My reserve, my recoil from all exhibitionism, was no doubt also a matter of heredity and upbringing. Which of us at home ever alluded to feelings or ever attempted to express them? But I don't doubt we had them as strong as other people. We were a Victorian household, and, in spite of an almost militant agnosticism, attached without the smallest tinge of scepticism or hypocrisy to the ideals of the time: duty, work, abnegation, a stern repression of what was called self-indulgence, a horror and a terror of lapsing from the current code. My father, who was a man of science and passed his time in investigating with heroic patience and the strictest independence of judgment one or two of the laws of nature, would not have dreamt for a moment of submitting the laws of ethics to the same scrutiny. My mother, from whom all her children inherited an ardent love of letters, and who read me aloud Tom Jones when I was fifteen (not that I understood one-tenth of it, utterly unenlightened as I was to the physical side of human nature) and who knew most of the Elizabethans more or less by heart, had the most singular faculty of keeping experience at bay. It was her abounding vitality, I think, that made her enjoy the blood and savagery of those outrageous authors. But she admired them from behind a wall of principle and morality which kept her absolutely safe from coming into any dangerous contact with their violence. And her own vitality, no doubt, never troubled her. Married at eighteen, and the mother of thirteen children, she was, I imagine, completely unaware of her senses. For a person who was so plunged in literature she was strangely devoid of psychology and strangely unconscious of persons. She never had a notion of what any of us children were doing or thinking, and intrigues of the most obvious and violent nature might be, and indeed often were, carried on under her very nose without her having the smallest suspicion of them. Her love of poetry was part no doubt of her sensibility to music. It was because of his sound that she reluctantly forgave Milton his abominable doctrines and learnt Paradise Lost by heart. But I think her chief passion in life was public affairs. Allied by birth and marriage to the aristocracy of Anglo-Indian families, the daughter and wife of great administrators, a profound interest in the craft of statesmanship was inherited in her blood and fostered by all the circumstances of her life.
I am trying to explain that though my home was very rich in intellectual influences of many sorts, there was in it a curious, an almost anomalous lack—an insufficient sense, that is—of humanity and art. With all her love of literature and music and painting, with all her vivid intelligence, my mother, I think, never felt them otherwise than with her mind. She was perhaps incapable of the mystical illumination. To speak on a lower plane, she surrounded herself with ugly objects; her furniture, her pictures, her clothes, were chosen, not without care but without taste; she was incapable of discriminating food or wine. Though we lived in the solid comfort which befitted our exact station in life, the sensual element was totally lacking from our upbringing. I remember becoming aware of this by comparing my mother with her only sister, our aunt E., who had none of my mother's mental capacity, but who was sensitive to art to the very finger-tips of her beautiful hands, and successfully created about herself an atmosphere of "ordre et beauté, luxe, calme et volupté." No; it was not only the unavoidable confusion and restrictions imposed upon a family of ten children which made our home so different. It was something much more fundamental than that.
But those missing elements which I think my childhood instinctively craved for were not to be given to me until a good deal later—until perhaps too late—when their assimilation was not possible without a profound upheaval and perhaps a permanent intoxication of my whole being.
When I was about thirteen, my mother sent me to a boarding-school which had a considerable reputation at the time and happened to be situated near to where we lived, in a London suburb which still preserved the charm of Georgian houses, spacious gardens, spreading cedar-trees, and flowering bushes. This school was kept by an eminent lady belonging to the Wesleyan persuasion. Before sending me there, my mother honourably explained our atheistical views and asked Miss Stock to give her word not to attempt to convert me. She did so and conscientiously kept it. She never spoke of religion to me personally, but I lived in a stifling atmosphere of it. I had the oppressive feeling of being an outcast, a pariah; I felt the astonishment and reprobation of my three bedroom companions when I heroically got into bed without first kneeling down by my bedside and saying or pretending to say my prayers. I was liable during my first term or two to be asked by an elder girl at any turn of a garden path whether I didn't love Jesus, which embarrassed me horribly. I assisted at prayers, at Bible classes. I went to chapel twice a day on Sundays. I heard incessant talk about our Saviour's blood, the dreadful necessity of saving one's soul, the frightful abysses into which one might fall at any moment if one didn't fly to hide oneself in the Rock of Ages. These people seemed to be beset on every side by "temptations"; they lived in continual terror of falling into "sin." Sin? What was sin? Evidently there loomed in the dark background a mysterious horror from which pure-minded girls must turn away their thoughts, but there were dangers enough near at hand which made it necessary to walk with extreme wariness—pitfalls, which one could hardly avoid without the help of God. I had to do without that, but I was very wary and naturally conscientious. Even so, one never could tell. There was the dreadful crime of "acting a lie," so hard to discern, so easy to commit. If you said you had read a book and had not looked out the meaning of every word you did not understand, there you were! A special Bible-class was convened, you were publicly told that you were "half mentally, morally and spiritually dead," and your companions were asked to pray for you. This did not happen to me personally, but such episodes made me violently indignant and extremely nervous. I should have disliked being held up to public reprobation. I should have still more disliked being expelled, and I lived in a state of continual terror. The fact that after a year or two I found a friend did not diminish my terrors—on the contrary—but it helped me to endure them. We discovered—how did we discover—after what innumerable feelers and cautious explorations of the ground, did we discover, that we were both "agnostics"? Lucy, moreover, had the credit of having become one on her own initiative. Ah! what a heavenly relief! Here was someone who rebelled like oneself, who read Shelley in secret too, who understood when one said Prometheus was greater than Christ. And then still more boldly, we ventured further; we talked of still more dangerous subjects—of love, of marriage. Should we love? Should we marry? Our heroes? Our ideals? And that extraordinary, alluring, forbidden mystery that we sensed lying at the back of all grown-up minds, what was it? We knew dimly we should never understand anything till we understood that. But oh! how innocent, how ignorant we were! How undirected, how misdirected our curiosity! How far from discovering the right track, of even suspecting its existence! But even so, we knew that our conversations were extremely perilous, to be indulged in only with the utmost precautions. We felt like two conspirators and trembled with terror if a mistress came upon us unexpectedly. Had she overheard us? Surely she had overheard us. We could see it in her face. Our consciences were loaded with guilt. If a special Bible class was convened, we went to it with knocking knees and frightful apprehensions.
We escaped, however. The end of my time was reached without disaster, and when Miss Stock bade me good-bye, she said, looking over her spectacles with the mild benevolence that characterized her in the intervals of special Bible classes:
"I am afraid, my dear, you haven't been very happy here. Can you tell me why? Is there anything you have had to complain of?"
"No! oh, no! No!"
