Painted Windows | Page 7

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-