My parents were both tall and light, and the
others took after them. I was small and dark, and they were tall
blondes with blue eyes and pale gold hair. And in disposition I was
unlike them as in physique. How do you account for it?"
It was a long question, I said, and I had told her all I could about
it. I couldn't go further into it; I was too ignorant. I had just
touched on the subject in one of my books. It was in other books, with
reference to a supposed antagonism which still survives in blue-eyed
and dark-eyed people.
She asked me to give her the titles of the books I spoke of. "You
imagine, I daresay," she said, "that it is mere idle curiosity on my
part. It isn't so. The subject has a deep and painful interest for me."
That was all, and I had forgotten all about the conversation until some
time afterwards, when I had a letter from her recalling it. I quote one
passage without the alteration of a syllable:
"Oh, why did I not know before, when I was young, in the days when my
beautiful blue-eyed but cruel and remorseless mother and sisters made
my life an inexplicable grief and torment! It might have lifted the
black shadows from my youth by explaining the reason of their
persecutions - it might have taken the edge from my sufferings by
showing that I was not personally to blame, also that nothing could
ever obviate it, that I but wasted my life and broke my heart in for
ever vain efforts to appease an hereditary enemy and oppressor."
Cases of this kind cannot, however, appear conclusive. The cases in
which mother and daughters unite in persecuting a member of the family
are not uncommon. I have known several in my experience in which
respectable, well-to-do, educated, religious people have displayed a
perfectly fiendish animosity against one of the family. In all these
cases it has been mother and daughters combining against one daughter,
and so far as one can see into the matter, the cause is usually to be
traced to some strangeness or marked peculiarity, physical or mental,
in the persecuted one. The peculiarity may be a beauty of disposition,
or some virtue or rare mental quality which the others do not possess.
It would perhaps be worth while to form a society to investigate all
these cases of persecution in families, to discover whether or not they
afford any support to the notion of an inherited antagonism of dark and
light races. The Anthropological, Eugenic and Psychical Research
Societies might consider the suggestion.
XXXI
THE RETURN OF THE CHIFF-CHAFF
(SPRING SADNESS)
On a warm, brilliant morning in late April I paid a visit to a shallow
lakelet or pond five or six acres in extent which I had discovered some
weeks before hidden in a depression in the land, among luxuriant furze,
bramble, and blackthorn bushes.
