VI
For about two years I was mainly with my grandmother. I had a governess and went to classes with six other little girls.
After that I went away to school. I was not unhappy, but that time did not seem to count. In the holidays, when Guy and Hugo came home, I went to Yearsly, and that was like coming alive again. The holidays were much shorter than the term time, but they stand out in my remembrance as the only real parts of those years.
I believe many children have this power of detachment, almost like a sort of suspended animation—a living quite apart in an untouchable world of one’s own, when the outside world is too uncongenial. Certainly Hugo and I did it. Guy did not need to. It was not that he cared less for home, but he had room for more different enjoyments, more different people and forms of life.
These holidays at Yearsly stretch out, in one way, as an unbroken continuity, so that the time before school and this are not separated really by the big break which we felt at the time.
I have felt like that often with big and important events in life, or what seem to one so at the time. In one sense they are irreparable and complete, and nothing is ever the same again, and in another they seem after a certain time to have made no difference at all.
What is different ‘and what the same’? I suppose there is no test—no way of knowing—just as with a person—they change and yet are the same. When I think of myself as a child, through all these years I am writing about, in one way I see myself as quite a different person⸺a child whom I watch and wonder at, sometimes, and from whom I am quite detached; and yet in another way I feel all the time, that that child and I myself, now, are one. And both are true.
Only Hugo does not change. He grows, of course, and changes to that extent, from a child into a man, but from the earliest time that I remember him, and I cannot remember any time before that, it is the same indescribable personality. He is different and more lovable than other people. Not cleverer, nor better, exactly. Guy could do most things better than he could, and many other people are as good; but no one I have ever met was like Hugo in the special quality he had. Guy felt it too, and Cousin Delia, and the Addingtons did, and, I think, Sophia Lane Watson. Some people did not understand Hugo at all.
Walter didn’t, and some of the people at Oxford. I have heard people say he posed, and gave himself airs, and it used to bewilder me at first that anyone could be so wildly mistaken.
Hugo never posed. I don’t think he could have, if he had tried. He cared so little what other people thought of him. He lived so entirely in a world of his own.
He was kind, and very careful about hurting people’s feelings, when he thought of it, but often he used to forget altogether that anyone was there. He said odd things sometimes, unexpected sort of things, because what he saw struck him in some unexpected light. It would never have occurred to him to say what he said for any other reason.
It used to worry me at one time that Walter did not appreciate Hugo, but that was a long time ago. I see now, and have seen for many years, that they never could have understood each other. They spoke different languages—or rather they used the same words for quite different meanings.
Walter once said:
‘Hugo has charm, certainly, but he is an unsatisfactory fellow. What is there behind all that?’
And another time he said:
‘If Hugo had ever done a good day’s work one would know where one was with him.’
And I could not explain. Hugo did work in his own way constantly, practically all day long, but it was not the kind of work that Walter could recognize or admit. Hugo was living and taking in and trying to understand all the time. If Hugo went for a ride on a bus—afterwards, when we were older—he found drama and beauty and queer exciting romance. He would tell one when he came back sometimes about it. The other people in the bus, people he had looked down on walking in the street, lights and shadows in a fog, sunsets in smoke, everything and anything was exciting and inspiring to Hugo; and some one else might have been the same bus ride and seen nothing at all.
It was not that he was exactly observant, for he wasn’t. Often he noticed nothing when other people did. But he had a world of his own in which he lived a great deal, and sometimes—you never knew when—outside sights and sounds responded to something in it, and there was an illumination, a sudden quickening into life, of all around.
We who knew Hugo and loved him understood this. I don’t think Walter could have been expected to understand; he was too different.