In the next room I sat and read, a pleasant warmth of parental
protection in my heart. And then Ernest began to cough. It was no light
childish spasm, but a deep racking cough that froze my blood. There
had been a little cold in him when he came. I had taken him out into
the raw December air. I had overexerted him in my thoughtless haste.
Visions of a delirious and pneumonic child floated before me. Or what
was that dreadful thing called croup? I could not keep my thought on
my book. That racking cough came again and again. Ernest must be awake
and tossing feverishly. Yet when I looked in at him, he would be lying
peaceful and rosy, and the cough that tore him did not disturb his
slumbers. He must then be in a state of fatigue so extreme that even
the cough could not wake him. I reproached myself for dragging him
into the cold. How could I have led him on so long a journey, and let
him play with a strenuousness such as his days never knew! I foresaw
a lurid to-morrow: Ernest sick, myself helpless and ignorant, guilty
of a negligence that might be fatal. And as I watched him, he began to
show the most alarming tendency to fall out of bed. I did not dare to
move him, and yet his head moved ever more perilously near the edge. I
relied on a chair pushed close to the bed to save him. But I felt weary
and worn. What an exacting life, the parent’s! Could it be that every
evening provided such anxieties and problems and thrills? Could one let
one’s life become so engrossed?
And then I remembered how every evening, when we went to bed, we
used to ask our mother if she was going to be home that evening, and
with what thankful security we sank back, knowing that we should be
protected through another night. Ernest had not seemed to care what
became of me. Having had no home and no parents, he had grown up into
a manly robustness. He did not ask what you were going to do with him.
He was all for the moment. He took the cash and let the credit go. It
was I who felt the panic and the insecurity. I envied Ernest. I saw
that contrary to popular mythology, there were advantages in being an
institutional orphan, provided you had been properly Binet-ed as of
normal intelligence and the State got you a decent boarding-mother.
How much bringing up Ernest had escaped! If his manners were not
polished, at least they were not uncouth. He had been a little shy
at first, nodding at questions with a smile, and throwing his head
against the chair. But there was nothing repressed about him, nothing
institutionalized, and certainly nothing artificial.
His cough grew lighter, and as I looked at his yellow hair and the
angelic flush of his round cheeks, I thought of the horrid little
puppets that had been produced around me in conventional homes,
under model fathers and kind and devout mothers. How their fears and
inhibitions contrasted with Ernest’s directness! His bitter mood
at going to bed had a certain fine quality about it. I recalled
the _camaraderie_ we had established. The box of lemon-drops, only
half-exhausted, stared at me from the pocket of his little sweater. I
became proud of Ernest. I was enjoying again my vicarious parenthood.
What did that obscure and tangled heredity of his, or his most
problematical of futures, matter to him or to me? It was delightful
to adopt him thus imaginatively. If he turned out badly, could you
not ascribe it to his heredity, and if well, to your kindly nurture
and constant wisdom? Nothing else could be very much thought about,
perhaps, but for the moment Ernest seemed supremely worth thinking
about. There would be his education. And suddenly it seemed that I did
not know very much about educating a child. It would be too absorbing.
There would be no time for the making of a living. Ernest loomed before
my imagination in the guise of a pleasant peril.
And then morning came. As soon as it was light Ernest could be
heard talking and chuckling to himself, with no hint of delirium or
pneumonia, or the bogies of the night. When I spoke he came running in
in his bare feet, and crawled in with me. He told me that in spite of
my valiant chair he had really fallen out of bed. He did not care, and
proceeded to jump over me in a vigorous acrobatic way. He did not even
cough, and I wondered if all the little sinister things of childhood
passed so easily with the night. It was impossible to remember my fears
as he tossed and shouted, the perfection of healthiness. Parenthood now
seemed almost too easy to bother with.
Ernest caught sight of my dollar watch on the chair, and I saw that he
conceived a fatal and instantaneous passion. He listened to its tick,
shook it, ogled it amorously. He made little suggestive remarks about
liking it. I teased him with the fact that he could not tell time.
Ernest snorted at first in good-natured contempt at the artificial
rigidity of the process, but finally allowed himself to be persuaded
that I was not fooling him. And my heart swelled with the generosity
which I was about to practise in presenting him with this wonderful
watch.
But it suddenly became time to dress, for my parental day was to end
at nine. And then I discovered that it was as hard to get Ernest into
his clothes as it was to get him out of them. It was intolerable to
him that he should leave his romp and the watch, and he shouted a No
to my every suggestion. A new parental crisis crashed upon me. What a
life of ingenuity and stratagem the parent had to lead! To spend half
one’s evening persuading a sleepy and bitter little boy to take off his
clothes, and half the morning in persuading a vivid and jubilant little
boy to put them on again--this was a life that taxed one’s personal
resources to the utmost. I reasoned with Ernest. I pointed out that
his kind friend was coming very soon, and that he must be ready. But
Ernest was obdurate. He would not even bathe. I pointed out the almost
universal practice of the human race of clothing themselves during
the early morning hours. Historic generalizations had no more effect
on Ernest in the morning than they had had in the evening. And with
a sudden stab I thought of the watch. That watch I knew would be an
Aladdin’s lamp to make Ernest my obedient slave. I had only to bribe
him with it, and he would bathe, dress, or do anything which I told him
to do. Here was the easy art of corruption by which parents got moral
clutches on their children! And I deliberately renounced it. I would
not bribe Ernest. Yet the mischief was done. So intuitive was his mind
that I felt guiltily that he already knew my readiness to give him the
watch if he would only dress. In that case, I should miss my moral
victory. I could not disappoint him, and I did not want to bribe him
inadvertently.
There was another consideration which dismayed me. Even if Ernest
should prove amenable to reason or corruption, where was my ability to
reconstruct him? Unbuttoning a sleepy and scarcely resisting little
boy in the evening was quite different from constructively buttoning
a jumping and hilarious one in the morning. And time was flowing
dangerously on. Only a sudden theory of self-activity saved me. Could
Ernest perhaps dress himself? I caught him in one of his tumbles and
asked him. His mind was too full of excitement, to be working on
prosaic themes. And then I shot my bolt. “I don’t believe you know how
to dress yourself, do you?” To that challenge Ernest rose. “Hurry!” I
said, “and see how quickly you can dress. See if you can dress before
I can!” Ernest flew into the other room, and in an incredibly short
time appeared quite constructed except as to an occasional rear-button,
washed and shining, self-reliant, ready for the business of the day. I
glowed with the success of my parental generalship. I felt a sense of
power. But power gained in so adroit and harmless a way was safe. What
a parent I would make! How grateful I was to Ernest to be leaving me at
this height!
I gave him the watch. Though he had longed, the fulfillment of his
desire struck him with incredulity. The event awed him. But I showed
him how to wind it, and seemed so indifferent to its fate that he
was reassured as to my sincerity. He recovered his poise. He sang as
he ate his breakfast. And when his guide and friend came, amused and
curious, he went off with her as unreluctantly as he had come, proud
and self-possessed, the master of himself. He strutted a little with
his watch, and he politely admitted that he had had a good time.
I do not know whether Ernest ever thought of me again. He had been an
unconscious artist, for he had painted many new impressions on my soul.
He had been sent to me to test my theories of parenthood, but he had
driven away all thought of theory in the obsession of his demands. How
could I let him go so cheerily out of my door? It wasn’t at all because
I minded having my time absorbed, for I like people to absorb my time.
Why did I not cling to him, buy him from his protector, with a “Dear
boy, you shall never leave my pleasant rooms again”? Why did I not rush
after him down the street, stung by a belated remorse? I was conscious
enough that I was missing all the dramatic climax of the situation. I
was not acting at all as one does with tempting little orphan boys.
But that is the way life works. The heart fails, and the vast and
incalculable sea of responsibility drowns one in doubt. I let him go
with no more real hesitation than that with which he went.
The later life of Ernest I feel will be one of sturdy self-reliance.
That all the aspects of his many-sided character did not become
apparent in the short time that I held him was clear from the report I
heard of a Christmas party to which he was invited a few weeks later.
Ernest, it seems, had broken loose with the fervor of a modern Europe
after its forty years of peace. He had seized chocolate cake, slapped
little girls, bitten the hand of the kind lady who fed him, and ended
by lying down on the floor and yelling in a self-reliant rage. Was this
the effect of a day with me? Or had I charmed and soothed him? I had a
pleasant shudder of power, wondering at my influence over him.
The next I heard of Ernest was his departure for the home of an
adopting family in New Jersey, from which he was presently to be
shipped back for offenses unknown. My respect for Ernest rose even
higher. He would not fit in easily to any smug conventional family
life. He would not rest adopted until he was satisfied. I began to
wonder if, after all, we were not affinities. He had kept the peace
with me, he had derived stimulation from my society. Should I not have
called him back? Shall I not now? Shall I not want to see him with me
again? I wonder.