The Golden Scarecrow

by Hugh Walpole

Angelina Braid, on the morning of her third birthday, woke very early. It would be too much to say that she knew it was her birthday, but she awoke, excited. She looked at the glimmering room, heard the sparrows beyond her windows, heard the snoring of her nurse in the large bed opposite her own, and lay very still, with her heart thumping like anything. She made no noise, however, because it was not her way to make a noise. Angelina Braid was the quietest little girl in all the Square. "You'd never meet one nigher a mouse in a week of Sundays," said her nurse, who was a "gay one" and liked life.

It was not, however, entirely Angelina's fault that she took life quietly; in 21 March Square, it was exceedingly difficult to do anything else. Angelina's parents were in India, and she was not conscious, very acutely, of their existence. Every morning and evening she prayed, "God bless mother and father in India," but then she was not very acutely conscious of God either, and so her mind was apt to wander during her prayers.

She lived with her two aunts—Miss Emmy Braid and Miss Violet Braid—in the smallest house in the Square. So slim was No. 21, and so ruthlessly squeezed between the opulent No. 20 and the stout ruddy-faced No. 22, that it made one quite breathless to look at it; it was exactly as though an old maid, driven by suffragette wildness, had been arrested by two of the finest possible policemen, and carried off into custody. Very little of any kind of wildness was there about the Misses Braid. They were slim, neat women, whose rather yellow faces had the flat, squashed look of lawn grass after a garden roller has passed over it. They believed in God according to the Reverend Stephen Hunt, of St. Matthew-in-the-Crescent—the church round the corner—but in no other kind of God whatever. They were not rich, and they were not poor; they went once a week—Fridays—to visit the poor of St. Matthew's, and found the poor of St. Matthew's on the whole unappreciative of their efforts, but that made their task the nobler. Their house was dark and musty, and filled with little articles left them by their grand-parents, their parents, and other defunct relations. They had no friendly feeling towards one another, but missed one another when they were separated. They were, both of them, as strong as horses, but very hypochondriacal, and Dr. Armstrong of Mulberry Place made a very pleasant little income out of them.

I have mentioned them at length, because they had a great deal to do with Angelina's quiet behaviour. No. 21 was not a house that welcomed a child's ringing laughter. But, in any case, the Misses Braid were not fond of children, but only took Angelina because they had a soft spot in their dry hearts for their brother Jim, and in any case it would have been difficult to say no.

Their attitude to children was that they could not understand why they did not instantly see things as they, their elders, saw them; but then, on the other hand, if an especially bright child did take a grown-up point of view about anything that was considered "forward" and "conceited," so that it was really very difficult for Angelina.

"It's a pity Jim's got such a dull child," Miss Violet would say. "You never would have expected it."

"What I like about a child," said Miss Emmy, "is a little cheerfulness and natural spirit—not all this moping."

Angelina was not, on the whole, popular.... The aunts had very little idea of making a house cheerful for a child. The room allotted to Angelina as a nursery was at the top of the house, and had once been a servant's bedroom. It possessed two rather grimy windows, a faded brown wallpaper, an old green carpet, and some very stiff, hard chairs. On one wall was a large map of the world, and on the other an old print of Romans sacking Jerusalem, a picture which frightened Angelina every night of her life, when the dark came and the lamp illuminated the writhing limbs, the falling bodies, the tottering walls. From the windows the Square was visible, and at the windows Angelina spent a great deal of her time, but her present nurse—nurses succeeded one another with startling frequency—objected to what she called "window-gazing." "Makes a child dreamy," she said; "lowers her spirits."

Angelina was, naturally, a dreamy child, and no amount of nurses could prevent her being one. She was dreamy because her loneliness forced her to be so, and if her dreams were the most real part of her day to her that was surely the faults of her aunts. But she was not at all a quick child; although to-day was her third birthday she could not talk very well, could not pronounce her r's, and lisped in what her trail of nurses told her was a ridiculous fashion for so big a girl. But, then, she was not really a big girl; her figure was short and stumpy, her features plain and pale with the pallor of her first Indian year. Her eyes were large and black and rather fine.

On this morning she lay in bed, and knew that she was excited because her friend had come the night before and told her that to-day would be an important day. Angelina clung, with a desperate tenacity, to her memories of everything that happened to her before her arrival on this unpleasant planet. Those memories now were growing faint, and they came to her only in flashes, in sudden twists and turns of the scene, as though she were surrounded by curtains and, every now and then, was allowed a peep through. Her friend had been with her continually at first, and, whilst he had been there, the old life had been real and visible enough; but on her second birthday he had told her that it was right now that she should manage by herself. Since then, he had come when she least expected him; sometimes when she had needed him very badly he had not appeared.... She never knew. At any rate, he had said that to-day would be important.... She lay in bed, listening to her nurse's snores, and waited.