Next to our garden, separated only by a wooden fence, through which we
children used to peep, was the opulent and well-kept garden of Monsieur
Prefontaine, who was a very important man, once Mayor of Hochelaga, the
French quarter of Montreal, in which we lived. Madame Prefontaine,
moreover, was an object of unfailing interest and absorbing wonder to us
children. She was an enormously fat woman, and had once taken a trip to
New York City, to look for a wayward sister. There she had been offered
a job as a fat woman for a big circus. Madame Prefontaine used to say to
the neighbors, who always listened to her with great respect:
“Mon dieu! That New York--it is one beeg hell! Never do I feel so hot as
in dat terrible city! I feel de grease it run all out of me! Mebbe, eef
I stay at dat New York, I may be one beeg meelionaire--oui! But, non!
Me? I prefer my leetle home, so cool and quiet in Hochelaga than be
meelionaire in dat New York, dat is like purgatory.”
We had an old straggly garden. Everything about it looked “seedy” and
uncared for and wild, for we could not afford a gardener. My sisters and
I found small consolation in papa’s stout assertion that it looked
picturesque, with its gnarled old apple trees and shrubs in their
natural wild state. I was sensitive about that garden. It was awfully
poor-looking in comparison with our neighbors’ nicely kept places. It
was just like our family, I sometimes treacherously thought--unkempt and
wild and “heathenish.” A neighbor once called us that. I stuck out my
tongue at her when she said it. Being just next to the fine garden of
Monsieur Prefontaine, it appeared the more ragged and beggarly, that
garden of ours.
Mama would send us children to pick the maggots off the currant bushes
and the bugs off the potato plants and, to encourage us, she would give
us one cent for every pint of bugs or maggots we showed her. I hated the
bugs and maggots, but it was fascinating to dig up the potatoes. To see
the vegetables actually under the earth seemed almost like a miracle,
and I would pretend the gnomes and fairies put them there, and hid
inside the potatoes. I once told this to my little brothers and sisters,
and Nora, who was just a little tot, wouldn’t eat a potato again for
weeks, for fear she might bite on a fairy. Most of all, I loved to pick
strawberries, and it was a matter of real grief and humiliation to me
that our own strawberries were so dried-up looking and small, as
compared with the big, luscious berries I knew were in the garden of
Monsieur Prefontaine.
On that day, I had been picking strawberries for some time, and the sun
was hot and my basket only half full. I kept thinking of the berries in
the garden adjoining, and the more I thought of them, the more I wished
I had some of them.
It was very quiet in our garden. Not a sound was anywhere, except the
breezes, making all kinds of mysterious whispers among the leaves. For
some time, my eye had become fixed, fascinated, upon a loose board, with
a hole in it near the ground. I looked and looked at that hole, and I
thought to myself: “It is just about big enough for me to crawl
through.” Hardly had that thought occurred to me, when down on hands and
knees I dropped, and into the garden of the great Monsieur Prefontaine I
crawled.
The strawberry beds were right by the fence. Greedily I fell upon them.
Oh, the exquisite joy of eating forbidden fruit! The fearful thrills
that even as I ate ran up and down my spine, as I glanced about me on
all sides. There was even a wicked feeling of fierce joy in
acknowledging to myself that I was a thief.
“Thou shalt not steal!” I repeated the commandment that I had broken
even while my mouth was full, and then, all of a sudden, I heard a
voice, one that had inspired me always with feelings of respect and awe
and fear.
“How you get in here?”
Monsieur Prefontaine was towering sternly above me. He was a big man,
bearded, and with a face of preternatural importance and sternness.
I got up. My legs were shaky, and the world was whirling about me. I
thought of the jail, where thieves were taken, and a great terror seized
me. Monsieur Prefontaine had been the Mayor of Hochelaga. He could have
me put in prison for all the rest of my life. We would all be disgraced.
“Well? Well? How you get in here?” demanded Monsieur Prefontaine.
“M’sieu, I--I-_crawled in_!” I stammered, indicating the hole in the
fence.
“Bien! _Crawl out_, madame!”
“Madame” to me, who was but twelve years old!
“_Crawl out!_” commanded Monsieur, pointing to the hole, and feeling
like a worm, ignominiously, under the awful eye of that ex-mayor of
Hochelaga, on hands and knees and stomach, I crawled out.
Once on our side, I felt not the shame of being a thief so much as the
degradation of _crawling out_ with that man looking.
Feeling like a desperate criminal, I swaggered up to the house,
swinging my half-filled basket of strawberries. As I came up the path,
Ellen, a sister just two years older than I, put her head out of an
upper window and called down to me:
“Marion, there’s a beggar boy coming in at the gate. Give him some of
that stale bread mama left on the kitchen table to make a pudding with.”
The boy was about thirteen, and he was a very dirty boy, with hardly any
clothes on him. As I looked at him, I was thrilled with a most beautiful
inspiration. I could regenerate myself by doing an act of lovely
charity.
“Wait a minute, boy.”
Disregarding the stale bread, I cut a big slice of fresh, sweet-smelling
bread that Sung Sung, our one very old Chinese servant, had made that
day. Heaping it thick with brown sugar, I handed it to the boy.
“There, beggar boy,” I said generously, “you can eat it all.”
He took it with both hands, greedily, and now as I looked at him
another, a fiendish, impulse seized me. Big boys had often hit me, and
although I had always fought back as valiantly and savagely as my puny
fists would let me, I had always been worsted, and had been made to
realize the weakness of my sex and age. Now as I looked at that beggar
boy, I realized that here was my chance to hit a big boy. He was smiling
at me gratefully across that slice of sugared bread, and I leaned over
and suddenly pinched him hard on each of his cheeks. His eyes bulged
with amazement, and I still remember his expression of surprise and
pained fear. I made a horrible grimace at him and then ran out of the
room.