The Beth Book
the doctor came at last, and had time to attend to her, he pronounced
her to be a fine child, and declared that she had made a good
beginning, and would do well for herself, which words the nurse
declared to be of happy omen. Her father was not fit to appear until
late in the day. He came in humbly, filled with remorse for that
mis-spent night, and was received with the feeble flicker of a smile,
which so touched and softened him that he made more of the new child,
and took a greater interest in her than he had done in any of the
others at the time of their birth. There was some difficulty about a
name for her. Her father proposed to call her Elizabeth--after his
sister, he said--but Mrs. Caldwell objected. Elizabeth was Miss
Gottley's name also, a fact which she recollected, but did not
mention. That she did not like the name seemed reason enough for not
choosing it; but her husband persisted, and then there was a hot
dispute on the subject above the baby's cradle. The dispute ended in a
compromise, the mother agreeing to have the child christened Elizabeth
if she were not called so; and she would not have her called Eliza,
Elsie, Elspeth, Bessie, Betsy, or Bess either. This left nothing for
it but to call her Beth, and upon consideration both parents liked the
diminutive, her father because it was unaccustomed, and her mother
because it had no association of any kind attached to it.
For the first three months of her life Beth cried incessantly, as if
bewailing her advent. Then, one day, she opened her eyes wide, and
looked out into the world with interest.
CHAPTER II
It was the sunshine really that first called her into conscious
existence, the blessed heat and light; up to the moment that she
recognised these with a certain acknowledgment of them, and consequently
of things in general outside herself, she had been as unconscious as a
white grub without legs. But that moment roused her, calling forth from
her senses their first response in the thrill of warmth and well-being
to which she awoke, and quickening her intellect at the same time with
the stimulating effort to discover from whence her comfort came. She
could remember no circumstance in connection with this earliest
awakening. All she knew of it was the feeling of warmth and brightness,
which she said recurred to her at odd times ever afterwards, and could
be recalled at will.
Some may see in this first awakening a foreshadowing of the fact that
she was born to be a child of light, and to live in it; and certainly
it was always light for which she craved, the actual light of day,
however; but nothing she yearned for ever came to her in the form she
thought of, and thus, when she asked for sunshine it was grudgingly
given, fate often forcing her into dark dwellings; but all the time
that light which illumines the spirit was being bestowed upon her in
limitless measure.
The next step in her awakening was to a kind of self-consciousness.
She was lying on her nurse's lap out of doors, looking up at the sky,
and some one was saying, "Oh, you pretty thing!" But it was long years
before she connected the phrase with herself, although she smiled in
response to the voice that uttered it. Then she found herself on her
feet in a garden, moving very carefully for fear of falling; and
everything about her was gigantic, from Jane Nettles, the nurse, at
whose skirt she tugged when she wanted to attract attention, to the
brown wallflower and the purple larkspur which she could not reach to
pull. There was a thin hedge at the end of the garden, through which
she looked out on a path across a field, and a thick hedge on her
left, in which a thrush had built a nest at an immense height above
her head. Jane lifted her up to look into the nest, and there was
nothing in it; then Jane lifted her up again, and, oh! there was a
blue egg there; and Jane lifted her up a third time, and the egg had
brown spots on it. The mystery of the egg awed her. She did not ask
herself how it came to be there, but she felt a solemn wonder in the
fact, and the colour caused a sensation of pleasure, a positive
thrill, to run through her. This was her first recognition of beauty,
and it was to the beauty of colour, not of form, that her senses
awoke! Through life she had a keen joy and nice discrimination in
colours, and seemed to herself to have always known their names.
But those spots on the egg. She was positive that they had come
between her first and second peep, which shows how defective her
faculty of observation, which became so exact under cultivation, was
to begin with. Beth also betrayed other traits with regard to the
spots, which she carried through life--the trick of being most
positive when she was quite in the wrong, for one; and want of faith
in other people, for another.
Jane said: "Did you see the spots that time, dearie?"
"Spots just comed," Beth declared.
"No, dearie, spots always there," Jane answered.
"Spots _comed_," Beth maintained.
"No, dearie. Spots always there, only you didn't see them."
"Spots comed _now_!" Beth stamped, and then, because Jane shook her
head, she sat down suddenly on the gravel, and sent up a howl which
brought her father out. He chucked Jane under the chin. Jane giggled,
then made a sign; and there was Mrs. Caldwell looking from one to the
other.
To Beth's recollection it seemed as if she had rapidly acquired the
experiences of this first period. Each incident that she remembered is
apparently trifling in itself, but who can say of what significance as
an indication? In those first few years, had there been any there with
intelligence to interpret, they probably would have found foreshadowings
of all she might be, and do, and suffer; and that would have been the
time to teach her. To me, therefore, these earliest impressions are more
interesting than much that occurred to her in after life, and I have
carefully collected them in the hope of finding some clue in them to
what followed. In several instances it seems to me that the impression
left by some chance observation or incident on her baby mind, made it
possible for her to do many things in after life which she certainly
never would have done but for those early influences. It would be
affectation, therefore, to apologise for such detail. Nothing can be
trivial or insignificant that tends to throw light on the mysterious
growth of our moral and intellectual being. Many a cramped soul that
struggles on in after years, vainly endeavouring to rise on a broken
wing, might, had the importance of such seeming trifles in its
development been recognised, have won its way upward from the first,
untrammelled and uninjured. It was a Jesuit, was it not, who said: "Give
me the child until it is six years old; after that you can do as you
like with it." That is the time to make an indelible impression of
principles upon the mind. In the first period of life, character is a
blossom that should be carefully touched; in the second the petals
fall, and the fruit sets; it is hard and acrid then until the third
period, when, if things go well, it will ripen on the bough, and be
sweet and wholesome--if ill, it will drop off immediately, and rot upon
the ground.
Beth was a combative child, always at war with Jane. There was a great
battle fought about a big black velvet bonnet that Beth wanted to wear
one day. Beth screamed and kicked and scratched and bit, and finally
went out in the bonnet triumphantly, and found herself standing alone
on the edge of a great green world dotted with yellow gorse. A hot,
wide dusty road stretched miles away in front of her; and at an
infinite distance overhead was the blue sky flecked with clouds so
white and dazzling that her eyes ached when she looked at them. She
had stopped a moment to cry, "Wait for me!" Jane walked on, however,
taking no notice, and Beth struggled after her, whimpering, out of
breath, choked with dust, scorched with heat, parched with thirst,
tired to death--how she suffered! A heartless lark sang overhead,
regardless of her misery: and she never afterwards heard a lark
without recalling the long white road, the heat, and dust, and
fatigue. She tore off the velvet bonnet, and threw it away, then began
another despairing "Wait for me!" But in the midst of the cry she saw
some little yellow flowers growing in the grass at the roadside, and
plumped down then and there inconsequently to gather them. By that
time Jane was out of sight; and at the moment Beth became aware of the
fact, she also perceived an appalling expanse of bright blue sky above
her, and sat, gazing upwards, paralysed with terror. This was her
first experience of loneliness, her first terrified sensation of
immensity.
Then the snowdrops and crocuses were out, and the sky grew black, and
she sat on the nursery floor and looked up at it in solemn wonder.
Flakes of snow began to fall, a few at first, then thicker and
thicker, till the air was full of them, and Jane said, "The Scotch are
picking their geese," and immediately Beth saw the Scotch sitting in
some vague scene, picking geese in frenzied haste, and throwing great
handfuls of feathers up in the air; which was probably the first
independent flight of her imagination.
It is astonishing how little consciousness of time there is in these
reminiscences. The seasons are all confounded, and it is as if things
had happened not in succession but abreast. There was snow on the
ground when her brother Jim was with her in the wash-house, making
horse-hair snares to catch birds. They made running loops of the
horse-hair, and tied them on to sticks, then went out and stuck them
in the ground in the garden outside the wash-house window, sprinkled
crumbs of bread, and crept carefully back to watch. First came a
robin with noiseless flight, and lit on the ground with its head on
one side; but the children were too eager, and in their excitement
they made a noise, and the robin flew away. Next came a sparrow, saw
the children, saw the crumbs, and, with the habitual self-possession
of his race, stretched in his head between the sticks, picked out the
largest piece of bread, and carried it off in triumph. Immediately
afterwards a blackbird flew down, and hopped in among the snares
unconsciously. In a moment he was caught, and, with a wild shout of
joy, the children rushed out to secure their prize; but when they
reached the spot the blackbird had burst his bonds and escaped. Then
Beth threw a chunk of wood at her brother, and cut his head open. His
cries brought out the household, and Beth was well shaken--she was
always being shaken at this time--and marched off promptly to papa's
dressing-room, and made to sit on a little chair in the middle of the
floor, where she amused herself by singing at the top of her voice--
"All around Sebastopol,
All around the ocean,
Every time a gun goes off,
Down falls a Russian."
She wondered why her father and mother were laughing when they came to
release her. Before they appeared, however, brother Jim, her victim,
had come to the door with his head tied up, and peeped in; and she
knew that they were friends again, because he shot ripe gooseberries
at her across the floor as if they had been marbles. There is a
discrepancy here, seeing that snow and ripe gooseberries are not in
season at the same time. It is likely, however, that she broke her
brother's head more than once, and the occasions became confounded in
her recollection.
When the children went to bathe off the beach, Beth would not let Jane
dip her if kicking, scratching, and screaming could prevent it. There
used to be terrible scenes between them, until at last one day
somebody else's old Scotch nurse interfered, and persuaded Beth to go