The patience of young children in illness is a commonplace of some little
books, but none the less a fresh fact. In spite of the sentimental,
children in illness remain the full sources of perpetual surprises. Their
self-control in real suffering is a wonder. A little turbulent girl,
brilliant and wild, and unaccustomed, it might be thought, to deal in any
way with her own impulses--a child whose way was to cry out, laugh,
complain, and triumph without bating anything of her own temperament, and
without the hesitation of a moment, struck her face, on a run, against a
wall and was cut and in a moment overwhelmed with pain and covered with
blood. "Tell mother it's nothing! Tell mother, quick, it's nothing!"
cried the magnanimous child as soon as she could speak.
The same child fell over the rail of a staircase and was obliged to lie
for some ten days on her back, so that the strained but not broken little
body might recover itself. Every movement was, in a measure, painful;
and there was a long captivity, a helplessness enforced and guarded by
twinges, a constant impossibility to yield to the one thing that had
carried her through all her years--impulse. A condition of acute
consciousness was imposed upon a creature whose first condition of life
had been unconsciousness; and this during the long period of ten of a
child's days and nights at eight years old.
Yet during every hour of the time the child was not only gay but patient,
not fitfully, but steadily, resigned, sparing of requests, reluctant to
be served, inventive of tender and pious little words that she had never
used before. "You are exquisite to me, mother," she said, at receiving
some common service.
Even in the altering and harassing conditions of fever, a generous child
assumes the almost incredible attitude of deliberate patience. Not that
illness is to be trusted to work so. There is another child who in his
brief indispositions becomes invincible, armed against medicine finally.
The last appeal to force, as his distracted elders find, is all but an
impossibility; but in any case it would be a failure. You can bring the
spoon to the child, but three nurses cannot make him drink. This, then,
is the occasion of the ultimate resistance. He raises the standard of
revolution, and casts every tradition and every precept to the wind on
which it flies. He has his elders at a disadvantage; for if they pursue
him with a grotesque spoon their maxims and commands are, at the moment,
still more grotesque. He is committed to the wild novelty of absolute
refusal. He not only refuses, moreover, he disbelieves; he throws
everything over. Told that the medicine is not so bad, this nihilist
laughs.
Medicine apart, a minor ailment is an interest and a joy. "Am I unwell
to-day, mother?" asks a child with all his faith and confidence at the
highest point.