On Sylvia, her mother had to admit to herself, this art of education was hard to practise. Sylvia didn’t want to sculpture herself, at any rate into the forms which Martha and Herbert found most beautiful. She was quite discouragingly without that sense of moral beauty on which the Claxtons relied as a means of education. It was ugly, they told her, to be rough, to disobey, to say rude things and tell lies. It was beautiful to be gentle and polite, obedient and truthful. ‘But I don’t mind being ugly,’ Sylvia would retort. There was no possible answer, except a spanking; and spanking was against the Claxtons’ principles.
Aesthetic and intellectual beauty seemed to mean as little to Sylvia as moral beauty. What difficulties they had to make her take an interest in the piano! This was the more extraordinary, her mother considered, as Sylvia was obviously musical; when she was two and a half she had already been able to sing ‘Three Blind Mice’ in tune. But she didn’t want to learn her scales. Her mother talked to her about a wonderful little boy called Mozart. Sylvia hated Mozart. ‘No, no!’ she would shout, whenever her mother mentioned the abhorred name. ‘I don’t want to hear.’ And to make sure of not hearing, she would put her fingers in her ears.
Nevertheless, by the time she was nine she could play ‘The Merry Peasant’ from beginning to end without a mistake. Martha still had hopes of turning her into the musician of the family. Paul, meanwhile, was the future Giotto; it had been decided that he inherited his father’s talents. He accepted his career as docilely as he had consented to learn his letters. Sylvia, on the other hand, simply refused to read.
‘But think,’ said Martha ecstatically, ‘how wonderful it will be when you can open any book and read all the beautiful things people have written!’ Her coaxing was ineffective.
‘I like playing better,’ said Sylvia obstinately, with that expression of sullen bad temper which was threatening to become as chronic as her mother’s smile. True to their principles, Herbert and Martha let her play; but it was a grief to them.
‘You make your daddy and mummy so sad,’ they said, trying to appeal to her better feelings. ‘So sad. Won’t you try to read to make your daddy and mummy happy?’ The child confronted them with an expression of sullen, stubborn wretchedness, and shook her head. ‘Just to please us,’ they wheedled. ‘You make us so sad.’ Sylvia looked from one mournfully forgiving face to the other and burst into tears.
‘Naughty,’ she sobbed incoherently. ‘Naughty. Go away.’ She hated them for being sad, for making her sad. ‘No, go away, go away,’ she screamed when they tried to comfort her. She cried inconsolably; but still she wouldn’t read.
Paul, on the other hand, was beautifully teachable and plastic. Slowly (for, with his adenoids, he was not a very intelligent boy) but with all the docility that could be desired, he learned to read about the lass on the ass in the grass and other such matters. ‘Hear how beautifully Paul reads,’ Martha would say, in the hope of rousing Sylvia to emulation. But Sylvia would only make a contemptuous face and walk out of the room. In the end she taught herself to read secretly, in a couple of weeks. Her parents’ pride in the achievement was tempered when they discovered her motives for making the extraordinary effort.
‘But what is this dreadful little book?’ asked Martha, holding up the copy of ‘Nick Carter and the Michigan Boulevard Murderers’ which she had discovered carefully hidden under Sylvia’s winter underclothing. On the cover was a picture of a man being thrown off the roof of a skyscraper by a gorilla.
The child snatched it from her. ‘It’s a lovely book,’ she retorted, flushing darkly with an anger that was intensified by her sense of guilt.
‘Darling,’ said Martha, beautifully smiling on the surface of her annoyance, ‘you mustn’t snatch like that. Snatching’s ugly.’ ‘Don’t care.’ ‘Let me look at it, please.’ Martha held out her hand. She smiled, but her pale face was heavily determined, her eyes commanded.
Sylvia confronted her, stubbornly she shook her head. ‘No, I don’t want you to.’
‘Please,’ begged her mother, more forgivingly and more commandingly than ever, ‘please.’ And in the end, with a sudden outburst of tearful rage, Sylvia handed over the book and ran off into the garden. ‘Sylvia, Sylvia!’ her mother called. But the child would not come back. To have stood by while her mother violated the secrets of her private world would have been unbearable.
Owing to his adenoids Paul looked and almost was an imbecile. Without being a Christian Scientist, Martha disbelieved in doctors; more particularly she disliked surgeons, perhaps because they were so expensive. She left Paul’s adenoids unextirpated; they grew and festered in his throat. From November to May he was never without a cold, a quinsy, an earache. The winter of 1921 was a particularly bad one for Paul. He began by getting influenza which turned into pneumonia, caught measles during his convalescence and developed at the New Year an infection of the middle ear which threatened to leave him permanently deaf.
The doctor peremptorily advised an operation, treatment, a convalescence in Switzerland, at an altitude and in the sun. Martha hesitated to follow his advice. She had come to be so firmly convinced of her poverty that she did not see how she could possibly afford to do what the doctor ordered. In her perplexity she wrote to Judith. Two days later Judith arrived in person.
‘But do you want to kill the boy?’ she asked her sister fiercely. ‘Why didn’t you get him out of this filthy dank hole weeks ago?’
In a few hours she had arranged everything. Herbert and Martha were to start at once with the boy. They were to travel direct to Lausanne by sleeper. ‘But surely a sleeper’s hardly necessary,’ objected Martha. ‘You forget’ (she beautifully smiled), ‘we’re simple folk.’ ‘I only remember you’ve got a sick child with you,’ said Judith, and the sleeper was booked. At Lausanne he was to be operated on. (Expensive reply-paid telegram to the clinic; poor Martha suffered.)
And when he was well enough he was to go to a sanatorium at Leysin. (Another telegram, for which Judith paid, however. Martha forgot to give the money back.) Martha and Herbert, meanwhile, were to find a good hotel, where Paul would join them as soon as his treatment was over. And they were to stay at least six months and preferably a year. Sylvia, meanwhile, was to stay with her aunt in England; that would save Martha a lot of money. Judith would try to find a tenant for the house on the common.
‘Talk of savages!’ said Judith to her husband. ‘I’ve never seen such a little cannibal as Sylvia.’
‘It’s what comes of having vegetarian parents, I suppose.’
‘Poor little creature!’ Judith went on with an indignant pity. ‘There are times when I’d like to drown Martha, she’s such a criminal fool. Bringing those children up without ever letting them go near another child of their own age! It’s scandalous! And then talking to them about spirituality and Jesus and ahimsa and beauty and goodness knows what! And not wanting them to play stupid games, but be artistic! And always being sweet, even when she’s furious! It’s dreadful, really dreadful! And so silly. Can’t she see that the best way of turning a child into a devil is to try to bring it up as an angel? Ah well . . .’ She sighed and was silent, pensively; she herself had had no children and, if the doctors were right, never would have children.
The weeks passed and gradually the little savage was civilized. Her first lessons were lessons in the art of moderation. The food, which at the Bamboroughs’ house was good and plentiful, was at the beginning a terrible temptation to a child accustomed to the austerities of the spiritual life.
‘There’ll be more tomorrow,’ Judith would say, when the child asked for yet another helping of pudding. ‘You’re not a snake, you know; you can’t store up today’s overeating for next week’s dinners. The only thing you can do with too much food is to be sick with it.’
At first Sylvia would insist, would wheedle and whine for more. But luckily, as Judith remarked to her husband, luckily she had a delicate liver. Her aunt’s prophecies were only too punctually realized. After three or four bilious attacks Sylvia learned to control her greed. Her next lesson was in obedience. The obedience she was accustomed to give her parents was slow and grudging. Herbert and Martha never, on principle, commanded, but only suggested. It was a system that had almost forced upon the child a habit of saying no, automatically, to whatever proposition was made to her. ‘No, no, no!’ she regularly began, and then gradually suffered herself to be persuaded, reasoned, or moved by the expression of her parents’ sadness into a belated and generally grudging acquiescence.
Obeying at long last, she felt an obscure resentment against those who had not compelled her to obey at once. Like most children, she would have liked to be relieved compulsorily of responsibility for her own actions;
