She was remarkable in the first place because she never rode in a perambulator like other children; either she walked—on bare, shapely, pink feet—or her own personal attendant, Elspeth (a very tall woman indeed), carried her in a plaid slung over one of her broad shoulders. Elspeth despised the “bit barrows” of the other nurses, and was quite strong enough to have carried Jean’s mother as well as Jean. “She will go barefoot,” Elspeth would say, “till she iss seven, and when she iss a woman she will walk like a queen, and not like a hen!”
Jean, if possible, went bareheaded as well as “barefoot,” and perhaps that is the reason why her hair is so abundant, so curly, so full of golden light that in the sunshine it almost makes you blink. Moreover, her eyes are big and blue. Sunshine and rain, and kind fresh winds have tinted her face with the loveliest warm browns and pinks; she is not yet five years old, and she can dance the sword dance! It is really a great sight to see Jean’s pink feet twinkling in and out between two unsheathed swords of her father’s, and he is a proud man.
Yet there never was such a “girly” girl as Jean.
She has an enormous family of dolls—for her adorers all bring dolls, and they are as the sands of the sea in number—she takes a motherly interest in them all, both dolls and adorers, but her inseparable companion is one “Tammy,” an ancient and dirty-faced rag soldier; with arms and legs resembling elongated sausages, a square body, no feet, and a head shaped like a breakfast “bap.” Not an attractive personality to the uninitiated, but he and Jean were as Ruth and Naomi. It is something of a sorrow to her that the exigencies of Tammy’s figure do not admit of a kilt, just as she puzzled all last summer in sorrowful surprise that her father never once donned the uniform she so admires.
Jean’s people live at a house on the Terrace, which has at the back a shady old-fashioned garden with a big square lawn in the centre. There Jean’s brothers, Colin and Andrew, played cricket, while Jean fielded or drilled her dolls under the trees. In the evening, after dinner, there would be a sound of men’s voices and an occasional thrum of the banjo under those same trees, and a cheerful clink of glasses, while men with brown faces and trim, well-set heads laughed and rejoiced in a coolness that concealed no malaria.
Jean’s father had a reprehensible habit of bringing her, wrapped in a blanket, out into the garden at ten o’clock at night, when she would be handed about from knee to knee like a superior sort of refreshment. To be fetched out of bed in this fashion would have been upsetting to some children, but Jean, with an adorable sleepy smile, would make herself agreeable for half an hour or so, and when carried back and tucked into bed—always by her father—fell asleep again directly, and never seemed a scrap the worse. On such occasions she was always expected to sing. She never sang anything but Scottish songs—mournful or martial, mostly Jacobite, and her repertory was enormous. While other children were learning “Little Jack Horner,” or “Hey diddle diddle!” Jean, thanks to Elspeth, learned “Hey Johnny Cope,” or “Cam’ ye by Athol,” and her voice was as the voice of Katherine of France, “broken music,” for her voice was music, and her English broken. Sometimes a belated passer-by would wait outside to listen in wonder to someone singing in the clearest baby voice:
Sing Hey, my bra’ John Hielandman,
Sing Ho, my bra’ John Hielandman,
and at the end of each refrain she always kissed her father, for there was no one in the world to match with him in Jean’s eyes. She absolutely declined to sing the last verse after that day upon which she discovered what “hanging” meant, Colin and Andrew having suspended Tammy from the apple tree. At times, Jean could raise her voice otherwise than in song, and on that occasion the whole Terrace resounded with her shrieks.
Next door there dwelt a very grumpy gentleman. With that easy confidence in a neighbor’s neighborliness generally manifested by people who have lived much abroad, Jean’s father, on taking up his quarters, had written asking permission to put some wire-netting on the top of the party wall to prevent cricket balls going over. To his immense surprise he received a curt and discourteous refusal, which terminated in a warning to the effect that, if balls did come over, there they would have to stay, as the writer would in no circumstances have boys running in and out of his house, and there was no back entrance. Of course balls went over; but Colin and Andrew found an unexpected ally in Mr. Knagg’s housekeeper, who threw the balls back again without consulting him; and Mr. Knagg felt rather aggrieved that, as yet, he had found no cause for complaint. Complaint in some form or other was as the breath of life to him; he had gone to law with so many of his fellow-townsmen that his society was no longer sought after, and his exceedingly clean steps were untrodden by strangers. He intended at first to complain that the banjo-playing in the garden disturbed him at his studies, when he happened to hear Jean sing “This iss no my plaid,” and somehow he gave up the idea.