Autobiographyof a Child

By HANNAH LYNCH

New York

Dodd, Mead & Company 1899

Copyright, 1898, By Dodd, Mead and Company

Chapter I. LOOKING BACKWARD.

The picture is clear before me of the day I first walked. My mother, a handsome, cold-eyed woman, who did not love me, had driven out from town to nurse's cottage. I shut my eyes, and I am back in the little parlour with its spindle chairs, an old-fashioned piano with green silk front, its pink-flowered wall-paper, and the two wonderful black-and-white dogs on the mantelpiece. There were two pictures I loved to gaze upon—Robert Emmett in the dock, and Mary Stuart saying farewell to France. I do not remember my mother's coming or going. Memory begins to work from the moment nurse put me on a pair of unsteady legs. There were chairs placed for me to clutch, and I was coaxingly bidden to toddle along, "over to[Pg 2] mamma." It was very exciting. First one chair had to be reached, then another fallen over, till a third tumbled me at my mother's feet. I burst into a passion of tears, not because of the fall, but from terror at finding myself so near my mother. Nurse gathered me into her arms and began to coo over me, and here the picture fades from my mind.

My nurse loved me devotedly, and of course spoiled me. Most of the villagers helped her in this good work, so that the first seven years of my childhood, in spite of baby-face unblest by mother's kiss, were its happiest period. Women who do not love their children do well to put them out to nurse. The contrast of my life at home and the years spent with these rustic strangers is very shocking. The one petted, cherished, and untroubled; the other full of dark terrors and hate, and a loneliness such as grown humanity cannot understand without experience of that bitterest of all tragedies—unloved and ill-treated childhood. But I was only reminded of my sorrow at nurse's on the rare occasion of my mother's visits, or when nurse once a month put me into my best clothes, after washing my face with blue mottled soap—a thing I detested—and carried me off on the mail-car to[Pg 3] town to report my health and growth. This was a terrible hour for me. From a queen I fell to the position of an outcast. My stepfather alone inspired me with

confidence. He was a big handsome man with a pleasant voice, and he was always kind to me in a genial, thoughtless way. He would give me presents which my mother would angrily seize from me and give to her other children, not from love, for she was hardly kinder to them than to me, but from an implacable passion to wound, to strike the smile from the little faces around her, to silence a child's laughter with terror of herself. She was a curious woman, my mother. Children seemed to inspire her with a vindictive animosity, with a fury for beating and banging them, against walls, against chairs, upon the ground, in a way that seems miraculous to me now how they were saved from the grave and she from the dock.

She had a troop of pretty engaging children, mostly girls, only one of whom she was ever known to kiss or caress, and to the others she was worse than the traditional stepmother of fairy tale. It was only afterwards I learned that those proud creatures I, in my abject solitude, hated and envied, lived in the same deadly fear[Pg 4] of her with which her cold blue eyes and thin cruel lips inspired me with.

But there were, thank God! many bright hours for me, untroubled by her shadow. I was a little sovereign lady in my nurse's kindly village, admired and never thwarted. I toddled imperiously among a small world in corduroy breeches and linsey skirts, roaming unwatched the fields and lanes from daylight until dark. We sat upon green banks and made daisy chains, and dabbled delightedly with the sand of the pond edges, while we gurgled and chattered and screamed at the swans.

The setting of that nursery biography is vague. It seemed to me that the earth was made up of field beyond field, and lanes that ran from this world to the next, with daisies that never could be gathered, they were so many; and an ocean since has impressed me less with the notion of immensity of liquid surface than the modest sheet of water we called the Pond. Years afterwards I walked out from town to that village, and how small the pond was, how short the lanes, what little patches for fields so sparsely sprinkled with daisies! A more miserable disillusionment I have not known.

I have always marvelled at the roll of [Pg 5]reminiscences and experiences of childhood told consecutively and with coherence. Children live more in pictures, in broken effects, in unaccountable impulses that lend an unmeasured significance to odd trifles to the exclusion of momentous facts, than in story. This alone prevents the harmonious fluency of biography in an honest account of our childhood. Memory is a random vagabond, and plays queer tricks with proportion. It dwells on pictures of relative unimportance, and revives incidents of no practical value in the shaping of our lives. Its industry is that of the idler's, wasteful, undocumentary, and untrained. For vividness without detail, its effects may be compared with a canvas upon which a hasty dauber paints a background of every obscure tint in an inextricable confusion, and relieves it with sharply defined strokes of bright colour.

Jim Cochrane, my everyday papa, as I called him, was a sallow-faced man with bright black eyes, which he winked at me over the brim of his porter-measure, as he refreshed himself at the kitchen fire after a hard day's work. He was an engine-driver, and once took me on the engine with him to the nearest station, he and a comrade holding me tight between them, while[Pg 6] I shrieked and chattered in all the bliss of a first adventure.

This is a memory of sensation, not of sight. I recall the rush through the air, the sting, like needle-points against my cheeks and eyelids, of the bits of coal that flew downward from the roll of smoke, the shouting men laughing and telling me not to be afraid, the red glare of the furnace whenever they slid back the grate opening, the whiff of fright and delight that thrilled me, and, above all, the confidence I had that I was safe with nurse's kind husband.

Poor Jim! His was the second dead face I looked upon without understanding death. The ruthless disease of the Irish peasant was consuming him then, and he died before he had lived half his life through.

[Pg 7]

Chapter II. MARY JANE.

Mary Jane was my first subject and my dearest friend. She lived in a little cottage at the top of the village that caught a tail-end view of the pond and the green from the back windows.

It is doubtful if I ever knew what calling her father followed, and I have forgotten his name. But Mary Jane I well remember, and the view from those back windows. She was older than I, and was a very wise little woman, without my outbursts of high spirits and inexplicable reveries. She had oiled black curls, the pinkest of cheeks, and black eyes with a direct and resolute look in them, and she read stories that did not amuse or interest me greatly, because they were chiefly concerned with good everyday boys and girls. She tried to still a belief in fairies by transforming them into angels, but she made splendid daisy chains, and she could balance herself like a bird upon the branches that overhung the pond.

[Pg 8]

Here she would swing up and down in fascinating peril, her black curls now threatening confusion with the upper branches, her feet then skimming the surface of the water. It was a horrible joy to watch her and calculate the moment when the water would close over branch and boots and curls.

My first attempt to imitate her resulted in my own immersion, and a crowd to the rescue from the nearest public-house. After the shock and the pleasant discovery that I was not drowned, and was really nothing the worse for my bath, I think I enjoyed the sensation of being temporarily regarded in the light of a public personage. But Mary Jane howled in a rustic abandonment to grief. She told me afterwards she expected to be taken to prison, and believed the Queen would sentence her to be hanged. It took longer to comfort her than to doctor me.

It was some time after that before I again attempted to swing upon the branches over the pond, but contented myself with feeding the swans from the bank upon a flat nauseous cake indigenous to the spot, I believe, which a shrivelled old woman used to sell us at a stall hard by. There were flower-beds and a rural châlet near the pond, which now leads me to conclude[Pg 9] that the green was a single-holiday resort, for I remember a good deal of cake-crumbs, orange-peels, and empty ginger-beer bottles about the place.

The old woman was very popular with us. Even when we had no pennies to spend, she would condescend to chat with us as long as we cared to linger about her stall of delights, and she sometimes wound up the conversation by the gift of our favourite luxury, a crab-apple.

I fear there was not one of us that would not cheerfully have signed away our future both here and hereafter for an entire trayful of crab-apples. Each tray held twelve, placed two and two, like school-ranks; and I know not which were the more bewitching to the eye, the little trays or the demure double rows of little apples. The child rich enough to hold out a pinafore for Bessy to wreck this harmony of tray and line by pouring twelve heavenly balls into it, asked nothing more from life in the way of pleasure.

The pride of Mary Jane's household was an album containing views of New York, whither Mary Jane's eldest brother had gone. New York, his mother told us, was in America. The difficulty for my understanding was to explain how any place so big as New York could find[Pg 10] another place big enough to stand in. Why was New York in America and not America in New York?

Neither Mary Jane nor her mother could make anything of my question. They said you went across the sea in a ship to New York, and when they added that the sea was all water, I immediately thought that they must mean the pond, and that if I once got to the other side of it I should probably find America and New York.

Until then I had believed the other side of the pond to be heaven, because the sky seemed to touch the tops of the trees. But it was nicer to think of it as America, because there was a greater certainty of being able to get back from America than from heaven,—above all, when I was so unexpectedly made acquainted with the extremely disagreeable method by which little children are transported thither.

I do not know where nurse can have taken Mary Jane and me once. I have for years cherished the idea that it was to Cork, which was a long way off; but I am assured since that she never took me anywhere in a train, and that certainly I never was in Cork.

This is a mystery to me, for the most vivid recollection of those early years is a train [Pg 11]journey with nurse and Mary Jane. I remember the train steaming slowly into a station: the hurry, the bustle, the different tone of voices round me, and Mary Jane's knowing exclamation, "Angela, this is Cork, one of the biggest towns of Ireland—as fine, they say, as Dublin."

Now, if I were never in Cork, never travelled with nurse and Mary Jane, will any one explain to me how I came to remember those words so distinctly? Odder still, I am absolutely convinced that nurse took my hand in an excited grasp, and led me, bewildered and enchanted, through interminable streets full of such a diversity of objects and interests as dazed my imagination like a blow. Not that I was unacquainted with city aspects; but this was all so different, so novel, so much more brilliant than the familiar capital!

I remember the vivid shock of military scarlet in a luminous atmosphere, and smiling foreign faces, and several ladies stopped to look at me and cry, "Oh, the little angel!" I was quite the ideal wax doll, pretty, delicate, and abnormally fair. I believe Mary Jane worshipped me because of the whiteness of my skin and for my golden hair.

Memories of this journey I never made and[Pg 12] of this town I never visited do not end here. After eternal wanderings through quite the liveliest streets I have ever known, without remembrance of stopping, of entrance or greetings, I find myself in an unfamiliar room with nurse, Mary Jane, a strange lady, and my mother. My mother was dressed in pale green poplin, and looked miraculously beautiful. I know the dress was poplin, because nurse said so when I touched the long train and wondered at its stiffness.

She looked at me coldly, and said to nurse—

"That child has had sunstroke. I never saw her so red. You must wash her in new milk."

Whereupon she rang a bell, and cried out to somebody I did not see to fetch a basin of milk and a towel. I shuddered at the thought that perhaps my mother would wash my face instead of nurse, for I dreaded nothing so much as contact with that long white hand of sculptural shape.

Among the mysteries of my life nothing seems so strange to me as the depth of this physical antipathy to my mother. The general reader to whom motherhood is so sacred will not like to read of it. But to suppress the most passionate instinct of my nature, would be to suppress the[Pg 13] greater part of my mental and physical sufferings. As a baby I went into convulsions, I am told, if placed in my mother's arms. As a child, a girl, nothing has been so dreadful to me as the most momentary endurance of her touch.

Once when I was threatened with congestion of the brain from over-study, I used to lie in frenzied apprehension of the feel of her hand on my brow, and she was hardly visible in the doorway before a nervous shudder shook my frame, and voice was left me to mutter, "Don't touch me! oh, don't touch me!" Her glance was quite as repulsive to me, and I remember how I used to feel as if some one were walking over my grave the instant those unsmiling blue eyes fell upon me. An instinct stronger than will, even in advanced girlhood, inevitably compelled me to change my seat to get without their range.

I recall this feeling, to-day quite dead, as part of my childhood's sufferings, and I wonder that the woman who inspired it should in middle life appear to me a woman of large and liberal and generous character, whose foibles and whose rough temper in perspective have acquired rather a humorous than an antipathetic aspect.[Pg 14] But children, but girls, are not humorists, and they take life and their elders with a lamentable gravity.

On this occasion it was my mother who washed my face in new milk. The fragrance and coolness of the milk were delicious, if only a rougher and coarser hand had rubbed my cheeks.

While still submitting to the process, I stared eagerly round the room. There was a grand piano in black polished wood, the sofa was blue velvet and black wood, and the carpet a very deep blue. The air smelt of gillyflowers, and there were big bunches in several vases. Yet my mother assures me she never met me at Cork or elsewhere, never washed my face in new milk, is unacquainted with that black piano, the blue velvet sofa, and the gillyflowers.

She admits she did possess a pale green robe of poplin with an enormous train, bought for a public banquet given to distinguished Americans, but doubts if I ever saw it. Nurse, whom I questioned years after, laughed at the idea as at a nightmare.

Still that journey to Cork, Mary Jane's words and my mother's, the bowl of new milk, the green poplin dress, the blue-and-black sofa, the[Pg 15] grand piano, and the gillyflowers, remain the strongest haunting vision of those years.

The first sampler I ever saw was worked by Mary Jane. I associate the alphabet in red and green wool with shining blue-black curls behind a bright-green tracery of foliage upon a blue sky.

Mary Jane used to sit upon a high bank, and work assiduously at her sampler. I thought her achievement very wonderful, but I own I never could see anything in coloured wools and a needle to tempt an imaginative child. So much sitting still was dull, and the slow growth of letters or sheep or flowers exasperating to young nerves on edge. My affection for Mary Jane, however, was so strong, that I gallantly endeavoured to learn from her, but it was in the butterfly season, and there was my friend Johnny Burke racing past after a splendid white butterfly.

What was the letter "B" in alternate stitches of red and green in comparison with the capture of that butterfly?

So the child, the poet tells us, is always mother of the woman, and not even the sane and sobering influence of the years has taught me that serious matters are of greater consequence than the catching of some beautiful [Pg 16]butterfly. As I bartered childhood to agreeable impulses, so have I bartered youth and middle age, and if I now am a bankrupt in the face of diminishing impulses, who is to blame, after all, but perverse and precarious nature?

What became of Mary Jane I have never known. Upon my memory she is eternally impaled: a child of indefinite years from eight to eleven, with oily ringlets and clear black eyes, pink-cheeked, smiling, over-staid for her age (except in the matter of swinging recklessly over the pond), working samplers, telling a group of unlettered babies exceedingly moral tales, devoted to me and to a snub-nosed doll I abhorred; with inexhaustible gifts, including a complete knowledge of the views of New York, an enthusiasm for that mysterious being Mary Stuart, and an acquaintance with national grievances vaguely embodied in a terror of Queen Victoria's power over her Irish subjects.

She must have grown into a woman of principle and strong views.

[Pg 17]

Chapter III. MY BROTHER STEVIE.

I must have been about five when my sovereignty was seriously threatened by the coming of Stevie. The ceremony of arrival I do not remember. He seems to have started into my life like Jack out of his box to kneel for ever in his single attitude,—upon a sofa, with his elbows on a little table drawn up in front of the sofa, and his head resting either on one or both palms.

Do not ask me if he ever slept, lay down, or walked as other children. I have no memory of him except kneeling thus upon the parlour sofa, looking at me or out of the window with beautiful unearthly eyes of the deepest brown, full of passionate pain and revolt. Only for my tender nurse did this fierce expression soften to a wistfulness still more sad.

That Stevie's head was impressive, almost startlingly great, even eyes so young as mine could discern. Auburn hair the colour of rich[Pg 18] toned wood, that only reveals the underlying red when the sun or firelight draws it out, and looks like heavy shadow upon a broad white forehead when no gleam is upon it; strong features not pinched but beautified by disease, and a depth and eloquence of regard such as are rarely looked for under children's lids.

The head expressed not pathos so much as tragedy. The frame I never saw; I cannot tell if Stevie were tall or dwarfed. A tipsy town nurse had dropped him down the length of two long flights of stairs, and a strong child's back was broken.

He did not bear his sorrow patiently, I fear, but with sullen courage and with a corrosive silent fretting. He hated me in envy of my health and nimble limbs, but what he hated still more than even the sight of my vivacious pleasures was any question about his health. I never saw a glance so deadly as that with which he responded to the kindly hope of Mary Jane's mamma that his back was feeling better. If a look could kill, Mary Jane had been motherless on the spot.

But alas for me! no longer a sole sovereign. My serene al fresco kingdom was invaded by the darker passions. I did not like Stevie. He[Pg 19] was a boy a little girl might be sorry for in her better moments, but could not love.