Until then I had believed the other side of the pond to be heaven, because the sky seemed to touch the tops of the trees. But it was nicer to think of it as America, because there was a greater certainty of being able to get back from America than from heaven,—above all, when I was so unexpectedly made acquainted with the extremely disagreeable method by which little children are transported thither.
I do not know where nurse can have taken Mary Jane and me once. I have for years cherished the idea that it was to Cork, which was a long way off; but I am assured since that she never took me anywhere in a train, and that certainly I never was in Cork.
This is a mystery to me, for the most vivid recollection of those early years is a train journey with nurse and Mary Jane. I remember the train steaming slowly into a station: the hurry, the bustle, the different tone of voices round me, and Mary Jane's knowing exclamation, "Angela, this is Cork, one of the biggest towns of Ireland—as fine, they say, as Dublin."
Now, if I were never in Cork, never travelled with nurse and Mary Jane, will any one explain to me how I came to remember those words so distinctly? Odder still, I am absolutely convinced that nurse took my hand in an excited grasp, and led me, bewildered and enchanted, through interminable streets full of such a diversity of objects and interests as dazed my imagination like a blow. Not that I was unacquainted with city aspects; but this was all so different, so novel, so much more brilliant than the familiar capital!
I remember the vivid shock of military scarlet in a luminous atmosphere, and smiling foreign faces, and several ladies stopped to look at me and cry, "Oh, the little angel!" I was quite the ideal wax doll, pretty, delicate, and abnormally fair. I believe Mary Jane worshipped me because of the whiteness of my skin and for my golden hair.
Memories of this journey I never made and of this town I never visited do not end here. After eternal wanderings through quite the liveliest streets I have ever known, without remembrance of stopping, of entrance or greetings, I find myself in an unfamiliar room with nurse, Mary Jane, a strange lady, and my mother. My mother was dressed in pale green poplin, and looked miraculously beautiful. I know the dress was poplin, because nurse said so when I touched the long train and wondered at its stiffness.
She looked at me coldly, and said to nurse—
"That child has had sunstroke. I never saw her so red. You must wash her in new milk."
Whereupon she rang a bell, and cried out to somebody I did not see to fetch a basin of milk and a towel. I shuddered at the thought that perhaps my mother would wash my face instead of nurse, for I dreaded nothing so much as contact with that long white hand of sculptural shape.
Among the mysteries of my life nothing seems so strange to me as the depth of this physical antipathy to my mother. The general reader to whom motherhood is so sacred will not like to read of it. But to suppress the most passionate instinct of my nature, would be to suppress the greater part of my mental and physical sufferings. As a baby I went into convulsions, I am told, if placed in my mother's arms. As a child, a girl, nothing has been so dreadful to me as the most momentary endurance of her touch.