AS SEEN THROUGH WOMAN'S EYES.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXVI, Issue 5, 3 February 1906, Page 60

AS SEEN THROUGH WOMAN'S EYES.

Mrs Mannington Caffyn; “lota.”

We may outgrow the forbearance ot our relatives, offend our friends, and be forgotten by the land that gave us birth, but the scents and sounds of our childhood will never forsake us (remarks the authoress of “The Yellowaster” in an “M.A.P.” article). They lurk in all oulr .lilences. Sometimes they silence our speech. They gather round us when we eome to die. 1 think we must carry them with us into the Beyond. So to the very last of my days the scent of a bog myrtle will renew my youth like an eagle s. And no sheen ot jewel is quite so good to me as the brown of a moorland stream. For I was born between the great bog and the hills that fed it, eight miles from a railway station, a telegraph office, or a butcher’s shop. That is, one in which you expect to find beef and mutton and other seasonable joints hanging up on hooks or stored chastely away in an ice-chamber to await the daily criticism of the housewife. There were villages, indeed, in which you would be very likely to pick up portions of beasts if you sent in early — but there was always the danger that someone else would have sent in earlier. And although one might have managed to subsist oneself upon what came to hand—poultry and bacon and game—one could certainly not permit one’s friends to do so. And two or three friends were always liable to drop in to dinner. Thus the Irish matron of that day never looked a great deal younger than her grand-daughter. She became, however, a woman of wit and resource, and her dinners dwelt in the mind. It was proven by the fact that no one thought anything of a drive of 15 miles to enjoy one of them. Indeed, where pleasure was eonerned, neither distance nor the elements ever eome in anyone’s way. It was altogether another matter with business. But we were not wholly frivolous. Far from it. We were a strictly conservative community, and would as soon have thought of entertaining a pickpocket as a Radical. We were “solid Gospel” Protestants, and had nightmares about the “thin edge of the wedge” and the Pope. But what we really worshipped was our ancestors. We drank our wine oil the mahogany; and, now I eome to think of it, although our men, from being always out of doors hunting and fishing and shooting, had the most wonderful health, even with that advantage they really drank a great deaf too much.

But we knew nothing of that then. We only knew that after dinner they looked more than usually proud and handsome, and paid the most beautiful and convincing compliments. Still, those of them who stayed at home do not appear to have done much for the world or in it. And many, alas! died young.

We were conservative, really, to a quite unprecedented extent. We hated modern innovations. Sometimes it happened that a rich stranger, who could have bought most of us up with

one year’s income, would alight in our midst, generally in response to an advertisement in the “Field.” So after all he was not the first offender. Someone plainly had sent in the advertisement. He would take the house of that relative too poor for the moment to keep it up himself, whom despair had driven to the “Field,” and proceed to carry on life in the way he had always done—the apple-pie-order way of which he could alone conceive. But it nevei failed to hurt our local prejudices. We called it “infernal impudence,” and invariably met in solemn conclave to debate as to whether it were wise to call on the domestic arrangements of the interloper. Curiosity always outran pride, and although in our -ecret souls we d'.d not dislike it, we called their English accent affectation, whilst the omission of an h, or “whatever” set in a wrong place, was enough to bring on a comity convulsion. We were savages, I think, wit.i a stronglymarked artistic temperament. We sniffed the free and pleasant airs of a very young world, and the atino phere of Para-di-e before the Fall wrapt us round. We were as simple and innocent and humane, in a wild way, as we were impossible. It was a weird environment to have been born and bred in. and may in some measure account for certain grievous shortcomings in my work which appear to distress certain of my critics in quite an Irish way. It must not be thought that we had no yearnings after- the higher culture, or the finer flavours of life. On the contrary. My father was quite a theorist upon the "higher education of woman.” “Pen up a lot of womankind, old or young, together for any length of time." he maintained, “and you’ll bring out all the cat in them, and little else.” To save us from so dire a fate he refused to let us go to school. So for many years we plagued the lives out of a succession of most estimable governesses in sc :00l hours. Out of them, this forming part of the scheme of education, we followed our father’s gun up-hill and down, through quagmire and boghole—excellent pointers—most faithful of retrievers. We learnt to be silent while he fished, and. when he neither fished nor shot, we rode whatever happened to be in the stables. Girl friends were distinctly discouraged as fostering the cat in-tinct. Our redletter days were the holidays, when the boys of the locality came home front

school. The modern novel was. in our remarkable household, anathema. Through the English Classics we ranged at will. These, in the schemer’s computation, began with Chaucer and ended with Byron. We picked up curiou- lore as we read, and discussed it all at dinner at the tops of our voices, thus keeping gossip at bay. Certain of our friends and relations said that we should all come to a bad end on account of our up bringing, and cargoes of A.L.O.E. and kindred authors would from time to time be discharged in our midst. They were either handed on to the “Protestant Orp’-anage.” a solemn institution of which we were extremely proud, or returned as likely to develop softening of the brain.

The literary proclivities of my father were of a robust order. He always wrote the accounts of the hunts himself. They were greatly admired. No wonder, indeed, for they were full of a very wellchosen selection of quotations, and no one permitted himself to be quite sure as to which was quotation and which original matter. We were courteous in our own way. Besides writing the account of the runs, my father knew the four Gospels by heart, most of the Psalms, “Paradise Lost,” the best-known plays of Shakespeare, bits out of Hudibras. and every line of the Elizabethan poets and Byron one would venture to repeat in mixed company. We had them all in turn when we went shooting or coming back from the hunts.

And yet we had the most delicate-soul-ed of all the poets in the family, and we worshipped him at a meek distance, although w-e were dreadfully sorry he was a "papist.” Aubrey de Vere was of our kindred. So life went on with a dreamv swing, and having light hearts and sound bodies, and a wild sort of ideal at the back of our minds, we waited hapnily for the great surprise. She came in the shape of a stepmother. A silly, shallow, unkind creature, with a common Celtic soul and a coarse thumb. It twi-ted up all the nerves in our ridiculous bodies, and we grew restless. It was just then that I got hold of the “Life of Sister Dora,” written by a zealot, and I, also, resolved to be a nurse. The idea was full of poetic possibilities, and I was something of an expert in the care of sick animals. It was a fashionable eraze at that time in civilized communities, but had not yet penetrated to ours The immortal “Sairey” was still our nursing model. The relations shrieked aloud. I suffered many things, really, before I became a nurse. I was a fewyears too young, to begin with, and the authorities distrusted my seriousness of purpose. However. I reached my goal in the end. In company with some other girls, also young. I was received at St. Thomas’ Hospital, rather under protest, as a paying probationer, to the amusement of the doctors, I think, and the annoyance of the sisters, who, I daresay, were partly right in their judgment. We were very sincere and zealous, and had a most exalted outlook. But we were prigs, and fiercely intolerant towards those with any lower aim. or what we were pleased to consider a lower aim—it was probably only a more practical one. My relatives were right also, in a way. There are drawbacks to the nursing state for very young girls. And yet it seems to me that it is good to see life and death quite close when you are young, and that good weighs invincible at the bottom of evil. For my own part. I, with my little knowledge of life, have often helped greatly when a woman with none would only have hindered.

But I had only a very short nursing career—hardly one at all—for I married, and found my hands full with other interests. For my husband’s health failed directly after my marriage, and we went by the doctor’s orders to Australia. To have to leave London, the centre of success, and with broken health, was the ruin of a career of great promise; so one suffered. But to watch the growth of a young country- who thinks aloud is interesting, and, as usual, the evil brought its good. It is fine to see the painter trying his paints and to live

under wide skies. One carries the sense of illimitable distances in one’s heart for ever, and the sweeping roll of the great Pacific. One learns also at first hand the cry of the heart for home, and the plangent love that knits our overseas brotners to the old grey Mother. In Australia before the slump one learnt other things as well. Neither logic, custom, and commonsense could prevent any reasonable mortal from intending to become a millionaire. So once, just as we were on the verge of the condition, my husband had to go home to complete the formalities. He wanted me to go too, but 1 preferred to wait until we were actually within the sacred enclosure. It only meant a few months, after all. So he went away with our eldest, a little lad of seven. And having at last some time at my disposal, the old impulses came trooping up out ol their hidden chamber, and I wrote “A Yellow Aster,’ but never then ever thought of publishing it. In spite of appearances, 1 have a high ideal.

Then my husband returned, and the slump came, and even the old-established millionaires vanished as doth a mist. Some went to prison, some travelling en prince (the memory of these the newspapers kept green). But most of them just paid up to the uttermost farthing and were forgotten. We went home with three boys to educate. And then 1 remembered the slovenly MS. that had filled so many offices. It was lost and found again in the bed of a eat. I pulled it forth from its retirement, and read it aloud to a typewriting girl. She was a friend, too, and kind and tolerant. But she had herself written and published many thousands of words, and I trembled before her as before the “wissenden.” Did her eyes look dubious, I cut out a chunk —expectant, 1 threw one in. But for this I think the story would have been more coherent. It succeeded, however, after a fashion. Most women writers have, I believe, been taken by the hand at the beginning by some veteran in the trade, admonished and encouraged. No one ever came to my help except once, when a lady, for no apparent reason, swooped down, and. so to speak, annexed me. She instructed me in a thousand matters, ami we were getting on very nicely' when suddenly- she discovered that I was not George Egerton. Then she quite lost her temper, and dropped me like a hot coal. No, I was never taken by the hand. 1 just blundered anyhow into the outer courts of the temple, and now I blunder on and hope always. And some day my hope may be fulfilled—not elsewhere, but here—and I, too, may write a Book, and so enter in through the doors into the sanctuary. a o o « a “Yes,” said the young writer, “I’ve got pretty- deep into my- new novel now.” “Ah!” remarked the friend, “the plot’s thickening, eh?” “Yes, perhaps that’s it; at any rate I'm stuck.”

Madge: Why do you think she has passed the age of thirty? Millieent: Because she invariably says “us girls.”