EARLY INFLUENCES
Boys remained boys in those old days very much longer than they do
now. The smartness of children like my grandsons, Shem, Ham and
Japhet, for instance, who at the age of two hundred and fifty arrogate
to themselves all the knowledge of the universe, was comparatively
unknown when I was a child. To begin with we were of a different breed
from the boys of to-day, and life itself was more simple. We were
surrounded with none of those luxuries which are characteristic of
modern life, and we were in no haste to grow old by taking short cuts
across the fields of time. We were content to remain youthful, and
even childish, taking on ourselves none of the superiorities of age
until we had attained to the years which are presumed to go with
discretion. We did not think either arrogantly or otherwise that we
knew more by intuition than our parents had been able to learn from
experience, and, with a few possible exceptions, we none of us assumed
that position of high authority in the family which is, I regret to
say, generally assumed by the sons and daughters of the present. For
myself, I was quite willing to admit, even on the day of my birth,
that my father, in spite of certain obvious limitations, knew more
than I; and that my mother in spite of the fact that she was a woman,
was possessed, in a minor degree perhaps, but still indubitably
possessed, of certain of the elementary qualities at least of human
intelligence. As I recall my attitude towards my elders in those
days, the only person whose pretensions to superior attainments along
lines of universal knowledge I was at all inclined to resent, was my
maiden aunt, Jerusha, my father's sister, who, having attained to the
kittenish age of 623 years, unmarried, and having consequently had no
children, knew more about men and their ways, and how to bring up
children scientifically than anybody at that time known to civilized
society. Indeed I have always thought that it was the general
recognition of the fact that Aunt Jerusha knew just a little more than
there was to know that had brought about that condition of enduring
spinsterhood in which she was passing her days. Even her, however, I
could have viewed with amused toleration if so be she could have been
induced to practice her theories as to the Fifty-seven Best Ways To
Bring Up The Young upon others than myself. She was an amusing young
thing, and the charming way in which even in middle age--she was as I
have already said 623 years old at the time of which I write--she held
on to the manners of youth was delightful to contemplate. She always
kept herself looking very fit, and was the first woman in our section
of the world to wear her hair pompadour in front, running to the
extreme psychic knot behind--she called it psychic, though I have
since learned that the proper adjective is Psyche, indicating rather a
levity of mind than anything else. It should be said of her in all
justice that she was a leader in her set, and as President of the
Woman's Club of Enochsville was a person of more than ordinary
influence, and it was through her that the movement to grant the
franchise to all single women over three hundred and forty, resulted
in the extension of the suffrage to that extent.
[Illustration: "It's a boy, sir!"]
Incidentally I cannot forget the wise words of my father in this
connection. He had always been an anti-suffragist, but when Aunt
Jerusha's plan was laid before him he swung instantly around and
became one of its heartiest advocates.
"It is a wise measure," said he. "Safe, sane and practical, for no
single woman will confess to the age of qualification, so that in
passing this act we grant the prayers of our petitioners without
subjecting ourselves to the dangers of women's suffrage. Remember my
son, that it always pays to be generous with that which costs you
nothing, and that woman's suffrage is as harmless as the cooing dove
if you only take the precaution to raise the age limit high enough to
freeze out the old maids."
I should add too that Aunt Jerusha had a way with her that was not
without its fascination. To look at her you would never have supposed
that she was more than four hundred years old, and the variety of eyes
that she could make when there were men about, was wonderful to see. I
noticed it the very day I was born, and when I first caught sight of
that piquante little glance that now and then she cast in my direction
out of the tail of her eye, I began rummaging about in the back of my
subconscious mind for the precise words with which to characterize
her.
"You giddy old flirt!" was the apostrophe I had in mind at the moment,
but, of course, having had no practice in speech I was compelled to
forego the pleasure of giving audible expression to the thought.
Unfortunately for me Aunt Jerusha equipped with that intuitive
knowledge of what to do under any given circumstances that invariably
goes with the status of maiden-aunthood in its acute stages, now
assumed complete control of my destinies; and for a time it looked as
though I were in a fair way to become what the great Egyptian ruler,
King Ptush the Third was referring to in many of his State papers as a
"Meticulous Mollycoddle." To begin with, Aunt Jerusha was a strong
believer in the New Thought School of Infantile Development, and when
I was barely six weeks old she began strapping me on a board like an
Eskimo baby, and suspending me thus restrained to a peg in the wall,
where, helpless, I was required to hang and stare while she implanted
the germs of strength in my soul by reading aloud whole chapters from
the inspired chisellings of the popular seer Ber Nard Pshaw, who was
to the literature of that period what King Ptush was to statecraft. He
was the acknowledged leader of the Neo-Bunkum School of Right
Thinking, and had first attracted the attention of his age by his
famous reply to one who had called him an Egotist.
"I am more than that," he answered. "I am a Megotist. The world is
full of I's, but there is only one Me."
Upon this sort of thing was I fed, not only spiritually but
physically, by my Aunt Jerusha. When, for instance, I found myself
suffering from a pain in my Commissary Department for the sole and
sufficient reason that my nurse had inadvertently handed me the hard
cider jug instead of my noon-day bottle of discosaurus' milk, she
would rattle off some such statement as this: _Thought is everything.
Pain is something. Hence where there is no thought there can be no
pain. Wherefore if you have a pain it is evident that you have a
thought. To be rid of the pain stop thinking._
Then she would fix her eye on mine, and gaze at me sternly in an
effort to remove my sufferings by the hot poultice of her own mushy
reflections instead of getting the peppermint and the hot-water bag.
When night came on and I was restless instead of wooing slumber on my
behalf with soft and soothing lullabies, or telling me fairy-stories
such as children love, she would say: _The child's mind is immature.
His conclusions, therefore, are immature. Whence his decisions as to
what he likes lack maturity, and consequently to give him that for
which he professes to like is equivalent to feeding him on unripe
fruit. So we conclude that what he says he likes he really does not
like, and to please him therefore, it becomes necessary to give him
what he professes to dislike. Ergo, I will read him to sleep with the
seventeenth chapter, part forty-nine of the works of Niet-Zhe on the
co-ordination of our æsthetic powers in respect to the relative
delights of pleasure and pain._
I will do my Aunt Jerusha the credit of saying at this point that her
method of putting me to sleep was efficacious. I do not ever remember
having retained consciousness past the third paragraph of her remedy
for insomnia.
[Illustration: Aunt Jerusha as a disciplinarian.]
I tremble to think of what I should have become had this fauntleroy
process of rearing been allowed to continue unchecked. There were
prigs enough in our family already without afflicting the world with
another, and it rejoices me to this day to recall that just as we were
reaching the point when it was either an early and beautiful demise in
the odor of sanctity as a perfect child, or my present eminence as the
most continuous human performance on record for me, my father stepped
in, reasserted his authority and rescued me from the clutches of my
Aunt Jerusha. Returning one day from business, he discovered Aunt
Jerusha sitting in a rocking-chair in the nursery before me reading
aloud from her tablets, whilst I, as usual, hung strapped and
suspended from a hook on the picture moulding. It was my supper-time,
and she was feeding me according to the New Thought method of
catering. The substance of her discourse was that hunger was an idea,
nothing more. She was proving to her own satisfaction at least that I
was hungry only because I thought I was hungry, and as father came in
she was trying to persuade me that if I would be a good boy and make
up my mind that my appetite had been appeased by a series of courses
of thought biscuits, spirituelle waffles, and mental hors d'oeuvres
generally I would no longer be hungry.
"Fill your spirit stomach with the food of thought, Methy, dear," she
was saying as my father appeared in the door-way. "Make up your mind
that it is stuffed with the crackers and milk of the spirit; that
your spiritual bread is buttered with the oleomargerine of lofty
ideals, and sugared with the saccharin of your granulated meditations,
and you will grow strong. You will become an intellectual athlete,
like the great King Ptush of Egypt; a winner in the spiritual
Marathon--"
"What are you trying to do with this kid, anyhow?" demanded my father
at this point. "Turn him into a strap-hanger, or is this just a little
lynching party?"
"Hush, Enoch," protested Aunt Jerusha. "Do not project an
unsympathetic thought wave across our wires. I am just getting little
Methy into a receptive mood. He is having his supper."
"Supper?" roared my father. "You call that stuff supper? Why, the
child is getting thinner than a circus lemonade--"
"In the grosser sense, yes," replied Aunt Jerusha, calmly, after the
manner of maiden ladies who are sure of their position. "But look at
those eyes. Do they not betoken a great and budding soul within that
is hourly waxing in strength and beauty?"
"My dear Jerusha," said my father, unhooking me from the wall and
handing me a ripe red banana to eat, "all that you say is very lovely,
and I have no doubt that under your administration of affairs the boy
will sooner or later become a bully idea, but I hate a man whose
convexity of soul has been attained through a concavity of stomach.
What this boy needs at this stage of the game is development in what
you properly term the grosser sense, I might even go so far as to say
the butcher sense as well as the grocer sense. Ham and eggs is what he
needs."
And with that he sent out and had a diplodocus carnegii killed, and
fed me himself for the next ten days on dainty morsels cut from the
fatted calf of that luscious bird. It was thus that I escaped the fate
of the over-good who die young and became a factor in the world of
affairs rather than a pleasant memory in the minds of my family.
As for my education it was limited, and I may say desultory. In this
my Aunt Jerusha was allowed a greater authority than in the matter of
my diet, and she early made up her mind that the great weakness of the
educational system of the day was the tendency of the teachers in our
schools to cram the minds of the young.
"There is no hurry in days like these when people live to be eight or
nine hundred years old," she observed to my mother. "There is not very
much to be learned as yet. Science is in its infancy, very little
history has been made, and as for Latin and Greek, it is entirely
unnecessary for Methy to study those languages, because as yet,
nobody speaks them, and with the possible exception of that tramp
poet, Homer, who passed through here last week on his way West, nobody
is using it in literature. Teach him the three Rs and all will be
well. Taking the alphabet first and learning one letter a year for
twenty-six years he will be able to read and write as early in life as
he ought to. If we were more careful not to teach our children to read
in their childhood we should not be so anxious about the effects of
pernicious literature upon their adolescent morals. If I had my way no
one should be taught to read until after he had passed his hundredth
year. In that way, and in that way only can we protect our youth from
the dreadful influence of such novels as 'Three Cycles, Not To Mention
The Rug,' which dreadful book I have found within the past month in
the hands of at least twenty children in the neighborhood, not one of
whom was past sixty."
It was thus resolved that my education should proceed with due
deliberation and even as Aunt Jerusha had suggested, I was taught only
one letter a year for the first twenty-six years of my life, after
which I took up addition, multiplication, short and long division and
fractions. My father would not permit me to learn subtraction.
"It is a waste of time," said he. "Children subtract by intuition. Put
in all your time teaching Methy how to add and multiply."
My history was meagre, because as Aunt Jerusha had said, history
itself was meagre. There had not even been a flood, much less a first,
second, or third Punic War. Nobody in my time had ever heard of
Napoleon Bonaparte or George Washington or Julius Cæsar, or
Alexander, save a few prophets in the hills back of Enochsville, in
whose prognostications few of their contemporaries took any stock; as
was indeed not unnatural, since when they attempted to prophesy as to
the weather they showed themselves to be rather poor guessers. If a
man prophesies a blizzard for to-morrow and to-morrow comes bringing
with it the balmy odors of Spring, no one is likely to set much store
by his prognostications concerning the possible presidential candidacy
of a man named Bryan six or seven thousand years later. Consequently
the only history with which I took the trouble to familiarize myself
was that which ante-dated my birth, and even that was somewhat hazy in
the minds of historians. My predecessors in the patriarchal profession
were a reticent lot, inherited no doubt from our original ancestor
Adam, who could never be got to talk even to members of his immediate
family on the subject of his early years. True, it is generally
believed that he had no early years, and that he was born on his
fifty-ninth birthday, but even as to that he would not speak. I shall
never forget the look on his face when I asked him at a Thanksgiving
dinner one year if he had ever been a monkey with a tail. He rose up
from the table with considerable dignity, and leading me out into the
wood-shed turned me over on his knee and subjected me to a rather
severe course of treatment with a hair-brush.
"There, my lad," he observed when he had done. "If I had had a tail
that is about where I should have worn it."
I never referred to the subject again.