What a life was hers! She ordered lunch and dinner precisely as she chose; she had a silver card-case with cards in it, stating who she was and where she was, and we all belonged to her, and so in some dim way did my father, and even the biggest boys of the great sixth form itself touched their caps to her as she passed. And slowly, slowly I became aware that she was worthy of all these pleasures and this homage.
There were certainly lessons in those days, I suppose for about an hour a day. There was a book called _Reading without Tears_, which said that a-b was “ab,” and d-o-g was “dog.” There must have been certain crises over this learning for I was kept in instead of going out one day, and, with the fatal habit of inversion which has clung to me all my life, said, so my mother told me, “I call it tears without reading!” I record this anecdote in pure self-condemnation: I don’t suppose I knew that this _obiter dictum_ made sense; it was only the beginning of a habit to play about with words, and see to what fashion of affairs they could be suited. Every morning also, when we came downstairs we went into my mother’s sitting-room, and learned a new verse of a Psalm, repeating the verses previously learned. The Twenty-Third Psalm was one of these, and the Ninety-First I think must have been another, since I cannot remember the time when I did not know it by heart. I do not think that these religious repetitions meant anything to me; they were part of the inevitable day, which was full of glee.
That my mother had any other life of her own, full as I know it to have been of worries and anxieties and of marvellous happinesses, never, as was natural, occurred to any of us. She was, as far as concerns my memory of her at Wellington, a glorious sunlit figure, living a life that appeared to be the apotheosis of hedonism, the mistress of a shouting houseful of children, all wilful, all set on having their own way, and she calmly ruled us all, without even letting us know that we were being ruled. All the time she was a very young woman married to a man twelve years her senior who was as violently individual as anyone could be. But for us she floated there like the moons of eau-de-Cologne which embellished our handkerchiefs, carrying something of the fairyhood of Abracadabra, and all the wizardry of her own inimitable wisdom. After Beth it was she who first emerged out of the landscape which once embraced trees and people alike, and to us soared upwards like a rising constellation. She could not take Beth’s place, for Beth filled that, but she enlarged a child’s heart, and dwelt there. She never ceased from her own enlargements: in my mother’s house there were many mansions. There were mansions for everybody, and none of the tenants usurped the place of another. As we grew up, all of us, without exception, felt that we were especially hers, and were in a unique relation to her. We were all quite right about that, and so were a myriad friends of hers. There was “the best room” for each of them. How she did it, how she conveyed that adorable truth I know now, because I know that love is of infinite dimensions, and has the same perfect room for all. But the childish instinct was right: she cared supremely, and gave her whole heart to each of us.