"We are warning you."
"Well, don"t sit nodding there like three crows; your cursing will come to nothing, because you don"t know nothing about London, nor about life, nor about nothing. What"s the good of joring about the way to Heaven, when you don"t know the way to Liverpool Street without asking a policeman? I say Jenny shall be happy. I say she shall be jolly and merry and laugh when she"s a mind to, bless her, and never come to no harm with her mother to look after her. She sha"n"t be a Plain Jane and No Nonsense, with her hair screwed back like a broom, but she shall be Jenny, sweet and handsome, with lips made for kissing and eyes that will sparkle and shine like six o"clock of a summer morning."
Mrs. Raeburn was sitting up in bed, holding high the unconscious infant.
"And she _shall_ be happy, d"ye hear? And you sha"n"t have her, so get out, and don"t wag your bonnets at my Jenny."
The three aunts looked at each other.
"I see the footprints of Satan in this room," said Miss Horner.
"Not a bit of it," contradicted her niece. "It"s your own muddy feet."
Outside, a German band, seduced from hibernation by St. Luke"s summer, played the "March of the Priests" from "Athalie," leaving out the more important notes, and soon a jaded omnibus, with the nodding bonnets of the three Miss Horners, jogged slowly back to Clapton.
When the Miss Horners withdrew from the dingy bedroom the swish and rustle of their occupation, Mrs. Raeburn was at first relieved, afterwards indignant, finally anxious.
Could this strawberry-colored piece of womanhood beside her really be liable to such a life of danger and temptation and destruction? Could this wide-eyed stolidity ever become a spark to set men"s hearts afire?
Would those soft, uncrumpling hands know some day love"s fever? No, no, her Jenny should be a home-bird--always a home-bird, and marry some nice young chap who could afford to give her a comfortable house where she could smile at children of her own, when the three old aunts had moldered away like dry sticks of lavender. All that babble of flames and h.e.l.l was due to religion gone mad, to extravagant perusal of bra.s.s-bound Bibles, to sour virginity. With some perception of human weakness, Mrs. Raeburn began to realize that her aunts" heads were full of heated imaginations because they had never possessed an outlet in youth. The fierce adventures of pa.s.sion had been withheld from them, and now, in old age, they were playing with fires that should have been extinguished long ago. Fancy living with those terrible old women at Clapton, hearing nothing but whispers of h.e.l.l-fire. All that talk of looking after Jenny"s soul was just telling the tale. There must be some scheme behind it all. Perhaps they wanted to save money in a servant, and thought to bring on Jenny by degrees to a condition of undignified utility.
Mrs. Raeburn was by no means a harsh judge of human nature, but her aunts having arrived at an unpropitious moment, she could not see their offer from a reasonable standpoint. Moreover, she had the proud woman"s invariable suspicion of a gift; withal, there was a certain cynicism which made her say "presents weren"t given for nothing in this world."
Anyway, she decided, they were gone, and a good riddance, and she wouldn"t ask them to Hagworth Street again in a hurry. The problem of getting in a woman to help now arose. Mrs. Nightman was off to-morrow; Alf and Ede would be back in a week, and Charlie"s breakfast must be attended to. Mrs. Nightman informed her she knew where a likely girl of fifteen was to be found--a child warranted to be willing and clean and truthful. To-morrow, Mrs. Raeburn settled, this paragon must be interviewed.
To-morrow dawned, and in the wake of sunrise came the paragon. She still wore the dresses of childhood, but paid toll to responsibleness by s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up her mouse-colored hair to the likeness of a c.o.c.kle-sh.e.l.l, adding thereby, in her mother"s estimation, eighteen months, in her own, ten years, to her age. She was a plum-faced child, with glazed cheeks.
Her nose, Mrs. Raeburn observed with pleasure, did not drip like palings on a wet day. The paragon was just an ordinary old little girl, pitched into life with a pair of ill-fitting boots, a pinafore, and half a dozen hairpins. But she would do. Wait a minute. Was she inclined to loll or mouch? No. Was she bound to tilt a perambulator? No. Must she read light fiction when crossing a road? She didn"t like reading.
Mrs. Raeburn decided more than ever that she would do.
Was she good at washing unwilling children? She washed many brothers and sisters with yellow soap and dried them thoroughly every Sat.u.r.day night.
Did she want the place? Mother would be glad if she got it. What was her name? Ruby. Mrs. Raeburn thanked goodness she had abandoned Ruby as a possible suffix to Jenny. Her surname? O"Connor. Irish? She didn"t know.
Yes, she should have a week"s trial.
So the paragon became a part of the household as integral as the furniture and almost as ugly, and, as she grew older, almost as unnecessarily decorated. Alfie, the young Tartar, tried to break her in by severe usage, but succ.u.mbed to the paragon"s complete imperviousness.
Edie was too young to regard her as anything but an audience for long and baseless fits of weeping.
The two children were brought back by Aunt Mabel from her house at Barnsbury, where they had sojourned during the birth of their sister.
Mrs. Raeburn was softer and plumper and shorter than her sister. She had a rosy complexion, and eyes as bright as a bird"s. She had, too, the merriest laugh in the world till Jenny grew older and made it sound almost mirthless beside her own. It was this capacity for laughter which made her resent the aunts" attempt to capture Jenny for melancholy.
Although, before the child"s birth, she had not been particularly enthusiastic about its arrival, the baby already possessed a personality so compelling that the mother esteemed her above both the elder children, not because she was the last born, but because she genuinely felt the world was the richer by her baby. If she had been asked to express this conviction in words, she would have been at a loss. She would have been embarra.s.sed and self-conscious, sure that you were laughing at her. She did venture once to ask Mabel if she thought Jenny prettier than the other two; but Mabel laughed indulgently, and Mrs.
Raeburn could not bring herself to enlarge upon the point.
She wished somehow that her mother could have lived to see Jenny, and her father, too. Of this desire she was not aware when Alfie and Edie arrived. She felt positive her father would have considered Jenny full of life. Paradoxically enough for a butcher, Mr. Unwin had admired life more than anything else. Perhaps Mrs. Raeburn experienced an elation akin to that felt of old by wayside nymphs who bore children to Apollo and other divine philanderers. She knew that, however uneventful the rest of her life might be, in achieving Jenny she had done something comparable to her dreams as a girl in the sunny Islington window that looked away down to the Angel. She could not help feeling a subtle pity for her elder sister, whose first-born was due in May. Boy or girl, it would be a putty statuette beside her Jenny. The latter was alive. How amazingly she was conscious of that vitality in the darkness, when she felt the baby against her breast.
Her own eyes were bright, but Jenny"s eyes were stars that made her own look like pennies beside them. Such fancies she found herself weaving, lying awake in the night-time.
Chapter III: _Dawn Shadows_
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 a.s.sumed 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 b.u.mped 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 a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sured 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 b.u.t.ter, 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 antic.i.p.ation 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 pa.s.sion 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 b.u.mped down to take a crossing and up to regain the pavement. Pa.s.sers-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 fl.u.s.tered 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?"