CHAPTER I
Certain scenes, certain pictures of his very early years of childhood, stood out for Archie, when he came to the mature age of eight or nine, above the dim clouds that engulfed the time when the power of memory was only beginning to germinate. He had no doubt (and was probably right about it) as to which the earliest of those was: it was the face of his nurse Blessington leaning over his crib. She held a candle in her hand which a little dazzled him, but the sight of her face, tender and anxious and divinely reassuring, was the point of that memory. He had been asleep, and had awoke with a start, and finding himself alone in the midst of the immense desolation of the dark that pressed like an invader from all sides onto him, he had lifted up his voice and yelled. Then as by a conjuring- trick Blessington had appeared with her comforting presence that quite robbed the dark of its terrors. It must still have been early in the night, for she had not yet gone to bed, and had on above her smooth grey hair her cap with its adorable blue ribands in it. At her throat was the brooch made of the same stuff as the shining shillings with which a year or two later she bought the buns and sponge-cakes for tea. He remembered no more than that, he knew nothing of what she had said: the whole of that memory consisted in the fact of the entire comfort and relief which her face brought. It was just a vignette of memory, the earliest of all; there was nothing whatever before it, and for some time nothing after.
Gradually the horizon widened; scenes and situations in which Archie was still, as it were, a detached observer (as if looking through a telescope) made themselves visible. He remembered gazing through the bars of the high nursery-fire guard at the joyful glow of the coals. At the corner of the grate (he remembered this with extreme distinctness) there was a black coal the edge of which was soft and bubbly. A thin streamer of smoke blew out of it, and from time to time this smoke caught light and flared very satisfactorily. But all that, the joyfulness and the satisfaction, was external to him; it was the coals and the streams of burning gas that were in themselves joyful and satisfactory. That must have been in the winter, and it was in the same winter perhaps that he came home with Blessington and two other children, girls and larger than himself, whom he grew to believe were his sisters, through a wood of fir-trees between the trunks of which shone a round red ball that resembled the coals in the nursery-grate. He knew, perhaps Blessington, perhaps a sister, perhaps his mother had told him, that it was Christinas Eve, and he saw that when Blessington spoke to him she steamed delightfully at the mouth, as if there had been a hot bath just inside her lips. At her suggestion he found he could do it, too, and his sisters also; whereafter they played hot-baths all the way home. But of the Christmas Day that followed he had no recollection whatever.
His observation grew a little less detached, and he began to form in his mind an explorer's map of the places where these phenomena occurred, to be dimly aware that he was taking some sort of part in them, and was not a mere spectator. One summer evening he definitely knew that the day-nursery and the night-nursery and the room beyond where his sisters slept were all part of the red-brick house which he and others inhabited, just as, according to Blessington, the rabbit which he had seen pop into its hole in the wood beyond the lawn had a home within it. He had already had his bath before going to bed, on a patch of sunlight that lay on the floor, and escaping, slippery as a trout, from Blessington's towelling hands, had run with a squeal of
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Certain scenes, certain pictures of his very early years of childhood, stood out for Archie, when he came to the mature age of eight or nine, above the dim clouds that engulfed the time when the power of memory was only beginning to germinate. He had no doubt (and was probably right about it) as to which the earliest of those was: it was the face of his nurse Blessington leaning over his crib. She held a candle in her hand which a little dazzled him, but the sight of her face, tender and anxious and divinely reassuring, was the point of that memory. He had been asleep, and had awoke with a start, and finding himself alone in the midst of the immense desolation of the dark that pressed like an invader from all sides onto him, he had lifted up his voice and yelled. Then as by a conjuring- trick Blessington had appeared with her comforting presence that quite robbed the dark of its terrors. It must still have been early in the night, for she had not yet gone to bed, and had on above her smooth grey hair her cap with its adorable blue ribands in it. At her throat was the brooch made of the same stuff as the shining shillings with which a year or two later she bought the buns and sponge-cakes for tea. He remembered no more than that, he knew nothing of what she had said: the whole of that memory consisted in the fact of the entire comfort and relief which her face brought. It was just a vignette of memory, the earliest of all; there was nothing whatever before it, and for some time nothing after.
Gradually the horizon widened; scenes and situations in which Archie was still, as it were, a detached observer (as if looking through a telescope) made themselves visible. He remembered gazing through the bars of the high nursery-fire guard at the joyful glow of the coals. At the corner of the grate (he remembered this with extreme distinctness) there was a black coal the edge of which was soft and bubbly. A thin streamer of smoke blew out of it, and from time to time this smoke caught light and flared very satisfactorily. But all that, the joyfulness and the satisfaction, was external to him; it was the coals and the streams of burning gas that were in themselves joyful and satisfactory. That must have been in the winter, and it was in the same winter perhaps that he came home with Blessington and two other children, girls and larger than himself, whom he grew to believe were his sisters, through a wood of fir-trees between the trunks of which shone a round red ball that resembled the coals in the nursery-grate. He knew, perhaps Blessington, perhaps a sister, perhaps his mother had told him, that it was Christinas Eve, and he saw that when Blessington spoke to him she steamed delightfully at the mouth, as if there had been a hot bath just inside her lips. At her suggestion he found he could do it, too, and his sisters also; whereafter they played hot-baths all the way home. But of the Christmas Day that followed he had no recollection whatever.
His observation grew a little less detached, and he began to form in his mind an explorer's map of the places where these phenomena occurred, to be dimly aware that he was taking some sort of part in them, and was not a mere spectator. One summer evening he definitely knew that the day-nursery and the night-nursery and the room beyond where his sisters slept were all part of the red-brick house which he and others inhabited, just as, according to Blessington, the rabbit which he had seen pop into its hole in the wood beyond the lawn had a home within it. He had already had his bath before going to bed, on a patch of sunlight that lay on the floor, and escaping, slippery as a trout, from Blessington's towelling hands, had run with a squeal of
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