VI

FEARS OF CHILDHOOD

If I look back over my own life, I can discern three distinct stages of fear and anxieties, and I expect it is the same with most people.  The terrors of childhood are very mysterious things, and their horror consists in the child’s inability to put the dread into words.  I remember how one night, when we were living in the Master’s Lodge at Wellington College, I had gone to bed, and waking soon afterwards heard a voice somewhere outside.  I got out of bed, went to the door, and looked out.  Close to my door was an archway which looked into the open gallery that ran round the big front hall, giving access to the bedrooms.  At the opposite end of the hall, in the gallery, burnt a gaslight:  to my horror I observed close to the gas what seemed to me a colossal shrouded statue, made of a black bronze, formless, silent, awful.  I crept back to my bed, and there shivered in an ecstasy of fear, till at last I fell asleep.  There was no statue there in the morning!  I told my old nurse, after a day or two of dumb dread, what I had seen.  She laughed, and told me that a certain Mrs. Holder, an elderly widow who was a dressmaker, had been to see her, about some piece of work.  They had turned out the nursery lights and were going downstairs, when some question arose about the stuff of the frock, whatever it was.  Mrs. Holder had mounted on a chair to look close at the stuff by the gaslight; and this was my bogey!

We had a delightful custom in nursery days, devised by my mother, that on festival occasions, such as birthdays or at Christmas, our presents were given us in the evening by a fairy called Abracadabra.

The first time the fairy appeared, we heard, after tea, in the hall, the hoarse notes of a horn.  We rushed out in amazement.  Down in the hall, talking to an aunt of mine who was staying in the house, stood a veritable fairy, in a scarlet dress, carrying a wand and a scarlet bag, and wearing a high pointed scarlet hat, of the shape of an extinguisher.  My aunt called us down; and we saw that the fairy had the face of a great ape, dark-brown, spectacled, of a good-natured aspect, with a broad grin, and a curious crop of white hair, hanging down behind and on each side.  Unfortunately my eldest brother, a very clever and imaginative child, was seized with a panic so insupportable at the sight of the face, that his present had to be given him hurriedly, and he was led away, blanched and shuddering, to the nursery.  After that, the fairy never appeared except when he was at school:  but long after, when I was looking in a lumber-room with my brother for some mislaid toys, I found in a box the mask of Abracadabra and the horn.  I put it hurriedly on, and blew a blast on the horn, which seemed to be of tortoise-shell with metal fittings.  To my amazement, he turned perfectly white, covered his face with his hands, and burst out with the most dreadful moans.  I