AMONG the pictures that I see when I look back into the past, is the one where I, a sullen, egotistic per-son nine years old, stood quite alone in the world. To he sure, there were fa-ther and mother in the house, and there were the other children, and not one among them knew I was alone. The world certainly would not have re-garded me as friendless or orphaned.
There was nothing in my mere appear-ance, as I started away to school in my clean ginghams, with my well-brushed hair, and embroidered school-bag, to lead any one to suppose that I was a castaway. Yet I was -- I had discovered this fact, hidden though it might be from others.
I was no longer loved. Father and mother loved the other children; but not me. I might come home at night, fairly bursting with important news about what had happened in class or among my friends, and try to relate my little histories. But did mother listen? Not at all. She would nod like a mandarin while I talked, or go on turning the leaves of her book, or writing her letter.
What I said was of no importance to her.
Father was even less interested. He frankly told me to keep still, and went on with the accounts in which he was so absurdly interested, or examined "papers" -- stupid-looking things done on legal cap, which he brought home with him from the office. No one kissed me when I started away in the morn-ing; no one kissed me when I came home at night. I went to bed unkissed. I felt myself to be a lonely and misunder-stood child -- perhaps even an adopted one.
Why, I knew a little girl who, when she went up to her room at night, found the bedclothes turned back, and the shade drawn, and a screen placed so as to keep off drafts. And her mother brushed her hair twenty minutes by the clock each night, to make it glossy; and then she sat by her bed and sang softly till the girl fell asleep.
I not only had to open my own bed, but the beds for the other children, and although I sometimes felt my mother's hand tucking in the bedclothes round me, she never stooped and kissed me on the brow and said, "Bless you, my child." No one, in all my experience, had said, "Bless you, my child." When the girl I have spoken of came into the room, her mother reached out her arms and said, before everybody, "Here comes my dear little girl." When I came into a room, I was usually told to do something for somebody. It was "Please see if the fire needs more wood," or "Let the cat in, please," or "I'd like you to weed the pansy bed be-fore supper-time."
In these circumstances, life hardly seemed worth living. I decided that I had made a mistake in choosing my family. It did not appreciate me, and it failed to make my young life glad.
I knew my young life ought to be glad.
And it was not. It was drab, as drab as Toot's old rain-coat.
Toot was "our coloured boy." That is the way we described him. Father had brought him home from the war, and had sent him to school, and then apprenticed him to a miller. Toot did "chores" for his board and clothes, but was soon to be his own man, and to be paid money by the miller, and to marry Tulula Darthula Jones, a nice coloured girl who lived with the Cut-lers.
The time had been when Toot had been my self-appointed slave. Almost my first recollections were of his carry-ing me out to see the train pass, and saying, "Toot, toot!" in imitation of the locomotive; so, although he had rather a splendid name, I called him "Toot," and the whole town followed my example. Yes, the time had been when Toot saw me safe to school, and slipped little red apples into my pocket, and took me out while he milked the cow, and told me stories and sang me plantation songs. Now, when he passed, he only nodded. When I spoke to him about his not giving me any more ap-ples, he said:
"Ah reckon they're your pa's ap-ples, missy. Why, fo' goodness' sake, don' yo' he'p yo'se'f?"
But I did not want to help myself.
I wanted to be helped -- not because I was lazy, but because I wanted to be adored. I was really a sort of fairy princess, -- misplaced, of course, in a stupid republic, -- and I wanted life con-ducted on a fairy-princess basis. It was a game I wished to play, but it was one I could not play alone, and not a soul could I find who seemed inclined to play it with me.
Well, things went from bad to worse.
I decided that if mother no longer loved me, I would no longer tell her things.
So I did not. I got a hundred in spell-ing for twelve days running, and did not tell her! I broke Edna Grantham's mother's water-pitcher, and kept the fact a secret. The secret was, indeed, as sharp-edged as the pieces of the broken pitcher had been; I cried under the bedclothes, thinking how sorry Mrs.
Grantham had been, and that mother really ought to know. Only what was the use? I no longer looked to her to help me out of my troubles.
I had no need now to have father and mother tell me to hurry up and finish my chatter, for I kept all that hap-pened to myself. I had a new "intimate friend," and did not so much as men-tion her. I wrote a poem and showed it to my teacher, but not to my unin-terested parents. And when I climbed the stairs at night to my room, I swelled with loneliness and anguish and resent-ment, and the hot tears came to my eyes as I heard father and mother laughing and talking together and paying no at-tention to my misery. I could hear Toot, who used to be making all sorts of little presents for me, whistling as he brought in the wood and water, and then "cleaned up" to go to see his Tulula, with never a thought of me.
And I said to myself that the best thing I could do was to grow up and get away from a place where I was no longer wanted.
No one noticed my sufferings further than sometimes to say impatiently, "What makes you act so strange, child?" And to that, of course, I an-swered nothing, for what I had to say would not, I felt, be understood.
