So much for my education, a thing which it seems to me is likely to continue—and specially in respect of human nature—as long as I keep alive. With so little childish company, without rivalry, I was inclined to swell myself out with conceit and complacency. “It’s easy holding down the latchet when nobody pulls the string.” But whatever size we may be, in soul or body, I have found that the world wields a sharp pin, and is pitiless to bubbles.
Though inclined to be dreamy and idle when alone, I was, of course, my own teacher too. My senses were seven in number, however few my wits. In particular I loved to observe the clustering and gathering of plants, like families, each of a shape, size, and hue, each in their kind and season, though tall and lowly were intermingled. Now and then I would come on some small plant self-sown, shining and flourishing, free and clear, and even the lovelier for being alone in its kind amid its greater neighbours. I prized these discoveries, and if any one of them was dwarfed a little by its surroundings I would cosset it up and help it against them. How strange, thought I, if men so regarded each other’s intelligence. If from pitying the dull-witted the sharp-witted slid to mere toleration, and from toleration to despising and loathing. What a contest would presently begin between the strong-bodied stupid and the feeble-bodied clever, and how soon there would be no strong-bodied stupid left in the world! They would dwindle away and disappear into Time like the mammoth and the woolly bear. And then I began to be sorry for the woolly bear and to wish I could go and have a look at him. Perhaps this is putting my old head on those young shoulders, but when I strive to re-enter the thoughts of those remote days, how like they seem to the noisy wasting stream beside which they flowed on, and of whose source and destination I was unaware.
All this egotism recalls a remark that Mrs. Ballard once made apropos of some little smart repartee from Miss M. as she sat beside her pasteboard and slapped away at a lump of dough, “Well I know a young lady who’s been talking to the young man that rubbed his face with a brass candlestick.”
IV
In the midst of my eighteenth year fortune began to darken. My mother had told me little of the world, its chances and changes, cares and troubles. What I had learned of these came chiefly from books and my own speculations. We had few visitors and from all but the most familiar I was quickly packed away. My mother was sensitive of me, for both our sakes. But I think in this she was mistaken, for when my time came, Life found me raw, and it rubbed in the salt rather vigorously.
My father had other views. He argued for facing the facts, though perhaps those relating to fruit and paper are not very intimidating. But he seldom made his way against my mother, except in matters that concerned his own comfort. He loved me fondly but throughout my childhood seems to have regarded me as a kind of animated marionette. When he came out from his Mills and Pockets it amused him to find me nibbling a raspberry beside his plate. He’d rub his round stubbly head, and say, “Well, mamma, and how’s Trot done this morning?” or he would stoop and draw ever so heedfully his left little finger down my nose to its uttermost tip, and whisper: “And so to Land’s End, my love.” Now and then I would find his eyes fixed on me as if in stupefaction that I was actually his daughter.
But now that I was getting to be a young woman and had put up my hair, and the future frowned near, this domestic problem began seriously to concern him. My mother paled at the very mention of it. I remember I had climbed up on to his writing desk one morning, in search of a pair of high boots which I had taken off in his study the evening before. We had been fishing for sticklebacks. Concealed from view, while the wind whined at the window, I heard a quarrel between my father and mother about me which I will never repeat to mortal ear. It darkened my mind for days, and if … but better not.
At this time anxiety about money matters must have begun its gnawing in my poor father’s brains. And I know what that means. He had recommended to others and speculated himself in some experiment in the cultivation of the trees from which the Chinese first made paper, and had not only been grossly cheated, but laughed at in the press. The Kentish Courier—I see his ears burning now—had referred to him as “the ingenious Mr. Tapa”; and my mother’s commiseration had hardly solaced him: “But, my dear, you couldn’t have gone to Canton by yourself. We must just draw in our horns a little.” The ingenious Mr. Tapa patted the hand on his shoulder, but his ears burned on.
“Besides,” my mother added, with a long, sighing breath, as she seated herself again, “there are the books.” He plucked his spectacles off, and gazed vaguely in her direction: “Oh, yes, yes, there are the books.”
Nor was he long daunted by this attack. He fell in love with some notion of so pickling hop-poles that they would last forever. But the press was no kinder to his poles than to his mulberries.
And then befell the blackest misfortune of my life. I had been ill; and for a few days had been sleeping in one of the spare bedrooms in a cot beside my mother, so that she should be near me if I needed her. This particular evening, however, I had gone back to my own
