CHAPTER I—MY MOTHER

It happened about six in the morning, in a large red room. A bar of sunlight streamed in at the window, in which dust-motes were dancing by the thousand. A man and woman were lying in bed; I was standing up in my cot, plucking at the woman with my podgy fingers. She stirred, turned, rubbed her eyes, smiled, stretched out her arms, and drew me under the bed-clothes beside her. The man slept on.

This is my earliest recollection. If it be true that the soul is born not at the same time as the body, but at a later period with the first glimmering of memory, then this was the morning on which my soul groped its way into the world.

I have sometimes thought that I have never grown wiser than the knowledge contained in that first recollection. Nothing that I have to record in this book will carry me much further. The scene is symbolic: a little child, inarticulate, early awakened in a sunlit room, vainly striving to make life answer questions. Do we ever get beyond that? The woman is Nature. The man is God. The room is the world—for me it has always been filled with sunlight.

My mother I remember as very tall and patient, vaguely beautiful and smiling. I can recall hardly anything she said—only her atmosphere and the fragrance of violets which seemed always to cling about her. I know that she took me out beneath the stars one night; there was frost on the ground and church-bells were ringing. And I know that one summer’s day, on a holiday at Ransby, she led me through lanes far out into the country till my legs were very tired. We came to a large white house, standing in a parkland. There we hid behind a clump of trees for hours. A horseman came riding down the avenue. My mother ran out from behind the trees and tried to make him speak with her. She held me up to show me to him, and grasped his rein to make him halt. He said something angrily, set spurs to his horse, and disappeared at a gallop. She began to cry, telling me that the man was her father. I was too tired to pay much attention. She had to carry me most of the way home. It was dark when we entered Ransby.

In London some months later—it must have been wintertime, for we were sitting by the fire-light—she took me in her arms and asked me if I would like to have a sister. I refused stoutly. At dawn I was wakened by hurrying feet on the staircase. Next day I was given a new box of soldiers to keep me quiet. A lot of strange people stole in and out the house as if they owned it. I never saw my mother again.

All I had known of her had been so shy and gentle that it was a good deal of a surprise to me to learn years later that, as a girl, she had been considered rather dashing. She had been called “The gay Miss Fannie Evrard” and her marriage with my father had begun with an elopement. Her father was Sir Charles Evrard, brother-in-law to the Earl of Lovegrove; my father’s folk were ship-chandlers in Ransby, outfitting vessels for the Baltic trade.

The inequality of the match, as far as social position was concerned, made life in Ransby impossible. My father was only a reporter on the local paper at the time of his escapade; the Evrards lived at Woadley Hall and were reckoned among the big people in the county. It must have been to this house that my mother took me on that dusty summer’s day.

After his marriage my father settled down in London, gaining his living as a free-lance journalist. I believe he was very poor at the start. He did not re-visit Ransby until years later. Pride prevented. My mother returned as often as finances would allow, in the vain hope of a reconciliation with her family. On these occasions she would stay at the ship-chandler’s, and was an object of curiosity and commiseration among the neighbors.

Most of the facts which lie outside my own recollection were communicated to me by my grandmother. She never got over her amazement at her son’s audacity. It was without parallel in her experience until I attempted to repeat his performance with an entirely individual variation. She never tired of rehearsing the details; it was noticeable that she always referred to my mother as “Miss Fannie.”

“Often and often,” she would say, “have I seen Miss Fannie come a-prancin’ down the High Street with her groom a-followin’. She was always mounted on a gray horse, with a touch of red about her. Sometimes it was a red feather in her hat and sometimes a scarlet cloak. When Sir Charles rode beside her you could see the pride in his eye. She was his only child.”

After my small sister failed to arrive someone must have told me that my mother had gone to find her. I would sit for hours at the window, watching for her homecoming.