No; like the ’Badian and Jamaican nigger who considers that going to church on the occasion of his marriage (though there is often a long family by that time) gives him a clean bill of spiritual health for all past and future soul-sicknesses, I had some dim idea that from henceforth I was immune from the terror that walketh by night. I did not put it that way, of course, but that certainly was the immediate effect of my baptism. But it was a clean little soul, after all. Lack of opportunity had prevented sin, and I did not even know the joy of an occasional theft of jam or sugar. Then came an episode which I am sure most people will find difficult of belief, and no one more so than myself, for a reason presently to be given.
One of my uncles was a gentleman’s groom, and through lying in a damp bed he had contracted some disease of the throat which made him an invalid for five long years. All that time he lived with auntie, but I believe his sweetheart, who was lady’s maid at the big house where he had been employed, remained faithful to him and paid auntie for his keep. He attended Dr. Sieveking at St. Mary’s Hospital, and always took me with him on the days when he went. My recollections of those days are all grey. He never joked, never even talked to me, and as for giving me a penn’orth of sweets—I doubt if the idea ever occurred to him. At last he died, and I, who did not know anything about death, of course was banished from all the discussions which took place. Of course, being a secretive and very quiet child, I asked no questions; but I bided my time. It came. He was laid in his coffin in the next room to ours—the bedroom which auntie and I occupied.
They sent me up to bed as usual and I went through all the usual formulæ of retiring. And then I got up, crept out upon the landing, listened intently, and, hearing nothing, fled into the death room. There lay the coffin on its trestles covered with a sheet. The moon shone through the white blinds as if they had not been there. I drew the sheet back and looked upon that face. I do not believe I should have been terrified at all, but a handkerchief was tied under his jaw and over his head and it gave him an appearance that I cannot describe. And one of his eyes was half open. I drew the sheet rapidly back, I slid to the door, passed through it, closed it behind me, listened again—no sound—crept into bed and covered my head with the bedclothes. I lay for over an hour with thumping heart and panting breath, but I slept at last. And I have never been able to look upon the dead without terrible sensations since—indeed, I have not seen a dead face since I lost my youngest boy fifteen years ago.
But I notice that I am lingering too long over those earliest days. Yet I must just pause a moment over the change from my much-loved and comfortable petticoats to trousers. My poor old grandfather had died and been buried by my auntie, and from a pair of his best trousers she made me my initial pair. Poor lady, she knew rather less than most people of the make of masculine garments, but she did her best, and presently, in the midst of a little group of giggling work-girls I was endued with the tubes. That’s what they were, just tubes, and my little legs felt as forlorn and distant in them as if they had no connection with me. I draw a veil over other details as not being seemly, but as I forlornly surveyed myself standing there, with those tubes nearly reaching to my shoulders, the giggling of the girls burst into unquenchable laughter and I nearly died with shame. No child likes to be an object of laughter, but that I certainly was then, and all my aunt’s well-meant efforts to stay the yells of laughter were fruitless.
They were taken off me then, but I wore them; oh yes, I wore them, and what I endured from the street urchins who saw me in them I can never tell—the trouble was too great. But as all those troubles were soon to be merged in a much greater trouble, I must pass them over and get on. Once and once only I had seen my mother. A heap of old clothing like a pile of autumn leaves was shown me, and I was told that that was my mother who had come to see me but had been taken ill. I was frightened, and ran to hide myself. And I never saw her again. It was not long after this that my poor auntie died, and I having no one, for my father being a British workman with a strong desire to back horses and play billiards, could not be expected to want me, I was flung upon the streets.
I have told the story of that time fairly fully in different books, but I may perhaps just pause here to point out that the position was not common. For I had been brought up in a sheltered home without even the faintest knowledge of evil, brought up more like a tender little girl than a boy, and then suddenly, at the age of nine, I was flung into a veritable maelstrom of vice. I don’t comment upon this; I just state the fact that this happened in 1866, when I was barely nine years old.
CHAPTER II
RANDOM MEMORIES
So very minutely have I detailed in four different books the various happenings in my life that I am confined to two periods for recollections, but those two embrace what to me at any rate were full of interest. The first of these was my officer time at sea, and the second the period since my emancipation from the desk until now. It is true that I have touched upon events in the first period in With Christ at Sea, but very lightly, and there are many reminiscences unconnected with that book which rush to the mind now.
For instance, there is a little matter connected with my visit to Noumea, New Caledonia, when I was mate of a colonial barque, that for some queer reason has been persistent in my memory lately. I’m sure I wonder that I haven’t used it before, for it has all the elements of a good story in it. It must be remembered that Noumea is a French convict settlement, and while I say nothing about the treatment of the convicts, I need not labour the point that any attempt to escape means the shortest possible shrift to the escapee if caught in the act. Now at the time of which I write there were five warships in the harbour, a few schooners, my own barque and a French convict ship. I had been ashore and found on coming down to the beach that I had, as we say, “lost my passage,” i.e. my boat had gone without me.
Now I had a great dread of staying ashore at night in a foreign port (oh, yes, I know that proves me to have been any opprobrious sort of thing you like, but we’ll take that as read), and so it never even occurred to me to go back to the hotel—at least that’s what they called it. Nor did I dare to shout, for though the night was still we were a long way out, and I was afraid of bringing the gendarmes down upon me. But in the clear darkness I saw about a dozen boats moored some hundred feet or so off the beach, and without thinking I waded in and swam off to the nearest one. She was fastened at the bows by a chain passing through a ring in the stern inside, and I started to unreeve that chain. How many fathoms of it I hauled up I can’t imagine, or why the rattle of it didn’t rouse all Noumea; but I came to the end at last, and it wouldn’t pass the ring.