A PARTING WORD FOR BOY.
Upon the satin seat of a chair in the corner of the drawing-room, lie
six white Lima beans, and three small red-spotted apples. Wild fruit
they are, cast by a superannuated crab, spared by the woodman's axe
because it stands on the verge of the orchard. The apple-pickers never
look under it for gleanings. The beans were pulled from a frost-bitten
vine in the garden, and shelled with difficulty, the pods being tough,
and Boy's fingers tender. Both trophies secured, they were brought
into the house, deposited in the safest place Boy's ingenuity could
devise, and, alas! forgotten in the hurry of catching the "twain."
There was no room for them in Boy's long-suffering pockets. They
bulged to the bursting point with chestnuts, also the spoil of the
grasping little fingers.
Boy is city-born and city-bred, and a day in the country is better
than a thousand in street and park. A day in the woods, when chestnuts
and walnuts hustle down with every breath of air, and the hollows are
knee-deep with painted leaves, has joys the eager tongue trips over
itself in the endeavor to recount. Boy and Boy's mother took the six
o'clock train to town last night. This morning, throwing open the
parlor blinds, I espy the six flat, white beans and the three
red-speckled crab-apples. They were so much to the owner; except for
the value imparted by association with the dancing blue eyes and the
tight clutch of fingers that had green stains on them when the wrestle
with the pods was over, they are so much more than worthless to
everybody else--that there is infinite pathos in the litter. It is
picturesque and poetic.
There will be no poetry, picturesqueness or pathos in the litter when
Boy is older by a year or two. His leavings in outlandish places will
become "trash," and still later on "rubbish" and "hateful." At twelve
years of age he will be a "hulking boy," and convicted of bringing
more dirt into the house upon one pair of soles than three pairs of
hands can clean up. Eyes that fill now in surveying the tokens of his
recent occupations and his lordly disregard of conventionalities, will
flash petulantly upon books left, face downward, over night, on the
piazza floor; muddy shoes kicked into the corner of the hall; the
half-whittled cane and open knife on the sofa, and coats and caps
everywhere except upon the hooks intended for them.
I once heard a grown-up beauty declare in the presence and hearing of
a half-grown brother, that, "every boy should be put under a barrel at
fourteen, and kept there until he was twenty, out of the sight of his
kindred and acquaintances."
"Up to twenty-one he is an unmitigable nuisance!" concluded the belle,
with the vanity of one who has put the case smartly.
The lad listened to the tirade without the twitch of a
muscle--stolidity that proved him to be well used to such flaying.
Three out of four boys in that family "turned out badly," and were
cried down by a scandalized community for disgracing a decent and
godly ancestry. Hearing this, I recollected the beauty and the barrel,
and speculated sadly whether or not this were the key to the enigma.
It generally happens that the grown-up sister has less patience with
the growing brother than any other member of the household. From
principle and from inclination, and, I am inclined to add, from
nature, she "sits upon" Boy habitually.
Ungrateful Lady Mary Wortley Montagu called her quondam lover,
Alexander Pope--
"A sign-post likeness of the human race:
That is, at once resemblance and disgrace."
In her visions of the coming man, the sister resents the truth that
Boy belongs to the same species and sex, or persists in judging him by
this standard. In the "freshness" of his age and kind, he is skeptical
as to her good looks and other fascinations, and takes wicked
satisfaction in giving her to understand that he, at least, "is not
fooled by her tricks and manners." If her "nagging" is a thorn under
his jacket, his cool disdain is a grain of sand inside of her slipper.
What looks like natural antipathy between big sisters and little
brothers is but one of several reasons why home is so often less like
home to the boys than to the rest of the family.
I have in my mind's eye a distinct picture of the quarters allotted to
a promising college-lad in the mansion of a wealthy father, and which
I saw by accident. Each of the three accomplished sisters had her own
bed-chamber, fitted up according to her taste. A spacious sitting-room
on the second floor, with windows on the sunny front and at the side,
was common to the trio. There were flowers, workstands, desks, easels,
bookshelves, lounging and sewing chairs, pictures selected by each;
_portiéres_ in the doorways and costly rugs upon the polished floor.
Up two flights of stairs, _on the same floor with the servants_, the
brother was domiciled in a low-browed, sunless back-room, overlooking
kitchen-yards and roofs. A dingy ingrain carpet was worn thin in
numerous places; no two pieces of furniture were even remotely related
to one another in style or age. The wall-paper hung here and there in
strips; the windows were dim with dirt; dust lay thickly in every
corner; a counterpane of dubious complexion had a dark, wide-spreading
stain in the centre.
It is true, I admit, that the place reeked with stale cigar smoke, and
that the infirm table propped for security against the wall, groaned
under a collection of juvenile "properties," the heterogeneity of
which, defies my pen and memory. But, bestow a wild boy in such
lodgings as he might find in a low tavern, and he will treat them
accordingly. He is more observant than his mother imagines, and more
sensitive than his sisters would believe. Too proud to betray the
sense of humiliation engendered by appointments unsuited to his
station and education, he proceeds to be "comfortable" and "jolly" in
his own way.
To return to our own Boy--who, my heart misgives me, lifted up his voice
and wept sore last night upon discovering that the hard-won beans and
scarlet-speckled apples were left behind--his loving mother has hung his
nursery walls with good engravings and artistically-colored pictures, in
the conviction that a child's taste for art is formed early and for
long. Heaven grant that she may keep true to this principle in all
matters pertaining to his upbringing, and in judicious dependence upon
the influence of external impressions upon the immature mind of her
offspring!
Is our bigger boy, then, so rooted and grounded in right tastes and
right feeling as to be proof against the atmosphere of the
worst-located and worst-furnished room covered by his father's roof?
How far will the mother's assertion that he is the apple of her eye
and dearest earthly possession go, when balanced against the
object-lesson of quarters which are the household hospital of
incurables, in the line of beds, tables, stools and candlesticks? If
his sister's room is adorned with exquisite etchings and choice
paintings, while his is the refuge for chromos that have had their
day--will he not draw his own inferences? If his mother never climbs
to the sky-parlor to see that the careless housemaid does her duty in
sweeping, dusting and picking-up, does not he divine why his chamber
is systematically neglected?
Many a shrewd fellow has marked the progress of an ageing or shabby
article of furniture, from the guest-chamber, through the family rooms
upward, until it settles for life, or good behavior, in his apartment,
and felt a dull pang at heart that he would not confess. Many another
fellow, as shrewd and more reckless, has flung out passionately at
what he construed into an insult, and made it the ostensible excuse
for resorting to places where the motto that "anything will do for the
boys," is unknown in practice.
An English woman once commented to me upon the difference between our
manner of lodging and treating our sons and that which obtains in her
native land. "We behave to our boys as if they were princes of the
blood," she said, in her soft, sweet voice. "American girls are young
princesses at home and in society, and grace the position rarely well.
But--excuse me for speaking frankly--their brothers are sometimes
lodged like grooms."
She was so far from wrong that I could not be displeased at the blunt
criticism. The just mean between the stations thus specified is
equality, and the firm maintenance of the same by the parents. Manners
and environment are apt to harmonize. To teach a boy not to be
slovenly and destructive in his own domain, give him a domain in
which he can feel the pride of proprietorship. He would like to invite
his comrades into his "den," as his sisters entertain intimate friends
in their boudoir. He may not put into words the reasons why, instead
of saying openly--"Come in and up!" to his evening visitor, he
whispers at the outer door, "Let us go out!" which too often means,
also, "down." Perhaps he is so imbued with the popular ideas
respecting the furnishment of his lodging-place as hardly to interpret
to himself his unwillingness to let outsiders see how well his "den"
deserves the name.
Nevertheless, fond mother, give him the trial of something better.
Send the "incurables" to the auction room, and fit him out anew with
what should be the visible expression of your love and your desire for
his welfare. Why expect him to take these on trust any more than you
expect the daughters to do this? Yet their apartments are poems of
good-will and maternal devotion.
In all sincerity, let me notify you that the son will not keep his
premises in such seemly array as the girls keep theirs. It is not in
the genuine boy. I question if a three-year-and-a-half-old
granddaughter would have chosen as a safe place of deposit for the
white beans and red-freckled apples the handsomest chair I have. You
will find your laddie's soiled collars in his waste-paper basket; his
slippers will depend from the corner of the picture you had framed for
him on his last birthday; his dress-suit will be crumpled upon his
wardrobe shelf, and his _chiffonier_ be heaped with a conglomeration
of foils, neckties, dead _boutonnières_, visiting-cards, base-balls,
odd gloves, notebook, handkerchiefs, railway guides, emptied
envelopes, caramel papers, button hooks, fugitive verses, blacking
brushes, inkstand, hair brushes--the mother who reads this can
complete the inventory, if she has abundant patience, and time is no
object with her.
Nevertheless, I repeat it--let him have his "den," and one in which he
can find more comfort and enjoyment than in any other haunt. We
mistake--the most affectionate of us--in attributing to our sons'
sensibilities the robustness or wiry insensitiveness that belongs to
their physical conformation. Timely gifts are not thrown away upon
them; each tasteful contribution to their well-being and happiness is
a seed set in good soil.
A dear friend, in whose judgment I have put much faith, put it well
when she gave her reason for rectifying only the glaring disorders of
her boy's apartments while he was out of them, and letting the rest
go.
"They must be clean and bright," she remarked, with tender
forbearance. "But I never meddle with his books and papers, or do
anything that will, in his opinion, mar the individuality of his
quarters. He likes to feel that they have the impress of himself, you
see. Rigid surveillance, or the appearance of it, would irk him. For a
long time it annoyed me that he preferred his imprint to mine. A pile
of pamphlets on the carpet within easy reach of his chair was a
grievance; his boxing gloves were an eyesore when left upon his table,
and he _might_ find some other place for his dumb-bells than the exact
middle of the room. Then, by degrees, I thought my way to the stable
verity whereupon I now rest, that _the boy is worth more than the
room_."