The Project Gutenberg eBook, Mary Lee, by Geoffrey Pomeroy Dennis

MARY
LEE

MARY LEE

BY

GEOFFREY DENNIS

NEW YORK
ALFRED A. KNOPF
MCMXXII

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.

Published, August, 1922

Set up, electrotyped, and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y.
Paper (Warren's) furnished by Henry Lindenmeyr & Sons, New York, N. Y.
Bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

PART
ONE

CHAPTER I: I AM BORN

I was born at Tawborough on March the Second, 1848.

It seems to have been a great year in the history books. Fires of revolution sweeping over Europe; half the capitals aflame. From Prague to Palermo, from Paris to Pesth, the peoples rising against their rulers. Wars and rumours of wars; civil strife everywhere. Radicals in Prussia, revolutionaries in Italy, rebels in Austria, republicans in France. Even in old England we had our chartists.

All such troubles failed to touch Tawborough. What did she know of it all, or care if she knew? She was a good old peaceful English country town, with her own day's work to do. The great world might go its way for all she cared—a wild and noisy way it seemed. She would go hers.

Not that Tawborough had always been without a say in England's affairs. She had indeed a long and honourable history. At the dawn of time there was a settlement in the marshes where the little stream of Yeo empties itself into the Taw: a primitive village of wattled huts, known to the Britons as Artavia. The Phœnicians record the name for us, and describe the place as a great mart for their commerce. Here the tin of the western mines was bartered against the rich products of the East: camphire and calamus, spikenard and saffron, fine linen and purple silk. This was the origin of Tawborough market, which is the first in Devonshire to this day. Artavia seems to have been an important seat of the old British worship. The see of the Arch-Druid of the West was near at hand in the Valley of the Rocks at Lynton; from the sacred oak-groves above the Taw on a clear day the Druids could see the fires of the great altar on the Promontory of Hercules—Hartland Point they call it now.

Religion, indeed, in one way or another, seems to have coloured most of the big events of the town's history. The next great fight was between pagans and Christian men.

It was the foeman from the North, threatening the men of Wessex with desolation. One day the terrified townsfolk heard clanging in their ears the great ivory horns of the Northmen, and beheld the blood-red banners sailing up the Taw. One of the standards had upon it a Raven. Then the Englishmen knew their foe for the wild Hubba, King of the Vikings; since the Raven floated always at his mast. The banner was of crimson. It had been worked by the King's three sisters in a noontide and blessed by a strange Icelandic wizard, who endowed the Raven sewn upon it with this magical gift: that she clapped her wings to announce success to the Viking arms, and drooped them to presage failure. Never till this day had the black wings drooped; they drooped this winter's morning. So the English took heart. Odin, Earl of Devon, sallied forth from Kenwith Castle, defeated and slew King Hubba, and captured the magic banner. Then came peace for a while. King Alfred, full of piety, came to Tawborough and set up the great Mound by the Castle. King Athelstan gave the town a charter, and housed himself in a magnificent palace at Umberleigh hard by.

In the wake of the Normans came the religious orders. The Cluniacs built a monastery in the town, the Benedictines another at Pilton just outside. With the monks came light and learning, better lives and milder ways. Tawborough became rich and prosperous. Her trade excelled that of Bristol. Her fair and market were famous "tyme out of mynde." For many years the Taw—that "greate, hugy, mighty, perylous and dredful water"—became a highway for the ships of all nations.

When the New World was found, Englishmen sailed west for glory. Devon led the way, Tawborough men among the foremost, and Tawborough ships did valiant deeds against the Invincible Armada. Those were the great days of England. The townsfolk were all for the new religion. Spaniard and Papist were twin-children of the devil. A murrain on both! They favoured the Puritan party in the civil wars, stood out against the rest of the county, and shouted for the Parliament. Though when the Royalists took the town and gay Prince Charles made it his headquarters, the townspeople were charmed with His Merry Highness; and he, as he told Lord Clarendon, with them. All the courtiers were of the same mind. Lord Clarendon himself declared that Tawborough was "a very fine sweet town as ever I saw," while Lady Fanshawe thought that the cherry pies they made there "with their sort of cream" were the best things that man, or woman, could eat. Gay John Gay, who wrote the Beggar's Opera, showed to the world the fair and likeable character of his native town, which at heart, however, was always of the godly serious-minded quality, Puritan to the core. No town in England gave a warmer welcome to the poor Huguenots, who were flying from King Lewis. One Sunday morning as the townsfolk were coming forth from Church they saw against the sky—not this time the scarlet banners of the North—the brown sails of an old French schooner, bearing up the Taw a band of exiled French Puritans, weary and wretched after their voyage. Tawborough found every one of them a home. In return the grateful Frenchmen taught the natives new ways of cloth-weaving, which sent the fame of Tawborough Bays through all the land.

Later came a change, a new century, the reign of King Coal; and Tawborough, like many another historic Western town, sank into comparative decay. What did the new industrial cities know of such as her, or care if they knew? For her part, she was indifferent to their ignorance or their indifference alike. She was a good old English country town with her own day's work to do. Troubles, invasions, vicissitudes had assailed her before. New blood, Saxon, Danish, Norman, Huguenot had coursed through her veins. Her dead had buried their dead. The people pass, the place alone is abiding.... Abiding, yet not eternal; for there comes the day when the old earth will fall into the sun.... Meanwhile, Town Tawborough had her daily life to live, her townsfolk had theirs.

Two of them, indeed, were living theirs with plenty of zest, somewhere in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Jael and Hannah Vickary were the daughters of an old sea-captain, Ebenezer Vickary of Torribridge. He and his brother had three or four vessels of their own, trading with the Indies in sugar and molasses, or with the Spanish Main, as it then still was, in logwood and mahogany. The brother died in Cuba of the yellow fever. Soon afterwards Ebenezer gave up the sea, settled down in Tawborough, and died in his time. He left his two daughters enough money to live upon in the quiet style of those days, together with a big dwelling house by the old North Gate. Here Jael and Hannah Vickary lived alone, with an old servant whose years were unknown and unnumbered, and whose wages were six pounds a year. They had a few friends and visitors, faithful women of the Parish Church, chief among whom were the Other Six of "the Seven Old Maids of Tawborough." By a strange coincidence seven female children had been born in Tawborough on August the First 1785, all of whom had risen to be devout handmaidens of the Lord in the work of the Parish Church, shining lights around the central figure of the Vicar, and all of whom had dwindled into a sure spinsterhood. "We are the wise virgins," said Jael Vickary, their leader and spiritual chief, in whom the scorn of all menfolk except the Vicar (who had a meek wife and twelve children) amounted to a prophet's passion. This passion was shared in various degrees by the Other Six, to wit: Miss Lucy Clarke, Miss Fanny Baker, Miss Keturah Crabb, Miss Sarah Tombstone, and last but not least the Heavenly Twins, the Misses Glory and Salvation Clinker. The Twins were the only regular visitors at Northgate House. There were a few others, no relatives among them. Jael and Hannah had indeed an elder brother, John: Ebenezer's only son. He had gone to London as a boy, worked his way up in a wholesale sugar house in the City, and become passing rich. His sisters were kept aware of his existence only by receiving occasional presents and more occasional letters. He never married. Thus it was that his death, if nothing so crude as a self-acknowledged source of financial hope to Miss Jael, would nevertheless have been borne by her with true Christian fortitude.

If alike in a salt and shrewdness of personality unknown to our end of the century, in most ways the two sisters differed as much as two human beings can. Miss Jael was hard, Miss Hannah kindly; Miss Jael stern, Miss Hannah gentle; Miss Jael was feared, Miss Hannah loved. Though Hannah was less than eighteen months her sister's junior, this unbridgeable gulf enabled Miss Jael throughout life to refer to Miss Hannah as "a young woman," and to treat her accordingly. Then, behold, in the year 1822, when both were nearer forty than thirty, the Young Woman brazenly gave ear to the suit of one Edward Lee, an old sea-captain, who had sailed under her father, and was twenty years her senior. Jael mocked (Why did he choose her? asked her heart bitterly); yet stayed on at Northgate House, when Captain Lee came to live there, to bully and bludgeon the dear old man into his grave. This procedure took but five years. The old man died, leaving to his widow two little girls and a boy: Rachel, Martha and Christian.

In the godlier activities of Tawborough life Jael and her widowed sister were leading lights, with the parish church as General Headquarters of their operations. Miss Jael was the vicar's right-hand man. She ran his poor club, his guild, his Dorcas-meeting, effacing completely the meek many-childrened little lady of the Rectory. He thought her a queen among women, a tower set upon a rock.

All this was in the twenties and thirties of the century, ere yet the Church of England had taken her earliest step on the swift steep path to Rome. The same wave of evangelical fervour that had swelled Wesley's great following had strengthened also the Church from which they broke away. This fervour, whether Methodist or Established, did not however go nearly far enough for certain pious souls, especially in the West country, who formed themselves into little bodies for the Worship of God in the strictest and simplest Gospel fashion. "They continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayer." They called themselves the Saints, or more modestly the Brethren. Outsiders called them the Plymouth Brethren—they flourished in the great seaport—or more profanely, the Plymouth Rocks. They were drawn from all communions and no communion, if principally from the Established Church; from all classes and conditions, the humbler trades-folk perhaps predominating. In Tawborough they were especially active. From the days of the primitive Druids away through the long story of missionaries and monks, seafaring Protestants and Huguenot exiles, here was a town that took her religion neat. She preferred the good Calvin flavouring, and thus it was that the Plymouth evangel sent up a savoury smell in her nostrils. There were literally hundreds of converts. The Parish Church lost some of its leading members. Arose the cry "The Church in danger!"; and of all who responded, most valiant was the Vicar's right-hand man. She stemmed the tide of deserters with loins girt for battle. Like St. Paul, she breathed out threatenings and slaughter against the new sect. She encouraged the faithful, visited the wavering, anathematized deserters. To crown her efforts she counselled the vicar to summon a great Church Defence Meeting in the Parish Room, to rally and re-affirm the confidence of the faithful. The Vicar agreed. The hour of commencement saw a right goodly and godly assembly foregathered together. On the platform sat a Canon of Exeter, the old Marquess of Exmoor, several county bigwigs, the Mayor and the Churchwardens. Seven o'clock struck, the Vicar was about to open the proceedings, everything was ready—except—except that two honoured places on the platform (in those days a place on a platform was for a woman an honour indeed) were not yet occupied. Miss Vickary and her sister were late. The Vicar hesitated. There was a distinguished company, true: but start the meeting without its guiding spirit—never! Give her five minutes.... Some one handed the Vicar an envelope. He opened it, read through the contents, and fainted then and there.

How the reverend gentleman was brought round from his swoon by the joint endeavours of the Canon, the Marquess, two Churchwardens, nine ladies and a bottle of sal-volatile; how the great Church Defence Meeting fizzled to an inglorious end; and how Jael Vickary and Hannah Lee were baptized in the Taw in the presence of three thousand five hundred spectators, there is no need to relate here. The facts were well enough known to the older generation in the town. Some say that the Vicar made a last despairing effort to retain his apostate right-hand man; that, with tears in his eyes, he went down on his knees before her. If so, as Hannah wickedly said, he was the only man who ever did so, and in any case he achieved nothing. On the contrary The Great Betrayal encouraged wholesale desertions. The Other Six deserted en masse.

Henceforward Jael Vickary's life was occupied with two main things: building up the new sect, and bringing up her sister's family. She filled the vacant post of father with thoroughness and vigour. Her method was the rod, or to be accurate the thorned stick, and a horrible weapon it was. Hannah approved the method in moderation, though she could never have applied it herself. Much of her life, indeed, was spent in protecting her children from her sister. Rachel, the eldest, was best beloved. She was a sweet, gentle child; bright, tender and gay. Martha was quieter, even morose. Christian was a peevish child, weak and ailing from birth. With no husband to help her, and her sister on the scold from morn till night, Hannah Lee's life was not an easy one. She gave her two daughters the best schooling in Devonshire, as schooling for girls went in those days; so that when they grew up they were able to take positions as governesses in the best families of the county. Rachel went to Woolthy Hall to teach Guy, the Lord Tawborough's five year old heir. Martha was employed by the Groves, of Grove House near Exeter, to begin the education of their daughter. The two girls' attainments and appearance explained their good fortune. Rachel in particular was a refined and attractive young woman, with bright eyes, a peerless skin, and a gentle winning expression. Dressed oftenest in a dove-coloured cotton robe, she had a Quakerish charm, simple yet sure.

Hannah was left alone at Tawborough with Jael and young Christian. As the years passed, life turned greyer. When the Devon and Three Counties' Bank collapsed, nearly half the household income disappeared. Jael's imperiousness grew with her years, while her temper soured. Christian was in a decline, dying slowly before his mother's eyes. Then came Martha's marriage. She had fallen in with one Simeon Greeber, a retired chemist, who lived over at Torribridge—the Taw's twin-river's port, and Tawborough's immemorial rival. This Greeber was the local leader of the extreme wing of the Saints, the Close or Exclusive Brethren; a man twice Martha Lee's age, and one who filled her aunt and her mother with a special sense of dislike and mistrust. Against their will she married him, gave up her excellent post with the Grove family, and went to live at Torribridge.

Hannah's consolation was always Rachel, whom she loved most dearly. Then, in its turn, came Rachel's marriage.

At Woolthy Hall the young governess had come into contact with Lord Tawborough's cousin, Mr. Philip Traies, who was a frequent if not welcome guest. He had served in the Navy, but had left the service under doubtful circumstances. He had led a scandalous life and earned a reputation to match it. A clear-cut handsome mouth set in a proud aristocratic face, a fine bearing, a fine speech, and an honoured name, deluded many and were his own undoing. In ill odour with his family and his Maker, he decided to come to terms with the latter. At the age of forty, he joined the Plymouth Brethren. When the Devil turns saint he does a very sharp round-about, and no withered Anglo-Indian colonel who communed with the Saints in his dotage to ensure himself as gay a time in the next world as he had passed in this, ever excelled Mr. Philip Traies in fervour and piety. He worshipped occasionally with the Tawborough Saints, who were duly honoured. Sometimes here, and sometimes at his cousin's, he met Rachel Lee, at this time a girl of twenty-one. He bestowed upon her the favour of eager kindly patronage, as such men will; though if she were beneath him in station, and his equal in manners and good looks, she was far above him in everything else: goodness and purity and wholeness of heart. Quite how it happened nobody knew; but one day Rachel came home from Woolthy Hall, and said to her mother, "I am going to marry Mr. Philip Traies."

Hannah entreated. A "good" match with a bad man had no attraction for her. She pleaded with Rachel. Aunt Jael would not stoop to plead; she gave her niece instead a plain outline of Mr. Philip Traies' past.

"I know," said the girl, and murmured something about "reforming" him.

Neither mother nor aunt achieved her surrender. Pleading and plain-speaking did nothing, nor ever do. The wedding took place at the registry office, as in those days the Brethren's Meeting Houses were not licensed for solemnization of marriages, and neither bride nor bridegroom would enter a church or chapel: temples of Antichrist. Hannah sat through the ceremony with a queer sense of foreboding, of sickness, and coming sorrow; an order of sentiment which, as a sensible Devon woman with no tomfool tombstone fancies ever in her head, in sixty years she had not known. Immediately after the ceremony, at the registry office door, the bridegroom suddenly loosened himself from the bride's arm, and walked sharply away without saying a word. Nobody knew why. Everybody stared. The wedding breakfast at Northgate House began without him. They waited; he did not come. After an hour the tension became unbearable. The guests whispered in groups; Rachel and her mother bore already on their brows the sorrow of the years to come. Aunt Jael's face was a gloomy triumphant "I told you so." Pastries were nibbled, wine was sipped; the joy-feast continued. After nearly two hours a bell rang, and the bridegroom appeared.

"Your explanation?" asked Hannah. Rachel dared not look.

"Oh, I had another woman to see. A glass of sherry please. Besides, it amused me."

He took her away to his house at Torquay. Their married life was wretched from the start. Among many evil passions these two predominated in Mr. Philip Traies: desire and cruelty. Here was a lovely and gentle girl who would satisfy both. The first was soon appeased (shattering love in her heart once and for all), the second never. Cruelty is insatiable. With this man it was a devouring passion. It is doubtful perhaps if he was sane. Taunts, foulness, sneers.... He starved her sometimes, taunted her with her lowlier birth, engaged the servants on the condition of ill-treating their mistress, dismissed them if they wavered. All the time he talked religion. The knees of his elegant trousers were threadbare with prayer. He could fit a text to every taunt. Then a baby-boy came to cheer the sinking heart. A few hours after the child was born, when the young mother lay in the agony and weakness she alone can know, Mr. Philip Traies entered the room—with a gentler word to-day surely?—no, with this: "So this is how you keep your fine promises to make a good lady of the house, a busy housewife and the rest of it"—he raised his voice savagely—"idling in bed at four in the afternoon. Get up, you idle bitch!" Leaning over the end-rail, he spat in her face.

The baby soon died. He taunted her with nursing it badly; and doubled every cruelty he knew save blows.

"Strike me," she said once.

Her patience was a fool's, a saint's, a loving woman's; her goodness, if not her spirits, unfailing. In writing home she made the best of things. But her heart was broken, her spirit wasting away.

"Why did you marry me?" she asked.

"To break your spirit," was the amused reply.

"Then your marriage has fulfilled its purpose," she said wearily. "My spirit is broken. Now I can go home."

That night she wrote to Hannah. The letter is faded, and stained with three women's tears, wife's, mother's, daughter's. "Dearest Mother," she wrote, "I am ill and weary. Another little child is coming, but I may not live for it to be born. I can leave him without failing in my wife's duty now, for the end is very near. I am coming home to die. Your loving broken-hearted Daughter."

Next day she packed for home.

"Deserting me, are you? Fine Jezebel ways! A good Christian wifely thing to do, I'm sure. I thought we were proud of doing our duty."

His sneers did not move her now. She was going home to die.

Northgate House was a dismal place to return to. It was a wet cheerless winter. Hannah was tired and heart-sore. Christian was dying. Jael was evil-tempered, scolding harshly: her comfort to her mother and daughter was still "I told you so." Rachel went straight to bed. In a few days Christian died, a sickly pitiful boy of twenty. "It is the Lord's will," said his mother. Hannah had everything to do, for Simeon Greeber would not let Martha come over from Torribridge, and Jael took to her bed with a convenient fit of the ague. Faith in the eternal love of God was Hannah's only stay. Always, ever, "It was the Lord's will." This sufficed her, though the times were bitter. The day after Christian's funeral was wet and wintry: March the Second 1848. Rachel was twenty-four. Three years ago she had been a happy healthy girl. Now she was a dying broken woman. The morning of that day she gave birth to a daughter. Then she was very weak. Her eyes closed, yet she seemed to see something.

"What do you see, Rachel, my dear?" asked her mother.

The spirit was already half away, looking through the golden gates of Heaven.

"There is a little angel born. I see her in God's cradle. My little angel, God's little angel. I shall be with her always—though far away. I see ... the King in His beauty ... I behold the land ... that is very far off."

Her face was radiant as a lover's, yet sad as Love is. Hannah could not reply. The dying woman seemed to sleep. Her mother watched. An hour passed. Rachel opened her eyes.

"Mother."

"Yes, my dear."

"Love my little baby for me; and—tell him—I forgive him." The eyes closed, this time for ever.

My poor mother.

CHAPTER II: BEAR LAWN

My first memory in this life is of a moving. I am sitting in a high chair, kept in by a stick placed through a hole in each arm. I am surrounded by the utmost disarray. In front of me is an old sponge-bath, crammed full of knick-knacks and drawing-room ornaments. I stretch out my hands yearningly, acquisitively, and make signs of wrenching from its offensive gaolerlike position the stick which bars my way. My Grandmother coaxes me to keep it in, and uses the words she is to use so often later on—words which will punctuate my daily life in days to come:

"Don't 'ee do it, my dear. Sit 'ee still and give no trouble. Ye'll tumble and hurt yourself, so leave the stick alone. Don't 'ee do it."

"If she don't, I'll take it out myself and lay it about her," comes another voice, which is to punctuate as regularly and much more raucously my early doings. And Aunt Jael shakes her fist, and lowers at me.

Perhaps I don't really remember the trifling incident. Most likely I only remember that I remember. It is a photograph of a photograph, smudged by the fingers of Time. Yet I see as clearly as ever the dark room in disarray, my Grandmother kind and coaxing, Aunt Jael threatening and harsh. The memory is clearer because Time has not blurred but rather sharpened it. I grew up the gauge of an unequal battle between Grandmother and Great-Aunt. Moving-day is merely the moment in which my infant intelligence first caught news of the struggle.

At this time I must have been about three years old, for it was some three years after my mother's death that we moved from the High Street, at the time when—I think it was in 1852—the old North Gate was removed, and our house pulled down. Our new house was Number Eight, Bear Lawn. The Lawn was a biggish patch of grass with houses on both sides. At the far end from the road it merged into a steep grassy bank, crowned with poplars, which allowed no egress. At the near end a big iron gate barred us off from the plebeian houses of Bear Street, to which the Lawn mansions felt themselves notably superior.

The Lawn lay to the right of the street some little way out of the town. In reality it was an old barrack-square, "converted." The houses on each side of it were barracks put up during the French Revolutionary Wars. When Boney was beaten and the soldiers sent away, an enterprising builder turned the barracks into two terraces of houses, and sowed the barrack-square with grass seed. Bear Lawn became one of the most elegant quarters of Tawborough, a quiet preserve of genteel habitation; though the houses never quite lost their barrack quality. They were too square and bare and big to be truly genteel. And too roomy.

Number Eight was one of the squarest and barest.

It was gloomy. How far the aspect it will always bear in my mind may be a reflection of the dark and unhappy days I spent there, and how far it was real, I cannot ever say. It was a house of big empty corridors, dark bare spaces, and an incommunicable dreariness that somehow stilled you as you crossed the doorstep. There was none of the cosy warmth that makes so many dark old houses a homely joy to the senses and a warm fragrance for the memory. It had the silence in it that only large empty spaces can create, did not seem inhabited, and smelt of coffins, I used to think. Even in summer there was a suggestion of damp and cold and bleakness, and always there was the silence which made me wait—and listen.

Downstairs there were three big rooms: Aunt Jael's, the dining-room and the kitchen. Aunt Jael's was the front one. The door was always unlocked, yet the key was left on the outside of the door, and I was forbidden to enter. Like Mrs. Bluebeard (of whom I had never heard) or our first mother Eve (in the knowledge of whom I grew to understanding), I felt that prohibition made perfect; and the forbidden room attracted me beyond all others. I visited it usually in the afternoon, when the thunder and trumpets of Aunt Jael's after-dinner doze in the dining-room announced that the road was clear. The blinds were always drawn, winter and summer alike; and the windows closed. The room seemed filled with a dull yellowish kind of mist, the ochre-coloured blind toning the darkness, and just permitting you to see a yellowish carpet and dull yellowish furniture. A row of dismal plants, standing in saucers on the floor, filled the bay window. There was a great oak sideboard, stuffed with Aunt Jael's preserves and pickles; though it was long before I had the courage and the opportunity to ransack it thoroughly. The walls were covered with spears and daggers, trophies of the Gospel in distant lands. In a corner reposed the supreme trophy, a huge wooden god, sitting with arms akimbo. His votaries (until salvation, in the person of Brother Immanuel Greeber, had turned them from their ways) dwelt, I believe, in the Society Islands; though he looked for all the world like a Buddha, with his painless impenetrable eyes and his smile of changeless calm. In his dark unwholesome corner he dominated the room. The yellow mist was incense in his nostrils.

The middle room we called the dining-room, though Aunt Jael favoured "back parlour." Here we lived and prayed and ate, and here a large part of this story took place. The window overlooked our small backyard, which being flanked by out-houses gave little light; so this room too was dark, though not as dark as Aunt Jael's, since the blinds were not usually drawn. It was more barely furnished. There was the table, a chiffonier, a side-board, a bookcase, and two principal chairs: a "gentleman's" armchair to the left of the fireplace, with two big arms; and a "lady's," armless, to the right. One was comfortable, the other was not. One was Aunt Jael's, the other was my Grandmother's. There were four bedrooms on the first floor, and I must note their strategic positions. Aunt Jael's was the first on the right, my own the second; we were over the dining-room and surveyed the backyard. My Grandmother's chamber, the first on the left, and the spare-room beyond it overlooked the Lawn. At the half-landing above was Mrs. Cheese's bedroom, while the top of the house consisted of an enormous whitewashed attic, lighted by an unwashed skylight and suffused by a cold bluish gloom that contrasted queerly with the foggy yellow of the front room downstairs yet excelled it in silent cheerlessness. Here I would spend hours, or whole days, either of my own free will, that I might moon and mope to my heart's content, and talk aloud to myself without fear of mocking audience; or perforce, banished by the frequent judgment of Aunt Jael.

It was our moving into this house that supplies my first earthly memory. My first important—dramatic, historic—remembrance must date from several months later, when I was nearly four years old. The scene was our evening reading of the Word. We were sitting in our usual positions round the dining-room fire after supper.

To the left of the chimney-piece, in the big black horsehair chair—the comfortable one, the one with sides and arms—sat my Great-Aunt Jael. This was her permanent post. From this coign of vantage she issued ukases, thundered commands, hurled anathemas and brandished her sceptre—that thorned stick of whose grim and governmental qualities I have the fullest knowledge of any soul (or body) on earth. She was a short, stout, stocky, strong-looking woman, yet bent; when walking, bent sometimes almost double. Leaning on her awful stick, she looked the old witch she was. Peaky black cap surmounting beetling black brows and bright black eyes, wrinkled swarthy skin, beaky nose, a hard mouth whiskered like a man's, and a harder chin: feature for feature, she was the witch of the picture-books. All her dresses, silk, serge or bombazine, were black. On the night I speak of, an ordinary week-night, she was dressed in her oldest serge. The great Holy Bible on her knees might have been some unholy wizard's tome.

To the right of the chimney-piece sat my Grandmother. She resembled her sister in feature; the character of the face was as different as is heaven from hell. This indeed was the very quality of the difference, and I had a fancy that they were the same face, one given to God, the other sold to Satan. My Grandmother had the same beaky nose and nut-cracker face. Her mouth and chin were firm, but kind instead of cruel. Her skin was milk-white instead of swarthy, her caps were of white lace. Her eyes were as bright as my Great-Aunt's, but bright with kindliness instead of menace. Her whole face spoke of goodwill to others and perfect peace. It was a sweet old face. I love it still.

In the middle, facing the fire, sat Mrs. Cheese. She was a farmer's daughter and widow from near South Molton; and looked it. She was short, fat and ruddy; a few years younger than her mistresses, perhaps at this time a woman of sixty.

I myself crouched on a little stool between Mrs. Cheese and Aunt Jael; but nearer the latter, that I might be watched, and cuffed, with ease. On this particular evening, my heart was hot with rage against Aunt Jael, who had flogged me and locked me in the attic: I don't remember what for. She ordered me more sternly than usual not to dare to move my eyes from her face as she read the nightly portion from the Word of God. To-night it was from her favourite Proverbs, the thirtieth chapter: the words of Agur the son of Jakeh, even the prophecy; the words the man spake unto Ithiel, even unto Ithiel and Ucal.

Aunt Jael read, or rather declaimed the Word, in a harsh staccato way; not without a certain power, especially in the dourer passages of Proverbs or the dismaller in Job or Lamentations. In one of her favourite Psalms, the eighteenth or the sixty-eighth, reeking with battle and revenge, and bespattered with the blood of the enemies of Jehovah, her voice would rise to a dark triumphal shout, terrible as an army with banners. This evening I looked sullenly at the floor as she boomed forth the words of Agur, determined not to fix my eyes on her face at any rate until Stick coaxed me. Suddenly my eyes were transfixed to the floor. A gigantic cockroach was crawling about near my feet. I wanted to cry out but managed to contain myself until, behold, the creature crawled away from my left foot towards the leg of Aunt Jael's chair, reached the chair leg, began to climb it with resolution. I watched, half in fascination, half in fear. It reached the level of the horsehair upholstery. Aunt Jael had reached verse thirteen.

"Their eyelids are lifted up." She looked meaningly at me.

Fortunately my eyelids were by this time well lifted up, as the beetle was now half way up the chair, approaching the awful place where Aunt Jael's shoulder touched the upholstery. No—yes: it crawled on to the arm, and mounted her sleeve right up to the shoulder. Righteous revenge for her cruelty and harshness counselled silence. "Let her suffer," I said to myself, "let the cockroach do his worst." Fear of interrupting gave like counsel. On the other side spoke the prickings of conscience and pity, and above all a wild desire to scream.

Aunt Jael read on, innocent of the unbidden guest upon her shoulder. "The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid—"

"Ay, and the way of a beetle with a Great-Aunt," I could have shouted. The beast, after a moment's hesitation and survey, had now turned along the shoulder to the neck. The warm hairy flesh of Aunt Jael's neck was but six inches away.

"The ants are a people not strong, yet they prepare their meat in the summer; The conies are but a feeble folk, yet they make their houses in the rocks; The locusts have no King, yet go they forth all of them by bands; The spider taketh hold with her hands—"

"Yes," I shrieked—in a moment shot through with terror, joy, relief; suffused by a new beatific sense of speaking historic words—"and the beetle taketh hold with his claws!" As I uttered the words the insect crawled from her collar on to the very flesh of her neck. She understood, with Spartan calm took hold of him, squashed him carefully between her thumb and forefinger and threw him on the fire, where he sizzled sickeningly.

"Surely the churning of milk bringeth forth butter, and the wringing of the nose bringeth forth blood: so the forcing of wrath bringeth forth strife."

There the chapter ended. She slammed the book and turned on me.

"You have forced wrath, Child. I shall bring forth strife."

And despite my Grandmother's entreaties, she led me from the room by the nose, which she pulled unmercifully: though no blood was brought forth. Out in the passage she gave me a cruel beating with the thorned stick, till I screamed for mercy, and my Grandmother intervened.

"'Tis cruel, Jael. The child cried out about the beetle for your sake."

"Sake or no sake, she cried out unseemly and irreverent. That's all I look at."

I was sore in body and sorer in heart. I had screamed out to warn Aunt Jael of the insect's approach, and now I was flogged for my pains. I knew in my own heart that what Grandmother had pleaded was not in point of fact quite true, I knew I had been secretly glad to see the creature making for Aunt Jael's skin, and for this reason had kept silence for so long. The physical instinct to scream had merely been stronger in the end than my resolution to say nothing. In a dim sort of way I realized this, and saw that my Grandmother's plea was unwarranted. But I saw more clearly that the common-sense of the position was that I had done Aunt Jael a good turn, and that the flogging was—in the light of the facts as she (not the Lord or I) knew them—mean and undeserved. I brooded revenge, as always. Aunt Jael's beatings were always more or less cruel, always more or less unjust; this I knew with a child's instinct, distorted and exaggerated no doubt by wretchedness and pride. So always I planned revenge, which sooner or later brought on the next flogging.

This time, however, my revenge was undetected. Next morning I came downstairs just as Mrs. Cheese was beginning to lay the table for breakfast. There were two separate sets of everything—breakfast-ware, dinner-services, tea-things, plate, knives and forks, even cruets—Grandmother's and Aunt Jael's, which the latter insisted on keeping rigorously separate. So, every day for breakfast or tea there would be two cups and saucers and plates with the gold pattern for my Grandmother and me, and one solitary cup and saucer and plate of Willow-pattern for my Great-Aunt. She had her own tea-pot too, a great fluted thing in old silver-plate, which could have held tea for a dozen; but never a taste of tea was poured forth from it for any one else, save on occasions so rare that I can number them on the fingers of my hand. So there was no mistaking the utensil with which, in which, from which, or out of which Aunt Jael would partake of nourishment. I was wandering round the table when I noticed, at first with fright, then, when I ascertained that it was dead, with interest and purpose, a large beetle much the same as its fumigated brother of the night before, lying on its back, claws heavenward. A divine idea possessed me. I picked it up, squashed it between my thumb and forefinger in the true Aunt Jaelian manner, and smeared the loathsome substance all over my Great-Aunt's teaspoon and the inside of her cup. It was an act of genius, that rare thing: the Revenge Perfect. "With the beetle hast thou slain," I said solemnly out loud, "by the beetle shalt thou perish."

"Perish" was a poetic flight, as Aunt Jael entirely failed to notice the mess in her cup, which she filled with tea from her exclusive pot, or the mess on her spoon, with which she stirred lustily. She drank three cupfuls, and belched as blandly as usual. Now I saw the imperfection of my revenge perfect. In idea and execution it had been superb, and to see her guzzling down the embeetled tea was very sweet. But she did not know she was drinking it—this was the eternal thorn that mars the everlasting rose. I had, however, the compensation of safety. All through breakfast, I looked meek and forgiving. Aunt Jael relented.

"Here, child, have a drink of tea out of my cup; 'twill do 'ee more good than the milk-and-water stuff your Grandma always gives 'ee."

"No, thank you, Aunt," I replied. And I triumphed in my heart.

Fate was about to triumph over me. Beetle had led to beating, and I had used beetle (with tea-cup) for revenge. Now Fate used tea-cup for triumph. It befell at tea-time, I think the same day. My arm was on the table-cloth, and, before I knew what I was doing, it (and Fate) had swept Aunt Jael's own old blue exclusive willow-pattern cup on to the floor, where it lay in a thousand avenging fragments. A brutal cuff full in the face changed fear and remorse into rage.

"Careless little slut!" she shouted. "What are 'ee biding there for staring like a half-daft sheep?—Say you're sorry, say you're sorry."

"I was sorry," I faltered, "but I'm not now."

This was the first brave thing I ever did, so brave that I hold my breath now to think of it. I shrank from some monstrous blow.

No blow came; partly because my Grandmother looked warningly ready to interfere, partly because my Great-Aunt had decided on another punishment, the only one I feared worse than blows.

"Oh, not sorry, eh, careless little slut?—"

"Stop it, Jael, I tell 'ee," broke in my Grandmother. "The child must try to be more careful and handy, and she's to say she's sorry, but—"

"Say she's sorry?" echoed Aunt Jael. "But she's just said she's not. 'I'm not sorry now' quoth she! Not sorry, not sorry, young huzzy, do 'ee know where Not-sorry goes? Do 'ee? I'll tell 'ee: straight to Hell. Obstinacy in sin is the worst sin, and its reward is Hell. Hell, child, where your body will be scorched with flames and racked with awful torments. Devils will twist and twease your flesh, and 'twill be for ever too. You've done a wrong thing, and your nasty proud soul is too wicked to say you're sorry. You spurn the chance of repentance, the free offer of God A'mighty, made through me His servant. You shall suffer eternal punishment."

I quailed. At four the fear of that word had fallen on my soul. She knew it: the beady eyes gleamed.

"No hope, no escape. Flames, pains, coals of fire, coals of fire! Ha, ha, ha!" (Here she cackled.) "Not sorry, eh? Very like you'll be sorry then, when you look across the gulf and see all your dear ones in Abraham's bosom. No hope of ever joining them. Torture for all eternity. Have you thought what the word Eternity means, child? You're young in your sins as yet, but you know that well enough, ha, ha, ha!" (She chuckled again, three hard little cackling noises they always were, cruel enough.) "It means that you will suffer the torments of the lake of fire that is burning with brimstone, not for a mere thousand thousand years, but for ever and ever and ever—"

I was less than four years old, and I could bear it no longer. I flew to my Grandmother's arm for safety, sobbing brokenly, half-wild for fear.

Aunt Jael leaned back, content, pleased with the success of her punishment, and sure of heaven. Though if there be the Hell she raved of, it is for such as her.

My Grandmother comforted me. She was torn, I suppose, between two feelings. Her faith told her that what her sister said was true, her heart that it was cruel. I felt somehow even then that this was the nature of my Grandmother's struggle. The good heart turns away from cruelty, even when it speaks with all the authority of true religion, and so my Grandmother always turned away. She compromised: said nothing to Aunt Jael, while she comforted me; while soothing the victim, did not scold the scolder.

"Don't cry my dearie, and don't 'ee be frightened. Nought can harm 'ee. Your good aunt is right. 'Tis true that Hell is terrible, 'tis true that you're a sinful child, and 'tis true that you'll be going to the cruel place, if you have no sorrow and repentance in your heart. You broke your Aunt's fine cup; run to her now, tell her you're sorry. Only then can you be saved from the wrath of Jehovah, freed by repentance, cleansed by love of Christ. And even as Hell is awful, so is Heaven good. Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. Run to your Aunt. Say: 'I'm sorry, Aunt.'"

I hesitated. Like my Grandmother's, my four-year-old heart found it had to decide between two calls. The call of fear was, "Say you're sorry, and escape surely from Hell." The call of hate was "Why? She is a bad cruel woman; and you're not sorry at all, you're glad you've smashed her evil cup."

"Besides," added the Tempter, "as you're not sorry, it would be lying to say you are."

I hung doubtfully. At length I pouted, "I don't want to."

"But true repentance," said my Grandmother, "means doing things you don't want to."

I said nothing.

"Mary, child—" my Grandmother paused a moment, "there is a bright angel in heaven who wants you to give way—your dear mother. I seem to hear her speaking to me now, and telling me so."

It is hard for me to explain the power that word had over me from my earliest days. I had a dear angelic vision of kind eyes and two white shining wings. I would shut my eyes in bed at night and see her. Sometimes she seemed to come very near, sometimes she would seem to bend over me and kiss me. Now, as my Grandmother finished speaking, I seemed to see her near. I ran across the room to the old arm-chair.

"I'm sorry, Great-Aunt," I said.

CHAPTER III: CHILD OF PRIVILEGE

Such a life and such a household encouraged unchildlike emotions. I was puzzled far too soon in life by the puzzle of all life. I could not reconcile the wrath of Jehovah with the love of Christ, or the harshness of my Great-Aunt with the kindness of my Grandmother, which was the near and earthly form of that discrepancy. The world was a mysterious battlefield between Wrath and Love, as No. 8 Bear Lawn was a nearer and more familiar battle-place between Aunt Jael and Grandmother. Hell versus Heaven was another aspect of the battle. These two words were part of our daily life. They helped to make the two battles seem but one; for all the innumerable struggles between Aunt Jael and my Grandmother were conducted in the words and in the ways of our religion.

Our whole life was indeed our religion, or rather our religion was our life. From morn till night our daily life at Bear Lawn was an incessant preparation for our eternal life above. First we said our own private bedside prayers and read our "bedroom portions" of the Word. Then down in the dining-room after breakfast, Aunt Jael read the Word and prayed aloud for half-an-hour or more; the same after supper in the evening. Then, last thing at night, my Grandmother came to my room and prayed with me by my bedside. We lived in the world of our faith in a complete and intense way almost beyond the understanding of a modern household, however God-fearing. The promises of the faith, the unsearchable riches of Christ, the hope of God, the fear of Hell were our mealtime topics. Sin, as personified by me, was a fruitful subject. Both my Grandmother and Aunt Jael returned to it unwearied, the former mournfully because she loved me, the latter with a rough relish because she loved me not.

The main principles of our faith may be summed up in a few capital-letter words. First, there was THE LORD: the God whom all men worship: Who is One. My child's difficulty was that He seemed to be Two. There was Aunt Jael's God, a Prince of battles, revenge and judgment, dipping His foot in the blood of enemies and the tongue of His dogs in the same; a King terrible in anger, dark as a thundercloud; Jehovah, the great I AM. There was my Grandmother's God, a loving Heavenly Father, slow to anger and plenteous in mercy, pitying His children like a Father, Whose mercy was from everlasting to everlasting, Whose loving kindness was for ever.

"I will avenge," thundered Aunt Jael from her horsehair throne.

"God is Love," replied my Grandmother.

There was the WORLD, a comprehensive word which covered all concerts, entertainments, parties—whatever they might be, for I cannot say I knew—all merrymakings, junketings, outings, pleasures, joys; all books save the Book; all affection save for things above; all finery, furbelows, feathers, frills; smart clothes, love of money, lollipops, light conversation and unheavenly thoughts. Everything was of this world worldly which did not savour strongly of the next. There was the FLESH or the World made manifest in our bodies. It existed to be "mortified," chiefly by dancing attendance on Aunt Jael. Not to be up and about, getting Aunt Jael's morning cup-of-tea was fleshly, though it does not seem to have been fleshly to drink the same. Then there was the DEVIL, styled Personal, whom Mrs. Cheese in a fit of regrettable blasphemy once identified with Some One Else, and though the blasphemy shocked, I cannot truly say it pained me.

"She'm the very Dow'l hissel, th' ole biddy," said our bonds-woman one day after an encounter in the kitchen in which "th' ole biddy" had brandished big words, and had ended by brandishing the frying-pan also before leaving the beaten Mrs. Cheese to blaspheme, and later to be soothed by th' ole biddy's sister.

Then there was the BEAST, the so-called Pope of Rome: and his Mistress, that great WHORE that sitteth upon many waters, that Woman sitting upon a scarlet-coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns, that Strumpet arrayed in purple and scarlet, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations, upon whose forehead was her name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH—known also, in cravener circles, as the Roman Catholic Church. Beast and Whore were inextricably mixed up in my mind: an amorphous twin mass of scarlet and monstrous horror. I hated them with the passionate hate of ignorance, religion and mystery.

There were the ELECT, the Saints, the Few, God's Chosen Ones. There was the ROOM they worshipped in, the BLOOD which redeemed them, the GRACE which sustained them, and the eternal Rest or REWARD on High they aspired to. There was the WAY they reached it, the PLAN of Salvation which shewed them the Way, and the BOOK in which the Plan was to be found.

The Book! We read it aloud together twice a day, and privately many times. We delved into its pages early and late, in season and out of season. They say that the old Cromwellians were men of one book; No. 8 Bear Lawn was a house of one book with very vengeance, for Aunt Jael would suffer no trumpery sugar-tales such as "The Pilgrim's Progress"—a book which many even of the staunchest Puritans stooped, I have learnt later, to peruse. There were other books in the dining-room bookcase—works of devotion, exhortation and exposition that I shall speak of later—but until I was ten years old, my Grandmother and Aunt decided I should read no other word whatsoever save The Book. Looking back, I do not regret their decision.

Day and night we searched the Scriptures. Aunt Jael and Grandmother discussed them interminably, and sometimes I dared to join in. Our preferences varied, and were the best index of our characters. Aunt Jael's favourite book was without doubt the Proverbs. Its salt old wisdom found echo in her mind. Its continual exhortations to chasten and to correct, nor ever to spare the rod, because of the crying of the chastened one, appealed to her nearly. They were quoted at me daily; usually, alas, as the prelude to offensive action with the thorned stick. Job was another favourite, and the din and bloodshed of the Books of Kings. Jeremiah, prophesying vengeance and horror, was her best-loved Prophet. Parts of Isaiah found favour too, most of all the thirty-fourth chapter where the prophet sings of the wild terrors that shall fill the day of the Lord's vengeance, when the screech-owl shall make her resting place in Zion and the vultures be gathered together. Of the Psalms she read most the forty-sixth, "God is our refuge and strength!" and the sixty-eighth, "Let God arise, let His enemies be scattered." Ah, she was an Old Testament woman. "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth" was a dispensation she could follow better than "Love your enemies." The law of Moses was more acceptable in her sight than the Law of Christ, Jehovah's word from the mountain than the Sermon on the Mount. The Epistle to the Romans, where Saint Paul scolds and scourges the saints of the Imperial City, was her favourite New Testament book. She loved the whole Bible, however, and knew it better than any one I have ever met except my Grandmother. She kept all the commandments, except perhaps the tenth. For she coveted Miss Salvation Clinker's fine white teeth. Her own were few—and black.

My Grandmother was a New Testament woman. She loved the Gospels best: the story of Jesus. She knew—and lived—better than any one the Sermon on the Mount, but came most often to St. John: the third chapter, "God so loved the world"; the tenth, "I am the Good Shepherd"; and the fifteenth, "I am the True Vine." She read through the Epistles every week, quoting most often from I Corinthians XIII—the Charity chapter—and the Epistles of John. In the Old Testament, she loved best the Psalms. She knew them of course by heart, as did I. The twenty-third and the hundred-and-third meant most to her. Aunt Jael's favourite, the savage sixty-eighth, was alien to her whole faith. She would not say she disliked it—to dislike a word or a letter of God's Word would have been sin. She obeyed the ten commandments that God gave to Moses and the two greater ones that Christ gave to the questioning scribe. She loved the Lord, and she loved her neighbours as herself. She was the only Christian I have ever met.

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."

What I have said about my Grandmother's pastures in the Bible shows what manner of woman she was. Yet not quite completely. She was gentle and forgiving, and the most unselfish human being I have ever met, or ever shall; but this and more. She was as shrewd a housewife as her sister; a woman of common-sense and plain seeing. Nor was she weak or meek. She gave in to Aunt Jael, certainly; but on principle, that is through strength rather than weakness. And whenever she chose to fight ungloved, she would usually beat her sister. I was the chief battle-ground. When Aunt Jael's abuse or ill-treatment of me became too outrageous, Grandmother would show fight, and on her day could leave Aunt Jael drubbed and apologetic upon the stricken field. But if my Grandmother thus defended me to Aunt Jael, she never had a good word to say of me to myself, or to the Lord. Every night at my bedside she poured out my wickedness before my Maker; and in all her life she only praised me once. With rare instinct she refused to water the plant of self-righteousness which she saw ready to flourish in me like the bay-tree. In her mild way she could be as outspoken as her sister; indeed what with the two of them and Mrs. Cheese, who "called a spade a spade, and a pasnip a pasnip," ours was a stark outspoken house, a dark palace of Plain Speaking. Despite all my Grandmother's loveliness of character, she lacked one thing. Demonstrative affection, warm clinging love, the encircling arm, the kiss, the gentle madness, the dear embrace,—things I did not know the existence of till a later unforgettable moment, though they were the mystery, the hunger, never perfectly visualized, never in the heart understood, that till that moment I was seeking always to solve, to satisfy; the thing I cried for passionately without knowing what thing it was—these had no meaning for her, no place ever in her life. The nearest she had known was in her love for my mother. Did they kiss? I wonder. In all the years of her love and goodness to me, she never once kissed me upon the mouth, nor hugged me, nor let me hug her; nor said the word for which my little wild heart was waiting. For so good and affectionate a woman she was strangely phlegmatic. As she did not embrace in love, nor did she weep in sorrow. Even when my mother died, her eyes, she told me, were dimmed for a moment only. It was the Lord's will: wherefore weep? Yet I have seen her shedding tears of joy over a missionary chronicle which told of the conversion of some African negro. She had tears, that is, for the Lord; as her strongest love was for Him. Humans mattered much; but less. Thus I was lonely.

To give a picture of myself in those early days I find harder, though once again the Bible helps. I liked the imaginative old stories of Genesis, I liked the sad and gloomy books, I liked mysterious words; that is, I was imaginative, morbid, and fond of the unknown and the beautiful: much what any other child brought up under the same circumstances would have been. If not a remarkable, and certainly not a clever child, I was no less certainly out-of-the-ordinary. With my morbid environment it was inevitable. I was serious, solemn and sensitive beyond what any child should be. In fact my oddness really amounted to this, that I was unchildlike—chiefly because I was unhappy. If ever there were a moping miserable little guy, it was I. I had no companions of my own age whatever, nor up till just before the time I left Tawborough for Torribridge had I ever been alone with any other child for half an hour in my life. Aunt Jael forbade intercourse with worldly children, and my Grandmother agreed. They were an unknown race. All my companions were old women; the youngest, Mrs. Cheese, was sixty. I was never allowed to play with the Lawn children, indeed never allowed to play with anybody or "at" anything. I was kept indoors all day long to mope about in the gloomy house.

The distractions allowed were two: searching the Scriptures, and plain sewing. At six in the morning I got up, and, from the age of five or six onwards, made my own bed and dusted my bedroom. Then I went into Aunt Jael's room, and helped her to dress. Aunt Jael was usually in an evil temper first thing, and the only coin in which she repaid my services was hard words and harder bangs. It was a painful half-hour passed in an atmosphere of laces and buttons, hooks and eyes, blows and maledictions. Sometimes if I failed to do her boots up quickly enough, she would kick me. The next duty was helping Mrs. Cheese and Grandmother with the breakfast, which was eaten at half past seven punctually. After breakfast, prayers; then I dusted the dining-room; then from nine to eleven, two wretched hours with Aunt Jael styled Lessons, a hotchpotch of Proverbs, pothooks and multiplication-tables, served up with the usual seasoning of cuffs and imprecations. Every day I cried wretchedly, though tears brought nothing but the stick—and tears again. From eleven to twelve I sewed with my Grandmother; at noon we had dinner. After dinner Grandmother usually studied the Word in her bedroom, while Aunt Jael snored in her chair: I was left to moon about the house alone, with no plaything, no books, no companions; no resources whatever but my own imagination. I would sit for hours in the great blue attic, talking to myself, inventing imaginary scenes in which I triumphed over Aunt Jael and humbled her before the world, or reciting from the Word, or often merely weeping. After supper, came prayers and reading the Word; then bedside prayers with my Grandmother; then bed, which was not a much happier place, as I dreamt often, usually nightmares of hell and eternity, Satan and Aunt Jael.

It was a dreary life. I was a dreary little girl, and I must have looked it. No photograph was ever taken to perpetuate the prim, sulky, pale Quakerish little object I am told I was. My odd appearance was not helped by decent clothes. There was to be no indulgence of the Flesh, and I was dressed with due unbecomingness, always in the same way. I wore a dark green corduroy blouse and skirt, and a little corduroy bonnet to match, bedecked with a gaunt duck's feather. For winter I had an ugly black overcoat with a cape. I had black woollen mittens and square hobnailed boots.

I had no martyr's idea of myself, however, no exquisite self-pity, and any trace of such that may appear here is to be laid at the door of the authoress aged fifty, not of her chrysalis aged five. All I knew was that I was miserable. I had a child's sure instinct for injustice. I knew it was unjust that Aunt Jael should beat and abuse me all day long. I hated her bitterly, and hate makes no one happier. Lovelessness is even worse than hate, and the two beset me. My Grandmother loved me tenderly no doubt, but her ways were not my ways. She had no understanding of what I longed for. I wanted somebody—I only half guessed this, not daring to believe the visualization when it suggested itself—in whose bosom I could bury my face and cry for pure happiness. I would whimper myself to sleep thinking of my mother. Sometimes I seemed to see her as an angel. She looked kind and radiant, and comforted me. When my Grandmother caught me crying for my mother, I would say it was because of Aunt Jael's latest flogging.

Fear ruled me. The Devil and Hell frightened me terribly, and Eternity more. The thought of living for ever and ever and ever, the attempt of my child's mind to picture everlastingness, to visualize my own soul living through the pathless spaces of a billion years, and to be still no nearer the end than at the beginning,—this morbid unceasing trick of my imagination filled me with an ecstasy of fear, that froze and numbed my brain. I would sit up in bed too terrified to scream, voiceless with fear. My heart beat wildly. The realization that there was no hope, no way out—oh, heart, none ever—that because I was once born I must live for all eternity, seized my body and brain alike. I would jump out of bed, cry brokenly "God, God" in wild agony of soul, until, at last, the terror passed. Then, in a strange way, the blood rushed warmly back into my brain, and a languorous feeling of ease succeeded the terror of a moment before. Sometimes I was wicked and foolish enough to suffer the horror of thus "thinking Eternity out" for the sake of the luxurious backwash of comfort and physical peace which followed. But most often the terror came imperiously, and I could not escape it. I would be looking at the stars, I would think of their ineffable distances, then from eternity in space my mind would be dragged as by some devil to eternity in time, and I would have to live through the terror of the attempt—against my own will as it were—to think out, to live out, the meaning of living for ever. It is the worst agony the poor human soul can know; for a child, unnameable. There is no escape. The soul must go through the agony of the whole visualization—it may only be seconds, though it seems (perhaps is) Eternity Itself—right to the moment when the brain and body can abide the horror no longer, and from the very depths the soul cries out to "God."

A happy healthy child would know nothing of such bogeys; but I was neither. I was puny and ailing; I rarely went out of doors. Market on a Friday morning, Meeting on Sundays, and an afternoon walk once in a long while constituted my record of outings. The only real advantage I gained from this unhappy and unhealthy life was the development of a quite unusual power of instinct and intuition. Shut up all day long with no companions but the same three faces, I could read every mood and movement of them with unerring skill. Like the savage, or any one else who lives in an abnormally narrow world, I felt things rather than knew them. And the thing I felt and knew most sorely was that I was wretched. And when Aunt Jael moralized and said, "You are a privileged child indeed," I felt and knew that she was lying.

"Your holy kinsfolk, your saintly mother, your godly surroundings, your exceptional chances of grace, all show you to be a Child of Privilege."

All this, from the earliest days that I could understand, was usual enough. One day, however, when I was about five, she paused here with an air of special importance that I scented at once, then proceeded, "Your Grandmother and I have come to a decision, Child. Everything points out that the Lord has chosen you for special privileges, and special works for Him. If you were a boy, Child, the way would be clear. We should train you for the Ministry of His Word. Yet the way has been made plain. Your Grandmother and I have decided, after much seeking of the Lord in prayer, that your lot is to be cast—(she looked towards my Grandmother for confirmation, and concluded majestically)—in the field of foreign labour. You will bear witness to the Lord among the heathen. 'Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel, for lo! I am with you alway'!"

I looked appealingly towards my Grandmother. "Yes," she said, "I think it is the Lord's will."

So that was my life work. I was to spend Eternity as a missionary.

"You are indeed a Child of Privilege," Aunt Jael was booming.

CHAPTER IV: I GO TO MEETING

On Lord's Day, March the Sixth 1853, being the first Sabbath after my fifth birthday, I was taken to Meeting.

Meeting!—one social sphere my Grandmother and Great-Aunt knew; their one earthly club, set, milieu; company of saints, little flock of the elect, assembling together of the chosen of God from Eternity!

I awoke to find Grandmother standing by my bed; which was unusual, for I always woke myself.

"'Tis a great and notable day, my dear; the day you are to join with the Lord's people in prayer and praise. I want to pray with 'ee."

I got out of my bed, and when she had put around me the old red dressing gown, we knelt down together by the bedside, and the Lord was besought to vouchsafe that my first public acquaintance with His People might be abundantly blessed to me. After breakfast I was sent upstairs to my bedroom to meditate apart for an hour before Meeting; an exercise ordained henceforward every Sunday of my life.

About a quarter-past-ten we sallied forth, Mary in green corduroy between Grandmother in her Sunday black and Aunt Jael with her go-to-Meeting blue-velvet-ribboned bonnet. I should now behold the inside of the Room, antechamber of Heaven; I should join in public worship with the Saints. Curiosity alone did not stir me; in some vague exalted way, I hoped to get nearer to the Lord.

The Room was a bare little tabernacle in a side-street, built in the Noah's Ark style dear also to Methodism. Grandmother took my hand as we mounted the steps from the street; we passed into the Holy Place. I received at once the curious effect of a light bluish mist which, though brighter, reminded me of the thick blue gloom of my attic, and which was caused by the light blue distempered brick of the walls and ceiling. There were eight windows in the Room, which was many times larger than our parlour and by far the largest place I had ever entered; each consisted of twenty-four small square panes, six in the perpendicular by four breadthways, a source for years to come of endless countings and pattern-weavings and mystical mathematical tricks. There were two of these windows at each end of the room, and two down each side. All eight were set so high as almost to merge into the ceiling. The curious result was that while near the floor it was comparatively dark, the upper part of the room was very light. A symbol, I thought; for Earth is dark, but Heaven bright. Aunt Jael led the way up a druggeted sort of aisle to the front row where we alone sat: the family's immemorial place, though purchased by no worldly pew-rent. In the first rush of newness I but dimly apprehended the benches of black-clad figures we had passed. Immediately in front of us stood the Lord's Table, covered with spotless white damask, and laden with two tall bottles of wine, two great pewter tankards, and two cottage-loaves on plates. Beyond the Table was a low raised dais from which the Gospel was preached at the evening meetings for unbelievers; never used at the Breakings of Bread, for all Saints are equal, and none may stand above his fellows. On either side of the Table, however, respectively to our right and left were the (unofficial) seats of the mighty: Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge and Brother Brawn on one side, Brother Quappleworthy and Brother Browning on the other. On the wall at the far end was a clock, loudly audible in the abysmal silences of prayer.

I did not absorb all the details at a first glance; nor do I really remember the particular texts, expositions and hymns of that initiatory day. What I do always retain and rehearse in my mind is rather one "Type" meeting, from first silence to final benediction; an ideal combination of many different Lord's Days, in which I have unconsciously fitted together Brothers, events, homilies, each in most typical essence.

This morning meeting, the Breaking of Bread, was the meeting par excellence. The Breaking of the Bread and the drinking of wine were the central acts of a tense and devout program of prayer, of reading and exposition of the Word, and of hymn-singing, unaccompanied by any choir or instrument of music. Only Saints were bidden, i. e., those who had testified aloud to the saving grace of the body and the blood, and had taken up their Cross in public baptism. We were no ordinary Dissenting chapel, where "All are welcome":—the more the merrier, more grist to the mill, more pennies on the plate, more souls for the Kingdom. Only the Lord's own chosen testified people were deemed worthy of this solemn privilege of eating His sacred Body and drinking His sacred Blood; and only they were admitted. The only exceptions were a few children, like myself, who could not be left at home by their elders. A few non-privileged adults very occasionally came: old friends of the Meeting who for some reason of reluctance or uncertainty were untestified and unbaptized, or strangers, drawn by sympathy or curiosity; but earthen platter and pewter mug were zealously snatched away if such alien hands essayed to grasp them. (So too was the collecting-box. I have seen visitors with outstretched arm and generous shilling gasp with surprise as the money-box was drawn rudely out of their reach. Unlike worldlywise church or chapel, we would touch none but hallowed gold. The collection was as close a privilege as the communion.)

On an average morning we were fifty or sixty strong; more women than men, more old than young, more wan than hale, more humble than high. With dough of small shopkeepers, masons, artisans, gardeners, old women with pathetic private incomes, washerwomen, charwomen, servants, we had leaven of more comfortable middle-class people like Grandmother and Aunt Jael, or "better" folk still like Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge, or best of all dear Brother Quappleworthy, our graduate of the University of Oxford, our cousin by marriage with a peer of England! Believers in the aristocratic principle would have noted with satisfaction that from this blue-blooded minority were drawn almost all the "Leading Saints."

We were a community. The better-to-do helped the poor, and remembered that all were equal before God. Odd folk and sane folk, stupid folk and wise folk: with all their failings, a more gentle, worthy, sincere and trustful company of followers of Jesus of Nazareth could not have been found in this whole world or century. The fault they were farthest from is the one the fool most often imputes: hypocrisy. They were, of course, a varied company; it takes all sorts to make a Meeting.

Our Leading Brothers were Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge, with Brothers Brawn, Browning, Briggs, Quappleworthy, Quick, and Quaint. The last was only included just to round things off and to justify Mr. Pentecost's holy pleasantry "The Lord is watching us: let us mind our B's and Q's," for he was really quite an obscure brother who rarely broke silence, and then to pray so pessimistically that he can never have expected his petitions to be heard, let alone answered.

To be Leading Brother implied merely this: to stand out of the ruck of silent members, either in prayer or exposition of the Word. Many an obscure Brother, however, who would never have risked his hand at prayer or exposition occasionally blurted into a morning's modest fame by announcing a hymn. A stir of special interest was always felt in the Meeting on such occasions, and it was whispered that "the Lord was notably working in Brother So-and-So." Giving out a hymn was after all not so mean a performance. Every line of every verse was slowly enunciated by the chooser before we began to sing. The church and chapel habit of reading out only the first verse (or even line!) struck me as very odd and meagre when I first encountered it many years later. Prayer, however, was the favourite form of self-expression. All the Leading Saints were "powerful in prayer."

Exposition either followed or accompanied the reading of a portion of the Word. It was our "sermon." Our five regular expounders were Mr. Pentecost, Brothers Quappleworthy (the chief), Brawn, Browning and Briggs.

Though in theory we allowed no official ruler of the synagogue, in practice Mr. Pentecost Dodderidge was our Great High Priest. He alone was spoken of as Mister. He alone was immune from error and criticism. It is hard for me to reconstruct his personality now, when my own mentality is so different from when I knew him, when he prayed for me, blessed me, took me on his knees. It is still harder to convey to this generation the reverence in which his venerable white hairs were held. The world in which he ruled, the Saints' world, may have been small; but within its pale, through all England, he was revered as the holiest child of man. And we of the Tawborough Meeting possessed him for ourselves: in his old age he ceased to travel, and left us but little. We shone in the reflected glory of his presence; knew ourselves the Meeting of Meetings, called blessed of the Lord. He lived by prayer alone: the anonymous gifts of money on which he chiefly lived came to him whence he did not know, except that they came from God. In the old ancestral house another famous Pentecost Dodderidge had built he still lived; in one hallowed room he welcomed all who came to him for their souls' good; another was fitted as a workshop, and here till after his eightieth year he spent a portion of every day at the lathe. He could preach in eight languages, in five of them fluently. He never rose later than four and devoted the three hours before breakfast to "knee-drill," i. e., incessant prayer. He baptized believers in the river Taw till his eightieth year. One memorable immersion of which I shall speak later took place when he had turned eighty-four. His one kink was a trick of godly epigrams and holy repartees, cunningly led up to, of which he was as nearly vain as he could be. I remember Aunt Jael once saying to him in our dining-room at Bear Lawn:

"Your 'Life' should be written, Mr. Pentecost."

"But it is being written, dear sister," he replied. "It will be published in the morning."

"Published? Where?"

"Beyond the sky. The author is the Lord Jesus Christ. The ink is His precious Blood."

Another day my Grandmother asked him if he would begin to remember me in his prayers.

"I cannot," he replied gently.

"Cannot?" faltered my Grandmother.

"No, I cannot begin to pray for her. I have begun already."

For all his eminence Pentecost took no preponderating share in worship, nor ever made himself like the "Ministering Brothers" of some other meetings, who prayed almost all the prayers, chose almost all the hymns, gave one long sermon-like piece of exposition, and officiated alone at the Lord's Table—for all the world like a dissenting parson in his chapel or a priest in his church.

Second in importance stood Brother Brawn, a fat, doddering, bleating, weak-at-the-knees old bachelor and Christian; the maid-of-all-work of the Meeting, who distributed the offertory, paid the caretaker, saw to the heating and cleaning of the room, and bought the bread and wine. With his white waggly little beard and gentle animal features he looked absurdly like a goat, and ba-a-a-d just like one too. He had two little homilies only, which he and we knew by heart; one on 'Ell and the other on Mysteries, often given one after the other to form a continuous whole. Some of the Saints, I fear, dared to think these holy discourses dull. Not so Miss Salvation Clinker, who declared that "ivry word wat falls from 'is blessed lips is a purl uv great price."

Brother Quappleworthy, who stood equal in importance, was a striking contrast. He was our intellect, our light of learning, our peer's cousin-in-law. His erudition in real Hebrew and real Greek ranked with Brother Brawn's devotion, if a little lower than Pentecostal saintliness. Sneer we never so smugly at the filthiness of mere book knowledge, not one of us but was somehow elated to hear that favourite phrase: "Now in the original Greek—" His supplications, if acceptable to many, were perhaps too much of a muchness. It was all "Yea Lord, Nay Lord, Oh Lord, Ah Lord, If Lord...."

After Brother Quappleworthy, Brother Browning was our most frequent speaker. He came to Meeting accompanied by his little boy Marcus, the most youthful person present save me, but not, alas, by his spouse, who belonged, alas, to that pernicious sect of Bible Christians whom he (seven times alas) did occasionally himself frequent.

There was Brother Briggs, by vocation an oilman's handyman, whose face always shone with oil of happiness and hope, whose utterances were charged with an uncontrollable optimism and joy, a ringing, shouting, h-less content with the universe. The learned would call it cosmic expansiveness. Beside him Walt Whitman was a prophet of despair, Mark Tapley a misanthrope. His favourite word was "bewtivul" and he used it without mercy. There was Brother Quaint, the gloomy pray-er. There was Brother Lard, who emitted from his mouth periodic noises—signs of bad manners and digestion—which it is unusual to mention on paper: endemic endeavours that punctuated the subtlest exposition of Quappleworthy, the dreariest prayer of Quaint's, and added a spice of charm and unexpectedness to the whole service. I enjoyed them coarsely; with solemn face, pious unawareness. One joyous occasion I remember when Brother Quappleworthy was beginning the eighth chapter of the Revelation in his most impressive style. At the words "There was silence in heaven about the space of half-an-hour," he paused dramatically to illustrate, as it were, the meaning. Then, after five seconds of rapt silence, Brother Lard trumpeted forth: long, loud, luscious, lingering; a diapason of swaying sound and chronic indigestion. To the eternal credit of my Grandmother and Great-aunt, I record it that they smiled.... There was Brother Marks, a thin unhappy-looking man, wearing large black-rimmed spectacles, who mourned in a far corner apart, and never uttered a word or even joined in the hymns. I thought him a sinister figure; his goggles repelled me; I associated him by some vague but authentic impulse with the Personal Devil.

The Sisters were of course less important than the Brothers. "Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak." Above all the others towered Sister Vickary and Sister Lee. My Grandmother was universally loved. Before Aunt Jael the whole meeting quailed. Brother Briggs grovelled. Brother Brawn obeyed, Brother Quappleworthy deferred. She herself deferred to Pentecost Dodderidge alone; indeed the veneration she felt for the venerable instrument of her conversion, her Ananias of Damascus, was touching in so masterful a soul. In the ledgers of the Lord, I make bold to guess, it stands to her credit. In the counsels of the elders she was supreme; she was the wise woman of the Proverbs. No decision affecting the welfare of the flock could be taken by Pentecost or Brawn without the assent of the Shepherdess, as the former called her, perhaps not unmindful of her crook. No meeting felt it had the right—or courage—to begin without her presence. When it was over, she walked out first, bowing to right and left like an Empress as she stalked the length of the Room. She had as much common-sense as any other three Saints added together. Not a soul of them loved her.

* * * * * * *

We arrived each Lord's day about twenty-five past ten. When all were assembled, there was a period of five or ten minutes' absolute silence, broken only by the strident ticking of the clock. Some pairs of eyes were closed in silent prayer, others stared straight before them at some heavenly object of reflection.

Up rose Brother Browning. "Let us sing together to the glory of the Lord hymn number one-four-two: 'We praise Thee, O Jehovah!'" There was a turning of leaves, for at this time most of us possessed hymn-books, though a few of the older generation, including Aunt Jael, viewed all hymn-books as snares of the Devil, and bore witness against the fleshly innovation by still singing always from memory. Brother Browning read aloud the whole hymn:

We praise Thee, O Jehovah!
We know, whate'er betide,
Thy name, "Jehovah Jireh,"
Secures, "Thou wilt provide."

We praise Thee, O Jehovah!
Our banner gladly raise;
"Jehovah Nissi!" rally us
For conflict, victory, praise.

We praise Thee, O Jehovah!
In every trouble near;
"Jehovah Shalom"—God is peace,—
Dispels each doubt and fear.

We praise Thee, O Jehovah!
And, clothed in righteousness,
"Jehovah" great "Tskidkenu!"
Complete, we gladly bless.

We praise Thee, O Jehovah!
Thou wilt for Israel care!
"Jehovah Shammah," precious thought!
Henceforth "The Lord is there."

We sang sitting. Oh, inharmonious howl! Some Brother—usually Brother Schulz, who was fancied to possess musical talent—pitched the key and set the time as he fancied. The latter was always funereally slow, the former more often than not much too high or too low to be persevered with. Not that that mattered. Somebody would merely switch off into another key anything from a semitone to an octave higher or lower as the case might be: switching part of the way back again if the change proved too drastic. The consequence of this go-as-you-please policy was that a hymn would sometimes be sung in four different times and seven or eight different keys. Above all the holy din you could hear Brother Briggs bawling forth his joy in the Lord; higher still the awful metallic howl of Sister Yeo.

When the hymn was done there was another space of complete silence till the spirit moved Brother Quappleworthy to utterance. Once on his feet, he found his two Bibles, English and Greek, rather difficult to wield, especially as his reading from the Word hardly ever consisted of one solid chapter read straight through, but of snippets of two or three verses each from half-a-dozen different books, connected only by their (imagined) relevance to the topic he had in mind: grace or trustfulness or hope or sin. We all followed him in our own Bibles: so that his Reading had orchestral accompaniment of zealous page-rustlings. "Let us read together in the Book of Genesis, that sixth chapter and those fifth, sixth and seventh verses ... and now let us turn to the Book of Job, the fifth chapter and the thirteenth verse ... and now a verse in that sweet Second Epistle of Peter, the second chapter and that fourth verse...."

After we had rustled backwards and forwards for a few minutes, Brother Quappleworthy closed first one Bible and then the other with two emphatic snaps, and put them under his left arm, leaving his right hand free to gesticulate,—more especially the right forefinger, which ever and anon he brandished to exhort, to emphasize, to warn, to wheedle. "Well, brethren, the upshot and outcome of all that we have read is—ah—manifest. It is—ah—this. He alone saved us from the pit. He alone, not—ah—another. He saved us—miserable sinners, grovelling worms—us and none others. Far be it from us ever to think ourselves worthy of such grace and favour! Far otherwise!—but so He willed. Our souls—your soul, ah, my soul—would have gone into eternal darkness save for Him, the Lord,—Κὑρiοϛ [Greek: Kyrios]—how I love it in the old Greek! He alone, brethren, can—ah—renew our natures; and can—ah—shape better desires for our natures when renewed—can show us the more excellent way!..."

After a new silence, the spirit would move Brother Brawn to clamber to his feet, and give us his changeless utterance on "'Ell" or "Mysteries." I give it with a word for word accuracy I cannot often vouch for. His er-er was a bleating sort of stammer much less elegant than Brother Quappleworthy's ah.

"My mind, brethren, 'as bin—er—er dwellin' much all through the mornin' on the subject of 'Ell. On the torments and 'orrors that all the 'eathen and unsaved will taste down there below, yes, and are tastin' at this very minnit as we are praisin' the Lord 'ere in this Rume. Torments and—er—er—er—'orrors. You know. I know. And they torments are for all the sinners an' unsaved: ivry wan uv them, not for some jis', as I've 'eard folk say. No for all, all, ALL, A L L. You mark my words. All the 'eathen shall be 'urled to 'Ell, whether they've 'eard or whether they 'aven't!" (This last sentence he sing-songed with violent emphasis, clapping his hands together at the syllables I have marked) "O Yes! I can imagine 'em wallering in the brimstone and sulphur. I know. We shall be wi' Lazarus in Abraham's—er—er—bosom, and they will be down the fiery gulf, down in the fiery pit. So, brethren, let us be ready for the Lord, let us make sure uv our place in the bosom, not the pit. Bosom for us! BOSOM! We must watch and er—er—pray. We must. I'm sure we must."

A pause. He shifted his feet clumsily. His thick lips moved stupidly as he made mental preparations for Part Two.

"My mind, brethren, 'as been—er—er—dwellin' much on another subjict this mornin', the subjict of Mysteries. It has; I'm sure it has. There are two mysteries. There is the mystery of godliness, that's one; and the mystery of iniquity, that's two. It all 'appened at the Fall. The Fall was when the mystery of godliness became the mystery of iniquity; an' the mystery of iniquity became the mystery of godliness; all mixmuddled up together as you mid say. It became 'ard to-er—er—tell 'em apart. 'Tis only 'Is chosen ones as can do it—that's you and me, brethren—and 'tain't orwis easy for us. Let us try to know one from the other, and if we tries our 'ardest, the Lord will 'elp us to. Yes 'E will. I'm sure 'E will."

After Brother Brawn, the beginning of the meeting was well over. We knew that the great moments were drawing near. A deeper silence filled the little room: the hush of pure holiness. There was a prayer or two, and then we sang the Bread hymn. Usually this one:

Through Thy precious body broken
Inside the veil.
Oh, what words to sinners spoken—
Inside the veil.
Precious, as the blood that bought us;
Perfect, as the love that sought us;
Holy, as the Lamb that brought us;
Inside the veil.

When we see Thy love unshaken,
Outside the camp.
Scorn'd by man, by God forsaken,
Outside the camp.
Thy loved cross alone can charm us;
Shame doth now no more alarm us;
Glad we follow, nought can harm us;
Outside the camp.

Lamb of God! through Thee we enter
Inside the veil.
Cleansed by Thee, we boldly venture
Inside the veil.
Not a stain; a new creation;
Ours is such a full salvation!
Low we bow in adoration,
Inside the veil.

Unto Thee, the homeless stranger,
Outside the camp.
Forth we hasten, fear no danger,
Outside the camp.
Thy reproach far richer treasure
Than all Egypt's boasted pleasure;
Drawn by love that knows no measure,
Outside the camp.

Soon Thy saints shall all be gathered,
Inside the veil.
All at home, no more be scattered,
Inside the veil.
Nought from Thee our hearts shall sever,
We shall see Thee, grieve Thee never;
"Praise the Lamb!" shall sound for ever
Inside the veil.

We sang it to a slow drawling tune, incommunicably dreary.

Pentecost arose, white and priestly. "Little children, every time I come to this Table, I come with a joy, a peace and a gratitude that are ever new. My heart is too full of love for my Saviour for any words of mine to tell you. Let us bear in mind, little children, rather His own precious words: This is my Body, which is given for you."

As he ceased, Brother Brawn arose from his seat at the right of the Table, took each of the loaves, held them sacrificially aloft, broke them in twain. One plate he himself passed round among the Saints, Brother Browning the other. I watched with evergreen curiosity and reverence how each Saint broke off a piece of bread and with closed eyes slowly munched it away. Once in a way the impious thought seized me that 'twas all farce, mummery, tomfoolery: this chewing of dough. The next instant I would flush crimson to have let such wickedness find place for an instant in my mind: I would look and behold the rapture on the munching faces; and understand beyond all doubting that here was something mystical, magical, holy. I could see that those who took bread obtained thereby some supernal joy that I was too young or too sinful to share. It could not be tomfoolery if it gave you the rapture I could see on the faces around me. Besides, Jesus had ordained it.

Another silence—the middle space of the double sacrifice—ere we sang the Wine hymn:

It is the blood, it is the blood,
Which has atonement made;
It is the blood which once for all
Our ransom price has paid.

It was the blood, the mark of blood
The people's houses bore;
And when that mark by God was seen
His angel passed the door.

Not water, then, nor water now,
Has ever saved a soul;
Not Jewish rites, but Jesus' stripes
Can make the wounded whole.

"I see the blood," "I see the blood,"
A voice from Heaven cries,
The soul that owns this token true,
And trusts it, never dies.

For He who suffered once for all,
That we might life obtain,
Will never leave His Father's throne
To shed that blood again.

Brother Quick, in a low voice trembling with passion, prayed that God would make us worthy of this chief experience.

There was a moment of the holiest and most breathless silence I have ever known. I have stood alone at midnight when no birds sang, no leaf stirred, and the autumn stars shone silently through the unwhispering roof of a dark Russian forest. I have stood on the summit of the Great Gable and gazed at the wild soundless mountains all around, in that wild soundless moment before the dawn arrives. But never except in the Romish Mass, at that multitudinous most sacred moment when the heart stops beating, have I tasted so awful a silence as this, when the Spirit of God moved in the hearts of our little company. I did not greet Him in mine—not yet.

Brother Brawn uncorked the two bottles of wine and filled the tankards. The rapture on the faces round me was tenser than after the Bread: especially, I thought, in Pentecost's and my Grandmother's. The longing to share it possessed me more and more every day as I grew up. I hoped that at a very tender age I too might break the bread and drink the wine.

The third and last stage of the Meeting usually began with an utterance from Brother Briggs. If everything before had led up to the communion, Brother Briggs led on from it. He bellowed so loud that at times the roof rang. "Aw, my dear brethering, after the cup us all 'ave tasted, there be only one thing I'ze goin' to zay—Praise the Lawd, O my Sowl! Praise ye the Lawd! I'm only a pore hignorrint zinner, but I knaws this yer: That Jesus zhed 'Is bled vur me, and that 'tis uv 'Is precious bled as I've bin a-privil'ged to drink this mornin'. 'E 'ath 'olpen hus! O 'ow I luv that word hus! O 'ow I luv that word hus! Turn wi' me to the gauspel accordin' to St. Matthew, chapter eight verse zeventeen: 'Imself took our infirmities and bare our zickness. Praise 'Im, zes I, praise 'Im! Let ivry thing that 'ath breath praise the Lawd! Bewtivul! Bewtivul!

"Us shud orwis be praisin' 'Im, brethering, and us shud orwis be 'appy in 'Is love. Orwis 'appy! If us be un'appy, 'tis along of this yer—that us 'ave bin drinkin' of zum voul stream, instead uv they vountains uv 'Is love. And us are 'appy, arn't us, brethering? As I luke round at 'ee, all brothers and zisters, and zee what triumphs and trophies of grace ye all be, I zes to missel', and I cries aloud to 'eaven: Praise ye the Lawd! Bewtivul!

"'E 'ave dragged us up out of a norribull pit, a norribull pit, out o' the moiry clay, and shed 'Is blid that us may live wi' 'Im vur iver and ivermore. Turn wi' me to the blessid gauspel according to St. Jan, the sixth chapter and vivty-zixth verse, and 'earken to vat my Lawd zes there: 'E that eateth my flesh, 'e zes, an' drinketh my blid, dwelleth in me, 'e zes, an' I in 'im. O 'ow I luv that word 'Im.' O 'ow I luv that word 'Im! O the blessed thought: to dwell for iver in 'Im, an 'Im in us! Bewtivul! Bewtivul! Bewtivul!..."

Then would he bellow forth and would we sing "He sitteth o'er the waterfloods" or "I hear the Accuser Roar":—

I hear the Accuser roar
Of ills that I have done,
I know them well, and thousands more—
Jehovah findeth none.

Sin, Satan, Death, press near
To harass and appal;
Let but my risen Lord appear,
Backward they go and fall.

Before, behind, around,
They set their fierce array,
To fight and force me from my ground,
Along Emmanuel's way.

I meet them face to face,
Through Jesus' conquest blest,
March in the triumph of His grace,
Right onward to my rest.

There, in His Book, I bear
A more than conqu'ror's name,
A soldier, son, and fellow-heir
Who fought and overcame.

Bless, bless the Conqueror slain—
Slain in His victory;
Who lived, Who died, Who lives again,
For thee, dear Saint, for thee!

Brother Brawn made the Announcements. On that first occasion, I remember, he made some reference to me ("One of tender years worshipping with us for the first time"), to my dedication to the Lord, and to his hopes that I might be made meet therefor.

Everybody stared. I flushed, with infant conceit rather than pious ecstasy: it was my first appearance in public. After Announcements, the Offertory. This was taken in a large square box divided into four slit compartments labelled in white painted capitals: MINISTRY, FOREIGN FIELD, POOR, EXPENSES. My Grandmother was always much exercised in her giving. Her own inclinations were more towards Poor and Foreign Field, but she felt she ought not to neglect less showy and alluring Expenses nor coyer, more elusive Ministry. She would compromise between duty and pleasure by putting a sixpence in all four, with perhaps an extra copper or two in Poor; of her modest income giving half-a-crown to the Lord at this morning service alone. Aunt Jael with a rather larger income (and no Mary to support) never gave more than a shilling between all four compartments. She also had a penchant for Expenses: I suppose it pleased her—waywardly—as the least human of the four.

(This fourfold collecting-box allowed a pleasurable width of choice, but a quite different consideration had led to its introduction and the supersession of the cloth bag formerly in use. During a period of several years a lump of sugar had been put in the bag every Lord's day at Breaking of Bread, and though clouds of prayer were offered up to soften the heart of the sinner-Saint who played this weekly prank upon his Meeting and his Maker, they were all of no avail. He (or she) hardened his heart; every Lord's day the bag was found to contain yet another impious lump. Stare Brother Brawn never so stark at every giving hand, the sinner remained undetected in his sweet career. It was finally suggested by Aunt Jael that a new type of box, with but a narrow slit for the coins to pass through, would baffle the evil-doer. The choice-of-beneficiare partisans united with her, and they evolved between them this fourfold enormity, with its meat-dish dimensions and its four defensive slits. Vain precautions! Idle hopes! All the sugar-sinner did was to insert a much smaller piece than before; usually in Foreign Field. It was a marvel to the Saints how he squeezed it through; a tragedy how he persevered in his sin.)

After the Offertory came perhaps another hymn and prayer; then the End. We all stood up and sang the following:

When we will be
Where we would be,
When we shall be
What we should be,
Things that are not
Now, nor could be,
Then shall be—ee
Our own!

While we remained standing, Pentecost raised his hands in benediction. And so to dinner.

* * * * * * *

Breaking of Bread, though the principal service, was only one of five each Lord's Day at the Room, all of which I attended regularly before I was seven. There was but an hour at home for dinner ere I set forth for Lord's Day School at half past one, which lasted for an hour and was followed immediately by the Young Persons' Prayer-Meeting. I got home for tea, after which we all sallied forth to the Gospel Address for Unbelievers, usually delivered by Brother Browning, two hours long and dreary beyond belief, in a ghostly atmosphere of guttering candle-light. This was followed by another Prayer-Meeting, followed again, at least in the summer months, by the Street Testimony, when we all repaired to the Strand, and gathered together a mixed circle of friends and curious and scoffers—like the Salvation Army in the next generation. Even this was not the end; for at home there was Reading and prayers, just as on week-days. If I were more deadly-tired than usual after that awful Sunday, Aunt Jael would spin the prayer out and choose a specially long chapter. Most Sundays I went to bed half sick with fatigue, my head aching, hardly able to undress.

Smiling was forbidden, and I had little reason to break the rule. Tears, however, were allowed, and I shed them in plenty.

* * * * * * *

If Breaking of Bread was not our only Meeting, nor was our Room the only Meeting in the town. I knew of four others. First, the Grosvenor Street Branch Meeting, offspring of ours, in the special care of Brother Quappleworthy, who preached there on Sunday evenings. Salvation always derided my Grandmother and Aunt for calling it Grow-vner Street. "I'm no scholard," she said, "but tidden common-sense to mispernounce like that. Gross-veener 'tis, and Gross-veener ollers 'twill be!"

Second, there was the Close, Exclusive or Darbyite Meeting, ruled over by one Mr. Nicodemus Shufflebottom, a giant-tall man with a flat white face, who reminded me of a walking tombstone. The Exclusives or Darbyites regarded us, I suppose, much as we regarded the rest of Christendom; as walkers in darkness. We regarded them as wandering sheep, foolish perhaps, rather than sinful. "Those brethren," Mr. Pentecost described them, "whose consciences lead them to refuse my fellowship and to deprive me of theirs." I never went to their Tawborough Meeting while I was a child.

Third, there was Brother Obadiah Tizzard's Upper Room for Celibate Saints, a kind of loft in which half-a-dozen old maids and two or three bachelors met together for meditation and breaking of bread. All were singular as all were single. Their service was one of silent hymnless worship interspersed by personal quarrels; silence broken by backchat. The last word as well as the first was with Salvation. Glory did duty for Brother Lard; less vulgar if more incessant. All were sustained by the conviction of their unique fidelity to scripture. "We break bread in an upper room," said Glory to my Grandmother time and again on Tuesday afternoons, "as did Jesus with the Twelve. We are poor an' 'umble: an' so was Jesus. We are not wed, an' no more was Jesus. We shall go to heaven pure: an' so did Jesus."

Fourth, there was Ebenezer. The name was applied indifferently to the meeting-room itself or to the one gentleman who attended it. He was the Meeting, the whole Meeting, and nothing but the Meeting. He sat on a bench for silent prayer all alone by himself, got up and read the Word aloud to himself, mounted on a little dais and lengthily harangued himself, handed round the bread and wine to himself, and (for all I know) took the collection from and appropriated it to himself. Ebenezer had once belonged to our Meeting, but in some occult way we had displeased him, and he left us for Mr. Nicodemus Shufflebottom, leaving him also in turn for the straiter ways of Brother Obadiah Tizzard. Him even too he left finally, to worship God in his own way all alone. I doubt if he was really mad: odd only, and nearer to Heaven than Hanwell. His real name, if he had one, I never knew.

* * * * * * *

Perhaps I have said too much of the Meeting; for though the one great piece of the whole outer world I saw during many years, it was never more than that: something I saw. I was never of it, as of Eight Bear Lawn. It never helped to fashion my child's life or longings, nor touched at any time the inside life I led: the real Mary.

One other thing stands clearly apart in my memory as taking place that first Lord's Day.

Alone together at my bedside my Grandmother confirmed my dedication to the Lord's service. She told me of her vision, renewed that day as she had drunk the sacred wine, that I should serve Him as a Missionary in the foreign field with glory and honour. She told me of the trials and tribulations I should have to face; but that if a faithful steward, I should find my reward in heaven. Then she read aloud my favourite seventh Chapter of Revelation. When she came to the fourteenth verse, These are they which came out of great tribulation, I could keep silence no longer. I cried to her to stop. Words had already a magical effect on me, and could throw me into ecstasy. All through my childhood "tribulation" was big magic. Now it threw me into a trance of disordered emotion and delight.

"O Grandmother," I cried, "I will! I will! I will serve Jesus for ever! I am longing to go through tribulation, through lovely lovely tribulation!"

I broke into crying and laughing. I hungered to suffer, to embrace, kiss, adore, go mad, abase myself, throw myself on the floor before her feet, love, hold, possess, be possessed, mingle.... Why could she not put her arms around me, seize me, comfort me, crush me?

For one imperceptible moment my child's soul understood. The moment passed; too swift to be retained, even remembered.

Had I been dreaming? What was it all?... Yes, I had wanted something, something that Grandmother could not give, could not take.

"You're overwrought and tired, my dear," she was saying. "What you want is a good sleep."

CHAPTER V: I GO TO SCHOOL

Next morning Grandmother and I sallied forth. It was a bright spring day, with a high wind blowing. We went down Bear Street and along Boutport Street to where it joins the High Street; and just beyond, on the far side of the road, saw the old ivy-coloured house whose door was to be my portal of worldly understanding.

My future instructresses, the Misses Glory and Salvation Clinker, were our only regular visitors at Bear Lawn. They were third cousins of a sort, though a social grade or two lower than ourselves, I apprehended,—more Devonshirey, "commoner" than we. Tuesday after Tuesday they came to our house for a long-established weekly afternoon of tea and godly discoursing. Glory was a tall, thin, bony old woman, with a bleary far-away stare. She wore a faded black serge dress, whereon the only ornaments were dribble-marks in front, which spread fan-wise from her chin to her waist; and a tiny black bonnet, tied round her chin sometimes by a ribbon, oftener by a piece of string, at one whimsical period by a strip of carefully-prepared bacon-rind. She spoke little, chiefly of Death and the New Jerusalem, though a perpetual clicking noise—represented most nearly by er-er-er, and variously explained—always kept you aware of her presence. "Life," ran her favourite aphorism, "is but one long prercession o' deathbeds." She was quite mad, very gentle, wrapped in gloom, and beatifically happy. Er-er-er-er was unbroken and continuous. You could have used her for a metronome.

Salvation was a saner, a coarser type: a noisy, aggressive woman, whose chief subject of conversation was herself; a pious shrew with a big appetite and a nagging tongue. She always ate an enormous tea, though Aunt Jael, of whom alone in the world she was frightened, would sometimes keep her hunger roughly in check. Glory, on the other hand, always brought special provisions of her own, and at tea-time made her own exclusive preparations. First she went into the far corner, where she had deposited a net-bag full of parcels. From this she abstracted a saucepan, a little spirit-lamp, a box of rusks shaped like half moons, a bottle of goat's milk, a porringer and a great wooden spoon. She put the lamp on the floor, lighted it, boiled the milk in the little saucepan, threw in six or eight of the rusks and stirred with the wooden spoon until she produced a steaming mush. She didn't eat this, nor yet did she drink it; neither word describes the fearful and wonderful fashion in which she imbibed, absorbed, inhaled, appropriated it. Of every spoonful she managed to acquire perhaps a quarter; the other three-quarters strolled gently down her chin. As she was short-sighted, and as when she ate she ignored her food and looked steadily ahead at the glories of the New Jerusalem, she often missed the spoon altogether. The noise she made was notable. Hence Aunt Jael always refused to allow her to eat at our table, and consigned her to "Glory's corner."

Though I saw the Clinkers in our house Tuesday after Tuesday, I had never yet beheld them in their own. My eyes fastened on the brass door plate:

The Misses Clinker
ELEMENTARY EDUCATIONAL ESTABLISHMENT
For the Daughters
of Gentlemen.

The top line was in elegant copy-book writing.

"Look, Grandmother," I cried, "Misses is spelt wrong. Why do they put M-i-f-s-e-s? It's silly." I resented the absurd "s". My faith in the infallibility of the twin Gamaliels at whose feet I was to sit was dashed on their very doorstep. Could the blind lead the blind?

"Why, 'tis often written that way," rejoined my Grandmother, "'tis an old way of writing a double S. You've plenty to learn, you see."

If the first line was offensive to common-sense, the remainder of the notice challenged mere truth. Elementary you could not gainsay, but Educational Establishment for a description of that frowsy den and those two ignorant old maids was florid rather than faithful, while Gentlemen as a term to connote the male parents of the clientèle was—even in the most dim and democratic sense of that unpopular word—just false. Finally, there were sons as well as daughters: some three or four of the fifteen pupils who comprised the school.

Salvation opened the door, grinning an aggressive welcome, but we were officially received by Glory. "Welcome! Welcome to this place!" she cried impressively. I saw that the sisters' rôles were here reversed. Glory was as unkempt as ever, the "black" serge she wore shades greener than her Tuesday afternoon one, and quite four inches higher one side than the other. As next-worldly and bleary-eyed as in our house, her part here was the part of a Principal: Principal of an Educational Establishment for the Daughters (yea and Sons) of Gentlemen. Salvation, screech she never so loudly, was in this schoolroom but second fiddle.

* * * * * * *

The schoolroom was an old-fashioned kitchen. The day's dinner was cooked before our eyes on a spit before the fire; the pupils acted as turnspits. The room was low, smoke-begrimed and dingy; the windows opaque with dirt. On the filthy walls were a print of the Duke of Wellington (?), all nose and sternness, an old Map of the World on Mercator's Projection with the possessions of the Spanish crown yellow, and the possessions of the British crown red, and many framed texts worked in white and blue wool. One huge text, worked in many colours, stood over the doorway: A ROD FOR THE FOOL'S BACK. Prov: xxvi. v. 3. There were two classes, on different sides of the room. I was put with the younger. They were all new faces, except one or two that I had seen the day before at the Room. They were, indeed, the first children I had ever spoken to. In grown-up parlance the pupils would have been dubbed lower-middle class, though Marcus Browning, whom I knew by sight because he lived in the Lawn in a house just opposite ours, was as middle-middle class as Aunt Jael and my Grandmother. I felt these distinctions perfectly, and regarded one Susan Durgles, a lank untidily-dressed fluffy-haired child of seven or eight, and the leading spirit in our class, with that feeling of quiet disdain which the sureness of higher caste can alone bestow: her father was a mere cobbler in Green Lane, and while I looked at her as though I knew it, she looked back lovingly as though she knew I did. Between Susan and myself sat a pale thin child, Seth Baker, who had St. Vitus' dance. I had never seen anything of the sort before, and stared more through curiosity than pity as his slate and slate-pencil shook in his hand.

The first lesson was Rithmetick with Miss Glory called (vulgarly) by Miss Salvation Figurin'. With her best far-away look Miss Glory peered forth into eternity: "If eggs be twenty-eight a shilling" (they were in those days, at any rate in Spring) "how many be you agwain to get for, er-er-er-one poun' three shillin' and vourpence ha' penny?"

Up shot the grimy hand of little Seth Baker. "Please'm, please'm," appealingly. He was always first and always right, but the rest of us were not suffered to dodge the labour of calculation, as Miss Glory would oftenest ignore Seth and drop on weaker members of the flock, myself or Susan Durgles.

"Now then, Susan Durgles. 'Ee heard the question. How many then-er-er-er-er-er-?"

"Please'm, I-er-er-er-er-er-don't know."

This shameless mockery was allowed to go unpunished. My mind strove to picture Aunt Jael coping with a like impertinence. I imagined the black wrath, the awful hand upon my shoulder. With what new weapon would she scourge me? Scorpions, perhaps, if obtainable.

During our mental arithmetic lesson, the advanced students at the other end of the room were receiving combined instruction from the deputy-principal in crochet-work and carikter-formation. Miss Salvation was shouting technical advice of the stitch, slip, three treble, four chain, and draw-through-the-first-loop-on-the-hook order, together with more general instructions how to earn the joys of heaven and eschew the fires of hell.

After a while the sisters changed places, and my efforts were transferred from high finance to handwriting, called (whimsically) by Miss Glory, Penmanship. Miss Salvation distributed dirty dog-eared copy books. I was set to work on the last page, the Z page, of an otherwise completed and wholly filthy book, to reproduce fourteen times in zealous copper-plate: "Zeal of Thy House hath eaten me up." Meanwhile Miss Salvation transferred to us her godly bawling as to the way we should, or chiefly, shouldn't go: interlarding this with fragments of more specialized holy information, which being entirely useless I have never forgotten; e. g., which was the longest verse in the Word of God, and which was the shortest; the number of books in the Old Testament, and in the New; that "straightway" was the private and particular word of St. Mark, while "That it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet" was the chosen cliché of St. Matthew.

Miss Glory took turn with us again for the third lesson: Reading. Our book was of course The Book. One mouldy old Bible was passed round, and we read in turn from its brown-spotted and damp-smelling pages. I think it was my first or second day that it fell to my turn to read from the eighteenth chapter of the Book of Genesis, where the Lord appeared unto Abraham in the plains of Mamre, and Abraham said unto the Lord concerning the destruction of Sodom, Wilt thou also destroy the righteous with the wicked? I knew the passage well, and read with relish and excitement the diminuendo Peradventures.

"Good, my child, good. Your readin' is a credit to your dear Grannie and your dear Great-Aunt. You read it fine, as to the manner born."

For the first time in my life the enchanting incense of praise filled my nostrils. I flushed, and while others read of Lot at the gate of Sodom and what-not else, I ceased to listen. My heart was beating to this refrain: You read it fine—as to the manner born. So I was good for something, for all Aunt Jael's daily blows and curses, my Grandmother's nightly She-is-weak-Lord-and-sinful petitions. I read fine!

The first day Mrs. Cheese called for me; but afterwards I was entrusted to Marcus Browning as escort. He was two years older: "a good child, not like some I could name" (Aunt Jael), "Born of Saints" (Grandmother), and possessed of the more fleshly merit of also living on the Lawn. We spoke little together.

The event I remember best of my first days at the Elementary Educational Establishment was a fight. Susan Durgles was for ever making fun of poor little Seth Baker's affliction. One day when Miss Glory and Miss Salvation were both out of the room Susan went a little too far.

"Look to 'im, look to 'im!" she mocked. "He looks like wan o' thase yer weather-cocks what wag and wobble about on the church steeple. Goes like this, do he? Ha, ha. Can't help hisself, can't he, palaverin' li'l wretch?" She flapped her hands in Seth's walrus way, and nodded her head convulsively in mocking imitation of poor little St. Vitus.

He was a meek child, but this time he could stand it no longer. "Dirty cobbler's lass!" he cried, and banged Susan full in the face with his small clenched fist. A regular fight began. My sympathies were wholly pro-Seth. Was not Susan the sneerer, the tormenter, the tyrant, the Aunt Jael, and Seth the harried one, the oppressed one, the victim, the me?