Chapter 9

To my seven-years' rule there are, however, many exceptions--little girls who keep the child's charm in spite of the changes which years and a newly developing sense can bring to them. I have met with some rare instances of the child being as much to us at ten as at five.

One instance which I have in my mind just now is of a little girl of nine, or perhaps nearly ten, and it seemed to me in this case that this new sense, the very quality which is the spoiler of the child-charm, may sometimes have the effect of enhancing it or revealing it in a new and more beautiful aspect.

I met her at Cromer, where she was one of a small group of five visitors; three ladies, one old, the others middle-aged, and a middle-aged gentleman. He and one of the two younger ladies were perhaps her parents, and the elderly lady her grandmother. What and who these people were I never heard, nor did I enquire; but the child attracted me, and in a funny way we became acquainted, and though we never exchanged more than a dozen words, I felt that we were quite intimate and very dear friends.

The little group of grown-ups and the child were always together on the front, where I was accustomed to see them sitting or slowly walking up and down, always deep in conversation and very serious, always regarding the more or less gaudily attired females on the parade with an expression of repulsion. They were old-fashioned in dress and appearance, invariably in black--black silk and black broadcloth. I concluded that they were serious people, that they had inherited and faithfully kept a religion, or religious temper, which has long been outlived by the world in general--a puritanism or Evangelicalism dating back to the far days of Wilberforce and Hannah More and the ancient Sacred order of Claphamites.

And the child was serious with them and kept pace with them with slow staid steps. But she was beautiful, and under the mask and mantle which had been imposed on her had a shining child's soul. Her large eyes were blue, the rare blue of a perfect summer's day. There was no need to ask her where she had got that colour; undoubtedly in heaven "as she came through." The features were perfect, and she pale, or so it had seemed to me at first, but when viewing her more closely I saw that colour was an important element in her loveliness--a colour so delicate that I fell to comparing her flower-like face with this or that particular flower. I had thought of her as a snowdrop at first, then a windflower, the March anemone, with its touch of crimson, then various white, ivory, and cream-coloured blossoms with a faintly-seen pink blush to them.

Her dress, except the stocking, was not black; it was grey or dove-colour, and over it a cream or pale-fawn-coloured cloak with hood, which with its lace border seemed just the right setting for the delicate puritan face. She walked in silence while they talked and talked, ever in grave subdued tones. Indeed it would not have been seemly for her to open her lips in such company. I called her Priscilla, but she was also like Milton's pensive nun, devout and pure, only her looks were not commercing with the skies; they were generally cast down, although it is probable that they did occasionally venture to glance at the groups of merry pink-legged children romping with the waves below.

I had seen her three or four or more times on the front before we became acquainted; and she too had noticed me, just raising her blue eyes to mine when we passed one another, with a shy sweet look of recognition in them--a questioning look; so that we were not exactly strangers. Then, one morning, I sat on the front when the black-clothed group came by, deep in serious talk as usual, the silent child with them, and after a turn or two they sat down beside me. The tide was at its full and children were coming down to their old joyous pastime of paddling. They were a merry company. After watching them I glanced at my little neighbour and caught her eyes, and she knew what the question in my mind was--Why are not you with them? And she was pleased and troubled at the same time, and her face was all at once in a glow of beautiful colour; it was the colour of the almond blossom;--her sister flower on this occasion.

A day or two later we were more fortunate. I went before breakfast to the beach and was surprised to find her there watching the tide coming in; in a moment of extreme indulgence her mother, or her people, had allowed her to run down to look at the sea for a minute by herself. She was standing on the shingle, watching the green waves break frothily at her feet, her pale face transfigured with a gladness which seemed almost unearthly. Even then in that emotional moment the face kept its tender flower-like character; I could only compare it to the sweet-pea blossom, ivory white or delicate pink; that Psyche-like flower with wings upraised to fly, and expression of infantile innocence and fairy-like joy in life.

I walked down to her and we then exchanged our few and only words. How beautiful the sea was, and how delightful to watch the waves coming in! I remarked. She smiled and replied that it was very, very beautiful. Then a bigger wave came and compelled us to step hurriedly back to save our feet from a wetting, and we laughed together. Just at that spot there was a small rock on which I stepped and asked her to give me her hand, so that we could stand together and let the next wave rush by without wetting us. "Oh, do you think I may?" she said, almost frightened at such an adventure. Then, after a moment's hesitation, she put her hand in mine, and we stood on the little fragment of rock, and she watched the water rush up and surround us and break on the beach with a fearful joy. And after that wonderful experience she had to leave me; she had only been allowed out by herself for five minutes, she said, and so, after a grateful smile, she hurried back.

Our next encounter was on the parade, where she appeared as usual with her people, and nothing beyond one swift glance of recognition and greeting could pass between us. But it was a quite wonderful glance she gave me, it said so much:--that we had a great secret between us and were friends and comrades for ever. It would take half a page to tell all that was conveyed in that glance. "I'm so glad to see you," it said, "I was beginning to fear you had gone away. And now how unfortunate that you see me with my people and we cannot speak! They wouldn't understand. How could they, since they don't belong to our world and know what we know? If I were to explain that we are different from them, that we want to play together on the beach and watch the waves and paddle and build castles, they would say, 'Oh yes, that's all very well, but--' I shouldn't know what they meant by that, should you? I do hope we'll meet again some day and stand once more hand in hand on the beach--don't you?"

And with that she passed on and was gone, and I saw her no more. Perhaps that glance which said so much had been observed, and she had been hurriedly removed to some place of safety at a great distance. But though I never saw her again, never again stood hand in hand with her on the beach and never shall, I have her picture to keep in all its flowery freshness and beauty, the most delicate and lovely perhaps of all the pictures I possess of the little girls I have met.

XX

DIMPLES

It is not pleasant when you have had your say, made your point to your own satisfaction, and gone cheerfully on to some fresh subject, to be assailed with the suspicion that your interlocutor is saying mentally: All very well--very pretty talk, no doubt, but you haven't convinced me, and I even doubt that you have succeeded in convincing yourself!

For example, a reader of the foregoing notes may say: "If you really find all this beauty and charm and fascination you tell us in some little girls, you must love them. You can't admire and take delight in them as you can in a piece of furniture, or tapestry, or a picture or statue or a stone of great brilliancy and purity of colour, or in any beautiful inanimate object, without that emotion coming in to make itself part of and one with your admiration. You can't, simply because a child is a human being, and we do not want to lose sight of the being we love. So long as the love lasts, the eye would follow its steps because--we are what we are, and a mere image in the mind doesn't satisfy the heart. Love is never satisfied, and asks not for less and less each day but for more--always for more. Then, too, love is credulous; it believes and imagines all things and, like all emotions, it pushes reason and experience aside and sticks to the belief that these beautiful qualities cannot die and leave nothing behind: they are not on the surface only; they have their sweet permanent roots in the very heart and centre of being."

That, I suppose, is the best argument on the other side, and if you look straight at it for six seconds, you will see it dissolve like a lump of sugar in a tumbler of water and disappear under your very eyes. For the fact remains that when I listen to the receding footsteps of my little charmer, the sigh that escapes me expresses something of relief as well as regret. The signs of change have perhaps not yet appeared, and I wish not to see them. Good-bye, little one, we part in good time, and may we never meet again! Undoubtedly one loses something, but it cannot balance the gain. The loss in any case was bound to come, and had I waited for it no gain would have been possible. As it is, I am like that man in _The Pilgrim's Progress_, by some accounted mad, who the more he cast away the more he had. And the way of it is this; by losing my little charmers before they cease from charming, I make them mine for always, in a sense. They are made mine because my mind (other minds, too) is made that way. That which I see with delight I continue to see when it is no more there, and will go on seeing to the end: at all events I fail to detect any sign of decay or fading in these mind pictures. There are people with money who collect gems--diamonds, rubies and other precious stones--who value their treasures as their best possessions, and take them out from time to time to examine and gloat over them. These things are trash to me compared with the shining, fadeless images in my mind, which are my treasures and best possessions. But the bright and beauteous images of the little girl charmers would not have been mine if instead of letting the originals disappear from my ken I had kept them too long in it. All because our minds, our memories are made like that. If we see a thing once, or several times, we see it ever after as we first saw it; if we go on seeing it every day or every week for years and years, we do not register a countless series of new distinct impressions, recording all its changes: the new impressions fall upon and obliterate the others, and it is like a series of photographs, not arranged side by side for future inspection, but in a pile, the top one alone remaining visible. Looking at this insipid face you would not believe, if told, that once upon a time it was beautiful to you and had a great charm. The early impressions are lost, the charm forgotten.

This reminds me of the incident I set out to narrate when I wrote "Dimples" at the head of this note. I was standing at a busy corner in a Kensington thoroughfare waiting for a bus, when a group of three ladies appeared and came to a stand a yard or two from me and waited, too, for the traffic to pass before attempting to cross to the other side. One was elderly and feeble and was holding the arm of another of the trio, who was young and pretty. Her age was perhaps twenty; she was of medium height, slim, with a nice figure and nicely dressed. She was a blonde, with light blue-grey eyes and fluffy hair of pale gold: there was little colour in her face, but the features were perfect and the mouth with its delicate curves quite beautiful.

But after regarding her attentively for a minute or so, looking out impatiently for my bus at the same time, I said mentally: "Yes, you are certainly very pretty, perhaps beautiful, but I don't like you and I don't want you. There's nothing in you to correspond to that nice outside. You are an exception to the rule that the beautiful is the good. Not that you are bad--actively, deliberately bad--you haven't the strength to be that or anything else; you have only a little shallow mind and a little coldish heart."

Now I can imagine one of my lady readers crying out: "How dared you say such monstrous things of any person after just a glance at her face?"

Listen to me, madam, and you will agree that I was not to blame for saying these monstrous things. All my life I've had the instinct or habit of seeing the things I see; that is to say, seeing them not as cloud or mist-shapes for ever floating past, nor as people in endless procession "seen rather than distinguished," but distinctly, separately, as individuals each with a character and soul of its very own; and while seeing it in that way some little unnamed faculty in some obscure corner of my brain hastily scribbles a label to stick on to the object or person before it passes out of sight. It can't be prevented; it goes on automatically; it isn't _me_, and I can no more interfere or attempt in any way to restrain or regulate its action than I can take my legs to task for running up a flight of steps without the mind's supervision.

But I haven't finished with the young lady yet. I had no sooner said what I have said and was just about to turn my eyes away and forget all about her, when, in response to some remarks of her aged companion, she laughed, and in laughing so great a change came into her face that it was as if she had been transformed into another being. It was like a sudden breath of wind and a sunbeam falling on the still cold surface of a woodland pool. The eyes, icily cold a moment before, had warm sunlight in them, and the half-parted lips with a flash of white teeth between them had gotten a new beauty; and most remarkable of all was a dimple which appeared and in its swift motions seemed to have a life of its own, flitting about the corner of the mouth, then further away to the middle of the cheek and back again. A dimple that had a story to tell. For dimples, too, like a delicate, mobile mouth, and even like eyes, have a character of their own. And no sooner had I seen that sudden change in the expression, and especially the dimple, than I knew the face; it was a face I was familiar with and was like no other face in the world, yet I could not say who she was nor where and when I had known her! Then, when the smile faded and the dimple vanished, she was a stranger again--the pretty young person with the shallow brain that I did not like!

Naturally my mind worried itself with this puzzle of a being with two distinct expressions, one strange to me, the other familiar, and it went on worrying me all that day until I could stand it no longer, and to get rid of the matter, I set up the theory (which didn't quite convince me) that the momentary expression I had seen was like an expression in some one I had known in the far past. But after dismissing the subject in that way, the subconscious mind was still no doubt working at it, for two days later it all at once flashed into my mind that my mysterious young lady was no other than the little Lillian I had known so well eight years before! She was ten years old when I first knew her, and I was quite intimately acquainted with her for a little over a year, and greatly admired her for her beauty and charm, especially when she smiled and that dimple flew about the corner of her mouth like a twilight moth vaguely fluttering at the rim of a red flower. But alas! her charm was waning: she was surrounded by relations who adored her, and was intensely self-conscious, so that when after a year her people moved to a new district, I was not sorry to break the connection, and to forget all about her.

Now that I had seen and remembered her again, it was a consolation to think that she was already in her decline when I first knew and was attracted by her and on that account had never wholly lost my heart to her. How different my feelings would have been if after pronouncing that irrevocable judgment, I had recognised one of my vanished darlings--one, say, like that child on Cromer Beach, or of dozens of other fairylike little ones I have known and loved, and whose images are enduring and sacred!

XXI

WILD FLOWERS AND LITTLE GIRLS

Thinking of the numerous company of little girls of infinite charm I have met, and of their evanishment, I have a vision of myself on horseback on the illimitable green level pampas, under the wide sunlit cerulean sky in late September or early October, when the wild flowers are at their best before the wilting heats of summer.

Seeing the flowers so abundant, I dismount and lead my horse by the bridle and walk knee-deep in the lush grass, stooping down at every step to look closely at the shy, exquisite blooms in their dewy morning freshness and divine colours. Flowers of an inexpressible unearthly loveliness and unforgettable; for how forget them when their images shine in memory in all their pristine morning brilliance!

That is how I remember and love to remember them, in that first fresh aspect, not as they appear later, the petals wilted or dropped, sun-browned, ripening their seed and fruit.

And so with the little human flowers. I love to remember and think of them as flowers, not as ripening or ripened into young ladies, wives, matrons, mothers of sons and daughters.

As little girls, as human flowers, they shone and passed out of sight. Only of one do I think differently, the most exquisite among them, the most beautiful in body and soul, or so I imagine, perhaps because of the manner of her vanishing even while my eyes were still on her. That was Dolly, aged eight, and because her little life finished then she is the one that never faded, never changed.

Here are some lines I wrote when grief at her going was still fresh. They were in a monthly magazine at that time years ago, and were set to music, although not very successfully, and I wish it could be done again.

Should'st thou come to me again From the sunshine and the rain, With thy laughter sweet and free, O how should I welcome thee!

Like a streamlet dark and cold Kindled into fiery gold By a sunbeam swift that cleaves Downward through the curtained leaves;

So this darkened life of mine Lit with sudden joy would shine, And to greet thee I should start With a great cry in my heart.

Back to drop again, the cry On my trembling lips would die: Thou would'st pass to be again With the sunshine and the rain.

XXII

A LITTLE GIRL LOST

Yet once more, O ye little girls, I come to bid you a last good-bye--a very last one this time. Not to you, living little girls, seeing that I must always keep a fair number of you on my visiting list, but to a fascinating theme I had to write about. For I did really and truly think I had quite finished with it, and now all at once I find myself compelled by a will stronger than my own to make this one further addition. The will of a little girl who is not present and is lost to me--a wordless message from a distance, to tell me that she is not to be left out of this gallery. And no sooner has her message come than I find there are several good reasons why she should be included, the first and obvious one being that she will be a valuable acquisition, an ornament to the said gallery. And here I will give a second reason, a very important one (to the psychological minded at all events), but not the most important of all, for that must be left to the last.

In the foregoing impressions of little girls I have touched on the question of the child's age when that "little agitation in the brain called thought," begins. There were two remarkable cases given; one, the child who climbed upon my knee to amaze and upset me by her pessimistic remarks about life; the second, my little friend Nesta--that was her name and she is still on my visiting list--who revealed her callow mind striving to grasp an abstract idea--the idea of time apart from some visible or tangible object. Now these two were aged five years; but what shall we say of the child, the little girl-child who steps out of the cradle, so to speak, as a being breathing thoughtful breath?

It makes me think of the cradle as the cocoon or chrysalis in which, as by a miracle (for here natural and supernatural seem one and the same), the caterpillar has undergone his transformation and emerging spreads his wings and forthwith takes his flight a full-grown butterfly with all its senses and faculties complete.

Walking on the sea front at Worthing one late afternoon in late November, I sat down at one end of a seat in a shelter, the other end being occupied by a lady in black, and between us, drawn close up to the seat, was a perambulator in which a little girl was seated. She looked at me, as little girls always do, with that question--What are you? in her large grey intelligent eyes. The expression tempted me to address her, and I said I hoped she was quite well.

"O yes," she returned readily. "I am quite well, thank you."

"And may I know how old you are?"

"Yes, I am just three years old."

I should have thought, I said, that as she looked a strong healthy child she would have been able to walk and run about at the age of three.

She replied that she could walk and run as well as any child, and that she had her pram just to sit and rest in when tired of walking.

Then, after apologising for putting so many questions to her, I asked her if she could tell me her name.

"My name," she said, "is Rose Mary Catherine Maude Caversham," or some such name.

"Oh!" exclaimed the lady in black, opening her lips for the first time, and speaking sharply. "You must not say all those names! It is enough to say your name is Rose."

The child turned and looked at her, studying her face, and then with heightened colour and with something like indignation in her tone, she replied: "That _is_ my name! Why should I not tell it when I am asked?"

The lady said nothing, and the child turned her face to me again.

I said it was a very pretty name and I had been pleased to hear it, and glad she told it to me without leaving anything out.

Silence still on the part of the lady.

"I think," I resumed, "that you are a rather wonderful child;--have they taught you the ABC?"

"Oh no, they don't teach me things like that--I pick all that up."

"And one and one make two--do you pick that up as well?"

"Yes, I pick that up as well."

"Then," said I, recollecting Humpty Dumpty's question in arithmetic to Alice, "how much is one-an'-one-an'-one-an'-one-an'-one-an'-one?"--speaking it as it should be spoken, very rapidly.

She looked at me quite earnestly for a moment, then said, "And can _you_ tell me how much is two-an'-two-an'-two-an'-two-an'-two-an'-two?"--and several more two's all in a rapid strain.

"No," I said, "you have turned the tables on me very cleverly. But tell me, do they teach you nothing?"

"Oh yes, they teach me something!" Then dropping her head a little on one side and lifting her little hands she began practising scales on the bar of her pram. Then, looking at me with a half-smile on her lips, she said: "That's what they teach me."

After a little further conversation she told me she was from London, and was down with her people for their holiday.

I said it seemed strange to me she should be having a holiday so late in the season. "Look," I said, "at that cold grey sea and the great stretch of sand with only one group of two or three children left on it with their little buckets and spades."