Following Darkness/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
Of my earliest childhood I can form no consecutive picture; I shall therefore pass over it quickly. Certain incidents stand out with extraordinary vividness, but the chain uniting them is wanting, and it is even impossible for me to be quite sure as to the order in which they occurred. Some are so trivial that I do not know why I should remember them; others, at the time, doubtless, more important, have now lost their significance; and countless others, again, I must have completely forgotten. But it occurs to me, on looking back deliberately, that I have changed very little from what I was in those first years. I have developed, but what I was then I am now, what I cared for then I care for now. In other words, like everybody else, I came into this world a mere bundle of inherited instincts, for the activity of which I was no more responsible than for the falling of last night's rain.
Of the dawning of consciousness I have no recollection whatever. Back farther than anything else there reach two impressions—one, of being set to dance naked on a table, amid the laughter of women, and the rhythmic clapping of their hands; the other, probably later in date, of what must have been a house-cleaning, stamped on my mind by an inexplicable fear of those flakey collections of dust which gather under furniture that has not been moved for a long time. By then I had certainly learned to talk, for those flakes of dust I called "quacks." I do not know where the name came from, nor why I should have disliked "quacks," but they affected me with a strange dread, and here was a whole army of them where I had never seen but one or two. Some stupid person running after me with a broom pretended to sweep them over me, and I started bawling at the top of my voice. Then, for consolation, I was lifted up to bury my nose in a bowl of violets, and the colour and sweetness of the flowers took away my trouble. Probably it was later than this that I first became aware of a peculiar sensibility to dress—not to underclothing, but to my outer garments. To be dressed in a new suit of clothes gave me a curious physical pleasure—a feeling purely sensual, and that must, I imagine, have been connected with the dawn of obscure sex instincts. Such things can be of little interest save to the student of psychology, and it would be tedious to catalogue them in full, but I have no doubt myself that if they, and others, had been intelligently observed, the whole of my future could have been cast from them. To me, I confess, they throw a disquieting light upon all human affairs, reviving that sombre figure of destiny which overshadowed the antique world.
Another and happier instinct which I brought with me from the unknown was an intense sympathy with animals. There was not a cat or dog or goat or donkey in the village that I had not struck up a friendship with. I even carried this sympathy so far as to insist on feeding daily the ridiculous stone lions which flanked the doorsteps at Derryaghy House. I don’t think I ever actually believed that their morning meal of stale bread gave much pleasure to these patient beasts, and I had with my own eyes seen sparrows and thrushes—who very soon came to look out for me—snatch it from them before my back was turned; still, I persevered, stroking their smooth backs, kissing their cold muzzles, just as I lavished depths of affection on a stuffed, dilapidated, velvet elephant who for many years was my nightly bed-fellow.
My only impressions of my mother go back to those days or, possibly, earlier—a voice singing gay songs to the piano, while I dropped asleep in my bed upstairs—and then, again, somebody lifting me out of this bed to kiss me, the close contact of a face wet with tears, the pressure of arms that held me clasped tightly, that even hurt a little. That is all, I cannot remember how she looked, or anything else. On the evening when she said good-bye to me and left our house, I knew she was crying, but, though it called up in me a sort of solemn wonder, I did not understand it, and went to sleep almost as soon as she put me back into my bed. It was not till next day that my own tears came, with the first real sorrow I had known.
There follows now a sort of blank in my recollections, which continues on to my ninth or tenth year. I do not know why this period should have been so unproductive of lasting impressions. It is like a tranquil water over which I bend in the hope of seeing some face or vision ripple to the surface, but my hope is disappointed. Nothing emerges—not even a memory of any of those ailments, measles and what not, from which, in common with other children, I suppose I must have suffered. Nor can I recollect learning to read. I can remember quite well when I couldn't read, for I have a very distinct recollection of lying on my stomach, on the parlour floor, a book open in front of me, along whose printed, meaningless lines I drew my finger, turning page after page till the last was reached, though what solemn pleasure I could have got from so dull a game—surely the most tedious ever invented—I now utterly fail to comprehend.
I was always very fond of being read to, except when the story had a moral, or was about pious children, when I hated it. The last of these moral tales I listened to was called "Cassy." I particularly disliked it, but I can remember now only one scene, where Cassy comes into an empty house at night, and discovers a corpse there. This had an effect on my mind which for several days made me extremely reluctant to go upstairs by myself after dark. "Jessica's First Prayer," "Vinegar Hill," "The Golden Ladder"—how I loathed them all! Every Sunday, after dinner, my father would take some such volume from the shelf, open if, and put on his spectacles, Holding the book at a long distance from his eyes, he would read aloud in a monotonous, unanimated voice, while I sat on a high-backed chair and listened, for I was not allowed to play the most innocent game, nor even to go out for a walk. These miserable tales were full of the conversions of priggish children; of harrowing scenes in public-houses or squalid city dens. Some of them were written to illustrate the Ten Commandments; others to illustrate the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer. They contained not the faintest glimmer of imagination or life: from cover to cover they were ugly, dull, unintelligent, full of death, poverty and calamity. On the afternoon when "Cassy's" successor was produced—I forget its name—in a state of exasperation, brought about by mingled boredom and depression, I snatched the book out of my father’s hands and flung it on the fire. I was whipped and sent to bed, but anything was better than "Vinegar Hill," and next Sunday, also, I refused to listen. Again, with tingling buttocks, I was banished to the upper regions, but really I had triumphed, for when the fateful day came round once more, the book-case was not opened, and I had never again to listen to one of those sanctimonious tales.
Fairy stories and animal stories were what I liked best, while some of the old nursery rhymes and jingles had a fascination for me.
"How many miles to Babylon?
Three score and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?—
Yes, and back again."
Was it some magical suggestion in the word "candlelight" that invariably evoked in a small child's mind a definite picture of an old fantastic town of towers and turrets, lit by waving candles, and with windows all ablaze in dark old houses? Many of these rhymes had this quality of picture making:
"Hey, diddle diddle,
The cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon:
The little dog laughed
To see such sport
When the dish ran away with the spoon."
That, I suppose, is pure nonsense, yet the magic was there. Before and after the cow made her amazing leap the stuff was a mere jingle: it was the word "Moon" that brought up the picture: and I saw the white, docile beast, suddenly transformed, pricked by the sting of midsummer madness, with lowered head and curling horns, poised for flight, for the wonderful upward leap, while a monstrous, glowing moon hung like a great scarlet Chinese lantern in the clouds, low against a black night.
At this time I had few books I cared for, but as I grew older, and my powers of understanding increased, I found more, for up at Derryaghy House was a whole library in which I might rummage without any other interference than that my father could exercise from a distance. Sometimes when I brought a book home which he did not approve of, he would send me back with it; but if I had begun it I always finished it. I had made this a rule; though, on the other hand, if I had not begun it, I let my father have his way.
Everything connected with the East had a deep attraction for me—or, shall I say, what I imagined the East to be—a country of magicians and mysterious talismans, of crouching Sphinxes and wonderful gardens. I delighted in the more marvellous stories in the "Arabian Nights," and I regretted infinitely that life was really not like that. To go for a walk and fall straightway on some wonderful adventure, that was what I should have loved. I remember poring over a big folio of photographs of Eastern monuments. Those mystical, winged beasts with human heads, in their attitude of eternal waiting and listening, touched some chord in my imagination: they had that strangeness which I adored, and at the same time they had an odd familiarity. I appeared to remember—but, oh, so dimly!—having seen them before, not in pictures, but under a hot, heavy, languid sun, long, long ago. The luxuriousness, the softness and sleepy charm of the Asiatic temper—I had something in common with it, I could understand it. The melodious singing of a voice through the cool twilight; the notes of a lute dying slowly into silence; another voice, low and clear and musical, reading from the "Koran"—where had I head all that? I pictured great coloured bazaars, where grave merchants with long white beards sat cross-legged and silent, where beautiful, naked, golden-skinned slaves stood waiting for a purchaser, where you could buy silken carpets that would carry you over the world, and black, ebony horses, swifter than light.
Mrs. Carroll had given me one of the upstairs rooms at Derryaghy to be my very own, and had let me furnish it myself from a store of old, out-moded furniture, which, for I know not how long, had been gathering dust and cobwebs in a kind of immense, low attic called the lumber-room. Everything was more or less threadbare and worn, but I had plenty to choose from, and the actual rummaging was as exciting as an adventure on a desert island. I had discovered a quaint little piano, with but two or three octaves of notes, and most of those silent, save for a tawngling of wires. This I thought must be Prudence Carroll's spinet, for it looked exactly like the one in her portrait; indeed, that had been my principal reason for bringing it downstairs. With Prudence Carroll I had been in love all my life, and sometimes, in the dusk, when I struck very softly one of the cracked treble notes of the spinet, I would imagine her spirit stealing on tip-toe up behind me to listen. Another discovery, and perhaps the most exciting, was of an old davenport, with a secret drawer at the back of it—not so very secret, perhaps, since I had found it without looking for it, owing to the weakness of the spring, and my own energetic dusting. Inside was nothing more interesting than some old accounts, written on discoloured paper, but anybody who opened it to-day would, I fancy, find more appropriate documents. . . . .
There was a cushioned window-seat, low and deep, and from it I could look out over the sea. In summer, with the window wide open, I could listen to it also, and to all kinds of lovely songs coming through it, dreamy and happy and sad. For there was a sort of undercurrent of dreaming that ran through my life. The romance surrounding the picture of Prudence Carroll, that peculiar, brooding quality of mind by which I could give to such things a kind of spiritual life that had for me an absolute reality, was, perhaps, only too characteristic of a mental condition which might unsympathetically be called that of perpetual wool-gathering. Though I played cricket and football, and bathed and knocked about generally with the other boys in the village, I had no close friends, and I dreamed of an imaginary playmate. For this playmate and myself I invented appropriate adventures. He had a name, which I shall not write here, and I still think he was an extraordinarily nice boy, but he dropped out of my existence about my fifteenth year. I had my secret world, too, where such adventures took place. Behind this inner, imaginative life must have lurked a vague dissatisfaction with life as I actually found it. Now and then I read something which appeared to me to describe my other world, and, as I chanced on such suggestions more frequently in verse than in prose, I became a great reader of poetry. The passages that echoed so familiarly, though so faintly, from my mysterious, lovely land, brought it up before me very much as the scent of a flower may call up a vision of a high-walled summer garden. Whether any reality lay behind it, I don’t know that I even asked myself; but, on drowsy summer afternoons, dream and reality would float and mingle together, and I would feel intensely happy.
As I write I would give much to be able to live over again one of those summer afternoons, when the air hung heavy with the scent of mignonette and roses, and Mrs. Carroll sat reading or working, while I lay in the grass on my back at her feet, and the low sound of the sea splashed through the silence of my sleepy thoughts, and the booming of a bee was the slumberous soul of June or July heat turned to music. In those hours my other world was very, very near.
Afterwards I sometimes wondered if there were a place where those lived days were laid away, or if their beauty, happiness and peace, must be quite lost. They had a quality of peacefulness that for me no later days have had: I seemed to dip deep into their cleansing dreamy quiet, as into a clear sea.
Other dreams I had, that were not so pleasant, but they came only at night. One I still remember vividly was unfortunately typical of many. I seemed to be walking down a street with another boy, when our attention was attracted by the high, bare wall of a house. There was something, I know not what, about this house, which made it different from its neighbours and aroused our curiosity. We noticed in the wall, almost on the street level, a small window. This window was open, and a fatal fascination drew us to it at once. I watched my friend crawl through, for we knew the house was empty; then I followed him, the opening being just wide enough to admit me. Inside, we found ourselves on a gigantic marble staircase, spiral in form, and winding up and down as far as we could follow it with our eyes. There were no windows except the one we had entered by, and it, somehow, was invisible from inside, yet the place was perfectly lighted. There were no landings, no doors, nothing but this staircase, absolutely uniform in its construction, with low, broad, marble steps which wound down and down, and up and up. The place resembled a vast, still well, and we could not hear the slightest sound as we stood listening. The steps were very shallow, and we ran lightly down. The other boy went more quickly than I did, and in a little while I lost sight of him, though I still heard his footsteps, growing ever fainter, till at least they died away, and the stillness closed in about me with a strange heaviness. I continued to follow him, but all at once I noticed that the stairs I trod were darker and stained with damp. A faint chill odour and feeling of damp and decay rose, too, into my face, and the light was growing dimmer. I knew I was going down into a great vault or tomb far below the ground, a charnel-house, an unknown place of death. I caught sight far below me of a light as of a lamp burning, and I had an intuition, a consciousness that came to me in a flash, that my companion had awakened something. This knowledge brought with it a memory of mysterious horror, a memory that I had been here before. Then, with an ever increasing terror, I began to run up the steps I had just run down, but my feet had grown heavy and my limbs weak. Up and up I hurried, seeing nothing before me but an endless stretch of winding marble stairs. I did not know where my window was, I might even now have passed it. I heard nothing, but I knew I was being followed, and that whatever it was that followed me was gaining on me rapidly. I could hardly breathe: an agony of fear shook me. Then I heard close to my ear the bark of a dog. It was the window. I dropped on my knees and squeezed my head and shoulders through; I was almost free when I felt myself grasped from behind and with a scream I woke shaking, panting, bathed in sweat.
There came a time when these nightmares occurred so frequently that I got to be able to waken myself out of them. While I was actually dreaming—when I would have run a few steps down the stair, for example—a sudden foresight of what was coming would dawn upon me, and by a violent struggle I would break through the net of sleep and sit up in bed. Many of these dreams were connected with. a dark, mahogany wardrobe which stood in my father's bedroom. When I had begun to dream and found myself in that room I knew something evil was going to happen, and I would watch the wardrobe door and struggle violently to wake myself before it should open. Even when I was wide awake, and in broad daylight, this so ordinary piece of furniture came to have, for me, a sinister aspect. It was odd that I should have suffered so from these grisly nocturnal terrors, for in ordinary life I was not in any way a coward. A feeling of shame made me keep them a profound secret, and as I grew older they diminished, till by the time I was fifteen they had practically ceased.
Perhaps I should here attempt some slight description of my father, whom I have already mentioned, and of my home. My father was the National schoolmaster at Newcastle, County Down, and our house was next door to the school. My bedroom window looked out over the sea, about a hundred yards away, and behind the house were the Mourne Mountains, and the Derryaghy estate, which took in the lower slopes of Slieve Donard. Our house, when the Virginian creeper that covered it was red, looked pretty enough from the road, but was poorly and even meagrely furnished. The most that could be said for it was that it was clean and tidy. The few attempts at ornamentation would have been better away—the two or three pictures, the hideous vases on the mantelpiece. My father had a strong liking for illuminated texts, and there were several of these, in gilt frames, in every room in the house, including the kitchen and the bath-room. What furniture there was was modern, cheap, and objectionable: it was characteristic of my father that he had never even bought himself a comfortable arm-chair.
He was a tall man, thin and grizzled, pale, and dressed always in an ill-cut, ready-made, black tail-coat and waistcoat, with dark gray trousers. I always disliked his clothes, especially the two shining buttons at the back of his coat. He wore a beard and moustache, both somewhat ragged, and his brown eyes were indescribably melancholy. His hands and feet were very coarse and large. There was power in his face, but there was a depressing lack of anything approaching geniality. He gave me the impression that he did everything from a sense of duty, and nothing because he took a pleasure in it. The seriousness of his expression was truly portentous: it was impossible that anything in the world could matter so much as that. He was not well-off—that is obvious from the position he occupied—but he lived in a way that was unnecessarily economical. He was by no means ungenerous if it were some case of distress that had come to his knowledge, but in ordinary life he was excessively near. The only luxuries he had ever permitted himself were these coloured texts, and they cost little.
When I was with him I never felt quite at my ease, and this made me sulky and perpetually on the defensive. I was not more with him than I could help, and as we lived alone together, with only an old woman who came in every day to look after the house and do the cooking, it must have been easy for him to see that I avoided his society. I never pretended to myself to have any particular affection for him, and I don't even know that it would have mended matters if I had.
One night, when I was about fourteen, I woke up in the dark, with the consciousness that it was very late and that I was not alone in my room. The next moment I knew my father was there, kneeling beside my bed. I lay absolutely quiet: I knew he was praying, and praying for me. Presently I heard him sigh, and then rise noiselessly to his feet, but I gave no sign. I heard him move away, I heard my door being softly closed, the faint click of the latch as it slipped into its place. I lay on with my eyes wide open, wondering why he had come in like this. I did not like it. It made me feel uncomfortable, as all emotions do when we are unable to respond to them. I believed my father cared for me far more than for anything else in the world, yet somehow that did not help matters. It was not the sort of love that begets love in return. Though he loved me, I felt he did not trust me, or rather that he believed I had an infinite capacity for yielding to temptation. By this time I understood that when my mother left home she had gone to somebody else. I knew at any rate that she was living, for she had sent a sum of money for my education, which my father had returned, though some scruple of conscience had made him think it right to tell me he had done so. But he explained nothing and I asked no questions. As I lay awake that night I thought of all this, and it occurred to me that it might have much to do with his extraordinary anxiety about my religious and moral life. He was afraid, and I lay awake for a long time trying to puzzle out what it was he was afraid of.
It was quite impossible for him to make me religious. For one thing, it was not in my nature. It was not so much that I disbelieved what I was taught of religion, as that these instructions aroused in me an implacable antagonism. I did not Uke the notion of an all-seeing God, for instance. Imperfectly grasped, this conception represented to my mind a kind of tyranny, a kind of espionage, which I strongly resented. Moreover, I detested Sundays and everything connected with them. When I went to church it was with a face like a thunder-cloud, and once there, with an in- credible obstinacy, I would shut my ears to all that went on, prayers, hymns, and sermon. This fact, combined with so many others, tended, as time passed, to make my relations with my father more and more strained, for he was religious in the narrowest and severest fashion. I remember his taking me, one Sunday evening, when I was between twelve and thirteen, to hear a preacher who had come from a considerable distance to hold two special services. The occasion stands out from all others, because it was the only one upon which I was startled out of my habitual attitude of sulky defiance. For the first three-quarters of an hour all went as usual, and when the sermon was about to begin I prepared myself to think of other things. But the text, or texts, delivered in a quiet, impressive voice, arrested my attention.
"For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences ; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven. . . . . Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams: and I will show wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood and fire, and vapour of smoke: the sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood And then shall they see the Son of Man coming in a cloud, with power and great glory."
In spite of myself the words thrilled me with their vivid, menacing suggestiveness, and I listened intently to what followed. It seemed apparent that the end of the world was at hand. The signs were taken up one by one, and it was shown, to my growing discomfiture, that all had been fulfilled: nothing remained but the sounding of the last trumpet, which, according to the preacher—he seemed even to regard it as highly probabl—might take place that very night. By the time he had reached this point my disquietude had become abject fear, and I joined fervently in the last prayer. But why had I never been told of this imminent danger? When we got back from church, it was a very subdued boy who sat by his father's side, a Bible open on the parlour table in front of him. I read with a feverish haste to prove my changed way of life, and, it must be confessed, also to keep off as long as possible the hour of bed-time. There was a horrible plausibility about what I had heard. The concluding words kept ringing in my ears. "I see no reason why it should not be this very night." "Wouldn't it, in fact, be just the kind of thing that would happen at night?" I asked myself piteously; and I was tormented by a dread of the hideous trumpet note, by a bloody moon, and by the apparition of dead and shrouded bodies, rising up with glaring eyeballs and tied jaws and all the mouldering signs of the grave—dreadful, galvanized corpses, risen from their wormy beds to meet their Lord in the air. At length I could put off my bed-time no longer. I could see my father was not convinced by the open Bible, and, with his usual suspiciousness, had become curious as to what passages I was so interested in. Ten minutes later, on my knees in my small, candle-lit bedroom, I was lying to my God of a tremendous love I had begun to feel for Him; but in spite of this I passed an abominable night. In the morning I continued my miserable hypocrisy, grovelling before this frightful Deity for Whom I had developed so sudden and demonstrative an affection, and Whom, at the same time, I begged naively not to come. Gradually, but not for several days, these terrors faded, receiving their death-blow when my father told me that all Jews must return to Jerusalem before the last day. Now there was a Jewish family living at Castlewellan, whom I thought I could keep my eye on, and as I had heard nothing of their moving I felt fairly safe.
Very quickly I became more emancipated as I began to think things out for myself, and a year later I could laugh at these early fears. My father told me a crude anecdote which he had read, I think, in Mark Pattison's "Memoirs." A man in a public-house in Leicestershire had used the oath, "God strike me blind," and instantly he had been struck blind by a flash of lightning. On becoming converted he had recovered his sight while taking the Sacrament. This edifying tale was, I believe, vouched for by a friend and disciple of Cardinal Newman's, but to me, I confess, it seemed as stupid and revolting as anything I had ever heard. My father declared it to be true, yet I secretly doubted it, and that afternoon, in my own room, standing by the window, I said aloud, and very deliberately," God strike me blind! God strike me blind!" I waited with a mingled trepidation and incredulity, as if I had thrown some mysterious bomb into the unknown. A sea-gull flew past the window, white against the dark autumn sky: the leaves of the Virginian creeper trembled and grew still. I said again and in a louder voice, "God strike me blind! But no flash of lightning followed. Down below, on the beach, the gray waves curled over with a slow musical splash. I looked into the sky, but it was calm and untroubled, and I decided that the story was a myth.
Most of my religious difficulties were, however, metaphysical. The conception of eternity was one I could not grasp. I could, in a vague way, figure myself as living on for ever, but I could not with the same facility move my mind backward. I seemed able to imagine that there might be no end, but I could not imagine that there had been no beginning. "If there had been no beginning, how could we ever have got as far as this? "I asked myself. "Where I am now—this particular moment—must be at a certain distance from something, or it cannot be anywhere. But if there is no beginning, then this moment cannot be any further on than yesterday was! "My brain grew dizzy with vain efforts to think impossible thoughts. I would break a stick and say, "God can make it that I haven't broken it. But if I shut my eyes, and when I open them the stick is whole, that will only show He has mended it. Yet He is all-powerful! "And so on, and so on; for whatever point I took up, sooner or later I was met by an insoluble problem. These problems were, nevertheless, just what fascinated me. The practical ethics of religion, that I should simply be good and encourage in myself a variety of Christian virtues—that kind of thing did not interest me in the least. As a matter of fact, I possessed singularly few of these virtues. It is true that I detested any kind of meanness or cruelty, that I was truthful, straightforward, and, in certain directions, loving and gentle enough; but I was egotistical, proud, and ludicrously self-conscious, quick tempered, flying into violent passions for very little, and, above all, I had a stubbornness nothing could move.