I was not really surprised when fate knocked at the door next morning
in the person of my grinning friend, and swiftly left a well-bundled
little boy with me. I have rarely seen a young woman look as
maliciously happy as did his guide when she left, with the remark that
she couldn’t possibly come for Ernest that evening, but would take him
at nine o’clock on the morrow. My first quick resentment was stilled by
the thought that perhaps an official day was a day plus a night. But
Ernest loomed formidably at me. There would be problems of sleeping.
Was I a victim? Well, that is what parents were! They should not find
me weak.
Ernest expressed no aversion to staying with me. He was cheerful, a
little embarrassed, incurious. The removal of his hat disclosed a
Dutch-cut of yellow hair, blue eyes, many little freckles, and an
expression of slightly quizzical good-humor. I really had not had the
least conception how big a boy of six was likely to be, and I found
comfort in the evidence that he was big enough to be self-regulating,
and yet deliciously small enough to be watched over. He could be played
with, and without danger of breaking him.
Ernest sat passively on a chair and surveyed the room. I had thought a
little pedantically of exposing him to some Montessori apparatus. I had
got nothing, however. The room suddenly became very inane; the piano
a huge packing-box, the bookcases offensive, idiotic shelves. A silly
room to live in! A room practically useless for these new and major
purposes of life. I was ashamed of my surroundings, for I felt that
Ernest was surveying me with contempt and reproach.
It suddenly seemed as if little boys must like to look at pictures.
Ernest had clambered up into a big chair, and was sitting flattened
against its back, his legs sticking straight out in front of him, and
a look of mild lassitude on his face. He took with some alacrity the
illustrated newspaper supplement which I gave him, but my conscience
tortured me a little as to whether his interest was the desperate
one of demanding something for his mind to feed on, however arid it
might be, or whether it was a genuine æsthetic response. He gave all
the pictures exactly the same amount of time, rubbing his hand over
each to make sure that it was flat, and he showed no desire to talk
about anything he had seen. Since most of the pictures were of war,
my pacifist spirit rebelled against dwelling on them. His celerity
dismayed me. It became necessary to find more pictures. I had a sudden
horror of an afternoon of picture-books, each devoured in increasingly
accelerated fashion. How stupid seemed my rows of dully printed books!
Not one of them could disgorge a picture, no matter how hard you shook
it. Despair seized me when I found only a German handbook of Greek
sculpture, and another of Michelangelo. In hopeful trepidation I began
on them. I wondered how long they would last.
It was clearly an unfamiliar field to Ernest. My attempts to test his
classical knowledge were a failure. He recognized the Greeks as men
and women, but not as gods, and there were moments when I was afraid
he felt their nudity as indecent. He insisted on calling the Winged
Victory an angel. There had evidently been religion in Ernest’s career.
I told him that these were pictures of marble statues from Greece,
of gods and things, and I hurriedly sketched such myths as I could
remember in an attempt to overtake Ernest’s headlong rush of interest.
But he did not seem to listen, and he ended by calling every flowing
female form an angel. He laughed greatly at their missing arms and
heads. I do not think I quite impressed him with the Greek spirit.
On Michelangelo there was chance to test his Biblical background. He
proved never to have heard of David, and took the story I told him
with a little amused and incredulous chortle. Moses was new to him,
and I could not make him feel the majesty of the horns and beard.
When we came to the Sistine I felt the constraint of theology. Should
I point out to him God and Adam and Eve, and so perhaps fix in his
infant mind an ineradicable theological bias? Now I understand the
temptation which every parent must suffer, to dose his child with easy
mythology. Something urged me to say, Adam was the first man and Eve
was the first woman, and get the vague glow of having imparted godly
information. But I am glad that I had the strength sternly to refrain,
hoping that Ernest was too intellectually robust to be trifled with. I
confined myself to pointing out the sweep of clouds, the majesty of the
prophets, the cracks in the plaster, the mighty forms of the sibyls.
But with my last sibyl I was trapped. It smote my thought that there
were no more pictures. And Ernest’s passivity had changed. We were
sitting on the floor, and his limbs began to take on movement. He
crawled about, and I thought began to look menacingly at movable
objects on tables. My phobia of the combination of movable objects
and children returned. Parenthood suddenly seemed the most difficult
thing in the world. Ernest was not talking very much, and I doubted my
ability to hold him very long entranced in conversation. Imagination
came to my relief in the thought of a suburban errand. I remembered a
wonderful day when I myself had been taken by my uncle to the next town
on a journey--the long golden afternoon, the thundering expresses at
the station, the amazing watch which he had unaccountably presented me
with at the end of the day. Ernest should be taken to Brookfield.
Our lunch had to be taken at the railroad station. Ernest climbed with
much puffing up to the high stool by the lunch-counter, and sat there
unsteadily and triumphantly while I tried to think what little boys ate
for their lunch. My decision for scrambled eggs and a glass of milk was
unwise. The excitement of feeding scrambled eggs to a slippery little
boy on top of a high stool was full of incredible thrills. The business
of preventing a deluge of milk whenever Ernest touched his glass forced
me to an intellectual concentration which quite made me forget my own
eating. Ernest himself seemed in a state of measureless satisfaction;
but the dizzy way in which he brandished his fork, the hairbreadth
escape of those morsels of food as they passed over the abyss of his
lap, the new and strange impression of smearedness one got from his
face, kept me in a state of absorption until I found we had but one
minute to catch our train. With Ernest clutching a large buttered roll
which he had decently refused to relinquish, we rushed through the
gates.
When the candy-man came through the train, Ernest asked me in the most
detached tone in the world if I was going to buy any candy. And I asked
him with a similar dryness what his preferences in candy were. He
expressed a cool interest in lemon-drops. The marvelous way in which
Ernest did not eat those lemon-drops gave me a new admiration for his
self-control. He finished his buttered roll, gazed out of the window,
casually ate two or three lemon-drops, and then carefully closed
the box and put it in his pocket. I was almost jealous of Ernest’s
character. I recalled my incorrigible nibblings. I predicted for Ernest
a moral life.
Our talk was mostly of the things that flashed past our eyes. I was
interested in Ernest’s intellectual background. Out of the waste of
sign-boards and salt-meadows there was occasionally disentangled a
river with boats or a factory or a lumber-yard which Ernest could be
called upon to identify. He was in great good humor, squirming on his
seat, and he took delight in naming things and in telling me of other
trips on the railroad he had taken. He did not ask where we were going.
I told him, but it seemed not especially to concern him. He was living
in life’s essential,--excitement,--and neither the future nor the past
mattered. He held his own ticket a little incredulously, but without
that sense of the importance of the business that I had looked for. I
found it harder and harder not to treat him as an intellectual equal.
In Brookfield I became conscious of a desire to show Ernest off. I
was acquiring a proprietary interest in him. I was getting proud of
his good temper, his intelligence, his self-restraint, his capacity
for enjoying himself. I wanted to see my pride reflected in another
mind. I would take him to my wise old friend, Beulah. I knew how
pleasurably mystified she would be at my sudden possession of a chubby,
yellow-haired little boy of six.
Ernest had a delightful hour on Beulah’s parlor floor. He turned
somersaults, he shouted, he played that I was an evil monster who was
trying to catch him. He would crawl up warily towards me and put his
hand on my sleepily outstretched palm. As I suddenly woke and seized
him, he would dart away in shrieks of fear and glee. When I caught
him, I would feel like a grim ogre indeed, for his face would cloud
and little tears shoot into his eyes, and his lips would curl in
mortal fear. And then I would let him go tugging and sprawling, and
he would yell with joy, and steal back with ever-renewed cunning and
watchfulness. When he had eaten Beulah’s cakes and drunk her cocoa, he
lay back in a big chair, glowing with rosiness, and still laughing at
the thought of his escape from my ogredom.
Our minds played about him. I tried to tease Beulah into adopting him.
We spoke of his birth in a reformatory, and the apparently indomitable
way in which nature had erased this fact from his personality. We
wondered about his unknown mother, and his still more unknown father,
and what he would be and how either of us could help keeping him
forever. She pleaded her Man, I my poverty. But we were not convincing,
and I began to conceive a vague fear of Ernest’s adopting me, because I
could not let him go.
And then it was time for the train. Ernest was very self-possessed.
His manners on leaving Beulah were those of an equal, parting from a
very old and jolly friend. The walk to the station gave me a sudden
realization how very badly the world was adapted to the needs of
little boys. Its measurements, its times, its lengths and its breadths
were grotesquely exaggerated. Ernest ploughed manfully along, but I
could feel the tug at my hand. Time would have to double itself for
him to reach the station in the allotted minutes. His legs were going
in great strides like those of the giant in seven-league boots, and
he was panting a little. I was cruel, and yet there was the train. I
felt myself a symbol of parenthood, earth-adjusted, fixed on an adult
goal, dragging little children panting through a world not their own.
“I’m ti-yerd!” said Ernest in so plaintive a voice that my heart smote
me. Nameless premonitions of what might ensue to Ernest from being
ti-yerd came upon me. I felt a vague dread of having already made
Ernest an invalid for life. But my adulthood must have triumphed, for
the train was caught. Ernest’s spirits revived on the reappearance of
the lemon-drops. And my heart leaped to hear him say that only his
legs were ti-yerd, and that now they were no longer so. The world had
diminished again to his size.