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INFANCY

When I penetrate backward into my childhood I come perhaps sooner than many people to impassable night. A sweet darkness enfolds with a faint blessing my life up to the age of about four. The task of attempting stubbornly to break up that darkness is one I have never proposed to myself, but I have many times gone up to the edge of it, peering, listening, stretching out my hands, and I have heard the voice of one singing as I sat or lay in her arms; and I have become again aware very dimly of being enclosed in rooms that were shadowy, whether by comparison with outer sunlight I know not. The songs, first of my mother, then of her younger sister, I can hear not only afar off behind the veil but on this side of it also. I was, I should think, a very still listener whom the music flowed through and filled to the exclusion of all thought and of all sensation except of blissful easy fullness, so that too early or too sudden ceasing would have meant pangs of expectant emptiness. The one song which, by reason of its repetition or of some aptitude in me, I well remember, was one combining fondness with tranquil if peevish retrospection and regret in a soft heavy twilight. I reach back to it in that effort through a thousand twilights lineally descended from that first one and from the night which gave it birth. If I cried or suffered pain or deprivation in those years nothing remains to star the darkness. Either I asked no question or I had none but sweet answers. I was at peace with life. Indoors, out of the sun, I seem never to have been troubled by heat or cold strong enough to be remembered. But out of doors, somewhere at the verge of the dark years, I can recall more simply and completely than any spent indoors at that time one day above others. I lay in the tall grass and buttercups of a narrow field at the edge of London and saw the sky and nothing but the sky. There was some one near, probably a servant, necessary but utterly insignificant. I was alone and happy to be so, just as indoors I was happy among people and shadows between walls. Was it one day or many? I know of no beginning or end to it; but an end I suppose it had an age past.

Then I entered the lowest class of a large suburban board school. There were some boys and more girls whom I desired and sometimes struggled to sit next; and at least two whom I avoided. One a poor dirty girl without eyelashes who came from an old hovel at the top of one of the poorer and older streets, and has lent a certain disrelish ever since to the name of 'Lizzie'; the other was a boy whom I had seen charging at his desk with his head lowered, like a bull. Of the mistresses I can see a tallish one, with pink complexion, high cheekbones and sleek light brown hair, whose home was a confectioner's shop, so that it happened that she gave away sweets for slight merits; one dark and shorter, more likeable and hateable; and a stout, short, bustling head mistress in whom I never knew of anything but her appearance to prove her common humanity with the children and other teachers. I learnt easily: perhaps my memory would record the sweets I earned but not the punishments, nor yet the morning and afternoon labours, whether well or ill performed, of five days in the week. I had no elder brother, and the younger ones of three and one were not yet old enough to accompany me; if I had any friend with whom I walked or trotted home, embraced and embracing as I see children now, I have forgotten. Not that I was lonely, but that I was stung with no intense delight by company, nor with pain by lack of it. I knew boys and girls in several of the streets parallel to ours or crossing it. One or more of them was with me when I found myself somehow on the forbidden side of a black fence which divided the back gardens of one street from a meadow and cut short another street; there were trees and cows in the meadow, and a small pond not far from the fence. With one of these friends, a girl, I went home once and in her back garden I first saw dark crimson dahlias and smelt bitter crushed stalks in plucking them. As I stood with my back to the house among the tall blossoming bushes I had no sense of any end to the garden between its brown fences: there remains in my mind a greenness, at once lowly and endless. Why some children, whether my equals or old enough to protect me, were pleasant, and how, I cannot say. Their faces are invisible to me all except one: I can say only that some were fat and the eyes narrow, and that some girls had dark hair, others fair. The one that I can see has black curly hair, dark eyes and cherry lips; and she is smiling: her name was Tottie Armour. We picked sorrel leaves and ate them among the gorse bushes on Wandsworth Common. A railway ran across the Common in a deep bushy cutting, and this I supposed to be a natural valley and had somehow peopled it with unseen foxes. The long mounds of earth now overgrown with grass and gorse heaped up at my side of the cutting from which they had been taken were 'hills' to us, who wore steep yellow paths by running up and down them. Equal to them in height and steepness, and almost equal as playing grounds, were the hills of snow lining Northcote Road, the principal street, one winter. I remember the look of many of the streets, but as not a year has since gone by without my seeing them it is probably not their very early look, save in perhaps a few cases. The first was when I stood by the beerhouse at the bottom of one of them and watched what was happening fifty yards up in the roadway. A mad dog had run into one of the narrow front gardens and lay just inside the railings; a man on the other side with a pickaxe was about to kill the dog; and a small crowd had collected in the roadway. I do not know that I saw the blow struck, but the idea of sharp heavy steel piercing the shaggy hair, flesh and bone of a living creature has remained horrible and ineffaceable ever since. Another street which I seem to recall as it was then and as it soon afterwards ceased to be was one leading to Clapham Junction Station. It consists of a low inn with a red painted board up and a row of old dark small cottages mostly with longish front gardens and low wooden fences and a rustic outmoded look inspiring a sort of curiosity and liking as well as some pity or contempt.

If I cannot call up images of most of the streets as they were then, because I have witnessed the gradual development since, perhaps the reason is the same for my being unable to call up images of my father and mother or of my brothers. No. I have only one clear early glimpse of my father-darting out of the house in his slippers and chasing and catching a big boy who had bullied me. He was eloquent, confident, black-haired, brown-eyed, all that my mother was not. By glimpses, I learnt with awe and astonishment that he had once been of my age. He knew, for example, far more about marbles than the best players at school. His talk of 'alley-taws'-above all the way his thumb drove the marble out of the crook of his first finger, the speeding sureness of it-these betokened mastery. Once or twice I spent an hour or so in his office in an old government building. The presence of a washstand in a sitting-room pleased me, but what pleased me still more was the peculiar large brown carraway biscuit which I never got anywhere else. My father at this time gave or was to have given lessons to Lady Somebody, and he mentioned her to me once when we were together in his office. She became connected somehow with the carraway biscuit. With or without her aid, this rarity had a kind of magic and beauty as of a flower or bird only to be found in one wood in all the world. I can hear but never see him telling me for the tenth or hundredth time the story of the Wiltshire moonrakers hanging in a chain over a bridge to fetch the moon out, which they had mistaken for a green cheese, and the topmost one, whose hold on the parapet began slipping, crying out, 'Hold tight below while I spit on my hands,' and many another comic tale or rhyme. My mother I can hardly see save as she is now while I am writing. I cannot see her but I can summon up her presence. She is plainest to me not quite dressed, in white bodice and petticoat, her arms and shoulders rounded and creamy smooth. My affection for her was leavened with lesser likings and with admiration. I liked the scent of her fresh warm skin and supposed it unique. Her straight nose and chin made a profile that for years formed my standard. No hair was so beautiful to me as hers was, light golden brown hair, long and rippling. Her singing at fall of night, especially if we were alone together, soothed and fascinated me, as though it had been divine, at once the mightiest and the softest sound in the world. Usually perhaps there was a servant, but my mother did everything for us in the house, made many of our clothes and mended them, prepared and gave us food, tended us when sick, comforted us when cold, disappointed, or sorrowful. The one terrible thing I witnessed as a small child was my mother suddenly rising from the dining-table with face tortured and crying, 'I am going to die.' My father took her on his knee and soothed her. I had and have no idea what was the matter. For her younger sister I felt a similar affection and admiration, though less, and far less often exercised, for her visits were neither long nor frequent. The grace, smoothness and gentleness of her voice and movements gave me pleasure. My first conscious liking for the female body was at sight of her sitting less than half dressed in a chair, her head bent and one foot on to which she was pulling a stocking lifted from the floor. Years afterwards I used to think of this from time to time to envy the privilege of...