Letty Fox by Christina Stead Read Free Book Online

out my clothes, the carpets, and the furniture with my climbing and jumping. I was loud-voiced and rude, as I saw other children of my age were, and went into a screaming fit to get my way. I was uncommonly bright when it came to my own interests, and understood things relating to them, long before I could speak properly; but I spoke early too, filling the house with a rattle, a drooling and buzzing from early dawn. There was now no sign of the inherently feeble child who had made its entrance on the stage of life and received my name. Adults were obliged to bear with my roughness and selfishness and call it energy, health, animal spirits, self-expression, and so forth. I became wilder and more cruel each day as I saw them more miserable, being obliged to go through the martyrdom of me and beginning to look old, drooping and sulking, but swallowing all this that was repugnant to them. I loved shoving garbage down their withered necks, punching their fat stomachs, and treading on their toes. Mother thought I would become timid and a failure if I was scolded, I would be
repressed
!
    The friends I had chosen at school, two or three healthy, loud-voiced girls and boys, had parents who thought the same. In our own minds we were already mature. The teachers and friends were almost dead, to us they smelled and looked dead. Even lovely Aunt Phyllis seemed to me at that time gross, idiotic, and elderly, and she was too busy with “love” to bother exercising any influence over me. To me, besides, she was only partly pretty; I was prettier, so were others at school. I had never, at that time, seen a pretty woman, and did not know what they meant by it—at least, I could not pick out a pretty woman as readily as I could an ugly one. But I was very fond of men, would run up to them, lead them by the hand, kiss them and ask them for things, for I soon found out that they were either charmed or obliged to appear charmed.
    When I had been at this school some time, Mr. McLaren came to the house and saw me, I should say, apprehended me. He spoke severely to me, the first grown person who had ever done that. My mother took me from the room with a frown on her face; at the door she turned back and said gently that he did not understand, I was a sensitive child and might have bad dreams, caused by his repressive behavior.
    â€œYou should be careful of your attitude toward children, and not introduce foreign elements into their surroundings, you see,” said Mother, “because even a moment’s conflict, a casual acquaintance with an adult person, even a child, may alter a child’s whole life. They are so impressionable, so ready to learn.” She added that she selected her weekly floorwasher very carefully with my feelings in view and was always in the room when the window-washer was there. At this, I jubilantly burst back into the room with a loud yell, and rushing up to Mr. McLaren, squirted a mouthful of water between his plump and yawning thighs. Mr. McLaren observed that he would fan my little tail so red that the baboon in the zoo wouldn’t be in it. My mother burst into tears, seeing him pick me up; but Mr. McLaren only took me in his arms, set me on his damp knee, and after saying, “One squirm out of you and you’ll get the cat” (at which my mother looked very sulky indeed), began to tell me a story. It was a fascinating old-style tale about Br’er Bullfrog, told in the seductive dialect of a certain Uncle Remus. No sooner had the first dulcet sounds broken on my delighted ear, however, than Mother indignantly came over and raised me from the old gentleman’s knee.
    â€œWe never tell any dialect stories here,” she said, most shocked. “They only teach race prejudice; the child must not know that other people are different from us.”
    Mr. McLaren turned red, his gray eyes flashed; but after looking at her for a long moment, he bowed his head and said in a trembling but