Free Letty Fox by Christina Stead Page A

be inside there. Mrs. Goodsir told her it was unhealthy for a young girl her age, but Uncle Perce said, “In educating the young we must make use of any show of interest,” and gave her books to read about prisons and dungeons, tortures in the Middle Ages, the horrors of the Inquisition, and prison memoirs. He said it would teach her history in her own terms. She and Carl read these books down in the orchard and talked about them; at least they said they did, but up in the house, at dinnertime, everyone made sly remarks about calf love and big silly children.
    Nevertheless, it was impossible not to be interested in the two lovers. Besides, with her tales and books, which we saw in her room in the attic, we had an inexhaustible spring of games. We played Torture Chamber, Torquemada, Anarchists, Butcher Shop, and Institution; and we also played Lovers, imitating Carl and Cecily, but going farther than they ever went, I suppose.
    One afternoon this strange couple went to Uncle Percival and asked him to allow them to marry; Cecily was thirteen and Carl nearly fifteen. “If we are married we can live together; we can live in The Wreck or at home,” said Carl. “We can still go to school,” said Cecily. Hogg was embarrassed, grew red in the face with shame and gravity, and sent Carl to walk on the road while he hastened down, just as he was, in his sneakers and slacks, to see the parents. He was pleased with this important reason for visiting the stone house, for those were rich retired bourgeois who lived there, bridge players, highball drinkers, automobile fans who rushed up and down in their several cars dusting up the flowers and scaring off the birds. They sneered at Uncle Perce.
    That evening, this solemn Romeo and Juliet went to the stone house parents too, and said they wished to marry—what could they do if marriage was refused to them; they were in love and could not wait all those years—five, six, until they would be too old; they could not wait. Such haste to love, even their decorum, caused a scandal. Each family blamed the other.
    Jacky and I ran off to a far part of the orchard in the long grass to talk it over; we talked it over in whispers, hand in hand and almost without a joke. For several days we were in a soft pious mood. It got to be known. Everyone tried to see them and joked about them. Roars of laughter, loud quarrels came from the stone house. At other times, people going along the road talked softly, looking at our house. Most people believed that they had already mated in the grass; but the grave young couple believed in their elders and waited first to be legally wed. Shameful questions they had to answer. Nothing was decided.

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    T he Wreck was a large rectangular box with an extension on one side. A solid pitched roof covered this extension, and on the landing in the stairs a full-sized door led to the attic, under this roof. This attic had an excellent floor, but it had to be entered on hands and knees. At one time, perhaps, there had been a flimsy second story which had been knocked about by storms or struck by lightning. Uncle Perce intended to rebuild this vanished second story at some time. Meanwhile he was busy all the year rebuilding the rest of the house. Since it was all of wood and he was energetic, he could alter a door, a window, or rip out a wall or a flooring, in a day. Sometimes, when he felt sick, he worked at home developing photographs, writing a treatise; and the children, at four or five, after school, might find that there was no door where a door had been in the morning. He built a room with a lean-to roof, near the kitchen. To this he added a shed. In the shed he built benches and in a third room, no more than a closet, he built wooden beds. The shed, intended for a new privy, was cut off from the new bedroom by a right-angled passage, with two doors leading outside.
    Sometimes he changed his mind about these doors and closed them up. When Mrs.