Crying Child Read Online Free PDF

down this way is the wing the Captain built on. We don’t use it, but I give it a good turning out every six months when my niece comes up.”
    Mary was beginning to droop a little. Mrs. Willard noticed it, and hurried us through the next eight bedrooms, which were in the Captain’s “new” wing. I remember very little about them—only a conglomerate impression of rooms somber with drawn drapes and most of the furniture swathed in dust covers.
    There was one thing I particularly wanted to see, and when Mrs. Willard said she had better go down and start dinner, I protested.
    “We haven’t seen the tower. I have a strange weakness for towers.”

    “It’s too much for Mary,” Mrs. Willard said. “All those stairs.”
    “I think I will lie down for half an hour or so,” Mary said. “But you go ahead, Jo. I know you love exploring. You can’t get lost.”
    I didn’t exactly get lost. At any point I could have retraced my steps. But there were times when I’d have been hard put to it to explain exactly where I was. The place was like a badger’s warren.
    And there was an additional element, one that made the ensuing hour a time I’ll never forget. It was a Looking-Glass feeling, a sensation of having stepped through into another dimension or another time; as if there were two houses on that same spot, existing simultaneously, yet separated from one another by an indescribable gulf. The rooms on the lower floors were lovely, charming, warm—habitable rooms, where real people talked and ate and slept and did all the normal, real things. The upper floors were cut off by more than a flight of stairs. Up there it was hard to imagine that there was life anywhere for a dozen miles.
    I found a ballroom on the third floor—the biggest, dustiest, most echoing vault of a room I had ever seen. Even my imagination, which is pretty good, couldn’t people that vast desolationwith laughing guests, with music or the swaying forms of ghostly dancers. The other rooms on that floor were good-sized, but not as elegant as the ones below. I assumed that the majority of them were extra guest rooms which had been used only when the family gave big parties. One suite was different. It must have been the children’s area—day nursery, night nursery, and the bedroom of the governess or nanny. There was very little furniture left in place anywhere on this floor, but the faded wallpaper in one room had a design of rabbits and ducks, and the battered condition of floors and walls suggested generations of pounding feet, bouncing balls, and crayon murals.
    The sight of those rooms made me a little melancholy, and as I went on, still searching for stairs that would lead to the tower, I found myself thinking of the children who had lived in this house over its many years. Ran had been one of them. Surely they hadn’t put him up in those dreary rooms, not with the house so empty. Children of earlier eras had not had an easy life; to be seen and not heard was the rule, and upper-class parents made darned good and sure the little darlings weren’t even seen any oftener than was absolutely necessary. They lived apart with the servants; sleeping, playing, eating by themselves. Animal crackers and cocoa to drink, with nurse standing by; Mother and Daddy dine later,in state. It sounded delightful—in the poem. Maybe it was. Maybe children really were happier out of the adult world with its incomprehensible demands and strict rules. But the poem hadn’t been written by a child, it had been written by a grown-up, under the effect of the useful amnesia that makes adults think of childhood as a happy time—forgetting the loneliness, the uncertainty, the fear.
    The fourth-floor corridor was even drearier than the third. Here were the servants’ quarters and the vast attics. The drab paint on the walls had been cream-colored once; now it was mottled and stained by time, and the floorboards squealed as I walked along, leaving the prints of my feet in