The Puppet Show of Memory. Baring Maurice

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СКАЧАТЬ it happened. Then the toy was unaccountably lost, and I never discovered the secret of this mysterious and wonderful engine.

      During all this time there were two worlds of which one gradually became conscious: the inside world and the outside world. The centre of the inside world, like the sun to the solar system, was, of course, our father and mother (Papa and Mamma), the dispenser of everything, the source of all enjoyment, and the final court of appeal, recourse to which was often threatened in disputes.

      Next came Chérie, then my mother’s maid, Dimmock, then Sheppy, the housekeeper, who had white grapes, cake, and other treats in the housekeeper’s room. She was a fervent Salvationist and wore a Salvationist bonnet, and when my father got violent and shouted out loud ejaculations, she used to coo softly in a deprecating tone.

      Then there was Monsieur Butat, the cook, who used to appear in white after breakfast when my father ordered dinner; Deacon, his servant, was the source of all worldly wisdom and experience, and recommended brown billycock hats in preference to black ones, because they did not fade in the sea air; Harriet, the housemaid, who used to bring a cup of tea in the early morning to my mother’s bedroom, and Frank the footman. I can’t remember a butler in London, but I suppose there was one; but if it was the same one we had in the country, it was Mr. Watson.

      

      Dimmock, or D., as we used to call her, played a great part in my early life, because when I came up to London or went down to the country alone with my father and mother she used to have sole charge of me, and I slept in her room. One day, during one of these autumnal visits to London, I was given an umbrella with a skeleton’s head on it. This came back in dreams to me with terrific effect, and for several nights running I ran down from the top to the bottom of the house in terror. The umbrella was taken away. I used to love these visits to London when half the house was shut up, and there was no one there except my father and mother and D., and we used to live in the library downstairs. There used to be long and almost daily expeditions to shops because Christmas was coming, as D. used to chant to me every morning, and the Christmas-tree shopping had to be done. D. and I used to buy all the materials for the Christmas-tree—the candles, the glass balls, and the fairy to stand at the top of it—in a shop in the Edgware Road called Eagle. I used to have dinner in the housekeeper’s room with Sheppy, and spent most of my time in D.’s working-room. One day she gave me a large piece of red plush, and I had something sewn round it, and called it Red Conscience. Never did a present make me more happy; I treated it as something half sacred, like a Mussulman’s mat.

      On one occasion D. and I went to a matinée at St. James’s Theatre to see A Scrap of Paper, played by Mr. and Mrs. Kendal. This year I read the play (it was translated from Sardou’s Pattes de Mouche) for the first time, and I found I could recollect every scene of the play, and Mrs. Kendal’s expression and intonation.

      Another time Madame Neruda, who was a great friend of my mother’s, whom we saw constantly, gave me two tickets for a ballad concert at which she was playing. The policeman was told to take me into the artists’ room during the interval. D. was to take me, but for some reason she thought the concert was in the evening, and it turned out to be in the afternoon; so as a compensation my father sent us to an operetta called Falka, in which Miss Violet Cameron sang. I enjoyed it more than any concert. The next day Madame Neruda came to luncheon and heard all about the misadventure. “And did you enjoy your operetta?” she asked. “Yes,” I said, with enthusiasm. “Say, not as much as you would have enjoyed the ballad concert,” said my mother. But I didn’t feel so sure about that.

      I used to do lessons with Mrs. Christie, and have music lessons from Mademoiselle Ida, and in the afternoon I often used to go out shopping in the carriage with my mother, or for a walk with D. But I will tell more about her later when I describe Membland.

      The girls had a maid who looked after them called Rawlinson, and she and the nursery made up the rest of the inside world in London.

      In the outside world the first person of importance I remember was Grandmamma, my mother’s mother, Lady Elizabeth Bulteel, who used to paint exquisite pictures for the children like the pictures on china, and play songs for us on the pianoforte. She often came to luncheon, and used to bring toys to be raffled for, and make us, at the end of luncheon, sing a song which ran:

      “A pie sat on a pear tree,

      And once so merrily hopped she,

      And twice so merrily hopped she,

      Three times so merrily hopped she,”

      Each singer held a glass in his hand. When the song had got thus far, everyone drained their glass, and the person who finished first had to say the last line of the verse, which was:

      “Ya-he, ya-ho, ya-ho.”

      And the person who said it first, won.

      Everything about Grandmamma was soft and exquisite: her touch on the piano and her delicate manipulation of the painting-brush. She lived in Green Street, a house I remember as the perfection of comfort and cultivated dignity. There were amusing drawing-tables with tiles, pencils, painting-brushes; chintz chairs and books and music; a smell of potpourri and lavender water; miniatures in glass tables, pretty china, and finished water-colours.

      In November 1880—this is one of the few dates I can place—we were in London, my father and mother and myself, and Grandmamma was not well. She must have been over eighty, I think. Every day I used to go to Green Street with my mother and spend the whole morning illuminating a text. I was told Grandmamma was very ill, and had to take the nastiest medicines, and was being so good about it. I was sometimes taken in to see her. One day I finished the text, and it was given to Grandmamma. That evening when I was having my tea, my father and mother came into the dining-room and told me Grandmamma was dead. The text I had finished was buried with her.

      The next day at luncheon I asked my mother to sing “A pie sat on a pear tree,” as usual. It was the daily ritual of luncheon. She said she couldn’t do “Hopped she,” as we called it, any longer now that Grandmamma was not there.

      Another thing Grandmamma had always done at luncheon was to break a thin water biscuit into two halves, so that one half looked like a crescent moon; and I said to my mother, “We shan’t be able to break biscuits like that any more.”

CHAPTER III

       MEMBLAND

       Table of Contents

      To mention any of the other people of the outside world at once brings me to Membland, because the outside world was intimately connected with that place. Membland was a large, square, Jacobean house, white brick, green shutters and ivy, with some modern gabled rough-cast additions and a tower, about twelve miles from Plymouth and ten miles from the station Ivy Bridge.

      On the north side of the house there was a gravel yard, on the south side a long, sweeping, sloping lawn, then a ha-ha, a field beyond this and rookery which was called the Grove.

      When you went through the front hall you came into a large billiard-room in which there was a staircase leading to a gallery going round the room and to the bedrooms. The billiard-room was high and there were no rooms over the billiard-room proper—but beyond the billiard-table the room extended into a lower section, culminating in a semicircle of windows in which there was a large double writing-table.

      Later, under the staircase, there was СКАЧАТЬ