Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  But Uncle Perce feared these adventures for him, and kept writing letters to the police; the wicked youths, corrupting his child, must be put into Farmington. He named them—Jack Lack, Frank Shields, others. Templeton, at this, ran away from home, and was brought back. This was the moment when Jacky and I joined the tribe of women. Up till then we had had our own world but been free with boys, but now that the ferocity and criminality of the young boy’s world bred round us, we feared the strange, leering, jeering, foul-mouthed and foul-minded brutish outlaws; and so it was to be for a few years for me. I soon again became a companion of boys and men, but Jacqueline always had a sign of this terror which enters little girls’ hearts.

  Once or twice Jacky and I, four or five years younger than Jack Lack, tried to get him to play our more terrifying games, such as Torquemada, but he seemed deaf, or pushed us away and rushed off with a shout. Naturally we disliked him, for we thought ourselves very attractive creatures, and some of the boys tried to get into our games, sensing secret pleasures, perhaps. We let hints drop.

  One day Jack Lack, walking the rail of the new picket fence, was yelling insults at Uncle Perce, who was leaning out of a new window he was cutting upstairs. Uncle said, “Get down, you damn fool!”

  “Pigg-Hogg, Hogg in his Pigsty, dirty old Hogg.”

  “If you break my fence, I’ll kick you down the street.” “Dirty old Hogg!”

  “I’ll break every bone in your body, you young pirate!”

  “Hogg cutting doors so the bugs can get out!”

  My uncle, in a great state, bellowed, “I hope you fall and get the spikes through your belly—” We screeched.

  Jack Lack continued walking the railing. My uncle thundered down the old carpetless stairs. Jack Lack had cleared the fence and was far down the road, arms and legs flying.

  On another occasion, Uncle found three boys who had escaped from Farmington and for whom citizens and police were out searching. My uncle was a good woodsman and was always scouting round; when he was working about the house, he kept his eye skinned. He saw a thin smoke rise in the air one evening, smelled, calculated, and, in his soft shoes, stole down through the tousled growth of a near field to find the green hideout of the three reformatory boys. They had a large pail hanging on cross-sticks and a good fire underneath. In the pail was a stew just coming to the boil—the water was racing, a brown scum had risen, and the thin smell of the meat mixed maddeningly with the bush smell. Mr. Hogg himself was hungry; it was an hour to dinner time and he was a large-framed ravenous man who ate everything he liked and never put fat on his bones.

  The man and the boys parleyed. The stew was now bubbling furiously; pieces of meat and vegetable sailed over the brown pool. Hogg could not resist looking down at it and saying thoughtfully, “Smells fine; where did you get the makings?”

  The smallest, a poor, clerkly boy ventured, “We got it from the Home.” The other boys looked at him and he realized his mistake.

  “What do you care?” said the redhead. “Can’t you go along home and let us get out of here?”

  “We shot a rabbit, a bird, too,” said one, suddenly; he looked sulkily at the intruder.

  The setting sun shot long red rays through the bush at Hogg’s left.

  Hogg smiled cunningly, “Let’s fall to, boys!” and he sat down with them, using a clean collecting tin for his pannikin. He showed a ferocious appetite and made the boys sit back while he lunged for the meat. When it was all gone, he kicked over what remained, saying, “Well, it was really my bird and rabbit, boys, my fire, my sticks. It’s against the law to make a fire here,” he said. “You’ll have the woods on fire and burn all these people’s homes. You only think of your bellies and thieving, that’s why you’re where you are.”

  “Is that so?” said the redhead, who had a hungry stomach-ache. There was a large-headed boy who looked fiercely at Hogg, and his eyes were bright with tears: “I did nothing, I never did anything. They just got after me.”

  “There’s a simple answer to that,” said Hogg. “Go back to the Farm and give yourselves up.”

  One boy snickered bitterly, one shrugged.

  “Go on down to the road and get going,” said Hogg, full of meat.

  The boys mooched off, the one with the pail carrying it off. Hogg, to conceal his wild exultation at having eaten the stolen meat, stopped to gather a mandrake he saw. He carefully loosened the soil and brought up the strange plant, with two green leaves and a white flower and two brown roots and a white root, and which for him was Podophyllum peltatum (May apple), and when he approached the road going into the lower valley and came down softly, skirting an old stone fence in which he knew some copperheads lived, he saw that the three boys were talking to another boy and looking up the hill. The fourth boy was Jack Lack. For all his woodcraft, he made sounds; the boys broke and went in opposite directions, Lack mounting the hill.

  “Watch out for copperheads,” called out Hogg involuntarily, for at this time of a warm evening they liked to lie out on the smooth, tarred road, catching the last rays that came through the tunnel of branches. The boys looked at him and went on straight down the road. Suddenly they halted, looked down in front of them, and watched something that was moving toward the hill where Hogg stood. Hogg laughed. It was the copperhead, he knew, that was there every evening. The boys, startled, went on cautiously and hurried out of sight.

  Hogg turned away from the stone heaps and made for the road, all the time looking at the ground with an expert eye. The farmers round there went about with canvas shoes, all through the fields, in spite of the danger, and he did the same, to be one of them.

  He was strange and distasteful. He held them up on the roads, haranguing them about their political views and their errors. He himself, single-handed, had tried to stop them going to their mysterious rendezvous, some years before, when the fiery cross burned on the hills, and there was talk about Catholics and Jews, but out of deviltry and irresponsibility he himself at times laughed with them; a little later he would give the fascist salute for fun, explaining that this was the old Roman gesture, and would make a garden-knot in his wild, unweeded place in the shape of the swastika, saying that it was an old Greek pattern, the original of all the mazes of the world; and all this because he thought even these death-dealing frenzies of his neighbors contemptible games of the ignorant and childish, and because the world was just a vacant lot to him. The farmers, the death-riders, the reformatory boys were all the same to him. They were Other-men, Not-Hogg.

  When he woke up the next morning, someone had scrawled on the picket fence, one letter to a pike, “P-e-r-c-e H-o-g-g, d-i-r-t-y d-o-g, e-t a-1-1 o-u-r m-e-a-t, w-a-s-h y-o-u-r d-i-r-t-y f-e-e-t.” “I know who it is,” said he, and he laid for Jack Lack, but the boy kept away for a long time. Hogg forgot his enemy and went on changing and renovating The Wreck.

  6

  We went to the local school in a bus. Jacky worked well, although the instruction was poor and the children were out of hand; but I joined the rowdiest and outbumpkined them all. Wherever there was a tussle in the playground, I was in it, and would rush in and out of school, bruising head and shoulders with the toughest and strongest there. It was not to lead them, it was only to get myself known as the worst child there. Jacky did not care one way or another usually, but sometimes would go off with her nose in the air and a conceited expression. When this happened, I ran to join her.

  “You’re a gangster, a gun moll,” she would say; and I did not like this from her, beginning to be afraid that I might end up with the riffraff.

  This was always my secret fear and still is; just the same, I cannot join the pokerfaces, the bronze hearts, the laurel-wreaths, the moguls and brahmins. There is something wrong with the marshal’s baton they smuggled into my corporal’s knapsack; it will not come out by more than a head, it is an unborn baton. Thus I seemed to lead the rough youngsters out there, but I was afraid of criticism from my uncles, my mother, and Jacky. I had no self-confidence. />
  Away from school, at The Wreck, we forgot this wildness and poured our brains and souls into the games I have referred to. Anything cruel and gruesome in our education served us for a framework. Torquemada was a game in which we devised tortures for everyone we detested or despised: legs sawn off without ether, hearts plucked out, flayings, singeings, scalpings, and slow roasting; this was nothing. The interest of this game was that it wore us out and the pleasures of a torture were soon exhausted, so that for days we would abandon the game until we thought up a new torment. Inspired by some new hate, we imagined a new torture. We had eyes put out with sizzling stakes, entrails thrown steaming to the dogs. We learned from Ulysses the crafty and Solomon the wise, from Puritan and Catholic, we learned cruelty, dear to young, hot hearts.

  I don’t know what imagination is, if not an unpruned, tangled kind of memory. I had a clear rich memory for everything I read about or heard suitable for our games, but Jacky brought in details which we had never read about and at the same time they were not always amusing, something chilling but always the kind of thing my father always called “arabesques.” I have a practical mind and see little use in the imagination. I imagine only in one or two directions; that is, I can imagine what lies directly ahead of me and around me and I prepare to cope with it. I can imagine conversations in which I defeat enemies or win over friends, and apart from that, nothing; and as these things I imagine generally turn out to be venomous or empty fantasy and there is enough trouble in my world, I avoid them. But Jacky was quite happy losing herself in ideas which had no likeness to reality. She got through the world as I did, up to a certain point—neither better nor worse, and got about as easily. I would not say now that these fancies injured her chances. I compare this sort of thinking with the enormous dreams actors have. Stage characters are not real, but they have a function and they make the actors famous; therefore, in a way they’re a strong reality. My mother always saw herself as some character which she nearly lived; but she lived in these characters without putting them in a book or on the stage. In one way, too, through these romances of hers, my mother adapted herself wonderfully well to her unhappiness and lived many years in suspension.

  Up till last year, even, I would have ridiculed this as escape from the world; now I’m twenty-four and I can see this ingenuity is a tool for some; they can sell it, gull others by it. The greater the dream, the greater the number of dupes and gulls. Why is that? One would be foolish to overlook this strange impractical quality in mankind. If all those present constitute the fittest to survive—but really this is distressing thought. I have plenty of invention, but only when I am obliged to it. This is a very different kind of ingenuity, for very often these romancers, fantastics, are not good liars at all. They fumble it as if their fantasy were a great reality to which no lie can measure. A lie is real; it aims at success. A liar is a realist.

  I can’t work out the tie between this inventiveness of Jacky and her love of truth, and the connection between my contrary pair of traits, a quick wit to save myself and others in danger, and the disrepute in which the creative imagination is with me. At any rate, I easily got tired of Jacky’s inventions; she went on inventing; we turned our backs on each other, would not speak for days. She saw how things ought to be, I saw how things must be. She was very late coming at an understanding of people’s weaknesses, so that she could take advantage of them; but she would discuss traits and temperaments and imagine what they would do in some situation in which they had never been. I saw what use people were to me. I taught her what I could to make her more practical, but I do not think she taught me anything. I was cast, as my father says, at birth; I can become more complex, but not different.

  In Torquemada we put our friends to torture; in Inquisition and Judge Jeffries we tried them and condemned them to various deaths. In Butcher Shop we hung them up by the heels, naked, and sliced joints from them as the customers came in; we reinvented Sawney Beane! We even once got the large and plump Cecily to act as a carcass for us, and this was interrupted by the advent of our angry and bashful Uncle Hogg. We had what we called a Miracle Play: we each performed miracles, being put to it, usually, to invent anything very wonderful; it was a kind of Liars’ Bench. We had Blue-beard, Operations, Having a Baby, and Wedding; but as neither wanted to be the man and Templeton would only sometimes act the husband, and at last angrily refused the role, this last play was neglected and left us with a sad feeling. We loved the dressing for it, but did not like the manlessness.

  At this time, we both made up our minds to love Templeton, always a handsome boy, and madly he kissed us, putting his hand out for our scarcely started nipples; but at times we threw him over for Ramon Navarro and Clark Gable. We laughed at Templeton’s sex-fever; we knew it was unseasonable. We had rituals invented by us. One of them was Oh, to be worthy. We shared the same room on the rickety second story in The Wreck, and when we went to bed and when we got up would kneel down and pray aloud in turn, “Oh, God, make me worthy this day to get a rich man when I marry.” We had whole days of holiness, when Jacky had only to look at me, when I shouted, “Make me worthy!” or I had only to look at her, when she stole the raisins; and each knew what the other was thinking, “It’s not this way one gets to be worthy of a movie star.” We had moments of Holiness for Templeton, foresaw the time when he would be a movie star and we would go to Hollywood and claim relationship. We would appear in all the night clubs with Templeton. At other times we ourselves would be movie stars and thus be united professionally with the glamour-boy; but he was growing dark and ripe as a mulberry, crazy, hot and slippery.

  Uncle Percival had a large round garden he had spaded out of the uncut turf, with a swastika in the center; in this he put plants to instruct us. I knew skunk cabbage, golden rod, May apple, polk-weed, chicory, poison ivy, that’s about all. Jacky got to know things with more poetic names like Traveler’s Joy, Monkshood, Meadowsweet; but as these things did not live up to their names, I did not care about them—mostly little, dull flowers; and none compared at all with the flowers in town, orchids, gardenias, roses, hyacinths. What is the use of affecting a great interest in these country weeds? There are a few like flowering dogwood that have some looks, but how can that compare with a large, showy rose? Can those wayside asters compare with real asters, or that wretched yellow thing, Forsythia, with yellow orchids?

  There are so many conventions, which I attribute to romancing. One must accept them only in order to see clearly ahead and not be confused with false rebellions. I hate all this. I don’t want to be original, but I don’t want to be a romantic; if I could only see clearer ahead, I’d make my way with my straight mind, for I can always look myself in the face and add one and one. The trouble is then, when I am adding one and one, that doubts and anxieties come to cloud my mind. I see the sum total but figures float in from outside and I think, “But should I count that in too?”

  Jacky used to say, as we grew up, that part of my viewpoint came from my shortsightedness. I cannot see very far ahead of me. I cannot see distant combinations of people and trees, for example. The view of couples in the distance gives you certain ideas about them. But the fact is, that when we come to things like this— love—I might as well have been born blind, for it is not couples in the distance, nor people on the next bench, that bother me; it is the man with me, and what he does to me, and if even he sits too far off, I have no interest in him. My reply to Jacky, my lifelong friend, is (now at least, it was not then) that I am more sensual than she is, and the sense of touch is stronger developed in me than in her. I must touch reality and there is no reality till I touch. In those days, in our games, I was impatient with her imagined brocades and festooned torture chambers; and if they had been present I would have seized the one for myself and, if a queen, used the other. But I am not sure that Jacky would have done either; she imagined only affairs with prisoners and ministers of state. We quarreled at our games. We were both selfish, feminine, ambitious; but I wished to be showy
and Jacky had vague ambitions to be an empress, a great actress or artist, even a great mistress, some woman who ruined cabinets, turned aside the will of the people, destroyed nations.

  We were both pretty enough. Some of our games turned round our looks, our lovers, our weddings, Hollywood. Those were very happy days, when we were away from our parents and living in this unshaved park of Uncle Perce. We fought and cried often. Sometimes it was about the relative wealth and value of our positions in the world, I, married to a rich man, with seven maids; she, a queen or a Dubarry. We both claimed Templeton. His grandfather was a very rich insurance man: he had a gold and asbestos mine in Canada, other properties. No one knew what he would have at his majority.

  Our family, the Morgans, owned real estate, several small houses cut up into apartments, and two hotels. It now had a chicken farm that Uncle Philip was running on the top of Lydnam Hill. There was much dispute about this chicken farm in the family: they said it ruined the property. The shrill white chickens came down to the Lodge at all hours and laid their eggs in stumps and thickets. Uncle Philip had not enough help. In spite of a low-running wolfish dog and a family of farmers helping him, thieves came in lorries for his poultry, at night. There were not enough houses for the fowls and they lodged in the stooped old apple and pear trees.