The Autobiography of Jack the Ripper Read Online Free PDF Page B

protection, for a child of five could have surmounted it.
    Although the temptation to trespass upon the doctor’s private patch and gorge upon his fruit was always withstood—or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the yielding to temptation seemed as unthinkable to us as would the flouting of a religious taboo to a South Sea Islander—another temptation lay at hand to offset it. On the western side of the playground lay, beyond the brick wall, another garden which, by the number of fruit-trees it contained, might almost be called an orchard. The penalty for climbing, or even peering, over this wall was distinctly and repeatedly specified and, moreover, frequently exacted to the uttermost tear; for infringements of the regulation were common.
    Many were the raids carried out by the more lawless of my school-fellows upon this inviting domain, and this despite the fact that detection was the usual rule. The owner of the orchard was an elderly man not physically unlike our Dr. Styles, but with a large, black beard. He was referred to amongst ourselves as Bap—short for John the Baptist—but his real name I never heard. However, we credited him with an almost uncanny perception in the matter of missing fruit. The saying arose in our midst that the pears of his orchard were, like the hairs of his head, all numbered; it was remarkable that the jump-and-grab extraction of even a single pear would be followed within the hour by a visit from Bap to our principal, and a dreadful Nemesis.
    In discussing the unpopular Bap amongst ourselves we usually supplemented the nick-name by the term “worldling.” That old worldling Bap; or the old worldling next door. In explanation of this apparently quite innocent pleasantry I should say that the word “worldling” was one constantly in the mouth of Dr. Styles, by whom it was meant to signify a person unduly interested in this earthly life as opposed to the promised joys of the hereafter. But the word caught our fancy and was used by us in exactly the way that a more objectionable word was, and is, used in a lower stratum of society. Just as the latter term, while literally to be interpreted as a vulgar allusion to sexual perversion, is yet applied with no real regard to its meaning as an epithet of contempt (or, perhaps, genial endearment), so was the term “worldling” used by us. We meant exactly what the navvy meant when he used the (to us) analogous expression—no more and no less. And our term was less likely to cause us trouble if overheard.
    Incidentally when, by long usage, we had adapted the word “worldling” to our own peculiar needs, it became to us a source of great joy to hear it continually cropping up in our principal’s religious discourses. It was like listening to a clergyman preaching a sermon interlarded with the obscene colloquialisms of the tap-room.
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    My attendance at this school is distinguished in my mind, as I look back upon it, for two things. The first of these was that I suddenly evinced a talent for drawing. It blossomed under the sympathetic encouragement of one of that long stream of under-masters to which I have previously referred; the only one of those masters of whom I retain a clear recollection.
    We learned in some roundabout way that this man, whose name was Pearson, had been an artist before his reduction to the lower dregs of schoolmastering. Other than that an artist was a man who painted pictures, we had but a shadowy conception of the term, but a lad named Sanders, whose father was connected with the Press in some obscure capacity, was able to enlighten us. We learned from him that an artist is a man who paints pictures of girls with nothing on; that he lives in a state of guilty splendour in one of certain districts given over to debauchery—such as St John’s Wood and Chelsea—and that he can be found in his lair at most times of the day with a naked girl on his