CHAPTER SECOND
Beginning Early, I Learn Love, Fear, and Hunger—I Become Acquainted with Letters, and Alas! I Lose One of my Two Illusions.
Of the Days of St. Patrick that followed, not one found me in the city of my birth—indeed, six months completed my period of existence in the Dominion, and I have known it no more.
Some may think it strange that I mention these early years at all, but the reason for such mention will appear later on. Looking back at them, they seem to divide themselves into groups of four years each. During the first four, my time was principally spent in growing and learning to keep out of people's way. I acquired some other knowledge, too, and little child as I was, I knew fear long before I knew the thing that frightened me. I knew that love for my mother which was to become the passion of my life, and I also knew hunger. But the fear was harder to endure than the hunger—it was so vague, yet so all-encompassing.
We had to flit so often—suddenly, noiselessly. Often I was gently roused from my sleep at night and hastily dressed—sometimes simply wrapped up without being dressed, and carried through the dark to some other place of refuge, from—what? When I went out into the main business streets I had a tormenting barège veil over my face that would not let me see half the pretty things in the shop windows, and I was quick to notice that no other little girl had a veil on. Next I remarked that if a strange lady spoke to me my mother seemed pleased—but if a man noticed me she was not pleased, and once when a big man took me by the hand and led me to a candy store for some candy she was as white as could be and so angry she frightened me, and she promised me a severe punishment if I ever, ever went one step with a strange man again. And so my fear began to take the form of a man, of a big, smiling man—for my mother always asked, when I reported that a stranger had spoken to me, if he was big and smiling.
I had known the sensation of hunger long before I knew the word that expressed it, and I often pressed my hands over my small empty stomach, and cried and pulled at my mother's dress skirt. If there was anything at all to give I received it, but sometimes there was absolutely nothing but a drink of water to offer, which checked the gnawing for a moment or two, and at those times there was a tightening of my mother's trembling lips, and a straight up and down wrinkle between her brows, that I grew to know, and when I saw that look on her face I could not ask for anything more than "a dwink, please."
As an illustration of her almost savage pride and honesty: I one day saw a woman in front of the house buying some potatoes. I knew that potatoes cooked were very comforting to empty stomachs. One or two of them fell to the street during the measuring and I picked one up, and, fairly wild with delight, I scrambled up the stairs with it. But my mother was angry through and through.
"Who gave it to you?" she demanded.
I explained with a trembling voice: "I des' founded it on the very ground—and I'se so hungry!"
But hungry or not hungry, I had to take the potato back: "Nothing in the world could be taken without asking—that was stealing—and she was the only person in the world I had a right to ask anything of!"