Her mind was fixed and definite, she embodied all that confidence in church and decorum and the assurances of the pulpit which was characteristic of the large mass of the English people--for after all, the rather low-Church section WAS the largest single mass--in early Victorian times.She had dreams, I suspect, of going to church with him side by side; she in a little poke bonnet and a large flounced crinoline, all mauve and magenta and starched under a little lace-trimmed parasol, and he in a tall silk hat and peg-top trousers and a roll-collar coat, and looking rather like the Prince Consort,--white angels almost visibly raining benedictions on their amiable progress.Perhaps she dreamt gently of much-belaced babies and an interestingly pious (but not too dissenting or fanatical)little girl or boy or so, also angel-haunted.And I think, too, she must have seen herself ruling a seemly "home of taste," with a vivarium in the conservatory that opened out of the drawing-room, or again, making preserves in the kitchen.My father's science-teaching, his diagrams of disembowelled humanity, his pictures of prehistoric beasts that contradicted the Flood, his disposition towards soft shirts and loose tweed suits, his inability to use a clothes brush, his spasmodic reading fits and his bulldog pipes, must have jarred cruelly with her rather unintelligent anticipations.His wild moments of violent temper when he would swear and smash things, absurd almost lovable storms that passed like summer thunder, must have been starkly dreadful to her.She was constitutionally inadaptable, and certainly made no attempt to understand or tolerate these outbreaks.She tried them by her standards, and by her standards they were wrong.Her standards hid him from her.The blazing things he said rankled in her mind unforgettably.
As I remember them together they chafed constantly.Her attitude to nearly all his moods and all his enterprises was a sceptical disapproval.She treated him as something that belonged to me and not to her."YOUR father," she used to call him, as though I had got him for her.
She had married late and she had, I think, become mentally self-subsisting before her marriage.Even in those Herne Hill days Iused to wonder what was going on in her mind, and I find that old speculative curiosity return as I write this.She took a considerable interest in the housework that our generally servantless condition put upon her--she used to have a charwoman in two or three times a week--but she did not do it with any great skill.She covered most of our furniture with flouncey ill-fitting covers, and she cooked plainly and without very much judgment.The Penge house, as it contained nearly all our Bromstead things, was crowded with furniture, and is chiefly associated in my mind with the smell of turpentine, a condiment she used very freely upon the veneered mahogany pieces.My mother had an equal dread of "blacks"by day and the "night air," so that our brightly clean windows were rarely open.
She took a morning paper, and she would open it and glance at the headlines, but she did not read it until the afternoon and then, Ithink, she was interested only in the more violent crimes, and in railway and mine disasters and in the minutest domesticities of the Royal Family.Most of the books at home were my father's, and I do not think she opened any of them.She had one or two volumes that dated from her own youth, and she tried in vain to interest me in them; there was Miss Strickland's QUEENS OF ENGLAND, a book Iremember with particular animosity, and QUEECHY and the WIDE WIDEWORLD.She made these books of hers into a class apart by sewing outer covers upon them of calico and figured muslin.To me in these habiliments they seemed not so much books as confederated old ladies.
My mother was also very punctual with her religious duties, and rejoiced to watch me in the choir.
On winter evenings she occupied an armchair on the other side of the table at which I sat, head on hand reading, and she would be darning stockings or socks or the like.We achieved an effect of rather stuffy comfortableness that was soporific, and in a passive way Ithink she found these among her happy times.On such occasions she was wont to put her work down on her knees and fall into a sort of thoughtless musing that would last for long intervals and rouse my curiosity.For like most young people I could not imagine mental states without definite forms.
She carried on a correspondence with a number of cousins and friends, writing letters in a slanting Italian hand and dealing mainly with births, marriages and deaths, business starts (in the vaguest terms) and the distresses of bankruptcy.
And yet, you know, she did have a curious intimate life of her own that I suspected nothing of at the time, that only now becomes credible to me.She kept a diary that is still in my possession, a diary of fragmentary entries in a miscellaneous collection of pocket books.She put down the texts of the sermons she heard, and queer stiff little comments on casual visitors,--" Miss G.and much noisy shrieking talk about games and such frivolities and CROQUAY.A.
delighted and VERY ATTENTIVE." Such little human entries abound.
She had an odd way of never writing a name, only an initial; my father is always "A.," and I am always "D." It is manifest she followed the domestic events in the life of the Princess of Wales, who is now Queen Mother, with peculiar interest and sympathy."Pray G.all may be well," she writes in one such crisis.
