I
I had been talking rather loosely about the bringing-up of children.
They had been lately appearing to me in the guise of infinitely
prevalent little beings who impressed themselves almost too vividly
upon one’s consciousness. My summer vacation I had passed in a
household where a vivacious little boy of two years and a solemn little
boy of six months had turned their mother into a household slave. I had
seen walks, conversations, luncheons, and all the amenities of summer
civilized life, shot to pieces by the indomitable need of imperious
little children to be taken care of. Little boys who came running at
you smiling, stubbed their toes, and were instantly transformed into
wailing inconsolables; babies who woke importunately at ten o’clock in
the evening, and had to be brought down warm and blinking before the
fire; human beings who were not self-regulating, but to whom every
hard surface, every protuberance, was a menace to happiness, and in
whom every want and sensation was an order and claim upon somebody
else--these were new offerings to my smooth and independent existence.
They interested and perturbed me.
The older little boy, with his sunny luxuriance of hair and cheek,
was always on the point of saying something novel and disconcerting.
The baby, with his deep black eyes, seemed to be waiting silently and
in soft anticipation for life. He would look at you so calmly and yet
so eagerly, and give you a pleasant satisfaction that just your mere
presence, your form, your movement, were etching new little lines on
his cortex, sending new little shoots of feeling through his nerves.
You were being part of his education just by letting his consciousness
look at you. I liked particularly to hold my watch to his ear, and
see the sudden grave concentration of his face, as he called all his
mind to the judgment of this arresting phenomenon. I would love to
accost him as he lay murmuring in his carriage, and to check his little
breakings into tears by quick movements of my hands. He would watch me
intently for a while until the fact of his little restless woe would
come upon him again. I was challenged then to something more startling,
and the woe would disappear in little short gasps. But I would find
that he was subject to the law of diminishing returns. The moment would
arrive when the woe submerged everything in a wail, and his mother
would have to be called to nurse or coddle him in the magical motherly
way.
The baby I found perhaps more interesting than his little brother,
for the baby’s moods had more style to them. The brother could be
transformed from golden prattlingness to raging storm, with the most
disconcerting quickness. He could want the most irrational things with
an intensity that got itself expressed in hypnotic reiteration. Some
smoldering will-to-power in one’s self told one that a child should
never be given the thing that he most wanted; and yet in five minutes
one would have given him one’s soul, to be rid of the brazen rod which
he pounded through one. But I could not keep away from him. He and
his baby brother absorbed me, and when I contemplated their mother’s
life, I had many a solemn sense of the arduousness of being a parent.
I thought of the long years ahead of them, and the incalculability of
their manifestations. I shuddered and remained, gloating, I am afraid,
a little over the opportunity of enjoyment without responsibility.
All these things I was recounting the other evening after dinner to a
group of friends who professionally look after the minds and bodies
of the neglected. I was explaining my absorption, and the perils
and merciless tyranny of the mother’s life, and my thankfulness at
having been so much in, and yet so much not of, the child-world. I
was not responsible, and the policeman mother could be called in at
any time to soothe or to quell. I could always maintain the amused
aloofness which is my usual attitude toward children. And I made the
point that parenthood must become less arduous after the child is a
self-regulating little organism, and can be trusted not to commit
suicide inadvertently over every threshold, can feed himself, dress
himself, and take himself reasonably around. I even suggested unwarily
that after five or six the tyranny was much mitigated.
There was strong dissent. Just at that age, I was told, the real
responsibilities began. I was living in a fool’s paradise of
bachelordom if I thought that at six children were grown-up. One of the
women before the fire made it her business to get children adopted. I
had a sense of foreboding before she spoke. She promptly confirmed my
intuition by offering to endow me with an infant of six years, for a
day or for as long as I would take him. The hearty agreement of the
rest amazed and alarmed me. They seemed delighted at the thought of my
becoming parent for a day. I should have Ernest. They all knew Ernest;
and I should have him. They seemed to have no concern that he would not
survive my brief parenthood. It rather warmed and flattered me to think
that they trusted me.
I had a sense of being caught in an inescapable net, prisoner of my own
theories. If children of six were no longer tyrants, the possession
of Ernest would not interfere with my work or my life. I had spoken
confidently. I had a reputation among my friends of speaking eloquently
about “the child.” And I always find it almost impossible to resist the
offer of new experience. I hesitated and was lost. I even found myself
naming the day for Ernest’s momentary adoption. And during all that
week I found it increasingly impossible to forget him. The night before
Ernest was to come I told myself that I could not believe that this
perilous thing was about to happen to me. I made no preparations to
receive Ernest in my tiny bachelor apartment. I felt that I was in the
hands of fate.