The Retrospect

After dinner father took his arm-chair and his long-stemmed churchwarden, mother her indefatigable needle. Or perhaps she and I would walk out together to call upon our neighbours – those who received us in the keeping-room (aptly named), where we could enjoy the informal intercourse that was in character with the place, or those who invited us to the parlour, the primness, comfortlessness, reserve and artificiality of which were reflected in our demeanour, as in that of the lady of the house. When Mrs H. was summoned without notice to interview a caller here, she kept that caller waiting while she changed her gown, put on her best cap, got out her best decanters and silver cake-basket; her daughter similarly revised her costume before she allowed herself to be seen, although they always "dressed" for midday dinner and the afternoon, after their kitchen and farm work of the morning. But when we appeared unexpectedly, Mrs H.'s up-thrown hands and H.M.'s "Lawk-a-daisy-me!" would express not consternation but ready welcome; and in that dear old keeping-room, with its beamed ceiling almost on our heads, we were friends and not company, and could open hearts and mouths as freely as we liked. That is, the grown-ups could – not I. "Little girls must be seen and not heard," was the admonition addressed to me when I attempted to join in the conversation. My part was to listen, which I did so well that I could almost fill a book with the interesting family secrets and village scandals unconsciously confided to my retentive child's memory.

There was a lady spoken of who went to bed when her baby was dying, and who, on rising in the morning, showed disappointment that it was not dead, and resentment towards the Good Samaritan (H.M. herself) who had sat up with it all night, and whose skill had pulled it through. There was another lady who, having come into a fortune of thousands, had wept because a hundred or two belonging to it had been left to someone else, the reason of those tears being that the odd money would have enabled the weeper to refurnish her house without breaking into the rounded bulk of the big legacy. There was yet another, a devoted whist-player, who had been caught by some extraordinarily smart person in the practice of an ingenious swindle. She would say to her husband, clearly her partner in guilt as in the game, although somehow he escaped censure: "Dear, it is your turn," or: "How warm the room is!" or: "Come, go on," or "See what the time is " —i. e. drop some seeming innocent remark beginning with a certain letter, according as she wanted him to lead diamonds, hearts, clubs or spades. This was evidently regarded as a most horrifying tale, and I could not see why – for a long time. Nor was it easy to fathom the significance of that one about the governess and tutor, who were expelled together from a great house in the neighbourhood, because they had been discovered love-making when they should have been attending to their duties. The warning about "little pitchers" – dropped, it was fondly supposed, unnoticed by me – would now and then spoil the dénouement of a story; but there were dozens and dozens that came to me complete, to be understood in later years, if not at the time. On our way home from these casual symposia I would question mother upon points that puzzled me. Often she would say: "Never mind," or: "You would not understand"; but more often she gave me the information I wanted. She excused herself for this unfashionable weakness in a mother of the period by explaining (the plea for all indulgence) that I was "different from other children."

Five-o'clock tea was not afternoon tea. It was the family evening meal. Ham, brawn (we called it pork-cheese), or some fancy meat, cold, and laid out in slices on a plate, was there for sandwiching between bread and butter similarly prepared; or the savoury might be shrimps or crab, or radishes or cress; jams of great variety, and particularly cakes, filled the rest of the table space that was not occupied by the tea-tray, crowned with its hissing urn. And for this meal no white cloth was used; nor do I remember such a thing as a finger-napkin at any meal. It seemed to be the adjunct of the finger-glass, which we did not aspire to.

Tea was made as at breakfast, but not for us; we had ours in the nursery, of bread-and-treacle or bread-and-dripping, and our mugs held milk and water – except only on such great occasions as Christmas days and birthdays, when we were allowed what we called "gunpowder tea," which was our milk-and-water sugared and slightly coloured with a few spoonfuls from the grown-ups' teapot. In winter a pair of tallow candles illuminated the scene. The grandparents used wax candles – one grandfather used four at a time, and six for company, in six big silver candlesticks – but ours were usually made, like so much else that other people bought at shops, by mother's ingenious hands. Snuffers accompanied them. Some that I have seen were such works of art as well as curiosities that I wonder I have not heard of them amongst the hoards of bric-à-brac collectors. We possessed one beautiful pair in chased and pierced silver, the box patterned like a watch-case; and another of the same metal, finely worked, which had a spring inside the little door that snuffed the black wick into the receiver; and the trays of both matched in style and workmanship. I do not know what became of them – thrown away, probably, as antiquated rubbish, when oil lamps came in.

It was by the light of a tallow candle that mother did the exquisite needlework that nobody can do now, in these effulgent evenings. You almost need a microscope to see the stitches of her fairy-like baby-clothes. Father read his paper quite comfortably by the same dim flame. And people wore spectacles in old age only, and never complained, in my hearing, of ailing or deficient eyes. Why was that?

Although mother, when not needed for social purposes, sewed on until supper-time, my interminable seam was laid aside. I might thread beads or dress dolls or make kettle-holders. Also, the rule that barred story-books, as one would bar cards or dancing, during the serious work hours of the day, was relaxed after tea, and I could batten on "Peter Parley" and The Child's Companion and "The Swiss Family Robinson" – when I was old enough – without incurring the reproach attaching to the dissipated and idle. My earliest fairyland I found in pictures, about which I wove stories of my own. We took a small penny periodical filled with descriptions and illustrations of the contents of the Great Exhibition; this did not much appeal to me, although I remember its woodcuts well. I preferred the lovely Annuals, with their large-eyed and small-mouthed Lady Blessingtons, and the pocket-books, annuals also, which, in addition to their blank pages, contained prize poems and a variety of things, chief amongst them engravings of the country seats of the nobility and gentry. In these palaces and gardens I wandered in fancy, the possessor of them all. But the book I loved most, at the beginning of books, was a handsomely bound collection of tales or sketches, the author of which was (I think) a Mrs Ellis, and the moral – interpreted at a later age – something to do with the temperance question. The letterpress was a blank to me; the steel engravings bound together at the end of the volume I pored over by the hour. One was called "Lady Montfort parting from her Children." She was a beautiful creature in a spacious bare neck and a chaplet of roses, tearing herself wildly from the embraces of a large family trying to hold her back. She was going to have an operation for something, and the doctor was going to perform it with the drunkard's shaking hand and kill her. All I then knew was that she was parting from her children for the last time, and I used to weep over their fate and dream about it. Another picture represented a girl in a high-waisted, pillow-case-like gown and flowered coal-scuttle bonnet (a fashion gone out before I came in), accompanied by another, her maid, similarly but more plainly attired, leaning, from the outside road, over a gate belonging to an ideal parsonage house. I do not know whether drink had caused the late incumbent to die prematurely or to be expelled from his living, but in any case it was responsible for throwing his daughter upon the world. "Looking towards my home and knowing I nevermore should call it mine," was the touching legend inscribed upon the page. I would have given worlds to know how she got on, poor thing. The picture of an after-dinner gentleman being supported out of the dining-room by the butler and footman, and meeting some outraged relative at the door, was too subtly tragic for my understanding.

Children (according to their view) were sent to bed too soon; they always have been, and always will be. But that was not a grievance of mine. As a nursery child, not yet at the stage of learning letters, I practically lived downstairs with my parents – at such times as the youngest aunt was not there to prevent it. Father took me out on horseback about the farm, seated on a pad in front of him within his arms, mother in the gig with her when she went to her old home or shopping to L – ; and I believe I could always manage to sit up to supper, if I begged hard and long enough. I was a thoroughly spoilt child. Father's excuse was that I "could not spoil," but I am discounting that fond belief by displaying the spoilt child's base ingratitude – remembering how love carried to extremes indulged my heart's desires, and blaming that love in print! If, while shopping with my mother, I lost my heart to a ducky little parasol (it was of grey watered silk, with white silk lining, deep fringe and a handle jointed in the middle), I would find it next day, springing out on me from some artful ambush, "With Father's Love." For years, on opening the piano for practice, I used to find one spring day the first cucumber of the season, because I was particularly fond of cucumbers. He did not care what it cost, if only he could be the first to treat me. And I purse my lips at their dear shades and shake a reproving head. Still, the fact remains that I sat up of a night when I ought to have been in bed, and even at times when we had "parlour company."

For well I remember the whist tables that entertained our circle on winter evenings, in that room to the left of the hall at T – , and myself sitting at the elbow of one of my parents to watch the mysterious cards and the mutations in the four little piles of coin. It was the rigour of the game, without a doubt – no talk, no levity, but a still and solemn concentration upon the play; and I think I must have been rather a good child, after all, to have been allowed to be there to look on at it.

I remember one other evening pastime of the grown-ups at this period, and my curious participation in it – table-turning. There was an epidemic – probably the first – of enthusiasm for this method of occult research. And round the heavy "centre table," which was a feature of the drawing-rooms of the time, friends gathered to consult the oracle or to deride it, as the case might be. In our house they compromised on an open-minded curiosity tempered with the feeling that "there really must be something in it" – something supernatural, they meant. Interests and credulity were strengthened by my performances at the game. I was supposed to be a mere onlooker, "to be seen and not heard," as usual, but perhaps the chain of hands was not long enough, or perhaps I wanted to join in, and the let-the-little-dear-do-what-she-likes habit of the house admitted me to a place accordingly; at any rate, I one day found myself perched on a book-piled chair in the circle of earnest inquirers round the centre table, my thumbs in contact, the tips of my fourth fingers overlapping the tips of those on either side of me.

Long had the company sat in silent suspense, the solid piece of furniture – round-topped, and supported by a stout pedestal and claw feet resting on mahogany lions' backs – refusing to make a sign; but no sooner was my influence brought to bear upon it than it began to creak and groan, and was presently lumbering like a Wombwell elephant about the room, with us after it, scrambling over stools and other impedimenta to hold fast to it as long as possible. In recording events of so long ago, and particularly a matter of this kind, I wish to make full allowance for unconscious exaggeration; but that the table was declared too heavy to be pushed into such movements, and that I was frequently sent for to start them when older hands failed to do so, are circumstances that seem particularly clear to me.

I suppose, as my fellow-tableturners said at the time, there must have been "something" in me, as well as in "it," if I have rightly described what happened. I mentioned in my "Thirty Years in Australia" a German doctor who in his old age became a spiritualist, and tried hard to persuade me to lend myself to séance purposes, because, he said, I had that in me which marked me out as a medium. Might it possibly have been the same "something" that he divined? Well, I neither know nor care. The little mysteries are all embraced in the big Mystery, which would not be mysterious if we had the power to understand it. I was always that kind of a sceptic which believes in there being a reason for everything. When I was a girl I saw ghosts – unmistakably visible ghosts – and even in their presence, certain that they could not be flesh and blood creatures, and paralysed with horror to know it, I was able to keep this attitude of mind. Since nothing else ailed me that I knew of, I said to myself, "I am going mad"; and I was quite correct in my diagnosis, since what was really happening to me was the beginning of brain fever. I never had or showed the slightest leaning towards or interest in so-called supernatural phenomena. Occult "science" is to me what Mrs Harris was to Betsy Prig. The table-turning craze soon passed, as far as my people were concerned, and I never, even to that extent, dabbled in the black arts again.

The social evening, in those old days, began after the five-o'clock tea and ended with the nine-o'clock supper. This was a great meal, always. The cloth was spread for it as for dinner, and chairs drawn up and carving-knives flourished. The cold joint, with pickles, cold fowl, meat pie, the occasional crab or lobster, the cucumber in its season, any left-over trifles of sweet pastry and creams, cheese – with beer, of course – that was the meal which our forebears found it possible to sleep on, and (which is much more surprising) some of their descendants enjoy without discomfort to this day. In the four houses of the four feather-beds the custom has never been abrogated.

Supper over, and dishes returned to the pantry, the elders at once prepared for bed – to burrow in those mounds of feathers with their heads in nightcaps, and nothing but their own exhausted breath to live on the long night through. Doors and windows – the latter barricaded at nightfall with wooden shutters (hinged and flattened into the wainscoted window-frame by day) drawn over them and fixed with an iron bar across – were severally examined in the most careful manner by whoever was head of the establishment for the time being. Servants might shut the house, but the responsibility of making sure that it was safe for the dark hours was too great to be left to them. I suppose there was some reason for this in the social conditions of the time. Perhaps father's military (yeomanry) accoutrements – which I never saw him wear, but which he was said to have worn, and certainly possessed – had some connection with his actions in preparing his house of a night as if for an expected siege. I know that any suspicious noise occurring after he had done so brought him and his blunderbuss upon the scene in the shortest possible space of time. And that raids did sometimes take place was proved by the sad story of a friend of ours, whose melancholy visage was accounted for by the fact that he had once shot a burglar dead without meaning it. He saw an unlawful hand intruded through a sawn-out gap in his window-shutter, and, calculating that the hand was well above the owner's body, fired at it from within the room. Alas! On the shoulders of him who worked from the ground was an unsuspected second man, and he received the charge in his breast. It was told us of the heart-broken doer of that deed that "he never smiled again."

So, the guard having gone the rounds, the humdrum duties of the day – that never palled – were ended. Master and mistress, bearing key-basket and plate-basket (the plate having been duly counted), trudged upstairs to that bed which was virtually their bedroom also. And slept!