I had never known, however, that it was a trade at which to work at regularly for a living, and I could not but reflect that it couldn’t be a business at which much money was earned. It was clear that the drover’s object in hiring a boy instead of a dog must be a study of economy; and if the boy worked for him for a less sum than would buy a dog his daily meat, to say the least of it, he wasn’t likely to grow over-fat.
Still the stranger had asserted, and my father had backed the assertion, that “barking” was preferable to carrying a baby about; and this, as I had a right to assume, under the most ordinary circumstances, with a real mother at home who cared for you, and gave you a whacking no oftener than you deserved it. How much more desirable, then, was it for me who had no real mother, a father who didn’t care the price of a pot of beer for me, and no more than half a bellyful of victuals! Carrying the baby about was the bane of my existence, and every day it grew worse and worse to bear; and this not only by reason of Polly growing daily bigger and stronger, as the contents of the next chapter will show.
Chapter X. Descriptive of my nocturnal troubles with Polly. I am provoked to assault my stepmother, and run away from home.
Head nurse
My supposition that my father’s marriage with Mrs. Burke could not make me more uncomfortable than I previously was proved to be altogether fallacious.
Prior to that interesting event, however much I might be fagging about during the day, rest came with the evening. Mrs. Burke relieved me of the baby, and come bed-time, I could sleep uninterruptedly, and rise in the morning perfectly refreshed. Now, however, matters were managed differently. It was my stepmother’s opinion, and one in which my father agreed, that little Polly might as well sleep in my bed.
And if she had slept, it would have mattered little to me. The chest-of-drawers bedstead in Mrs. Burke’s room was of ample size to accommodate both of us, and, as I loved her very much.
I should have been rather glad of her company. But she did not sleep. I daresay it was her teeth, poor little soul! but, really, she was dreadfully tiresome. She was laid in my bed in the early part of the evening; and, by dint of creeping in myself with extreme caution, I generally contrived to get to sleep without waking her, and to secure three. or four hours’ rest. Between one and two o’clock, however, she invariably awoke, squalling her loudest, and refusing to be pacified without an immediate and abundant supply of victuals and drink. To prepare against this, a little stock of bread and butter, and a pot full of milk and water, was always placed by the bedside, and while it held out against her attacks, all went well enough. The worst of it was, it never did hold out long enough. Her appetite for midnight food was something miraculous. Piece after piece would vanish, crust as well as crumb; and when she founds that it was all gone, then she set her pipes up. All the cuddling, and hushing, and coaxing, and singing, you could offer her were rejected with shrieks: nothing would pacify her. “Mammy! mammy! mammy!” You might have heard her on the opposite side of the alley.
The amount of ingenuity expended by me towards keeping that child quiet might, properly applied, have served for the invention of the steam-engine or the electric telegraph. “Would she go out a-walking with her Jimmy?” Sometimes, especially if it were a moonlight night, she would agree. Of course, it was only make-believe going a-walking; but she wasn’t to know that. We had to dress, as though I meant it. There used to hang up behind the door an old black crape bonnet of Mrs. Burke’s, and this I used to tie on her head, wrapping my jacket round her for a cloak. My walking costume consisted solely in an old hairy cap of my father’s, reserved and hidden between the bed and the bedstead for the purpose. It was very bad on cold nights to paddle about the uncarpeted floor in this way; but there was no help for it: to have put my trousers on would have jeopardised the success of the scheme.
When we were dressed and ready to start, an imaginary Mrs. Burke would address me through the door, bidding me take that dear baby for a nice walk, and show her the shop where they sold such beautiful sugar-sticks; and to this I would dutifully reply that I was quite ready, and meant to start immediately. Then we would start; but, for our lives, couldn’t find the room door. This piece of strategy was the soul of the performance. We couldn’t find the door, try our hardest. We wanted to get out to go and buy that sugar-stick, and we couldn’t, because that wicked door was hiding. The big crape bonnet was invaluable in carrying out the cheat, its black sides rising like walls on either side of her face, and serving the purpose of “blinkers,” so that her vision was limited to the strictly straightforward, and side-glancing rendered impossible. The luck that attended this manoeuvre was of three qualities. Under the influence of the first quality, she would in the course of half-an-hour or so, drop off to sleep in my arms, and remain so while I stealthly slid into bed with her; (it was in hopes of this result that I refrained from putting on my trousers before we set out walking.) If my luck was but middling, she would grow so cold and tired as to ask to be put into bed; or she would be brought to see the feasibility of my suggestion that we had better both lie down and watch the window till the naughty door came back again. The worst of this arrangement was, that she frequently would lie still long enough only for us both to become warm and comfortable, and then to insist on going a-walking again. The worst luck of all was, when she would not go a-walking with her Jimmy; when she turned a deaf ear to promises of sugar-sticks to-morrow; when my imitations of cats and dogs, and donkeys and mad bullocks, instead of inducing her silent wonder and admiration, drove her frantic from terror, and she would have more “bar.” “Bar” was her word for bread and butter, and “Bar! bar! bar!” was her only answer to everything I could say.
At such times my stepmother would hammer at the wall with a stick.
“What are you doin’, wid the dear child, you young scoundhrill?”
“She wants more ‘bar.’”
“And is it too great a throuble for ye to get up and get her some, lazy-bones?”
“How can I? There ain’t none.”
“How do ye mane, ain’t none?”
“She’s ate it all. Can’t you hear what she keeps hollerin’?”
“Ate it all, you little liar! What! You’ve been up to your hoggish tricks ’agin, have you? and shtole it all away from the little craythur. Well, you’d betther make her quiet. You know what you’ll get if you bring me in there.”
She was right. I did know “what I should get,” having had it so often; and, with tears in my eyes when it came to this, I would beg of Polly to be quiet. Not she. She had heard mammy’s voice, and grew more rampagious than ever. Then, with my heart in my mouth, I would presently hear a half-aloud threat from the next room, and a shuffling of hasty feet, and a scrambling at the lock of the door, and, raging like an angry cat, in would rush my stepmother with nothing on but her bed-gown and frilled nightcap. Without a moment’s warning, she would fall on me and pummel my unprotected body without mercy; she would wring my head about and knead her bony fists about my sides, till my breath was used up and I could not cry out. My father never knew the extent of the punishment I suffered on these occasions, for all the while she was paying into me, she was clacking in her loudest voice, not about how she was serving me, but how she would serve me if I ever ate away the baby’s food again.