My own early loves in the Book I can record faithfully. From the age of four to the age of twelve, I always used the same copy; a large musty old Bible that had belonged to my Mother, though not too large to hold comfortably in both hands. It was heavily marked.
There were three different kinds of mark: in ordinary black lead pencil, to show chapters I was studying with Grandmother and Aunt Jael, or portions I had to learn by heart; in blue crayon to indicate well-liked places; in red crayon to mark the passages I loved best of all. That old Bible is open before me now as I write: the red marks are faded a little, but they still tell me what I liked best in those far-off days, and (nearly always) like best still.
My preferences fell under three main heads. First, the bright-coloured stories of the beginning of the Bible, the wondrous lives of the men who began the world: Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and Benjamin; with Princes such as Chedorlaomer the King of Elam, Tidal King of nations, and Pharaoh, full of dreams. There were revengeful women and some who suffered revenge: Hagar turned forth by Sarah into the wilderness of Beersheba; Lot's wife on whom God took vengeance and turned into a pillar of salt, and Potiphar's, who took vengeance on Joseph. There were mysterious places: Eden and Egypt, Ur of the Chaldees, the Wilderness and the Cities of the Plain, the land of Canaan flowing with milk and honey, and the slime pits of Siddim into which the Kings of Sodom and Gomorrah fell. Wonders of earth and heaven: the Tower of Babel, the Serpent in the garden, the Tree of Knowledge; the Creation, the Plagues and the Flood; the Ark of refuge and the fugitive Dove.
My second bent was for the mournful places of the Word; a morbid taste, but then so was I. The gloom of Job and the menace of Lamentations and the Woes of Matthew XXIV seemed to belong to our forbidding house. Up in the dim blueness of the attic I would declaim aloud the twenty-fourth chapter, where Christ spoke of the signs of His coming: wars and rumours of wars, famine and pestilence and earthquakes:
"Wheresoever the carcase is, there the eagles will be gathered together."
In my weak childish treble it must have sounded comic, though nobody ever laughed except, maybe, the God above the attic skylight. More even than gloom, I love pure sorrow: Ecclesiastes, where the Preacher talks of the sadness of all life, the eternal misery of Man; and the story of the Passion, the Son of Man Who tasted human bitterness and death. The subtlety of the Preacher may have been beyond me; it needs no wit but a child's understanding of English words to feel his unplumbable woe in her heart. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities: all is vanity. While Gethsemane saw the whole world's sorrow in a night-time.
My third, and chief, happiness was in the words. Passages there are of sounding wrath or matchless imagery. I did not understand them, for they pass all understanding. But I loved them, plastered them marginally with three thicknesses of red crayon, cried them aloud. I have counted, and the books with most markings are these four: The Psalms, the Song of Solomon, Isaiah, and The Revelation. In the last I revelled with a pure ecstasy of awe: in the sixth chapter, where the sun becomes black as sack-cloth of hair, and the moon as blood; in the twenty-first, which tells of the City of Heaven, a city of pure gold, like unto clear glass, the foundations of whose rocks are garnished with jasper and sapphire and chalcedony and emerald and sardonyx and sardius and chrysolyte and beryl and topaz and chrysoprasus and jacinth and amethyst, whose light is the Lamb; most of all in the seventh chapter: "What are these which are arrayed in white robes? And whence came they? These are they which came out of great tribulation and have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb."
My Psalms, as I called them, as against Grandmother's or Aunt Jael's protégés, were the hundred-and-thirty-seventh, By the waters of Babylon, and the twenty-fourth, Who is the King of glory?
However much I might write about the Book, it would fail to fill the place in this record that it filled in our lives, of which it moulded the very moods. Aunt Jael as lover of the Mosaic law and student of the Proverbs, was herself stern lawgiver and sayer of dark sayings. She ruled. Ruled my Grandmother (nearly always and in nearly everything, though there were exceptions); ruled me (except in one or two awful occasions I shall tell of); ruled Mrs. Cheese (until the latter's Exodus); ruled the household, ruled the Meeting, and could have ruled the whole world with a due sense of her fitness for the post. The old armchair was her throne, the thorned stick her sceptre. As a woman she had, as I can see now, many high qualities. She did her duty as she saw it; was honourable and straightforward. She loved the truth, especially when it was unpalatable to other people. She had a deep fund of common-sense. She was a thrifty, hard-headed, sensible house-wife; and, as I said before, observed with zeal some nine of the Commandments. But of kinder or more endearing qualities I remember none. No doubt some of the child's bitterness and the child's bias remain with me still—perhaps it is merely vain to imagine that I hold the scales evenly and do not let prejudice weight memory—but I look across many years and see, as I believe the world saw, a hard bad old woman. Heaven, they say, forgives those who love much; maybe it forgives also those who are little loved, for they need forgiveness most. Aunt Jael started life hard, but I feel certain that the hardness was made a hundredfold harder because no love—no lover—had ever come her way. Bitter because she had no family of her own, she strove to embitter her sister's. Cheated of the two things we women need most—lordship and love—in revenge she lorded it over everybody, and loved not a soul in the world. Not but what she could have wedded many a time if she'd felt so inclined, including some as "others" didn't mind stooping to take though they were her leavings; not but what—in short, to all the tragical-comical backward boastings of the unchosen woman she would treat us at times. It was one of her few weaknesses, and I have since wondered if, failing to deceive six-year-old me, she succeeded in deceiving herself. During a tirade of this kind, I always fell a-musing what "Uncle Jael" would have been like. I decided he would wear smoked black glasses, like the man who came to tune our old piano; because I once fancied that Aunt Jael's eyes had rested upon the latter with a suspicion of unwonted coyness. This must have been a freak of my imagination, if not of Aunt Jael's after-dinner brandy. "For two good qualities," she used to say, "I thank and praise the Lord. That he has preserved me all my life from all wanton sentiment; and that it has pleased Him to make me the most fearless and outspoken woman in this town."