Lore of Proserpine | Page 7

not speak, to my mother I did not; the others, being my juniors all, hardly existed. Who is to declare the motives of a child's mind? What was the nature of this reticence? Was it that my real habit was reverie? Was it, as I suspect, that constitutional timidity made me diffident? I was a coward, I am very sure, for I was always highly imaginative. Was it, finally, that I was dimly conscious of matters which I despaired of putting clearly? Who can say? And who can tell me now whether I was cursed or blessed? Certainly, if it had been possible to any person my senior to share with me my daily adventures, I might have conquered the cowardice from which I suffered such terrible reverses. But it was not. I was the eldest of a large family, and apparently the easiest to deal with of any of it. I was what they call a tractable child, being, in fact, too little interested in the world as it was to resent any duties cast upon me. It was not so with the others. They were high-spirited little creatures, as often in mischief as not, and demanded much more pains then I ever did. What they demanded they got, what I did not demand I got not: "Lo, here is alle! What shold I more seye?"
How it was that, taking no interest in my actual surroundings, I became aware of unusual things behind them I cannot understand. It is very difficult to differentiate between what I imagined and what I actually perceived. It was a favourite string of my poor father's plaintive lyre that I had no eyes. He was a great walker, a poet, and a student of nature. Every Sunday of his life he took me and my brother for a long tramp over the country, the intense spiritual fatigue of which exercise I should never be able to describe. I have a sinking of the heart, even now, when I recall our setting out. Intolerable labour! I saw nothing and said nothing. I did nothing but plug one dull foot after the other. I felt like some chained slave going to the hulks, and can well imagine that my companions must have been very much aware of it. My brother, whose nature was much happier than mine, who dreamed much less and observed much more, was the life of these woeful excursions. Without him I don't think that my father could have endured them. At any rate, he never did. I amazed, irritated, and confounded him at most times, but in nothing more than my apathy to what enchanted him.[1] The birds, the flowers, the trees, the waters did not exist for me in my youth. The world for me was uninhabited, a great empty cage. People passed us, or stood at their doorways watching us, but I never saw them. If by chance I descried somebody coming whom it would be necessary to salute, or to whom I might have to speak, I turned aside to avoid them. I was not only shy to a fault, as a diffident child must be, but the world of sense either did not exist for me or was thrust upon me to my discomfort. And yet all the while, as I moved or sat, I was surrounded by a stream of being, of infinite constituents, aware of them to this extent that I could converse with them without sight or speech. I knew they were there, I knew them singing, whispering, screaming. They filled my understanding not my senses. I did not see them but I felt them. I knew not what they said or sang, but had always the general sense of their thronging neighbourhood.
[Footnote 1: And me also when I was enabled at a later day to perceive them. I am thankful to remember and record for my own comfort that that day came not too late for my enchantment to overtake his and proceed in company.]
I enlarge upon this because I think it justifies me in adding that, observing so little, what I did observe with my bodily eyes must almost certainly have been observable. But now let the reader judge.
The first time I ever saw a creature which was really outside ordinary experience was in the late autumn of my twelfth year. My brother, next in age to me, was nine, my eldest sister eight. We three had been out walking with our mother, and were now returning at dusk to our tea through a wood which covered the top of a chalk down. I remember vividly the scene. The carpet of drenched leaves under bare branches, the thin spear-like shafts of the underwood, the grey lights between, the pale frosty sky overhead with