The Beth Book
into the water with her and consent to be dipped three times. Beth
went like a lamb--instead of having to be dragged in and pushed under,
given no time to recover her breath between each dip, half choked with
sand and salt water, and finally dragged out, exhausted by the
struggle, and certainly suffering more than she had benefited by the
immersion. The cold water came up about her and took her breath away
as the old Scotch nurse led her in, and Beth clung to her hand and
panted "Wait!" as she nerved herself for the dip. Nurse had promised
to wait until Beth was ready, and it was Beth's faith in her promise
that gave her courage to go bravely through the ordeal. The old Scotch
nurse never deceived her as Jane had done, and so Beth learnt that
there are people in the world you can depend on.
There was one painful circumstance in connection with those battles on
the beach. Beth was such a tiny girl, they did not think it necessary
to give her a bathing dress, and consequently she was marched into the
water with nothing on; and the agony of shame she suffered is
indescribable. But the worst of it was, the shame wore off. Jim teased
her about it and called her "a little girl," a dreadful term of
reproach in those days, when the boys were taught to consider
themselves superior beings. Beth flew at him, and fought him for it,
but was beaten; and then she took off her things in the nursery, and
scampered up and down before them all, with nothing on, just to show
how little she cared.
It is astonishing how small a part Beth's family play in these
childish recollections. Her father took very little notice of the
children. He was out of health and irritable, and only tried to save
himself annoyance; not to disturb him was the object of everybody's
life. Probably he only appeared on the scene when Beth was naughty,
and the recollection, being painful, was quickly banished. She
remembered him coming downstairs when she was standing in the hall one
day, when her mother was away from home. He had a letter in his hand,
and asked her if she would send her love to mamma. Her heart bounded;
it seemed to her such a tremendous thing to be asked; and she was
dying to send her love; but such an agony of shyness came upon her,
she could not utter a word. She had a little hymn-book in her hand,
however, which she held out to her father. No, that would not do. He
could not send the book, only her love. Didn't she love mamma? Didn't
she! But not a word would come.
All through life she was afflicted with that inability to speak at
critical times. Dumb always was she apt to be when her affections were
concerned, except occasionally, in moments of strong excitement; and
in anger, when she was driven to bay. The intensity of her feelings
would probably have made her dumb in any case in moments of emotion;
but doubtless the hardness of those about her at this impressionable
period strengthened the defect. It is impossible to escape from the
hampering influences of our infancy. Among Beth's many recollections
of these days, there was not one of a caress given or received, or of
any expression of tenderness; and so she never became familiar with
the exquisite language of love, and was long in learning that it is
not a thing to be ashamed of and concealed.
Later that day, with a mighty effort, she summoned up courage enough
to go down to her father. She was determined to send the message to
mamma; but when it came to the point, she was again unable to utter a
word on the subject. Her mother had gone to stay with her relations in
England. Beth found her father in the dining-room, and several other
people were present. He was standing by the sideboard, mixing
whisky-and-water, so, instead of sending her love to mamma, Beth
exclaimed, confidently and pleasantly, "If you drink whisky, you'll be
drunk again."
A smart slap rewarded this sally. Beth turned pale and recoiled. It
was her first taste of human injustice. To drink and to be drunk was
to her merely the natural sequence of cause and effect, and she could
not conceive why she should be slapped and turned out of the room so
promptly for uttering such a simple truth.
Beth was present at many discussions between her father and mother,
and took much interest in them, all the more perhaps, because most of
what was said was a mystery to her. She wondered why any mention of
the "moon-faced Bessie" disturbed her mother's countenance. Jane
Nettles, too--when her mother was out, her father used to come and
talk to Jane, and they laughed a good deal. He admired Jane's white
teeth, and the children used to make Jane show them her teeth after
that.
"Papa says Jane's got nice white teeth," Beth said to her mother one
day, and she never forgot the glance which Mrs. Caldwell threw at her
husband. His eyes fell before it.
"What! even the servants, Henry!" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed, and then
she left the room. Beth learned what it all meant in after years, the
career of one of her brothers furnishing the clue. Like father, like
son.
It was after this that Mrs. Caldwell went to visit her relations in
England, accompanied by two of the children. It was in the summer, and
Jane took Beth to the Castle Hill that morning to see the steamer,
with her mother on board, go by. The sea was iridescent, like molten
silver, the sky was high and cloudless, and where sea and sky met and
mingled on the horizon it was impossible to determine. Numbers of
steamers passed far out. They looked quite small, and Beth did not
think there was room in any of them for her mother and brother and
sister. They did not, therefore, interest her much, nor did the
policeman who came and talked to Jane. But the Castle Hill, and the
little winding path up which she had come, the green of the grass, the
brambles, the ferns, the ruined masonry against which she leant, the
union of sea and sky and shore, the light, the colour, absorbed her,
and drew her out of herself. Her soul expanded, it spread its wings,
it stretched out spiritual arms to meet and clasp the beloved nature
of which it felt itself to be a part. It was her earliest recognition
of their kinship, a glimpse of greatness, a moment of ecstasy never to
be forgotten, the first stirring in herself of the creative faculty,
for in her joy she burst out into a little song--
"Far on the borders of the Arcane."
It was as if the pleasure played upon her, using her as a passive
instrument by which it attained to audible expression. For how should
a child know a word like Arcane? It came to her as things do which we
have known and forgotten--the whole song did in fact; but she held it
as a possession sacred to herself, and never recorded it, or told more
than that one line, although it stayed with her, lingered on her lips,
and in her heart, for the rest of her life. It was a great moment for
Beth, the moment when her further faculty first awoke. On looking back
to it in after years, she fancied she found in it confirmation of an
opinion which she afterwards formed. Genius to her was yet only
another word for soul. She could not believe that we all have souls,
or that they are at all equally developed even in those who have
obtained them. She was a child under six at this time, Jane Nettles
was a woman between twenty and thirty, and the policeman--she could
not say what age he was; but she was the only one of the three that
throbbed responsive to the beauty of the wonderful scene before them,
or felt her being flooded with the glory of the hour.
Meanwhile, what her parents would have called her education had begun.
She went with Mildred, her elder sister, to a day school. They used to
run down the street together without a nurse, and the sense of freedom
was delicious to Beth. They had to pass the market where the great
mealy specimen potatoes were displayed, and Mary Lynch's shop--she was
the vegetable woman, who used to talk to Mrs. Caldwell about the
children when they went there, and one or the other always called them
"poor little bodies," upon which they commented afterwards among
themselves. Mary Lynch was a large red-faced woman, and when the
children wanted to describe a stout person they always said, "As fat
as Mary Lynch." One house which Beth had to pass on her way to school
made a strong impression on her imagination. It was a gloomy abode
with a broad doorstep and deep portico, broken windows, and a
mud-splashed door, from beneath which she always expected to see a
slender stream of blood slowly trickling. For a man called Macgregor
had murdered his wife there--beaten her brains out with a poker. Beth
never heard the name Macgregor in after life without a shiver of
dislike. Much of her time at school was spent in solitary confinement
for breaches of the peace. With a face as impassive as a monkey's she
would do the most mischievous things, and was always experimenting in
naughty tricks, as on one occasion when Miss Deeble left the
schoolroom for a minute, but had to come hurrying back, recalled by
wild shrieks; and found that Beth had managed in that minute to tip up
a form with four children on it, throw their books out of the window,
and sprinkle ink all over the floor. Miss Deeble marched her
downstairs to an empty kitchen, and left her sitting on a stool in the
middle of it with an A B C in her hand. But Beth took no interest in
the alphabet in those days, and hunted black-beetles with the bellows
instead of learning it. The hearthstone was the place of execution.
When she found a beetle, she would blow him along to it with the
bellows, and there despatch him. She had no horror of any creature in
her childhood, but as she matured, her whole temperament changed in
this respect, and when she met a beetle on the stairs she would turn
and fly rather than pass it, and she would feel nauseated, and shiver
with disgust for hours after if she thought of it. She knew the exact
moment that this horror came upon her; it happened when she was ten
years old. She found a beetle one day lying on its back, and thinking
it was dead, she took it up, and was swinging it by its antennae when
the creature suddenly wriggled itself round, and twined its prickly
legs about her finger, giving her a start from which she never
recovered.
Beth probably got as far as A B ab, while she was at Miss Deeble's;
but if she were backward with her book, her other faculties began to
be acute. It was down in that empty kitchen that she first felt the
enchantment of music. Some one suddenly played the piano overhead and
Beth listened spell-bound. Again and again the player played, and
always the same thing, practising it. Beth knew every note. Long
afterwards she was trying some waltzes of Chopin's, and came upon one
with which she was quite familiar. She knew that she had heard it all,
over and over again, but could not think when or where. Presently,
however, as she played it, she perceived a smell of black-beetles, and
instantly she was back in that disused kitchen of Miss Deeble's,
listening to the practising overhead.
All Beth's senses were acute, and from the first her memory helped
itself by the involuntary association of incongruous ideas. Many
people's recollections are stimulated by the sense of smell, but it is
a rarer thing for the sense of taste to be associated with the past in
the same way, as it was in Beth's case. There were many circumstances
which were recalled by the taste of the food she had been eating at
the time they occurred. The children often dined in the garden in
those early days, and once a piece of apple-dumpling Beth was eating
slid off her plate on to the gravelled walk. Some one picked it up,
and put it on her plate again, all covered with stones and grit, and
the sight of hot apple-dumpling made her think of gravel ever