Chapter I

Daphne's earliest memories were of being awake in her cot while the daylight was still outside the blinds, though flushed with sunset. Downstairs were footsteps and closing doors and women's voices; and sometimes her father's voice, only this was so deep as to be but half heard. In another and smaller cot slept Owen, her baby brother, who often woke and cried for a minute and dropped off to sleep again. He frightened her a little when, after dark, he would suddenly climb through a crescendo from whimpering to crying, and crying to screaming; and she would be glad when Hollins came up and quieted him with a fruity and ingratiating, "Now, go to by-by like a good little boy," or picked him up and sang to him:

Sonny go round the sun,
Sonny go round the moon,
Sonny go round the mulberry bush,
On a Sunday afternoon----

though Daphne was always faintly worried by this equating of a mulberry bush with the sun and moon. If Miss Durgon came up instead, she was much more prosaic. She put Owen firmly on his other side, and added as she went out, to Daphne, who was sitting up, big-eyed, to watch the rearrangement of Owen:

"Now you go to sleep. We don't want nonsense from you too."

With the passing of time Daphne learnt that there were three stable people in her world: Hollins, round, and in a blue cotton uniform, chiefly associated with comfort and friendliness; Miss Durgon, long, black, and chiefly associated with correction, church and manners; and her father, with a pointed beard. She conceived that fathers and beards went together, and was much surprised the first time she saw some one else's father who had not even a moustache. How he could be old enough to be a father was not clear.

Her father was a jolly person in the early morning before breakfast. At half-past seven she was allowed to go into his bedroom and to climb on to the eiderdown for the playing of a game called "When I say 'kipper.'" It consisted in Daphne's inventing a long story to which her father must listen carefully, because directly she worked in the dangerous word "kipper" he was to tickle her violently. Her shrieks of alarm, after uttering the word "kipper," always began before the tickling got really started, and her yells of laughter and screams for mercy generally rewarded Mr. Bruno's tickling campaign within thirty seconds of its inception. When Owen was old enough to play this game it was doubly exciting; for sometimes he would work in the dangerous word, and she, unprepared for it so soon, was caught and tickled till she rolled, screaming with hysterical laughter, off the bed to the floor.

Some mornings she woke very early, and knew she would not go to sleep again, because it was daylight; and then her games had to be silent, for it was an offence to wake Owen; so she would use her knee or her foot to lift the bedclothes into a tent and sprawl about under them, divided in her mind whether they formed an Indian's wigwam or a Commander-in-Chief's headquarters. Wearying of this, she would lie on her back and with her knees form the white quilt into a range of mountains. There were Alpine pathways up the folds, and if she half-closed her eyes she could see the St. Bernard dogs and the pious monks as they looked for dead men in the snowdrifts.

Hollins was a good person when she told them tales, but her nursery rhymes struck Daphne from the first as rather silly. Cows couldn't jump over moons, nor dishes run away with spoons. And "Old Mother Hubbard," which told of an old woman going to the larder to get a bone for her dog and finding the place empty: vaguely Daphne felt that as a story it led to nothing, and certainly wasn't worth making a song about. Nor could she see that little Jack Horner's remark, "What a good boy am I!" had any sense or sequence. Though in courtesy she applauded Hollins for her frequent rendering of these poems, she felt uncomfortably that the pleasant old servant was sinking in her estimation by uttering such nonsense. Her father agreed that Jack Horner's exclamation was a _non-sequitur_, and told her that she had a quite exceptional clarity of brain, which would be a curse to her through life. And then he added: "How's this for a nursery rhyme, Duffy?" and recited gently:

How many miles to Babylon?
Three-score and ten.
Can I get there by candlelight?
Aye. There and back again.

"That's not far from beauty, Duffy, as I hope you'll be able to see one day."

And somehow it _did_ sound different. Its measured movement pleased her, and its blue sadness; and these made her feel solemn and dreamy.

Fairy tales weren't nonsense, because they were admittedly stories of people in an imaginary world, and so could be completely, engrossingly satisfying. They were her monopolising delight when she could read--at least, Grimm's were. Grimm's she read again and again, lolling in a deep arm-chair with her heels beneath her, and the book on the chair's arm. Grimm's stories were real stories, clear and exciting. Hans Andersen's were different: she could not get hold of them, and they were rather terrible. Yet after she had abandoned the annoying book they haunted her strangely: "The Girl who Trod on the Loaf"--ugly, dark, wonderful story; "The Red Shoes," "Ib and little Christina," and "Something." Whole sentences from them hung in her memory: "She flew away, as if she were flying straight into the sun." "They said 'Clink' and were broken." "And that was something."

"You don't understand, Duffy," said Mr. Tenter Bruno, when the annoyingness of Hans Andersen was pointed out to him. "But while Grimm only entertains you with what is agreeable, Hans Andersen _troubles_ you with beauty."

When, in Hollins's phrase, she was "rising nine," her father decided to move to town. Earning a much larger income now, he could have lived in considerable style, but for the ever-gnawing fear that either his brain-power or his vogue would dwindle, and the workhouse ensue. This made him resolve that his place in town should not be in one of the expensive districts. But it would have to be fairly big, if it were to accommodate the two children, Miss Durgon, Hollins, and another servant.

Such a house was found at last in Deseret Road, West Kensington. The sanguine Mr. Bruno was quite pleased with it: a tall, red-brick place, with basement and area and four stories above--the sort of place which would both make him very comfortable and allow itself to be called a suburban barbarity. The back of the house looked over the grounds of Queen's Club, so that one could watch the Varsity sports and football matches from all the windows that were above the grounds' encircling trees. Opposite the house front, across a good road, was a sunken waste ground waiting for the builder to arrive upon it. In the neighbourhood were many such places, though the long screens of uniform houses were building apace.

So there joined Daphne's more vivid memories the picture of that exciting day when they journeyed up to London and their new house. To her, who had only been told of London, it was a move as exciting as the departure of town children for the sea; the packing in the previous week, the trunks standing in the hall the night before, the arrival of the "fly" from the Ballard Arms, the stacking of the trunks about the carriage, and the drive, thus laden, to the station. Hollins and the maid had gone ahead to prepare the house, so Daphne and Owen secured one pair of corner seats in the railway carriage, and their father and Miss Durgon the other. More people got in, which meant extinction for Owen, Miss Durgon telling him he must keep his seat and not fidget. Daphne, having been wakeful most of the night, was lulled to sleep by the passing of the hedgerows and palings, and by the slow rolling and swinging of the train, till the voices of the strange occupants, and of her father and Miss Durgon, floated in a luminous mist behind her half sleep.

She was awakened by a jolting and slowing of the train and the movements of the people in the compartment. The November day had darkened, and out of her window she saw more interlacing railway lines than she could have believed possible, all of them wet, as if rain had fallen here, and shining in gaslight. The backs of the houses were dark-grey and gloomy, and the few lit windows frightened her with their suggestiveness. Unconsciously she created stories of misery for the people behind them. The train rolled into the colossal station that bruised and battered her with its noises and smell and hurrying.

"We must get a four-wheeler," said her father importantly.

She wondered what a four-wheeler was, till the porter trundled their luggage alongside a "fly" much more squat than the carriage sent by the Ballard Arms. There was a head-achy smell inside it, and she was glad when her father sat her on his knee, for she received a draught from the window, as well as being able to see the things coming into view. First, there were lighted shops and entangling traffic; then a broad, roomy road of tall houses; then a great highway that seemed all coloured buses and four-wheelers and jingling hansoms. These hansoms, she said, were like sedan chairs drawn by horses. All of it kept her commenting and questioning, till of a sudden she was given a fear--one of those fears that one did not tell to adults for they were not liable to them. There was a man running beside their cab. A man in a cloth cap, with a muffler round his neck. In and out of the pedestrians he padded, sometimes on the roadway, sometimes on the pavement, often glancing at the luggage stacked on the cab's roof. The scenery changed, but the padding man was as unlosable as a shadow. She drew back her face from the window.

They were bowling now down a wide road, on one side of which were rows of tall houses, painted white or cream, or left a cindery grey, and on the other an interminable line of railings with trees and grass beyond. Daphne could only judge that a garden so endless must be the Queen's and she inquired of her father:

"Is that where the Queen lives, daddy?"

"Yes; she used to live there, or a little farther on--in fact, she was born there, but, like us, she's moved."

"And who lives there now, then?"

Mr. Bruno controlled a smile.

"Oh, the Prince Consort has a seat there."

"Who's the Prince Consort?" She thought foggily of Grimm's princes.

"Well, he's a howling swell in his place in there," assured her father.

Daphne said no more, for, in staring out, she had seen the shadow-man still keeping level with the cab. They had passed into a neighbourhood that, though it had some tall, red-brick houses, was subtly inferior to anything they had come through before. Miss Durgon made the remark: "Dear me, this is all very familiar ground," and Daphne, while envying her this knowledge, thought that somehow the neighbourhood suited Miss Durgon. What she meant she could not have said: probably that it was a dark and well-behaved neighbourhood, a genteel hanger-on of the fine white houses, and a place that would prohibit the noisier games.

Now the cab left the streets where the buses were, and got into quiet roads of residential houses. It seemed to turn round every corner that Daphne gambled it would turn round. And always the running man turned with it. It stopped at last before a high house, one of a red-brick row, with many white steps leading up to its front door. There was a lamp-post opposite the area gate, and she could see by its light that the dark-green paint on the hall door was raised into little blisters. Interesting things to prick.

The cab-door opened by itself--or, rather, it was opened by the shadow, who touched his cloth cap. Daphne, whom her father was about to hand out, shrunk back as if she were being handed to some dark, night messenger.

"It's all right," laughed her father. "This gentleman has only come to help us with our luggage."

That moment the hall door of their new home opened, flooding the steps with gas-light; and Daphne, seeing Hollins standing there, rushed hurriedly past the shadow into her arms.

Because of its complete difference from their Sussex home, the house in Deseret Road appealed to Daphne as a place much more romantic and thrilling--especially on foggy falls of their first November, when it could assume an air of the sinister. She and Owen early examined, not without fears, its every room and cupboard and cellar. Owen at first had not seen much reason to be afraid of them--nor, in truth, had Daphne--but, in order to make them more interesting, she had deliberately worked on his imagination and her own with rather disturbing ideas about secret panels and subterranean passages, till Owen was obviously terrified of them, and she herself wondered what exactly her feelings about them were. To explore at night the kitchen and pantries, which were actually below ground and down a stairway like a mine-shaft, was a thrilling adventure when prosecuted with a companion--unthinkable alone.

The long dining-room was a dangerous place because of the huge syphon for making soda-water that stood in the centre of the sideboard, before the mirror. This great bulbous, though neat-waisted glass thing, encased in a trellis-work of wire, was as large as a child, and Hollins had told them that the wire casing was to prevent it exploding.

"Dangerous things," she had said. "They have to be all wrapped up in wire like that, being apt to go sort of what I call--off."

So Daphne, in the first weeks, always went past the sideboard quickly; and she marvelled, with hand at her mouth, when her father lifted the thing carelessly, and even shook it.

The sounds outside the house, too, were so different from those around their Sussex home. There the birds had sung, hardly heeded, in the boughs or under the eaves, or fluttered out of the creeper on the walls; and footsteps were seldom heard unless they were those of Eadigo on the gravel, or some visitor approaching the door. But here in Deseret Road sounded the rattle of two-wheeled tradesmen's carts, almost under the breakfast-room window; the crunching of errand-boys' hand-barrows; the ringing on the pavement of the feet of passers-by; or a loud and continued vibrating as some idle, whistling urchin dragged a stick along the area railings. In the winter came the bell of the muffin-man; and at other times the musical, sad cry of men and women selling lavender:

Lavender, sweet lavender,
Sixteen branches a penny

The errand boys were interesting because they could often be encouraged to put out their tongues or make long noses. And the muffin-man was never to be missed; if Daphne announced his appearance, Owen rushed to the breakfast-room window. He balanced a whole tray of muffins on his head, with nothing of the contortion, nervousness and reaching of one's tongue up to one's nose that Daphne had found inevitable when trying to do it with the butler's tray.

Ever afterwords the muffin bell made her think of a winter Sunday afternoon in Deseret Road. A year had passed. Father was away--tremendously far away. Having decided to treat himself to a holiday in India, he had departed in a cloud of romance, after showing the children his cabin trunks, his tropical hats, and pictures of the huge ship in which he would actually live for several weeks. Once he had "dressed up" in his Indian toggery, and beautifully neat and handsome, distinguished and whimsical he had looked in his white drill, smiling above his brown beard. Father's absence brought one advantage: Hollins, instead of Miss Durgon, took them to church. When father was at home, Miss Durgon had always conducted them with great parade to St. Antony's near by. It was a long, unintelligible service, and Daphne's only interest was to hope that some one would faint again, like a young woman who had caused a splendid diversion one warm spring morning. But nobody ever obliged again, and Daphne's detestation of church was suddenly increased to horror by the fixed idea that one day _she_ was destined to provide the excitement. This heart-stopping thought would come over her, if the sermon were at all long, so that she would send up an ejaculatory prayer as sincere as that house of prayer had ever known: "O God, make him stop!" Miss Durgon's deportment at church incensed her more than anywhere else; it was so silly the way she opened her Bible, directly the preacher announced the text and its reference. What was the sense in looking them up when she had just been told what they were? Guessing that her father did not approve of church, she one day announced to Miss Durgon that she didn't think she would go that morning; Father didn't go. But Miss Durgon made short work of this: "Your father's a very clever man. When you're as clever as he is, you'll be able to question whether or not you'll go to church"; to which Daphne answered promptly: "Father says I _am_ clever."

But now that Mr. Bruno had gone away, Miss Durgon ceased going to church, delegating to Hollins the task of taking the children. And going to Hollins's church was nothing like so detestable as going to Miss Durgon's. Hollins had a church of her own fancy, quite a distance away, to which you went in a bus.

"I do seem to fancy it, I must say," she told the children. "I can't explain it--it sort of _gets_ me. Your St. Antony's doesn't get me at all."

She had first taken them there in the morning, telling them they would be pleased with the procession; it was as good as a theatre. This had excited them, and in their pew they eagerly awaited the beginning of the entertainment. When the banners and crucifixes and candles and incense and scarlet-skirted boys and quilted clergymen poured out from behind the high altar, Owen, who had been watching them with a falling mouth, suddenly looked up to Hollins and said:

"Is it all right?"

Hollins murmured "Sh--sh," and nodded "Yes," thereby answering the question that England had essayed to answer for sixty years.

On this particular winter afternoon, the children's service was more than usually entertaining. Glossy coloured pictures were brought round by the stout, smiling gentleman in the linen and lace, and distributed to the children. It was better than the crackers thrown by the clown in the pantomime, for every child seemed (if craning heads saw aright) to receive one, and the stout gentleman had almost as merry a smile as the clown's. When he came alongside Owen, who was at the end of the pew--in fact, almost in the nave, such was his open-mouthed interest--and offered him a picture, Owen looked up at Hollins and asked:

"Is it all right?"

And Hollins said:

"Yes. Sh----! Quite all right. Take it."

So he took it and began to chew one of its corners. Daphne had some difficulty in taking hers for she was struggling with a fit of giggling.

Towards the end of the service, when the church was darkening, another exciting and mirthful thing happened: the verger lit the gas-brackets one after another. Then came a hymn, "All things bright and beautiful," and a procession in which the children fell in, pew by pew, behind the choir, and walked round the church. The little ones, Daphne noticed with a throb of pity that hurt her, held the hands of older brothers and sisters, and ran and stumbled along, dropping their books and weeping bitter tears that were unheeded in the roar of:

_All_ things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small,
_All_ things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.

One by one the pews in front of the Brunos emptied, and Daphne got quite exhilarated, as it drew near their moment to turn into the nave. Owen, being on the outside of the pew, had to lead off, and he prefaced so unusual a proceeding by looking up at Hollins with eyebrows that obviously inquired into its correctness. Reassured, he stepped out to join the others, first making certain, however, that Hollins and his sister were coming too.

When, after the blessing and a hymn sung most amusingly on one's knees, they passed out with the crowd into the road, they found it quite dark, though they had not yet had tea. They walked quickly down the road, Daphne talking excitedly and skippingly to Hollins about the service. And then the muffin bell sounded. And even while they were drawing attention to it, a muffin-man swung round a distant corner, and approached them along their very pavement.

"Is there muffins for tea?" asked Owen.

"You shouldn't ought to say, Is there? Where's your grammar? You should say, Are there?"

So Daphne said it.

"Well, are there?"

"No, Miss Inquisitive, there aren't."

"Well, couldn't we take some back with us?"

"Well now, did you ever? Of course not."

"Oh, do let's."

Owen said nothing, being not quite clear whether so abnormal a development were all right.

"Oh, Holly, may we?"

Daphne always gained her point by calling Hollins this endearing name.

"You know you didn't ought to buy anything of a Sunday."

"Yes, you ought. Didn't he tell us that the disciples picked the corn as they walked through the field? Why, I believe Owen's is a picture of them.... It is!" She gave a little jump. "Oh, Holly, I believe you're a Pharisee. Look, that's you in the background, looking snitchy."

"You're a clever one," said Hollins. "You say more than your prayers, you do." And, as the muffin-man was now close, she stopped before him.

"Oh, good!" muttered Daphne, as Hollins bought.

They were soon at the wide high street, where the buses were. They clambered inside one, Hollins refusing them permission to mount to the top, on the score that the air after dark was treacherous. So, wrapped up in their reefer coats, they sat in the bus, swinging their legs, and staring up at the advertisements of Sapolio, or down at a new one, which was fixed at the bus's end, a picture of a very discontented baby climbing out of a bath to get a piece of soap.

"What does it say beneath?" asked Owen.

"It says, 'He won't be happy till he gets it.'"

"What's he want it for?"

"How should I know, silly? Eat it, I expect."

Hollins was always shorter with Owen than with Daphne. She believed she had some special feeling for Daphne, having been beside her father when the news came of her birth.

"Did he get it?" asked Daphne.

"How should I know, silly one? No, I don't think he did. He fell down and hurt his nose."

Owen's hand shot to the bridge of his nose in nervous sympathy. He brought it away quickly with a timid glance, to see if any one had remarked so absurd a motion. But no one had because the bus had stopped to allow of a lady's entrance. As all the seats were occupied, she would have been obliged to stand if Hollins hadn't nudged Owen and whispered, "Who's a little gentleman now?" Owen was dreading this; not because he minded giving up his seat, but because he so disliked the publicity, and the not knowing what to say to the lady. She, however, saved him from speech by saying, "Well, that is kind of you," and Hollins by adding, "Not at all. He's pleased."

When they were home again, they found that Miss Durgon was out, and not likely to be back all the evening. Then it was that Daphne heard Hollins mutter her mysterious words, "I guessed as much. I thought so.... Well, come down to my room, and we'll have a jolly tea together there.... Ha--I knew it...."

Down in her common little sitting-room, she poked up the fire till it flared with excitement.

"I do like a nice blaze on a winter's afternoon. There's nothing like a bit of a flare to cheer you up. See that blue flame? That means frost. Now you watch that, and if you're very good, I'll bring up something that's even better than muffins."

"Oh, what's that, what's that?" demanded Daphne.

"Ask no questions and you'll hear no lies," teased Hollins as she disappeared. In a few minutes she returned with a paper bag, and, kneeling heavily on the rug before the fire, produced chestnuts, to a shriek of delight from Daphne and a request for further information and explanation from Owen. The chestnuts were placed on the bars of the fire.

After tea they told stories in the glow of the fire, and had a concert, singing with the help of Hollins, "Way down upon the Swanee River," and the hymn, "I love to hear the story," not out of piety but because its tune was so curly. And lastly, Hollins gave her famous solo about the little tailor boy, who went skipping into smoke with a broadcloth under his arm:

With a broadcloth under his arm,
With a broadcloth under his arm,
And the little tailor boy went skipping into smoke
With a broadcloth under his arm.

Which was always a signal for Hollins to say, "And now you go skipping off to bed."