Take it; my wife the long, long day
Weeps by the cocoa-tree,
And my young children leave their play
And ask in vain for me.”
I haven’t seen or heard the poem these fifty odd years. It seems tawdry stuff to me now; but the boy’s accents were of the very soul of tragedy and I realized clearly that I couldn’t recite that poem as well as he did. He was inimitable. Every time his accents and manner altered; now he did these verses wonderfully, at another time those, so that I couldn’t ape him; always there was a touch of novelty in his intense realization of the tragedy. Strange to say it was the only poem he recited at all well.
An examination came and I was first in the school in arithmetic and first too in elocution; Vernon even praised me, while Willie slapped me and got kicked on the shins for his pains. Vernon separated us and told Willie he should be ashamed of hitting one only half as big as he was. Willie lied promptly, saying I had kicked him first. I disliked Willie; I hardly know why, save that he was a rival in the school life.
After this Annie began to treat me differently and now I seemed to see her as she was and was struck by her funny ways. She wished both Chrissie and myself to call her “Nita”; it was short for “Anita”, she said, which was the stylish French way of pronouncing Annie. She hated “Annie”—it was “common and vulgar”; I couldn’t make out why.
One evening we were together and she had undressed Chrissie for bed, when she opened her own dress and showed us how her breasts had grown while Chrissie’s still remained small, and indeed “Nita’s” were ever so much larger and prettier and round like apples. Nita let us touch them gently and was evidently very proud of them. She sent Chrissie to bed in the next room while I went on learning a lesson beside her. Nita left the room to get something, I think, when Chrissie called me and I went into the bedroom wondering what she wanted. She wished me to know that her breasts would grow too, and be just as pretty as Nita’s. “Don’t you think so!” she asked, and taking my hand put it on them, and I said, “Yes”, for indeed I liked her better than Nita who was all airs and graces and full of affectations.
Suddenly Nita called me, and Chrissie kissed me, whispering “don’t tell her” and I promised. I always liked Chrissie and Vernon. Chrissie was very clever and pretty, with dark curls and big hazel eyes, and Vernon was a sort of hero and always very kind to me.
I learned nothing from this happening. I had hardly any sex-thrill with either sister, indeed, nothing like so much as I had had, five years before, through the girl’s legs in Mrs. Frost’s school, and I record the incident here chiefly for another reason. One afternoon about 1890, Aubrey Beardsley and his sister Mabel, a very pretty girl, had been lunching with me in Park Lane. Afterwards we went into the Park. I accompanied them as far as Hyde Park Corner. For some reason or other, I elaborated the theme that men of thirty or forty usually corrupted young girls, and women of thirty or forty in turn corrupted youths.