Page:Following darkness (IA followingdarknes00reid).pdf/21

 dilapidated, velvet elephant who for many years was my nightly bed-fellow.

My only impressions of my mother go back to those days or, possibly, earlier—a voice singing gay songs to the piano, while I dropped asleep in my bed upstairs—and then, again, somebody lifting me out of this bed to kiss me, the close contact of a face wet with tears, the pressure of arms that held me clasped tightly, that even hurt a little. That is all, I cannot remember how she looked, or anything else. On the evening when she said good-bye to me and left our house, I knew she was crying, but, though it called up in me a sort of solemn wonder, I did not understand it, and went to sleep almost as soon as she put me back into my bed. It was not till next day that my own tears came, with the first real sorrow I had known.

There follows now a sort of blank in my recollections, which continues on to my ninth or tenth year. I do not know why this period should have been so unproductive of lasting impressions. It is like a tranquil water over which I bend in the hope of seeing some face or vision ripple to the surface, but my hope is disappointed. Nothing emerges—not even a memory of any of those ailments, measles and what not, from which, in common with other children, I suppose I must have suffered. Nor can I recollect learning to read. I can remember quite well when I couldn't read, for I have a very distinct recollection of lying on my stomach, on the parlour floor, a book open in front of me, along whose printed, meaningless lines I drew my finger, turning page after page till the last was reached, though what solemn pleasure I could have got from so dull a game—surely the most tedious ever invented—I now utterly fail to comprehend.

I was always very fond of being read to, except when the story had a moral, or was about pious children, when