Comin' Thro' the Rye (Mathers)/Seed Time/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII.
"Virtue! a fig! 'Tis ourselves that we are thus or thus. Our bodies are our gardens to the which our wills are gardeners . . . . either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry; why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills."
The morning of my departure has arrived. The carriage is at the door, my boxes are on the roof, and if anything could console me at this trying moment, it would be the knowledge of the number of good things one bursting hamper contains. As it is, I am vaguely conscious of some pleasant morsel at the back of my mind that will by-and-by emerge to the front and comfort me. I have swallowed half an egg and a pint of salt tears for breakfast; I have wished papa good-bye, or rather I have aimed a damp shot at his nose, between the sheets (he is ill); and now I am standing in the hall, hugging my plentiful brothers and sisters all round, kissing them passionately with streaming cheeks and loud sobs, that might melt the heart of a stone. Finally, I bolt headlong into the carriage, where mother sits awaiting me, and burrow on the floor thereof. Charles Lovelace puts his head in at the window to squeeze a tiny packet into my hand. I cannot thank him, for my voice is attuned to nothing but howls; and away we go. I lift myself from my abased condition, to wave my dripping pocket-handkerchief at the group by the door, and find some small comfort in the fact that they are crying, every one, except Charles. The sight of their regret gives me a fresh access of grief, and I am just retiring behind my useless handkerchief, to indulge in a storm of sobs, when the carriage stops, and George Tempest comes to the window. "Good-bye," he says, taking my hand in his, and looking painedly at my blubbered, miserable face, "good-bye!" That is all he says, and yet he conveys as much sorrow and sympathy in the homely word as though he had talked for an hour. As we drive on again I begin a fresh bout that includes the leaving him in its grievances; and by the time we reach the station I am damp enough to give any one near me a cold, if it were winter instead of summer time. Jack fishes me out, and puts me in the waiting-room, with the rest of the light luggage, and, while the footman gets our tickets, he tries to revive my drooping spirits by sketches as to what we will do in the Christmas holidays. But oh! on this burning dog-day, Christmas seems a very, very long way off; besides, why should I not be having my holidays now, instead of looking five months a-head? I ought not to be going at all.
The train comes snorting in—how sickeningly hot it looks!—and somehow I am bundled into it. As it is starting, I lean out of the window, and, regardless of porters and his own disgust, I hug Jack round the neck with despairing energy and a splashing shower of tears. "Good-bye!" I cry, waving my wet rag and scarlet nose out of the window as long as he is in sight; then I tumble back into the carriage, plump into the arms of a nervous, spindle-shanked, elderly gentleman, who shoots me off his knees with such vigour that I take an involuntary seat on the opposite side.
It matters very little to me where I am, for my whole attention is taken up with hard crying—crying that is as unlike other people's tears as a floodgate is to a brooklet. I wonder if, when I am grown up, I shall get out of this habit of wasteful, exhaustive weeping? I always did save my troubles up into a lump and clear them all off at once. It takes me some time to begin, but when I do I don't stop in a hurry. We are half-way to our destination before my nose and cheeks have lost their first glossy shininess, and the elderly gentleman has shut his gaping mouth of amazement. Thank goodness, I have mother; and after a while she brings me to a tolerable state of composure.
Charteris, the place to which I am going, is eighty miles from home: so it is evening before we arrive there—the last six miles being performed by coach through scenery that would delight me were not my heart so heavy. We stop before a long, low building, with a great many windows in two level lines. It is approached by a handsome carriage drive, terminating in a species of court, and the house door is entered by a porch. We are shown into a moderately large room, hung with maps. It has a stiff, schoolish air that chills me and prepares my soul for all manner of cold, barren, loveless laws and habits. What would I not give for our battered, noisy, disreputable old school-room at Silverbridge? The door opens, and Miss Tyburn enters, stately, imposing, grave. She scans me so closely as she takes my hand that I feel she is reading to the very bottom of my soul. While she talks to mother I study her face, which is an uncommon one: command sits on her forehead; intellect and power look out of her eyes: upon her lips passion and will have set their seal; over the whole countenance, and in the marvellously, perfectly formed head, is a remarkable air of penetration, determination, and clear common sense. Presently she asks mother if she would like to see the dormitories and schools, and we follow her along a glass corridor and into a dining-room, vast and square, with three large windows. The walls are hung with busts of Homer, Aristotle, Cicero, and all the grand old poets, senators, and orators. Over the mantelpiece hangs a picture of St. John and the Lamb painted in oils. We go through endless school and class-rooms, filled with girls who look with some astonishment at me as I walk behind my elders, and so upstairs to the dormitories, which are long and wide, with windows on both sides, and partitioned off into narrow bedrooms just large enough to contain a bed and a small square box, while a curtained shelf runs across from one side to the other exactly above the bed, and a thick curtain closes in the room at the entrance. We go downstairs again, and very soon mother takes her departure. She is going to sleep the night at the house of a friend who lives twenty miles away. Oh, mother! mother! as you drive away do you know what a wretched, wretched child you leave behind?
Ay! she knows, and her heart is every whit as heavy as mine. I am too much in awe of Miss Tyburn to do more than sniff noiselessly after mother goes; besides, I have literally no tears left. One can be sorrier, I am sure, when one's eyes are dry than when they are wet. Miss Tyburn speaks to me kindly—indeed I am a spectacle that might move any one to compassion—and sends for "Mary Burns," who presently comes—a gentle, fair, slim girl of fifteen, and into her charge am I given and dismissed. She takes me upstairs, and having washed my face and smoothed my hair, I go down with her to the school-room, where (for it is a half-holiday) about fifty girls are reading, writing, talking, laughing, moving about, and buzzing like a hive of bees. The noise comforts and reassures me. What I have dreaded was the stillness, the stiff formality of the life of routine; clearly my notions of female school life were mistaken ones.
On our arrival we are quickly surrounded, and I am chaffed, catechised, and overhauled in a sufficiently merciless fashion. Though somewhat taken aback, I prove however equal to the occasion; for I am not one of a large family for nothing she who could retain any of that mauvaise honte yclept bashfulness, or be unable to fight her own battles after the training I have had, would either be a vicious idiot or a solemn and self-satisfied prig. So I retort and riposte with a success that presently beats my assailants out of the field. They bear me no ill-will, though, any more than I do them; they do but seek to test the value of the metal, and small blame to them if on finding it to be false they cry out. I think they find I am not that, however; and though some hard knocks are exchanged, no malice is borne. By supper time I am feeling tolerably cheerful, but my heart sinks again as after prayers a chorus of "good-nights" echoes around me, and a storm of kisses, both deep and loud, beats on my astonished ears. There are about sixty females of all ages present, and they all kiss one another with a hearty vigour that sounds as if they liked it.
We are not a kissing family at home: there is much affection between us, but little sentiment. Save when we have quarrelled, or are going a journey, we rarely embrace each other. It is a matter of course to kiss mother whenever we can, but we never dream of indiscriminate caresses among ourselves—that must indeed be a wonderful gush of misery or affection that produces a hug. Therefore, lest I be pounced on and kissed in mistake for somebody else, I precipitately retire to my bed, where I sleep as soundly and well as though leaving home and going to school were a most regular, everyday affair.
An evil bell clanging through the pleasant tangle of a dream awakens me. Before I am half dressed it sounds again, but somehow or other I scramble downstairs behind the rest to the school-room, where lessons are gone through for an hour, while I look on; then prayers, conducted in a widely different fashion to that prevailing at home; then breakfast—good tea, good bread, sweet butter; then to church, where the service lasts half an hour. The church is scarcely bigger than a chapel, quite lovely in its dainty smallness, and far more richly garnished than are many more imposing edifices. The seats are of carved oak, every window is of stained glass—(I wonder why those strange stiff figures of saint and apostle, that violate every rule of art, impress us with the idea of a supernatural beauty that no amount of exquisite and correct drawing could afford?)—the east one, a soft blaze of colour through which the light falls on the tesselated chancel floor in glorious patches of amber, purple, green, and gold. It looks very hushed, and quaint, and solemn; and as I slip into my seat in the chancel, which is divided from the body of the church by a carved screen, a wonderfully strange, novel sensation steals over me. It seems so odd to be kneeling without papa's stern eye upon me, and all the dear brothers and sisters stretching out right and left, in goodly sober ranks. The thought of them nearly sets me off crying again, for I have given my eyes a good rest during the night; but I fight the tears back and make my responses with the rest.
The clergyman almost makes me jump as I look at him; I have seen the same face, only twenty years younger maybe, hanging up in papa's study between a print of Taglioni in her best days, and a sporting celebrity, name unknown. We have even studied this man's face with impertinent interest, thanks to a remark mother made one day to the effect that papa and he had been "old friends," and we have speculated often enough as to whether they ever kicked each other, or never fell out from sheer lack of opportunity.
I am sorry when the last "Amen" is spoken, and we step out of the dim cool church into the gaudy brisk day. I am sorrier still, when, at ten o'clock, I am summoned to the committee-room, and undergo at Miss Tyburn's hands a searching examination into the extent of my very limited mental capabilities, and to whatsoever questions are asked me on this, that, and t'other, write the answers down in a large volume that is called the committee-book, but is in reality a Book of Doom, in which in her time many and many a girl has written herself down an ass. That I do the same you may be very sure, and I presently retire with the proud conviction that in ignorance I have beaten all my predecessors, every one.
In the afternoon I began my real school life with needlework, over which in very good sooth my trouble begins, for though well versed in the arts of climbing and jumping, I am utterly ignorant of such gentle accomplishments as "felling" and "stitching." And so the day wears away, and the morrow comes, and very so on I get into the ways of my new life, and in spite of sundry homesick qualms and heart-sinkings, grow to love it very heartily. It has its ups and downs, its jealousies and bickerings, its hard lessons to be learned, and hard knocks submitted to; but none the less I find my school existence a wholesome, pleasant, happy one. There is no tyranny here. It is in a girl's own hands whether she gets on well or badly. She will not be censured for faults she has not committed, nor praised without just reason. Her work is plain and clear before her, and she can pursue it without let or hindrance. Every hour is well filled, every pleasure well earned, and the sleep that each night brings is sound and deep. Now and again I am seized with a passionate longing to see them all at home. I shut my eyes and picture them to myself so strongly that my spirit seems to go out of my body and stand in their midst; I wander in at the school-room door, and look on all their faces, one by one, and if they only knew I was there, if they spoke to me. I am sure I should hear them. . . .
I had a letter from mother this morning. She bids me use my time profitably and waste none, for it is more precious than gold. She need not be afraid: I know that now is my apprentice time, now that breathing space that is given to all young people, and which, once wasted, will come back to them never more. Somehow a girl's mind at school always makes me think of a field on which the seed is sown, which will either take root and ripen abundantly, or wither away, leaving it bare and unadorned. I never knew how really ignorant I was till I came here. I don't remember ever thinking about the matter, but I had a vague idea that I was a good deal worse than Milly, but rather better than Jack. Now I stand forth a confessed ignoramus, and am beaten at all points by pert youngsters of twelve and thirteen. Fortunately I know the nakedness of my mind, so there is a hope that at some future day it may be decently clad. It is curious that the more one knows the more acutely one feels one's bareness. Intensely, thoroughly ignorant people attain to a height of self-esteem, that the man who has spent a lifetime in amassing knowledge, only to find that all he knows is but a drop in the full cup of knowledge, can never hope to reach. My studies do not prevent my getting into plenty of scrapes; often and often my madcap pranks get me into hot water, but good luck pulls me safely through. We go for wonderful walks through such lovely country as Silverbridge could never boast. The school is built on the top of a hill, and on three sides the ground slopes away to the valleys. Following the road you descend this hill, and, crossing a bridge on the left, pass through the flower-bright fields, and so to the valleys through which a brook runs, leaping, sparkling, widening, narrowing, with a dainty border of forget-me-nots, and reeds that stand up stiff and straight, like sentinels guarding the pretty flowers. On either side banks and woods rise steeply to a great height. In spring time, the girls say, they are speckled all over with spring flowers, of which there are many curious and unknown species, never met with in flatter, duller regions. And oh, it must be a rare and delicate sight to see these picturesque slopes putting on their thousand tints of green and yellow, and one for which my eyes look eagerly. These valleys are strangely cool and deep and silent; not a sound breaks the stillness save the fretting of the water against the stones, or the infrequent song of the birds—clearer, sweeter here, I always think, than anywhere else. To me these valleys always seem to have remained just as they left God's hand at the creation of the world, they are so fresh, so pure, so untrodden with their vernal shades and dim, cool alleys. A deep peace broods ever over them, and the weary, struggling, sinful world seems very far away. Walking in them one feels the faint echo of some such exquisite delight as Adam and Eve knew when they walked together in the garden of Paradise for the first time, when it was all new, fresh from God's hand, and their souls were innocent and pure enough to taste its exceeding delicacy. I think none but the very young, or the very old can enjoy nature thoroughly; with the latter the heart and mind are dulled, and ordinary events and interests have little power over them, and they go back to that simplicity of mind that makes the treasures of the earth suffice without the excitement of the passions of the heart; while the very young look on it with unjaded eyes, and no restless longing after things they do not know and have never dreamed of. The nightingale has made his home down here. He sings at night to the brook, to the silent glades, to his mistress; and I know by the rapture of his voice that he rejoices in the beauty around him as keenly as though he had a human soul. Often I softly open my window to listen to his deathless song, and wish that I were in the valley below standing on the moonlit sward alone with the night, the little brown bird, and my own delight. And I grow to love these hills and valleys with an exceeding love that I never knew for Silverbridge; and know that some day when I lie a-dying, in fancy I shall go back to and visit them; I shall look with clear eyes on the purple brow of the hills, hear the running silver babble of the brook, and the trill of the nightingale will come to me out of the heart of the silence. . . .