The One I Knew The Best Of All

Frances Hodgson Burnett

• Publisher: Jazzybee Verlag
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9783849649012
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

To say that Mrs. Burnett's account of 'The One I Knew Best of All' is a fascinating book, is to put the matter very mildly. It is not one little girl alone whose experiences are here recorded, but, as the author justly claims, it is the story of any child with an imagination. Mrs. Burnett's recollections go back to a very early age; she remembers events that happened before she was three years old, and she cannot remember a time when she was not capable of forming decided opinions about things. Mrs. Burnett has written many attractive books-books that have made friends for her all over the world-but she has never written a book more charming than this. The naiveté, candor, and utter unpretentiousness of it are qualities that give it an enduring fascination.

Chapter I - The One I Knew the Best of All

I HAD every opportunity for knowing her well, at least. We were born on the same day, we learned to toddle about together, we began our earliest observations of the world we lived in at the same period, we made the same mental remarks on people and things, and reserved to ourselves exactly the same rights of private personal opinion. I have not the remotest idea of what she looked like. She belonged to an era when photography was not as advanced an art as it is to-day, and no picture of her was ever made. It is a well-authenticated fact that she was auburn-haired and rosy, and I can testify that she was curly, because one of my earliest recollections of her emotions is a memory of the momentarily maddening effect of a sharp, stinging jerk of the comb when the nurse was absent-minded or maladroit. That she was also a plump little person I am led to believe, in consequence of the well-known joke of a ribald boy cousin and a disrespectful brother, who averred that when she fell she bounced like an india-rubber ball. For the rest, I do not remember what the looking-glass reflected back at her, though I must have seen it. It might, consequently, be argued that on such occasions there were so many serious and interesting problems to be attended to that a reflection in the looking-glass was an unimportant detail.

In those early days I did not find her personally interesting — in fact, I do not remember regarding her as a personality at all. It was the people about her, the things she saw, the events which made up her small existence, which were absorbing, exciting, and of the most vital and terrible importance sometimes. It was not until I had children of my own, and had watched their small individualities forming themselves, their large imaginations giving proportions and values to things, that I began to remember her as a little Person; and in going back into her past and reflecting on certain details of it and their curious effects upon her, I found interest in her and instruction, and the most serious cause for tender deep reflection on her as a thing touching on that strange, awful problem of a little soul standing in its newness in the great busy, tragic world of life, touched for the first time by everything that passes it, and never touched without some sign of the contact being left upon it.

What I remember most clearly and feel most serious is one thing above all: it is that I have no memory of any time so early in her life that she was not a distinct little individual. Of the time when she was not old enough to formulate opinions quite clearly to herself I have no recollection, and I can remember distinctly events which happened before she was three years old. The first incident which appears to me as being interesting, as an illustration of what a baby mind is doing, occurred a week or so after the birth of her sister, who was two years younger than herself. It is so natural, so almost inevitable, that even the most child-loving among us should find it difficult to realize constantly that a mite of three or four, tumbling about, playing with india-rubber dogs and with difficulty restrained from sucking the paint off Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, not to mention the animals, is a person" and that this person is ten thousand times more sensitive to impression than one's self, and that hearing and seeing one, this person, though he or she may not really understand, will be likely, in intervals of innocent destruction of small portable articles, to search diligently in infant mental space until he or she has found an explanation of affairs, to be pigeon-holed for future reference. And yet I can most solemnly declare that such was the earliest habit of that " One I knew the best of all."

One takes a fat, comfortable little body on one's knee and begins to tell it a story about " a fairy "or "a doggie" or "a pussy." And the moment the story begins the questions begin also. And with my recollection of the intense little Bogie whom I knew so well and who certainly must have been a most e very-day-looking little personage, giving no outward warning of preternatural alertness and tragic earnestness, my memory leads me to think that indeed it is not a trifle to be sufficiently upright and intelligent to answer these questions exactly as one should. This first incident, which seems to me to denote how early a tiny mind goes through distinct processes of thought, is a very clear memory to me.

I see a comfortable English bedroom, such as would to-day seem old-fashioned without being ancient enough to be picturesque. I remember no articles of furniture in the room but a rather heavy four-posted carved mahogany bed, hung with crimson damask, ornamented with heavy fringe and big cords and tassels, a chair by this bedside — I think it was an arm-chair covered with chintz — and a footstool. This was called " a buffet," and rhymed with Miss Muffet eating her curds and whey. In England Miss Muffet sat on " a buffet " on the blood-curdling occasion when

" There came a big spider

And sat down beside her

And frightened Miss Muffet away."

This buffet was placed upon the hearth-rug before the fire, and a very small being was sitting upon it, very conscious, in a quiet way, of her mamma lying on the crimson-draped bed, and the lady friend who was sitting in the chair by her, discussing their respective new babies. But most of all was the Small Person on the buffet conscious of their own personal new baby who was being taken care of by a nurse just near her.

Perhaps the interest of such recollections is somewhat added to by the fact that one can only recall them by episodes, and that the episodes seem to appear without any future or any past. Not the faintest shadow of the new baby seems to appear upon the camera, up to this moment, of the buffet, and I have no remembrance of any mental process which led to the Small Person's wishing to hold it on her knee. Perhaps it was a sudden inspiration.

But she did wish to hold it, and notified as much, apparently with sufficient clearness, to the nurse.

The shadow of the nurse has no name and no special individuality. She was only a figure known as " The Nurse "

But she impresses me in these days as having been quite definite in her idea that Persons not yet three years old were not to be trusted entirely with the new-born, however excellent their intentions were.

How the Small Person expressed herself in those days I do not know at all. Before three years articulation is not generally perfect, but if hers was not I know she was entirely unaware of her inadequacies. She thought she spoke just as other people did, and I never remember her pronunciation being corrected. I can recall, with perfect distinctness, however, what she thought she expressed and what her hearers seemed to understand her to say.

It was in effect something like this:

" I want to hold the

New Baby on my knee. "

" You are too little," said the Nurse.

"No, I am not too little. The New Baby is little, and I am on the buffet, and I will hold her tight if you will put her on my knee."

" She would slip off, I am afraid."

" No, I will hold her tight with both arms, just like you do. Please give her to me." And the Small Person spread her small knees.

I don't know how long the discussion lasted, but the Nurse was a good-natured person, and at last she knelt down upon the hearth-rug by the buffet, holding the white-robed new baby in her arms, and amiably pretended to place it in the short arms and on the tiny knees, while she was really supporting it herself.

" There," she said. " Now she is on your knee." She thought she had made it all right, but she was gravely mistaken.

" But I want to hold her myself"' said the Small Person.

" You are holding her," answered the Nurse, cheerfully. " What a big girl to be holding the New Baby just like a grown-up lady."

The Small Person looked at her with serious candor.

" I am not holding her," she said. " You are holding her."

That the episode ended without the Small Person either having held the New Baby, or being deceived into fancying she held it, is as clear a memory to me as if it had occurred yesterday; and the point of the incident is that after all the years that have passed I remember with equal distinctness the thoughts which were in the Small Person's mind as she looked at the Nurse and summed the matter up, while the woman imagined she was a baby not capable of thinking at all.

It has always interested me to recall this because it was so long ago, and while it has not faded out at all, and I see the mental attitude as definitely as I see the child and the four-post bed with its hangings, I recognize that she was too young to have had in her vocabulary the -words to put her thoughts and mental arguments into — and yet they were there, as thoughts and mental arguments are there to-day — and after these many years I can write them in adult words without the slightest difficulty. I should like to have a picture of her eyes and the expression of her baby face as she looked at the nurse and thought these things, but perhaps her looks were as inarticulate as her speech.

" I am very little," she thought. " I am so little that you think I do not know that you are pretending that I am holding the new baby, while really it is you who are holding it. But I do know. I know it as well as you, though I am so little and you are so big that you always hold babies. But I cannot make you understand that, so it is no use talking. I want the baby, but you think I shall let it fall. I am sure I shall not. But you are a grown-up person and I am a little child, and the big people can always have their own way."

I do not remember any rebellion against an idea of injustice. All that comes back to me in the form of a mental attitude is a perfect realization of the immense fact that people who were grown up could do what they chose, and that there was no appeal against their omnipotence.

It may be that this line of thought was an infant indication of a nature which developed later as one of its chief characteristics, a habit of adjusting itself silently to the inevitable, which was frequently considered to represent indifference, but which merely evolved itself from private conclusions arrived at through a private realization of the utter uselessness of struggle against the Fixed.

The same curiosity as to the method in which the thoughts expressed themselves to the small mind devours me when I recall the remainder of the bedroom episode, or rather an incident of the same morning.

The lady visitor who sat in the chair was a neighbor, and she also was the proprietor of a new baby, though her baby was a few weeks older than the very new one the Nurse held.

She was the young mother of two or three children, and had a pretty sociable manner toward tiny things. The next thing I see is that the Small Person had been called up to her and stood by the bed in an attitude of modest decorum, being questioned and talked to.

I have no doubt she was asked how she liked the New Baby, but I do not remember that or anything but the serious situation which arose as the result of one of the questions. It was the first social difficulty of the Small Person — the first confronting of the overwhelming problem of how to adjust perfect truth to perfect politeness.

Language seems required to mentally confront this problem and try to settle it, and the Small Person cannot have had words, yet it is certain that she confronted and wrestled with it.

" And what is your New Baby's name to be? " the lady asked.

" Edith" was the answer.

" That is a pretty name," said the lady. " I have a new baby, and I have called it Eleanor. Is not that a pretty name? "

In this manner it was — simple as it may seem — that the awful problem presented itself. That it seemed awful — actually almost unbearable — is an illustration of the strange, touching sensitiveness of the new-born butterfly soul just emerged from its chrysalis — the impressionable sensitiveness which it seems so tragic that we do not always remember.

For some reason — it would be impossible to tell what — the Small Person did not think Eleanor was a pretty name. On strictly searching the innermost recesses of her diminutive mentality she found that she could not think it a pretty name. She tried, as if by muscular effort, and could not. She thought it was an ugly name; that was the anguish of it. And here was a lady, a nice lady, a friend with whom her own mamma took tea, a kind lady, who had had the calamity to have her own newest baby christened by an ugly name. How could anyone be rude and hard-hearted enough to tell her what she had done — that her new baby would alwa...

Table of contents

• PREFACE
• Chapter I - The One I Knew the Best of All
• Chapter II - The Little Flower Book and the Brawn Testament
• Chapter III - The Back Garden of Eden
• Chapter V. - Islington Square,
• Chapter VI. - A Confidence Betrayed
• Chapter VII. The Secretaire
• Chapter VIII. The Party
• Chapter IX. The Wedding
• Chapter X. The Strange Thing
• Chapter XI. " Mamma " — and the First One
• Chapter XII. " Edith Somerville " — and Raw Turnips
• Chapter XIII. Christopher Columbus
• Chapter XIV. The Dryad Days
• Chapter XVI. And So She Did