Lore of Proserpine | Page 7

the sulks.
They saw me mooning in idleness and were revolted; or I walked dully
the way I was bid and they despaired of my parts. I could not explain

myself to them, still less justify, having that miserable veil of reserve
close over my mouth, like a yashmak. To my father I could 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