying something over and over again, something that I could not
quite hear. There was a strange creaking noise, too, and certainly
footsteps following along behind me. I walked faster and faster until I
was fairly running; and then absolutely galloping; the pram swayed madly
from side to side, but by a miracle did not upset. At last, the hot
breath of the pursuer on my very neck, I reached the blessed garden
door; and after a short but most dangerous struggle, managed to wrench
it open, got through alive, and fairly slammed it after me. I never told
anyone of the perils I had passed through. I was not proud of this
adventure.

All the same, when there were grown-ups about to make it safe, I loved
the Sandwalk; I used to crawl on all fours through the undergrowth for
the whole length of the wood, worshipping every leaf and bramble as I
went. In the very middle there was the secret clay-pit, where we grubbed
up the red clay, and rolled it in our handkerchiefs, and tried to make
little pots to bake on the bars of the nursery grate; which were not a
success. And, under protection, I would even dare to climb right down
inside the hollow ash. There is something extraordinarily moving about a
hollow tree.

There were other frightening places at Down besides the Sandwalk; there
was the Poison House. This was a tumbledown shed which had once been a
gazebo; a regular witches' hovel, overgrown with ivy. It was hidden in a
thicket and we used to go to look at it with awe and admiration; but we
never dared to go inside it. I don't know why there was supposed to be
poison there, any more than I know why, at Down, there was supposed to
be a Bottomless Hole at the top of the second floor staircase, where it
was rather dark. You could not exactly _see_ the hole, but you had to go
very carefully round it.

       *     *     *     *     *

Every day at Down my father used to take us for the most romantic walks,
telling us stories about the places as we went: up the steep hill to
Cudham Church; or to look for orchids at Orchis Bank, or along a
legendary smuggler's track, or to the Big Woods where Uncle William had
been lost as a child. The sudden valleys, the red, red earth full of
strangely shaped flints, the great lonely woods, the sense of
remoteness, made it different from any other place we knew. We were only
sixteen miles from London Bridge, and yet it was so quiet that if a cart
came down our lane we all rushed to look over the orchard wall to see
it go by. Sometimes we went with Nana to the village to watch the smith
shoeing the cart-horses; or to call on the old woman who made
pillow-lace, with little bobbins on her threads. And sometimes we went
to the Shop.

[Illustration: The birthday presents. Frances, me and Bernard.]

I remember going to the Shop on Bernard's fourteenth birthday to buy a
penny stick of chocolate for his birthday present. I have a perfectly
clear picture of him, when we went into the drawing-room to give him our
presents, lying with his long Etonian legs on the sofa, in a negligent,
grown-up attitude. I was five, so I gave the chocolate first; Frances
was four and a half, and she gave him a red flannel doll's cap, about
two inches long, which she had made herself. He thanked her warmly and
put it on top of his head at once, which we thought extremely witty. We
loved and admired him very much, and we did not mind, even if he did
switch our legs rather too hard when he played at school with us,
because it was such fun to play with him. We were proud to fag for him,
when he lay on the lawn under the mulberry tree and he sent us to fetch
gooseberries and apples for him. We knocked the early Kentish Beauties
down for him with the croquet mallets; they were pale pink and green,
juicy and fresh-tasting, and they used to fall down on the grassy grave
of Polly, my grandfather's old dog, who had been buried under the
Kentish Beauty tree.

On the lawn were two great yew trees, and the swing hung between them; I
adored their magic, open-ended, scarlet berries; and at the top of the
lawn stood a Spanish chestnut, which sometimes had chestnuts almost big
enough to eat; under this tree was the mysterious Earthworm stone, which
had been put there by my grandfather, with an apparatus to record how
fast the earth-worm castings would cover it up. In front of the veranda
stood the sundial, about which Aunt Bessy's friend Miss S. used to be
particularly instructive; and there grew the salvias, whose blue flowers
we used to suck for the honey that is in them. Grandmamma would look out
of the upstairs window and smile and shake her finger at us if she saw
us picking them.

When I was eleven Grandmamma died and it all came to an end. Now the
place belongs to the British Association. They have tried to keep the
grounds just as they were; and even though Down is now called Downe, and
London has crawled much nearer, it still seems as quiet and remote in
the garden as ever it was.




  CHAPTER IX

  _Ghosts and Horrors_


The only ghost I ever saw was at Down, and it was a rabbit. All the best
beds at Down were great four-posters, with ceilings and curtains of
stiff shiny chintz hanging all round them. One night, when I was
sleeping in a little bed beside my mother's big one, I saw, I most
certainly saw, a rabbit come out on the top of the canopy and run all
along it and disappear at the far end. They never would believe me about
this, which was unkind of them, for the tops of beds were always
dangerous places.

In our own house at Cambridge, there were no four-posters--my mother did
not approve of them--and bed-curtains were becoming vestigial; but
still, all proper grown-up beds had muslin curtains hanging from small
round canopies, which were fixed to hooks in the ceilings. That was
where the tigers lived. I never actually saw one myself, but that only
made it the more frightening. This was one of the reasons why I never
liked sleeping in my mother's room. Fortunately, ordinary beds for
children no longer had any curtains at all, so that the night-nursery
was quite safe. The tigers can't have been very comfortable on the
canopies, which were only about a yard across, but that was their own
business. One really must not start being sentimental about tigers.

[Illustration: The Habitat of the British Tiger (_Felis Tigris
Britannicus_). Note the protective colouring of the stripes. This
species is now almost extinct, owing to the progressive abandonment of
the use of bed-canopies; just as the draining of marshes has diminished
the number of malarial mosquitoes. These tigers used to suffer very much
from the occupational disease of _Canopy Cramp_.]

Anyhow, I had very little sense of relative size in those days. I
remember a fierce argument with Charles, in which I maintained that
Dobbin, our rocking horse, was as big as a real cart-horse. Dobbin was
about three foot high. And I was always afraid of being sucked down the
bath-hole when the water ran away with that dreadful scrautching noise.

One of the chief advantages of going to boarding school was that there I
slept in a room with other girls; and surely neither tigers, ghosts,
nightmares nor burglars would dare to come into a room stuffed so full
of people? Whereas my lonely bedroom at home was often quite stiff with
horrors. Once, when I was about fifteen, I spent a whole night of panic
lying awake listening to a strange muffled knocking on the wall. It was
not till the next day that it occurred to me that it might have been the
beating of my own heart. Another time, when my parents were away, I am
ashamed to say that the footsteps and whispering in the garden under my
window grew so alarming that I actually telephoned to the Police. Who
came and said it was Cats. Cats! It would be cats; they knew I didn't
like them, the devils.

My room was always full of dreams. The worst one was Joan of Arc. She
came one windy night in full armour, and galloped up and down the
passage outside my bedroom, stopping sometimes to shake and bang at my
door and vow that she would kill me when she got in. Fortunately the
door held and I woke before she broke it down; but the clanking of her
armour and the fury of her feet have given me a permanent dislike to
her. If you once dream about a person, the taste of your dream, bad or
good, will cling to him or her for the rest of your life.

I suppose it was because one so often saw fallen and ill-used horses in
those days, that I came to identify myself with them. It is still a
great relief to me that one so seldom sees them now; even though this is
only because there are so few horses to see. And that is really a sad
business, for surely horses, like men, would rather exist than not exist
at all, in spite of all the drawbacks of living.

At any rate, I often dreamt I was a horse, and I know exactly what it
feels like to be one. I even know what it feels like to be able to
twitch the skin on my shoulder, and shudder away a fly. Once I dreamt
that I was a young yellow mare, and I was trying to hide behind a gorse
bush from a very wicked bull. My yellow legs were so long that it was
difficult to keep them folded up, and I was afraid that spots of my hide
would shine out through the holes in the bush; but I woke before the
bull got me. Bulls, of course, were always frightening; chiefly because
of the bull in _Holiday House_, which chased Lord Rockville in a wood.
It seemed so unnatural of a bull to be in a wood. But bulls in dreams
were far more frightening than real bulls.

Once I dreamt a regular ghost story. I thought that Mrs. Phillips, our
housekeeper, came to my father and said: 'I think I ought to tell you,
sir, that there is a wolf in the laundry.' My father said 'Nonsense',
but we all went down to the laundry and looked over the top of the
half-door. It was late and rather dark, but we could see a creature
there, running up and down, and hear him snarling. My father said: 'I
think it's only a dog, but he seems very fierce; leave him there for
to-night, and I will get the police in the morning.' Then there was a
gap in my dream and I thought I had gone to bed and to sleep, still
vaguely knowing that there was a restless animal shut up not far away.
Then I dreamt that I woke suddenly, with an unspeakable shock, to the
consciousness that someone was lying in bed beside me. I put my hand out
and touched the soft naked shoulder of a woman; and a cold, gentle,
little woman's voice said: 'I have not been in bed for a hundred years.'
My heart stood absolutely still with fear, for I knew with complete
certainty that this was the spirit of a werewolf woman, which had been
inhabiting the body of the wolf in the laundry; and that she had now
come to try to take possession of me. She lay beside me in the bed, a
little, soft-skinned, small-boned, fair-haired creature, and talked to
me very quietly, and told me all about her life; and my blood ran cold
with horror at her every word. It was a hundred years since she had been
a woman, and had been used to slip away from her husband's side, and run
about at night in a wolf's form, killing lambs and hens, and smelling
the wild smells of the woods. 'Feel the scars,' she said, and she guided
my hand to the dry scars on her back, where the wolves had bitten her in
play. Her husband had tried to keep her in at night, by 'the magic of
iron' beside her bed, and 'by the holy power of salt'; but when he had
failed and failed again, he had finally killed her, 'more than a hundred
years ago'. Never since then had she been able to take possession of a
human soul, or known human comfort or food or firelight. 'But now', she
said, 'You...' and she took my left hand and began to draw it across
towards herself, very slowly and softly, but quite irresistibly; and I
knew that if she got it right across and laid my hand on her heart, I
should be hers for ever; and her wolf-soul would take possession of my
body. I could neither move nor speak, and my hand was being pulled
further and further across her; when suddenly I was able to make the
sign of the cross with my right hand; and I woke trembling and sweating
to see the blessed dawn coming in at the window.

The personality of the woman was still so strong in the room that though
I was broad awake, I did not feel safe for an hour or two longer; nor
could I escape from the sense of her presence for several days. It has
always been a mystery to me that I should have saved myself by making
the sign of the cross. I had hardly ever seen it done; nor, in my waking
life, would it ever have occurred to me to sign myself. I suppose it
came out of some story. I have often wished that I could see Lady
Macbeth acted as a character like my werewolf woman; it would surely be
more impressive than your great ranting hoydens. That gentle quiet voice
would make the cruel words sound more unnatural, the small still figure
would look more ruthless and implacable than any Lady Macbeth I have
ever seen.

My dreams were always rather melodramatic, though mostly in a more
agreeable way. I was generally a boy, swimming rivers with a dagger in
my mouth, or riding for my life with a message, or shooting my way out
of a fray; in fact, I led at night a sort of Henty existence of most
pleasurably exciting adventures. And so I still do, thank God.

But by day I was not nearly so brave as I was at night. The rough gangs
of boys who used to rove about Castle End were quite enough to terrify
me. To reach our grandmother's or uncles' houses in the Huntingdon Road,
we had to pass through a corner of Castle End, called Mount Pleasant. (I
used to mix this name up with Mont Blanc, Blanc Mange, Mont Blange,
etc.) At the top of a steep green bank stood a short row of tumbledown
cottages, inhabited by most _un_pleasant people. The place was quiet,
there were only gardens with very high palings, on the lower side of the
road, so there was little hope of help if we were attacked. We tried to
rush through quickly, if possible when the boys were at school; for if
they could, they threw stones at us; and I was knocked off my bicycle
and my hair was pulled. Once when we were being snowballed, Bernard
suddenly appeared, and rushed at the insurgent populace like a V.C., and
said, 'Damn you, go away,' in a very heroic manner, and the rioters fled
to their purlieus in a panic.

Even when we went with Nana and the pram we were sometimes stoned; and
we saw unpleasant things: a drunken man, or a child being beaten. The
sight I remember with most horror was a little group of dreadful boys
near the pump and horse trough at the corner of Shelly Row. They were
wringing the neck of a white hen; and a smaller boy stood apart, sobbing
pitifully. I suppose it was his hen. Nana hurried us by. As we grew
older, the danger from the boys grew less, and gradually ceased
altogether. I suppose there may still be such gangs about, terrifying to
the children, but imperceptible to the grown-up people; but I hope I am
right in thinking that their activities are not quite so public as they
used to be then.

[Illustration: The dreadful boys and the poor white hen.]

The Poor always frightened me very much. There was a most evil Blind
Man, with a beard, who sat in a little hole in the railings, which
seemed to be specially made for beggars, opposite the Bull Hotel of
those days. Beggars sometimes sit there still. He always had a dog, but
it was never the same dog for long. We thought perhaps he murdered his
dogs? I have only now realized that the reason why Blind Pew in
_Treasure Island_ frightened me so extremely, was that I gave him the
face of our own Blind Man. The lame crossing-sweeper at the corner of
the Backs had a terrible mutilated face. I tried never to see him,
though his crossing was so near our house that it was difficult to avoid
doing so sometimes.

[Illustration: The Blind Man.]

One saw drunken men or really horrible tramps much more often in those
days, especially on Castle Hill, or down the Newmarket Road; but the
worst people I ever saw were in London. It was when I was first at the
Slade School. We were all working one afternoon in the Big Life Room,
when the most blood-curdling screams of Murder! Murder! Help! Help!
began to come up through the high windows. We could not see out at all
on that side of the building. The cries went on and on, and at last
another girl and I ran out, just as we were, in our pinafores, to find
out if we could help anyone. We had to go an immense way round to reach
the place, right across the wide courtyard of University College, and
out of the gate; and then round two sides of its great enclosure, till
we reached a shabby street where we had never been before. At last, out
of breath, we found an archway giving entrance to a yard which ran along
under the Slade School windows. It was a foul place, closed at the far
end; in every hovel the door was open, and there were groups of women
and children sitting on the ground, picking over heaps of dreadful rags.
It seemed to me that all the women, even the young ones, had black eyes
and no teeth. By that time the screaming had ceased, but we asked a
one-eyed hag what had been happening. 'Ow, she was drunk,' she said,
''er 'usband was beating 'er. You can't do no good to 'er. You'd better
go 'ome, dearie.' A little group of filthy, battered women had gathered
round us, and we felt that this was true. We went back to work very
silent and crestfallen. I suppose there were many such backwaters then,
in among the respectable streets; but this was the only time I ever saw
such a God-forsaken hole.

I cannot exaggerate the terror to me of driving across London alone in a
four-wheeler, even after I was quite grown-up, and even in the daytime.
And in the evening, the thought of having to get home afterwards, quite
spoilt the pleasure of a theatre. Of course, one could not go in a
hansom without a Man. Generally there _was_ a man to take one home; and
then going jingling and cantering along, with the wind in one's face,
was delicious. But one could never quite count on it; sometimes one was
just put into a smelly old four-wheeler; to be driven round and round
London to a 'den of iniquity' (whatever that might be) for what seemed
like hours, before one suddenly found oneself at Uncle William's front
door.

One evening, in Cambridge, I saw something really frightening, and I
never told anyone anything about it. When I was about eighteen I used to
play second flute in the little C.U.M.S. orchestra of those days. I did
not play well and was always afraid of coming in on the wrong beat after
counting 153 empty bars. However, Mr. Dent and Clive Carey, who were
the conductors, were very kind to me, and I dare say I did not do very
much harm. One evening the friend, who generally went with me, did not
turn up. I was not supposed to go out alone after dinner, but I thought
that silly, and anyhow if they didn't know, they wouldn't mind. So I
went off alone, rather nervously. Well, I was coming quietly home again
by myself just about ten o'clock, and there was nobody at all to be
seen, as I turned into the narrow darkness of Silver Street. I was just
abreast of the little public-house, the Anchor, which stands at the town
end of the bridge, when suddenly a small gang of rather disreputable
undergraduates came running quickly towards me from the other side of
the river.

[Illustration: What had happened? I shall never know.]

They were carrying, flat out, the body of a woman who seemed to be dead.

Drowned in the river? That was my first thought. And then at once all
kinds of possibilities rushed into my mind. Murdered? Or captured for
some nameless purpose? Something horrible and vague and improper? It did
not occur to me that she might be drunk. Men got drunk; women didn't.
Anyhow, the men were in desperate haste and looked frightened and
guilty, in their smashed-in caps and tattered gowns. They took no notice
of me, but dashed across the Bridge and huddled quickly into the safety
of the Anchor. Two or three more men, who were behind, came running
up--one was carrying the girl's hat--and followed the others into the
public-house and banged the door behind them. And then everything was
quite quiet and ordinary again; as if death and melodrama had never been
there at all.

I went slowly on, wondering what on earth I ought to do. Surely someone
ought to find out what had been happening? There was something so evil
about the whole affair. Ought I to tell my father? But I could hardly
endure the thought of speaking to him about it. Perhaps it was something
improper as well as wicked? And that would make him even more
uncomfortable than it would make me--intolerably embarrassing to us
both, to know that the other knew of it. Of course, in those days it
would have been inconceivable to me that any respectable woman should go
into a public-house on any occasion whatever; far less a young girl like
me. A public-house was a mysterious sinister haunt, full of Bad Women,
where decent working men might occasionally go for a glass of beer
(though it would be better if they didn't); but where a Gentleman would
only go (_a_) if he were Fast, or (_b_) if he were showing off and
pretending to be Fast, or (_c_) if he were on a walking tour. I had
never been into the bar of any public-house till some time in the
'twenties, and then I felt very shy and out of place. But naturally my
father could have gone there on an errand of inquiry.

Undecided I went on home and went into the study. It was the usual
domestic scene. My father was working with his shoes off as always, and
his feet in their dark red socks in the fender. He looked up at my
entrance and waited, in his kind patient way, for things to settle down
again, before going on with his long neat rows of little figures and
symbols. My mother was sitting there, too, surrounded by heaps of
papers: advertisements, old bills, letters, newspapers, flotsam and
jetsam, most of which would have been better in the waste-paper basket.
It was all very quiet and humdrum, and I burst into the familiar room,
feeling like a bomb so highly charged with horror and emotion that I
should blow the whole house up if I exploded.

My mother said: 'Gwenny dear, just add up the milkman's book, will you,
please? I can't make it come right.' They had noticed nothing at all.
These old people! They never did notice anything, so blind and deaf and
insensitive as they were. The most appalling, the most shattering
things, could happen under their very noses, and they would know nothing
about them. It was perfectly easy to hide anything from them, from Love
to a bad cold and cough. In fact, if you wanted them to know something,
you absolutely had to shout it at them, and even then they probably
would not grasp it. When I wanted to tell my father that I was engaged
to be married, I had to follow him up and down the meadow for nearly an
hour--he was absorbed in shooting with a bow on the Lammas Land--before
I could bring myself to interrupt him. He had never noticed that I was
trying to attract his attention, till I spoke; and then he reproached me
for not having done so sooner!

So I quite coldly decided to mind my own business and to say nothing
about what I had seen. I knew I was being cowardly, and that this was
wrong, but I did not regret my decision. Though I would still like to
know what had really been happening that night?

But anyhow, that was one great comfort: that it was perfectly easy to
hide one's feelings from the old people. They never knew about any of
the things I have written in this chapter. I simply could not have
endured the touch of their stupid, kind sympathetic fingers on my
private soul.

Yes, it was a great comfort, how easy it was to be secret.

[Illustration]




  CHAPTER X

  _The Five Uncles_


One year, at the Christmas party, all the five uncles were there; and
among uncles I include my father. A father is only a specialized kind of
uncle anyhow.

Uncle William, Uncle George, Uncle Frank, Uncle Leonard and Uncle
Horace; a solid block of uncles, each more adorable than the other.
There was a great family likeness among them; and when I was quite
small, the chief difference between them, to my short-sighted eyes, was
that three of them had short beards, and the other two only rudimentary
whiskers. At a little distance I even found it difficult to tell the
three bearded ones apart--and they included my own father! For they all
had the same kind of presence; the same flavour, and the same family
voice--a warm, flexible, very moving voice; the same beautiful hands,
and, of course, the same permanently chilly feet.

So that year we five nieces, with affectionate impudence, acted a short
scene, in which we each took the part of one of our uncles.

The plot was simple: we came into the room one by one, making some
characteristic remark; then, each in turn, took off our shoes and sat
down to warm our feet at an imaginary fire. Margaret, as Uncle William,
stumped into the room (he had a wooden leg), whistling under her breath
his theme tune: '_Girls and Boys come out to Play_', and produced _one_
sock out of her pocket to warm at the fire; I, as my father, made some
mild complaint about the crowing of the cocks, which waked him so early
of a morning. I cannot remember what Uncle Lenny and Uncle Horace did;
but Ruth, as Uncle Frank, captured the show. She came in humming an air
of Handel's; the real Uncle Frank was kneeling up on a chair, and then
moving about near the chimney-place; and Ruth began imitating every
movement he made as he watched us. And for quite a long time he had not
the faintest idea that he was being copied; and kept on saying, 'Who
_is_ she acting? What _is_ she doing?' Till at last we all laughed so
much at them both that the scene came to an end.


  UNCLE WILLIAM

They really were the most unself-conscious people that ever lived, those
five uncles; but Uncle William was the most unself-conscious of them
all. He hardly knew that he had a self at all. There is a story about
him at my grandfather's funeral at Westminster Abbey. He was sitting in
the front seat as eldest son and chief mourner, and he felt a draught on
his already bald head; so he put his black gloves to balance on the top
of his skull, and sat like that all through the service with the eyes of
the nation upon him.

He was as sound as a bell in body and soul--the only one of the five
sons entirely free from hypochondria. In fact, he was as nearly made of
pure gold as anyone on this earth can be; and I am really afraid of
writing what I feel about him, in case I might sound like Queen Victoria
writing about the Prince Consort. You had only to see his fresh pink
cheeks, his clear blue eyes under the shaggy eyebrows, his white hair
and strong chin, to know what sort of a man he was. Uncle Frank said
once: 'You could eat a mutton chop off William's face,' because he
looked so clean and wholesome.

His life, like himself, was very simple. He became partner in a bank at
Southampton, and married Sara Sedgwick, a member of a cultivated New
England family. She was the sister-in-law of Professor Charles Eliot
Norton, of Cambridge, Massachusetts; the friend of William and Henry
James, and of many well-known Englishmen.

They had no children, and we did not know them very well till we spent a
Christmas with them, once when my mother was ill. Then Nana took us all
four to stay at their house at Basset, on the outskirts of Southampton.
It was a very large, and really hideous, Victorian villa, with lawns and
a carriage-sweep and a monkey-puzzle tree and plate-glass windows;
painfully tidy, psychologically clean, rigidly perfect in organization.
'Mrs. Darwin is very particular,' the maids used to say; and it was a
triumph of understatement. There was no shouting up the backstairs here;
you rang the bell and the footman came. What terrible little hooligans
we must have seemed there! They were well off and lived in style and
comfort; but it was neither for the style nor the comfort that Aunt Sara
really cared. Her religion was Duty, and it was her duty to her position
and her class to live like that. It was Right, for instance, for people
of her kind to keep a carriage and horses. This is not a manner of
speaking; she truly felt it a Duty.

As for Uncle William, of course he liked comfort up to a point, but he
would have been perfectly happy living in any way that was suitable for
a gentleman. But Aunt Sara decided what was proper for them; for she
understood about that sort of thing better than he did.

I liked Aunt Sara very much, in spite of her rigidity, her conventions,
her particularity. She was intelligent and fine-grained, and above all,
she could laugh. I liked her lined, sallow, tragic face; and I somehow
caught a glimpse of the strand of heroism which underlay it all. I liked
the taste of the steel in her. She would certainly have died for her
faith; and her faith did not seem much odder to me than any other
faith. All faiths were queer; the point was, would you die for them?

One evening that Christmas, she told us the story of Voltaire's
intervention in the case of the Protestant, Jean Calas, with an ardour
of admiration, which quite carried us away. I once overheard my mother
say: 'Sara talks so well; all the gentlemen like talking to her.'
Another evening she read us Cowper's _Epitaph on a Hare_; and when she
read:

  _A Turkey carpet was his lawn,
  Whereon he loved to bound,
  To skip and gambol like a fawn,
  And swing his rump around . . ._

the irrepressible Margaret immediately asked: 'What's a rump?' She was
hurriedly suppressed; but afterwards Aunt Sara lay in wait for her,
caught her alone, and said in a hushed voice: 'I think I ought to tell
you that the rump is the _back_ part of an animal, but it is a word you
must never, never use.' And even at that age Margaret felt what an
effort Aunt Sara had had to make, to speak of such a matter. But it was
her duty, and so, of course, she did it.

During the time we were at Basset the Black Week of the South African
War occurred. Everyone seemed very cross and gloomy, but no one told us
what was happening, as they would have done at home. We were, however,
taken down to the docks to see Lord Roberts embarking for South Africa.
We saw a ship and some soldiers, but we did not see Lord Roberts,
because the Carriage had to go home, or the Horses might have been
tired.

You, who know only motors, have no idea of the responsibility The Horses
were in those days. They could hardly do anything, they got tired so
quickly. At least carriage horses did. Cab horses were different, of
course. Aunt Sara always had to walk up the smallest hill behind her own
carriage; and when she had driven exactly ten miles she used to get out
and send it home; and transfer herself into a cab to finish her
shopping. Of course, the cab-horse might have done more than ten miles,
but that was not her business. It was like the Boy Scout who did his
good deed for the day by taking the mouse out of the trap and giving it
to the cat. Sometimes I used to think it would almost have been easier
to put The Horses into the carriage and push them ourselves.

It was the same with the servants: dinner must not be a minute late or
they would be Upset. I have never quite been able to forgive the cook,
who Aunt Sara thought might have been upset, if dinner had been put off
for five minutes, the night the Mummers came. Her worry about it quite
spoilt and cut short the only sight we shall ever have of real natural
Christmas mummers, singing their native notes, in the suburbs of
Southampton in 1899! But Aunt Sara said the dinner would spoil. We
begged and prayed most urgently, and as a very special favour we were
allowed to see some of the play before we were hustled into the
dining-room.

As the front door was opened, the men came walking straight into the
hall, in single file, looking neither to right nor to left, and speaking
their lines as they came, in a sort of half-chant. Then some of them
stood in a group on one side, and whoever was on the stage, so to speak,
walked up and down--three steps up and three steps down--as he said his
part; and when he had done he retired into the standing group, and the
next man came out to speak. The only lines I can remember are:

 _Here come I little Jumping Jack,
  With my wife and family on my back._

This was a little man with a basket of dolls on his back. Sometimes they
fought lovely stylized duels; one, two, three bangs each, with their
wooden swords, and then the loser fell down dead, and the Devil came
with a bottle of medicine and brought him to life again. And now it
occurs to me even as I write: was it perhaps the Devil who was wrong?
and not the Cook's fault at all? Did Aunt Sara think it vulgar and
unsuitable for children? It is possible; but when we told our parents
about it, they only laughed and said: 'Sara is so particular, she
couldn't bear to have dinner a minute late if the end of the world were
coming.'

The only other event was that Uncle William took us to see Sir Neville
Chamberlain, an old general who had lost several fingers in the Indian
Mutiny; and in coming back in the dark we got lost in making a short cut
through a wood, and Uncle William plunged about among the briars and the
rabbit-holes and got rather cross. He was nice when he was cross like
that; vigorous and refreshing.

Also Aunt Sara unfortunately thought it her duty to give a children's
party to entertain her little nephews and nieces. This was Hell,
particularly to me, because I looked so very miserable that a kind sort
of colonel felt he had a mission to cheer me up, and _would_ keep on
dancing with me. I did so wish he would leave me alone. We were
dreadfully disappointed in our Christmas presents, too; for Aunt Sara
gave a mirror to me and a blue satin handkerchief sachet to Margaret;
dull, useless objects, when we had so much wanted story-books.

Some time after this visit Uncle William broke his leg out hunting and
was obliged to have it amputated; so that in our memories he always
stumps about with a stick, and only warms one foot at the fire, instead
of two like all the other uncles. But after a time, when he got a wooden
leg that fitted him, he became fairly active again. Then Aunt Sara died,
and soon afterwards Uncle William retired from the bank and took a house
in London, next door to Number 12 Egerton Place, where Uncle Lenny and
Mildred lived. They were tall gloomy houses, furnished in the most
proper late-Victorian and Edwardian style, with everything really good
and lasting, though often quite surprisingly ugly. Indeed, everything
was so solid that most of the things we had from his house after his
death, are still nearly as good as new. Aunt Ida herself (!) took one of
Uncle William's silk under-vests, and had it made into the most
beautiful evening blouse for Ruth.

After moving to London Uncle William gradually flowered into a second
youth and became, what he always ought to have been, a really
first-class uncle. I suppose that after Aunt Sara's death he turned to
various half-forgotten interests to fill his loneliness; he had always
read a good deal, but now he read more widely than ever. He read
everything: all the classic works in all the languages he had ever
known, or not quite forgotten: Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian; a
bit of each every day; and when he was late for dinner, it was always
because he was 'just finishing a paragraph'. He was very shy about it,
and would be caught hiding Homer under a pile of papers, and have to be
gently coaxed out into the open to talk about him. 'Fine fellow, old
Homer,' he would say; or 'Fine fellow, old Go-eethe.' He went to plays
and exhibitions, and sometimes bought pictures, when I fancy he was
fleeced by the dealers. He was passionately fond of architecture, too; I
remember that when he had seen Selby Abbey for the first time, on his
way north to Durham, he felt obliged to motor all the way back next day,
to see it again--a long way for those early motors. He took to going to
concerts; and even sometimes, if he thought he was alone in the house,
he would sneak into his little used drawing-room and try to pick out
bits of Beethoven's symphonies on the pianoforte. 'Fine fellow, old
Beet-oven,' he would say.

[Illustration: Uncle William at a picture gallery. 'Fine fellow, old
Rembrandt.']

You will notice that I talk quite naturally of a _pianoforte_ when I am
thinking of that generation, because it was always called so by them.
They all said _Ingine_ for Engine, and _Chimist_ for Chemist and
_Yumour_ for Humour; they called a dress a _gown_, and a bunch of
flowers a _nosegay_, and medicine _physic_; and Uncle William always
said _Hunderd_ for hundred. 'I would go a hunderd miles to see a really
fine tree'--I can hear him saying; and once he did, too.

To the end of his life he was a little ashamed of never quite knowing
what was proper and what was not. He certainly sometimes lent me books
which were rather surprising to my youthful mind. I suppose Aunt Sara
had always undertaken this branch of criticism for him. He startled me
once by saying: 'I wonder when leasehold marriages will come in?' I was
still so young that it had never occurred to me that all marriages were
not permanent; so I said, in an appalled voice: 'Do you really think
they will?' 'Well, it looks like it, doesn't it?' he said.

Another time, as he was watching the dowdy Newnham students of those
days passing our house, he said sadly: 'Why do those young women always
wear dung-coloured coats?' For he dearly liked to see a pretty girl well
turned out. If he were out walking with me, leaning on my arm, as he
usually did, and a pretty girl came by, he would stop dead, turn round,
stare, and say loudly: 'Good looking young woman that.' She must
certainly have heard him; however, any girl must have been pleased by
such hearty approval. Once, when he had been entranced by the singing of
a duet by two girls, who both happened to have rather prominent teeth,
he said, 'Miss X sings like a bird, but little Miss Thingummy sings like
an angel fine powerful teeth they both have'--without any pause between
the sentences.

At Egerton Place he used to keep all the books which were suspected of
not being quite fit for the _jeune fille_, in a large bookcase in the
bathroom; and there on the walls hung photographs of nude works of art
by such people as Michelangelo, or Praxiteles. But one did not feel much
inclined to study the Venus of Milo, or to settle down to _Tristram
Shandy_, or _Madame Bovary_ in that bathroom, it was too alarming a
place. The enormous mahogany-sided bath was approached by two steps, and
had a sort of grotto containing a shower-bath at one end; this was lined
with as many different stops as the organ in King's Chapel. And it was
as difficult to control as it would be for an amateur to play that
organ. Piercing jets of boiling, or ice-cold, water came roaring at one
from the most unexpected angles, and hit one in the tenderest spots.
Only Uncle William was not afraid of the monster; but he had perfect
physical courage.

Presently he bought a Motor Car! A White Steam Car, which he named
Betsey. In this we had wonderful fun in the holidays--for he generally
now spent the holidays with us. Sometimes we drove what seemed immense
distances then--over thirty miles! Once we drove from a place on the
borders of Wales to London in three days, sleeping at Hereford and
Oxford on the way; a tremendous effort; we were quite exhausted. The car
was always breaking down and having to be given drinks of water with a
teacup out of the nearest ditch. Sometimes it blew up and spattered us
with orange spray out of the boiler; and at any steep hill it was no
better than Aunt Sara's Horses; it stopped, and we all had to get out
and push behind; while someone carried a large stone to scotch the
wheel, when we were out of breath.

Mr. Hoskins, the Chauffeur, was a gruff sort of character; like Straker
in _Man and Superman_, he always knew everything without being told. We
rather liked him, but I am afraid he had the length of Uncle William's
foot; as indeed all the servants had. They must have had an agreeable
time of it, unless they quarrelled too much among themselves over the
loot. Betsey had to be painted every year, and it took two months every
time; but Mr. Hoskins insisted that it must be done; he needed a
holiday, I suppose.

Dear Uncle William, how sweet he looked in his tasselled nightcap, when
he shyly received company in bed, if he were unwell; how enchanting he
was when he stumped over to the sideboard to fetch a bottle, and stumped
back again, hugging it and muttering affectionately, 'Dear old Gin.'
(Query: What would Aunt Sara have said to that? But I think she would
have laughed.) How angelic he looked on the pony on which he sometimes
rode after he lost his leg; how shamefacedly he would arrive at
Christmas with 'a few odds and ends'--(an enormous box of good things
from Fortnum and Mason's); and how certain he was to say, every night at
half-past ten 'Let me see; how goes the Enemy? I think it is time for
B-E-D.'


  UNCLE GEORGE

When we acted the uncles that Christmas we thought afterwards that my
father had been just a little hurt by my too light-hearted reference to
his troubles with the cocks that crow in the morn. For he took his ill
health seriously, and in many ways was very like Aunt Etty. When he felt
unwell he always walked about with a shawl over his shoulders; this was
a regular sign of feeling 'seedy' with all the uncles and aunts (Aunt
Etty wore one permanently); but it was exceedingly easy to divert him at
those times; you could do wonders with a little affection and a question
about something which interested him. I could not talk science to him as
Charles could; but I could ask him what _party per pale_ meant, or who
was John of Gaunt's third wife? And he would react at once, and soon
would be talking away quite gaily in spite of his discomforts.

Anything historical or heraldic would do, for he was the most romantic
man alive. Heraldry had been the unforgotten passion of his boyhood;
history and languages remained his chief interests all his life; outside
science, of course. Though I should not be surprised to learn that even
his scientific interests had had a romantic origin; at any rate, what
can be more romantic than the tides or the moon?

He loved travelling, and always wanted to see absolutely everything in
any country he visited; to learn the history and to speak the language
and talk to everyone he met. Besides the ordinary European languages, he
was always playing about with odd dialects--Provenal, Platt Deutsch,
Romanche, Icelandic; and he liked to get all the technical terms of any
craft right, and to find out the pedigrees of the words. I am sure that
he never played real tennis--the classic game--without enjoying the
ancient names of the parts of the court: the _Grille_, the _Dedans_, the
_Tambour_; or without remembering the first act of _Henry V_. In the
same way, when he took up archery, he loved using the right terms: the
_nock_ of the arrow, the _bracer_ on the wrist, and so on. And all the
time, whether he were playing tennis or pacing the Lammas Land to
measure how far he had shot, he was, half-consciously, being himself a
character in medieval history; and when he was playing with
throwing-sticks or boomerangs, he was being an Australian blackfellow.
He always wore a little flint and steel on his watch-chain. How he would
have loved it if he had ever found occasion to make a real fire with
them!

The books he read to us were all in the romantic vein: Shakespeare's
Histories, Chaucer, Percy's Reliques, Scott's novels. He adored a Roman
road or a prehistoric fort, and no one enjoyed a good dungeon, or a fine
set of battlements, more than he did. To him the north was always more
romantic than the south; so nearly every summer we went to Yorkshire for
part of the holidays, and as we crossed the railway bridge over the
Trent he would say, with great satisfaction: '_Now_ we're in the North
of England.' There our poor mother was dreadfully bored, but the first
taste of the iron-cold air, the first glimpse of the dry-stone walls,
went to our heads like wine. What fun it was, walking with him through
the driving rain and mist, over hills and walls and bogs, while he told
us stories about the Stone Age inhabitants of the moors.

With all this side of him I was very much in touch. It used to make me
feel quite ill to think that I should never, never see Chaucer or Queen
Elizabeth, or Rembrandt, or John Hampden, or whoever was the hero of the
moment. I would have given years of my life to spend a day in another
century, to see what it was like, and I would still give quite a lot to
do so. Once I was overcome by the sad end of a story-book, and was found
sobbing in the nursery, saying for all explanation: 'Robin Hood's dead!
Robin Hood's dead!' My mother could not help laughing a little, but my
father quite understood.

He was much more alert than the other brothers, more active, quicker in
his movements and in his reactions; quickly fond of people, fond of the
servants and tradesmen; really caring about their chilblains or their
sick mothers; considerate of everyone. When our dog, old Sancho, had to
be shot, it was he who comforted the broken-hearted Margaret. And yet he
was oddly clumsy at times, not always tactful. This was caused by his
simplicity, not by selfishness--he was completely unselfish; but he was
not quick at noticing people's expressions, and was apt to take things
at their surface value. If you said you were well, he would believe it
quite simply; and if someone said he was glad to see him, it would never
occur to him to doubt it. Warm and open, his spirits were quickly up and
quickly down. In his _up_ moods you might sometimes have thought him
vain; he was so proud of his knowledge of languages, so navely
delighted by the honours he received. How pleased he was when he was
made President of the British Association, for its South African visit
in 1905; how he enjoyed being made a Knight of the Bath, with its
romantic associations. But it was all a transparent, almost childish,
surprise at his own success; and one could prick it in an instant, if
one were cruel enough to try. He was more a man of the world than the
other brothers, if you could possibly call any of them men of the world
at all.

As a girl I was apt to consider my elders strangely innocent. Perhaps
they really were, though my father was certainly not quite so simple as
I thought him then. I remember my intense astonishment when, at a
dinner-party, Virginia Stephen made a slightly double-edged joke, and my
father _understood_ it! And turned away, shocked! This was, no doubt,
chiefly because the joke was made by a young woman; for men's and
women's worlds were more sharply divided then, than they are nowadays.
But my surprise and his disgust are very significant, both of our time
and of our family; for it was a mild enough joke; nowadays not even the
very young would think it unsuitable for their parents to be able to
understand it. I thought it natural enough that an advanced person like
me should understand the joke, but it seemed to me really improper that
he should. I remember, too, that he was disgusted by Stendhal's _Le
Rouge et le Noir_, when I lent it to him; though I am still surprised
that he did not appreciate the romantic fire which lies beneath Julien
Sorel's somewhat unscrupulous methods of getting on in the world.

With his nerves always as taut as fiddle strings, it was really
extraordinary that my father should be the most patient man alive. He
was a little sad sometimes, a little worried; but never sad _at_ you;
just plain sad. And never, never, never cross. Indeed Aunt Cara had
written of him in early days: 'He has an absolutely perfect temper,' and
it remained true of him to the end of his life.

We used to rush in and out of the study, when he was working, to get
'frog-paper'--half-sheets of paper for drawing on, which he kept for us,
under a green china frog--and he would just wait, with his 'Stylograph'
pen in the air, looking disturbed but friendly, till we had banged the
door and he could get back to the 'Pear-shaped Figure of Equilibrium'
again. My mother, too, always sat in the study, rustling and scrattling
about in her heaps of papers, and sometimes talking to us or the
servants in whispers, which can't have been very soothing. I am afraid
he had very little peace in the study; but though he sometimes looked
rather distraught, he never gave us the slightest hint that he would
like to be quiet. Indeed, he was so affectionate, that it is quite
possible that he did really prefer the human warmth of the interruptions
to the coldness of solitude.


  UNCLE FRANK

Uncle Frank was the most charming of the brothers, always excepting
Uncle William. He was the musician, the writer, the artist, in a family
which might well have been called benevolently Philistine. Overtly,
explicitly, they would have admitted that they knew nothing at all about
music, very little about art, and not a great deal even about
Literature, though they all loved reading. They were apt to regard the
arts as the inessential ornaments of Life; unimportant matters. But this
is a superficial view of them: in their scientific work they showed many
of the characteristics of the creative artist: the sense of style, of
proportion; the passionate love of their subject; and, above all, the
complete integrity and the willingness to take infinite trouble to
perfect any piece of work. Some of them found style difficult, but they
did at least know that it mattered.

But they were sometimes very blind about things which lay outside their
own particular world. There were whole realms of thought about which
they were entirely ignorant; and yet they, who questioned every
scientific statement, would sometimes be content to accept the most
superficial views on those other matters. For instance, they had no
feeling at all for philosophy or religion. They accepted the Christian
ethics, and would have liked to be ordinary Christians themselves, if
they could have believed in the dogmas. In fact, they might well be
called _Christian Parasites_ (which is what most of us are, in reality).
They were tolerant of the religions of others; only all religions seemed
equally strange to them; and the rites and ceremonies were just curious
survivals of magic and paganism: mumbo-jumbo.

Neither had they any idea of the complications of psychology. They found
it difficult to conceive of a mixture of motives; or of a man who says
one thing and means another; or of a person who is sometimes honest and
sometimes dishonest; because they were so completely single-hearted
themselves.

So, being what they were, it was rather wide-minded of my father and
Uncle Frank to take part in some of the early psychical experiments
conducted by Mr. F. W. H. Myers and Professor Henry Sidgwick. Uncle
Frank and Mr. Myers were actually each holding an ankle of the medium
Eusapia Palladino, when she made the movements which led to her
exposure. This was unfortunate, for it shook the uncles' faith in all
the subsequent investigations of the Society for Psychical Research.
They had probably not much wanted to believe in these manifestations
anyhow, but had thought that it would be only fair to give the
experiments a trial; but I have the impression that they were rather
relieved to discover that the medium was a fraud. Certainly spiritualism
went against the grain with them. Once Mr. Myers touched Uncle Frank and
said: 'Frank, let me _feel_ you: a man who really does not WANT
immortality.' And Uncle Frank answered: 'Well, Myers, I don't like
myself very much as I am, and I really could not bear the thought of
going on for ever.'

But though there were many things to which they were blind, things in
art and literature which they could not perceive at all, at any rate
they hardly ever liked anything that was bad. This is perhaps a
negative virtue, but such as it is, it was theirs; and, on the whole,
they had good taste. Even when their vision was imperfect, they always
had the grace of honesty, and there was something engaging in the
candour with which they said what they thought, about things which they
did not understand in the least. There was Grandmamma's remark about
Tennyson's play _Queen Mary_: 'It's not nearly so tiresome as
Shakespeare'--and Aunt Bessy's that '_Henry IV_ would be such a good
play without Falstaff'--both of which delight me.

But Uncle Frank, at any rate, had a good deal of the artist in him. He
loved music, and played by turns the flute, oboe, bassoon, recorder and
pipe-and-tabor. He had a fine sense of style, and a light touch in
writing--he wrote two charming books of essays--and his very personal
turns of speech and of humour were enchanting. He certainly set the tone
in which both Bernard and Frances have always thought and written. He
wrote heavenly verses in the Poetry Game; he made lovely drawings in the
Picture Game; but the old jokes are now too fragile to bear the public
light of day. A few sayings remain: of a social lie he was to tell: 'I
will do my best, but though I am a willing, yet I am not a ready liar.'
Of a dull book: 'I have tried to read it by repeated charges at the
point of the bayonet, but I have failed.' To a host, who told him that
if he insisted on starting at once, he would have to wait an hour at the
station: 'I would rather wait _anywhere_ but here.'

[Illustration: The cab had been ordered for 12.20; it was now nearly
12.15, so Uncle Frank said bitterly: 'I have now given up all hope of
catching the train.' And after all, he had to wait 35 minutes at the
station.]

Uncle Frank was always apt to suffer from fits of depression. This was
his form of the family hypochondria; but it had no doubt been
accentuated by the shock from which he never recovered: the death of his
young wife, Amy Ruck, at the birth of her first child, Bernard (later to
be the golfer and writer). Certainly, after this, he continually
expected the worst about everything; though, from various stories of his
childhood I have the impression that he had always been of a melancholy
temperament. It was natural enough that he should have a horror of
childbirth and illness, but his melancholy went deeper than that. He was
difficult to cheer in his moods of heaviness; he seemed to have no
spring of hope in him. Sometimes it even seemed doubtful whether it was
good for him to play golf, it reduced him to such despondency; nearly
every day he came home saying that nobody had ever played so badly
before!'

Uncle Frank was the only one of the brothers who was a naturalist. My
father or Uncle Horace would notice the ripple-marks in the sea-sand, or
the way in which the deep pot-holes in a worn road were formed; or they
would notice that an obsolete wooden plough was still in use; but
neither of them--none of them except Uncle Frank--noticed 'birds and
beasts and flowers'; though Uncle William knew something of geology. But
Uncle Frank was a real field naturalist, making botany his chief study,
but knowing a great deal about birds as well. He became his father's
assistant at Down, and his father said once, when they were
collaborating on a paper: 'Frank works _too_ hard, he'll never get on.'
In a way this was true; he would work for ever on a subject, but he had
little ambition, and hardly cared at all for the honours that came to
him. After his father's death he returned to Cambridge and worked at the
Botany School on the physiology of plants. He was at various times
lecturer and reader there, but when once the chair of Botany was vacant,
he refused to stand for the Professorship, for which he would have been
a strong candidate, saying that a younger man needed it more than he
did. This was characteristic both of his lack of ambition and of his
consideration for others. He was President of the British Association in
Dublin in 1908; but he will probably be best remembered for his edition
of the _Life and Letters_ of his father.

Uncle Frank married again in 1883, when Bernard was seven. His wife was
Ellen Crofts, Fellow and lecturer in English literature at Newnham.
Their only child was Frances, seven months younger than I am. She
married Professor F. M. Cornford, who later became Professor of Ancient
Philosophy at Cambridge, and who translated Plato.

After my grandfather's death, Grandmamma spent the winters in Cambridge,
at the Grove, a large house on the Huntingdon Road. It was surrounded by
great park-like meadows, and here both Uncle Frank and Uncle Horace
built themselves houses: _Wychfield_ and _The Orchard_. It was a lovely
place, where the children and Grandmamma's cows and carriage-horses, and
Frances's donkeys all wandered about under the trees. When Grandmamma
died the Grove was sold; and Aunt Bessy moved to a smaller house in
Cambridge; and then the children felt very much injured at having to be
content with their own large gardens instead of roving about over the
whole domain; and they were particularly insulted by having to go out
into the common, vulgar road to get from one house to the other. They
stood in a row on the fence and solemnly cursed the new owners.

It is odd how little I remember Aunt Ellen, though I was eighteen when
she died. Perhaps she did not care much for children, or know how to
make friends with them? Anyhow, much as I enjoyed going to Wychfield, I
always felt that I went there rather as fodder for Frances than as a
person in my own right. It seemed to be difficult to Aunt Ellen to be
warm and open to the ordinary lowbrow inhabitants of the world; for she
was reserved; her sympathies were deep, but narrow.

But I liked her very much, and admired her daring in cutting short her
rough black hair--an unconventional thing to do in those days. She
always looked picturesque and charming; with her straight eyebrows and
square whitey-brown face, especially as I remember her best in a
Victorian pink gown with large red bows all down the front.

And then, how impressive the cigarettes were! I can't remember seeing
any other women smoke, except her friends Jane Harrison and Alice Dew
Smith, sitting in wicker chairs in the delightful untidy veranda at
Wychfield. They used to play games there: making rhymes about their
friends, or comparing them to animals or plants or puddings. The veranda
was full of pretty things, all among the golf-clubs and tennis rackets;
Persian rugs and gay cushions, and even the dogs' drinking bowls were of
queer Italian pottery. There were always dogs hanging about: Whisk, the
clever Aberdeen, and stupid old Pat, the Irish terrier, who was always
being exploited by Whisk. They were quite as important as the people.
One year the dogs sent Christmas presents to Frances, with Bernard's
rhymed labels on them:

  _Little Whisk
  Sends you thisk._

  _Little Pat
  Sends you that._

Aunt Ellen and her friends seemed to me wonderfully up-to-date and
literary. She used to read Stevenson and Henley to us, which was the
height of modernity then. I believe she had a real feeling for
literature; yet there was always something about it that made me a
little uncomfortable. Was it possibly rather precious? For instance, she
did not care for Dickens. This must have been a barrier between her and
Bernard, who was always a Dickens expert.

The house was full of lovely things, but that was Uncle Frank's doing.
Aunt Ellen's own taste in art had more of the vogue of the moment. There
was just a trace of greenery-yallery and Japanese fans about her own
rooms; and the nursery was rather pitch-piney and bleak. In the
drawing-room hung a large engraving after a painting by Fred Walker,
'The Harvest Moon', in which a rustic character with a scythe and
several maidens wended their classical ways across the face of the full
moon. You could almost date the marriage from that picture alone, it was
so often given as a wedding present about 1883. I knew two other of the
best academic houses in Cambridge where it was the chief adornment of
the drawing-room. There was a small cast of the 'Venus of Milo'; and all
about the house there hung large photographs of the Best Pictures: the
'Sistine Madonna', of course (all proper drawing-rooms had _her_; we had
her ourselves, even larger, at home); and Watts's 'Hope', and 'Love and
Death'; and in Frances's room, an adorable row of Carpaccio babies
brought back from Italy. Even in those cultivated circles the French
Impressionists had not yet been heard of; though J. F. Millet had got
through. Aunt Etty had a photograph of 'The Angelus', but it was hung in
a second-class spare bedroom.

Aunt Ellen was not a happy person, though I don't know what was wrong.
Possibly she suffered from being too closely surrounded by Darwins. She
ought to have been an early member of the Anti-Darwin League, a society
recently founded by people who have inadvertently married Darwins.
Certainly her cry was often: 'Don't tell Henrietta I'm ill; _promise_
not to tell her.' 'Don't tell Ida; I know I've done wrong again.' But
that is not explanation enough. Long after her death Jane Harrison said
to me: 'I could not be sorry when Ellen died, because she was so
unhappy; though I don't know why. She loved her husband and child, and
had everything she wanted in the world.' Was it a temperamental
melancholy; had she a real distaste for life? Was it a reflection of
Uncle Frank's broken spirit? Or did she need work, a career, a religion?
Probably she didn't know herself.

When he was quite old, Uncle Frank fell in love again; and married
Florence, the strange and beautiful widow of Professor F. W. Maitland,
the historian; but that is another story, and does not come into this
one.


  UNCLE LENNY

  Question: _Which of all the Darwin brothers
            Eats still faster than the others?_

  Answer: _Spite of Mildred's watchful eyes,
          Uncle Lenny takes the prize._

              (From _Christmas Conundrums_, by Bernard)

Uncle Lenny was Major Darwin, R.E., but anyone less military it would be
hard to imagine; even his moustache looked benevolent and civilian; and
his round face, with its rudimentary whiskers, was kind, patient and
amused. We used to wonder what had made him go into the army, till he
told me that he had done so 'because he was afraid of being afraid'; not
a reason a coward would give. Probably, too, with his usual humility, he
considered the army suitable, because he thought himself less
intelligent than the other brothers. He was a slow developer, but he
went on growing all his life. When he was a very old man he was more
interested in the future of the world than in the past; which is rare in
the old.

He was at Woolwich and Chatham with Lord Kitchener, and said once that
he was not much of a believer in the value of examinations: 'Why, in one
examination I came out top and Kitchener was ploughed.' And, 'We really
never thought then that _Kitchener_ would do anything, which just
shows....'

Uncle Lenny did all kinds of scientific odd jobs in his twenty years in
the Royal Engineers: observing eclipses, or teaching chemistry or
photography, or working on the topography of Africa. He did very little
routine military work, and the only time he saw active service was at
Malta, when he was leading a file of men down a narrow high-walled lane,
and they met an infuriated cow. After a moment of painful indecision, he
was obliged to give the order for an ignominious retreat.

He had only inherited the family hypochondria in a mild degree, but in
1890 he resigned from the Army for the rather unconvincing reason that
'his health was not very good'. His life then became fuller than ever,
with many different interests. He was in Parliament for three years, in
consequence of which we all believed firmly, that 'poor Uncle Lenny
never went to bed'. But he was far too even-minded to be successful in
politics. He became President of the Royal Geographical Society, and
then of the Eugenic Society; and so at last, when he was over sixty, he
found that he was doing work which he felt to be of importance.

I can only remember his first wife, Aunt Bee--Elizabeth Fraser--as an
extra loud rustling silk petticoat coming along the nursery passage at
Down, in the days when the more you rustled the grander you were; or as
a bell-shaped modish silhouette against a window. Nana said, 'Aunt Bee
doesn't care for children.' I believe she was gay and sociable as well
as elegant; but it must have been hard to be lively at Number 12 Egerton
Place, as I remember it. This was their house, just off the Brompton
Road; and Aunt Bee seemed to have furnished it entirely out of the
purchases she had made on a tour round the world: carved Oriental
furniture, all of it quite black, except a few brass trays. It _was_ a
dark and dismal house. When, after Aunt Bee's death, Uncle Lenny married
Mildred, nothing was altered there at all; and Mildred, with her fresh,
light grey clothes and golden hair, looked very odd in Aunt Bee's
setting. Once, as a girl, I went to a dinner-party during Mildred's
reign at No. 12, and I must reluctantly state that it was the dullest I
ever endured, but I am sure it was chiefly the fault of the furniture.
Nobody could possibly have sparkled in that sombre setting.

Mildred kept her own cheerful furniture for the house they built on
Ashdown Forest. That was really their home: Cripps's Corner, on the very
edge of the forest, with the half-wild fields running down between the
woods in front, to the little brook at the bottom; and the great view,
out over the Weald to the South Downs, twenty-five miles away. They had
been quite unable to control the architect, who got the bit between his
teeth, and designed the house chiefly to please himself. He insisted on
putting in heavily leaded, small-paned, pseudo-Gothic windows, through
which it was quite impossible to see one of the loveliest views in
England (a study of the minds of architects would be a psychological
curiosity). However, I dare say that they did not put up much of a fight
against him, for I can well imagine Mildred saying, with kindly
tolerance: 'Yes, the windows are dreadful, but they make the young man
so happy, Poor Darling.' When Uncle Lenny showed the new house to Uncle
Horace, he said: 'Well, Horace, I suppose you think these windows are
not only ugly but immoral.' And Uncle Horace said: 'Yes, that is exactly
it.' Which shows that they had the right principles in design, when they
chose to think about it.

It is there, at Cripps's Corner, that we always think of Uncle Lenny and
Mildred; at the end of the road, at the end of their lives, living in
happy and uneventful solitude, three miles from the nearest village.

My mother used to say that in some ways Aunt Bee was better for Uncle
Lenny than dear Mildred: more stimulating and less damping to any
enterprise. It is true that Mildred was inclined to think that nearly
every activity was very rash, and more likely to do harm than good; and
Uncle Lenny was far too judicious to need soft-pedalling; but they were
so happy together, that it is quite impossible to think that anything
could have been more perfect than their marriage. It used to be
delightful to be welcomed at Cripps's Corner by Mildred, with real
sympathy in her voice for the dangers and exhaustion we had suffered
during the two-hour train journey from London. 'You _Poor Lamb_, how
_tired_ you must be after that _Horrid_ Journey.' One might have been
arriving from Timbuctoo.

We had always known and loved Mildred Massingberd, because she was our
cousin before she was our aunt. It is difficult to draw the very queer
character that Mildred was, and yet to show her charm. Everything one
writes about her seems so grim and puritanic, and yet she was one of the
most lovable people I ever knew. She was one of those strange beings who
really _enjoy_ discomfort, and who always remind me of the sheep in the
French proverb: '_Le mouton aime la misre_.' She would have lived
happily for ever on tea and bread-and-butter, with a cold bath every
morning, and a backless wooden stool to sit on. 'It doesn't matter if
she's a good cook, so long as she's a good woman,' she said once, as she
engaged a cook. She did, accidentally, once have a good cook; but the
cooking soon deteriorated sadly from a lack of encouragement which
amounted almost to Cruelty-to-Cooks.

Once when some children were staying at Cripps's Corner, Mildred gave
them ginger-nuts for their elevenses--she loved to spoil children--and
Uncle Lenny always had one, too. On the last day of the visit, she said:
'There, Leonard, that's your last ginger-nut; you won't get any more.'
The children were dreadfully upset, and came privately to their mother
to ask: '_Why_ can't poor Uncle Lenny have any more biscuits?' Of course
this was a joke of hers; but, for all that, she really cared so little
for bodily joys, that she could not understand how small pleasantnesses
like ginger-nuts can add up together to make life solid and good.

Yet she was always ministering to the weaker brethren about her, and
moreover doing it without making them feel ashamed of their grossness.
There was none of that guilty feeling of being a cannibal, which good
vegetarians always manage to give you. Not at all: 'They do so like
these things, poor Darlings,' she seemed to be saying, as she tenderly
and amusedly provided us with coffee, or hot-water bottles, or any other
of the harmless comforts of the flesh.

But not with drink; a line was drawn there, for Mildred was a fanatical
teetotaller; and took in, believe it or not, a periodical called _The
Journal of Inebriety_. However, she allowed Uncle Lenny to have a tot of
whiskey every night 'as medicine'; but he had to drink it in one gulp,
while she kept her eyes averted from the horrid sight. He was then given
a charcoal biscuit to take the taste away. He used to tease her gently
about alcohol, and she loved the teasing!

She hated all innovations, and for a long time she would allow no
electric light or telephone in their isolated house; and the motor car,
which they finally kept, must have had a miserable life of it, owing to
a lack of that motherly love which motors need, like all other animals.

She had a deep distrust of art in all its forms, but particularly of
music. She wrote to Margaret: '_I wonder why so many literary and
artistic people have so little power of leading good and helpful lives?
It is sad indeed to be born with the artistic temperament. I do hope
your Richard won't succomb to it, but I feel anxious about the clarionet
and piano._'

We used to have fierce arguments on this subject, and Uncle Lenny used
to shock me when, in talking about Eugenics, he maintained that a money
standard was the _only possible_ criterion in deciding which human
stocks should be encouraged to breed; though he admitted that this test
was not a perfect one: 'A man who can earn and keep money shows that he
has the qualities essential to survival.' I said that money had little
importance for such people as artists, philosophers, inventors, gypsies.
It would be an irreparable loss to the human race if those valuable
strains were to be bred out altogether. It depressed me deeply to think
of everybody living in tidy little suburban villas, earning and keeping
money--_what for_? But Uncle Lenny could not see this at all. He had
very little use for artists; and gypsies were generally dirty and
dishonest. During one of these conversations Mildred, in her horror of
the Arts, was driven into the definite statement, that a man who
successfully held a small job in a post office was worth more than the
greatest artist in the world! And Uncle Lenny sat there, listening and
amused; but in substantial agreement with her.

I must add, however, that when the Ashdown Forest Conservators wanted to
shut up a half-crazed old cave-man, who had lived all his life as a kind
of outlaw on the forest, Uncle Lenny told them that they should have
caught him fifty years ago; if they shut him up now he would certainly
die; so they left the poor old fellow free. But Uncle Lenny was rather
apologetic about his action, as it was against all his best principles.

In her own way, Mildred was an ardent feminist, and often deplored
matrimony for her friends as a most rash and unnecessary venture; though
she held that women should be kind to men, and not expect too much of
them, 'because they are such helpless things, Poor Lambs'. Once, when
she was ill, I begged her to see a doctor. She answered: 'What's the
good of my getting the doctor? I don't know what's the matter with me,
so I can't tell him what to do, and that is the only thing that is any
use with doctors. But, of course, he's only a _Man_.' Later on they had
a woman doctor, whom she did trust.

I remember a letter of congratulation to a girl on her marriage; it ran
something like this: '_My dear X. I must tell you how much I admire your
courage in getting married. I can't myself understand this enthusiasm
for matrimony, as women are so much happier single; still it does_
sometimes _turn out quite well_;' (etc. etc.; accompanied by a large
cheque). If, after some such incident one pointed out that she and
Uncle Lenny appeared to be very happy, she would only say that of course
that was quite different, and that they were exceptionally fortunate.
She used to boast: 'Of course I have no sense of humour' (which was
quite untrue), and then would take much pleasure in guying her own
idiosyncrasies; and yet she meant what she said, too.

She had a large circle who were known as 'Mildred's Poories', to whom
she was endlessly attentive. They were mostly elderly women:

  _Who can't be said to coruscate,
  Who are not quite as fair as houris,
  The deaf, the dull, the desolate,
  The too immortal race of Poories..._'

as Bernard described them in a poem, written for Uncle Lenny's ninetieth
birthday. I think of Mildred sitting up very straight--she never leant
against the back of a chair--sewing flannelette nightgowns for the
poorest of the Poories; garments which I am afraid the most miserable of
paupers would not now condescend to die in; but which I am sure she
would thankfully have worn herself.

After about 1905 Mildred's clothes never altered again, and throughout
all the wild vicissitudes of fashion, she went on wearing her long
narrow skirts, high-necked blouses, large straw hats and narrow-footed
boots. But, in her own curious aristocratic way, I believe she took a
good deal of trouble about her unfashionable attire, and was conscious
that she had been, and still was, good-looking. Aunt Etty once wrote,
after some function of Uncle Lenny's, that 'being dressed like a
Duchess' suited Mildred, and it was true.

Everything Mildred said and did delighted and amused Uncle Lenny, even
when she refused him ginger biscuits! He was often amused at himself,
too, and would tell us many gentle stories to his own detriment. Once,
when he was presiding at a solemn committee meeting, he was roused from
contemplation by a voice saying: 'Do you find that soothing, Major
Darwin?' and became aware that he was slowly and rhythmically rubbing
his nose from one end to the other of the large sheet of pink
blotting-paper which lay before him. He was not quite so
unself-conscious as Uncle William, or he could not have told that story
about himself.

Sometimes, when one was walking with him in his solitary garden at
Cripps's Corner, he would look carefully all round him, and if there was
no one at all in sight (and there never was anyone within miles), he
would tell one in a lowered voice about some relation who had been dead
for about sixty years, and who used occasionally to drink.

Or he would tell one of his three celebrated improper stories. The one I
liked best was about a lady who got locked into the lavatory on a Sunday
morning; so her brother-in-law, a clergyman, sat on a chair up against
the door and read the morning service aloud to her from outside. The
other two stories were not quite up to this level of impropriety. It was
sometimes very difficult to imagine Uncle Lenny in the army!

He was extraordinarily humble about himself. He told me several times:
'I remember all the silly and bad things I ever did; all the times I was
unkind or tactless or made a fool of myself; every one of them. I wish I
didn't. It makes me so unhappy even now. I wish I could remember the
good things, if there were any.' There was one painful story of which I
cannot remember the details: about how he had been asked for advice, and
had given it; and how for forty years now he had been harassed by the
thought that he might have given the wrong advice.

But he remembered with the most touching satisfaction how a man, not an
intimate friend, came to him in great distress, saying that his wife had
left him, and what ought he to do? Uncle Lenny felt very doubtful, but
at last said: 'Do you know where your wife has gone?' 'Yes, I know where
she is.' 'Then I think you had better go after her and try to bring her
back.' The advice was taken with success, and the couple lived happily
together ever afterwards; and years later the man thanked Uncle Lenny
for his good counsel. Another verse of Bernard's poem comes to my mind;
of how Uncle Lenny was

  _Serenely kind and humbly wise,
  Whom each may tell the thing that's hidden
  And always ready to advise
  And ne'er to give advice unbidden._

This was quite true.


  UNCLE HORACE

A fact about Uncle Horace, which set him in a most amiable light, was
that he had the greatest difficulty in learning to spell well enough to
pass the Little Go. My grandfather did not spell very well either; all
through the _Beagle Journal_ he spelt _broad_ BROARD, and _yacht_
YATCH--a sympathetic weakness. It was understood by us children, that
Uncle Horace and Mr. Dew Smith had started a sort of concern called _The
Shop_, where they made clocks and machines and things; and where we
hoped that poor spelling would not matter much. Nowadays it is called
_The Cambridge Scientific Instrument Company_, and is not unknown; but
then it was in a very small way, and was just _The Shop_, and was
considered by my father as rather a doubtful commercial venture. Long
afterwards Uncle Lenny said: 'Of all my brothers, Horace was the one
whom I should have thought the least likely to make a success in life.'
Yet he made a great success as a scientific engineer. But in those days
they used to say: 'Of course Horace is brilliant with machines, but will
he really be able to make the business _go_? And his health is so bad,
too. . . .'

For Uncle Horace and my father were the two brothers who really had weak
health. Uncle Horace was the youngest surviving child of the family, and
had been delicate and backward as a boy. Doubtless my grandmother had
coddled him a good deal, and he may have been over-protected by his
brothers, who were very fond of him. However, he was far too
affectionate and unselfish to be spoilt; but, though he grew up able to
work, and to work hard, he always retained traces of the invalid's
outlook, and of the old blissful dependence on his mother. When he was
ill, he did not worry over details as my father and Aunt Etty did; but
he did enjoy the extra affection he received at those times. Here is a
scrap of a letter from Grandmamma, written in 1889, after a visit to
Horace, who was recovering from an illness: '_I have seen the dear old
man. He looks so sweet and so handsome, with his pale clear complexion,
and his hair and beard so dark. . . . His poor hands are very
transparent._' This last phrase brings her vividly before me. '_His poor
hands_' (there was nothing the matter with his hands), the expression
somehow shows the quality of her dangerous interest in ill health.

In 1893, after years of ill health, he was at last successfully operated
on by Sir Frederick Treves for _typhlitis_, as appendicitis was then
called. This was one of the early operations, and was then considered
very risky. Soon after this, in the Jubilee Year, he was made Mayor of
Cambridge, and had a furred gown and a gold chain; so it looked as if
both his health and his spelling had improved. We children thought it
grand that he should be Mayor; but at the same time we felt that it was
very kind and condescending of him to consort with the Town on equal
terms like that! The University and the Town kept themselves to
themselves in those days; Uncle Horace tried hard to bring them closer
together.

However, his chief title to fame was that he used to amuse us by
standing on a chair in the dining-room, holding a tin of treacle, and
demonstrating that syrup always fell in a perfectly straight line, from
the spoon in his high-held hand, into a saucer on the floor. After a
time, the exceptions that proved the truth of the laws of gravity became
rather frequent, to the detriment of the carpet; and then Aunt Ida
decided that he must conduct his operations in the veranda in future.
After that, the experiments demonstrated the effect of the wind on
treacle, more often than anything else.

Uncle Horace had not taken kindly to the classical and literary sides of
his education; but he had a certain directness of perception, and
delicacy of touch, which were very attractive. Aunt Etty writes of him,
when he was twenty-four: '_I've taken to being more in love than usual
with Jemmy_ [Horace]. _I think he has such a charming nature, so fresh
and unspotted by the world; and his very absence of culture, gives him a
certain originality which is refreshing._' I felt this myself, but his
absorption in his dear machines always remained a barrier to me, for
they are not at all in my line; though I liked to watch the affection in
his face and the tender movements of his beautiful sensitive hands as he
touched them.

Also I did not know Uncle Horace as well as the other uncles because he
and his family often spent the holidays at Aunt Ida's home at Abinger,
so that he was not often at Down with us. (As Aunt Etty's Janet put it
once so well: 'Mr. Rorace and Mrs. Sidar rar rat Tabinger Rall.')

But chiefly I did not get to know him because, warm, tender-hearted,
sympathetic as he was, he rather tended to disappear behind the
clear-cut distinction of Aunt Ida. She was the daughter of Lord Farrer,
who was connected in rather complicated ways with our family. She must
have been enchanting when young; so fine-spun and rare, with her sloping
shoulders and shining Victorian perfection. Uncle Lenny had been
attracted first; but when she accepted Uncle Horace there was great
opposition from her family; or, at least from that part of her family,
who were our own relations! Uncle Horace, they said, had very poor
health, no proper profession, or likelihood of earning a decent living,
and not much culture; really none of those Darwin young men were
anything like good enough for Ida. So there was a terrible to-do, and
everyone obeyed the advice given by a family poet on a like occasion
some fifty years earlier:

  _Write a letter, write a letter;
  Good advice will make us better;
  Father, mother, sister, brother,
  Let us all advise each other._

But, of course, the young people carried it through in the teeth of the
clashing aunts; it is however interesting to consider the low esteem in
which our revered uncles were once held.

So they were married and built the Orchard, and had three children:
Erasmus, who was four years older than me, and who was killed at the
Battle of Ypres in 1915; and Ruth, who is two years older than me, and
is now Mrs. Rees Thomas; and Nora, who is of my own age, and who married
Alan Barlow.

I did not really get to know Aunt Ida very well in my childhood; but
when I was older I knew her and loved her exceedingly, and I never could
enough appreciate the fineness of her quality and the sensibility of her
perceptions. But, as a child, I only dimly felt all this, for as
children we were all a little afraid of her. We felt that we were rough
and rude, and it seemed impossible to live up to her standards. She
never said anything critical, she was always kind, but we somehow felt
that our hats or our legs or our manners were wrong (and so they were,
particularly our manners). And what was worse, we never knew exactly how
they were wrong, or what we could do about it.

There was always a feeling at the Orchard of things which had better not
be said; though why not, or what they were, was beyond our imagination.
Mystery seemed to veil everything there; but I don't believe there was
really any mystery at all. Aunt Ida would say: 'I am sorry that the
children can't come to tea on Tuesday,' and it would seem as if there
must be some portentous and secret reason why they could not come. And
then, later, we would discover by accident that they had only had to go
to the dentist, or do something else equally humdrum. I remember, almost
with a shiver, how we heard from Aunt Ida that a favourite nursery-maid
of theirs was going to leave. What could she have done? What could she
possibly have done? for Aunt Ida to say in _that_ voice: 'Rose is going
away.' I believe she was only leaving to be married.

Frances and I used to gossip together and say that Ruth and Nora liked
being mysterious, too. They would say: 'I'm going to see A Person,'
where we would have said: 'I'm going to see Miss Greene'; or 'I've got
Something to do' where we would have said, 'I've got to write a French
Composition to-day.'

On thinking over this queer atmosphere at the Orchard, I believe that
the mystery partly emanated from Aunt Ida's intense desire for privacy;
and partly from her over-sensitive response to life. She saw the world
with very clear eyes, and sometimes it was more than she could bear.
There are many things in the world which are brutal and shocking, but
most of us are coarse-grained enough to be able to think: 'Oh well,
things _are_ like that, and there is nothing I can do about it, so why
worry?' and then we muffle up the facts and never see them naked again.
But Aunt Ida could not do this; she never let her vision become
thickened and fogged, as most people do. That was what was so wonderful
about her. Only some things were too terrible for her to look at, or to
tell.

Once you were through the barriers, you were accepted as a friend for
ever; and talking to her was always a joy and a refreshment; she
understood so much, she was so fine-grained and sensitive. But her
artist's nature was always driving her on to aim at perfection in
everything, and so she could never herself attain satisfaction. In
manners and in morals; in rising up and in lying down; in the roasting
of the chicken, and in the trimming of Nora's garden hat; everything had
to be perfectly done in the only right way. This made life difficult at
times--a little slackness is a comfortable thing; but she did reach some
fulfilment in the finish and charm of her house, and in all the lovely
things she had found and put there; and above all in her garden, her
secret poet's garden, where the blackbirds sang all day long in the
mossy apple trees, and where every flower was a new discovery. There she
had really made an image of Paradise such as only herself could have
conceived.

       *     *     *     *     *

It is extraordinary how different the interiors of these five houses
were. You had only to put your nose inside the front doors to smell
their diversity: Uncle William's, correct, hideous, in the very best
late-Victorian style; only his books and his writing-table reflecting
anything of his personality; our house, untidy, undistinguished--(I am
afraid that fiend Economy had taken a hand in the choice of some of the
furniture)--yet somehow friendly and comfortable enough; Uncle Frank's,
charming and solid and simple and gay, everywhere characteristic of his
instinctive taste; Uncle Lenny's the strangest mixture of the
unassimilated ideas of his two wives, yet very pleasant wherever Mildred
had got the upper hand; Uncle Horace's--though one thought of it as Aunt
Ida's--almost too full of detail; but beautiful, not grand--and every
tiny corner of it loved and finished and exquisite.

       *     *     *     *     *

When I read over what I had written about these five brothers, I felt
that it might seem that I had made them too good, too nice, too
single-hearted to be true. But it _was_ true, for in a way that was what
was wrong with them. I always used to feel that they needed protecting
and cherishing, for they never seemed to me to have quite grown up. No
doubt my attitude to them arose partly from the arrogance of my youth,
and my children probably feel the same about me now; but still, when I
think of my uncles beside some of their friends, they seem to me to show
a sort of innocent lack of imagination, which was exceptional. They were
quite unable to understand the minds of the poor, the wicked, or the
religious.

My grandfather said once: 'I have five sons, and I have never had to
worry about any one of them, except about their health.' Well, that is
not quite right. One ought to have to worry sometimes about young
people, because they ought to be growing out in new ways and
experimenting for themselves. But my grandfather was so tolerant of
their separate individualities, so broad-minded, that there was no need
for his sons to break away from him; and they lived all their lives
under his shadow, with the background of the happiest possible home
behind them. Of course, that world, which now seems to us to have been
so stable and prosperous, seemed eventful enough to them then; and they
had certainly done their full share of work in it, and had had plenty of
personal difficulties; all the same, it is probable that the reason for
this feeling of mine about them lies partly in the relative smoothness
of their lives, but yet more in the straightforwardness and simplicity
of their characters.

At any rate, I know that I always felt older than they were. Not nearly
so good, or so brave, or so kind, or so wise. Just older.

[Illustration: My grandfather on his horse Tommy. From a photograph.]




  CHAPTER XI

  _Religion_


The first religious experience that I can remember is getting under the
nursery table to pray that the dancing mistress might be dead before we
got to the Dancing Class. I was about half-way through the exasperating
business which dancing class entailed: being changed right down to my
skin, and washed and brushed, and having the comfortable dirt taken out
of my fingernails. Margaret was sitting on the table, while Nana made
her hair into long sausage-curls, with a wet brush round her finger. We
thought the sausages very ugly, but Nana admired them, and we all loved
Nana so much that we would do anything she liked. So Margaret bore it as
well as she could, and only gave a little snarl when a drop of cold
water fell on her bare neck. Charles was carefully washing his hands
without any soap, the usual expression of philosophic calm on his round
face. I think that he sometimes washed without any water either, for I
well remember the smooth and permanent pale grey texture of his fingers.

When I was about half-dressed, as I said, in my white flannel petticoat
to be exact, I considered my costume suitable, and I got under the table
for religious seclusion, and took up an attitude modelled on Sir Joshua
Reynolds' 'Infant Samuel kneeling in Prayer', as the correct position
for divine transactions. We knew the Infant Samuel very well, from the
picture-card game of National Gallery, which we often played.

[Illustration: The first prayer. 'Please, God, let Miss Ratcliffe be
dead before we get to Dancing Class.']

It was not that I had any grudge against that particular dancing
mistress, who was called, I think, Miss Ratcliffe. Of course, all
dancing mistresses were affected jades. Hamlet's words perfectly
described them, when I read them later on: '_You jig, you amble, you
lisp and nickname God's creatures and make your wantonness your
ignorance._' But that would not have mattered to me if only they had
kept their jigging and ambling to themselves and left me in peace. But
as it was, we were forced to go, and I really could think of no other
weapon of self-defence except prayer. Not that I believed in that much;
still, perhaps it was worth trying.

But, of course, prayer did not succeed. Prayers, at least _my_ prayers,
never did. So far as I can remember, none of the dancing mistresses from
whom I suffered, ever had so much as a cold in the head in all the time
I knew them. There they always were, that scourge of the human race; and
we always had to go through the whole degrading ritual, from the first
March Past with its elegant bows to Miss Ratcliffe, right down to the
bitter end of the waltz or the lancers.

I have sometimes wondered what would have been my reaction if the
dancing mistress had fallen down dead, as I came into the classroom. I
suppose I should have felt rather guilty; but after all it would have
been God's doing, not mine; and that He should have done such a thing at
my request would have destroyed my respect for Him, for once and all.

For the only virtue God had, to my mind, was that of impartiality; and
so prayer itself seemed to me to be an immoral proceeding. It was as if
you were trying to bribe the Judge. My idea of prayer was: 'Please God,
if you will let there be Chocolate Pudding for lunch, I will be very
good to-day.' I am now told that this is not the right idea of prayer,
but it was mine then. Well, now: could it be right that God should
suddenly put Chocolate Pudding into the head of the cook, when she had
intended to make Marmalade Pudding, which I hated, but which other
people liked? No, it would be exceedingly unjust. In fact, it would be a
shabby thing for me to try to do a deal for myself in that way; and most
unfair of God to agree to my terms. But, anyhow, He never did; God
simply never did what I asked Him; so that on the whole I thought Him
incorruptible, which was just as well. There remained the possibility
that prayer might work as magic. But even as magic it never succeeded.
It was altogether a bad idea. After that, prayer became synonymous for
me with giving up hope; if ever I prayed again, it was only in a final
frenzy of despair, and was the first step towards resignation at not
getting what I wanted.

God had a smooth oval face, with no hair and no beard and no ears. I
imagine that He was not descended, as most Gods are, from Father
Christmas, but rather from the Sun Insurance Office sign. Even now this
hairless, earless, egg-shaped face, which I have drawn, gives me a sort
of holy feeling in my stomach. He sat up in the night sky like that,
sending out Good Things with one hand, and Bad Things with the other
hand. This was somehow connected with not letting your right hand know
what your left hand was doing. There were probably an equal number of
Good Things and Bad Things, and they were probably sent out with fair
impartiality; at least, I was willing to give God the benefit of the
doubt about it--though certainly it did seem as if the Bad Things had a
strong tendency to go to the Good people; and vice versa. For from my
earliest childhood I knew very well that Being Good did not pay. It was
just a thing that you might--or might not--like for its own sake; and
the verse about the wicked flourishing like the green bay tree, was one
of the few texts that went home to me with a click. God was not good and
kind; at best, he was indifferent and the world was beautiful but quite
pitiless.

[Illustration: God.]

And yet, deep down in the furthest depths of my mind, I must still have
wished to believe in the Justice of God; for during the war I suddenly
noticed, with surprise, that I was half-consciously comforting myself
with the thought that Hitler and his gang would get what they deserved
after their deaths, and that the innocent people they had tortured would
all receive prizes in the next world! In fact, I still half believed in
an exceedingly primitive kind of Heaven and Hell. How difficult it is to
perceive in oneself the remains of early superstitions.

Prayer was not the only idea of the grown-ups which seemed to me wrong
in itself. They had a complete set of values for Badness and Goodness,
which I will call System A; and this only partly coincided with my own
private set of values: System B. I was always troubled by the confusion
of trying to reconcile the two incompatible codes. System A and System B
overlapped and agreed in disapproving of dishonesty, cruelty and
cowardliness; but otherwise they had little in common; and there might
often be very different points of view about what constituted dishonesty
or cowardliness. For instance, when I had been obliged to steal some
sugar, I felt that it made it perfectly honest if I put my head through
the drawing-room door and shouted: 'I've taken three lumps of sugar out
of the pantry,' and then ran away. My conscience was quite clear after
that, and it did not prevent me from doing it again. This is the
principle of Confession. I should have minded very much if I had felt
myself to be dishonest; but I did not mind if they scolded me for
disobedience. Obedience, though important in System A, had no place at
all in System B.

Of course all kinds of goodness, in both systems, were hampered by
being, by definition, something which you did not want to do. If you did
want to do it, then it wasn't goodness. Thus being kind to a person you
liked didn't count at all, because you wanted to do it; and being kind
to a person you didn't like (like Poor Old Betsy at Down) was no use
either; because--as I thought then--the person always knew perfectly
well that you disliked them, and so of course the kindness could not
please them. So kindness was no use anyway. Nor were other efforts at
Goodness more successful. For one thing Goodness never made me feel nice
afterwards; I must be abnormal, for the reputed afterglow of virtue
simply did not occur. Goodness-against-the-grain simply made me feel
mean, hypocritical and servile; so that Goodness only resulted in a
weight on my conscience; a weight often heavier than if I had been Bad
on purpose; and nearly as heavy, as if I had been Bad by accident.

For the most muddling thing of all was that the Badnesses you did _by
accident_ were what made you feel most guilty. Of course, this was all
wrong by System A. The grown-ups pretended that it was what you did
_on purpose_ that mattered. This was, and is, quite untrue. No one ever
really regrets doing a Badness on purpose. For instance, if you were
rude or disobedient to Miss X, a governess you rightly despised, you
felt rather pleased with yourself afterwards; or if you paddled without
asking leave, anyhow you had had the paddling, and no one could ever
take it away from you again.

But if you were unkind or rude by mistake to someone you loved--Ah, then
you just wished you were dead. The story of Aunt Bessy and Margaret's
impersonation of Miss S. is a case in point. We had truly intended to
amuse and please Aunt Bessy and when she was hurt, we were shattered by
remorse. Once when Nana was ill in hospital, and my mother wanted to
take me to see her, I refused to go, in all innocence. I could not bear
the idea of seeing her changed, and sick, and surrounded by strangers.
What could I say to her in public? We could only look at each other from
far off, so what was the use of going? If I could possibly have believed
that she would have liked to see me, I would willingly have gone; but
that never occurred to me at all. This is the sort of thing one is sorry
for afterwards, just because one did not do it on purpose.

My own code of virtue, System B, took this strange fact into account,
but the grown-ups' System A was not realistic enough to do so. Yet if
they would only be honest, even old people would admit that when they
forget an appointment or are cross on purpose, they don't feel sorry at
all; whereas, if they did the same things by accident, they would feel
thoroughly guilty. Can it be called anything but Remorse, the anguish
which pierces your breast when you discover that you have thrown away
your return ticket, or lost your latchkey, by your own carelessness?

Anyhow, whether by accident or on purpose, by being Good or by being
Bad, System A or System B, I always had a weight on my conscience of
many pounds--if conscience weight is measured in pounds? Guiltiness was
a permanent condition, like rheumatism; and one just had to learn to
disregard it, and to carry on under it, as best one could. Huckleberry
Finn has the last word on conscience--and I was as conscious-ridden as
poor Huck himself.

'_It don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's
conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him_ anyway. _If I had
a yaller dog that didn't know more than a person's conscience, I would
pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's
insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow._'

This is most terribly TRUE.

There was another way in which the grown-ups were far from candid. This
was about yet a third code of values: System C, or _Ladies and
Gentlemen_. We were taught very carefully and with great insistence how
gentlemen behaved. 'Gentlemen don't tell lies; Ladies don't pick their
noses; Gentlemen never avoid paying their bus fares; Ladies are always
polite to servants; Gentlemen never show they are afraid; No Lady would
wear a hat like that; Gentlemen are always generous with money, don't
hit smaller boys; never read other people's letters;' and so on and so
forth; a mixture of morals and manners, which seemed to me a much more
real and practical rule to live by, than the Goodness and Badness of
System A. It was definite and easy to understand; and it was not holy
and infected with piety; so that, whatever happened, it had no effect on
the conscience afterwards. In this it was quite unlike Systems A and B.
By System C, you were sorry if you did something wrong on purpose, but
no sorrier if you did it by accident; and in neither case were you left
with a load of sacrilegious guilt on your mind. I can't account for
this, but it is a fact.

To be sure, there was a side of System C which seemed rather silly: for
instance, when they made such a fuss because you walked out of the room
in front of Mrs B.; or when public schoolboys--(not my brothers)--talked
so much about bounders, and about the things no gentleman could possibly
do; but in our family we really saw very little of the worst kind of
snobbishness of System C, so that on the whole it seemed to me
right--even fine--in its emphasis on disinterestedness and honour, and
especially in its detachment from money values. 'He's very poor, but he
_is_ such a gentleman.' 'Of course you might make a lot of money that
way, but it's not the sort of thing one could possibly do.'

But the grown-ups were not candid in being unwilling to admit that Code
C was quite as important as Code A. They believed in it profoundly; much
more passionately than in Code A (though they did not know this); and
yet they would not say so openly, or let you say so either. This was
partly because Being a Gentleman was already beginning to be considered
snobbish and undemocratic; but still more because they felt so deeply
about it that they really did not like speaking of it. You were scolded
if you said that someone 'was not quite a gentleman', because it was
vulgar to say so, _though not to think so_. In fact, it was exactly what
they themselves had meticulously taught us to think. I will try to be
braver and more realistic than they were; and so, in spite of
overwhelming current opinion, and with the certainty of being thought
snobbish, I will say, straight out, that System C was on the whole a
good code, and that being a gentleman was, at its best, a fine thing.

Of course the code was not perfect; it had both the advantages and the
disadvantages of being a rule it was quite possible to live up to;
unlike System A, which gloried in aiming impossibly high. But the best
kind of System C incorporated a good deal of the Christian ethics of
System A; and it was this C-with-a-dash-of-A, which was the fundamental
rule which guided the best people I knew as a child. My own code was
B-with-a-dash-of-C.

       *     *     *     *     *

My chief Badnesses were furies. I used to get into really frightful
states of red-hot, impotent rage, at being made to do such things as go
to Dancing Class, or Parties, or Church (in that order of dislike); or
at having to wear stockings in the summer, or gloves, or (later on)
stays, or any clothes which were too smart, or too tight, or too hot. I
did not mind how shabby they were. Or at having to eat vegetables; or
learning to sew, or having Bible lessons. I admit now that some of these
things were advisable, or even necessary; and I am sure that they must
have tried to make me understand this, but they never succeeded, and
these things all seemed to me completely unreasonable and unfair. The
rages exhausted and frightened me, and I knew I was quite wrong by the
grown-up Standard A; while even by my own Standard B, it was a useless,
hopeless expense of spirit. Charles used to tell me how silly I was; of
course the grown-ups were wrong, but it wasn't worth while to put myself
into such a state about something I couldn't help. Yet all the time I
felt that I was not more in the wrong than the wicked animal in the
rhyme:

  _Cet animal est bien mchant,
  Quand on l'attaque, il se dfend._

But to finish up about prayer. I can also remember my mother telling me
that the Cruel Turks were killing the Poor Armenians; and that the
Archbishop of Canterbury, or Mr. Gladstone--or perhaps both of
them--said we were all to pray for them, and that I was to remember to
pray, too. I thought: 'Much good that will do them,' and 'That's just
the sort of thing they _would_ say;' and I had not the faintest
intention of doing anything so silly. This must have been in the summer
of 1894, for it was just before Billy was born.

       *     *     *     *     *

Pretty soon after that, when we were both between nine and ten years
old, Frances took me to a very private place under the wooden bridge on
the Little Island, and told me there, in confidence, that it was not at
all the thing nowadays to believe in Christianity any more. It simply
wasn't done. I felt at once that this was what I had always thought,
though I had not been quite able to express it. I admired Frances
tremendously; she seemed to live in an up-to-date, sophisticated world,
where Art and Literature were taken seriously. Her mother had short
hair, and even _smoked cigarettes_; so that anything Frances said was
sure to be right. Her information was a great relief to me; a real
comfort. From that very night I gave up saying my prayers. I remember,
that evening, catching a glimpse, through the doorway, of Charles
kneeling by his bed and thinking: 'Poor boy, he's only seven; I won't
disturb his mind just yet.' But, knowing my own incapacity for holding
my tongue, I am certain that I told him all about it next day; and I
don't suppose his mind was at all disturbed. He had probably known it
all along.

I am sure that Frances was quite sincere when she preached to me under
the bridge, but soon afterwards she began to be troubled by Doubt. She
had never been christened, and various story-books now made her wonder
if this could be quite safe. _We_ had all been christened, and Frances
had sometimes made us feel decidedly inferior on that account--provincial
and behind the times. Now, gradually, she began to suffer torments of
fear in case her parents might be wrong about Christianity. To her, her
parents were perfect in wisdom, and the mere idea that they could be
wrong was very dreadful. Now I could read _The Daisy Chain_, or _The
Wide Wide World_, and just take the religion as the queer habits of
those sort of people, exactly as if I were reading a story about
Mohammedans or Chinese. But Frances took it all very seriously; and was
sadly upset when Ellen Montgomery, in _The Wide Wide World_, was told
that she ought to love Christ more than her own mother. I didn't turn a
hair at that sort of nonsense. Frances had always enjoyed pretending to
believe in superstitions, even when she didn't. Believing what you can't
believe is a kind of exercise which some people like. Others don't. I
don't. This is however the religious temperament, and it got Frances in
the end.

[Illustration: Frances (left) converting me under the bridge.]

I must be more cynical than Frances by nature, for I am sure that I
never thought my parents perfect in wisdom; nor any other grown-up
people either, for the matter of that. But then I clearly have not got
the right feeling about parents. During the last war a young French
airman told me, that when he was trying to escape from occupied France
across Spain, he was taken by the Spanish police, and was obliged to
destroy all his papers in great haste. 'Et figurez-vous, Madame,' he
said, dropping his voice to the lowest depths of blood-curdling horror,
'que j'ai du manger la photo de ma mre!' I hope I registered the right
brand of consternation at this appalling confession, for if he had
perceived what I really felt he would have thought me most indelicate.

It was unfortunate that my mother insisted on giving us Bible lessons
herself, for they bored us dreadfully, and there was always trouble
about them. She had little gift for teaching; but I do not now think
that she was insincere about it, though I am afraid I thought so then.
The fact was that she was far simpler in her views on religion that I
would then have thought possible in anyone grown-up. She was a
warm-hearted, innocently pleasure-loving person who, to the end of her
life, enjoyed the things of this world in a fresh and youthful way,
which was very attractive, though we superior children sometimes found
it rather exasperating. She loved engagements and weddings and babies
and food and games and dress and riddles and auction sales; and above
all she simply adored parties and picnics and sprees of any kind. But
she also truly wished to be good and to do right, and so she took us to
church and taught us about religion, just as she had been taught herself
when she was young. For the vestiges of her early-American puritanism
still clung about her; rather oddly combined with the axiom that what my
father thought was always right; however the demands of logic never
troubled her at any time. She was not a bit worldly, like Aunt Cara, but
she had not got a religious nature, and religion, as taught by her, made
no sense at all to us. Perhaps it wouldn't anyhow, but we should have
respected it more if we had been taught by someone with a natural
feeling for spiritual matters. As it was, it was hopeless.

There was a certain grey Sunday-school book which seemed to us beyond
bearing; and so, after a good deal of plotting and counter-plotting, we
hid it in a very good place, between the rafters and the ceiling of the
attic. It fell down into the hollow of the wall, and we thought we were
safe. But after a time suspicion fell on us, and there was a dreadful
fuss. We were sent up before the highest tribunal, and at last obliged
to confess. Then my father took the fire-tongs and led a very solemn
procession upstairs, and there was a ceremonial fishing in the wall with
the tongs. Unfortunately the book was hooked and landed; and we were
immediately given a lesson out of it. This we received very meekly, for
we were much impressed by my father's intervention. After that the book
tactfully disappeared of its own accord, and we never saw it again; I
suppose my father had recommended its eclipse. It would have been better
if he had intervened more often in our affairs--he hardly ever did--for
things went very smoothly when he took a hand; and we grew reasonable
and calm.

There were always difficulties about going to church, too, because it
was such a supreme bore. It was not quite as bad as dancing class,
though in the same category, because it only required passive endurance,
not active participation. Still it made us very cross to have to spend
all that time keeping still and thinking about nothing at all;
especially when there were so many thousands of things we were simply
dying to do at home. Boredom to me was an active torment, not a passive
one, and I just raged and seethed with impatience, all through the
service, waiting for the moment when I could rush home, tear off my
horrible hat and gloves, and get on with whatever I had been doing, when
I had been shanghaied by the Press Gang (my mother). I remember once how
the congregation stared at me when I leapt enthusiastically to my feet
at the sound of a premature '_And Now_' from the parson; and how
miserably I sank back into my place as he went droning on again. I
believe my poor mother felt that if only she could get us into church,
some of the meaning of it might sink into us unconsciously; but I don't
see how it could, with anyone in my usual church-going mood of white-hot
indignation.

College chapels usually have the Litany instead of a sermon; this seemed
to me the lowest layer of the dust-and-ashes of boredom and misery. I
never listened to any part of the service except the Psalms; I liked
them because I always liked poetry. For the same reason I did not like
the hymns. I lived through the Litany by thinking what horrid words
_Vouchsafe_ and _Beseech_ were, and wondering if they meant something
frightfully improper; or by hoping that the pigeons would get inside the
roof again.

For it was to King's College Chapel that we were usually taken; and that
was another trouble: I couldn't bear the music there! I don't expect
anyone to understand about this, but I simply hated the unfair, juicy
way in which the organ notes oozed round inside the roof, and sapped
your vitals, and made you want to cry about nothing at all. I liked my
music dry, not wet, in those days, just as I still do. Dr. Mann was
organist then, and I dare say that he was rather soulful; at any rate, I
have never yet been able to dissociate music at King's Chapel from the
kind of emotional appeal which I find most antipathetic of all.

[Illustration: The topmost floor of the Granary. A place of refuge on a
Sunday morning.]

Nor were other churches more congenial to me. For one thing, I was quite
Oliver-Cromwellian in my distaste for all kinds of ritual and ceremony.
They told you that God was a Spirit; that seemed to me a good idea, and
I understood it and liked it; and then they spoilt it altogether by
doing all sorts of mumbo-jumbo, which could not possibly have anything
to do with a God who was a spirit. This shocked me unspeakably; for I
was very high-minded and pure in those days; not to say arrogant. I was
really far more anti-clerical than anti-religious; I might conceivably
have made quite a decent Quaker.

As it was, I went to church cross, and got crosser all the time; I grew
to distrust the very church bells, and honestly believed that
nine-tenths of the congregation were hypocrites, and the remaining
tenth, sentimental fools. My only excuse is that I really did not know
anyone of a religious temperament whom I could love and admire; and
occasional pious governesses made it much worse.

We did not go to church every Sunday, so there was always a chance of
escape, and presently we discovered a good retreat. Directly after
Sunday breakfast, before any pronouncement had been made, we disappeared
discreetly down to the end of the garden, where the old granary stood,
as yet unmodernized. This tall old empty warehouse stood with its
foundations in the river; there was a cellar, full of old wood and
rubbish, not much above water-level; and above that there were four
floors, each a large, low, dark empty room, where corn had once been
stored. In the middle of each floor was a square hole, and a ladder
leading up to the floor above. So if you climbed up from the cellar and
pulled up all four ladders after you as you went, you were cut off from
the world by five ladderless storeys and you could quite reasonably
pretend not to hear people calling from the garden below. We took lumps
of sugar and hunks of bread with us, and sat on the floor in the top
loft, under the roof, till all danger of church was over. The roof was
beginning to fall in, and the ivy grew through the latticed
window-holes, and pigeons lived up there and cooed deliciously. It was a
mysterious, happy place, far from the world and full of new ideas, and
it did me a great deal more good than ever church did. I still often
dream of it, and then I am always just on the point of making strange
and wonderful discoveries.

Though I found all kinds of churches very indigestible, I was curious
about Christianity; and when I was about twelve I set out to read the
whole Bible through from end to end; and I did get all the way from
Genesis to the Acts, before I got bogged down in the incomprehensibility
of St. Paul. And later still, when I was fourteen or fifteen, I had a
sort of private religious revival, and read the Gospels thoroughly and
took in as much as I was capable of receiving. This was all done in the
most shamefaced secrecy and solitude; for to speak openly of religious
matters would have been terribly embarrassing. How we blushed and
squirmed when a certain governess thought that we ought to say grace!
And I always turned my eyes modestly away from the indecency of a
calendar of texts which hung on my mother's bedroom door.

I took the Christian precepts to heart too, and tried to carry them out,
quite literally. 'Do unto others, as you would that they should do unto
you': it seemed right and fair. So I gave the kitchen-maid a copy of
Milton's _Poems_ for a Christmas present, because I wanted it so much
myself. She thanked me most politely, but I somehow felt it was not
quite a success (poor kitchen-maid!). And I can remember saying
helpfully to a new-made widow, aged about thirty-five: 'Never mind,
you'll soon be dead, too,' because I thought that I should want to die
if I had lost my husband. I recall very clearly the startled expression
of one of her blue eyes, looking at me over the edge of her
pocket-handkerchief. I always supposed that my feelings were exactly
like other people's; it was much later before I noticed, with surprise,
that they weren't. I found people very puzzling. I used to sit and watch
their impassive faces, and wonder what they were thinking about.

       *     *     *     *     *

So I grew to be sixteen, and went away to boarding-school; and on the
first Sunday there all the big girls, very old and powerful, got round
me in a ring and began asking me questions. 'Don't you _really_ believe
in Adam and Eve, Gwen?' 'How do you think you were made then?' 'Do you
think we are all kind of monkeys?' 'Don't you believe in the Flood?' And
so on and so forth. It was quite frightful; it was like being in the
midst of a herd of bullocks, all staring at you, and coming closer and
closer with their shining horns. Only they weren't bullocks, but very
important top-girls, all with their hair fashionably puffed out over
their eyes--which made them look still more like bullocks--and with very
smart blouses and tight waist-belts and brooches in their ties. I was
fat and awkward and ill-dressed and wore spectacles and my hair was not
puffed out at all; and worst of all, I was a new girl. Still, one can
die but once; and I wasn't going to let them see how frightened I was.
So I dug in my heels and scrunched my hands together, and answered: 'No,
I don't,' stoutly, to all their questions; and they were most
delightfully horrified and shocked.

Therefore, when we went off in a crocodile to church next Sunday, I
determined to testify to my faith. And when they all knelt down to pray
on first going in, I sat up straight and didn't kneel; and when they all
turned to the east for the Creed, I didn't turn; and when they bowed, I
didn't bow; and when they mumbled the Lord's Prayer, I didn't mumble;
and I felt like a real martyr. To my surprise, no one said anything to
me about this; I imagine that the mistresses must have given the girls a
hint to hold their tongues, which was clever of them. This somewhat
deflated me; but I could not retreat from the position I had taken up,
and all the time I was at school I kept up my silent protest; though,
after a time, being a non-conformist became rather a bore. When they
asked me to be confirmed, I just said, politely but firmly: 'No, thank
you.'

Then there was a catastrophe. I was put into a Scripture class taught by
a curate. The lessons were all about ons, which intrigued me
exceedingly; but I was never to know what they were, because in the
second lesson the curate saw me drawing in my notebook, and went to the
headmistress and said that I was not reverent; and she decided that I
had better leave the class. I felt this most unfair, and it hurt my
feelings, for I always drew in my notebooks and it did not mean that I
was not attending. And I did so much want to know about those ons, and
now I never should.

The girls' ideas of religion, and even the mistresses' ideas of
reverence, were a complete mystery to me. For instance, on the night
before a hockey match we always had 'Onward Christian Soldiers' for the
hymn at Prayers. It was sung _fortissimo_, and was supposed to ginger us
up to martial prowess next day; indeed great importance was attached to
the _brio_ with which it was sung. This shocked and disgusted me very
much indeed; and it made me doubt their sincerity in other ways. I was a
very serious person then, and I conceived of religion as a high and
spiritual affair, and did not like seeing it made ridiculous, even if I
were not a believer myself.

This hymn-singing seemed to me just as silly as the port wine they gave
us before the match; indeed 'Onward Christian Soldiers' and port wine
are still inextricably mixed together in my mind. We had our usual
enormous dinner at 1.30; and as the match was at 2.15 we used to get all
ready first, even to strapping our hockey-pads on to our legs before we
set to work to consume vast platefuls of pea-soup, great chunks of roast
beef and vegetables, and slabs of suet pudding and jam. Then each of the
team was solemnly given a glassful of sweet and sticky port, and we
rushed straight from the table out to the hockey-field. I found the port
extremely nasty and difficult to swallow; and everyone complained that
it made them feel sick; still, it was an honour to get it, so we drank
it gratefully. But if we won the match--and we generally did win--it
must have been that the spiritual uplift imparted to us by 'Onward
Christian Soldiers' was able to overcome even the acute discomfort of
the mixture in our insides.

I got into hot water once again, most innocently. One wet Sunday we did
not go to church, but the headmistress read us the morning service, and
I had to read the first lesson. I was told to look it up; and there was
a choice of two lessons in the list. So I took the first one, without
even looking at the other, though it happened to be some rather
well-known bit. My lesson was all about a Harlot walking down a street,
and all the men looking at her in an unsuitable manner. At least, that
is how I remember it; but I cannot identify the passage without reading
the whole Bible through. I didn't exactly know what a harlot was, but as
I read I felt there was something uncomfortable in the air around me.
Afterwards I was sent for to the headmistress, and she asked, why on
earth I had read that chapter? I said: 'Because it was the lesson for
the day.' And as it really was, and as it was out of the Bible, there
was nothing she could do about it. But I am sure she suspected me, with
my bad record, of trying to sabotage the Church of England.

Afterwards an intelligent Scripture mistress came, and I learnt with
interest all about David, and read Browning's _Saul_ with her; and that
term I won the Scripture prize in the examination. This naturally
annoyed the girls a good deal, and I thought that even the mistresses
looked a little odd about it. Still, if religion consisted in an
appreciation of Browning and a knowledge of the habits of jerboas (for
which I got good marks)--I could do that. I think I could even have done
ons, if I had had the chance.

But I think there must be more to it than that.

[Illustration]




  CHAPTER XII

  _Sport_


My mother was one of the most intrepid women who ever existed. No
illness or pain ever drew a murmur from her, and she always seemed to
believe that no disasters could conceivably happen to any of her
children. She had a most convenient theory that we could not possibly be
drowned in the river which surrounded and divided our garden; in fact,
that the waters of the Cam were hardly even wet; and as we never were
drowned, this was an excellent idea. But why we were not drowned, I
can't imagine. We fell in pretty often, and the river is almost
everywhere deep enough to drown a child, and in places very deep. Later
on in life she used to make our blood run cold by insisting on taking
three or four very small grandchildren (our children) out in the boat
alone, herself rowing. She was an old lady then, and she could not
possibly have saved even one drowning child; but unless we were there in
person to defend our offspring, she would carry off her delighted
victims from under the very noses of the reluctant and responsible
nurses. Nothing except _force majeure_ ever prevented her from doing
what she had a mind to do; and we ourselves had to fight like tigresses
at bay to keep our children on dry land. But, of course, none of them
ever got drowned either. Sometimes we almost wished they had; it was
the only thing that could have _learnt_ her.

[Illustration: Pirates. Charles and I are in the boat under the granary
wall. Margaret and Sancho have been marooned on a desert island in the
distance. In the boat can be seen the keg of rum indispensable to
piracy.]

So we were all able to swim early, and grew up knowing how to manage
boats by instinct: row-boats and canoes; but not punts, for there were
then none on the Cam. We had the best games of pirates in an old square,
flat-bottomed boat, which the gardener used when he was cutting the
weeds in the river; it always needed baling, and sometimes sank under
our very feet. I would come home and see wet footprints on the kitchen
doorstep, and follow the tracks upstairs to find that Charles had had to
swim ashore again. But my mother never even thought we should catch cold
when we fell in! A wonderful quality in a mother.

There was also the row-boat _The Griffin_, which was rather heavy to
launch. _The Griffin_ was the joy and pride of my mother's romantic
heart. She was always inventing errands which obliged someone to row her
down to Trinity, or to Jolley's old furniture shop by the Town Bridge.
Later on, we all saved up our money for a long time and, with the help
of a few tips, bought a canoe of our own, _The Escallop_.

We used to fish interesting things out of the river; once we caught
seven top-hats in one day. Another time a baker's cart-horse took fright
at the Newnham ford and dashed off into the deep place under the mill;
the man leapt out in time, but the horse was drowned, and all the bread
came floating down and we fed the hens on it for weeks. Once Billy,
almost a baby, caught a large eel which had come ashore on the island;
he came staggering along, saying it was 'a Mama worm for the chickens',
and Secky, our old gardener, said he was 'a reg'lar little Admiral
Nelson' to have caught it. Another time when we were playing at Wicked
French Governesses on the Big Island, I was so convincing in the
title-part, that my terrified pupil, Frances, ran away from me down into
the ditch which separates the Island from the Lammas-Land. The mud and
water came nearly up to her shoulders, but she managed to scramble
out--on the wrong side; and then had to be persuaded to wade back again.
It says much for our nurses that they were more frightened than cross,
in spite of all the mess.

The queer thing about falling into the river is that you are never
surprised when you do it; you feel as if you had known all along that
you were going in just at that instant. I remember looking calmly and
intelligently at the green bubbles going slowly up past me as I went
down head-foremost into the depths, the time when Ralph heroically dived
after me, into what proved to be about four feet of water.

For, when I was about seven or eight, two Gods revealed themselves to
our worshipping eyes. They were our cousins, Ralph and Felix Wedgwood,
and they came up as undergraduates to Trinity, first Ralph and, soon
after, Felix. Divine Beings, glorious in their condescension, one or
both of them used often to spend whole afternoons playing with us. Then
the pirates became more reckless than ever. Sometimes the pirate ship
was captained by Ralph, while a land-party, headed by Felix, made great
detours, carrying a plank with them, which they threw across the ditches
for a bridge, and so turned up in unexpected places and boarded the
vessel with incredible valour. Sometimes we made bonfires, and rushed
about the islands waving torches made of the straw covers of wine
bottles: or we had battles with miniature fire-boats, made out of
cardboard boxes and candle-ends and matches. Or there was tree-climbing,
roof-climbing, story-telling; everything they did was exciting beyond
words. In fact, sometimes it was too exciting and we could not sleep at
night afterwards, and Felix had to be asked to moderate the horrors of
his stories (but I don't think he did).

There was one story about two South American Indians, Gaucho and Poncho,
who were dying of starvation in a jungle; but Gaucho saved them by
catching a sackful of big black ants; and Poncho put the mouth of the
sack to his mouth, and squeezed the bottom, and the ants all ran down
his throat and were very nourishing. In another story someone was
lowered down a well, and ghostly, furry bony hands came out of the sides
and clutched at him as he went by. This was almost too much for me, told
as it was inside the gable part of the roof, where it was pitch
dark--the part beyond the boarded attic. You had to seesaw, squeezing
yourself through the rafters to get there; and then to be very careful
not to walk on the plaster between the beams. Once Ralph himself did go
through the plaster, and to our delight he sat astride a beam, with his
legs hanging down through the ceiling into the room below, where Nana
was giving Billy a bath.

We used to explore the huge cellars under the Grange, where there are
places for fabulous numbers of beer barrels; and there Ralph taught us
how to write our names on the ceiling in candle smoke; while Felix
terrified us by jumping at us out of dark corners. The most superior
inscriptions were made in blood, pinched out of a pricked finger; but
the ordinary records, such as 'I have been a Prisoner here for
forty-five years', or 'I am slowly starving to death', were too
expensive in blood, and had to be written in smoke. We came out of the
cellars with our hair full of candle-grease, in a delicious state of
terror.

Ralph and Felix made fashionable a new and particularly blood-curdling
form of hide-and-seek. Our ordinary game was called Scallawag, and was
played of a winter's evening all over the house, which was well adapted
for the purpose, having two staircases and plenty of passages and
complications. All the passage lights were turned out--our parents were
wonderfully patient about this--and the Scallawag pounced out of dark
corners on the seekers, and chased them as they raced shrieking for
Home. I am sorry to say that Charles and I found that we could add zest
to this game by making Margaret Scallawag, and then goading and
insulting her till she became mad with rage; a thing which was never
very difficult to do. We were then really afraid of being caught by
her, for the ferocity of her pinches was well known. In battle, Margaret
selected a certain very painful part of her victim's upper arm for
pinching; I hit with my fists; Charles kicked. This was the accepted
practice during hostilities; which, I must say, were not usually very
serious.

Ralph's innovation lay in playing hide-and-seek out of doors at night;
the party was divided into two sides, and a lantern was placed in the
middle of the lawn, to be Home. Tiptoeing about in the rustling
blackness of the garden, with a potential enemy behind every bush, was
altogether too much for my nerves though, of course, I dared not say so.
Yet even through my terror, I enjoyed the strong secrecy of the night,
and felt how the power and personality of each tree and plant comes
pouring out in the dark. After that first game of hide-and-seek I used,
half frightened, to slip out for a moment at night, whenever I could.

The climax of all earthly pleasures came when we received a letter from
Ralph, written in invisible ink, inviting us to tea in his rooms in
Trinity. After that tea-party poor Charles went through a terrible
ordeal, for Felix threw his cap on to the grass in the Great Court, and
dared him to go on to it to fetch it. Walking on the sacred college
grass is about the worst crime a Cambridge child can commit; however,
Charles did it and survived.

Floods were a great source of pleasure to us; when one was imminent we
used to watch the height of the water on the boathouse steps, from hour
to hour, and grieve if it began to go down. Very soon indeed--long
before it had reached the top step of the cellar under the house--the
hens had to be rescued from the Big Island, and brought over to lodgings
in the Granary. It was such fun catching them, and putting them into
sacks and wading through the rising water with them, that we had to be
forcibly prevented from moving them far too soon, at the very first
sign of a possible flood.

We used to climb about all over the roof, too (it was not so dangerous
as it sounds), and Charles and I stole a cigarette from the study, and
cut it in half, and smoked the halves, sitting astride of a gable in a
very dashing way, expecting every moment to be sick.

As a matter of fact I was secretly terrified at all this climbing, and I
wished very much that my mother would take fright for once, and would
forbid it. But she did not turn a hair, even when she saw us, in the
course of a game of hide-and-seek, climb on to the top of the high old
wall which separates the Grange garden from the road, and run along it,
chasing each other, and finally jump down into the garden at the end.
That wall is exactly nine feet high; it makes me feel quite green even
now, to think that I was obliged to do such a thing, simply in order not
to lose 'face' with the others. For _they_ weren't in the least
afraid--unless, indeed, they were pretending better than I did. Nora and
Frances were great tree-climbers, and used to boast about bringing down
birds' eggs in their mouths, quite like people in books. I pretended
with all my might that I liked climbing, but it is difficult to be
convincing when you feel sick and giddy; and the others knew very well
that it was a sham. I was even frightened once when we sat in a row on
the top of the high wall to see the Prince of Wales go by. He had been
to a review, and came riding along, very stout indeed, with a lot of
officers. And one dreadful time, I really _could_ not make myself jump
down from a trapeze, and Ruth and Nora and Frances jeered at me, and
went away and left me in tears, to get down as best I could.

We built a platform of planks, for a house, in the copper beech tree,
and went up and down to it by a swinging rope-ladder, which had the
special advantage of being too difficult for Margaret and Billy to climb
(what horrid creatures children are!). We also bought a cart-load of old
bricks from a builder, for ten shillings, and began to build a brick
house on the Big Island, using mud for mortar. We mixed earth and
water, in a pit, to a most delightful salubrious consistency, and then
slopped it on the wall and stuck the bricks on; a satisfactory pursuit.

One of the very few times I ever saw Charles really angry was when these
brick walls were fairly high. I took a large shovelful of the best mud,
and heaved (or should it be _hove_?) it on to the wall, with such
enthusiasm that most of it went over on to the other side; where
unfortunately I had not noticed that Charles was kneeling. It all went
on to his head, and I really thought he would kill me. Another time when
I enraged him he was so angry that, being by then too old to hit a girl,
he found relief in throwing his shoes into the river. He then had to
undress and go in and fetch them out again, which, I suppose, soothed
him.

We never finished the brick house because, just when the walls were high
enough for us to begin on the roof, Charles was sent away to school, and
I had not the heart to go on with it alone. Margaret was not the
building sort of person, and was too young anyhow. It did not seem worth
while to do anything; for there was no chance of his ever coming back
properly again. I was very miserable; I remember crying in bed, just
loud enough for Nana to hear from the nursery and to come and comfort
me; but not loud enough for anyone else to hear. But soon after that
Nana began to be ill; and then she went away, too, and never came back
any more. That was the end of my childhood; and I passed on into a much
less happy adolescence.

       *     *     *     *     *

We played the classic games to a certain extent, but we were not very
good at them, and I myself was very bad indeed, especially at tennis. On
the whole we thought them rather dull, and found it more amusing to
invent new games of our own, such as Tenni-croque, in which you had to
move croquet balls about by throwing tennis balls at them. However, at
school I managed to get into the hockey team; not by skill, but by a
kind of terrified ferocity; and because I could run rather fast. I even
broke a strange girl's nose in a match; at least, she skidded in the mud
during a wild storm of rain, and fell gently forward, nose downwards, on
to my stick; and I felt more guilty than if I had hacked her in the face
on purpose. But such is guilt. (_See_ Religion, page 215.) And I won a
race for a hundred yards at the school sports, and at last got my
long-coveted book of Milton's _Poems_ as a prize. I was not showing off
in asking for it; I really wanted it.

The Bicycling craze came in when we were just about at the right age to
enjoy it. At first even 'safety' bicycles were too dangerous and
improper for ladies to ride, and they had to have tricycles. My mother
had (I believe) the first female tricycle in Cambridge; and I had a
little one, and we used to go out for family rides, all together; my
father in front on a bicycle, and poor Charles standing miserably on the
bar behind my mother, holding on for all he was worth. I found it very
hard work, pounding away on my hard tyres; a glorious, but not a
pleasurable pastime.

[Illustration: The family outing. Charles, my mother, Sancho, me and my
father. Charles said afterwards: 'The body is too fat and the arms are
too short.' (My mother's body and his own arms.) Sancho is saying: 'How
fast they go; it must be 5 or 6 miles an hour. But of course they never
think of _me_.']

Then, one day at lunch, my father said he had just seen a new kind of
tyre, filled up with air, and he thought it might be a success. And soon
after that everyone had bicycles, ladies and all; and bicycling became
the smart thing in Society, and the lords and ladies had their pictures
in the papers, riding along in the park, in straw boater hats. We were
then promoted to wearing baggy knickerbockers under our frocks, and over
our white frilly drawers. We thought this horridly improper, but rather
grand; and when a lady (whom I didn't like anyhow) asked me, privately,
to lift up my frock so that she might see the strange garments
underneath, I thought what a dirty mind she had. I only once saw a woman
(not, of course, a _lady_) in real bloomers.

My mother must have fallen off her bicycle pretty often, for I remember
seeing, several times, the most appalling cuts and bruises on her legs.
But she never complained, and always kept these mishaps to herself.
However, the great Mrs. Phillips, our cook, always knew all about them;
as indeed she knew practically everything that ever happened. She used
to draw us into the servants' hall to tell us privately: 'Her Ladyship
had a nasty fall yesterday; she cut both her knees and sprained her
wrist, and the front wheel of her bicycle is bent all crooked. But don't
let her know I told you.' So we never dared say anything, even if we saw
her Ladyship limping. Similar little contretemps used to occur when, at
the age of nearly seventy, she insisted on learning to drive a car. She
never mastered the art of reversing, and was in every way an
unconventional and terrifying driver. Mrs. Phillips used then to tell
us, under the seal of secrecy: 'Her Ladyship ran into the back of a
milk-cart yesterday; but it wasn't much hurt'; or 'A policeman stopped
her Ladyship because she was on the wrong side of the road; but she said
she didn't know what the white line on the road meant, so he explained
and let her go on.' Mrs. Phillips must have had an excellent
Intelligence Service at her command, for the stories were always true
enough. But though she was omniscient, she was always very discreet.

How my father did adore those bicycles! Such beautiful machines! They
were as carefully tended as if they had been alive; every speck of dust
or wet was wiped from them as soon as we came back from a ride; and at
night they were all brought into the house, and slung up to the ceiling
of the kitchen passage by a series of ingenious pulleys, for fear that
the night air in the covered backyard might rust them. His heart would
have bled to see the callous way in which we treat our humble necessary
beasts of burden nowadays.

Sometimes, with friends, we used to harness four bicycles with ropes to
a little four-wheeled wagon, and Margaret was obliged to be passenger in
it. The brunt of the duties appertaining to the youngest always fell on
Margaret, because Billy was really too small. Anyhow she had as yet no
bicycle of her own, so she ought to have been very thankful to be
allowed to be passenger. But she wasn't. The cart was too light; it
upset if it were empty, and even with her weight in it, the back wheels
banged up and down, in a very alarming way, when we went fast. Sometimes
the four postilions quarrelled, and all went different ways, and the
cart ran into the curb and upset; and sometimes the ropes all got
tangled up and everyone fell off and the cart upset; and sometimes it
just upset of its own accord; but Margaret was only terrified and never
badly hurt, and after all one expects to pay something for the privilege
of playing with older people.

[Illustration: The four-in-hand, undecided whether to go up the Backs or
round by Newnham. In the distance may be seen the lame crossing-sweeper
and Sidgwick Avenue. Sancho is saying: 'Of course they'll all be killed,
and then they'll say it was my fault. How unjust people always are.']

Once the arrogance of the Upper Classes went too far, and the Lower
Classes were driven into Red Revolution. We were playing soldiers in a
pine-wood with the three Butler boys, and Margaret and the other young
ones had been kept far too long on sentry duty, while the Generals (Jim
and Charles and I) had been conferring in the tent; so Margaret suddenly
mutinied in the most subversive manner, and said that she was going to
run away, and would not be a soldier any more. We said, then she would
be a Deserter; but when we tried to arrest her, she turned on us in a
mad fury, and in the scrimmage _bit_ Charles in the middle of his back,
so fiercely that her teeth went right through his jacket and shirt and
vest, and drew blood. (Biting is always the weapon of the weaker party.)
We were absolutely stunned at her wickedness, and said, sanctimoniously,
that we would never, NEVER, have anything to do with her again. She then
ran away screaming, while the Butlers all watched in consternation. That
was what made it so dreadful; that this family scandal should be seen by
Jim and Gordon and Nevile. We were really ashamed of our treatment of
her, though at the time we maintained that it was her own fault for
contravening all the rules of military discipline. I went after her, and
found her lying under a tree in a state of hysteria; I brought her
firmly home and delivered her to Nana, who calmed her, and bathed
Charles's back, and said nothing about the _fracas_ to our parents.
Neither the Butlers nor we ever referred to this shocking affair again,
till many years later.

       *     *     *     *     *

We weren't great at card games, except for Fighting Demon, when bedlam
broke loose. This game has, no doubt, been the ultimate cause to its
addicts of many a nervous breakdown in later life; though this is an
idea which never seems to have occurred to the psychologists. There was
also the more soothing Muggins, suitable alike for extreme youth and
incipient senility (though Uncle Richard could not _even_ play
Muggins!). And there was National Gallery (or Nat. Gal.). This was
played like Happy Families, with a set of cards of very blurry
photographs of the English pictures at the National Gallery. Thus we
grew familiar with such works as 'Ulysses (de)riding Polyphemus', where
you could neither make out Ulysses, nor see what he was riding on; or
'The Fighting _Temeraire_'--which we took to be the little black tug in
front; or 'Uncle Toby and Widow Wadman' (Uncle Tob. and Wid. Wad.); or
Landseer's 'Dignity and Impudence' (Dig. and Imp.); or mysterious
pictures such as 'Sigismonda grieving over the heart of Guiscardo',
where Sig. (as she was called) was holding a kind of soup tureen, and
there was no heart anywhere.

But our chief intellectual exercise was the Letter Game: word-making and
word-taking. At this we became practically professional; and sometimes,
in the holidays, the game would have gone on all night, if the teams had
not been sent to bed in a state of exhaustion, while the letters were
left on the table, for the game to be finished in the morning. Many an
expert must have blessed the sound education given him by the Letter
Game when, later in life, his self-respect obliged him to do _The Times_
Crossword every day.

We gradually developed a regular word-game technique, and the rules were
perfected to cover all exigencies. Any dictionary word was allowed, but
no proper names, and a word could be stolen by adding a letter _and_
changing the meaning. Many words known only to dictionaries were of
great value: such as ZAX (a slate-cutter's tool); and other words such
as PYX or wax which were held to be practically unstealable. It was a
recognized fact, for instance, that the only steal for FOX was
CRUCIFIXION--which needs eight extra letters, most unlikely to occur
simultaneously. Then there were regular expected sequences of steals,
such as MIX, MINX, MIXEN, EXAMINE; and as any part of a verb was
allowed, provided the meaning was changed, by the end of a hard-fought
game, the board would be strewn with such splendid words as (thou)
REASSESSEDST; or (he or she) DECONTAMINATETH. The finest play of the
game lay in the ETHS and EDSTS of the verbal endings.

This game can be very embarrassing at times. Suppose, for instance, that
one side had the innocent word trumpet, and an s was turned up, you
could see all the older people getting red in the face in their efforts
not to say STRUMPET. Heavens! how Aunt Bessy's fingers did fumble and
flutter, when Margaret (it _would_ be Margaret) shouted in triumph:
'STRUMPET; what does that mean?' But Aunt Bessy replied, with her usual
dignity: 'It's a word we don't generally use.' (I should guess that she
did not quite know herself what it meant.) The word was probably
forbidden for Aunt Bessy's sake; but it is such a good example of the
way a word might run, if it were to follow its own natural and
licentious course, that I give it here. It would probably start as RUM;
and go on RUMP, TRUMP, TRUMPET, STRUMPET, (thou) TRUMPEDST, (he or she)
STRUMPETED, (thou) TRUMPETEDST, (thou) STRUMPETEDST; and I cannot get it
any farther, though a real virtuoso, such as Charles, might be able to
do so.

This had been a Down game originally, and legends had grown up around
it, such as that of the nameless person who had set his heart on getting
HIPPOPOTAMUS, and who, in consequence never got a word at all. (I have
always believed, without evidence, that this must have been Uncle
Richard.) Then there was the story of my grandfather (C.D.) who, on
seeing the word MOTHER on the board, looked at it for a long time, and
then said 'MOE-THER; there's no word MOETHER.' I feel that the
Psychologists might get a great deal of fun out of this anecdote--I beg
their pardons, I don't mean fun, but Important Information; clues to the
conception of the _Origin of Species_ on the one hand, or to his ill
health on the other; both of which developments could doubtless be
proved by this story to be the direct consequences of the early death of
his own MOETHER.

       *     *     *     *     *

I had a solitary game of my own, played at bedtime; it was called 'Being
Kind to Poor Pamela'. Pamela was a child with whom I sometimes played,
but whom I rather despised. The game was played by getting out of bed
and lying on the floor, until you were as cold as you could bear to be.
During that time you were Poor Pamela, lying out in the snow in her
nightgown, owing to the cruelty of her parents. She was starving and the
wolves were howling in the woods all round. Then you became yourself
again, and went out into the cold and rescued poor Pamela--the wolves
were getting very near--and you put her into your own bed and warmed
her, and fed her, and comforted her most tenderly. This made you feel
frightfully good and kind; and you could do it over and over again,
until you could keep awake no longer. On showing this passage to
Margaret, she revealed that she had independently practised a variety of
this sport, when put to bed with a hot-water bottle, because she had a
cold; only it was not Pamela whom she impersonated by lying naked on the
oil-cloth, but a mother with a baby (a doll). A good cure for a cold.

But when I met Pamela again in real life, I was just as nasty to her as
ever. This fortunately was not very often, as she did not live in
Cambridge. She was the sort of person one was always nasty to; because,
however hard one tried to be nice to her, she always managed to give you
a remorseful feeling that you had not really understood her. It was just
a quality she had. Once when I went to tea with her alone, we were given
a special little feast; and among the good things were some raspberries.
They turned out to be full of maggots, but Pamela ate them all up, both
hers and mine. Without saying anything, she implied that she so seldom
had anything nice for tea, that she was glad even of maggotty
raspberries; while no doubt I, lucky I, had delicious fruit every day of
my life (which was very far indeed from being true). I think now, that
there was not the faintest reason to believe that her parents were at
all unkind to her; but in a patient, tolerant, uncomplaining way, she
certainly made me think so then; and all without a word being said on
the subject.

[Illustration: Poor Pamela; the wolves are getting very near.]

In this quality of hers, Pamela always reminded me of our dog Sancho
(pronounced--correctly--San-tcho. Sometimes pedantic visitors tried to
call him Sanko, and were despised by us for their ignorance of Spanish).
He was a brown water-spaniel, rather like Dog Tray in _Struwwel Peter_,
and with the same reproachful expression. He was obviously born to be a
martyr, and it was hard on him that he had to manage to be one without
the necessary ill-treatment: like making bricks without straw. But he
did very well, for he had a wonderful power of putting other people in
the wrong. He would sit there staring at you; brown and fat and smelly;
slobbering, and sometimes giving a heavy sigh; and however long a walk
you had taken him, he made you feel that it ought to have been longer;
and however many biscuits he had had, he made you feel that he ought to
have had more. Frances tells me that there was a legend in her family
that Sancho was nearly always kept chained up; this was entirely untrue,
but it just shows the force of his character that he was able to impose
this idea on them from a distance. In other respects, he was a worthy,
but boring dog, and appallingly faithful. We had at different times
several more interesting dogs; but, just because I have a weak
conscience, Sancho remains in my memory as the principal dog of my
childhood.

[Illustration: Sancho and me in the garden. I am saying: 'Oh, Sancho, I
do think you might let me have _one_ of my own biscuits. You know you've
had five already.' Sancho is saying: 'But I hardly ever have anything to
eat, and I _did_ think you were a kind person.' He ate enormously and
was much too fat anyhow.]

Of course the Pamela game was a form of one of the acting games we were
always playing. I never played with dolls at all, except when they were
useful for acting--to be sailors in a shipwreck, or human sacrifices. We
had a whole mythology of Gods, of whom the chief was Great Pompadella
Bim, and they all required frequent human sacrifices; though they often
had to be content with spent shot-gun cartridges, which we collected to
represent soldiers. They weren't very nice Gods--Norse Gods, with a dash
of the more unpleasant Greek Gods in them; and more than a _soupon_ of
Jehovah.

From the far beginnings of dumb crambo and charades, we gradually
climbed to the heights of the Christmas play. This was written in
Committee, by us all together, and was the principal event of the year.
As soon as one play was acted we instantly began planning the next one,
even upon Boxing Day! They were performed in our house, on the evening
of Christmas Day, and were followed by the Christmas dinner, which was
attended by all the family then in Cambridge, and by no one else at all.

These plays were built up on a good solid foundation of Gilbert and
Sullivan, and were full of topical allusions. They always had a Chorus,
in which we all took part, whenever we were not on the stage in some
other capacity, because we were short of actors. Bernard wrote and
recited the Prologue, but he was too grown-up to act with us; Erasmus
disliked acting and refused to take part. Charles probably disliked it
quite as much, but public opinion always compelled him to be the Prince
and to wear the beautiful Russian boots--a present from Felix--which
were the Prince's insignia, and the glory of our dressing-up box. Nora
was considered the prettiest of us (to her disgust), so she generally
had to be the Princess, which was very dull for her. Ruth and Margaret
were celebrated actresses and had character parts; and the rest of us
were Witches, Professors, Ghosts or whatever was required. I did a good
deal of the costume designing, and used to cut out dresses by the simple
process of laying the patient down on a piece of butter muslin, and
cutting out round his edges. But we had a pretty good stock of curious
cast-off odds and ends to fall back on. There was no scenery, and only a
screen for a curtain. The plots were incredibly complicated; no one
really understood them; but that was no matter; for the success of the
play depended entirely on the wit, and the verses. The dialogue was in
prose, and full of jokes; the verses were mostly written by Ruth and
Frances. Here is the opening chorus of _The Magic Snowboot_, which was
written when Nora, Frances and I were round about thirteen and fourteen.
It was spoken by a _Chorus of the Cooks_ of the Princess Lavinia
Plantagenet:

  THOMAS: _You must know our situation
          Is the highest in the nation;
          On a close examination_

  ALL:          _Of a heraldery book,_

  THOMAS: _You'll find there's not a badge in it
          So noble as Plantagenet;
          And though you won't imagine it,_

  ALL:          _I am that household's cook._

  THOMAS: _So we cook and wash the crockery,
          Go out and weed the rockery;
          This service is no mockery,_

  ALL:          _You probably infer;_

  THOMAS: _Yet we condescend to dish-up
          For a baron or a bishop,
          And we'll sometimes send the fish up_

  ALL:          _For an ordinary Sir._

I fancy that the character of Princess Lavinia must have been founded on
that of my mother, who certainly would have thought weeding the rockery
quite a suitable occupation for the cook; and who, like the Princess,
was able to put her ideas across, as no one else could have done.

Here is the end of a lecture by the _Witch of Curses_, delivered at the
Sorcery Institute to a _Chorus of Ghosts_. It contains allusions to the
boredom of the Sunday afternoon calls of shy undergraduates, who were
perfectly miserable, but quite unable to go away.

  THE WITCH: _My Experiment One makes e'en undergraduates laugh,
             Though their collars and general depression be quite
               unimpeachable;
             'Twill reach to their stony young hearts in a minute, or even
               a half;
             Provided their stony young, stolid young, stupid young hearts
               are made reachable._

  GHOSTS: _Nervous freshmen in a row,
          Kind of, sort of, don't you know,
          As the Sunday onward wears,
          Sitting swallowing in chairs,
          O take a moral from this song
          And never, never stay too long._

Once the play had to be put off, because we all had influenza and the
aunts were in a terrible Darwin fuss about it, which annoyed and shamed
us very much. When the play was finally acted, Bernard's Prologue
contained these lines:

  _Fell Influenza, stalking through the land,
  From this devoted house has held its hand.
  See how each Mother, with a touching pride,
  Lays the well-worn thermometer aside.
  No less than seven Darwins, be it said,
  Are simultaneously out of bed!_

Bernard used to write whole plays for us, too. There was _The Apterix_
and _The Bishop of South-West Equatorial Mesopotamia_. This last was a
summer play, to be acted in the garden; but Alas! it was an exclusive
Wychfield production, in which Ruth and Nora (who lived near by) took
part, but of which I was only a dazzled and jealous spectator. We had
the advantage of having the river in our garden; but we had the great
disadvantage of living over a mile from the others.

Ruth was the Bishop--or rather an Imp impersonating the Bishop--and she
came riding through the garden on to the stage on a tricycle. She was
dressed in episcopal clothes, and her long hair was tucked down the back
of her neck; but a blue woollen tail hanging out behind betrayed her
infernal origin. There had been some trouble about this, and Aunt Ida
had only allowed Ruth to act under protest; but whether it was the male
dress, or the clerical dress, or the tail, to which she objected, we
never knew. There were only near relations in the audience to see the
shocking sight, anyhow. The text had also been bowdlerized; for in the
original draft, the Bishop had brought with him, as specimens of the
handiwork of his only convert, a waste-paper basket, and _a pair of
bathing-drawers_; but during rehearsal an orange had been substituted
for the bathing-drawers, by order of the Censor.

As we grew older the plays grew more informal, but we still always acted
some half-impromptu skit on Christmas Day. The year that Frances got
engaged to Francis Cornford, I wrote the play myself: _The Importance of
being Frank_. In this all the characters were called Francis or Frances,
which caused great confusion, until the hero allowed himself to be
called Frank; a solution which the Cornfords did not adopt in real life.

I believe this was the last of the regular plays; after that we got
married or turned our attentions to other diversions.

[Illustration]




  CHAPTER XIII

  _Clothes_


Clothes were a major cause of rows, naughtiness, misery and all
unpleasantness, right through my whole youth. The difficulties were
caused, not only by best clothes, but by practically everything we wore.

In her own way my mother took a good deal of trouble about dress, not
only about her own, but about ours, too. She used to spend hours and
hours superintending a humble daily dressmaker in cutting old dresses to
pieces, and putting them together again in new permutations and
combinations; for that marble-hearted fiend Economy, who was her evil
angel, was always putting in his spoke and preventing her from having
things made at a good shop. Sometimes the results of this home
manufacture were rather clumsy; but as far as my mother was concerned it
really did not matter much, as she always managed to look attractive,
even if it were in spite of, rather than because of, her dress. For one
thing she had a very fair idea of what became her; she never wore those
dreadful hard boater hats, when they were so fashionable; and she knew
that soft floppy things suited her better than tailor-made suits. She
was in her glory in a 'tea-gown'; or in a summer dress, with a feather
boa, ostrich-plume hat and parasol.

My share of the dressmaking industry was the unpicking of the old
dresses, which I did most unwillingly. Sometimes, when it went on for
too long, Good God, there was such a scene! But even that was not so bad
as when I had to try on a new frock myself. It seemed to me then that I
was kept standing on the table for whole days at a time (I suppose it
may have been about twenty minutes), while she and the dressmaker
fumbled about, with their mouths full of pins; cutting with ice-cold
scissors against my bare neck, and constantly saying: 'Now _please_
stand up straight for a minute'; or 'For Goodness' sake do keep still';
until at last there was a real explosion.

[Illustration: The Torturers. The daily dressmaker is on the left; my
mother in her most implacable mood kneels on the right.]

Once, when I could not endure it a single instant longer, I went
completely mad and, seizing between my teeth the pink cotton frock they
were fitting on, I bit it all to pieces. I suppose I was punished for
this, but I cannot remember anything except my triumphant satisfaction
in my crime. Another time I fairly liquidated a hat. My mother had
brought back some hats for us from Paris. They had yellow straw crowns
and frilly white paper brims, and were supposed to look like daisies.
After an argument, one Sunday morning, Margaret and I were made to go to
King's Chapel wearing them, and a sulkier pair of daisies you never saw.
But once inside, and safe in the stalls--for Walter the Verger always
put us in the High Places, though we really had no connection with
King's--once safe inside, I say, where grown-up reactions had all to be
put into cold storage and their human accounts were frozen.... I took
off my hat and STOOD on it, and squashed it as flat as ever St. George
squashed the Dragon; and no one could ever wear it again. Glory, glory
hallelujah.

For, in spite of my mother's efforts, I thought all my clothes horrible.
I can't remember liking a single coat or hat or frock in all my youth,
except for one pinafore with pink edges. There is a theory that we
always admire the present-day fashions, and think those which are
recently past vulgar, till lapse of time gives them a period romance
again. This cannot always be true; for I certainly thought that the
dresses my mother had worn in the 'eighties were rather charming, while
all the fashions from 1890 till 1914 seemed to me then, and seem to me
still, preposterous, hideous and uncomfortable.

I remember, when I was at school in 1902, walking at the back of our
Sunday crocodile, and seeing all the girls in front of me, very smart
and Sundayfied, going down the hill to church. And I thought (I am
afraid, with a touch of superiority): 'How frightful they all look, and
what a lot of trouble they have taken to make themselves still more
frightful. I am sure I look every bit as hideous, but at any rate I
haven't taken any trouble about it at all.' I thought them much 'the
worse for dress', as Uncle Lenny once said of an over-dressed lady of
his acquaintance. The thought comes back to me perfectly clear, every
time I get a whiff of something which reminds me of the empty, damp,
suburban, Sunday-morning smell of Wimbledon Common; and then I see again
their beribboned top-heavy hats, stuck on to the top of the hair they
had spent so long in frizzling and puffing out; and their tightly
corseted, bell-shaped figures wobbling down the hill, as they chattered
their way to church.

I suppose that, in spite of the fashions, there must have been _some_
elegant women in the 'nineties; but even if any of them lived in
Cambridge (which is doubtful) we should certainly have failed to
appreciate them. Cambridge was not well-dressed; Darwins were far from
smart; and we cousins despised, or affected to despise, dress. Four of
us really did, largely because our clothes were imposed on us from
above, without even the power of veto. Frances alone had a secret wish
to be prettily dressed; but she had to pretend to be above such things;
for interest in clothes showed a low moral nature. Whenever we were
telling stories, if the story-teller said: 'She was a very fashionable
lady,' we all knew at once that _she_ was the villainess of the piece.

In a less explicit way this was the attitude to dress of all born
Darwins, and of most of the married-in Darwins, too. Dressing well was a
Duty, and not a pleasure: your duty to that state of life to which it
had pleased God to call you. Dresses designed solely with an eye to the
wearer's age and position are apt to be rather serious affairs; but at
any rate every aunt managed to look extremely dignified in one of her
'best gowns'. Aunt Ida always looked like a duchess, anyhow--one of the
best kind of duchesses of the real old aristocracy; and Aunt Etty was
magnificent on occasion. Her dresses were beautiful, too, even in that
unpromising age, and her little lace caps were charming. As always, she
made her position perfectly clear; she would say: 'I shall wear my pearl
necklace and then they'll know that I've done my best.' White gloves
were also a sign that one was doing one's best.

My mother, on the other hand, frankly enjoyed dress. She tells in a
letter how she set out to pay some visits, '_George in his high hat,
which he only wears in London and Paris, and I in my red cloth. We both
went off feeling very comfortable in our best clothes. Clothes do give
you assurance, there is no doubt about it._' There, in a nutshell, lies
the difference between her and me. For she could never have believed
that this feeling was entirely unknown to me. Nor, with the best
intentions in the world, did she understand that I needed very special
treatment to be made tolerable; that what suited her, did not suit me.

Once, when I was about eighteen, I was made into a fat, blue-satin
bridesmaid for a cousin's wedding. It is really astonishing that I did
not cast a curse over that bridal pair, such were the blackness and
venom of my feelings in the church. However, the marriage has been a
success, in spite of this inauspicious opening. But I can here and now
lay my hand on my heart and say that I always--when I thought about
it--felt a great ill-dressed lump; and when I went to boarding-school,
and they all despised me, I thought they were perfectly right. In a sort
of way that is; for I simultaneously thought them quite wrong, about
appearances in general.

My clothes were particularly unsuccessful just then. I had a new green
tweed coat and skirt, badly made by the poor little daily dressmaker;
and the skirt had been lined with bright buttercup-yellow cotton, which
showed round the edges whenever I moved. This was because, at the
Christmas party that year, there had appeared an enormous yellow
pumpkin, which suddenly split open to reveal Billy and all the Christmas
presents inside it; and so my mother had economically used up the
pumpkin material to line my skirt.

I endured the criticisms of the girls at school for some time--and girls
are very outspoken about such matters--but at last I turned at bay. I
simply made up my mind that as I could not be good-looking or
well-dressed, I would never again think about my appearance at all. I
would have enough clothes to be decent, but I would try to be as nearly
invisible as possible, and would live for the rest of my life like a
sort of disembodied spirit. Of course I knew that this was not the best
possible solution, but it was the only one that seemed to me
practicable. And at any rate this decision did really set me free; I
hardly ever thought about my clothes or my looks any more at all; and,
except sometimes at the beginning of a party, nearly always forgot to be
self-conscious.

       *     *     *     *     *

One of the difficulties in illustrating this book is that if I draw the
people as they really were, they simply look impossible. Not quaint, or
old-fashioned or uncomfortable or even ugly; but just simply impossible.
If I draw young men in bowler hats and high collars and black coats in a
canoe on the river, no one will believe that (_a_) they were gentlemen;
or (_b_) that if they were, they could look like that. I have some
snapshots of May Week picnics, where the girls are dressed in
tight-bodiced, high-collared, long-skirted silk dresses, which you would
think only suitable for an afternoon party at Buckingham Palace; while
their hats are terrific compilations of fruit, flowers and feathers. And
we wore the most incredible clothes for bicycling or playing tennis.

The thought of the discomfort, restraint and pain, which we had to
endure from our clothes, makes me even angrier now than it did then; for
in those days nearly everyone accepted their inconveniences as
inevitable. Except for the most small-waisted, naturally
dumb-bell-shaped females, the ladies never seemed at ease, or even quite
as if they were wearing their own clothes. For their dresses were always
made too tight, and the bodices wrinkled laterally from the strain; and
their stays showed in a sharp ledge across the middles of their backs.
And in spite of whalebone, they were apt to bulge below the waist in
front; for, poor dears, they were but human after all, and they had to
expand somewhere. How my heart went out to a fat French lady we met once
in a train, who said she was going into the country for a holiday 'pour
prendre mes aises sans corset'. Whenever I went to stay with Aunt Etty,
soon after my arrival, I would feel her fingers fumbling in my
waist-belt, to make sure that I was not tight-lacing; for she suspected
every young person of a wish to be fashionable. She used to tell us a
dreadful moral tale about a lady who laced herself so hard that she cut
her liver _right in half_, and died in consequence. (I don't really
think that there was much danger of my dying in that way.)

We knew it was almost hopeless--we were outnumbered and outflanked on
every side--but we _did_ rebel against stays. Margaret says that the
first time she was put into them--when she was about thirteen--she ran
round and round the nursery screaming with rage. I did not do that. I
simply went away and took them off; endured sullenly the row which
ensued, when my soft-shelled condition was discovered; was forcibly
re-corsetted; and, as soon as possible went away and took them off
again. One of my governesses used to weep over my wickedness in this
respect. I had a bad figure, and to me they were real instruments of
torture; they prevented me from breathing, and dug deep holes into my
softer parts on every side. I am sure no hair-shirt could have been
worse to me.

After the torture of stays came the torture of hats, the enormous
over-trimmed hats, which were fixed to the armature of one's puffed-out
hair by long and murderous pins. On the top of an open bus, in a wind,
their mighty sails flapped agonizingly at their anchorage, and pulled
out one's hair by the handful.

Males and females alike, we had always to wear something on our heads
out of doors. Even for children playing in the garden, this was
absolutely necessary. According to the weather, we were told, that we
should catch cold, or get sunstroke, if we went bare-headed. But the
real reason was that it was proper--that the hat was an essential part
of the dress.

Skirts were more tiresome than painful, but they could be very tiresome
indeed. By the time I was eighteen, my skirts came right down to the
ground, and Sunday dresses had to have little trains behind. It was
difficult to walk freely in the heavy tweed 'walking skirts', which kept
on catching between the knees. Round the bottom of these skirts I had,
with my own hands, sewn two and a half yards of 'brush braid', to
collect the worst of the mud; for they inevitably swept the roads,
however carefully I might hold them up behind; and the roads were then
much muddier than the tarred roads are now. Afterwards the crusted mud
had to be brushed off, which might take an hour or more to do. There can
be no more futile job, imposed by an idiotic convention, than that of
perpetual skirt-brushing. This was the only work that ever made me wish
that I had a maid; otherwise I despised people who could not look after
themselves.

Once I asked Aunt Etty what it had been like to wear a crinoline. 'Oh,
it was delightful,' she said. 'I've never been so comfortable since they
went out. It kept your petticoats away from your legs, and made walking
so light and easy.'

One of our governesses, thinking to be very modern and dashing, once
ordered a new skirt, which cleared the ground by quite two inches. But
when it came she was too bashful to wear it, and finally only solved the
difficulty by always wearing spats with it. For, of course, ankles ought
never to be seen at all and, if they were, the lady they belonged to was
not quite a nice lady. Legs had no value, except that of impropriety.

This was the reason why quite well-dressed, but respectable, women did
not seem to mind wearing shabby shoes and stockings--though even the
most proper lady could not help letting her shoes peep out sometimes.
Well-brought-up young men were taught by careful mothers to get over a
stile _before_ a lady, and then stand with their backs to it, looking at
the view, while they stuck out an anonymous hand sideways to help her
out of her embarrassing position.

[Illustration: Good manners.]

Of course, this was because the switch-over from the hair-mindedness of
the mid-Victorian period to the leg-mindedness of the twentieth century
had not yet taken place. Hair was still an asset in the 'nineties,
though it was not what it once had been. No longer did ladies flaunt
enormous masses of well-brushed hair over their shoulders, as they used
to do when they were going to be painted by Rossetti, or photographed by
Mrs. Cameron. There is even a photograph of the 'sixties of Aunt
Etty--surely the least vain person in the world--dressed for a party,
with her hair all over her shoulders.

My mother's lovely golden-brown hair came down nearly to the ground, it
was the longest I have ever seen--though even so, I don't believe that
Browning could have wrapped it 'three times her little neck around', as
he says he did when he strangled Porphyria. But my mother was not so
proud of it, as she would have been twenty years earlier; she even had
bits cut out, as she said her plaits were too heavy. Hair in the
'nineties was worn all in coils and plaits, and was often very prettily
arranged. In the nineteen hundreds it had to be puffed out in hideous
lumps and bumps, over cushions or frames. It was important still, but no
longer the crown of a woman's glory as it had once been.

As for the men, those maned and bearded lions, who had roared and tossed
their tangled doormats in the 'sixties, had now somewhat tempered their
magnificence; though even in the 'seventies Aunt Etty wrote with pride
of Uncle Richard's 'unusually long thick brown beard'; and in the
'eighties my mother still thought that Mr. T.'s plentiful hair and 'nice
_soft_ brown beard' were attractions. But beards were yearly growing
smaller and the younger men were likely only to cultivate moustaches.
Whiskers were definitely relics of the past, and every year the area
devoted to them grew less, as the razor went further inland among the
bristles. In the 'nineties the hair on their manly heads was cut to a
reasonable length, half-way between the exuberance of the 'sixties and
the horrid two-day's growth of prickles on the back of the head, which
is, unfortunately, to-day's style.

But though hair was going out, respectable female legs had not yet come
in. That revolution needed a World War to set going. Nowadays we spend
far too much on the thinnest possible stockings, in which we are very
cold in the winter; and we say casually: 'She's got rather pretty hair';
but with enthusiasm: 'She's got _lovely_ legs'; for good ankles matter
more than anything else.

It fairly makes my heart bleed to see photograph after photograph of
ourselves as children, playing in the garden in high summer, always in
thick, black, woolly stockings and high boots. We wore, too, very long,
full overalls with long sleeves, and of course hats or caps of some
sort. All the same we were luckier than our cousins, because in warm
weather we were sometimes allowed to play out-of-doors with bare feet,
and they hardly ever were. There is a pathetic story of Erasmus, Ruth
and Nora. They once, in the holidays, found a little brook and, quite
innocently, began to paddle in it. Then their poor consciences began to
work, and one of them was sent back to the house to ask permission. They
were told Certainly not; and they had to put on their black woollen
stockings and hot tight boots again.

As I grew older, my mother began to say that it was not proper for me
to walk about with bare legs any more, even in the country. 'There,
Gwen, that man's seen you. I don't know what he'll think of a big girl
like you, going about like that.' But though this made me shy and
uncomfortable, I defied propriety, and went on walking barefoot whenever
I dared. It is still quite dreadful to me to reflect that during at
least fifty years of my life, Propriety has hardly ever allowed me to
enjoy one of the simplest and most innocent of sensual pleasures: the
air blowing on my bare ankles. What a waste of the only life I have!

I wish, too, that I had been allowed then to have proper boys' boots,
with little brass hooks for the laces; for I wanted them then so
passionately, and now it is too late; I don't want them any more. I
always had button boots, which I thought effeminate. They were made to
measure by Mr. Flack the shoemaker, who ran a tickly pencil round our
toes, in his shop looking over the Round Church graveyard. We never had
ready-made boots. There was a grand row once, when Charles was made to
wear a pair of my old buttonboots, and we both thought it an insult to
his sex. I was much the angrier of the two, and made a terrible scene on
his behalf; while he bore with the indignity of the buttons with his
usual aloofness. They must have been the very same boots which he was
forbidden to take off, once when we were acting a barefoot play in the
garden at Down, and he had a cold. He was, as usual, to be the Fairy
Prince--a role which he detested, but which his sex made it inevitable
that he should play--so it was felt that the entire production was in
danger. Whoever heard of a Fairy Prince in black button boots? Then
someone thought of sticking flowers--scabiouses--into all the
buttonholes of the boots; and the play was saved.

There must have been something aristocratic about buttons in those days,
for everything that could possibly button and unbutton was made to do
so: buttons all down the front of one's nightgown, buttons on the
sleeves, buttons on one's bodices and drawers, buttons everywhere. That
anonymous genius, who discovered that clothes could be slipped over
one's head, had not yet been born; nor had his twin brother, who
discovered elastic.

Women were incredibly modest then, even with each other. You could see a
friend in her petticoat, but nothing below that was considered decent.
At school, the sight of a person in her white frilly drawers caused
shrieks of outraged virtue; and I should have thought it impossible to
be seen downstairs in my dressing-gown. As a consequence decent women
did not take very much trouble about their underclothes, which were apt
to be rather Jaeger and patched; but they were often extremely
complicated. This is what a young lady wore, with whom I shared a room
one night--beginning at the bottom, or scratch:

    1. Thick, long-legged, long-sleeved woollen combinations.

    2. Over them, white cotton combinations, with plenty of buttons
       and frills.

    3. Very serious, bony, grey stays, with suspenders.

    4. Black woollen stockings.

    5. White cotton drawers, with buttons and frills.

    6. White cotton 'petticoat-bodice', with embroidery, buttons and
       frills.

    7. Rather short, white flannel, petticoat.

    8. Long alpaca petticoat, with a flounce round the bottom.

    9. Pink flannel blouse.

    10. High, starched, white collar, fastened on with studs.

    11. Navy-blue tie.

    12. Blue skirt, touching the ground, and fastened tightly to the
        blouse with a safety-pin behind.

    13. Leather belt, very tight.

    14. High button boots.

I watched her under my eyelashes as I lay in bed. She would have been
horrified if she had known that I was awake.

Warm underclothes were very important. This is what my American
grandmother wrote to my mother, soon after she came to live in England:
'_Do you wear thick warm flannels? I do think Queen Victoria has a great
deal to answer for, in making the ladies wear low-neck dresses at her
receptions, thus setting the fashion of so dressing, which I believe has
sent many a young and delicate woman to her grave._' Children were
generally far too warmly dressed, but our cousins suffered more than we
did from parental solicitude. They were always too hot.

Dress-hangers were unknown in my youth--at any rate to me. And I well
remember the first time I ever saw face-powder. It was on the
dressing-table of a most venerable lady, in whose house we were playing
hide-and-seek at a small children's party. I cannot imagine how I knew
what it was; but I did know, and was very much shocked at the sight of
it. _Could Mrs. H. really be respectable?_ If you could only have seen
her! The kind, elderly, intellectual wife of a kind, elderly,
intellectual don. Even now it surprises me that she knew about powder!

My astonishment was probably due to the fact that my mother never used
it; her clear pink-and-white complexion needed no such help. I believe
that people used to discuss whether she were made up or not. I can vouch
for it that she was not. However, obviously, less favoured ladies did
use powder, with discretion; but never young girls. And never, never
rouge or lipstick. That was definitely only for actresses, or 'certain
kinds of women', or the wickedest sort of 'fashionable lady'.

[Illustration: 'She uses Face Powder! Can she be really Respectable?']

Rupert Brooke once told us a story, which had been told him by a friend
at King's, as having happened to himself. This young man said that he
had been brought up with a cousin, a girl of whom he was very fond. When
she was about seventeen this girl suddenly died. The boy had been
exceedingly sorry, but at the time of her death he had been much
occupied with his tripos and other matters, so that he had not been so
much shattered as he might otherwise have been. But some months later he
had a dream which showed what a blow her death had really been to him.
He saw in his dream this young girl standing before a mirror; and he
thought, with an indescribable shock of horror and incredulity, that she
appeared to be making up her face. This seemed to him so impossible that
he crept up behind her, and then saw clearly in the glass that she was
indeed painting her face, but that she was _dead_. She was trying to
cover up the ravages of death on a decaying face. He woke to the
dreadful knowledge of the meaning of mortality. It was in 1912 that
Rupert told us that story, but you could not tell it now. The point of
it--the impossibility of a young girl making up before a mirror--would
be entirely missed.

When I was eighteen I was given a dress-allowance of 60 a year. This
was to cover everything, all my clothes and my own private
expenses--books, presents, travel, drawing materials. This was a very
good allowance, and I should have felt extremely rich if I had been able
to spend as little as I wished on clothes. But the authorities required
me to lay out on dress sums that I considered enormous. I had always to
have at least three really good (and horribly ugly) evening dresses
ready to wear; and lots of long white kid gloves, which were very
expensive; and never nice again after they had once got dirty. And
always at least one pair of silk stockings. They cost ten shillings, I
remember! What a bother and a waste of good money it all was.

After writing so bitterly about the clothes of my youth, I must now be
just, and admit that they had one great advantage over the clothes we
wear nowadays. We had _Pockets_. What lovely hoards I kept in them:
always pencils and india-rubbers and a small sketchbook and a very large
pocket-knife; beside string, nails, horse-chestnuts, lumps of sugar,
bits of bread-and-butter, a pair of scissors, and many other useful
objects. Sometimes even a handkerchief. For a year or two I also carried
about a small book of Rembrandt's etchings, for purposes of worship.

Why mayn't we have Pockets? Who forbids it? We have got Woman's
Suffrage, but why must we still always be inferior to Men?




  CHAPTER XIV

  _Society_


Dancing class was the worst of the social events which I dreaded as a
child. It was worse than Parties and worse than Church. It was the
indignity of it that I minded so much, not only the terrible waste of
time, or the dressing-up, bad though that was. In the abstract, so to
speak, I thought my white frock and pink sash extremely beautiful; but
_not on me_. When I wore them I felt a fool, and I went on feeling a
fool all the time I had them on. I knew I was fat and clumsy and plain,
and the white frock made it worse. And, on top of that, the fiendish
Dancing Woman wanted me to hop, and wave my arms about, and stick out my
legs, and do idiotic things with skipping ropes and castanets, in
public. Degrading antics. I always felt exactly like a lion at a circus,
when he is made to ride a bicycle with a pink ribbon round his neck; and
I resented it exceedingly.

Strangely enough many of the other children seemed to like the class;
and even my cousins, whom I admired more than anyone else in the world,
didn't mind it much. Frances was quite distinguished at the Double
Through, in skipping. But I felt a shame for them which they didn't feel
for themselves. Sometimes one of the best dancers, generally Dolly,
would be called out to do a star turn in front of the class; and when
she had finished, Miss Ratcliffe's voice would rise in a long crescendo
scream, with a drop at the end, as she called:

[Illustration: NOW CHILDREN ALL TOGETHAR]

It was then that I hated her worst of all; and I stood there wishing
death, torture, and the undying worm on the poor lady.

So, in revenge, I did it all as badly as possible; kicked the heels of
the child in front of me when we were marching; and toppled over
sideways when we were kneeling on one knee and supposed to be making
graceful semicircles with our arms. But when we came to the polka or the
barn dance, I used to relieve my feelings by choosing a congenial
partner and getting round the room as fast as we possibly could. Then we
would be sent out of the room for 'racing'; but that I liked. Or I would
divert myself by squabbling with one of the boys who disgraced his manly
sex by wearing yellow plush knickerbockers and girl's shoes. The
lynx-eyed mothers and nurses sat around the room, with shawls on their
laps and rivalry in their hearts, while the jangly piano unceasingly
churned out jiggetty tunes. Last indignity of all, fuzzy, tickly,
Shetland shawls were put over our mouths, so that we should not catch
cold when we went home through the Cambridge fog; and the wool got full
of little drops of water from our breath. The only thing tolerable about
the whole business was the ceiling of the room. It was made in a pattern
of pink and blue plaster mouldings, and looked as if it might have been
good to eat. As if a kind, but rather mawkish, angel had made a roof out
of Turkish Delight.

I am sure that Charles hated the dancing just as much as I did; but he
did not get so angry about it, for he always seemed able to remain above
such futilities, and to go on appearing to dance, while he was really
thinking calmly about prime numbers and electricity, and all that sort
of thing; the sort of stuff I carefully did not listen to when he and my
father were talking together. I shut my mind up tight as soon as they
began.

[Illustration: The Dancing Class. Oh no, my dear contemporaries, I know
very well that neither you, nor your mothers, nor your nurses, nor even
Miss Ratcliffe herself, ever looked like this. This is a Psychological
picture; it is what it felt like to me at the time. You are none of you
in the picture; nor am I, because I have just been sent out of the room
in disgrace.]

However, since those days, this dancing problem has been solved by one
of Charles's sons in a very satisfactory way. After a series of colds
and stomach-aches which came on regularly on Monday afternoons, he was
told that he would have to go to the next dancing class, whatever the
state of his health. There were neither tears nor prayers, and he went
off quite quietly on the appointed day; but when he got there he just
lay down on the floor; and stayed lying down. You can't make a person
jig and amble when they go on lying on the ground. I wish I had thought
of this myself; but it needs a man, and perhaps a genius, to invent
anything so simple; and, anyhow, I should never have had the strength of
mind to carry it through properly. This was, no doubt, an hereditary
reaction on the part of Charles's son, for Nora says that she can
remember Charles himself, during some altercation with a nursemaid,
lying immovable on the ground in the Backs, surrounded by shocked and
admiring female relations.

As I grew older the horrors of Dancing Class grew rather less, though
the resentment remained; until at last I stopped going altogether; but
the horrors of Parties, which had been intermittent while we were young,
became constantly more frequent and distressing. What I really need on
these public occasions is Protective Colouring and plenty of cover. In
these respects parties are not quite so bad as Dancing Class. The
unpleasant clothes are the same for both, and they are in no sense
protective; but at a Party you can often manage to spend part of the
time under the stairs, or behind the window curtains, or in the
lavatory; and you are hardly ever obliged to prance about in public;
whereas, at Dancing Class, there is never any cover at all. Then, too,
there is frequently good food at a party; only unfortunately I was
always so rattled by the company that I hardly knew what I was eating.
If only I could have taken it away to eat under the stairs! Also,
sometimes my cousins were at the party, too, and then we made a bee line
for a quiet corner and all jabbered away together, just as if we were at
home; only we were always scolded for it and told that it was bad
manners to do so. I have no doubt that we must have seemed very arrogant
and exclusive, but really we were only very shy. I can never remember
enjoying a party in those days, and I am always surprised when I see
modern children go off quite cheerfully to some gruesome festivity; and
I offer them a great deal of sympathy, which they don't seem to need in
the least.

Going out to tea with children we knew was not so bad. In fact, it was
sometimes rather fun; for we generally had tea in the decent seclusion
of the nursery, and then Nana was there, too. This was a great
protection, and we were not too much frightened to enjoy the food.

Tea at Trinity Lodge was great fun. We used to hope to go there directly
after the quarterly visit of the Judge for the Assizes. For the Judge,
as representative of the King, turns the Master out of part of his
lodge, and takes possession of certain rooms for himself and his
servants; and even has his own kitchen and cook. The Master and Fellows
used to greet him ceremonially and feed him on mulled port and a special
sort of sweet biscuit, which we believed to be the only kind a Judge
could eat. And the nursery had the remains of the biscuits after he had
left. Then the Master, Dr. Montagu Butler, used sometimes to come to the
nursery while we were having tea; and on Jim's birthday, when we had tea
in the great dining-room, he would make a short but elegant speech,
which we thought very grand. After tea, Jim would read us the last few
hundred lines which he had added to his epic poem on the Siege of Troy;
and then we would settle down to hide-and-seek, all over the rambling,
dimly lighted house: through the great drawing-room full of
seventeenth-century portraits; and under the Judge's bed; or tiptoe down
a romantic underground passage, which joins one part of the complicated
old house to another; and we even sometimes got a glimpse down into the
College Hall, through the little window in the panelling behind the
Master's bed. I believe I could even now find my way in the dark, and on
all fours, right across the great dust-sheeted drawing-room. But, of
course, that wasn't a party, that was fun.

We must have seen a good many Great Men in our youth, but most of them
seemed to me very uninteresting. There was Lord Kelvin; he looked very
fine, but he seemed to be always absorbed in his own thoughts, and never
opened his mouth, except once. That was when poor Charles, at a very
young age, was made to recite to him '_The Charge of the Light
Brigade_'. 'Into the Jaws of Deff rode the Six Hundred,' said Charles,
and then: 'What's Jaws of Deff?' to which Lord Kelvin, living up to his
part as a Great Man, replied: 'Doing your Duty, my Boy.'

An amusing recollection of this very young age is of overhearing scraps
of conversation about 'that foolish young man, Ralph Vaughan Williams',
who _would_ go on working at music when 'he was so hopelessly bad at
it'. This memory is confirmed by a letter of Aunt Etty's: '_He has been
playing all his life, and for six months_ hard, _and yet he can't play
the simplest thing decently_. _They say it will simply break his heart
if he is told that he is too bad to hope to make anything of it._' She
held much the same opinion of the early writings of E. M. Forster, a
family friend: '_His novel is really_ not _good_; _and it's too
unpleasant for the girls to read_. _I very much hope he will turn to
something else, though I am sure I don't know what._' But, of course,
these two were not great men then; this is what you have to go through
to become great.

But Francis Galton was both pleasant and impressive, with his bushy,
twitching eyebrows. We went to his house once to have our fingerprints
taken for some experiment on the classification of fingerprints, on
which he was working. He did not provide us with any means of washing
off the printers' ink, and we had to go about all day in London with
sticky black hands. Lord Rayleigh was pleasant, too. Once, when we were
older, he came to call when the elders happened to be out; and he sat on
the sofa like a great ginger cat and told us very funny stories: how his
barber had said to him: 'Wonderful things brains, my lord, so good for
the roots of the 'air.' My father said afterwards: 'That came out of
Rayleigh's own factory of stories. He makes up all the best ones
himself.'

And then there was Monsieur Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador. He came
to Cambridge for some ceremony and lunched with us. He had just lost his
wife and was in deep mourning: he wore a top-hat and the most beautiful
frock-coat; and black kid gloves, which he never took off. Margaret and
I were sent to show him the garden before lunch, and he entertained us
with a monologue suitable for _jeunes filles_. It was all about _la
morale_. 'C'est la morale qui soutient l'homme. Le chat, le chameau' [I
particularly remember the immorality of the camels] le lion, le
tigre--etc., etc.--n'ont pas de morale. Enfin c'est la morale qui
soutient l'homme.' Margaret and I walked respectfully on either side of
him, making polite interjections, and wondering whether French girls
often had to swallow this sort of stuff. I dare say he was wondering
whether Englishmen often had to endure such dumb, ill-dressed, lumps of
girls.

[Illustration: _L'Entente Cordiale._ Margaret is carefully noting every
intonation of the Ambassador's voice, with a view to 'doing' him later
on. I am most miserably conscious of my spectacles and the hairpins
sticking straight into my head, and of all my horrible brand-new
grown-up clothes. Monsieur Cambon is wondering if he can make his list
of immoral animals last out till lunch-time.]

I have had many doubts as to whether Monsieur Cambon actually said _le
moral_ or _la morale_; the question is terribly involved, because the
words have different meanings, and while _le moral_ in French is best
translated by _morale_ in English, _la morale_ in French corresponds
more nearly to the English meaning of _morals_. On the whole, I think he
must have said _la morale_, because _morals_ rather than _morale_ are
what young ladies and animals are so sadly in need of, (particularly
camels). In fact, the Ambassador was trying, in his curious Gallic way,
to express the idea which Bishop Wykeham, so long ago, made into an
epigram: 'Manners makyth Man.'

As I grew older, parties grew steadily worse. My mother saw that we were
shy and bad mixers, and thought that seeing more people would be good
for us; and so, in our adolescence, she grew more and more autocratic
about forcing us to go out. Of course, she was perfectly right in
principle, only it did not work out well in practice.

It was a difficult situation both for her and for me. The kind of girl
she understood was gay and pretty and charming, and had lots of
love-affairs and told her all about them; and she never understood that
I could not--really _could_ not--fill this role. It was part of her
indomitable courage never to admit defeat, so she grew more and more
inexorable in trying to force a square peg into a round hole, and in
driving me into society for my own good; and I grew more and more
miserable. It was really pathetic to see her pleasure when, later on, a
niece of her own came on a long visit, and exactly filled the place that
Margaret or I ought to have taken.

I am certain that she never understood the agonies I went through.
Shyness was so alien to her that she could not take it seriously, and
could only laugh at me, or scold me mildly, which made me feel guilty as
well as shy. 'It is so _silly_!' [Of course it was, I knew that
perfectly well, but it didn't make any difference.] 'People can't eat
you!' [No, but _look_ at you, which was much worse.]

My cowardice sometimes rose to such a pitch that once, when I had been
invited to spend a weekend with a charming and friendly family, I simply
could not bring myself to go over the edge, at zero hour on the Saturday
morning; and I telegraphed that I was ill and could not come. My mother
was away from home, or this would have been impossible. I was ashamed
afterwards, and knew I had been idiotic: 'for,' thought I, 'I might have
met there a young man, who would have fallen head over ears in love with
me at first sight, and how lovely that would be; or I might have made
real friends with one of the girls; all kinds of nice things might have
happened. What a donkey I am!'

I dreaded the servants at strange houses quite as much as the hosts
themselves. One could not hide from the servants; they came and looked
at you in bed, and, very rightly, despised your toothbrush and your
underclothes; every privacy lay open before them. Anyhow, I always hated
being waited on personally; why should I, a healthy girl of eighteen,
have tea brought to me in bed by a tired woman of double my own age?

Even when I had made up my mind to face the music and not be a coward,
it only meant that I put my head down and charged blindly on to the
assegais of the assembled impis, with such determination that I nearly
frightened them into fits. It was the only way I could do it. I am sure
I don't know what ought to be done with idiots like me; but I am very
glad that I was not my own mother. I have mercifully not had to deal
with the problem myself, as my own daughters being half French were born
knowing by instinct all the things I shall never learn. It was _they_
who had to deal with _me_, though they soon gave me up as a bad job. But
though I defeated my French daughters, I think possibly a French mother
might have made something of me. I have seen the most grotesque lumps of
French girls turned into charming young women; not beautiful perhaps,
but intriguing, characteristic--personalities in fact. But to do that
you have to work with the grain of the wood. My mother did not
understand that wood has a grain in it at all.

She could never have believed it possible that it was out of
uncontrollable panic that I upset a whole dish of spinach into my lap,
at one of the first dinner-parties I ever went to. I was about eighteen,
and I had on my best green satin evening dress, very smart and tight and
shiny. I mopped away at the mess with my long white kid gloves, and made
it much worse. The kind parlour-maid tried to help me; but my
neighbours, instead of making a joke of it, pretended that they did not
see; no doubt from the best of motives, but it was not the right
treatment. Oh dear, Oh dear, how I did wish to fall down dead that very
instant! But it was a horrible dress anyhow; I had been allowed no
choice in colour or make; and I was glad when it was found to be spoilt
for ever.

I was never good at tennis, and at a tennis party I became quite unable
to serve a ball over the net at all. At a river picnic I simply rowed
and rowed; so that I always thought of picnics as Hard Labour; but
rowing was much less painful than having to talk to people. I felt sick
for several days before my first dances, for fear that I should be
shamed in public by not having enough partners. However, in time, I did,
with economy and skill, generally manage to get enough dances engaged to
look decent; and by degrees I got to dance fairly well and acquired a
clientle of young men who liked dancing, and to whom I did not have to
talk very much. But I did not enjoy dances.

Once, after we were grown-up, my mother insisted on having rather a
large picnic: 'Because you really ought to get to know the young people
of your own age.' We sulkily pointed out that we didn't get to know them
at picnics; but it was no good, it had to be; and as it was to be a
specially grand affair, we were to drive to the Ouse in a private
motor-bus, instead of going on the Cam as usual. The open-topped
motor-bus was the best part of the business to our minds, for we had
seldom been in a motor-bus then, and going bowling along the Huntingdon
Road on the roof was rather splendid.

It was at this picnic that I first beheld true heroism. Probably
everyone concerned will remember the story in a different way; that is
human nature; but I can only tell the story as I remember it myself.

Well, it all went off with the usual kind of grisly brightness, and the
picnic part and all its dreary sports were over: the sham cricket with a
bun for a ball, the fighting with paddles, the airy badinage about
catching crabs: it had all at last drawn to its longed-for close, and
everyone was packing up the baskets to go home. I must observe that we
liked a Free Picnic, with spontaneous sports and lots of cousins, well
enough; it was only the forced labour of a Compulsory picnic which made
everything seem so dismal. I hope the guests did not feel it too much;
we did try to be agreeable, but I am afraid we were not very good at
concealing our feelings.

Now among our guests were two sisters, whom I shall call Cordelia and
Jane. The boats were moored in very deep water, beneath a steep bank,
perhaps four or five feet high, and Cordelia and I had scrambled into
one of them to receive the baskets, when Jane appeared at the top of the
bank. A man, standing in my boat, held out his hand and said brightly:
'Jump in.' So Jane simply jumped! From that height! She hit the edge of
the boat, which would certainly have upset if I had not instinctively
thrown all my weight over on the other side. After wobbling wildly for a
moment both she and the man, who tried to hold her, fell with a terrific
splash into the deep water. Then, by my side, Cordelia rose grandly to
her feet, and with a ringing cry of, 'Oh, Jane!' simply _stepped_ into
the river, no doubt preferring a watery grave to living on alone; and
thus illustrating the verse:

  _Decisive action in the hour of need
  Denotes the hero, but does not succeed._

Then might have been seen the glorious spectacle of English Manhood at
its best; one gentleman was already swimming about in the flood; another
dived splendidly into the stream, and then found that he had chosen a
place which was not really deep enough for diving; and Charles, who had
been at some distance away, arriving on the bank when the rescue was
already well in hand, obviously felt that, as a host, he must not be
behindhand in getting wet. So he waded in, at a shallow place, till the
water came just below his watch-chain--(I saw his hand on his
watch)--and thus honour was satisfied. There were hardly enough drowning
young ladies to go round, and 'one poor Tiger didn't get a Christian';
especially as Cordelia managed to climb back into the boat by herself;
but for a minute the Ouse was rather like Alice's Pool of Tears, when
all the animals were swimming about. But at last everyone was saved.
Even the people who had not jumped--or walked--into the water, were
nearly as wet as the heroes and heroines, from helping them to climb
into the boats; and when at last a friendly house was found--and it was
not very near--there were only enough dry clothes for Jane, and they
belonged to a very old lady; the rest of us had to drive home as we
were. All this made us very late, but finally the two girls, Jane
muffled in her borrowed dress, were smuggled in at the kitchen door of
their house; and though their mother was told all about it, the
adventure, with her connivance, was for ever concealed from their
father, who was very ill at the time.

But we felt that anyhow _that_ picnic had been worth while.

       *     *     *     *     *

Not long after this we ourselves organized a picnic, which no one could
call a success. It was just before Frances' wedding; Uncle Frank was
very gloomy at the idea of losing her, and Frances thought that
something ought to be done to cheer him up, and to entertain the uncles
and aunts assembled in Cambridge for the occasion. So a river picnic was
arranged, entirely for their sakes; a family party, given by the young
for the old.

It was a grey, cold, gusty day in June. The aunts sat huddled in furs in
the boats, their heavy hats flapping in the wind. The uncles, in coats
and cloaks and mufflers, were wretchedly uncomfortable on the hard,
cramped seats, and they hardly even tried to pretend that they were not
catching their deaths of cold. But it was still worse when they had to
sit down to have tea on the damp, thistly grass near Grantchester Mill.
There were so many miseries which we young ones had never noticed at
all: nettles, ants, cow-pats . . . besides that all-penetrating wind.
The tea had been put into bottles wrapped in flannels (there were no
Thermos flasks then); and the climax came when it was found that it had
all been sugared beforehand. This was an inexpressible calamity. They
all hated sugar in their tea. Besides it was Immoral. Uncle Frank said,
with extreme bitterness: 'It's not the sugar I mind, but the Folly of
it.' This was half a joke; but at his words the hopelessness and the
hollowness of a world where everything goes wrong, came flooding over
us; and we cut our losses and made all possible haste to get them home
to a good fire.

[Illustration: Heroic survivors of the picnic. Left to right: Uncle
Frank, Uncle Horace, Aunt Etty, Aunt Ida, my mother. My father has
shamefully given in already, unable to face any more hardships, and has
started off alone to walk home. Aunt Ida alone has still a gallant smile
glued to her lips; the others are just enduring. The trees of Byron's
Pool can be seen in the distance.]

Frances was the first of us girls to be married, and her marriage was
the end of an epoch. After that we were really grown up. I had already
been allowed to stop trying to be a young lady; and I was now very
happy, living in London, alone with Uncle William, and working at the
Slade School.

When I look back on those years when I was neither fish nor flesh,
between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two, I remember them as an
uncomfortable time, and sometimes a very unhappy one. Now that I have
certainly attained the status of Good Red Herring, I may at last be
allowed to say: Oh dear, Oh dear, how horrid it was being young, and how
nice it is being old and not having to mind what people think.

[Illustration]


=Transcriber's Notes:=
  hyphenation, spelling and grammar have been preserved as in
    the original
  Page 99, "independant" changed to "independent"
  Page 117, "listened for it" changed to "listened for it."
  Page 122, "enioying" changed to "enjoying"
  Page 129, "tapesty" changed to "tapestry"
  Page 131/132, "we be longed" changed to "we belonged"
  Page 139, "at all There" changed to "at all. There"
  Page 187, "had hanged the door" changed to "had banged the door"
  Page 211, "to Dancing Class." changed to "to Dancing Class.'"
  Page 237, "slubious" changed to "salubrious"
  Page 243, "Widow Wadman" changed to "Widow Wadman'"




[End of Period Piece, by Gwen Raverat]
