The Retrospect

by Ada Cambridge

Compared with these disciplinarians my dear mother was nowhere. She could hardly bring herself to scold a child. As far as I was concerned my father was the same. His weak indulgence of me, the open favouritism with which he distinguished me from my brothers and sisters was—I know now—scandalous. Harsh to his boys, and too ready to box the ears of the little girls when they were old enough, he never laid an angry finger on me. One punishment only was mine, and I must have been bad indeed at the times when it was inflicted; I was sent to sit on the stairs. That does not sound like punishment at all, but the treadmill was not dreaded more by those condemned to it. To sit on the stairs meant to sit on the bottom step of the front stairs, just facing the hall door, in dread expectation of a visitor who should be witness of the unspeakable ignominy of my position—akin to that of one exposed in the village stocks to the insults of a hostile populace. I could not look at that front door, that I used to watch in such agonies of fear, without seeing behind it the huddled little figure, quaking in terror of the caller who hardly ever came.

If I was let off so lightly myself, I suffered horribly in the punishments of my nursery companions, particularly in the case of my one-year-older brother—a thoughtful, gifted, sensitive boy, with a fragile body and a spirit that could not be bent or intimidated, who, from his babyhood until he came to his deathbed at seventeen, was in constant collision with a passionate father who had not the capacity to understand him. I remember once beating out with a poker the panels of a door behind which he sat in darkness, a prisoner on bread and water, proud and silent, with a bleeding back but a dry eye, that I might get to him to weep over him and comfort him. It makes me feel wicked, even now, to think of it. And to think of his poor, delicate, devoted mother, who did understand him, and to whom he was so precious, more helpless than I to prevent or mitigate these tragic blunders, makes my own mother-blood run cold.

In the generations before my own it seems to have been incumbent on a father who would do his duty to be cruel to his sons (and how hard the tradition dies!); it was incumbent on a mother to be stern and distant with her young daughters, if she could—and there is ample evidence that she forced herself to it. What the conception of parental duty now is we know. Thinking the matter over, it seems to me that the happy mean between the two extremes may have been struck somewhere about the time when I was a child myself. I am not citing my own experiences in proof of this—far from it—but the broad general rules that applied to all respectable households of the period.

The iron hand had taken on the velvet glove. Discipline—still a synonym for decency, for civilisation, for religion, in the average parent's mind—was enforced, not pitilessly, as aforetime, but with firmness, and as a rule in moderate and reasonable ways. The child, even the spoilt child, remained completely subject to its natural rulers, whose sense of responsibility for its well-being seemed never out of their minds; but while "duty" was still the watchword—and the word stood for a real thing—the weakness of the weak side was more justly allowed for—not pandered to, you understand; only not treated as a crime to be cured by punishment. Duty—duty—how one loathed the word! But how good for character to be trained to recognise the thing! The very infant, if able to employ itself usefully, had a daily task of some kind—was taught that life was meant for work, and that play was unlawful save as a reward for work. Even at T—— it was my duty, and I knew it, to spend certain hours with a long seam or hem, stabbing my finger, weeping over repeated unpickings and admonishments, just as it was my duty to make a joyless breakfast of bread and milk. Every little girl must know how to manufacture, single-handed, a whole shirt for her father—and the amount of fine sewing in a whole shirt of those days must now be seen to be believed—or hide her head amongst her peers and cause her mother to be ashamed of her. I was well on the way with this laborious undertaking before I could read.

Utter drudgery it was, because the scheme of "plain-work" was too vast, and its details too minute and complicated, for my understanding, but it did not destroy my inherited love of the needle. When it ceased to be an instrument of discipline, it became my favourite toy. I could be kept "good" at any time with beads to thread, or some wools and a bit of canvas for a kettle-holder, or, above all, scraps with which to dress dolls. What girl-child makes dolls' clothes—proper dolls' clothes—now? In my child days it was an occupation as constant as it was delightful. All the year round I was stocking a little trunk with elaborate costumes for my children, against they went with me a-visiting, or in the family party to the seaside. It was thus that I learned to be independent of dressmakers for myself in later years. A particularly bright memory of my life at T—— is the way I "spent the day"—a regular-recurring holiday—at a neighbouring farmhouse. My hostesses kept a doll for me. I never took it home—it lived in a drawer in their spare bedroom—but it was brought out as soon as I arrived, together with such odds and ends of material as were available at the moment; and down I sat to reclothe the puppet anew, in a costume of fresh design, the completion of which would synchronise with the call of parent or nurse to fetch me home. Now, when a houseful of grown-ups has a child to entertain for many hours at a stretch, what labour and strain to keep it amused and happy! These people had only to give me a doll, a rag or two, and sewing materials, and I was amused for the whole day, and so happy that I have never forgotten how happy I was.

On account of that doll—which, after all, was not more than six inches long—I had been most anxious to see the house belonging to it. I knew it had been near T——, and, as I remembered it, almost unique in rustic charm. Often, amid the lightly run up homes of Australia, I had thought of its solid, old-world, if humble, beauty, and on this particular afternoon I had purposed to feast my artistic sense upon it with a satisfaction unknown to me when I was young and ignorant. It was quite a shock—so accustomed had I become to finding all I looked for—to discover that it was no more; the one thing gone, of which no trace at all remained. Its garden was wholly obliterated, and on the site of the old house stood a new house, the commonest of the common, from which I turned in disappointment and disgust. Dear, dear old vanished home! I could not have believed I should feel its loss so much.

But I can say of it, in the words of the obituary column, that, although gone, it is not forgotten. In my gallery of Memory the picture of it hangs, no line or tint bedimmed by the passage of the years.

Behold it with me, my reader. In the foreground an oval lawn, carefully kept (for I was frequently employed to weed the daisies out): it is ringed with gravelled path, then squared box borders, then flower-beds, behind which on one side rises a thick belt of fir-trees, and on the other lie the farmyards, over a dividing wall. From the little green gate in the roadway fence (lined with a clipped hedge) one views the old dwelling at the top of the lawn; long and low, its walls a mat of ivy, pierced with latticed casements, opening outward, and a front door under a little porch; a large, steep, thatched roof, with dormer windows to the row of four bedrooms, and old ornamental chimneys in clusters, tall and fat. On the side of the trees, wooden lattices in the ivy let sunless light into the dairy (robber rats used to squeeze through the interstices and get caught fast on their return), and the finest violets and primroses grow underneath. Also, farther into the green shade, pet hedgehogs live that a little girl feeds with milk, and that uncurl and scuffle along at her heels through the pine-needles to show their cupboard love. And along that side the bees feed from the foxgloves, in the bells of which little boys entrap them, to chase the little girl with the buzzing prisoners, helpless in their silken bags. The backyard, unseen, has red-brick pathways through it, ringing with the clink of pattens and milk-pails; one leads to a green door, portal of a paradise of unforbidden fruit; another branches off to the gate of nearest access to the deeply mired cowyard, which is also the pigyard and poultry-yard—which, by the way, should suggest an effluvium to be remembered, but does not, possibly because the windows of the period were used, not to let air in, but to keep it out. Sweet old house—altogether sweet, smelling only of lavender and cabbage roses and pot-pourri and fragrant cookings....

The title of the picture is "The House of the Doll."

For the doll's sake, Mrs H., its mistress, and H.M. (the two Christian names never dissociated), her daughter, stand out from the shadowy crowd of my earliest acquaintances in high relief. So small a society as we were in our village and adjacent hamlets—miles and miles from any railway—we had, of course, our cliques. Some of the half-dozen or so of farmers' families were not to be familiarly recognised on any account; with two or three we were distantly fraternal, confining our amenities to cake-and-wine calls; one or two were on such a footing with us that we "dropped in" on each other at uncanonical hours, and conducted intercourse in our "keeping" rooms and in our ordinary attire, but still with the perfect understanding that the precise etiquette of the time forbade the dearest friend to stay to meals unless previously invited and prepared for; excepting, of course, in crises of trouble, when etiquette must ever give way to primitive impulse. The H. family were amongst these intimates, and chief of them all to me on account of that doll.