Jenny reached the age of two years and a few months without surprising
her relatives by any prodigious feats of intelligence or wickedness. But
in Hagworth Street there was not much leisure to regard the progress of
babyhood. There was no time for more than physical comparisons with
other children. It would be pleasant to pretend that Jenny gazed at the
stars, clapping a welcome to Caesiopea and singing to the Pleiades; but,
as a matter of fact, it was not very easy to regard the heavens from the
kitchen window of Number Seventeen. I should be happy to say that
flowers were a joy to her from the beginning, but very few flowers came
to Hagworth Street--groundsel for the canary sometimes, and plantains,
but not much else. The main interest of Jenny's earliest days lay rather
with her mother than herself.
The visit of the three old aunts roused Mrs. Raeburn to express her
imagination at first, but gradually assumed a commonplace character as
the months rolled by without another visit and as Jenny, with a chair
pushed before her, learned to walk rather earlier than most children,
but showed no other sign of suffering or benefiting by that grim
intervention. Perhaps, when she pushed her wooden guide so quickly along
the landing that chair and child bumped together down every stair, her
mother was inclined to think she was lucky not to be killed. Anyway, she
said so to the child, who was shrieking on the mat in the hall; and in
after years Jenny could remember the painful incident. Indeed, that and
a backward splash into the washtub on the first occasion of wearing a
frock of damson velveteen, were the only events of her earliest life
that impressed themselves at all sharply or completely upon her mind.
Through time's distorted haze she could also vaguely recall an adventure
with treacle when, egged on by Alfie, she had explored the darkness of
an inset cupboard and wedged the stolen tin of golden syrup so tightly
round her silvery curls that Alfie had shouted for help. The sensation
of the sticky substance trickling down her face in numerous thin streams
remained with her always.
People were only realized in portions. For example, Ruby O'Connor
existed as a rough, red hand, descending upon her suddenly in the midst
of baby enjoyments. Alfie and Edie were two noises, acquiring with
greater nearness the character of predatory birds. That is to say, in
Jenny's mind the intimate approach of either always announced loss or
interruption of a pleasure. Her father she first apprehended as a pair
of legs forming a gigantic archway, vast as the Colossus of Rhodes must
have loomed to the triremes of the Confederacy. Better than kisses or
admonitions, she remembered her mother's skirt, whether as support or
sanctuary. The rest of mankind she did not at all distinguish from trees
walking. She was better able to conceive a smile than a face, but the
realization of either largely depended upon its association with the
handkerchief of "peep-bo."
Seventeen Hagworth Street was familiar, first of all, through the step
of the front door, which she invariably was commanded to beware. She did
not grasp its propinquity from the perambulator, for, when lifted out of
the latter and told to run in to mother, it was only the step which
assured her of the vast shadowy place of warmth and familiar smells in
which she spent most of her existence. Of the smells, the best
remembered in after-life was that of warm blankets before the kitchen
fire. Her only approach to an idea of property rested in the security of
a slice of bread and butter, which could be devoured slowly without
wakening Alfie's cupidity. On the other hand, when jam was added, the
slice must be gobbled, not from greediness, but for fear of losing it.
This applied also to the incidental booty of stray chocolates or paints.
Her notion of territory was confined to places where she could sit or
lie at ease. The patchwork hearthrug, which provided warmth, softness,
something to tug at, and, sometimes, pieces of coal to chew, was
probably her earliest conception of home, and perhaps her first
disillusionment was due to a volatile spark burning her cheek. Bed
struck her less as a prelude to the oblivion of sleep than as a spot
where she was not worried about sucking her thumb. Perhaps her first
emotion of mere sensuousness was the delicious anticipation of
thumb-sucking as Ruby O'Connor propelled her upstairs with the knee, a
sensuousness that was only very slightly ruffled by the thought of soap
and flannelette. Suspicion was born when once she was given a spoonful
of jam, whose melting sweetness disclosed a clammy sediment of gray
powder, so that ever afterwards the offer of a spoon meant kicks and
yells, dribbles and clenched resistance. Her first deception lay in
pretending to be asleep when she was actually awake, as animals
counterfeit death to avoid disturbance. Whether, however, she had any
idea of being what she was not, is unlikely, as she did not yet possess
a notion of being. Probably "peep-bo," when first practiced by herself,
helped to formulate an embryonic egotism.
The birth of light on summer mornings kindled a sense of wonder when she
realized that light did not depend on human agency. Later on, dawn was
connected in her mind with the suddenly jerky movement of the
night-light's luminous reflection upon the ceiling, at which she would
stare for hours in meditative content. This movement was always followed
by the splutter and hiss of the drowning wick, and her first feeling of
nocturnal terror was experienced when once these symptoms occurred and
were followed, not by morning light, but by darkness. Then she shrieked,
not because she feared anything in the darkness yet, but because she
could not understand it.
The sensations of this Islington baby may have resembled those of a
full-grown Carib or Hottentot in their simple acceptance of primary
facts, in a desire for synthetic representation which distinguishes an
unsophisticated audience of plays, in that odd passion for accuracy
whose breach upsets a habit, whose observance confirms dogs, children
and savages in their hold upon life.
As was natural for one more usually occupied with effects than causes,
Jenny took delight in colored chalks and beads, and probably a vivid
scarlet _pelisse_ first awoke her dormant sense of beauty. The
appearance of this vestment was more important than its purpose, but the
tying on of her "ta-ta"--at first a frilled bonnet, later on a rakish
Tam o' Shanter--was clapped as the herald of drowsy glidings in cool
airs. She would sit in the perambulator staring solemnly at Ruby, and
only opening her eyes a little wider when she was bumped down to take a
crossing and up to regain the pavement. Passers-by, who leaned over to
admire her, gained no more appreciation than a puzzled blink, less than
was vouchsafed to the sudden shadow of a bird's flight across her
vision.
Then came hot summer days and a sailor hat which enrolled her in the
crew of the H.M.S. _Goliath_. This hat she disliked on account of the
elastic, which Alfie loved to catch hold of and let go with a smacking
sound that hurt her chin dreadfully; and sometimes in tugging at it, she
would herself let it slip so that it caught her nose like a whip.
These slow promenades up and down the shady side of Hagworth Street were
very pleasant; although the inevitable buckling of the strap began to
impede her ideas of freedom, so much so in time that it became a duty to
herself to wriggle as much as possible before she let Ruby fasten it
round her waist. Perhaps the first real struggle for self-expression
happened on a muddy day, when she discovered that, by letting her podgy
hand droop over the edge of the perambulator, the palm of it could be
exquisitely tickled by the slow and moist revolutions of the wheel. Ruby
instantly forbade this. Jenny declined to obey the command. Ruby leaned
over and slapped the offending hand. Jenny shrieked and kicked. Edie
fell down and became involved with the wheels of the perambulator. Alfie
knelt by a drain to pretend he was fishing. Jenny screamed louder and
louder. An errand-boy looked on. An old lady rebuked the flustered Ruby.
The rabbit-skin rug palpitated with angry little feet, Ruby put up the
hood and tightened the strap round Jenny, making her more furious than
ever. It came on to rain. It came on to blow. It was altogether a
thoroughly unsatisfactory morning.
"I'll learn you, Miss Artful, when I gets you home. You will have your
own way, will you? Young Alfie, come out of the gutter, you naughty boy.
I'll tell your father. Get up, do, Edie."
At last they reached Number Seventeen. Summoned by yells, Mrs. Raeburn
came to the door.
"Whatever have you been doing to the children, Ruby?"
"Lor', mum, they've been that naughty, I haven't known if I was on my
head or my heels."
The interfering old lady came up at this moment.
"That girl of yours was beating your baby disgracefully."
"No, I never," declared Ruby.
"I shall report you to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to
Children."
"That's right, Mother Longnose, you'll do a lot," said Ruby, whose Irish
ancestry was flooding her cheeks.
"Were you whipping Jenny?" inquired Mrs. Raeburn.
"I slapped her wrist."
"What for?"
"Because she wouldn't keep her hands off of the wheel. I told her not
to, but she would go on."
"I shall report you all," announced the old lady.
This irritated Mrs. Raeburn, who replied that she would report the old
lady as a wandering lunatic. Jenny's right to act as she wished was in
the balance. The old lady, like many another before, ruined freedom's
cause by untimely propaganda. Mrs. Raeburn plucked her daughter from the
perambulator, shook her severely, and said: "You bad, naughty girl,"
several times in succession. Jenny paused for a moment in surprise, then
burst into yells louder by far than she had ever achieved before, and
was carried into the house out of reach of sympathy.
From that moment she was alert to combat authority. From that moment to
the end of her days, life could offer her nothing more hateful than
attempted repression. That this struggle over the wheel of a
perambulator endowed her with a consciousness of her own personality, it
would be hard to assert positively, but it is significant that about
this age (two years and eight months) she no longer always spoke of
herself as Jenny, but sometimes took the first personal pronoun. Also,
about this age, she began to imagine that people were laughing at her,
and, being taken by her mother into a shop on one occasion, set up a
commotion of tears, because, she insisted, the ladies behind the counter
were laughing at her, when really the poor ladies were trying to be
particularly pleasant. When Jenny was three, another baby came to
Hagworth Street--dark-eyed, puny, and wan-looking. Jenny was put on the
bed beside her.
"This is May," said her mother.
"I love May," said Jenny.
"Very much, do you love her?"
"Jenny loves May. I love May. May is Jenny's dolly."
And from that moment, notwithstanding the temporary interruptions of
many passionate quarrels, Jenny made that dark-eyed little sister one of
the great facts in her life. This was well for May, because, as she grew
older, she grew into a hunchback.
Two more years went by of daily walks and insignificant adventures.
Jenny was five. Alfie and Edie were now stalwart scholars, who rushed
off in the mornings, the former armed, according to the season, with
chestnuts, pegtops or bags of marbles, the latter full of whispers and
giggles, always one of a bunch of other little girls distinguishable
only by dress. About this time Jenny came to the conclusion she did not
want to be a girl any longer. But the bedrock of sexual differences
puzzled her: obviously one vital quality of boyishness was the right to
wear breeches. Jenny took off her petticoats and stalked about the
kitchen.
"You rude thing!" said Ruby, shocked by the exhibition.
"I'm not a rude thing," Jenny declared; "I'm being a boy."
"And wherever is your petticoats?"
"I frowed 'em away," said Jenny. "I'm a boy."
"You're rude little girl."
"I'm not a girl. I won't be a girl. I want to be a boy." Jenny darted
for the street, encountering by the gate the outraged blushes of Edie
and her bunch of secretive companions.
"Did you ever?" said the ripest. "Look at Edie's sister."
Boys opposite began to "holler." Alfie appeared bent double in an effort
to secure a blood ally. He lost at once the marble and the respect of
his schoolfellows. His confusion was terrible. His sister skirtless
before the public eye! Young Jenny making him look like a fool!
"Go on in, you little devil," he shouted. He ground his teeth.
"Go on in!"
Ruby was by this time in pursuit of the rebel. Mrs. Raeburn had been
warned and was already at the gate. Alfie, haunted by a thousand mocking
eyes, fled to his room and wept tears of shame. Edie broke away from her
friends, and stood, breathing very fast, in petrified anticipation.
Jenny was led indoors and up to bed.
"Why can't I be a boy?" she moaned.
"Well, there's a sauce!" said Ruby. "However on earth can you be a boy
when you've been made a girl?"
"But I don't want to be a girl."
"Well, you've got to be, and that's all about it. You'll be fidgeting
for the moon next. Besides, if you go trapesing round half-dressed, the
policeman'll have you."
Jenny had heard of the powers of the policeman for a long time. Those
guardians of order stood for her as sinister, inhuman figures, always
ready to spring on little girls and carry them off to unknown places.
She was never taught to regard them as kindly defenders on whom one
could rely in emergencies, but looked upon them with all the suspicion
of a dog for a uniform. Their large quiescence and their habit of
looming unexpectedly round corners shed a cloud upon the sunniest
moment. They were images of vengeance at whose approach even boys
huddled together, shamefaced.
Mrs. Raeburn came upstairs to interview her discontented daughter.
"Don't you ever do any such thing again. Behaving like a tomboy!"
"Why mayn't I be a boy?"
"Because you're a girl."
"Who said so?"
"God."
"Who's God?"
"That's neither here nor there."
God was another shadow upon enjoyment. He was not to be found by pillar
boxes. He did not lurk in archways, it is true. He was apparently not a
policeman, but something bigger, even, than a policeman. She had seen
His picture--old and irritable, among the clouds.
"Why did God say so?"
"Because He knows best."
"But I want to be a boy."
"Would you like me to cut off all your curls?"
"No--o--o."
"Well, if you want to be a boy, off they'll have to come. Don't make any
mistake about that--every one, and I'll give them to May. Then you'll be
a sight."
"Am I a girl because I'm pretty?"
"Yes."
"Is that what girls are for?"
"Yes."
This adventure made Jenny much older because it set her imagination
working, or rather it made her imagination concentrate. Reasons and
causes began to float nebulously before her mind. She began to ask
questions. Gone was the placid acceptance of facts. Gone was the stolid
life of babyhood. Darkness no longer terrified her because it was not
light, but because it was populated with inhabitants both dismal and
ill-minded. At first these shapes were undefined, mere cloudy
visualizations of Ruby's vague threats. Bogymen existed in cupboards and
other places of secluded darkness, but without any appearance capable of
making a pictorial impression. It was a Punch and Judy show that first
endowed the night with visible and malicious shadows.
The sound of the drum boomed from the far end of Hagworth Street. The
continual reiteration of the pipes' short phrase of melody summoned boys
and girls from every area. The miniature theater stood up tall in a
mystery of curtains. Row after row of children was formed, row upon row
waited patiently till the showman left off his two instruments and gave
the word to begin. Down below, ineffably magical, sounded the squeaking
voice of Punch. Up he came, swinging his little legs across the sill; up
he came in a glory of red and yellow, and a jingle of bells. Jenny gazed
spell-bound from her place in the very front row. She laughed gayly at
this world of long noses and squeaking merriment, of awkward, yet
incredibly agile movement. She turned round to see how the bigger
children behind enjoyed it all, and fidgeted from one foot to the other
in an ecstasy of appreciation. She laughed when Punch hit Judy; she
laughed louder still when he threw the baby into the street. She
gloried in his discomfiture of the melancholy showman with squeaky wit.
He was a wonderful fellow, this Punch; always victorious with stick and
tongue. His defeat of the beadle was magnificent; his treatment of Jim
Crow a triumph of strategy. To be sure, he was no match for Joey, the
clown. But lived there the mortal who could have contended successfully
with such a jovial and active and indefatigable assailant?
Jenny was beginning to see the world with new eyes. The kitchen of
Number Seventeen became a dull place; the street meant more to her than
ever now, with the possibility of meeting in reality this enchanted
company, to whom obedience, repression, good-behavior were just so many
jokes to be laughed out of existence. How much superior to Jenny's house
was Punch's house. How delicious it would be to bury dogs in coffins.
But the clown! After all, he could have turned even Jenny's house into
one long surprise. He summed up all Jenny's ideas of enjoyment. She
heard Ruby behind her commenting upon his action as "owdacious." The
same unsympathetic tyrant had often called her "owdacious," and here,
before her dancing deep eyes, was audacity made manifest. How she longed
to be actually of this merriment, not merely a spectator at the back of
whose mind bed loomed as the dull but inevitable climax of all delight.
Then came the episode of the hangman, and the quavering note of fear in
Punch's voice found a responsive echo in her own.
"He's going to be hanged," said Ruby gloatingly.
Jenny began to feel uneasy. Even in this irresponsible world, there was
unpleasantness in the background.
Then came the ghost--a terrifying figure. And then came a green dragon,
with cruel, snapping jaws--even more terrifying--but most terrifying of
all was Ruby's answer to her whispered inquiry:
"Why was all that?"
"Because Punch was a bad, wicked man."
The street so crudely painted on the back of the puppet-show took on
suddenly a strange and uninviting emptiness, seemed to stand out behind
the figures with a horrid likeness to Hagworth Street, to Hagworth
Street in a bad dream devoid of friendly faces. Was a green dragon the
end of pleasure? It was all very disconcerting.
The play was over; the halfpennies had been gathered in. The lamplighter
was coming round, and through the dusk the noise of pipe and drums
slowly grew faint in the distance with a melancholy foreboding of
finality.
Jenny's brain was buzzing with a multitude of self-contradictory
impressions. For once, in a way, she was glad to hold tightly on to
Ruby's rough, red hand. But the conversation between Ruby and another
big girl on the way home was not encouraging.
"And she was found in an area with her throat cut open in a stream of
blood, and the man as did it got away and ain't been caught yet."
"There's been a lot of these murders lately," said Ruby.
"Hundreds," corroborated her friend.
"Every night," added Ruby, "sometimes two."
"I've been afraid to sleep alone. You can hear the paper boys calling of
'em out."
True enough, that very night, Jenny, lying awake, heard down the street
cries gradually coming nearer in colloquial announcement of sudden
death, in hoarse revelations of blood and disaster.
"Could I be murdered?" she asked next day.
"Of course you could," was Ruby's cheerful reply. "Especially if you
isn't a good girl."
Jenny went over in her mind the drama of Punch and Judy. Murder meant
being knocked on the head with a stick and thrown out of the window.
That night again the cries went surging up and down the street. Details
of mutilation floated in through the foggy air till the flickering
night-light showed peeping hangmen in every dim corner. Jenny covered
herself with the blankets and pressed hot, sleepless eyelids close to
her eyes, hoping to distract herself from the contemplation of horror by
the gay wheels of dazzling colors which such an action always produces.
The wheels appeared, but presently turned to the similitude of blood-red
spots. She opened her eyes again. The room seemed monstrously large.
Edie was beside her. She shook her sleeping sister.
"Wake up; oh, Edie, do wake up!"
"Whatever is it, you great nuisance?"
In the far distance, "Another Horrible Murder in Whitechapel," answered
Edie's question, and Jenny began to scream.