It was the same about attending church. Her parents went to one service on Sundays; she insisted on going to all three, and would sit and stand and kneel, book in hand, as if taking a part in it all, but always when you looked at her, her eyes would meet yours and the sweet smile would come to her lips.
I had been told by her mother that Mab would not have dolls and toys, and this fact, recalled at an opportune moment, revealed to me her secret mind—her baby philosophy. We, the inhabitants of the village, grown-ups and children as well as the domestic animals, were her playmates and playthings, so that she was independent of sham blue-eyed babies made of sawdust and cotton and inanimate fluffy Teddy-bears; she was in possession of the real thing! The cottages, streets, the church and school, the fields and rocks and hills and sea and sky were all contained in her nursery or playground; and we, her fellow-beings, were all occupied from morn to night in an endless complicated game, which varied from day to day according to the weather and time of year, and had many beautiful surprises. She didn't understand it all, but was determined to be in it and get all the fun she could out of it. This mental attitude came out strikingly one day when we had a funeral—always a feast to the villagers; that is to say, an emotional feast; and on this occasion the circumstances made the ceremony a peculiarly impressive one.
A young man, well known and generally liked, son of a small farmer, died with tragic suddenness, and the little stone farm-house being situated away on the borders of the parish, the funeral procession had a considerable distance to walk to the village. To the church I went to view its approach; built on a rock, the church stands high in the centre of the village, and from the broad stone steps in front one got a fine view of the inland country and of the procession like an immense black serpent winding along over green fields and stiles, now disappearing in some hollow ground or behind grey masses of rock, then emerging on the sight, and the voices of the singers bursting out loud and clear in that still atmosphere.
When I arrived on the steps Mab was already there; the whole village would be at that spot presently, but she was first. On that morning no sooner had she heard that the funeral was going to take place than she gave herself a holiday from school and made her docile mother dress her in her daintiest clothes. She welcomed me with a glad face and put her wee hand in mine; then the villagers—all those not in the procession—began to arrive, and very soon we were in the middle of a throng; then, as the six coffin-bearers came slowly toiling up the many steps, and the singing all at once grew loud and swept as a big wave of sound over us, the people were shaken with emotion, and all the faces, even of the oldest men, were wet with tears—all except ours, Mab's and mine.
Our tearless condition—our ability to keep dry when it was raining, so to say—resulted from quite different causes. Mine just then were the eyes of a naturalist curiously observing the demeanour of the beings around me. To Mab the whole spectacle was an act, an interlude, or scene in that wonderful endless play which was a perpetual delight to witness and in which she too was taking a part. And to see all her friends, her grown-up playmates, enjoying themselves in this unusual way, marching in a procession to the church, dressed in black, singing hymns with tears in their eyes—why, this was even better than school or Sunday service, romps in the playground or a children's tea. Every time I looked down at my little mate she lifted a rosy face to mine with her sweetest smile and bugloss eyes aglow with ineffable happiness. And now that we are far apart my loveliest memory of her is as she appeared then. I would not spoil that lovely image by going back to look at her again. Three years! It was said of Lewis Carroll that he ceased to care anything about his little Alices when they had come to the age of ten. Seven is my limit: they are perfect then: but in Mab's case the peculiar exquisite charm could hardly have lasted beyond the age of six.
XVIII
FRECKLES
My meeting with Freckles only served to confirm me in the belief, almost amounting to a conviction, that the female of our species reaches its full mental development at an extraordinarily early age compared to that of the male. In the male the receptive and elastic or progressive period varies greatly; but judging from the number of cases one meets with of men who have continued gaining in intellectual power to the end of their lives, in spite of physical decay, it is reasonable to conclude that the stationary individuals are only so because of the condition of their lives having been inimical. In fact, stagnation strikes us as an unnatural condition of mind. The man who dies at fifty or sixty or seventy, after progressing all his life, doubtless would, if he had lived a lustrum or a decade longer, have attained to a still greater height. "How disgusting it is," cried Ruskin, when he had reached his threescore years and ten, "to find that just when one's getting interested in life one has got to die!" Many can say as much; all could say it, had not the mental machinery been disorganised by some accident, or become rusted from neglect and carelessness. He who is no more in mind at sixty than at thirty is but a half-grown man: his is a case of arrested development.
It is hardly necessary to remark here that the mere accumulation of knowledge is not the same thing as power of mind and its increase: the man who astonishes you with the amount of knowledge stored in his brain may be no greater in mind at seventy than at twenty.
Comparing the sexes again, we might say that the female mind reaches perfection in childhood, long before the physical change from a generalised to a specialised form; whereas the male retains a generalised form to the end of life and never ceases to advance mentally. The reason is obvious. There is no need for continued progression in women, and Nature, like the grand old economist she is, or can be when she likes, matures the mind quickly in one case and slowly in the other; so slowly that he, the young male, goes crawling on all fours as it were, a long distance after his little flying sister—slowly because he has very far to go and must keep on for a very, very long time.