XII.
Among the delights of Summer were picnics to the woods. There would be several during the course of the season. When the weather seemed to inspire confidence, a few phaetons would be engaged for the family and their relations and friends, and some Sunday morning the seat of each carriage would be packed full of good things. We took tablecloth and serviettes with us, bread, butter, eggs and salmon, sausages, cold meat and coffee, as well as a few bottles of wine. Then we drove to some keeper's house, where for money and fair words they scalded the tea for us, and the day's meal was seasoned with the good appetite which the outdoor air gave us.
As a child I preserved an uncomfortable and instructive recollection of one of these expeditions. The next day my mother said to me: "You behaved very ridiculously yesterday, and made a laughing stock of yourself." "How?" "You went on in front of the grown-up people all the time, and sang at the top of your voice. In the first place, you ought not to go in front, and in the next place, you should not disturb other people by singing." These words made an indelible impression upon me, for I was conscious that I had not in the least intended to push myself forward or put on airs. I could only dimly recollect that I had been singing, and I had done it for my own pleasure, not to draw attention to myself.
I learnt from this experience that it was possible, without being naughty or conceited, to behave in an unpleasing manner, understood that the others, whom I had not been thinking about, had looked on me with disfavour, had thought me a nuisance and ridiculous, my mother in particular; and I was deeply humiliated at the thought.
It gradually dawned upon me that there was no one more difficult to please than my mother. No one was more chary of praise than she, and she had a horror of all sentimentality. She met me with superior intelligence, corrected me, and brought me up by means of satire. It was possible to impress my aunts, but not her. The profound dread she had of betraying her feelings or talking about them, the shrewdness that dwelt behind that forehead of hers, her consistently critical and clear- sighted nature, the mocking spirit that was so conspicuous in her, especially in her younger days, gave me, with regard to her, a conviction that had a stimulating effect on my character--namely, that not only had she a mother's affection for me, but that the two shrewd and scrutinising eyes of a very clever head were looking down upon me. Rational as she was through and through, she met my visionary inclinations, both religious and philosophical, with unshaken common sense, and if I were sometimes tempted, by lesser people's over- estimating of my abilities, to over-estimate them myself, it was she who, with inflexible firmness, urged her conviction of the limitations of my nature. None of my weaknesses throve in my mother's neighbourhood.
This was the reason why, during the transitional years between boyhood and adolescence, the years in which a boy feels a greater need of sympathy than of criticism and of indulgence than of superiority, I looked for and found comprehension as much from a somewhat younger sister of my mother's as from the latter herself. This aunt was all heart. She had an ardent, enthusiastic brain, was full of tenderness and goodness and the keenest feeling for everything deserving of sympathy, not least for me, while she had not my mother's critical understanding. Her judgment might be obscured by passion; she sometimes allowed herself to be carried to imprudent extremes; she had neither Mother's equilibrium nor her satirical qualities. She was thus admirably adapted to be the confidant of a big boy whom she gave to understand that she regarded as extraordinarily gifted. When these transitional years were over, Mother resumed undisputed sway, and the relations between us remained in all essentials the same, even after I had become much her superior in knowledge and she in some things my pupil. So that it affected me very much when, many years after, my younger brother said to me somewhat sadly: "Has it struck you, too, that Mother is getting old?" "No, not at all," I replied. "What do you think a sign of it?" "I think, God help me, that she is beginning to admire us."