She had straight honey-coloured hair, pale eyes, puckered brow, pouting mouth, and a yell, a sheer, bad-tempered, angry yell which she used for no other reason than to make herself thoroughly unpleasant. Bodily she was a healthy child.
Her family brought her to my house suddenly because the whole lot of them had come down with measles while staying in a boarding-house nearby. The other boarders got panicky and asked them to go! Early in the morning the mother came to me, very fussed. Lower West was empty and measles being a temporary complaint, I let the woman have the flat.
When the taxi load of spotty children drove up to my door I was hustling to warm up the beds and make up extras. Some of the children sat limp and mute waiting, while others whimpered fretfully. The infant, a lumpy child of un-walking, un-talking age, was the only one who had not got measles.
The mother set the child on the floor while she went to fetch the sick, spotty miseries from the cab. The infant’s head, as it were, split in two–eyes, cheeks, brow retired, all became mouth, and out of the mouth poured a roar the equal of Niagara Falls.
The lady in the Doll’s Flat above stuck her head out of the window and looked down. “Measles,” I warned, and she drew her own and her small son’s head back, closed her windows and locked her door.
T’he measles took their course under a doctor and a trained nurse. I ran up and down the stairs with jellies and gruel. Night and day the baby cried. The House of All Sorts supposed she was sickening for measles and endured it as best they could. The baby did not get measles.
After fumigation and quarantine were over and nothing ailed the child we had the Doctor’s word as assurance that it was only a cranky; mean temper that was keeping us awake all night. The tenants began coming to me with complaints, and I had to go down and talk to the mother.
I said, “No one in the house can sleep for the child’s crying, something will have to be done. I cannot blame my tenants for threatening to go and I cannot afford to lose them.” The woman was all syrupy enthusing over the soups and jellies I had sent the measles; but she suddenly realized that I was in earnest and that my patience for my household’s rest was at an end.
If only I could have gone down to the mother in the middle of the night when we were all peevish for sleep, it would have been different, but, with the child sitting for the moment angel-like in her mother’s lap, it was not easy to proceed. I looked out the window. Near the front gate I saw the child’s pram drawn up dishevelled from her morning nap.
What my tenants resented most was not that the child kept the whole household awake at night but that the mother put her baby to sleep most of the day in the garden, close by the gate through which people came and went to the house. After listening to her yelling all night every one was incensed to be told in the daytime, “Hush, hush! my baby is asleep: don’t wake her.”
The mother pounced upon the little boy upstairs, upon baker, postman, milkman, visitors; every one was now afraid to come near our house; people began to shun us. I looked at the disordered pram and took courage.
“Would you please let the baby take her day naps on the back verandah; she would be quiet there and not interfere with our coming and going.”
“My baby on the back porch! Certainly not!”
“Why does the child cry so at night? My tenants are all complaining; something will have to be done.”
“People are most unreasonable.”
She was as furious as a cow whose calf has been ill-treated.
“Who is it that suffers most, I’d like to know? Myself and my husband! It is most ill-natured of tenants to complain.”
Standing the baby on her knee and kissing her violently, “Oose never been werry seepsy at night has Oo, Puss Ducksey?”
The child smacked the mother’s face with extraordinary vigour, leaving a red streak across the cheek. The mother kissed the cruel little fist.
“Something will have to be done, otherwise I shall have an empty house.” I repeated determinedly for the third time. “What, for instance?”
“A few spankings.”
The woman’s face boiled red. “Spank Puss! Never!”
My hand itched to spank both child and mother.
“Why don’t you train the child? It is not fair to her, only makes people dislike her.”
“As if any one could dislike Puss, our darling!” She looked hate at me.
During our conversation Puss had been staring at me with all her pale eyes, her brow wrinkled. Now she scrambled from her mother’s lap to the floor and by some strange, crablike movement contrived not only to reach me but to drag herself up by my skirt and stand at my knee staring up into my face.
“Look! Look! Puss has taken her first steps alone and to you, you, who hate her,” said the angry mother.
“I don’t hate the youngster. Only I cannot have a spoilod child rob me of my livelihood and you must either train her or go elsewhere.”
She clutched the honey-haired creature to her.
“The people upstairs have left because of your baby’s crying at night. They gave no notice. How could I, expect it: the man has to go to business whether your child has yelled all night or not. Another tenant is going too. I wish I could leave myself!”
I saw that my notice was being ignored. I had sent it in when I served her last rent. Go she must! It was in her hand when she came up to pay.
“Of course you don’t mean this?” She held out the notice.
“I do.”
“But have you not observed an improvement? She only cried four times last night.”
“Yes, but each time it lasted for a quarter of the night.”
“Sweet Pussy!” she said, and smothered the scowling face with kisses. “They don’t want us, Puss!”
“That notice stands,” I said, looking away from Puss. “I got no notices from the tenants Puss drove away.”
The angry mother rushed for the door. I went to open it for her and a little pink finger reached across her mother’s shoulder and gave me a little, pink poke and a friendly gurgling chuckle.
“What I cannot understand,” the woman blazed at me as she turned the corner, “is why Puss, my shy baby who won’t allow any one to speak to her, appears actually to like you, you who hate her.”
But did I hate the little girl with honey-Coloured hair? She had cost me two tenants and no end of sleep, had heated my temper to boiling, yet, somehow I could not hate that baby. The meanest thing about her was the way she could make you feel yourself. One has to make a living and one must sleep. It is one of the crookednesses of life when a little yellow-haired baby can cause you so much trouble and yet won’t even let you hate her.
Puss sailed off to her new home in a pram propelled by an angry parent.
“Ta ta,” she waved as they turned the corner–and I? I kissed my hand to Puss when her mother was not looking.
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