How strange is that unquestioning obedience of childhood! Recognition of it might well give pause to careless instructors of youth. The kiss meant torture to me, in anticipation and in fact. But I was bidden, and never dreamed of refusing to obey. No doubt, there was also at work in me some dim sort of infantile delicacy. This was an occasion upon which a gentleman could have no choice....
Ah, well, I believe Amelia was a dear good soul, and I am sure I hope she married well, and lived happily ever after. I have no recollection whatever of how or when she drifted out of my life. But the visit to Jinny's deathbed, and the exciting leaps from the immeasurably long kitchen table into Amelia's print-clad arms, are things which stand out rather more clearly in my recollection than many of the events of, say, twenty years later.
II
How is it that my earliest recollections should centre about folk no nearer or dearer to me than domestic servants? I know that my mother died within three months of my birth. There had to be, and was, another woman in my life before Amelia; but I have no memories of her. She was an aunt, an unmarried sister of my mother's; but I believe my father quarrelled with her before I began to 'take notice' very much; and then came Amelia.
The large underground kitchen really was fairly big. I had a look at it no more than a dozen years ago. The house, too, was and is a not unpleasing one, situated within a stone's throw of Russell Square, Bloomsbury. Its spaces are ample, its fittings solidly good, and its area less subterranean than many. Near by is a select livery stable and mews of sub-rural aspect, with Virginia creeper climbing over a horse's head in stucco. Amelia shared with me a night nursery and a nursery-living room in this house, the latter overlooking the mews, through the curving iron rails of a tiny balcony. Below us my father occupied a small bedroom and a large sitting-room, the latter being the 'first floor front.'
At this time, and indeed during all the period of my first English memories--say, eight years--my father was engaged in journalistic work. I know now that he had been called to the bar, a member of Lincoln's Inn; but I do not know that he ever had a brief. He gave some years, I believe, to coaching and tutoring. I remember seeing, later in my boyhood, a tattered yellow prospectus which showed that he once delivered certain lectures on such subjects as 'Mediaeval English Poetry.' In my time I gather that my father called no man master or employer, but was rather the slave of a number of autocrats in Fleet Street. 'The office,' as between Amelia and myself, may have meant all Fleet Street. But my impression now is that it meant the building then occupied by the ----. (Here figures the name of one of London's oldest morning newspapers.--Ed.) And, it may be, the ---- Club; for I have reason to believe that my father did much of his work at his club. I have even talked there with one member at least who recollected this fact.
But the memory of my father as he was in this early period is curiously vague. It would seem that he produced no very clear impression on my mind then. Our meetings were not very frequent, I think. As I chiefly recall them, they occurred in the wide but rather dark entrance hall, and were accompanied by conversation confined to Amelia and my father. At such times he would be engaged in polishing his hat, sometimes with a velvet pad, and sometimes on his coat-sleeve. I used to hear from him remarks like these:
'Well, keep him out of doors as much as possible, so long as it doesn't rain. Eh? Oh, well, you'd better buy another. How much will it be? I will send up word if I am back before the boy's bed-time.'
And then he might turn to me, after putting on his hat, and absently pull one of my ears, or stroke my nose or forehead. His hands were very slender, warm, and pleasantly odorous of soap and tobacco. 'Be a good man,' he would say. And there the interview ended. He never said: 'Be a good child'; always 'a good man'; and sometimes he would repeat it, in a gravely preoccupied way.
Once, and, so far as I remember, only once, we met him out-of-doors; in the park, it was, and he took us both to the Zoological Gardens, and gave us tea there. (Yellowish cake with white sugar icing over it has ever since suggested to me the pungent smell of monkey-houses and lions' cages.) The meeting was purely accidental, I believe.